WHY AMERICAN MARRIAGES FAIL AND OTHER PAPERS WHY AMERICAN MARRIAGES FAIL AND OTHER PAPERS BY ANNA A. ROGERS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1909 COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY EUSTACE B. ROGERS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November IQOQ IN MEMORIAM ANNA ALEXANDER ROGERS CONTENTS WHY AMERICAN MARRIAGES FAIL 3 SOME FAULTS OF AMERICAN MEN* 43 WHY AMERICAN MOTHERS FAIL 71 WHAT WE PUT UP WITH in BEHIND THE TIMES 151 4 A FEW FALLACIES IN OUR EDUCA- TION 185 WHY AMERICAN MARRIAGES FAIL WHY AMERICAN 'MARRIAGES FAIL THE STAGE OF THE KNIFE " We surgeons of the law do desperate cures, Sir ! " THAT a large percentage of marriages achieve very little beyond a bare working compromise with happiness is not to be seriously denied. Nor is it to be doubted that there are more matrimonial catastro- phes to-day than there were a generation ago. In fact, every recent decade has shown a marked increase in the evil of divorce in the United States, out of all proportion to the growth of population. It is also a matter of statistics that the evil is growing more rapidly in our country than in Eu- rope. Of course, this preponderance may 3 AMERICAN MARRIAGES be partly accounted for by the greater number of divorce courts on this side of ,, the Atlantic. We have 2921 courts which have the pdxver.to grant divorces, as against England's one, Germany's twenty-eight, and France's seventy-nine. Since during the last fifty years more radical changes by far have come in the I social status of women than in that of men, there is a chance that at her door may lie the cause of at least some of this fast-growing social disease. And it is upon 'hat admittedly daring assumption that these few suggestions are based. There are those who consider that the statistics of divorce represent only an ap- parent fact, the argument being that this is the age of expression, not suppression. They go on to say that there are few more diseases in the world of to-day than there were in Babylon, but that the wider and more intelligent recognition of disease and the modern differentiation in diagnosis lead to a false impression; that the real differ- 4 AMERICAN MARRIAGES ence lies in the fact that a physician's work is now done in the open ; that his discov- eries belong to the morning paper ; and that our modern life teems with specialists, hospitals, and an ever-enlarging materia medica. Medical books and magazines and lectures are more and more accessible to the general public. In the same way it is claimed that the increasing difficulties in the marriage rela- tion to-day are only apparent; that that question, too, has only just come into the open. The lovers of individualism main- tain that it is high time that the enlight- ened surgery of divorce was resorted to, forgetting that " the significance of the in- crease of divorce must be sought in its relation to the family and the social order generally, rather than for its bearing on individual morality," still less for its bear- ing on individual happiness. To follow the parallel a bit farther, may it not be suggested that, as there is a grow- ing conviction among the best physicians 5 AMERICAN MARRIAGES that the knife is resorted to unnecessarily often to right physical disorders, the same may be true of psychological disorders ? Gentler remedies, dietary measures, the daily regime of more intelligent living, have been known to spare more than one pa- tient the horrors of the operating table. In fact, is not prevention the only genu- ine modern miracle ? Toward that great end surely come all the physical sciences, all social philanthropies and philosophies, bringing in outstretched hands their gifts to suffering humanity! Three " instances " come uppermost : (i) Woman's failure to realize that mar- riage is her work in the world. (2) Her growing individualism. (3) Her lost art of giving, replaced by a highly developed receptive faculty. First : Marriage is woman's work in the L world not man's. From whatever point it is viewed, physical or spiritual, as a ques- tion of civic polity or a question of indi- vidual ethics, it is her specific share of the 6 AMERICAN MARRIAGES world's work first, last, and always ; al- lotted to her by laws far stronger than she is. And the woman who fails to recognize this and acknowledge it has the germ of divorce in her veins at the outset. Moonlit and springtime moods all to the contrary, the fact remains that marriage is not a man's work, but one of his dearest delusions, from which he parts begrudg- ingly. Moreover, it is not even necessary to him in the accomplishment of those things which are his work. It is generally no more than his dream of prolonging through years a humanly improbable con- dition. Happiness as a husband and father has always been his scarcely whispered prayer, his dearest secret hope, toward which all his idealism yearns. That numer- ous other and very potent motives enter into men's hearts is not in the least over- looked; it is only claimed that to the aver- age man his future marriage is little more than a very beautiful dream. But the wife who insists childishly upon 7 AMERICAN MARRIAGES treating marriage, either in theory or in practice, as a beautiful dream, is forgetful of how very little is left of earnest life-work for a woman if she repudiates the dignified duty of wedlock placed upon her shoul- ders. Why should she not be taught the plain fact that no other work really impor- tant to the world has ever been done by a woman since " the morning of the world " ? Only as a woman, with all that that entails upon her, is she alone, preeminent, unap- proachable. And yet apparently her whole energy is to-day bent upon dethroning herself ! Men, at this stage of civilization, are not only the world's workers, breadwinners, home-builders, fighters, supporters of all civic duties, they are also the world's .idealists. All else is mere quibbling ! / Whatever the future may develop, up to j the present time no great religion, deserv- j ing the name, has ever been founded by a I woman ; no vital discovery in science ever Nmade by her; no important system of phi- 8 AMERICAN MARRIAGES N losophy ; no code of laws either formulated \ or administered. Nor along the supposedly / more feminine lines of human develop- 7 i 11 \ ment has, as yet, any really preeminent \ work come from her. Upon literature, music, sculpture, painting, women have as J yet made very few enduring marks. As to her recent small successes at self-support, however to be commended and encouraged, they do not lead to any big end outside of herself or her immediate surroundings ; her purposes are personal and ephemeral. The poets are responsible for much of the present feminine megalomania, but modern scientists are effectively reducing the swelling, as it were ; which may lead to a generally healthier social condition all around the family circle. In estimating the secondary differences between men and women, Havelock Ellis's interesting sum- mary of what recent scientific research has so far accomplished states several facts that are markedly contrary to the general drift of unscientific opinion : 9 AMERICAN MARRIAGES " As regards the various senses . . . the balance of advantage on the side of women is less emphatically on their side than popular notions would have led us to expect. The popular belief is really founded on the confusion of two totally distinct nervous qualities : sensibility and irritabil- ity or as it is perhaps better called, affec- tability; women having greater irritability, men deeper sensibility/' Galton, the pioneer in accurate study of the sensory differences between man and woman, remarks: " I found as a rule that men have more delicate powers of discrim- ination than women, and the business ex- perience of life seems to confirm this." Two of Ellis's more homely illustrations tend to support this view: cc It is worthy of note that pianoforte tuners are usually men" ; and, "men have a monopoly of the higher walks of culinary art ; women are not employed in such occupations as tea- tasting, which requires specially delicate discrimination ; they are rarely good con- 10 AMERICAN MARRIAGES noisseurs of wine ; and while gourmandes are common, the more refined expression gourmet does not even possess a feminine form." The few foregoing suggestions are of- fered in refutation of the present false and demoralizing deification of women, espe- cially in this country, an idolatry of which we as a people are so inordinately proud.^ One of the evil effects of this attitude is : shown in the intolerance and selfishness of young wives, which is largely responsible , for the scandalous slackening of marriage ties in the United States. Every stranger coming within our gates is amazed at the social domination of the try, the subordination to her and her wishes of the hard-working, self-effacing male. An extreme antithesis to this American woman-worship is of course to be found in England ; and a picture comes to mind full of grim humor a typical John Bull, deep magenta complexion, Pickwickian in figure, as sure of himself as the sun itself, ii AMERICAN MARRIAGES the entirely joyless parent of four grown daughters. They stood in line before the counter in a silk shop in Italy. Four lengths of the same dull elderly shade of purple were measured off and paid for by the Great Briton ; the four Britonesses stood helpless, voiceless, exchanging sly glances of bitter disappointment and dis- gust. They were asked no questions, hence they were as dumb as the beasts of the field. Once papa remarked with resounding com- placence : "A good wearing shade, my dears." " Oh, yes, papa ! "returned the spiritless chorus. Papa gave each one her bundle, where- upon she said, " Thank you, papa ! " And then he led the way pompously, and the five filed out, the narrow, broken-hearted shoulders of the girls drooping more than ever. The big brilliant eyes of the Italian clerk met those of the writer, an interna- tional smile was exchanged, and he exploded into two words : 12 AMERICAN MARRIAGES " Barbara ! Sauvage ! " But that some middle ground between these poor abject English girls and our equally abject American fathers and hus- bands may be discovered, is not despaired of in this age of many and sudden changes. It is contended (not without a decent show of timidity !) that in marriage, more often than not, the man is the idealist, how- ever far he himself falls short of his own standards. Witness his inevitable dislike for and impatience of the whole barbaric dis- play of a public wedding that senseless whirl of grossly material things in which women revel. "What has it all to do with you, and our love, our happiness ? " What wife has not stored away somewhere in her memory words like these, pleaded in a lover's voice ? And the chances are that the woman called him selfish, and swore prettily that she reveled in "such vile matter," so she be " fairly bound." The average wife who manages to live, after a marriage for love, up to the aver- AMERICAN MARRIAGES age husband's ideal of her before marriage, I will, it is safe to say, reach her highest spi- | ritual development. She need not aspire to any higher goal than the poor man's own illusions! The real trouble is that they are rather likely to prove uncomfortably ex- alted. In fact, to preserve his ideal of her just the average busy man is really her life-work. Hers, somehow, by hook or by crook, to save out of the inevitable strife of those early days of character reconstruc- tion, at least a workable armistice; some sort of a broad friendship which leaves room for human frailties ; to cultivate a habit of reasonable concession ; a motherly wish to be a source of harmony to her hus- band ; and an honest determination to ar- rest the disease of " incompatibility " (la- tent always) in its incipiency, long years before it reaches the stage of the knife ; to rise a little above the primitive frankness of a certain colored wife who admitted non- chalantly, " Oh, yes, I done left 'im!" AMERICAN MARRIAGES " Wha' for you done left 'im?" she was asked. " Oh, I jes' natch 'ully los' all taste fo' 'im!" Which explanation, crude as it is, would cover the cause of an astonish- ing number of divorces in this year of grace 1907. II GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM " My sweet, my own Myself ! " THE rock upon which most of the flower- bedecked marriage barges go to pieces is the latter-day cult of individualism; the worship of the brazen calf of Self. It is admittedly not easy to remember that our lives are only important as inte- gral parts of a big social system. Espe- cially difficult is it for a woman to be made to realize this, because her whole life hith- erto has been generally an experiment in individualism ; whereas a man's, since the first primitive times, has become more and more an experiment in communism. The inborn rampant ego in every man has found its wholesome outlet in hard work, gener- ally community-work, which further keeps down his egoism ; whereas the devouring ego in the " new woman " is as yet largely 16 AMERICAN MARRIAGES a useless, uneasy factor, vouchsafing her very little more peace than it does those in her immediate surcharged vicinity. Nowadays she receives almost a man's mental and muscular equipment in school or college, and then at the age of twenty she stops dead short and faces a world of negatives! No exigent duties, no im- perative work, no manner of expending normally her highly-developed, hungry en- ergies. That they turn back upon her and devour her is not to be wondered at. One is reminded of that irresistible character- ization : " Alarm-clock women that buzz for a little and then run down." And so it comes to pass that this high- ly trained, well-equipped (and also ill- equipped) feminine ego faces wifehood the one and only subject about which she is persistently kept in the dark. And from the outset she fails to realize, never having been taught it, that what she then faces is not a brilliant presentation at the Court of Love, not a dream of ecstasy and triumph, AMERICAN MARRIAGES not even a lucky and comfortable life-billet she is facing her work at last ! her diffi- cult, often intensely disagreeable and dan- gerous, life-task. And her salary of love will sometimes be only partly paid, some- times begrudgingly, sometimes not at all, very rarely overpaid, by either her husband or her children. One of the pre- cise facts that young women should be taught, as they are taught physical geo- graphy, is that men, all men, have their high and low emotional tides, and a good wife is the immovable shore to her hus- band's restless life. It would appear that the indiscriminate and undigested education of the female masses and classes is depriving us Amer- icans of good servants and of good wives at once. They are all "above their sta- tion!" / The really small percentage of unmar- j ried women who have the blessing of paid < work of any sort in their lives (as an ab- V solute necessity against starvation) are of > 18 AMERICAN MARRIAGES the elect, and of course know it not! The J rest must wait for matrimony, if modest ; / struggle for it, if not. And then all this / unexpended feminine egoism, joined with ^> unexpended physical energy, demands / from the normally expended masculine \ egoism far more of everything than he is 1 at all prepared to give, far more than she has any just claim to demand. More of his love,more admiration, more time, more money she wants more of them all to satisfy her recently discovered Sell. Ask tKe first girl bf twenty who presents her- self, let her be the average badly educated, restless, pampered, passionate, but shallow- natured maiden of the day, superb in physique, meagre in sentiment, and note her answer as to what she demands (not hopes for!) of her probable husband, quite irrespective of what he may get in return. He must be a god physically (that seems to be the modern American girl's sine qua nori) ; he must have wealth, brains, educa- tion, position, a perfect temper, and a lim- 19 AMERICAN MARRIAGES itless capacity to adore her, kneeling. And he, poor soul, after the first exigent mood, which soon passes, wants very little more than peace and a place to smoke unmo- lested ; combined preferably with a guar- anteed blindness to his general faults and particular fads. A recent public vote on this subject actually resulted in a stronger poll for "sweet temper" than for any other masculine prerequisite in a wife. In a broader aspect American women are as a whole pampered and worshiped out of all reason, a condition which is sometimes found in young civilizations. In even a brief comparison with the same class in other countries, it will be found that our women as a whole do not deserve it. In France the proportion of wage-earning women is thirty-four per cent of the wage- earning population; in the United States it is only seventeen percent. In France the working-women form eighteen per cent of the population, compared with six per cent in this country. Further, they do not 20 AMERICAN MARRIAGES render the conscientious careful personal domestic service of the German women ; nor the financial support of French wives, and intelligent helpfulness in commercial as well as domestic affairs. How many American husbands could seriously advise with their wives on the subject ot business and expect even comprehension, let alone sound business advice ? An astonishing number ot Frenchwomen of all classes are in commercial matters the gifted " silent partners " of their husbands, however lo- quacious in social doings. The painstaking thrift of European women has no parallel in this country; nor the painstaking clean- liness that is a revelation to American eyes accustomed to the general "slouch" from one end of the United States to another. It has been said of the much-maligned Italians that only among the Chinese can be found a parallel to their almost tragic economies. Half of Italy could live on what New York City alone throws away in a year. In England, too, every intelligent 21 AMERICAN MARRIAGES woman understands politics, would be ashamed not fully to comprehend the measures before Parliament; and during election times she works with the energy of a ward politician for the man or idea that has won the right to her loyalty. Then, too, she lives more in other people's lives than we do. Each woman feels her obliga- tion to give much of her energy to an end- less detail of philanthropic work in her immediate neighborhood. On the other hand very much more philanthropic work is done in this country, outside of the churches, than in England, but it is managed on a broader, less per- sonal basis. In fact, it is left to twenty clear-headed, business-like women to do the work which is divided among two thou- sand of her English sisters. This is pre- cisely what the writer wishes to prove, the general idleness and self-centredness of the average American woman, and her un- proved claim to be worshiped. One very salient difference strikes the 22 AMERICAN MARRIAGES American traveler in walking before noon about any of, say, four European cities, London, Paris, Berlin, or Vienna. It may be summed up in the exclamation, " Why, where are the women?" An Italian friend fighting his way along Washington Street in Boston, walking, not on the sidewalk, which was a solid immovable congestion of femininity, but on the cobblestones of the narrow street, was heard to gasp, "The Public is here a common noun of the femi- nine gender!" He on his side wondered where the men were. The whole world of women in the city, and from its suburbs, apparently, betakes itself to the shops every day, between nine o'clock and twelve. Shops are stifling, street-cars jammed, sidewalks impassable. This is more or less true of shopping districts in all cities all over the United States. This phenomenon represents several truths : we are prosperous ; our men never " shop " ; and as a people our women dress far beyond their incomes, the men remain- 2 3 AMERICAN MARRIAGES ing singularly negligent in their dress. Our sense of proportion in money expendi- ture has not yet properly developed ; that only comes in a more advanced stage of civilization. On a morning walk an English woman said to the writer, in one of our western cities especially given over to the national passion for dress, " Any countrywoman of mine dressed as that woman is, or that, or that, would be in her carriage. She would return to a substantial home, the door would be opened by a man in livery, every item of her environment would match the elegance of those furs, that frightfully expensive hat, that very. smart broadcloth walking suit. Whereas the chances are (you see I've been keeping my eyes open!) that she came in a street-car, and will go home in one ; she lives either in tiny lodgings, I beg your pardon, flat! and will open her front door with a pass-key ; or else she lives in one of the suburban towns, in a very trumpery sort of little house, which does 24 AMERICAN MARRIAGES not in the least match those furs nor that hat! And a slovenly c slavey' attends the door when she rings for admittance " " Or what is much more likely, her daughter or her mother," added the Amer- ican. The main cause of this daily submer- gence of our streets by the feminine world is not mere vanity, for the industrious, home- staying French women have that quality to an even greater and much more insidious degree. It seems to be a combination of excessive energy and sheer idleness of pur- pose, and the national vice of extravagance. The writer has taken the time and pains to follow, more than once, several typical American women on a typical morning shopping tour, and has discovered the anomaly that the longer they take to shop, the less they actually buy! And these idlers are not the well-dressed prosperous women, they are the poorly clad, pale and irritable from fatigue. From counter to counter they go, fingering, pricing, commenting, 25 AMERICAN MARRIAGES passing on, hour after hour. Sometirnes an ice-cream soda in the basement is their only lunch, followed by a complete rearrange- ment of hair in the " Ladies Parlor " ; then a slow stroll through the "Art Depart- ment," and they remark casually to any one who will listen, " Well, I guess it 's about time to go home! " One involuntarily won- ders about that " home " ! These facts are true of tens of thousands of our women in every city in the Union ; and much travel has failed to discover their exact equiva- lent anywhere else in the world. These facts mean a big economic loss somewhere in our development. All the writer cares to claim is that our women as a whole are spoiled, extremely idle, and curiously undeserving of the maudlin wor- ship that they demand from our hard-work- ing men. That the higher-class women waste their time in equal measure is still more easy of proof. They crowd the smarter shops, bent on the American worship of " Everything 26 AMERICAN MARRIAGES Ready-made " ; matinees are packed with solidly feminine audiences. The hair- dressers', the manicurists', the cafes at lunch- time, are full to overflowing with women extravagant, idle, self-centred. More- over, the always small class of so-called society women, per se, works harder and during longer hours in their pursuit of pleasure than any other women in our country. They must perforce live by some sort of regulation and economy of energy to remain in the running at all. Of course there are capable, earnest, in- dustrious specimens of beautiful woman- hood in every city, town, or village in the land, who make not only good wives and mothers, but who are leaders in philan- thropic work, and often also retain their social preeminence by a careful apportion- ing of their time and vitality. These ex- ceptions serve to emphasize the unworthi- ness of the woman who strives but to " live and breathe and die A rose-fed pig in an aesthetic sty! " 2 7 AMERICAN MARRIAGES She has not merged her fate with her hus- band's if married, nor with her father's if not ; she does not properly supplement their lives, she is striving for a detached profitless individuality. I emphasize this, for the fact that men are selfish, and vicious, and " desperately wicked," has been so thoroughly exploited, that the preference given to a less acknowledged economic situation may perhaps be pardoned. Ill " Wifehood is thought great in India in proportion to its giving, not receiving. ' ' SISTER NEVEDITA. IN India an affection which asks for an equal return, so many heartbeats for a like number, is called "shop-keeping." Among us Westerners this Eastern exalted faculty of giving affection and not looking for any equable exchange of commodities, has de- generated into a sort of passion for senti- mental bargains! Unfortunately, there are no genuine psy- chic bargains thrown out on life's counter. The really good spiritual things cost the most, as do the material things. Success in any undertaking, even marriage, is al- ways both shy and obstinate, and hides behind quite a thorny hedge of persistence, hard work, unselfishness, and above all, patience, a quality, now gone out of fashion, which made of our grandmothers civiliz- ing centres of peace and harmony ; for 29 AMERICAN MARRIAGES they were content to use slow curative measures to mend their matrimonial ail- ments, and the " knife " was looked upon with horror. One finds so often in the women of that generation a strange quiet as of wisdom long digested ; a deep abid- ing strength ; an aloofness of personality that makes for dignity ; sweet old faces that bear the marks of" love's grandeur." What is there to-day in all this fret and fuss and fury of feminine living, that compares with the power for good of these wonderful old women, fast disappearing ? We, of our day, on the contrary, hear much of such things as these : " Out upon your patience! If patience had not gone out of us women, we should still be sold in the market-places ! From it were welded our chains, and the whole ignominy of the past." There is really only one serious objec- tion to this sort of talk it is not true. The abolition of all forms of slavery that the world has ever seen began in some 30 AMERICAN MARRIAGES mans brain, working from above down, not from beneath up! No great united ac- tion of women has led to their gradual emancipation. Big changes such as that have always been born in some man's big soul, an entirely impersonal masculine ide- ality working slowly toward the general good. Girls are capable of great patience, en- ergy, and persistence in the acquisition of education or what are known as accom- plishments. And later on in life, if women, bent on social success, were as easily dis- couraged, as exacting, as irritable in the accomplishment of that task, as they often are in the undertaking of marriage, the list of the world's successful salons would indeed be a brief one. There is no doubt that the women of the day have the qualities that would make for success, even in marriage, if they elected to expend them in these commonplace ways. But the present excessive education of young women, and excessive physical cod- 3 1 AMERICAN MARRIAGES dling (the gymnastics, breathing exercises, public and private physical culture, the masseurs, the manicurists, the shampooers) have produced a curious anomalous hybrid : a cross between a magnificent, rather un- mannerly boy, and a spoiled, exacting, demi-mondaine, who sincerely loves in this world herself alone. Thus quite a new re- lationship between the sexes has arisen, a slipshod unchivalrous companionship, which before marriage they nominate "good form, " but which after marriage they illogically discover to be cause for tears or for temper. Two winters ago an old-fashioned wo- man who had lived in many lands chap- eroned a party of well-bred, decidedly "smart" Am erican young people, bent upon examining into some of the larger settle- ment workings of New York City. Dur- ing a long evening entailing much walking and crossing of crowded streets, the girls strode along as detached and independent as if it were broad daylight, and they quite 32 AMERICAN MARRIAGES friendless. They crossed the bustling ave- nues, climbed in and out of cars, and never one masculine hand raised to help, nor voice to guide. The effect of such almost brutal discourtesy was startling indeed to the older woman, who had for years been out of touch with young America. One generation had brought this painful change about. Whose new ideal of sex-relation was this? Before the evening was over illu- mination came. " Will you be good enough to give me your hand as I get out of the car ? I 'm accustomed to it," finally said the woman of a past generation in a decidedly un- amiable tone. The young man's hand went out will- ingly at the next stop, and in a low voice he said, with a sigh and a smile : " It's a comfort to be with a woman once more who wants such a thing! I hope you '11 pardon me, but it 's not our fault. The girls snub us, you know, and say it's the worst possible form, and all that; and 33 AMERICAN MARRIAGES yet the fellows would all like to do little things like that for women I know I should ! It seems as if the girls were snub- bing one of our most decent instincts, don't you know but well, you see how it is ! My mother always taught me that manners were but morals wearing their best bonnets and gowns." Is it to be wondered at that the indefin- able charm, the sacredness and mystery of womanhood are fast passing away from among us ? When women themselves set the standard of conduct lower down ; when they consider it a gaucherie to blush, shy- ness a laughable anachronism, sentiment "sickening nonsense," courtesy "bad form," is it cause for wonder that a few months after marriage a girl so often finds her husband disillusioned and in an ugly reactionary mood ? Finding also herself stung into a fury of disappointment and resentment at his want of that same instinc- tive tenderness and courtesy which she had repulsed before marriage, and which now, 34 AMERICAN MARRIAGES when it is too late, she not only longs for, but demands ! "If women thought less of their own souls and more about men's tempers, marriage would n 't be what it is," wrote a recent feminine philosopher. There are several facts about the masculine charac- ter of which women will do well to realize the immutability. It makes not one par- ticle of difference what the wife expects or demands in marriage, whether she gives freely or begrudgingly, if for any reason whatsoever a man does not find his home happy, or at least peaceful, whether it be her fault or his, the chances are that he will close his lips, put on his hat, and go his brutal way elsewhere! He may seek distraction among other men, in a frenzy of work or pleasure and he may not. Of one thing the young wife may be sure, that a man has neither the instinct nor the time to coddle his disappoint- ments in marriage be puts on bis bat! 35 AMERICAN MARRIAGES This is his universal, silent, unlabeled ar- gument, that the happiness of that home is not his business, but hers. If the fault is his, the brute expects patience; if it's hers, he expects self-control. If neither is forthcoming well, that is her lookout ! He wanted to be happy, he expected it, or else he would not have married her. Under all of this selfish shunting of the responsibility of home-happiness on to the woman's shoulders, lies a deep justi- fying truth, it is her business, and the fact that some of nature's laws, such as gravitation, are at times extremely irri- tating, does not, however, make them in- operative. Let the fault be his or hers, the main source of trouble lies in the undue devel- opment of youthful individualism. That the fault is generally hers, is of course not for a moment implied ; but as the great French pessimist, in a mild mood, sug- gests, " Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side." 36 AMERICAN MARRIAGES / On his side, nine times out of ten in t this country, a man marries for love. Of 1 course he idealizes her, and is absolutely ) sure that she is going to make him happy, surely the greatest source of peril to the young wife lies in the distorted vision of her bridegroom's eyes, blinded by a pas- sion for perfection! It would indeed be heaven if love's lens were after all the only just one, instead of being generally the most untrue! The man's motives, if selfish, are gen- erally as pure as are consistent with faulty humanity. At least he considers them a fair basis for a happy marriage ; and he also thinks that, if he stays true and steadfast and sober, and clothes and feeds his wife, he has done his part. That he wants to continue loving her and being beloved, wants happiness, goes without saying ; was it not nominated in the bond ? He is perfectly amazed when some strange, obscure element suddenly intrudes and turns his, as well as her, melody into 37 AMERICAN MARRIAGES discord ; blackens his, as well as her, ideal. He is helpless, bewildered, frantic, " Lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I!" On the young wife's part, she has been brought up in ignorance of a man's make- up, of his latent brutalities in which is rooted his very strength to bear the bur- dens of life. Unprepared, undisciplined, uncounseled, impatient of a less thing than godhood itself, she often refuses even to try to adjust the yoke to her inexperienced shoulders, and more and more often throws it off, glorying in the assertion of her " per- sistent self." She has not been told that perfection does not exist; that the yoke of imperfection is laid on every pair of shoulders, his as well as hers ; that no wife celebrates her golden wedding, smiling and content under her gray hair, who has not her secret history of struggle, bitter disap- pointment, loneliness, jealousy, physical and mental agony. It is safe to say that 38 AMERICAN MARRIAGES she also did not marry an angel, for the very simple reason that there are none male or female in the whole wide world. But she was blessed with that " passion of great hearts," patience, and she has been victorious in the battle of life, the bat- tle that we are all fighting, every one ; not this weeping wife here, nor that one there, nursing her wrath. "It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frail- ties, whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than your own." The en- gineer of a train must have learned well his business before he is allowed to assume the responsibility of the levers. How much knowledge of the even more complicated physical and moral levers of marriage do the average young people bring to bear upon their life-problem ? Happily many of the colleges for wo- men have commenced to recognize the wisdom of introducing the study of the 39 AMERICAN MARRIAGES family, and the statistics of sociology. It would seem that such a chair should be filled by a woman holding the degree of motherhood and wifehood, whatever else she may have picked up of human know- ledge. And even then, with all that un- doubtedly could be taught our young women along these lines, it is but a pre- paration ; there is the test ahead of them all, when they will need the wisdom that only life itself can slowly and painfully teach. Somewhere before the benediction of the marriage ceremony might well be in- serted Amiel's beautifully cadenced words to women facing their great life-work : " Never to tire, never grow cold ; to be pa- tient, sympathetic, tender ; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always ; like God to love always, this is duty." SOME FAULTS OF AMERICAN MEN SOME FAULTS OF AMERICAN MEN "It is a law of this universe, that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form." The Stones of Venice. PERHAPS it might be more definitive to speak of the shortcomings of American men, of their negative faults. These are, after all, the specifically national ones. The positive faults belong to the sex irrespec- tive of nationality, and form too large a subject for such small handling as this. Furthermore, ever since Moses selected a negative phrasing when he hammered out the ten great moral laws, the world, with unconscious humor, has gone on listing a man's virtues negatively. We say : he does not drink ; he does not gamble ; he is nothing of a Lovelace. But his faults re- 43 AMERICAN MEN main positive : " he is a thief," we say, ra- ther than " he is not honest," which somehow sounds euphemistic, and breeds instant doubtof the entire truth of the state- ment. Perhaps, too, because of their less complex make-up, their tendency to fall by themselves as it were, into classified types, one really gets a rough picture of the men thus negatively described. One likes or dislikes them on even such slight hearsay. And yet what number of negations will ever convey the slightest idea of a wo- man? What availeth it to learn of her that she does not drink, is not given to habitual profanity ? Even when the praise goes to excess, and we learn that she is not a gadabout, nor does she throw any- thing large or hard at her husband's head, we are still left in doubt concerning her attractiveness as a companion for either an hour or a lifetime. That a woman's virtues are still summed up positively, in face of much internal opposition to sex- 44 AMERICAN MEN differentiation of any sort, is a tribute to a difference of standard, which she should be the last to quarrel with, had she wis- dom, instead of only a little learning. It also stands for the woman's greater com- plexity, in which lies half of her power in the world. It requires finer lines to limn her as an individual. So we will keep (prayerfully!) to the sins of American masculine omission. To begin with a caution bred of some experience with American complacency, it were as well to recognize at once that geographic isolation is largely responsible for the picture of supreme contentment with themselves which the men of this country present to the humbled beholder. We doubtless have inherited some of it with our British blood, but there still re- mains much that is stamped in clear let- tering, "made in America." From a purely artistic point of view, it is a pity to try to disturb, even for an instant, a national pose so full of boyish optimism 45 AMERICAN MEN in a world largely given over to unsightly regret, humiliation, and despair. But as it is not yet universally admitted that the foremost ship of the millennium has already reached our golden shores, and as a whole nation's self-illusions have been known to vanish in one day and one night; and upon the bare chance that this may again hap- pen, either in smoke literal or smoke metaphorical, may not a little of our own Yankee farsightedness be suggested and pardoned once in a way ? This American complacency embraces that citizen himself, as he sees himself; his wife (especially his wife) as he sees her ; his children, if perchance he takes time to remember that he has any ; his system of government, unless the ogre known as the Other Party is in power, when the citizen is more critical; his country at large and all that therein is, from finance to watermelons. Like a Turk, he is particularly enamored of size in the harem of his affections. 46 AMERICAN MEN " The great quality of Dulness is to be unalterably contented with itself," quoth Thackeray ; but he was not writing of American human nature, nor are our men in the least dull. They have only been too long geographically removed from any just comparison with other civilized nations ; and, what is more to the point, too absorbed mentally with domestic issues to bridge the seas with their minds, if not with their bodily senses, to learn that there are other points of view than our own, equally civilized, if not always more " advanced." What the busy American citizen sees of those least worthy specimens of other nations who are so rashly welcomed to our shores, only serves further to enhance his own self-satisfaction. But is not that a little like judging one's host by spending the evening in his kitchen ? To offset in a measure this mental pro- vincialism, would it not be possible to in- troduce in our more advanced grades, in 47 AMERICAN MEN all of our schools, the serious study of the criticisms of the United States written by the enlightened and just foreigners who have not always flattered us ? We are surely in no further exigent need of flattery, much as our appetite remains childishly keen for such sweet relish. The habit in- stilled early of standing back from one's nation, and judging coolly between right and wrong, wisdom and fallacy, can hurt no patriotism worthy the name. "The strength of criticism lies only in the weak- ness of the thing criticised," said one of our own great men. If we wish to be treated as a nation of grown men among the world's opposed armies of men, there is no better strategy than to find out exactly how our enemy (commercial, political, military) estimates us. There has been more than one great general who has found success along that line, and laid his plans of offense or de- fense accordingly. Surely the time for "baby talk" has passed, young as we still AMERICAN MEN obviously are. There are many valuable books written by clear-sighted aliens, crit- icising, not abusing, us as a people, so- cially, politically, economically, which might serve to shake this dangerous self-satisfac- tion, and open young American eyes to the fact that perfection itself has not yet quite been attained ; there remains much to be done before we are what we think, or pretend to think, that we are. There is left a lot of plain, old-fashioned, everlast- ing human blundering going on here in the United States, as well as elsewhere in the world, now as from the beginning. The just, temperate criticisms of our want of ideality, of beauty, of repose, by the great English critic Matthew Arnold (equally severe with his own people) would serve to clear the atmosphere of mirage, to give one or two illustrations of what is meant. The careful reading of Hugo Miin- sterberg's estimate of us is doubly valua- ble : first, because much of it was not primarily written for our eyes; second, 49 AMERICAN MEN because it is distinctly sympathetic, and the Sun succeeded in doing what the Wind failed to do in the shrewd old fable. One of the wisest Americans of the last half- century, whom the writer had the honor of knowing, once was heard to reply to a query : " No, never read antagonistic bio- graphy it is a pure waste of time! An estimate to be absolutely just, must be in greater part sympathetic." He went on to compare the value of the first part of Bourrienne's "Life of Napoleon," when he was in favor with his master, with the last part, when Napoleon no longer playfully pinched his quondam secretary's cheeks. As our average men are admittedly not readers of books, however many newspa- pers and magazines they may devour, the writer proposes to quote and to paraphrase, for the sake of brevity, from Miinster- berg's " American Traits," especially from the chapter on " Education." II "There was never before a nation that gave the education of the young into the hands of the lowest bidder." HUGO MUNSTERBERG. THIS trenchant sentence was written of our educational system within ten years. It is based upon the fact that three- fourths of American education is in the hands of women, who are able to underbid the men by the very conditions of their being. Few of them are what the average man is when he has reached the age when he is fitted to teach the sole supporters of growing families; and hence they are will- ing to work for smaller salaries, thereby slowly driving the men from teaching as a paying profession. It was the business of male teachers to remain in the ranks and keep there their dominance, as in other nations which have grown great. If there were nothing more vital to the com- monwealth than the distribution of the AMERICAN MEN $200,000,000 yearly spent in education in this country, then perhaps we might read- ily comprehend and sympathize with the present attitude toward this serious matter. But to make that very secondary question the prime consideration is to lose sight altogether of the object of this vast ex- penditure. Surely it is not to furnish honest sup- port to a given number of needy women (worthy as that plea may be), women who have their full share of American snob- bishness about working with their hands as a means of support. Is not the real ob- ject to get the best, broadest, sanest teach- ers for the children of the nation ? A civilization is indeed crude that is all eyes for the salary, with only a side-glance for the work to be performed in return. Our distribution of the salaries of teachers in this country simply places a premium on the celibate spirit, exactly as Rome has for centuries. As a result, Italy to-day has difficulty in rinding men to do 52 AMERICAN MEN her work. Some day we may be in equal need of men to be what men ought to be the social backbone of the nation in all the ramifications of what is called civi- lization. It is into the female celibate hands that our men have suffered the greater part of the education of their children to drift. It is a note of warning to our civilization, that cannot be too often repeated, this rapid "womanizing," as Miinsterberg calls it, of almost the entire education of the American youth. Is this complete boukversement of sex- conditions so very much nearer the wise economic balance kept by the older nations of civilized Europe than the Eastern condi- tions where the men draw the curtains of the harem across all such vexing questions? Are our own men, after all, driven by overwork rather than by their senses, slowly reverting to that convenient condi- tion of home affairs : "I haven't time, go ask your mother"? If that sentence was 53 AMERICAN MEN overheard anywhere on earth, would the speaker's nationality remain long in doubt, however free from colloquialism his ac- cent ? That young American women stand abreast of men, even very often ahead of them, in college work, represents nothing important save to the most superficial vision. It simply stamps the nature of that work in American colleges. Nor does the fact that women make apparently good teachers settle the question satisfactorily. As our German critic gently puts it: " The work, which in all other civilized countries is done by men, cannot in the United States be slipped into the hands of women without being profoundly al- tered in character." And again: "If the entire culture of the nation is womanized, it will be in the end weak and without decisive influence on the progress of the world." No poetical claim of idealizing their women, of having the utmost confidence 54 AMERICAN MEN in their judgment, will remove from American men the plain stigma of shirking the burdens borne by the men of all other civilized peoples; shirking them for what, up to the present time, have seemed to them of more importance questions of government and of the practical develop- ment of primitive conditions. And yet it was Wendell Phillips who wrote, " Edu- cation is the only interest worthy of the deep, controlling anxiety of the thought- ful man." As the future of our republic is rooted in the average intelligence of the people, it is difficult to watch with patience the turning over of the mental training of our children to a sex profoundly dominated by the emotions. Even a young and daring nation can- not fight the laws of nature, and " Nature cannot be dodged." She makes always for differentiation of function, not for empty repetitions of potentiality among species. The man has his, the woman 55 AMERICAN MEN hers, and our faulty system of education calls aloud for man's reinstated attention, his profoundest thought. In this country, " the whole higher cult- ure is feminized." Eighty-five per cent of the patrons of theatres are women, says our critic. Women are the readers of our books, they make up an American audi- ence at public lectures, concerts. They con- trol our charities and church work. In Europe at least one-half of the people present at an art exhibition are men; in this country one sees less than five per centum of men present at such an exhibi- tion, by actual count. The germ of femi- nization is firmly planted in the whole national intellectuality, until now woman has the practical monopoly. The purely native resources of our nation and our politics remain in the hands of men; it is about all they have retained, and the suffragists begrudge them even that. Ill THE responsibility for the present hu- miliating slave-trade in which rich Amer- ican girls are sold to the titled decadents of England and the Continent is almost wholly the fault of the men of this country. This opinion is offered only after years of observation and consideration of our social conditions, and after a pathological study of American men. Their open as- tonishment and chagrin at this phenome- non would be vastly amusing were it not so pathetic. Our men have a helpless in- ability to see themselves. Nor is the re- sponsibility of the mother lost sight of, for the foreign suitor begins with her, as he does in Europe. She is the outer cita- del which must first succumb to his studied charm. This outer citadel is carried with aston- ishing ease, as he quickly discovers, and for three reasons. The mother is easily 57 AMERICAN MEN dazzled; her social foundations do not go down deep in the class to which she al- most invariably belongs ; her husband has made every dollar of the lure of those millions, without which there would not be this problem to solve. Second, the wo- men who see what a given man really is, who estimate him at all justly, who begin even to understand men's social standards in this country or in Europe, are rare in- deed. The American mother is clearly out of her depth at the start, as unfit as a child to counsel her daughter. She is not equipped for it. It is not her work. In the third place, that subtle relationship of sex which European men of any age al- ways have the art of establishing with a woman of whatever age : their attention, their quick courtesy toward women, their habit of listening absorbedly when a wo- man speaks, all this is so absolutely new to the American mother that she be- comes hypnotized by it, and can no longer distinguish truth from falsity, or a mere 58 AMERICAN MEN national point of etiquette from a personal thouglitfulness and delicate tenderness of feeling. She, poor soul, at the age most sensi- tive to flattery, is hungry for a little con- sideration. When it comes from this for- eigner, unhappily there has been nothing in her past like it to help her to see through it to its core. On the contrary, she has been so long used to being treated as a social incumbrance, snubbed, interrupted, unconsidered by all of her daughter's do- mestic suitors, that to separate principles from manners, without the aid of her hus- band, who " leaves it all to her," in the old, honored American way, is to demand impossibilities of her. And he, the father? He is so used to the bees flying to and fro about his flower, he is so absolutely absorbed body and soul in his work, he has for so long shunted all such things off on his wife, that he only wakes up and "gets mad," as the saying is, when it is too late. 59 AMERICAN MEN Then the astonishment of the thought- less father and the selfish brother and the discarded, discourteous American suitor, are about equally divided. Any concep- tion that they are in any way responsible for it, never enters their minds. The mother is unjustly blamed for the whole thing. Nor do they withhold the " I told you so," when the cruel ending comes, as it so often does. As if any mother, even a parvenue American, would have encour- aged the suit of the foreigner, if she had not erred in her judgment of men. After all, though the United States may be the girl's paradise, it distinctly is not the mother's. For she must carry the load alone, all but the monetary providing, alone from the day of the child's birth to the day her boy kisses her lightly good-by, and goes on his way which she alone, not his weary, absent-minded father, helped him to select. She carries her daughter, from baby- hood, through all of her school-life (what number of American fathers know even 60 ;AMERICAN MEN the name of their daughters' day-schools, or had any part in the selection?) to the day when she too, unterrified through ig- norance, opens the door of her own life and goes out hand-in-hand with some un- known man. More than one American mother has told the writer of her weariness in struggling alone with such responsibil- ities, "a mother and yet husbandless." The American masculine claim of ab- sorption in his work does not in the least justify such a condition. Frenchmen sup- port their wives and still find time to go shopping with them too ! Englishmen do likewise, and find energy left to place their sons in school, energy to watch keenly the love-affairs of their daughters, unhesita- tingly bidding this or that man be gone ; moral courage and physical vitality left after the day's work to be in fact, as well as in fancy, " the head of the house." They have the wisdom to leave hours for play, for pure boyishness of living. And all this may be observed in the same middle 61 AMERICAN MEN class that with us turns the whole issue over to the wife, expecting of her all wisdom, though knowing her sheltered youth ; and all vitality, to run unceasingly and unaided the whole machinery of the family. No wonder our women have " nerves " ! No wonder they are becoming more and more restless (one of the first evidences of strain), more and more discontented as time passes. Masculine kindness to our women is some- times so tangled up with selfishness that there need be no surprise that there is some confusion regarding them. Not that our men want the money, after which they are striving, for themselves, for their pleasures. They do not. They are almost notoriously generous. Our rich men give, give, give : to their wives, their children, to colleges, to hospitals, to churches, until the whole world is amazed at their generosity. The habit and fury of work, unreason- ing, illogical, quite unrelated to any need, is a masculine disease in this country, and 62 AMERICAN MEN the whole social system has for years paid the inevitable penalty. Here and there a man tries to stop in time, but finds him- self obsessed by work so that he can no longer think of anything else. He is as much a slave to it as is any opium-taker to his drug, or drunkard to his potion. It is a grave danger, not only to the individual, but to the whole American civilization. The young Americans too, who are so contemptuous about our girls' preference for foreigners, must look to themselves and their shortcomings for some of the cause, and must, with the older men, share the responsibility for it. In the first place, our young men are not good lovers, however in the end they may be good husbands. And what girl of twenty has the foresight to comprehend that ? If she has that foresight she is simply not " in love," as the phrase goes, and alas ! it takes so much love to carry a woman, any woman, through the tremen- dous strain of marriage. A very necessary AMERICAN MEN and a very wise foresight is not natural in any maiden, and that is one of the solid advantages of the European system, at which we so glibly sneer. The difference in the divorce records of Europe and the United States is not all to the credit of any church. Where the head dominates the heart, the results show in the long run in marriage as well as in any other undertaking. The over-sentimental- ism in all such matters with us carries with it the gravest of dangers. We expect our girls to "fall in love " and at the same time be their own cool-headed chaperones; girls from whom we carefully hide the living truth. Is there logic in that? The opinion (which has been held for some twenty years) is ventured that the purely temperamental difference between American men and those of England and the Continent, is at the bottom of the freedom we have found it safe to accord our girls. The latter are not so intrinsically impeccable, but the for- mer are by nature temperamentally cold, a 64 AMERICAN MEN condition perhaps due to several genera- tions of overstraining. No sensitive woman can be in Europe a single day without recognizing this fact beyond all caviling. No man save a trained psychologist would recognize this patho- logical fact, of which hundreds of average American women-travelers have spoken to the writer, from girls of seventeen to women of fifty. " We women count for so much more over there, don't we? " is very often the way it is put. On the other hand, the leisure of our wo- men, their coddling, their luxury of living, has developed them along exactly opposite lines. May not this growing temperamental difference account for some of the tenden- cies in our civilization that seem obscure ? Our young men lean back and compla- cently argue that, as their hands and hearts are clean, and as all other men are rascals, in greater or less degree, they should be of course preferred. Have they gone no deeper into the question than that ? Would 65 AMERICAN MEN Thisbe have cared as ardently for Pyramus if the Wall had not been there ? Who carry flowers, jellies, books, sym- pathy to criminals, however hideous their crimes, but the women ? The ill-regulated, unreasoning emotionality of a large num- ber of our women is not to be overesti- mated in determining any question apper- taining to them. Women's Rights women, so-called, who naturally affiliate one with another, may shudder and laugh de- risively to their heart's content, but the truth is unassailable, that worth has not yet succeeded in deciding the love-affairs of either sex. Men are in no greater de- gree attracted by the gentle, well-balanced, womanly girls, who would make excellent wives, than the latter by the honest, disin- terested, temperate, clean-hearted men. If men and women did make wise selections the villains would be at hand. Other mat- ters decide such problems. The question of brilliancy of plumage is not so far behind us humans that it no longer counts. Our 66 AMERICAN MEN college men study these matters, but fail to make the atavistic analogy when it comes to social matters in their later lives. Hence their profane rage at the girls when for- eigners come fortune-hunting. If the truth were told, most young Ameri- can men are not especially interesting. They do not keep up their reading. They have a national obtundity when it comes to music, to art, to literature ; nor do many of them take any of these things at all seriously. The young among them are not good conversationalists. Our cleverest men are monologists pure and simple. They lecture admirably. They are born orators along modified lines. They are inevitable story- tellers. None of this is conversation ; and women like conversation, like its courtesies, which at least pretend a little interest when their turn comes in the game. Knowledge of people and affairs outside our own coun- try pricks more than one bubble about our young men. Tired men fill our vaudeville theatres, 67 AMERICAN MEN for thereat least the audience is largely mas- culine, even in the daytime. They are too near exhaustion to do more than listen to wit quite easy of comprehension. Our girls are accustomed to amusing these tired men. That joy of being amused, of being interested by a man of the world, is not to be omitted in any just weighing of the question why they find foreigners attractive; and as time passes, in spite of all the bitter disillusionments of the past, our rich girls will make more and more unflattering selections from among suitors from across the seas. And it is full time our young men awakened to their own share in the causes which lead to such a condition. The whole social system of Eng- land and of Europe generally spares a girl such shameful sales. The mothers, the fa- thers, the men about her, are equipped to protect her, and they take the time and spare the energy to do so. Justly considered, it is a social, psychic question, quite apart from man's commercial value in the world. WHY AMERICAN MOTHERS FAIL WHY AMERICAN MOTHERS FAIL "You wish, O woman, to be ardently loved, and forever, even till death ! Be, then, the mother of your children." " LEVANA." MOTHERS are the gardeners of the human race. There is no office under the divine government that approaches theirs, be- cause none other is so closely allied to it. Any system of education that fails to impress upon our girls the immense civic value of motherhood, its imposing dig- nity, its grave responsibilities to the state itself, fails of its purpose. Any system of education in our republic that does not instill, from the start, into an American boy, the fact that this government is rooted in his vote and that of his com- rades, fails doubly of its purpose. Our much-vaunted public-school sys- 7 1 AMERICAN MOTHERS tern, which we shake like a banderole in the face of Europe, does neither of these things ; or rather, it does the former not at all, and the latter most perfunctorily and inadequately. The reason that girls are not taught the dignity of motherhood is only too ob- vious : it is but the usual crude, shame- faced American way of totally ignoring the wholesome primal elements of human life. Our schools shirk the responsibility by claiming that such counsel should come from mothers. And the mothers are rare indeed who do not ignore, generation after generation, this fundamental problem. Between the two negligences girls prac- tically are never given this larger point of view, which would be good not only for the state, but also for their own personal uplift above that sense of personal failure that so often comes to us all. The boys are not inoculated with the germ of citizenship because their educa- tion is too often left in the hands of rou- AMERICAN MOTHERS tine teachers totally incapable of any large outlook upon life, or else of those whose hands are tied by convention. Again, nei- ther parents nor schools do their duty by the boy any more than by the girl. There are no state or federal laws to force recog- nition of such vital questions ; to direct, at once, the hearing of American boys and girls to that deep national note that would bind them to life's bigger harmonies, to those larger relationships of the individual to government and society. These two sentiments alone, thoroughly instilled in the flexible minds and hearts of our young people, would, later on, stay many a hand bent on the social suicide of divorce; and also in two generations would begin to make for good in the world of politics. Unfortunately, educational legislation is slow to recognize its own shortcomings, slower still to rectify them. American men, as a whole, are as strangely weak and in- vertebrate in their relations to their chil- dren as they are in their relations to their 73 AMERICAN MOTHERS wives. The quicker remedy lies there. But only a riper, sounder civilization, with enlarged vision, will see its utmost needs, and make its demands. So, after all, it is to the mothers one must speak with lowered voice: to the gardeners, some wise and some unwise ; some patient and some restless; the strong of vision, and the near-sighted gardeners, working among the human seedlings and young plants in the great garden called Society. Fathers are seldom more than the flo- rists connected with the hothouses. They deal almost solely with effects; after the mothers have done, well or ill, the work down in the dark under the blossoming plant, digging sometimes very blindly among the twisted roots of cause. So it has come about that, when the young children in her care grow awry, we inquire of the mother and her methods; just as we bespeak the truck-gardener when our vegetables are amiss, or a horse- 74 AMERICAN MOTHERS breeder when our cattle breed down along degenerate lines. A successful mother (fighting both he- redity and individual bias) is a more im- portant factor in a municipality than any merely successful man in it; much more important, were she but made to realize it. For motherhood is a thing apart, " a dis- tinct and individual creation; different from anything else God ever thought of," said, in all reverence, an American preacher. Her position has in it all the tragedy of lifelong isolation in the performance of her work; all the pathos of vast expendi- ture of vitality with no personal reward. The millionaire railroad official, once an office-boy, gets his reward for tremendous Iab0r, in power and money ; the scientist gets his in the world's recognition of his accomplished work. The mother's reward is spiritual, and lies only in the work itself, for she has not the stimulus of an audi- ence, and few indeed are the children who v recognize their mother's struggles, their 75 AMERICAN MOTHERS mothers sacrifices. As to her love, they accept it as they do the air they breathe; and who of us stops to thank Oxygen and Nitrogen for combining so conveniently for our benefit ? All of this purposely leaves out the mother's emotional reward, for reasons that will appear later. Much more impor- tant than any matter of sentiment is it that she should learn that she is doing some- thing for her country, apart from all the very best efforts of man. It would not be amiss if in every home one found this sentence of Phillips Brooks's, illuminated, and hung well "on the line": "No man has come to true greatness who has not felt, in some degree, that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him He gives him for mankind." There is a pathetic hopelessness about many mothers. One so often hears them wearily say, " I Ve given up my whole life for years to my children, and yet it seems to have failed. They are not as I meant 76 AMERICAN MOTHERS them to be, nor as I hoped that they would be. What is wrong? I wish some- one would help me." It is suggested, in all humility and ten- derness, that there are several things go- ing amiss in the human garden. In the first place, it takes something besides fem- inine hearts to manage men and the off- spring of men ; it takes feminine brains, every wisdom-tipped arrow in a woman's quiver. Nine times out of ten, women put too much emotion, and not enough judgment, into both wifehood and mother- hood. Everything has combined for cen- turies to bring this about. Much of the discontent of the present day among / women is based on the fact that they do not yet realize that their life-tasks are not properly merely emotional at all, but pre- ' eminently intellectual. It is safe to say that if a woman finds that her life makes no use of her intellect, she is a bad house- keeper, a poor wife, a poorer mother, a useless citizen. 77 AMERICAN MOTHERS The best wives and mothers manage to preserve a certain mental aloofness from their husbands and children, the better to estimate with justice the task ahead. It is precisely that faculty which differentiates a woman from a tigress, whose mere emo- tion, considered by itself, in both relation- ships is no different in kind from the woman's own. Qne can count so abso- lutely upon the basic emotionality of women, that a deal of excision will still leave an abundance for the joy of man and his everlasting bewilderment. The whole present tendency in life is to the over-development of emotion among men, women, and especially children; and little or nothing is done to keep it in its proper proportion. As sentiment has been dying out in modern life, its place seems to be taken by nerve excitation ; by a craving for agitation of any sort. The present madness for speed over the seas, through the air, through the solid earth itself, unduly develops a sort of pleas- 78 AMERICAN MOTHERS urable trepidation among adults; as those so-called "amusements" at "resorts" both terrify and fascinate the unfortunate chil- dren who are allowed to flock to them. The hourly intrusion of news racks our nerves. It is the opium of this generation which we cannot long remain without. That hitherto restful week at sea, upon which overtaxed men and women could once count in sim- pler, slower times, is being taken from us forever. Music is becoming more and more emo- tional as time passes. In the drama surely Sardou and Ibsen take more out of their auditors than even Shakespeare ever did. A novel must leave a man breathless, or he is bored; so, too, an afternoon drive. Winged Mercury is the god of the hour. A bit of a rascal, to be sure, but he "gets there"! There is no peace to be had, no restful slow-sipping of life that once satis- fied our strong-nerved forefathers. Woman has but drifted with the rush- ing current. Her wifehood is generally 79 AMERICAN MOTHERS measured by the yardstick of her pleasura- ble emotions; her motherhood very often by a series of passionate instincts which are allowed full sway, as if representing directly the word of God in a household. What is really needed to precipitate both peace and progress is, not the elimination, but the firm control of emotion and instinct, by cool deliberate feminine wisdom all of that which should have been transmitted to her before marriage and motherhood, and all that she has herself since discovered. Marriage and motherhood still come into a girl's life, even in this materialistic country of ours, in a succession of blinding emo- tional flashes, standing vividly out against the dark sky of utter ignorance. She is left bewildered, groping in the dark thereafter, feeling about her nothing stable, but only more, and more, and ever more emo- tions ! Ignorant of her subject, criminally un- prepared, her children are often a mere series of unsuccessful experiments, which 80 AMERICAN MOTHERS she tries, rather frantically, one after an- other, as each child presents new problems. For Nature has a trait which greatly com- plicates a mother's work : a mysterious pas- sion for seemingly useless differentiation within a given species. This forces the mother both to pass new laws and to con- stantly revise old laws in her government code. "Human experience, like the stern-lights of a ship at sea, illumines only the path which we have passed over." It is the searchlights for which we are pleading. If a mother would but strive to put less heart into it all, and more mind! If she would but look with wide-open eyes and say to herself, "I will make the care of my children an intellectual task. I '11 put into it what brains I have, as I used once to do into literary, philanthropic, or social mat- ters. This is the most important of all, for it embraces everything else. It 's not a mere question of alternating love and tears, fierce pride and frantic despair." 81 AMERICAN MOTHERS Her duties in the garden are three: i. Watering the seeds. 2. Pruning the young growing plants. 3. Killing the offending insects at the blossoming time. And ever and always weeding is to be done, from the early spring till the snow comes. I THE SEEDS ON the whole, too much time is given by an American mother to a child in its infancy, between the first and the third year; too little time from the fourth to the tenth year ; and after that she allows others' opinions, much too often, to dominate her own in both the mental and the moral de- velopment of her family. She has come to think that the task is no longer hers. Thus it has come about that education has so largely become the cumbersome con- vention that it undoubtedly is. The fathers in the United States leave it to the mothers ; the mothers leave it to the schools; the schools, public or private, are generally in the hands of narrow specialists, "common- schooled and uncultivated/' in the sense that " culture looks beyond machinery," as Matthew Arnold said of us. So many par- 83 AMERICAN MOTHERS ents feed their children blindly into the edu- cational hopper, and then walk to the spout at the other end to receive unquestioned the "finished" product. Schools override the mother's own intelligent convictions; Sunday schools take the place, and most in- adequately, of her own sense of morality. Nothing of this is as it should be. If a mother ever sinks into the background of her child's life she has no one to blame for it but herself. She has not risen to the task, that 's all. Love has not proved itself every- thing in the solution of her problem. She can supplement the crudities of the child's mental schooling, and should leave Sunday schools for the motherless. No one can know, as she does, the weak spots in her offspring's character. The love-madness of a young mother for her tiny infant, poetical and picturesque as it is, is harmful in many ways. It is to a great extent a sensuous obsession to which in this country the husband and father is, all too often, ruthlessly sacrificed. If this 84 AMERICAN MOTHERS sacrifice were in the least justified by the needs of the infant, there would be little to criticise; but it is distinctly not so justified in the average middle-jdass household. A phlegmatic nurse whose ministrations are rooted in duty alone, is not only equally as good for the baby, but is very much better. It is but a seed, and all the better, as are other seeds, for being left undisturbed to sleep its way into life. If the child does not need all this frenzy ofwatching and excited coddling of the more or less hysterical mother, then it is not only unwise but cruel to subject the bewildered young father to the half-tragic, half-comic tyranny of an American household ruled by a young baby. The violent bushing that he receives at the front door, the complete ignoring of all of his rights, the needless neglect hour after hour while his wife pardon, his baby's mother! worships at her new shrine, emphasize the unbalanced emotionality of most of our young women. Those hours of heedless 85 AMERICAN MOTHERS neglect on the part of the wife are very often the entering wedge which some day will separate the two. The child, instead of bringing them close/ together, is the inno- cent cause of their growing apart. At the root of it is not too much love, but too little mental balance. Moreover, the conten- tion is made that it is not wholly love which blinds her, it is to a certain extent the emotional indulgence of a febrile un- controlled young woman adrift on the sea of a newly discovered instinct. "Knowledge is the parent of love; Wisdom, love itself." If it is claimed that the national curse of poor servants is the cause of this un- deniable obsession of young American mothers, the reply is ready : " Why then is it that between the years of four and ten American children do not see enough of their mothers ? " The servant question is surely no nearer solution, and no apa- thetic nurse can then give the child what the mother can and should give. 86 II PRUNING THE YOUNG PLANTS MORE than one American mother has admitted to the writer a curious sudden reaction of indifference against her once- worshiped baby after the fifth year. The ecstatic mother-passion of earlier days has mysteriously fled, just as the wife-ecstasy had fled in its turn. She admitted it, as if it were an interesting psychic phenome- non, and she helpless to right it just when the child really begins to need her tenderness, her time, all of her wisdom and gravest consideration ! Every one of these successive phases of motherhood could just as well have been taught her years before, taught her to watch for, guard against, and meet intelli- gently when the issues presented them- selves, one by one, in her own life. Some new factor must be evolved in our national AMERICAN MOTHERS life to fill successfully this gap between four and ten in our children's lives. Only when enforced by poverty do a large number of American mothers them- selves care for their young children, be- yond mere physical needs. They would not trust the little impercipient life at first to a nurse, however staid and competent; now, more often than is good to see, an ignorant nursemaid of sixteen years be- comes the predominant element in the child's life. Manners, morals, mental needs are left largely in her hands and she is a mere child herself. The physical needs, at least so far as cleanliness is concerned, generally remain in the mother's hands, but the question of the child's diet runs riot in more American households than is at all realized. If the child is well dressed, its hair and teeth in perfect condition, it is turned over to the nurse from eight in the morning till eight at night. Can it be that we had much better adopt from England the nursery-governess and 88 AMERICAN MOTHERS the nursery-table ? The former (with all her drawbacks) is infinitely more compe- tent than our mere " nurse-girls " ; while the latter institution ensures the simple diet of which our children are in such dire need. At least we should be spared the sight of an elaborately dressed American baby of six, entirely unattended, walking into a huge hotel dining-room where her parents had lived for years, and ordering " deviled crabs and pink ice cream " for her dinner, which the poor little creature actually ate amid the smiling glances of the guests and waiters ! It was no less than a painful vsight, and by no means an isolated instance. What was inevitably ahead of that child ? Her digestion ruined, her vanity, her in- dependence forced before their time, her whole sensibility blunted. Even hotel-life need not spoil a child, if less money were spent on her clothes and her mother's and part of the saving paid in fair wages to a first-class governess, who would remove AMERICAN MOTHERS the little one from flattering glances, and place her in a world where "deviled crabs' 1 would remain an unknown temptation for many a long year to come. If those American mothers who labor so many hours in torturing some flimsy material with drawn-work or embroidery would but give the same time, or even part of it, to the little child's spirit instead of its body ! Very often we see a prince- like body, carrying a starving little soul, starving for companionship, for healthy amusement, for that sense of comfort that strict but intelligent discipline alone brings alike* to children and to servants. Children's amusements in this country are undoubtedly becoming more and more artificial. Why? Because it makes the mother's and nurse's task easier. Examine the situation from whatever standpoint you choose, every facet shows this deplorable fact. To feed and clothe a child of five is a very simple and expeditious matter com- pared with amusing that restless little bun- 90 AMERICAN MOTHERS die of activities. And yet in a long life the writer has known only one mother who took upon her own shoulders the entire amusement of her family of five children, leaving the sewing to the nurses ! There were no theatres, no vaudeville, no cir- cuses, no hippodromes, to bewilder and exhaust those children's minds; no me- chanical toys, no elaborate paper dolls " made in Germany." They had hammers, nails, and some boards ; pieces of treasured Bristol-board, scissors, paste, and a little paint-box, and the "stay-in" days flew by, given over to the joy of creation under the sympathetic direction of that mother, who sat in a low chair, close to, their level, that she might be one of them. On the out-of- door days, they were tumbled into a little wagonette, which was their nursery. The old pony was driven by the mother her- self; the best child of the day sat beside her in the seat of honor, and off they jogged to the woods or the beach, both of which were happily accessible. Their AMERICAN MOTHERS simple lunch was devoured afield. The mother invented, directed, and entered into all their games, the merriest of them all. But the charm of an ocean beach is supreme and needs no human aids ; so, once she gave a push to the little eager minds, off they slid, enthusiastic and con- tented for hours. The mother whipped out a book from under the carriage-seat, and so got to herself a couple of hours of cov- eted reading. For she was a brilliant, cul- tivated woman, knowing several languages and yet was content to spend it all lav- ishly for thirteen years of her short life, upon her children. This inspired mother claimed that it was far less of a strain to play with her children than to punish them ; because a large percentage of the sins of childhood are based on lack of intelligent diversion. From this mother came no whine about her wasted talents, because she made use of them ! During the severe winters, she made her incessant task of reading to 92 AMERICAN MOTHERS her children tell significantly. Before the eldest was ten years old, they all knew almost every nook and cranny of Walter Scott, and other standard works followed in turn. She read certain idyllic tales writ- ten in French, which she translated aloud into simple English, thereby diverting her- self as well as the children. It was years before they even knew what she had done. One of that family told me that he had never read a current book of fiction until he was sixteen ! His taste had been formed without any long-winded lectures on liter- ature. Froissart, JEsop, Josephus, and Bunyan were household words. Later, the mother wrote little plays full of fire and sword, into which was smuggled many a spoonful of history, or mythology, or poetical legend. The children were the eager little stock company. She rehearsed them, suggested costumes and scenery; and yet, with all this prodigal expenditure of time and real talent, she always laugh- ingly claimed to other mothers: "Try it! 93 AMERICAN MOTHERS They are happier, and so am I. Idleness and absence of motive lead to crime in the nursery as well as the street. And as for me, I know exactly what they are doing, and how." Hers was a rarely rich, successful life. That she was a much-loved woman to the end scarce need be recorded of her. Within a year the dernier cri in child- amusement at a charitable fete brought vividly back, through contrast, that pic- ture of fine motherhood. Kinetoscopes depicted, for tents reeking full of feverish- eyed children, fictitious scenes of Russian cruelty ending in a most revolting form of murder ! Little breathless voices asked in the dark : " What does it mean, mo- ther?" "Why does he hate her so much, mother?" One strained in the half light to see such mothers of little beings who would have been so happy merely roam- ing through the adjoining meadows ! Then later came another "amusement" for the children. A real hose-and-ladder com- 94 AMERICAN MOTHERS pany, a real fire engine rented for the purpose ; a fire alarm, the burning of a small wooden house erected for the pur- pose, the realistic rescue of a straw mo- ther and child, all for the amusement save the mark! of those watching babies! The whole thing was absolutely insane in its blindness to the real needs of child-life. No wonder we see them blase at eight, nervous wrecks at twelve, neuras- thenia, insomnia, dipsomania, decadence ahead of them. And the committee who made out this programme (including* many another "sensational feature") was composed of the leading women of the city in which the festival was held. Where were the mothers to wipe out with justi- fiable wrath such a breach of sane think- ing? such an outrage to the most obvious of responsibilities ? Our American communities are quick to regulate child-labor in some wretched household where the pennies count so much ; but one seldom hears of any laws 95 AMERICAN MOTHERS to regulate children's amusements among the many comfortable homes where the mothers are either too weak, too silly, or too selfish, to make and enforce their own laws. And so the weeds come thick and fast and choke the young growing plants, the weed of vaudeville, killing the sense for true dramatic art ; the pest of rag-time, killing music; slang, choking language; indiscriminate current-novel-reading, fatal to any good reading in the future; the devastating weed of unhealthy excitement, to blight, for all time, any simple whole- someness of either thought or feeling. A law prohibiting children under the age of fifteen from entering any and all theatres might well be passed with profit, taking out of the incompetent hands of mothers any volition in this grave matter. It fills the air this craze of the merest children for cheap shows in this country ; it packs their minds with vulgar triviali- ties, debases their ideals, perverts their taste. It is becoming daily more frequent. AMERICAN MOTHERS As well feed a child on mushrooms and champagne, and expect it ever afterwards to relish bread and milk. It is but a repetition of that poor neg- lected baby and her "deviled crabs and pink ice cream " ! One sees hundreds of examples of it, in one form or another, every year of living in this country. At the root of it, in every single instance, is an unwise mother. Her children remain ignorant where they should be familiar; become enlightened where they should be blind ; and suffer always from enlarge- ment of the emotions. Within a year the writer saw at a hotel an eager group of beautifully clad little ones gathered every evening between seven and eight about a middle-aged cripple who told them stories. They were breathless, entranced. That it was a per- fectly new element in their lives was ap- parent. To be deprived of it was the severest punishment in that colony of several hundred souls. 97 AMERICAN MOTHERS A young woman was overheard idly to observe to her companion, " Is n't it a charming sight ? " The older woman with her replied an- grily: "It is distinctly not a charming sight ! It is shocking ! What are they, with all their extravagant clothes, but the starving children of selfish, vain mothers? That unfortunate man simply fills up an awful gap in their lives every mother as she sees it should blush and hang her head. Out of that score of children, there is not one who has ever had an adult give it any real companionship before in its life. I have taken the trouble to verify this and so I say again, that picture over there is far from being charming ! " Ill DESTROYING THE INSECTS AT BLOSSOMING TIME A WISE mother will make long-stored wisdom bear fresh fruit. All of her read- ing can be utilized. Long ago she read that "a word unspoken is like a sword in thy scabbard thine; if vented, thy sword is in another's hand." She can draw a lesson from it for her son in the power of silence and reserve. She also read that "respect for others is the first condition of savoir vivre" ; and she is helped in her task of teaching her girl tactfulness and good manners ; and that they are not to be looked for in a laby- rinth of negatives, but found walking along the highway in the good sunshine. In the much-mooted question of man- ners the imitativeness of children should make the mothers' task easier than it is, 99 AMERICAN MOTHERS for the solution is example, not precept. Imitation is the whole story. A little boy is scolded for not remembering to raise his cap "to the ladies." I have met lads of six and eight to whom this courtesy had already become as instinctive as it was to their father. No more so, no less, but exactly as it was to their father. "Trot father, trot mither, how can foal amble ? " Making all allowance for wide national differences of opinion, there is much in a French mother's sympathy with her son, as he approaches manhood, which seems more intelligent than the Anglo- Saxon way of withholding sympathy at that crisis. Most American mothers sud- denly turn into stepmothers at this crit- ical period. Every sentence begins with " Thou shalt not," and she plumes her- self upon her righteousness. And her boy? He becomes a stranger to her. The French mother but adds a new com- radeship to her old tenderness, full of far-sighted wisdom and fathomless sym- 100 AMERICAN MOTHERS pathy for existing conditions; not for ideal conditions that do not exist. He and his mother become closer friends than ever, and he does not withdraw himself from her. She cares much more for her boy than for her righteousness this mother ! It is but a change in the intellectual outlook, and yet surprisingly few Ameri- can women recognize the necessity for it. When an American mother has the intel- ligence to understand, she finds that her son will bring to her not only his tri- umphs but his failures; not only the story of his virtues but that of his sins, man to man, and then only the wisest motherhood can guide him safely out of the wilderness. But the deepest stain on American motherhood is exactly at this period in the life of her grown son and grown daughter. For some reason, partly tem- peramental, a large number of mothers fall short of any comprehension of what 101 AMERICAN MOTHERS is demanded of them. Even when they have been faithful in all their earlier trusts, they fail very often at this point. Her boy, now a man, of course loves her as of old, but she has not been his in- tellectual comrade, his strongest inspira- tion, as she might have been had she put her brain into her motherhood, applied what knowledge she had, or studied along the best lines running parallel to the lines of his development. There are scores of helpful hygienic and philosophical books that would aid mothers to approach their problem well- equipped. All this is of course also the task of the father, but we are speaking of American conditions, and we may as well exclude him first as last, as he has elected to shed family responsibilities, save that of lavish monetary support. In that par- ticular he is a prince. One illustration cut from the matrix of life is worth a chapter of generalities. One summer night a few years ago four IO2 AMERICAN MOTHERS people sat on a high roof near New York City. One could see far down the bay and over to the Jersey shore. There was a middle-aged woman and her son of twenty-three years, an elderly man and his wife all Americans. The mother had been boasting of her three boys, their success, their virtues. Under it all was a very natural and pretty pride, as of a gardener telling of his roses, and their freedom from the worm i' the bud. A chance word brought politics to the front. The older woman said aside to the young man : "So you've twice cast your yote! It marks an epoch in a man's life, only second to marriage, does n't it ? To take one's part, though small, in the making of history that is fine ! " The mother laughed. " My son has never voted, and says he never will he hates politics, and I don't wonder ! " 103 AMERICAN MOTHERS All as lightly as if telling of a fastidious taste in cravats ! The son added tolerantly, "We men know what a dirty mess it is." In the older woman's heart moaned a sad voice : " She is a failure^ this mother ! She is blind, and so he, the son, does not see the truth!" The silence which followed was filled by the languor of the heat and the pres- sure of low-bending skies. Then the older man chuckled and mut- tered: " There 's trouble ahead low bridge ! " For he knew his wife and the hot fires flaming beneath her silence. " Will you take me over there, where I can see the light on the Statue of Lib- erty?" she presently asked quietly, and she and the youth walked away. It took her forty-five minutes to do the work, and years have passed, but that man has voted ever since ! Jerking her head in the direction of Bedloe's Island, she began: 104 AMERICAN MOTHERS "Oh don't laugh, don't laugh, you have admitted a crime ! Don't you know, have n't you been taught, don't you see for yourself, that every time an educated man in the United States fails to vote he has slyly slipped a stone out of place in the foundations of that great statue over there, the foundations of our government ? Upon your vote rests the security of the whole complicated structure of republicanism, as we Ameri- cans are now testing it in the eyes of the world. Whatever you do, do not laugh ! " In the end she held out her hand and spoke gently : " You see I, being a wo- man, have no vote, so you must cast yours for yourself and for me too, as wisely as you can. Will you ? " The mother was still laughing when the older woman bade them good-night ; but the latter was very sad, having no sons of her own with any need of her. American women constantly cry out against the smallness of their lives, the 105 AMERICAN MOTHERS limitations that encompass them. If they would but do wisely and thoroughly their apportioned tasks, they would have need of every power possible to humanity, such are the potentialities of true mother- hood. The schools of both son and daughter would be forced into rational, logical lines ; the boy would be trained first, last, and always, for good citizenship ; the daugh- ter would not be allowed to drift on, as helpless as a leaf on a stream, with no knowledge whatever of the currents, the cataracts, the whirlpools ahead of her inevitably ahead of her on her way down to the broad sea of fine womanhood. Women fret themselves and others for the right to vote, and they do not see that their son's vote, their brother's, their friend's, is verily their own. They cry out against certain social evils, and they for- get that the ranks are ever recruited from among the daughters of Vanity, Uncon- trol, and Idleness. 106 AMERICAN MOTHERS Even the childless women of the world have placed upon them the responsibility of motherhood ; for every young man can be a task to them, every girl better for their counsel. There is no excuse for idleness or re- pining there is work in plenty for all women ; and it is the most honorable work in the world, for " On the blue mountains of our dim childhood towards which we ever turn and look, stand the mothers who marked out to us, from thence, our life." WHAT WE PUT UP WITH WHAT WE PUT UP WITH THE feeling of an American for his flag is especially deeply rooted. It is the only symbol he has, about which to wreathe whatever of national sentiment he has within him. It takes the place of a royal family in our imaginations ; it survives our changes of administration; it stands the assaults of war, and the equally peril- ous countermining of peace. It has coirfe to symbolize, in a word, our national con- tinuity. The tiniest emigrant is quickly taught in our public schools to raise his grimy little fist in salutation of it; the toughest old soldier or sailor needs no other lead- ership to spur him on to death in its de- fense. It is as if we were to paraphrase that old mingled cry of mourning and tri- iii WHAT WE PUT UP WITH umph, "Le President est mort; vive le Drapeau ! " Only a couple of yards of bright bunt- ing, and eighty millions of people behind it couchant. And yet surely there is no nation of them aU'which so persistently misuses its most cherished emblem, forgetful that "if we wish ourselves to be high, we should treat that which is over us as high." No- thing is more certain than that "familiarity excludes respect," as ^Esop chose to put it. One must live for five years under the flags of other nations to thrill deeply at sight of one's own ; patriotism seeming to grow in a ratio of distance from home. Witness the sore-headed German Social- ist fuming like a furnace in the Father- land, where nothing pleases him, from the Kaiser down to the tax on beer; and see him three years later transplanted to American soil, raising his stein, with tears in his eyes, as he drinks his "Hoch der Kaiser." 112 WHAT WE PUT UP WITH The writer in her younger days has stood for hours up in the old Campanile at Venice, or across the canal at the Salute, and watched daily for the coming of a cer- tain white ship-of-war carrying " the Flag." At last there was a movement in the pale distance far down the harbor, as if a phan- tom ship out of the dim past had entered the Diga of Malamocco. Creeping on and on in the breathless iridescent morning air, at last the great white monster emerged, and came more and more slowly through the narrow path to the harbor. The Flag the Stars and Stripes! And then a sud- den veil of tears blots out all: ship and flag and shore and quivering sunlight all but the aching thought of home ! Years later this Exile (not Expatriate), coming down from the Black Sea on the Bosphorus up near Buyukdereh, with Asia on the left and Europe on the right, and with thoughts bent full upon that unique geographical situation, suddenly felt her heart stop beating with a passionate nos- "3 WHAT WE PUT UP WITH talgia, all interest in geography dead at a breath. A wandering breeze had brought down a strain of familiar music, so foreign to the environment as to be humorous but for its fierce tug at the heart "Dixie/* play.ed on a mandolin and a guitar, com- ing from a trim yacht anchored ofFThe- rapia, the Flag floating sleepily from her stern. Space was annihilated, home brought so close that one stopped breathing. And again, a few years later, in Manila Bay the Exile stood on the deck of the flagship which had led the battle line not many months before, during the fight of that first of May. The western sky was quartered in blood and gold and silver and iridescence; one of those tropical sunsets that are impos- sible to paint by either brush or pen. About the American man-of-war was that pitiful semicircle of half-sunken Span- ish ships, before there was time to remove them. In the centre of the poop of the 114 WHAT WE PUT UP WITH Olympia, silhouetted against that blazing sunset, was the distinguished-looking, very erect figure of the admiral, in white uni- form, standing at attention, facing the Flag as it was lowered from the staff. As it slipped down very slowly to its rest for the night, the bugles sounded retreat. Motionless and in absolute silence the little band of exiles saw the naval cere- mony through to its finish. There were few on deck that evening who failed to realize that it was an illumi- nated page in American history, a thing to hush the light jest, excuse enough for full eyes and quivering lips. Against such a mental background as this, the following pictures stand out with almost painful clearness. Another year and another, and