GIFT OF 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
THE 
 
 PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 NORMAN BRIDGE 
 
 HERBERT S. STONE & COMPANY 
 
 CHICAGO <5r NEW YORK 
 
 MDCCCXCVIII 
 

 COPYRIGHT 1898, BY 
 HERBERT S. STONE & CO 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE PENALTIES OF TASTE . . . . i 
 
 Two KINDS OF CONSCIENCE .... 27 
 
 BASHFULNESS 59 
 
 THE NERVES OF THE MODERN CHILD . . 87 
 
 SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY . "9 
 
 OUR POORLY EDUCATED EDUCATORS . . 143 
 
The Penalties of Taste 
 
 The purpose of knowledge is to increase 
 the life and comfort of man. We seem to 
 seek knowledge for its own sake, but we do 
 not. We enjoy the seeking, well knowing 
 that some of our findings will be useful. 
 The ulterior aim is the mental happiness as 
 well as the physical comfort of the race, and 
 especially of the individual. 
 
 First we must have the necessities, bread, 
 clothes, warmth and shelter ; not merely for 
 the moment, but for the future. The hand- 
 to-mouth method, which most of us pursue, 
 is really repugnant to our instinctive sense. 
 We desire to accumulate; it is only our 
 weakness in the face of temptation that 
 prevents us from doing it. 
 
 Next naturally come through our knowl 
 edge the amenities, the refinements of life, 
 and the embellishments which we dignify as 
 arts. Some of these are useful in securing 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 the primal necessities of life others exist 
 for the pleasure they may give us, and appar 
 ently for this alone. 
 
 In accomplishing the sought-for object, 
 whatever it may be, there is a selection from 
 among different ways and things. We 
 choose one thing and reject another. We 
 have a preference ; this evidences the begin 
 ning of taste. 
 
 Choice, or taste, as to getting and having 
 is utilitarian; it helps in the business of 
 acquisition. It is for an end in life, but it is 
 not itself the end. It helps us to live, to 
 accomplish our various purposes. 
 
 But we select also not to gain some ulterior 
 object, but for the pleasure in the emotional 
 enjoyment of the thing selected; not to 
 acquire something, but because we have 
 acquired something. That something may 
 be called selective feeling or power. It 
 does not help us to live to get bread 
 rather we to some extent live for it. This 
 is taste in the higher sense, and it may 
 become so much a part of us that its 
 demands are nearly as inexorable as hunger. 
 It drives us to spend almost as much for the 
 decorations as for the body of the garment 
 or of the house. 
 
 Whether taste is utilitarian or exists for 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 its own sake, it is the same in essence. It is 
 one of the unavoidable refinements of exist 
 ence and thought. It comes with the rising 
 of the race, with growth and with natural 
 selection, and it is potent in helping the 
 race to rise. Because of it some survive, 
 while others fail and fall. But ordinarily 
 this classification does not obtain among us. 
 If the selective sense is exercised strictly for 
 useful and necessary purposes we are very 
 apt to call it worldly acumen or good judg 
 ment ; while if it more directly contributes 
 to a beauty and pleasure not necessarily con 
 nected with the acquisition of the bare needs 
 of life, we call it taste. But it is psycho 
 logically one thing and not two things. And 
 strictly it is quite impossible to sharply seg 
 regate the utilitarian from the esthetic taste, 
 since they to some degree blend into each 
 other. 
 
 The primary purpose of taste must be to 
 lead us right and not wrong; it is our 
 natural guide. If it made no mistakes it 
 would always lead us to the right pastures, 
 the best springs and best shade. But it 
 makes mistakes sometimes, and it leads us 
 wrong and so begets discomfort as well as 
 happiness; it is both fortunate and unfor 
 tunate. It often gives us not only great 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 pleasure in itself, but the gratification of suc 
 cess of various kinds some useful to the 
 serious purposes of our lives, some quite 
 useless or worse than useless. But by its 
 misdirection or excess of refinement, it often 
 also wears out our nerves and embitters our 
 years. Too much of a good ingredient spoils 
 the mixture. If only a little in excess in the 
 solution, the products of the yeast plant are 
 sure to poison and kill every germ of it. So 
 of the whole world of microscopic life. Thus 
 it is with the emotions and refinements of 
 our human lives. The best element and 
 influence, if in excess, may wither the very 
 thing it is calculated to foster and conserve. 
 
 There is a vast multitude of aids to the 
 formation of taste. Any hour almost we can 
 have free advice about it. All the schools 
 of every sort are ready to help us to it. So 
 are all the good people who strongly think 
 they themselves possess a large share of cor 
 rect taste. And we usually get the advice in 
 abundance, such as it is. But we grope in 
 the twilight or the fog for guides against the 
 excess, and the effects of wrong taste. 
 
 We are a race of experimenting, un 
 finished, and evolving units. We blunder 
 blunder in everything, and, of course, 
 blunder in taste. We learn haltingly or too 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 ardently in certain directions and with poor 
 sense of proportion, and so our knowledge is 
 often wofully out of balance. 
 
 The selective feeling or taste is something 
 altogether necessary, but always to be gov 
 erned and regulated. To select the right 
 thing in the right proportion and to know 
 the thing to avoid, is the great desideratum. 
 It is the consummation of the utility of taste. 
 
 In any study of this subject a few cardinal 
 facts force themselves into view. 
 
 In the first place, taste for taste s sake 
 costs. But utilitarian taste saves. This 
 latter means the most economical, durable 
 and useful houses, tools and clothes; it 
 means less expense in living, more resources 
 for the future, more leisure for the workers. 
 It brings the best results with the least labor 
 and expense; it is profitable in the highest 
 sense, so truly profitable that some critics are 
 sure to deny the definition, and say it is a 
 bad use of the word taste. 
 
 On the other hand, taste of the esthetic 
 sort, of a high order, what may be called 
 taste for taste s sake, always adds to some 
 body s burdens; its proper possession is for 
 the leisure of the race, for the time and state 
 of lessened burdens and accumulated profits. 
 Feathers, ribbons, lace, pictures and jewels, 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 expensive amusements and indulgences, 
 always cost and never save. 
 
 We must not only have taste in the ways 
 of money-making, but taste in all the ameni 
 ties and refinements of life. We must know 
 the correct demeanor, correct manners and 
 clothes, the right language to use, the true 
 standards of decoration of houses and things, 
 and the perfect gauge of art in all directions. 
 This is the fiat of growth and development. 
 
 Taste, quite as much as education or 
 general intelligence, fixes the place of men 
 and women in the social scale. And the 
 social scale is, next to freedom from starva 
 tion, sun-strokes and frost, the most impor 
 tant thing in the world. A lapse from our 
 standard of taste, that will make us ridicu 
 lous in the eyes of the set we belong to (or 
 aspire to belong to) , is always a most grievous 
 misfortune, and no one would willingly be 
 guilty of it. To eat with a knife ; or to say, 
 "I seen John," or "I have never saw such 
 weather before," is more damning to a cer 
 tain social existence than to be charged with 
 theft, or be indicted by the grand jury. A 
 man can bear criticism of his utilitarian taste 
 as he endures an unfortunate speculation; 
 but to know that his sense of manners and 
 the esthetics is open to censure or ridicule, 
 6 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 cuts him to the quick. It is such mortifica 
 tion and the fear of it that holds worthy 
 people to the laudable ambition to strive to 
 have correct taste. 
 
 But standards of taste differ; we do not 
 agree even as to what they are. One social 
 order or class of people holds to one; 
 another to another; and they all change 
 with the years. Often the canons of taste of 
 one set are execrated by the set above or 
 below it for if there is any subject on which 
 sensible people give themselves complete 
 license in the use of the superlative degree, 
 that subject is what they regard as bad taste. 
 
 So we have a very babel of diversity in 
 esthetic sense and sentiment; and a great 
 dispute is forever going on as to what really 
 constitutes correct taste and true art. The 
 fact is that each grade of social and intel 
 lectual existence has a standard, or stand 
 ards, of its own. That which is most 
 artistic to a particular man is his standard 
 and his rod for measuring all beside. 
 
 People are constantly passing from one 
 social level to another, usually from lower 
 to higher ones. Many have aspirations 
 for higher stages, and if they attain them 
 they must, with each little step, learn some 
 new criterion of taste and art; and if the 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 step is a long one, the lessons are numerous, 
 difficult and extremely perplexing. The 
 struggle for the new standard, forever go 
 ing on and always intense, and never fully 
 rewarded with quite the hoped-for gain, is 
 one of the pathetic travails of the race. 
 
 Take a boy reared on a farm, with small 
 knowledge of the amenities and estimates of 
 refined city life. Let him go to live in the 
 city and try to learn these, and see his strug 
 gles and mortifications. Or let him enter a 
 school of city "Boys from the best families, 
 and see the sweat and the agony of his initia 
 tion, far prolonged till he has learned his 
 lesson. The treatment of their prisoners by 
 the barbarians is a fair comparison to this. 
 He not unlikely finds that his treatment at 
 the hands of his fellows is barbarous. But 
 forceful people of the highest development, 
 on occasion and for an occasion sometimes 
 drop back some steps and show their bar 
 baric propensities; and they rarely do it 
 more pronouncedly than when as boys they 
 show some greenhorn of a fellow what they 
 regard as his proper paces. 
 
 Then we are perplexed by the dictum, 
 which we hear so often from the highly cul 
 tivated, that there is, fixed and immutable, 
 one true standard of art, that everybody 
 8 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 must know and believe in, or be adjudged to 
 be nobody. There may be such a standard, 
 but if so, the vast majority refuse to agree 
 as to what it is; a majority of thinking 
 people it seems cannot be led to unite* on 
 any very definite criterion. Each one stick 
 les for his own notions and standards ; and 
 these are as multifarious as the shadows. 
 
 If we study the question analytically we 
 find that much of taste with any social group 
 is simply a matter of fashion. What was 
 good taste last year may be bad taste now, 
 otherwise bad fashion. So, as the fashion 
 changes in our particular group, we scurry to 
 keep up with it, and generally fail. Per 
 haps we catch up at times, but usually late 
 and always with scattered ranks, like a strag 
 gling army coming into camp. The trouble 
 is we usually don t know just when and at 
 what rate the fashion does change. Charles 
 Dudley Warner some years ago proposed 
 an international committee to keep track of 
 its fluctuations and inform us promptly for 
 our guidance. He said, for example, that 
 he knew the year before it was good taste 
 for a gentleman to stand with his thumbs in 
 his vest pockets, but he was wholly at sea as 
 to whether it still was good taste. 
 
 A friend of mine once changed or created 
 
 9 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 a fashion in trousers in a town of Illinois by 
 wearing for a day, under the stress of dire 
 necessity, a garment made of some loud stuff 
 that was not really in fashion in any part of 
 the world. He was a stranger on the street, 
 was known to live in the metropolis, and the 
 gullible men took his clothes as an infallible 
 sign of the coming fashion, and so straight 
 way, before night, bought out all the neg 
 lected stock of such goods to be found in town 
 much to the joy of the merchants who 
 had foreseen serious loss. For aught I know 
 some of those men have never yet learned 
 that their terrible, plaid trousers of one 
 summer of long ago were only in fashion in 
 their own little burg ; and they are probably 
 happier in the ignorance. 
 
 If any man is in doubt that taste and stand 
 ards change, let him observe how the next 
 hundred people shake hands with him. 
 Most will grasp his hand in the old, easy 
 way, the hands striking at the most comfort 
 able level ; but a few, say one in forty, will 
 grasp and hold it for an instant rigidly at 
 the level of his middle shirt stud. He feels 
 an instinctive surprise at this; he tries 
 momentarily to get the hands down to the 
 old level, but he finds his gentle pressure in 
 that direction is resisted, and gives it up. 
 10 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 When he reflects that invariably the friend 
 with the new shake is one who moves in the 
 strictly modern set, and perhaps has been 
 off to college, he divines the changing of a 
 standard and wonders if the new fashion is 
 founded on a desire to grasp hands on the 
 level of the heart. 
 
 Note how a hundred men on the street 
 show with their hats their respect for a lady 
 or gentleman. There are at least half a 
 dozen different ways and they speak for as 
 many different epochs or localities. They 
 range from the simple touch of the brim to 
 the very modern and now less exclusive but 
 awkward bringing of the hat down with the 
 crown presenting so that it will cover a high 
 collar or a flowing necktie. 
 
 Standards in art, pure art, change. The 
 soft landscapes of old, that aimed to present 
 nature as it is or as most people see it to be, 
 or think they do, are now rather out of date, 
 and we have instead the impressionist s dash 
 of awful color. May be this is truer; at 
 least it shows an evolution. Such facts 
 prove that if there is any fixed and everlast 
 ing standard of true art it must be one so 
 narrow as to be confined to the very primer 
 of the subject, the few basal principles of 
 harmony and grace. 
 
 ii 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 There is a standard of taste for every man. 
 Men rise and their standards change; per 
 haps the latter rise also, they certainly 
 change. No standard rises truly that does 
 not thereby better serve the true interests of 
 all; we may think otherwise, but it is not 
 otherwise. The best taste must always con 
 serve the pleasure and profit of the person 
 concerned. That which is art to any par 
 ticular man is his standard. Next year or 
 decade maybe, he will have thrown aside 
 the thing that now comforts him, and come to 
 enjoy a better and perhaps a higher one. 
 Art must minister to the sentiments of the 
 man the sentiments change and evolve with 
 the amplification of the mind, and the stand 
 ards change likewise. 
 
 In the one social set that we have grown 
 up in or grown into we think we know the 
 lines of fashion and taste, and feel that we 
 are getting along, and the thought comforts 
 us. But straightway we struggle to get into 
 another and perhaps a higher company not 
 always really a higher one, albeit often one 
 with more glitter and then it dawns 
 upon us that we have been worshiping the 
 wrong gods, and are densely ignorant. 
 We must immediately acquire a new set of 
 ideas, new canons of correct taste and 
 
 12 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 thinking 1 , and to some degree a new order 
 of conduct. 
 
 The change in standard of taste is like any 
 other development in response to the forces 
 of evolution. For every man it ought to be 
 (and frequently it is) a development toward 
 a more perfect adjustment to his environ 
 ment. This is the true way, the ideal way 
 that we so often fall short of realizing; 
 in our groping toward it without fixed 
 notions of what we are doing and what for, 
 we often hitch and halt, then rush ahead and 
 overdo it, and fret and fume over our ideals 
 and accomplishments. 
 
 To ape, or try to have, high taste without 
 its necessary background of character and 
 attainments, is always grotesque and comical. 
 High refinement must come by natural 
 steps ; it cannot be forced successfully. We 
 may try to do this, but our automatic crudity 
 always exposes us and brings humiliation; 
 we always get caught sooner or later, and 
 our vulnerable points are where we least 
 think. The parvenu is beset with fear lest 
 he shall blunder; he tries not to, but ever in 
 some evil moment he does. 
 
 Over-decoration and dilettanteism in any 
 line of thought or action is to the balanced 
 mind always pitiable. Over-decoration only 
 
 13 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 pleases the crude ; to those of normal taste it 
 is always absurd; and its prevalence is so 
 glaring that it tends to disgust the most 
 refined people with decorations in general, 
 and so they periodically, in their clothes and 
 the houses they build and decorate, and in 
 their manners, evince a return to a simplic 
 ity so severe that the world stops to notice 
 and commend it. 
 
 It is labor wasted to try to teach art to 
 children unprepared for it; and for us to 
 drill into them, or attempt to, the higher 
 refinements before they have learned the 
 essential decencies of life, savors of wicked 
 ness. Fancy a girl who cannot properly 
 dress herself, who goes about with an 
 untidy, perhaps a smooty neck, and slov 
 enly clothes, who has by her own neglect a 
 room always left in chaotic disorder, being 
 taught art and music and other embellish 
 ments ; try to think in a speculative way of 
 such a girl being embellished. Or take a girl, 
 of average intelligence and less a lout, 
 moved by her normal impulses of selfish 
 ness, which most children must have, whose 
 intelligent conversation is mostly restricted 
 to sports, gowns, neckties, stage people, 
 and love stories read and dreamed about; 
 who knows the least possible about her 
 
 14 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 environment, except those elements of it 
 which amuse her, and see how we try to 
 teach her polish and taste, and what good 
 art is. What is the use of it? She could 
 not, to save her life, tell with any intimate 
 knowledge a useful thing that her father or 
 mother does in the daily round of duties. 
 Even less is she capable of doing any of them 
 herself. If her life is to be altogether 
 sordid and selfish as it starts, and her time is 
 to be given wholly to her amusement and 
 gratification, this teaching might be wise. 
 But even then she could acquire no wholly 
 sane grasp of the subject. And if her life is 
 to be of the slightest use in the world, her 
 embellishments must supplement as well as 
 ornament some plain knowledge of the vital 
 things about her. 
 
 This picture is not overdrawn ; there are 
 many such girls and boys doomed to this 
 kind of misuse of their powers and opportu 
 nities. Thus educated, or rather neglected, 
 they harmonize with nothing but similar 
 souls, and are out of joint with the universe. 
 The most pathetic phase of the case of such 
 children is that they are mainly either in 
 families of wealthy people who may give 
 them, if they will, the most symmetrical 
 development and the best chance in the 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 world, or in poorer families where there is a 
 constant struggle to force them to a so-called 
 higher social plane than they apparently 
 occupy. The two classes of children are 
 equally unfortunate and their parents are 
 equally wrong. Both classes are entitled to 
 a better race for life and a high career ; they 
 have a right to better treatment at the hands 
 of their fathers and mothers. 
 
 The ministry of taste ought to be one of 
 pleasure, but often and in diverse ways it 
 brings a penalty of sorrow. Exalted taste 
 always leads to hyperesthesia; it is syn 
 onymous with hyperesthesia, it means that. 
 One who is excessively developed must be 
 sensitive and fastidious in the direction of 
 the over-growth ; he is perhaps dull in other 
 directions as a consequence. The victim is 
 perpetually nagged and worried by things 
 that offend his taste. Bad taste is always 
 about us; dirt and untidiness are every 
 where, and the squeamish person is likely to 
 hate them and if he does, he is never at a 
 loss for something to hate, and may live 
 most of the time on a mental diet of gall and 
 wormwood. Squalor, crudeness, bad man 
 ners and bad grammar; bad music and art 
 in every sort, ill-fitting clothes and inhar- 
 mony of colors, nearly drive him to insanity. 
 16 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 There are many lovers of music who are 
 so painfully critical that they rarely enjoy it 
 much because they instinctively find them 
 selves pained by every trifling defect, which 
 they perhaps alone are capable of perceiving. 
 While they listen their souls lose the 
 inspiration which they deserve and which 
 the less critical have. They are comparing 
 the performance with some other one, like a 
 judge who must render a verdict or award a 
 premium. So they miss the ennobling and 
 sweet influence which music has for us 
 they, the very people who ought to be capa 
 ble of getting the most of joy out of it. 
 
 Hypercriticism in art, literature and dec 
 oration imposes on us similar penalties. 
 We take the unction to our souls that high 
 refinement in taste enables us to enjoy so 
 much more acutely as to counterbalance the 
 discomforts and the penalties. For it is 
 only by such a theory that we are able to 
 make out in the end a balance of gain for all 
 our labor and alleged development. Other 
 wise we should be distinctly the losers by the 
 growth. I hope the theory is correct. 
 
 The happiest people are not the highly 
 wrought; those excessively developed in a 
 particular direction, however much they may 
 in their lives enrich the community; but 
 
 17 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 rather the common middle class of folk who 
 are not censoriously particular about their 
 tidiness or their grammar. Manifold 
 annoyances of the critical class are to them 
 unheard of. They work and play and snooze 
 on oblivious of many such frets and worries 
 as beset their hypersensitive neighbors. 
 These last the hyperesthetics are, with 
 the squalid poor whose spirits are broken by 
 their struggles, the real unfortunates of the 
 world. 
 
 There is another penalty of taste in the 
 mental fatigue to the artistic temperament 
 from sights and sounds that cannot be shut 
 out. 
 
 Some of us dull ones go along through life 
 most of the time only half noticing the sights 
 about us, and then rarely with any sense of 
 their symmetry and beauty, or the contrary. 
 So that once in a while, when we do arouse 
 ourselves to look contemplatively at our 
 environment, we see beauties and interest 
 that we usually fail to notice ; they are new 
 and fresh to us; we are disillusioned and 
 reillusioned by them. 
 
 But the artistic temperament sees every 
 thing, and sees it all the time, and with an 
 eye to the beauty or the ugliness of it all. 
 It is rested and comforted by certain things 
 18 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 and tired and irritated by others, and finally 
 fatigued by the things that first comforted. 
 It feasts on them, the sights and scenes 
 around it, and tires of them one after 
 another. The fatigue shows itself in the 
 desire to get away, to have new scenes and 
 air and objects a new atmosphere. 
 
 So the man, tired of the old, rushes off 
 after fresh impressions. He is then charmed 
 into ecstasy with a very ugly thing if only it 
 is novel and not of his commonplaces. From 
 the finished streets and walks and fronts of 
 the trim town, what a delight to such a soul 
 to get out and find a tangled wood, a 
 neglected brook or a dilapidated shanty with 
 weeds and grass growing about it, and a man 
 or a woman with rude clothes and disheveled 
 appearance! He calls this sort of thing 
 artistic; it is fine material for an artist s 
 brush and he glories and revels in it and will 
 travel miles to sketch it. But from the stand 
 point of the eternally beautiful it is absurd 
 to say that it is artistic. It is only food for 
 the avid artist because it is unusual and 
 widely different from the sights and scenes 
 that are daily ground into his impressionable 
 brain. His very composition compels him 
 to observe everything about him, every hour 
 of the day, and always with pleasure or 
 19 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 pain, and therefore with emotion. Mr. 
 Whistler and Mr. Hopkinson-Smith have 
 given us fine revelations of this yearning-, 
 and how to gratify it and examples could 
 be multiplied into volumes. 
 
 The artist s nature is an emotional one and 
 must see things with pleasure and pain ; and 
 the emotions tire like the laboring muscles 
 and must have rest and change ; and when 
 the change comes it is such a joy that we 
 seem to have no other way to express our 
 selves but to say that the medium of it is 
 artistic. So we have created a new meaning 
 for a word. 
 
 This then is the penalty for having the 
 emotional, the artistic taste and temper 
 ament. Like a wolf the penalty follows such 
 natures the emotional, the esthetic, the 
 impressionable through life ; it makes them 
 enjoy and suffer more keenly than the rabble 
 can, and compels them to seek changes of 
 many sorts. They are constantly hunting 
 for some new thing and in multiplied ways. 
 This longing and seeking constitute the 
 basis of changing fashions the varying of 
 things because of our sole desire for change, 
 makes the ebb and flow of fashion. And to 
 what minute details and in how many direc 
 tions are there fashions to change! In 
 20 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 clothes and other personal belongings, in 
 dwellings and their decorations, in manners 
 and language, in the amenities of life in 
 everything the sensitive nature is touched 
 by, or touches. 
 
 Does any one doubt that this constant seek 
 ing, this ardor for change is a penalty? Let 
 him then contemplate the fortunes of the 
 simple, dull people, pleased with little, but 
 pleased and unworried; who never tire of 
 their simple surroundings and lot, who never 
 have "nervous prostration," nor require a 
 change of scene to save them from the 
 asylum, and then say if the life of man in 
 this world whether in groveling, or in the 
 hidden by-paths, or in glory has not its 
 sufficient compensations. 
 
 The severest penalty of high taste, the one 
 most harmful to the career of man, consists 
 in the fact that it often stands in the way 
 of his ambitions. It prevents our worldly 
 practical efficiency ; it robs us of the main 
 chance and keeps us to the outside track in 
 the race, when we are striving to get to the 
 inside one. 
 
 How does it do all this? By making us 
 irascible, easily irritated or crushed in spirit 
 and so thrown off our balance, even stam 
 peded by the veriest trifles. For this reason 
 
 21 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 we tire too readily; have neurasthenia, and 
 require vacations. Our enemies who would 
 see us fail understand they can any time 
 spoil our equanimity and cause us to be ridi 
 culous, by some trifling act or word they 
 know will hit our vulnerable spot. They 
 know the nature of our tinder and what will 
 fire it, and we are at their mercy. But acci 
 dents are as likely to unman us. A stray 
 splash of mud strikes our new clothes and 
 we are too weak to perform our part in the 
 day s program, unless it be a program of 
 battle. If it is a social or a quasi social one 
 we are undone for any effective action. 
 
 I once knew a really great man to make a 
 fool of himself, storming at everybody about 
 him, because some fellow had approached 
 him in his official capacity, without observing 
 all the proprieties. A superior and refined 
 woman is worried and made cross and sick, 
 by a slight breach of the best table manners 
 on the part of some member of her family. 
 Hysteria and other and worse fits of sick 
 ness; losses in business; losses of battles 
 even, occur from just this kind of infirmity 
 of our poor human nerves. 
 
 The absent-mindedness of the nagged man 
 and of the man humiliated, leads to many 
 failures Annoyed and irritated he is inca- 
 
 22 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 pable of remembering what is said to him or 
 what he reads. Retention in the memory, 
 and mental performances for action, require 
 for their best success mental tranquillity, 
 freedom from the emotion of annoyance. 
 (The emotion of annoyance often goes by 
 other names, as anger, jealousy, envy and 
 hate.) Moved by this emotion, preoccupied, 
 forgetful, a man orders the wrong bill of 
 goods, or turns the signal the wrong way 
 and makes a collision, or sends the regiment 
 the wrong way into battle and to certain de 
 feat. For the time he has lost utterly the 
 most useful mental traits for success in life, 
 namely imperturbability and power of con 
 centration on the subject in hand. He who 
 can always be proof against perturbation is 
 the man most sure to triumph. He is most 
 of all to be envied, for he cannot be stam 
 peded. Other things being equal, the suc 
 cessful clans and races are those that can 
 make themselves proof against the things, 
 little things mainly, that nonplus and exas 
 perate. It is the unsymmetrical and weak, 
 the degenerates, that are most obnoxious to 
 such influences. The superior success in 
 almost every sort of material undertaking 
 that has in modern times always characterized 
 the Jewish people is a distinct illustration 
 
 23 
 
THE PENALTIES OF TASTE 
 
 of this truth. They have the regnant power 
 of concentration and continuity. 
 
 It is hard to keep the human genus plumb. 
 We are prone to swing too far in one direc 
 tion or the other. Taste is calculated to help 
 us; up to a certain point it does; it is a 
 guiding power within us for success the 
 success we covet and need. But when it is 
 over-developed and erethismic, and the 
 touch of our unavoidable environment 
 makes an explosion imminent, and we be 
 come hysterical children instead of balanced 
 people with powers to endure and to exe 
 cute, then and so far taste is a misfortune. 
 We are humiliated and harmed by the thing 
 that should help and ennoble us ; we are be 
 coming the worn out of the world, the passt 
 of the race. If we cannot succeed in mod 
 erating our intensity we had better pray for 
 a little of the dullness and apathy of the clod, 
 to the end that our nerves may be rested 
 and our tribe, after some- generations, may 
 come back to the simple lines and better bal 
 ance of those people who are the bed-rock of 
 society, and so the hope of the future. 
 
Two Kinds of Conscience 
 
Two Kinds of Conscience 
 
 The motives that move men to conduct are 
 always an interesting study. One of the 
 most enjoyable satisfactions of life is to 
 feel certain of how others would act under a 
 given set of circumstances. We especially 
 like to believe we know where to find those 
 we esteem, on all sorts of occasions, as Grant 
 felt about Sheridan. It is of all things de 
 sirable. We have great satisfaction in think 
 ing we know how men will act, and we clas 
 sify them with some strictness according to 
 this supposed knowledge. Some will, in our 
 imagination, always do right, or what we 
 think is right; others, always wrong; some 
 will always be superior, others trivial ; others 
 still, vain or envious or resentful or hateful 
 or foolish. We have the catalogue fairly 
 well formed and definite as to a large num 
 ber of people we know of ; as to others, it is 
 more vague. 
 
 27 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 But we are repeatedly thrown out of our 
 reckoning by finding that people we had put 
 into a particular list have somehow gotten 
 into another one. Some one whom we had 
 catalogued as thoroughly bad is, to our sur 
 prise and disappointment, discovered doing 
 a very good and wholly unselfish act, while 
 some human god we had created suddenly 
 falls; a man we thought a model of refine 
 ment is found acting and uttering rank vul 
 garity; while some supposedly crude nature 
 suddenly surprises us with evidences of the 
 highest superiority. This is all very con 
 fusing. 
 
 One might think that from a knowledge 
 of our own motives of action it would be 
 easy to divine the springs of action for peo 
 ple in general. But nothing could be more 
 fallacious, for, in the first place, we rarely 
 analyze our own motives and their interac 
 tion upon each other. Yet we are forever 
 speculating on the why of the performances 
 of others, and have not the slightest hesita 
 tion about attributing motives and reasons 
 for every act. In doing this, however, we 
 usually do not agree some of us guess one 
 motive to govern in a particular course of 
 conduct, others another, and there is an end 
 less dispute as to why certain people do or 
 28 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 have done certain things. Any thoughtful 
 study of our own lives must show us that 
 to many of our acts, much of our conduct, 
 we are moved by a mixture of motives, 
 many of them more or less conflicting ; but 
 for other people, we too often believe we 
 find that but one moving impulse has gov 
 erned, and that not of the highest character. 
 It is one of the curiosities of sociological 
 study how easily we find reasons that are sat 
 isfactory to us for all sorts of things, and es 
 pecially for that thing most recondite and 
 difficult to find out, the true basis of action 
 of other human beings. If a man s spinal 
 column happens to grow with certain curves 
 that make the body stand erect, with the 
 head thrown back, we are, many of us, sure 
 to think he is proud and top-lofty. If the 
 wrinkles on his face happen to give it a so 
 ber cast, we almost instinctively associate 
 with him the idea of funereal gloom or self- 
 righteousness, forgetting that some of the 
 saddest men of the world are those who 
 make the most fun and appear the most 
 cheerful. We even accuse the horses and 
 dogs of vanity and pride if they happen to 
 carry their heads high and have arching 
 necks, so unfair and unjudicial are our judg 
 ments of living things. 
 29 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 If it is true, and it certainly is, that our 
 vital conduct or moral acts are determined 
 by a mixture of motives, then it must be that 
 these are more or less .conflicting. A partic 
 ular act is the result of a balance of the 
 motives ; if one of these were a little stronger, 
 or another a little weaker, the act would be 
 different. One motive or emotion existing 
 within us to a high degree overcomes all 
 opposing ones and so determines the act. 
 Then, too, as we might expect to find, with 
 the changing conditions of our surround 
 ings and of our physical state, the emotions 
 vary somewhat; now, a particular one is 
 strong, another weak; to-morrow or next 
 month the relations will be reversed, and so 
 varying results in conduct. 
 
 As the conduct determined by this shifting 
 of motives, emotions and governing princi 
 ples is sure to have a moral quality, and as 
 this quality, of our acts gives that something 
 to the man which we call character, it hap 
 pens that every man has several moral sides 
 (whether the world discovers them or not), 
 several different phases of character. No 
 body with any power and effectiveness 
 among people probably ever wholly es 
 capes this fluctuation in character and con 
 duct. Those most nearly escape it who have 
 
 30 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 a few motives and emotions so powerful as 
 to be . able with substantial constancy to 
 dominate all the rest ; they are strong be 
 cause uniform. But most persons endlessly 
 vary little or much in moral quality accord 
 ing to any standard you may name. 
 
 As fixity of purpose is desirable (a high 
 purpose being always implied) and always 
 is sought, we struggle to develop certain 
 emotions and directing impulses so that as 
 guides to conduct they shall be infallible or 
 nearly so. 
 
 But in spite of us, they are more or less 
 fallible always, and they fluctuate in de 
 gree and change in character. So it may be 
 said that every man has more than one, most 
 people have several, different shades of char 
 acter and emotional promptings, as they 
 have under different circumstances differing 
 orders of taste and sentiment. 
 
 Certain emotional qualities of the mind 
 grow till they become nearly the controlling 
 element in the character, and they tip the 
 beam in many of the daily acts of life. This 
 mental something is connected with beliefs, 
 opinions and education; it is a matter of 
 growth. But it is, for the present study, of 
 less consequence how the quality is created ; 
 it is more important that it exists and that 
 
 31 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 it governs and dominates other qualities. 
 From childhood to age we all have some 
 such controlling- motives. There are no ex 
 ceptions to the rule; even the abnormal 
 natures, the degenerates, follow the rule as 
 much as others do. 
 
 The most profound knowledge of man, 
 therefore, is to know the force and nature 
 of these directing springs in his thinking and 
 his life. The controlling force is the man ; 
 for it is like a hypnotizing other human na 
 ture that can within certain limits control all 
 his usually voluntary acts and create for him 
 his moral character. 
 
 This governing principle, this guide of 
 action, which gives a standard of conduct and 
 judgment to every man, is known by various 
 names, as emotion, instinct, emotional ideas, 
 motives, principles and, finally, conscience. 
 The word conscience is convenient ; it means 
 to us more than the others and seems more 
 intimately connected with the moral qualities 
 of people. Conscience, as we ordinarily con 
 ceive it, is a guide of action that distinguishes 
 between right and wrong; it is the moral 
 mentor within a man for his own acts and by 
 which he judges the acts of others; it is the 
 power within that, modified by the influences 
 of the environment, leads to a definite and 
 
 3 2 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 fairly constant course of action. But con 
 science is largely a matter of education. To 
 a moderate degree it is inborn and there 
 fore instinctive. Applied to things, beliefs 
 and principles, it is substantially all ac 
 quired. From the same family of children 
 you may, with the necessary favoring influ 
 ences, develop the most opposite beliefs on 
 politics, religion and the right treatment of 
 others the most divergent conceptions of 
 right and wrong. 
 
 After one has by his birth, growth and 
 surroundings acquired a conscience guide, 
 he finds himself with not one, but per 
 haps several, and they are often in con 
 flict with each other ; now one controls, now 
 another, and in most things their influence 
 is somewhat mingled. One result of this fact 
 is the moods of life, always varying and vari 
 able. A man cannot direct all his acts by 
 the same and the one impulse and motive, 
 however he may try ; yet one emotion may, 
 and probably does in the main, rule him, 
 and at one time he may hate himself for hav 
 ing been governed at another time by a cer 
 tain motive, as when he buys a book he 
 neither wants nor needs because he is asked 
 to by an attractive woman, or contributes 
 too liberally at a public collection because a 
 
 33 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 woman pleads with him and the audience is 
 gazing at him in his blushes. He is not gov 
 erned by the same conscience at all times ; 
 or, rather, his conscience does not at all 
 times carry him to the same line, nor can it. 
 Stupendous efforts are constantly made to 
 influence the actions and attitudes of persons 
 and peoples, of judges and juries; the real 
 purpose is mostly to change or vary the con 
 science or standard of judgment. If the 
 judgment can be changed the conduct is 
 likely to be also. But a man s digestion, 
 whether he is fed or hungry, his degree of 
 fatigue, his emotions regarding the things 
 and people around him, whether they have 
 nagged or conciliated him, and love or hate 
 him, whether he is flattered or censured all 
 these and many more influences vary his 
 conduct, even when he fancies he is living 
 by the same rule. And men differ from each 
 other, no two probably having identical con 
 science guides ; they show thus the normal 
 variations of the race. 
 
 In one aspect, these standards of action 
 fall naturally into two classes or orders dif 
 fering vitally from each other. For want of 
 more fit designations, one may be called the 
 personal or individual, the other the com 
 pany, class or collective conscience. Many 
 
 34 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 other classifications could be made, but this 
 is a natural one ; it is also a help to a fair 
 and proper interpretation of many phases 
 of human conduct that have caused the phi 
 losophers and historians no end of trouble. 
 These standards obtain with people of all 
 ages and conditions, and they are well-nigh 
 universal. In having these two distinct 
 forms of conscience all men are alike the 
 classification is self-suggestive. 
 
 The individual standard is perhaps the 
 higher, as it is the more interesting, al 
 though probably the less potent. It impels 
 a man to do what he alone believes he ought 
 to do. It is the standard personal ; and 
 might also be called the deliberative stand 
 ard ; it is the conscience of the solitude and 
 tranquillity of the soul, of the man commun 
 ing with himself, of the man uninfluenced 
 or when he tries to believe himself uninflu 
 enced by his environment, for to be wholly 
 uninfluenced by environment rarely happens 
 to any one in his deliberative moods, and to 
 most people never happens. The personal 
 standard has many drawbacks, and is beset 
 by many difficulties and conflicting influences ; 
 moreover, it is completely followed by only 
 a few, although it gives the cue and direction 
 to very much of the company conscience. 
 
 35 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 The collective conscience is the standard 
 of the man in a company, a crowd or a guild. 
 It is an altogether different standard from 
 the personal one. The two are often in con 
 flict, although they are often completely 
 concordant. The feelings and impulses that 
 belong to this standard are in general the ever 
 present emotions of mankind. Collective 
 conscience implies a mutualness of interests 
 and of duty. All must act, outwardly at 
 least, modified always by the personal sel 
 fishness normal to the race, for the benefit 
 of the company. So universal and strong is 
 this feeling that violation of it is frowned 
 upon or otherwise punished. It is the con 
 science of the majority, which insists that it 
 shall be respected by all, even if some do 
 not fully agree with it. Having been the 
 standard of the majority, and had the loyalty 
 of most of the class, we from habit often fol 
 low it after the majority have in their indi 
 vidual minds repudiated it. It is the execu 
 tive, the official conscience. With it is often, 
 or generally, coupled a fellowship feeling, 
 an unwritten law or tenet, that the interests 
 and acts of the company are sacred from the 
 rest of mankind : hence informers and spies 
 are regarded as infamous. A crowd of haz 
 ing students (always of the close corporation 
 
 36 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 of a school class), a mob bent on mischief or 
 revenge, a body of strikers after their rights, 
 a band of revolutionists, or a dozen boys or 
 girls out for a lark; these equally show the 
 common understanding of the inviolability of 
 the acts and secrets of the company. 
 
 A boy of fourteen lay sick with some in 
 flammation inside his abdomen. He was a 
 remarkably fine nature, bright and ambi 
 tious, but always tractable, and uncommonly 
 truthful. What was more uncommon, he 
 lived in confidential relations with his par 
 ents. He even went to them with many of 
 his perplexities that boys are usually unable 
 to talk to their fathers and mothers about, 
 but discuss with their older and bolder play 
 mates. He was in agony now, and it was 
 thought the inflammation might have been 
 caused by an injury, but when interrogated 
 the boy denied it; and when his mother 
 asked him if he had been in any scrape with 
 the boys and been hurt, he looked her 
 squarely in the face with the gaze of honest 
 confidence and said to her: "Why do you ask 
 such a question? Of course not." Later in 
 the sickness he became delirious and, in his 
 raving, revealed how he had gotten into 
 some scuffle with his fellows and been vio 
 lently kicked in the abdomen by one of 
 
 37 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 them, a boy considerably older than himself. 
 There was no doubt now that this was the 
 cause of the sickness. He never afterwards 
 came back to full consciousness, but died 
 without knowing he had unwittingly be 
 trayed the boys of his set. The knowledge 
 would have disturbed his conscience and 
 shocked his sense of honor unspeakably, and 
 it was a mercy that he was spared such a hu 
 miliation. 
 
 In a hospital amphitheater were gathered 
 some scores of senior medical students to 
 witness a clinic by a great surgeon. The 
 operations to be done in their presence were 
 formidable and dangerous, and all the pa 
 tients were known to be women. The assist 
 ants brought one of the patients, on a roller 
 table, to the door of the amphitheater, and 
 halted as the surgeon preceded them into 
 the room. As he entered, the students, from 
 the mixed motives of pleasure at his coming 
 and the prospect of seeing an operation, 
 broke into hand clapping and foot stamping, 
 garnished by stray yells and whistles from 
 concealed voices. The surgeon had more 
 than once told the class that on operation 
 days there must be no demonstration or 
 noise of any sort to frighten or wound the 
 38 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 feelings of the patients or their friends. The 
 class was composed in the main of fine fel 
 lows, not one of whom would have yelled or 
 clapped his hands had he been the only man 
 waiting for the exhibition ; nor would he have 
 been one of four or even ten then he would 
 have been individualized and identifiable. 
 But one of a hundred, the man instinctively 
 felt himself merged in the mass, and his acts 
 were governed by a different motive. More 
 over, not a man but would have burned with 
 a sense of outrage at the performance had 
 the patient been his mother or his sister. 
 The Professor now hesitated an instant, col 
 ored a trifle, then promptly dismissed the 
 class, saying there would be "no clinic to 
 day," and retired from the amphitheater 
 to do his surgery in the private operating 
 room. The students were dumfounded; 
 they looked at each other a moment, and 
 then slowly filed out of the building. They 
 had come a mile or two to see this clinic and 
 felt a sense of chagrin at being defrauded of 
 it. They began to regard themselves as 
 having been insulted. This clinic was on the 
 program and they had been invited to attend 
 it; they had gotten up early and taken a 
 hasty breakfast, to be there, and now had 
 been sent away without a word; it was an 
 
 39 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 outrage. They went back to their college 
 and held a meeting to consider their griev 
 ance. It soon became an indignation meet 
 ing, notwithstanding the protests of a few 
 who were cried down ; and a committee was 
 sent to the Professor to ask for some ex 
 planation or satisfaction. When he told the 
 committee that he had nothing to say that 
 he had said all he cared to or needed to the 
 members were satisfied they had come on a 
 fool s errand, that the class had made a mis 
 take ; and had their courage been equal to it, 
 they would gladly have gone back to their 
 fellows and said so. But it was evident that 
 they did not dare to do this, it required more 
 nerve than they had to confront the class 
 empty-handed, and so they pleaded with him 
 for some word that would harmonize things. 
 They really wanted some statement that 
 would appear to be an apology on his part, 
 to take back to their classmates; and an 
 hour was spent in vain discussion. He 
 finally divined the predicament of the com 
 mittee and generously gave them some state 
 ment the half of which they could go back 
 and tell and make to appear to be a conces 
 sion, and the other half keep silence about, all 
 of which they did. The tempestuous natures 
 in the class had been conciliated, the wise 
 40 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 ones saw the joke, and the incident was at 
 an end. These events illustrate well the 
 crowd conscience and what it does for us, 
 and such incidents are of daily occurrence. 
 
 One expression of the collective conscience 
 is fashion, and people obey it; it is the "cor 
 rect thing to do. That they follow it so im 
 plicitly is only proof of its pervading force. 
 Fashions in clothes, in modes of speech, in 
 table manners, and the use of calling cards, 
 are the least of the customs of society that 
 express the collective conscience. A woman 
 or man who violates in a flagrant way the 
 fashion in anything is as promptly aware of 
 the penalty for the offense as is the college 
 boy who informs on his fellows, or a criminal 
 who turns state s evidence. The penalty 
 may not be severe, but it is always felt. 
 
 Neither of the two sorts of conscience can 
 ever be followed completely; the class con 
 science is more likely to be obeyed implicitly 
 than the other, for there are many people 
 who do seem to have no real minds of their 
 own but who follow where the company leads, 
 without hesitation and without question. 
 The standards often conflict, and there are 
 emotions and impulses that draw the strug 
 gling soul (that does know itself) toward 
 each as against the other, a conflict that 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 often leads to behavior that is curious, even 
 queer and contradictory, and to some that 
 seems at first completely inexplicable, save 
 on the unnecessary theory of temporary lu 
 nacy. The greatest historical character of 
 the century illustrated this truth in his early 
 life. 
 
 A citizen of Chicago once many years ago 
 received calls from two young men on the 
 same day and within an hour of each other. 
 He was honored with the confidence of each, 
 which opened his eyes as to some of the absurd 
 things that rational beings are capable of 
 doing at the behest of what they regard as 
 the fashion. One of the men was a long-time 
 neighbor ; the other was a stranger who said 
 he was from New York. Each of them had 
 red and swollen eyes, trembling hands and 
 that general nervousness and agitation that 
 often come from either genuine grief or 
 over-stimulation. It developed as to each 
 that it was both genuine grief and over- 
 stimulation that was the trouble; only, the 
 grief was of that day, because of the de 
 bauchery of the day before. The first one 
 apologized for his condition and explained it 
 by saying that he had not touched liquor for 
 many months and did not like it anyway, 
 but he had received a visit from a young 
 42 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 gentleman from the East, who had come with 
 a letter of introduction from a friend who 
 begged him to show the stranger any cour 
 tesy he could. Of course, nothing but a 
 champagne dinner would do; and, of course, 
 willing or unwilling, he had to drink with 
 his guest. "But did the man intimate that 
 he expected a champagne dinner, or to be 
 made drunk?" "Oh no, he was a gentleman 
 about it and protested that he did not care 
 for it and urged me not to order it on his ac 
 count. But I knew he expected it, they all 
 do, and I had to do it." The second young 
 man also apologized for his appearance, and 
 said that at home he never had occasion to 
 call on any one in such a state, for at home 
 he never drank at all, but he had been too 
 highly entertained by a gentleman in Chi 
 cago to whom he had brought a letter. * I 
 didn t want to drink his liquor," he said, 
 "but he insisted on it; and, of course, it 
 would have been a discourtesy both to him 
 and to my friend who gave me the letter, if 
 I had refused." 
 
 Each of these men had sufficiently demon 
 strated his own cowardice ; for it is only a 
 coward who can offer such an excuse for a 
 debauch if it is not strictly true ; and if it 
 was true in either case, then the man had 
 
 43 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 confessed his weakness towards what was to 
 him class conscience. 
 
 The human love of approbation must be 
 considered in any study of this subject. It 
 is the determining influence of much of hu 
 man conduct, and colors the character of 
 mankind. The dread of censure is a com 
 plementary emotion and is always linked 
 with the love of applause. And there are so 
 many kinds of approbation and censure, and 
 from many sources! The approbation of 
 one s own judgment and best sense is one; 
 the applause of the company is another. 
 Then, the impulsive applause of to-day may 
 turn to the censure of to-morrow or some 
 other morrow, when the company has had 
 time to think and separate and its members 
 be alone a little and listen to the prompt 
 ings of the personal conscience. We may 
 gain the applause of the hour, and be sure 
 of self -censure perpetually; or we may have 
 perfect self-satisfaction in an act with a cer^ 
 tainty of after self-chastisement, if not blame 
 from the community. So go on the strug 
 gle and the conflict. Men overcome and dis 
 regard their present impulses in the hope of 
 after approval of themselves and their world. 
 They face danger and death rather than 
 yield to their physical fear, and take the 
 
 44 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 avalanche that is sure to follow. The battle 
 fields of war furnish great examples of this ; 
 but these are few and trifling compared to 
 those of the manifold struggles in the moral 
 battles of mankind that forever go unre 
 corded. The fear of after condemnation that 
 makes one control his shaking knees in the 
 face of danger and do his duty for the appro 
 bation to follow, is the same fear that often 
 makes us quail before a fashion or popular 
 notion that is innately ignoble and altogether 
 beneath us. 
 
 The presence of a crowd moving in a given 
 direction easily makes a man forget his per 
 sonal standard. This is notoriously true 
 when the crowd is stirred by a strong emo 
 tion of ambition or dislike or fear. The 
 moving impulse becomes suddenly right and 
 we join the procession. A quiet neighbor of 
 mine, a man never known to do an ungentle 
 thing before, was seen once, in a surging 
 crowd at a box office window, to push aside 
 a small woman with whom he was unac 
 quainted and take her place to get his ticket 
 first. Meeting her on the street or any 
 where with his personal conscience in con 
 trol, he would have been the embodiment of 
 deference and courtesy. Soldiers in battle 
 as long as they are most of them controlled 
 
 45 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 by their crowd conscience on the side of 
 courage and discipline, keep their ranks and 
 fight well. The courage of the large major 
 ity holds up the few shaky ones the ex 
 ample is infectious. But let them, or a 
 majority of them, be seized with the crowd 
 sentiment of fear, and they break in a panic 
 and actually trample on their fellows for 
 their own individual safety. The tragedy 
 of the Bridge of the Beresina in the retreat 
 from Moscow was only more disgraceful to the 
 race than many others, and more shows the 
 brutality that is in it, because the conditions 
 happened to be such as to make it possible 
 for so many to be killed so many as to 
 make islands of dead bodies in the river; 
 islands that have remained to this day. But 
 the same mad rush and forgetfulness have 
 occurred a million times and will continue to 
 occur as the accidents of life favor, perhaps 
 a little less often as we rise, if we do rise ; 
 but they will not cease, nor should we ex 
 pect them to. 
 
 It is not possible to have a personal con 
 science dissociated from the interests, real or 
 supposed, of the individual. Human indi 
 vidual selfishness is unavoidable and neces 
 sary. What is best for him, or what he 
 thinks is best for him, will more or less gov- 
 46 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 ern every man ; what is absolutely right for 
 him, wholly apart from self-interest, it is 
 hard for him to say, and candid men say it 
 variously. No two state it exactly in the 
 same way; and so for each man there is a 
 personal conscience, an individual standard 
 of right, differing a little from that of every 
 other one. One judge will accept a pass on 
 a railroad and probably not cease to be an 
 honest judge; another refuses all such fa 
 vors, and even compels his daughters to 
 return gifts sent them by rich lady friends. 
 
 To the personal standard there can be no 
 fashion or custom, which is the same thing. 
 Fashion means a doing of something because 
 others do it or have done it ; and to the in 
 dividual conscience pure and simple, such a 
 thing is impossible. But the fact that no 
 wholesome and sane nature is entirely free 
 from the influence of customs (even those 
 that are disapproved of) is proof that nobody 
 is wholly and constantly governed by the 
 personal conscience. That men are con 
 trolled by it at times completely, and in 
 some degree generally, is encouraging for 
 the future of the race. 
 
 The individual standard is higher than the 
 collective one ; the personal is greater than 
 the crowd conscience. It is farther removed 
 
 47 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 from barbarism ; more comes of it and from 
 it ; it is most potent for good, and most real 
 and high good comes of it. It must be 
 diviner. It is the hope of the world against 
 the mob, the panic, the stampede of the 
 army, and the frenzy and bad fashions of 
 the less thinking rabble. It makes a man 
 walk without fear or guile and welcome the 
 light ; it gives the most rest and comfort of 
 mind, and least taxes the memory to be sure 
 what falsehoods may have been told. It is 
 the result of that philosophy that has satis 
 faction in its doing, if not in itself ; it takes 
 a man above the need of applause and praise 
 from his fellows and makes him proof against 
 the hisses of the crowd if he only knows he 
 is true to the standard. It means, as far as it 
 goes, self-containment and imperturbability 
 two qualities of mind that all men may 
 well covet. With these qualities, homesick 
 ness as a disease is impossible, and one has 
 courage to defy the unreasonable behests of 
 the collective standard ; with these qualities, 
 such exhibitions are possible, as of Thomas 
 at Chickamauga, and Phillips in Faneuil Hall 
 amid the hisses of the multitude when de 
 fending the act of Love joy as higher than 
 that of the Revolutionary Fathers. 
 
 But the collective standard is necessary. 
 48 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 It needs regulating, but it cannot be abol 
 ished. The company conscience is unavoid 
 able. It is the first and earliest standard ; it 
 comes in childhood and is more instinctive, 
 but it is nearer barbarism. Barbarism is 
 more selfish, perhaps, than modern civilized 
 society; it is surely more cruel. Not the 
 strongest, perhaps, but one of the earliest 
 attributes of childhood, especially the mas 
 culine side of it, after imagination, is 
 cruelty, especially to animals. The boy is 
 a soldier, always with sword and gun, and 
 always to slay or to lord it over others; 
 he is rarely a private, doing camp duty ; but 
 a bandit, a robber, an Indian or a pirate, 
 and is always victorious ; he never surren 
 ders. Many a boy must run away from home 
 and try to be an outlaw before he is disil 
 lusioned, and returns to more rational lines. 
 The boy always imagines himself a man 
 and imitates what he regards as a man s, or 
 a manly older boy s ways; but his notion of 
 manliness is liable to warping, and he is 
 very apt to take for his hero the wildest man 
 or the most daring and nonchalant boy. And 
 after he has developed an ambition to re 
 semble the modern creditable man of high 
 character, he will occasionally enjoy break 
 ing away from his standard and, with some 
 
 49 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 ruder boy, will become for an hour a bandit 
 or a soldier again. He drops from the higher 
 to the lower level and rises back again in 
 that brief period. Your girl may early show 
 a perfectly inhuman cruelty to pet animals, 
 and occasionally to other children attri 
 butes she may never again reveal, except as 
 a woman under the stress of jealousy and 
 hate. 
 
 Every one has the crowd conscience to some 
 degree; we may pretend to the contrary, 
 but the pretense is shallow and unbecom 
 ing. The crowd conscience makes collect 
 ive action possible; and such action, and 
 with force, is necessary to the community. 
 Society were impossible without it; other 
 wise, adverse forces and the enemies of the 
 community would destroy it. The collect 
 ive conscience expresses itself in numerous 
 conservative usages for the common good. 
 These are when analyzed only forms of fash 
 ion ; and so great a sentiment as patriotism 
 is one of them. Fashion rules the world, it 
 may be ; but fashion is the expression of the 
 collective standard. We prate about the 
 vacillation and changes of fashions as though 
 there was no stability in them ; but it is only 
 a paltry few that change often ; and because 
 they mean labor and cost to us we notice 
 
 5 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 them and forget that they are not all there 
 is of the ways of the world. Most fashions 
 last through centuries, some of them many 
 centuries, and all because they are founded 
 on the primal needs of the race. 
 
 Some of the unwholesome results of the 
 collective standard are mobs, popular upris 
 ings of frenzy and foolishness, stampedes 
 of soldiers, of audiences and crowds; mob 
 jail-breakings and hangings; many college 
 hazings and other pranks annoying to neigh 
 borhoods. These examples are no more phe 
 nomenal than the hasty, ill-considered and 
 inconsiderate expressions of popular senti 
 ment shown in the general clamor and in 
 popular elections sometimes. Popular senti 
 ment is generally safe and reliable, but after 
 the people have stopped to think, not al 
 ways in the haste of first thought and hot 
 feeling. The class conscience, especially in 
 haste, is capable of being as cruel and mer 
 ciless as any tyrant conceivable. 
 
 Another result of the class standard is the 
 blind following of custom because it is cus 
 tom, and the short-sighted condemnation or 
 social rejection of some good people because 
 they have followed their individual con 
 sciences too much, even when they have 
 done no harm to the community. But from 
 
 5 1 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 the collective conscience come patriotism, or 
 much of it; churches, guilds and parties of 
 all sorts ; union of forces in general for the 
 common benefit ; good order and security in 
 society, respect for personal and property 
 rights; and many of the emotions that make 
 the blessed individual and collective com 
 panionships of human life. The personal 
 conscience would have to create, if it did not 
 already exist, a company conscience for the 
 security, as well as the pleasure, of society. 
 Society could not exist otherwise. 
 
 The individual standard has little enthu 
 siasm about foot-ball and yacht-racing; and 
 political campaigns would lose a vast deal 
 of their force and meaning if left to it ; so 
 would all movements for the relief of dis 
 tress and the betterment of mankind. It 
 is the class conscience that most pushes for 
 excellence and success in every direction of 
 community, class or guild interest ; it makes 
 the world move. But it may be temporarily 
 foolish and blind and make the world move 
 wrong. It comes back finally to the right 
 track, albeit with some energy wasted. 
 Class conscience persecuted the witches and 
 has practiced all manner of religious intoler 
 ance and cruelty; but then, it gave us the 
 Declaration of Independence and abolished 
 
 5 2 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 human slavery. In all such instances, it is 
 true that from first to last both standards are 
 involved, the individual one at first, but the 
 execution is always with the community im 
 pulses. 
 
 So, while we laud the individual conscience 
 and look to it to modify and control, within 
 limits, the collective one it does this some 
 what, but ought to do it more we must not 
 despise the company conscience, which we 
 all have, for it is indispensable, even if it 
 does somehow and sometime make cowards 
 of us all. 
 
 The question of questions is how to re 
 strict within wholesome limits the operations 
 of the collective standard; how to prevent 
 the mobs and brutality, the needless hard 
 ships, and still leave it ready to defend the 
 public rights and occasionally by a burst of 
 fury to sweep away some colossal public 
 abuse or wrong, that may have grown upon 
 the people by insidious steps or been left be 
 hind as a relic of the by-gone in the march 
 of a nation to higher levels. 
 
 A few lessons are paramount. We should 
 never fail (as we usually do) to calculate on 
 the possibility of a stampede whenever a 
 mass of people are gathered together, 
 whether it is an audience, a picnic party or 
 
 53 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 an army, or when new influences or ideas 
 are suddenly brought to the public attention. 
 The veriest trifles may on occasion precipi 
 tate a rush that is as wild and blind and as 
 heartless as the behavior of a herd of cattle. 
 It is one of the possibilities of our kind, and 
 thoughtful minds should not invite their own 
 disappointment by forgetting this, nor suffer 
 the existence of death-traps of any kind by 
 failing to provide numerous exits, wide pas 
 sage ways, and abundant reserves to prevent 
 or cover a retreat. Never forget the possi 
 bility of even a good popular sentiment tak 
 ing the masses off their feet. 
 
 Then, profit comes of cultivating self-poise 
 and individual judgment and action. With 
 our constitution of society, independent per 
 sonal action and responsibility are the prom 
 ise of progress. The truly independent 
 thinker is the hope of the political world; 
 as he is in a lesser degree of the social 
 world also. 
 
 The mere fact that one or two men in a 
 hundred are known to be uninfluenced by 
 the clamor of any rabble, good or bad, is to 
 any community a force of unspeakable value. 
 The excitable ones know well that the fiftieth 
 man must be met and conciliated or overcome 
 in any hot-headed movement. He is a fac- 
 
 54 
 
TWO KINDS OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 tor as a voter and a citizen that cannot be 
 ignored, and he exercises a wholesome reg 
 ulating and modifying, often repressive, in 
 fluence on the hasty tendencies of the crowd. 
 The thieves of the public treasury, of all 
 classes and shades, are afraid of him. Even 
 one forceful man in a hundred thousand 
 may have an amazing influence on public 
 affairs, if he has the time and inclination to 
 devote to disinterested care of the public in 
 terests. There are a few such men in each 
 of our large cities. In one of the large cen 
 ters of the East, a wealthy man of leisure 
 was for many years a terror to the hot 
 headed and the filchers of the public; and 
 solely because he gave himself to the task 
 and they knew they would have to meet him 
 at every turn. This one man in the multi 
 tude may be called a croaker or a fossil ; but 
 often he is the sole force that is able to check 
 the rising of the mob or the stampede of the 
 army, or to compel men to stop and think 
 before taking action that may be hasty or 
 regrettable. 
 
 55 
 
Bashfulness : Its Effect on 
 Life and Character 
 
Bashfulness: Its Effect on 
 Life and Character 
 
 If a man has a tender knee-joint he favors 
 it in his movements and takes many precau 
 tions to avoid hurting it. He minifies his 
 walking, and keeps away from rough side 
 walks. The limping lessens the pain. If the 
 defect is permanent, or likely to be, he 
 orders his life and selects his vocation and 
 avocations so as to escape discomfort in it 
 as far as possible. He shuns crowds and 
 crushes, athletic activities and a bustling 
 life, and looks ahead for danger of a jar 
 upon the tender nerves of the vulnerable 
 part. He becomes timid and self- watchful ; 
 so both his gait and his character are 
 changed and in a measure determined by his 
 infirmity. He is altogether a different man 
 in his life and his place among men by rea 
 son of the one defect; a defect for which he 
 
 59 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 may be in no way responsible. His sensi 
 tiveness to pain and aversion to discomfort, 
 as well as to danger, are what shape his gait 
 and his life. 
 
 Nobody finds an y difficulty in seeing the 
 effect on the man of the tender spot in the 
 physical body. That a tender emotional spot 
 will produce like results is less clearly per 
 ceived. We all understand that mental and 
 so-called moral qualities somehow create, if 
 they do not constitute, the character of every 
 man; but emotions of certain sorts (moral 
 qualities themselves) have a powerful influ 
 ence in the same direction. Thus, patriot 
 ism, love of friends and of children, love of 
 home or the opposite; hatred of certain 
 things, people or institutions these and 
 many other forms of emotional ideas are 
 potent in directing and shaping the course 
 of the lives of men and women the world 
 over. The emotions named are objective; 
 they primarily reach outside their possessor 
 to people and things, many and diverse; 
 they effect forcibly his relations to his envi 
 ronment, and effect his own character. Other 
 emotions there are which first directly con 
 cern the individual himself, subjective emo 
 tions, and they are quite as formative of 
 character and one s place in the world. Any- 
 60 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 thing that forms the character of a man, 
 more or less determines his career in life. 
 One of the most potent subjective emotions 
 of all doomed to be always neglected and 
 unrecognized is bashfulness, self-conscious 
 ness or diffidence. Its force is introspective ; 
 its possessor is its victim ; and it is the ten 
 der moral knee-joint of mankind. That 
 love of approbation and a fear he may not 
 acquit himself well, and some conceit at 
 times, may be psychologically back of the 
 emotion, does not lessen its force on the 
 character of the man, however much it may 
 suggest as to a remedy. 
 
 The most insistent quality of self-con 
 sciousness is its disagreeableness. It is 
 tantamount to chagrin, mortification, embar 
 rassment; it comes with blushing; it is a jar 
 to the feelings that is to be, and, what is 
 more, is shunned like a possible blow on a 
 sensitive nerve. The shunning and dodging 
 due to this fact lead to the most amazing 
 changes in the lives of people, as we cannot 
 fail to see when we study them even casually 
 and look for these effects. 
 
 The trouble is that we usually do not study 
 people as to the genesis of their ways, eccen 
 tricities and habits; yet the personal peculi 
 arities of people constitute one of the most 
 61 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 interesting of all subjects. We never tire of 
 considering them and reading books about 
 them. But the personal peculiarities some 
 how seem to have been born with people and 
 never to have grown out of psychological 
 conditions that are definable, capable of 
 study and possibly of correction or better 
 ment. 
 
 In features, conformation and looks no two 
 persons are alike ; in ways they are just as 
 diverse. We are, I think, rather less im 
 pressed by the looks of folks than by their 
 manners and character. For these latter 
 mainly we like or dislike or are indifferent 
 to sundry persons. We select our friends, 
 those we are drawn to and pleased with, if 
 we can; we shun the opposite, and ignore 
 the vaster mass of mankind, because of these 
 attributes. 
 
 We accept the bodily conformation of peo 
 ple as the fate of birth no man can increase 
 or lessen his stature or the length of his nose. 
 We mistakenly put the ways of mankind in 
 the same category. But the manners of men 
 are largely the product of emotions and 
 impulses capable of considerable control and 
 direction. 
 
 The first cardinal fact we discover in a 
 study of the origin and growth of character 
 62 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 and manners is that the moving thing in the 
 life of civilized man is his emotion. The 
 word emotion is one of the most misused or 
 variously used of the language, but a good 
 meaning of it is thought with pleasure or pain, 
 that is, thought with feeling. Most of our 
 thoughts are emotional, and they are almost 
 the only thoughts that determine the con 
 duct of life. The unpleasant things we avoid, 
 and the pleasurable ones we grasp or grasp 
 at, and so life is one grand effort to minify 
 our sufferings and enlarge the sum total of 
 our enjoyments. We come instinctively to 
 shun the unpleasant things, and are drawn 
 similarly to the pleasant ones; and so our 
 emotional promptings are mostly automatic. 
 
 The most moving of all the emotions, es 
 pecially early in life, are those that grow out 
 of our relations and association with our 
 kind. These relations are vital to most of 
 us for good or ill, for pleasure or pain, and 
 it is natural to expect that powerful emotions 
 would develop from them. 
 
 One of the strongest of all these is that 
 curious sense of uneasiness that comes of 
 our consciousness of the presence and scru 
 tiny of others. This is both primal and po 
 tent because it is produced by and touches 
 man s very initial act as a social being. He 
 
 63 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 cannot meet his fellowmen, especially if he 
 has a desire to meet them well, and appear 
 before them to advantage (an almost uni 
 versal desire), without danger of this emo 
 tion, and as a matter of fact the emotion 
 actually besets nearly all mankind. Boys 
 and men have it more than girls and women, 
 and it varies with the decades of the individ 
 ual s life, varies both in its quality and in 
 its effect on his behavior and character. By 
 a large class of boys and men there is rarely 
 experienced any purely physical discomfort 
 that is comparable to the mental distress of 
 bashfulness, diffidence or stage-fright, which 
 they seem powerless to avoid whenever they 
 are thrown among people outside of their 
 few intimates. For this men shun society, 
 avoid people and publicity, are even dis 
 courteous to those they would like to culti 
 vate. They blunder and hitch and halt 
 iinder the stress of it, usually appear at their 
 worst, and are covered with a sense of em 
 barrassment and humiliation; they cannot 
 even make love smoothly. It blights con 
 versation ; the tongue is frozen and thought 
 is dead the man is wooden, he is a block 
 head indeed. He cudgels his brain to think 
 of something to say, and then says the wrong 
 thing, or thinks afterward that he has said it. 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 He is humiliated by the sense of bashf ulness, 
 and by the consciousness that he has had it, 
 and must have it again on occasion ; and so 
 the one uppermost mental impression about 
 it is that of intense discomfort and chagrin 
 from which almost any escape seems justifi 
 able. 
 
 Can any one doubt that such experiences 
 must influence the course of a man s life? 
 The wonder is rather that the study of the 
 lives of the common people has not long since 
 discovered, growing out of this paramount 
 emotion, many of their qualities of character 
 and conduct. 
 
 Bashfulness not merely often shapes the 
 character of people, but it fixes the standards 
 by which they are judged by the com 
 munity; and a wofully unfair and inaccu 
 rate standard it often is. 
 
 How does the emotion produce this 
 result? By what it leads us to do or omit in 
 order to avoid the consciousness of it. The 
 emotion is our tender joint; we dislike it, 
 and try by all sorts of queer acts (that oft- 
 repeated become automatic) to avoid hurting 
 it. We try to mask or cover or hide it, and 
 to make ourselves oblivious to it, and the 
 results of our effort are grotesque and 
 astonishing. 
 
 65 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 It is a curious property of the nervous sys 
 tem that various disagreeable and unfortu 
 nate sensations and emotions can be driven 
 away, stopped or altered by other and quite 
 minor ones artificially induced. Thus 
 squeezing the hand or foot violently just at 
 the moment of the beginning of an epileptic 
 fit will often stop it. Slight, gentle pressure 
 upon the head, or stroking it, may stop its 
 aching. The touch of the hand of a friend 
 drives away fear, and in a nervous person 
 may ward off a fit of hysteria. A fellow 
 whistles or sings to keep his courage up, and 
 he succeeds. The sound of his own voice 
 gives him a feeling of comradeship that makes 
 solitude endurable and drives out the appre 
 hension of impending harm. One must 
 often walk the floor or wring his hands to 
 drive away nervousness; if asked about it 
 he will say that it is a vent to the nervous 
 ness. Eugene Feld could not think and 
 write at his best unless he had peculiar ink, 
 and paper and pen that pleased him; and 
 many men can never think so easily as when 
 they can sit with their feet elevated ; and cold 
 ness of the feet spoils any creative thought to 
 most men. A newspaper writer tries to find 
 his ideas or his muse, and they disappoint 
 him, but let him begin to chew a toothpick 
 66 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 or the end of an tmlighted cigar, and his 
 thoughts flow like oil. There is scime 
 physical inhibition to thought and tranquillity 
 which diversion of another part of the nerv 
 ous system, as by the cigar or toothpick or 
 warmth to the feet, removes or counteracts. 
 Bashfulness is disagreeable to us, and not 
 merely this, it also inhibits thought and pre 
 vents mental and nervous balance. If we 
 can make ourselves unconscious of it, it 
 ceases for all practical purposes to exist, and 
 so we early fall to doing multifarious things 
 to take the place, to our nervous sensibili 
 ties, of this sensation ; to drive away or dis 
 place the inhibitory influence of it, by which 
 it prevents thought, action and comfort. A 
 man twirls his watch-chain or his mustache 
 or his cane, or he wiggles his feet while he 
 is talking to you; you hand him a note to 
 deliver to a friend, and if he puts it in his 
 pocket, well for the note; if he holds it in 
 his hand while he still talks, he will handle 
 it a dozen times over, and will soil it with 
 his fingers till you are ashamed to have your 
 friend see it. Once, when Bismarck arose to 
 address the Reichstag, he held in his hand 
 his quill pen ; had he left that on his desk 
 his mental confusion would have been 
 greater; it was sufficient as it was. Before 
 67 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 he had uttered a dozen sentences he had 
 unconsciously torn the pen into shreds and 
 thrown it bit by bit upon the floor; only 
 then had he become so enthused with his 
 subject that he forgot his embarrassment 
 and his hands. A diffident acquaintance 
 calls on you for advice ; he sits near you, and 
 must touch your chair with his foot before 
 he can talk freely. Another strokes his 
 beard or twists his face or opens his eyes 
 widely at the end or beginning of every sen 
 tence. As long as he is doing some one of 
 these maneuvers or tricks he is, to some 
 extent at least, unconscious of his diffidence ; 
 its inhibitory influence is removed ; the trick 
 is a comfort and a satisfaction, and is turned 
 to as instinctively as some children suck 
 their thumbs for solace. 
 
 Now, when we come to study these tricks 
 we discover that they are susceptible of 
 classification, as to their essential features, 
 their origin and especially as to their influ 
 ence on the character and career of the indi 
 vidual. Some are insignificant, and, to all 
 but the very critical, not noticeable ; others 
 are apparent to observant persons, but only 
 as harmless excrescences of personal ways ; 
 while others the world never forgives because 
 it regards them as founded in perversity or 
 68 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 mental warping, and it judges men by this 
 yardstick, and gives them places in the scale 
 of the race much lower than they deserve. 
 So to the misfortune of bashfulness and the 
 tricks they have acquired to parry it, they 
 have added the further misfortune to be mis 
 judged and misunderstood. 
 
 One of the saddest facts about the whole 
 subject is that the victim is usually uncon 
 scious of the tricks, and goes on year after 
 year misjudging himself as much as the 
 world misjudges him, but in a different way. 
 
 Each man s tricks are peculiar to himself, 
 and, at first thought, no one could possibly 
 tell, if he should try his best, how his par 
 ticular mannerism began, or why it continues 
 without change. The fact is that in most 
 instances it began in childhood or youth, and 
 has continued in the way it began by virtue 
 of the physiological law that the nerve cen 
 ters tend to reproduce an act once done 
 rather than to do another and different one. 
 By this law all the habits, all the automa 
 tisms of our daily existence are built up, even 
 our education. Once set agoing, the trick 
 is repeated again and again, and soon be 
 comes as automatic as walking is ; and so it 
 continues, perhaps to the end of life, with the 
 victim often in serene ignorance of the fact. 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 If every person could suddenly have 
 revealed to him all his habits and manner 
 isms that have originated and continued in 
 the necessities, real and imaginary, of his 
 own bashfulness, there would probably be 
 the largest company of surprised and dis 
 gusted people since the beginning of the 
 world. 
 
 In the main there is no way of making 
 people see these vices, for they are not 
 normally inclined to see them, and frank 
 friends who will tell them are few. Our 
 friends have courage to tell us of our sins, 
 and we take it not unkindly; but they are 
 reluctant about telling us of our foibles, lest 
 our vanities may be touched and we be 
 angry. 
 
 If we could only so learn the art of intro 
 spection as to study ourselves impersonally, 
 most of us would discern a few mannerisms 
 growing out of bashfulness, the correction 
 of which would make us changed beings to 
 the community. The novels of Mr. Howells 
 have done a vast amount of good to his read 
 ers by uncovering and bringing into strong 
 relief the numerous foibles of our poor 
 nature, and so helping us to a profitable self- 
 examination, but I do not recall that he, or 
 any other author, has ever dealt with those 
 70 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 which come out of the emotion of bashful- 
 ness. No foibles of the race are more pro 
 nounced than these, and the list of them is 
 large. Only a few of them can be described 
 here. 
 
 One of the most disagreeable vices of 
 mannerism is the habit of interjecting into 
 one s conversation little explosions of 
 laughter quite without meaning and usually 
 without the smallest occasion for mirth. In 
 the main it is very silly. It is a common 
 habit ; a man will laugh with every sentence 
 or every third sentence whether grave or 
 gay ; even death itself gets its giggle, and he 
 may scold if it is a gentle scolding, and may 
 tell of his gravest misfortune in the same 
 manner. Only when he is in deep anger or 
 great fear does he drop this habit. He will 
 describe a slaughter, read a sentence of 
 death, and condole with mourners with the 
 aid of his own little laugh, and he doesn t 
 know it, or if he knows it, he is incapable 
 usually of seeing how it looks to others. 
 The habit always starts in bashfulness, and 
 has no other genesis whatever. But it gives 
 the critics the ground for unfavorable com 
 ment which they never neglect ; they never 
 exercise a charitable judgment, but, with 
 the inexorableness of fate, they give the indi- 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 vidual a character and estimate colored about 
 as badly as possible by the fact of this man 
 nerism. 
 
 Another habit founded in the same mis 
 fortune is that of making jests or jokes out 
 of nearly everything. Horse-play is con 
 stant; extravagances of speech, hyperbole, 
 figures of speech and quotations are a large 
 part of the conversation. Some of these 
 victims come finally to be quite unable, out 
 side of their constant associates, to speak 
 simply and in their own language about any 
 thing, and the world regards them as insin 
 cere, hilarious or trifling, when they are 
 only following an automatism in manner 
 that started in bashfulness. This habit 
 begins later in life than that of automatic 
 laughter, but it is quite as disagreeable to 
 others, and more damaging to a man s repu 
 tation. 
 
 A much worse habit is that of bravado and 
 pompousness in talk and action, a habit early 
 acquired and shown especially in boys reared 
 under a certain regime. I have never known 
 this fault more common among boys than in 
 rural New England. As long as a boy can 
 keep up his air of pomposity, he can avoid 
 breaking down in embarrassment, and this 
 becomes his refuge in his bashfulness ; and 
 72 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 once started he never gets over the habit, 
 and so the mark is fixed upon the man by 
 this juvenile blemish. 
 
 The habit of sternness is only a variation ; 
 a man grows into ways of severity, that in 
 his soul he does not mean, and wife, chil 
 dren, everybody, feel it, and the tender 
 hearted man is never discovered; nobody 
 ever knows him. His early bashfulness has 
 buried his true self out of sight. The man 
 is chained to the inexorable; if he should 
 relax his severity he might some day shed 
 tears, and that would be soft and womanish 
 and a disgrace to him. Many women have 
 this habit as fixed as men have. They will 
 kiss their babies, but never their children, 
 and never a word of endearment or affection 
 must be used that would be childish and 
 silly. The poet s old man parting with 
 his son on his going to the war could only 
 say: "Good-bye, Jim, take care of yourself." 
 That was all he could say; it exhausted his 
 vocabulary of affection, and it revealed a 
 poverty that is always pathetic. 
 
 A curious type produced by self -conscious 
 ness and diffidence is one of people afraid 
 of controversy, and morally too feeble or 
 too lazy to dispute or disagree. To such 
 people even the gentlest controversy has a 
 
 73 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 look of unfriendliness and severity, and is a 
 hint of battle. You meet such a one on 
 the street, and he will carry the amenities 
 of the weather into every avenue of conver 
 sation you can engage him in. If it is rain 
 ing he will say it is a rainy day ; if fair, that 
 it is fair, and if foggy, then foggy there can 
 be no controversy about the weather. But 
 talk of a dozen other subjects and he will 
 agree with you as to all of them, or, if he 
 does not agree, he will say he doesn t know; 
 that is a bulwark behind which he can 
 retreat, and may at any moment. These 
 people spend their whole lives agreeing with 
 others, both those who may happen to be 
 "in the way with" them, and those whom 
 they meet casually. They are negative char 
 acters, and count in the world very much like 
 so many ciphers, for they have no opinions 
 on anything but the commonest subjects, no 
 opinions that require to be defended. The 
 world counts them as nonentities, and yet it 
 is unfair, for many of them have views that 
 would do anybody credit, and many succeed 
 in filling useful places in society. Their 
 lack of self-assertion is not the result of 
 ordinary cowardice, but of that form only 
 that is the product of bashfulness or diffi 
 dence, and they are hopelessly handicapped 
 
 74 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 by it; with the graver things of life they 
 often have courage enough. 
 
 Some men are so bashful about contro 
 versies that they are at times unable to be 
 strictly truthful when truth-telling might 
 lead to a dispute. Some veer so far from 
 the possibility of a controversy that they 
 shrink from showing any displeasure unless 
 they are positively angry ; then the diffidence 
 is gone by displacement. They seem pleased 
 when displeased, and scare you when, out of 
 smiles and suavity, they explode in anger 
 without apparent reason. When a boy at 
 school I was once the sole boarder of a lady 
 who habitually met people with smiles and 
 serenity that seemed without reserve or 
 alloy. She interlarded her conversation with 
 little, gentle laughter that I then thought 
 due to her exceeding sweetness of disposi 
 tion. Now it is plain that it was an auto 
 matic mannerism to cover her diffidence; 
 then it was a warrant that she could never 
 be cross, and as it had been constant for 
 weeks, it gave me a sense of great satisfac 
 tion and security. An explosion of dynamite 
 could not have surprised me more than when 
 she gave me an angry scolding one evening 
 for being late to supper she said I had been 
 late repeatedly, which was probably true, 
 
 75 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 although that was the first intimation that 
 had come to my dull mind of the fact or that 
 I might incommode her. The cause of her 
 displeasure ceased at once, and she resumed 
 her manner of artificial smiles and laughter 
 which had the same sound and look as 
 before, but I could never get over a sus 
 picion of her I had been startled, and could 
 not again feel sure of understanding her. 
 She was a good woman, and a perfect ex 
 ample of a large class of people who are for 
 ever miscalculated because of manners that 
 depend on the cowardice of diffidence and 
 that make them always a little insincere in 
 their demeanor toward others. Probably 
 their sort of insincerity is better than an 
 opposite kind ; it is not wholly bad since it 
 often deceives us into a belief that there are 
 more sweet-tempered people in the world 
 than actually exist, but it leads to awkward 
 and very humiliating surprises and to many 
 a disillusionment. 
 
 But a more unfortunate and numerous 
 type is that of people bashful about their 
 ignorance. They have some weird sensitive 
 ness that makes them blush at the exposure 
 of any defect in their mental equipment, and 
 so they hedge in conversation, and refrain 
 from asking questions or expressing opin- 
 76 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 ions that they think likely to reveal it. 
 Of course the) 7 do reveal it on every hand 
 and in the most blind unconsciousness 
 and their blushes are spared by this latter 
 fact. This foolishness is an attribute of 
 immaturity and nervousness, and people 
 grow out of it as they broaden ; the greater 
 the man the less he shows this quality. 
 Your truly superior man is frankness itself; 
 he will come to a new town or situation, or 
 among a new set of people, full of a new 
 subject, and will ask a hundred questions, 
 and reveal his ignorance as simply as a 
 child would. A narrow man, afraid his 
 limitations may become known, will listen 
 and keep shut like a clam; most likely his 
 ignorance will be revealed inadvertently ; if 
 not, he will be set down as simply taciturn 
 and unresponsive. 
 
 I would not by any means condemn the 
 practice of silence in ignorance, for it helps 
 many a one out of hard dilemmas, and is often 
 commendable ; it is only unfortunate when it 
 handicaps a man and makes him to appear 
 smaller than he really is, besides making him 
 a coward ; and when it is invoked not to fur 
 ther the serious, laudable purposes of life, 
 but to cover the weakness of diffidence. 
 
 I know that the claim will be challenged 
 
 77 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 that bashfulness is more common in the male 
 than in the female part of the community, 
 but the proof is ample. The excrescences 
 resulting from it are fully twice as common 
 in men as in women, and a most mortifying 
 one, not before referred to, is found almost 
 solely in boys and men, namely, that of stut 
 tering and stammering. How many stam 
 mering girls or women can you count? It is 
 a thing almost unheard of. And why does 
 it occur almost exclusively among boys? 
 Self-consciousness is the only explanation; 
 when the stuttering boys are alone, they 
 speak perfectly in company they never do. 
 
 While bashfulness is a misfortune, and 
 produces untold grief, it is not wholly mis 
 chievous, for it both speaks for and develops 
 gentler natures than otherwise we might 
 have, and therefore has a ministry for good. 
 Boldness is less likely to go with bashfulness, 
 and boldness is offensive; but occasionally 
 it is affected to parry the sensation of bash- 
 fulness, and then it is doubly offensive. 
 Diffidence in some people draws others 
 toward them to be gentle to them, and gentle 
 by reason of this restraining quality. 
 
 After we have analyzed bashfulness and 
 discovered its results, what ought we to do 
 with it? Should we abolish it if we could? 
 
 78 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 That is impossible anyway, for it is inborn and 
 inherent in the lives of men, as completely 
 so as a belief in a hereafter ; nor should we 
 try to abolish it out of human nature, for 
 that would be a distinct loss to the race. 
 
 The supreme thing for us to do is to 
 acknowledge it freely as something that is as 
 unavoidable as the color of the skin, and not 
 attempt to mask it or cover it up, or resort 
 to any tricks to make ourselves feel that it 
 does not exist. 
 
 Nobody thinks less of a man because he is 
 bashful ; he suffers no disesteem from others 
 on account of it; then why should he dis 
 esteem himself? Probably the bashful man, 
 if he is free from offensive mannerisms 
 about it, that is, if he acts bashful without 
 tricks to hide it, is admired and cultivated by 
 more desirable people for this very reason. 
 What a blessed relief from his troubles if he 
 could stop hating himself because of this 
 besetment and could agree that he would act 
 sincerely and simply, and without devices to 
 conceal it ! 
 
 It is always laudable to act better than we 
 are ; it is a harmless deception upon others. 
 The reflex effect of this course upon our 
 selves is sometimes, let us hope, to lead us 
 to become better in heart, and so there is a 
 
 79 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 real gain. But it is always unprofitable to 
 deceive ourselves by tricks to hide our real 
 sensations, or otherwise. And we can act 
 better than ourselves in no other way so well 
 as by behaving with simplicity and genuine 
 ness. 
 
 But alas, long before a man is able to 
 reason about his mannerisms and the harm 
 they may work to his character and career, 
 he is usually past help in the thralldom of 
 these very habits ; they have begun in child 
 hood, and he fails to see them, or if he does 
 discover exactly how he looks and acts to 
 others, he finds that it requires a long and 
 patient self-watchfulness, a constant intro 
 spection, extending through months or years, 
 before he can hope to eradicate wholly the 
 blemishes that have been fixed by perhaps 
 decades of automatic nervous and mental 
 action. 
 
 One of the best remedies for bashfulness 
 is to think more of others and less of self. 
 As a man grows unselfish and imbued with 
 his duty to others his bashfulness decreases. 
 As we get over our egotism, our eterlasting 
 thinking about ourselves and what we are to 
 do toward others and how we are to appear 
 to them, and what others are likely to say 
 and do for us and in relation to us our per- 
 80 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 sonal selves, our vanity the less our minds 
 will be concerned with this remarkable 
 emotional sensation. 
 
 Exactly as we enlarge in the breadth and 
 extent of our conscious, unselfish duties 
 toward others duties that are linked to no 
 hope of reward or applause does our supe 
 riority to self-consciousness grow. 
 
 One of the most unprofitable of all mental 
 occupations, if pursued far or long, is the 
 meditation on the debts of attention others 
 owe to us, commendation that we deserve 
 as well as our debts in the contrary direc 
 tion. These deferential bills payable and 
 receivable cause almost as much grief and 
 trouble as their monetary homologues. 
 
 So, if we cannot put diffidence out of our 
 natures entirely and ought not to, we may 
 both lessen our annoyance at it and at the 
 same time grow better in soul and heart by 
 reducing our conceits, or, in other -words, 
 our selfishness, and by increasing our altru 
 ism. 
 
 The outlook for much improvement to 
 many people growing out of a study by them 
 selves of this subject is far from flattering. 
 Of those who consider it only a few will ever 
 study introspectively ; fewer will discover 
 their own unnaturalness of manner that has 
 81 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 grown up from an emotional basis (we easily 
 discover the blemishes in others), and a 
 select few will ever succeed in this way in 
 permanently correcting the faults. 
 
 Better success may be had with children in 
 the formative period of the tricks. They 
 may be taught, if their parents will, to avoid 
 disagreeable habits, to act and be them 
 selves, and that bashfulness is neither to be 
 shunned nor to be ashamed of. If this last 
 truth could be taught effectively to all chil 
 dren, it would prove a most useful step, for 
 then the temptation to take on mannerisms 
 would be greatly reduced. But for average 
 diffident children this would not be suffi 
 cient; the impulse to acquire the tricks is 
 too spontaneous, and there is only one 
 sovereign remedy for such, and that is for 
 their close friends and parents and chiefly 
 their mothers to study them carefully and 
 by pointing out their mannerisms, and show 
 ing their inevitable effect if they continue, to 
 help them to shun or correct them. In order 
 to accomplish this end, it is usually indis 
 pensable to keep the confidence and coopera 
 tion of the child absolutely. He must know 
 that you have his interest wholly and only at 
 heart, or you will not succeed best. You 
 may attain partial success by shaming a 
 82 
 
BASHFULNESS 
 
 child out of such habits ; never the best suc 
 cess. 
 
 For a large class of children the service 
 contemplated would be more useful in their 
 after lives than a fortune or a college educa 
 tion. One of the greatest difficulties in our 
 dealings with a child is over the emotions of 
 egotism and selfishness. These qualities are 
 to a large degree synonymous ; they belong 
 to most children, and particularly to the 
 forceful ones who are destined to control the 
 affairs of the world ; belong to them as to the 
 beasts and birds. These qualities, especially 
 the selfishness phase, are a great grief to 
 their parents, to their mothers most, for it 
 means heedlessness of their mothers rights 
 and claims, and so heart-crushings and dis 
 appointments. But they cannot be eradi 
 cated, nor should we wish them so. If we 
 can temper them to a wholesome limit for 
 the general good of the individual, and at the 
 same time reduce his own chagrin at his 
 bashfulness, we should regard the result as a 
 great victory. 
 
The Nerves of the Modern 
 Child 
 
The Nerves of the Modern 
 Child 
 
 Man s place in the world is determined by 
 the type and development of his nervous 
 system. His brain and spinal cord fix his 
 character and force. Defects of other 
 organs, as heart, lungs, kidneys, and spleen, 
 may destroy his life. But defect or weak 
 ness of brain and cord, while perhaps 
 allowing him to live long, hamper him per 
 petually. 
 
 The conservation of his nervous system 
 must be, from birth to death, of paramount 
 importance. Next to the forces that make 
 for the general bodily strength and resisting 
 power, those that influence the development 
 and habits of the nervous system are most of 
 all powerful in shaping the career of the indi 
 vidual. To a large degree it is true of no 
 other set of organs but the nervous system 
 
 87 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 that influences and impressions of very early 
 life determine the final result. 
 
 Every child has the natural right to the 
 most successful and complete career in life 
 that is possible to it. Any rational sacrifice 
 or discipline in early years is justifiable and 
 desirable, if it will perfect and round out the 
 life and character as a whole, and give the 
 individual the best chance in the race for 
 success, and the greatest final aggregate of 
 happiness. Fathers and mothers doubtless 
 always try to train their children by the best 
 light they have and so as to create the great 
 est probability of their ultimate success in 
 life. There can be no impeachment of the 
 good intentions toward their children of the 
 great world of parents. But taken together 
 they have numerous standards and systems 
 of bringing up and educating children for 
 their best good. In their tendencies and 
 results many of the systems are directly 
 opposed to each other, and history has wit 
 nessed several successive changes among the 
 same people. Old ways have been discarded 
 for new ones, always on the theory that the 
 new are better. Changes have sometimes 
 been made in accordance with altered notions 
 of the highest purpose of a child s life, but 
 not often. 
 
 88 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 There is a general consensus that most 
 children will have to earn their bread 
 directly or indirectly, to live in civilized if 
 not enlightened society, and that it is desir 
 able they should have comfortable if not 
 happy lives of peace and amity. The inexor 
 able struggle for existence is never lost sight 
 of by any one undertaking seriously and in 
 a large way the care and education of chil 
 dren. A conspicuous few, however, and 
 those most able to do the very best for their 
 children, appear to think, if their manage 
 ment is an index of their thoughts, that a 
 child should become solely an ornamental 
 part of society. The multifarious changes 
 in methods of education and care of the 
 young in the past indicate the difficulties of 
 the subject, and suggest that the last word 
 has by no means yet been said. 
 
 A study of the physical life of the people 
 shows that in some way a better word is 
 sorely needed. Efforts to correct evils some 
 times create others in different directions. 
 Current conditions point to something 
 wrong ; some tendency must be bad. 
 
 Insanity and various other nervous dis 
 orders that more or less disable their victims, 
 are alarmingly prevalent and probably on 
 the increase among the people. 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 Why this tendency? There must be some 
 cause for it; it does not exist by chance. 
 And the cause must somehow spend itself 
 on the nervous system. Is a nervous de 
 generacy of the race imminent or upon us? 
 If so, then the basis of it will be found in 
 some habit of life or in the development of 
 the people, some influence which is con 
 tinued probably through successive genera 
 tions of individuals. 
 
 Nature is a great bookkeeper. It is true 
 of every cell and fibre of the nervous system, 
 as it is in the philosophy of life, that you 
 cannot both have your cake and eat it. 
 Brain cells and all cells are limited in their 
 capacity for function by their inherent and 
 congenital potentiality, differing in indi 
 viduals, always dependent for their best on 
 good pabulum of blood, freedom from effete 
 matter, and on time for recuperation after 
 function. 
 
 Long periods of nervous and mental strain 
 can be compensated for only by longer rest; 
 this is tmavoidable if a genuine restoration 
 of power is to be accomplished; and such 
 restoration is usually possible if the labor 
 and strain have been moderate. But really 
 excessive depletion of the nervous system as 
 a result of labor, worry, passion, indulgence 
 90 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 or sickness of any sort usually ends in re 
 duced power that is to some extent per 
 manent. Only partial restoration is possible 
 even by prolonged abstinence and rest. It 
 is doubtful that any truly exaggerated strain 
 of any organ of the body, any set or system 
 of cells, is ever entirely recovered from. 
 For cells produce their successors as one 
 by one they break down and die ; and the 
 progeny of severely debilitated cells cells 
 potentially debilitated by excessive labor 
 can hardly be expected to reach the highest 
 or even the original standard. 
 
 Infantile insomnia lasting a year or two is 
 sometimes followed by some years of over 
 sleeping, after which the normal conditions 
 and habits are restored. There is an army 
 of broken-down men of business and women 
 of society who must absent themselves from 
 friends and business for months or years at a 
 time for rest and the recuperation that comes 
 of changed conditions of existence. And 
 then the recovery is never up to the full 
 standard of normal resisting power; the vic 
 tim is left at best always a little below par. 
 
 It is very evident that sections of the human 
 race, and not a few of those most potential 
 in the affairs of the world, are becoming 
 congenitally weaker in their nerve cells, or 
 
 9 1 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 that to them at least modern life is becoming 
 more severe in its wearing effects on this part 
 of the organism. Either the power of endur 
 ance is lessening, or the load is increasing in 
 weight. As a result various nervous affec 
 tions and weaknesses abound and are prob 
 ably increasing. Among these, and short of 
 insanity, are : (a) Nervous and mental weak 
 ness shown on slight exertion, so-called 
 "nervous prostration"; great nervousness 
 on exertion of any kind, and easy mental and 
 nervous demoralization; (b) a tendency to 
 pain, especially in the head; pain on the 
 slightest over- work or severe mental atten 
 tion, or close work with the eyes ; persisting 
 pain in the back sometimes called crudely 
 "spinal irritation"; and (c) manifold forms 
 of psycho-neurosis such as spasms, neural 
 gias, amyosthenia or muscular weakness 
 occurring in an erratic manner, and aberra 
 tions of sensation and sight. These forms 
 are often interdependent, frequently co-exist 
 and are interchangeable. They are all more 
 or less dependent upon some instability or 
 irregularity in sensation, emotion or will 
 power over muscular and other acts. They 
 are sometimes called hysterical, but this is 
 an inadequate designation. 
 
 Is there any nexus between this class of 
 92 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 disorders and symptoms, and any of the 
 prevalent habits of the people? I think 
 there is. 
 
 First of all, to a large class of people the 
 nervous strain of life in America is greater 
 than formerly, and so the potentiality of 
 brain cells is worn out faster; the load is 
 heavier. Then the unwholesomeness of the 
 lives of many infants and children, on their 
 nervous side, reduces the capacity of their 
 brains to bear worry in their maturity, and 
 so the power is reduced. Nothing illus 
 trates this last proposition better than the 
 growth of the emotional or so-called hyster 
 ical habit, as nothing shows better than that 
 how easy it is for injury to be done to the 
 mental and emotional nature. 
 
 The hysterical tendency grows by what it 
 feeds upon. Emotional excitement, the 
 shortest step beyond the wholesome limit, is 
 always liable, if not certain, to beget lack of 
 emotional stability; then excessive mobility 
 of nervous force in the emotional direction 
 may occur, and frequent and ready explo 
 sions. Personal attention received, compli 
 ments, praise, may produce it to a moderate 
 degree; but yearning expectation of per 
 sonal attention causes it to a much greater 
 degree, and more than anything else. 
 
 93 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 Indeed, expectation of the attentions of 
 others, of their consideration, compliments 
 and applause; the fear these may not be 
 received; grief, chagrin and jealousy at 
 their not coming, or because they are not of 
 the right kind or degree, or just to the lik 
 ing of the recipient, more than all other 
 causes, tend to develop the hysterical consti 
 tution, and to wear out the nervous and 
 mental resources. 
 
 That mental worry and not work wears us 
 out is an old, true doctrine. But worry is 
 an emotion entirely, and for many people 
 the whole secret of happiness is to minify 
 or abolish this emotion. The history of 
 medicine is full of examples of queer mind 
 disease produced by the carkiiig emotions of 
 over desire for attention, and of jealousy. 
 Dr. Weir Mitchell has described them and 
 their treatment With these people, to a 
 singularly morbid condition of mind, is 
 added by slow development the most amaz 
 ing system of tricks and deception to in 
 duce sympathy. No one does these things 
 in any such degree at first; but like any 
 other vice, this is a matter of growth, and 
 the growth finally attained is appalling. 
 A patient refuses to eat, and is the won 
 der of the neighborhood she eats surrep- 
 
 94 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 titiously. One is completely bedridden, 
 and cannot eat without vomiting she 
 does sometimes actually vomit but her 
 nurse is pledged to keep secret the fact that 
 she walks about at night and eats freely and 
 retains her food. One woman, a supposed 
 wreck of nerves, keeps up her high fever for 
 weeks by sending the nurse out of the room 
 for some trifle whenever her temperature is 
 being taken, and then herself shaking the 
 mercury upward in the thermometer. There 
 is no manner of deception short of crime, if 
 crime even has been the limit, that such 
 patients have not perpetrated at the behest 
 of their insatiable craving for attention and 
 sympathy and wonder. 
 
 These morbid states grow out of the 
 normal love of the companionship and fel 
 lowship of mankind; they are only normal 
 emotion run wild and unchecked. Imagina 
 tion and love of companionship belong to 
 every child; we cannot stop nor curb them 
 much, nor should we care to; it is the 
 morbidity that kills, and the habit of exag 
 geration, and emotional, even hysterical, 
 exaltation is a thing that comes to children, 
 in a smaller way, as truly as to men. No 
 observing physician, who has treated many 
 nervous children, has failed to note how 
 
 95 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 quickly some of these develop, or discover 
 that they have, almost any symptom that is 
 inquired about in their hearing; how they 
 often complain of pains and other morbid 
 phenomena, wholly as a result of suggestion 
 or mimetism. Such patients are numerous 
 enough, but only a few have the symptoms 
 to the phenomenal degree indicated above. 
 And the treatment found most successful for 
 such cases is a revelation in its effects as to the 
 cause and nature of this class of disorders. 
 
 The treatment consists in taking away all 
 the incentives to the deception by stopping 
 absolutely all gratification of the morbid 
 emotions. For many days no one who could 
 possibly express sympathy or pity or wonder 
 is allowed to speak to the patient; at the 
 same time he is fed, cared for, and groomed 
 faithfully and tenderly. The treatment is 
 usually successful. The fuel is cut off, and 
 the flame dies. The rest of body and nerves 
 and the utter change from previous habits 
 help the recuperative power of the system to 
 bring about a recovery, partial or complete. 
 
 For the neuralgias, nervous prostration, 
 and the inability for connected thought, the 
 doctors advise perfect rest, and freedom 
 from care and worry. The treatment con 
 sists, essentially, in freeing the mind from 
 96 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 every influence that has caused the trouble, 
 and putting it and the body in a wholesome 
 state of good hygiene. If the recuperation 
 can be complete, and the causative influ 
 ences can be avoided, the brain does not fall 
 again into the same condition. The 
 prophylaxis is to avoid the cause. 
 
 But how does child or adult begin to fall 
 into these bad ways? What is the sequence? 
 It is easy enough. One of the very first 
 experiences in the life of a child is of caress- 
 ings and other proofs of affection. These 
 are precious to the groping susceptibilities of 
 the new being, as they are precious through 
 life. And perhaps before the end of the 
 first week after birth the child has, if it is 
 born to parents of the nervous temperament, 
 learned to demand these attentions. Before 
 long it must be sung to, or walked with, to 
 court sleep, and soon will not fall asleep dis 
 appointed, and till it gets the sweet pabulum 
 of lulling affection it is disappointed. It 
 finds in its mother s heart as strong a desire 
 to give as it has to have, and so the habit 
 grows and the child is carried on into years, 
 led, followed, obeyed, played with, enter 
 tained, and not a minute to itself for its poor 
 brain cells to run in spontaneous action. 
 
 So he becomes an autocrat in the home ; 
 
 97 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 he demands everything, and if he does not 
 get everything he wants, he gets some sup 
 posedly good thing in its place, and he 
 certainly receives constant attention and 
 makes incalculable work for everyone about 
 him. He must be perpetually amused; if 
 he cries he is perhaps fed, and often anything 
 but good food ; he must be talked to, carried 
 about ; drums and music are invoked any 
 thing to satisfy him or stop his crying. He 
 cannot sleep unless he is carried in the arms, 
 perhaps for hours, or rocked or sung to; 
 then if the lulling stops he is awake again 
 to demand the same process repeated. And 
 he is withal a very poor sleeper. Verily, 
 his, nervous system has grown by what it 
 has fed upon, and he has early become a 
 hyperesthetic nervous invalid, with no 
 stability in normal ways, but herculean per 
 sistency in abnormal ones. 
 
 We have changed in recent years our 
 methods of dealing with children. Formerly 
 they were taught not only obedience, but to 
 be seen and not heard, and seen without 
 ostentation ; now we rush the most promising 
 of them forward, and lead them to feel, what 
 is largely true, that the world is theirs ; and 
 it is a question whether we have gained by 
 the change. 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 Many successful men and women look 
 back with regret on the severe lines of their 
 own childhood, and thank Heaven that their 
 children s lot is cast in gentler ones but 
 the children are less vigorous than their par 
 ents were, they have more pain and discom 
 fort, and neurasthenia, and can accomplish 
 less in the arithmetic of the world. More 
 over, they have proportionately fewer 
 children than their parents had, and the 
 latter had fewer than the grandparents. 
 Thus the so-called higher civilization and 
 development, and more indulgence of chil 
 dren, not in what they want and need, but 
 in what on the moment they wish for, are 
 constantly deteriorating the race, or a sup 
 posedly favored part of it, while they 
 accentuate its refinements of taste, and 
 increase its avidity for pleasure. They 
 cause such effect of exhaustion of the nerv 
 ous system of the individual that a single 
 generation is sufficient to show the reduced 
 resistance to the effects of the unavoidable 
 environment on brain and nerves. 
 
 A great lesson that philosophers of all 
 times have taught is the folly of mortgaging 
 the future for the present, of yielding to the 
 desire for a momentary, intense, present 
 pleasure at the expense of the comfort of the 
 
 99 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 long future. It has been through the ages 
 notorious that adults are in danger of doing 
 this, and Goethe told in Faust only the 
 story that was as old as the thought of the 
 race ; this character was merely an example 
 of a class of intense men and women of all 
 times, ready to promise their future to the 
 devil or anybody or anything, if their 
 insistent gratification be secured now. The 
 close of this century has witnessed the exten 
 sion of this sort of sin against mankind to a 
 large number of children, and with both the 
 connivance and assistance of their parents. 
 Instead of allowing the child what it 
 desires, if it comports with some rights of 
 others and is not bad for its own develop 
 ment, it is too often allowed everything it 
 likes, unless it can be seen to be instantly 
 very harmful. The greater the companion 
 ship and comradery parents have with their 
 children, the more easily they conclude the 
 children should have the same indulgence of 
 pleasures as the grown people. Is it any 
 wonder that the children should, many of 
 them, with such latitude, increase their 
 intellectual and nervous speed, and wear out 
 their cerebral dynamos? The wonder is, 
 rather, that we who pretend to think should 
 wonder at it. 
 
 100 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 What and where is the remedy? 
 
 The remedy is several sided, but in prin 
 ciple it is simple. Its basis is candor and 
 honesty to the child s whole life the future 
 as well as the present. It spurns the idea 
 that the present, because it is on hand with 
 its demands, shall necessarily have sway 
 over the interests of the future career which 
 are not here to plead. 
 
 The remedy falls naturally into several 
 paragraphs. 
 
 Give the child, if possible, good general 
 physical health. To this end he must have 
 much outdoor life, good ventilation of his 
 rooms, wholesome food in abundance, which 
 he must eat as deliberately as possible. He 
 should never have any stimulant or narcotic 
 of any sort or amount unless actually pre 
 scribed for sickness. This refers to tea, 
 coffee, tobacco, and alcohol. Relieve him of 
 every local irritation or chronic inflamma 
 tion of any part of his body; for such are 
 sure, in a reflex way, to harm the nervous 
 system, to his unspeakable and life-long 
 injury. 
 
 This good body and brain health can be 
 
 attained only by long hours of sleep. A 
 
 child should always go to bed early, nolens 
 
 volcns. and it should then have its sound 
 
 101 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 sleep out without being awakened. Other 
 things equal, probably not another rule of 
 childhood is so useful as that which insists 
 on the largest measure of sleep possible. 
 
 For his brain s future, his life spirit, be 
 honest with him. Give him every good and 
 pleasure that will aid his development and 
 strength for the race of life ; these will give 
 him a childhood happy enough, and always 
 blessed to look back upon. Withhold the 
 bad things, even forcefully. It is safe to be 
 as candid and honest with a child as you are 
 with a man. The mystery and uncandor of 
 most parents on the subject of the physical 
 lives of their children do more harm than the 
 most unlimited frankness. 
 
 If the basis here indicated is to be 
 attained, certain definite things in the lives 
 of many children must be omitted or 
 changed. We must as far as possible com 
 pel a tranquil nervous and intellectual life. 
 Every indulgence that will minister solely or 
 greatly to nervous excitement and emotional 
 exaltation must be refused. Stop walking 
 with the baby and rocking him to sleep. 
 Attend to his normal wants, especially as to 
 food and temperature, then put him in his 
 bed and leave him alone. The instant he 
 finds this rule inexorable he will acquiesce, 
 102 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 to his benefit and delight ; he will have more 
 and better sleep and gain in nervous strength 
 amazingly. 
 
 Never "show off" a child. The trotting 
 of him out in public to speak or play or do 
 4 smart things usually panders to his vanity, 
 if not that of his parents, and develops a 
 baneful love of attention and applause. 
 There is no good in it for any child ; least of 
 all is it beneficial to the bashful one. 
 
 Never boast of the exploits of a child in 
 his presence, for it encourages his pride, and 
 pride is a vicious emotion in children, as it is 
 in adults. Pride is not the same quality as 
 self-respect, which is always good. 
 
 Avoid any indulgence that increases the 
 sense of personal embarrassment of a child, 
 but teach him, if possible, that bashfulness 
 is not a sin, nor a thing to be made fun of, 
 nor to be ashamed of. 
 
 Don t repeatedly nag the child to preserve 
 the clothes he wears, or about his general 
 neatness, or even as to many good manners 
 that he will take on instinctively at his 
 adolescence. We don t try to make infants 
 behave like ladies and gentlemen ; then why 
 should we little children, or even big chil 
 dren, at the expense of their regard for us 
 and the good influence we have over them? 
 103 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 For a nervous child reduce the emotional 
 excitement of every sort to a minimum ; and 
 for the excitement of play and bustle with 
 other children, which prevents eating or 
 sleeping well, ordain certain hours each day 
 to be spent alone or with an unemotional per 
 son \vho will refrain from entertaining him. 
 He thus will find he can amuse himself, and 
 this resource for such a nature will bring rest. 
 A child reduced in weight by lowered nutri 
 tion; with poor digestion, made worse by 
 bolting the little food he eats, but who plays 
 furiously and to exhaustion throughout his 
 school noontime ; who has so-called growing 
 pains at night that nearly always speak for 
 embarrassed intestinal digestion, and who 
 sleeps badly, and with dreams and night 
 mare, may often be brought to himself and 
 made a new creature by being compelled to 
 stay in the house unentertained at least one 
 hour in the middle of the day, and to go to 
 bed early. Left to the expedients of his 
 own ingenuity for a time each day, he finds 
 he has an appetite, and he soon has better 
 digestion and sleeps sweetly, and grows in 
 weight and strength and tranquillity. Prob 
 ably there is no method of correction of a 
 disobedient child so useful in all ways as to 
 make him stop and go to bed in a room alone. 
 104 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 He dislikes it, but the punishment is devoid 
 of brutality, and the child thinks by him 
 self, actually meditates, and rests and 
 sleeps. 
 
 The course of things in which a child is 
 constantly pandered to, amused, and kept 
 occupied is unutterably vicious. It increases 
 nervous irritability and the inborn selfish 
 ness that is great enough already. Let him 
 learn to be something of and to himself, 
 work out to some slight extent his own 
 mental salvation, and find that it is possible 
 for him to stop and think and do nothing 
 else for a perceptible time. He may envy 
 other children whom he sees having more 
 things done for them, but he will some day 
 look back on the time of his youth with a 
 stronger brain than those other favored chil 
 dren will then have, and his totality of enjoy 
 ment through life will, if he has good sense, 
 be greater than theirs. He will have fewer 
 jealousies and hates, and more wholesome 
 emotions. 
 
 The brain of every child who is worth 
 much is active enough in its own way, and 
 quite sufficiently imaginative. We may well 
 direct its activity into wholesome channels 
 of education and equipment for its future, 
 but we are not called upon, even in educat- 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 ing it, to increase the normal activity of its 
 brain cells and wear out the powers it ought 
 to have for the more useful years of adult 
 life, or to make for it a new world of fancy 
 and imagination. The sweet memories of 
 fairy tales are but a beggarly possession for 
 a large class of sensitive children who always 
 acquire, with the fairy tales, a belief in the 
 reality of ghosts and hobgoblins, and are 
 for years nightly terrified by thoughts of 
 them. It is no reply to this contention to 
 say that it is unfair to deprive the child of 
 imagination ; nobody ever succeeded in doing 
 that, nor is it desirable to do it. And fairy 
 tales are not in themselves to be despised, 
 and probably are a blessing to some children. 
 But their mission at best is one of pleasure, 
 not of development of power, and to some 
 child-natures they are poison. Let a child 
 build up his own imaginative world out of 
 the actualities of his environment and of 
 himself, and he will come to mature years 
 with a more wholesome and promising mind 
 for it. Many a boy left to himself in these 
 matters has evolved so much of the philos 
 ophy of life that, when later he reads Plato 
 and Socrates and Emerson, he seems to be 
 repeatedly confronting the children of his 
 own brain. 
 
 1 06 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 Nor does this plea deserve the censure 
 that it would deprive child-life of its pleas 
 ures. It looks far away from any such 
 calamity. But there are pleasures and 
 pleasures, and the circus and spectacular 
 performance do not furnish the kind of 
 enjoyment that is most wholesome or per 
 manently satisfying to a normal child. They 
 soon begin to wear him out and give him 
 troubled dreams and make him sick. No 
 parent would think of sending a child into 
 such excitement every day. Yet it is the 
 fatuous sin of modern evolved and culti 
 vated society that it is doing its utmost to 
 give its children the same character of excite 
 ment, only under color of a different name 
 and in a lesser degree, and not far from six 
 days every week, and then wondering that 
 we have among us a growing army of worn- 
 out children, neurasthenics and emotional 
 invalids. 
 
 Education should increase the power to 
 accomplish and resist, never lessen it; and 
 it is a pitiful thing that a child should break 
 down nervously through the ordeal of being 
 educated. Yet many a child does; some are 
 handicapped for life and some are killed by 
 it. They are sent away from school with 
 damaged eyes and wrecked nerves to rest 
 107 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 for months, to drop back a class or a year, 
 and then, on re-entering, to do perhaps very 
 indifferent work. 
 
 In the first place, education gained at such 
 cost is substantially useless; in the second 
 place, something is radically wrong in the 
 process when such effects follow. The cur 
 rent process may for the many the major 
 ity be a good one ; but for the susceptible 
 ones liable to break, it is altogether bad, 
 since, in nearly every step in its progress, 
 it lessens rather than increases their power 
 in the world s work. A better method must 
 be found; it is unfair that these children 
 should go through life with no systematic 
 education; it is wicked to let them be 
 crushed in the getting of it. 
 
 What kind of schooling in detail could 
 take its place with better or the best results 
 it might not be easy to say, although any one 
 that will spare the health of the child is 
 better than one that ruins it. But it is 
 not difficult to point out how the school 
 life as devised for the average person bears 
 heavily on certain susceptible children ; and 
 the problem is the same in the academy and 
 the college. 
 
 The trouble must be either in the course 
 of study or in the manner of its pursuit. A 
 108 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 boy in the field, the woods, and on the sea 
 may in four years learn of his fellows and 
 those about him as many things, such as 
 they are, as he would acquire at a college, 
 and be more vigorous with each successive 
 month. Ought the school to have so widely 
 different an effect? The mental work, as 
 distinguished from worry, is not responsible 
 for the injury. Worry tires, but not mental 
 work of a wholesome sort and degree. 
 There must be some cause beside the pure 
 ideation involved in the act of learning, for 
 this act, when uncontaminated, is pleasant 
 and restful. 
 
 School life, as it seems necessary for 
 most children to live it, begets some influ 
 ences that unquestionably do lower the 
 vitality and predispose to weakness, sick 
 ness, and ruination. There are several such 
 factors, and they bear most on sensitive chil 
 dren (and there are many such) who have 
 only barely enough vigor to sustain them 
 selves under the best conditions. The more 
 marked of these factors may be classified 
 under mental worry, sedentary life, and too 
 much housing. 
 
 To all sensitive and emotional children the 
 mental worry of school life is harder than 
 the work. They worry lest they shall fail, 
 109 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 or acquit themselves poorly, or fall behind 
 some fellow. The very rivalry so whole 
 some to many is exhausting to them, for 
 jealousy and envy are mixed up with it, and 
 these emotions are the most depressing of 
 all. Study in classes is without doubt stim 
 ulating to intellectual pursuits, and a great 
 help to the majority of students; but it is, 
 to the minority, so unavoidably connected 
 with the depressing influences of rivalry, 
 fear, jealousy, envy and even hate, that its 
 good is lost in its harm. 
 
 Most school work is done indoors, and 
 this lessens the surplusage of the resisting 
 power of the system. The greatest vigor is 
 only consistent with outdoor life, for the 
 outdoor air is the best to breathe, and sun 
 light is good; the air of the school-room 
 contains at least twice as much animal con 
 tamination, even with the best system of 
 ventilation, as the outdoor atmosphere. 
 The great remedy for broken-down bodies is 
 to live practically out of doors day and 
 night. 
 
 A sedentary life for any child is bad. 
 Regular and active exercise is necessary, and 
 many school children wholly fail to have it. 
 To study long with the body in a fixed posi 
 tion, which is done by an army of pupils 
 no 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 despite the efforts of their teachers, is always 
 debilitating. Athletics are something of a 
 remedy, and in a few schools are made to 
 tell to the best advantage. But they are not 
 a feature in the school life of a quarter of 
 the children who most need them, and they 
 are voluntarily pursued best and most by 
 the strong and vigorous. The weakly ones 
 usually shun the blood- stirring sports. 
 
 For the strong and nervously tranquil 
 there is perhaps small occasion to complain 
 in general of the modern school system ; but 
 for the less fortunate a new educational 
 gospel must be preached, which is nothing 
 less than a plea for schooling to be carried 
 on in and through the vocations and avoca 
 tions of life by teachers who shall live with 
 the pupils and be so practical and pleasing in 
 their instruction that it shall be free from 
 every quality that can wear out the nervous 
 resisting power. The plan should be to 
 make the child s life one of constant develop 
 ment both of body and mind, and under the 
 most ideal hygiene. This should combine 
 as both initial and necessary, rather than 
 secondary, conditions the right amount of 
 outdoor exercise, of work, chore and errand 
 doing, as well as athletics; of quiet rest in 
 the house, various mental diversions and 
 in 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 relaxations, just enough solitude and com 
 pany to obtain the best results; as much 
 reading and discussion of the things read as 
 is consistent with the plan, and a large 
 amount of sleep. Such a schedule would 
 provide what might be called a constant 
 vacation for the pupil ; the very conditions 
 necessary to produce pleasurably the largest 
 development of the bodily powers. This 
 scheme might be prescribed for any weakly 
 child to try and make sure that he shall belie 
 his prospects and live to attain adult years 
 with some show of a life equipment. 
 Carried out more or less thoroughly, it would 
 prevent and it is the only kind of an educa 
 tional system that can with any certainty 
 prevent the lowering of the vitality of the 
 nervous system in the process of education 
 of the handicapped children. 
 
 The educational goal is to make every 
 step, every hour of this system (even the 
 sleeping hour) in some manner tell towards 
 the mental and physical development of the 
 individual. The education would come 
 unconsciously, like the learning of the 
 games and child- fashions from playmates. 
 The growth of the mind would be as free 
 from any indication of shock or strain as are 
 the wholesome activity and unfoldings of 
 
 112 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 the years of infancy and young childhood 
 before the education is begun or thought of. 
 
 Some book-tasks there would have to be, 
 some lessons, but they would involve no 
 more labor than the story-reading that is 
 wisely permitted any child or young person. 
 The chief growth would come through the 
 intellectual development the teacher could 
 make possible, even compel, through and by 
 almost every move and act of the pupil and 
 every hour of the day ; he would compel the 
 child s environment, including the human 
 part of it and its history, to teach him ; the 
 pupil would acquire not a passive but an 
 active, a vital and virile cerebral relationship 
 with every element and thing about and 
 within him ; these latter would instruct him 
 and become a part of his intellectual life. 
 They would creep into his mental living as 
 the rocks and hills and trees do in an oft- 
 repeated journey, and the process would be 
 as poetic and sweet. This sort of acquisition 
 comes easily, and is always pleasurable; it 
 does not weary the nerves nor worry the 
 soul. It shows the ground on which we 
 stand as nothing else ever can ; and it is the 
 best education, both for the joy of having 
 and for the power that it imparts. 
 
 Nor is this altogether a new idea or a bid 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 for a complete innovation, although per 
 haps no school now carries out exactly the 
 scheme as here outlined. But the educa 
 tional world is moving toward it a little, as 
 shown by the great increase in practical 
 courses of instruction, in outdoor teaching, 
 field work, and in the numerous forms of 
 manual training that are finding their way 
 into the schools of many countries. The 
 movement is toward imparting a knowledge 
 of things as well as of people, and doing 
 this by as much direct contact with them as 
 possible. That is what manual training is, 
 and about all it is. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to say that in the 
 system proposed the teachers would have to 
 be superior people, far above the ordinary, 
 and altogether wholesome, pleasing to the 
 young, and practical ; none of the bookworm 
 doctrinaires, ignorant of the practical things 
 of life, and misfits in the universe, would do 
 at all. Let the right teacher be found and 
 the problem is easy. And the right teacher 
 lives and may be found. It ma)^ require 
 some hunting, but it is possible. And it is 
 possible for a boy to be educated, and highly 
 so, by daily association with certain men in 
 thought, work, rest, and play. Indeed, as 
 to some men, it would be impossible for any 
 114 
 
NERVES OF MODERN CHILD 
 
 boy of fair intelligence and tractability to 
 associate with them a year in these relations 
 and not show it in the largest possible educa 
 tional growth. 
 
Some Lessons of Heredity 
 
Some Lessons of Heredity 
 
 It is the truest economy to live and work 
 along the lines of law. 
 
 A world of energy has been expended to 
 make a machine capable of moving itself 
 perpetually, and the grief at failure has been 
 correspondingly great. 
 
 Many good people have had sore struggles 
 over their beliefs in ethics and religion, 
 which they might have been spared had they 
 first sought the line between the knowable 
 and the unknowable. 
 
 The influences of heredity have been 
 invoked to explain nearly everything in 
 men s lives, sometimes to the discredit of 
 the whole subject. But the influence has 
 most undoubtedly some laws that are as 
 inexorable as the stars, and a study of them 
 from any standpoint must always be useful, 
 and can never be harmful. 
 119 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 Instinct is hereditary and congenital 
 automatism in animal function, and of all 
 animals man has the least of it. The 
 human infant is not only the most helpless 
 of all, but does fewest things with expert- 
 ness because its parents have done them 
 before; it has the fewest hereditary autom 
 atisms at birth. 
 
 The completed being, the full-grown man 
 or woman, is largely an automaton, does 
 most of the daily acts in a more or less 
 mechanical way, but these automatisms 
 have to be acquired, and no animal of any 
 sort has the fitness to strive successfully for 
 its own existence until they are acquired. 
 They constitute the education of man, and 
 practically all there is of it. He is most 
 learned and expert who has the largest series 
 of orderly and useful mental and nervous 
 automatisms. 
 
 The bird builds nearly as perfect a nest the 
 first time it tries as it ever does; it has an 
 untaught faculty that is expert the instant 
 it is required. The bees and the beavers 
 illustrate this truth. 
 
 The human young has but two intuitive 
 
 faculties at birth to cry, and to close its 
 
 lips and retract its tongue. All the rest 
 
 must be acquired by practice and trial, and 
 
 120 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 the growth goes on for a third of a century, 
 so long is the youth and development of the 
 man. 
 
 But although much is left to be acquired, 
 much is inherited. The transmission of the 
 qualities of the parents to the children is 
 nearly as certain and extensive as is the 
 case with the lower animals, only it is less 
 apparent at beginning. It crops out at 
 every step in the development of the indi 
 vidual in manifold ways and methods and 
 mannerisms. 
 
 How completely the exterior physical con 
 formation is often transmitted everybody 
 knows. Color of skin and hair, form of 
 features, looks, size, gait, and the tone of the 
 voice even, surprisingly resemble those of 
 one or both of the parents. Sometimes the 
 apparent resemblance is to one parent only, 
 or to a grandparent most, or even a great- 
 grandparent, whence we have the expressive 
 word atavism. But the appearances are 
 about three-quarters of them clearly the 
 copies of those of the direct parents, one or 
 the other chiefly, or the two in a blending 
 of variable degrees. Not more than a 
 quarter of them can be traced to previous 
 ancestry over the heads of the parents. The 
 cases of atavism are remembered because 
 121 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 they are most striking, and so they seem 
 more numerous than they really are. The 
 moles on the skin of the one parent which is 
 most resembled reappear in the child; and 
 at about the same age they may some of 
 them enlarge and take on the morbidity 
 known as sarcoma, often a mortal disease. 
 The parent has a nervous susceptibility 
 whereby certain articles of food, in a reflex 
 way, cause a sudden swelling of portions of 
 the skin with itching : the common hives ; or, 
 instead, a swelling of the tongue occurs; or 
 the lining of the bronchial tubes, a condition 
 producing what we call asthma. The child 
 has most likely the same susceptibility, and 
 so the same experiences at about the same 
 time in his life. The victim of migraine or 
 sick-headache can usually find some explana 
 tion, if not satisfaction, in the fact that his 
 father or mother had it before him, and 
 through the same decades of life. 
 
 It is unquestionable that in every minute 
 hidden fiber of the physical organism in the 
 brain especially the resemblance to the 
 parents is as marked as it is in the external 
 surface. There is every reason to regard 
 this as true, and nothing to the contrary, and 
 the ways and the mental and emotional ten 
 dencies follow the same law as the shape of 
 122 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 the tissues. Those who doubt this do so 
 with poor show of reason, although certain 
 facts would at first thought seem to give 
 warrant for the doubt. The chief fact look 
 ing against the theory is that the mental of 
 emotional trait that happens to be the 
 strongest nearly always governs the indi 
 vidual and gives color to his character, so 
 that a father and son may markedly resemble 
 each other and yet appear to be very differ 
 ent because the uppermost governing motive 
 in one does not govern the other. One cul 
 tivates religion and art, the other horses, 
 cards and sports with all that these imply. 
 The men seem very unlike, but the likeness 
 is remarkable. One is by our measure very 
 exemplary, and the other perhaps a great 
 sinner, yet they put exactly the same powers 
 into use in similar ways, only about subjects 
 having very different if not opposite moral 
 qualities and attributes. 
 
 Two well-known women of Chicago have 
 predicted that women and men will some 
 day be superior to "physical laws, inherited 
 tendencies and social conditions." That is 
 to say that then the human body will not 
 grow by the appropriation of food to the 
 needs of the organism by chemical and vital 
 forces ; the child will not resemble his par- 
 123 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 ents because they are his parents, and he 
 will grow up uninfluenced by the social 
 atmosphere about him. It may be they are 
 right, but for all practical purposes we may 
 as well postulate that physical laws are not 
 likely to change, and that human beings are 
 born to resemble their parents to a certain 
 degree in emotions, ways of thinking and 
 acting, as well as in looks. What men come 
 to believe is quite another matter from their 
 ways and methods of thinking. If the father 
 and the son hold widely different views on 
 religion and politics it does not argue dis 
 similarity in methods and powers. 
 
 It was long ago settled that the best bal 
 ance and the greatest vigor of the organism, 
 whether of man or animals, come of some 
 unlikeness of the parents. Too much 
 similarity of them leads to a weakening of 
 the race, and races run out from such causes. 
 Thoroughbred animals are notoriously less 
 tough and resisting than the common herd. 
 They are all too much alike ; it is the ambi 
 tion that they shall be alike ; this insures in 
 a high degree certain qualities supposed to 
 be desirable, like high speed, or an easy 
 riding-gait in a horse, but in resisting 
 severe conditions the thoroughbred is always 
 outdone by the mongrel. These truths 
 124 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 obtain as to men as well as animals. The 
 first step in the deterioration is the occur 
 rence of weakness in some organ or power, 
 a weakness likely to be transmitted if the 
 parents are similar, and in the struggle for 
 existence only the strong and symmetrical, 
 the well-balanced, thrive greatly and outlast 
 their fellows inherited weaknesses are fatal 
 finally. 
 
 Excessive development in a particular 
 direction, the intellectual or emotional or the 
 artistic, is likely to lead to a progeny less 
 vigorous, and perhaps erratic and lacking 
 symmetry. There is lack of symmetry 
 because some quality is unusually developed, 
 and also because some other one and per 
 haps a very necessary one is below the 
 requisite standard. This lack of balance is 
 probably unavoidable for more than one or 
 two successive generations ; such is the law. 
 
 Intellectual greatness rarely continues 
 through more than two or three generations 
 of a family, and gifted families run out, or, 
 if not that, they run down for several gener 
 ations and till new blood from humbler, but 
 for the weal of the race more promising, 
 sources can enter them. 
 
 The fact of heredity will not and cannot be 
 gainsaid. The hereditary intellectual states 
 
 "5 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 and endowments cannot be denied, but the 
 greatest intellects do not always, nor usually, 
 come from the greatest but rather from fair 
 or mediocre ones, of well-balanced people 
 and well-mixed or varied parentage. Vigor 
 of body and tranquillity and stability of nerv 
 ous system tell for most, and generations of 
 wholesome, tranquil lives are a preparation 
 for one or a few lives of surpassing capa 
 bilities. Students wonder why persons with 
 great and phenomenal intellects usually are 
 born to people of simple lives and tastes 
 and meager attainments. They ought not to 
 wonder, for the predecessors of the phenom- 
 enons have generally had bodies and brains 
 so firm and perfect and with such reserve 
 of balanced power that their children might 
 easily be capable of great things. We are 
 surprised that the children of intellectual 
 and spiritual greatness are not always great, 
 but are occasionally degenerates, full of way 
 ward passions, and altogether devoid of that 
 balance of character that tells in life and in 
 society. We should not be surprised, for 
 the step from a genius to a degenerate, an 
 uneven, unbalanced person, is sometimes a 
 short one, and very high intellectuality on 
 the part of the parents often means an exces 
 sive mobility of brain-impulses that is in the 
 126 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 long run a weakness in itself; it always, too, 
 suggests an uncertainty as to the reliability 
 of the other qualities of the organism, for no 
 man can be great far beyond the average of 
 his kind in one direction and be sure of 
 sufficient strength and perfect balance in all 
 the others. 
 
 If the invariable transmission of exces 
 sively-developed qualities were possible, it 
 would mean the doom of the race, for the in 
 dividuals would many of them become so 
 asymmetrical that they would go to the wall 
 in the face of the adverse conditions of their 
 environment. Like begets like, but under 
 wholesome conditions, not to the extent of 
 perpetuating for long unbalanced specimens 
 even in what we choose to call a good direc 
 tion. Then, similar things can by a trifling 
 variation come to appear quite unlike. For 
 example, the child of very wise and intel 
 lectual people of the highest credit is smart, 
 bright enough, but lacks application, and 
 has so much appetite, or so little self-control, 
 that he habitually swallows in undue pro 
 portion the substances commonly regarded 
 as fit for the human body, and by this little 
 variation he becomes a vagabond. The 
 fault with the heredity is not that the intel 
 lectual traits were not transmitted, but that 
 127 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 in the inevitable slight variations resulting 
 from that process, it has happened that the 
 work-day has become two instead of ten 
 hours, and that the alcohol taken is twenty 
 instead of one per cent of the water, and so 
 the moral sense of society is outraged. If 
 only tobacco had taken the place of alcohol, 
 society wouldn t complain so much of the 
 heredity, for then the moral sense of the 
 community would not be shocked. Or if the 
 mental quality of industry had been just a 
 little greater, as the parents had it, and if 
 the self-control against the appetite for 
 stimulants common to the race, had been as 
 great as the parents had it, there would have 
 been no trouble. 
 
 Really, the transmitted traits that count 
 most, that we most prize, that most de 
 termine the place of the individual in the 
 world, are the emotional ones. An emo 
 tional balance means self-control and a 
 proper place in society ; it means that man 
 ner of action that we call character or moral 
 conduct, by which the world measures every 
 man. The world does not care half so much 
 about the real intellectual capacity of men 
 as it does for the qualities that make for 
 conduct. 
 
 Can these traits be developed where they 
 128 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 do not exist? The philanthropic soul of the 
 world says they can, and sometimes they 
 seem to be. Certainly great good is often 
 done by the eiforts in this direction; the 
 training seems to pay. Only good can come 
 of a study of the methods of production of 
 the changes that occur, and it is pertinent 
 enough to ask if we really do produce new 
 traits, or if when they come to people as 
 new qualities they are not really a late 
 appearance of hereditary traits slightly 
 enhanced, it may be, by cultivation. 
 
 We do not try much to train a dull intel 
 lect, but are content to let it fill a humble 
 and useful place in the world ; it can be a 
 plodder and work ; it can serve. If it is dull 
 enough to be irresponsible or imbecile, if it 
 cannot serve even, we train it ; but if it is 
 only dull we let it work out alone such 
 development as it can. Rather it is the 
 man of wayward passions and propensities, 
 who comes of very low parents, or exactly 
 the opposite, whom we seek to save by 
 our training. And if he is saved, we are 
 sure to credit our efforts for the whole of 
 it. But often it is not training in the true 
 sense at all, but only some accidental or 
 unexpected influence on the emotional 
 nature that is effective. One emotion or 
 129 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 propensity may be and often is completely 
 responsible for the bad career of one of the 
 parents. Perhaps it is envy or jealousy; a 
 hatred of certain people or classes; too 
 great a love for certain things; too much 
 selfishness of one form or another; an 
 inability to draw the line between truth and 
 fiction; a belief that the world owes them 
 a living, or has toward them a grudge, or 
 has wronged them any one of these may 
 warp a life into a monstrosity, as meas 
 ured by the calipers of society. Do we 
 train the children of such into our ideal 
 men and women? To a slight degree, per 
 haps; to a vastly greater degree we fail, or 
 we hit by chance upon ways to help them 
 avoid the misguiding impulses. Or rather 
 our social state or their social state and 
 environment happens to accomplish this end 
 and often the hit is accidental, undesigned 
 and unexpected. It is true enough that we 
 try unceasingly to evoke sentiments and 
 develop impulses that we think will improve 
 or save them, but often they spurn our 
 efforts and are saved by some chance influ 
 ence that we had not thought of. The 
 watchful zeal of all the self-constituted and 
 often nagging monitors, who stand over us 
 to see that we do not go astray, may be lost 
 
 130 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 in the face of one sweet word of encourage 
 ment and faith that comes like a fragrant 
 zephyr from an unexpected quarter. 
 
 One cardinal truth we usually forget, 
 namely, that a human being from infancy to 
 full adult age often passes through several 
 phases of character and conduct that are as 
 diverse as saints and sinners, that are 
 directly and always hereditary, and yet that 
 are to most minds utterly inexplicable on 
 such grounds. The confusion comes of sup 
 posing that every individual is either good 
 or bad, or once bad is always so, and once 
 good must so remain instead of the truth 
 that all good people have some faults, and 
 even very bad people have some good in 
 them ; or of supposing that every individual 
 through life lives in one and the same moral 
 groove. A boy may be a proper subject for 
 the penitentiary, if not the asylum, and the 
 rounded manhood of the same individual be 
 fit to canonize; or the reverse may be the 
 case. For example, take the outlandish 
 behavior of some children of good people. 
 The boys are rowdies, bandits and thieves; 
 they are abusive to everybody at times, and 
 wholly unmanageable; into all manner of 
 mischief, and always aping the boys that are 
 most worthless and reckless. They are 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 barbarians, and show how most of us have 
 not advanced much. Girls sometimes, in 
 their sphere and circle, exhibit traits that 
 prove they are of the same race as the boys. 
 One peculiar trait is that of palming off their 
 fiction for truth, and a trait of many of both 
 sexes is marked cruelty to the lower animals, 
 and often to other children. The motive of 
 cruelty is probably based on the emotion of 
 pleasure that comes to the barbarian phases 
 of most natures at the discomfort and mis 
 fortunes of others, and to the natural child 
 desire (a recurrence to barbarism again) to 
 domineer and rule. Let any such children 
 happen to carry these traits into adult life, 
 and they are socially ruined. That they do 
 not usually carry them through life is 
 because it is a part of the evolution of their 
 natures, their hereditary tendency, to 
 change with each half decade up to full 
 adult responsibility, and they mostly arrive 
 at this period with those motives and im 
 pulses in control of them that make decent 
 members of the community. 
 
 People often enough wonder how a cer 
 tain incorrigible boy could be born to such 
 superbly balanced parents as he has; and 
 declare that there must be some hitch in the 
 heredity, or that this is a case where hered- 
 
 132 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 itary influences failed to work. Neither is 
 the case. There is seventy-five per cent of 
 certainty that his parents, one or both of 
 them, passed through the identical moral 
 phase at his time of life, and some day his 
 neighbors may wonder how so exemplary a 
 citizen as he will become could ever have 
 such hoodlums of boys as his sons, in spite 
 of their mother, will perhaps be. And do 
 you think any amount of training would 
 change this order of things and make the 
 fifteenth year trait appear at the tenth? Did 
 you ever see training avail in such cases? 
 True it is that the boys improve while the 
 training is going on, but we ought to be fair 
 to the evolutionary changes, and not 
 attribute their results to the drill. 
 
 It is the birth of a wholesome self-con 
 sciousness, and the passing out of the period 
 of carelessness and rebellion against advice 
 and refinement into one of normal self- 
 respect, that produces the change in most of 
 these boys it is the march of time more 
 than any training, as such, that is the 
 determining influence. 
 
 I would not underrate or discredit train 
 ing of^a wholesome sort for any child. But 
 training to be wholesome must be both 
 necessary and useful ; and much of that 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 bestowed on unbecoming and wayward chil 
 dren is useless, and some of it is both 
 unnecessary and mischievous. 
 
 It is useless to nag children to keep their 
 clothes clean, when a period of life is com 
 ing soon that will make them desire to do 
 this. 
 
 During the clown period your boy may not 
 keep his room in order, nor turn down the 
 bed-clothes when he gets up in the morn 
 ing, nor behave himself in a polite manner 
 in company or at table, nor walk in a 
 decorous way along the street, unless you 
 are constantly at his heels to watch and train 
 him. But what is the use of wasting your 
 energy over these things when he will 
 normally evolve himself out of his loutish- 
 ness, and that quickly, as the years fly? 
 
 Your girl may romance to you with a 
 sober face, and build all manner of fiction 
 for you, showing her thraldom to emotions 
 that, should she continue unchanged, would 
 by and by scandalize her if not you. But 
 almost as sure as the sun, her development 
 will in a few years bring her a spirit of 
 genuine honesty and purity that will give 
 you comfort to your dying day. 
 
 The best training for children is manifestly 
 of that gentle sort, which, always firm and 
 
 134 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 along certain lines effective, never degener 
 ates into garrulous hectoring, but always 
 keeps their confidence. 
 
 The greatest power over a child is possible 
 only when he believes you understand him 
 and have some sympathy with his soul. 
 Thousands of boys have been made worse 
 through too much training by their elders, 
 who have forgotten their own childhood. 
 Their elders have been too short-sighted to 
 see that if in certain directions they would 
 mostly let the boys alone a few years, much 
 of the training would be unnecessary; and 
 it could hardly be expected that the boys 
 would have the mental scope to see that if 
 they could bear the discipline a few years it 
 would come to an end. 
 
 Their parents have looked on their pranks 
 as showing permanent sins to be immediately 
 corrected at all hazards and at any cost or 
 penalty. The boys have regarded their 
 discipline as the fixed order and fate of their 
 whole lives, from which any escape was justi 
 fiable. And so some have run away, some 
 have expended vast ingenuity to circumvent 
 their discipline, and others have been driven 
 from harmless roguery to crime, and a few 
 have committed suicide, while multitudes 
 have acquired a permanent sense and spirit 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 of bitterness that have tinged their whole 
 after lives with darkness. 
 
 Heredity makes it possible for some to do 
 what the majority cannot attain. It makes 
 it impossible for some to refrain from doing 
 certain things that the majority can easily 
 avoid. 
 
 Some of these things are offenses against 
 taste and decorum ; some of them are crimes. 
 
 If an offense is unavoidable by reason of 
 heredity, shall a man be punished for it? 
 Shall a man be held responsible for what 
 was born in him? The inference is plain, 
 but human judges are too fallible to say 
 when an offense is certainly unavoidable, or 
 how far self-control can go, or just the point 
 at which it ceases in a particular person and 
 under particular circumstances, and so the 
 rules of society and the laws of the state 
 must be inexorable to all but that poorly 
 defined class, the insane. 
 
 Heredity cannot excuse, but it may 
 explain many of the lapses of our poor 
 human nature. And the knowledge of it 
 ought to lead us to that charity that forgives 
 wisely, and to that helpfulness that does not 
 hinder but helps truly. 
 
 The line between strict sanity and insanity 
 is poorly drawn and always must be. 
 
 136 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 Measured by the normal, ideal mentality of 
 the race a large proportion of people are 
 insane, and this is the contention of some 
 alienists. But a fit and workable definition 
 of- insanity cannot be made on such severe 
 lines; for if nearly everybody is insane then 
 we must have some other term for those 
 unfortunates who require the restraints or 
 indulgence of society and the state. We 
 use the word degenerate to cover cases of 
 abnormal mentality that do not easily fall 
 within the meaning of insanity. Some of 
 these cases have unsymmetrically developed 
 bodies, especially skulls, as well as brains. 
 Some of the degenerates are very near to 
 genius, but they are also very near to the 
 most conservative definition of insanity. 
 Thousands of such people have been impris 
 oned for crimes, and hundreds have been put 
 to death for offenses against the state. Can 
 such things be justified on any ground what 
 ever? 
 
 Popular sentiment revolts against the 
 idea of punishing an insane person. If the 
 victim be called a degenerate, it does not 
 seem half so awful, albeit awful enough. Most 
 habitual criminals are degenerates, and if all 
 these were to be spared the convictions would 
 not be half as many as they are to-day. But 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 all degenerates and many insane are capable 
 of some self-control, though less than normal 
 people, and if punitive measures are insti 
 tuted and calculated to foster self-control 
 against crime, they are not improperly 
 applied to these persons. The death- 
 penalty is, of course, out of the argument as 
 to the victim, and whether it produces any 
 wholesome repressive effect on the living is 
 a question in dispute. The thing it does 
 sometimes is to remove from the world a 
 man who might commit other enormous 
 crimes ; the thing it does often is to satisfy 
 the popular demand for a victim and for 
 vengeance. 
 
 In the extent of responsibility to which 
 we hold erring humanity, it is a thousand 
 pities that we could not always be fair. But 
 the limitation of our knowledge is so sharp ? 
 our wisdom is so faulty and we are so liable 
 to have our opinions and actions colored by 
 our own possible degeneracy, that we can 
 only hope to strive after complete justice 
 without ever attaining it. We may know 
 the basis of justice in the abstract, and make 
 rules about it that shall seem to be faultless, 
 but to apply them with more than the 
 crudest possible fairness to individual cases 
 is, with our fallibility, practically impossible. 
 
 138 
 
SOME LESSONS OF HEREDITY 
 
 We cannot judge of the degree of degener 
 acy, or even ordinarily of the degree of 
 lunacy, that will excuse a particular man 
 from the legal punishment of his crime, as 
 long as, under ordinary circumstances, he 
 passes for a normal or even erratic member 
 of society and attends to his business. 
 
 So we shall probably go on as we have 
 done, sending the wrong man to prison, and 
 the man to prison wrongfully ; sending to the 
 gallows the man who should be in an 
 asylum, and perhaps sometimes the reverse; 
 and holding men to a standard of resistance 
 to temptation that neither the judges nor 
 jurymen are ever equal to. 
 
Our Poorly Educated 
 Educators 
 
Our Poorly Educated 
 Educators 
 
 Words are tools of thought. 
 
 Definitions are the mile-posts and guide- 
 boards of reasoning. 
 
 If two understand their words and defini 
 tions alike ; if their tools are the same and 
 they handle them similarly, they can reason 
 together and agree, and so get on. 
 
 But if, as usually happens, they use words 
 and premises differently; if these have for 
 them different significations, they will, as 
 usually happens also, dispute and differ if 
 not quarrel over the simplest thing. Most 
 disputes of life grow out of this kind of 
 beginnings. 
 
 One difficulty is that definitions change. 
 A word begins its career with a single 
 definite meaning which the dictionary and 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 the literature give clearly. In a quarter of 
 a century another and quite variant meaning 
 is added ; and in three centuries perhaps half 
 a dozen more have succeeded each other at 
 varying intervals, each called into being by 
 the needs of life or by the whim or the love of 
 change of some writer. One may use with 
 propriety on occasion any one of the eight 
 shades of meaning. 
 
 This mutability of the language has its dis 
 advantages, if also its advantages ; language 
 will and must change and grow. If only it 
 would not change without reason or need! 
 There are some stalwart souls among us who 
 think the language should never change, but 
 remain as it was. The conservative peda 
 gogues have bravely stood in the breach and 
 tried to stem the rush for change for the 
 sake of change, and they have done some 
 good. They have made war on every fresh 
 invention of slang as they would fight fire ; 
 and have shamed us for catching at new 
 words and uses of them, as we rush after 
 new fashions in clothes. 
 
 But men look at things differently as time 
 goes on, and so names and definitions must 
 have different meanings, according as we 
 occupy the old or the new ground. The 
 world moves whether or not it advances. 
 144 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 Perhaps in no field of thought have defini 
 tions changed more than in that of education 
 and pedagogy. What the word education 
 should mean; what the best education is 
 that which is worthy of the name ; and how 
 and in what order it ought to be undertaken 
 and carried on, are, according to the best 
 minds, widely different from what they were 
 a century ago. Then education had little or 
 less necessary relation to the duties and 
 cares of life ; it was determined by fashion 
 and the worship of the ancient ; now it has, or 
 is growing to have, for its cardinal object, 
 before which all else must bend, the fit 
 ting of the learner for the struggle for exist 
 ence and the tussle with the world. He is 
 best educated who has the largest knowledge 
 of his environment past and present, in 
 cluding of course the human race, and 
 whose development has taken that course 
 and sequence that best fit him for life in 
 the social body. This is only another way 
 of saying that true education means the 
 largest development of the mind for useful 
 sociological ends. Education must fit a man 
 for life and career; our careers must be 
 in the body social, and we aim at the highest 
 career possible for each. 
 
 A further study of the process, or analysis 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 of it, shows that the thing that takes place is 
 the formation of mental habits. A deeper 
 scrutiny reveals that what happens is the 
 production of relative automatisms of action 
 of the nerve centers. So he is best educated 
 who has the largest and most manageable 
 series of orderly and useful habits in the 
 action of the brain and other nerve centers. 
 And these habits include and cover what are 
 ordinarily understood to be facts as well as 
 reasoning and action. That brain is most 
 equipped which on the greatest number 
 and variety of occasions in life acts in a 
 fairly automatic manner in the best way for 
 the usefulness and happiness of the individ 
 ual. Such a personality not only has the 
 highest order of education, but has also 
 the largest development of character in its 
 broadest sense. 
 
 In acquiring or giving education the 
 temptation is to seek too much in one 
 direction to the neglect of most beside; to 
 follow books so assiduously that a habit is 
 formed of thinking that no knowledge can 
 reach us save through books, and that we 
 cannot attain wisdom by any other means. 
 
 Books then become, not merely the record 
 of men s thoughts, observations and acts, 
 but they grow to be somehow sacred, and so 
 146 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 their following becomes blind and unreason 
 ing; it amounts to worship. 
 
 Specialism in study most indispensable 
 for the greatest development of thought and 
 progress of the world logically tends in this 
 very direction. The specialist is liable, 
 even likely, to build himself up in one direc 
 tion to the neglect of everything that does 
 not minister in some way to this end. He 
 sometimes after many years grows into such 
 an unconscious worship of authority, other 
 wise books, that he fails to discover that 
 younger students, less bound by the books 
 and by tradition, and more given to the 
 study of the actualities, are going down to 
 the heart of nature, acquiring new views and 
 larger understanding of things, and rush 
 ing past their elders to revolutionize the 
 specialties themselves. This is no less true 
 of educators than of the rest of the world. 
 Pedagogues like to believe with others that 
 there is some final authority, that certain 
 foundations are fixed and immutable; not 
 possible to be disturbed by future discover 
 ies. It is the man so brazen as to hunt for 
 defects in these very bed-rocks who will give 
 us no peace. 
 
 Educators in all lines, especially the higher 
 ones, are apt to be specialists; it could not 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 be otherwise. Great educators must be 
 investigators; and one mind cannot at this 
 day investigate many fields of knowledge andv 
 hope to add something to all of them. 
 
 Does specialism on the part of educators, or 
 any other influence, narrow them, to the 
 injury of their work and of their influence 
 on the young? Do they tend to become, in 
 the broadest sense, poorly educated? 
 
 Before asking for a theory of a fact it is 
 pertinent to set forth the fact. And the fact 
 is that many of our educators and not a few 
 working in the higher fields are by the best 
 modern definitions very poorly educated. 
 They are unequipped in the great problems 
 of the world; they are unfit to deal with 
 their environment. They can do nothing but 
 teach they have often tried other fields of 
 labor, to fail in each and finally come back 
 to teaching as the sole thing they are capa 
 ble of doing ; and many of them know little 
 outside of their particular specialties, and 
 some are very poor teachers. These state 
 ments need no statistical proof ; they are so 
 well known as to stand without argument. 
 
 This is an age of practical things. The 
 
 thousand things and processes in and about 
 
 our daily lives, thanks to the study of 
 
 nature, are now fairly well known ; they are 
 
 148 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 rational and not to be explained by myths 
 that explain nothing. They are easily 
 known, not mysterious; more than ever 
 before they tell in a man s life and career, 
 and no one can be educated without a large 
 knowledge of them. This is the philosophy 
 of common things, and in this modern day it 
 is as essential to every symmetrical char 
 acter, as is that automatic method of con 
 sidering things that is common to the better 
 part of the race, and so is called common- 
 sense. Stuart Mill was wrong in holding 
 that a man should know everything of some 
 thing, and something of everything. Every 
 one should indeed know thoroughly some 
 one subject. But there are some dozens of 
 subjects and hundreds of topics about which 
 any man may be ignorant without impro 
 priety. Only these do not include the com 
 mon matters of his environment ; the things 
 he rubs against every day of his existence. 
 Of all such subjects, he should know at least 
 something, and complete ignorance is inex 
 cusable; in one who undertakes to teach 
 pupils above the years of early childhood, 
 such ignorance is reprehensible. 
 
 It is a wide knowledge of common things 
 that fits a man to keep away from the wall 
 in the struggle for existence ; it enables him, 
 149 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 as nothing else can, to make a respectable 
 race with his competitors, and to earn their 
 respect and his own comfort as well as 
 respect by doing it. 
 
 Such a knowledge of common things 
 always consists with great education in a 
 particular direction, and with the highest 
 expertness; it aids such expertness. Yet 
 there are teachers who are large enough to 
 be ignorant of many things outside of their 
 special fields and small enough to be proud 
 of their ignorance of the common knowledge 
 of the world. When a man reaches this 
 point, or cannot rise above it, he needs a 
 great deal of what we call personal character 
 to save him from losing his influence over 
 the young and his influence in the com 
 munity. 
 
 Only a few can be great experts, most 
 must be plain, common students and edu 
 cators in various, often numerous, lines. 
 For the higher education and the graduate 
 study, expert teachers must be had. But 
 the mass of people cannot have the higher 
 education, nor do post-graduate work. They 
 may, nevertheless, be wise in a little educa 
 tion, and they must plod. How to give 
 them the greatest wisdom with whatsoever 
 education they may have is the problem. 
 
 150 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 This cannot be done by withholding from 
 them the world s knowledge of common 
 things; nor is any teacher fit to instruct 
 them who is ignorant of it. The greatest 
 teacher is the one who has the largest good 
 influence over his pupils and gives to the 
 greatest degree direction to their after 
 thought and work, and that teacher is usually 
 well informed in many directions while per 
 haps expert in one. 
 
 It is a melancholy truth that many of our 
 educators are ignorant of a multitude of 
 facts about many subjects that any well- 
 informed person knows about. This is 
 neither creditable nor necessary. They 
 should have more general common knowl 
 edge than the average well-informed citizen, 
 and vastly more than the average of the 
 parents of their pupils. There is no justifi 
 cation for general ignorance in the fact that 
 they are informed on some few subjects ; the 
 needs of specialism do not require this. 
 
 Nothing sets forth the situation with more 
 vividness than when some teacher of a 
 restricted department, perhaps of the 
 classics, goes out on a vacation tour with a 
 lot of inquisitive young students. He gets 
 tangled up hopelessly a dozen times in 
 twenty-four hours. The history of some 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 actual occurrences of this kind would make 
 racy reading. 
 
 Imagine a small if perhaps a voluble child 
 asking the professor why the pebbles in the 
 bank are rounded and do not have sharp 
 corners. Then imagine the professor wish 
 ing the teacher of geology were there to tell 
 them why. 
 
 The boys see a fog appear to approach 
 from the ocean, and they ask what fog is. 
 And does it really come from the ocean? 
 And what is dew, and where does it come 
 from? And why does it rain? The replies 
 of the professor are a fine attempt to talk 
 without committing himself, for he does not 
 answer one of the questions. 
 
 They camp out at night and dispute as to 
 whether the night air is damp. Then they 
 would know why it is colder sleeping in the 
 uncovered wagon than under it, and their 
 teacher cannot tell definitely and clearly any 
 of these things. They wonder why certain 
 kinds of clothing, as wool, cotton, or linen, 
 are warmer than others, and wait in vain for 
 a clear and rational answer. 
 
 In their tramp next day they see luscious 
 grapes growing on the rockiest and appar 
 ently most barren soil. How can such soil 
 produce for fifty successive years good crops 
 
 152 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 of grapes with tons of sugar and wonderful 
 flavor each year, and the last year as good 
 as the first? And no one can tell them. 
 They cannot see how the sugar can be found 
 in such rocks, and the professor suggests 
 that the laboratory of nature in the earth 
 must be wonderful; he taxes their faith 
 instead of giving them a plain answer that 
 is so very easy. 
 
 Then when they stop at a country tavern 
 and like small barbarians insist on going 
 into the kitchen, one small questioner sets 
 them all in a flutter by asking why the 
 doughnuts "boil" the moment they drop into 
 the hot lard. The lard doesn t boil, and the 
 dough does. Why are the doughnuts cooked 
 in lard anyhow? Why not cook them in hot 
 water? The teacher their fountain of wis 
 dom cannot tell them. 
 
 Then why does the bread rise? Why is 
 the butter rancid? No answer. The pro 
 fessor could not tell what fire is, and what 
 happens when things burn. And if one of 
 the boys had asked him to tell why oiled 
 rags sometimes take fire spontaneously he 
 would have fled from the room. 
 
 Distilled water is served at the table, and 
 the small boy again wants to know why it is 
 flat to the taste, and the professor says it is 
 
 153 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 because the life is left out of it in the distil 
 lation ; it is dead. Imagine such an answer 
 from the teacher of anybody ! 
 
 When asked how the water drank is 
 appropriated by the human body, this 
 educator has forgotten his physiology, if he 
 ever studied it, and cannot give a clear 
 answer to save his life. 
 
 The boys go out after the lunch and see 
 an electric motor at work, and ask the 
 simplest and most natural of all questions, 
 namely, why the current makes the wheel 
 revolve in one direction and not the other. 
 The professor is completely floored by it, 
 and the electrician of the works, presuppos 
 ing a knowledge of terms and principles that 
 common students could not possibly have, 
 gives a good explanation of the whole 
 process, that shoots entirely over the heads 
 of them all. 
 
 Then they insist on being told how a tele 
 phone really works, and look to their teacher, 
 and quite in vain, for a simple explanation 
 of that device that we have had among us in 
 familiar use for more than a fifth of a century. 
 
 They come back to the tavern at night and 
 listen to stories and wrangles among the 
 habitues of the place about all sorts of 
 things. 
 
 154 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 A dispute occurs as to whether a fish float 
 ing in water weighs more or less after it is 
 dead than when it was alive, and the pro 
 fessor is in doubt how it is, or why the fish 
 floats to the top and lies on its back as soon 
 as it dies. 
 
 Then they fall to telling ghost stories 
 and superstitions, in which all more or less 
 join. All protest that they are not super 
 stitious, but nearly every one shows some 
 weakness in this direction. One declares 
 that he doesn t believe in the notion at all, 
 yet he would rather not start on a journey or 
 begin an important business on Friday ; that 
 is the way he feels, he doesn t know just why. 
 Another instinctively counts the company, 
 and if he finds it numbers exactly thirteen 
 he suddenly discovers he has an engagement 
 and must go. After the wrangle they go 
 out for a walk, and find the new moon has 
 just appeared, and the boys are a trifle 
 amused to see the professor turn round so as 
 to bring his right shoulder next the orb as he 
 first beholds it. 
 
 Some will protest that it would require a 
 large knowledge of meteorology, botany, 
 geology, physics and chemistry to under 
 stand all the things this professor was 
 bothered about, and that a common teacher 
 
 155 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 must not be expected to be informed on so 
 large a range of subjects. Or that schools 
 do their greatest good through the beau 
 tiful atmosphere of culture and scholar 
 ship with which piipils are surrounded. 
 Men of education, successful in life, are 
 quoted as saying that the ministry of their 
 school days was mainly of this kind. Then 
 we are told that the chief thing a pupil 
 gets from his teacher, that lasts forever, is 
 development and strength of character that 
 if he gets these and a smattering of knowl 
 edge it is sufficient, and that the chief thing 
 a teacher ought to have is character. 
 
 Now, there are some truths in this conten 
 tion ; indeed, it is all true except the infer 
 ential propositions that the teacher should 
 not know something, and should not think. 
 
 If a person is so ignorant of the very 
 primer of these sciences as not to be able to 
 understand most of such simple questions as 
 the boys put to the professor, then he is not 
 educated, and ought not to enter on the 
 business of trying to educate the men and 
 women of the future. These are the basal 
 principles of the simplest common knowl 
 edge of mankind, and it is childish for edu 
 cators to plead justification for ignorance of 
 them. Every man and woman ought to 
 
 156 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 know something of these sciences, and must 
 if they observe and think at all about their 
 environment. 
 
 This knowledge does not have to be got 
 ten out of books. It does not have to come 
 with any formal or formidable study of these 
 subjects ; but mostly it comes logically and 
 unconsciously, but unerringly naturally 
 even to the unlettered thinking man. 
 Should all men and women, of thought know 
 something of geology, zoology, botany, 
 chemistry, physics, and meteorology? By 
 all means yes and every truly, even 
 slightly, educated person does. 
 
 To say the doughnuts boil because the 
 water they contain is made into steam by the 
 hot lard, does not tax the memory of book 
 reading or some school study. Every 
 thoughtful person knows it by observation, 
 and everybody who has seen yeast in fer 
 mentation, full of bubbles that must be made 
 by the yeast plant, knows, even if he is 
 unable to read and write, that it is the same 
 bubbles in the dough that make it porous 
 and make it rise. Shall a teacher of men 
 be excused for ignorance deeper and denser 
 than an unlettered man has? 
 
 Every one knows that a newspaper put 
 over the tomato vines at night .will keep off 
 
 157 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 the hoarfrost, and that clouds and smoke do 
 the same thing, and yet to the teacher s 
 mind the question of the relative temperature 
 in the uncovered wagon and under it is a 
 mystery insoluble. 
 
 People may not know that sugar and starch 
 are carbon products, and that all such come 
 out of the air through the enormously out 
 spread surface of the leaves of plants, and 
 that all the plants ever get out of the earth 
 are water and the mineral salts that go into 
 vegetable growth, and that, therefore, a 
 rocky soil, if it contains the right salts and 
 can get water, may produce grapes or grain 
 as long as these conditions last. But shall 
 teachers of the young be excused from 
 knowing such a cardinal and simple thing? 
 These are questions that touch the industries 
 of life, the bread earning of existence. 
 
 The telephone and the electric motor may 
 be left to the expert few, but growth of 
 plants, the making of food, and the preserva 
 tion of animal heat by clothes and houses 
 and roofs and fires, touch the life of the 
 people to which all education must con 
 tribute, or it is rubbish. 
 
 For the growing generations the atmos 
 phere of culture and thought of the schools 
 is blessed forever. But what is this atmos- 
 
 158 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 phere? Analyze it and tell what it consists 
 in! It is very little but the influence of 
 honest and critical thought, and for that is 
 my contention. I would abolish most of the 
 teachers who do not think and reason. The 
 greatest service a teacher ever renders a 
 student is to show him how to think, and 
 think for himself. By so much as wisdom 
 is greater than knowledge is this higher than 
 the teaching of mere facts. 
 
 I know there is something beside all this in 
 the atmosphere of school life. There are the 
 amenities and the fashions of culture; the 
 things that make a man appear cultivated, 
 as his manners and his pronunciation. But 
 all these are little in the struggle of life 
 compared with learning to think and master 
 ing the first principles of all knowledge. 
 
 In the educational results nobody would 
 discount or discredit that something called 
 character, otherwise continuity in good 
 purposes, honesty and kindliness. But I 
 have never heard that observation and crit 
 ical thinking are inimical to character, nor 
 that a man is likely to fall from grace 
 because he has come to know somewhat, nor 
 that largeness of information and maturity 
 of wisdom will shut out of mind essential 
 morality. 
 
 159 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 The needs of the times are for broad, 
 sensible, scientific, wholesome people for 
 teachers of the young. There is no need of 
 unbalanced, one-sided people, nor of prodigies 
 and geniuses. It is no kindly wish for any 
 child that he should emulate one of these 
 last. 
 
 Geniuses are many of them degenerates; 
 which means that they are one-sided and 
 unbalanced. They have one faculty excess 
 ively developed, and other quite as useful 
 ones correspondingly dwarfed. They are 
 apt to be overwrought, hypercritical and 
 intemperate in their characterization of 
 things, and they are generally unwholesome 
 guides. We call them geniuses because 
 they are over-developed in some one credit 
 able direction. Some of us sit at their feet 
 and pray we may be like them, when, if 
 most men were to become like them, the 
 social organization would be impossible the 
 social state would cease. 
 
 Such people are not useless to the world, 
 but often very useful. They frequently 
 startle mankind by their strides for progress 
 and for good. But their proper place is in 
 the laboratory, the study, the field or on the 
 expedition; rarely at the teacher s desk. 
 The dwarfing of some good qualities injures 
 1 60 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 them for teachers; their excessively devel 
 oped gifts and powers sometimes fit them 
 to do things mightily. Better teachers than 
 they could probably be found in every town. 
 Good educators are characterful and bal 
 anced men and women, superior and able; 
 they do not need to be phenomenal. They 
 make good models for boys and girls and 
 every student of high aspirations has such a 
 model that colors his whole after life 
 through his emulation of admired and usually 
 admirable qualities. Every yearning youth 
 has a hero, and must have, and he copies 
 unconsciously some of his notions, his mental 
 bent, his mannerisms, and sometimes even 
 his vices. Early the youth is liable to glory 
 in some older or bolder boy who is usually 
 admired for his buncombe and bravado, or 
 for his recklessness. This is one of the 
 barbarian phases of the boy s evolution 
 which rarely lasts very long. Many success 
 ful men, potent in the affairs of the world, 
 have looked back with pride to the models of 
 their youth, the men they have emulated. 
 Can you recall many models of such men 
 who were not symmetrical characters? Men 
 are not proud of the unsymmetrical ; the 
 people with supernumerary members or 
 angular mental faculties. If the hero is a 
 161 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 normal nature the copying is useful, but if he 
 is a genius, with vicious excrescences, the 
 worshiper is sure to grow a warped char 
 acter. It is better to emulate nobody than 
 a degenerate. 
 
 The best teachers are those most fit to be 
 admired in the calm measure of after school 
 years. These teachers are not prodigies; 
 but they are sound and stable, cultivated and 
 intelligent, never erratic and undisciplined, 
 always poised, good "all round" people. 
 They are thoughtful, faithful, observing and 
 skeptical people, who subject everything to 
 the test of reason and common-sense. They 
 are candid people, with gentle tempers; 
 they mostly look you quietly but squarely in 
 the face without a quiver; and they wear 
 well. 
 
 Preachers often tell the story of the edu 
 cation for the ministry of boys who have 
 been found after vain efforts and trials to be 
 utterly worthless for any other occupation. 
 Doctors sometimes tell the same story to 
 explain the presence of inefficient members 
 in their own profession. The medical pro 
 fession suffers in this way more than the 
 clerical, and the profession of teaching 
 suffers more than either, and probably more 
 than any other. 
 
 162 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 It is bad enough to admit men and 
 women to the profession who are poorly 
 equipped and qualified ; it is a worse and a 
 commoner offense to keep them after their 
 unfitness is shown. Not only are many 
 kept after they are found to be unfit, but 
 they continue to stay because they have 
 stayed ; there is something about the popular 
 conscience that helps them to fasten their 
 clutch on a position more firmly solely 
 because they have held it. School boards 
 are not the best judges of the art of teach 
 ing; weak teachers can any day hide from 
 them their own ignorance of a thousand 
 things every teacher ought to know and 
 the teachers themselves say they teach well, 
 and they ought to know about it. More 
 over, the teachers need work that always 
 appeals. 
 
 Many an incompetent teacher becomes 
 proficient by observation of the currents and 
 tides ; by growth. But often he grows fixed 
 in ways and prejudices and eccentricities as 
 the years go, and so is progressively less fit 
 to teach the young, and more of a menace to 
 the social and political body. 
 
 We are all guilty of numerous wrongs upon 
 the young, and not the least of them is our 
 modern extravagant indulgence of children 
 
 163 
 
OUR EDUCATORS 
 
 in their own bent and their own way in con 
 duct, manners, work and play; in study and 
 learning. Our sin of non-discipline is 
 almost as great as was that of the severity of 
 the earlier centuries. Affection is no justi 
 fication for granting a pleasure to-day that is 
 sure to cut deep to-morrow or some other 
 day; and almost the foolishest speech a 
 successful man or woman can make is to say 
 that they will spare their children all the 
 struggles and privations most of them 
 developmental in the highest degree which 
 they themselves early had to endure. 
 Modern ease of existence has tried with 
 some success to kill off the more stalwart 
 virtues, but one thing the community owes 
 to itself to do for the rising generation. It 
 owes it to the men and women of to-morrow 
 that they shall as far as possible associate 
 with and learn of the most sensible, best 
 rounded people, the most sane and whole 
 some natures, folks who are freest from 
 hysteria and crankiness of all sorts, and even 
 from the heroics of ostentatious goodness. 
 
 164 
 
PRINTED BY R. R. DONNELLEY 
 AND SONS COMPANY AT THE 
 LAKESIDE PRESS, CHICAGO, ILL. 
 
By HAROLD FREDERIC 
 
 GLORIA MUNDI: A NOVEL 
 
 Mr. Frederic s two triumphs of the last few years 
 have been " The Damnation of Theron Ware " in 
 serious fiction and "March Hares" in a light and 
 brilliantly witty style which is all his own. " Gloria 
 Mundi " comes as his first work since the publication 
 of these two successful books and happily enough 
 it combines the keen thoughtful analysis of the one 
 with the delicacy of touch of the other. Mr. Frederic 
 takes for his hero a young man brought up without 
 much attention in the south of France, who, by a 
 wholly unexpected combination of circumstances, 
 falls heir to an English earldom. His entire training 
 has unfitted him for the position, and Mr. Frederic 
 makes much of the difficulties it forces upon him. 
 The other characters are some good and bad mem 
 bers of the nobility, an " actress-lady," and a type 
 writer. 
 
 12mo. Cloth. Uniform with " The Damnation of 
 Theron Ware." $1.50. 
 
 THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE 
 
 It is unnecessary at this time to say much of " The 
 Damnation of Theron Ware" or "Illumination" as 
 it is called in England. The sales have already 
 reached thirty-five thousand, which is in itself the 
 most substantial evidence of the novel s readable- 
 ness. Owing to the failure of its former publishers 
 the book was temporarily out of print, but it is now 
 enjoying a constant and certain success. 
 
 The merit of the booK is worthy of special praise because of 
 the exceptional strength, variety, and originality of the char 
 acters. - Cleveland World. 
 
 Mr. Frederic has written a daring story, and one which is 
 doubly impressive because of the straightforward simplicity of 
 his manner of presenting his case. His attack is certainly a bold 
 one, and it will be strange if he does not bring down the unani 
 mous maledictions of the cloth on his devoted head. Chicago 
 Evening Post. 
 
 12mo. Cloth. Thirty-fifth thousand. $1.50. 
 HERBERT S. STONE & Co., CHICAGO & NEW YORK. 
 
By H. 0. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR 
 
 THE VICE OP FOOLS 
 
 A novel of society life in Washington. 
 
 The great success of Mr. Chatfield-Taylor s society 
 novels gives assurance of a large sale to this new 
 story. It can hardly be denied that few persons in 
 this country are better qualified to treat the " smart 
 set" in various American cities, and the life in 
 diplomatic circles offers an unusually picturesque 
 opportunity. 
 
 Mr. Chatfield-Taylor has brought out a fourth novel, and one 
 which is distinctly a gain in style over his previous achievements 
 in that line. As a series of society scenes the panorama of the 
 book is perfect. A dinner at the Hungarian embassy is detailed 
 with much humor, great pictorial power and keen knowledge. 
 The dialogue may be characterized heartily as crisp, witty, and 
 sparkling. Mr. Chatfield-Taylor proves himself a past master of 
 epigram; and if society were to talk a tenth as well as he repre 
 sents there would be no cause for accusing it of frivolity. 
 Chicago Times-Herald. 
 
 16mo. Cloth. With ten full-page illustrations by 
 Raymond M. Crosby. Fifth thousand. $1.50. 
 
 TWO WOMEN AND A FOOL 
 
 The story of an actress, an artist and a very sweet 
 girl. The scenes are laid in Chicago, London, and 
 Paris; in theatres, studios, and bachelor apartments. 
 It is the history of an infatuation with moral inter 
 ludes. 
 
 Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor, whom Paul Bourget has named 
 as the most promising novelist of American social life, has given 
 us a clever story in "Two Women and a Fool." The tale is 
 retrospective; one hears it from the lips of Guy, an artist; and it 
 concerns his love for two women, a very naughty and an ex 
 tremely nice one, Moira and Dorothy respectively. Moira. who 
 becomes a soubrette, leads Guy, who becomes a successful artist, 
 a tremendous pace, wearying him at length, but still holding the 
 power to revive him with her look that allures. The romance 
 leaps from Chicago to London and Paris and back to the Windy 
 City again. It is steadily entertaining, and its dialogue, which 
 is always witty, is often brilliant. C. D. Gibson s pictures are 
 really illustrative. Philadelphia Press. 
 
 18mo. Cloth. With frontispiece by C. D. Gibson. 
 Ninth thousand. 10.75. 
 
 HERBERT S. STONE & Co., CHICAGO & NEW YORK. 
 
By ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 THE LONDONERS: AN ABSURDITY 
 
 " The Green Carnation was among the most amus 
 ing society sketches that recent years have given us. 
 After it Mr. Hichens, perhaps wisely, devoted himself 
 to much more serious work. In " The Londoners " 
 he returns to his original manner without making his 
 burlesque so personal. It is the story of a smart 
 woman, wearied by her position and its duties, who 
 seeks to get out of society. The idea is an original 
 one, and when contrasted with the efforts of a second 
 heroine to get into society, the result is wholly delight 
 ful. The story has already attained a considerable 
 popularity. 
 
 With a cover designed by Claude F. Bragdon. 
 12mo. Cloth. Second impression. $1.50. 
 
 FLAMES: A LONDON FANTASY 
 
 The book is sure to be widely read. Buffalo Commercial. 
 
 It carries on the attention of the reader from the first chapter 
 to the last. Full of exciting incidents, very modern, excessively 
 up to date. London Daily Telegraph. 
 
 In his last book Mr. Hichens has entirely proved himself. His 
 talent does not so much lie in the conventional novel, but more 
 in his strange and fantastic medium. " Flames " suits him, has 
 him at his best. Pall Matt Gazette. 
 
 "Flames " is a powerful story, not only for the novelty of its 
 plot, but for the skill with which it is worked out, the brilliancy 
 of its descriptions of the London streets, of the seamy side of the 
 city s life which night turns to the beholder; but the descriptions 
 are neither erotic nor morbid. * . * * We may repudiate the 
 central idea of soul-transference, but the theory is made the 
 vehicle of this striking tale in a manner that is entirely sane and 
 wholesome. It leaves no bad taste in the mouth. * * * 
 "Flames" it is the author s fancy that the soul is like a little 
 flame, and hence the title must be read with care. There is 
 much epigrammatic writing in it that will delight the literary 
 palate. It is far and away ahead of anything that Mr. Hichens 
 has ever written before. Brooklyn Eagle. 
 
 With a cover designed by F. R. Kimbrough. 12mo. 
 Cloth. Second impression. $1.50. 
 
 HERBERT S. STONE & Co., CHICAGO & NEW YORK. 
 
By HENRY JAMES 
 
 IN THE CAGE: A NOVELETTE 
 
 With every recent story Mr. James seems to have 
 entered a new field. " What Maisie Knew " was cer 
 tainly a wide departure from his previous work, and 
 " In The Cage," the life of a girl behind the wire 
 screen of an English telegraph office, is as novel as 
 one could wish. The story is slight and the incidents 
 are few, but the charm of Mr. James s style, the 
 absolute precision of his expression, the keenness of 
 the analysis make the book remarkable in contem 
 porary fiction. 
 
 We could not wish for a better representation of the art of Mr. 
 Henry James. In appearance it is only a sketch of a girl who 
 works the telegraph in an office that is part of a grocer s shop in 
 the West End, but as background there is the extravagant world 
 of fashion throwing out disjointed hints of vice and intrigue in 
 messages handed in as indifferently as if the operator were only 
 part of the machine. Nevertheless, she is a woman, too, and 
 feminine interest and curiosity so quicken her wits that she is 
 able to piece together "the high encounter with life, the large 
 and complicated game" of her customers. This, in fact, is the 
 romance in her life, the awakening touch to her imagination, 
 and it is brought into skilful contrast with the passionless com 
 monplace of her own love. Academy. 
 
 12mo. Cloth. Uniform with "What Maisie 
 Knew." $1.25. 
 
 WHAT MAISIE KNEW: A NOVEL 
 
 Henry James s masterpiece. Chicago Times-Herald. 
 
 It will rank as one of his most notable achievements. New 
 York Sun. 
 
 The book contains some of the author s cleverest dialogue. 
 New York Tribune. 
 
 "What Maisie Knew," taken all in all, contains some of the 
 keenest, most profound analysis which has yet come from the 
 pen of that subtle writer. There is no question that Henry 
 James s latest work will sell. New York Commercial Advertiser. 
 
 It is quite impossible to ignore that, if the word have any 
 significance and is ever to be used at all, we are here dealing 
 with genius. This is a work of genius as much as Mr. Meredith s 
 best work. Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 12mo. Third impression. 1.50. 
 HERBERT S. STONE & Co., CHICAGO & NEW YORK. 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS 
 
 WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 OVERDUE. 
 
 6 29*68 -9 P 
 
 SEP !>. 1968 8Y 
 
 LrL 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY