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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays, by
+Ambrose Bierce
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays
+       1909
+
+Author: Ambrose Bierce
+
+Editor: S.O. Howes
+
+Release Date: May 2, 2008 [EBook #25304]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHADOW ON THE DIAL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL AND OTHER ESSAYS
+
+By Ambrose Bierce
+
+Edited by S. O. HOWES
+
+Copyright 1909
+
+
+
+
+A NOTE BY THE AUTHOR
+
+IT WAS expected that this book would be included in my "Collected
+Works" now in course of publication, but unforeseen delay in the date of
+publication has made this impossible. The selection of its contents was
+not made by me, but the choice has my approval and the publication my
+authority.
+
+AMBROSE BIERCE.
+
+Washington, D. C. March 14. 1909.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+THE note of prophecy! It sounds sharp and clear in many a vibrant line,
+in many a sonorous sentence of the essays herein collected for the
+first time. Written for various Californian journals and periodicals
+and extending over a period of more than a quarter of a century, these
+opinions and reflections express the refined judgment of one who has
+seen, not as through a glass darkly, the trend of events. And having
+seen the portentous effigy that we are making of the Liberty our fathers
+created, he has written of it in English that is the despair of those
+who, thinking less clearly, escape not the pitfalls of diffuseness and
+obscurity. For Mr. Bierce, as did Flaubert, holds that the right word is
+necessary for the conveyance of the right thought and his sense of word
+values rarely betrays him into error. But with an odd--I might almost
+say perverse--indifference to his own reputation, he has allowed
+these writings to lie fallow in the old files of papers, while others,
+possessing the knack of publicity, years later tilled the soil with
+some degree of success. President Hadley, of Yale University, before
+the Candlelight Club of Denver, January 8, 1900, advanced, as novel and
+original, ostracism as an effective punishment of social highwaymen.
+This address attracted widespread attention, and though Professor
+Hadley's remedy has not been generally adopted it is regarded as his
+own. Mr. Bierce wrote in "The Examiner," January 20, 1895, as follows:
+"We are plundered because we have no particular aversion to plunderers."
+
+The 'predatory rich' (to use Mr. Stead's felicitous term) put their
+hands into our pockets because they know that, virtually, none of us
+will refuse to take their hands in our own afterwards, in friendly
+salutation. If notorious rascality entailed social outlawry the only
+rascals would be those properly--and proudly--belonging to the 'criminal
+class.'
+
+Again, Edwin Markham has attracted to himself no little attention by
+advocating the application of the Golden Rule in temporal affairs as a
+cure for evils arising from industrial discontent In this he, too, has
+been anticipated. Mr. Bierce, writing in "The Examiner," March 25, 1894,
+said: "When a people would avert want and strife, or having them,
+would restore plenty and peace, this noble commandment offers the only
+means--all other plans for safety and relief are as vain as dreams, and
+as empty as the crooning of fools. And, behold, here it is: 'All things
+whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.'"
+
+Rev. Charles M. Sheldon created a nine days' wonder, or rather a seven,
+by conducting for a week a newspaper as he conceived Christ would have
+done. Some years previously, June 28, 1896, to be exact, the author
+of these essays wrote: "That is my ultimate and determining test of
+right--'What, under the circumstances, would Christ have done?'--the
+Christ of the New Testament, not the Christ of the commentators,
+theologians, priests and parsons."
+
+I am sure that Mr. Bierce does not begrudge any of these gentlemen the
+acclaim they have received by enunciating his ideas, and I mention the
+instances here merely to forestall the filing of any other claim to
+priority.
+
+The essays cover a wide range of subjects, embracing among other
+things government, dreams, writers of dialect, and dogs, and always the
+author's point of view is fresh, original and non-Philistine. Whether
+one cares to agree with him or not, one will find vast entertainment in
+his wit that illuminates with lightning flashes all he touches. Other
+qualities I forbear allusion to, having already encroached too much upon
+the time of the reader.
+
+S. O. HOWES.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THERE is a deal of confusion and uncertainty in the use of the words
+"Socialist," "Anarchist," and "Nihilist." Even the '1st himself commonly
+knows with as little accuracy what he is as the rest of us know why he
+is. The Socialist believes that most human affairs should be regulated
+and managed by the State--the Government--that is to say, the majority.
+Our own system has many Socialistic features and the trend of republican
+government is all that way. The Anarchist is the kind of lunatic who
+believes that all crime is the effect of laws forbidding it--as the pig
+that breaks into the kitchen garden is created by the dog that chews its
+ear! The Anarchist favors abolition of all law and frequently belongs to
+an organization that secures his allegiance by solemn oaths and dreadful
+penalties. "Nihilism" is a name given by Turgenieff to the general body
+of Russian discontent which finds expression in antagonizing authority
+and killing authorities. Constructive politics would seem, as yet, to
+be a cut above the Nihilist's intelligence; he is essentially a
+destructionary. He is so diligently engaged in unweeding the soil that
+he has not given a thought to what he will grow there. Nihilism may
+be described as a policy of assassination tempered by reflections upon
+Siberia. American sympathy with it is the offspring of an unholy union
+between the tongue of a liar and the ear of a dupe.
+
+Upon examination it will be seen that political dissent, when it takes
+any form more coherent than the mere brute dissatisfaction of a mind
+that does not know what it wants to want, finds expression in one of but
+two ways--in Socialism or in Anarchism. Whatever methods one may think
+will best substitute for a system gradually evolved from our needs and
+our natures a system existing only in the minds of dreamers, one is
+bound to choose between these two dreams. Yet such is the intellectual
+delinquency of many who most strenuously denounce the system that we
+have that we not infrequently find the same man advocating in one
+breath, Socialism, in the next, Anarchism. Indeed, few of these sons of
+darkness know that even as coherent dreams the two are incompatible.
+With Anarchy triumphant the Socialist would be a thousand years further
+from realization of his hope than he is today. Set up Socialism on a
+Monday and on Tuesday the country would be _en fete_, gaily hunting down
+Anarchists. There would be little difficulty in trailing them, for they
+have not so much sense as a deer, which, running down the wind, sends
+its tell-tale fragrance on before.
+
+Socialism and Anarchism are the two extremes of political thought; they
+are parts of the same dung, in the sense that the terminal points of a
+road are parts of the same road. Between them, about midway, lies
+the system that we have the happiness to endure. It is a "blend" of
+Socialism and Anarchism in about equal parts: all that is not one is the
+other. Everything serving the common interest, or looking to the welfare
+of the whole people, is socialistic in the strictest sense of the word
+as understood by the Socialist Whatever tends to private advantage or
+advances an individual or class interest at the expense of a public
+one, is anarchistic. Cooperation is Socialism; competition is Anarchism.
+Competition carried to its logical conclusion (which only cooperation
+prevents or can prevent) would leave no law in force no property
+possible no life secure.
+
+Of course the words "cooperation" and "competition" are not here used in
+a merely industrial and commercial sense; they are intended to cover
+the whole field of human activity. Two voices singing a duet--that is
+cooperation--Socialism. Two voices singing each a different tune and
+trying to drown each other--that is competition--Anarchism: each is a
+law unto itself--that is to say, it is lawless. Everything that ought
+to be done the Socialist hopes to do by associated endeavor, as an army
+wins battles; Anarchism is socialistic in its means only: by cooperation
+it tries to render cooperation impossible--combines to kill combination.
+Its method says to its purpose: "Thou fool!"
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Everything foretells the doom of authority. The killing of kings is
+no new industry; it is as ancient as the race. Always and everywhere
+persons in high place have been the assassin's prey. We have ourselves
+lost three Presidents by murder, and will doubtless lose many another
+before the book of American history is closed. If anything is new in
+this activity of the regicide it is found in the choice of victims. The
+contemporary "avenger" slays, not the merely great, but the good and
+the inoffensive--an American President who had struck the chains from
+millions of slaves; a Russian Czar who against the will and work of his
+own powerful nobles had freed their serfs; a French President from whom
+the French people had received nothing but good; a powerless Austrian
+Empress, whose weight of sorrows touched the world to tears; a blameless
+Italian King beloved of his people; such is a part of the recent record
+of the regicide whose every entry is a tale of infamy unrelieved by one
+circumstance of justice, decency or good intention.
+
+And the great Brazilian liberator died in exile.
+
+This recent uniformity of malevolence in the choice of victims is not
+without significance. It points unmistakably to two facts: first, that
+the selections are made, not by the assassins themselves, but by some
+central control inaccessible to individual preference and unaffected
+by the fortunes of its instruments; second, that there is a constant
+purpose to manifest an antagonism, not to any individual ruler, but to
+rulers; not to any system of government, but to Government. It is a war,
+not upon those in authority, but upon Authority. The issue is defined,
+the alignment made, the battle set: Chaos against Order, Anarchy against
+Law.
+
+M. Vaillant, the French gentleman who lacked a "good opinion of the
+law," but was singularly rich in the faith that by means of gunpowder
+and flying nails humanity could be brought into a nearer relation with
+reason, righteousness and the will of God, is said to have been nearly
+devoid of a nose. Of this affliction M. Vaillant made but slight
+account, as was natural, seeing that but for a brief season did he need
+even so much of nose as remained to him. Yet before its effacement by
+premature disruption of his own petard it must have had a certain value
+to him--he would not wantonly have renounced it; and had he foreseen its
+extinction by the bomb the iron views of that controversial device would
+probably have been denied expression. Albeit (so say the scientists)
+doomed to eventual elimination from the scheme of being, and to the
+Anarchist even now something of an accusing conscience, the nose is
+indubitably an excellent thing in man.
+
+This brings us to consideration of the human nose as a measure of
+human happiness--not the size of it, but its numbers; its frequent or
+infrequent occurrence upon the human face. We have grown so accustomed
+to the presence of this feature that we take it as a matter of course;
+its absence is one of the most notable phenomena of our observation--"an
+occasion long to be remembered," as the society reporter hath it
+Yet "abundant testimony showeth" that but two or three centuries ago
+noseless men and women were so common all over Europe as to provoke
+but little comment when seen and (in their disagreeable way) heard
+They abounded in all the various walks of life: there were honored
+burgomasters without noses, wealthy merchants, great scholars, artists,
+teachers. Amongst the humbler classes nasal destitution was almost as
+frequent as pecuniary--in the humblest of all the most common of all.
+Writing in the thirteenth century, Salsius mentions the retainers and
+servants of certain Suabian noblemen as having hardly a whole ear among
+them--for until a comparatively recent period man's tenure of his ears
+was even more precarious than that of his nose. In 1436, when a Bavarian
+woman, Agnes Bemaurian, wife of Duke Albert the Pious, was dropped off
+the bridge at Prague, she persisted in rising to the surface and trying
+to escape; so the executioner gave himself the trouble to put a long
+pole into her hair and hold her under. A contemporary account of the
+matter hints that her disorderly behavior at so solemn a moment was due
+to the pain caused by removal of her nose; but as her execution was by
+order of her own father it seems more probable that "the extreme penalty
+of the law" was not imposed. Without a doubt, though, possession of a
+nose was an uncommon (and rather barren) distinction in those days among
+"persons designated to assist the executioner," as the condemned were
+civilly called. Nor, as already said, was it any too common among
+persons not as yet consecrated to that service: "Few," says Salsius,
+"have two noses, and many have none."
+
+Man's firmer grasp upon his nose in this our day and generation is
+not altogether due to invention of the handkerchief. The genesis and
+development of his right to his own nose have been accompanied with a
+corresponding advance in the possessory rights all along the line of
+his belongings--his ears, his fingers and toes, his skin, his bones, his
+wife and her young, his clothes and his labor--everything that is (and
+that once was not) his. In Europe and America today these things can
+not be taken away from even the humblest and poorest without somebody
+wanting to "know the reason why." In every decade the nation that is
+most powerful upon the seas incurs voluntarily a vast expense of blood
+and treasure in suppressing a slave trade which in no way is injurious
+to her interests, nor to the interests of any but the slaves.
+
+So "Freedom broadens slowly down," and today even the lowliest incapable
+of all Nature's aborted has a nose that he dares to call his own and
+bite off at his own sweet will. Unfortunately, with an unthinkable
+fatuity we permit him to be told that but for the very agencies that
+have put him in possession he could successfully assert a God-given and
+world-old right to the noses of others. At present the honest fellow is
+mainly engaged in refreshing himself upon his own nose, consuming that
+comestible with avidity and precision; but the Vaillants, Ravechols,
+Mosts and Willeys are pointing his appetite to other snouts than his,
+and inspiring him with rhinophagic ambition. Meantime the rest of us are
+using those imperiled organs to snore with.
+
+'Tis a fine, resonant and melodious snore, but it is not going to last:
+there is to be a rude awakening. We shall one day get our eyes open to
+the fact that scoundrels like Vaillant are neither few nor distant.
+We shall learn that our blind dependence upon the magic of words is a
+fatuous error; that the fortuitous arrangement of consonants and vowels
+which we worship as Liberty is of slight efficacy in disarming the
+lunatic brandishing a bomb. Liberty, indeed! The murderous wretch loves
+it a deal better than we, and wants more of it. Liberty! one almost
+sickens of the word, so quick and glib it is on every lip--so destitute
+of meaning.
+
+There is no such thing as abstract liberty; it is not even thinkable.
+If you ask me, "Do you favor liberty?" I reply, "Liberty for whom to do
+what? Just now I distinctly favor the liberty of the law to cut off the
+noses of anarchists caught red-handed or red-tongued. If they go in for
+mutilation let them feel what it is like. If they are not satisfied with
+the way that things have been going on since the wife of Duke Albert the
+Pious was held under water with a pole, and since the servitors of the
+Suabian nobleman cherished their vestigial ears, it is to be presumed
+that they favor reversion to that happy state. There is grave objection,
+but if we must we will. Let us begin (with moderation) by reverting
+_them_."
+
+I favor mutilation for anarchists convicted of killing or inciting to
+kill--mutilation followed by death. For those who merely deny the right
+and expediency of law, plain mutilation--which might advantageously take
+the form of removal of the tongue.
+
+Why not? Where is the injustice? Surely he who denies men's right to
+make laws will not invoke the laws that they have wickedly made! That
+were to say that they must not protect themselves, yet are bound
+to protect him. What! if I beat him will he call the useless and
+mischievous constabulary? If I draw out his tongue shall he (in the
+sign-language) demand it back, and failing of restitution (for surely I
+should cut it clean away) shall he have the law on me--the naughty law,
+instrument of the oppressor? Why? that "goes neare to be fonny!"
+
+Two human beings can not live together in peace without laws--laws
+innumerable. Everything that either, in consideration of the other's
+wish or welfare, abstains from is inhibited by law, tacit or expressed.
+If there were in all the world none but they--if neither had come with
+any sense of obligation toward the other, both clean from creation, with
+nothing but brains to direct their conduct--every hour would evolve an
+understanding, that is to say, a law; every act would suggest one. They
+would have to agree not to kill nor harm each other. They must arrange
+their work and all their activities to secure the best advantage. These
+arrangements, agreements, understandings--what are they but laws? To
+live without law is to live alone. Every family is a miniature State
+with a complicate system of laws, a supreme authority and subordinate
+authorities down to the latest babe. And as he who is loudest in
+demanding liberty for himself is sternest in denying it to others,
+you may confidently go to the Maison Vaillant, or the Mosthaus, for a
+flawless example of the iron hand.
+
+Laws of the State are as faulty and as faultily administered as those of
+the Family. Most of them have to be speedily and repeatedly "amended,"
+many repealed, and of those permitted to stand, the greater number fall
+into disuse and are forgotten. Those who have to be entrusted with the
+duty of administering them have all the limitations of intelligence and
+defects of character by which the rest of us also are distinguished from
+the angels. In the wise governor, the just judge, the honest sheriff
+or the patient constable we have as rare a phenomenon as the faultless
+father. The good God has not given us a special kind of men upon whom to
+devolve the duty of seeing to the observance of the understandings that
+we call laws. Like all else that men do, this work is badly done. The
+best that we can hope for through all the failures, the injustice, the
+disheartening damage to individual rights and interests, is a fairly
+good general result, enabling us to walk abroad among our fellows
+unafraid, to meet even the tribesmen from another valley without too
+imminent peril of braining and evisceration. Of that small security the
+Anarchist would deprive us. But without that nothing is of value and we
+shall be willing to renounce all. Let us begin by depriving ourselves of
+the Anarchist.
+
+Our system of civilization being the natural outgrowth of our wretched
+moral and intellectual natures, is open to criticism and subject
+to revision. Our laws, being of human origin, are faulty and their
+application is disappointing. Dissent, dissatisfaction, deprecation,
+proposals for a better system fortified with better laws more
+intelligently administered--these are permissible and should be welcome.
+The Socialist (when he is not carried away by zeal to pool issues with
+the Anarchist) has that in him which it does us good to hear. He may be
+wrong b all else, yet right in showing us wherein we ourselves are
+wrong. Anyhow, his mission is amendment, and so long as his paths are
+peace he has the right to walk therein, exhorting as he goes. The
+French Communist who does not preach Petroleum and It rectified is to be
+regarded with more than amusement, more than compassion. There is room
+for him and his fad; there are hospitable ears for his boast that Jesus
+Christ would have been a Communist if there had been Communes. They
+really did not "know everything down in Judee." But for the Anarchist,
+whose aim is not amendment, but destruction--not welfare to the race,
+but mischief to a part of it--not happiness for the future, but revenge
+for the past--for that animal there should be no close season, for that
+savage, no reservation. Society has not the right to grant life to one
+who denies the right to live. The protagonist of reversion to the regime
+of lacking noses should lack a nose.
+
+It is difficult to say if the bomb-thrower, actual or potential, is
+greater as scoundrel or fool. Suppose his aim is to compel concession by
+terror. Can not the brute observe at each of his exploits a tightening
+of "the reins of power?" Through the necessity of guarding against him
+the mildest governments are becoming despotic, the most despotic more
+despotic. Does he suppose that "the rulers of the earth" are silly
+enough to make concessions that will not insure their safety? Can _he_
+give them security?
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Of all the wild asses that roam the plain, the wildest wild ass that
+roams the plain is indubitably the one that lifts his voice and heel
+against that socialism known as "public ownership of public utilities,"
+on the ground of "principle." There may be honest, and in some degree
+intelligent, opposition on the ground of expediency. Many persons whom
+it is a pleasure to respect believe that a Government railway, for
+example, would be less efficiently managed than the same railway in
+private hands, and that political dangers lurk in the proposal so
+enormously to increase the number of Federal employes as Government
+ownership of railways would entail. They think, in other words, that
+the policy is inexpedient. It is a duty to reason with them, which, as
+a rule, one can do without being insulted. But the chap who greets the
+proposal with a howl of derision as "Socialism!" is not a respectable
+opponent. Eyes he has, but he sees not; ears--oh! very abundant
+ears--but he hears not the still, small voice of history nor the still
+smaller voice of common sense.
+
+Obviously to those who, having eyes, do see, public ownership of
+anything is a step in the direction of Socialism, for perfect Socialism
+means public ownership of everything. But "principle" has nothing to
+do with it The principle of public ownership is already accepted and
+established. It has no visible opponents except in the camp of the
+Anarchists, and fewer of them are visible there than soap and water
+would reveal. Antagonists of the _principle_ of Socialism lost their
+fight when the first human government held the dedicatory exercises of a
+Cave of Legislation. Since then the only question about the matter has
+been how far the _extension_ of Socialism is expedient Some would draw
+the limiting line at one place, some at another; but only a fool thinks
+there can be government without it, or good government without a great
+deal of it (The fact that we have always had a great deal of it yet
+never had good government affirms nothing that it is worth while to
+consider.) The word-worn example of our Postal Department is only one of
+a thousand instances of pure Socialism. If it did not exist how bitter
+an opposition a proposal to establish it would evoke from Adversaries of
+the Red Rag! The Government builds and operates bridges with general
+assent; but as the late General Walker pointed out, it might under some
+circumstances be more economical, or better otherwise, to build and
+operate a ferry boat, which is a floating bridge. But that would be
+opposed as rank Socialism.
+
+The truth is that the men and women of principle are a pretty dangerous
+class, generally speaking--and they are generally speaking. It is they
+that hamper us in every war. It is they who, preventing concentration
+and regulation of un-abolishable evils, promote their distribution and
+liberty. Moral principles are pretty good things--for the young and
+those not well grounded in goodness. If one have an impediment in his
+thought, or is otherwise unequal to emergencies as they arise, it is
+safest to be provided beforehand with something to refer to in order
+that a right decision may be made without taking thought. But "spirits
+of a purer fire" prefer to decide each question as it comes up, and to
+act upon the merits of the case, unbound and unpledged. With a
+quick intelligence, a capable conscience and a habit of doing right
+automatically one has little need to burden one's mind and memory with
+a set of solemn principles formulated by owlish philosophers who do not
+happen to know that what is right is merely what, in the long run and
+with regard to the greater number of cases, is expedient Principle
+is not always an infallible guide. For illustration, it is not always
+expedient--that is, for the good of all concerned--to tell the truth,
+to be entirely just or merciful, to pay a debt. I can conceive a case in
+which it would be right to assassinate one's neighbor. Suppose him to
+be a desperate scoundrel of a chemist who has devised a means of
+setting the atmosphere afire. The man who should go through life on an
+inflexible line of principle would border his path with a havoc of human
+happiness.
+
+What one may think perfect one may not always think desirable. By
+"perfect" one may mean merely complete, and the word was so used in
+my reference to Socialism. I am not myself an advocate of "perfect
+Socialism," but as to Government ownership of railways, there is
+doubtless a good deal to be said on both sides. One argument in its
+favor appears decisive; under a system subject to popular control the
+law of gravitation would be shorn of its preeminence as a means of
+removing personal property from the baggage car, and so far as it is
+applicable to that work might even be repealed.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+When M. Casimir-Perier resigned the French Presidency there were
+those who regarded the act as weak, cowardly, undutiful and otherwise
+censurable. It seems to me the act, not of a feeble man, but of a strong
+one--not that of a coward, but that of a gentleman. Indeed, I hardly
+know where to look in history for an act more entirely gratifying to
+my sense of "the fitness of things" than this dignified notification
+to mankind that in consenting to serve one's country one does not
+relinquish the right to decent treatment--to immunity from factious
+opposition and abuse--to at least as much civil consideration as is due
+from the Church to the Devil.
+
+M. Casimir-Perier did not seek the Presidency of the French Republic;
+it was thrust upon him against his protestations by an apparently almost
+unanimous mandate of the French people in an emergency which it was
+thought that he was the best man to meet. That he met it with modesty
+and courage was testified without dissent. That he afterward did
+anything to forfeit the confidence and respect that he then inspired is
+not true, and nobody believes it true. Yet in his letter of resignation
+he said, and said truly:
+
+"For the last six months a campaign of slander and insult has been going
+on against the army, magistrates. Parliament and hierarchical Chief of
+State, and this license to disseminate social hatred continues to be
+called 'the liberty of thought.'"
+
+And with a dignity to which it seems strange that any one could be
+insensible, he added:
+
+"The respect and ambition which I entertain for my country will not
+allow me to acknowledge that the servants of the country, and he who
+represents it in the presence of foreign nations, may be insulted every
+day."
+
+These are noble words. Have we any warrant for demanding or expecting
+that men of clean life and character will devote themselves to the good
+of ingrates who pay, and ingrates who permit them to pay, in flung mud?
+It is hardly credible that among even those persons most infatuated
+by contemplation of their own merit as pointed out by their thrifty
+sycophants "the liberty of thought" has been carried to that extreme.
+The right of the State to demand the sacrifice of the citizen's life is
+a doctrine as old as the patriotism that concedes it, but the right to
+require him to forego his good name--that is something new under the
+sun. From nothing but the dunghill of modern democracy could so noxious
+a plant have sprung.
+
+"Perhaps in laying down my functions," said M. Casimir-Perier, "I shall
+have marked out a path of duty to those who are solicitous for the
+dignity, power and good name of France in the world."
+
+We may be permitted to hope that the lesson is wider than France and
+more lasting than the French Republic. It is time that not only France
+but all other countries with "popular institutions" should learn that if
+they wish to command the services of men of honor they must accord them
+honorable treatment; the rule now is for the party to which they belong
+to give them a half-hearted support while suffering all other parties
+to slander and insult them. The action of the President of the French
+Republic in these disgusting circumstances is exceptional and unusual
+only in respect of his courage in expressly resenting his wrong.
+Everywhere the unreasonable complaint is heard that good men will not
+"go into politics;" everywhere the ignorant and malignant masses and
+their no less malignant and hardly less ignorant leaders and
+spokesmen, having sown the wind of reasonless obstruction and partisan
+vilification, are reaping the whirlwind of misrule. So far as
+concerns the public service, gentlemen are mostly on a strike against
+introduction of the mud-machine. This high-minded political workman,
+Casimir-Perier, never showed to so noble advantage as in gathering up
+his tools and walking out.
+
+It may be, and a million times has been, urged that abstention from
+activity in public affairs by men of brains and character leaves the
+business of government in the hands of the incapable and the vicious. In
+whose hands, pray, in a republic does it logically belong? What does
+the theory of "representative government" affirm? What is the lesson
+of every netherward extension of the suffrage? What do we mean by
+permitting it to "broaden slowly down" to lower and lower intelligences
+and moralities?--what but that stupidity and vice, equally with virtue
+and wisdom, are entitled to a voice in political affairs, a finger in
+the public pie?
+
+A person that is fit to vote is fit to be voted for. He who is competent
+for the high and difficult function of choosing an officer of the State
+is competent to serve the State as an officer. To deny him the right is
+illogical and unjust. Participation in Government can not be at the same
+time a privilege and a duty, and he who claims it as a privilege must
+not speak of another's renunciation (whereby himself is more highly
+privileged) as "shirking." With every retirement from politics increased
+power passes to those who remain. Shall they protest? Shall they, also,
+who have retired? Who else is to protest? The complaint of "incivism"
+would be more rational if there were some one by whom it could
+reasonably be made.
+
+My advice to slandered officials has ever been: "Resign." The public
+officials of this favored country, Heaven be thanked, are infrequently
+slandered: they are, as a rule, so bad that calumniation is a
+compliment. Our best men, with here and there an exception, have
+been driven out of public life, or made afraid to enter it. Even
+our spasmodic efforts at reform fail ludicrously for lack of leaders
+unaffiliated with "the thing to be reformed." Unless attracted by the
+salary, why should a gentleman "aspire" to the Presidency of the United
+States? During his canvass (and he is expected to "run," not merely to
+"stand") he will have from his own party a support that should make him
+blush, and from all the others an opposition that will stick at nothing
+to accomplish his satisfactory defamation. After his election his
+partition and allotment of the loaves and fishes will estrange an
+important and thenceforth implacable faction of his following without
+appeasing the animosity of any one else; and during his entire service
+his sky will be dark with a flight of dead cats. At the finish of his
+term the utmost that he can expect in the way of reward not expressible
+in terms of the national currency is that not much more than one-half of
+his countrymen will believe him a scoundrel to the end of their days.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+The kind of government that we have seems to me one of the worst kinds
+extant A government that does not protect life is a flat failure, no
+matter what else it may do. Life being almost universally regarded as
+the most precious possession, its security is the first and highest
+essential--not the life of him who takes life, but the life which is
+exposed defenceless to his hateful hand. In no country in the world,
+civilized or savage, is life so insecure as in this. In no country in
+the world is murder held in so light reprobation. In no battle of modern
+times have so many lives been taken as are lost annually in the United
+States through public indifference to the crime of homicide--through
+disregard of law, through bad government. If American self-government,
+with its ten thousand homicides a year, is good government, there is no
+such thing as bad. Self-government! What monstrous nonsense! Who governs
+himself needs no government, has no governor, is not governed. If
+government has any meaning it means the restraint of the many by the
+few--the subordination of numbers to brains. It means the determined
+denial to the masses of the right to cut their own throats. It means
+the grasp and control of all the social forces and material enginery--a
+vigilant censorship of the press, a firm hand upon the church, keen
+supervision of public meetings and public amusements, command of the
+railroads, telegraph and all means of communication. It means, in
+short, the ability to make use of all the beneficent influences of
+enlightenment for the good of the people, and to array all the powers
+of civilization against civilization's natural enemies--the people.
+Government like this has a thousand defects, but it has one merit: it is
+government.
+
+Despotism? Yes. It is the despotisms of the world that have been the
+conservators of civilization. It is the despot who, most powerful for
+mischief, is alone powerful for good. It is conceded that government is
+necessary--even by the "fierce democracies" that madly renounce it. But
+in so far as government is not despotic it is not government. In Europe
+for the last one hundred years, the tendency of all government has been
+liberalization. The history of European politics during that period is
+a history of renunciation by the rulers and assumption by the ruled.
+Sovereign after sovereign has surrendered prerogative after prerogative;
+the nobility privilege after privilege. Mark the result: society
+honeycombed with treason; property menaced with partition; assassination
+studied as a science and practiced as an art; everywhere powerful
+secret organizations sworn to demolish the social fabric that the slow
+centuries have but just erected and unmindful that themselves will
+perish in the wreck. No heart in Europe can beat tranquilly under clean
+linen. Such is the gratitude, such is the wisdom, such the virtue of
+"The Masses." In 1863 Alexander II of Russia freed 25,000,000 serfs. In
+1879 they had killed him and all joined the conspirators.
+
+That ancient and various device, "a republican form of government,"
+appears to be too good for all the peoples of the earth excepting one.
+It is partly successful in Switzerland; in France and America, where
+the majority is composed of persons having dark understandings and
+criminal instincts, it has broken down. In our case, as in every case,
+the momentum of successful revolution carried us too far. We
+rebelled against tyranny and having overthrown it, overthrew also the
+governmental form in which it had happened to be manifest. In their
+anger and their triumph our good old gran'thers acted somewhat in the
+spirit of the Irishman who cudgeled the dead snake until nothing was
+left of it, in order to make it "sinsible of its desthroction." They
+meant it all, too, the honest souls! For a long time after the setting
+up of the republic the republic meant active hatred to kings, nobles,
+aristocracies. It was held, and rightly held, that a nobleman could not
+breathe in America--that he left his title and his privileges on the
+ship that brought him over. Do we observe anything of that in this
+generation? On the landing of a foreign king, prince or nobleman--even a
+miserable "knight"--do we not execute sycophantic genuflexions? Are not
+our newspapers full of flamboyant descriptions and qualming adulation?
+Nay, does not our President himself--successor to Washington and
+Jefferson!--greet and entertain the "nation's guest"? Is not every
+American young woman crazy to mate with a male of title? Does all this
+represent no retrogression?--is it not the backward movement of the
+shadow on the dial? Doubtless the republican idea has struck strong
+roots into the soil of the two Americas, but he who rightly considers
+the tendencies of events, the causes that bring them about and the
+consequences that flow from them, will not be hot to affirm the
+perpetuity of republican institutions in the Western Hemisphere. Between
+their inception and their present stage of development there is scarcely
+the beat of a pendulum; and already, by corruption and lawlessness,
+the people of both continents, with all their diversities of race and
+character, have shown themselves about equally unfit. To become a nation
+of scoundrels all that any people needs is opportunity, and what we are
+pleased to call by the impossible name of "self-government" supplies it.
+
+The capital defect of republican government is inability to repress
+internal forces tending to disintegration. It does not take long for a
+"self-governed" people to learn that it is not really governed--that an
+agreement enforcible by nobody but the parties to it is not binding.
+We are learning this very rapidly: we set aside our laws whenever we
+please. The sovereign power--the tribunal of ultimate jurisdiction--is
+a mob. If the mob is large enough (it need not be very large), even
+if composed of vicious tramps, it may do as it will. It may destroy
+property and life. It may without proof of guilt inflict upon
+individuals torments unthinkable by fire and flaying, mutilations that
+are nameless. It may call men, women and children from their beds and
+beat them to death with cudgels. In the light of day it may assail the
+very strongholds of law in the heart of a populous city, and assassinate
+prisoners of whose guilt it knows nothing. And these things--observe, O
+victims of kings--are habitually done. One would as well be at the mercy
+of one's sovereign as of one's neighbor.
+
+For generations we have been charming ourselves with the magic of words.
+When menaced by some exceptionally monstrous form of the tyranny of
+numbers we have closed our eyes and murmured, "Liberty." When armed
+Anarchists threaten to quench the fires of civilization in a sea of
+blood we prate of the protective power of "free speech." If,
+
+     "Girt about by friends or foes,
+     A man may speak the thing he will,"
+
+we fondly fancy that the thing he will speak is harmless--that immunity
+disarms his tongue of its poison, his thought of its infection. With a
+fatuity that would be incredible without the testimony of observation,
+we hold that an Anarchist free to go about making proselytes, free to
+purchase arms, free to drill and parade and encourage his dupes with a
+demonstration of their numbers and power, is less mischievous than an
+Anarchist with a shut mouth, a weaponless hand and under surveillance of
+the police. The Anarchist himself is persuaded of the superiority of
+our plan of dealing with him; he likes it and comes over in quantity,
+inpesting the political atmosphere with the "sweltered venom" engendered
+by centuries of oppression--comes over here, where he is not oppressed,
+and sets up as oppressor. His preferred field of malefaction is the
+country that is most nearly anarchical. He comes here, partly to better
+himself under our milder institutions, partly to secure immunity while
+conspiring to destroy them. There is thunder in Europe, but if the storm
+ever break it is in America that the lightning will fall, for here is
+a great vortex into which the decivilizing agencies are pouring without
+obstruction. Here gather the eagles to the feast, for the quarry is
+defenceless. Here is no power in government, no government. Here an
+enemy of order is thought to be least dangerous when suffered to preach
+and arm in peace. And here is nothing between him and his task of
+supervision--no pampered soldiery to repress his rising, no iron
+authority to lay him by the heels. The militia is fraternal, the
+magistracy elective. Europe may hold out a little longer. The Great
+Powers may make what stage-play they will, but they are not maintaining
+their incalculable armaments for aggression upon one another, for
+protection from one another, nor for fun. These vast forces are
+purely constabular--creatures and creators of discontent--phenomena of
+decivilization. Eventually they will fraternize with Disorder or become
+themselves Praetorian Guards more dangerous than the perils that have
+called them into existence.
+
+It is easy to forecast the first stages of the End's approach: Rioting.
+Disaffection of constabulary and troops. Subversion of the Government
+A policy of decapitation. Upthrust of the serviceable Anarchist.
+His prompt effacement by his victorious ally and natural enemy, the
+Socialist. Free minting and printing of money--to every citizen a
+shoulder-load of the latter, to the printers a ton each. Divided
+counsels. Pandemonium. The man on horseback. Gusts of grape. ------?
+
+Formerly the bearer of evil tidings was only slain; he is now ignored.
+The gods kept their secrets by telling them to Cassandra, whom no one
+would believe. I do not expect to be heeded. The crust of a volcano is
+electric the fumes are narcotic; the combined sensation is delightful no
+end. I have looked at the dial of civilization; I tell you the shadow
+is going back. That is of small importance to men of leisure, with
+wine-dipped wreaths upon their heads. They do not care to know.
+
+
+
+
+CIVILIZATION
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE question "Does civilization civilize?" is a fine example of _petitio
+principii_. and decides itself in the affirmative; for civilization must
+needs do that from the doing of which it has its name. But it is not
+necessary to suppose that he who propounds is either unconscious of his
+lapse in logic or desirous of digging a pitfall for the feet of
+those who discuss; I take it he simply wishes to put the matter in an
+impressive way, and relies upon a certain degree of intelligence in the
+interpretation.
+
+Concerning uncivilized peoples we know but little except what we are
+told by travelers--who, speaking generally, can know very little but the
+fact of uncivilization as shown in externals and irrelevances, and are
+moreover, greatly given to lying. From the savages we hear very little.
+Judging them in all things by our own standards, in default of a
+knowledge of theirs, we necessarily condemn, disparage and belittle. One
+thing that civilization certainly has not done is to make us intelligent
+enough to understand that the opposite of a virtue is not necessarily a
+vice. Because we do not like the taste of one another it does not follow
+that the cannibal is a person of depraved appetite. Because, as a rule,
+we have but one wife and several mistresses each it is not certain that
+polygamy is everywhere--nor, for that matter, anywhere--either wrong or
+inexpedient. Our habit of wearing clothes does not prove that conscience
+of the body, the sense of shame, is charged with a divine mandate; for
+like the conscience of the spirit it is the creature of what it seems to
+create: it comes to the habit of wearing clothes. And for those who hold
+that the purpose of civilization is morality it may be said that peoples
+which are the most nearly naked are, in our sense, the most nearly
+moral. Because the brutality of the civilized slave owners and dealers
+created a conquering sentiment against slavery it is not intelligent to
+assume that slavery is a maleficent thing amongst Oriental peoples (for
+example) where the slave is not oppressed.
+
+Some of these same Orientals whom we are pleased to term half-civilized
+have no regard for truth. "Takest thou me for a Christian dog," said
+one of them, "that I should be the slave of my word?" So far as I can
+perceive the "Christian dog" is no more the slave of his word than the
+True Believer, and I think the savage--allowing for the fact that his
+inveracity has dominion over fewer things--as great a liar as either of
+them. For my part, I do not know what, in all circumstances, is right
+or wrong; but I know, if right, it is at least stupid to judge an
+uncivilized people by the standards of morality and intelligence set up
+by civilized ones. An infinitesimal proportion of civilized men do not,
+and there is much to be said for civilization if they are the product of
+it.
+
+Life in civilized countries is so complex that men there have more ways
+to be good than savages have, and more to be bad; more to be happy, and
+more to be miserable. And in each way to be good or bad, their generally
+superior knowledge--their knowledge of more things--enables them to
+commit greater excesses than the savage could widi the same opportunity.
+The civilized philanthropist wreaks upon his fellow creatures a
+ranker philanthropy, the civilized scoundrel a sturdier rascality.
+And--splendid triumph of enlightenment!--the two characters are, in
+civilisation, commonly combined in one person.
+
+I know of no savage custom or habit of thought which has not its mate
+in civilized countries. For every mischievous or absurd practice of
+the natural man I can name you a dozen of the unnatural which are
+essentially the same. And nearly every custom of our barbarian ancestors
+in historic times survives in some form today. We make ourselves look
+formidable in battle--for that matter, we fight. Our women paint their
+faces. We feel it obligatory to dress more or less alike, inventing the
+most ingenious reasons for it and actually despising and persecuting
+those who do not care to conform. Within the memory of living persons
+bearded men were stoned in the streets; and a clergyman in New York
+who wore his beard as Christ wore his, was put into jail and variously
+persecuted till he died. We bury our dead instead of burning them, yet
+every cemetery is set thick with urns. As there are no ashes for the
+urns we do not trouble ourselves to make them hollow, and we say
+their use is "emblematic." When, following the bent of our ancestral
+instincts, we go on, age after age, in the performance of some senseless
+act which once had a use and meaning we excuse ourselves by calling
+it symbolism. Our "symbols" are merely survivals. We have theology and
+patriotism. We have all the savage's superstition. We propitiate and
+ingratiate by means of gifts. We shake hands. All these and hundreds
+of others of our practices are distinctly, in their nature and by their
+origin, savage.
+
+Civilization does not, I think, make the race any better. It makes men
+know more: and if knowledge makes them happy it is useful and desirable.
+The one purpose of every sane human being is to be happy. No one
+can have any other motive than that. There is no such thing as
+unselfishness. We perform the most "generous" and "self-sacrificing"
+acts because we should be unhappy if we did not. We move on lines of
+least reluctance. Whatever tends to increase the beggarly sum of human
+happiness is worth having; nothing else has any value.
+
+The cant of civilization fatigues. Civilization is a fine and beautiful
+structure. It is as picturesque as a Gothic cathedral. But it is built
+upon the bones and cemented with the blood of those whose part in all
+its pomp is that and nothing more. It cannot be reared in the generous
+tropics, for there the people will not contribute their blood and bones.
+The proposition that the average American workingman or European peasant
+is "better off" than the South Sea Islander, lolling under a palm and
+drunk with over-eating, will not bear a moment's examination.
+
+It is we scholars and gentlemen that are better off.
+
+It is admitted that the South Sea Islander in a state of nature is
+overmuch addicted to the practice of eating human flesh; but concerning
+that I submit: first, that he likes it; second, that those who supply
+it are mostly dead. It is upon his enemies that he feeds, and these
+he would kill anyhow, as we do ours. In civilized, enlightened and
+Christian countries, where cannibalism has not yet established itself,
+wars are as frequent and destructive as among the maneaters. The
+untitled savage knows at least why he goes killing, whereas the private
+soldier is commonly in black ignorance of the apparent cause of
+quarrel--of the actual cause, always. Their shares in the fruits of
+victory are about equal: the Chief takes all the dead, the General all
+the glory. Moreover it costs more human life to supply a Christian
+gentleman with food than it does a cannibal--with food alone: "board;"
+if you could figure out the number of lives that his lodging, clothing,
+amusements and accomplishment cost the sum would startle. Happily _he_
+does not pay it. Considering human lives as having value, cannibalism is
+undoubtedly the more economical system.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Transplanted institutions grow but slowly; and civilization can not be
+put into a ship and carried across an ocean. The history of this country
+is a sequence of illustrations of these truths. It was settled by
+civilized men and women from civilized countries, yet after two and a
+half centuries with unbroken communication with the mother systems, it
+is still imperfectly civilized. In learning and letters, in art and the
+science of government, America is but a faint and stammering echo of
+England.
+
+For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we are indebted
+to England; the errors and mischiefs are of our own creation. We have
+originated little, because there is little to originate, but we have
+unconsciously reproduced many of the discredited and abandoned systems
+of former ages and other countries--receiving them at second hand, but
+making them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the national
+belief in their newness. Newness! Why, it is not possible to make an
+experiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology, or in
+morals, that has not been made over, and over, and over again. Fools
+talk of clear and simple remedies for this and that evil afflicting the
+commonwealth. If a proposed remedy is obvious and easily intelligible,
+it is condemned in the naming, for it is morally certain to have been
+tried a thousand times in the history of the world, and had it been
+effective men ere now would have forgotten, from mere disuse, how to
+produce the evil it cured.
+
+There are clear and simple remedies for nothing. In medicine there
+has been discovered but a single specific; in politics not one.
+The interests, moral and natural, of a community in our highly
+differentiated civilization are so complex, intricate, delicate and
+interdependent, that you can not touch one without affecting all. It
+is a familiar truth that no law was ever passed that did not have
+unforeseen results; but of these results, by far the greater number are
+never recognized as of its creation. The best that can be said of any
+"measure" is, that the sum of its perceptible benefits seems so to
+exceed the sum of its perceptible evils as to constitute a balance of
+advantage. Yet the magnificent innocence of the statesman or philosopher
+to whose understanding "the whole matter lies in a nutshell"--who thinks
+he can formulate a practical political or social policy within the four
+corners of an epigram--who fears nothing because he knows nothing--is
+constantly to the fore with a simple specific for ills whose causes are
+complex, constant and inscrutable. To the understanding of this creature
+a difficulty well ignored is half overcome; so he buttons up his eyes
+and assails the problems of life with the divine confidence of a blind
+pig traversing a labyrinth.
+
+The glories of England are our glories. She can achieve nothing that our
+fathers did not help to make possible to her. The learning, the power,
+the refinement of a great nation, are not the growth of a century,
+but of many centuries; each generation builds upon the work of the
+preceding. For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that "revered
+pile," the civilization of England. And shall we now try to belittle the
+mighty structure because other though kindred hands are laying the top
+courses while we have elected to found a new tower in another land? The
+American eulogist of civilization who is not proud of his heritage in
+England's glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser heritage in the lesser
+glory of his own country.
+
+The English are undoubtedly our intellectual superiors; and as the
+virtues are solely the product of education--a rogue being only a dunce
+considered from another point of view--they are our moral superiors
+likewise. Why should they not be? It is a land not of log and pine-board
+schoolhouses grudgingly erected and containing schools supported by such
+niggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed population will consent
+to pay, but of ancient institutions splendidly endowed by the State and
+by centuries of private benefaction. As a means of dispensing formulated
+ignorance our boasted public school system is not without merit; it
+spreads it out sufficiently thin to give everyone enough to make him a
+more competent fool than he would have been without it; but to compare
+it with that which is not the creature of legislation acting with malice
+aforethought, but the unnoted outgrowth of ages, is to be ridiculous.
+It is like comparing the laid-out town of a western prairie, its
+right-angled streets, prim cottages, "built on the installment plan,"
+and its wooden a-b-c shops, with the grand old town of Oxford, topped
+with the clustered domes and towers of its twenty-odd great colleges;
+the very names of many of whose founders have perished from human record
+as have all the chronicles of the times in which they lived.
+
+It is not alone that we have had to "subdue the wilderness;" our
+educational conditions are otherwise adverse. Our political system is
+unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed
+in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one
+will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for
+instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained
+intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and
+a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer
+and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and
+pedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you deny it in a man?
+
+I do not claim that the political and social system that creates an
+aristocracy of leisure, and consequently of intellect, is the best
+possible kind of human organization; I perceive its disadvantages
+clearly enough. But I do not hold that a system under which all
+important public trusts, political and professional, civil and military,
+ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated men--that is, men of
+trained faculties and disciplined judgment--is not an altogether faulty
+system.
+
+It is only in our own country that an exacting literary taste is
+believed to disqualify a man for purveying to the literary needs of a
+taste less exacting--a proposition obviously absurd, for an exacting
+taste is nothing but the intelligent discrimination of a judgment
+instructed by comparison and observation. There is, in fact, no pursuit
+or occupation, from that of a man who blows up a balloon to that of
+the man who bores out the stove pipes, in which he that has talent and
+education is not a better worker than he that has either, and he than
+he that has neither. It is a universal human weakness to disparage
+the knowledge that we do not ourselves possess, but it is only my own
+beloved country that can justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum
+of the impotents and incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge
+whatsoever. It was an American Senator (Logan) who declared that he
+had devoted a couple of weeks to the study of finance, and found the
+accepted authorities all wrong. It was another American Senator (Morton)
+who, confronted with certain ugly facts in the history of another
+country, proposed "to brush away all facts, and argue the question on
+considerations of plain common sense."
+
+Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes in
+the _personnel_ of government--to say nothing of the manner of men that
+ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant--we
+attain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing here
+as a science of politics, because it is not to any one's interest to
+make politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth finds
+general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over
+again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity
+suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.
+
+One of the disadvantages of our social system, which is the child of our
+political, is the tyranny of public opinion, forbidding the utterance of
+wholesome but unpalatable truth. In a republic we are so accustomed
+to the rule of majorities that it seldom occurs to us to examine their
+title to dominion; and as the ideas of might and right are, by our
+innate sense of justice, linked together, we come to consider public
+opinion infallible and almost sacred. Now, majorities rule, not because
+they are right, but because they are able to rule. In event of collision
+they would conquer, so it is expedient for minorities to submit
+beforehand to save trouble. In fact, majorities, embracing, as they
+do the most ignorant, seldom think rightly; public opinion, being the
+opinion of mediocrity, is commonly a mistake and a mischief. But it is
+to nobody's interest--it is against the interest of most--to dispute
+with it. Public writer and public speaker alike find their account in
+confirming "the plain people" in their brainless errors and brutish
+prejudices--in glutting their omnivorous vanity and inflaming their
+implacable racial and national hatreds.
+
+I have long held the opinion that patriotism is one of the most
+abominable vices affecting the human understanding. Every patriot in
+this world believes his country better than any other country. Now, they
+cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it follows
+that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to
+be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active
+manifestation--it is fond of shooting--patriotism would be well enough
+if it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same
+feeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels
+us likewise to go over the border to quench the fires and overturn the
+altars of our neighbors. It is all very pretty and spirited, what the
+poets tell us about Thermopylae, but there was as much patriotism at one
+end of that pass as there was at the other. Patriotism deliberately and
+with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the
+interests of a part. Worse still, the fraction so favored is determined
+by an accident of birth or residence. Patriotism is like a dog which,
+having entered at random one of a row of kennels, suffers more in
+combats with the dogs in the other kennels than it would have done
+by sleeping in the open air. The hoodlum who cuts the tail from a
+Chinamen's nowl, and would cut the nowl from the body if he dared,
+is simply a patriot with a logical mind, having the courage of his
+opinions. Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind
+as a stone and irrational as a headless hen.
+
+There are two ways of clarifying liquids--ebullition and precipitation;
+one forces the impurities to the surface as scum, the other sends them
+to the bottom as dregs. The former is the more offensive, and that
+seems to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merely
+separated but not removed. We are told with tiresome iteration that our
+social and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer to
+appear? If the purpose of free institutions is good government where is
+the good government?--when may it be expected to begin?--how is it to
+come about? Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practical
+means to a simple end--the public welfare; worthy of no respect if they
+fail of its accomplishment. The tree is known by its fruit. Ours, is
+bearing crab-apples.
+
+If the body politic is constitutionally diseased, as I verily believe;
+if the disorder inheres in the system; there is no remedy. The fever
+must burn itself out, and then Nature will do the rest. One does not
+prescribe what time alone can administer. We have put our criminal class
+in power; do we suppose they will efface themselves? Will they restore
+to _us_ the power of governing _them_? They must have their way and
+go their length. The natural and immemorial sequence is: tyranny,
+insurrection, combat. In combat everything that wears a sword has a
+chance--even the right. History does not forbid us to hope. But it
+forbids us to rely upon numbers; they will be against us. If history
+teaches anything worth learning it teaches that the majority of mankind
+is neither good nor wise. Where government is founded upon the public
+conscience and the public intelligence the stability of States is a
+dream. Nor have we any warrant for the Tennysonian faith that
+
+     "Freedom broadens slowly down
+     From precedent to precedent."
+
+In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we have
+abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and
+better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed
+itself to have the secret of national perpetuity. In support of this
+universal delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate places
+of the earth cry out against it. Vestiges of obliterated civilizations
+cover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proud
+and populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman's boast of
+national stability. Our nation, our laws, our history--all shall go down
+to everlasting oblivion with the others, and by the same road. But I
+submit that we are traveling it with needless haste.
+
+But it is all right and righteous. It can be spared--this Jonah's
+gourd civilization of ours. We have hardly the rudiments of a true
+civilization; compared with the splendors of which we catch dim glimpses
+in the fading past, ours are as an illumination of tallow candles. We
+know no more than the ancients; we only know other things, but nothing
+in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and little that is truly wisdom.
+Our vaunted _elixir vito_ is the art of printing with moveable types.
+What good will those do when posterity, struck by the inevitable
+intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed? Our
+libraries will become its stables, our books its fuel.
+
+Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space as
+a scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has so
+differentiated as to have no longer a community of interest and
+feeling; which shows as a ripe result of the principles underlying it
+a reasonless and rascally feud between rich and poor; in which one is
+offered a choice (if one have the means to take it) between American
+plutocracy and European militocracy, with an imminent chance of
+renouncing either for a stultocratic republic with a headsman in the
+presidential chair and every laundress in exile.
+
+I have not a "solution" to the "labor problem." I have only a story.
+Many and many years ago lived a man who was so good and wise that none
+in all the world was so good and wise as he. He was one of those few
+whose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has passed their
+fellowmen begin to think them gods and treasure their words as divine
+law; and by millions they are worshiped through centuries of time.
+Amongst the utterances of this man was one command--not a new nor
+perfect one--which has seemed to his adorers so preeminently wise that
+they have given it a name by which it is known over half the world. One
+of the sovereign virtues of this famous law is its simplicity, which is
+such that all hearing must understand; and obedience is so easy that any
+nation refusing is unfit to exist except in the turbulence and adversity
+that will surely come to it. When a people would avert want and strife,
+or having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble commandment
+offers the only means--all other plans for safety or relief are as vain
+as dreams, and as empty as the crooning of fools. And behold, here it
+is: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye
+even so to them."
+
+What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen
+into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory
+and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that "business
+is business;" you lazy workman, railing at the capitalist by
+whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you
+starve--rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way
+of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists,
+applauding with indelicate palms when one of your coward kind hurls a
+bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile
+politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable;
+you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to
+the labor problem" as there are dunces among you who can not coherently
+define it--do you really think yourself wiser than Jesus of Nazareth? Do
+you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for dealing
+with all the evils besetting states and souls? Have you the effrontery
+to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to
+obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you fatigue
+the spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes,
+your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speech-ing, marching and
+maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to you
+it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own
+blood and your pickpocket civilization quenched as a star that falls
+into the sea.
+
+
+
+
+THE GAME OF POLITICS
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+IF ONE were to declare himself a Democrat or a Republican and the claim
+should be contested he would find it a difficult one to prove. The
+missing link in his chain of evidence would be the major premise in
+the syllogism necessary to the establishment of his political status--a
+definition of "Democrat" or "Republican." Most of the statesmen in
+public and private life who are poll-parroting these words, do so with
+entire unconsciousness of their meaning, or rather without knowledge
+that they have lost whatever of meaning they once had. The words are
+mere "survivals," marking dead issues and covering allegiances of the
+loosest and most shallow character. On any question of importance each
+party is divided against itself and dares not formulate a preference.
+There is no question before the country upon which one may not think
+and vote as he likes without affecting his standing in the political
+communion of saints of which he professes himself a member. "Party
+lines" are as terribly confused as the parallels of latitude and
+longitude after a twisting earthquake, or those aimless lines
+representing the competing railroad on a map published by a company
+operating "the only direct route." It is not probable that this state of
+things can last; if there is to be "government by party"--and we should
+be sad to think that so inestimable a boon were soon to return to Him
+who gave it--men must begin to let their angry passions rise and take
+rides. "Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey," where the people
+are too wise to dispute and too good to fight. Let us have the good old
+political currency of bloody noses and cracked crowns; let the yawp
+of the demagogue be heard in the land; let ears be pestered with the
+spargent cheers of the masses. Give us a whoop-up that shall rouse us
+like a rattling peal of thunder. Will nobody be our Moses--there
+should be two Moseses--to lead us through this detestable wilderness of
+political stagnation?
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Nowhere "on God's green earth"--it is fitting, that this paper contain
+a bit of bosh--nowhere is so much insufferable stuff talked in a given
+period of time as in an American political convention. It is there that
+all those objectionable elements of the national character which evoke
+the laughter of Europe and are the despair of our friends find freest
+expression, unhampered by fear of any censorship more exacting than
+that of "the opposing party"--which takes no account of intellectual
+delinquencies, but only of moral. The "organs" of the "opposing party"
+will not take the trouble to point out--even to observe--that the
+"debasing sentiments" and "criminal views" uttered in speech and
+platform are expressed in sickening syntax and offensive rhetoric.
+Doubtless an American politician, statesman, what you will, could
+go into a political convention and signify his views with simple,
+unpretentious common sense, but doubtless he never does.
+
+Every community is cursed with a number of "orators"--men regarded as
+"eloquent"--"silver tongued" men--fellows who to the common American
+knack at brandishing the tongue add an exceptional felicity of
+platitude, a captivating mastery of dog's-eared sentiment, a copious and
+obedient vocabulary of eulogium, an iron insensibility to the ridiculous
+and an infinite affinity to fools. These afflicting Chrysostoms are
+always lying in wait for an "occasion" It matters not what it is: a
+"reception" to some great man from abroad, a popular ceremony like the
+laying of a corner-stone, the opening of a fair, the dedication of a
+public building, an anniversary banquet of an ancient and honorable
+order (they all belong to ancient and honorable orders) or a club
+dinner--they all belong to clubs and pay dues. But it is in the
+political convention that they come out particularly strong. By some
+imperious tradition having the force of written law it is decreed that
+in these absurd bodies of our fellow citizens no word of sense shall be
+uttered from the platform; whatever is uttered in set speeches shall be
+addressed to the meanest capacity present As a chain can be no stronger
+than its weakest link, so nothing said by the speakers at a political
+convention must be above the intellectual reach of the most pernicious
+idiot having a seat and a vote. I don't know why it is so. It seems to
+be thought that if he is not suitably entertained he will not attend, as
+a delegate, the next convention.
+
+Here are the opening sentences of the speech in which a man was once
+nominated for Governor:
+
+"Two years ago the Republican party in State and Nation marched to
+imperial triumph. On every hilltop and mountain peak our beacons
+blazed and we awakened the echoes of every valley with songs of our
+rejoicings."
+
+And so forth. Now, if I were asked to recast those sentences so that
+they should conform to the simple truth and be inoffensive to good taste
+I should say something like this:
+
+"Two years ago the Republican party won a general election."
+
+If there is any thing in this inflated rigmarole that is not adequately
+expressed in my amended statement, what is it? As to eloquence it will
+hardly be argued that nonsense, falsehood and metaphors which were
+old when Rome was young are essential to that. The first man (in early
+Greece) who spoke of awakening an echo did a felicitous thing. Was it
+felicitous in the second? Is it felicitous now? As to that military
+metaphor--the "marching" and so forth--its inventor was as great an ass
+as any one of the incalculable multitude of his plagiarists. On this
+matter hear the late Richard Grant White:
+
+"Is it not time that we had done with the nauseous talk about campaigns,
+and standard-bearers, and glorious victories (imperial triumphs) and
+all the bloated army-bumming bombast which is so rife for the six months
+preceding an election? To read almost any one of our political papers
+during a canvass is enough to make one sick and sorry.... An election
+has no manner of likeness to a campaign, or a battle. It is not even a
+contest in which the stronger or more dexterous party is the winner; it
+is a mere counting, in which the bare fact that one party is the more
+numerous puts it in power if it will only come up and be counted; to
+insure which a certain time is spent by each party in reviling and
+belittling the candidates of its opponents and lauding its own; and
+this is the canvass, at the likening of which to a campaign every honest
+soldier might reasonably take offense."
+
+But, after all, White was only "one o' them dam litery fellers," and I
+dare say the original proponent of the military metaphor, away off
+there in "the dark backward and abysm of time," knew a lot more about
+practical politics than White ever did. And it is practical politics to
+be an ass.
+
+In withdrawing his own name from before a convention, a California
+politician once made a purely military speech of which a single sample
+passage is all that I shall allow myself the happiness to quote:
+
+"I come before you today as a Republican of the Republican banner county
+of this great State of ours. From snowy Shasta on the north to sunny
+Diego on the south; from the west, where the waves of the Pacific look
+upon our shores, to where the barriers of the great Sierras stand clad
+in eternal snow, there is no more loyal county to the Republican party
+in this State than the county from which I hail. [Applause, naturally.]
+Its loyalty to the party has been tested on many fields of battle
+[Anglice, in many elections] and it has never wavered in the contest
+Wherever the fate of battle was trembling in the balance [Homer, and
+since Homer, Tom, Dick and Harry] Alameda county stepped into the breach
+and rescued the Republican party from defeat."
+
+Translated into English this military mouthing would read somewhat like
+this:
+
+"I live in Alameda county, where the Republicans have uniformly outvoted
+the Democrats."
+
+The orators at the Democratic convention a week earlier were no better
+and no different. Their rhetorical stock-in-trade was the same old
+shop-worn figures of speech in which their predecessors have dealt for
+ages, and in which their successors will traffic to the end of--well, to
+the end of that imitative quality in the national character, which,
+by its superior intensity, serves to distinguish us from the apes that
+perish.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+"What we most need, to secure honest elections," says a well-meaning
+reformer, "is the Clifford or the Myers voting machine." Why, truly,
+here is a hopeful spirit--a rare and radiant intelligence suffused with
+the conviction that men can be made honest by machinery--that human
+character is a matter of gearing, ratchets and dials! One would give
+something to know how it feels to be like that. A mind so constituted
+must be as happy in its hope as a hen incubating a nest-ful of porcelain
+door-knobs. It lives in rapturous contemplation of a world of its own
+creation--a world where public morality and political good order are
+to be had by purchase at the machine-shop. In that delectable world
+religion is superfluous; the true high priest is the mechanical
+engineer; the minor clergy are the village blacksmiths. It is rather
+a pity that so fine and fair a sphere should prosper only in the
+attenuated ether of an idiot's understanding.
+
+Voting-machines are doubtless well enough; they save labor and enable
+the statesmen of the street to know the result within a few minutes of
+the closing of the polls--whereby many are spared to their country who
+would otherwise incur fatal disorders by exposure to the night air
+while assisting in awaiting the returns. But a voting-machine that human
+ingenuity can not pervert, human ingenuity can not invent.
+
+That is true, too, of laws. Your statesman of a mental stature somewhat
+overtopping that of the machine-person puts his faith in law.
+Providence has designed to permit him to be persuaded of the efficacy
+of statutes--good, stringent, carefully drawn statutes definitively
+repealing all the laws of nature in conflict with any of their
+provisions. So the poor devil (I am writing of Mr. Legion) turns for
+relief from law to law, ever on the stool of repentance, yet ever
+unfouling the anchor of hope. By no power cm earth can his indurated
+understanding be penetrated by the truth that his woful state is due,
+not to any laws of his own, nor to any lack of them, but to his rascally
+refusal to obey the Golden Rule. How long is it since we were all
+clamoring for the Australian ballot law, which was to make a new Heaven
+and a new earth? We have the Australian ballot law and the same old
+earth smelling to the same old Heaven. Writhe upon the triangle as we
+may, groan out what new laws we will, the pitiless thong will fall upon
+our bleeding backs as long as we deserve it. If our sins, which are
+scarlet, are to be washed as white as wool it must be in the tears of a
+genuine contrition: our crocodile deliverances will profit us nothing.
+We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring
+art, literature and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of
+civilization. We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with
+prosperous rascals and fawning upon the merely rich. It is not permitted
+to our employers to plead in justification of low wages the law of
+supply and demand that is giving them high profits. It is not permitted
+to discontented employees to break the bones of contented ones and
+destroy the foundations of social order. It is infamous to look upon
+public office with the lust of possession; it is disgraceful to solicit
+political preferment, to strive and compete for "honors" that are
+sullied and tarnished by the touch of the reaching hand. Until we amend
+our personal characters we shall amend our laws in vain. Though Paul
+plant and Apollos water, the field of reform will grow nothing but the
+figless thistle and the grapeless thorn. The State is an aggregation of
+individuals. Its public character is the expression of their personal
+ones. By no political prestidigitation can it be made better and wiser
+than the sum of their goodness and wisdom. To expect that men who do not
+honorably and intelligently conduct their private affairs will honorably
+and intelligently conduct the affairs of the community is to be a fool.
+We are told that out of nothing God made the Heavens and the earth; but
+out of nothing God never did and man never can, make a public sense of
+honor and a public conscience. Miracles are now performed but one day
+of the year--the twenty-ninth of February; and on leap year God is
+forbidden to perform them.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Ye who hold that the power of eloquence is a thing of the past and the
+orator an anachronism; who believe that the trend of political events
+and the results of parliamentary action are determined by committees
+in cold consultation and the machinations of programmes in holes and
+corners, consider the ascension of Bryan and be wise. A week before the
+convention of 1896 William J. Bryan had never heard of himself; upon his
+natural obscurity was superposed the opacity of a Congressional service
+that effaced him from the memory of even his faithful dog, and made him
+immune to dunning. Today he is pinnacled upon the summit of the tallest
+political distinction, gasping in the thin atmosphere of his unfamiliar
+environment and fitly astonished at the mischance. To the dizzy
+elevation of his candidacy he was hoisted out of the shadow by his own
+tongue, the longest and liveliest in Christendom. Had he held it--which
+he could not have done with both hands--there had been no Bryan. His
+creation was the unstudied act of his own larynx; it said, "Let there
+be Bryan," and there was Bryan. Even in these degenerate days there is
+a hope for the orators when one can make himself a Presidential peril by
+merely waving the red flag in the cave of the winds and tormenting the
+circumjacence with a brandish of abundant hands.
+
+To be quite honest, I do not entirely believe that Orator Bryan's tongue
+had anything to do with it. I have long been convinced that personal
+persuasion is a matter of animal magnetism--what in its more obvious
+manifestation we now call hypnotism. At the back of the words and the
+postures, and independent of them, is that secret, mysterious
+power, addressing, not the ear, not the eye, nor, through them,
+the understanding, but through its matching quality in the auditor,
+captivating the will and enslaving it That is how persuasion is
+effected; the spoken words merely supply a pretext for surrender. They
+enable us to yield without loss of our self-esteem, in the delusion that
+we are conceding to reason what is really extorted by charm. The words
+are necessary, too, to point out what the orator wishes us to think,
+if we are not already apprised of it. When the nature of his power is
+better understood and frankly recognized, he can spare himself the toil
+of talking. The parliamentary debate of the future will probably be
+conducted in silence, and with only such gestures as go by the name of
+"passes." The chairman will state the question before the House and
+the side, affirmative or negative, to be taken by the honorable member
+entitled to the floor. That gentleman will rise, train his compelling
+orbs upon the miscreants in opposition, execute a few passes and exhaust
+his alloted time in looking at them. He will then yield to an honorable
+member of dissenting views. The preponderance in magnetic power and
+hypnotic skill will be manifest in the voting. The advantages of the
+method are as plain as the nose on an elephant's face. The "arena" will
+no longer "ring" with anybody's "rousing speech," to the irritating
+abridgment of the inalienable right to pursuit of sleep. Honorable
+members will lack provocation to hurl allegations and cuspidors.
+Pitchforking statesmen and tosspot reformers will be unable to play at
+pitch-and-toss with reputations not submitted for the performance. In
+short, the congenial asperities of debate will be so mitigated that the
+honorable member from Hades will retire permanently from the hauls of
+legislation.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+"Public opinion," says Buckle, "being the voice of the average man, is
+the voice of mediocrity." Is it therefore so very wise and infallible
+a guide as to be accepted without other credentials than its name and
+fame? Ought we to follow its light and leading with no better assurance
+of the character of its authority than a count of noses of those
+following it already, and with no inquiry as to whether it has not on
+many former occasions let them and their several sets of predecessors
+into bogs of error and over precipices to "eternal mock?" Surely
+"the average man," as every one knows him, is not very wise, not very
+learned, not very good; how is it that his views, of so intricate and
+difficult matters as those of which public opinion makes pronouncement
+through him are entitled to such respect? It seems to me that the
+average man, as I know him, is very much a fool, and something of a
+rogue as well. He has only a smattering of education, knows virtually
+nothing of political history, nor history of any kind, is incapable of
+logical, that is to say clear, thinking, is subject to the suasion of
+base and silly prejudices, and selfish beyond expression. That such
+a person's opinions should be so obviously better than my own that
+I should accept them instead, and assist in enacting them into laws,
+appears to me most improbable. I may "bow to the will of the people"
+as gracefully as a defeated candidate, and for the same reason, namely,
+that I can not help myself; but to admit that I was wrong in my belief
+and flatter the power that subdues me--no, that I will not do. And if
+nobody would do so the average man would not be so very cock-sure of
+his infallibility and might sometimes consent to be counseled by his
+betters.
+
+In any matter of which the public has imperfect knowledge, public
+opinion is as likely to be erroneous as is the opinion of an individual
+equally uninformed. To hold otherwise is to hold that wisdom can be got
+by combining many ignorances. A man who knows nothing of algebra can
+not be assisted in the solution of an algebraic problem by calling in
+a neighbor who knows no more than himself, and the solution approved
+by the unanimous vote of ten million such men would count for nothing
+against that of a competent mathematician. To be entirely consistent,
+gentlemen enamored of public opinion should insist that the text books
+of our common schools should be the creation of a mass meeting, and all
+disagreements arising in the course of the work settled by a majority
+vote. That is how all difficulties incident to the popular translation
+of the Hebrew Scriptures were composed. It should be admitted, however
+that most of those voting knew a little Hebrew, though not much. A
+problem in mathematics is a very simple thing compared with many of
+those upon which the people are called to pronounce by resolution and
+ballot--for example, a question of finance.
+
+"The voice of the people is the voice of God"--the saying is so
+respectably old that it comes to us in the Latin. He is a strange, an
+unearthly politician who has not a score of times publicly and solemnly
+signified his faith in it But does anyone really believe it? Let us see.
+In the period between 1859 and 1885, the Democratic party was defeated
+six times in succession. The voice of the people pronounced it in error
+and unfit to govern. Yet after each overthrow it came back into the
+field gravely reaffirming its faith in the principles that God had
+condemned. Then God twice reversed Himself, and the Republicans "never
+turned a hair," but set about beating Him with as firm a confidence of
+success (justified by the event) as they had known in the years of their
+prosperity. Doubtless in every instance of a political party's defeat
+there are defections, but doubtless not all are due to the voice that
+spoke out of the great white light that fell about Saul of Tarsus. By
+the way, it is worth observing that that clever gentleman was under no
+illusion regarding the origin of the voice that wrought his celebrated
+"flop"; he did not confound it with the _vox populi_ The people of
+his time and place had no objection to the persecution that he was
+conducting, and could persecute a trifle themselves upon occasion.
+
+Majorities rule, when they do rule, not because they ought, but because
+they can. We vote in order to learn without fighting which party is the
+stronger; it is less disagreeable to learn it that way than the other
+way. Sometimes the party that is numerically the weaker is by possession
+of the Government actually the stronger, and could maintain itself in
+power by an appeal to arms, but the habit of submitting when outvoted
+is hard to break. Moreover, we all recognize in a subconscious way, the
+reasonableness of the habit as a practical method of getting on; and
+there is always the confident hope of success in the next canvass. That
+one's cause will succeed because it ought to succeed is perhaps the most
+general and invincible folly affecting the human judgment Observation
+can not shake it, nor experience destroy. Though you bray a partisan in
+the mortar of adversity till he numbers the strokes of the pestle by the
+hairs of his head, yet will not this fool notion depart from him. He is
+always going to win the next time, however frequently and disastrously
+he has lost before. And he can always give you the most cogent reasons
+for the faith that is in him. His chief reliance is on the "fatal
+mistakes" made since the last election by the other party. There never
+was a year in which the party in power and the party out of power did
+not make bad mistakes--mistakes which, unlike eggs and fish, seem always
+worst when freshest. If idiotic errors of policy were always fatal, no
+party would ever win an election and there would be a hope of better
+government under the benign sway of the domestic cow.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Each political party accuses the "opposing candidate" of refusing to
+answer certain questions which somebody has chosen to ask him. I think
+myself it is discreditable for a candidate to answer any questions at
+all, to make speeches, declare his policy, or to do anything whatever
+to get himself elected. If a political party choose to nominate a man so
+obscure that his character and his views on all public questions are
+not known or inferable he ought to have the dignity to refuse to expound
+them. As to the strife for office being a pursuit worthy of a noble
+ambition, I do not think so; nor shall I believe that many do think so
+until the term "office seeker" carries a less opprobrious meaning
+and the dictum that "the office should seek the man, not the man the
+office," has a narrower currency among all manner of persons. That by
+acts and words generally felt to be discreditable a man may evoke great
+popular enthusiasm is not at all surprising. The late Mr. Barnum was not
+the first nor the last to observe that the people love to be humbugged.
+They love an impostor and a scamp, and the best service that you can do
+for a candidate for high political preferment is to prove him a little
+better than a thief, but not quite so good as a thug.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The view is often taken that a representative is the same thing as a
+delegate; that he is to have, and can honestly entertain, no opinion
+that is at variance with the whims and the caprices of his constituents.
+This is the very _reductio ad absurdum_ of representative government.
+That it is the dominant theory of the future there can be little doubt,
+for it is of a piece with the progress downward which is the invariable
+and unbroken tendency of republican institutions. It fits in well with
+manhood suffrage, rotation in office, unrestricted patronage, assessment
+of subordinates, an elective judiciary and the rest of it. This theory
+of representative institutions is the last and lowest stage in our
+pleasant performance of "shooting Niagara." When it shall have universal
+recognition and assent we shall have been fairly engulfed in the
+whirlpool, and the buzzard of anarchy may hopefully whet his beak for
+the national carcass. My view of the matter--which has the further merit
+of being the view held by those who founded this Government--is that a
+man holding office from and for the people is in conscience and honor
+bound to do what seems to his judgment best for the general welfare,
+respectfully regardless of any and all other considerations. This is
+especially true of legislators, to whom such specific "instructions" as
+constituents sometimes send are an impertinence and an insult. Pushed to
+its logical conclusion, the "delegate" idea would remove all necessity
+of electing men of brains and judgment; one man properly connected
+with his constituents by telegraph would make as good a legislator as
+another. Indeed, as a matter of economy, one representative should act
+for many constituencies, receiving his instructions how to vote from
+mass meetings in each. This, besides being logical, would have the added
+advantage of widening and hardening the power of the local "bosses,"
+who, by properly managing the showing of hands could have the same
+beneficent influence in national affairs that they now enjoy in
+municipal. The plan would be a pretty good one if there were not so many
+other ways for the Nation to go to the Devil that it appears needless.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+With a wiser wisdom than was given to them, our forefathers in making
+the Constitution would not have provided that each House of Congress
+"shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of
+its own members." They would have foreseen that a ruling majority of
+Congress could not safely be trusted to exercise this power justly in
+the public interest, but would abuse it in the interest of party. A
+man's right to sit in a legislative body should be determined, not by
+that body, which has neither the impartiality, the knowledge of evidence
+nor the time to determine it rightly, but by the courts of law. That is
+how it is done in England, where Parliament voluntarily surrendered the
+right to say by whom the constituencies shall be represented, and there
+is no disposition to resume it. As the vices hunt in packs, so, too,
+virtues are gregarious; if our Congress had the righteousness to decide
+contested elections justly it would have also the self-denial not to
+wish to decide them at all.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+The purpose of the legislative custom of "eulogizing" dead members of
+Congress is not apparent unless it is to add a terror to death and make
+honorable and self-respecting members rather bear the ills they have
+than escape through the gates of death to others that they know a good
+deal about. If a member of that kind, who has had the bad luck to "go
+before," could be consulted he would indubitably say that he was sorry
+to be dead; and that is not a natural frame of mind in one who is exempt
+from the necessity of himself "delivering a eulogy."
+
+It may be urged that the Congressional "eulogy" expresses in a general
+way the eulogist's notion of what he would like to have somebody say
+of himself when he is by death elected to the Lower House. If so, then
+Heaven help him to a better taste. Meanwhile it is a patriotic duty to
+prevent him from indulging at the public expense the taste that he has.
+There have been a few men in Congress who could speak of the character
+and services of a departed member with truth and even eloquence. One
+such was Senator Vest. Of many others, the most charitable thing that
+one can conscientiously say is that one would a little rather hear a
+"eulogy" by them than on them. Considering that there are many kinds
+of brains and only one kind of no brains, their diversity of gifts is
+remarkable, but one characteristic they have in common: they are all
+poets. Their efforts in the way of eulogium illustrate and illuminate
+Pascal's obscure saying that poetry is a particular sadness. If not sad
+themselves, they are at least the cause of sadness in others, for no
+sooner do they take to their legs to remind us that life is fleeting,
+and to make us glad that it is, than they burst into bloom as poets all!
+Some one has said that in the contemplation of death there is something
+that belittles. Perhaps that explains the transformation. Anyhow the
+Congressional eulogist takes to verse as naturally as a moth to a
+candle, and with about the same result to his reputation for sense.
+
+The poetry is commonly not his own; what it violates every law of sense,
+fitness, metre, rhyme and taste it is. But nine times in ten it is
+some dog's-eared, shop-worn quotation from one of the "standard" bards,
+usually Shakspere. There are familiar passages from that poet which
+have been so often heard in "the halls of legislation" that they have
+acquired an infamy which unfits them for publication in a decent family
+newspaper; and Shakspere himself, reposing in Elysium on his bed of
+asphodel and moly, omits them when reading his complete works to the
+shades of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, for their sins.
+
+This whole business ought to be "cut out" It is not only a waste of
+time and a sore trial to the patience of the country; it is absolutely
+immoral. It is not true that a member of Congress who, while living
+was a most ordinary mortal, becomes by the accident of death a hero, a
+saint, "an example to American youth." Nobody believes these abominable
+"eulogies," and nobody should be permitted to utter them in the time
+and place designated for another purpose. A "tribute" that is exacted
+by custom and has not the fire and light of spontaneity is without
+sincerity or sense. A simple resolution of regret and respect is all
+that the occasion requires and would not inhibit any further utterance
+that friends and admirers of the deceased might be moved to make
+elsewhere. If any bereaved gentlemen, feeling his heart getting into his
+head, wishes to tickle his ear with his tongue by way of standardizing
+his emotion let him hire a hall and do so. But he should not make the
+Capitol a "Place of Wailing" and the Congressional Record a book of
+bathos.
+
+
+
+
+SOME FEATURES OF THE LAW
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THERE is a difference between religion and the amazing circumstructure
+which, under the name of theology, the priesthoods have builded round
+about it, which for centuries they made the world believe was the true
+temple, and which, after incalculable mischiefs wrought, immeasurable
+blood spilled in its extension and consolidation, is only now beginning
+to crumble at the touch of reason. There is the same difference between
+the laws and the law--the naked statutes (bad enough, God knows) and
+the incomputable additions made to them by lawyers. This immense body of
+superingenious writings it is that we all are responsible to in person
+and property. It is unquestionable authority for setting aside any
+statute that any legislative body ever passed or can pass. In it are
+dictates of recognized validity for turning topsy-turvy every principle
+of justice and reversing every decree of reason. There is no fallacy so
+monstrous, no deduction so hideously unrelated to common sense, as not
+to receive, somewhere in the myriad pages of this awful compilation, a
+support that any judge in the land would be proud to recognize with a
+decision if ably persuaded. I do not say that the lawyers are altogether
+responsible for the existence of this mass of disastrous rubbish, nor
+for its domination of the laws. They only create and thrust it down
+our throats; we are guilty of contributory negligence in not biting the
+spoon.
+
+As long as there exists the right of appeal there is a chance of
+acquittal. Otherwise the right of appeal would be a sham and an insult
+more intolerable, even, than that of the man convicted of murder to say
+why he should not receive the sentence which nothing he may say will
+avert. So long as acquittal may ensue guilt is not established. Why,
+than are men sentenced before they are proved guilty? Why are they
+punished in the middle of proceedings against them? A lawyer can reply
+to these questions in a thousand ingenious ways; there is but one
+answer. It is because we are a barbarous race, submitting to laws made
+by lawyers for lawyers. Let the "legal fraternity" reflect that a lawyer
+is one whose profession it is to circumvent the law; that it is a
+part of his business to mislead and befog the court of which he is an
+officer; that it is considered right and reasonable for him to live by
+a division of the spoils of crime and misdemeanor; that the utmost
+atonement he ever makes for acquitting a man whom he knows to be guilty
+is to convict a man whom he knows to be innocent. I have looked into
+this thing a bit and it is my judgment that all the methods of our
+courts, and the traditions of bench and bar exist and are perpetuated,
+altered and improved, for the one purpose of enabling the lawyers as a
+class to exact the greatest amount of money from the rest of mankind.
+The laws are mostly made by lawyers, and so made as to encourage and
+compel litigation. By lawyers they are interpreted and by lawyers
+enforced for their own profit and advantage. The whole intricate and
+interminable machinery of precedent, rulings, decisions, objections,
+writs of error, motions for new trials, appeals, reversals, affirmations
+and the rest of it, is a transparent and iniquitous systems of
+"cinching." What remedy would I propose? None. There is none to propose.
+The lawyers have "got us" and they mean to keep us. But if thoughtless
+children of the frontier sometimes rise to tar and feather the legal
+pelt may God's grace go with them and amen. I do not believe there is a
+lawyer in Heaven, but by a bath of tar and a coating of hen's-down they
+can be made to resemble angels more nearly than by any other process.
+
+The matchless villainy of making men suffer for crimes of which they may
+eventually be acquitted is consistent with our entire system of laws--a
+system so complicated and contradictory that a judge simply does as he
+pleases, subject only to the custom of giving for his action reasons
+that at his option may or may not be derived from the statute. He may
+sternly affirm that he sits there to interpret the law as he finds it,
+not to make it accord with his personal notions of right and justice. Or
+he may declare that it could never have been the Legislature's intention
+to do wrong, and so, shielded by the useful phrase _contra bonos mores_,
+pronounce that illegal which he chooses to consider inexpedient. Or
+he may be guided by either of any two inconsistent precedents, as best
+suits his purpose. Or he may throw aside both statute and precedent,
+disregard good morals, and justify the judgment that he wishes to
+deliver by what other lawyers have written in books, and still others,
+without anybody's authority, have chosen to accept as a part of the law.
+I have in mind judges whom I have observed to do all these things in a
+single term of court, and could mention one who has done them all in a
+single decision, and that not a very long one. The amazing feature
+of the matter is that all these methods are lawful--made so, not by
+legislative enactment, but by the judges. Language can not be used with
+sufficient lucidity and positiveness to land them.
+
+The legal purpose of a preliminary examination is not the discovery of
+a criminal; it is the ascertaining of the probable guilt or innocence
+of the person already charged. To permit that person's counsel to insult
+and madden the various assisting witnesses in the hope of making them
+seem to incriminate themselves instead of him by statements that may
+afterward be used to confuse a jury--that is perversion of law to defeat
+justice. The outrageous character of the practice is seen to better
+advantage what contrasted with the tender consideration enjoyed by the
+person actually accused and presumably guilty--the presumption of his
+innocence being as futile a fiction as that a sheep's tail is a leg when
+called so. Actually, the prisoner in a criminal trial is the only
+person supposed to have a knowledge of the facts who is not compelled to
+testify! And this amazing exemption is given him by way of immunity
+from the snares and pitfalls with which the paths of all witnesses are
+wantonly beset! To a visiting Lunarian it would seem strange indeed
+that in a Terrestrial court of justice it is not deemed desirable for an
+accused person to incriminate himself, and that it _is_ deemed desirable
+for a subpoena to be more dreaded than a warrant.
+
+When a child, a wife, a servant, a student--any one under personal
+authority or bound by obligation of honor--is accused or suspected an
+explanation is demanded, and refusal to testify is held, and rightly
+held, a confession of guilt To question the accused--rigorously and
+sharply to examine him on all matters relating to the offense, and even
+trap him if he seem to be lying--that is Nature's method of criminal
+procedure; why in our public trials do we forego its advantages? It may
+annoy; a person arrested for crime must expect annoyance. It can not
+make an innocent man incriminate himself, not even a witness, but it can
+make a rogue do so, and therein lies its value. Any pressure short of
+physical torture or the threat of it, that can be put upon a rogue to
+make him assist in his own undoing is just and therefore expedient.
+
+This ancient and efficient safeguard to rascality, the right of a
+witness to refuse to testify when his testimony would tend to convict
+him of crime, has been strengthened by a decision of the United States
+Supreme Court. That will probably add another century or two to its
+mischievous existence, and possibly prove the first act in such an
+extension of it that eventually a witness can not be compelled to
+testify at all. In fact it is difficult to see how he can be compelled
+to now if he has the hardihood to exercise his constitutional right
+without shame and with an intelligent consciousness of its limitless
+application.
+
+The case in which the Supreme Court made the decision was one in which a
+witness refused to say whether he had received from a defendant railway
+company a rate on grain shipments lower than the rate open to all
+shippers. The trial was in the United States District Court for the
+Northern District of Illinois, and Judge Gresham chucked the scoundrel
+into jail. He naturally applied to the Supreme Court for relief, and
+that high tribunal gave joy to every known or secret malefactor in the
+country by deciding--according to law, no doubt--that witnesses in a
+criminal case can not be compelled to testify to anything that "_might
+tend_ to criminate them _in any way_, or subject them to _possible_
+prosecution." The italics are my own and seem to me to indicate, about
+as clearly as extended comment could, the absolutely boundless nature
+of the immunity that the decision confirms or confers. It is to be
+hoped that some public-spirited gentleman called to the stand in some
+celebrated case may point the country's attention to the state of the
+law by refusing to tell his name, age or occupation, or answer any
+question whatever. And it would be a fitting _finale_ to the farce if he
+would threaten the too curious attorney with an action for damages for
+compelling a disclosure of character.
+
+Most lawyers have made so profound a study of human nature as to think
+that if they have shown a man to be of loose life with regard to women
+they have shown him to be one that would tell needless lies to a jury--a
+conviction unsupported by the familiar facts of life and character.
+Different men have different vices, and addiction to one kind of
+"upsetting sin" does not imply addiction to an unrelated kind. Doubtless
+a rake is a liar in so far as is needful to concealment, but it does
+not follow that he will commit perjury to save a horsethief from the
+penitentiary or send a good man to the gallows. As to lying, generally,
+he is not conspicuously worse than the mere lover, male or female; for
+lovers have been liars from the beginning of time. They deceive when it
+is necessary and when it is not. Schopenhauer says that it is because of
+a sense of guilt--they contemplate the commission of a crime and, like
+other criminals, cover their tracks. I am not prepared to say if that
+is the true explanation, but to the fact to be explained I am ready to
+testify with lifted arms. Yet no cross-examining attorney tries to break
+the credibility of a witness by showing that he is in love.
+
+An habitual liar, if disinterested, makes about as good a witness
+as anybody. There is really no such thing as "the lust of lying:"
+falsehoods are told for advantage--commonly a shadowy and illusory
+advantage, but one distinctly enough had in mind. Discerning no
+opportunity to promote his interest, tickle his vanity or feed a grudge,
+the habitual liar will tell the truth. If lawyers would study human
+nature with half the assiduity that they give to resolution of hairs
+into their longitudinal elements they would be better fitted for service
+of the devil than they have now the usefulness to be.
+
+I have always asserted the right and expediency of cross-examining
+attorneys in court with a view to testing their credibility. An
+attorney's relation to the trial is closer and more important than that
+of a witness. He has more to say and more opportunities to deceive
+the jury, not only by naked lying, but by both _suppressio veri_ and
+_suggestio falsi_. Why is it not important to ascertain his credibility;
+and if an inquiry into his private life and public reputation will
+assist, as himself avers, why should he not be put upon the grill and
+compelled to sweat out the desired incrimination? I should think it
+might give good results, for example, to compel him to answer a few
+questions touching, not his private life, but his professional. Somewhat
+like this:
+
+"Did you ever defend a client, knowing him to be guilty?"
+
+"What was your motive in doing so?"
+
+"But in addition to your love of fair play had you not also the hope and
+assurance of a fee?"
+
+"In defending your guilty client did you declare your belief in his
+innocence?"
+
+"Yes, I understand, but necessary as it may have been (in that it helped
+to defeat justice and earn your fee) was not your declaration a lie?"
+
+"Do you believe it right to lie for the purpose of circumventing
+justice?--yes or no?"
+
+"Do you believe it right to lie for personal gain--yes or no?"
+
+"Then why did you do both?"
+
+"A man who lies to beat the laws and fill his purse is--what?"
+
+"In defending a murderer did you ever misrepresent the character, acts,
+motives and intentions of the man that he murdered--never mind the
+purpose and effect of such misrepresentation--yes or no?"
+
+"That is what we call slander of the dead, is it not?"
+
+"What is the most accurate name you can think of for one who slanders
+the dead to defeat justice and promote his own fortune?"
+
+"Yes, I know--such practices are allowed by the 'ethics' of your
+profession, but can you point to any evidence that they are allowed by
+Jesus Christ?"
+
+"If in former trials you have obstructed justice by slander of the
+dead, by falsely affirming the innocence of the guilty, by cheating in
+argument, by deceiving the court whom you are sworn to serve and assist,
+and have done all this for personal gain, do you expect, and is it
+reasonable for you to expect, the jury in this case to believe you?"
+
+"One moment more, please. Did you ever accept an annual, or other fee
+conditioned on your not taking any action against a corporation?"
+
+"While in receipt of such refrainer--I beg you pardon, retainer--did you
+ever prosecute a blackmailer?"
+
+It will be seen that in testing the credibility of a lawyer it is
+needless to go into his private life and his character as a man and
+a citizen: his professional practices are an ample field in which to
+search for offenses against man and God. Indeed, it is sufficient simply
+to ask him: "What is your view of 'the ethics of your profession' as a
+suitable standard of conduct for a pirate of the Spanish Main?"
+
+The moral sense of the laymen is dimly conscious of something wrong
+in the ethics of the noble profession; the lawyers affirming, rightly
+enough, a public necessity for them and their mercenary services, permit
+their thrift to construe it vaguely as personal justification. But
+nobody has blown away from the matter its brumous encompassment and let
+in the light upon it It is very simple.
+
+Is it honorable for a lawyer to try to clear a man that he knows
+deserves conviction? That is not the entire question by much. Is it
+honorable to pretend to believe what you do not believe? Is it honorable
+to lie? I submit that these questions are not answered affirmatively by
+showing the disadvantage to the public and to civilization of a lawyer
+refusing to serve a known offender. The popular interest, like any other
+good cause, can be and commonly is, served by foul means. Justice itself
+may be promoted by acts essentially unjust. In serving a sordid ambition
+a powerful scoundrel may by acts in themselves wicked augment the
+prosperity of a whole nation. I have not the right to deceive and lie in
+order to advantage my fellowmen, any more than I have the right to steal
+or murder to advantage them, nor have my fellowmen the power to grant me
+that indulgence.
+
+The question of a lawyer's right to clear a known criminal (with the
+several questions involved) is not answered affirmatively by showing
+that the law forbids him to decline a case for reasons personal to
+himself--not even if we admit the statute's moral authority.
+Preservation of conscience and character is a civic duty, as well as a
+personal; one's fellow-men have a distinct interest in it. That, I
+admit, is an argument rather in the manner of an attorney; clearly
+enough the intent of this statute is to compel an attorney to cheat and
+lie for any rascal that wants him to. In that sense it may be regarded
+as a law softening the rigor of all laws; it does not mitigate
+punishments, but mitigates the chance of incurring them. The infamy of
+it lies in forbidding an attorney to be a gentleman. Like all laws it
+falls something short of its intent: many attorneys, even some who
+defend that law, are as honorable as is consistent with the practice of
+deceit to serve crime.
+
+It will not do to say that an attorney in defending a client is not
+compelled to cheat and lie. What kind of defense could be made by any
+one who did not profess belief in the innocence of his client?--did
+not affirm it in the most serious and impressive way?--did not lie? How
+would it profit the defense to be conducted by one who would not meet
+the prosecution's grave asseverations of belief in the prisoner's guilt
+by equally grave assurances of faith in his innocence? And in point
+of fact, when was counsel for the defense ever known to forego the
+advantage of that solemn falsehood? If I am asked what would become
+of accused persons if they had to prove their innocence to the lawyers
+before making a defense in court, I reply that I do not know; and in my
+turn I ask: What would become of Humpty Dumpty if all the king's horses
+and all the king's men were an isosceles triangle?
+
+It all amounts to this, that lawyers want clients and are not particular
+about the kind of clients that they get All this is very ugly work,
+and a public interest that can not be served without it would better be
+unserved.
+
+     I grant, in short, 'tis better all around
+     That ambidextrous consciences abound
+     In courts of law to do the dirty work
+     That self-respecting scavengers would shirk.
+     What then? Who serves however clean a plan
+     By doing dirty work, he is a dirty man.
+
+But in point of fact I do not "grant" any such thing. It is not for
+the public interest that a rogue have the same freedom of defense as an
+honest man; it should be a good deal harder for him. His troubles should
+begin, not when he seeks acquital, but when he seeks counsel. It would
+be better for the community if he could not obtain the services of a
+reputable attorney, or any attorney at all. A defense that can not be
+made without his attorney's actual knowledge of his guilt should be
+impossible to him. Nor should he be permitted to remain off the witness
+stand lest he incriminate himself. It ought to be the aim of the court
+to let him incriminate himself--to make him do so if his testimony
+will. In our courts that natural method would serve the ends of justice
+greatly better than the one that we have. Testimony of the guilty would
+assist in conviction; that of the innocent would not.
+
+As to the general question of a judge's right to inflict arbitrary
+punishment for words that he may be pleased to hold disrespectful to
+himself or another judge, I do not myself believe that any such right
+exists; the practice seems to be merely a survival--a heritage from the
+dark days of irresponsible power, when the scope of judicial authority
+had no other bounds than fear of the royal gout or indigestion. If in
+these modern days the same right is to exist it may be necessary to
+revive the old checks upon it by restoring the throne. In freeing us
+from the monarchial chain, the coalition of European Powers commonly
+known in American history as "the valor of our forefathers" stripped us
+starker than they knew.
+
+Suppose an attorney should find his client's interests imperiled by
+a prejudiced or corrupt judge--what is he to do? If he may not make
+representations to that effect, supporting them with evidence, where
+evidence is possible and by inference where it is not, what means of
+protection shall he venture to adopt? If it be urged in objection that
+judges are never prejudiced nor corrupt I confess that I shall have no
+answer: the proposition will deprive me of breath.
+
+If contempt is not a crime it should not be punished; if a crime it
+should be punished as other crimes are punished--by indictment
+or information, trial by jury if a jury is demanded, with all the
+safeguards that secure an accused person against judicial blunders and
+judicial bias. The necessity for these safeguards is even greater
+in cases of contempt than in others--particularly if the prosecuting
+witness is to sit in judgment on his own grievance. That should, of
+course, not be permitted: the trial should take place before another
+judge.
+
+Why should twelve able-bodied jurymen, with their oaths to guide them
+and the law to back, submit to the dictation of one small judge armed
+with nothing better than an insolent assumption of authority? A judge
+has not the moral right to order a jury to acquit, the utmost that he
+can rightly do is to point out what state of the law or facts may seem
+to him unfavorable to conviction. If the jurors, holding a different
+view, persist in conviction the accused will have grounds, doubtless,
+for a new trial. But under no circumstances is a judge justified in
+requiring a responsible human being to disregard the solemn obligation
+of an oath.
+
+The public ear is dowered with rather more than just enough of clotted
+nonsense about "attacks upon the dignity of the Bench," "bringing the
+judiciary into disrepute" and the rueful rest of it. I crave leave
+to remind the solicitudinarians sounding these loud alarums on their
+several larynges that by persons of understanding men are respected, not
+for what they do, but for what they are, and that one public functionary
+will stand as high in their esteem as another if as high in character.
+The dignity of a wise and righteous judge needs not the artificial
+safeguarding which is a heritage of the old days when if dissent found a
+tongue the public executioner cut it out. The Bench will be sufficiently
+respected when it is no longer a place where dullards dream and rogues
+rob--when its _personnel_ is no longer chosen in the back-rooms of
+tipple-shops, forced upon yawning conventions and confirmed by the votes
+of men who neither know what the candidates are nor what they should be.
+With the gang that we have and under our system must continue to have,
+respect is out of the question and ought to be. They are entitled to
+just as much of its forms and observances as are needful to maintenance
+of order in their courts and fortification of their lawful power--no
+more. As to their silence under criticism, that is as they please. No
+body but themselves is holding their tongues.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+A law under which the unsuccessful respondent in a divorce proceeding
+may be forbidden to marry again during the life of the successful
+complainant, the latter being subject to no such disability, is
+infamous infinitely. If the disability is intended as a punishment it
+is exceptional among legal punishments in that it is inflicted without
+conviction, trial or arraignment, the divorce proceedings being quite
+another and different matter. It is exceptional in that the period
+of its continuance, and therefore the degree of its severity, are
+indeterminate; they are dependent on no limiting statute, and on
+neither the will of the power inflicting nor the conduct of the person
+suffering.
+
+To sentence a person to a punishment that is to be mild or severe
+according to chance or--which is even worse--circumstance, which but one
+person, and that person not officially connected with administration of
+justice, can but partly control, is a monstrous perversion of the main
+principles that are supposed to underlie the laws.
+
+In "the case at bar" it can be nothing to the woman--possibly herself
+remarried--whether the man remarries or not; that is, can affect only
+her feelings, and only such of them as are least creditable to her.
+Yet her self-interest is enlisted against him to do him incessant
+disservice. By merely caring for her health she increases the sharpness
+of his punishment--for punishment it is if he feels it such; every hour
+that she wrests from death is added to his "term." The expediency of
+preventing a man from marrying, without having the power to prevent him
+from making his marriage desirable in the interest of the public and
+vital to that of some woman, is not discussable here. If a man is ever
+justified in poisoning a woman who is no longer his wife it is when, by
+way of making him miserable, the State has given him, or he supposes it
+to have given him, a direct and distinct interest in her death.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+With a view, possibly, to promoting respect for law by making the
+statutes so conform to public sentiment that none will fall into
+disesteem and disuse, it has been advocated that there be a formal
+recognition of sex in the penal code, by making a difference in the
+punishment of men and of women for the same crimes and misdemeanors. The
+argument is that if women were "provided" with milder punishment
+juries would sometimes convict them, whereas they now commonly get off
+altogether.
+
+The plan is not so new as might be thought. Many of the nations of
+antiquity of whose laws we have knowledge, and nearly all the European
+nations until within a comparatively recent time, punished women
+differently from men for the same offenses. And as recently as the
+period of the Early Puritan in New England women were punished for some
+offenses which men might commit without fear if not without reproach.
+The ducking-stool, for example, was an appliance for softening the
+female temper only. In England women used to be burned at the stake for
+crimes for which men were hanged, roasting being regarded as the milder
+punishment. In point of fact, it was not punishment at all, the victim
+being carefully strangled before the fire touched her. Burning was
+simply a method of disposing of the body so expeditiously as to give
+no occasion and opportunity for the unseemly social rites commonly
+performed about the scaffold of the erring male by the jocular populace.
+As lately as 1763 a woman named Margaret Biddingfield was burned in
+Suffolk as an accomplice in the crime of "petty treason." She had
+assisted in the murder of her husband, the actual killing being done by
+a man; and he was hanged, as no doubt he richly deserved. For "coining,"
+too (which was "treason"), men were hanged and women burned. This
+distinction between the sexes was maintained until the year of grace
+1790, after which female offenders ceased to have "a stake in the
+country," and like Hood's martial hero, "enlisted in the line."
+
+In still earlier days, before the advantages of fire were understood,
+our good grandmothers who sinned were admonished by water--they were
+drowned; but in the reign of Henry III a woman was hanged--without
+strangulation, apparently, for after a whole day of it she was cut down
+and pardoned. Sorceresses and unfaithful wives were smothered in mud, as
+also were unfaithful wives among the ancient Burgundians. The punishment
+of unfaithful husbands is not of record; we only know that there were
+no austerely virtuous editors to direct the finger of public scorn their
+way.
+
+Among the Anglo-Saxons, women who had the bad luck to be detected in
+theft were drowned, while men meeting with the same mischance died a dry
+death by hanging. By the early Danish laws female thieves were buried
+alive, whether or not from motives of humanity is not now known. This
+seems to have been the fashion in France also, for in 1331 a woman named
+Duplas was scourged and buried alive at Abbeville, and in 1460 Perotte
+Mauger, a receiver of stolen goods, was inhumed by order of the Provost
+of Paris in front of the public gibbet. In Germany in the good old
+days certain kinds of female criminals were "impaled," a punishment too
+grotesquely horrible for description, but likely enough considered by
+the simple German of the period conspicuously merciful.
+
+It is, in short, only recently that the civilized nations have placed
+the sexes on an equality in the matter of the death penalty for crime,
+and the new system is not yet by any means universal. That it is a
+better system than the old, or would be if enforced, is a natural
+presumption from human progress, out of which it is evolved. But
+coincidently with its evolution has evolved also a sentiment adverse
+to punishment of women at all. But this sentiment appears to be of
+independent growth and in no way a reaction against that which caused
+the change. To mitigate the severity of the death penalty for women to
+some pleasant form of euthanasia, such as drowning in rose-water, or
+in their case to abolish the death penalty altogether and make their
+capital punishment consist in a brief interment in a jail with a
+softened name, would probably do no good, for whatever form it might
+take, it would be, so far as woman is concerned, the "extreme penalty"
+and crowning disgrace, and jurors would be as reluctant to inflict it as
+they now are to inflict hanging.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Testators should not, from the snug security of the grave, utter a
+perpetual threat of disinheritance or any other uncomfortable fate to
+deter an American citizen, even one of his own legatees, from applying
+to the courts of his country for redress of any wrong from which he
+might consider himself as suffering. The courts of law ought to be open
+to any one conceiving himself a victim of injustice, and it should be
+unlawful to abridge the right of complaint by making its exercise more
+hazardous than it naturally is. Doubtless the contesting of wills is
+a nuisance, generally speaking, the contestant conspicuously devoid of
+moral worth and the verdict singularly unrighteous; but as long as
+some testators really _are_ daft, or subject to interested suasion, or
+wantonly sinful, they should be denied the power to stifle dissent by
+fining the luckless dissenter. The dead have too much to say in this
+world at the best, and it is monstrous and intolerable tyranny for them
+to stand at the door of the Temple of Justice to drive away the suitors
+that themselves have made.
+
+Obedience to the commands of the dead should be conditional upon their
+good behavior, and it is not good behavior to set up a censure of
+actions at law among the living. If our courts are not competent to
+say what actions are proper to be brought and what are unfit to be
+entertained let us improve them until they are competent, or abolish
+them altogether and resort to the mild and humane arbitrament of the
+dice. But while courts have the civility to exist they should refuse
+to surrender any part of their duties and responsibilities to such
+exceedingly private persons as those under six feet of earth, or sealed
+up in habitations of hewn stone. Persons no longer affectible by human
+events should be denied a voice in determining the character and trend
+of them. Respect for the wishes of the dead is a tender and beautiful
+sentiment, certainly. Unfortunately, it can not be ascertained that
+they have any wishes. What commonly go by that name are wishes once
+entertained by living persons who are now dead, and who in dying
+renounced them, along with everything else. Like those who entertained
+them, the wishes are no longer in existence. "The wishes of the dead,"
+therefore, are not wishes, and are not of the dead. Why they should
+have anything more than a sentimental influence upon those still in the
+flesh, and be a factor to be reckoned with in the practical affairs
+of the super-graminous world, is a question to which the merely human
+understanding can find no answer, and it must be referred to the
+lawyers. When "from the tombs a doleful sound" is vented, and "thine ear"
+is invited to "attend the cry," an intelligent forethought will suggest
+that you inquire if it is anything about property. If so pass on--that
+is no sacred spot.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Much of the testimony in French courts, civil and martial, appears to
+consist of personal impressions and opinions of the witnesses. All very
+improper and mischievous, no doubt, if--if what? Why, obviously, if
+the judges are unfit to sit in judgment By designating them to sit the
+designating power assumes their fitness--assumes that they know enough
+to take such things for what they are worth, to make the necessary
+allowances; if needful, to disregard a witness's opinion altogether. I
+do not know if they are fit. I do not know that they do make the needful
+allowances. It is by no means clear to me that any judge or juror,
+French, American or Patagonian, is competent to ascertain the truth when
+lying witnesses are trying to conceal it under the direction of skilled
+and conscientiousless attorneys licensed to deceive. But his competence
+is a basic assumption of the law vesting him with the duty of deciding.
+Having chosen him for that duty the French law very logically lets him
+alone to decide for himself what is evidence and what is not. It does
+not trust him a little but altogether. It puts him under conditions
+familiar to him--makes him accessible to just such influences and
+suasions as he is accustomed to when making conscious and unconscious
+decisions in his personal affairs.
+
+There may be a distinct gain to justice in permitting a witness to
+say whatever he wants to say. If he is telling the truth he will not
+contradict himself; if he is lying the more rope he is given the more
+surely he will entangle himself. To the service of that end defendants
+and prisoners should, I think, be compelled to testify and denied the
+advantage of declining to answer, for silence is the refuge of guilt
+In endeavoring by austere means to make an accused person incriminate
+himself the French judge logically applies the same principle that a
+parent uses with a suspected child. When the Grandfather of His Country
+arraigned the wee George Washington for arboricide the accused was not
+carefully instructed that he need not answer if a truthful answer would
+tend to convict him. If he had refused to answer he would indubitably
+have been lambasted until he did answer, as right richly he would have
+deserved to be.
+
+The custom of permitting a witness to wander at will over the entire
+field of knowledge, hearsay, surmise and opinion has several distinct
+advantages over our practice. In giving hearsay evidence, for example,
+he may suggest a new and important witness of whom the counsel for the
+other side would not otherwise have heard, and who can then be brought
+into court. On some unguarded and apparently irrelevant statement he may
+open an entirely new line of inquiry, or throw upon the case a flood
+of light. Everyone knows what revelations are sometimes evoked by
+apparently the most insignificant remarks. Why should justice be denied
+a chance to profit that way?
+
+There is a still greater advantage in the French "method." By giving a
+witness free rein in expression of his personal opinions and feelings we
+should be able to calculate his frame of mind, his good or ill will
+to the prosecution or defense and, therefore, to a certain extent his
+credibility. In our courts he is able by a little solemn perjury to
+conceal all this, even from himself, and pose as an impartial witness,
+when in truth, with regard to the accused, he is full of rancor or
+reeking with compassion.
+
+In theory our system is perfect. The accused is prosecuted by a public
+officer, who having no interest in his conviction, will serve the State
+without mischievous zeal and perform his disagreeable task with fairness
+and consideration. He is permitted to entrust his defense to another
+officer, whose duty it is to make a rigidly truthful and candid
+presentation of his case in order to assist the court to a just
+decision. The jurors, if there are jurors, are neither friendly nor
+hostile, are open-minded, intelligent and conscientious. As to the
+witnesses, are they not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth (in
+so far as they are permitted) and nothing but the truth? What could
+be finer and better than all this?--what could more certainly assure
+justice? How close the resemblance is between this ideal picture and
+what actually occurs all know, or should know. The judge is commonly
+an ignoramus incapable of logical thought and with little sense of the
+dread and awful nature of his responsibility. The prosecuting attorney
+thinks it due to his reputation to "make a record" and tries to convict
+by hook or crook, even when he is himself persuaded of the defendant's
+innocence. Counsel for the defense is equally unscrupulous for
+acquittal, and both, having industriously coached their witnesses,
+contend against each other in deceiving the court by every artifice
+of which they are masters. Witnesses on both sides perjure themselves
+freely and with almost perfect immunity if detected. At the close of it
+all the poor weary jurors, hopelessly bewildered and dumbly resentful of
+their duping, render a random or compromise verdict, or one which best
+expresses their secret animosity to the lawyer they like least or their
+faith in the newspapers which they have diligently and disobediently
+read every night Commenting upon Rabelais' old judge who, when impeached
+for an outrageous decision, pleaded his defective eye-sight which made
+him miscount the spots on the dice, the most distinguished lawyer of my
+acquaintance seriously assured me that if all the cases with which he
+had been connected had been decided with the dice substantial justice
+would have been done more frequently than it was done. If that is true,
+or nearly true, and I believe it, the American's right to sneer at the
+Frenchman's "judicial methods" is still an open question.
+
+It is urged that the corrupt practices in our courts of law be uncovered
+to public view, whenever that is possible, by dial impeccable censor,
+the press. Exposure of rascality is very good--better, apparently
+for rascals than for anybody else, for it usually suggests something
+rascally which they had overlooked, and so familiarizes the public with
+crime that crime no longer begets loathing. If the newspapers of the
+country are really concerned about corrupter practices than their own
+and willing to bring our courts up to the English standard there is
+something better than exposure--which fatigues. Let the newspapers set
+about creating a public opinion favorable to non-elective judges, well
+paid, powerful to command respect and holding office for life or good
+behavior. That is the only way to get good men and great lawyers on the
+Bench. As matters are, we stand and cry for what the English have and
+rail at the way they get it. Our boss-made, press-ridden and mob-fearing
+paupers and ignoramuses of the Bench give us as good a quality of
+justice as we merit A better quality awaits us whenever the will to have
+it is attended by the sense to take it.
+
+
+
+
+ARBITRATION
+
+THE universal cry for arbitration is either dishonest or unwise. For
+every evil there are quack remedies galore--especially for every evil
+that is irremediable. Of this order of remedies is arbitration, for of
+this order of evils is the inadequate wage of manual labor. Since the
+beginning of authentic history everything has been tried in the hope
+of divorcing poverty and labor, but nothing has parted them. It is not
+conceivable that anything ever will; success of arbitration, antecedently
+improbable, is demonstrably impossible. Most of the work of the world
+is hard, disagreeable work, requiring little intelligence. Most of the
+people of the world are unintelligent--unfit to do any other work. If
+it were not done by them it would not be done, and it is the basic work.
+Withdraw them from it and the whole superstructure would topple and
+fall. Yet there is too little of the work, and there are so many
+incapable of doing anything else that adequate return is out of the
+question. For the laboring _class_ there is no hope of an existence that
+is comfortable in comparison with that of the other class; the hope of
+an individual laborer lies in the possibility of fitting himself for
+higher employment--employment of the head; not manual but cerebral
+labor. While selfishness remains the main ingredient of human nature
+(and a survey of the centuries accessible to examination shows but a
+slow and intermittent decrease) the cerebral workers, being the wiser
+and no better, will manage to take the greater profit. In justice it
+must be said of them that they extend a warm and sincere invitation to
+their ranks, and take "apprentices;" every chance of education that the
+other class enjoys is proof of that.
+
+All this is perhaps a trifle abstruse; let us, then, look at arbitration
+more nearly; in our time it is, in form at least something new. It
+began as "international arbitration," which already, in settling a few
+disputes of no great importance, has shown itself a dangerous remedy. In
+the necessary negotiation to determine exactly what points to submit to
+whom, and how, and where, and when to submit them, and how to carry out
+the arbitrator's decision, scores of questions are raised, upon each of
+which it is as easy to disagree and fight as upon the original issue.
+International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many
+burning questions for a smouldering one; for disputes that have reached
+a really acute stage are not submitted. The animosities that it has
+kindled have been hotter than those it has quenched.
+
+Industrial arbitration is no better; it is manifestly worse, and any law
+enforcing it and enforcing compliance with its decisions, is absurd and
+mischievous. "Compulsory arbitration" is not arbitration, the essence
+whereof is voluntary submission of differences and voluntary submission
+to judgment. If either reference or obedience is enforced the
+arbitrators are simply a court with no powers to do anything but apply
+the law. Proponents of the fad would do well to consider this: If a
+party to a labor dispute is _compelled_ to invoke and obey a decision
+of arbitrators that decision must follow strictly the line of law; the
+smallest invasion of any constitutional, statutory or common-law right
+will enable him to upset the whole judgment No legislative body can
+establish a tribunal empowered to make and enforce illegal or extra
+legal decisions; for making and enforcing legal ones the tribunals that
+we already have are sufficient This talk of "compulsory arbitration"
+is the maddest nonsense that the industrial situation has yet evolved.
+Doubtless it is sent upon us for our sins; but had we not already a
+plague of inveracity?
+
+Arbitration of labor disputes means compromise with the unions. It can,
+in this country, mean nothing else, for the law would not survive a
+half-dozen failures to concede some part of their demands, however
+reasonless. By repeated strikes they would eventually get all their
+original demand and as much more as on second thought they might choose
+to ask for. Each concession would be, as it is now, followed by a new
+demand, and the first arbitrators might as well allow them all that they
+demand and all that they mean to demand hereafter.
+
+Would not employers be equally unscrupulous. They would not. They could
+not afford the disturbance, the stoppage of the business, the risk
+of unfair decisions in a country where it is "popular" to favor and
+encourage, not the just, but the poor. The labor leaders have nothing to
+lose, not even their jobs, for their work is labor leading. Their dupes,
+by the way, would be dupes no longer, for with enforced arbitration the
+game of "follow my leader" would pay until there should be nothing to
+follow him to but empty treasuries of dead industries in an extinct
+civilization. If there must be enforced arbitration it should at least
+not apply to that sum of all impudent rascalities, the "sympathetic
+strike."
+
+As to the men who have set up the monstrous claim asserted by the
+"sympathetic strike," I shall refer to the affair of 1904. If it was
+creditable in them to feel so much concern about a few hundred aliens in
+Illinois, how about the grievances of the whole body of their countrymen
+in California? When their employers, who they confess were good to them,
+were plundering the Californians, they did not strike, sympathetically
+nor otherwise. Year after year the railway companies picked the pockets
+of the Californians; corrupted their courts and legislatures; laid its
+Briarean hands in exaction upon every industry and interest; filled the
+land with lies and false reasoning; threw honest men into prisons and
+locked the gates of them against thieves and assassins; by open defiance
+of the tax collector denied to children of the poor the advantages of
+education--did all this and more, and these honest working men stood
+loyally by it, sharing in wages its dishonest gains, receivers, in one
+sense, of stolen goods. The groans of their neighbors were nothing to
+them; even the wrongs of themselves, their wives and their children did
+not stir them to revolt. On every breeze that blew, this great chorus
+of cries and curses was borne past their ears unheeded. Why did they not
+strike then? Where then were their fiery altruists and storm-petrels
+of industrial disorder? No!--the ingenious gods who have invented the
+Debses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with names that would
+make a cat laugh, have never put it into their cold selfish hearts to
+order out their misguided followers to redress a public wrong, but only
+to inflict one--to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an appetite
+for notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of power, or
+punish the crime of prosperity.
+
+It is a practical, an illogical, a turbulent time, yes; it always
+is. The age of Jesus Christ was a practical age, yet Jesus Christ was
+sweetly impractical. In an illogical period Socrates reasoned clearly,
+and logically died for it. Nero's time was a time of turbulence, yet
+Seneca's mind was not disturbed, nor his conscience perverted. Compare
+their fame with the everlasting infamy that time has fixed upon the
+names of the Jack Cades, the Robespierres, the Tomaso Nielos--guides and
+gods of the "fierce democracies" which rise with a sickening periodicity
+to defile the page of history with a quickly fading mark of blood and
+fire, their own awful example their sole contribution to the good of
+mankind. To be a child of your time, imbued with its spirit and endowed
+with its aims--that is to petition Posterity for a niche in the Temple
+of Shame.
+
+No strike of any prominence ever takes place in this country without
+the concomitants of violence and destruction of property, and usually
+murder. These cheerful incidents one who does not personally suffer them
+can endure with considerable fortitude, but the sniveling, hypocritical
+condemnation of them by the press that has instigated them and the
+strikers who have planned and executed them, and who invariably ascribe
+them to those whom they most injure; the solemn offers of the leaders to
+assist in protecting the imperiled property and avenging the dead, while
+openly employing counsel for every incendiary and assassin arrested in
+spite of them--these are pretty hard to bear. A strike means (for it
+includes as its main method) violence, lawlessness, destruction of the
+property of others than the strikers, riot and if necessary bloodshed.
+Even when the strikers themselves have no hand in these crimes they are
+morally liable for the foreknown consequences of their act. Nay, they
+are morally liable for _all the_ consequences--all the inconveniences
+and losses to the community, all the sufferings of the poor entailed by
+interruptions of trade, all the privations of other workingmen whom
+a selfish attention to their own supposed advantage throws out of the
+closed industries. They are liable in morals and should be made so in
+law--only that strikes are needless. It is not worth while to create a
+multitude of complex criminal responsibilities for acts which can easily
+be prevented by a single and simple one. How?
+
+First, I should like to point out that we are hearing a deal too much
+about a man's inalienable right to work or play, at his own sovereign
+will. In so far as that means--and it is always used to mean--his right
+to quit any kind of work at any moment, without notice and regardless of
+consequences to others, it is false; there is no such moral right, and
+the law should have at least a speaking acquaintance with morality. What
+is mischievous should be illegal. The various interests of civilization
+are so complex, delicate, intertangled and interdependent that no man,
+and no set of men, should have power to throw the entire scheme into
+confusion and disorder for pro-motion of a trumpery principle or a class
+advantage. In dealing with corporations we recognize that. If for any
+selfish purpose the trade union of railway managers had done what their
+sacred brakemen and divine firemen did--had decreed that "no wheel
+should turn," until Mr. Pullman's men should return to work--they would
+have found themselves all in jail the second day. _Their_ right to quit
+work was not conceded: they lacked that authenticating credential of
+moral and legal irresponsibility, an indurated palm. In a small lockout
+affecting a mill or two the offender finds a half-hearted support in
+_the_ law if he is willing to pay enough deputy sheriffs; but even
+then he is mounted by the hobnailed populace, at its back the daily
+newspapers, clamoring and spitting like cats. But let the manager of a
+great railway discharge all its men without warning and "kill" its own
+engines! Then see what you will see. To commit a wrong so gigantic with
+impunity a man must wear overalls.
+
+How prevent anybody from committing it? How break up this _regime_ of
+strikes and boycotts and lockouts, more disastrous to others than to
+those at whom the blows are aimed--than to those, even, who deliver
+them. How make all those concerned in the management and operation
+of great industries, about which have grown up tangles of related and
+dependent interests, conduct them with some regard to the welfare of
+others? Before committing ourselves to the dubious and irretraceable
+course of "Government ownership," or to the infectious expedient of a
+"pension system," is there anything of promise yet untried?--anything of
+superior simplicity and easier application? I think so. Make a breach
+of labor contract by either party to it a criminal offense punishable by
+imprisonment "Fine or imprisonment" will not do--the employee, unable to
+pay the fine, would commonly go to jail, the employer seldom. That would
+not be fair.
+
+The purpose of such a law is apparent: Labor contracts would then be
+drawn for a certain time, securing both employer and employee and
+(which is more important) helpless persons in related and dependent
+industries--the whole public, in fact--against sudden and disastrous
+action by either "capital" or "labor" for accomplishment of a purely
+selfish or frankly impudent end. A strike or lockout compelled to
+announce itself thirty days in advance would be innocuous to the public,
+whilst securing to the party of initiation all the advantages that
+anybody professes to want--all but the advantage of ruining others and
+of successfully defying the laws.
+
+Under the present _regime_ labor contracts are useless; either party can
+violate them with impunity. They offer redress only through a civil suit
+for damages, and the employee commonly has nothing with which to
+conduct an action or satisfy a judgment. The consequence is seen in
+the incessant and increasing industrial disturbances, with their
+ever-attendant crimes against property, life and liberty--disturbances
+which by driving capital to investments in which it needs employ no
+labor, do more than all the other causes so glibly enumerated by every
+newspaper and politician, though by no two alike, to bring about the
+"hard times"--which in their turn cause further and worse disturbances.
+
+
+
+
+INDUSTRIAL DISCONTENT
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE time seems to have come when the two antagonistic elements of
+American society should, and could afford to, throw off their disguise
+and frankly declare their principles and purposes. But what, it may be
+asked, are the two antagonistic elements? Dividing lines parting the
+population into two camps more or less hostile may be drawn variously;
+for example, one may be run between the law-abiding and the criminal
+class. But the elements to which reference is here made are those
+immemorable and implacable foes which the slang of modern economics
+roughly and loosely distinguishes as "Capital" and "Labor." A more
+accurate classification--as accurate a one as it is possible to
+make--would designate them as those who do muscular labor and those who
+do not. The distinction between rich and poor does not serve: to the
+laborer the rich man who works with his hands is not objectionable; the
+poor man who does not, is. Consciously or unconsciously, and alike by
+those whose necessities compel them to perform it and those whose better
+fortune enables them to avoid it, manual labor is considered the most
+insufferable of human pursuits. It is a pill that the Tolstois, the
+"communities" and the "Knights" of Labor can not sugarcoat. We may prate
+of the dignity of labor; emblazon its praise upon banners; set apart a
+day on which to stop work and celebrate it; shout our teeth loose in its
+glorification--and, God help our fool souls to better sense, we think we
+mean it all!
+
+If labor is so good and great a thing let all be thankful, for all
+can have as much of it as may be desired. The eight-hour law is
+not mandatory to the laborer, nor does possession of leisure entail
+idleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street
+peddler--to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf
+from the door without eating him--to abandon their ignoble callings,
+seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them right
+sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those who are
+engaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part of their
+incomes they can purchase from their employers the right to work as hard
+as they like in even the dullest times.
+
+Manual labor has nothing of dignity, nothing of beauty. It is a hard,
+imperious and dispiriting necessity. He who is condemned to it feels
+that it sets upon his brow the brand of intellectual inferiority. And
+that brand of servitude never ceases to burn. In no country and at
+no time has the laborer had a kindly feeling for the rest of us, for
+everywhere and always has he heard in our patronising platitudes the
+note of contempt. In his repression, in the denying him the opportunity
+to avenge his real and imaginary wrongs, government finds its main
+usefulness, activity and justification. Jefferson's dictum that
+governments are instituted among men in order to secure them in "life,
+liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is luminous nonsense. Governments
+are not instituted; they grow. They are evolved out of the necessity of
+protecting from the handworker the life and property of the brain worker
+and the idler. The first is the most dangerous because the most numerous
+and the least content. Take from the science and the art of government,
+and from its methods, whatever has had its origin in the consciousness
+of his ill-will and the fear of his power and what have you left? A pure
+republic--that is to say, no government.
+
+I should like it understood that, if not absolutely devoid of
+preferences and prejudices, I at least believe myself to be; that except
+as to result I think no more of one form of government than of another;
+and that with reference to results all forms seem to me bad, but bad in
+different degrees. If asked my opinion as to the results of our own, I
+should point to Homestead, to Wardner, to Buffalo, to Coal Creek, to the
+interminable tale of unpunished murders by individuals and by mobs, to
+legislatures and courts unspeakably corrupt and executives of criminal
+cowardice, to the prevalence and immunity of plundering trusts and
+corporations and the monstrous multiplication of millionaires. I should
+invite attention to the pension roll, to the similar and incredible
+extravagance of Republican and Democratic "Houses"--a plague o' them
+both! If addressing Democrats only, I should mention the protective
+tariff; if Republicans, the hill-tribe clamor for free coinage of
+silver. I should call to mind the existence of prosperous activity of a
+thousand lying secret societies having for their sole object mitigation
+of republican simplicity by means of pageantry and costumes grotesquely
+resembling those of kings and courtiers, and titles of address and
+courtesy exalted enough to draw laughter from an ox.
+
+In contemplation of these and a hundred other "results," no less
+shameful in themselves than significant of the deeper shame beneath
+and prophetic of the blacker shame to come, I should say: "Behold the
+outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people!
+Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon
+the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted
+abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the
+efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words!
+We have believed in the wisdom of majorities and are fooled; trusted to
+the good honor of numbers, and are betrayed. Our touching faith in
+the liberty of the rascal, our strange conviction that anarchy making
+proselytes and bombs is less dangerous than anarchy with a shut mouth
+and a watched hand--lo, this is the beginning of the aid of the dream!"
+
+Our Government has broken down at every point, and the two
+irreconcilable elements whose suspensions of hostilities are mistaken for
+peace are about to try their hands at each other's tempting display of
+throats. There is no longer so much as a pretense of amity; apparently
+there will not much longer be a pretense of regard for mercy and morals.
+Already "industrial discontent" has attained to the magnitude of war.
+It is important, then, that there be an understanding of principles and
+purposes. As the combatants will not define their positions truthfully
+by words, let us see if it can be inferred from the actions which
+are said to speak more plainly. If one of the really able men who now
+"direct the destinies" of the labor organizations in this country,
+could be enticed into the Palace of Truth and "examined" by a skilful
+catechist he would indubitably say something like this:
+
+"Our ultimate purpose is abolition of the distinction between employer
+and employee, which is but a modification of that between master and
+slave.
+
+"We propose that the laborer shall be chief owner of all the property
+and profits of the enterprise in which he is engaged, and have through
+his union a controlling voice in all its affairs.
+
+"We propose to overthrow the system under which a man can grow richer by
+working with his head than with his hands, and prevent the man who works
+with neither from having anything at all.
+
+"In the attainment of these ends any means is to be judged, as to its
+fitness for our use, with sole regard to its efficacy. We shall punish
+the innocent for the sins of the guilty. We shall destroy property and
+life under such circumstances and to such an extent as may seem to us
+expedient. Falsehood, treachery, arson, assassination, all these we look
+upon as legitimate if effective.
+
+"The rules of 'civilized warfare' we shall not observe, but shall put
+prisoners to death or torture them, as we please.
+
+"We do not recognize a non-union man's right to labor, nor to live. The
+right to strike includes the right to strike _him_."
+
+Doubtless all that (and "the half is not told") sounds to the
+unobservant like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the
+principles of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no
+element of exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great
+strike or lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts,
+notorious and undisputed, upon which some of these confessions of faith
+are founded. The war is practically a servile insurrection, and
+servile insurrections are today what they ever were: the most cruel and
+ferocious of all manifestations of human hate. Emancipation is rough
+work; when he who would be free, himself strikes the blow, he can not
+consider too curiously with what he strikes it nor upon whom it falls.
+It will profit you to understand, my fine gentleman with the soft hands,
+the character of that which is confronting you. You are not threatened
+with a bombardment of roses.
+
+Let us look into the other camp, where General Hardhead is so engrossed
+with his own greatness and power as not clearly to hear the shots on his
+picket line. Suppose we hypnotize him and make him open his "shut soul"
+to our searching. He will say something like this:
+
+"In the first place, I claim the right to own and enclose for my own use
+or disuse as much of the earth's surface as I am desirous and able to
+procure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy of
+the entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. To
+the objection that this must eventually here, as it has actually done
+elsewhere, deprive the rest of you places upon which legally to be born,
+and exclude you after surreptitious birth as trespassers from all chance
+to procure directly the fruits of the earth, I reply that you can be
+born at sea and eat fish.
+
+"I claim the right to induce you, by offer of employment, to colonize
+yourselves and families about my factories, and then arbitrarily, by
+withdrawing the employment, break up in a day the homes that you have
+been years in acquiring where it is no longer possible for you to
+procure work.
+
+"In determining your rate of wages when I employ you, I claim the right
+to make your necessities a factor in the problem, thus making your
+misfortunes cumulative. By the law of supply and demand (God bless its
+expounder!) the less you have and the less chance to get more, the more
+I have the right to take from you in labor and the less I am bound to
+give you in wages.
+
+"I claim the right to ignore the officers of the peace and maintain a
+private army to subdue you when you rise.
+
+"I claim the right to make you suffer, by creating for my advantage an
+artificial scarcity of the necessaries of life.
+
+"I claim the right to employ the large powers of the government in
+advancing my private welfare.
+
+"As to falsehood, treachery and the other military virtues with which
+you threaten me, I shall go, in them, as far as you; but from arson
+and assassination I recoil with horror. You see you have very little to
+burn, and you are not more than half alive anyhow."
+
+That, I submit, is a pretty fair definition of the position of the
+wealthy man who works with his head. It seems worth while to put it on
+record while he is extant to challenge or verify; for the probability is
+that unless he mend his ways he will not much longer be wealthy, work,
+nor have a head.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In discussion of the misdoings at Homestead and Coeur d' Alene it is
+amusing to observe all the champions of law and order gravely prating
+of "principles" and declaring with all the solemnity of owls that these
+sacred things have been violated. On that ground they have the argument
+all their own way. Indubitably there is hardly a fundamental principle
+of law and morals that the rioting laborers have not footballed out
+of the field of consideration. Indubitably, too, in doing so they have
+forfeited as they must have expected to forfeit, all the "moral support"
+for which they did not care a tinker's imprecation. If there were any
+question of their culpability this solemn insistence upon it would lack
+something of the humor with which it is now invested and which saves the
+observer from death by dejection.
+
+It is not only in discussions of the "labor situation" that we hear this
+eternal babble of "principles." It is never out of ear, and in politics
+is especially clamant. Every success in an election is yawped of as
+"a triumph of Republican (or Democratic) principles." But neither
+in politics nor in the quarrels of laborers and their employers have
+principles a place as "factors in the problem." Their use is to supply
+to both combatants a vocabulary of accusation and appeal. All the fierce
+talk of an antagonist's violation of those eternal principles upon which
+organized society is founded--and the rest of it--what is it but the
+cry of the dog with the chewed ear? The dog that is chewing foregoes the
+advantage of song.
+
+Human contests engaging any number of contestants are not struggles of
+principles but struggles of interests; and this is no less true of those
+decided by the ballot than of those in which the franker bullet gives
+judgment. Nor, but from considerations of prudence and expediency, will
+either party hesitate to transgress the limits of the law and outrage
+the sense of right. At Homestead and Wardner the laborers committed
+robbery, pillage and murder, as striking workmen invariably do when they
+dare, and as cowardly newspapers and scoundrel politicians encourage
+them in doing. But what would you have? They conceive it to be to their
+interest to do these things. If capitalists conceive it to be to theirs
+they too would do them. They do not do them for their interest lies in
+the supremacy of the law--under which they can suffer loss but do not
+suffer hunger.
+
+"But they do murder," say the labor unions; "they bring in gangs of
+armed mercenaries who shoot down honest workmen striving for their
+rights." This is the baldest nonsense, as they know very well who utter
+it. The Pinkerton men are mere mercenaries and have no right place in
+our system, but there have been no instances of their attacking men not
+engaged in some unlawful prank. In the fight at Homestead the workmen
+were actually intrenched on premises belonging to the other side, where
+they had not the ghost of a legal right to be. American working men are
+not fools; they know well enough when they are rogues. But confession is
+not among the military virtues, and the question. Is roguery expedient?
+is not so simple that it can be determined by asking the first preacher
+you meet.
+
+It would be very nice and fine all round if idle workmen would not riot
+nor idle employers meet force with force, but invoke the impossible
+Sheriff. When the Dragon has been chained in the Bottomless Pit and we
+are living under the rule of the saints, things will be so ordered, but
+in these rascal times "revolutions are not made with rosewater," and
+this is a revolution. What is being revolutionized is the relation
+between our old friends. Capital and Labor. The relation has already
+been altered many times, doubtless; once, we know, within the period
+covered by history, at least in the countries that we call civilized.
+The relation was formerly a severely simple one--the capitalist owned
+the laborer. Of the difficulty and the cost of abolishing that system
+it is needless to speak at length. Through centuries of time and with
+an appalling sacrifice of life the effort has gone on, a continuous
+war characterized by monstrous infractions of law and morals, by
+incalculable cruelty and crime. Our own generation has witnessed the
+culminating triumphs of this revolution, and of its three mightiest
+leaders the assassination of two, the death in exile of the third. And
+now, while still the clank of the falling chains is echoing through the
+world, and still a mighty multitude of the world's workers is in bondage
+under the old system, the others, for whose liberation was all this
+"expense of spirit in a waste of shame," are sharply challenging the
+advantage of the new. The new is, in troth, breaking down at every
+point The relation of employer and employee is giving but little better
+satisfaction than that of master and slave. The difference between the
+two is, indeed, not nearly so broad as we persuade ourselves to think
+it. In many of the industries there is practically no difference at all,
+and the tendency is more and more to effacement of the difference where
+it exists.
+
+Labor unions, strikes and rioting are no new remedies for this insidious
+disorder; they were common in ancient Rome and still more ancient Egypt.
+In the twenty-ninth year of Rameses III a deputation of workmen employed
+in the Theban necropolis met the superintendent and the priests with
+a statement of their grievances. "Behold," said the spokesman, "we
+are brought to the verge of famine. We have neither food, nor oil, nor
+clothing; we have no fish; we have no vegetables. Already we have sent
+up a petition to our sovereign lord the Pharaoh, praying that he will
+give us these things and we are going to appeal to the Governor that we
+may have the wherewithal to live." The response to this complaint was
+one day's rations of corn. This appears to have been enough only while
+it lasted, for a few weeks later the workmen were in open revolt.
+Thrice they broke out of their quarter, rioting like mad and defying the
+police. Whether they were finally shot full of arrows by the Pinkerton
+men of the period the record does not state.
+
+"Organized discontent" in the laboring population is no new thing under
+the sun, but in this century and country it has a new opportunity and
+Omniscience alone can forecast the outcome. Of one thing we may be very
+sure, and the sooner the "capitalist" can persuade himself to discern it
+the sooner will his eyes guard his neck: the relations between those who
+are able to live without physical toil and those who are not are a
+long way from final adjustment, but are about to undergo a profound and
+essential alteration. That this is to come by peaceful evolution is a
+hope which has nothing in history to sustain it. There are to be bloody
+noses and cracked crowns, and the good people who suffer themselves to
+be shocked by such things in others will have a chance to try them for
+themselves. The working man is not troubling himself greatly about a
+just allotment of these blessings; so that the greater part go to those
+who do not work with their hands he will not consider too curiously any
+person's claim to exemption. It would perhaps better harmonize with his
+sense of the fitness of things (as it would, no doubt, with that of the
+angels) if the advantages of the transitional period fell mostly to the
+share of such star-spangled impostors as Andrew Carnegie; but almost any
+distribution that is sufficiently objectionable as a whole to the other
+side will be acceptable to the distributor. In the mean time it is to be
+wished that the moralize, and homilizers who prate of "principles" may
+have a little damnation dealt out to them on account. The head that
+is unable to entertain a philosophical view of the situation would be
+notably advantaged by removal.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+It is the immigration of "the oppressed of all nations" that has made
+this country one of the worst on the face of the earth. The change from
+good to bad took place within a generation--so quickly that few of us
+have had the nimbleness of apprehension to "get it through our heads."
+We go on screaming our eagle in the self-same note of triumph that we
+were taught at our fathers' knees before the eagle became a buzzard.
+America is still "an asylum for the oppressed;" and still, as always and
+everywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum, avenging upon those
+who give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they fled. The saddest
+thing about oppression is that it makes its victims unfit for anything
+but to be oppressed--makes them dangerous alike to their tyrants, their
+saviors and themselves. In the end they turn out to be fairly energetic
+oppressors. The gentleman in the cesspool invites compassion, certainly,
+but we may be very well assured, before undertaking his relief without
+a pole, that his conception of a prosperous life is merely to have his
+nose above the surface with another gentleman underfoot.
+
+All languages are spoken in Hell, but chiefly those of Southeastern
+Europe. I do not say that a man fresh from the fields or the factories
+of Europe--even of Southeastern Europe--may not be a good man; I say
+only that, as a matter of fact, he commonly is not. In nine instances in
+ten he is a brute whom it would be God's mercy to drown on his arrival,
+for he is constitutionally unhappy.
+
+Let us not deny him his grievance: he works--when he works--for men no
+better than himself. He is required, in many instances, to take a part
+of his pay in "truck" at prices of breathless altitude; and the pay
+itself is inadequate--hardly more than double what he could get in his
+own country. Against all this his howl is justified; but his rioting and
+assassination are not--not even when directed against the property and
+persons of his employers. When directed against the persons of other
+laborers, who choose to exercise the fundamental human right to work for
+whom and for what pay they please--when he denies this right, and with
+it the right of organized society to exist, the necessity of shooting
+him is not only apparent; it is conspicuous and imperative. That he and
+his horrible kind, of whatever nationality, are usually forgiven this
+just debt of nature, and suffered to execute, like rivers, their annual
+spring rise, constitutes the most valid of the many indictments that
+decent Americans by birth or adoption find against the feeble form of
+government under which their country groans, A nation that will not
+enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its
+people.
+
+This "citizen soldiery" business is a ghastly failure. The National
+Guard is not worth the price of its uniforms. It is intended to be a
+Greater Constabulary: its purpose is to suppress disorders with which
+the civil authorities are too feeble to cope. How often does it do so?
+Nine times in ten it fraternizes with, or is cowed or beaten by
+the savage mobs which it is called upon to kill. In a country with
+a competent militia and competent men to use it there would be crime
+enough and some to spare, but no rioting. Rioting in a Republic is
+without a shadow of excuse. If we have bad laws, or if our good laws are
+not enforced; if corporations and capital are "tyrannous and strong;" if
+white men murder one another and black men outrage white women, all this
+is our own fault--the fault of those, among others, who seek redress
+or revenge by rioting and lynching. The people have always as good
+government, as good industrial conditions, as effective protection of
+person, property and liberty, as they deserve. They can have what ever
+they have the honesty to desire and the sense to set about getting
+in the right way. If as citizens of a Republic we lack the virtue and
+intelligence rightly to use the supreme power of the ballot so that it
+
+     "Executes a freeman's will
+     As lightning does the will of God"
+
+we are unfit to be citizens of a Republic, undeserving of peace,
+prosperity and liberty, and have no right to rise against conditions due
+to our own moral and intellectual delinquency. There is a simple way,
+Messieurs the Masses to correct public evils: put wise and good men into
+power. If you can not do that for you are not yourselves wise, or will
+not for you are not yourselves good, you deserve to be oppressed when
+you submit and shot when you rise.
+
+To shoot a rioter or lyncher is a high kind of mercy. Suppose that
+twenty-five years ago (the longer ago the better) two or three criminal
+mobs in succession had been exterminated in that way, "as the law
+provides." Suppose that several scores of lives had been so taken,
+including even those of "innocent spectators"--though that kind of
+angel does not abound in the vicinity of mobs. Suppose that no demagogue
+judges had permitted officers in command of the "firing lines" to be
+persecuted in the courts. Suppose that these events had writ themselves
+large and red in the public memory. How many lives would this have
+saved? Just as many as since have been taken and lost by rioters, plus
+those that for a long time to come will be taken, and minus those that
+were taken at that time. Make your own computation from your own data; I
+insist only that a rioter shot in time saves nine.
+
+You know--you, the People--that all this is true. You know that in
+a Republic lawlessness is villainy entailing greater evils than it
+cures--that it cures none. You know that even the "money power" is
+powerful only through your own dishonesty and cowardice. You know that
+nobody can bribe or intimidate a voter who will not take a bribe or
+suffer himself to be intimidated--that there can be no "money power"
+in a nation of honorable and courageous men. You know that "bosses" and
+"machines" can not control you if you will not suffer then to divide you
+into "parties" by playing upon your credulity and senseless passions.
+You know all this, and know it all the time. Yet not a man has the
+courage to stand forth and say to your faces what you know in your
+hearts. Well, Messieurs the Masses, I don't consider you dangerous--not
+very. I have not observed that you want to tear anybody to pieces for
+confessing your sins, even if at the same time he confesses his own.
+From a considerable experience in that sort of thing I judge that you
+rather like it, and that he whom, secretly, you most despise is he who
+echoes back to you what he is pleased to think you think and flatters
+you for gain. Anyhow, for some reason, I never hear you speak well of
+newspaper men and politicians, though in the shadow of your disesteem
+they get an occasional gleam of consolation by speaking fairly well of
+one another.
+
+
+
+
+CRIME AND ITS CORRECTIVES
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+SOCIOLOGISTS have been debating the theory that the impulse to commit
+crime is a disease, and the ayes appear to have it--not the impulse but
+the decision. It is gratifying and profitable to have the point settled:
+we now know "where we are at," and can take our course accordingly.
+It has for a number of years been known to all but a few back-number
+physicians--survivals from an exhausted _regime_--that all disease is
+caused by bacilli, which worm themselves into the organs that secrete
+health and enjoin them from the performance of that rite. The
+medical conservatives mentioned attempt to whittle away the value and
+significances of this theory by affirming its inadequacy to account
+for such disorders as broken heads, sunstroke, superfluous toes,
+home-sickness, burns and strangulation on the gallows; but against the
+testimony of so eminent bacteriologists as Drs. Koch and Pasteur their
+carping is as that of the idle angler. The bacillus is not to be denied;
+he has brought his blankets and is here to stay until evicted, and
+eviction can not be wrought by talking. Doubtless we may confidently
+expect his eventual suppression by a fresher and more ingenious
+disturber of the physiological peace, but the bacillus is now chief
+among ten thousand evils and it is futile to attempt to read him out of
+the party.
+
+It follows that in order to deal intelligently with the criminal impulse
+in our afflicted fellow-citizens we must discover the bacillus of crime.
+To that end I think that the bodies of hanged assassins and such persons
+of low degree as have been gathered to their fathers by the cares of
+public office or consumed by the rust of inactivity in prison should be
+handed over to the microscopists for examination. The bore, too, offers
+a fine field for research, and might justly enough be examined alive.
+Whether there is one general--or as the ancient and honorable orders
+prefer to say, "grand"--bacillus, producing a general (or grand)
+criminal impulse covering a multitude of sins, or an infinite number of
+well defined and several bacilli, each inciting to a particular crime,
+is a question to the determination of which the most distinguished
+microscopist might be proud to devote the powers of his eye. If the
+latter is the case it will somewhat complicate the treatment, for
+clearly the patient afflicted with chronic robbery will require
+medicines different from those that might be efficacious in a gentleman
+suffering from constitutional theft or the desire to represent his
+District in the Assembly. But it is permitted to us to hope that all
+crimes, like all arts, are essentially one; that murder, arson and
+conservatism are but different symptoms of the same physical disorder,
+back of which is a microbe vincible to a single medicament, albeit the
+same awaits discovery.
+
+In the fascinating theory of the unity of crime we may not unreasonably
+hope to find another evidence of the brotherhood of man, another
+spiritual bond tending to draw the various classes of society more
+closely together.
+
+From time to time it is said that a "wave" of some kind of crime
+is sweeping the country. It is all nonsense about "waves" of crime.
+Occasionally occurs some crime notable for its unusual features, or for
+the renown of those concerned. It arrests public attention, which for a
+time is directed to that particular kind of crane, and the newspapers,
+with business-like instinct, give, for a season, unusual prominence to
+the record of similar offenses. Then, self-deceived, they talk about a
+"wave," or "epidemic" of it. So far is this from the truth that one of
+the most noticeable characteristics of crime is the steady and unbroken
+monotony of its occurrence in certain forms. There is nothing so dull
+and unvarying as this tedious uniformity of repetition. The march of
+crime is never retarded, never accelerated. The criminals appear to be
+thoroughly well satisfied with their annual average, as shown by the
+periodical reports of their secretary, the statistician.
+
+A marked illustration occurs to me. Many years ago in London a
+well-known and respectable gentleman was brutally garroted. It was during
+the "silly season"--between sessions of Parliament, when the newspapers
+are likely to be dull. They at once began to report cases of garroting.
+There appeared to be an "epidemic of garroting." The public mind was
+terribly excited, and when Parliament met it hastened to pass the
+infamous "flogging act"--a distinct reversion to the senseless and
+discredited methods of physical torture, so alluring to the half
+instructed mind of the average journalist of today. Yet the statistics
+published by the Home Secretary under whose administration the act was
+passed show that neither at the time of the alarm was there any
+material increase of garroting, nor in the period of public tranquillity
+succeeding was there any appreciable diminution.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+By advocating painless removal of incurable idiots and lunatics,
+incorrigible criminals and irreclaimable drunkards from this vale of
+tears Dr. W. Duncan McKim provoked many a respectable but otherwise
+blameless person to throw a catfit of great complexity and power. Yet
+Dr. McKim seemed only to anticipate the trend of public opinion and
+forecast its crystallization into law. It is rapidly becoming a question
+of not what we ought to do with these unfortunates, but what we shall be
+compelled to do. Study of the statistics of the matter shows that in
+all civilized countries mental and moral diseases are increasing,
+proportionately to population, at a rate which in the course of a few
+generations will make it impossible for the healthy to care for the
+afflicted. To do so will require the entire revenue which it is possible
+to raise by taxation--will absorb all the profits of all the industries
+and professions and make deeper and deeper inroads upon the capital
+from which they are derived. When it comes to that there can be but
+one result. High and humanizing sentiments are angel visitants, whom we
+entertain with pride and pleasure, but when _fine_ entertainment becomes
+too costly to be borne we "speed the parting guest" forthwith. And
+it may happen that in inviting to his vacant place a less exciting
+successor--that in replacing Sentiment with Reason--we shall, in this
+instance, learn to our joy that we do but entertain another angel. For
+nothing is so heavenly as Reason; nothing is so sweet and compassionate
+as her voice--
+
+     "Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
+     But musical as is Apollo's lute,"
+
+Is it cruel, is it heartless, is it barbarous to use something of the
+same care in breeding men and women as in breeding horses and dogs?
+Here is a determining question: Knowing yourself doomed to hopeless
+idiocy, lunacy, crime or drunkenness, would you, or would you not,
+welcome a painless death? Let us assume that you would. Upon what
+ground, then, would you deny to another a boon that you would desire for
+yourself?
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The good American is, as a rule, pretty hard upon roguery, but he
+atones for his austerity by an amiable toleration of rogues. His
+only requirement is that he must personally know the rogues. We all
+"denounce" thieves loudly enough, if we have not the honor of their
+acquaintance. If we have, why, that is different--unless they have the
+actual odor of the prison about them. We may know them guilty, but we
+meet them, shake hands with them, drink with them, and if they happen to
+be wealthy or otherwise great invite them to our houses, and deem it an
+honor to frequent theirs. We do not "approve their methods"--let that be
+understood; and thereby they are sufficiently punished. The notion that
+a knave cares a pin what is thought of his ways by one who is civil and
+friendly to himself appears to have been invented by a humorist. On the
+vaudeville stage of Mars it would probably have made his fortune.
+If warrants of arrest were out for every man in this country who is
+conscious of having repeatedly shaken hands with persons whom he knew to
+be knaves there would be no guiltless person to serve them.
+
+I know men standing high in journalism who today will "expose" and
+bitterly "denounce" a certain rascality and tomorrow will be hobnobbing
+with the rascals whom they have named. I know legislators of renown who
+habitually in "the halls of legislation" raise their voices against the
+dishonest schemes of some "trust magnate," and are habitually seen in
+familiar conversation with him. Indubitably these be hypocrites all.
+Between the head and the heart of such a man is a wall of adamant, and
+neither organ knows what the other is doing.
+
+If social recognition were denied to rogues they would be fewer by many.
+Some would only the more diligently cover their tracks along the devious
+paths of unrighteousness, but others would do so much violence to their
+consciences as to renounce the disadvantages of rascality for those
+of an honest life. An unworthy person dreads nothing so much as the
+withholding of an honest hand, the slow inevitable stroke of an ignoring
+eye.
+
+For one having knowledge of Mr. John D. Rockefeller's social life and
+connections it would be easy to name a dozen men and women who by a
+conspiracy of conscription could profoundly affect the plans and profits
+of the Standard Oil Company. I have been asked: "If John D. Rockefeller
+were introduced to you by a friend, would you refuse to take his hand?"
+I certainly should--and if ever thereafter I took the hand of that hardy
+"friend" it would be after his repentance and promise to reform his
+ways. We have Rockefellers and Morgans because we have "respectable"
+persons who are not ashamed to take them by the hand, to be seen with
+them, to say that they know them. In such it is treachery to censure
+them; to cry out when robbed by them is to turn State's evidence.
+
+One may smile upon a rascal (most of us do so many times a day) if one
+does not know him to be a rascal, and has not said he is; but
+knowing him to be, or having said he is, to smile upon him is to be a
+hypocrite--just a plain hypocrite or a sycophantic hypocrite, according
+to the station in life of the rascal smiled upon. There are more plain
+hypocrites than sycophantic ones, for there are more rascals of no
+consequence than rich and distinguished ones, though they get fewer
+smiles each. The American people will be plundered as long as the
+American character is what it is; as long as it is tolerant of
+successful knavery; as long as American ingenuity draws an imaginary
+distinction between a man's public character and his private--his
+commercial and his personal In brief, the American people will be
+plundered as long as they deserve to be plundered. No human law can stop
+it, none ought to stop it, for that would abrogate a higher and more
+salutary law: "As ye sow ye shall reap."
+
+In a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst is the following: "The story of
+all our Lord's dealings with sinners leaves upon the mind the invariable
+impression, if only the story be read sympathetically and earnestly,
+that He always felt kindly towards the transgressor, but could have
+no tenderness of regard toward the transgression. There is no safe and
+successful dealing with sin of any kind save as that distinction is
+appreciated and made a continual factor in our feelings and efforts."
+
+With all due respect for Dr. Parkhurst, that is nonsense. If he will
+read his New Testament more understandingly he will observe that
+Christ's kindly feeling to transgressors was not to be counted on by
+sinners of every kind, and it was not always in evidence; for example,
+when he flogged the money-changers out of the temple. Nor is Dr.
+Parkhurst himself any too amiably disposed toward the children of
+darkness. It is not by mild words and gentle means that he has hurled
+the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. Such
+revolutions as he set afoot are not made with spiritual rose-water;
+there must be the contagion of a noble indignation fueled with harder
+wood than abstractions. The people can not be collected and incited to
+take sides by the spectacle of a man fighting something that does
+not fight back. It is men that Dr. Parkhurst is trouncing--not their
+crimes--not Crime. He may fancy himself "dowered with the hate of hate,
+the scorn of scorn," but in reality he does not hate hate but hates the
+hateful, and scorns, not scorn, but the scornworthy.
+
+It is singular with what tenacity that amusing though mischievous
+superstition keeps its hold upon the human mind--that grave _bona
+fide_ personification of abstractions and the funny delusion that it is
+possible to hate or love them. Sin is not a thing; there is no existing
+object corresponding to any of the mere counter-words that are properly
+named abstract nouns. One can no more hate sin or love virtue than
+one can hate a vacuum (which Nature--itself imaginary--was once by the
+scientists of the period solemnly held to do) or love one of the three
+dimensions. We may think that while loving a sinner we hate the sin,
+but that is not so; if anything is hated it is other sinners of the same
+kind, who are not quite so close to us.
+
+"But," says Citizen Goodheart, who thinks with difficulty, "shall I
+throw over my friend when he is in trouble?" Yes, when you are convinced
+that he deserves to be in trouble; throw him all the harder and the
+further because he is your friend. In addition to his particular offense
+against society he has disgraced _you_. If there are to be lenity and
+charity let them go to the criminal who has foreborne to involve you
+in his shame. It were a pretty state of affairs if an undetected scamp,
+fearing exposure, could make you a co-defendant by so easy a precaution
+as securing your acquaintance and regard. Don't throw the first stone,
+of course, but when convinced that your friend is a proper target, heave
+away with a right hearty good-will, and let the stone be of serviceable
+dimensions, scabrous, textured flintwise and delivered with a good aim.
+
+The French have a saying to the effect that to know all is to pardon
+all; and doubtless with an omniscient insight into the causes of
+character we should find the field of moral responsibility pretty
+thickly strewn with extenuating circumstances very suitable indeed for
+consideration by a god who has had a hand in besetting "with pitfall
+and with gin" the road we are to wander in. But I submit that universal
+forgiveness would hardly do as a working principle. Even those who are
+most apt and facile with the incident of the woman taken in adultery
+commonly cherish a secret respect for the doctrine of eternal damnation;
+and some of them are known to pin their faith to the penal code of their
+state. Moreover there is some reason to believe that the sinning woman,
+being "taken," was penitent--they usually are when found out.
+
+I care nothing about principles--they are lumber and rubbish. What
+concerns our happiness and welfare, as affectible by our fellowmen, is
+conduct "Principles, not men," is a rogue's cry; rascality's counsel to
+stupidity, the noise of the duper duping on his dupe. He shouts it most
+loudly and with the keenest sense of its advantage who most desires
+inattention to his own conduct, or to that forecast of it, his
+character. As to sin, that has an abundance of expounders and is already
+universally known to be wicked. What more can be said against it, and
+why go on repeating that? The thing is a trifle wordworn, whereas the
+sinner cometh up as a flower every day, fresh, ingenious and inviting.
+Sin is not at all dangerous to society; it is the sinner that does all
+the mischief. Sin has no arms to thrust into the public treasury and
+the private; no hands with which to cut a throat; no tongue to wreck
+a reputation withal. I would no more attack it than I would attack an
+isosceles triangle, a vacuum, or Hume's "phantasm floating in a void."
+My chosen enemy must be something that has a skin for my switch, a head
+for my cudgel--something that can smart and ache and, if so minded,
+fight back. I have no quarrel with abstractions; so far as I know they
+are all good citizens.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEATH PENALTY
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+"DOWN with the gallows!" is a cry not unfamiliar in America. There is
+always a movement afoot to make odious the just principle of "a life for
+a life"--to represent it as "a relic of barbarism," "a usurpation of
+the divine authority," and the rotten rest of it The law making murder
+punishable by death is as purely a measure of self-defense as is the
+display of a pistol to one diligently endeavoring to kill without
+provocation. Even the most brainless opponent of "capital punishment"
+would do that if he knew enough. It is in precisely the same sense an
+admonition, a warning to abstain from crime. Society says by that law:
+"If you kill one of us you die," just as by display of the pistol
+the individual whose life is attacked says: "Desist or be shot." To be
+effective the warning in either case must be more than an idle threat.
+Even the most unearthly reasoner among the gallows-downing unfortunates
+would hardly expect to frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol
+to be unloaded. Of course these queer illogicians can not be made to
+understand that their position commits them to absolute non-resistance
+to any kind of aggression, and that is fortunate for the rest of us,
+for if as Christians they frankly and consistently took that ground we
+should be under the miserable necessity of respecting them.
+
+We have good reason to hold that the horrible prevalence of murder in
+this country is due to the fact that we do not execute our laws--that
+the death penalty is threatened but not inflicted--that the pistol is
+not loaded. In civilized countries, where there is enough respect for
+the laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them. While man
+still has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold widiout
+cracking we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists and
+assassins and persons with a private system of lexicography who define
+hanging as murder and murder as mischance, and many another disagreeable
+creation, but in all this welter of crime and stupidity are areas where
+human life is comparatively secure against the human hand. It is at
+least a significant coincidence that in these the death penalty for
+murder is fairly well enforced by judges who do not derive any part of
+their authority from those for whose restraint and punishment they hold
+it. Against the life of one guiltless person the lives of ten thousand
+murderers count for nothing; their hanging is a public good, without
+reference to the crimes that disclose their deserts. If we could
+discover them by other signs than their bloody deeds they should be
+hanged anyhow. Unfortunately we must have a death as evidence. The
+scientists who will tell us how to recognize the potential assassin, and
+persuade us to kill him, will be the greatest benefactor of his century.
+
+What would these enemies of the gibbet have?--these lineal descendants
+of the drunken mobs that pelted the hangmen at Tyburn Tree; this progeny
+of criminals, which has so defiled with the mud of its animosity the
+noble office of public executioner that even "in this enlightened
+age" he shirks his high duty, entrusting it to a hidden or unnamed
+subordinate? If murder is unjust of what importance is it whether it's
+punishment by death be just or not?--nobody needs to incur it.
+
+Men are not drafted for the death penalty; they volunteer. "Then it is
+not deterrent," mutters the gentleman whose rude forefather pelted the
+hangman. Well, as to that, the law which is to accomplish more than a
+part of its purpose must be awaited with great patience. Every murder
+proves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging that it
+is somewhat deterrent--it deters the person hanged. A man's first murder
+is his crime, his second is ours.
+
+The voice of Theosophy has been heard in favor of downing the gallows.
+As usual the voice is a trifle vague and it babbles. Clear speech is the
+outcome of clear thought, and that is something to which Theosophists
+are not addicted. Considering their infirmity in that way, it would be
+hardly fair to take them as seriously as they take themselves, but
+when any considerable number of apparently earnest citizens unite in a
+petition to the Governor of their State, to commute the death sentence
+of a convicted assassin without alleging a doubt of his guilt the
+phenomenon challenges a certain attention to what they do allege. What
+these amiable persons hold, it seems, is what was held by Alphonse Karr:
+the expediency of abolishing the death penalty; but apparently they do
+not hold, with him, that the assassins should begin. They want the State
+to begin, believing that the magnanimous example will effect a change of
+heart in those about to murder. This, I take it, is the meaning of their
+assertion that "death penalties have not the deterring influence which
+imprisonment for life carries." In this they obviously err: death deters
+at least the person who suffers it--he commits no more murder; whereas
+the assassin who is imprisoned for life and immune from further
+punishment may with impunity kill his keeper or whomsoever he may be
+able to get at. Even as matters now are, the most incessant vigilance is
+required to prevent convicts in prison from murdering their attendants
+and one another. How would it be if the "life-termer" were assured
+against any additional inconvenience for braining a guard occasionally,
+or strangling a chaplain now and then? A penitentiary may be described
+as a place of punishment and reward; and under the system proposed the
+difference in desirableness between a sentence and an appointment would
+be virtually effaced. To overcome this objection a life sentence would
+have to mean solitary confinement, and that means insanity. Is that what
+these Theosophical gentlemen propose to substitute for death?
+
+These petitioners call the death penalty "a relic of barbarism," which
+is neither conclusive nor true. What is required is not loose assertion
+and dogs-eared phrases, but evidence of futility, or, in lack of that,
+cogent reasoning. It is true that the most barbarous nations inflict the
+death penalty most frequently and for the greatest number of offenses,
+but that is because barbarians are more criminal in instinct and less
+easily controlled by gentle methods than civilized peoples. That is
+why we call them barbarous. It is not so very long since our English
+ancestors punished more than forty kinds of crime with death. The fact
+that the hangman, the boiler-in-oil and the breaker-on-the-wheel had
+their hands full does not show that the laws were futile; it shows that
+the dear old boys from whom we are proud to derive ourselves were a bad
+lot--of which we have abundant corroborative evidence in their brutal
+pastimes and in their manners and customs generally. To have restrained
+that crowd by the rose-water methods of modern penology--that is
+unthinkable.
+
+The death penalty, say the memorialists, "creates blood-thirstiness in
+the unthinking masses and defeats its own ends. It is a cause of
+murder, not a check." These gentlemen are themselves of "the unthinking
+masses"--they do not know how to think. Let them try to trace and
+lucidly expound the chain of motives lying between the knowledge that
+a murderer has been hanged and the wish to commit a murder. How,
+precisely, does the one beget the other? By what unearthly process of
+reasoning does a man turning away from the gallows persuade himself that
+it is expedient to incur the danger of hanging? Let us have pointed out
+to us the several steps in that remarkable mental progress. Obviously,
+the thing is absurd; one might as reasonably say that contemplation of
+a pitted face will make a man go and catch smallpox, or the spectacle of
+an amputated limb on the scrap-heap of a hospital tempt him to cut off
+his arm.
+
+"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," says the Theosophist, "is
+not justice. It is revenge and unworthy of a Christian civilization." It
+is exact justice: nobody can think of anything more accurately just
+than such punishments would be, whatever the motive in awarding them.
+Unfortunately such a system is not practicable, but he who denies its
+absolute justice must deny also the justice of a bushel of corn for a
+bushel of corn, a dollar for a dollar, service for service. We can not
+undertake by such clumsy means as laws and courts to do to the criminal
+exactly what he has done to his victim, but to demand a life for a life
+is simple, practicable, expedient and (therefore) right.
+
+Here are two of these gentlemen's dicta, between which they inserted the
+one just considered, though properly they should go together in frank
+inconsistency:
+
+"6. It [the death penalty] punishes the innocent a thousand times more
+than the guilty. Death is merciful to the tortures which the living
+relatives must undergo. And they have committed no crime."
+
+"8. Death penalties have not the deterring influence which imprisonment
+for life carries. Mere death is not dreaded. See the number of suicides.
+Hopeless captivity is much more severe."
+
+Merely noting that the "living relatives" whose sorrows so
+sympathetically affect these soft-hearted and soft-headed persons are
+those of the murderer, not those of his victim, let us consider what
+they really say, not what they think they say: "Death is no very
+great punishment, for the criminal doesn't mind it much, but hopeless
+captivity is a very great punishment indeed Therefore, let us spare
+the assassin's family the tortures they will suffer if we inflict
+the lighter penalty. Let us make it easier for them by inflicting the
+severer one."
+
+There is sense for you!--sense of the sound old fruity Theosophical
+sort--the kind of sense that has lifted "The Beautiful Cult" out of the
+dark domain of reason into the serene altitudes of inexpressible Thrill!
+
+As to "hopeless captivity," though, there is no such thing.
+In legislation, today can not bind tomorrow. By an act of the
+Legislature--even by a constitutional prohibition, we may do away with
+the pardoning power; but laws can be repealed, constitutions amended.
+
+The public has a short memory, signatures to petitions in the line of
+mercy are had for the asking, and tender-hearted Governors are familiar
+afflictions. We have life sentences already, and sometimes they are
+served to the end--if the end comes soon enough! but the average length
+of "life imprisonment" is, I am told, a little more than seven years.
+Hope springs eternal in the human beast, and matters simply can not
+be so arranged that in entering the penitentiary he will "leave hope
+behind." Hopeless captivity is a dream.
+
+I quote again:
+
+"9. Life imprisonment is the natural and humane check upon one who has
+proven his unfitness for freedom by taking life deliberately."
+
+What! it is no longer "much more severe" than the "relic of barbarism?"
+In the course of a half dozen lines of petition it has become "humane".
+Truly these are lightning changes of character! It would be pleasing to
+know just what these worthy Theosophers have the happiness to think that
+they think.
+
+"It is the only punishment that receives the consent of conscience."
+
+That is to say, their conscience and that of the convicted assassin.
+
+"Taking the life of a murderer does not restore the life he took
+therefore, it is a most illogical punishment. Two wrongs do not make a
+right."
+
+Here's richness! Hanging an assassin is illogical because it does
+not restore the life of his victim; incarceration does; therefore,
+incarceration is logical--_quod erat demonstrandum_.
+
+Two wrongs certainly do not make a right, but the veritable thing in
+dispute is whether taking the life of a life-taker is a wrong. So naked
+and unashamed an example of _petitio principii_ would disgrace a debater
+in a pinafore. And these wonder-mongers have the incredible effrontery
+to babble of "logic"! Why, if one of them were to meet a syllogism in a
+lonely road he would run away in a hundred and fifty directions as hard
+as ever he could hook it. One is almost ashamed to dispute with such
+intellectual cloudings.
+
+Whatever an individual may rightly do to protect himself society may
+rightly do to protect him, for he is a part of itself. If he may
+rightly take life in defending himself society may rightly take life in
+defending him. If society may rightly take life in defending him it may
+rightly threaten to take it. Having rightly and mercifully threatened to
+take it, it not only rightly may take it, but expediently must.
+
+The law of a life for a life does not altogether prevent murder. No law
+can altogether prevent any form of crime, nor is it desirable that it
+should. Doubtless God could so have created us that our sense of right
+and justice could have existed without contemplation of injustice and
+wrong, as doubtless he could so have created us that we could have felt
+compassion without a knowledge of suffering, but doubtless he did not.
+Constituted as we are, we can know good only by contrast with evil. Our
+sense of sin is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin air of universal
+morality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience could
+not be kept alight A community without crime would be a community
+without warm and elevated sentiments--without the sense of justice,
+without generosity, without courage, without magnanimity--a community of
+small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil. We
+can have too much of crime, no doubt; what the wholesome proportion is
+none can say. Just now we are running a good deal to murder, but he who
+can gravely attribute that phenomenon, or any part of it, to infliction
+of the death penalty, instead of virtual immunity from any penalty at
+all, is justly entitled to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being
+a simpleton.
+
+The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hot
+and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has visited
+this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress
+lest the number of things be insufficient to her need. The matter is
+important variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven and
+the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage. There can be
+no doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental objections to
+the death penalty that quite outweigh such practical considerations in
+its favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend. Aided by the minority
+of men afflicted by the same mental malady, they will indubitably effect
+its abolition in the first lustrum of their political activity. The
+New Woman will scarcely feel the seat of power warm beneath her before
+giving to the assassin's "unhand me villain!" the authority of law.
+So we shall make again the old experiment, discredited by a thousand
+failures, of preventing crime by tenderness to caught criminals. And
+the criminal uncaught will treat us to a quality of toughness notably
+augmented by the Christian spirit of the regime.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make them
+both just and popular is the adoption by murderers of a system of
+painless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no hope
+that the people will renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style
+of executions endeared to them by memories and associations of the
+tenderest character. There is also, I fancy, a shaping notion in the
+public mind that the penologists and their allies have gone about as
+far as they can safely be permitted to go in the direction of a softer
+suasion of the criminal nature toward good behavior. The modern prison
+has become a rather more comfortable habitation than the dangerous
+classes are accustomed to at home. Modern prison life has in their eyes
+something of the charm and glamor of an ideal existence, like that in
+the Happy Valley from which Rasselas had the folly to escape. Whatever
+advantages to the public may be secured by abating the rigors of
+imprisonment and inconveniences incident to execution, there is
+this objection, it makes them less deterrent. Let the penologers and
+philanthrope, have their way and even hanging might be made so pleasant
+and withal so interesting a social distinction that it would deter
+nobody but the person hanged. Adopt the euthanasian method of
+electricity, asphyxia by smothering in rose-leaves, or slow poisoning
+with rich food, and the death penalty may come to be regarded as the
+object of a noble ambition to the _bon vivant_, and the rising young
+suicide may go and murder somebody else instead of himself in order to
+receive a happier dispatch than his own 'prentice hand can assure him.
+
+But the advocates of agreeable pains and penalties tell us that in the
+darker ages, when cruel and degrading punishment was the rule, and was
+freely inflicted for every light infraction of the law, crime was more
+common than it is now; and in this they appear to be right. But they one
+and all overlook a fact equally obvious and vastly significant: that
+the intellectual, moral and social condition of the masses was very low.
+Crime was more common because ignorance was more common, poverty was
+more common, sins of authority, and therefore hatred of authority, were
+more common. The world of even a century ago was a quite different
+world from the world of today, and a vastly more uncomfortable one. The
+popular adage to the contrary notwithstanding, human nature was not by a
+long cut the same then that it is now. In the very ancient time of that
+early English king, George III, when women were burned at the stake
+in public for various offenses and men were hanged for "coining" and
+children for theft, and in the still remoter period, (circa 1530) when
+poisoners were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals were
+disemboweled and some are thought to have undergone _the pene forte et
+dure_ of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo has since
+made popular--in literature)--in these wicked old days it is possible
+that crime flourished, not because of the law's severity, but in spite
+of it. It is possible that our respected and respectable ancestors
+understood the situation as it then was a trifle better than we can
+understand it on the hither side of this gulf of years, and that they
+were not the reasonless barbarians that we think them to have been.
+And if they were, what must have been the unreason and barbarity of the
+criminal element with which they had to deal?
+
+I am far from thinking that severity of punishment can have the same
+restraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted;
+but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of
+conviction, and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection, the
+"pile" will be "complete" with a vengeance. There is a peculiar fitness,
+perhaps, in the fact that all these ideas for comfortable punishment
+should be urged at a time when there appears to be a tolerably general
+disposition to inflict no punishment at all. There are, however, still a
+few old-fashioned persons who hold it obvious that one who is ambitious
+to break the laws of his country will not with as light a heart and as
+airy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the
+chance of one more nearly resembling that which he would select for
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+After lying for more than a century dead I was revived, given a new
+body, and restored to society. This was in the year 2015. The first
+thing of interest that I observed was an enormous building, covering a
+square mile of ground. It was surrounded on all sides by a high, strong
+wall of hewn stone upon which armed sentinels paced to and fro. In one
+face of the wall was a single gate of massive iron, strongly guarded.
+While admiring the cyclopean architecture of the "reverend pile" I was
+accosted by a man in uniform, evidently The Warden, with a cheerful
+salutation.
+
+"Colonel," I said, pressing his hand, "it gives me pleasure to find some
+one that I can believe. Pray tell me what is this building."
+
+"That," said the colonel, "is the new State penitentiary. It is one of
+twelve, all alike."
+
+"You surprise me," I replied. "Surely the criminal element must have
+increased enormously."
+
+"Yes, indeed," he assented; "under the Reform _regime_, which began in
+your day, it became so powerful, bold and fierce that arrests were no
+longer possible and the prisons then in existence were soon overcrowded.
+The State was compelled to erect others of greater capacity."
+
+"But, Colonel," I protested, "if the criminals were too bold and
+powerful to be taken into custody, of what use are the prisons! And how
+are they crowded?"
+
+He fixed upon me a look that I could not fail to interpret as expressing
+a doubt of my sanity. "What?" he said, "is it possible that the modern
+Penology is unknown to you? Do you suppose we practise the antiquated
+and ineffective method of shutting up the rascals? Sir, the growth of
+the criminal element has, as I said, compelled the erection of more and
+larger prisons. We have enough to hold comfortably all the honest men
+and women of the State. Within these protecting walls they carry on all
+the necessary vocations of life excepting commerce. That is necessarily
+in the hands of the rogues as before."
+
+"Venerated representative of Reform," I exclaimed, wringing his hand
+with effusion, "you are Knowledge, you are History, you are the Higher
+Education! We must talk further. Come, let us enter this benign edifice;
+you shall show me your dominion and instruct me in the rules. You shall
+propose me as an inmate."
+
+I walked rapidly to the gate. When challenged by the sentinel, I
+turned to summon my instructor. He was nowhere visible: desolate and
+forbidding, as about the broken statue of Ozymandias,
+
+     "The lone and level sands stretched far away."
+
+
+
+
+RELIGION
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+This is my ultimate and determining test of right--"What, in the
+circumstances, would Christ have done?"--the Christ of the New
+Testament, not the Christ of the commentators, theologians, priests
+and parsons. The test is perhaps not infallible, but it is exceedingly
+simple and gives as good practical results as any. I am not a Christian,
+but so far as I know, the best and truest and sweetest character in
+literature, is next to Buddha, Jesus Christ. He taught nothing new in
+goodness, for all goodness was ages old before he came; but with an
+almost infallible intuition he applied to life and conduct the entire
+law of righteousness. He was a lightning moral calculator: to his
+luminous intelligence the statement of the problem carried the
+solution--he could not hesitate, he seldom erred. That upon his deeds
+and words was founded a religion which in a debased form persists and
+even spreads to this day is mere attestation of his marvelous gift:
+adoration is a primitive mode of recognition.
+
+It seems a pity that this wonderful man had not a longer life under more
+complex conditions--conditions more nearly identical with those of the
+modern world and the future. One would like to be able to see, through
+the eyes of his biographers, his genius applied to more and more
+difficult questions. Yet one can hardly go wrong in inference of his
+thought and act. In many of the complexities and entanglements of
+modern affairs it is no easy matter to find an answer off-hand to the
+question,"What is it right to do?" But put it in another way: "What
+would Christ have done?" and lo! there is light. I Doubt spreads her
+bat-like wings and is away; the sun of truth springs into the sky,
+splendoring the path of right and marking that of error with a deeper
+shade.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Gentlemen of the secular press dealt with the Rev. Mr. Sheldon not
+altogether fairly. To some very relevant considerations they gave no
+weight. It was not fair, for example, to say, as the distinguished
+editor of the "North American Review" did, that in professing to conduct
+a daily newspaper for a week as he conceived that Christ would have
+conducted it, Mr. Sheldon acted the part of "a notoriety seeking
+mountebank." It seldom is fair to go into the question of motive, for
+that is something upon which one has the least light, even when the
+motive is one's own. The motives that we think dominale us seem simple
+and obvious; they are in most instances exceedingly complex and obscure.
+Complacently surveying the wreck and ruin that he has wrought, even that
+great anarch, the "well meaning person," can not have entire assurance
+that he meant as well as the disastrous results appear to him to show.
+
+The trouble with Mr. Harvey of the "Review" was inability to put himself
+in another's place if that happened to be at any considerable distance
+from his own place. He made no allowance for the difference in the point
+of view--for the difference, that is, between his mind and the mind
+of Mr. Sheldon. If Mr. Harvey had undertaken to conduct that Kansas
+newspaper as Christ would have done he would indeed have been "a
+notoriety seeking mountebank," or some similarly unenviable thing, for
+only a selfish purpose could persuade him to an obviously resultless
+work. But Mr. Sheldon was different--his was the religious mind--a mind
+having faith in an "overruling" Providence who can, and frequently does,
+interfere with the orderly relation of cause and effect, accomplishing
+an end by means otherwise inadequate to its production. Believing
+himself a faithful servant of that Power, and asking daily for its
+interposition for promotion of a highly moral purpose, why should he not
+have expected his favor to the enterprise? To expect that was, in
+Mr. Sheldon, natural, reasonable, wise; his folly lay in believing in
+conditions making it expectable. A person convinced that the law of
+gravitation is suspended is no fool for walking into a bog. Mr. Harvey
+may understand, but Mr. Sheldon can not understand, that Jesus Christ
+would not edit a newspaper at all.
+
+The religious mind, it should be understood, is not logical. It may
+acquire, as Whateley's did, a certain familiarity with the syllogism as
+an abstraction, but of the syllogism's practical application, its
+real relation to the phenomena of thought, the religious mind can know
+nothing. That is merely to say that the mind congenitally gifted with
+the power of logic and accessible to its light and leading does not take
+to religion, which is a matter, not of reason, but of feeling--not of
+the head, but of the heart. Religions are conclusions for which the
+facts of nature supply no major premises. They are accepted or rejected
+according to the original mental make-up of the person to whom they
+appeal for recognition. Believers and unbelievers are like two boys
+quarreling across a wall. Each got to his place by means of a ladder.
+They may fight if they will, but neither can kick away the other's
+support.
+
+Believing the things that he did believe, Mr. Sheldon was entirely right
+in thinking that the main purpose of a newspaper should be the salvation
+of souls. If his religious belief is true that should be the main
+purpose, not only of a newspaper, but of everything that has a purpose,
+or can be given one. If we have immortal souls and the consequences of
+our deeds in the body reach over into another life in another world,
+determining there our eternal state of happiness or pain, that is the
+most momentous fact conceivable. It is the only momentous fact; all
+others are chaff and rags. A man who, believing it to be a fact, does
+not make it the one purpose of his life to save his soul and the souls
+of others that are willing to be saved is a fool and a rogue. If he
+think that any part of this only needful work can be done by turning a
+newspaper into a gruelpot he ought to do so or (preferably) perish in
+the attempt.
+
+The talk of degrading the sacred name, and all that, is mostly nonsense.
+If one may not test his conduct in this life by reference to the highest
+standard that his religion affords it is not easy to see how religion
+is to be made anything but a mere body of doctrine. I do not think the
+Christian religion will ever be seriously discredited by an attempt to
+determine, even with too dim a light, what under given circumstances,
+the man miscalled its "founder" would do. What else is his great example
+good for? But it is not always enough to ask oneself, "How would Christ
+do this?" One should first consider whether Christ would do it. It is
+conceivable that certain of his thrifty contemporaries may have asked
+him how he would change money in the Temple.
+
+If Mr. Sheldon's critics were unfair his defenders were, as a rule,
+not much better. They meant to be fair, but they had to be foolish. For
+example, there is the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, whose defence was published
+with Mr. Harvey's attack. I shall give a single illustration of how this
+more celebrated than cerebrated "divine" is pleased to think that he
+thinks. He is replying to some one's application to this matter of
+Christ's injunction, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth."
+This command, he gravely says, "is not against money, nor against the
+making of money, but against the loving it for its own sake and the
+dedicating of it to self-aggrandizing uses." I call this a foolish
+utterance, because it violates the good old rule of not telling an
+obvious falsehood. In no word nor syllable does Christ's injunction give
+the least color of truth to the reverend gentleman's "interpretation;"
+that is the reverend gentleman's very own, and doubtless he feels
+an honest pride in it. It is the product of a controversial need--a
+characteristic attempt to crawl out of a hole in an enclosure which
+he was not invited to enter. The words need no "interpretation;" are
+capable of none; are as clear and unambiguous a proposition as language
+can frame. Moreover, they are consistent with all that we think we know
+of their author's life and character, for he not only lived in poverty
+and taught poverty as a blessing, but commanded it as a duty and a means
+of salvation. The probable effect of universal obedience among those who
+adore him as a god is not at present an urgent question. I think even so
+faithful a disciple as the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst has still a place to lay
+his head, a little of the wherewithal to be clothed, and a good deal of
+the power of interpretation to excuse it.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+There are other hypocrites than those of the pulpit Dr. Gatling, the
+ingenious scoundrel who invented the gun that bears his name with
+commendable fortitude, says he has given much thought to the task of
+bringing the forces of war to such perfection that war will be no more.
+Commonly the man who talks of war becoming so destructive as to be
+impossible is only a harmless lunatic, but this fellow utters his cant
+to conceal his cupidity. If he thought there was any danger of the
+nations beating their swords into plowshares we should see him "take the
+stump" against agriculture forthwith. The same is true of all military
+inventors. They are lions' parasites; themselves, of cold blood they
+fatten upon hot. The sheep-tick's paler fare is not at all to their
+taste.
+
+I sometimes wish I were a preacher: preachers do so blindly ignore their
+shining opportunities. I am indifferently versed in theology--whereof,
+so help me Heaven, I do not believe one word--but know something of
+religion. I know, for example, that Jesus Christ was no soldier; that
+war has two essential features which did not command His approval:
+aggression and defence. No man can either attack or defend and remain
+Christian; and if no man, no nation. I could quote texts by the hour
+proving that Christ taught not only absolute abstention from violence
+but absolute non-resistance. Now what do we see? Nearly all the
+so-called Christian nations of the world sweating and groaning under
+their burdens of debt contracted in violation of these injunctions which
+they believe divine--contracted in perfecting their means of offense
+and defense. "We must have the best," they cry; and if armor plates
+for ships were better when alloyed with silver, and guns if banded with
+gold, such armor plates would be put upon the ships, such guns would be
+freely made. No sooner does one nation adopt some rascal's costly device
+for taking life or protecting it from the taker (and these soulless
+inventors will as readily sell the product of their malign ingenuity to
+one nation as to another) than all the rest either possess themselves
+of it or adopt something superior and more expensive; and so all pay the
+penalty for the sins of each. A hundred million dollars is a moderate
+estimate of what it has cost the world to abstain from strangling the
+infant Gatling in his cradle.
+
+You may say, if you will, that primitive Christianity--the Christianity
+of Christ--is not adapted to these rough-and-tumble times; that it is
+not a practical scheme of conduct. As you please; I have not undertaken
+to say what it is not, but what it partly is. I am no Christian, though
+I think that Christ probably knew what was good for man about as well
+as Dr. Gatling or the United States Ordnance Office. It is not for me to
+defend Christianity; Christ did not. Nevertheless, I can not forbear the
+wish that I were a preacher, in order sincerely to affirm that the awful
+burdens borne by modern nations are obvious judgments of Heaven for
+disobedience to the Prince of Peace. What a striking theme to kindle
+fires upon the heights of imagination--to fill the secret sources of
+eloquence--to stir the very stones in the temple of truth! What a
+noble subject for the pious gentlemen who serve (with rank, pay and
+allowances) as chaplains in the Army and the Navy, or the civilian
+divines who offer prayer at the launching of an ironclad!
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+A matter of missionaries commonly is to the fore as a cause of quarrel
+among nations which have the hardihood to prefer their own religions
+to ours. Missionaries constitute, in truth, a perpetual menace to the
+national peace. I dare say the most of them are conscientious men and
+women of a certain order of intellect. They believe, and from the way
+that they interpret their sacred book have some reason to believe, that
+in meddling uninvited with the spiritual affairs of others they perform
+a work acceptable to God--their God. They think they discern a moral
+difference between "approaching" a man of another religion about the
+state of his soul and approaching him on the condition of his linen
+or the character of his wife. I think there is no difference. I have
+observed that the person who volunteers an interest in my spiritual
+welfare is the same person from whom I must expect an impudent concern
+about my temporal affairs. The missionary is one who goes about throwing
+open the shutters of other men's bosoms in order to project upon the
+blank walls a shadow of himself.
+
+No ruler nor government of sense would willingly permit foreigners to
+sap the foundation of the national religion. No ruler nor government
+ever does permit it except under the stress of compulsion. It is through
+the people's religion that a wise government governs wisely--even in our
+own country we make only a transparent pretense of officially ignoring
+Christianity, and a pretense only because we have so many kinds of
+Christians, all jealous and inharmonious. Each sect would make this a
+Theocracy if it could, and would that make short work of any missionary
+from abroad. Happily all religions but ours have the sloth and timidity
+of error; Christianity alone, drawing vigor from eternal truth, is
+courageous enough and energetic enough to make itself a nuisance to
+people of every other faith. The Jew not only does not bid for converts,
+but discourages them by imposition of hard conditions, and the Moslem
+True Believer's simple, forthright method of reducing error is to cut
+off the head holding it. I don't say that this is right; I say only
+that, being practical and comprehensible, it commands a certain respect
+from the impartial observer not conversant with scriptural justification
+of the other practice.
+
+It is only where the missionaries have made themselves hated that there
+is any molestation of Europeans engaged in the affairs of this world.
+Chinese antipathy to Caucasians in China is neither a racial animosity
+nor a religious; it is an instinctive dislike of persons who will not
+mind their own business. China has been infested with missionaries from
+the earliest centuries of our era, and they have rarely been molested
+when they have taken the trouble to behave themselves. In the time of
+the Emperor Justinian the fact that the Christian religion was openly
+preached throughout China enabled that sovereign to wrest from the
+Chinese the jealously-guarded secret of silk-making. He sent two monks
+to Pekin, who alternately preached seriousness and studied sericulture,
+and who brought away silkworms' eggs concealed in sticks.
+
+In religious matters the Chinese are more tolerant than we. They let the
+religions of others alone, but naturally and rightly demand that others
+shall let theirs alone. In China, as in other Oriental countries
+where the color line is not drawn and where slavery itself is a light
+affliction, the mental attitude of the zealot who finds gratification
+in "spreading the light" of which he deems himself custodian, is not
+understood. Like most things not understood, it is felt to be bad, and
+is indubitably offensive.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+At a church club meeting a paper was read by a minister entitled, "Why
+the Masses Do not Attend the Churches." This good and pious man was not
+ashamed to account for it by the fact that there is no Sunday law,
+and "the masses" can find recreation elsewhere, even in the drinking
+saloons. It is frank of him to admit that he and his professional
+brethren have not brains enough to make religious services more
+attractive than shaking dice for cigars or playing cards for drink; but
+if it is a fact he must not expect the local government to assist in
+spreading the gospel by rounding-up the people and corralling them in
+the churches. The truth is, and this gentleman suspects it, that "the
+masses" stay out of hearing of his pulpit because he talks nonsense
+of the most fatiguing kind; they would rather do any one of a thousand
+other things than go to hear it. These parsons are like a scolding wife
+who grieves because her husband will not pass his evenings with her. The
+more she grieves, the more she scolds and the more diligently he keeps
+away from her. I don't think Jack Satan is conspicuously wise, but he
+is in the main a good entertainer, with a right pretty knack at making
+people come again; but the really reprehensible part of his performance
+is not the part that attracts them. The parsons might study his methods
+with great advantage to religion and morality.
+
+It may be urged that religious services have not entertainment for their
+object. But the people, when not engaged in business or labor, have
+it for _their_ object. If the clergy do not choose to adapt their
+ministrations to the characters of those to whom they wish to minister,
+that is their own affair; but let them accept the consequences. "The
+masses" move along the line of least reluctance. They do not really
+enjoy Sunday at all; they try to get through the day in the manner that
+is least wearisome to the spirit. Possibly their taste is not what it
+ought to be. If this minister were a physician of bodies instead of
+souls, and patients who had not called him in should refuse to take
+the medicine which he thought his best and they his nastiest, he should
+either offer them another, a little less disagreeable if a little less
+efficacious, or let them alone. In no case is he justified in asking the
+civil authority to hold their noses while he plies the spoon.
+
+"The masses" have not asked for churches and services; they really do
+not care for anything of the kind--whether they ought is another matter.
+If the clergy choose to supply them, that is well and worthy. But they
+should understand their relation to the impenitent worldling, which is
+precisely that of a physician without a mandate from the patient, who
+may not be convinced that there is very much the matter with him. The
+physician may have a diploma and a State certificate authorizing him to
+practise, but if the patient do not deem himself bound to be practised
+upon has the physician a right to make him miserable until he will
+submit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not persuade him to come to the
+dispensary and take medicine there is an end to the matter, and he may
+justly conclude that he is misfitted to his vocation.
+
+I am sure that the ministers and that singularly small contingent of
+earnest and, on the whole, pretty good persons who cluster about them do
+not perceive how alien they are in their convictions, tastes, sympathies
+and general mental habitudes to the great majority of their fellow men
+and women. Their voices, like "the gushing wave" which, to the ears of
+the lotus-eaters,
+
+     "Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave,"
+
+come to us as from beyond a great gulf--mere ghosts of sound, almost
+destitute of signification. We know that they would have us do
+something, but what it is we do not clearly apprehend. We feel that they
+are concerned for us, but why we are imperfectly able to conceive. In an
+intelligible tongue they tell us of unthinkable things. Here and there
+in the discourse we catch a word, a phrase, a sentence--something
+which, from ancestors whose mother-speech it was, we have inherited the
+capacity to understand; but the homily as a whole is devoid of meaning.
+Solemn and sonorous enough it all is, and not unmusical, but it lacks
+its natural accompaniment of shawm and sackbut and the wind-swept harp
+in the willows by the waters of Babylon. It is, in fact, something of a
+survival--the memory of a dream.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+The first week of January is set apart as a week of prayer. It is a
+custom of more than a half century's age, and it seems that "gracious
+answers have been received in proportion to the earnestness and
+unanimity of the petitions." That is to say, in this world's speech, the
+more Christians that have prayed and the more they have meant it, the
+better the result is known to have been. I don't believe all that. I
+don't believe that when God is asked to do something that he had not
+intended to do he counts noses before making up his mind whether to do
+it or not God probably knows the character of his work, and knowing that
+he has made this a world of knaves and dunces he must know that the
+more of them that ask for something, and the more loudly they ask, the
+stronger is the presumption that they ought not to have it. And I think
+God is perhaps less concerned about his popularity than some good folk
+seem to suppose.
+
+Doubtless there are errors in the record of results--some things
+set down as "answers" to prayer which came about through the orderly
+operation of natural laws and would have occurred anyhow. I am told that
+similar errors have been made, or are believed to have been made, in
+the past. In 1730, for example, a good Bishop at Auvergne prayed for an
+eclipse of the sun as a warning to unbelievers. The eclipse ensued and
+the pious prelate made the most of it; but when it was shown that
+the astronomers of the period had foretold it he was a sufferer from
+irreverent gibes. A monk of Treves prayed that an enemy of the church,
+then in Paris, might lose his head, and it fell off; but it transpired
+that, unknown (or known) to the monk, the man was under sentence of
+decapitation when the prayer was made. This is related by Ausolus, who
+piously explains, however, that but for the prayer the sentence might
+perhaps have been commuted to service in the galleys. I have myself
+known a minister to pray for rain, and the rain came. Perhaps you can
+conceive his discomfiture when I showed him that the weather bureau had
+previously predicted a fair day.
+
+I do not object to a week of prayer. But why only a week? If prayer
+is "answered" Christians ought to pray all the time. That prayer is
+"answered" the Scripture affirms as positively and unequivocally as
+anything can be affirmed in words: "All things whatsoever ye shall ask
+in prayer, believing, that ye shall receive." Why, then, when all the
+clergy of this country prayed, publicly for the recovery of President
+McKinley, did the man die? Why is it that although two pious Chaplains
+ask almost daily that goodness and wisdom may descend upon Congress,
+Congress remains wicked and unwise? Why is it that although in all the
+churches and half the dwellings of the land God is continually asked for
+good government, good government remains what it always and everywhere
+has been, a dream? From Earth to Heaven in unceasing ascension flows a
+stream of prayer for every blessing that man desires, yet man remains
+unblest, the victim of his own folly and passions, the sport of fire,
+flood, tempest and earthquake, afflicted with famine and disease, war,
+poverty and crime, his world an incredible welter of evil, his life'
+a labor and his hope a lie. Is it possible that all this praying is
+futilized and invalidated by the lack of faith?--that the "asking"
+is not credentialed by the "believing?" When the anointed minister
+of Heaven spreads his palms and uprolls his eyes to beseech a general
+blessing or some special advantage is he the celebrant of a hollow,
+meaningless rite, or the dupe of a false promise? One does not know, but
+if one is not a fool one does know that his every resultless petition
+proves him by the inexorable laws of logic to be the one or the other.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+Modern Christianity is beautiful exceedingly, and he who admires not is
+eyed batly and minded as the mole. "Sell all thou hast," said Christ and
+"give to the poor." All--no less--in order "to be saved." The poor were
+Christ's peculiar care. Ever for them and their privations, and
+not greatly for their spiritual darkness, fell from his lips the
+compassionate word, the mandate divine for their relief and cherishing.
+Of foreign missions, of home missions, of mission schools, of church
+buildings, of work among pagans _in partibus infidelium_, of work among
+sailors, of communion table, of delegates to councils--of any of these
+things he knew no more than the moon man. They were inventions of
+others, as is the entire florid and flamboyant fabric of ecclesiasticism
+that has been reared, stone by stone and century after century, upon his
+simple life and works and words. "Founder," indeed! He founded nothing,
+instituted nothing; Paul did all that Christ simply went about doing,
+and being, good--admonishing the rich, whom he regarded as criminals,
+comforting the luckless and uttering wisdom with that Oriental
+indirection wherein our stupid ingenuity finds imaginary warrant for all
+desiderated pranks and fads.
+
+
+
+
+IMMORTALITY
+
+THE desire for life everlasting has commonly been affirmed to be
+universal--at least that is the view taken by those unacquainted with
+Oriental faiths and with Oriental character. Those of us whose knowledge
+is a trifle wider are not prepared to say that the desire is universal
+or even general.
+
+If the devout Buddhist, for example, wishes to "live alway," he has not
+succeeded in very clearly formulating the desire. The sort of thing that
+he is pleased to hope for is not what we should call life, and not what
+many of us would care for.
+
+When a man says that everybody has "a horror of annihilation," we may be
+very sure that he has not many opportunities for observation, or that
+he has not availed himself of all that he has. Most persons go to sleep
+rather gladly, yet sleep is virtual annihilation while it lasts; and if
+it should last forever the sleeper would be no worse off after a million
+years of it than after an hour of it There are minds sufficiently
+logical to think of it that way, and to them annihilation is not a
+disagreeable thing to contemplate and expect.
+
+In this matter of immortality, people's beliefs appear to go along with
+their wishes. The chap who is content with annihilation thinks he will
+get it; those that want immortality are pretty sure they are immortal,
+and that is a very comfortable allotment of faiths. The few of us that
+are left unprovided for are those who don't bother themselves much about
+the matter, one way or another.
+
+The question of human immortality is the most momentous that the mind
+is capable of conceiving. If it is a fact that the dead live, all other
+facts are in comparison trivial and without interest. The prospect of
+obtaining certain knowledge with regard to this stupendous matter is not
+encouraging. In all countries but those in barbarism the powers of the
+profoundest and most penetrating intelligences have been ceaselessly
+addressed to the task of glimpsing a life beyond this life; yet today no
+one can truly say that he knows. It is still as much a matter of faith
+as ever it was.
+
+Our modern Christian nations hold a passionate hope and belief in
+another world, yet the most popular writer and speaker of his time, the
+man whose lectures drew the largest audiences, the work of whose pen
+brought him the highest rewards, was he who most strenuously strove to
+destroy the ground of that hope and unsettle the foundations of that
+belief.
+
+The famous and popular Frenchman, Professor of Spectacular Astronomy,
+Camille Flammarion, affirms immortality because he has talked with
+departed souls who said that it was true. Yes, Monsieur, but surely
+you know the rule about hearsay evidence. We Anglo-Saxons are very
+particular about that. Your testimony is of that character.
+
+"I don't repudiate the presumptive arguments of school men. I merely
+supplement them with something positive. For instance, if you assumed
+the existence of God this argument of the scholastics is a good one. God
+has implanted in all men the desire of perfect happiness. This desire
+can not be satisfied in our lives here. If there were not another life
+wherein to satisfy it then God would be a deceiver. _Voila tout_."
+
+There is more: the desire of perfect happiness does not imply
+immortality, even if there is a God, for:
+
+( 1 ) God may not have implanted it, but merely suffers it to exist, as
+He suffers sin to exist, the desire of wealth, the desire to live longer
+than we do in this world. It is not held that God implanted all the
+desires of the human heart. Then why hold that He implanted that of
+perfect happiness?
+
+(2) Even if He did--even if a divinely implanted desire entail its own
+gratification--even if it can not be gratified in this life--that does
+not imply immortality. It implies _only_ another life long enough for
+its gratification just once. An eternity of gratification is not a
+logical inference from it.
+
+(3) Perhaps God _is_ "a deceiver" who knows that He is not? Assumption
+of the existence of a God is one thing; assumption of the existence of
+a God who is honorable and candid according to our finite conception of
+honor and candor is another.
+
+(4) There may be an honorable and candid God. He may have implanted
+in us the desire of perfect happiness. It may be--it is--impossible to
+gratify that desire in this life. Still, another life is not implied,
+for God may not have intended us to draw the inference that He is going
+to gratify it. If omniscient and omnipotent, God must be held to have
+intended, whatever occurs, but no such God is assumed in M. Flammarion's
+illustration, and it may be that God's knowledge and power are limited,
+or that one of them is limited.
+
+M. Flammarion is a learned, if somewhat "yellow" astronomer.
+
+He has a tremendous imagination, which naturally is more at home in
+the marvelous and catastrophic than in the orderly regions of familiar
+phenomena. To him the heavens are an immense pyrotechnicon and he is the
+master of the show and sets off the fireworks. But he knows nothing
+of logic, which is the science of straight thinking, and his views of
+things have therefore no value; they are nebulous.
+
+Nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence is a dream, having
+absolutely no basis in anything that we know or can hope to know. Of
+after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony,
+in assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it--if it is
+enjoyable. Whether this testimony has actually been given--and it is the
+only testimony worth a moment's consideration--is a disputed point Many
+persons while living this life have professed to have received it.
+But nobody professes, or ever has professed, to have received a
+communication of any kind from one in actual experience of the
+fore-life. "The souls as yet ungarmented," if such there are, are dumb
+to question. The Land beyond the Grave has been, if not observed,
+yet often and variously described: if not explored and surveyed, yet
+carefully charted. From among so many accounts of it that we have, he
+must be fastidious indeed who can not be suited. But of the Fatherland
+that spreads before the cradle--the great Heretofore, wherein we all
+dwelt if we are to dwell in the Hereafter, we have no account. Nobody
+professes knowledge of that. No testimony reaches our ears of flesh
+concerning its topographical or other features; no one has been so
+enterprising as to wrest from its actual inhabitants any particulars of
+their character and appearance, to refresh our memory withal. And among
+educated experts and professional proponents of worlds to be there is a
+general denial of its existence.
+
+I am of their way of thinking about that. The fact that we have no
+recollection of a former life is entirely conclusive of the matter.
+To have lived an unrecollected life is impossible and unthinkable, for
+there would be nothing to connect the new life with the old--no thread
+of continuity--nothing that persisted from the one life to the other.
+The later birth is that of another person, an altogether different
+being, unrelated to the first--a new John Smith succeeding to the late
+Tom Jones.
+
+Let us not be misled here by a false analogy. Today I may get a
+thwack on the mazzard which will give me an intervening season of
+unconsciousness between yesterday and tomorrow. Thereafter I may live to
+a green old age with no recollection of anything that I knew, or did, or
+was before the accident; yet I shall be the same person, for between the
+old life and the new there will be a _nexus_, a thread of continuity,
+something spanning the gulf from the one state to the other, and the
+same in both--namely, my body with its habits, capacities and powers.
+That is I; that identifies me as my former self--authenticates and
+credentials me as the person that incurred the cranial mischance,
+dislodging memory.
+
+But when death occurs _all_ is dislodged if memory is; for between
+two merely mental or spiritual existences memory is the only _nexus_
+conceivable; consciousness of identity is the only identity. To
+live again without memory of having lived before is to live another.
+Re-existence without recollection is absurd; there is nothing to
+re-exist.
+
+
+
+
+OPPORTUNITY
+
+THIS is not a country of equal fortunes; outside a Socialist's dream no
+such country exists or can exist. But as nearly as possible this is a
+country of equal opportunities for those who begin life with nothing but
+nature's endowments--and of such is the kingdom of success.
+
+In nine instances in ten successful Americans--that is Americans
+who have succeeded in any worthy ambition or legitimate field of
+endeavor--have started with nothing but the skin they stood in. It
+almost may be said, indeed, that to begin with nothing is a main
+condition of success--in America.
+
+To a young man there is no such hopeless impediment as wealth or the
+expectation of wealth. Here a man and there a man will be born so
+abundantly endowed by nature as to overcome the handicap of artificial
+"advantages," but that is not the rule; usually the chap "born with
+a gold spoon in his mouth" puts in his time sucking that spoon, and
+without other employment. Counting possession of the spoon success, why
+should he bestir himself to achieve what he already has?
+
+The real curled darling of opportunity has nothing in his mouth but his
+teeth and his appetite--he knows, or is likely to know, what it is to
+feel his belly sticking to his back. If he have brains a-plenty he
+will get on, for he must be up and doing--the penalty of indiligence is
+famine. If he have not, he may up and do to the uttermost satisfaction
+of his mind and heart, but the end of that man is failure, with possibly
+Socialism, that last resort of conscious incompetence. It fatigues, this
+talk of the narrowing opportunities of today, the "closed avenues to
+success," and the rest of it. Doubtless it serves its purpose of making
+mischief for the tyrant trusts and the wicked rich generally, but in a
+six months' bound volume of it there is not enough of truth to float a
+religion.
+
+Men of brains never had a better chance than now to accomplish all that
+it is desirable that they should accomplish; and men of no brains never
+did have much of a chance, nor under any possible conditions can have
+in this country, nor in any other. They are nature's failures,
+God's botchwork. Let us be sorry for them, treating them justly and
+generously; but the Socialism that would level us all down to their
+plane of achievement and reward is a proposal of which they are
+themselves the only proponents.
+
+Opportunity, indeed! Who is holding me from composing a great opera that
+would make me rich and famous?
+
+What oppressive laws forbade me to work my passage up the Yukon as
+deckhand on a steamboat and discover the gold along Bonanza creek?
+
+What is there in our industrial system that conceals from me the secret
+of making diamonds from charcoal?
+
+Why was it not I who, entering a lawyer's office as a suitable person to
+sweep it out, left it as an appointed Justice of the Supreme Court?
+
+The number of actual and possible sources of profit and methods of
+distinction is infinite. Not all the trusts in the world combined in one
+trust of trusts could appreciably reduce it--could condemn to permanent
+failure one man with the talent and the will to succeed. They can
+abolish that doubtful benefactor of the "small dealer," who lives
+by charging too much, and that very thickly disguised blessing the
+"drummer," whom they have to add to the price of everything they sell;
+but for every opportunity they close they open a new one and leave
+untouched a thousand actual and a million possible ones. As to their
+dishonest practices, these are conspicuous and striking, because
+"lumped," but no worse than the silent, steady aggregate of cheating;
+by which their constituent firms and individuals, formerly consumed the
+consumer without his special wonder.
+
+
+
+
+CHARITY
+
+THE promoter of organized charity protests against "the wasteful and
+mischievous method of undirected relief." He means, naturally,
+relief that is not directed by somebody else than the person
+giving it--undirected by him and his kind--professional
+almoners--philanthropists who deem it more blessed to allot than
+to bestow. Indubitably much is wasted and some mischief done by
+indiscriminate giving--and individual givers are addicted to that faulty
+practice. But there is something to be said for "undirected relief"
+quite the same. It blesses not only him who receives (when he is worthy;
+and when he is not upon his own head be it), but him who gives. To
+those uncalculating persons who, despite the protests of the organized
+charitable, concede a certain moral value to the spontaneous impulses of
+the heart and read in the word "relief" a double meaning, the office
+of the mere distributor is imperfectly sacred. He is even without
+scriptural authority, and lives in the perpetual challenge of a moral
+_quo warranto_. Nevertheless he is not without his uses. He is a
+tapper of tills that do not open automatically. He is almoner to the
+uncompassionate, who but for him would give no alms. He negotiates
+unnatural but not censurable relations between selfishness and
+ingratitude. The good that he does is purely material. He makes two
+leaves of fat to grow where but one grew before, lessens the sum of
+gastric pangs and dorsal chills. All this is something, certainly,
+but it generates no warm and elevated sentiments and does nothing in
+mitigation of the poor's animosity to the rich. Organized charity is a
+sapid and savorless thing; its place among moral agencies is no higher
+than that of root beer.
+
+Christ did not say "Sell whatsoever thou hast and give to the church to
+give to the poor." He did not mention the Associated Charities of the
+period. I do not find the words "The Little Sisters of the Poor ye have
+always with you," nor "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of
+these Dorcas societies ye have done it unto me." Nowhere do I find
+myself commanded to enable others to comfort the afflicted and visit the
+sick and those in prison. Nowhere is recorded God's blessing upon him
+who makes himself a part of a charity machine--no, not even if he be the
+guiding lever of the whole mechanism.
+
+Organized charity is a delusion and a snare. It enables Munniglut to
+think himself a good man for paying annual dues and buying transferable
+meal tickets. Munniglut is not thereby, a good man. On the Last Great
+Day, when he cowers in the Ineffable Presence and is asked for an
+accounting it will not help him to say, "Hearing that A was in want I
+gave money for his need to B." Nor will it help B to say, "When A was
+in distress I asked C to relieve him, and myself allotted the relief
+according to a resolution of D, E and F."
+
+There are blessings and benefactions that one would willingly
+forego--among them the poor. Quack remedies for poverty amuse; a real
+specific would kindle a noble enthusiasm. Yet the world would lose much
+by it; human nature would suffer a change for the worse. Happily and
+unhappily poverty is not abolishable: "The poor ye have always with you"
+is a sentence that can never become unintelligible. Effect of a thousand
+causes, poverty is invincible, eternal. And since we must have it let us
+thank God for it and avail ourselves of all its advantages to mind and
+character. He who is not good to the deserving poor--who knows not those
+of his immediate environment, who goes not among them making inquiry of
+their personal needs, who does not wish with all his heart and both his
+hands to relieve them--is a fool.
+
+
+
+
+EMANCIPATED WOMAN
+
+WHAT I should like to know is, how "the enlargement of woman's sphere"
+by entrance into the various activities of commercial, professional and
+industrial life benefits the sex. It may please Helen Gougar and satisfy
+her sense of logical accuracy to say, as she does: "We women must work
+in order to fill the places left vacant by liquor-drinking men." But who
+filled these places before? Did they remain vacant, or were there then
+disappointed applicants, as now? If my memory serves, there has been no
+time in the period that it covers when the supply of workers--abstemious
+male workers--was not in excess of the demand. That it has always been
+so is sufficiently attested by the universally inadequate wage rate.
+
+Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they
+need. The field, then, into which women have put their sickles was
+already overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have
+obtained has been got by displacing men--who would otherwise be
+supporting women. Where is the general advantage? We may shout "high
+tariff," "combination of capital," "demonetization of silver," and what
+not, but if searching for the cause of augmented poverty and crime,
+"industrial discontent," and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically
+expounding it, we should take some account of this enormous, sudden
+addition to the number of workers seeking work. If any one thinks that
+within the brief period of a generation the visible supply of labor can
+be enormously augmented without profoundly affecting the stability of
+things and disastrously touching the interests of wage-workers, let no
+rude voice dispel his dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous
+understanding may joy to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung
+themselves in advocacy of quack remedies for evils for which they
+themselves are cause; it remains true that when the contention of two
+lions for one bone is exacerbated by the accession of a lioness the
+squabble is not composable by stirring up some bears in the cage
+adjacent.
+
+Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to the
+good of her sex by refusing needed employment in the hope that it
+may fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our
+congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual
+head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve's daughters. This is
+a world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are so
+intertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitious
+to help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to that
+end provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The "enlargement of woman's
+opportunities" has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the
+sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can
+not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly
+traceable to "emancipation of woman" is as impregnable to the light as a
+toad in a rock.
+
+A marked demerit of the new order of things--the regime of female
+commercial service--is that its main advantage accrues, not to the race,
+not to the sex, not to the class, not to the individual woman, but to
+the person of least need and worth--the male employer. (Female employers
+in any considerable number there will not be, but those that we have
+could give the male ones profitable instruction in grinding the faces
+of their employees.) This constant increase of the army of labor--always
+and everywhere too large for the work in sight--by accession of a new
+contingent of natural oppressibles makes the very teeth of old Munniglut
+thrill with a poignant delight. It brings in that situation known as two
+laborers seeking one job---and one of them a person whose bones he can
+easily grind to make his bread. And Munniglut is a miller of skill and
+experience, dusted all over with the evidence of his useful craft. When
+Heaven has assisted the Daughters of Hope to open to women a new "avenue
+of opportunities" the first to enter and walk therein, like God in the
+Garden of Eden, is the good Mr. Munniglut, contentedly smoothing the
+folds out of the superior slope of his paunch, exuding the peculiar
+aroma of his oleagmous personality, and larding the new roadway with the
+overflow of a righteousness secreted by some spiritual gland stimulated
+to action by relish of his own identity. And ever thereafter the subtle
+suggestion of a fat Philistinism lingers along the path of progress like
+an assertion of a possessory right.
+
+It is God's own crystal truth that in dealing with women unfortunate
+enough to be compelled to earn their own living and fortunate enough
+to have wrested from Fate an opportunity to do so, men of business and
+affairs treat them with about the same delicate consideration that they
+show to dogs and horses of the inferior breeds. It does not commonly
+occur to the wealthy "professional man," or "prominent merchant," to be
+ashamed to add to his yearly thousands a part of the salary justly due
+to his female bookkeeper or typewriter, who sits before him all day with
+an empty belly in order to have an habilimented back. He has a vague,
+hazy notion that the law of supply and demand is mandatory, and that in
+submitting himself to it by paying her a half of what he would have to
+pay a man of inferior efficiency he is supplying the world with a noble
+example of obedience. I must take the liberty to remind him that the
+law of supply and demand is not imperative; it is not a statute, but
+a phenomenon. He may reply: "It is imperative; the penalty for
+disobedience is failure. If I pay more in salaries and wages than I need
+to, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will drive me
+from the field." If his margin of profit is so small that he must eke
+it out by coining the sweat of his workmen into nickels, I've nothing to
+say to him. Let him adopt in peace the motto, "I cheat to eat" I do not
+know why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided sustenance for the
+worming sparrow, the sparrowing owl, and the owling eagle, approves the
+needy man of prey, and makes a place for him at table.
+
+Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is
+a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch--as cunning is the
+wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward. Nobody
+is altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpaying
+the workmen in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigent
+seamen. To oppress one's own workmen, and provide for the workmen of
+a neighbor--to skin those in charge of one's own interests, while
+cottoning and oiling the residuary product of another's skinnery--that
+is not very good benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves in
+place of both. The man who eats _pate de fois gras_ in the sweat of his
+girl cashier's face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that his
+typewriter may have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerably
+satisfactory specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that in
+his own home--a fairly good one--he may enjoy and merit that highest
+and most honorable title in the hierarchy of woman's favor, "a good
+provider." One having a just claim to that glittering distinction should
+enjoy a sacred immunity from the coarse and troublesome question, "From
+whose backs and bellies do you provide?"
+
+So much for the material results to the sex. What are the moral results?
+One does not like to speak of them, particularly to those who do not and
+can not know--to good women in whose innocent minds female immorality
+is inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face; to foolish,
+book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective sanctity that
+hedges womanhood. If men of the world with years enough to have lived
+out of the old _regime_ into the new would testify in this matter there
+would ensue a great rattling of dry bones in bodices of reform ladies.
+Nay, if the young man about town, knowing nothing of how things were
+in the "dark backward and abysm of time," but something of the moral
+difference between even so free-running a creature as the society girl
+and the average working girl of the factory, the shop and the office,
+would speak out (under assurance of immunity from prosecution) his
+testimony would be a surprise to the cartilaginous virgins, blowsy
+matrons, acrid relicts and hairy males of Emancipation. It would pain,
+too, some very worthy but unobservant persons not in sympathy with "the
+cause."
+
+Certain significant facts are within the purview of all but the very
+young and the comfortably blind. To the woman of today the man of today
+is imperfectly polite. In place of reverence he gives her "deference;"
+to the language of compliment has succeeded the language of raillery.
+Men have almost forgotten how to bow. Doubtless the advanced female
+prefers the new manner, as may some of her less forward sisters,
+thinking it more sincere. It is not; our giddy grandfather talked
+high-flown nonsense because his heart had tangled his tongue. He treated
+his woman more civilly than we ours because he loved her better. He
+never had seen her on the "rostrum" and in the lobby, never had seen
+her in advocacy of herself, never had read her confessions of his sins,
+never had felt the stress of her competition, nor himself assisted by
+daily personal contact in rubbing the bloom off her. He did not know
+that her virtues were due to her secluded life, but thought, dear old
+boy, that they were a gift of God.
+
+
+
+
+THE OPPOSING SEX
+
+EMANCIPATION of woman is not of American invention. The "movement,"
+like most others that are truly momentous, originated in Europe, and has
+broken through and broken down more formidable barriers of law, custom
+and tradition there than here. It is not true that the English married
+woman is "virtually a bondwoman" to her husband; that "she can hardly
+go and come without his consent, and usually he does not consent;" that
+"all she has is his." If there is such a thing as "the bitterness of the
+English married woman to the law," underlying it there is such a thing
+as ignorance of what the law is. The "subjection of woman," as it exists
+today in England, is customary and traditionary--a social, not a legal,
+subjection. Nowhere has law so sharply challenged that male dominion
+whose seat is in the harder muscles, the larger brain and the coarser
+heart And the law, it may be worth while to point out, was not of woman
+born; nor was it handed down out of Heaven engraved on tables of stone.
+Learned English judges have decided that virtually the term "marital
+rights" has no longer a legal signification. As one writer puts it,
+"The law has relaxed the husband's control over his wife's person and
+fortune, bit by bit, until legally it has left him nothing but the power
+to prevent her, if he is so disposed, and arrives in time, from jumping
+out of the window." He will find it greatly to his interest to arrive in
+time when he conveniently can, and to be so disposed, for the husband is
+still liable for the wife's torts; and if she makes the leap he may have
+to pay for the telescoping of a subjacent hat or two.
+
+In England it is the Tyrant Man himself who is chafing in his chain. Not
+only is a husband still liable for the wrongs committed by the wife whom
+he has no longer the power to restrain from committing them, but in many
+ways--in one very important way--his obligation to her remains intact
+after she has had the self-sacrifice to surrender all obligation to him.
+Moreover, if his wife has a separate estate he has to endure the pain
+of seeing it hedged about from her creditors (themselves not altogether
+happy in the contemplation) with restrictions which do not hamper the
+right of recourse against his own. Doubtless all this is not without a
+softening effect upon his character, smoothing down his dispositional
+asperities and endowing him day by day with fresh accretions of
+humility. And that is good for him. I do not say that female autonomy is
+not among the most efficacious agencies for man's reclamation from the
+sin of pride; I only say that it is not indigenous to this country, the
+sweet, sweet home of the assassiness, the happy hunting ground of the
+whiplady, the paradise of the vitrioleuse.
+
+If the protagonists of woman suffrage are frank they are shallow; if
+wise, uncandid. Continually they affirm their conviction that political
+power in the hands of women will give us better government. To proof of
+that proposition they address all the powers that they have and marshal
+such facts as can be compelled to serve under their flag. They either
+think or profess to think that if they can show that women's votes will
+purify politics they will have proved their case. That is not true;
+whether they know it or not, the strongest objection to woman suffrage
+would remain untouched. Pure politics is desirable, certainly, but it
+is not the chief concern of the best and most intelligent citizens. Good
+government is "devoutly to be wished," but more than good government we
+need good women. If all our public affairs were to be ordered with
+the goodness and wisdom of angels, and this state of perfection were
+obtained by sacrifice of any of those qualities which make the best of
+our women, if not what they should be, nor what the mindless male thinks
+them, at least what they are, we should have purchased the advantage too
+dearly. The effect of woman suffrage upon the country is of secondary
+importance: the question for profitable consideration is, How will it
+affect the character of woman? He who does not see in the goodness and
+charm of such women as are good and charming something incalculably more
+precious than any degree of political purity or national prosperity may
+be a patriot: doubtless he is; but also he has the distinction to be a
+pig.
+
+I should like to ask the gallant gentlemen who vote for removal of
+woman's political disability if they have observed in the minds and
+manners of the women in the forefront of the movement nothing "ominous
+and drear." Are not these women different--I don't say worse, just
+different--from the best types of women of peace who are not exhibits
+and audibles? If they are different, is the difference of such a nature
+as to encourage a hope that activity in public affairs will work an
+improvement in women generally? Is "the glare of publicity" good for her
+growth in grace and winsomeness? Would a sane and sensible husband or
+lover willingly forego in wife or sweetheart all that the colonels of her
+sex appear to lack, or find in her all that they appear to have and to
+value?
+
+A few more questions--addressed more particularly to veteran observers
+than to those to whom the world is new and strange. Have you observed
+any alteration in the manner of men toward women? If so, is it in the
+direction of greater rudeness or of more ceremonious respect? And again,
+if so, has not the change, in point of time, been coincident with the
+genesis and development of woman's "emancipation" and her triumphal
+entry into the field of "affairs"? Are you really desirous that the
+change go further? Or do you think that when women are armed with the
+ballot they will compel a return of the old _regime_ of deference
+and delicate consideration--extorting by their power the tribute once
+voluntarily paid to their weakness? Is there any known way by which
+women can at once be our political equals and our social superiors, our
+competitors in the sharp and bitter struggle for glory, gain or bread,
+and the objects of our unselfish and undiminished devotion? The present
+predicts the future; of the foreshadow of the coming event all sensitive
+female hearts feel the chill. For whatever advantages, real or illusory,
+some women enjoy under this _regime_ of partial "emancipation" all women
+pay. Of the coin in which payment is made the shouldering shouters of
+the sex have not a groat and can bear the situation with impunity. They
+have either passed the age of masculine attention or were born without
+the means to its accroachment. Dwelling in the open bog, they can afford
+to defy eviction.
+
+While men did nearly all the writing and public speaking of the world,
+setting so the fashion in thought, women, naturally extolled with true
+sexual extravagance, came to be considered, even by themselves, as a
+very superior order of beings, with something in them of divinity which
+was denied to man. Not only were they represented as better, generally,
+than men, as indeed anybody could see that they were, but their goodness
+was supposed to be a kind of spiritual endowment and more or less
+independent of environmental influences.
+
+We are changing all that. Women are beginning to do much of the writing
+and public speaking, and not only are they going to extol us (to the
+fattening of our conceit) but they are bound to disclose, even to the
+unthinking, certain defects of character in themselves which their
+silence had veiled. Their competition, too, in several kinds of affairs
+will slowly but certainly provoke resentment, and moreover expose them
+to temptations which will distinctly lower the morality of their
+sex. All these changes, and many more having a similar effect and
+significance, are occurring with amazing rapidity, and the stated
+results are already visible to even the blindest observation. In
+accurate depiction of the new order of things conjecture fails, but
+so much we know: the woman-superstition has already received its death
+wound and must soon expire.
+
+Everywhere, and in no reverential spirit, men are questioning the
+dear old idolatry; not "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer," but
+dispassionately applying to its basic doctrine the methods of scientific
+criticism. He who within even the last twenty years has not marked in
+society, in letters, in art, in everything, a distinct change in man's
+attitude toward women--a change which, were one a woman, one would not
+wish to see--may reasonably conclude that much, otherwise observable, is
+hidden by his nose. In the various movements--none of them consciously
+iconoclastic--engaged in overthrowing this oddest of modern
+superstitions there is something to deprecate, and even deplore, but
+the superstition can be spared. It never had much in it that was either
+creditable or profitable, and all through its rituals ran a note of
+insincerity which was partly Nature's protest against the rites, but
+partly, too, hypocrisy. There is no danger that good men will ever cease
+to respect and love good women, and if bad men ever cease to adore
+them for their sex when not beating them for their virtues the gain in
+consistency will partly offset the loss in religious ecstasy.
+
+Let the patriot abandon his fear, his betters their hope, that only
+the low class woman will vote--the unlettered wench of the slums, the
+raddled hag of the dives, the war-painted _protegee_ of the police. Into
+the vortex of politics goes every floating thing that is free to move.
+The summons to the polls will be imperative and incessant. Duty will
+thunder it from every platform, conscience whisper it into every ear,
+pride, interest, the lust of victory--all the motives that impel men to
+partisan activity will act with equal power upon women as upon men; and
+to all the other forces flowing irresistibly toward the polls will be
+added the suasion of men themselves. The price of votes will not decline
+because of the increased supply, although it will in most instances be
+offered in currencies too subtle to be counted. As now, the honest and
+respectable elector will habitually take bribes in the invisible coin
+of the realm of Sentiment--a mintage peculiarly valued by woman. For
+one reason or another all women will vote, even those who now view the
+"right" widi aversion. The observer who has marked the strength and
+activity of the forces pent in the dark drink of politics and given off
+in the act of bibation will not expect inaction to the victim of the
+"habit," be he male or she female. In the partisan, conviction is
+compulsion---opinions bear fruit in conduct. The partisan thinks in
+deeds, and woman is by nature a partisan--a blessing for which the Lord
+has never made her male relatives and friends sufficiently thankful. Not
+a mere man of them would have the effrontery to ask her toleration if
+she were not Depend upon it, the full strength of the female vote will
+eventually be cast at every election. And it would be well indeed for
+civilization and the interests of the race if woman suffrage meant no
+more than going to the polling-place and polling--which clearly is all
+that it has been thought out to mean by the headless horsemen spurring
+their new hobbies bravely at the tail of the procession. That would be
+a very simple matter; the opposition based upon the impropriety of the
+female rubbing shoulders at the polls with such scurvy blackguards
+as ourselves may with advantage be retired from service. Nor is it
+particularly important what men and measures the women will vote for. By
+one means or another Tyrant Man will have his way; the Opposing Sex can
+merely obstruct him in his way of having it. And should that obstruction
+ever be too pronounced, the party line and the sex line coinciding,
+woman suffrage will then and henceforth be no more.
+
+In the politics of this bad world majorities are of several kinds. One
+of the most "overwhelming" is made up of these simple elements: (1) a
+numerical minority; (2) a military superiority. If not a single election
+were ever in any degree affected by it, the introduction of woman
+suffrage into our scheme of manners and morals would nevertheless be the
+most momentous and mischievous event of modern history. Compared with
+the action of this destructive solvent, that of all other disintegrating
+agencies concerned in our decivilization is as the languorous
+indiligence of rosewater to the mordant fury of nitric acid.
+
+Lively Woman is indeed, as Carlyle would put it, "hellbent" on
+purification of politics by adding herself as an ingredient. It is
+unlikely that the injection of her personality into the contention
+(and politics is essentially a contention) will allay any animosities,
+sweeten any tempers, elevate any motives. The strifes of women are
+distinctly meaner than those of men--which are out of all reason mean;
+their methods of overcoming opponents distinctly more unscrupulous. That
+their participation in politics will notably alter the conditions of the
+game is not to be denied; that, unfortunately, is obvious; but that it
+will make the player less malignant and the playing more honorable is
+a proposition in support of which one can utter a deal of gorgeous
+nonsense, with a less insupportable sense of its unfitness, than in the
+service of any other delusion.
+
+The frosty truth is that except in the home the influence of women is
+not elevating, but debasing. When they stoop to uplift men who need
+uplifting, they are themselves pulled down, and that is all that is
+accomplished. Wherever they come into familiar contact with men who are
+not their relatives they impart nothing, they receive all; they do not
+affect us with their notions of morality; we infect them with ours.
+
+In the last forty years, in this country, they have entered a hundred
+avenues of activity from which they were previously debarred by an
+unwritten law. They are found in the offices, the shops, the factories.
+Like Charles Lamb's fugitive pigs, they have run up all manner of
+streets. Does any one think that in that time there has been an advance
+in professional, commercial and industrial morality? Are lawyers
+more scrupulous, tradesmen more honest? When one has been served by a
+"saleslady" does one leave the shop with a feebler sense of injury
+than was formerly inspired by a transaction at the counter--a duller
+consciousness of being oneself the commodity that has changed hands?
+Have actresses elevated the stage to a moral altitude congenial to the
+colder virtues? In studios of the artists is the "sound of revelry by
+night" invariably a deep, masculine bass? In literature are the immoral
+books--the books "dealing" with questionable "questions"--always, or
+even commonly, written by men?
+
+There is one direction in which "emancipation of woman" and enlargement
+of her "sphere" have wrought a reform: they have elevated the
+_personnel_ of the little dinner party in the "private room." Formerly,
+as any veteran man-about-town can testify, if he will, the female
+contingent of the party was composed of persons altogether unspeakable.
+That element now remains upon its reservation; among the superior
+advantages enjoyed by the man-about-town of today is that of the
+companionship, at his dinner _in camera_, of ladies having an honorable
+vocation. In the corridors of the "French restaurant" the swish of
+Pseudonyma's skirt is no longer heard; she has been superseded by the
+Princess Tap-tap (with Truckle & Cinch), by my lady Snip-snip (from the
+"emporium" of Boltwhack & Co.), by Miss Chink-chink, who sits at the
+receipt of customs in that severely un-French restaurant, the Maison
+Hash. That the man-about-town has been morally elevated by this
+Emancipation of Girl from the seclusion of home to that of the "private
+room" is too obvious for denial. Nothing so uplifts Tyrant Man as the
+table talk of good young women who earn their own living.
+
+I do not wish to be altogether ironical about this rather serious
+matter--not so much so as to forfeit anything of lucidity. Let me state,
+then, in all earnestness and sobriety and simplicity of speech, what is
+known to every worldly-wise male dweller in the cities, to every scamp
+and scapegrace of the clubs, to every reformed sentimentalist and every
+observer with a straight eye--namely, that in all the various classes of
+young women in our cities who support, or partly support, themselves
+in vocations which bring them into personal contact with men, female
+chastity is a vanishing tradition. In the lives of the "main and
+general" of these, all those _considerate_ which have their origin in
+personal purity, and cluster about it, and are its signs and safeguards,
+have almost ceased to cut a figure. It is needless to remind me that
+there are exceptions--I know that. With some of them I have personal
+acquaintance, or think I have, and for them a respect withheld from
+any woman of the rostrum who points to their misfortune and calls it
+emancipation--to their need and calls it a spirit of independence. It
+is not from these good girls that you will hear the flippant boast of an
+unfettered life, with "freedom to develop;" nor is it they who will be
+foremost and furious in denial and resentment of my statements regarding
+the morals of their class. They do not know the whole truth, thank
+Heaven, but they know enough for a deprecation too deep to find relief
+in a cheap affirmation of woman's purity, which is, and always has been,
+the creature of seclusion.
+
+The fitness of women for political activity is not in present question;
+I am considering the fitness of political activity for women. For women
+as men say they are, wish them to be, and try to think them, it is unfit
+altogether--as unfit as anything else that "mixes them up" with us,
+compelling a communication and association that are not social. If
+we wish to have women who are different from ourselves in knowledge,
+character, accomplishments, manners; as different mentally as
+physically--and in these and in all odier expressible differences reside
+all the charms that they have for us--we must keep them, or they must
+keep themselves, in an environment unlike our own. One would think that
+obvious to the meanest capacity, and might even hope that it would
+be understood by the Daughters of Thunder. Possibly the Advanced One,
+hospitably accepting her karma, is not concerned to be charming to
+"the likes o' we'"--would prefer the companionship of her blue gingham
+umbrella, her corkscrew curls, her epicene audiences and her name in
+the newspapers. Perhaps she is content with the comfort of her raucous
+voice. Therein she is unwise, for self-interest is the first law. When
+we no longer find woman charming we may find a way to make them more
+useful--more truly useful, even, than the speech-ladies would have them
+make themselves by competition. Really, there is nothing in the world
+between them and slavery but their power of interesting us; and that has
+its origin in the very differences which the Colonels are striving to
+abolish. God has made no law of miracles and none of His laws are going
+to be suspended in deference to woman's desire to achieve familiarity
+without contempt. If she wants to please she must retain some scrap of
+novelty; if she desires our respect she must not be always in evidence,
+disclosing the baser side of her character, as in competition with us
+she must do (as we do to one another) or lamentably fail. Mrs. Edmund
+Gosse, like "Ouida," Mrs. Atherton, and all other women of
+brains, declares that the taking of unfair advantages--the lack of
+magnanimity--is a leading characteristic of her sex. Mrs. Gosse adds,
+with reference to men's passive acquiescence in this monstrous folly
+of "emancipation," that possibly our quiet may be the calm before the
+storm; and she utters this warning, which, also, more strongly, "Ouida"
+has uttered: "How would it be with us if the men should suddenly rise
+_en masse_ and throw the whole surging lot of us into convents and
+harems?"
+
+It is not likely that men will "rise _en masse_" to undo the mischief
+wrought by noisy protagonists of Woman Suffrage working like beavers to
+rear their airy fad upon the sandy foundation of masculine tolerance
+and inattention. No rising will be needed. All that is required for the
+wreck of their hopes is for a wave of reason to slide a little farther
+up the sands of time, "loll out its large tongue, lick the whole
+labor flat" The work has prospered so far only because nobody but its
+promoters has taken it seriously. It has not engaged attention from
+those having the knowledge and the insight to discern beneath its
+cap-and-bells and the motley that is its only wear a serious menace to
+all that civilized men hold precious in woman. It is of the nature of
+men--themselves cheerful polygamists, with no penitent intentions--to
+set a high value upon chastity in woman. (We need not inquire why they
+do so; those to whom the reasons are not clear can profitably remain in
+the valley of the shadow of ignorance.) Valuing it, they purpose having
+it, or some considerable numerical presumption of it. As they perceive
+that in a general way women are virtuous in proportion to the remoteness
+of their lives and interests from the lives and interests of men--their
+seclusion from the influences of which men's own vices are a main
+part--an easy and peaceful means will doubtless be found for the
+repression of the shouters.
+
+In the orchestration of mind woman's instruments might have kept silence
+without injury to the volume and quality of the music; efface the
+impress of her touch upon the world and, by those who come after, the
+blank must be diligently sought. Go to the top of any large city
+and look about and below. It is not much that you will see, but it
+represents an amazing advance from the conditions of primitive man. No
+where in the wide survey will you see the work of woman. It is all the
+work of men's hands, and before it was wrought into form and substance,
+existed as conscious creations in men's brains. Concealed within
+the visible forms of buildings and ships--themselves miracles of
+thought--lie such wonder-worlds of invention and discovery as no human
+life is long enough to explore, no human understanding capacious enough
+to hold in knowledge. If, like Asmodeus, we could rive the roofs and
+see woman's part of this prodigious exhibition--the things that she has
+actually created with her brain--what kind of display would it be? It is
+probable that all the intellectual energy expended by women from first
+to last would not have sufficed, if directed into the one channel, for
+the genesis and evolution of the modern bicycle.
+
+I once heard a lady who had playfully competed with men in a jumping
+match gravely attribute her defeat to the trammeling of her skirt.
+Similarly, women are pleased to explain their penury of mental
+achievement by repressive education and custom, and therein they are not
+altogether in heresy. But even in regions where they have ever had the
+freedom of the quarries they have not builded themselves monuments.
+Nobody, for example, is holding them from greatness in poetry, which
+needs no special education, and music, in which they have always been
+specially educated; yet where is the great poem by a woman? where the
+great musical composition? In the grammar of literature what is the
+feminine of Homer, of Shakspere, of Goethe, of Hugo? What female names
+are the equivalents of the names of Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Wagner?
+Women are not musicians--they "sing and play." In short, if woman had no
+better claim to respect and affection than her brain; no sweeter charms
+than those of her reason; no means of suasion but her power upon men's
+convictions, she would long ago have been "improved off the face of
+the earth." As she is, men accord her such homage as is compatible with
+contempt, such immunities as are consistent with exaction; but whereas
+she is not altogether filled with light and is moreover, imperfectly
+reverent, it is but right that in obedience to Scriptural injunction she
+keep silence in our churches while we are worshipping Ourselves.
+
+She will not have it so, the good, good girl; as moral as the best of
+us, she will be as intellectual as the rest of us. She will have out her
+little taper and set the rivers of thought all ablaze, legging it over
+the land from stream to stream till all are fired. She will widen her
+sphere, forsooth, herself no wider than before. It is not enough that we
+have edified her a pedestal and perform impossible rites in celebration
+of her altitude and distinction. It does not suffice that with never
+a smile we assure her that she is the superior sex--a whopper by the
+repetition whereof certain callow youth among us have incurred the
+divine vengeance of belief. It does not satisfy her that she is
+indubitably gifted with pulchritude and an unquestionable genius for
+its embellishing; that Nature has endowed her with a prodigious knack
+at accroachment, whereby the male of her species is lured to a
+suitable doom. No; she has taken unto herself in these evil days that
+"intelligent discontent" which giveth its beloved fits. To her flock of
+graces and virtues she must add our one poor ewe lamb of brains. Well,
+I tell her that intellect is a monster which devours beauty; that the
+woman of exceptional mind is exceptionally masculine in face, figure,
+action; that in transplanting brains to an unfamiliar soil God leaves
+much of the original earth about the roots. And so with a reluctant
+farewell to Lovely Woman, I humbly withdraw from her presence and hasten
+to overtake the receding periphery of her "sphere."
+
+One moment more. Mesdames: I crave leave to estop your disfavor--which
+were affliction and calamity--by "defining my position" in the words
+of one of yourselves, who has said of me (though with reprehensible
+exaggeration, believe me) that I hate woman and love women--have an
+acute animosity to your sex and adoring each individual member of
+it. What matters my opinion of your understandings so long as I am in
+bondage to your charms? Moreover, there is one service of incomparable
+utility and dignity for which I esteem you eminently fit--to be mothers
+of men.
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN SYCOPHANT
+
+AN AMERICAN newspaper holds this opinion: "If republican government
+had done nothing else than give independence to American character and
+preserve it from the servility inseparable from the allegiance to kings,
+it would have accomplished a great work."
+
+I do not doubt that the writer of that sentence believes that republican
+government has actually wrought the change in human nature which
+challenges his admiration. He is very sure that his countrymen are not
+sycophants; that before rank and power and wealth they stand covered,
+maintaining "the godlike attitude of freedom and a man" and exulting in
+it. It is not true; it is an immeasurable distance from the truth. We
+are as abject toadies as any people on earth--more so than any European
+people of similar civilization. When a foreign emperor, king, prince or
+nobleman comes among us the rites of servility that we execute in his
+honor are baser than any that he ever saw in his own land. When a
+foreign nobleman's prow puts into shore the American shin is pickled in
+brine to welcome him; and if he come not in adequate quantity those of
+us who can afford the expense go swarming over sea to struggle for front
+places in his attention. In this blind and brutal scramble for social
+recognition in Europe the traveling American toady and impostor has many
+chances of success: he is commonly unknown even to ministers and consuls
+of his own country, and these complaisant gentlemen, rather than incur
+the risk of erring on the wrong side, take him at his own valuation and
+push him in where his obscurity being again in his favor, he is treated
+with kindly toleration, and sometimes a genuine hospitality, to which he
+has no shadow of right nor title, and which, if he were a gentleman, he
+would not accept if it were voluntarily proffered. It should be said in
+mitigation that all this delirious abasement in no degree tempers his
+rancor against the system of which the foreign notable is the flower and
+fruit. He keeps his servility sweet by preserving it in the salt of
+vilification. In the character of a blatant blackguard the American snob
+is so happily disguised that he does not know himself.
+
+An American newspaper once printed a portrait of her whom the irreverent
+Briton had a reprehensible habit of designating colloquially as "The Old
+Lady," But the editor in question did not so designate her--his simple
+American manhood and republican spirit would not admit that she was
+a lady. So he contented himself with labeling the portrait "Her Most
+Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria" This incident raises an important
+question.
+
+Important Question Raised by This Incident: Is it better to be a subject
+and a man, or a citizen and a flunkey--to own the sway of a "gory
+tyrant" and retain one's self-respect, or dwell, a "sovereign elector,"
+in the land of liberty and disgrace it?
+
+However it may be customary for English newspapers to designate the
+English sovereign, they are at least not addicted to sycophancy in
+designating the rulers of other countries than their own. They would
+not say "His Abracadabral Humpti-dumptiness Emperor William," nor "His
+Pestilency the Speaker of the American House of Representatives."
+They would not think of calling even the most ornately self-bemedaled
+American sovereign elector "His Badgesty." Of a foreign nobleman they do
+not say "His Lordship;" they will not admit that he is a lord; nor when
+speaking of their own noblemen do they spell "lord" with a capital L, as
+we do. In brief, when mentioning foreign dignitaries, of whatever rank
+in their own countries, the English press is simply and serviceably
+descriptive: the king is a king, the queen a queen, the jack a jack. We
+use "another kind of common sense." At the very foundation of our
+political system lies the denial of hereditary and artificial rank. Our
+fathers created this government as a protest against all that, and all
+that it implies. They virtually declared that kings and noblemen could
+not breathe here, and no American loyal to the principles of the
+Revolution which made him one will ever say in his own country "Your
+Majesty" or "Your Lordship"--the words would choke him and they ought.
+
+There are a few of us who keep the faith, who do not bow the knee
+to Baal, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of
+political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty
+are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that illimitable inane where
+their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in the bogs
+of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the man-made
+gods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the bale-fires
+of political consistency I can not profess myself a member in good
+standing. In view of this general recreancy and treason to the
+principles that our fathers established by the sword--having in constant
+observation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn nonsense
+of hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in practical
+realization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in the work
+of their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom they are
+too good. Seeing that we are immune to none of the evils besetting
+monarchies, excepting those for which we secretly yearn; that inequality
+of fortune and unjust allotment of honors are as conspicuous among us as
+elsewhere; that the tyranny of individuals is as intolerable, and that
+of the public more so; that the law's majesty is a dream and its failure
+a fact--hearing everywhere the footfalls of disorder and the watchwords
+of anarchy, I despair of the republic and catch in every breeze that
+blows "a cry prophetic of its fall."
+
+I have seen a vast crowd of Americans change color like a field of
+waving grain, as it uncovered to do such base homage to a petty foreign
+princess as in her own country she had never received. I have seen
+full-grown, self-respecting American citizens tremble and go speechless
+when spoken to by the Emperor of Brazil. I have seen a half-dozen
+American gentlemen in evening clothes trying to outdo one another in the
+profundity of their bows in the presence of the nigger King of Hawaii.
+I have not seen a Chinese "Earl" borne in a chair by four Americans
+officially detailed for the disgraceful service, but it was done,
+and did not evoke a hiss of disapproval. And I did not--thank
+Heaven!--observe the mob of American "simple republicans" that dogged
+the heels of a disreputable little Frenchman who is a count by courtesy
+only, and those of an English duke quietly attending to his business of
+making a living by being a married man. The republican New World is
+no less impested with servility than the monarchial Old. One form of
+government may be better than another for this purpose or for that; all
+are alike in the futility of their influence upon human character. None
+can affect man's instinctive abasement in the contemplation of power and
+rank.
+
+Not only are we no less sycophantic than the people of monarchial
+countries; we are more so. We grovel before their exalted personages,
+and perform in addition a special prostration at the clay feet of
+our own idols--which _they_ do not revere. The typical "subject,"
+hat-in-hand to his sovereign and his nobleman, is a less shameful figure
+than the "citizen" executing his genuflexion before the public of which
+he is himself a part. No European court journal, no European courtier,
+was ever more abject in subservience to the sovereign than are the
+American newspaper and the American politician in flattery of the
+people. Between the courtier and the demagogue I see nothing to choose.
+They are moved by the same sentiment and fired by the same hope. Their
+method is flattery, and their purpose profit. Their adulation is not a
+testimony to character, but a tribute to power, or the shadow of power.
+If this country were governed by its criminal idiots we should have the
+same attestations of their goodness and wisdom, the same competition for
+their favor, the same solemn doctrine that their voice is the voice of
+God. Our children would be brought up to believe that an Idiotocracy is
+the only natural and rational form of government And for my part I'm
+not at all sure that it would not be a pretty good political system, as
+political systems go. I have always, however, cherished a secret faith
+in Smithocracy, which seems to combine the advantages of both the
+monarchial and the republican idea. If all the offices were held for
+life by Smiths--the senior John being President--we should have a
+settled and orderly succession to allay all fears of anarchy and a
+sufficiently wide eligibility to feed the fires of patriotic ambition.
+All could not be Smiths, but many could marry into the family.
+
+The Harrison "progress" left its heritage of shame, whereof each abaser
+would gladly have washed the hands of him in his neighbor's basin. All
+this was in due order of Nature, and was to have been expected. It was
+a phenomenon of the same character as, in the loves of the low, the
+squabbling consequent upon satiety and shame. We could not slink out
+of sight; we could deny our sycophancy, albeit we might give it another
+name; but we could somewhat medicine our damaged self-esteem by dealing
+damnation 'round on one another. The blush of shame turned easily to the
+glow of indignation, and many a hot hatred was kindled at the rosy flame
+of self-contempt. Persons conscious of having dishonored themselves are
+doubly sensitive to any indignity put upon them by others. The vices and
+follies of human nature are interdependent; they do not move alone,
+nor are they singly aroused to activity. In my judgment, this entire
+incident of the President's "tour" was infinitely discreditable to
+President and people. I do not go into the question of his motive in
+making it. Be that what it may, the manner of it seems to me an
+outrage upon all the principles and sentiments underlying republican
+institutions. In all but the name it was a "royal progress"--the same
+costly ostentation, the same civic and military pomp, the same solemn
+and senseless adulation, the same abasement of spirit of the Many before
+the One. And according to republican traditions, ten thousand times a
+year affirmed, in every way in which affirmation is possible, we fondly
+persuade ourselves, as a true faith in the hearts of our hearts,
+that the One is the inferior of the Many! And it is no mere political
+catch-phrase: he _is_ their servant; he _is_ their creature; all that
+in him to which they grovel (dignifying and justifying their instinctive
+and inherited servility by names as false as anything in ceremonial
+imposture) they themselves have made, as truly as the heathen has
+made the wooden god before which he performs his unmanly rite. It
+is precisely this thing--the superiority of the people to their
+servants--that constitutes, and was by our fathers understood to
+constitute, the essential, fundamental difference between the monarchial
+system which they uprooted and the democratic one which they planted in
+its stead. Deluded men! how little they guessed the length and strength
+and vitality of the roots left in the soil of the centuries when their
+noxious harvestage of mischievous institutions had been cast as rubbish
+to the void!
+
+I am no contestant for forms of government--no believer in either the
+practical value or the permanence of any that has yet been devised. That
+all men are created equal, in the best and highest sense of the phrase,
+I hold; not as I observe it held by others, but as a living faith. That
+an officeholder is a servant of the people; that I am his political
+superior, owing him no deference, and entitled to such deference
+from him as may be serviceable to keep him in mind of his
+subordination--these are propositions which command my assent, which
+I _feel_ to be true and which determine the character of my personal
+relations with those whom they concern. That I should give my hand, or
+bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in homage to or recognition
+of his office, great or small, is to me simply inconceivable. These
+tricks of servility with the softened names are the vestiges of an
+involuntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer. They
+represent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their most
+primitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestations
+of a proper respect for "the President's great office" is either a
+rogue, a dupe or a journalist They come to us out of a fascinating but
+terrible past as survivals of servitude. They speak a various language
+of oppression, and the superstition of man-worship; they cany forward
+the traditions of the sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the
+people may be heard always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave.
+
+Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Respect the dead. Let the
+President look to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going
+about the country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest
+of a thieving corporation, but at our expense--shining and dining and
+swining--unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes
+calculated for the meridian of Coon Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously
+adapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd "progress," does
+not prove it, and the presumption of his "great office" is against him.
+
+Can you not see, poor misguided "fellow citizens," how you permit your
+political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load you
+down with them? Will nothing teach you that all this fuss-and-feathers,
+all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding,
+this "manifestation of a proper respect for the nation's head" has no
+decent place in American life and American politics? Will no experience
+open your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurd
+imitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by the
+managers of the performance?--that while you toss your greasy caps in
+air and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahs
+the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploiting
+your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; "power is of the People,"
+and you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable
+privilege--to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one! And
+you can not even choose among the lean leeches, but must accept those
+designated by the programmers and showmen who have the reptiles on tap!
+But then you are not "subjects;" you are "citizens"--there is much
+in that Your tyrant is not a "King;" he is a "President." He does
+not occupy a "throne," but a "chair." He does not succeed to it by
+inheritance; he is pitchforked into it by the boss. Altogether, you are
+distinctly better off than the Russian mujik who wears his shirt outside
+his trousers and has never shaken hands with the Czar in all his life.
+
+I hold that kings and noblemen can not breathe in America. When they set
+foot upon our soil their kingship and their nobility fall away from them
+like the chains of a slave in England. Whatever a man may be in his
+own country, here he is but a man. My countrymen may do as they please,
+lickspittling the high and mighty of other nations even to the filling
+of their spiritual bellies, but I make a stand for simple American
+manhood. I will meet no man on this soil who expects from me a greater
+deference than I could properly accord to the President of my own
+country. My allegiance to republican institutions is slack through lack
+of faith in them as a practical system of governing men as men are. All
+the same, I will call no man "Your Majesty," nor "Your Lordship." For
+me to meet in my own country a king or a nobleman would require as much
+preliminary negotiation as an official interview between the Mufti of
+Moosh and the Ahkoond of Swat. The form of salutation and the style and
+tide of address would have to be settled definitively and with precision.
+With some of my most esteemed and patriotic friends the matter is more
+simple; their generosity in concession fills me with admiration and
+their forbearance in exaction challenges my astonishment as one of the
+seven wonders of American hospitality. In fancy I see the ceremony of
+their "presentation" and as examples of simple republican dignity I
+commend their posture to the youth of this fair New World, inviting
+particular attention to the grand, bold curves of character shown in the
+outlines of the Human Ham.
+
+
+
+
+A DISSERTATION ON DOGS
+
+OF ALL anachronisms and survivals, the love of the dog; is the most
+reasonless. Because, some thousands of years ago, when we wore other
+skins than our own and sat enthroned upon our haunches, tearing
+tangles of tendons from raw bones with our teeth, the dog ministered
+purveyorwise to our savage needs, we go on cherishing him to this day,
+when his only function is to lie sun-soaken on a door mat and insult
+us as we pass in and out, enamored of his fat superfluity. One dog in
+a thousand earns his bread--and takes beefsteak; the other nine hundred
+and ninety-nine we maintain, by cheating the poor, in the style suitable
+to their state.
+
+The trouble with the modern dog is that he is the same old dog. Not an
+inch has the rascal advanced along the line of evolution. We have ceased
+to squat upon our naked haunches and gnaw raw bones, but this companion
+of the childhood of the race, this vestigial remnant of _juventus mundi_
+this dismal anachronism, this veteran inharmony of the scheme of
+things, the dog, has abated no jot nor tittle of his unthinkable
+objection-ableness since the morning stars sang together and he had sat
+up all night to deflate a lung at the performance. Possibly he may some
+time be improved otherwise than by effacement, but at present he is
+still in that early stage of reform that is not incompatible with a
+mouthful of reformer.
+
+The dog is a detestable quadruped. He knows more ways to be
+unmentionable than can be suppressed in seven languages.
+
+The word "dog" is a term of contempt the world over. Poets have sung and
+prosaists have prosed of the virtues of individual dogs, but nobody
+has had the hardihood to eulogize the species. No man loves the Dog; he
+loves his own dog or dogs, and there he stops; the force of perverted
+affection can no further go. He loves his own dog partly because that
+thrifty creature, ever cadging when not maurauding, tickles his vanity
+by fawning upon him as the visible source of steaks and bones; and
+partly because the graceless beast insults everybody else, harming as
+many as he dares. The dog is an encampment of fleas, and a reservoir of
+sinful smells. He is prone to bad manners as the sparks fly upward. He
+has no discrimination; his loyalty is given to the person that feeds
+him, be the same a blackguard or a murderer's mother. He fights for his
+master without regard to the justice of the quarrel--wherein he is no
+better than a patriot or a paid soldier. There are men who are proud of
+a dog's love--and dogs love that kind of men. There are men who, having
+the privilege of loving women, insult them by loving dogs; and there are
+women who forgive and respect their canine rivals. Women, I am told, are
+true cynolaters; they adore not only dogs, but Dog--not only their
+own horrible little beasts, but those of others. But women will love
+anything; they love men who love dogs. I sometimes wonder how it is that
+of all our women among whom the dog fad is prevalent none have incurred
+the husband fad, or the child fad. Possibly there are exceptions, but
+it seems to be a rule that the female heart which has a dog in it
+is without other lodgers. There is not, I suppose, a very wild and
+importunate demand for accommodation. For my part, I do not know which
+is the less desirable, the tenant or the tenement There are dogs that
+submit to be kissed by women base enough to kiss them; but they have a
+secret, coarse revenge. For the dog is a joker, withal, gifted with as
+much humor as is consistent with biting.
+
+Miss Louise Imogen Guiney has replied to Mrs. Meynell's proposal to
+abolish the dog--a proposal which Miss Guiney has the originality to
+call "original." Divested of its "literature," Miss Guiney's plea for
+the defendant consists, essentially, of the following assertions: (1)
+Dogs are whatever their masters are. (2) They bite only those who fear
+them. (3) Really vicious dogs are not found nearer than Constantinople.
+(4) Only wronged dogs go mad, and hydrophobia is retaliation. (5) In
+actions for damages for dog-bites judicial prejudice is against the dog.
+(6) "Dogs are continually saving children from death." (7) Association
+with dogs begets piety, tenderness, mercy, loyalty, and so forth; in
+brief, the dog is an elevating influence: "to walk modestly at a dog's
+heels is a certificate of merit!" As to that last, if Miss Guiney had
+ever observed the dog himself walking modestly at the heels of another
+dog she would perhaps have wished that it was not the custom of her sex
+to seal the certificate of merit with a kiss.
+
+In all this absurd woman's statements, thus fairly epitomized, there
+is not one that is true--not one of which the essential falsity is not
+evident, obvious, conspicuous to even the most delinquent observation.
+Yet with the smartness and smirk of a graduating seminary girl refuting
+Epicurus she marshals them against the awful truth that every year in
+Europe and the United States alone more than five thousand human beings
+the of hydrophobia--a fact which her controversial conscience does not
+permit her to mention. The names on this needless death-roll are mostly
+those of children, the sins of whose parents in cherishing their own
+hereditary love of dogs is visited upon their children because they have
+not the intelligence and agility to get out of the way. Or perhaps they
+lack that tranquil courage upon which Miss Guiney relies to avert the
+canine tooth from her own inedible shank.
+
+Finally this amusing illogician, this type and example of the female
+controversialist, has the hardihood to hope that there may be fathers
+who can see their children the the horrible death of hydrophobia without
+wishing "to exile man's best ideal of fidelity from the hearthstones of
+civilization." If we must have an "ideal of fidelity" why not find it,
+not in the dog that kills the child, but in the father that kills the
+dog. The profit of maintaining a standard and pattern of the virtues (at
+considerable expense in the case of this insatiable canine consumer) may
+be great, but are we so hard pushed that we must go to the animals for
+it? In life and letters are there no men and women whose names kindle
+enthusiasm and emulation? Is fidelity, is devotion, is self-sacrifice
+unknown among ourselves? As a model of the higher virtues why will not
+one's mother serve at a pinch? And what is the matter with Miss Guiney
+herself? She is faithful, at least to dogs, whatever she may be to
+the hundreds of American children inevitably foredoomed to a death of
+unthinkable agony.
+
+There is perhaps a hope that when the sun's returning flame shall gild
+the hither end of the thirtieth century this savage and filthy brute,
+the dog, will have ceased to "banquet on through a whole year" of human
+fat and lean; that he will have been gathered to his variously unworthy
+fathers to give an account of the deeds done in body of man. In the
+meantime, those of us who have not the enlightened understanding to be
+enamored of him may endure with such fortitude as we can command
+his feats of tooth among the shins and throats of those who have; we
+ourselves are so few that there is a strong numerical presumption of
+personal immunity.
+
+It is well to have a clear understanding of such inconveniences as
+may be expected to ensue from dog-bites. That inconveniences and even
+discomforts do sometimes flow from, or at least follow, the mischance of
+being bitten by dogs, even the sturdiest champion of "man's best friend"
+will admit when not heated fay controversy. True, he is disposed to
+sympathy for those incurring the inconveniences and discomforts, but
+against apparent incompassion may be offset his indubitable sympathy
+with the dog. No one is altogether heartless.
+
+Amongst the several disadvantages of a close personal connection with
+the canine tooth, the disorder known as hydrophobia has long held an
+undisputed primacy. The existence of dus ailment is attested by so many
+witnesses, many of whom, belonging to the profession of medicine, speak
+with a certain authority, that even the breeders and lovers of snap-dogs
+are compelled reluctantly to concede it, though as a rule they stoutly
+deny that it is imparted by the dog. In their view, hydrophobia is a
+theory, not a condition. The patient imagines himself to have it, and
+acting upon that unsupported assumption or hypothesis, suffers and dies
+in the attempt to square his conduct with his opinions.
+
+It seems there is firmer ground for their view of the matter than the
+rest of us have been willing to admit There is such a thing, doubtless,
+as hydrophobia proper, but also there is such another thing as
+pseudo-hydrophobia, or hydrophobia improper.
+
+Pseudo-hydrophobia, the physicians explain, is caused by fear of
+hydrophobia. The patient, having been chewed by a healthy and harmless
+dog, broods upon his imaginary peril, solicitously watches his imaginary
+symptoms, and, finally, persuading himself of their reality, puts them
+on exhibition, as he understands them. He runs about (when permitted) on
+his hands and knees, growls, barks, howls, and in default of a tail wags
+the part of him where it would be if he had one. In a few days he is
+gone before, a victim to his lack of confidence in man's best friend.
+
+The number of cases of pseudo-hydrophobia, relatively, to those of true
+hydrophobia, is not definitely known, the medical records having been
+imperfectly made, and never collated; champions of the snap-dog, as
+intimated, believe it is many to nothing. That being so (they argue),
+the animal is entirely exonerated, and leaves the discussion without a
+stain upon his reputation.
+
+But that is feeble reasoning. Even if we grant their premises we can not
+embrace their conclusion. In the first place, it hurts to be bitten by
+a dog, as the dog himself audibly confesses when bitten by another
+dog. Furthermore, pseudo-hydrophobia is quite as fatal as if it were a
+legitimate product of the bite, not a result of the terror which that
+mischance inspires.
+
+Human nature being what it is, and well known to the dog to be what it
+is, we have a right to expect that the creature will take our weaknesses
+into consideration--that he will respect our addiction to reasonless
+panic, even as we respect his when, as we commonly do, we refrain from
+attaching tinware to his tail. A dog that runs himself to death to evade
+a kitchen utensil which could not possibly harm him, and which if he did
+not flee would not pursue, is the author of his own undoing in precisely
+the same sense as is the victim of pseudo-hydrophobia. He is slain by
+a theory, not a condition. Yet the wicked boy that set him going is
+not blameless, and no one would be so zealous and strenuous in his
+prosecution as the cynolater, the adorer of dogs, the person who holds
+them guileless of pseudo-hydrophobia.
+
+Mr. Nicholas Smith, while United States Consul at Liege, wrote, or
+caused to be written, an official report, wickedly, willfully and
+maliciously designed to abridge the privileges, augment the ills and
+impair the honorable status of the domestic dog. In the very beginning
+of this report Mr. Smith manifests his animus by stigmatizing
+the domestic dog as an "hereditary loafer;" and having hurled the
+allegation, affirms "the dawn of a [Belgian] new era" wherein the
+pampered menial will loaf no more. There is to be no more sun-soaking on
+door mats having a southern exposure, no more usurpation of the warmest
+segment of the family circle, no more successful personal solicitation
+of cheer at the domestic board. The dog's place in the social scale is
+no longer to be determined by consideration of sentiment, but will be
+the result of cold commercial calculation, and so fixed as best to serve
+the ends of industrial expediency. All this in Belgium, where the dog
+is already in active service as a beast of burden and draught; doubtless
+the transition to that humble condition from his present and
+immemorial social elevation in less advanced countries will be slow and
+characterized by bitter factional strife. America, especially, though
+ever accessible to the infection of new and profitable ideas, will
+be angularly slow to accept so radical a subversion of a social
+superstructure that almost may be said to rest upon the domestic dog as
+a basic verity.
+
+The dogs are our only true "leisure class" (for even the tramps are
+sometimes compelled to engage in such simple industries as are possible
+within the "precincts" of the county jail) and we are justly proud of
+them. They toil not, neither spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not
+a dog. Instead of making them hewers of wood and drawers of water, it
+would be more consonant with the Anglomaniacal and general Old World
+spirit, now so dominant in the councils of the nation, to make them
+"hereditary legislators." And Mr. Smith must permit me to add, with a
+special significance, that history records an instance of even a horse
+making a fairly good Consul.
+
+Mr. Smith avers with obvious and impudent satisfaction that in Liege
+twice as many draught dogs as horses are seen in the streets, attached
+to vehicles. He regards "a gaily painted cart" drawn by "a well fed
+dog" and driven by a well fed (and gaily painted) woman as a "pleasing
+vision." I do not; I should prefer to see the dog sitting at the receipt
+of steaks and chops and the lady devoting herself to the amelioration of
+the condition of the universe, and the manufacture of poetry and stories
+that are not true. A more pleasing vision, too, one endeared to eye and
+heart by immemorial use and wont, is that of stranger and dog indulging
+in the pleasures of the chase--stranger a little ahead--while the woman
+in the case manifests a characteristically compassionate solicitude lest
+the gentleman's trousers do not match Fido's mustache. It is, indeed,
+impossible to regard with any degree of approval the degradation to
+commercial utility of two so noble animals as Dog and Woman; and if Man
+had joined them together by driving-reins I should hope that God would
+put them asunder, even if the reins were held by Dog. There would
+no doubt be a distinct gain as well as a certain artistic fitness in
+unyoking the strong-minded female of our species from the Chariot of
+Progress and yoking her to the apple-cart or fish-wagon, and--but that
+is another story; the imminence of the draughtwoman is not foreshadowed
+in the report of our Consul at Liege.
+
+Mr. Smith's estimate of the number of dogs in this country at 7,000,000
+is a "conservative" one, it must be confessed, and can hardly have been
+based on observations by moonlight in a suburban village; his estimate
+of the effective strength of the average dog at 500 pounds is probably
+about right, as will be attested by any intelligent boy who in campaigns
+against orchards has experienced detention by the Cerberi of the places.
+Taking his own figures Mr. Smith calculates that we have in this country
+3,500,000,000 pounds of "idle dog power." But this statement is more
+ingenious than ingenuous; it gives, as doubtless it was intended to
+give, the impression that we have only idle dogs, whereas of all mundane
+forces the domestic dog is most easily stirred to action. His expense
+of energy in pursuit of the harmless, necessary flea, for example, is
+prodigious; and he is not infrequently seen in chase of his own tail,
+with an activity scarcely inferior. If there is anything worth while
+in accepted theories of the conversion and conservation of force these
+gigantic energies are by no means wasted; they appear as heat, light
+and electricity, modifying climate, reducing gas bills and assisting
+in propulsion of street cars. Even in baying the moon and insulting
+visitors and bypassers the dog releases a certain amount of vibratory
+force which through various mutations of its wave-length, may do its
+part in cooking a steak or gratifying the olfactory nerve by throwing
+fresh perfume on the violet. Evidently the commercial advantages of
+deposing the dog from the position of Exalted Personage and subduing him
+to that of Motor would not be all clear gain. He would no longer have
+the spirit to send, Whitmanwise, his barbarous but beneficent yawp over
+the housetops, nor the leisure to throw off vast quantities of energy
+by centrifugal efforts at the conquest of his tail. As to the fleas, he
+would accept them with apathetic satisfaction as preventives of thought
+upon his fallen fortunes.
+
+Having observed with attention and considered with seriousness the
+London _Daily News_ declares its conviction that the dog, as we have the
+happiness to know him, is dreadfully bored by civilization. This is one
+of the gravest accusations that the friends of progress and light have
+been called out to meet--a challenge that it is impossible to ignore and
+unprofitable to evade; for the dog as we have the happiness to know him
+is the only dog that we have the happiness really to know. The wolf is
+hardly a dog within the meaning of the law, nor is the scalp-yielding
+coyote, whether he howls or merely sings and plays the piano; moreover,
+these are beyond the pale of civilization and outside the scope of our
+sympathies.
+
+With the dog it is different His place is among us; he is with us and of
+us--a part of our life and love. If we are maintaining and promoting a
+condition of things that gives him "that tired feeling" it is befitting
+that we mend our ways lest, shaking the carpet dust from his feet and
+the tenderloin steaks from his teeth, he depart from our midst and
+connect himself with the enchanted life of the thrilling barbarian. We
+can not afford to lose him. The cynophobes may call him a "survival" and
+sneer at his exhausted mandate--albeit, as Darwin points out, they are
+indebted for their sneer to his own habit of uncovering his teeth to
+bite; they may seek to cast opprobrium upon the nature of our affection
+for him by pronouncing it hereditary--a bequest from our primitive
+ancestors, for whom he performed important service in other ways than
+depriving visitors of their tendons; but quite the same we should miss
+him at his meal time and in the (but for him) silent watches of the
+night. We should miss his bark and his bite, the feel of his forefeet
+upon our shirt-fronts, the frou-frou of his dusty sides against our
+nether habiliments. More than all, we should miss and mourn that visible
+yearning for chops and steaks, which he has persuaded us to accept as
+the lovelight of his eye and a tribute to our personal worth. We must
+keep the dog, and to that end find means to abate his weariness of us
+and our ways.
+
+Doubtless much might be done to reclaim our dogs from their uncheerful
+state of mind by abstention from debate on imperialism; by excluding
+them from the churches, at least during the sermons; by keeping them
+off the streets and out of hearing when rites of prostration are in
+performance before visiting notables; by forbidding anyone to read aloud
+in their hearing the sensational articles in the newspapers, and by
+educating them to the belief that Labor and Capital are illusions. A
+limitation of the annual output of popular novels would undoubtedly
+reduce the dejection, which could be still further mitigated by
+abolition of the more successful magazines. If the dialect story or poem
+could be prohibited, under severe penalties, the sum of night-howling
+(erroneously attributed to lunar influence) would experience an audible
+decrement, which, also, would enable the fire department to augment its
+own uproar without reproach. There is, indeed, a considerable number of
+ways in which we might effect a double reform--promoting the advantage
+of Man, as well as medicating the mental fatigue of Dog. For another
+example, it would be "a boon and a blessing to man" if Society would put
+to death, or at least banish, the mill-man or manufacturer who persists
+in apprising the entire community many times a day by means of a steam
+whistle that it is time for his oppressed employees (every one of whom
+has a gold watch) to go to work or to leave off. Such things not only
+make a dog tired, they make a man mad. They answer with an accented
+affirmative Truthful James' plaintive inquiry,
+
+     "Is civilization a failure,
+     Or is the Caucasian played out?"
+
+Unquestionably, from his advantageous point of view as a looker-on at
+the game, the dog is justified in the conviction that they are.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANCESTRAL BOND
+
+A WELL-KNOWN citizen of Ohio once discovered another man of the same
+name exactly resembling him, and writing a "hand" which, including the
+signature, he was unable to distinguish from his own. The two men
+were unable to discover any blood relationship between them. It is
+nevertheless almost absolutely certain that a relationship existed,
+though it may have been so remote a degree that the familiar term
+"forty-second cousin" would not have exaggerated the slenderness of the
+tie. The phenomena of heredity have been inattentively noted; its laws
+are imperfectly understood, even by Herbert Spencer and the prophets. My
+own small study in this amazing field convinces me that a man is the
+sum of his ancestors; that his character, moral and intellectual,
+is determined before his birth. His environment with all its varied
+suasions, its agencies of good and evil; breeding, training, interest,
+experience and the rest of it--have little to do with the matter and can
+not alter the sentence passed upon him at conception, compelling him to
+be what he is.
+
+Man is the hither end of an immeasurable line extending back to the
+ultimate Adam--or, as we scientists prefer to name him, Protoplasmos.
+Man travels, not the mental road that he would, but the one that he
+must--is pushed this way and that by the resultant of all the forces
+behind him; for each member of the ancestral line, though dead, yet
+pusfaedi. In one of what Dr. Nolmes (Holmes, ed.) calls his "medicated
+novels," _The Guardian Angel_, this truth is most admirably and lucidly
+set forth with abundant instance and copious exposition. Upon another
+work of his, _Elsie Venner_--in which he erroneously affirms the
+influence of circumstance and environment--let us lay a charitable hand
+and fling it into the fire.
+
+Clearly all one's ancestors have not equal power in shaping his
+character. Conceiving them, according to our figure, as arranged in line
+behind him and influential in the ratio of their individuality, we shall
+get the best notion of their method by supposing them to have taken
+their places in an order somewhat independent of chronology and a little
+different from their arrangement behind his brother. Immediately at his
+back, with a controlling hand (a trifle skinny) upon him, may stand his
+great-grandmother, while his father may be many removes arear. Or
+the place of power may be held by some fine old Asian gentleman who
+flourished before the confusion of tongues on the plain of Shinar; or by
+some cave-dweller who polished the bone of life in Mesopotamia and was
+perhaps a respectable and honest troglodyte.
+
+Sometimes a whole platoon of ancestors appears to have been moved
+backward or forward, _en bloc_ not, we may be sure, capriciously, but in
+obedience to some law that we do not understand. I know a man to whose
+character not an ancestor since the seventeenth century has contributed
+an element. Intellectually he is a contemporary of John Dryden, whom
+naturally he reveres as the greatest of poets. I know another who has
+inherited his handwriting from his great-grandfather, although he has
+been trained to the Spencerian system and tried hard to acquire it.
+Furthermore, his handwriting follows the same order of progressive
+development as that of his greatgrandfather. At the age of twenty he
+wrote exactly as his ancestor did at the same age, and, although at
+forty-five his chirography is nothing like what it was even ten years
+ago, it is accurately like his great-grandfather's at forty-five. It was
+only five years ago that the discovery of some old letters showed
+him how his great-grandfather wrote, and accounted for the absolute
+dissimilarity of his own handwriting to that of any known member of his
+family.
+
+To suppose that such individual traits as the configuration of the
+body, the color of the hair and eyes, the shape of hands and feet, the
+thousand-and-one subtle characteristics that make family resemblances
+are transmissible, and that the form, texture and capacities of
+the brain which fix the degree of natural intellect, are _not_
+transmissible, is illogical and absurd. We see that certain actions,
+such as gestures, gait, and so forth, resulting from the most complex
+concurrences of brain, nerves and muscles, are hereditary. Is it
+reasonable to suppose that the brain alone of all the organs performs
+its work according to its own sweet will, free from congenital
+tendencies? Is it not a familiar fact that racial characteristics are
+persistent?--that one race is stupid and indocile, another quick and
+intelligent? Does not each generation of a race inherit the intellectual
+qualities of the preceding generation? How could this be true of
+generations and not of individuals?
+
+As to stirpiculture, the intelligent and systematic breeding of men and
+women with a view to improvement of the species--it is a thing of the
+far future, It is hardly in sight. Yet, what splendid possibilities it
+carries! Two or three generations of as careful breeding as we bestow
+on horses, dogs and pigeons would do more good than all the penal,
+reformatory and educating agencies of the world accomplish in a thousand
+years. It is the one direction in which human effort to "elevate the
+race" can be assured of a definitive, speedy and adequate success. It
+is hardly better than nonsense to prate of any good coming to the race
+through (for example) medical science, which is mainly concerned in
+reversing the beneficent operation of natural laws and saving the
+unfittest to perpetuate their unfitness. Our entire system of charities
+is of, to the same objection; it cares for the incapables whom Nature
+is trying to "weed out," This not only debases the race physically,
+intellectually and morally, but constantly increases the rate of
+debasement. The proportion of criminals, paupers and the various kinds
+of "inmates" of charitable institutions augments its horrible percentage
+yearly. On the other hand, our wars destroy the capable; so thus we make
+inroads upon the vitality of the race from two directions. We preserve
+the feeble and extirpate the strong. He who, in view of this amazing
+folly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the human
+race toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose Olympian
+heights are inaccessible--the Titans of fact can never scale them to
+storm its ancient reign.
+
+
+
+
+THE RIGHT TO WORK
+
+ALL kinds of relief, charitable or other, doubtless tend to perpetuation
+of pauperism, inasmuch as paupers are thereby kept alive; and living
+paupers unquestionably propagate their unthrifty kind more abundantly
+than dead ones. It is not true, though, that relief interferes with
+Nature's beneficent law of the survival of the fittest, for the power
+to excite sympathy and obtain relief is a kind of fitness. I am still a
+devotee of the homely primitive doctrine that mischance, disability or
+even unthrift, is not a capital crime justly and profitably punishable
+by starvation. I still regard the Good Samaritan with a certain
+toleration and Jesus Christ's tenderness to the poor as something more
+than a policy of obstruction.
+
+If no such thing as an almshouse, a hospital, an asylum or any one of
+the many public establishments for relief of the unfortunate were known
+the proposal to found one would indubitably evoke from thousands of
+throats notes of deprecation and predictions of disaster. It would be
+called Socialism of the radical and dangerous kind--of a kind to menace
+the stability of government and undermine the very foundations of
+organized society! Yet who is more truly unfortunate than an able-bodied
+man out of work through no delinquency of will and no default of effort?
+Is hunger to him and his less poignant than to the feeble in body and
+mind whom we support for nothing in almshouse or asylum? Are cold and
+exposure less disagreeable to him than to them? Is not his claim to the
+right to live as valid as theirs if backed by the will to pay for life
+with work? And in denial of his claim is there not latent a far greater
+peril to society than inheres in denial of theirs? So unfortunate and
+dangerous a creature as a man willing to work, yet having no work to do,
+should be unknown outside of the literature of satire. Doubtless there
+would be enormous difficulties in devising a practicable and beneficent
+system, and doubtless the reform, like all permanent and salutary
+reforms, will have to grow. The growth naturally will be delayed by
+opposition of the workingmen themselves--precisely as they oppose prison
+labor from ignorance that labor makes labor.
+
+It matters not that nine in ten of all our tramps and vagrants are such
+from choice, and irreclaimable degenerates into the bargain; so long as
+one worthy man is out of employment and unable to obtain it our duty
+is to provide it by law. Nay, so long as industrial conditions are such
+that so pathetic a phenomenon is possible we have not the moral right
+to disregard that possibility. The right to employment being the right
+to life, its denial is homicide. It should be needless to point out
+the advantages of its concession. It would preserve the life and
+self-respect of him who is needy through misfortune, and supply an
+infallible means of detection of his criminal imitator, who could
+then be dealt with as he deserves, widiout the lenity that finds
+justification in doubt and compassion. It would diminish crime, for an
+empty stomach has no morals. With a wage rate lower than the commercial,
+it would disturb no private industries by luring away their workmen,
+and with nothing made to sell there would be no competition with private
+products. Properly directed, it would give us highways, bridges and
+embankments which we shall not otherwise have.
+
+It is difficult to say if our laws relating to vagrancy and vagrants
+are more cruel or more absurd. If not so atrocious they would evoke
+laughter; if less ridiculous we should read them with indignation. Here
+is an imaginary conversation:
+
+The Law: It is forbidden to you to rob. It is forbidden to you to steal.
+It is forbidden to you to beg.
+
+The Vagrant: Being without money, and denied employment, I am compelled
+to obtain food, shelter and clothing in one of these ways, else I shall
+be hungry and cold.
+
+The Law: That is no affair of mine. Yet I am considerate--you are
+permitted to be as hungry as you like and as cold as may suit you.
+
+The Vagrant: Hungry, yes, and many thanks to you; but if I go naked I am
+arrested for indecent exposure. You require me to wear clothing.
+
+The Law: You'll admit that you need it.
+
+The Vagrant: But not that you provide a way for me to get it. No one
+will give me shelter at night; you forbid me to sleep in a straw stack.
+
+The Law: Ungrateful man! we provide a cell.
+
+The Vagrant: Even when I obey you, starving all day and freezing all
+night, and holding my tongue with both hands, I am liable to arrest for
+being "without visible means of support."
+
+The Law: A most reprehensible condition.
+
+The Vagrant: One thing has been overlooked--a legal punishment for
+begging for work.
+
+The Law: True; I am not perfect.
+
+
+
+
+THE RIGHT TO TAKE ONESELF OFF
+
+A PERSON who loses heart and hope through a personal bereavement is like
+a grain of sand on the seashore complaining that the tide has washed
+a neighboring grain out of reach. He is worse, for the bereaved grain
+cannot help itself; it has to be a grain of sand and play the game of
+tide, win or lose; whereas he can quit--by watching his opportunity
+can "quit a winner." For sometimes we do beat "the man who keeps the
+table"--never in the long run, but infrequently and out of small stakes.
+But this is no time to "cash in" and go, for you can not take your
+little winning with you. The time to quit is when you have lost a big
+stake, your fool hope of eventual success, your fortitude and your love
+of the game. If you stay in the game, which you are not compelled to do,
+take your losses in good temper and do not whine about them. They are
+hard to bear, but that is no reason why you should be.
+
+But we are told with tiresome iteration that we are "put here" for some
+purpose (not disclosed) and have no right to retire until summoned--it
+may be by small-pox, it may be by the bludgeon of a blackguard, it may
+be by the kick of a cow; the "summoning" Power (said to be the same as
+the "putting" Power) has not a nice taste in the choice of messengers.
+That "argument" is not worth attention, for it is unsupported by either
+evidence or anything remotely resembling evidence. "Put here." Indeed!
+And by the keeper of the table who "runs" the "skin game." We were put
+here by our parents--that is all anybody knows about it; and they had no
+more authority than we, and probably no more intention.
+
+The notion that we have not the right to take our own lives comes of
+our consciousness that we have not the courage. It is the plea of the
+coward--his excuse for continuing to live when he has nothing to live
+for--or his provision against such a time in the future. If he were not
+egotist as well as coward he would need no excuse. To one who does not
+regard himself as the center of creation and his sorrow as the throes of
+the universe, life, if not worth living, is also not worth leaving. The
+ancient philosopher who was asked why he did not the if, as he taught,
+life was no better than death, replied: "Because death is no better than
+life." We do not know that either proposition is true, but the matter is
+not worth bothering about, for both states are supportable--life despite
+its pleasures and death despite its repose.
+
+It was Robert G. Ingersoll's opinion that there is rather too little
+than too much suicide in the world--that people are so cowardly as to
+live on long after endurance has ceased to be a virtue. This view is but
+a return to the wisdom of the ancients, in whose splendid civilization
+suicide had as honorable place as any other courageous, reasonable and
+unselfish act. Antony, Brutus, Cato, Seneca--these were not of the kind
+of men to do deeds of cowardice and folly. The smug, self-righteous
+modern way of looking upon the act as that of a craven or a lunatic is
+the creation of priests, Philistines and women. If courage is manifest
+in endurance of profitless discomfort it is cowardice to warm oneself
+when cold, to cure oneself when ill, to drive away mosquitoes, to go in
+when it rains. The "pursuit of happiness," then, is not an "inalienable
+right," for that implies avoidance of pain. No principle is involved in
+this matter; suicide is justifiable or not, according to circumstances;
+each case is to be considered on its merits and he having the act under
+advisement is sole judge. To his decision, made with whatever light
+he may chance to have, all honest minds will bow. The appellant has
+no court to which to take his appeal. Nowhere is a jurisdiction so
+comprehensive as to embrace the right of condemning the wretched to
+life.
+
+Suicide is always courageous. We call it courage in a soldier merely to
+face death--say to lead a forlorn hope--although he has a chance of life
+and a certainty of "glory." But the suicide does more than face death;
+he incurs it, and with a certainty, not of glory, but of reproach. If
+that is not courage we must reform our vocabulary.
+
+True, there may be a higher courage in living than in dying--a moral
+courage greater than physical. The courage of the suicide, like that of
+the pirate, is not incompatible with a selfish disregard of the rights
+and interests of others--a cruel recreancy to duty and decency. I have
+been asked: "Do you not think it cowardly when a man leaves his family
+unprovided for, to end his life, because he is dissatisfied with life
+in general?" No, I do not; I think it selfish and cruel. Is not that
+enough to say of it? Must we distort words from their true meaning
+in order more effectually to damn the act and cover its author with a
+greater infamy? A word means something; despite the maunderings of
+the lexicographers, it does not mean whatever you want it to mean.
+"Cowardice" means the fear of danger, not the shirking of duty. The
+writer who allows himself as much liberty in the use of words as he is
+allowed by the dictionary-maker and by popular consent is a bad writer.
+He can make no impression on his reader, and would do better service at
+the ribbon-counter.
+
+The ethics of suicide is not a simple matter; one can not lay down laws
+of universal application, but each case is to be judged, if judged
+at all, with a full knowledge of all the circumstances, including
+the mental and moral make-up of the person taking his own life--an
+impossible qualification for judgment. One's time, race and religion
+have much to do with it. Some people, like the ancient Romans and
+the modern Japanese, have considered suicide in certain circumstances
+honorable and obligatory; among ourselves it is held in disfavor. A man
+of sense will not give much attention to considerations of that kind,
+excepting in so far as they affect others, but in judging weak offenders
+they are to be taken into the account. Speaking generally, then, I
+should say that in our time and country the following persons (and some
+others) are justified in removing themselves, and that to some of them
+it is a duty:
+
+One afflicted with a painful or loathsome and incurable disease.
+
+One who is a heavy burden to his friends, with no prospect of their
+relief.
+
+One threatened with permanent insanity.
+
+One irreclaimably addicted to drunkenness or some similarly destructive
+or offensive habit.
+
+One without friends, property, employment or hope.
+
+One who has disgraced himself.
+
+Why do we honor the valiant soldier, sailor, fireman? For obedience to
+duty? Not at all; that alone--without the peril--seldom elicits remark,
+never evokes enthusiasm. It is because he faced without flinching the
+risk of that supreme disaster--or what we feel to be such--death. But
+look you: the soldier braves the danger of death; the suicide braves
+death itself! The leader of the forlorn hope may not be struck. The
+sailor who voluntarily goes down with his ship may be picked up or cast
+ashore. It is not certain that the wall will topple until the fireman
+shall have descended with his precious burden. But the suicide--his
+is the foeman that never missed a mark, his the sea that gives nothing
+back; the wall that he mounts bears no man's weight And his, at the end
+of it all, is the dishonored grave where the wild ass of public opinion
+
+     "Stamps o'er his head but can not break his sleep."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shadow On The Dial, and Other
+Essays, by Ambrose Bierce
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