J^<- V 
 
 rtginal ant Mrctual 
 
 The Plain People's Plaint 
 By A True Night-Errant 
 
 Unwittingly the world has answer made : 
 Commercial Competition is the Life of Trade. 
 
 xxxiv, 8-9. 
 
 [viresque adquirat eundoj
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 
 :d 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 l:rs. Ben B, Lindsey 
 
 pj astn ^i^jJiiniX^t^
 
 SIN 
 
 ORIGINAL AND ACTUAL 
 
 The Plain People's Plaint 
 BY 
 
 T. K. E. 
 
 Univittingly the nvorld has ans^wer made: 
 Commercial Competition is the Life of Trade, 
 xxxi'v, 8-9. 
 
 [VIRESQUE ADQUIRAT EUNDO] 
 
 BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER 
 
 TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK CO., LIMITED
 
 Copyright, 1915, by Richard G. Badger 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.
 
 p 
 
 EDITOR'S NOTE 
 
 To accept, whenever possible, both the reading 
 and the pointing of the original manuscript as it 
 found its way into the hands of the publisher, has 
 been, in the preparation of this work for the press, 
 the aim of the Editor. 
 
 In the enforced absence of counsel or suggestion 
 from the author (due to the history of the MS. 
 and to the unusual circumstances attending its pub- 
 lication) this course has seemed to be dictated as 
 well by a sense of fair treatment as of necessity. 
 
 As will be seen, the rather copious notes, appended 
 by the advice of experienced critics, often discover 
 the harmony of the author's thought with that of 
 well-known writers and thinkers. 
 
 W. G. Sette. 
 
 Chicago, Illinois, 
 February 22, 1914. 
 
 1106227
 
 The Ramona Hotel, 
 San Francisco, Cal., 
 
 October 28, 1903. 
 Mr. W. G. Sette, 
 637 Nulluby Street, 
 
 Chicago, Illinois. 
 
 My dear Sette, 
 
 Your letter finds me just returned from a busi- 
 ness trip that took me into the foothills of the 
 Sierras and beyond. Believe me, up five thousand 
 feet above sea level, in the midst of redwood for- 
 ests that are truly primeval, the climate is glorious. 
 If you must leave Chicago on account of your 
 health, I suggest that you give this a trial. Besides 
 climatic advantages you will here surely find enter- 
 tainment in your favorite diversion of character 
 study, for the mining and lumber camps are peopled 
 by all kinds and nations and you cannot fail to run 
 across something that is at once interesting and 
 unique. 
 
 On the trip referred to, while at , in 
 
 County, I came near, as I imagine, having an ad- 
 venture myself, of which I think I must give you 
 an account. I am also sending you under separate 
 cover some " documentary evidence " — you have a 
 nose for such things, I have not — papers that you 
 may do what you please with, even to searching out 
 
 V
 
 EXPLANATORY LETTER 
 
 the author, if the fancy strike you and you are will- 
 ing to squander money on the Pinkertons. 
 
 In September word from our people sent me to 
 
 to make some adjustments. This place, as 
 
 you do not know, is an extensive lumber camp situ- 
 ated at quite an elevation on the mountain side, with 
 wide stretches of magnificent timber in every direc- 
 tion. Thus removed far from the insulting inquisi- 
 tiveness of civilization, it affords an ideal retreat 
 for one who would forget the world, or, perchance, 
 have the world forget him. The major force of 
 employes go in as soon as the deep snows have 
 melted, April or May, and come out in October. 
 A few in charge of the buildings and equipment 
 bury themselves there for years. It is oftenest 
 reached over trail on horseback. The lumber is 
 sent down in " chutes " or, after the plain is reached, 
 in a canal, from whose terminus it is distributed by 
 rail. Such a camp, with its branches, affords em- 
 ployment for several thousand men. 
 
 The so-called hotels of such a place are, naturally 
 enough, pronouncedly democratic. Glancing across 
 the room at the table of " mill hands " on the even- 
 ing of my arrival, my attention was arrested by a 
 man whose face, notwithstanding his rough clothes 
 and uncouth surroundings, contrasted strangely 
 with those of his fellows. " What unkind fate," I 
 mused, " has led you to such association and em- 
 
 VI
 
 EXPLANATORY LETTER 
 
 ployment?" Tall, finely proportioned, athletic, his 
 complexion and physiognomy bespoke an ancestry 
 from the north of Europe. His skin was ruddy, 
 his features quite regular, a heavy, flowing, very 
 blond mustache gave him a look of distinction and 
 fixed him in memory. Such were my mental notes 
 made, half unconsciously, across the wide dining 
 hall. 
 
 Passing out after dinner I found him seated on 
 the rude porch settee. Instinctively, I took a seat 
 beside him, addressing to him some remark of gen- 
 eral import. It was then that I more particularly 
 noticed that his general bearing was one of culture 
 and refinement, that of a well-bred gentleman. 
 From remarks upon the weather and the place the 
 transition to less conventional subjects followed, 
 and after half an hour's talk, when he excused him- 
 self to retire, I was conscious that I had met an 
 exceptional intelligence, a most attractive personal- 
 ity, in the rough garb of an ordinary workman. 
 
 Such an experience in this region, however, is not 
 singular enough to make a lasting impression. Re- 
 sponsibilities of business quite drove it from my 
 mind till I was seated at the table the next evening, 
 when my eyes again fell upon that strikingly hand- 
 some head and face. Again I found him on the 
 porch settee (I think he was expecting me) and 
 again we dropped into conversation. This took a 
 vii
 
 EXPLANATORY LETTER 
 
 wide range — history, philosophy, poetry, the clas- 
 sics. In science, especially that relating to biology 
 and medicine, he seemed much interested, as also in 
 theology and the law. His acquaintance wath scrip- 
 tural texts might have suggested a priestly training 
 had not almost equal familiarity with other depart- 
 ments of knowledge dispelled the idea of specializa- 
 tion. French, German, Italian and Spanish, with 
 their literatures, he had manifestly made his own, 
 while he was not lost in several of the old tongues. 
 In truth, such fullness of knowledge and force of 
 observation were displayed in these quite informal 
 talks, that I myself began to look forward to this 
 evening hour of our meeting as promising an intel- 
 lectual treat. 
 
 I now recall an incident that took place early in 
 these meetings as having at the time made an im- 
 pression upon me, but under the spell of his influ- 
 ence it soon passed away. We had chatted as usual 
 until nearly bedtime, w^hen — Blond, shall I call 
 him? for so direct and personal was our communion, 
 so entirely a matter of chance our meeting and 
 acquaintance, that I, at least, did not think of the 
 formality of names — suggested a glass of beer at 
 the near-by saloon. Reluctantly and, as you know, 
 quite aside from my custom, I acquiesced. Behind 
 us as we stood at the bar (a beautiful creation in 
 mahogany, by the way, even in this out-of-the-way 
 viii
 
 EXPLANATORY LETTER 
 
 mountain camp) were ranged some half-dozen slot- 
 machines and other gambling devices in the shape 
 of wheels, etc. "Do you ever risk anything?" he 
 asked. I replied that playing had no attraction for 
 me, as being either too mechanical or resting upon 
 no determined laws. " Well," said he, " I'll put in 
 something for you," at the same time setting down 
 his stein and moving over toward the machines. 
 
 In the half-dozen evenings w^e had passed together, 
 throughout the discussion of every subject and topic, 
 his manner had been one of deliberate calm, of 
 judicial poise, of a man in fact, who had schooled 
 himself to the nicest self-control. Now, however, 
 his deep-blue eyes were kindled, his countenance 
 strangely animated, his voice vibrant with emotion, 
 as, selecting a number for me, he dropped in his 
 half-dollar and gave the wheel a spin. The change 
 that came upon him as the wheel stopped short of 
 the number chosen held me in still greater wonder 
 — disappointment, misery, despair, almost agony, 
 were depicted in every feature of his countenance. 
 I would not have thought the earth swinging from 
 its orbit into space could have moved him so. And 
 before I could recover from my surprise, he had, 
 with the same show of excited interest, made an- 
 other selection and set the wheel in motion, only 
 to be plunged into yet deeper depths of agonized 
 disappointment. 
 
 ix
 
 EXPLANATORY LETTER 
 
 Hastening, at this point, to assure him that I was 
 never " lucky," at the same time urging that I must 
 retire early, I induced him to leave the place. As 
 we parted for the night his face lacked its cus- 
 tomary expression of repose and good-nature, and 
 I sought my own room, much marveling at this 
 unaccountable interest in the turn of a wheel. 
 
 Some week or ten days after this incident we 
 were seated one evening quite unconventionally on 
 the platform of a provision depot. As if by mutual 
 agreement we had come to meet at the close of each 
 day. Of his work I did not know more than that 
 he appeared at the table with the mill hands. He 
 had not referred to my business in any way. Our 
 souls had been in closest communion in the consid- 
 eration of many subjects, yet of each o-ther's history 
 and personal affairs we were in utter ignorance. 
 I had remarked to McKeel, after our first casual 
 meeting, upon the seeming intelligence of this man, 
 but since then it had not occurred to me to question 
 his history, antecedents, or what not. Nor had I 
 thought that he was interested in mine. That he 
 was attracted to me, that something in my personal- 
 ity had touched him, awakening a strong desire to 
 confide in me, I did not doubt. 
 
 On the evening referred to, I afterwards recalled, 
 he did not appear to be in his accustomed good 
 spirits; it seemed something was weighing upon his 
 
 X
 
 EXPLANATORY LETTER 
 
 mind. The conversation, as usual, was straying 
 untethered. We were seated, as I have said, quite 
 near each other, when, to my great surprise, with 
 somewhat in his voice that I had noted when he 
 stood in the saloon before the chance-wheel, I found 
 him looking me full in the face while saying, with 
 slow, tremulous accent: 
 
 " I know what you are," 
 
 Without at all taking in the situation, I returned 
 his level glance and said, good-naturedly, " Well, if 
 you insist upon being clairvoyant, go ahead." 
 
 " You're a detective," said he, with great solem- 
 nity. 
 
 Still without understanding of the situation, so 
 absurd did his suspicion appear, and, at the moment, 
 irresistibly impelled to carry along what appeared 
 to me a bit of pleasantry, I at once clapped my 
 hand upon his shoulder, saying, " Dead right you 
 are; and you're just the man I've been looking for. 
 Consider yourself my prisoner." 
 
 This is a particular species of joke that I have 
 solemnly resolved never to repeat. A tenderfoot 
 gains serviceable understanding only by actually 
 walking in and out among men. That this form 
 of words might have an unpleasant echo; that it 
 was, in fact, not infrequently used in this region 
 as a sort of incantation with which to exorcise evil 
 spirits, sometimes indeed, resulting in their crying 
 xi
 
 EXPLANATORY LETTER 
 
 out, and even in sundry manifestations of violence, 
 I should have had in mind. And I know not 
 whether some such form of action might not have 
 been preferable to what actually took place, as af- 
 fording mental relief. The vision of awful change 
 that came over that face I can see clearly yet. On 
 the instant, I was inexpressibly sorry, perplexed, 
 alarmed, but before I could recover myself to act, 
 he exclaimed, utterly breaking down: 
 
 " You may take me. But I haven't done any- 
 thing." 
 
 " See here, man," said I, at last comprehending 
 the situation, " can't you understand a joke? Here, 
 just take a look at my business card. I thought you 
 knew what I was up here for." Then remarking 
 how ridiculous his suspicion had appeared, I gradu- 
 ally led him back to the paths of our previous con- 
 versations. 
 
 We talked late that night. Never had he seemed 
 in better spirits. His old-time brilliancy returned, 
 and also his seeming confidence in me. 
 
 As in the old days in college when you and I 
 were chums, my habit of late rising is still upon me. 
 It was ten o'clock and after, the next morning, 
 before I had breakfasted and was out. 
 
 " Hello, Mill," called out McKeel, who was just 
 passing as I reached the porch. " I have a letter 
 for you over at the oflice. Your Swede left it early 
 xii
 
 EXPLANATORY LETTER 
 
 this morning just as he was starting off." 
 
 Of course, I immediately recalled the scene of the 
 previous evening. So my handsome, learned, philo- 
 sophic friend had taken French leave. But w^hy 
 should there be any word for me? 
 
 Later in the day this part of the mystery was also 
 solved. A large envelope, evidently obtained at the 
 Company's office, held the manuscript that I am 
 sending you. It is undoubtedly his production. 
 Let me know how it impresses you. 
 
 My next stopping place will be The Hollenbeck, 
 Los Angeles. 
 
 Yours, very hurriedly, 
 T. O. Mill. 
 
 xm
 
 TO 
 
 THAT SMALL CLASS 
 
 OF 
 
 HUMAN BEINGS 
 
 WHO 
 
 ON THE BASIS OF 
 
 SOME LITTLE KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 ELECT 
 
 TO DO A FRACTION OF THEIR OWN THINKING 
 
 AND 
 
 AT THE SAME TIME 
 
 ACCORD 
 
 AS AN INALIENABLE RIGHT 
 
 THE SAME PRIVILEGE TO THEIR FELLOWS 
 
 THIS IMPERFECT WORK 
 
 IS 
 
 MOST RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED 
 
 BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR
 
 Suite 1732 
 Hotel de La Republique° 
 
 Sing Sing,° New York, 
 
 December 14, 1900. 
 To the Plain People: 
 
 In these days of Night-errantry, when Sirs of 
 the Pen, from the doubty contributors to The Star 
 of Hope° down to our highest misrepresentatives 
 in the Halls of Legislation and of Execution, are 
 invading every Field of Honor and, by force of 
 mere arms, penumbrating every unfortunate subject 
 encountered in their quests, I make for this present 
 excursion neither lame excuse nor abject apology. 
 
 That many of the subjects touched are of, at 
 least, passing interest, no gentleman of the cult will 
 deny; and it is not necessary for me to remind the 
 occult that, in such a work, the sacrifice of exact 
 outline and clearness of expression — not to say in- 
 sight — to freedom of movement and facility of 
 withdrawal from untenable positions, most aptly 
 characterizes your True Night, whose proper genius, 
 be it known, culminates in the originality of a veiled 
 design. 
 
 Finally, I may be permitted to cherish the hope 
 that, in respect of my absolution, the abbreviated 
 number of my quests, the topographic extent of my 
 2
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 For the authorship of the MS. see letter on 
 page V. 
 
 THE INSCRIPTION. 
 
 Note the severe class limitation. 
 
 THE INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Hotel de La Republique. The Commonwealth 
 Hotel, where are forcibly lodged the Common- 
 wealth's errants, geographical and moral. In other 
 words, the State's Prison. 
 
 Sing Sing. A city above New York on the Hud- 
 son River, the seat of one of the most noted 
 prisons in the United States. By petition of its 
 citizens the name was changed in March, 1901, to 
 Ossining. 
 
 The Star of Hope. The name of a bright paper 
 edited and published by the convicts in the above 
 state prison at Sing Sing.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 errancy, and especially, the manifest absence in my 
 composition of the Unities" of Time and Place — 
 tantamount to establishing an alibi — may serve to 
 absolve me, in the view of my sympathetic fellow- 
 errants and colaborateurs, from any charge or suspi- 
 cion of irreverence, lack of patriotism, infidelity to 
 class interests, higher criticism, or dissatisfaction 
 with the existing order of things. However, — 
 
 Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto. 
 
 An Oregon fir or giant sequoia of California out- 
 stretching its huge length is said to vibrate sensibly 
 in every particle of its being at the mere scratching 
 of a needle-point upon its superficial cortex. Not 
 only so: the vibrations resulting from the simul- 
 taneous use of several needle-points, at first complex, 
 discordant, are soon woven into simple, rhythmic 
 pulsations of sound that become sympathetically har- 
 monious. 
 
 It were sweet recompense, indeed, and reward 
 exceeding great, to feel that a single one of the 
 innumerable hearts that constitute the Universe of 
 Souls has beaten with accelerated pulsation by rea- 
 son of the faint and feeble scratches recorded here 
 and thus become a causative element in characteriz- 
 ing the grand diapase of universal concord. 
 
 History is the science of interdependence: of men 
 as continuously adjusting themselves to environment 
 4
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 "Unities of Time and Place. Terms descriptive of 
 the classical drama. The " manifest absence " here 
 referred to may relate to the discursive character of 
 the poem that follows as vi-ell as to the roving habits 
 (Night-errancy) of the "gentlemen of the cult," 
 i.e., burglars, thieves, etc. 
 
 The play upon words in the first three para- 
 graphs, based upon customs and technical terms 
 known to professional outlawry, is suggestive of the 
 writer's character and surroundings. 
 
 As to the probability of literary ability discover- 
 ing itself w^ithin prison walls, the case of " John 
 Carter," pardoned from the Stillwater prison, Minn., 
 in 1 910, is still remembered. Also in point is the 
 following Associated Press dispatch : 
 
 ToPEKA, Kansas, 
 October 11, 1906. 
 E. B. Jewett, of Wichita, former Warden of the 
 State penitentiary at Lansing, came to Topeka to 
 confer with Attorney General Coleman regarding 
 the suit which Ira N. Terrill has filed against him 
 in the District Court of Leavenworth County. 
 Terrill is the Oklahoma ex-convict, recently released. 
 Terrill is a " literary man," if the facts warrant 
 the allegations of his position in the suit against the 
 prison officials. He asks damages in the sum of 
 $1000 because the manuscript of several of his lit- 
 erary works was forcibly taken from him during the 
 5
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 subject to mutation ; of things and circumstances as 
 providing the circumambient plasma, if you will, to 
 quicken, nourish and fructify the evolutionary po- 
 tentialities of the species. Its forceful makers often 
 wist not of their own doing; its supreme writers, 
 looking reverently into the heart of things, ever 
 interpret while offering painful sacrifice. Into its 
 stream from time to time, at certain junctures and 
 after seeming preparation, appear to be injected vital 
 principles that serve as dynamic influences to modify 
 the universal current. 
 
 Such a season of preparation were the centuries 
 immediately preceding the Christian era. Follow- 
 ing upon former experiments among peoples and 
 nations came those organizers of world governmental 
 systems, Philip of Macedon, his greater son Alex- 
 ander, and the Caesars, who gathered the visible 
 threads of human experience into deftly-woven skeins 
 that, in their magic hands, endowed with organic 
 being the then known world, — military roads, great 
 cities pulsing with life, temples to nourish sacred 
 honor, vast libraries to disseminate knowledge, and, 
 aggislike over all, that marvelous structure of the 
 Roman Law, whose towering capstone beaconed 
 forth upon ever-before terrified humanity the uplift- 
 ing and re-assuring signal, jus humanum — other 
 names for arteries, veins, nerves, ganglionic centers 
 — in short, the essential organs of highly sensitized 
 6
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 period of his incarceration at Lansing. In his 
 petition Terrill, who has been admitted to the bar, 
 enumerates the manuscripts as follows : 
 
 " One romance consisting of an introductory poem 
 and song from and by each of the Nine Muses, a 
 song from and by the Son of Brage, and a song 
 from and by Jove. 
 
 " Also a poem entitled, ' When Erigg Leaves 
 Fensel.' "
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 life in human society. 
 
 It was at such a juncture of circumstances and 
 after such manifest preparation that was heralded 
 by ONE whose name characterizes the loftiest con- 
 ceptions of human conduct and whose teachings have 
 determined the swift currents of subsequent history 
 a principle defining the value, not of individual 
 wealth but of individual worth, not of personal rank 
 but of personal character; a principle sanctioning, 
 not the arrogant domination of the few but the 
 sweet subjection and common service of all ; a prin- 
 ciple foreshadowed, indeed, in that lofty ideal of the 
 Roman Law, but adequately expressed only in the 
 predication of the solidarity of the human race and 
 the indisputably consequent brotherhood of man. 
 
 Again, in our own day, it would seem that the 
 world has developed a high degree of organic fitness. 
 Human society was never before so highly sensitized. 
 Abjectly bowing down before that hydra-headed, 
 poison-veined, soul-destroying fetish, commercial- 
 ism, distance has been annihilated, boundaries of 
 states and nations obliterated, race distinctions swal- 
 lowed up in miscegenation, the strikers at Babel re- 
 instated, until this mundane habitat of man, once 
 proudly spacious, is now become a mere nutshell 
 cobwebbed with nerve filaments! 
 
 And now what wait we for? That we approach 
 the eve of important revelation, few are unwilling 
 8
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 to believe. But who shall interpret the manifest 
 signs of the times! Who of us is willing to stand 
 forth as a prophet! 
 
 " Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the 
 sky and of the earth ; but how is it ye do not discern 
 this time? Yea, and why even of yourselves judge 
 ye not what is right ? " 
 
 T. K. E. 
 
 10
 
 SIN 
 ORIGINAL AND ACTUAL
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 I 
 
 If Eden saw the highest" state of man 
 (And all of us believe that this is so), 
 Then, surely, it behooves whoever can. 
 Without regarding race or creed, to know 
 By what mishap he came to fall so low. 
 True, EVOLUTION blandly simulates 
 That man survives from age to age to grow. 
 However, microbe ptomaine" stimulates 
 False hope within consumptives and degenerates. 
 
 II 
 
 In passing, note this strange phenomenon 
 By which respected fellow-man beyond 
 Doubt proves himself the shining paragon : 
 Although created of all reason fond, 
 He's far too noble to endure its bond. 
 Consistent here is peasant, priest and wit; 
 New° gods, new systems rise beneath their wand. 
 Eschewing wands we'll use such words as fit. 
 Relying, just this once, on facts and Holy Writ. 
 12
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 I. 
 
 I. highest state. " It is no less a doctrine of 
 Scripture than a fact of experience that mankind is 
 a fallen race." — Charles Hodge, D.D., in Systematic 
 Theology. 
 
 8. microbe ptomaine. Modern medical science 
 has found that disease toxins circulating in the blood 
 act In some manner as a mental stimulus. 
 
 " Unlike so many consumptives, Keats had none 
 of that spes phthisica which carries them hopefully 
 to the very gates of the grave." — Dr. William Osier 
 in an address, John Keats, The Apothecary Poet. 
 
 II. 
 
 7. New gods, new systems. New philosophies, 
 new theologies are ever nascent. " Within the space 
 of this generation," says Dr. John Watson (Ian 
 Maclaren), "Christianity has been shifting her 
 basis from the Latin to the Greek conception of 
 God." 
 
 Life, as it is known to us, implies continuous 
 change. The power of idealization in man marks 
 him as a religious being. It follows that true re- 
 ligion is not institutional, but personal. Human 
 souls are characterized by successive ideals of the 
 " highest good," not by mere professed beliefs, 
 which have made such a mockery of religion. Hence 
 the truth of Carlyle's dictum, " A man's religion is 
 the chief fact with regard to him." 
 13
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 III 
 
 You'll find in Chapter I of Genesis, 
 
 If to The Book an open mind you bring, 
 
 Unblemished promises of real bliss, — 
 
 Sweet, welcome words that make the tear-drops 
 
 spring. 
 Whose echoes all adown the ages ring: 
 " Behold, I give thee every herb and tree 
 For meat ; dominion over every thing. 
 Or fish, or beast, or fowl, where'er it be," 
 Said our first° god. And all looked on was good 
 
 to see. 
 
 IV 
 
 In such a picture see the primal man, 
 Reflection of the god he then conceived. 
 No dwindling dwarf whose life was but a span 
 The nightmare of disordered souls here breathed. 
 Erect, full-chested, strong, his body sheathed 
 A heart and lungs that even yet enforced 
 His Mother Earth to give long life. Relieved 
 Was spine by arms not then so wide divorced 
 From nether limbs that brain o'erworked° had come 
 accurst. 
 
 14
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 " Every great spiritual dogma is a poetic truth, 
 and therefore elastic. Only the ignorant insist on 
 putting a literal interpretation upon figures of speech. 
 When we have more imagination, more spirituality, 
 more fluidity, we shall have a different religion and 
 a better religion." — The late Father Dorney, of 
 Chicago, quoted in The Philistine. 
 
 The variety of and change in man's ideals, the 
 inescapable process of soul-marking, are set forth 
 by LeRoy Bliss Peckham in Unity (Chicago), 
 August, 1906: 
 
 Even Our Own God 
 
 And God, even our own God, shall bless us. — 
 Psalms Ixvii, 6. 
 That totem carved grotesque, the Moloch fashioned 
 
 E'en more than horrible by crudest art; 
 Prone-visioned Mammon, Venus all impassioned. 
 
 Mars, Jesus Christ, — each finds a counterpart 
 Within the archives of the human heart. 
 
 Familiar Spirit guarding inmost shrine 
 At which all sacrifice, with sometime smart. 
 
 To apparent Good, which always means Divine. 
 
 Sole image thou of thine own deity, 
 
 A semblance never limned by hand of Fate, 
 
 Since God takes shape from what seems good to thee 
 And spirit's choice to spirit gives estate. 
 
 Distinctive seal upon each soul must be, 
 For Good, as God, doth individuate. 
 15
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 Nor through the tedious schools was Nature 
 
 known, 
 But full-flowered intuition" quick revealed 
 Her laws and varied forms. Responsive shone 
 The stars. Day also uttered speech. Unsealed 
 The spirits mysteries, the heart-aches healed. 
 Like to deep water-brooks his being ran 
 A thousand years with veins not yet congealed. 
 Communion with High Heaven not under ban 
 Then, in the coolness of the day God walked with 
 Man. 
 
 VI 
 
 The strife for place and power not then begun, 
 The earth, sunlit and fair, belonged to all° 
 Her children, and their simple lives did run 
 Untremblingly, — no horrid grotesque scrawl 
 On Nature's page nor need of custom's wall ° 
 As law to stay the fallen in the mire, 
 The sacrificial victims of Man's fall. 
 No earthly pomp could lift him higher; 
 To glorify his God was all his heart's desire. 
 
 i6
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 III. 
 
 g. first god. That Moses in editing the Penta- 
 teuch availed himself of sacred writings already 
 existing is established by the record of the Nippur 
 tablets lately recovered by The University of Penn- 
 sylvania. These were written a thousand years 
 before Moses' time and recount the story of Eden 
 and of the deluge. 
 
 Two strongly marked systems drawn from are 
 termed the Elohistic and the Jehovlstic, representing 
 the ancient gods Elohim and Jehovah. It is upon 
 the former that Christ calls {Mark xv, 34) from the 
 cross. Access to different sources may explain the 
 apparent repetitions in the text, especially Genesis 
 
 1-5- 
 
 IV. 
 
 9. brain o'erworked. " In making the human 
 species, nature apparently exhausted her resources. 
 The development of hands freed from locomotion, 
 and a brain out of proportion to bodily weight are 
 tours de force, and, so to speak, an afterthought 
 which put the heaviest strain possible on the material 
 employed, and even diverted some of the organs 
 from the original design. A number of ailments, 
 like hernia, appendicitis, and uterine displacement, 
 are due to the fact that the erect posture assumed 
 when the hands were diverted from locomotion to 
 prehensile uses put a strain not originally intended 
 17
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 VII 
 
 Now 't seems in Eden was a tract most fair, 
 A paradise or park, — in fact, preserve. 
 Of course, the god° ?nan fashioned put him there 
 To dress° it. Bottom-land, ° you will observe, 
 Has always played the part of a conserv- 
 Atory, educating folks to climb 
 Life's Tree or ladder. Any who had nerv-e 
 To reach the top would surely have sublime 
 Ideas of good and bad, even in ancient time. 
 
 VIII 
 
 This fertile tract was watered by a river, 
 The record tells us, but we must surmise 
 Its naming, whether Nile or Gaudalquiver. 
 Yet, truly, he can see, who only tries. 
 The situation promised towns of size. 
 That garden° " eastward," four° debouchuries, 
 Suggest, perhaps, commercial enterprise. 
 I'd not be classed among the visionaries; 
 The Adamses may have gone as missionaries, 
 
 i8
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 on certain tissues and organs. Similarly, the pro- 
 portion of idiocy and insanity in human species shows 
 that nature had reached the limit of elasticity in 
 her materials and begun to take great risks." — Pro- 
 fessor W. I. Thomas in The Forum. 
 
 V. 
 
 2. full-flowered intuition. With the develop- 
 ment of the objective mind, which is rational, these 
 subjective intuitional powers, original endowments, 
 were, in great measure, abated. Unless return be 
 made to conditions that obtained in the childhood 
 of the race, except men become as little children, 
 neither will the spirit mysteries be unsealed nor will 
 God walk with them as of old. — See Genesis ii, 
 19-20; Matthew xviii, 3. 
 
 VI. 
 
 2. belonged to all. " To deny a man his equal 
 right to the use of land is to deny him the benefit of 
 his own labor or its products without due return." — 
 Henry George. 
 
 5-6. custom's wall as law. Law, as a rule of 
 human action, is largely founded on custom.. In an 
 exact state of altruistic and egoistic balance the 
 exact rights of each and all would obtain. 
 
 VII. 
 
 3. god man fashioned. Cf. Ingersoll's " An 
 honest god's the noblest work of man." 
 
 19
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 IX 
 
 Avant couriers^ of civilization 
 Is what we call 'em now. And such° has been 
 The colonist of every age and nation, — 
 Phoenician, Grecian, English and Latin, 
 Moses, Mohammed, Henghist or Pepin, — 
 Intently " dressing " their god-given portion, 
 Assigning failures to errors or sin. 
 And forces strange are thereby set in motion, 
 For civilization denotes a complex notion. 
 
 X 
 
 And apropos of sin, I'd here remark 
 That Greek and Hebrew give the sense in chief, 
 If back to such old teachers you will hark: 
 To miss the mark or err was their belief. 
 Was not Man's earthly life e'er held° in fief? 
 Before mankind had violated rights. 
 The body spent, death° came as sweet relief. 
 Ask History for human nature's blights. 
 She answers: " Unjust power, pride° and appetites." 
 
 20
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 4. To dress it. See Genesis ii, 15. 
 
 4. bottom-land. The land along the river courses 
 has ever been, and still is, a fruitful source of tribal 
 and of international dispute. Its products nourish 
 great cities like Cairo, Buenos Aires, New Orleans, 
 Adelaide. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 6. garden " eastward." This was on the line 
 of the Orient's caravan trade. 
 
 6. four debouchuries. See Genesis ii, 10-14. 
 
 IX. 
 
 I. Avant couriers. The missionary claims the 
 protection of the flag; trade follows the national 
 colors; territorial annexation or absorption often 
 results. 
 
 In 1897 ^^^'0 German Catholic missionaries were 
 murdered in the province of Shan-tung, China. 
 Within ten days of the murder a German squadron 
 was on its way to the coveted territory, and within 
 two weeks Kiao-chau Bay was in German hands, 
 controlling a large part of the rich province of Shan- 
 tung. This territory was held for the exclusive 
 profit of Germany, without the familiar " open 
 door " attachment. 
 
 3. And such has been. " In the Congo country 
 there is a miserable state of affairs and great need 
 of a skillful hangman. . . . But what is going on 
 21
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XI 
 
 I'll here confess that microscopic germ, 
 Or hatched in slime, or emanate from star. 
 Were fit progenitor of human worm 
 And pedigree more easy traced by far 
 Than beings formed for goodness as we are. 
 However, I must banish such allusion 
 Or else I shall my course of reason mar. 
 I hear Dame Logic shout in my confusion: 
 " Your° ways: admit the premises; deny conclusion." 
 
 XII 
 
 We've posited that Humans once were good. 
 The now we know ; before we cannot see. 
 This Eden stream doth run as through a wood — 
 A sort of knot on our ancestral tree, 
 Not late unknown in genealogy. 
 Can it e'en be that scar is from a blow 
 By which was severed for eternity 
 The good? And, sure, doth not our reasoning 
 show 
 Two premises" as fair as scientist can know? 
 
 22
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 over there is only a process of civilization, a work 
 of evolution. The English in India did the same 
 thing, and so did the Spanish in America. Our 
 British forefathers practiced injustice and knavery 
 against the Indians of North America for centuries. 
 It is a trick the Romans had, and there can be noth- 
 ing in the Congo region half as horrible as the con- 
 quest of Judea by the Caesars." 
 
 The Congo region. What a splendid layout for 
 the plastic hand of civilization! And Christian 
 civilization found it out years ago, and is giving 
 the " plastic hand," even as " stout Cortez " turned 
 the trick for one Montezuma." — The JVashington 
 Post, Feb. 28, 1906. 
 
 X. 
 
 5. held in fief. In feudal times land was thus 
 held on condition of service to an over-lord. 
 
 7. death came as sweet relief. " It may be sup- 
 posed that as in sleep an instinctive need of rest is 
 manifested, in natural death is manifested man's 
 instinctive aspiration towards death." — Professor 
 Elie Metchnikoff, of the Pasteur Institute, Paris. 
 
 9. See / John ii, 16. 
 
 XI. 
 
 9. Your ways. Cf. As You Like It, Act I., ii, 
 
 191. 
 
 23
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XIII 
 
 We know that each effect must have a cause; 
 That choice doth govern every human end. 
 'Tis only thus by following well-known laws 
 That we can understand why God did send, 
 As Adam thought, his people to defend 
 And dress a land that promised all content. 
 The data given, inductive" methods lend 
 Their aid to show how Adam's mind was bent, — 
 The which we would propose: financial better- 
 ment. 
 
 XIV 
 
 Hark how two colonists" of later days. 
 While nearing lands where living waters poured, 
 Both herdsmen, came to parting of the ways: 
 " Choose left or right," sped Abram's winged 
 
 word. 
 Then son of Haran's lifted eyes adored, 
 Beholding bottom-land of Jordan fain. 
 Well-watered as " the garden of the Lord." 
 And Lot did choose him all that fertile plain 
 Of Jordan, under Sodom and Gomorrah's reign. 
 
 24
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 In syllogistic reasoning each step admits the alter- 
 native of denying the basis of the argument or of 
 admitting the contention. 
 
 XII. 
 9. Two premises. Implied in I. i. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 7. inductive methods. Reasoning in which we 
 proceed from less general to more general propo- 
 sitions. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 I. two colonists. See Genesis xlii, 5-13. 
 
 Lot deliberately chose material wealth in a rich 
 valley among a godless people, while Abram sought 
 the conditions of right living as of the first impor- 
 tance. The author would class Adam with Lot. 
 
 55
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XV 
 
 How Adam first lost sight of the Shechinah,° 
 We all, indeed, can clearly understand. 
 Also his need of deus° ex inachina; 
 We've said° 'twas human to keep one on hand. 
 As e'en to-day is seen in every land. 
 He does, of course, provide himself and wife 
 With dress qui est de rigueur quite off hand, 
 A most important adjunct of high life; 
 Questions of dress and food, you know, have long 
 been rife. 
 
 XVI 
 
 And lest th' ungentle reader say he went 
 Too far who ventured on such exegesis, 
 I'll cite examples from The Testament, 
 That will, perhaps, maintain my Gentile thesis. 
 Was not temptation" pictured just as this is, 
 When Christ was led into The Wilderness? 
 The devil proffered wealth and power of CrcEsus; 
 Stones turned to bread would conquer sore dis- 
 tress ; 
 Than pride, descent from temple spire was nothing 
 less. 
 
 26
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 XV. 
 
 I. ,The Shecliinah. The symbol of the Divine 
 presence ; here, righteousness, 
 
 3. deus ex machina. A contrivance in the 
 ancient Greek theater to indicate a change of scene, 
 as a device simulating a descent to the infernal 
 regions. Such was the " Charonian steps " repre- 
 senting the passage of a god through the air across 
 the stage ; whence the dictum applied to the mock 
 supernatural or providential. At any point in the 
 play a god, of the right temper, could thus be sum- 
 moned to solve the difficulties of the situation. 
 
 The author applies this principle to the shifting 
 character and attributes of Deity, as assigned by 
 men, in the different ages. 
 
 4. We've said. In II. 7. 
 
 XVI 
 
 5. temptation. See Luke iv, 1-13. 
 
 27
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XVII 
 
 Nor is there wanting further parallel 
 In sacred records of the fallen Man, 
 If those who read The Word should dare to tell: 
 The Needle's Eye, unwise Saphira's ban, — 
 Ay, wicked deeds from Beer-sheba to Dan 
 Are ripened weeds of Adam's planting sent 
 Adrift, distilling vapors that o'erfan 
 The world, as noisome grown, to such extent. 
 By telling truly fairest nations would be rent 
 
 XVIII 
 
 With violence, were 't not for powers that hold 
 In check Earth's children, — call 'em what you 
 
 will, 
 King, court, class, wealth or subtle priests that 
 
 mold 
 Our minds to feel The Powers That Be are still 
 Ordained of God, the which conceptions thrill 
 With different pulse as age on ages brim 
 And men and gods are working at the mill 
 Adjusting revelations, while per vim 
 The deus ex machina grinds out teraphim.° 
 
 ^ 
 
 28
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 9. teraphim. Like the penates of the Romans 
 these were little household gods of clay, by whom 
 families expected, for reverence bestowed, to be re- 
 warded with domestic prosperity, such as plenty of 
 food, health, and various necessities of domestic 
 life. See Genesis xxxi, 19; Hosea iii, 4. 
 
 29
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XIX 
 
 How many countless aeons intervened 
 Between events in Chapters I and II 
 Has never been from Revelation gleaned. 
 That god is changed" is known to but a few. 
 (A second reading might not injure you) 
 In gifts, however, none can fail to see. 
 If those who read the text will read it true, 
 Apparent" change in certain kinds of tree 
 That never yet were classified in botany. 
 
 XX 
 
 We all agree that Adam's folk were changed 
 In purpose, spirit, faith, ideals and mind, 
 As toward the trading Orient they ranged — 
 'Tis so, and hath° been so, with trading kind, 
 That leaves the Heart of Life for juiceless rind. 
 And when the sense of loss begins to prick. 
 We, ostrichlike, ourselves impose the blind, 
 Becoming soon accustomed to the trick 
 And, naturally, very anthropomorphic." 
 
 30
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 XIX. 
 
 3. god is changed. Cf. III. 9. 
 
 8. Apparent change. In Genesis i, 29, the gift 
 of trees appears to be unqualified. 
 
 XX. 
 
 4. 'Tis so and hath been so. All history 
 chronicles the corrupting, blighting power of wealth. 
 Arcadian simplicity flourished inland, removed from 
 the trade of seaports. Punka fides was the blossom 
 and fruit of a commercial system that reduced 
 mendacity to a fine art. The English have been a 
 nation of shopkeepers, and soon the Americans will 
 command the world's trade if they be not out- 
 witted by the Japanese, whose natural aptitude is 
 very great. 
 
 " Education," says our Commissioner of Educa- 
 tion, William T. Harris, " assumes a utilitarian 
 character among a commercial people (the Phoe- 
 nicians). . . . Not only arithmetic and writing, but 
 cunning and deceit were taught, as necessary for 
 skillful bargains." 
 
 9. anthropomorphic. The proneness of man to 
 ascribe human qualities to the Divine Being. See 
 XVIII. 9; XXVI. 8. 
 
 31
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXI 
 
 Suppose this change was to a mode of life 
 Removed from Nature's sweet simplicity? ° 
 Where man could not be Man° from sordid strife 
 And all his being mad complexity? 
 Where souls ne'er clad in holy sacristy? 
 Where powers of body wrought to dangerous 
 
 height ? 
 Where tumult of the mind was ecstasy? 
 Till, Nature turned, th' appointed saprophite° 
 Became, in tissues worn, the baleful parasite? 
 
 XXII 
 
 Now mind, in asking this I do not say 
 That our first parents even prejudiced 
 Our prospects, fostering commerce in a way; 
 I know quite out of court I should be hissed. 
 Do we not know, indeed, what would be missed, 
 To relegate a principle like this 
 From history, the SUN, which all insist 
 To Church and State and Nation bringeth bliss. 
 Great commerce! Universal" apotheosis! 
 
 32
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 XXI. 
 
 2. simplicity. " Simplicity is a state of mind. 
 Let a fox be a fox, a swallow a swallow, a rock a 
 rock ; and let a man be a man, and not a fox, a hare, 
 a hog, or a bird of prey: this is the sum of the 
 whole matter."— Pasteur Wagner in The Simple 
 Life. 
 
 3. Where man could not be Man. " The busi- 
 ness man is always worried. He is always over- 
 worked. His family scarcely know him. He 
 lacks leisure, and the aesthetic appreciation that goes 
 with it, almost as thoroughly as does the laborer. 
 One of the editors of one of our best monthlies re- 
 marks : ' I never knew a man truly lovable to the 
 core, but that he was a man of leisure.' The busi- 
 ness man's leisure never comes, except with compe- 
 tence or retirement. To many men these never 
 come. When they do, they find him broken in 
 health, chained to commercialism of thought and 
 taste, and lost forever to true amusement." — Sidney 
 A. Reeve in The Cost of Competition. 
 
 8-9. saprophyte; parasite. "Disease germs, in 
 all probability, are descended from micro-organisms 
 which in the original design of nature had for their 
 function the transformation of organic into inor- 
 ganic matter. That by sin death came into the 
 world may be literally true. 
 33
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXIII 
 
 Just think of mighty empires to rescind ! 
 Of states and cities, capitals and quays, — 
 Tyre, Carthage, Venice, Babylon and Inde; 
 Rome, Canton, London, Cairo, and the seas 
 Afloat with bottoms weighed with luxuries! 
 Or cameled convoys fetching sparkling prism, 
 Silk, satin, nard, frankincense, gold to tease 
 Ambition, — raise, refine Man's organism — 
 But stop! My breathless haste o'erruns° my syllo- 
 gism. 
 
 XXIV 
 
 But, cartes, greatest names are in an age 
 
 In every nation, whether new or old 
 
 (Don't doubt I'll name the book and point the 
 
 page). 
 Coincident with richest flow of gold, — 
 Nile's overflow of periodic mold. 
 Still, Clio's ways° are no great mystery 
 Where stories of the so-called great are told : 
 The pageantries of wealth pass glittering by; 
 The shuffling footsteps of Earth's poor — how 
 
 noiselessly ! 
 
 34
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 " Abuse, excess, and dissipation may have reduced 
 the vitality of the human body to such a degree as 
 to make it congenial for micro-organisms, whose 
 function had been saprophytic only, to become para- 
 sitic. With time and opportunity, through the 
 process of evolution, new kinds of micro-organisms 
 have followed with the order of propensity reversed, 
 becoming primarily parasitic and secondarily sapro- 
 phytic. . . . 
 
 " There are many reasons, at hand already, for be- 
 lieving that the tubercle bacillus is a product of 
 evolution. The chief one is the resemblance of 
 tuberculosis, leprosy, and syphilis to one another. 
 
 " The Bermudas, America, and the Sandwich 
 Islands were strangers to consumption until visited 
 by civilization." — Lawrence W. Flick, M.D., 
 Phipps' Institute, Philadelphia. 
 
 XXII. 
 g. nniversal apotheosis. Deification. The or- 
 ganized efforts of mankind are devoted to the ex- 
 tension of commerce. Witness the life-and-death 
 struggle of the nations for the last world-market in 
 the Orient. This must soon give rise to a great 
 war, perhaps world-wide. 
 
 XXIII. 
 9. c'erruns. If the assumption in I. i be correct, 
 35
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXV 
 
 Of virtue's worth each age the harbinger? 
 Integrity in forum, mart, and hall? 
 The Master's praise of widowed almoner? 
 Love, peace, unselfishness now over all? 
 God's Holy Temple void of middle" wall? 
 O man! arch-hypocrite of hj^pocrites, 
 Afraid° and naked when God's voice did call. 
 The dog, returned, his nasty vomit° eats; 
 So shameless man from age to age hypocrisy repeats! 
 
 XXVI 
 
 If Adam set the fashion in this wood 
 (As you and I believe to some extent) 
 Of competition's curse, ° think how he could, 
 E'en using far-fetched, specious argument, 
 Place all its woes° upon a lowly serpent! 
 True 't is, with Orientals figures thrive 
 In making luminous the mind's content; 
 Did° Adam with his new-made god connive? 
 Then take as symbol the most crooked thing alive? 
 
 36
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 that Eden saw the highest state of man, then it is 
 not within reason that his organism has since been 
 raised or refined in the murky atmosphere of com- 
 mercialism. 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 6. Clio's ways. Clio, patron goddess of history. 
 
 XXV. 
 
 5. middle wall. See Ephesians ii, 14. 
 
 7. Afraid and naked. " I heard thy voice in the 
 garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked ; and 
 I hid myself." — Genesis iii, 10. 
 
 8. vomit. See Proverbs xxvi, 11. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 3. competition's curse. " Look at the unnum- 
 bered, unknown millions, fighting for life, and pre- 
 tending not; counting each ounce of strength and 
 each penny of cash for its weight against, not always 
 sheer hunger and cold, but against disease and do- 
 mestic burdens, against that deterioration which 
 comes from monotony of existence, against child- 
 hood's lack of opportunity or age's lack of comfort, 
 good appearance, and that proper pride of social 
 position which the self-satisfied alternately appeal to 
 for further stimulus for striving and condemn as 
 extravagantly wasteful ! There is the pain ! There 
 allot your sympathy! 
 
 37
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXVII 
 
 This thought, at first, is most astonishing! 
 (Don't ask, I prithee, how it came to me) 
 And yet a flood of light it seems to bring. 
 With such interpretation of Life's Tree, 
 Mayhap we'll read aright our heraldry: 
 a shield, embossed twin of hemispheres, 
 Discovers" sail 'twixt azure sky and sea. 
 Upon whose sable flag, brave nurse of 
 
 FEARS, 
 A RAVEN d' argent BROODING SERPENT d' Or APPEARS. 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 Alas! the pirate vikings still are rife. 
 
 Their ports the cities on earth's human shore 
 
 And vicks but arteries of human strife, 
 
 That feed and fester competition's sore, — 
 
 Mephitic streams that White Wings° ne'er pass 
 
 o'er. 
 Hence plundering raven, glutton cormorant, 
 In silver on black flags above them soar, 
 While crooked gold reveals the symbol's bent. 
 Behold the blazonry" of man's achievement! 
 
 38
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 " Do business from the age of fifteen on ! Breathe 
 and eat and drink business: worship it by day and 
 dream of it by night! . . . Learn at every turn to 
 take all that the law allows — and five or five hun- 
 dred per cent, more, if you can escape detection." — 
 Sidney A. Reeve in The Cost of Competition. 
 
 5. Place all its woes. " The serpent beguiled 
 me, and I did eat. . . . The woman . . . she gave 
 me of the tree and I did eat." — Genesis iii, 12-13. 
 
 8-9. Did Adam, having deluded himself into the 
 belief that he might, in the eyes of his newly con- 
 ceived deity, shift his responsibility onto a fellow 
 creature, finally, when he shamefacedly saw the 
 bent of his own nature and the perfidy of his act, 
 take an emblem that would at once symbolize his 
 action and be an everlasting memorial of the event? 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 6-9. Coat of Arms for Adam's posterity. See 
 outside cover. 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 5. Cf. Vergil's JEneid iii, 442; vi, 118. 
 9. See Coat of Arms, outside cover. 
 
 39
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXIX 
 
 In jotting down these hasty presentations 
 I want to do justice without masking 
 Faults, humbly emulating some great nations 
 Where fullest pardon follows the asking 
 And criminals" in sunshine are basking. 
 So great is sympathy" or fellow-feeling! 
 Nor fear of future life with stern tasking; 
 Our present god° is one whose mouth is mealing, 
 Reproving softly murder, vice, and public stealing. 
 
 XXX 
 
 But circumstances may extenuate: 
 Pre-natal ° influence, or too much money, 
 Hath oft determined deathless soul's estate, 
 As known to every learned " Br'er Bunny." 
 Alack! E'en sober history seems funny 
 When wealth, position, family and dress 
 Do enter most religious ceremony. 
 Our first parents were Jews, we must confess — 
 Was 't Moses lifted serpent in The Wilderness? 
 
 40
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 5. criminals. " The danger nowadays Is not 
 that innocent men will be convicted of crime, but 
 that the guilty man will go scot free. This is 
 especially the case where the crime is one of greed 
 and cunning," — President Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 " I grieve for my country to say that the admin- 
 istration of criminal law in all the states of the 
 Union (there may be one or two exceptions) is a 
 disgrace to our civilization. . . . Since 1885 in the 
 United States there have been 131,951 murders and 
 homicides, and there have been 2,286 executions. 
 In 1885 the number of murders was 1,808. In 
 1904 it had increased to 8,482. The number of 
 executions in 1885 was 108. In 1904 it was 116. 
 This startling increase in the number of murders 
 and homicides as compared with the number of ex- 
 ecutions tells the story. As murder is on the 
 increase, so are all the offenses of the felony class, 
 and there can be no doubt that they will continue 
 to increase unless the criminal laws are enforced 
 with more certainty, more uniformity, more severity 
 than they now are." — Secretary of War Taft in 
 Address to Students of Yale Law School. 
 
 6. So great is sympathy. " But ours is so young 
 a government? We have not had time! Why, 
 the truth is, we are infinitely worse now than when 
 41
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXXI 
 
 While treating questions of theology 
 I have not mentioned lovely Eve by name, 
 And do so with profound apology. 
 As to her being specially to blame 
 For social aspirations, some will claim 
 That greatest stress of woman's life always 
 Is trimming taper feeding social flame. 
 Thus wives and daughters, prone to thread the 
 maze, 
 Worship Dame Fashion, — true society decays. 
 
 XXXII 
 
 To cite what sagest tongues ejaculate: 
 Before that first sheer downward plunge of Man 
 Conception always was immaculate; 
 Suggestive power of mind° the primal plan; 
 To propagate like beasts was part of ban. 
 Then parturition, like unfolding flower, 
 Was painless. But in later veins where ran 
 Intemperate the life, where passions glower, 
 Pure spirit waned, then yielded to a baser power. 
 
 42
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 we were much younger. . . . The fact is, the cause 
 of crime among us is not defective laws, but a tem- 
 perament unknown to our forefathers, a new racial 
 tendency, to tolerate crime as well as to find excuses 
 for it. Our present way of treating crime is not 
 only recent, but springs from the people themselves." 
 — Frederick Bausman in The American Law Reg- 
 ister. 
 
 8. Our present god. " Society and even the 
 Church," says The Living Church (Milwaukee), 
 "are honeycombed with the spirit of perjury. . . . 
 Our religion has become so softened that no preacher 
 warns his congregation that ' all liars ' — not even 
 trust magnates, insurance officials, and priests of the 
 church excepted — * all liars shall have their part 
 in the lake which burneth with fire and brim- 
 stone, which is the second death.' The popular 
 theology of the fashionable churches, supported by 
 wealthy men of this type, no longer believe in these 
 puerilities! " 
 
 XXX. 
 
 2. pre-natal influences. Familiarity with the 
 emblem chosen by Adam (XXVI. 9) left a birth- 
 mark on future generations. This thought sug- 
 gested the " brazen serpent " in line 9 below. 
 
 XXXII. 
 4. power of mind. " In the Golden Age they 
 43
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXXIII 
 
 Hail, Mother! Would thy piteous curse° were 
 
 cured. 
 Thy loving essence, moved by love Inspired — 
 What pangs through countless ages hast endured ! 
 What countless lips thy circling breasts inquired ! 
 Yet once, far down the ages, still admired, 
 Appeared thy perfect^ image, isolate 
 Like flaming star from central sun retired. 
 Confirming proof of woman's first° estate, — 
 The Virgin Mother, Holy, Pure, Immaculate! 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 Ah! question of the distant ages born, 
 Unanswered hitherto for you or me. 
 How hast thou honest hearts with anguish torn! 
 What principle" subsumes this enmity° 
 To spirit, faith, and physiology? 
 Has whelmed God's creatures fair in horrid shade 
 And given them o'er to works of deviltry? 
 Unwittingly the world has answer made: 
 Commercial competition" is the life of trade. 
 
 44
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 (human beings) attained a spirituality which no 
 other age has developed. Their bodies were per- 
 pectly healthy, harmonious, and beautiful. They 
 wore no clothes and had no sense of shame. There 
 were no carnal relations between man and woman, 
 and a child was born in the womb of its mother by 
 the potency of the mind of the male." — Baba 
 Premand Bharati in Sree Krishna. 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 I. piteous curse. " Unto the woman He said, I 
 will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy concep- 
 tion ; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children ; and 
 thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule 
 over thee," — Genesis iii, i6. 
 
 We have in this passage, expressed in rather con- 
 cise terms, the prediction of five future states : ( i ) 
 increase of sorrow ; (2) increase of conception; (3) 
 sorrowful parturition; (4) carnal desire; (5) sub- 
 jection. Change from a present state is necessary 
 to the fulfillment of the first two; with the last three 
 it is not so stated. Inferentially, each of the five 
 conditions predicted had not obtained aforetime. 
 
 That the artificialities of civilization and domesti- 
 cation, to say nothing of the processes of evolution, 
 have wrought marvelous changes in the breeding 
 habits of men and other animals, even a cursory ex- 
 amination of the " natural seasons," in their dif- 
 45
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXXV 
 
 From hence arises myriad serpent brood 
 
 Of varied shape, — men, snakes and devils mixed. 
 
 Persuade or hiss according to their mood, 
 
 But inward grovel all, decretal-pyxed. ° 
 
 And cursed their riches heaped (Pray, look at 
 
 text°), 
 Above what those from beast or cattle want. 
 World-type of traders is forever fixed: 
 However much ill-gotten gain they vaunt. 
 Behold the liar, cheat, and fawning sycophant! 
 
 XXXVI 
 
 Some dozen stanzas back 't was in my heart 
 To comment on the strict propriety 
 Of crooked symbol for the liar's art. 
 But do not think the serpent bad per se: 
 Mere physical adaptability 
 To twist, to eat the dirt, and not to laugh, ° 
 Like accidental traits in you and me. 
 To prove this worm is not so bad by half, 
 Observe the twined snake on iEsculapius' staff. ° 
 
 46
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 ferent states, past and present, must discover. Says 
 T. H. Huxley in his Lay Sermons, " The constitu- 
 tion of many wild animals is so altered by confine- 
 ment that they will not breed even with their own 
 females." 
 
 Premising that some such physiological change as 
 that implied in the note on XXXII. 4 took place at 
 an early, remote period of human history, the actual 
 or imagined result of climatic change, mode of liv- 
 ing, food supply, general environment due to migra- 
 tion, or evolutionary process, it is not difficult to 
 understand the unspeakable consternation it would 
 cause in simple, untaught minds, the profound, 
 abiding sense of shame and wrong-doing, of degra- 
 dation and pollution. And hence the action re- 
 corded in Genesis iii, 7, upon which the commenta- 
 tors are so eloquently silent. 
 
 There is a notion among ancient Rabbis that 
 Adam was possessed of a bi-sexual organization, and 
 this conclusion they drew from Genesis i, 27, where 
 it is said, "God created man in his own image; 
 male- female (not male and female) created He 
 them." Again, in Genesis v, 2, " Male-female cre- 
 ated He them ; and blessed them, and called their 
 name Adam, in the day when they were created." — 
 The Talmud. 
 
 "The nature of the tumor (dermoid cyst) has 
 not been certainly determined but it is quite evi- 
 47
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXXVII 
 
 Oft symbols in themselves quite innocent, 
 Exempli gratia, letters, D-O-G, 
 With what they signify become so blent 
 That form and meaning are like fruit and tree. 
 Again, with self-same symbols, G-O-D, 
 A simple change in order of citation 
 Doth magnify the concept's high degree. 
 Thus accident of Adam's illustration" 
 Did make the serpent crossed" throughout the wide 
 creation. 
 
 XXXVIII 
 
 The malediction seen in Chapter III, 
 
 Set down by Pentateuchal editor. 
 
 Describes" what then was, had been, still would 
 
 be. 
 Thus outward form° of sin we still abhor. 
 But cultivate the seed" from which the flaw. 
 We own, in all our lives doth truly spring, — 
 Indeed, do hold as sole conservator 
 And healthy sign of life" the very thing 
 That on our race from Eden's time hath left its; 
 sting. 
 
 48
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 dent that it represents an attempt at the formation 
 of an organism. It has, therefore, been designated 
 as a fcetus in foetu. Others have looked upon it as 
 the result of a form of parthenogenesis." — Alfred 
 Stengel, M.D., in Text-Book of Pathology. 
 
 6. perfect. Whether parthenogenesis be re- 
 garded as a relapse from the sexual mode of propa- 
 gation to the primal condition of non-sexual propa- 
 gation attributed to Adam by the Rabbis, or to a 
 somewhat later condition of non-sexual propagation 
 attributed to human beings in the so-called Golden 
 Age when " a child was born in the womb of its 
 mother by the potency of the mind of the male," 
 we have in the Mother of The Christ a " perfect 
 image " of motherhood. 
 
 8. first. " None of the earlier ancestors of man 
 and of the higher animals were capable of the higher 
 functions of sexual reproduction, but multiplied only 
 in an asexual manner. . . . Hermaphroditism is 
 prevalent in lower animals of the most different 
 groups; in these, each single individual, when sex- 
 ually mature, each individual, contains male and 
 female sexual cells, and is, therefore, capable of self- 
 fertilization and self-reproduction. ... In man as 
 well as in other vertebrates, the original rudiment of 
 the sexual organ is hermaphrodite. ... In any case, 
 however, sexual reproduction, both in plants and in 
 animals . . . has come only at a later date out of 
 49
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XXXIX 
 
 " More land and gold ! " th' ambitious statesman 
 
 cries ; 
 " Look crucial balance sheet of foreign trade ! " 
 Another war ere tear of widow dries 
 And golden guerdon of old butcher's paid. 
 " One of the Powers," hear so proudly said. 
 " Nay, Prince of Peace is powerful to stem° 
 These tides of greed and cruelty. Soon stayed, 
 No longer shall we have to battle" them; 
 Are not the biggest guns now cast at Bethlehem?" 
 
 XL 
 
 " No longer seen a Hundred Years of war 
 Or Thirty Years of cruel bloody strife! 
 Such savage butcheries our souls abhor, 
 That waste our substance and consume our life ! " 
 More manly° than free use of club and knife, 
 Enslaved in shop or field, a nerveless martyr, 
 To pay in tax on self and child and wife 
 For floating forts° (Of course, our safety's 
 barter), 
 Princes" of Peace, indeed upon the troubled water? 
 
 50
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 the ancient process of non-sexual reproduction." — 
 Ernst Haeckel in History of Creation. 
 
 " The secretion of milk by males is a return to 
 an extremely ancient condition in which both sexes 
 were able to nourish the young." — Metchnikoff. 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 4. this enmity. The simple, normal life of man 
 as represented in stanzas IV-VI has been detri- 
 mentally superseded by the strenuous, artificial life 
 of a rampant commercialism. See note on XXVI. 
 3. Also on XLII. 6. 
 
 4-7. What principle, etc. Says Senator Bev- 
 eridge in support of his bill for a Federal child- 
 labor law: "These children, reaching what ought 
 to be manhood and womanhood, become the parents 
 of offspring inheriting their degeneracy, and these 
 children in turn grow up to produce other children 
 still more degenerate. . . . 
 
 "If one state passes a good law and other states 
 do not, the manufacturers in the good state are at a 
 business disadvantage with the manufacturers of the 
 bad state; for the latter can employ cheap child- 
 labor and the former cannot. The manufacturers 
 in the good state suffer because of the very righte- 
 ousness of that state's laws; and the manufacturers 
 in a bad state profit by the very wickedness of that 
 state's laws." 
 
 51
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XLI 
 
 The lusts of Nations are the lusts of men. 
 'T is unit's bent° that tempers aggregate's. 
 Thus has resultant measure ever been 
 What led the Nations stalking to their fates. 
 What in them seemed life, and high estates, — 
 Wealth, power, appetite, the pride of gory 
 Fields, luxury, the Senate's loud debates, — 
 Was death. Howe'er tricked out we read their 
 story. 
 Each greatness is entombed, decay of splendor hoary. 
 
 XLII 
 
 Premise with me this principle of pelf. 
 Then read, with care, verse 15, Chapter III. 
 With look about you you will see yourself 
 How present human state and curse agree. 
 Propose a better meaning for Life's Tree. 
 Let woman° speak, in savage life or civil. 
 Con well your history. Conclude with me: 
 If " Love of Money " be " The Root of Evil," 
 Then he who hoards it is a conscientious devil. 
 
 52
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 Thus is high-mindedness in nations, states and 
 individuals a bar to success under the competitive 
 S3-stem. 
 
 9. Commercial Competition. " Unlimited com- 
 petition has proved one of the greatest curses of 
 modem civilization. It w^as unlimited competition 
 which created the great trusts, exactly as it created 
 the sweatshop, and is chiefly responsible for child 
 labor. The new freedom is merely the old, old 
 freedom which permits each man to cut his neigh- 
 bor's throat." — Colonel Roosevelt in recent Pitts- 
 burg speech. 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 4. decretal-pyxed. Settled by authoritative let- 
 ter or decree; lodged in the holy vessel where the 
 reserved eucharist is kept. 
 
 5. " Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed 
 above all cattle and above every beast of the field." 
 — Genesis iii, 14. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 6. not to laugh. To laugh is a distinctively 
 human prerogative. Says Andrew Carnegie, " Mil- 
 lionaires who laugh are rare." 
 
 9. .aisculapius' staff. Patron god of medicine, 
 commonly represented as an old man with a long 
 beard, his distinctive attribute being a staff with a 
 serpent coiled round it. 
 
 53
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XLIII 
 
 As human cursed, in shape of haggish witch° 
 
 (I'm telling simply what you also know), 
 
 Is cause of qualm and night-sweat, cramp and 
 
 stitch, 
 And exudes evil where'er she does go; 
 Thus° verses after 15 clearly show 
 Our Ancient Symbol lived right near the ground. 
 Fit dwelling place for thought and action low. 
 'T is thus the emblematic curse is found 
 Where creeping, crawling, crooked things do most 
 abound. 
 
 XLIV 
 
 As on Olympus neither one nor three 
 Composed high council ° of immortal gods. 
 So pictures" Genesis our deity, 
 Unless who's learn'd° in Egypt's wisdom nods; 
 Makes Adam's time more dark than Ichabod's.° 
 Is it that° man-formed teraphim of clay, 
 But now composite of gross senseless clods. 
 The spirit of true living souls obey 
 And role of jealous gods in Eden's garden play? 
 
 54
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 8. Adam's illustration. See XXVI. 8-9. 
 
 g. crossed. To cross was originally either to 
 bless or to curse. Here the archaic form is retained ; 
 commonly, cursed or curst. 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 3. Describes, etc. The ultimate effect of a de- 
 parture from righteousness must ever be the same. 
 Does the author here refer to the results of compe- 
 tition? See note on XXVI. 3. 
 
 4. outward form. While the physical snake, the 
 emblem of Adam's unrighteousness, is loathed, the 
 principles of insincerity, indirection, and crooked- 
 ness in human affairs are very generally practiced. 
 
 5. seed. Mad desire for wealth. 
 
 8. life. " In life money means everything, and 
 therefore anybody will do anything to get it. It 
 enslaves those whom it possesses, and it likewise en- 
 slaves in a more sordid way those who have none 
 of it." — Joseph Medill Patterson in Letter to 
 Mayor Dunne. 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 6. powerful to stem. With the ever increasing 
 cost of government there has been the concurrently 
 confident prediction that Christianity would do 
 away with wars and armaments. 
 
 55
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XLV 
 
 " It came to pass° that when the sons of God, 
 As man began to multiply, first saw 
 The daughters fair of men, it seemed odd, 
 They were so beautiful, and almost awe- 
 Inspired they took them wives by Nature's law." 
 Think not I quote the Ancient Word to mock. 
 Time's mantle of man's thought discovers flaw 
 In its unfolding, therefore feel no shock; 
 From out God's later writing crops azoic° rock. 
 
 XLVI 
 
 Perhaps you think we ought to look askance 
 In reading verses twenty-two to four. 
 Are gods here votaries" of " haut finance," 
 That drive a hated rival from their door? 
 (This thought occurs to us, and several more) 
 With Adam " cornered," ° they would surely 
 
 sing, 
 Circling the Tree of Life° which they adore, 
 Attuning ex machina: " Everything 
 For god (our god) and god (our god) in every- 
 thing." 
 
 56
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 8. have to battle. " The Friend's differences 
 with them (other Christians) are not fundamental as 
 to the character of war, but he has a different system 
 of determining conduct. He prefers to believe that 
 the Divine Ruler of the affairs of men instituted 
 certain moral laws which in the long run will work 
 out the best results. They place their own judg- 
 ment in the scale, and see a better way, which in 
 this particular emergency nullifies the Christian law 
 and establishes in its place a law of expediency, a 
 law which says, Do as much good as you can in 
 every determination of conduct; choose the less of 
 the two evils; do that which would be otherwise 
 evil, that good may come." — President Isaac Sharp- 
 less of Haverford College. 
 
 9. Bethlehem. A town in Pennsylvania where 
 are cast the most terribly destructive guns known 
 to modern warfare. Also a town in Palestine, the 
 birthplace of Jesus Christ. 
 
 XL. 
 
 5. More manly. To be taxed to death while 
 slaving under artificial conditions or done to death 
 while fighting under natural conditions, — which 
 more becomes a man, is the question. 
 
 8. floating forts. England's battleship, Dread- 
 naught, launched by King Edward at Portsmouth, 
 Feb. 10, 1905, cost $7,500,000. A present-day 
 57
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XLVII 
 
 Behold what's clearly written in the text. 
 Consider Eden° other name for pleasure. 
 Whatever 't was that Man's ambition vexed, 
 Be 't power, appetite or money treasure, 
 Brought human ruin in exceeding measure. 
 Though all at first had been subject to him. 
 Unlawful usage, 'mid unholy leisure," 
 Arrayed against him e'en the Seraphim, 
 Till flaming" sword appeared in hand of Cherubim. 
 
 XLVIII 
 
 To follow man, erstwhile androgynous," 
 To analyze his changing hopes and fears 
 Would take your time — what's more, 't would 
 
 weary us, 
 For history's a thing of countless years. 
 Besides, to him who either reads or hears. 
 Unless it's one who's blind or will not see, 
 Our human hearts discover but veneers, 
 And search for motive, as wise men agree, 
 Finds truest record" in our etymology. 
 
 58
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 battleship may cost $10,000,000. 
 
 At the Dockers' Congress held at Bristol, June 
 10, 1905, Mr. Ben Tillet stated that there were 
 over a million men and women out of employment, 
 and that 50% of the dock laborers obtained only 
 two and a half days' work per week. 
 
 Increase of taxes and of the mendicant poor are 
 two problems of present-day English statesmanship. 
 
 Of $643,000,000, the national income of the 
 United States for 1910, $450,000,000, or 70%, was 
 expended for past wars and preparation for war, 
 leaving $193,000,000, or 30%, for all other pur- 
 poses. And ours is a so-called " peaceful " nation ! 
 
 Said Count Sergius Witte, the ablest of Russian 
 statesmen and financiers, in London, 1914: " Sketch 
 a picture in your mind's eye of all that those sums, 
 if properly spent, could effect for the nations that 
 now waste them on heavy guns, rifles, dreadnaughts, 
 fortresses and barracks. If this money were laid 
 out on improving the material lot of the people, in 
 housing them hygienically, in procuring for them 
 healthier air, medical aid and needful periodical rest, 
 they would live longer and work to better purpose, 
 and enjoy some of the happiness or contentment 
 which at the present is the prerogative of the few. 
 
 " Again, all the best brain work of the most emi- 
 nent men is focused on efforts to create new lethal 
 weapons, or to make the old ones more deadly. . . . 
 59
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XLIX 
 
 We've shown that Adam's soul dwelt on posses- 
 sion 
 And sought this in a bottom-land or meadow. 
 Both place and object were the life-long passion 
 That brought us all into penumbric shadow. 
 After a search for names of offspring had now 
 Become needful, his Hebrew tongue, 'tis plain, 
 And fullness of the heart, straightway endow 
 His second, Abel,° vieadow; gainer, Cain,° 
 The very first-born of the pair made one of twain. 
 
 Appropriately, in the meadow land 
 Did° Abel as a shepherd tend his sheep. 
 Cain sowed broad acres by the breezes fanned. 
 First-fruits and firstlings of the flock did keep 
 The both,° the altar of their god to heap. 
 Respect for Abel and his offering 
 Had God, but gainer, Cain, he chided deep: 
 " If doest well, then shalt thou offering bring; 
 Not so, mine altar needeth not thy cherishing." 
 
 60
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 For one of the arts in which cultured nations have 
 made most progress is warfare. The noblest efforts 
 of the greatest thinkers are wasted on inventions 
 to destroy human life. 
 
 " When I call to mind the gold and the work 
 thus dissipated in smoke and sound and compare that 
 picture with this other — villagers with drawn, 
 sallow faces, men and women and dimly conscious 
 children perishing slowly and painfully of hunger 
 — I begin to ask myself whether human culture and 
 the white man who personifies it are not wending 
 towards the abyss." 
 
 9. Princes of Peace. " The peculiar note of the 
 Gospel is, Blessed are the meek — Blessed are the 
 merciful — Blessed are the peace-makers. Jesus 
 said : * Put up thy sword ; all they that take the 
 sword shall perish by the sword.' There are priests 
 of the Gospel to-day, as of the Russian state church, 
 who seem to say day and night : ' Draw thy sword ; 
 they who do not draw the sword shall perish.' I 
 say that it is a truly awful thought that an arch- 
 bishop should write the solemn calumny, ' God 
 made battles, too ' ; that a leading statesman on a 
 Sunday afternoon should cite to his people this sick- 
 ening blasphemy." — Mr. Frederick Harrison in 
 The Positivist Review (London). 
 
 " The war of armed peace which prevails to- 
 day is not a war between nations. It is a war 
 61
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LI 
 
 Our god to-day, though still omnipotent" — 
 Compare with him the outline Moses drew, 
 As from His presence wrothful Cain He sent — 
 No, keep your thoughts from that one central 
 
 pew, 
 Albe't the owner's cloak° seem rather new ; 
 Hear sacred priest,° as heaped salver sifts, 
 Out-speaking law in burning words and few: 
 " Nor wrongful gain the fragrant incense lifts, 
 Nor holy service claims the aid of taint ed° gifts, 
 
 LII 
 
 " Will God be pleased with thousand rams or ten 
 Thousand rivers of oil? Who inherit 
 The earth and fullness thereof 'yond His ken? 
 The cattle upon every hill, that shear it? 
 The beasts of forest, fowls that hover near it? 
 Behold, in inward parts the truth lies. 
 Sincere must be the word, or He'll not hear it. 
 False worship human broth erhood° denies. 
 No broken, contrite heart wilt thou, O God, despise. 
 
 62
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 between privilege and democracy. The upholders 
 of aristocracy, of privilege, of oppression, of arma- 
 ment, of the patriotism which ends in envy and 
 hate, the upholders of war, of exploitation, of im- 
 perialism, the world over, are one and the same. 
 And we who are bound to them in the alliance of 
 common citizenship and common finance, must pay 
 our part in all their orgies." — David Starr Jordan 
 in Harper's Weekly. 
 
 XLI. 
 
 2. 'Tis unit's bent. " The character of the 
 aggregate is determined by the character of its 
 component units." — Herbert Spencer in The Study 
 of Sociology. 
 
 XLII. 
 
 6. Let woman speak. " In this stage of society 
 (savagery), woman, strong physically, journeyed 
 with the men on their trips and provided food and 
 clothing for herself and children. As the human 
 race advanced into barbarism she became less the 
 companion of man, but still procured much of her 
 own food. She at one time stood at the head of 
 the matriarchal family and from her her children 
 took their names and through her reckoned their 
 descent. With later barbarism life grew more 
 settled. Herds and flocks were kept. These were 
 63
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 Liir 
 
 " If I were hungry, would I ask of thee? 
 No bullocks from thy house, or he-goats, prove 
 My favor. Thou hatest instruction. See 
 Thy rich adornments, bulging eyes that move 
 On fatness, serpent tongue with slanders wove. 
 Consenting with the thief — a putrid fount! 
 My golden words, Do justly, mercy love 
 And humbly zualk before thy God, do count 
 With such as thou no more than Sermon on the 
 Mount." 
 
 LIV 
 
 You'd thought e'en crafty over-reaching Cain, 
 After such chiding and severe rebuff, 
 Would simply felt like giving up his gain — 
 Like throwing up his hands with, " Hold ! 
 
 Enough." 
 That elder brother thine of different stuff; 
 His primal make-up of another sod. 
 Who would the light of Brother Man out-snuff. 
 A trifling incident, reproof of God, 
 Cain journeyed further tradeward to the land of 
 Nod.° 
 
 64
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 tended by the men and graduall}' they also took over 
 to themselves the agriculture. 
 
 " These new conditions resulted in woman's find- 
 ing more of her material support in man. Her work 
 became now almost wholly confined to the home, 
 and thus savagery and barbarism gave birth to and 
 slowly developed her economic dependence. Civ- 
 ilization brought this to full growth. 
 
 " With the introduction of private property the 
 headship of the family was transferred from the 
 mother to the father. This marked the first great 
 economic and social change for woman. It meant 
 that she now became a secluded being, entirely 
 dependent on man for subsistence." — May Wood 
 Simmons. 
 
 ' The world-traffic in maidens is nowadays as 
 well organized as was in a former period the trade 
 in negro slaves. ... In two great cities of one 
 country (Buenos Aires and Rio Janeiro) the ill- 
 starred thoroughfares Calle Juan and Lavalle are, 
 as a result of this state of affairs, known as the 
 ' Calle Sangre y Lagruna' " — Frankfurter Zeitung. 
 
 " Woman was the first human being that tasted 
 bondage. Woman was a slave before the slave 
 existed." — August Bebel in Woman in the Past, 
 Present and Future. 
 
 " Notre empire est detruit, si Thomme est 
 reconnu." — Laboulaye. 
 
 65
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LV 
 
 That little incident, as you may guess 
 (Its order, merely, brings it in my verse), 
 Was murder° of a brother — nothing less. 
 Such wounds° in countless thousands we may 
 
 nurse 
 As seeds of Cain increasingly rehearse 
 Those echoes that across the ages bound, 
 Reverberating through God's universe: 
 " Where is thy brother? " ° Or that later sound, 
 " Thy brother's bloody voice still crieth from the 
 
 ground." 
 
 LVI 
 
 Relaxed was Cain in purpose not a whit ; 
 To gain the world at any cost his end. 
 First, violence appeared the road to it. 
 Though brothers all to Hades had to send. 
 When, later, God saw evil did not mend ; 
 That wickedness of man on earth abode 
 Continually, though He oft did lend 
 Wise counsel, as a temporary good 
 Was sent upon the earth that kind Noachian° flood. 
 
 66
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 1. " It is a riddle to me how so many learned 
 heads should so far forget their metaphysics, and 
 destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to ques- 
 tion the existence of spirits : for my part, I have ever 
 believed, and do now know, that there are witches." 
 — Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici. 
 
 5. Thus. As admittedly in the case of witches, 
 so, manifestly, proximity or contact of the serpent 
 blasted all ; so also with tortuous human conduct, of 
 which the serpent is the adamic symbol. 
 
 XLIV. 
 
 2. high council. See Homer's Iliad, viii, 1-4. 
 
 3. So pictures Genesis. " And the Lord God 
 said. Behold, the man has become as one of us." 
 This pronoun " us " indicates there is present in the 
 garden more than the one god who is speaking. — 
 See Genesis iii, 22. 
 
 4. who's learn'd. " And Moses was learned in 
 all the wisdom of the Egyptians." — Acts vii, 22. 
 
 5. Ichabod's. The birth of old Eli's grandson, 
 Ichabod, was hastened by the tidings that the ark 
 of God had been taken by the Philistines. — See 
 / Samuel iv, 19-22. 
 
 6. Is it that. Is it possible, it is asked, that the 
 little clay household deities, the teraphim, are be- 
 
 67
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LVII 
 
 Well, human germs thus filtered through coop- 
 Eration of God's mercy and Noah's ark, 
 The best, for certain reasons, stayed on top. 
 The records that are serious do not hark 
 To tales of Tubal-cain's° o'er-laden barque, 
 Nathless 'tis doubtless true some overloaded 
 And, propter hoc, they went down in the dark. 
 Not strange that those by acquisition goaded 
 With keen reluctance leave behind what they have 
 hoarded. 
 
 LVIII 
 
 Our wicked world contains no unmixed good. 
 This maxim never tells more truth than when 
 Applied to ark made out of gopher wood ; 
 For, intermingled with the blood of men, 
 It saved the Cainite seed for citizen. 
 Severely taught by flood force wouldn't do. 
 Determined yet the ROOD° to foil again. 
 It set itself a hellish plot to brew, 
 Which grows quite plain, in recent years, to not a 
 few. 
 
 68
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 come animate, and, being so, jealous of Adam's 
 presence ? 
 
 XLV. 
 
 1-5. Apparently, the extreme anthropomorphism 
 of this passage {Genesis vi, 1-2), together with the 
 evidence of polytheism referred to in XLIV. 3, is 
 cited to enforce the author's interpretation of the 
 fivefold curse (Genesis iii, 14-19) essayed in XLIII. 
 Note the apology in XLV. 6-9. 
 
 7. azoic rock. Primitive, unfossilized rock. Its 
 outcropping as indicative of earlier conditions is 
 compared to the appearance of polytheism and 
 anthropomorphism in the sacred writings. 
 
 XLVI. 
 
 3. votaries. Whether the persons represented as 
 taking part in Genesis iii, 22, are merely those bent 
 on gain, and so jealous of Adam who had invaded 
 their business territory, is the question. 
 
 6. " cornered." Language of the Stock Ex- 
 change. 
 
 7. Tree of Life. A comparison of Genesis i, 29, 
 with Genesis ii, 9, 16 and 17, is interesting. The 
 author clearly regards whatever prohibition was 
 placed upon Adam, as related to the sordid acqui- 
 sition of wealth. 
 
 69
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LIX 
 
 Of course, the general purpose was the same 
 That elder Cain in the beginning had: 
 Subjection of the human race, the aim. 
 'Twas clumsy work made first attempt so bad, 
 Reflection on which made the heirs quite sad. 
 To gain more surely, safely, was begun 
 Possession of each source of wealth" to add. 
 'Twas said : " Appropriate these one by one, 
 And Lo ! as centuries roll our work of gain is done." 
 
 LX 
 
 Tremendous task, and long, they undertook. 
 Who schemed each strand of power in hand to 
 
 bring; 
 And yet this scheme the schemers ne'er forsook. 
 At first, indeed, it seemed an easy thing. 
 With one man prophet, warrior, priest and king.° 
 Such incongruity of powers elate 
 Was seen by good, and Cainite following, 
 For jealousies 'mongst wicked ne'er abate. 
 And rank and file had not yet grown emasculate. 
 
 70
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 XLVII. 
 
 2. Eden. The basic idea of the Hebrew word is 
 pleasure. 
 
 7. In this line are expressed two corrupt phases 
 of wealth and its getting. 
 
 8-9. See Genesis iii, 24. 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 1. androgynous. Having two sexes. See note 
 on XXXIII. I. 
 
 9. truest record. " To study the etymology of a 
 people's language is to study the embryology of their 
 civilization." — Rozenkranz in Philosophy of Edu- 
 cation. 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 8. meadow; gainer. In Hebrew the basic idea 
 of the word Cain is acquisition, gainer, possession ; 
 of Abel, meadow. 
 
 L. 
 
 2. Did Abel. " And Abel was a keeper of sheep, 
 but Cain was a tiller of the ground." — Genesis 
 iv, 2. 
 
 5. The both. See Genesis iv, 3, 4, and following. 
 
 LI. 
 
 I. still omnipotent. An all powerful God needs 
 71
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXI 
 
 Hence followed differentiation of 
 The proper function, governance and reign 
 Of nations, each of which did strangely move 
 Ambition in the subtle sons of Cain, — 
 Divisions still, until a myriad skein 
 Of influences lay in hands adroit 
 And earth was held in plutocratic main. 
 The common people (Faith! How could they 
 know it?) 
 Were henceforth meanly given o'er to base exploit. 
 
 LXI I 
 
 I don't assume that Clio of the Nine 
 Has quite withheld from you historic dole 
 While helping me with this discourse of mine. 
 Survey the oracles, unwound the scroll. 
 From vast Cathedral unto totem-pole, ° — 
 Revolting rites that claim barbaric home, 
 Performed, indeed, for tribal gods' console; 
 Or let your 'stonied gaze still us-ward come 
 E'en to high water-mark of Mediaeval Rome, 
 
 72
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 neither service nor tribute from the wicked, it is 
 hinted. 
 
 5. owner's cloak. Referring to the present-day 
 fashion of designating places of worship by the 
 names of notable individuals, priests or worshipers. 
 
 6. Hear sacred priest. To this venerable priest, 
 who speaks through the following stanza, and " as 
 one having authority," we can hear his God saying: 
 " Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not thy peace: 
 for I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to 
 hurt thee." — Acts xviii, 9. 
 
 9. tainted gifts. The Inter-Ocean (Chicago), 
 commenting on the position of Dr. Washington 
 Gladden as to taking money for church and mis- 
 sionary purposes from persons whose gains " were 
 made by methods morally reprehensible and socially 
 injurious," asks: "How about the bequests, the 
 annual contributions or the occasional subscriptions 
 of those whose fortunes had a beginning in fraudu- 
 lent land deeds, jumped claims, in shoddy army 
 clothing, in cut-throat mortgages, in paper shoes, in 
 all forms of national, state, municipal, and com- 
 mercial graft, in advantage taken of the weakness 
 or confidence of others — in the thousand and one 
 ' sharp practices ' that have been common in this 
 fair land of ours for the last hundred years? " 
 
 Says First Citizen Wilh'am J. Bryan: "The 
 time will surely come when the men of influence and 
 73
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXIII 
 
 And you will see fierce strife for highest seat, 
 Control of mighty treasuries, fat livings, 
 Much sought by those who live to drink and eat, 
 Rare filchings from the people's vulgar givings 
 Or gotten through political contrivings, — 
 Adelphi,° Dian's Shrine, the Sibyl's Leaves, — 
 Recalling Temple° and our Master's strivings: 
 "My house shall be called (How my spirit 
 
 grieves ! ) 
 The House of Prayer? Ye have made it den of 
 
 thieves." 
 
 LXIV 
 
 Nor mine to teach you history secular 
 
 Of warriors, statesmen, generals and kings, 
 
 That's been drunk in with your vernacular; 
 
 Whether of simple age that Homer sings 
 
 Or later time, though fame notorious rings: 
 
 Their name, in truth, were Legion, great and 
 
 small, 
 Who, under garb of purifying springs 
 Of government, have added wormwood, gall. 
 With secret, selfish, devilish aim of grasping all. 
 
 74
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 authority in our churches will no longer sell re- 
 spectability to great criminals by helping them spend 
 their ill-gotten gains. 
 
 " It will be a great step in advance, and will have 
 a tremendous influence in stopping crime, when we 
 can say to them : ' Your money has blood upon it. 
 Keep it, and learn how lonely a man can be without 
 peace, without conscience, and without friends.' " 
 
 LII. 
 
 8. human brotherhood. " God is infinitely 
 above being benefited by our services. I can show 
 my gratitude for His mercies only by readiness to 
 help His children, my brethren." — Benjamin 
 Franklin. 
 
 " It may be said that Christianity has done much 
 to awaken benevolence, and that it has taught men 
 to call one another brethren. Yes, to call one 
 another so; but has it yet given the true feeling of 
 brotherhood ? " — William E. Channing, D.D. 
 
 LIII. 
 
 In this stanza the old priest speaks in the char- 
 acter and person of God himself, whom he repre- 
 sents. 
 
 Stanzas LII and LIII are paraphrased from 
 Psalms 50, 51, and Micah vi, which see. 
 
 75
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXV 
 
 For many centuries, as I've depicted, 
 
 This struggle lasted, yet from earth the kin 
 
 And kith of Abel had not been evicted. 
 
 While seizing strands of power there'd always 
 
 been 
 Objection strong to union creeping in. 
 Among the followers of Cain, by means 
 Of which was missed the very center-pin. 
 Hence frequent shifting of their varied screens, 
 Until the age of corporations and machines." 
 
 LXVI 
 
 One, Dives, ° said: " This common earthen ball 
 Is source of human victuals, drink and clothes, 
 Bestowed divinely, ere Edenic thrall. ° 
 Now man's so multiplied, as each one knows, 
 That daily-worked machines keep off the woes 
 Of hunger, scarcely filling human maw. 
 Control of these machines we now propose 
 To gain, whose ownership, maintained by law, 
 Will give us just what Father Cain in vision saw. 
 
 76
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 LIV. 
 9. land of Nod. See Genesis iv, 16. 
 
 LV. 
 
 3. murder of a brother. See Genesis iv, 8. 
 
 4. Such wounds. " The fiercest and bloodiest of 
 modern wars — except alone the present Russo- 
 Japanese conflict — result in smaller losses in deaths, 
 maimings, and the infliction of mortal diseases than 
 are caused by the ordinary processes of the capitalistic 
 system of industry. A modern Milton might appro- 
 priately remind us that — 
 
 Peace hath her butcheries no less renowned 
 than war.' " 
 
 — W. J. Ghent in Tom Watsons Magazine. 
 
 8-9. See Genesis iv, 9 and 10. 
 
 " The workingmen who are crushed, crippled, or 
 killed, who contract incurable diseases, who are 
 poisoned, or who are incapacitated by carelessness, 
 insanitary conditions, or dangerous machinery, are 
 so numerous in this day that in a few decades we 
 shall look back upon this period as one of down- 
 right barbarism. . , . The cause and the effect are 
 clear. Then why does not the owner or employer 
 remedy the cause of the sickness, poverty and 
 death ? . . . These men are murderers." — Robert 
 Hunter in Poverty. 
 
 77
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXVII 
 
 " Now learn from me how towering ambition, 
 With enterprise and foresight in forbears, 
 Shall reach, at last, legitimate fruition 
 And make of Cainite blood th' undoubted heirs 
 Of all the wealth" of earth, and its affairs. 
 Whereas, aforetime, each at will produced. 
 And each was free-born owner of his wares, 
 Now, workman from machine can be seduced ° 
 And product's limitation easily induced, 
 
 LXVIII 
 
 " If need there be to make the market rise, 
 By fostering scarcity ; and thus we'll send 
 The prices soaring upward to the skies. 
 Collective be production. None shall lend 
 A hand in distribution. And stipend 
 For work shall be what we ourselves may set. 
 Eyes blind can see our fortunes soon shall mend. 
 Though countless hands may toil and brows may 
 
 sweat, 
 Like Egypt's slaves^ of old, they'll be our servants 
 
 yet. 
 
 78
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 See also The Unborn Slave, Walter Vail Hollo- 
 way. 
 
 LVI. 
 3-9. See Genesis vi, 5-22. 
 
 LVII. 
 
 5. tales of Tubal-cain's. See Genesis iv, 22. 
 
 Tubal-cain, being " an instructer of every artificer 
 in brass and iron," is naturally the Patron Saint of 
 the owners of industrial machinery under the cap- 
 italist system. 
 
 LVIII. 
 
 7. the rood. By anticipation, The Cross; by 
 implication, the protection vouchsafed the oppressed 
 upon the realization of the principle of human 
 brotherhood. 
 
 LIX. 
 
 7. each source of wealth. Witness the present- 
 day sapient ownership of land, of food products, of 
 means of transportation, of mines, of water-power 
 and reservoirs, of manufactories, — in short, of pub- 
 lic necessities, of public utilities, and of public fran- 
 chises, rapidly developing a state of industrial 
 feudalism under the competitive wage and monopoly 
 price system. 
 
 LX. 
 
 5. With one man prophet. " The king was gen- 
 79
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXIX 
 
 " Though nearing goal, j'ou'U promise to seem 
 
 good 
 To forces needing soporific balms 
 And not provoke another general flood. 
 Especially, Religion claims our alms. 
 Support its forms° without confessing qualms 
 Of conscience. Subtly taught the use and name 
 Of GOLD, its sworded spirit, sans alarms. 
 Shall soon become the handmaid" of our aim 
 And OPEN DOOR of unknown worlds to trade and 
 fame. 
 
 LXX 
 
 " Just here I say, without circumlocution, 
 Our chiefest hope of safety lies in forcing 
 The Press to gauze-veiled mental prostitution," 
 Be warned of me: Uncolored, free discoursing 
 Of chainless minds that fancied wounds are nurs- 
 ing 
 Would make those straightway rise whom we 
 
 obsess. 
 Win cunning hand and brain ° by rich disbursing. 
 Instruction find wherein one did confess, 
 ' He tried ° to see Jesus, but could not for the 
 
 PRESS.' 
 
 80
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 eral, priest, and judge. He led the armj^ prayed to 
 the gods for the city's safety, and settled cases at 
 private law." — Botsford in The Beginnings of the 
 Greeks. 
 
 LXII. 
 
 5. This line comprehends the entire gamut of re- 
 ligious expression during the ages. 
 
 LXIII. 
 
 6. Through suchlike institutions astute men, by 
 playing upon the emotional and religious in human 
 nature, have ever dominated their fellows. 
 
 7. Recalling Temple. See Mark xi, 17. 
 
 LXV. 
 
 9. corporations and machines. Corporation and 
 monopoly mark the latest phase of concentrated 
 wealth. Accompanying this is the great body of 
 workers shut out from the instruments of produc- 
 tion, or using them only with the consent of those 
 who have become their owners, and securing for 
 their labor but an inequitable share of what they 
 produce. 
 
 " The remainder," says Lester F. Ward, " finds 
 Its way into the hands of the comparatively few, 
 usually non-producing individuals whom the usages 
 and laws of all countries permit to claim that they 
 
 ;i
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXI 
 
 " Another point, If t be you are not blind 
 
 To early influences: Dispense with all 
 
 Informing° power in training human mind. 
 
 Teach labyrinthinely the apple's fall,° 
 
 While sounding loud ' the bread-and-butter" call.' 
 
 Potential" powers of mind you'll thus abate 
 
 And doubly weave° our commerce's golden 
 
 thrall. 
 Material things fill human minds of late, 
 Which augurs well our early sailing" Ship of State. 
 
 LXXII 
 
 " That we may sail this still, and free from 
 
 lurches, 
 And lest folks soon our hellish plot may see, 
 Develop class and fashion in the churches." 
 Behold, then, earth, with education" free, 
 Mere apotheosized machinery! 
 This combination will appear more just, 
 If on the system's vulgar unit" be 
 (Though humorous it seem, as surely must) 
 This pious legend graven fair: In God we trust. 
 
 82
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 own the very sources of all wealth and the right to 
 allow or forbid its production." 
 
 Bulletin No. 150, of the Census of 1900, gives 
 the average wealth production per year in the 
 United States for each laborer as $2451, the average 
 wage receipts per year for each laborer as $437. 
 Such a " dangerous monopoly " has labor become. 
 
 " It is, then, conservative to set $650 as the ex- 
 treme low limit of the Living Wage in cities of the 
 North, East, and West. Probably $600 is high 
 enough for the cities of the South. At this wage 
 there can be no saving and a minimum of pleasure. 
 Yet there are in the United States, at least five mil- 
 lion industrial workers who are earning $600 or less 
 a year." — Frank Hatch Streightoff, p. 162, The 
 Standard of Living (19 14). 
 
 " Three-quarters of the adult males and nineteen- 
 twentieths of the adult females actually earn less 
 than $600 a year." — Scott Nearing, p. 214, Wages 
 in the United States ( 191 1 ) . 
 
 LXVI. 
 
 I. Dives. See Luke xvi, 19-31. 
 
 3. Edenic thrall. See stanza VI above. 
 
 LXVII. 
 
 5. Of all the wealth of earth. " The transfer 
 of the ownership of the country's industrial prop- 
 83
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXIII 
 
 " To steady our affairs and keep in awe 
 The ot 7roXXoL,° as I have said before, 
 We'll have recourse to body of the law,° 
 Both criminal and civil, that its lore 
 May seem to be for all an open door, 
 While on the stage we play our pantomime. 
 What acts are right, w^hat wrong, we will explore, 
 And each, at very start, take stand sublime: 
 Whatever interferes with business" is a crime. 
 
 LXXIV 
 
 " Among the people quote that gentle rhyme, 
 There's so much bad, alas! in best of us 
 (Be sure 'twill turn attention from our mime) 
 And so much good in very worst of us. 
 It ill becomes the most effaced of us 
 (You'll understand this line is most emphatic) 
 To think or speak ill of the rest of us. 
 Thus quieting some questions problematic. 
 Though plutocrats, you'll seem at heart most demo- 
 cratic." ° 
 
 84
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 erty, from its people generally to a few of its people 
 only, reaches the bed-rock of social and moral forces 
 on which alone the whole structure of republican in- 
 stitutions rests; for, under such conditions, instead 
 of depending, each upon himself and his own intelli- 
 gence chiefly for success, the great bulk of our 
 people, increasinglj', will become dependent upon 
 others. This is paternalism; paternalism in almost 
 its final form." — Judge Peter S. Grosscup in 
 McClure's. 
 
 8. workman from machine can be seduced. 
 " The tools of the modern workman are the 
 machine; both it and the land are owned by others. 
 He cannot work on the land or at the machine ex- 
 cept by the permission of another. If the owner 
 does not find it profitable to employ him, the work- 
 man must remain idle." — Robert Hunter in 
 Poverty. 
 
 LXVIII. 
 
 9. Like Egypt's slaves. See Exodus v, 1-23. 
 
 " Between chattel slavery, the rude method of 
 appropriating labor, and industrial slavery, the more 
 civilized method, the difference is only of form." — 
 Henry George. 
 
 LXIX. 
 
 5. Support its forms. " The fifty-two Baptist 
 Churches in Manhattan and the Bronx, with their 
 85
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXV 
 
 The optimates° all approved this plan 
 So brilliantly conceived, as you'll allow, 
 And straightway execution prompt began. 
 What progress made, and how received, you know 
 As well as I. 'Twere over long to show 
 How first the advent of machines was hailed 
 By general as freedom from the blow 
 Of time-consuming labor late entailed 
 By cruel fear° that virgin power of earth had failed; 
 
 LXXVI 
 
 Or how, as plan set forth was longer used 
 And even less of freedom was their own. 
 They saw their confidence had been abused ; 
 That certain classes lived for self alone, 
 In splendor such as Orient kings' outshone, 
 Whilst life, complexed, grew wearisome and hard° 
 For those who cared for children and hearth- 
 stone — 
 For simple joys they held as high award, 
 And hoped that laws and government would be 
 their guard. 
 
 86
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 19.733 members and their property valued at 
 $6,000,000, present almost the one sensational in- 
 stance of a denomination largely ruled by one 
 wealthy man."— Rev. W. D. P. Bliss in The Inde- 
 pendent. 
 
 8. the handmaid of our aim. " If we want an 
 example of the depth of savagery, vainglory, and 
 superstition, worthy of a Dahomey savage, we should 
 turn to the barbarous rites now being enacted by 
 Russian priests, blessing the war against Japan. . . . 
 They are only an extreme example of the perversion 
 of which the Gospel of Christ is capable." — Fred- 
 erick Harrison. 
 
 LXX. 
 
 3. mental prostitution. " There is hardly a 
 morning paper in New York that does not every 
 day publish vile scandal, some vicious, corrupt story 
 that serves no good end. The counting room guides 
 the editorial policy. Advertising columns influence 
 and corrupt news columns. I say this because it is 
 a fact, and not because it excuses the existence of a 
 sheet like Town Topics." — District Attorney 
 Jerome in Collier's Libel Suit. 
 
 In placing the advertisement of their ruinous 
 compounds proprietary medicine firms usually have 
 a provision against printing in the newspapers any- 
 thing " detrimental to their interests." 
 87
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXVII 
 
 Familiar figure came the Nouveau Riche, 
 A simple, pin-head structure oft enough, 
 Whose sole excuse for being was backsheesh;" 
 Or one who'd had the nerve to run a bluff. 
 Played valiantly the game and got the stuff. 
 And now possessed of what was meant for all, 
 Secure in custom and in law, rebuff 
 Is what he has in store for those who crawl 
 Beneath his glassy eye to pick the crumbs let fall. 
 
 LXXVIII 
 
 His cold and haughty spouse° you'll not mistake, 
 If intuition point the mother who'd 
 Bestow her child in marriage on a rake, 
 Regarding class and wealth" the highest good. 
 Was such, alas! Edenic motherhood," 
 All loveless of the progeny it bore? 
 Maternal nature shaming sex and blood, 
 Not shielding woman whether high or lower, 
 Indifferent" if for very bread she had to wh ? 
 
 88
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 Also b}^ what is known as the " red clause," 
 printed across the face of the contract, " It is mu- 
 tually agreed that this contract is void if any law 
 is enacted in your state restricting or prohibiting the 
 manufacture or sale of proprietary medicines." 
 This " canker " has eaten into religious journals 
 even. 
 
 Such an " educator " of the people, such a cham- 
 pion of popular legislation, such a moral and re- 
 ligious influence, is the modern newspaper likely to 
 be! 
 
 7. Win cunning hand and brain. " The money 
 kings long ago saw the value of a newspaper as an 
 adjunct to financial operations. . . . They recog- 
 nize the power of the press as extending in many 
 directions, and they want power, — political, 
 financial, social. . . . Most of the papers at the 
 present time have no policy at all. The editor 
 knows that a ring on the telephone may mean the 
 instant reversal of all he has planned ; he is com- 
 pelled to realize that he is only a puppet whose wires 
 are pulled carelessly by a stronger hand." — Richard 
 W. Kemp in New York Bookman. 
 
 " Journalism is not really a literary profession. 
 The journalist of to-day is obliged to hold himself 
 ready to serve any cause, — like the condottieri of 
 feudal Italy, or the free captains of other countries. 
 If he can enrich himself sufficiently to acquire com- 
 89
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXIX 
 
 And what the scion of this noble house, 
 So fathered, mothered, bent as pliant twig? 
 Art willing to predict or man or mouse 
 Or other something perhaps wondrous big, 
 That'll prove itself a true ancestral sprig? 
 (Dost mark with care the antecedents' trait 
 In breeding horse or dog or kine or pig?) 
 Big, burly brute, if not degenerate, 
 Whose sordid prodigality is all innate. 
 
 LXXX 
 
 Witness that fine expression of hauteur. 
 
 The cold disdain and countenance severe, 
 
 Of dames and damoiselles, as if sans peur, 
 
 If not the sans reproche of Chevalier," 
 
 To every preference gave them title clear ; 
 
 While, proud advancing, whom they call their 
 
 liege. 
 Of gilded throng the lordly chanticleer. 
 Puts on the airs of one conducting siege: 
 The din of crow and cackle drowns Noblesse oblige. 
 
 90
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 parative independence in this really nefarious profes- 
 sion, — then, indeed, he is able to utter his heart's 
 sentiments and indulge his tastes." — Lafcadio Hearn 
 in Whitman Letter to O'Connor. 
 9. See Luke xix, 3. 
 
 LXXL 
 
 3. Informing power. To inform is to imbue, 
 to actuate with vitality. One here recalls De 
 Quincy's distinction, literature of power and liter- 
 ature of knowledge. 
 
 " Facts, not refined in the alembic of reason, are 
 like ferrets in a rabbit burrow: they quickly drive 
 out the ideas from the mind. I recall a favorite 
 saying of my father, ' The mind is not a prolix gut 
 to be stuffed.' " — President Wilson of Princeton. 
 
 Edward Everett Hale was once talking about edu- 
 cation with a Japanese prince, who said to him: 
 " We do not give so much time to arithmetic in 
 our schools as you do. We think it makes men 
 sordid." 
 
 4. the apple's fall. The physical sciences. 
 
 5. the bread-and-butter call. So-called practical 
 education ; the duty of amassing wealth. 
 
 6. Potential powers of mind. To lead the mind 
 to realize its potential powers is to educate it. 
 Upon such realization depends man's hope of attain- 
 ing the express image in which he was created. 
 
 91
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXXI 
 
 " Consider" thou the lih'es of the field ; 
 They toil not, truly, neither do they spin. 
 Yet Solomon, with all his empire's yield. 
 Lacked raiment such as they're appareled in. 
 'Tis leisured classes culture, art begin. 
 And do the fowls that airy pathways beat 
 Or sow or reap, or store in barn or bin ? " 
 Avaunt thee, Wretch! God's Word thy reason- 
 ing meet: 
 " If any would not work, neither should he then 
 eat." ° 
 
 LXXXII 
 
 Hear Learned Bench, ° of grave judicial mien, 
 Discourse equality before the law ; 
 An ancient theory still held, I ween. 
 But which no earthly practice ever saw. 
 (Such fictions legal minds do not abhor) 
 Is 't friendless, poor, outcast, unknown, uncouth, 
 That's haled before him 'mid the mimic war 
 Of words, or son of luxury, forsooth? 
 Ye Serfs, in such administration see the truth! 
 
 92
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 7. doubly weave. With complete elimination of 
 the aesthetic and spiritual from his nature, man will 
 lose sight of the higher ideals and become entirely 
 practical, materialistic, and commercial. 
 
 9. our early sailing Ship of State. " There is 
 hardly any way in which corporations can do more 
 harm than in using their funds for the benefit of any 
 political party. It is only an indirect way of influ- 
 encing to their own advantage legislation and the 
 administration of the law, and, if carried far enough, 
 it might give them control of the Government." — 
 N. Y. Journal of Commerce. 
 
 LXXII. 
 
 3. class and fashion in the churches. " The 
 immediate question in the church is not so much 
 what it shall believe as what it shall do." — Theo- 
 dore T. Munger, D.D., in Atlantic Monthly. 
 
 4. with education free. Care of children by the 
 state is the culmination of paternalism, implying 
 governmental machinery that has become apotheo- 
 sized or deified. 
 
 7. the system's vulgar unit. " In the harness of 
 the ' sj'stem ' men knew no Sabbath, no Him; they 
 had no time to offer thanks, no care for earthly or 
 celestial beings; from their eyes no human agonies 
 could squeeze a tear, no human suffering wring a 
 pang from their hearts. They were immune to 
 93
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXXIII 
 
 "'Sh! 'Sh! Don't speak it even though 'tis so. 
 Dissimulation is the proper thing. 
 Descant Man's progress from the past till now 
 And show improvement future years will bring, 
 If we're to keep our fingers on the string. 
 In very sooth, we are the powers that be, 
 Enthroned securely as was never king. 
 To question law, the common herd must see, 
 Is flagrant violation of morality." 
 
 LXXXIV 
 
 Is this Sweet Charity that comes apace, 
 Whilom so gentle, tender, dovelike meek? 
 It seems a being of another race, 
 So matronly she's grown, with eyes that seek 
 Unmaidenly her office, words that speak 
 More anxiously for recognition wide 
 As almoner than for the suffering weak. 
 Who rightly doeth alms, to self hath died. 
 If to his heart alone a brother s need hath cried. 
 
 94
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 every feeling known to God and man. They knew 
 only dollars. Their relatives of a moment since, 
 their friends of yesterday and long, long ago, they 
 regarded only as lumps of matter with which to feed 
 the whirring, grinding mill which poured forth into 
 their bin — dollars." — Thomas W. Lawson in 
 Everybody's. 
 
 7. vulgar unit. U. S. silver dollar, of course. 
 
 LXXIII. 
 
 2. ot TToXXoi. Greek; the many, the multitude. 
 Opposed to the " optimates " in LXXV. i, which 
 see. 
 
 3. body of the law. " The whole body of our 
 laws as at present framed are ridiculous and obso- 
 lete. They are designed always to uphold capital at 
 the expense of the community. The most potent 
 weapon in the armory of capital is delay, for delay 
 induces forgetfulness of wrong and the chance to 
 corrupt." — George Medill Patterson in letter of 
 resignation to Mayor Dunne of Chicago. 
 
 g. Whatever interferes with business. " But 
 the besieging captain of to-day has other weapons 
 than his formidable special rate. Have you ever 
 watched, month after month, an attack on a recalci- 
 trant business by some great leader? It is quite as 
 interesting in its way as the study of the siege of 
 Toulon, of Vicksburg, or of Port Arthur. Mines 
 95
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXXV 
 
 What shall we say of gentleness of love, 
 That clear-eyed, holy, high-born, heavenly thing, 
 Descended at the Jordan as a dove, 
 To seal Heaven's pleasure like a bridal ring? 
 Ensample not the low-bred underling, 
 Vain parry in which hypocrites do lead, 
 But rather those professing Christ their king. 
 Dost see among thy neighbors many a deed 
 Would put to shame the followers of Confucius' 
 creed ? ° 
 
 LXXXVI 
 
 " Judge° not, in order that ye be not judged," 
 Said He, an office neither yours nor mine; 
 And, sure, to measure souls is unbegrudged. 
 Again, " Cast not your pearls before the swine, 
 Lest they may turn and rend you though benign, 
 Nor give what's high and holy unto dog." 
 Upon us then, it seems, there is divine 
 Command to judge our fellow-man agog. 
 Else how'd we 'scape from feeding pearls to cur or 
 hog? 
 
 96
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 are run under the man's credit and exploded at the 
 moment when they will cause the most confusion: 
 abatis are constructed around his markets until 
 whenever he would enter them he falls into entangle- 
 ments, which mean retreat or death; a system of 
 incessant sharp-shooting is kept up, picking off a bit 
 of raw product here, delaying a carload there, secur- 
 ing the countermand of an order at this point, bully- 
 ing or wheedling into underselling at that, trumping 
 up lawsuits, securing vexatious delays. For fertility 
 of invention in harassing maneuvers I recommend 
 the campaign of a modern captain of industry as far 
 superior to the annoyance of the famous guerrilla 
 warfare of the Spaniards." — Miss Ida M. Tarbell 
 in McClure's. 
 
 LXXIV. 
 
 9. most democratic. "The spirit of graft and 
 lawlessness is the American spirit," says Mr. Lincoln 
 Steffens in his new book. " The typical American 
 citizen is the business man. The typical business 
 man is a bad citizen ; he is busy. If he be a ' big 
 business man ' and very busy, he does not neglect, he 
 is very busy with, politics, oh, very busy and very 
 businesslike. I found him buying boodlers in St. 
 Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originat- 
 ing corruption in Pittsburg, sharing with bosses in 
 Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and 
 97
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXXVII 
 
 Nor did The Christ keep silent of the wrong 
 He saw about him in humanity; 
 Nor clear-toned voice of Prophets in Old Song. 
 The things" that are not, they pretend to be, 
 And evils that exist they never see. 
 Who seek complaisance, whatsoe'er is done. 
 Return, Elijah, David, and Hosee! 
 Discerning Spirit of The Matchless One, 
 Still scourge hypocrisy with whip of scorpion! 
 
 LXXXVIII 
 
 Be silent those who prate of Virtue's worth ; 
 Who uplift right as shield in human life. 
 Go where the wolves and tigers own their birth 
 To learn the ethics° of commercial strife, — 
 That competition's war is to the knife! 
 Sailing your humble barque along the coast 
 Of pirate seas, you'll hear a slogan rife: 
 '* Each one is for himself" (no idle boast) 
 And let the devil overtake the hindermost." 
 
 98
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 beating good government with corruption funds in 
 New York. He is the chief source of corruption, 
 and it were a boon if he would neglect politics." 
 
 LXXV. 
 
 I. optimates. Latin; the aristocracy. Not un- 
 naturally, this title (assumed in early days before 
 Leo Plebs became, by special warrant, painter to the 
 Roman Senators) primarily meant " the best." 
 
 9. By cruel fear. Malthus, in his Essay on Pop- 
 ulation a century ago, reasoned that, if population 
 were permitted to increase at its natural rate, it 
 would soon overtake the means of subsistence. 
 Checks both positive and preventive were advocated. 
 
 Leaders among the laboring classes in the United 
 States are now preaching " the birth strike " as a 
 means of reducing the margin of surplus labor, and 
 so bettering the condition of workmen. 
 
 LXXVL 
 
 6. grew wearisome and hard. It Is estimated 
 that in the United States at the present time are 
 10,000,000 persons in a state of acute poverty. 
 " Those who are in poverty may be able to get a 
 bare subsistence, but they are not able to obtain the 
 necessities which will permit them to maintain a 
 state of physical efficiency. They are the large 
 class in any industrial nation who are on the verge 
 99
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 LXXXIX 
 
 If sometime reach jour ears a wild discoursing 
 Of large increase in present output of 
 The virtues we pretend to be a-nursing, 
 Unselfishness, and kindness, justice, love, 
 Confessedly injunctions from above. 
 Let pass as Siren Song° of Powers That Be — 
 Injected lubricant in fixed groove 
 Of the MACHINE, to keep under the lee 
 While buffeting the choppy waves of human sea. 
 
 XC 
 
 When on the stage comes gloomy pessimist 
 With ranting of the woes he can't forestall ; 
 Whose name alone saves him from nihilist, 
 And slower poison from his lips let fall — 
 Throw in the loud-mouthed agitators all, 
 WTio don't know simple pipe stem is a Doric;" 
 'Twere kindness real, when these begin to bawl. 
 Affecting knowledge present and historic. 
 To calmly proffer each the phial paregoric. 
 
 ^ 
 
 100
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 of distress." — Robert Hunter in Poverty. 
 
 " A factor that has had a real tendency to lower 
 the actual average earnings of the wage-earner in 
 many industries is the displacement of the skilled 
 operative by machinery which permits the substitu- 
 tion of a comparatively unskilled machine hand. . . . 
 Thus in the tanning of leather women and girls are 
 now performing work formerly done by men. . . . 
 Since 1890 in the boot and shoe industry an increase 
 of 18.3 per cent, in the value of products resulted 
 ... in only 6.9 per cent, increase in the number 
 of wage-earners and an apparent decrease of 2.5 per 
 cent, in wages paid." — Census Report, 1900, Vol. 
 VTI, pp. 123-4. 
 
 LXXVII. 
 
 3. backsheesh. Turkish; money left as an in- 
 heritance; a gift of money, a gratuity. 
 
 LXXVIII. 
 
 I. cold and haughty spouse. " Modern British 
 men and women, what are they? This is what I 
 want to bring out. A nation can never survive 
 with women of the Spartan type, which, as I have 
 told you, is the American of to-day. The Romans 
 were the same, and they ruined their empire. They 
 had one idea, an all absorbing idea, which killed all 
 ideas of religion, of art, of everything — the idea 
 
 lOI
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XCI 
 
 Descent to hell° is just as easy now 
 For mortal man as it has ever been ; 
 Its portal still is marked by golden bough, ° 
 Where many rich and powerful are seen ; 
 And Venus' doves° lead some that go therein. 
 'Tis man's ascent from down that's difficult. 
 Now learn, with eye upon his state of sin, 
 How he would upward strive with best result, — 
 Mount up, in fact, like missile from a catapult. 
 
 XCII 
 
 To carry thus the secret of a change 
 In fallen species (Is this naming you?) 
 That would affect it in its entire range, — 
 From very ground, I say, up to The Blue, — 
 Impresses some, no doubt, as something new; 
 Regeneration simple, on a plane 
 Examined from whatever point of view 
 Accepted canons will not call inane 
 And highest scholarship pronounce both sound and 
 sane. 
 
 102
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 of empire. They spent their whole life in that one 
 absorbing pursuit — domination; in such a country 
 woman has no place." — Dr. Emil Reich in The 
 Grand Magazine (London). 
 
 4. Regarding class and wealth. " To the 
 bourgeois j^oung lady — the Gibson girl, as she is 
 otherwise known — literary love is a sentiment 
 ranking with a box of bonbons, and actual love is a 
 class marriage with artificially restricted progen)^" 
 — Upton Sinclair in Collier s Weekly. 
 
 5. Edenic motherhood. 
 
 " A mother is a mother still, 
 The holiest thing alive." 
 
 — Coleridge. 
 
 Christian civilization throughout, taking its cue 
 from the oriental valuation and appreciation im- 
 plied in " Woman, what have I to do with thee? " 
 has consistently exposed motherhood to the vagrant 
 casuistries of troglodyte or cunning priests and batra- 
 chian scientists, leaving God's profoundest law 
 to find expression in the mouths of inspired babes 
 and sucklings. Verily, the illumination of Religion 
 by a variant treatment of Scarlet Letters shall one 
 day cease! 
 
 9. Indifferent. " The entire economic situation 
 stands in the relation of cause to the conditions 
 found in the homes and health of women. Modern 
 103
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XCIII 
 
 As traveler lost in horrid shade of wood, 
 Who yearns to see the light of heaven once more, 
 Doth cast about him in contemplate mood 
 For vantage of tall tree like sycamore 
 (Recall Zaccheus° once in days of yore) ; 
 So thou, surrounded by luxuriant growth 
 Of systems fraught with many evils sore. 
 Awake thy soul! Shake off its coward sloth! 
 Seek clearest light that is above as nothing loath! 
 
 XCIV 
 
 Yes, seek this in thyself and for thyself; 
 To such extent thy selfishness may be. 
 Nor curious longing, nor desire for pelf, 
 Told him of old to climb a wayside tree, — 
 Moved, rather. Kindly Light of World to see. 
 Wouldst haply raise thy neighbor's ideal high, 
 That with thine own it may at last agree? 
 Thou° hypocrite! First cast from thine own eye 
 Its ingrained beam, then highest truth thou mayst 
 descry. 
 
 104
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 industry appears as a gigantic ]Moloch into which 
 are fed the lives and health of the laboring class. . . . 
 Woman's average wage in the United States is about 
 $5.00 per week, while many receive but $1.00 or 
 $1.50. This is not a living wage, and many women 
 are forced to choose between existence and a life 
 of prostitution." — May Wood Simmons. 
 
 LXXX. 
 
 4. Chevalier. Chevalier Bayard, the knight sans 
 peur et sans reproche, perhaps the only hero of the 
 Middle Ages that deserved the unmingled praise 
 and admiration bestowed upon him. His love of 
 virtue, especially that kingliest of virtues, justice, 
 was so passionate that he was wont to declare that 
 all empires, kingdoms, states and provinces where 
 justice did not rule were mere forests filled with 
 brigands. 
 
 LXXXI. 
 
 1-7. See Matthew vi, 26-29; Luke xii, 24-28. 
 9. See // Thessalonians iii, 10. 
 
 LXXXII. 
 
 I. Hear learned Bench. " But, most important 
 
 of all, is to do away with an elected judiciary. . . . 
 
 The cowardice of the bar, my own profession, is 
 
 responsible in large measure for the character of the 
 
 105
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XCV 
 
 Thy spirit mounting upward to the Light 
 With ardor, simple faith, and hope, and love, 
 Thou'lt see about thee manifested blight 
 That will thy sense of perfect safety move, — 
 Poor, withered branches, viewed in Light Above. 
 Art thou thyself" a limb of stately tree. 
 Inspiring presence complementing grove, 
 Great institutional" society? 
 Dost feel that "withered branch" is fatting simile? 
 
 XCVI 
 
 Or lustiness" sustained the spirit's growth 
 As revelations on thy soul have burst. 
 On near approach didst sometimes question worth 
 Of seeming beauty, strength, use oft rehearsed. 
 Whose ways thy climbing footsteps fondly nursed ? 
 (So Other, once, while footing sacred routes 
 Near Olivet, spied fig tree, straightway cursed) 
 Still climbing up whilst marking lusty shoots, 
 Recall injunction, " Ye shall know them by their 
 fruits." 
 
 106
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 judges who sit in this department. In Massachu- 
 setts, where they have life judges and where they 
 are appointive, you will hear a group of lawyers say 
 they don't want to bring a certain case before certain 
 judges, because of a certain slant in their opinion. 
 In this city (New York) you will hear lawyers 
 who object to bringing cases before judges, because 
 they are close to this or that political leader, or to 
 this or that commercial interest." — District Attor- 
 ney William Travers Jerome at a banquet in his 
 honor. 
 
 LXXXV. 
 
 9. the followers of Confucius' creed. " Through 
 the rise of Japan a fresh term of comparison has 
 come into existence in the presence of which the self- 
 estimates of all Christian nations and of Christianity 
 itself will have to be revised. . . . There is room, 
 nay, opportunity, for a rival candidate. That the 
 Christian ideal of moral excellence is splendid, even 
 unsurpassed, no one doubts. But no less certain, 
 no less striking, is the failure of the West to justify 
 that ideal, both in national and in private life. The 
 sense of dissatisfaction which this failure has pro- 
 duced has entered deep into the moral consciousness 
 of Christians all the world over; and if the impres- 
 sion has been deep in the case of those who profess 
 and call themselves Christians, it has been yet 
 107
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XCVII 
 
 The withered branch thou wilt not all despise, 
 
 Nor lusty strong inordinate admire; 
 
 The former, tried, didst leave thee something 
 wise, 
 
 And if the latter seem to lift thee higher, 
 
 Its sanction, after times, thou wilt inquire. 
 
 Leaf, twig nor branch superfluous in the wood. 
 
 So in the human forest, who aspire 
 
 To rise above th' accursed Cainite brood 
 Must cherish highest sense of human brother- 
 hood." 
 
 XCVIII 
 
 Ascending wisely thus thy Tree of Life 
 With singleness of purpose, spirit true, 
 Thou'lt best escape earth's hollow sordid strife 
 And bring a glimpse of Heaven into thy view, — 
 Perchance thy neighbor's creed with life imbue. 
 Ascend, but not by golden bough or fate 
 As misers, parvenues and pirates do; 
 Trust common honesty° to elevate, 
 For only thus will man regain his lost estate. 
 
 io8
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 deeper with the multitudes who have turned their 
 backs on the Church. . . . The astounding divorce 
 between the ethical ideals of Christendom and its 
 moral practice, the liberty of interpretation with 
 which the first principles of Christian morality are 
 misapplied to our social life ; the freedom, amounting 
 to effrontery, with which one thing is professed and 
 the opposite practiced; the disgraceful sophisms by 
 which the Christian conscience is taught to be blind 
 to its own blindness — these and many other truths 
 of a like nature, once apprehended only by a small 
 and neglected company, have during the last three 
 years been revealed in their true colors to tens of 
 thousands of persons who never thought of them 
 before." — L. P. Jacks, editor The Hibberd Journal 
 (London). 
 
 LXXXVI. 
 
 I. Judge not. See Matthew vii, i-6. 
 
 LXXXVII. 
 
 4-5. Has the author in mind the Latin hex- 
 ameter, 
 Quae non sunt simulo; quae sunt, ea dissimulantur? 
 
 LXXXVIIL 
 
 4. the ethics of commercial strife. " Men tell 
 us that to succeed means to get money, because with 
 109
 
 THE PLAIN PEOPLE'S PLAINT 
 
 XCIX 
 
 Art tempted still to grovel in the dust, 
 Adoring dunghill steam to mammon curled, 
 That stifles wholesome breath in good and just? 
 What shall it profit if thou gain the world, — 
 Its every crown with priceless gems impearled, — 
 Thy sense of beauty dwarfed, thy soul unshriven, 
 Thy mind untaught, self-reverence's standard 
 
 furled, 
 With naught but vulgar riches for a leaven? 
 Look down! " For hardly shall a rich° man enter 
 
 heaven." 
 
 Let be the world is come vast sounding board 
 That mingles echoes of the shameless deeds 
 Of those who plunder, graft, rob, steal and hoard 
 Earth's sordid wealth, to gratify the needs 
 Acquired through Adam and forbidden seeds. 
 Nathless, while such cacophony abounds, 
 Still clarion as tide of time recedes, 
 Across abyss, high o'er all priestly frowns, 
 " Ye cannot" serve God and mammon " ever re- 
 sounds. 
 
 1 10
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 that all other good things can be secured. Men 
 tell us that the one thing to do is to promote and 
 protect the particular trade, or industry, or corpora- 
 tion in which we have a share : the laws of trade will 
 work out that survival of the fittest which is the 
 only righteousness, and if we survive, that will prove 
 that we are fit. . . . And what will follow? . . . 
 An age of greedy privilege and sullen poverty, of 
 blatant luxury and curious envy, of rising palaces 
 and vanishing homes, of stupid frivolity and idiotic 
 publicomania. . . . An age when princes of finance 
 buy protection from the representatives of a fierce 
 democracy, when the guardians of the savings which 
 insure the lives of the poor use them as a surplus 
 to pay for the extravagance of the rich, and when 
 men who have climbed above their fellows on golden 
 ladders tremble at the crack of the blackmailer's 
 whip and come down at the call of an obscene news- 
 paper." — Henry Van Dyke, D.D., University Day 
 Address, Pennsylvania. 
 
 8. Each one is for himself. " Shorn of all sub- 
 tleties and complexities, the chief struggle of men, 
 and of groups of men, is for food and shelter. And, 
 as of old they struggled with tooth and nail, so to- 
 day they struggle, with teeth and nails elongated 
 into armies and navies, machines, and economic ad- 
 vantages. ... In the social jungle everybody Is 
 
 III
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 preying upon everybody else." — Jack London in the 
 Atlantic Monthly. 
 
 LXXXIX. 
 
 6. Let pass as Siren Song. " The amazing blun- 
 der is in the chief executive of a great nation attack- 
 ing business interests, judges, and persons, in procla- 
 mations to Congress and in interviews for the daily 
 papers." — The Rev. Doctor James R. Day, Chan- 
 cellor of Syracuse University, in his attack upon 
 President Roosevelt for his Oil-Trust Message to 
 Congress. 
 
 " The prevention of discontent will be the prior 
 study to which the intellect and the energies of the 
 nobles and their legates will be ever bent. To that 
 and the teaching of the schools and colleges, the ser- 
 mons, the editorials, the stump orators and even the 
 plays at the theaters will be skillfully and persua- 
 sively molded; and the questioning heart of the 
 poor which perpetually seeks some answer to the 
 painful riddle of the earth, will meet with a multi- 
 tude of mollifying responses." — W. J. Ghent in 
 The Independent (New York). 
 
 xc. 
 
 6. Doric. The least ornate style of Grecian arch- 
 itecture; its columns are plain. 
 
 A hint of the author's appreciation of intelligence 
 113
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 in a public critic is afforded in his dedication by the 
 expression, " on the basis of some little knowledge 
 and experience." The uneven quality of the verse 
 of this poem, as well as its digressive character, has 
 been noted by the reader. This stanza hardly rises 
 above the level of doggerel. Its expression of con- 
 tempt for mere blatant, blatherskite, ignorant 
 mouthing, so common to the times, is nevertheless 
 highly perspicuous. 
 
 XCI. 
 
 I. Descent to hell. See Vergil's Mneid, vi, 
 126, and following. 
 3. golden bough. The same, 137, 140-1. 
 5. Venus' doves. The same, 190. 
 
 XCIII. 
 
 5. Zaccheus. See Luke xix, 4. 
 
 XCIV. 
 8. Thou hypocrite. See Matthew vii, 5. 
 
 XCV. 
 
 6. Art thou thyself? Argumentum ad hominem. 
 8. Great institutional society. Human society 
 
 regarded as a grove, composed of institutions, good, 
 
 bad, and indifferent, of which individual human 
 
 units are the members or limbs, is the figure. To 
 
 115
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 the student of forestry who notes the history of indi- 
 vidual trees, with the development or loss of their 
 branches under varied conditions, this affords an 
 interesting comparison. 
 
 XCVI. 
 
 I. Or lustiness. Here institutions, and their 
 human branches, promise great strength ; they seem, 
 perchance, indispensable, of enduring worth. So 
 with the fig tree in sacred story. See Mark xi, 
 13-14; Matthew vii, 16. 
 
 XCVIL 
 
 9. human brotherhood. " The goal of progress 
 in Christian civilization is the greatest perfection of 
 the whole, and the simultaneous realization of the 
 good of the whole race in each individual." — Wil- 
 liam T. Harris, Commissioner of Education. 
 
 Follow the chain of the slave,' said Emerson, 
 ' and you will find the other end upon the wrist of 
 the master.' So it is to-day and so it will be for- 
 ever; there can be no haven of refuge and no palace 
 of art for any one — only strife and failure for 
 all — until the fact of human brotherhood is 
 granted, until the fact is pounded into our sluggish 
 minds, that there can be no soul-life for any man 
 until it is for all, that there can be among us neither 
 political virtue, nor social refinement, nor true 
 117
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 religion, nor vital art, so long as men, women, and 
 children are chained up to toil for us in mines and 
 factories and sweatshops, are penned in filthy slums, 
 and fed on ofFal, and doomed to rot and perish in 
 soul-sickening misery and horror." — Upton Sinclair 
 in Collier's Weekly. 
 
 XCVIII. 
 
 8. Trust commoii honesty. " Common Honesty 
 as a Prophylactic; the Need of Its Revival," a senti- 
 ment attributed to Ex-President Grover Cleveland. 
 
 XCIX. 
 
 9. " Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall 
 hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven." — 
 Matthew xix, 23 ; Mark x, 23. 
 
 " You are not your own. Nothing that you have 
 is your own. We haven't learned the Christian Re- 
 ligion if we have not learned the lesson of steward- 
 ship. . . . Disregard of this trust is the cause of all 
 the social evils of London and New York. If every 
 man considered himself as a steward, there would be 
 no object in dishonesty. Stewardship would do 
 away with the tyranny of capital. This bitter rise 
 of Socialism, the new terror of Europe, is due to 
 the neglect of the elementary principles of the 
 Christian social religion." — The Rt. Rev. A. F. 
 119
 
 EDITOR'S NOTES 
 
 Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, at an open 
 air service in Wall Street, N. Y. 
 
 c. 
 
 9. " And He said also unto his disciples. If ye 
 have not been faithful in that which is another's, 
 w^ho will give you that which is your own? No 
 servant can serve two masters : for either he will hate 
 the one and love the other; or else he will hold to 
 the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve 
 God and mammon" — Luke xvi, 12-13. 
 
 And the bourgeoisie, who were lovers of money, 
 heard all these things; and they scoffed at Him. 
 
 121
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAF.II ^ 
 
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 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 804 745
 
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 xxvii, 6-9 
 
 Behold the blazonry of Man's achievement! 
 
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