m »>w< y j mw n t mtw »iwt<>W»«« lllliWWtlimHIM * H t «M I W BHlHt m mw wHiM n*J TM ' MMn» «iww H t m i M wi ■ -«tU*wHf re i m M m H*i m m«iiw«w ' 'rttiao*>***f«* H t «i i m »» ■ rj U l WiW^ W THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES u^^*- ^ The Rise of Dennis Hathnaught To My Wife, JESSIE HOWELL MacCARTHY Who Assisted Me in Gathering Material and Who Typed the Manuscript^ This Book Is Inscribed. THE RISE OF DEMIS HATHMU&HT Life of the Common People Across the Ages as Set Down in the Great Books of the World By JAMES PHILIP MacCARTH Y Author of "The Newspaper Worker" Brooklyn— New York THE WRITERS' PUBLISHING CO. Copyrlgrhted for the Author by the Writers' Fnbllshlng; Co., Brooklyn^— New York, TJ. S. A., 1915. Application for British Copyright pend- ing. Set np and Blectrotyped. First Edition of 1,000 Print- ed In September, 1915. The Writers' Fabllshing Com- pany, Brooklyn— New York, V. S. A. on i3 hA t1l> DENNIS HATHNAUGHT'S GENEALOGICAL TREE Chapter I. page Dennis Hathnaught's Lowly Origin; His Biological Ancestry; Primi- tive Man; Ancient Contempt for Labour, EflFects of Evolution and Suggestion on Human Progress... 1 Chapter II. Dennis Hathnaught Early Assumes the Hod; Account of Ancient Labour and Slavery 13 Chapter III. Dennis' Iron Collar — "Servus Sum." Slavery in the Roman Republic and Empire 27 ^ Chapter IV. — ' The World's Midnight— Hathnaught as Serf; Feudal System, its Rise and Decline; Misery of the Corn- el mon People in the Middle Ages; If) Debt of Modern Times to Mediaeval CM Thinkers and Doers 33 o Chapter V. When Dennis Hathnaught was a Saxon; Life Under Manorial Sys- tem and the Peculiar Saxon Laws t which form the Basis of all Good g Modern Laws. Effects of the Nor- ^ man Conquest 44 f> Chapter VI. \ The Black Death Emancipates Dennis; By making Labour Scarce, this Pestilence led to Wage System and Growth of Class Conscious Working Class 55 "* Chapter VII. Dennis Hathnaught Becomes a Citizen; Rise of Cities in Middle Ages and Struggle of Hard Work- ing Burghers with the Lawless, LTseless and Ignorant Nobility 64 462375 Chapter VIII. page Dennis Founds the Hanseatic League; Weary of Being Robbed by Thieving Barons, Common Men Unite in Great Trade Confederation and Become More Powerful than Nations 81 Chapter IX. Fritz Hathnaught and the Peas- ants' War; Struggle of German Labour in Sixteenth Century to Emancipate Itself from Feudal Op- pression, and Unspeakable Manner in which Nobles put the Rising Down; Belgium Had a Precedent 90 Chapter X. Dennis in Sixteenth Century Eng- land; Remarkable Prosperity of English Hathnaughts in this Age as Shown by Froude; Guilds and Lon- don Companies 9.5 Chapter XI. Dennis in Seventeenth Century England; Macaulay's Graphic Pic- ture of the Times; Degradation of the People; Lack of Sympathy with Suffering; Brutality of Sports and of the Nobility lOG Chapter XII. Dennis and the Industrial Revolu- tion; Domestic Labour gives way to Factory System ; Misery of Child Labour before Enactment of Fac- tory Laws Ill Chapter XIII. Jacques Bonhomme, French Hath- naught ; Causes that led a Degraded and Enslaved People to Turn Upon their Oppressors and Annihilate them in the French Revolution.... 12S Chapter XIV. Dennis the Ploughman in Politics; Conditions that led to Emancipation of English Agriciiltnriil Labourers and their l.'.iifranchiscincnt in 1884. 1S8 Chapter XV. page The Right Hon. Dennis Hath- naught, M.P. ; Account of Recent Socialistic Legislation in England under Leadership of Lloyd George and of tiie Labour Party; Curb- ing the Lords 149 Chapter XVL Patrick Hathnaught, Home Ruler; True Cause of Modern Irish Dissen- sion is Religious Differences; Two Races in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics; Signs of Better Times.. 169 Chapter XVII. Slavic Hathnaughts, Ivan and Michael; Extraordinary Power of Nobles and Church over the People; Emancipation of the Serfs ; Struggle toward Freedom 170 Chapter XVIII. Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam; Brief Sketch of American Industry; Rise of the Trusts; Tariff Reform; - Effect of Slavery on Southern Character 180 Chapter XIX. Dennis Setting His House in Order; Economic Reform; Socialism; Syn- dicalism and Sabotage; What is to Follow Socialism? Feminism; Trade Unions 193 Chapter XX. Dennis Inquiring into Land Titles; Henry George's Single Tax; The Physiocrats; Malthusian Laws of Population; Unearned Increment.. 211 Chapter XXI. Dennis Becomes a Literary Hero; Summaries of Books Touching upon Certain Peculiar Phases of the Labour Movement 217 Chapter XXII. Hathnaught versus Have-and-Hold ; Barbarism of People and Nobles of Olden Times; Whim being Re- placed by Responsibility; Dennis Approaching Real Freedom 226 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT RISES TO EXPLAIN. "The Rise of Dennis Hathnaught" was not written with an eye to obtaining a university degree. It is therefore chatty and informal, rather than painfully sci- entific and academic. We should not brood too much over the miseries of a dead past when there is so much to be done in the living present. But man may be taught to judge more intelligent- ly of his own time and its problems if he has some idea of past times and their institutions. In this spirit Dennis Hath- naught takes the platform for a short address to his "Fellow Citizens." He will be grateful for any applause he may receive, and hopes that adverse critics will put cotton batting around the bricks they may throw. Yeoman service for human liberty has been done by persons with a sense of humour. No man who understands the wholesome effect of laughter ever throws a bomb or tries to reform the world by assassination. If the fool that shot J. P. Morgan had brooded less and laughed more, he would not have taken himself so seriously. There has been great in- justice in the world, but we have now reached the age of adjustments, when the better elements of Capital and Labour are working earnestly to bring about a more equitable social system. The Golden Age will not be ushered in by dividing the accumulations of tho rich among the poor. It is a question if the vicious, idle, proletariat, who works only under compulsion of economic pres- sure, is not a greater menace than the unscrupulous capitalist who exploits hu- man labour. It is decreed by the courts eternal that in the sweat of his face man shall earn his bread, and this applies equally as well to John D. Rockefeller as it does to Dennis Hathnaught. The Standard Oil Company would not last a year if Rockefeller dawdled away all his time on the golf links. That is his recre- ation, just as that of Dennis Hathnaught is bending the elbow with his cronies at Casey's little place on the corner. Every man to his taste. We cannot reform overnight a world that has been millions of years in the making. There Is good basis for the argu- ment that we might lessen the distance to the Millennium if we Improved our manners. There is nothing so discourag- ing as the spectacle of a loud-mouthed economic reformer, whose vocal rearing of the ideal Republic keeps pace with bad manners that find vent in dental archaeology — the excavating of a ruined molar, with a young sapling — and the editing of fingernails with a pair of pocket scissors. Let us have patience. Progress Is an eternal and an ordered law, and it is written in the stars that we shall not go backward. Every man has his day. The castle and the hut are interchangeable residences. Emerson summarizes the so- cial history of the ages in a stanza: The lord is the peasant that was. The peasant the lord that shall be; The lord is hay, the peasant grass. One dry, and one the living tree. This ' unceasing struggle operates through the laws of Evolution and Sug- gestion. A thing that has had no begin- ning can never have an end. The seem- ing zenith is but the nadir of new heights. The Ultimate beckons to us bvit never waits. We are on our way. Whither, only the Fates may tell, and Destiny is not loquacious. CHAPTER I. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT'S LOWLY ORIGIN. Man, that fleck of dust in the Infinite, swelling with pride before the altar of iDls Ego and indulging his fancy in self- worship imagines himself a Chantecler, Lord of Creation, Master of Woman and Summouer of the Sun. Engaged as he is in the pursuit of the useless, and eter- nally struggling for selfish preferment or meaningless pleasure — a spendthrift of time as well as of money — we might im- agine the world a great Cosmic Bloom- ingdale, were it not that here and there one sees the thinker and the doer — the student busy with his experiments, the worker labouring in shop or field. Eons ago, more years than mind can reckon, this old world of ours was plung- ing aimlessly through the night of Chaos, and intellectually, it would be plunging through it yet, were it not that in every age, and at intervals almost cyclic there arose men of vision with the teaching and preaching instinct strong within them — in China a Confucius, In Greece a Socrates, in Italy a Savonarola, in Germany a Luther — men with that sublime courage and touch of divinity 2 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT that gives them kinship with Christ and puts the fire of inspiration upon their words. When such men are abroad in the land, tyranny and injustice flee as from a wrath that is overwhelming. Prom the time the first man was agi- tated by the first thought, we have heard much of Good and of Evil, forces repre- senting some sort of a contest for the mastery, constantly going on in the world. Yet there are very few really good people and very few bad ones. All men bear the mark of caste, the stigmata of environment, example and habit, and the numerosity of the race constitutes a mediocrity, obsessed by the fetish of prestige and eternally aping the manners and pattering the words of other men. It is a physiological-biological phenome- non that the vast majority of men and women come into the world with still born brains — from the cradle to the grave exhibiting in their lives, the static monotony of unchanging sameness. One cannot be said to be truly good, unless his whole course of action is character- ized by sacrifice and disinterested living, with never a tho jght of approbation, ap- preciation or emolument. No one that shows remorse can be said to be truly bad. Rational and normal man may be di- vided into three classes — the Progressive, the Lack-alert and the Dumbwit. The Progres.sive has the instinct of per.^onaI leadership and acts upon his own initiative. His only authority is ex- DENNIS II ATIIN AUGHT 3 perience. He is like the Monad of Leib- nitz, the universe in miniature. The Lack-alert does well under in- struction, but must always be directed. He reverences authority, even in the face of his own experience and better judg- ment. Tradition, Father's politics and Mother's religion are all sufficient for this simple child of nature. There isn't the cream of an idea on the top of his bottle; he is a skim-milk thinker. Par excellence he is the Conventionarian. The Dumbwit acts only under orders and must be driven to his task like the g-alley slave. Trying to get ideas into his head is like signalling to Mars. He is the backbone of the Caste system — thinks men are born into classes and that they must always remain so. With the Lack-alert, he is the great breeding ground of true snobbery, despising his own kind and deferential to those whom he looks upon as of the better classes. He laughs lonpv and 'ondly when the Man with the New Idea finds his way to King Ignorance barred by the two trusty guardsmen, Prejudice and Bigotry, and is subjected to the badgering of the King's impish children. Little Pooh-Pooh and Taint-so. Intelligence is as rare as radium and man, all but mummified by acquiescence in traditional authority, grows slowly into fullness of the Spirit ana-»an understand- ing of the higher life and its significance. What is popularly called intelligence is more often cunning, shrewdness, saga- city. True intelligence is vision that lifts 4 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT one above the clouds where the sweep of sky is unbroken. There is an ig- norance of culture as well as of illiteracy. One may find ignorance in academic halls quite as readily as in the haunts of the day labourer. When you realize the depths of your own ignorance — the in- iquity of race and religious hatreds, so- cial snobbery, and industrial injustice, you have reached the foothills from which you may view the heights it is necessary to climb to get in communion with true knowledge. Aesculapius re- storing the sight of the Aristophanic Plutus, typifies the meaning of education which is simply the effort to make the blind see. It is the ground idea of modern think- ers that the chief aim of existence is race culture and that progress is an eternal and an ordered law. When we walk abroad in the world of Imagination and Memory, we see everywhere, wrecks and ruins and pulled-down things; but through an opening in the trees we may see the rebuilding in the land of To- morrow, of things that will be after we are gone. Progress, the battle of Today with Yesterday for the possession of Tomor- row, operates through two great forces ^Evolution, which is biological or phys- ical; and Suggestion, which is psycho- logical or mental. In tracing the biological or physical history of man, we find that his needs and his primitive struggles with nature DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 5 to gain subsistence, made work a neces- sity. Through successive a,e:es he gradu- ally gained knowledge, and through Sug- gestion improved the implements of labour. Hunger made it necessary to get food. The cold suggested shelter and led him to protect his body by a cover- ing, usually of skins, the beginnings of clothing. Primitive man dwelt in trees, in lakes, and in caves. It was a strug- gle for existence with little idea of co- operation. Every man's hand was raised against his brother and war and blood- shed were the universal rule. Painfully man went through successive stages — the stone age, the age of bronze or metals, etc. Uncounted ages must have passed before the suggestion of soil cultivation came to mankind, and Agriculture gave the first impetus to Civilization. In the Bible we are told that the first man was named Adam and that he start- ed perfect — sort of armed cap-a-ple for the struggle of life, which in Eden, was no struggle at all until Eve had that apple discussion with the serpent. It was a golden age such as poets, among others the pagan Hesiod, loved to picture. But science pretty conclusively proves that friend Adam might better be called Den- nis and surnamed Hathnaught. Par from having fallen from a state of pristine in- nocence, he is on the ascending scale, working painfully toward the land of better things. It has been a hard jour- ney, and it is a far cry from the flg leaf to the dress suit. 6 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT You will find ample evidence of this In Sir John Lubbock's "Prehistoric Times," and "Origin of Civilization"; Drummond's "Ascent of Man"; Darwin's "Origin of Species" and "Descent of Man"; L. H. Morgan's "Ancient Society"; Winwood Reade's "Martyrdom of Man"; the various works of Sir Henry Sumner Maine; Edmund B. Tylor's "Early His- tory of Mankind," and "Primitive Cul- ture"; Frazer's "Golden Bough." In the view of Science man's progress is upward, and out of an original state of barbarism and savagery, he is working toward culture and the higher life. Brief- ly, theology holds that man, through the sin of Adam degenerated, and can only be redeemed through the grace of re- ligion. Science holds that barbarism was a stage of evolution or progress and in no sense the result of degeneration. "Primitive Man" is also ably discussed in a work of that name by Louis Figuier, in which not only is it shown that man harks back to an immense antiquity, but that he has had to fight for every ad- vantage he has gained. He goes into full discussions of the "Stone Age" and the "Age of Metals," and shows man dwelling in caves and hollows, dressed in skins, and limited to a few implements of wood and stone. Early society originated in the family under the rule of the father or patriarch; an aggregation of families formed the clan or tribe under a chief, and as au- thority spread, a confederation of tribes DENNIS HATIINAUGHT 7 became the nation under a King. Au- thority is designed to establish internal order and external security. It originated in Suggestion and its development has been constantly along the lines of Evolu- tion. In a primitive combat one brute overcomes another, and victory naturally suggests the idea of domination. All living creatures from ants to man have more or less of the gregarious spirit and gather in communities. In the fam- ily relation, however primitive, the au- thority of the parents is established over the children, and some investigators be- lieve that in the very earliest of times, the family circle constituted a matri- archy, gynecocracy or metrocracy, with the mother supreme over all. As man began to acquire a knowledge of the sex relation and its significance, the father became all powerful and gradually there developed the subjection of woman which still obtains in the world with such force, buttressed as it is with tradition and a so-called religious sanction, that millions of foolish virgins and matrons, gladly subscribing to the convention that they are a weak and inferior lot, become the most venomous opponents of sex equality and "Woman's emancipation. Lawlessness and absence of restraint breed discomfort and insecurity, and au- thority grew in proportion as the leaders that had won the right to command through brute power and strength of will and mind, gained adherents. It is natural for authority, unrestrained by external 8 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT forces or internal opposition to drift to- ward absolutism, and so finally through- out the world the old freedom of the in- dividual will disappeared and tyranny- was established with the power of life and death over subjects, vested in the rulers. This tyranny in time took on a kind of sacerdotal function and gradually in men's minds grew a belief in the divinity of Kings and the custom of in- vesting them with power through elab- orate and ornate symbolism and cere- mony. Human proji-ress has l)eeh greatly ad- vanced by man's efforts to mitigate the miseries of existence. In an age of cold and lack of comfort we may well believe that fire came into the life of man as a great blessing. This will always be asso- ciated with the wonderful story of Pro- metheus. Taking pity on man, Prome- theus stole fire from Heaven and gave it to humankind whereupon he incurred the wrath of Zeus, and was condemned to be bound on a rock of the Caucasus with a vulture continually gnawing at his liver. On this myth Aeschylus based his great tragedy of "Prometheus Bound," which is supposed to be the only existing part of a trilogy unfolding the whole story. Hesiod, who was approximately a con- temporary of Homer, also tells the Pro- methean myth in his "Works and Days," and it will always be to his honour that although he lived in an age when labour was despised, he sang of the dignity of labour. DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 9 God himself, we are told in the Bible, indorsed labour \/heu he said that in the sweat of his brow, man should earn his bread. According to Herodotus, an important business among- the Thraeians was the sale of their children for exportation. But industry was not held in high re- pute. Thus: "To be idle is most honour- able; but to be a tiller of the soil, most dishonourable; to live by war and rapine most glorious." Handicrafts were little esteemed in those early ages of war and the exploitation of man. Says Herodotus: "Whether the Greeks learned the custom from the Egyptians I am unable to de- termine with certainty, seeing that the Thraeians, Scythians, Persians, Lydians, and almost all barbarous nations hold in less honour than their other citizens, those who learn any art and their de- scendants, but deem such to be noble as abstain from handicrafts, and particular- ly those who devote themselves to war. All the Greeks, moreover, have adopted the same notion, and especially the Lace- daemonians; but the Corinthians hold handicraftsmen in least disesteem." There were many honourable exceptions to this general contempt for labour that characterized the upper classes of an- tiquity. Everybody is familiar with the story of Cincinnatus, who when called to become dictator of Rome was at the plough, according to Livy. Plutarch In his life of Philopoemen, called "the last of the Greeks," relates that a woman of 10 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT. Megara, mistaking that distinguished man for a servant desired him to assist her in the business of the kitchen, where- upon he set about to cleave some wood. English story tellers relate a similar tale of King Alfred, with the exception that the Saxon was put to watching cakes to prevent them from burning. While on his estate Philopoemen slept as one of the labourers and he worked, according to Plutarch, with his vine dressers and ploughmen. Thus, one of the greatest men of his age touched el- bows with the humblest, and ennobled labour by example. Theognis has many a fling at those that toil, and Aristotle had a contempt for labour as a mere manual phase of existence. He held the barbarian to be an inferior breed, born to obey, as the Greek was to command, and assigned him as slave, the duty of doing work with hand.s, leaving the citizen time for politics, social enjoyment and the pursuit of the beautiful as reflected in art, letters, music, philo-sophy, and the gymnasium, where he developed symmetry of body. Woman he regarded as merely a race propagator, in every way inferior to man and subject to him. Aristophanes, to some extent, shared with Aristotle and other ancients, this contempt for labour, for we see him hurl- ing at his enemy Euripides the taunt that his mother had gained a livelihood as an herb woman. Curiously enough, too, Socrates, as re- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 11 ported by Xenophon in his "Economics," takes largely the same view of woman as a domestic labourer that Aristotle did, al- though his great disciple Plato, in his "Republic," would elevate her position and improve her education. In the so-called suffragette comedies of Aristophanes — the Thesmophoriazusoe, the Eccleziazusoe, and the Lysistrata, we find ancient woman's revolt against the intolerable domestic slavery to which custom had condemned her, a demand akin to that of the suffragette of to-day. Industrial pursuits among the ancients were often hereditary, son following father. In discussing the Spartans or Lacedaemonians, Herodotus says: "In this respect also the Lacedaemonians re- semble the Egyptians: their heralds, mu- sicians, and cooks succeed to their fathers' professions; so that a musician is son of a musician, a cook of a cook, and a herald of a herald; nor do others on account of the clearness of their voice apply themselves to this profession and exclude others; but they continue to practice it after their fathers. These things, then, are so." In this little book, we shall endeavour to trace the history of the Hathnaughts through all its stages — compulsory la- bour or slavery; serfdom and feudalism; rise of the cities; trade development; crafts; wages; factories; trade-unionism; socialism; syndicalism; feminism — as re- flected in the works of historians, phil- osophers, novelists, economists, poets, of 12 DENNIS HATHNAVUHT all ages and nations. Naught shall be set down in malice, yet while we hope to receive the benediction of "Imprima- tur," there are some we feel that will load us with maledictions and consign us to the common hangman. CHAPTER II. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT EARLY AS- SUMES THE HOD. Man is essentially a peddler and a ■trader. Little Stonehatchet Skinclothes, when he could not get what he wanted by force, learned through the suggestion of exchange to "Swap" with his cave and tree dwelling playmates as little Johnny Jones does with the boys of today. The elder Skinclothes dickered and bartered. As time went on and man's necessities grew, the ancients began making trading trips by caravans, camels, pack horses, and small boats, just as the elder Jones now possesses great workshops, fields, golden with plenty, good highways, rail- roads and steamships to facilitate the business of commerce. From ancient barter has developed modern commerce, and our system of coinage and the con- veniences of our banking arrangements are the successors of the articles of ex- change, coloured beads, wampum, trin- kets, fancy cloths and the innumerable other substitutes of the primitive world for money. In primitive times labour was, for the most part, compulsory. So remote In the history of the industrial life was the 13 14 DENNIS HATHNAUGIIT origin of the institution of slavery that surviving annals show no record of its heginning. War made it possible to get slaves easily and their number grew to such proportions that in the time of Sylla there were 13,000,000 of the tribe in Italy alone. We find this statement in the International Encyclopedia. The same authority, taking its facts from pre-ex- isting authorities, tells us that slave la- bour was first made a systematic business by the Phoenicians, who established a reg- ular trade of buying and selling slaves. Aristotle, who limited culture to his own ideal — the citizen of a Greek city state — supports the institution of slav- ery by elaborate argument in his "Poli- tics." He describes a Greek gentleman's family as consisting of man, wife, chil- dren and slaves. The position of the wife as defined by Aristotle is far from a happy one. Her main purpose, accord- ing to the Stagirite, is to perpetuate the species and to superintend the labour of the slaves and the upbringing of the children. She must submit without ques- tion to her husband's commands and could never hope to share in his social or political life. The white slave of to- day, whose wrongs are being so widely discussed, in ancient Greece would really be the only free woman, for the seclu- sion of married women made it possible only for the courtesans of Greece to share the larger life of the citizens. We have mentioned the part the Phcr- nlclans have played in the history of DENNIS HATIINAUQHT 15 slavery. Greatest of the Phoenician colo- nies was Carthage on the north coast of Africa, which in turn grew to be a powerful state, the rival of Rome and an actual menace to the supremacy of that mistress of the world. Splendid pic- tures of life in Carthage and the deplor- able state of the industrial classes are shown by Gustave Flaubert in his ro- mance of "Salammbo," daughter of Ha- milcar and sister of Hannibal. It was the Phoenicians who developed early industrial life beyond all antiquity. Herodotus, in the opening of his history, tells of their migration from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and of distant voy- ag'es made by their merchants, all of which, we know, tended to the growth of industrial life and increased the de- mand for labour. Herodotus has some curious entries on the subject of labour. For example, Tri- tantsechmes, son of Artabazus, Satrap or governor of Babylon, had so great a number of Indian dogs that four large towns in the plains were exempted from all other taxes so that their inhabitants might find food for the dogs. So you see, milady who neglects human kind and children in her devotion to her lap- dog has good ancient precedent in pro- viding her pet with a retinue of servants. Herodotus tells us that in Egypt, the women attended markets and traffic while the men stayed at home weaving. Men carried burdens on their heads, women on their shoulders. Sons were not com- 16 DENNIS UATHN AUGHT pelled to support their parents, but daughters had no choice and were com- pelled to do so. The wash lady was an important worker, no doubt, for the "Egyptians wore linen garments, con- stantly fresh washed. Men wore two garments, women but one, so we might see the spectacle in an ancient Egyptian substitute for a department store of greater variety in men's goods than in those of women. Ldnen was an impor- tant article of manufacture and of ex- port. Embalming was an important trade in Ancient Egypt and Herodotus tells some facts about the embalmers that prove their business methods not unlike that of the undertaker of to-day, who shows the bereaved various coffins with prices carefully graded to meet the purs- es of mourners. When the dead body was brought to the embalmers, they showed the bearers wooden models of corpses made exactly alike by painting. They showed the most expensive man- ner of embalming, next an inferior kind, and lastly the cheapest of all. There have been tricks In all trades, yea, from the very beginning. In the time of Cheops, Herodotus says, the wicked king shut up the temples and ordered all the Egyptians to work for him. Some were appointed to draw stones from the quarries in the Arabian moun- tain down to the Nile; others to receive the stones when transported in vessels across the river and to drag them up the DENNIS HATHNAUOHT 17 mountain called the Libyan. One hun- dred thousand men at a time worked in this manner, each party during three months. "The time," continues Herodotus, "dur- ing which the people were thus harassed by toil, lasted ten years on the road which they constructed, along which they drew the stones, a work, in my opinion, not much less than the pyramids, . . . On this road then ten years were ex- pended, and in forming the subterranean apartments on the hill, on which the py- ramids stand, which he had made as a burial vault for himself, in an island formed by draining a canal from the Nile." Twenty years were expended in the building of the pyramid itself. Hero- dotus adds that an interpreter told him a certain inscription on the pyramid ex- plained how much had been expended In radishes, onions, and garlic for the workmen — one thousand six hundred tal- ents of silver. The historian speculates how much more was expended in iron tools, in bread, and in clothes for the la- bourers. To provide all these necessities of food and dress would imply that many other thousands of Hathnaughts were engaged in weaving and in working iron, while tmcounted other unfortunates made the soil productive of crops, the prosperity of which they could not hope to share with a King so avaricious and egotistical that he drained the labour of the land for twenty years so that his vile and worth- 18 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT less body mig-ht have imposing sepulchre at the end of his infamous reign of fifty years. The pyramid-building craze seiz- ed his brother Chephren also, and in the course of his fifty-six years of power he, too, exhausted the land. "Thus," says Herodotus, "one hundred and six years are reckoned during which the Egyptians suffered all kinds of calamities." Blessings returned with Mycerinus, son of Cheops, who "permitted the peo- ple, who were worn down to the last ex- tremity, to return to their employments." With the Scythians, Herodotus says, cattle raising rather than agriculture was the great industry and this was car- ried on by the labour of the tribe of Hathnaught. The Scythians had a cruel habit of depriving their slaves of sight. In describing their methods of dairy la- bour he tells of a rude kind of churning: "When they have finished milking, they pour the milk into hollow wooden vessels, and having placed the blind men round about the vessels, they agitate the milk; and having skimmed off that which swims on the surface, they consider it the most valuable, but that which sub- sides is of less value than the other." All of which would indicate that but- ter making is an ancient industry, but we no longer think it necessary to de- prive the workers of sight. It has always been a matter of aston- ishment to students of man's social his- tory, that great masses of the people should uncomplainingly and servilely sub- DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 10 mit to oppression. Herodotus tells a story of certain Scythians who, having withdrawn from their country for a pe- riod of twenty-eight years, found them- selves on their return opposed by a new and vigorous population — young men born of the blind slaves and the wives of the absent Scythians. When they found it impossible to overcome these youths, one of the wiser among the re- turning Scythians suggested that they throw away their arms and rush upon their opponents with whips, for, he sage- ly argued, the whip would remind them of their condition of servitude. The Scythians carried out the suggestion, and the youths docilely submitted to be beat- en and enslaved. Like the young lackey in Charles Rann Kennedy's "Servant in the House," who was shocked to see his young mistress assist in clearing the ta- ble, his ancient prototypes probably "knew their places." How else can we account for the sub- mission of the Helots, the Hathnaughts of Spai'ta, who far outnumbered their oppressors? The Langhorns, summariz- ing ancient testimony, in their transla- tion of Plutarch assert that "these poor wretches were marked out for slaves in their dress, their gestures, and, in short, in everything. They wore dogskin bon- nets and sheepskin vests; they were for- bidden to learn any liberal art, or to perform any act worthy of their masters. Once a day they received a certain num- ber of stripes for fear they should for- 20 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT get they were slaves, and to crown all, they were liable to the cryptia, which was sure to be executed on all such as spoke, looked, or walked like freemen." "Perhaps," says Plutarch, "it was the cryptia, as they called it, or ambuscade, if that was really one of this lawgiver's (Lycurgus') Institutions, as Aristotle says It was, which gave Plato so bad an im- pression both of Lycurgus and his laws. "The governors of the youth ordered the shrewdest of them from time to time to disperse themselves in the country, provided only with daggers and some necessary provisions. In the daytime they hid themselves, and rested in the most private places they could find, but at night they sallied out into the roads, and killed all the Helots they could meet with. Nay, sometimes by day they fell upon them in the fields and murdered the ablest and strongest of them. Thu- cydides relates in his history of the Pelo- ponnesian war, that the Spartans select- ed such of them as were distinguished for their courage, to the number of two thousand or more, declared them free, crowned them with garlands and con- ducted them to the temples of the gods; hut soon after they all disappeared; and no one could either then or since give account in what manner they were de- stroyed. "Aristotle particularly says the ephori, as soon as they were invested in their office, declared war against the Helots, that they might be massacred under pre- DENNIS HAT UN AUGHT 21 tense of law. In other respects they treated them with great inhumanity; sometimes they made them drink till they were intoxicated, and in that condition led them into the public halls to show the young men what drunkenness was. They ordered them to sing mean songs, and to dance ridiculous dances, but not to meddle with any that were genteel and graceful. Thus, they tell us that when the Thebans afterwards invaded Laconia and took a great number of the Helots prisoners, they ordered them to sing odes of Terpander, Alcman or Spen- dori, the Lacedaemonian, but they ex- cused themselves, alleging that it was forbidden by their masters. Those who say that a freeman in Sparta was most a freeman, and a slave most a slave, seem well to have considered the difference of states." Other authorities take exception to this, declaring that isolated instances of cruelty prove no systematic oppression of the Helots. Thomas Keightley In his once popular school "History of Greece" summarizes all the evidence favourable to the Spartans and declares that the con- dition of the Helots more resembled that of the villeins of the Middle Ages, or the peasants of Russia, than of slaves in general. But Keightley, venturing the hope that his history might be regarded as a good introduction to Thirlwall's History of Greece, betrays his leanings, for Thirlwall's sympathies are aristo- cratic, even as those of the abler George Grote are democratic. 22 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT In Rome the Impatience of the Hath- naug-hts was always greater th^n among other nations of antiquity. In Livy, Plu- tarch and other ancient writers we are entertained with the stoi-y of the strug- gles of the Hathnaughts or plebeians for recognition and share in the govern- ment, of the agrarian agitations and of the tumults that resulted in the deaths of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, cham- pions of the tribe of Hathnaught. Scholars differ concerning the extent to which the compulsory labour of the Hathnaughts was employed in ancient times. The Encyclopspdia Britannica (11th edition) article, "Labour Legisla- tion," declares that there was undoubt- edly a certain amount of free labour, even at the time when Egypt was plung- ed in the craze of pyramid building. Grote, in his "History of Greece," has an interesting account of the poor free labourers of Greece, and a later author- ity, William Scott Ferguson, in "Greek Imperialism," maintains that great mass- es of the free Athenians were forced by circumstances to labour and to take an active part in the trade of the day. This would imply an honourable antiquity for the pay envelope. Theodor Mommsen, whose "History of Rome" Is a work of Immense learning despite certain alleged shortcomings on the side of partisanship, takes account of the free labour of ancient Rome. As fresh land was acquired by the state the patrician class claimed to control it, a DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 2.3 claim bitterly contested by the Hath- naughts, particularly of the agricultural class. The struggle took the form, he says, of a demand for political rights and resulted in the appointment of tribunes of the Plebs with power of veto. This struggle with privi- lege lasted two hundred years. An important change was effected by the Canuleian law which made marriage be- tween plebeians and patricians valid. The Licinian law, eighty years later, admitted plebeians to the consulship and required the employment of free labour in agri- culture. Gradually there arose a new ar- istocracy, partly plebeian in origin, but in course of time those new families be- came as oppressive as the old, for in the time of Tiberius Gracchus the free agri- cultural class had disappeared and the land had become divided into immense estates, worked by slave labour. Cen- turies were to pass before this yoke was removed from the necks of the tribe of Hathnaught. In Rome in the time of Caesar and Ci- cero, according to W. Warde Fowler (So- cial Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero) the poor free plebeian population was housed In great lodging-houses call- ed Insulae or islands because they stood detached and surrounded on all sides by streets just as islands are by water. It Is believed there were shops or tabernse on the first floor, probably bakeries where grain was ground and bread sold cheaply. At times an immense 24 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT multitude, estimated to have numbered several hundred thousand, received free grain from the government, for it was a favourite way among the ancients, just as It is at present, to allay the discontent of the mob through the stomach. The free workers in leather, shoemaklng, clothing and other trades had guilds, perhaps somewhat after the manner of the Trade Unions, but there Is no evi- dence that this free labour ever com- plained of the competition of slave la- bour. With the Romans, conquest and terri- torial aggrandizement were national pas- sions and in the train of the legions fol- lowed the merchant and trader. The Ro- man genius for road building made the empire a network of magnificent high- ways and colonies planted at points de- termined with a masterly grasp of stra- tegical valuations, Romanized the prov- inces and gradually turned the barbari- ans into Latin-speaking Roman citizens, proud of the common empire whose ex- pansion they had formerly resisted with Immense loss of life and resultant slav- ery. From such a system it was natural that commerce should spring, and into the nature of this business scholars are now inauirlng with such zeal and suc- cess that one need not have much im- agination to conjure up some sort of a picture of the teeming Roman world. Let us take an imaginary journey back to Rome along the road of yesterday un- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 25 der the guidance of Fowler, Abbott's "Common People of Ancient Rome," Herberman's "Business Life in Ancient Rome," Gibbon and Ferrero. We see the shops along the streets with signs and window dressing not unlike the system in vogue in our day. A string of hams In front of a shop indicates the provi- sion store. There are restaurants and inns everywhere, but no chairs at table, for the Roman dined while lounging or reclining. The street hawker we find as great a nuisance as he is today, finally becoming the subject of state regulation. The trav- elling cook with apparatus set up in the street sells his steaming sausages, as his latter day brother sells the hot frank- furter. Our modern merchant would not care for Roman streets; raised stones set at intervals from side to side interfered with the rapid transit of drays and doubtless came in for condemnation from many an ancient board of trade. The object of these stones was to Insure the pedestrian dry passage in wet wea- ther, for to the Roman overshoes were unknown. We find great storage houses and granaries all over Rome, and a thorough- ly organized banking system that lent money and undertook the capitalization of all sorts of industries, public works, shipping, and the collecting of taxes, al- ways farmed out to the highest bidder. These bankers and money lenders had 26 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT their agents throughout the empire. There was a well organized postal ser- vice with the mail deliveries expedited by relays of swift horses. Intelligence of state and distant happenings was made known by means of that ancient proto- type of the newspaper, the Acta Diurna Romani Populi (Daily Acts of the Roman People), a news service in Caesar's time posted at Important points, something after the manner of a modern newspa- per's bulletin board. The news was brought in by couriers, constituting a kind of pony express. Let us mingle with the crowds about the "Acta." We are surprised at the ab- sence of classic Latin speech and the prevalence of colloquialisms bearing a strange resemblance to our slang, with ancient equivalents of "Do you catch on?" "Gave the old man a touch," etc. The Roman, no matter how careless his manner of life, was a stickler for a fine funeral and everywhere we find burial associations. There was a great deal of private philanthropy as there is with us, for Rome had its Rockefellers and Carnegies, but no state provision for old age, no workhouses for the indigent poor, no hospitals to relieve the suffer- ing. Property was held at private risk, for there was no system of Insurance, yet arson was common and men often de- istroyed their own homes. It was the cus- tom of the Roman after a fire to give the victim goods and money, and often DENNia HATHNAUOHT 27 such private contributions amounted to more than the loss. This might be re- garded as a species of insurance and ex- plains the temptation "to make a Are** which is still common in the modern world. We discover in ancient trade combina- tions the ancestor of the octopus or mod- ern trust. Manufacturing was largely- carried on under the domestic system, the workers, free or slave, being em- ployed at home rather than gathered in great factories as with us. The minute sub-division of labour is traceable to the Roman passion for system, efficiency and organization. There were not only 250 dif- ferent divisions of slaves, but free la- bour was organized according to the hand- icraft of the worker. These guilds of free workmen, so far as research goes to show, did not combine to raise wages and lower working hours, but to gain through the fraternal spirit comradeship and im- proved social life. The guilds had their rituals, and their officers and insignia were patterned after the titles and insig- nia of the Roman government officials. In the next chapter we shall deal spe- cifically with the question of slavery, the most important of all, for the brunt of Rome's industrial battle fell to the lot of the empire's beasts of burden, the unre- (tulted toilers. CHAPTER III. DENNIS' IRON COLLAR^'SERTUS SUM." In the preceding chapter it has been shown that the tribe of Hathnaught was very numerous in the Roman World. In time, the tribe became distinguished by a peculiar mark of ignobility — an iron collar worn about the neck on which was the inscription — "Servus Sum" — I am a slave. Added to this was the name of the gentleman or lady that revelled In luxury at the expense of the un- requited toil of the Hathnaughts. The tribe worked from daylight to darkness, faring on scant rations and always liable to the most horrible punishments and chastisements. Mere whim at any time could send a slave to the torture cham- ber. He could not give testimony in a Court of law except under the torture. When his master offered him as a wit- ness, he was put to "the question" and it often resulted in death. Juvenal, greatest of all the satirists that the world has ever known, tells us that some of the grand Roman dames used to keep paid torturers and that while their hair was being dressed, they 2S DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 29 amused themselves listening to the sound of the lash and the cries of the poor victims who had been stripped for pun- ishment so that a degenerate yearning to witness human suffering might be satisfied. Gibbon in his "Decline and Pall of the Roman Empire" has many pictures drawn from the annals of the House of Hathnaught, but Gibbon lacked the sublime indignation that surged in the Juvenalian soul, and his words lack the passion of resentment. In the camp of Lucullus, he tells us, an ox sold for a drachma, a Hathnaught for four drachmas or about three shil- lings. "The slaves," he says, "consisted for the most part of barbarian captives, taken in thousands by the chances of war, purchased at a vile price (just quoted), accustomed to a life of indepen- dence, and impatient to break and to avenge their fetters." It was long before the protection of the law was extended to the slaves and mitigated, in a measure, the severity of the masters, but manumission was not encouraged too freely even in the best of times, through the fear that newly ac- quired freedom for multitudes of bond- men might set loose a dangerous element that was bound to the empire by no tie of blood, kinship, or nationality. Freedmen, Gibbon says, were excluded from civil or military honours, and the stigma of servile origin clung to them for three or four generations. Many of 30 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT the slaves were men of learning — physi- cians and philosophers — and often a noble Roman possessed hundreds or even thou- sands of bondmen. That their lives were lightly valued is shown by the story of Pedanius Secundus. The four hundred slaves under his roof were all put to death for not preventing- his murder. Almost every profession, either liberal or mechanical, might be found in the household of an opulent Senator, Gibbon says, and in the International Encyclo- pedia we find it stated that in Rome there were as many as two hundred and fifty different classes of slaves. Public slaves were the property of the State, and were engaged in road building and other pub- lic works. The private slaves, we read in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, were di- vided into two kinds — familia rustica or rural, and familia urbana or domestic. Over the rural slaves was the villicus, a chief slave or overseer. They worked in chain gangs, and at night, according to Wallon's "History of Slavery," were confined in the ergastulum or under- ground slave prison. According to Gibbon the Hathnaughts were at least equal in number to the free inhabitants of the Roman world. An historian of our own times, Gugliel- mo Ferrero, goes deeper than Gibbon into the origin of the Roman slave trade — the exploitation of members of the tribe of Hathnaught for the enrichment of pre- Christian seigniors. It is the opinion of Fer- rero (Greatness and Decline of Rome) DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 31 that this trade had its beginning in the scarcity of the old free labour and the disinclination of free workmen to engage in tasks that promised a bare living and no assured future of Improved personal conditions. Lester F. Ward, author of "Pure So- ciology," appears to have had a similar thought in mind when, noting the disin- clination of the Hathnaughts to labour, he says: "How did man learn to work? Did the needs of existence teach him self- denial, tone down his wild, unsettled na- ture, and discipline his mind and body to daily toil? Not at all. It is safe to say that if left wholly to these influences man would have never learned to labour. It required some other influence far more imperative and coercive. In a word, nothing short of slavery could ever have accomplished this. This was the social mission of human slavery — to convert mere activity into true labour." Whatever the cause, Perrero shows that in the second century before Christ there was established in Rome a vast and systematized traffic in the flesh of the Hathnaughts. Traders followed the ar- mies and bought the prisoners who were promptly resold to the best advantage to their masters. Kings of Numidia and Mauritania even sold their own subjects in their eagerness for gain. Caravans of slaves poured into Rome from Gaul, Ger- many, and the East. The Hathnaughts were sold without regard to their feelings or family ties, wherever it pleased the 32 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT dealers to send them. All that was ex- pected of them was submission and la- bour. In some instances those that show- ed special aptitude were educated in va- rious arts and were even made proficient with the sword with a view of being hired out by their masters as gladiators at great funerals. In "Quo Vadis," "Fabiola," and like books we get fine pictures of the slaves — pictures that are redolent of the life of antiquity. We see the unpaid and ill- treated Hathnaughts dancing attendance on the great whom some one has esti- mated to number not more than thirty thousand in an empire teeming with mil- lions of humankind. We find Dennis and his wife and children attending their mas- ters and mistresses at the toilet, in the bath, at the table, and in the kitchen. They had to furnish the idlers with amusement and entertainment, no matter how heavy of heart they might be. When the great ventured abroad, the handsomest of the tribe of Hathnaught attended them. Dennis had no day off and no vacation. Perquisites he picked up here and there were called his "pecu- lium" and often these tips formed the nucleus of the fund that eventually pur- chased his freedom. To the everlasting credit of the tribe, be it said, they were not altogether con- tented to wear the collar of servitude. One of the house, Spartacus Hathnaught, roused the en.slaved population in 73 B. C. and engaged In a great servile insurrec- DENNIS HATHNAUOHT 33 tion which was successfully waged by the slaves armed with all sorts of weapons, until the superior discipline and resoui'ces of the Romans conquered. With the death of Spartacus, the Hathnaughts' in- surrection was at an end and the tribe resumed its shackles. These shackles were not broken until Christianity became firmly established in the empire which soon afterward fell, and slavery was replaced by that later form of servitude known as the feudal system. By that time the rural slaves of Rome had become merged in the class of the coloni. The colonus in the old days of Rome was a freeman who worked a farm sometimes under lease and sometimes under a form of metayage. CHAPTER IV. THE WORLD'S MIDNIGHT— HATH- NAUGHT AS SEEF. Knowledge of the history of the Middle Ages, is necessary if we would trace in order, the annals of the house of Hath- naught. Edward Everett rightly called the period, "the midnight of the world." Victor Duruy's sweeping view has the advantage of brevity. Particularly good is his account of feudalism. William Robertson has viewed the period in an introductory volume to his "History of Charles, the Fifth," and Henry Hallam's work on the subject is still widely read and studied, although later research has led scholars to question certain of his conclusions and to bring the charge of inaccuracy against him. No one, how- ever, has ever impugned his sincerity or charged him with partiality — the curse of the special advocate In historical writing. J. P. C. Hecker's "Epidemics of the Middle Ages," a German work of which there is a translation by B. C. Babington, contains a mass of matter about "The Black Death" of the fourteenth century and that mysterious scourge of the race, 34 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 35 "the Sweating Sickness" which came in five successive periods, the last in 1551. The "Black Death" swept away 25,- 000,000 of Europe's inhabitants and it is said that in one cemetery near Lon- don, 50,000 bodies were buried. The world's midnight began in 476 A. D. when the triumph of Odoacer in Italy put an end to the Roman Empire. It lasted until the Turks took Constan- tinople in 1453 and the Ottoman power supplanted that of the Eastern empire. The Dark Ages, when intellect was in eclipse, are usually held to include the period from the time of Odoacer until the thirteenth century when there was such a notable revival of intellectual activity along all lines that Dr. James Walsh has characterized it as the greatest of the centuries. The Middle Ages, so far as the mass of the people counted, constituted one thousand years of darkness, crime, degradation, superstition and injustice. Here and there a scholar, usually a monk, kept the candle of progress burn- ing while he busied himself with re- search, experiment, or the copying of manuscripts, but the ruling powers, the nobility and churchmen, cared little .save for the perpetuation of their own power. The church opposed the feudal sys- tem, not because it oppressed the serfs, but because it divided the serf's allegiance and deprived the ecclesiastical power of supreme domination by making the serf directly dependent upon his overlord. 3(5 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Feudalism, according to Duruy, was first recognized by the edict of Kierry- sur-Oise (877) whereby Charles the Bald recognized the right of a son to inherit the fief or the office of his father. Under the feudal system everybody became somebody's man. The great seignior was the vassal of the king; the seigniors in turn parcelled out the land to their own vassals in return for mili- tary and other services. The vassal was obliged to enroll for war under his lord and to supply him with money — first to ransom him in the event of captivity; second to defray the expenses incident to the knighting of the seignior's or lord's eldest son; third, to provide a dowry for the lord's daughter. These contributions were called aides. The vassal did homage to his lord and through an act of hom- age, sons of vassals on the death of their fathers, received in turn their lands from feudal lords. Often there was a symbolic offering from vassal to lord, of a sod or other trifle in acknowledgment of his overlordship. There was a marked difference between the feudalism of France and that which obtained in England. In France subin- feudation was practiced to such an ex- tent that, as Buckle remarks, oppression became an organized system. The vassal who held his land from the overlord, let It out to others responsible to him- self, while these In turn subdivided the land until the lowest man had masters I DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 37 running back by the score. In England, in the time of the first Edward, the statute known as Quia Emptors for- bade subinfeudation and lessened the load of the Hathnaughts. To this day in France the effect of subinfeudation is seen in the intensive agriculture of the peasantry on small plots of ground. The mass of the population during the Middle Ages, were serfs attached to their particular estate or glebe without hope of emancipation and debarred by cruel penalties from ever leaving it. Lords through their bailiffs and serf- inasters held the Hathnaughts in check and were at liberty to treat them as they pleased, and more often than not it pleased them to submit them to outrage and cruel exactions. If a girl serf happened to be pretty she was at the mercy of her master without right of appeal or redress, and if she were to marry, her lord could at will take the bridegroom's place the first night. This was called the "right of first fruits", "Droit du Seignior", or "Jus primae Noctis" (law of the first night), and is described with terrible realism in Eugene Sue's "Mysteries of the People." The law is also worked into the plot of Beaumarchais' comedy of Figaro. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition), says there is no trustworthy evidence that the law ever had official sanction but admits that lawless barons vei-y likely enforced it. John Lothrop Motley (Rise of the Dutch Republic), 462375 38 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT holds that there was such a law, which led Bismarck to take issue with him, contending that it was only a tax or money payment exacted by the lord from the bridegroom. The history of the Hathnaughts in the Middle Ages is realistically pictured by Eugene Bonnemere, in his "Histoire des Paysans." He deals primarily with the period between 1200 and 1850, but in an introduction he traces the history from 50 B. C. to 1200 A. D. In telling the painful story of the French Hathnaughts Bonnemere considers his relation to the nobility and the king and the means whereby an arrogant nobility was able to reduce the French peasants to a state of serfdom, worse than obtained in any other country. Like Buckle and other authorities he shows that in England to win over the common people to their cause, the nobil- ity had to make concessions to Dennis and let him share in a measure, privil- leges the great lords had obtained from the king. In France the nobles were more powerful and could afford to dis- dain Dennis, who year by year descended more and more into the scale of serfdom while in England the people were gain- ing slowly, but surely, point after point, and gradually building up that glorious unwritten charter, the British Consti- tution. Magna Charta was wrested from IClng John at Runnymede in June, 1215, and greatly extended popular rights and DENNIS IIATHNAVOHT 39 privileges. In 1264 English cities were returning members to Parliament and the House of Commons came into exist- ence and began that fight with Privi- lege that has only ended in our day by the Commons winning supremacy over the House of Lords. Feudalism like slavery had its useful as well as its dark side. It established authority and built up population by fixing man in a set abode. But the authority being irresponsible, became a tyranny that proved its own undoing and eventually led to its fall. To the Middle Ages we owe other re- markable institutions — Monasticism, the Crusades, Chivalry, and trial by ordeal. Monasticism had its origin in the de- sire of the soul-weary to find a refuge from a world full of injustice and tur- moil. In the seclusion of the monasteries the monks copied and illuminated manu- scripts, thus saving to mankind the priceless gift of learning, particularly of classical Greek and Roman literature. Out of the monastic school often de- veloped the University. Monastic ex- ample improved farming methods and by dignifying manual labour, taught re- spect for work. Monks were not only the manufactur- ers and educators, but took care of the sick and orphans and developed the idea of service that we see to-day in our great hospitals. The abuse of the monastic life was that it withdrew the best men and women from a world that could illy spare them. 40 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT It was a monk, Peter, the Hermit, whose preaching- brought on the Cru- sades, movemeuts that dispatched im- mense numbers to the East to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the Saracenic In- fidels, and which are often described as outbursts of ignorant and fanatical zeal. Yet we must not overlook certain im- portant and enduring effects of these wildly romantic expeditions. They weakened feudalism in its backbone by luring serfs from the soil; they opened up new avenues of commerce and last- ly, by disturbing the flow of culture at its eastern fountain head in Constanti- nople, caused many artists to immigrate to Italy and Germany and thus sent a shaft of light through the Dark Ages. Chivalry had its origin in the Cru- sades and in the romantic literature that this coming together of the West and the East brought into existence. It was the old Germanic idea of the sacredness of womanhood, described by Tacitus, brought to full flower by the new mili- tary order of knighthood. Only those of noble birth might aspire to be knights, and the candidate for knightly honours was invested with his rank only after a ceremonial that Included fasting and prayer, the vigil over his arms, and vows to uphold ideals of honour and hu- manity. He always selected a lady, often Imaginary, as his ideal, and roamed the world in quest of adventure. The joust and tournament were the favourite pastimes and he put all the more ardour DENNI8 HAT UN AUGHT 41 into his work from the fact that his lady love was a spectator. To Chivalry- is traced the origin of duelling. Despite the romance that has made the Age of Chivalry glow with life and beauty, we are too often disillusioned by instances of wife-beating and injustice on the part of knights, and Cervantes may be said to have put the world for- ever in his debt by destroying the in- stitution through Don Quixote. Perhaps the most terrible of all pecu- liarities of the Middle Ages was the method of punishment. In H. C. Lea's "History of the Inquisition" we are told that the "wheel, the cauldron of boil- ing oil, burning alive, burying alive, flaying alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the ordinary expedients by which the criminal jurist sought to de- ter crime by frightful examples which would make a profound impression on a not over-sensitive population." Trial by ordeal proves the amazing prevalence of superstition and ignorance. The usual forms such trials took were the ordeals of fire, water, and personal combat. A person accused might be blindfolded and forced to walk between two fires. If only scorched in slight de- gree it was held that innocence was established. Again an accused person might be required to walk barefooted on red hot iron and if no burning resulted, innocence was miraculously proved. In the "Lives of the Saints," you may read of a pious royal lady who, without ra4sing 42 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT so much as a blister, walked upon red hot ploughshares. But the miracle never happened. If it did, precautions were taken to protect the lady's feet. It is a story for the marines. The water cure for crimes took various forms. If the accused, thrown into water, sank, he was supposed to be in- nocent, for the act of floating was In- terpreted to mean that the water wished to eject the guilty, sin-red individual. Persons accused of witchcraft were sub- jected to this test. In the ordeal of hot water, the accused was required to take a stone out of a boiling cauldron. In some cases one had to plunge the arm as far as the elbow in the boiling water. If the hand and arm readily healed it was proof of innocence. In the ordeal Qf personal combat or the wager of battle, the challenger stood facing the west, the person challenged the east. Defeat of the challenged party meant innocence of the accused. In case the vanquished begged for life he was often granted his wish, upon re- tracting his accusation, and thereafter was known as a recreant. Trial by ordeal is found to be common up to the thirteenth century and rarer from that time on, as more enlightened councils prevailed and saner ideas of jurisprudence were established. Among primitive peoples It persists to our day, particularly in Africa as we know on the strength of testimony submitted by DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 43 the great missionary, David Livingstone. "But did the Middle Ages wholly die?" asks Duruy, who answers his own ques- tion: "They bequeathed to Modern Times virile maxims of public and individual rig^hts, which then profited only the lords, but which now profit all. The Middle Ages developed chivalrous ideas, a sentiment of honour, a respect for woman which still stamp with a peculiar seal those who preserve and practice them. Lastly, mediseval architecture re- mains the most imposing material mani- festation of the religious sentiment, an architecture we can only copy when we wish to erect the fittest houses of prayer." Duruy might have added that in these so-called Dark Ages were founded most of the great schools and universities of Europe and that to these times we owe many great discoveries and inventions of which the most glorious were the dis- covery of America and the invention of printing. CHAPTER V. WHEN DENNIS HATHNAUGHT WAS A SAXON. In the days of the Anglo-Saxons there were, throughout England, Village Com- munities, conducted under the Manorial system. The Lord of the Manor was the great man of the community, and lander him and attached to the soil were the freemen and villeins. Villeins, who were of the tribe of Hathnaughts, were in a state of serfdom, bound for life to the estate upon which they were born, and under obligations to the Lord of the Manor to render him services in return for his protection and the use of the land. Mainly the services consisted in military duties and agricultural labour. There was little to recommend the con- dition of the Hathnaughts in Anglo- Saxon days, in comparison with the con- dition of Sambo Hathnaught, the black slave of Dixie. The Lord of the Manor earned his luxuries in the sweat of his serf's face, and the Anglo-Saxon Dennis always laboured in fear of the lash. As the serf of that day was called Nativus it is believed by some authorities that the mass of the subjugated people were of the displaced Celtic race. 44 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 45 England as it was then, was divided into shires; these again were divided into smaller districts called hundreds and these hundreds into still smaller sub-di- visions called tithings. Hallam in his "Middle Ages," discussing Anglo-Saxon times in England says: "There were but two denominations of persons above the class of servitude, thanes and ceorls; the owners and the cultivators of land, or rather, perhaps, as a more accurate distinction, the gen- try and the inferior people. Among all the Northern Nations as is well known, the weregild or composition for murder, was the standard measure of the grada- tion of society. In the Anglo-Saxon laws, we find two ranks of freeholders; the first called King's thanes whose lives were valued at 1200 shillings; the sec- ond of inferior degree, whose composi- tion was half that sum. That of a ceorl was 200 shillings. By the laws of Wil- liam the Conqueror there was still a composition fixed for the murder of a villein or ceorl, the strongest proof of his being, as it was called law-worthy, and possessing a rank however subordi- nate in political society. And this com- position was due to his kindred, not to the lord. Indeed, it seems positively de- clared in another passage that the cul- tivators though bound to remain upon the land were only subject to certain services. Nobody can doubt that the villeinl and bordarii of Doomsday Book, who are always distinguished from the 46 DENNIS IIATHNAVOHT serfs of the demesne, were the ceorls of Anglo-Saxon law." To possess land was the only way to power, social or political. It is believed that to each hundred warriors among the Saxons, a particular portion of land was allotted, and these again divided the land among the different families. Land that remained over was called the folk- land and the king could not grant any of this away without permission of the Witanagemot. Society became divided into Hathnaughts who had no standing in law and were at the mercy of the master; the landless freeman who placed himself in a position of dependence and thus acquired protection under the law; the full freeman who owned land and gauged his rank according to the num- ber of hides of land he owned. The ceorl owned one hide, the thegn or thane, five, and the earl, forty hides. These last classes were on something of an equal footing and one might pass from one to the other with growing wealth. To Anglo-Saxon days are traced those beginnings of constitutional and ordered government now so general throughout the world. Towns grew by the acciden- tal fact of the proximity of farms and an official called the reeve, attended by four townsmen represented a township's interests in the courts of the Hundred and the Shire. The Hundred was a com- bination of towns, the gemot or court of the hundred held monthly sessions, and these were attended by the lords DENNIS JIATHNAUGHT 47 of the domains included in the hundred; the reeves and their four men; and the priest of the parish. Criminals were tried in the Courts of the Hundred and land and other ques- tions decided, usually by twelve men chosen from representatives at the Court. Matters always had to take orderly proce- dure and it was not legal to hear ques- tions in superior courts until they had first been heard in the Court of the Hun- dred. An aggregation of Hundreds made up the Shire of which the great man was the earldorman whose office became hereditary and who later became known by the title of earl. The king was rep- resented in the Shire by the sheriff, who convoked, semi-annually, the Shire-moot, or court above the Hundred, and pre- sided over its deliberations, with the earldorman and bishop sitting with him. Supreme over all was the great coun- cil of the nation, the Witanagemot. This must not be confounded with present representative bodies called Parliament and Congress. Its membership was made up of the earldormen, bishops, abbots and thanes. The Witanagemot was not only the Supreme Court of the Anglo- Saxon world, but it had the power of electing the king and promulgating laws. The power of the Witanagemot was of a more or less fluctuating character for a king who was a real king and not a mere figurehead could always bring the Witanagemot to his way of thinking and doing. 48 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Kingly power was largely increased by making the interests of members of his household identical with those of royalty. Gesiths or companions of the king form- ed a sort of Swiss Guard of royalty, but the gesithcund as time went on disap- peared into the general body of thane- hood. Thanes became powerful through grants of land from the king and often such grants carried with them power of sac and soc, and in this way, the right of the thane to decide out of hand, mat- ters that in earlier days were submitted to the hundred-moot. Sac and soc are also written sake and soke. The first involved a cause in dis- pute between litigants and the right to hold court and administer justice with- in a specified district. Under the Nor- mans such power was vested in the Manorial Courts. The system in one form or another has been exercised by the Squirearchy of England almost to our own day. Soc or soke as defined by Webster, concerned "the right to hold court and do justice, with the franchise to receive certain fees or fines arising from it; jurisdiction over a certain ter- ritory or over certain men, or the right to exercise such jurisdiction or receive certain fees or fines belonging to that right or the territory over which the jurisdiction exists." Although the king reserved to himself the right of soc or soke over thanes, the tendency of the system was to increase more and more the power of the thanes DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 49 until in time a few powerful nobles be- came a menace to royalty as the foun- tain head of a central authority. In thanehood, Green (History of the English People) found the germ of feudalism. This system indeed did form the raw material of the feudalism introduced so ruthlessly by Wilham the Conqueror, who, with his Normans conquered Eng- land in 1066. Duruy (History of the Middle Ages) with his usual power of presenting vivid pictures of olden times without unnec- essary circumlocution describes the man- ner in which William divided the Saxon lands among his followers. "The secular and the ecclesiastical do- mains of the Saxons," he says, "were occupied by the conquerors, many of whom had been cowherds or weavers or simple priests on the continent, but now became lords and bishops. Between 1080 and 1086 a register of all the properties occupied was drawn up. This is the fa- mous land roll of England called by the Saxons the Doomsday Book. On this land thus divided was established the most regular feudal system in Europe. Six hundred barons had beneath them 60,- 000 knights. Over all towered the king, who appropriated 1462 manors and the principal cities and by exacting the di- rect oath from even the humblest knights, attached every vassal closely to himself." William was wise in his day and gen- eration, and had closely observed, not 50 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT only the lessening of the royal power in France in consequence of the rise of great feudatories, but the gradual de- velopment of a similar system in Eng- land as a result of the growth of thane- hood. When he granted one of his lords a vast amount of land he took pains to see that the tracts were in widely sep- arated districts, and in this way foiled the ambition of a powerful vassal who might seek to become great in his home Shire. When England was harassed by the Danes, the Anglo-Saxons were subjected to what is known as the Danegeld, a tribute paid to the piratic Danes. The tax fell upon land under cultivation. Wil- liam saw fit to continue this tax, and eighteen years after the Conquest tripled it. It was one of the most vexatious exactions that oppressed the Hath- naughts. Another of his oppressive mea- sures was to take over jurisdiction of the forests, and to visit with heavy pen- alties, even deprivation of sight and life, the presumption of those who dared to kill game therein. This right belonged exclusively to himself and his favourites. These forest laws led to the outlawry of many persons, and in the old ballads and tales we find stories of the hardy bands that defied the Norman kings, par- ticularly of the romantic deeds of Robin Hood, Little John, Maid Marion and others who found refuge in Sherwood Forest and founded in the greenwood and the brush, the outlaw republic of the Hathnaughts. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 51 Edward Augustus Freeman (History of the Norman Conquest of England) writ- ing of the misfortunes that had come upon the Anglo-Saxons with the death of their King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, declares that from that day the Normans "began to work the will of God upon the folk of England till there were left in England no chiefs of the land of English blood, till all were brought down to bondage and sorrow, till it was a shame to be called an English- man, and the men of England were no more a people." The Normans despoiled the Saxon Hathnaughts of everything and exploit- ed the whole land for the conquering race. No more interesting picture of this contest exists in literature than that drawn by Sir Walter Scott in the first chapter of "Ivanhoe." In this we are carried back to the England of Richard the First and in the talk between Wamba the jester and Gurth, the swineherd, we get a graphic picture of the times. Gurth, who is of the house of Hathnaught, bears about his neck a brass band welded on and with the inscription upon it: "Gurth, the son of Beowulph is the born thrall of Cedric of Rotherwood." Wamba shows that everything worth while is given a Norman name, while all that is mean re- mains Saxon. "Why, how call you these grunting brutes running about on their four legs?" demanded Wamba. "Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that." 52 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT "And swine is good Saxon," said the jester, "but how call you the sow when she is flayed and drawn and quartered, and hung up by the heels like a traitor?" "Pork," answered the swineherd. "I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives and is in charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman and is called pork, when she is carried to the castle-hall to feast among the nobles; ■what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?" All of which goes to show that friend Wamba, in his way, was as much a walking delegate of sedition as Rousseau ever was. Suggestion is a great teacher. At the time of the Norman Conquest there was a Saxon slave trade in Eng- land, according to Green, Hallam, Taine and other authorities, which had its headquarters at Bristol and was finally suppressed by William the Conqueror. Taine (History of English Literature) tells the story thus: "At Bristol, at the time of the Conquest, as we are told by an historian of the time (Life of Bishop Wolston) it was the custom to buy men and women in all parts of England, and to carry them to Ireland for sale in or- der to make money. The buyer usually made the young women pregnant, and took them to market in that condition in order to insure a better price." Taine quotes his authority as follows: "You DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 53 might have seen with sorrow long files of young people of both sexes and of the greatest beauty, bound with ropes, and daily exposed for sale. . . . They sold in this manner as slaves their near- est relative, and even their own chil- dren." Green declares that when Henry II finally undertook the Conquest of Ire- land, that country was filled with Saxon Hathnaughts who had been enslaved, and that this was one of the grounds for the invasion. Hallam quotes Giraldus Cambrensis to show that the Irish en- tered into an agreement, finally, to eman- cipate the slaves, but he does not name the Hibernian Lincoln of the occasion. Green ("History of the English Peo- ple") calls attention to the rise of the universities as a menace to the perpetuity of feudalism. The democratic tendencies of the great Schools did much to under- mine the system just as we see in the Russian literature of our own day that the student life in the university towns of Muscovy has hastened the day of Ivan Hathnaught's emancipation and has brought greater freedom to those that toil. According to Green the university was a protest against the isolation of man from man. With the Latin the tongue of the learned everywhere, "a common intellectual kinship and rivalry," says Green, "took the place of the petty strifes which parted province from prov- ince and realm from realm." 54 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Wandering Oxford Scholars carried the writings of Wyclif to the libraries of Prague, we are told, and who can doubt that the interchange of knowledge by dif- ferent countries hastened the great spir- itual revolution of which the English WycUf and the Bohemian Huss and Je- rome of Prague were the precursors — ■ the Reformation of Luther? CHAPTER VI. THE BLACK DEATH EMANCIPATES DENNIS. The Black Death which swept away 25,000,000 of Europe's inhabitants, scourg- ed the Continent between 1348 and 1351. It swept England in 1349. This great calamity had an important bearing on the question of wages and constitutes an epoch In the history of the tribe of Hathnaught. Says the International Encyclopedia: "The institution of the Guild was the protest of the labouring class against feudalism. Ociginating in the Anglo- Saxon family system, it became intrench- ed behind the growing strength of Chris- tianity, and gradually assimilated with It all the forces that were inimical to the control of the labouring class by the feudal barons and other potentates. Through the influence of the Guild, hand- labour became a power, hand labourers were artists, and the golden age of man- ual skill arrived. In the work of the loom. In metal working and wood carv- ing, in the manufacture of pottery and glass, this period has never been equal- led. Artists Uke the Delia Robbias, Ghi- 55 56 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT berta, Andrea del Sarto, and Benvenuto Cellini ennobled labour. But the age be- came luxurious, and the masterpieces of art labour centered in a few hands. "As has ever been the case in history, interests conflicted, wealth tended to cen- tralize and consolidate itself, the Guilds divided among themselves into plodders and those who accumulated the results of their toil, vast operations in trade be- came possible to those who possessed the necessary enterprise and skill, and so Capital was born as a new factor in the utilization of labour, and a new enemy for the labourer to confront and to an- tagonize. The influence of the new force was speedily felt, and the tendency to exclusiveness and monopoly on the part of the wealthy awakened in the workers the idea of organization, and there grew up an independent working class for the first time in history. Now, too, for the first time in its application to large and organized bodies of labourers, the wage question took prominence. "This arose primarily from the effect upon the population of the terrible plagues and famines which, beginning about the middle of the fourteenth cen- tury, began to devastate Europe. The depopulation of countries resulted in a scarcity of labourers, but every attempt on the part of the latter to insure the adop- tion of a higher rate of wages on this account met with strenuous and per- sistent opposition from employers." Edgar Sanderson in his "History of the DENNIS HATHNAVGHT 57 World," says: "The effect in England (of the Black Death) was to raise the wages paid by landowners, who now tilled their lands mostly by hired labour, and to cause some legislation to compel the pea- eants to work at fixed wages in their own localities. Much of the land ceased, from the lack of labourers, to be tilled for corn, and became pasture for the raising of wool, which was a source of great profit by export for weaving in the looms of the Netherlands." Green (History of the English People) says: "The social strife, too, gathered bit- terness with every effort at repression. It was in vain that Parliament after Par- liament increased the severity of its laws. The demands of the Parhament of 1376 show how inoperative the previous Sta- tutes of Labourers had proved. They prayed that constables be directed to ar- rest all who infringed the statute, that no labourer should be allowed to take refuge In a town and become an artisan if there were need of his services in the country from which he came, and that the king would protect lords and employers against the threats of death uttered by serfs who refused to serve. "The reply of the Royal Council shows that statesmen at any rate were begin- ning to feel that oppression might be pushed too far. The king refused to in- terfere by any further and harsher pro- visions between employers and employed, and left cases of breach of law to be dealt with in his ordinary courts of justice — 58 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT on the one side he forbade the threaten- ing gatherings which were already com- mon in the country, but on the other he forbade the illegal exactions of the em- ployers. With such a reply, however, the proprietary class were hardly likely to be content. Two years later the Par- liament of Gloucester called for a fugi- tive slave law which would enable lords to seize their serfs in whatever county or town they found refuge, and in 1379 they prayed that judges might be sent five times a year into every shire to en- force the Statute of Labourers." Frederick W. Hackwood in a work bearing the sarcastic title, "The Good Old Times," also points out the ultimate benefits to Dennis, that followed in the wake of the Black Death. He shows that in consequence of the great mortality, food was cheap and abundant in the first year of the plague. As the plague continued, agriculture was neglected and the price of fopd in- creased enormously. The scarcity of labour put a premium upon it and Den- nis was not slow to demand high wages. Hackwood says that the laws aimed at regulating wages and the labour market, were enforced upon the Hathnaughts by fines and punishment of a corporal na- ture. But it was all to no purpose for a rise In the price of corn made it im- possible for Dennis to live under the old wage standard. Great landowners tried to enforce the regulations of the statute, however, and DENNIS HATHNAUQHT 59 the expedient was hit upon of branding runaway Hathnaughts on the forehead. Citizens of towns harbouring runaways were liable to severe punishment. Here and there a landowner converted his land into sheep pastures because of the diffi- culty of getting labour, while others be- gan leasing the land for rental to farmers which put the burden of finding labour to till the soil sauarely upon the tenant. Thus originated in the days immediately following the Black Death, the class of tenant farmers now so important an ele- ment in rural life — the yeomanry of Mer- rie England. Experiments with sheep farming, ac- cording to Hackwood, led to important re- sults. The wool trade grew to be a source of great wealth and lords who so em- ployed their land, began to encroach upon the common lands, which they fenced in, thereby arbitrarily and illegally shut- ting out the Hathnaughts who had long enjoyed the right of free pasturage. It is from this time that date the hedges, so characteristic to-day of the English landscape — a thing of beauty that had its origin In robbery and injustice, and in many Instances of tragic results to the long-suffering Hathnaughts. While these rapacious lords were try- ing to abolish wages and restore the serf- dom of the old feudal days, others of a more discerning kind concluded it would be wiser and in the end more profitable to control all means of supply and make their own bargain with Dennis. Public 60 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT lands were appropriated by the whole- sale by these mediaeval land grabbers who pretended a philanthropic desire to re- claim waste places and thus improve the national prosperity. Parhament woriceu hand in glove with the land robbers and the system continaed until 1845 when a million acres were enclosed. Thousands of private acts of Parliament sanctioned this wholesale larceny of the public do- main which, crowded the Hathnaughts into tighter and tighter quarters on the "tight little island." John Ball, who preached sedition in the reign of Richard II (1381), inculcated levelling principles among the Hath- naughts, according to David Hume in his "History of England." Says Hume: "The first faint dawn of the arts and of good government in that age, had excited the minds of the populace in different states of Europe, to wish for a better condition, and to murmur against those chains which the laws enacted by the haughty nobility and gentry had so long imposed upon them. The commotions of the people in Flanders, the mutiny of the peasants in France, were the natural ef- fects of the growing spirit of indepen- dence; and the report of these events being brought into England, whose per- sonal slavery, a.s we learn from Frois- sart, was moie general than in any other country in Europe, had prepared the minds of the multitude lor an insurrec- tion. "Ono John Ball, also, a seditious DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 61 preacher who affected low popularity, went about the country and Inculcated on his audience the principles of the first origin of mankind from one common stock, their equal right to liberty and to all the goods of nature, the tyranny of artificial distinctions and the abuses which had arisen from the degradation of the more considerable part of the species, and the aggrandizement of a few insolent rulers. These doctrines, so agreeable to the populace and so conformable to the ideas of primitive equality which are in- graven in the hearts of all men, were greedily received by the multitude and scattered the sparks of that sedition which the present tax raised into a con- flagration." In a footnote Hume says: "There were two verses at that time in the mouths of the common people, which, In spite of prejudice, one cannot but regard with some degree of approbation: When Adam delved and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?" The tax mentioned by Hume was the Imposition of three groats a head on every person, male or female, above fif- teen years of age. The first disorder was raised by a blacksmith of the tribe of Hathnaught, in a village of Essex. The collecting of the tax had been farmed out to tax-gatherers in each county, and one of these insisting on payment for a daughter of the blacksmith, offered indig- nities to the child with the result that Hathnaught brained him with a hammer. 62 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Immediately the other Hathnaughts rushed to arms headed by Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, Hob Carter, and Tom Miller. One hundred thousand of them assem- bled at Blackheath, and some of them, to show their purpose of levelling all man- kind, forced kisses on the king's mother who was returning from a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Lawyers fared badly, for the Hathnaughts, regarding the men of law as enemies, hanged every one they encountered. Ability to read and write was enough to condemn the victim. Richard II took refuge in the Tourer, but finally had to come forth and deal with the rebels who had been engaged in a campaign of murder and pillage. At a conference with the king, Wat Tyler was so insolent that Walworth, the Mayor of London, struck him down with his sword and members of the king's retinue dispatched the rebel chief. The Hath- naughts would have wreaked a terrible revenge had it not been for Richard's presence of mind. With wonderful cool- ness he ventured among them and said he would be their leader. The poor sim- pletons were granted charters and liber- ties, and they thought the millennium well under way, but not long afterward the king gathered a great force of ad- herents and forced the rebels to submit. Parliament revoked the charters of en- franchisement, certain leaders were exe- cuted without process of law, and the Hathnaughts who had hoped to see all rank and distinctions levelled, were again enslaved. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 63 Thus, while the Black Death emanci- pated Dennis from serfdom and made him class conscious, the rising of the Hath- naughts under Wat Tyler left him with- out political liberty, a boon for which he is still battling in our day under Lloyd George and the Labour party. CHAPTER VII. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT BECOMES A CITIZEN. When you say your daily prayers, you should thank Heaven for the mountains and the cities, for they have done much to win you freedom. In Sheridan Knowles' "William Tell" we see how lov- ingly the Swiss Hathnaught addressed his "crags and peaks," but back of the walls of the cities, no less than in the moun- tains, embattled Hathnaughts have won charters of liberty in many a hard-fought contest with feudal privileges. Duruy, in his "Middle Ages," traces the beginning of the communal movement to 1067, when the city of Mens went to war against Its overlord. Little by little the burgesses, often with the aid of the kings who wished to break down the vast feudal power, won concession after concession. In "the good old days," a freeman, linger- ing a year and a day upon the domain of a lord, became, automatically, a serf. In the days when the city began to rise and flourish, the fact that a serf dwelt unchal- lenged within its walls for a year and a day, made him a freeman. By the twelfth century the serf had become so far ac- knowledged to be a human being that he 94 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 65 could leg-ally give testimony in a court of law. Guizot (History of Civilization in Eu- rope), discussing the rise of free cities, declares that it was not till the eleventh and twelfth centuries that corporate cit- ies make any figure in history. "I cannot, at this period," he says, "call in the tes- timony of known and contemporary events, because it was not till between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries that corporations attained any degree of per- fection and influence, that those institu- tions bore any fruit, and that we can veri- fy our assertions by history. . . . But let us enter one of those free cities and see what is going- on within it. Here things take quite another turn; we find ourselves in a fortified town, defended by armed burgesses. Those burgesses fix their own taxes, elect their own magis- trates, have their own courts of judica- ture, their own public assemblies for de- liberating upon public measures, from which none are excluded. They make war at their own expense, even against their suzerain, maintain their own mi- litia. In short, they govern themselves, they are sovereigns. ... In the pres- ent day the burgesses in a national point of view, are everything — municipalities nothing; formerly corporations were everything, while the burgesses, as re- spects the nation, were nothing." Guizot says that from the fifth cen- tury to the time of the complete organ- ization of the feudal system, the state of 6G DENNIS HATHNAUGHT the times was continually getting worse. Before that time the towns had retained some fragments of Roman institutions in the government of the towns. Upon the triumph of the feudal system the Hath- naughts of the towns, without falling into the slavery of the agriculturists, were en- tirely subjected to the control of a lord, were included in some fief, and lost, by this title, somewhat of the independence which still remained to them. Guizot continues: "When once, how- ever, the feudal system was fairly estab- lished, when every man had taken his place, and became fixed, as it were, to the soil; when the wandering life had entirely ceased, the towns again assumed some importance — a new activity began to display itself within them. This is not surprising. Human activity, as we all know, is like the fertility of the soil: when the disturbing process is over, it re- appears and makes all to glow and blos- som; wherever there appears the least glimmering of peace and order the hopes of man are excited, and with his hopes his industry. Ihis is what took place in the cities. No sooner was society a little set- tled under the feudal system, than the proprietors of fiefs began to feel new wants, and to acquire a certain taste for improvement and melioration; this gave rise to some little commerce and industry In the towns of their domains; wealth and population increased within them — slowly for certain, but still they increased. "Among other circumstances which DENNIS IIATHNAUGIIT 67 aided in bringing- this about, there is one which, in my opinion, has not been suf- ficiently noticed, — I mean the asylum, the protection which the churches afforded to fugitives. Before the free towns were constituted, before they were in a condi- tion by their power, their fortifications, to ofiEer an asylum to the desolate population of the country, when there was no place of safety for them but the church, this circumstance alone was sufficient to draw into the cities many unfortunate persons and fugitives. These sought refuge either in the church itself or within its pre- cincts; it was not merely the lower or- ders, such as serfs, villeins, and so on, that sought this protection, but frequent- ly men of considerable rank and wealth, who might chance to be proscribed. The chronicles of the times are full of exam- ples of this kind. We find men lately powerful, upon being attacked by some more powerful neighbour, or by the king himself, abandoning their dwellings, and carrying away all the property they could rake together, entering into some city, and placing themselves under the protection of a church: they became citizens. Ref- ugees of this sort had, in my opinion a considerable influence upon the progress of the cities; they introduced into them, besides their wealth, elements of a popu- lation superior to the great mass of their inhabitants." In the old days, men wandered far to pillage, but under the fixed, settled life of the feudal system, the brunt of pillage fell upon the cities. 68 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Guizot says: "The exactions of the pro- prietors of fiefs upon the burgesses were redoubled at the end of the tenth century. "WTienever the lord of the domain, by which a city was girt, felt a desire to in- crease his wealth, he gratified his avarice at the expense of the citizens. "It was more particularly at this period that the citizens complained of the total want of commercial secui-ity. Merchants on returning from their trading rounds, could not, with safety, return to their city. Every avenue was taken possession of by the lord of the domain and his vassals. The moment in which industry com- menced its career was precisely that in which security was most wanting. Noth- ing is more galling to an active spirit than to be deprived of the long anticipated plea- sure of enjoying the fruits of his indus- try . . . There is in the progressive movement, which elevates a man of a population toward a new fortune, a spirit of resistance against iniquity and vio- lence much more energetic than in any other situation." It was a time, we read, when there was no settled order, but a perpetual recur- rence of individual will, refusing to sub- mit to authority. "Such," says Guizot, "was the conduct of the major part of the holders of fiefs toward their .suzerains, of the small pro- prietors of land to the greater; so that at the very time when the cities were op- pressed and tormented, at the moment when they had new and greater interests DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 69 to sustain, they had before their eyes a continual lesson of insurrection. "The feudal system rendered this ser- vice to mankind — it has constantly exhib- ited individual will, displaying itself in all its power and energy — ... In spite of their weakness, in spite of the pro- digious inequality which existed between them and the great proprietors, their lords, the cities everywhere broke out into rebellion against them. . . . Doubt- less in the eighth, ninth, and tenth cen- turies there were many attempts at re- sistance, many efforts made for free- dom: — many attempts to escape from bondage, which not only were unsuccess- ful, but remained without glory. Still we may rest assured that those attempts had a vast influence upon succeeding events: they kept alive and maintained the spirit of liberty — they prepared the great insurrection of the eleventh cen- tury." Guizot describes the construction of the house of a citizen of the twelfth century so far as one can now obtain an idea of it. "It consisted usually," he said, "of three stories, one room in each; that on the ground floor served as a general eating- room for the family; the first story was rauch elevated for the sake of security, and this is the most remarkable circum- stance in the construction. The room In this story was the habitation of the mas- ter of the house and his wife. The house was, in general, flanked with an angular tower, usually square: another symptom 70 DENNIS HATUNAUGHT of war; another means of defence. The second story consisted again of a sin- gle room; its use is not known, but it probably served for the children and do- mestics. Above this in most houses, was a small platform, evidently intended as an observatory or watch tower. Every feature of the building bore the appear- ance of war. This was the decided char- acteristic, the true name of the movement which wrought out the freedom of the cities. . . . Treaties of peace between the cities and their adversaries were so many charters. These charters of the cit- ies were so many positive treaties of peace between the burgesses and their lords." These insurrections Guizot regards as spontaneous, growing out of a similarity of oppressions of the Hathnaughts, and in no sense the result of concerted action. Each town rebelled on its own account against its own lord, unconnected with any other place. Royalty, seeking its own advantage sometimes sided with the cit- ies, sometimes with the lords, but alto- gether, he thinks, produced more of good than of evil. This inevitable interference of royalty, brought on frequent and close connections between the Hathnaughts and the king and the result was the cities became a part of the state and be- gan to have relations with the general government. Says Guizot: "This formation of a great social class was the necessary re- sult of the local enfranchisement of the DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 71 burgesses. . , , In the twelfth cen- tury, this class was almost entirely com- posed of merchants or small traders, and little landed or house proprietors who had taken up their residence in the city. Three centuries afterward there were added to this class lawyers, physicians, men of letters, and the local magistrates." This rise of free citizenship, Guizot points out, resulted in the struggle of classes, "a struggle which constitutes the very fact of modern history, and of which it is full." . . . "No class has been able to overcome, to subject the others; the struggle, instead of rendering society stationary, has been a principal cause of its progress." . . . "The cities them- selves, in their turn, entered into the feudal system; they had vassals, and be- came suzerains; and by this title pos- sessed that portion of sovereignty which was inherent with suzei-ainty. A great confusion arose between the rights which they held from their feudal position and those which they had acquired by their insurrection; and by this double title they held the sovereignty. "Let us see, as far as the very scanty sources left us will allow, how the in- ternal government of the cities, at least in the more early times, was managed. The entire body of the inhabitants formed the communal assembly; all those who had taken the communal oath — and all who dwelt within the walls were obliged to do so — were summoned, by the tolling of the bell, to the general assembly. In 72 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT this was named the magistrates. The number chosen, and the power and pro- ceedings of the magistrates, differed very considerably. After choosing the magis- trates, the assemblies dissolved; and the magistrates governed almost alone, suf- ficiently arbitrarily, being under no fur- ther responsibility than the new elec- tions, or perhaps, popular outbreaks which were, at this time, the great guar- antee for good government. ... It was impossible, especially while such man- ners prevailed, to establish anything like a regular government with proper guar- antees of order and duration. The greater part of the population of these cities were ignorant, brutal and savage to a degree which rendered them exceedingly diflacult to govern." Inevitably, as Guizot shows, there was formed a burgess aristocracy, and a sys- tem of privileges was introduced into the cities, resulting in great inequality. There grew up in all the cities, a number of opulent burgesses and a population more or less numerous of Hathnaughts who, despite their Inferiority, were not with- out influence. The superior citizens, he says, found themselves pressed between two great difficulties: first, the arduous one of governing the turbulent Hath- naughts; and secondly, that of with- standing the continual attempts of the ancient master of the borough, who sought to regain his former power. Such, he says, was the situation of their af- fains, not only in France, but in Europe down to the sixteenth century. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 73 Wolfgang Menzel (History of Germany) declares that the cities of the Teutonic races, Insignificant in origin, gradually rose to a height of power that made it possible for them to defy the authority of the sovereign and to become the most powerful support of the empire. Particu- lai'ly interesting to the student of indus- trialism is his description of the German Guilds. You will note all through his ac- count, that Fritz Hathnaught is entitled to wear service stripes as a Soldier in the army of human liberty. Listen to Menzel: "Increasing civilization had produced numerous wants, which commerce and industry alone supply. The people, more- over, oppressed by the feudal system in the country, sheltered themselves beneath the segis of the city corporations. The artisans, although originally serfs, were always free. In many cities the air be- stowed freedom; whoever dwelt within their walls could not be reduced to a state of vassalage, and was instantly affran- chised, although formerly a serf when dwelling beyond the wall. "In the thirteenth century, every town throughout Flanders enjoyed this priv- ilege. It was only in the villages that fell, at a later period, under the jurisdic- tion of the towns, that the peasants still remained in a state of vassalage. The emperors, who beheld in the independence and power of the cities, a defense against the princes and popes, readily bestowed great privileges upon them, and released them from the jurisdiction of the lords of 74 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT the country, the bishops, and the im- perial governors. The cities often as- serted their own independence, the power of a bishop being unable to cope with that of a numerous and high-spirited body of citizens. Ihey also increased their ex- tent at the expense of the provincial no- bility, by throwing- down their castles, by taking their serfs as Pfahlburger (subur- bans) or by purchasing their lands. "The imperial free cities had the right of prescribing their own laws which were merely ratified by the emperor. . . . To the right of legislation was added that of independent jurisdiction, which was de- noted by the pillars known as Roland's pillars, and by the red towers. The red flag was the sign of penal judicature, and red towers were used as prisons for crim- inals; and as the practice of torture be- came more general in criminal cases, tor- ture, famine, witch and heretic towers were erected in almost every town. The management of the town affairs was at length entirely entrusted to the council, which originally consisted of the sheriffs headed by a mayor, but was afterward chiefly composed of members elected from the different parishes, and was at length compelled to admit among its number the presidents of the various guilds; and the mayor, the president of the ancient bur- gesses, was, consequently, replaced by the burgomaster, or president of the guilds. The right of .self-government was denoted by the bell on the town or council house. In the Middle Ages the greatest pride of DENNIS HATHNAVGHT 75 the provincial cities, which had gained independence. . . . The gnilds ere long grasped at greater privileges, and formed a democratic party which aimed at wrest- ing the management of the town business out of the hands of the aristocratic burghers. "The corporations corresponded with the ancient German Guilds. The artisan en- tered as an apprentice, became partner, and finally master. The apprentice, like the knightly squire, was obliged to travel. The completion of a masterpiece was re- quired before he could become a master. Illegitimate birth and immorality excluded the artisan from the guild. Each guild was strictly superintended by a tribune. Every member of a guild was assisted when in need by the society. Every dis- agreement between the members was put a stop to, as injurious to the whole body. The members of one corporation generally dwelt in one particular street, had their common station in the market, their dis- tinguishing colors, and a part assigned to them in guarding the city, etc. These guilds chiefly conduced to bring art and handicraft to perfection." The rise of the English town is de- scribed by Green. "If," he says, "we pass from the English university to the Eng- lish town, we see a progress as impor- tant and hardly less interesting. In their origin our boroughs were utterly unlike those of the rest of the ancient world. The cities of Italy and Provence had pre- served the municipal institutions of their 76 DENNIS IIATHNAUGHT Roman past; the German towns had been founded by Henry the Fowler with the purpose of sheltering industry from the feudal oppression around them; the com- munes of Northern France sprang- into existence in revolt against feudal out- rage within their wall. "But in England the traditions of Rome passed utterly away, while feudal oppres- sion was held fairly in check by the Crown. The English town therefore was in its beginning simply a piece of the gen- eral country, organized and governed pre- cisely in the same manner as the town- ships around it. Its existence witnessed indeed to the need which was felt in those earlier times of mutual help and protec- tion. The burgh or borough was probably a more defensible place than the common village ; it may have had a ditch or mound about it instead of the quickset hedge or tun from which the town took its name. But in itself it was simply a township or group of townships where men clustered, whether for trade or defense more thickly than elsewhere. . . ." "Towns like Bristol were the direct re- sult of trade. There was the same vari- ety in the mode in which the various town communities were formed. WWle the bulk of them grew by simple Increase of population from township to town, larger boroughs, such as York with its six shires, or London with its wards and sokes and franchises, show how families and groups of settlers settled down side by side, and claimed as they coalesced, DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 77 each for itself, its shire or share of the town-ground, while jealously preserving its individual life within the town com- munity. But strange as these aggrega- tions might be, the constitution of the borough which resulted from them was simply that of the people at large. Wheth- er we regard it as a township, or rather from its s.ze as a hundred or collection of townships, the obligations of the dwellers within its bounds were those of the town- ships round, to keep fence and trench in good repair, to send a contingent to the fyrd and a reeve and four men to the hundred court and shire court. "As in other townships, land was a nec- essary accompaniment of freedom. The landless man who dwelt in a borough had no share in its corporate life: for purposes of government or property the town con- sisted simply of the landed proprietors within its bounds. "The common lands which are still at- tached to many of the boroughs take ua back to a time when each township lay within a ring or mark of open ground which served at once as boundary and pasture land. Each of the four wards of York had its common pasture ; Oxford has still Its own 'Portmeadow.' "The inner life of the borough lay as in the township about It, in the hands of its own freemen, gathered in borough- moot or portmannimote. But the social change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal requirement that each man should have a lord, affected the towns as 78 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT it affected the rest of the country. Some passed into the hands of great thanes near to them; the bulk became known as in the demesne of the king. A new officer, the lord's or king's reeve, was a sign of this revolution. It was the reeve who first summoned the borough-moot and admin- istered justice in it; it was he who col- lected the lord's dues or annual rent of the town, and who exacted the services it owed to its lord. "To modern eyes these services would imply almost complete subjection. When Leicester, for instance, passed from the hands of the Conqueror into those of its earls, its townsmen were bound to reap their lord's corn-crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his pound. The great forest around was the earl's, and it was only out of his grace that the little borough could drive its swine into the woods or pasture its cattle in the glades. The justice and the government of a town lay wholly in its master's hands; he appointed its bailiffs, received the fines and forfeitures of his tenants, and the fees and tolls of their markets and fairs." "But," continues Green rather naively in view of the fact that the Englishman has been stripped of all save his trou- sers, "when once these dues were paid and these services rendered, the English townsman was practically free. His rights were as rigidly defined by custom as those of his lord. Property and person alike were secured against arbitrary seizure. He DENNI8 HATHNAUGHT 79 could demand a fair trial on any charge, and even if justice was administered by his master's reeve, it was administered in the presence and with the assent of his fellow townsmen. "The bell which swung out from the town tower gathered the burgesses to a common meeting, where they could exer- cise rights of free speech and free delib- eration on their own affairs. Their mer- chant guild, over its ale-feast, regulated trade, distributed the sums due from the towns among the different burgesses, looked to the due repairs of gate and wall, and acted, in fact, pretty much the same as the town council of to-day. ... In the quiet quaintly named streets and town mead and market place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that swung out its summons to the crowded borough- mote, in merchant-guild, and church-guild and craft-guild, lay the life of English- men who were doing more than knight and baron to make England what she is, the life of their homes and their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their steady ceaseless struggle for right and freedom. "London stood first among English towns and the privileges which its citi- zens won became precedents for the burghers of meaner boroughs. Even at the conquest its power and wealth se- cured it a full recognition of all its an- cient privileges from the Conqueror. In one way indeed it profited by the revolu- tion which laid England at the feet of the 80 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT stranger. One Immediate result of Wil- liam's success was an immigration into England from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders followed quick on the invasion of the Norman sol- diery. Every Norman noble as he quar- tered himself upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered his English cloister, gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, French domestics about him," But Dennis Hathnaught is coming into his own, and in our day, centuries of struggle against oppression are crystal- lizing into ideas of municipal regulation and government that make English cities Important in the study of economic de- velopment. More than any other class in Britain, Dennis Hathnaught is entitled to the honour of posing for a statue of John Bull. John's square jaw is the evolution of the first grim resolution of the Hath- naughts to give tyranny the hurry call to the exit CHAPTER VIII. DENNIS FOUNDS THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE. It may sound paradoxical to credit Den- nis Hathnaught with the founding of such a powerful and opulent organization as the Hanseatic League, but when one un- derstands that the great bourgeois class of the Middle Ages — as indeed of all ages — was recruited from the lower order of society it is but historic justice to add the Hanseatic League to the roll of Hath- naught's achievements. The Lords of Have-and-Hold, being essentially a robber class, founded on con- quest, thievery, and the mailed fist, would never think of such an orderly thing as the organization of trade and the accu- mulating of wealth through the medium of honest barter. Indeed, the entire his- tory of the League is filled with incidents of titled freebooters and their mobs of re- tainers swooping down upon the traders and enriching themselves through tribute and pillage. The Hanseatic League was first an or- ganization of German merchants, and this developed into a commercial union of cer- tain German towns. Its rise is generally 81 82 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT understood to date from 1241, when Lu- beck and Hamburg formed an alliance. It had factories or trading stations in Wisby, London, Novgorod, Bergen, and Bruges. The aims of the League were mainly to improve conditions for their merchants abroad and establish a greater unity among the towns with a view to improving trade efficiency. In England the merchants were called Easterlings, whence the present word sterUng. Thanks to the efforts of the Historical Society of the Hanseatic Cities, we are destined to possess a fruitful literature on this interesting subject. There are two able works in German on the Hanseatic League. One by Georg Sartorius (Ge- schichte des hanseatischen Bundes) traces the growth and ultimate decadence of the League in a way that makes the work still authoritative, even though fuller ma- terial than the author worked with is now available. E. Dietrich Schafer in his work on the subject had an advantage over Sartorius, for the researches of the His- torical Societv of the Hanseatic Cities were accessible to him. So that while he does not altogether supplant Sartorius, his work is held to be a greater authority. Wolfgang Menzel, in his "History of Germany," devotes considerable space to the League. His work is available for English readers in a translation by Mrs. George Horrocks. "The power of the princes in Germany," he says, "was counterpoised by that of the cities, which, sensible of their inability in- DENNIS HATHNAUailT 83 dividually to assert their liberty, endan- gered by the absence and subsequent ruin of the Emperor, had mutually entered into an offensive and defensive alliance. The cities on the Northern Ocean and the Baltic vied with those of Lombardy in denseness of population, and in the asser- tion of their independence. Their fleet re- turned from the East laden with glory. They conquered Lisbon, besieged Accon and Damietta, founded the order of Ger- man Hospitalers, and gained great part of Livonia and Prussia. A strict union ex- isted among their numerous merchants. Every city possessed a corporation or guild, consisting, according to the custom of the times, of masters, partners, and apprentices. These guilds were armed and formed the chief strength of the city. "Ghent and Bruges were the first cities in Flanders which became noted for their civil privileges, their manufactories, com- merce, and industry. In the twelfth cen- tury they had already formed a Hansa, a great commercial association in which seventeen cities took part. In the thir- teenth century, their example was follow- ed by the commercial towns on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Baltic, but on a larger scale, the new Hansa, forming a political as well as a commercial asscciation, which was commenced by Lubeck, between which and Hamburg a treaty was made, A. D. 1241, in which Bremen and almost every city in the north of Germany as far as Cologne and Brunswick joined." Something of their power is shown by 84 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Menzel in the stories he tells of the LUbeck fleet worsting Erich IV of Den- mark, and the citizens of Bremen pulling down a custom house the archbishop had erected, and asserting their independence A. D. 1246. . . . Flanders, he says, far surpassed other countries in her municipal privileges, art, and industry, possessed the first great commercial navy, and founded the first great commercial league or Hansa in the twelfth century. "This example," he continues, "the first subjection of the Wends on the Baltic, and the crusades, greatly increased the activity of commerce in the thirteenth century on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Baltic. The crusades were undertaken in a mercantile as well as a religious point of view. In the East the merchant pil- grims formed themselves into the German order of knighthood, and, on their return to their native country, leagued together, A. D. 1241, for the purpose of defending ti. its against the native princes, and their commerce against the attack of the foreigner. "This Hansa League extended to such a degree in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as sometimes to include upward of seventy cities; its fleets ruled the Northern Ocean, conquered entire coun- tries, and reduced powerful sovereigns to submission. The union that existed be- tween the cities was, nevertheless, far from firmly cemented, and the whole of its immense force, was, from want of DENNIS HATHNAUQHT 85 unanimity, seldom brought to bear at once upon its enemies. A single attempt would have placed the whole of Northern Ger- many within its power, had the policy of the citizens been other than inercantile, and had they not been merely intent upon forcing the temporal and spiritual lords to trade with them upon the most favourable conditions." Liibeck, Menzel says, was the metropo- lis of the whole league, where the direc- tory of the Hansa, the general archive and treasury were kept, and where the great Hansa diets were held by the depu- ties from all the Hanse towns, in which they took into deliberation commercial speculations, the arming of fleets, peace, and war. Menzel continues, "At Bruges, the Hansa merely possessed a depot for their goods, which passed hence into the hands of the Italians. The Colognese merchants pos- sessed a second great depot as early as 1203, in London, still known as Guildhall, the hall of the merchants' guild of Co- logne. At a later period, the Hansa mo- nopoUzed the whole commerce of England. At Bergen, in Norway, the Hansa pos- sessed a third and extremely remarkable colony, 3,000 Hanseatic merchants, mas- ters, and apprentices living there like monks without any women. The Han- seatic colonists were generally forbidden to marry lest they should take possession of the country in which they lived and deprive the League of it. The fourth great depot was founded at Novgorod, in 86 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT the north of Russia, A. D. 1277. By it the ancient commercial relations between the coasts of the Baltic and Asia were preserved and the Hansa traded by land with Asia at first through Riga, but on the expulsion of the Tartars from Russia and the subjection of Novgorod by the Tzars, through Breslau, Erfurt, Magde- burg, and Leipzig. Germany and Europe were thus supplied with spices, silks, jewels, etc., from Asia; with furs, iron, and immense quantities of herrings from the North. France principally traded in salt, while Germany exported beer and wine, corn, linen, and arms; Bohemia, metals and precious stones; and Flanders, fine linen and cloths of every description. "The ferocity of the Hungarians, Ser- vians, and Wallachians, and the enmity of the Greeks, effectually closed the Dan- ube, the natural outlet for the produce of the interior of Germany toward Asia. The traffic on this stream during the Crusades raised Ulm, and, at a later period, Augs- berg, to considerable importance. "The traffic on the Rhine was far more considerable, notwithstanding the heavy customs levied by the barbarous princes and knights which the Rhinish league was annually compelled to oppose and put down by force. "Cologne was the grand depot for the whole of the inland commerce. Goods were brought here from every quarter of the globe, and, according to a Hanseatlc law, no merchant coming from the West, from Flanders or Spain, was allowed to DENNIki HATHNAUGHT 87 pass with his goods further than Co- logne; none coming from the East, not even. the Dutch, could mount, and none from the upper country descend, the Rhine beyond that city. The highroads were naturally in a bad state, and in- fested with toll-gatherers and robbers. The merchants were compelled to pur- chase a safe-conduct along the worst roads, or to clear them by force of arms. Most of the roads were laid by the mer- chants with the permission of well-dis- posed princes. Thus, for instance, the rich burgher, Henry Cunter of Botzen, laid the road across the rocks until then impassable, on the Eisack, between Botzen and Brixen, A. D. 1304; travellers up to that period, having been compelled to make a wearisome detour through Meran and Jauffen. "The lace and cloth manufactures of the Flemish, which lent increased splen- dour to the courts, the wealthy, and the high-born, were the first that rose into note, the Hansa being merely occupied with trade and commercial monopoly. Ulm afterward attempted to compete with the Italian manufacturers; but Nurem- berg, on account of her central position, less attracted by foreign commerce, be- came the first town of manufacturing re- pute In Germany. "The trade with the rich East, and the silver mines discovered in the tenth cen- tury in the Harz, in the twelfth, in the Erz Mountains in Bohemia, brought more money into circulation. The ancient Hohl- 88 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT pfennigs (solidi, shillings), of which there were twenty-two to a pound (and twelve denarii to a shilling) were replaced by the heavy Groschen (solidi grossi), of which there were sixty to a silver mark, and by the albus or white pennies, which varied in value. The working of the Bo- hemian mines in the fourteenth century, brought the broad Prague Groschen into note; they were reckoned by scores, always by sixties, the cardinal number in Bohemia. The smaller copper coins, or Heller (from hohl, hollow; halb, half; or from the free imperial town, Halle) were weighed by the pound, the value of which was two gulden, which at a later period, when silver became more common, rose to three." But the League went the way of earth at last. Its last days are well described by Edgar Sanderson: (History of the World) "The decline of this great trade- confederation began with a change in the movement of the herring. Early in the fifteenth century the fish deserted the Baltic spawning grounds for the German Ocean; the Netherlands gained what the Hansa towns of the eastern sea had lost; and Amsterdam, In a large degree, took the place of Liibeck, which, in the four- teenth century had a population ap- proaching the double of its numbers in 1870. The wealth, pride, and power of these northern commercial towns waned further after the change of commercial routes due to the discovery of America and of the way to India around the Cape. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 89 The Dutch members of the Confederacy had left it early in the fifteenth century, and the rise of British commerce in Tudor days had its influence, while the Reforma- tion, changing- the religion of northern Europe, lessened the demand for wax for candles as well as for the salt fish in which some of the towns still traded. Early in the seventeenth century Lubeck, Hamburg-, and Bremen were the only sur- vivors of the Leagrue, and these three famous free cities, after the middle of the nineteenth century, relinquished their old privileges as free ports by incorporation into the German Zoll Verein, or Customs Union." Sanderson nays a tribute to the noble part played by the League in "spreading civilization through regions of Europe sunk in barbarism, and by maintaining- the cause of right against mig-ht." Had the League been less intent upon trade it might have founded a great and powerful industrial empire, but its mem- bers, so long as trade was unhampered, did not interfere with the ambitions of princes and had no wish to govern. We should like to see it still flourishing under the motto "Esto perpetua," but as this was not to be, let \is inscribe upon its tomb, "Requiescat In pace." CHAPTER IX. FRITZ HATHNAUGHT AND THE PEASANTS' WAR. One of the greatest struggles of a des- pised, oppressed and exploited people to drop the burden from the back and as- sume the erect stature of freemen, was that of Fritz Hathnaught in sixteenth century Germany. This "Peasants' War" as it is known in history, started in 1524, spread rapidly, and was not suppressed untU 1525. "The religious liberty preached by Luther," says Menzel (History of Ger- many), "was understood by them as also implying the political freedom for which they sighed. Their condition had greatly deteriorated during the past century. The nobility had bestowed the chief part of their wealth on the church and dis- sipated the remainder at court. Luxury had also greatly increased, and the peas- ant was consequently laden with feudal dues of every description, to which were added their ill-treatment by the men-at- arms and mercenaries maintained at their expense, the damage done by game, the destruction of the crops by the noble followers of the chase, and finally, the 90 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 91 extortions practiced by the new law-offi- ces, the wearisome written proceedings, and the impoverishment consequent on lawsuits. The German peasant, despised and enslaved, could no longer seek refuge from the tyranny of his liege in the cities, where the reception of fresh sub- urbans was strictly prohibited, and where the citizen, enervated by wealth and luxury, instead of siding with the peasant, imitated the noble and viewed him with contempt." Menzel enumerates the twelve articles that the Hathnaughts wished to submit to a court of arbitration, as follows: "First — the right of the peasantry to appoint their own preachers who were to be al- lowed to preach the word of God from the Bible. Second — That the dues paid by the peasantry were to be abolished with the exception of tithes ordained by God for the maintenance of the clergy, the surplus of which was to be applied to general purposes and to the maintenance of the poor. Third — The abolition of vas- salage as iniquitous. Fourth — The right of hunting, fishing and fowling. Fifth — • That of cutting wood In the forests. Sixth — The modification of socage and average service. Seventh — That the peas- ant should be guaranteed from the ca- price of his lord by a fixed agreement. Eighth — The modification of the rent upon feudal lands, by which a part of the profit would be secured to the occu- pant. Ninth — The administration of jus- tice accoi'ding to the ancient laws, not 92 DENNIS HATHNAUGIIT according to the new statutes and to ca- price. Tenth — The restoration of com- munal property, illegally seized. Elev- enth — The abolition of dues on the death of a serf, by which the widow and or- phans were deprived of their right. Twelfth — The acceptance of the afore- said articles or their refutation as con- trary to Scripture." Although they had named Luther as a possible member of a court of arbitra- tion, he refused to interfere in their af- fairs, dreading, according to Menzel, the insolence of the Hathnaughts under the guidance of Anabaptists and enthusiasts. He used his utmost efforts to put down the insurrection, and was accused by Thomas Munzer, one of the Hathnaughts, of "deserting the cause of liberty and of rendering the Reformation a fresh ad- vantage for the princes, a fresh means of tyranny." For a time the Hathnaughts had for a leader, Goetz von Berlichingen, a notor- ious robber, who forms the subject of a drama by Goethe, who idealizes the ban- dit and his character. Menzel describes him as an ordinary highwayman. He had lost a hand by a cannon shot and In its place had an iron hand. When the revolt was put down, "The city of Wurzburg," according to Menzel, "threw open her gates to the triumphant Truchsess who held a fearful court of judgment in which the prisoners were })oheaded by his jester, Hans." In a note to the text, Menzol adds: "The DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 93 peasants knelt in a row before the Truch- sess, while Hans the Jester, with the sword of execution in his hand, marched up and down behind them. The Truch- sess demanded; 'which among them had been implicated in the revolt?' None acknowledged the crime. 'Which of them had read the Bible?' Some said yes, some no, and each of those who re- plied in the affirmative was instantly de- prived of his hea^ by Hans, amid the loud laughter of the squires. The same fate befell those who knew how to read or write. The priest of Schipf, an old, gouty man, who had zealously opposed the peasantry, had himself carried by four of his men to the Truchsess in order to receive the thanks of that prince for his services; but Hans, imagining that he was one of the rebels, suddenly step- ping behind him, cut off his head. Upon which, the Truchsess relates, 'I seriously reproved my good Hans for his untoward jest.' " These butchers were fit ancestors of the despoilers of Belgium. Menzel de- clares that in this slaughter of the Hath- naughts, which was general, the spiritual princes surpassed their lay brethren in atrocity. In a later revolt of a more re- ligious nature under Thomas Munzer, which broke out in Thuringia In the summer of 1525, the peasants were de- feated at Frankenhausen with great slaughter, and Munzer, found secreted In a haystack, was put to the rack and executed. In all, more than one hun- 94 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT dred thousand of the Hathnaughts fell in this terrible struggle, and at the end the survivors were worse off than ever. According to Menzel the misery of the Hathnaughts was by no means so great during the Middle Ages as it became af- ter the great peasant war of 1525. All through the ages will ring the wail of the poor peasant boy, victim of oppres- sion and malnutrition, who did not fear death so much as he regretted the fact that he never had enjoyed a good din- ner: "Alas! Alas! must I die so soon, and I have scarcely had a bellyful twice in my life!" CHAPTER X. DENNIS IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND. Prom the Norman Conquest to the ac- cession of Henry VIII, a period of five centuries, Saxon and Norman were gradually disappearing, and out of the great melting pot of the nation there came the modern Englishman. We have seen how oppressive was the government of the Conqueror, yet this very oppres- sion which aimed at the centralization of authority in the king, brought the barons in self-defence into alliance with the burghers. "Thus," says Duruy, in chorus with Buckle and Bonnemere, "the nobles sav- ed their rights only by securing those of their humblest allies. In this man- ner of agreement between the burgher middle class and the nobles, English pub- lic liberty was founded." The Normans seemed more bent upon robbing the people through unjust tax- ation than in building up a strong gov- ernment with a united people, speaking a common language and with a common destiny. But insensibly the Norman and Saxon elements were fusing; the union was hastened by the wresting of the Magna Charta from King John in 1215, and the poems of Chaucer, and Wyclif's 95 96 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT translation of the Bible, blended the current speech of both races into that glorious tong-ue that finally burst into full splendour in the age of Elizabeth. When Henry VIII ascended the throne he reigned over a genuine English peo- ple. Old animosities had disappeared, and there were few in the nation that could tell on which side their ancestors had fought at Hastings. James Anthony Froude in the first chapter of his "History of England," has an interesting survey of the social con- dition of the Hathnaughts in sixteenth century England. He treats in turn of mediaeval civilization; the encouragement of manufactures; the decline of the towns; the feudal system; the distribu- tion of property; wages and prices; la- bour and capital; management of land; the commercial spirit; absorption of land for pasturage; income of the higher classes; clergy and laity; education; or- ganization of trade; the London Compa- nies; handloom weavers. In the time of Henry VIII there was passed a statute for the encouragement of the linen trade and thus to bring about the better employment of the peo- ple. "This act," says Froude, "was de- signed immediately to keep wives and children of the poor in work in their own houses; but it leaves no doubt that manufactures in England had not of themselves that tendency to self-develop- ment which would encourage an enlarg- ing population. The woolen manufac- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 97 tures similarly appear, from the many statutes upon them, to have been vigor- ous at a fixed level, but to have shown no tendency to rise beyond that level. With a fixed market and a fixed demand production continued uniform." Proude notes the general decay of the towns in 1540 during Henry VIII's reign and a decline of manufactures despite statutory encouragement. But he ex- plains this by saying that the old towns were built, not for industry, but for the protection of property and life, and as the country had become secure, one of the purposes of the towns was no longer required. The woolen manufacture in Worcestershire, he says, was spreading into the open country and doubtless into other counties, too. "It was in fact," observes Proude, "the first symptom of the impending revolu- tion." . . . "This mighty change, how- ever, was long in silent progress before it began to tell on the institutions of the country. When city burghers bought estates, the law insisted jealously on their accepting with them all the feudal obligations. Attempts to use the land as a 'commodity' were angrily repressed; while again, such persons endeavoured, as they do at present, to cover the recent origin of their families by adopting the manners of the nobles instead of trans- ferring the habits of the towns to the parks and chases of the English coun- ties. The old English organization main- tained its full activity; and the duties of 98 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT property continued to be for another cen- tury more considered than its rights." Villanage in the reign of Henry VIII had practically ceased, but Froude shows that Hathnaught was far from being his own master; nor might he be idle or leave his employment at will or through caprice. "Through all these arrangements," says Froude, "a single aim is visible; that every man in England should have his definite place and definite duty as- signed to him, and that no human being should be at liberty to lead at his own pleasure an unaccountable existence." He goes on to discuss the respective ad- vantages of large and small estates — peasant proprietary or a constantly di- minishing number of wealthy landlords, but takes no sides himself. "Dress," he continues, "which now scarcely suffices to distinguish the mas- ter from his servant, was then the sym- bol of rajik, prescribed by statute to the various orders of society as strictly as the regimental uniform to officers and privates; diet was also prescribed and with equal strictness." What was eaten and the amount that might be partaken of. was duly set forth in the law. There was nothing in those days that might be likened to the so-called "lobster pal- aces" of Broadway, New York. "The state of the working classes," says Froude, "can, however, be more certainly determined by a comparison of their wages with the prices of food. Both DENNIS HATHNAUOHT 99 were regulated, as far as regulation was possible, by act of parliament, and we have therefore data of the clearest kind by which to judge. The majority of agricultural labourers lived in the houses of their employers; this, however, was not the case with all, and if we can satisfy ourselves as to the rate at which those among the poor were able to live who had cottages of their own, we may be assured that the rest did not live worse at their master's tables." Ye who rail against the high cost of living, give heed to these prices fixed by law and quoted by Froude: "Beef and pork were a half penny a pound, mutton was three farthings. These were fixed at these prices by the 3d of the 24th of Henry VIII." . . . "The best pig or goose in a country market could be bought for fourpence; a good capon for threepence or fourpence; a chicken for a penny; a hen for twopence." Froude estimates that a penny in terms of Hath- naught's necessities must have been near- ly equal in the reign of Henry VIII to the present shilling. "Turning then to the table of wages," he says, "it will be easy to ascertain his position. By the 3d of the 6th of Henry VIII it was enacted that master car- penters, masons, bricklayers, tylers, plumbers, glaziers, joiners, and other em- ployers of such skilled workmen, should give to each of their journeymen, if no meat or drink was allowed, sixpence a day for the half year, five pence a 100 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT day for the other half; or five pence- half penny for the yearly average. The common labourers were to receive four pence a day for half the year, for the remaining half, three pence. In the har- vest months they were allowed to work by the piece, and might earn consider- ably more." Commenting upon this in a foot- note and citing authorities, Proude says: "The wages were fixed at a maximum, showing that labour was scarce, and that its natural tendency was toward a higher rate of remuneration. Persons not possessed of other means of subsistence were punishable if they refused to work at the statutable rate of payment; and a clause in the act of Henry VIII di- rected that where the practice had been to give lower wages, lower wages should be taken. This provision was owing to a difference in the value of money in different parts of England. The price of bread at Stratford, for instance, was permanently twenty-five per cent, below the price in London." . . . "In 1581 the Agricultural labourer as he now ex- ists was only beginning to appear." . . . "This novel class had been called into being by the general raising of rents, and the wholesale eviction of the smaller tenantry which followed the Reforma- tion." Harrison in his "Description of Eng- land," quoted by Froude, says he knew old men, who, comparing things present with things past, spoke of two things I DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 101 ijrown to be very grievous — to wit, the enhancing of rents and the daily oppres- sion of copyholders, whose lords seek to bring their poor tenants almost into plain servitude and misery, daily devis- ing new means, and seeking up all the old, how to cut them shorter and short- er; doubling, trebling, and now and then seven times increasing their fines; driv- ing them also for every trifle to lose and forfeit their tenures, by whom the great- est part of the realm jioth stand and is maintained, to the end they may fleece them yet more; which is a lamentable hearing." For all his supposed advantage the la- bourer was not contented. "The wages act of Henry VIII," says Froude, "was unpopular with the labourers, and was held to deprive them of an opportunity of making better terms for themselves." . . . "On the one side parliament in- terfered to protect employers against their labourers; but it was equally de- termined that employers should not be allowed to abuse their opportunities; and this directly appears from the 4th of the 5th of Elizabeth, by which, on the most trifling appearance of a deprecia- tion in the currency, it was declared that the labouring man could no longer live on the wages assigned to him by the act of Henry; and a sliding scale was in- stituted by which, for the future, wages should be adjusted to the price of food." This method of trying to adjust prices to the purchasing power we find, in "The 102 DENNI8 HATHNAUGHT Common People of Ancient Rome," by- Professor Frank S. Abbott, was worked out in the days of Diocletian 301 A. D. It was not a success, for imperial and kingly edicts cannot supplant the natural laws of political economy. Professor Ab- bott, following the line of Froude, shows the prices of different articles of food in the days of Diocletian and the wages paid the free labourers. Froude, writing of the towns, the trad- ing and manufacturing classes, says: "The names and shadows linger about London of certain ancient societies, the members of which may still occasionally be seen in quaint gilt barges pursuing their own difficult way among the swarm- ing steamers; while on certain days, the traditions concerning which are fast dy- ing out of memory, the Fishmongers* Company, the Goldsmiths' Company, the Mercers' Company make procession down the river for civic feasting at Greenwich or Blackwall. The stately tokens of ancient honour still belong to them, and the remnants of ancient wealth and pa- tronage and power. Their charters may be read by curious antiquaries, and the bills of fare of their ancient entertain- ment. But for what purpose they were called into being, what there was in those associations of common trades to sur- round with gilded insignia, and how they came to be possessed of broad lands and church preferments, few people now care to think or inquire. Trade and traders have no dignity any more in the eyes DENNIS IIATTINAUGHT 103 of anyone, except what money lends to them; and these outward symbols scarce- ly rouse even a passing feeling of curi- osity. And yet these companies were once something more than mere names. They are all which now remain of a vast organization which once penetrated the entire trading life of England — an or- ganization set on foot to realize that most necessary, if most difficult, condition of commercial excellence under which man shall deal faithfully with his brother, and all wares offered for sale of whatever kind, should honestly be what they are pretended to be." Under the Guild system, according to Froude, no one was permitted to supply articles which he had not been educated to manufacture; the price at which arti- cles ought justly to be sold was deter- mined; and care was taken to see that cloth put up for sale was true cloth, of true texture and full weight; and so on through the list with all other goods, in the effort to enforce honest dealing. In London a central council sat for every branch of trade and this council acted in conjunction with the chancellor and the crown. The council fixed prices, wages, arranged rules of apprenticeship. There were searchers who, in companj'' with the Lord Mayor, or other official, in- spected the shops of traders. When nec- essaryj suggestions in reports submitted to the state authorities by the guilds, not infrequently became law through stat- ute enactment. 104 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT It was the age of the apprentice. No one might open a trade or become a manufacturer unless he had served his full apprenticeship. There was some notion of the vocation- al idea in those days, for no man, ac- cording to Froude, might work at a busi- ness for which he was unfit, and the state insisted on its natural right that thildren should not be allowed to grow up In idleness, to be returned at mature age upon its hands. Says Froude: "The children of those who could afford the small entrance fees were apprenticed to trades, the rest were apprenticed to agriculture; and if chil- dren were found growing up idle, and their fathers or their friends failed to prove that they were able to secure them an ultimate maintenance, the may- ors in towns and the magistrates in the country had authority to take possession of such children, and apprentice them as they saw fit, that when they grew up they might not be driven by want or In- capacity to dishonest courses." Froude observes that it would be mad- ness to try to apply to the changed con- dition of the present those trade regula- tions of the Plantagenets and the Tudors, but he suggests that it would be well if some competent person made these laws the subject of a special treatise. Under this iron discipline trade was regulated by law, some of the laws being salutary, but others vexatious, as in the "act touching weavers," which, limiting weav- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 105 ers living in towns to two looms, tended to prevent the cloth manufacture from falling into the power of larye capitalists employing hands. We complain of the short weight gro- cer and the impure food vender, but there were such in the days of the much mar- ried Henry VIII. We read in Froude of complaints made by the leather trade of searchers who, for a bribe, aflfixed their seal to goods imperfectly tanned, to the great deceit of the buyers thereof." Ex- cessive fees were often imposed, too, up- on apprentices in defiance of the law. The custom of skinning your tribe is an old one, Dennis. Toulmin Smith, in his "English Guilds," traces the original ordinances of more than a hundred early English Guilds. Lujo Brentano in a preliminary essay narrates the history and development of the guilds. This work is held to be the standard authority on the subject. Bren- tano deals with the origin of guilds; re- ligious and social guilds; town guilds or merchant guilds; craft guilds and trades- unions. Craft guilds are usually held to have been the beginnings of the trades- unions, but they differed from the mod- ern union in that the membership in- cluded masters. Ihus the guild might act in times of trouble as a board of arbitration and conciliation. The guild was really labour's first great progressive stand against the continuance of the feudal system as shown in a previous chapter. CHAPTER XI. DENNIS IN SETENTEENTH CEN- TURY ENGLAND. Macaulay's History of England shall De our authority, for the industrial his- tory of Merrie England in the Seven- teenth Century. His brilliant work con- tains but a few pages concerning the actual life of the Hathnaughts, but this Is because of the scantiness of the ma- terials. "The most numerous class," he says, "is precisely the class respecting which we have the most meager information. In those times philanthropists did not yet regard it as a sacred duty, nor had dema- gogues yet found it a lucrative trade to talk and write about the distress of the labourer. History was too much occu- pied with courts and camps to spare a line for the hut of the peasant or the garret of the mechanic. The press now often sends forth in a day a greater quantity of discussion and declamation about the condition of the working man than was published during the twenty- eight years which elapsed between the Restorg,tion and the Revolution. . . . "The great criterion of the state of 106 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT 107 the common people is the amount of their wages; and as four-fifths of the common people were, in the seventeenth century, employed In agriculture, it is especially important to ascertain what were the wages of agricultural industry. ... Sir William Petty (Political Arith- metic), whose mere assertion carries great' weight, informs us that a labourer was by no means in the lowest state who received for a day's work four-pence with food or eight-pence without food. Four shillings a week therefore were, according to Petty's calculation, fair agri- cultural wages. . . . "About the beginning of the year 1685 the justices of Warwickshire, in the exercise of a power entrusted to them by an Act of Elizabeth, fixed, at their quarter sessions, a scale of wages for the county, and notified that every em- ployer who gave more than the author- ized sum, and every working man who received more, would be liable to pun- ishment." In some places the Hathnaijghts were more favoured, and Macaulay cites Rich- ard Dunning, a gentleman of Devonshire, as authority for the statement that the wages of the Devonshire Dennis were, in 1685, without food, five shillings a week. In the neighbourhood of Bury Saint Ed- munds, Macaulay asserts, conditions were even better, for the magistrates of Suf- folk in the spring of 1682 decreed that where a Hathnaught was not boarded he should have five shillings a week in 103 DENNIS IIATIINAVGHT winter and six in summer. In 1661 the justices of Chelmsford fixed the wages of Essex Hathnaughts who were not boarded, at six shillings in winter and seven in summer. Macaulay points out that In the years in which this order was made, necessaries of life were immoderately dear. "Wheat was at seventy shillings the quarter, which would even now be considered as almost a famine price." . . . The average wage of his own day, Ma- caulay observes, was very much higher, and in prosperous counties the weekly wages of Hathnaughts engaged in farm work amounted to twelve, fourteen, and even sixteen shillings. He continues: "The remuneration of workmen em- ployed in manufactures has always been higher than that of tillers of the soil. In the year 1680, a member of the House of Commons remarked that tTie high wages paid in this country made it im- possible for our textures to maintain a competition with the produce of the In- dian looms. An English mechanic, he said, instead of slaving like a native of IJengal for a piece of copper, exacted a shilling a day." Because of the inattention formerly paid to the Hathnaughts, a ^eat deal of their history, Macaulay says, may be learned only from the ballads. One of the most remarkable of the popular lays chaunted about the streets of Norwich and Tweeds in the time of Charles tho ►Second, may still be read, as it is pre- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 109 served in the British Museum. This bal- lad, which is described as "the vehement and bitter cry of labour against capital," tells of the "good old times when every artisan employed in the woolen manu- facture lived as well as a farmer. But those times are past. Sixpence a day was now all that could be earned by hard labour at the loom. If the poor com- plained that they could not live on such a pittance, they were told that they were free to take it or leave it. For so miser- able a recompense were the producers of wealth compelled to toil, rising early and lying down late, while the master clothier, eating, sleeping, and idling, be- came rich by their exertions." It may be remarked here, that the bal- lad is really the battle hymn of the Hathnaughts. In all ages, in rude verse, the Hathnaughts have poured out their souls in complaints against the bitter and unequal struggle for existence, and a history of this ballad Influence on the thought of the humble would make an instructive and illuminating, as well as an entertaining, chapter in a history of the industrial life. Macaulay has this reference to child labour: "It may here be noticed that the practice of setting children prematurely to work, a practice which the State, the legitimate protector of those who can- not protect themselves, has, in our time, wisely and humanely interdicted, pre- vailed in the seventeenth century to an extent which, when compared with the 110 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT extent of the manufacturing system, seems almost incredible. At Norwich, the chief seat of the clothing trade, a little creature of six years old was thought fit for labour. Several writers of that time, and among them some who were considered as eminently benevolent, men- tion, with exultation, the fact that in that single city, boys and girl? of very tender age created wealth exceeding what was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve thousand pounds a year. The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which discerns and the humanity which reme- dies them." Let us commend this observation to amateur sociologists and moral tinkers of our time who would have us believe we are going to Hell so fast that the lirakes won't work. Pursuing the history of the Hath- naughts further, Macaulay says: "Dur- ing several generations, the Commission- ers of Greenwich Hospital have kept a register of the wages paid to different classes of worKmeu who have been cm- ployed in the repairs of the building. From this valuable record it appears that, in the course of a hundred and twenty years, the daily earnings of the brick- layer have risen from half a crown to DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 111 four and ten pence, those of the mason from a crown to five and three pence, those of the carpenter from half a crown to five and five pence, and those of the plumber from three shillings to five and six pence. "It seems clear, therefore, that the wages of labour, estimated in money, were, in 1685, not more than half of what they now are; and there were few articles important to the workingman of which the price .was not, in 1685, more than half of what it now is. Beer was undoubtedly much cheaper in that age than at present. Meat was also cheaper, but was still so dear that hundreds of thousands of families scarcely knew the taste of it." In this connection he cites King's "Natural and Political Conclusions," in which, he says, it is roughly estimated the common people of England in that day numbered 880,000 families; of these families, according to King, 440,000 ate animal food twice a week. The remain- ing 440,000 ate it not at all or at most not oftener than once a week. The ma- jority, Macaulay says, lived on rye, bar- ley, and oats. We may profitably com- pare this with Froude's description of the Hathnaughts in the preceding cen- tury. Below the labourers, as in the present day, was the class that couid not live without some aid from the parish. In our own day we learn from British blue books and economic writers, that one 112 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Hathnaught in every thirty-seven in Eng- land and Wales receives some measure of relief from the funds, and that in London the ratio is one in thirty-two. In 1685, according to Gregory King, as cited by Macaulay, the number of inhabitants of England who received relief consti- tuted one-fourth of the population. "And this estimate," says Macaulay, "which all our respect for his authority will scarcely prevent us from calling ex- travagant, was pronounced by Davenant eminently judicious." King and Daven- ant estimated the paupers and beggars in 1696 to number 1,330,000, out of a population of 5,500,000, an amazing pro- portion. Macaulay touches upon the difficulties of reaching markets owing to the wretched state of the means of trans- portation. "The market place which the rustic can now reach with his cart in an hour was, a hundred and sixty years ago, a day's journey from him," says Macaulay. "The street which now affords to the artisan, during the whole night, a secure, convenient, and a brilliantly- lighted walk was, a hundred and sixty years ago, so dark after sunset that he would not have been able to see his hand, so ill-paved that he would have run constant risk of breaking his neck, and so ill-watched that he would have been In imminent danger of being knocked down and plundered of his small earnings." DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 113 Macaulay draws attention at this point to the wretched state of medicine and surgery in that day, declaring that bri de- layers and chimney sweepers of to-day who may be injured can have treatment in hospitals that gr^at lords like Ormond could not purchase in the seventeenth century. In those days, too, he observes, work- men and wives had the common experi- ence of ill treatment. "The discipline of workshops, of schools, of private fami- lies, though not more efficient than at present, was infinitely harsher," he adds. "Masters, well born and bred, were in the habit of beating their servants. Peda- gogues knew of no way of imparting knowledge but by beating their pupils. Husbands of decent station were not ashamed to beat their wives. "The implacability of hostile factions was such as we can scarcely conceive. Whigs were disposed to murmur because Stafford was suffered to die without see- ing his bowels burned before his face. Tories reviled and insulted Russell as his coach passed from the Tower to the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields. As little mercy was shown by the populace to sufferers of a humbler rank. If an of- fender was put into the pillory, it was well if he escaped with life from the shower of brickbats and paving stones. If he was tied to the cart's tail the crowd pressed round him, imploring the hangman to give it the fellow well and make him howl. 114 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT "Gentlemen arranged parties of plea- sure to Bridewell on court days, for the purpose of seeing the wretched women, who beat hemp there, whipped. A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a woman burned for coining, excited less sympathy than is now felt for a galled horse or an overdriven ox." Canting Englishmen of to-day who would have you believe their country the sole custodian of all the virtues, and their statesmen the high priests of civil- ization; who love to dilate upon the horrors of life under the Roman Em- pire, and of the cruelties of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, can find plenty of parallels to these in their own country. We are told by vari- ous authorities that about 70,000 persons were executed during the reign of Henry VIII, including two of the old monster's wives, and it would not be hard to prove that more people suffered death in Eng- land for trivial offences than met a like fate during the whole course of the French Revolution. "Woe to the man," says Rousseau In his "Political Economy," which forms part of the literature of the French Rev- olution, "who has a pretty daughter and a powerful neighbour." The same was true of Merrie England for many ages and even down to our time. Fielding's "lom Jones," in the person of Molly Seagrim, shows us that the peasant's daughter was regarded as a morsel for the gentry, and Mrs. Lynn Linton, In DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 115 an article on George Eliot in a work called "Women Novelists of the Reign of Victoria," declares that even down to her own day it was common for peas- ant girls to have children by the squire's son, and such children were not frowned upon as they are in our more enlight- ened twentieth century. Sports of England up to a recent date were brutal in the extreme, and ancient Rome scarcely surpassed them in cruelty. Macaulay declares that in the seventeenth century, "multitudes assembled to see gladiators hack each other to pieces with deadly weapons, and shouted with delight when one of the combatants lost a An- ger or an eye." "The prisons," he continues, "were hells on earth, seminaries of every crime and of every disease. At the assizes the lean and yellow culprits brought with them from their cells to the dock an atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes avenged them signally on the bench, bar, and jury. But on all this misery society looked with profound indifference. Nowhere could be found that sensitive and restless compassion which has, in our time, extended a pow- erful protection to the factory child, to the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave, which pries into the stores and water- casks of every emigrant ship, which winces at every lash laid on the back of a drunken soldier, which will not suffer the thief in the hulks to be ill-fed or overworked, and which has repeatedly 116 DENNIS n AT HN AUGHT endeavoured to save the life even of a murderer." Here we see the ceaseless and inevit- able working out of the laws of prog- ress — the softening of human emotions as we get further and further from the jungle and nearer and nearer the Age of Service, when men shall clasp hands as brothers, and work together for the common good. All honour to the noble Englishmen who have laboured for the new order, and who at this very moment in the British Parliament, the greatest stronghold of Privilege, are doing a mighty work for human freedom. CHAPTER XII. DENNIS AND THE INDUSTRIAL RET- OLUTION. In the annals of progress the eigh- teenth century might be called the Kin- dergarten of the Future, for it was a hundred years of the sowing of new ideas that it will take other centuries to reap and garner. It is always a temptation to those that write of this fascinating age to discourse upon the progress of manners — the coarseness and vulgarity of the life and speech of the higher classes; the lack of refinement even in the clergy; the pur- suit of women by the rakes and beaux of the times; the practical joking of the men about town; the dangers of streets and highways because of the numerous bands of Mohocks and highwaymen ; the heavy hand of justice upon even the lightest offences which could send little children to the scaffold for the pettiest kind of petty larcenies; the horrors and promiscuity of prison life that huddled murderers, highwaymen, harlots, poor debtors, and even women and children, together, without a thought of the dan- ger of contamination or caring for the 117 118 DENNIS HATHNAVGHT physical or spiritual comfort of the un- fortunates. It was an age of high swearing, gam- bling, drunkenness, duelling, and indul- gence in brutish sports. The country- squire as a rule had the manners of a prize fighter, and the mass of the people lived in misery and degradation. Yet it was essentially an age of ideas, when men of all classes were revolting against the standards of their times. It is because of this revolt and the ideas scattered by the social insurgents that we no longer have Squire Westerns, Par- son TruUibers, imprisonment for debt, private madhouses, where it was easy to incarcerate inconvenient relatives who were slow in dying, or streets so danger- ous that a Sir Roger De Coverley must needs provide himself with a body-guard when he goes to a place of entertain- ment. Its close was marked by the success- ful issue of the American and French Revolutions, and by a demand for politi- cal rights on the part of the British peo- ple that is working out the present eco- nomic destiny of the United Kingdom. But, from the viewpoint of the Hath- naughts, the most interesting and sig- nificant event of the Eighteenth Century was the Industrial Revolution, when do- mestic labour began to be replaced by the factory system and machinery. Like all things worth while, the In- dustrial Revolution was not conceived by some genius over night and put In full DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 119 force the next morning. It was of slow- growth, going back, indeed, to the third Edward, whom Hallam (Middle Ages) calls the father of English commerce. It was this Edward who, in 1331, "took ad- vantage of the discontent among the manufacturers of Flanders to invite them as settlers into his dominions," according to Hallam. It was during this reign, too, Hallam tells us, that industry acquired a measure of respect, so that a merchant got on a footing somewhat equal to that of a landed proprietor. This change had an Important effect on the matter of ■ dress. "By the Statute of Appeal in 37 Ed- ward III," Hallam observes, "merchants and artificers who had five hundred pounds' value in goods and chattels might use the same dress as squires of one hundred pounds a year. All those who were worth more than this might dress like men of double that estate." It is a safe wager that this law boomed the tailoring business, for it is not in human nature to resist the temptation to climb socially, especially when a king deigns to give you a friendly boost. In Arnold Toynbee's "Industrial Revo- lution," we trace the development of the factory system in England. In a chapter on "Manufactures and Trades" he deals with the histori' of the woolen, iron, cot- ton, hardware, and hosiery trades in eighteenth-century England. The woolen trade, he says, probably existed in Eng- land from an early date, and he notes a mention of it in a law of 1224. 120 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT "In 1331," observes Toynbee, following Hallam, "John Kennedy brought the art of weaving woolen cloth from Flanders into England, and received the protection of the king, who at the same time invited over fullers and dyers. There is extant a petition of the worsted weavers and merchants of Norwich to Edward III in 1348. ... In 1402 the manufacture was settled to a great extent in and near London, but it gradually shifted, owing to the high price of labour and provisions to Surrey, Kent, Essex, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire, and afterward still further into the counties of Dorset, Wilts, Somer- set, Gloucester, and even as far as York- shire." The cotton trade had so insignificant a beginning in England, according to Toyn- bee, as to be mentioned only once, and that incidentally, by Adam Smith. It was confined to Lancashire, where its head- quarters were Manchester and Bolton. In 1760 not more than 40,000 persons were engaged in It. Toynbee finds the hardware trade growing up about Sheffield and Birming- ham, the latter town employing more than 50,000 in that industry in 1727. The hosiery trade, too, Toynbee, de- clares, was in its infancy in the eigh- teenth century. By 1800 the manufac- ture of silk ho.siery had centred in Der- by, woolen ho.siery in Leicester, though Nottingham had not yet absorbed the cot- ton hosiery trade. At the beginning of the century there were 14,000 looms in all the British islands. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 121 Linen, he notes, was an ancient manu- facture in England, and had been intro- duced into Dundee in the seventeenth century. It was the chief manufacture of Ireland, where it had been introduced by French Huguenots, who had settled there at the end of the seventeenth cen- tury. "The machines used in the cotton man- ufacture," says Baines, in his "History of the Cotton Manufacture," as quoted by Toynbee, "were up to the year 1760 near- ly as simple as those of India; though the loom was more strongly and perfect- ly constructed, and cards for combing the cotton had been adopted from the woolea manufacture, none but the strong cottons such as fustian and dimities were as yet made in England, and for these the de- mand must always have been limited." "In 173S," Toynbee adds, "John Wyatt invented spinning by rollers, but the dis- covery never proved profitable. In 1760 the manufacturer of Lancashire began to use the flag shuttle. Calico printing was already largely developed. "The reason why division of labour was carried out to so small an extent and in- vention so rare and so little regarded, is given by Adam Smith himself. Division of labour, as he points out, is limited by the extent of the market, and owing to bad means of communication the market for English manufactures was still a very narrow one. Yet England, however slow the development of her manufactures, ad- vanced, nevertheless, more rapidly in 122 DENNIS HATHNAVGHT this respect than other nations. One great secret of her progress lay in the facilities for water carriage afforded by her rivers, for all communication by land was still in the most neglected condition. A second cause was the absence of in- ternal customs barriers such as existed in France and in Prussia until Stein's time. The home trade of England was absolutely free. . . . "When we turn to investigate the in- dustrial organization of the time we find that the class of capitalist employers was as yet but in its infancy. A large part of our goods were still produced on the domestic system. Manufactures were lit- tle concentrated in towns, and only par- tially separated from agriculture. The manufacturer was literally the man who worked with his own hands in his own cottage. Nearly the whole cloth trade of the West Riding, for Instance, was or- ganized on this system at the beginning of the century. "An important feature in the indus- trial organization of the time was the ex- istence of a number of small master-man- ufacturers, who were entirely inde|||nd- ent, having capital and land of their own, for they combined the culture of small freehold pasture-farms with their handi- craft. Defoe (Defoe's Tour) has left an interesting picture of their life. "This system, however, was no longer universal in Arthur Young's time (North- ern Tour). That writer found at Shef- field a silk-mill employing one hundred DENNIS HATHNAUOHT 123 and fifty-two hands, including women and children; at Darlington, one master-man- ufacturer employed above fifty looms; at Boynton there were one hundred and fifty hands in one factory. "So, too, in the west of England cloth- trade the germs of the capitalist system were visible. The rich merchant gave out work to labourers in the surround- ing villages, who were his employees, aruJ were not independent. In the Notting- ham hosiery trade there were in 1750 fifty manufacturers known as putters-out who employed twelve hundred frames; in Leicestershire eighteen hundred frames were so employed. In the hand-made nail business of Staffordshire and Wor- cestershire the merchant had warehouses in different parts of the district, and gave out nail rods to the nail-master sufficient for a week's work for him and his fam- ily. "In Lancashire we can trace step by step the growth of the capitalist employ- er. At first we see, as in Yerkshire, the weaver furnishing himself with warp and weft, which he worked up in his own house and brought himself to market. By degrees he found it diflicult to get yarn from the spinners; so the merchants at Manchester gave him out linen warp and raw cotton, and the weaver became de- pendent on them. Finally the merchant would get together thirty or forty looms in a town. This was the nearest ap- proach to the capitalist system before th& great mechanical inventions." 124 DENNIS n AT HN AUGHT Toynbee describes the great fairs, where a large part of the inland traffic was carried on, and which were still almost as important as in the Middle Ages. The most famous of all was the fair at Stur- bridge, to which goods were brought on pack-horses. There were also great fairs at Lynn, Boston, Gainsborough, and Bev- erly. In ancient Rome (Fowler's Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero) there was a good banking system, conducted by the Argentarii. The Argentarius took money for deposit on interest, and there were bills of exchange, letters of credit, and something conforming to our check. Yet in the Middle Ages merchants and man- ufacturers were hampered by the ab- sence of banks and a good system of ex- change. Even in the eighteenth century ready cash was essential, for banking, Toynbee says, was little developed. "The Bank of England existed," he continues, "but before 1759 issued no notes of less value than twenty pounds. By a law of 1709, no other bank of more than six partners was allowed; and in 1750, ac- cording to Burke, there were not more than twelve bankers' shops out of Lon- don. The Clearing House was not estab- lished till 1775." So isolated were some districts that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Yorkshire yeoman, according to Rob- ert Southey, as told in "The Doctor" and quoted by Toynbee, was ignorant of sugar, potatoes, and cotton, and the Cum- DENNIii HATHNAUQHT 125 berland dalesman, as appears in Words- worth's "Guide to the Lakes," lived en- tirely on the produce of his farm. "It was the domestic system," says Toynbee, "which the great Socialist writ- ers, Sismondi and Lassalle, had in their minds when they Inveighed against the modern organization of industry. Those who lived under it, they pointed out, though poor, were on the whole prosper- ous; over-production was absolutely im- possible." What is true of England is true of the beginnings of trade everywhere. But what a change had been wrought in the time of Napoleon, when British trade had developed to such an extent that the Cor- sican bandit referred to the tight little island as a "nation of shopkeepers." Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the invention of labour-saving machinery has completely revolutionized manufacturing industries, not only in England, but throughout the world. These inventions, which have proved great blessings to labour, have always been fought by the Hathnaughts, particularly trades-unionists, and even in our own day labour-saving devices and implements are as bitterly opposed as in the days of Arkwright and the spinning jenny. This hostile attitude of ignorant labour toward the very implements that are hastening the day of proletarian eman- cipation, is well set forth in Charles Reade's novel "Put Yourself in His Place." In this work we see the violent 126 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT opposition that met Henry Little's experi- ments with inventions, even to the extent of endangering life and property, some- thing after the manner of the MacNa- maras of our own times. One great re- sult of the introduction of machinery and the development of science has been to diversify labour. There are to-day many hundreds of different ways of making a living that were not known in Shake- speare's day. Even such a simple thing as the souvenir post card gives work to thousands. It is a disputed question, however, among economists whether the Industrial Revolution has been an unmixed blessing to labour. There seems to be a law, as John G. Lockhart points out in his "His- tory of Napoleon Buonaparte," comment- ing upon the effects of the French Revo- lution and of Napoleon's career upon the world, "that violent and sudden changes in the structure of social and political order have never yet occurred without inflicting utter misery upon at least one generation." The Industrial Revolution had its trag- edies. Before the enactment of the Fac- tory Acts, the Hathnaughts, men, women, and children, were at the mercy of un- scrupulous capitalists. Gibbins, In his "Industrial History of England," declares that it was "not until the wages of the workmen had been reduced to a starva- tion level that they consented to their children and wives being employed in the mills." To get labour the greedy mill- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 127 owners, under the smug pretence of ap- prenticing them to the new employments, obtained children from the parish work- houses, whom they never paid, and who worked long hours, day and night, under- fed and ill-treated. These children slept in relays in beds that never had a chance to cool, and such as showed a disposition to run away, worked and slept with irons riveted on their ankles, and with long links reaching to the hips. Gibbins quotes his authorities for these statements and shows the sexes living promiscuously and with less decorum than the brutes. This trade in work- house children became in time a regular slave traffic. There are still traces of it in the world, but enlightened legislation nowadays tends to humanize the Indus- trial Life and checks the martyrdom of childhood. Karl Marx, in his "Capital," discussing this awful traffic in child labour in Eng- land, says that the hapless apprentices were flogged, tortured, and fettered, and that this squeezing of profits out of hu- man blood continued until Sir Robert Peel introduced a bill for the protection of children. In the view of Marx, Capital came into the world, dripping from head to foot and from every pore with blood and dirt. This is, of course, the extreme view of the militant Socialist, and is un- fair to the progressive and conscientious Capitalist, who from the first has not beeji neglectful of the rights and comforts of his employees. Sir Robert Peel was him- self a capitalist. CELAPTER XIII. JACQUES BONHOMME, FRENCH HATHNAUGHT. "Jacques Bonhomme has a broad back and can stand it," was a stock phrase of the nobility and clergy of the ancient regime in Prance, when adding an addi- tional burden to the already intolerable load carried by the French Hathnaught. Feudalism, we have seen in previous chapters and from citations drawn from Buckle, Duruy, and Bonnemere, was al- ways stronger in France than elsewhere because of the power of the nobles to enforce their claims even against the kings. In all the tribe of Hathnaught, r.o one had less than poor Jacques Bon- homme. Temporary concessions or recog- nition of his class as a third estate, as in the time of Philip, the Fair who, in 1302, called together the States General of nobles, clergy and commons, were short lived. Men like Etienne Marcel tried in vain to improve conditions, and despair often took the form of terrible risings and reprisals such as that of the Jacquerie or Hathnaughts in 135S, but all ended in the further enslavement of the common herd. 128 DENNIS HATIIN AUGHT 129 Some towns, notably Laon, had wrung charters from the king, nobles and clergy, but these communal experiments were ill-starred, and after a brief blaze of glory, sank back into the general mass of degradation which tyranny attempted to make the fixed, permanent and unal- terable condition of life. Poor Jacques staggered on beneath his burden, worn to a rail and little better than skin and bone, paying all the taxes and reaping none of the benefits, while nobles and clergy, made more insolent with the passing years, waxed fatter and fatter. Jacques carried this crushing weight for more than four hundred years after the rising of the Jacquerie until, in 1789, the oppressed and despoiled Hathnaughts burst all bounds and feudalism and priv- ilege disappeared in a torrent of the sub- limcst rage that this world has ever known — the immortal B'rench Revolution. The literature of this Revolution is im- mense and is still growing. As time passes and passions subside, men are coming to see the beneficial results to the world of this outpouring of a nation's wrath beside which the wrath of Achilles was the wail of an infant in the midst of a cannonading. Carlyle's celebrated work on the period must not be regarded as authoritative. It is a great prose epic, full of power and brilliancy, but if you know little of his- tory to start with you will gain little knowledge from Carlyle of the causes and effects of this mighty upheaval. It 130 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT bears the same relation to other and more judicious works on the Revolution that Worcestershire sauce does to a steak, and if taken in this way it is very appetizing. To mention authorities would be to print an immense bibliography. Impor- tant works bearing upon the subject have been produced by Taine, DeTocqueville, Thiers, Blanc, Van Laun, Lamartine, Rocquain, Arthur Young (Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789), Mignet, Doniol, Michelet, Alison, Sybel, Hausser, Rabaut, Buchez, Ker- verseau and Clavelin, Ternaux, Madame de Stael, Janet, Burke, Quinet, Berriat, Mackintosh, and Croker. Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities" is a study of the period in fiction. When the Revolution broke out, liberty had entirely disappeared and the Hath- naughts were oppressed, impoverished, and threatened with starvation. They lived in poor cabins, their clothing hardly deserved the name of rags, and their main article of diet was black bread, with a substitute for tea made by pouring water over husks. To possess white bread and be discovered, meant a visitation from the tax-collector. Every tax press- ed down upon the poor and industrious, while the rich, idle rascals, and clergy were immune. Some of the worst burdens were the taille, a land tax, the gabelle or salt tax; tithes of various kinds, for an idle, vicious, and worthless clergy had to get DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 131 its pound of flesh also; wine and poll taxes and seigneurial dues; corvees or forced, unpaid labour on the highways during a quarter of the -"f^ar, for the roads had to be kept in good condition for the coaches of the lazy and rascally nobles. Rousseau in his "Political Economy," contending that the law should reflect the popular will, and that there should be no privileged classes with extremes of poverty and riches, says: "If a man of position robs his creditors or commits other acts of rascality, is he not sure of impunity? Are not all the blows he dis- tributes, all the violences he commits, the very murders and assassinations of which he is guilty, hushed up and for- gotten in a few months? But let this man himself be robbed, and the whole police set to work, and woe to the poor innocent man whom they suspect. If he has to pass a dangerous place, escorts scour the country. If a noise is made at his gate, at a word all is silent. If the axle of his coach breaks, everybody runs to help him. If a carter crosses his path his attendants are ready to knock him down, while fifty decent pedestrians go- ing to business might be crushed rather than a lazy rascal be stopped in his coach. "All these attentions do not cost him a sou; they are the rights that belong to the rich man. How different with the poor. The more he needs humanity, the more society refuses it to him. If there are corvees to make, recruits required, it 132 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT is he who has the preference. He al- ways bears besides his own burdens, those from which his rich neighbour is exempt." Old people were compelled to beat ponds at night so that the favoured fam- ilies might not have their slumbers dis- turbed by the croaking of frogs. The poor tiller of the soil had no redress if his lord's pigeons consumed his grain; Indeed, it is not unlikely that if he inter- fered with those birds which he was pre- cluded by law from possessing, he might have been subjected to punishment. His lord while hunting had a perfect right to pull down the fences and ride over his crops. If a man high in favour at Court wished to get rid of an enemy he had the means of doing so through the lettre de cachet, and the enemy was hastened to the Bas- tile without formality of trial or even the merits of the case being given considera- tion. Voltaire once served a term of impris- onment for merely resenting vert^ally a wanton insult from a Court parasite. We may be sure that incidents like this made the little man of Ferney do yeoman ser- vice in bringing on the Revolution. Court favourites and royal mistresses received pensions and gifts which taxed the Hathnaughts beyond the limits of en- durance. Camille Desmoulins, one of the leaders of the devolution, speaking of one Ducrot, who was in receipt of a pension of seventeen hundred livrcs for his ser- DENNIS HAT UN AUGHT 133 vices as hairdresser to Mademoiselle d'Artois, observed that the young lady "died at the age of three before she had any hair." Arthur Young, whose "Travels" are a mine of information on the state of the country before the Revolution, speaks of the enormous revenues (300,000 livres a year) of the Abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Germain, and noting how the land was wasted, declares that one- fourth the sum would establish a noble farm. The "fat ecclesiastic," as Young calls him, like the rest of his tribe, did nothing to improve the condition of the wretched people. "Pat ecclesiastic"! How often that characterization appears in the writings of those who have touch- ed upon the history of the Hathnaughts across the ages. We have been kept lean while monks and prelates are known by their anatomical architecture — the ro- tundity of their convex facades. Another observation of Young is sig- nificant and worthy of chronicle. He found that the great seignior, Conde, had more than a hundred square miles of idle land and forest which teemed with game. Yet the poor inhabitants might not till any of this land nor could the Hathnaughts destroy even the meanest of the game that kept on increasing and pestered the poor dwellers in the neigh- bourhood to the limit of endurance. All burdens fell upon the shoulders of men of ignoble birth. Members of the tribe of Hathnaught might never aspire 1S4 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT to preferment in the church, the army or the State. Only persons of rank were entitled to own pigeons. In consequence of this systematic degradation of the people there was little mechanical skill or real progress, and all departments requir- ing such talents were in the hands of foreigners. Manufactures were encour- aged only so far as they contributed to the luxury or comfort of the nobility. None of the blessings of modern liberty — a free press, free speech, and open dis- cussion, the suffrage, representation and the popular voice in government, trial by jury, and the habeas corpus, wera known. You could tell one's rank In- stantly from his dress or deportment. It was only just before the Revolution that the establishment of clubs broke down barriers sufficiently to enable educated men to come together without the an- cient, aristocratic distinction of rank. That even the most sacred tie in the world, the intimacy of a good man and a good woman, bound together by mar- riage, was not respected, is illustrated in a story told by Buckle in his "History of Civilization." "In the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury," he says, "there was an actress on the French stage of the name of Chan- tllly. She, though beloved by Maurice de Saxe, preferred a more honourable at- tachment, and married Favart, the well- known writer of songs and of comic operas. Maurice, amazed at her boldness, applied for aid to the French crown. That DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 135 he should have made such an application is sufficiently strange; but the result of it is hardly to be paralleled except in some Eastern despotism. The govern- ment of Prance, on hearing the circum- stance, had the inconceivable baseness to issue an order directing Favart to aban- don his wife, and intrust her to the charge of Maurice, to whose embraces she was compelled to submit." A sense of humour impels us to one more citation, this time from Taine's "Ancient Regime." It is his famous ac- count of the progress of the French King from the moment he arises in the morn- ing, through all the intricacies of getting him into his shirt and down to the ante- chamber where visiting grandees await him. It is that consummate ass, Louis XIV, of whom he speaks: "In the morning at the hour named by himself beforehand, the head valet awak- ens him; five series of persons enter in turn to perform their duty, and, 'al- though very large, there are days when the waiting rooms can hardly contain the crowd of courtiers.' " Scores of officials and servitors tackled the king from different angles, each with a special job — spirits of wine were poured on the king's hands from a service of plate, and he was then handed a basin of holy water — this old roue with a palaceful of mistresses. He crossed himself and said a prayer, which no doubt the fools about him thought was taken down in shorthand by an angel. In presence of 1S6 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT every one his Majesty got out of bed and put on his sUppers. He received his dressing gown from the grand cham- berlain and the first gentleman, and sat him down in a chair in which later he would put on his clothes. Then another group of persons, each with a distinct duty, came in and danced attendance on Louis. All sorts of tom- fool things followed before the king washed his hands preparatory to dress- ing. Two pages — count 'em, as Tody Hamilton, Barnum's press agent, would say — removed the royal slippers. The grand master of the wardrobe drew off the royal nightshirt by the right hand and the first valet of the wardrobe did the same to the left, while both oflicials handed the garment to an officer of the wardrobe. Then came a valet of the wardrobe in solemn manner bearing the shirt of his Majesty, wrapped in white taffeta. Does his Majesty slip into his shirt without further ado? Nothing of the sort; he is far from getting into it yet. "The honour of handing it," says Taine, "is reserved to the sons and grandsons of France; in default of these, to the princes of the blood or those legitimated; in their default to the grand chamberlain or to the first eentleman of the bed- chamber — the latter case, it must be ob- {-:erved, being very rare, the princes being obliged to be present at the king's lever as well as the princesses at that of the Queen. At last the shirt is presented. DENNIS HATHNAUQHT 137 and a valet carries off the old one; the first valet of the wardrobe and the first valet-de-chambre hold the fresh one, each by a right and left arm, respectively; while two other valets during this oper- ation extend his dressing gown in front of him to serve as a screen. The shirt is now on his back, and the toilet com- mences." Louis is still far from dressed, but the reader who would know more of the de- tails will have to consult Taine. Enough has been showxi to piove that the use- less, wasteful, and criminal expenditures of this corrupt Court for a day, would support half a province of Hathnaughts. And the peasantry had to furnish the wherewithal in the sweat of their brows. Contrast all this with the simple and artless grace of our old friend Martin Gilhooly, the brick-layer, who bounds out of bed in the morning, yanks off his cutty sark without ceremony and jumps into his simple articles of attire, while in the kitchen his good wife Mary Ann is slipping a modest repast into his dinner-pail. Twenty minutes after Mar- tin awakes, he is on his way to the scene of his labour. And Martin does a better day's work than Louis ever did, the best day he ever knew. CHAPTER XrV. DENNIS, THE PLOUGHMAN, IN POLITICS. It is a temperamental difference of character that makes the British Hath- naught gain concessions from the ruling caste by agitation, mass meeting and pe- tition, that his French cousin thinks im- possible of attainment save when de- manded back of a barricade. In the last hundred years the Hath- naughts have seen some mighty changes, notable among them being the removal of the civil and other disabilities of the Catholics and Jews; the great Reform bill of 1832, which dealt a deathblow to aristocratic privilege and ascendency; the repeal of the odious Corn Laws in 1846, establishing free trade as a natural right, and reducing the high cost of liv- ing; further parliamentary reform in 1866; disestablishment of the Irish Church and the abolishing of the tithe system which made the mass of the Irish people support a small body of ecclesias- tics whose religion they despised. But for the purposes of the present discussion the most significant reform was that which in 1884 extended the fran- 138 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 139 chise to the agricultural labourers, the Hathnaughts of rural Britain, who, up to that time, had advanced but little beyond the serfdom of the Middle Ages. This bill swelled the voting lists by a round two million. It is not exaggeration to say that in the middle of the nineteenth century there was not a more wretched or hope- less class of Hathnaughts in the world than the English agricultural labourers. Mr. Warren Isham, in "The Mud Cabin," a study of the character and tendencies of British institutions (D. Appleton & Co., 1853), records some first hand in- vestigations of this unfortunate class. He found an absolute lack of interest in the tenant and labourer on the part of Lord Have-and-Hold, who fattened on his ill- gotten part of poor Hathnaught's earn- ings. "It is enough for him to know," says Mr. Isham, "that if they die of destitu- tion, there are enough others to take their places and labour for the same pit- tance." There is evidence that this indifference to the comforts of the labourer still char- acterizes the British landlord. Mrs. Philip Snowden, in an address delivered some years ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, declared that although he was at the head of the sanitary reform com- mission, the Duke of Northumberland op- posed sanitary legislation because It would materially increase his own ooilga- tions. Mrs. Snowden told of twenty-eight 140 DENNIS HATHNAU(jrtlT thousand tenements inspected, only one hundred and twenty-eight of which had bathroom facilities. The workhouse has always been the British landlord's solution of the question of Hathnaught's miseries. Mr. Isham found that in Dorsetshire it cost twenty- seven pounds 9s. 9d. annually to support a prisoner. Agricultural labourers did not earn more than twenty pounds. A single criminal cost more to support than an entire family often numbering five, six or eight children. "Is it a wonder," asks Mr. Isham, "that the famished wretch should be a thief, schooled to it as he is by the robbery practiced upon himself, and goaded to it by the pinchings of hunger? But though that be his name, and though, to ex- piate his offence, he be sent to Botany Bay, he has cleaner hands and a lig-hter load of guilt on his soul than me land- lord who stays behind to riot upon the fruit of his earnings." About the same time Mr. Isham was making' his study of British industry so far as it applies to the agricultural la- bourer, the London Morning Chronicle was publishing the results of an investi- gation conducted by its own commission- er. "Education," said the Chronicle, "has advanced him but little beyona wnat he was in the days of William the Con- queror. As he was in generations gone by, so he is now, a moral enigma, a physical .scandal, an intellectual catalep- tic." This writer declares, "They are en- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 141 tirely wanting in the independent bear- ing of the man, are awkward in their gait, and dress in a garb which belongs to another century than this." Isham says that of the marriages that transpired in England and Wales in 1839, 1840, 1841, out of 367,894 couples united in wedlock, 122,457 men and 181,- 378 women made their marks in the reg- ister. He saw whole troops of females at work in the field, toiling at the spade, the mattock, and the hoe. Higher edu- cation for these people was opposed on the ground that it would make the Hath- naughts look above their station and there would be no one to black the boots or tend the horses of the gentry. Isham contends that the landlord, and not the Hathnaughts, benefited princi- pally by the abolition of serfdom. At the exhibition of the "Works of Industry of All Nations," held in England in 1852, he saw one thousand Hathnaughts in their smock frocks and with red ribbons on their hats marched two by two into the Crystal Palace as though on purpose for a show. These men spoke to Isham of belong- ing to this squire or that lord, and an Englishman of intelligence standing by told him they belonged to the soil as much as the serfs of Russia, and, al- though not named in the bond, were ac- tually transferred with the soil from master to master. Citing Hallam's "Middle Ages" as au- thority, Isham continues: "No more 142 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT than three centuries ago, the forefath- ers of those people were serfs, which is but another name for slaves. They were bought and sold, not only with the soil, but without the soil, and were sub- ject to the lash. Between the land- lord and the serfs stood the vassal, who sustained much the same relation to each as the tenant farmer does now; that is, the landlord let out the land and serfs to the vassal, as he does now the land to the tenant farmer, the labourers, though not actually stipulated for, con- tinuing to sustain much the same rela- tion to both as the serfs did before. The appearance, the legal forms of serfdom have been abolished, I am bold to say, the better to enjoy the reality." There is very strong evidence that the landlord has gained by the change from serfdom to the present system, for he is relieved of the old feudal respon- .sibility of furnishing his quota of men for military service, and of caring for his serfs when ill or Incapacitated. The London Morning Chronicle, which made its investigation about the same time Tsham did, quoted Portesque to prove that four hundred years ago the princi- pal food of the serfs was meat. Harri- son's "Description of England" has a like observation. "The Spanish nobles who came into England with Philip," .says Harrison, "were astonished at the diet which they found among the poor. 'The.se Engli.sh,' said one of them, 'have Ihoir houses made of sticks and dirt, DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 143 but they fare commonly as well as the King-.' " We are told by Isham that there was an understanding- among the farmers of a parish that they would not employ each other's labourers, an understanding so well observed that a Hathnaught, fired by a sense of liberty and setting out upon his travels to better his for- tune, met, at the first place he asked for employment, the question that al- ways put a damper upon his hopes and sent him back to his old servitude: "Why did you leave your master?" This is what the Englishman meant when he told Isham that the Hathnaughts were still transferred with the soil as in the days of serfdom. Serfdom is not without its friends among modern historians. That high Tory, Sir Archibald Alison, in his "His- tory of Europe" (Vol. 4; Harper & Brothers, 1843), says in a footnote on page twelve after quoting Cochrane's "Travels in Russia and Siberia": "It would be a happy day for the Irish peasantry, the slaves of their own heed- less and savage passions, when they ex- changed places with the Siberian con- victs, subjected to the less grievous yoke of punishment and despotism." In the main body of the text this "amiable" historian says: "It would be a real blessing to its (Ireland's) inhab- itants, in lieu of the destitution of free- dom, to obtain the protection of slavery." As a "Modest Proposal" this beats Swift's 144 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT suggestion to use children for food in Ireland, but there is this difference — the heavy-minded old Tory, Alison, was in earnest; Swift was only fooling. Duruy in his "Middle Ages" makes particular note of the modern champions of serfdom and cites their stock argu- ments. One Ditchfield, in a recent work entitled "The Old English Squire," mourns the passing of this dominant class and bewails the fact that the auc- tioneer's hammer is heard everywhere throughout the land. Yet to those who look forward to a day of freedom for the English Hathnaught, this sound may verily be compared to the music of a liberty bell. It is no longer possible, as Bulwer Lytton shows it was in his ro- mance, "My Novel," for Squire Hazel- dean to put Hathnaught in the stocks, and, thanks to the good work accom- plished since the days of Joseph Arch, the English agricultural labourer is as- suming more of the manner and erect stature of a freeman. Joseph Arch was one of those simple souls that appear from time to time across the ages, who are born with a mission, and have the divine call to preach. Justin McCarthy tells his story in "A History of Our Own Times." He says: "Suddenly in the spring of 1872, not long after the opening of Parlia- ment, vague rumours began to reach Lon- don of a movement of some kind among the labourers of South Warwickshire. It was first reported that they had asked DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 145 for an increase of wages; then that they were actually forming a labourers' union, after the pattern of the artisans; then that they were on strike. There came accounts of meetings of rural labourers — meetings positively where men made speeches. Instantly the London papers sent down their special correspondents, and for weeks the movement among the agricultural labourers of South "War- wickshire — the county of Shakespeare — became the sensation of London. "How the thing first came about is not very clear. But it seems that in one of the South Warwickshire villages, where there was sad and sullen talk of starvation, it occurred to some one to suggest a strike against the landlords. The thing took fire somehow. A few men accepted it at once. In the neigh- bouring village was a man who, al- though only a day labourer, had been long accustomed to act as a volunteer preacher of Methodism, and who, by his superior intelligence, his good char- acter, and his effective- way of talking, had acquired a great influence among his fellows. This man was Joseph Arch. He was consulted, and he approved of the notion. He was asked if he would get together a meeting and make a speech, and he consented. "Calling a meeting of day labourers then was almost as bold a step as pro- claiming a revolution. Yet it was done somehow. There were no circulars, no placards, none of the machinery which 146 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT we associate with the getting up of a meeting. The news had to be passed on by word of mouth that a meeting was to be held and where; the incredulous had to be convinced that there was really to be a meeting; the timid had to be prevailed upon to take courage and go. The meeting was held under a great chestnut tree, which thereby acquired a sort of fame. There a thousand labour- ers came together and were addressed by Joseph Arch. He carried them all with him. His one great idea — great and bold to them, simple and small to us — was to form a labourers' union hke the trades-unions of the cities. The idea was taken up with enthusiasm. New branches were formed every day. Arch kept on holding meetings and addressing crowds." When the movement was In full swing, important men like Auberon Her- bert lent it their support and Arch be- came associated with members of Par- liament and others of a class unfamiliar to him, but McCarthy says his good sense never forsook him. Many were surprised to note that when the Hath- naughts showed political predilection they inclined more toward Liberalism than they did toward Toryism. "Most persons," says McCarthy, "had supposed that a race of beings brought up for generations under the exclusive tutor- ship of the landlord, the vicar, and the wives of the landlords and the vicar, would have had any political tendencies DENNIS HATIINAUGHT 147 they possessed drilled and drummed into the grooves of Toryism." It may be set down in passing that the Church of England, with its system of putting the livings or rectorships in the hands of the powerful families, and the resultant filling of these with com- placent and pliable vicars, has had a vicious effect upon the development of the character of the humble. One little hymn of this church, the stronghold of the dominant class, chants the lovely thought that God has ordered the estate of the great and the lowly and that all should be content to let things remain as they are. But it is refreshing news to read in the press of the current day that there is a loud demand in England for the suppression of this canting ode of Smugdom. We return to McCarthy's history: "The landlords in most places declared themselves against the move- ment of the labourers. Some of them denounced it in unmeasured language. Mr. Disraeli at once sprang to the front as the champion of feudal aristocracy and the British country squire. The con- troversy was taken up in the House of Commons, and served, if it did nothing else, to draw all the more attention to the condition of the British labourer. "One indirect but necessary result of the agitation was to remind the public of the injustice done to the rural popu- lation when they were left unfranchised at the time of the passing of the last Reform Bill. The injustice was strong- 148 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT ly pressed upon the Government, and Mr. Gladstone frankly acknowledged that It would be impossible to allow things to remain long in their anomalous state. In truth, when the Reform Bill was pass- ed nobody supposed that the rural popu- lation were capable of making any use of a vote. Therefore the movement which began in Warwickshire took two directions when the immediate effects of the partial strike were over. A perma- nent union of labourers was formed, cor- responding generally in system with the organizations of the cities. The other direction was distinctly political. The rural population through their leaders joined with the reformers of the cities for the purpose of obtaining an equal franchise in town and country; in other words, for the enfranchisement of the peasantry. The emancipation of the ru- ral labourers began when the first meet- ing answered the appeals of Joseph Arch. The rough and ready peasant preacher had probably little idea, when he made hia speech under the chestnut tree, that he was speaking the first words of a new chapter of the country's history." Arch afterward sat in Parliament as the first representative there of the tribe of Hathnaught. CHAPTER XV. THE RIGHT HON. DENNIS HATH- NAUGHT, M. P. Permit me to introduce to you Mr. Dennis Hathnaught, M. P. You will hard- ly recognize him, but he is the same old fellow we saw in ancient days wearing- an iron collar; toiling as serf in mediaeval times; rising in insurrection under Wat Tyler, and finally organizing into unions under Joseph Arch. Now he has kicked over the conventions of ages by actually entering Parliament and taking his seat beside the scions of Have-and-Hold. The Labour party is becoming a power in pol- itics and in Parliament. When the House of Lords attacked the budget in 1910, the question of the right of the hereditary house, irresponsible to the people, to interfere with the financial legislation of the country, became acute and led to proposals for its abolition or its reformation along radical lines, such as curtailing its privileges, doing away with its power of veto, or making it an elective second chamber. Lords of Have-and-Hold were not so obtuse that they did not realize the grav- ity of the situation, and so, in the elec- tion that followed the appeal to the coun- 149 150 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT try in 1910 they adopted the tactics of the Artful Dodg-er, who, although he was the thief himself, always tried to distract at- tention from himself by shouting "Stop thief" the loudest. The emissaries of the Lords succeeded very well in getting the Hathnaughts' edge off them by raising the cry for tariff reform, deriding the free-trade policy that has governed Eng- land since the Corn laws days, and de- manding the establishment of a protec- tive tariff, which they declared meant work and wages for Dennis. How these privileged gentlemen do worry about the work and wages of the proletariat — when they want his vote. The Lords, as a mat- ter of fact, were simply stealing the thunder of Joseph Chamberlain, who came out, years before, in support of a re- turn to the protective policy which had been shattered by Richard Cobden and the old Corn Laws agitators. Chief of the Hathnaughts in Parliament is Lloyd George. His underlying idea of taxation is that it should be borne by those that can best afford to bear it. He holds that it should fall upon the super- fluities of life, rather than upon the ne- cessities. It is a revival of the old ques- tion that so long agitated France, and finally led to the Revolution. In the days of the old regime in France the rich food and luxuries of the rich were not taxed, but the bread and salt of the peo- ple were. The equipage of the rich noble was not burdened with a tax, but the donkey of the poor peddler and trades- DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 151 man was. In like manner, the English Lords have been willing to put the bur- den of taxation on the back of poor Den- nis. Lloyd George thinks there has come a time in British history when Dennis and milord should change burdens. He contends that his reforms mean the set- ting up of a great insurance scheme for the unemployed, the sick, and the infirm. He is for the proletariat, so long exploit- ed for the aggrandizement of the nobil- ity. The Westminster Gazette, supporting Lloyd George, declared that England has prolonged a feudal land system to the point at which it seriously threatens the further progress of the country. The Lords and their kind have grown fat on unearned increment. The land of Eng- land is owned by a smaller group of per- sons than a like area in any other part of the globe. Half of England is possess- ed by two thousand five hundred per- sons. The Duke of Sutherland owns 1,- 358,600 acres. It is easy to see, there- fore, that there is in Britain a great landlord's trust, of which the House of Lords may be called the Board of Direc- tors. Mr. G. K. Chesterton, who has done yeoman service in the Hathnaught cause, declares truly that great estates in the hands of the few was one of the main causes in bringing about the downfall of Rome. He finds the system to be the curse of Ireland and the cause of its misery, and points out that the system 152 DENNI8 HATHNAUGHT brought on the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, most of the great land- lords of Great Britain and Ireland are the descendants of parasites and syco- phants who got their estates as a reward for their fawning and cajoling of the great. In some few cases the properties were the reward of great services to the state, but these are the exception. Much sympathy has been wasted upon the poet Spenser, who wrote "The Faerie Queen," because his estate in Ireland was sacked by Irish rebels and his home burned. But Spenser, like others of his kind, was sim- ply a receiver of stolen goods. His Irish property was unjustly wrested from a native of the soil and turned over to him as a reward for his glorification of Eliza- beth. All the real good men of this stamp have ever conferred upon their country in a material way would fit snugly in the snuff box of a microbe. It was the purpose of the land system proposed by Lloyd George to encourage the better use of the land by making large quantities of it available for homes, for industrial purposes, and for public enjoyment. Every owner of land was re- quired to furnish an estimate of his prop- erty at his own valuation. This includ- ed the total value of property as it stood, with buildings and other improvements, and that of the site alone — the "original site value." It was the starting point of a new sys- tem of taxation. It was planned to take, by taxation, part of the increased value DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 153 . of these lands, not due to any exertion of the landlord, but to the increasing- growth and prosperity of the country — the un- earned increment. Undeveloped land, which now bears lightly, the burden of taxation — hardly enough, in fact, to be appreciable — would have to assume its share of taxation. This, Lloyd George and thinkers in the same economic school contend, will force landlords to put the land without delay to its "most socially advantageous use," to quote the Manchester Guardian, one of the great provincial newspapers of Eng- land. The great world war has stopped all progressive legislation, but the new Doomsday Survey of England is simply postponed, for the democratic movement has too much impetus to go back now. Expropriation of the landlords by state purchase, on a plan similar to that now being worked out in Ireland, has been suggested for Great Britain, but on this point Lloyd George said: "If the extrava- gant prices which have hitherto accom- panied every acquisition of land for pub- lic or industrial purposes are to rule in future, the peasant proprietary is doom- ed to a subsidized insolvency." When he first urged a new state valuation, the Conservatives denounced it as virtual confiscation. Lloyd Georg-e and the party of Hath- naughts wish to do away with land monop- oly, so that rural England can be re- created and developed. They mean to put an end to the holding- of vast areas, over 154 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT which the idle rich, when making holiday, may hunt a poor fox or deer to its death. The new order of things means the pass- ing of the old-fashioned country gentle- man, who rules like a lord of feudal days, tyrannizing over a tenantry doomed for lack of opportunity to a poverty that is hopeless. The gentry in many instances hold the parish living, to which they as- sign a clergyman who can be depended upon to preach the gospel of Christ ac- cording to the version of the landlord, and he also has the power in many in- stances to say who shall represent his district in the House of Commons. The rotten and pocket boroughs of England have not all disappeared, and the exten- sion of the suffrage and the secret ballot does not always enable the Hathnaughts to vote according to their Inclinations and consciences. Mr. A. St. John Adcock, a London journalist and novelist, writing in the London Daily Chronicle, from personal observations made during the election fol- lowing the lord's rejection of the budget in 1910, declared that the landlords dic- tated how the rural population should vote, and that the people were I'ttle more than serfs. We have seen by the career of Joseph Arch, who in 1872, after a hard- fought campaign against the low wages paid agricultural labourers, organized the National Agricultural Labourers' Union, that there is plenty of evidence of the survival of serfdom in rural England. Mr. Adcock said that the lords dominated DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 155 not only the land and the tenantry, but the schools and the churches. He told of one noble Duke who caused his mono- gram to appear above the doors of the cottages in a village he owned. His mon- ogram also appeared on the outer wall of the church, as if he were the local deity, and the place were dedicated to his wor- ship. "The villagers," Mr. Adcock said, "are the duke's tenants, and, since none of the poorer dwellers hereabouts believe in the secrecy of the ballot, it is easy to guess for which candidate they voted, and why." These wretched Hathnaughts are forced to vote against their own best interests through fear of eviction, the blacklist, and persecution. Even the school-chil- dren, Mr. Adcock said, were forced to wear the blue rosettes of the Conserva- tive candidate, although they were the sons and daughters of men Liberal by conviction. A fine state of affairs in free and merrie England. These people live in wretched hovels, and their masters make no effort, as shown by Mr. Ad- cock, to improve their condition or elevate them In any way. One of the worst types of landlords in England is what is known as "the ground landlord." Leaseholders may own the buildings in a town, but some peer may have an ancient title to the land, and as a "ground landlord" exact tribute. Vast areas of England are made soli- tudes for sports, while thousands cry for 156 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT bread and a chance to work. To learn how the lords use the idle land that it is proposed to make productive through taxation, take this illustration of the late Mr. William T. Stead, the noted English journalist, writing- in the Eeview of Re- views, London. Mr. Stead took for his purpose the estate of Strathfieldsaye, of eight thousand acres, a grant to the Duke of Wellington, as a reward for military services. The birds and other game shot by succeeding dukes and their friends from 1887 to 1909, a period of twenty- two years, including pheasants, par- tridges, hares, rabbits, and woodcock, numbered one hundred and forty-nine thousand two hundred and eighty-five. Farmers or Hathnaughts dare not touch a single bird or game animal, even if they find them on the road or upon their own leased land, excepting by express permission of the duke. To enter a pre- serve, Mr. Stead says, is to incur the sus- picion of felony as a poacher or game thief. Prevented from spreading out upon the land, the source of all wealth, the Hath- naughts are crowded into the towns and cities, and there is frightful congestion and incidental poverty. Pauperism is on the increase, and there is a noticeable de- terioration, physically, of the common English people. Figures give the number of paupers in England and Wales as almost a mil- lion. This va.st army, comprising one in every thirty-seven of the population, is DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 157 receiving public relief in some form. A report of the Local Government Board in 1910 showed that the number of able- bodied men relieved on account of want of work had increased one hundred and thirty-three per cent, over the previous year's figures. The total body of pauper- ism, as compared with the total on the same date of the previous year had in- creased by 3.4 per cent. The new recruits numbered thirty-seven thousand one hundred and seventy-seven. The highest increase was in Durham, 7.1 per cent. One in every thirty-two persons in Lon- don is a pauper. It is all due to free trade, cry the Unionists, but Dennis Hathnaught, M. P., representing the La- bour party, knows better. Great attention is now being given in England to the question of the physical deterioration of the English people. This tendency toward degeneracy was brought out very strikingly at the time of the Boer War, when England needed re- cruits. It has since been reduced to a systematic study. In a medical examina- tion of forty thousand children in various parts of England, thirteen per cent, were found to be suffering from defective vi- sion, one per cent, from heart disease, one per cent, from lung trouble, two per cent, from bodily deformity. Sir Francis Galton, England's leading authority on the subject of eugenics, held that the bulk of the community was de- teriorating, judging from inquiries into the teeth, hearing, eyesight, and mal- formation of children in board schools 3 5 8 DENNIS HA THNAUOHT and from the apparently continuous in- crease of insanity and feeble-mindedness. He declared that the popularity of ath- letics proved little, for it is one thing to acclaim successful athletes, which any mob of weaklings can do, as at a cricket match. It is another thing to be an athlete one's self. Other features of recent progressive British legislation are measures for a larger income tax and an increase in the taxation of liquors and tobacco; old-age pensions, and compulsory workingmen's insurance. The liquor and tobacco taxes were used by the Conservatives in a tell- ing way with the Hathnaughts. The tax on whiskey was especially odious in Ire- land and Scotland, large distilling coun- tries, but bore lighter on England, where there is little distilling, but much brew- ing of beer. However, Ireland and Scot- land, and also Wales, support the Lib- erals, because of benefits that are ex- pected to come to them in other ways. In the days of Elizabeth, according to Hume, the House of Commons first ven- tured to assert its rights as a legislative body, particularly in regard to financial bills. In our day — since 1910, in fact — the House of Lords has been stripped of its power of veto, and can no longer hold back the progress of the country by play- ing the dog in the manger. Dennis Hathnaught, M. P., is young in legisla- tion, but he is old in memory, and it is written in the Stars that the days of the Lords are numbered, and that their castles are to be dismantled. CHAPTER XVI. PATRICK HATHNAUGHT, HOME RULER. Priestcraft and Parsonolatry have di- vided Irish Hathnaughts into two hostile camps — Catholics who regard themselves as Irish, and Protestants who are largely anti-Irish and indifferent to the national aspirations. If left to themselves, the Hathnaughts would undoubtedly live In amity and peace, but the curse of dissen- sion and the almost unexampled power of the Catholic and Protestant clergy over their flocks perpetuate a hatred that retards the national prosperity and pre- sents the example of a quick-witted, in- telligent race that might be among the world's leaders, retaining an almost me- diaeval development. So great is the insistence that educa- tion shall be sectarian, that several of the so-called Queen's colleges which are avowedly non-sectarian, have but few students. If a child is a Catholic, the priests demand that he shall be turned over to them; the Episcopal or Church of Ireland clergy are equally zealous that they lose none of their own, and the Presbyterians are no less determined 159 160 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT that Presbyterian born Irishmen shall follow in the footsteps of Calvin and Knox. So-called "godless schools" where these children would be taught together, might prove the salvation of the coun- try, but in order to get to Heaven, each by his own route, they have turned the country into a Hell. It is religion that divides the Irish and not race, for the so-called Scotch-Irish are of blood kindred to that of the native Irish. 1 might cite a score of authorities to show that Scotia or Scotland was an ancient name of Ireland and that the Scots of to-day are descendants of Irish tribes that centuries ago crossed to North Britain. In coming to Ireland at the time of the plantation of Ulster under James the first, the Scotch were simply returning to the fatherland. General Stewart of Garth in his famous "Sketches of the Highlanders" declares he often acted as interpreter for Gaelic speaking Irish sol- diers, finding their language to differ but little from that of the Highland Scotch. Even the Scotch Lowlander, who now considers himself qufte English, sjpoks Gaelic until the time of Malcolm III (1056) when the king, having married an English princess, introduced English speech, customs, and immigrants into the country. Before the Reformation the native Irish and the new settlers always amalgamated just as Celt, Saxon, Dane and Norman united to form the English race of to-day, but since that great spirit- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 161 ual upheaval, the Irish have divided ac- cording to religion. If you are Catholic you are Irish, if not Catholic you get an alibi. Thus we see S. S. McClure in his "Au- tobiography" labouring to prove in his first chapter, that although born in Ire- land he is a native of Scotland, a notable exception to the rule of Sir Boyle Roche that it is impossible to be in two places at once unless you are a bird. One can- not help thinking that such persons imag- ine that at the time of the Creation the making of Ireland was let out to a sub- contractor who wore a funny little hat, smoked a short clay pipe, and carried his materials in a hod, while gentle zephyrs from the newly made Lakes of Klllarney blew through his Galways. In one of the ablest studies of the Irish question that has ever been made, the preface to "John Bull's Other Island," George Bernard Shaw truthfully con- tends that it is not the complacent, priest- ridden Catholic who is the typical Irish- man and rebel, but the Protestant of the class represented by himself. Joseph McCabe, an "Anglo-Saxon" with a n-ime as Gaelic as Murphy, in his book on Shaw, pooh-poohs the great jester'3 >laim to be Irish and labours to prove that the Irish do not amount to much anyhow. Another McCabe — James D. — reflects the same spirit in a book called "Great Fortunes," when he describes Robert Bonner as "merely a Scotchman born in Ireland." There is paradox for you with the vengeance of the bigot. 162 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT An attempt has even been made to show a distinction between Scotch and Irish by claiming- that Mac is a Scottish form and Mc an Irish one having no con- nection with Mac, wfien the truth is that Mc is only an abbreviation of Mac which means son. Ireland is the only country in the world that has been systematically deprived of its right to claim its sons and daughters, the minute they engage in any work or art other than carrying the hod or scrub- bing floors. In a book called "Race or Mongrel," which is based on the argu- ment that races deteriorate when they practice promiscuity and mix their blood with that of alien people, the author, Al- fred Schultz, whose name would probably lead him to be interned in England as a German if he happened to be there during the great war, declares that the English are a race of one blood, the Sax- ons, Danes and Normans being merely branches of the same great people. He entirely ignores the great Celtic element in the English blood which scholars have recognized and studied since the time Matthew Arnold in his "Celtic Literature," drew attention to the subject. Schultz in dealing with Ireland, ignores the com- mon Gaelic heritage of Ireland and Scot- land, and calmly writes down the North Irish as a separate race although if he had the philosophical insight of a spar- row he would have seen that the race difference is almost wholly due to religion and the traditions of religion. DENNIS HATHNAUQHT 163 Michael J. F. McCarthy in books call- ed "Priests and People of Ireland," "Rome in Ireland" and similar works has waged, with some encouraging- degree of success, a fight against the almost druidical power of the priesthood over the people. lie declares that thousands, especially la- bourers, have fled across the Atlantic and Indian oceans to escape this intolerable thralldom. In Lover's "Rory O'More" there is an amusing account of the hero purchasing a good stout stick for his parish priest to beat his flock with, and this prerogative of power to inflict per- sonal chastisement has not been alto- gether abandoned by the clar-gy even in our day. On the other hand, Orangemen, by per- petuating an asinine idolatry of William III, have been reared in a belief that they are not Irish at all. I remember reading in a book on Ireland written by a Mr. Lynd, an amusing story illustrating this. A friend of Lynd meeting one McCabe, a labourer of some notoriety in his particu- lar town, remarked, "You have a good Irish name," whereupon McCabe replied with emphasis, "Irish hell; it is a good Protestant name." This animosity of Protestant for Catho- lic and Catholic for Protestant is worked for all it is worth by the great landlord interests. They raise the cry that "Home Rule" means "Rome Rule," but in reality it is the perpetuation of landlord ascen- dency they are working for, and not re- ligion, for they know full well that there 164 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT can be no religious persecution under the measure of home rule whicn the Brit- ish government aims to establish for the Irish people in a Parliament on Dublin's College Green, at the close of the present world war. To understand what is meant by Home Rule makes a brief recital of Irish history- necessary. From the time of Henry, the second, who came to Ireland under pow- er of a "bull" issued in 1154 by Pope Adrian the fourth, whose family name was Nicholas Brakespere and who was the only Englishman who ever occupied the Papal throne, Ireland has been ex- ploited for the benefit of English rulers and adventurers. There was a time in the history of Ireland when it was no crime for an Englishman to kill an Irish- man and when an Irishman could not maintain an action in the courts, no mat- ter how just his cause. In the time of Elizabeth, according to Froude's "History of England," it was proposed by a company of adventurers to have an "open season" on the Irish and to repopulate the land with EnglLsh colonists, but the kind suggestion was never acted upon. That Irish life was held cheaply is borne out by Froude, an anti-Irish writer, who tells us that when time hung heavy upon the shoulders of English officers in the "good old days," they had a habit of going out for some "Killings," using the people as game. The Irish were ordered to adopt the names, customs and language of the in- DENNI8 HATHNAUGHT 165 vader and after the Reformation, to con- form to the established church (Epis- copalian). The son of an Irish Catholic upon becoming Protestant could evict his father and assume the ownership of his estates. It was a crime to say the Mass and a capital offense to be a priest. Education, under the old Penal laws was denied to Irish Catholics and it is a mat- ter of historic record that even Daniel O'Connell, the great Irish Liberator, al- though his father was a member of an- cient family and of means, was forced, because of this proscription to learn his first letters from a hedge schoolmaster, a species of instructor unique in the history of education and made necessary by the Penal laws which denied educa- tion to Catholics. Gradually the major portion of the land of Ireland was taken from the rightful owners on one pretext or another and parcelled out among Eng- lish adventurers. Irish trade was annihilated by British legislative enactments and this brought on conditions that led Dean Swift, one of the greatest leaders of public opinion Ireland ever had, (See Lecky: Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland) to propose a species of boycott against England at a time when the word boycott was not in use, but the system as a means of achiev- ing an end, well understood. He pro- posed that Irishmen buy only Irish made goods, and thus bar the English out of Irish markets. England's difficulty has always been 166 DENNI8 HATHNAUGHT Ireland's opportunity. In 1782, taking advantage of the American Revolution which was giving England all the trou- ble she could bear, there was formed an Irish Protestant organization called the Volunteers, ostensibly for the repelling of threatened French invaders, but In reality to bring about the legislative In- dependence of Ireland. These Volun- teers under Lord Charlemont forced Eng- land to recognize the independence of the Irish Parliament sitting in College Green, Dublin. Of that parliament the greatest orator was Henry Gratton. Curious it was that in this Parliament, representing the people of a country overwhelmingly Catholic, no Catholic could sit. Presbyterians and other Dissenters had almost as hard a time as the Catholics of Ireland and it is a matter of history that the Irish rebellion of 1798 was large- ly a Presbyterian rising. The majority of the United Irishmen were Protestants. Francis McKinley, an ancestor of Pres- ident McKinley, was one of the Protes- tant Irish hanged in '98. Green (History of the English People) declares, however, that some of the Catholic rebels used to pounce on and slaughter Protestants just because they happened to be Protestants and that this turning of the national cause into a religious one, alienated the Ulstermen. In 1801 by shameless bribery and the plentiful distribution of titles and privileges, the English government brought about a union of the parliaments of England and Ireland. Then arose the DENNIS HATHNAVGHT 167 mighty Daniel O'Connell who had formed an organization to bring about Catholic emancipation, a feat he achieved in 1829 when he forced the Duke of WelHngton to consent to a measure of relief as the alternative of threatened civil war. O'Connell did not advocate the separation of Ireland from England as an indepen- dent country, believing, according to Wendell Phillips, that free, Ireland would be but a petty nation like Portugal and subject to the bullying of European pow- ers. But he did not believe in permitting his native land to be exploited by the Eng- lish. O'Connell had been elected to the British Parliament before emancipation had been achieved, but on account of his religion, had not been permitted to take his seat. When he did become a member entitled to speak upon the floor of the House, he raised his voice in behalf of a repeal of the Union and the restoration of Ireland's own parliament. In 1848 hot headed young Irishmen under Smith O'Brien started a rebellion which was an unsuccessful rising. O'Connell had broken with these young Irelanders as they were called, and died of a broken heart. After O'Connell's death there were no great, determined efforts to bring about a repeal of the Union, but in 1872 Mr. Isaac Sutt who had been of counsel for Smith O'Brien was returned for Limerick as a Home Ruler and imder him the agi- tation for the repeal of the Union became a moderate demand for home rule or 168 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT self-government in Ireland. Butt was a Protestant but earnestly devoted to his country's welfare. He was finally ousted from the leadership by Charles Stewart Parnell who headed a party demanding a broader measure of self-government than Mr. Butt and his followers had urged. Mr. Parnell remained leader of the party until 1891 when he was forced into retirement because of his intrigue with the famous Kitty O'Shea, sister of Gen- eral Evelyn Wood and wife of Captain O'Shea, one of Parnell's followers. Par- nell like Butt was a Protestant land- holder. Mr. Justin McCarthy, historian and novelist, succeeded to the leadership of a majority of the Irish Nationalist party but a small number remained true to Parnell under the leadership of Mr. John Redmond who eventually succeeded to the leadership of the whole party on the retirement of Mr. McCarthy who was more fitted for the study than for the forum. Redmond's leadership has been mas- terly and the consummate ability he has shown in beating down British prejudice has brought home rule within striking distance. Winston Churchill who braved the wrath of the Orangemen and showed a characteristic contempt for their threats by speaking for homo rule in the holy city of the Boyne faction, Belfast, de- clared the measure would be the means of bringing to an end, an accursed sys- tem that mad(! men hate their fellows. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT lfl» Hopeful signs are not wanting in Ire- land that Mr. Churchill's prophecy may come true and that Irish Hathnaughts, unmindful of priest or parson, shall join issues for the rehabilitation of their na- tion, and work together for the common good. It would be an easy matter for a chemist to prove that there is no dif- ference in the elements that form the waters of the Tiber and the Boyne. All the trouble comes from the attitude of the people that assemble on the banks. CHAPTER XVII. SLATIC HATHNAUGHTS— ITAN AND MICHAEL. In Russia and Poland the Hath- naughts were subjected until recently to a crushing and grinding serfdom that seemed all but hopeless. Even now that the people are demanding through their Duma some measure of self-government, Ivan, the Russian, and Michael, the Pole, are overwhelmed with grievous taxa- tion that makes their position almost as burdensome as that of the Jews whom they are taught by a vicious State church to persecute and despise. In a history of the common people, it is well worth while to study the conditions under which the Russian and Polish peasants toiled and sweated for an idle, lawless and ignorant nobility. Rambaud, in his "History of Russia," classifies the Hathnaughts of old Russia under three heads — "The slave or kholop, properly so-called, the mancipium of the Romans, a man taken in war, sold by himself or some one else, or son of a kholop. Second, the peasant inscribed on the lands of a noble, the colonus ad- scriptius of the Roman Empire, whose 170 DENNIS HATHNAUGIir 171 person was legally free, but who was to be reduced by means of a more and more rigourous legislation to the condition of krepostnyi or serf of the glebe. Third, the free cultivator who lived like a farmer on the lands of another and had the right to change his master, but who was soon to be mingled with the preced- ing class." "It was the inscribed peasant," says Rambaud, "who constituted almost the whole of the rural population. In th* ancient provinces the peasant might consider himself as the primitive In- habitant of the soil. He was only made subject to the gentleman in order to secure to the latter an income sufficient for military service; he therefore con- tinued to look on himself as the true proprietor. In these rural masses the primitive features of the Slav organiza- tion were preserved in all their vigour. It was the commune or mir, and not the individuals, who possessed the land; it was the commune that was responsible to the Tzar for the tax for the corvee and dues to the lord. This responsibility armed the commune with an enormous power over its members, and this power embodied itself in the starost, assisted by elders. "In the bosom of the commune the family was not organized less severely, less tyrannically than the mir. The father of the family had over his wife, his sons, married or single, and their wives, an authority almost as absolute 172 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT as that of the starost over the commune or the Tzar over the Empire. The pa- rental authority became harder and more stern from the contact with serfage and the despotic rule. Ancient barbarism was still intact among these ignorant people; the graceful customs or the sav- age manners, the poetic or cruel super- stitions of the early Slavs, were per- petuated by them. The Russian peasant remained a pagan under his veneer of orthodoxy. His funeral songs seem destitute of all Christian hope. His mar- riage songs preserve the tradition of the purchase or capture of the bride. The sad lot of the rustic was yet to be ag- gravated during the three centuries of progress which the upper classes had still to accomplish. In view of the state, as of the proprietor, he tended more and more to become a beast of burden, a pro- ductive force to be used and abused at pleasure. . . . "The starost governed the town and the district depending on it. As the citi- zens paid the heaviest taxes, they were forbidden to quit the town; they were, as during the last days of the Roman Empire, bound to the city glebe. Alexis Mikhailovitch was afterward to attach the pain of death to this prohibition. To assess the impost, the starost convoked at once both the deputies of the town and those of the rural communities. The impost of the tagla was paid by the town collectively in proportion to the number of fires, and all the people were DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 173 collectively responsible for each other to the State. "In the burgess class may be counted the merchants, whose Russian name of gostl (guests or strangers) shows how far commerce still was from being ac- climatized in this land and under this regime. Muscovy produced in abun- dance leather from oxen, furs from the blue and black fox, the zibeline, the beaver, and the ermine; wax, honey, hemp, tallow, oil from the seal, and dried flsh. From China, Bokhara, and Persia, she received silks, tea and spices. The Russian people are naturally intelligent and industrious, but still commerce lan- guished. "Fletcher, the Englishman, has as- signed as the reason for this decay the Insecurity created by anarchy and des- potism. The moujik did not care either to save or to lay by. He pretended to be poor and miserable to escape the exac- tions of the prince and the plunder of his agents. If he had money he buried it, as one in fear of an invasion. " 'Often,' says the English writer, 'you will see them trembling with fear, lest a boyard should know what they have to sell. I have seen them at times when they had spread out their wares so that you might make a better choice, look all around them, as if they feared an enemy would surprise them and lay hands on them. If I asked them the cause, they would say to me "I was afraid there might be a noble or one of the sons of 174 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT the boyards here; they would take away my merchandise by force" "... The citizen, like the inhabitant of the French towns of the fourteenth century, was only a sort of villein; he wore the cos- tume of a peasant and lived almost like him. The merchants were really what they were called by Ivan, the Terrible — the moujiks of commerce." Two other long-established institutions — domestic slavery and the seclusion of women — have had a marked effect upon the social and industrial life of Russia. "Besides the peasants more or less attached to the glebe," says Rambaud, "all Russian proprietors kept in their castles, or in their town houses at Mos- oow, a multitude of servants like those who encumbered the senators' palaces in, imperial Rome. A great lord always gathered round him many hundreds at these dvorovie, both men and women« )x)ught or born in the house, whom he never paid, whom he fed badly and who served him badly in return, but whose numbers served to give an idea of the wealth of their master. "The cortege of a noble on his way to the Kremlin may be compared to that of a Japanese daimio. A long file of sledges or chariots, a hundred horses, outriders who made the people stand back by blows with their whips; a crowd of armed men who escorted the noble; and behind a host of dvorovie, often with naked feet beneath their magnificent liveries, filled with their stir and noise DENNIS HATHNAUaUT 175 the streets of Bielyi-gorod. These do- mestic slaves were subjected, without distinction of sex, to the most severe discipline, and were forced to submit to all the cruel or voluptuous caprices of their masters, and, like the slaves of antiquity, were exposed to the moat frightful chastisements. Whilst the registered colon was attached to the land, the kholopy could be sold, either by heads or by families, without compunc- tion. Wives were separated from their husbands, and children from their par- ents." The serf system may be studied from the interesting point of view of fiction from Gogol's "Dead Souls" and Tur- genief's short story of "Mumu." It Is small wonder that long before Alexander II emancipated the Hathnaughts, March 3, 1861. there had been loud calls for amelioration. Rambaud describes that other bar- barous and oriental system of the Rus- sians — the seclusion of women. Woman was little better off than a slave. A Russian proverb says, "I love thee like my soul and I dust thee like my jacket." She had as little part in the life of her husband until a comparatively modern time — and then only under the French influence — as an ancient Greek woman did. It is related by Rambaud on the authority of Herberstein that a Russian woman, having married a foreigner, did not believe herself loved, as he never beat her. She was in disgrace with the 176 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT other women who got their chastisement regularly. So widespread was this sub- mission and so thoroughly had the rotten and superstitious Russian Church incul- cated it as a duty upon them, that even robust women would willingly submit to be whipped by a feeble husband. Russian Hathnaughts are robbed and impoverished by the religious and monastic institutions in an even greater degree than are the Spanish people. Shortly after the legal murder of Ferrer, the great educator in Spain, there was an agitation for the suppression of the re- hgious houses. It was shown that these institutions sheltered sixty thousand men and women subject to vows as monks and nuns, who were engaged in pro- ductive industries in competition with paid labour and highly taxed manufactur- ers, but with the advantage to the mon- asteries of having no taxes to pay or wage scales to meet. Russia is even more monk and priest- ridden than Spain. In Voltaire's "Charles XII" he describes the Russia of the days before Peter the Great, when the head of the Russian Church possessed power of life and death oy.er all Russians and even the Tzar acknowledged his superior authority by holding the bridle of the horse when the visible head of the church on earth was on parade. Peter changed all that, but the church has never lost its hold upon the people and has been largely instrumental in repressing lib- erty and persecuting the great writers DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 177 that have dared to give the living force of words to the national aspirations. The church, too, has alwavs been back of the pogroms. During the massacre of the Jews at Kishineff, the bishop of that place, according to Michael Davitt in "Within the Pale," went about bless- ing the murderers. Some notion of the enormous wealth uselessly amassed by the Russian Church in a country subject to periodical dis- tress and famine may be gathered from the following news letter from St. Peters- burg, printed in the New York Sun, Sunday. August 31st, 1913: "The hoarded wealth of the Russian monasteries and convents is certainly immense, although it may not reach the fabulous aggregate of $4,000,000,000, at which popular belief persists in estimat- ing the gold and jewels which the eight hundred and seventy-three recognized religious establishments in the empire have amassed in the course of cen- turies. "The Duma when considering this year's budget of the Holy Synod insisted on an inquiry being made into the re- sources of the religious associations. The results were surprising, for accord- ing to official reports the private mov- able property of all these institutions only amounted to $30,657,500. Their total annual income was placed at $10,000,000 and their expenditure at $9,000,000, $3,- 500,€00 of which was put down as the cost of maintenance of the archbishops 178 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT and the monastic fraternities. The value of the land owned by monasteries and convents was estimated at $104,500,000. "It is hardly necessary to say that no one believes these figures to be anywhere near the truth. It is pointed out that a great number of richly bejeweled saints' images which are well known to the public are worth upward of $500,000 each. Common report places the wealth of the famous Troitzka monastery at $325,000,000, and its possessions in dia- monds alone are estimated at $12,500,000." In Poland we And similar conditions. Campbell in his "Pleasures of Hope" says that "freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell," but by all accounts the Polish Hath- naught did not lose much when his country was partitioned by Prussia, Russia, and Austria. In the collected "Political Writings" of Richard Cobden, article "Poland," we read "that, down to the partition of their territory, about nineteen out of every twenty of the inhabitants were slaves; possessing no rights, civil or political — that about one in every twenty was a nobleman — and this body of nobles formed the very worst aristocracy of ancient or modern times; putting up and pulling down their kings at pleasure; passing selfiijh laws which gave them the power of life and death over their serfs, whom they sold and bought like horses or dogs; usurping, to each of themselves, the privileges of a petty sovereign, and denying to all besides the meanest rights DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 179 of human beings; and scorning all pur- suits as degrading, except that of the sword, they engaged in incessant wars with neighbouring states, or they plunged their own country Into all the horrors of anarchy, for the purpose of giving employment to themselves and their de- pendents." Cobden continues: "The mass of the people were serfs, who had no legal pro- tection and no political rights, who en- joyed no power over property of any kind, and who possessed less security of life and limb than has been lately ex- tended to the cattle of this island by the act of Parliament against cruelty to animals." Kosciusko fought under Washington for American independence. It is to be hoped that in his attempt to reestablish the Polish nation he was actuated by a desire to make his people free in every sense of the word, in which event it may be that Campbell was not indulg- ing in poetic license when he said that "freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell." CHAPTER XVIII. BROTHER JONATHAN AND UNCLE SAM. Here and there in the homes of those fond of the antique one sees the old spin- ning- wheel, mute evidence of the primi- tive domestic beginnings of American in- dustry. Now the smokestack is seen in every hamlet in the land and the Ameri- can manufacturer, a lineal descendant of the house of Hathnaught, is rapidly dis- tancing competitors even in England and Germany. Brother Jonathan Hathnaught, when he began laying his humble foundation of American industry, was beset with all the vexations incident to the theocracy of Colonial New England when the minister was even more powerful than the gov- ernor. "According to the custom established in Massachusetts," says Richard Hildreth (History of the United States), the Church and State were most intimately blended. The Magistrates and General Court, aided by the advice of the elders, claimed and exercised a supreme control In spiritual as well as temporal matters; while even in matters purely temporal 180 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 181 the elders were consulted on all impor- tant questions. . . . Besides the Sun- day service, protracted to a great length there were frequent lectures on week days, an excess of devotion unreasonable in an infant colony, and threatening the interruption of necessary labour." Hil- dreth might have added that this "excess of devotion" did not prevent occasional scandal as shown by Hawthorne's "Scar- let Letter" in the relations of Hester Prynne and the young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. In addition to religious distinctions, Hildreth says, there were others of a tem- poral character "transferred from that system of semi-feudal English Society in which the Colonists had been born and bred." "A discrimination," he goes on to say, "between gentlemen and those of inferior condition was carefully kept up. Only gentlemen were entitled to the prefix of 'Mr.'; their number was quite small, and deprivation of the right to be so address- ed was inflicted as a punishment. Good man or good woman, by contraction 'goody,' was the address of inferior per- sons. . . . All amusements were pro- scribed; all gayety seemed to be regarded as a sin." If one slandered the govern- ment or churches or wrote home discour- aging letters, the punishment called for whipping, cropping of ears, and banish- ment. It was in this great state monastery of Puritanism where the joyous side of na- 182 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT ture and even the natural affections were suppressed, and the conventions that breed deceit, hypocrisy, and oppression were fostered, that Jonathan Hathnaught in the breathing spells between prayer meetings and week-day devotions found- ed American industrial life. American industrial supremacy is due not only to the enterprise of Jonathan, but to an unexampled mechanical genius and the development of inventions. Rich- ard Cobden, in an article on "America," in his "Political Writings," bears witness to this. "The Americans," he says, "possess a quicker mechanical genius than even our- selves (such, again, was the case with our ancestors in comparison with the Dutch), as witness their patents, and the improvements for which we are indebted to individuals of that country in mechan- ics — such as spinning, engraving, etc. We gave additional speed to our ships by Improving upon the naval architecture of the Dutch; and the similitude again ap- plies to the superiority which, in com- parison with the British models, the Americans have, for all the purposes of activity and economy, imparted to their vessels." American industry has been greatly de- veloped by improving the means of trans- portation, and Cobden contrasts the en- thusiasm with which the Americans have established railroads with the indifferent if not hostile attitude of the parliament of his own country. DENNIS HATHNAUOHT 183 "The London and Birmingham Com- pany," says Cobden, "after spending up- wards of forty thousand pounds in at- tempting to obtain for its undertaking the sanction of the Legislature, was unsuc- cessful in tVip House of Lords." Cobden gives the following extract from the evidence taken before the committee of those titled boobies: "Do you know the name of Lady Has- tings' place? How near to it does your line go? Taking the look out of the prin- cipal rooms of the house, does it run in front of the principal rooms? How far from the house is the point where it be- comes visible? That would be a quarter of a mile? Could the engines be heard in the house at that distance? Is there any cutting or embankment there? Is It in sight of the house? Looking to the country is it not possible that the line could be taken at a greater distance from the residence of Lady Hastings?" Think of it, because an idle, useless, and aimless woman of title might have her slumbers disturbed by the toot of a passing train, rapid transit had to be de- layed in England. It is small wonder that patient old John Bull is at last awakening to the necessity of abolishing this house of titled ninnies which has an hereditary right to hold back the nation's progress. Even in Colonial days, American en- terprise had excited the jealousy of the British and the obnoxious stamp act and other exactions led to the American Revo- 184 DENNm HATUNAUaUT lution, which was basically an econom- ic insurrection, notwithstanding the flap- doodle utterances of Fourth of July ora- tors. Within fifty years after this event, American industries had grown to such an extent as to bear comparison with those of England. In the "American Almanack" for 1835, as quoted by Cobden, we find that the exports from the United States for the year ending Sept. 25, 1833, amounted to $90,140,000, about twenty millions sterling of English money. The British exports for the same period were 47,000,000 pounds, of which 36,000,000 were of home commodities or manufactures, whilst the remaining 11,000,000 consisted of foreign and colonial produce. "Now," says Cobden, "in order to in- stitute a fair comparison between the re- spective trades of the two countries, it will be necessary to bear in mind that at the above period, the population of America was about 14,000,000, whilst that of the British empire may be reckoned to have been 25,500,000." Cobden adds that if we note that 2,000,000 of the American population were negroes, the commerce was decidedly in favor of the United States. Manufactures that had an early and rapid development were shipbuilding, the boot and .shoe, paper, cordage, nails, and furniture industries. The first growth of these was in New England, and much of It domestic manufacture, unconnected with factory labour, Cobden observes. In- deed, we may remark it was a familiar DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 185 Sight less than thirty years ago, before boot and shoe making machinery revo- lutionized the business, to find Hath- naughts, fathers and sons, in their own homes or in small bandbox-like work- shops busy making footwear. Cobden's observations are all the more remarkable when one recalls that in 1807, twenty-eight years before, the "embargo" had paralyzed trade. "The sound of the caulking hammer," says John Bach Mc- Master, in his "History of the People of the United States," "was no longer heard in the shipyards. The sail-lofts were de- serted; the rope-walks were closed; ttie cartmen had nothing to do. In a twink- ling the price of every commodity went down, and the price of every foreign com- modity went up. But no wages were earned, no business was done, and money almost ceased to circulate." The gov- ernment, business men, and workingmen suffered immense losses. Thousands be- came bankrupt, the newspapers were full of insolvent-debtor notices, and post of- fices and cross-road posts had advertise- ments of sheriffs' sales. "In the cities," says McMaster, "the jails were not large enough to hold the debtors. At New York during 1809, thir- teen hundred men were imprisoned for no other crime than being ruined by the embargo. "A traveller who saw the city in this day of distress assures us that it looked like a town ravaged by pestilence. The counting-houses were shut or advertised 186 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT to let. The coffee houses were almost empty — the streets along the water front were almost deserted. The ships were dismantled; their decks were cleared, their hatches were battened down. Not a box, not a cask, not a barrel, not a bale was to be seen on the wharves, where the grass had begun to grow luxuriantly. A year later eleven hundred and fifty were confined for debts under twenty-five dollars, and were clothed by the Humane Society." Wages in those days, accord- ing to McMaster, averaged about one dol- lar a day. Cobden's tribute to the mechanical genius of Americans makes it easy to understand the marvellous growth of American industries. That growth may' be best studied by turning to encyclopedic articles on the various items of manu- facture — cotton, woollens, shipbuilding, cordage, weaving, spinning, boots and shoes, iron, steel, and the like. Its history has also been made the subject of gov- ernmental inquiry, and among special works treating of the subject may be mentioned Wright's "Industrial Evolution of the United States." Jonathan Hathnaught and his Uncle Samuel hold honourable places In the his- tory of labour. From earliest times we read, men have made shoes in Lynn, and Fall River and Lowell long ago became the great centers of the textile trade. In the International Encyclopedia, under the head "Manufactures" wo find that the jealousy of the English long prevented DENNIS IIATHNAUGHT 187 our budding manufacturers from making use of the Hargreaves and Arkwright spinning machinery and threw every pos- sible obstacle in the way of American native industries so English trade might control the market. President Wilson and his supporters have revised the tariff upon a "revenue only" basis. This brings out prominently the fact that our tariff was originally designed to build up our so-called infant industries. Those "infants," tariff reform- ers say, have been nourished so well upon the tariff milk that they have become giants — trusts, and to some extent agen- cies for the restraint of trade. Just how a trust is called into being may be studied in Ida Tarbell's "History of the Standard Oil Company." This company was the first great trust, and continues to be the most powerful one. It is conducted with a masterful grasp of an opportunity that pales the power and achievements of Napoleon. Socialists of the evolutionary school welcome the trusts which have now in- vaded all industries, and regard these great corporations as a step in the di- rection of the ultimate state control of the means of production, distribution, transportation, and communication. Trusts have been made the subject of governmental investigation largely be- cause of charges of unfair discrimination in their favour by railroads granting re- bates, and in May, 1913, a Congressional Committee conducted an inquiry into the workings of the Steel Trust. 188 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT Various attempts to dissolve trusts have been made, but with little apparent suc- cess. By the very intricacies of their or- ganization they appear to be Protean in their nature and disappear through the exit marked "Dissolution," only to re- appear at the entrance marked "Resolved into our original companies." But these companies stick together like Corsican brothers, and the dissolution is apparently hardly more than a name. It is this concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and the irresponsibility of these few to the people at large that has led to the agitation for the state regulation of trusts, and to outbursts challenging the claim that inheritance is a natural right, and contending that it is a legitimate province of government to turn great fortunes back to the state bv legislation. In other words, there is a growing disposition to make wealth as- sume a definite responsibility and not be governed as in the old days by the whim of the possessor. It is a modern version of the old cry of the utilitarian Bentham, "The greatest good of the greatest num- ber." George Frisbie Hoar, long a Senator from Massachusetts, in an address before the Chickatawbut Club of Boston, shortly before his death, instanced the following as evils of the trusts: (1) Destruction of competition. (2) The management of industries by absentee capital. (3) Destruction of local public spirit. DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 189 (4) Fraudulent capitalization. (5) Secrecy. (6) Management for the private benefit of the officers. (7) The power to corrupt elections, and in some cases to corrupt the courts. (8) Indifference to public sentiment. There are three tariff schools in the United States: Protectionists who believe In a high tariff, those who believe In a tariff for revenue only, and free traders. In public > life there are few who have dared openly to advocate free trade. Po- litically therefore we hear of protection- ists and tariff reformers who believe in a tariff for revenue only. Taxes are levied for the support of city, county, state and national government and, according to tariff reformers, should be exacted only to defray the actual ex- penses of government. Internal revenue is obtained by taxing whiskey, beer, and tobacco. Tariff taxes and duties are col- lected at "ports of entry." Millions ac- crue annually to government through tariff taxes, and it is the contention of low tariff advocates that this contracts the volume of the currency and leads to panics. Protection, they declare, keeps up the prices on goods, fosters trusts and corners, and makes paupers on the one hand and millionaires on the other. Laws of supply and demand regulate the prices of goods and establish the standard of wages. Scarcity of a thing enhances its price; abundance of a thing 190 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT lowers Its price. This holds true also of labour. As Henry George used to say, when two men seek one job, wages are low; when two jobs seek one man, wages are high. If, as protectionists assert, tariff reduction would open American markets to English goods, English wages would increase. Density of population, too, has a great effect on labour. Opponents of the protective system charge that protection killed American foreign commerce by fettering it with its system. It is held that liberty of ex- change, or free trade, is a natural right and that tariff walls interfere with this right and discourage commercial en- terprise. Labour creates wealth; restrict- ing trade contracts labour's opportunities and reduces wages, according to econo- mists that favour tariff reduction or its abolition. It is a noteworthy fact in the history of economic development in the United States that American industries have tak- en an immense jump forward as the re- sult of the emancipation of the black man — Sambo Hathnaught. Professor Cairnes, in his work "The Slave Power," finds three fundamental defects in slave labour — it is compulsory and therefore not given willingly; it is unskilful; it is lacking in versatility. It therefore follows that slave labour is only advantageous when concentrated and slaves pursue unskilled vocations. In his "Democracy in America," De Tocqueville, speaking of the introduction DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 191 of the negro slave into the American Colonies, says: "Slavery, as we shall after- wards show, dishonours labour; it intro- duces idleness into society, and with idle- ness ignorance and pride, luxury and dis- tress. It enervates the powers of the mind, and benumbs the activity of man. The influence of slavery, united to the English character, explains the manners and social condition of the Southern States. . . . "It is not for the good of the negroes, but for that of the whites, that measures are taken to abolish slavery in the United States. The first negroes were imported into Virginia about the year 1621. In America therefore, as well as on the rest of the globe, slavery originated in the South. Thence it spread from one settle- ment to another; but the number of slaves diminished toward the Northern States, and the negro population was al- ways very limited in New England. "A century had scarcely elapsed since the foundation of the Colonies when the attention of the planters was struck by the extraordinary fact that the Provinces which were comparatively destitute of slaves increased in population, in wealth and in prosperity more rapidly than those which contained the greatest number of negroes. In the former, however, the in- habitants were obliged to cultivate the soil themselves or by hired labourers; in the latter they were furnished with hands for which they paid no wages; yet, al- though labour and expense were on the 192 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT one side, and ease with economy on the other, the former were in possession of the most advantageous system. The con- sequence seemed to be the more difficult to explain, since the settlers, who all be- longed to the same European race, had the same habits, the same civilization, the same laws, and their shades of difference were extremely slight." Slavery, however, created differences for the Southerner, De Tocqueville says, acquiring through his possession of slaves the idea that he is born to command and who expects to be obeyed without resist- ance, becomes supercilious, hasty, "iras- cible, violent and ardent in his desires. Impatient of obstacles, but easily dis- couraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt." The Northerner, on the other hand, having no slaves or even servants about him in childhood, grows self-reliant and learns to supnly his own wants. Since the emancipation of the slaves as a result of the civil war, the old South has disappeared, and a new industrial South Is making for prosperity and building up a race of self-reliant and earnest men. The old Southerner, whom Mark Twain declares in his "Life on the Mississippi" built up his ideas of life and chivalry on the basis of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels, again to quote words of the glo- rious Mark used in another connection, "is a thing of the dead and pathetic past." CHAPTER XIX. DENNIS SETTING HIS HOUSE JN OR- DER. Dennis Hathnaught is sliowing unmis- takable signs of determination to set up governmental housekeeping for himself. In ancient days and throughout the Mid- dle Ages, he was subject to kicks and cuffs and lashings, with no reward for his labour. Little by little all that has been changed. Slavery gradually merged into serfdom and serfdom into paid la- bour. As time went on, Dennis exhibited greater and greater interest in govern- ment, and slowly grew into an enfran- chised citizen with a humble, but ever- increasing right to a voice in affairs. This development of the Hathnaughts from slavery to economic importance in government had its birth in Suggestion. Master minds in their ranks by insinua- tion, innuendo, or open preaching as in the case of Wamba to Gurth, awakened the dumbwits among the Hathnaughts. Conversation and stories of returning sol- diers, itinerant tinkers and peddlers, run- away slaves and serfs, concerning move- ments taking place elsewhere, all had an effect through Suggestion upon the en- 193 194 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT slaved masses and led them, in imitation of their fellows, to revolt and to demand amelioration of conditions and a share in the harvests they reaped. Since the in- vention of printing the work of awaken- ing the people has been marvellously accelerated. Every mental operation is in the na- ture of Suggestion. In works on psy- chology you will read of consciousness, sub-consciousness, somnambulism, hyp- notism, perception, understanding, mem- ory, habit, imagination, judgment, con- ception, sensations, sight, touch, feelings, scent, hearing, irritability, desires, ad- miration, contempt, compassion, emo- tions, attention, association of ideas, voli- tion, motives, reason, relativity of knowl- edge, resemblances, right and wrong, sagacity (especially in animals), sympa- thy, thought, truth, vision — all subject to Suggestion growing out of the myste- rious processes of the mind whereby one fact in association with another or by contrast with it, brings forth the Sug- gestion that later becomes a new incen- tive to action and further progress. Even speech originated In suggestion if the onomatopoeic theory is correct — that lan- guage owes its origin to man's attempt in the beginning to adapt words to sounds. Hiss, cackle, caw, buzz, are in- stances of sound imitation. Like everything else, government is the result of Evolution and Suggestion. No man or group of men has yet been able to frame a Constitution or Code of Laws DEN N I a HATHNAUGJIT 195 that may become the fixed, unalterable source of g-overnmental powers for all time. Even our own Constitution that we regard as reverently as the Carthag- inians did the sacred garment of Tanit, does not always work out the problem as the Fathers intended it should. Human improvement is born of Sug- gestion growing out of Precedent, and Liberty is the result of many conces- sions often wrung painfully from the ruling classes. Were we to reestablish suddenly the slavery of Greece and Rome, every man, woman, and child would see the injustice and iniquity of it, for we now possess the historic sense and the historic background to judge It by. But many fine men and women of antiquity, with nothing different to look backward to, approved of slavery and saw no injustice in an idle group reap- ing the full benefit of the labour of an active and enslaved class. The best of all Constitutions is the British Constitution for it has the ad- vantage of not being a set and written document and may thus grow by acces- sions. It is in reality nothing but the digested spirit of laws safeguarding hu- man rights, such as the Magna Charta, the immortal habeas corpus act which guarantees a person against unjust seiz- ure and incarceration; right of trial by jury in open court, and the right to chal- lenge men called to the panel; religious freedom and toleration; right of assem- bly and petition; the tendency toward an 196 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT equitable adjustment of taxation; grad- ual abolition of exemptions and privi- leges enjoyed by the nobility and clergy; procedure under due process of law so that citizens may not fear imprisonment or confinement in madhouses without form of trial or the procuring of a writ or warrant. Dennis Hathnaught is working through Trades-Unions, Socialism, and Syndical- ism, as well as through the old political parties, which he is beginning to suspect, are simply nest-builders for political cuckoos. If any one ever adapts Othello to the labour question, Dennis as Othel- lo will have the professional politician for his lago or false friend. In a book purposely kept within short compass, it would be impossible to dis- cuss exhaustively all the phases of economic evolution, and in our account here of Trade-Unionism, Socialism, and Syndicalism, we shall touch only upon the surface, giving the untrained reader just enough to enable him to go intelli- gently into a deeper study of the move- ments. Trades-Unionism may be said to date from the first conference of slaves, im- patient to shed their chains. In Eugene Sue's curious work, "The Mysteries of the People; or History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages," we find refer- ence to the "Sons of the Mistletoe," an organization of Gallic Hathnaughts in Ancient Pvomo which met in a cave, members often dragging their heavy DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 197 chains to the meeting place. Their aim was to throw off the yoke of their mas- ters, but in reality it was an economic movement and may be cited as an early example of the trades-union. Again, the agrarian agitation on the part of the plebeian population of Rome itself, led to the organization of guilds that had in them the germ of trades unionism and socialism. In the Middle Ages the Guilds were or- ganizations of tradesmen, but with this difference — they included masters as well as workmen. For the student curious to trace the history of these now powerful organizations, we may refer to Thorold Rogers' "Six Centuries of Work and Wages," Gibbins' "Economic History of England," Webbs' "History of Trades Unionism," Brentano's "Guilds and Trades Unions," and Fawcett's "Political Economy." Professor Fawcett was a member of the "Social Science Commit- tee on Trade Societies," which made an exhaustive report on the general subject of workmen's organizations which is still a standard authority. This report was published in England in 1860. Objects of unions in the main are to regulate the hours of labour and to set the standard of wages. The unions from the very beginning of their history have contended for the right to control the ap- prentice system, which in the old days constituted a kind of serfdom in which the apprentice was bound by strict arti- cles of indenture to serve his master 198 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT while learning- a trade. Nowadays, an apprentice may abandon his work at will, but in earlier times he was liable to the law. The idea of the unions in control- ling the apprentice system was to keep trades from becoming overcrowded, and so well was this done by the unions that In the city of Lynn, Mass., the backbone of the shoemakers' unions and their mon- opoly of the labour supply was not broken until the importation of cheap Italian and Armenian labour led the man- ufacturers to the breaking in of green hands when their skilled workmen were on strike. With the rise of an independent and class-conscious working class in England, after the "Black Death," when labour was exceedingly scarce, the Hathnaughts asserted a right to have a word in the matter of wages and hours of labour. Thorold Rogers, in his "Six Centuries of Work and Wages," calls the time from the peasants' rebellion in 1381 to the reign of Henry VIII, "the golden age of the English Labourer," for his fight for recognition led to better wages, shorter hours, and more certainty of employ- ment. This, too, despite the fact that the government, leagued with the great land owners, endeavoured to stay the progress ot labour toward independence and self- regulation. As we understand the trades union of today, it may be said to have been in ex- istence for four hundred years approxi- mately, for in 1548, in the reign of Ed- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 199 ward VI, as shown by the statutes of England, a law was aimed against work- men, who had combined and taken an oath to do only certain kinds of work and to regulate the method of doing It, the hours and the compensation. There Is abundant evidence by Froude, Macau- lay, and other historians that the gov- ernment for centuries tried to control la- bour arbitrarily, and it was not until 1824 that it became legal for workmen through organization to set a value upon their own labour and to have a say about hours and other conditions. The Chartist movement in England was the outgrowth of a growing sense of independence on the part of labour and its demand for political rights. Chartism has a literature of its own Be- sides being incorporated in every history of the early years of Queen Victoria's reign. It had its origin in a state of low wages accompanied by a high cost of living. The agitation raged for ten years and occasioned great public excitement. Oddly enough, one of the most famous leaders of this uprise of the English pro- letariat was one Feargus O'Connor, a celebrated mob orator who claimed de- scent from Brian Boru. The agitation which resulted in monster petitions to parliament, occasioned great alarm In conservative England, and disturbances led to bloodshed. Demands of the Chartists as we view such matters today, were very moderate. They were six in number — first, annual 200 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Parliaments; second, Universal Suffrage; third, Vote by ballot; fourth, Equal Elec- toral Districts; fifth. Abolition of Prop- erty Qualifications for members of Parlia- ment; sixth, Payment of members of Parliament. Most of these demands are now the law of the land and labour has made such headway politically that we have the spectacle of sixty labour members sit- ting in the British Parliament, and con- stituting the backbone of radical legis- lation. The initiative, the referendum, the re- call, employers' liability legislation, com- pulsory insurance, old-age pensions, wo- man suffrage, commission government, and like legislation are all manifestations of the presence of Dennis Hathnaught in Congress, Parliament, Reichstag, and Duma. Socialism also is ancient of days. Las- salle calls Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (535-475 B. C), the father of Socialism. Many of the early insurrections, particularly the risings un- der Spartacus and Wat Tyler were so- ciaUstic in character, but it has been only since the French Revolution that the idea of social equality has assumed a political importance. Rousseau was a great detached teacher of Socialism. In his "Social Contract" he stirred the nation with his famous sen- tence, "Man is born free but is every- where enslaved." In this work he ad- vanced principles that made his book a DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 201 kind of Bible to the revolutionists and made a sharp attack upon the claim of the landowner and the nobly born to ex- clusive privilege of wielding political power. The labourer whose toil made It possible for the State to exist, Rousseau maintained, had a right to participate in the business of government. Henri Alphonse Esquiros, a French- man (1812-1876), in his "Evangel of the People," pictures Christ as a socialist teacher in full sympathy with the Indus- trial revolutionary movement. This was published in 1840 and its author's reward was eight months' imprisonment and a fine of five hundred francs. The Prance of that day wanted no preachers of rev- olution, least of all economic revolution through the medium of the founder of Christianity. Karl Marx was the founder of interna- tional socialism. His battle cry, "Work- Ingmen of the World, unite," is still the rallying slogan of the social revolution whether that revolution takes the form ot trades-unionism, socialism, or syndi- calism. His great work, "Capital," dis- plays a wonderful grasp upon the funda- m.entals of economics and the knowledge he shows of economic literature is enor- mous and intimate. His work has been translated into many languages and be- sides epitomes gotten out by socialistic publishers, there is available in English, a good translation edited by FVed En- gels. One of the earliest attempts in the 202 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT United States to bring the levelling proc- ess to bear upon the classes of society was the Brook Farm experiment in which George Ridley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Albert Brisbane, Margaret Fuller, and some other of the noted persons of the day took part. Its effort to achieve equal- ity and solve the vexed labour problem failed, but the experiment, besides the usual historical accounts that preserve Its memory, is immortalized by Haw- thorne in "The Blithedale Romance." Frederick Spielhagen, in his novel, "Hammer and Anvil" (1869), gives us a study of the warring castes of Germany as affected by the peculiar nature of German institutions. We must choose whether we will be the hammer or the anvil, he says, and tries to point a way out by declaring that it shall not be hammer or anvil, but hammer and anvil, for, he says, everything and every hu- man being is both at once and every mo- ment. In Germany, where Socialism has had a wonderful expansion, one of the great leaders was August Bebel. In his "Wo- man under Socialism," he notes the im- portance of the female sex in the econ- omic evolution of the race, and declares that her emancipation and perfect equality with man is the goal of all social development — a foregone con- clusion which no power can alter or set aside. As a step in this direction, the rule of man over man, and capitalist over workman, he declares, must be abolished. DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 203 Then, he thinks, will come the Golden Age, for which men have dreamed for centuries, and with the end of class rule, will come the end of the rule of man over woman. Whatever the motive of titled women in taking up the cause of militancy and demanding' the ballot, there is no doubt that the great feminist movement of to- day is an outgrowth of socialistic agita- tion. Olive Schreiner, in her notable work, "Woman and Labour," calls the feminist movement a sex revolt against parasitism. In her demand that woman shall become a producer and a worker, instead of becoming a doll or a mere pop- ulation increaser, she takes her place be- side the John the Baptists of Progress, who are crying aloud in the wilderness of our modern industrial world. Those who think women in politics a modern phenomenon would do well to open their Livy and read about the fu- rore caused by C, Oppius proposing a law in Ancient Rome, long before the Christian era, forbidding women the use of golden ornaments. In the debate that followed, the way the women went out into the highways and byways, besieg- ing influential men and agitating for the repeal of the law, would put cheer into Mrs. Pankhurst's soul during a hunger strike. Every "Jeremiah" who pours out lamentations against "Maria" and her "Votes for Women" militancy, would do well to read these luminous pages of Livy. After all, it may be that militancy 204 DENNIS II ATHN AUGHT is only atavistic. Our modern suffra- gettes may be descendants of those old Roman matrons. In harmony with this growing femin- ist spirit is the demand for the single moral standard for men and for women. Mrs. Hathnaught is not only demanding the vote, but she is showing an impa- tience with the reckless deductions of sociological scamps and ecclesiastical windbags who are always holding inquis- itorial sessions over feminine morals. There should be some legal penalty to reach scoundrels who make wholesale charges, not backed by evidence, that girls in department stores eke out an ad- ditional income through secret prostitu- tion. Turn around is fair play, and it would be in line for women to challenge these critics by inquiring into their own moral standards which, as frequent newspaper exposures show, are often more or less mangy. There is some truth in the epigram that mankind may be divided into two classes — the guilty and the undetected. A militant branch of the undetected may be called the Plying Squadron of Virtue. The mission of this precious corps Is to push little Miss Foundout and her lover, Mr. Haha You Villain, into the ranks of the guilty. This done, they sing a pean, for the triumph of the righteous and the glory of the good. Anti-suffragists are fond of dilating on the home, yet the home as we know it, is a very modern institution. They go into DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 205 ecstacies over the so-called sweet wo- manhood of yesterday. Yet these poor souls were hardly more than sex manni- kins who had their lovers picked out for them by autocratic fathers and whose Ig- norance was such that their conversa- tion seldom went beyond the small scan- dals and the society flapdoodle of the boudoir. In that charming Scotch Com- edy, Moffat's, "Bunty Pulls the Strings," there is a fine representation of the old- fashioned religious home, but for my own part I would rather spend a week's end in jail than a Sabbath day with Tammas. Socialists claim to have suffered im- mensely from misrepresentation and prej- udice. The Papal authorities, they as- sert, have organized a band of lay Jesuits, the Knights of Columbus, to fight them on the ground that socialism is an im- moral movement that threatens the home and the sanctity of marriage. In Germany the movement has been combated by prosecution and imprison- ment, but it has covered the prison walls like ivy and has spread itself over the land. Any cut-and-dried Utopian programme for the righting of human wrongs is best fought by reason and frank discussion, and not by hatred and intolerance. It 13 the hardest thing in the world to make people see things justly and impartially. The best of us either condemn or con- done according to our prejudices or pred- ilections. We may illustrate our point by a triangle: 206 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT if / / \ // f \^ ^/ J \o */ s V ?/ a v> 'V \ 6>^se of= ^/usTtce- He who has prejudice be he Con- servative or Socialist, will always look along the line of condemnation. In like manner the man with predilection will excuse or condone. But he who looks down from the angle of impartiality can see at once the lines of condemnation and condonation as well as the sti'aight line of truth that leads to the Base or Justice. Socialism aims to establish the coop- erative Commonwealth, and its motto is "To each according to his deeds." It would level class distinctions, make the w'orld a great body of producing work- men, and by giving every man the full fruit of his labour, do away with the wage system which socialists term econ- omic slavery. Under this system the State would control the means of pro- duction, transportation, and distribution. In the view of the Socialist the work- DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 207 ingman is nothing more than a ticket of leave serf. Now we have to deal with Syndicalism and Sabotage, both French in their or- igin. Since the great strike in Lawrence and in 1913 with the strike in Paterson, N. J., under the Industrial Workers of the World, we have heard much of Syn- dicalism. In the last few years, thanks to the ever-growing interest in econom- ics, we have seen many volumes on the subject issue from the press. Socialism contends that it would eman- cipate labour by gaining control of the government; Syndicalism would achieve a like result by getting control of indus- tries through the medium of Unions. So- cialism finds its weapon in the ballot; the Syndicalist, in the general strike or so- called direct action. Sabotage and boy- cotting are instruments of the movement supplementary to the general strike. Discussing the new movement, the New York Evening Post quoted one of its leaders as follows: "Fellow-workers, you want an eight- hour day. Well, take it, and when you come back the next morning, tell the master you were on strike four hours yesterday. "You want to get possession of the in- struments of production? You are in possession already. All you have to do Is to declare you own the factory in which you work. If the master protests, lock him out. You say you don't get the full value of your toil? Get It, do 208 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT only as much work as you are paid for, and go slow the rest of the time. You say the machinery ruins your health? Ruin the machinery for a while. You say you are treated like dirt? Put some dirt into the product." This injury to ma- chinery and product constitutes Sabot- age. The word comes from sabot, French for shoe, and originated in a "pleasant" little custom of disgruntled workmen throwing their wooden shoes into ma- chinery and wrecking the finely adjusted mechanism. Socialism would substitute the State for the individual proprietor; Syndical- ism on the other hand aims at a decen- tralizing effect whereby the whole body of workers in various places, represent- ed on trade councils will control the in- dustries that supply the demands of so- ciety without the interference of a cen- tral government. In this way trade cen- tres would become communes. Syndical- ism does not divide the workers into sep- arate unions. It takes in all workers in- discriminately, and by making the cause of one the concern of all, aims to have the workers strike as one man. The Syn- dicalist thus regards himself as a true democrat. The old trade unionist with his exclusive trade organization, is look- ed upon as an aristocrat. The non-producer or, as the Syndical- ists call him, the parasite of society, would, it is asserted, automatically be- come non-existent. Thus we might see the spectacle of a duke exchanging his DENNIS HATHNAUOHT 209 coronet for a hod and the old English Squire dropping the golf stick for the shovel. Important recent works are "Syndical- ism and Labour," by Sir Arthur Clay; "Syndicalism and the General Strike," by Arthur D. Lewis; "American Syndical- ism — the Industrial Workers of the World," by John Graham Brooks; "The New Unionism," by Andre Tridon. Syndicalism is such a radical advance over ordinary Socialism that it may re- sult in many conservatives finally be- coming Socialists to fight this more ad- vanced and revolutionary development of economic thought. But Socialism is far from being the Ultima Thule of Government. Its great- est weakness is a tendency toward dog- matism. The revolutionary Socialist hates the Fabian and the Communist and Syn- dicalist hate the moderate Socialist. The form of organization, or tyranny of the group tends to minimize the object sought, just as in some religious bodies, the way you worship seems to count for more than what you worship and why you worship. Just as nature is governed by the power inherent in the atom, so must all true and lasting progress de- pend upon the improvement of the indi- vidual man — the race unit. Opponents of Socialism declare that the weakest point in the movement !s the supposed disinclination of man to labovir. With growing intelligence this ancient prejudice toward labour is dying 210 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT out. Labour is assuming a dignity which makes it a reproach to be an idler and last of all, as Fourier shows, labour may be made attractive. If this could be done, John Stuart Mill says, the principal dif- ficulty of Socialism would be overcome. Socialism is but a milestone in the progress of Dennis Hathnaught. What Is to come after it we know not, for it is not given to man to lift the veil of the future. Keep up your courage and trudge on. Your journey is unending. In Swe- denborg, Browning, and others of the thinking tribe, you will find thoughts that combat the idea of finality. Walt Whitman, the poet of Democracy, a man jocund with the zest of living, held to the belief that "it is provided in the es- sence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary." There is no place for the loafer in the scheme of that mysterious thing we call Life. The soul never dies nor does per- sonal identity die. Man cannot escape his Destiny and suicide does not end suf- fering. What you do Here counts for you There. You must face the issue and here or somewhere, man must do his work. This journey of ours had no be- ginning and it will never have an end. We pass from the nadir to the zenith only to find that what we thought the zenith is but the nadir of new heights. Courage, and trudge on — up, up, up, ever in pursuit of the Ultimate which beck- ens to us but never waits. CHAPTER XX. DENNIS INQUIRING INTO LAND TITLES. Rousseau, borrowing a thought from Pascal, declared the first man who en- closed a piece of land the real founder of society. All through history the great struggle has been between those that own land and those that are landless. If you possess nothing it is easy to con- vince yourself that you should have a share of your neighbour's property. Ana- lyze the arguments of many pseudo so- cialists who confound their covetousness with conviction, and you will find tbair basis in the fable of the two Irishmen, one of whom possessed two goats, while the other had none. One of the most radical proposals to settle the land question is that put forth by Henry George in his "Progress and Poverty" — a system which has becoma widely known under the familiar eco- nomic name of the "Single Tax." Mr. George would abolish all taxes save that on land. By exempting improve- ments and taxing land to its full value he would do away with speculation in land, and real estate brokers would not 211 212 ^ DENNIS HATUNAUGHT find it profitable, he contends, to hold unimproved land as they do at present, waiting- to take advantage of new pub- lic works or the enterprise of contiguous landowners, to enhance, without ex- pense to themselves, the value of land held for speculation. Under the present system, if an apart- ment house faces desii-able property — say the home of a wealthy man with Its park and gardens — the Hathnaughts in the apartments are Jikely, according to single taxers, to pay a far higher ren- tal than if the outlook were upon a fac- tory. The difference between the rent Hath- naught pays and what he would be charged were there a factory fronting him instead of the well-kept home of the millionaire, constitutes, in the view of single taxers, an unearned increment. In a humorous way the following story from Harper's Magazine illustrates the manner in which the "unearned incre- ment" opei'ates and is sometimes circum- vented: An old coloured woman came into a Washington real-estate office the other day and was recognized as a tenant of a small house that had become much enhanced in value by reason of a new union station in that neighbourhood. "Look here, auntie, we are going to raise your rent this month," the agent remarked briskly. " 'Deed, an' ah's glad to hear dat, sah," the old woman replied, ducking her head DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 213 politely. "Mighty glad, fo' sho', case ah des come in hyah terday ter tell yo' all dat ah couldn't raise hit dis month." In a certain measure Mr. George's sys- tem has been introduced into that great .experiment station of civilization and laboratory of economics — New Zealand, where it is no longer possible to alienate land. Lloyd George and his followers, In a modified form, are applying the prin- ciple to the land question in England. The physiocrats, a group of French economists of the eighteenth century, held views that were in many particulars like those of Mr. George, especially in regard to what they called the "Impot Unique," which resembled the single tax. It was the contention of the physiocrats that land was the only source of wealth. A surplus was produced through culti- vation and nature's free and generous help, and this surplus, the excess of the value of the product over its cost, the physiocrats called the "Produit Net." As land is the great source of wealth there is naturally competition for its use, and this brings the prospective tenant into negotiations with the landlord. In this way the tenant is forced to hand over to the landlord the greater part of the "Produit Net" under the name of rent. Frangois Quesnay (1694-1774), one of the leading physiocrats, noted three class- es — the farmer whose first hand devo- tion to agriculture produced the "Produit Net"; the landlord who waited until the harvest was gai'nered and then, without 214 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT the turn of a hair, collected most of the "Produit Net" in the name of rent; last- ly, the manufacturers and their like — the so-called "Sterile Class" — who even- tually got what was left. Quesnay, developing his argument from the conditions, which he held to be self- evident facts, contended that a tax on land, the "impot unique," was the only legitimate form of taxation. It was Ques- nay who invented the term "Political Economy," but later thinkers do not agree with his characterization of manu- facturers as a "Sterile Class," because they do not produce wealth, but simply alter its shape. The manufacturer adds utility to a thing which had not previous- ly possessed this attribute, and thus they add to human happiness by meeting hu- man wants — a work that can hardly be called sterile. Adam Smith, author of "The Wealth of Nations," the real founder of the sci- ence of Political Economy, pays a high tribute to the worth and value of the labours of the physiocrats. Some ap- proximation also to their theories and the theories of Mr. George will be found In Herbert Spencer's "Social Statics," In which it Is held that "equity does not permit property in land." "Supposing," he argues, "the entire habitable globe to be so enclosed, it follows that if the landowners have a valid right to its sur- face, all who are not landowners have no right at all to its surface. Hence, such can exist on the earth by sufferance DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 215 only. They are all trespassers. Save by the permission of the lords of the soil, they can have no room for the soles of their feet. Nay, should the others think fit to deny them a resting place, these landless men might equitably be expelled from the earth altogether." Spencer, although he changed his views in later life, very clearly foreshadows the principle of land nationalization which Mr. George advances in "Progress and Poverty" and other economic works. Since the fall of the feudal system the leasing of land to tenants has taken va- rious forms. The usual way is a direct rental, but in Italy and some other coun- tries we find the Metayer system, where- by the landowner takes his pay in a portion of the produce. In the United States this is called "taking a farm on shares." It is fully described by Faw- cett and other political economists. In Ulster, in the North of Ireland, there has long been a check on the avarice of land- lords, called the "tenant right," where- by the Hathnaught may get some return for his enterprise and may realize on his good will. In developing his land theory in "Prog- ress and Poverty," Henry George com- bats the principles set forth by Malthus in his "Essay on Population." This work appeared in 1798 and has been the sub- ject of world-wide controversy. Briefly Malthus, who foreshadowed the law of natural selection, held that the human race possesses the possibility of increas- 216 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT ing faster than the supply of subsistence; that while population might double in a quarter of a century, it was unlikely that the means of subsistence would do so. The Malthusian Jaws are three in num- ber: First — Population is limited by means of subsistence. Second — Population increases when the means of subsistence increase unless in- terrupted by checks. Third — These checks which hold popu- lation down to the level of subsistence are vice, misery and moral restraint. Darwin also takes note of the Mal- thusian propositions and shows the effect of natural selection and the- law of the survival of the fittest in modifying the laws of Malthus. Few persons are now alarmed by these propositions which grew out of wrongs and conditions that obtained in the days of Malthus, but which are now happily being corrected by freer trade and other intelligent legisla- tion and a more enlightened view on the part of the population as to man's place In nature. Men and women are not so prone nowa- days to bring into the world children damned from birth to lives of degrada- tion and misery. "Moral restraint" Is developing into the new science of eu- genics or race selection. CHAPTER XXI. DENNIS BECOMES A LITERARY HERO. While we find incidental references to labour in ancient books, it is only with- in the last century that Dennis Hath- naught has been considered of sufficient importance to have books written about him as the main theme. Macaulay makes a kind of apology in his "History of Eng- land" for his slight attention to the com- mon people, and sets down as the cause the scantiness of the materials of their history. "Literature during many ages," says Buckle (History of Givilizataon), "In- stead of benefiting society, injured it by increasing credulity, and thus stopping the progress of knowledge. Indeed, the aptitude for falsehood became so great that there was nothing men were un- willing to believe. Nothing came amiss to their greedy and credulous ears. His- tories of omens, prodigies, apparitions, strange portents, monstrous appearances in the heavens, the wildest and most in- coherent absurdities, were repeated from mouth to mouth, and copied from book to book, with as much care as if they 217 218 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT were the choicest treasures of human wisdom. "Instead of telling us those things which alone have any value, instead of ^ving us information respecting the progress of knowledge, and the way In which mankind has been affected by the diffusion of that knowledge, instead of these things, the vast majority of his- torians fill their works with the most trifling and miserable details: personal anecdotes of kings and courts; intermin- able relations of what was said by one minister, and what was thought by an- other, and, what is worse than all, long accounts of campaigns, battles, sieges, very interesting to those engaged in them, but to us utterly useless, because they neither furnish new truths, nor do they supply the means by which new truths may be discovered. "This is the real impediment which now stops our advance. It is this want of judgment, and this ignorance of what Is most worthy of selection, which de- prives us of materials that ought long since to have been accumulated, arranged, and stored up for future use. In other great branches of knowledge, observation has preceded discovery; first the facts have been registered, and then their laws have been found. But in the study of the history of man, the important facts have been neglected, and the unimportant ones preserved." All this is changing. Green wrote a DENNIS HATHN AUGHT 219 history of the English people rather than a history of England. In America J. B. McMaster has done a like service for the "People of the United States." Prom the press there is pouring out dally books innumerable touching upon labour and the social revolution. The writers sometimes use the poetical form, then again fiction, history, or the form of special treatise. The movement has In- vaded the stage, and some notable plays have been produced within the last few years, which touch upon the life and struggles of the Hathnaughts. Publishers' statements — particularly a striking one in the Atlantic Monthly by a member of the Macmillan firm — show that there is a lessening demand for old books, and a marvellous increase In the public taste for new fiction. But It Is a cheering note of the times to hear that on the other hand there is a great and growing public that calls for solid books on economic questions and even the most conservative of the publishers are now supplying these, many of them revolu- tionary in their character. The first mighty blow struck at foolish literature was that of Cervantes in "Don Quixote," which laughed the absurdities of the Age of Chivalry out of existence. Lord Morley of Blackburn (John Mor- ley), in a study of "Diderot and the En- cyclopaedists," points out the power wielded by these precursors of the French Revolution, by combining with the scien- tific idea the social idea. Old intellectual 220 DENNIS HATHNAUGTIT insurgents like Abelard, Bruno, and Va- nini, he says, had felt the iron hand of the church because, with all their phi- losophy and science, they lacked the social idea. The Encyclopaedists, combining- the scientific with the social idea, met the Church on new ground and with a new weapon. "Its leaders," Morley says, "surveyed the entire field with as much accuracy, and with as wide a range as their in- struments allowed; and they scattered over the world a set of ideas which at once entered into energetic rivalry with the ancient scheme of authority. The great symbol of this new comprehensive- ness in the insurrection was the En- cyclopaedia. . . . Broadly stated, the great moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abid- ing place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad in- stitutions. This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a now dispensation. Every social improvement since has been the outcome of that doctrine in one form or another." No summary of facts bearing upon the house of Hathnaught would be complete without reference to the important part played by the "Encyclopedic." Breath- ing as it did the broadest humanity and sympathy with the Hathnaughts and DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 221 human progress; subordinating the church to science and the service of man, it appeared at a time when the people were ripe for revolution. The old order was changing, and the "Encyclo- pedle" hurried the process of the change. It was projected by men who were im- patient of all restraint upon liberty, and its thirty-five volumes were completed between the years 1751 and 1780. With- in twenty-five years the spark thus ig- nited burst into the conflagration known as the French Revolution. We see the mob element in Katherine Pearson Woods novel, "Metzerott, Shoe- maker." This is a modern study of so- cialism with an American setting in an industrial center called "Micklegard." Karl Metzerott, the hero, will not stick to his last, but concerns himself with the social revolution as he sees it in his community. Free thinker in religion and socialist in political bent, he dreams of a day when America will be a vast co- operative commonwealth. With some others he establishes a co-operative busi- ness which meets with success. But there are warnings of an explosion in the discontent of the Hathnaughts, and when the breaking of a dam at the pri- vate fish pond of the ruling caste brings on a flood, there is only needed the death of a poor victim to bring out the mob spirit. Metzerott leads the Hathnaughts that are bearing down upon the home of Randolph, the town's wealthiest citi- zen, to wreak vengeance, when a bullet 222 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT ends the life of the shoemaker's son Louis, and the mob is turned into mourn- ers about the grief-crazed father. Class jealousy, which makes the Hath- naughts suspicious of any of their num- ber seen fraternizing with the caste above them, is shown in "Ihe Mutable Many," by Robert Barr (1896). The scene is London, and the theme the social revo- lution. During a strike, Sartwell, man- ager of the factory affected, will not deal with the strikers as a body, but he does meet Marsten, one of the men, and as individuals they review the clashing issues. Marsten, although he loves Edna Sart- well, the manager's daughter, is loyal to his class, and the fight continues, with the result that the strike is lost, and Marsten finds himself dismissed as work- man and lover. He is made secretary of the union, and tries to win Miss Sart- well, although he has a rival for her hand in Barney Hope, son of one of the mill owners. She refuses them both. There is a second strike at the works and Marsten has this so well under way that success is in sight, when Edna Sart- well calls at the union headquarters to plead with Marsten to let her father win and thus retain his ascendency at the works, offering him her hand as a re- ward. He will not listen to what he considers a dishonourable proposal, but the interview has sealed his fate, for the Hathnaughts jump to the conclusion that he is betraying them. He is so severely DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 223 treated in consequence that he has to ■underg-o attention at a hospital. Sart- ■well easily defeats Marsten's successor and what might have been a winning fight under the old secretary becomes rout under the new. But Marsten in the end wins the girl. Some years ago "The Breadwinners," a powerful study of the labour question, attracted wide attention, and there was much speculation concerning the iden- tity of the author. A member of the old firm of Harper's which published the book, not long ago revealed the author in the person of the late John Hay. In his lifetime Mr. Hay never acknowledged It, despite its wide circulation and fre- quent intimations that the novel was from his pen. In "The Breadwinners" is depicted the worst side of the labour question — the rascally, demagogic leader and the easily inflamed mob. Maud Matchin, daughter of a Western carpenter in business for himself, is loved by one of her father's workmen, Sam Sleeny, but she has taken a violent fancy to Alfred Farnham, for- merly an army oflBcer, and tells him so. Maud is fair to look upon, but en- vironment and lack of culture have put the vulgar taint upon her, and, of course, she does not appeal to Farnham, who has brought about the situation by showing an interest in the girl. Farnham really loves the beautiful Alice Belding. As the story develops, Farnham or- ganizes a volunteer band to protect prop- 224 DENNIS HATHNAUOHT erty during a great strike which brealis out, and in an attaclc upon his home by the rioters, Sleeny hits him with a ham- mer. Poor Sleeny If left to himself would not be a bad sort of fellow, but he is under the influence of Offitt, an un- scrupulous and dishonest labour leader, and had grown jealous of Farnham, whom he mistakes for a rival. Maud feels that Farnham should be punished for his treatment of her, and Offitt, with a view to winning her for himself, gets a hammer from Sleeny, and entering Farnham's house, assaults and robs him. Sleeny is arrested for the crime after Offitt has cast suspicion upon him. Offitt tries to induce Maud to fly with him, but she will have none of him, and learning the truth from his admis- sions, she makes it known. Sleeny would have been cleared of the charge, but be- fore his innocence is established he breaks jail, and meeting Offitt at Maud's house, kills him. Tried for this murder, he is acquitted, as it is held he must have been insane at the time. Alice Belding and her mother nursed Farnham after Offitt's murderous attack on him, and Alice, who had previously refused him, finds that in reality she cares for him a great deal. In noticing books deahng with the Hathnaughts we should not overlook those powerful stories in the "Epic of the Wheat," P"'rank Norris's "The Octo- pus" and "The Pit." The first deals with wheat In the growing; "The Pit" deals DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 225 with the Chicago wheat pit. A third novel to complete a trilogy was to have been called "The Wolf," and was to have dealt with a famine in Europe, but this was not completed when the author died. Norris portrays with startling vividness the manner in which railroads and cor- porations rob the farmer and control legislation. A notable recent novel, "The Inside of the Cup," by Winston Churchill, is a worth-while study of social conditions, especially of the use some unscrupulous wealthy men make of the church as a cloak for their hypocrisy. CHAPTER XXII. HATHNAUGHT VERSUS HAYE-AND- HOLD. Romance and tales of chivalry have thrown a glamour about the old nobility, yet in the main the Lords of Have-and- Hold were barbarous, illiterate and un- couth. Their principal occupations were rioting, war, wholesale robbery, oppres- sion of the Hathnaughts, feastings, and tournaments. They seldom bathed and their table manners were often worse than those of a 'longshoreman. Charle- magne with all his authority failed when he tried to introduce schools, and for ages, all over Europe, learning was con- sidered unworthy of the warrior caste and was contemptuously referred to as the province of clerks and clerics. In- deed, it was the illiteracy of the nobility that gave the church such an enormous ascendency over the feudal lords of the Middle Ages. This illiteracy and the consequences growing out of it is strikingly illustrated by Bulwer Lytton in "The Last of the Barons" in describing the struggle of Adam Warner, whose experiments with steam and the invention of an engine, led 226 DENNIS H AT HN AUGHT 227 to suspicions that perhaps the Devil had a hand in it — a deduction that seemed almost confirmed when the engine blew up because it lacked a safety valve. Tytler (History of Scotland) is author- ity for the statement that from the ac- cession of Alexander III to the death of David (1370) it would be impossible to instance a single case of a Scottish baron possessing the power to sign his name. There is authority for the belief that this condition obtained in many cases, even as late as the closing half of the sixteenth century. Arthur Young, whose valuable obser- vations on Prance and French life and institutions have been made use of in the chapter dealing with the French Rev- olution, found such an amazing degree of ignorance in eighteenth century France that he easily persuaded a Frenchman that England possessed neither trees nor rivers. Trade, industry, the useful arts, and the well-ordered life were despised in "the good old days," and war, outrage, pillage, and gross intemperance in eating and drinking were regarded as the only fit occupations of a gentleman. Indeed, al- though manners have softened, labour and trade are still held in contempt, and when a member of the nobility actually does go to work. It causes a ripple of excitement and long cabled accounts of the phenome- non to the foreign press give the incident international note. As late as the eighteenth century (see 228 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Hazlitt's "Old Cookery Books") the cus- tom of using the fork at table — started In Italy in the fourteenth century — was still a novelty in England, and gentlemen travelling in Great Britain (see Inter- national Encyclopedia) who had acquired the habit on the Continent always car- ried a fork in a case, for the inns did not supply them. Hazlitt also inclines to give credence to the report that when Queen Elizabeth was told of the defeat of the Armada she was keeping "secret house" and enjoying an unconventional session with a roast goose. Keeping "se- cret house" was the way they charac- terized in those days a return to the rude manners of the "good old times" before table etiquette began to make inroads in England. If Mrs. Trollope had been more mindful of her own people's recent emergence from barbarism, she might have been kinder to the Yankees of tho early nineteenth century whose habits she criticised so frankly in "Domestic Man- ners of the Americans." It is not so many generations ago that ancestors of some of our "best" Ameri- can families used to rush in at the din- ner hour with coat off and suspenders down and tackle their tripe and corn cakes with all the wild abandon of primi- tive man. Mediaeval Lords of Have-and-Hold sometimes combined patronage of the Arts with tho greatest cruelties of un- restrained despotism. Selwyn Brinton. author of "Renaissance In Italian Art," DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 229 declares that when the Communes and Republics of Italy began to get exhaust- ed and finally to disappear, there sprang up in their place everywhere, the great princely houses, the Medici of Florence, the Visconti and the Sforza at Milan, the Este at Ferrara, the Bentivogli at Bo- logna, the Montefeltri at Urbino, the Baglioni at Perugia, the Malatesta at Ri- mini, and Cesena and the Gonzaghi at Mantua — all living in castles, lording it over the adjacent territory, and forever in the shadow of death from poison or murder, "In the strange and frightful isolation in which the Italian despot often lived," says Brinton, "ever plotting himself to keep his insecure throne, ever watchlnj? against plots within the city and without, this brilliant society of dependents (schol- ars, poets, painters) became his solace and his highest pleasure. Traverse that wonderful palace of the house of Este — intact, surrounded by its moat, dominat- ing with its insolent pride the old city of Ferrara. Into the upper galleries and banquet halls the sunlight pours. We seem to hear the musical laughter, the rustle of the rich old cinque-cento cos- tumes; the walls are hung with paintings by Dosso Dossi or Titian — naked wres- tlers, figures running, and the radiant deities of the old re-awakened mythology. "And below, beneath even the moat, lies the other side of the picture: the hor- rible dungeons, dark, noisome, shadowy, where the political conspirator, the incon- 230 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT venient relative, the too outspoken citi- zen, the suspected wife, were thrust, and — soon forgotten." In the "Life and Letters of Elizabeth, Last Duchess of Gordon," by the Rev. A. Moody Stuart, will be found the following incident abridged from Sir Walter Scott: "Two hundred years ago, Gordon Castle, then called the Bog of Gicht, presented a very different scene. The Parquharsons of Deeside having slain a Gordon of note, the Marquis of Huntly, along with the Laird of Grant, prepared to take a bloody vengeance for his death. That none of the guilty tribe might escape, Grant oc- cupied the upper end of the vale of Dee with his clan while the Gordons ascend- ed the river from beneath, each party killing, burning, and destroying without mercy all they found before them. The men and women of the race were nearly all slain; and when the day was done, Huntly found himself encumbered with about two hundred orphan children. "About a year after the foray, the Laird of Grant chanced to dine at the Marquis's castle, and was of course en- tertained with magnificence. After din- ner Huntly conducted Grant to a balcony which overlooked the kitchen, where he saw the remains of the abundant feast of the numerous household flung at random into a large trough. The master cook gave a signal with his silver whistle, on which a hatch like that of a dog kennel was raised, and there rushed into the kitchen, shrieking, shouting, yelling, a DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 231 huge mob of children, half-naked and to- tally wild, who threw themselves on the contents of the trough, and fought, strug- gled, and clamored for the largest share. "Grant was a man of humanity, and asked, 'In the name of Heaven, who are these?' 'They are the children of those Farquharsons whom we slew last year on Deeside,' answered Huntly. "The Laird felt more shocked than it would have been prudent or polite to ex- press. 'My Lord,' he said, 'my sword helped to make these poor children or- phans, and it is not fair that your lord- ship should be burdened with all the ex- pense of maintaining them. You have supported them for a year and a day, al- low me now to take them to Castle Grant, and keep them for the same time at my cost.' "Such was the savage sport of the lord of Gordon Castle two hundred years ago; and when his lady looked over that balcony, it was only to enjoy the spec- tacle, and not to rescue any of the wretched children from their revolting degradation." Like father, like son ; children of Lords of Have-and-Hold were equally unmind- ful of the feelings of the common people. In Eugene Sue's "The Iron Trevet," one of "The Mysteries of the People" series, he tells of a seignior's son who lamented that he had never seen a serf drowned. In the Clancarty there is handed down a tradition that a daughter of a Mac- Carthy More wept because she had never 232 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT seen a peasant hanged. To please her, her father ordered a man brought in from the fields and his daughter's wish was soon satisfied. The people as the demagogues love to call the mass of the Hathnaughts are easily gulled even in our day, and they permitted this injustic* to go on in ex- change for sops occasionally thrown to them. Etienne De La Boetie (1530-1563) in a work called "Discourse on Voluntary Slavery," but also known as "Contre- Un" (Against One), which Warner's Li- brary of the World's Best Literature de- scribes as a rather flat attack on mon- archy, but which nevertheless is filled with sound and shrewd observation, pays his respects to "the people." In common with many historians, De La Boetie notes how easily the people are made to forget their liberties and the outrages against them when they are lured by theatrical performances, games, spectacles, gladia- torial combats, and the exhibiting of strange beasts, as was the usual method among Roman tyrants to make the pop\a- lace willing instruments of oppression. The tyrants used even to feast the Ro- man mob, and this appeal to appetite was so effective, says Boetie, that the "clever- est of them all would not have dropped his bowl of soup to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato." That feudal system of government in New York city known as Tammany Hall ).s founded on the same principle. Every DENNIS HATHNAUGHT 233 year the district leaders give outings, and the allegiance of the enfranchised fools of the city is purchased for a plate of chowder. Heinrich Heine (1799-1856), a very good friend of human liberty, likewise had contempt for the loafer proletariat. "Your poor Monarch"" (the people), he says, "is not lovely; on the contrary, he is very ugly. But his ugliness is the re- sult of dirt, and will vanish as soon as we erect public bathhouses where his Majesty, the People, can bathe gratis. A bit of soap will not prove amiss, and we shall then behold a smart looking People, a People indeed of the first water. . . . As soon as his High Mightiness has been properly fed, and has sated his appetite, he will smile on us with gracious conde- scension, just as the other monarchs do. . . . He bestows his affection and his confidence on those who shout the jargon of his own passions; while he reserves his hatred for the brave man who en- deavours to reason and exalt him. . . . Give the People the choice between the most righteous of the righteous and the most wretched highway robber, and rest assured its cry will be, 'Give us Barab- bas. Long live Barabbas!' "The secret of this perversion is igno- rance. This national evil we must en- deavour to allay by means of public schools, where education, together with bread and butter and such other food as may be required, will be supplied free of expense." 234 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Therein lies the whole secret of true progress — Education. Man's greatest crime, often committed in the name of the Most High, has been the degradation of God's image. Slavery, serfdom, the Indian Caste system, all handmaids of Ignorance, have been designed to hold man down to the brute level, but Educa- tion, the training and disciplining of his thinking powers, will put him in touch with the Infinite. Knowledge of hygiene and sanitation will yet banish the slums and the White Plague, and Domestic Science with its flreless cookers, vacuum cleaners, dish and clothes washing machines is already emancipating woman from drudgery. A growing impatience with the jack- assery of armaments is bringing about a marked decline in the war spirit, and the softening of human passions has banished torture from judicial inquiries and is bringing about prison reform and a loud call for the abolition of capital punishment which is always swift for the poor and slow to reach the powerful. Race and religious prejudices are dying out, and snobbery is coming to be regard- ed as a fair target for ridicule. There is graft In high places, but all this will be corrected by the independent voter when the fetish of partisan government and al- legiance Is destroyed. We are doing away with poorhouses and robbing old age of its terrors through l)rnslons and Insurance, and the day is not far distant when representative gov- DENNIS HATHNAVGHT 235 ernment will be genuinely what it implies. Coeval, too, with the emancipation of man and woman, is coming- the emanci- pation of the child and a growing sense that it possesses certain little rights that no one has any right to dispute and which many States now recognize. Through playgrounds, Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, and other organizations, childhood is not only being made tolerable, but zestful and Joyous. We are getting down to fundamentals — the root of things. We are no longer con- tent to make misery comfortable. Hith- erto by means of charity, we have been putting vaseline on a cancer. Now we would uproot the cancer — do away with poverty and degradation altogether, and In the place of a purposeless proletariat, substitute a clean, healthy, self-reliant, and ambitious working class. Out of the ages of Servitude Is coming the Age of Service. Unmindful of agitator or dema- gogue, the better elements of Capital and Labour are coming together as brothers and will yet solve the problem of work and wages. Through struggle we have gained se- curity of life against Whim. It now re- mains for us to establish the principle of Responsibility — the right of man to cer- tainty of employment and full and equi- table recompense for it, without injustice to any man or confiscation of his prop- erty. Up to the present time the great gov- erning force of the world has been Whim 236 DENNIS 11 AT HN AUGHT — "God and my right," said the strong man with his heel on the neck of the low- ly. Man is now becoming insistent that Whim shall be replaced by Responsibility — that the rights of the race as a whole shall count for more than the desires of any individual, even to the extent of pull- ing down his fences and levelling his an- cestral castles if the public weal demands it, just as in a former age the law upheld the Whim of a Duchess of Sutherland who sought to improve the landscape by evicting hundreds of poor Scottish croft- ers and driving them into starvation and death. Progress, that strange, inexplicable and irresistible force, working relentlessly, in- cessantly, through a Law of Inevitability, is whirling Man onward to his Destiny. Even the Music of the Spheres seems to take on something of the chant of the Marseillaise. After centuries of thraldom to superstition and ignorance, man is be- ginning to understand real freedom. THE END. WITNESSES SUMMONED TO TESTIFY Obedient to the promptings of inherited behefs and prejudices, often hideous and cruel, we are dead men's slaves. Tra- dition keeps us in grooves cut long ago for our ancestors. In studying the his- tory of the common people, one cannot avoid the conclusion that had there never been widespread ignorance and superstition, there never would have been any tyranny or political injustice; and that the emancipation of man and the happiness of the race can only be achieved through education and the su- premacy of the educated. I once overheard a pompous and ig- norant city official, looking over a pop- ular, illustrated account of paleontology in a Sunday newspaper, ask a better mentally equipped associate to define the difference between the dinosaurus and the ichthyosaurus. The man interrogated told him that the difference was almost imperceptible — the only distinction being that the dinosaurus had a binomial equa- tion on its logarithm. As this was said in all earnestness, tne explanation was accepted. That city of- ficial was a true descendant of the fellow who proposed to breed gondolas. What can be expected in the way of good gov- 237 238 DENNIS HATHN AUGHT eminent from gentlemen like that? While we have ignorant statesmen and an ig- norant citizenship, all the socialism that has ever been preached will not remedy conditions. Until mankind learns to appreciate the useful, and recognizes the ennobling effect of work, we will have the spectacle of the gilded youth wasting his substance on chorus girls, and sturdy loafers supported by the washtub energy of wives, mothers, and sisters. Against such, rich and poor, the vagrancy laws should be enforced. In this account of the struggle between Dennis Hathnaught and the Lords of Have-and-Hold, it has been necessary to summon many witnesses. Among those that have testified may be cited the following: Lubbock's "PreUistoric Times" and "Origin of Civilizatiun" ; Dnimmond's "Ascent of 5Ian" ; Morgan's "Ancient Society" ; Beade's "Martyr- dom of Man"; Sir Henry Sumner Maine's Works; Tylor's "Early History of Mankind" and "Primi- tive Culture"; Cbarles Darwin's Works; Fiquier's "Primitive Man" ; Aescbylus' "Prometheus Bound" ; Hesiod's "Works and Days" ; Herodo- tus' History; Tlie Bible; Livy's "History of Komo" ; Plutarch's Lives; Theognis , Aristotle's "Politics"; Aristophanes' Comedies; Plato's "Re- public"; Xeuopihoiu's "Economics"; International Encyclopedia; Flaubert's "Salammbo" ; Fowler's "Social Life at Home in the Age of Cicero"; Mot- ley's "Itise of the Dutch Uepublic" ; Webster's Dictionary. Buckle's "History of Civilization"; Charles Eann Kennedy's "Servant in the House" ; Thuycldidos' "History of the Peloponnesian War" ; Keightley's "History of Greece" ; Thirlwall's "History n) " ; nonnemere's "Hlstolre des Pay- Bans" ; I'reeiiian's "Ilislory of the Norman Con- quest of England"; i;reeu's "lllstoiy of llie )Cng- DENNIS HATHNAVGHT 239 lish People"; Scott's "Ivanhoe" ; Taine's "History of English Literature" ; Sanderson's "History of the World"; Hackwood's "The Good Old Times"; Hume's "History of England"; Knowles' "William Tell"; Guizot's •■liistcry of Civilization in Europe"; Menzel's "His- tory of Germany"; Chaucer; Wicklif's Bible; Froude's "History of England" ; Harrison's "De- scription of England" ; Abbott's "Common People of Ancient Rome"; Smith's "English Guilds"; JIacaulay's "History of England" ; General Stew- art's "Sketches of the Highlanders." Rousseau's "Political Economy"; Fielding's "Tom Jones"; Linton's "George Eliot" in "Wo- men Novelists of the Reign of Victoria" ; Toyn- bee's "Industrial Revolution" ; Reade's "Put Yourself in His Place" ; Lockhart's "Life of Na- poleon Buonaparte" ; Gibbins' "Industrial History of England"; French Revolution — Taine, De- TocQueville, Thiers, Blanc, Van Laun, Lamartine, Rocquain, Arthur Young, Mignet, Donlol, Miche- let, Alison, Sybel, Hausser, Kabaut, Buchez, Ker- verseau and Clavelin, Ternaux, Madame de iStael, Janet, Burke, Quinet, Berriat, Mackintosh, Cro- ker, Dickens, Rousseau, Voltaire, Carlyle; Isham's "The Mud Cabin"; London Chronicle; Alison's "History of Europe"; Dean Swift; Lytton's "My Novel" ; McCarthy's "History of Our Own Times" ; Westminster Gazette; G. K. Chesterton; Man- chester Guardian ; A. St. John Adcock ; English Government Reports and Blue Books; Sir Francis Gallon, the eugenist; McCarthy's Anti-Clerical Works on Ireland; Lover's "Rory O'More" ; Lecky's "Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland" ; Wendell Phillips' oration on 0''Connell ; Winston Churchill's Home Rule "Speech at Belfast ; Ram- baud's "History of Russia" ; Gogol's "Dead Souls"; Turgenief's "Mumu" ; Voltaire's "Charles XII." New York Sun; Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope"; Cobden's "Political Writings"; Hildreth's "History of the United States"; Hawthorne's "iScarlet Letter"; Mc'Master's "History of the People of the United States" ; Tarbell's "History of the iStandard Oil Company"; Jeremy Bentham ; George Frisbie Hoar; Cairnes' "The Slave Pow- er" ; Wallon's "History of Slavery" ; Sienkie- wicz's "Quo Vadis" ; De Tocqueville's "Democ- racy in America"; Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi"; The British Constitution; Brinton's "Renaissance in Italian Art" ; Stuart's "Life of the Duchess of Gordon" ; Boetie's "Voluntary Slavery" (Against One); Heinrich Heine; Rogers' "Six Centuries of Work and Wages" ; Webb's "History of Trade Unionism"; Brentano's "Guilds and Trade Unions" : Fawcett's "Political Econo- my" ; David Livingstone; Lasalle ; Herberman's "Business Life in Ancient Rome" ; Rousseau's "Social Contract" ; Esquiros' "Evangel of the People" : Karl Marx's "Capital" ; Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance" ; Spielhagen's "Hammer and Anvil"; Rebel's "Woman and Labour"; Mof- fat's "Bunty Pulls the Strings"*, The Knights of 240 DENNIS HATHNAUGHT Columbus ; Industrial Workers of the World ; New York Evening Post; H. C. Lea's "History of the Inquisition" ; Wiseman's "Fabiola." Clay's "Syndicalism and Labour"; Lewis' "Syn- dicalism and the General Strike"; Brooks' "Amer- ican Syndicalism" ; Tridon's "New Unionism" ; Swedenborg; Browning; Walt Whitman; Gleorge's "Progress and Poverty"; Harper's Magazine; Quesnay and the Physiocrats; Adam Smith; Her- bert Spencer; JIalthus on "Population"; Morley's "Diderot and the Encyclopedists" ; Woods' "Met- zerott, Shoemaker"; Barr's "The Mutable ilany" ; Ditehfield's "Old English Squire"; Hay's "The Breadwinners" ; Norris' "The Octopus" and "The Pit"; Churchill's "The Inside of the Cup"; Lytton's "Last of the Barons"; Tytler's "History of Scotland"; Hazlitt's "Old Cookery Books"; Mrs. TroUope's "Domestic Manners of the Amer- icans"; Davitt's "Within the Pale"; Crete's "History of Greece"; Ferguson's "Greek Im- perialism." THE SERIO-COMIC PROFESSION By L. J. i>XMA LOS ANG^iLES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. ^^^^ ^^ 19511 FonnL9 — 15m-10,'48(B10a9)444 jm iJacCn rthy- 4841 Rise of Den.nis M12r H^thnaurh-fa, UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 902 212 o ^. .t.KS:- HD 4841 M12r Mliyill«MIMIW»l»l«ll»m«IWIWIMIMl«illlllll M I M IIWI«lltlMIM»W«MII»Mllllllllllll l ll IJ I .1.-., \j.\: ! 1 i ! ' ' • . . \ < ' .ACJES /\S SI^T DOWN IK THE CREXl 'F iRLD ..