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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and Body;
+Vol. II Love and Society, by Upton Sinclair
+
+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 Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and Body; Vol. II Love and Society
+
+Author: Upton Sinclair
+
+Release Date: November 23, 2011 [EBook #38117]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The
+Book _of_ Life
+
+UPTON SINCLAIR
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOK OF LIFE
+
+
+
+
+_The_
+Book of Life
+
+_By_ UPTON SINCLAIR
+
+VOLUME ONE:
+MIND AND BODY
+
+VOLUME TWO:
+LOVE AND SOCIETY
+
+UPTON SINCLAIR
+PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
+
+WHOLESALE DISTRIBUTORS
+_THE PAINE BOOK COMPANY_
+CHICAGO
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1921, 1922
+BY
+UPTON SINCLAIR
+_All Rights Reserved._
+
+
+                _To_
+           Kate Crane Gartz
+in acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a
+better world, and her fidelity to those
+      who struggle to achieve it.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+The writer of this book has been in this world some forty-two years.
+That may not seem long to some, but it is long enough to have made many
+painful mistakes, and to have learned much from them. Looking about him,
+he sees others making these same mistakes, suffering for lack of that
+same knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This being the case,
+it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus the blunders and
+the pain.
+
+There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year,
+asking him questions, some of them of the strangest. A man is dying of
+cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast? A man is unable to
+make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women? A
+man has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him what to
+do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little time for
+self-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to read? Many
+such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of people,
+earnest, hungry for happiness, and groping as if in a fog. The things
+they most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in the
+newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend. Of these agencies,
+the first is not entirely competent, the second is not entirely honest,
+and the third is not entirely up to date. Nor is there anywhere a book
+in which the effort has been made to give to everyday human beings the
+everyday information they need for the successful living of their lives.
+
+For the present book the following claims may be made. First, it is a
+modern book; its writer watches hour by hour the new achievements of the
+human mind, he reaches out for information about them, he seeks to
+adjust his own thoughts to them and to test them in his own living.
+Second, it is, or tries hard to be, a wise book; its writer is not among
+those too-ardent young radicals who leap to the conclusion that because
+many old things are stupid and tiresome, therefore everything that is
+old is to be spurned with contempt, and everything that proclaims itself
+new is to be taken at its own valuation. Third, it is an honest book;
+its writer will not pretend to know what he only guesses, and where it
+is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally, it is a kind
+book; it is not written for its author's glory, nor for his enrichment,
+but to tell you things that may be useful to you in the brief span of
+your life. It will attempt to tell you how to live, how to find health
+and happiness and success, how to work and how to play, how to eat and
+how to sleep, how to love and to marry and to care for your children,
+how to deal with your fellow men in business and politics and social
+life, how to act and how to think, what religion to believe, what art to
+enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the boys phrase it!
+
+There are several ways for such a book to begin. It might begin with the
+child, because we all begin that way; it might begin with love, because
+that precedes the child; it might begin with the care of the body,
+explaining that sound physical health is the basis of all right living,
+and even of right thinking; it might begin as most philosophies do, by
+defining life, discussing its origin and fundamental nature.
+
+The trouble with this last plan is that there are a lot of people who
+have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; they have creeds and
+catechisms which they know by heart, and if you suggest to them anything
+different, they give you a startled look and get out of your way. And
+then there is another, and in our modern world a still larger class, who
+say, "Oh, shucks! I don't go in for religion and that kind of thing."
+You offer them something that looks like a sermon, and they turn to the
+baseball page.
+
+Who will read this Book of Life? There will be, among others, the great
+American tired business man. He wrestles with problems and cares all
+day, and when he sits down to read in the evening, he says: "Make it
+short and snappy." There is the wife of the tired business man, the
+American perfect lady. She does most of the reading for the family; but
+she has never got down to anything fundamental in her life, and mostly
+she likes to read about exciting love affairs, which she distinguishes
+from the unexciting kind she knows by the word "romance." Then there is
+the still more tired American workingman, who has been "speeded up" all
+day under the bonus system or the piece-work system, and is apt to fall
+asleep in his chair before he finishes supper. Then there is the
+workingman's wife, who has slaved all day in the kitchen, and has a
+chance for a few minutes' intimacy with her husband before he falls
+asleep. She would like to have somebody tell her what to do for croup,
+but she is not sure that she has time to discuss the question whether
+life is worth living.
+
+Yet, I wonder; is there a single one among all these tired people, or
+even among the cynical people, who has not had some moment of awe when
+the thought came stabbing into his mind like a knife: "What a strange
+thing this life is! What am I anyhow? Where do I come from, and what is
+going to become of me? What do I mean, what am I here for?" I have sat
+chatting with three hoboes by a railroad track, cooking themselves a
+mulligan in an old can, and heard one of them say: "By God, it's a queer
+thing, ain't it, mate?" I have sat on the deck of a ship, looking out
+over the midnight ocean and talking with a sailor, and heard him use
+almost the identical words. It is not only in the class-room and the
+schools that the minds of men are grappling with the fundamental
+problems; in fact, it was not from the schools that the new religions
+and the great moral impulses of humanity took their origin. It was from
+lonely shepherds sitting on the hillsides, and from fishermen casting
+their nets, and from carpenters and tailors and shoemakers at their
+benches.
+
+Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a difference
+what you believe about life, how it comes to be, where it is going, and
+what is your place in it. Is there a heaven with a God, who watches you
+day and night, and knows every thought you think, and will some day take
+you to eternal bliss if you obey his laws? If you really believe that,
+you will try to find out about his laws, and you will be comparatively
+little concerned about the success or failure of your business. Perhaps,
+on the other hand, you have knocked about in the world and lost your
+"faith"; you have been cheated and exploited, and have set out to "get
+yours," as the phrase is; to "feather your own nest." But some gust of
+passion seizes you, and you waste your substance, you wreck your life;
+then you wonder, "Who set that trap and baited it? Am I a creature of
+blind instincts, jealousies and greeds and hates beyond my own control
+entirely? Am I a poor, feeble insect, blown about in a storm and
+smashed? Or do I make the storm, and can I in any part control it?"
+
+No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you may be, it will
+pay you to get such things straight: to know a little of what the wise
+men of the past have thought about them, and more especially what
+science with its new tools of knowledge may have discovered.
+
+The writer of this book spent nine years of his life in colleges and
+universities; also he was brought up in a church. So he knows the
+orthodox teachings, he can say that he has given to the recognized wise
+men of the world every opportunity to tell him what they know. Then,
+being dissatisfied, he went to the unrecognized teachers, the
+enthusiasts and the "cranks" of a hundred schools. Finally, he thought
+for himself; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself. As a
+result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or final truth; but
+he has what he might describe as a rough working draft, a practical
+outline, good for everyday purposes. He is going to have confidence
+enough in you, the reader, to give you the hardest part first; that is,
+to begin with the great fundamental questions. What is life, and how
+does it come to be? What does it mean, and what have we to do with it?
+Are we its masters or its slaves? What does it owe us, and what do we
+owe to it? Why is it so hard, and do we have to stand its hardness? And
+can we really know about all these matters, or will we be only guessing?
+Can we trust ourselves to think about them, or shall we be safer if we
+believe what we are told? Shall we be punished if we think wrong, and
+how shall we be punished? Shall we be rewarded if we think right, and
+will the pay be worth the trouble?
+
+Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the simplest
+language possible. I would avoid long words altogether, if I could; but
+some of these long words mean certain definite things, and there are no
+other words to serve the purpose. You do not refuse to engage in the
+automobile business because the carburetor and the differential are
+words of four syllables. Neither should you refuse to get yourself
+straight with the universe because it is too much trouble to go to the
+dictionary and learn that the word "phenomenon" means something else
+than a little boy who can play the piano or do long division in his
+head.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART ONE: THE BOOK OF THE MIND
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+CHAPTER I. THE NATURE OF LIFE                                          3
+
+Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the
+bounds of real truth as distinguished from phrases and
+self-deception.
+
+CHAPTER II. THE NATURE OF FAITH                                        8
+
+Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and
+what we know intuitively; what is implied in the process
+of thinking, and without which no thought could be.
+
+CHAPTER III. THE USE OF REASON                                        12
+
+Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies
+we are compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it.
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY                                    17
+
+Compares the ways of Nature with human morality, and
+tries to show how the latter came to be.
+
+CHAPTER V. NATURE AND MAN                                             21
+
+Attempts to show how man has taken control of Nature,
+and is carrying on her processes and improving upon them.
+
+CHAPTER VI. MAN THE REBEL                                             27
+
+Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason,
+in which man finds himself, and how he can advance to
+a securer condition.
+
+CHAPTER VII. MAKING OUR MORALS                                        31
+
+Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit
+human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human
+reason.
+
+CHAPTER VIII. THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION                                37
+
+Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of
+means to ends, and depends upon the understanding of a
+particular set of circumstances.
+
+CHAPTER IX. THE CHOOSING OF LIFE                                      42
+
+Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is
+best in life, and decide what we wish to make of it.
+
+CHAPTER X. MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR                                     50
+
+Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the
+relative importance of our various duties.
+
+CHAPTER XI. THE MIND AND THE BODY                                     53
+
+Discusses the interaction between physical and mental
+things, and the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed
+causes.
+
+CHAPTER XII. THE MIND OF THE BODY                                     61
+
+Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does
+to the body, and how it can be controlled and made use
+of by the intelligence.
+
+CHAPTER XIII. EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS                              67
+
+Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and
+other methods by which a new universe of life has been
+brought to human knowledge.
+
+CHAPTER XIV. THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY                               74
+
+Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point
+of view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling
+us to live forever?
+
+CHAPTER XV. THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL                                 81
+
+Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of
+spiritism thus put before us.
+
+CHAPTER XVI. THE POWERS OF THE MIND                                   91
+
+Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance
+is slavery, and what science means to the people.
+
+CHAPTER XVII. THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND                                 98
+
+Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to
+preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our
+lives and the lives of all men.
+
+
+PART TWO: THE BOOK OF THE BODY
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. THE UNITY OF THE BODY                                 105
+
+Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is
+not a matter of many different organs and functions, but
+is one problem of one organism.
+
+CHAPTER XIX. EXPERIMENTS IN DIET                                     115
+
+Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and
+his conclusions as to what to eat.
+
+CHAPTER XX. ERRORS IN DIET                                           123
+
+Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they
+play in the making of health and disease.
+
+CHAPTER XXI. DIET STANDARDS                                          134
+
+Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities
+we need, and their money cost.
+
+CHAPTER XXII. FOODS AND POISONS                                      145
+
+Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon
+the system of stimulants and narcotics.
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. MORE ABOUT HEALTH                                     156
+
+Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing,
+bathing and sleep.
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. WORK AND PLAY                                          163
+
+Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and
+the overworked.
+
+CHAPTER XXV. THE FASTING CURE                                        169
+
+Deals with Nature's own remedy for disease, and how to
+make use of it.
+
+CHAPTER XXVI. BREAKING THE FAST                                      177
+
+Discusses various methods of building up the body after
+a fast, especially the milk diet.
+
+CHAPTER XXVII. DISEASES AND CURES                                    182
+
+Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and
+what is known about their cause and cure.
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+THE BOOK OF THE MIND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE NATURE OF LIFE
+
+     (Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the bounds of
+     real truth as distinguished from phrases and self-deception.)
+
+
+If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what Life is. But
+unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The only consolation I can
+find is in the fact that nobody else knows either.
+
+We ask the churches, and they tell us that male and female created He
+them, and put them in the Garden of Eden, and they would have been happy
+had not Satan tempted them. But then you ask, who made Satan, and the
+explanation grows vague. You ask, if God made Satan, and knew what Satan
+was going to do, is it not the same as if God did it himself? So this
+explanation of the origin of evil gets you no further than the Hindoo
+picture of the world resting on the back of a tortoise, and the tortoise
+on the head of a snake--and nothing said as to what the snake rests on.
+
+Let us go to the scientist. I know a certain physiologist, perhaps the
+greatest in the world, and his eager face rises before me, and I hear
+his quick, impetuous voice declaring that he knows what Life is; he has
+told it in several big volumes, and all I have to do is to read them.
+Life is a tropism, caused by the presence of certain combinations of
+chemicals; my friend knows this, because he has produced the thing in
+his test-tubes. He is an exponent of a way of thought called Monism,
+which finds the ultimate source of being in forms of energy manifesting
+themselves as matter; he shows how all living things arise from that and
+sink back into it.
+
+But question this scientist more closely. What is this "matter" that you
+are so sure of? How do you know it? Obviously, through sensations. You
+never know matter itself, you only know its effects upon you, and you
+assume that the matter must be there to cause the sensation. In other
+words, "matter," which seems so real, turns out to be merely "a
+permanent possibility of sensation." And suppose there were to be
+sensations, caused, for example, by a sportive demon who liked to make
+fun of eminent physiologists--then there might be the appearance of
+matter and nothing else; in other words, there might be mind, and
+various states of mind. So we discover that the materialist, in the
+philosophic sense, is making just as large an act of faith, is
+pronouncing just as bold a dogma as any priest of any religion.
+
+This is an old-time topic of disputation. Before Mother Eddy there was
+Bishop Berkeley, and before Berkeley, there was Plato, and they and the
+materialists disputed until their hearers cried in despair, "What is
+Mind? No matter! What is Matter? Never mind!" But a century or two ago
+in a town of Prussia there lived a little, dried-up professor of
+philosophy, who sat himself down in his room and fixed his eyes on a
+church steeple outside the window, and for years on end devoted himself
+to examining the tools of thought with which the human mind is provided,
+and deciding just what work and how much of it they are fitted to do. So
+came the proof that our minds are incapable of reaching to or dealing
+with any ultimate reality whatever, but can comprehend only
+phenomena--that is to say, appearances--and their relations one with
+another. The Koenigsberg professor proved this once for all time,
+setting forth four propositions about ultimate reality, and proving them
+by exact and irrefutable logic, and then proving by equally exact and
+irrefutable logic their precise opposites and contraries. Anybody who
+has read and comprehended the four "antinomies" of Immanuel Kant[A]
+knows that metaphysics is as dead a subject as astrology, and that all
+the complicated theories which the philosophers from Heraclitus to
+Arthur Balfour have spun like spiders out of their inner consciousness,
+have no more relation to reality than the intricacies of the game of
+chess.
+
+     [A] See Paulsen: "Life of Kant."
+
+The writer is sorry to make this statement, because he spent a lot of
+time reading these philosophers and acquainting himself with their
+subtle theories. He learned a whole language of long words, and even the
+special meanings which each philosopher or school of philosophers give
+to them. When he had got through, he had learned, so far as metaphysics
+is concerned, absolutely nothing, and had merely the job of clearing out
+of his mind great masses of verbal cobwebs. It was not even good
+intellectual training; the metaphysical method of thought is a _trap_.
+The person who thinks in absolutes and ultimates is led to believe that
+he has come to conclusions about reality, when as a matter of fact he
+has merely proved what he wants to believe; if he had wanted to believe
+the opposite, he could have proven that exactly as well--as his
+opponents will at once demonstrate.
+
+If you multiply two feet by two feet, the result represents a plain
+surface, or figure of two dimensions. If you multiply two feet by two
+feet by two feet, you have a solid, or figure of three dimensions--such
+as the world in which we live and move. But now, suppose you multiply
+two feet by two feet by two feet by two feet, what does that represent?
+For ages the minds of mathematicians and philosophers have been tempted
+by this fascinating problem of the "fourth dimension." They have worked
+out by analogy what such a world would be like. If you went into this
+"fourth dimension," you could turn yourself inside out, and come back to
+our present world in that condition, and no one of your three-dimension
+friends would be able to imagine how you had managed it, or to put you
+back again the way you belonged. And in this, it seems to me, we have
+the perfect analogy of metaphysical thinking. It is the "fourth
+dimension" of the mind, and plays as much havoc with sound thinking as a
+physical "fourth dimension" would play with--say, the prison system. A
+man who takes up an absolute--God, immortality, the origin of being, a
+first cause, free will, absolute right or wrong, infinite time or space,
+final truth, original substance, the "thing in itself"--that man
+disappears into a fourth dimension, and turns himself inside out or
+upside down or hindside foremost, and comes back and exhibits himself in
+triumph; then, when he is ready, he effects another disappearance, and
+another change, and is back on earth an ordinary human being.
+
+The world is full of schools of thought, theologians and metaphysicians
+and professors of academic philosophy, transcendentalists and
+theosophists and Christian Scientists, who perform such mental
+monkey-shines continuously before our eyes. They prove what they please,
+and the fact that no two of them prove the same thing makes clear to us
+in the end that none of them has proved anything. The Christian
+Scientist asserts that there is no such thing as matter, but that pain
+is merely a delusion of mortal mind; he continues serene in this faith
+until he runs into an automobile and sustains a compound fracture of
+the femur--whereupon he does exactly what any of the rest of us do, goes
+to a competent surgeon and has the bone set. On the other hand, some
+devoted young Socialists of my acquaintance have read Haeckel and
+Dietzgen, and adopted the dogma that matter is the first cause, and that
+all things have grown out of it and return to it; they have seen that
+the brain decays after death, they declare that the soul is a function
+of the brain--and because of such theories they deliberately reject the
+most powerful modes of appeal whereby men can be swayed to faith in
+human solidarity.
+
+The best books I know for the sweeping out of metaphysical cobwebs are
+"The Philosophy of Common Sense" and "The Creed of a Layman," by
+Frederic Harrison, leader of the English Positivists, a school of
+thought established by Auguste Comte. But even as I recommend these
+books, I recall the dissatisfaction with which I left them; for it
+appears that the Positivists have their dogmas like all the rest. Mr.
+Harrison is not content to say that mankind has not the mental tools for
+dealing with ultimate realities; he must needs prove that mankind never
+will and never can have these tools, I look back upon the long process
+of evolution and ask myself, What would an oyster think about
+Positivism? What would be the opinion of, let us say, a young turnip on
+the subject of Mr. Frederic Harrison's thesis? It may well be that the
+difference between a turnip and Mr. Harrison is not so great as will be
+the difference between Mr. Harrison and that super-race which some day
+takes possession of the earth and of all the universe. It does not seem
+to me good science or good sense to dogmatize about what this race will
+know, or what will be its tools of thought. What does seem to me good
+science and good sense is to take the tools which we now possess and use
+them to their utmost capacity.
+
+What is it that we know about life? We know a seemingly endless stream
+of sensations which manifest themselves in certain ways, and seem to
+inhere in what we call things and beings. We observe incessant change in
+all these phenomena, and we examine these changes and discover their
+ways. The ways seem to be invariable; so completely so that for
+practical purposes we assume them to be invariable, and base all our
+calculations and actions upon this assumption. Manifestly, we could not
+live otherwise, and the spread of scientific knowledge is the further
+tracing out of such "laws"--that is to say, the ways of behaving of
+existence--and the extending of our belief in their invariability to
+wider and wider fields.
+
+Once upon a time we were told that "the wind bloweth where it listeth."
+But now we are quite certain that there are causes for the blowing of
+the wind, and when our researches have been carried far enough, we shall
+be able to account for and to predict every smallest breath of air. Once
+we were told that dreams came from a supernatural world; but now we are
+beginning to analyze dreams, and to explain what they come from and what
+they mean. Perhaps we still find human nature a bewildering and
+unaccountable thing; but some day we shall know enough of man's body and
+his mind, his past and his present, to be able to explain human nature
+and to produce it at will, precisely as today we produce certain
+reactions in our test-tubes, and do it so invariably that the most
+cautious financier will invest tens of millions of dollars in a process,
+and never once reflect that he is putting too much trust in the
+permanence of nature.
+
+In many departments of thought great specialists are now working,
+experimenting and observing by the methods of science. If in the course
+of this book we speak of "certainty," we mean, of course, not the
+"absolute" certainty of any metaphysical dogma, but the practical
+certainty of everyday common sense; the certainty we feel that eating
+food will satisfy our hunger, and that tomorrow, as today, two and two
+will continue to make four.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE NATURE OF FAITH
+
+     (Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and what we know
+     intuitively; what is implied in the process of thinking, and
+     without which no thought could be.)
+
+
+The primary fact that we know about life is growth. Herbert Spencer has
+defined this growth, or evolution, in a string of long words which may
+be summed up to mean: the process whereby a number of things which are
+simple and like one another become different parts of one thing which is
+complex. If we observe this process in ourselves, and the symptoms of it
+in others, we discover that when it is proceeding successfully, it is
+accompanied by a sensation of satisfaction which we call happiness or
+pleasure; also that when it is thwarted or repressed, it is accompanied
+by a different sensation which we call pain. Subtle metaphysicians, both
+inside the churches and out, have set themselves to the task of proving
+that there must be some other object of life than the continuance of
+these sensations of pleasure which accompany successful growth. They
+have proven to their own satisfaction that morality will collapse and
+human progress come to an end unless we can find some other motive,
+something more permanent and more stimulating, something "higher," as
+they phrase it. All I can say is that I gave reverent attention to the
+arguments of these moralists and theologians, and that for many years I
+believed their doctrines; but I believe them no longer.
+
+I interpret the purpose of life to be the continuous unfoldment of its
+powers, its growth into higher forms--that is to say, forms more complex
+and subtly contrived, capable of more intense and enduring kinds of that
+satisfaction which is nature's warrant of life. If you wish to take up
+this statement and argue about it, please wait until you have read the
+chapter "Nature and Man," and noted my distinction between instinctive
+life and rational life. For men, the word "growth" does not mean _any_
+growth, _all_ growth, blind and indiscriminate growth. It does not mean
+growth for the tubercle bacillus, nor growth for the anopheles mosquito,
+nor growth for the house-fly, the spider and the louse. Neither do we
+mean that the purpose of man's own life is _any_ pleasure, _all_
+pleasure, blind and indiscriminate pleasure; the pleasure of alcohol,
+the pleasure of cannibalism, the pleasure of the modern form of
+cannibalism which we call "making money." We have survived in the
+struggle for existence by the cooperative and social use of our powers
+of judgment; and our judgment is that which selects among forms of
+growth, which gives preference to wheat and corn over weeds, and to
+self-control and honesty over treachery and greed.
+
+So when we say that the purpose of life is happiness, we do not mean to
+turn mankind loose at a hog-trough; we mean that our duty as thinkers is
+to watch life, to test it, to pick and choose among the many forms it
+offers, and to say: This kind of growth is more permanent and full of
+promise, it is more fertile, more deeply satisfactory; therefore, we
+choose this, and sanction the kind of pleasure which it brings. Other
+kinds we decide are temporary and delusive; therefore we put in jail
+anyone who sells alcoholic drink, and we refuse to invite to our home
+people who are lewd, and some day we shall not permit our children to
+attend moving picture shows in which the modern form of cannibalism is
+glorified.
+
+The reader, no doubt, has been taught a distinction between "science"
+and "faith." He is saying now, "You believe that everything is to be
+determined by human reason? You reject all faith?" I answer, No; I am
+not rejecting faith; I am merely refusing to apply it to objects with
+which it has nothing to do. You do not take it as a matter of faith that
+a package of sugar weighs a pound; you put it on the scales and find
+out--in other words, you make it a matter of experiment. But all the
+creeds of all the religious sects are full of pronouncements which are
+no more matters of faith than the question of the weighing of sugar. Is
+pork a wholesome article of food or is it not? All Christians will
+readily acknowledge that this is a matter to be determined by the
+microscope and other devices of experimental science; but then some Jew
+rises in the meeting and puts the question: Is dancing injurious to the
+character? And immediately all members of the Methodist Episcopal Church
+vote to close the discussion.
+
+What is faith? Faith is the instinct which underlies all being, assuring
+us that life is worth while and honest, a thing to be trusted; in other
+words, it is the certainty that successful growth always is and always
+will be accompanied by pleasure. The most skeptical scientist in the
+world, even my friend the physiologist who proves that life is nothing
+but a tropism, and can be produced by mixing chemicals in
+test-tubes--this eager friend is one of the most faithful men I know. He
+is burning up with the faith that knowledge is worth possessing, and
+also that it is possible of attainment. With what boundless scorn would
+he receive any suggestion to the contrary--for example, the idea that
+life might be a series of sensations which some sportive demon is
+producing for the torment of man! More than that, this friend is burning
+up with the certainty that knowledge can be spread, that his fellow men
+will receive it and apply it, and that it will make them happy when they
+do. Why else does he write his learned books in defense of the
+materialist philosophy?
+
+And that same faith which animates the great monist animates likewise
+every child who toddles off to school, and every chicken which emerges
+from an egg, and every blade of grass which thrusts its head above the
+ground. Not every chicken survives, of course, and all the blades of
+grass wither in the fall; nevertheless, the seeds of grass are spread,
+and chickens make food for philosophers, and the great process of life
+continues to manifest its faith. In the end the life process produces
+man, who, as we shall presently see, takes it up, and judges it, and
+makes it over to suit himself.
+
+You will note from this that I am what is called an optimist; whereas
+some of the great philosophers of the world have called themselves
+pessimists. But I notice with a smile that these are often the men who
+work hardest of all to spread their ideas, and thus testify to the
+worthwhileness of truth and the perfectibility of mankind. There has
+come to be a saying among settlement workers and physicians, who are
+familiar with poverty and its effects upon life, that there are no bad
+babies and good babies, there are only sick babies and well babies. In
+the same way, I would say there are no pessimists and optimists, there
+are only mentally sick people and mentally well people. Everywhere
+throughout life, both animal and vegetable, health means happiness, and
+gives abundant evidence of that fact. All healthy life is satisfactory
+to itself; when it develops reason, it tries to find out why, and this
+is yet another testimony to the fact that having power and using it is
+pleasant. When I was in college the professor would propound the old
+question: "Would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy philosopher?"
+My answer always was: "I would rather be a happy philosopher." The
+professor replied: "Perhaps that is not possible." But I said: "I will
+prove that it is!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE USE OF REASON
+
+     (Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies we are
+     compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it.)
+
+
+The great majority of people are brought up to believe that some
+particular set of dogmas are objects of faith, and that there are
+penalties more or less severe for the application of reason to these
+dogmas. What particular set it happens to be is a matter of geography;
+in a crowded modern city like New York, it is a matter of the particular
+block on which the child is born. A child born on Hester Street will be
+taught that his welfare depends upon his never eating meat and butter
+from the same dish. A child born on Tenth Avenue will be taught that it
+is a matter of his not eating meat on Fridays. A child born on Madison
+Avenue will be taught that it is a question of the precise metaphysical
+process by which bread is changed into human body and wine into human
+blood. Each of these children will be assured that his human reason is
+fallible, that it is extremely dangerous to apply it to this "sacred"
+subject, and that the proper thing to do is to accept the authority of
+some ancient tradition, or some institution, or some official, or some
+book for which a special sanction is claimed.
+
+Has there ever been in the world any revelation, outside of or above
+human reason? Could there ever be such a thing? In order to test this
+possibility, select for yourself the most convincing way by which a
+special revelation could be handed down to mankind. Take any of the
+ancient orthodox ways, the finding of graven tablets on a mountain-top,
+or a voice speaking from a burning bush, or an angel appearing before a
+great concourse of people and handing out a written scroll. Suppose that
+were to happen, let us say, at the next Yale-Harvard football game;
+suppose the news were to be flashed to the ends of the earth that God
+had thus presented to mankind an entirely new religion. What would be
+the process by which the people of London or Calcutta would decide upon
+that revelation? First, they would have to consider the question
+whether it was an American newspaper fake--by no means an easy question.
+Second, they would have to consider the chances of its being an optical
+delusion. Then, assuming they accepted the sworn testimony of ten
+thousand mature and competent witnesses, they would have to consider the
+possibility of someone having invented a new kind of invisible
+aeroplane. Assuming they were convinced that it was really a
+supernatural being, they would next have to decide the chances of its
+being a visitor from Mars, or from the fourth dimension of space, or
+from the devil. In considering all this, they would necessarily have to
+examine the alleged revelation. What was the literary quality of it?
+What was the moral quality of it? What would be the effect upon mankind
+if the alleged revelation were to be universally adopted and applied?
+
+Manifestly, all these are questions for the human reason, the human
+judgment; there is no other method of determining them, there would be
+nothing for any individual person, or for men as a whole to do, except
+to apply their best powers, and, as the phrase is, "make up their minds"
+about the matter. Reason would be the judge, and the new revelation
+would be the prisoner at the bar. Humanity might say, this is a real
+inspiration, we will submit ourselves to it and follow it, and allow no
+one from now on to question it. But inevitably there would be some who
+would say, "Tommyrot!" There would be others who would say, "This new
+revelation isn't working, it is repressing progress, it is stifling the
+mind." These people would stand up for their conviction, they would
+become martyrs, and all the world would have to discuss them. And who
+would decide between them and the great mass of men? Reason, the judge,
+would decide.
+
+It is perfectly true that human reason is fallible. Infallibility is an
+absolute, a concept of the mind, and not a reality. Life has not given
+us infallibility, any more than it has given us omniscience, or
+omnipotence, or any other of those attributes which we call divine. Life
+has given us powers, more or less weak, more or less strong, but all
+capable of improvement and development. Reason is the tool whereby
+mankind has won supremacy over the rest of the animal kingdom, and is
+gradually taking control of the forces of nature. It is the best tool we
+have, and because it is the best, we are driven irresistibly to use it.
+And how strange that some of us can find no better use for it than to
+destroy its own self! Visit one of the Jesuit fathers and hear him seek
+to persuade you that reason is powerless against faith and must abdicate
+to faith. You answer, "Yes, father, you have persuaded me. I admit the
+fallibility of my mortal powers; and I begin by applying my doubts of
+them to the arguments by which you have just convinced me. I was
+convinced, but of course I cannot be sure of a conviction, attained by
+fallible reason. Therefore I am just where I was before--except that I
+am no longer in position to be certain of anything."
+
+You answer in good faith, and take up your hat and depart, closing the
+door of the good father's study behind you. But stop a moment, why do
+you close the door? You close the door because your reason tells you
+that otherwise the cold air outside will blow in and make the good
+father uncomfortable. You put your hat on, because your reason has not
+yet been applied to the problem of the cause of baldness. You step out
+onto the street, and when you hear a sudden noise, you step back onto
+the curbstone, because your reason tells you that an automobile is
+coming, and that on the sidewalk you are safe from it. So you go on,
+using your reason in a million acts of your life whereby your life is
+preserved and developed. And if anybody suggested that the fallibility
+of your reason should cause you to delay in front of an automobile, you
+would apply your reason to the problem of that person and decide that he
+was insane. And I say that just as there is insanity in everyday
+judgments and relationships, so there is insanity in philosophy,
+metaphysics and religion; the seed and source of all this kind of
+insanity being the notion that it is the duty of anybody to believe
+anything which cannot completely justify itself as reasonable.
+
+Nowadays, as ideas are spreading, the champions of dogma are hard put to
+it, and you will find their minds a muddle of two points of view. The
+Jewish rabbi will strive desperately to think of some hygienic objection
+to the presence of meat and butter on the same plate; the Catholic
+priest will tell you that fish is a very wholesome article of food, and
+that anyhow we all eat too much; the Methodist and the Baptist and the
+Presbyterian will tell you that if men did not rest one day in seven
+their health would break down. Thus they justify faith by reason, and
+reconcile the conflict between science and theology. Accepting this
+method, I experiment and learn that it improves my digestion and adds to
+my working power if I play tennis on Sunday. I follow this indisputably
+rational form of conduct--and find myself in conflict with the "faith"
+of the ancient State of Delaware, which obliges me to serve a term in
+its state's prison for having innocently and unwittingly desecrated its
+day of holiness!
+
+If you read Professor Bury's little book, "A History of Freedom of
+Thought," you will discover that there has been a long conflict over the
+right of men to use their minds--and the victory is not yet. The term
+"free thinker," which ought to be the highest badge a man could wear, is
+still almost everywhere throughout America a term of vague terror. In
+the State of California today there is a Criminal Syndicalism Act, which
+provides a maximum of fourteen years in jail for any person who shall
+write or publish or speak any words expressive of the idea that the
+United States government should be overthrown in the same way that it
+was established--that is, by force; only a few months ago the writer of
+this book was on the witness stand for two days, and had the painful,
+almost incredible experience of being battered and knocked about by an
+inquisitive district attorney, who cross-examined him as to every detail
+of his beliefs, and read garbled extracts from his published writings,
+in the effort to make it appear that he held some belief which might
+possibly prejudice the jury against him. The defendant in this case, a
+returned soldier who had spent three years as a volunteer in the
+trenches, and had been twice wounded and once gassed, was accused, not
+merely of approving the Soviet form of government, but also of having
+printed uncomplimentary references to priests and religious
+institutions.
+
+Nowadays it is the propertied class which has taken possession of the
+powers of government, and which presumes to censor the thinking of
+mankind in its own interest. But whether it be priestcraft or whether it
+be capitalism which seeks to bind the human mind, it comes to the same
+thing, and the effort must be met by the assertion that, in spite of
+errors and blunders, and the serious harm these may do, there is no way
+for men to advance save by using the best powers of thinking they
+possess, and proclaiming their conclusions to others. Speaking
+theologically for the moment, God has given us our reasoning powers, and
+also the impulse to use them, and it is inconceivable that He should
+seek to restrict their use, or should give to anyone the power to forbid
+their use. It is His truth which we seek, and His which we proclaim. In
+so doing we perform our highest act of faith, and we refuse to be
+troubled by the idea that for this service He will reward us by an
+eternity of sulphur and brimstone.
+
+Throughout the remainder of this book it will be assumed that the reader
+accepts this point of view, or, at any rate, that he is willing for
+purposes of experiment to give it a trial and see where it leads him. We
+shall proceed to consider the problems of human life in the light of
+reason, to determine how they come to be, and how they can be solved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
+
+     (Compares the ways of nature with human morality, and tries to show
+     how the latter came to be.)
+
+
+Seventy years ago Charles Darwin published his book, "The Origin of
+Species," in which he defied the theological dogma of his time by the
+shocking idea that life had evolved by many stages of progress from the
+diatom to man. This of course did not conform to the story of the Garden
+of Eden, and so "Darwinism" was fought as an invention of the devil, and
+in the interior of America there are numerous sectarian colleges where
+the dread term "evolution" is spoken in awed whispers. Only the other
+day I read in my newspaper the triumphant proclamation of some clergyman
+that "Darwinism" had been overthrown. This reverend gentleman had got
+mixed up because some biologists were disputing some detail of the
+method by which the evolution of species had been brought about. Do
+species change by the gradual elimination of the unfit, or do they
+change by sudden leaps, the "mutation" theory of de Vries? Are acquired
+powers transmitted to posterity, or is the germ plasm unaffected by its
+environment? Concerning such questions the scientists debate. But the
+fact that life has evolved in an ordered series from the lower forms to
+the higher, and that each individual reproduces in embryo and in infancy
+the history of this long process--these facts are now the basis of all
+modern thinking, and as generally accepted as the rotation of the earth.
+
+You may study this process of evolution from the outside, in the
+multitude of forms which it has assumed and in their reactions one to
+another; or you may study it from the inside in your own soul, the
+emotions which accompany it, the impulse or craving which impels it, the
+_élan vital_, as it is called by the French philosopher Bergson. The
+Christians call it love, and Nietzsche, who hated Christianity, called
+it "the will to power," and persuaded himself that it was the opposite
+of love.
+
+You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one entitled
+"Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the complete unmorality
+of nature, and declares that there is no way by which what mankind knows
+as morality can have originated in the process of nature or can be
+reconciled to natural law. This statement, coming from a leading
+agnostic, was welcome to the theologians. But when I first read the
+essay, as a student of sixteen, it seemed to me narrow; I thought I saw
+a standpoint from which the contradiction disappeared. The difference
+between the morality of Christ and the morality of nature is merely the
+difference between a lower and a higher stage of mental development. The
+animal loves and seeks by instinct to preserve the life which it
+knows--that is to say, its own life and the life of its young. The wolf
+knows nothing about the feelings of a deer; but man in his savage state
+develops reasoning powers enough to realize that there are others like
+himself, the members of his own tribe, and he makes for himself taboos
+which forbid him to kill and eat the members of that tribe. At the
+present time humanity has developed its reason and imaginative sympathy
+to include in the "tribe" one or two hundred million people; while to
+those outside the tribe it still preserves the attitude of the wolf.
+
+How came it that a mind so acute as Huxley's went so far astray on the
+question of the evolution of morality? The answer is that this was the
+factory age in England, and the great scientist, a rebel in theological
+matters, was in economics a child of his time. We find him using the
+formulas of bourgeois biology to ridicule Henry George and his plea for
+the freeing of the land. "Competition is the life of trade," ran the
+nineteenth century slogan; and competition was the god of nineteenth
+century biology. Tennyson summed it up in the phrase: "Nature red in
+tooth and claw with ravin;" and this was found convenient by Manchester
+manufacturers who wished to shut little children up for fourteen hours a
+day in cotton mills, and to harness women to drag cars in the coal
+mines, and to be told by the learned men of their colleges and the holy
+men of their churches that this was "the survival of the fittest," it
+was nature's way of securing the advancement of the race.
+
+But now we are preparing for an era of cooperation, and it occurs to our
+men of science to go back to nature and find out what really are her
+ways. If you will read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in
+Evolution," you will find a complete refutation of the old bourgeois
+biology, and a view of nature which reveals in it the germs of human
+morality. Kropotkin points out that everywhere throughout nature it is
+the social and not the solitary animals which are most numerous and most
+successful. There are many millions of ants and bees for every hawk or
+eagle, and certainly in the state of nature there were thousands of deer
+for every lion or tiger that preyed upon them. And all these social
+creatures have their ways of being, which it requires no stress of the
+imagination to compare with the tribal customs and the moral codes of
+mankind. The different animals prey upon one another, but they do not
+prey upon their own species, except in a few rare cases. The only beast
+that makes a regular practice of exploiting his own kind is man.
+
+By hundreds of interesting illustrations Kropotkin shows that mutual aid
+and mutual self-protection are the means whereby the higher forms of
+being have been evolved. Insects and birds and fish, nearly all the
+herbivorous mammals, and even a great many of the carnivores, help one
+another and protect one another. The chattering monkeys in the treetops
+drove out the saber-tooth tiger from the grove because there were so
+many of them, and when they saw him they all set up a shriek and clamor
+which deafened and confused him. And when by and by these monkeys
+developed an opposed thumb, and broke off a branch of a tree for a club,
+and fastened a sharp stone on the end of it for an axe, and fell upon
+the saber-toothed tiger and exterminated him, they did it because they
+had learned solidarity--even as the workers of the world are today
+learning solidarity in the face of the beast of capitalism.
+
+Man has survived by the cunning of his brain, we are told, and that is
+true. But first among the products of that cunning brain has been the
+knowledge that by himself he is the most helpless and pitiful of
+creatures, while standing together and forming societies and developing
+moralities, he is master of the world. He has not yet learned that
+lesson entirely; he has learned it only for his own nation. Therefore he
+takes the highest skill of his hand and the subtlest wit of his brain,
+and uses them to manufacture poison gases. At the present hour he is
+painfully realizing that his poison formulas all become known to the
+tribes whom he calls his enemies, and so it is his own destruction he is
+engaged in contriving. In other words, man has come to a time when his
+mechanical skill, his mastery over the forces of nature, has developed
+more rapidly than his moral sense and his imaginative sympathy. His
+ability to destroy life has become dangerously greater than his desire
+to preserve it. So he confronts the fair face of nature as an insane
+creature, wrecking not merely everything that he himself has built up,
+but everything that nature has built in the ages before him. He is
+striving now with infinite agony to make this fact real to himself, and
+to mend his evil ways; and the first step in that process is to root out
+from his mind the devil's doctrine which in his blindness and greed he
+has himself implanted, that there is any way for him to find real
+happiness, or to make any worth while progress on this earth, by the
+method of inflicting misery and torment upon his fellow men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NATURE AND MAN
+
+     (Attempts to show how man has taken control of nature, and is
+     carrying on her processes and improving upon them.)
+
+
+If the argument of the preceding chapter is sound, human morality is not
+a fixed and eternal set of laws, but is, like everything else in the
+world, a product of natural evolution. We can trace the history of it,
+just as we trace the story of the rocks. It is not a mysterious or
+supernatural thing, it is simply the reaction of man to his environment,
+and more especially to his fellow men. The source of it is that same
+inner impulse, that love of life, that joy in growing, that faith which
+appears to be the soul of all being.
+
+Man is a part of nature and a product of nature; in many fundamental
+respects his ways are still nature's ways and his laws still nature's
+laws. But there are other and even more significant ways in which man
+has separated himself from nature and made himself something quite
+different. In order to reveal this clearly, we draw a distinction
+between nature and man. This is a proper thing to do, provided we bear
+in mind that our classification is not permanent or final. We
+distinguish frogs from tadpoles, in spite of the fact that at one stage
+the creature is half tadpole and half frog. We distinguish the animal
+from the vegetable kingdom, despite the fact that in their lower forms
+they cannot be distinguished.
+
+What, precisely, is the difference between nature and man? The
+difference lies in the fact that nature is apparently blind in her
+processes; she produces a million eggs in order to give life to one
+salmon, she produces countless millions of salmon to be devoured by
+other fish apparently no better than salmon. Poets may take up the
+doctrine of evolution and dress it out in theological garments, talking
+about the "one far off divine event towards which the whole creation
+moves," but for all we can see, nature, apart from man, is just as well
+satisfied to move in circles, and to come back exactly where she
+started. Nature made a whole world of complicated creatures in the
+steamy, luke-warm swamps of the Mesozoic era, and then, as if deciding
+that the pattern of a large body and a small brain was not a success,
+she froze them all to death with a glacial epoch, and we have nothing
+but the bones to tell us about them.
+
+No one understands anything about evolution until he has realized that
+the phrase "the survival of the fittest" does not mean the survival of
+the best from any human point of view. It merely means the survival of
+those capable of surviving in some particular environment. We consider
+our present civilization as "fit"; but if astronomical changes should
+cause another ice age, we should discover that our "fitness" depended
+upon our ability to live on lichens, or on something we could grow by
+artificial light in the bowels of the earth.
+
+So much for our ancient mother, nature. But now--whether we say with the
+theologians that it was divine providence, or with the materialist
+philosophers that it was an accidental mixing of atoms--at any rate it
+has come about that nature has recently produced creatures who are
+conscious of her process, who are able to observe and criticize it, to
+take up her work and carry it on in their own way, for better or for
+worse. Whether by accident or design, there has been on parts of our
+planet such a combination of climate and soil as has brought into being
+a new product of nature, a heightened form of life which we call
+"intelligence." Creation opens its eyes, and beholds the work of the
+creator, and decides that it is good--yet not so good as it might be!
+Creation takes up the work of the creator, and continues it, in many
+respects annulling it, in other respects revising it entirely. Whether a
+sonnet is a better or a higher product than a spider is a question it
+would be futile to discuss; but this, at least, should be clear--nature
+has produced an infinity of spiders, but nature never produced a sonnet,
+nor anything resembling it.
+
+Man, the creature of God, takes over the functions of God. This fact may
+shock us, or it may inspire us; to the metaphysically minded it offers a
+great variety of fascinating problems. Can it be that God is in process
+of becoming, that there is no God until he has become, in us and through
+us? H. G. Wells sets forth this curious idea; and then, of course, the
+bishops and the clergy rise up in indignation and denounce Mr. Wells as
+an upstart and trespasser upon their field. They have been worshipping
+their God for some three or four thousand years, and know that He has
+been from eternity; He created the world at His will, and how shall
+impious man presume to rise up and criticize His product, and imagine
+that he can improve upon it? Man, with his cheap and silly little toys,
+his sonnets and scientific systems, his symphony concerts and such pale
+imitations of celestial harmonies!
+
+Mr. Wells, in his character of God in the making, has created a bishop
+of his own, and no doubt would maintain the thesis that he is a far
+better bishop than any created by the God of the Anglican churches. We
+will leave Mr. Wells' bishop to argue these problems with God's bishops,
+and will merely remind the reader of our warning about these
+metaphysical matters. You can prove anything and everything, whichever
+and however, all or both; and discussions of the subject are merely your
+enunciation of the fact that you have your private truth as you want it.
+It may be that there is an Infinite Consciousness, which carries the
+whole process of creation in itself, and that all the seeming wastes and
+blunders of nature can be explained from some point of view at present
+beyond the reach of our minds. On the other hand it may be that
+consciousness is now dawning in the universe for the first time. It may
+be that it is an accident, a fleeting product like the morning mist on
+the mountain top. On the other hand, it may be that it is destined to
+grow and expand and take control of the entire universe, as a farmer
+takes control of a field for his own purposes. It may be that just as
+our individual fragments of intelligence communicate and merge into a
+family, a club, a nation, a world culture, so we shall some day grope
+our way toward the consciousness of other planets, or of other states of
+being subsisting on this planet unknown to us, or perhaps even toward
+the cosmic soul, the universal consciousness which we call God.
+
+But meantime, all we can say with positiveness is this: man, the
+created, is becoming the creator. He is taking up the world purpose, he
+is imposing upon it new purposes of his own, he is attempting to impose
+upon it a moral code, to test it and discipline it by a new standard
+which he calls economy. To the present writer this seems the most
+significant fact about life, the most fascinating point of view from
+which life can be regarded. The reader who wishes to follow it into
+greater detail is referred to a little book by Professor E. Ray
+Lankester, "The Kingdom of Man"; especially the opening essay, with its
+fascinating title, "Nature's Insurgent Son."
+
+In what ways have the reasoned and deliberate purposes of man revised
+and even supplanted the processes of nature? The ways are so many that
+it would be easier to mention those in which he has not done so. A
+modern civilized man is hardly content with anything that nature does,
+nor willing to accept any of nature's products. He will not eat nature's
+fruits, he prefers the kinds that he himself has brought into being. He
+is not content with the skin that nature has given him; he has made
+himself an infinite variety of complicated coverings. He objects to
+nature's habit of pouring cold water upon him, and so he has built
+himself houses in which he makes his own climate; he has recently taken
+to creating for himself houses which roll along the ground, or which fly
+through the air, or which swim under the surface of the sea; so he
+carries his private climate with him to all these places. It was
+nature's custom to remove her blunders and her experiments quickly from
+her sight. But man has decided that he loves life so well that he will
+preserve even the imbeciles, the lame and the halt and the blind. In a
+state of nature, if a man's eyes were not properly focused, he blundered
+into the lair of a tiger and was eaten. But civilized man despises such
+a method of maintaining the standard of human eyes; he creates for
+himself a transparent product, ground to such a curve that it corrects
+the focus of his eyes, and makes them as good as any other eyes. In ten
+thousand such ways we might name, man has rebelled against the harshness
+of his ancient mother, and has freed himself from her control.
+
+But still he is the child of his mother, and so it is his way to act
+first, and then to realize what he has done. So it comes about that very
+few, even of the most highly educated men, are aware how completely the
+ancient ways of nature have been suppressed by her "insurgent son." It
+is a good deal as in the various trades and professions which have
+developed with such amazing rapidity in modern civilization; the paper
+man knows how to make paper, the shoe man knows how to make shoes, the
+optician knows about grinding glasses, but none of these knows very much
+about the others' specialties, and has no realization of how far the
+other has gone. So it comes about that in our colleges we are still
+teaching ancient and immutable "laws of nature," which in the actual
+practice of men at work are as extinct and forgotten as the dodo. In all
+colleges, except a few which have been tainted by Socialist thought,
+the students are solemnly learning the so-called "Malthusian law," that
+population presses continually upon the limits of subsistence, there are
+always a few more people in every part of the world than that part of
+the world is able to maintain. At any time we increase the world's
+productive powers, population will increase correspondingly, so there
+can never be an end to human misery, and abortion, war and famine are
+simply nature's eternal methods of adjusting man to his environment.
+
+Thus solemnly we are taught in the colleges. And yet, nine out of ten of
+the students come from homes where the parents have discovered the
+modern practice of birth control; all the students are themselves
+finding out about it in one way or another, and will proceed when they
+marry to restrict themselves to two or three children. In vain will the
+ghost of their favorite statesman and hero, Theodore Roosevelt, be
+traveling up and down the land, denouncing them for the dreadful crime
+of "race suicide"--that is to say, their presuming to use their reason
+to put an end to the ghastly situation revealed by the Malthusian law,
+over-population eternally recurring and checked by abortion, war and
+famine! In vain will the ghost of their favorite saint and moralist,
+Anthony Comstock, be traveling up and down the land, putting people in
+jail for daring to teach to poor women what every rich woman knows, and
+for attempting to change the entirely man-made state of affairs whereby
+an intelligent and self-governing Anglo-Saxon land is being in two or
+three generations turned over to a slum population of Italians, Poles,
+Hungarians, Portuguese, French-Canadians, Mexicans and Japanese!
+
+Likewise in every orthodox college the student is taught what his
+professors are pleased to call "the law of diminishing returns of
+agriculture." That is to say, additional labor expended upon a plot of
+land does not result in an equal increase of produce, and the increase
+grows less, until finally you come to a time when no matter how much
+labor you expend, you can get no more produce from that plot of land.
+All professors teach this, because fifty years ago it was true, and
+since that time it has not occurred to any professor of political
+science to visit a farm. And all the while, out in the suburbs of the
+city where the college is located, market gardeners are practicing on an
+enormous scale a new system of intensive agriculture which makes the
+"law of diminishing returns" a foolish joke.
+
+As Kropotkin shows in his book, "Fields, Factories and Workshops," the
+modern intensive gardener, by use of glass and the chemical test-tube,
+has developed an entirely new science of plant raising. He is
+independent of climate, he makes his own climate; he is independent of
+the defects of the soil, he would just as soon start from nothing and
+make his soil upon an asphalt pavement. By doubling his capital
+investment he raises, not twice as much produce, but ten times as much.
+If his methods were applied to the British Isles, he could raise
+sufficient produce on this small surface to feed the population of the
+entire globe.
+
+So we see that by simple and entirely harmless devices man is in
+position to restrict or to increase population as he sees fit. Also he
+is in position to raise food and produce the necessities of life for a
+hundred or thousand times as many people as are now on the earth. But
+superstition ordains involuntary parenthood, and capitalism ordains that
+land shall be held out of use for speculation, or shall be exploited for
+rent! And this is done in the name of "nature"--that old nature of the
+"tooth and claw," whose ancient plan it is "that they shall take who
+have the power, and they shall keep who can"; that ancient nature which
+has been so entirely suppressed and supplanted by civilized man, and
+which survives only as a ghost, a skeleton to be resurrected from the
+tomb, for the purpose of frightening the enslaved. When a predatory
+financier wishes a fur overcoat to protect himself from the cold, or
+when he hires a masseur to keep up the circulation of his blood, you do
+not find him troubling himself about the laws of "nature"; never will he
+mention this old scarecrow, except when he is trying to persuade the
+workers of the world to go on paying him tribute for the use of the
+natural resources of the earth!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MAN THE REBEL
+
+     (Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, in which
+     man finds himself, and how he can advance to a securer condition.)
+
+
+In the state of nature you find every creature living a precarious
+existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the creature survives only
+so long as it keeps itself at the top of its form. The result is the
+maintenance of the type in its full perfection, and, under the
+competitive pressure, a gradual increase of its powers. Excepting when
+sudden eruptions of natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly
+provided with a set of instincts for all emergencies; it is in
+harmonious relationship to its environment, it knows how to do what it
+has to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection.
+But now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, abolishes the
+competitive struggle, and changes at his own insolent will both his
+environment and his reaction thereto.
+
+Man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; they are for
+his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the inconveniences of nature
+and the stresses of the competitive struggle. In a state of nature there
+are no fat animals, but in civilization there are not merely fat
+animals, but fat men to eat the fat animals. In a state of nature no
+animal loafs very long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. But
+man, by his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, and
+also his fellow men. So he produces unlimited wealth for himself; not
+merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he wants, but he builds a
+whole elaborate set of laws and moral customs and religious codes about
+this power, he invents manners and customs and literatures and arts,
+expressive of his superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of
+his ability to enslave and exploit them. So he destroys for his
+imperious self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained
+over him; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thousand
+monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. And each one of
+these diseases and abnormalities is a new life of its own; it develops
+a body of knowledge, a science, and perhaps an art; it becomes the means
+of life, the environment and the determining destiny of thousands,
+perhaps millions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the
+colossal structure which we call civilization--in part still healthy and
+progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer.
+
+What is to be done about this cancer? First of all, it must be
+diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the causes of it
+determined. Man, the rebel, has rejected his mother nature, and has lost
+and for the most part forgotten the instincts with which she provided
+him. He has destroyed the environment which, however harsh to the
+individual, was beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of
+it a gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving pictures
+and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' furnishing
+establishments."
+
+Shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, that he shall
+no longer make asylums for the insane and homes for the defective,
+eye-glasses for the astigmatic and malted milk for the dyspeptic? There
+are some who preach that. Among the multitude of strange books and
+pamphlets which come in my mail, I found the other day a volume from
+England, "Social Chaos and the Way Out," by Alfred Baker Read, a learned
+and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein with all the paraphernalia of
+learning it is gravely maintained that the solution for the ills of
+civilization is a return to the ancient Greek practice of infanticide.
+Every child at birth is to be examined by a committee of physicians, and
+if it is found to possess any defect, or if the census has established
+that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this baby
+shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. You might think that
+this is a joke, after the fashion of Swift's proposal for eating the
+children of famine-stricken Ireland. I have spent some time examining
+this book before I risk committing myself to the statement that it is
+the work of a sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun.
+
+If we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first point we
+have to understand is that nature has nothing to do with it. We cannot
+appeal to nature, because we are many thousands of years beyond her
+sway. We left her when the first ape came down from the treetop and
+fastened a sharp stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable
+good-bye to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and
+altered his diet by means of fire. Therefore, it is no argument to say
+that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." Our choice will lie
+among a thousand different courses, but the one thing we may be sure of
+is that none of them will be "natural." Bairnsfather, in one of his war
+cartoons, portrays a British officer on leave, who got homesick for the
+trenches and went out into the garden and dug himself a hole in the mud
+and sat shivering in the rain all night. And this amuses us vastly; but
+we should be even more amused if any kind of reformer, physician,
+moralist, clergyman or legislator should suggest to us any remedy for
+our ills that was really "according to nature."
+
+Civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no love for nature
+except as an object for the play of his fancy and his wit. He means to
+live his own life, he means to hold himself above nature with all his
+powers. Yet, obviously, he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot
+give his life-blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper
+tissues starve. He must somehow divert the flow of his energies, his
+social blood-stream, so to speak, from the cancer to the healthy growth.
+To abandon the metaphor, man will determine by the use of his reason
+what he wishes life to be; he will choose the highest forms of it to
+which he can attain. He will then, by the deliberate act of his own
+will, devote his energies to those tasks; he will make for himself new
+laws, new moral codes, new customs and ways of thought, calculated to
+bring to reality the ideal which he has formed. So only can man justify
+himself as a creator, so can he realize the benefit and escape the
+penalties of his revolt from his ancient mother.
+
+And then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we have come back to
+nature, only in a new form. Nature, harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind
+as we call her, yet had her deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she
+protected and preserved the type. Man, in his new pride of power, has
+invented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "individualism."
+He lives and works for himself; he chooses to wear silk shirts, and to
+break the speed limit, and to pin ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now
+what he must do with his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from
+degeneration, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old
+mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, as an act
+of high daring: I will protect the species, I will preserve the type! I
+will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic intoxication, because it
+damages the health of my offspring; I will deny myself the amusement of
+sexual promiscuity for the same reason. I will devise imitations of the
+chase and of battle in order that I may keep my physical body up to the
+best standard of nature. Because I understand that all civilized life is
+based upon intelligence, I will acquire knowledge and spread it among my
+fellow men. Because I perceive that civilization is impossible without
+sympathy, and because sympathy makes it impossible for me to be happy
+while my fellow men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my
+energies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all forms
+of exploitation of man by his fellows.
+
+Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay entitled "A
+Moral Equivalent for War." He sets forth the idea that men have loved
+war through the ages because it has called forth their highest efforts,
+has made them more fully aware of the powers of their being. He asks,
+May it not be possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his
+love of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to
+invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the destruction
+of other men and their enslavement, but upon cooperative emulation in
+the unfoldment of the powers of the mind? That this can be done by men,
+I have never doubted. That it will be done, and done quickly, has been
+made certain by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all
+thinking people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been such
+that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization more damage
+than it is able to endure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MAKING OUR MORALS
+
+     (Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit human
+     facts, and there can be no judge of it save human reason.)
+
+
+Assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be accepted, it
+appears that human life is in part at least a product of human will,
+guided by human intelligence. Man finds himself in the position of the
+crew of a ship in the middle of the ocean; he does not know exactly how
+the ship was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but he
+has discovered how the engines are run, and how the ship is steered, and
+the meaning of the compass. So now he takes charge of the ship, and
+keeps it afloat amid many perils; and meantime, on the bridge of the
+vessel, there goes on a furious argument over the question what port the
+ship shall be steered to and what chart shall be used.
+
+It is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile is useful
+because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable are the
+conditions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent the problems with
+which he finds himself confronted. The moral and legal codes of mankind
+may be compared to the steering orders which are given to the helmsman
+of the vessel. Northeast by north, he is told; and if during the night a
+heavy wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard,
+then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direction. If he
+does not do so, he may find that his vessel has swung around and is
+going to some other part of the world. Next morning the passengers may
+wake up and find the ship on the rocks--because the helmsman persisted
+in following certain steering directions which were laid down in an
+ancient Hebrew book two or three thousand years ago!
+
+If life is a continually changing product, then the laws which govern
+conduct must also be continually changing, and morality is a problem of
+continuous adjustment to new circumstances and new needs. If man is free
+to work upon this changing environment, he must be free to make new
+tools and devise new processes. If it is the task of reason to choose
+among many possible courses and many possible varieties of life, then
+clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every detail of his laws
+and customs and moral codes.
+
+This is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of all
+religions. So far as I know there is no religion which does not teach
+that the conduct of man in certain matters has been eternally fixed by
+some higher power, and that it is man's duty to conform to these rules.
+It is considered to be wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact,
+to do so is the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than
+any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be.
+
+Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us take, for a test, the
+Ten Commandments. These commandments were graven upon stone tablets some
+four thousand years ago, and are supposed to have been valid ever since.
+"Thou shalt not kill," is one; others phrase it, "Thou shall do no
+murder"; and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of
+controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former version, while
+if you are a member of the military general staff of your country you
+accept the latter. You maintain the right to kill your fellow men,
+provided that those who do the killing have been previously clad in a
+special uniform, indicating their distinctive function as killers of
+their fellow men. You maintain, in other words, the right of making war;
+and presently, when you get into making war, you find yourself
+maintaining the right to kill, not merely by the old established method
+of the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which destroy
+the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city full at a time.
+
+And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided the
+killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a man who sits upon
+a raised bench and wears a black robe, and perhaps a powdered wig. You
+consider that by the simple device of putting this man into a black robe
+and a powdered wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the
+divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to human reason;
+and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so subjected, you call him
+by the dread name "pacifist," and if he attempts to preach his idea, you
+send him to prison for ten or twenty years, which means in actual
+practice that you kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and
+tubercular infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of
+killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "C. O.," and you bully and
+beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water cure" in your
+dungeons.
+
+Or take the commandment that we shall not commit adultery. Surely this
+is a law about which we can agree! But presently we discover that
+unhappily married couples desire to part, and that if we do not allow
+them to part, we actually cause the commission of a great deal more
+adultery than otherwise. Therefore, our wise men meet together, and
+revise this divine law, and decide that it is not adultery if a man
+takes another wife, provided he has received from a judge an engraved
+piece of paper permitting him to do so. But some of the followers of
+religion refuse to admit this right of mere mortal man. The Catholic
+Church attempts to enforce its own laws, and declares that people who
+divorce and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mortal
+sin. The Episcopal Church does not go quite so far as that; it allows
+the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. Other churches are content
+to accept the state law as it stands. Is it not manifest that all these
+groups are applying human reason, and nothing but human reason, to the
+interpreting and revising of their divine commandments?
+
+Or take the law, "Thou shalt not steal." Surely we can all agree upon
+that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets us nowhere, because we have
+to set up a human court to decide what is "stealing." Is it stealing to
+seize upon land, and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for
+your own, and hand it down to your children forever? Yes, of course,
+that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your
+statement. It is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number of
+years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by law, and
+held unchangeable forever. Also, we run up against the fact that it is
+not stealing, if it is done by the State, by men who have been dressed
+up in the costume of killers before they commit the act.
+
+Again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, while
+other men are starving and dying for lack of land to labor upon? Some of
+us call this stealing, but we are impolitely referred to as "radicals,"
+and if we venture to suggest that anyone should resist this kind of
+stealing, we are sentenced to slow death from malnutrition and
+tubercular infection. Again, is it stealing for a victim of our system
+of land monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of
+his starving child? The law says that this is stealing, and sends the
+man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of mankind protests, and
+I have heard a great many respectable Americans venture so far in
+"radicalism" as to say that they themselves would steal under such
+circumstances.
+
+One could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is enough to
+make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to attempt to talk
+about "divine" rules for human conduct. Regardless of any ideas you may
+hold, or any wishes, you are forced at every hour of your life to apply
+your reason to the problems of your life, and you have no escape from
+the task of judging and deciding. All that you do is to judge right or
+to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery upon yourself
+and upon all who come into contact with you. How much more sensible,
+therefore, to recognize the fact of moral and intellectual
+responsibility; to investigate the data of life with which you have to
+deal, the environment by which you are surrounded, and to train your
+judgment so that you will be able to fit yourself to it with quickness
+and certainty!
+
+"But," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves mankind without
+any guide or authority. How can human beings act, how can they deal with
+one another, if there are no laws, no permanent moral codes?"
+
+The answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of morality does
+not mean at all that there will be no permanent laws and working
+principles. Many of the facts of life are fixed for all practical
+purposes--the purposes not merely of your life and my life, but the life
+of many generations. We are not likely to see in our time the end of the
+ancient Hebrew announcement that "the sins of the father are visited
+upon the children"; therefore it is possible for us to study out a
+course of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down to his
+children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. The Catholic Church
+has had for a thousand years or more the "mortal sin" of gluttony upon
+its list; and today comes experimental science with its new weapons of
+research, and discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the
+arteries, and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will
+ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. Indeed, science has added to
+gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of alcoholic liquor for
+beverage purposes; we have done this in spite of the manifest fact that
+the drinking of wine was not merely an Old Testament virtue, but a New
+Testament religious rite.
+
+To say that human life changes, and that new discoveries and new powers
+make necessary new laws and moral customs, is to say something so
+obvious that it might seem a waste of paper and ink. Man has invented
+the automobile and has crowded himself into cities, and so has to adopt
+a rigid set of traffic regulations. So far as I know, it has never
+occurred to any religious enthusiast to seek in the book of Revelation
+for information as to the advisability of the "left hand turn" at
+Broadway and Forty-second Street, New York, at five o'clock in the
+afternoon. But modern science has created new economic facts, just as
+unprecedented as the automobile; it has created new possibilities of
+spending and new possibilities of starving for mankind; it has made new
+cravings and new satisfactions, new crimes and new virtues; and yet the
+great mass of our people are still seeking to guide themselves in their
+readjustments to these new facts by ancient codes which have no more
+relationship to these facts than they have to the affairs of Mars!
+
+I am acquainted with a certain lady, one of the kindest and most devoted
+souls alive, who seeks to solve the problems of her life, and of her
+large family of children and grand-children, according to sentences
+which she picks out, more or less at random, from certain more or less
+random chapters of ancient Hebrew literature. This lady will find some
+words which she imagines apply to the matter, and will shut her devout
+eyes to the fact that there are other "texts," bearing on the matter,
+which say exactly the opposite. She will place the strangest and most
+unimaginable interpretations upon the words, and yet will be absolutely
+certain that her interpretation is the voice of God speaking directly to
+her. If you try to tell her about Socialism, she will say, "The poor ye
+have always with you"; which means that it is interfering with Divine
+Providence to try to remedy poverty on any large scale. This lady is
+ready instantly to relieve any single case of want; she regards it as
+her duty to do this; in fact, she considers that the purpose of some
+people's poverty is to provide her with a chance to do the noble action
+of relieving it. You would think that the meaning of the sentence,
+"Spare the rod and spoil the child," would be so plain that no one
+could mistake it; but this good lady understood it to mean that God
+forbade the physical chastisement of children, and preferred them
+"spoiled." She held this idea for half a lifetime--until it was pointed
+out to her that the sentence was not in the Bible, but in "Hudibras," an
+old English poem!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION
+
+     (Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of means to
+     ends, and depends upon the understanding of a particular set of
+     circumstances.)
+
+
+Some years ago I used to know an ardent single tax propagandist who
+found my way of arguing intensely irritating, because, as he phrased it,
+I had "no principles." We would be discussing, for example, a protective
+tariff, and I would wish to collect statistics, but discovered to my
+bewilderment that to my single tax friend a customs duty was "stealing"
+on the part of the government. The government had a right to tax land,
+because that was the gift of nature, but it had no right to tax the
+products of human labor, and when it took a portion of the goods which
+anyone brought into a country, the government was playing the part of a
+robber. Of course such a man was annoyed by the suggestion that in the
+early stages of a country's development it might possibly be a good
+thing for the country to make itself independent and self-sufficient by
+encouraging the development of its manufactures; that, on the other
+hand, when these manufactures had grown to such a size that they
+controlled the government, it might be an excellent thing for the
+country to subject them to the pressure of foreign competition, in order
+to lower their value as a preliminary to socializing them.
+
+The reader who comes to this book looking for hard and fast rules of
+life will be disappointed. It would be convenient if someone could lay
+down for us a moral code, and lift from our shoulders the inconvenient
+responsibility of deciding about our own lives. There may be persons so
+weak that they have to have the conditions of their lives thus
+determined for them; but I am not writing for such persons. I am writing
+for adult and responsible individuals, and I bear in mind that every
+individual is a separate problem, with separate needs and separate
+duties. There are, of course, a good many rules that apply to everybody
+in almost all emergencies, but I cannot think of a single rule that I
+would be willing to say I would apply in my life without a single
+exception. "Thou shalt not kill" is a rule that I have followed, so far
+without exception; but as soon as I turn my imagination loose, I can
+think of many circumstances under which I should kill. I remember
+discussing the matter with a pacifist friend of mine, an out-and-out
+religious non-resistant. I pointed out to him that people sometimes went
+insane, and in that condition they sometimes seized hatchets and killed
+anyone in sight. What would my pacifist friend do if he saw a maniac
+attacking his children with a hatchet? It did not help him to say that
+he would use all possible means short of killing the maniac; he had
+finally to admit that if he were quite sure it was a question of the
+life of the maniac or the life of his child, he would kill. And this is
+not mere verbal quibbling, because such things do happen in the world,
+and people are confronted with such emergencies, and they have to
+decide, and no rule is a general rule if it has a single exception.
+There is a saying that "the exception proves the rule," but this is very
+silly; it is a mistranslation of the Latin word "probat," which means,
+not proves, but tests. No exception can prove a rule. What the exception
+does is to test the rule by showing that the result does not follow in
+the exceptional case.
+
+The only kind of rule which can be laid down for human conduct is a rule
+in such general terms that it escapes exceptions by leaving the matter
+open for every man's difference of opinion. Any kind of rule which is
+specific will sooner or later pass out of date. Take, by way of
+illustration, the ancient and well-established virtue of frugality.
+Obviously, under a state of nature, or of economic competition, it is
+necessary for every man to lay by a store "for a rainy day." But suppose
+we could set up a condition of economic security, under which society
+guaranteed to every man the full product of his labor, and the old and
+the sick were fully taken care of--then how foolish a man would seem who
+troubled to acquire a surplus of goods! It would be as if we saw him
+riding on horseback through the main street of our town in a full suit
+of armor!
+
+I devote a good deal of space to this question of a fixed and
+unchangeable morality, because it is one of the heaviest burdens that
+mankind carries upon its back. The record of human history is sickening,
+not so much because of blood and slaughter, but because of fanaticism;
+because wherever the mind of man attempts to assert itself, to escape
+from the blind rule of animal greed, it adopts a set of formulas, and
+proceeds to enforce them, regardless of consequences, upon the whole of
+life. Consider, for example, the rule of the Puritans in England. The
+Puritans glorified conscience, and it is perfectly proper to glorify
+conscience, but not to the entire suppression of the beauty-making
+faculties in man. Macaulay summed up the Puritan point of view in the
+sentence that they objected to bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to
+the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. As a result of
+applying that principle, and lacing mankind in a straight-jacket by
+legislation, England swung back into a reaction under the Cavaliers, in
+which debauchery held more complete sway than ever before or since in
+English life.
+
+This is a hard lesson, but it must be learned: there is no virtue that
+does not become a vice if it is carried to extremes; there is no virtue
+that does not become a vice if it is applied at the wrong time, or under
+the wrong circumstances, or at the wrong stage of human development. In
+fact, we may say that most vices are virtues misapplied. The so-called
+natural vices are simply natural impulses carried to excess, while the
+unnatural vices result from the suppression and distortion of natural
+impulses. The Greeks had as their supreme virtue what they called
+"sophrosuné." It is a beautiful word, worth remembering; it means a
+beautiful quality called moderation. We shall find, as we come to
+investigate, that life is a series of compromises among many different
+needs, many different desires, many different duties; and reason sits as
+a wise and patient judge, and appoints to each its proper portion, and
+denies to it an excess which would starve the others. Such is true
+morality, and it is incompatible with the existence of any fixed code,
+whether of human origin or divine.
+
+The fixed morality is a survival of a far-off past, of the days of
+instinct and servitude. Human reason has developed but slowly, and
+perhaps only a few people are as yet entirely capable of taking control
+of their own destiny; perhaps it is really dangerous to think for
+oneself! But if we investigate carefully, we may decide that the danger
+is not so much to ourselves as it is to others. The most evil of all the
+habits that man has inherited from his far-off past is the habit of
+exploiting his fellows, and in order to exploit them more safely the
+ruling castes of priests and kings and nobles and property owners have
+taken possession of the moralities of the world and shaped them for
+their own convenience. They have taught the slave virtues of credulity
+and submission; they have surrounded their teachings with all the
+terrors of the supernatural; they have placed upon rebellion the
+penalties, not merely of this world, but of the next, not merely of the
+dungeon and the rack, but of hellfire and brimstone.
+
+I do not wish to go to extremes and say that the moral codes now taught
+in the world are made wholly in this evil way. As a matter of fact they
+are a queer jumble of the two elements, the slave terrors of the past
+and the common sense of the present. There is not one moral code in the
+world today, there are many. There is one for the rich, and an entirely
+different one for the poor, and the rich have had a great deal more to
+do with shaping the code of the poor than the poor have had to do with
+shaping the code of the rich. There is one code for governments, and an
+entirely different one for the victims of governments. There is one code
+for business, and an entirely different one, a far more human and decent
+one, for friendship. Above all, there is one code for Sunday and another
+code for the other six days of the week. Most of our idealisms and our
+sentimental fine phrases we reserve for our Sunday code, while for our
+every-day code we go back to the rule of the jungle: "Dog eat dog," or
+"Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first." When you
+attempt to suggest a new moral code to our present day moral
+authorities, it is the fine phrases of the Sunday code they bring out
+for exhibition purposes; and perhaps you are impressed by their
+arguments--until Monday morning, when you attempt to apply this code at
+the office, and they stare at you in bewilderment, or burst out laughing
+in your face.
+
+What I am trying to do here is to outline a code that will not be a
+matter of phrases but a matter of practice. It will apply to all men,
+rich as well as poor, and to all seven days of the week. I am not so
+much suggesting a code, as pointing out to you how you can work out your
+own code for yourself. I am suggesting that you should adopt it, not
+because I tell you to, but because you yourself have taken it and tested
+it, precisely as you would test any other of the practical affairs of
+your life--potatoes as an article of diet, or some particular sack of
+potatoes that a peddler was trying to sell to you. It is not yet
+possible for you to be as sure about everything in your life as you can
+be about a sack of potatoes; human knowledge has not got that far; but
+at least you can know what is to be known, and if anything is a matter
+of uncertainty, you can know that. Such knowledge is often the most
+important of all--just as the driver of an automobile wants to know if a
+bridge is not to be depended on.
+
+So I say to you that if you want to find happiness in this life, look
+with distrust upon all absolutes and ultimates, all hard and fast rules,
+all formulas and dogmas and "general principles." Bear in mind that
+there are many factors in every case, there are many complications in
+every human being, there are many sides to every question. Try to keep
+an open mind and an even temper. Try to take an interest in learning
+something new every day, and in trying some new experiment. This is the
+scientific attitude toward life; this is the way of growth and of true
+success. It is inconvenient, because it involves working your brains,
+and most people have not been taught to do this, and find it the hardest
+kind of work there is. But how much better it is to think for yourself,
+and to protect yourself, than to trust your thinking to some group of
+people whose only interest may be to exploit you for their advantage!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE CHOOSING OF LIFE
+
+     (Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is best in
+     life, and decide what we wish to make of it.)
+
+
+We have made the point about evolution, that it may go forward or it may
+go backward. There is no guarantee in nature that because a thing
+changes, it must necessarily become better than it was. On the contrary,
+degeneration is as definitely established a fact as growth, and it is of
+the utmost importance, in studying the problem of human happiness and
+how to make it, to get clear the fact that nature has produced, and
+continues to produce, all kinds of monstrosities and parasites and
+failures and abortions. And all these blunders of our great mother
+struggle just as hard, desire life just as ardently as normal creatures,
+and suffer just as cruelly when they fail. Blind optimism about life is
+just as fatuous and just as dangerous as blind pessimism, and if we
+propose to take charge of life, and to make it over, we shall find that
+we have to get quickly to the task of deciding what our purpose is.
+
+"Choose well, your choice is brief and yet endless," says Carlyle. You
+are driven in your choice by two facts--first, that you have to choose,
+regardless of whether you want to or not; and second, that upon your
+choice depend infinite possibilities of happiness or of misery. The
+interdependence of life is such that you are choosing not merely for the
+present, but for the future; you are choosing for your posterity
+forever, and to some extent you are choosing for all mankind. Matthew
+Arnold has said that "Conduct is three-fourths of life"; but I, for my
+part, have never been able to see where he got his figures. It seems to
+me that conduct is practically everything in life that really counts.
+Conduct is not merely marriage and birth and premature death; it is not
+merely eating and drinking and sleeping: it is thinking and aspiring; it
+is religion and science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the
+lightning and the cyclone, but with the spread of knowledge it is coming
+to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may be even the comet
+and the rising of the sun.
+
+We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous problem of human
+conduct; we are going to ask ourselves the question: What kind of life
+do we want? What kind of life are we going to make? What are the
+standards by which we may know excellence in life, and distinguish it
+from failure and waste and blunder in life? Obviously, when we have done
+this, we shall have solved the moral problem; all we shall have to say
+is, act so that your actions help to bring the desirable things into
+being, and do not act so as to hinder or weaken them.
+
+We shall not be able to go to nature to settle this question for us.
+This is our problem, not nature's. But we shall find, as usual, that we
+can pick up precious hints from her; we shall be wise to study her ways,
+and learn from her successes and her failures. We are proud of her
+latest product, ourselves. Let us see how she made us; what were the
+stages on the way to man?
+
+First in the scale of evolution, it appears, came inert matter. We call
+it inert, because it looks that way, though we know, of course, that it
+consists of infinite numbers of molecules vibrating with speed which we
+can measure even though we cannot imagine it. This "matter" is
+enormously fascinating, and a wise man will hesitate to speak
+patronizingly about it. Nevertheless, considering matter apart from the
+mind which studies it, we decide that it represents a low stage of
+being. We speak contemptuously of stones and clods and lumps of clay. We
+award more respect to things like mountains and tempest-tossed oceans,
+because they are big; in the early days of our race we used to worship
+these things, but now we think of them merely as the raw material of
+life, and we should not be in the least interested in becoming a
+mountain or an ocean.
+
+Almost everyone would agree, therefore, that what we call "life" is a
+higher and more important achievement of nature. And if we wish to grade
+this life, we do so according to its sentience--that is to say, the
+amount and intensity of the consciousness which grows in it. We are
+interested in the one-celled organisms which swarm everywhere throughout
+nature, and we study the mysterious processes by which they nourish and
+beget themselves; we suspect that they have a germ of consciousness in
+them; but we are surer of the meaning and importance of the
+consciousness we detect in some complex organism like a fish or bird.
+We learn to know the signs of consciousness, of dawning intelligence,
+and we esteem the various kinds of creatures according to the amount of
+it they possess. We reject mere physical bigness and mere strength.
+Joyce Kilmer may write:
+
+    "Poems are made by men like me,
+     But only God can make a tree"--
+
+And that seems to us a charming bit of fancy; but the common sense of
+the thing is voiced to us much better in the lines of old Ben Jonson:
+
+    "It is not growing like a tree
+     In bulk doth make man better be."
+
+If we take two animals of equal bulk, the hippopotamus and the elephant,
+we shall be far more interested in the elephant, because of the
+intelligence and what we call "character" which he displays. There are
+good elephants and bad elephants, kind ones and treacherous ones. We
+love the dog because we can make a companion of him; that is, because we
+can teach him to react to human stimuli. Of all animals we are
+fascinated most by the monkey, because he is nearest to man, and
+displays the keenest intelligence.
+
+Someone may say that this is all mere human egotism, and that we have no
+way of really being sure that the life of elephants and hippopotami is
+not more interesting and significant than the life of men. Never having
+been either of these animals, I cannot say with assurance; but I know
+that I have the power to exterminate these creatures, or to pen them in
+cages, and they are helpless to protect themselves, or even to
+understand what is happening to them. So I am irresistibly driven to
+conclude that intelligence is more safe and more worth while than
+unintelligence; in short, that intelligence is nature's highest product
+up to date, and that to foster and develop it is the best guess I can
+make as to the path of wisdom--that is, of intelligence!
+
+When we come to deal with human values, we find that we can trace much
+the same kind of evolution. Back in the days of the cave man, it was
+physical strength which dominated the horde; but nowadays, except in the
+imagination of the small boy, the "strong man" does not cut much of a
+figure. We go once, perhaps, to see him lift his heavy weights and
+break his iron bars, but then we are tired of him. Mere strength had to
+yield in the struggle for life to quickness of eye and hand, to energy
+which for lack of a better name we may call "nervous." The pugilist who
+has nothing but muscle goes down before his lighter antagonist who can
+keep out of his reach, and the crowd loves the football hero who can
+duck and dodge and make the long runs. One might cite a thousand
+illustrations, such as the British bowmen breaking down the heavily
+armored knights, or the quick-moving, light vessels of Britain
+overcoming the huge galleons of Spain. And as society develops and
+becomes more complex, the fighting man becomes less and less a man of
+muscle, and more and more a man of "nerve." Alexander, Cæsar and
+Napoleon would have stood a poor chance in personal combat against many
+of their followers. They led, because they were men of energy and
+cunning, able to maintain the subtle thing we call prestige.
+
+Now the world has moved into an industrial era, and who are the great
+men of our time, the men whose lightest words are heeded, whose doings
+are spread upon the front pages of our newspapers? Obviously, they are
+the men of money. We may pretend to ourselves that we do not really
+stand in awe of a Morgan or a Rockefeller, but that we admire, let us
+say, an Edison or a Roosevelt. But Edison himself is a man of money, and
+will tell you that he had to be a man of money in order to be free to
+conduct his experiments. As for our politicians and statesmen, they
+either serve the men of money, or the men of money suppress them, as
+they did Roosevelt. The Morgans and the Rockefellers do not do much
+talking; they do not have to. They content themselves with being obeyed,
+and the shaping of our society is in their hands.
+
+And yet, some of us really believe that there are higher faculties in
+man than the ability to manipulate the stock market. We consider that
+the great inventor, the great poet, the great moralist, contributes more
+to human happiness than the man who, by cunning and persistence,
+succeeds in monopolizing some material necessity of human life. "Poets,"
+says Shelley, "are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." If this
+strange statement is anywhere near to truth, it is surely of importance
+that we should decide what are the higher powers in men, and how they
+may be recognized, and how fostered and developed.
+
+What is, in its essence, the process of evolution from the lower to the
+higher forms of mental life? It is a process of expanding consciousness;
+the developing of ability to apprehend a wider and wider circle of
+existence, to share it, to struggle for it as we do for the life we call
+our "own." The test of the higher mental forms is therefore a test of
+universality, of sympathetic inclusiveness; or, to use commoner words,
+it is a test of enlightened unselfishness.
+
+Every human individual has the will to life, the instinct of
+self-preservation, which persuades him that he is of importance; but the
+test of his development is his ability to realize that, important though
+he may be, he is but a small part of the universe, and his highest
+interests are not in himself alone, his highest duties are not owed to
+himself alone. And as the life becomes more of the intellect, this fact
+becomes more and more obvious, more and more dominating. Men who
+monopolize the material things of the world and their control are
+necessarily self-seeking; but in the realm of the higher faculties this
+element, in the very nature of the case, is forced into the background.
+It is evident that truth is not truth for the Standard Oil Company, nor
+for J. P. Morgan and Company, nor yet for the government of the United
+States; it is truth for the whole of mankind, and one who sincerely
+labors for the truth does so for the universal benefit.
+
+There may be, of course, an element of selfishness in the activities of
+poets and inventors. They may be seeking for fame; they may be hoping to
+make money out of their discoveries; but the greatest men we know have
+been dominated by an overwhelming impulse of creation, and when we read
+their lives, and discover in them signs of petty vanity or jealousy or
+greed, we are pained and shocked. What touches us most deeply is some
+mark of self-consecration and humility; as, for example, when Newton
+tells us that after all his life's labors he felt himself as a little
+child gathering sea-shells on the shore of the great ocean of truth; or
+when Alfred Russel Wallace, discovering that Darwin had been working
+longer than himself over the theory of the origin of species, generously
+withdrew and permitted the theory to go to the world in Darwin's name.
+
+There are three faculties in man, usually described as intellect,
+feeling and will. According as one or the other faculty predominates,
+we have a great scientist, a great poet, or a great moralist. We might
+choose a representative of each type--let us say Newton, Shakespeare and
+Jesus--and spend much time in controversy as to which of the three types
+is the greatest, which makes the greatest contribution to human
+happiness. But it will suffice here to point out that the three
+faculties do not exclude one another; every man must have all three, and
+a perfectly rounded man should seek to develop all three. Jesus was
+considerable of a poet, and we should pay far less heed to Shakespeare
+if he had not been a moralist. Also there have been instances of great
+poets and painters who were scientists--for example, Leonardo and
+Goethe.
+
+The fundamental difference between the scientist and the poet is that
+one is exploring nature and discovering things which actually exist,
+whereas the other is creating new life out of his own spirit. But the
+poet will find that his creations take but little hold upon life, if
+they are not guided and shaped by a deep understanding of life's
+fundamental nature and needs--in other words, if the poet is not
+something of a scientist. And in the same way, the very greatest
+discoveries of science seem to us like leaps of creative imagination; as
+if the mind had completed nature, through some intuitive and sympathetic
+understanding of what nature wished to be.
+
+The point about these higher forms of human activity is that they renew
+and multiply life. We may say that if Jesus had never lived, others
+would have embodied and set forth with equal poignancy the revolutionary
+idea of the equality of all men as children of one common father. And
+perhaps this is true; but we have no way of being sure that it is true,
+and as we look back upon the last nineteen hundred years of human
+history, we are unable to imagine just what the life of mankind during
+those centuries would have been if Jesus had died when he was a baby. We
+do not know what modern thought might have been without Kant, or what
+modern music might have been without Beethoven. We are forced to admit
+that if it had not been for the patient wisdom and persuasive kindness
+of Lincoln, the Slave Power might have won its independence, and America
+today might have been a military camp like Europe, and the lives and
+thoughts of every one of us would have been different.
+
+Or take the activities of the poet. Many years ago the writer was asked
+to name the men who had exercised the greatest influence upon him, and
+after much thought he named three: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. And now
+consider the significance of this reply. One of these people, Shelley,
+was what we call a "real" person; that is, a man who actually lived and
+walked upon the earth. Concerning Hamlet, it is believed there was once
+a Prince of Denmark by that name, but the character who is known to us
+as Hamlet is the creation of a poet's brain. As to the third figure,
+Jesus, the authorities dispute. Some say that he was a man who actually
+lived; others believe that he was God on earth; yet others, very
+learned, maintain that he is a legendary name around which a number of
+traditions have gathered.
+
+To me it does not make a particle of difference which of the three
+possibilities happens to be true about Jesus. If he was God on earth, he
+was God in human form, under human limitations, and in that sense we are
+all gods on earth. And whether he really lived, or whether some poet
+invented him, matters not a particle so far as concerns his effect upon
+others. The emotions which moved him, the loves, the griefs, the high
+resolves, existed in the soul of someone, whether his name were Jesus or
+John; and these emotions have been recorded in such form that they
+communicate themselves to us, they become a part of our souls, they make
+us something different from what we were before we encountered them.
+
+In other words, the poet makes in his own soul a new life, and then
+projects it into the world, and it becomes a force which makes over the
+lives of millions of other people. If you read the vast mass of
+criticism which has grown up about the figure of Hamlet, you learn that
+Hamlet is the type of the "modern man." Shakespeare was able to divine
+what the modern man would be; or perhaps we can go farther and say that
+Shakespeare helped to make the modern man what he is; the modern man is
+more of Hamlet, because he has taken Hamlet to his heart and pondered
+over Hamlet's problem. Or take Don Quixote. No doubt the follies of the
+"age of chivalry" would have died out of men's hearts in the end; but
+how much sooner they died because of the laughter of Cervantes! Or take
+"Les Miserables." Our prison system is not ideal by any means, but it is
+far less cruel than it was half a century ago, and we owe this in part
+to Victor Hugo. Every convict in the world is to some degree a happier
+man because of this vision which was projected upon the world from the
+soul of one great poet. No one can estimate the part which the writings
+of Tolstoi have played in the present revolution in Russia, but this we
+may say with certainty: there is not one man, woman or child in Russia
+at the present moment who is quite the same as he would have been if
+"Resurrection" had never been written.
+
+In discussing the highest faculties of man we have so far refrained from
+using the word "genius." It is a word which has been cheapened by
+misuse, but we are now in position to use it. The things which we have
+just been considering are the phenomena of genius--and we can say this,
+even though we may not know exactly what genius is. Perhaps it is, as
+Frederic Myers asserts, a "subliminal uprush," the welling up into the
+consciousness of some part of the content of the subconscious mind. Or
+perhaps it is something of what man calls "divine." Or perhaps it is the
+first dawning, the first hint of that super-race which will some day
+replace mankind. Perhaps we are witnessing the same thing that happened
+on the earth when glimmerings of reason first broke upon the mind of
+some poor, bewildered ape. We cannot be sure; but this much we can say:
+the man of genius represents the highest activity of the mind of which
+we as yet have knowledge. He represents the spirit of man, fully
+emancipated, fully conscious, and taking up the task of creation; taking
+human life as raw material, and making it over into something more
+subtle, more intense, more significant, more universal than it ever was
+before, or ever would have been without the intervention of this new
+God-man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR
+
+     (Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the relative
+     importance of our various duties.)
+
+
+So now we may say that we know what are the great and important things
+in life. Slowly and patiently, with infinite distress and waste and
+failure, but yet inevitably, the life of man is being made over and
+multiplied to infinity, by the power of the thinking mind, impelled by
+the joy and thrill of the creative action, and guided by the sense of
+responsibility, the instinct to serve, which we call conscience. To
+develop these higher faculties is the task we have before us, and the
+supreme act to which we dedicate ourselves.
+
+So now we are in position to define the word moral. Assuming that our
+argument be accepted, that action is moral which tends to foster the
+best and highest forms of life we know, and to aid them in developing
+their highest powers; that is immoral which tends to destroy the best
+life we know, or to hinder its rapid development.
+
+Let us now proceed to apply these tests to the practices of man; first
+as an individual, and then as a social being. What are my duties to
+myself, and what are my duties to the world about me?
+
+You will note that these questions differ somewhat from those of the old
+morality. Jesus told us, first, that we should love the Lord our God,
+and, second, that we should love our neighbor as ourself. Some would say
+that modern thought has dismissed God from consideration; but I would
+prefer to say that modern thought has decided that the place where we
+encounter God most immediately is in our own miraculously expanding
+consciousness. Our duty toward God is our duty to make of ourselves the
+most perfect product of the Divine Incarnation that we can become. Our
+duty to our neighbor is to help him to do the same.
+
+Of course, as we come to apply these formulas, we find that they overlap
+and mingle inextricably; the two duties are really one duty looked at
+from different points of view. We decide that we owe it to ourselves to
+develop our best powers of thinking, and we discover that in so doing we
+make ourselves better fitted to live as citizens, better equipped to
+help our fellow men. We go out into our city to serve others by making
+the city clean and decent, and we find that we have helped to save
+ourselves from a pestilence.
+
+The most commonly accepted, or at any rate the most commonly preached,
+of all formulas is the "golden rule," "Do unto others as you would have
+them do unto you." This formula is good so far as it goes, but you note
+that it leaves undetermined the all-important question, what _ought_ we
+to want others to do unto us. If I am an untrained child, what I would
+have others do unto me is to give me plenty of candy; therefore, under
+the golden rule, my highest duty becomes to distribute free candy to the
+world. The "golden rule" is obviously consistent with all forms of
+self-indulgence, and with all forms of stagnation; it might result in a
+civilization more static than China.
+
+Or let us take the formula which the German philosopher Kant worked out
+as the final product of his thinking: "Act so that you would be willing
+for your action to become a general rule of conduct." Here again is the
+same problem. There are many possible general rules of conduct. Some
+would prefer one, some others; and there is no possible way of escape
+from the fact that before men can agree what to do, they must decide
+what they wish to make of their lives.
+
+To the formula of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," the
+answer is obvious enough: "Suppose my neighbor is not worthy of as much
+love as myself?" To be sure, it is a perilous thing for me to have to
+decide this question; nevertheless, it may be a fact that I am a great
+inventor, and that my neighbor is a sexual pervert. There is, of course,
+a sense in which I may love him, even so; I may love the deeper
+possibilities of his nature, which religious ecstasy can appeal to and
+arouse. But in spite of all ecstasies and all efforts, it may be that
+his disease--physical, mental and moral--has progressed to such a point
+that it is necessary to confine him, or to castrate him, or even to
+asphyxiate him painlessly. To say that I must love such a man as myself
+is, to say the least, to be vague. We can see how the indiscriminate
+preaching of such a formula would open the flood-gates of sentimentality
+and fraud.
+
+Modern thinking says: Thou shalt love the highest possibilities of life,
+and thou shalt labor diligently to foster them; moreover, because life
+is always growing, and new possibilities are forever dawning in the
+human spirit, thou shalt keep an open mind and an inquiring temper, and
+be ready at any time to begin life afresh.
+
+Such is the formula. It is not simple; and when we come to apply it, we
+find that it constantly grows more complex. When we attempt to decide
+our duty to ourselves, we find that we have in us a number of different
+beings, each with separate and sometimes conflicting duties and needs.
+We have in us the physical man and the economic man, and these clamor
+for their rights, and must have at least a part of their rights, before
+we can go on to be the intellectual man, the moral man, or the artistic
+man. So our life becomes a series of compromises and adjustments between
+a thousand conflicting desires and duties; between the different beings
+which we might be, but can be only to a certain extent, and at certain
+times. We shall see, as we come to investigate one field after another
+of human activity, that we never have an absolute certainty, never an
+absolute right, never an absolute duty; never can we shut our eyes, and
+go blindly ahead upon one course of action, to the exclusion of every
+other consideration! On the contrary, we sit in the seat of
+self-determination as a highly trained and skillful engineer. We keep
+our eyes upon a dozen different gauges; we press a lever here and touch
+a regulator there; we decide that now is a time for speed, and now for
+caution; and knowing all the time that the safety, not merely of
+ourselves, but of many passengers, depends upon the decisions of each
+moment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE MIND AND THE BODY
+
+     (Discusses the interaction between physical and mental things, and
+     the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed causes.)
+
+
+It is our plan, so far as possible, to discuss the problems of the mind
+in one section of this book, and the problems of the body in another;
+but just as we found that we could not separate our duties to ourself
+from our duties to our neighbors, so we find that the mind and the body
+are inextricably interwoven, and that whenever we probe deeply into one,
+we discover the other. The interaction of the mind and the body is a
+fascinating problem into which we must look for a moment, not because we
+expect to solve it, but because it illuminates the whole subject.
+
+The human body is a machine. It takes in carbon and oxygen, and burns
+them, and gives out carbon dioxide and other waste products, and
+develops energy in proportion to the amount of carbon it consumes. This
+machine has its elaborate apparatus of action and reaction, its sensory
+organs where outside stimuli are received, its nerves like telegraph
+wires to carry these impressions, its brain cells to store them and to
+transform them into reactions. We know to some extent how these brain
+cells work. We know what portions of the brain are devoted to this or
+that activity. We know that if we stick a pin into a certain spot we
+shall paralyze the left forefinger. We know that by injecting a certain
+drug, or by breathing a certain gas, we can cause this or that sensation
+or reaction, such as laughing or weeping or mania. We know what poisons
+are generated in the system by anger, and what chemical changes take
+place in a muscle that is tired. All this is part of a vast new science
+which is called bio-chemistry, or the chemistry of life.
+
+Our bodies, therefore, are part of the material universe, and subject to
+the laws or ways of being of this universe. The first of these laws that
+we know is the law of causation. Every change in the universe has its
+cause, and that in turn had another cause; this chain is never broken,
+no matter how far we go, and the same causes universally produce the
+same effects. If you see a ball move on a billiard table, you know that
+the ball did not move itself; you know that something struck the ball or
+tilted the table. You discover that the motion of the ball moves the air
+around it, and the waves of that motion are spread through the room.
+They strike the walls, and the motion is carried on through the walls,
+and if we had instruments sensitive enough, we could feel the motion of
+that billiard ball at the other side of the world, and a few million
+years from now at the most remote of the stars. This is what is called
+the law of the conservation of energy, and when we discover something
+like radium which seems to violate that law by giving out unlimited
+quantities of energy, we investigate and discover a new form of energy
+locked up in the atom. In the disintegration of the atom we have a
+source of power which, when we have learned to use it, will multiply
+perhaps millions of times the powers we are now able to use on this
+earth. But energy, no matter how many times it is transformed, and in
+what strange ways it reappears, always remains, and is never destroyed,
+and never created out of nothing.
+
+My friend the great physiologist once took me into his laboratory and
+showed me a little aquarium in which some minute creatures were wiggling
+about--young sea-urchins, if I remember. The physiologist took a bottle
+containing some chemical, and dropped a single drop into the water, and
+instantly all these little black creatures, which had been darting
+aimlessly in every direction through the water, turned and swam all in
+one direction, toward the light. They swam until they touched the walls
+of the aquarium, and there they stuck, trying their best to swim
+farther. "And now," said my friend, "that is what we call a 'tropism,'
+and all life is a tropism. What you see in that aquarium means that some
+day we shall know just what combination of chemicals causes a human
+being to move this way or that, to do this thing or that. When
+bio-chemistry has progressed sufficiently, we shall be able to make
+human qualities, perhaps in the sperm, perhaps in the embryo, perhaps
+day by day by means of diet or injection."
+
+Said I: "Some day, when bio-chemistry has progressed far enough, you
+will know what combination of chemicals causes a man to vote the
+Democratic or Republican ticket."
+
+"Why not?" answered my friend. (He has a sense of humor about all things
+except this sacred bio-chemistry.)
+
+Said I: "When you have got to that stage, keep the secret carefully, and
+we will fix up a scheme, and a few days before election we will release
+some gas in our big cities, and sweep the country for the Socialist
+ticket."
+
+But jesting aside: if the human body is a material thing, existing in
+the material world and subject to causation, there must be material
+reasons for the actions of human bodies, just the same as for the moving
+of billiard balls. We hear the sound of a billiard ball striking the
+cushion, and we are prepared to accept the idea that the thing we call
+hearing in us is caused by the impinging of sound waves upon our
+eardrums. And if we investigate human beings in the mass, we find every
+reason to believe that they act according to laws, and that there are
+material causes for their acts. If you get up and shout fire in a
+theater, you know how the audience will behave. If you study statistics,
+you can say that in any large city a certain fixed number of human
+beings are going to commit suicide every month; you can even say that
+more are going to commit suicide in the month of June than in any other
+month. You can say that more people are going to die at two o'clock in
+the morning than at any other hour. You know that certain changes in the
+weather will cause all human beings to behave in the same way. You know
+that an increase of prices or an increase of unemployment will cause a
+certain additional number of men to commit crimes, and a certain
+additional number of women to become prostitutes. You know that if a man
+overeats, his thoughts will change their color; he will have what he
+calls "the blues." I might cite a thousand other illustrations to prove
+that human minds are subject to material laws, and therefore to
+investigation by the bio-chemists.
+
+But now, stop a moment. Here you sit reading a book. Something in the
+book pleases you, and you say, "Good!" Perhaps you slap your knee or
+clench your fist. Now here is a motion of your hand, which stirs the air
+about you, and which, according to the laws of energy, will spread its
+effects to the other side of the world, and even to the farthest of the
+stars. Or perhaps the book makes you angry, and you throw it down in
+disgust; an entirely different motion, which will affect the other side
+of the world and the farthest of the stars in an entirely different
+way. The machine of the universe will be forever altered because of that
+slapping of your knee or that throwing down of your book.
+
+And what was the cause of these things? So far as we can see, the
+material cause was exactly the same in each case--the reading of certain
+letters. Two human beings, sitting side by side and reading exactly the
+same letters, might be affected in exactly opposite ways. It seems
+hardly rational to maintain that the material difference of two pairs of
+eyes, moving over exactly the same set of letters, could have resulted
+in two such different motions of the hands. As a matter of fact, the
+very same letters may affect the same person in different ways. The
+composer, Edward MacDowell, once told me how on his birthday his pupils
+sent him a gift, with a card containing some lines from the opera
+"Rheingold," beginning, "O singe fort"--that is, "Oh, sing on." But the
+composer happened, when glancing at the card, to think French instead of
+German, and got the message, "Oh, powerful monkey!" This, of course, was
+disconcerting to a famous piano performer, and his pupils, if they had
+been watching his face, would have seen an unexpected reaction. It seems
+manifest, does it not, that the cause of this difference of reaction was
+not any difference of the letters, but purely a difference of _thought_?
+So it appears that thoughts may change the material universe; they may
+break the chain of causation, and interfere with material events.
+
+Compare the two things, a state of consciousness and say, a steam
+shovel. They are entirely different, and so far as we can see, entirely
+incompatible and unrelated. Can anyone imagine how a thought can turn
+into a steam shovel, or a steam shovel into a thought? We can understand
+how a steam shovel lifts a mass of earth out of the ground, and we can
+understand how a human hand moves a lever which causes the shovel to
+act; but we are unable to conceive how a state of mind--whether it be a
+desire for pay, or an ideal of service, or a vision of the Panama
+Canal--can so affect a steam shovel as to cause it to move. We can sit
+and think motion at a billiard ball for a thousand years, and it does
+not move; but when we think motion at our hand, it moves instantly, and
+passes on the motion to the billiard ball or the steam shovel. When fire
+touches our hand it sends some kind of vibration to the brain, and in
+some inconceivable way that vibration is turned into a state of
+consciousness called pain, and that is turned, "as quick as thought,"
+into another kind of motion, the jerking back of our hand.
+
+So it seems certain that consciousness really does "butt in" on the
+chain of natural causation. And yet, just see in what position this
+leaves the scientist who is investigating life! Imagine if you can, the
+plight of a doctor who wanted to prescribe a diet for a sick person, if
+he knew that every piece of chicken and every piece of fish were free to
+decide of its own impulse whether or not it would be digested in the
+human stomach. But the plight of this doctor would be nothing to the
+plight of the chemist or the biologist or the engineer who was asked to
+do his thinking and his planning in a world containing a billion and a
+quarter human beings, each one a lawless agent, each one a source of new
+and unforeseeable energies, each one acting as a "first cause," and
+starting new chains of activity, tearing the universe to pieces
+according to his own whims. What kind of a universe would that be? It
+would simply be a chaos; there could be no thinking, there could be no
+life in it; there could be no two things the same in it, and no laws of
+any sort.
+
+So then we fall back into the hands of the "determinists," who assert
+one unbreakable chain of natural causation, and regard the human body as
+an automaton. We go back to the bio-chemist, who purposes some day to
+ascertain for us just exactly what molecules of matter in just what
+positions and combinations in the brain cells of William Shakespeare
+caused him to perpetrate a mixed metaphor. We go back to the belief that
+human beings act as they must act, because the clock of life, wound up
+and started, must move in such and such a fashion.
+
+But now, let us see what are the implications of that theory! Here am I
+writing a book, appealing to men to act in certain ways. Of course, I
+know that not all will follow my advice. Some will be foolish--or what
+seems to me foolish. Others will be weak, and will resolve to act in
+certain ways, and then go and act in other ways. But some will be just;
+some will be free; some will use their brains--because, you see, I am
+convinced that they _can_ use their brains! I am convinced that ideas
+will affect and stir them, in complete defiance of the bio-chemist, who
+tells me that they act that way because of certain chemicals in their
+brain cells, and that I write my book because of other chemicals, and
+that my idea that I am writing the book because I want to write it is a
+delusion, and that the whole thing is happening just so because the
+universe was wound up that way.
+
+Now, this an unsolved problem, and I have no solution to offer. What I
+have set forth is in substance one of the four "antinomies" of Kant, and
+you can see for yourself how it is possible to prove either side, and
+impossible to be sure of either. Perhaps there is really a duality in
+life. Perhaps there are two aspects of the universe, the material and
+the spiritual, and perhaps they do not really interact as they seem to,
+but both are guided and determined by some higher reality of life of
+which we know nothing. In that case there would really be a chemical
+equivalent for every thought, and there would be a trace of
+consciousness for every material atom in the universe. Maybe the
+theologians are right, and in the universal consciousness of God the
+whole future exists predetermined. Maybe to God there is no such thing
+as time; the past, the present, and the future are all alike to Him.
+
+There is nothing more painful to the human mind than to have to confess
+its own impotence. Yet I can see no escape from the dilemma we are here
+facing. There is not a man alive who does not assume the freedom of the
+will, who does not show in all his acts that he agrees with old Dr.
+Samuel Johnson: "We know we are free and there's an end on't." Without a
+belief in freedom we cannot get beyond the animal, we cannot become the
+masters of our own souls. And yet, the man who swallows that idea whole,
+and goes out into the world and preaches personal morality to the
+neglect of the fundamental economic facts, the facts of the body in its
+relationship to all other bodies--we know what happens to that man; he
+becomes a shouting fool. Unless he is literally a fool, or a knave, he
+quickly discovers his own futility, and proceeds to use his common
+sense, in spite of all his theories. "Come to Jesus!" cried William
+Booth, and he went out in the streets of London to save souls with a
+bass drum; but presently, in day by day contact with the degradation of
+the London slums, he realized that he could not save souls so long as
+those souls were dwelling in starved and lousy bodies. So William Booth
+with his Salvation Army took to starting night shelters and cast-off
+clothing bureaus!
+
+And of exactly the same sort is the bewilderment which falls to the lot
+of the scientist who is honest and willing to face the facts. The
+bio-chemist with his test tubes and his microscopes and his complex
+apparatus of research sits himself down and accumulates a mass of
+information about the human body. He investigates the diseases of the
+body and learns in detail just how these diseases spread and sometimes
+how they are caused; he can present you with a diagnosis, showing the
+exact stage to which the degeneration of a certain organ has proceeded,
+and perhaps he can suggest to you a change of diet or some drug which
+will, for a time at least, check the process of the breakdown. But in
+other cases he will be perfectly helpless; he will be, as it were,
+buried under the mass of detail which he has accumulated; he will find
+the vital energy depressed, and he will not know any way to renew it.
+But along will come some mental specialist, who in a half hour's talk
+with the patient, by a simple change in the patient's _ideas_, will
+completely make over the patient's life, and set going a new vital
+process which will restore the body to its former health. A religious
+enthusiast may do this, a psychotherapist may do it, a moral genius may
+do it; and the physician with all his learning will find himself like a
+man on the outside of a house, peering in through the windows and trying
+in vain to find out something about the life of the family and its
+guests.
+
+This is humiliating to the chemist and the medical man, but they have to
+face it, because it is a fact. In the seat of authority over the human
+body there sits a higher being which, without any religious
+implications, we may call the soul; or, if it is impossible to get away
+from the religious implication of that word, we will call it the
+consciousness, or the personality. This master of the house of life is
+in many ways dependent upon the house. If the furnace goes out he
+freezes, and if the house takes fire and burns up--well, he disappears
+and leaves no address. But in other ways the master of the house is
+really master, and is a worker of miracles. He does things which we do
+not at all understand, and cannot yet even foresee, but which often
+completely make the house over.
+
+William James, a scientist of real authority, has a wonderful essay,
+"The Powers of Men," in which he sets forth the fact that human beings
+as a general rule make use of only a small portion of the energies which
+dwell in their beings, and that one of our problems is to find the ways
+by which we can draw upon stores of hidden energy which we have within
+us. Also, in a fascinating book, "Varieties of the Religious
+Experience," James has endeavored to study and analyze the phenomena
+which hitherto the physician and the biologist have been disposed to
+ridicule and neglect. But unless I am mistaken, every scientist in the
+end will be forced to come back to the central fact, that life is a
+unity, and that the heart of it is the spirit; that what we call the
+will is not an accident, not a delusion, not some by-product of nature,
+but is the very secret of life; and that behind it is a vast ocean of
+power, which now and then sweeps away all dykes, and floods into the
+human consciousness.
+
+The writer of this book is now a patient and plodding teacher of a
+certain economic doctrine, a preacher of what he might call
+anti-parasitism. He has come to the conclusion that the habit of men to
+enslave their fellows and exploit them and draw their substance from
+them without return--that this habit is destructive to all civilization,
+and is incompatible with any of the higher forms of life, intellectual,
+moral or artistic. He has come to the conclusion that there is no use
+attempting to build a structure of social life until there is a sound
+foundation; in other words, until the capitalist system has been
+replaced by cooperation. But in his youth he was, or thought he was, a
+poet, and touched upon that strange and wonderful thing which we call
+genius. He saw his own consciousness, as it were a leaf driven before a
+mighty tempest of spiritual energy. And he believes that this experience
+was no delusion, but was a revelation of the hidden mysteries of being.
+He still has memories of this startling experience, still hints of it in
+his consciousness; something still leaps in his memory, like a
+race-horse, or like the war-horse of Revelations, which "scenteth the
+battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting." Because
+of these things he can never accept any philosophy which shackles the
+human spirit, he will never in his thought attempt to set bounds to the
+possibilities of human life. The very heart of life beats in us, the
+wonder of it and the glory of it swells like a tide behind us. New
+universes are born in us, or, if you prefer, they are made by us; and
+the process is one of endless joy, of rapture beyond anything that the
+average man can at present imagine, or that any instruments invented by
+science can weigh or measure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE MIND OF THE BODY
+
+     (Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does to the
+     body, and how it can be controlled and made use of by the
+     intelligence.)
+
+
+The importance of the mind in matters of health becomes clearer when we
+understand that what we commonly call our minds--the mental states which
+confront us day by day in our consciousness--are really but a small
+portion of our total mind. In addition to this conscious mind there is
+an enormous mass of our personality which is like a storehouse attached
+to our dwelling, a place to which we do not often go, but to which we
+can go in case of need. This storehouse is our memory, the things we
+know and can recall at will. And then there is another, still vaster
+storehouse--no one has ever measured or guessed the size of it--which
+apparently contains everything that we have ever known, perhaps also
+everything that our ancestors have known. A common simile for the human
+mind is that of an iceberg; a certain portion of it appears above the
+surface of the sea, but there is seven times as much of it floating out
+of sight under the water.
+
+This subconscious mind seems to be the portion most closely united with
+the body. It has its seat in the back parts of the brain, in the spinal
+cord and the greater nervous ganglia, such as the solar plexus. It is
+the portion of our mind which controls the activities of our body, all
+those miraculous things which went on before we first opened our eyes to
+the light, and which go on while we sleep, and never cease until we die.
+When we cut our finger and admit foreign germs to our blood, some
+mysterious power causes millions of our blood corpuscles to be rushed to
+this spot, to destroy and devour the invading enemy. We do not know how
+this is done, but it is an intelligent act, measured and precisely
+regulated, as much so as a railroad time-table. When the supply of
+nourishment in the body becomes low, something issues a notice by way of
+our stomach, which we call hunger; when we take food into the stomach,
+something pours out the gastric juice to digest it; when this digested
+food is prepared and taken up in the blood stream, something decides
+what portion of it shall be turned into muscle, what into brain cells,
+what into hair, what into finger nails. Sometimes, of course, mistakes
+are made and we have diseases. But for the most part all this infinitely
+intricate process goes on day and night without a hitch, and it is all
+the work of what we might call "the mind of the body."
+
+And just as our material bodies are the product of an age-long process
+of development repeated in embryo by every individual, so is this mental
+life a product of long development, and carries memories of this far-off
+process. In our instincts there dwells all the past, not merely of the
+human race, but of all life, and if we should ever succeed in completely
+probing the subconscious mind and bringing it into our consciousness, it
+would be the same as if we were free to ramble about in all the past.
+Huxley set forth the fact that all the history of evolution is told in a
+piece of chalk; and we probably do not exaggerate in saying that all the
+history of the universe is in the subconscious mind of every human
+being. When the partridge which has just come out of the egg sees the
+shadow of the hawk flit by and crouches motionless as a leaf, the
+partridge is not acting upon any knowledge which it has acquired in the
+few minutes since it was hatched. It is acting upon a knowledge
+impressed upon its subconscious mind by the experience of millions of
+partridges, perhaps for tens of thousands of years. When the physician
+lifts the newly born infant by its ankle and spanks it to make it cry,
+the physician is using his conscious reason, because he has learned from
+previous experience, or has been taught in the schools that it is
+necessary for the child's breathing apparatus to be instantly cleared.
+But when the child responds to the spanking with a yell, it is not moved
+by reasoned indignation at an undeserved injury; it is following an
+automatic reaction, as a result of the experience of infants in the
+stone age, experience which in some obscure way has been registered and
+stored in the infant cerebellum.
+
+Science is now groping its way through this underworld of thought.
+Obviously we should have here a most powerful means of influencing the
+body, if by any chance we could control it. We are continually seeking
+in medical and surgical ways to stimulate or to retard activities of the
+body, which are controlled entirely by this subconscious mind. If we are
+suffering intense pain in a joint, we put on a mustard plaster, what we
+call a counter-irritant, to trouble the skin and draw the congested
+blood away from the place of the pain. On the other hand, we may
+stimulate the functions of the intestines by the application of hot
+fomentations, to bring the blood more actively to that region. But if by
+any means we could make clear our wishes to the subconscious mind, we
+should be dealing with headquarters, and should get quicker and more
+permanent results.
+
+Can we by any possibility do this? To begin with, let me tell you of a
+simple experiment that I have witnessed. I once knew a man who had
+learned to control the circulation of his blood by his conscious will. I
+have seen him lay his two hands on the table, both of the same color,
+and without moving the hands, cause one hand to turn red and the other
+to turn pale. And, obviously, so far as this man is concerned, the
+problem of counter-irritants has been solved. He is a mental mustard
+plaster.
+
+And what was done by this man's own will can be done to others in many
+ways. The most obvious is a device which we call hypnotism. This is a
+kind of sleep which affects only the conscious control of the body, but
+leaves all the senses awake. In this hypnotic sleep or "trance" we
+discover that the subconscious mind is a good deal like the Henry Dubb
+of the Socialist cartoons; it is faithful and persistent, very strong in
+its own limited field, but comically credulous, willing to believe
+anything that is told it, and to take orders from any one who climbs
+into the seat of authority. You have perhaps attended one of the
+exhibitions which traveling hypnotists are accustomed to give in country
+villages. You have seen some bumpkin brought upon the stage and
+hypnotized, and told that he is in the water and must swim for his life,
+or that he is in the midst of a hornets' nest, or that his trousers are
+torn in the seat--any comical thing that will cause an audience to howl
+with laughter.
+
+These facts were first discovered nearly a hundred and fifty years ago
+by a French doctor named Mesmer. He was a good deal of a charlatan, and
+would not reveal his secrets, and probably the scientific men of that
+time were glad to despise him, because what he did was so new and
+strange. There is a certain type of scientific mind which sits aloft on
+a throne with a framed diploma above its head, and says that what it
+knows is science and what it does not know is nonsense. And so
+"mesmerism" was left for the quacks and traveling showmen. But half a
+century later a French physician named Liébault took up this method of
+hypnotism, without all the fakery that had been attached to it. He
+experimented and discovered that he could cure not merely phobias and
+manias, fixed ideas, hysterias and melancholias; he could cure definite
+physical diseases of the physical body, such as headache, rheumatism,
+and hemorrhage. Later on two other physicians, Janet and Charcot,
+developed definite schools of "psychotherapy." They rejected hypnotism
+as in most cases too dangerous, but used a milder form which is known as
+"hypnoidization." You would be surprised to know how many ailments which
+baffle the skill of medical men and surgeons yield completely to a
+single brief treatment by such a mental specialist.
+
+All that is necessary is some method to tap the subconscious mind. In
+many cases the subconsciousness knows what is the matter, and will tell
+at once--a secret that is completely hidden from the consciousness. For
+example, a man's hands shake; they have been shaking for years, and he
+has no idea why, but his subconscious mind explains that they first
+began to shake with grief over the death of his wife; also, the
+subconscious mind meekly and instantly accepts the suggestion that the
+time for grief is past, and that the hands will never shake again.
+
+Or here is a woman who has become convinced that worms are crawling all
+over her. Everything that touches her becomes a worm, even the wrinkles
+in her dress are worms, and she is wild with nervousness, and of course
+is on the way to the lunatic asylum. She is hypnotized and sees the
+operator catching these worms one by one and killing them. She is told
+that he has killed the last, but she insists, "No, there is one more."
+The operator clutches that one, and she is perfectly satisfied, and
+completely cured. Her husband writes, expressing his relief that he no
+longer has to "sleep every night in a fish pond." This instance with
+many others is told by Professor Quackenbos in his book, "Hypnotic
+Therapeutics."
+
+Among the most powerful means to influence the subconscious personality
+is religious excitement. Religion has come down to us from ancient
+times, and its fears and ecstasies are a part of our instinctive
+endowment. Those who can sway religious emotions can cure disease, not
+merely fixed ideas, but many diseases which appear to be entirely
+physical, but which psycho-analysis reveals to be hysterical in nature.
+Of course these religious persons who heal by laying on of hands or by
+purely mental means deny indignantly that they are using hypnotism or
+anything like it. I am aware that I shall bring upon myself a flood of
+letters from Christian Scientists if I identify their methods of curing
+with "animal magnetism" and "manipulation," and other devices of the
+devil which they repudiate. All I can say is that their miracles are
+brought about by affecting the subconscious mind; there is no other way
+to bring them about, and for my part I cannot see that it makes a great
+difference whether the subconscious mind is affected by a hand laid on
+the forehead, or by a hand waved in the air, or by an incantation
+pronounced, or by a prayer thought in silence. If you can persuade the
+subconscious mind that God is operating upon it, that God is omnipotent
+and is directing this particular healing, that is the most powerful
+suggestion imaginable, and is the basis of many cures. But if in order
+to achieve this, it is necessary for me to persuade myself that I can
+find some meaning in the metaphysical moonshine of Mother Eddy--why,
+then, I am very sorry, but I really prefer to remain sick.
+
+But such is not the case. You do not have to believe anything that is
+not true; you simply have to understand the machinery of the
+subconscious, and how to operate it. We are only beginning to acquire
+that knowledge, and we need an open mind, free both from the dogmatism
+of the medical men and the fanaticism of the "faith curists." A few
+years ago in London I met a number of people who were experimenting in
+an entirely open-minded way with mental healing, and I was interested in
+their ideas. I happened to be traveling on the Continent, and on the
+train my wife was seized by a very dreadful headache. She was lying with
+her head in my lap, suffering acutely, and I thought I would try an
+experiment, so I put my hand upon her forehead, without telling her what
+I was doing, and concentrated my attention with the greatest possible
+intensity upon her headache. I had an idea of the cause of it; I
+understood that headaches are caused by the irritation of the sensory
+nerves of the brain by fatigue poisons, or other waste matter which the
+blood has not been able to eliminate. I formed in my mind a vivid
+picture of what the blood would have to do to relieve that headache, and
+I concentrated my mental energies upon the command to her subconscious
+mind that it should perform these particular functions. In a few
+minutes my wife sat up with a look of great surprise on her face and
+said, "Why, my headache is gone! It went all at once!"
+
+That, of course, might have been a coincidence; but I tried the
+experiment many times, and it happened over and over. On another
+occasion I was able to cure the pain of an ulcerated tooth; I was able
+to cure it half a dozen times, but never permanently, it always
+returned, and finally the tooth had to come out. My wife experimented
+with me in the same way, and found that she was able to cure an attack
+of dyspepsia; but, curiously enough, she at once gave herself a case of
+dyspepsia--something she had never known in her life before. So now I
+will not allow her to experiment with me, and she will not allow me to
+experiment with her! But we are quite sure that people with psychic
+gifts can definitely affect the subconscious mind of others by purely
+mental means. We are prepared to believe in the miracles of the New
+Testament, and in the wonders of Lourdes, as well as in the healings of
+the Christian Scientists and the New Thoughters, which cannot be
+disputed by any one who is willing to take the trouble to investigate.
+We can face these facts without losing our reason, without ceasing to
+believe that everything in life has a cause, and that we can find out
+this cause if we investigate thoroughly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS
+
+     (Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and other
+     methods by which a whole new universe of life has been brought to
+     human knowledge.)
+
+
+One of the most common methods of exploring the subconscious mind is the
+method of automatic writing. I have never tried this myself, but tens of
+thousands of people are sitting every night with a "ouija" in front of
+them, holding a pencil on a piece of paper and letting their
+subconscious minds write what they please. Most of them are hoping to
+get messages from the dead--a problem which we shall discuss in the next
+chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that automatic writing and
+table rapping and other devices of mediumship have opened up to us a
+vast mass of subconscious mentality. A part of the scientific world
+still takes a contemptuous attitude and calls this all humbug, but many
+of our greatest scientists have been persuaded to investigate, and have
+become convinced that in this mass of subconsciousness there is mingled,
+not merely the mind of the medium, but the minds of all those present,
+and possibly other minds as well. For my part, I do not see how any one
+can study disinterestedly the proceedings of the Society for Psychical
+Research and not become convinced that telepathy at least is one of the
+powers of the subconscious mind.
+
+Telepathy is what is popularly known as "thought transmission." Every
+one must know people who are what is called "psychic," and will know
+what is happening to some friend in another part of the world, or will
+go upstairs because they "sense" that some one wants them, or will go to
+the door because they "have a hunch" that some one is coming. And maybe
+these things are only chance, but you will be unscientific if you do not
+take the trouble to read and learn what modern investigators have
+brought out on such subjects.
+
+This much is certain, and is denied by no competent investigator:
+whatever has been in your mind is there still, and it is possible to
+find a way of tapping the buried memory. An old woman, delirious with
+fever, begins to babble in a strange language, and it is discovered that
+she is talking ancient Hebrew. The woman is entirely illiterate, and her
+conscious memory knows no language but her own, her conscious mind has
+no ideas beyond those of her domestic life and the gossip of the
+village. But investigation is made, and it is discovered that when this
+woman was a girl, she worked in the home of a Hebrew scholar, and heard
+him reading aloud. She did not understand a word of what she heard, and
+was not consciously listening to it; nevertheless, every syllable of it
+had been stored away forever by her subconscious mind. Innumerable cases
+of this sort have been established; and, as a matter of fact, we might
+have been prepared for such discoveries by the memory-feats of the
+conscious mind. It is well known that Mozart, when a child, could listen
+to a new opera, and go home and play it over note for note. At present
+there is a child in America, giving exhibitions in public, carrying on
+thirty games of chess at the same time. There have been others who do
+sums of mental arithmetic, such as multiplying thirty-two figures by
+thirty-two figures, or reciting the Bible backwards.
+
+All this seems incredible; and yet there is something still more
+incredible. Suppose that these same powers, which are stored in our
+subconscious minds, were stored also in the minds of animals! A few
+years ago Maurice Maeterlinck published a book, "The Unknown Guest," in
+the course of which he tells about his experiments with the so-called
+Elberfeld horses: two animals which had been trained for years by their
+owner to give signals by moving their forefeet, and which apparently
+could count and divide and multiply large sums, and extract square and
+cube root, and spell out names, and recognize sounds, scents and colors,
+and read time from the face of a watch. Of course, it is easy to say
+that this is absurd, that the horses must have got some signals from
+their trainer; but, as it happened, they would do their work in the
+absence of their trainer; they would do it in the dark, or with a sack
+over their heads, and the best scientific minds of Germany were unable
+to suggest any test conditions which could not be met. There have been
+many gigantic frauds in the world, and this may have been one of them;
+on the other hand, there have been many new discoveries, and for my part
+I will finish exploring the miracles of the subconscious mind of man,
+before I presume to say that anything is impossible in the subconscious
+mind of a horse or a dog. Also I will wait for some learned person to
+explain to me how the subconscious minds of horses and dogs know enough
+to build and repair their bones and teeth, so cleverly that modern
+architectural and engineering science could teach them nothing. I ask,
+also, if it is possible to find a region in the subconsciousness which
+is common to two people, why is it absurd to suggest that there might be
+a region common to a man and a horse? Why is this any more absurd than
+that they should eat the same food and breathe the same air and feel the
+same affection and be frightened at the same dangers?
+
+The only persons who will be dogmatic about such subjects are the
+persons who are ignorant. Those who take the trouble to investigate,
+discover more wonderful things every day, and they realize that we have
+here a whole universe of knowledge, to which we have as yet barely
+opened the doors. Consider, for example, the facts which we are
+acquiring on the subject of personality and what it means. You would
+say, perhaps, that if there is anything you know positively, it is that
+you are one person, and have never been anybody else, and that your body
+belongs to you, and that nobody else ever has used or ever can use it.
+But what would you say if I told you that tomorrow "you" might cease to
+be, and somebody else might be in possession of your body, walking it
+around and wearing its clothes and spending its money? What if I were to
+tell you that there might be in "you," or in your body, half a dozen
+different personalities which you have never known or dreamed of, and
+that tomorrow there might break out a war between them and "you," as to
+which of the half dozen people should hear with your ears and speak with
+your tongue and walk about with your clothes on? Unless you are familiar
+with the literature of multiple personality, you would surely say that
+this was unbelievable--quite as much so as a mathematical horse!
+
+Let us begin with the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne, who was many
+years ago a perfectly respectable clergyman in a Rhode Island town. One
+day he disappeared, and his family did not hear of him. A year or two
+later there was a store-keeper in a town in Pennsylvania, who suddenly
+came to himself as the Reverend Ansel Bourne, not knowing what he had
+been in the meantime, or how he came to be keeping a store. Under
+hypnotism it developed that he had in him two personalities, and his
+trance personality recollected all that had been happening in the
+meantime and told about it freely.
+
+Or take the still more fascinating case of the young lady who is known
+in the literature of psychotherapy as Miss Beauchamp. Her story is told
+in a book, "The Dissociation of a Personality," by Dr. Morton Prince of
+Boston. Some thirty years ago Miss Beauchamp, a very conscientious and
+dignified young lady, became nervous and ill, and took to doing strange
+things, which were a source of shame and humiliation to her. Under
+hypnotism it was discovered to be a case of multiple personality. The
+other personality, who finally gave herself the name of Sally, was
+entirely different in character from Miss Beauchamp, being mischievous,
+vain, and primitive as a child. She conceived an intense dislike for
+Miss Beauchamp, whom she called by abusive names; at times when she
+could get possession of Miss Beauchamp's body, she delighted in playing
+humiliating tricks upon her enemy, spending her money, running her into
+debt, breaking her engagements, disgracing her before her friends. Sally
+was always well and Miss Beauchamp was always ill, and Sally would take
+the body, for which they fought for possession, and take it for long and
+exhausting walks, and leave it cold and miserable, lost and penniless,
+in the possession of Miss Beauchamp! And of course this made Miss
+Beauchamp more and more a wreck, and Sally took possession of more and
+more of her time. Sally knew everything that Miss Beauchamp did and
+thought, but Miss Beauchamp did not know about Sally. She only knew that
+there were gaps in her life, during which she did things she could not
+explain. And because she did not want her friends to think her insane,
+she would try to hide this dreadful condition of affairs; but Sally
+would spoil her plans by writing letters to her friends, and also by
+writing insulting letters for Miss Beauchamp to find when she took
+possession again.
+
+Then one day, after several years of treatment, there appeared yet
+another personality, who knew nothing about Miss Beauchamp or Sally
+either, and only knew what Miss Beauchamp had known up to some years
+before. Miss Beauchamp had a college education, and wrote and spoke
+French; Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it; the new
+personality did not have a college education at all. Nevertheless,
+after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating as any novel
+you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was the real Miss
+Beauchamp; the others were "split off" personalities. He traced the
+cause to a severe mental shock, and succeeded in the end in combining
+the first Miss Beauchamp with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate
+and wanton Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally
+murdering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but he
+condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sentence. It is a
+"movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I should think it would make
+disconcerting reading to persons who believe that each of us is one
+immortal soul, or "has" one immortal soul, and is responsible for it to
+a personal God.
+
+There is never any end to the problems of these multiple personalities,
+and each case is a test of the judgment and ingenuity of the specialist.
+He will try to make one personality "stick," and will fail, and will
+have to accept another, or a combination of two. In one case, he found
+that he could not get the right personality to "stick" except under
+hypnosis, so he decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and
+the new personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If
+you wish to know more about this subject you can find books in any
+well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of Personality," by H.
+Addington Bruce, because it contains in the appendix an excellent list
+of the literature of the subconscious in all its many aspects.
+
+There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring this
+underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. Some fifteen
+years ago a psychotherapist in New York told me about the discoveries of
+a physician in Vienna, and gave me some pamphlets, written in very
+difficult and technical German. Since then this Professor Freud has been
+translated, and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers
+make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up Jesus
+because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves Christians, and
+in the same way we have no right to blame Freud for all the absurdities
+of the psychoanalysts.
+
+Probably there never was a time in human history when there were not
+people who interpreted dreams, and you can still buy "dream books" for
+twenty-five cents, and learn that a white horse means that you are going
+to get a letter from your sweetheart tomorrow; then you can buy another
+dream book, telling you that a white horse means there is going to be a
+death in your family within the year. Naturally this prejudices thinking
+people against dream analysis; yet, dreams are facts, and every fact has
+its cause, and if you dream about a white horse, there must assuredly be
+some reason for your dreaming this particular thing. Of course we know
+that if you eat mince-pie and welsh-rabbit at midnight, you will dream
+about something terrible; but will it be snakes, or will it be a
+railroad wreck, or will it be white horses trampling over you?
+Obviously, it may be a million different unpleasant things; and what is
+it that picks out this or that from the infinite store of your memory,
+and brings it into the region of half-consciousness which we call the
+dream?
+
+Professor Freud's discovery is in brief that the dream is a
+wish-fulfillment. Our instincts present to our consciousness a great
+mass of impulses and desires, and among these the consciousness selects
+what it pleases, and represses and refuses to recognize or to act upon
+the others. But maybe these decisions are not altogether satisfactory to
+the subconsciousness. The mind of the body is in rebellion against the
+mind--shall we say of reason, or shall we say of society? The mind of
+society, otherwise known as the moral law, says that you shall be a good
+little boy, and shall go to school and learn what you are told, and on
+Sunday go to church and sit very still through a long sermon; whereas,
+the body of a boy would rather be a savage, hunting birds' nests and
+scalping enemies and exploring magic caves full of precious jewels. So
+the subconsciousness of the boy, balked and miserable, awaits its time,
+and finds its satisfaction when the boy is asleep and his moral censor
+has relaxed its control.
+
+This dream mind is not a logical and orderly thing like the conscious
+mind; it is not business-like and civilized, it does not deal in
+abstractions. It is far more interested in things than in words; it does
+not present us with formulas, but with pictures, and with stories of
+weird and wonderful happenings. It is like the mind of the race, which
+we study in legends and religions. It does not tell us that the sun is a
+mass of incandescent hydrogen gas, so and so many miles in diameter; it
+tells us that the sun is a cosmic hero who slays the black dragon of
+night. So the mind of our body presents us with innumerable pictures and
+symbols, exactly such as we find in poetry. There may be, and frequently
+is, dispute as to just what a poet meant by this or that particular
+image, but if we read all the work of any particular poet, we get a
+certain impression of that poet's individuality. If he is always talking
+about the perfume of women's hair and the gleam of the white flesh of
+nymphs in the thickets, we are not left in doubt as to what is wrong
+with this poet.
+
+And just so, when the expert sets to work to examine all the dreams that
+any one person can remember, day after day, sooner or later the expert
+observes that these dreams hover continually about one particular
+subject; and by questioning the person, he can find out what is the
+secret which is troubling the person, perhaps without the person himself
+being aware of it. Of course there are many people who like nothing so
+much as to talk about themselves; and many are spending their time and
+their money on the latest fad of being "psyched," who would, in any
+properly organized world, be put to work at hoeing weeds or washing
+their own clothes. Nevertheless, it is a fact that there are real mental
+disorders in the world, and innumerable honest and earnest people who
+have something the matter with them which they do not understand. Here
+is one way by which the conscientious investigator can find out what the
+trouble is, and make it clear to them, and by establishing harmony
+between their conscious and their subconscious minds, can many times put
+them in the way of health and happiness.
+
+Through psychoanalysis we are enabled to understand the "split"
+personality and its cause. We discover that almost everyone has more or
+less rudimentary forms of multiple personality hidden within him; made
+out of desires and traits which he does not like, or which the world
+forces him to drive into the deeps of his being. These may be evil
+impulses, of sex or violence; they may be the most noble altruisms, or
+artistic yearnings, ridiculous things in a world of "hustle." A quite
+normal man or woman may keep a separate self, apart from the world,
+living a Jekyll life of business propriety and a Hyde life of religious
+or musical ecstasy. Or again, the repressed impulses may integrate
+themselves in the unconscious, and you may have genius or lunacy or
+both--"great wits to madness near allied." The modern knowledge on such
+dark mysteries you may find in Hart's "The Psychology of Insanity."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY
+
+     (Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of
+     view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live
+     forever?)
+
+
+As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own and other
+people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange question: Is it all
+our own mind, and that of other living people, or are we by any chance
+dealing with the minds of those who are dead? A great many earnest
+people, and some very learned people, are fully convinced that the
+latter is the case, and we have now to consider their arguments.
+
+When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost stories, and would
+shudder over them; but I was given to understand that all this was just
+imagination, I must not take ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or
+dragons or nymphs or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts
+seriously--well, such a person would be almost as comical as that
+supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you believe it,
+in those days there actually were people who believed they could learn
+to fly in the air, and spent their time manufacturing machines for this
+purpose! There was a scientist in Washington who had this "bug," and
+built himself a machine and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac
+river. We all laughed at him--we laughed so long and so loud that we
+killed the poor man; and then, a few years later, somebody took that
+machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! But that
+was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not quite so ready to laugh
+at an idea because it was new.
+
+I remember vividly my first meeting with a man who believed in ghosts.
+He was a Unitarian clergyman, the Reverend Minot J. Savage of New York.
+I was sixteen years old, and just breaking out of my theological shell,
+and Doctor Savage helped to pry me loose. He was a grave and kindly man,
+of great learning and intelligence, and I remember vividly my
+consternation when one day he told me--oh, yes, he had seen many ghosts,
+he was accustomed to talk with ghosts every now and then. There was no
+doubt whatever that ghosts existed!
+
+He told me many stories. I remember one so well that I do not have to go
+back to his books to look up the details. It was in the days before the
+Atlantic cable, and he had a friend who took a steamer to England. One
+night Doctor Savage was awakened and found the ghost of his friend
+standing by his bedside. The ship had gone down off the Irish coast, so
+the ghost declared, but the friend did not want Doctor Savage to think
+that he had suffered from the pangs of drowning; he had been struck on
+the left side of the head by a beam of the ship and had been killed
+instantly. Doctor Savage wrote down these circumstances and had them
+witnessed by a number of people, and two or three weeks later he
+received word that the body of his friend had been found on the Irish
+coast, with the left side of the head crushed in.
+
+So then, of course, I studied the subject of ghosts. I have studied it
+off and on ever since, and have read most of the important new
+discoveries and arguments of the psychic researchers. To begin with, I
+will mention the contents of two large volumes, Gurney's "Phantasms of
+the Living." In this book are narrated many hundreds of cases, of which
+Doctor Savage's story is a type. It appears that persons at the moment
+of death, or in times of great mental stress, do somehow have the power
+to communicate with other people, even at the other side of the world. A
+few such cases might be attributed to coincidence or to fraud, but when
+you have so many cases, attested in minute detail by so many hundreds of
+otherwise honest people, you are not being scientific but simply stupid
+if you dismiss the whole subject with contempt.
+
+Gurney discusses the phenomenon and its probable causes. We know, of
+course, that hallucinations are among the most common of psychic
+phenomenon. Your subconscious mind can be caused to see and hear and
+feel anything; likewise it has power to cause you to see and hear and
+feel anything. In practically all cases of multiple personality some of
+the split-off personalities can cause the others to see and hear and
+feel. And the consciousness, you must understand, takes these things to
+be just as real as real things; there is no way you can tell an
+hallucination from reality--except to ask other people about it. And if
+we admit the idea of telepathy, we may say that phantasms are
+hallucinations caused by this means; that is, the subconscious mind of
+your wife or your mother or your friend who is ill or dying, transmits
+to your subconscious mind some vivid impression, which causes your own
+subconscious mind to present to your consciousness a perfect image of
+that person, walking and talking with you, and your consciousness has no
+way of telling but that the image is real.
+
+So much for phantasms of the living. But are there any phantasms of the
+dead? Are there any cases in which the time of the appearance can be
+proven to be subsequent to the time of death? Even this would not prove
+survival, of course; it is perfectly possible that the telepathic
+impulse might be delayed in our own minds, it might not flash into
+consciousness until our own state of mind made it possible. Can we say
+that there are cases in which the facts communicated are such as to
+convince us that the person was already dead, and was telling us
+something as a dead person and not as a living one?
+
+Before we go into this question, let us clear the ground for the subject
+by discussing the survival of personality from a more general
+standpoint. What is it that we want to prove? What are the probabilities
+of its being true? What would be the consequences of its not being true?
+Have we any grounds, other than those of psychic research, for thinking
+that it is true, or that it may be true, or that it ought to be true?
+What, so to speak, are the morals of the doctrine of immortality?
+
+Well, to begin with, the survival of the soul after death and forever is
+one of the principal doctrines of the Christian religion. Many devout
+Christians will read this book, and I will seem to them blasphemous when
+I say that this argument does not concern me. I count myself one of the
+lovers and friends of Jesus, I am presumptuous enough to believe that if
+he were on earth, I would understand him and get along with him
+excellently; but I do not know any reason why I should believe this,
+that, or the other doctrine about life because any religious sect,
+founded upon the name of Jesus, commands me so to believe. I see no more
+reason for adopting the idea of heaven because it is a Christian idea
+than I see for adopting the idea of reincarnation because it is a
+precious and holy idea to hundreds of millions of Buddhists. I have some
+very good friends who are Theosophists, and are quite convinced of this
+idea of reincarnation; that is, that the soul comes back into life over
+and over again in many different bodies, thus completing itself and
+renewing itself and expiating its sins. My Theosophist friends have a
+most elaborate and complicated body of what they consider to be
+knowledge on this subject; yet I have to take the liberty of saying that
+I cannot see that it has any relation to reality. It seems to me as
+completely unproven as any other fairy story, or myth, or legend--for
+example, the seven infernos of Dante, and the elaborate and complicated
+torments that are suffered there.
+
+But, it will be argued, Jesus rose from the dead, and thus proved the
+immortality of the soul. Now, in the first place, there are many learned
+investigators who consider there is insufficient evidence for believing
+that Jesus ever lived; and certainly if this be so, it will be difficult
+to prove that he rose from the dead. Again, it was a common occurrence
+for crucified men not to die; sometimes it happened that their guards
+allowed them to be spirited away--even nowadays we have known of prison
+guards being bribed to allow a prisoner to escape. Again, the events of
+the return of Jesus may have been just such psychic phenomena as we are
+trying in this chapter to explain. Or, once more, they may have been
+purely legends. A very brief study will convince a thinking person that
+the people of that time were ready to believe anything, and to accept
+facts upon such authority, and to make them the basis for a scientific
+conclusion, is simply to be childish.
+
+I shall be told, of course, that it is in the Bible, and therefore it
+must be true. The Bible is inspired, you say; and perhaps this is so.
+But then, a great deal of other literature is inspired, and that does
+not relieve me of the task of comparing these various inspirations, and
+judging them, and picking out what is of use to me. The Bible is the
+literature of the ancient Hebrews for a couple of thousand years. It
+represents what the race mind of a great people for one generation after
+another judged worth recording and preserving. You may get an idea what
+this means, if you will picture to yourself a large volume of English
+literature, containing some Teutonic myths, and the Saxon chronicles,
+and the "Morte d'Arthur," and several of Chaucer's stories, and some
+Irish fairy tales, and some of Bacon's essays, and Shakespeare's "Venus
+and Adonis," and the English prayer book, and the architect's
+specifications for Westminster Abbey, and a good part of "Burke's
+Peerage"; also Blackstone's "Commentaries," a number of Wesley's hymns,
+and Pope's "Essay on Man," and some chapters of Carlyle's "Past and
+Present," and Gladstone's speeches, and Blake's poems, and Captain
+Cook's story of his voyage around the world, and Southey's "Life of
+Nelson," and Morris's "News from Nowhere," and Blatchford's "Merrie
+England," and scores of pages from Hansard, which is the equivalent of
+our Congressional Record. You may find this description irreverent, but
+do not think it is meant so. Do me the honor to get out your Bible and
+look it over from this point of view!
+
+But, you say, if we die altogether when we finish this earthly life,
+what becomes of moral responsibility and the punishment of sins? What
+shall we say to the wicked man to make him be good, if we cannot reward
+him with a heaven and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is
+that we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand years,
+and the results seem to indicate that we might better seek out some
+other method of inducing men to behave themselves. They do not believe
+so completely in heaven and hell these days, but there were times in
+history when they did believe completely, and not merely were the
+believers just as cruel, they were just as treacherous and just as
+gluttonous and just as drunken. If you want to satisfy yourself on this
+point, I refer you to my book "The Profits of Religion," page 129.
+
+Now, as a matter of fact, I think I can discern the outlines of a system
+of rewards and punishments automatically working in the life of men. I
+am not sure that I can prove that the wicked always get punished and the
+virtuous always rewarded; yet, when I stop and think, I am sure that I
+would not care to change places with any of the wicked people that I
+know in this world. Life may not always be "getting" them, but it has a
+way of "getting" their descendants, and I could not be entirely happy if
+I knew that my son and his sons were going to share the fate which I now
+observe befalling, for example, the grand dukes of Russia and their
+children. Life is one thing, and it does not exist for the individual,
+but for the race; its causes and effects do not always manifest
+themselves in one individual, but in a line of descendants. "Why are
+they called dynasties?" asked one of my professors of history; and a
+student brought the session to an end by answering: "Because that is
+what they always seem to do!"
+
+But this is not perfect justice, you will argue. It is not perfect, from
+the point of view of you or me; but then, I ask, what else is there in
+the world that is perfect from that point of view? Why should our
+justice be any more perfect than, for example, our health or our
+thinking or our climate or our government? And, may it not very well be
+that our justice is up to us, in precisely the same way that some of
+these other things are up to us? Maybe what we have to do is to set to
+work to see to it that virtue does always get rewarded and vice does
+always get punished, right here and now, instead of waiting for an
+omnipotent God to attend to it in some hypothetical heaven.
+
+I find this life of mine very wonderful, and enormously interesting. I
+am willing to take it on the terms that it is given, and to try to make
+the best of it; and I do not see that I have any right to dictate what
+shall be given me in some future life. If my father gives me a Christmas
+present, I am happy and grateful; and, of course, if I know that he is
+going to give me another present next Christmas, I am still more happy;
+but I do not see that I have any right to argue that because he gives me
+one Christmas present, he must give me an unlimited number of them, and
+I think it would be very ungrateful of me to refuse to thank him for a
+Christmas present until I had made sure that I was to get one next time!
+
+Neither do I find myself such a wonderful person that I can assert that
+the morality of the universe absolutely depends upon the fact that I am
+immortal. Of course, I should like to live forever, and to know all the
+wonderful things that are going to happen in the world, and if it is
+true that I am so to live, I shall be immensely delighted. But I cannot
+say that it _must_ be true, and all I can do is to investigate the
+probabilities. On this point my view is stated in a sentence of
+Spinoza's: "He who would love God rightly must not desire that God love
+him in return."
+
+To sum up, the question of immortality is purely a question of fact. It
+is one to be approached in a spirit of open-minded inquiry, entirely
+unaffected by hopes or fears or dogmas or moral claims. It is worth
+while to get clear that we may be immortal, even though we do not now
+know it and cannot now prove it; it is possible that all psychic
+research might end in telepathy, and still, when we die, we might wake
+up and find ourselves alive. It might possibly be that some of us are
+immortal and not all of us. It might be that some parts of us are
+immortal and not the rest. It might be that our subconsciousness is
+immortal and not our consciousness. It might be that all of us, or some
+part of us, survive for a time, but not forever. This last is something
+which I myself am inclined to think may be the case.
+
+Also, it seems worthwhile to mention that it is no argument against
+immortality that we cannot imagine it, that we cannot picture a universe
+consisting of uncountable billions of living souls, or what these souls
+would do to pass the time. It may very well be that among these souls
+there is no such thing as time. It may be that they are thoroughly
+occupied in ways beyond our imagining, or again, that they are not
+occupied, and under no necessity of being occupied. Let the person who
+presents such arguments begin by picturing to you how the brain cells
+manage to store up the uncounted millions of memories which you have,
+the thousands of words and combinations of words, and the thoughts which
+go with them, musical notes and tunes, colors and odors and visual
+impressions, memories of the past and hopes of the future and dreams
+that never were. Where are all those hundreds of millions of things, and
+what are they like when they are not in our consciousness, and how do
+they pass the time, and where were they in the hundreds of millions of
+years before we were born, and where will they be in the hundreds of
+millions of years of the future? When our wise men can answer these
+questions completely, it will be time enough for them to tell us about
+the impossibility of immortality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL
+
+     (Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of
+     spiritism thus put before us.)
+
+
+Let us now take up the question of survival of personality after death
+from the strictly scientific point of view; let us consider what facts
+we have, and the indications they seem to give. First, we know that to
+all appearances the consciousness and the subconsciousness are bound up
+with the body. They grow with the body, they decline with the body, they
+seem to die with the body. We can irretrievably damage the consciousness
+by drawing a whiff of cyanogen gas into the lungs, or by sticking a pin
+into the brain, or by clogging one of its tiny blood vessels with waste
+matter. It is terrible to us to think that the mind of a great poet or
+prophet or statesman may be snuffed out of existence in such a way; but
+then, it is no argument against a fact to say that it is terrible.
+Insanity is terrible, war is terrible, pestilence is terrible, so also
+are tigers and poisonous snakes; but all these things exist, and all
+these things have power over the wisest and greatest mind, to put an end
+to its work on this earth at least.
+
+And now we come with the new instrument of psychic research, to probe
+the question: What becomes of this consciousness when it disappears? Can
+we prove that it is still in existence, and is able by any method to
+communicate with us? Those who answer "Yes" argue that the mind of the
+dead person, unable to use its own bodily machinery any longer, manages
+in the hypnotic trance to use the bodily machinery of another person,
+called a "medium," and by it to make some kind of record to identify
+itself.
+
+This, of course, is a strange idea, and requires a good deal of proof.
+The law of probability requires us not to accept an unlikely
+explanation, if there is any more simple one which can account for the
+facts. When we examine the product of automatic writing, table-tipping,
+and other psychic phenomena, we have first to ask ourselves, Is there
+anything in all this which cannot be explained by what we already know?
+Then, second, we have to ask, Is there any other supposition which will
+explain the facts, and which is easier to believe than the spirit
+theory?
+
+These "spirits" apparently desire to convince us of their reality, and
+they tell us many things which are expected to convince us; they tell us
+things which we ourselves do not know, and which spirits might know. But
+here again we run up against the problem of the subconsciousness, with
+its infinite mass of "forgotten" knowledge. It is not so easy for the
+"spirits" to tell us things which we can be sure our subconscious mind
+could not possibly contain. Also, there comes the additional element of
+telepathy. It appears to be a fact that under trance conditions, or
+under any especially exciting conditions of the consciousness, one mind
+can reach out and take something out of another mind, or one mind can
+cause something to be passed over to another mind; and so information
+can be communicated to the mind of a medium, and can appear in automatic
+writing, or in clairvoyance, or in crystal gazing.
+
+One of the most conscientious and earnest of all the investigators of
+this subject was the late Professor Hyslop, who many years ago sought to
+teach me "practical morality" (from the bourgeois point of view) in
+Columbia University. Professor Hyslop worked for fifteen years with a
+medium by the name of Mrs. Piper, who was apparently sincere and was
+never exposed in any kind of fraud. In Professor Hyslop's books you will
+find innumerable instances of amazing facts brought out in Mrs. Piper's
+trances. You will find Professor Hyslop arguing that the only way
+telepathy can account for these facts is by the supposition that there
+is a universal subconscious mind, or that the subconscious mind of the
+medium possesses the power to reach into the subconscious mind of every
+other living person and take out anything from it. But for my part, I
+cannot see that the case is quite so difficult. Professor Hyslop
+recites, for example, how Mrs. Piper would tell him facts about some
+long dead relative--facts which he did not know, but was later able to
+verify. But that proves simply nothing at all, because there could be no
+possible way for Professor Hyslop to be sure that he had never known
+these facts about his relatives. The facts might have been in his
+subconscious mind without having ever been in his conscious mind at all;
+he might have heard people talking about these matters while he was
+reading a book, or playing as a boy, paying no attention to what was
+said.
+
+And then came Sir Oliver Lodge with his investigations. I will say this
+for his work--he was the first person who was able to make real to my
+mind the startling idea that perhaps after all the dead might be alive
+and able to communicate with us. You will find what he has to say in his
+book, "The Survival of Man," and it seems fair that a great scientist
+and a great man should have a chance to convince you of what seem to him
+the most important facts in the world.
+
+Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in the war, and it is claimed that
+he began at once to communicate with his family. Among other things, he
+told them of the existence of a picture, which none of them had ever
+seen or heard of, a group photograph which he described in detail. But,
+of course, other people in this group knew of the existence of the
+photograph, and so we have again the possibility that some member of Sir
+Oliver's family may have taken into his subconscious mind without
+knowing it an impression or description of that picture. If you care to
+experiment, you will find that you can frequently play a part in the
+dreams of a child by talking to it in its sleep; and that is only one of
+a thousand different ways by which some member of a family might
+acquire, without knowing it, information of the existence of a
+photograph.
+
+There is another possibility to be considered--that a portion of the
+consciousness may survive, and not necessarily forever. We are
+accustomed when death takes place to see the body before us, and we know
+that we can preserve the body for thousands of years if we wish. Why is
+it not possible that when conscious life is brought to a sudden end,
+there may remain some portion of the consciousness, or of the
+subconsciousness, cut off from the body, and slowly fading back into the
+universal mind energy, whatever we please to call it? There is a hard
+part of the body, the skeleton, which survives for some time; why might
+there not be a central core of the mind which is similarly tough and
+enduring? Of course, if consciousness is a function of the brain, it
+must decay as the brain decays; but how would it be if the brain were a
+function of the consciousness--which is, so far as I can see, quite as
+likely a guess.
+
+I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility of this idea.
+I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits of those recently
+dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. Of course, you can go to
+any seance in the "white light" district of your city and receive
+communications from the souls of Cæsar and Napoleon and Alexander the
+Great and Pocahontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary,
+you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and
+Achilles; but you will not find much reality about any of these people,
+they will not tell you very much about the everyday details of their
+lives. This fact that so much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our
+own time tends to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever.
+How simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles would
+come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to find copies of
+his lost tragedies! You would think that the soul of Sophocles, seeing
+our great need of beauty and wisdom, would be interested to give us his
+works! From genius, operating under the guidance of the conscious mind,
+we get sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums give us
+suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the operation of
+the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, for example, from
+dissociated personalities.
+
+There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, produced by the
+automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who tells us in evident good
+faith that her conscious personality is entirely innocent of Patience,
+and all her thought and doings. Patience writes long novels and dramas
+in a quaint kind of old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing
+about this language. But does she positively know that when she was a
+child, she never happened to be in the room with someone who was reading
+old English aloud? Nothing seems more likely than that her subconscious
+mind heard some quaint, strange language, and took possession of it, and
+built up a personality around it, and even made a new language and a new
+literature from that starting point.
+
+That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subconscious revels. It
+creates new characters, with an imagination infinite and inexhaustible.
+Who has not waked up and been astounded at the variety and reality of a
+dream? Who has not told his dreams and laughed over them? The
+subconscious will play at games, it will act and rehearse elaborate
+rôles; it will put on costumes, and delight in being Cæsar and Napoleon
+and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Hamlet and Don Quixote and
+Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will even play at being "spirits"! It
+will be mischievous and impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of
+its own importance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's
+most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. It
+will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a grief-stricken family;
+it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," and cause an earnest
+professor of "practical morality" to give up a respectable position in
+Columbia University and write books to convince the world that the dead
+are sending him messages.
+
+Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss Beauchamp.
+Remember that here we are not dealing with any guess work about
+"spirits"; here we have half a dozen different "controls," none of them
+the least bit dead, but all of them a part of the consciousness of one
+entirely alive young lady. A specialist has spent some six years
+investigating the case, day after day, week after week, writing down the
+minute details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant known as
+"Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom you ever held in your
+arms. Sally has love and hate, fear and hope, pain and delight--and
+Sally is a little demon, created entirely out of the subconsciousness of
+a highly refined and conscientious young college graduate of Boston.
+Sally spends Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally pawns
+Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; Sally uses
+Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about Miss Beauchamp;
+Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or makes her hear exactly the
+opposite of what is spoken to her. Yes, and Sally pleads and fights
+frantically for her life; Sally enters into intrigues with other parts
+of Miss Beauchamp, and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who
+is her Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge!
+
+And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a grieving mother,
+and made that mother think she was talking to the ghost of a long lost
+child? Can anybody doubt that Sally could and would play the part of any
+person she had ever known, or of any historic character she had ever
+read about? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the conscious
+Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this, and was horrified
+when she was told about it. So here you have the following situation, no
+matter of guesswork, but definitely established: your dearest friend may
+act as a medium, and in all good faith may bring to the surface some
+part of his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in a
+hundred different rôles, and plays upon you with deliberate malice the
+most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks.
+
+And how much worse the situation becomes when to this there is added the
+possibility of conscious fraud! When the medium is a person who is
+taking your money, and thrives by making you believe in the "spirits"
+she produces! You may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of
+the Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, and in row
+after row of tents you may hear, and even see, every kind of spirit you
+ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs.
+And you may see poor farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their
+cheeks, listening to the endearments of their dead children, and to
+wisdom from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a Bowery
+accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years ago by Will Irwin in a
+book called "The Medium Game"; and then--after traveling from one kind
+of medium to another, and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he
+went into a "parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who
+had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most intimate secrets
+of his life!
+
+It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is at work upon a
+device to enable spirits to communicate with the living, if there really
+are spirits seeking to do this. It is Edison's idea that spirits may
+inhabit some kind of infinitely rarefied astral body, and he proposes to
+manufacture an instrument which is sensitive to an impression many
+millions of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This
+should make it easier for the spirits, and should constitute a fairer
+test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is perfected and put to
+work by scientific men, I wish to suggest a few tests which will
+convince me that there really are spirits, and that the results are not
+to be explained by telepathy.
+
+First, assuming that the spirits live forever, there are some useful
+things which were known to the people of ancient time, and are not known
+to anyone living now. For example, let one of the Egyptian craftsmen
+come forward and tell us the secret of their glass-staining, which I
+understand is now a lost art. And then Sophocles, as I have already
+suggested, will tell us where we can find his lost dramas; or if he
+doesn't know where any copies are buried, let him find in the spirit
+world some scribe or librarian or book-lover who can give us this
+priceless information. All over the ancient lands are buried and
+forgotten cities, and in those cities are papyrus scrolls and graven
+tablets and bricks. Infinite stores of knowledge are thus concealed from
+us; and how simple for the ancient ones who possess this information to
+make it known to us, and so to convince us of their reality!
+
+Or, again, supposing that spirits are not immortal, but that they slowly
+fade from life as do their bodies. Suppose that a Raymond Lodge or other
+recently dead soldier wishes to communicate with his father and to
+convince his father that it is really an independent being, and not
+simply a part of the father's subconscious mind--let him try something
+like this. Let the father write six brief notes, and put them in six
+envelopes all alike, and shuffle them up and put them in a hat and draw
+out one of them. Now, assuming that the experimenter is honest, there is
+no living human being who knows the contents of that envelope, and if
+the medium is dipping into the subconscious mind of the experimenter,
+the chances are one in six of the right note being hit upon. Assuming
+that spirits may not be able to get inside an envelope and read a folded
+letter, there is no objection to the experimenter, provided he is
+honest, and provided there are no mirrors or other tricks, holding the
+envelope behind his back, and tearing it open, and spreading it out for
+the convenience of the spirit. And now, if the spirit can read that
+letter correctly every time, we shall be fairly certain that whatever
+force we are dealing with, it is not the subconscious mind of the
+experimenter.
+
+Or, let us take another test. Let us have a roulette wheel in a covered
+box, or hidden away so that no one but the spirit can see it. We spin
+the wheel, and any one of the habitues of Monte Carlo can figure out the
+chance of the little ball dropping into any particular number. If now
+the spirit can tell us each time where we shall find the ball, we shall
+know that we are dealing with knowledge which does not exist either in
+the conscious or the subconscious mind of any living human being.
+
+Among the things that "spirits" have been accustomed to do, since the
+days when they first made their appearance with the Fox sisters in
+America, are the lifting of tables and the ringing of bells and the
+assuming of visible forms. These are what is known as
+"materializations," and when I was a boy, and used to hear people
+talking about these things, there was always one test required: let the
+materializations manifest themselves upon recording instruments
+scientifically devised; let photographs be taken of them, let them be
+weighed and measured, and so on. Well, time has moved forward, and these
+tests have been met, and it appears that "materializations" are
+facts--although it is still as uncertain as ever what they are
+materializations of. An English scientist, Professor Crawford, has
+published a book entitled "The Reality of Psychic Phenomena," in which
+he tells the results of many years of testing materializations by the
+strictest scientific methods. When the medium "levitates" a table--that
+is, causes it to go up in the air without physical contact--it appears
+that her own weight increases by exactly the weight of the table. When
+she exerts any force, which apparently she can do at a distance, the
+recording instruments show the exact counter-force in her own body.
+
+The results of these investigations are calculated at first to take your
+breath away. It begins to appear that the theosophists may be right, and
+that we may have one or more "astral" bodies within or coincident with
+the physical body; and that under the trance conditions we mold and make
+over this "astral" body in accordance with our imaginations, precisely
+as a sculptor molds the clay. At any rate, our subconsciousness has the
+power to project from it masses of substance, and to cause these to take
+all kinds of forms, for example, human faces, which have been
+photographed innumerable times. Or the body can shoot out long rods or
+snaky projections, which lift tables, and exert force which has been
+recorded upon pressure instruments and weighed by scales.
+
+As I write, a friend lends me a fifteen-dollar volume, a translation
+just published of an elaborate work by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, a
+physician of Munich, giving minute details of four years' experiments in
+this field. So rigid was this investigator in his efforts to exclude
+fraud, that not merely was the medium stripped and sewed up in black
+tights, but the "cabinet" in which she sat was a big sack of black
+cloth, everywhere sewed tight by machine. Every crevice of the medium's
+body was searched before and after the tests, and every inch of the
+"cabinet" gone over. The investigators sat within a couple of feet of
+the medium, and would draw back the curtains, and while holding her
+hands and her feet, would watch great masses of filmy gray and white
+stuff exude from the medium's mouth, from her armpits and breasts and
+sides. This would happen in red light of a hundred candle power, by
+which print could be easily read; and the medium would herself
+illuminate the phenomena with a red electric torch. The investigators
+would be privileged to examine these "phantom" forms, to touch them
+gently, and be touched by them--soft and slimy, like the tongue of an
+animal; but sometimes the things would misbehave, and strike them in the
+eye, hurting them.
+
+The medium, a young French girl living in the home of the wife of a
+well-known French playwright, had begun with spiritualist ideas, but
+came to take a matter-of-fact attitude to what happened, and in her
+trances would labor to mold these emanations into hands or faces, as
+requested by those present. She finally succeeded in allowing them to
+separate the soft mucous stuff from her body, and keep it for chemical
+and bacteriological examination. All this time she would be surrounded
+by a battery of cameras, nine at once, some of them inside the cabinet;
+and when the desired emanation was in sight, all these cameras would be
+set off by flashlight, and in the book you have over two hundred such
+photographs, showing faces and hands from every point of view. There are
+even moving-pictures, showing the material coming out of her mouth and
+going back!
+
+It is evident that we have here a whole universe of unexplored
+phenomena; and it seems that many of the old-time superstitions which
+were dumped overboard have now to be dragged back into the boat and
+examined in the light of new knowledge. What could smack more of magic
+and fraud than crystal-gazing? Yet it appears that the subconsciousness
+has power to project an image of its hidden memories into a crystal
+ball, where it may be plainly seen. We find so well-recognized an
+authority as Dr. Morton Prince using this method to enable one of the
+many Miss Beauchamps to recall incidents in her previous life which were
+otherwise entirely lost to her. Likewise this exploration of the
+disintegration of personality enables us to watch in the making all the
+phenomena of trance and ecstasy which have had so much to do with the
+making of religions. We know now how Joan of Arc heard the "voices," and
+we can make her hear more voices or make her stop hearing voices, as we
+prefer. Also we know all about demons and "demoniac possession." We can
+cast out demons--and without having to cause them to enter a herd of
+swine! We may some day be prepared to investigate the wonder stories
+which the Yogis tell us, about their ability to leave their physical
+bodies in a trance, and to appear in England at a few moments' notice
+for the transaction of their spiritual business!
+
+But we want things proven to us, and we don't want the people with whom
+we work to be animated either by religious fanaticism or by money greed.
+We are ready to unlimber our minds, and prepare for long journeys into
+strange regions, but we want to move cautiously, and choose our route
+carefully, and be sure we do not lose our way! We want to deal
+rationally with life; we don't want to make wild guesses, or to choose a
+complicated and unlikely solution when a simple one will suffice. But,
+on the other hand, we must be alive to the danger of settling down on
+our little pile of knowledge, and refusing to take the trouble to
+investigate any more. That is a habit of learned men, I am sorry to say;
+the law of inertia applies to the scientist, as well as to the objects
+he studies. The scientists of our time have had to be prodded into
+considering each new discovery about the subconscious mind, precisely as
+the scientists of Galileo's time had to be prodded to watch him drop
+weights from the tower of Pisa. When he told them that the earth moved
+round the sun instead of the sun round the earth, they tortured him in a
+dungeon to make him take it back, and he did so, but whispered to
+himself, "And yet it moves." And it did move, of course, and continued
+to move. And in exactly the same way, if it be true that we have these
+hidden forces in us, they will continue to manifest themselves, and
+masses of people will continue to flock to Lily Dale, and to pay out
+their hard-earned money, until such a time as our learned men set to
+work to find out the facts and tell us how we can utilize these forces
+without the aid of either superstition or charlatanry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE POWERS OF THE MIND
+
+     (Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance is
+     slavery, and what science means to the people.)
+
+
+We have now completed a brief survey of the mind and its powers.
+Whatever we may have proved or failed to prove, this much we may say
+with assurance: the reader who has followed our brief sketch attentively
+has been disabused of any idea he may have held that he knows it all;
+and this is always the first step towards knowledge.
+
+The mind is the instrument whereby our race has lifted itself out of
+beasthood. It is the instrument whereby we hold ourselves above the
+forces which seek to drag us down, and whereby we shall lift ourselves
+higher, if higher we are to go. How shall we protect this precious
+instrument? How shall we complete our mastery of it? What are the laws
+of the conduct of the mind?
+
+The process of the mind is one of groping outward after new facts, and
+digesting and assimilating them, as the body gropes after and digests
+and assimilates food. The senses bring us new impressions, and we take
+these and analyze them, tear them into the parts which compose them,
+compare them with previous sensations, recognize difference in things
+which seem to be alike, and resemblances in things which seem to be
+different; we classify them, and provide them with names, which are, as
+it were, handles for the mind to grasp. Above all, we seek for causes;
+those chains of events which make what we know as order in the world of
+phenomena. And when the mind has what seems to be a cause, it proceeds
+to test it according to methods it has worked out, the rules and
+principles of experimental science.
+
+It is a comparatively small number of sensations which the body brings
+to the mind of itself; it is a narrow world in which we should live if
+our minds adopted a passive attitude toward life. But some minds possess
+what we call curiosity; they set out upon their own impulse to explore
+life; they discover new laws and make new experiences and new
+sensations for themselves. The mind forms an idea, and at first, after
+the fashion of the ancient Greek philosophers, it glorifies that idea
+and sets it in the seat of divinity. But presently comes the empirical
+method, which refuses authority to any idea unless it can stand the test
+of experiment, and prove that it corresponds with reality. Nowadays the
+thinker amasses his facts, and forms a theory to explain them, and then
+proceeds to try out this theory by the most rigid method that he or his
+critics can devise. If the theory doesn't "work"--that is, if it doesn't
+explain all the facts and stand all the tests--it is thrown away like a
+worn-out shoe. So little by little a body of knowledge is built up which
+is real knowledge; which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can
+use as foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization.
+
+By this method of research man is expanding his universe beyond anything
+that could have been conceived in the pre-scientific days. Hour by hour,
+while we work and play and sleep, the mind of our race is discovering
+new worlds in which our posterity will dwell. For uncounted ages man
+walked upon the earth, surrounded by infinite swarms of bacterial life
+of whose existence he never dreamed. The invisible rays of the spectrum
+beat upon him, and he knew nothing of what they did to him, whether good
+or evil. He lifted his head and saw vast universes of suns, in
+comparison with which his world was a mere speck of dust; yet to him
+these universes were globes or lanterns which some divinity had hung in
+the sky.
+
+One of the most fascinating illustrations of how the mind runs ahead of
+the senses is the story of the planet Uranus, which, less than two
+hundred years ago, had never been beheld by the eye of man. A
+mathematician seated in his study, working over the observations of
+other planets, their motions in relation to their mass and distance,
+discovered that their behavior was not as it should be. At certain times
+none of them were in quite the right place, and he decided that this
+variation must be due to the existence of an unknown body. He worked out
+the problem of what must be the mass and the exact orbit of this body,
+in order for it to be responsible for the variations observed; and when
+he had completed these calculations, he announced to the astronomical
+world, "Turn your telescopes to a certain spot in the heavens at a
+certain minute of a certain night, and you will find a new planet of a
+certain size." And so for the first time the human senses became aware
+of a fact, which by themselves they might not have discovered in all
+eternity.
+
+Now, the importance of exact knowledge concerning a new planet may not
+be apparent to the ordinary man; but if the thing which is discovered
+is, for example, an unknown ray which will move an engine or destroy a
+cancer, then we realize the worthwhileness of research, and the masters
+of the world's commerce are willing to give here and there a pittance
+for the increase of such knowledge. But men of science, who have by this
+time come to a sense of their own dignity and importance, understand
+that there is no knowledge about reality which is useless, no research
+into nature which is wasted. You might say that to describe and classify
+the fleas which inhabit the bodies of rats and ground-squirrels, and to
+study under the microscope the bacteria which live in the blood of these
+fleas--that this would be an occupation hardly worthy of the divinity
+that is in man. But presently, as a result of this knowledge about fleas
+and flea diseases being in existence and available, a bacteriologist
+discovers the secret of the dread bubonic plague, which hundreds of
+times in past history has wiped out a great part of the population of
+Europe and Asia.
+
+Mark Twain tells in his "Connecticut Yankee" how his hero was able to
+overcome the wizard Merlin, because he knew in advance of an eclipse of
+the sun. And this was fiction, of course; but if you prefer fact, you
+may read in the memoirs of Houdin, the French conjurer, how he was able
+to bring the Arab tribes into subjection to the French government by
+depriving the great chieftains of their strength. He gathered them into
+a theatre, and invited their mighty men upon the stage, and there was an
+iron weight, and they were able to lift it when Houdin permitted, and
+not to lift it when he forbade. These noble barbarians had never heard
+of the electro-magnet, and could not conceive of a force that could
+operate through a solid wooden floor beneath their feet.
+
+Such things, trivial as they are, serve to illustrate the difference
+between ignorance and knowledge, and the power which knowledge gives.
+The man who knows is godlike to those who do not know; he may enslave
+them, he may do what he pleases with their lives, and they are powerless
+to help themselves. Anyone who would help them must begin by giving them
+knowledge, real knowledge. There is no such thing as freedom without
+knowledge, and it must be the best knowledge, it must be new knowledge;
+he who goes against new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the
+Chinese who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, and with
+umbrellas over their heads.
+
+Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings and priests and
+ruling castes; but this supreme power has been wrested from them, and
+this is the greatest step in human progress so far taken. "Seek and ye
+shall find," is the law concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall
+be opened unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that
+knowledge is your priceless birthright, and that you should repudiate
+all men and all institutions and all creeds and all formulas which seek
+to keep this heritage from you. Beware of men who bid you believe
+something because it is told you, or because your fathers believed it,
+or because it is written in some ancient book, or embodied in some
+ancient ceremonial. Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at
+the same time beware of the modern spells which have been contrived to
+replace them! Beware of party cries and shibboleths, the idols of the
+forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which are set as snares for
+your feet. Beware of cant--that paraphernalia of noble sentiments,
+artificially manufactured by politicians and newspapers for the purpose
+of blinding you to their knaveries. Remember that you live in a world of
+class conflicts; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged by
+secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately released
+by people who seek to make use of you for purposes which are theirs and
+not yours. In the fairy-tales we used to love, the hero was provided
+with magic protection against the perils of those times; but what hero
+and what magic will guard the modern man against the propaganda of
+militarism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism?
+
+The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can be taught
+sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. There are many
+books on mind and memory training, some of which are useful, and some of
+which are trash. There is an English system widely advertised, called
+"Pelmanism," of which I have personally made no test, but it has won
+endorsements of a great many people who do not give their endorsements
+lightly.
+
+This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in medicine, or
+in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount of charlatanry,
+but there is also genuine knowledge being patiently accumulated and
+standardized. When the United States government had to have an army in a
+hurry it did not make its millions of young men into teamsters or
+aviators at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction
+times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently I visited
+the Whittier Reform School in California, where delinquent boys are
+educated by the state. A boy had been set to work in the tailor shop,
+and it had been found that he was unable to make the buttons and the
+buttonholes of a coat come in the right place. For nine years the state
+of California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been laboring to
+teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; the effort had cost
+some five thousand dollars, to say nothing of all the coats which were
+spoiled, and all the mental suffering of the victim and his teachers.
+Finally someone persuaded the state of California to spend a few
+thousand dollars and install a psychological bureau for the purpose of
+testing all the inmates of the institution; so by a half hour's
+examination the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective.
+Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was only eight
+years old, and so he would never be able to achieve the feat of making
+buttons and buttonholes meet.
+
+This is a new science which you may read about in Terman's "The
+Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal children, it is
+established that certain tasks can be performed at certain ages. A child
+of three can point to his eyes, his nose and his mouth; he can repeat a
+sentence of six syllables, and repeat two digits, and give his family
+name. Older children are asked to look at a picture and then tell what
+they saw; to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according to
+their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note absurdities in
+statements, to count backwards, and to make change. Children of fifteen
+are asked to interpret fables, to reverse the hands of a clock, and so
+on. Of course there are always variations; every child will be better at
+some kinds of tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and
+taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child--which
+may be widely different from its physical age. You may find some whose
+minds have stopped growing altogether, and can only be made to grow by
+special methods of education. Enlightened communities are now conducting
+separate schools for defective children--replacing the old-fashioned
+schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor little
+wretches to learn what was beyond their power.
+
+In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, and in the
+detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast amount of "fake," but
+also the beginning of a science. Our laws do not as yet permit the use
+of automatic writing and the hypnotic trance in the investigation of
+crime, but they have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for
+example, those of memory association. The examiner prepares a list of a
+hundred names of objects, and reads those names one after another, and
+asks the person he is investigating to name the first thing which is
+suggested to him by each word in turn. "Engine" will suggest "steam," or
+perhaps it will suggest "train"; "coat" will suggest "trousers," or
+perhaps it will suggest "pocket," and so on. The examiner holds a
+stop-watch, and notes what fraction of a second each one of these
+reactions takes. The ordinary man, who is not trying to conceal
+anything, will give all his associations promptly, and the reaction
+times will be approximately alike. But suppose the man has just murdered
+somebody with an axe, and buried the body in a cellar with a fire
+shovel, and taken a pocketbook, and a watch, and a locket, and a number
+of various objects, and climbed out of the cellar window by breaking the
+glass; and now suppose that in his list of a hundred objects the
+psychologist introduces unexpectedly a number of these things. In each
+case the first memory association of the criminal will be one which he
+does not wish to give. He will have to find another, and that inevitably
+takes time. One or two such delays might be accidental; but if every
+time there is any suggestion of the murder, or the method or scene of
+the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be sure that
+the conscious mind is interfering with the subconscious mind. The
+difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind is always
+possible to detect, and if you are permitted to be thorough in your
+experiments, you can make certain what is in the subconscious mind that
+the conscious mind is trying to conceal.
+
+Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and expert knowledge
+confers mastery over the shrewdest untrained mind. The only trouble is
+that under our present social system the trained mind is very apt to be
+working in the interest of class privilege. The psychologist who is
+employed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may be as
+little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in making poison
+gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for the extermination of its
+rebellious slaves. But what this proves is not that scientific knowledge
+is untrustworthy, but merely that the workers must acquire it, they must
+have their own organizations and their own experiments in every field.
+To give knowledge to the masses of mankind, slow and painful as the
+process seems, is now the most important task confronting the
+enlightened thinker.
+
+The method of psychoanalysis gives us also much insight into the
+phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may ultimately come to
+understand it. At present we are embarrassed because genius is so often
+closely allied to eccentricity; the supernormal appears in connection
+with the subnormal--and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets
+and painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, adopt
+irresponsibility as their religion; they live in a world of their own,
+they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, or to be true to
+their wives. They are followed by a host of disciples, who adopt the
+defects of the master as a substitute for his qualities. And so there
+grows up a perverted notion of what genius is, and wholly false
+standards of artistic quality. There is nothing mankind needs more than
+sure and exact tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to
+acquire languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability
+to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time shaping
+and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting masses of facts
+and weaving them into a pattern calculated to awaken the emotion in
+others. This is the last and greatest work of the human spirit, and to
+select the men who can do it, and foster their activity, is the ultimate
+purpose of all true science.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND
+
+     (Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to preserve and
+     develop its powers for the protection of our lives and the lives of
+     all men.)
+
+
+Someone wrote me the other day, asking, "When is the best time to
+acquire knowledge?" I answer, "The time is now." It is easier to learn
+things when you are young, but you cannot be young when you want to be,
+and if you are old, the best time to acquire knowledge is when you are
+old. It is true that the brain-cells seem to harden like the body, and
+it is less easy for them to take on new impressions; but it can be done,
+and just as Seneca began to learn Greek at eighty, I know several old
+men whom the recent war has shaken out of their grooves of thought and
+compelled to deal with modern ideas.
+
+But if you are young, then so much the better! Then the divine thrill of
+curiosity is keenest; then your memory is fresh, and can be trained;
+your mind is plastic, and you can form sound habits. You can teach
+yourself to respect truth and to seek it, you can teach yourself
+accuracy, open-mindedness, flexibility, persistence in the search for
+understanding.
+
+First of all, I think, is accuracy. Learn to think straight! Let your
+mind be as a sharp scalpel, penetrating unrealities and falsehoods,
+cutting its way to the facts. When you set out to deal with a certain
+subject, acquire mastery of it, so that you can say, "I know." And yet,
+never be too sure that you know! Never be so sure, that you are not
+willing to consider new facts, and to change your way of thinking if it
+should be necessary. I look about me at the world, and see tigers and
+serpents, dynamite and poison gas and forty-two centimeter shells--yet I
+see nothing in the world so deadly to men as an error of the mind. Look
+at the mental follies about you! Look at the prejudices, the delusions,
+the lies deliberately maintained--and realize the waste of it all, the
+pity of it all!
+
+Every man, it seems, has his pet delusions, which he hugs to his bosom
+and loves because they are his own. If you try to deprive him of those
+delusions, it is as though you tore from a woman's arms the child she
+has borne. I have written a book called "The Profits of Religion," and
+never a week passes that there do not come to me letters from people who
+tell me they have read this book with pleasure and profit, they are
+grateful to me for teaching them so much about the follies and delusions
+of mankind, and it is all right and all true, save for two or three
+pages, in which I deal with the special hobby which happens to be their
+hobby! What I say about all the other creeds is correct--but I fail to
+understand that the Mormon religion is a dignified and inspired
+religion, a gift from on high, and if only I would carefully study the
+"Book of Mormon," I would realize my error! Or it is all right, except
+what I say about the Christian Scientists, or the Theosophists, or
+perhaps one particular sect of the Theosophists, who are different from
+the others. Today there lies upon my desk a letter from a man who has
+read many of my books, and now is grief-stricken because he must part
+company from me; he discovers that I permit myself to speak
+disrespectfully about the Seventh Day Adventist religion, whereas he is
+prepared to show the marvels of biblical prophecy now achieving
+themselves in the world. How could any save a divinely revealed religion
+have foreseen the present movement to establish the Sabbath by law? Yes,
+and presently I shall see the last atom of the prophecy fulfilled--there
+will be a death penalty for failure to obey the Sabbath law!
+
+Cultivate the great and precious virtue of open-mindedness. Keep your
+thinking free, not merely from outer compulsions, but from the more
+deadly compulsions of its own making--from prejudices and superstitions.
+The prejudices and superstitions of mankind are like those diseased
+mental states which are discovered by the psychoanalyst; what he calls a
+"complex" in the subconscious mind, a tangle or knot which is a center
+of disturbance, and keeps the whole being in a state of confusion. Each
+group of men, each sect or class, have their precious dogmas, their
+shibboleths, their sacred words and stock phrases which set their whole
+beings aflame with fanaticism. They have also their phobias, their words
+of terror, which cannot be spoken in their presence without causing a
+brain-storm.
+
+At present the dread word of our time is "Communist."
+
+You can scarcely say the word without someone telephoning for the
+police. And yet, when you meet a Communist, what is he? A worn and
+fragile student, who has thought out a way to make the world a better
+place to live in, and whose crime is that he tells others about his
+idea! Or perhaps you belong to the other side, and then your word of
+terror is the word "Capitalist." You meet a Capitalist, and what do you
+find? Very likely you find a man who is kindly, generous in his personal
+impulses, but bewildered, possibly a little frightened, still more
+irritated and made stubborn. So you realize that nearly all men are
+better than the institutions and systems under which they live; you
+realize the urgent need of applying your reasoning powers to the problem
+of social reorganization.
+
+Cultivate also, in the affairs of your mind, the ancient virtue of
+humility. There is an oldtime poem, which perhaps was in your school
+readers, "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" My answer is,
+for innumerable reasons. The spirit of mortal should be proud and must
+be proud because life throbs in it, and because life is a marvelous
+thing, and the excitement of life is perpetual. Yesterday I met a young
+mother; and of what avail is all the pessimism of poets against the
+pride of a young mother? "Oh!" she cried, and her face lighted up with
+delight. "He said 'Goo'!" Yes, he said "Goo!"--and never since the world
+began had there been a baby which had achieved that marvel. Presently it
+will be, "Look, look, he is trying to walk!" Then he will be getting
+marks at school, and presently he will be displaying signs of genius.
+Always it will take an effort of the mind of that young mother to
+realize that there are other children in the world as wonderful as her
+own; and perhaps it will take many generations of mental effort before
+there will be young mothers capable of realizing that some other child
+is more wonderful than her child.
+
+In other words, it is by a definite process of broadening our minds that
+we come to realize the lives of others, to transfer to them the interest
+we naturally take in our own lives, and to admit them to a state of
+equality with ourselves. This is one of the services the mind must
+render for us; it is the process of civilizing us. And there is another,
+and yet more important task, which is to make clear to us the fact that
+we do not altogether make this life of ours, that there is a universe of
+power and wisdom which is not ours, but on which we draw. "The fear of
+the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," said the Psalmist. We know now
+that fear is an ugly emotion, destructive to life; but it may be
+purified and made into a true humility, which every thinking man must
+feel towards life and its miracles.
+
+Also the man will have joy, because it is given him to share the high,
+marvelous adventure of being. To the pleasures of the body there is a
+limit, and it comes quickly; but the pleasures of the mind are infinite,
+and no one who truly understands them can have a moment of boredom in
+life. To a man who possesses the key to modern thought, who knows what
+knowledge is and where to look for it, the life of the mind is a
+panorama of delight perpetually unrolled before him. To the minds of our
+ancestors there was one universe; but to our minds there are many
+universes, and new ones continually discovered.
+
+The only question is, which one will you choose? Will you choose the
+universe of outer space, the material world of infinity? Consider the
+smallest insect that you can see, crawling upon the surface of the
+earth; small as that insect is in relation to the earth, it is not so
+small, by millions of times, as is the earth in relation to the universe
+made visible to our eyes by the high-power telescope, plus the
+photographic camera, plus the microscope. If you want to know the
+miracles of this world of space, read Arrhenius' "The Life of the
+Universe," or Simon Newcomb's "Sidelights on Astronomy." Suffice it here
+to say that we have a chemistry of the stars, by means of the
+spectroscope; that we can measure the speed and direction of stars by
+the same means; that we have learned to measure the size of the stars,
+and are studying stars which we cannot even see! And then along comes
+Einstein, with his theories of "relativity," and makes it seem that we
+have to revise a great part of this knowledge to allow for the fact that
+not merely everything we look at, but also we ourselves, are flying
+every which way through space!
+
+Or will you choose the universe of the atom, the infinity of the
+material world followed the other way, so to speak? Big as is the
+universe in relation to our world, and big as is our world in relation
+to the insect that crawls on it, the insect is bigger yet in relation to
+the molecules which compose its body; and these in turn are millions of
+millions of times bigger than the atoms which compose them; and then,
+behold, in the atom there are millions of millions of electrons--tiny
+particles of electric energy! We cannot see these infinitely minute
+things, any more than we can see the electricity which runs our trolley
+cars; but we can see their effects, and we can count and measure them,
+and deal with them in complicated mathematical formulas, and be just as
+certain of their existence as we are of the dust under our feet. If you
+wish to explore this wonderland, read Duncan's "The New Knowledge," or
+Dr. Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science."
+
+Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our racial past
+locked up in the secret chambers of our mind? Or will you choose the
+universe of the superconscious, the infinity of genius manifested in the
+arts? By the device of art man not merely creates new life, he tests it,
+he weighs it and measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the
+physicist with the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out
+what works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral and
+spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker of life.
+
+Written words can give but a feeble idea of the wonders that are found
+in these enchanted regions of the mind. Here are palaces of splendor
+beyond imagining, here are temples with sacred shrines, and
+treasure-chambers full of gold and priceless jewels. Into these places
+we enter as Aladdin in the ancient tale; we are the masters here, and
+all that we see is ours. He who has once got access to it--he possesses
+not merely the magic lamp, he possesses all the wonderful fairy
+properties of all the tales of our childhood. His is the Tarnhelm and
+the magic ring which gives him power over his foes; his is the sword
+Excalibur which none can break, and the silver bullet which brings down
+all game, and the flying carpet upon which to travel over the earth, and
+the house made of ginger-bread, and the three wishes which always come
+true, and the philter of love, and the elixir of youth, and the music of
+the spheres, and--who knows, some day he may come upon heaven, with St.
+Peter and his golden key, and the seraphim singing, and the happy blest
+conversing!
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+THE BOOK OF THE BODY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE UNITY OF THE BODY
+
+     (Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is not a
+     matter of many different organs and functions, but is one problem
+     of one organism.)
+
+
+The reader who has followed our argument this far will understand that
+we are seldom willing to think of the body as separate from the mind.
+The body is a machine, to be sure, but it is a machine that has a
+driver, and while it is possible for a sound machine to have a drunken
+and irresponsible driver, such a machine is not apt to remain sound very
+long. Frequently, when there is trouble with the machine, we find the
+fault to be with the driver; in other words, we find that what is needed
+for the body is a change in the mind.
+
+If you wish to have a sound body, and to keep it sound as long as
+possible, the first problem for you to settle is what you want to make
+of your life; you must have a purpose, and confront the tasks of life
+with energy and interest. What is the use of talking about health to a
+man who has no moral purpose? He may answer--indeed, I have heard
+victims of alcoholism answer--"Let me alone. I have a right to go to
+hell in my own way."
+
+I am aware, of course, that the opposite of the proposition is equally
+true. A man cannot enjoy much mental health while he has a sick body. It
+is a good deal like the old question, Which comes first, the hen or the
+egg? The mind and the body are bound up together, and you may try to
+deal with each by turn, but always you find yourself having to deal with
+both. Most physicians have a tendency to overlook the mind, and
+Christian Scientists make a religion of overlooking the body, and each
+pays the penalty in greatly reduced effectiveness.
+
+My first criticism of medical science, as it exists today, is that it
+has a tendency to concentrate upon organs and functions, and to overlook
+the central unity of the system. You will find a doctor who specializes
+in the stomach and its diseases, and is apt to talk as if the stomach
+were a thing that went around in the world all by itself. He will
+discuss the question of what goes into your stomach, and overlook to
+point out to you that your stomach is nourished by your blood-stream,
+which is controlled by your nervous system, which in turn is controlled
+by hope, by ambition, by love, by all the spiritual elements of your
+being. A single pulse of anger or of fear may make more trouble with the
+contents of your stomach than the doctor's pepsins and digestive
+ferments can remedy in a week.
+
+Of course, you may do yourself some purely local injury, and so for a
+time have a purely local problem. You may smash your finger, and that is
+a problem of a finger; but neglect it for a few days, and let blood
+poison set in, and you will be made aware that the human body is one
+organism, and also that, in spite of any metaphysical theories you may
+hold, your body does sometimes dominate and control your mind.
+
+Some one has said that the blood is the life; and certainly the blood is
+both the symbol and the instrument of the body's unity. The blood
+penetrates to all parts of the body and maintains and renews them. If
+the blood is normal, the work of renewal does not often fail. If there
+is a failure of renewal--that is, a disease--we shall generally find an
+abnormal condition of the blood. The distribution of the blood is
+controlled by the heart, a great four-chambered pump. One chamber drives
+the blood to the lungs, a mass of fine porous membranes, where it comes
+into contact with the air, and gives off the poisons which it has
+accumulated in its course through the body, and takes up a fresh supply
+of oxygen. By another chamber of the heart the blood is then sucked out
+of the lungs, and by the next chamber it is driven to every corner of
+the body. It takes to every cell of the body the protein materials which
+are necessary for the body's renewal, and also the fuel materials which
+are to be burned to supply the body's energy; also it takes some thirty
+million millions of microscopic red corpuscles which are the carriers of
+oxygen, and an even greater number of the white corpuscles, which are
+the body's scavengers, its defenders from invasion by outside germs.
+
+There are certain outer portions of the body, such as nails and the
+scales of the skin, which are dead matter, produced by the body and
+pushed out from it and no longer nourished by the blood. But all the
+still living parts of the body are fed at every instant by the stream of
+life. Each cell in the body takes the fuel which it needs for its
+activities, and combines it with the oxygen brought by the red
+corpuscles; and when the task of power-production has been achieved, the
+cell puts back into the blood-stream, not merely the carbon dioxide, but
+many complex chemical products--ammonia, uric acid, and the "fatigue
+poisons," indol, phenol and skatol. The blood-stream bears these along,
+and delivers some to the sweat glands to be thrown out, and some to the
+kidneys, and the rest to the lungs.
+
+All of this complicated mass of activities is in normal health perfectly
+regulated and timed by the nervous system. You lie down to sleep, and
+your muscles rest, and the vital activities slow up, your heart beats
+only faintly; but let something frighten you, and you sit up, and these
+faculties leap into activity, your heart begins to pound, driving a
+fresh supply of blood and vital energy. You jump up and run, and these
+organs all set to work at top speed. If they did not do so, your muscles
+would have no fresh energy; they would become paralyzed by the fatigue
+poisons, and you would be, as we say, exhausted.
+
+All the rest of the body might be described as a shelter and accessory
+to the life-giving blood-stream; all the rest is the blood-stream's
+means of protecting itself and renewing itself. The stomach is to digest
+and prepare new blood material, the teeth are to crush it and grind it,
+the hands are to seize it, the eyes are to see it, the brain is to
+figure out its whereabouts. Man, in his egotism, imagines his little
+world as the center of the universe; but the wise old fellow who lives
+somewhere deep in our subconsciousness and looks after the welfare of
+our blood-stream--he has far better reason for believing that all our
+consciousness and our personality exist for him!
+
+Now, disease is some failure of this blood-stream properly to renew
+itself or properly to protect itself and its various subsidiary organs.
+When you find yourself with a disease, you call in a doctor; and unless
+this doctor is a modern and progressive man, he makes the mistake of
+assuming that the disease is in the particular organ where it shows
+itself. You have, let us say, "follicular tonsilitis." (These medical
+men have a love for long names, which have the effect of awing you, and
+convincing you that you are in desperate need of attention.) Your throat
+is sore, your tonsils are swollen and covered with white spots; so the
+doctor hauls out his little black bag, and makes a swab of cotton and
+dips it, say in lysol, and paints your tonsils. He knows by means of the
+microscope that your tonsils are covered and filled with a mass of
+foreign germs which are feeding upon them; also he knows that lysol
+kills these germs, and he gives you a gargle for the same purpose, puts
+you to bed, and gradually the swelling goes down, and he tells you that
+he has cured you, and sends you a bill for services rendered. But maybe
+the swelling does not go down; maybe it gets worse and you die. Then he
+tells your family that nature was to blame. Nature is to blame for your
+death, but it never occurs to anyone to ask what nature may have had to
+do with your recovery.
+
+I do not know how many thousands of diseases medical science has now
+classified. And for each separate disease there are complex formulas,
+and your system is pumped full of various mineral and vegetable
+substances which have been found to affect it in certain ways. Perhaps
+you have a fever; then we give you a substance which reduces the
+temperature of your blood-stream. It never occurs to us to reflect that
+maybe nature has some purpose of her own in raising the temperature of
+the blood; that this might be, so to speak, the heat of conflict, a
+struggle she is waging to drive out invading germs; and that possibly it
+would be better for the temperature to stay up until the battle is over.
+Or maybe the heart is failing; then our medical man is so eager to get
+something into the system that he cannot wait for the slow process of
+the mouth and the stomach, he shoots some strychnine directly into the
+blood-stream. It does not occur to him to reflect that maybe the heart
+is slowing up because it is overloaded with fatigue poisons, of which it
+cannot rid itself, and that the effect of stimulating it into fresh
+activity will be to leave it more dangerously poisoned than before.
+
+We are dealing here with processes which our ancient mother nature has
+been carrying on for a long time, and which she very thoroughly
+understands. We ought, therefore, to be sure that we know what is the
+final effect of our actions; more especially we ought to be sure that we
+understand the cause of the evil, so that we may remove it, and not
+simply waste our time treating symptoms, putting plasters on a cancer.
+This is the fundamental problem of health; and in order to make clear
+what I mean, I am going to begin by telling a personal experience, a
+test which I made of medical science some twelve or fourteen years ago,
+in connection with one of the simplest and most external of the body's
+problems--the hair. First I will tell you what medical science was able
+to do for my hair, and second what I myself was able to do, when I put
+my own wits to work on the problem.
+
+I had been overworking, and was in a badly run down condition. I was
+having headaches, insomnia, ulcerated teeth, many symptoms of a general
+breakdown; among these I noticed that my hair was coming out. I decided
+that it was foolish to become bald before I was thirty, and that I would
+take a little time off, and spend a little money and have my hair
+attended to. I did not know where to go, but I wanted the best authority
+available, so I wrote to the superintendent of the largest hospital in
+New York, asking him for the name of a reliable specialist in diseases
+of the scalp. The superintendent replied by referring me to a certain
+physician, who was the hospital's "consulting dermatologist," and I went
+to see this physician, whose home and office were just off Fifth Avenue.
+
+He examined my scalp, and told me that I had dandruff in my hair, and
+that he would give me a prescription which would remove this dandruff
+and cause my hair to stop falling out. He charged me ten dollars for the
+visit, which in those days was more money than it is at present. Being
+of an inquiring turn of mind, I tried to get my money's worth by
+learning what there was to learn about the human hair. I questioned this
+gentleman, and he told me that the hair is a dead substance, and that
+its only life is in the root. He explained that barbers often persuade
+people to have their hair singed, to keep it from falling out, and that
+this was an utterly futile procedure, and likewise all shampooing and
+massage, which only caused the hair to fall out more quickly. It was
+better even not to wash the hair too often. All that was needed was a
+mixture of chemicals to kill the dandruff germs; and so I had the
+prescription put up at a drug store, and for a couple of years I
+religiously used it according to order, and it had upon my hair
+absolutely no effect whatever.
+
+So here was the best that medical science could do. But still, I did not
+want to be bald, so I went among the health cranks--people who
+experiment without license from the medical schools. Also, I
+experimented upon myself, and now I know something about the human hair,
+something entirely different from what the rich and successful
+"consulting dermatologist" taught me, but which has kept me from
+becoming entirely bald:
+
+First, the human hair is made by the body, and it is made, like
+everything else in the body, out of the blood-stream. It is perfectly
+true that the dandruff germ gets into the roots, and makes trouble, and
+that the process of killing this germ can be helped by chemicals; but it
+does not take a ten-dollar prescription, it only takes ten cents' worth
+of borax and salt from the corner grocery. (Put a little into a saucer,
+moisten it, rub it into the scalp, and wash it out again.) But
+infinitely more important than this is the fact that healthy hair roots
+are a product of healthy blood, and that unhealthy blood produces sick
+hair roots, which cannot hold in the hair. Most important of all is the
+fact that in order to make healthy hair roots the blood must flow fully
+and freely to these hair roots; whereas I had been accustomed for many
+hours every day of my life to clap around my scalp a tight band which
+almost entirely stopped the circulation of the life-giving blood to my
+sick hair roots. In other words, by wearing civilized hats, I was
+literally starving my hair to death.
+
+As soon as I realized this I took off my civilized hat, and have never
+worn one since. As a rule, I don't wear anything. On the few occasions
+when I go into the city, I wear a soft cap. Now and then I experience
+inconvenience from this--the elevator boy in some apartment house tells
+me to come in by the delivery entrance, or the porter of a sleeping-car
+will not let me in at all. I remember discussing these embarrassments
+with Jack London, who went even further in his defiance of civilization,
+and wore a soft shirt. It was his custom, he said, to knock down the
+elevator boys and sleeping-car porters. I answered that that might be
+all right for him, because he could do it; whereas I was reduced to the
+painful expedient of explaining politely why I went about without the
+customary symbols of my economic superiority.
+
+The "consulting dermatologist" had very solemnly and elaborately warned
+me concerning the danger of moving my hair too violently, and thus
+causing it to come out; but now my investigations brought out the fact
+that moving the hair, that is, massaging the scalp, increases the flow
+of blood to the hair roots, and further increases resistance to disease.
+As for causing the hair to fall out, I discovered that the more quickly
+you cause a hair to fall out, the greater is the chance of your getting
+another hair. If a hair is allowed to die in the root, it kills that
+root forever, but if it is pulled out before it dies, the root will make
+a new hair. Every "beauty parlor" specialist knows this; she knows that
+if a hair is pulled, it grows back bigger and stronger than ever, and so
+to pull out hair is the last thing you must do if you want to get rid of
+hairs!
+
+I know a certain poet, who happens to have been well-endowed with
+physical graces by our mother nature. He finds it worth while to
+preserve them--they being accessory to those amorous experiences which
+form so large a part of the theme of poetry. Anyhow, this poet values
+his beautiful hair, and you will see him sitting in front of his
+fireplace, reading a book, and meanwhile his fingers run here and there
+over his head, and he grabs a bunch of hair and pulls and twists it. He
+has cultivated this habit for many years, and as a result his hair is as
+thick and heavy as the "fuzzy-wuzzies" of Kipling's poem. It is a
+favorite sport of this poet to lure some rival poet into a contest. He
+will mildly suggest that they take hold of each other's hair and have a
+tug of war. The rival poet, all unsuspecting, will accept the challenge,
+and my friend will proceed to haul him all over the place, to the
+accompaniment of howls of anguish from the victim, and howls of glee
+from the victor, who has, of course, a scalp as tough as a rhinoceros
+hide.
+
+I am not a poet, and it is not important that I should be beautiful, and
+I have been too busy to remember to pull my hair; but by giving up tight
+hats, and by limiting the amount of my overworking, I have managed to
+keep what hair I had left when the hair specialist had got through with
+me. I tell this anecdote at the beginning of my discussion of health,
+because it illustrates so well the factors which appear in every case of
+disease, and which you must understand in seeking to remedy the trouble.
+
+We have a phrase which has come down to us from the ancient Latins,
+"vis medicatrix naturae," which means the healing power of nature. So
+long ago men realized that it is our ancient mother who heals our
+wounds, and not the physician. Out of this have grown the cults of
+"nature cure" enthusiasts; and according to the fashion of men, they fly
+to extremes just as unreasonable and as dangerous as those of the "pill
+doctors" they are opposing. I have in mind a man who taught me probably
+more than any other writer on health questions, and with whom I once
+discussed the subject of typhoid, how it seemed to affect able-bodied
+men in the prime of their physical being. This, of course, was contrary
+to the theories of nature cure, and my friend had a simple way of
+meeting the argument--he refused to believe it. He insisted that, as
+with all other germ infections, it must be a question of bodily tone; no
+germ could secure lodgment in the human body unless the body's condition
+was reduced.
+
+"But how can you be sure of that?" I argued. "You know that if you go
+into the jungle, you are not immune against the scorpion or the cobra or
+the tiger. There is nothing in all nature that is safe against every
+enemy. What possible right have you to assert that you are immune
+against every enemy which can attack your blood-stream?"
+
+We shall find here, as we find nearly always, that the truth lies
+somewhere between the extremes of two warring schools. Our race has been
+existing for a long time in a certain environment, and its very
+existence implies superiority to that environment. The weaklings, for
+whom its hardships were too severe, were weeded out; hostile parasites
+invaded their blood-stream and conquered and devoured them. But those
+who survived were able to make in their blood-stream the substances
+known as anti-bodies, the "opsonins," to help the white blood corpuscles
+devour the germs. As the result of their victory, we carry those
+anti-bodies in our system, which gives us immunity to those particular
+diseases, or at any rate gives us the ability to have the diseases
+without dying. Every time we go into a street car, we take into our
+throat and lungs the germs of tuberculosis. Examination proves that we
+carry around with us in our mouths the germs of all the common throat
+and nose diseases, colds, bronchitis, tonsilitis. No matter what
+precautions we might take, no matter if we were to gargle our throats
+every few minutes, we could never get rid of such germs. And they wage
+continual war upon the body's defenses; they batter in vain upon the
+gates of our sound health. But take us to some new environment to which
+we are not accustomed; take us to Panama in the old days of yellow
+fever, or take us to Africa, and let the tsetse fly bite us, and infect
+us with "sleeping sickness." Here are germs to which our systems are not
+accustomed; and before them we are as helpless as the ancient
+knights-at-arms, who had conquered everything in sight, and ruled the
+continent of Europe for many hundreds of years, but were wiped off the
+earth by a chemist mixing gunpowder.
+
+In the Marquesas Islands, in the South Seas, there lived a beautiful and
+happy race of savages, believed to have been descended, long ages ago,
+from Aryan stock. From the point of view of physical perfection, they
+were an ideal race, living a blissful outdoor life, which you may read
+about in Melville's "Typee," and in O'Brien's "White Shadows in the
+South Seas." This race conformed to all the requirements of the nature
+enthusiast. They went practically naked, their houses were open all the
+time, they lived on the abundant fruits of the earth. To be sure, they
+were cannibals, but this was more a matter of religious ceremony than of
+diet. They ate their war captives, but this was only after battle, and
+not often enough to count, one way or the other, in matters of health.
+They had lived for uncounted ages in perfect harmony with their
+environment; they were happy and free; and certainly, if such a thing
+were possible to human beings, they should have been proof against
+germs. But a ship came to one of these islands, and put ashore a sailor
+dying of tuberculosis, and in a few years four-fifths of the population
+of this island had been wiped out by the disease. What tuberculosis left
+were finished by syphilis and smallpox, and today the Marquesans are an
+almost extinct race.
+
+But there is another side to the argument--and one more favorable to the
+nature cure enthusiast. We civilized men, by soft living, by
+self-indulgence and lack of exercise, may reduce the tone of our body
+too far below the standard which our ancestors set for us; and then the
+common disease germs get us, then we have colds, sore throats,
+tuberculosis. The nature cure advocate is perfectly right in saying that
+there is no use treating such diseases; the thing is to restore the body
+to its former tone, so that we may be superior to our normal environment
+and its strains.
+
+You know the poem of the "One Hoss Shay," which was so perfectly built
+in every part that it ran for fifty years and then collapsed all at once
+in a heap. But the human body is not built that way. It always has one
+or more places which are weaker than the others, and which first show
+the effects of strain. In one person it will take the form of dyspepsia,
+in another it will be headaches, in another colds, in another decaying
+teeth, in another hardening of the arteries or stiffening of the joints.
+But whatever the symptoms may be, the fundamental cause is always the
+same, an abnormal condition of the blood-stream, and a consequent
+lowering of the body's tone. Therefore, studying any disease and its
+cure, you have first the emergency question, are there any germs lodged
+in the body, and if so, how can you destroy them? As part of the
+problem, you have to ask whether your blood-stream is normal, and if
+not, what are the methods by which you can make it normal and keep it
+so? Also you have to ask, what are the reasons why your trouble
+manifests itself in this or that particular organ? Is there some
+weakness or defect there, and can the defect be remedied, or can your
+habits be changed so as to reduce the strain on that organ? Are there
+any measures you can take to increase the flow of blood to that organ,
+and to promote its activity? In the study of your health, you will find
+that circumstances differ, and the importance of one factor or the other
+will vary; but you will seldom find any problem in which all these
+factors do not enter, and you will seldom find an adequate remedy unless
+you take all the factors into consideration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+EXPERIMENTS IN DIET
+
+     (Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and his
+     conclusions as to what to eat.)
+
+
+Students of the body assure us that every particle of matter which
+composes it is changed in the course of seven years. It is obvious that
+everything that is a part of the body has at some time to be taken in as
+food; so the problem of our diet today is the problem of what our body
+shall consist of seven years from now, and probably a great deal sooner.
+
+I begin this discussion by telling my own personal experiences with
+food. I am not going to recommend my diet for anyone else; because one
+of the first things I have to say about the subject is that every human
+individual is a separate diet problem. But I am going to try to
+establish a few principles for your guidance, and more especially to
+point out the commonest mistakes. I tell about my own mistakes, because
+it happens that I know them more intimately.
+
+I was brought up in the South, where it is the custom of people to give
+a great deal of time and thought to the subject of eating. Among the
+people I knew it was always taken for granted that there should be at
+least one person in the kitchen devoting all her time to the preparing
+of delicious things for the family to eat. This person was generally a
+negress, and, needless to say, she knew nothing about the chemistry of
+foods, nothing about their constituents or nutritive qualities. All she
+knew was about their taste; she had been trained to prepare them in ways
+that tasted best, and was continually being advised and exhorted and
+sometimes scolded by the ladies of the family on this subject. At the
+table the family and the guests never failed to talk about the food and
+its taste, and not infrequently the cook would be behind the door
+listening to their comments; or else she would wait until after the
+meal, for the report which somebody would bring her.
+
+In addition to this, the ladies of the family were skilled in what is
+called "fancy cooking." They did not bother with the meats and
+vegetables, but they mixed batter cakes, and made all kinds of elaborate
+desserts, and exchanged these treasures and the recipes for them with
+other ladies in the neighborhood. In addition to this, there were
+certain periods of the week and of the year especially devoted to the
+preparing and consuming of great quantities of foods. Once every seven
+days the members of the family expressed their worship of their Creator
+by eating twice as much as usual; and at another time they celebrated
+the birth of their Redeemer by overeating systematically for a period of
+two or three weeks. Needless to say, of course, the children brought up
+in such an environment all had large appetites and large stomachs, and
+their susceptibility to illness was recognized by the setting apart for
+them of a whole classification of troubles--"children's diseases," they
+were called. In addition to children's diseases, there were coughs and
+colds and sore throats and pains in the stomach and constipation and
+diarrhea, which the children shared with their adults.
+
+I had a little more than my share of all these troubles. Always a doctor
+would be sent for, and always he was wise and impressive, and always I
+was impressed. He gave me some pills or a bottle of liquid, a
+teaspoonful every two hours, or something like that--I can hear the
+teaspoon rattle in the glass as I write. I had a profound respect for
+each and every one of those doctors. He was wisdom walking about in
+trousers, and whenever he came, I knew that I was going to get well; and
+I did, which proved the case completely.
+
+Then I grew up, and at the age of eighteen or nineteen became possessed
+of a desire for knowledge, and took to reading and studying literally
+every minute of the day and a good part of the night. I seldom let
+myself go to sleep before two o'clock in the morning, and was always up
+by seven and ready for work again. I did this for ten years or so, until
+nature brought me to a complete stop. During these ten years I was a
+regular experiment station in health; that is, I had every kind of
+common ailment, and had it over and over again, so that I could try all
+the ways of curing it, or failing to cure it, and keep on trying until I
+was sure, one way or the other. I came recently upon a wonderful saying
+by John Burroughs, which will be appreciated by every author. "This
+writing is an unnatural business. It makes your head hot and your feet
+cold, and it stops the digesting of your food."
+
+This trouble with my digestion began when I was writing my second novel,
+camping out on a lonely island at the foot of Lake Ontario. I went to
+see a doctor in a nearby town, and he talked learnedly about dyspepsia.
+The cause of it, he said, was failure of the stomach to secrete enough
+pepsin, and the remedy was to take artificial pepsin, obtained from the
+stomach of a pig. He gave me this pig-pepsin in a bottle of red liquid,
+and I religiously took some after each meal. It helped for a time; but
+then I noticed that it helped less and less. I got so that a simple meal
+of cold meat and boiled potatoes would stay in my stomach for hours, in
+spite of any amount of the pig-pepsin; I would lie about in misery,
+because I wanted to work, and my accursed stomach would not let me.
+
+All the time, of course, I was using my mind on this problem, groping
+for causes. I found that the trouble was worse if I worked immediately
+after eating. I found also that it was worse when I was writing books.
+When I got sufficiently desperate, I would stop writing books and go off
+on a hunting trip. I would tramp twenty miles a day over the mountains,
+looking for deer, and I would come back at night too tired to think, and
+in a week or two every trace of my trouble would be gone. So my life
+regimen came to be--first the writing of a book, and then a hunting trip
+to get over the effects of it. But as time went on, alas, I noticed that
+the recuperation was more slow and less certain. The working times grew
+shorter, and the hunting times grew longer, until finally I had got to a
+point where I couldn't work at all; I would go to pieces in a few days
+if I tried it. It was apparently the end of my stomach, and the end of
+my sleeping, and the end of my writing books. My teeth were decaying,
+not merely outside but inside; I would have abscesses, and most
+frightful agonies to endure. I would lie awake all night, and it would
+seem to me that I could feel my body going to pieces--an extremely
+depressing sensation!
+
+I had been trying experiments all this time. I had been going to one
+doctor after another, and had got to realize that the doctors only
+treated symptoms; they treated the "diseases" when they appeared--but
+nobody ever told you how to keep the "diseases" from appearing. Why
+could there not be a doctor who would look you over thoroughly, and tell
+you everything that was wrong with you, and how to set it right? A
+doctor who would tell you exactly how to live, so that you might keep
+well all the time! I was studying economics, and becoming suspicious of
+my fellow man; it occurred to me that possibly it might be embarrassing
+to a doctor, if he cured all his patients, and taught them how to live,
+so that none of them would ever have to come to him again. It occurred
+to me that possibly this might be the reason why "preventive medicine,"
+constructive health work, was getting so little attention from the
+medical fraternity.
+
+Two things that plagued me were headache and constipation, and they were
+obviously related. For constipation, the world had one simple remedy;
+you "took something" every night or every morning, and thought no more
+about it. My stout and amiable grandmother had drunk a glass of Hunyadi
+water every morning for the last thirty or forty years, and that she
+finally died of "fatty degeneration of the heart" was not connected with
+this in the mind of anyone who knew her. As for the headaches, people
+would tell you this, that, and the other remedy, and I would try
+them--that is, unless they happened to be drugs. I was getting more and
+more shy of drugs. I had some blessed instinct which saved me from
+stimulants and narcotics. I had never used tea, coffee, alcohol or
+tobacco, and in my worst periods of suffering I never took to putting
+myself to sleep with chloral, or to stopping my headaches with
+phenacetin.
+
+At the end of six or eight years of purgatory, I came upon a prospectus
+of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This seemed to me exactly what I wanted;
+this was constructive, it dealt with the body as a whole. So I spent a
+couple of months at the "San," and paid them something like a thousand
+dollars to tell me all they could about myself.
+
+The first thing they told me was that meat-eating was killing me. It was
+perfectly obvious, was it not, that meat is a horrible feeding place for
+germs, that rotten meat is dreadfully offensive, and likewise digested
+meat--consider the excreta of cats, for example! I listened solemnly
+while Doctor Kellogg read off the numbers of billions of bacteria per
+gram in the contents of the colon of a carnivorous person. It certainly
+seemed proper that the author of "The Jungle" should be a vegetarian, so
+I became one, and did my best to persuade myself that I enjoyed the
+taste of the patent meat-substitutes which are served in hundred calory
+portions in the big Sanitarium dining-room.
+
+There also I met Horace Fletcher, and learned to chew every particle of
+food thirty-two times, and often more. I exercised in the Sanitarium
+gymnasium, and watched the sterilized dancing--the men with the men and
+the women with the women. I was patiently polite with the Seventh Day
+Adventist religion, and laid in a supply of postage stamps on Friday
+evening. Finally, and most important of all, I went once a day to the
+"treatment rooms," and had my abdomen doctored alternately with hot
+cloths and ice. By this means I kept up a flow of blood in the
+intestinal tract, and stimulated these organs to activity; so my
+constipation was relieved, and my headaches were less severe--so long as
+I stayed at the Sanitarium, and was boiled and frozen once every day.
+But when I left the Sanitarium, and abandoned the treatments, the
+troubles began to return. Meantime, however, I had written a book in
+praise of vegetarianism--a book which has got into the libraries, and
+cannot be got out again!
+
+I went on to a new variety of health crank, the real "nature cure"
+practitioners. Vegetarianism was not enough, they insisted; the evil had
+begun long before, when man first ruined his food and destroyed its
+nutritive value by means of fire. There was only one certain road to
+health, and that was by the raw food route, the monkey and squirrel
+diet. I had gone out to California for a winter's rest, and decided I
+would give this plan a thorough trial. For five months I lived by
+myself, and the only cooked food I ate was shredded wheat biscuit. For
+the rest I lived on nuts and salads and fresh and dried fruits; and
+during this period I enjoyed such health as I had never known in my life
+before. I had literally not a single ailment. I was not merely well, but
+bubbling over with health. I had a friend who said it cheered him up
+just to see me walk down the street.
+
+I thought that it was entirely the raw food, and that I had solved the
+problem forever; but I overlooked the fact that during those five months
+I had done no hard brain work, no writing. I went back to writing again,
+and things began to go wrong; my wonderful raw foods took to making
+trouble in my stomach--and I assure you that until you try, you have no
+idea the amount of trouble that can be made in your stomach by a load of
+bananas and soaked prunes which has gone wrong! For a year or two I
+agonized; I could not give up my wonderful raw food diet, because I had
+always before me the vision of those months in California, and could
+not understand why it was not that way again.
+
+But the time came when I would eat a meal of raw food, and for hours
+afterwards my stomach would feel like a blown-up football. Then somebody
+gave me a book by Dr. Salisbury on the subject of the meat diet. Of all
+the horrible things in the world, a meat diet sounded to me the worst; I
+had been a vegetable enthusiast for three years, and thought of eating
+meat as you would think of cannibalism. But there has never been a time
+in my life when I would not hear something new, and give it a trial if
+it sounded well; so I read the books of Doctor Salisbury, which have
+long been out of print, and have been curiously neglected by the medical
+profession. Salisbury was a real pioneer, an experimenter. He wrote in
+the days before the germ theory, and so missed his guess regarding
+tuberculosis, but he perceived that most of the common diseases are
+caused by dietetic errors, and he set to work to prove it. He showed
+that hog cholera and army diarrhea are the same disease, and come from
+the same cause. He took a squad of men and fed them on army biscuit for
+two or three weeks, until they were nearly dead, and then he put them on
+a diet of lean beef and completely cured them in a few days. He did this
+same thing with one kind of food after another, and in each case he
+would bring his men as near to death as he dared, and then he would cure
+them. He showed that meat is the only food which contains all the
+elements of nutrition, the only food upon which a person can live for an
+unlimited period. As Salisbury said, "Beef is first, mutton is second,
+and the rest nowhere."
+
+It was his idea that tuberculosis of the lungs is caused by spores of
+fermenting starch clogging the minute blood vessels. He claimed that
+there is an early stage of tuberculosis, in which the spores are
+floating in the blood stream; he put large numbers of patients upon a
+diet of lean beef, ground and cooked, and he cured them of tuberculosis,
+and if one of them would break the diet and yield to a craving for
+starch or sugar, Salisbury claimed that he could find it out an hour or
+two later by examining a drop of their blood under the microscope. In
+his books he described vividly the effects of an excess of starch and
+sugar in the diet. He called it "making a yeast-pot of your stomach";
+and you can imagine how that hit my stomach, full of half digested
+bananas and prunes!
+
+I tried the Salisbury diet, and satisfied myself of this one fact, that
+lean meat is for brain-workers the most easily assimilated of all foods.
+Salisbury claimed that you could not overeat on meat, but I do not
+believe there is any food you cannot overeat on, nor do I believe that
+anyone should try to live on one kind of food. We are by nature
+omnivorous animals. Our digestive tracts are similar to those of hogs
+and monkeys, which eat all varieties of food they can get. One of the
+common errors of the nature cure enthusiast is to cite the monkey and
+the squirrel as fruit and nut-eating animals, when the fact is that
+monkeys and squirrels eat meat when they can get it, and the ardor with
+which they go bird-nesting is evidence enough that they crave it. If
+there is any race of man which is vegetarian, you will find that it is
+from necessity alone. The beautiful South Sea Islanders, who are the
+theme of the raw fooders' ecstasy, spend a lot of their time catching
+fish, and sometimes they kill a pig, and celebrate the event precisely
+as Christians celebrate the birth of their Redeemer.
+
+From this you may be able to guess my conclusions, as the result of much
+painful blundering and experimenting. So far as diet is concerned, I
+belong to no school; I have learned something from each one, and what I
+have learned from a trial of them all is to be shy of extreme statements
+and of hard and fast rules. To my vegetarian friends who argue that it
+is morally wrong to take sentient life, I answer that they cannot go for
+a walk in the country without committing that offense, for they walk on
+innumerable bugs and worms. We cannot live without asserting our right
+to subject the lower forms of life to our purposes; we kill innumerable
+germs when we swallow a glass of grape juice, or for that matter a glass
+of plain water. I shall be much surprised if the advance of science does
+not some day prove to us that there are rudimentary forms of
+consciousness in all vegetable life; so we shall justify the argument of
+Mr. Dooley, who said, in reviewing "The Jungle," that he could not see
+how it was any less a crime to cut off a young tomato in its prime, or
+to murder a whole cradleful of baby peas in the pod!
+
+There is no question that meat-eating is inconvenient, expensive, and
+dirty. I have no doubt that some day we shall know enough to be able to
+find for every individual a diet which will keep him at the top of his
+power, without the maintenance of the slaughter-house. But we do not
+possess that knowledge at present; at least, I personally do not possess
+it. I happen to be one of those individuals--there are many of
+them--with whom milk does not agree; and if you rule out milk and meat,
+you find yourself compelled to get a great deal of your protein from
+vegetable sources, such as peas, beans and nuts. All these contain a
+great deal of starch, and thus there is no way you can arrange your diet
+to escape an excess of starch. Excess of starch, so my experience has
+convinced me, is the deadliest of all dietetic errors. It is also the
+commonest of errors, the cause, not merely of the common throat and nose
+infections, but of constipation, and likewise of diarrhea, of anemia,
+and thus, through the weakening of the blood stream, of all disorders
+that spring from this source--decaying teeth and rheumatism, boils, bad
+complexion, and tuberculosis. Starch foods are the cheapest, therefore
+they form the common diet of the poor, and are responsible for the
+diseases of undernourishment to which the poor are liable.
+
+On the other hand, of course, there are perfectly definite diseases of
+overnourishment; high blood pressure, which culminates in apoplexy;
+kidney troubles, which result from the inability of these organs to
+eliminate all the waste matter that is delivered to them; fatty
+degeneration of the heart, or of the liver, or any of the vital organs.
+You may cause a headache by clogging the blood stream through
+overeating, or you may cause it by eating small quantities of food, if
+those foods are unbalanced, and do not contain the mineral elements
+necessary to the making of normal blood. Whatever the trouble with your
+health, it is my judgment that in two cases out of three you will find
+it dates back to errors in diet. I do not think I exaggerate in saying
+that a knowledge of what to eat and how much to eat is two-thirds of the
+knowledge of how to keep yourself in permanent health.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+ERRORS IN DIET
+
+     (Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they play in
+     the making of health and disease.)
+
+
+It is my purpose in this chapter to lay down a few general principles to
+aid you in the practical problem of selecting the best diet for
+yourself. But it must be made clear at the outset that there can be no
+hard and fast rule. All human bodies are more or less alike, but on the
+other hand all are more or less different. Modern civilization has given
+very few bodies the chance to be perfect; nearly all have some weakness,
+some abnormality, and need some special modification in diet to fit
+their particular problem. The ideal in each case would be a complete
+study of the individual system. Some day, no doubt, medical science will
+analyze the digestive juices and the gland secretions and the
+blood-stream of every human being, and say, you need a certain
+percentage of starch and a certain percentage of protein; you need such
+and such proportion of phosphorus and iron; you should avoid certain
+acids--and so on. But at present we are devoting our science to the task
+of killing and maiming other people, instead of enabling ourselves to
+live in health and happiness; so it is that most of those who read this
+book will be too poor to command the advice of a diet specialist. The
+best you can do is to get a few general ideas and try them out, watching
+your own body and learning its peculiarities.
+
+Human food contains three elements: proteins, fats and carbohydrates.
+The proteins are the body-building material, and the foods which are
+rich in proteins are lean meat, the white of eggs, milk and cheese,
+nuts, peas and beans. A certain amount of this kind of food is needed by
+the body. If it is missing, the body will gradually waste away. If too
+much of it is taken, the body can turn it into energy-making material,
+but this is a wasteful process, and the best evidence appears to be that
+it is a strain upon the system. Experiments conducted by Professor
+Chittenden of Yale have proven conclusively that men can live and
+maintain body weight upon much less protein food than previous dietetic
+standards had indicated.
+
+The fats are found in fat meats and dairy products, and in nuts, olives,
+and vegetable oils. The body is prepared to digest and assimilate a
+certain amount of fat, no one knows how much. I have found in my own
+case that I require a great deal less than people ordinarily eat. I have
+for many years maintained good health upon a diet containing no more fat
+than one gets with lean meat once or twice a day. I never use butter or
+olive oil, nor any fat in cooking. My reason for this is that fats are
+the most highly concentrated form of food, and the easiest upon which to
+overeat. Excess of fat is a cause, not merely of obesity, but also of
+boils and pimples and "pasty" complexion, and other signs of a clogged
+blood-stream.
+
+The third variety of food is the carbohydrates, and of these there are
+two kinds, starches and sugars. Starch is the white material of the
+grains and tubers; the principal food element of bread and cereals,
+rice, potatoes, bananas, and many prepared substances such as
+corn-starch, tapioca, farina and macaroni. Starchy foods compose
+probably half the diet of the average human being. In my own case, they
+compose about one-sixth, so you see to what extent my beliefs differ
+from the common. Starch is not really necessary in the diet at all. I
+have a friend who is subject to headaches, and finds relief from them by
+a diet of meat, salads, and fresh fruits exclusively. The first thing
+that excess of starch or sugar does is to ferment in the system, and
+cause flatulence and gas. But strange as it may seem, if the excess of
+starch is perfectly digested and assimilated into the system, the
+condition may be worse yet, because you may have a great quantity of
+energy-producing material, without the necessary mineral elements which
+the body requires in the handling of it.
+
+If you cremate a human body and study the ashes chemically, you find a
+score or more of mineral salts. You find these in the blood, and no
+blood is normal and no body can be kept normal which does not contain
+the right percentage of these elements. It is not merely that they are
+needed to build bones and teeth; they are needed at every instant for
+the chemistry of the cells. Every time you move a muscle, you fill the
+cells of that muscle with a certain amount of waste matter. You may
+prove how deadly this matter is by binding a tight cord about your arm,
+and then trying to use the arm. We are only at the beginning of
+understanding the subtle chemistry of the body; but this much we know,
+the cells transform the waste products, and they are thrown out of the
+system as ammonia, uric acid, etc.; and for this process the blood must
+have a continual supply of many mineral salts.
+
+So vital are they, and so fatal to health is their absence, that it is
+far better for you to eat nothing at all than to eat improperly balanced
+foods, or foods which are deficient in the organic salts. You may prove
+this to yourself by a simple experiment. Put two chickens in separate
+pens, where nobody can feed them but yourself. Feed one of them on water
+and white bread, or corn starch, or sugar, or any energy-making
+substance which contains little of the mineral elements. Feed the other
+chicken on plain water. You will find that the one which has the food
+will quickly become droopy and sickly; its feathers will fall out, it
+will have what in human beings would be known as headaches, colds, sore
+throats, decaying teeth and boils. At the end of a couple of weeks it
+will be a dead chicken. The one which you feed on water alone will not
+be a happy chicken, neither will it be a fat chicken, but it will be a
+live chicken, and a chicken without disease. I am going later on to
+discuss the subject of fasting. For the present I will merely say that a
+chicken which has nothing but water is living upon its own flesh, and
+therefore has a meat diet, containing the mineral elements necessary to
+the elimination of the fatigue poisons.
+
+I am going to try not to be dogmatic in this book, and not to say things
+that I do not know. I confess to innumerable uncertainties about the
+subject of diet; but one thing I think I do know, and that is that human
+beings should eliminate absolutely from their food those modern
+artificial products, which look so nice, and are so easy to handle, and
+are put up in packages with pretty labels, and have been in some way
+artificially treated to remove the wastes and impurities--including the
+vital mineral salts. Among such food substances I include lard and its
+imitations made from cottonseed oil, white flour, all the prepared and
+refined cereals, polished rice, tapioca, farina, corn starch, and
+granulated and powdered sugar. Any of these substances will kill a
+chicken in a couple of weeks, and the only reason they take a longer
+time to kill you is because you mix them with other kinds of foods. But
+to the extent that you eat them, your diet is deficient; and do not
+console yourself with the idea that the mineral elements will be made up
+from other foods, because you don't know that, and nobody else knows it.
+Nobody knows just how much of any particular organic salt the body
+needs. All we know is that the primitive races, which ate natural foods,
+enjoyed vigorous health, while the American people, who consume the
+greatest proportion of the so-called "refined" foods, have the very best
+dentists and the very worst teeth in the world.
+
+There are many kinds of sugar, found in the sugar-cane and the beet, and
+in all fruits. Sugar may also be made from any form of starch; this is
+glucose, which is put up in cans and sold as an imitation of maple
+syrup. The ordinary granulated and powdered sugar is made by taking from
+the natural syrup every trace of mineral elements; so I have no
+hesitation in saying that the ordinary cane sugar and beet sugar of our
+breakfast tables and our confectionery stores is not a food, but a slow
+poison. The causes of the wonderful progress of American dentistry,
+which is the marvel of the civilized world, are cane sugar, white flour,
+and the frying-pan, each of which dietetic crimes I shall take up in
+turn.
+
+We have the richest country in the world; we eat more food, probably by
+50 per cent, and we waste more food, probably by 500 per cent, than any
+other people in the world; and yet, go to any small farming community in
+America, and what do you find? You find the teeth of the young children
+rotting in their heads, and having to be pulled out before their second
+teeth come. You find these second teeth rotting often before the age of
+twenty. A friend of mine, who knows the American farmer, sums it up this
+way: "He has two things that he requires if he is to be really
+respectable and happy. First, he wants to get all the fireplaces in his
+home boarded up, and all the windows nailed tight; and second, he wants
+to get all his teeth out, and an artificial set installed. Out of the
+farmers' wives in my neighborhood, not one in ten keeps her own teeth
+until she is thirty."
+
+If you go to the Balkans, where the peasants live on sour milk, with
+grains which they grind at home; or to southern Italy and Sicily, where
+they live on cheese and black bread and olives; or among savage people,
+where they hunt and fish and gather the natural fruits, you find old
+men without a single decayed tooth. There must be some reason for this,
+and the reason is found in our denatured grocery-store foods. The
+farmer's wife will gather up her eggs and her butter and cheeses, and
+take them to the store and bring back cans of lard and packages of
+sugar. The farmer will sell his perfectly good wheat and corn meal, and
+bring back in his wagon cases of "refined" cereal foods, for which he
+has paid ten times the price of the grain!
+
+Dentists will tell you that the way candy injures the teeth is by
+sticking to them and fermenting, forming acids, which destroy the tooth
+structure. And that may be a part of the reason. But the principal
+reason why the teeth decay is because the blood-stream is abnormal, and
+is unable to keep up the repairs of the body. Your teeth are living
+structures, just as much as any other part of you, and they will resist
+decay if you supply them with the proper nourishment.
+
+You need sugar; you need a considerable quantity of it every day. Nature
+provides this sugar in combination with the organic salts, and also with
+the precious vitamines, whose function in the body we are only beginning
+to investigate. All the mineral substances which give the color and
+flavor to oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, figs, prunes, raisins--all
+these you take out when you make sugar. Or perhaps you put in some
+imitations of them, made from coal tar chemicals, and drink them at your
+soda fountains! So little appreciation has the American farmer's wife of
+natural fruits, that when she preserves them, she considers it necessary
+to fill them full of cane sugar; in fact, she has a notion that they
+won't keep unless she cooks them up with sugar! So snobbish are we
+Americans about our eating, that we make the best of our foods into
+bywords. We make jokes in our comic papers about the "boarding-house
+prune"; and yet prunes and raisins are among the wholesomest foods we
+have, and if we fed them to our children instead of cakes and candy and
+coal-tar flavorings, our dental industry would rapidly decline.
+
+And the same thing is true of bread. When I was a boy, I thought I had
+to have hot bread at least twice a day, and if I were called upon to eat
+bread that was more than a day old, I felt that I was being badly abused
+by life. I used to read fairy stories, in which something called "black
+bread" was mentioned, something obscure and terrible; the symbol of
+human misery was Cinderella sitting in the ashes and eating a crust of
+dry "black bread." But now since I have studied diet, I have taken my
+place with Cinderella. I can afford to buy whatever kind of bread I
+want; I can have the best white bread, piping hot, three times a day, if
+I want it; but what I eat three times a day is a crust of hard dry
+"black bread."
+
+"Black bread" is the fairy story name for bread made of the whole grain.
+It is eaten that way by the peasant because he has no patent milling
+machinery at his disposal, to fan away the life-giving elements of his
+food. Nearly all the mineral elements of the grain are contained in the
+outer, dark-colored portion. The white part is almost pure starch; and
+when you use white flour, you are not merely starving your blood-stream,
+your bones, and your teeth, you are also depriving the digestive tract
+of the rough material which it is accustomed to handle, and which it
+needs to stimulate it to action. I am aware that whole grain products
+are a trifle less easy of digestion, but we should not pamper and weaken
+our digestive tract any more than we let our muscles get flabby for lack
+of action. We should require our stomachs to handle the ordinary natural
+foods, precisely as we accustom our body to react from cold water, and
+to stand honest hard work.
+
+For ages the Japanese peasants have lived on rice, with a little dried
+fish. Quite recently there began to spread throughout Japan a mysterious
+disease known as beri-beri. It was especially prevalent in the army, and
+so the scientists of Japan set out to discover the cause, and it proved
+to be the modern practice of polishing rice, which takes off the outer
+coating of the grain. Rice is one of the most wholesome of foods, if it
+is eaten in the natural state; but in order to get it in that state in
+this country, you have to find a special food store of the health
+cranks, and have to pay a special price for it. You have to pay a higher
+price for whole wheat bread--because ninety-nine people out of a hundred
+are ignorant, and insist upon having their foodstuffs pretty to look at!
+
+Probably you have read sea stories, and know of the horrors of scurvy.
+Scurvy and beri-beri are similar diseases, with a similar cause. The men
+on the old sailing ships used to have to live on white biscuit and salt
+meat, and they always knew that to recover from their gnawing illness,
+they must get to port and get fresh vegetables and fruits, especially
+onions and lemons, which contain the vitamines as well as the salts. But
+you will see the modern housewife going into the grocery store, and
+surveying the shelves of "package" goods, and in her ignorance picking
+out the scurvy-making products, and frequently paying for them a much
+higher price than for the health-making ones!
+
+Then, when she has got her white flour, and her cane sugar, and her
+lard, she will take it home, and mix it up, and put it in the frying
+pan, and serve it hot to her husband and children. Nature has so
+constituted her husband and children that they digest starch before they
+digest fat; that is to say, the starch is digested mainly in the
+stomach, while the fat is digested mainly after the food has been passed
+on into the small intestine. But by frying the starch before it is
+eaten, the housewife carefully takes each grain of the starch and
+protects it with a little covering of fat. Thus the digestive juices of
+the stomach cannot get at the starch, and the starch goes down into the
+small intestine a good part undigested. If some evil spirit, wishing to
+make trouble for the human organism, had charge of the laying out of our
+diet, he could hardly devise anything worse than that. And yet it would
+be no exaggeration to say that the average American, especially the
+average farmer, eats out of a frying-pan. If his potatoes have to be
+warmed over, they go into the frying-pan; his precious batter-cakes and
+doughnuts are cooked in a frying-pan, and all his precious hot breads
+are mixed with lard. If it were not for the fact that you cannot broil a
+beefsteak over a modern gas range, I would tell you that the first step
+toward health for the average American would be to throw the frying-pan
+out of the window, and to throw the cook-book after it.
+
+The whole modern art of cooking is largely a perversion; a product of
+idleness, vanity, and sensuality. It is one of the monstrous growths
+consequent upon our system of class exploitation. We have a number of
+idle people with nothing to do but eat, and who demonstrate their
+superiority to the rest of us by their knowledge of superior foods, and
+superior ways of preparing them. They have the wealth of the world at
+their disposal, also the services of their fellow man without limit, and
+they set their fellow man to work to enable them to give elaborate
+banquets, and to sit in solemn state and gorge themselves, and to have a
+full account of their behavior published in the next morning's
+newspapers. A great part of this perverse art we owe to what is called
+the "ancient régime" in France--a régime which starved the French
+peasantry until they were black skinned beasts hiding in caves and
+hollow trees. So it comes about that our modern food depravity parades
+itself in French names, and American snobbery requires of its devotees a
+course in the French language sufficient to read a menu card. Needless
+to say, this elaborate gastronomic art has been developed without any
+relation to health, or any thought of the true needs of the body. It is
+one of the products of the predatory system which we can say is absolute
+waste. Having done my own cooking for the past twenty-five years, I make
+bold to say that I can teach anybody all he needs to know about cooking
+in one lesson of half an hour, and that the total amount of cooking
+required for a large family can be done by one person in twenty minutes
+a day.
+
+In the first place, a great many foods do not have to be cooked at all,
+and are made less fit by cooking. In the next place, the only cooking
+that is ever required is a little boiling, or in the case of meat,
+roasting or broiling. In the next place, the art of combining foods in
+cooking is a waste art, because no foods should be combined in cooking.
+Every food has its own natural flavor, which is lost in combination, and
+if anybody is unable to enjoy the natural flavors of simply cooked
+foods, there is one thing to say to that person, and that is to wait
+until he is hungry. Let him take a ten-mile walk in the open air, and he
+will have more interest in his next meal. I am not a fanatic, and have
+no desire to destroy the pleasures of life; I am recommending to people
+that they should seek the higher pleasures of the intellect, and those
+pleasures are not found in standing over a cook stove, nor in compelling
+others to stand over a cook stove. Moreover, I know that the artificial
+mixing of foods to tempt peoples' palates is one of the principal causes
+of overeating, and therefore of ill health, and therefore of the
+ultimate destruction of the pleasures of life.
+
+I went out from the world of cooks before I was twenty. I wanted to
+write a book, and to be let alone while I was doing it. I lived by
+myself, and found out about cooking by practical experience. On a few
+occasions since then, I have lived in a house with a servant, and had
+some cooking done for me, but it was always because somebody else
+wanted it, and against my protest. In the last ten years we have had no
+servant in our home, and because I want my wife to give her energy to
+more important things than feeding me, I do my share of getting every
+meal. We have worked out a system of housekeeping by which we get a meal
+in five minutes, and when we finish it, it takes three minutes to clear
+things away.
+
+If I tell you what I eat, please do not get the impression that I am
+advising you to eat these same things. My diet consists of the foods
+which I have found by long experience agree with me. There are many
+other foods which are just as wholesome, but which I do not eat, either
+because they don't happen to agree with me, or because I don't care for
+them so much. I am fond of fruit, and eat more of that than of anything
+else. It is not a cheap article of diet, but you can save a good deal if
+you buy it in quantities, as I do. A little later I am going to discuss
+the prices of foods.
+
+For breakfast I eat a slice of whole wheat bread, three good-sized
+apples, stewed, and eight or ten dates. It takes practically no time to
+prepare this breakfast. The bread has to be baked, of course, but this
+is done wholesale; we buy four loaves at a time, and it is just as good
+at the end of a couple of weeks as when we buy it. When I lived in the
+world of cooks, I would call for apple sauce; which meant that somebody
+had to pare apples, cut them up, stew them, mix them with sugar, grate a
+little nutmeg over them, set them on ice, and serve them to me on a
+glass dish, with a little pitcher of cream. But now what happens is that
+I put a dozen apples in a big sauce-pan and let them simmer while I am
+eating. We have a rule in our family that we do not do any cooking
+except while we are eating, because if we try it at any other time of
+the day, we get buried in a book or in a manuscript, and forget about it
+until the smoke causes somebody in the street to summon the fire
+department. So the apples for my breakfast were cooked during last
+night's supper; and during the breakfast there will be some vegetable
+cooking for lunch.
+
+At this lunch, which is my "square meal," I eat a large slice of
+beefsteak, say a third of a pound. Jack London used to say that the only
+man who could cook a beefsteak was the fireman of a railway locomotive,
+because he had a hot, clean shovel. The best imitation you can get is a
+hot, clean frying-pan; and when you are sure that it is hot, let it get
+hotter. The whole secret of cooking meat is to keep the juices inside,
+and to do that you must cook it quickly. When you slap it down on a hot
+frying-pan, the meat is seared, and the juices stay inside, and if you
+do not turn it over until it is almost ready to burn, you don't need to
+cook it very long on the other side. That is the one secret of cooking
+worth knowing; it doesn't cost anything, and saves time instead of
+wasting it. As I have never found anybody else capable of learning it, I
+reserve the cooking of the beefsteak as one of my family duties.
+
+To continue the lunch, a slice of whole wheat bread, and a large
+quantity of some fresh salad, such as celery, or lettuce and tomatoes,
+without dressing. For a part of this may be substituted a vegetable, one
+or two beets or turnips, cooked during a previous meal, and warmed up in
+a couple of minutes; and we do not throw away the tops of the turnips
+and beets and celery, we put them on and cook them, and they serve for
+the next day's meal. If you would eat a large quantity of such "greens"
+once a day, you would escape many of the ills that your flesh is at
+present heir to. Finally, for dessert, an orange and a small handful of
+raisins, or one or two figs.
+
+The evening meal will be the same as the breakfast; except once in a
+while when I am especially hungry, and want some meat. I am writing in
+the winter season, so the fruits suggested are those available in
+winter. The menu will be varied with every kind of fruit at the season
+when it is cheapest and most easily obtained. The beefsteak will appear
+at about three meals out of four; occasionally it will be replaced by
+the lean meat of pork or mutton, or by fish. The bread may be replaced
+by rice, or boiled potatoes, either white or sweet, and occasionally by
+graham crackers. I know that these contain a little fat and sugar, but I
+try not to be fanatical about my diet, and the rules I suggest do not
+carry the death penalty. There was a time when I used to allow my
+friends to make themselves miserable by trying to provide me with
+special foods when they invited me to a meal, but now I tell them to
+"forget it," and I politely nibble a little of everything, and eat most
+of what I find wholesome; if there is nothing wholesome, I content
+myself with the pretense of a meal. If I find myself in a restaurant, I
+quite shamelessly get a piece of apple or pumpkin pie, omitting most of
+the crust. As I don't go away from home more than once or twice a month,
+I do not have to worry about such indulgence. The main thing is to
+arrange one's home diet on sound lines, and learn to enjoy the simple
+and wholesome foods, of which there is a great variety obtainable, and
+at prices possible to all but the wretchedly poor.
+
+In conclusion, since everybody likes to have a feast now and then, I
+specify that my diet regimen allows for holidays. Assuming that I am
+your guest for a day, and that you wish to "blow" me, regardless of
+expense, here will be the menu. Breakfast, some graham crackers, a bunch
+of raisins, a can of sliced pineapple in winter, or a big chunk of
+watermelon in summer. Dinner, or lunch, roast pork, a baked apple, a
+baked sweet potato and some spinach. Supper, lettuce, dates, and a dish
+of popcorn flavored with peanut butter. Try this next Christmas!
+
+P. S. After this book had been put into type, I chanced to be looking
+over Herbert Quick's illuminating book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth."
+Discussing the importance of certain organic salts to the body, Dr.
+Quick states: "Animals have been fed, as an experiment, on foods
+deficient in phosphorus. For a while they seemed to do well. Then they
+collapsed. It takes only three months of a ration without phosphorus to
+wreck an animal. Individual creatures were killed after a month of this
+diet, and it was found that the flesh was taking the phosphate--for the
+phosphorus exists in the body in that form--from the bones to supply its
+need. In other words, the body was eating its own bones! When this
+process had robbed the bones to the limit, the collapse came, and the
+animal could never recover."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+DIET STANDARDS
+
+     (Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities we
+     need, and their money cost.)
+
+I think there is no more important single question about health than the
+question of how much food we should eat. It is one about which there is
+a great deal of controversy, even among the best authorities. We shall
+try here for a common-sense solution. At the outset we have to remind
+ourselves of the distinction we tried to draw between nature and man. To
+what extent can civilized man rely upon his instincts to keep him in
+perfect health?
+
+Let us begin by considering the animals. How is their diet problem
+solved? Horses and cattle in a wild state are adjusted to certain foods
+which they find in nature, and so long as they can find it, they have no
+diet problem. Man comes, and takes these animals and domesticates them;
+he observes their habits, and gives to them a diet closely approaching
+the natural one, and they get along fairly well. But suppose the man,
+with his superior skill in agriculture, taking wild grain and planting
+it, reaping and threshing it by machinery, puts before his horse an
+unlimited quantity of a concentrated food such as oats, which the horse
+can never get in a natural state--will that horse's instincts guide it?
+Not at all. Any horse will kill itself by overeating on grain.
+
+I have read somewhere a clever saying, that a farm is a good place for
+an author to live, provided he can be persuaded not to farm it. But once
+upon a time I had not heard that wise remark, and I owned and tried to
+run a farm. I had two beautiful cows of which I was very proud, and one
+morning I woke up and discovered that the cows had got into the pear
+orchard and had been feeding on pears all night. In a few hours they
+both lay with bloated stomachs, dying. A farmer told me afterwards that
+I might have saved their lives, if I had stuck a knife into their
+stomachs to let out the gas. I do not know whether this is true or not.
+But my two dead cows afford a perfect illustration of the reason why
+civilized man cannot rely upon his instincts and his appetites to tell
+him when he has had enough to eat. He can only do this, provided he
+rigidly restricts himself to the foods which he ate in the days when his
+teeth and stomach and bowels were being shaped by the process of natural
+selection. If he is going to eat any other than such strictly natural
+foods, he will need to apply his reason to his diet schedule.
+
+In a state of nature man has to hunt his food, and the amount that he
+finds is generally limited, and requires a lot of exercise to get.
+Explorers in Africa give us a picture of man's life in the savage state,
+guided by his instincts and very little interfered with by reason. The
+savages will starve for long periods, then they will succeed in killing
+a hippopotamus or a buffalo, and they will gorge themselves, and nearly
+all of them will be ill, and several of them will die. So you see, even
+in a state of nature, and with natural foods, restraint is needed, and
+reason and moral sense have a part to play.
+
+What do reason and moral sense have to tell us about diet? Our bodily
+processes go on continuously, and we need at regular intervals a certain
+quantity of a number of different foods. The most elementary experiment
+will convince us that we can get along, maintain our body weight and our
+working efficiency upon a much smaller quantity of food than we
+naturally crave. Civilized custom puts before us a great variety of
+delicate and appetizing foods, upon which we are disposed to overeat;
+and we are slow observers indeed if we do not note the connection
+between this overeating and ill health. So we are forced to the
+conclusion that if we wish to stay well, we need to establish a
+censorship over our habits; we need a different diet regimen from the
+haphazard one which has been established for us by a combination of our
+instincts with the perversions of civilization.
+
+Up to a few years ago, it was commonly taken for granted by authorities
+on diet that what the average man actually eats must be the normal thing
+for him to eat. Governments which were employing men in armies, and at
+road building, and had to feed them and keep them in health, made large
+scale observations as to what the men ate, and thus were established the
+old fashioned "diet standards." They are expressed in calories, which is
+a heat unit representing the quantity of fuel required to heat a certain
+small quantity of water a certain number of degrees. In order that you
+may know what I am talking about, I will give a rough idea of the
+quantity of the more common foods which it takes to make 100 calories:
+one medium sized slice of bread, a piece of lean cooked steak the size
+of two fingers, one large apple, three medium tablespoonfuls of cooked
+rice or potatoes, one large banana, a tablespoonful of raisins, five
+dates, one large fig, a teaspoonful of sugar, a ball of butter the size
+of your thumbnail, a very large head of lettuce, three medium sized
+tomatoes, two-thirds of a glass of milk, a tablespoonful of oil. You
+observe, if you compare these various items, how little guidance
+concerning food is given by its bulk. You may eat a whole head of
+lettuce, weighing nearly a pound, and get no more food value than from a
+half ounce of olive oil which you pour over it. You may eat enough lean
+beefsteak to cover your plate, and you will not have eaten so much as a
+generous helping of butter. A big bowl of strawberries will not count
+half so much as the cream and sugar you put over them. So you may
+realize that when you eat olive oil, butter, cream, and sugar, you are
+in the same danger as the horse eating oats, or as my two cows in the
+pear orchard; and if some day a surgeon has to come and stick a knife
+into you, it may be for the same reason.
+
+The old-fashioned diet standards are as follows: Swedish laborers at
+hard work, over 4,700 calories; Russian workmen at moderate work, German
+soldiers in active service, Italian laborers at moderate work, between
+3,500 and 3,700 calories; English weavers, nearly 3,500 calories;
+Austrian farm laborers, over 5,000 calories. Some twenty years ago the
+United States government made observations of over 15,000 persons, and
+established the following, known as the "Atwater standards": men at very
+hard muscular work, 5,500 calories; men at moderately active muscular
+work, 3,400 calories; men at light to moderate muscular work, 3,050
+calories; men at sedentary, or women at moderately active work, 2,700
+calories.
+
+In the last ten or fifteen years there has arisen a new school of
+dietetic experts, headed by Professors Chittenden and Fisher of Yale
+University. Professor Chittenden has published an elaborate book, "The
+Nutrition of Man," in which he tells of long-continued experiment upon a
+squad of soldiers and a group of athletes at Yale University, also upon
+average students and professors. He has proved conclusively that all
+these various groups have been able to maintain full body weight and
+full working efficiency upon less than half the quantity of protein food
+hitherto specified, and upon anywhere from one-half to two-thirds the
+calory value set forth in the former standards.
+
+When I first read this book, I set to work to try its theories upon
+myself. During the five or six months that I lived on raw food, I took
+the trouble to weigh everything that I ate, and to keep a record. It is,
+of course, very easy to weigh raw foods exactly, and I found that I
+lived an active life and kept physical health upon slightly less than
+2,500 calories a day. I have set this as my standard, and have
+accustomed myself to follow it instinctively, and without wasting any
+thought upon it. Sometimes I fall from grace; for I still crave the
+delightful cakes and candies and ice cream upon which I was brought up.
+I always pay the penalty, and know that I will not get back to my former
+state of health until I skip a meal or two, and give my system a chance
+to clean house. The average man will find the regimen set forth in this
+book austere and awe-inspiring; I do not wish to pose as a paragon of
+virtue, so perhaps I should quote a sarcastic girl cousin, who remarked
+when I was a boy that the way to my heart was with a bag of
+ginger-snaps. I live in the presence of candy stores and never think of
+their existence, but if someone brings candy into the house and puts it
+in front of me, I have to waste a lot of moral energy in letting it
+alone. A few years ago I had a young man as secretary who discovered
+this failing of mine, and used to afford himself immense glee by buying
+a box of chocolates and leaving it on top of my desk. I would give him
+back the box--with some of the chocolates missing--but he would persist
+in "forgetting it" on my desk; he would hide and laugh hilariously
+behind the door, until my wife discovered his nefarious doings, and
+warned me of them.
+
+Professor Chittenden states quite simply the common sense procedure in
+the matter of food quantity. Find out by practical experiment what is
+the very least food upon which you can do your work without losing
+weight. That is the correct quantity for you, and if you are eating
+more, you certainly cannot be doing your body any good, and all the
+evidence indicates that you are doing it harm. You need not have the
+least fear in making this experiment that you will starve yourself.
+Later on, in a chapter on fasting, I shall prove to you that you carry
+around with you in your body sufficient reserve of food to keep you
+alive for eighty or ninety days; and if you draw on a small quantity of
+this you do not do yourself the slightest harm. Cut down the amount of
+your food; eat the bulky foods, which contain less calory value, and
+weigh yourself every day, and you will be surprised to discover how much
+less you need to eat than you have been accustomed to.
+
+One of the things you will find out is that your stomach is easily
+fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a meal consisting of a
+moderate quantity of lean meat, a very little bread, a heaping dish of
+turnip greens, and a big slice of watermelon, you will feel fully
+satisfied, yet you will not have taken in one-third the calory value
+that you would at an ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and
+dessert. The bulky kind of food is that for which your system was
+adapted in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large
+stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you had lived on
+refined and concentrated foods such as butter, sugar, olive oil, cheese
+and eggs. You have a long intestinal tract, adapted to slowly digesting
+foods, and to the work of extracting nutrition from a mass of roughage.
+You have a very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian
+scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the problems of
+health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous stage of evolution,
+and a source of much disease. The best thing you can do with that lower
+bowel is to give it lots of hay, as it requires; in other words, to eat
+the salads and greens which contain cellulose material. This contains no
+food value, and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and
+stimulates it to activity.
+
+If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, it may not be
+digested, and in that case it will fill your system with poisons.
+Second, it may be assimilated, but not burned up by the body. In that
+case it has to be thrown out by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and
+this puts upon these organs an extra strain, to which in the long run
+they may be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up as
+fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to tide you over
+the times when food was scarce. If you were a bear, you would naturally
+want to eat all you could, and be as fat as possible in November, so
+that you might be able to hunt your prey when you came out from your
+winter's sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to eat
+your regular meals all winter; you have established a system of
+civilization which makes you certain of your food, and the place where
+you keep your surplus is in the bank, or sewed up in the mattress, or
+hidden in your stocking. In other words, a civilized man saves money,
+and the habit of storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is
+a survival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health.
+Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra weight around
+with him, but his body has to keep it and tend it; and what are the
+effects of this is fully shown by life insurance tables. People who are
+five or ten per cent over weight have five or ten per cent more chance
+of dying all the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under
+weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of life
+expectation. There is no answer to these figures, which are the result
+of the tabulation of many hundreds of thousands of cases. The meaning of
+them to the fat person is to put himself on a diet of lean meat, green
+vegetables and fresh fruits, until he has brought himself down, not
+merely to the normal fatness of the civilized man, but to the normal
+leanness of the athlete, the soldier on campaign, and the student who
+has more important things to think about than stuffing his stomach.
+
+There is, of course, a certain kind of leanness which is the result of
+ill health. There are wasting diseases; tuberculosis, for example, and
+anemia. There are people who worry themselves thin, and there are a few
+rare "spiritual" people, so-called, who fade away from lack of
+sufficient interest in their bodies. That is not the kind of leanness
+that I mean, but the active, wiry leanness, which sometimes lives a
+hundred years. Nearly always you will find that such people are spare
+eaters; and you will find that our ideal of rosy plumpness, both for
+adults and children, is a wholly false notion. We once had in our home
+as servant an Irish girl, who was what is popularly called "a picture of
+health," with those beautiful flaming cheeks that Irish and English
+women so often have. She was in her early twenties, and nobody who knew
+her had any idea but that her health was perfect. But one morning she
+was discovered in bed with one side paralyzed, and in a couple of weeks
+she was dead with erysipelas. The color in her cheeks had been nothing
+but diseased blood vessels, overloaded with food material; and with the
+blood in that condition, one of the tiny vessels in the brain had become
+clogged.
+
+In the same way I have seen children, two or three years old, plump and
+rosy, and considered to be everything that children should be; but
+pneumonia would hit them, and in two or three days they would be at
+death's door. I do not mean that children should be kept hungry; on the
+contrary, they should have four or five meals a day, so that they do not
+have a chance to become too hungry. But at those meals they should eat
+in great part the bulky foods, which contain the natural salts needed
+for building the body. If a child asks for food, you may give it an
+apple, or you may give it a slice of bread and butter with sugar on it.
+The child will be equally well content in either case; but it is for
+you, with your knowledge of food values, to realize that the bread with
+butter and sugar contains two or three times as much nutriment as the
+apple, but contains practically none of the precious organic salts which
+will make the child's bones and teeth.
+
+So far I have discussed this subject as if all foods grew on bushes
+outside your kitchen door, and all you had to do was to go and pick off
+what you wanted. But as a matter of fact, foods cost money, and under
+our present system of wage slavery, the amount of money the average
+person can spend for food is strictly limited. In a later book I am
+going to discuss the problem of poverty, its causes and remedies. All
+that I can do here is to tell you what foods you ought to have, and if
+society does not pay you enough for your work to enable you to buy such
+foods, you may know that society, is starving you, and you may get busy
+to demand your rights as human beings. Meantime, however, such money as
+you do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of you
+spend it very unwisely indeed.
+
+In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most wholesome
+foods are cheap--often because people do not know enough to value them.
+We insist upon having the choice cuts of meats, because they are more
+tender to the teeth, but the cheaper cuts are exactly as nutritious. We
+insist upon having our meats loaded with fat, although fatness is an
+abnormal condition in an animal, and excess of fat is a grave error in
+diet. I live in a country where jack rabbits are a pest, and in the
+market they sell for perhaps one-fourth the cost of beef, and yet I can
+hardly ever get them, because people value them so little as food; they
+prefer the meat of a hog which has been wallowing in a filthy pen, and
+has been deliberately made so fat that it could hardly walk!
+
+I have already spoken of prunes, a much despised and invaluable food.
+All the dried fruits are rich in food values, and if we could get them
+untreated by chemicals, they would be worth their cost. I was brought up
+to despise the cheaper vegetables, such as cabbage and turnips; I never
+tasted boiled cabbage until I was forty, and then to my great surprise I
+made the discovery that it is good. Raw cabbage is as valuable as any
+other salad; it is a trifle harder to digest for some people, but I do
+not believe in pampering the stomach. Both potatoes and rice are cheap
+and wholesome, if only we would get unpolished rice, and if we would
+leave the skins on the potatoes until after they are cooked. Nearly all
+the mineral salts of the potato are just under the outer skin, and are
+removed by the foolish habit of peeling them.
+
+The prices of food differ so widely at different seasons and in
+different parts of the world, that there is not much profit in trying to
+figure how cheaply a person can live. I have found that I spend for the
+diet I have indicated here, from sixty to eighty cents a day. I do not
+buy any fancy foods, but on the other hand, I do not especially try to
+economize; I buy what I want of the simple everyday foods in their
+season. Most everyone will find that it is a good business proposition
+to buy the foods which he needs to keep in health. If the average
+workingman would add up the money he spends, not merely in the
+restaurants, but in the candy stores, the drug stores, the tobacco
+stores, and the offices of doctors and dentists, he would find, I think,
+that he could afford to buy himself the necessary quantity of wholesome
+natural foods. For a family of three, in the place where I live, enough
+of these foods can be purchased for a dollar a day, and this is about
+one-fourth what common labor is being paid, and one-eighth of what
+skilled labor is being paid. I will specify the foods: a pound and a
+half of shoulder steak, a loaf of whole wheat bread or a box of shredded
+wheat biscuit, a head of cabbage, a pound of prunes, and four or five
+pounds of apples.
+
+There are many ways of saving in the purchase of food if you put your
+mind upon it. If you are buying prunes, you may pay as high as fifty
+cents or a dollar a pound for the big ones, and they are not a bit
+better than the tiny ones, which you can buy for as low as eight cents a
+pound in bulk. When bread is stale, the bakers sell it for half price,
+despite the fact that only then has it become fit to eat. If you buy
+canned peaches, you will pay a fancy price for them, and they will be
+heavy with cane sugar; but if you inquire, you find what are known as
+"pie peaches," put up in gallon tins without sugar, and at about half
+the price. The butcher will sell you what he calls "hamburg steak" at a
+very low price, and if you let him prepare it out of your sight, he will
+fill it with fat and gristle; but let him make some while you watch, and
+then you have a very good food. One of my diet rules is that I do not
+trust the capitalist system to fix me up any kind of mixed or ground or
+prepared foods. I have not eaten sausage since I saw it made in Chicago.
+
+Also there is something to know about the cooking of foods, since it is
+possible to take perfectly good foods and spoil them by bad cooking.
+Once upon a time our family discovered a fireless cooker, and thought
+that was a wonderful invention for an absent-minded author and a wife
+who is given to revising manuscripts. But recent investigations which
+have been made into the nature of the "vitamines," food ferments which
+are only partly understood, suggest that prolonged cooking of food may
+be a great mistake. The starch has to be cooked in order to break the
+cell walls by the expansion of the material inside. Twenty minutes will
+be enough in the case of everything except beans, which need to be
+cooked four or five hours. Meat should be eaten rare, except in the case
+of pork, which harbors a parasite dangerous to the human body; therefore
+pork should always be thoroughly cooked. The white of eggs is made less
+digestible by boiling hard or frying. Eggs should never be allowed to
+boil; put them on in cold water, and take them off as soon as the water
+begins to boil. It is not necessary to cook either fresh fruit or dried.
+The dried fruits may be soaked and eaten raw, but I find that several
+fruits, especially apples and pears, do not agree with me well if they
+are eaten raw, so I stew them for fifteen or twenty minutes. I have no
+objection to canned fruits and vegetables, provided one takes the
+trouble in opening them to make sure there is no sign of spoiling. If
+you put up your own fruits, do not put in any sugar. All you have to do
+is to let them boil for a few minutes, and to seal them tightly while
+they are boiling hot. The whole secret of preserving is to exclude the
+air with its bacteria.
+
+If you live on a farm, you will have no trouble in following the diet
+here outlined, for you can produce for yourselves all the foods that I
+have recommended; only do not make the mistake of shipping out your best
+foods, and taking back the products of a factory, just because you have
+read lying advertisements about them. Take your own wheat and oats and
+corn to the mill, and have it ground whole, and make your own breads and
+cereals. Try the experiment of mixing whole corn meal with water and a
+little salt, and baking it into hard, crisp "corn dodgers." I do not eat
+these--but only because I cannot buy them, and have no time to make
+them.
+
+Another common article of food which I do not recommend is salted and
+smoked meats. I do not pretend to know the effects of large quantities
+of salt and saltpetre and wood smoke upon the human system, but I know
+that Dr. Wiley's "poison squad" proved definitely that a number of these
+inorganic minerals are injurious to health, and I prefer to take fresh
+meat when I can get it. I use a moderate quantity of common salt on meat
+and potatoes, because there seems to be a natural craving for this. I
+know that many health enthusiasts insist that I am thus putting a strain
+on my kidneys, but I will wait until these health enthusiasts make clear
+to me why deer and cattle and horses in a wild state will travel many
+miles to a salt-lick. I have learned that it is easy to make plausible
+statements about health, but not so easy to prove them. For example, I
+was told that it is injurious to drink water at meals, and for years I
+religiously avoided the habit; but it occurred to some college professor
+to find out if this was really true, and he carried on a series of
+experiments which proved that the stomach works better when its contents
+are diluted. The only point about drinking at meals is that you should
+not use the liquid to wash down your food without chewing it.
+
+I can suggest two other ways by which you may save money on food. One is
+by not eating too much, and another is by eating all that you buy. The
+amount of food that is wasted by the people of America would feed the
+people of any European nation. The amount of food that is thrown out
+from any one of our big American leisure class hotels would feed the
+children of a European town. I think it may fairly be described as a
+crime to throw into the garbage pail food which might nourish human
+life. In our family we have no garbage pail. What little waste there is,
+we burn in the stove, and my wife turns it into roses. It consists of
+the fat which we cannot help getting at the butcher's, and the bones of
+meat, and the skins of some fruits and vegetables. It would never enter
+into our minds to throw out a particle of bread, or meat, or other
+wholesome food. If we have something that we fear may spoil, we do not
+throw it out, but put it into a saucepan and cook it for a few minutes.
+If you will make the same rule in your home, you will stop at least that
+much of the waste of American life; and as to the big leisure class
+hotels, and the banquet tables of the rich--just wait a few years, and I
+think the social revolution will attend to them!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+FOODS AND POISONS
+
+     (Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon the
+     system of stimulants and narcotics.)
+
+
+A few years ago there died an old gentleman who had devoted some twenty
+years of his life to teaching people to chew their food. Horace Fletcher
+was his name, and his ideas became a fad, and some people carried them
+to comical extremes. But Fletcher made a real discovery; what he called
+"the food filter." This is the automatic action of the swallowing
+apparatus, whereby nature selects the food which has been sufficiently
+prepared for digestion. If you chew a mouthful of food without ever
+performing the act of swallowing, you will find that the food gradually
+disappears. What happens is that all of it which has been reduced to a
+thin paste will slip unnoticed down your throat, and you may go on
+putting more food into your mouth, and chewing, and can eat a whole meal
+without ever performing the act of swallowing. Fletcher claimed that
+this is the proper way to eat, and that you can train yourself to follow
+this method. I have tried his idea and adopted it. One of my diet rules,
+to which there is no exception, is that if I haven't the time to chew my
+food properly, I haven't the time to eat; I skip that meal.
+
+The habit of bolting food is a source of disease. To be sure, the
+carnivorous animals bolt their food, but they are tougher than we are,
+and do not carry the burden of a large brain and a complex nervous
+system. If you swallow your meals half chewed, and wash them down with
+liquids, you may get away with it for a while, but some day you will pay
+for it with dyspepsia and nervous troubles. And the same thing applies
+to your habit of jumping up from meals and rushing away to work, whether
+it be work of the muscles, or of brain and nerves. Proper digestion
+requires the presence of a quantity of blood in the walls of the stomach
+and digestive tract. It requires the attention of your subconscious
+mind, and this means rest of muscles and brain centers. If you cannot
+rest for an hour after meals, omit that meal, or make it a light one, of
+fruit juices, which are almost immediately absorbed by the stomach, and
+of salads, which do not ferment. You may rest assured that it will not
+hurt you to skip a meal, and make up for it when you have time to be
+quiet. I have been many times in my life under very intense and long
+continued nervous strain; for example, during the Colorado coal strike,
+I led a public demonstration which kept me in a state of excitement all
+the day and a good part of the night several weeks. During this period I
+ate almost nothing; a baked apple and a cup of custard would be as near
+as I would go to a meal, and as a result I came through the experience
+without any injury whatever to my health. I lost perhaps ten pounds in
+weight, but that was quickly made up when I settled back to a normal way
+of life.
+
+I have been on camping trips when I had a great deal of hard work to do,
+carrying a canoe long distances on my back, or paddling it forty miles a
+day. On the mornings of such a trip I have seen a guide cook himself an
+elaborate breakfast of freshly baked bread, bacon, and even beans, and
+make a hearty meal and then go straight to work. My meal, on the
+contrary, would consist of a small dish of stewed prunes, or perhaps
+some huckleberries or raspberries, if they could be found. I will not
+say that I could do as much as the guide, because he was used to it, and
+I was not. But I can say this--if I had eaten his breakfast at the start
+of the day, I would have been dead before night; and I mean the word
+"dead" quite literally. I know a man who started to climb Whiteface
+mountain in the Adirondacks. He climbed half way, and then ate lunch,
+which consisted of nine hard boiled eggs. Then he started to climb the
+rest of the mountain, and dropped dead of acute indigestion.
+
+There are few poisons which can affect the system more quickly, or more
+dangerously, than a mass of food which is not digested. The stomach is
+an ideal forcing-house for the breeding of bacteria. It provides warmth
+and moisture, and you, in your meal, provide the bacteria and the
+material upon which they thrive. Under normal conditions, the stomach
+pours out a gastric juice which kills the bacteria; but let this gastric
+juice for any reason be lacking--because your nervous energy has gone
+somewhere else, or because your blood-stream, from which the gastric
+juice must be made, has been drawn away to the muscles by hard labor;
+then you have a yeast-pot, with great quantities of gases and poisons.
+In acute cases the results are evident enough: violent pains and
+convulsions, followed by coma and the turning black of the body. But
+what you should understand is that you may produce a milder case of such
+poisoning, and may do it day after day habitually, and little by little
+your vital organs will be weakened by the strain.
+
+It does not make any difference at what hour of the twenty-four you take
+the great bulk of your food. It is one of the commonest delusions that
+you get some strengthening effect from your food immediately, and must
+have this strength in order to do hard work. To be sure, there are
+substances, such as grape-sugar, which require practically no digesting;
+you can hold them in the mouth, and they will be digested by the saliva,
+and absorbed at once into the blood-stream. But unless you have been
+starved for a long period you do not need to get your strength in this
+rush fashion. If you ate your normal meals on the previous day, your
+blood-stream is fully supplied with nutriment which has been put through
+a long process of preparation, and you can get up in the morning and
+work all day, if necessary, upon what is already in your system. To be
+sure, you may feel hungry, and even faint, but that is merely a matter
+of habit; your system is accustomed to taking food and expects it. But
+if you are a laborer doing hard work, you can easily train yourself to
+eat a light meal in the morning, and another light meal at noon, and to
+eat a hearty meal when your work is done and you can rest. Two light
+meals and a hearty meal are all that any system needs, and you can prove
+it to yourself by trying it, and watching your weight once a week.
+
+I have tried many experiments, and the conclusion to which I have come
+is that there is no virtue in any particular meal-hours or any
+particular number of meals. For several years I tried the experiment of
+two meals a day. I was living a retired life, and had little contact
+with the world, and I would make a hearty meal at ten o'clock in the
+morning, and another at five in the afternoon. But later on I found that
+inconvenient, and now I take a light breakfast, and two moderate-sized
+meals at the conventional hours of lunch and dinner. I can arrange my
+own time, so after meal times is when I get my reading done. Sometimes,
+when I am tired, I feel sleepy after meals, but I have learned not to
+yield to this impulse. I do not know how to explain this; I have
+observed that animals sleep after eating, and it appears to be a natural
+thing to do; but I know that if I go to sleep after a meal, nature makes
+clear to me that I have made a mistake, and I do not repeat it. I never
+eat at night, and always go to bed on an empty stomach, so I am always
+hungry when I open my eyes in the morning. I never know what it is not
+to be hungry at meal times, and my habits are so regular that I could
+set my watch by my stomach.
+
+Another common habit which is harmful is eating between meals. I have
+known people who are accustomed to nibble at food nearly all the time.
+Shelley records that he tried it as an experiment, thinking it might be
+a convenient way to get digestion done--but he found that it did not
+work. The stomach is apparently meant to work in pulses; to do a job of
+digesting, and then to rest and accumulate the juices for another job.
+It will accustom itself to a certain régime, and will work accordingly,
+but if, when it has half digested a load of food, you pile more food in
+on top, you make as much trouble as you would make in your kitchen if
+you required your cook to prepare another meal before she has cleaned up
+after the last one. Three times a day is enough for any adult to eat.
+Children require to eat oftener, because their bodies are more active,
+and they not merely have to keep up weight, but to add to it. The
+simplest way to arrange matters with children is to give them three good
+meals at the hours when adults eat, and then to give them a couple of
+pieces of fruit between breakfast and lunch, and again between lunch and
+supper. I have never seen a child who would not be satisfied with this,
+when once the habit was established.
+
+I have already spoken of the cooking and serving of food. I consider
+that the "gastronomic art," as it is pompously called, is ninety-nine
+per cent plain rubbish. To be sure, if foods are appetizingly prepared,
+and look good and smell good and taste good, they will cause the gastric
+juices to flow abundantly, as the Russian scientist Pavlov has
+demonstrated by practical experiment with the stomach-pump. But I know
+without any stomach-pump that the best thing to make my gastric juices
+flow is hard work and a spare diet. When I come home from five sets of
+tennis, and have a cold shower and a rub-down, my gastric juices will
+flow for a piece of cold beefsteak and a cold sweet potato, quite as
+well as for anything that is served by a leisure class "chef." Needless
+to say, I want food to be fresh, and I want it to be clean, but I have
+other things to do with my time and money than to pamper my appetites
+and encourage food whims.
+
+If you have a grandmother, or ever had one, you know what grandmothers
+tell you about "hot nourishing food"; but I have tried the experiment,
+and satisfied myself that there is absolutely no difference in
+nourishing qualities between hot food and cold food. If you chew your
+food sufficiently, it will all be ninety-eight and six-tenths degree
+food when it gets to your stomach, and that is the way your stomach
+wants it. Of course, if you have been out in a blizzard, and are
+chilled, and want to restore the body temperature, a hot drink will be
+one of the quickest ways, and if the emergency is extreme, you may even
+add a stimulant. On the other hand, if you are suffering from heat, it
+is sensible to cool your body by a cold drink. But you should use as
+much judgment with yourself as you would with a horse, which you do not
+permit to drink a lot of cold water when he is heated up, and is going
+into his stall to stand still.
+
+I have mentioned the word "stimulants," and this opens a large subject.
+There are drugs which affect the body in two different ways: some excite
+the nerves, and through the nerves the heart and blood-stream, to more
+intense activity; others have the effect of deadening the nerves, and
+dulling the sense of exhaustion and pain. One of these groups is called
+stimulants, and the other is called narcotics; but as a matter of fact
+the stimulants are really narcotics, because they operate by dulling the
+nerves whose function it is to prevent the over-accumulation of fatigue
+poisons; in other words, they keep the nerves and muscles from knowing
+that they are tired, and so they go on working.
+
+It is possible, of course, to conceive of an emergency in which that is
+necessary. Once upon a time, on a hunting trip, I had been traveling all
+day, and was caught in a rain storm, and exhausted and chilled to the
+bone; I had to make camp without a fire, so when I got the tent up I
+wrapped myself in blankets and drank a couple of tablespoons full of
+whiskey. That is the only time I have ever taken whiskey in my life,
+and it warmed me almost instantly, and did me no harm. In the same way
+there were two or three occasions when I was on the verge of a nervous
+breakdown, and could not sleep, and let the doctor give me a sleeping
+powder. But in each case I knew that I was fooling with a dangerous
+habit, and I did no more fooling than necessary. No one should make use
+of either stimulants or narcotics except in extreme emergency, and never
+but a few times in a lifetime. What you should do is to change your
+habits so that you will not need to over-strain.
+
+All these drugs are habit forming; that is to say, they leave the body
+no better, and with a craving for a repetition of the relief. When you
+are tired, it is because your muscles and nerves are storing up fatigue
+poisons more rapidly than your blood-stream can get rid of them. You
+need to know about this condition, and exhaustion and pain are nature's
+protective warning. If you put a stop to the warning, you are as
+unintelligent as the Eastern despots who used to cut off the head of the
+messenger who brought bad tidings. If, when you have a headache, you go
+into a drug store and let the druggist mix you one of those white fizzy
+drinks, what you are doing is not to get rid of the poisons in your
+blood-stream, but merely to reduce the action of your heart, so as to
+keep the blood from pressing so fast into the aching blood vessels and
+nerves. You may try that trick with your heart a number of times, but
+sooner or later you will try it once too often--your heart will stop a
+little bit quicker than you meant it to!
+
+Drugs are poisons, and their action depends upon their poisoning some
+particular portion of the body, and temporarily paralyzing it. And bear
+this in mind, they are none the less poisonous because they are
+"natural" products. You can kill yourself by cyanide of potassium, which
+comes out of a chemist's retort; but you can kill yourself just as dead
+with laudanum, which comes out of a plant, or with the contents of the
+venom sac of a snake. You are poisoning yourself none the less certainly
+if you use alcohol, which is made from the juices of beautiful fruits,
+and has had hosts of famous poets writing songs about it; or you can
+poison yourself with the caffein which you get in a lovely brown bean
+which comes from Brazil, fragrant to the nostrils and delicious to the
+taste. You may drink wine and tea and coffee for a hundred years, and
+have your picture published in the newspapers as a proof that these
+habits conduce to health; but nothing will be said about the large
+number of people who practiced these habits, and didn't live so long,
+and about how long they might have lived if they hadn't practiced these
+habits.
+
+I was brought up in the South, and my "elders" belonged to a generation
+which had grown up in war time. For this reason many of the men both
+drank and smoked to excess, and in my boyhood I lived among them and
+watched them, and with the help of advice from a wise mother, I
+conceived a horror of every kind of stimulant. The alcoholic poets could
+not fool me; I had been in the alcoholic wards of the hospitals. I had
+seen one man after another, beautiful and kindly and gracious men,
+dragged down into a pit of torment and shame.
+
+Alcohol is, I think, the greatest trap that nature ever set for the feet
+of the human race. It is responsible for more degradation and misery
+than any other evil in the world; and I say this, knowing well that my
+Socialist friends will cry, "What about Capitalism?" My answer is that I
+doubt if there ever would have been any Capitalism in the world, if it
+had not been for alcohol. If the workers had not been systematically
+poisoned, and all their savings taken from them by the gin-mill, they
+would never have submitted to the capitalist system, they would have
+built the co-operative commonwealth at the time they were building the
+first factories. I listen to the arguments of my radical friends about
+"personal liberty," but I note that in Russia, when it was a question of
+making a practical revolution and keeping it alive, the first thing the
+leaders did was to drag out the contents of the wine-cellars of the
+palaces, and smash them in the gutters.
+
+Tea and coffee are, of course, much milder in their effects than
+alcohol; you can play with them longer, and the punishment will be less
+severe. But if you make habitual use of them, you will pay the penalty
+which all drugs exact from the system. Your brain and your nerve centers
+will be less sensitive, less capable of working except under the
+influence of drugs; their reacting power will be dulled, and they will
+wear out more quickly. I have watched the slaves of the "morning cup of
+coffee," and know how they suffer when they do not get it. Likewise, I
+have watched the tea drinkers. It is comical to live in England, and see
+all the able-bodied men obliged to leave their work at four o'clock in
+the afternoon, and seek the regular stimulus for their tired nerves. If
+you are to meet anybody, it is always for "tea" that the ceremony is
+set, and if you refuse to drink tea, your hostess will be uncomfortable,
+unable to talk about anything but the strange, incredible notion that
+one can live without tea. I discovered after a while the solution of
+this problem; I would say that I preferred a little hot water, if you
+please, and so my hostess would pour me a cup of hot water, and I would
+sit and gravely sip it, and everybody would be perfectly content: I was
+conforming to the outward appearance of normality, which is what the
+British conventions require.
+
+I have never drunk a cup of coffee, so I do not know what its effect on
+me would be. But some fifteen years ago I drank a glass of very weak
+iced tea at eight o'clock in the evening, and did not get to sleep until
+four or five the next morning. So I know that there is really a drug in
+tea. I know also that I might accustom my system to it, just as I might
+learn to poison my lungs with nicotine without being made immediately
+and suddenly ill; but why should I wish to do this? Life is so
+interesting to me that I do not need to stimulate my brain centers in
+order to appreciate the thrill of it. And when I am tired, I can rest
+myself by listening to music, or by reading a worth-while novel--things
+which I have found do not leave the after effects of nicotine.
+
+I remember the first time I met Jack London. Our meeting consisted in
+good part of his "kidding" me, because I was lacking in the congenial
+vices of the café. He told me how much I had missed, because I had never
+been drunk; One ought to try the great adventure, at least once! Poor
+Jack is gone, because his kidneys gave out at forty; and nothing could
+seem more ungracious than to point out that I am still alive, and
+finding life enjoyable. Yet, in this book we are trying to find out how
+to live, and if there are habits which wreck and destroy a magnificent
+physique, and bring a great genius to death at the age of forty--surely
+the rest of us want to know about it, and to be warned in time. I
+mention Jack London in this connection, because he has said the last
+word on the subject of alcohol. Read "John Barleycorn," and especially
+read between the lines of it, and you will not need my argument to
+persuade you to be glad that the Eighteenth Amendment has been written
+into the Constitution, and that it is your duty as a Socialist, not
+merely to obey it, but to vote for its enforcement.
+
+I am proceeding on the assumption that your life is of importance to
+you; that you have a job to do which you know to be worth while, and to
+which you desire to apply your powers. You agree with me that the
+workers of the world are suffering, and that it is necessary for them to
+find their freedom, and that this takes hard work and hard thinking. You
+may say that I exaggerate the amount of harm that is done to the system
+by tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. Well, let us assume that in
+moderate quantities they do no harm at all: even so, I have the right to
+ask you to show that they do some good; otherwise, surely, it is a
+mistake for the workers to spend their savings upon them.
+
+Consider, for example, the amount of money which the wage slaves of the
+world spend upon tobacco. Suppose they could be persuaded for two or
+three years to spend this amount upon good reading matter--do you not
+think there would be an improvement in their condition? Surely you
+cannot maintain that the use of tobacco is necessary to the activities
+of the brain! Surely you do not think that a man has to have a cigarette
+in order to stimulate his thoughts, or to smoke a pipe to rest himself
+after his work is done! I offer myself as evidence in such a
+controversy; I have written as many books as any man in the radical
+movement, and the sum total of my lifetime smoking amounts to one-half
+of one cigarette. I tried that when I was eight years old, and somebody
+told me a policeman would arrest me if he caught me, and I threw away
+the cigarette, and ran and hid in an alley, and have not yet got over my
+scare.
+
+In the "Journal for Industrial Hygiene" for October, 1920, is an article
+entitled "Fatigue and Efficiency of Smokers in a Strenuous Mental
+Occupation." Experiments were conducted among telegraph operators, and
+the result showed that "the heavy smokers of the group show a higher
+output rate at the beginning of the day than the light smokers, but
+their rate falls off more markedly in the late hours, and their
+production for the whole day is definitely less than that of the light
+smokers. The heavy smokers also show less ability than the light smokers
+to respond to increasing pressure of work in the late hours of the day
+by handling their full share of the work presented."
+
+One point upon which every medical authority agrees is--that the use of
+nicotine is of deadly effect upon the immature organism. Half-grown
+youths who smoke cigarettes will never be full-sized men; they will
+never have normal lungs or a normal heart. And likewise, all authorities
+agree about the effect of smoking upon the organism of women. I gave
+what little help I could to the task of helping to set women free, and
+to make them the equals of men; but I was always pained when I
+discovered that some of my feminist friends understood by woman's
+emancipation no more than her right to adopt men's vices. I would say to
+these ardent young female radicals, who cultivate the art of dangling a
+cigarette from their lower lip, and sip cocktails out of coffee-cups in
+Greenwich Village cafés, that they will never be able to bear sound
+children; but I know that this would not interest them--they don't want
+to bear any children at all. So I say that they will never be able to
+think straight thoughts, and will be nervous invalids when they are
+thirty.
+
+We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, and we put several
+millions of our young men into armies, and if there were any of them who
+did not already know how to smoke cigarettes, they learned it under
+official sanction. So now we have a national tobacco bill that runs up
+to two billions, and will insure us a new generation of "Class C"
+rating. Speaking to the young radicals who are reading my books, I say:
+We want to make the world over, to make it a place of freedom and
+kindness, instead of the hell of greed and hate that it is today. For
+that purpose we need a new moral code, and we can never win our victory
+without it. I have attended radical conventions, sitting in unventilated
+halls amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and listening to men wrangle all
+through the day and a great part of the night; I have watched the fatal
+dissensions in the movement, the quarrelings of the right wingers and
+the left wingers and all stages and degrees in between, and I have
+wondered--not jestingly, but in pitying earnest--how much of all those
+personalities and factional misunderstanding had their origin in carbon
+dioxide and nicotine. There is no use suggesting such ideas to the older
+men, whose habits are fixed; but a new generation is coming on, with a
+new vision of the enormous task before it; and is it too much to expect
+of these young men and women, that they shall realize in advance the
+grim tasks they have to do, and shall learn to run the machine of their
+body so as to get out of it the maximum amount of service? Is it too
+much to hope for, that some day we shall have a race of young fighters
+for truth and justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and
+consecrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from wage
+slavery and war?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+MORE ABOUT HEALTH
+
+     (Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing,
+     bathing and sleep.)
+
+
+In discussing the question of health, we have given the greater part of
+the space to the subject of diet, for the reason that experience has
+convinced us that diet is two-thirds of health, and that nearly always
+in disease you find errors of diet playing a part. There are, however,
+other important factors of health, now to be discussed.
+
+Everything of which the body makes use is taken in the form of food and
+drink, with the exception of one substance, the oxygen we get out of the
+air. Every time we draw a breath we take in a certain amount of oxygen,
+and every time we expel a breath, we drive out a certain amount of a gas
+called carbon dioxide, which is what the body makes of the fuel it
+burns. The body can get along for several days without water, and for
+two or three months without food, but it can only get along for two or
+three minutes without oxygen. It should be obvious that when the body
+expels carbon dioxide, with a slight mixture of other more poisonous
+gases, and sucks back what it expects will be a fresh supply of oxygen,
+it wants to get oxygen, and not the same gases it has just expelled, nor
+gases which have been expelled from the lungs of other people.
+
+In the days when primitive man lived outdoors, he did not have to think
+about this problem. When he breathed poison from his lungs, the moving
+air of nature blew it away, and the infinite vegetation of nature took
+the carbon dioxide and turned it back into oxygen. And even when man
+built himself shelters, he was not cunning enough to make them
+air-tight; he had to leave a big hole for the smoke to get out, and
+smaller holes through which to get light. But now our wonderful
+civilization has solved these problems; we make our walls of air-tight
+plaster, and we have invented a substance which will admit light without
+admitting air. So we have the "white plague" of tuberculosis, and so we
+have innumerable minor plagues of coughs and colds and sore throats.
+
+In the summer time the solution of the problem is easy. Have as many
+doors and windows in your home as possible, and keep them open, and have
+nothing in your home to make dust or to retain dust. But then comes
+stormy and cold weather, and you have to close your doors and windows,
+and keep your home at a higher temperature than the air outside. How
+shall you do this, and at the same time get a continual supply of fresh
+air?
+
+I will take the various methods of heating one by one. The problem in
+each case is simple and can be made clear in a sentence or two.
+
+First, the open fireplace. This is a perfect solution, if you have
+enough fuel, and do not have to worry about the waste of heat. An open
+fireplace draws out all the air in the room in a short time, and you do
+not have to bother about opening doors or windows; you may be sure that
+the air is getting in through some cracks, or else the fire would not
+burn.
+
+Second, a wood or coal or gas stove in the room, provided with a proper
+vent, so that all the gases of combustion are drawn up the chimney. This
+changes the air more slowly than an open fireplace, but it does the work
+fairly well. All that you have to be careful about is that your vent is
+sufficiently large and is working properly. If your fire does not
+"draw," you will have smoke or coal-gas in the house, and this is bad
+for the lungs; but worse for the lungs is a gas that you can neither see
+nor smell nor taste, the deadly carbon monoxide. This gas is produced by
+incomplete combustion, and whenever you see yellow flames from gas or
+coal, you are apt to have this poisonous substance. Small quantities of
+it are sufficient to cause violent headaches, and repeated doses of it
+are fatal. Men who work in garages which are not properly ventilated run
+this risk all the time, because carbon monoxide is one of the products
+of imperfect combustion in the gas engine.
+
+Next, the furnace. A furnace sends fresh warm air into your house; the
+only trouble is that it takes out all the moisture, and some authorities
+say that this is bad for the lungs and throat. I do not know whether
+this is true, but all furnaces are supposed to have a water chamber to
+supply moisture to the air, and you should keep a pan of water on every
+stove or radiator in your house.
+
+Next, steam heat, which includes hot-water heating. This is one of the
+abominations of our civilization, and one of the methods by which our
+race is committing suicide. There is nothing wrong about steam heat in
+itself; the room is warmed in a harmless way; but the trouble is it
+stays warm only so long as the doors and windows are kept shut. You are
+in an air-tight box, and can be warm provided you do not mind being
+suffocated. The moment you open a door or window, you have a cold draft
+on your feet, and if you wish to change the air entirely you have to let
+out all the heat; so, of course, you never do change it entirely, but go
+on breathing the same air over and over, and every time you breathe it
+the condition of your body is a little more reduced.
+
+The solution of this problem is not to heat the air in the room, but to
+use your steam coils to heat fresh air, and then drive this air, already
+warmed, into the room, at the same time providing a vent through which
+the old air can be pushed out. This is the hot air system of heating,
+and it requires some kind of engine or dynamo, and therefore is
+expensive. It has been installed in a few office buildings and theaters.
+One of the most perfect systems I ever inspected is in the building of
+the New York Stock Exchange, where the air is warmed in winter, and
+cooled in summer, and freed from dust, and exactly the right quantity is
+supplied. It is a humorous commentary upon our civilization that we take
+perfect care of the breathing apparatus of our stock-gamblers, but pay
+no attention to the breathing apparatus of our senators and congressmen,
+whose one business in life is to use their lungs. The stately old
+building with its white marble domes looks impressive in moving pictures
+and on illustrated postcards, but it has no system of ventilation
+whatever, and is a death-trap to the poor wretches who are compelled to
+spend their days, and sometimes their nights, within its walls. This
+contrast is one symptom of the rise of industrial capitalism and the
+collapse of political democracy.
+
+We have reserved to the last a method of heating which is the worst, and
+can only be described as a crime against health: the use of gas and oil
+stoves set out in the middle of the room, without a vent, and
+discharging their fumes into the room. These stoves are simply
+instruments of slow death, and their manufacture should be prohibited
+by law. In the meantime, what you have to do is to refuse to live in a
+room or to work in an office where such stoves are used. I have heard
+dealers insist that this or the other kind of gas or oil stove was so
+contrived as to consume all the fumes. Do not let anybody fool you with
+such nonsense. There has never been any form of combustion devised which
+consumes all the fumes. No such thing can be, because the products of
+combustion are not combustible. The so-called "wickless blue flame"
+stoves do burn all the oil, and a properly regulated gas stove will burn
+all the gas, but that simply means that it turns the oil and gas into
+carbon dioxide, the very substance which your lungs are working day and
+night to get out of your body.
+
+Moreover, there is no oil or gas stove which ever burns perfectly all
+the time, either because there is too much gas or insufficient air. Oil
+and gas stoves sometimes give a partly yellow flame. You can cause them
+to give a yellow flame at any time by blowing air against them, and that
+yellow flame means imperfect combustion, and a probability of the deadly
+carbon monoxide. These facts are known to every chemist and to every
+student of hygiene, and the fact that civilized people continue to burn
+such oil and gas stoves in their homes and offices is simply one more
+proof that our civilization values human welfare and health at nothing
+whatever in comparison with profits.
+
+Not merely should you see that you have a continuous supply of fresh air
+in your home, but you should try to keep down dust in your home, and
+especially fine particles of lint. Once upon a time our ancestors were
+unable to make houses and floors tight, and so they put rugs on the
+floors and hung tapestries on the walls to keep out the wind. We
+civilized people are able to make both floors and walls absolutely
+tight, and yet we continue to use rugs and curtains, it being the first
+principle of our education that propriety requires us to continue to do
+the things which our ancestors did. I am unable to think of a more silly
+or stupid thing in the world than a rug or a curtain, but I have lived
+in the house with them all my life, because, alas, the ladies cannot be
+happy otherwise. They want their homes to be "pretty," and so they
+continue to set dust traps, and to set themselves futile jobs of house
+cleaning and shopping.
+
+Not all of us are able to be out of doors as much as we ought to be, but
+all of us spend seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four in sleep,
+and this time at least we ought to spend out of doors. I understand that
+this is futile advice to give to the very poor. I was poor myself for
+many years, and had to put all my clothes on at night in order to keep
+warm, and even then I could not always do it. Nevertheless, from the
+time I first realized the importance of ventilation I never slept in a
+room with a closed window.
+
+I say, sleep outdoors if you possibly can. You do not have to be afraid
+of exposure, for cold will not hurt you if you keep your body in proper
+condition. I have slept out in a rubber blanket, with the rain beating
+on my head and face; I have spread a rubber blanket on a hummock in the
+midst of a swamp, and waked up in the morning with my hair and face
+soaked in cold, white fog, but I never caught cold from such things;
+there is no harm whatever in dampness or in "night air," if you are in
+proper condition. Of course, you may get your ears frostbitten in the
+middle of winter, but you can have a sleeping hood to remove that
+danger.
+
+The "nature cure" enthusiasts, who lay so much stress upon an outdoor
+life, also insist that the wearing of clothes is a harmful civilized
+custom. They urge us to take "sun baths" and to "ventilate the skin."
+Now, as a matter of fact, the skin does not breathe, it merely gives out
+moisture, and it does not give out any less because we have clothing on
+us, provided the clothing is dry and clean, and will absorb moisture.
+But bye and bye the clothing becomes loaded with the waste substances
+given out by the skin, and then it will absorb no more, and if you do
+not change your clothing, no doubt it may have some effect upon health.
+
+But the principal evil of civilized clothing is that it binds the body
+and prevents the free play of the muscles, and, more important yet,
+stops the free circulation of the blood. I have already discussed hats,
+which are the principal cause of baldness. I will go to the other
+extremity of the body, and mention tight shoes, which, strange as it may
+seem, cause headaches and colds. You will be able to find a few
+civilized men with normal feet, but you will hardly ever find a woman
+whose toes are not crowded together and misshapen. I have said that the
+human body is one organism, and that it is fed and its health
+maintained by the blood-stream; I say now that the circulation of the
+blood is one thing, and if you block it at any one place, you block it
+everywhere. Of course, not all the blood-stream goes down into the feet,
+but some of it does, and if it is clogged in the feet, and the blood
+vessels cramped and crowded, there is a certain amount of poison kept in
+the system, which the system should have got rid of.
+
+Why do women wear tight shoes? Because the leisure class members of
+their sex have been kept in harems and used as the playthings of men. To
+be fragile and delicate was the thing admired by the masters of wealth,
+and to have small hands and feet was a sign that women belonged to this
+parasite class. Therefore at all hazards women's feet must be kept
+small, even at the expense of their health and happiness; and so they
+put themselves up on several inches of heels, which cause them to toddle
+around like marionettes on a stage, with all their toes crowded down
+into a lump.
+
+Why do men wear tight bands around their scalps, which cause their hair
+to drop out, and tight, stiff columns around their necks, which stop the
+circulation of the blood into their heads, and cause them to have
+headaches instead of ideas? The reason is that for ages the rulers of
+the tribe have wished to demonstrate publicly their superiority to the
+common herd, which does the menial tasks. In England all gentlemen wear
+tall black silk band-boxes on their heads, and in America they have a
+choice among several varieties of round tight boxes. All men who work in
+offices wear stiffly starched collars and cuffs, as a means of
+demonstrating their superiority to the common workers, who have to sweat
+at their necks. I think it is not too much to hope that when class
+exploitation is done away with, we shall also get rid of these class
+symbols, and choose our clothing because it is warm and comfortable, and
+not according to the perverted imbecilities of "style."
+
+The skin gives out perspiration which is greasy; also the skin is
+constantly growing, putting out layers of cells which dry up and are
+worn off. We need to bathe with soap to remove the grease, and we need
+to rub with a towel to brush away the dead cells of the skin, so that
+the pores may be kept open. No one is taking care of his body who does
+not wash and rub it once every twenty-four hours, and once or twice a
+week with warm water and soap. It is often stated that hot baths are
+weakening, but I have never found it so; however, I think it is a bad
+practice to pamper the body, which should be accustomed to the shock of
+cold water. The rule as to bathing, both as to temperature and time, is
+simple. If, after the bath and rub-down, your body has reacted and you
+feel vigorous and fresh, that bath has done you good. If, on the other
+hand, you feel chilled and depressed, then you have been too long in the
+water, or its temperature was too low. Every person has to find his own
+rules in such matters. The only general rule is that as one grows older
+the body reacts less quickly.
+
+All day, as we work and think, we store up more poisons in our cells
+than the body can get rid of, and the time comes when the cells are so
+loaded with poisons that we have to stop for a while, and let our
+blood-stream clean house. The quantity of sleep one needs is a problem
+like that of cold water; each person has to find his own rule. In
+general, one needs less and less sleep as one grows older. Infants sleep
+the greater part of the time; growing children should sleep ten or
+eleven hours, adults seven or eight, and old people, unless they have
+let themselves get fat, generally do not want to sleep more than six,
+and part of this in short naps. When you sleep, your bodily energies
+relax, and you make less heat, therefore you need extra clothing; but
+this clothing should never cover the mouth and nose, nor should it be so
+heavy as to make breathing a burden. If you are in good condition, it
+will do you no harm to be chilly when you sleep, except that you do not
+sleep so soundly. Sleeping too much is just as harmful as sleeping too
+little. Nature will tell you that. The important thing, as in all other
+problems of health, is to have something interesting to think about,
+some exciting work to do in the world, and then you will sleep as little
+as you have too.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+WORK AND PLAY
+
+     (Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and the
+     overworked.)
+
+
+In discussing the important question of exercise, there is one
+fundamental fact to begin with: that our present civilization divides
+men sharply into two classes, those who do not get enough exercise, and
+those who get too much. Obviously it would be folly to make the same
+recommendations to the two classes.
+
+I begin with those who get too much exercise. They include a great
+number, probably the majority of those who do the manual work of the
+world. They include the farmers and the farm-hands, who work from dawn
+to sunset, and sometimes by lantern light. They include also the
+farmers' wives, the kitchen slaves of whom the old couplet tells:
+
+    "Man's work ends from sun to sun,
+     But woman's work is never done."
+
+I am aware that men have worked that way for countless ages, and yet the
+race is still surviving; but I am aware also that men wither up with
+rheumatism, and contract chronic diseases of the kidneys and the blood
+vessels, consequent upon the creation of greater quantities of fatigue
+poisons than the body can regularly eliminate.
+
+I have very little interest in the past, and none whatever in finding
+fault with it. My purpose is to criticize the present for the benefit of
+the future, and therefore I say that modern machinery and the whole
+development of modern large-scale production make it absolutely
+unnecessary that women should slave all their waking hours in kitchens,
+or that men should slave all day. I say it is monstrous folly that men
+should work for twelve-hour stretches in steel mills, and for ten and
+eleven hours in factories and mines. Organized labor has adopted the
+slogan, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for
+play"; but my slogan is "Four hours for work, four hours for study,
+eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for play."
+
+I know, and am prepared to demonstrate to any thinking man, that modern
+civilization can produce, not merely all the necessities, but all the
+comforts of life for every man, woman and child in the community, by the
+expenditure of four hours a day work of the adult, able-bodied men and
+women. So to all the wage slaves of the factories and mines, the fields
+and the kitchens, I say that too much exercise is what is the matter
+with you, and what you need is to get off in a quiet nook in the woods
+and read a good novel, not merely for a few hours, but for a few months,
+until you get over the effects of capitalist civilization. I know that
+not many of you can get away as yet, but I urge you to insist upon
+getting away, to fight for the chance to get away; and I will here
+suggest a few of the novels for you to read when finally you do get
+away. I choose the easy ones, which the dullest and most tired of you
+will love; I say, make up your mind to read these thirty-two books
+before you die, and do not let the world cheat you out of your chance!
+
+Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Charles D.
+Stewart: The Fugitive Blacksmith. W. Clark Russell: The Wreck of the
+Grosvenor. R. L. Stevenson: Treasure Island, Kidnapped. Jack London: The
+Sea Wolf, The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden. Joseph Conrad: Youth. H. G.
+Wells: The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, The Sea Lady, The
+History of Mr. Polly, The Food of the Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreau.
+Upton Sinclair: The Jungle, King Coal, Jimmie Higgins, 100 Per Cent.
+Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie. George Moore: Esther Waters. Frank
+Norris: The Octopus. Brand Whitlock: The Turn of the Balance. De Foe:
+Robinson Crusoe. Fielding: Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild the Great.
+Thackeray: The Adventures of Barry Lyndon. Marmaduke Pickthall: The
+Adventures of Hadji Baba. Blasco Ibanez: The Fruit of the Vine. Frank
+Harris: Montes the Matador. Frederik van Eeden: The Quest. Tolstoi:
+Resurrection.
+
+And now for the people who do not get enough exercise. In the armies of
+King Cyrus it was the law that every man was required to sweat once
+every twenty-four hours, and that is still the law for every business
+man and office-worker and writer of books. There is no substitute for
+it, and there is no health without it. I have heard Dr. Kellogg say that
+the modern woman sends out her health with her washing, and I have
+heard the leisure class ladies at the Sanitarium discuss this cryptic
+utterance and wonder what he meant by it. I know that there is use
+telling leisure class ladies what exercise at the wash-tub would do for
+their abdomens and backs. I will only tell them that unless they can
+find some kind of vigorous activity which keeps them in a free
+perspiration for an hour or two each day, they will never be really
+well, and will never bear children without agony and abortion.
+
+For myself, I have found that the minimum is three or four times a week.
+Unless I get that much hard exercise I am soon in trouble. So my advice
+to the business man is to take off his coat and collar and turn out and
+help his truck-man; my advice to the white collar slave is to get a
+part-time job, and dig ditches the rest of the time. To the man who has
+cares which pursue him, and likewise to the ardent student and
+brain-worker, I say that they should find, not merely exercise, but
+play. The distinction between the two things is important. There can be
+play that is not exercise, for example cards and chess; and, of course,
+there can be exercise that is not play. What you must have is something
+that is both play and exercise; something that not merely causes your
+heart to beat fast, and your lungs to pump fast, and your sweat glands
+to throw out poisons from your body, but something that fully occupies
+your mind and gives your higher brain centers a chance to relax.
+
+Our civilization has very largely destroyed the possibility of play and
+the spirit of play. We civilized people no longer know what play is, and
+regard the desire to play as something abnormal--a form of vice. We
+allow children to play after school hours, and on Saturdays; but for
+grown-up, serious-minded men and women to want to play would be almost
+as disreputable as for them to want to get drunk. What could foe more
+pitiful than the spectacle of tens of thousands of men crowding into our
+baseball parks and amusement fields to watch other men play for them!
+Imagine, if you can, a crowd of people gathering in a restaurant or
+theater to watch other people _eat_ for them! Imagine yourself a man
+from Mars, coming down to a world with so many people in want, and
+finding whole classes of men forbidden to do any work, under penalty of
+disgrace, and compelled, in order to exercise their muscles, to pull on
+rubber straps and lift weights and wave dumb-bells and Indian clubs in
+the air--methods of expending their muscular energy which are
+respectable because they accomplish nothing!
+
+When I was a boy, I was fond of all kinds of games. I was a good tennis
+player, and in the country an incessant hunter and fisherman. When on
+the city streets we boys could not find any other game to play, we would
+get up on the roofs of the houses and throw clothes-pins and snow-balls
+at the "Dagoes" working in the nearby excavations; so we had the fine
+game of being chased by the "Dagoes," with the chance, real or
+imaginary, of having a knife stuck into us. But then, as I grew older,
+and became aware of the pain and misery of the world, I lost my interest
+in games, and for ten years or so I never played; I did nothing but
+study and write. So my health gave way, and I had the problem of
+restoring it, and I spent some twenty years wrestling with this problem,
+before I thoroughly convinced myself on the point that there can be no
+such thing as sound and permanent health without a certain amount of
+play.
+
+I don't think there is any kind of hard physical work I failed to try,
+in the course of my experiments. I rode horseback, and took long walks,
+and climbed mountains, and swam, and dug gardens, and chopped down whole
+groves of trees and cut them up and carried them to the fireplace. I
+have done this latter work for a whole winter in the country, several
+hours every day, and it has done my health no good to speak of; I have
+been ready for a breakdown at the end of it. The reason is that all the
+time I was doing these things with my body, I was going right on working
+my brain. While I was swimming or climbing a mountain or galloping on
+horseback, I was absorbed in the next chapter of the book I was writing,
+so that I literally did not know where I was. I would make up my mind
+that I would not think about my work, and would make desperate efforts
+not to do so; but it was like walking along the edge of a slippery
+ditch--sooner or later I was bound to fall in, and go floundering along,
+unable to get out again!
+
+And the same thing applies to all gymnastic work. I have experimented
+with a dozen different systems of exercises, and with all kinds of water
+treatments; I have used dumb-bells and Indian clubs and Swedish
+gymnastics, MacFadden's exercises in bed, and the Yogi breathing
+exercises, and more kinds of queer things than I can remember now; but
+for me there is only one solution of the problem, which is to have an
+antagonist. It may be a deer I am trying to shoot, or some trout I am
+trying to lure out of their holes; it may be some boys I am trying to
+beat at football or hockey, or it may be the game I know best and find
+most convenient, which is tennis. If it is tennis, then it has to be
+someone who can make me work as hard as I know how; for if it is someone
+I can beat easily, why, before I have been playing ten minutes, I am
+busily working out the next chapter of a book, or answering letters I
+have just got in the mail.
+
+Recently I came upon a book, "The Psychology of Relaxation," by Dr.
+Patrick, in which the theory of this is set forth. Civilized man is
+working his higher brain centers more than his body can stand; his brain
+is running away with him, absorbing a constantly increasing share of his
+energies. True relaxation is only possible where the higher brain
+centers are lulled, and the back lobes of the brain brought into
+activity. One of the means of doing this is alcohol, and that is why
+through the ages all races of men have craved to get drunk. There is a
+method which is harmless, and does not break down the system, and that
+is play. When we become really interested in play, we are as children,
+or as primitive man; we do all the things that our race used to do many
+ages ago; we hunt and fight, we pit our wits against the wits of our
+enemies, and struggle with desperation to get the better of them. If our
+play is physical play, if we are absorbed in a game or bodily contest,
+then we are exerting and developing all those portions of us which
+civilization tends to atrophy and deaden.
+
+There are people who will dispute with you about Socialism, and ask, how
+we are going to provide incentives if we do away with wage slavery. When
+you tell them that activity is natural to human beings, and that if
+there were no work, men and women would have to make some, they shake
+their heads mournfully and tell you about the problem of "human nature."
+But consider games and sports: men do not have to work their bodies, yet
+they go out and deliberately hunt for trouble! They invent themselves
+subtle and complicated games, and are not content until they find people
+who can beat them at it, or at any rate can make them work to the limit
+of their strength, until they are in a dripping perspiration and
+thoroughly exhausted! I may be too optimistic about "human nature," but
+I believe that this is the attitude every normal human being takes
+toward the powers, both mental and physical, which he possesses; he
+wants to use them, and for all they are worth. If you don't believe it,
+just take any group of youngsters, give them a baseball and bat, turn
+them loose in a vacant lot, and watch them "choose up sides" and fall to
+work, screaming and shouting in wild excitement! There are some races of
+the earth which do not yet know baseball, but the Filipinos and the
+Japanese have learned it, and even the war-worn "Poilus" and the
+supercilious "Tommies" condescended to experiment with it. And if you
+think it is only physical competition that young human animals enjoy,
+try them at putting on a play, or printing a magazine, or conducting a
+debate, or building a house--anything whatever that involves healthy
+competition, and is related to the big things of life, but without being
+for the profit of some exploiter! Get clear the plain and simple
+distinction between work and play: play is what you want to do, while
+work is what the profit system makes you do!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE FASTING CURE
+
+     (Deals with nature's own remedy for disease, and how to make use of
+     it.)
+
+
+We have next to consider the various human ailments, what causes them,
+and how they can be remedied. As it happens, I know of a cure that comes
+pretty near being that impossible thing, a "cure-all." At any rate, it
+is so far ahead of all other cures, that a discussion of it will cover
+three-fourths of the subject.
+
+When I was a boy living in New York, there was a man by the name of Dr.
+Tanner, who took a forty-day fast. He was on public exhibition at the
+time, and was supposed to be watched day and night; the newspapers gave
+a great deal of attention to the story, and crowds used to come to gaze
+at him. I remember very well the conversations I heard about the matter.
+People were quite sure that it couldn't be true. The man must be getting
+something to eat on the sly; he must have some nourishment in the water
+he drank; no human being could fast more than five or six days without
+starving to death.
+
+In the year 1910 I published in the United States and England a magazine
+article telling how on several occasions I had fasted ten or twelve
+days, and what I had accomplished by it. I found that I had the same
+difficulty to confront as old Dr. Tanner; I received scores of letters
+from people who called me a "faker," and I read scores of newspaper
+editorials to the same effect. The New York Times published a dispatch
+about three young ladies on Long Island who were trying a three-day
+fast, and the Times commented editorially to the effect that these young
+ladies were "the victims of a shallow and unscrupulous sensationalist."
+
+The notion that human beings can perish for lack of food in a few days
+is deeply rooted in people's minds. Recently a group of eleven Irishmen
+in jail set to work to starve themselves to death, as a protest against
+British rule in their country. Day after day the newspapers reported the
+news from Cork prison, and at about the twentieth day they began to
+state that the prisoners were dying, that the priest had been sent for,
+that their relatives were gathered on the prison steps. Day after day
+such reports continued, through the thirties, and the forties, and the
+fifties, and the sixties, and the seventies. One man died on the
+eighty-eighth day, and MacSwiney died on the seventy-fourth. The other
+nine gave up after ninety-four days and were all restored to health. I
+watched carefully the newspaper and magazine comment on this incident,
+yet I did not see a single remark on the medical aspects of it; I could
+not discover that scientific men had learned anything whatever about the
+ability of the body to go without food for long periods.
+
+Get this clear at the outset: Nobody ever "starved to death" in less
+than two months, and it is possible for a fat person to go without food
+for as long as three or four months. People who "starve to death" in
+shorter times do not die of starvation, but of fright. The first time I
+fasted happened to be at the time of the Messina earthquake. I was
+walking about, perfectly serene and happy, having been without food for
+three days, and I read in my newspaper how the rescue ships had reached
+Messina, and found the population ravenous, in the agonies of
+starvation, some of the people having been without food for seventy-two
+hours! (It sounds so much worse, you see, when you state it in hours.)
+
+The second point to get clear is that the fast is a physiological
+process; that is to say, it is something which nature understands and
+carries through in her own serene and efficient way. When you take a
+fast, you are not carrying out a freak notion of your own, or of mine;
+you are discovering a lost instinct. Every cat and dog knows enough not
+to take food when it is ill; it is only in hospitals conducted by modern
+medical science that the custom prevails of serving elaborate "trays" to
+invalids. I remember a story about a man who made himself a reputation
+and a fortune by curing the pet dogs of the rich. These beautiful little
+creatures, which sleep between silken covers, and have several servants
+to wait upon them, and are fed from gold and silver dishes upon rich and
+elaborately cooked foods, fall victim to as many diseases as their
+mistresses, and they would be brought to this specialist, who conducted
+his dog hospital in an old brickyard. In each one of the compartments of
+the brick kiln he would shut up a dog with a supply of fresh water, a
+crust of stale bread, a piece of bacon rind, and the sole of an old
+shoe; and after a few days he would go back and find that the dog had
+eaten the crust of bread, and then he would write to the owner that the
+dog was on the high road to recovery. He would go back a few days later
+and find that the dog had eaten the piece of bacon rind, and then he
+would write that the dog was very nearly cured. He would wait until the
+dog had eaten the piece of shoe leather, and then he would write that
+the dog was completely cured, and the owner might come and take it away.
+
+Just what is the process of the fast cure? I do not pretend to know
+positively. I can only make guesses, and wait for science to
+investigate. I believe that the main source of the diseases of civilized
+man is improper nutrition, and the clogging of the system with food
+poisons in various stages. And when you fast you do two things: first,
+you stop entirely the fresh supply of those food poisons, and second,
+you allow the whole of the body's digestive and assimilative tract to
+rest--to go to sleep, as it were--so that all the body's energy may go
+to other organs. The body carries with it at all times a surplus store
+of nutriment, which can be taken up and used by the blood stream,
+apparently with much less trouble than is required to convert fresh food
+to the body's uses. In other words, the body can feed on its own tissues
+more easily than it can feed from the stomach. In the fast you may lose
+anywhere from half a pound to two pounds in weight per day, and this
+will be taken, first from your store of fat, and then from your muscular
+tissues. Every part of your muscular tissue will be taken, before
+anything is taken from your vital organs, your nerves or your
+blood-stream. So long as there is a particle of muscular material left,
+so long as you can make even the slightest movement of one finger, you
+are still fasting, and it is only when your muscular tissue is all gone
+that you begin at last to starve. So far as I know, the cases of
+MacSwiney and the other Irishman are the only cases on record where
+fasters have died of starvation.
+
+What the body does during the fast is quite plain, and can be told by
+many symptoms. It begins a thorough house-cleaning, throwing out
+poisonous material by every channel. The perspiration and the breath
+become offensive, the tongue becomes heavily coated, so that you can
+scrape the material off with a knife. I have heard vegetarians explain
+this by saying that when the body is living off its own tissues, it is
+following a cannibal diet; but that is all nonsense, because you can
+live on meat exclusively, and quickly satisfy yourself that none of
+these symptoms occurs. It is evident that the body is taking advantage
+of the opportunity to get rid of waste products; and this will go on for
+ten days, for twenty days, in some cases for as long as forty or fifty
+days; and then suddenly occurs a strange thing: in spite of the
+"cannibal diet" the symptoms all come to a sudden end. The tongue
+clears, the breath becomes sweet, the appetite suddenly awakens.
+
+During the period of a normal fast you lose all interest in food. You
+almost forget that there is such a thing as eating; you can look at food
+without any more desire for it than you have to swallow marbles and
+carpet tacks. But then suddenly appetite returns, as I have explained,
+and you find that you can think of nothing but food. This is what
+students of the subject describe as a "complete fast," and while I do
+not want to go to extremes and say that the "complete fast" will cure
+every case of every disease, I can certainly say this: in the letters
+which have come to me from people who tried the fast at my suggestion,
+there are cases of every kind of common disease. In my book, "The
+Fasting Cure," I give the results in cases reported to me after the
+publication of my first magazine article. I quote two paragraphs:
+
+"The total number of fasts taken was 277, and the average number of days
+was six. There were 90 of five days or over, 51 of ten days or over, and
+six of 30 days or over. Out of the 119 person who wrote to me, 100
+reported benefit, and 17 no benefit. Of these 17 about half give wrong
+breaking of the fast as the reason for the failure. In cases where the
+cure had not proved permanent, about half mentioned that the recurrence
+of the trouble was caused by wrong eating, and about half of the rest
+made this quite evident by what they said. Also it is to be noted that
+in the cases of the 17 who got no benefit, nearly all were fasts of only
+three or four days.
+
+"Following is the complete list of diseases benefited--45 of the cases
+having been diagnosed by physicians: indigestion (usually associated
+with nervousness), 27; rheumatism, 5; colds, 8; tuberculosis, 4;
+constipation, 14; poor circulation, 3; headaches, 5; anaemia, 3;
+scrofula, 1; bronchial trouble, 5; syphilis, 1; liver trouble, 5;
+general debility, 5; chills and fever, 1; blood poisoning, 1; ulcerated
+leg, 1; neurasthenia, 6; locomotor ataxia, 1; sciatica, 1; asthma, 2;
+excess of uric acid, 1; epilepsy, 1; pleurisy, 1; impaction of bowels,
+1; eczema, 2; catarrh, 6; appendicitis, 3; valvular disease of heart, 1;
+insomnia, 1; gas poisoning, 1; grippe, 1; cancer, 1."
+
+There are many diseases with many causes, and some yield more quickly
+than others to the fast. In the first group I put the diseases of the
+digestive and alimentary tract. Stomach and bowel troubles, and the
+nervous disorders occasioned by these, stop almost immediately when you
+fast. Next come disorders of the blood-stream, which are generally a
+second stage of digestive troubles. Everything immediately due to
+impurities of the blood, pimples, boils, and ulcers, inflammation, badly
+healing wounds, etc., respond to a few days of fasting as to the magic
+touch of the old-time legends. When it comes to diseases caused by germ
+infections, you have a double aspect of the problem, and must have a
+double method of attack. I would not like to say that fasting could cure
+such a disease as sleeping sickness, to the germs of which our systems
+are not accustomed, and against which they may well be helpless. On the
+other hand, in the case of common infections, such as colds and sore
+throats, the fast is again the touch of magic. Having been plagued a
+great deal by these ailments in past times, I am accustomed to say that
+I would not trade my knowledge of fasting for everything else that I
+know about health.
+
+The first thing you must do if you want to take a fast is to read the
+literature on the subject and make up your mind that the experiment will
+do you no injury. You should also try to get your relatives to make up
+their minds, because you are nervous when you are fasting, and cannot
+withstand the attacks of the people around you, who will go into a panic
+and throw you into a panic. As I said before, it is quite possible for
+people to die of panic, but I do not believe that anybody ever died of a
+fast. I have known of two or three cases of people dying while they were
+fasting, but I feel quite certain that the fast did not cause their
+death; they would have died anyhow. You must bear in mind that among the
+people who try the fast, a great many are in a desperate condition; some
+have been given up by the doctors, and if now and then one of these
+should die, we may surely say that they died in spite of the fast, and
+not because of it. There is no physician who can save every patient, and
+it would be absurd to expect this. I have read scores of letters from
+people who were at the point of death from such "fatal" diseases as
+Bright's disease, sclerosis of the liver, and fatty degeneration of the
+heart, and were literally snatched out of the jaws of death by beginning
+a fast. I would not like to guess just what percentage of dying people
+in our hospitals might be saved if the doctors would withdraw all food
+from them, but I await with interest the time when medical science will
+have the intelligence to try that simple experiment and report the
+results.
+
+Just the other day in the Los Angeles county jail, a chiropractor went
+on hunger strike, as a protest against imprisonment, and he fasted 41
+days. Then he broke his fast, the reason being given that his pulse was
+down to 54, and he was afraid of dying. I smiled to myself. The normal
+pulse is 70. I have taken my pulse many times at the end of a ten-day
+fast, and it has been as low as 32, and I am not dead yet, and if I wait
+to die from the symptoms of a fast, I expect to live a long time indeed!
+
+The first time I fasted, I felt very weak, and lay around and hardly
+cared to lift my head; if I walked from my bed to the lawn, I was tired
+in the legs. But since then I have grown used to fasting. I have fasted
+for a week probably twenty or thirty times, and on such occasions I have
+gone about my business as if nothing were happening. Of course I would
+not try to play tennis, or to climb a mountain, but it is a fact that on
+the seventh day of a fast in New York, I climbed the five or six flights
+of stairs to the top of the Metropolitan Opera House, and felt no ill
+effects from doing this. I climbed slowly, and was careful not to tire
+myself. The simple rule is not to have anything that you must do on the
+fast, and then do what you feel like doing. Lie down and rest, and read
+a book, and take as much exercise as you find you enjoy. Keep your mind
+quiet and free from worries, and lock out of the house everybody who
+tells you that your heart is going to stop beating in the next few
+minutes, and that you must have an injection of strychnine to start it,
+and some beefsteak and fried onions to "restore your strength." Give
+yourself up to the care of your wise old mother nature, who will attend
+to your heart just as securely and serenely as she attended to it in the
+days before you were born.
+
+By fasting I mean that you take no food whatever. I know some nature
+cure teachers who practice what they call a "fruit fast." All I know is
+that if I eat nothing but fruit, I soon have my stomach boiling with
+fermentation, and also I suffer with hunger; whereas, if I take a
+complete fast, I promptly forget all about food. You must drink all the
+water you can on the fast. This helps nature with her house-cleaning; it
+is well to drink a glass of water every half hour at least. Do not try
+to go without water, and then write me that the fasting cure is a
+failure. Also please do not write and ask me if it will be fasting if
+you take just a little crackers and milk, or some soup, or something
+else that you think doesn't count!
+
+I recommend a dose of laxative to clean out the system at the beginning
+of a fast, because the bowels are apt to become sluggish at once, and
+the quicker you get the system cleansed, the better. It does no good to
+take laxatives if you are going to pile in more food, but if you are
+going to fast, that is a different matter. You should take a full warm
+enema every day during the fast, so long as it brings any results. There
+are some people whose bowels are so frightfully clogged that I have
+known the enema to bring results even in the second and third weeks. On
+the other hand, if there is no solid matter to be removed, a small enema
+every day will suffice. Take a warm bath every day; and needless to say,
+you should get all the fresh air you can, and should sleep as much as
+you can. You may have difficulty in sleeping, because the fast is apt to
+make you nervous and wakeful. I have known people who could not fast
+because they could not sleep, and I have taught them a little trick, to
+put a hot water bottle at the feet, and another on the abdomen, to draw
+the blood away from the head. So they would quickly fall asleep, and
+they got great benefit from their fasts.
+
+You should supply yourself with good music if you can, and with plenty
+of good reading matter. You will be amazed to find how active your mind
+becomes; perhaps you had never known before what a mind you had. Your
+blood has always been so clogged with food poisons that you didn't know
+you could think. My three act play, "The Nature Woman," was conceived
+and written in two days and a half on a fast; but I do not recommend
+this kind of thing--on the contrary, I strongly urge against it, because
+if you work your brain on a fast, you do not get the good from your
+fast, and do not recover so quickly. Put off all your problems until you
+have got your health back, and seek only to divert your mind while
+fasting.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+BREAKING THE FAST
+
+     (Discusses various methods of building up the body after a fast,
+     especially the milk diet.)
+
+
+There remains the question of how to break the fast, and this is the
+most important part of the problem. You may undo all the good of your
+fast by breaking it wrong, and you are a thousand times as apt to kill
+yourself then, as while you are fasting. When your hunger comes back, it
+comes back with a rush, and some people have not the will power to
+control it.
+
+I do not advocate a complete fast in any case except of serious chronic
+disease, and then only under the advice of someone with experience; but
+I advocate a short fast of a week or ten days for almost every common
+ailment, and I know that such a fast will help, even where it may not
+completely cure. You may go on fasting so long as you are quiet and
+happy; but when you find you are becoming too weak for comfort, or for
+the peace of mind of your family physician and your friends, you may
+break your fast, and show them that it is possible to restore your
+strength and body weight, and then they won't bother so much when you
+try it again! Take nothing but liquid foods in the breaking of a fast; I
+recommend the juices of fruits and tomatoes, also meat broths. If you
+have fasted a week or two, take a quarter of a glass; if you have fasted
+a month, take a tablespoonful, and wait and see what the results are.
+Remember that your whole alimentary tract is out of action, and give it
+a chance to start up slowly. Take small quantities of liquid food every
+two hours for the first day. Then you can begin taking larger
+quantities, and on the next day you can try some milk, or a soft poached
+egg, or the pulp of cooked apples or prunes. Do not take any solid food
+until you are quite sure you can digest it, and then take only a very
+little. Do not take any starchy food until the third day.
+
+I have known people to break these rules. I knew a man who broke his
+fast on hamburg steak, and had to be helped out with a stomach pump.
+Once I broke a week's fast with a plate of rich soup, because I was at a
+friend's house and there was nothing else, and I yielded to the claims
+of hospitality, and made myself ill and had to fast for several days
+longer.
+
+The easiest way to break a fast is upon a milk diet. I have seen
+hundreds of people take this diet, and very few who did not get benefit.
+The first time I fasted, which was twelve days, I lost 17 pounds, and I
+took the milk diet for 24 days thereafter, and gained 32 pounds. I took
+it at MacFadden's Sanitarium, where I had every attention. Since then, I
+have many times tried to take a milk diet by myself, but have never been
+able to get it to agree with me. I do not know how to explain this fact;
+I state it, to show how hard it is to lay down general rules. On the
+milk diet you take into your system two or three times as much food as
+you can assimilate, and this is a violation of all my diet rules; but it
+appears that the bacteria which thrive in milk produce lactic acid,
+which is not harmful to the system, and if you do not take other foods
+you may safely keep the system flooded with milk.
+
+After a fast you should begin with small quantities of milk, and by the
+third day you may be taking a full glass of warm milk every half hour or
+every twenty minutes, until you have taken seven or eight quarts per
+day. It is better to take it warm, but sometimes people take it just as
+well without warming. Dr. Porter, who has a book on the milk diet,
+insists upon complete rest, and makes his patients stay in bed.
+MacFadden, on the other hand, recommends gymnastics in the morning
+before the milk, and during the afternoon he recommends a rest from the
+milk for a couple of hours, followed by abdominal exercises to keep the
+bowels open. This is very important during a fast, because you are
+taking great quantities of material into your system and it must not be
+permitted to clog. Therefore take an enema daily, if necessary to a free
+movement. Also take a warm bath daily. Take the juice of oranges and
+lemons if you crave them.
+
+Upon one thing everyone who has had experience with the milk diet
+agrees, and that is the necessity of absolute mental rest. If you
+become excited, or nervous, or angry on a milk diet, you may turn all
+the contents of your stomach into hard curds, and may put yourself into
+convulsions. The wonderful thing about the milk diet is the state of
+physical and mental bliss it makes possible. It is the ideal way of
+breaking a fast, because it leaves you no chance to get hungry; you have
+all the food you want, and your system is bathed in happiness, a sense
+of peace and well-being which is truly marvelous and not to be
+described. You gain anywhere from half a pound to two pounds a day, and
+you feel that you have never before in your life known what perfect
+health could be. The fast sets you a new standard, you discover how
+nature meant you to enjoy life, and never again are you content with
+that kind of half existence with which you managed to worry along before
+you discovered this remedy.
+
+But let me hasten to add that I do not recommend the fast as a regular
+habit of life. The fast is an emergency measure, to enable the body to
+cleanse itself and to cure disease. When you have got your body clean
+and free from disease, it is your business to keep it that way, and you
+should apply your reason to the problem of how to live so that you will
+not have to fast. If you find that you continue to have ailments, then
+you must be eating wrongly, or overworking, or committing some other
+offense against nature; either that, or else you must have some organic
+trouble--a bone in your spine out of place, as the osteopaths tell you,
+or your eyes out of focus, or your appendix twisted and infected. I do
+not claim that the fasting cure will supplant the surgeons and the
+oculists and the dentists. It will not mend your bones if you break
+them, and it will not repair your teeth that are already decayed; but it
+will help to keep your teeth from decaying in the future, and it will
+help you to prepare for a surgical operation, and to recover from it
+more quickly. I had to undergo an operation for rupture a couple of
+years ago, and I fasted for two days before the operation, and for three
+days after it, and I had no particle of nausea from the ether, and was
+able to tend to my mail the day after the operation.
+
+There is one disease for which I hesitate to recommend the fast, and
+that is tuberculosis, because I have been told of cases in which the
+patient lost weight and did not recover it. However, in my tabulation
+of 277 cases, you will note four cases of tuberculosis, and in my book
+is given a letter from a patient who claimed great benefit. If I had the
+misfortune to contract tuberculosis, I would take a three or four day
+fast, followed by a milk diet for a long period. The milk diet is
+pleasant to take, and it cannot possibly do any harm. If it did not
+effect a cure, I would try the Salisbury treatment--that is, lean meat
+ground up and medium cooked, and nothing else, except an abundance of
+hot water between meals. Prof. Irving Fisher wrote me that there is
+urgent need of experiment to determine proper diet in tuberculosis; and
+until these experiments have been made, we can only grope. I am quite
+sure that the "stuffing system," ordinarily used by doctors, is a tragic
+mistake.
+
+In the case of any other disease whatever, even though I might take
+medical or surgical treatment, I would supplement this by a fast,
+because there is no kind of treatment which does not succeed better with
+the blood in good condition. In the case of emergencies, accidents,
+wounds, etc., I would rest assured that recovery would be more prompt if
+I were fasting. When David Graham Phillips was shot, I wrote a letter to
+the New York Call, saying that his doctors had killed him, because they
+had fed him while he was lying in a critical condition in the hospital.
+To take nutriment into the body under such circumstances is the greatest
+of blunders.
+
+The fast will help children, just as it helps adults, only they do not
+need to fast so long. It will help the aged and make them feel young.
+(You need not be afraid to fast, no matter how old you are.) It is, of
+course, an immediate cure for fatness, and strange as it may seem, it is
+also a cure for unnatural thinness. People with ravenous appetites are
+just as apt to be thin as to be fat, because it is not what you eat that
+builds up your body, but only what you assimilate, and if you eat too
+much, you can make it impossible to assimilate anything properly. If you
+take a fast and break it carefully, your body will come to its normal
+weight, and all your functions to their normal activity.
+
+A physician wrote me, taking me to task for listing among the cures
+reported in my tabulation a case of locomotor ataxia. This disease, he
+explained, is caused because a portion of a nerve has been entirely
+destroyed, and it is a disease that is absolutely and positively and
+forever incurable. I answered that I knew this to be the teaching of
+present day medical science, but I invited him to consider for a moment
+what happens in nature. When a crab loses a claw, we do not take it as a
+matter of course that the crab must go about with one claw for the
+balance of its life; nature will make that crab another claw. Man has
+lost the power of replacing a lost leg, but he stills retains the power
+of replacing tissue which has been cut away by a surgeon's knife, and
+medical science takes this as a matter of course. How shall anybody say
+that nature has forever lost the power of rebuilding a bit of nervous
+tissue? How shall anyone say that if the blood-stream is cleansed of
+poisons, and the energy of the whole body restored, one of the results
+may not be the repairing of a broken nerve connection? I invite my
+readers who have ailments, and especially I invite all medical men among
+my readers, to make a fair test of the fasting cure. The results will
+surprise them, and they will quickly be forced to revise their methods
+of treating illness.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+DISEASES AND CURES
+
+     (Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and what is known
+     about their cause and cure.)
+
+
+I begin with the commonest of all troubles, known as a "cold." This name
+implies that the cause of the trouble lies in exposure or chill. All the
+grandmothers of the world are agreed about this. They have a phrase--or
+at least they had it when I was a boy: "You will catch your death."
+Every time I went out in the rain, every time I played with wet feet, or
+sat in a draft, or got under a cold shower, I would hear the formula,
+"You will catch your death."
+
+And, on the other hand, there are the "health cranks," who declare
+vehemently that the name "cold" is a misnomer and a trap for people's
+thoughts. Cold has nothing to do with it, they say, and point to arctic
+explorers who frequently get frozen to death, but do not "catch cold"
+until they get back into the warm rooms of civilization. As for drafts,
+the "health cranks" aver that a draft is merely "fresh air moving";
+which is supposed to settle the matter. However, when you come to think
+about it, you realize that a cyclone is likewise merely "fresh air
+moving," so you have not decided the question by a phrase.
+
+While I was writing these chapters on health I contracted a severe
+cold--which was a joke on me. The history of this cold is as clear in my
+mind as anything human can be, and it will serve for an illustration,
+showing how much truth the grandmothers have on their side, and how much
+the "health cranks" have.
+
+To begin with, I had been overworking. All sorts of appeals come to me;
+hundreds of people write me letters, and I cannot bear to leave them
+unanswered. I accepted calls to speak, and invitations where I had to
+eat a lot of stuff of which my reason disapproves; so one morning I woke
+up with a slight sore throat. I fasted all day, and by evening felt all
+right. But there came another call, and I consented to take a long
+automobile ride on a cold and rainy night, and when I got back home,
+after five or six hours, I was thoroughly chilled, and my "cold" came on
+during the night.
+
+This explanation will, I imagine, be satisfactory to all the
+grandmothers of the world. All the dear, good grandmothers know that an
+automobile ride on a cold, rainy night is enough to give any man "his
+death." But listen, grandmothers! I have lain out watching for deer all
+night in the late fall, with only a thin blanket to cover me, and gotten
+up so stiff with cold that I could hardly move; yet I did not "catch
+cold." When I was a youth, I have ridden a bicycle twenty miles to the
+beach in April, with snow on the ground, and plunged into the surf and
+swam, and then ridden home again. I have bathed in the sea when I had to
+run a quarter of a mile in a bathing suit along a frost-covered pier,
+and with an icy wind blowing through my bones; yet I never took cold
+from that, and never got anything but a feeling of exhilaration. So it
+must be that there is some reason why exposure causes colds at one time
+and not at another.
+
+The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." They understand
+that your blood-stream must be clogged, your bodily tone reduced by bad
+air and lack of exercise, and more especially by over-eating, or by an
+improperly balanced diet. But then most of them go to extremes, and
+insist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my body had
+nothing to do with my cold. But I know otherwise--I have watched the
+thing happen so often. In times when I was run down, the slightest
+exposure would cause me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got
+myself a sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with
+nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with wet feet, or
+by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, when I had been perspiring a
+little. How to explain this I am not sure, but my guess is that you
+drive the blood away from the surface of the body at a time when it is
+weakened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army of the
+white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body to the germs.
+
+I know there are nature curists who argue that germs have nothing to do
+with disease; but they have never been able to convince me--germs are
+too real, and too many, and too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of
+meat exposed to the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will
+settle upon it and begin to feed upon it and to multiply; the meat,
+being dead, is powerless to protect itself. But your nose and throat are
+also meat, and just as good food for the germs. The only difference is
+that this meat is alive, there is a living blood-stream circulating
+through it, and several score billions of the body's own kind of germs,
+the blood corpuscles. If these blood corpuscles are sound and properly
+nourished, and are brought to the place of infection, they are able to
+destroy all the common germs; so it is that you do not have diseases,
+but instead have health. But your health always implies a struggle of
+your organism against other organisms, and it is the business of your
+reason to watch your body and give all the help you can in protecting
+it. Coughs and colds, sore throats and headaches, are the first warnings
+that your defenses are being weakened. As a rule these ailments are not
+serious in themselves, but they are signs of a wrong condition, and if
+you neglect this condition, pretty soon you will find that you have to
+deal with something deadly.
+
+My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, eat nothing for
+twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. If you have a severe cold
+or sore throat, you will be wise to lie in bed for a day or two, by an
+open window. You may also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you
+will find them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous
+membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In the old sad
+days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go to the doctor, and have
+my throat and nose pumped full of black and green and yellow and purple
+liquids, which did me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay
+on for two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and I would
+be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by inches, and not one of
+the doctors could tell me why.
+
+The next most common ailment is a headache, and this means poisons in
+your blood-stream. It may be from improper diet, from alcohol, or drugs,
+or bad air, or nervous excitement. If it is none of these things, then
+you should begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for
+example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths and the
+chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made important
+discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the nervous force which
+directs the blood-stream is carried to the organs of the body by nerves
+which leave the spinal cord through openings between the vertebrae. If
+any of these openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply,
+which means ill-health in that part of the body to which the nerve
+leads. That such trouble can be corrected by straightening the bones of
+the spine, seems perfectly reasonable; but like most people with a new
+idea, the discoverers proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have
+before me an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral
+displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety-five per
+cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per cent being due to
+subluxations of other skeletal segments." Naturally people who believe
+this will devote nearly all their study to the bones and the nervous
+system. But surely, there are other parts of your body which are
+necessary besides bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts
+happen to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not focus
+properly, and you are continually wearing out the optic nerve, thus
+giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia? What if you have an appendix
+that has been twisted and malformed from birth, and is a center of
+infection so long as it remains in the body?
+
+Several years ago I had an experience with the appendix, from which I
+learned something about one of the commonest of human ailments,
+constipation, or sluggishness of the bowels. This is a cause of
+innumerable chronic ailments grouped under the head of auto-intoxication,
+or the poisoning of the body by the absorption into the system of the
+products of fermentation and decay in the bowels. The bowels should move
+freely two or three times every day, and the movements should be soft. I
+suffered from constipation for some twenty years, and tried, I think,
+every remedy known both to science and to crankdom. In the beginning the
+doctors gave me drugs which by irritating the intestinal walls cause
+them to pour out quantities of water, and hurry the irritating
+substances down the intestinal tract. That is all right for an
+emergency; if you have swallowed a poison, or food which is spoiled, or
+if you have overeaten and are ill, get your system cleaned out by any
+and every device. But if you habitually swallow mild poisons, which is
+what all laxatives are, you weaken the intestinal tract, and you have to
+take more and more of these poisons, and you get less results. We may
+set down as positive the statement that drugs are not a remedy for
+constipation.
+
+Next comes diet. Eat the rough and bulky foods, say the nature curists,
+and stimulate the intestinal walls to activity. I tried that. I listened
+to the extreme enthusiasts, and boiled whole wheat and ate it, and
+consumed quantities of bran biscuit, and of a Japanese seaweed which Dr.
+Kellogg prepares, and of petroleum oil, and even the skins of oranges,
+which are most uncomfortable eating, I assure you. I would eat things
+like this until I got myself a case of diarrhea--and so was cured of
+constipation for a time! Strange as it may seem to you, there are even
+people who tell you to eat sand. I listened to them, and ate many
+quarts.
+
+Then there is exercise. MacFadden taught me a whole series of exercises
+for developing the muscles of the abdominal walls and the back, which
+are greatly neglected by civilized man. The fundamental cause of
+constipation is a sluggish life, and to exercise our bodies is a duty;
+but to me it was always an agony of boredom to lie on a bed and wiggle
+my abdomen for a quarter of an hour. The same thing applies to hot water
+treatments, which are effective, but a nuisance and a waste of time. I
+never could keep them up except when I was in trouble.
+
+Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual irritating pain in
+my right side, which I quickly realized must lie in the appendix. I
+tried massage, and hot and cold water treatments, and my favorite
+remedy, a week's fast. The pain disappeared, but it returned, so finally
+I decided, to the dismay of my physical culture friends, to have the
+appendix out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature
+curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of the body,
+which pours an oil or something into the intestinal tract, and so helps
+to prevent constipation. Well, evidently my appendix wasn't doing its
+job, so I took it to a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been
+twisted and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of continuous
+infection. From the time I had that operation, I have never had to think
+about the subject of constipation. This experience suggests to me how
+easy it is for people to make statements about health which have no
+relationship to facts.
+
+I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly well realize
+that if human beings would take proper care of their health, the great
+proportion of surgical operations would be unnecessary. I realize,
+also, that surgeons get paid by the job, and therefore have a money
+interest in operating, and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of
+them will ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is
+true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and that by
+standing a little temporary inconvenience you can save yourself a
+life-time of discomfort.
+
+Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here a natural weakness,
+from which there results a dangerous and uncomfortable affliction.
+Hundreds of thousands of men are going around all their lives wearing
+elaborate and expensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely
+useless, and trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An
+operation takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, and when
+our government drafted its young men into the army and found that
+fourteen in every thousand of them had rupture, it shipped them into the
+hospitals wholesale and sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords
+one case where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there
+were practically no returns from the great number of army cases.
+
+Likewise you find extreme statements repeated concerning the evils of
+vaccination; but if you will read Parkman's "History of the Jesuits in
+North America," you will see the horrible conditions under which the
+Indians lived in the United States--noble savages, you understand,
+entirely uncontaminated by civilized white men, and whole populations
+regularly wiped out every few years by epidemics of smallpox. That these
+epidemics ceased was due to the discovery that by infecting the body
+with a mild form of the disease, it could be made to develop substances
+which render it immune to the deadly form. Here in California we have a
+law which makes vaccination for school children optional, and so we may
+some day have another epidemic to test the theories of the
+anti-vaccinationists.
+
+I know, of course, the dreadful stories of people who have been given
+syphilis and other diseases by impure vaccines. I don't know whether
+such stories are true; but I do know that people who live in houses are
+sometimes killed by earthquakes and by lightning, yet we do not cease to
+live in houses because of this chance. It seems to me that the remedy
+for such vaccination evils is not to abolish vaccination, but to take
+more care in the manufacture of our vaccines.
+
+This danger is removed by using vaccines which are sterile, and are made
+especially for each person. Germs are taken from the sick person, and
+injected into an animal. The body of the animal develops with great
+rapidity the "anti-bodies" necessary to resistance to the germs; and as
+these "anti-bodies" are chemical products, not affected by heat, we can
+take a serum from the animal, sterilize it, and then inject it into the
+system of the patient, thus increasing resistance to the disease. I
+admit that the best way to increase such resistance is to take care of
+your health; but sometimes we confront an emergency, and must use
+emergency remedies. We have serums that really cure diphtheria and
+meningitis, and one that will prevent lock-jaw; anyone who has ever seen
+with his own eyes how the deadly membranes of diphtheria melt away as a
+result of an injection, will be less dogmatic about the efforts of
+science to combat disease.
+
+Of course it is much pleasanter if you can destroy the source of the
+disease, and keep it from getting into the human body. Every few years
+the southern part of our country used to be devastated by yellow fever
+epidemics. Every kind of weird and fantastic remedy was tried; people
+would go around with sponges full of vinegar hung under their noses;
+they would burn the clothing and bedding of those who died of the
+disease; they would wear gloves when they went shopping, so as not to
+touch the money with their hands. But at last medical experimenters
+traced the disease to a certain kind of mosquito, and now, if we drain
+the swamps and screen our houses and stay in doors after sundown, we do
+not get yellow fever, nor malaria either. In the same way, if we keep
+our bodies clean with soap and hot water, we do not get bitten by lice,
+and so do not die of typhus. If we take pains with our drains and water
+supply, so that human excrement does not get into it, and if we destroy
+the filth-carrying housefly, we do not have epidemics of typhoid.
+
+But under conditions of battle it is not possible for men to take these
+precautions, and so when they go into the army they get a dose of
+typhoid serum. And this illustrates the difference between a true or
+hygienic remedy for disease, and a temporary or emergency remedy. If you
+say that you want to abolish war, and with it the need for typhoid
+vaccination, I cheerfully agree with you in this. All that I am trying
+to do is to point out the folly of flying to extremes, and rejecting any
+remedy which may help. What is the use of making the flat statement that
+vaccinations and serums never aid in the cure of disease, when any man
+can see with his own eyes the proof that they do? In the Spanish war,
+before typhoid vaccination, many times more soldiers died of this
+disease than died of bullets; but in the late war there was practically
+no typhoid at all in the army camps. On the other hand, it was noticed
+that the men who had just come in, and who therefore had just been
+vaccinated, were considerably more susceptible to influenza; which shows
+that vaccination does reduce the body condition for a time. The reader
+may say that in this case I am trying to sit on both sides of the fence;
+but the truth is that I am trying to keep an open mind, and to consider
+all the facts, and to avoid making rash statements.
+
+One of the statements you hear most frequently is that drugs can never
+remedy disease, or help in remedying it. Now, I abhor the drugging
+system of the orthodox medical men; I have talked with them, and heard
+them talk with one another, and I know that they will mix up half a
+dozen different substances, in the vague hope that some one of them will
+have some effect. Even when they know definitely the effects they are
+producing, they are in many cases merely suppressing symptoms. On the
+other hand, however, it is a fact that medical science has had for a
+generation or two a specific which destroys the germs of one disease in
+the blood, without at the same time injuring the blood itself. That
+disease is malaria, and the drug is quinine. Of course, the way to avoid
+malaria is to drain the swamps; but you cannot do that all at once, nor
+can you always screen your house and stay in at sundown. When you first
+go into a country, you have no house to screen, and some emergency will
+certainly arise that exposes you to mosquito bites. So you will need
+quinine, and will be foolish not to use it, and know how to use it.
+
+Recently medical chemists discovered another remedy, this time for
+syphilis. It is called salvarsan, and while it does not always cure, it
+frequently does. In laboratories today men are working over the problem
+of constructing a combination of molecules which will destroy the germ
+of sleeping sickness, without at the same time injuring the blood. If
+they find it, they will save hundreds of millions of lives. I do not see
+why we cannot recognize such a possibility, while at the same time
+making use of physical culture, of diet and fasting.
+
+When the manuscript of this book was sent to the printer, there appeared
+in this place a paragraph telling of the work of Dr. Albert Abrams of
+San Francisco, in the diagnosis and cure of disease by means of
+radio-active vibrations. As the book is going to press, the writer finds
+himself in San Francisco, attending Dr. Abrams' clinics; and so he finds
+it possible to give a more extended account of some fascinating
+discoveries, which seem destined to revolutionize medical science. If I
+were to tell all that I have seen with my own eyes in the last twelve
+days, I fear the reader would find his powers of credulity
+overstretched, so I shall content myself with trying to tell, in very
+sober and cautious language, the theory upon which Abrams is working,
+and the technic which he has evolved.
+
+Modern science has demonstrated that all matter is simply the activity
+of electrons, minute particles of electric force. This is a statement
+which no present-day physicist would dispute. The best evidence appears
+to indicate that a molecule of matter is a minute reproduction of the
+universe, a system of electrons whirling about a central nucleus. No eye
+has ever beheld an electron, for it is billions of times smaller than
+anything the microscope makes visible; but we can see the effects of
+electronic activity, and all modern books of physics give photographs of
+such. It is possible to determine the vibration rates of electrons, and
+to Dr. Abrams occurred the idea of determining the vibration rates of
+diseased tissue and disease germs. He discovered that it was invariably
+the same; not merely does all cancerous material, for example, yield the
+same rate, but the blood of a person suffering from cancer yields that
+rate, at all times and under all circumstances. The vibration of cancer,
+of tuberculosis, of syphilis--each is different, uniform and invariable.
+Likewise in the blood are other vibrations, uniform and dependable,
+which reveal the sex and age of the patient, the virulence of the
+disease and the period of its duration--yes, and even the location in
+the body, if there be some definite infected area. So here is a modern
+miracle, an infallible device for the diagnosis of disease. Dr. Abrams
+does not have to see the patient; all he has to have is a drop of blood
+on a piece of white blotting paper, and he sits in his laboratory and
+tells all about it, and somewhere several thousand miles away--in
+Toronto or Boston or New Orleans--a surgeon operates and finds what he
+has been told is there!
+
+And that is only the beginning of the wonder; because, says Abrams, if
+you know the vibration rate of the electrons of germs, you can destroy
+those germs. It used to be a favorite trick of Caruso to tap a glass and
+determine its musical note, and then sing that note at the glass and
+shatter it to bits. It is well known that horses, trotting swiftly on a
+bridge, have sometimes coincided in their step with the vibration of the
+bridge and thus have broken it down. On that same principle this wizard
+of the electron introduces into your body radio-activity of a certain
+rate--and shall I say that he cures cancer and syphilis and tuberculosis
+of many years standing in a few treatments? I will not say that, because
+you would not and could not believe me. I will content myself with
+telling what my wife and I have been watching, twice a day for the past
+twelve days.
+
+The scene is a laboratory, with rows of raised seats at one side for the
+physicians who attend the clinic. There is a table, with the instruments
+of measurement, and Dr. Abrams sits beside it, and before him stands a
+young man stripped to the waist. The doctor is tapping upon the abdomen
+of this man, and listening to the sounds. You will find this the
+weirdest part of the whole procedure, for you will naturally assume that
+this young man is being examined, and will be dazed when some one
+explains that the patient is in Toronto or Boston or New Orleans, and
+that this young man's body is the instrument which the doctor uses in
+the determining of the vibration rates of the patient's blood. Dr.
+Abrams tried numerous instruments, but has been able to find nothing so
+sensitive to electronic activity as a human body. He explains to his
+classes that the spinal cord is composed of millions of nerve fibres of
+different vibration rates; hence a certain rate communicated to the
+body, is automatically sorted out, and appears on a certain precise spot
+of the body in the form of increased activity, increased blood pressure
+in the cells, and hence what all physicians know as a "dull area," which
+can be discovered by what is known as "percussion," a tapping with a
+finger. To map out these areas is merely a matter of long and patient
+experiment; and Abrams has been studying this subject for some twenty
+years--he is author of a text-book on what is known as the "reactions
+of Abrams." So now he provides the world with a series of maps of the
+human body; and he sits in front of his "subject," and his assistant
+places a specimen of blood in a little electrically connected box, and
+sets the rheostat at some vibration number--say fifty--and Dr. Abrams
+taps on a certain square inch of the abdomen of his "subject," and
+announces the dread word "cancer." Then he places the electrode on
+another part of the "subject's" body, and taps some more, and announces
+that it is cancer of the small intestine, left side; some more tapping,
+and he announces that its intensity is twelve ohms, which is severe; and
+pretty soon there is speeding a telegram to the physician who has sent
+this blood specimen, telling him these facts, and prescribing a certain
+vibration rate upon the "oscilloclast," the instrument of radio-activity
+which Dr. Abrams has devised.
+
+Now, you watch this thing for an hour or two, and you say to yourself:
+"Here is either the greatest magician in the history of mankind, or else
+the greatest maniac." You may have come prepared for some kind of fraud,
+but you soon dismiss that, for you realize that this man is desperately
+in earnest about what he is doing, and so are all the physicians who
+watch him. So you seek refuge in the thought that he must be deluding
+himself and them, perhaps unconsciously. But you talk with these men,
+and discover that they have come from all over the country, and always
+for one reason--they had sent blood specimens to Abrams, and had found
+that he never made a mistake; he told them more from a few drops of the
+patient's blood than they themselves had been able to find out from the
+whole patient. And then into the clinic come the doctor's own
+patients--I must have heard sixty or eighty of them tell their story and
+many of them have been lifted from the grave. People ten years blind
+from syphilis who can see; people operated on several times for cancer
+and given up for dying; people with tumors on the brain, or with one
+lung gone from tuberculosis. It is literally a fact that when you have
+sat in Abrams' clinic for a week, all disease loses its terrors.
+
+This, you see, is really the mastery of life. If we can measure and
+control the minute universe of the electron and the atom, we have
+touched the ultimate source of our bodily life. I might take chapters of
+this book to tell you of the strange experiments I have seen in this
+clinic--showing you, for instance, how these vibrations respond to
+thought, how by denying to himself the disease the patient can for a
+few moments cancel in his body the activity of the harmful germs;
+showing how the reactions differ in the different sexes and at different
+ages, and how they respond to different colors and different drugs.
+Abrams' method has revealed the secret of such efficacy as drugs
+possess--their work is done by their radio-activity, and not by their
+chemical properties. Also the problem of vaccination has been
+solved--for Abrams has discovered a dread new disease, which is bovine
+syphilis, originally caused in cattle by human inoculation, and now
+reintroduced in the human being by vaccination, and becoming the agent
+which prepares the soil of the body for such disorders as tuberculosis
+and cancer. And it appears that we can all be rendered immune to these
+diseases, by a few electronic vibrations, introduced into our bodies in
+childhood; so is opened up to our eyes a wonderful vision of a new race,
+purified and made fit for life. So here at last is science justified of
+her optimism, and our faith in human destiny forever vindicated. Take my
+advice, whoever you may be that are suffering, and find out about this
+new work and help to make it known to the world.
+
+There are many romances of medical science, some of them fascinating as
+murder mysteries and big game hunting. Turn to McMasters' "History of
+the People of the United States" and read his account of the terrible
+epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia a hundred years ago; I have
+already referred to the weird and incredible things the people did in
+their effort to ward off this plague--sponges of vinegar under their
+noses and "fever fires" burning in the streets; and then a mosquito
+would fly up and bite them, and in a few hours they would be dead! Or
+what could be stranger than the tracing of the bubonic plague, which has
+cost literally billions of human lives, to a parasite in the blood of
+fleas which live on the bodies of rats! Or what could be more unexpected
+than the tracing of our rheumatic aches and twinges to the root canals
+of the teeth!
+
+One of the common ailments which afflict poor humanity is rheumatism, a
+cause of endless suffering. It was supposed to be due to damp climate
+and exposure, and this is true to a certain extent, in the same way that
+colds are due to exposure. But the investigators realized that there
+must be some bodily condition rendering one susceptible, and they set to
+work to trace this condition down. The pains of rheumatism are caused by
+uric acid settling in the joints of the body. What causes the uric
+acid? Well, there is uric acid in red meat, so let us forbid rheumatic
+people to eat it! But this is overlooking the fact that the human body
+itself is a uric acid factory; and also the fact that uric acid taken
+into the stomach may not remain uric acid by the time it gets to the
+blood-stream. We know that you may eat a great deal of fruit acid
+without necessarily making acid blood. On the other hand, you can make
+acid blood by eating a lot of sugar! So you see it isn't as simple as it
+sounds.
+
+Rheumatism has been traced to its lair, which is found to be the roots
+of the teeth. Here is a part of the body difficult to get at, and as a
+consequence of bad diet and unwholesome ways of living, infections will
+start there, and pus sacs be formed, and the poisons absorbed into the
+blood-stream and distributed through the body. The first thought is to
+draw the infected teeth; but that is a serious matter, because you need
+your teeth to chew your food. So the dentist has to go through a
+complicated process of opening up the tooth and cleaning out the root
+canals, and treating the infected spots at the roots. Then he has to
+fill the tooth all the way down to the roots, leaving no place for
+infection to gather. This, of course, takes time and costs money, and is
+one more illustration of the fact that there is one health law for the
+rich and another health law for the poor.
+
+All the time that I write these chapters about health I feel guilty. I
+know that the wholesome food I recommend costs money, and I know that
+surgery and dentistry cost money--yes, even sunlight and fresh air and
+recreation; even a fast, because you have to rest while you take it, and
+you have to have a roof over your head, and warmth in winter time, and
+somebody to wait upon you when you are weak. I know that for a great
+many of the people who read what I write, all these things are
+impossible of attainment; I know that for the great majority of the
+common people the benefits of science do not exist. Science discovers
+how to prevent disease, but the discoveries are not applied, because the
+profit system controls the world, and the profit system wants the labor
+of the poor, regardless of what happens to their health. If the people
+fall ill, they are thrown upon the scrap heap, and the profit system
+finds others to take their place.
+
+Take, for example, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a germ infection, but
+it practically never gets hold upon a human body except when the body is
+reduced by undernourishment and lack of fresh air. Tuberculosis,
+therefore, is a disease of slums and jails. It is definitely and
+indisputably a disease of poverty. It could be wiped off the face of the
+earth in a single generation; and the same is true of typhus and
+typhoid. There is another whole host of ailments which could be wiped
+out by measures of public hygiene, plus education. This includes all the
+infant diseases, and the deadly venereal diseases. But the profit system
+stands in the way; and so, in these closing paragraphs of this Book of
+the Body, I say that there is one disease which is the deadliest of all,
+and the source of all others, and that disease is poverty.
+
+I know a certain physician to the rich, who is an honest and
+conscientious man. He said, "I loath my work. I am wasting my time. I am
+called in by these fat, over-fed rich people in their leisure class
+hotels, and what am I to say to them? Shall I say to them, 'You are
+living an abnormal life, and you can never be well until you cut out
+root and branch all your habits of self indulgence which are destroying
+you?' But no, I can't say that--not one time in a thousand. I am
+expected to be polite and serious, and to listen to them while they tell
+the long tiresome story of their symptoms, and I have to encourage them,
+and give them some temporary device that will remove some of the
+symptoms of their trouble."
+
+And what should one say to this honest physician? Should one tell him to
+go and be a physician to the poor? Would he be any happier there? He
+could tell the poor the causes of their diseases, and they would listen
+patiently--they are trained to listen, and to accept what they are told.
+Here is a girl living in an inside bedroom in a tenement, and working
+ten or eleven hours a day in an unventilated factory, and she is ill
+with tuberculosis. The physician tells her that she needs plenty of
+fresh air and rest, and a lot of eggs and milk in her diet. He tells her
+that, and he knows that she has as much chance of carrying out his
+orders as of flying to the moon. Or maybe he comes upon a typhoid
+epidemic, and discovers, as happened to a friend of mine in Chicago,
+that there is defective plumbing in some houses owned by the political
+leader of the district. Or maybe it is a case of venereal disease, in a
+young man who was drafted into the army and turned loose amid the joys
+of Paris. Maybe it is just a commonplace, every-day story of a room full
+of school children, 22 per cent of them undernourished, as is the case
+in New York City, and the parents out of work a part of the time, and
+with no possibility in their lives of ever earning enough to feed the
+children properly. When you confront these universal facts of our
+present social order, you realize that the problem of disease is not
+merely a problem of the body, but is a problem of the mind as well; a
+problem of politics and religion and philosophy, of the whole way of
+thinking of the so-called civilized world. A book of health which did
+not point out these facts would be, not a book of health, but a book of
+sham.
+
+But meantime, while we are trying to change the world's ideas, we have
+to live, and we can do our work better if we keep as well as possible. I
+have tried to point out the way; it is, as you can see, a matter in part
+of the body and in part of the mind. All the bodily régime here laid out
+has its basis in mental habits; all wise and wholesome ways of life can,
+at the age when our minds are plastic, be made into "second
+nature"--things which we do automatically, without effort or temptation
+to do otherwise. This is the real secret of true happiness in the
+conduct of our personal lives; to acquire self-control, to rule our
+desires and our passions, not harshly and spasmodically, but serenely,
+as one drives a car which he thoroughly understands. It is in vain that
+we preach freedom to men who have not this self-mastery; as the poet
+tell us: "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves of their own
+compulsion." And of all the personal possessions which man can attain on
+this earth, the most precious is the one of a sound mind controlling a
+sound body. I close this book by quoting some verses written by Sir
+Henry Wotton three hundred years ago, which I have all my life
+considered one of the noblest pieces of poetry in our heritage:
+
+     THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE
+
+    How happy is he born and taught
+      That serveth not another's will;
+    Whose armour is his honest thought
+      And simple truth his utmost skill!
+
+    Whose passions not his masters are,
+      Whose soul is still prepared for death,
+    Not tied unto the world with care
+      Of public fame, or private breath.
+
+    Who envies none that chance doth raise
+      Or vice; who never understood
+    How deepest wounds are given by praise;
+      Nor rules of state, but rules of good:
+
+    Who hath his life from rumours freed,
+      Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
+    Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
+      Nor ruin make accusers great:
+
+    Who God doth late and early pray
+      More of His grace than gifts to lend;
+    And entertains the harmless day
+      With a well-chosen book or friend;
+
+    --This man is freed from servile bands
+      Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;
+    Lord of himself, though not of lands;
+      And having nothing, yet hath all.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Abrams, Dr., 190
+
+Adultery, 33
+
+Adventist, 99
+
+Agriculture, 25
+
+Alcohol, 151
+
+Anti-bodies, 188
+
+Antinomies, 58
+
+Appendix, 186
+
+Arnold, 42
+
+Arrhenius, 101
+
+Automatic writing, 67
+
+
+Bairnsfather, 29
+
+Bathing, 162
+
+Battle Creek Sanitarium, 118
+
+Beauchamp, 70, 85, 89
+
+Beethoven, 47
+
+Bergson, 17
+
+Beri-beri, 128
+
+Bible, 77
+
+Bio-chemist, 59
+
+Black bread, 128
+
+Blood, 106
+
+Body, 53, 105
+
+Booth, 58
+
+Bourne, 69
+
+Bruce, 71
+
+Bury, 15
+
+
+Caffein, 150
+
+Calories, 135
+
+Candy, 137
+
+Capitalist, 100
+
+Carbohydrates, 124
+
+Carbon monoxide, 157
+
+Children, 140, 180
+
+Chiropractors, 174, 184
+
+Chittenden, 136
+
+Christian Scientists, 5, 65, 105
+
+Clothing, 160
+
+Coffee, 151
+
+Colds, 183
+
+Commandments, 32
+
+Communist, 99
+
+Complete fast, 172
+
+Comstock, 25
+
+Conduct, 42
+
+Consciousness, 56
+
+Constipation, 185
+
+Cooking, 129, 142
+
+Crawford, 88
+
+Cyrus, 164
+
+
+Dandruff, 109
+
+Dante, 77
+
+Darwin, 17, 46
+
+Dentistry, 126, 190
+
+Determinists, 57
+
+Diet, 131
+
+Diet Standards, 135
+
+Digestion, 145
+
+Diphtheria, 188
+
+Diseases, 107, 117
+
+Dogs, 17
+
+Draft, 182
+
+Drugs, 118, 150, 185, 189
+
+Dubb, 63
+
+Duncan, 102
+
+Dyspepsia, 117
+
+
+Eddy, 65
+
+Edison, 45, 86
+
+Einstein, 101
+
+Elberfeld horses, 68
+
+Evolution, 8, 17
+
+Exercise, 163
+
+
+Faith, 9
+
+Faith curists, 65
+
+Fast cure, 171
+
+Fatness, 139
+
+Fats, 124
+
+Fever, 108
+
+Fireless cooker, 142
+
+Fireplace, 157
+
+Fisher, 136
+
+Fletcher, 119, 145
+
+Food filter, 145
+
+Fourth dimension, 5
+
+Free thinker, 15
+
+Freud, 71
+
+Fruit fast, 175
+
+Frugality, 38
+
+Frying-pan, 129
+
+Furnace, 157
+
+
+Gargles, 184
+
+Gastronomic art, 148
+
+Genius, 49, 60
+
+George, 18
+
+Germs, 183
+
+God, 22, 50
+
+Goethe, 47
+
+Golden rule, 51
+
+Greens, 132
+
+Gymnastic work, 166
+
+
+Hair, 109
+
+Hallucinations, 75
+
+Hamlet, 48
+
+Happiness, 9
+
+Harrison, 6
+
+Hats, 110
+
+Headache, 122, 150, 184
+
+Health cranks, 182
+
+Heart, 108
+
+Houdin, 93
+
+Hugo, 48
+
+Huxley, 17, 62
+
+Hyslop, 82
+
+
+Iceberg, 61
+
+Infanticide, 28
+
+Instincts, 134
+
+Intelligence, 22
+
+Immortality, 79
+
+Irwin, Will, 86
+
+
+James, 30, 59, 60
+
+Jesus, 47, 48, 50, 51, 76
+
+John Barleycorn, 152
+
+Johnson, 58
+
+Jonson, 44
+
+
+Kant, Immanuel, 4, 47, 51, 58
+
+Kellogg, Doctor, 118, 164, 186
+
+Kilmer, Joyce, 44
+
+Knowledge, 94
+
+Kropotkin, 18, 26
+
+
+Langley, 74
+
+Lankester, Prof. E. Ray, 23
+
+Laxatives, 175, 185
+
+Leanness, 139
+
+Leonardo, 47
+
+Liébault, 64
+
+Life, 3
+
+Lily Dale, 86, 90
+
+Lincoln, 47
+
+Locomotor ataxia, 180
+
+Lodge, Sir Oliver, 83
+
+Lodge, Raymond, 87
+
+London, Jack, 152
+
+
+Macaulay, 39
+
+MacDowell, Edward, 56
+
+MacFadden, 178, 186
+
+MacSwiney, 170
+
+Maeterlinck, Maurice, 68
+
+Malaria, 189
+
+Malthusian law, 25
+
+Marquesans, 113
+
+Materializations, 88
+
+Matter, 3
+
+Meal-hour, 147
+
+Measurement of Intelligence, Terman's, 95
+
+Meat, 121
+
+Medical science, 105
+
+Mesmer, 63
+
+Messina earthquake, 170
+
+Metaphysics, 4
+
+Metchnikoff, 138
+
+Milk diet, 128
+
+Moderation, 39
+
+Monism, 3
+
+Morality, 21, 31, 34, 50
+
+Morgan, 45
+
+Mormon, 99
+
+Mozart, 68
+
+Multiple personality, 69
+
+Mutation, 17
+
+Myers, 49
+
+
+Nature, 21, 24, 29
+
+Nature cure, 160
+
+Nature Woman, 176
+
+Neighbor, 50
+
+Newcomb, Simon, 101
+
+Newton, 47
+
+New York Times, 169
+
+Nicotine, 154
+
+Nietzsche, 17
+
+Novels, 164
+
+Nutrition of Man, 136
+
+
+Oil stoves, 158
+
+Opsonins, 112
+
+Optimism, 42
+
+Osteopaths, 184
+
+Ouija, 67
+
+Overeating, 134
+
+Oxygen, 156
+
+
+Patrick, Dr., 167
+
+Pavlov, 148
+
+Phantasms, 75
+
+Phillips, David Graham, 180
+
+Piper, Mrs., 68
+
+Play, 165
+
+Poisons, 146
+
+Pork, 142
+
+Porter, Dr., 178
+
+Positivists, 6
+
+Poverty, 194
+
+Prices of food, 141
+
+Prince, Dr. Morton, 70, 89
+
+Profits of Religion, 78, 99
+
+Proteins, 123
+
+Prunes, 127
+
+Psychology, 96
+
+Psychotherapy, 64
+
+Puritans, 39
+
+
+Quackenbos, 64
+
+Quinine, 188
+
+Quixote, 48
+
+
+Raisins, 127
+
+Raw food, 119
+
+Read, Alfred Baker, 28
+
+Reason, 13
+
+Refined foods, 126
+
+Relaxation, 167
+
+Religion, 32
+
+Reincarnation, 76
+
+Rest, 146
+
+Revelation, 12
+
+Rheumatism, 193
+
+Rice, 128
+
+Rockefeller, 45
+
+Roosevelt, Theodore, 25, 45
+
+Rugs, 159
+
+Rupture, 187
+
+
+Sabbath, 99
+
+Salisbury, 120
+
+Sally, 70, 85
+
+Salt, 143
+
+Meats, salted, 143
+
+Salts, 124
+
+Salvarsan, 189
+
+Savages, 135
+
+Savage, Rev. Minot J., 74
+
+Schrenck-Notzing, 88
+
+Scurvy, 128
+
+Seneca, 98
+
+Shakespeare, 47
+
+Shelley, 45, 48
+
+Sleep, 162
+
+Sleeping sickness, 113, 173
+
+Smokers, 153
+
+Socialism, 167
+
+Sophocles, 87
+
+Sore throat, 183
+
+Spencer, 8
+
+Spinoza, 79
+
+Spirits, 82
+
+Spiritualists, 86
+
+Starch, 122, 124
+
+Stealing, 33
+
+Steam heat, 158
+
+Stimulant, 149
+
+Stock Exchange, 158
+
+Stomach, 105, 138, 148
+
+Style, 161
+
+Subconscious mind, 61
+
+Sunday code, 40
+
+Sugar, 126
+
+Surgery, 186
+
+Survival, 81
+
+Survival of the fittest, 22
+
+Syndicalism, 15
+
+Syphilis, 189
+
+
+Tanner, Dr., 169
+
+Tariff, 37
+
+Tea, 151
+
+Teeth, 127, 193
+
+Telepathy, 67, 75
+
+Theosophists, 76
+
+Tight shoes, 161
+
+Tobacco, 153
+
+Tolstoi, 49
+
+Tonsilitis, 107
+
+Trance, 63
+
+Tropism, 54
+
+Tuberculosis, 112, 120, 179, 194, 195
+
+Twain, Mark, 93
+
+Typhoid, 112, 188, 192
+
+
+Uranus, 92
+
+Uric acid, 193
+
+
+Vaccination, 187, 189
+
+Vaccines, 188
+
+Vegetarian, 121
+
+Vitamines, 127, 142
+
+
+Wallace, 46
+
+Wells, H. G., 22
+
+Williams, Dr. Henry Smith, 102
+
+Worth, Patience, 84
+
+
+Yellow fever, 188
+
+Yogis, 90
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOK OF LIFE
+
+VOLUME TWO: LOVE AND SOCIETY
+
+                _To_
+           Kate Crane Gartz
+in acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a
+better world, and her fidelity to those
+      who struggle to achieve it.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PART THREE: THE BOOK OF LOVE
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.   THE REALITY OF MARRIAGE                              3
+Discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world,
+and their relation to the ideal of monogamous love.
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.   THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARRIAGE                            8
+Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its history,
+the stages of its development in human society.
+
+CHAPTER XXX.    SEX AND YOUNG AMERICA                                 15
+Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect
+the future generation.
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.    SEX AND THE "SMART SET"                              23
+Portrays the moral customs of those who set the fashion
+in our present-day world.
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.    SEX AND THE POOR                                    29
+Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and
+the diseases which result from it.
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.    SEX AND NATURE                                     33
+Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of
+natural or physical disharmony.
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV.   LOVE AND ECONOMICS                                   36
+Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due
+to the displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.
+
+CHAPTER XXXV.   MARRIAGE AND MONEY                                    40
+Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher
+form of prostitution known as the "marriage of convenience."
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI.   LOVE VERSUS LUST                                     46
+Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it
+should be followed and when repressed.
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII. CELIBACY VERSUS CHASTITY                              51
+
+The ideal of the repression of the sex-impulse, as against
+the ideal of its guidance and cultivation.
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE DEFENSE OF LOVE                                  55
+
+Discusses passionate love, its sanction, its place in life,
+and its preservation in marriage.
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX. BIRTH CONTROL                                          60
+
+Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the
+greatest of man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's
+enslavement, and placing the keys of life in his hands.
+
+CHAPTER XL. EARLY MARRIAGE                                            66
+
+Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the
+duty of parents in respect to them.
+
+CHAPTER XLI. THE MARRIAGE CLUB                                        71
+
+Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to
+avoid unhappy marriages.
+
+CHAPTER XLII. EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE                                  75
+
+Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that
+we have the right and the duty to teach it.
+
+CHAPTER XLIII. THE MONEY SIDE OF MARRIAGE                             79
+
+Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of
+matrimony.
+
+CHAPTER XLIV. THE DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY                                 83
+
+Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should
+endeavor to preserve it.
+
+CHAPTER XLV. THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY                                  89
+
+Discusses the question, to what extent one person may
+hold another to the pledge of love.
+
+CHAPTER XLVI. THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE                                  93
+
+Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and
+one of the means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.
+
+CHAPTER XLVII. THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE                             97
+
+Discusses the circumstances under which society has the
+right to forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.
+
+
+PART FOUR: THE BOOK OF SOCIETY
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII. THE EGO AND THE WORLD                                103
+
+Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant
+and in primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment
+to life.
+
+CHAPTER XLVIX. COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION                          107
+
+Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and
+the part which selfishness and unselfishness play in the
+development of social life.
+
+CHAPTER L. ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY                                 115
+
+Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and
+whether there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.
+
+CHAPTER LI. RULING CLASSES                                           119
+
+Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained,
+and what sanction it can claim.
+
+CHAPTER LII. THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION                         122
+
+Discusses the series of changes through which human
+society has passed.
+
+CHAPTER LIII. INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION                                   126
+
+Examines the process of evolution in industry and the
+stage which it has so far reached.
+
+CHAPTER LIV. THE CLASS STRUGGLE                                      132
+
+Discusses history as a battle-ground between ruling and
+subject classes, and the method and outcome of this
+struggle.
+
+CHAPTER LV. THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM                                    136
+
+Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and
+the effect of this system upon the minds of the workers.
+
+CHAPTER LVI. THE CAPITALIST PROCESS                                  142
+
+How profits are made under the present industrial
+system and what becomes of them.
+
+CHAPTER LVII. HARD TIMES                                             145
+
+Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing,
+and why abundant production brings distress instead of
+plenty.
+
+CHAPTER LVIII. THE IRON RING                                         148
+Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles production,
+and makes true prosperity impossible.
+
+CHAPTER LIX. FOREIGN MARKETS                                         151
+Considers the efforts of capitalism to save itself by marketing
+its surplus products abroad, and what results from
+these efforts.
+
+CHAPTER LX. CAPITALIST WAR                                           155
+Shows how the competition for foreign markets leads
+nations automatically into war.
+
+CHAPTER LXI. THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRODUCTION                         158
+Shows how much wealth we could produce if we tried
+and how we proved it when we had to.
+
+CHAPTER LXII. THE COST OF COMPETITION                                162
+Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine,
+those which are obvious and those which are
+hidden.
+
+CHAPTER LXIII. SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM                             166
+Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the
+state, and the idea of its management by the trade unions.
+
+CHAPTER LXIV. COMMUNISM AND ANARCHISM                                170
+Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the
+idea of a society without compulsion, and how these
+ideas have fared in Russia.
+
+CHAPTER LXV. SOCIAL REVOLUTION                                       175
+How the great change is coming in different industries,
+and how we may prepare to meet it.
+
+CHAPTER LXVI. CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION                           179
+Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they
+afford to do it, and what will be the price?
+
+CHAPTER LXVII. EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS                       183
+Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its
+chances for success in the United States.
+
+CHAPTER LXVIII. THE PROBLEM OF THE LAND                              188
+Discusses the land values tax as a means of social readjustment,
+and compares it with other programs.
+
+CHAPTER LXIX. THE CONTROL OF CREDIT                                  192
+Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of
+industry, and may play in the freeing of industry.
+
+CHAPTER LXX. THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY                                 198
+Discusses various programs for the change from industrial
+autocracy to industrial democracy.
+
+CHAPTER LXXI. THE NEW WORLD                                          202
+Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning
+with its money aspects; the standard wage and its variations.
+
+CHAPTER LXXII. AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION                               206
+Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster
+co-operative farming and co-operative homes.
+
+CHAPTER LXXIII. INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION                              210
+Discusses scientific, artistic, and religious activities, as
+a superstructure built upon the foundation of the standard
+wage.
+
+CHAPTER LXXIV. MANKIND REMADE                                        215
+Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what
+happens to these in the new world.
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+THE BOOK OF LOVE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE REALITY OF MARRIAGE
+
+     (Discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world, and their
+     relation to the ideal of monogamous love.)
+
+
+Just as human beings through wrong religious beliefs torture one
+another, and wreck their lives and happiness; just as through wrong
+eating and other physical habits they make disease and misery for
+themselves; just so they suffer and perish for lack of the most
+elementary knowledge concerning the sex relationship. The difference is
+that in the field of religious ideas it is now permissible to impart the
+truth one possesses. If I tell you there is no devil, and that believing
+this will not cause you to suffer in an eternity of sulphur and
+brimstone, no one will be able to burn me at the stake, even though he
+might like to do so. If I advise you that it is not harmful to eat
+beefsteak on Friday, or to eat thoroughly cooked pork any day of the
+week, neither the archbishops nor the rabbis nor the vegetarians will be
+able to lock me in a dungeon. But if I should impart to you the simplest
+and most necessary bit of knowledge concerning the facts of your sex
+life--things which every man and woman must know if we are to stop
+breeding imbecility and degeneracy in the world--then I should be
+liable, under federal statutes, to pay a fine of $5,000, and to serve a
+term of five years in a federal penitentiary. Scarcely a week passes
+that I do not receive a letter from someone asking for information about
+such matters; but I dare not answer the letters, because I know there
+are agencies, maintained and paid by religious superstition, employing
+spies to trap people into the breaking of this law.
+
+I shall tell you here as much as I am permitted to tell, in the simplest
+language and the most honest spirit. I believe that human beings are
+meant to be happy on this earth, and to avoid misery and disease. I
+believe that they are given the powers of intelligence in order to seek
+the ways of happiness, and I believe that it is a worthy work to give
+them the knowledge they need in order to find happiness.
+
+At the outset of this Book of Love we are going to examine the existing
+facts of the sex relationships of men and women in present-day society.
+We shall discover that amid all the false and dishonest thinking of
+mankind, there is nowhere more falsity and dishonesty than here. The
+whole world is a gigantic conspiracy of "hush," and the orthodox and
+respectable of the world are like worshippers of some god, who spend
+their day-time burning incense before the altar, and in the night-time
+steal the sacred jewels and devour the consecrated offerings. These
+worshippers confront you with the question, do you believe in marriage;
+and they make the assumption that the institution of marriage exists, or
+at some time has existed in the world. But if you wish to do any sound
+thinking about this subject, you must get one thing clear at the outset;
+the institution of marriage is an ideal which has been preached and
+taught, but which has never anywhere, in any society, at any stage of
+human progress, actually existed as the general practice of mankind.
+What has existed and still exists is a very different institution, which
+I shall here describe as marriage-plus-prostitution.
+
+By this statement I do not mean to deny that there are many women, and a
+few men, who have been monogamous all their lives; nor that there are
+many couples living together happily in monogamous marriage. What I mean
+is that, considering society as a whole, wherever you find the
+institution of marriage, you also find, co-existent therewith and
+complementary thereto, the institution of prostitution. Of this double
+arrangement one part is recognized, and written into the law; the other
+part is hidden, and prohibited by law; but those who have to do with
+enforcing the law all know that it exists, and practically all of them
+consider it inevitable, and a great many derive income from it. So I
+say: if you believe in marriage-plus-prostitution, that is your right;
+but if marriage is what you believe in, then your task is to consider
+such questions as these: Is marriage a possible thing? Can it ever
+become the sex arrangement of any society? What are the forces which
+have so far prevented it from prevailing, and how can these forces be
+counteracted?
+
+It is my belief that monogamous love is the most desirable of human sex
+relationships, the most fruitful in happiness and spiritual development.
+The laws and institutions of civilized society pretend to defend this
+relationship, but the briefest study of the facts will convince anyone
+that these laws and institutions are not really meant to protect
+monogamous love. What they are is a device of the property-holding male
+to secure his property rights to women, and more especially to secure
+himself as to the paternity of his heirs. In primitive society, where
+land and other sources of wealth were held in common, and sex monogamy
+was unknown, there was no way to determine paternity, and no reason for
+doing so. But under the system of private property and class privilege,
+it is necessary for some one man to support a child, if it is to be
+supported; and when a man has fought hard, and robbed hard, and traded
+hard, and acquired wealth, he does not want to spend it in maintaining
+another man's child. That he should let himself be fooled into doing so
+is one of the greatest humiliations his fellowmen can imagine. If you
+read Shakespeare's plays, and look up the meaning of old words, so as to
+understand old witticisms and allusions, you will discover that this was
+the stock jest of Shakespeare's time.
+
+In order to protect himself from such ridicule, the man maintained in
+ancient times his right to kill the faithless woman with cruel tortures.
+He maintains today the right to deprive her of her children, and of all
+share in his property, even though she may have helped to earn it. But
+until quite recent times, the beginning of the revolt of women, there
+was never any corresponding penalty for faithlessness in husbands. Under
+the English law today, the husband may divorce his wife for infidelity,
+but the wife must prove infidelity plus cruelty, and the courts have
+held that the cruelty must consist in knocking her down. While I was in
+England, the highest court rendered a decision that a man who brought
+his mistress to his home and compelled his wife to wait upon her was not
+committing "cruelty" in the meaning of the English law.
+
+This is what is known as the "double standard," and the double standard
+prevails everywhere under the system of marriage-plus-prostitution, and
+proves that capitalist "monogamy" is not a spiritual ideal, but a matter
+of class privilege. It is a breach of honor for the ruling class male to
+tamper with the wife of his friend; it is frequently dangerous for him
+to tamper with the young females of his own class; but it is in general
+practice taken for granted that the young females of lower classes are
+his legitimate prey. In England a man may have a marriage annulled, if
+he can prove that the woman he married had what is called a "past"; but
+everybody takes it for granted that the man has had a "past"; it is
+covered by the polite phrase, "sowing his wild oats." Wherever among the
+ruling class you find men bold enough to discuss the facts of the sex
+order they have set up, you find the idea, expressed or implied, that
+this "wild oats" is a necessary and inevitable part of this order, and
+that without it the order would break down. The English philosopher,
+Lecky, making an elaborate study of morals through the ages, speaks of
+the prostitute in the following frank language:
+
+"Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient
+guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless
+happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their
+untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have
+known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble
+form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with
+shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the
+eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."
+
+I invite you to study these sentences and understand them fully.
+Remember that they are the opinion of the most learned historian of sex
+customs who has ever written in English; a man whose authority is
+recognized in our schools, whose books are in every college library.
+William Edward Hartpole Lecky is not in any sense a revolutionist; he is
+a conventional English scholar, an upholder of English law and order and
+patriotism. He is not of my school of thought, but of those who now own
+the world and run it. I quote him, because he tells in plain language
+what kind of world they have made; I invite you to study his words, and
+then judge my statement that the sex arrangement under which we live in
+modern society is not monogamous love, but marriage-plus-prostitution.
+
+It is my hope to point the way to a higher system. I should like to call
+it marriage; but perhaps it would be more precise to call it
+marriage-minus-prostitution. In working it out, we shall have to think
+for ourselves, and discard all formulas. It is obvious that our
+present-day religious creeds, ethical ideals, legal codes, and social
+rewards and punishments have been powerless to protect marriage, or to
+make it the rule in sex relationships. So we shall have to begin at the
+beginning and find new reasons for monogamous love, a new basis of
+marriage other than the protection of private property. We shall have to
+inform ourselves as to the fundamental purposes of sex; we shall have to
+ask ourselves: What are the factors which determine rightness and
+wrongness in the sex relationship? What is love, and what ought it to
+be? These questions we shall try to approach without any fixed ideas
+whatever. We shall decide them by the same tests that we have used in
+our thinking about God and immortality, health and disease. We shall
+ask, not what our ancestors believed, not what God teaches us, not what
+the law ordains, not what is "respectable," nor yet what is "advanced,"
+according to the claim of modern sex revolutionists and "free lovers."
+We shall ask ourselves, what are the facts. We shall ask, what can be
+made to work in practice, what can justify itself by the tests of reason
+and common sense.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARRIAGE
+
+     (Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its history, the
+     stages of its development in human society.)
+
+
+What, in the most elemental form, is sex? It is a difference of function
+which makes it necessary for two organisms to take part in the
+reproduction of the species. The purpose, or at any rate the effect, of
+this sex difference is the mixing of characteristics and qualities. If
+the sex relationship were unnecessary to reproduction, variations might
+begin, and be propagated and carried to extremes in one line of
+inheritance, without ever affecting the rest of the species. Very soon
+there would be no species, or rather an infinity of them; each line of
+descent would fly apart, and become a group all by itself. You have
+perhaps heard people comment on the fact that blondes so frequently
+prefer brunettes, and that tall men are apt to marry short women, and
+vice versa. This is perhaps nature's way of keeping the type uniform, of
+spreading qualities widely and testing them thoroughly. Nature is
+continually trying out the powers of every individual in every species,
+and by the process of sexual selection she chooses, for the reproduction
+of the species, the individuals which are best fitted for survival.
+This, of course, refers to nature, considered apart from man. In human
+society, as I shall presently show, sexual selection has been distorted,
+and partly suppressed.
+
+Sex differentiation and sexual selection exist almost universally
+throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, everywhere save in the
+lowest forms of being. They take strange and startling forms, and like
+everything else in nature manifest amazing ingenuity. People who wish to
+prove this or that about human sex relations will advance arguments from
+nature; but as a matter of fact we can learn nothing whatever from
+nature, except her determination to preserve the products of her
+activity and to keep them up to standard. Sometimes nature will give the
+precedence in power, speed and beauty to the male, and sometimes to the
+female. She is perfectly ruthless, and willing in the accomplishment of
+her purpose to destroy the individuals of either sex. She will content
+the most rabid feminist by causing the female spider to devour her mate
+when his purpose has been accomplished; or by causing the male bee to
+fall from his mating in the air, a disemboweled shell.
+
+As for man, he has won his supremacy over nature by his greater power to
+combine in groups; by his more intense gregarious, or herd instincts,
+which enabled him to fight and destroy creatures which would have
+exterminated him if he had fought them alone. So in primitive society
+everywhere, we find that the individual is subordinated to the group,
+and the "folkways" give but little heed to personal rights. Very
+thorough investigations have been made into the life of primitive man in
+many parts of the world, and the anthropologists are now arguing over
+the exact meaning of the data. We shall not here attempt to decide among
+them, but rest content with the statement that communism and tribal
+ownership is a widespread social form among primitive man, so much so as
+to suggest that it is an early stage in social evolution.
+
+And this communism includes, not merely property, but sex. In the very
+earliest days there was often no barrier whatever to the sex
+relationship; not even between brothers and sisters, nor between parents
+and children. In fact, we find savages who do not know that the sex
+relationship has anything to do with procreation. But as knowledge
+increases, sex "tabus" develop, some wise, and some foolish. From causes
+not entirely clear, but which we discuss in Chapter XLVIII, there
+gradually evolves a widespread form of sex relationship of primitive
+man, the system of the "gens," as it is called. This is the Latin word
+for family, but it does not mean family in the narrow sense of mother
+and father and children, but in the broad sense of all those who have
+blood relationship, however far removed--uncles and aunts and cousins,
+as far as memory can trace. In primitive communism a man is not
+permitted to enter into the sex relationship with a woman of the same
+gens, but with all the women of some other gens. It is difficult for us
+to imagine a society in which all the men named Jones would be married
+to all the women named Smith; but that was the way whole races of
+mankind lived for many thousands of years.
+
+In that primitive communist society, the woman was generally the equal
+of the man. It is true that she did the drudgery of the camp, but the
+man, on the other hand, faced the hardships of battle and the chase on
+land and sea. The woman was as big as the man, and except when
+handicapped by pregnancy, as strong as the man; she was as much
+respected, if not more so. Her children bore her name, and were under
+her control, and she was accustomed to assert herself in all affairs of
+the tribe. In Frederick O'Brien's "White Shadows in the South Seas," you
+may read a comical story of a journey this traveler made into the
+interior of one of the cannibal islands. Everywhere he was treated with
+courtesy and hospitality, but was embarrassed by continual offers from
+would-be wives. In one case a powerful cannibal lady, whose advances he
+rejected, picked him up and proceeded to carry him off, and he was quite
+helpless in her grasp; he might have been a cannibal husband today, if
+it had not been for the intervention of his fellow travelers.
+
+The basis of this sex equality under primitive communism is easy to
+understand. All goods belonged to the tribe, and were shared alike
+according to need. Children were the tribe's most precious possession;
+therefore the woman suffered little handicap from having a child to bear
+and feed. Primitive woman would bear her child by the roadside, and pick
+it up in her arms, and continue her journey; and when she needed food,
+she did not have to beg for it--if there was food for anyone, there was
+food for her and her child. She did her share of the gathering and
+preparing of food, because that was the habit and law of her being; she
+had energies, and had never heard of the idea of not using them.
+
+This primitive communism generally disappears as the tribe progresses.
+We cannot be sure of all the stages of its disappearance, or of the
+causes, but in a general way we can say that it gives way before the
+spread of slavery. In the beginning primitive man does not have any
+slaves, he does not have sufficient foresight or self-restraint for
+that. When he kills his enemies in battle, he builds a fire and roasts
+their flesh and eats them; and those whom he captures alive, he binds
+fast and takes with him, to be sacrificed to his voodoo gods. But as he
+comes to more settled ways of living, and as the tribe grows larger, it
+occurs to the chiefs in battle that the captives would be glad to give
+their labor in return for their lives, and that it would be convenient
+to have some people to do the hard and dirty work. So gradually there
+comes to be a class at the bottom of society, and another class at the
+top. Those who capture the slaves and keep them at work lay claim to the
+products of their labor--at first better weapons and personal
+adornments, then separate homes for the chiefs and priests, separate
+gardens, separate flocks and herds, and--what more natural?--separate
+women.
+
+This process becomes complete when the tribe settles down to
+agriculture, and the ruling classes take possession of the land. When
+once the land is privately owned, classes are fixed, and class
+distinctions become the most prominent fact in society. And step by step
+as this happens, we see women beaten down, from the position of the
+cannibal lady, who could ask for the man she wanted and carry him off by
+force if necessary, to the position of the modern woman, who is
+physically weak, emotionally unstable, economically dependent, and
+socially repressed. You may resent such phrases, but all you have to do
+is to read the laws of civilized countries, written into the statute
+books by men to define the rights and duties of women; you will see that
+everywhere, before the recent feminist revolt, women were classified
+under the law with children and imbeciles.
+
+Maternity imposes on woman a heavy burden, and before the discovery of
+birth control, a burden that is continuous. For nine months she carries
+the child in her body, and then for a year or two she carries it in her
+arms, or on her back; and by that time there is another child, and this
+continues until she is broken down. Having this burden, she cannot
+possibly compete with the unburdened male for the possession of
+property. So wherever there is economic competition; wherever certain
+individuals or classes in the tribe or group are allowed to seize and
+hold the land; wherever the products of labor cease to be the community
+property, and become private property, the objects of economic strife;
+then inevitably and by natural process, woman comes to be placed among
+those who cannot protect themselves--that is, among the children and the
+imbeciles and the slaves. Of course, some children are well cared for,
+and so are some imbeciles, and some slaves, and some women. But they are
+cared for as a matter of favor, not as a matter of their own power. They
+proceed no longer as the cannibal lady, but by adopting and cultivating
+the slave virtues, by making themselves agreeable to their masters, by
+flattering their masters' vanity and sensuality--in other words by
+exercising what we are accustomed to call "feminine charm."
+
+From early barbaric society up to the present day, we observe that there
+are classes of women, just as there are classes of men. The position of
+these classes changes within certain limits, but in broad outline the
+conditions are fixed, and may be easily defined. There is, first of all,
+the ruling class woman. She must have birth; she may or may not have
+wealth, according as to whether the laws of that society or tribe permit
+her to have possessions of her own, or to inherit anything from her
+parents. If she has no wealth, then she will need beauty. She is the
+woman who is selected by the ruling class man to bear his name and his
+children, and to have charge of the household where these children are
+reared, and trained for the inheriting of their father's wealth and the
+carrying on of his position. This confers upon the ruling class woman
+great dignity, and makes her a person of responsibility. She rules, not
+merely over the slaves of the household, but over men of inferior social
+classes, and in a few cases an exceptionally able woman has become a
+queen, and ruled over men of her own class. This ruling class woman has
+been known through all the ages by a special name, and the ways and
+customs regarding her have been studied in an entertaining book, "The
+Lady," by Emily James Putnam.
+
+Next in privilege and position to the "lady" is the mistress, the woman
+who is selected by the ruling class man, not primarily to bear his
+children, but to entertain and divert him. She may, of course, bear
+children also. In barbaric societies, and up to quite recent times, the
+importance of the ruling class man was indicated by the number of
+concubines he had, and the position of these women was hardly inferior
+to that of the wife or queen. In the days of the French monarchy, the
+king's mistress was frequently more important than the queen; she was a
+woman of ability, maintaining her supremacy in the intrigues of the
+court. In ancient Greek society, the "hetairae" were a recognized class,
+and Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, was the most brilliant and most
+conspicuous woman in Athens. In modern France, the position of the
+mistress is recognized by the phrase "demi-monde," or half-world. The
+American plutocracy has developed upon a superstructure of Puritanism,
+and therefore, in America, hypocrisy is necessary. But in the great
+cities of America, the vast majority of the ruling class men keep
+mistresses before marriage, and a great many keep them afterwards; and
+these mistresses are coming to be more and more openly flaunted, and to
+acquire more and more of what is called "social position." It is
+possible now in the "smart set" for a lady to accept the status of
+mistress, delicately veiled, without losing caste thereby, and actresses
+and other free lance women who got their start in life by taking the
+position of mistress, are coming more and more to be recognized as
+"ladies," and to be received into what are called the "best circles."
+
+There remains to be considered the position of the lower class women. In
+barbarous society these women were very little different from slaves.
+They had no rights of their own, except such rights as their master man
+chose to allow them for his own convenience. They were sold in marriage
+by their parents, and they went where they were sold, and obeyed their
+new master. They became his household drudges, and reserved their
+affections for him; if they failed to do this, he stoned them to death,
+or strangled them with a cord and tied them in a sack and threw them
+into the river.
+
+And, of course, the rights of the master man yielded to the rights of
+men of higher classes. The king or nobleman could take any woman he
+wished at any time, and he made laws to this effect and enforced them.
+In feudal society the lord of the manor claimed the right of the first
+night with the wives of his serfs; this was one of the ruling class
+privileges which was abolished in the French revolution. Wherever the
+French revolution did not succeed in affecting land tenure, the right of
+the land owner to prey upon his tenant girls continues as a custom, even
+though it is not written in the law, and would be denied by the
+hypocritical. It prevails in Poland, as you may discover by reading
+Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools"; it prevails in England, as you may discover
+from Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." You will find that it prevails
+in every part of the world where women have poverty and men have wealth
+and prestige, dress suits and automobiles. You will find it wherever
+there are leisure class hotels, or colleges, or other gatherings of
+ruling class young males. You will find it in the theatrical and moving
+picture worlds. It is well understood in the theatrical world of
+Broadway that the woman "star" in the profession gets her start in life
+by becoming the mistress of a manager or "angel." In the moving picture
+world of Southern California it is a recognized convention, known to
+everyone familiar with the business, that a young girl parts with her
+virtue in exchange for an important job.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+SEX AND YOUNG AMERICA
+
+     (Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect the future
+     generation.)
+
+
+Our first task is to consider how people actually behave in the matter
+of sex--as distinguished from the way they pretend to behave. The first
+and most necessary step in the cure of any disease is a correct
+diagnosis, and in this case we have not merely to make the diagnosis,
+but to prove it; because the most conspicuous fact about our present
+sex-arrangements is a mass of organized concealment. Not merely do
+teachers and preachers for the most part suppress all mention of these
+subjects; but the defenders of our present economic disorder are
+accustomed to acclaim the private property régime as the only basis of
+family life. So long as people hold such an idea, there is no use trying
+to teach them anything on the subject. There is no use talking to them
+about monogamous love, because all they understand is hypocrisy. In this
+chapter, therefore, we shall proceed to hold up the mirror in front of
+capitalist morality.
+
+I pause and consider: Where shall I begin? At the top of society, or at
+the bottom? With the city or the country? With the old or the young? I
+think you care most of all about your boys and girls, so I am going to
+tell you what is happening to the youth of America in these days of
+triumphant reaction.
+
+I have a son, about whom naturally I think a great deal; just now he is
+a student at one of our state universities, and he wrote me the other
+day: "I went to a dance, and believe me, father, if you knew what these
+modern dances mean, you would write something about them." I know what
+they mean. They have come to us straight from the brothels of the
+Argentine, among the vilest haunts of vice in the world. Others have
+come from the jungle, where they were natural. The poor creature of the
+jungle has his sex-desire and nothing else; he is not troubled with
+brains, he does not have a complicated social organism to build up and
+protect, consequently he does not need what are called "morals." But we
+civilized people need morals, and we are losing them, and our society is
+disintegrating, going back to the howling and fighting and cannibalism
+of the jungle.
+
+Prof. William James, America's greatest psychologist, tells us that
+going through the motions appropriate to an emotion automatically causes
+that emotion to be felt. If you watch an actor preparing to rush on the
+stage in an emotional scene, you will see him walking about, clenching
+his fists, stamping his feet, making ferocious faces, "working himself
+up." And now, what do you think is going on in the minds of young men
+and women, while with their bodies they are going through procedures
+which are nothing and can be nothing but imitations of sexual contact?
+
+The parents, it appears, are ignorant and unsophisticated, and have left
+it for the children to find out what these dances mean. In Rhode Island,
+one of our oldest states, is Brown College, chosen by New England's
+aristocracy for the education of its sons; and these boys go to social
+affairs in the best homes in Providence, and they call them
+"petting-parties." And here is what they write in their college paper:
+
+"The modern social bud drinks, not too much, often, but enough. She
+smokes unguardedly, swears considerably, and tells 'dirty' stories. All
+in all, she is a most frivolous, passionate, sensation-seeking little
+thing."
+
+This statement, published in a college paper, causes a scandal, and a
+newspaper reporter goes to interview the college boy who edits the
+paper, and this boy talks. He tells how he met a lovely girl at a dance,
+and his heart was thrilled with the rapture of young love. "Frankly,
+between you and me, I was pretty smitten with this particular little
+lady. Felt about her, don't you know, like a real guy feels about the
+girl he could imagine himself married to. Thought she was too nice to
+touch, almost; you know the grave sort of love affair a man always has
+once in a lifetime. Well, we walked a bit, and I guess I didn't say
+much, for a while. I felt plenty--respectfully--just the same. And as we
+turned the corner of one of the buildings here, she grasped my hand.
+Hers was trembling. 'Love and let love is my motto, dearie,' said this
+seraph of my dreams; 'come, we're losing a lot of time getting started.'
+That girl thought I was dead slow. She didn't know that just then I
+imagined the great love of my life was just entering the door. It was
+cruel the way she got down from the pedestal I had built for her."
+
+Suppose I should ask you to name the influence that is having most to do
+with shaping the thoughts of young America--what would you answer?
+Undoubtedly, the moving pictures. It is from the "movies" that your
+children learn what life is; if I can show you that a certain thing is
+in the "movies," you can surely not deny that it is passing every day
+and night into the hearts and minds of millions of our boys and girls.
+Take a vote among the girls, what would they consider the most
+delightful destiny in life; surely nine out of ten would answer, to
+become a screen star, and pose before a world of admirers, and be paid a
+million dollars a year. Make a test and see; and put that fact together
+with the one I have already stated, that in order to get an important
+job in the "movies," a girl must regularly and as a matter of course
+part with her virtue.
+
+You will be told, no doubt, that this is a slanderous statement, so let
+me give you a little evidence. I happened within the past year to be in
+the private office of a well known moving picture producer, a man who is
+married, and takes care to tell you that he loves his wife. He was
+producing a play, the heroine of which was supposed to be a daughter of
+Puritan New England. To play this part he had engaged a chaste girl, and
+as a result was in the midst of a queer trouble, which he poured out to
+me. His "leading man" had refused to act with this girl, insisting that
+no girl could act a part of love unless she had had passionate
+experience; no such thing had ever been heard of in moving pictures
+before. Likewise, the director agreed that no girl who is chaste could
+act for the screen, and the producer asked my advice about it. Mr.
+William Allen White, of Kansas, was present in the office, and
+authorizes me to state that he substantiates this anecdote. We both
+advised the producer to stand by the girl, and he did so; and the
+picture went out, and proved to be what in trade parlance is termed a
+"frost"; that is to say, your children didn't care for it, and it cost
+the producer something like a hundred thousand dollars to make this
+attempt to defy the conventions of the moving picture world.
+
+I will tell you another story. I have a friend, a prominent man in Los
+Angeles, who was appealed to by a young lady who wished to act in the
+"movies." My friend introduced this young lady to a very prominent
+screen actor, who in turn introduced her to one of the biggest producers
+in America, one of the men whose "million dollar feature pictures" are
+regularly exploited. The producer examined the young lady's figure, and
+told her that she would "do"; he added, quite casually, and as a matter
+of course, that she would be expected to "pay the price." The young lady
+took exception to this proposition, and gave up the chance. She told my
+friend about it, and he, being a man of the world, accustomed to dealing
+with the foibles of his fellowmen, wrote a note to the actor, explaining
+that inasmuch as this young lady had been socially introduced to him,
+and by him socially introduced to the manager, she should not have been
+expected to "pay the price." To this the actor answered that my friend
+was correct, and he would see the manager about it. The manager conceded
+the point, and the young lady got her chance in the "movies" and made
+good without "paying the price." This story tells you all you need to
+know about the difference in sex ethics that society applies to the
+"lady" and to the daughter of the common people.
+
+You know, of course, what is the stock theme of all moving pictures--the
+virtuous daughter of the people, who resists all temptations, and is
+finally rescued from her would-be seducer by the strong and sturdy arm
+of a male doll. Could one ask a more perfect illustration of capitalist
+hypocrisy than the fact that the girl who plays this role is required to
+pay with her virtue for the privilege of playing it! And if you know
+anything about young girls, you can watch her playing it on the screen,
+and see from her every gesture that what I am telling you is true. My
+wife knows young girls, and I took her, the other day, to see a moving
+picture. She said: "I have solved a problem. When I come home on the
+street-cars, it happens that I ride with a lot of young girls from the
+high school. I have been watching them, and I couldn't imagine what was
+the matter with them. All simple, girlish straightforwardness is gone
+out of them; they are making eyes, in the strangest manner--and at
+nobody; just practicing, apparently. They wear yearning facial
+expressions; when they start to walk, they do not walk, but writhe and
+wiggle. I thought there must be some nervous eye and lip disease got
+abroad in the school. But now, when I go to a moving picture, I discover
+what it means. They are imitating the 'stars' on the screen!"
+
+In these pictures, you know, there are "ingenues," young girls engaged
+in making a happy ending to the story by capturing a rich lover; and
+then there are "vamps," engaged in seducing young men, or breaking up
+some happy home. In old-style melodrama it was possible to tell the
+"ingenue" from the "vamps"; the former would trip lightly, and glance
+coyly out of the corners of her eyes, while the "vamp" moved with slow,
+languished writhing, blinking heavy-lidded, sinister eyes. But
+now-a-days the "vamps" have learned to pose as "ingenues," and the
+"ingenues" are as vicious as the "vamps"; they both make the same
+glances, and culminate in the same sensual swoon. It is all sex, and
+nothing else--except revolvers and fighting, and wild rushing about.
+
+And then, too, there are the musical comedies, made wholly out of sex,
+being known as "girl shows," or more frankly still, "leg shows." A row
+of half naked women, prancing and gyrating on the stage, and in front of
+them rows of bald-headed old men, gazing at them greedily; also college
+boys, or boys too imbecile to get through college, sending in their
+cards with boxes of costly flowers. You will be shocked as you read my
+plain statements of fact, but if you are the average American, you will
+take your family to a musical show which has come straight from the
+brothels of Paris, every allusion of which is obscene. I remember once
+being in a small town in the South, when one of these "road shows"
+arrived from New York, and I realized that this institution was simply a
+traveling house of ill fame; the whole male portion of the town was
+a-quiver with excitement, a mixture of lust and fear.
+
+I live in Southern California, one of many places in America where the
+idle rich gather for their diversion. The country is dotted with
+palatial hotels, and a golden flood of pleasure-seekers come in every
+winter. I have talked with some of the college boys in this part of the
+country, and also with teachers who try to save the boys; they report
+these "swell" hotels as hot-beds of vice, haunted by married women with
+automobiles, and nothing to do, who wish to go into the canyons for
+sexual riots. Even elderly women, white-haired women, old enough to be
+your grandmother! I have had them pointed out to me in these hotels,
+their cheeks and lips covered with rouge, with pink silk tights on their
+calves, and nothing else almost up to their knees and nothing at all
+half way down their backs. These old women seek to prey on boys, wanting
+their youth, and being willing to lavish money upon them. They are
+preying on your boys--you prosperous business men, who have preached the
+gospel of "each for himself," and are proud of your skill to prey upon
+society. You heap up your fortunes, and call it success, and are secure
+and happy. You have made your children safe against want, you think; but
+how are you going to make them safe against the "vamps" who prey upon
+the overwhelming excitements of youth, and betray your sons before your
+very eyes--teaching them lust in their youth, so that love may never be
+born in their stunted hearts? All the haunts of "gilded vice" are
+thriving, and somebody's boy is paying the interest on the capital, to
+say nothing of paying the police.
+
+Many years ago I paid a call upon Anthony Comstock, head of the Society
+for the Prevention of Vice. Comstock was an old-style Puritan, and many
+insist that he was likewise an old-style grafter. However that may be,
+he had a collection of the literature of pornography which would cause
+any man to hesitate in condemning his activities. There is a vast
+traffic in this kind of thing; it is sold by pack-peddlers all over the
+country, and it is sold in little shops in the neighborhood of public
+schools. You may be sure that in your school there are some boys who
+know where to get it, even though they will not tell what they know. I
+will describe just one piece that a school boy brought to me, a
+catalogue of obscene literature, for sale in Spain, and to be ordered
+wholesale. You know how men with wares to sell will expend their
+imaginations and exhaust their vocabulary in describing to you the
+charms of each particular article for sale. Here was a catalogue of one
+or two hundred pages, listing thousands of items, pictures, pamphlets
+and books, and various implements of vice, all set forth in that
+imitation ecstasy of department stores and seed catalogues: here was
+"something neat," here was a "fancy one," this one was "a peach," and
+that one was "a winner."
+
+When I was a lad, I was tramping in the Adirondack mountains and was
+picked up by an itinerant photographer. We rode all day together, and he
+became friendly, and showed me some obscene pictures. Presently he
+discovered that he was dealing with a young moralist, and apparently it
+was the first time he had ever had that experience; he talked honestly,
+and we became friends on a different basis. This man had a wife and
+children at home, but he traveled all over the mountains, and was like
+the sailor with a girl in every port. Also he was thoroughly familiar
+with all forms of unnatural vice, and took this also as a matter of
+course, and spread it on his journeys.
+
+The other day I read a statement by a prominent physician in New York;
+he had been talking with a police captain, and had asked him to state
+what in his opinion was the most significant development in the social
+life of New York. The answer was, "The spread of male prostitution."
+Here is a subject to which I have to admit my courage is unequal. I
+cannot repeat the jokes which I have heard young men tell about these
+matters, and about the attitude of the police to them. Suffice it to say
+that these hideous forms of vice are now the commonplace of the
+under-world of all our great cities. The other day a friend of mine was
+talking with a prostitute who had left a high-class resort, where the
+price charged was ten dollars, and gone to live in a "fifty-cent house,"
+frequented by sailors. She was asked the reason, and her explanation
+was, "The sailors are natural." Dr. William J. Robinson has written in
+his magazine an account of the haunts in Berlin which are frequented by
+the victims of unnatural vice, there allowed to meet openly and to
+solicit. Frank Harris, in his "Life of Oscar Wilde," tells how when that
+scandal was at its height, and further exposure threatened, swarms of
+the most prominent men in England suddenly discovered that it was
+advisable for them to travel on the Continent. The great public schools
+of England are rotten with these practices; the younger boys learn them
+from the older ones, and are victims all the rest of their lives. And
+the corruption is creeping through our own social body--and you think
+that all you have to do is not to know about it!
+
+My friend Floyd Dell, reading this manuscript, insists that this chapter
+and the one following are too severe. In case others should agree with
+him, I quote two newspaper items which appear while I am reading the
+proofs. The first is from an interview with H. Gordon Selfridge, the
+London merchant, telling his impressions of America. He tells about the
+"flappers," and then about the "shifters."
+
+"The other is the newly exploited 'shifters.' The 'shifters' are an
+organization of mushroom growth among high school girls and boys which
+is spreading through the eastern States and winning converts among
+youngsters. It is described as the 'flapper Ku Klux,' and its emblem, if
+worn by a girl, according to high school teachers and children's society
+leaders who oppose it, to be nothing more nor less than an invitation to
+be kissed.
+
+"To call it an organization even is exaggeration, for the 'shifters' are
+better described as a secret understanding without any responsible head.
+
+"From being a seemingly harmless group whose emblem was originally a
+brass paper clip fastened in the coat lapel it has developed by rapid
+strides. Manufacturers of emblems are coining money by the sale of
+hands, palm outstretched. The significance is take what you want or, as
+the motto of the order says, 'be a good fellow; get something for
+nothing.' One of the principles is to 'do' one's parents, referred to as
+'they.'"
+
+The second item is an Associated Press despatch:
+
+"ST. LOUIS, March 10.--In reiterating his statement that a girls' and a
+boys' secret organization requiring that all applicants must have
+violated the moral code before admission was granted, existed in a local
+high school, Victor J. Miller, president of the Board of Police
+Commissioners, tonight named the Soldan High School as the one in which
+the alleged immoral conditions exist. The school is attended largely by
+children of the wealthy West End citizens.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+SEX AND THE "SMART SET"
+
+     (Portrays the moral customs of those who set the fashion in our
+     present-day world.)
+
+
+We have discussed what is happening to our young people; let us next
+consider what our mature people are doing. Having mentioned conditions
+in England, I will give a glimpse of London "high life" two years before
+the war.
+
+As a visiting writer, I was invited to luncheon at the home of a woman
+novelist, whose books at that time were widely read both in her country
+and here. Present at the luncheon was a prominent publisher, who I
+afterwards learned was the lady's lover; also the lady's grown and
+married son. The publisher looked like a buxom hunting squire, but the
+lady told me that he was very unhappy, because his wife would not
+divorce him. The lady had just come from a week-end party at the home of
+an earl, who at this moment occupies one of the highest posts in the
+gift of the British Empire. Things had gone comically wrong at this
+country house party, she said, because the hostess had failed to
+remember that Lord So-and-so was at present living with Lady
+Somebody-else. One of the duties of hostesses at house parties, it
+appears, is to know who is living with whom, in order that they may be
+put in connecting rooms. In this case his Lordship had been grouchy, and
+everybody's pleasure had been spoiled.
+
+This produced a discussion of the subject of marriage, and the son
+remarked that marriage was like an old slipper; you wore it, because you
+had got used to it, but you did not talk about it, because it was
+unimportant and stupid. I went away, and happened to mention these
+matters to a friend, who had met this woman novelist in Nice. The
+novelist had there, in a group of people, been introduced to a young
+girl who was suffering from neurasthenia. "My dear," said the novelist,
+affectionately, "what you need is to have an illegitimate baby."
+
+This, you will say, is the "old world," and you always knew that it was
+corrupt. If so, let me tell you a few things that I have seen among the
+"upper circles" of our own great and virtuous democracy. My first
+acquaintance with New York "society" came after the publication of "The
+Jungle." As the author of that book I was a sensation, almost as much so
+as if I had won the heavy-weight championship of the world. Out of
+curiosity I accepted an invitation for a weekend amid what is called the
+"hunting set" of Long Island. Here was a gorgeous palace with many
+tapestries, and soft-footed servants, and decanters and cocktails at
+every stage of one's journey about the place, like coaling stations on
+the trade routes of the British Empire. One of the first sights that
+caught my young eye was a large and stately lady in semi-undress,
+smoking a big black cigar. If I were to mention her name, every
+newspaper reader in America would know her; and before I had been
+introduced to her, I heard two young men in evening dress make an
+obscene remark about her, and what she was waiting for that evening.
+
+I discovered quickly that, while there was a great deal of sex among
+these people, there was very little love. There was principally a wish
+to score cleverly and subtly at the expense of another person's
+feelings. It is called the "smart set," you understand, and I will give
+you an idea of how "smart" it is. I was walking down a passage with a
+lady, and on a couch sat another lady, side by side with a certain very
+famous lawyer, whose golden eloquence you have probably listened to from
+platforms, and whom for the purpose of this anecdote I will name Jones.
+Mr. Jones and the lady on the sofa were sitting very close together, and
+my companion, with a bright smile over her shoulder, called out: "Be
+careful, Mary; you'll be scattering a lot of little Joneses around here
+if you don't watch out!" Quite "continental," you perceive; and a long
+way from the Puritanism of our ancestors!
+
+From there I went to the billiard-room, and observed a young man of
+fashion trying to play billiards when he was half drunk. It was a funny
+spectacle, and they took away his cigarette by force, for fear he would
+drop it on the cloth of the billiard table. Pretty soon he was telling
+about a racing meet, and an orgy with negro women in a stable. Therefore
+I returned to where the ladies were gathered, and one middle-aged
+matron, who had read widely, including some of my books, engaged me in
+serious conversation. I came later on to know her rather well, and she
+told me her views of love; the source of all the sex troubles of
+humanity was that they took the relationship seriously. Modern
+discoveries made it unnecessary to attach importance to it. She herself,
+acting upon this theory, probably had had relations with--my friends,
+reading the proofs of this book, beg me to omit the number of men,
+because you would not believe me!
+
+You may argue that this is not typical; say that I fell into the
+clutches of some particular group of degenerates. All I can tell you is
+that these people are as "socially prominent" as any in New York City. I
+will say furthermore that I have sat in the home of the best known
+corporation lawyer in America, who was paid a million dollars to
+organize the steel trust--the late James B. Dill, at that time a member
+of the Court of Appeals of New Jersey--and have heard him "muck-rake"
+his business friends by the hour with stories of that sort. I have heard
+him tell of the "steel crowd" hiring a trolley car and a load of
+prostitutes and champagne, and taking an all-night trip from one city to
+another, smashing up both the car and the prostitutes. I have heard him
+tell of sitting on the deck of a Sound steamer, and overhearing two of
+his Wall Street associates and their wives arranging to trade partners
+for the night.
+
+I have mentioned a lady who had a great many lovers. Once in the
+dining-room of a club on Fifth Avenue, commonly known as "the
+Millionaires'," a companion pointed out various people, many of whom I
+had read about in the newspapers, and told me funny stories about them.
+"See that old boy with a note-book," said my host. "That is Jacob
+So-and-so, and he is entering up the cost of his lunch. He keeps
+accounts of everything, even of his women. He told me he had had over a
+thousand, and they had cost him over a million."
+
+It is impossible to say what is the most terrible thing in capitalist
+society, but among the most terrible are assuredly the old men. The
+richest and most powerful banker in America was in his sex habits the
+merry jest of New York society. He took toward women the same attitude
+as King Edward VII; if he wanted one, he went up and asked for her, and
+it made no difference who she was, or where she was. This man's personal
+living expenses were five thousand dollars a day, and all women
+understood that they might have anything within reason.
+
+When I was a boy, living in New York, there was a certain aged
+money-lender about whom one read something in the newspapers almost
+every day. He was a prominent figure, because he was worth eighty
+millions, yet wore an old, rusty black suit, and saved every penny.
+Every now and then you would read in the paper how some woman had been
+arrested for attempting to blackmail him in his office. It seemed
+puzzling, because you wouldn't think of him as a likely subject for
+blackmail. Some years later I met Dorothy Richardson, author of "The
+Long Day," a very fine book which has been undeservedly forgotten. Miss
+Richardson had been a reporter for the New York _Herald_, and had been
+sent to interview this old money-lender. She was ushered into his
+private office, and as soon as the attendant had gone out and closed the
+door, the old man came up, and without a word of preliminaries grabbed
+her in his arms like a gorilla. She fought and scratched, and got out,
+and was wise enough to say nothing about it; therefore there was nothing
+published about another attempt to blackmail the aged money-lender!
+
+What this means is that men of unlimited means live lives of unbridled
+lust, and then in their old age they are helpless victims of their own
+impulses. There was a certain enormously wealthy United States Senator
+from West Virginia, who came very near being Vice President of the
+United States. This doddering old man would go about the streets of
+Washington with a couple of very decorous and carefully trained
+attendants; and whenever an attractive young woman would pass on the
+street, or when one would approach the Senator, these two attendants
+would quietly slip their arms into his and hold him fast. They would do
+this so that the ordinary person would not suspect what was going on,
+but would think the old man was being supported.
+
+You do not have to take these things on my word; the newspapers are full
+of them all the time, and they are proven in court. Just now as I write,
+the president of the most powerful bank in America is claiming in court
+that his children are not his own, but that their father is an Indian
+guide. His wife, on the other hand, is accusing the banker of having
+played the role of husband to several other women. He would take these
+women traveling on his yacht, which, quaintly enough, was termed the
+"Modesty."
+
+Also the papers have been full of the "Hamon case." Here is a wealthy
+man, Republican National Committeeman from Oklahoma, who is about to go
+to Washington to advise our new President whom to appoint to office from
+that state. Before he goes, he casts off his mistress, and she shoots
+him. She was his secretary, it appears, and helped him to make his
+fortune; she has made many friends, and a million dollars is spent to
+save her life. The prosecuting attorney calls her a "painted snake," and
+accuses her of having sat week after week "displaying to the jury
+twenty-four inches of silk stockinged shin-bone." The jury, apparently
+unable to withstand this allurement, acquits the woman, and she
+announces that she intends to bring suit under the man's will to get his
+money! Also, she is going into the "movies," and tells us that it is to
+be "for educational purposes." Everything in our capitalist society must
+be "educational," you understand. It was P. T. Barnum who discovered
+that the American people would flock to look at a five-legged calf, if
+it was presented as "educational."
+
+The moving pictures and the theatres are the honey-pots which gather the
+feminine beauty and youthful charm of our country for the convenience of
+rich men's lust. These girls swarm in the theatrical agencies, and in
+the artists' studios; they starve for a while, and finally they yield.
+In every great city there are thousands of men of wealth, whose only
+occupation is to prey upon such girls. I know a certain theatrical
+manager, the most famous in the United States, a sensual, stout little
+Jew. He is a man of culture and subtle insight, and in the course of his
+conversation he described to me, quite casually and as a matter of
+course, the charm of deflowering a virgin. Nothing could equal that
+sensation; the first time was the last.
+
+Many years ago there was a horrible scandal in New York. The most famous
+architect in America was murdered, and the newspapers probed into his
+life, and it was revealed to us that many of the most famous artists and
+men about town in New York maintained elaborate studios, equipped with
+every luxury, all the paraphernalia of all the vices of the ages; and
+through these places there flowed an endless stream of beautiful young
+girls. In every large city in America you will find an "athletic club,"
+and if you go there and listen to the gossip, you discover that there
+are scores of idle rich men with automobiles and private apartments, and
+a staff of procurers used in preying, not merely upon young girls, but
+also upon young boys. And these are not merely the children of the poor,
+they are the children of all but the rich and powerful. In the "movies"
+you see pictures of girls lured into automobiles, and carried out into
+the country, or seduced by means of "knock-out drops," and you think
+this is just "melodrama"; but it is happening all the time. In every big
+city of our country the police know that hundreds of young girls
+disappear every year. At a recent convention of police chiefs in
+Washington, it was stated, from police records, that sixty thousand
+girls disappear every year in the United States, leaving no trace.
+Unless the parents happen to be in position to make a fuss, not even the
+names of the girls are published in the newspapers. I do not ask you to
+believe such things on my word; believe District Attorney Sims of
+Chicago, who made the most thorough study of this subject ever made in
+America, and wrote:
+
+"When a white slave is sold and landed in a house or dive she becomes a
+prisoner.... In each of these places is a room having but one door, to
+which the keeper holds the key. Here are locked all the street clothes,
+shoes and ordinary apparel.... The finery provided for the girls is of a
+nature to make their appearance on the street impossible. Then in
+addition to this handicap, the girl is placed at once in debt to the
+keeper for a wardrobe.... She cannot escape while she is in debt, and
+she can never get out of debt. Not many of the women in this class
+expect to live more than ten years--perhaps the average is less. Many
+die painful deaths by disease, many by consumption, but it is hardly
+beyond the truth to say that suicide is their general expectation."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+SEX AND THE POOR
+
+     (Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and the
+     diseases which result from it.)
+
+
+It is manifest that the rich cannot indulge in vices, without drawing
+the poor after them; and in addition to this, the poor have their own
+evil instincts, which fester in neglect. There were several hundred
+thousand dark rooms, that is rooms without light or ventilation, in New
+York City before the war. Now the country is reported to be short a
+million homes, and in New York City working girls are sleeping six or
+eight in a room. In the homes of the poor in the slums, parents and
+children and boarders all sleep in one room indiscriminately, and the
+world moves back to that primitive communism, in which incest is an
+everyday affair, and little children learn all the vices there are. I
+have in my hand a pamphlet by a physician, in charge of a hospital in
+New York, who in fifteen years has examined nine hundred children who
+have been raped, and the age of the youngest was eight months! I have
+another pamphlet by a settlement worker, who discusses the problem of
+the thousands of deserted wives, most of them with children, many with
+children yet unborn. As I write, there are millions of men out of work
+in our country, and these men are desperate, and they quit and take to
+the road. They join the army of the casual workers, the "blanket
+stiffs"; and, of course, the more there are of these men, the more
+prostitutes there have to be, and the more homosexuality there will
+inevitably be.
+
+Also the girls are out of work, and are on the streets. Many years ago I
+visited the mill towns of New England, "she-towns" they are called, and
+one of the young fellows said to me that you could buy a girl there for
+the price of a sandwich. Read "The Long Day," to which I have previously
+referred, and see how our working girls live. Dorothy Richardson
+describes her room-mate, who read cheap novels which she found in the
+gutter weeklies. She read them over and over; when she had got to the
+bottom of the pile, she began again, because her mind was so weak that
+she had forgotten everything. And then one day Miss Richardson happened
+to be groping in a corner of a closet, and came upon a great pile of
+bottles, and examined them, and was made sick with horror--abortion
+mixtures.
+
+Dr. William J. Robinson, an authority on the subject, estimates that
+there are one million abortions in the United States every year. Some of
+these are accidental, caused by venereal disease, but the vast majority
+are deliberate acts, crimes under the law, murder of human life. Dr.
+Robinson also estimates, from the many thousands of cases which come to
+him, that ninety-five per cent of all men have at some time practiced
+self-abuse. He is a strenuous opponent of what he calls "hysteria" on
+the subject of venereal disease, and insists that its prevalence is
+exaggerated; that instead of one person in ten being syphilitic, as is
+commonly stated, the proportion is only one in twenty. He insists that
+the percentage of persons having had gonorrhea is only twenty-five per
+cent, instead of seventy-five or eighty-five. I find that other
+authorities generally agree in the statement that fifty per cent of
+young men become infected with some venereal disease before they reach
+the age of thirty. The Committee of Seven in New York estimated in 1903
+that there were two hundred thousand cases of syphilis in the city, and
+eight hundred thousand of gonorrhea. There were villages in France
+before the war in which twenty-five per cent of the inhabitants were
+syphilitic, and in Russia there were towns in which it was said that
+every person was syphilitic. We may safely say that these latter are the
+only towns in Europe in which there was not an enormous increase of this
+disease during and since the war.
+
+What are the consequences of these diseases? The consequences are
+frightful suffering, not merely to persons guilty of immorality, but to
+innocent persons. Dr. Morrow, generally recognized as the leading
+authority on this subject, estimates that ten per cent of all wives are
+infected with venereal disease by their husbands; he estimates that
+thirty per cent of all the infected women in New York were wives who had
+got the disease from their husbands. It is estimated that thirty per
+cent of all the births, where either parent has syphilis, result in
+abortions. It is estimated that fifty per cent of childlessness in
+marriage is caused by gonorrhea, and twenty-five per cent of all
+existing blindness. In Germany, before the war, there were thirty
+thousand persons born blind from this cause. It is estimated that
+ninety-five per cent of all abdominal operations performed upon women
+are due to gonorrhea. And any of these horrors may fall upon persons who
+lead lives of the strictest chastity. There was a case reported in
+Germany of 236 children who contracted venereal disease from swimming in
+a public bath.
+
+All these things are products of our system of
+marriage-plus-prostitution. They are all part of that system, and no
+study of the system is complete without them. Everywhere throughout
+modern civilization prostitution is an enormous and lucrative industry.
+In New York it is estimated to give employment to two hundred thousand
+women, to say nothing of the managers, and the runners, and the men who
+live off the women. There are thousands of resorts, large and small,
+high-priced and cheap, and the police know all about it, and derive a
+handsome income from it. And you find it the same in every great city of
+the world; in every port where sailors land, or every place where crowds
+of men are expected. If there is to be a football game, or a political
+convention, the managers of the industry know about it, and while they
+may never have heard the libel that Socialism preaches sexual license,
+they all know that capitalism practices it, and they provide the
+necessary means. In the United States there are estimated to be a half a
+million prostitutes, counting the inmates of houses alone.
+
+During the late war, at the army bases in France, the British government
+maintained official brothels; but if you published anything about this
+in England, you ran a chance of having your paper suppressed. During the
+occupation of the Rhine country, the French sent in negro troops,
+savages from the heart of Africa, whose custom it is to cut off the ears
+of their enemies in battle; and the French army compelled the German
+population to supply white women for these troops. I have quoted in "The
+Brass Check" a pious editorial from the Los Angeles _Times_, bidding the
+mothers of America be happy, because "our boys in France" were safe in
+the protecting arms of the Y. M. C. A. and the Knights of Columbus. I
+dared not publish at this time a passage which I had clipped from the
+London _Clarion_, in which A. M. Thompson told how he watched the
+"doughboys" in the cafés of Paris, with a girl on each knee, and a
+glass of wine in each hand.
+
+I will add one little anecdote, giving you a glimpse of the sex
+conventions of war. The American army made desperate efforts to keep
+down venereal disease, and required all men to report to their
+regimental surgeon immediately after having had sex relations. Our army
+moved into Coblentz, and the regulations strictly forbade any
+fraternizing with the inhabitants. But immediately it was discovered
+that there was an increase of disease, and investigation was made, and
+revealed that men had been ceasing to report to the surgeons, because
+they were afraid of being punished for having "fraternized with the
+enemy." So a new order was issued, providing that having sexual
+intercourse would not be considered as "fraternizing." I do not know any
+better way to distinguish my ideal of morality from the military ideal,
+than to say that according to my understanding of it, the sex
+relationship should always and everywhere imply and include
+"fraternizing."
+
+Finally, in concluding this picture of our present-day sex arrangements,
+there is a brief word to be said about divorce. In the year 1916, the
+last statistics available as I write, there were just over a million
+marriages in the United States, and there were over one hundred and
+twelve thousand divorces. This would indicate that one marriage in every
+nine resulted in shipwreck. But as a matter of fact the proportion is
+greater, because the marriages necessarily precede the divorces, and the
+proportion of divorces in 1916 should be calculated upon the number of
+marriages which took place some five or ten years previously. Of the one
+million marriages in 1916, we may say that one in seven or one in eight
+will end in the divorce courts. Let this suffice for a glimpse of the
+system of marriage-plus-prostitution--a field of weeds which we have
+somehow to plow up and prepare for a harvest of rational and honest
+love!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+SEX AND NATURE
+
+     (Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of natural or
+     physical disharmony.)
+
+
+Elie Metchnikoff, one of the greatest of scientists, wrote a book
+entitled "The Nature of Man," in which he studied the human organism
+from the point of view of biology, demonstrating that in our bodies are
+a number of relics of past stages of evolution, no longer useful, but
+rather a source of danger and harm. We have, for example, in the inner
+corner of the eye a relic of that third eyelid whereby the eagle is
+enabled to look at the sun. This is a harmless relic. But we have also
+an appendix, a degenerate organ of digestion, or gland of secretion,
+which now serves as a center of infection and source of danger. We have
+likewise a lower bowel, a survival of our hay-eating days, and a cause
+of autointoxication and premature death. Among the sources of trouble,
+Metchnikoff names the fact that the human male possesses a far greater
+quantity of sexual energy than is required for purposes of procreation.
+This becomes a cause of disharmony and excess, it causes man to wreck
+his health and destroy himself.
+
+Manifestly, this is a serious matter; for if it is true, our efforts to
+find health and happiness in love are doomed to failure, and Lecky is
+right when he describes the prostitute as the "guardian of virtue," the
+eternal and necessary scapegoat of humanity. But I do not believe it is
+true; I think that here is one more case of the endless blundering of
+scientists and philosophers who attempt to teach physiology, politics,
+religion and law, without having made a study of economics. I do not
+believe that the sex troubles of mankind are physiological in their
+nature, but have their origin in our present system of class privilege.
+I believe they are caused, not by the blunders of nature, but by the
+blunders of man as a social animal.
+
+Let us take a glimpse at primitive man. I choose the Marquesas Islands,
+because we have complete reports about them from numerous observers.
+Here was a race of people, not interfered with by civilization, who
+manifested all that overplus of sexual energy to which Metchnikoff calls
+attention. They placed no restraint whatever upon sex activity, they had
+no conception of such an idea. Their games and dances were sex play, and
+so also, in great part, was their religion. Yet we do not find that they
+wrecked themselves. Physically speaking, they were one of the most
+perfect races of which we have record. Both the men and women were
+beautiful; they were active and strong from childhood to old age,
+and--here is the significant thing--they were happy. They were a
+laughing, dancing, singing race. They hardly knew grief or fear at all.
+They knew how to live, and they enjoyed every process and aspect of
+their lives, just as children do, naively and simply. This included
+their sex life; and I think it assures us that there can be no such
+fundamental physical disharmony in the human organism as the great
+Russian scientist thought he had discovered.
+
+Is it not a fact that throughout nature a superfluity of any kind of
+energy or product may be a source of happiness, rather than of distress?
+Consider the singing of the birds! Or consider nature's impulse to cover
+a field with useless plants, and how by a little cunning, we are able to
+turn it into a harvest for our own use! In the life of our bodies one
+may show the same thing again and again. We have within us the
+possibility of and the impulse toward more muscular activity than our
+survival makes necessary; but we do not regard this additional energy as
+a curse of nature, and a peril to our lives--we turn out and play
+baseball. We have an impulse to see more than is necessary, so we climb
+mountains, or go traveling. We have an impulse to hear more, so we go to
+a concert. We have an impulse to think more, so we play chess, or whist,
+or write books and accumulate libraries. Never do we think of these
+activities as signs of an irrevocable blunder on the part of nature.
+
+But about the activities of love we feel differently; and why is this?
+If I say that it is because we have an unwholesome and degraded attitude
+toward love, because, as a result of religious superstition we fear it,
+and dare not deal with it honestly, the reader may suspect that I am
+preparing to hint at some self-indulgence, some form of sex orgy such as
+the "turkey trot" and the "bunny hug" and the "grizzly bear," the
+"shimmy" and the "toddle" and the "cuddle." I hasten to explain that I
+do not mean any of the abnormalities and monstrosities of present-day
+fashionable life. Neither do I mean that we should set out to emulate
+the happy cannibals in the South Seas. In the Book of the Mind I set
+forth as carefully as I knew how, the difference between nature and man,
+the life of instinct and the life of reason. It is my conviction that if
+civilized life is to go on, there must be a far wider extension of
+judgment and self-control in human affairs; our lost happiness will be
+found, not by going "back to nature," but by going forward to a new and
+higher state, planned by reason and impelled by moral idealism.
+
+But we find ourselves face to face with horrible sex disorders, and a
+great scientist tells us they are nature's tragic blunder, of which we
+are the helpless victims. Manifestly, the way to decide this question is
+to go to nature, and see if primitive people, having the same physical
+organism as ours, had the same troubles and spent their lives in the
+same misery. If they did, then it may be that we are doomed; but if they
+did not, then we can say with certainty that it is not nature, but
+ourselves, who have blundered. Our task then becomes to apply reason to
+the problem; to take our present sex arrangements, our field of
+bad-smelling weeds, and plow it thoroughly, and sow it with good seed,
+and raise a harvest of happiness in love. It is my belief that,
+admitting true love--honest and dignified and rational love--it is
+possible to pour into it any amount of sex energy, to invent a whole new
+system of beautiful and happy love play.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+LOVE AND ECONOMICS
+
+     (Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due to the
+     displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.)
+
+
+If the cause of our sex disorders is not physiological, what is it?
+Everything in nature must have a cause, and this includes human nature,
+the actions and feelings of men, both as individuals and as groups. We
+hear the saying: "You can't change human nature"; but the fact is that
+human nature is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can
+watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, and if we
+had the intelligence to use the forces now at our command, we could mold
+human nature, as precisely as a brewer converts a carload of hops into a
+certain brand of beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and
+virtue are products like vinegar."
+
+Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and class
+privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and the natural
+sources of wealth by a group. This enables the privileged group to live
+in idleness upon the labor of the rest of society; it confers unlimited
+power with practically no responsibility--a strain which not one human
+being in a thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the
+past five thousand years is one demonstration after another that the
+conferring upon a class of power without responsibility means the
+collapse of that class and the downfall of its civilization.
+
+So far as concerns the ruling class male, what the system of privilege
+does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge his sex desires. What
+it does for the female is to submit her to the male desires, and to
+abolish that mutuality in sex, that interaction between male and female
+influence, which is the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a
+predatory society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of class as
+well as of sex, and the result is the perverting of sexual selection,
+and a constantly increasing tendency towards the survival of the unfit.
+
+In a state of nature the males compete among themselves for the favor of
+the female. The female is not raped, nor is she kidnapped; on the
+contrary, she exercises her prerogative, she inspects the various male
+charms which are set before her, and selects those which please her,
+according to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak
+and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce themselves, and the
+procreating is done by the highest specimens of the type.
+
+But now we have a world which is ruled by money, in which opportunity,
+and indeed survival, depend upon money, and the whole tendency of
+society is to make money standards supreme. We do not like to admit
+this, of course; our instincts revolt against it, and our higher
+faculties reinforce the revolt, so we carefully veil our money motives,
+and invent polite phrases to conceal them. You will hear people deny it
+is money which determines admission into what is called "society," the
+intimate life of the ruling class. They will tell you that it is not
+money, it is "good taste," "refinement," "charm of personality," and so
+on. But if you analyze all these things, you speedily discover that they
+are made out of money; they are symbols of the possession of money,
+devised by those who possess it, as a means of keeping themselves apart
+from those who do not possess it. I would safely defy a member of the
+ruling class to name a single element in what he calls "refinement," or
+"good taste," that is not in its ultimate analysis a symbol of the
+possession of money. Let it be the pronunciation of a word, or the cut
+of a coat, or the method of handling a fork--whatever it may be, it is
+part of a code, revealing that the person, or more important yet, the
+ancestors of the person, have belonged to the leisure class, and have
+had time and opportunity to learn to do things in a certain precise
+conventional way. I say "conventional," for very frequently these tests
+have no relationship whatever to reality. Considered as a matter of
+common sense and convenience, it is a great deal better to eat peas with
+a spoon than with a fork, and to use both a knife and fork in eating
+lettuce; but if you eat peas with a spoon, or use a knife on lettuce,
+every member of the ruling class will instantly know that you are an
+interloper, as much so as if you took to throwing the china at your
+hostess.
+
+Our culture is a money culture, our standards are money standards, and
+our sex decisions are based upon money, not upon love. Any man can have
+money in our society, provided the accident of birth favors him, and it
+is everywhere known that any man who has money can get a wife. It is
+certainly not true that any man with _no_ money can get a wife, and it
+is true that most men who have little money have to take wives who have
+less--that is, who belong to a lower class, according to the world's
+standards. The average young girl of the propertied classes is trained
+for marriage as for any other business. She is taught to be sexually
+cold, but to imitate sexual excitement deliberately, so as to arouse it
+in the male, and to keep herself surrounded with a swarm of males; this
+being the basis of her prestige, the factor which will cause the
+"eligible" man, the "catch," to desire her. In polite society this
+proceeding is known as "coquetry," or "charm," and it would be no
+exaggeration to say that seventy-five per cent of all the novels so far
+written in the world are expositions of this activity; also that when we
+go to the theater, we go in order to watch and sympathize with these
+manifestations of pecuniary sexuality.
+
+As a rule the young girl knows what she is doing, but she is taught to
+camouflage it, to preserve her "innocence." She would not dream of
+marrying for money; she wants to marry something "distinguished"--that
+is to say, something which has received the stamp of approval from a
+world which approves money. She wants to marry somebody who is
+"elegant," who is in "good form"; she wants to marry without having to
+think about the horrid subject of money at all, and so she is carefully
+chaperoned, and confined to a world where nothing but money is to be
+met. In Tennyson's poem, "The Northern Farmer," the old fellow is
+coaching his son on the subject of marriage, and they are driving along
+a road, and the farmer listens to his horses' hoofs, and they are
+saying, "Proputty, proputty, proputty!" The farmer sums up in one
+sentence the doctrine of pecuniary marriage as it is taught to the
+ruling class virgin: "Doän't thee marry for money, but goä wheer money
+is."
+
+In this process, of course, the ruling class virgin must spend a great
+deal of money in order to keep up her own prestige; and when she is
+married, she must spend it to keep up the prestige of her unmarried
+sisters, and then of her children. As a result of this, the only ruling
+class males who can afford to marry are the rich ones. There are always
+some who are richer, and these are the most desirable; so the tendency
+with each generation is to put the period of marriage further off; the
+man has to wait until he has accumulated enough "proputty" to satisfy
+the girl of his desires--a girl whom he admires because of her pecuniary
+prestige. He delays, and meantime he satisfies his passions with the
+daughters of the poor. As a result of this, when he does finally come to
+marry, he is apt to be unlovely and unlovable. The woman frequently does
+not love him at all, but takes him cold-bloodedly because he is
+"eligible"; in that case she is a cold and "sexless" wife. Or else,
+after she has married him she discovers his unloveliness, and either
+decides that all men are selfish brutes, and reconciles herself to a
+celibate life, or else she goes out and preys upon the domestic
+happiness of other women.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+MARRIAGE AND MONEY
+
+     (Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher form of
+     prostitution known as the "marriage of convenience.")
+
+
+I realize that all these sex problems are complicated. Every case is
+individual, and in no two cases can you give exactly the same
+explanation. But it is my thesis that whatever the cause, if you trace
+down the causes of the cause, you will find economic inequality and
+class privilege. It is evident in the lives of the rich, and it is even
+more evident in the lives of the poor, who are not permitted the luxury
+of pretense. The poor live in a world dominated by forces which they
+seldom understand, subjected to enormous pressure which crushes and
+destroys them, without their being able to see it or touch it. In the
+world of the poor there is first of all poverty; there is insecurity of
+employment and insufficiency of wage, and the daily and hourly terror of
+starvation and ruin. Above this is a world of power and luxury, a
+wonderland of marvels and thrills, seen through a colored mist of
+romance. The working-class girl, born to drudgery and perpetual
+child-bearing, has a brief hour in which her cheeks are red and her
+beauty is ripe; and out of the heaven above her steps a male creature
+panoplied in the armor of ruling class prestige--that is to say, a dress
+suit--and scattering about him a shower of automobile rides, jewelry and
+candy and flowers. She opens her arms to him; and then, when her brief
+hour of rapture is past, she becomes the domestic drudge of some
+workingman, or else the inmate of a brothel.
+
+It is a custom of social workers and church people, seeking data about
+these painful subjects, to interview numbers of prostitutes, and
+question them as to the causes of their "fall"; so you read statistics
+to the effect that seventeen per cent of prostitution has an economic
+cause, that twenty-six per cent is caused by love of finery, etc. These
+pious people, employed by the ruling class to maintain ruling class
+prestige by demonstrating that wage slavery has nothing to do with
+white slavery, attain their purpose by restricting the word "economic"
+to food and shelter; forgetting that young girls do not live by bread
+alone, but also by ribbons, and silk stockings, and moving picture
+shows, and trips to Coney Island, and everything else that gives a
+momentary escape from drudgery into joy. We all understand, of course,
+that the daughters of the rich are entitled to joy, and we provide them
+with it as a matter of course; but the daughters of the poor are
+supposed to work in a cotton mill ten or eleven hours a day from
+earliest childhood, and the joy we provide for them is vicarious. As a
+woman poet sets it forth:
+
+    "The golf links lie so near the mill
+       That almost every day
+     The laboring children can look out
+       And see the men at play."
+
+Some years ago my wife and I were invited to meet Mrs. Mary J. Goode, a
+keeper of brothels in the "Tenderloin," who had revolted against the
+system of police graft, and had exposed it in the newspapers. My wife
+questioned her closely as to the psychology of people in her business,
+and she insisted that the majority of prostitutes were not oversexed,
+nor were they feeble minded; they were women who had loved and trusted,
+and had been "thrown down." As Mrs. Goode phrased it, they said to
+themselves: "Never again! After this, they'll pay!"
+
+As a matter of fact, the causes of prostitution are so largely economic
+that the other factors are hardly worth mentioning. The sale of sex is
+unknown in savage society, and would be unknown in a Socialist society.
+If here and there some degenerate individual would rather sell her sex
+than do her share of honest labor in a free and just world, such an
+individual would become a patient in the psychopathic ward of a public
+hospital. Economic forces drive women to prostitution, first, by direct
+starvation, and second, by teaching them money standards of prestige,
+the ideal of living without working, which is the heaven achieved by the
+rich and longed for by the poor. Contributory to the process are
+policemen, politicians, and judges who protect the property of the rich,
+and prey upon the disinherited; also newspaper editors, college
+professors, priests of God and preachers of Jesus, who attribute the
+social evil to "original sin," or the "weakness of human nature."
+
+So far as men are concerned, economic forces operate by three main
+channels; late marriage, loveless marriage, and drudgery in wives. You
+will find patronizing and maintaining the brothels the following kinds
+of males; first, young boys who have been taught that it is "manly" to
+gratify their sex impulses; second, young men who take it for granted
+that they cannot afford to marry; third, old bachelors who have looked
+at marriage and decided that it is not a paying proposition; fourth,
+married men who have been picked out for their money, and have come to
+the conclusion that "good women" are necessarily sexless; and finally,
+married men whose wives have lost the power to charm them by continuous
+childbearing, and the physical and nervous strain of domestic slavery.
+
+This latter applies not merely to the wives of the poor. It applies to
+members of the middle classes, and even of the richer classes, because
+the job of managing many servants is often as trying as the doing of
+one's own work. To explain how domestic drudgery is caused by economic
+pressure would require a little essay in itself. The home is the place
+where the man keeps his sex property apart under lock and key, and it
+is, therefore, the portion of our civilization least influenced by
+modern ideas. Women still drudge in separate kitchens and nurseries, as
+they have drudged for thousands of years. They cook their dinners over
+separate fires, and have each their own little group of children,
+generally ill cared for, because the work is done by an untrained
+amateur. Moreover, the prestige of this home has to be kept up, because
+the social position and future prosperity of the man depend upon it. The
+children must be dressed in frilled and starched clothing, which makes
+them miserable, and wears out the tempers and pocketbooks of the
+mothers. Costly entertainments must be given, and twice a day a meal
+must be prepared for the father of the family--all good wives have
+learned the ancient formula for the retention of masculine affections:
+"Feed the brute!" Living in a world of pecuniary prestige, every
+particle of the woman's surplus energy must go into some form of
+ostentation, into buying or making things which are futile and
+meaningless. In such a blind world, dazed by such a struggle, women
+become irritable, they lose their sex charm, they forget all about
+love; so the husband gives up hoping for the impossible, accepts the
+common idea that love and marriage are incompatible, and adopts the
+formula that what his wife doesn't know will not hurt her.
+
+And step by step, as economic evolution progresses, as vested wealth
+becomes more firmly established and claims for itself a larger and
+larger share of the total product of society--so step by step you find
+the pecuniary ideals becoming more firmly established, you find marriage
+becoming more and more a matter of property, and less and less a matter
+of love. In European countries there may still be some love marriages
+among the poor, but in the upper classes there is no longer any pretense
+of such a thing, and if you spoke of it you would be considered absurd.
+In countries of fresh and naive commercialism, like America, the women
+select the men because of their money prestige; but in Germany, the
+process has gone a step further--the men are so firmly established in
+their class positions that they insist upon being bought with a fortune.
+The same is true when titled foreigners condescend to visit our "land of
+the dollar." They will stoop to a vulgar American wife only in case her
+parents will make a direct settlement of a fortune upon the husband, and
+then they take her back home, and find their escape from boredom in the
+highly cultivated mistresses of their own land.
+
+Everywhere on the Continent, and in Great Britain also, it is accepted
+that marriages are matters of business, and only incidentally and very
+slightly of affection. The initiative is commonly taken, not by the
+young people, but by the heads of the families. Preliminary protocols
+are exchanged, and then the family solicitors sit down and bargain over
+the matter. If they were making a deal for a carload of hams, they would
+be governed by the market price of hams at the moment, also by the
+reputation of that particular brand of ham; and similarly, in the case
+of marriage, they are governed by the prestige of the family names, and
+the market price of husbands prevailing. Always the man exacts a cash
+settlement, and in Catholic countries he becomes the outright owner of
+all the property of his wife, thus reducing her completely to the status
+of a chattel. If any young couple dares to break through these laws of
+their class, the whole class unites to trample them down. One of the
+greatest of English novelists, George Meredith, wrote his greatest
+novel, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," to show how, under the most
+favorable circumstances, the union of a ruling class youth with a
+farmer's daughter could result in nothing but shipwreck.
+
+The country in which the property marriage is most firmly established is
+probably France; and in France the rights of nature are recognized in a
+kind of supplementary union, which constitutes what is known as the
+"domestic triangle," or in the French language, "_la vie trois_." The
+young girl of the French ruling classes is guarded every moment of her
+life like a prisoner in jail. She is sold in marriage, and is expected
+to bear her husband an heir, possibly two or three children. After that,
+she is considered, not under the law or by the church, but by the
+general common sense of the community, to be free to seek satisfaction
+of her love needs. Her husband has mistresses, and she has a lover, and
+to that lover she is faithful, and in her dealings with him she is
+guided by an elaborate and subtle code. Practically all French fiction
+and drama deal with this "life in threes," and the complications and
+tragedies which result from it. I name one novel, simply because it
+happens to be the last that I myself have read, "The Red Lily," by
+Anatole France.
+
+Of course, every human being knows in his heart that this is a monstrous
+arrangement, and there are periods of revolt when real feeling surges up
+in the hearts of men, and we have stories of true love, young and
+unselfish love, such for example as Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," or
+St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," or Halévy's "L'Abbe Constantin."
+Everybody reads these stories and weeps over them, but everybody knows
+that they are like the romantic shepherds and shepherdesses of the
+ancient régime; they never had any existence in reality, and are not
+meant to be taken seriously. If anybody attempts to carry them into
+action, or to preach them seriously to the young, then we know that we
+are dealing with a disturber of the foundations of the social order, a
+dangerous and incendiary villain, and we give him a name which sends a
+shudder down the spine of every friend of law and order--we call him a
+"free-lover."
+
+I see before my eyes the wretch cowering upon the witness stand, and the
+virtuous district attorney, who has perhaps spent the previous night in
+a brothel, pointing a finger of accusing wrath into his face, and
+thundering, "Do you believe in free love?" The wretch, if he is wise,
+will not hesitate or parley; he will not ask what the district attorney
+means by love, or what he means by freedom. Here in very truth is a case
+where "he who hesitates is lost!" Let the wretch instantly answer, No,
+he does not believe in free love, he believes in love that pays cash as
+it goes; he believes in love that investigates carefully the prevailing
+market conditions, decides upon a reasonable price, has the contract in
+writing, and lives up to the bargain--"till death do us part." If the
+witness be a woman, let the answer be that she believes in slave love;
+that she expects to be sold for the benefit of her parents, the prestige
+of her family and the social position of her future offspring. Let her
+say that she will be a loyal and devoted servant, and will never do
+anything at any time to invalidate the contract which is signed for her
+by her parents or guardians.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+LOVE VERSUS LUST
+
+     (Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it should be
+     followed and when repressed.)
+
+
+We have considered the sex disorders of our age and their causes. We
+have now to grope our way towards a basis of sanity and health in these
+vital matters.
+
+Consider man, as Metchnikoff describes him, with his overplus of sex
+energy. From early youth he is besieged by impulses and desires, and as
+a rule is left entirely uninstructed on the subject, having to pick up
+his ideas from the conversation of older lads, who have nothing but
+misinformation and perversions to give him. Nearly all these older lads
+declare and believe that it is necessary to gratify the sex impulse,
+that physically it is harmful not to do so. I have even heard physicians
+and trainers maintain that idea. Opposed to them are the official
+moralists and preachers of religion, who declare that to follow the sex
+impulse, except when officially sanctioned by the church, is to commit
+sin.
+
+At different times in my life I have talked with all kinds of people,
+young and old, men and women, doctors and clergymen, teachers and
+trainers of athletes, and a few wise and loving mothers who have talked
+with their own boys and other boys. As a result I have come to agree
+with neither side in the debate. I believe that there is a distinction
+which must be drawn, and I ask you to consider it carefully, and bear it
+in mind in all that I say on the problem of happiness and health in sex.
+
+I believe that a normal man is one being, manifesting himself in various
+aspects, physical, emotional, intellectual. I believe that all these
+aspects of human activity go normally together, and cannot normally be
+separated, and that the separation of them is a perversion and source of
+harm. I believe that the sex impulse, as it normally manifests itself,
+and would manifest itself in a man if he were living a normal life, is
+an impulse which includes every aspect of the man's being. It is not
+merely physical desire and emotional excitement; it is intellectual
+curiosity, a deep and intense interest, not merely in the body, but in
+the mind and heart and personality of the woman.
+
+I appreciate that there is opportunity for controversy here. As a matter
+of psychology, it is not easy to separate instinct from experience, to
+state whether a certain impulse is innate or acquired. Some may argue
+that savages know nothing about idealism in sex, neither do those modern
+savages whom we breed in city slums; some may make the same assertion
+concerning a great mass of loutish and sensual youths. We have got so
+far from health and soundness that it is hard to be sure what is
+"normal" and what is "ideal." But without going into metaphysics, I
+think we can reasonably make the following statement concerning the sex
+impulse at its first appearance in the average healthy youth in
+civilized societies; that this impulse, going to the roots of the being,
+affecting every atom of energy and every faculty, is accompanied, not
+merely by happiness, but by sympathetic delight in the happiness of the
+woman, by interest in the woman, by desire to be with her, to stay with
+her and share her life and protect her from harm. In what I have to say
+about the subject from now on, I shall describe this condition of being
+and feeling by the word "love."
+
+But now suppose that men should, for some reason or other, evolve a set
+of religious ideas which denied love, and repudiated love, and called it
+a sin and a humiliation; or suppose there should be an economic
+condition which made love a peril, so that the young couple which
+yielded to love would be in danger of starvation, or of seeing their
+children starve. Suppose there should be evolved classes of men and
+women, held by society in a condition of permanent semi-starvation;
+then, under such conditions, the impulse to love would become a trap and
+a source of terror. Then the energies of a great many men would be
+devoted to suppressing love and strangling it in themselves; then the
+intellectual and spiritual sanctions of love would be withdrawn, the
+beauty and charm and joy would go out of it, and it would become a
+starving beggar at the gates, or a thief skulking in the night-time, or
+an assassin with a dagger and club. In other words, sex would become all
+the horror that it is today, in the form of purchased vice, and more
+highly purchased marriage, and secret shame, and obscure innuendo. So we
+should have what is, in a civilized man, a perversion, the possibility
+of love which is physical alone; a purely animal thing in a being who is
+not purely animal, but is body, mind and spirit all together. So it
+would be possible for pitiful, unhappy man, driven by the blind urge of
+nature, to conceive of desiring a woman only in the body, and with no
+care about what she felt, or what she thought, or what became of her
+afterwards.
+
+That purely physical sex desire I will indicate in our future
+discussions by the only convenient word that I can find, which is lust.
+The word has religious implications, so I explain that I use it in my
+own meaning, as above. There is a great deal of what the churches call
+lust, which I call true and honest love; on the other hand, in Christian
+churches today, there are celebrated innumerable marriages between
+innocent young girls and mature men of property, which I describe as
+legalized and consecrated lust.
+
+We are now in position to make a fundamental distinction. I assert the
+proposition that there does not exist, in any man, at any time of his
+life, or in any condition of his health, a necessity for yielding to the
+impulses of lust; and I say that no man can yield to them without
+degrading his nature and injuring himself, not merely morally, but
+mentally, and in the long run physically. I assert that it is the duty
+of every man, at all times and under all circumstances, to resist the
+impulses of lust, to suppress and destroy them in his nature, by
+whatever expenditure of will power and moral effort may be required.
+
+I know physicians who maintain the unpopular thesis that serious damage
+may be done to the physical organism of both man and woman by the long
+continued suppression of the sex-life. Let me make plain that I am not
+disagreeing with such men. I do not deny that repression of the sex-life
+may do harm. What I do deny is that it does any harm to repress a
+physical desire which is unaccompanied by the higher elements of sex;
+that is to say, by affection, admiration, and unselfish concern for the
+sex-partner and her welfare. When I advise a man to resist and suppress
+and destroy the impulse toward lust in his nature, I am not telling him
+to live a sexless life. I am telling him that if he represses lust, then
+love will come; whereas, if he yields to lust, then love may never come,
+he may make himself incapable of love, incapable of feeling it or of
+trusting it, or of inspiring it in a woman. And I say that if, on the
+other hand, he resists lust, he will pour all the energies of his being
+into the channels of affection and idealism. Instead of having his
+thoughts diverted by every passing female form, his energies will become
+concentrated upon the search for one woman who appeals to him in
+permanent and useful ways. We may be sure that nature has not made men
+and women incompatible, but on the contrary, has provided for
+fulfillment of the desires of both. The man will find some woman who is
+looking for the thing which he has to offer--that is, love.
+
+And now, what about the suppression of love? Here I am willing to go as
+far as any physician could desire, and possibly farther. Speaking
+generally, and concerning normal adult human beings, I say that the
+suppression of love is a crime against nature and life. I say that long
+continued and systematic suppression of love exercises a devastating
+effect, not merely upon the body, but upon the mind and all the energies
+of the being. I say that the doctrine of the suppression of love, no
+matter by whom it is preached, is an affront to nature and to life, and
+an insult to the creator of life. I say that it is the duty of all men
+and women, not merely to assert their own right to love, but to devote
+their energies to a war upon whatever ideas and conventions and laws in
+society deny the love-right.
+
+The belief that long continued suppression of love does grave harm has
+been strongly reinforced in the last few years by the discovery of
+psycho-analysis, a science which enables us to explore our unconscious
+minds, and lay bare the secrets of nature's psychic workshop. These
+revelations have made plain that sex plays an even more important part
+in our mental lives than we realized. Sex feeling manifests itself, not
+merely in grown people, but in the tiniest infants; in these latter it
+has of course no object in the opposite sex, but the physical sensations
+are there, and some of their outward manifestations; and as the infant
+grows, and realizes the outside world, the feelings come to center upon
+others, the parents first of all. These manifestations must be guided,
+and sometimes repressed; but if this is done violently, by means of
+terror, the consequences may be very harmful--the wrong impulses or the
+terrors may survive as a "complex" in the unconscious mind, and cause a
+long chain of nervous disorders and physical weaknesses in the adult.
+These things are no matter of guesswork, they have been proven as
+thoroughly as any scientific discovery, and are used in a new technic of
+healing. Of course, as with every new theory, there are unbalanced
+people who carry it to extremes. There are fanatics of Freudianism who
+talk as if everything in the human unconsciousness were sex; but that
+need not blind us to the importance of these new discoveries, and the
+confirmation they bring to the thesis that sane and normal love, wisely
+guided by common sense and reasoned knowledge, is at a certain period of
+life a vital necessity to every sound human being.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+CELIBACY VERSUS CHASTITY
+
+     (The ideal of the repression of the sex impulse, as against the
+     ideal of its guidance and cultivation.)
+
+
+There are two words which we need in this discussion, and as they are
+generally used loosely, they must now be defined precisely. The two
+words are celibacy and chastity. We define celibacy as the permanent and
+systematic suppression of love. We define chastity, on the other hand,
+as the permanent and systematic suppression of lust. Chastity, as the
+word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing for it; it
+is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially in the young, of
+consecrating their beings to the search for love, and to becoming worthy
+for love. In that sense we regard chastity as one of the most essential
+of virtues in the young. It is widely taught today, but ineffectively,
+because unintelligently and without discrimination; because, in other
+words, it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and
+one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases.
+
+The origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. At a certain
+stage in human development the eyes of the mind are opened, and to some
+man comes a revelation of the life of altruism and sympathetic
+imagination. To use the common phrase, the man discovers his spiritual
+nature. But under the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside
+him is in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and
+trample it into the mire. One of the most powerful of these destructive
+agencies, as it seems to the man, is sex. By means of sex he is laid
+hold upon by strange and terrible creatures who do not understand his
+higher vision, but seek only to prey upon him, and use him for their
+convenience. At the worst they rob him of everything, money, health,
+time and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they put
+him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. In the words of a
+wise old man of the world, Francis Bacon, "He who marries and has
+children gives hostages to fortune." In a world wherein war, pestilence,
+and famine held sway, the man of family had but slight chance of
+surviving as a philosopher or prophet or saint. Discovering in himself a
+deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, he
+imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away to the desert,
+and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and lashed himself with whips,
+and allowed worms and lice to devour his body, in the effort to destroy
+in himself the impulse of sex.
+
+So the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, not of much use,
+but better than nothing; and so we still have in the world celibate
+priesthoods, and what is more dangerous to our social health, we have
+the old, degraded notions of the essential vileness of the sex
+relationship--notions permeating all our thought, our literature, our
+social conventions and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true
+wisdom and health and happiness in love.
+
+I say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral disease; it is
+a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her energies to breaking
+it down, and she always succeeds. There never has been a celibate
+religious order, no matter how noble its origin and how strict its
+discipline, which has not sooner or later become a breeding place of
+loathsome unnatural vices. And sooner or later the ideal begins to
+weaken, and common sense to take its place, and so we read in history
+about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who have "nieces"
+and attractive servant girls. Make the acquaintance of any police
+sergeant in any big city of America, and get him to chatting on friendly
+terms, and you will discover that it is a common experience for the
+police in their raids upon brothels to catch the representatives of
+celibate religious orders. As one old-timer in the "Tenderloin" of New
+York said to me, "Of course, we don't make any trouble for the good
+fathers." Nor was this merely because the old sergeant was an Irishman
+and a Catholic; it was because deep down in his heart he knew, as every
+man knows, that the craving of a man for the society and companionship
+of a woman is an overwhelming craving, which will break down every
+barrier that society may set against it.
+
+There is another form of celibacy which is not based upon religious
+ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely selfish in its nature.
+It is unorganized and unreasoned, and is known as "bachelorhood"; it has
+as its complements the institutions of old maidenhood and of
+prostitution. Both forms of celibacy, the religious and the economic,
+are entirely incompatible with chastity, which is only possible where
+love is recognized and honored. Chastity is a preparation for love; and
+if you forbid love, whether by law, or by social convention, or by
+economic strangling, you at once make chastity a Utopian dream. You may
+preach it from your pulpits until you are black in the face; you may
+call out your Billy Sundays to rave, and dance, and go into convulsions;
+you may threaten hell-fire and brimstone until you throw whole audiences
+into spasms--but you will never make them chaste. On the contrary,
+strange and horrible as it may seem, those very excitements will turn
+into sexual excitements before your eyes! So subtle is our ancient
+mother nature, and so determined to have her own way!
+
+The abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of womanhood, its
+distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, is not yet dead in the
+world. It is in our very bones, and is forever appearing in new and
+supposed to be modern forms. Take a man like Tolstoi, who gained
+enormous influence, not merely in Russia, but throughout the world among
+people who think themselves liberal--humanitarians, pacifists,
+philosophic anarchists. Tolstoi's notions about sex, his teachings and
+writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one continuous
+manifestation of disease. All through his youth and middle years, as an
+army officer, popular novelist, and darling of the aristocracy, his life
+was one of license, and the attitude toward women he thus acquired, he
+never got out of his thoughts to his last day. Gorky, meeting him in his
+old age, reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole
+attitude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome slyness.
+
+But Tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the great moral
+consciences of humanity. He looked about him at a world gone mad with
+greed and hate, and he made convulsive efforts to reform his own spirit
+and escape the power of evil. As regards sex, his thought took the form
+of ancient Christian celibacy. Man must repudiate the physical side of
+sex, he must learn to feel toward women a "pure" affection, the
+relationship of brother and sister. In his novel, "Resurrection,"
+Tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a beautiful peasant girl
+and conceives for her such a noble and generous emotion; but gradually
+the poison of physical sex-desire steals into his mind, he seduces her,
+and she becomes a prostitute. Later in life, when he discovers the crime
+he has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, and
+wins her to God and goodness by the unselfish and unsexual love which he
+should have maintained from the beginning.
+
+It was Tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward this kind of
+love, and when it was pointed out to him that if this doctrine were to
+be applied universally, the human race would become extinct, his answer
+was that there was no reason to fear that, because only a few people
+would be good enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! Here
+you see the reincarnation of the old Christian notion that we are
+"conceived in sin and born in iniquity." We may be pure and good, and
+cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life continue. Some choose to
+sin, and these sinners hand down their sinful qualities to the future;
+and so virtue and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile
+crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom God has
+sent to call down destruction upon a world which He had made--through
+some mistake never satisfactorily explained!
+
+It is easy nowadays to persuade intelligent people to laugh at such a
+perverted view of life; but the truth is that this attitude toward sex
+is written, not merely into our religious creeds and formulas, but into
+most of our laws and social conventions. It is this, which for
+convenience I will call the "monkish" view of love, which prevents our
+dealing frankly and honestly with its problems, distinguishing between
+what is wrong and what is right, and doing anything effective to remedy
+the evils of marriage-plus-prostitution. That is why I have tried so
+carefully to draw the distinction between what I call love and what I
+call lust; between the ideal of celibacy, which is a perversion, and the
+idea of chastity, which must form an essential part of any regimen of
+true and enduring love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+THE DEFENSE OF LOVE
+
+     (Discusses passionate love, its sanction, its place in life, and
+     its preservation in marriage.)
+
+
+I have before me as I write a newspaper article by Robert Blatchford, a
+great writer and great man. He is dealing with the subject of "Love and
+Marriage," and his doctrine is summed up in the following sentences:
+"There is a difference between loving a woman and falling in love with
+her. The love one falls into is a sweet illusion. But that fragrant
+dream does not last. In marriage there are no fairies."
+
+This expresses one of the commonest ideas in the world. Passionate love
+is one thing, and marriage is another and different thing, and it is no
+more possible to reconcile them than to mix oil and water. Our notions
+of "romantic" love took their rise in the Middle Ages, from the songs
+and narratives of the troubadours, and this whole tradition was based
+upon the glorification of illegitimate and extra-marital love. That
+tradition has ruled the world of art ever since, and rules it today. I
+do not exaggerate when I say that it is the conventional view of grand
+opera and the drama, of moving pictures and novels, that impassioned and
+thrilling love is found before marriage, and is found in adultery and in
+temptations to adultery, but is never found in marriage. I have a pretty
+varied acquaintance with the literature of the world, and I have sat and
+thought for quite a while, without being able to recall a single
+portrait of life which contradicts this thesis; and certainly anyone
+familiar with literature could name ten thousand novels and dramas and
+grand operas which support the thesis.
+
+English and American Puritanism have beaten the tradition down to this
+extent: the novelist portrays the glories and thrills of young love, and
+carries it as far as the altar and the orange blossoms and white ribbons
+and showers of rice--and stops. He leaves you to assume that this
+delightful rapture continues forever after; but he does not attempt to
+show it to you--he would not dare attempt to show it, because the
+general experience of men and women in marriage would make him
+ridiculous. So he runs away from the issue; if he tells you a story of
+married life, it is a story of a "triangle"--the thrills of love
+imperiling marriage, and either crushed out, or else wrecking the lives
+of the victims. Such is the unanimous testimony of all our arts today,
+and I submit it as evidence of the fact that there must be something
+vitally wrong with our marriage system.
+
+Personally, I am prepared to go as far as the extreme sex-radical in the
+defense of love and the right to love. I believe that love is the most
+precious of all the gifts of life. I accept its sanctions and its
+authority. I believe that it is to be cherished and obeyed, and not to
+be run away from or strangled in the heart. I believe that it is the
+voice of nature speaking in the depths of us, and speaking from a wisdom
+deeper than we have yet attained, or may attain for many centuries to
+come. And when I say love, I do not mean merely affection. I do not mean
+merely the habit of living in the same home, which is the basis of
+marriage as Blatchford describes it. What I mean is the love of the
+poets and the dreamers, the "young love" which is thrill and ecstasy, a
+glorification and a transfiguration of the whole of life. I say that,
+far from giving up this love for marriage, it is the true purpose of
+marriage to preserve this love and perpetuate it.
+
+To save repetition and waste of words, let us agree that from now on
+when I use the word love, I mean the passionate love of those who are
+"in love." I believe that it is the right of men and women to be "in
+love," and that there is no true marriage unless they are "in love," and
+stay "in love." I believe that it is possible to apply reason to love,
+to learn to understand love and the ways of love, to protect it and keep
+it alive in marriage. Blatchford writes the sentence, "Matrimony cannot
+be all honeymoon." I answer that assuredly it can be, and if you ask me
+how I know, I tell you that I know in the only way we really know
+anything--because I have proven it in my own life. I say that if men and
+women would recognize the perpetuation of the honeymoon as the purpose
+of marriage, and would devote to that end one-hundredth part of the
+intelligence and energy they now devote to the killing of their fellow
+human beings in war, we might have an end to the wretched "romantic
+tradition" which makes the most sacred emotion of the human heart into
+a sneak-thief skulking in the darkness, entering our lives by back
+alleys and secret stairways--while greed and worldly pomp, dullness and
+boredom, parade in by the front entrance.
+
+In the first place, what is love--young love, passionate love, the love
+of those who "fall in"? I know a certain lady, well versed in worldly
+affairs, who says that it is at once the greatest nonsense and the
+deadliest snare in the world. This lady was trained as a "coquette";
+she, and all the young ladies she knew, made it their business to cause
+men to fall in love with them, and their prestige was based upon their
+skill in that art. So to them "love" was a joke, and men "in love" were
+victims, whether ridiculous or pitiable. To this I answer that I know
+nothing in life that cannot be "faked"; but an imitation has value only
+as it resembles something that is real, and that has real value.
+
+I am aware that it is possible for a society to be so corrupted, so
+given up to the admiration of imitations, of the paint and powder and
+silk-stocking-clad-ankle kind of love, that true and genuine love
+interest, with its impulse to self-sacrifice and self-consecration, is
+no longer felt or understood. I am aware that in such a society it is
+possible for even the very young to be so sophisticated that what they
+take to be love is merely vanity, the worship of money, and the grace
+and charm which the possession of money confers. I have known girls who
+were "head over heels" in love, and thought it was with a man, when
+quite clearly they were in love with a dress suit or a social position.
+In such a society it is hard to talk about natural emotions, and deep
+and abiding and disinterested affections.
+
+Nevertheless, amid all the false conventions, the sham glories and
+cowardices of our civilization, there abides in the heart the craving
+for true love, and the idea of it leaps continually into flame in the
+young. In spite of the ridicule of the elders, in spite of blunders and
+tragic failures, in spite of dishonesties and deceptions--nevertheless,
+it continues to happen that out of a thousand maidens the youth finds
+one whose presence thrills him with a new and terrible emotion, whose
+lightest touch makes him shiver, almost makes his knees give way.
+
+If you will recall what I have written about instinct and reason, you
+will know that I am not a blind worshipper of our ancient mother
+nature. I am not humble in my attitude toward her, but perfectly willing
+to say when I know more than she does. On the other hand, when I know
+nothing or next to nothing, I am shy of contradicting my ancient mother,
+and disposed to give respectful heed to her promptings. One of the
+things about which we know almost nothing at present is the subject of
+eugenics. We are only at the beginning of trying to find out what
+matings produce the best offspring. Meantime, we ought to consider those
+indications which nature gives us, just as we consider her advice about
+what food to eat and what rest to take.
+
+It is not my idea that science will ever take men and women and marry
+them in cold blood, as today we breed our cattle. What I think will
+happen is that young men and women will meet one another, as they do at
+present, and will find the love impulse awakening; they will then submit
+their love to investigation, as to whether they should follow that
+impulse, or should wait. In other words, I do not believe that science
+will ever do away with the raptures of love, but will make itself the
+servant of these raptures, finding out what they mean, and how their
+precious essence may be preserved.
+
+I perfectly understand that the begetting of children is not the only
+purpose of love. The children have to be reared and trained, which means
+that a home has to be founded, and the parents have to learn to
+co-operate. They have to have common aims in life, and temperaments
+sufficiently harmonious so that they can live in the house together
+without tearing each other's eyes out. This means that in any civilized
+society all impulses of love have to be subjected to severe criticism. I
+intend, before long, to show just how I think parents and guardians
+should co-operate with young people in love; to help them to understand
+in advance what they are doing, and how it may be possible for them to
+make their love permanent and successful. For the moment I merely state,
+to avoid any possible misunderstanding, that I am the last person in the
+world to favor what is called "blind" love, the unthinking abandonment
+to an impulse of sex passion. What I am trying to show is that the
+passionate impulse, the passionate excitement of the young couple, is
+the material out of which love and marriage are made. Passion is a part
+of us, and a fundamental part. If we do not find a place for it in
+marriage, it will seek satisfaction outside of marriage, and that means
+lying, or the wrecking of the marriage, or both.
+
+Passion is what gives to love and marriage its vitality, its energy, its
+drive; in fact, it gives these qualities to the whole character. It is a
+vivifying force, transfiguring the personality, and if it is crushed and
+repressed, the whole life of that person is distorted. Yet it is a fact
+which every physician knows, that millions of women marry and live their
+whole lives without ever knowing what passionate gratification is. As a
+consequence of this, millions of men take it for granted that there are
+"good" women and "bad" women, and that only the latter are interesting.
+This, of course, is simply one of the abnormalities caused by the
+supplanting of love by money as a motive in marriage. Love becomes a
+superfluity and a danger, and all the forces of society, including
+institutionalized religion, combine to outlaw it and drive it
+underground. Or we might say that they lock it in a dungeon--and that
+the supreme delight of all the painters, poets, musicians, dramatists
+and novelists of all climes and all periods of history, is to portray
+the escape of the "young god" from these imprisonments. The story is
+told in six words of an old English ballad: "Love will find out the
+way!"
+
+Is it not obvious that there must be something vitally wrong with our
+institutions and conventions in matters of sex, when here exists this
+eternal war between our moralists and our artists? Why not make up our
+minds what we really believe; whether it is true that poets are, as
+Shelley said, "the unacknowledged legislators of mankind," or whether
+they are, as Plato declared, false teachers and seducers of the young.
+If they are the latter, let us have done with them, let us drive them
+from the state, together with lovers and all other impassioned persons.
+But if, on the other hand, it is truth the poets tell about life, then
+let us take the young god out of his dungeon, and bring him into our
+homes by the front door, and cast out the false gods of vanity and greed
+and worldly prestige which now sit in his place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+BIRTH CONTROL
+
+     (Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the greatest of
+     man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's enslavement, and
+     placing the keys of life in his hands.)
+
+
+I assume that you have followed my argument, and are prepared to
+consider seriously whether it may be possible to establish love in
+marriage as the sex institution of civilized society. If you really wish
+to bring such an institution into existence, the first thing you have to
+do is to accomplish the social revolution; that is, you must wipe out
+class control of society, and prestige based upon money exploitation.
+But that is a vast change, and will take time, and meanwhile we have to
+live, and wish to live with as little misery as possible. So the
+practical question becomes this: Suppose that you, as an individual,
+wish to find as much happiness in love as may now be possible, what
+counsel have I to offer? If you are young, you wish this advice for
+yourself; while if you are mature, you wish it for your children. I will
+put my advice under four heads: First, marriage for love; second, birth
+control; third, early marriage; fourth, education for marriage.
+
+The first of these we have considered at some length. A part of the
+process of social revolution is personal conversion; the giving up by
+every individual of the worldly ideal, the surrender of luxury and
+self-indulgence, the consecrating of one's life to self education and
+the cause of social justice. And do not think that that is an easy
+thing, or an unimportant thing, a thing to be taken for granted. On the
+contrary, it is something that most of us have to struggle with at every
+hour of our lives, because respect for property and worldly conventions
+has become one of our deepest instincts; our whole society is poisoned
+with it, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I have
+known in my life who have completely escaped from it. It is not merely a
+question of refusing to marry except for love, it is a question of
+refusing to love except for honest and worthy qualities. It is a
+question of saving our children from the damnable forces of snobbery,
+which lay siege to their young minds and destroy the best impulses of
+their hearts, while we in our blindness are still thinking of them as
+babies.
+
+Of the other three topics that I have suggested, I begin with birth
+control, because it is the most fundamental and most important. Without
+birth control there can be no freedom, no happiness, no permanence in
+love, and there can be no mastery of life. Birth control is one of the
+great fundamental achievements of the human reason, as important to the
+life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing.
+Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind
+also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us
+animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel.
+
+Ever since the dawn of history, and probably for long ages before that,
+our race has been struggling against this blind insanity of nature.
+Poor, bewildered Theodore Roosevelt stormed at what he called "race
+suicide," thinking it was some brand new and terrible modern corruption;
+but nowhere do we find a primitive tribe, nowhere in history do we find
+a race which did not seek to save itself from overgrowth and consequent
+starvation. They did not know enough to prevent conception, but they did
+the best they could by means of abortion and infanticide. And because
+today superstition keeps the priceless knowledge of contraception from
+the vast majority of women, these crude, savage methods still prevail,
+and we have our million abortions a year in the United States. Assuming
+that something near one-fourth our population consists of women capable
+of bearing children, we have one woman in twenty-five going through this
+agonizing and health-wrecking experience every year. They go through
+with it, you understand, regardless of everything--all the moralists and
+preachers and priests with their hell fire and brimstone. They go
+through with it because we have both marriage without love, and love
+without marriage; also because we permit some ten or twenty per cent of
+our total population to suffer the pangs of perpetual starvation,
+because more than half our farms are mortgaged or occupied by tenants,
+and some ten or twenty per cent of our workers are out of jobs all the
+time.
+
+Some of our women know about birth control. They are the rich women, who
+get what they want in this world. They object to the humiliations and
+inconveniences of child bearing, and some of them raise one or two
+children, and others of them raise poodle dogs. Also, our middle classes
+have found out; our doctors and lawyers and college professors, and
+people of that sort. But we deliberately keep the knowledge from our
+foreign populations, by the terrors which the church has at its command.
+And what is the practical consequence of this procedure? It is that
+while all our Anglo-Saxon stock, those who founded our country and
+established its institutions, are gradually removing themselves from the
+face of the earth, our ignorant and helpless populations, whether in
+city slums or on tenant farms, are multiplying like rabbits. Read Jack
+London's "The Valley of the Moon" and see what is happening in
+California. You will find the same thing happening in any portion of the
+United States where you take the trouble to use your own eyes.
+
+Now, I try to repress such impulses toward race prejudice as I find in
+myself. I am willing to admit for the sake of this argument that in the
+course of time all the races that are now swarming in America,
+Portuguese and Japanese and Mexican and French-Canadian and Polish and
+Hungarian and Slovakian, are capable of just as high intellectual
+development as our ancestors who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
+But no one who sees the conditions under which they now live can deny
+that it will take a good deal of labor, teaching them and training them,
+as well as scrubbing them, to accomplish that result. And what a waste
+of energy, what a farce it makes of culture, to take the people who have
+already been scrubbed and taught and trained for self-government, and
+exterminate them, and raise up others in their place! It seems time that
+we gave thought to the fundamental question, whether or not there is
+something self-destroying in the very process of culture. Unless we can
+answer this we might as well give up our visions and our efforts to lift
+the race.
+
+Theodore Roosevelt stormed at birth control for something like ten
+years, and it would be interesting if we could know how many Anglo-Saxon
+babies he succeeded in bringing into the world by his preachments. If
+what he wanted was to correct the balance between native and foreign
+births, how much more sensible to have taught birth control to those
+poor, pathetic, half-starved and overworked foreign mothers of our slums
+and tenant farms! I can wager that for every Anglo-Saxon baby that
+Theodore Roosevelt brought into the world by his preachings, he could
+have kept out ten thousand foreign slum babies, if only he had lent his
+aid to Margaret Sanger!
+
+Ah, but he wanted all the babies to be born, you say! I see before me
+the face of a certain devout old Christian lady, known to me, who
+settles the question by the Bible quotation, "Be fruitful and multiply."
+But what avails it to follow this biblical advice, if we allow one out
+of five of the new-born infants to perish from lack of scientific care
+before they are two years old? What avails it if we send them to school
+hungry, as we do twenty-two per cent of the public school children of
+New York City? What avails it if we allow venereal disease to spread, so
+that a large percentage of the babies are deformed and miserable? What
+avails it if, when they are fully grown, we can think of nothing better
+to do with them than to take them by millions at a time and dress them
+up in uniforms and send them out to be destroyed by poison gases? Would
+it not be the part of common sense to establish universal birth control
+for at least a year or two--until we have learned to take care of our
+newly born babies, and to feed our school children, and to protect our
+youths from vice, and to abolish poverty and war from the earth?
+
+These are the social aspects of birth control. There are also to be
+considered what I might call the personal aspects of it. Because young
+people do not know about it, and have no way to find out about it, they
+dare not marry, and so the amount of vice in the world is increased.
+Because married women do not know about it, love is turned to terror,
+and marital happiness is wrecked. Because the harmless and proper
+methods are not sensibly taught, people use harmful methods, which cause
+nervous disorders, and wreck marital happiness, and break up homes.
+Thorough and sound knowledge about birth control is just as essential to
+happiness in marriage as knowledge of diet is necessary to health, or as
+knowledge of economics is necessary to intelligent action as a voter and
+citizen. The suppression by law of knowledge of birth control is just as
+grave a crime against human life as ever was committed by religious
+bigotry in the blackest days of the Spanish Inquisition.
+
+Now this law stands on the statute books of our country, and if I should
+so much as hint to you in this book what you need to know, or even where
+you can find out about it, I should be liable to five years in jail and
+a fine of $5,000, and every person who mailed a copy of this book, or
+any advertisement of this book, would be in the same plight. But there
+is not yet a law to prohibit agitation against the law, so the first
+thing I say to every reader of this book is that they should obtain a
+copy of the _Birth Control Review_, published at 104 Fifth Avenue, New
+York, and also should join the Voluntary Parenthood League, 206
+Broadway, New York. Get the literature of these organizations and
+circulate them and help spread the light!
+
+As to the knowledge which you need, the only advice I am allowed to give
+is that you should seek it. Seek it, and persist in seeking, until you
+find it. Ask everyone you know; and ask particularly among enlightened
+people, those who are willing to face the facts of human life and trust
+in reason and common sense. I do not know if I am violating the law in
+thus telling you how to find out about birth control. One of the
+charming features of this law, and others against the spreading of
+knowledge, is that they will never tell you in advance what you may say,
+but leave you to say it and take your chances! I believe that I am not
+violating any law when I tell you that there are half a dozen simple,
+inexpensive, and entirely harmless methods of preventing undesired
+parenthood without the destruction of the marital relationship.
+
+I am one of those who for many years believed that the destruction of
+the marital relationship was the only proper and moral method. I was
+brought up to take the monkish view of love. I thought it was an animal
+thing which required some outside justification. I had been taught
+nothing else; but now I have had personal experience of other
+justifications of love, and I believe that love is a beautiful and
+joyful relationship, which not merely requires no other justification,
+but confers justification upon many other things in life.
+
+I used to believe in that old ideal of celibacy, thinking it a fine
+spiritual exercise. But since then I have looked out on life, and have
+found so many interesting things to do, so much important work calling
+for attention, that I do not have to invent any artificial exercises for
+my spirit. I have looked at humanity, and brought myself to recognize
+the plain common sense fact--that whatever superfluous energy I may have
+to waste upon artificial spirituality, the great mass of the people have
+no such energy to spare. They need all their energies to get a living
+for themselves and for their wives and little ones. They have their sex
+impulses, and will follow them, and the only question is, shall they
+follow them wisely or unwisely? The religious people decide that sexual
+indulgence is wrong, and they impose a penalty--and what is that
+penalty? A poor, unwanted little waif of a soul, which never sinned, and
+had nothing to do with the matter, is brought into a hostile world, to
+suffer neglect, and perhaps starvation--in order to punish parents who
+did not happen to be sufficiently strong willed to practice continence
+in marriage!
+
+I used to believe that there was benefit to health and increase of
+power, whether physical or mental, in the celibate life. I have tried
+both ways of life, and as a result I know that that old idea is
+nonsense. I know now that love is a natural function. Of course, like
+any other function it can be abused; just as hunger may become gluttony,
+sleeping may become sluggishness, getting the money to pay one's way
+through life may become ferocious avarice. But we do not on this account
+refuse ever to eat or sleep or get money to pay our debts. I do not say
+that I believe, I say I know, that free and happy love, guided by wisdom
+and sound knowledge, is not merely conducive to health, but is in the
+long run necessary to health.
+
+People who condemn birth control always argue as if one wished to teach
+this knowledge indiscriminately to the young. Perhaps it is natural that
+those who oppose the use of reason should assume that others are as
+irrational as themselves. All I can say is that I no more believe in
+teaching birth control to the young than I believe in feeding beefsteak
+to nursing infants. There is a period in life for beefsteaks--or, if my
+vegetarian friends prefer, for lentil hash and peanut butter sandwiches;
+in exactly the same way there is a time for teaching the fundamentals of
+sex, and another time for teaching the art of happiness in marriage,
+which includes birth control. That brings me, by a very pleasant
+transition, to the other two subjects which I have promised to discuss:
+early marriage and education for marriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+EARLY MARRIAGE
+
+     (Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the duty of
+     parents in respect to them.)
+
+
+I have shown how economic forces in our society make for later and later
+marriage; and at the present time economic forces are so overwhelming
+that all other forces are hardly worth mentioning in comparison. You
+are, let us say, the mother of a boy of eighteen, and you have what you
+call "common sense"--meaning thereby a grasp of the money facts of life.
+If your darling boy of eighteen should come to you with a grave face and
+announce, "Mother dear, I have met the girl I love, and we have decided
+that we want to get married"--you would consider that the most absurd
+thing you had ever heard in all your born days, and you would tell the
+lad that he was a baby, and to run along and play. If he persisted in
+his crazy notion, you and your husband and all the brothers and sisters
+and relatives and friends both of the boy and the girl would set to
+work, by scolding and ridiculing, to make life a misery for them, and
+ninety-nine times out of a hundred you would break down the young
+couple's marital intention.
+
+But now, let us try another supposition. Let us suppose that your
+darling boy of eighteen should come to you again and say, "Mother dear,
+some of the boys are going to spend this evening in a brothel, and I
+have decided to go along." Would you think that was the most absurd
+thing you had ever heard in all your born days? Or would you answer,
+"Yes, of course, my boy; that is what I had in mind when I made you give
+up the girl you loved"? No, you would not answer that. But here is the
+vital fact--it doesn't matter what you would answer, for you would never
+have a chance to answer. When a mother's darling wants to get married,
+he comes and asks his mother's blessing; but never does a mother's
+darling ask a blessing before he goes with the other boys to a brothel.
+He just goes. Maybe he borrows the money from some other fellow, and
+next day tells you he went to a theater. Or maybe he picks up some poor
+man's daughter on the street, and takes her into the park, or up on the
+roof of a tenement. Some such thing he does, to find satisfaction for an
+instinct which you in your worldly wisdom or your heavenly piety spurn
+and ridicule.
+
+I do not wish to exaggerate. If you are an exceptionally wise and
+tactful mother, you may keep the confidence of your boy, and guide him
+day by day through his temptations and miseries, and keep him chaste.
+But the more you try that, the more apt you will be to come to my
+conclusion, that late marriage is a crime against the race; the more
+aware you will be of the danger, either that his boy friends may break
+him down, or that some lewd woman may come to his bedroom in the
+night-time. Never will you be able to be quite sure that he is not lying
+to you, because of his shame, and the pain he cannot bear to inflict
+upon you. Never will you be quite sure that he is not hiding some cruel
+disease, sneaking off to some quack who takes his money and leaves him
+worse than before--until finally he shoots off his head, as happened to
+a nephew of an old and dear friend of mine.
+
+Such is the problem of the mother of a son; and now, what about the
+mother of a daughter? This seems much simpler; because your daughter is
+not generally troubled with sex cravings, and if you teach her the
+proprieties, and see that she is carefully chaperoned, you may
+reasonably hope that she will be chaste. But some day you expect that
+she will marry; and then comes your problem. If you are the usual
+mother, you are looking for some one who can maintain her in the state
+of life to which she is accustomed. If a fairy prince would come along,
+or a plaster saint, you would be pleased; but failing that, you will
+take a successful business man, one who has made his way in the world
+and secured himself a position. But turn back to the figures I gave you
+a while ago. If this man is thirty years of age, there is at least a
+fifty-fifty chance that he has had some venereal disease; and while the
+doctors claim to cure these diseases absolutely, we must bear in mind
+that doctors are human, and sometimes claim more than they perform.
+Every doctor will admit, if you pin him down, that these diseases burrow
+deeply into the tissues, and many times are supposed to be cured when
+they are only hidden.
+
+Here is, in a nutshell, the problem of the mother of a daughter. If you
+marry your daughter at seventeen to a lad of her own age, you have a
+very good chance of marrying her to a person who is chaste. If you marry
+her to a man of twenty-five, you have perhaps one chance in a hundred.
+If you marry her to a man of thirty-five, you have perhaps one chance in
+ten thousand. You may not like these facts; I do not like them myself;
+but I have learned that facts are none the less facts on that account.
+
+You know the average society bud of eighteen, and her attitude to a boy
+of the same age. She regards him as a child; and you think, perhaps,
+that it is natural for a girl to be interested in men of thirty-five and
+even forty-five. But I tell you that it is not natural, it is simply one
+of the perversions of pecuniary sex. The girl is interested in such men,
+because all her young life she has been carefully coached for the
+marriage market; because she is dressed for it, and solemnly brought
+out, and introduced to other players of this exciting game of marriage
+for money, with its incredible prizes of automobiles and jewels and
+palaces full of servants, and magic check-books that never grow empty.
+But suppose that, instead of regarding her as a prize in a lottery, you
+let her grow up naturally, and taught her the truth about herself, both
+body and mind; suppose that, instead of dressing her in ways
+deliberately contrived to emphasize her sex, you put her in a simple
+uniform, and taught her to be honest and straightforward, instead of
+mincing and coy; suppose she played athletic games with boys of her own
+age, and invited them to her home, not for "jazz" dancing and stuffing
+cake and candy, but for the sharing of good music and literature and
+art--don't you think that maybe this girl might become interested in a
+lad of her own age, and choose him with some understanding of his real
+self?
+
+You take it for granted that young people should not marry until they
+can "afford it." But stop and consider, is not this a relic of old days?
+Always it takes time, and deliberate effort of the reason, to adjust our
+conventions to new facts; so face this fact--marriage today does not
+necessarily mean children, it may just mean love. It involves little
+more expense, because the young people need cost no more together than
+they cost in the separate homes of their parents. If they are children
+of the poor, they are already taking care of themselves. If they are
+children of the moderately well off, their parents expect to support
+them while they are getting an education; and why can they not just as
+well live together, and the parents of each contribute their share? Let
+the parents of the boy give him, not merely what it costs to keep him at
+home, but also the sums which otherwise the boy would pay to the
+brothels. By this argument I do not mean that I favor keeping young
+people financially dependent upon their parents. My own son is working
+his own way through college, and I should be glad to see every young man
+doing the same. All that I am saying is that if parents are going to
+support their children while they are getting an education, they might
+just as well support them married as single, instead of penalizing
+matrimony by making all allowances cease at that point.
+
+I know a certain ardent feminist, who is all for late marriage for
+women, and abhors my ideas on this subject. She wants women to get a
+chance to develop their personalities; whereas I want to sacrifice them
+to the frantic exigencies of the male animal! Young things of seventeen
+and eighteen have no idea what they are, or what they want from life;
+the mating impulse is a blind frenzy in them, and they must be taught to
+control it, just as they are taught not to kill when they are angry!
+
+In the first place, I point out that young ladies in colleges and in
+ballrooms give a lot of time and thought to sex, even though they do not
+call it by that inelegant term. I very much question whether, if we
+should apply our wisdom to the task of getting our young people happily
+mated before we sent them off to college, we should not get a lot more
+serious study out of them than we now do, with all their "fussing" and
+flirting and dancing.
+
+Second, I am willing to make heroic moral efforts, where I see any
+chance of adequate results, but I have examined the facts, and
+definitely made up my mind that it is not worth while, in our present
+stage of culture, to preach to the mass of men the doctrine that they
+should abstain from sex experience until they are twenty-five or thirty
+years of age. You may storm at them, but they only laugh at you; you may
+pass laws, and try to put them in jail, but you only provide a harvest
+for blackmailers and grafters. As to sacrificing the girl, my answer is
+simply that I believe in love; and in this I think the girl will agree
+with me, if you will let her! I have never heard any qualified person
+maintain that it hurts a girl to respond to love at the age of seventeen
+or eighteen; nor do I think that it hurts a boy, provided that he is
+taught the virtues of moderation and self-restraint. Without these, it
+will hurt him to eat; but that is no argument for starving him. As for
+the question of his maturity and power to judge, we are able at present
+to keep him from marrying anybody, so I think we might reasonably hope
+to keep him from marrying a wanton or a slut. Certainly we might find
+somebody better than the peroxide blonde he now picks up in front of the
+moving picture palace.
+
+The question, at what ages we shall advise our young couple to have
+children, is a separate one, depending upon many circumstances. First,
+of course, they should not have any until they are able financially to
+maintain them. As to the age at which it is physically advisable, that
+is a question to be settled by physicians and physiologists. I myself
+had the idea that the proper age would be when the woman had attained
+her full stature; but my friend Dr. William J. Robinson sends me some
+statistics from the Johns Hopkins Hospital _Bulletin_, which startle me.
+This publication for January, 1922, gives the results in five hundred
+childbirths, in which the mother's age was from twelve to sixteen years
+inclusive. It appears that pregnancy and labor at these ages are no more
+dangerous than in older women; but on the other hand, the duration of
+the labor is actually shorter, and the size of the children is not
+inferior. These facts are so contrary to the general impression that I
+content myself with calling attention to them, and leave the commenting
+to be done by feminists and others who oppose themselves to the idea of
+early marriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+THE MARRIAGE CLUB
+
+     (Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to avoid
+     unhappy marriages.)
+
+
+I will make the assumption that you would like to have a trial of my
+cure for prostitution. You would like to do something right here and
+now, without waiting for the social revolution. Very well: I propose
+that you shall find a few other parents of boys and girls who are in
+revolt against our system of hidden vice, and that you will meet and
+form a modern marriage club. Only you won't call it that, of course; you
+will tactfully describe it as a literary society, or a social circle, or
+an Epworth League. The parents who run it will know what it is for, just
+as they do today; the only difference being that it will exist to
+promote love matches instead of money matches. It happens that I am
+myself a tactless sort of a person, not skillful at avoiding saying what
+I mean. So, in this chapter, I shall content myself with setting forth
+exactly what this marriage club will do, and leaving it to more clever
+people to supply the necessary camouflage.
+
+This club will begin by correcting the most stupid of all our
+educational blunders, the assumption of the necessary immaturity of the
+young. Our young people nowadays have ten times as much chance to learn
+and ten times as much stimulus to learn as we had; and it is a generally
+safe assumption that they know much more than we think they do, and are
+ready to learn every sensible and interesting thing. I am carrying on an
+epistolary acquaintance with a little miss of twelve, who has read half
+a dozen of my books--among the "worst" of them--and writes me letters of
+grave appreciation. I have talked on Socialism to a thousand school
+children, and had them question me for an hour, and heard just as worth
+while questions as I have heard from an audience of bankers. Never in my
+life have I talked about real things with children that I did not find
+them proud to be treated seriously, and eager to show that they were
+worthy of that honor. A great part of our foolishness with children is
+due to the emptiness of our own heads.
+
+These parents will delegate one man and one woman to make a thorough
+study of the sex education of the young. Of course, there is knowledge
+about sex which has to be given to the very youngest child, and more and
+more must be given as they grow older and ask more questions. But what I
+have in mind here is that detailed and precise knowledge which must be
+given to the young when they approach the period of puberty. At this age
+of fourteen or fifteen the man will take each of the boys apart, and the
+woman will take each of the girls, and will explain to them what they
+need to know. This duty will not be trusted to parents, for parents have
+an imbecile fear of talking straight to their children, and try to get
+by with rubbish about bees and flowers. Let every child know that the
+days of the hole-and-corner sex business is forever past, and that here
+is an instructed person, who talks real American, and knows what he is
+talking about, and will deal with facts, instead of with evasions.
+
+This club will help to educate the youngsters, and also to give them a
+good time, developing both their minds and bodies, and learning to know
+them thoroughly. When they are sixteen each one will have another talk,
+this time about marriage and what it means; learning that it is not
+merely flirtations and delicious thrills, but a business partnership,
+and the deepest and best of all friendships. So when John finds that he
+likes Mary best of all the girls he knows, this won't be a subject for
+"kidding" and sly innuendo, and blushes and simpering on Mary's part,
+but an occasion for decent and sensible talk about what each of them
+really is, and what each thinks the other to be. If they think they are
+in love, then there will be a council of the elder statesmen, to
+consider that case, and what are the chances of happiness in that love.
+This may sound forbidding, but it is exactly what is done at
+present--only it is not done honestly and frankly, and therefore does
+not carry proper weight with the young people.
+
+I am an opponent of long engagements, but I am also an opponent of no
+engagements at all; I know no truer proverb than "Marry in haste and
+repent at leisure." It would be my idea that a very young couple should
+announce their engagement, and then wait six months, and be consulted
+again about the matter, and have a chance to withdraw with no hard
+feelings, if either party thought best. If they wished to go on, they
+might be asked to wait another six months, if their elders felt very
+certain there were reasons to doubt the wisdom of the match.
+
+There are, of course, people who, because of disease or physical defect,
+should never be allowed to marry; and others who might marry, but should
+not be allowed to have children. There should be laws providing for such
+cases, requiring physical examination before marriage, and in extreme
+cases providing for a simple and harmless surgical operation to prevent
+the hopelessly unfit from passing on their defects to the future. But
+dealing for the moment with normal young persons, members of our modern
+marriage club, I should say that if, after they have listened to the
+warning of their elders, and have waited for a decent interval to think
+things over, they still remain of the opinion that they can make a
+successful marriage, then it is up to the elders to wish them luck. I
+have known of young couples who have refused to heed warnings, and
+regretted it; but I have known of others who went ahead and had their
+own way and proved they were right. There is a form of wisdom called
+experience and there is another form called love.
+
+I hear the worldly and cynical rail at the blindness of "young love,"
+and I can see the truth in what they say; but also I can see the deeper
+truth in the magic dreams of the young soul. Here is a youth who adores
+a girl, and you know the girl, and it is comical to you, because you
+know she is not any of the things the youth imagines. But who are you
+that claim to know the last thing about a human soul? Look into your
+own, and see how many different things you are! Look back, if you can,
+to the time when you were young, and remember the visions and the hopes.
+They have lost all reality to you now; but who can say how many of them
+you might have made real if there had been one other person who believed
+in them, and loved them, and would not give them up?
+
+I write this; and then I think of the other side--the fools that I have
+known in love! The trusting women, marrying rotten men to reform them!
+The pitiful people who think that fine phrases and sentimentality can
+take the place of facts! I implore my young couples to sit down and
+face the realities of their own natures, to decide what they are, and
+what they want to be--and if there is going to be any change, let it be
+made and tried out before marriage! I implore them to begin now to
+control their desires by their reason and judgment; to begin, each of
+them at the very outset, to carry their share of the burdens and do
+their share of the hard work. I implore them to value independence and
+self-reliance in the other, and never above all things to marry from
+pity, which is a worthy emotion in its place, but has nothing to do with
+sex, which should be an affair between equals, a matter of partnership
+and not of parasitism. I think that, on the whole, the most dreadful
+thing in love is the use of it for preying, for the securing of favors
+and advantages of any sort, whether by men or by women.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE
+
+     (Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that we have the
+     right and the duty to teach it.)
+
+
+I assume now that our young couple have definitely made up their minds,
+and that the wedding day is near. They are therefore, both the man and
+the woman, in position to receive information as to the physical aspects
+of their future experience. This information is now for the most part
+possessed only by pathologists--who impart it too late, after people
+have blundered and wrecked their lives. The opponents of birth control
+ask in horror if you would teach it to the young; I am now able to
+answer just when I would teach it; I would teach it to these young
+couples about to marry. I would make it by law compulsory for every
+young couple to attend a school of marriage, and to learn, not merely
+the regulation of conception, but the whole art of health and happiness
+in sex.
+
+Perhaps the words, "a school of marriage," strike you as funny. When I
+was young I remember that Pulitzer founded a school of journalism, and
+all newspaper editors made merry--they knew that journalism could only
+be learned in practice. But nowadays every city editor gives preference
+to an applicant who has taken a college course in reporting; they have
+learned that journalism can be taught, just like engineering and
+accounting. In the same way I assert that marriage can be taught, and
+the art of love, physical, mental, moral, and even financial; I think
+that the day will come when enlightened parents would no more dream of
+trusting their tender young daughter to a man who had not taken a course
+in sex, than they would go up in an aeroplane with a pilot who knew
+nothing about an engine.
+
+The knowledge which I possess upon the art of love I would be glad to
+give you in this book; but unfortunately, if I were to do so, my book
+would be suppressed, and I should be sent to jail.
+
+Some ten or twelve years ago I received a pitiful letter from a man who
+was in state's prison in Delaware, charged with having imparted
+information as to birth control. Under our amiable legal system, a
+perfectly innocent man may be thrown into jail, and kept there for a
+year or two before he is tried, and if he is without money or friends,
+he might as well be buried alive. I went to Wilmington to call on the
+United States attorney who had caused the indictment in this case, and
+had an illuminating conversation with him. The official was anxious to
+justify what he had done. He assured me that he was no bigot, but on the
+contrary an extremely liberal man, a Unitarian, a Progressive, etc. "But
+Mr. Sinclair," he said, "I assure you this prisoner is not a reformer or
+humanitarian or anything like that. He is a depraved person. Look, here
+is something we found in his trunk when we arrested him; a pamphlet,
+explaining about sex relations. See this paragraph--it says that the
+pleasure of intercourse is increased if it is prolonged."
+
+I looked at the pamphlet, and then I looked at the attorney. "Do you
+think you have stated the matter quite fairly?" I asked. "Apparently the
+purpose is to explain that the emotions of women are more slow to be
+aroused than those of men, and that husbands failing to realize this,
+often do not gratify their wives."
+
+"Well," said the other, "do you consider that a subject to be
+discussed?"
+
+"Pardon me if I discuss it just a moment," I replied. "Do you happen to
+know whether the statement is a fact?"
+
+"No, I don't. It may be, I suppose."
+
+"You have never investigated the matter?"
+
+The legal representative of our government was evidently annoyed by my
+persistence. "I have not," he answered.
+
+"But then, suppose I were to tell you that thousands of homes have been
+broken up for lack of just that bit of knowledge; that tens of thousands
+of marriages are miserable for lack of it."
+
+"Surely, Mr. Sinclair, you exaggerate!"
+
+"Not at all. I could prove to you by one medical authority after
+another, that if the desire of a woman in marriage is roused, and then
+left ungratified, the result is nervous strain, and in the long run it
+may be nervous breakdown."
+
+The above covers only one detail of the pamphlet in question. I read
+some pages of it, and argued them out with the attorney. It was a
+perfectly simple, straightforward exposition of facts about the
+physiology of sex; and one of the reasons a man was to be sent to jail
+for several years was--not that he had circulated such a pamphlet, not
+that he had showed it to young people, but merely that he had it in his
+trunk!
+
+There is an honest and very useful book, written by an English
+physician, Dr. Marie C. Stopes, entitled "Married Love," published by
+Dr. Wm. J. Robinson of New York, a specialist of authority and
+integrity. The book deals with just such vital facts in a perfectly
+dignified and straightforward manner; yet Dr. Robinson has been hounded
+by the postoffice department because of it; he was convicted and forced
+to pay a fine of $250, and the book was barred from the mails!
+
+I have so much else of importance to say in this Book of Love that it
+would not be sensible to jeopardize it by causing a controversy with our
+official censors of knowledge. Therefore I will merely say in general
+terms that men and women differ, not merely as a sex, but as
+individuals, and every marriage is a separate problem. Every couple has
+to solve it in the intimacy of their love life, and for this there are
+needed, first of all, gentleness on the part of the man, especially in
+the first days of the honeymoon; and on the part of both at all times
+consideration for the other's welfare and enjoyment, and above all,
+frankness and honesty in talking out the subject. Reticence and shyness
+may be virtues elsewhere, but they have no place in the intimacies of
+the sex life; if men and women will only ask and answer frankly, they
+can find out by experience what makes the other happy, and what causes
+pain.
+
+We are dealing here with the most sacred intimacy of life, and one of
+the most vital of life's problems. It is here, in the marriage bed, that
+the divorce problem is to be settled, and likewise the problem of
+prostitution; for it is when men and women fail to understand each
+other, and to gratify each other, that one or the other turns cold and
+indifferent, perhaps angry and hateful--and then we have passions
+unsatisfied, and ranging the world, breaking up other homes and
+spreading disease. So I would say to every young couple, seek knowledge
+on this subject. Seek it without shame from others who have had a chance
+to acquire it. Seek it also from nature, our wise old mother, who knows
+so much about her children!
+
+Be natural; be simple and straightforward; and beware of fool notions
+about sex. If you will look in the code of Hammurabi, which is over four
+thousand years old, you will see the provision that a man who has
+intercourse with a menstruating woman shall be killed. In Leviticus you
+will read that both the man and the woman are to be cast out from their
+people. You will find that most people still have some such notion,
+which is without any basis whatever in health. And this is only one
+illustration of many I might give of ignorance and superstition in the
+sex life. I would give this as one very good rule to bear in mind; your
+love life exists for the happiness and health of yourself and your
+partner, and not for Hammurabi, nor Moses, nor Jehovah, nor your
+mother-in-law, nor anybody else on the earth or above it.
+
+Great numbers of people believe that women are naturally less passionate
+than men, and that marital happiness depends upon men's recognizing
+this. Of course, there are defective individuals, both men and women;
+but the normal woman is every bit as passionate as a man, if once she
+has been taught; and if love is given its proper place in life, and
+monkish notions not allowed to interfere, she will remain so all through
+life, in spite of child-bearing or anything else. I say to married
+couples that they should devote themselves to making and preserving
+passionate gratification in love; because this is the bright jewel in
+the crown of marriage, and if lovers solve this problem, they will find
+other problems comparatively simple.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+THE MONEY SIDE OF MARRIAGE
+
+     (Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of
+     matrimony.)
+
+
+So far we have discussed marriage as if it consisted only of love. But
+it is manifest that this is not the case. Marriage is every-day
+companionship, and also it is partnership in a complicated business. In
+our school of marriage therefore we shall teach the rights and duties of
+both partners to the contract, and shall face frankly the money side of
+the enterprise.
+
+One of the first facts we must get clear is that the economics of
+marriage are in most parts of the world still based upon the subjection
+of woman, and are therefore incompatible with the claims of woman as a
+partner and comrade. They will never be right until the social
+revolution has abolished privilege, and the state has granted to every
+woman a maternity endowment, with a mother's pension for every child
+during the entire period of the rearing and education of that child.
+Until this is done, the average woman must look to some man for the
+support of her child, and that, by the automatic operation of economic
+force, makes her subject to the whims of the man. What women have to do
+is to agitate for a revision of the property laws of marriage; and
+meantime to see that in every marriage there is an extra-legal
+understanding, which grants to the woman the equality which laws and
+conventions deny her.
+
+When I was a boy my mother had a woman friend who, if she wanted to go
+downtown, would borrow a quarter from my mother. This woman's husband
+was earning a generous salary, enough to enable him to buy the best
+cigars by the box, and to keep a supply of liquors always on hand; but
+he gave his wife no allowance, and if she wanted pocket money she had to
+ask him for it, each time a separate favor. Yet this woman was keeping a
+home, she was doing just as hard work and just as necessary work as the
+man. Manifestly, this was a preposterous arrangement. If a woman is
+going to be a home-maker for a husband, it is a simple, common-sense
+proposition that the salary of the husband shall be divided into three
+parts--first, the part which goes to the home, the benefit of which is
+shared in common; second, the part which the husband has for his own
+use; and third, the part which the wife has for hers. The second and
+third parts should be equal, and the wife should have hers, not as a
+favor, but as a right. If the two are making a homestead, or running a
+farm, or building up a business, then half the proceeds should be the
+woman's; and it should be legally in her name, and this as a matter of
+course, as any other business contract. If the woman does not make a
+home, but merely displays fine clothes at tea parties, that is of course
+another matter. Just what she is to do is something that had better be
+determined before marriage; and if a man wants a life-partner, to take
+an interest in his work, or to have a useful work of her own, he had
+better choose that kind of woman, and not merely one that has a pretty
+face and a trim ankle.
+
+The business side of marriage is something that has to be talked out
+from time to time; there have to be meetings of the board of directors,
+and at these meetings there ought to be courtesy and kindness, but also
+plain facts and common sense, and no shirking of issues. Love is such a
+very precious thing that any man or woman ought to be willing to make
+money sacrifices to preserve it. But on the other hand, it is a fact
+that there are some people with whom you cannot be generous; the more
+you give them, the more they take, and with such people the only safe
+rule is exact justice. Let married couples decide exactly what
+contribution each makes to the family life, and what share of money and
+authority each is entitled to.
+
+I might spend several chapters discussing the various rocks on which I
+have seen marriages go to wreck. For example, extravagance and worldly
+show; clothes for women. In Paris is a "demi-monde," a world of brutal
+lust combined with riotous luxury. The women of this "half-world" are in
+touch with the world of art and fashion, and when the rich costumers and
+woman-decorators want what they call ideas, it is to these lust-women
+they go. The fashions they design are always depraved, of course; always
+for the flaunting of sex, never for the suggestion of dignity and grave
+intelligence. At several seasons of the year these lust-women are
+decked out and paraded at the race-courses and other gathering places
+of the rich, and their pictures are published in the papers and spread
+over all the world. So forthwith it becomes necessary for your wife in
+Oshkosh or Kalamazoo to throw away all the perfectly good clothes she
+owns, and get a complete new outfit--because "they" are wearing
+something different. Of course the costume-makers have seen that it is
+extremely different, so as to make it impossible for your wife and
+children to be happy in their last season's clothes. I have a winter
+overcoat which I bought fourteen years ago, and as it is still as good
+as new I expect to use it another fourteen years, which will mean that
+it has cost me a dollar and a half per year. But think what it would
+have cost me if I had considered it necessary each year to have an
+overcoat cut as the keepers of French mistresses were cutting theirs!
+
+But then, suppose you put it up to your wife and daughters to wear
+sensible clothes, and they do so, and then they observe that on the
+street your eyes turn to follow the ladies in the latest disappearing
+skirt? The point is, you perceive, that you yourself are partly to blame
+for the fashions. They appeal to a dirty little imp you have in your own
+heart, and when the decent women discover that, it makes them blazing
+hot, and that is one of the ways you may wreck your domestic happiness
+if you want to. Unless I am greatly mistaken, when the class war is all
+over we are going to see in our world a sex war; but it is not going to
+be between the men and the women, it is going to be between the mother
+women and the mistress women, and the mistress women are going to have
+their hides stripped off.
+
+Men wreck marriage because they are promiscuous; and women wreck it
+because they are parasites. Woman has been for long centuries an
+economic inferior, and she has the vices of the subject peoples and
+tribes. Now there are some who want to keep these vices, while at the
+same time claiming the new privileges which go with equality. Such a
+woman picks out a man who is sensitive and chivalrous; who knows that
+women suffer handicaps, pains of childbirth, physical weakness, and who
+therefore feels impelled to bear more than his share of the burdens. She
+makes him her slave; and by and by she gets a child, and then she has
+him, because he is bowed down with awe and worship, he thinks that such
+a miracle has never happened in the world before, and he spends the rest
+of his life waiting on her whims and nursing her vanities. I note that
+at the recent convention of the Woman's Party they demanded their rights
+and agreed to surrender their privileges. There you have the final test
+by which you may know that women really want to be free, and are
+prepared to take the responsibilities of freedom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+THE DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY
+
+     (Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should endeavor to
+     preserve it.)
+
+
+So far in this discussion we have assumed that love means monogamous
+love. We did so, for the reason that we could not consider every
+question at once. But we have promised to deal with all the problems of
+sex in the light of reason; and so we have now to take up the question,
+what are the sanctions of monogamy, and why do we refuse sanction to
+other kinds of love?
+
+First, let us set aside several reasons with which we have nothing to
+do. For example, the reason of tradition. It is a fact that Anglo-Saxon
+civilization has always refused legal recognition to non-monogamous
+marriage. But then, Anglo-Saxon civilization has recognized war, and
+slavery, and speculation, and private property in land, and many other
+things which we presume to describe as crimes. If tradition cannot
+justify itself to our reason, we shall choose martyrdom.
+
+Second, the religious reason. This is the one that most people give. It
+is convenient, because it saves the need of thinking. Suffice it here to
+say that we prefer to think. If we cannot justify monogamy by the facts
+of life, we shall declare ourselves for polygamy.
+
+What are the scientific and rational reasons for monogamy? First among
+them is venereal disease. This may seem like a vulgar reason, but no one
+can deny that it is real. There was a time, apparently, when mankind did
+not suffer from these plagues, and we hope there may be such a time
+again. I shall not attempt to prescribe the marital customs for the
+people of that happy age; I suspect that they will be able to take care
+of themselves. Confining myself to my lifetime and yours, I say that the
+aim of every sensible man and woman must be to confine sex relations to
+the smallest possible limits. I know, of course, that there are
+prophylactics, and the army and navy present statistics to show that
+they succeed in a great proportion of cases. But if you are one of
+those persons in whose case they don't succeed, you will find the
+statistics a cold source of comfort to you.
+
+John and Mary go to the altar, or to the justice of the peace, and John
+says: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow." But the formula is
+incomplete; it ought to read: "And likewise with the fruits of my wild
+oats." Marriage is a contract wherein each of the contracting parties
+agrees to share whatever pathogenic bacteria the other party may have or
+acquire; surely, therefore, the contract involves a right of each party
+to have a say as to how many chances of infection the other shall incur.
+John goes off on a business trip, and is lonesome, and meets an
+agreeable widow, and figures to himself that there is very little chance
+that so charming a person can be dangerous. But maybe Mary wouldn't
+agree with his calculations; maybe Mary would not consider it a part of
+the marriage bargain that she should take the diseases of the agreeable
+widow. What commonly happens is that Mary is not consulted; John revises
+the contract in secret, making it read that Mary shall take a chance at
+the diseases of the widow. How can any thinking person deny that John
+has thus committed an act of treason to Mary?
+
+I know that there are people who don't mind running such chances; that
+is one reason why there are venereal diseases. All I can say is that the
+sex-code set forth in this book is based upon the idea that to deliver
+mankind from the venereal plague, we wish to confine the sex
+relationship within the narrowest limits consistent with health,
+happiness and spiritual development; and that to this end we take the
+young and teach them chastity, and we marry them early while they are
+clean, and then we call upon them to make the utmost effort to make a
+success of that union, and to make it a matter of honor to keep the
+marital faith. We do this with some hope of effectiveness, because we
+have made our program consistent with the requirements of nature, the
+genuine needs of love both physical and spiritual.
+
+The second argument for monogamy is the economic one. We have dreamed a
+social order where every child will be guaranteed maintenance by the
+state, and where women will be free from dependence on men. What will be
+the love arrangements of men and women under this new order is another
+problem which we leave for them to decide, in the certainty that they
+will know more about it than we do. Meantime, we are for the present
+under the private property régime, and have to love and marry and raise
+our children accordingly. The children must have homes, and if they are
+to be normal children, they must have both the male and female influence
+in their lives; which means that their parents must be friends and
+partners, not quarreling in secret. This argument, I know, is one of
+expediency. I have adopted it, after watching a great number of people
+try other than monogamous sex arrangements, and seeing their chances of
+happiness and success wrecked by the pressure of economic forces. To
+rebel against social compulsion may be heroism, and again it may be
+merely bad judgment. For my part, the world's greatest evil is poverty,
+the cause of crime, prostitution and war. I concentrate my energies upon
+the abolishing of that evil, and I let other problems wait.
+
+The third reason is that monogamy is economical of human time and
+thought. The business of finding and wooing a mate takes a lot of
+energy, and adjustment after marriage takes more. To throw away the
+results of this labor and do it all over again is certainly not common
+sense. Of course, if you bake a cake and burn it, you have to get more
+material and make another try; but that is a different matter from
+baking a cake with the deliberate intention of throwing it away after a
+bite or two.
+
+The advocates of varietism in love will here declare that we are begging
+the question. We are assuming that love and the love chase are not
+worthy in themselves, but merely means to some other end. Can it be that
+love delights are the keenest and most intense that humans can
+experience, and that all other purposes of life are contributory to
+them? Certainly a great deal of art lends support to this idea, and many
+poets have backed up their words by their deeds. As Coleridge phrased
+it:
+
+    "All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
+     Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
+     All are but ministers of Love
+     And feed his sacred flame."
+
+This is a question not to be played with. Experimenting in love is
+costly, and millions have wrecked their lives by it. The sex urge in us
+is imperious and cruel; it wants nothing less than the whole of us,
+body, mind and spirit, and ofttimes it behaves like the genii in the
+bottle--it gets out, and not all the powers in the universe can get it
+back. I have talked with many men about sex and heard them say that it
+presents itself to them as an unmitigated torment, something they would
+give everything they own to be free of. And these, mind you, not men
+living in monasteries, trying to repress their natural impulses, but men
+of the world, who have lived freely, seeking pleasure and taking it as
+it came. The primrose path of dalliance did not lead them to peace, and
+the pursuit of variety in love brought them only monotony.
+
+I stop and think of one after another of these sex-ridden people, and I
+cannot think of one whom I would envy. I know one who in a frenzy of
+unhappiness seized a razor and castrated himself. I think of another, a
+certain classmate in college whom I once stopped in a conversation,
+remarking: "Did you ever realize what a state you have got your mind
+into? Everything means sex to you. Every phrase you hear, every idea
+that is suggested--you try to make some sort of pun, to connect it
+somehow or other with sex." The man thought and said, "I guess that's
+true." The idea had never occurred to him before; he had just gone on
+letting his instincts have their way with him, without ever putting his
+reason upon the matter.
+
+That was a crude kind of sex; but I think of another man, an idealist
+and champion of human liberty. One of the forms of liberty he maintained
+was the right to love as many women as he pleased, and although he was a
+married man, one hardly ever saw him that he was not courting some young
+girl. As a result, his mental powers declined, and he did little but
+talk about ideas. I do not know anyone today who respects him--except a
+few people who live the same sort of life. The thought of him brings to
+my mind a sentence of Nietzsche--a man who surely stood for freedom of
+personality: "I pity the lovers who have nothing higher than their
+love."
+
+A question like this can be decided only by the experience of the race.
+Some will make love the end and aim of life, and others will make it the
+means to other ends, and we shall see which kind of people achieve the
+best results, which kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the
+most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the
+experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough of it and
+quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I
+know others who are still in it--and I watch their lives and find them
+to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is
+based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful
+"free lovers." Of course, I know some noble and sincere people who do
+not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but
+these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor
+than if they were duly married.
+
+It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine
+permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in
+love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content
+yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining
+together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in
+which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon
+the sacred intimacy of sex! You can learn to take sex lightly, of
+course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true
+and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires
+some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals
+mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love,
+and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men
+and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it
+seriously--and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the
+rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we
+learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and
+making us truly social creatures.
+
+Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in
+her glorification of the sex-corruptions of capitalist society. She
+indicted American literature for its "bourgeois" qualities--among these
+the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with
+their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of sex promiscuity as
+they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to
+remark that "one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly
+be." That sounds like a paradox, but it is really a profound truth, and
+the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in
+the sex relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to
+those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no
+reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY
+
+     (Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold another
+     to the pledge of love.)
+
+
+Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the same who had me sent
+to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, as I have narrated in "The Brass
+Check." I remember arguing with him concerning his ideas of sex, which
+were of the freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put the
+great unanswerable question: "What are you going to do about the problem
+of jealousy?" And I had no response at hand; for jealousy is truly a
+most cruel and devastating and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you
+escape it, if you are going to preserve monogamy?
+
+The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down all the prejudices
+against sexual promiscuity. Free and unlimited license was every
+person's right, and for any other person to interfere was enslavement,
+for any other person to criticize was superstition. But the power of
+superstition is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men
+resentful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of
+their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disapproval of
+jealousy.
+
+Other men, less purely physiological in their attitude to sex, have
+wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. G. Wells has a novel,
+"In the Days of the Comet," in which he portrays two men, both nobly and
+truly in love with the same woman. One in a passion of jealousy is about
+to murder the other, when a great social transformation is magically
+brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to universal love, and
+the two men nobly and lovingly share the same woman. Shelley also
+dreamed this dream, inviting two women to share him. I have known others
+who tried it, but never permanently. I do not say that it never has
+succeeded, or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing
+the future--I am trying to give practical advice to people, for the
+conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on this point is
+that polygamous and polyandrous experiments in modern capitalist society
+cost more than they are worth.
+
+I once knew a certain high school teacher, who believed religiously in
+every kind of freedom. When she married, she and her husband, an artist,
+made a vow against jealousy; but as it worked out, this vow meant that
+the wife had a steady job and took care of the husband, while he loafed
+and loved other women. When finally she grew tired of it, he accused her
+of being jealous; also, she had brought it down to the matter of money!
+I know another woman, an Anarchist, widely known as a lecturer on sex
+freedom. She laid down the general principle of unlimited personal
+freedom for all, and she tried to live up to her faith. She entered into
+a "free union" with a certain man, and when she discovered that he was
+making love to another woman, in the presence of a friend of mine she
+threw a vase of flowers at his head. You see, her general principles had
+clashed with another general principle, to the effect that a person who
+feels deep and strong love inevitably desires that love to endure, and
+cannot but suffer to see it preyed upon and destroyed.
+
+Let us first consider the question, just what are the true and proper
+implications of monogamous love? The Roman Catholic church advocates
+"monogamy," and understands thereby that a man and woman pledge
+themselves "till death do us part," and if either of them cancels this
+arrangement it is adultery and mortal sin. I hope that none of my
+readers understands by "monogamy" any such system of spiritual
+strangulation. My own idea is rather what some churchman has
+sarcastically described by the term "progressive polygamy." I believe
+that a man and woman should pledge their faith in love, and should keep
+that faith, and endeavor with all their best energies to make a success
+of it; they should strive each to understand the other's needs, and
+unselfishly to fulfill them, within the limits of fair play. But if,
+after such an effort has been truly made, it becomes clear that the
+union does not mean health and happiness for one of the parties, that
+party has a right to withdraw from it, and for any government or church
+or other power to deny that right is both folly and cruelty.
+
+Now, on the basis of this definition of monogamy--or, if you prefer, of
+progressive polygamy--we are in position to say what we think about
+jealousy. If two people pledge their faith, and one breaks it, and the
+other complains, we do not call that jealousy, but just common decency.
+Neither do we call it jealousy if one expects the other to avoid the
+appearance of guilt; for love is a serious thing, not to be played with,
+and I think that a person who truly loves will do everything possible to
+make clear to the beloved that he is keeping and means to keep the
+plighted faith.
+
+You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in endeavoring thus to
+distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable jealousy, and calling
+the former by some other name. It does not make much difference about
+words, provided I make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole
+string of words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and cannot be
+discussed without preliminary explanations and distinctions; religion,
+for example, and morality, and aristocracy, and justice, to name only a
+few. Most people's thinking about marriage and love has been made like
+soup in a cheap restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of scraps and
+notions from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian monkery
+and Renaissance license, absurdly called "romance." So before you can do
+any thinking about a problem like jealousy, you have to agree to use the
+word to mean something definite, whether good or bad.
+
+We shall take jealousy as a "bad" word, and use it to mean the setting
+up, by a man or woman, of some claim to the love of another person,
+which claim cannot be justified in the court of reason and fair play.
+This includes, in the first place, all claims based upon a courtship,
+not ratified by marriage. It is to the interest of society and the race
+that men and women should be free to investigate persons of the other
+sex, and to experiment with the affections before pledges of marriage
+are made. If sensible customs of love and just laws of marriage were
+made, there would be no excuse for a woman's giving herself to a man
+before marriage; she should be taught not to do it, and then if she does
+it, the risk is her own, and the disgusting perversion of venality and
+greed known as the "breach of promise suit" should be unknown in our
+law. The young should be taught that it is the other person's right to
+change his mind and withdraw at any time before marriage; whatever pains
+and pangs this may cause must be borne in silence.
+
+The second kind of jealousy is that which seeks to keep in the marriage
+bond a person who is not happy in it and has asked to be released. The
+law sanctions this kind of cowardly selfishness, which manifests itself
+every day on the front pages of our newspapers--a spectacle of monstrous
+and loathsome passions unleashed and even glorified. Husbands set the
+bloodhounds of the law after wives who have fled with some other man,
+and send the man to a cell, and drag the woman back to a loveless home.
+Wives engage private detectives, and trail their husbands to some "love
+nest," and then ensue long public wrangles, with washing of filthy
+linen, and the matter is settled by a "separation." The virtuous wife,
+who may have driven the man away by neglect or vanity or stupidity, is
+granted a share of his earnings for the balance of her life; and two
+more people are added to the millions who are denied sexual happiness
+under the law, and are thereby impelled to live as law violators.
+
+For this there is only one remedy conceivable. We have banned
+cannibalism and slavery and piracy and duelling, and we must ban one
+more ancient and cruel form of human oppression, the effort to hold
+people in the bonds of sex by any other power save that of love. I am
+aware that the reactionaries who read this book will take this sentence
+out of its context and quote it to prove that I am a "free lover." I
+shall be sorry to have that done, but even so, I was not willing to live
+in slavery myself, and I am not willing to advocate it for others. I am
+aware that there are degenerate and defective individuals, and that we
+have to make special provision for them, as I shall presently set forth;
+but the average, normal human being must be free to decide what is love
+for him, and what is happiness for him. Every person in the world will
+have to deny himself the right to demand love where love is not freely
+given, and all lovers in the world will have to hold themselves ready to
+let the loved one go if and when the loved one demands it. I am aware
+that this is a hard saying, and a hard duty, but it is one that life
+lays upon us, and one that there is no escaping.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE
+
+     (Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and one of the
+     means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.)
+
+
+You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about the "divorce
+evil," and you will find that to the preacher or editor this "evil"
+consists of the fact that more and more people are refusing to stay
+unhappily married. It does not interest these moralizers if the
+statistics show that it is women who are getting most of the divorces,
+and that the meaning of the phenomenon is that women are refusing to
+continue living with drunken and dissolute men. To the clergy, the
+breaking of a marriage is an evil _per se_, and regardless of
+circumstances. They know this because God has told them so, and in the
+name of God they seek to keep people tied in sex unions which have come
+to mean loathing instead of love.
+
+Now, I will assert it as a mathematical certainty that a considerable
+percentage of marriages must fail. It is essential to progress that
+human beings should grow, both mentally and spiritually, and manifestly
+they cannot all grow in the same way. If they grow differently, must
+they not sometimes lose the power to make each other happy in the
+marital bonds? Who does not know the man who masters life and becomes a
+vital force, while his wife remains dull and empty? If such a man
+changes wives, the world in general denounces him as a selfish beast;
+but the world does not know nor does it care about those thousands of
+men who, not caring to be branded as selfish beasts, fulfill the needs
+of their lives by keeping mistresses in secret.
+
+I knew a certain country school teacher, one of the most narrowly
+conventional young women imaginable, who was engaged to a middle-aged
+business man. He went to New York on a business trip, and stayed a
+couple of months, and wrote her that he had met some Anarchists, and had
+discovered that all he had read about them in the newspapers was false,
+and that they were the true and pure idealists to whom the rest of his
+life must be devoted. The young lady was horrified; nor was she any
+happier when she came to New York and met her fiancé's new friends. She
+ought in common sense to have broken the engagement; but she was in
+love, and she married, as many another fool woman does, with the idea of
+"reforming" the man. She failed, and was utterly and unspeakably
+wretched.
+
+I know another man, a conservative capitalist of narrow and aggressive
+temper, whose wife turned into an ardent Bolshevik. The man thinks that
+all Bolsheviks should be shut up in jail for life, while the wife is
+equally certain that all jails should be razed to the ground and all
+Bolsheviks placed in control of the government. These two people have
+got to a point where they cannot sit down to the breakfast table without
+flying into a quarrel. I know another case of a modern scientist, an
+agnostic, whose wife, a half-educated, sentimental woman, took to
+dabbling in mysticism, and drove him wild by setting up an image of
+Buddha in her bedroom, and consorting with "swamis" in long yellow
+robes. I know another whose wife turned into an ultra-pious Catholic,
+and turned over the care of his domestic life to a priest. Is it not
+obvious that the only possible solution of such problems lies in
+divorce? Unless, indeed, we are all of us going to turn over the care of
+our domestic lives to the priests!
+
+Our grandfathers and grandmothers believed one thing, and believed the
+same thing when they were seventy as when they were twenty; so it was
+possible for them to dwell in domestic security and permanence till
+death did them part. But we are learning to change our minds; and
+whether what we believe is better or worse than what our ancestors
+believed, at least it is different. Also we are coming to take what we
+believe with more seriousness; the intellectual life means more and more
+to us, and it becomes harder and harder for us to find sexual and
+domestic happiness with a partner who does not share our convictions,
+but, on the contrary, may be contributing to the campaign funds of the
+opposition party.
+
+I do not mean by this that people should get a divorce as soon as they
+find they differ about some intellectual idea; on the contrary, I have
+advocated that they should do everything possible to understand and to
+tolerate each other. But it is a fact that intellectual convictions are
+the raw material out of which characters and lives are made, and it is
+inevitable that some characters and lives that fit quite well at twenty
+should fit very badly at thirty or forty. When we refuse divorce under
+such circumstances we are not fostering marriage, as we fondly imagine;
+we are really fostering adultery. It is a fact that not one person in
+ten who is held by legal or social force in an unhappy sex union will
+refrain from seeking satisfaction outside; and because these outside
+satisfactions are disgraceful, and in some cases criminal, they seldom
+have any permanence. Therefore it follows that "strict" divorce laws,
+such as the clerical propaganda urges upon us, are in reality laws for
+the promotion of fornication and prostitution.
+
+There is a short story by Edith Wharton, in which the "divorce evil" is
+exhibited to us in its naked horror; the story called "The Other Two,"
+in the volume "The Descent of Man." A society woman has been divorced
+twice and married three times, and by an ingenious set of circumstances
+the woman and all three of the men are brought into the same
+drawing-room at the same time. Just imagine, if you can, such an
+excruciating situation: a woman, her husband, and two men who used to be
+her husbands, all compelled to meet together and think of something to
+say! I cite this story because it is a perfect illustration of the
+extent to which the "divorce problem" is a problem of our lack of sense.
+Mrs. Wharton will, I fear, consider me a very vulgar person if I assert
+that there is absolutely no reason whatever why any of those four people
+in her story should have had a moment's discomfort of mind, except that
+they thought there was. There is absolutely nothing to prevent a man and
+woman who used to be married from meeting socially and being decent to
+each other, or to prevent two men from being decent to each other under
+such circumstances. I would not say that they should choose to be
+intimate friends--though even that may be possible occasionally.
+
+I know, because I have seen it happen. In Holland I met a certain
+eminent novelist and poet, a great and lovable man. I visited his home,
+and met his wife and two little children, and saw a man and woman living
+in domestic happiness. The man had also two grown sons, and after a few
+days he remarked that he would like me to meet the mother of these young
+men. We went for a walk of a mile or so, and met a lady who lived in a
+small house by herself, and who received us with a friendly welcome and
+talked with us for a couple of hours about music and books and art. This
+lady had been the writer's wife for ten years or so, and there had been
+a terrible uproar when they voluntarily parted. But they had refused to
+pay attention to this uproar; they understood why they did not wish to
+remain husband and wife any longer, but they did not consider it
+necessary to quarrel about it, nor even to break off the friendship
+which their common interests made possible. The two women in the case
+were not intimate, I gathered, but they frequently met at the homes of
+others, and found no difficulty in being friendly. I suggest to Mrs.
+Wharton that this story is at least as interesting as the one she has
+told; but I fear she will not care to write it, because apparently she
+considers it necessary that people who are well bred and refined should
+be the helpless victims of destructive manias.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII
+
+THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE
+
+     (Discusses the circumstances under which society has the right to
+     forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.)
+
+
+We have quoted the old maxim, "Marry in haste and repent at leisure,"
+and we suggested that parents and guardians should have the right to ask
+the young to wait before marriage, and make certain of the state of
+their hearts. We have now the same advice to give concerning divorce;
+the same claim to enter on behalf of society--that it has and should
+assert the right to ask people to delay and think carefully before
+breaking up a marriage.
+
+What interest has society in the restriction of divorce? What affair is
+it of any other person if I choose to get a divorce and marry a new wife
+once a month? There are many reasons, not in any way based upon
+religious superstition or conventional prejudice. In the first place,
+there are or may be children, and society should try to preserve for
+every child a home with a father and a mother in it. Second, there are
+property rights, of which every marriage is a tangle, and the settlement
+of which the law should always oversee. Third, there is the question of
+venereal disease, which society has an unquestionable right to keep
+down, by every reasonable restriction upon sexual promiscuity. And
+finally, there is the respect which all men and women owe to love. It
+seems to me that society has the same right to protect love against
+extreme outrage, as it has to forbid indecent exposure of the person on
+the street.
+
+There is in successful operation in Switzerland a wise and sane divorce
+law, based upon common sense and not upon superstition. A couple wish to
+break their marriage, and they go before a judge, and in private
+session, as to a friendly adviser, they tell their troubles. He gives
+them advice about their disagreement, and sends them away for three
+months to think it over. At the end of three months, if they still
+desire a divorce, they meet with him again. If he still thinks there is
+a chance of reconciliation, he has the right to require them to wait
+another three months. But if at the end of this second period they are
+still convinced that the case is hopeless, and that they should part,
+the judge is required to grant the divorce. You may note that this is
+exactly what I have suggested concerning young couples who become
+engaged. In both cases, the parties directly interested have the right
+to decide their own fate, but the rest of the world requires them to
+think carefully about it, and to listen to counsel. Except for grave
+offenses, such as adultery, insanity, crime or venereal disease, I do
+not think that anyone should receive a divorce in less than six months,
+nor do I think that any personal right is contravened by the imposing of
+such a delay.
+
+Next, what are we going to say to the right, or the claim to the right,
+on the part of a man or woman, to be married once a year throughout a
+lifetime? In order to illustrate this problem, I will tell you about a
+certain man known to me. In his early life he spent a couple of years in
+a lunatic asylum. He lays claim to extraordinary spiritual gifts, and
+uses the language of the highest idealism known. He is a man of culture
+and good family, and thus exerts a peculiar charm upon young women of
+refinement and sensitiveness. To my knowledge he was three times married
+in six years, and each time he deserted the woman, and forced her to
+divorce him, and to take care of herself, and in one case of a child. In
+addition, he had begotten one child out of marriage, and left the mother
+and child to starve. For ten years or so I used to see him about once in
+six months, and invariably he had a new woman, a young girl of fine
+character, who had been ensnared by him, and was in the agonizing
+process of discovering his moral and mental derangement. Yet there was
+absolutely nothing in the law to place restraint upon this man; he could
+wander from state to state, or to the other side of the world, preying
+upon lovely young girls wherever he went.
+
+This particular man happens to call himself a "radical"; but I could
+tell you of similar men in the highest social circles, or in the
+political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world; they are in
+every rank of life, and are just as definitely and certainly menaces to
+human welfare and progress as pirates on the high seas or highwaymen on
+the road. Nor are they confined to the males; the world is full of women
+who use their sex charms for predatory purposes, and some of them are
+far too clever for any law that you or I can contrive at present. But I
+think we might begin by refusing to let any man or woman have more than
+two divorces in one lifetime, in any state or part of the world. If any
+man or woman tries three times to find happiness in love, and fails each
+time, we have a right to assume that the fault must lie with that
+person, and not with the three partners.
+
+I think we may go further yet; having made wise laws of love and
+marriage, taking into consideration all human needs, we have a right to
+require that men and women shall obey the laws. At present the great
+mass of the public has sympathy for the law-breaker; just as, in old
+days, the peasants could not help admiring the outlaw who resisted
+unjust land laws and robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist
+régime, we can not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even
+though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore. But when
+we have made sex laws that we know are just and sensible--then we shall
+consider that we have the right to restrain sex criminals, and in
+extreme cases we shall avail ourselves of the skill of science to
+perform a surgical operation which will render him unable in future to
+prey upon the love needs of people who are placed at his mercy by their
+best qualities, their unselfishness and lack of suspicion.
+
+We clear out foul-smelling weeds from our garden, because we wish to
+raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein. There lives in
+California a student of plant life, who has shown us what we can do, not
+by magic or by superhuman efforts, but simply by loving plants, by
+watching them ceaselessly, understanding their ways, and guiding their
+sex-life to our own purposes. We can perform what to our ignorant
+ancestors would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all
+sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own kind, and
+survive forever if we give them proper care. In other words, Luther
+Burbank has shown us that we can "change plant nature."
+
+There flash back upon my memory all those dull, weary, sick human
+creatures, who have repeated to me that dull, weary, sick old formula,
+"You cannot change human nature." I do not think I am indulging either
+in religious superstition or in blind optimism, but am speaking
+precisely, in saying that whenever human beings get ready to apply
+experimental science to themselves, they can change human nature just as
+they now change plant nature. By putting human bodies together in love,
+we make new bodies of children more beautiful than any who have yet
+romped on the earth; and in the same way, by putting minds and souls
+together, we can make new kinds of minds and souls, different from those
+we have previously known, and greater than either the man-soul or the
+woman-soul alone.
+
+Also, by that magic which is the law of mind and soul life, each new
+creation can be multiplied to infinity, and shared by all other minds
+and souls that live in the present or may live in the future. We have
+shown elsewhere how genius multiplies to infinity the joy and power of
+life by means of the arts; and one of the greatest of the arts is the
+art of love. Consider the great lovers, the true lovers, of history--how
+they have enriched the lives of us all. It does not make any difference
+whether these men and women lived in the flesh, or in the brain of a
+poet--we learn alike from Dante and Beatrice, from Abélard and Héloïse,
+from Robert and Elizabeth Browning, from Tristan and Isolde, from Romeo
+and Juliet, what is the depth and the splendor of this passion which
+lies hidden within us, and how it may enrich and vivify and glorify all
+life.
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+THE BOOK OF SOCIETY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII
+
+THE EGO AND THE WORLD
+
+     (Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant and in
+     primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment to life.)
+
+
+We have now to consider the relationship of man to his fellows, with
+whom he lives in social groups. Upon this problem floods of light have
+been thrown by the new science of psycho-analysis. I will try to give,
+briefly and in simple language, an idea of these discoveries.
+
+One of the laws of biology is that every individual, in his development,
+reproduces the history of the race; so that impulses and mental states
+of a child reveal to us what our far-off ancestors loved and feared. The
+same thing is discovered to be true of neurotics, people who have failed
+in adjusting themselves to civilized life, and have gone back, in some
+or all of their mental traits, to infantile states. If we analyze the
+unconscious minds of "nervous patients," and compare them with what we
+find in the minds of infants, and in savages, we discover the same
+dreams, the same longings and the same fears.
+
+The mental life of man begins in the womb. We cannot observe that life
+directly, but we know that it is there, because there cannot be organic
+life without mind to direct it, and just as there is an unconscious mind
+that regulates the bodily processes in adults, so in the embryo there
+must be an unconscious mind to direct the flow of blood, the building of
+bones, muscle, eyes and brain. The mental life of that unborn creature
+is of course purely egotistical; it knows nothing outside itself, and it
+finds this universe an agreeable place--everything being supplied to it,
+promptly and perfectly, without effort of its own.
+
+But suddenly it gets its first shock; pain begins, and severe
+discomfort, and the creature is shoved out into a cold world, yelling in
+protest against the unsought change. And from that moment on, the
+new-born infant labors to adjust itself to an entirely new set of
+conditions. Discomforts trouble it, and it cries. Quickly it learns that
+these cries are answered, and satisfaction of its needs is furnished.
+Somehow, magically, things appear; warm and dry covering, a trickle of
+delicious hot milk into its mouth. At first the infant mind has no idea
+how all this happens; but gradually it comes to realize objects outside
+itself, and it forms the idea that these objects exist to serve its
+wants. Later on it learns that there are particular sounds which attach
+to particular objects, and cause them to function. The sound "Mama," for
+example, produces a goddess clothed in beauty and power, performing
+miracles. So the infant mind arrives at the "period of magic gestures"
+and the "period of magic words"; corresponding to a certain type of myth
+and belief which we find in every race and tribe of human being that now
+exists or ever has existed on earth. All these stories about magic
+wishes and magic rings and magic spells of a thousand sorts; and nowhere
+on earth a child which does not listen greedily to such fancies! The
+reason is simply that the child has passed through this stage of mental
+life, and so recently that the feelings are close to the surface of his
+consciousness.
+
+But gradually the infant makes the painful discovery that not everything
+in existence can be got to serve him; there are forces which are proof
+against his magic spells; there are some which are hostile, and these
+the infant learns to regard with hatred and fear. Sometimes hatred and
+fear are strangely mixed with admiration and love. For example, there is
+a powerful being known as "father," who is sometimes good and useful,
+but at other times takes the attention of the supremely useful "mother,"
+the source of food and warmth and life. So "father" is hated, and in
+fancy he is wished out of the way--which to the infant is the same thing
+as killing. Out of this grows a whole universe of fascinating mental
+life, which Freud calls by the name "the [OE]dipus complex"--after the
+legend of the Greek hero who murdered his father and committed incest
+with his mother, and then, when he discovered what he had done, put out
+his own eyes. There is a mass of legends, old as human thought,
+repeating this story; we cannot be sure whether they have grown out of
+the greeds and jealousies of this early wish-life of the infant, or
+whether they had their base in the fact that there was a stage in human
+progress in which the father really was killed off by the sons.
+
+This latter idea is discussed by Freud, in his book, "Totem and Taboo."
+It appears that primitive man lived in hordes, which were dominated by
+one old male, who kept all the women to himself, and either killed the
+young males, or drove them out to shift for themselves; so the young men
+would combine and murder their father. The forming of human society, of
+marriage and the family, depended upon one factor, the decision of the
+young victors to live and let live. The only way they could do this was
+to agree not to quarrel over the women of their own group, but to seek
+other women from other groups. This may account for what is known as
+"exogamy," an almost universal marriage custom of primitive man, whereby
+a man named Jones is barred by frightful taboos from the women named
+Jones, but is permitted relations with all the women named Smith.
+
+To return to our infant: he is in the midst of a painful process of
+adjusting himself to the outside world; discovering that sometimes all
+his magic words and gestures fail, his wishes no longer come true. There
+are beings outside him, with wills of their own, and power to enforce
+them; he has to learn to get along with these beings, and give up his
+pleasures to theirs. These processes which go on in the infant soul, the
+hopes and the terrors, the griefs and the angers, are of the profoundest
+significance for the later adult life. For nothing gets out of the mind
+that has once got into it; the infantile cravings which are repressed
+and forgotten stay in the unconscious, and work there, and strive still
+for expression. The conscious mind will not tolerate them, but they
+escape in the form of fairy-tales and stories, of dreams and delusions,
+slips of the tongue, and many other mental events which it is
+fascinating to examine. Also, if we are weakened by ill health or
+nervous strain, these infantile wishes may take the form of "neuroses,"
+and fully grown people may take to stammering, or become impotent, or
+hysterical, or even insane, because of failures of adjustment to life
+that happened when they were a year or two old. These things are known,
+not merely as a matter of theory, but because, as soon as by analysis
+these infant secrets are brought into consciousness and adjusted there,
+the trouble instantly ceases.
+
+So it appears that the whole process of human life, from the very hour
+of birth, consists of the correct adjustment of men and women in
+relation to their fellows. Not merely is man a social being, but all the
+prehuman ancestors of men, for ages upon geologic ages, have been
+social beings; they have lived in groups, and their survival has
+depended upon their success in fitting themselves snugly into group
+relationships. Failure to make correct adjustments means punishment by
+the group, or by enemies outside the group; if the failure is serious
+enough, it means death. We may assert that the task of understanding
+one's fellow men, and making one's self understood by them, is the most
+important task that confronts every individual.
+
+And if we look about the world at present, the most superficial of us
+cannot fail to realize that the task is far from being correctly
+performed. So many people unhappy, so many striving for what they cannot
+get! So many having to be locked behind bars, like savage beasts,
+because they demand something which the world is resolved not to let
+them have! So many having to be killed, by rifles and machine-guns, by
+high explosive shells and poison gas--because they misunderstood the
+social facts about them, and thought they could fulfill some wishes
+which the rest of mankind wanted them to repress! As I read the
+psycho-analyst's picture of the newly born infant with its primitive
+ego, its magic cries and magic gestures, I cannot be sure how much of it
+is sober science and how much is mordant irony--a sketch of the mental
+states of the men and women I see about me--whole classes of men and
+women, yes, even whole nations!
+
+The effort of the following chapters will be to interpret to men and
+women the world which they have made, and to which they are trying to
+adjust themselves. More especially we shall try to show how, by better
+adjustments, men may change both themselves and the world, and make both
+into something less cruel and less painful, more serene and more certain
+and more free.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIX
+
+COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION
+
+     (Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and the part which
+     selfishness and unselfishness play in the development of social
+     life.)
+
+
+Pondering the subject of this chapter, I went for a stroll in the
+country, and seating myself in a lonely place, became lost in thought;
+when suddenly my eye was caught by something moving. On the bare, hot,
+gray sand lay a creature that I could see when it moved and could not
+see when it was still, for it was exactly the color of the ground, and
+fitted the ground tightly, being flat, and having its edges scalloped so
+that they mingled with the dust. It was a lizard, covered with heavy
+scales, and with sharp horns to make it unattractive eating. At the
+slightest motion from me it vanished into a heap of stones, so quickly
+that my eye could scarcely follow it.
+
+This creature, you perceive, is in its actions and its very form an
+expression of terror; terror of devouring enemies, of jackals that
+pounce and hawks that swoop, and also of the hot desert air that seeks
+to dry out its few precious drops of moisture. Practically all the
+energies of this creature are concentrated upon the securing of its own
+individual survival. To be sure, it will mate, but the process will be
+quick, and the eggs will be left for the sun to hatch out, and the baby
+lizards will shift for themselves--that is to say, they will be
+incarnations of terror from the moment they open their eyes to the
+light.
+
+The jackal seeks to pounce upon the lizard, and so inspires terror in
+the lizard; but when you watch the jackal you find that it exhibits
+terror toward more powerful foes. You find that the hawk, which swoops
+upon the lizard, is equally quick to swoop away when it comes upon a man
+with a gun. This preying and being preyed upon, this mixture of cruelty
+and terror, is a conspicuous fact of nature; if you go into any orthodox
+school or college in America today, you will be taught that it is
+nature's most fundamental law, and governs all living things. If you
+should take a course in political economy under a respectable
+professor, you would find him explaining that such cruelty-terror
+applies equally in human affairs; it is the basis of all economic
+science, and the effort to escape from it is like the effort to lift
+yourself by your boot-straps.
+
+The professor calls this cruelty-terror by the name "competition"; and
+he creates for his own purposes an abstract being whom he names "the
+economic man," a creature who acts according to this law, and exists
+under these conditions. One of the professor's formulas is the so-called
+"Malthusian law," that population presses always upon the limits of
+subsistence. Another is "the law of diminishing returns of agriculture,"
+that you can get only so much product out of a certain piece of land, no
+matter how much labor and capital you put into it. Another is Ricardo's
+"iron law of wages," that wages cannot rise above the cost of living.
+Another is embodied in the formula of Adam Smith, that "Competition is
+the life of trade." The professor enunciates these "laws," coldly and
+impersonally, as becomes the scientist; but if you go into the world of
+business, you find them set forth cynically, in scores of maxims and
+witticisms: "Dog eat dog," "the devil take the hindmost," "business is
+business," "do others or they will do you."
+
+Evidently, however, there is something in man which rebels against these
+"natural" laws. In our present society man has set aside six days in the
+week in which to live under them, and one day in the week in which to
+preach an entirely different and contradictory code--that of Christian
+ethics, which bids you "love your neighbor," and "do unto others as you
+would they should do unto you." Between these Sunday teachings and the
+week-day teachings there is eternal conflict, and one who takes pleasure
+in ridiculing his fellow men can find endless opportunity here. The
+Sunday preachers are forbidden to interfere with the affairs of the
+other six days; that is called "dragging politics into the pulpit." On
+the other hand, incredible as it may seem, there are professors of the
+week-day doctrine who call themselves Christians, and believe in the
+Sunday doctrine, too. They manage this by putting the Sunday doctrine
+off into a future world; that is, we are to pounce upon one another and
+devour one another under the "iron laws" of economics so long as we live
+on earth, but in the next world we shall play on golden harps and have
+nothing to do but love one another. If anybody is so foolish as to apply
+the Sermon on the Mount to present-day affairs, we regard him as a
+harmless crank; if he persists, and sets out to teach others, we call
+him a Communist or a Pacifist, and put him in jail for ten or twenty
+years.
+
+In the Book of the Mind, I have referred to Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a
+Factor in Evolution," which I regard as one of the epoch-making books of
+our time. Kropotkin clearly proves that competition is not the only law
+of nature, it is everywhere modified by co-operation, and in the great
+majority of cases co-operation plays a larger part in the relations of
+living creatures than competition. There is no creature in existence
+which is entirely selfish; in the nature of the case such a creature
+could not exist--save in the imaginations of teachers of special
+privilege. If a species is to survive, some portion of the energies of
+the individual must go into reproduction; and steadily, as life
+advances, we find the amount of this sacrifice increasing. The higher
+the type of the creature, the longer is the period of infancy, and the
+greater the sacrifice of the parent for the young. Likewise, most
+creatures make the discovery that by staying together in herds or
+groups, and learning to co-operate instead of competing among
+themselves, they increase their chances of survival. You find birds that
+live in flocks, and other birds, like hawks and owls and eagles, that
+are solitary; and you find the co-operating birds a thousand times as
+numerous--that is to say, a thousand times as successful in the struggle
+for survival. You find that all man's brain power has been a social
+product; the supremacy he has won over nature has depended upon one
+thing and one alone--the fact that he has managed to become different
+from the "economic man," that product of the imagination of the
+defenders of privilege.
+
+It is evident that both competition and co-operation are necessary to
+every individual, and the health of the individual and of the race lies
+in the proper combination of the two. If a creature were wholly
+unselfish--if it made no effort to look after its own individual
+welfare--it would be exterminated before it had a chance to reproduce.
+If, on the other hand, it cannot learn to co-operate, its progeny stand
+less chance of survival against creatures which have learned this
+important lesson. We have a nation of a 110,000,000 people, who have
+learned to co-operate to a certain limited extent. Some of us realize
+how vastly the happiness of these millions might be increased by a
+further extension of co-operation; but we find ourselves opposed by the
+professors of privilege--and we wish that these gentlemen would go out
+and join the lizards of the desert sands or the sharks of the sea,
+creatures which really practice the system of "laissez faire" which the
+professors teach.
+
+The plain truth is that we cannot make a formula out of either
+competition or co-operation. We cannot settle any problem of economics,
+of business or legislation, by proclaiming, for example, that
+"Competition is the life of trade." Competition may just as well turn
+out to be the death of trade; it depends entirely upon the kind of
+competition, and the stage of trade development to which it is applied.
+In the early eighteenth century, when that formula of Adam Smith was
+written, competition was observed to keep down prices and provide
+stimulus to enterprise, and so to further abundant production. But the
+time came when the machinery for producing goods was in excess, not
+merely of the needs of the country, but of the available foreign
+markets, and then suddenly the large-scale manufacturers made the
+discovery that competition was the death of trade to them. They
+proceeded, as a matter of practical common sense, and without consulting
+their college professors, to abolish competition by forming trusts. We
+passed laws forbidding them to do this, but they simply refused to obey
+the laws. In the United States they have made good their refusal for
+thirty-five years, and in the end have secured the blessing of the
+Supreme Court upon their course.
+
+So now we have co-operation in large-scale production and marketing. It
+is known by various names, "pools," "syndicates," "price-fixing,"
+"gentlemen's agreements." It is a blessing for those who co-operate, but
+it proves to be the death of those who labor, and also of those who
+consume, and we see these also compelled to combine, forming labor
+unions and consumers' societies. Each side to the quarrel insists that
+the other side is committing a crime in refusing to compete, and our
+whole social life is rent with dissensions over this issue. Manifestly,
+we need to clear our minds of dead doctrines; to think out clearly just
+what we mean by competition, and what by co-operation, and what is the
+proper balance between the two.
+
+I have been at pains in this book to provide a basis for the deciding of
+such questions. It is a practical problem, the fostering of human life
+and the furthering of its development. We cannot lay down any fixed
+rule; we have to study the facts of each case separately. We shall say,
+this kind of competition is right, because it helps to protect human
+life and to develop its powers. We shall say, this other kind of
+competition is wrong because it has the opposite effect. We shall say,
+perhaps, that some kind was right fifty years ago, or even ten years
+ago, because it then had certain effects; but meantime some factor has
+changed, and it is now having a different effect, and therefore ought to
+be abolished.
+
+There has never been any kind of human competition which men did not
+judge and modify in that way; there is no field of human activity in
+which ethical codes do not condemn certain practices as unfair. The
+average Englishman considers it proper that two men who get into a
+dispute shall pull off their coats, and settle the question at issue by
+pummeling each other's noses. But let one of these men strike his
+opponent in the groin, or let him kick his shins, and instantly there
+will be a howl of execration. Likewise, an Anglo-Saxon man who fights
+with the fists has a loathing for a Sicilian or Greek or other
+Mediterranean man who will pull a knife. That kind of competition is
+barred among our breeds; and also the kind which consists of using
+poisons, or of starting slanders against your opponent.
+
+If you look back through history, you find many forms of competition
+which were once eminently respectable, but now have been outlawed. There
+was a time, for example, when the distinction we draw between piracy and
+sea-war was wholly unknown. The ships of the Vikings would go out and
+raid the ships and seaports of other peoples, and carry off booty and
+captives, and the men who did that were sung as heroes of the nation.
+The British sea-captains of the time of Queen Elizabeth--Drake,
+Frobisher, and the rest of them--are portrayed in our school books as
+valiant and hardy men, and the British colonies were built on the basis
+of their activities; yet, according to the sea laws in force today, they
+were pirates. We regard a cannibal race with abhorrence; yet there was a
+time when all the vigorous races of men were cannibals, and the habit of
+eating your enemies in battle may well have given an advantage to the
+races which practiced it.
+
+On the other hand, you find sentimental people who reject all
+competition on principle, and would like to abolish every trace of it
+from society, and especially from education. But stop and consider for a
+moment what that would mean. Would you abolish, for example, the
+competition of love, the right of a man to win the girl he wants? You
+could not do it, of course; but if you could, you would abolish one of
+the principal methods by which our race has been improved. Of course,
+what you really want is, not to abolish competition in love, but to
+raise it to a higher form. There is an old saying, "All's fair in love
+and war," but no one ever meant that. You would not admit that a man
+might compete in love by threatening to kill the girl if she preferred a
+rival. You would not admit that he might compete by poisoning the other
+man. You would not admit that he might compete by telling falsehoods
+about the other man. On the other hand, if you are sensible, you admit
+that he has a right to compete by making his character known to the
+girl, and if the other man is a rascal, by telling the girl that.
+
+Would you abolish the competition of art, the effort of men to produce
+work more beautiful and inspiring than has ever been known before? Would
+you abolish the effort of scientists to overthrow theories which have
+hitherto been accepted? Obviously not. You make these forms of
+competition seem better by calling them "emulation," but you do not in
+the least modify the fact that they involve the right of one person to
+outdo other persons, to supplant them and take away something from them,
+whether it be property or position or love or fame or power. In that
+sense, competition is indeed the law of life, and you might as well
+reconcile yourself to it, and learn to play your part with spirit and
+good humor.
+
+Also, you might as well train your children to it. You will find you
+cannot develop their powers to the fullest without competition; in fact,
+you will be forced to go back and utilize forms of competition which are
+now out of date among adults. I have told in the Book of the Body how I
+myself tried for ten years or more to live without physical competition,
+and discovered that I could not; I have had to take up some form of
+sport, and hundreds of thousands of other men have had the same
+experience. What is sport? It is a deliberate going back, under
+carefully devised rules, to the savage struggles of our ancestors. The
+very essence of real sport is that the contestants shall, within the
+rules laid down, compete with each other to the limit of their powers.
+With what contempt would a player of tennis or baseball or whist regard
+the proposition that his opponent should be merciful to him, and let him
+win now and then! Obviously, these things have no place in the game, and
+to be a "good sport" is to conform to the rules, and take with enjoyment
+whatever issue of the struggle may come.
+
+But then again, suppose you are competing with a child; obviously, the
+conditions are different. You no longer play the best you can, you let
+the child win a part of the time; but you do not let the child know
+this, or it would spoil the fun for the child. You pretend to try as
+hard as you know how, and you cry out in grief when you are beaten, and
+the child crows with delight. And yet, that does not keep you from
+loving the child, or the child from loving you.
+
+The purpose of this elaborate exposition is to make clear the very vital
+point that a certain set of social acts may be right under some
+conditions, and desperately wrong under other conditions. They may be
+right in play, and not in serious things; they may be right in youth,
+and not in maturity; they may be right at one period of the world's
+development, while at another period they are destructive of social
+existence. If, therefore, we wish to know what are right and wrong
+actions in the affairs of men, if we wish to judge any particular law or
+political platform or program of business readjustment, the first thing
+we have to do is to acquire a mass of facts concerning the society to
+which the law or platform or program, is to be applied. We need to ask
+ourselves, exactly what will be the effect of that change, applied in
+that particular way at that particular time. In order to decide
+accurately, we need to know the previous stages through which that
+society has passed, the forces which have been operating in it, and the
+ways in which they have worked.
+
+But also we must realize that the lessons of history cannot ever be
+accepted blindly. The "principles of the founders" apply to us only in
+modified form; for the world in which we live today is different from
+any world which has ever been before, and the world tomorrow will be
+different yet. We are the makers of it, and the masters of it, and what
+it will be depends to some extent upon our choice. In fact, that is the
+most important lesson of all for us to learn; the final purpose of all
+our thought about the world is to enable us to make it a happier and a
+better world for ourselves and our posterity to live in.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L
+
+ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY
+
+     (Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and whether
+     there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.)
+
+
+In the letters of Thomas Jefferson is found the following passage:
+
+"All eyes are open or opening to the rights of man. The general spread
+of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable
+truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their
+backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them
+legitimately, by the grace of God."
+
+This, which Jefferson, over a hundred years ago, described as a
+"palpable truth," is still a long way from prevailing in the world. We
+are trying in this book not to take anything for granted, so we do not
+assume this truth, but investigate it; and we begin by admitting that
+there are many facts which seem to contradict it, and which make it more
+difficult of proof than Jefferson realized. It is not enough to point
+out the lack of saddles on the backs, and of boots and spurs on the feet
+of newly born infants; for the fact is that men are not exploited
+because of saddles, nor is the exploiting accomplished by means of boots
+and spurs. It is done by means of gold and steel, banks and credit
+systems, railroads, machine-guns and battleships. And while it is not
+true that certain races and classes are born with these things on them,
+they are born to the possession of them, and the vast majority of
+mankind are without them all their lives, and without the ability to use
+them even if they had them.
+
+The doctrine that "all men are created equal," or that they ought to be
+equal, we shall describe for convenience as the democratic doctrine. It
+first came to general attention through Christianity, which proclaimed
+the brotherhood of all mankind in a common fatherhood of God. But even
+as taught by the Christians, the doctrine had startling limitations. It
+was several centuries before a church council summoned the courage to
+decide that women were human beings, and had souls; and today many
+devout Christians are still uncertain whether Japanese and Chinese and
+Filipinos and Negroes are human beings, and have souls. I have heard old
+gentlemen in the South gravely maintain that the Negro is not a human
+being at all, but a different species of animal. I have heard learned
+men in the South set forth that the sutures in the Negro skull close at
+some very early age, and thus make moral responsibility impossible for
+the black race. And you will find the same ideas maintained, not merely
+as to differences of race and color, but as to differences of economic
+condition. You will find the average aristocratic Englishman quite
+convinced that the "lower orders" are permanently inferior to himself,
+and this though they are of the same Anglo-Saxon stock.
+
+For convenience I will refer to the doctrine that there is some natural
+and irremovable inferiority of certain races or classes, as the
+aristocratic doctrine. I will probably startle some of my readers by
+making the admission that if there is any such natural or irremovable
+inferiority, then a belief in political or economic equality is a
+blunder. If there are certain classes or races which cannot think, or
+cannot learn to think as well as other classes and races, those mentally
+inferior classes and races will obey, and they will be made to obey, and
+neither you nor I, nor all the preachers and agitators in the world,
+will ever be able to arrange it otherwise. Suppose we could do it, we
+should be committing a crime against life; we should be holding down the
+race and aborting its best development.
+
+Is there any such natural and irremovable inferiority in human beings?
+When we come to study the question we find it complicated by a different
+phenomenon, that of racial immaturity, which we have to face frankly and
+get clear in our minds. One of the most obvious facts of nature is that
+of infancy and childhood. We have just pointed out that if you are
+competing with a child, you do it in an entirely different way and under
+an entirely different set of rules, and if you fail to do this, you are
+unfair and even cruel to the child. And it is a fact of our world that
+there are some races more backward in the scale of development than
+other races. You may not like this fact, but it is silly to try to evade
+it. People who live in savage huts and beat on tom-toms and fight with
+bows and arrows and cannot count beyond a dozen--such people are not
+the mental or moral equals of our highly civilized races, and to treat
+them as equals, and compete with them on that basis, means simply to
+exterminate them. And we should either exterminate them at once and be
+done with it, or else make up our minds that they are in a childhood
+stage of our race, and that we have to guide them and teach them as we
+do our children.
+
+There is no more useful person than the wise and kind teacher. But
+suppose we saw some one pretending to be a teacher to our children,
+while in reality enslaving and exploiting them, or secretly robbing and
+corrupting them--what would we say about that kind of teacher? The name
+of that teacher is capitalist commercialism, and his profession is known
+as "the white man's burden"; his abuse of power is the cause of our
+present racial wars and revolts of subject peoples. A fair-minded man,
+desirous of facing all the facts of life, hardly knows what stand to
+take in such a controversy; that is, hardly knows from which cause the
+colored races suffer more--the white man's exploitation, or their own
+native immaturity.
+
+To say that certain races are in a childhood stage, and need instruction
+and discipline, is an entirely different thing from saying they are
+permanently inferior and incapable of self-government. Whether they are
+permanently inferior is a problem for the man of science, to be
+determined by psychological tests, continued possibly over more than one
+generation. We have not as yet made a beginning; in fact, we have not
+even acquired the scientific impartiality necessary to such an inquiry.
+
+In the meantime, all that we can do is to look about us and pick up
+hints where we can. In places like Massachusetts, where Negroes are
+allowed to go to college and are given a chance to show what they can
+do, they have not ousted the white man, but many of them have certainly
+won his respect, and one finds charming and cultured men among them, who
+show no signs of prematurely closed up skulls. And one after another we
+see the races which have been held down as being inferior, developing
+leadership and organization and power of moral resistance. The Irish are
+showing themselves today one of the most vigorous and high-spirited of
+all races. The Hindus are developing a movement which in the long run
+may prove more powerful than the white man's gold and steel. The
+Egyptians, the Persians, the Filipinos, the Koreans, are all devising
+ways to break the power of capitalist newspaper censorship. How sad that
+the subject races of the world have to get their education through
+hatred of their teachers, instead of through love!
+
+Of course, these rebel leaders are men who have absorbed the white man's
+culture, at least in part; practically always they are of the younger
+generation, which has been to the white man's schools. But this is the
+very answer we have been seeking--as to whether the race is permanently
+inferior, or merely immature and in need of training. It is not only
+among the brown and black and yellow races that progress depends upon
+the young generations; that is a universal fact of life.
+
+In the course of this argument we shall assume that the Christian or
+democratic theory has the weight of probability on its side, and that
+nature has not created any permanently and necessarily inferior race or
+class. We shall assume that the heritage of culture is a common
+heritage, open to all our species. We shall not go so far as the
+statement which Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence,
+that "all men are created free and equal"; but we shall assert that they
+are created "with certain inalienable rights," and that among these is
+the right to maintain their lives and to strive for liberty and
+happiness. Also, we shall say that there will never be peace or order in
+the world until they have found liberty, and recognition of their right
+to happiness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LI
+
+RULING CLASSES
+
+     (Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained, and
+     what sanction it can claim.)
+
+
+It is possible to conceive an order of nature in which all individuals
+were born and developed exactly alike and with exactly equal powers.
+Such is apparently the case with lower animals, for example the ants and
+the bees. But among human beings there are great differences; some are
+born idiots and some are born geniuses. Even supposing that we are able
+to do away with blindness and idiocy, it is not likely that we can ever
+make a race of uniform genius. There will always be some more capable
+minds, who will discover new powers of life, and will compel the others
+to learn from them. It is to the interest of the race that this learning
+should be done as quickly as possible. In other words, the great problem
+of society is how to recognize superior minds and put them in authority.
+
+We look back over history, and discover a few wise men, and many rulers;
+but very, very rarely does it happen that the ruler is a wise man, or a
+friend of wise men. Far more often we find the ruler occupied in
+suppressing the wise man and his wisdom. There was a ruler who allowed
+the mob to crucify Jesus, and another who ordered Socrates to drink the
+hemlock, and another who tortured Galileo, and another who chopped off
+the head of Sir Walter Raleigh--and so on through a long and tragic
+chronicle. And even when the accident of a wise ruler occurs he is apt
+to be surrounded by a class of parasites and corrupt officials who are
+busy to thwart his will.
+
+The general run of history is this: some group seizes power by force,
+and holds it by the same means, and seeks to augment and perpetuate it.
+Those who win the power are frequently men of energy and practical
+sense, and do fairly well as governors; but they are never able to hand
+on their virtues, and their line becomes corrupted by sensuality and
+self-indulgence, and the subject classes are plundered and driven to
+revolt. Often the revolt fails, but in the course of time it succeeds,
+and there is a new dynasty, or a new ruling class, sometimes a little
+better than the old, sometimes worse.
+
+How shall one judge whether the new régime is better or worse?
+Obviously, this is a most important question; it has to do, not merely
+with history, but with our daily affairs, our voting. As one who has
+read some tens of thousands of pages of history, and has pondered its
+lessons with heart-sickness and despair, I lay down this general law by
+which revolts and changes of power may be judged: If the change results
+in the holding of power by a smaller number of people, it is a reaction;
+but if the change results in distributing the power among a larger group
+of the community, then that community has made a step in advance.
+
+I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central American
+country--Guatemala, I think--which showed 130 revolutions in less than a
+hundred years. Some rascal gets together a gang, and seizes the
+government and plunders its revenue. When he has plundered too much,
+some other rascal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang.
+Such "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for the
+Richard Harding Davis type of fiction; but we do not consider them as
+having any relationship to progress. We describe them as "palace"
+revolutions.
+
+But compare with this the various English revolutions. We write learned
+histories about them, and describe England as "the Mother of
+Parliaments." The reason for this is that when there was political
+discontent in England, the protesting persons proceeded to organize
+themselves, and to understand their trouble and to remedy it. They had
+the brain power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and
+when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling class to
+give way, they brought about a wider extension of liberty, a wider
+distribution of power. Tennyson has pictured England as a state "where
+freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." We today,
+reading its history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the
+word "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a
+community to move forward slowly than to move forward rapidly and then
+move backward nearly as far.
+
+We have pointed out several times the important fact of biology that
+change does not necessarily mean progress from any rational or moral
+point of view. Degeneration is just as real a fact as progress, and it
+does not at all follow that because things change they are changing for
+the better. It is worth while to repeat this in discussing human
+society, for it is just as true of governments and morals as of living
+species. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundredfold the
+machinery of wealth production, and only be increasing luxury and
+wantonness and graft. A nation may change its governmental forms, its
+laws and social conventions, and boast noisily of these changes in the
+name of progress, while as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the
+road to ruin which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I
+can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you can judge,
+and that is the test already indicated: Is the actual, effective power
+of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller percentage of the
+population than before the change took place?
+
+You will note the words "actual, effective power." Nothing is more
+familiar in human life than for forms to survive after the spirit which
+created them is dead; and nothing is more familiar than the use of these
+forms as masks to deceive the populace. There have been many times in
+history when people have gone on voting, long after their votes ceased
+to count for anything; there have been many times when people have gone
+through the motions of freedom long after they have been slaves. Mexico
+under Diaz had one of the most perfect of constitutions, and was in
+reality one of the most perfect of despotisms; and we Americans are
+sadly familiar with political democracies which do not work.
+
+Shall we, therefore, join the pessimists and say that history is a blind
+struggle for useless power, and that the notion of progress is a
+delusion? I do not think so; on the contrary, I think it is easily to be
+demonstrated that there has been a steady increase in the amount of
+knowledge possessed by the race, and in the spread of this knowledge
+among the whole population. I think that through most of the period of
+written history we can trace a real development in human society. I
+think we can analyze the laws of this development, and explain its
+methods; and I think this knowledge is precious to us, because it
+enables us to accelerate the process and to make the end more certain.
+This task, the analysis of social evolution, is the task we have next to
+undertake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LII
+
+THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION
+
+     (Discusses the series of changes through which human society has
+     passed.)
+
+
+We have now to consider, briefly, the history of man as a social being,
+the groups he has formed, and the changes in his group systems.
+Everything in life grows, and human societies are no exception to the
+rule. They have undergone a long process of evolution, which we can
+trace in detail, and which we find conforms exactly to the law laid down
+by Herbert Spencer; a process whereby a number of single and similar
+things become different parts of one complex thing. In the case of human
+societies the units are men and women, and social evolution is a process
+whereby a small and simple group, in which the individuals are
+practically alike, grows into a large and complex group, in which the
+individuals are widely different, and their relations one to another are
+complicated and subtle.
+
+There are two powerful forces pressing upon human beings, and compelling
+them to struggle and grow. The first of these forces is fear, the need
+of protection against enemies; the second is hunger, the need of food
+and the means of producing and storing food. The first causes the
+individual to combine with his fellows and establish some form of
+government, and this is the origin of political evolution. The second
+causes him to accumulate wealth, and to combine industrially, and this
+is the origin of economic evolution. Because the first force is a little
+more urgent, we observe in the history of human society that evolution
+in government precedes evolution in industry.
+
+I made this statement some twenty years ago, in an article in "Collier's
+Weekly." I wrote to the effect that man's first care was to secure
+himself against his enemies, and that when he had done this he set out
+to secure his food supply. "Collier's" called upon the late Professor
+Sumner of Yale University, a prize reactionary and Tory of the old
+school, to answer me; and Professor Sumner made merry over my statement,
+declaring that man sought for food long before he was safe from his
+enemies. Some years later, when Sumner died, one of his admirers wrote
+in the New York "Evening Post" that he had completely overwhelmed me,
+and I had acknowledged my defeat by failing to reply--something which
+struck me as very funny. It was, of course, possible that Sumner had
+overwhelmed me, but to say that I had considered myself overwhelmed was
+to attribute to me a degree of modesty of which I was wholly incapable.
+As a matter of fact, I had had my usual experience with capitalist
+magazines; "Collier's Weekly" had promised to publish my rejoinder to
+Sumner, but failed to keep the promise, and finally, when I worried
+them, they tucked the answer away in the back part of the paper, among
+the advertisements of cigars and toilet soaps.
+
+Professor Sumner is gone, but he has left behind him an army of pupils,
+and I will protect myself against them by phrasing my statement with
+extreme care. I do not mean to say that man first secures himself
+completely against his enemies, and then goes out to hunt for a meal. Of
+course he has to eat while he is countering the moves of his enemies; he
+has to eat while he is on the march to battle, or in flight from it. But
+ask yourself this question: which would you choose, if you had to
+choose--to go a couple of days with nothing to eat, or to have your
+throat cut by bandits and your wife and children carried away into
+slavery? Certainly you would do your fighting first, and meantime you
+would scratch together any food you could. While you were devoting your
+energies to putting down civil war, or to making a treaty with other
+tribes, or to preparing for a military campaign, you would continue to
+get food in the way your ancestors had got it; in other words, your
+economic evolution would wait, while your political evolution proceeded.
+But when you had succeeded in putting down your enemies, and had a long
+period of peace before you, then you would plant some fields, and
+domesticate some animals, or perhaps discover some new way of weaving
+cloth--and so your industrial life would make progress.
+
+It is easy to see why Professor Sumner wished to confuse this issue. He
+could not deny political evolution, because it had happened. He despised
+and feared political democracy, but it was here, and he had to speak
+politely to it, as to a tiger that had got into his house. But
+industrial democracy was a thing that had not yet happened in the
+world; it was only a hope and a prophecy, and therefore a prize old Tory
+was free to ridicule it. I remember reading somewhere his statement--the
+notion that democracy had anything to do with industry, or could in any
+way be applied to industry, was a piece of silliness. So, of course, he
+sought to demolish my idea that there was a process of evolution in
+economic affairs, paralleling the process of political evolution which
+had already culminated in democracy.
+
+Let us consider the process of political evolution, briefly and in its
+broad outlines. Take any savage tribe; you find it composed of
+individuals who are very much alike. Some are a little stronger than
+others, a little more clever, more powerful in battle; but the
+difference is slight, and when the tribe chooses someone to lead them,
+they might as well choose one man as another. They all have a say in the
+tribe councils, both men and women; their "rights" in the tribe are the
+same. They are, of course, slaves to ignorance, to degrading
+superstition and absurd taboos; but these things apply to everyone
+alike, there is no privileged caste, no hereditary inequality.
+
+But little by little, as the tribe grows in numbers, and in power and
+intelligence, as it comes to capture slaves in battle, and to unite with
+other tribes, there comes to be an hereditary chieftain and a group of
+his leading supporters, his courtiers and henchmen. When the society has
+evolved into the stage which we call barbarism, there is a permanent
+superior caste; there are hereditary priests, who have in their keeping
+the favor of the gods; and there is a subject population of slaves.
+
+The society moves on into the feudal stage, in which the various grades
+and classes are precisely marked off, each with its different functions,
+its different privileges and rights and duties. The feudal
+principalities and duchies war and struggle among themselves; they are
+united by marriage or by conquest, and presently some stronger ruler
+brings a great territory under his power, and we have what is called a
+kingdom; a society still larger, still more complex in its organization,
+and still more rigid in its class distinctions. Take France, under the
+ancient régime, and compare a courtier or noble gentleman with a serf;
+they are not only different before the law, they are different in the
+language they use, in the clothes they wear, in the ideas they hold;
+they are different even in their bodies, so that the gentleman regards
+the serf as an inferior species of creature.
+
+The kings warred among themselves and emperors arose. The ultimate ideal
+in Europe was a political society which should include the whole
+continent, and this ideal was several times almost attained. But it is
+the rule of history that wherever a large society is built upon the
+basis of privilege and enslavement, the ruling classes prove morally and
+intellectually unequal to the burden put upon them; they become
+corrupted, and their rule becomes intolerable. This happened in Europe,
+and there came political revolutions--first in England, which
+accomplished it by gradual stages, and then in the French monarchy, and
+quite recently in a dozen monarchies and empires, large and small.
+
+What precisely is this political revolution? Let us consider the case of
+France, where the change was sudden, and the issues precisely drawn.
+King Louis XIV had said, "I am the state." To a person of our time that
+might seem like boasting, but it was merely an assertion of the existing
+political fact. King Louis was the state by universal consent, and by
+divine authority, as all men believed. The army was his army, the navy
+was his navy, and wars, when he made them, were his wars. Everyone in
+the state was his subject, and all the property of the state was his
+personal, private property, to dispose of as he pleased. The government
+officials carried out his will, and members of the nobility held the
+land and ruled in his name.
+
+But now suddenly the people of France overthrew the king, and put him to
+death, and drove the nobles into exile; they seized the power of the
+French state, and proclaimed themselves equal citizens in the state,
+with equal voices in its government and equal rights before the law. So
+we call France a republic, and describe this form of society as
+political democracy. It is the completion of the process of political
+evolution, and you will see that it moves in a sort of spiral; having
+completed a circle and got back where it was before, but upon a higher
+plane. The citizens of a modern republic are equal before the law, just
+as were the members of the savage tribe; but the political organization
+is vastly larger, and infinitely more complicated, and every individual
+lives his life upon a higher level, because he shares in the benefits of
+this more highly organized and more powerful state.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIII
+
+INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION
+
+     (Examines the process of evolution in industry and the stage which
+     it has so far reached.)
+
+
+And now let us consider the process of industrial evolution. We shall
+find it to be exactly the same thing, reproducing the changes in another
+field of activity. You may picture two gigantic waves sweeping over the
+ocean. In some places the waves are far apart, and in other places they
+are closer together; for a time they may mingle, and perhaps their bases
+always mingle. It would be easy for a critic to point out how political
+affairs play a leading part in industrial evolution, and vice versa; it
+would be easy to argue that property rules the political state, or
+again, that the main function of the political state is to protect
+property. As I have said, man has to fight his enemies, and he has to
+seek food, and often he has to do the two things at the same time; but
+nevertheless, broadly speaking, we observe two great waves, sweeping
+over human society, and most of the time these waves are clearly
+separated and easily distinguished.
+
+Industry in a savage tribe is, like government, simple and uniform; all
+the members of the tribe get their living in the same way. One may be a
+little more expert as a fisherman, another as a gatherer of cocoanuts,
+but the fisherman gathers cocoanuts and the cocoanut-gatherer fishes. In
+the days of primitive communism there is little economic strife and
+little change; but as slavery comes in, and the private property system,
+there begins industrial war--the members of the tribe trade with one
+another, and argue over prices, and gradually some get the better of
+others, they accumulate slaves and goods, and later on they appropriate
+the land to their private use. Of course, the men who do this are often
+the rulers of the tribe, and so politics and industry are mixed; but
+even assuming that the state never interfered, assuming that the
+government allowed business affairs to work themselves out in their own
+way, the tendency of competition is always to end in monopoly. The big
+fish eat the little fish, the strong gain advantage over the weak, the
+rich grow richer, and the poor grow relatively poorer. As the amount of
+trading increases, and men specialize in the arts of bargaining, we see
+again and again how money concentrates in the hands of a few. It does
+this, even when the political state tries to prevent it; as, for
+example, when the princes and dukes of the Middle Ages would torture the
+Jewish money-lenders and take away their treasure, but the Jews never
+failed to grow rich again.
+
+It is when political evolution has completed itself, and a republic has
+been set up, that a free field is given to economic forces to work
+themselves out to their logical end. We have seen this in the United
+States, where we all started pretty much on the same economic level, and
+where political tyranny has had little hold. Our civilization is a
+civilization of the trader--the business man, as we call him; and we see
+how big business absorbs little business, and grows constantly larger
+and more powerful. We are familiar with what we call "graft," the use by
+business men of the powers of government to get trade advantage for
+themselves, and we have a school of old-time thinkers, calling
+themselves "Jeffersonian Democrats," who insist that if only there had
+never been any government favors, economic equality and democracy would
+have endured forever in our country. But it is my opinion that
+government has done far more to prevent monopoly and special privilege
+in business than to favor it; and nevertheless, monopoly has grown.
+
+In other words, the tendency toward concentration in business, the
+absorption of the small business by the big business, is an irresistible
+natural process, which neither can be nor should be hindered. The
+condition of competition, whether in politics or in industry, is never a
+permanent one, and can never be made permanent; it is a struggle which
+automatically brings itself to an end. Large-scale production and
+distribution is more economical than small-scale, and big business has
+irresistible advantages of credit and permanence over little business.
+As we shall presently show, the blind and indiscriminate production of
+goods under the competitive system leads to the glutting of markets and
+to industrial crises. At such times the weaker concerns are weeded out
+and the strong ones take their trade; and as a result, we have the
+modern great corporation, the most powerful machine of production yet
+devised by man, and which corresponds in every aspect to the monarchy in
+political society.
+
+We are accustomed to speak of our "captains of industry," our "coal
+kings," and "beef barons" and "lords of steel," and we think we are
+using metaphors; but the universality of these metaphors points to a
+fundamental truth in them. As a matter of fact, our modern captain of
+industry fills in the economic world exactly the same functions as were
+filled in ancient days by the head of a feudal state. He has won his
+power in a similar struggle, and he holds it by similar methods. He
+rules over an organization of human beings, arranged, economically
+speaking, in grades and classes, with their authorities and privileges
+and duties precisely determined, as under the "ancient régime." And just
+as King Louis said, "I am the state," so Mr. Armour considers that he is
+Armour & Co., and Mr. Morgan considers that he is the house of Morgan,
+and that the business exists for him and is controlled by him under
+divine authority.
+
+If I am correct in my analysis of the situation, this process of
+industrial evolution is destined to complete itself, as in the case of
+the political state. The subject populations of industry are becoming
+more and more discontented with their servitude, more and more resentful
+of that authority which compels them to labor while others reap the
+benefit. They are organizing themselves, and preparing for a social
+transformation which will parallel in every detail the revolution by
+which our ancestors overthrew the authority of King George III over the
+American colonies, and made inhabitants of those colonies no longer
+subjects of a king, but free and equal citizens of a republic. I expect
+to see a change throughout the world, which will take the great
+instruments of production which we call corporations and trusts, out of
+the hands of their present private owners, and make them the property,
+either of the entire community, or of those who do the work in them.
+This change is the "social revolution," and when it has completed
+itself, we shall have in that society an Industrial Republic, a form of
+business management which constitutes economic democracy.
+
+The history of the world's political revolutions has been written almost
+exclusively by aristocratic or bourgeois historians; that is to say, by
+men who, whatever their attitude toward political democracy, have no
+conception of industrial democracy, and believe that industrial strife
+and enslavement are the normal conditions of life. If, however, you will
+read Kropotkin's "Great French Revolution," you will be interested to
+discover how important a part was played in this revolution by economic
+forces. Underneath the political discontent of the merchants and middle
+classes lay a vast mass of social discontent of the peasants and
+workers. It was the masses of the people who made the revolution, but it
+was the middle classes who seized it and turned it to their own ends,
+putting down attempts toward economic equality, and confining the
+changes, so far as possible, to the political field.
+
+And everywhere throughout history, if you study revolutions, you find
+that same thing happening. You find, for example, Martin Luther fighting
+for the right to preach the word of God without consulting the Pope; but
+when the peasants of Germany rose and sought to set themselves free from
+feudal landlords, Luther turned against them, and called upon the
+princes to shoot them down. "The ass needs to be beaten, and the
+populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand." The landlords and
+propertied classes of England were willing to restrict the power of the
+king, and to give the vote to the educated and well-to-do; but from the
+time of Jack Cade to our own they shoot down the poor.
+
+But meantime, the industrial process continues; the modern factory
+system brings the workers together in larger and larger groups, and
+teaches them the lesson of class consciousness. So the time of the
+workers draws near. The first attempt in modern times to accomplish the
+social revolution and set up industrial democracy was in the Paris
+Commune. When the French empire collapsed, after the war with Germany in
+1871, the workers of Paris seized control. They were massacred, some
+50,000 of them, and the propertied classes of France established the
+present bourgeois republic, which has now become the bulwark of reaction
+throughout the Continent of Europe.
+
+Next came the Russian revolution of 1905, and this was an interesting
+illustration of the relation between the two waves of social progress.
+Russia was a backward country industrially, and according to theory not
+at all prepared for the social revolution. But nowadays the thoughts of
+men circulate all over the world, and the exiles from Russia had
+absorbed Marxian ideas, and were not prepared to accept a purely
+political freedom. So in 1905, after the Japanese war, when the people
+rose and forced the Czar to grant a parliament, the extremists made an
+effort to accomplish the social revolution at the same time. The
+peasants began to demand the land, and the workers the factories;
+whereupon the capitalists and middle classes, who wanted a parliament,
+but did not want Socialism, went over to the side of reaction, and both
+the political and social revolutions were crushed.
+
+But then came the great war, for which Russia with her incompetent
+government and her undeveloped industry was unprepared. The strain of it
+broke her down long before the other Allies, and in the universal
+suffering and ruin the Russian people were again forced to rise. The
+political revolution was accomplished, the Czar was imprisoned, and the
+Douma reigned supreme. Middle class liberalism throughout the world gave
+its blessings to this revolution, and hastened to welcome a new
+political democracy to the society of nations. But then occurred what to
+orthodox democratic opinion has been the most terrifying spectacle in
+human history. The Russian people had been driven too far towards
+starvation and despair; the masses had been too embittered, and they
+rose again, overthrowing not only their Czar and their grand dukes, but
+their capitalists and land-owners. For the first time in history the
+social revolution established itself, and the workers were in control of
+a great state. Ever since then we have seen exactly what we saw in
+Europe from 1789 onward, when the first political republic was
+established, and all the monarchies and empires of the world banded
+themselves together to stamp it out. We have witnessed a campaign of
+war, blockade, intrigue and propaganda against the Soviet government of
+Russia, all pretending to be carried on in the name of the Russian
+people, and for the purpose of saving them from suffering--but all
+obviously based upon one consideration and one alone, the fear that an
+effort at industrial self-government might possibly prove to be a
+success.
+
+Whether or not the Soviets will prove permanent, no one can say. But
+this much is certain; just as the French revolution sent a thrill around
+the world, and planted in the hearts of the common people the wonderful
+dream of freedom from kings and ruling classes, just so the Russian
+revolution has brought to the working masses the dream of freedom from
+masters and landlords. Everywhere in capitalist society this ferment is
+working, and in one country after another we see the first pangs of the
+new birth. Also we see capitalists and landlords, who once found
+"democracy," "free speech" and "equality before the law" useful formulas
+to break down the power of kings and aristocrats, now repudiating their
+old-time beliefs, and going back to the frankest reaction. We see, in
+our own "land of the free," the government refusing to reprint the
+Declaration of Independence during the war, and arresting men for
+quoting from it and circulating it; we even see the Department of
+Justice refusing to allow people to reprint the Sermon on the Mount!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIV
+
+THE CLASS STRUGGLE
+
+     (Discusses history as a battle-ground between ruling and subject
+     classes, and the method and outcome of this struggle.)
+
+
+There is a theory of social development, sometimes called the
+materialistic interpretation of history, and sometimes the economic
+interpretation of history. It is one of the contributions to our thought
+which we owe to Karl Marx, and like all the rest of Marxian theory, it
+is a subject of embittered controversy, not merely between Socialists
+and orthodox economists, but between various schools of revolutionary
+doctrine. For my part, I have never been a great hand for doctrine,
+whether ancient or modern; I am not much more concerned with what Marx
+taught than I am with what St. Paul taught, or what Martin Luther
+taught. My advice is to look at life with your own eyes, and to state in
+simple language the conclusions of your own thinking.
+
+Man is an eating animal; he has also been described as a tool-making
+animal, and might be described as an ideal-making animal. There is a
+tendency on the part of those who specialize in the making of ideals to
+repudiate the eating and the tool-making sides of man; which accounts
+for the quarrel between the Marxians and the moralists. All through
+history you find new efforts of man to develop his emotional and
+spiritual nature, and to escape from the humiliating limitations of the
+flesh. These efforts have many of them been animated by desperate
+sincerity, but none of them have changed the fundamental fact that man
+is an eating animal, an animal insufficiently provided by nature against
+cold, and with an intense repugnance to having streams of cold water run
+down back of his neck. The religious teachers go out with empty purse,
+and "take no thought for the morrow"; but the forces of nature press
+insistently upon them, and little by little they make compromises, they
+take to shelter while they are preaching, they consent to live in
+houses, and even to own houses, and to keep a bank account. So they make
+terms with the powers of this world, and the powers of this world,
+which are subtle, and awake to their own interests, find ways to twist
+the new doctrine to their ends.
+
+So the new religion becomes simply another form of the old hypocrisy;
+and it comes to us as a breath of fresh air in a room full of corruption
+when some one says, "Let us have done with aged shams and false
+idealisms. Let us face the facts of life, and admit that man is a
+physical animal, and cannot do any sane and constructive thinking until
+he has food and shelter provided. Let us look at history with unblinking
+eyes, and realize that food and shelter, the material means of life, are
+what men have been seeking all through history, and will continue to
+seek, until we put production and distribution upon a basis of justice,
+instead of a basis of force."
+
+Such is, as simply as I can phrase it, the materialistic interpretation
+of history. Put into its dress of scientific language it reads: the
+dominant method of production and exchange in any society determines the
+institutions and forms of that society. I do not think I exaggerate in
+saying that this formula, applied with judgment and discrimination, is a
+key to the understanding of human societies.
+
+Wherever man has moved into the stage of slavery and private property
+there has been some group which has held power and sought to maintain
+and increase it. This group has set the standards of behavior and belief
+for the community, and if you wish to understand the government and
+religion, the manners and morals, the philosophy and literature and art
+of that community, the first thing you have to do is to understand the
+dominant group and its methods of keeping itself on top. This statement
+applies, not merely to those cultural forms which are established and
+ordained by the ruling class; it applies equally well to the
+revolutionary forms, the behavior and beliefs of those who oppose the
+ruling class. For men do not revolt in a vacuum, they revolt against
+certain conditions, and the form of their revolt is determined by the
+conditions. Take, for example, primitive Christianity, which was
+certainly an effort to be unworldly, if ever such an effort was made by
+man. But you cannot understand anything about primitive Christianity
+unless you see it as a new form of slave revolt against Roman
+imperialism and capitalism.
+
+The theory of the class struggle is the master key to the bewilderments
+and confusions of history. Always there is a dominant class, holding
+the power of the state, and always there are subject classes; and sooner
+or later the subject classes begin protesting and struggling for wider
+rights. When they think they are strong enough, they attempt a revolt,
+and sometimes they succeed. If they do, they write the histories of the
+revolt, and their leaders become heroes and statesmen. If they fail, the
+histories are written by their oppressors, and the rebels are portrayed
+as criminals.
+
+One of the commonest of popular assumptions is that if the rebels have
+justice on their side, they are bound to succeed in the long run; but
+this is merely the sentimental nonsense that is made out of history. It
+is perfectly possible for a just revolt to be crushed, and to be crushed
+again and again; just as it is possible for a child which is ready to be
+born to fail to be born, and to perish miserably. The fact that the
+Huguenots had most of the virtue and industry and intelligence of France
+did not keep them from being slaughtered by Catholic bigots, and
+reaction riveted upon the French people for a couple of hundred years.
+The fact that the Moors had most of the industry of Spain did not keep
+them from being driven into exile by the Inquisition, and the
+intellectual life of the Spanish people strangled for three hundred or
+four hundred years.
+
+Some eight hundred years ago our ancestors in England brought a cruel
+and despotic king to battle, and conquered him, and on the field of
+Runnymede forced him to sign a grant of rights to Englishmen. That
+document is known as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter, and everyone who
+writes political history today recognizes it as one of the greatest of
+man's achievements, the beginning of a process which we hope will bring
+freedom and equality before the law to every human being on earth.
+
+And now we have come to the stage in our industrial affairs, when the
+organized workers seek to bring the monarchs of industry into the
+council chamber, and force them to sign a similar Great Charter, which
+will grant freedom and self-government to the workers. Just as King John
+was forced to admit that the power to tax and spend the public revenue
+belonged to the people of England, and not to the ruler; just so the
+workers will establish the principle that the finances of industry are a
+public concern, that the books are to be opened, and prices fixed and
+wages paid by the democratic vote of the citizens of industry. If that
+change is accomplished, the historian of the future will recognize it
+as another momentous step in progress; and he will heed the protests of
+the lords of industry, that they are being deprived of their freedom to
+do business, and of their sacred legal rights to their profits, as
+little as he heeded the protests of King John against the "treason" and
+"usurpation" and infringement of "divine right" by the rebellious
+barons.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LV
+
+THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM
+
+     (Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and the effect of
+     this system upon the minds of the workers.)
+
+
+In the beginning man got his living by hunting and fishing. Then he took
+to keeping flocks and herds, and later by slow stages he settled down to
+agriculture. With the introduction of slavery and the ownership of the
+land by ruling classes, there came to be a subject class of workers, who
+toiled on the land from dawn to dark, year in and year out, and got, if
+they were fortunate, an existence for themselves and their families.
+Whether these workers were called slaves or serfs or peasants, whether
+their product was taken from them in the form of taxes by the king, or
+of rent by the landlord, made no difference; the workers were bound to
+the soil, like the beasts with which they lived in intimate contact.
+They were drafted into armies, and made to fight for their lords and
+masters; they suffered pestilence and famine, fire and slaughter; but
+with infinite patience they would rebuild their huts, and dig and plant
+again, whether for the old master or for a new one.
+
+In the early days these workers made their own crude tools and weapons;
+but very early there must have been some who specialized in such arts,
+and with the growth of towns and communications came a new kind of
+labor, based upon a new system. Some enterprising man would buy slaves,
+or hire labor, and obtain a supply of raw material, and manufacture
+goods to be bartered or sold. He would pay his workers enough to draw
+them from the land, and would sell the product for what he could get,
+and the difference would be his profit. That was capitalism, and at
+first it was a thing of no importance, and the men who engaged in it had
+no social standing. But princes and lords needed weapons and supplies
+for their armies, and the men who could furnish these things became more
+and more necessary, and the states which encouraged them were the ones
+which rose to power. Merchants and sea-traders became the intimates of
+kings, and by the time of the Roman empire, capitalism was a great
+world power, dominating the state, using the armies of the state for its
+purposes. It went down with the rest of Roman civilization, but in the
+Middle Ages it began once more to revive, and by the end of the
+eighteenth century the merchants and money lenders of France, with their
+retainers, the lawyers and journalists, were powerful enough to take the
+control of society.
+
+Then, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, came the invention of
+machinery and of the power process. Capitalism began to grow like a
+young giant among pygmies. In the course of a century it has ousted all
+other methods of production, and all other forms of social activity. A
+hundred years ago the British House of Commons was a parliament of
+landlords; today it is a Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association. Out
+of the 707 members of the British House of Commons, 361 are members of
+the "Federation of British Industries," the labor-smashing organization
+of British "big business." And the same is true of every other
+parliament and congress in the modern capitalist state. Practically all
+the wealth of the world today is produced by the capitalist method, and
+distributed under capitalist supervision, and therefore capitalist ideas
+prevail in our society, to the practical exclusion of all other ideas. I
+have shown in "The Profits of Religion" how these ideas dominate the
+modern church, and in "The Brass Check" how they dominate the modern
+press. I plan to write two books, to show how they dominate education
+and literature.
+
+A hundred years ago an industry consisted of a half a dozen or a dozen
+men, working under the personal supervision of an owner, and using crude
+hand tools. Today it consists of a gigantic trust, owning and managing
+scores and perhaps hundreds of mills and factories, each employing
+thousands of workers. A corporation like the Steel Trust owns enough of
+the sources of its raw material to give it practical monopoly; it owns a
+fleet of vessels especially designed for ore-carrying; it owns its
+private railroads, to deliver the ore to the mills. Through its system
+of dummy directorates it has practical control of the main railroads
+over which it distributes its products; also of banks and trust
+companies and insurance companies, to gather the money of the public to
+finance its undertakings. It owns huge office buildings, and vast
+tracts of land upon which the homes of its workers are built. It has a
+private army for the defense of its property--a complete army of
+cavalry, infantry and artillery, including a large and highly efficient
+secret service department, with a host of informers and spies. It has
+newspapers for the purpose of propaganda, and it controls the government
+of every village, town and city in which it has important interests. If
+you will take the trouble to visit a "steel town," and make inquiries
+among public officials, newspaper men, and others who are "on the
+inside," you will discover that those in authority consider it necessary
+and proper that "steel" should control, and are unable to conceive any
+other condition of affairs. If you go to other parts of the country,
+where other great industries are located, you find it taken for granted
+that "copper" should control, or "lumber," or "coal," or "oil," or
+whatever it may be.
+
+Under the system of large scale capitalism, labor is a commodity, bought
+and sold in the market like any other commodity. Some years ago Congress
+was requested to pass a law contradicting this fundamental fact of world
+capitalism. Congress passed a law, very carefully worded so that no one
+could be sure what it meant, and a few years later the Supreme Court
+nullified the law. But all through this political and legal controversy
+the status of labor remained exactly the same; there was a "labor
+market," consisting of those members of the community who, in the
+formula of Marx, had nothing but their labor power to sell. These
+competed for recognition at the factory gates, and highly skilled
+foremen selected those who offered the largest quantity of labor power
+for the stated wage.
+
+So entirely impersonal is this process that there are great industries
+in America in which ninety per cent of the common labor force is hired
+and fired all over again in the course of a year. These men are put to
+work in gangs, under a system which enables one picked man to set the
+pace, and compel all the others to keep up with him, under penalty of
+being discharged. This process is known as "speeding up," and its
+purpose is to obtain from each worker the greatest quantity of energy in
+exchange for his daily wage. In the steel industry men work twelve hours
+a day for six days in the week, and then finish with a twenty-four-hour
+day. If they do not work so long in other industries, it is because
+experience has proven that the greatest quantity of energy can be
+obtained from them in a shorter time. There are very few men who can
+stand this pace for long. Those who are not crippled or killed in
+accidents are broken down at forty, and all the great corporations
+recognize this fact. Their foremen pick out the younger men, and
+practically all concerns have an age rule, and never hire men above
+forty or forty-five.
+
+I shall not in this book go into details concerning the fate of the
+worker under the profit system. I have written two novels, "The Jungle"
+and "King Coal," in which the facts are portrayed in detail, and it
+seems the part of common sense to refer the reader to these text-books.
+It will suffice here to set forth the main outlines of the situation. In
+every capitalist country of the world the masses of the people are
+herded into industries, in whose profits they have no share, and in
+whose welfare they have no interest. They do not know the people for
+whom they work; they have no human relationship, either with their work
+or with their employers. They see the surplus of their product drawn off
+to maintain a class of idlers, whose activities they know only through
+the scandals of the divorce courts and the luxury-love of the moving
+picture screen. They compete with one another for jobs, and bid down one
+another's wages; and if they attempt to organize and end this
+competition, their efforts are broken by newspaper propaganda and
+policemen's clubs. At the same time they know that monopoly, open or
+secret, prevails in the fixing of prices, and so they find the struggle
+to "get ahead" a losing one. In America it used to be possible for the
+young and energetic to "go West"; but now the wave of capitalism has
+reached the Pacific coast and been thrown back, and there is no more
+frontier.
+
+The man who works on the land has been through all the ages a solitary
+man. He is better friends with his horse and his cow than with his
+fellow humans. He is brutalized by incessant toil, he lives amid dirt
+and the filth of animals, he is, in the words of Edwin Markham:
+
+    "A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
+     Stunted and stunned, a brother to the ox."
+
+He is a victim of natural forces which he does not understand, and
+inevitably therefore he is superstitious. Being alone, he is helpless
+against his masters, and only utter desperation drives him to revolt.
+
+But consider the capitalist system--how different the conditions of its
+workers! Here they are gathered into city slums, and their wits are
+sharpened by continual contact with their fellows. The printing press
+makes cheap the spread of information, and the soap-box makes it even
+cheaper. Any man with a grievance can shout aloud, and be sure of an
+audience to listen, and he can get a great deal said before the company
+watchman or the policeman can throttle him. Moreover, the modern worker
+is not struggling with drought and tempest and hail; he does not see his
+labors wiped out by volcanic eruption or lightning stroke; he is dealing
+with machinery, something that he himself has made, and that he fully
+understands. If a machine gets out of order, he does not fall down upon
+his knees and pray to God to fix it. All the training of his life
+teaches him the relationship of cause and effect, the adjustment of
+means to ends. So the modern worker, as a necessary consequence of his
+daily work, is practical, skeptical, and unsentimental in his
+psychology. And what is more, he is making all the rest of society of
+the same temperament. He is building roads out into the country, and
+building machines to roll over them; he is running telephone lines and
+sending newspapers and magazines and moving picture shows to the peasant
+and the farmer; so the young peasants and farmers hunger for the city,
+and they learn to fix machinery instead of praying to God.
+
+Such is the psychology of the modern working class; and the supreme
+achievement of their sharpened wits is an understanding of the
+capitalist process. As a matter of fact they did not make this discovery
+for themselves; it was made for them by middle-class men, lawyers and
+teachers and writers--Fourier, Owen, Marx, Lassalle. The modern doctrine
+is called by various names: Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Bolshevism,
+Syndicalism, Collectivism. Later on I shall define these various terms,
+and point out the distinctions between them. For the moment I emphasize
+the factor they all have in common, and which is fundamental: they wish
+to break the power of class ownership and control of the instruments and
+means of production; they wish to replace private capitalism by some
+system under which the instruments and means of production are
+collectively owned and operated; and they look to the non-owning class,
+the proletarian, as the motive power by which this change is to be
+compelled. I shall in future refer to this as the "social revolutionary"
+doctrine; taking pains to explain that the word "revolutionary" is to be
+divested of its popular meaning of physical violence. It is perfectly
+conceivable that the change may be brought about peaceably, and I shall
+try to show before long that in modern capitalist states the decision as
+to whether it is brought about peaceably or by violence rests with the
+present masters of industry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVI
+
+THE CAPITALIST PROCESS
+
+     (How profits are made under the present industrial system and what
+     becomes of them.)
+
+
+We have next to examine the structure of the capitalist order, basing
+our argument on facts which are admitted by everyone, including the most
+ardent defenders of the present system.
+
+All men have to have certain material things which we describe as goods.
+As these goods do not produce themselves, it is necessary that some
+should work. The workers must have tools; also they must have access to
+the land and the sources of raw materials. These means of production are
+owned by some individuals in the community, and this ownership gives
+them power to direct the work of the rest. Those who own the land and
+the natural sources of wealth we call capitalists, or business men, and
+those who do not own these things, or whose share in them is
+insignificant, are the proletariat, or working class.
+
+If you state to the average American that there is a capitalist class
+and a proletariat in this country, he will point out that many who are
+now members of the capitalist class were originally members of the
+proletariat; they have worked hard and saved, and accumulated property.
+But this is merely confusing the issue. The fact that some proletarians
+turn into capitalists and some capitalists into proletarians is
+important to the individuals concerned, but it does not alter the fact
+that there are two classes, capitalist and proletarian. Consider, by way
+of illustrating, a field with trees growing on it; we have earth, and we
+have trees, and the distinction between them is unmistakable. The roots
+of the trees go down into the earth, and take up portions of the earth
+and turn it into tree. The leaves and the dead branches fall, and in the
+course of time are turned once more to earth. There are all sorts of
+stages between earth and tree, and between tree and earth; but you would
+not therefore say that the word "earth" and the word "tree" are
+misnomers.
+
+The working men go to the business man and apply for work. The business
+man gives them work, and takes their product, and offers it in the
+market at a price which allows him a profit above cost. If he can sell
+at a profit, he repeats the process, and the worker has a job. If he
+cannot sell at a profit, the worker is out of a job. Here and there may
+be a benevolent business man who, rather than turn his workers out of a
+job, will sell his goods at cost, or even for a short time at a loss;
+but if he keeps the factory going simply for the benefit of his workers,
+and with no expectation of ever making a profit, that is a form of
+charity, and not the common system under which our business is now
+carried on.
+
+So it appears that the worker is dependent for his wages upon the
+ability of the business man to make a profit. The worker's life is
+inextricably bound up with the profit of the capitalist--no profit for
+the capitalist, no life for the worker. The capitalist, going out to
+look for markets for his goods, is seeking, not merely profit for
+himself, but life for his workers.
+
+Now, the business man pays a certain percentage of his total receipts
+for labor, another percentage for raw materials, another percentage for
+his overhead charges, and the rest is profit in various forms, rent to
+the landlord, interest to the bondholder, dividends to the stockholder.
+All this total sum goes to human individuals, and each has thus a
+certain amount of money to spend. They pay it over to other individuals
+for goods or services, and so the money keeps circulating, and business
+keeps going. That is as deep as the average mind probes into the
+process.
+
+But let us probe a little deeper. It is evident that, in the course of
+all this exchanging of goods, some individuals get a larger share than
+other individuals. Our government collects an income tax, and thus we
+have statistics representing what people are willing to admit about the
+share they get. In 1917 it appeared that, speaking roughly, one family
+out of six had an income of over $1,000 a year, and one family out of
+twelve had an income of over $2,000. But there were 19,000 families
+which admitted incomes of over $50,000 a year, and 300 with over
+$1,000,000 a year.
+
+Now the families that get less than a thousand dollars a year obviously
+have to spend the greater part of their income upon their immediate
+living expenses. But the families that get $50,000 a year do not need
+to spend everything, and most of them take the greater part of their
+income and reinvest it--that is, they spend it upon the creating of new
+machinery of production, railroads, mills, factories, office buildings,
+the whole elaborate structure of capitalist industry.
+
+Exactly what proportion of the total product of industry is thus taken
+and reinvested no one can say; but this we know, our cities are growing
+at an enormous rate, our manufacturing power is increasing by leaps and
+bounds, we are perfecting processes which enable one man to do the work
+of a hundred men, which increase the product of one man's labor a
+hundredfold. All this goes on blindly, automatically; a Niagara of goods
+of all sorts is poured out, and we call it "prosperity."
+
+But then suddenly a strange and bewildering thing happens. All at once,
+and without warning, orders fall off, values begin to drop, business
+collapses, factories are shut down, and millions of men are thrown out
+of jobs. Merchants look at one another with blanched faces; each one has
+been counting on paying his bills with the profits he was going to make,
+and now his profits are gone, and he can't pay. The newspapers and
+magazines keep insisting that it can't be true, that business is going
+to revive next week, that prosperity is just ahead. But the factories
+stay shut, and the millions of men stay idle.
+
+This is the condition in which we find ourselves as I write this book.
+It has been happening regularly in our history every ten years or so,
+ever since America started; we have had a hundred years to reflect upon
+it and to probe into the causes of it, and such is business intelligence
+in the most enlightened country in the world, you may search the pages
+of our newspapers from the first column of millionaire divorce suits to
+the last column of "situations wanted," and nowhere can you find one
+word to explain this mysterious calamity of "hard times"--how it comes
+to happen to our social system, or what could be done to prevent it! To
+supply this deficiency in present day thinking is our next task.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVII
+
+HARD TIMES
+
+     (Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing, and why
+     abundant production brings distress instead of plenty.)
+
+
+Let us picture a small island inhabited by six men. One of these men
+fishes, another hunts, another gathers cocoanuts, another raises goats
+for clothing, and so on. The six men among them produce by their labor
+all the necessities of their lives, and they exchange their products
+with one another. The island is productive, and each of the men is free,
+and makes his exchanges on equal terms; on that basis the industry of
+the island can continue indefinitely, and there will never be any
+trouble. There may sometimes be over-production, but it will not cause
+anyone to starve. If the fisherman is unusually lucky one day, he will
+be able to take a vacation for a few days, living on his fish and the
+products he exchanges for his fish. For the sake of convenience in
+future reference, I will describe this happy island as a "free" society;
+meaning that each of the members of this society has access on equal
+terms to the sources of wealth, and each owns the product of his own
+labor, without paying tribute to any one else for the right to labor, or
+to exchange his products.
+
+But now let us suppose that one of the men on the island is strong and
+aggressive; he takes a club and knocks down the other five men, and
+compels them to sign a piece of paper agreeing that hereafter he is the
+president of the land development company of the island, the chief
+stockholder in the goat-raising company, and owner of the fishing
+concession and the cocoanut grove; also, that hereafter goods shall not
+be bartered in kind, but shall be exchanged for money, and that he is
+the banker, and also the government, with the right to issue money. In
+this society you will find that the real work, the actually productive
+work, is done by five men, instead of by six, and these five do not get
+the full value of their labor. The fisherman will fish, but his product
+will no longer belong to himself; he will get part of it as wages, while
+the "business man" takes charge of the balance. So when there is a
+lucky day, there will be prosperity in the fishing industry, but this
+prosperity will not benefit the fisherman; he will have only his wage,
+and when he has caught too many fish, he will not have a few days'
+vacation, but will be out of a job.
+
+And exactly the same thing will happen to the goat-herd. He will
+probably have work all the year round, because goats have to be tended,
+but he will get barely enough to keep him alive, and the surplus skins
+and milk will go to the owner of the no-longer-happy island. Perhaps it
+will occur to the owner that the man who raises cocoanuts might also
+keep an eye on the goats, and so the goat-herd will be permanently out
+of a job, and will turn into what is called a tramp, or vagrant.
+Inasmuch as everything to eat on the island belongs to the owner, the
+ex-goat-herd will be tempted to become a criminal, and so it will be
+necessary for the owner to arm the cocoanut man with a club and make him
+into a policeman; or perhaps he will organize the fisherman and the
+hunter into a militia for the preservation of law and order. They will
+be glad to serve him, because, owing to the extreme productivity of the
+island, they will be out of jobs a great part of the time, and but for
+the generosity of the business man, would have no way of earning a
+living.
+
+But suppose that the cocoanut man should invent a machine for gathering
+a year's supply of nuts in a week; suppose the fisherman should devise a
+scheme to fill his boat with fish in a few minutes; and suppose that as
+a result of these inventions the business man got so rich that he moved
+to Paris, and no longer saw his workers, or even knew their names. Under
+these conditions you can see that overproduction and unemployment might
+increase on the island; and also the business man might seem less human
+and lovable to his wage slaves, and might need a larger police force. It
+might even happen that he would discover the need of a propaganda
+department, in order to keep his police force loyal, and a secret
+service to make sure that agitators did not get into the schools.
+
+The five islanders, having filled all the barns and storehouses, would
+be turned out to starve; and when they asked the reason, they would be
+told it was because they had produced a surplus of food. This may sound
+grotesque, but it is what is being said to 5,000,000 men in America as I
+write. There are clothing-workers who are going about in rags, and they
+are told it is because they have produced too much clothing. There are
+shoe-workers whose shoes are falling off their feet, and they are told
+it is because they have produced too many shoes. There are carpenters
+who have no homes, and they are told that a great many homes are needed,
+but unfortunately it doesn't pay the builders to go ahead just now. This
+may sound like a caricature, but it happens to be the most prominent
+single fact in the consciousness of 5,000,000 Americans at the close of
+the year 1921. No wonder they are discontented with the present order.
+
+The solution of the mystery is so simple that the 5,000,000 unemployed
+cannot be kept permanently from understanding it. The reason the five
+men on the island are starving is because one man owns the island and
+the others own nothing. If the island were community property, the five
+men would each own a share of the contents of the barns and storehouses,
+and would not be starving. If the 100,000,000 people of America owned
+the productive machinery of America, then instantly the unemployment
+crisis would pass like an evil dream. The farm-workers who need shoes
+would exchange their food with the starving shoe-workers, and the
+starving shoe-workers would have jobs. They would want clothing, and so
+the clothing-makers would start to work; and so on all the way down the
+line. There is only one thing necessary to make this possible, and that
+is the thing which we have agreed to call the social revolution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVIII
+
+THE IRON RING
+
+     (Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles production,
+     and makes true prosperity impossible.)
+
+
+We have seen that in an exploiting society there is a surplus which is
+taken by the exploiter; and that under the modern system this surplus
+must be sold at a profit before production can continue. The vital fact
+in such a society is that the worker has not the money to buy back all
+that he produces; therefore it is inevitable that a surplus product
+should accumulate. When this happens, production must be cut down, and
+during that period the worker is without a job, and without means of
+living. The fact that he needs the product does not help him; the point
+is that he has not the money to buy it. In such a society the productive
+machinery is never used to the full. The machinery is controlled by a
+profit-seeking interest, seeking an opportunity to make sales, and
+restricting production according to the prospect of sales. So the actual
+product bears no relationship to the possible product, and people who
+live in an exploiting society can form no conception of true prosperity.
+
+For, you see, the market is limited by the competitive wage system. We
+have seen that in our own rich, prosperous country only one family out
+of six has more than $1,000 a year income; only one family out of twelve
+has $2,000 a year. It does not make any difference that the warehouses
+are bursting with goods; a family constitutes a market of so many
+dollars a year, and then, so far as the profit system is concerned, that
+family is non-existent; that family stops consuming, and the productive
+machinery is halted to that extent.
+
+I have been accustomed to portray the profit system under the simile of
+an iron ring riveted about the body of a baby. That ring would cause the
+baby some discomfort at the beginning, but it would not be serious, and
+the baby would get used to it. But as the baby grew the trouble caused
+by the ring would increase, and finally there would come a time when
+the baby would be suffering from a whole complication of troubles, and
+for each of these troubles there would be but one remedy--break the
+ring. Does the baby cry all the time? Break the ring! Is its digestion
+defective? Break the ring! Is it threatened with convulsions or with
+blood poisoning? Break the ring!
+
+Here is our industrial society, growing at a rate never equalled by any
+human baby; and here is this iron ring riveted about its middle. Here is
+poverty, here is unemployment, here is graft, here is crime, here is war
+and plague and famine; and for all these evils there is but one cause,
+and but one remedy. Break the ring! Set production free from the
+strangulation of the profit system.
+
+I will admit that there may have been a time in the history of the
+social infant when this ring was necessary. I admit that if the great
+industrial machine was to be constructed, it was necessary that the mass
+of the people should consume only part of what they produced, and should
+allow the balance to be reinvested as capital. But now it has been done,
+and the process is complete. We have a machine capable of producing many
+times more than we can consume; shall we still go on building that
+machine? Shall we go on starving ourselves, to save the money, to
+multiply over and over again the products, in order that we may be
+thrown out of work, and be starved even more completely?
+
+A few generations ago we had in colonial America a society that in part
+at least was "free." In that society everybody got the necessities of
+life. They did not have the modern Sunday supplement and the moving
+picture show, but they had bread and meat and good substantial clothing,
+and furniture so well made that we still preserve it. The children in
+those days grew up to be strong and sturdy men and women, who would have
+seen nothing to envy in the bodies or minds of the slum population of
+New York and Chicago. In short, they had all the true necessities of
+life; and yet their work was done by hand, the power process was unknown
+and undreamed of.
+
+Now comes modern machinery, and multiplies the productive power of the
+hand laborer by five, by ten, sometimes by a hundred. Here, for example,
+is the "Appeal to Reason" selling millions of cheap books for ten cents
+apiece, and making a profit on it; installing a gigantic press which
+takes paper, sheet after sheet, prints 128 pages of a book at one
+impression, and folds and stitches and binds the books, all in one
+process, and turns them out complete at the rate of 10,000 copies per
+hour. Here is a factory which turns out 100,000 automobiles a month.
+Here is a mill which turns out many millions of yards of cloth a month.
+If our colonial ancestors had been told about these marvels, they would
+have said instantly: "Then, of course, everybody in that society will
+have all the books they want, and all the clothing they want, and all
+the automobiles. Everybody in that society will have five or ten or one
+hundred times as much goods as we have."
+
+Imagine the bewilderment of our colonial ancestor if he had been told:
+"The majority of the people in that society will not have so much of the
+real necessities of life as you have. They will have a few cheap
+trinkets, designed to tickle their senses; they will have cheap
+newspapers, carefully contrived to keep their minds vacant and to keep
+them contented with their lot; they will have moving picture shows
+constructed for the same purpose; but all their material things will be
+flimsy, put together for show and not for permanence; their food will be
+adulterated, their clothing will be shoddy, everything they have will be
+made, not for their service, but for the profit of some one who lives by
+selling to them. The average wage earned by those who do the work of
+this new machine civilization will be less than half the amount
+necessary to purchase the necessities of a decent life, and one-tenth of
+the total population will be living in such poverty that they are unable
+to maintain physical fitness, or to rear their children into full sized
+men and women."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIX
+
+FOREIGN MARKETS
+
+     (Considers the efforts of capitalism to save itself by marketing
+     its surplus products abroad, and what results from these efforts.)
+
+
+If our analysis of present-day society is correct, we have the enormous
+populations of the modern industrial countries, living always on the
+verge of starvation, their chance for survival depending at all times
+upon the ability of their employers to find a profitable market for a
+surplus of goods. At first the employer seeks that market at home; but
+when the home markets are glutted, he goes abroad; and so develops the
+phenomenon of foreign trade and rivalry for foreign trade, as the basic
+fact of capitalism, and the fundamental cause of modern war.
+
+Let us get clear a simple distinction concerning foreign trade. There is
+a kind of trade which is normal, and would thrive in a "free" society.
+In the United States we can produce nearly all the necessities of life,
+but there are a few which we cannot produce--rubber, for example, and
+bananas, and good music. These things we wish to import. We buy them
+from other countries, and incur a debt, which we pay with products which
+the other countries need from us; wheat, for example, and copper, and
+moving pictures with cowboys in them. This is equal exchange, and a
+natural phenomenon. A "free" society would produce such surplus goods as
+were necessary to procure the foreign products that it desired. When it
+had produced that much, the workers would stop and take a vacation until
+they wanted more foreign products.
+
+But under capitalism we have an entirely different condition--we produce
+a surplus of goods which we _have_ to sell in order to keep our
+factories running, and to keep our working population from starving. And
+note that it does not help us to get back an equal quantity of foreign
+goods in exchange. We must have what we call "a favorable balance"; that
+is, we must have other people going into debt to us, so that we can be
+continually shipping out more goods than we take back; continually
+piling up credits which we can "negotiate," or turn into cash, so that
+we can go on and repeat the process of making more goods, selling them
+for more profits, and putting the surplus into the form of more
+machinery, to make still more goods and still more profits.
+
+And then, after a while, we come upon this embarrassing phenomenon;
+nations which buy and do not sell must either do it by sending us gold,
+or by our giving them credit. The sending of gold cannot go on
+indefinitely, because then we should have all the gold, and if other
+nations had none that would destroy their credit. On the other hand,
+business cannot be done by credit indefinitely; for the very essence of
+credit is a promise to pay, and payment can only be made in goods, and
+how can we take the goods without ruining our own industry?
+
+Fifteen years ago I pointed this out in a book. The argument was
+irrefutable, and the conclusion inescapable, but the few critics who
+noted it repeated their usual formula about "dreamers and theorists."
+Now, however, the business mills have ground on, and what was theory has
+become fact before our eyes. We have trusted the nations of Europe for
+some $10,000,000,000 worth of goods, and they are powerless to pay, and
+if they did pay, they would bankrupt American industry. France wishes to
+collect an enormous indemnity from Germany, but nobody can figure out
+how this indemnity can be paid without ruining French industry. The
+French have demanded coal from Germany, and have got more than they can
+use, and are "dumping" it in Belgium and Holland, with the result that
+the British coal industry is ruined. The French clamor that the Germans
+must pay for the destruction they wrought in Northern France, and the
+Germans offer to send German workmen to rebuild the ruined towns; but
+the French denounce this as an insult--it would deprive French
+workingmen of their jobs! So I might continue for pages, pointing out
+the manifold absurdities which result from a system of industry for the
+profit of a few, instead of for the use of all.
+
+Ever since I first began to read the newspapers, some twenty-five or
+thirty years ago, all our political life has been nothing but the
+convulsions of a social body tortured by the constricting ring of the
+profit system. Everywhere one group struggling for advantage over
+another group, and politicians engaged in playing one interest against
+another interest! My boyhood recollections of public life consist of
+campaign slogans having to do with the tariff: "production and
+prosperity," "reciprocity," "the full dinner pail," "the foreigner pays
+the tax," etc.
+
+The workingman, under the profit system, is like a man pounding away at
+a pump. He can get a thin trickle of water from the spout of the pump if
+he works hard enough, but in order to get it he has to supply ten times
+as much to some one who has tapped the pipe. But the tapping has been
+done underground, where the workingman cannot see it. All the workingman
+knows is that there is no job for him if the products of "cheap foreign
+labor" are allowed to be "dumped" on the American market. That is
+obvious, and so he votes for a tax on foreign imports, high enough to
+enable his own employer to market at a profit. He does not realize that
+he is thus raising the price of everything that he buys, and so leaving
+himself worse off than he was before.
+
+All governments are delighted with this tariff device, because they are
+thus enabled to get money from the public without the public's knowing
+it. "The foreigner pays the tax," we are told, and as a result of this
+arrangement the steel trust just before the war was selling its product
+at a high price to the American people, and taking its surplus abroad
+and selling it to the foreigner at half the domestic price. And we see
+this same thing in every line of manufacture, and all over the world. We
+see one nation after another withdrawing itself as a market for
+manufactured products, and entering the lists as a marketer. One more
+nation now able to fill all its own needs, and going out hungrily to
+look for foreign customers, adding to the glut of the world's
+manufactured products and the ferocity of international competition!
+
+At the close of the Civil War the total exports of the United States
+averaged approximately $300,000,000, and the total imports were about
+the same. In 1892 the exports first touched $1,000,000,000, while the
+imports were about nine-tenths of that sum. In the year 1913 the exports
+were nearly $2,500,000,000, while the imports were $600,000,000 less;
+and in the year 1920 our exports were over $8,000,000,000 and our
+imports a little over $5,000,000,000! So we have a "favorable balance"
+of almost $3,000,000,000 a year--and as a result we are on the verge of
+ruin!
+
+This "iron ring" of overproduction and lack of market exercises upon our
+industrial body a steady pressure, a slow strangling. But because the
+body is in convulsions, struggling to break the ring, the pressure of
+the ring is worse at some times than at others. We have periods of what
+we call "prosperity," followed by periods of panic and hard times. You
+must understand that only a small part of our business is done by means
+of cash payments, whether in gold or silver or paper money. Close to 99%
+of our business is done by means of credit, and this introduces into the
+process a psychological factor. The business man expects certain
+profits, and he capitalizes these expectations. Business booms, because
+everybody believes everybody else's promises; credit expands like a huge
+balloon, with the breath of everybody's enthusiasm. But meantime real
+business, the real market, remains just what it was before; it cannot
+increase, because of the iron ring which restricts the buying power of
+the mass of the people by the competitive wage. So presently the time
+comes when somebody realizes that he has over-capitalized his hopes; he
+curtails his orders, he calls in his money, and the impulse thus started
+precipitates a crash in the whole business world. We had such a crash in
+1907, and I remember a Wall Street man explaining it in a magazine
+article entitled, "Somebody Asked for a Dollar."
+
+We learned one lesson by that panic; at least, the big financial men
+learned it, and had Congress pass what is called the "Federal Reserve
+Act," a provision whereby in time of need the government issues
+practically unlimited credit to banks. This, of course, is fine for the
+banks; it puts the credit of everybody else behind them, and all they
+have to do is to stop lending money--except to the big insiders--and sit
+back and wait, while the little men go to the wall, and the mass of us
+live on our savings or starve. We saw this happen in the year 1920, and
+for the first time we had "hard times" without having a financial panic.
+But instead we see prices staying high--because the banks have issued so
+much paper money and bank credits.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LX
+
+CAPITALIST WAR
+
+     (Shows how the competition for foreign markets leads nations
+     automatically into war.)
+
+
+In a discussion of the world's economic situation, published in 1906,
+the writer portrayed the ruling class of Germany as sitting in front of
+a thermometer, watching the mercury rising, and knowing that when it
+reached the top, the thermometer would break. This thermometer was the
+German class system of government, and the mercury was the Socialist
+vote. In 1870 the vote was 30,000, in 1884 it was 549,000, in 1893 it
+was 1,876,000, in 1903 it was 3,008,000, in 1907 it was 3,250,000, in
+1911 it was 4,250,000. Writing between 1906 and 1913, I again and again
+pointed out that this increase was the symptom of social discontent in
+Germany, caused by the overproduction of invested capital throughout the
+world, and the intensification of the competition for world markets. I
+pointed out that a slight increase in the vote would be sufficient to
+transfer to the working class of Germany the political power of the
+German state; and I said that the ruling class of Germany would never
+permit that to happen--when it was ready to happen Germany would go to
+war, to seize the trade privileges of some other nation.
+
+There was a time when wars were caused by national and racial hatreds.
+There are still enough of these venerable prejudices left in the world,
+but no student of the subject would deny that the main source of modern
+wars is commercial rivalry. In 1917 we sent Eugene V. Debs to prison for
+declaring that the late world war was a war of capitalist greed. But two
+years later President Wilson, who had waged the war, declared in a
+public speech that everybody knew it had been a war of commercial
+rivalries.
+
+The aims of modern war-makers are two. First, capitalism must have raw
+materials, including coal and oil, the sources of power, and gold and
+silver, the bases of credit. Parts of the world which are so unfortunate
+as to be rich in these substances become the bone of contention between
+rival financial groups, organized as nations. Some sarcastic writer has
+defined a "backward" nation as one which has gold mines and no navy. We
+are horrified to read of the wars of the French monarchs, caused by the
+jealous quarrels of mistresses; but in 1905 we saw Russia and Japan go
+to war and waste a million lives because certain Russian grand dukes had
+bribed certain Chinese mandarins and obtained concessions of timber on
+the Yalu River. We now observe France and Germany vowed to undying hate
+because of iron mines in Lorraine, and the efforts of France to take the
+coal mines of Silesia from Germany, and give them to Poland, which is
+another name for French capitalism.
+
+The other end sought by the war-makers is markets for manufactured
+products, and control of trade routes, coaling stations and cables
+necessary to the building up of foreign trade. England has been
+"mistress of the seas" for some 300 years, which meant that her traders
+had obtained most of these advantages. But then came Germany, with her
+newly developed commercialism, shoving her rival out of the way. The
+Englishman was easy-going; he liked to play cricket, and stop and drink
+tea every afternoon. But the German worked all day and part of the
+night; he trained himself as a specialist, he studied the needs of his
+customers--all of which to the Englishman was "unfair" competition. But
+here were the populations of the crowded slums, dependent for their
+weekly wage and their daily bread upon the ability of the factories to
+go on turning out products! Here was the ever-blackening shadow of
+unemployment, the mutterings of social discontent, the agitators on the
+soap-boxes, the workers listening to them with more and more eager
+attention, and the journalists and politicians and bankers watching this
+phenomenon with a ghastly fear.
+
+So came the great war. Social discontent was forgotten over night, and
+England and France plunged in to down their hated rival, once and for
+all time. Now they have succeeded: Germany's ships have been taken from
+her, and likewise her cables and coaling stations; the Berlin-Bagdad
+Railroad is a forgotten dream; the British sit in Constantinople, and
+the traffic goes by sea. American capitalism wakes up, and rubs its eyes
+after a debauch of Presbyterian idealism, and discovers that it has paid
+out some $20,000,000,000, in order to confer all these privileges and
+advantages upon its rivals!
+
+Ever since I can remember the world, there have been peace societies; I
+look back in history and discover that ever since there have been wars,
+there have been prophets declaiming against them in the name of
+humanity and God. As I write, there is a great world conference on
+disarmament in session in Washington, and all good Americans hope that
+war is to be ended and permanent peace made safe. All that I can do at
+this juncture is to point out the fundamental and all-controlling fact
+of present-day economics: that for the ruling class of any country to
+agree to disarmament and the abolition of war, is for that class to sign
+its own death warrant and cut its own throat. American capitalism can
+survive on this earth only by strangling and destroying Japanese
+capitalism and British capitalism, and doing it before long. The
+far-sighted capitalists on both sides know that, and are making their
+preparations accordingly.
+
+What the members of the peace societies and the diplomats of the
+disarmament conferences do is to cut off the branches of the tree of
+war. They leave the roots untouched, and then, when the tree continues
+to thrive, they are astounded. I conclude this chapter with a concrete
+illustration, cut from my morning newspaper. We went to war against
+German militarism, and to make the world safe for democracy--meaning
+thereby capitalist commercialism. We commanded the German people to
+"beat their swords into plough-shares"; that is, to set their Krupp
+factories to making tools of peace; and they did so. We saddled them
+with an enormous indemnity, making them our serfs for a generation or
+two, and compelling them to hasten out into the world markets, to sell
+their goods and raise gold to pay us. And now, how does their behavior
+strike us? Do we praise their industry, and fidelity to their
+obligations? Here are the headlines of a news despatch, published by the
+Los Angeles Times on December 10, 1921, at the top of the front page,
+right hand column, the most conspicuous position in the paper. Read it,
+and understand the sources of modern war!
+
+       _NEW ATTACK BY BERLIN_
+
+  *       *       *       *       *
+
+     DUMPING GOODS BY WHOLESALE
+
+  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cheap German Trash Puts Thousands of Americans Out of Employment
+
+  *       *       *       *       *
+
+ Glove Plants Shut Down and Potash Industry Killed
+        by Teuton Intrigue
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXI
+
+THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRODUCTION
+
+     (Shows how much wealth we could produce if we tried, and how we
+     proved it when we had to.)
+
+
+One of the commonest arguments in defense of the present business system
+runs as follows: The amount of money which is paid to labor is greatly
+in excess of the amount which is paid to capital. Suppose that tomorrow
+you were to abolish all dividends and profits, and divide the money up
+among the wage workers, how much would each one get? The sum is figured
+for some big industry, and it is shown that each worker would get one or
+two hundred dollars additional per year. Obviously, this would not bring
+the millennium; it would hardly be worth while to take the risk of
+reducing production in order to gain so small a result.
+
+But now we are in position to realize the fallacy of such an argument.
+The tax which capital levies upon labor is not the amount which capital
+takes for itself, but the amount which it prevents labor from producing.
+The real injury of the profit system is not that it pays so large a
+reward to a ruling class; it is the "iron ring" which it fastens about
+industry, barring the workers from access to the machinery of production
+except when the product can be sold for a profit. Labor pays an enormous
+reward to the business man for his management of industry, but it would
+pay labor to reward the business man even more highly, if only he would
+take his goods in kind, and would permit labor, after this tax is paid,
+to go on making those things which labor itself so desperately needs.
+
+But, you see, the business man does not take his goods in kind. The
+owner of a great automobile factory may make for himself one automobile
+or a score of automobiles, but he quickly comes to a limit where he has
+no use for any more, and what he wants is to sell automobiles and "make
+money." He does not permit his workers to make automobiles for
+themselves, or for any one else. He reserves the product of the factory
+for himself, and when he can no longer sell automobiles at a profit, he
+shuts the workers out and automobile-making comes to an end in that
+community. Thus it appears that the "iron ring" which strangles the
+income of labor, strangles equally the income of capital. It paralyzes
+the whole social body, and so limits production that we can form no
+conception of what prosperity might and ought to be.
+
+Consider the situation before the war. We were all of us at work under
+the competitive system, and with the exception of a few parasites,
+everybody was occupied pretty close to the limit of his energy. If any
+one had said that it would be possible for our community to pitch in and
+double or treble our output, you would have laughed at him. But suddenly
+we found ourselves at war, and in need of a great increase in output,
+and we resolved one and all to achieve this end. We did not waste any
+time in theoretical discussions about the rights of private capital, or
+the dangers of bureaucracy and the destruction of initiative. Our
+government stepped in and took control; it took the railroads and
+systematized them, it took the big factories and told them exactly what
+to make, it took the raw materials and allotted them, where they were
+needed, it fixed the prices of labor, and ordered millions of men to
+this or that place, to this or that occupation. It even seized the
+foodstuffs and directed what people should eat. In a thousand ways it
+suppressed competition and replaced it by order and system. And what was
+the result?
+
+We took five million of our young men, the very cream of our industrial
+force, and withdrew them from all productive activities; we put them
+into uniforms, and put them through a training which meant that they
+were eating more food and wearing more clothing and consuming more goods
+than nine-tenths of them had ever done in their lives before. We built
+camps for them, and supplied them with all kinds of costly products of
+labor, such as guns and cartridges, automobiles and airplanes. We
+treated two million of them to an expensive trip to Europe, and there we
+set them to work burning up and destroying the products of industry, to
+the value of many billions of dollars. And not only did we supply our
+own armies, we supplied the armies of all our allies. We built millions
+of dollars worth of ships, and we sent over to Europe, whether by
+private business or by government loans, some $10,000,000,000 worth of
+goods--more than ten years of our exports before the war.
+
+All the labor necessary to produce all this wealth had to be withdrawn
+from industry, so far as concerned our domestic uses and needs. It would
+not be too much to say that from domestic industry we withdrew a total
+of ten million of our most capable labor force. I think it would be
+reasonable to say that two-thirds of our productive energies went to war
+purposes, and only one-third was available for home use. And yet, we did
+it without a particle of real suffering. Many of us worked hard, but few
+of us worked harder than usual. Most of us got along with less wheat and
+sugar, but nobody starved, nobody really suffered ill health, and our
+poor made higher wages and had better food than ever in their lives
+before. If this argument is sound, it proves that our productive
+machinery is capable, when properly organized and directed, of producing
+three times the common necessities of our population. Assuming that our
+average working day is nine hours, we could produce what we at present
+consume by three hours of intelligently directed work per day.
+
+Let us look at the matter from another angle. Just at present the hero
+of the American business man is Herbert Hoover; and Mr. Hoover recently
+appointed a committee, not of Socialists and "Utopians," but of
+engineering experts, to make a study of American productive methods. The
+report showed that American industry was only thirty-five or forty per
+cent efficient. Incidentally, this "Committee on Waste" assessed, in the
+case of the building industry, sixty-five per cent of the blame against
+management and only twenty-one per cent against labor; in six
+fundamental industries it assessed fifty per cent of the blame against
+management and less than twenty-five per cent against labor. Fifteen
+years ago a professor of engineering, Sidney A. Reeve by name, made an
+elaborate study of the wastes involved in our haphazard and planless
+industrial methods, and embodied his findings in a book, "The Cost of
+Competition." His conclusion was that of the total amount of energy
+expended in America, more than seventy per cent was wasted. We were
+doing one hundred per cent of work and getting thirty per cent of
+results. If we would get one hundred per cent of results, we should
+produce three and one-third times as much wealth, and the income of our
+workers would be increased one or two thousand dollars a year.
+
+Robert Blatchford in his book, "Merrie England," has a saying to the
+effect that it makes all the difference, when half a dozen men go out to
+catch a horse, whether they spend their time catching the horse or
+keeping one another from catching the horse. Our next task will be to
+point out a few of the ways in which good, honest American business men
+and workingmen, laboring as intelligently and conscientiously as they
+know how, waste their energies in keeping one another from producing
+goods.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXII
+
+THE COST OF COMPETITION
+
+     (Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine, those
+     which are obvious and those which are hidden.)
+
+
+The United States government is by far the largest single business
+enterprise in the United States; and a study of congressional
+appropriations in 1920, made by the United States Bureau of Standards,
+reveals the fact that ninety-three per cent of the total income of the
+government went to paying for past wars or preparing for future wars. We
+have shown that modern war is a product of the profit system, and if
+civilized nations would put their industry upon a co-operative basis,
+they could forget the very idea of war, and we should then receive
+fourteen times as much benefit from our government as we receive at
+present; we should have fourteen times as good roads, fourteen times as
+many schools, fourteen times as prompt a postoffice and fourteen times
+as efficient a Congress. What it would mean to industry to abolish war
+is something wholly beyond the power of our imagination to conceive; for
+along with ninety-three per cent of our government money there goes into
+military preparation the vast bulk of our intellectual energy and
+inventive genius, our moral and emotional equipment.
+
+Next, strikes and the losses incidental to strikes, and the costs of
+preparing against strikes. This includes, not merely the actual loss of
+working time, it includes police and militia, private armies of gunmen,
+and great secret service agencies, whose total income runs up into
+hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Industrial warfare is simply
+the method by which capitalists and workers determine the division of
+the product of industry; as if two men should co-operate in raising
+poultry, and then fall to quarrelling over the ownership of the eggs,
+and settle the matter by throwing the eggs at each other's heads.
+
+Next, bankruptcy. Statistics show that regularly some ten per cent of
+our business enterprises fail every year. Take any block occupied by
+little business men, grocers and haberdashers and "notions," and you
+will see that they are always changing. Each change represents a human
+tragedy, and the total is a frightful waste of human energy; it happens
+because we can think of no better way to distribute goods than to go
+through the work of setting up a business, and then discover that it
+cannot succeed because the neighborhood is already overstocked with that
+kind of goods.
+
+Next, fires which are a result of bankruptcy. You may laugh, perhaps,
+thinking that I am making a joke; but every little man who fails in
+business knows that he has a choice of going down in the social scale,
+or of setting fire to his stock some night, and having a big insurance
+company set him on his feet again. The result is that a certain
+percentage of bankrupts do regularly set fire to their stores. Some
+fifteen years ago there was published in "Collier's Weekly" a study of
+the costs to society of incendiary fires. The Fire Underwriters'
+Association estimated the amount as a quarter of a billion dollars a
+year; and all this cost, you understand, is paid out of the pockets of
+those who insure their homes and their stores, and do not burn them
+down.
+
+From this follows the costs of insurance, and the whole insurance
+industry, which is inevitable under the profit system, but is entire
+waste so far as true production is concerned. Big enterprises like the
+Steel Trust do not carry insurance, and neither does the United States
+Postoffice. They are wealthy enough to stand their own losses. A
+national co-operative enterprise would be in the same position, and the
+whole business of collecting money for insurance and keeping records and
+carrying on lawsuits would be forgotten.
+
+Next, advertising. It would be no exaggeration to say that seventy per
+cent of the material published in American newspapers and magazines
+today is pure waste; and therefore seventy per cent of the labor of all
+the people who cut down forests and manufacture and transport paper and
+set up type and print and distribute publications is wasted. There is,
+of course, a small percentage of advertising that is useful, but most of
+it is boasting and falsehood, and even where it tells the truth it
+simply represents the effort of a merchant to persuade you to buy in his
+store instead of in a rival store--an achievement which is profitable to
+the merchant, but utterly useless to society as a whole.
+
+This same statement applies to all traveling salesmen, and to a great
+percentage of middlemen. It applies also to a great part of delivery
+service. If you live in a crowded part of any city, you see a dozen milk
+wagons pass your door every morning, doing the work which could be done
+exactly as well by one. That is only one case out of a thousand I might
+name.
+
+Next, crime. I have already discussed the crime of arson, and I might
+discuss the crimes of pocket-picking, burglary, forgery, and a hundred
+others in the same way. I am aware of the fact that there may be a few
+born criminals; there may be a few congenital cheats, whom we should
+have to put in hospitals. But we have only to consult the crime records,
+during the war and after the war, in order to see that when jobs are
+hunting men there are few criminals, and when men are hunting jobs there
+are many criminals. I have no figures as to the cost of administering
+justice in the United States--policemen, courts and jails--but it must
+be hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
+
+I have discussed at great length the suppression of the productive power
+of society. I should not fail to mention the suppression of the
+inventive power of society, a factor less obvious, but probably in the
+long run even greater. Every one familiar with the inside of a big
+industry knows that hundreds and even thousands of useful processes are
+entirely suppressed, because it would not pay one particular concern to
+stand the expense of the changes involved. You know how, during the war,
+our government brought all the makers of engines together and perfected
+in triumph a "Liberty motor." But now we have gone back to private
+interest and competition, and each concern is jealously engaged in
+guarding its own secrets, and depriving industry as a whole of the
+benefit of everything that it learns. Each is spying upon the others,
+stealing the secrets of the others, stealing likewise from those who
+invent new ideas--and thus discouraging them from inventing any more.
+
+I use this word "discourage," and I might write a chapter upon it. What
+human imagination can conceive the amount of social energy that is lost
+because of the factor of discouragement, directly caused by the
+competitive method? Who can figure what it means to human society that a
+great percentage of the people in it should be haunted by fear of one
+sort or another--the poor in fear of unemployment, sickness and
+starvation, the little business man in fear of bankruptcy and suicide,
+the big business man in fear of hard times and treachery of his
+competitors, the idle rich in fear of robbery and blackmail, and the
+whole community in fear of foreign war and domestic tumult!
+
+Anyone might go on and elaborate these factors that I have named, and
+think of scores of others. Anyone familiar with business life or with
+industrial processes would be able to put his finger on this or that
+enormous saving which he would be able to make if he and all his rivals
+could combine and come to an agreement. This has been proven over and
+over again in large-scale industry; it is the fact which has made of
+large-scale industry an overwhelming power, sucking all the profits to
+itself, reaching out and taking in new fields of human activity, and
+setting at naught all popular clamor and even legal terrors. How can
+anyone, seeing these facts, bring himself to deny that if we did
+systematize production and make it one enterprise, precisely adapted to
+one end, we should enormously increase the results of human labor, and
+the benefit to all who do the world's work?
+
+A good deal of this waste we can stop when we get ready, and other parts
+of it our bountiful mother nature will replace. When in a world war we
+kill some ten or twenty millions of the flower of our young manhood, we
+have only to wait several generations, and our race will be as good as
+ever. But, on the other hand, there is some waste that can never be
+repaired, and this is the thing truly frightful to contemplate. When we
+dig the iron ore out of the bowels of the earth and rust it away in
+wars, we are doing something our race can never undo. And the same is
+true of many of our precious substances: phosphorus, sulphur, potash.
+When we cut down the forests from our mountain slopes, and lay bare the
+earth, we not merely cause floods and washouts, and silt up our harbors,
+we take away from the surface of our land the precious life-giving soil,
+and make a habitable land into a desert, which no irrigating and
+reforesting can ever completely restore. The Chinese have done that for
+many centuries, and we are following in their footsteps; more than six
+hundred million wagon-loads of our best soil are washed down to the sea
+every year! If you wish to know about these matters, I send you to a
+book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth," by Herbert Quick. It is one of the
+most heart-breaking books you ever read, yet it is merely a quiet
+statement of the facts about our present commercial anarchy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIII
+
+SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM
+
+     (Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the state, and
+     the idea of its management by the trade unions.)
+
+
+Let us now assume that we desire to abolish the wastes of the
+competitive method, and to put our industry on a basis of co-operation.
+How should we effect the change, and how should we run our industry
+after it was done?
+
+Let us take the United States Steel Corporation. What change would be
+necessary to the socializing of this concern? United States Steel is
+owned by a group of stockholders, and governed by a board of directors
+elected by them. The owners are now to be bought out with government
+bonds, and the board of directors retired. It may also be necessary to
+replace a certain number of the higher executive officials, who are
+imbued entirely with the point of view of this board, and have to do
+with finance, rather than with production. Of course, some other
+governing authority would have to be put in control. What would this
+authority be? There are several plans before the world, several
+different schools of thought, which we shall consider one by one.
+
+First, the Socialist program. The Socialist says, "Consider the
+postoffice, how that is run. It is run by the President, who appoints a
+Postmaster-General as his executive. Let us therefore turn the steel
+industry over to the government, and let the President appoint another
+member of his cabinet, a Director of Steel; or let there be a
+commission, similar to the Interstate Commerce Commission, or the
+various war industry boards." Any form of management of the steel
+industry which provides for its control and operation by our United
+States government is Socialism of one sort or another.
+
+There has been, of late, a great deal of dissatisfaction with
+government, on the part of the general public, and also of labor. The
+postoffice clerks, for example, complain that they are inadequately paid
+and autocratically managed, deprived of their rights not merely as
+workers but as citizens. The steel workers complain that when they go on
+strike against their masters, the government sends in troops and
+crushes their strike, regardless of the rights or wrongs of it. In order
+to meet such tactics, labor goes into politics, and elects here and
+there its own representatives; but these representatives become
+mysteriously affected by the bureaucratic point of view, and even where
+they try hard, they do not accomplish much for labor. Therefore, labor
+becomes disgusted with the political process, and labor men do not
+welcome the prospect of being managed by government.
+
+If you ask such men, they will say: "No; the politicians don't know
+anything about industry, and can't learn. The people who know about
+industry are those who work in it. The true way to run an industry is
+through an organization of the workers, both of hand and brain. The true
+way to run the Steel Trust is for all the workers in it, men and women,
+high and low, to be recognized by law as citizens of that industry; each
+shop must elect its own delegates to run that shop, and elect a delegate
+to a central parliament of the industry, and this industry in turn must
+elect delegates to a great parliament or convention of all the delegates
+of all the industries. In such a central gathering every one would be
+represented, because every person would be a producer of some sort, and
+whether he was a steel worker or a street sweeper or a newsboy, he would
+have a vote at the place where he earns his living, and would have a say
+in the management of his job. The great central parliament would elect
+an executive committee and a president, and so we should have a
+government of the workers, by the workers, for the workers." This idea
+is known as Syndicalism, derived from the French word "syndicat,"
+meaning a labor union. Since the Russian revolution it has come to be
+known as soviet government, "soviet" being the Russian word for trade
+council.
+
+Now, taking these two ideas of Socialism and Syndicalism, it is evident
+that they may be combined in various ways, and applied in varying
+degrees. It is perfectly conceivable, for example, that the people of
+the United States might elect a president pledged to call a parliament
+of industry, and to delegate the control of industry to this parliament.
+He might delegate the control to a certain extent, and provide for its
+extension, step by step; so our society might move into Syndicalism by
+the way of Socialism. You have only to put your mind on the
+possibilities of the situation to realize that one method shades into
+the other with a great variety of stages.
+
+Consider next the stages between capitalism and Socialism. We have in
+the United States some industries which are purely capitalistic; for
+example, the Steel Trust, which is privately owned, and has been
+powerful enough, not merely to suppress every effort of its workers to
+organize, but every effort of the government to regulate it. On the
+other hand, the United States Postoffice represents State Socialism;
+although the workers have been forbidden to organize, and the management
+of the industry is so arbitrary that I have always preferred to call it
+State Capitalism. Likewise the United States army and navy represent
+State Socialism. When we had the job of putting the Kaiser out of
+business, we did not hire Mr. Rockefeller to do it; it never once
+occurred to our advocates of "individualism," of "capitalist enterprise
+and initiative," to suggest that we should hire out our army and navy,
+or employ the Steel Trust or the Powder Trust to organize its own army
+and navy to do the fighting for us. Likewise, for the most part, we run
+the job of educating our children by the method of municipal Socialism.
+We run our libraries in the same way, and likewise our job of fire
+protection.
+
+It is interesting to note how in every country the line between
+capitalism and Socialism is drawn in a different place. In America we
+run practically all our libraries for ourselves, but it would seem to us
+preposterous to think of running our theatres. In Europe, however, they
+have state-owned theatres, which set a far higher standard of art than
+anything we know at home. Also, they have state-owned orchestras and
+opera-houses, something we Americans leave to the subscriptions of
+millionaires. In Europe it seems perfectly natural to the people that
+the state should handle their telegrams in connection with the
+postoffice; but if you urge government ownership of the telegraphs in
+the United States, they tell you that the proposition is "socialistic,"
+and that saves the need of thinking about it. We take it for granted
+that our cities could run the libraries--even though we were glad when
+Carnegie came along and saved us the need of appropriating money for
+buildings. Just why a city should be able to run a library, and should
+not be able to run an opera-house, or a newspaper, is something which
+has never been made clear to me.
+
+Let us next examine the stages between capitalism and Syndicalism. A
+great many large corporations are making experiments in what they call
+"shop management," allowing the workers membership in the boards of
+directors and a voice in the conditions of their labor. This is
+Syndicalism so far as it goes. Likewise it is Syndicalism when the
+clothing workers and the clothing manufacturers meet together and agree
+to the setting up of a permanent committee to work out a set of rules
+for the conduct of the industry, and to fix wages from time to time.
+Obviously, these things are capable of indefinite extension, and in
+Europe they are being developed far more rapidly. For example, in Italy
+the agricultural workers are organized, and are gradually taking
+possession of the great estates, which are owned by absentee landlords.
+They wage war upon these estates by means of sabotage and strikes, and
+then they buy up the estates at bargain prices and develop them by
+co-operative labor. This has been going on in Italy for ten years, and
+has become the most significant movement in the country. It is a triumph
+of pure Syndicalism; and such is the power of pure capitalism in the
+United States that the American people have not been allowed to know
+anything about this change.
+
+Next, what are the stages between Socialism and Syndicalism? These also
+are infinite in number and variety. As a matter of fact, there are very
+few Socialists who advocate State Socialism without any admixture of
+Syndicalism. The regular formula of the Socialist party is "the social
+ownership and democratic control of the instruments and means of
+production;" and what the phrase "democratic control" means is simply
+that you introduce into your Socialist mixture a certain flavoring of
+Syndicalism, greater or less, according to your temperament. In the same
+way there are many Syndicalists who are inclined toward Socialism. In
+every convention of radical trade unionists, such as, for example, the
+I. W. W., you find some who favor political action, and these will have
+the same point of view as the more radical members of the Socialist
+party, who urge a program of industrial as well as political action.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIV
+
+COMMUNISM AND ANARCHISM
+
+     (Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the idea of a
+     society without compulsion, and how these ideas have fared in
+     Russia.)
+
+
+The Russian revolution has familiarized us with the word Communism. In
+the beginning of the revolutionary movement Communism denoted what we
+now call Socialism; for example, the Communist Manifesto of Marx and
+Engels became the platform of the Social-democratic parties. But because
+most of these parties supported their governments during the war, the
+more radical elements have now rejected the word Socialism, and taken up
+the old word Communism. In the Russian revolution the Communists went so
+far as to seize all the property of the rich, and so the word Communism
+has come to bear something of its early Christian significance.
+
+It is obvious that here, too, it is a question of degree, and Socialism
+will shade into Communism by an infinite variety of stages, depending
+upon what forms of property it is decided to socialize. The Socialist
+formula commonly accepted is that "goods socially used shall be socially
+owned, and goods privately used shall be privately owned." If you own a
+factory, it will be taken by the state, or by the workers, and made
+social property like the postoffice; but no Socialist wants to socialize
+your clothing, or your books, any more than he wants to socialize your
+toothbrush.
+
+But when you come to apply this formula, you run quickly into
+difficulties. Suppose you are a millionaire, and own a palace with one
+or two hundred rooms, and a hundred servants. Do you use that socially,
+or do you use it privately? And suppose there is a scarcity of houses,
+and thousands of children are dying of tuberculosis in crowded tenement
+rooms? You own a dozen automobiles, and do you use them all privately? I
+point out to you that in time of emergency the capitalist state does not
+hesitate over such a problem; it seizes your palace and turns it into a
+hospital, it takes all your cars and uses them to carry troops. It
+should be obvious that a proletarian state would be tempted by this
+precedent.
+
+The Communists also have a formula, which reads: "From each according to
+his ability, to each according to his necessity." I do not see how any
+sensitive person can deny that this is an extremely fine statement of an
+ideal in social life. We take it quite for granted in family life; if
+you knew a family in which that rule did not apply, you would consider
+it an unloving and uncivilized family. I believe that when once industry
+has been socialized, and we have a chance to see what production can
+become, we shall find ourselves quickly adopting that family custom as
+our law, for all except a few congenital criminals and cheats. We shall
+find that we can produce so much wealth that it is not worth while
+keeping count of unimportant items. If today you meet someone on the
+street and ask him for a match or a pin, you do not think of offering to
+pay him. This is an automatic consequence of the cheapness of matches
+and pins. Once upon a time you were stopped on the road every few miles
+and made to pay a few cents toll. I remember seeing toll-gates when I
+was a boy, but I don't think I have seen one for twenty years.
+
+In exactly the same way, under socialized industry, we shall probably
+make street-car traffic free, and then railroad traffic; we shall
+abolish water meters and gas meters and electric light meters, also
+telephone charges, except perhaps for long distances, and telegraph
+tolls for personal messages. Then, presently, we shall find ourselves
+with such a large wheat crop that we shall make bread free; and then
+music and theatres and clothing and books. At present we use furniture
+and clothing as a means of manifesting our economic superiority to our
+fellowmen. One of the most charming books in our language is Veblen's
+"Theory of the Leisure Class," in which these processes are studied. We
+shall, of course, have to raise up a new generation, unaccustomed to the
+idea of class and of class distinction, before we could undertake to
+supply people with all the clothing they wanted free of charge.
+
+The Russian theorists made haste to carry out these ideas all at once;
+they tried to leap several centuries in the evolution of Russian
+society. They ordained complete Communism in land; but the peasants
+would have nothing to do with such notions--each wanted his own land,
+and what he produced on it. The Soviets have now been forced to give
+way, not merely to the peasants, but to the traders; and so we see once
+again that it is better to take one step forward than to take several
+steps forward and then several steps backward. The Russian revolution
+is not yet completed, so no one can say how many steps backward it will
+be forced to take.
+
+This revolution was an interesting combination of the ideas of Socialism
+and Syndicalism. The trade unionists seized the factories, and made an
+effort at democratic control of industry. At the same time the state was
+overthrown by a political party, the Bolsheviks, who set up a
+dictatorship of the proletariat. Because of civil war and outside
+invasion, the democratic elements in the experiment have been more and
+more driven into the background, and the authority of the state has
+correspondingly increased. This causes us to think of the Soviet system
+as necessarily opposed to democracy, but this is not in any way a
+necessary thing. There is no inevitable connection between industrial
+control by the workers and a dictatorship over the state. In Germany the
+state is proceeding to organize a national parliament of industry, and
+to provide for management of the factories by the labor unions. The
+Italian government has promised to do the same thing. These, of course,
+are capitalist governments, and they will keep their promises only as
+they are made to; but it is a perfectly possible thing that in either of
+these countries a vote of the people might change the government, and
+put in authority men who would really proceed to turn industry over to
+the control of the workers. That would be the Soviet or Syndicalist
+system, brought about by democratic means, without dictatorship or civil
+war.
+
+Another group of revolutionary thinkers whose theories must be mentioned
+are the Anarchists. The word Anarchy is commonly used as a synonym for
+chaos and disorder, which it does not mean at all. It means the absence
+of authority; and it is characteristic of people's view of life that
+they are unable to conceive of there being such a thing as order, unless
+it is maintained by force. The theory of the Anarchist is that order is
+a necessity of the human spirit, and that people would conform to the
+requirements of a just order by their own free will and without external
+compulsion. The Anarchist believes that the state is an instrument of
+class oppression, and has no other reason for being. He wishes the
+industries to be organized by free associations of the people who work
+in them.
+
+Some of the greatest of the world's moral teachers have been Anarchists:
+Jesus, for example, and Shelley and Thoreau and Tolstoi, and in our time
+Kropotkin. These men voiced the highest aspirations of the human
+spirit, and the form of society which they dreamed is the one we set
+before us as our final goal. But the world does not leap into perfection
+all at once, and meantime here we have the capitalist system and the
+capitalist state, and what attitude shall we take to them? There are
+impassioned idealists who refuse to make any terms with injustice, or to
+submit to compulsion, and these preach the immediate destruction of
+capitalist government, and capitalist government responds with prison
+and torture, and so we have some Anarchists who throw bombs.
+
+There are those who call themselves "philosophic" Anarchists, wishing to
+indicate thereby that they preach this doctrine, but do not attempt to
+carry it into action as yet. Some among these verge toward the Communist
+point of view, and call themselves Communist-anarchists; such was
+Kropotkin, whose theories of social organization you will find in his
+book "The Conquest of Bread." There are others who call themselves
+Syndicalist-anarchists, finding their centers of free association in the
+radical labor unions.
+
+After the Russian revolution, the Anarchists found themselves in a
+dilemma, and their groups were torn apart like every other party and
+class in Russia. Here was a new form of state set up in society, a
+workers' state, and what attitude should the Anarchists take toward
+that? Many of them stood out for their principles, and resisted the
+Bolshevik state, and put the Bolsheviks under the embarrassing necessity
+of throwing them into jail. We good orthodox Americans, who are
+accustomed to dump Socialists and Communists and Syndicalists and
+Anarchists all together into one common kettle, took Emma Goldman and
+Alexander Berkman and shipped them over to Russia, where we thought they
+belonged. Now our capitalist newspapers find it strange that these
+Anarchists do not like the Russian government any better than they like
+the American government!
+
+On the other hand, a great many Anarchists have suddenly found
+themselves compelled by the Russian situation to face the facts of life.
+They have decided that a government is not such a bad thing after
+all--when it is your own government! Robert Minor, for example, has
+recanted his Anarchist position, and joined the Communists in advocating
+the dropping of all differences among the workers, all theories as to
+the future, and concentrating upon the immediate task of overthrowing
+capitalist government and keeping it overthrown. In every civilized
+nation the Russian revolution has had this effect upon the extreme
+revolutionists. It has given them a definite aim and a definite program
+upon which they can unite; it has presented to capitalist government the
+answer of force to force; it has shown the masters of industry in
+precise and definite form what they have to face--unless they set
+themselves immediately and in good faith to the task of establishing
+real democracy in industry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXV
+
+SOCIAL REVOLUTION
+
+     (How the great change is coming in different industries, and how we
+     may prepare to meet it.)
+
+
+From a study of the world's political revolutions we observe that a
+variety of governmental forms develop, and that different circumstances
+in each country produce different institutions. Suppose that back in the
+days of the French monarchy some one asked you how France was going to
+be governed as a political republic; how would elections be held, what
+would be the powers of the deputies, who would choose the premier, who
+would choose the president, what would be the duties of each? Who can
+explain why in France and England the executive is responsible to the
+parliament and must answer its questions, while in the United States the
+executive is an autocrat, responsible to no one for four years? Who
+could have foreseen that in England, supposed to remain a monarchy, the
+constitution would be fluid; while in America, supposed to be a
+democracy, the constitution would be rigid, and the supreme power of
+rejecting changes in the laws would be vested in a group of reactionary
+lawyers appointed for life? There will be similar surprises in the
+social revolution, and similar differences between what things pretend
+to be and what they are.
+
+I used to compare the social revolution to the hatching of an egg. You
+examine it, and apparently it is all egg; but then suddenly something
+begins to happen, and in a few minutes it is all chicken. If, however,
+you investigate, you discover that the chicken had been forming inside
+the egg for some time. I know that there is a chicken now forming inside
+our social egg; but having realized the complexity of social phenomena,
+I no longer venture to predict the exact time of the hatching, or the
+size and color of the chicken.
+
+Perhaps it is more useful to compare the social revolution to a
+child-birth. A good surgeon knows what is due to happen, but he knows
+also that there are a thousand uncertainties, a thousand dangerous
+possibilities, and all he can do is to watch the process and be prepared
+to meet each emergency as it arises. The birth process consists of one
+pang after another, but no one can say which pang will complete the
+birth, or whether it will be completed at all. Karl Marx is author of
+the saying that "force is the midwife of progress," so you may see that
+I am not the inventor of this simile of child-birth.
+
+There are three factors in the social revolution, each of which will
+vary in each country, and in different parts of the country, and at
+different periods. First, there is the industrial condition of the
+country, a complex set of economic factors. The industrial life of
+England depends primarily on shipping and coal. In the United States
+shipping is of less importance, and railroads take the place. In the
+United States the eastern portion lives mainly by manufacture, the
+western by agriculture, while the south is held a generation behind by a
+race problem. In France the great estates were broken up, and
+agriculture fell into the hands of peasant proprietors, who are the main
+support of French capitalism. In Prussia the great estates were held
+intact, and remained the basis of a feudal aristocracy. In America land
+changes hands freely, and therefore one-third of our farms are
+mortgaged, and another third are worked by tenants. In Russia there was
+practically no middle class, while in the United States there is
+practically nothing but middle class; the rich have been rich for such a
+short while that they still look middle class and act middle class, in
+spite of all their efforts, while the working class hopes to be middle
+class and is persuaded that it can become middle class. Such varying
+factors produce in each country a different problem, and make inevitable
+a different process of change.
+
+The second factor is the condition of organization and education of the
+workers. This likewise varies in every country, and in every part of
+every country. There is a continual struggle on the part of the workers
+to organize and educate themselves, and a continual effort on the part
+of the ruling class to prevent this. In some industries in America you
+find the workers one hundred per cent organized, and in other industries
+you find them not organized at all. It is obvious that in the former
+case the social change, when it comes, will be comparatively simple,
+involving little bloodshed and waste; in the latter case there will be
+social convulsions, rioting and destruction of property, disorganization
+of industry and widespread distress.
+
+The third factor is the state of mind of the propertied classes, the
+amount of resistance they are willing to make to social change. I have
+done a great deal of pleading with the masters of industry in my
+country; I have written appeals to Vincent Astor and John D.
+Rockefeller, to capitalist newspapers and judges and congressmen and
+presidents. I have been told that this is a waste of my time; that these
+people cannot learn and will not learn, and that it is foolish to appeal
+either to their hearts or their understanding. But I perceive that the
+class struggle is like a fraction; it has a numerator and a denominator,
+and you can increase the fraction just as well by decreasing the
+denominator as by increasing the numerator. To vary the simile, here are
+two groups of men engaged in a tug of war, and you can affect the result
+just as decisively by persuading one group to pull less hard, as by
+persuading the other group to pull harder.
+
+Picture to yourself two factories. In factory number one the owner is a
+hard-driving business man, an active spirit in the so-called "open-shop"
+campaign. He believes in his divine right to manage industry, and he
+believes also in the gospel of "all that the traffic will bear." He
+prevents his men from organizing, and employs spies to weed out the
+radicals and to sow dissensions. When a strike comes, he calls in the
+police and the strike-breaking agencies, and in every possible way he
+makes himself hated and feared by his workers. Then some day comes the
+unemployment crisis, and a wave of revolt sweeping over the country. The
+workers seize that factory and set up a dictatorship of the proletariat
+and a "red terror." If the owner resists, they kill him; in any case,
+they wipe out his interest in the business, and do everything possible
+to destroy his power over it, even to his very name. They run the
+business by a shop committee, and you have for that particular factory a
+Syndicalist, or even Anarchist form of social reconstruction.
+
+Now for factory number two, whose owner is a humane and enlightened man,
+studying social questions and realizing his responsibility, and the
+temporary nature of his stewardship. He gives his people the best
+possible working conditions, he keeps open books and discusses wages and
+profits with them, he educates the young workers, he meets with their
+union committees on a basis of free discussion. When the unemployment
+crisis comes and the wave of revolt sweeps the country, this man and his
+workers understand one another. He says: "I can no longer pay profits,
+and so I can no longer keep going under the profit system; but if you
+are ready to run the plant, I am ready to help you the best I can."
+Manifestly, this man will continue the president of the corporation, and
+if he trains his sons wisely, they will keep his place; so, instead of
+having in that factory a dictatorship and a terror, you will have a
+constitutional monarchy, gradually evolving into a democratic republic.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVI
+
+CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION
+
+     (Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they afford to do
+     it, and what will be the price?)
+
+
+The problem of whether the social revolution shall be violent or
+peaceable depends in great part upon our answer to the question of
+confiscation versus compensation. We are now going to consider, first,
+the abstract rights and wrongs of the question, and, second, the
+practical aspects of it.
+
+There is a story very popular among single taxers and other advocates of
+freedom of the land. An English land-owner met a stranger walking on his
+estate, and rebuked him for trespassing. Said the stranger, "You own
+this land?" Said the other, "I do." "And how did you get it?" "I
+inherited it from my father." "And how did your father get it?" "He
+inherited it from his father." So on for half a dozen more ancestors,
+until at last the Englishman answered, "He fought for it." Whereupon the
+stranger took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and said, "I'll
+fight you for it."
+
+This is all there is to say on the subject of the abstract rights of
+land titles. There is no title to land which is valid on a historical
+basis. Everything rests upon fraud and force, continued through endless
+ages of human history. We in the United States took most of our land
+from the Indians, and in the process our guiding rule was that the only
+good Injun was a dead Injun. We first helped the English kings to take
+large sections of our country from the French and Spanish, and then we
+took them from the English king by a violent revolution. We purchased
+our Southwestern states from Mexico, but not until we had taken the
+precaution of killing some thousands of Mexicans in war, which had the
+effect of keeping down the purchase price. It would be a simple matter
+to show that all public franchises are similarly tainted with fraud.
+Proudhon laid down the principle that "property is theft," and from this
+principle it is an obvious conclusion that society has the right to
+scrap all paper titles to wealth, and to start the world's industries
+over again on the basis of share and share alike.
+
+But stop and consider for a moment. "Property is theft," you say. But go
+to your corner grocery, and tell the grocer that you deny his title to
+the sack of prunes which he exhibits in front of his counter. He will
+tell you that he has paid for them; but you answer that the prunes were
+raised on stolen land, and shipped to him over a railroad whose
+franchise was obtained by bribery. Will that convince the grocer? It
+will not. Neither will it convince the policeman or the judge, nor will
+it convince the voters of the country. Most people have a deeply rooted
+conviction that there are rights to property now definitely established
+and made valid by law. If you have paid taxes on land for a certain
+period, the land "belongs" to you; and I am sure you might agitate from
+now to kingdom come without persuading the American people that New
+Mexico ought to be returned to Mexico, or the western prairies to the
+Indian tribes.
+
+Such are the facts; now let us apply them to the right of exploitation,
+embodied in the ownership of a certain number of bonds or shares of
+stock in the United States Steel Corporation. "Pass a law," says the
+Socialist, "providing for the taking over of United States Steel by the
+government." At once to every owner comes one single thought--are you
+going to buy this stock, or are you going to confiscate it? If you
+attempt confiscation, the courts will declare the law unconstitutional;
+and you either have to defy the courts, which is revolutionary action,
+or to amend the constitution. If you adopt the latter course, you have
+before you a long period of agitation; you have to carry both houses of
+Congress by a two-thirds majority, and the legislatures of three-fourths
+of the States. You have to do this in the face of the most bitter and
+infuriated opposition of those who are defending what they regard as
+their rights. You have to meet the arguments of the entire capitalist
+press of the country, and you have the certainty of widespread bribery
+of your elected officials.
+
+The prospect of doing all this under the forms of law seems extremely
+discouraging; so come the Syndicalists, saying, "Let us seize the
+factories, and stop the exploitation at the point of production." So
+come the Communists, saying, "Let us overthrow capitalist government,
+and break the net of bourgeois legality, and establish a dictatorship of
+the proletariat, which will put an end to privilege and class domination
+all at once." What are we to say to these different programs?
+
+Suppose we buy out the stockholders of United States Steel, and issue
+to them government bonds, what have we accomplished? Nothing, say the
+advocates of confiscation; we have changed the form of exploitation, but
+the substance of it remains the same. The stockholders get their money
+from the United States government, instead of from the United States
+Steel Corporation; but they get their money just the same--the product,
+not of their labor, but of the labor of the steel workers. Suppose we
+carried out the same procedure all along the line; suppose the
+government took over all industries, and paid for their securities with
+government bonds. Then we should have capitalism administered by a
+capitalist government, instead of by our present masters of industry; we
+should have a state capitalism, instead of a private capitalism; we
+should have the government buying and selling products, and exploiting
+labor, and paying over the profits to an hereditary privileged class.
+The capitalist system would go on just the same, except that labor would
+have one all-powerful tyrant, instead of many lesser tyrants, as at
+present.
+
+So argue the advocates of confiscation. And the advocates of purchase
+reply that in buying the securities of United States Steel, we should
+fix the purchase price at the present market value of the property, and
+that price, once fixed, would be permanent; all future unearned
+increment of the steel industry would belong to the government instead
+of to private owners. Consider, for example, what happened during the
+world war. When I was a boy, soon after the Steel Trust was launched,
+its stock was down to something like six dollars, and I knew small
+investors who lost every dollar they had put in. But during the war,
+steel stock soared to a hundred and thirty-six dollars per share; it
+paid dividends of some thirty per cent per year, and accumulated
+enormous surpluses besides.
+
+The same thing was true of practically all the big corporations.
+According to Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, there were coal companies
+which paid as high as eight hundred per cent per year; that is to say,
+the profits in one year were eight times the total investment. Assuming
+that our government bonds paid five per cent, it appears that the owners
+of these coal companies got one hundred and sixty times as much under
+our present private property system as they would have got under a
+system of state purchase. Even completely dominated by capitalism as our
+courts are today, they would not dare require us to pay for industries
+more than six per cent on the market value of the investment; and from
+what I know of the inside graft of American big business that would be
+restricting the private owners to less than one-fourth of what they are
+getting at present.
+
+We have already pointed out the economies that can be made by putting
+industry under a uniform system. But all these, important as they are,
+amount to little in comparison with the one great consideration, which
+is that by purchasing large scale industry, we should break the "iron
+ring"; we should thenceforth be able to do our manufacturing for use
+instead of for profit, and so we should put an end to unemployment. Our
+cheerful workers would throng into the factories, to produce for
+themselves instead of for masters; and in one year of that we should so
+change the face of our country that a return to the system of private
+ownership would be unthinkable. In one year we could raise production to
+such a point that the interest on the bonds we had issued would be like
+the crumbs left over from a feast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVII
+
+EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS
+
+     (Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its chances for
+     success in the United States.)
+
+
+I am aware that the suggestion of paying for the industries we socialize
+will sound tame and uninspiring to a lot of ardent young radicals of my
+acquaintance. They will shake their heads sadly and say that I am
+getting middle-aged and tired. We have seen in Russia and Hungary and
+other places, so many illustrations of the quick and easy way to
+expropriate the expropriators that now there is in every country a
+considerable group of radicals who will hear to no program less
+picturesque than barricades and councils of action.
+
+In considering this question, I set aside all considerations of abstract
+right or wrong, the justification for violence in the overthrow of
+capitalist society. I put the question on the basis of cash, pure and
+simple. It will cost a certain amount of money to buy out the owners,
+and that money will have to be paid, as it is paid at present, out of
+the labor of the useful workers. The workers don't want to pay any more
+than they have to; the question they must consider is, which way will
+they have to pay most. The advocates of the dictatorship of the
+proletariat are lured by the delightful prospect of not having to pay
+anything; and if that were really possible it would undoubtedly be the
+better way. But we have to consider this question: Is the program of not
+having to pay anything a reality, or is it only a dream? Suppose it
+should turn out that we have to pay anyhow, and that in the case of
+violent revolution we pay much more, and in addition run serious risk of
+not getting what we pay for?
+
+Here are enormous industries, running at full blast, and it is proposed
+that some morning the workers shall rise up and seize them, and turn out
+the owners and managers, and run the industries themselves. Will anybody
+maintain that this can be done without stopping production in those
+factories for a single day? Certainly production must stop during the
+time you are fighting for possession; and the cruel experience of
+Russia proves that it will stop during the further time you are fighting
+to keep possession, and to put down counter-revolutionary conspiracies.
+Also, alas, it will stop during the time you are looking for somebody
+who knows how to run that industry; it will stop during the time you are
+organizing your new administrative staff. You may discover to your
+consternation that it stops during the time you are arranging to get
+other industries to give you credit, and to ship you raw materials; also
+during the time you are finding the workers in other industries who want
+your product, and are able to pay for it with something that you can
+use, or that you can sell in a badly disorganized market.
+
+And all the time that you are arranging these things, you are going to
+have the workers at your back, not getting any pay, or being paid with
+your paper money which they distrust, and growling and grumbling at you
+because you are not running things as you promised. You see, the mass of
+the workers are not going to understand, because you haven't made them
+understand; you have brought about the great change by your program of a
+dictatorship, of action by an "enlightened minority"; and now you have
+the terror that the unenlightened majority may be won back by their
+capitalist masters, and may kick you out of control, or even stand you
+up against a wall and shoot you by a firing squad. And all the time you
+are worrying over these problems, who can estimate the total amount the
+factory might have been producing if it had been running at full blast?
+Whatever that difference is, remember, it is paid by the workers; and
+might that sum not just as well have been used to buy out the owners?
+
+If we were back in the old days of hand labor and crude, unorganized
+production, I admit that the only way to benefit the slaves might be to
+turn out the masters by force. But here we have a social system of
+infinite complexity, a delicate and sensitive machine, which no one
+person in the world, and no group of persons understands thoroughly. In
+the running of such a machine a slight blunder may cost a fortune; and
+certainly all the skill, all the training, all the loyal services of our
+expert engineers and managers is needed if we are to remodel that
+machine while keeping it running. The amount of wealth which we could
+save by the achieving of that feat would be sufficient to maintain a
+class of owners in idleness and luxury for a generation; and so I say,
+with all the energy and conviction I possess, _pay them_! Pay them
+anything that is necessary, in order to avoid civil war and social
+disorganization! Pay them so much that they can have no possible cause
+of complaint, that the most hide-bound capitalistic-minded judge in the
+country cannot find a legal flaw in the bargain! Pay them so that every
+engineer and efficiency expert and manager and foreman and stenographer
+and office-boy will stay on the job and work double time to put the
+enterprise through! Pay them such a price that even Judge Gary and John
+D. Rockefeller will be willing to help us do the job of social
+readjustment!
+
+"Ah, yes," my young radical friends will say, "that sounds all very
+beautiful, but it's the old Utopian dream of brotherhood and class
+co-operation. That will never happen on this earth, until you have first
+abolished capitalism." My answer is, it could happen tomorrow if we had
+sufficient intelligence to make it happen. That it does not happen is
+simply absence of intelligence. And will anyone maintain that it is the
+part of an intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent course than he
+knows? What is the use of our intelligence, if we abdicate its
+authority, and give ourselves up to programs of action which we know are
+blind and destructive and wasteful? We may see a great vessel going on
+the rocks; we may feel certain that it is going, in spite of everything
+we can do; but shall we fail to do what we can to make those in the
+vessel realize how they might get safely into the harbor?
+
+We have had the Russian revolution before us for four years. Mankind
+will spend the next hundred years in studying it, and still have much to
+learn, but the broad outlines of the great experiment are now plain
+before our eyes. Russia was a backward country, and she tried to fight a
+modern war, and it broke her down. She had practically no middle class,
+and her ruling class was rotten, and so the revolutionists had their
+chance, and they seized it. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that
+they came to the rescue of Russia, saving her from the hands of those
+who were trying to force her to fight, when she was utterly exhausted
+and incapable of fighting.
+
+Anyhow, here was your dictatorship of the proletariat. It turned out all
+the executive experts, or nearly all of them, because they were tainted
+with the capitalist psychology; and then straightway it had to call them
+back and make terms with them, because industry could not be run without
+them. And of course these engineers and managers sabotaged the
+revolution--every non-proletarian sabotaged it, both inside Russia and
+outside. You denounced this, and protested against this, but all the
+same it happened; it was human nature that it should happen, and it is
+one of the things you have to count on, in any and every country where
+you attempt the social revolution by minority action.
+
+They have got power in Russia, and they dream of getting power in
+America in the same way. But there is no such disorganization in our
+country as there was in Russia, and it would take a generation of civil
+strife to bring us to such a condition. We have a middle class,
+powerful, thoroughly organized, and thoroughly conscious. Moreover, this
+class has ideals of majority rule, which are bred in its very bones; and
+while they have never realized these ideals, they think they have, and
+they are prepared to fight to the last gasp in that belief. All that the
+leaders of Moscow have to do is to bring about an attempt at forcible
+revolution, and they will discover in American society sufficient power
+of organization and of brutal action to put their movement out of
+business for a generation.
+
+A hundred years ago we had chattel slavery firmly fixed as the
+industrial system of one-half of these United States. To far-seeing
+statesmen it was manifest that chattel slavery was a wasteful system,
+and that it could not exist in competition with free labor. There was a
+great American, Henry Clay, who came forward with a proposition that the
+people of the United States, through their government, should raise the
+money, about a billion dollars, and compensate the owners of all the
+slaves and set them free. For most of his lifetime Henry Clay pleaded
+for that plan. But the masters of the South were making money fast; they
+knew how to handle the negro as a slave, they could not imagine handling
+him as a free laborer, and they would not hear to the plan. On the other
+side of Mason and Dixon's line were fanatical men of "principle," who
+said that slavery was wrong, and that was the end of it. There is a
+stanza by Emerson discussing this question of confiscation versus
+compensation:
+
+    Pay ransom to the owner
+      And fill the bag to the brim.
+    Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
+      And ever was. Pay him.
+
+This, you see, is magnificent utterance, but as economic philosophy it
+is reckless and unsound. The abolitionists of the North took up this
+poem, and the slave power of the South answered with a battle-song:
+
+    War to the hilt,
+    Theirs be the guilt,
+    Who fetter the freeman to ransom the slave!
+
+And so the issue had to be fought out. It cost a million human lives and
+five billions of treasure, and it set American civilization back a
+generation. And now we confront exactly the same kind of emergency, and
+are coming to exactly the same method of solution. We have white
+wage-slaves clamoring for their freedom, and we have business men making
+money out of them, and exercising power over them, and finding it
+convenient and pleasant. They are going to fight it out in a civil war,
+and which side is going to win I am not sure. But when the historians
+come to write about it a couple of generations from now, let them be
+able to record that there were a few men in the country who pleaded for
+a sane and orderly and human solution of the problem, and who continued
+to voice their convictions even in the midst of the cruel and wasteful
+strife!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVIII
+
+THE PROBLEM OF THE LAND
+
+     (Discusses the land values tax as a means of social readjustment,
+     and compares it with other programs.)
+
+
+The writer of this book has been watching the social process for twenty
+years, trying to figure out one thing--how the change from competition
+to co-operation can be brought about with the minimum of human waste. He
+has come to realize that the first step is a mental one; to get the
+people to want the change. That means that the program must be simple,
+so that the masses can understand it. As a social engineer you might
+work out a perfect plan, but find yourself helpless, because it was hard
+to explain. As illustration of what I mean, I cite the single tax, a
+theory which has a considerable hold in America, but which politically
+has been utterly ineffective.
+
+A few years ago a devoted enthusiast in Southern California, Luke North,
+started what he called the "Great Adventure" to set free the idle land.
+In the campaign of 1918 I gave my help to this movement, and when it
+failed I went back and took stock, and revised my conclusions concerning
+the single tax. Theoretically the movement has a considerable percentage
+of right on its side. Land, in the sense that single taxers use it,
+meaning all the natural sources of wealth, is certainly an important
+basis of exploitation, and if you were to tax land values to the full
+extent, you would abolish a large portion of privilege--just how large
+would be hard to figure. I was perfectly willing to begin with that
+portion, so I helped with the "Great Adventure." But a practical test
+convinced me that it could never persuade a majority of the people.
+
+The single tax proposal is to abolish all taxes except the tax on land
+values. Then come the associations of the bankers and merchants and real
+estate speculators, crying in outraged horror, "What? You propose to let
+the rich man's stocks and bonds go free? You propose to put no tax on
+his cash in the vaults and on his wife's jewels? You propose to abolish
+the income tax and the inheritance tax, and put all the costs of
+government on the poor man's lot?"
+
+Now, of course, I know perfectly well that the rich man dodges most of
+his income tax and most of his inheritance tax. I know that he pays a
+nominal pittance on his cash in the bank and on his wife's jewels, and
+likewise on his stocks and bonds. I know that the corporations issuing
+these stocks and bonds would be far more heavily hit by a tax on the
+natural resources they own; they could not evade this tax, and they know
+it, and that is why they are moved to such deep concern for the fate of
+the poor man and his lot. I know that the tax on the poor man's lot
+would be infinitesimal in comparison with the tax on the great
+corporation. But how can I explain all this to the poor man? To
+understand it requires a knowledge of the complexities of our economic
+system which the voters simply have not got.
+
+How much easier to take the bankers and speculators at their word! To
+answer, "All right, gentlemen, since you like the income and inheritance
+taxes, the taxes on stocks and bonds and money and jewels, we will leave
+these taxes standing. Likewise, we assent to your proposition that the
+poor man should not pay taxes on his lot, while there are rich men and
+corporations in our state holding twenty million acres of land out of
+use for purposes of speculation. We will therefore arrange a land values
+tax on a graduated basis, after the plan of the income tax; we will
+allow one or two thousand dollars' worth of land exempt from all
+taxation, provided it is used by the owner; and we will put a graduated
+tax on all individuals and corporations owning a greater quantity of
+land, so that in the case of individuals and corporations owning more
+than ten thousand dollars' worth of land, we will take the full rental
+value, and thus force all idle land into the market."
+
+Now, the provision above outlined would have spiked every single
+argument used by the opposition to the "Great Adventure" in California
+in 1918; it would have made the real intent of the measure so plain as
+to win automatically the additional votes needed to carry the election.
+But I tried for three years, without being able to persuade a single one
+of the "Great Adventure" leaders to recognize this plain fact. The
+single taxer has his formula, the land values tax and no other tax, and
+all else is heresy. Actually, the president of a big single tax
+organization in the East declared that by the advocacy of my idea I had
+"betrayed the single tax!" We may take this as an illustration of the
+difference between dogmatism and science in the strategy of the class
+struggle.
+
+I first suggested my program immediately after the war, with the
+provision that the land thrown on the market should be purchased by the
+state, and used to establish co-operative agricultural colonies for the
+benefit of returned soldiers. But we have preferred to have our returned
+soldiers stay without work, or to displace the men and women who had
+been gallantly "doing their bit." By this means we soon had five million
+men out of work, and many other millions bitterly discontented with
+their wages. Again I took up the proposition for a graduated land tax,
+with the suggestion that the money should be used to provide a pension,
+first for every dependent man or woman over sixty years of age in the
+country, and second for every child in the country whose parents were
+unable properly to support it, whether because they were dead or sick or
+unemployed.
+
+You may note that in advocating this program, you would not have to
+convert anybody to any foreign theories, nor would you have to use any
+long words; you would not have to say anything against the constitution,
+nor to break any law, nor to give occasion for patriotic mobs to tar and
+feather you. To every poor man in your state you could say, "If you own
+your own house and lot, this bill will lift the taxes from both, and
+therefore it will mean fifty or a hundred dollars a year in your pocket.
+If you do not own a home, it will take millions of idle acres out of the
+hands of the speculators, and break the price of real estate, so that
+you can have either a lot in the city or a farm in the country with
+ease."
+
+Furthermore, you could say, "This measure will have the effect of
+drawing the unemployed from the cities at once, and so stopping the
+downward course of wages. At the same time that wages hold firm, the
+cost of food will go down, because there will be millions more men
+working on the land. In addition to that, the state will have an
+enormous income, many millions of dollars a year, taken exclusively from
+those who are owning and not producing. This money will be expended in
+saving from suffering and humiliation the old people of the country, who
+have worked hard all their lives and have been thrown on the scrap-heap;
+also in making certain that every child in the country has food enough
+and care enough to make him into a normal and healthy human being, so
+that he can do his share of work in the world and pay his own way
+through life."
+
+I submit the above measure to those who believe that the road to social
+freedom lies by some sort of land tax. But before you take it up I
+invite you to consider whether there may not be some other way, even
+easier. There is a homely old saying to the effect that "molasses
+catches more flies than vinegar"; and I am always looking for some way
+that will get the poor what they want, without frightening the rich any
+more than necessary.
+
+I know a certain type of radical whom this question always exasperates.
+He answers that the opposition will be equally strong to any plan; the
+rich will do anything for the poor except get off their backs--and so
+on. In reply I mention that among the most ardent radicals I know are
+half a dozen millionaires; I know one woman who is worth a million, who
+pleads day and night for social revolution, while the people who work
+for her are devoted and respectful wage slaves. Herbert Spencer said
+that his idea of a tragedy was a generalization killed by a fact. I
+shall not say that the existence of millionaire Socialists and parlor
+Bolsheviks kills the theory of the class struggle, but I certainly say
+it compels us to take thought of the rich as well as of the poor in
+planning the strategy of our campaign.
+
+And manifestly, if we want to consider the rich, the very last device we
+shall use is that of a tax. Nobody likes to pay taxes; everybody agrees
+in classifying taxes with death. Each feels that he is paying more than
+his share already; each knows that the government which collects the tax
+is incompetent or worse. Stop and recall what we have proven about the
+"iron ring"; the possibilities of production latent in our society.
+Realize the bearings of this all-important fact, that we can offer to
+mankind a social revolution which will make everybody richer, instead of
+making some people poorer! Exactly how to do this is the next thing we
+have to inquire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIX
+
+THE CONTROL OF CREDIT
+
+     (Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of
+     industry, and may play in the freeing of industry.)
+
+
+How is it that the rich are becoming richer? The single taxer answers
+that it is by monopoly of the land, the natural sources of wealth; the
+Socialist answers that it is by the control of the machinery of
+production. But if you go among the rich and make inquiry, you speedily
+learn that these factors, large as they are, amount to little in
+comparison with another factor, the control of credit. There are hosts
+of little capitalists and business men who deal in land and produce
+goods with machinery, but the men who make the real fortunes and
+dominate the modern world are those who control credit, and whose
+business is, not the production of anything, but speculation and the
+manipulation of markets.
+
+"Money makes the mare go," our ancestors used to say; and money today
+determines the destiny of empires. What is money? We think of it as gold
+and silver coins, and pieces of engraved paper promising to pay gold and
+silver coins. But the report of the U. S. Comptroller of the Currency
+for 1919 shows that the business of the country was done, 5% by such
+means and 95 % by checks; so, for practical purposes, we may say that
+money consists of men's willingness to trust other men, or groups or
+organizations of men, when they make written promise to pay. In other
+words, money is credit; and the control of credit means the control of
+industry. The problem of social readjustment is mainly but the problem
+of taking the control of credit out of the hands of private individuals,
+and making it a public or social function.
+
+Who controls credit today? The bankers. And how do they control it? We
+give it to them; we, the masses of the people, who take them our money
+and leave it with them. A very little real money in hand becomes, under
+our banking system, the basis of a great amount of imaginary money. The
+Federal Reserve law requires that banks shall hold in reserve from
+seven to thirteen per cent of demand deposits; which means, in
+substance, that when you leave a dollar with a banker, the banker is
+allowed, under the law, to turn that dollar into anywhere from seven to
+thirteen dollars, and lend those dollars out. In addition, he deposits
+his reserves with the Federal Reserve bank, and that bank keeps only
+thirty-five per cent in reserve--in other words, the seven to thirteen
+imaginary dollars are multiplied again by three.
+
+Under the stress of war, this process of credit inflation has been
+growing like the genii let out of the bottle. Under the law, the Federal
+Reserve banks are supposed to hold a gold reserve of 40% to secure our
+currency. But in December, 1919, these banks held a trifle over a
+billion dollars' worth of gold, while our paper money was over four
+billion. In addition, our banks have over thirty-three billions of
+deposits, and all these are supposed to be secured by gold; in addition,
+there are twenty-five billions of government bonds, and uncounted
+billions of private notes, bonds and accounts, all supposed to be
+payable in gold. So it appears that about one per cent of our
+outstanding money is real, and the rest is imaginary--that is, it is
+credit.
+
+The point for you to get clear is this: The great mass of this imaginary
+money is created by law, and we have the power to abolish it or to
+change the ownership of it at any time we develop the necessary
+intelligence. Let us consider the ordinary paper money, the one and two
+and five and ten dollar "bills," with which we plain people do most of
+our business. These are Federal Reserve notes, and there are about three
+billions of them; how do they come to be? Why, we grant to the national
+banks by law the right to make this money; the government prints it for
+them, and they put it into circulation. And what does it cost them? They
+pay one per cent for the use of the money; in some cases they pay only
+one-half of one per cent; and then they lend it to us, the people--and
+what do they charge us? The answer is available in a recent report of
+the U. S. Comptroller of the Currency, as follows:
+
+"I have the record of the loans made by one Texas national bank to a
+hard-working woman who owned a little farm a few miles from town. She
+borrowed, in the aggregate, $2,375, making about thirty loans during the
+year. Listen to the details of the robbery: $162.50 for 30 days at 36
+per cent; $377. for 34 days at 44 per cent; $620.25 for 23 days at 77
+per cent; $11. for 30 days at 120 per cent; $21.50 for 30 days at 90
+per cent; $33. for 2 days at 93 per cent; $27. for 15 days at 195 per
+cent; $110. for 30 days at 120 per cent--that was to buy a horse for her
+plowing; $20 for 48 days at 187 per cent; $6 for 10 days at 720 per
+cent; $7 for 3 days at 2,000 per cent, and so on; every cent paid off by
+what sweat and struggle only God knows."
+
+In Oklahoma, where the legal rate of interest is six per cent, with ten
+per cent as the maximum under special contract, harassed farmers paid
+all the way from 12 to 2400 per cent, with 40 per cent as the average.
+In the case of one bank, the Comptroller proved that not a single
+solitary loan had been made under fifteen per cent. He cited one
+particular case that he asked to be regarded as typical. In the spring
+the farmer went to the bank and arranged for a loan of $200. Out of his
+necessity he was compelled to pay 55 per cent interest charge. Unable to
+meet the note at maturity, he had to agree to 100 per cent interest in
+order to get the renewal. The next renewal forced him up to 125 per
+cent. For four years the thing went on, and all the drudgery of the
+father and the mother and the six children could never keep down the
+terrible interest or wipe out the principal. As a finish the bank
+swooped down and sold him out; the wretched man, barefoot and hungry,
+went to work clearing a swamp, caught pneumonia and died; the county
+buried him, and neighbors raised a purse to send the widow and children
+back to friends in Arkansas.
+
+This is the thing called the Money Trust in action, and this is the
+power we have to take out of private control. It is our first job, and
+all other jobs are in comparison hardly worth mentioning. How are we
+going to do it?
+
+The farmers of North Dakota have shown one way. They took the control of
+their state government into their own hands, and the most important and
+significant thing they did was to start a public bank. The interests
+fought them tooth and nail; not merely the interests of North Dakota,
+not merely of the Northwest, but of the entire United States. They
+fought them in the law courts, up to the United States Supreme Court,
+which decided in favor of the people of North Dakota. Therefore, make
+note of this vital fact--the most important single fact in the strategy
+of the class struggle--every state can, under the constitution, have a
+public bank; every city and town can have one, and no court can ever
+forbid it!
+
+Therefore, I say to all Socialists, labor men and social reformers of
+every shade and variety, nail at the top of your program of action the
+demand for a public bank in your community, to take the control of
+credit out of the hands of speculators and use it for the welfare of the
+people. Make it your first provision that every dollar of public money
+shall be deposited in this bank and every detail of public financing
+handled by this bank; make it your second provision that the purpose of
+this bank shall be to put all private banks out of business, and take
+over their power for the people.
+
+At present, you understand, it is taken for granted that the first
+purpose of the government is to foster the private credit system. Take,
+for example, the postal savings bank. The private banks fought this for
+a generation, and finally they allowed us to have it, on condition that
+it should be turned into a device for collecting money for them. Our
+postal bank turns over all its money to the private banks, at the
+grotesque rate of two per cent interest; and recently I read of the
+director of the postal bank appearing before a convention of bankers,
+asking for some small favor, and humbly explaining that it was not his
+idea to make the postal bank a rival of the private savings banks. Why
+should he not do so? Let us nail it to our radical program that the
+postal savings bank is to fight for business, just as do the private
+banks, and lend its funds direct to the people on good security.
+
+Let our Federal banking system also become the servant of the public
+welfare, and let its energy be devoted to breaking the strangle-hold of
+predatory finance on our industry. Let the government issue all money,
+and use it for the transfer of industry from private into public hands.
+Do we want to socialize our railroads, our coal mines, our telegraphs
+and telephones? Do we want to buy them, in order to avoid the wastes of
+civil war and insurrection? We have agreed that we do; and here we have
+the way of doing it. If the bankers can create, out of our willingness
+to trust them, billions upon billions of imaginary money, then so can
+we, the people of the United States, create money out of our willingness
+to trust ourselves. And do not let anybody fool you for a single second
+by talking about "fiat money" and "inflation of the currency." If you
+are paying twice as much for everything as you did before the war, you
+are paying it because the bankers have doubled the amount of money in
+circulation--for that reason and that alone. That double money the
+bankers own; the only question now to be decided is, who is to own the
+double money that will be created tomorrow?
+
+Make note of the fact that it costs nothing to start a public bank. If
+you want to put the steel trust out of business by competition, you have
+several hundred thousand dollars worth of rolling mills and ore land to
+buy; but the banks can be put out of business by nothing but a law. The
+material parts of a bank, the white marble columns and bronze railings
+and mahogany trimmings, are as nothing compared with the inner soul of a
+bank, its control of the life-blood of your business and mine; and this
+we can have for the taking. We can keep our own "credit"; instead of
+sending it to Wall Street, where speculators use it to bleed us white,
+we can set it to building up our own community, under the direction of
+officials whom we select. Also, we can have our gigantic national bank,
+controlling all our thirty-three billions of dollars of deposits, and
+likewise the hundreds of billions of credit built upon them.
+
+The first time you suggest this plan to a banker or business man, you
+will be told that increase of money by the government does not benefit
+labor or the general consumer; "inflation of the currency" causes prices
+to go up correspondingly. To this I will furnish an effective reply:
+that at the same time the government issues new money, the government
+will also fix prices; and then watch the face of your banker or business
+man! If he is a man who can really think, and is not just repeating like
+a parrot the formulas he has learned from others, he will perceive that
+the combination of currency inflation and price-fixing would catch him
+as the two parts of a nut-cracker catch a nut; and he will know that you
+can take the meat out of him any time you please. He may argue that it
+is not fair; but point out to him that it is exactly what the big banks
+and the trusts have been doing to us right along--increasing the amount
+of money in circulation, and at the same time raising the prices we pay
+for goods, and so taking out the meat from us nuts!
+
+We have agreed that we do not mean to be unfair either to the banker or
+the manufacturer; we are simply going to stop their being unfair to us.
+We are going to convince them that their power to catch us in a
+nut-cracker is forever at an end. We allow them six per cent on their
+investments, and guarantee them this by turning over to them some of our
+new money--that is, government bonds. When we have thoroughly convinced
+them that they can't get any more, they will take these bonds and quit;
+and thus simply, without violence or destruction of property, we shall
+slide from our present system of commercial cannibalism into the new
+co-operative commonwealth.
+
+We have had "cheap money" campaigns in the United States many times, and
+as this book is written, it becomes evident that we are to have another.
+Henry Ford is advocating the idea, and so is Thomas A. Edison. The
+present writer would like to make plain that in supporting such a
+program, he does it for one purpose, and one only--the taking over of
+the industries by the community. The creation of state credit for that
+purpose is the next step in the progress of human society; whereas the
+creation of state credit for the continuance of the profit system is a
+piece of futility amounting to imbecility. This distinction is
+fundamental, and is the test by which to judge the usefulness of any new
+program, and the intelligence of those who advocate it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXX
+
+THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY
+
+     (Discusses various programs for the change from industrial
+     autocracy to industrial democracy.)
+
+
+The program of the railway workers for the democratic management of
+their industry is embodied in the Plumb plan. You may learn about it by
+addressing the weekly paper of the railway brotherhoods, which is called
+"Labor," and is published in Washington, D. C. It appears that our
+transportation industry can be at once socialized, because of a clause
+in the constitution which gives the national government power over
+"roads and communications." Through decades of mismanagement under the
+system of private greed, the railroads have been brought to such a
+financial condition that they will be forced into nationalization,
+whenever we stop them from dipping their fingers into the public
+treasury.
+
+Under the Plumb plan the government is to purchase the roads from their
+present owners, paying with government bonds. The management is to be
+under the control of a board consisting in part of representatives of
+the government, and in part of the workers--this being a combination of
+the methods of Socialism and Syndicalism. The same program can be
+applied constitutionally to telegraphs and telephones, to interstate
+trolley systems, express companies, oil pipe lines, and all other means
+of interstate communication and distribution.
+
+The Plumb plan also deals with coal and steel and other great
+industries. These could not be nationalized without a constitutional
+amendment, but it appears that in the majority of the constitutions of
+the states are provisions that all corporate charters are held subject
+to the power of the legislature to amend, modify, or revoke the same.
+That gives us a right to take over these corporations through state
+action. The only preliminary is to elect state administrations which
+will represent us, instead of representing the corporations. Also, most
+state constitutions contain the provision that "no corporation shall
+issue its stocks or bonds, except for money, labor, or property actually
+received." The word "labor" gives the opening wedge for the Plumb plan.
+The state can purchase these industries, giving bonds in exchange, and
+can issue to the workers labor stock, which stock will carry part
+control of the industry.
+
+Also, the railroad brotherhoods have started their own bank, in
+Cleveland, Ohio, and it is proving an enormous success. Make note of
+this point; every large labor union can have its own bank, to finance
+its industries and its propaganda. Stop and consider how preposterous it
+is that the five million organized workers of the United States should
+deposit their hundreds of millions of savings in capitalist banks, to be
+used to finance private undertakings which crush unions and hold labor
+in bondage. Let every big labor union have its own building, its own
+banking and insurance business, its own vacation camp in the country,
+its own school for training its future leaders. Also, let every labor
+council in every big city start a labor daily, to tell the workers the
+truth and point the way to freedom. Let every farmers' organization
+follow suit; and let these groups get together, to exchange their
+products upon a co-operative basis. Already the railway men are
+arranging with the farmers, to buy the farm products and distribute them
+co-operatively; they are getting together with the clothing workers, to
+have the latter make clothing for them, and with the shoe-workers to
+make shoes.
+
+This is the co-operative movement, which has become the largest single
+industry in Great Britain, and is the backbone of industrial democracy
+and sound radicalism. It is spreading rapidly in America now. It is
+taking the money of the people out of the control of the profit system,
+and diverting it into channels of public service. It is training men to
+believe in brotherhood instead of in greed. It is giving them business
+experience, so that when the time comes the taking over of our
+industrial machine will not have to be done by amateurs, but by men who
+know what co-operation is, and how to make a success of it.
+
+This work will go on more rapidly yet when the workers have united
+politically, and brought into power a government which will assist them
+instead of assisting the bankers. A most interesting program for the
+development of working-class financial credit is known as the "Douglas
+plan," which is advocated by a London weekly, the "New Age," and is
+explained in two books, called "Economic Democracy" and "Credit Power
+and Democracy," by Douglas and Orage. This program is in brief that the
+furnishing of credit shall become a function of organized labor, based
+upon the fact that the true and ultimate basis of all credit is the
+power of hand and brain labor to produce wealth. The labor unions, or
+"guilds," shall pay the management of industry and pay capital for the
+use of the industrial plant, and shall finance production and new
+industrial development out of their "credit power," their ability to
+promise production and to keep their promises.
+
+This "Douglas plan" seeks to break the Money Trust by the method of
+Syndicalism. Another method of breaking it, through state regulation of
+bank loans, you will find most completely set forth in an extremely able
+book, "The Strangle Hold," by H. C. Cutting, an American business man,
+whom you may address at San Lorenzo, California. Another method,
+utilizing the third factor in industry, the consumer, is the method of
+banking by consumers' unions. Such are the Raffeisen banks, widely known
+in Germany, and a specimen of which exists in the single tax colony at
+Arden, Delaware. Those who wish to know about the co-operative bank, or
+other forms of co-operation, may apply to the Co-operative League of
+America, 2 West 13th Street, New York, whose president is Dr. James P.
+Warbasse. Information concerning public ownership may be had from the
+Public Ownership League, 127 N. Dearborn Street, Chicago; also from the
+Socialist party, 220 South Ashland Boulevard, Chicago, and from the
+Bureau of Social Research of the Rand School of Social Science, New
+York.
+
+Also, I ought to mention the very interesting plan for social
+reconstruction set forth by Mr. King C. Gillette, inventor of the safety
+razor. This plan you may find in your public library in two encyclopedic
+volumes, "Gillette's Social Redemption," and "Gillette's World
+Solution." The politician seeks to solve the industrial problem by means
+of the state, and the labor leader seeks to solve it by the unions; it
+is to be expected that Mr. Gillette, a capitalist, should seek to solve
+it by means of the corporation. He points out that the modern "trust" is
+the greatest instrument of production yet invented by man; and he asks
+why the people should not form their own "trust," to handle their own
+affairs, and to purchase and take over the industries from their present
+private masters. It is interesting to note that Mr. Gillette's solution
+is fully as radical and thorough-going as those of the State Socialists
+or the Syndicalists. The "People's Corporation" which he projects and
+plans some day to launch upon the world would be a gigantic "consumers'
+union," whose "credit power" would speedily dominate and absorb all
+other powers in modern society; it would make us all stockholders, and
+give us our share of the benefits of social productivity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXI
+
+THE NEW WORLD
+
+     (Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning with its money
+     aspects; the standard wage and its variations.)
+
+
+It has been indicated that the new society will be different in
+different countries and in different parts of the same country, in
+different industries and at different times. No one can predict exactly
+what it will be, and anyone who tries to predict is unscientific. But
+every man can work out his own ideas of the most economical and sensible
+arrangements for a co-operative society, and in these final chapters I
+set forth my ideas.
+
+One of the first things people ask is, "Will there be money in the new
+society, or how will labor be rewarded and goods paid for?" I answer
+that there will be money, and the business methods of the new society
+will be so nearly the same as at present that in this respect you would
+hardly realize there had been any change. The only difference will be
+that in the new society you will be paid several times as much for your
+labor; or, if you prefer to put it the other way, you will be able to
+buy several times as much with your money. Why should we waste our time
+working out systems of "credit-cards," when we already have a system in
+the form of gold and silver coins and paper currency? Why should we
+bother with "labor checks," when we have a banking and clearing-house
+system, understood by everyone but the illiterate? The only difference
+we shall make is that nobody can get gold and silver coins or paper
+currency, except by performing labor to pay for them; nobody can have
+money in the bank and draw checks against it, until he has rendered to
+society an equivalent amount of service.
+
+When you have earned your money in the new world, you will spend it
+wherever you please, and for whatever you please; the only difference
+being that the price you pay will be the exact labor-cost of producing
+that article, with no deduction for any form of exploitation. As I wrote
+sixteen years ago in "The Industrial Republic," you will be able to get,
+if you insist upon it, a seven-legged spider made of diamonds, and the
+only question society will ask is, Have you performed services
+equivalent to the material and labor necessary to the creating of that
+unusual article of commerce? Of course, society won't put it to you in
+that complicated formula; it will simply ask, "Have you got the price?"
+Which, you observe, is exactly the question society asks you at present.
+
+The next thing that everybody wants to know is, "Shall we all be paid
+the same wages?" I answer, yes and no, because there will be three
+systems of payment. There will be a basic wage, which everybody will get
+for every kind of useful service necessary to production; this will be,
+as it were, the foundation of our economic structure. On top of this
+will be built a system of special payments for special services, which
+are of an intellectual nature, and cannot be standardized and dealt with
+wholesale. In addition, there will be for a time a third arrangement,
+applying to agricultural work, which is in a different stage of
+development, and to which different conditions apply.
+
+Let us take, first, our standard wage. The census of our Utopian
+commonwealth reveals that we have ten million able-bodied workers
+engaged in mining, manufacturing, and transportation; this including, of
+course, office-work and management--everything that enters into these
+industries. By scientific management, the best machinery, and the
+elimination of all possible waste, we find that they produce eighty
+million dollars worth of goods an hour. A portion of this we have to set
+aside to pay for the raw materials which they do not produce, and for
+the upkeep of the plant, and for margin of error--what our great
+corporations call a surplus. We find that we have fifty million dollars
+per hour left, and that means that we can pay for labor five dollars per
+hour, or twenty dollars for the regular four-hour day. This is our
+standard wage, received by all able-bodied workers.
+
+But quickly we find that our industries are not properly balanced. A
+great many men want to work at the jobs which are clean and pleasant,
+such as delivering mail, and very few want to work at washing dishes in
+restaurants and cleaning the sewers. There is no way we can adjust this,
+except by paying a higher wage, or by reducing the number of hours in
+the working day, which is the same thing. The only other method would be
+to have the state assign men to their work, and that would be
+bureaucracy and slavery, the essence of everything we wish to get away
+from in our co-operative commonwealth.
+
+What we shall have, so far as concerns our basic industries, is a
+government department, registering with mathematical accuracy the
+condition of supply and demand in all the industries of the country. Our
+demand for shoes is increasing, for some reason or other; a thousand
+more shoe-workers are needed, therefore the price of labor in the shoe
+industry is increased five cents per day--or whatever amount will draw
+that number of workers from other occupations. On the other hand, there
+are too many people applying for the job of driving trucks, therefore we
+reduce slightly the compensation for this work. There are more men who
+want jobs in Southern California than in Alaska, therefore the payment
+for the same grade of work in Alaska has to be higher. All this is not
+merely speculation, it is not a matter of anybody's choice; it is an
+automatic, self-adjusting system, subject to precise calculations. The
+only change from our present system is from guesswork to exact
+measurement. At present we do not know how many shoes our country will
+require next season, neither do we know how many shoes are going to be
+made, neither do we know how many people can make shoes, nor how many
+would like to learn, nor how many would like to quit that job and take
+to farming. It would be the simplest matter in the world to find out
+these things--far simpler that it was to register all our possible
+soldiers, and examine them physically and mentally, and train them and
+feed them and ship them overseas to "can the Kaiser."
+
+Of course, we drafted the men for this war job; but in the new world
+nobody is drafted for anything. It is any man's privilege to starve if
+he feels like it; it is his privilege to go out into the mountains and
+live on nuts and berries if he can find them. Nobody makes him go
+anywhere, or makes him work at anything--unless, of course, he is a
+convicted criminal. To the free citizen all that society has to say is,
+if he buys any products, he must pay for those products with his own
+labor, and not with some other man's labor. Of course, he may steal, or
+cheat, as under capitalism; our new world has laws against stealing and
+cheating, and does its best to enforce them. The difference between the
+capitalist world and our world is merely that we make it impossible for
+any man to get money _legally_ without working.
+
+Under these conditions the average man wishes to work, and the only
+question remaining is, how shall he work? If he wants to work by
+himself, and in his own way, nobody objects to it. He is able to buy
+anything he pleases, whether raw materials or finished products. If he
+wants to buy leather and make shoes after his own pattern, no one stops
+him, and if he can find anyone to buy these shoes, he can earn his
+living in that way. He is able to get land for as long a time as he
+wants it, by paying to the state the full rental value of that land, and
+if he wants to farm the land, he can do so, and sell his products. As a
+matter of theory, he is perfectly free to hire others to farm the land
+for him, or with him. There is no law to prevent it, neither is there
+any law to prevent his renting a factory and buying machinery, and
+hiring labor to make shoes.
+
+But, as a matter of practical fact, it is impossible for him to do this,
+because the community is in the business of making shoes, and on an
+enormous scale, with great factories run democratically by the workers,
+and there is very small chance of any private business man being able to
+draw the workers away from these factories. The community factories have
+all the latest machinery; they apply the latest methods of scientific
+management, and they turn out standard shoes at such a rate that private
+competition is unthinkable. Of course, there may be some special kind of
+shoes, involving an intellectual element, in which there can be private
+competition. This kind of manufacture is covered in our second method of
+payment; but before we discuss it, let us settle the problem of our most
+important basic industry, which is agriculture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXII
+
+AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION
+
+     (Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster
+     co-operative farming and co-operative homes.)
+
+
+Farming the land is a very ancient industry, and while its tools have
+been improved, its social forms have been the same for a long time. The
+worker on the land is conservative, and the Russian Bolsheviks, who
+tried to rush their peasants into Communism, found that they had only
+succeeded in stopping the production of food. We make no such blunder in
+our new society. We have found a way to abolish speculation in land, and
+exploitation based on land-ownership, while leaving the farmer free to
+run his business in the old way if he wants to.
+
+In our new society we take the full rental value of all land which is
+not occupied and used by the state. The farmer and the city dweller
+alike "own" their land, in the sense that they have the use of it for as
+long as they please, but they pay to the state the rental value of the
+land, minus the improvements. So they cannot speculate in the land or
+rent it out to others; they can only use it, and they only pay for what
+they actually use. They may put improvements on the land, with full
+assurance of having the use and benefit thereof, and they may sell the
+improvements, and the new owner enters into possession, with no
+obligation but to pay the rental value of the unimproved land to the
+state.
+
+The farmer goes on raising his products, and if he wants to drive to
+town and deliver them to his customers, he may do so; but he finds it
+cheaper to market them through the great labor co-operatives and state
+markets. As there is no longer any private interest involved in these
+activities, no one has any interest in cheating him, and he gets the
+full value of the products, less the cost of marketing. If the farmer
+wishes to continue all his life in his old style individualistic method
+of working the land, he is free to do so. But here is what he sees going
+on within a few miles of his place:
+
+The state has bought a square mile of land, and has taken down the
+fences and established an agricultural co-operative for purposes of
+experiment and demonstration. The farm is run under the direction of
+experts; the soils are treated with exactly the right fertilizers for
+each crop, the best paying crops are raised, the best seed is used, and
+the best machinery. The workers of this new agricultural co-operative
+receive the standard wage, and they live in homes specially built for
+them, with all the conveniences made possible by wholesale production.
+Also, these co-operators live in a democratic community; they determine
+their own conditions of labor, being represented on the governing board,
+along with the experts appointed by the state.
+
+The farmer watches this experiment, at first with suspicion; but he
+finds that his sons have less suspicion than he has, and his sons keep
+pointing out to him that their little farm is not making the standard
+wage or anything like it; and, moreover, the standard wage is constantly
+increasing, whereas, the price of farm-products is dropping. And here is
+the state, ready to direct new co-operative ventures, inviting a score
+of farmers in the community to combine and buy out the unwilling ones,
+and establish a new co-operative. Sooner or later the old farmer gives
+way; or he dies, and his sons belong to the new world.
+
+So ultimately we have our national agricultural system, in which all the
+requirements of our people are studied, and all the possibilities of our
+soil and climate, and the job of raising the exact quantities of food
+that we need, both for our own use and for export, is worked out as one
+problem. We know how much lumber we need, and we raise it on all our
+hillsides and mountain slopes, and so protect ourselves from floods and
+the denuding of our continent. We know where best to raise our wheat,
+and where best to raise our potatoes and our cabbages, and we do not do
+this by crude hand-labor, nor by the labor of women and children from
+daybreak till dark. We have special machines that plant each crop, and
+other machines that reap it or dig it out of the ground and prepare it
+for market.
+
+A few days ago I read a discussion in the Chamber of Commerce of
+Calcutta. Some one called attention to the wastes involved in the
+current method of handling rubber. One consignment of rubber had been
+sold more than three hundred separate times, and the cost of these
+transactions amounted to three times the value of the rubber. This is
+only one illustration, and I might quote a thousand. If you doubt my
+figures as to the possibility of production in the new society, remind
+yourself that a large percentage of the things you use have been bought
+and sold many scores of times before you get them. Consider the cabbage,
+for which you pay six or eight cents a pound in the grocery store, and
+for which the farmer gets, say, half a cent a pound.
+
+In this new world the state has an enormous income, derived from its tax
+on land values. It no longer has to send around men once a year to ask
+you how many diamond rings your wife has, and to tax you on your
+honesty, if you have any. It no longer has to make its money by such
+lying devices as a tariff, therefore its moral being is no longer
+poisoned by a tariff-lobby. It taxes every citizen for the right to use
+that which nature created, and leaves free from taxation that which the
+citizens' own labor created; this kind of taxation is honest, and fair
+to all, because no one can evade it. The state uses the proceeds of this
+land tax in the public services, the libraries and research laboratories
+and information bureaus; in free insurance against fire and flood and
+tempest; and in a pension to every member of society above the working
+age of fifty-five, or below the working age of eighteen. Of course, the
+state might leave it to every man to save up for his old age, but not
+all men are this wise, and the state cannot afford to let the unwise
+ones starve. It is more convenient for the state to figure that all men,
+or nearly all, are going to be old, and to hold back some of their money
+while they are young and strong, in the certainty that when they are
+old, they will appreciate this service. Also the state takes care of the
+sick and incapacitated, and the mentally or physically defective. But we
+do not leave these latter loose in the world to reproduce their defects;
+we have in our new world some sense of responsibility to the future, and
+there is nothing to which we devote more effort than making certain that
+nothing unsound or abnormal is allowed entrance into life.
+
+The problem of the care of children is a complicated one, and our new
+society is in process of solving it. We look back on the old world in
+which the having of children was heavily taxed, in the form of an
+obligation to care for these children until they were old enough to
+work. Then the parents were allowed to exploit the labor of the
+children, so that among the very poor the raising of children was a
+business speculation, like the raising of slaves or poultry. But in our
+new world we consider the interest of the child, and of the society in
+which that child is to be a citizen. We decide that this society must
+have citizens, and that the raising of the future citizens is a work
+just exactly as necessary and useful as the raising of a crop of
+cabbages. Therefore, we pay a pension to all mothers while they are
+raising and caring for children. At the same time we assert the right to
+see that this money is wisely spent, and that the child is really cared
+for. If it is neglected, we are quick to take it away from its parents,
+and put it in one of our twenty-four-hour-a-day schools.
+
+We realize that the home is an ancient industry, even more ancient than
+agriculture, and we do not try to socialize it all at once. But just as
+we demonstrate to farmers that the individual farm does not pay, so we
+demonstrate to mothers the wastefulness of the single laundry, the
+single kitchen, the single nursery. We establish community laundries,
+community kitchens, community nurseries, and invite our women to help in
+these activities, and to learn there, under expert guidance, the
+advantages of domestic co-operation. We convince them by showing better
+results in the health and happiness of the children, and in the time and
+strength of the mothers. So, little by little, we widen the field of
+co-operative endeavor, and increase the total product of human labor and
+the total enjoyment of human life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIII
+
+INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION
+
+     (Discusses scientific, artistic and religious activities, as a
+     superstructure built upon the foundation of the standard wage.)
+
+
+Karl Kautsky, intellectual leader of the German Social-democracy, gives
+in his book, "The Social Revolution," a useful formula as to the
+organization of the future society. This formula is: "Communism in
+material production, Anarchism in intellectual production." It will
+repay us to study this statement, and see exactly what it means.
+
+Material production depends directly upon things; and as there is only a
+limited quantity of things in the world, if any one person has more than
+his share, he deprives some other person to that extent. So there have
+to be strict laws concerning the distribution of material products. But
+with intellectual things exactly the opposite is the case. There is no
+limit in quantity, and any one person can have all he wants without
+interfering with anybody else. Everybody in the world can perform a play
+by Shakespeare, or play a sonata by Beethoven, and everybody can enjoy
+it as much as he pleases without keeping other people from enjoying it
+all they please. Also, material production can be standardized; we can
+have great factories to turn out millions of boxes of matches, each
+match like every other match, and the more alike they are the better.
+But in intellectual affairs we want everyone to be different, or at
+least we want everyone to be free to be different, and if some one can
+become much better than the others, this is the most important kind of
+production in the world, for he may make over our whole intellectual and
+moral life.
+
+For the production of material things our new society has great
+factories owned in common, and run by majority vote of the workers, and
+we place the products of that factory at the disposal of all members of
+society upon equal terms. That is our "Communism in material
+production." On the other hand, in our intellectual production we leave
+everybody free to live his own life, and to associate himself with
+others of like aims, and we place as few restrictions as possible upon
+their activities. This is the method of free association, or "Anarchism
+in intellectual production."
+
+Our problem would be simple if material and intellectual production
+never had to mingle. But, as it happens, every kind of intellectual
+production requires a certain amount of material, and every kind of
+material production involves an intellectual element. Therefore, our two
+methods have to be combined, and we have a complex problem which we have
+to solve in a variety of different ways, and upon which we must
+experiment with open minds and scientific temper.
+
+First, let us take the intellectual elements involved in the production
+of purely material things, such as matches and shoes and soap. Let us
+take invention. Naturally, we do not want to go on making matches and
+shoes and soap in the same old way forever. On the contrary, we want to
+stimulate all the workers in these industries to use their wits and
+improve the processes in every possible way. The whole of society has an
+interest in this, and the soap workers have an especial interest. Our
+soap industry has an invention department, with a group of experts
+appointed by the executive committee of the national council of soap
+workers. All soap workers are taxed, say five cents a day, for the
+support of this activity. Likewise the state contributes a generous sum
+out of its income toward the work of soap research. In addition to this,
+the soap industry offers prizes and scholarships for suggestions as to
+the improvement of every detail of the work, and at meetings of every
+local of soap workers somebody makes new suggestions as to methods of
+stimulating their intellectual life--not merely as regards soap, but as
+regards citizenship, and art and literature, and human life in general.
+Our soap workers, you must understand, are no longer wage-slaves,
+brutalized by toil and poverty; they are free citizens of a free
+society. Our soap workers' local in every city has its own theatre and
+concert hall and lecture bureau, and publishes its own magazine.
+
+Every industry has its immediate intellectual problems, its trade
+journals in which these are discussed, and its research boards in which
+they are worked out. The ambitions of the young workers in that industry
+are concentrated upon getting into this intellectual part of their
+trade. Examinations are held and tests are made to discover the most
+competent men, and written suggestions are considered by boards of
+control. It is, of course, of great importance to every worker that the
+channels of promotion should be kept open, and that the man who really
+has inventive talent shall get, not merely distinction and promotion,
+but financial reward, so that he may have time and materials to continue
+his experiments.
+
+This research department, you perceive, is a sort of superstructure,
+built upon the foundation of our standard wage; and this same simile
+applies to numerous other forms of intellectual production. For example,
+our community paper mills turn out paper, and our community printers are
+prepared to turn out millions of books. How shall we determine what is
+to be the intellectual content of these material books? There are many
+different methods. First, there is the method of individualism. A man
+has something to say, and he writes a book; he works in the soap
+factory, and saves a part of his standard wage, and when he has money
+enough he orders the community printers to print his book, and the
+community booksellers to handle it for him, and the community postoffice
+to deliver it for him. Again, a group of men organize themselves into an
+association, or club, or scientific society, and publish books. The
+Authors' League takes up the work of publishing the writings of its
+members, and the Poetry Society does the same.
+
+This is the method of Anarchism, or free association. But there is no
+reason why we should not have along side it the method of Socialism;
+there is no reason why we should not have state publishing houses, just
+as we have state universities and state libraries. The state should
+certainly publish standard works of all sorts, bibles and dictionaries
+and directories, and cheap editions of the classics. In this new world
+our school boards are not chosen by business men for purposes of graft,
+they are chosen by the people to educate our children; so it seems to us
+perfectly natural that the National Educational Association should
+conduct a publication department, and order the printing of the school
+books which the children use.
+
+In the same way, anyone is free to write a play, or to put on a play,
+and invite people to come and see it. But, like the individual farmers
+and the individual mothers of families, the play-producer in our society
+is in competition with great community enterprises, which set a high
+standard and make competition difficult. The same thing applies to the
+opera, and to concerts, and to all the arts and sciences. You can start
+a private hospital if you wish, but you will be in competition with
+public institutions, and you can only succeed if you are a man of
+genius--that is, if you have something to teach, too new and startling
+for the public boards of control to recognize. You try your new method,
+and it works, and that becomes a criticism of the public boards of
+control, and before long the people by their votes turn out the old
+board of control and put you in.
+
+That is politics, you say; but we in our new world do not use the word
+politics as one of contempt. We really believe that public sentiment is
+in the long run the best authority, and the appeal to public sentiment
+is at once a social privilege and a social service. What we strive to do
+is to clear the channels of appeal, and avoid favoritism and stagnation.
+To that end we maintain, in every art and every science and every
+department of human thought, endless numbers of centers of free,
+independent, co-operative activity, so that every man who has an
+inspiration, or a new idea, can find some group to support him or can
+form a new group of his own.
+
+This is our "Anarchism in intellectual production," and it is the method
+under which in capitalist society men organize all their clubs and
+societies and churches. Devout members of the Roman Catholic Church will
+be startled to be told that theirs is an Anarchist organization; but
+nevertheless, such is the case. The Catholic Church owns a great deal of
+property, and speculates in real estate, and to that extent it is a
+capitalist institution. It holds a great many people by fear, and to
+that extent it is a feudal institution. But in so far as members of the
+church believe in it and love it and contribute of their free will to
+its support, they are organizing by the method which all Anarchists
+recommend and desire to apply to the whole of society. Anarchist clubs
+and Christian churches are both free associations for the advocacy of
+certain ideas, the only difference being in the ideas they advocate.
+
+In our new world such organizations have been multiplied many fold, and
+form a vast superstructure of intellectual activity, built upon the
+foundation of the standard wage. In this new world all the people are
+free. They are free, not merely from oppression, but from the fear of
+oppression; they have leisure and plenty, and they take part naturally
+and simply in the intellectual life. The old, of course, have not got
+over the dullness which a lifetime of drudgery impressed upon them, but
+the young are growing up in a world without classes, and in which it
+seems natural that everyone should be educated and everyone should have
+ideas. They earn their standard wage, and devote their spare time to
+some form of intellectual or artistic endeavor, and spend their spare
+money in paying writers and artists and musicians and actors to
+stimulate and entertain them.
+
+These latter are the ways of distinction in our new society; these are
+the paths to power. The only rich men in our world are the men who
+produce intellectual goods; the great artists, orators, musicians,
+actors and writers, who are free to serve or not to serve, as they see
+fit, and can therefore hold up the public for any price they care to
+charge. Just now there is eager discussion going on in our world as to
+whether it is proper for an opera singer, or a moving picture star, or a
+novelist, to make a million dollars. Our newspapers are full of
+discussions of the question whether anyone can make a million dollars
+honestly, and whether men of genius should exploit their public. Some
+point out that our most eminent opera singer spends his millions in
+endowing a conservatory of art; but others maintain that it would be
+better if he lowered his prices of admission, and let the public use its
+money in its own way. The extremists are busy founding what they call
+the Ten-cent Society, whose members agree to boycott all singers and
+actors who charge more than ten cents admission, and all moving picture
+stars who receive more than a hundred thousand dollars a year for their
+service. These "Ten-centers" do not object to paying the money, but they
+object to the commercializing of art, and declare especially that the
+moral effect of riches is such that no rich person should ever, under
+any circumstances, be allowed to influence the youth of the nation. In
+this some of the greatest writers join them, and renounce their
+copyrights, and agree to accept a laureateship from some union of
+workers, who pay them a generous stipend for the joy and honor of being
+associated with their names. The greatest poet of our time began life as
+a newsboy, and so the National Newsvenders' Society has adopted him, and
+taken his name, and pays him ten thousand dollars a year for the
+privilege of publishing his works.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIV
+
+MANKIND REMADE
+
+     (Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what happens to
+     these in the new world.)
+
+
+We have briefly sketched the economic arrangements of the co-operative
+commonwealth. Let us now consider what are the effects of these
+arrangements upon the principal social diseases of capitalism.
+
+The first and most dreadful of capitalism's diseases is war, and the
+economic changes here outlined have placed war, along with piracy and
+slavery, among the half-forgotten nightmares of history. We have broken
+the "iron ring," and are no longer dependent upon foreign concessions
+and foreign markets for the preservation of our social system and the
+aggrandizement of a ruling class. We can stay quietly at home and do our
+own work, and as we produce nearly everything we need, we no longer have
+to threaten our neighbors. Our neighbors know this, and therefore they
+do not arm against us, and we have no pretext to arm against them. We
+take toward all other civilized nations the attitude which we have taken
+toward Canada for the past hundred years.
+
+We have a small and highly trained army, a few regiments of which are
+located at strategic points over the country. This army we regard and
+use as we do our fire department. When there is widespread damage by
+fire or flood or storm or earthquake, we rush the army to the spot to
+attend to the work of rescue and rebuilding. Also, we have a small navy
+in international service; for, of course, we are no longer an
+independent and self-centered nation; we have come to realize that we
+are part of the world community, and have taken our place as one state
+in the International Socialist Federation. We send our delegates to the
+world parliament, and we place our resources at the disposal of the
+world government. However, it now takes but a small army and navy to
+preserve order in the world. We govern the backward nations, but the
+economic arrangements of the world are such that we are no longer driven
+to exploit and oppress them. We send them teachers instead of soldiers,
+and as there are really very few people in the world who fight for the
+love of fighting, we have little difficulty in preserving peace. We pay
+the backward peoples a fair price for their products which we need. Our
+world government takes no money out of these countries, but spends it
+for the benefit of those who live in the countries, to teach them and
+train their young generations for self-government.
+
+Next, what are the effects of our new arrangements upon political
+corruption and graft? The social revolution has broken the prestige of
+wealth. Money will buy things, but it no longer buys power, the right to
+rule other men; it no longer buys men's admiration. Everybody now has
+money, and nobody is any longer afraid of starvation. It is no longer
+the fashion to save money--any more than it is the fashion to carry
+revolvers in drawing-rooms or to wear chain mail in place of
+underclothing. So our political life is cleansed of the money influence.
+People now get power by persuading their fellows, not by buying them or
+threatening them. The world is no longer full of men ravenous for jobs,
+and ready to sell their soul for a "position." So it is no longer
+possible to build up a "machine" based on desire for office.
+
+The changes have resulted in an enormous intensification of our
+political activities. We have endless meetings and debates; we have so
+many propaganda societies that we cannot keep track of them. And some of
+these societies, like the Catholic Church, have a large membership, and
+large sums of money at their disposal. But a few experiments at carrying
+elections by a "campaign-chest" have convinced everybody that to have
+the facts on your side is the only permanent way to political power. Our
+new society is jealous of attempts to establish any sort of ruling
+class, and the surest way to discredit yourself is to advocate any form
+of barrier against freedom of discussion, or the right of the people's
+will to prevail.
+
+Next, what is the status of crime? We have too recently escaped from
+capitalism to have been able to civilize entirely our slum population,
+and we still have occasional crimes of violence, especially crimes of
+passion. But we have almost entirely eliminated those classes of crime
+which had to do with property, and we have discovered that this was
+ninety-five per cent of all crime. We have eliminated them by the simple
+device of making them no longer profitable. Anybody can go into our
+community factories, and under clean and attractive working conditions,
+and without any loss of prestige or social position, can earn the means
+of satisfying his reasonable wants by three hours work a day. Almost
+everybody finds this easier than stealing or cheating.
+
+But more important yet, as a factor in abolishing crime, is the
+abolition of class domination and the prestige of wealth. We no longer
+have in our community a ruling class which lives without working, and
+which offers to the weak-minded and viciously inclined the perpetual
+example of luxury. We no longer set much store on jewels and fine
+raiment; we do not make costly things, except for public purposes, where
+all may enjoy them; and nobody stores great quantities of money, because
+everyone has a guarantee of security from the state. So we are gradually
+putting our policemen and jailers and judges and lawyers to constructive
+work.
+
+Next, what about disease? The diseases of poverty are entirely done away
+with. We are now able to apply the knowledge of science to the whole
+community, and so we no longer have to do with tuberculosis and typhoid,
+or with rickets and anæmia in children, or with heavy infant mortality.
+We have sterilized our unfit, the degenerates and the defectives, and so
+do not have to reckon with millions of children from these wretched
+stocks. We now give to the question of public health that prominence
+which in the old days we used to give to war and the suppression of
+crime and social protest. Our public health officers now replace our
+generals and admirals, and we really obey their orders.
+
+Next, as to prostitution. Just as in the case of crime, we are still too
+close to capitalism not to have among us the victims of social
+depravity, both men and women. We still have a great deal of vice which
+springs from untrained animal impulse, and we have some cultivated and
+highly sophisticated pornography. But we have entirely done away with
+commercial vice, and we have done it by cutting the root which nourished
+it. Women in our communities are really free; and by that we do not mean
+the empty political freedom which existed in the days of wage
+slavery--we mean that women are permanently delivered from economic
+inferiority, by the recognition on the part of the state of the money
+value of their special kind of work, the bearing and training of
+children. This kind of work not merely receives the standard wage, it
+also receives the best surgical and nursing treatment free. Housework
+and home-making are legally recognized services; and the woman before
+marriage and after her children have been nursed is free to go into the
+community factories and earn for herself the standard wage, with no loss
+of social position. Consequently, no woman sells her sex, and no man
+buys it.
+
+This does not mean, of course, that we have solved the sex problem in
+our new society. There are two great social problems with which we have
+to deal, the first of these being the sex problem, and the second the
+race problem. Our scientists are occupied with eugenics, and we are
+finding out how to guide our young people in marriage, so that our race
+may be built up, and the ravages of capitalism remedied as quickly as
+possible. Also we are trying to find out the laws of happiness and
+health in love. We are founding societies for the purpose of protecting
+love, and, as hinted in the Book of Love, we have a determined social
+struggle between two groups of women--the mother-women and the
+mistress-women--those who take love gravely, as a means of improving the
+race, and those who take it as a decoration, a form of play. Our men are
+embarrassed by having to choose between these groups, and occupy
+themselves with trying to keep the struggle from turning into civil war.
+
+Second, the race problem. Our economic changes have, of course, done
+away with some of the bitterest phases of this strife. White workingmen
+in the North no longer mob and murder negro workingmen for taking their
+jobs, and in the South our land values tax prevents the landlord from
+exploiting either white or negro labor. But our white race is still
+irresistibly bent upon preserving its integrity of blood, and the more
+far-seeing among the negroes have come to realize that there can never
+be any real happiness for them in a society where they are denied the
+higher social privileges. There is a movement for the development of a
+genuine Negro Republic in Africa, and for mass emigration. Also there is
+a proposition, soon to be settled at an election, for the dividing of
+the United States into three districts upon racial lines. First, there
+are to be, in the Far South, three or four states which are inhabited
+and governed solely by negroes, and to which white men may come only as
+temporary visitors; a large group of states in the North which are white
+states, and to which negroes may come only as visitors; and finally, a
+middle group of states, in which both whites and black are allowed to
+live, as at present, but with the proviso that no one may live there
+who takes part in any form of racial strife or agitation. This program
+gives to race-conscious negroes their own land, their own civilization,
+their own chance of self-realization; it gives to race-conscious white
+men the same opportunity; and it leaves to those who are not troubled by
+the problem, a country where black and white may dwell in quiet good
+fellowship.
+
+Finally, what has been the effect of our economic changes upon the
+purely personal vices which gave us so much trouble and unhappiness in
+the old days? What, for example, has been the effect upon vanity? You
+should see our new crop of children in our high schools! There are no
+longer any social classes among them; the rich ones do not arrive in
+private automobiles, to make the poor ones envious, and they do not
+isolate themselves in little snobbish cliques. They arrive in community
+automobiles, and all wear uniforms--one of the simple devices by which
+we repress the impulse of the young toward display of personal egotism.
+They are all full of health and happy play, and their heads are busily
+occupied with interesting ideas. Our girls are trained to thinking,
+instead of to personal adornment; they are developing their minds,
+instead of catching a rich husband by sexual charms. So we have been
+able, in a single generation of training, to make a real and appreciable
+difference in the amount of vanity and self-consciousness to be found
+among our young people.
+
+And the same thing applies to a score of other undesirable qualities,
+which, under the system of competitive commercialism, were
+overstimulated in human beings. In those old days everyone was seeking
+his own survival, and certain qualities which had survival value became
+the principal characteristics of our race. Those qualities were greed
+and persistence in acquisitiveness, cunning and subtlety, also bragging
+and self-assertiveness. In that old world people destroyed their fellows
+in order to make their own safety and power; they wasted goods in order
+to be esteemed, to preserve what they called their "social position."
+But now we have cut the roots of all these vile weeds. We have so
+adjusted the business relationships of men that we do not have to have
+hysterical religious revivals in order to keep the human factors alive
+in their hearts. We have established it as a money fact, which everyone
+quickly realizes, that it pays better to co-operate; there is more
+profit and less bother in being of service to others. So we have
+prepared a soil in which virtues grow instead of vices, and we find
+that people become decent and kindly and helpful without exhortation,
+and with no more moral effort than the average man can comfortably make.
+Of course, we have still personal vices to combat, and new virtues to
+discover and to propagate; but this has to do with the future, whereas
+we are here confining ourselves to those things which have been
+demonstrated in our new society.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Abortion, 61
+
+Abortions, 30
+
+Advertising, 163
+
+Agricultural co-operative, 206
+
+Anarchism, 210
+
+Anarchist, 89, 90
+
+Anarchy, 172
+
+Anglo-Saxon, 62, 111
+
+"Appeal to Reason", 149
+
+Aristocratic doctrine, 116
+
+Armour, 128
+
+Atherton, Gertrude, 87
+
+
+Babies, 63
+
+Bachelorhood, 52
+
+Bacon, Francis, 51
+
+Banking system, 192
+
+Bankruptcy, 162
+
+Barbarism, 124
+
+Barnum, P. T., 27
+
+Berkman, Alexander, 173
+
+Biology, 103
+
+Birth control, 61, 76
+
+Birth Control Review, 64
+
+Blatchford, Robert, 55, 161
+
+"Blind" love, 58
+
+Bolsheviks, 172
+
+Breach of promise suit, 91
+
+Brothel, 66
+
+Brothels, 31
+
+Burbank, Luther, 99
+
+Business man, 143
+
+
+Capital, 158
+
+Capitalism, 136, 168
+
+Capitalists, 142
+
+Carnegie, 168
+
+Catholic Church, 213, 216
+
+Celibacy, 51, 52, 64
+
+Chastity, 51
+
+Chattel slavery, 186
+
+Childbirths, 70
+
+Children, 70, 72, 85, 208
+
+Christianity, 115, 133
+
+"Clarion", 31
+
+Class struggle, 133, 177
+
+Clay, Henry, 186
+
+Coleridge, 85
+
+"Collier's Weekly", 122, 163
+
+Committee on Waste, 160
+
+Commune, 129
+
+Communism, 10, 170, 210
+
+Compensation, 179
+
+Competition, 108, 127
+
+Competitive wage system, 148
+
+"Complex", 49
+
+Comstock, Anthony, 20
+
+Confiscation, 179
+
+Congress, 138
+
+Contraception, 61
+
+Co-operation, 109, 199, 200
+
+Coquetry, 38
+
+Corporation, 127
+
+Courtship, 91
+
+Credit, 152, 154, 192, 200
+
+Credit-cards, 202
+
+Crime, 164, 216
+
+Culture, 62
+
+Cutting, H. C., 200
+
+
+Dances, 15
+
+Debs, Eugene V., 155
+
+Degeneration, 121
+
+"Demi-monde", 80
+
+Democratic doctrine, 115
+
+Dictatorship, 180, 183, 185
+
+Dill, James B., 25
+
+Disarmament, 157
+
+Discouragement, 164
+
+Disease, 217
+
+Divorce, 32, 93, 97
+
+Double standard, 5
+
+"Douglas plan", 199
+
+"Dumping", 152
+
+
+Economic evolution, 123
+
+Economic man, 108
+
+Emerson, 186
+
+Emulation, 112
+
+Engagements, 72
+
+England, 120, 156, 175
+
+Eugenics, 58
+
+Evolution, 122
+
+Exogamy, 105
+
+Exploitation, 181
+
+Exploiting, 148
+
+Exports, 153
+
+
+Factory system, 129
+
+Farming, 206
+
+"Favorable balance", 151
+
+Fear, 122, 164
+
+Federal Reserve Act, 154
+
+Feminist, 69
+
+Feudal stage, 124
+
+Fires, 163
+
+Foreign trade, 151
+
+"Free love", 44, 87
+
+"Free lover", 92
+
+France, 175
+
+France, Anatole, 44
+
+Freud, 104
+
+
+Gens, 9
+
+Germany, 155, 156
+
+Gillette, King C., 200
+
+Goldman, Emma, 173
+
+Gonorrhea, 30
+
+Goode, Mary J., 41
+
+Government, 166
+
+"Graft", 127, 216
+
+"Great Adventure", 188
+
+
+Hammurabi, 78
+
+"Hamon case", 26
+
+"Hard times", 144
+
+Hardy, 13
+
+Harris, Frank, 21
+
+"High life", 23
+
+Home, 42, 209
+
+Honeymoon, 56
+
+Hoover, Herbert, 160
+
+House of Commons, 137
+
+Huguenots, 134
+
+Human nature, 99
+
+Hunger, 122
+
+
+Ideals, 132
+
+Imports, 153
+
+Income tax, 143, 188
+
+Industrial evolution, 126
+
+Infant, 103
+
+Infanticide, 61
+
+Inflation, 196
+
+Inheritance tax, 188
+
+"Ingenues", 19
+
+Instinct, 57
+
+Insurance, 163
+
+Intellectual production, 211
+
+"Iron ring", 158
+
+Island, 145
+
+I. W. W., 169
+
+
+James, William, 16
+
+Jealousy, 89
+
+Jews, 127
+
+
+Kautsky, Karl, 210
+
+"King Coal", 139
+
+Kropotkin, 109, 129, 173
+
+
+Labor, 158
+
+Labor checks, 202
+
+Labor union, 199
+
+Laissez faire, 110
+
+Land tax, 190
+
+Land titles, 179
+
+Land values, 208
+
+Late marriage, 67
+
+Lecky, 6, 33
+
+Leviticus, 78
+
+Liberty motor, 164
+
+London, Jack, 62
+
+Los Angeles Times, 157
+
+Love, 34, 47, 100, 112, 218
+
+Lust, 48
+
+Luther, Martin, 129
+
+Luxury, 60
+
+
+Machinery, 149
+
+"Magic gestures", 104
+
+Magna Carta, 134
+
+Malthusian law, 108
+
+Markham, Edwin, 139
+
+Marquesas Islands, 33
+
+Marriage, 4
+
+Marriage club, 71
+
+Marriage market, 68
+
+Marx, Karl, 132, 138, 176
+
+Materialistic interpretation, 132
+
+Material production 210
+
+Maternity endowment 79
+
+Meredith, George 43
+
+"Merrie England" 161
+
+Metchnikoff, Elie 33, 46
+
+Mexico 121
+
+Middle class 176, 186
+
+Minor, Robert 173
+
+Mistress 12
+
+Money 37, 192, 202
+
+Money Trust 194
+
+Monogamy 5, 83, 90
+
+Moors 134
+
+Moralists 59
+
+Morgan 128
+
+Mother's pension 79
+
+Moving pictures 17
+
+
+Negro 218
+
+Negroes 116
+
+Neuroses 105
+
+Neurotics 103
+
+North Dakota 194
+
+North, Luke 188
+
+
+O'Brien, Frederick 10
+
+Oedipus complex 104
+
+"Open-shop" 177
+
+
+Panic 154
+
+Parasitism 74
+
+Passion 58
+
+Permanence 87
+
+Piracy 111
+
+Pity 74
+
+Plumb plan 198
+
+Political evolution 123
+
+Political revolution 125
+
+Politics 213
+
+Pornography 20
+
+Postal savings bank 195
+
+Poverty 40
+
+Primitive man 9
+
+Privilege 36
+
+Professor Sumner 122
+
+Profit system 148, 158
+
+"Progressive polygamy" 90
+
+Proletariat 142
+
+Promiscuity 87
+
+Property marriage 44
+
+Prosperity 144
+
+Prostitute 6
+
+Prostitution 4, 31, 41, 217
+
+Proudhon 179
+
+Psycho-analysis 49, 103
+
+Public bank 194
+
+Publishing 212
+
+
+Quick, Herbert 165
+
+
+Race prejudice 62
+
+Race problem 218
+
+Racial immaturity 116
+
+Raffeisen bank 200
+
+Reeve, Sidney A. 160
+
+Republic 125
+
+Research 212
+
+"Resurrection" 53
+
+Revolt 134
+
+Ricardo 108
+
+Richardson, Dorothy 26
+
+Ring 148
+
+Robinson, Dr. William, J, 21, 30, 70, 77
+
+Roman Catholic church 90
+
+"Romance" 91
+
+"Romantic" love 55
+
+Roosevelt 61
+
+Rulers 119
+
+Russia 129, 185
+
+
+Sanger, Margaret 63
+
+School of marriage 75
+
+Selection 8
+
+Sex 8
+
+Sex education 72
+
+Sex impulse 46
+
+Sex problem 218
+
+Sex urge 86
+
+Sex war 81
+
+Shelley 59, 89
+
+"She-towns" 29
+
+Shop management 168
+
+Sienkiewicz 13
+
+Sims, District Attorney 28
+
+Single tax 188
+
+Slavery 10, 126, 136
+
+"Smart set" 24
+
+Smith, Adam 108
+
+Snobbery 61
+
+Socialism, 166
+
+Social revolution, 128, 147, 175
+
+Soviets, 130, 171
+
+"Speeding up", 138
+
+Spencer, Herbert, 122
+
+Spirituality, 64
+
+Sport, 113
+
+Standard wage, 203
+
+Steel Trust, 137
+
+Stopes, Dr. Marie C., 77
+
+Strikes, 162
+
+Syndicalism, 167
+
+Syphilis, 30
+
+
+Tabu, 9
+
+Tariff, 153
+
+Taxes, 191
+
+Tennyson, 38, 120
+
+"The Brass Check", 31, 137
+
+"The Conquest of Bread", 173
+
+"The Cost of Competition", 160
+
+"The Industrial Republic", 202
+
+"The Jungle", 139
+
+"The Lady", 12
+
+"The Long Day", 26, 29
+
+"The Nature of Man", 33
+
+"The Profits of Religion", 137
+
+"The Social Revolution", 210
+
+"The Strangle Hold", 200
+
+Thompson, A. M., 31
+
+Tolstoi, 53
+
+"Totem and Taboo", 104
+
+"Triangle", 56
+
+
+Unconscious, 105
+
+Unemployment, 147
+
+
+"Vamps", 19
+
+Vanity, 219
+
+Varietism, 85
+
+Venereal disease, 30, 67, 83
+
+Voltaire, 36
+
+Voluntary Parenthood League, 64
+
+
+War, 162
+
+Wars, 155
+
+Waste, 165
+
+Wells, H. G., 89
+
+Wharton, Edith, 95
+
+"Wild oats", 6
+
+White man's burden, 117
+
+White, William Allen, 17
+
+Worker, 140
+
+Workers, 176
+
+Working class, 140
+
+Woman, 12
+
+
+"Young love", 56, 73
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR
+
+Published by the Author, Pasadena, California
+
+Trade Distributors: The Paine Book Co., Chicago, [I].
+
+
+The Brass Check
+
+A Study of American Journalism
+
+Who owns the press and why?
+
+When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda? And
+whose propaganda?
+
+Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is it
+honest material?
+
+No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the
+first time the questions are answered in a book.
+
+The first edition of this book, 23,000 copies, was sold out two weeks
+after publication. Paper could not be obtained for printing, and a
+carload of brown wrapping paper was used. The printings to date amount
+to 144,000 copies. The book is being published in Great Britain and
+colonies, and in translations in Germany, France, Holland, Norway,
+Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Hungary and Japan.
+
+     HERMANN BESSEMER, _in the "Neues Journal," Vienna_:
+
+     "Upton Sinclair deals with names, only with names, with balances,
+     with figures, with documents, a truly stunning, gigantic
+     fact-material. His book is an armored military train which with
+     rushing pistons roars through the jungle of American monsterlies,
+     whistling, roaring, shooting, chopping off with Berserker rage the
+     obscene heads of these evils. A breath-taking, clutching, frightful
+     book is 'The Brass Check.'"
+
+(=Prices of all books, unless otherwise stated, cloth $1.20, 3 copies $3,
+10 copies $9; paper 60c, 3 copies $1.50, 10 copies $4.50. All prices
+postpaid.=)
+
+
+THE BOOK OF LIFE
+
+A book of practical counsel. Volume One--Mind and Body. Discusses truth
+and its standards, and the basis of health, both mental and physical.
+Tells people how to live, in order to avoid waste and pain, and to find
+happiness and achieve progress.
+
+Volume Two--Love and Society. Discusses health in sex; love and
+marriage, chastity, monogamy, birth control, divorce. Explains modern
+economic problems, Socialism, revolution, industrial democracy, and the
+future society. Prices of volumes one and two bound in one, cloth $1.50,
+paper $1.00. Either of the two volumes separately, cloth $1.20, paper
+60c.
+
+
+THE JUNGLE
+
+This novel, first published in 1906, caused an international sensation.
+It was the best selling book in the United States for a year; also in
+Great Britain and its colonies. It was translated into seventeen
+languages, and caused an investigation by President Roosevelt, and
+action by Congress. The book has been out of print for ten years, and is
+now reprinted by the author at a lower price than when first published,
+although the cost of manufacture has since more than doubled.
+
+     "Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there
+     been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book
+     as has come to Upton Sinclair."--_New York Evening World._
+
+     "It is a book that does for modern industrial slavery what 'Uncle
+     Tom's Cabin' did for black slavery. But the work is done far better
+     and more accurately in 'The Jungle' than in 'Uncle Tom's
+     Cabin.'"--ARTHUR BRISBANE, _in the New York Evening Journal_.
+
+
+KING COAL
+
+A novel of the Colorado coal country.
+
+     "Clear, convincing, complete."--LINCOLN STEFFENS.
+
+     "I wish that every word of it could be burned deep into the heart
+     of every American."--ADOLPH GERMER.
+
+     DEBS AND THE POETS: Edited by Ruth Le Prade, with an introduction
+     by Upton Sinclair. A collection of poetry about Debs.
+
+SYLVIA: A novel of the South.
+
+SYLVIA'S MARRIAGE: A sequel. (Both in cloth only.)
+
+
+100% A STORY OF A PATRIOT
+
+Would you like to go behind the scenes and see the "invisible
+government" of your country saving you from the Bolsheviks and the Reds?
+Would you like to meet the secret agents and provocateurs of "Big
+Business," to know what they look like, how they talk and what they are
+doing to make the world safe for democracy? Several of these gentlemen
+have been haunting the home of Upton Sinclair during the past three
+years and he has had the idea of turning the tables and investigating
+the investigators. He has put one of them, Peter Gudge by name, into a
+book, together with Peter's ladyloves, and his wife, and his boss, and a
+whole group of his fellow-agents and their employers.
+
+     _From_ LOUIS UNTERMEYER, _Author of "Challenge," etc._:
+
+     "Upton Sinclair has done it again. He has loaded his Maxim (no
+     Silencer attached), taken careful aim, and--bang!--hit the bell
+     plump in the center.
+
+     "First of all, '100%' is a story; a story full of suspense, drama,
+     'heart interest,' plots, counterplots, high life, low life, humor,
+     hate and other passions--as thrilling as a W. S. Hart movie, as
+     interest-crammed as (and a darned sight more truthful than) your
+     daily newspaper."
+
+
+THEY CALL ME CARPENTER: A TALE OF THE SECOND COMING
+
+Narrates how Jesus came to Los Angeles in the year 1921, and what
+happened to Him. To be published in September, 1922.
+
+
+THE CRY FOR JUSTICE
+
+An anthology of the literature of social protest, with an introduction
+by Jack London, who calls it "this humanist Holy-book." Thirty-two
+illustrations, 891 pages. Cloth, $1.50; paper, $1.00.
+
+     "It should rank with the very noblest works of all time. You could
+     scarcely have improved on its contents--it is remarkable in variety
+     and scope. Buoyant, but never blatant, powerful and passionate, it
+     has the spirit of a challenge and a battle cry."--LOUIS UNTERMEYER.
+
+     "You have marvelously covered the whole ground. The result is a
+     book that radicals of every shade have long been waiting for. You
+     have made one that every student of the world's thought--economic,
+     philosophic, artistic--has to have."--REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN.
+
+
+THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
+
+A study of supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to
+privilege. The first investigation of this subject ever made in any
+language.
+
+     "You have put a lot of work into it and you have marshalled your
+     facts in, masterly fashion."--WILLIAM MARION REEDY.
+
+	        *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following typographical errors have been corrected by the text
+transcriber:
+
+worshiping=>worshipping
+
+changes takes place=>changes take place
+
+is an impuse=>is an impulse
+
+center of continous=>center of continuous
+
+a starvling beggar at the gates=>a starving beggar at the gates
+
+of fool nations about sex=>of fool notions about sex
+
+any personal right in contravened=>any personal right is contravened
+
+industrial evoluton=>industrial evolution
+
+to the poeple=>to the people
+
+Social revoluton=>Social revolution
+
+her hands and and feet=>her hands and her feet
+
+Liebault=>Liébault
+
+Sienkewicz's "Whirlpools"=>Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools"
+
+Magna Charta, 134=>Magna Carta, 134
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and
+Body; Vol. II Love and Society, by Upton Sinclair
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF LIFE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 38117-8.txt or 38117-8.zip *****
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+<title>
+  The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Book of Life, by Upton Sinclair.
+</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and Body;
+Vol. II Love and Society, by Upton Sinclair
+
+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 Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and Body; Vol. II Love and Society
+
+Author: Upton Sinclair
+
+Release Date: November 23, 2011 [EBook #38117]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+<p class="cb">THE BOOK OF LIFE</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter">
+<a href="images/cover_lg.jpg">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="363" height="550" alt="image of the book&#39;s cover" title="image of the book&#39;s cover" /></a>
+</p>
+
+
+<p><a name="VOLUME_I" id="VOLUME_I"></a></p>
+
+<div class="boxx">
+<h1>
+<i>The</i><br />
+<big>Book of Life</big></h1>
+
+<p class="cb"><i>By</i> UPTON SINCLAIR<br />
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<a href="#VOLUME_I">VOLUME ONE:<br />
+MIND AND BODY</a><br />
+<br />
+<a href="#VOLUME_II">VOLUME TWO:<br />
+LOVE AND SOCIETY</a><br />
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<small><span class="smcap">Upton Sinclair</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Pasadena, California</span><br /></small>
+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;<br />
+<small>WHOLESALE DISTRIBUTORS</small><br />
+<i>THE PAINE BOOK COMPANY</i><br />
+CHICAGO</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+<br />&nbsp;
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1921, 1922</span><br />
+BY<br />
+UPTON SINCLAIR<br />
+<i>All Rights Reserved.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<br />&nbsp;
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="cb">
+<i>To</i><br />
+<br />
+<span class="eng">Kate Crane Gartz</span><br />
+<br />
+in acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a<br />
+better world, and her fidelity to those<br />
+who struggle to achieve it.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" summary=""
+style="border:3px double gray;">
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#VOLUME_I">Volume I</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CONTENTS_VOL_I">Contents Volume I</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#INDEX_VOL_I">Index Volume I</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#VOLUME_II">Volume II</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CONTENTS_VOL_II">Contents Volume II</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#INDEX_VOL_II">Index Volume II</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTORY" id="INTRODUCTORY"></a>INTRODUCTORY</h2>
+
+<p>The writer of this book has been in this world some forty-two years.
+That may not seem long to some, but it is long enough to have made many
+painful mistakes, and to have learned much from them. Looking about him,
+he sees others making these same mistakes, suffering for lack of that
+same knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This being the case,
+it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus the blunders and
+the pain.</p>
+
+<p>There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year,
+asking him questions, some of them of the strangest. A man is dying of
+cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast? A man is unable to
+make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women? A
+man has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him what to
+do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little time for
+self-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to read? Many
+such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of people,
+earnest, hungry for happiness, and groping as if in a fog. The things
+they most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in the
+newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend. Of these agencies,
+the first is not entirely competent, the second is not entirely honest,
+and the third is not entirely up to date. Nor is there anywhere a book
+in which the effort has been made to give to everyday human beings the
+everyday information they need for the successful living of their lives.</p>
+
+<p>For the present book the following claims may be made. First, it is a
+modern book; its writer watches hour by hour the new achievements of the
+human mind, he reaches out for information about them, he seeks to
+adjust his own thoughts to them and to test them in his own living.
+Second, it is, or tries hard to be, a wise book; its writer is not among
+those too-ardent young radicals who leap to the conclusion that because
+many old things are stupid and tiresome, therefore everything that is
+old is to be spurned with contempt, and everything that proclaims itself
+new is to be taken at its own valuation. Third, it is an honest book;
+its writer will not pretend to know what he only guesses, and where it
+is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally, it is a kind
+book; it is not written for its author's glory, nor for his enrichment,
+but to tell you things that may be useful to you in the brief span of
+your life. It will attempt to tell you how to live, how to find health
+and happiness and success, how to work and how to play, how to eat and
+how to sleep, how to love and to marry and to care for your children,
+how to deal with your fellow men in business and politics and social
+life, how to act and how to think, what religion to believe, what art to
+enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the boys phrase it!</p>
+
+<p>There are several ways for such a book to begin. It might begin with the
+child, because we all begin that way; it might begin with love, because
+that precedes the child; it might begin with the care of the body,
+explaining that sound physical health is the basis of all right living,
+and even of right thinking; it might begin as most philosophies do, by
+defining life, discussing its origin and fundamental nature.</p>
+
+<p>The trouble with this last plan is that there are a lot of people who
+have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; they have creeds and
+catechisms which they know by heart, and if you suggest to them anything
+different, they give you a startled look and get out of your way. And
+then there is another, and in our modern world a still larger class, who
+say, "Oh, shucks! I don't go in for religion and that kind of thing."
+You offer them something that looks like a sermon, and they turn to the
+baseball page.</p>
+
+<p>Who will read this Book of Life? There will be, among others, the great
+American tired business man. He wrestles with problems and cares all
+day, and when he sits down to read in the evening, he says: "Make it
+short and snappy." There is the wife of the tired business man, the
+American perfect lady. She does most of the reading for the family; but
+she has never got down to anything fundamental in her life, and mostly
+she likes to read about exciting love affairs, which she distinguishes
+from the unexciting kind she knows by the word "romance." Then there is
+the still more tired American workingman, who has been "speeded up" all
+day under the bonus system or the piece-work system, and is apt to fall
+asleep in his chair before he finishes supper. Then there is the
+workingman's wife, who has slaved all day in the kitchen, and has a
+chance for a few minutes' intimacy with her husband before he falls
+asleep. She would like to have somebody tell her what to do for croup,
+but she is not sure that she has time to discuss the question whether
+life is worth living.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, I wonder; is there a single one among all these tired people, or
+even among the cynical people, who has not had some moment of awe when
+the thought came stabbing into his mind like a knife: "What a strange
+thing this life is! What am I anyhow? Where do I come from, and what is
+going to become of me? What do I mean, what am I here for?" I have sat
+chatting with three hoboes by a railroad track, cooking themselves a
+mulligan in an old can, and heard one of them say: "By God, it's a queer
+thing, ain't it, mate?" I have sat on the deck of a ship, looking out
+over the midnight ocean and talking with a sailor, and heard him use
+almost the identical words. It is not only in the class-room and the
+schools that the minds of men are grappling with the fundamental
+problems; in fact, it was not from the schools that the new religions
+and the great moral impulses of humanity took their origin. It was from
+lonely shepherds sitting on the hillsides, and from fishermen casting
+their nets, and from carpenters and tailors and shoemakers at their
+benches.</p>
+
+<p>Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a difference
+what you believe about life, how it comes to be, where it is going, and
+what is your place in it. Is there a heaven with a God, who watches you
+day and night, and knows every thought you think, and will some day take
+you to eternal bliss if you obey his laws? If you really believe that,
+you will try to find out about his laws, and you will be comparatively
+little concerned about the success or failure of your business. Perhaps,
+on the other hand, you have knocked about in the world and lost your
+"faith"; you have been cheated and exploited, and have set out to "get
+yours," as the phrase is; to "feather your own nest." But some gust of
+passion seizes you, and you waste your substance, you wreck your life;
+then you wonder, "Who set that trap and baited it? Am I a creature of
+blind instincts, jealousies and greeds and hates beyond my own control
+entirely? Am I a poor, feeble insect, blown about in a storm and
+smashed? Or do I make the storm, and can I in any part control it?"</p>
+
+<p>No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you may be, it will
+pay you to get such things straight: to know a little of what the wise
+men of the past have thought about them, and more especially what
+science with its new tools of knowledge may have discovered.</p>
+
+<p>The writer of this book spent nine years of his life in colleges and
+universities; also he was brought up in a church. So he knows the
+orthodox teachings, he can say that he has given to the recognized wise
+men of the world every opportunity to tell him what they know. Then,
+being dissatisfied, he went to the unrecognized teachers, the
+enthusiasts and the "cranks" of a hundred schools. Finally, he thought
+for himself; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself. As a
+result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or final truth; but
+he has what he might describe as a rough working draft, a practical
+outline, good for everyday purposes. He is going to have confidence
+enough in you, the reader, to give you the hardest part first; that is,
+to begin with the great fundamental questions. What is life, and how
+does it come to be? What does it mean, and what have we to do with it?
+Are we its masters or its slaves? What does it owe us, and what do we
+owe to it? Why is it so hard, and do we have to stand its hardness? And
+can we really know about all these matters, or will we be only guessing?
+Can we trust ourselves to think about them, or shall we be safer if we
+believe what we are told? Shall we be punished if we think wrong, and
+how shall we be punished? Shall we be rewarded if we think right, and
+will the pay be worth the trouble?</p>
+
+<p>Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the simplest
+language possible. I would avoid long words altogether, if I could; but
+some of these long words mean certain definite things, and there are no
+other words to serve the purpose. You do not refuse to engage in the
+automobile business because the carburetor and the differential are
+words of four syllables. Neither should you refuse to get yourself
+straight with the universe because it is too much trouble to go to the
+dictionary and learn that the word "phenomenon" means something else
+than a little boy who can play the piano or do long division in his
+head.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a name="CONTENTS_VOL_I" id="CONTENTS_VOL_I"></a><big>CONTENTS</big></th></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" >&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_ONE">PART ONE: THE BOOK OF THE MIND</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" >&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" colspan="2"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="1"><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">Chapter I.</a> The Nature of Life</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_003">3</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the<br />
+bounds of real truth as distinguished from phrases and<br />
+self-deception.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">Chapter II.</a> The Nature of Faith</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_008">8</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and<br />
+what we know intuitively; what is implied in the process<br />
+of thinking, and without which no thought could be.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">Chapter III.</a> The Use of Reason</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_012">12</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies<br />
+we are compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Chapter IV.</a> The Origin of Morality</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_017">17</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Compares the ways of Nature with human morality, and<br />
+tries to show how the latter came to be.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">Chapter V.</a> Nature and Man</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_021">21</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Attempts to show how man has taken control of Nature,<br />
+and is carrying on her processes and improving upon them.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">Chapter VI.</a> Man the Rebel</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_027">27</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason,<br />
+in which man finds himself, and how he can advance to<br />
+a securer condition.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">Chapter VII.</a> Making Our Morals</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_031">31</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit<br />
+human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human<br />
+reason.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">Chapter VIII.</a> The Virtue of Moderation</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_037">37</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of<br />
+means to ends, and depends upon the understanding of a<br />
+particular set of circumstances.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">Chapter IX.</a> The Choosing of Life</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_042">42</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is<br />
+best in life, and decide what we wish to make of it.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">Chapter X.</a> Myself and My Neighbor</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_050">50</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the<br />
+relative importance of our various duties.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">Chapter XI.</a> The Mind and the Body</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_053">53</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the interaction between physical and mental<br />
+things, and the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed<br />
+causes.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">Chapter XII.</a> The Mind of the Body</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_061">61</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does<br />
+to the body, and how it can be controlled and made use<br />
+of by the intelligence.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">Chapter XIII.</a> Exploring the Subconscious</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_067">67</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and<br />
+other methods by which a new universe of life has been<br />
+brought to human knowledge.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">Chapter XIV.</a> The Problem of Immortality</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_074">74</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point<br />
+of view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling<br />
+us to live forever?</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">Chapter XV.</a> The Evidence for Survival</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_081">81</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of<br />
+spiritism thus put before us.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">Chapter XVI.</a> The Powers of the Mind</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_091">91</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance<br />
+is slavery, and what science means to the people.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">Chapter XVII.</a> The Conduct of the Mind</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_098">98</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to<br />
+preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our<br />
+lives and the lives of all men.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" >&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_TWO">PART TWO: THE BOOK OF THE BODY</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" >&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">Chapter XVIII.</a> The Unity of the Body</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_105">105</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is<br />
+not a matter of many different organs and functions, but<br />
+is one problem of one organism.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">Chapter XIX.</a> Experiments in Diet</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_115">115</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and<br />
+his conclusions as to what to eat.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">Chapter XX.</a> Errors in Diet</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_123">123</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they<br />
+play in the making of health and disease.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">Chapter XXI.</a> Diet Standards</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_134">134</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities<br />
+we need, and their money cost.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">Chapter XXII.</a> Foods and Poisons</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_145">145</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon<br />
+the system of stimulants and narcotics.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">Chapter XXIII.</a> More About Health</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing,<br />
+bathing and sleep.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">Chapter XXIV.</a> Work and Play</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_163">163</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and<br />
+the overworked.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">Chapter XXV.</a> The Fasting Cure</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_169">169</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Deals with Nature's own remedy for disease, and how to<br />
+make use of it.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">Chapter XXVI.</a> Breaking the Fast</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_177">177</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses various methods of building up the body after<br />
+a fast, especially the milk diet.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">Chapter XXVII.</a> Diseases and Cures</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_i_page_182">182</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and<br />
+what is known about their cause and cure.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#INDEX_VOL_I">INDEX VOLUME I</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><a name="vol_i_page_001" id="vol_i_page_001"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_ONE" id="PART_ONE"></a>PART ONE<br /><br />
+THE BOOK OF THE MIND</h2>
+
+<p><a name="vol_i_page_002" id="vol_i_page_002"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="vol_i_page_003" id="vol_i_page_003"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br />
+THE NATURE OF LIFE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the bounds of
+real truth as distinguished from phrases and self-deception.)</p></div>
+
+<p>If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what Life is. But
+unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The only consolation I can
+find is in the fact that nobody else knows either.</p>
+
+<p>We ask the churches, and they tell us that male and female created He
+them, and put them in the Garden of Eden, and they would have been happy
+had not Satan tempted them. But then you ask, who made Satan, and the
+explanation grows vague. You ask, if God made Satan, and knew what Satan
+was going to do, is it not the same as if God did it himself? So this
+explanation of the origin of evil gets you no further than the Hindoo
+picture of the world resting on the back of a tortoise, and the tortoise
+on the head of a snake&mdash;and nothing said as to what the snake rests on.</p>
+
+<p>Let us go to the scientist. I know a certain physiologist, perhaps the
+greatest in the world, and his eager face rises before me, and I hear
+his quick, impetuous voice declaring that he knows what Life is; he has
+told it in several big volumes, and all I have to do is to read them.
+Life is a tropism, caused by the presence of certain combinations of
+chemicals; my friend knows this, because he has produced the thing in
+his test-tubes. He is an exponent of a way of thought called Monism,
+which finds the ultimate source of being in forms of energy manifesting
+themselves as matter; he shows how all living things arise from that and
+sink back into it.</p>
+
+<p>But question this scientist more closely. What is this "matter" that you
+are so sure of? How do you know it? Obviously, through sensations. You
+never know matter itself, you only know its effects upon you, and you
+assume that the matter must be there to cause the sensation. In other
+words, "matter," which seems so real, turns out to be merely "a
+permanent possibility of sensation." And suppose there were to be
+sensations, caused, for example, by a sportive demon<a name="vol_i_page_004" id="vol_i_page_004"></a> who liked to make
+fun of eminent physiologists&mdash;then there might be the appearance of
+matter and nothing else; in other words, there might be mind, and
+various states of mind. So we discover that the materialist, in the
+philosophic sense, is making just as large an act of faith, is
+pronouncing just as bold a dogma as any priest of any religion.</p>
+
+<p>This is an old-time topic of disputation. Before Mother Eddy there was
+Bishop Berkeley, and before Berkeley, there was Plato, and they and the
+materialists disputed until their hearers cried in despair, "What is
+Mind? No matter! What is Matter? Never mind!" But a century or two ago
+in a town of Prussia there lived a little, dried-up professor of
+philosophy, who sat himself down in his room and fixed his eyes on a
+church steeple outside the window, and for years on end devoted himself
+to examining the tools of thought with which the human mind is provided,
+and deciding just what work and how much of it they are fitted to do. So
+came the proof that our minds are incapable of reaching to or dealing
+with any ultimate reality whatever, but can comprehend only
+phenomena&mdash;that is to say, appearances&mdash;and their relations one with
+another. The Koenigsberg professor proved this once for all time,
+setting forth four propositions about ultimate reality, and proving them
+by exact and irrefutable logic, and then proving by equally exact and
+irrefutable logic their precise opposites and contraries. Anybody who
+has read and comprehended the four "antinomies" of Immanuel Kant<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a>
+knows that metaphysics is as dead a subject as astrology, and that all
+the complicated theories which the philosophers from Heraclitus to
+Arthur Balfour have spun like spiders out of their inner consciousness,
+have no more relation to reality than the intricacies of the game of
+chess.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> See Paulsen: "Life of Kant."</p></div>
+
+<p>The writer is sorry to make this statement, because he spent a lot of
+time reading these philosophers and acquainting himself with their
+subtle theories. He learned a whole language of long words, and even the
+special meanings which each philosopher or school of philosophers give
+to them. When he had got through, he had learned, so far as metaphysics
+is concerned, absolutely nothing, and had merely the job of clearing out
+of his mind great masses of verbal cobwebs. It was not even good
+intellectual training; the metaphysical method of thought is a <i>trap</i>.
+The person who thinks in absolutes<a name="vol_i_page_005" id="vol_i_page_005"></a> and ultimates is led to believe that
+he has come to conclusions about reality, when as a matter of fact he
+has merely proved what he wants to believe; if he had wanted to believe
+the opposite, he could have proven that exactly as well&mdash;as his
+opponents will at once demonstrate.</p>
+
+<p>If you multiply two feet by two feet, the result represents a plain
+surface, or figure of two dimensions. If you multiply two feet by two
+feet by two feet, you have a solid, or figure of three dimensions&mdash;such
+as the world in which we live and move. But now, suppose you multiply
+two feet by two feet by two feet by two feet, what does that represent?
+For ages the minds of mathematicians and philosophers have been tempted
+by this fascinating problem of the "fourth dimension." They have worked
+out by analogy what such a world would be like. If you went into this
+"fourth dimension," you could turn yourself inside out, and come back to
+our present world in that condition, and no one of your three-dimension
+friends would be able to imagine how you had managed it, or to put you
+back again the way you belonged. And in this, it seems to me, we have
+the perfect analogy of metaphysical thinking. It is the "fourth
+dimension" of the mind, and plays as much havoc with sound thinking as a
+physical "fourth dimension" would play with&mdash;say, the prison system. A
+man who takes up an absolute&mdash;God, immortality, the origin of being, a
+first cause, free will, absolute right or wrong, infinite time or space,
+final truth, original substance, the "thing in itself"&mdash;that man
+disappears into a fourth dimension, and turns himself inside out or
+upside down or hindside foremost, and comes back and exhibits himself in
+triumph; then, when he is ready, he effects another disappearance, and
+another change, and is back on earth an ordinary human being.</p>
+
+<p>The world is full of schools of thought, theologians and metaphysicians
+and professors of academic philosophy, transcendentalists and
+theosophists and Christian Scientists, who perform such mental
+monkey-shines continuously before our eyes. They prove what they please,
+and the fact that no two of them prove the same thing makes clear to us
+in the end that none of them has proved anything. The Christian
+Scientist asserts that there is no such thing as matter, but that pain
+is merely a delusion of mortal mind; he continues serene in this faith
+until he runs into an automobile and sustains a compound<a name="vol_i_page_006" id="vol_i_page_006"></a> fracture of
+the femur&mdash;whereupon he does exactly what any of the rest of us do, goes
+to a competent surgeon and has the bone set. On the other hand, some
+devoted young Socialists of my acquaintance have read Haeckel and
+Dietzgen, and adopted the dogma that matter is the first cause, and that
+all things have grown out of it and return to it; they have seen that
+the brain decays after death, they declare that the soul is a function
+of the brain&mdash;and because of such theories they deliberately reject the
+most powerful modes of appeal whereby men can be swayed to faith in
+human solidarity.</p>
+
+<p>The best books I know for the sweeping out of metaphysical cobwebs are
+"The Philosophy of Common Sense" and "The Creed of a Layman," by
+Frederic Harrison, leader of the English Positivists, a school of
+thought established by Auguste Comte. But even as I recommend these
+books, I recall the dissatisfaction with which I left them; for it
+appears that the Positivists have their dogmas like all the rest. Mr.
+Harrison is not content to say that mankind has not the mental tools for
+dealing with ultimate realities; he must needs prove that mankind never
+will and never can have these tools, I look back upon the long process
+of evolution and ask myself, What would an oyster think about
+Positivism? What would be the opinion of, let us say, a young turnip on
+the subject of Mr. Frederic Harrison's thesis? It may well be that the
+difference between a turnip and Mr. Harrison is not so great as will be
+the difference between Mr. Harrison and that super-race which some day
+takes possession of the earth and of all the universe. It does not seem
+to me good science or good sense to dogmatize about what this race will
+know, or what will be its tools of thought. What does seem to me good
+science and good sense is to take the tools which we now possess and use
+them to their utmost capacity.</p>
+
+<p>What is it that we know about life? We know a seemingly endless stream
+of sensations which manifest themselves in certain ways, and seem to
+inhere in what we call things and beings. We observe incessant change in
+all these phenomena, and we examine these changes and discover their
+ways. The ways seem to be invariable; so completely so that for
+practical purposes we assume them to be invariable, and base all our
+calculations and actions upon this assumption. Manifestly, we could not
+live otherwise, and the spread of scientific knowledge<a name="vol_i_page_007" id="vol_i_page_007"></a> is the further
+tracing out of such "laws"&mdash;that is to say, the ways of behaving of
+existence&mdash;and the extending of our belief in their invariability to
+wider and wider fields.</p>
+
+<p>Once upon a time we were told that "the wind bloweth where it listeth."
+But now we are quite certain that there are causes for the blowing of
+the wind, and when our researches have been carried far enough, we shall
+be able to account for and to predict every smallest breath of air. Once
+we were told that dreams came from a supernatural world; but now we are
+beginning to analyze dreams, and to explain what they come from and what
+they mean. Perhaps we still find human nature a bewildering and
+unaccountable thing; but some day we shall know enough of man's body and
+his mind, his past and his present, to be able to explain human nature
+and to produce it at will, precisely as today we produce certain
+reactions in our test-tubes, and do it so invariably that the most
+cautious financier will invest tens of millions of dollars in a process,
+and never once reflect that he is putting too much trust in the
+permanence of nature.</p>
+
+<p>In many departments of thought great specialists are now working,
+experimenting and observing by the methods of science. If in the course
+of this book we speak of "certainty," we mean, of course, not the
+"absolute" certainty of any metaphysical dogma, but the practical
+certainty of everyday common sense; the certainty we feel that eating
+food will satisfy our hunger, and that tomorrow, as today, two and two
+will continue to make four.<a name="vol_i_page_008" id="vol_i_page_008"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br />
+THE NATURE OF FAITH</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and what we know
+intuitively; what is implied in the process of thinking, and
+without which no thought could be.)</p></div>
+
+<p>The primary fact that we know about life is growth. Herbert Spencer has
+defined this growth, or evolution, in a string of long words which may
+be summed up to mean: the process whereby a number of things which are
+simple and like one another become different parts of one thing which is
+complex. If we observe this process in ourselves, and the symptoms of it
+in others, we discover that when it is proceeding successfully, it is
+accompanied by a sensation of satisfaction which we call happiness or
+pleasure; also that when it is thwarted or repressed, it is accompanied
+by a different sensation which we call pain. Subtle metaphysicians, both
+inside the churches and out, have set themselves to the task of proving
+that there must be some other object of life than the continuance of
+these sensations of pleasure which accompany successful growth. They
+have proven to their own satisfaction that morality will collapse and
+human progress come to an end unless we can find some other motive,
+something more permanent and more stimulating, something "higher," as
+they phrase it. All I can say is that I gave reverent attention to the
+arguments of these moralists and theologians, and that for many years I
+believed their doctrines; but I believe them no longer.</p>
+
+<p>I interpret the purpose of life to be the continuous unfoldment of its
+powers, its growth into higher forms&mdash;that is to say, forms more complex
+and subtly contrived, capable of more intense and enduring kinds of that
+satisfaction which is nature's warrant of life. If you wish to take up
+this statement and argue about it, please wait until you have read the
+chapter "Nature and Man," and noted my distinction between instinctive
+life and rational life. For men, the word "growth" does not mean <i>any</i>
+growth, <i>all</i> growth, blind and indiscriminate growth. It does not mean
+growth for the tubercle bacillus, nor growth for the anopheles mosquito,
+nor growth for the<a name="vol_i_page_009" id="vol_i_page_009"></a> house-fly, the spider and the louse. Neither do we
+mean that the purpose of man's own life is <i>any</i> pleasure, <i>all</i>
+pleasure, blind and indiscriminate pleasure; the pleasure of alcohol,
+the pleasure of cannibalism, the pleasure of the modern form of
+cannibalism which we call "making money." We have survived in the
+struggle for existence by the cooperative and social use of our powers
+of judgment; and our judgment is that which selects among forms of
+growth, which gives preference to wheat and corn over weeds, and to
+self-control and honesty over treachery and greed.</p>
+
+<p>So when we say that the purpose of life is happiness, we do not mean to
+turn mankind loose at a hog-trough; we mean that our duty as thinkers is
+to watch life, to test it, to pick and choose among the many forms it
+offers, and to say: This kind of growth is more permanent and full of
+promise, it is more fertile, more deeply satisfactory; therefore, we
+choose this, and sanction the kind of pleasure which it brings. Other
+kinds we decide are temporary and delusive; therefore we put in jail
+anyone who sells alcoholic drink, and we refuse to invite to our home
+people who are lewd, and some day we shall not permit our children to
+attend moving picture shows in which the modern form of cannibalism is
+glorified.</p>
+
+<p>The reader, no doubt, has been taught a distinction between "science"
+and "faith." He is saying now, "You believe that everything is to be
+determined by human reason? You reject all faith?" I answer, No; I am
+not rejecting faith; I am merely refusing to apply it to objects with
+which it has nothing to do. You do not take it as a matter of faith that
+a package of sugar weighs a pound; you put it on the scales and find
+out&mdash;in other words, you make it a matter of experiment. But all the
+creeds of all the religious sects are full of pronouncements which are
+no more matters of faith than the question of the weighing of sugar. Is
+pork a wholesome article of food or is it not? All Christians will
+readily acknowledge that this is a matter to be determined by the
+microscope and other devices of experimental science; but then some Jew
+rises in the meeting and puts the question: Is dancing injurious to the
+character? And immediately all members of the Methodist Episcopal Church
+vote to close the discussion.</p>
+
+<p>What is faith? Faith is the instinct which underlies all being, assuring
+us that life is worth while and honest, a thing to be trusted; in other
+words, it is the certainty that successful<a name="vol_i_page_010" id="vol_i_page_010"></a> growth always is and always
+will be accompanied by pleasure. The most skeptical scientist in the
+world, even my friend the physiologist who proves that life is nothing
+but a tropism, and can be produced by mixing chemicals in
+test-tubes&mdash;this eager friend is one of the most faithful men I know. He
+is burning up with the faith that knowledge is worth possessing, and
+also that it is possible of attainment. With what boundless scorn would
+he receive any suggestion to the contrary&mdash;for example, the idea that
+life might be a series of sensations which some sportive demon is
+producing for the torment of man! More than that, this friend is burning
+up with the certainty that knowledge can be spread, that his fellow men
+will receive it and apply it, and that it will make them happy when they
+do. Why else does he write his learned books in defense of the
+materialist philosophy?</p>
+
+<p>And that same faith which animates the great monist animates likewise
+every child who toddles off to school, and every chicken which emerges
+from an egg, and every blade of grass which thrusts its head above the
+ground. Not every chicken survives, of course, and all the blades of
+grass wither in the fall; nevertheless, the seeds of grass are spread,
+and chickens make food for philosophers, and the great process of life
+continues to manifest its faith. In the end the life process produces
+man, who, as we shall presently see, takes it up, and judges it, and
+makes it over to suit himself.</p>
+
+<p>You will note from this that I am what is called an optimist; whereas
+some of the great philosophers of the world have called themselves
+pessimists. But I notice with a smile that these are often the men who
+work hardest of all to spread their ideas, and thus testify to the
+worthwhileness of truth and the perfectibility of mankind. There has
+come to be a saying among settlement workers and physicians, who are
+familiar with poverty and its effects upon life, that there are no bad
+babies and good babies, there are only sick babies and well babies. In
+the same way, I would say there are no pessimists and optimists, there
+are only mentally sick people and mentally well people. Everywhere
+throughout life, both animal and vegetable, health means happiness, and
+gives abundant evidence of that fact. All healthy life is satisfactory
+to itself; when it develops reason, it tries to find out why, and this
+is yet another testimony to the fact that having power and using it is
+pleasant. When I was in college the professor would<a name="vol_i_page_011" id="vol_i_page_011"></a> propound the old
+question: "Would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy philosopher?"
+My answer always was: "I would rather be a happy philosopher." The
+professor replied: "Perhaps that is not possible." But I said: "I will
+prove that it is!"<a name="vol_i_page_012" id="vol_i_page_012"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br />
+THE USE OF REASON</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies we are
+compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it.)</p></div>
+
+<p>The great majority of people are brought up to believe that some
+particular set of dogmas are objects of faith, and that there are
+penalties more or less severe for the application of reason to these
+dogmas. What particular set it happens to be is a matter of geography;
+in a crowded modern city like New York, it is a matter of the particular
+block on which the child is born. A child born on Hester Street will be
+taught that his welfare depends upon his never eating meat and butter
+from the same dish. A child born on Tenth Avenue will be taught that it
+is a matter of his not eating meat on Fridays. A child born on Madison
+Avenue will be taught that it is a question of the precise metaphysical
+process by which bread is changed into human body and wine into human
+blood. Each of these children will be assured that his human reason is
+fallible, that it is extremely dangerous to apply it to this "sacred"
+subject, and that the proper thing to do is to accept the authority of
+some ancient tradition, or some institution, or some official, or some
+book for which a special sanction is claimed.</p>
+
+<p>Has there ever been in the world any revelation, outside of or above
+human reason? Could there ever be such a thing? In order to test this
+possibility, select for yourself the most convincing way by which a
+special revelation could be handed down to mankind. Take any of the
+ancient orthodox ways, the finding of graven tablets on a mountain-top,
+or a voice speaking from a burning bush, or an angel appearing before a
+great concourse of people and handing out a written scroll. Suppose that
+were to happen, let us say, at the next Yale-Harvard football game;
+suppose the news were to be flashed to the ends of the earth that God
+had thus presented to mankind an entirely new religion. What would be
+the process by which the people of London or Calcutta would decide upon
+that revelation? First, they would have to consider the question<a name="vol_i_page_013" id="vol_i_page_013"></a>
+whether it was an American newspaper fake&mdash;by no means an easy question.
+Second, they would have to consider the chances of its being an optical
+delusion. Then, assuming they accepted the sworn testimony of ten
+thousand mature and competent witnesses, they would have to consider the
+possibility of someone having invented a new kind of invisible
+aeroplane. Assuming they were convinced that it was really a
+supernatural being, they would next have to decide the chances of its
+being a visitor from Mars, or from the fourth dimension of space, or
+from the devil. In considering all this, they would necessarily have to
+examine the alleged revelation. What was the literary quality of it?
+What was the moral quality of it? What would be the effect upon mankind
+if the alleged revelation were to be universally adopted and applied?</p>
+
+<p>Manifestly, all these are questions for the human reason, the human
+judgment; there is no other method of determining them, there would be
+nothing for any individual person, or for men as a whole to do, except
+to apply their best powers, and, as the phrase is, "make up their minds"
+about the matter. Reason would be the judge, and the new revelation
+would be the prisoner at the bar. Humanity might say, this is a real
+inspiration, we will submit ourselves to it and follow it, and allow no
+one from now on to question it. But inevitably there would be some who
+would say, "Tommyrot!" There would be others who would say, "This new
+revelation isn't working, it is repressing progress, it is stifling the
+mind." These people would stand up for their conviction, they would
+become martyrs, and all the world would have to discuss them. And who
+would decide between them and the great mass of men? Reason, the judge,
+would decide.</p>
+
+<p>It is perfectly true that human reason is fallible. Infallibility is an
+absolute, a concept of the mind, and not a reality. Life has not given
+us infallibility, any more than it has given us omniscience, or
+omnipotence, or any other of those attributes which we call divine. Life
+has given us powers, more or less weak, more or less strong, but all
+capable of improvement and development. Reason is the tool whereby
+mankind has won supremacy over the rest of the animal kingdom, and is
+gradually taking control of the forces of nature. It is the best tool we
+have, and because it is the best, we are driven irresistibly to use it.
+And how strange that some of us can find no better use for it than to
+destroy its<a name="vol_i_page_014" id="vol_i_page_014"></a> own self! Visit one of the Jesuit fathers and hear him seek
+to persuade you that reason is powerless against faith and must abdicate
+to faith. You answer, "Yes, father, you have persuaded me. I admit the
+fallibility of my mortal powers; and I begin by applying my doubts of
+them to the arguments by which you have just convinced me. I was
+convinced, but of course I cannot be sure of a conviction, attained by
+fallible reason. Therefore I am just where I was before&mdash;except that I
+am no longer in position to be certain of anything."</p>
+
+<p>You answer in good faith, and take up your hat and depart, closing the
+door of the good father's study behind you. But stop a moment, why do
+you close the door? You close the door because your reason tells you
+that otherwise the cold air outside will blow in and make the good
+father uncomfortable. You put your hat on, because your reason has not
+yet been applied to the problem of the cause of baldness. You step out
+onto the street, and when you hear a sudden noise, you step back onto
+the curbstone, because your reason tells you that an automobile is
+coming, and that on the sidewalk you are safe from it. So you go on,
+using your reason in a million acts of your life whereby your life is
+preserved and developed. And if anybody suggested that the fallibility
+of your reason should cause you to delay in front of an automobile, you
+would apply your reason to the problem of that person and decide that he
+was insane. And I say that just as there is insanity in everyday
+judgments and relationships, so there is insanity in philosophy,
+metaphysics and religion; the seed and source of all this kind of
+insanity being the notion that it is the duty of anybody to believe
+anything which cannot completely justify itself as reasonable.</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays, as ideas are spreading, the champions of dogma are hard put to
+it, and you will find their minds a muddle of two points of view. The
+Jewish rabbi will strive desperately to think of some hygienic objection
+to the presence of meat and butter on the same plate; the Catholic
+priest will tell you that fish is a very wholesome article of food, and
+that anyhow we all eat too much; the Methodist and the Baptist and the
+Presbyterian will tell you that if men did not rest one day in seven
+their health would break down. Thus they justify faith by reason, and
+reconcile the conflict between science and theology. Accepting this
+method, I experiment and learn that it improves my digestion and adds to
+my working power if I<a name="vol_i_page_015" id="vol_i_page_015"></a> play tennis on Sunday. I follow this indisputably
+rational form of conduct&mdash;and find myself in conflict with the "faith"
+of the ancient State of Delaware, which obliges me to serve a term in
+its state's prison for having innocently and unwittingly desecrated its
+day of holiness!</p>
+
+<p>If you read Professor Bury's little book, "A History of Freedom of
+Thought," you will discover that there has been a long conflict over the
+right of men to use their minds&mdash;and the victory is not yet. The term
+"free thinker," which ought to be the highest badge a man could wear, is
+still almost everywhere throughout America a term of vague terror. In
+the State of California today there is a Criminal Syndicalism Act, which
+provides a maximum of fourteen years in jail for any person who shall
+write or publish or speak any words expressive of the idea that the
+United States government should be overthrown in the same way that it
+was established&mdash;that is, by force; only a few months ago the writer of
+this book was on the witness stand for two days, and had the painful,
+almost incredible experience of being battered and knocked about by an
+inquisitive district attorney, who cross-examined him as to every detail
+of his beliefs, and read garbled extracts from his published writings,
+in the effort to make it appear that he held some belief which might
+possibly prejudice the jury against him. The defendant in this case, a
+returned soldier who had spent three years as a volunteer in the
+trenches, and had been twice wounded and once gassed, was accused, not
+merely of approving the Soviet form of government, but also of having
+printed uncomplimentary references to priests and religious
+institutions.</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays it is the propertied class which has taken possession of the
+powers of government, and which presumes to censor the thinking of
+mankind in its own interest. But whether it be priestcraft or whether it
+be capitalism which seeks to bind the human mind, it comes to the same
+thing, and the effort must be met by the assertion that, in spite of
+errors and blunders, and the serious harm these may do, there is no way
+for men to advance save by using the best powers of thinking they
+possess, and proclaiming their conclusions to others. Speaking
+theologically for the moment, God has given us our reasoning powers, and
+also the impulse to use them, and it is inconceivable that He should
+seek to restrict their use, or should give to anyone the power to forbid
+their use.<a name="vol_i_page_016" id="vol_i_page_016"></a> It is His truth which we seek, and His which we proclaim. In
+so doing we perform our highest act of faith, and we refuse to be
+troubled by the idea that for this service He will reward us by an
+eternity of sulphur and brimstone.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the remainder of this book it will be assumed that the reader
+accepts this point of view, or, at any rate, that he is willing for
+purposes of experiment to give it a trial and see where it leads him. We
+shall proceed to consider the problems of human life in the light of
+reason, to determine how they come to be, and how they can be solved.<a name="vol_i_page_017" id="vol_i_page_017"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br />
+THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Compares the ways of nature with human morality, and tries to show
+how the latter came to be.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Seventy years ago Charles Darwin published his book, "The Origin of
+Species," in which he defied the theological dogma of his time by the
+shocking idea that life had evolved by many stages of progress from the
+diatom to man. This of course did not conform to the story of the Garden
+of Eden, and so "Darwinism" was fought as an invention of the devil, and
+in the interior of America there are numerous sectarian colleges where
+the dread term "evolution" is spoken in awed whispers. Only the other
+day I read in my newspaper the triumphant proclamation of some clergyman
+that "Darwinism" had been overthrown. This reverend gentleman had got
+mixed up because some biologists were disputing some detail of the
+method by which the evolution of species had been brought about. Do
+species change by the gradual elimination of the unfit, or do they
+change by sudden leaps, the "mutation" theory of de Vries? Are acquired
+powers transmitted to posterity, or is the germ plasm unaffected by its
+environment? Concerning such questions the scientists debate. But the
+fact that life has evolved in an ordered series from the lower forms to
+the higher, and that each individual reproduces in embryo and in infancy
+the history of this long process&mdash;these facts are now the basis of all
+modern thinking, and as generally accepted as the rotation of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>You may study this process of evolution from the outside, in the
+multitude of forms which it has assumed and in their reactions one to
+another; or you may study it from the inside in your own soul, the
+emotions which accompany it, the impulse or craving which impels it, the
+<i>élan vital</i>, as it is called by the French philosopher Bergson. The
+Christians call it love, and Nietzsche, who hated Christianity, called
+it "the will to power," and persuaded himself that it was the opposite
+of love.</p>
+
+<p>You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one entitled<a name="vol_i_page_018" id="vol_i_page_018"></a>
+"Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the complete unmorality
+of nature, and declares that there is no way by which what mankind knows
+as morality can have originated in the process of nature or can be
+reconciled to natural law. This statement, coming from a leading
+agnostic, was welcome to the theologians. But when I first read the
+essay, as a student of sixteen, it seemed to me narrow; I thought I saw
+a standpoint from which the contradiction disappeared. The difference
+between the morality of Christ and the morality of nature is merely the
+difference between a lower and a higher stage of mental development. The
+animal loves and seeks by instinct to preserve the life which it
+knows&mdash;that is to say, its own life and the life of its young. The wolf
+knows nothing about the feelings of a deer; but man in his savage state
+develops reasoning powers enough to realize that there are others like
+himself, the members of his own tribe, and he makes for himself taboos
+which forbid him to kill and eat the members of that tribe. At the
+present time humanity has developed its reason and imaginative sympathy
+to include in the "tribe" one or two hundred million people; while to
+those outside the tribe it still preserves the attitude of the wolf.</p>
+
+<p>How came it that a mind so acute as Huxley's went so far astray on the
+question of the evolution of morality? The answer is that this was the
+factory age in England, and the great scientist, a rebel in theological
+matters, was in economics a child of his time. We find him using the
+formulas of bourgeois biology to ridicule Henry George and his plea for
+the freeing of the land. "Competition is the life of trade," ran the
+nineteenth century slogan; and competition was the god of nineteenth
+century biology. Tennyson summed it up in the phrase: "Nature red in
+tooth and claw with ravin;" and this was found convenient by Manchester
+manufacturers who wished to shut little children up for fourteen hours a
+day in cotton mills, and to harness women to drag cars in the coal
+mines, and to be told by the learned men of their colleges and the holy
+men of their churches that this was "the survival of the fittest," it
+was nature's way of securing the advancement of the race.</p>
+
+<p>But now we are preparing for an era of cooperation, and it occurs to our
+men of science to go back to nature and find out what really are her
+ways. If you will read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in
+Evolution," you will find a complete<a name="vol_i_page_019" id="vol_i_page_019"></a> refutation of the old bourgeois
+biology, and a view of nature which reveals in it the germs of human
+morality. Kropotkin points out that everywhere throughout nature it is
+the social and not the solitary animals which are most numerous and most
+successful. There are many millions of ants and bees for every hawk or
+eagle, and certainly in the state of nature there were thousands of deer
+for every lion or tiger that preyed upon them. And all these social
+creatures have their ways of being, which it requires no stress of the
+imagination to compare with the tribal customs and the moral codes of
+mankind. The different animals prey upon one another, but they do not
+prey upon their own species, except in a few rare cases. The only beast
+that makes a regular practice of exploiting his own kind is man.</p>
+
+<p>By hundreds of interesting illustrations Kropotkin shows that mutual aid
+and mutual self-protection are the means whereby the higher forms of
+being have been evolved. Insects and birds and fish, nearly all the
+herbivorous mammals, and even a great many of the carnivores, help one
+another and protect one another. The chattering monkeys in the treetops
+drove out the saber-tooth tiger from the grove because there were so
+many of them, and when they saw him they all set up a shriek and clamor
+which deafened and confused him. And when by and by these monkeys
+developed an opposed thumb, and broke off a branch of a tree for a club,
+and fastened a sharp stone on the end of it for an axe, and fell upon
+the saber-toothed tiger and exterminated him, they did it because they
+had learned solidarity&mdash;even as the workers of the world are today
+learning solidarity in the face of the beast of capitalism.</p>
+
+<p>Man has survived by the cunning of his brain, we are told, and that is
+true. But first among the products of that cunning brain has been the
+knowledge that by himself he is the most helpless and pitiful of
+creatures, while standing together and forming societies and developing
+moralities, he is master of the world. He has not yet learned that
+lesson entirely; he has learned it only for his own nation. Therefore he
+takes the highest skill of his hand and the subtlest wit of his brain,
+and uses them to manufacture poison gases. At the present hour he is
+painfully realizing that his poison formulas all become known to the
+tribes whom he calls his enemies, and so it is his own destruction he is
+engaged in contriving. In<a name="vol_i_page_020" id="vol_i_page_020"></a> other words, man has come to a time when his
+mechanical skill, his mastery over the forces of nature, has developed
+more rapidly than his moral sense and his imaginative sympathy. His
+ability to destroy life has become dangerously greater than his desire
+to preserve it. So he confronts the fair face of nature as an insane
+creature, wrecking not merely everything that he himself has built up,
+but everything that nature has built in the ages before him. He is
+striving now with infinite agony to make this fact real to himself, and
+to mend his evil ways; and the first step in that process is to root out
+from his mind the devil's doctrine which in his blindness and greed he
+has himself implanted, that there is any way for him to find real
+happiness, or to make any worth while progress on this earth, by the
+method of inflicting misery and torment upon his fellow men.<a name="vol_i_page_021" id="vol_i_page_021"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br />
+NATURE AND MAN</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Attempts to show how man has taken control of nature, and is
+carrying on her processes and improving upon them.)</p></div>
+
+<p>If the argument of the preceding chapter is sound, human morality is not
+a fixed and eternal set of laws, but is, like everything else in the
+world, a product of natural evolution. We can trace the history of it,
+just as we trace the story of the rocks. It is not a mysterious or
+supernatural thing, it is simply the reaction of man to his environment,
+and more especially to his fellow men. The source of it is that same
+inner impulse, that love of life, that joy in growing, that faith which
+appears to be the soul of all being.</p>
+
+<p>Man is a part of nature and a product of nature; in many fundamental
+respects his ways are still nature's ways and his laws still nature's
+laws. But there are other and even more significant ways in which man
+has separated himself from nature and made himself something quite
+different. In order to reveal this clearly, we draw a distinction
+between nature and man. This is a proper thing to do, provided we bear
+in mind that our classification is not permanent or final. We
+distinguish frogs from tadpoles, in spite of the fact that at one stage
+the creature is half tadpole and half frog. We distinguish the animal
+from the vegetable kingdom, despite the fact that in their lower forms
+they cannot be distinguished.</p>
+
+<p>What, precisely, is the difference between nature and man? The
+difference lies in the fact that nature is apparently blind in her
+processes; she produces a million eggs in order to give life to one
+salmon, she produces countless millions of salmon to be devoured by
+other fish apparently no better than salmon. Poets may take up the
+doctrine of evolution and dress it out in theological garments, talking
+about the "one far off divine event towards which the whole creation
+moves," but for all we can see, nature, apart from man, is just as well
+satisfied to move in circles, and to come back exactly where she
+started. Nature made a whole world of complicated creatures in the
+steamy, luke-warm swamps of the Mesozoic era, and then, as if deciding<a name="vol_i_page_022" id="vol_i_page_022"></a>
+that the pattern of a large body and a small brain was not a success,
+she froze them all to death with a glacial epoch, and we have nothing
+but the bones to tell us about them.</p>
+
+<p>No one understands anything about evolution until he has realized that
+the phrase "the survival of the fittest" does not mean the survival of
+the best from any human point of view. It merely means the survival of
+those capable of surviving in some particular environment. We consider
+our present civilization as "fit"; but if astronomical changes should
+cause another ice age, we should discover that our "fitness" depended
+upon our ability to live on lichens, or on something we could grow by
+artificial light in the bowels of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>So much for our ancient mother, nature. But now&mdash;whether we say with the
+theologians that it was divine providence, or with the materialist
+philosophers that it was an accidental mixing of atoms&mdash;at any rate it
+has come about that nature has recently produced creatures who are
+conscious of her process, who are able to observe and criticize it, to
+take up her work and carry it on in their own way, for better or for
+worse. Whether by accident or design, there has been on parts of our
+planet such a combination of climate and soil as has brought into being
+a new product of nature, a heightened form of life which we call
+"intelligence." Creation opens its eyes, and beholds the work of the
+creator, and decides that it is good&mdash;yet not so good as it might be!
+Creation takes up the work of the creator, and continues it, in many
+respects annulling it, in other respects revising it entirely. Whether a
+sonnet is a better or a higher product than a spider is a question it
+would be futile to discuss; but this, at least, should be clear&mdash;nature
+has produced an infinity of spiders, but nature never produced a sonnet,
+nor anything resembling it.</p>
+
+<p>Man, the creature of God, takes over the functions of God. This fact may
+shock us, or it may inspire us; to the metaphysically minded it offers a
+great variety of fascinating problems. Can it be that God is in process
+of becoming, that there is no God until he has become, in us and through
+us? H. G. Wells sets forth this curious idea; and then, of course, the
+bishops and the clergy rise up in indignation and denounce Mr. Wells as
+an upstart and trespasser upon their field. They have been worshipping
+their God for some three or four thousand years, and know that He has
+been from eternity; He created the world at His will, and how shall
+impious man<a name="vol_i_page_023" id="vol_i_page_023"></a> presume to rise up and criticize His product, and imagine
+that he can improve upon it? Man, with his cheap and silly little toys,
+his sonnets and scientific systems, his symphony concerts and such pale
+imitations of celestial harmonies!</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wells, in his character of God in the making, has created a bishop
+of his own, and no doubt would maintain the thesis that he is a far
+better bishop than any created by the God of the Anglican churches. We
+will leave Mr. Wells' bishop to argue these problems with God's bishops,
+and will merely remind the reader of our warning about these
+metaphysical matters. You can prove anything and everything, whichever
+and however, all or both; and discussions of the subject are merely your
+enunciation of the fact that you have your private truth as you want it.
+It may be that there is an Infinite Consciousness, which carries the
+whole process of creation in itself, and that all the seeming wastes and
+blunders of nature can be explained from some point of view at present
+beyond the reach of our minds. On the other hand it may be that
+consciousness is now dawning in the universe for the first time. It may
+be that it is an accident, a fleeting product like the morning mist on
+the mountain top. On the other hand, it may be that it is destined to
+grow and expand and take control of the entire universe, as a farmer
+takes control of a field for his own purposes. It may be that just as
+our individual fragments of intelligence communicate and merge into a
+family, a club, a nation, a world culture, so we shall some day grope
+our way toward the consciousness of other planets, or of other states of
+being subsisting on this planet unknown to us, or perhaps even toward
+the cosmic soul, the universal consciousness which we call God.</p>
+
+<p>But meantime, all we can say with positiveness is this: man, the
+created, is becoming the creator. He is taking up the world purpose, he
+is imposing upon it new purposes of his own, he is attempting to impose
+upon it a moral code, to test it and discipline it by a new standard
+which he calls economy. To the present writer this seems the most
+significant fact about life, the most fascinating point of view from
+which life can be regarded. The reader who wishes to follow it into
+greater detail is referred to a little book by Professor E. Ray
+Lankester, "The Kingdom of Man"; especially the opening essay, with its
+fascinating title, "Nature's Insurgent Son."</p>
+
+<p>In what ways have the reasoned and deliberate purposes of<a name="vol_i_page_024" id="vol_i_page_024"></a> man revised
+and even supplanted the processes of nature? The ways are so many that
+it would be easier to mention those in which he has not done so. A
+modern civilized man is hardly content with anything that nature does,
+nor willing to accept any of nature's products. He will not eat nature's
+fruits, he prefers the kinds that he himself has brought into being. He
+is not content with the skin that nature has given him; he has made
+himself an infinite variety of complicated coverings. He objects to
+nature's habit of pouring cold water upon him, and so he has built
+himself houses in which he makes his own climate; he has recently taken
+to creating for himself houses which roll along the ground, or which fly
+through the air, or which swim under the surface of the sea; so he
+carries his private climate with him to all these places. It was
+nature's custom to remove her blunders and her experiments quickly from
+her sight. But man has decided that he loves life so well that he will
+preserve even the imbeciles, the lame and the halt and the blind. In a
+state of nature, if a man's eyes were not properly focused, he blundered
+into the lair of a tiger and was eaten. But civilized man despises such
+a method of maintaining the standard of human eyes; he creates for
+himself a transparent product, ground to such a curve that it corrects
+the focus of his eyes, and makes them as good as any other eyes. In ten
+thousand such ways we might name, man has rebelled against the harshness
+of his ancient mother, and has freed himself from her control.</p>
+
+<p>But still he is the child of his mother, and so it is his way to act
+first, and then to realize what he has done. So it comes about that very
+few, even of the most highly educated men, are aware how completely the
+ancient ways of nature have been suppressed by her "insurgent son." It
+is a good deal as in the various trades and professions which have
+developed with such amazing rapidity in modern civilization; the paper
+man knows how to make paper, the shoe man knows how to make shoes, the
+optician knows about grinding glasses, but none of these knows very much
+about the others' specialties, and has no realization of how far the
+other has gone. So it comes about that in our colleges we are still
+teaching ancient and immutable "laws of nature," which in the actual
+practice of men at work are as extinct and forgotten as the dodo. In all
+colleges, except a few which have been tainted by<a name="vol_i_page_025" id="vol_i_page_025"></a> Socialist thought,
+the students are solemnly learning the so-called "Malthusian law," that
+population presses continually upon the limits of subsistence, there are
+always a few more people in every part of the world than that part of
+the world is able to maintain. At any time we increase the world's
+productive powers, population will increase correspondingly, so there
+can never be an end to human misery, and abortion, war and famine are
+simply nature's eternal methods of adjusting man to his environment.</p>
+
+<p>Thus solemnly we are taught in the colleges. And yet, nine out of ten of
+the students come from homes where the parents have discovered the
+modern practice of birth control; all the students are themselves
+finding out about it in one way or another, and will proceed when they
+marry to restrict themselves to two or three children. In vain will the
+ghost of their favorite statesman and hero, Theodore Roosevelt, be
+traveling up and down the land, denouncing them for the dreadful crime
+of "race suicide"&mdash;that is to say, their presuming to use their reason
+to put an end to the ghastly situation revealed by the Malthusian law,
+over-population eternally recurring and checked by abortion, war and
+famine! In vain will the ghost of their favorite saint and moralist,
+Anthony Comstock, be traveling up and down the land, putting people in
+jail for daring to teach to poor women what every rich woman knows, and
+for attempting to change the entirely man-made state of affairs whereby
+an intelligent and self-governing Anglo-Saxon land is being in two or
+three generations turned over to a slum population of Italians, Poles,
+Hungarians, Portuguese, French-Canadians, Mexicans and Japanese!</p>
+
+<p>Likewise in every orthodox college the student is taught what his
+professors are pleased to call "the law of diminishing returns of
+agriculture." That is to say, additional labor expended upon a plot of
+land does not result in an equal increase of produce, and the increase
+grows less, until finally you come to a time when no matter how much
+labor you expend, you can get no more produce from that plot of land.
+All professors teach this, because fifty years ago it was true, and
+since that time it has not occurred to any professor of political
+science to visit a farm. And all the while, out in the suburbs of the
+city where the college is located, market gardeners are practicing on an
+enormous scale a new system of intensive agriculture which makes the
+"law of diminishing returns" a foolish joke.<a name="vol_i_page_026" id="vol_i_page_026"></a></p>
+
+<p>As Kropotkin shows in his book, "Fields, Factories and Workshops," the
+modern intensive gardener, by use of glass and the chemical test-tube,
+has developed an entirely new science of plant raising. He is
+independent of climate, he makes his own climate; he is independent of
+the defects of the soil, he would just as soon start from nothing and
+make his soil upon an asphalt pavement. By doubling his capital
+investment he raises, not twice as much produce, but ten times as much.
+If his methods were applied to the British Isles, he could raise
+sufficient produce on this small surface to feed the population of the
+entire globe.</p>
+
+<p>So we see that by simple and entirely harmless devices man is in
+position to restrict or to increase population as he sees fit. Also he
+is in position to raise food and produce the necessities of life for a
+hundred or thousand times as many people as are now on the earth. But
+superstition ordains involuntary parenthood, and capitalism ordains that
+land shall be held out of use for speculation, or shall be exploited for
+rent! And this is done in the name of "nature"&mdash;that old nature of the
+"tooth and claw," whose ancient plan it is "that they shall take who
+have the power, and they shall keep who can"; that ancient nature which
+has been so entirely suppressed and supplanted by civilized man, and
+which survives only as a ghost, a skeleton to be resurrected from the
+tomb, for the purpose of frightening the enslaved. When a predatory
+financier wishes a fur overcoat to protect himself from the cold, or
+when he hires a masseur to keep up the circulation of his blood, you do
+not find him troubling himself about the laws of "nature"; never will he
+mention this old scarecrow, except when he is trying to persuade the
+workers of the world to go on paying him tribute for the use of the
+natural resources of the earth!<a name="vol_i_page_027" id="vol_i_page_027"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br />
+MAN THE REBEL</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, in which
+man finds himself, and how he can advance to a securer condition.)</p></div>
+
+<p>In the state of nature you find every creature living a precarious
+existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the creature survives only
+so long as it keeps itself at the top of its form. The result is the
+maintenance of the type in its full perfection, and, under the
+competitive pressure, a gradual increase of its powers. Excepting when
+sudden eruptions of natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly
+provided with a set of instincts for all emergencies; it is in
+harmonious relationship to its environment, it knows how to do what it
+has to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection.
+But now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, abolishes the
+competitive struggle, and changes at his own insolent will both his
+environment and his reaction thereto.</p>
+
+<p>Man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; they are for
+his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the inconveniences of nature
+and the stresses of the competitive struggle. In a state of nature there
+are no fat animals, but in civilization there are not merely fat
+animals, but fat men to eat the fat animals. In a state of nature no
+animal loafs very long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. But
+man, by his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, and
+also his fellow men. So he produces unlimited wealth for himself; not
+merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he wants, but he builds a
+whole elaborate set of laws and moral customs and religious codes about
+this power, he invents manners and customs and literatures and arts,
+expressive of his superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of
+his ability to enslave and exploit them. So he destroys for his
+imperious self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained
+over him; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thousand
+monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. And each one of
+these diseases and abnormalities is a new<a name="vol_i_page_028" id="vol_i_page_028"></a> life of its own; it develops
+a body of knowledge, a science, and perhaps an art; it becomes the means
+of life, the environment and the determining destiny of thousands,
+perhaps millions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the
+colossal structure which we call civilization&mdash;in part still healthy and
+progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer.</p>
+
+<p>What is to be done about this cancer? First of all, it must be
+diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the causes of it
+determined. Man, the rebel, has rejected his mother nature, and has lost
+and for the most part forgotten the instincts with which she provided
+him. He has destroyed the environment which, however harsh to the
+individual, was beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of
+it a gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving pictures
+and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' furnishing
+establishments."</p>
+
+<p>Shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, that he shall
+no longer make asylums for the insane and homes for the defective,
+eye-glasses for the astigmatic and malted milk for the dyspeptic? There
+are some who preach that. Among the multitude of strange books and
+pamphlets which come in my mail, I found the other day a volume from
+England, "Social Chaos and the Way Out," by Alfred Baker Read, a learned
+and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein with all the paraphernalia of
+learning it is gravely maintained that the solution for the ills of
+civilization is a return to the ancient Greek practice of infanticide.
+Every child at birth is to be examined by a committee of physicians, and
+if it is found to possess any defect, or if the census has established
+that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this baby
+shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. You might think that
+this is a joke, after the fashion of Swift's proposal for eating the
+children of famine-stricken Ireland. I have spent some time examining
+this book before I risk committing myself to the statement that it is
+the work of a sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun.</p>
+
+<p>If we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first point we
+have to understand is that nature has nothing to do with it. We cannot
+appeal to nature, because we are many thousands of years beyond her
+sway. We left her when the first ape came down from the treetop and
+fastened a sharp stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable
+good-bye<a name="vol_i_page_029" id="vol_i_page_029"></a> to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and
+altered his diet by means of fire. Therefore, it is no argument to say
+that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." Our choice will lie
+among a thousand different courses, but the one thing we may be sure of
+is that none of them will be "natural." Bairnsfather, in one of his war
+cartoons, portrays a British officer on leave, who got homesick for the
+trenches and went out into the garden and dug himself a hole in the mud
+and sat shivering in the rain all night. And this amuses us vastly; but
+we should be even more amused if any kind of reformer, physician,
+moralist, clergyman or legislator should suggest to us any remedy for
+our ills that was really "according to nature."</p>
+
+<p>Civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no love for nature
+except as an object for the play of his fancy and his wit. He means to
+live his own life, he means to hold himself above nature with all his
+powers. Yet, obviously, he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot
+give his life-blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper
+tissues starve. He must somehow divert the flow of his energies, his
+social blood-stream, so to speak, from the cancer to the healthy growth.
+To abandon the metaphor, man will determine by the use of his reason
+what he wishes life to be; he will choose the highest forms of it to
+which he can attain. He will then, by the deliberate act of his own
+will, devote his energies to those tasks; he will make for himself new
+laws, new moral codes, new customs and ways of thought, calculated to
+bring to reality the ideal which he has formed. So only can man justify
+himself as a creator, so can he realize the benefit and escape the
+penalties of his revolt from his ancient mother.</p>
+
+<p>And then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we have come back to
+nature, only in a new form. Nature, harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind
+as we call her, yet had her deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she
+protected and preserved the type. Man, in his new pride of power, has
+invented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "individualism."
+He lives and works for himself; he chooses to wear silk shirts, and to
+break the speed limit, and to pin ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now
+what he must do with his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from
+degeneration, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old<a name="vol_i_page_030" id="vol_i_page_030"></a>
+mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, as an act
+of high daring: I will protect the species, I will preserve the type! I
+will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic intoxication, because it
+damages the health of my offspring; I will deny myself the amusement of
+sexual promiscuity for the same reason. I will devise imitations of the
+chase and of battle in order that I may keep my physical body up to the
+best standard of nature. Because I understand that all civilized life is
+based upon intelligence, I will acquire knowledge and spread it among my
+fellow men. Because I perceive that civilization is impossible without
+sympathy, and because sympathy makes it impossible for me to be happy
+while my fellow men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my
+energies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all forms
+of exploitation of man by his fellows.</p>
+
+<p>Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay entitled "A
+Moral Equivalent for War." He sets forth the idea that men have loved
+war through the ages because it has called forth their highest efforts,
+has made them more fully aware of the powers of their being. He asks,
+May it not be possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his
+love of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to
+invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the destruction
+of other men and their enslavement, but upon cooperative emulation in
+the unfoldment of the powers of the mind? That this can be done by men,
+I have never doubted. That it will be done, and done quickly, has been
+made certain by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all
+thinking people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been such
+that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization more damage
+than it is able to endure.<a name="vol_i_page_031" id="vol_i_page_031"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><br />
+MAKING OUR MORALS</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit human
+facts, and there can be no judge of it save human reason.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be accepted, it
+appears that human life is in part at least a product of human will,
+guided by human intelligence. Man finds himself in the position of the
+crew of a ship in the middle of the ocean; he does not know exactly how
+the ship was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but he
+has discovered how the engines are run, and how the ship is steered, and
+the meaning of the compass. So now he takes charge of the ship, and
+keeps it afloat amid many perils; and meantime, on the bridge of the
+vessel, there goes on a furious argument over the question what port the
+ship shall be steered to and what chart shall be used.</p>
+
+<p>It is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile is useful
+because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable are the
+conditions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent the problems with
+which he finds himself confronted. The moral and legal codes of mankind
+may be compared to the steering orders which are given to the helmsman
+of the vessel. Northeast by north, he is told; and if during the night a
+heavy wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard,
+then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direction. If he
+does not do so, he may find that his vessel has swung around and is
+going to some other part of the world. Next morning the passengers may
+wake up and find the ship on the rocks&mdash;because the helmsman persisted
+in following certain steering directions which were laid down in an
+ancient Hebrew book two or three thousand years ago!</p>
+
+<p>If life is a continually changing product, then the laws which govern
+conduct must also be continually changing, and morality is a problem of
+continuous adjustment to new circumstances and new needs. If man is free
+to work upon this changing environment, he must be free to make new
+tools and devise new processes. If it is the task of reason to choose<a name="vol_i_page_032" id="vol_i_page_032"></a>
+among many possible courses and many possible varieties of life, then
+clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every detail of his laws
+and customs and moral codes.</p>
+
+<p>This is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of all
+religions. So far as I know there is no religion which does not teach
+that the conduct of man in certain matters has been eternally fixed by
+some higher power, and that it is man's duty to conform to these rules.
+It is considered to be wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact,
+to do so is the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than
+any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be.</p>
+
+<p>Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us take, for a test, the
+Ten Commandments. These commandments were graven upon stone tablets some
+four thousand years ago, and are supposed to have been valid ever since.
+"Thou shalt not kill," is one; others phrase it, "Thou shall do no
+murder"; and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of
+controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former version, while
+if you are a member of the military general staff of your country you
+accept the latter. You maintain the right to kill your fellow men,
+provided that those who do the killing have been previously clad in a
+special uniform, indicating their distinctive function as killers of
+their fellow men. You maintain, in other words, the right of making war;
+and presently, when you get into making war, you find yourself
+maintaining the right to kill, not merely by the old established method
+of the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which destroy
+the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city full at a time.</p>
+
+<p>And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided the
+killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a man who sits upon
+a raised bench and wears a black robe, and perhaps a powdered wig. You
+consider that by the simple device of putting this man into a black robe
+and a powdered wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the
+divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to human reason;
+and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so subjected, you call him
+by the dread name "pacifist," and if he attempts to preach his idea, you
+send him to prison for ten or twenty years, which means in actual
+practice that you kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and
+tubercular infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of<a name="vol_i_page_033" id="vol_i_page_033"></a>
+killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "C. O.," and you bully and
+beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water cure" in your
+dungeons.</p>
+
+<p>Or take the commandment that we shall not commit adultery. Surely this
+is a law about which we can agree! But presently we discover that
+unhappily married couples desire to part, and that if we do not allow
+them to part, we actually cause the commission of a great deal more
+adultery than otherwise. Therefore, our wise men meet together, and
+revise this divine law, and decide that it is not adultery if a man
+takes another wife, provided he has received from a judge an engraved
+piece of paper permitting him to do so. But some of the followers of
+religion refuse to admit this right of mere mortal man. The Catholic
+Church attempts to enforce its own laws, and declares that people who
+divorce and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mortal
+sin. The Episcopal Church does not go quite so far as that; it allows
+the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. Other churches are content
+to accept the state law as it stands. Is it not manifest that all these
+groups are applying human reason, and nothing but human reason, to the
+interpreting and revising of their divine commandments?</p>
+
+<p>Or take the law, "Thou shalt not steal." Surely we can all agree upon
+that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets us nowhere, because we have
+to set up a human court to decide what is "stealing." Is it stealing to
+seize upon land, and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for
+your own, and hand it down to your children forever? Yes, of course,
+that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your
+statement. It is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number of
+years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by law, and
+held unchangeable forever. Also, we run up against the fact that it is
+not stealing, if it is done by the State, by men who have been dressed
+up in the costume of killers before they commit the act.</p>
+
+<p>Again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, while
+other men are starving and dying for lack of land to labor upon? Some of
+us call this stealing, but we are impolitely referred to as "radicals,"
+and if we venture to suggest that anyone should resist this kind of
+stealing, we are sentenced to slow death from malnutrition and
+tubercular infection. Again, is it stealing for a victim of our system
+of land<a name="vol_i_page_034" id="vol_i_page_034"></a> monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of
+his starving child? The law says that this is stealing, and sends the
+man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of mankind protests, and
+I have heard a great many respectable Americans venture so far in
+"radicalism" as to say that they themselves would steal under such
+circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>One could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is enough to
+make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to attempt to talk
+about "divine" rules for human conduct. Regardless of any ideas you may
+hold, or any wishes, you are forced at every hour of your life to apply
+your reason to the problems of your life, and you have no escape from
+the task of judging and deciding. All that you do is to judge right or
+to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery upon yourself
+and upon all who come into contact with you. How much more sensible,
+therefore, to recognize the fact of moral and intellectual
+responsibility; to investigate the data of life with which you have to
+deal, the environment by which you are surrounded, and to train your
+judgment so that you will be able to fit yourself to it with quickness
+and certainty!</p>
+
+<p>"But," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves mankind without
+any guide or authority. How can human beings act, how can they deal with
+one another, if there are no laws, no permanent moral codes?"</p>
+
+<p>The answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of morality does
+not mean at all that there will be no permanent laws and working
+principles. Many of the facts of life are fixed for all practical
+purposes&mdash;the purposes not merely of your life and my life, but the life
+of many generations. We are not likely to see in our time the end of the
+ancient Hebrew announcement that "the sins of the father are visited
+upon the children"; therefore it is possible for us to study out a
+course of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down to his
+children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. The Catholic Church
+has had for a thousand years or more the "mortal sin" of gluttony upon
+its list; and today comes experimental science with its new weapons of
+research, and discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the
+arteries, and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will
+ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. Indeed, science has added to
+gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of alcoholic liquor for
+beverage purposes; we have done this in<a name="vol_i_page_035" id="vol_i_page_035"></a> spite of the manifest fact that
+the drinking of wine was not merely an Old Testament virtue, but a New
+Testament religious rite.</p>
+
+<p>To say that human life changes, and that new discoveries and new powers
+make necessary new laws and moral customs, is to say something so
+obvious that it might seem a waste of paper and ink. Man has invented
+the automobile and has crowded himself into cities, and so has to adopt
+a rigid set of traffic regulations. So far as I know, it has never
+occurred to any religious enthusiast to seek in the book of Revelation
+for information as to the advisability of the "left hand turn" at
+Broadway and Forty-second Street, New York, at five o'clock in the
+afternoon. But modern science has created new economic facts, just as
+unprecedented as the automobile; it has created new possibilities of
+spending and new possibilities of starving for mankind; it has made new
+cravings and new satisfactions, new crimes and new virtues; and yet the
+great mass of our people are still seeking to guide themselves in their
+readjustments to these new facts by ancient codes which have no more
+relationship to these facts than they have to the affairs of Mars!</p>
+
+<p>I am acquainted with a certain lady, one of the kindest and most devoted
+souls alive, who seeks to solve the problems of her life, and of her
+large family of children and grand-children, according to sentences
+which she picks out, more or less at random, from certain more or less
+random chapters of ancient Hebrew literature. This lady will find some
+words which she imagines apply to the matter, and will shut her devout
+eyes to the fact that there are other "texts," bearing on the matter,
+which say exactly the opposite. She will place the strangest and most
+unimaginable interpretations upon the words, and yet will be absolutely
+certain that her interpretation is the voice of God speaking directly to
+her. If you try to tell her about Socialism, she will say, "The poor ye
+have always with you"; which means that it is interfering with Divine
+Providence to try to remedy poverty on any large scale. This lady is
+ready instantly to relieve any single case of want; she regards it as
+her duty to do this; in fact, she considers that the purpose of some
+people's poverty is to provide her with a chance to do the noble action
+of relieving it. You would think that the meaning of the sentence,
+"Spare the rod and spoil the child," would be so plain that no one<a name="vol_i_page_036" id="vol_i_page_036"></a>
+could mistake it; but this good lady understood it to mean that God
+forbade the physical chastisement of children, and preferred them
+"spoiled." She held this idea for half a lifetime&mdash;until it was pointed
+out to her that the sentence was not in the Bible, but in "Hudibras," an
+old English poem!<a name="vol_i_page_037" id="vol_i_page_037"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><br />
+THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of means to
+ends, and depends upon the understanding of a particular set of
+circumstances.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Some years ago I used to know an ardent single tax propagandist who
+found my way of arguing intensely irritating, because, as he phrased it,
+I had "no principles." We would be discussing, for example, a protective
+tariff, and I would wish to collect statistics, but discovered to my
+bewilderment that to my single tax friend a customs duty was "stealing"
+on the part of the government. The government had a right to tax land,
+because that was the gift of nature, but it had no right to tax the
+products of human labor, and when it took a portion of the goods which
+anyone brought into a country, the government was playing the part of a
+robber. Of course such a man was annoyed by the suggestion that in the
+early stages of a country's development it might possibly be a good
+thing for the country to make itself independent and self-sufficient by
+encouraging the development of its manufactures; that, on the other
+hand, when these manufactures had grown to such a size that they
+controlled the government, it might be an excellent thing for the
+country to subject them to the pressure of foreign competition, in order
+to lower their value as a preliminary to socializing them.</p>
+
+<p>The reader who comes to this book looking for hard and fast rules of
+life will be disappointed. It would be convenient if someone could lay
+down for us a moral code, and lift from our shoulders the inconvenient
+responsibility of deciding about our own lives. There may be persons so
+weak that they have to have the conditions of their lives thus
+determined for them; but I am not writing for such persons. I am writing
+for adult and responsible individuals, and I bear in mind that every
+individual is a separate problem, with separate needs and separate
+duties. There are, of course, a good many rules that apply to everybody
+in almost all emergencies, but I cannot think of a single rule that I
+would be willing to say I would<a name="vol_i_page_038" id="vol_i_page_038"></a> apply in my life without a single
+exception. "Thou shalt not kill" is a rule that I have followed, so far
+without exception; but as soon as I turn my imagination loose, I can
+think of many circumstances under which I should kill. I remember
+discussing the matter with a pacifist friend of mine, an out-and-out
+religious non-resistant. I pointed out to him that people sometimes went
+insane, and in that condition they sometimes seized hatchets and killed
+anyone in sight. What would my pacifist friend do if he saw a maniac
+attacking his children with a hatchet? It did not help him to say that
+he would use all possible means short of killing the maniac; he had
+finally to admit that if he were quite sure it was a question of the
+life of the maniac or the life of his child, he would kill. And this is
+not mere verbal quibbling, because such things do happen in the world,
+and people are confronted with such emergencies, and they have to
+decide, and no rule is a general rule if it has a single exception.
+There is a saying that "the exception proves the rule," but this is very
+silly; it is a mistranslation of the Latin word "probat," which means,
+not proves, but tests. No exception can prove a rule. What the exception
+does is to test the rule by showing that the result does not follow in
+the exceptional case.</p>
+
+<p>The only kind of rule which can be laid down for human conduct is a rule
+in such general terms that it escapes exceptions by leaving the matter
+open for every man's difference of opinion. Any kind of rule which is
+specific will sooner or later pass out of date. Take, by way of
+illustration, the ancient and well-established virtue of frugality.
+Obviously, under a state of nature, or of economic competition, it is
+necessary for every man to lay by a store "for a rainy day." But suppose
+we could set up a condition of economic security, under which society
+guaranteed to every man the full product of his labor, and the old and
+the sick were fully taken care of&mdash;then how foolish a man would seem who
+troubled to acquire a surplus of goods! It would be as if we saw him
+riding on horseback through the main street of our town in a full suit
+of armor!</p>
+
+<p>I devote a good deal of space to this question of a fixed and
+unchangeable morality, because it is one of the heaviest burdens that
+mankind carries upon its back. The record of human history is sickening,
+not so much because of blood and slaughter, but because of fanaticism;
+because wherever the<a name="vol_i_page_039" id="vol_i_page_039"></a> mind of man attempts to assert itself, to escape
+from the blind rule of animal greed, it adopts a set of formulas, and
+proceeds to enforce them, regardless of consequences, upon the whole of
+life. Consider, for example, the rule of the Puritans in England. The
+Puritans glorified conscience, and it is perfectly proper to glorify
+conscience, but not to the entire suppression of the beauty-making
+faculties in man. Macaulay summed up the Puritan point of view in the
+sentence that they objected to bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to
+the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. As a result of
+applying that principle, and lacing mankind in a straight-jacket by
+legislation, England swung back into a reaction under the Cavaliers, in
+which debauchery held more complete sway than ever before or since in
+English life.</p>
+
+<p>This is a hard lesson, but it must be learned: there is no virtue that
+does not become a vice if it is carried to extremes; there is no virtue
+that does not become a vice if it is applied at the wrong time, or under
+the wrong circumstances, or at the wrong stage of human development. In
+fact, we may say that most vices are virtues misapplied. The so-called
+natural vices are simply natural impulses carried to excess, while the
+unnatural vices result from the suppression and distortion of natural
+impulses. The Greeks had as their supreme virtue what they called
+"sophrosuné." It is a beautiful word, worth remembering; it means a
+beautiful quality called moderation. We shall find, as we come to
+investigate, that life is a series of compromises among many different
+needs, many different desires, many different duties; and reason sits as
+a wise and patient judge, and appoints to each its proper portion, and
+denies to it an excess which would starve the others. Such is true
+morality, and it is incompatible with the existence of any fixed code,
+whether of human origin or divine.</p>
+
+<p>The fixed morality is a survival of a far-off past, of the days of
+instinct and servitude. Human reason has developed but slowly, and
+perhaps only a few people are as yet entirely capable of taking control
+of their own destiny; perhaps it is really dangerous to think for
+oneself! But if we investigate carefully, we may decide that the danger
+is not so much to ourselves as it is to others. The most evil of all the
+habits that man has inherited from his far-off past is the habit of
+exploiting his fellows, and in order to exploit them more<a name="vol_i_page_040" id="vol_i_page_040"></a> safely the
+ruling castes of priests and kings and nobles and property owners have
+taken possession of the moralities of the world and shaped them for
+their own convenience. They have taught the slave virtues of credulity
+and submission; they have surrounded their teachings with all the
+terrors of the supernatural; they have placed upon rebellion the
+penalties, not merely of this world, but of the next, not merely of the
+dungeon and the rack, but of hellfire and brimstone.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to go to extremes and say that the moral codes now taught
+in the world are made wholly in this evil way. As a matter of fact they
+are a queer jumble of the two elements, the slave terrors of the past
+and the common sense of the present. There is not one moral code in the
+world today, there are many. There is one for the rich, and an entirely
+different one for the poor, and the rich have had a great deal more to
+do with shaping the code of the poor than the poor have had to do with
+shaping the code of the rich. There is one code for governments, and an
+entirely different one for the victims of governments. There is one code
+for business, and an entirely different one, a far more human and decent
+one, for friendship. Above all, there is one code for Sunday and another
+code for the other six days of the week. Most of our idealisms and our
+sentimental fine phrases we reserve for our Sunday code, while for our
+every-day code we go back to the rule of the jungle: "Dog eat dog," or
+"Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first." When you
+attempt to suggest a new moral code to our present day moral
+authorities, it is the fine phrases of the Sunday code they bring out
+for exhibition purposes; and perhaps you are impressed by their
+arguments&mdash;until Monday morning, when you attempt to apply this code at
+the office, and they stare at you in bewilderment, or burst out laughing
+in your face.</p>
+
+<p>What I am trying to do here is to outline a code that will not be a
+matter of phrases but a matter of practice. It will apply to all men,
+rich as well as poor, and to all seven days of the week. I am not so
+much suggesting a code, as pointing out to you how you can work out your
+own code for yourself. I am suggesting that you should adopt it, not
+because I tell you to, but because you yourself have taken it and tested
+it, precisely as you would test any other of the practical affairs of
+your life&mdash;potatoes as an article of diet, or some particular sack of
+potatoes that a peddler was trying to sell to you. It is<a name="vol_i_page_041" id="vol_i_page_041"></a> not yet
+possible for you to be as sure about everything in your life as you can
+be about a sack of potatoes; human knowledge has not got that far; but
+at least you can know what is to be known, and if anything is a matter
+of uncertainty, you can know that. Such knowledge is often the most
+important of all&mdash;just as the driver of an automobile wants to know if a
+bridge is not to be depended on.</p>
+
+<p>So I say to you that if you want to find happiness in this life, look
+with distrust upon all absolutes and ultimates, all hard and fast rules,
+all formulas and dogmas and "general principles." Bear in mind that
+there are many factors in every case, there are many complications in
+every human being, there are many sides to every question. Try to keep
+an open mind and an even temper. Try to take an interest in learning
+something new every day, and in trying some new experiment. This is the
+scientific attitude toward life; this is the way of growth and of true
+success. It is inconvenient, because it involves working your brains,
+and most people have not been taught to do this, and find it the hardest
+kind of work there is. But how much better it is to think for yourself,
+and to protect yourself, than to trust your thinking to some group of
+people whose only interest may be to exploit you for their advantage!<a name="vol_i_page_042" id="vol_i_page_042"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><br />
+THE CHOOSING OF LIFE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is best in
+life, and decide what we wish to make of it.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have made the point about evolution, that it may go forward or it may
+go backward. There is no guarantee in nature that because a thing
+changes, it must necessarily become better than it was. On the contrary,
+degeneration is as definitely established a fact as growth, and it is of
+the utmost importance, in studying the problem of human happiness and
+how to make it, to get clear the fact that nature has produced, and
+continues to produce, all kinds of monstrosities and parasites and
+failures and abortions. And all these blunders of our great mother
+struggle just as hard, desire life just as ardently as normal creatures,
+and suffer just as cruelly when they fail. Blind optimism about life is
+just as fatuous and just as dangerous as blind pessimism, and if we
+propose to take charge of life, and to make it over, we shall find that
+we have to get quickly to the task of deciding what our purpose is.</p>
+
+<p>"Choose well, your choice is brief and yet endless," says Carlyle. You
+are driven in your choice by two facts&mdash;first, that you have to choose,
+regardless of whether you want to or not; and second, that upon your
+choice depend infinite possibilities of happiness or of misery. The
+interdependence of life is such that you are choosing not merely for the
+present, but for the future; you are choosing for your posterity
+forever, and to some extent you are choosing for all mankind. Matthew
+Arnold has said that "Conduct is three-fourths of life"; but I, for my
+part, have never been able to see where he got his figures. It seems to
+me that conduct is practically everything in life that really counts.
+Conduct is not merely marriage and birth and premature death; it is not
+merely eating and drinking and sleeping: it is thinking and aspiring; it
+is religion and science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the
+lightning and the cyclone, but with the spread of knowledge it is coming
+to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may be even the comet
+and the rising of the sun.<a name="vol_i_page_043" id="vol_i_page_043"></a></p>
+
+<p>We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous problem of human
+conduct; we are going to ask ourselves the question: What kind of life
+do we want? What kind of life are we going to make? What are the
+standards by which we may know excellence in life, and distinguish it
+from failure and waste and blunder in life? Obviously, when we have done
+this, we shall have solved the moral problem; all we shall have to say
+is, act so that your actions help to bring the desirable things into
+being, and do not act so as to hinder or weaken them.</p>
+
+<p>We shall not be able to go to nature to settle this question for us.
+This is our problem, not nature's. But we shall find, as usual, that we
+can pick up precious hints from her; we shall be wise to study her ways,
+and learn from her successes and her failures. We are proud of her
+latest product, ourselves. Let us see how she made us; what were the
+stages on the way to man?</p>
+
+<p>First in the scale of evolution, it appears, came inert matter. We call
+it inert, because it looks that way, though we know, of course, that it
+consists of infinite numbers of molecules vibrating with speed which we
+can measure even though we cannot imagine it. This "matter" is
+enormously fascinating, and a wise man will hesitate to speak
+patronizingly about it. Nevertheless, considering matter apart from the
+mind which studies it, we decide that it represents a low stage of
+being. We speak contemptuously of stones and clods and lumps of clay. We
+award more respect to things like mountains and tempest-tossed oceans,
+because they are big; in the early days of our race we used to worship
+these things, but now we think of them merely as the raw material of
+life, and we should not be in the least interested in becoming a
+mountain or an ocean.</p>
+
+<p>Almost everyone would agree, therefore, that what we call "life" is a
+higher and more important achievement of nature. And if we wish to grade
+this life, we do so according to its sentience&mdash;that is to say, the
+amount and intensity of the consciousness which grows in it. We are
+interested in the one-celled organisms which swarm everywhere throughout
+nature, and we study the mysterious processes by which they nourish and
+beget themselves; we suspect that they have a germ of consciousness in
+them; but we are surer of the meaning and importance of the
+consciousness we detect in<a name="vol_i_page_044" id="vol_i_page_044"></a> some complex organism like a fish or bird.
+We learn to know the signs of consciousness, of dawning intelligence,
+and we esteem the various kinds of creatures according to the amount of
+it they possess. We reject mere physical bigness and mere strength.
+Joyce Kilmer may write:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry">
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Poems are made by men like me,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: .25em;">But only God can make a tree"&mdash;</span></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>And that seems to us a charming bit of fancy; but the common sense of
+the thing is voiced to us much better in the lines of old Ben Jonson:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry">
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">"It is not growing like a tree</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: .25em;">In bulk doth make man better be."</span></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>If we take two animals of equal bulk, the hippopotamus and the elephant,
+we shall be far more interested in the elephant, because of the
+intelligence and what we call "character" which he displays. There are
+good elephants and bad elephants, kind ones and treacherous ones. We
+love the dog because we can make a companion of him; that is, because we
+can teach him to react to human stimuli. Of all animals we are
+fascinated most by the monkey, because he is nearest to man, and
+displays the keenest intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>Someone may say that this is all mere human egotism, and that we have no
+way of really being sure that the life of elephants and hippopotami is
+not more interesting and significant than the life of men. Never having
+been either of these animals, I cannot say with assurance; but I know
+that I have the power to exterminate these creatures, or to pen them in
+cages, and they are helpless to protect themselves, or even to
+understand what is happening to them. So I am irresistibly driven to
+conclude that intelligence is more safe and more worth while than
+unintelligence; in short, that intelligence is nature's highest product
+up to date, and that to foster and develop it is the best guess I can
+make as to the path of wisdom&mdash;that is, of intelligence!</p>
+
+<p>When we come to deal with human values, we find that we can trace much
+the same kind of evolution. Back in the days of the cave man, it was
+physical strength which dominated the horde; but nowadays, except in the
+imagination of the small boy, the "strong man" does not cut much of a
+figure.<a name="vol_i_page_045" id="vol_i_page_045"></a> We go once, perhaps, to see him lift his heavy weights and
+break his iron bars, but then we are tired of him. Mere strength had to
+yield in the struggle for life to quickness of eye and hand, to energy
+which for lack of a better name we may call "nervous." The pugilist who
+has nothing but muscle goes down before his lighter antagonist who can
+keep out of his reach, and the crowd loves the football hero who can
+duck and dodge and make the long runs. One might cite a thousand
+illustrations, such as the British bowmen breaking down the heavily
+armored knights, or the quick-moving, light vessels of Britain
+overcoming the huge galleons of Spain. And as society develops and
+becomes more complex, the fighting man becomes less and less a man of
+muscle, and more and more a man of "nerve." Alexander, Cæsar and
+Napoleon would have stood a poor chance in personal combat against many
+of their followers. They led, because they were men of energy and
+cunning, able to maintain the subtle thing we call prestige.</p>
+
+<p>Now the world has moved into an industrial era, and who are the great
+men of our time, the men whose lightest words are heeded, whose doings
+are spread upon the front pages of our newspapers? Obviously, they are
+the men of money. We may pretend to ourselves that we do not really
+stand in awe of a Morgan or a Rockefeller, but that we admire, let us
+say, an Edison or a Roosevelt. But Edison himself is a man of money, and
+will tell you that he had to be a man of money in order to be free to
+conduct his experiments. As for our politicians and statesmen, they
+either serve the men of money, or the men of money suppress them, as
+they did Roosevelt. The Morgans and the Rockefellers do not do much
+talking; they do not have to. They content themselves with being obeyed,
+and the shaping of our society is in their hands.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, some of us really believe that there are higher faculties in
+man than the ability to manipulate the stock market. We consider that
+the great inventor, the great poet, the great moralist, contributes more
+to human happiness than the man who, by cunning and persistence,
+succeeds in monopolizing some material necessity of human life. "Poets,"
+says Shelley, "are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." If this
+strange statement is anywhere near to truth, it is surely of importance
+that we should decide what are the higher powers in men, and how they
+may be recognized, and how fostered and developed.<a name="vol_i_page_046" id="vol_i_page_046"></a></p>
+
+<p>What is, in its essence, the process of evolution from the lower to the
+higher forms of mental life? It is a process of expanding consciousness;
+the developing of ability to apprehend a wider and wider circle of
+existence, to share it, to struggle for it as we do for the life we call
+our "own." The test of the higher mental forms is therefore a test of
+universality, of sympathetic inclusiveness; or, to use commoner words,
+it is a test of enlightened unselfishness.</p>
+
+<p>Every human individual has the will to life, the instinct of
+self-preservation, which persuades him that he is of importance; but the
+test of his development is his ability to realize that, important though
+he may be, he is but a small part of the universe, and his highest
+interests are not in himself alone, his highest duties are not owed to
+himself alone. And as the life becomes more of the intellect, this fact
+becomes more and more obvious, more and more dominating. Men who
+monopolize the material things of the world and their control are
+necessarily self-seeking; but in the realm of the higher faculties this
+element, in the very nature of the case, is forced into the background.
+It is evident that truth is not truth for the Standard Oil Company, nor
+for J. P. Morgan and Company, nor yet for the government of the United
+States; it is truth for the whole of mankind, and one who sincerely
+labors for the truth does so for the universal benefit.</p>
+
+<p>There may be, of course, an element of selfishness in the activities of
+poets and inventors. They may be seeking for fame; they may be hoping to
+make money out of their discoveries; but the greatest men we know have
+been dominated by an overwhelming impulse of creation, and when we read
+their lives, and discover in them signs of petty vanity or jealousy or
+greed, we are pained and shocked. What touches us most deeply is some
+mark of self-consecration and humility; as, for example, when Newton
+tells us that after all his life's labors he felt himself as a little
+child gathering sea-shells on the shore of the great ocean of truth; or
+when Alfred Russel Wallace, discovering that Darwin had been working
+longer than himself over the theory of the origin of species, generously
+withdrew and permitted the theory to go to the world in Darwin's name.</p>
+
+<p>There are three faculties in man, usually described as intellect,
+feeling and will. According as one or the other faculty<a name="vol_i_page_047" id="vol_i_page_047"></a> predominates,
+we have a great scientist, a great poet, or a great moralist. We might
+choose a representative of each type&mdash;let us say Newton, Shakespeare and
+Jesus&mdash;and spend much time in controversy as to which of the three types
+is the greatest, which makes the greatest contribution to human
+happiness. But it will suffice here to point out that the three
+faculties do not exclude one another; every man must have all three, and
+a perfectly rounded man should seek to develop all three. Jesus was
+considerable of a poet, and we should pay far less heed to Shakespeare
+if he had not been a moralist. Also there have been instances of great
+poets and painters who were scientists&mdash;for example, Leonardo and
+Goethe.</p>
+
+<p>The fundamental difference between the scientist and the poet is that
+one is exploring nature and discovering things which actually exist,
+whereas the other is creating new life out of his own spirit. But the
+poet will find that his creations take but little hold upon life, if
+they are not guided and shaped by a deep understanding of life's
+fundamental nature and needs&mdash;in other words, if the poet is not
+something of a scientist. And in the same way, the very greatest
+discoveries of science seem to us like leaps of creative imagination; as
+if the mind had completed nature, through some intuitive and sympathetic
+understanding of what nature wished to be.</p>
+
+<p>The point about these higher forms of human activity is that they renew
+and multiply life. We may say that if Jesus had never lived, others
+would have embodied and set forth with equal poignancy the revolutionary
+idea of the equality of all men as children of one common father. And
+perhaps this is true; but we have no way of being sure that it is true,
+and as we look back upon the last nineteen hundred years of human
+history, we are unable to imagine just what the life of mankind during
+those centuries would have been if Jesus had died when he was a baby. We
+do not know what modern thought might have been without Kant, or what
+modern music might have been without Beethoven. We are forced to admit
+that if it had not been for the patient wisdom and persuasive kindness
+of Lincoln, the Slave Power might have won its independence, and America
+today might have been a military camp like Europe, and the lives and
+thoughts of every one of us would have been different.</p>
+
+<p>Or take the activities of the poet. Many years ago the writer was asked
+to name the men who had exercised<a name="vol_i_page_048" id="vol_i_page_048"></a> the greatest influence upon him, and
+after much thought he named three: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. And now
+consider the significance of this reply. One of these people, Shelley,
+was what we call a "real" person; that is, a man who actually lived and
+walked upon the earth. Concerning Hamlet, it is believed there was once
+a Prince of Denmark by that name, but the character who is known to us
+as Hamlet is the creation of a poet's brain. As to the third figure,
+Jesus, the authorities dispute. Some say that he was a man who actually
+lived; others believe that he was God on earth; yet others, very
+learned, maintain that he is a legendary name around which a number of
+traditions have gathered.</p>
+
+<p>To me it does not make a particle of difference which of the three
+possibilities happens to be true about Jesus. If he was God on earth, he
+was God in human form, under human limitations, and in that sense we are
+all gods on earth. And whether he really lived, or whether some poet
+invented him, matters not a particle so far as concerns his effect upon
+others. The emotions which moved him, the loves, the griefs, the high
+resolves, existed in the soul of someone, whether his name were Jesus or
+John; and these emotions have been recorded in such form that they
+communicate themselves to us, they become a part of our souls, they make
+us something different from what we were before we encountered them.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, the poet makes in his own soul a new life, and then
+projects it into the world, and it becomes a force which makes over the
+lives of millions of other people. If you read the vast mass of
+criticism which has grown up about the figure of Hamlet, you learn that
+Hamlet is the type of the "modern man." Shakespeare was able to divine
+what the modern man would be; or perhaps we can go farther and say that
+Shakespeare helped to make the modern man what he is; the modern man is
+more of Hamlet, because he has taken Hamlet to his heart and pondered
+over Hamlet's problem. Or take Don Quixote. No doubt the follies of the
+"age of chivalry" would have died out of men's hearts in the end; but
+how much sooner they died because of the laughter of Cervantes! Or take
+"Les Miserables." Our prison system is not ideal by any means, but it is
+far less cruel than it was half a century ago, and we owe this in part
+to Victor Hugo. Every convict in the world is to some degree a happier
+man because of this vision which was projected upon the world<a name="vol_i_page_049" id="vol_i_page_049"></a> from the
+soul of one great poet. No one can estimate the part which the writings
+of Tolstoi have played in the present revolution in Russia, but this we
+may say with certainty: there is not one man, woman or child in Russia
+at the present moment who is quite the same as he would have been if
+"Resurrection" had never been written.</p>
+
+<p>In discussing the highest faculties of man we have so far refrained from
+using the word "genius." It is a word which has been cheapened by
+misuse, but we are now in position to use it. The things which we have
+just been considering are the phenomena of genius&mdash;and we can say this,
+even though we may not know exactly what genius is. Perhaps it is, as
+Frederic Myers asserts, a "subliminal uprush," the welling up into the
+consciousness of some part of the content of the subconscious mind. Or
+perhaps it is something of what man calls "divine." Or perhaps it is the
+first dawning, the first hint of that super-race which will some day
+replace mankind. Perhaps we are witnessing the same thing that happened
+on the earth when glimmerings of reason first broke upon the mind of
+some poor, bewildered ape. We cannot be sure; but this much we can say:
+the man of genius represents the highest activity of the mind of which
+we as yet have knowledge. He represents the spirit of man, fully
+emancipated, fully conscious, and taking up the task of creation; taking
+human life as raw material, and making it over into something more
+subtle, more intense, more significant, more universal than it ever was
+before, or ever would have been without the intervention of this new
+God-man.<a name="vol_i_page_050" id="vol_i_page_050"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X<br /><br />
+MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the relative
+importance of our various duties.)</p></div>
+
+<p>So now we may say that we know what are the great and important things
+in life. Slowly and patiently, with infinite distress and waste and
+failure, but yet inevitably, the life of man is being made over and
+multiplied to infinity, by the power of the thinking mind, impelled by
+the joy and thrill of the creative action, and guided by the sense of
+responsibility, the instinct to serve, which we call conscience. To
+develop these higher faculties is the task we have before us, and the
+supreme act to which we dedicate ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>So now we are in position to define the word moral. Assuming that our
+argument be accepted, that action is moral which tends to foster the
+best and highest forms of life we know, and to aid them in developing
+their highest powers; that is immoral which tends to destroy the best
+life we know, or to hinder its rapid development.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now proceed to apply these tests to the practices of man; first
+as an individual, and then as a social being. What are my duties to
+myself, and what are my duties to the world about me?</p>
+
+<p>You will note that these questions differ somewhat from those of the old
+morality. Jesus told us, first, that we should love the Lord our God,
+and, second, that we should love our neighbor as ourself. Some would say
+that modern thought has dismissed God from consideration; but I would
+prefer to say that modern thought has decided that the place where we
+encounter God most immediately is in our own miraculously expanding
+consciousness. Our duty toward God is our duty to make of ourselves the
+most perfect product of the Divine Incarnation that we can become. Our
+duty to our neighbor is to help him to do the same.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, as we come to apply these formulas, we find that they overlap
+and mingle inextricably; the two duties are really one duty looked at
+from different points of view. We<a name="vol_i_page_051" id="vol_i_page_051"></a> decide that we owe it to ourselves to
+develop our best powers of thinking, and we discover that in so doing we
+make ourselves better fitted to live as citizens, better equipped to
+help our fellow men. We go out into our city to serve others by making
+the city clean and decent, and we find that we have helped to save
+ourselves from a pestilence.</p>
+
+<p>The most commonly accepted, or at any rate the most commonly preached,
+of all formulas is the "golden rule," "Do unto others as you would have
+them do unto you." This formula is good so far as it goes, but you note
+that it leaves undetermined the all-important question, what <i>ought</i> we
+to want others to do unto us. If I am an untrained child, what I would
+have others do unto me is to give me plenty of candy; therefore, under
+the golden rule, my highest duty becomes to distribute free candy to the
+world. The "golden rule" is obviously consistent with all forms of
+self-indulgence, and with all forms of stagnation; it might result in a
+civilization more static than China.</p>
+
+<p>Or let us take the formula which the German philosopher Kant worked out
+as the final product of his thinking: "Act so that you would be willing
+for your action to become a general rule of conduct." Here again is the
+same problem. There are many possible general rules of conduct. Some
+would prefer one, some others; and there is no possible way of escape
+from the fact that before men can agree what to do, they must decide
+what they wish to make of their lives.</p>
+
+<p>To the formula of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," the
+answer is obvious enough: "Suppose my neighbor is not worthy of as much
+love as myself?" To be sure, it is a perilous thing for me to have to
+decide this question; nevertheless, it may be a fact that I am a great
+inventor, and that my neighbor is a sexual pervert. There is, of course,
+a sense in which I may love him, even so; I may love the deeper
+possibilities of his nature, which religious ecstasy can appeal to and
+arouse. But in spite of all ecstasies and all efforts, it may be that
+his disease&mdash;physical, mental and moral&mdash;has progressed to such a point
+that it is necessary to confine him, or to castrate him, or even to
+asphyxiate him painlessly. To say that I must love such a man as myself
+is, to say the least, to be vague. We can see how the indiscriminate
+preaching of such a formula would open the flood-gates of sentimentality
+and fraud.<a name="vol_i_page_052" id="vol_i_page_052"></a></p>
+
+<p>Modern thinking says: Thou shalt love the highest possibilities of life,
+and thou shalt labor diligently to foster them; moreover, because life
+is always growing, and new possibilities are forever dawning in the
+human spirit, thou shalt keep an open mind and an inquiring temper, and
+be ready at any time to begin life afresh.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the formula. It is not simple; and when we come to apply it, we
+find that it constantly grows more complex. When we attempt to decide
+our duty to ourselves, we find that we have in us a number of different
+beings, each with separate and sometimes conflicting duties and needs.
+We have in us the physical man and the economic man, and these clamor
+for their rights, and must have at least a part of their rights, before
+we can go on to be the intellectual man, the moral man, or the artistic
+man. So our life becomes a series of compromises and adjustments between
+a thousand conflicting desires and duties; between the different beings
+which we might be, but can be only to a certain extent, and at certain
+times. We shall see, as we come to investigate one field after another
+of human activity, that we never have an absolute certainty, never an
+absolute right, never an absolute duty; never can we shut our eyes, and
+go blindly ahead upon one course of action, to the exclusion of every
+other consideration! On the contrary, we sit in the seat of
+self-determination as a highly trained and skillful engineer. We keep
+our eyes upon a dozen different gauges; we press a lever here and touch
+a regulator there; we decide that now is a time for speed, and now for
+caution; and knowing all the time that the safety, not merely of
+ourselves, but of many passengers, depends upon the decisions of each
+moment.<a name="vol_i_page_053" id="vol_i_page_053"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><br />
+THE MIND AND THE BODY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the interaction between physical and mental things, and
+the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed causes.)</p></div>
+
+<p>It is our plan, so far as possible, to discuss the problems of the mind
+in one section of this book, and the problems of the body in another;
+but just as we found that we could not separate our duties to ourself
+from our duties to our neighbors, so we find that the mind and the body
+are inextricably interwoven, and that whenever we probe deeply into one,
+we discover the other. The interaction of the mind and the body is a
+fascinating problem into which we must look for a moment, not because we
+expect to solve it, but because it illuminates the whole subject.</p>
+
+<p>The human body is a machine. It takes in carbon and oxygen, and burns
+them, and gives out carbon dioxide and other waste products, and
+develops energy in proportion to the amount of carbon it consumes. This
+machine has its elaborate apparatus of action and reaction, its sensory
+organs where outside stimuli are received, its nerves like telegraph
+wires to carry these impressions, its brain cells to store them and to
+transform them into reactions. We know to some extent how these brain
+cells work. We know what portions of the brain are devoted to this or
+that activity. We know that if we stick a pin into a certain spot we
+shall paralyze the left forefinger. We know that by injecting a certain
+drug, or by breathing a certain gas, we can cause this or that sensation
+or reaction, such as laughing or weeping or mania. We know what poisons
+are generated in the system by anger, and what chemical changes take
+place in a muscle that is tired. All this is part of a vast new science
+which is called bio-chemistry, or the chemistry of life.</p>
+
+<p>Our bodies, therefore, are part of the material universe, and subject to
+the laws or ways of being of this universe. The first of these laws that
+we know is the law of causation. Every change in the universe has its
+cause, and that in turn<a name="vol_i_page_054" id="vol_i_page_054"></a> had another cause; this chain is never broken,
+no matter how far we go, and the same causes universally produce the
+same effects. If you see a ball move on a billiard table, you know that
+the ball did not move itself; you know that something struck the ball or
+tilted the table. You discover that the motion of the ball moves the air
+around it, and the waves of that motion are spread through the room.
+They strike the walls, and the motion is carried on through the walls,
+and if we had instruments sensitive enough, we could feel the motion of
+that billiard ball at the other side of the world, and a few million
+years from now at the most remote of the stars. This is what is called
+the law of the conservation of energy, and when we discover something
+like radium which seems to violate that law by giving out unlimited
+quantities of energy, we investigate and discover a new form of energy
+locked up in the atom. In the disintegration of the atom we have a
+source of power which, when we have learned to use it, will multiply
+perhaps millions of times the powers we are now able to use on this
+earth. But energy, no matter how many times it is transformed, and in
+what strange ways it reappears, always remains, and is never destroyed,
+and never created out of nothing.</p>
+
+<p>My friend the great physiologist once took me into his laboratory and
+showed me a little aquarium in which some minute creatures were wiggling
+about&mdash;young sea-urchins, if I remember. The physiologist took a bottle
+containing some chemical, and dropped a single drop into the water, and
+instantly all these little black creatures, which had been darting
+aimlessly in every direction through the water, turned and swam all in
+one direction, toward the light. They swam until they touched the walls
+of the aquarium, and there they stuck, trying their best to swim
+farther. "And now," said my friend, "that is what we call a 'tropism,'
+and all life is a tropism. What you see in that aquarium means that some
+day we shall know just what combination of chemicals causes a human
+being to move this way or that, to do this thing or that. When
+bio-chemistry has progressed sufficiently, we shall be able to make
+human qualities, perhaps in the sperm, perhaps in the embryo, perhaps
+day by day by means of diet or injection."</p>
+
+<p>Said I: "Some day, when bio-chemistry has progressed far enough, you
+will know what combination of chemicals causes a man to vote the
+Democratic or Republican ticket."<a name="vol_i_page_055" id="vol_i_page_055"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" answered my friend. (He has a sense of humor about all things
+except this sacred bio-chemistry.)</p>
+
+<p>Said I: "When you have got to that stage, keep the secret carefully, and
+we will fix up a scheme, and a few days before election we will release
+some gas in our big cities, and sweep the country for the Socialist
+ticket."</p>
+
+<p>But jesting aside: if the human body is a material thing, existing in
+the material world and subject to causation, there must be material
+reasons for the actions of human bodies, just the same as for the moving
+of billiard balls. We hear the sound of a billiard ball striking the
+cushion, and we are prepared to accept the idea that the thing we call
+hearing in us is caused by the impinging of sound waves upon our
+eardrums. And if we investigate human beings in the mass, we find every
+reason to believe that they act according to laws, and that there are
+material causes for their acts. If you get up and shout fire in a
+theater, you know how the audience will behave. If you study statistics,
+you can say that in any large city a certain fixed number of human
+beings are going to commit suicide every month; you can even say that
+more are going to commit suicide in the month of June than in any other
+month. You can say that more people are going to die at two o'clock in
+the morning than at any other hour. You know that certain changes in the
+weather will cause all human beings to behave in the same way. You know
+that an increase of prices or an increase of unemployment will cause a
+certain additional number of men to commit crimes, and a certain
+additional number of women to become prostitutes. You know that if a man
+overeats, his thoughts will change their color; he will have what he
+calls "the blues." I might cite a thousand other illustrations to prove
+that human minds are subject to material laws, and therefore to
+investigation by the bio-chemists.</p>
+
+<p>But now, stop a moment. Here you sit reading a book. Something in the
+book pleases you, and you say, "Good!" Perhaps you slap your knee or
+clench your fist. Now here is a motion of your hand, which stirs the air
+about you, and which, according to the laws of energy, will spread its
+effects to the other side of the world, and even to the farthest of the
+stars. Or perhaps the book makes you angry, and you throw it down in
+disgust; an entirely different motion, which will affect the other side
+of the world and the farthest of the<a name="vol_i_page_056" id="vol_i_page_056"></a> stars in an entirely different
+way. The machine of the universe will be forever altered because of that
+slapping of your knee or that throwing down of your book.</p>
+
+<p>And what was the cause of these things? So far as we can see, the
+material cause was exactly the same in each case&mdash;the reading of certain
+letters. Two human beings, sitting side by side and reading exactly the
+same letters, might be affected in exactly opposite ways. It seems
+hardly rational to maintain that the material difference of two pairs of
+eyes, moving over exactly the same set of letters, could have resulted
+in two such different motions of the hands. As a matter of fact, the
+very same letters may affect the same person in different ways. The
+composer, Edward MacDowell, once told me how on his birthday his pupils
+sent him a gift, with a card containing some lines from the opera
+"Rheingold," beginning, "O singe fort"&mdash;that is, "Oh, sing on." But the
+composer happened, when glancing at the card, to think French instead of
+German, and got the message, "Oh, powerful monkey!" This, of course, was
+disconcerting to a famous piano performer, and his pupils, if they had
+been watching his face, would have seen an unexpected reaction. It seems
+manifest, does it not, that the cause of this difference of reaction was
+not any difference of the letters, but purely a difference of <i>thought</i>?
+So it appears that thoughts may change the material universe; they may
+break the chain of causation, and interfere with material events.</p>
+
+<p>Compare the two things, a state of consciousness and say, a steam
+shovel. They are entirely different, and so far as we can see, entirely
+incompatible and unrelated. Can anyone imagine how a thought can turn
+into a steam shovel, or a steam shovel into a thought? We can understand
+how a steam shovel lifts a mass of earth out of the ground, and we can
+understand how a human hand moves a lever which causes the shovel to
+act; but we are unable to conceive how a state of mind&mdash;whether it be a
+desire for pay, or an ideal of service, or a vision of the Panama
+Canal&mdash;can so affect a steam shovel as to cause it to move. We can sit
+and think motion at a billiard ball for a thousand years, and it does
+not move; but when we think motion at our hand, it moves instantly, and
+passes on the motion to the billiard ball or the steam shovel. When fire
+touches our hand it sends some kind of vibration to the brain, and in
+some inconceivable way that vibration is<a name="vol_i_page_057" id="vol_i_page_057"></a> turned into a state of
+consciousness called pain, and that is turned, "as quick as thought,"
+into another kind of motion, the jerking back of our hand.</p>
+
+<p>So it seems certain that consciousness really does "butt in" on the
+chain of natural causation. And yet, just see in what position this
+leaves the scientist who is investigating life! Imagine if you can, the
+plight of a doctor who wanted to prescribe a diet for a sick person, if
+he knew that every piece of chicken and every piece of fish were free to
+decide of its own impulse whether or not it would be digested in the
+human stomach. But the plight of this doctor would be nothing to the
+plight of the chemist or the biologist or the engineer who was asked to
+do his thinking and his planning in a world containing a billion and a
+quarter human beings, each one a lawless agent, each one a source of new
+and unforeseeable energies, each one acting as a "first cause," and
+starting new chains of activity, tearing the universe to pieces
+according to his own whims. What kind of a universe would that be? It
+would simply be a chaos; there could be no thinking, there could be no
+life in it; there could be no two things the same in it, and no laws of
+any sort.</p>
+
+<p>So then we fall back into the hands of the "determinists," who assert
+one unbreakable chain of natural causation, and regard the human body as
+an automaton. We go back to the bio-chemist, who purposes some day to
+ascertain for us just exactly what molecules of matter in just what
+positions and combinations in the brain cells of William Shakespeare
+caused him to perpetrate a mixed metaphor. We go back to the belief that
+human beings act as they must act, because the clock of life, wound up
+and started, must move in such and such a fashion.</p>
+
+<p>But now, let us see what are the implications of that theory! Here am I
+writing a book, appealing to men to act in certain ways. Of course, I
+know that not all will follow my advice. Some will be foolish&mdash;or what
+seems to me foolish. Others will be weak, and will resolve to act in
+certain ways, and then go and act in other ways. But some will be just;
+some will be free; some will use their brains&mdash;because, you see, I am
+convinced that they <i>can</i> use their brains! I am convinced that ideas
+will affect and stir them, in complete defiance of the bio-chemist, who
+tells me that they act that way because of certain chemicals in their
+brain cells, and that I write my<a name="vol_i_page_058" id="vol_i_page_058"></a> book because of other chemicals, and
+that my idea that I am writing the book because I want to write it is a
+delusion, and that the whole thing is happening just so because the
+universe was wound up that way.</p>
+
+<p>Now, this an unsolved problem, and I have no solution to offer. What I
+have set forth is in substance one of the four "antinomies" of Kant, and
+you can see for yourself how it is possible to prove either side, and
+impossible to be sure of either. Perhaps there is really a duality in
+life. Perhaps there are two aspects of the universe, the material and
+the spiritual, and perhaps they do not really interact as they seem to,
+but both are guided and determined by some higher reality of life of
+which we know nothing. In that case there would really be a chemical
+equivalent for every thought, and there would be a trace of
+consciousness for every material atom in the universe. Maybe the
+theologians are right, and in the universal consciousness of God the
+whole future exists predetermined. Maybe to God there is no such thing
+as time; the past, the present, and the future are all alike to Him.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing more painful to the human mind than to have to confess
+its own impotence. Yet I can see no escape from the dilemma we are here
+facing. There is not a man alive who does not assume the freedom of the
+will, who does not show in all his acts that he agrees with old Dr.
+Samuel Johnson: "We know we are free and there's an end on't." Without a
+belief in freedom we cannot get beyond the animal, we cannot become the
+masters of our own souls. And yet, the man who swallows that idea whole,
+and goes out into the world and preaches personal morality to the
+neglect of the fundamental economic facts, the facts of the body in its
+relationship to all other bodies&mdash;we know what happens to that man; he
+becomes a shouting fool. Unless he is literally a fool, or a knave, he
+quickly discovers his own futility, and proceeds to use his common
+sense, in spite of all his theories. "Come to Jesus!" cried William
+Booth, and he went out in the streets of London to save souls with a
+bass drum; but presently, in day by day contact with the degradation of
+the London slums, he realized that he could not save souls so long as
+those souls were dwelling in starved and lousy bodies. So William Booth
+with his Salvation Army took to starting night shelters and cast-off
+clothing bureaus!</p>
+
+<p>And of exactly the same sort is the bewilderment which<a name="vol_i_page_059" id="vol_i_page_059"></a> falls to the lot
+of the scientist who is honest and willing to face the facts. The
+bio-chemist with his test tubes and his microscopes and his complex
+apparatus of research sits himself down and accumulates a mass of
+information about the human body. He investigates the diseases of the
+body and learns in detail just how these diseases spread and sometimes
+how they are caused; he can present you with a diagnosis, showing the
+exact stage to which the degeneration of a certain organ has proceeded,
+and perhaps he can suggest to you a change of diet or some drug which
+will, for a time at least, check the process of the breakdown. But in
+other cases he will be perfectly helpless; he will be, as it were,
+buried under the mass of detail which he has accumulated; he will find
+the vital energy depressed, and he will not know any way to renew it.
+But along will come some mental specialist, who in a half hour's talk
+with the patient, by a simple change in the patient's <i>ideas</i>, will
+completely make over the patient's life, and set going a new vital
+process which will restore the body to its former health. A religious
+enthusiast may do this, a psychotherapist may do it, a moral genius may
+do it; and the physician with all his learning will find himself like a
+man on the outside of a house, peering in through the windows and trying
+in vain to find out something about the life of the family and its
+guests.</p>
+
+<p>This is humiliating to the chemist and the medical man, but they have to
+face it, because it is a fact. In the seat of authority over the human
+body there sits a higher being which, without any religious
+implications, we may call the soul; or, if it is impossible to get away
+from the religious implication of that word, we will call it the
+consciousness, or the personality. This master of the house of life is
+in many ways dependent upon the house. If the furnace goes out he
+freezes, and if the house takes fire and burns up&mdash;well, he disappears
+and leaves no address. But in other ways the master of the house is
+really master, and is a worker of miracles. He does things which we do
+not at all understand, and cannot yet even foresee, but which often
+completely make the house over.</p>
+
+<p>William James, a scientist of real authority, has a wonderful essay,
+"The Powers of Men," in which he sets forth the fact that human beings
+as a general rule make use of only a small portion of the energies which
+dwell in their beings, and that one of our problems is to find the ways
+by which we can<a name="vol_i_page_060" id="vol_i_page_060"></a> draw upon stores of hidden energy which we have within
+us. Also, in a fascinating book, "Varieties of the Religious
+Experience," James has endeavored to study and analyze the phenomena
+which hitherto the physician and the biologist have been disposed to
+ridicule and neglect. But unless I am mistaken, every scientist in the
+end will be forced to come back to the central fact, that life is a
+unity, and that the heart of it is the spirit; that what we call the
+will is not an accident, not a delusion, not some by-product of nature,
+but is the very secret of life; and that behind it is a vast ocean of
+power, which now and then sweeps away all dykes, and floods into the
+human consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>The writer of this book is now a patient and plodding teacher of a
+certain economic doctrine, a preacher of what he might call
+anti-parasitism. He has come to the conclusion that the habit of men to
+enslave their fellows and exploit them and draw their substance from
+them without return&mdash;that this habit is destructive to all civilization,
+and is incompatible with any of the higher forms of life, intellectual,
+moral or artistic. He has come to the conclusion that there is no use
+attempting to build a structure of social life until there is a sound
+foundation; in other words, until the capitalist system has been
+replaced by cooperation. But in his youth he was, or thought he was, a
+poet, and touched upon that strange and wonderful thing which we call
+genius. He saw his own consciousness, as it were a leaf driven before a
+mighty tempest of spiritual energy. And he believes that this experience
+was no delusion, but was a revelation of the hidden mysteries of being.
+He still has memories of this startling experience, still hints of it in
+his consciousness; something still leaps in his memory, like a
+race-horse, or like the war-horse of Revelations, which "scenteth the
+battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting." Because
+of these things he can never accept any philosophy which shackles the
+human spirit, he will never in his thought attempt to set bounds to the
+possibilities of human life. The very heart of life beats in us, the
+wonder of it and the glory of it swells like a tide behind us. New
+universes are born in us, or, if you prefer, they are made by us; and
+the process is one of endless joy, of rapture beyond anything that the
+average man can at present imagine, or that any instruments invented by
+science can weigh or measure.<a name="vol_i_page_061" id="vol_i_page_061"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><br />
+THE MIND OF THE BODY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does to the
+body, and how it can be controlled and made use of by the
+intelligence.)</p></div>
+
+<p>The importance of the mind in matters of health becomes clearer when we
+understand that what we commonly call our minds&mdash;the mental states which
+confront us day by day in our consciousness&mdash;are really but a small
+portion of our total mind. In addition to this conscious mind there is
+an enormous mass of our personality which is like a storehouse attached
+to our dwelling, a place to which we do not often go, but to which we
+can go in case of need. This storehouse is our memory, the things we
+know and can recall at will. And then there is another, still vaster
+storehouse&mdash;no one has ever measured or guessed the size of it&mdash;which
+apparently contains everything that we have ever known, perhaps also
+everything that our ancestors have known. A common simile for the human
+mind is that of an iceberg; a certain portion of it appears above the
+surface of the sea, but there is seven times as much of it floating out
+of sight under the water.</p>
+
+<p>This subconscious mind seems to be the portion most closely united with
+the body. It has its seat in the back parts of the brain, in the spinal
+cord and the greater nervous ganglia, such as the solar plexus. It is
+the portion of our mind which controls the activities of our body, all
+those miraculous things which went on before we first opened our eyes to
+the light, and which go on while we sleep, and never cease until we die.
+When we cut our finger and admit foreign germs to our blood, some
+mysterious power causes millions of our blood corpuscles to be rushed to
+this spot, to destroy and devour the invading enemy. We do not know how
+this is done, but it is an intelligent act, measured and precisely
+regulated, as much so as a railroad time-table. When the supply of
+nourishment in the body becomes low, something issues a notice by way of
+our stomach, which we call hunger; when we take food into the stomach,
+something pours out the gastric juice to digest it; when this digested
+food is prepared and taken up in the blood<a name="vol_i_page_062" id="vol_i_page_062"></a> stream, something decides
+what portion of it shall be turned into muscle, what into brain cells,
+what into hair, what into finger nails. Sometimes, of course, mistakes
+are made and we have diseases. But for the most part all this infinitely
+intricate process goes on day and night without a hitch, and it is all
+the work of what we might call "the mind of the body."</p>
+
+<p>And just as our material bodies are the product of an age-long process
+of development repeated in embryo by every individual, so is this mental
+life a product of long development, and carries memories of this far-off
+process. In our instincts there dwells all the past, not merely of the
+human race, but of all life, and if we should ever succeed in completely
+probing the subconscious mind and bringing it into our consciousness, it
+would be the same as if we were free to ramble about in all the past.
+Huxley set forth the fact that all the history of evolution is told in a
+piece of chalk; and we probably do not exaggerate in saying that all the
+history of the universe is in the subconscious mind of every human
+being. When the partridge which has just come out of the egg sees the
+shadow of the hawk flit by and crouches motionless as a leaf, the
+partridge is not acting upon any knowledge which it has acquired in the
+few minutes since it was hatched. It is acting upon a knowledge
+impressed upon its subconscious mind by the experience of millions of
+partridges, perhaps for tens of thousands of years. When the physician
+lifts the newly born infant by its ankle and spanks it to make it cry,
+the physician is using his conscious reason, because he has learned from
+previous experience, or has been taught in the schools that it is
+necessary for the child's breathing apparatus to be instantly cleared.
+But when the child responds to the spanking with a yell, it is not moved
+by reasoned indignation at an undeserved injury; it is following an
+automatic reaction, as a result of the experience of infants in the
+stone age, experience which in some obscure way has been registered and
+stored in the infant cerebellum.</p>
+
+<p>Science is now groping its way through this underworld of thought.
+Obviously we should have here a most powerful means of influencing the
+body, if by any chance we could control it. We are continually seeking
+in medical and surgical ways to stimulate or to retard activities of the
+body, which are controlled entirely by this subconscious mind. If we are
+suffering intense pain in a joint, we put on a mustard plaster, what we
+call a counter-irritant, to trouble the skin and draw<a name="vol_i_page_063" id="vol_i_page_063"></a> the congested
+blood away from the place of the pain. On the other hand, we may
+stimulate the functions of the intestines by the application of hot
+fomentations, to bring the blood more actively to that region. But if by
+any means we could make clear our wishes to the subconscious mind, we
+should be dealing with headquarters, and should get quicker and more
+permanent results.</p>
+
+<p>Can we by any possibility do this? To begin with, let me tell you of a
+simple experiment that I have witnessed. I once knew a man who had
+learned to control the circulation of his blood by his conscious will. I
+have seen him lay his two hands on the table, both of the same color,
+and without moving the hands, cause one hand to turn red and the other
+to turn pale. And, obviously, so far as this man is concerned, the
+problem of counter-irritants has been solved. He is a mental mustard
+plaster.</p>
+
+<p>And what was done by this man's own will can be done to others in many
+ways. The most obvious is a device which we call hypnotism. This is a
+kind of sleep which affects only the conscious control of the body, but
+leaves all the senses awake. In this hypnotic sleep or "trance" we
+discover that the subconscious mind is a good deal like the Henry Dubb
+of the Socialist cartoons; it is faithful and persistent, very strong in
+its own limited field, but comically credulous, willing to believe
+anything that is told it, and to take orders from any one who climbs
+into the seat of authority. You have perhaps attended one of the
+exhibitions which traveling hypnotists are accustomed to give in country
+villages. You have seen some bumpkin brought upon the stage and
+hypnotized, and told that he is in the water and must swim for his life,
+or that he is in the midst of a hornets' nest, or that his trousers are
+torn in the seat&mdash;any comical thing that will cause an audience to howl
+with laughter.</p>
+
+<p>These facts were first discovered nearly a hundred and fifty years ago
+by a French doctor named Mesmer. He was a good deal of a charlatan, and
+would not reveal his secrets, and probably the scientific men of that
+time were glad to despise him, because what he did was so new and
+strange. There is a certain type of scientific mind which sits aloft on
+a throne with a framed diploma above its head, and says that what it
+knows is science and what it does not know is nonsense. And so
+"mesmerism" was left for the quacks and traveling showmen.<a name="vol_i_page_064" id="vol_i_page_064"></a> But half a
+century later a French physician named Liébault took up this method of
+hypnotism, without all the fakery that had been attached to it. He
+experimented and discovered that he could cure not merely phobias and
+manias, fixed ideas, hysterias and melancholias; he could cure definite
+physical diseases of the physical body, such as headache, rheumatism,
+and hemorrhage. Later on two other physicians, Janet and Charcot,
+developed definite schools of "psychotherapy." They rejected hypnotism
+as in most cases too dangerous, but used a milder form which is known as
+"hypnoidization." You would be surprised to know how many ailments which
+baffle the skill of medical men and surgeons yield completely to a
+single brief treatment by such a mental specialist.</p>
+
+<p>All that is necessary is some method to tap the subconscious mind. In
+many cases the subconsciousness knows what is the matter, and will tell
+at once&mdash;a secret that is completely hidden from the consciousness. For
+example, a man's hands shake; they have been shaking for years, and he
+has no idea why, but his subconscious mind explains that they first
+began to shake with grief over the death of his wife; also, the
+subconscious mind meekly and instantly accepts the suggestion that the
+time for grief is past, and that the hands will never shake again.</p>
+
+<p>Or here is a woman who has become convinced that worms are crawling all
+over her. Everything that touches her becomes a worm, even the wrinkles
+in her dress are worms, and she is wild with nervousness, and of course
+is on the way to the lunatic asylum. She is hypnotized and sees the
+operator catching these worms one by one and killing them. She is told
+that he has killed the last, but she insists, "No, there is one more."
+The operator clutches that one, and she is perfectly satisfied, and
+completely cured. Her husband writes, expressing his relief that he no
+longer has to "sleep every night in a fish pond." This instance with
+many others is told by Professor Quackenbos in his book, "Hypnotic
+Therapeutics."</p>
+
+<p>Among the most powerful means to influence the subconscious personality
+is religious excitement. Religion has come down to us from ancient
+times, and its fears and ecstasies are a part of our instinctive
+endowment. Those who can sway religious emotions can cure disease, not
+merely fixed ideas, but many diseases which appear to be entirely
+physical, but which psycho-analysis reveals to be hysterical in nature.
+Of course<a name="vol_i_page_065" id="vol_i_page_065"></a> these religious persons who heal by laying on of hands or by
+purely mental means deny indignantly that they are using hypnotism or
+anything like it. I am aware that I shall bring upon myself a flood of
+letters from Christian Scientists if I identify their methods of curing
+with "animal magnetism" and "manipulation," and other devices of the
+devil which they repudiate. All I can say is that their miracles are
+brought about by affecting the subconscious mind; there is no other way
+to bring them about, and for my part I cannot see that it makes a great
+difference whether the subconscious mind is affected by a hand laid on
+the forehead, or by a hand waved in the air, or by an incantation
+pronounced, or by a prayer thought in silence. If you can persuade the
+subconscious mind that God is operating upon it, that God is omnipotent
+and is directing this particular healing, that is the most powerful
+suggestion imaginable, and is the basis of many cures. But if in order
+to achieve this, it is necessary for me to persuade myself that I can
+find some meaning in the metaphysical moonshine of Mother Eddy&mdash;why,
+then, I am very sorry, but I really prefer to remain sick.</p>
+
+<p>But such is not the case. You do not have to believe anything that is
+not true; you simply have to understand the machinery of the
+subconscious, and how to operate it. We are only beginning to acquire
+that knowledge, and we need an open mind, free both from the dogmatism
+of the medical men and the fanaticism of the "faith curists." A few
+years ago in London I met a number of people who were experimenting in
+an entirely open-minded way with mental healing, and I was interested in
+their ideas. I happened to be traveling on the Continent, and on the
+train my wife was seized by a very dreadful headache. She was lying with
+her head in my lap, suffering acutely, and I thought I would try an
+experiment, so I put my hand upon her forehead, without telling her what
+I was doing, and concentrated my attention with the greatest possible
+intensity upon her headache. I had an idea of the cause of it; I
+understood that headaches are caused by the irritation of the sensory
+nerves of the brain by fatigue poisons, or other waste matter which the
+blood has not been able to eliminate. I formed in my mind a vivid
+picture of what the blood would have to do to relieve that headache, and
+I concentrated my mental energies upon the command to her subconscious
+mind that it should perform these particular functions.<a name="vol_i_page_066" id="vol_i_page_066"></a> In a few
+minutes my wife sat up with a look of great surprise on her face and
+said, "Why, my headache is gone! It went all at once!"</p>
+
+<p>That, of course, might have been a coincidence; but I tried the
+experiment many times, and it happened over and over. On another
+occasion I was able to cure the pain of an ulcerated tooth; I was able
+to cure it half a dozen times, but never permanently, it always
+returned, and finally the tooth had to come out. My wife experimented
+with me in the same way, and found that she was able to cure an attack
+of dyspepsia; but, curiously enough, she at once gave herself a case of
+dyspepsia&mdash;something she had never known in her life before. So now I
+will not allow her to experiment with me, and she will not allow me to
+experiment with her! But we are quite sure that people with psychic
+gifts can definitely affect the subconscious mind of others by purely
+mental means. We are prepared to believe in the miracles of the New
+Testament, and in the wonders of Lourdes, as well as in the healings of
+the Christian Scientists and the New Thoughters, which cannot be
+disputed by any one who is willing to take the trouble to investigate.
+We can face these facts without losing our reason, without ceasing to
+believe that everything in life has a cause, and that we can find out
+this cause if we investigate thoroughly.<a name="vol_i_page_067" id="vol_i_page_067"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><br />
+EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and other
+methods by which a whole new universe of life has been brought to
+human knowledge.)</p></div>
+
+<p>One of the most common methods of exploring the subconscious mind is the
+method of automatic writing. I have never tried this myself, but tens of
+thousands of people are sitting every night with a "ouija" in front of
+them, holding a pencil on a piece of paper and letting their
+subconscious minds write what they please. Most of them are hoping to
+get messages from the dead&mdash;a problem which we shall discuss in the next
+chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that automatic writing and
+table rapping and other devices of mediumship have opened up to us a
+vast mass of subconscious mentality. A part of the scientific world
+still takes a contemptuous attitude and calls this all humbug, but many
+of our greatest scientists have been persuaded to investigate, and have
+become convinced that in this mass of subconsciousness there is mingled,
+not merely the mind of the medium, but the minds of all those present,
+and possibly other minds as well. For my part, I do not see how any one
+can study disinterestedly the proceedings of the Society for Psychical
+Research and not become convinced that telepathy at least is one of the
+powers of the subconscious mind.</p>
+
+<p>Telepathy is what is popularly known as "thought transmission." Every
+one must know people who are what is called "psychic," and will know
+what is happening to some friend in another part of the world, or will
+go upstairs because they "sense" that some one wants them, or will go to
+the door because they "have a hunch" that some one is coming. And maybe
+these things are only chance, but you will be unscientific if you do not
+take the trouble to read and learn what modern investigators have
+brought out on such subjects.</p>
+
+<p>This much is certain, and is denied by no competent investigator:
+whatever has been in your mind is there still, and it is possible to
+find a way of tapping the buried memory. An old<a name="vol_i_page_068" id="vol_i_page_068"></a> woman, delirious with
+fever, begins to babble in a strange language, and it is discovered that
+she is talking ancient Hebrew. The woman is entirely illiterate, and her
+conscious memory knows no language but her own, her conscious mind has
+no ideas beyond those of her domestic life and the gossip of the
+village. But investigation is made, and it is discovered that when this
+woman was a girl, she worked in the home of a Hebrew scholar, and heard
+him reading aloud. She did not understand a word of what she heard, and
+was not consciously listening to it; nevertheless, every syllable of it
+had been stored away forever by her subconscious mind. Innumerable cases
+of this sort have been established; and, as a matter of fact, we might
+have been prepared for such discoveries by the memory-feats of the
+conscious mind. It is well known that Mozart, when a child, could listen
+to a new opera, and go home and play it over note for note. At present
+there is a child in America, giving exhibitions in public, carrying on
+thirty games of chess at the same time. There have been others who do
+sums of mental arithmetic, such as multiplying thirty-two figures by
+thirty-two figures, or reciting the Bible backwards.</p>
+
+<p>All this seems incredible; and yet there is something still more
+incredible. Suppose that these same powers, which are stored in our
+subconscious minds, were stored also in the minds of animals! A few
+years ago Maurice Maeterlinck published a book, "The Unknown Guest," in
+the course of which he tells about his experiments with the so-called
+Elberfeld horses: two animals which had been trained for years by their
+owner to give signals by moving their forefeet, and which apparently
+could count and divide and multiply large sums, and extract square and
+cube root, and spell out names, and recognize sounds, scents and colors,
+and read time from the face of a watch. Of course, it is easy to say
+that this is absurd, that the horses must have got some signals from
+their trainer; but, as it happened, they would do their work in the
+absence of their trainer; they would do it in the dark, or with a sack
+over their heads, and the best scientific minds of Germany were unable
+to suggest any test conditions which could not be met. There have been
+many gigantic frauds in the world, and this may have been one of them;
+on the other hand, there have been many new discoveries, and for my part
+I will finish exploring the miracles of the subconscious mind of man,<a name="vol_i_page_069" id="vol_i_page_069"></a>
+before I presume to say that anything is impossible in the subconscious
+mind of a horse or a dog. Also I will wait for some learned person to
+explain to me how the subconscious minds of horses and dogs know enough
+to build and repair their bones and teeth, so cleverly that modern
+architectural and engineering science could teach them nothing. I ask,
+also, if it is possible to find a region in the subconsciousness which
+is common to two people, why is it absurd to suggest that there might be
+a region common to a man and a horse? Why is this any more absurd than
+that they should eat the same food and breathe the same air and feel the
+same affection and be frightened at the same dangers?</p>
+
+<p>The only persons who will be dogmatic about such subjects are the
+persons who are ignorant. Those who take the trouble to investigate,
+discover more wonderful things every day, and they realize that we have
+here a whole universe of knowledge, to which we have as yet barely
+opened the doors. Consider, for example, the facts which we are
+acquiring on the subject of personality and what it means. You would
+say, perhaps, that if there is anything you know positively, it is that
+you are one person, and have never been anybody else, and that your body
+belongs to you, and that nobody else ever has used or ever can use it.
+But what would you say if I told you that tomorrow "you" might cease to
+be, and somebody else might be in possession of your body, walking it
+around and wearing its clothes and spending its money? What if I were to
+tell you that there might be in "you," or in your body, half a dozen
+different personalities which you have never known or dreamed of, and
+that tomorrow there might break out a war between them and "you," as to
+which of the half dozen people should hear with your ears and speak with
+your tongue and walk about with your clothes on? Unless you are familiar
+with the literature of multiple personality, you would surely say that
+this was unbelievable&mdash;quite as much so as a mathematical horse!</p>
+
+<p>Let us begin with the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne, who was many
+years ago a perfectly respectable clergyman in a Rhode Island town. One
+day he disappeared, and his family did not hear of him. A year or two
+later there was a store-keeper in a town in Pennsylvania, who suddenly
+came to himself as the Reverend Ansel Bourne, not knowing what he had
+been in the meantime, or how he came to be keeping a store.<a name="vol_i_page_070" id="vol_i_page_070"></a> Under
+hypnotism it developed that he had in him two personalities, and his
+trance personality recollected all that had been happening in the
+meantime and told about it freely.</p>
+
+<p>Or take the still more fascinating case of the young lady who is known
+in the literature of psychotherapy as Miss Beauchamp. Her story is told
+in a book, "The Dissociation of a Personality," by Dr. Morton Prince of
+Boston. Some thirty years ago Miss Beauchamp, a very conscientious and
+dignified young lady, became nervous and ill, and took to doing strange
+things, which were a source of shame and humiliation to her. Under
+hypnotism it was discovered to be a case of multiple personality. The
+other personality, who finally gave herself the name of Sally, was
+entirely different in character from Miss Beauchamp, being mischievous,
+vain, and primitive as a child. She conceived an intense dislike for
+Miss Beauchamp, whom she called by abusive names; at times when she
+could get possession of Miss Beauchamp's body, she delighted in playing
+humiliating tricks upon her enemy, spending her money, running her into
+debt, breaking her engagements, disgracing her before her friends. Sally
+was always well and Miss Beauchamp was always ill, and Sally would take
+the body, for which they fought for possession, and take it for long and
+exhausting walks, and leave it cold and miserable, lost and penniless,
+in the possession of Miss Beauchamp! And of course this made Miss
+Beauchamp more and more a wreck, and Sally took possession of more and
+more of her time. Sally knew everything that Miss Beauchamp did and
+thought, but Miss Beauchamp did not know about Sally. She only knew that
+there were gaps in her life, during which she did things she could not
+explain. And because she did not want her friends to think her insane,
+she would try to hide this dreadful condition of affairs; but Sally
+would spoil her plans by writing letters to her friends, and also by
+writing insulting letters for Miss Beauchamp to find when she took
+possession again.</p>
+
+<p>Then one day, after several years of treatment, there appeared yet
+another personality, who knew nothing about Miss Beauchamp or Sally
+either, and only knew what Miss Beauchamp had known up to some years
+before. Miss Beauchamp had a college education, and wrote and spoke
+French; Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it; the new
+personality did not have a college education at all. Nevertheless,<a name="vol_i_page_071" id="vol_i_page_071"></a>
+after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating as any novel
+you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was the real Miss
+Beauchamp; the others were "split off" personalities. He traced the
+cause to a severe mental shock, and succeeded in the end in combining
+the first Miss Beauchamp with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate
+and wanton Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally
+murdering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but he
+condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sentence. It is a
+"movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I should think it would make
+disconcerting reading to persons who believe that each of us is one
+immortal soul, or "has" one immortal soul, and is responsible for it to
+a personal God.</p>
+
+<p>There is never any end to the problems of these multiple personalities,
+and each case is a test of the judgment and ingenuity of the specialist.
+He will try to make one personality "stick," and will fail, and will
+have to accept another, or a combination of two. In one case, he found
+that he could not get the right personality to "stick" except under
+hypnosis, so he decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and
+the new personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If
+you wish to know more about this subject you can find books in any
+well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of Personality," by H.
+Addington Bruce, because it contains in the appendix an excellent list
+of the literature of the subconscious in all its many aspects.</p>
+
+<p>There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring this
+underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. Some fifteen
+years ago a psychotherapist in New York told me about the discoveries of
+a physician in Vienna, and gave me some pamphlets, written in very
+difficult and technical German. Since then this Professor Freud has been
+translated, and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers
+make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up Jesus
+because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves Christians, and
+in the same way we have no right to blame Freud for all the absurdities
+of the psychoanalysts.</p>
+
+<p>Probably there never was a time in human history when there were not
+people who interpreted dreams, and you can still buy "dream books" for
+twenty-five cents, and learn that a white horse means that you are going
+to get a letter from your sweetheart tomorrow; then you can buy another
+dream<a name="vol_i_page_072" id="vol_i_page_072"></a> book, telling you that a white horse means there is going to be a
+death in your family within the year. Naturally this prejudices thinking
+people against dream analysis; yet, dreams are facts, and every fact has
+its cause, and if you dream about a white horse, there must assuredly be
+some reason for your dreaming this particular thing. Of course we know
+that if you eat mince-pie and welsh-rabbit at midnight, you will dream
+about something terrible; but will it be snakes, or will it be a
+railroad wreck, or will it be white horses trampling over you?
+Obviously, it may be a million different unpleasant things; and what is
+it that picks out this or that from the infinite store of your memory,
+and brings it into the region of half-consciousness which we call the
+dream?</p>
+
+<p>Professor Freud's discovery is in brief that the dream is a
+wish-fulfillment. Our instincts present to our consciousness a great
+mass of impulses and desires, and among these the consciousness selects
+what it pleases, and represses and refuses to recognize or to act upon
+the others. But maybe these decisions are not altogether satisfactory to
+the subconsciousness. The mind of the body is in rebellion against the
+mind&mdash;shall we say of reason, or shall we say of society? The mind of
+society, otherwise known as the moral law, says that you shall be a good
+little boy, and shall go to school and learn what you are told, and on
+Sunday go to church and sit very still through a long sermon; whereas,
+the body of a boy would rather be a savage, hunting birds' nests and
+scalping enemies and exploring magic caves full of precious jewels. So
+the subconsciousness of the boy, balked and miserable, awaits its time,
+and finds its satisfaction when the boy is asleep and his moral censor
+has relaxed its control.</p>
+
+<p>This dream mind is not a logical and orderly thing like the conscious
+mind; it is not business-like and civilized, it does not deal in
+abstractions. It is far more interested in things than in words; it does
+not present us with formulas, but with pictures, and with stories of
+weird and wonderful happenings. It is like the mind of the race, which
+we study in legends and religions. It does not tell us that the sun is a
+mass of incandescent hydrogen gas, so and so many miles in diameter; it
+tells us that the sun is a cosmic hero who slays the black dragon of
+night. So the mind of our body presents us with innumerable pictures and
+symbols, exactly such as we find in poetry. There may be, and frequently
+is, dispute as to just<a name="vol_i_page_073" id="vol_i_page_073"></a> what a poet meant by this or that particular
+image, but if we read all the work of any particular poet, we get a
+certain impression of that poet's individuality. If he is always talking
+about the perfume of women's hair and the gleam of the white flesh of
+nymphs in the thickets, we are not left in doubt as to what is wrong
+with this poet.</p>
+
+<p>And just so, when the expert sets to work to examine all the dreams that
+any one person can remember, day after day, sooner or later the expert
+observes that these dreams hover continually about one particular
+subject; and by questioning the person, he can find out what is the
+secret which is troubling the person, perhaps without the person himself
+being aware of it. Of course there are many people who like nothing so
+much as to talk about themselves; and many are spending their time and
+their money on the latest fad of being "psyched," who would, in any
+properly organized world, be put to work at hoeing weeds or washing
+their own clothes. Nevertheless, it is a fact that there are real mental
+disorders in the world, and innumerable honest and earnest people who
+have something the matter with them which they do not understand. Here
+is one way by which the conscientious investigator can find out what the
+trouble is, and make it clear to them, and by establishing harmony
+between their conscious and their subconscious minds, can many times put
+them in the way of health and happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Through psychoanalysis we are enabled to understand the "split"
+personality and its cause. We discover that almost everyone has more or
+less rudimentary forms of multiple personality hidden within him; made
+out of desires and traits which he does not like, or which the world
+forces him to drive into the deeps of his being. These may be evil
+impulses, of sex or violence; they may be the most noble altruisms, or
+artistic yearnings, ridiculous things in a world of "hustle." A quite
+normal man or woman may keep a separate self, apart from the world,
+living a Jekyll life of business propriety and a Hyde life of religious
+or musical ecstasy. Or again, the repressed impulses may integrate
+themselves in the unconscious, and you may have genius or lunacy or
+both&mdash;"great wits to madness near allied." The modern knowledge on such
+dark mysteries you may find in Hart's "The Psychology of Insanity."<a name="vol_i_page_074" id="vol_i_page_074"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><br />
+THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of
+view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live
+forever?)</p></div>
+
+<p>As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own and other
+people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange question: Is it all
+our own mind, and that of other living people, or are we by any chance
+dealing with the minds of those who are dead? A great many earnest
+people, and some very learned people, are fully convinced that the
+latter is the case, and we have now to consider their arguments.</p>
+
+<p>When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost stories, and would
+shudder over them; but I was given to understand that all this was just
+imagination, I must not take ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or
+dragons or nymphs or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts
+seriously&mdash;well, such a person would be almost as comical as that
+supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you believe it,
+in those days there actually were people who believed they could learn
+to fly in the air, and spent their time manufacturing machines for this
+purpose! There was a scientist in Washington who had this "bug," and
+built himself a machine and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac
+river. We all laughed at him&mdash;we laughed so long and so loud that we
+killed the poor man; and then, a few years later, somebody took that
+machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! But that
+was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not quite so ready to laugh
+at an idea because it was new.</p>
+
+<p>I remember vividly my first meeting with a man who believed in ghosts.
+He was a Unitarian clergyman, the Reverend Minot J. Savage of New York.
+I was sixteen years old, and just breaking out of my theological shell,
+and Doctor Savage helped to pry me loose. He was a grave and kindly man,
+of great learning and intelligence, and I remember vividly my
+consternation when one day he told me&mdash;oh, yes, he had seen many ghosts,
+he was accustomed to talk with ghosts<a name="vol_i_page_075" id="vol_i_page_075"></a> every now and then. There was no
+doubt whatever that ghosts existed!</p>
+
+<p>He told me many stories. I remember one so well that I do not have to go
+back to his books to look up the details. It was in the days before the
+Atlantic cable, and he had a friend who took a steamer to England. One
+night Doctor Savage was awakened and found the ghost of his friend
+standing by his bedside. The ship had gone down off the Irish coast, so
+the ghost declared, but the friend did not want Doctor Savage to think
+that he had suffered from the pangs of drowning; he had been struck on
+the left side of the head by a beam of the ship and had been killed
+instantly. Doctor Savage wrote down these circumstances and had them
+witnessed by a number of people, and two or three weeks later he
+received word that the body of his friend had been found on the Irish
+coast, with the left side of the head crushed in.</p>
+
+<p>So then, of course, I studied the subject of ghosts. I have studied it
+off and on ever since, and have read most of the important new
+discoveries and arguments of the psychic researchers. To begin with, I
+will mention the contents of two large volumes, Gurney's "Phantasms of
+the Living." In this book are narrated many hundreds of cases, of which
+Doctor Savage's story is a type. It appears that persons at the moment
+of death, or in times of great mental stress, do somehow have the power
+to communicate with other people, even at the other side of the world. A
+few such cases might be attributed to coincidence or to fraud, but when
+you have so many cases, attested in minute detail by so many hundreds of
+otherwise honest people, you are not being scientific but simply stupid
+if you dismiss the whole subject with contempt.</p>
+
+<p>Gurney discusses the phenomenon and its probable causes. We know, of
+course, that hallucinations are among the most common of psychic
+phenomenon. Your subconscious mind can be caused to see and hear and
+feel anything; likewise it has power to cause you to see and hear and
+feel anything. In practically all cases of multiple personality some of
+the split-off personalities can cause the others to see and hear and
+feel. And the consciousness, you must understand, takes these things to
+be just as real as real things; there is no way you can tell an
+hallucination from reality&mdash;except to ask other people about it. And if
+we admit the idea of telepathy, we may say that phantasms are
+hallucinations caused by this means;<a name="vol_i_page_076" id="vol_i_page_076"></a> that is, the subconscious mind of
+your wife or your mother or your friend who is ill or dying, transmits
+to your subconscious mind some vivid impression, which causes your own
+subconscious mind to present to your consciousness a perfect image of
+that person, walking and talking with you, and your consciousness has no
+way of telling but that the image is real.</p>
+
+<p>So much for phantasms of the living. But are there any phantasms of the
+dead? Are there any cases in which the time of the appearance can be
+proven to be subsequent to the time of death? Even this would not prove
+survival, of course; it is perfectly possible that the telepathic
+impulse might be delayed in our own minds, it might not flash into
+consciousness until our own state of mind made it possible. Can we say
+that there are cases in which the facts communicated are such as to
+convince us that the person was already dead, and was telling us
+something as a dead person and not as a living one?</p>
+
+<p>Before we go into this question, let us clear the ground for the subject
+by discussing the survival of personality from a more general
+standpoint. What is it that we want to prove? What are the probabilities
+of its being true? What would be the consequences of its not being true?
+Have we any grounds, other than those of psychic research, for thinking
+that it is true, or that it may be true, or that it ought to be true?
+What, so to speak, are the morals of the doctrine of immortality?</p>
+
+<p>Well, to begin with, the survival of the soul after death and forever is
+one of the principal doctrines of the Christian religion. Many devout
+Christians will read this book, and I will seem to them blasphemous when
+I say that this argument does not concern me. I count myself one of the
+lovers and friends of Jesus, I am presumptuous enough to believe that if
+he were on earth, I would understand him and get along with him
+excellently; but I do not know any reason why I should believe this,
+that, or the other doctrine about life because any religious sect,
+founded upon the name of Jesus, commands me so to believe. I see no more
+reason for adopting the idea of heaven because it is a Christian idea
+than I see for adopting the idea of reincarnation because it is a
+precious and holy idea to hundreds of millions of Buddhists. I have some
+very good friends who are Theosophists, and are quite convinced of this
+idea of reincarnation; that is, that the soul comes back into life over
+and over again in many different bodies, thus completing itself and
+renewing itself and expiating its sins. My<a name="vol_i_page_077" id="vol_i_page_077"></a> Theosophist friends have a
+most elaborate and complicated body of what they consider to be
+knowledge on this subject; yet I have to take the liberty of saying that
+I cannot see that it has any relation to reality. It seems to me as
+completely unproven as any other fairy story, or myth, or legend&mdash;for
+example, the seven infernos of Dante, and the elaborate and complicated
+torments that are suffered there.</p>
+
+<p>But, it will be argued, Jesus rose from the dead, and thus proved the
+immortality of the soul. Now, in the first place, there are many learned
+investigators who consider there is insufficient evidence for believing
+that Jesus ever lived; and certainly if this be so, it will be difficult
+to prove that he rose from the dead. Again, it was a common occurrence
+for crucified men not to die; sometimes it happened that their guards
+allowed them to be spirited away&mdash;even nowadays we have known of prison
+guards being bribed to allow a prisoner to escape. Again, the events of
+the return of Jesus may have been just such psychic phenomena as we are
+trying in this chapter to explain. Or, once more, they may have been
+purely legends. A very brief study will convince a thinking person that
+the people of that time were ready to believe anything, and to accept
+facts upon such authority, and to make them the basis for a scientific
+conclusion, is simply to be childish.</p>
+
+<p>I shall be told, of course, that it is in the Bible, and therefore it
+must be true. The Bible is inspired, you say; and perhaps this is so.
+But then, a great deal of other literature is inspired, and that does
+not relieve me of the task of comparing these various inspirations, and
+judging them, and picking out what is of use to me. The Bible is the
+literature of the ancient Hebrews for a couple of thousand years. It
+represents what the race mind of a great people for one generation after
+another judged worth recording and preserving. You may get an idea what
+this means, if you will picture to yourself a large volume of English
+literature, containing some Teutonic myths, and the Saxon chronicles,
+and the "Morte d'Arthur," and several of Chaucer's stories, and some
+Irish fairy tales, and some of Bacon's essays, and Shakespeare's "Venus
+and Adonis," and the English prayer book, and the architect's
+specifications for Westminster Abbey, and a good part of "Burke's
+Peerage"; also Blackstone's "Commentaries," a number of Wesley's hymns,
+and Pope's "Essay on Man," and some chapters of Carlyle's "Past and
+Present," and Gladstone's<a name="vol_i_page_078" id="vol_i_page_078"></a> speeches, and Blake's poems, and Captain
+Cook's story of his voyage around the world, and Southey's "Life of
+Nelson," and Morris's "News from Nowhere," and Blatchford's "Merrie
+England," and scores of pages from Hansard, which is the equivalent of
+our Congressional Record. You may find this description irreverent, but
+do not think it is meant so. Do me the honor to get out your Bible and
+look it over from this point of view!</p>
+
+<p>But, you say, if we die altogether when we finish this earthly life,
+what becomes of moral responsibility and the punishment of sins? What
+shall we say to the wicked man to make him be good, if we cannot reward
+him with a heaven and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is
+that we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand years,
+and the results seem to indicate that we might better seek out some
+other method of inducing men to behave themselves. They do not believe
+so completely in heaven and hell these days, but there were times in
+history when they did believe completely, and not merely were the
+believers just as cruel, they were just as treacherous and just as
+gluttonous and just as drunken. If you want to satisfy yourself on this
+point, I refer you to my book "The Profits of Religion," page 129.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as a matter of fact, I think I can discern the outlines of a system
+of rewards and punishments automatically working in the life of men. I
+am not sure that I can prove that the wicked always get punished and the
+virtuous always rewarded; yet, when I stop and think, I am sure that I
+would not care to change places with any of the wicked people that I
+know in this world. Life may not always be "getting" them, but it has a
+way of "getting" their descendants, and I could not be entirely happy if
+I knew that my son and his sons were going to share the fate which I now
+observe befalling, for example, the grand dukes of Russia and their
+children. Life is one thing, and it does not exist for the individual,
+but for the race; its causes and effects do not always manifest
+themselves in one individual, but in a line of descendants. "Why are
+they called dynasties?" asked one of my professors of history; and a
+student brought the session to an end by answering: "Because that is
+what they always seem to do!"</p>
+
+<p>But this is not perfect justice, you will argue. It is not perfect, from
+the point of view of you or me; but then, I ask, what else is there in
+the world that is perfect from that point<a name="vol_i_page_079" id="vol_i_page_079"></a> of view? Why should our
+justice be any more perfect than, for example, our health or our
+thinking or our climate or our government? And, may it not very well be
+that our justice is up to us, in precisely the same way that some of
+these other things are up to us? Maybe what we have to do is to set to
+work to see to it that virtue does always get rewarded and vice does
+always get punished, right here and now, instead of waiting for an
+omnipotent God to attend to it in some hypothetical heaven.</p>
+
+<p>I find this life of mine very wonderful, and enormously interesting. I
+am willing to take it on the terms that it is given, and to try to make
+the best of it; and I do not see that I have any right to dictate what
+shall be given me in some future life. If my father gives me a Christmas
+present, I am happy and grateful; and, of course, if I know that he is
+going to give me another present next Christmas, I am still more happy;
+but I do not see that I have any right to argue that because he gives me
+one Christmas present, he must give me an unlimited number of them, and
+I think it would be very ungrateful of me to refuse to thank him for a
+Christmas present until I had made sure that I was to get one next time!</p>
+
+<p>Neither do I find myself such a wonderful person that I can assert that
+the morality of the universe absolutely depends upon the fact that I am
+immortal. Of course, I should like to live forever, and to know all the
+wonderful things that are going to happen in the world, and if it is
+true that I am so to live, I shall be immensely delighted. But I cannot
+say that it <i>must</i> be true, and all I can do is to investigate the
+probabilities. On this point my view is stated in a sentence of
+Spinoza's: "He who would love God rightly must not desire that God love
+him in return."</p>
+
+<p>To sum up, the question of immortality is purely a question of fact. It
+is one to be approached in a spirit of open-minded inquiry, entirely
+unaffected by hopes or fears or dogmas or moral claims. It is worth
+while to get clear that we may be immortal, even though we do not now
+know it and cannot now prove it; it is possible that all psychic
+research might end in telepathy, and still, when we die, we might wake
+up and find ourselves alive. It might possibly be that some of us are
+immortal and not all of us. It might be that some parts of us are
+immortal and not the rest. It might be that our subconsciousness is
+immortal and not our consciousness. It might<a name="vol_i_page_080" id="vol_i_page_080"></a> be that all of us, or some
+part of us, survive for a time, but not forever. This last is something
+which I myself am inclined to think may be the case.</p>
+
+<p>Also, it seems worthwhile to mention that it is no argument against
+immortality that we cannot imagine it, that we cannot picture a universe
+consisting of uncountable billions of living souls, or what these souls
+would do to pass the time. It may very well be that among these souls
+there is no such thing as time. It may be that they are thoroughly
+occupied in ways beyond our imagining, or again, that they are not
+occupied, and under no necessity of being occupied. Let the person who
+presents such arguments begin by picturing to you how the brain cells
+manage to store up the uncounted millions of memories which you have,
+the thousands of words and combinations of words, and the thoughts which
+go with them, musical notes and tunes, colors and odors and visual
+impressions, memories of the past and hopes of the future and dreams
+that never were. Where are all those hundreds of millions of things, and
+what are they like when they are not in our consciousness, and how do
+they pass the time, and where were they in the hundreds of millions of
+years before we were born, and where will they be in the hundreds of
+millions of years of the future? When our wise men can answer these
+questions completely, it will be time enough for them to tell us about
+the impossibility of immortality.<a name="vol_i_page_081" id="vol_i_page_081"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><br />
+THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of
+spiritism thus put before us.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Let us now take up the question of survival of personality after death
+from the strictly scientific point of view; let us consider what facts
+we have, and the indications they seem to give. First, we know that to
+all appearances the consciousness and the subconsciousness are bound up
+with the body. They grow with the body, they decline with the body, they
+seem to die with the body. We can irretrievably damage the consciousness
+by drawing a whiff of cyanogen gas into the lungs, or by sticking a pin
+into the brain, or by clogging one of its tiny blood vessels with waste
+matter. It is terrible to us to think that the mind of a great poet or
+prophet or statesman may be snuffed out of existence in such a way; but
+then, it is no argument against a fact to say that it is terrible.
+Insanity is terrible, war is terrible, pestilence is terrible, so also
+are tigers and poisonous snakes; but all these things exist, and all
+these things have power over the wisest and greatest mind, to put an end
+to its work on this earth at least.</p>
+
+<p>And now we come with the new instrument of psychic research, to probe
+the question: What becomes of this consciousness when it disappears? Can
+we prove that it is still in existence, and is able by any method to
+communicate with us? Those who answer "Yes" argue that the mind of the
+dead person, unable to use its own bodily machinery any longer, manages
+in the hypnotic trance to use the bodily machinery of another person,
+called a "medium," and by it to make some kind of record to identify
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>This, of course, is a strange idea, and requires a good deal of proof.
+The law of probability requires us not to accept an unlikely
+explanation, if there is any more simple one which can account for the
+facts. When we examine the product of automatic writing, table-tipping,
+and other psychic phenomena, we have first to ask ourselves, Is there
+anything in all this which <a name="vol_i_page_082" id="vol_i_page_082"></a>cannot be explained by what we already know?
+Then, second, we have to ask, Is there any other supposition which will
+explain the facts, and which is easier to believe than the spirit
+theory?</p>
+
+<p>These "spirits" apparently desire to convince us of their reality, and
+they tell us many things which are expected to convince us; they tell us
+things which we ourselves do not know, and which spirits might know. But
+here again we run up against the problem of the subconsciousness, with
+its infinite mass of "forgotten" knowledge. It is not so easy for the
+"spirits" to tell us things which we can be sure our subconscious mind
+could not possibly contain. Also, there comes the additional element of
+telepathy. It appears to be a fact that under trance conditions, or
+under any especially exciting conditions of the consciousness, one mind
+can reach out and take something out of another mind, or one mind can
+cause something to be passed over to another mind; and so information
+can be communicated to the mind of a medium, and can appear in automatic
+writing, or in clairvoyance, or in crystal gazing.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most conscientious and earnest of all the investigators of
+this subject was the late Professor Hyslop, who many years ago sought to
+teach me "practical morality" (from the bourgeois point of view) in
+Columbia University. Professor Hyslop worked for fifteen years with a
+medium by the name of Mrs. Piper, who was apparently sincere and was
+never exposed in any kind of fraud. In Professor Hyslop's books you will
+find innumerable instances of amazing facts brought out in Mrs. Piper's
+trances. You will find Professor Hyslop arguing that the only way
+telepathy can account for these facts is by the supposition that there
+is a universal subconscious mind, or that the subconscious mind of the
+medium possesses the power to reach into the subconscious mind of every
+other living person and take out anything from it. But for my part, I
+cannot see that the case is quite so difficult. Professor Hyslop
+recites, for example, how Mrs. Piper would tell him facts about some
+long dead relative&mdash;facts which he did not know, but was later able to
+verify. But that proves simply nothing at all, because there could be no
+possible way for Professor Hyslop to be sure that he had never known
+these facts about his relatives. The facts might have been in his
+subconscious mind without having ever been in his conscious mind at all;
+he might have<a name="vol_i_page_083" id="vol_i_page_083"></a> heard people talking about these matters while he was
+reading a book, or playing as a boy, paying no attention to what was
+said.</p>
+
+<p>And then came Sir Oliver Lodge with his investigations. I will say this
+for his work&mdash;he was the first person who was able to make real to my
+mind the startling idea that perhaps after all the dead might be alive
+and able to communicate with us. You will find what he has to say in his
+book, "The Survival of Man," and it seems fair that a great scientist
+and a great man should have a chance to convince you of what seem to him
+the most important facts in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in the war, and it is claimed that
+he began at once to communicate with his family. Among other things, he
+told them of the existence of a picture, which none of them had ever
+seen or heard of, a group photograph which he described in detail. But,
+of course, other people in this group knew of the existence of the
+photograph, and so we have again the possibility that some member of Sir
+Oliver's family may have taken into his subconscious mind without
+knowing it an impression or description of that picture. If you care to
+experiment, you will find that you can frequently play a part in the
+dreams of a child by talking to it in its sleep; and that is only one of
+a thousand different ways by which some member of a family might
+acquire, without knowing it, information of the existence of a
+photograph.</p>
+
+<p>There is another possibility to be considered&mdash;that a portion of the
+consciousness may survive, and not necessarily forever. We are
+accustomed when death takes place to see the body before us, and we know
+that we can preserve the body for thousands of years if we wish. Why is
+it not possible that when conscious life is brought to a sudden end,
+there may remain some portion of the consciousness, or of the
+subconsciousness, cut off from the body, and slowly fading back into the
+universal mind energy, whatever we please to call it? There is a hard
+part of the body, the skeleton, which survives for some time; why might
+there not be a central core of the mind which is similarly tough and
+enduring? Of course, if consciousness is a function of the brain, it
+must decay as the brain decays; but how would it be if the brain were a
+function of the consciousness&mdash;which is, so far as I can see, quite as
+likely a guess.<a name="vol_i_page_084" id="vol_i_page_084"></a></p>
+
+<p>I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility of this idea.
+I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits of those recently
+dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. Of course, you can go to
+any seance in the "white light" district of your city and receive
+communications from the souls of Cæsar and Napoleon and Alexander the
+Great and Pocahontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary,
+you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and
+Achilles; but you will not find much reality about any of these people,
+they will not tell you very much about the everyday details of their
+lives. This fact that so much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our
+own time tends to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever.
+How simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles would
+come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to find copies of
+his lost tragedies! You would think that the soul of Sophocles, seeing
+our great need of beauty and wisdom, would be interested to give us his
+works! From genius, operating under the guidance of the conscious mind,
+we get sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums give us
+suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the operation of
+the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, for example, from
+dissociated personalities.</p>
+
+<p>There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, produced by the
+automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who tells us in evident good
+faith that her conscious personality is entirely innocent of Patience,
+and all her thought and doings. Patience writes long novels and dramas
+in a quaint kind of old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing
+about this language. But does she positively know that when she was a
+child, she never happened to be in the room with someone who was reading
+old English aloud? Nothing seems more likely than that her subconscious
+mind heard some quaint, strange language, and took possession of it, and
+built up a personality around it, and even made a new language and a new
+literature from that starting point.</p>
+
+<p>That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subconscious revels. It
+creates new characters, with an imagination infinite and inexhaustible.
+Who has not waked up and been astounded at the variety and reality of a
+dream? Who has not told his dreams and laughed over them? The
+subconscious will play at games, it will act and rehearse elaborate
+rôles;<a name="vol_i_page_085" id="vol_i_page_085"></a> it will put on costumes, and delight in being Cæsar and Napoleon
+and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Hamlet and Don Quixote and
+Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will even play at being "spirits"! It
+will be mischievous and impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of
+its own importance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's
+most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. It
+will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a grief-stricken family;
+it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," and cause an earnest
+professor of "practical morality" to give up a respectable position in
+Columbia University and write books to convince the world that the dead
+are sending him messages.</p>
+
+<p>Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss Beauchamp.
+Remember that here we are not dealing with any guess work about
+"spirits"; here we have half a dozen different "controls," none of them
+the least bit dead, but all of them a part of the consciousness of one
+entirely alive young lady. A specialist has spent some six years
+investigating the case, day after day, week after week, writing down the
+minute details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant known as
+"Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom you ever held in your
+arms. Sally has love and hate, fear and hope, pain and delight&mdash;and
+Sally is a little demon, created entirely out of the subconsciousness of
+a highly refined and conscientious young college graduate of Boston.
+Sally spends Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally pawns
+Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; Sally uses
+Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about Miss Beauchamp;
+Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or makes her hear exactly the
+opposite of what is spoken to her. Yes, and Sally pleads and fights
+frantically for her life; Sally enters into intrigues with other parts
+of Miss Beauchamp, and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who
+is her Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge!</p>
+
+<p>And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a grieving mother,
+and made that mother think she was talking to the ghost of a long lost
+child? Can anybody doubt that Sally could and would play the part of any
+person she had ever known, or of any historic character she had ever
+read about? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the conscious
+Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this,<a name="vol_i_page_086" id="vol_i_page_086"></a> and was horrified
+when she was told about it. So here you have the following situation, no
+matter of guesswork, but definitely established: your dearest friend may
+act as a medium, and in all good faith may bring to the surface some
+part of his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in a
+hundred different rôles, and plays upon you with deliberate malice the
+most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks.</p>
+
+<p>And how much worse the situation becomes when to this there is added the
+possibility of conscious fraud! When the medium is a person who is
+taking your money, and thrives by making you believe in the "spirits"
+she produces! You may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of
+the Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, and in row
+after row of tents you may hear, and even see, every kind of spirit you
+ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs.
+And you may see poor farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their
+cheeks, listening to the endearments of their dead children, and to
+wisdom from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a Bowery
+accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years ago by Will Irwin in a
+book called "The Medium Game"; and then&mdash;after traveling from one kind
+of medium to another, and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he
+went into a "parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who
+had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most intimate secrets
+of his life!</p>
+
+<p>It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is at work upon a
+device to enable spirits to communicate with the living, if there really
+are spirits seeking to do this. It is Edison's idea that spirits may
+inhabit some kind of infinitely rarefied astral body, and he proposes to
+manufacture an instrument which is sensitive to an impression many
+millions of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This
+should make it easier for the spirits, and should constitute a fairer
+test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is perfected and put to
+work by scientific men, I wish to suggest a few tests which will
+convince me that there really are spirits, and that the results are not
+to be explained by telepathy.</p>
+
+<p>First, assuming that the spirits live forever, there are some useful
+things which were known to the people of ancient time, and are not known
+to anyone living now. For example, let one of the Egyptian craftsmen
+come forward and tell us<a name="vol_i_page_087" id="vol_i_page_087"></a> the secret of their glass-staining, which I
+understand is now a lost art. And then Sophocles, as I have already
+suggested, will tell us where we can find his lost dramas; or if he
+doesn't know where any copies are buried, let him find in the spirit
+world some scribe or librarian or book-lover who can give us this
+priceless information. All over the ancient lands are buried and
+forgotten cities, and in those cities are papyrus scrolls and graven
+tablets and bricks. Infinite stores of knowledge are thus concealed from
+us; and how simple for the ancient ones who possess this information to
+make it known to us, and so to convince us of their reality!</p>
+
+<p>Or, again, supposing that spirits are not immortal, but that they slowly
+fade from life as do their bodies. Suppose that a Raymond Lodge or other
+recently dead soldier wishes to communicate with his father and to
+convince his father that it is really an independent being, and not
+simply a part of the father's subconscious mind&mdash;let him try something
+like this. Let the father write six brief notes, and put them in six
+envelopes all alike, and shuffle them up and put them in a hat and draw
+out one of them. Now, assuming that the experimenter is honest, there is
+no living human being who knows the contents of that envelope, and if
+the medium is dipping into the subconscious mind of the experimenter,
+the chances are one in six of the right note being hit upon. Assuming
+that spirits may not be able to get inside an envelope and read a folded
+letter, there is no objection to the experimenter, provided he is
+honest, and provided there are no mirrors or other tricks, holding the
+envelope behind his back, and tearing it open, and spreading it out for
+the convenience of the spirit. And now, if the spirit can read that
+letter correctly every time, we shall be fairly certain that whatever
+force we are dealing with, it is not the subconscious mind of the
+experimenter.</p>
+
+<p>Or, let us take another test. Let us have a roulette wheel in a covered
+box, or hidden away so that no one but the spirit can see it. We spin
+the wheel, and any one of the habitues of Monte Carlo can figure out the
+chance of the little ball dropping into any particular number. If now
+the spirit can tell us each time where we shall find the ball, we shall
+know that we are dealing with knowledge which does not exist either in
+the conscious or the subconscious mind of any living human being.<a name="vol_i_page_088" id="vol_i_page_088"></a></p>
+
+<p>Among the things that "spirits" have been accustomed to do, since the
+days when they first made their appearance with the Fox sisters in
+America, are the lifting of tables and the ringing of bells and the
+assuming of visible forms. These are what is known as
+"materializations," and when I was a boy, and used to hear people
+talking about these things, there was always one test required: let the
+materializations manifest themselves upon recording instruments
+scientifically devised; let photographs be taken of them, let them be
+weighed and measured, and so on. Well, time has moved forward, and these
+tests have been met, and it appears that "materializations" are
+facts&mdash;although it is still as uncertain as ever what they are
+materializations of. An English scientist, Professor Crawford, has
+published a book entitled "The Reality of Psychic Phenomena," in which
+he tells the results of many years of testing materializations by the
+strictest scientific methods. When the medium "levitates" a table&mdash;that
+is, causes it to go up in the air without physical contact&mdash;it appears
+that her own weight increases by exactly the weight of the table. When
+she exerts any force, which apparently she can do at a distance, the
+recording instruments show the exact counter-force in her own body.</p>
+
+<p>The results of these investigations are calculated at first to take your
+breath away. It begins to appear that the theosophists may be right, and
+that we may have one or more "astral" bodies within or coincident with
+the physical body; and that under the trance conditions we mold and make
+over this "astral" body in accordance with our imaginations, precisely
+as a sculptor molds the clay. At any rate, our subconsciousness has the
+power to project from it masses of substance, and to cause these to take
+all kinds of forms, for example, human faces, which have been
+photographed innumerable times. Or the body can shoot out long rods or
+snaky projections, which lift tables, and exert force which has been
+recorded upon pressure instruments and weighed by scales.</p>
+
+<p>As I write, a friend lends me a fifteen-dollar volume, a translation
+just published of an elaborate work by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, a
+physician of Munich, giving minute details of four years' experiments in
+this field. So rigid was this investigator in his efforts to exclude
+fraud, that not merely was the medium stripped and sewed up in black
+tights, but the "cabinet" in which she sat was a big sack of black
+cloth,<a name="vol_i_page_089" id="vol_i_page_089"></a> everywhere sewed tight by machine. Every crevice of the medium's
+body was searched before and after the tests, and every inch of the
+"cabinet" gone over. The investigators sat within a couple of feet of
+the medium, and would draw back the curtains, and while holding her
+hands and her feet, would watch great masses of filmy gray and white
+stuff exude from the medium's mouth, from her armpits and breasts and
+sides. This would happen in red light of a hundred candle power, by
+which print could be easily read; and the medium would herself
+illuminate the phenomena with a red electric torch. The investigators
+would be privileged to examine these "phantom" forms, to touch them
+gently, and be touched by them&mdash;soft and slimy, like the tongue of an
+animal; but sometimes the things would misbehave, and strike them in the
+eye, hurting them.</p>
+
+<p>The medium, a young French girl living in the home of the wife of a
+well-known French playwright, had begun with spiritualist ideas, but
+came to take a matter-of-fact attitude to what happened, and in her
+trances would labor to mold these emanations into hands or faces, as
+requested by those present. She finally succeeded in allowing them to
+separate the soft mucous stuff from her body, and keep it for chemical
+and bacteriological examination. All this time she would be surrounded
+by a battery of cameras, nine at once, some of them inside the cabinet;
+and when the desired emanation was in sight, all these cameras would be
+set off by flashlight, and in the book you have over two hundred such
+photographs, showing faces and hands from every point of view. There are
+even moving-pictures, showing the material coming out of her mouth and
+going back!</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that we have here a whole universe of unexplored
+phenomena; and it seems that many of the old-time superstitions which
+were dumped overboard have now to be dragged back into the boat and
+examined in the light of new knowledge. What could smack more of magic
+and fraud than crystal-gazing? Yet it appears that the subconsciousness
+has power to project an image of its hidden memories into a crystal
+ball, where it may be plainly seen. We find so well-recognized an
+authority as Dr. Morton Prince using this method to enable one of the
+many Miss Beauchamps to recall incidents in her previous life which were
+otherwise entirely lost to her. Likewise this exploration of the
+disintegration of<a name="vol_i_page_090" id="vol_i_page_090"></a> personality enables us to watch in the making all the
+phenomena of trance and ecstasy which have had so much to do with the
+making of religions. We know now how Joan of Arc heard the "voices," and
+we can make her hear more voices or make her stop hearing voices, as we
+prefer. Also we know all about demons and "demoniac possession." We can
+cast out demons&mdash;and without having to cause them to enter a herd of
+swine! We may some day be prepared to investigate the wonder stories
+which the Yogis tell us, about their ability to leave their physical
+bodies in a trance, and to appear in England at a few moments' notice
+for the transaction of their spiritual business!</p>
+
+<p>But we want things proven to us, and we don't want the people with whom
+we work to be animated either by religious fanaticism or by money greed.
+We are ready to unlimber our minds, and prepare for long journeys into
+strange regions, but we want to move cautiously, and choose our route
+carefully, and be sure we do not lose our way! We want to deal
+rationally with life; we don't want to make wild guesses, or to choose a
+complicated and unlikely solution when a simple one will suffice. But,
+on the other hand, we must be alive to the danger of settling down on
+our little pile of knowledge, and refusing to take the trouble to
+investigate any more. That is a habit of learned men, I am sorry to say;
+the law of inertia applies to the scientist, as well as to the objects
+he studies. The scientists of our time have had to be prodded into
+considering each new discovery about the subconscious mind, precisely as
+the scientists of Galileo's time had to be prodded to watch him drop
+weights from the tower of Pisa. When he told them that the earth moved
+round the sun instead of the sun round the earth, they tortured him in a
+dungeon to make him take it back, and he did so, but whispered to
+himself, "And yet it moves." And it did move, of course, and continued
+to move. And in exactly the same way, if it be true that we have these
+hidden forces in us, they will continue to manifest themselves, and
+masses of people will continue to flock to Lily Dale, and to pay out
+their hard-earned money, until such a time as our learned men set to
+work to find out the facts and tell us how we can utilize these forces
+without the aid of either superstition or charlatanry.<a name="vol_i_page_091" id="vol_i_page_091"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><br />
+THE POWERS OF THE MIND</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance is
+slavery, and what science means to the people.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have now completed a brief survey of the mind and its powers.
+Whatever we may have proved or failed to prove, this much we may say
+with assurance: the reader who has followed our brief sketch attentively
+has been disabused of any idea he may have held that he knows it all;
+and this is always the first step towards knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>The mind is the instrument whereby our race has lifted itself out of
+beasthood. It is the instrument whereby we hold ourselves above the
+forces which seek to drag us down, and whereby we shall lift ourselves
+higher, if higher we are to go. How shall we protect this precious
+instrument? How shall we complete our mastery of it? What are the laws
+of the conduct of the mind?</p>
+
+<p>The process of the mind is one of groping outward after new facts, and
+digesting and assimilating them, as the body gropes after and digests
+and assimilates food. The senses bring us new impressions, and we take
+these and analyze them, tear them into the parts which compose them,
+compare them with previous sensations, recognize difference in things
+which seem to be alike, and resemblances in things which seem to be
+different; we classify them, and provide them with names, which are, as
+it were, handles for the mind to grasp. Above all, we seek for causes;
+those chains of events which make what we know as order in the world of
+phenomena. And when the mind has what seems to be a cause, it proceeds
+to test it according to methods it has worked out, the rules and
+principles of experimental science.</p>
+
+<p>It is a comparatively small number of sensations which the body brings
+to the mind of itself; it is a narrow world in which we should live if
+our minds adopted a passive attitude toward life. But some minds possess
+what we call curiosity; they set out upon their own impulse to explore
+life; they discover new laws and make new experiences and new
+sensations<a name="vol_i_page_092" id="vol_i_page_092"></a> for themselves. The mind forms an idea, and at first, after
+the fashion of the ancient Greek philosophers, it glorifies that idea
+and sets it in the seat of divinity. But presently comes the empirical
+method, which refuses authority to any idea unless it can stand the test
+of experiment, and prove that it corresponds with reality. Nowadays the
+thinker amasses his facts, and forms a theory to explain them, and then
+proceeds to try out this theory by the most rigid method that he or his
+critics can devise. If the theory doesn't "work"&mdash;that is, if it doesn't
+explain all the facts and stand all the tests&mdash;it is thrown away like a
+worn-out shoe. So little by little a body of knowledge is built up which
+is real knowledge; which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can
+use as foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization.</p>
+
+<p>By this method of research man is expanding his universe beyond anything
+that could have been conceived in the pre-scientific days. Hour by hour,
+while we work and play and sleep, the mind of our race is discovering
+new worlds in which our posterity will dwell. For uncounted ages man
+walked upon the earth, surrounded by infinite swarms of bacterial life
+of whose existence he never dreamed. The invisible rays of the spectrum
+beat upon him, and he knew nothing of what they did to him, whether good
+or evil. He lifted his head and saw vast universes of suns, in
+comparison with which his world was a mere speck of dust; yet to him
+these universes were globes or lanterns which some divinity had hung in
+the sky.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most fascinating illustrations of how the mind runs ahead of
+the senses is the story of the planet Uranus, which, less than two
+hundred years ago, had never been beheld by the eye of man. A
+mathematician seated in his study, working over the observations of
+other planets, their motions in relation to their mass and distance,
+discovered that their behavior was not as it should be. At certain times
+none of them were in quite the right place, and he decided that this
+variation must be due to the existence of an unknown body. He worked out
+the problem of what must be the mass and the exact orbit of this body,
+in order for it to be responsible for the variations observed; and when
+he had completed these calculations, he announced to the astronomical
+world, "Turn your telescopes to a certain spot in the heavens at a
+certain minute of a certain night, and you will find a new planet of a
+certain size." And so for the first time the human senses<a name="vol_i_page_093" id="vol_i_page_093"></a> became aware
+of a fact, which by themselves they might not have discovered in all
+eternity.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the importance of exact knowledge concerning a new planet may not
+be apparent to the ordinary man; but if the thing which is discovered
+is, for example, an unknown ray which will move an engine or destroy a
+cancer, then we realize the worthwhileness of research, and the masters
+of the world's commerce are willing to give here and there a pittance
+for the increase of such knowledge. But men of science, who have by this
+time come to a sense of their own dignity and importance, understand
+that there is no knowledge about reality which is useless, no research
+into nature which is wasted. You might say that to describe and classify
+the fleas which inhabit the bodies of rats and ground-squirrels, and to
+study under the microscope the bacteria which live in the blood of these
+fleas&mdash;that this would be an occupation hardly worthy of the divinity
+that is in man. But presently, as a result of this knowledge about fleas
+and flea diseases being in existence and available, a bacteriologist
+discovers the secret of the dread bubonic plague, which hundreds of
+times in past history has wiped out a great part of the population of
+Europe and Asia.</p>
+
+<p>Mark Twain tells in his "Connecticut Yankee" how his hero was able to
+overcome the wizard Merlin, because he knew in advance of an eclipse of
+the sun. And this was fiction, of course; but if you prefer fact, you
+may read in the memoirs of Houdin, the French conjurer, how he was able
+to bring the Arab tribes into subjection to the French government by
+depriving the great chieftains of their strength. He gathered them into
+a theatre, and invited their mighty men upon the stage, and there was an
+iron weight, and they were able to lift it when Houdin permitted, and
+not to lift it when he forbade. These noble barbarians had never heard
+of the electro-magnet, and could not conceive of a force that could
+operate through a solid wooden floor beneath their feet.</p>
+
+<p>Such things, trivial as they are, serve to illustrate the difference
+between ignorance and knowledge, and the power which knowledge gives.
+The man who knows is godlike to those who do not know; he may enslave
+them, he may do what he pleases with their lives, and they are powerless
+to help themselves. Anyone who would help them must begin by giving them
+knowledge, real knowledge. There is no such thing as freedom without
+knowledge, and it must be the best<a name="vol_i_page_094" id="vol_i_page_094"></a> knowledge, it must be new knowledge;
+he who goes against new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the
+Chinese who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, and with
+umbrellas over their heads.</p>
+
+<p>Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings and priests and
+ruling castes; but this supreme power has been wrested from them, and
+this is the greatest step in human progress so far taken. "Seek and ye
+shall find," is the law concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall
+be opened unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that
+knowledge is your priceless birthright, and that you should repudiate
+all men and all institutions and all creeds and all formulas which seek
+to keep this heritage from you. Beware of men who bid you believe
+something because it is told you, or because your fathers believed it,
+or because it is written in some ancient book, or embodied in some
+ancient ceremonial. Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at
+the same time beware of the modern spells which have been contrived to
+replace them! Beware of party cries and shibboleths, the idols of the
+forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which are set as snares for
+your feet. Beware of cant&mdash;that paraphernalia of noble sentiments,
+artificially manufactured by politicians and newspapers for the purpose
+of blinding you to their knaveries. Remember that you live in a world of
+class conflicts; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged by
+secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately released
+by people who seek to make use of you for purposes which are theirs and
+not yours. In the fairy-tales we used to love, the hero was provided
+with magic protection against the perils of those times; but what hero
+and what magic will guard the modern man against the propaganda of
+militarism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism?</p>
+
+<p>The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can be taught
+sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. There are many
+books on mind and memory training, some of which are useful, and some of
+which are trash. There is an English system widely advertised, called
+"Pelmanism," of which I have personally made no test, but it has won
+endorsements of a great many people who do not give their endorsements
+lightly.</p>
+
+<p>This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in medicine, or
+in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount<a name="vol_i_page_095" id="vol_i_page_095"></a> of charlatanry,
+but there is also genuine knowledge being patiently accumulated and
+standardized. When the United States government had to have an army in a
+hurry it did not make its millions of young men into teamsters or
+aviators at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction
+times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently I visited
+the Whittier Reform School in California, where delinquent boys are
+educated by the state. A boy had been set to work in the tailor shop,
+and it had been found that he was unable to make the buttons and the
+buttonholes of a coat come in the right place. For nine years the state
+of California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been laboring to
+teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; the effort had cost
+some five thousand dollars, to say nothing of all the coats which were
+spoiled, and all the mental suffering of the victim and his teachers.
+Finally someone persuaded the state of California to spend a few
+thousand dollars and install a psychological bureau for the purpose of
+testing all the inmates of the institution; so by a half hour's
+examination the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective.
+Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was only eight
+years old, and so he would never be able to achieve the feat of making
+buttons and buttonholes meet.</p>
+
+<p>This is a new science which you may read about in Terman's "The
+Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal children, it is
+established that certain tasks can be performed at certain ages. A child
+of three can point to his eyes, his nose and his mouth; he can repeat a
+sentence of six syllables, and repeat two digits, and give his family
+name. Older children are asked to look at a picture and then tell what
+they saw; to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according to
+their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note absurdities in
+statements, to count backwards, and to make change. Children of fifteen
+are asked to interpret fables, to reverse the hands of a clock, and so
+on. Of course there are always variations; every child will be better at
+some kinds of tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and
+taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child&mdash;which
+may be widely different from its physical age. You may find some whose
+minds have stopped growing altogether, and can only be made to grow by
+special methods of education. Enlightened communities are now conducting
+separate<a name="vol_i_page_096" id="vol_i_page_096"></a> schools for defective children&mdash;replacing the old-fashioned
+schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor little
+wretches to learn what was beyond their power.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, and in the
+detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast amount of "fake," but
+also the beginning of a science. Our laws do not as yet permit the use
+of automatic writing and the hypnotic trance in the investigation of
+crime, but they have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for
+example, those of memory association. The examiner prepares a list of a
+hundred names of objects, and reads those names one after another, and
+asks the person he is investigating to name the first thing which is
+suggested to him by each word in turn. "Engine" will suggest "steam," or
+perhaps it will suggest "train"; "coat" will suggest "trousers," or
+perhaps it will suggest "pocket," and so on. The examiner holds a
+stop-watch, and notes what fraction of a second each one of these
+reactions takes. The ordinary man, who is not trying to conceal
+anything, will give all his associations promptly, and the reaction
+times will be approximately alike. But suppose the man has just murdered
+somebody with an axe, and buried the body in a cellar with a fire
+shovel, and taken a pocketbook, and a watch, and a locket, and a number
+of various objects, and climbed out of the cellar window by breaking the
+glass; and now suppose that in his list of a hundred objects the
+psychologist introduces unexpectedly a number of these things. In each
+case the first memory association of the criminal will be one which he
+does not wish to give. He will have to find another, and that inevitably
+takes time. One or two such delays might be accidental; but if every
+time there is any suggestion of the murder, or the method or scene of
+the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be sure that
+the conscious mind is interfering with the subconscious mind. The
+difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind is always
+possible to detect, and if you are permitted to be thorough in your
+experiments, you can make certain what is in the subconscious mind that
+the conscious mind is trying to conceal.</p>
+
+<p>Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and expert knowledge
+confers mastery over the shrewdest untrained mind. The only trouble is
+that under our present social system the trained mind is very apt to be
+working in<a name="vol_i_page_097" id="vol_i_page_097"></a> the interest of class privilege. The psychologist who is
+employed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may be as
+little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in making poison
+gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for the extermination of its
+rebellious slaves. But what this proves is not that scientific knowledge
+is untrustworthy, but merely that the workers must acquire it, they must
+have their own organizations and their own experiments in every field.
+To give knowledge to the masses of mankind, slow and painful as the
+process seems, is now the most important task confronting the
+enlightened thinker.</p>
+
+<p>The method of psychoanalysis gives us also much insight into the
+phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may ultimately come to
+understand it. At present we are embarrassed because genius is so often
+closely allied to eccentricity; the supernormal appears in connection
+with the subnormal&mdash;and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets
+and painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, adopt
+irresponsibility as their religion; they live in a world of their own,
+they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, or to be true to
+their wives. They are followed by a host of disciples, who adopt the
+defects of the master as a substitute for his qualities. And so there
+grows up a perverted notion of what genius is, and wholly false
+standards of artistic quality. There is nothing mankind needs more than
+sure and exact tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to
+acquire languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability
+to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time shaping
+and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting masses of facts
+and weaving them into a pattern calculated to awaken the emotion in
+others. This is the last and greatest work of the human spirit, and to
+select the men who can do it, and foster their activity, is the ultimate
+purpose of all true science.<a name="vol_i_page_098" id="vol_i_page_098"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII<br /><br />
+THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to preserve and
+develop its powers for the protection of our lives and the lives of
+all men.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Someone wrote me the other day, asking, "When is the best time to
+acquire knowledge?" I answer, "The time is now." It is easier to learn
+things when you are young, but you cannot be young when you want to be,
+and if you are old, the best time to acquire knowledge is when you are
+old. It is true that the brain-cells seem to harden like the body, and
+it is less easy for them to take on new impressions; but it can be done,
+and just as Seneca began to learn Greek at eighty, I know several old
+men whom the recent war has shaken out of their grooves of thought and
+compelled to deal with modern ideas.</p>
+
+<p>But if you are young, then so much the better! Then the divine thrill of
+curiosity is keenest; then your memory is fresh, and can be trained;
+your mind is plastic, and you can form sound habits. You can teach
+yourself to respect truth and to seek it, you can teach yourself
+accuracy, open-mindedness, flexibility, persistence in the search for
+understanding.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, I think, is accuracy. Learn to think straight! Let your
+mind be as a sharp scalpel, penetrating unrealities and falsehoods,
+cutting its way to the facts. When you set out to deal with a certain
+subject, acquire mastery of it, so that you can say, "I know." And yet,
+never be too sure that you know! Never be so sure, that you are not
+willing to consider new facts, and to change your way of thinking if it
+should be necessary. I look about me at the world, and see tigers and
+serpents, dynamite and poison gas and forty-two centimeter shells&mdash;yet I
+see nothing in the world so deadly to men as an error of the mind. Look
+at the mental follies about you! Look at the prejudices, the delusions,
+the lies deliberately maintained&mdash;and realize the waste of it all, the
+pity of it all!</p>
+
+<p>Every man, it seems, has his pet delusions, which he hugs<a name="vol_i_page_099" id="vol_i_page_099"></a> to his bosom
+and loves because they are his own. If you try to deprive him of those
+delusions, it is as though you tore from a woman's arms the child she
+has borne. I have written a book called "The Profits of Religion," and
+never a week passes that there do not come to me letters from people who
+tell me they have read this book with pleasure and profit, they are
+grateful to me for teaching them so much about the follies and delusions
+of mankind, and it is all right and all true, save for two or three
+pages, in which I deal with the special hobby which happens to be their
+hobby! What I say about all the other creeds is correct&mdash;but I fail to
+understand that the Mormon religion is a dignified and inspired
+religion, a gift from on high, and if only I would carefully study the
+"Book of Mormon," I would realize my error! Or it is all right, except
+what I say about the Christian Scientists, or the Theosophists, or
+perhaps one particular sect of the Theosophists, who are different from
+the others. Today there lies upon my desk a letter from a man who has
+read many of my books, and now is grief-stricken because he must part
+company from me; he discovers that I permit myself to speak
+disrespectfully about the Seventh Day Adventist religion, whereas he is
+prepared to show the marvels of biblical prophecy now achieving
+themselves in the world. How could any save a divinely revealed religion
+have foreseen the present movement to establish the Sabbath by law? Yes,
+and presently I shall see the last atom of the prophecy fulfilled&mdash;there
+will be a death penalty for failure to obey the Sabbath law!</p>
+
+<p>Cultivate the great and precious virtue of open-mindedness. Keep your
+thinking free, not merely from outer compulsions, but from the more
+deadly compulsions of its own making&mdash;from prejudices and superstitions.
+The prejudices and superstitions of mankind are like those diseased
+mental states which are discovered by the psychoanalyst; what he calls a
+"complex" in the subconscious mind, a tangle or knot which is a center
+of disturbance, and keeps the whole being in a state of confusion. Each
+group of men, each sect or class, have their precious dogmas, their
+shibboleths, their sacred words and stock phrases which set their whole
+beings aflame with fanaticism. They have also their phobias, their words
+of terror, which cannot be spoken in their presence without causing a
+brain-storm.</p>
+
+<p>At present the dread word of our time is "Communist."<a name="vol_i_page_100" id="vol_i_page_100"></a></p>
+
+<p>You can scarcely say the word without someone telephoning for the
+police. And yet, when you meet a Communist, what is he? A worn and
+fragile student, who has thought out a way to make the world a better
+place to live in, and whose crime is that he tells others about his
+idea! Or perhaps you belong to the other side, and then your word of
+terror is the word "Capitalist." You meet a Capitalist, and what do you
+find? Very likely you find a man who is kindly, generous in his personal
+impulses, but bewildered, possibly a little frightened, still more
+irritated and made stubborn. So you realize that nearly all men are
+better than the institutions and systems under which they live; you
+realize the urgent need of applying your reasoning powers to the problem
+of social reorganization.</p>
+
+<p>Cultivate also, in the affairs of your mind, the ancient virtue of
+humility. There is an oldtime poem, which perhaps was in your school
+readers, "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" My answer is,
+for innumerable reasons. The spirit of mortal should be proud and must
+be proud because life throbs in it, and because life is a marvelous
+thing, and the excitement of life is perpetual. Yesterday I met a young
+mother; and of what avail is all the pessimism of poets against the
+pride of a young mother? "Oh!" she cried, and her face lighted up with
+delight. "He said 'Goo'!" Yes, he said "Goo!"&mdash;and never since the world
+began had there been a baby which had achieved that marvel. Presently it
+will be, "Look, look, he is trying to walk!" Then he will be getting
+marks at school, and presently he will be displaying signs of genius.
+Always it will take an effort of the mind of that young mother to
+realize that there are other children in the world as wonderful as her
+own; and perhaps it will take many generations of mental effort before
+there will be young mothers capable of realizing that some other child
+is more wonderful than her child.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, it is by a definite process of broadening our minds that
+we come to realize the lives of others, to transfer to them the interest
+we naturally take in our own lives, and to admit them to a state of
+equality with ourselves. This is one of the services the mind must
+render for us; it is the process of civilizing us. And there is another,
+and yet more important task, which is to make clear to us the fact that
+we do not altogether make this life of ours, that there is a universe of
+power and wisdom which is not ours, but on which<a name="vol_i_page_101" id="vol_i_page_101"></a> we draw. "The fear of
+the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," said the Psalmist. We know now
+that fear is an ugly emotion, destructive to life; but it may be
+purified and made into a true humility, which every thinking man must
+feel towards life and its miracles.</p>
+
+<p>Also the man will have joy, because it is given him to share the high,
+marvelous adventure of being. To the pleasures of the body there is a
+limit, and it comes quickly; but the pleasures of the mind are infinite,
+and no one who truly understands them can have a moment of boredom in
+life. To a man who possesses the key to modern thought, who knows what
+knowledge is and where to look for it, the life of the mind is a
+panorama of delight perpetually unrolled before him. To the minds of our
+ancestors there was one universe; but to our minds there are many
+universes, and new ones continually discovered.</p>
+
+<p>The only question is, which one will you choose? Will you choose the
+universe of outer space, the material world of infinity? Consider the
+smallest insect that you can see, crawling upon the surface of the
+earth; small as that insect is in relation to the earth, it is not so
+small, by millions of times, as is the earth in relation to the universe
+made visible to our eyes by the high-power telescope, plus the
+photographic camera, plus the microscope. If you want to know the
+miracles of this world of space, read Arrhenius' "The Life of the
+Universe," or Simon Newcomb's "Sidelights on Astronomy." Suffice it here
+to say that we have a chemistry of the stars, by means of the
+spectroscope; that we can measure the speed and direction of stars by
+the same means; that we have learned to measure the size of the stars,
+and are studying stars which we cannot even see! And then along comes
+Einstein, with his theories of "relativity," and makes it seem that we
+have to revise a great part of this knowledge to allow for the fact that
+not merely everything we look at, but also we ourselves, are flying
+every which way through space!</p>
+
+<p>Or will you choose the universe of the atom, the infinity of the
+material world followed the other way, so to speak? Big as is the
+universe in relation to our world, and big as is our world in relation
+to the insect that crawls on it, the insect is bigger yet in relation to
+the molecules which compose its body; and these in turn are millions of
+millions of times bigger than the atoms which compose them; and then,
+behold, in the<a name="vol_i_page_102" id="vol_i_page_102"></a> atom there are millions of millions of electrons&mdash;tiny
+particles of electric energy! We cannot see these infinitely minute
+things, any more than we can see the electricity which runs our trolley
+cars; but we can see their effects, and we can count and measure them,
+and deal with them in complicated mathematical formulas, and be just as
+certain of their existence as we are of the dust under our feet. If you
+wish to explore this wonderland, read Duncan's "The New Knowledge," or
+Dr. Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science."</p>
+
+<p>Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our racial past
+locked up in the secret chambers of our mind? Or will you choose the
+universe of the superconscious, the infinity of genius manifested in the
+arts? By the device of art man not merely creates new life, he tests it,
+he weighs it and measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the
+physicist with the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out
+what works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral and
+spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker of life.</p>
+
+<p>Written words can give but a feeble idea of the wonders that are found
+in these enchanted regions of the mind. Here are palaces of splendor
+beyond imagining, here are temples with sacred shrines, and
+treasure-chambers full of gold and priceless jewels. Into these places
+we enter as Aladdin in the ancient tale; we are the masters here, and
+all that we see is ours. He who has once got access to it&mdash;he possesses
+not merely the magic lamp, he possesses all the wonderful fairy
+properties of all the tales of our childhood. His is the Tarnhelm and
+the magic ring which gives him power over his foes; his is the sword
+Excalibur which none can break, and the silver bullet which brings down
+all game, and the flying carpet upon which to travel over the earth, and
+the house made of ginger-bread, and the three wishes which always come
+true, and the philter of love, and the elixir of youth, and the music of
+the spheres, and&mdash;who knows, some day he may come upon heaven, with St.
+Peter and his golden key, and the seraphim singing, and the happy blest
+conversing!<a name="vol_i_page_103" id="vol_i_page_103"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="vol_i_page_104" id="vol_i_page_104"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_TWO" id="PART_TWO"></a>PART TWO<br /><br />
+THE BOOK OF THE BODY</h2>
+
+<p><a name="vol_i_page_105" id="vol_i_page_105"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="vol_i_page_106" id="vol_i_page_106"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><br />
+THE UNITY OF THE BODY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is not a
+matter of many different organs and functions, but is one problem
+of one organism.)</p></div>
+
+<p>The reader who has followed our argument this far will understand that
+we are seldom willing to think of the body as separate from the mind.
+The body is a machine, to be sure, but it is a machine that has a
+driver, and while it is possible for a sound machine to have a drunken
+and irresponsible driver, such a machine is not apt to remain sound very
+long. Frequently, when there is trouble with the machine, we find the
+fault to be with the driver; in other words, we find that what is needed
+for the body is a change in the mind.</p>
+
+<p>If you wish to have a sound body, and to keep it sound as long as
+possible, the first problem for you to settle is what you want to make
+of your life; you must have a purpose, and confront the tasks of life
+with energy and interest. What is the use of talking about health to a
+man who has no moral purpose? He may answer&mdash;indeed, I have heard
+victims of alcoholism answer&mdash;"Let me alone. I have a right to go to
+hell in my own way."</p>
+
+<p>I am aware, of course, that the opposite of the proposition is equally
+true. A man cannot enjoy much mental health while he has a sick body. It
+is a good deal like the old question, Which comes first, the hen or the
+egg? The mind and the body are bound up together, and you may try to
+deal with each by turn, but always you find yourself having to deal with
+both. Most physicians have a tendency to overlook the mind, and
+Christian Scientists make a religion of overlooking the body, and each
+pays the penalty in greatly reduced effectiveness.</p>
+
+<p>My first criticism of medical science, as it exists today, is that it
+has a tendency to concentrate upon organs and functions, and to overlook
+the central unity of the system. You will find a doctor who specializes
+in the stomach and its<a name="vol_i_page_107" id="vol_i_page_107"></a> diseases, and is apt to talk as if the stomach
+were a thing that went around in the world all by itself. He will
+discuss the question of what goes into your stomach, and overlook to
+point out to you that your stomach is nourished by your blood-stream,
+which is controlled by your nervous system, which in turn is controlled
+by hope, by ambition, by love, by all the spiritual elements of your
+being. A single pulse of anger or of fear may make more trouble with the
+contents of your stomach than the doctor's pepsins and digestive
+ferments can remedy in a week.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, you may do yourself some purely local injury, and so for a
+time have a purely local problem. You may smash your finger, and that is
+a problem of a finger; but neglect it for a few days, and let blood
+poison set in, and you will be made aware that the human body is one
+organism, and also that, in spite of any metaphysical theories you may
+hold, your body does sometimes dominate and control your mind.</p>
+
+<p>Some one has said that the blood is the life; and certainly the blood is
+both the symbol and the instrument of the body's unity. The blood
+penetrates to all parts of the body and maintains and renews them. If
+the blood is normal, the work of renewal does not often fail. If there
+is a failure of renewal&mdash;that is, a disease&mdash;we shall generally find an
+abnormal condition of the blood. The distribution of the blood is
+controlled by the heart, a great four-chambered pump. One chamber drives
+the blood to the lungs, a mass of fine porous membranes, where it comes
+into contact with the air, and gives off the poisons which it has
+accumulated in its course through the body, and takes up a fresh supply
+of oxygen. By another chamber of the heart the blood is then sucked out
+of the lungs, and by the next chamber it is driven to every corner of
+the body. It takes to every cell of the body the protein materials which
+are necessary for the body's renewal, and also the fuel materials which
+are to be burned to supply the body's energy; also it takes some thirty
+million millions of microscopic red corpuscles which are the carriers of
+oxygen, and an even greater number of the white corpuscles, which are
+the body's scavengers, its defenders from invasion by outside germs.</p>
+
+<p>There are certain outer portions of the body, such as nails and the
+scales of the skin, which are dead matter, produced<a name="vol_i_page_108" id="vol_i_page_108"></a> by the body and
+pushed out from it and no longer nourished by the blood. But all the
+still living parts of the body are fed at every instant by the stream of
+life. Each cell in the body takes the fuel which it needs for its
+activities, and combines it with the oxygen brought by the red
+corpuscles; and when the task of power-production has been achieved, the
+cell puts back into the blood-stream, not merely the carbon dioxide, but
+many complex chemical products&mdash;ammonia, uric acid, and the "fatigue
+poisons," indol, phenol and skatol. The blood-stream bears these along,
+and delivers some to the sweat glands to be thrown out, and some to the
+kidneys, and the rest to the lungs.</p>
+
+<p>All of this complicated mass of activities is in normal health perfectly
+regulated and timed by the nervous system. You lie down to sleep, and
+your muscles rest, and the vital activities slow up, your heart beats
+only faintly; but let something frighten you, and you sit up, and these
+faculties leap into activity, your heart begins to pound, driving a
+fresh supply of blood and vital energy. You jump up and run, and these
+organs all set to work at top speed. If they did not do so, your muscles
+would have no fresh energy; they would become paralyzed by the fatigue
+poisons, and you would be, as we say, exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>All the rest of the body might be described as a shelter and accessory
+to the life-giving blood-stream; all the rest is the blood-stream's
+means of protecting itself and renewing itself. The stomach is to digest
+and prepare new blood material, the teeth are to crush it and grind it,
+the hands are to seize it, the eyes are to see it, the brain is to
+figure out its whereabouts. Man, in his egotism, imagines his little
+world as the center of the universe; but the wise old fellow who lives
+somewhere deep in our subconsciousness and looks after the welfare of
+our blood-stream&mdash;he has far better reason for believing that all our
+consciousness and our personality exist for him!</p>
+
+<p>Now, disease is some failure of this blood-stream properly to renew
+itself or properly to protect itself and its various subsidiary organs.
+When you find yourself with a disease, you call in a doctor; and unless
+this doctor is a modern and progressive man, he makes the mistake of
+assuming that the disease is in the particular organ where it shows
+itself. You have, let us say, "follicular tonsilitis." (These medical
+men<a name="vol_i_page_109" id="vol_i_page_109"></a> have a love for long names, which have the effect of awing you, and
+convincing you that you are in desperate need of attention.) Your throat
+is sore, your tonsils are swollen and covered with white spots; so the
+doctor hauls out his little black bag, and makes a swab of cotton and
+dips it, say in lysol, and paints your tonsils. He knows by means of the
+microscope that your tonsils are covered and filled with a mass of
+foreign germs which are feeding upon them; also he knows that lysol
+kills these germs, and he gives you a gargle for the same purpose, puts
+you to bed, and gradually the swelling goes down, and he tells you that
+he has cured you, and sends you a bill for services rendered. But maybe
+the swelling does not go down; maybe it gets worse and you die. Then he
+tells your family that nature was to blame. Nature is to blame for your
+death, but it never occurs to anyone to ask what nature may have had to
+do with your recovery.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know how many thousands of diseases medical science has now
+classified. And for each separate disease there are complex formulas,
+and your system is pumped full of various mineral and vegetable
+substances which have been found to affect it in certain ways. Perhaps
+you have a fever; then we give you a substance which reduces the
+temperature of your blood-stream. It never occurs to us to reflect that
+maybe nature has some purpose of her own in raising the temperature of
+the blood; that this might be, so to speak, the heat of conflict, a
+struggle she is waging to drive out invading germs; and that possibly it
+would be better for the temperature to stay up until the battle is over.
+Or maybe the heart is failing; then our medical man is so eager to get
+something into the system that he cannot wait for the slow process of
+the mouth and the stomach, he shoots some strychnine directly into the
+blood-stream. It does not occur to him to reflect that maybe the heart
+is slowing up because it is overloaded with fatigue poisons, of which it
+cannot rid itself, and that the effect of stimulating it into fresh
+activity will be to leave it more dangerously poisoned than before.</p>
+
+<p>We are dealing here with processes which our ancient mother nature has
+been carrying on for a long time, and which she very thoroughly
+understands. We ought, therefore, to be sure that we know what is the
+final effect of our actions; more especially we ought to be sure that we
+understand the cause of the evil, so that we may remove it, and<a name="vol_i_page_110" id="vol_i_page_110"></a> not
+simply waste our time treating symptoms, putting plasters on a cancer.
+This is the fundamental problem of health; and in order to make clear
+what I mean, I am going to begin by telling a personal experience, a
+test which I made of medical science some twelve or fourteen years ago,
+in connection with one of the simplest and most external of the body's
+problems&mdash;the hair. First I will tell you what medical science was able
+to do for my hair, and second what I myself was able to do, when I put
+my own wits to work on the problem.</p>
+
+<p>I had been overworking, and was in a badly run down condition. I was
+having headaches, insomnia, ulcerated teeth, many symptoms of a general
+breakdown; among these I noticed that my hair was coming out. I decided
+that it was foolish to become bald before I was thirty, and that I would
+take a little time off, and spend a little money and have my hair
+attended to. I did not know where to go, but I wanted the best authority
+available, so I wrote to the superintendent of the largest hospital in
+New York, asking him for the name of a reliable specialist in diseases
+of the scalp. The superintendent replied by referring me to a certain
+physician, who was the hospital's "consulting dermatologist," and I went
+to see this physician, whose home and office were just off Fifth Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>He examined my scalp, and told me that I had dandruff in my hair, and
+that he would give me a prescription which would remove this dandruff
+and cause my hair to stop falling out. He charged me ten dollars for the
+visit, which in those days was more money than it is at present. Being
+of an inquiring turn of mind, I tried to get my money's worth by
+learning what there was to learn about the human hair. I questioned this
+gentleman, and he told me that the hair is a dead substance, and that
+its only life is in the root. He explained that barbers often persuade
+people to have their hair singed, to keep it from falling out, and that
+this was an utterly futile procedure, and likewise all shampooing and
+massage, which only caused the hair to fall out more quickly. It was
+better even not to wash the hair too often. All that was needed was a
+mixture of chemicals to kill the dandruff germs; and so I had the
+prescription put up at a drug store, and for a couple of years I
+religiously used it according to order, and it had upon my hair
+absolutely no effect whatever.<a name="vol_i_page_111" id="vol_i_page_111"></a></p>
+
+<p>So here was the best that medical science could do. But still, I did not
+want to be bald, so I went among the health cranks&mdash;people who
+experiment without license from the medical schools. Also, I
+experimented upon myself, and now I know something about the human hair,
+something entirely different from what the rich and successful
+"consulting dermatologist" taught me, but which has kept me from
+becoming entirely bald:</p>
+
+<p>First, the human hair is made by the body, and it is made, like
+everything else in the body, out of the blood-stream. It is perfectly
+true that the dandruff germ gets into the roots, and makes trouble, and
+that the process of killing this germ can be helped by chemicals; but it
+does not take a ten-dollar prescription, it only takes ten cents' worth
+of borax and salt from the corner grocery. (Put a little into a saucer,
+moisten it, rub it into the scalp, and wash it out again.) But
+infinitely more important than this is the fact that healthy hair roots
+are a product of healthy blood, and that unhealthy blood produces sick
+hair roots, which cannot hold in the hair. Most important of all is the
+fact that in order to make healthy hair roots the blood must flow fully
+and freely to these hair roots; whereas I had been accustomed for many
+hours every day of my life to clap around my scalp a tight band which
+almost entirely stopped the circulation of the life-giving blood to my
+sick hair roots. In other words, by wearing civilized hats, I was
+literally starving my hair to death.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as I realized this I took off my civilized hat, and have never
+worn one since. As a rule, I don't wear anything. On the few occasions
+when I go into the city, I wear a soft cap. Now and then I experience
+inconvenience from this&mdash;the elevator boy in some apartment house tells
+me to come in by the delivery entrance, or the porter of a sleeping-car
+will not let me in at all. I remember discussing these embarrassments
+with Jack London, who went even further in his defiance of civilization,
+and wore a soft shirt. It was his custom, he said, to knock down the
+elevator boys and sleeping-car porters. I answered that that might be
+all right for him, because he could do it; whereas I was reduced to the
+painful expedient of explaining politely why I went about without the
+customary symbols of my economic superiority.</p>
+
+<p>The "consulting dermatologist" had very solemnly and<a name="vol_i_page_112" id="vol_i_page_112"></a> elaborately warned
+me concerning the danger of moving my hair too violently, and thus
+causing it to come out; but now my investigations brought out the fact
+that moving the hair, that is, massaging the scalp, increases the flow
+of blood to the hair roots, and further increases resistance to disease.
+As for causing the hair to fall out, I discovered that the more quickly
+you cause a hair to fall out, the greater is the chance of your getting
+another hair. If a hair is allowed to die in the root, it kills that
+root forever, but if it is pulled out before it dies, the root will make
+a new hair. Every "beauty parlor" specialist knows this; she knows that
+if a hair is pulled, it grows back bigger and stronger than ever, and so
+to pull out hair is the last thing you must do if you want to get rid of
+hairs!</p>
+
+<p>I know a certain poet, who happens to have been well-endowed with
+physical graces by our mother nature. He finds it worth while to
+preserve them&mdash;they being accessory to those amorous experiences which
+form so large a part of the theme of poetry. Anyhow, this poet values
+his beautiful hair, and you will see him sitting in front of his
+fireplace, reading a book, and meanwhile his fingers run here and there
+over his head, and he grabs a bunch of hair and pulls and twists it. He
+has cultivated this habit for many years, and as a result his hair is as
+thick and heavy as the "fuzzy-wuzzies" of Kipling's poem. It is a
+favorite sport of this poet to lure some rival poet into a contest. He
+will mildly suggest that they take hold of each other's hair and have a
+tug of war. The rival poet, all unsuspecting, will accept the challenge,
+and my friend will proceed to haul him all over the place, to the
+accompaniment of howls of anguish from the victim, and howls of glee
+from the victor, who has, of course, a scalp as tough as a rhinoceros
+hide.</p>
+
+<p>I am not a poet, and it is not important that I should be beautiful, and
+I have been too busy to remember to pull my hair; but by giving up tight
+hats, and by limiting the amount of my overworking, I have managed to
+keep what hair I had left when the hair specialist had got through with
+me. I tell this anecdote at the beginning of my discussion of health,
+because it illustrates so well the factors which appear in every case of
+disease, and which you must understand in seeking to remedy the trouble.</p>
+
+<p>We have a phrase which has come down to us from the<a name="vol_i_page_113" id="vol_i_page_113"></a> ancient Latins,
+"vis medicatrix naturae," which means the healing power of nature. So
+long ago men realized that it is our ancient mother who heals our
+wounds, and not the physician. Out of this have grown the cults of
+"nature cure" enthusiasts; and according to the fashion of men, they fly
+to extremes just as unreasonable and as dangerous as those of the "pill
+doctors" they are opposing. I have in mind a man who taught me probably
+more than any other writer on health questions, and with whom I once
+discussed the subject of typhoid, how it seemed to affect able-bodied
+men in the prime of their physical being. This, of course, was contrary
+to the theories of nature cure, and my friend had a simple way of
+meeting the argument&mdash;he refused to believe it. He insisted that, as
+with all other germ infections, it must be a question of bodily tone; no
+germ could secure lodgment in the human body unless the body's condition
+was reduced.</p>
+
+<p>"But how can you be sure of that?" I argued. "You know that if you go
+into the jungle, you are not immune against the scorpion or the cobra or
+the tiger. There is nothing in all nature that is safe against every
+enemy. What possible right have you to assert that you are immune
+against every enemy which can attack your blood-stream?"</p>
+
+<p>We shall find here, as we find nearly always, that the truth lies
+somewhere between the extremes of two warring schools. Our race has been
+existing for a long time in a certain environment, and its very
+existence implies superiority to that environment. The weaklings, for
+whom its hardships were too severe, were weeded out; hostile parasites
+invaded their blood-stream and conquered and devoured them. But those
+who survived were able to make in their blood-stream the substances
+known as anti-bodies, the "opsonins," to help the white blood corpuscles
+devour the germs. As the result of their victory, we carry those
+anti-bodies in our system, which gives us immunity to those particular
+diseases, or at any rate gives us the ability to have the diseases
+without dying. Every time we go into a street car, we take into our
+throat and lungs the germs of tuberculosis. Examination proves that we
+carry around with us in our mouths the germs of all the common throat
+and nose diseases, colds, bronchitis, tonsilitis. No matter what
+precautions we might take, no matter if we were to gargle our throats
+every few minutes, we could never get rid of such germs. And they<a name="vol_i_page_114" id="vol_i_page_114"></a> wage
+continual war upon the body's defenses; they batter in vain upon the
+gates of our sound health. But take us to some new environment to which
+we are not accustomed; take us to Panama in the old days of yellow
+fever, or take us to Africa, and let the tsetse fly bite us, and infect
+us with "sleeping sickness." Here are germs to which our systems are not
+accustomed; and before them we are as helpless as the ancient
+knights-at-arms, who had conquered everything in sight, and ruled the
+continent of Europe for many hundreds of years, but were wiped off the
+earth by a chemist mixing gunpowder.</p>
+
+<p>In the Marquesas Islands, in the South Seas, there lived a beautiful and
+happy race of savages, believed to have been descended, long ages ago,
+from Aryan stock. From the point of view of physical perfection, they
+were an ideal race, living a blissful outdoor life, which you may read
+about in Melville's "Typee," and in O'Brien's "White Shadows in the
+South Seas." This race conformed to all the requirements of the nature
+enthusiast. They went practically naked, their houses were open all the
+time, they lived on the abundant fruits of the earth. To be sure, they
+were cannibals, but this was more a matter of religious ceremony than of
+diet. They ate their war captives, but this was only after battle, and
+not often enough to count, one way or the other, in matters of health.
+They had lived for uncounted ages in perfect harmony with their
+environment; they were happy and free; and certainly, if such a thing
+were possible to human beings, they should have been proof against
+germs. But a ship came to one of these islands, and put ashore a sailor
+dying of tuberculosis, and in a few years four-fifths of the population
+of this island had been wiped out by the disease. What tuberculosis left
+were finished by syphilis and smallpox, and today the Marquesans are an
+almost extinct race.</p>
+
+<p>But there is another side to the argument&mdash;and one more favorable to the
+nature cure enthusiast. We civilized men, by soft living, by
+self-indulgence and lack of exercise, may reduce the tone of our body
+too far below the standard which our ancestors set for us; and then the
+common disease germs get us, then we have colds, sore throats,
+tuberculosis. The nature cure advocate is perfectly right in saying that
+there is no use treating such diseases; the thing is to restore the body
+to its former tone, so that we may be superior to our normal environment
+and its strains.<a name="vol_i_page_115" id="vol_i_page_115"></a></p>
+
+<p>You know the poem of the "One Hoss Shay," which was so perfectly built
+in every part that it ran for fifty years and then collapsed all at once
+in a heap. But the human body is not built that way. It always has one
+or more places which are weaker than the others, and which first show
+the effects of strain. In one person it will take the form of dyspepsia,
+in another it will be headaches, in another colds, in another decaying
+teeth, in another hardening of the arteries or stiffening of the joints.
+But whatever the symptoms may be, the fundamental cause is always the
+same, an abnormal condition of the blood-stream, and a consequent
+lowering of the body's tone. Therefore, studying any disease and its
+cure, you have first the emergency question, are there any germs lodged
+in the body, and if so, how can you destroy them? As part of the
+problem, you have to ask whether your blood-stream is normal, and if
+not, what are the methods by which you can make it normal and keep it
+so? Also you have to ask, what are the reasons why your trouble
+manifests itself in this or that particular organ? Is there some
+weakness or defect there, and can the defect be remedied, or can your
+habits be changed so as to reduce the strain on that organ? Are there
+any measures you can take to increase the flow of blood to that organ,
+and to promote its activity? In the study of your health, you will find
+that circumstances differ, and the importance of one factor or the other
+will vary; but you will seldom find any problem in which all these
+factors do not enter, and you will seldom find an adequate remedy unless
+you take all the factors into consideration.<a name="vol_i_page_116" id="vol_i_page_116"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX<br /><br />
+EXPERIMENTS IN DIET</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and his
+conclusions as to what to eat.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Students of the body assure us that every particle of matter which
+composes it is changed in the course of seven years. It is obvious that
+everything that is a part of the body has at some time to be taken in as
+food; so the problem of our diet today is the problem of what our body
+shall consist of seven years from now, and probably a great deal sooner.</p>
+
+<p>I begin this discussion by telling my own personal experiences with
+food. I am not going to recommend my diet for anyone else; because one
+of the first things I have to say about the subject is that every human
+individual is a separate diet problem. But I am going to try to
+establish a few principles for your guidance, and more especially to
+point out the commonest mistakes. I tell about my own mistakes, because
+it happens that I know them more intimately.</p>
+
+<p>I was brought up in the South, where it is the custom of people to give
+a great deal of time and thought to the subject of eating. Among the
+people I knew it was always taken for granted that there should be at
+least one person in the kitchen devoting all her time to the preparing
+of delicious things for the family to eat. This person was generally a
+negress, and, needless to say, she knew nothing about the chemistry of
+foods, nothing about their constituents or nutritive qualities. All she
+knew was about their taste; she had been trained to prepare them in ways
+that tasted best, and was continually being advised and exhorted and
+sometimes scolded by the ladies of the family on this subject. At the
+table the family and the guests never failed to talk about the food and
+its taste, and not infrequently the cook would be behind the door
+listening to their comments; or else she would wait until after the
+meal, for the report which somebody would bring her.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to this, the ladies of the family were skilled in what is
+called "fancy cooking." They did not bother with<a name="vol_i_page_117" id="vol_i_page_117"></a> the meats and
+vegetables, but they mixed batter cakes, and made all kinds of elaborate
+desserts, and exchanged these treasures and the recipes for them with
+other ladies in the neighborhood. In addition to this, there were
+certain periods of the week and of the year especially devoted to the
+preparing and consuming of great quantities of foods. Once every seven
+days the members of the family expressed their worship of their Creator
+by eating twice as much as usual; and at another time they celebrated
+the birth of their Redeemer by overeating systematically for a period of
+two or three weeks. Needless to say, of course, the children brought up
+in such an environment all had large appetites and large stomachs, and
+their susceptibility to illness was recognized by the setting apart for
+them of a whole classification of troubles&mdash;"children's diseases," they
+were called. In addition to children's diseases, there were coughs and
+colds and sore throats and pains in the stomach and constipation and
+diarrhea, which the children shared with their adults.</p>
+
+<p>I had a little more than my share of all these troubles. Always a doctor
+would be sent for, and always he was wise and impressive, and always I
+was impressed. He gave me some pills or a bottle of liquid, a
+teaspoonful every two hours, or something like that&mdash;I can hear the
+teaspoon rattle in the glass as I write. I had a profound respect for
+each and every one of those doctors. He was wisdom walking about in
+trousers, and whenever he came, I knew that I was going to get well; and
+I did, which proved the case completely.</p>
+
+<p>Then I grew up, and at the age of eighteen or nineteen became possessed
+of a desire for knowledge, and took to reading and studying literally
+every minute of the day and a good part of the night. I seldom let
+myself go to sleep before two o'clock in the morning, and was always up
+by seven and ready for work again. I did this for ten years or so, until
+nature brought me to a complete stop. During these ten years I was a
+regular experiment station in health; that is, I had every kind of
+common ailment, and had it over and over again, so that I could try all
+the ways of curing it, or failing to cure it, and keep on trying until I
+was sure, one way or the other. I came recently upon a wonderful saying
+by John Burroughs, which will be appreciated by every author. "This
+writing is an unnatural business. It makes your head hot and your feet
+cold, and it stops the digesting of your food."<a name="vol_i_page_118" id="vol_i_page_118"></a></p>
+
+<p>This trouble with my digestion began when I was writing my second novel,
+camping out on a lonely island at the foot of Lake Ontario. I went to
+see a doctor in a nearby town, and he talked learnedly about dyspepsia.
+The cause of it, he said, was failure of the stomach to secrete enough
+pepsin, and the remedy was to take artificial pepsin, obtained from the
+stomach of a pig. He gave me this pig-pepsin in a bottle of red liquid,
+and I religiously took some after each meal. It helped for a time; but
+then I noticed that it helped less and less. I got so that a simple meal
+of cold meat and boiled potatoes would stay in my stomach for hours, in
+spite of any amount of the pig-pepsin; I would lie about in misery,
+because I wanted to work, and my accursed stomach would not let me.</p>
+
+<p>All the time, of course, I was using my mind on this problem, groping
+for causes. I found that the trouble was worse if I worked immediately
+after eating. I found also that it was worse when I was writing books.
+When I got sufficiently desperate, I would stop writing books and go off
+on a hunting trip. I would tramp twenty miles a day over the mountains,
+looking for deer, and I would come back at night too tired to think, and
+in a week or two every trace of my trouble would be gone. So my life
+regimen came to be&mdash;first the writing of a book, and then a hunting trip
+to get over the effects of it. But as time went on, alas, I noticed that
+the recuperation was more slow and less certain. The working times grew
+shorter, and the hunting times grew longer, until finally I had got to a
+point where I couldn't work at all; I would go to pieces in a few days
+if I tried it. It was apparently the end of my stomach, and the end of
+my sleeping, and the end of my writing books. My teeth were decaying,
+not merely outside but inside; I would have abscesses, and most
+frightful agonies to endure. I would lie awake all night, and it would
+seem to me that I could feel my body going to pieces&mdash;an extremely
+depressing sensation!</p>
+
+<p>I had been trying experiments all this time. I had been going to one
+doctor after another, and had got to realize that the doctors only
+treated symptoms; they treated the "diseases" when they appeared&mdash;but
+nobody ever told you how to keep the "diseases" from appearing. Why
+could there not be a doctor who would look you over thoroughly, and tell
+you everything that was wrong with you, and how to set it right?<a name="vol_i_page_119" id="vol_i_page_119"></a> A
+doctor who would tell you exactly how to live, so that you might keep
+well all the time! I was studying economics, and becoming suspicious of
+my fellow man; it occurred to me that possibly it might be embarrassing
+to a doctor, if he cured all his patients, and taught them how to live,
+so that none of them would ever have to come to him again. It occurred
+to me that possibly this might be the reason why "preventive medicine,"
+constructive health work, was getting so little attention from the
+medical fraternity.</p>
+
+<p>Two things that plagued me were headache and constipation, and they were
+obviously related. For constipation, the world had one simple remedy;
+you "took something" every night or every morning, and thought no more
+about it. My stout and amiable grandmother had drunk a glass of Hunyadi
+water every morning for the last thirty or forty years, and that she
+finally died of "fatty degeneration of the heart" was not connected with
+this in the mind of anyone who knew her. As for the headaches, people
+would tell you this, that, and the other remedy, and I would try
+them&mdash;that is, unless they happened to be drugs. I was getting more and
+more shy of drugs. I had some blessed instinct which saved me from
+stimulants and narcotics. I had never used tea, coffee, alcohol or
+tobacco, and in my worst periods of suffering I never took to putting
+myself to sleep with chloral, or to stopping my headaches with
+phenacetin.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of six or eight years of purgatory, I came upon a prospectus
+of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This seemed to me exactly what I wanted;
+this was constructive, it dealt with the body as a whole. So I spent a
+couple of months at the "San," and paid them something like a thousand
+dollars to tell me all they could about myself.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing they told me was that meat-eating was killing me. It was
+perfectly obvious, was it not, that meat is a horrible feeding place for
+germs, that rotten meat is dreadfully offensive, and likewise digested
+meat&mdash;consider the excreta of cats, for example! I listened solemnly
+while Doctor Kellogg read off the numbers of billions of bacteria per
+gram in the contents of the colon of a carnivorous person. It certainly
+seemed proper that the author of "The Jungle" should be a vegetarian, so
+I became one, and did my best to persuade myself that I enjoyed the
+taste of the patent meat-substitutes which are served in hundred calory
+portions in the big Sanitarium dining-room.<a name="vol_i_page_120" id="vol_i_page_120"></a></p>
+
+<p>There also I met Horace Fletcher, and learned to chew every particle of
+food thirty-two times, and often more. I exercised in the Sanitarium
+gymnasium, and watched the sterilized dancing&mdash;the men with the men and
+the women with the women. I was patiently polite with the Seventh Day
+Adventist religion, and laid in a supply of postage stamps on Friday
+evening. Finally, and most important of all, I went once a day to the
+"treatment rooms," and had my abdomen doctored alternately with hot
+cloths and ice. By this means I kept up a flow of blood in the
+intestinal tract, and stimulated these organs to activity; so my
+constipation was relieved, and my headaches were less severe&mdash;so long as
+I stayed at the Sanitarium, and was boiled and frozen once every day.
+But when I left the Sanitarium, and abandoned the treatments, the
+troubles began to return. Meantime, however, I had written a book in
+praise of vegetarianism&mdash;a book which has got into the libraries, and
+cannot be got out again!</p>
+
+<p>I went on to a new variety of health crank, the real "nature cure"
+practitioners. Vegetarianism was not enough, they insisted; the evil had
+begun long before, when man first ruined his food and destroyed its
+nutritive value by means of fire. There was only one certain road to
+health, and that was by the raw food route, the monkey and squirrel
+diet. I had gone out to California for a winter's rest, and decided I
+would give this plan a thorough trial. For five months I lived by
+myself, and the only cooked food I ate was shredded wheat biscuit. For
+the rest I lived on nuts and salads and fresh and dried fruits; and
+during this period I enjoyed such health as I had never known in my life
+before. I had literally not a single ailment. I was not merely well, but
+bubbling over with health. I had a friend who said it cheered him up
+just to see me walk down the street.</p>
+
+<p>I thought that it was entirely the raw food, and that I had solved the
+problem forever; but I overlooked the fact that during those five months
+I had done no hard brain work, no writing. I went back to writing again,
+and things began to go wrong; my wonderful raw foods took to making
+trouble in my stomach&mdash;and I assure you that until you try, you have no
+idea the amount of trouble that can be made in your stomach by a load of
+bananas and soaked prunes which has gone wrong! For a year or two I
+agonized; I could not give up my wonderful raw food diet, because I had
+always before<a name="vol_i_page_121" id="vol_i_page_121"></a> me the vision of those months in California, and could
+not understand why it was not that way again.</p>
+
+<p>But the time came when I would eat a meal of raw food, and for hours
+afterwards my stomach would feel like a blown-up football. Then somebody
+gave me a book by Dr. Salisbury on the subject of the meat diet. Of all
+the horrible things in the world, a meat diet sounded to me the worst; I
+had been a vegetable enthusiast for three years, and thought of eating
+meat as you would think of cannibalism. But there has never been a time
+in my life when I would not hear something new, and give it a trial if
+it sounded well; so I read the books of Doctor Salisbury, which have
+long been out of print, and have been curiously neglected by the medical
+profession. Salisbury was a real pioneer, an experimenter. He wrote in
+the days before the germ theory, and so missed his guess regarding
+tuberculosis, but he perceived that most of the common diseases are
+caused by dietetic errors, and he set to work to prove it. He showed
+that hog cholera and army diarrhea are the same disease, and come from
+the same cause. He took a squad of men and fed them on army biscuit for
+two or three weeks, until they were nearly dead, and then he put them on
+a diet of lean beef and completely cured them in a few days. He did this
+same thing with one kind of food after another, and in each case he
+would bring his men as near to death as he dared, and then he would cure
+them. He showed that meat is the only food which contains all the
+elements of nutrition, the only food upon which a person can live for an
+unlimited period. As Salisbury said, "Beef is first, mutton is second,
+and the rest nowhere."</p>
+
+<p>It was his idea that tuberculosis of the lungs is caused by spores of
+fermenting starch clogging the minute blood vessels. He claimed that
+there is an early stage of tuberculosis, in which the spores are
+floating in the blood stream; he put large numbers of patients upon a
+diet of lean beef, ground and cooked, and he cured them of tuberculosis,
+and if one of them would break the diet and yield to a craving for
+starch or sugar, Salisbury claimed that he could find it out an hour or
+two later by examining a drop of their blood under the microscope. In
+his books he described vividly the effects of an excess of starch and
+sugar in the diet. He called it "making a yeast-pot of your stomach";
+and you can imagine how that hit my stomach, full of half digested
+bananas and prunes!<a name="vol_i_page_122" id="vol_i_page_122"></a></p>
+
+<p>I tried the Salisbury diet, and satisfied myself of this one fact, that
+lean meat is for brain-workers the most easily assimilated of all foods.
+Salisbury claimed that you could not overeat on meat, but I do not
+believe there is any food you cannot overeat on, nor do I believe that
+anyone should try to live on one kind of food. We are by nature
+omnivorous animals. Our digestive tracts are similar to those of hogs
+and monkeys, which eat all varieties of food they can get. One of the
+common errors of the nature cure enthusiast is to cite the monkey and
+the squirrel as fruit and nut-eating animals, when the fact is that
+monkeys and squirrels eat meat when they can get it, and the ardor with
+which they go bird-nesting is evidence enough that they crave it. If
+there is any race of man which is vegetarian, you will find that it is
+from necessity alone. The beautiful South Sea Islanders, who are the
+theme of the raw fooders' ecstasy, spend a lot of their time catching
+fish, and sometimes they kill a pig, and celebrate the event precisely
+as Christians celebrate the birth of their Redeemer.</p>
+
+<p>From this you may be able to guess my conclusions, as the result of much
+painful blundering and experimenting. So far as diet is concerned, I
+belong to no school; I have learned something from each one, and what I
+have learned from a trial of them all is to be shy of extreme statements
+and of hard and fast rules. To my vegetarian friends who argue that it
+is morally wrong to take sentient life, I answer that they cannot go for
+a walk in the country without committing that offense, for they walk on
+innumerable bugs and worms. We cannot live without asserting our right
+to subject the lower forms of life to our purposes; we kill innumerable
+germs when we swallow a glass of grape juice, or for that matter a glass
+of plain water. I shall be much surprised if the advance of science does
+not some day prove to us that there are rudimentary forms of
+consciousness in all vegetable life; so we shall justify the argument of
+Mr. Dooley, who said, in reviewing "The Jungle," that he could not see
+how it was any less a crime to cut off a young tomato in its prime, or
+to murder a whole cradleful of baby peas in the pod!</p>
+
+<p>There is no question that meat-eating is inconvenient, expensive, and
+dirty. I have no doubt that some day we shall know enough to be able to
+find for every individual a diet<a name="vol_i_page_123" id="vol_i_page_123"></a> which will keep him at the top of his
+power, without the maintenance of the slaughter-house. But we do not
+possess that knowledge at present; at least, I personally do not possess
+it. I happen to be one of those individuals&mdash;there are many of
+them&mdash;with whom milk does not agree; and if you rule out milk and meat,
+you find yourself compelled to get a great deal of your protein from
+vegetable sources, such as peas, beans and nuts. All these contain a
+great deal of starch, and thus there is no way you can arrange your diet
+to escape an excess of starch. Excess of starch, so my experience has
+convinced me, is the deadliest of all dietetic errors. It is also the
+commonest of errors, the cause, not merely of the common throat and nose
+infections, but of constipation, and likewise of diarrhea, of anemia,
+and thus, through the weakening of the blood stream, of all disorders
+that spring from this source&mdash;decaying teeth and rheumatism, boils, bad
+complexion, and tuberculosis. Starch foods are the cheapest, therefore
+they form the common diet of the poor, and are responsible for the
+diseases of undernourishment to which the poor are liable.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, of course, there are perfectly definite diseases of
+overnourishment; high blood pressure, which culminates in apoplexy;
+kidney troubles, which result from the inability of these organs to
+eliminate all the waste matter that is delivered to them; fatty
+degeneration of the heart, or of the liver, or any of the vital organs.
+You may cause a headache by clogging the blood stream through
+overeating, or you may cause it by eating small quantities of food, if
+those foods are unbalanced, and do not contain the mineral elements
+necessary to the making of normal blood. Whatever the trouble with your
+health, it is my judgment that in two cases out of three you will find
+it dates back to errors in diet. I do not think I exaggerate in saying
+that a knowledge of what to eat and how much to eat is two-thirds of the
+knowledge of how to keep yourself in permanent health.<a name="vol_i_page_124" id="vol_i_page_124"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX<br /><br />
+ERRORS IN DIET</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they play in
+the making of health and disease.)</p></div>
+
+<p>It is my purpose in this chapter to lay down a few general principles to
+aid you in the practical problem of selecting the best diet for
+yourself. But it must be made clear at the outset that there can be no
+hard and fast rule. All human bodies are more or less alike, but on the
+other hand all are more or less different. Modern civilization has given
+very few bodies the chance to be perfect; nearly all have some weakness,
+some abnormality, and need some special modification in diet to fit
+their particular problem. The ideal in each case would be a complete
+study of the individual system. Some day, no doubt, medical science will
+analyze the digestive juices and the gland secretions and the
+blood-stream of every human being, and say, you need a certain
+percentage of starch and a certain percentage of protein; you need such
+and such proportion of phosphorus and iron; you should avoid certain
+acids&mdash;and so on. But at present we are devoting our science to the task
+of killing and maiming other people, instead of enabling ourselves to
+live in health and happiness; so it is that most of those who read this
+book will be too poor to command the advice of a diet specialist. The
+best you can do is to get a few general ideas and try them out, watching
+your own body and learning its peculiarities.</p>
+
+<p>Human food contains three elements: proteins, fats and carbohydrates.
+The proteins are the body-building material, and the foods which are
+rich in proteins are lean meat, the white of eggs, milk and cheese,
+nuts, peas and beans. A certain amount of this kind of food is needed by
+the body. If it is missing, the body will gradually waste away. If too
+much of it is taken, the body can turn it into energy-making material,
+but this is a wasteful process, and the best evidence appears to be that
+it is a strain upon the system. Experiments conducted by Professor
+Chittenden of Yale have proven conclusively that men can live and
+maintain body weight upon<a name="vol_i_page_125" id="vol_i_page_125"></a> much less protein food than previous dietetic
+standards had indicated.</p>
+
+<p>The fats are found in fat meats and dairy products, and in nuts, olives,
+and vegetable oils. The body is prepared to digest and assimilate a
+certain amount of fat, no one knows how much. I have found in my own
+case that I require a great deal less than people ordinarily eat. I have
+for many years maintained good health upon a diet containing no more fat
+than one gets with lean meat once or twice a day. I never use butter or
+olive oil, nor any fat in cooking. My reason for this is that fats are
+the most highly concentrated form of food, and the easiest upon which to
+overeat. Excess of fat is a cause, not merely of obesity, but also of
+boils and pimples and "pasty" complexion, and other signs of a clogged
+blood-stream.</p>
+
+<p>The third variety of food is the carbohydrates, and of these there are
+two kinds, starches and sugars. Starch is the white material of the
+grains and tubers; the principal food element of bread and cereals,
+rice, potatoes, bananas, and many prepared substances such as
+corn-starch, tapioca, farina and macaroni. Starchy foods compose
+probably half the diet of the average human being. In my own case, they
+compose about one-sixth, so you see to what extent my beliefs differ
+from the common. Starch is not really necessary in the diet at all. I
+have a friend who is subject to headaches, and finds relief from them by
+a diet of meat, salads, and fresh fruits exclusively. The first thing
+that excess of starch or sugar does is to ferment in the system, and
+cause flatulence and gas. But strange as it may seem, if the excess of
+starch is perfectly digested and assimilated into the system, the
+condition may be worse yet, because you may have a great quantity of
+energy-producing material, without the necessary mineral elements which
+the body requires in the handling of it.</p>
+
+<p>If you cremate a human body and study the ashes chemically, you find a
+score or more of mineral salts. You find these in the blood, and no
+blood is normal and no body can be kept normal which does not contain
+the right percentage of these elements. It is not merely that they are
+needed to build bones and teeth; they are needed at every instant for
+the chemistry of the cells. Every time you move a muscle, you fill the
+cells of that muscle with a certain amount of waste matter. You may
+prove how deadly this matter is by binding<a name="vol_i_page_126" id="vol_i_page_126"></a> a tight cord about your arm,
+and then trying to use the arm. We are only at the beginning of
+understanding the subtle chemistry of the body; but this much we know,
+the cells transform the waste products, and they are thrown out of the
+system as ammonia, uric acid, etc.; and for this process the blood must
+have a continual supply of many mineral salts.</p>
+
+<p>So vital are they, and so fatal to health is their absence, that it is
+far better for you to eat nothing at all than to eat improperly balanced
+foods, or foods which are deficient in the organic salts. You may prove
+this to yourself by a simple experiment. Put two chickens in separate
+pens, where nobody can feed them but yourself. Feed one of them on water
+and white bread, or corn starch, or sugar, or any energy-making
+substance which contains little of the mineral elements. Feed the other
+chicken on plain water. You will find that the one which has the food
+will quickly become droopy and sickly; its feathers will fall out, it
+will have what in human beings would be known as headaches, colds, sore
+throats, decaying teeth and boils. At the end of a couple of weeks it
+will be a dead chicken. The one which you feed on water alone will not
+be a happy chicken, neither will it be a fat chicken, but it will be a
+live chicken, and a chicken without disease. I am going later on to
+discuss the subject of fasting. For the present I will merely say that a
+chicken which has nothing but water is living upon its own flesh, and
+therefore has a meat diet, containing the mineral elements necessary to
+the elimination of the fatigue poisons.</p>
+
+<p>I am going to try not to be dogmatic in this book, and not to say things
+that I do not know. I confess to innumerable uncertainties about the
+subject of diet; but one thing I think I do know, and that is that human
+beings should eliminate absolutely from their food those modern
+artificial products, which look so nice, and are so easy to handle, and
+are put up in packages with pretty labels, and have been in some way
+artificially treated to remove the wastes and impurities&mdash;including the
+vital mineral salts. Among such food substances I include lard and its
+imitations made from cottonseed oil, white flour, all the prepared and
+refined cereals, polished rice, tapioca, farina, corn starch, and
+granulated and powdered sugar. Any of these substances will kill a
+chicken in a couple of weeks, and the only reason they take a longer
+time to kill<a name="vol_i_page_127" id="vol_i_page_127"></a> you is because you mix them with other kinds of foods. But
+to the extent that you eat them, your diet is deficient; and do not
+console yourself with the idea that the mineral elements will be made up
+from other foods, because you don't know that, and nobody else knows it.
+Nobody knows just how much of any particular organic salt the body
+needs. All we know is that the primitive races, which ate natural foods,
+enjoyed vigorous health, while the American people, who consume the
+greatest proportion of the so-called "refined" foods, have the very best
+dentists and the very worst teeth in the world.</p>
+
+<p>There are many kinds of sugar, found in the sugar-cane and the beet, and
+in all fruits. Sugar may also be made from any form of starch; this is
+glucose, which is put up in cans and sold as an imitation of maple
+syrup. The ordinary granulated and powdered sugar is made by taking from
+the natural syrup every trace of mineral elements; so I have no
+hesitation in saying that the ordinary cane sugar and beet sugar of our
+breakfast tables and our confectionery stores is not a food, but a slow
+poison. The causes of the wonderful progress of American dentistry,
+which is the marvel of the civilized world, are cane sugar, white flour,
+and the frying-pan, each of which dietetic crimes I shall take up in
+turn.</p>
+
+<p>We have the richest country in the world; we eat more food, probably by
+50 per cent, and we waste more food, probably by 500 per cent, than any
+other people in the world; and yet, go to any small farming community in
+America, and what do you find? You find the teeth of the young children
+rotting in their heads, and having to be pulled out before their second
+teeth come. You find these second teeth rotting often before the age of
+twenty. A friend of mine, who knows the American farmer, sums it up this
+way: "He has two things that he requires if he is to be really
+respectable and happy. First, he wants to get all the fireplaces in his
+home boarded up, and all the windows nailed tight; and second, he wants
+to get all his teeth out, and an artificial set installed. Out of the
+farmers' wives in my neighborhood, not one in ten keeps her own teeth
+until she is thirty."</p>
+
+<p>If you go to the Balkans, where the peasants live on sour milk, with
+grains which they grind at home; or to southern Italy and Sicily, where
+they live on cheese and black bread and olives; or among savage people,
+where they hunt and<a name="vol_i_page_128" id="vol_i_page_128"></a> fish and gather the natural fruits, you find old
+men without a single decayed tooth. There must be some reason for this,
+and the reason is found in our denatured grocery-store foods. The
+farmer's wife will gather up her eggs and her butter and cheeses, and
+take them to the store and bring back cans of lard and packages of
+sugar. The farmer will sell his perfectly good wheat and corn meal, and
+bring back in his wagon cases of "refined" cereal foods, for which he
+has paid ten times the price of the grain!</p>
+
+<p>Dentists will tell you that the way candy injures the teeth is by
+sticking to them and fermenting, forming acids, which destroy the tooth
+structure. And that may be a part of the reason. But the principal
+reason why the teeth decay is because the blood-stream is abnormal, and
+is unable to keep up the repairs of the body. Your teeth are living
+structures, just as much as any other part of you, and they will resist
+decay if you supply them with the proper nourishment.</p>
+
+<p>You need sugar; you need a considerable quantity of it every day. Nature
+provides this sugar in combination with the organic salts, and also with
+the precious vitamines, whose function in the body we are only beginning
+to investigate. All the mineral substances which give the color and
+flavor to oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, figs, prunes, raisins&mdash;all
+these you take out when you make sugar. Or perhaps you put in some
+imitations of them, made from coal tar chemicals, and drink them at your
+soda fountains! So little appreciation has the American farmer's wife of
+natural fruits, that when she preserves them, she considers it necessary
+to fill them full of cane sugar; in fact, she has a notion that they
+won't keep unless she cooks them up with sugar! So snobbish are we
+Americans about our eating, that we make the best of our foods into
+bywords. We make jokes in our comic papers about the "boarding-house
+prune"; and yet prunes and raisins are among the wholesomest foods we
+have, and if we fed them to our children instead of cakes and candy and
+coal-tar flavorings, our dental industry would rapidly decline.</p>
+
+<p>And the same thing is true of bread. When I was a boy, I thought I had
+to have hot bread at least twice a day, and if I were called upon to eat
+bread that was more than a day old, I felt that I was being badly abused
+by life. I used to read fairy stories, in which something called "black
+bread" was mentioned, something obscure and terrible; the symbol of<a name="vol_i_page_129" id="vol_i_page_129"></a>
+human misery was Cinderella sitting in the ashes and eating a crust of
+dry "black bread." But now since I have studied diet, I have taken my
+place with Cinderella. I can afford to buy whatever kind of bread I
+want; I can have the best white bread, piping hot, three times a day, if
+I want it; but what I eat three times a day is a crust of hard dry
+"black bread."</p>
+
+<p>"Black bread" is the fairy story name for bread made of the whole grain.
+It is eaten that way by the peasant because he has no patent milling
+machinery at his disposal, to fan away the life-giving elements of his
+food. Nearly all the mineral elements of the grain are contained in the
+outer, dark-colored portion. The white part is almost pure starch; and
+when you use white flour, you are not merely starving your blood-stream,
+your bones, and your teeth, you are also depriving the digestive tract
+of the rough material which it is accustomed to handle, and which it
+needs to stimulate it to action. I am aware that whole grain products
+are a trifle less easy of digestion, but we should not pamper and weaken
+our digestive tract any more than we let our muscles get flabby for lack
+of action. We should require our stomachs to handle the ordinary natural
+foods, precisely as we accustom our body to react from cold water, and
+to stand honest hard work.</p>
+
+<p>For ages the Japanese peasants have lived on rice, with a little dried
+fish. Quite recently there began to spread throughout Japan a mysterious
+disease known as beri-beri. It was especially prevalent in the army, and
+so the scientists of Japan set out to discover the cause, and it proved
+to be the modern practice of polishing rice, which takes off the outer
+coating of the grain. Rice is one of the most wholesome of foods, if it
+is eaten in the natural state; but in order to get it in that state in
+this country, you have to find a special food store of the health
+cranks, and have to pay a special price for it. You have to pay a higher
+price for whole wheat bread&mdash;because ninety-nine people out of a hundred
+are ignorant, and insist upon having their foodstuffs pretty to look at!</p>
+
+<p>Probably you have read sea stories, and know of the horrors of scurvy.
+Scurvy and beri-beri are similar diseases, with a similar cause. The men
+on the old sailing ships used to have to live on white biscuit and salt
+meat, and they always knew that to recover from their gnawing illness,
+they must get to port and get fresh vegetables and fruits, especially<a name="vol_i_page_130" id="vol_i_page_130"></a>
+onions and lemons, which contain the vitamines as well as the salts. But
+you will see the modern housewife going into the grocery store, and
+surveying the shelves of "package" goods, and in her ignorance picking
+out the scurvy-making products, and frequently paying for them a much
+higher price than for the health-making ones!</p>
+
+<p>Then, when she has got her white flour, and her cane sugar, and her
+lard, she will take it home, and mix it up, and put it in the frying
+pan, and serve it hot to her husband and children. Nature has so
+constituted her husband and children that they digest starch before they
+digest fat; that is to say, the starch is digested mainly in the
+stomach, while the fat is digested mainly after the food has been passed
+on into the small intestine. But by frying the starch before it is
+eaten, the housewife carefully takes each grain of the starch and
+protects it with a little covering of fat. Thus the digestive juices of
+the stomach cannot get at the starch, and the starch goes down into the
+small intestine a good part undigested. If some evil spirit, wishing to
+make trouble for the human organism, had charge of the laying out of our
+diet, he could hardly devise anything worse than that. And yet it would
+be no exaggeration to say that the average American, especially the
+average farmer, eats out of a frying-pan. If his potatoes have to be
+warmed over, they go into the frying-pan; his precious batter-cakes and
+doughnuts are cooked in a frying-pan, and all his precious hot breads
+are mixed with lard. If it were not for the fact that you cannot broil a
+beefsteak over a modern gas range, I would tell you that the first step
+toward health for the average American would be to throw the frying-pan
+out of the window, and to throw the cook-book after it.</p>
+
+<p>The whole modern art of cooking is largely a perversion; a product of
+idleness, vanity, and sensuality. It is one of the monstrous growths
+consequent upon our system of class exploitation. We have a number of
+idle people with nothing to do but eat, and who demonstrate their
+superiority to the rest of us by their knowledge of superior foods, and
+superior ways of preparing them. They have the wealth of the world at
+their disposal, also the services of their fellow man without limit, and
+they set their fellow man to work to enable them to give elaborate
+banquets, and to sit in solemn state and gorge themselves, and to have a
+full account of their behavior<a name="vol_i_page_131" id="vol_i_page_131"></a> published in the next morning's
+newspapers. A great part of this perverse art we owe to what is called
+the "ancient régime" in France&mdash;a régime which starved the French
+peasantry until they were black skinned beasts hiding in caves and
+hollow trees. So it comes about that our modern food depravity parades
+itself in French names, and American snobbery requires of its devotees a
+course in the French language sufficient to read a menu card. Needless
+to say, this elaborate gastronomic art has been developed without any
+relation to health, or any thought of the true needs of the body. It is
+one of the products of the predatory system which we can say is absolute
+waste. Having done my own cooking for the past twenty-five years, I make
+bold to say that I can teach anybody all he needs to know about cooking
+in one lesson of half an hour, and that the total amount of cooking
+required for a large family can be done by one person in twenty minutes
+a day.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, a great many foods do not have to be cooked at all,
+and are made less fit by cooking. In the next place, the only cooking
+that is ever required is a little boiling, or in the case of meat,
+roasting or broiling. In the next place, the art of combining foods in
+cooking is a waste art, because no foods should be combined in cooking.
+Every food has its own natural flavor, which is lost in combination, and
+if anybody is unable to enjoy the natural flavors of simply cooked
+foods, there is one thing to say to that person, and that is to wait
+until he is hungry. Let him take a ten-mile walk in the open air, and he
+will have more interest in his next meal. I am not a fanatic, and have
+no desire to destroy the pleasures of life; I am recommending to people
+that they should seek the higher pleasures of the intellect, and those
+pleasures are not found in standing over a cook stove, nor in compelling
+others to stand over a cook stove. Moreover, I know that the artificial
+mixing of foods to tempt peoples' palates is one of the principal causes
+of overeating, and therefore of ill health, and therefore of the
+ultimate destruction of the pleasures of life.</p>
+
+<p>I went out from the world of cooks before I was twenty. I wanted to
+write a book, and to be let alone while I was doing it. I lived by
+myself, and found out about cooking by practical experience. On a few
+occasions since then, I have lived in a house with a servant, and had
+some cooking done<a name="vol_i_page_132" id="vol_i_page_132"></a> for me, but it was always because somebody else
+wanted it, and against my protest. In the last ten years we have had no
+servant in our home, and because I want my wife to give her energy to
+more important things than feeding me, I do my share of getting every
+meal. We have worked out a system of housekeeping by which we get a meal
+in five minutes, and when we finish it, it takes three minutes to clear
+things away.</p>
+
+<p>If I tell you what I eat, please do not get the impression that I am
+advising you to eat these same things. My diet consists of the foods
+which I have found by long experience agree with me. There are many
+other foods which are just as wholesome, but which I do not eat, either
+because they don't happen to agree with me, or because I don't care for
+them so much. I am fond of fruit, and eat more of that than of anything
+else. It is not a cheap article of diet, but you can save a good deal if
+you buy it in quantities, as I do. A little later I am going to discuss
+the prices of foods.</p>
+
+<p>For breakfast I eat a slice of whole wheat bread, three good-sized
+apples, stewed, and eight or ten dates. It takes practically no time to
+prepare this breakfast. The bread has to be baked, of course, but this
+is done wholesale; we buy four loaves at a time, and it is just as good
+at the end of a couple of weeks as when we buy it. When I lived in the
+world of cooks, I would call for apple sauce; which meant that somebody
+had to pare apples, cut them up, stew them, mix them with sugar, grate a
+little nutmeg over them, set them on ice, and serve them to me on a
+glass dish, with a little pitcher of cream. But now what happens is that
+I put a dozen apples in a big sauce-pan and let them simmer while I am
+eating. We have a rule in our family that we do not do any cooking
+except while we are eating, because if we try it at any other time of
+the day, we get buried in a book or in a manuscript, and forget about it
+until the smoke causes somebody in the street to summon the fire
+department. So the apples for my breakfast were cooked during last
+night's supper; and during the breakfast there will be some vegetable
+cooking for lunch.</p>
+
+<p>At this lunch, which is my "square meal," I eat a large slice of
+beefsteak, say a third of a pound. Jack London used to say that the only
+man who could cook a beefsteak was the fireman of a railway locomotive,
+because he had a hot,<a name="vol_i_page_133" id="vol_i_page_133"></a> clean shovel. The best imitation you can get is a
+hot, clean frying-pan; and when you are sure that it is hot, let it get
+hotter. The whole secret of cooking meat is to keep the juices inside,
+and to do that you must cook it quickly. When you slap it down on a hot
+frying-pan, the meat is seared, and the juices stay inside, and if you
+do not turn it over until it is almost ready to burn, you don't need to
+cook it very long on the other side. That is the one secret of cooking
+worth knowing; it doesn't cost anything, and saves time instead of
+wasting it. As I have never found anybody else capable of learning it, I
+reserve the cooking of the beefsteak as one of my family duties.</p>
+
+<p>To continue the lunch, a slice of whole wheat bread, and a large
+quantity of some fresh salad, such as celery, or lettuce and tomatoes,
+without dressing. For a part of this may be substituted a vegetable, one
+or two beets or turnips, cooked during a previous meal, and warmed up in
+a couple of minutes; and we do not throw away the tops of the turnips
+and beets and celery, we put them on and cook them, and they serve for
+the next day's meal. If you would eat a large quantity of such "greens"
+once a day, you would escape many of the ills that your flesh is at
+present heir to. Finally, for dessert, an orange and a small handful of
+raisins, or one or two figs.</p>
+
+<p>The evening meal will be the same as the breakfast; except once in a
+while when I am especially hungry, and want some meat. I am writing in
+the winter season, so the fruits suggested are those available in
+winter. The menu will be varied with every kind of fruit at the season
+when it is cheapest and most easily obtained. The beefsteak will appear
+at about three meals out of four; occasionally it will be replaced by
+the lean meat of pork or mutton, or by fish. The bread may be replaced
+by rice, or boiled potatoes, either white or sweet, and occasionally by
+graham crackers. I know that these contain a little fat and sugar, but I
+try not to be fanatical about my diet, and the rules I suggest do not
+carry the death penalty. There was a time when I used to allow my
+friends to make themselves miserable by trying to provide me with
+special foods when they invited me to a meal, but now I tell them to
+"forget it," and I politely nibble a little of everything, and eat most
+of what I find wholesome; if there is nothing wholesome, I content
+myself with the pretense of a<a name="vol_i_page_134" id="vol_i_page_134"></a> meal. If I find myself in a restaurant, I
+quite shamelessly get a piece of apple or pumpkin pie, omitting most of
+the crust. As I don't go away from home more than once or twice a month,
+I do not have to worry about such indulgence. The main thing is to
+arrange one's home diet on sound lines, and learn to enjoy the simple
+and wholesome foods, of which there is a great variety obtainable, and
+at prices possible to all but the wretchedly poor.</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion, since everybody likes to have a feast now and then, I
+specify that my diet regimen allows for holidays. Assuming that I am
+your guest for a day, and that you wish to "blow" me, regardless of
+expense, here will be the menu. Breakfast, some graham crackers, a bunch
+of raisins, a can of sliced pineapple in winter, or a big chunk of
+watermelon in summer. Dinner, or lunch, roast pork, a baked apple, a
+baked sweet potato and some spinach. Supper, lettuce, dates, and a dish
+of popcorn flavored with peanut butter. Try this next Christmas!</p>
+
+<p>P. S. After this book had been put into type, I chanced to be looking
+over Herbert Quick's illuminating book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth."
+Discussing the importance of certain organic salts to the body, Dr.
+Quick states: "Animals have been fed, as an experiment, on foods
+deficient in phosphorus. For a while they seemed to do well. Then they
+collapsed. It takes only three months of a ration without phosphorus to
+wreck an animal. Individual creatures were killed after a month of this
+diet, and it was found that the flesh was taking the phosphate&mdash;for the
+phosphorus exists in the body in that form&mdash;from the bones to supply its
+need. In other words, the body was eating its own bones! When this
+process had robbed the bones to the limit, the collapse came, and the
+animal could never recover."<a name="vol_i_page_135" id="vol_i_page_135"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI<br /><br />
+DIET STANDARDS</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities we
+need, and their money cost.)</p></div>
+
+<p>I think there is no more important single question about health than the
+question of how much food we should eat. It is one about which there is
+a great deal of controversy, even among the best authorities. We shall
+try here for a common-sense solution. At the outset we have to remind
+ourselves of the distinction we tried to draw between nature and man. To
+what extent can civilized man rely upon his instincts to keep him in
+perfect health?</p>
+
+<p>Let us begin by considering the animals. How is their diet problem
+solved? Horses and cattle in a wild state are adjusted to certain foods
+which they find in nature, and so long as they can find it, they have no
+diet problem. Man comes, and takes these animals and domesticates them;
+he observes their habits, and gives to them a diet closely approaching
+the natural one, and they get along fairly well. But suppose the man,
+with his superior skill in agriculture, taking wild grain and planting
+it, reaping and threshing it by machinery, puts before his horse an
+unlimited quantity of a concentrated food such as oats, which the horse
+can never get in a natural state&mdash;will that horse's instincts guide it?
+Not at all. Any horse will kill itself by overeating on grain.</p>
+
+<p>I have read somewhere a clever saying, that a farm is a good place for
+an author to live, provided he can be persuaded not to farm it. But once
+upon a time I had not heard that wise remark, and I owned and tried to
+run a farm. I had two beautiful cows of which I was very proud, and one
+morning I woke up and discovered that the cows had got into the pear
+orchard and had been feeding on pears all night. In a few hours they
+both lay with bloated stomachs, dying. A farmer told me afterwards that
+I might have saved their lives, if I had stuck a knife into their
+stomachs to let out the gas. I do not know whether this is true or not.
+But my two dead cows afford a perfect illustration of the reason<a name="vol_i_page_136" id="vol_i_page_136"></a> why
+civilized man cannot rely upon his instincts and his appetites to tell
+him when he has had enough to eat. He can only do this, provided he
+rigidly restricts himself to the foods which he ate in the days when his
+teeth and stomach and bowels were being shaped by the process of natural
+selection. If he is going to eat any other than such strictly natural
+foods, he will need to apply his reason to his diet schedule.</p>
+
+<p>In a state of nature man has to hunt his food, and the amount that he
+finds is generally limited, and requires a lot of exercise to get.
+Explorers in Africa give us a picture of man's life in the savage state,
+guided by his instincts and very little interfered with by reason. The
+savages will starve for long periods, then they will succeed in killing
+a hippopotamus or a buffalo, and they will gorge themselves, and nearly
+all of them will be ill, and several of them will die. So you see, even
+in a state of nature, and with natural foods, restraint is needed, and
+reason and moral sense have a part to play.</p>
+
+<p>What do reason and moral sense have to tell us about diet? Our bodily
+processes go on continuously, and we need at regular intervals a certain
+quantity of a number of different foods. The most elementary experiment
+will convince us that we can get along, maintain our body weight and our
+working efficiency upon a much smaller quantity of food than we
+naturally crave. Civilized custom puts before us a great variety of
+delicate and appetizing foods, upon which we are disposed to overeat;
+and we are slow observers indeed if we do not note the connection
+between this overeating and ill health. So we are forced to the
+conclusion that if we wish to stay well, we need to establish a
+censorship over our habits; we need a different diet regimen from the
+haphazard one which has been established for us by a combination of our
+instincts with the perversions of civilization.</p>
+
+<p>Up to a few years ago, it was commonly taken for granted by authorities
+on diet that what the average man actually eats must be the normal thing
+for him to eat. Governments which were employing men in armies, and at
+road building, and had to feed them and keep them in health, made large
+scale observations as to what the men ate, and thus were established the
+old fashioned "diet standards." They are expressed in calories, which is
+a heat unit representing the quantity of fuel required to heat a certain
+small quantity of water a certain number of degrees. In order that you
+may<a name="vol_i_page_137" id="vol_i_page_137"></a> know what I am talking about, I will give a rough idea of the
+quantity of the more common foods which it takes to make 100 calories:
+one medium sized slice of bread, a piece of lean cooked steak the size
+of two fingers, one large apple, three medium tablespoonfuls of cooked
+rice or potatoes, one large banana, a tablespoonful of raisins, five
+dates, one large fig, a teaspoonful of sugar, a ball of butter the size
+of your thumbnail, a very large head of lettuce, three medium sized
+tomatoes, two-thirds of a glass of milk, a tablespoonful of oil. You
+observe, if you compare these various items, how little guidance
+concerning food is given by its bulk. You may eat a whole head of
+lettuce, weighing nearly a pound, and get no more food value than from a
+half ounce of olive oil which you pour over it. You may eat enough lean
+beefsteak to cover your plate, and you will not have eaten so much as a
+generous helping of butter. A big bowl of strawberries will not count
+half so much as the cream and sugar you put over them. So you may
+realize that when you eat olive oil, butter, cream, and sugar, you are
+in the same danger as the horse eating oats, or as my two cows in the
+pear orchard; and if some day a surgeon has to come and stick a knife
+into you, it may be for the same reason.</p>
+
+<p>The old-fashioned diet standards are as follows: Swedish laborers at
+hard work, over 4,700 calories; Russian workmen at moderate work, German
+soldiers in active service, Italian laborers at moderate work, between
+3,500 and 3,700 calories; English weavers, nearly 3,500 calories;
+Austrian farm laborers, over 5,000 calories. Some twenty years ago the
+United States government made observations of over 15,000 persons, and
+established the following, known as the "Atwater standards": men at very
+hard muscular work, 5,500 calories; men at moderately active muscular
+work, 3,400 calories; men at light to moderate muscular work, 3,050
+calories; men at sedentary, or women at moderately active work, 2,700
+calories.</p>
+
+<p>In the last ten or fifteen years there has arisen a new school of
+dietetic experts, headed by Professors Chittenden and Fisher of Yale
+University. Professor Chittenden has published an elaborate book, "The
+Nutrition of Man," in which he tells of long-continued experiment upon a
+squad of soldiers and a group of athletes at Yale University, also upon
+average students and professors. He has proved conclusively that all
+these various groups have been able to maintain full body<a name="vol_i_page_138" id="vol_i_page_138"></a> weight and
+full working efficiency upon less than half the quantity of protein food
+hitherto specified, and upon anywhere from one-half to two-thirds the
+calory value set forth in the former standards.</p>
+
+<p>When I first read this book, I set to work to try its theories upon
+myself. During the five or six months that I lived on raw food, I took
+the trouble to weigh everything that I ate, and to keep a record. It is,
+of course, very easy to weigh raw foods exactly, and I found that I
+lived an active life and kept physical health upon slightly less than
+2,500 calories a day. I have set this as my standard, and have
+accustomed myself to follow it instinctively, and without wasting any
+thought upon it. Sometimes I fall from grace; for I still crave the
+delightful cakes and candies and ice cream upon which I was brought up.
+I always pay the penalty, and know that I will not get back to my former
+state of health until I skip a meal or two, and give my system a chance
+to clean house. The average man will find the regimen set forth in this
+book austere and awe-inspiring; I do not wish to pose as a paragon of
+virtue, so perhaps I should quote a sarcastic girl cousin, who remarked
+when I was a boy that the way to my heart was with a bag of
+ginger-snaps. I live in the presence of candy stores and never think of
+their existence, but if someone brings candy into the house and puts it
+in front of me, I have to waste a lot of moral energy in letting it
+alone. A few years ago I had a young man as secretary who discovered
+this failing of mine, and used to afford himself immense glee by buying
+a box of chocolates and leaving it on top of my desk. I would give him
+back the box&mdash;with some of the chocolates missing&mdash;but he would persist
+in "forgetting it" on my desk; he would hide and laugh hilariously
+behind the door, until my wife discovered his nefarious doings, and
+warned me of them.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Chittenden states quite simply the common sense procedure in
+the matter of food quantity. Find out by practical experiment what is
+the very least food upon which you can do your work without losing
+weight. That is the correct quantity for you, and if you are eating
+more, you certainly cannot be doing your body any good, and all the
+evidence indicates that you are doing it harm. You need not have the
+least fear in making this experiment that you will starve yourself.
+Later on, in a chapter on fasting, I shall prove to<a name="vol_i_page_139" id="vol_i_page_139"></a> you that you carry
+around with you in your body sufficient reserve of food to keep you
+alive for eighty or ninety days; and if you draw on a small quantity of
+this you do not do yourself the slightest harm. Cut down the amount of
+your food; eat the bulky foods, which contain less calory value, and
+weigh yourself every day, and you will be surprised to discover how much
+less you need to eat than you have been accustomed to.</p>
+
+<p>One of the things you will find out is that your stomach is easily
+fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a meal consisting of a
+moderate quantity of lean meat, a very little bread, a heaping dish of
+turnip greens, and a big slice of watermelon, you will feel fully
+satisfied, yet you will not have taken in one-third the calory value
+that you would at an ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and
+dessert. The bulky kind of food is that for which your system was
+adapted in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large
+stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you had lived on
+refined and concentrated foods such as butter, sugar, olive oil, cheese
+and eggs. You have a long intestinal tract, adapted to slowly digesting
+foods, and to the work of extracting nutrition from a mass of roughage.
+You have a very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian
+scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the problems of
+health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous stage of evolution,
+and a source of much disease. The best thing you can do with that lower
+bowel is to give it lots of hay, as it requires; in other words, to eat
+the salads and greens which contain cellulose material. This contains no
+food value, and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and
+stimulates it to activity.</p>
+
+<p>If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, it may not be
+digested, and in that case it will fill your system with poisons.
+Second, it may be assimilated, but not burned up by the body. In that
+case it has to be thrown out by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and
+this puts upon these organs an extra strain, to which in the long run
+they may be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up as
+fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to tide you over
+the times when food was scarce. If you were a bear, you would naturally
+want to eat all you could, and be as fat as possible in November, so
+that you might be able<a name="vol_i_page_140" id="vol_i_page_140"></a> to hunt your prey when you came out from your
+winter's sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to eat
+your regular meals all winter; you have established a system of
+civilization which makes you certain of your food, and the place where
+you keep your surplus is in the bank, or sewed up in the mattress, or
+hidden in your stocking. In other words, a civilized man saves money,
+and the habit of storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is
+a survival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health.
+Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra weight around
+with him, but his body has to keep it and tend it; and what are the
+effects of this is fully shown by life insurance tables. People who are
+five or ten per cent over weight have five or ten per cent more chance
+of dying all the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under
+weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of life
+expectation. There is no answer to these figures, which are the result
+of the tabulation of many hundreds of thousands of cases. The meaning of
+them to the fat person is to put himself on a diet of lean meat, green
+vegetables and fresh fruits, until he has brought himself down, not
+merely to the normal fatness of the civilized man, but to the normal
+leanness of the athlete, the soldier on campaign, and the student who
+has more important things to think about than stuffing his stomach.</p>
+
+<p>There is, of course, a certain kind of leanness which is the result of
+ill health. There are wasting diseases; tuberculosis, for example, and
+anemia. There are people who worry themselves thin, and there are a few
+rare "spiritual" people, so-called, who fade away from lack of
+sufficient interest in their bodies. That is not the kind of leanness
+that I mean, but the active, wiry leanness, which sometimes lives a
+hundred years. Nearly always you will find that such people are spare
+eaters; and you will find that our ideal of rosy plumpness, both for
+adults and children, is a wholly false notion. We once had in our home
+as servant an Irish girl, who was what is popularly called "a picture of
+health," with those beautiful flaming cheeks that Irish and English
+women so often have. She was in her early twenties, and nobody who knew
+her had any idea but that her health was perfect. But one morning she
+was discovered in bed with one side paralyzed, and in a couple of weeks
+she was dead with erysipelas.<a name="vol_i_page_141" id="vol_i_page_141"></a> The color in her cheeks had been nothing
+but diseased blood vessels, overloaded with food material; and with the
+blood in that condition, one of the tiny vessels in the brain had become
+clogged.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way I have seen children, two or three years old, plump and
+rosy, and considered to be everything that children should be; but
+pneumonia would hit them, and in two or three days they would be at
+death's door. I do not mean that children should be kept hungry; on the
+contrary, they should have four or five meals a day, so that they do not
+have a chance to become too hungry. But at those meals they should eat
+in great part the bulky foods, which contain the natural salts needed
+for building the body. If a child asks for food, you may give it an
+apple, or you may give it a slice of bread and butter with sugar on it.
+The child will be equally well content in either case; but it is for
+you, with your knowledge of food values, to realize that the bread with
+butter and sugar contains two or three times as much nutriment as the
+apple, but contains practically none of the precious organic salts which
+will make the child's bones and teeth.</p>
+
+<p>So far I have discussed this subject as if all foods grew on bushes
+outside your kitchen door, and all you had to do was to go and pick off
+what you wanted. But as a matter of fact, foods cost money, and under
+our present system of wage slavery, the amount of money the average
+person can spend for food is strictly limited. In a later book I am
+going to discuss the problem of poverty, its causes and remedies. All
+that I can do here is to tell you what foods you ought to have, and if
+society does not pay you enough for your work to enable you to buy such
+foods, you may know that society, is starving you, and you may get busy
+to demand your rights as human beings. Meantime, however, such money as
+you do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of you
+spend it very unwisely indeed.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most wholesome
+foods are cheap&mdash;often because people do not know enough to value them.
+We insist upon having the choice cuts of meats, because they are more
+tender to the teeth, but the cheaper cuts are exactly as nutritious. We
+insist upon having our meats loaded with fat, although fatness is an
+abnormal condition in an animal, and excess of fat is a<a name="vol_i_page_142" id="vol_i_page_142"></a> grave error in
+diet. I live in a country where jack rabbits are a pest, and in the
+market they sell for perhaps one-fourth the cost of beef, and yet I can
+hardly ever get them, because people value them so little as food; they
+prefer the meat of a hog which has been wallowing in a filthy pen, and
+has been deliberately made so fat that it could hardly walk!</p>
+
+<p>I have already spoken of prunes, a much despised and invaluable food.
+All the dried fruits are rich in food values, and if we could get them
+untreated by chemicals, they would be worth their cost. I was brought up
+to despise the cheaper vegetables, such as cabbage and turnips; I never
+tasted boiled cabbage until I was forty, and then to my great surprise I
+made the discovery that it is good. Raw cabbage is as valuable as any
+other salad; it is a trifle harder to digest for some people, but I do
+not believe in pampering the stomach. Both potatoes and rice are cheap
+and wholesome, if only we would get unpolished rice, and if we would
+leave the skins on the potatoes until after they are cooked. Nearly all
+the mineral salts of the potato are just under the outer skin, and are
+removed by the foolish habit of peeling them.</p>
+
+<p>The prices of food differ so widely at different seasons and in
+different parts of the world, that there is not much profit in trying to
+figure how cheaply a person can live. I have found that I spend for the
+diet I have indicated here, from sixty to eighty cents a day. I do not
+buy any fancy foods, but on the other hand, I do not especially try to
+economize; I buy what I want of the simple everyday foods in their
+season. Most everyone will find that it is a good business proposition
+to buy the foods which he needs to keep in health. If the average
+workingman would add up the money he spends, not merely in the
+restaurants, but in the candy stores, the drug stores, the tobacco
+stores, and the offices of doctors and dentists, he would find, I think,
+that he could afford to buy himself the necessary quantity of wholesome
+natural foods. For a family of three, in the place where I live, enough
+of these foods can be purchased for a dollar a day, and this is about
+one-fourth what common labor is being paid, and one-eighth of what
+skilled labor is being paid. I will specify the foods: a pound and a
+half of shoulder steak, a loaf of whole wheat bread or a box of shredded
+wheat biscuit, a head of cabbage, a pound of prunes, and four or five
+pounds of apples.<a name="vol_i_page_143" id="vol_i_page_143"></a></p>
+
+<p>There are many ways of saving in the purchase of food if you put your
+mind upon it. If you are buying prunes, you may pay as high as fifty
+cents or a dollar a pound for the big ones, and they are not a bit
+better than the tiny ones, which you can buy for as low as eight cents a
+pound in bulk. When bread is stale, the bakers sell it for half price,
+despite the fact that only then has it become fit to eat. If you buy
+canned peaches, you will pay a fancy price for them, and they will be
+heavy with cane sugar; but if you inquire, you find what are known as
+"pie peaches," put up in gallon tins without sugar, and at about half
+the price. The butcher will sell you what he calls "hamburg steak" at a
+very low price, and if you let him prepare it out of your sight, he will
+fill it with fat and gristle; but let him make some while you watch, and
+then you have a very good food. One of my diet rules is that I do not
+trust the capitalist system to fix me up any kind of mixed or ground or
+prepared foods. I have not eaten sausage since I saw it made in Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>Also there is something to know about the cooking of foods, since it is
+possible to take perfectly good foods and spoil them by bad cooking.
+Once upon a time our family discovered a fireless cooker, and thought
+that was a wonderful invention for an absent-minded author and a wife
+who is given to revising manuscripts. But recent investigations which
+have been made into the nature of the "vitamines," food ferments which
+are only partly understood, suggest that prolonged cooking of food may
+be a great mistake. The starch has to be cooked in order to break the
+cell walls by the expansion of the material inside. Twenty minutes will
+be enough in the case of everything except beans, which need to be
+cooked four or five hours. Meat should be eaten rare, except in the case
+of pork, which harbors a parasite dangerous to the human body; therefore
+pork should always be thoroughly cooked. The white of eggs is made less
+digestible by boiling hard or frying. Eggs should never be allowed to
+boil; put them on in cold water, and take them off as soon as the water
+begins to boil. It is not necessary to cook either fresh fruit or dried.
+The dried fruits may be soaked and eaten raw, but I find that several
+fruits, especially apples and pears, do not agree with me well if they
+are eaten raw, so I stew them for fifteen or twenty minutes. I have no
+objection to canned fruits and vegetables, provided one takes<a name="vol_i_page_144" id="vol_i_page_144"></a> the
+trouble in opening them to make sure there is no sign of spoiling. If
+you put up your own fruits, do not put in any sugar. All you have to do
+is to let them boil for a few minutes, and to seal them tightly while
+they are boiling hot. The whole secret of preserving is to exclude the
+air with its bacteria.</p>
+
+<p>If you live on a farm, you will have no trouble in following the diet
+here outlined, for you can produce for yourselves all the foods that I
+have recommended; only do not make the mistake of shipping out your best
+foods, and taking back the products of a factory, just because you have
+read lying advertisements about them. Take your own wheat and oats and
+corn to the mill, and have it ground whole, and make your own breads and
+cereals. Try the experiment of mixing whole corn meal with water and a
+little salt, and baking it into hard, crisp "corn dodgers." I do not eat
+these&mdash;but only because I cannot buy them, and have no time to make
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Another common article of food which I do not recommend is salted and
+smoked meats. I do not pretend to know the effects of large quantities
+of salt and saltpetre and wood smoke upon the human system, but I know
+that Dr. Wiley's "poison squad" proved definitely that a number of these
+inorganic minerals are injurious to health, and I prefer to take fresh
+meat when I can get it. I use a moderate quantity of common salt on meat
+and potatoes, because there seems to be a natural craving for this. I
+know that many health enthusiasts insist that I am thus putting a strain
+on my kidneys, but I will wait until these health enthusiasts make clear
+to me why deer and cattle and horses in a wild state will travel many
+miles to a salt-lick. I have learned that it is easy to make plausible
+statements about health, but not so easy to prove them. For example, I
+was told that it is injurious to drink water at meals, and for years I
+religiously avoided the habit; but it occurred to some college professor
+to find out if this was really true, and he carried on a series of
+experiments which proved that the stomach works better when its contents
+are diluted. The only point about drinking at meals is that you should
+not use the liquid to wash down your food without chewing it.</p>
+
+<p>I can suggest two other ways by which you may save money on food. One is
+by not eating too much, and another<a name="vol_i_page_145" id="vol_i_page_145"></a> is by eating all that you buy. The
+amount of food that is wasted by the people of America would feed the
+people of any European nation. The amount of food that is thrown out
+from any one of our big American leisure class hotels would feed the
+children of a European town. I think it may fairly be described as a
+crime to throw into the garbage pail food which might nourish human
+life. In our family we have no garbage pail. What little waste there is,
+we burn in the stove, and my wife turns it into roses. It consists of
+the fat which we cannot help getting at the butcher's, and the bones of
+meat, and the skins of some fruits and vegetables. It would never enter
+into our minds to throw out a particle of bread, or meat, or other
+wholesome food. If we have something that we fear may spoil, we do not
+throw it out, but put it into a saucepan and cook it for a few minutes.
+If you will make the same rule in your home, you will stop at least that
+much of the waste of American life; and as to the big leisure class
+hotels, and the banquet tables of the rich&mdash;just wait a few years, and I
+think the social revolution will attend to them!<a name="vol_i_page_146" id="vol_i_page_146"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII<br /><br />
+FOODS AND POISONS</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon the
+system of stimulants and narcotics.)</p></div>
+
+<p>A few years ago there died an old gentleman who had devoted some twenty
+years of his life to teaching people to chew their food. Horace Fletcher
+was his name, and his ideas became a fad, and some people carried them
+to comical extremes. But Fletcher made a real discovery; what he called
+"the food filter." This is the automatic action of the swallowing
+apparatus, whereby nature selects the food which has been sufficiently
+prepared for digestion. If you chew a mouthful of food without ever
+performing the act of swallowing, you will find that the food gradually
+disappears. What happens is that all of it which has been reduced to a
+thin paste will slip unnoticed down your throat, and you may go on
+putting more food into your mouth, and chewing, and can eat a whole meal
+without ever performing the act of swallowing. Fletcher claimed that
+this is the proper way to eat, and that you can train yourself to follow
+this method. I have tried his idea and adopted it. One of my diet rules,
+to which there is no exception, is that if I haven't the time to chew my
+food properly, I haven't the time to eat; I skip that meal.</p>
+
+<p>The habit of bolting food is a source of disease. To be sure, the
+carnivorous animals bolt their food, but they are tougher than we are,
+and do not carry the burden of a large brain and a complex nervous
+system. If you swallow your meals half chewed, and wash them down with
+liquids, you may get away with it for a while, but some day you will pay
+for it with dyspepsia and nervous troubles. And the same thing applies
+to your habit of jumping up from meals and rushing away to work, whether
+it be work of the muscles, or of brain and nerves. Proper digestion
+requires the presence of a quantity of blood in the walls of the stomach
+and digestive tract. It requires the attention of your subconscious
+mind, and this means rest of muscles and brain centers.<a name="vol_i_page_147" id="vol_i_page_147"></a> If you cannot
+rest for an hour after meals, omit that meal, or make it a light one, of
+fruit juices, which are almost immediately absorbed by the stomach, and
+of salads, which do not ferment. You may rest assured that it will not
+hurt you to skip a meal, and make up for it when you have time to be
+quiet. I have been many times in my life under very intense and long
+continued nervous strain; for example, during the Colorado coal strike,
+I led a public demonstration which kept me in a state of excitement all
+the day and a good part of the night several weeks. During this period I
+ate almost nothing; a baked apple and a cup of custard would be as near
+as I would go to a meal, and as a result I came through the experience
+without any injury whatever to my health. I lost perhaps ten pounds in
+weight, but that was quickly made up when I settled back to a normal way
+of life.</p>
+
+<p>I have been on camping trips when I had a great deal of hard work to do,
+carrying a canoe long distances on my back, or paddling it forty miles a
+day. On the mornings of such a trip I have seen a guide cook himself an
+elaborate breakfast of freshly baked bread, bacon, and even beans, and
+make a hearty meal and then go straight to work. My meal, on the
+contrary, would consist of a small dish of stewed prunes, or perhaps
+some huckleberries or raspberries, if they could be found. I will not
+say that I could do as much as the guide, because he was used to it, and
+I was not. But I can say this&mdash;if I had eaten his breakfast at the start
+of the day, I would have been dead before night; and I mean the word
+"dead" quite literally. I know a man who started to climb Whiteface
+mountain in the Adirondacks. He climbed half way, and then ate lunch,
+which consisted of nine hard boiled eggs. Then he started to climb the
+rest of the mountain, and dropped dead of acute indigestion.</p>
+
+<p>There are few poisons which can affect the system more quickly, or more
+dangerously, than a mass of food which is not digested. The stomach is
+an ideal forcing-house for the breeding of bacteria. It provides warmth
+and moisture, and you, in your meal, provide the bacteria and the
+material upon which they thrive. Under normal conditions, the stomach
+pours out a gastric juice which kills the bacteria; but let this gastric
+juice for any reason be lacking&mdash;because your nervous energy has gone
+somewhere else, or because your<a name="vol_i_page_148" id="vol_i_page_148"></a> blood-stream, from which the gastric
+juice must be made, has been drawn away to the muscles by hard labor;
+then you have a yeast-pot, with great quantities of gases and poisons.
+In acute cases the results are evident enough: violent pains and
+convulsions, followed by coma and the turning black of the body. But
+what you should understand is that you may produce a milder case of such
+poisoning, and may do it day after day habitually, and little by little
+your vital organs will be weakened by the strain.</p>
+
+<p>It does not make any difference at what hour of the twenty-four you take
+the great bulk of your food. It is one of the commonest delusions that
+you get some strengthening effect from your food immediately, and must
+have this strength in order to do hard work. To be sure, there are
+substances, such as grape-sugar, which require practically no digesting;
+you can hold them in the mouth, and they will be digested by the saliva,
+and absorbed at once into the blood-stream. But unless you have been
+starved for a long period you do not need to get your strength in this
+rush fashion. If you ate your normal meals on the previous day, your
+blood-stream is fully supplied with nutriment which has been put through
+a long process of preparation, and you can get up in the morning and
+work all day, if necessary, upon what is already in your system. To be
+sure, you may feel hungry, and even faint, but that is merely a matter
+of habit; your system is accustomed to taking food and expects it. But
+if you are a laborer doing hard work, you can easily train yourself to
+eat a light meal in the morning, and another light meal at noon, and to
+eat a hearty meal when your work is done and you can rest. Two light
+meals and a hearty meal are all that any system needs, and you can prove
+it to yourself by trying it, and watching your weight once a week.</p>
+
+<p>I have tried many experiments, and the conclusion to which I have come
+is that there is no virtue in any particular meal-hours or any
+particular number of meals. For several years I tried the experiment of
+two meals a day. I was living a retired life, and had little contact
+with the world, and I would make a hearty meal at ten o'clock in the
+morning, and another at five in the afternoon. But later on I found that
+inconvenient, and now I take a light breakfast, and two moderate-sized
+meals at the conventional hours of lunch and dinner. I can arrange my
+own time, so after meal times is<a name="vol_i_page_149" id="vol_i_page_149"></a> when I get my reading done. Sometimes,
+when I am tired, I feel sleepy after meals, but I have learned not to
+yield to this impulse. I do not know how to explain this; I have
+observed that animals sleep after eating, and it appears to be a natural
+thing to do; but I know that if I go to sleep after a meal, nature makes
+clear to me that I have made a mistake, and I do not repeat it. I never
+eat at night, and always go to bed on an empty stomach, so I am always
+hungry when I open my eyes in the morning. I never know what it is not
+to be hungry at meal times, and my habits are so regular that I could
+set my watch by my stomach.</p>
+
+<p>Another common habit which is harmful is eating between meals. I have
+known people who are accustomed to nibble at food nearly all the time.
+Shelley records that he tried it as an experiment, thinking it might be
+a convenient way to get digestion done&mdash;but he found that it did not
+work. The stomach is apparently meant to work in pulses; to do a job of
+digesting, and then to rest and accumulate the juices for another job.
+It will accustom itself to a certain régime, and will work accordingly,
+but if, when it has half digested a load of food, you pile more food in
+on top, you make as much trouble as you would make in your kitchen if
+you required your cook to prepare another meal before she has cleaned up
+after the last one. Three times a day is enough for any adult to eat.
+Children require to eat oftener, because their bodies are more active,
+and they not merely have to keep up weight, but to add to it. The
+simplest way to arrange matters with children is to give them three good
+meals at the hours when adults eat, and then to give them a couple of
+pieces of fruit between breakfast and lunch, and again between lunch and
+supper. I have never seen a child who would not be satisfied with this,
+when once the habit was established.</p>
+
+<p>I have already spoken of the cooking and serving of food. I consider
+that the "gastronomic art," as it is pompously called, is ninety-nine
+per cent plain rubbish. To be sure, if foods are appetizingly prepared,
+and look good and smell good and taste good, they will cause the gastric
+juices to flow abundantly, as the Russian scientist Pavlov has
+demonstrated by practical experiment with the stomach-pump. But I know
+without any stomach-pump that the best thing to make my gastric juices
+flow is hard work and a spare diet. When I<a name="vol_i_page_150" id="vol_i_page_150"></a> come home from five sets of
+tennis, and have a cold shower and a rub-down, my gastric juices will
+flow for a piece of cold beefsteak and a cold sweet potato, quite as
+well as for anything that is served by a leisure class "chef." Needless
+to say, I want food to be fresh, and I want it to be clean, but I have
+other things to do with my time and money than to pamper my appetites
+and encourage food whims.</p>
+
+<p>If you have a grandmother, or ever had one, you know what grandmothers
+tell you about "hot nourishing food"; but I have tried the experiment,
+and satisfied myself that there is absolutely no difference in
+nourishing qualities between hot food and cold food. If you chew your
+food sufficiently, it will all be ninety-eight and six-tenths degree
+food when it gets to your stomach, and that is the way your stomach
+wants it. Of course, if you have been out in a blizzard, and are
+chilled, and want to restore the body temperature, a hot drink will be
+one of the quickest ways, and if the emergency is extreme, you may even
+add a stimulant. On the other hand, if you are suffering from heat, it
+is sensible to cool your body by a cold drink. But you should use as
+much judgment with yourself as you would with a horse, which you do not
+permit to drink a lot of cold water when he is heated up, and is going
+into his stall to stand still.</p>
+
+<p>I have mentioned the word "stimulants," and this opens a large subject.
+There are drugs which affect the body in two different ways: some excite
+the nerves, and through the nerves the heart and blood-stream, to more
+intense activity; others have the effect of deadening the nerves, and
+dulling the sense of exhaustion and pain. One of these groups is called
+stimulants, and the other is called narcotics; but as a matter of fact
+the stimulants are really narcotics, because they operate by dulling the
+nerves whose function it is to prevent the over-accumulation of fatigue
+poisons; in other words, they keep the nerves and muscles from knowing
+that they are tired, and so they go on working.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible, of course, to conceive of an emergency in which that is
+necessary. Once upon a time, on a hunting trip, I had been traveling all
+day, and was caught in a rain storm, and exhausted and chilled to the
+bone; I had to make camp without a fire, so when I got the tent up I
+wrapped myself in blankets and drank a couple of tablespoons full of
+whiskey. That is the only time I have ever taken whiskey in my life,<a name="vol_i_page_151" id="vol_i_page_151"></a>
+and it warmed me almost instantly, and did me no harm. In the same way
+there were two or three occasions when I was on the verge of a nervous
+breakdown, and could not sleep, and let the doctor give me a sleeping
+powder. But in each case I knew that I was fooling with a dangerous
+habit, and I did no more fooling than necessary. No one should make use
+of either stimulants or narcotics except in extreme emergency, and never
+but a few times in a lifetime. What you should do is to change your
+habits so that you will not need to over-strain.</p>
+
+<p>All these drugs are habit forming; that is to say, they leave the body
+no better, and with a craving for a repetition of the relief. When you
+are tired, it is because your muscles and nerves are storing up fatigue
+poisons more rapidly than your blood-stream can get rid of them. You
+need to know about this condition, and exhaustion and pain are nature's
+protective warning. If you put a stop to the warning, you are as
+unintelligent as the Eastern despots who used to cut off the head of the
+messenger who brought bad tidings. If, when you have a headache, you go
+into a drug store and let the druggist mix you one of those white fizzy
+drinks, what you are doing is not to get rid of the poisons in your
+blood-stream, but merely to reduce the action of your heart, so as to
+keep the blood from pressing so fast into the aching blood vessels and
+nerves. You may try that trick with your heart a number of times, but
+sooner or later you will try it once too often&mdash;your heart will stop a
+little bit quicker than you meant it to!</p>
+
+<p>Drugs are poisons, and their action depends upon their poisoning some
+particular portion of the body, and temporarily paralyzing it. And bear
+this in mind, they are none the less poisonous because they are
+"natural" products. You can kill yourself by cyanide of potassium, which
+comes out of a chemist's retort; but you can kill yourself just as dead
+with laudanum, which comes out of a plant, or with the contents of the
+venom sac of a snake. You are poisoning yourself none the less certainly
+if you use alcohol, which is made from the juices of beautiful fruits,
+and has had hosts of famous poets writing songs about it; or you can
+poison yourself with the caffein which you get in a lovely brown bean
+which comes from Brazil, fragrant to the nostrils and delicious to the
+taste. You may drink wine and tea and coffee<a name="vol_i_page_152" id="vol_i_page_152"></a> for a hundred years, and
+have your picture published in the newspapers as a proof that these
+habits conduce to health; but nothing will be said about the large
+number of people who practiced these habits, and didn't live so long,
+and about how long they might have lived if they hadn't practiced these
+habits.</p>
+
+<p>I was brought up in the South, and my "elders" belonged to a generation
+which had grown up in war time. For this reason many of the men both
+drank and smoked to excess, and in my boyhood I lived among them and
+watched them, and with the help of advice from a wise mother, I
+conceived a horror of every kind of stimulant. The alcoholic poets could
+not fool me; I had been in the alcoholic wards of the hospitals. I had
+seen one man after another, beautiful and kindly and gracious men,
+dragged down into a pit of torment and shame.</p>
+
+<p>Alcohol is, I think, the greatest trap that nature ever set for the feet
+of the human race. It is responsible for more degradation and misery
+than any other evil in the world; and I say this, knowing well that my
+Socialist friends will cry, "What about Capitalism?" My answer is that I
+doubt if there ever would have been any Capitalism in the world, if it
+had not been for alcohol. If the workers had not been systematically
+poisoned, and all their savings taken from them by the gin-mill, they
+would never have submitted to the capitalist system, they would have
+built the co-operative commonwealth at the time they were building the
+first factories. I listen to the arguments of my radical friends about
+"personal liberty," but I note that in Russia, when it was a question of
+making a practical revolution and keeping it alive, the first thing the
+leaders did was to drag out the contents of the wine-cellars of the
+palaces, and smash them in the gutters.</p>
+
+<p>Tea and coffee are, of course, much milder in their effects than
+alcohol; you can play with them longer, and the punishment will be less
+severe. But if you make habitual use of them, you will pay the penalty
+which all drugs exact from the system. Your brain and your nerve centers
+will be less sensitive, less capable of working except under the
+influence of drugs; their reacting power will be dulled, and they will
+wear out more quickly. I have watched the slaves of the "morning cup of
+coffee," and know how they suffer when<a name="vol_i_page_153" id="vol_i_page_153"></a> they do not get it. Likewise, I
+have watched the tea drinkers. It is comical to live in England, and see
+all the able-bodied men obliged to leave their work at four o'clock in
+the afternoon, and seek the regular stimulus for their tired nerves. If
+you are to meet anybody, it is always for "tea" that the ceremony is
+set, and if you refuse to drink tea, your hostess will be uncomfortable,
+unable to talk about anything but the strange, incredible notion that
+one can live without tea. I discovered after a while the solution of
+this problem; I would say that I preferred a little hot water, if you
+please, and so my hostess would pour me a cup of hot water, and I would
+sit and gravely sip it, and everybody would be perfectly content: I was
+conforming to the outward appearance of normality, which is what the
+British conventions require.</p>
+
+<p>I have never drunk a cup of coffee, so I do not know what its effect on
+me would be. But some fifteen years ago I drank a glass of very weak
+iced tea at eight o'clock in the evening, and did not get to sleep until
+four or five the next morning. So I know that there is really a drug in
+tea. I know also that I might accustom my system to it, just as I might
+learn to poison my lungs with nicotine without being made immediately
+and suddenly ill; but why should I wish to do this? Life is so
+interesting to me that I do not need to stimulate my brain centers in
+order to appreciate the thrill of it. And when I am tired, I can rest
+myself by listening to music, or by reading a worth-while novel&mdash;things
+which I have found do not leave the after effects of nicotine.</p>
+
+<p>I remember the first time I met Jack London. Our meeting consisted in
+good part of his "kidding" me, because I was lacking in the congenial
+vices of the café. He told me how much I had missed, because I had never
+been drunk; One ought to try the great adventure, at least once! Poor
+Jack is gone, because his kidneys gave out at forty; and nothing could
+seem more ungracious than to point out that I am still alive, and
+finding life enjoyable. Yet, in this book we are trying to find out how
+to live, and if there are habits which wreck and destroy a magnificent
+physique, and bring a great genius to death at the age of forty&mdash;surely
+the rest of us want to know about it, and to be warned in time. I
+mention Jack London in this connection, because he has said the last
+word on the subject of alcohol. Read "John Barleycorn," and especially
+read between the lines of it,<a name="vol_i_page_154" id="vol_i_page_154"></a> and you will not need my argument to
+persuade you to be glad that the Eighteenth Amendment has been written
+into the Constitution, and that it is your duty as a Socialist, not
+merely to obey it, but to vote for its enforcement.</p>
+
+<p>I am proceeding on the assumption that your life is of importance to
+you; that you have a job to do which you know to be worth while, and to
+which you desire to apply your powers. You agree with me that the
+workers of the world are suffering, and that it is necessary for them to
+find their freedom, and that this takes hard work and hard thinking. You
+may say that I exaggerate the amount of harm that is done to the system
+by tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. Well, let us assume that in
+moderate quantities they do no harm at all: even so, I have the right to
+ask you to show that they do some good; otherwise, surely, it is a
+mistake for the workers to spend their savings upon them.</p>
+
+<p>Consider, for example, the amount of money which the wage slaves of the
+world spend upon tobacco. Suppose they could be persuaded for two or
+three years to spend this amount upon good reading matter&mdash;do you not
+think there would be an improvement in their condition? Surely you
+cannot maintain that the use of tobacco is necessary to the activities
+of the brain! Surely you do not think that a man has to have a cigarette
+in order to stimulate his thoughts, or to smoke a pipe to rest himself
+after his work is done! I offer myself as evidence in such a
+controversy; I have written as many books as any man in the radical
+movement, and the sum total of my lifetime smoking amounts to one-half
+of one cigarette. I tried that when I was eight years old, and somebody
+told me a policeman would arrest me if he caught me, and I threw away
+the cigarette, and ran and hid in an alley, and have not yet got over my
+scare.</p>
+
+<p>In the "Journal for Industrial Hygiene" for October, 1920, is an article
+entitled "Fatigue and Efficiency of Smokers in a Strenuous Mental
+Occupation." Experiments were conducted among telegraph operators, and
+the result showed that "the heavy smokers of the group show a higher
+output rate at the beginning of the day than the light smokers, but
+their rate falls off more markedly in the late hours, and their
+production for the whole day is definitely less than that of the light
+smokers. The heavy smokers also show less ability than the light smokers
+to respond to increasing pressure of<a name="vol_i_page_155" id="vol_i_page_155"></a> work in the late hours of the day
+by handling their full share of the work presented."</p>
+
+<p>One point upon which every medical authority agrees is&mdash;that the use of
+nicotine is of deadly effect upon the immature organism. Half-grown
+youths who smoke cigarettes will never be full-sized men; they will
+never have normal lungs or a normal heart. And likewise, all authorities
+agree about the effect of smoking upon the organism of women. I gave
+what little help I could to the task of helping to set women free, and
+to make them the equals of men; but I was always pained when I
+discovered that some of my feminist friends understood by woman's
+emancipation no more than her right to adopt men's vices. I would say to
+these ardent young female radicals, who cultivate the art of dangling a
+cigarette from their lower lip, and sip cocktails out of coffee-cups in
+Greenwich Village cafés, that they will never be able to bear sound
+children; but I know that this would not interest them&mdash;they don't want
+to bear any children at all. So I say that they will never be able to
+think straight thoughts, and will be nervous invalids when they are
+thirty.</p>
+
+<p>We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, and we put several
+millions of our young men into armies, and if there were any of them who
+did not already know how to smoke cigarettes, they learned it under
+official sanction. So now we have a national tobacco bill that runs up
+to two billions, and will insure us a new generation of "Class C"
+rating. Speaking to the young radicals who are reading my books, I say:
+We want to make the world over, to make it a place of freedom and
+kindness, instead of the hell of greed and hate that it is today. For
+that purpose we need a new moral code, and we can never win our victory
+without it. I have attended radical conventions, sitting in unventilated
+halls amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and listening to men wrangle all
+through the day and a great part of the night; I have watched the fatal
+dissensions in the movement, the quarrelings of the right wingers and
+the left wingers and all stages and degrees in between, and I have
+wondered&mdash;not jestingly, but in pitying earnest&mdash;how much of all those
+personalities and factional misunderstanding had their origin in carbon
+dioxide and nicotine. There is no use suggesting such ideas to the older
+men, whose habits are fixed; but a new generation is coming on, with a
+new vision of the enormous<a name="vol_i_page_156" id="vol_i_page_156"></a> task before it; and is it too much to expect
+of these young men and women, that they shall realize in advance the
+grim tasks they have to do, and shall learn to run the machine of their
+body so as to get out of it the maximum amount of service? Is it too
+much to hope for, that some day we shall have a race of young fighters
+for truth and justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and
+consecrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from wage
+slavery and war?<a name="vol_i_page_157" id="vol_i_page_157"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII<br /><br />
+MORE ABOUT HEALTH</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing,
+bathing and sleep.)</p></div>
+
+<p>In discussing the question of health, we have given the greater part of
+the space to the subject of diet, for the reason that experience has
+convinced us that diet is two-thirds of health, and that nearly always
+in disease you find errors of diet playing a part. There are, however,
+other important factors of health, now to be discussed.</p>
+
+<p>Everything of which the body makes use is taken in the form of food and
+drink, with the exception of one substance, the oxygen we get out of the
+air. Every time we draw a breath we take in a certain amount of oxygen,
+and every time we expel a breath, we drive out a certain amount of a gas
+called carbon dioxide, which is what the body makes of the fuel it
+burns. The body can get along for several days without water, and for
+two or three months without food, but it can only get along for two or
+three minutes without oxygen. It should be obvious that when the body
+expels carbon dioxide, with a slight mixture of other more poisonous
+gases, and sucks back what it expects will be a fresh supply of oxygen,
+it wants to get oxygen, and not the same gases it has just expelled, nor
+gases which have been expelled from the lungs of other people.</p>
+
+<p>In the days when primitive man lived outdoors, he did not have to think
+about this problem. When he breathed poison from his lungs, the moving
+air of nature blew it away, and the infinite vegetation of nature took
+the carbon dioxide and turned it back into oxygen. And even when man
+built himself shelters, he was not cunning enough to make them
+air-tight; he had to leave a big hole for the smoke to get out, and
+smaller holes through which to get light. But now our wonderful
+civilization has solved these problems; we make our walls of air-tight
+plaster, and we have invented a substance which will admit light without
+admitting air. So we have the "white plague" of tuberculosis, and so we
+have<a name="vol_i_page_158" id="vol_i_page_158"></a> innumerable minor plagues of coughs and colds and sore throats.</p>
+
+<p>In the summer time the solution of the problem is easy. Have as many
+doors and windows in your home as possible, and keep them open, and have
+nothing in your home to make dust or to retain dust. But then comes
+stormy and cold weather, and you have to close your doors and windows,
+and keep your home at a higher temperature than the air outside. How
+shall you do this, and at the same time get a continual supply of fresh
+air?</p>
+
+<p>I will take the various methods of heating one by one. The problem in
+each case is simple and can be made clear in a sentence or two.</p>
+
+<p>First, the open fireplace. This is a perfect solution, if you have
+enough fuel, and do not have to worry about the waste of heat. An open
+fireplace draws out all the air in the room in a short time, and you do
+not have to bother about opening doors or windows; you may be sure that
+the air is getting in through some cracks, or else the fire would not
+burn.</p>
+
+<p>Second, a wood or coal or gas stove in the room, provided with a proper
+vent, so that all the gases of combustion are drawn up the chimney. This
+changes the air more slowly than an open fireplace, but it does the work
+fairly well. All that you have to be careful about is that your vent is
+sufficiently large and is working properly. If your fire does not
+"draw," you will have smoke or coal-gas in the house, and this is bad
+for the lungs; but worse for the lungs is a gas that you can neither see
+nor smell nor taste, the deadly carbon monoxide. This gas is produced by
+incomplete combustion, and whenever you see yellow flames from gas or
+coal, you are apt to have this poisonous substance. Small quantities of
+it are sufficient to cause violent headaches, and repeated doses of it
+are fatal. Men who work in garages which are not properly ventilated run
+this risk all the time, because carbon monoxide is one of the products
+of imperfect combustion in the gas engine.</p>
+
+<p>Next, the furnace. A furnace sends fresh warm air into your house; the
+only trouble is that it takes out all the moisture, and some authorities
+say that this is bad for the lungs and throat. I do not know whether
+this is true, but all furnaces are supposed to have a water chamber to
+supply<a name="vol_i_page_159" id="vol_i_page_159"></a> moisture to the air, and you should keep a pan of water on every
+stove or radiator in your house.</p>
+
+<p>Next, steam heat, which includes hot-water heating. This is one of the
+abominations of our civilization, and one of the methods by which our
+race is committing suicide. There is nothing wrong about steam heat in
+itself; the room is warmed in a harmless way; but the trouble is it
+stays warm only so long as the doors and windows are kept shut. You are
+in an air-tight box, and can be warm provided you do not mind being
+suffocated. The moment you open a door or window, you have a cold draft
+on your feet, and if you wish to change the air entirely you have to let
+out all the heat; so, of course, you never do change it entirely, but go
+on breathing the same air over and over, and every time you breathe it
+the condition of your body is a little more reduced.</p>
+
+<p>The solution of this problem is not to heat the air in the room, but to
+use your steam coils to heat fresh air, and then drive this air, already
+warmed, into the room, at the same time providing a vent through which
+the old air can be pushed out. This is the hot air system of heating,
+and it requires some kind of engine or dynamo, and therefore is
+expensive. It has been installed in a few office buildings and theaters.
+One of the most perfect systems I ever inspected is in the building of
+the New York Stock Exchange, where the air is warmed in winter, and
+cooled in summer, and freed from dust, and exactly the right quantity is
+supplied. It is a humorous commentary upon our civilization that we take
+perfect care of the breathing apparatus of our stock-gamblers, but pay
+no attention to the breathing apparatus of our senators and congressmen,
+whose one business in life is to use their lungs. The stately old
+building with its white marble domes looks impressive in moving pictures
+and on illustrated postcards, but it has no system of ventilation
+whatever, and is a death-trap to the poor wretches who are compelled to
+spend their days, and sometimes their nights, within its walls. This
+contrast is one symptom of the rise of industrial capitalism and the
+collapse of political democracy.</p>
+
+<p>We have reserved to the last a method of heating which is the worst, and
+can only be described as a crime against health: the use of gas and oil
+stoves set out in the middle of the room, without a vent, and
+discharging their fumes into the room. These stoves are simply
+instruments of slow death,<a name="vol_i_page_160" id="vol_i_page_160"></a> and their manufacture should be prohibited
+by law. In the meantime, what you have to do is to refuse to live in a
+room or to work in an office where such stoves are used. I have heard
+dealers insist that this or the other kind of gas or oil stove was so
+contrived as to consume all the fumes. Do not let anybody fool you with
+such nonsense. There has never been any form of combustion devised which
+consumes all the fumes. No such thing can be, because the products of
+combustion are not combustible. The so-called "wickless blue flame"
+stoves do burn all the oil, and a properly regulated gas stove will burn
+all the gas, but that simply means that it turns the oil and gas into
+carbon dioxide, the very substance which your lungs are working day and
+night to get out of your body.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, there is no oil or gas stove which ever burns perfectly all
+the time, either because there is too much gas or insufficient air. Oil
+and gas stoves sometimes give a partly yellow flame. You can cause them
+to give a yellow flame at any time by blowing air against them, and that
+yellow flame means imperfect combustion, and a probability of the deadly
+carbon monoxide. These facts are known to every chemist and to every
+student of hygiene, and the fact that civilized people continue to burn
+such oil and gas stoves in their homes and offices is simply one more
+proof that our civilization values human welfare and health at nothing
+whatever in comparison with profits.</p>
+
+<p>Not merely should you see that you have a continuous supply of fresh air
+in your home, but you should try to keep down dust in your home, and
+especially fine particles of lint. Once upon a time our ancestors were
+unable to make houses and floors tight, and so they put rugs on the
+floors and hung tapestries on the walls to keep out the wind. We
+civilized people are able to make both floors and walls absolutely
+tight, and yet we continue to use rugs and curtains, it being the first
+principle of our education that propriety requires us to continue to do
+the things which our ancestors did. I am unable to think of a more silly
+or stupid thing in the world than a rug or a curtain, but I have lived
+in the house with them all my life, because, alas, the ladies cannot be
+happy otherwise. They want their homes to be "pretty," and so they
+continue to set dust traps, and to set themselves futile jobs of house
+cleaning and shopping.<a name="vol_i_page_161" id="vol_i_page_161"></a></p>
+
+<p>Not all of us are able to be out of doors as much as we ought to be, but
+all of us spend seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four in sleep,
+and this time at least we ought to spend out of doors. I understand that
+this is futile advice to give to the very poor. I was poor myself for
+many years, and had to put all my clothes on at night in order to keep
+warm, and even then I could not always do it. Nevertheless, from the
+time I first realized the importance of ventilation I never slept in a
+room with a closed window.</p>
+
+<p>I say, sleep outdoors if you possibly can. You do not have to be afraid
+of exposure, for cold will not hurt you if you keep your body in proper
+condition. I have slept out in a rubber blanket, with the rain beating
+on my head and face; I have spread a rubber blanket on a hummock in the
+midst of a swamp, and waked up in the morning with my hair and face
+soaked in cold, white fog, but I never caught cold from such things;
+there is no harm whatever in dampness or in "night air," if you are in
+proper condition. Of course, you may get your ears frostbitten in the
+middle of winter, but you can have a sleeping hood to remove that
+danger.</p>
+
+<p>The "nature cure" enthusiasts, who lay so much stress upon an outdoor
+life, also insist that the wearing of clothes is a harmful civilized
+custom. They urge us to take "sun baths" and to "ventilate the skin."
+Now, as a matter of fact, the skin does not breathe, it merely gives out
+moisture, and it does not give out any less because we have clothing on
+us, provided the clothing is dry and clean, and will absorb moisture.
+But bye and bye the clothing becomes loaded with the waste substances
+given out by the skin, and then it will absorb no more, and if you do
+not change your clothing, no doubt it may have some effect upon health.</p>
+
+<p>But the principal evil of civilized clothing is that it binds the body
+and prevents the free play of the muscles, and, more important yet,
+stops the free circulation of the blood. I have already discussed hats,
+which are the principal cause of baldness. I will go to the other
+extremity of the body, and mention tight shoes, which, strange as it may
+seem, cause headaches and colds. You will be able to find a few
+civilized men with normal feet, but you will hardly ever find a woman
+whose toes are not crowded together and misshapen. I have said that the
+human body is one organism, and that it is fed<a name="vol_i_page_162" id="vol_i_page_162"></a> and its health
+maintained by the blood-stream; I say now that the circulation of the
+blood is one thing, and if you block it at any one place, you block it
+everywhere. Of course, not all the blood-stream goes down into the feet,
+but some of it does, and if it is clogged in the feet, and the blood
+vessels cramped and crowded, there is a certain amount of poison kept in
+the system, which the system should have got rid of.</p>
+
+<p>Why do women wear tight shoes? Because the leisure class members of
+their sex have been kept in harems and used as the playthings of men. To
+be fragile and delicate was the thing admired by the masters of wealth,
+and to have small hands and feet was a sign that women belonged to this
+parasite class. Therefore at all hazards women's feet must be kept
+small, even at the expense of their health and happiness; and so they
+put themselves up on several inches of heels, which cause them to toddle
+around like marionettes on a stage, with all their toes crowded down
+into a lump.</p>
+
+<p>Why do men wear tight bands around their scalps, which cause their hair
+to drop out, and tight, stiff columns around their necks, which stop the
+circulation of the blood into their heads, and cause them to have
+headaches instead of ideas? The reason is that for ages the rulers of
+the tribe have wished to demonstrate publicly their superiority to the
+common herd, which does the menial tasks. In England all gentlemen wear
+tall black silk band-boxes on their heads, and in America they have a
+choice among several varieties of round tight boxes. All men who work in
+offices wear stiffly starched collars and cuffs, as a means of
+demonstrating their superiority to the common workers, who have to sweat
+at their necks. I think it is not too much to hope that when class
+exploitation is done away with, we shall also get rid of these class
+symbols, and choose our clothing because it is warm and comfortable, and
+not according to the perverted imbecilities of "style."</p>
+
+<p>The skin gives out perspiration which is greasy; also the skin is
+constantly growing, putting out layers of cells which dry up and are
+worn off. We need to bathe with soap to remove the grease, and we need
+to rub with a towel to brush away the dead cells of the skin, so that
+the pores may be kept open. No one is taking care of his body who does
+not wash and rub it once every twenty-four hours, and once or twice a
+week with warm water and soap. It is often stated<a name="vol_i_page_163" id="vol_i_page_163"></a> that hot baths are
+weakening, but I have never found it so; however, I think it is a bad
+practice to pamper the body, which should be accustomed to the shock of
+cold water. The rule as to bathing, both as to temperature and time, is
+simple. If, after the bath and rub-down, your body has reacted and you
+feel vigorous and fresh, that bath has done you good. If, on the other
+hand, you feel chilled and depressed, then you have been too long in the
+water, or its temperature was too low. Every person has to find his own
+rules in such matters. The only general rule is that as one grows older
+the body reacts less quickly.</p>
+
+<p>All day, as we work and think, we store up more poisons in our cells
+than the body can get rid of, and the time comes when the cells are so
+loaded with poisons that we have to stop for a while, and let our
+blood-stream clean house. The quantity of sleep one needs is a problem
+like that of cold water; each person has to find his own rule. In
+general, one needs less and less sleep as one grows older. Infants sleep
+the greater part of the time; growing children should sleep ten or
+eleven hours, adults seven or eight, and old people, unless they have
+let themselves get fat, generally do not want to sleep more than six,
+and part of this in short naps. When you sleep, your bodily energies
+relax, and you make less heat, therefore you need extra clothing; but
+this clothing should never cover the mouth and nose, nor should it be so
+heavy as to make breathing a burden. If you are in good condition, it
+will do you no harm to be chilly when you sleep, except that you do not
+sleep so soundly. Sleeping too much is just as harmful as sleeping too
+little. Nature will tell you that. The important thing, as in all other
+problems of health, is to have something interesting to think about,
+some exciting work to do in the world, and then you will sleep as little
+as you have too.<a name="vol_i_page_164" id="vol_i_page_164"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV<br /><br />
+WORK AND PLAY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and the
+overworked.)</p></div>
+
+<p>In discussing the important question of exercise, there is one
+fundamental fact to begin with: that our present civilization divides
+men sharply into two classes, those who do not get enough exercise, and
+those who get too much. Obviously it would be folly to make the same
+recommendations to the two classes.</p>
+
+<p>I begin with those who get too much exercise. They include a great
+number, probably the majority of those who do the manual work of the
+world. They include the farmers and the farm-hands, who work from dawn
+to sunset, and sometimes by lantern light. They include also the
+farmers' wives, the kitchen slaves of whom the old couplet tells:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry">
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Man's work ends from sun to sun,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: .25em;">But woman's work is never done."</span></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>I am aware that men have worked that way for countless ages, and yet the
+race is still surviving; but I am aware also that men wither up with
+rheumatism, and contract chronic diseases of the kidneys and the blood
+vessels, consequent upon the creation of greater quantities of fatigue
+poisons than the body can regularly eliminate.</p>
+
+<p>I have very little interest in the past, and none whatever in finding
+fault with it. My purpose is to criticize the present for the benefit of
+the future, and therefore I say that modern machinery and the whole
+development of modern large-scale production make it absolutely
+unnecessary that women should slave all their waking hours in kitchens,
+or that men should slave all day. I say it is monstrous folly that men
+should work for twelve-hour stretches in steel mills, and for ten and
+eleven hours in factories and mines. Organized labor has adopted the
+slogan, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for
+play"; but my slogan is "Four hours for work, four hours for study,
+eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for play."<a name="vol_i_page_165" id="vol_i_page_165"></a></p>
+
+<p>I know, and am prepared to demonstrate to any thinking man, that modern
+civilization can produce, not merely all the necessities, but all the
+comforts of life for every man, woman and child in the community, by the
+expenditure of four hours a day work of the adult, able-bodied men and
+women. So to all the wage slaves of the factories and mines, the fields
+and the kitchens, I say that too much exercise is what is the matter
+with you, and what you need is to get off in a quiet nook in the woods
+and read a good novel, not merely for a few hours, but for a few months,
+until you get over the effects of capitalist civilization. I know that
+not many of you can get away as yet, but I urge you to insist upon
+getting away, to fight for the chance to get away; and I will here
+suggest a few of the novels for you to read when finally you do get
+away. I choose the easy ones, which the dullest and most tired of you
+will love; I say, make up your mind to read these thirty-two books
+before you die, and do not let the world cheat you out of your chance!</p>
+
+<p>Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Charles D.
+Stewart: The Fugitive Blacksmith. W. Clark Russell: The Wreck of the
+Grosvenor. R. L. Stevenson: Treasure Island, Kidnapped. Jack London: The
+Sea Wolf, The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden. Joseph Conrad: Youth. H. G.
+Wells: The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, The Sea Lady, The
+History of Mr. Polly, The Food of the Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreau.
+Upton Sinclair: The Jungle, King Coal, Jimmie Higgins, 100 Per Cent.
+Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie. George Moore: Esther Waters. Frank
+Norris: The Octopus. Brand Whitlock: The Turn of the Balance. De Foe:
+Robinson Crusoe. Fielding: Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild the Great.
+Thackeray: The Adventures of Barry Lyndon. Marmaduke Pickthall: The
+Adventures of Hadji Baba. Blasco Ibanez: The Fruit of the Vine. Frank
+Harris: Montes the Matador. Frederik van Eeden: The Quest. Tolstoi:
+Resurrection.</p>
+
+<p>And now for the people who do not get enough exercise. In the armies of
+King Cyrus it was the law that every man was required to sweat once
+every twenty-four hours, and that is still the law for every business
+man and office-worker and writer of books. There is no substitute for
+it, and there is no health without it. I have heard Dr. Kellogg say that
+the modern woman sends out her health with her washing, and<a name="vol_i_page_166" id="vol_i_page_166"></a> I have
+heard the leisure class ladies at the Sanitarium discuss this cryptic
+utterance and wonder what he meant by it. I know that there is use
+telling leisure class ladies what exercise at the wash-tub would do for
+their abdomens and backs. I will only tell them that unless they can
+find some kind of vigorous activity which keeps them in a free
+perspiration for an hour or two each day, they will never be really
+well, and will never bear children without agony and abortion.</p>
+
+<p>For myself, I have found that the minimum is three or four times a week.
+Unless I get that much hard exercise I am soon in trouble. So my advice
+to the business man is to take off his coat and collar and turn out and
+help his truck-man; my advice to the white collar slave is to get a
+part-time job, and dig ditches the rest of the time. To the man who has
+cares which pursue him, and likewise to the ardent student and
+brain-worker, I say that they should find, not merely exercise, but
+play. The distinction between the two things is important. There can be
+play that is not exercise, for example cards and chess; and, of course,
+there can be exercise that is not play. What you must have is something
+that is both play and exercise; something that not merely causes your
+heart to beat fast, and your lungs to pump fast, and your sweat glands
+to throw out poisons from your body, but something that fully occupies
+your mind and gives your higher brain centers a chance to relax.</p>
+
+<p>Our civilization has very largely destroyed the possibility of play and
+the spirit of play. We civilized people no longer know what play is, and
+regard the desire to play as something abnormal&mdash;a form of vice. We
+allow children to play after school hours, and on Saturdays; but for
+grown-up, serious-minded men and women to want to play would be almost
+as disreputable as for them to want to get drunk. What could foe more
+pitiful than the spectacle of tens of thousands of men crowding into our
+baseball parks and amusement fields to watch other men play for them!
+Imagine, if you can, a crowd of people gathering in a restaurant or
+theater to watch other people <i>eat</i> for them! Imagine yourself a man
+from Mars, coming down to a world with so many people in want, and
+finding whole classes of men forbidden to do any work, under penalty of
+disgrace, and compelled, in order to exercise their muscles, to pull on
+rubber straps and lift weights and wave dumb-bells and Indian clubs in
+the air&mdash;methods of expending<a name="vol_i_page_167" id="vol_i_page_167"></a> their muscular energy which are
+respectable because they accomplish nothing!</p>
+
+<p>When I was a boy, I was fond of all kinds of games. I was a good tennis
+player, and in the country an incessant hunter and fisherman. When on
+the city streets we boys could not find any other game to play, we would
+get up on the roofs of the houses and throw clothes-pins and snow-balls
+at the "Dagoes" working in the nearby excavations; so we had the fine
+game of being chased by the "Dagoes," with the chance, real or
+imaginary, of having a knife stuck into us. But then, as I grew older,
+and became aware of the pain and misery of the world, I lost my interest
+in games, and for ten years or so I never played; I did nothing but
+study and write. So my health gave way, and I had the problem of
+restoring it, and I spent some twenty years wrestling with this problem,
+before I thoroughly convinced myself on the point that there can be no
+such thing as sound and permanent health without a certain amount of
+play.</p>
+
+<p>I don't think there is any kind of hard physical work I failed to try,
+in the course of my experiments. I rode horseback, and took long walks,
+and climbed mountains, and swam, and dug gardens, and chopped down whole
+groves of trees and cut them up and carried them to the fireplace. I
+have done this latter work for a whole winter in the country, several
+hours every day, and it has done my health no good to speak of; I have
+been ready for a breakdown at the end of it. The reason is that all the
+time I was doing these things with my body, I was going right on working
+my brain. While I was swimming or climbing a mountain or galloping on
+horseback, I was absorbed in the next chapter of the book I was writing,
+so that I literally did not know where I was. I would make up my mind
+that I would not think about my work, and would make desperate efforts
+not to do so; but it was like walking along the edge of a slippery
+ditch&mdash;sooner or later I was bound to fall in, and go floundering along,
+unable to get out again!</p>
+
+<p>And the same thing applies to all gymnastic work. I have experimented
+with a dozen different systems of exercises, and with all kinds of water
+treatments; I have used dumb-bells and Indian clubs and Swedish
+gymnastics, MacFadden's exercises in bed, and the Yogi breathing
+exercises, and more kinds of queer things than I can remember now; but
+for me<a name="vol_i_page_168" id="vol_i_page_168"></a> there is only one solution of the problem, which is to have an
+antagonist. It may be a deer I am trying to shoot, or some trout I am
+trying to lure out of their holes; it may be some boys I am trying to
+beat at football or hockey, or it may be the game I know best and find
+most convenient, which is tennis. If it is tennis, then it has to be
+someone who can make me work as hard as I know how; for if it is someone
+I can beat easily, why, before I have been playing ten minutes, I am
+busily working out the next chapter of a book, or answering letters I
+have just got in the mail.</p>
+
+<p>Recently I came upon a book, "The Psychology of Relaxation," by Dr.
+Patrick, in which the theory of this is set forth. Civilized man is
+working his higher brain centers more than his body can stand; his brain
+is running away with him, absorbing a constantly increasing share of his
+energies. True relaxation is only possible where the higher brain
+centers are lulled, and the back lobes of the brain brought into
+activity. One of the means of doing this is alcohol, and that is why
+through the ages all races of men have craved to get drunk. There is a
+method which is harmless, and does not break down the system, and that
+is play. When we become really interested in play, we are as children,
+or as primitive man; we do all the things that our race used to do many
+ages ago; we hunt and fight, we pit our wits against the wits of our
+enemies, and struggle with desperation to get the better of them. If our
+play is physical play, if we are absorbed in a game or bodily contest,
+then we are exerting and developing all those portions of us which
+civilization tends to atrophy and deaden.</p>
+
+<p>There are people who will dispute with you about Socialism, and ask, how
+we are going to provide incentives if we do away with wage slavery. When
+you tell them that activity is natural to human beings, and that if
+there were no work, men and women would have to make some, they shake
+their heads mournfully and tell you about the problem of "human nature."
+But consider games and sports: men do not have to work their bodies, yet
+they go out and deliberately hunt for trouble! They invent themselves
+subtle and complicated games, and are not content until they find people
+who can beat them at it, or at any rate can make them work to the limit
+of their strength, until they are in a dripping perspiration and
+thoroughly exhausted! I may be too optimistic about<a name="vol_i_page_169" id="vol_i_page_169"></a> "human nature," but
+I believe that this is the attitude every normal human being takes
+toward the powers, both mental and physical, which he possesses; he
+wants to use them, and for all they are worth. If you don't believe it,
+just take any group of youngsters, give them a baseball and bat, turn
+them loose in a vacant lot, and watch them "choose up sides" and fall to
+work, screaming and shouting in wild excitement! There are some races of
+the earth which do not yet know baseball, but the Filipinos and the
+Japanese have learned it, and even the war-worn "Poilus" and the
+supercilious "Tommies" condescended to experiment with it. And if you
+think it is only physical competition that young human animals enjoy,
+try them at putting on a play, or printing a magazine, or conducting a
+debate, or building a house&mdash;anything whatever that involves healthy
+competition, and is related to the big things of life, but without being
+for the profit of some exploiter! Get clear the plain and simple
+distinction between work and play: play is what you want to do, while
+work is what the profit system makes you do!<a name="vol_i_page_170" id="vol_i_page_170"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV<br /><br />
+THE FASTING CURE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Deals with nature's own remedy for disease, and how to make use of
+it.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have next to consider the various human ailments, what causes them,
+and how they can be remedied. As it happens, I know of a cure that comes
+pretty near being that impossible thing, a "cure-all." At any rate, it
+is so far ahead of all other cures, that a discussion of it will cover
+three-fourths of the subject.</p>
+
+<p>When I was a boy living in New York, there was a man by the name of Dr.
+Tanner, who took a forty-day fast. He was on public exhibition at the
+time, and was supposed to be watched day and night; the newspapers gave
+a great deal of attention to the story, and crowds used to come to gaze
+at him. I remember very well the conversations I heard about the matter.
+People were quite sure that it couldn't be true. The man must be getting
+something to eat on the sly; he must have some nourishment in the water
+he drank; no human being could fast more than five or six days without
+starving to death.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1910 I published in the United States and England a magazine
+article telling how on several occasions I had fasted ten or twelve
+days, and what I had accomplished by it. I found that I had the same
+difficulty to confront as old Dr. Tanner; I received scores of letters
+from people who called me a "faker," and I read scores of newspaper
+editorials to the same effect. The New York Times published a dispatch
+about three young ladies on Long Island who were trying a three-day
+fast, and the Times commented editorially to the effect that these young
+ladies were "the victims of a shallow and unscrupulous sensationalist."</p>
+
+<p>The notion that human beings can perish for lack of food in a few days
+is deeply rooted in people's minds. Recently a group of eleven Irishmen
+in jail set to work to starve themselves to death, as a protest against
+British rule in their country. Day after day the newspapers reported the
+news<a name="vol_i_page_171" id="vol_i_page_171"></a> from Cork prison, and at about the twentieth day they began to
+state that the prisoners were dying, that the priest had been sent for,
+that their relatives were gathered on the prison steps. Day after day
+such reports continued, through the thirties, and the forties, and the
+fifties, and the sixties, and the seventies. One man died on the
+eighty-eighth day, and MacSwiney died on the seventy-fourth. The other
+nine gave up after ninety-four days and were all restored to health. I
+watched carefully the newspaper and magazine comment on this incident,
+yet I did not see a single remark on the medical aspects of it; I could
+not discover that scientific men had learned anything whatever about the
+ability of the body to go without food for long periods.</p>
+
+<p>Get this clear at the outset: Nobody ever "starved to death" in less
+than two months, and it is possible for a fat person to go without food
+for as long as three or four months. People who "starve to death" in
+shorter times do not die of starvation, but of fright. The first time I
+fasted happened to be at the time of the Messina earthquake. I was
+walking about, perfectly serene and happy, having been without food for
+three days, and I read in my newspaper how the rescue ships had reached
+Messina, and found the population ravenous, in the agonies of
+starvation, some of the people having been without food for seventy-two
+hours! (It sounds so much worse, you see, when you state it in hours.)</p>
+
+<p>The second point to get clear is that the fast is a physiological
+process; that is to say, it is something which nature understands and
+carries through in her own serene and efficient way. When you take a
+fast, you are not carrying out a freak notion of your own, or of mine;
+you are discovering a lost instinct. Every cat and dog knows enough not
+to take food when it is ill; it is only in hospitals conducted by modern
+medical science that the custom prevails of serving elaborate "trays" to
+invalids. I remember a story about a man who made himself a reputation
+and a fortune by curing the pet dogs of the rich. These beautiful little
+creatures, which sleep between silken covers, and have several servants
+to wait upon them, and are fed from gold and silver dishes upon rich and
+elaborately cooked foods, fall victim to as many diseases as their
+mistresses, and they would be brought to this specialist, who conducted
+his dog hospital in an old brickyard. In each one of the compartments of
+the brick kiln he would shut up<a name="vol_i_page_172" id="vol_i_page_172"></a> a dog with a supply of fresh water, a
+crust of stale bread, a piece of bacon rind, and the sole of an old
+shoe; and after a few days he would go back and find that the dog had
+eaten the crust of bread, and then he would write to the owner that the
+dog was on the high road to recovery. He would go back a few days later
+and find that the dog had eaten the piece of bacon rind, and then he
+would write that the dog was very nearly cured. He would wait until the
+dog had eaten the piece of shoe leather, and then he would write that
+the dog was completely cured, and the owner might come and take it away.</p>
+
+<p>Just what is the process of the fast cure? I do not pretend to know
+positively. I can only make guesses, and wait for science to
+investigate. I believe that the main source of the diseases of civilized
+man is improper nutrition, and the clogging of the system with food
+poisons in various stages. And when you fast you do two things: first,
+you stop entirely the fresh supply of those food poisons, and second,
+you allow the whole of the body's digestive and assimilative tract to
+rest&mdash;to go to sleep, as it were&mdash;so that all the body's energy may go
+to other organs. The body carries with it at all times a surplus store
+of nutriment, which can be taken up and used by the blood stream,
+apparently with much less trouble than is required to convert fresh food
+to the body's uses. In other words, the body can feed on its own tissues
+more easily than it can feed from the stomach. In the fast you may lose
+anywhere from half a pound to two pounds in weight per day, and this
+will be taken, first from your store of fat, and then from your muscular
+tissues. Every part of your muscular tissue will be taken, before
+anything is taken from your vital organs, your nerves or your
+blood-stream. So long as there is a particle of muscular material left,
+so long as you can make even the slightest movement of one finger, you
+are still fasting, and it is only when your muscular tissue is all gone
+that you begin at last to starve. So far as I know, the cases of
+MacSwiney and the other Irishman are the only cases on record where
+fasters have died of starvation.</p>
+
+<p>What the body does during the fast is quite plain, and can be told by
+many symptoms. It begins a thorough house-cleaning, throwing out
+poisonous material by every channel. The perspiration and the breath
+become offensive, the tongue becomes heavily coated, so that you can
+scrape the material<a name="vol_i_page_173" id="vol_i_page_173"></a> off with a knife. I have heard vegetarians explain
+this by saying that when the body is living off its own tissues, it is
+following a cannibal diet; but that is all nonsense, because you can
+live on meat exclusively, and quickly satisfy yourself that none of
+these symptoms occurs. It is evident that the body is taking advantage
+of the opportunity to get rid of waste products; and this will go on for
+ten days, for twenty days, in some cases for as long as forty or fifty
+days; and then suddenly occurs a strange thing: in spite of the
+"cannibal diet" the symptoms all come to a sudden end. The tongue
+clears, the breath becomes sweet, the appetite suddenly awakens.</p>
+
+<p>During the period of a normal fast you lose all interest in food. You
+almost forget that there is such a thing as eating; you can look at food
+without any more desire for it than you have to swallow marbles and
+carpet tacks. But then suddenly appetite returns, as I have explained,
+and you find that you can think of nothing but food. This is what
+students of the subject describe as a "complete fast," and while I do
+not want to go to extremes and say that the "complete fast" will cure
+every case of every disease, I can certainly say this: in the letters
+which have come to me from people who tried the fast at my suggestion,
+there are cases of every kind of common disease. In my book, "The
+Fasting Cure," I give the results in cases reported to me after the
+publication of my first magazine article. I quote two paragraphs:</p>
+
+<p>"The total number of fasts taken was 277, and the average number of days
+was six. There were 90 of five days or over, 51 of ten days or over, and
+six of 30 days or over. Out of the 119 person who wrote to me, 100
+reported benefit, and 17 no benefit. Of these 17 about half give wrong
+breaking of the fast as the reason for the failure. In cases where the
+cure had not proved permanent, about half mentioned that the recurrence
+of the trouble was caused by wrong eating, and about half of the rest
+made this quite evident by what they said. Also it is to be noted that
+in the cases of the 17 who got no benefit, nearly all were fasts of only
+three or four days.</p>
+
+<p>"Following is the complete list of diseases benefited&mdash;45 of the cases
+having been diagnosed by physicians: indigestion (usually associated
+with nervousness), 27; rheumatism, 5; colds, 8; tuberculosis, 4;
+constipation, 14; poor circulation, 3;<a name="vol_i_page_174" id="vol_i_page_174"></a> headaches, 5; anaemia, 3;
+scrofula, 1; bronchial trouble, 5; syphilis, 1; liver trouble, 5;
+general debility, 5; chills and fever, 1; blood poisoning, 1; ulcerated
+leg, 1; neurasthenia, 6; locomotor ataxia, 1; sciatica, 1; asthma, 2;
+excess of uric acid, 1; epilepsy, 1; pleurisy, 1; impaction of bowels,
+1; eczema, 2; catarrh, 6; appendicitis, 3; valvular disease of heart, 1;
+insomnia, 1; gas poisoning, 1; grippe, 1; cancer, 1."</p>
+
+<p>There are many diseases with many causes, and some yield more quickly
+than others to the fast. In the first group I put the diseases of the
+digestive and alimentary tract. Stomach and bowel troubles, and the
+nervous disorders occasioned by these, stop almost immediately when you
+fast. Next come disorders of the blood-stream, which are generally a
+second stage of digestive troubles. Everything immediately due to
+impurities of the blood, pimples, boils, and ulcers, inflammation, badly
+healing wounds, etc., respond to a few days of fasting as to the magic
+touch of the old-time legends. When it comes to diseases caused by germ
+infections, you have a double aspect of the problem, and must have a
+double method of attack. I would not like to say that fasting could cure
+such a disease as sleeping sickness, to the germs of which our systems
+are not accustomed, and against which they may well be helpless. On the
+other hand, in the case of common infections, such as colds and sore
+throats, the fast is again the touch of magic. Having been plagued a
+great deal by these ailments in past times, I am accustomed to say that
+I would not trade my knowledge of fasting for everything else that I
+know about health.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing you must do if you want to take a fast is to read the
+literature on the subject and make up your mind that the experiment will
+do you no injury. You should also try to get your relatives to make up
+their minds, because you are nervous when you are fasting, and cannot
+withstand the attacks of the people around you, who will go into a panic
+and throw you into a panic. As I said before, it is quite possible for
+people to die of panic, but I do not believe that anybody ever died of a
+fast. I have known of two or three cases of people dying while they were
+fasting, but I feel quite certain that the fast did not cause their
+death; they would have died anyhow. You must bear in mind that among the
+people who try the fast, a great many are in a desperate condition; some
+have been given up by the doctors,<a name="vol_i_page_175" id="vol_i_page_175"></a> and if now and then one of these
+should die, we may surely say that they died in spite of the fast, and
+not because of it. There is no physician who can save every patient, and
+it would be absurd to expect this. I have read scores of letters from
+people who were at the point of death from such "fatal" diseases as
+Bright's disease, sclerosis of the liver, and fatty degeneration of the
+heart, and were literally snatched out of the jaws of death by beginning
+a fast. I would not like to guess just what percentage of dying people
+in our hospitals might be saved if the doctors would withdraw all food
+from them, but I await with interest the time when medical science will
+have the intelligence to try that simple experiment and report the
+results.</p>
+
+<p>Just the other day in the Los Angeles county jail, a chiropractor went
+on hunger strike, as a protest against imprisonment, and he fasted 41
+days. Then he broke his fast, the reason being given that his pulse was
+down to 54, and he was afraid of dying. I smiled to myself. The normal
+pulse is 70. I have taken my pulse many times at the end of a ten-day
+fast, and it has been as low as 32, and I am not dead yet, and if I wait
+to die from the symptoms of a fast, I expect to live a long time indeed!</p>
+
+<p>The first time I fasted, I felt very weak, and lay around and hardly
+cared to lift my head; if I walked from my bed to the lawn, I was tired
+in the legs. But since then I have grown used to fasting. I have fasted
+for a week probably twenty or thirty times, and on such occasions I have
+gone about my business as if nothing were happening. Of course I would
+not try to play tennis, or to climb a mountain, but it is a fact that on
+the seventh day of a fast in New York, I climbed the five or six flights
+of stairs to the top of the Metropolitan Opera House, and felt no ill
+effects from doing this. I climbed slowly, and was careful not to tire
+myself. The simple rule is not to have anything that you must do on the
+fast, and then do what you feel like doing. Lie down and rest, and read
+a book, and take as much exercise as you find you enjoy. Keep your mind
+quiet and free from worries, and lock out of the house everybody who
+tells you that your heart is going to stop beating in the next few
+minutes, and that you must have an injection of strychnine to start it,
+and some beefsteak and fried onions to "restore your strength." Give
+yourself up to the care of your wise<a name="vol_i_page_176" id="vol_i_page_176"></a> old mother nature, who will attend
+to your heart just as securely and serenely as she attended to it in the
+days before you were born.</p>
+
+<p>By fasting I mean that you take no food whatever. I know some nature
+cure teachers who practice what they call a "fruit fast." All I know is
+that if I eat nothing but fruit, I soon have my stomach boiling with
+fermentation, and also I suffer with hunger; whereas, if I take a
+complete fast, I promptly forget all about food. You must drink all the
+water you can on the fast. This helps nature with her house-cleaning; it
+is well to drink a glass of water every half hour at least. Do not try
+to go without water, and then write me that the fasting cure is a
+failure. Also please do not write and ask me if it will be fasting if
+you take just a little crackers and milk, or some soup, or something
+else that you think doesn't count!</p>
+
+<p>I recommend a dose of laxative to clean out the system at the beginning
+of a fast, because the bowels are apt to become sluggish at once, and
+the quicker you get the system cleansed, the better. It does no good to
+take laxatives if you are going to pile in more food, but if you are
+going to fast, that is a different matter. You should take a full warm
+enema every day during the fast, so long as it brings any results. There
+are some people whose bowels are so frightfully clogged that I have
+known the enema to bring results even in the second and third weeks. On
+the other hand, if there is no solid matter to be removed, a small enema
+every day will suffice. Take a warm bath every day; and needless to say,
+you should get all the fresh air you can, and should sleep as much as
+you can. You may have difficulty in sleeping, because the fast is apt to
+make you nervous and wakeful. I have known people who could not fast
+because they could not sleep, and I have taught them a little trick, to
+put a hot water bottle at the feet, and another on the abdomen, to draw
+the blood away from the head. So they would quickly fall asleep, and
+they got great benefit from their fasts.</p>
+
+<p>You should supply yourself with good music if you can, and with plenty
+of good reading matter. You will be amazed to find how active your mind
+becomes; perhaps you had never known before what a mind you had. Your
+blood has always been so clogged with food poisons that you didn't<a name="vol_i_page_177" id="vol_i_page_177"></a> know
+you could think. My three act play, "The Nature Woman," was conceived
+and written in two days and a half on a fast; but I do not recommend
+this kind of thing&mdash;on the contrary, I strongly urge against it, because
+if you work your brain on a fast, you do not get the good from your
+fast, and do not recover so quickly. Put off all your problems until you
+have got your health back, and seek only to divert your mind while
+fasting.<a name="vol_i_page_178" id="vol_i_page_178"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI<br /><br />
+BREAKING THE FAST</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses various methods of building up the body after a fast,
+especially the milk diet.)</p></div>
+
+<p>There remains the question of how to break the fast, and this is the
+most important part of the problem. You may undo all the good of your
+fast by breaking it wrong, and you are a thousand times as apt to kill
+yourself then, as while you are fasting. When your hunger comes back, it
+comes back with a rush, and some people have not the will power to
+control it.</p>
+
+<p>I do not advocate a complete fast in any case except of serious chronic
+disease, and then only under the advice of someone with experience; but
+I advocate a short fast of a week or ten days for almost every common
+ailment, and I know that such a fast will help, even where it may not
+completely cure. You may go on fasting so long as you are quiet and
+happy; but when you find you are becoming too weak for comfort, or for
+the peace of mind of your family physician and your friends, you may
+break your fast, and show them that it is possible to restore your
+strength and body weight, and then they won't bother so much when you
+try it again! Take nothing but liquid foods in the breaking of a fast; I
+recommend the juices of fruits and tomatoes, also meat broths. If you
+have fasted a week or two, take a quarter of a glass; if you have fasted
+a month, take a tablespoonful, and wait and see what the results are.
+Remember that your whole alimentary tract is out of action, and give it
+a chance to start up slowly. Take small quantities of liquid food every
+two hours for the first day. Then you can begin taking larger
+quantities, and on the next day you can try some milk, or a soft poached
+egg, or the pulp of cooked apples or prunes. Do not take any solid food
+until you are quite sure you can digest it, and then take only a very
+little. Do not take any starchy food until the third day.</p>
+
+<p>I have known people to break these rules. I knew a<a name="vol_i_page_179" id="vol_i_page_179"></a> man who broke his
+fast on hamburg steak, and had to be helped out with a stomach pump.
+Once I broke a week's fast with a plate of rich soup, because I was at a
+friend's house and there was nothing else, and I yielded to the claims
+of hospitality, and made myself ill and had to fast for several days
+longer.</p>
+
+<p>The easiest way to break a fast is upon a milk diet. I have seen
+hundreds of people take this diet, and very few who did not get benefit.
+The first time I fasted, which was twelve days, I lost 17 pounds, and I
+took the milk diet for 24 days thereafter, and gained 32 pounds. I took
+it at MacFadden's Sanitarium, where I had every attention. Since then, I
+have many times tried to take a milk diet by myself, but have never been
+able to get it to agree with me. I do not know how to explain this fact;
+I state it, to show how hard it is to lay down general rules. On the
+milk diet you take into your system two or three times as much food as
+you can assimilate, and this is a violation of all my diet rules; but it
+appears that the bacteria which thrive in milk produce lactic acid,
+which is not harmful to the system, and if you do not take other foods
+you may safely keep the system flooded with milk.</p>
+
+<p>After a fast you should begin with small quantities of milk, and by the
+third day you may be taking a full glass of warm milk every half hour or
+every twenty minutes, until you have taken seven or eight quarts per
+day. It is better to take it warm, but sometimes people take it just as
+well without warming. Dr. Porter, who has a book on the milk diet,
+insists upon complete rest, and makes his patients stay in bed.
+MacFadden, on the other hand, recommends gymnastics in the morning
+before the milk, and during the afternoon he recommends a rest from the
+milk for a couple of hours, followed by abdominal exercises to keep the
+bowels open. This is very important during a fast, because you are
+taking great quantities of material into your system and it must not be
+permitted to clog. Therefore take an enema daily, if necessary to a free
+movement. Also take a warm bath daily. Take the juice of oranges and
+lemons if you crave them.</p>
+
+<p>Upon one thing everyone who has had experience with the milk diet
+agrees, and that is the necessity of absolute<a name="vol_i_page_180" id="vol_i_page_180"></a> mental rest. If you
+become excited, or nervous, or angry on a milk diet, you may turn all
+the contents of your stomach into hard curds, and may put yourself into
+convulsions. The wonderful thing about the milk diet is the state of
+physical and mental bliss it makes possible. It is the ideal way of
+breaking a fast, because it leaves you no chance to get hungry; you have
+all the food you want, and your system is bathed in happiness, a sense
+of peace and well-being which is truly marvelous and not to be
+described. You gain anywhere from half a pound to two pounds a day, and
+you feel that you have never before in your life known what perfect
+health could be. The fast sets you a new standard, you discover how
+nature meant you to enjoy life, and never again are you content with
+that kind of half existence with which you managed to worry along before
+you discovered this remedy.</p>
+
+<p>But let me hasten to add that I do not recommend the fast as a regular
+habit of life. The fast is an emergency measure, to enable the body to
+cleanse itself and to cure disease. When you have got your body clean
+and free from disease, it is your business to keep it that way, and you
+should apply your reason to the problem of how to live so that you will
+not have to fast. If you find that you continue to have ailments, then
+you must be eating wrongly, or overworking, or committing some other
+offense against nature; either that, or else you must have some organic
+trouble&mdash;a bone in your spine out of place, as the osteopaths tell you,
+or your eyes out of focus, or your appendix twisted and infected. I do
+not claim that the fasting cure will supplant the surgeons and the
+oculists and the dentists. It will not mend your bones if you break
+them, and it will not repair your teeth that are already decayed; but it
+will help to keep your teeth from decaying in the future, and it will
+help you to prepare for a surgical operation, and to recover from it
+more quickly. I had to undergo an operation for rupture a couple of
+years ago, and I fasted for two days before the operation, and for three
+days after it, and I had no particle of nausea from the ether, and was
+able to tend to my mail the day after the operation.</p>
+
+<p>There is one disease for which I hesitate to recommend the fast, and
+that is tuberculosis, because I have been told of cases in which the
+patient lost weight and did not recover<a name="vol_i_page_181" id="vol_i_page_181"></a> it. However, in my tabulation
+of 277 cases, you will note four cases of tuberculosis, and in my book
+is given a letter from a patient who claimed great benefit. If I had the
+misfortune to contract tuberculosis, I would take a three or four day
+fast, followed by a milk diet for a long period. The milk diet is
+pleasant to take, and it cannot possibly do any harm. If it did not
+effect a cure, I would try the Salisbury treatment&mdash;that is, lean meat
+ground up and medium cooked, and nothing else, except an abundance of
+hot water between meals. Prof. Irving Fisher wrote me that there is
+urgent need of experiment to determine proper diet in tuberculosis; and
+until these experiments have been made, we can only grope. I am quite
+sure that the "stuffing system," ordinarily used by doctors, is a tragic
+mistake.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of any other disease whatever, even though I might take
+medical or surgical treatment, I would supplement this by a fast,
+because there is no kind of treatment which does not succeed better with
+the blood in good condition. In the case of emergencies, accidents,
+wounds, etc., I would rest assured that recovery would be more prompt if
+I were fasting. When David Graham Phillips was shot, I wrote a letter to
+the New York Call, saying that his doctors had killed him, because they
+had fed him while he was lying in a critical condition in the hospital.
+To take nutriment into the body under such circumstances is the greatest
+of blunders.</p>
+
+<p>The fast will help children, just as it helps adults, only they do not
+need to fast so long. It will help the aged and make them feel young.
+(You need not be afraid to fast, no matter how old you are.) It is, of
+course, an immediate cure for fatness, and strange as it may seem, it is
+also a cure for unnatural thinness. People with ravenous appetites are
+just as apt to be thin as to be fat, because it is not what you eat that
+builds up your body, but only what you assimilate, and if you eat too
+much, you can make it impossible to assimilate anything properly. If you
+take a fast and break it carefully, your body will come to its normal
+weight, and all your functions to their normal activity.</p>
+
+<p>A physician wrote me, taking me to task for listing among the cures
+reported in my tabulation a case of locomotor ataxia. This disease, he
+explained, is caused because a portion of a nerve has been entirely
+destroyed, and it is a disease that is<a name="vol_i_page_182" id="vol_i_page_182"></a> absolutely and positively and
+forever incurable. I answered that I knew this to be the teaching of
+present day medical science, but I invited him to consider for a moment
+what happens in nature. When a crab loses a claw, we do not take it as a
+matter of course that the crab must go about with one claw for the
+balance of its life; nature will make that crab another claw. Man has
+lost the power of replacing a lost leg, but he stills retains the power
+of replacing tissue which has been cut away by a surgeon's knife, and
+medical science takes this as a matter of course. How shall anybody say
+that nature has forever lost the power of rebuilding a bit of nervous
+tissue? How shall anyone say that if the blood-stream is cleansed of
+poisons, and the energy of the whole body restored, one of the results
+may not be the repairing of a broken nerve connection? I invite my
+readers who have ailments, and especially I invite all medical men among
+my readers, to make a fair test of the fasting cure. The results will
+surprise them, and they will quickly be forced to revise their methods
+of treating illness.<a name="vol_i_page_183" id="vol_i_page_183"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>XXVII<br /><br />
+DISEASES AND CURES</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and what is known
+about their cause and cure.)</p></div>
+
+<p>I begin with the commonest of all troubles, known as a "cold." This name
+implies that the cause of the trouble lies in exposure or chill. All the
+grandmothers of the world are agreed about this. They have a phrase&mdash;or
+at least they had it when I was a boy: "You will catch your death."
+Every time I went out in the rain, every time I played with wet feet, or
+sat in a draft, or got under a cold shower, I would hear the formula,
+"You will catch your death."</p>
+
+<p>And, on the other hand, there are the "health cranks," who declare
+vehemently that the name "cold" is a misnomer and a trap for people's
+thoughts. Cold has nothing to do with it, they say, and point to arctic
+explorers who frequently get frozen to death, but do not "catch cold"
+until they get back into the warm rooms of civilization. As for drafts,
+the "health cranks" aver that a draft is merely "fresh air moving";
+which is supposed to settle the matter. However, when you come to think
+about it, you realize that a cyclone is likewise merely "fresh air
+moving," so you have not decided the question by a phrase.</p>
+
+<p>While I was writing these chapters on health I contracted a severe
+cold&mdash;which was a joke on me. The history of this cold is as clear in my
+mind as anything human can be, and it will serve for an illustration,
+showing how much truth the grandmothers have on their side, and how much
+the "health cranks" have.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, I had been overworking. All sorts of appeals come to me;
+hundreds of people write me letters, and I cannot bear to leave them
+unanswered. I accepted calls to speak, and invitations where I had to
+eat a lot of stuff of which my reason disapproves; so one morning I woke
+up with a slight sore throat. I fasted all day, and by evening felt all
+right. But there came another call, and I consented to take a long
+automobile ride on a cold and rainy night, and<a name="vol_i_page_184" id="vol_i_page_184"></a> when I got back home,
+after five or six hours, I was thoroughly chilled, and my "cold" came on
+during the night.</p>
+
+<p>This explanation will, I imagine, be satisfactory to all the
+grandmothers of the world. All the dear, good grandmothers know that an
+automobile ride on a cold, rainy night is enough to give any man "his
+death." But listen, grandmothers! I have lain out watching for deer all
+night in the late fall, with only a thin blanket to cover me, and gotten
+up so stiff with cold that I could hardly move; yet I did not "catch
+cold." When I was a youth, I have ridden a bicycle twenty miles to the
+beach in April, with snow on the ground, and plunged into the surf and
+swam, and then ridden home again. I have bathed in the sea when I had to
+run a quarter of a mile in a bathing suit along a frost-covered pier,
+and with an icy wind blowing through my bones; yet I never took cold
+from that, and never got anything but a feeling of exhilaration. So it
+must be that there is some reason why exposure causes colds at one time
+and not at another.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." They understand
+that your blood-stream must be clogged, your bodily tone reduced by bad
+air and lack of exercise, and more especially by over-eating, or by an
+improperly balanced diet. But then most of them go to extremes, and
+insist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my body had
+nothing to do with my cold. But I know otherwise&mdash;I have watched the
+thing happen so often. In times when I was run down, the slightest
+exposure would cause me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got
+myself a sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with
+nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with wet feet, or
+by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, when I had been perspiring a
+little. How to explain this I am not sure, but my guess is that you
+drive the blood away from the surface of the body at a time when it is
+weakened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army of the
+white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body to the germs.</p>
+
+<p>I know there are nature curists who argue that germs have nothing to do
+with disease; but they have never been able to convince me&mdash;germs are
+too real, and too many, and too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of
+meat exposed to the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will
+settle<a name="vol_i_page_185" id="vol_i_page_185"></a> upon it and begin to feed upon it and to multiply; the meat,
+being dead, is powerless to protect itself. But your nose and throat are
+also meat, and just as good food for the germs. The only difference is
+that this meat is alive, there is a living blood-stream circulating
+through it, and several score billions of the body's own kind of germs,
+the blood corpuscles. If these blood corpuscles are sound and properly
+nourished, and are brought to the place of infection, they are able to
+destroy all the common germs; so it is that you do not have diseases,
+but instead have health. But your health always implies a struggle of
+your organism against other organisms, and it is the business of your
+reason to watch your body and give all the help you can in protecting
+it. Coughs and colds, sore throats and headaches, are the first warnings
+that your defenses are being weakened. As a rule these ailments are not
+serious in themselves, but they are signs of a wrong condition, and if
+you neglect this condition, pretty soon you will find that you have to
+deal with something deadly.</p>
+
+<p>My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, eat nothing for
+twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. If you have a severe cold
+or sore throat, you will be wise to lie in bed for a day or two, by an
+open window. You may also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you
+will find them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous
+membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In the old sad
+days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go to the doctor, and have
+my throat and nose pumped full of black and green and yellow and purple
+liquids, which did me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay
+on for two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and I would
+be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by inches, and not one of
+the doctors could tell me why.</p>
+
+<p>The next most common ailment is a headache, and this means poisons in
+your blood-stream. It may be from improper diet, from alcohol, or drugs,
+or bad air, or nervous excitement. If it is none of these things, then
+you should begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for
+example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths and the
+chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made important
+discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the nervous force which
+directs the blood-stream is carried to<a name="vol_i_page_186" id="vol_i_page_186"></a> the organs of the body by nerves
+which leave the spinal cord through openings between the vertebrae. If
+any of these openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply,
+which means ill-health in that part of the body to which the nerve
+leads. That such trouble can be corrected by straightening the bones of
+the spine, seems perfectly reasonable; but like most people with a new
+idea, the discoverers proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have
+before me an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral
+displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety-five per
+cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per cent being due to
+subluxations of other skeletal segments." Naturally people who believe
+this will devote nearly all their study to the bones and the nervous
+system. But surely, there are other parts of your body which are
+necessary besides bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts
+happen to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not focus
+properly, and you are continually wearing out the optic nerve, thus
+giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia? What if you have an appendix
+that has been twisted and malformed from birth, and is a center of
+infection so long as it remains in the body?</p>
+
+<p>Several years ago I had an experience with the appendix, from which I
+learned something about one of the commonest of human ailments,
+constipation, or sluggishness of the bowels. This is a cause of
+innumerable chronic ailments grouped under the head of
+auto-intoxication, or the poisoning of the body by the absorption into
+the system of the products of fermentation and decay in the bowels. The
+bowels should move freely two or three times every day, and the
+movements should be soft. I suffered from constipation for some twenty
+years, and tried, I think, every remedy known both to science and to
+crankdom. In the beginning the doctors gave me drugs which by irritating
+the intestinal walls cause them to pour out quantities of water, and
+hurry the irritating substances down the intestinal tract. That is all
+right for an emergency; if you have swallowed a poison, or food which is
+spoiled, or if you have overeaten and are ill, get your system cleaned
+out by any and every device. But if you habitually swallow mild poisons,
+which is what all laxatives are, you weaken the intestinal tract, and
+you have to take more and more of these poisons, and you get less
+results. We may set down as positive<a name="vol_i_page_187" id="vol_i_page_187"></a> the statement that drugs are not a
+remedy for constipation.</p>
+
+<p>Next comes diet. Eat the rough and bulky foods, say the nature curists,
+and stimulate the intestinal walls to activity. I tried that. I listened
+to the extreme enthusiasts, and boiled whole wheat and ate it, and
+consumed quantities of bran biscuit, and of a Japanese seaweed which Dr.
+Kellogg prepares, and of petroleum oil, and even the skins of oranges,
+which are most uncomfortable eating, I assure you. I would eat things
+like this until I got myself a case of diarrhea&mdash;and so was cured of
+constipation for a time! Strange as it may seem to you, there are even
+people who tell you to eat sand. I listened to them, and ate many
+quarts.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is exercise. MacFadden taught me a whole series of exercises
+for developing the muscles of the abdominal walls and the back, which
+are greatly neglected by civilized man. The fundamental cause of
+constipation is a sluggish life, and to exercise our bodies is a duty;
+but to me it was always an agony of boredom to lie on a bed and wiggle
+my abdomen for a quarter of an hour. The same thing applies to hot water
+treatments, which are effective, but a nuisance and a waste of time. I
+never could keep them up except when I was in trouble.</p>
+
+<p>Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual irritating pain in
+my right side, which I quickly realized must lie in the appendix. I
+tried massage, and hot and cold water treatments, and my favorite
+remedy, a week's fast. The pain disappeared, but it returned, so finally
+I decided, to the dismay of my physical culture friends, to have the
+appendix out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature
+curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of the body,
+which pours an oil or something into the intestinal tract, and so helps
+to prevent constipation. Well, evidently my appendix wasn't doing its
+job, so I took it to a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been
+twisted and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of continuous
+infection. From the time I had that operation, I have never had to think
+about the subject of constipation. This experience suggests to me how
+easy it is for people to make statements about health which have no
+relationship to facts.</p>
+
+<p>I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly well realize
+that if human beings would take proper care of their health, the great
+proportion of surgical operations would<a name="vol_i_page_188" id="vol_i_page_188"></a> be unnecessary. I realize,
+also, that surgeons get paid by the job, and therefore have a money
+interest in operating, and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of
+them will ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is
+true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and that by
+standing a little temporary inconvenience you can save yourself a
+life-time of discomfort.</p>
+
+<p>Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here a natural weakness,
+from which there results a dangerous and uncomfortable affliction.
+Hundreds of thousands of men are going around all their lives wearing
+elaborate and expensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely
+useless, and trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An
+operation takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, and when
+our government drafted its young men into the army and found that
+fourteen in every thousand of them had rupture, it shipped them into the
+hospitals wholesale and sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords
+one case where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there
+were practically no returns from the great number of army cases.</p>
+
+<p>Likewise you find extreme statements repeated concerning the evils of
+vaccination; but if you will read Parkman's "History of the Jesuits in
+North America," you will see the horrible conditions under which the
+Indians lived in the United States&mdash;noble savages, you understand,
+entirely uncontaminated by civilized white men, and whole populations
+regularly wiped out every few years by epidemics of smallpox. That these
+epidemics ceased was due to the discovery that by infecting the body
+with a mild form of the disease, it could be made to develop substances
+which render it immune to the deadly form. Here in California we have a
+law which makes vaccination for school children optional, and so we may
+some day have another epidemic to test the theories of the
+anti-vaccinationists.</p>
+
+<p>I know, of course, the dreadful stories of people who have been given
+syphilis and other diseases by impure vaccines. I don't know whether
+such stories are true; but I do know that people who live in houses are
+sometimes killed by earthquakes and by lightning, yet we do not cease to
+live in houses because of this chance. It seems to me that the remedy
+for such vaccination evils is not to abolish vaccination,<a name="vol_i_page_189" id="vol_i_page_189"></a> but to take
+more care in the manufacture of our vaccines.</p>
+
+<p>This danger is removed by using vaccines which are sterile, and are made
+especially for each person. Germs are taken from the sick person, and
+injected into an animal. The body of the animal develops with great
+rapidity the "anti-bodies" necessary to resistance to the germs; and as
+these "anti-bodies" are chemical products, not affected by heat, we can
+take a serum from the animal, sterilize it, and then inject it into the
+system of the patient, thus increasing resistance to the disease. I
+admit that the best way to increase such resistance is to take care of
+your health; but sometimes we confront an emergency, and must use
+emergency remedies. We have serums that really cure diphtheria and
+meningitis, and one that will prevent lock-jaw; anyone who has ever seen
+with his own eyes how the deadly membranes of diphtheria melt away as a
+result of an injection, will be less dogmatic about the efforts of
+science to combat disease.</p>
+
+<p>Of course it is much pleasanter if you can destroy the source of the
+disease, and keep it from getting into the human body. Every few years
+the southern part of our country used to be devastated by yellow fever
+epidemics. Every kind of weird and fantastic remedy was tried; people
+would go around with sponges full of vinegar hung under their noses;
+they would burn the clothing and bedding of those who died of the
+disease; they would wear gloves when they went shopping, so as not to
+touch the money with their hands. But at last medical experimenters
+traced the disease to a certain kind of mosquito, and now, if we drain
+the swamps and screen our houses and stay in doors after sundown, we do
+not get yellow fever, nor malaria either. In the same way, if we keep
+our bodies clean with soap and hot water, we do not get bitten by lice,
+and so do not die of typhus. If we take pains with our drains and water
+supply, so that human excrement does not get into it, and if we destroy
+the filth-carrying housefly, we do not have epidemics of typhoid.</p>
+
+<p>But under conditions of battle it is not possible for men to take these
+precautions, and so when they go into the army they get a dose of
+typhoid serum. And this illustrates the difference between a true or
+hygienic remedy for disease, and a temporary or emergency remedy. If you
+say that you want to abolish war, and with it the need for typhoid<a name="vol_i_page_190" id="vol_i_page_190"></a>
+vaccination, I cheerfully agree with you in this. All that I am trying
+to do is to point out the folly of flying to extremes, and rejecting any
+remedy which may help. What is the use of making the flat statement that
+vaccinations and serums never aid in the cure of disease, when any man
+can see with his own eyes the proof that they do? In the Spanish war,
+before typhoid vaccination, many times more soldiers died of this
+disease than died of bullets; but in the late war there was practically
+no typhoid at all in the army camps. On the other hand, it was noticed
+that the men who had just come in, and who therefore had just been
+vaccinated, were considerably more susceptible to influenza; which shows
+that vaccination does reduce the body condition for a time. The reader
+may say that in this case I am trying to sit on both sides of the fence;
+but the truth is that I am trying to keep an open mind, and to consider
+all the facts, and to avoid making rash statements.</p>
+
+<p>One of the statements you hear most frequently is that drugs can never
+remedy disease, or help in remedying it. Now, I abhor the drugging
+system of the orthodox medical men; I have talked with them, and heard
+them talk with one another, and I know that they will mix up half a
+dozen different substances, in the vague hope that some one of them will
+have some effect. Even when they know definitely the effects they are
+producing, they are in many cases merely suppressing symptoms. On the
+other hand, however, it is a fact that medical science has had for a
+generation or two a specific which destroys the germs of one disease in
+the blood, without at the same time injuring the blood itself. That
+disease is malaria, and the drug is quinine. Of course, the way to avoid
+malaria is to drain the swamps; but you cannot do that all at once, nor
+can you always screen your house and stay in at sundown. When you first
+go into a country, you have no house to screen, and some emergency will
+certainly arise that exposes you to mosquito bites. So you will need
+quinine, and will be foolish not to use it, and know how to use it.</p>
+
+<p>Recently medical chemists discovered another remedy, this time for
+syphilis. It is called salvarsan, and while it does not always cure, it
+frequently does. In laboratories today men are working over the problem
+of constructing a combination of molecules which will destroy the germ
+of sleeping sickness, without at the same time injuring the blood.<a name="vol_i_page_191" id="vol_i_page_191"></a> If
+they find it, they will save hundreds of millions of lives. I do not see
+why we cannot recognize such a possibility, while at the same time
+making use of physical culture, of diet and fasting.</p>
+
+<p>When the manuscript of this book was sent to the printer, there appeared
+in this place a paragraph telling of the work of Dr. Albert Abrams of
+San Francisco, in the diagnosis and cure of disease by means of
+radio-active vibrations. As the book is going to press, the writer finds
+himself in San Francisco, attending Dr. Abrams' clinics; and so he finds
+it possible to give a more extended account of some fascinating
+discoveries, which seem destined to revolutionize medical science. If I
+were to tell all that I have seen with my own eyes in the last twelve
+days, I fear the reader would find his powers of credulity
+overstretched, so I shall content myself with trying to tell, in very
+sober and cautious language, the theory upon which Abrams is working,
+and the technic which he has evolved.</p>
+
+<p>Modern science has demonstrated that all matter is simply the activity
+of electrons, minute particles of electric force. This is a statement
+which no present-day physicist would dispute. The best evidence appears
+to indicate that a molecule of matter is a minute reproduction of the
+universe, a system of electrons whirling about a central nucleus. No eye
+has ever beheld an electron, for it is billions of times smaller than
+anything the microscope makes visible; but we can see the effects of
+electronic activity, and all modern books of physics give photographs of
+such. It is possible to determine the vibration rates of electrons, and
+to Dr. Abrams occurred the idea of determining the vibration rates of
+diseased tissue and disease germs. He discovered that it was invariably
+the same; not merely does all cancerous material, for example, yield the
+same rate, but the blood of a person suffering from cancer yields that
+rate, at all times and under all circumstances. The vibration of cancer,
+of tuberculosis, of syphilis&mdash;each is different, uniform and invariable.
+Likewise in the blood are other vibrations, uniform and dependable,
+which reveal the sex and age of the patient, the virulence of the
+disease and the period of its duration&mdash;yes, and even the location in
+the body, if there be some definite infected area. So here is a modern
+miracle, an infallible device for the diagnosis of disease. Dr. Abrams
+does not have to see the patient; all he has to have is a drop of blood
+on a piece of white blotting paper, and he sits in his laboratory and
+tells all about it,<a name="vol_i_page_192" id="vol_i_page_192"></a> and somewhere several thousand miles away&mdash;in
+Toronto or Boston or New Orleans&mdash;a surgeon operates and finds what he
+has been told is there!</p>
+
+<p>And that is only the beginning of the wonder; because, says Abrams, if
+you know the vibration rate of the electrons of germs, you can destroy
+those germs. It used to be a favorite trick of Caruso to tap a glass and
+determine its musical note, and then sing that note at the glass and
+shatter it to bits. It is well known that horses, trotting swiftly on a
+bridge, have sometimes coincided in their step with the vibration of the
+bridge and thus have broken it down. On that same principle this wizard
+of the electron introduces into your body radio-activity of a certain
+rate&mdash;and shall I say that he cures cancer and syphilis and tuberculosis
+of many years standing in a few treatments? I will not say that, because
+you would not and could not believe me. I will content myself with
+telling what my wife and I have been watching, twice a day for the past
+twelve days.</p>
+
+<p>The scene is a laboratory, with rows of raised seats at one side for the
+physicians who attend the clinic. There is a table, with the instruments
+of measurement, and Dr. Abrams sits beside it, and before him stands a
+young man stripped to the waist. The doctor is tapping upon the abdomen
+of this man, and listening to the sounds. You will find this the
+weirdest part of the whole procedure, for you will naturally assume that
+this young man is being examined, and will be dazed when some one
+explains that the patient is in Toronto or Boston or New Orleans, and
+that this young man's body is the instrument which the doctor uses in
+the determining of the vibration rates of the patient's blood. Dr.
+Abrams tried numerous instruments, but has been able to find nothing so
+sensitive to electronic activity as a human body. He explains to his
+classes that the spinal cord is composed of millions of nerve fibres of
+different vibration rates; hence a certain rate communicated to the
+body, is automatically sorted out, and appears on a certain precise spot
+of the body in the form of increased activity, increased blood pressure
+in the cells, and hence what all physicians know as a "dull area," which
+can be discovered by what is known as "percussion," a tapping with a
+finger. To map out these areas is merely a matter of long and patient
+experiment; and Abrams has been studying this subject for some twenty
+years&mdash;he is author of<a name="vol_i_page_193" id="vol_i_page_193"></a> a text-book on what is known as the "reactions
+of Abrams." So now he provides the world with a series of maps of the
+human body; and he sits in front of his "subject," and his assistant
+places a specimen of blood in a little electrically connected box, and
+sets the rheostat at some vibration number&mdash;say fifty&mdash;and Dr. Abrams
+taps on a certain square inch of the abdomen of his "subject," and
+announces the dread word "cancer." Then he places the electrode on
+another part of the "subject's" body, and taps some more, and announces
+that it is cancer of the small intestine, left side; some more tapping,
+and he announces that its intensity is twelve ohms, which is severe; and
+pretty soon there is speeding a telegram to the physician who has sent
+this blood specimen, telling him these facts, and prescribing a certain
+vibration rate upon the "oscilloclast," the instrument of radio-activity
+which Dr. Abrams has devised.</p>
+
+<p>Now, you watch this thing for an hour or two, and you say to yourself:
+"Here is either the greatest magician in the history of mankind, or else
+the greatest maniac." You may have come prepared for some kind of fraud,
+but you soon dismiss that, for you realize that this man is desperately
+in earnest about what he is doing, and so are all the physicians who
+watch him. So you seek refuge in the thought that he must be deluding
+himself and them, perhaps unconsciously. But you talk with these men,
+and discover that they have come from all over the country, and always
+for one reason&mdash;they had sent blood specimens to Abrams, and had found
+that he never made a mistake; he told them more from a few drops of the
+patient's blood than they themselves had been able to find out from the
+whole patient. And then into the clinic come the doctor's own
+patients&mdash;I must have heard sixty or eighty of them tell their story and
+many of them have been lifted from the grave. People ten years blind
+from syphilis who can see; people operated on several times for cancer
+and given up for dying; people with tumors on the brain, or with one
+lung gone from tuberculosis. It is literally a fact that when you have
+sat in Abrams' clinic for a week, all disease loses its terrors.</p>
+
+<p>This, you see, is really the mastery of life. If we can measure and
+control the minute universe of the electron and the atom, we have
+touched the ultimate source of our bodily life. I might take chapters of
+this book to tell you of the strange experiments I have seen in this
+clinic&mdash;showing you, for instance, how these vibrations respond to
+thought, how<a name="vol_i_page_194" id="vol_i_page_194"></a> by denying to himself the disease the patient can for a
+few moments cancel in his body the activity of the harmful germs;
+showing how the reactions differ in the different sexes and at different
+ages, and how they respond to different colors and different drugs.
+Abrams' method has revealed the secret of such efficacy as drugs
+possess&mdash;their work is done by their radio-activity, and not by their
+chemical properties. Also the problem of vaccination has been
+solved&mdash;for Abrams has discovered a dread new disease, which is bovine
+syphilis, originally caused in cattle by human inoculation, and now
+reintroduced in the human being by vaccination, and becoming the agent
+which prepares the soil of the body for such disorders as tuberculosis
+and cancer. And it appears that we can all be rendered immune to these
+diseases, by a few electronic vibrations, introduced into our bodies in
+childhood; so is opened up to our eyes a wonderful vision of a new race,
+purified and made fit for life. So here at last is science justified of
+her optimism, and our faith in human destiny forever vindicated. Take my
+advice, whoever you may be that are suffering, and find out about this
+new work and help to make it known to the world.</p>
+
+<p>There are many romances of medical science, some of them fascinating as
+murder mysteries and big game hunting. Turn to McMasters' "History of
+the People of the United States" and read his account of the terrible
+epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia a hundred years ago; I have
+already referred to the weird and incredible things the people did in
+their effort to ward off this plague&mdash;sponges of vinegar under their
+noses and "fever fires" burning in the streets; and then a mosquito
+would fly up and bite them, and in a few hours they would be dead! Or
+what could be stranger than the tracing of the bubonic plague, which has
+cost literally billions of human lives, to a parasite in the blood of
+fleas which live on the bodies of rats! Or what could be more unexpected
+than the tracing of our rheumatic aches and twinges to the root canals
+of the teeth!</p>
+
+<p>One of the common ailments which afflict poor humanity is rheumatism, a
+cause of endless suffering. It was supposed to be due to damp climate
+and exposure, and this is true to a certain extent, in the same way that
+colds are due to exposure. But the investigators realized that there
+must be some bodily condition rendering one susceptible, and they set to
+work to trace this condition down. The pains of rheumatism are caused by
+uric acid settling in the joints<a name="vol_i_page_195" id="vol_i_page_195"></a> of the body. What causes the uric
+acid? Well, there is uric acid in red meat, so let us forbid rheumatic
+people to eat it! But this is overlooking the fact that the human body
+itself is a uric acid factory; and also the fact that uric acid taken
+into the stomach may not remain uric acid by the time it gets to the
+blood-stream. We know that you may eat a great deal of fruit acid
+without necessarily making acid blood. On the other hand, you can make
+acid blood by eating a lot of sugar! So you see it isn't as simple as it
+sounds.</p>
+
+<p>Rheumatism has been traced to its lair, which is found to be the roots
+of the teeth. Here is a part of the body difficult to get at, and as a
+consequence of bad diet and unwholesome ways of living, infections will
+start there, and pus sacs be formed, and the poisons absorbed into the
+blood-stream and distributed through the body. The first thought is to
+draw the infected teeth; but that is a serious matter, because you need
+your teeth to chew your food. So the dentist has to go through a
+complicated process of opening up the tooth and cleaning out the root
+canals, and treating the infected spots at the roots. Then he has to
+fill the tooth all the way down to the roots, leaving no place for
+infection to gather. This, of course, takes time and costs money, and is
+one more illustration of the fact that there is one health law for the
+rich and another health law for the poor.</p>
+
+<p>All the time that I write these chapters about health I feel guilty. I
+know that the wholesome food I recommend costs money, and I know that
+surgery and dentistry cost money&mdash;yes, even sunlight and fresh air and
+recreation; even a fast, because you have to rest while you take it, and
+you have to have a roof over your head, and warmth in winter time, and
+somebody to wait upon you when you are weak. I know that for a great
+many of the people who read what I write, all these things are
+impossible of attainment; I know that for the great majority of the
+common people the benefits of science do not exist. Science discovers
+how to prevent disease, but the discoveries are not applied, because the
+profit system controls the world, and the profit system wants the labor
+of the poor, regardless of what happens to their health. If the people
+fall ill, they are thrown upon the scrap heap, and the profit system
+finds others to take their place.<a name="vol_i_page_196" id="vol_i_page_196"></a></p>
+
+<p>Take, for example, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a germ infection, but
+it practically never gets hold upon a human body except when the body is
+reduced by undernourishment and lack of fresh air. Tuberculosis,
+therefore, is a disease of slums and jails. It is definitely and
+indisputably a disease of poverty. It could be wiped off the face of the
+earth in a single generation; and the same is true of typhus and
+typhoid. There is another whole host of ailments which could be wiped
+out by measures of public hygiene, plus education. This includes all the
+infant diseases, and the deadly venereal diseases. But the profit system
+stands in the way; and so, in these closing paragraphs of this Book of
+the Body, I say that there is one disease which is the deadliest of all,
+and the source of all others, and that disease is poverty.</p>
+
+<p>I know a certain physician to the rich, who is an honest and
+conscientious man. He said, "I loath my work. I am wasting my time. I am
+called in by these fat, over-fed rich people in their leisure class
+hotels, and what am I to say to them? Shall I say to them, 'You are
+living an abnormal life, and you can never be well until you cut out
+root and branch all your habits of self indulgence which are destroying
+you?' But no, I can't say that&mdash;not one time in a thousand. I am
+expected to be polite and serious, and to listen to them while they tell
+the long tiresome story of their symptoms, and I have to encourage them,
+and give them some temporary device that will remove some of the
+symptoms of their trouble."</p>
+
+<p>And what should one say to this honest physician? Should one tell him to
+go and be a physician to the poor? Would he be any happier there? He
+could tell the poor the causes of their diseases, and they would listen
+patiently&mdash;they are trained to listen, and to accept what they are told.
+Here is a girl living in an inside bedroom in a tenement, and working
+ten or eleven hours a day in an unventilated factory, and she is ill
+with tuberculosis. The physician tells her that she needs plenty of
+fresh air and rest, and a lot of eggs and milk in her diet. He tells her
+that, and he knows that she has as much chance of carrying out his
+orders as of flying to the moon. Or maybe he comes upon a typhoid
+epidemic, and discovers, as happened to a friend of mine in Chicago,
+that there is defective plumbing in some houses owned by the political
+leader of the district. Or maybe it is a case<a name="vol_i_page_197" id="vol_i_page_197"></a> of venereal disease, in a
+young man who was drafted into the army and turned loose amid the joys
+of Paris. Maybe it is just a commonplace, every-day story of a room full
+of school children, 22 per cent of them undernourished, as is the case
+in New York City, and the parents out of work a part of the time, and
+with no possibility in their lives of ever earning enough to feed the
+children properly. When you confront these universal facts of our
+present social order, you realize that the problem of disease is not
+merely a problem of the body, but is a problem of the mind as well; a
+problem of politics and religion and philosophy, of the whole way of
+thinking of the so-called civilized world. A book of health which did
+not point out these facts would be, not a book of health, but a book of
+sham.</p>
+
+<p>But meantime, while we are trying to change the world's ideas, we have
+to live, and we can do our work better if we keep as well as possible. I
+have tried to point out the way; it is, as you can see, a matter in part
+of the body and in part of the mind. All the bodily régime here laid out
+has its basis in mental habits; all wise and wholesome ways of life can,
+at the age when our minds are plastic, be made into "second
+nature"&mdash;things which we do automatically, without effort or temptation
+to do otherwise. This is the real secret of true happiness in the
+conduct of our personal lives; to acquire self-control, to rule our
+desires and our passions, not harshly and spasmodically, but serenely,
+as one drives a car which he thoroughly understands. It is in vain that
+we preach freedom to men who have not this self-mastery; as the poet
+tell us: "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves of their own
+compulsion." And of all the personal possessions which man can attain on
+this earth, the most precious is the one of a sound mind controlling a
+sound body. I close this book by quoting some verses written by Sir
+Henry Wotton three hundred years ago, which I have all my life
+considered one of the noblest pieces of poetry in our heritage:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry">
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">How happy is he born and taught</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">That serveth not another's will;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Whose armour is his honest thought</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">And simple truth his utmost skill!<a name="vol_i_page_198" id="vol_i_page_198"></a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Whose passions not his masters are,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Whose soul is still prepared for death,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Not tied unto the world with care</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of public fame, or private breath.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Who envies none that chance doth raise</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Or vice; who never understood</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">How deepest wounds are given by praise;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nor rules of state, but rules of good:</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Who hath his life from rumours freed,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Whose conscience is his strong retreat;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Whose state can neither flatterers feed,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nor ruin make accusers great:</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Who God doth late and early pray</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">More of His grace than gifts to lend;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">And entertains the harmless day</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">With a well-chosen book or friend;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">&mdash;This man is freed from servile bands</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Lord of himself, though not of lands;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">And having nothing, yet hath all.</span></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><a name="vol_i_page_199" id="vol_i_page_199"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="vol_i_page_200" id="vol_i_page_200"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="INDEX_VOL_I" id="INDEX_VOL_I"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+<p class="cb"><a href="#vol_i_A">A</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_B">B</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_C">C</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_D">D</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_E">E</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_F">F</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_G">G</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_H">H</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_I">I</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_J">J</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_K">K</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_L">L</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_M">M</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_N">N</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_O">O</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_P">P</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_Q">Q</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_R">R</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_S">S</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_T">T</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_U">U</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_V">V</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_W">W</a>,
+<a href="#vol_i_Y">Y</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="nind">
+<a name="vol_i_A" id="vol_i_A"></a>Abrams, Dr., 1<a href="#vol_i_page_090">90</a><br />
+Adultery, <a href="#vol_i_page_033">33</a><br />
+Adventist, <a href="#vol_i_page_099">99</a><br />
+Agriculture, <a href="#vol_i_page_025">25</a><br />
+Alcohol, <a href="#vol_i_page_151">151</a><br />
+Anti-bodies, <a href="#vol_i_page_188">188</a><br />
+Antinomies, <a href="#vol_i_page_058">58</a><br />
+Appendix, <a href="#vol_i_page_186">186</a><br />
+Arnold, <a href="#vol_i_page_042">42</a><br />
+Arrhenius, <a href="#vol_i_page_101">101</a><br />
+Automatic writing, <a href="#vol_i_page_067">67</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_B" id="vol_i_B"></a>Bairnsfather, <a href="#vol_i_page_029">29</a><br />
+Bathing, <a href="#vol_i_page_162">162</a><br />
+Battle Creek Sanitarium, <a href="#vol_i_page_118">118</a><br />
+Beauchamp, <a href="#vol_i_page_070">70</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_085">85</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_089">89</a><br />
+Beethoven, <a href="#vol_i_page_047">47</a><br />
+Bergson, <a href="#vol_i_page_017">17</a><br />
+Beri-beri, <a href="#vol_i_page_128">128</a><br />
+Bible, <a href="#vol_i_page_077">77</a><br />
+Bio-chemist, <a href="#vol_i_page_059">59</a><br />
+Black bread, <a href="#vol_i_page_128">128</a><br />
+Blood, <a href="#vol_i_page_106">106</a><br />
+Body, <a href="#vol_i_page_053">53</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_105">105</a><br />
+Booth, <a href="#vol_i_page_058">58</a><br />
+Bourne, <a href="#vol_i_page_069">69</a><br />
+Bruce, <a href="#vol_i_page_071">71</a><br />
+Bury, <a href="#vol_i_page_015">15</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_C" id="vol_i_C"></a>Caffein, <a href="#vol_i_page_150">150</a><br />
+Calories, <a href="#vol_i_page_135">135</a><br />
+Candy, <a href="#vol_i_page_137">137</a><br />
+Capitalist, <a href="#vol_i_page_100">100</a><br />
+Carbohydrates, <a href="#vol_i_page_124">124</a><br />
+Carbon monoxide, <a href="#vol_i_page_157">157</a><br />
+Children, <a href="#vol_i_page_140">140</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_180">180</a><br />
+Chiropractors, <a href="#vol_i_page_174">174</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_184">184</a><br />
+Chittenden, <a href="#vol_i_page_136">136</a><br />
+Christian Scientists, <a href="#vol_i_page_005">5</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_065">65</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_105">105</a><br />
+Clothing, <a href="#vol_i_page_160">160</a><br />
+Coffee, <a href="#vol_i_page_151">151</a><br />
+Colds, <a href="#vol_i_page_183">183</a><br />
+Commandments, <a href="#vol_i_page_032">32</a><br />
+Communist, <a href="#vol_i_page_099">99</a><br />
+Complete fast, <a href="#vol_i_page_172">172</a><br />
+Comstock, <a href="#vol_i_page_025">25</a><br />
+Conduct, <a href="#vol_i_page_042">42</a><br />
+Consciousness, <a href="#vol_i_page_056">56</a><br />
+Constipation, <a href="#vol_i_page_185">185</a><br />
+Cooking, <a href="#vol_i_page_129">129</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_142">142</a><br />
+Crawford, <a href="#vol_i_page_088">88</a><br />
+Cyrus, <a href="#vol_i_page_164">164</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_D" id="vol_i_D"></a>Dandruff, <a href="#vol_i_page_109">109</a><br />
+Dante, <a href="#vol_i_page_077">77</a><br />
+Darwin, <a href="#vol_i_page_017">17</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_046">46</a><br />
+Dentistry, <a href="#vol_i_page_126">126</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_190">190</a><br />
+Determinists, <a href="#vol_i_page_057">57</a><br />
+Diet, <a href="#vol_i_page_131">131</a><br />
+Diet Standards, <a href="#vol_i_page_135">135</a><br />
+Digestion, <a href="#vol_i_page_145">145</a><br />
+Diphtheria, <a href="#vol_i_page_188">188</a><br />
+Diseases, <a href="#vol_i_page_107">107</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_117">117</a><br />
+Dogs, <a href="#vol_i_page_017">17</a><br />
+Draft, <a href="#vol_i_page_182">182</a><br />
+Drugs, <a href="#vol_i_page_118">118</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_150">150</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_185">185</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_189">189</a><br />
+Dubb, <a href="#vol_i_page_063">63</a><br />
+Duncan, <a href="#vol_i_page_102">102</a><br />
+Dyspepsia, <a href="#vol_i_page_117">117</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_E" id="vol_i_E"></a>Eddy, <a href="#vol_i_page_065">65</a><br />
+Edison, <a href="#vol_i_page_045">45</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_086">86</a><br />
+Einstein, <a href="#vol_i_page_101">101</a><br />
+Elberfeld horses, <a href="#vol_i_page_068">68</a><br />
+Evolution, <a href="#vol_i_page_008">8</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_017">17</a><br />
+Exercise, <a href="#vol_i_page_163">163</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_F" id="vol_i_F"></a>Faith, <a href="#vol_i_page_009">9</a><br />
+Faith curists, <a href="#vol_i_page_065">65</a><br />
+Fast cure, <a href="#vol_i_page_171">171</a><br />
+Fatness, <a href="#vol_i_page_139">139</a><br />
+Fats, <a href="#vol_i_page_124">124</a><br />
+Fever, <a href="#vol_i_page_108">108</a><br />
+Fireless cooker, <a href="#vol_i_page_142">142</a><br />
+Fireplace, <a href="#vol_i_page_157">157</a><br />
+Fisher, <a href="#vol_i_page_136">136</a><br />
+Fletcher, <a href="#vol_i_page_119">119</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_145">145</a><br />
+Food filter, <a href="#vol_i_page_145">145</a><br />
+Fourth dimension, <a href="#vol_i_page_005">5</a><br />
+Free thinker, <a href="#vol_i_page_015">15</a><br />
+Freud, 71<a name="vol_i_page_201" id="vol_i_page_201"></a><br />
+Fruit fast, <a href="#vol_i_page_175">175</a><br />
+Frugality, <a href="#vol_i_page_038">38</a><br />
+Frying-pan, <a href="#vol_i_page_129">129</a><br />
+Furnace, <a href="#vol_i_page_157">157</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_G" id="vol_i_G"></a>Gargles, <a href="#vol_i_page_184">184</a><br />
+Gastronomic art, <a href="#vol_i_page_148">148</a><br />
+Genius, <a href="#vol_i_page_049">49</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_060">60</a><br />
+George, <a href="#vol_i_page_018">18</a><br />
+Germs, <a href="#vol_i_page_183">183</a><br />
+God, <a href="#vol_i_page_022">22</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_050">50</a><br />
+Goethe, <a href="#vol_i_page_047">47</a><br />
+Golden rule, <a href="#vol_i_page_051">51</a><br />
+Greens, <a href="#vol_i_page_132">132</a><br />
+Gymnastic work, <a href="#vol_i_page_166">166</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_H" id="vol_i_H"></a>Hair, <a href="#vol_i_page_109">109</a><br />
+Hallucinations, <a href="#vol_i_page_075">75</a><br />
+Hamlet, <a href="#vol_i_page_048">48</a><br />
+Happiness, <a href="#vol_i_page_009">9</a><br />
+Harrison, <a href="#vol_i_page_006">6</a><br />
+Hats, <a href="#vol_i_page_110">110</a><br />
+Headache, <a href="#vol_i_page_122">122</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_150">150</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_184">184</a><br />
+Health cranks, <a href="#vol_i_page_182">182</a><br />
+Heart, <a href="#vol_i_page_108">108</a><br />
+Houdin, <a href="#vol_i_page_093">93</a><br />
+Hugo, <a href="#vol_i_page_048">48</a><br />
+Huxley, <a href="#vol_i_page_017">17</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_062">62</a><br />
+Hyslop, <a href="#vol_i_page_082">82</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_I" id="vol_i_I"></a>Iceberg, <a href="#vol_i_page_061">61</a><br />
+Infanticide, <a href="#vol_i_page_028">28</a><br />
+Instincts, <a href="#vol_i_page_134">134</a><br />
+Intelligence, <a href="#vol_i_page_022">22</a><br />
+Immortality, <a href="#vol_i_page_079">79</a><br />
+Irwin, Will, <a href="#vol_i_page_086">86</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_J" id="vol_i_J"></a>James, <a href="#vol_i_page_030">30</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_059">59</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_060">60</a><br />
+Jesus, <a href="#vol_i_page_047">47</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_048">48</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_050">50</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_051">51</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_076">76</a><br />
+John Barleycorn, <a href="#vol_i_page_152">152</a><br />
+Johnson, <a href="#vol_i_page_058">58</a><br />
+Jonson, <a href="#vol_i_page_044">44</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_K" id="vol_i_K"></a>Kant, Immanuel, <a href="#vol_i_page_004">4</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_047">47</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_051">51</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_058">58</a><br />
+Kellogg, Doctor, <a href="#vol_i_page_118">118</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_164">164</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_186">186</a><br />
+Kilmer, Joyce, <a href="#vol_i_page_044">44</a><br />
+Knowledge, <a href="#vol_i_page_094">94</a><br />
+Kropotkin, <a href="#vol_i_page_018">18</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_026">26</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_L" id="vol_i_L"></a>Langley, <a href="#vol_i_page_074">74</a><br />
+Lankester, Prof. E. Ray, <a href="#vol_i_page_023">23</a><br />
+Laxatives, <a href="#vol_i_page_175">175</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_185">185</a><br />
+Leanness, <a href="#vol_i_page_139">139</a><br />
+Leonardo, <a href="#vol_i_page_047">47</a><br />
+Liébault, <a href="#vol_i_page_064">64</a><br />
+Life, <a href="#vol_i_page_003">3</a><br />
+Lily Dale, <a href="#vol_i_page_086">86</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_090">90</a><br />
+Lincoln, <a href="#vol_i_page_047">47</a><br />
+Locomotor ataxia, <a href="#vol_i_page_180">180</a><br />
+Lodge, Sir Oliver, <a href="#vol_i_page_083">83</a><br />
+Lodge, Raymond, <a href="#vol_i_page_087">87</a><br />
+London, Jack, <a href="#vol_i_page_152">152</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_M" id="vol_i_M"></a>Macaulay, <a href="#vol_i_page_039">39</a><br />
+MacDowell, Edward, <a href="#vol_i_page_056">56</a><br />
+MacFadden, <a href="#vol_i_page_178">178</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_186">186</a><br />
+MacSwiney, <a href="#vol_i_page_170">170</a><br />
+Maeterlinck, Maurice, <a href="#vol_i_page_068">68</a><br />
+Malaria, <a href="#vol_i_page_189">189</a><br />
+Malthusian law, <a href="#vol_i_page_025">25</a><br />
+Marquesans, <a href="#vol_i_page_113">113</a><br />
+Materializations, <a href="#vol_i_page_088">88</a><br />
+Matter, <a href="#vol_i_page_003">3</a><br />
+Meal-hour, <a href="#vol_i_page_147">147</a><br />
+Measurement of Intelligence, Terman's, <a href="#vol_i_page_095">95</a><br />
+Meat, <a href="#vol_i_page_121">121</a><br />
+Medical science, <a href="#vol_i_page_105">105</a><br />
+Mesmer, <a href="#vol_i_page_063">63</a><br />
+Messina earthquake, <a href="#vol_i_page_170">170</a><br />
+Metaphysics, <a href="#vol_i_page_004">4</a><br />
+Metchnikoff, <a href="#vol_i_page_138">138</a><br />
+Milk diet, <a href="#vol_i_page_128">128</a><br />
+Moderation, <a href="#vol_i_page_039">39</a><br />
+Monism, <a href="#vol_i_page_003">3</a><br />
+Morality, <a href="#vol_i_page_021">21</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_031">31</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_034">34</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_050">50</a><br />
+Morgan, <a href="#vol_i_page_045">45</a><br />
+Mormon, <a href="#vol_i_page_099">99</a><br />
+Mozart, <a href="#vol_i_page_068">68</a><br />
+Multiple personality, <a href="#vol_i_page_069">69</a><br />
+Mutation, <a href="#vol_i_page_017">17</a><br />
+Myers, <a href="#vol_i_page_049">49</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_N" id="vol_i_N"></a>Nature, <a href="#vol_i_page_021">21</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_024">24</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_029">29</a><br />
+Nature cure, <a href="#vol_i_page_160">160</a><br />
+Nature Woman, <a href="#vol_i_page_176">176</a><br />
+Neighbor, <a href="#vol_i_page_050">50</a><br />
+Newcomb, Simon, <a href="#vol_i_page_101">101</a><br />
+Newton, 47<a name="vol_i_page_202" id="vol_i_page_202"></a><br />
+New York Times, <a href="#vol_i_page_169">169</a><br />
+Nicotine, <a href="#vol_i_page_154">154</a><br />
+Nietzsche, <a href="#vol_i_page_017">17</a><br />
+Novels, <a href="#vol_i_page_164">164</a><br />
+Nutrition of Man, <a href="#vol_i_page_136">136</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_O" id="vol_i_O"></a>Oil stoves, <a href="#vol_i_page_158">158</a><br />
+Opsonins, <a href="#vol_i_page_112">112</a><br />
+Optimism, <a href="#vol_i_page_042">42</a><br />
+Osteopaths, <a href="#vol_i_page_184">184</a><br />
+Ouija, <a href="#vol_i_page_067">67</a><br />
+Overeating, <a href="#vol_i_page_134">134</a><br />
+Oxygen, <a href="#vol_i_page_156">156</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_P" id="vol_i_P"></a>Patrick, Dr., <a href="#vol_i_page_167">167</a><br />
+Pavlov, <a href="#vol_i_page_148">148</a><br />
+Phantasms, <a href="#vol_i_page_075">75</a><br />
+Phillips, David Graham, <a href="#vol_i_page_180">180</a><br />
+Piper, Mrs., <a href="#vol_i_page_068">68</a><br />
+Play, <a href="#vol_i_page_165">165</a><br />
+Poisons, <a href="#vol_i_page_146">146</a><br />
+Pork, <a href="#vol_i_page_142">142</a><br />
+Porter, Dr., <a href="#vol_i_page_178">178</a><br />
+Positivists, <a href="#vol_i_page_006">6</a><br />
+Poverty, <a href="#vol_i_page_194">194</a><br />
+Prices of food, <a href="#vol_i_page_141">141</a><br />
+Prince, Dr. Morton, <a href="#vol_i_page_070">70</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_089">89</a><br />
+Profits of Religion, <a href="#vol_i_page_078">78</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_099">99</a><br />
+Proteins, <a href="#vol_i_page_123">123</a><br />
+Prunes, <a href="#vol_i_page_127">127</a><br />
+Psychology, <a href="#vol_i_page_096">96</a><br />
+Psychotherapy, <a href="#vol_i_page_064">64</a><br />
+Puritans, <a href="#vol_i_page_039">39</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_Q" id="vol_i_Q"></a>Quackenbos, <a href="#vol_i_page_064">64</a><br />
+Quinine, <a href="#vol_i_page_188">188</a><br />
+Quixote, <a href="#vol_i_page_048">48</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_R" id="vol_i_R"></a>Raisins, <a href="#vol_i_page_127">127</a><br />
+Raw food, <a href="#vol_i_page_119">119</a><br />
+Read, Alfred Baker, <a href="#vol_i_page_028">28</a><br />
+Reason, <a href="#vol_i_page_013">13</a><br />
+Refined foods, <a href="#vol_i_page_126">126</a><br />
+Relaxation, <a href="#vol_i_page_167">167</a><br />
+Religion, <a href="#vol_i_page_032">32</a><br />
+Reincarnation, <a href="#vol_i_page_076">76</a><br />
+Rest, <a href="#vol_i_page_146">146</a><br />
+Revelation, <a href="#vol_i_page_012">12</a><br />
+Rheumatism, <a href="#vol_i_page_193">193</a><br />
+Rice, <a href="#vol_i_page_128">128</a><br />
+Rockefeller, <a href="#vol_i_page_045">45</a><br />
+Roosevelt, Theodore, <a href="#vol_i_page_025">25</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_045">45</a><br />
+Rugs, <a href="#vol_i_page_159">159</a><br />
+Rupture, <a href="#vol_i_page_187">187</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_S" id="vol_i_S"></a>Sabbath, <a href="#vol_i_page_099">99</a><br />
+Salisbury, <a href="#vol_i_page_120">120</a><br />
+Sally, <a href="#vol_i_page_070">70</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_085">85</a><br />
+Salt, <a href="#vol_i_page_143">143</a><br />
+Meats, salted, <a href="#vol_i_page_143">143</a><br />
+Salts, <a href="#vol_i_page_124">124</a><br />
+Salvarsan, <a href="#vol_i_page_189">189</a><br />
+Savages, <a href="#vol_i_page_135">135</a><br />
+Savage, Rev. Minot J., <a href="#vol_i_page_074">74</a><br />
+Schrenck-Notzing, <a href="#vol_i_page_088">88</a><br />
+Scurvy, <a href="#vol_i_page_128">128</a><br />
+Seneca, <a href="#vol_i_page_098">98</a><br />
+Shakespeare, <a href="#vol_i_page_047">47</a><br />
+Shelley, <a href="#vol_i_page_045">45</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_048">48</a><br />
+Sleep, <a href="#vol_i_page_162">162</a><br />
+Sleeping sickness, <a href="#vol_i_page_113">113</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_173">173</a><br />
+Smokers, <a href="#vol_i_page_153">153</a><br />
+Socialism, <a href="#vol_i_page_167">167</a><br />
+Sophocles, <a href="#vol_i_page_087">87</a><br />
+Sore throat, <a href="#vol_i_page_183">183</a><br />
+Spencer, <a href="#vol_i_page_008">8</a><br />
+Spinoza, <a href="#vol_i_page_079">79</a><br />
+Spirits, <a href="#vol_i_page_082">82</a><br />
+Spiritualists, <a href="#vol_i_page_086">86</a><br />
+Starch, <a href="#vol_i_page_122">122</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_124">124</a><br />
+Stealing, <a href="#vol_i_page_033">33</a><br />
+Steam heat, <a href="#vol_i_page_158">158</a><br />
+Stimulant, <a href="#vol_i_page_149">149</a><br />
+Stock Exchange, <a href="#vol_i_page_158">158</a><br />
+Stomach, <a href="#vol_i_page_105">105</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_138">138</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_148">148</a><br />
+Style, <a href="#vol_i_page_161">161</a><br />
+Subconscious mind, <a href="#vol_i_page_061">61</a><br />
+Sunday code, <a href="#vol_i_page_040">40</a><br />
+Sugar, <a href="#vol_i_page_126">126</a><br />
+Surgery, <a href="#vol_i_page_186">186</a><br />
+Survival, <a href="#vol_i_page_081">81</a><br />
+Survival of the fittest, <a href="#vol_i_page_022">22</a><br />
+Syndicalism, <a href="#vol_i_page_015">15</a><br />
+Syphilis, <a href="#vol_i_page_189">189</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_T" id="vol_i_T"></a>Tanner, Dr., <a href="#vol_i_page_169">169</a><br />
+Tariff, <a href="#vol_i_page_037">37</a><br />
+Tea, <a href="#vol_i_page_151">151</a><br />
+Teeth, <a href="#vol_i_page_127">127</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_193">193</a><br />
+Telepathy, <a href="#vol_i_page_067">67</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_075">75</a><br />
+Theosophists, 76<a name="vol_i_page_203" id="vol_i_page_203"></a><br />
+Tight shoes, <a href="#vol_i_page_161">161</a><br />
+Tobacco, <a href="#vol_i_page_153">153</a><br />
+Tolstoi, <a href="#vol_i_page_049">49</a><br />
+Tonsilitis, <a href="#vol_i_page_107">107</a><br />
+Trance, <a href="#vol_i_page_063">63</a><br />
+Tropism, <a href="#vol_i_page_054">54</a><br />
+Tuberculosis, <a href="#vol_i_page_112">112</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_120">120</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_179">179</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_194">194</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_195">195</a><br />
+Twain, Mark, <a href="#vol_i_page_093">93</a><br />
+Typhoid, <a href="#vol_i_page_112">112</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_188">188</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_192">192</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_U" id="vol_i_U"></a>Uranus, <a href="#vol_i_page_092">92</a><br />
+Uric acid, <a href="#vol_i_page_193">193</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_V" id="vol_i_V"></a>Vaccination, <a href="#vol_i_page_187">187</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_189">189</a><br />
+Vaccines, <a href="#vol_i_page_188">188</a><br />
+Vegetarian, <a href="#vol_i_page_121">121</a><br />
+Vitamines, <a href="#vol_i_page_127">127</a>, <a href="#vol_i_page_142">142</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_W" id="vol_i_W"></a>Wallace, <a href="#vol_i_page_046">46</a><br />
+Wells, H. G., <a href="#vol_i_page_022">22</a><br />
+Williams, Dr. Henry Smith, <a href="#vol_i_page_102">102</a><br />
+Worth, Patience, <a href="#vol_i_page_084">84</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="vol_i_Y" id="vol_i_Y"></a>Yellow fever, <a href="#vol_i_page_188">188</a><br />
+Yogis, <a href="#vol_i_page_090">90</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><a name="VOLUME_II" id="VOLUME_II"></a></p>
+
+<h1>THE BOOK OF LIFE</h1>
+
+<h2>VOLUME TWO: LOVE AND SOCIETY</h2>
+
+<p class="cb">
+<i>To</i><br />
+<br />
+<span class="eng">Kate Crane Gartz</span><br />
+<br />
+in acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a<br />
+better world, and her fidelity to those<br />
+who struggle to achieve it.<br />
+</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a name="CONTENTS_VOL_II" id="CONTENTS_VOL_II"></a><big>CONTENTS</big></th></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" >&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center" colspan="2"><a href="#PART_THREE">PART THREE: THE BOOK OF LOVE</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" colspan="2"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">Chapter XXVIII.</a></span>   <span class="smcap">The Reality of Marriage</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_003">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world,<br />
+and their relation to the ideal of monogamous love.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">Chapter XXIX.</a></span>   <span class="smcap">The Development of Marriage</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_008">8</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its history,<br />
+the stages of its development in human society.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">Chapter XXX.</a></span>    <span class="smcap">Sex and Young America</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_015">15</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect<br />
+the future generation.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI">Chapter XXXI.</a></span>    <span class="smcap">Sex and the "smart Set"</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_023">23</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Portrays the moral customs of those who set the fashion<br />
+in our present-day world.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII">Chapter XXXII.</a></span>    <span class="smcap">Sex and the Poor</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_029">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and<br />
+the diseases which result from it.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIII">Chapter XXXIII.</a></span>    <span class="smcap">Sex and Nature</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_033">33</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of<br />
+natural or physical disharmony.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIV">Chapter XXXIV.</a></span>   <span class="smcap">Love and Economics</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_036">36</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due<br />
+to the displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXV">Chapter XXXV.</a></span>   <span class="smcap">Marriage and Money</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_040">40</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher<br />
+form of prostitution known as the "marriage of convenience."</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVI">Chapter XXXVI.</a></span>   <span class="smcap">Love Versus Lust</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_046">46</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it<br />
+should be followed and when repressed.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVII">Chapter XXXVII.</a> Celibacy Versus Chastity</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_051">51</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; The ideal of the repression of the sex-impulse, as against<br />
+the ideal of its guidance and cultivation.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVIII">Chapter XXXVIII.</a> The Defense of Love</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_055">55</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses passionate love, its sanction, its place in life,<br />
+and its preservation in marriage.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIX">Chapter XXXIX.</a> Birth Control</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_060">60</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the<br />
+greatest of man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's<br />
+enslavement, and placing the keys of life in his hands.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XL">Chapter XL.</a> Early Marriage</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_066">66</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the<br />
+duty of parents in respect to them.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLI">Chapter XLI.</a> The Marriage Club</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_071">71</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to<br />
+avoid unhappy marriages.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLII">Chapter XLII.</a> Education for Marriage</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_075">75</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that<br />
+we have the right and the duty to teach it.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIII">Chapter XLIII.</a> The Money Side of Marriage</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_079">79</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of<br />
+matrimony.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIV">Chapter XLIV.</a> The Defense of Monogamy</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_083">83</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should<br />
+endeavor to preserve it.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLV">Chapter XLV.</a> The Problem of Jealousy</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_089">89</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the question, to what extent one person may<br />
+hold another to the pledge of love.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVI">Chapter XLVI.</a> The Problem of Divorce</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_093">93</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and<br />
+one of the means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVII">Chapter XLVII.</a> The Restriction of Divorce</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_097">97</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the circumstances under which society has the<br />
+right to forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" >&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_FOUR">PART FOUR: THE BOOK OF SOCIETY</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" >&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVIII">Chapter XLVIII.</a> The Ego and the World</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_103">103</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant<br />
+and in primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment<br />
+to life.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVIX">Chapter XLVIX.</a> Competition and Co-operation</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and<br />
+the part which selfishness and unselfishness play in the<br />
+development of social life.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_L">Chapter L.</a> Aristocracy and Democracy</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_115">115</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and<br />
+whether there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LI">Chapter LI.</a> Ruling Classes</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained,<br />
+and what sanction it can claim.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LII">Chapter LII.</a> The Process of Social Evolution</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_122">122</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the series of changes through which human<br />
+society has passed.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LIII">Chapter LIII.</a> Industrial Evolution</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_126">126</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Examines the process of evolution in industry and the<br />
+stage which it has so far reached.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LIV">Chapter LIV.</a> The Class Struggle</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_132">132</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses history as a battle-ground between ruling and<br />
+subject classes, and the method and outcome of this<br />
+struggle.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LV">Chapter LV.</a> The Capitalist System</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and<br />
+the effect of this system upon the minds of the workers.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LVI">Chapter LVI.</a> The Capitalist Process</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_142">142</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; How profits are made under the present industrial<br />
+system and what becomes of them.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LVII">Chapter LVII.</a> Hard Times</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_145">145</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing,<br />
+and why abundant production brings distress instead of<br />
+plenty.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LVIII">Chapter LVIII.</a> The Iron Ring</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_148">148</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles production,<br />
+and makes true prosperity impossible.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LIX">Chapter LIX.</a> Foreign Markets</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Considers the efforts of capitalism to save itself by marketing<br />
+its surplus products abroad, and what results from<br />
+these efforts.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LX">Chapter LX.</a> Capitalist War</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_155">155</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Shows how the competition for foreign markets leads<br />
+nations automatically into war.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXI">Chapter LXI.</a> The Possibilities of Production</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_158">158</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Shows how much wealth we could produce if we tried<br />
+and how we proved it when we had to.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXII">Chapter LXII.</a> The Cost of Competition</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_162">162</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine,<br />
+those which are obvious and those which are<br />
+hidden.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXIII">Chapter LXIII.</a> Socialism and Syndicalism</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_166">166</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the<br />
+state, and the idea of its management by the trade unions.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXIV">Chapter LXIV.</a> Communism and Anarchism</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_170">170</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the<br />
+idea of a society without compulsion, and how these<br />
+ideas have fared in Russia.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXV">Chapter LXV.</a> Social Revolution</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_175">175</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; How the great change is coming in different industries,<br />
+and how we may prepare to meet it.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXVI">Chapter LXVI.</a> Confiscation Or Compensation</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_179">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they<br />
+afford to do it, and what will be the price?</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXVII">Chapter LXVII.</a> Expropriating the Expropriators</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_183">183</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its<br />
+chances for success in the United States.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXVIII">Chapter LXVIII.</a> The Problem of the Land</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the land values tax as a means of social readjustment,<br />
+and compares it with other programs.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXIX">Chapter LXIX.</a> The Control of Credit</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of<br />
+industry, and may play in the freeing of industry.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXX">Chapter LXX.</a> The Control of Industry</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_198">198</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses various programs for the change from industrial<br />
+autocracy to industrial democracy.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXI">Chapter LXXI.</a> The New World</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_202">202</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning<br />
+with its money aspects; the standard wage and its variations.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXII">Chapter LXXII.</a> Agricultural Production</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_206">206</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster<br />
+co-operative farming and co-operative homes.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIII">Chapter LXXIII.</a> Intellectual Production</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_210">210</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses scientific, artistic, and religious activities, as<br />
+a superstructure built upon the foundation of the standard<br />
+wage.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIV">Chapter LXXIV.</a> Mankind Remade</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#vol_ii_page_215">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp; &nbsp; Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what<br />
+happens to these in the new world.</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><a name="vol_ii_page_001" id="vol_ii_page_001"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_THREE" id="PART_THREE"></a>PART THREE<br /><br />
+THE BOOK OF LOVE</h2>
+
+<p><a name="vol_ii_page_002" id="vol_ii_page_002"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="vol_ii_page_003" id="vol_ii_page_003"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII<br /><br />
+THE REALITY OF MARRIAGE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world, and their
+relation to the ideal of monogamous love.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Just as human beings through wrong religious beliefs torture one
+another, and wreck their lives and happiness; just as through wrong
+eating and other physical habits they make disease and misery for
+themselves; just so they suffer and perish for lack of the most
+elementary knowledge concerning the sex relationship. The difference is
+that in the field of religious ideas it is now permissible to impart the
+truth one possesses. If I tell you there is no devil, and that believing
+this will not cause you to suffer in an eternity of sulphur and
+brimstone, no one will be able to burn me at the stake, even though he
+might like to do so. If I advise you that it is not harmful to eat
+beefsteak on Friday, or to eat thoroughly cooked pork any day of the
+week, neither the archbishops nor the rabbis nor the vegetarians will be
+able to lock me in a dungeon. But if I should impart to you the simplest
+and most necessary bit of knowledge concerning the facts of your sex
+life&mdash;things which every man and woman must know if we are to stop
+breeding imbecility and degeneracy in the world&mdash;then I should be
+liable, under federal statutes, to pay a fine of $5,000, and to serve a
+term of five years in a federal penitentiary. Scarcely a week passes
+that I do not receive a letter from someone asking for information about
+such matters; but I dare not answer the letters, because I know there
+are agencies, maintained and paid by religious superstition, employing
+spies to trap people into the breaking of this law.</p>
+
+<p>I shall tell you here as much as I am permitted to tell, in the simplest
+language and the most honest spirit. I believe that human beings are
+meant to be happy on this earth, and to avoid misery and disease. I
+believe that they are given the powers of intelligence in order to seek
+the ways of happiness, and I believe that it is a worthy work to give
+them the knowledge they need in order to find happiness.<a name="vol_ii_page_004" id="vol_ii_page_004"></a></p>
+
+<p>At the outset of this Book of Love we are going to examine the existing
+facts of the sex relationships of men and women in present-day society.
+We shall discover that amid all the false and dishonest thinking of
+mankind, there is nowhere more falsity and dishonesty than here. The
+whole world is a gigantic conspiracy of "hush," and the orthodox and
+respectable of the world are like worshippers of some god, who spend
+their day-time burning incense before the altar, and in the night-time
+steal the sacred jewels and devour the consecrated offerings. These
+worshippers confront you with the question, do you believe in marriage;
+and they make the assumption that the institution of marriage exists, or
+at some time has existed in the world. But if you wish to do any sound
+thinking about this subject, you must get one thing clear at the outset;
+the institution of marriage is an ideal which has been preached and
+taught, but which has never anywhere, in any society, at any stage of
+human progress, actually existed as the general practice of mankind.
+What has existed and still exists is a very different institution, which
+I shall here describe as marriage-plus-prostitution.</p>
+
+<p>By this statement I do not mean to deny that there are many women, and a
+few men, who have been monogamous all their lives; nor that there are
+many couples living together happily in monogamous marriage. What I mean
+is that, considering society as a whole, wherever you find the
+institution of marriage, you also find, co-existent therewith and
+complementary thereto, the institution of prostitution. Of this double
+arrangement one part is recognized, and written into the law; the other
+part is hidden, and prohibited by law; but those who have to do with
+enforcing the law all know that it exists, and practically all of them
+consider it inevitable, and a great many derive income from it. So I
+say: if you believe in marriage-plus-prostitution, that is your right;
+but if marriage is what you believe in, then your task is to consider
+such questions as these: Is marriage a possible thing? Can it ever
+become the sex arrangement of any society? What are the forces which
+have so far prevented it from prevailing, and how can these forces be
+counteracted?</p>
+
+<p>It is my belief that monogamous love is the most desirable of human sex
+relationships, the most fruitful in happiness and spiritual development.
+The laws and institutions of civilized society pretend to defend this
+relationship, but the briefest<a name="vol_ii_page_005" id="vol_ii_page_005"></a> study of the facts will convince anyone
+that these laws and institutions are not really meant to protect
+monogamous love. What they are is a device of the property-holding male
+to secure his property rights to women, and more especially to secure
+himself as to the paternity of his heirs. In primitive society, where
+land and other sources of wealth were held in common, and sex monogamy
+was unknown, there was no way to determine paternity, and no reason for
+doing so. But under the system of private property and class privilege,
+it is necessary for some one man to support a child, if it is to be
+supported; and when a man has fought hard, and robbed hard, and traded
+hard, and acquired wealth, he does not want to spend it in maintaining
+another man's child. That he should let himself be fooled into doing so
+is one of the greatest humiliations his fellowmen can imagine. If you
+read Shakespeare's plays, and look up the meaning of old words, so as to
+understand old witticisms and allusions, you will discover that this was
+the stock jest of Shakespeare's time.</p>
+
+<p>In order to protect himself from such ridicule, the man maintained in
+ancient times his right to kill the faithless woman with cruel tortures.
+He maintains today the right to deprive her of her children, and of all
+share in his property, even though she may have helped to earn it. But
+until quite recent times, the beginning of the revolt of women, there
+was never any corresponding penalty for faithlessness in husbands. Under
+the English law today, the husband may divorce his wife for infidelity,
+but the wife must prove infidelity plus cruelty, and the courts have
+held that the cruelty must consist in knocking her down. While I was in
+England, the highest court rendered a decision that a man who brought
+his mistress to his home and compelled his wife to wait upon her was not
+committing "cruelty" in the meaning of the English law.</p>
+
+<p>This is what is known as the "double standard," and the double standard
+prevails everywhere under the system of marriage-plus-prostitution, and
+proves that capitalist "monogamy" is not a spiritual ideal, but a matter
+of class privilege. It is a breach of honor for the ruling class male to
+tamper with the wife of his friend; it is frequently dangerous for him
+to tamper with the young females of his own class; but it is in general
+practice taken for granted that the young females of lower classes are
+his legitimate prey. In England a man may have a marriage annulled, if
+he can prove that<a name="vol_ii_page_006" id="vol_ii_page_006"></a> the woman he married had what is called a "past"; but
+everybody takes it for granted that the man has had a "past"; it is
+covered by the polite phrase, "sowing his wild oats." Wherever among the
+ruling class you find men bold enough to discuss the facts of the sex
+order they have set up, you find the idea, expressed or implied, that
+this "wild oats" is a necessary and inevitable part of this order, and
+that without it the order would break down. The English philosopher,
+Lecky, making an elaborate study of morals through the ages, speaks of
+the prostitute in the following frank language:</p>
+
+<p>"Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient
+guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless
+happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their
+untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have
+known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble
+form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with
+shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the
+eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."</p>
+
+<p>I invite you to study these sentences and understand them fully.
+Remember that they are the opinion of the most learned historian of sex
+customs who has ever written in English; a man whose authority is
+recognized in our schools, whose books are in every college library.
+William Edward Hartpole Lecky is not in any sense a revolutionist; he is
+a conventional English scholar, an upholder of English law and order and
+patriotism. He is not of my school of thought, but of those who now own
+the world and run it. I quote him, because he tells in plain language
+what kind of world they have made; I invite you to study his words, and
+then judge my statement that the sex arrangement under which we live in
+modern society is not monogamous love, but marriage-plus-prostitution.</p>
+
+<p>It is my hope to point the way to a higher system. I should like to call
+it marriage; but perhaps it would be more precise to call it
+marriage-minus-prostitution. In working it out, we shall have to think
+for ourselves, and discard all formulas. It is obvious that our
+present-day religious creeds, ethical ideals, legal codes, and social
+rewards and punishments have been powerless to protect marriage, or to
+make it the rule in sex relationships. So we shall have to begin at the<a name="vol_ii_page_007" id="vol_ii_page_007"></a>
+beginning and find new reasons for monogamous love, a new basis of
+marriage other than the protection of private property. We shall have to
+inform ourselves as to the fundamental purposes of sex; we shall have to
+ask ourselves: What are the factors which determine rightness and
+wrongness in the sex relationship? What is love, and what ought it to
+be? These questions we shall try to approach without any fixed ideas
+whatever. We shall decide them by the same tests that we have used in
+our thinking about God and immortality, health and disease. We shall
+ask, not what our ancestors believed, not what God teaches us, not what
+the law ordains, not what is "respectable," nor yet what is "advanced,"
+according to the claim of modern sex revolutionists and "free lovers."
+We shall ask ourselves, what are the facts. We shall ask, what can be
+made to work in practice, what can justify itself by the tests of reason
+and common sense.<a name="vol_ii_page_008" id="vol_ii_page_008"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXIX<br /><br />
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARRIAGE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its history, the
+stages of its development in human society.)</p></div>
+
+<p>What, in the most elemental form, is sex? It is a difference of function
+which makes it necessary for two organisms to take part in the
+reproduction of the species. The purpose, or at any rate the effect, of
+this sex difference is the mixing of characteristics and qualities. If
+the sex relationship were unnecessary to reproduction, variations might
+begin, and be propagated and carried to extremes in one line of
+inheritance, without ever affecting the rest of the species. Very soon
+there would be no species, or rather an infinity of them; each line of
+descent would fly apart, and become a group all by itself. You have
+perhaps heard people comment on the fact that blondes so frequently
+prefer brunettes, and that tall men are apt to marry short women, and
+vice versa. This is perhaps nature's way of keeping the type uniform, of
+spreading qualities widely and testing them thoroughly. Nature is
+continually trying out the powers of every individual in every species,
+and by the process of sexual selection she chooses, for the reproduction
+of the species, the individuals which are best fitted for survival.
+This, of course, refers to nature, considered apart from man. In human
+society, as I shall presently show, sexual selection has been distorted,
+and partly suppressed.</p>
+
+<p>Sex differentiation and sexual selection exist almost universally
+throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, everywhere save in the
+lowest forms of being. They take strange and startling forms, and like
+everything else in nature manifest amazing ingenuity. People who wish to
+prove this or that about human sex relations will advance arguments from
+nature; but as a matter of fact we can learn nothing whatever from
+nature, except her determination to preserve the products of her
+activity and to keep them up to standard. Sometimes nature will give the
+precedence in power, speed and beauty to the male, and sometimes to the
+female. She<a name="vol_ii_page_009" id="vol_ii_page_009"></a> is perfectly ruthless, and willing in the accomplishment of
+her purpose to destroy the individuals of either sex. She will content
+the most rabid feminist by causing the female spider to devour her mate
+when his purpose has been accomplished; or by causing the male bee to
+fall from his mating in the air, a disemboweled shell.</p>
+
+<p>As for man, he has won his supremacy over nature by his greater power to
+combine in groups; by his more intense gregarious, or herd instincts,
+which enabled him to fight and destroy creatures which would have
+exterminated him if he had fought them alone. So in primitive society
+everywhere, we find that the individual is subordinated to the group,
+and the "folkways" give but little heed to personal rights. Very
+thorough investigations have been made into the life of primitive man in
+many parts of the world, and the anthropologists are now arguing over
+the exact meaning of the data. We shall not here attempt to decide among
+them, but rest content with the statement that communism and tribal
+ownership is a widespread social form among primitive man, so much so as
+to suggest that it is an early stage in social evolution.</p>
+
+<p>And this communism includes, not merely property, but sex. In the very
+earliest days there was often no barrier whatever to the sex
+relationship; not even between brothers and sisters, nor between parents
+and children. In fact, we find savages who do not know that the sex
+relationship has anything to do with procreation. But as knowledge
+increases, sex "tabus" develop, some wise, and some foolish. From causes
+not entirely clear, but which we discuss in Chapter XLVIII, there
+gradually evolves a widespread form of sex relationship of primitive
+man, the system of the "gens," as it is called. This is the Latin word
+for family, but it does not mean family in the narrow sense of mother
+and father and children, but in the broad sense of all those who have
+blood relationship, however far removed&mdash;uncles and aunts and cousins,
+as far as memory can trace. In primitive communism a man is not
+permitted to enter into the sex relationship with a woman of the same
+gens, but with all the women of some other gens. It is difficult for us
+to imagine a society in which all the men named Jones would be married
+to all the women named Smith; but that was the way whole races of
+mankind lived for many thousands of years.<a name="vol_ii_page_010" id="vol_ii_page_010"></a></p>
+
+<p>In that primitive communist society, the woman was generally the equal
+of the man. It is true that she did the drudgery of the camp, but the
+man, on the other hand, faced the hardships of battle and the chase on
+land and sea. The woman was as big as the man, and except when
+handicapped by pregnancy, as strong as the man; she was as much
+respected, if not more so. Her children bore her name, and were under
+her control, and she was accustomed to assert herself in all affairs of
+the tribe. In Frederick O'Brien's "White Shadows in the South Seas," you
+may read a comical story of a journey this traveler made into the
+interior of one of the cannibal islands. Everywhere he was treated with
+courtesy and hospitality, but was embarrassed by continual offers from
+would-be wives. In one case a powerful cannibal lady, whose advances he
+rejected, picked him up and proceeded to carry him off, and he was quite
+helpless in her grasp; he might have been a cannibal husband today, if
+it had not been for the intervention of his fellow travelers.</p>
+
+<p>The basis of this sex equality under primitive communism is easy to
+understand. All goods belonged to the tribe, and were shared alike
+according to need. Children were the tribe's most precious possession;
+therefore the woman suffered little handicap from having a child to bear
+and feed. Primitive woman would bear her child by the roadside, and pick
+it up in her arms, and continue her journey; and when she needed food,
+she did not have to beg for it&mdash;if there was food for anyone, there was
+food for her and her child. She did her share of the gathering and
+preparing of food, because that was the habit and law of her being; she
+had energies, and had never heard of the idea of not using them.</p>
+
+<p>This primitive communism generally disappears as the tribe progresses.
+We cannot be sure of all the stages of its disappearance, or of the
+causes, but in a general way we can say that it gives way before the
+spread of slavery. In the beginning primitive man does not have any
+slaves, he does not have sufficient foresight or self-restraint for
+that. When he kills his enemies in battle, he builds a fire and roasts
+their flesh and eats them; and those whom he captures alive, he binds
+fast and takes with him, to be sacrificed to his voodoo gods. But as he
+comes to more settled ways of living, and as the tribe grows larger, it
+occurs to the chiefs in battle that the captives would be glad to give
+their labor in return<a name="vol_ii_page_011" id="vol_ii_page_011"></a> for their lives, and that it would be convenient
+to have some people to do the hard and dirty work. So gradually there
+comes to be a class at the bottom of society, and another class at the
+top. Those who capture the slaves and keep them at work lay claim to the
+products of their labor&mdash;at first better weapons and personal
+adornments, then separate homes for the chiefs and priests, separate
+gardens, separate flocks and herds, and&mdash;what more natural?&mdash;separate
+women.</p>
+
+<p>This process becomes complete when the tribe settles down to
+agriculture, and the ruling classes take possession of the land. When
+once the land is privately owned, classes are fixed, and class
+distinctions become the most prominent fact in society. And step by step
+as this happens, we see women beaten down, from the position of the
+cannibal lady, who could ask for the man she wanted and carry him off by
+force if necessary, to the position of the modern woman, who is
+physically weak, emotionally unstable, economically dependent, and
+socially repressed. You may resent such phrases, but all you have to do
+is to read the laws of civilized countries, written into the statute
+books by men to define the rights and duties of women; you will see that
+everywhere, before the recent feminist revolt, women were classified
+under the law with children and imbeciles.</p>
+
+<p>Maternity imposes on woman a heavy burden, and before the discovery of
+birth control, a burden that is continuous. For nine months she carries
+the child in her body, and then for a year or two she carries it in her
+arms, or on her back; and by that time there is another child, and this
+continues until she is broken down. Having this burden, she cannot
+possibly compete with the unburdened male for the possession of
+property. So wherever there is economic competition; wherever certain
+individuals or classes in the tribe or group are allowed to seize and
+hold the land; wherever the products of labor cease to be the community
+property, and become private property, the objects of economic strife;
+then inevitably and by natural process, woman comes to be placed among
+those who cannot protect themselves&mdash;that is, among the children and the
+imbeciles and the slaves. Of course, some children are well cared for,
+and so are some imbeciles, and some slaves, and some women. But they are
+cared for as a matter of favor, not as a matter of their own power. They
+proceed no longer as the cannibal lady, but<a name="vol_ii_page_012" id="vol_ii_page_012"></a> by adopting and cultivating
+the slave virtues, by making themselves agreeable to their masters, by
+flattering their masters' vanity and sensuality&mdash;in other words by
+exercising what we are accustomed to call "feminine charm."</p>
+
+<p>From early barbaric society up to the present day, we observe that there
+are classes of women, just as there are classes of men. The position of
+these classes changes within certain limits, but in broad outline the
+conditions are fixed, and may be easily defined. There is, first of all,
+the ruling class woman. She must have birth; she may or may not have
+wealth, according as to whether the laws of that society or tribe permit
+her to have possessions of her own, or to inherit anything from her
+parents. If she has no wealth, then she will need beauty. She is the
+woman who is selected by the ruling class man to bear his name and his
+children, and to have charge of the household where these children are
+reared, and trained for the inheriting of their father's wealth and the
+carrying on of his position. This confers upon the ruling class woman
+great dignity, and makes her a person of responsibility. She rules, not
+merely over the slaves of the household, but over men of inferior social
+classes, and in a few cases an exceptionally able woman has become a
+queen, and ruled over men of her own class. This ruling class woman has
+been known through all the ages by a special name, and the ways and
+customs regarding her have been studied in an entertaining book, "The
+Lady," by Emily James Putnam.</p>
+
+<p>Next in privilege and position to the "lady" is the mistress, the woman
+who is selected by the ruling class man, not primarily to bear his
+children, but to entertain and divert him. She may, of course, bear
+children also. In barbaric societies, and up to quite recent times, the
+importance of the ruling class man was indicated by the number of
+concubines he had, and the position of these women was hardly inferior
+to that of the wife or queen. In the days of the French monarchy, the
+king's mistress was frequently more important than the queen; she was a
+woman of ability, maintaining her supremacy in the intrigues of the
+court. In ancient Greek society, the "hetairae" were a recognized class,
+and Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, was the most brilliant and most
+conspicuous woman in Athens. In modern France, the position of the
+mistress is recognized by the phrase <a name="vol_ii_page_013" id="vol_ii_page_013"></a>"demi-monde," or half-world. The
+American plutocracy has developed upon a superstructure of Puritanism,
+and therefore, in America, hypocrisy is necessary. But in the great
+cities of America, the vast majority of the ruling class men keep
+mistresses before marriage, and a great many keep them afterwards; and
+these mistresses are coming to be more and more openly flaunted, and to
+acquire more and more of what is called "social position." It is
+possible now in the "smart set" for a lady to accept the status of
+mistress, delicately veiled, without losing caste thereby, and actresses
+and other free lance women who got their start in life by taking the
+position of mistress, are coming more and more to be recognized as
+"ladies," and to be received into what are called the "best circles."</p>
+
+<p>There remains to be considered the position of the lower class women. In
+barbarous society these women were very little different from slaves.
+They had no rights of their own, except such rights as their master man
+chose to allow them for his own convenience. They were sold in marriage
+by their parents, and they went where they were sold, and obeyed their
+new master. They became his household drudges, and reserved their
+affections for him; if they failed to do this, he stoned them to death,
+or strangled them with a cord and tied them in a sack and threw them
+into the river.</p>
+
+<p>And, of course, the rights of the master man yielded to the rights of
+men of higher classes. The king or nobleman could take any woman he
+wished at any time, and he made laws to this effect and enforced them.
+In feudal society the lord of the manor claimed the right of the first
+night with the wives of his serfs; this was one of the ruling class
+privileges which was abolished in the French revolution. Wherever the
+French revolution did not succeed in affecting land tenure, the right of
+the land owner to prey upon his tenant girls continues as a custom, even
+though it is not written in the law, and would be denied by the
+hypocritical. It prevails in Poland, as you may discover by reading
+Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools"; it prevails in England, as you may discover
+from Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." You will find that it prevails
+in every part of the world where women have poverty and men have wealth
+and prestige, dress suits and automobiles. You will find it wherever
+there are leisure class hotels, or colleges, or other gatherings of
+ruling class young males. You<a name="vol_ii_page_014" id="vol_ii_page_014"></a> will find it in the theatrical and moving
+picture worlds. It is well understood in the theatrical world of
+Broadway that the woman "star" in the profession gets her start in life
+by becoming the mistress of a manager or "angel." In the moving picture
+world of Southern California it is a recognized convention, known to
+everyone familiar with the business, that a young girl parts with her
+virtue in exchange for an important job.<a name="vol_ii_page_015" id="vol_ii_page_015"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXX" id="CHAPTER_XXX"></a>CHAPTER XXX<br /><br />
+SEX AND YOUNG AMERICA</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect the future
+generation.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Our first task is to consider how people actually behave in the matter
+of sex&mdash;as distinguished from the way they pretend to behave. The first
+and most necessary step in the cure of any disease is a correct
+diagnosis, and in this case we have not merely to make the diagnosis,
+but to prove it; because the most conspicuous fact about our present
+sex-arrangements is a mass of organized concealment. Not merely do
+teachers and preachers for the most part suppress all mention of these
+subjects; but the defenders of our present economic disorder are
+accustomed to acclaim the private property régime as the only basis of
+family life. So long as people hold such an idea, there is no use trying
+to teach them anything on the subject. There is no use talking to them
+about monogamous love, because all they understand is hypocrisy. In this
+chapter, therefore, we shall proceed to hold up the mirror in front of
+capitalist morality.</p>
+
+<p>I pause and consider: Where shall I begin? At the top of society, or at
+the bottom? With the city or the country? With the old or the young? I
+think you care most of all about your boys and girls, so I am going to
+tell you what is happening to the youth of America in these days of
+triumphant reaction.</p>
+
+<p>I have a son, about whom naturally I think a great deal; just now he is
+a student at one of our state universities, and he wrote me the other
+day: "I went to a dance, and believe me, father, if you knew what these
+modern dances mean, you would write something about them." I know what
+they mean. They have come to us straight from the brothels of the
+Argentine, among the vilest haunts of vice in the world. Others have
+come from the jungle, where they were natural. The poor creature of the
+jungle has his sex-desire and nothing else; he is not troubled with
+brains, he does not have a complicated social organism to build up and<a name="vol_ii_page_016" id="vol_ii_page_016"></a>
+protect, consequently he does not need what are called "morals." But we
+civilized people need morals, and we are losing them, and our society is
+disintegrating, going back to the howling and fighting and cannibalism
+of the jungle.</p>
+
+<p>Prof. William James, America's greatest psychologist, tells us that
+going through the motions appropriate to an emotion automatically causes
+that emotion to be felt. If you watch an actor preparing to rush on the
+stage in an emotional scene, you will see him walking about, clenching
+his fists, stamping his feet, making ferocious faces, "working himself
+up." And now, what do you think is going on in the minds of young men
+and women, while with their bodies they are going through procedures
+which are nothing and can be nothing but imitations of sexual contact?</p>
+
+<p>The parents, it appears, are ignorant and unsophisticated, and have left
+it for the children to find out what these dances mean. In Rhode Island,
+one of our oldest states, is Brown College, chosen by New England's
+aristocracy for the education of its sons; and these boys go to social
+affairs in the best homes in Providence, and they call them
+"petting-parties." And here is what they write in their college paper:</p>
+
+<p>"The modern social bud drinks, not too much, often, but enough. She
+smokes unguardedly, swears considerably, and tells 'dirty' stories. All
+in all, she is a most frivolous, passionate, sensation-seeking little
+thing."</p>
+
+<p>This statement, published in a college paper, causes a scandal, and a
+newspaper reporter goes to interview the college boy who edits the
+paper, and this boy talks. He tells how he met a lovely girl at a dance,
+and his heart was thrilled with the rapture of young love. "Frankly,
+between you and me, I was pretty smitten with this particular little
+lady. Felt about her, don't you know, like a real guy feels about the
+girl he could imagine himself married to. Thought she was too nice to
+touch, almost; you know the grave sort of love affair a man always has
+once in a lifetime. Well, we walked a bit, and I guess I didn't say
+much, for a while. I felt plenty&mdash;respectfully&mdash;just the same. And as we
+turned the corner of one of the buildings here, she grasped my hand.
+Hers was trembling. 'Love and let love is my motto, dearie,' said this
+seraph of my dreams; 'come, we're losing a lot of time getting started.'
+That girl thought I was dead slow. She didn't know that just then I
+imagined the great love of my<a name="vol_ii_page_017" id="vol_ii_page_017"></a> life was just entering the door. It was
+cruel the way she got down from the pedestal I had built for her."</p>
+
+<p>Suppose I should ask you to name the influence that is having most to do
+with shaping the thoughts of young America&mdash;what would you answer?
+Undoubtedly, the moving pictures. It is from the "movies" that your
+children learn what life is; if I can show you that a certain thing is
+in the "movies," you can surely not deny that it is passing every day
+and night into the hearts and minds of millions of our boys and girls.
+Take a vote among the girls, what would they consider the most
+delightful destiny in life; surely nine out of ten would answer, to
+become a screen star, and pose before a world of admirers, and be paid a
+million dollars a year. Make a test and see; and put that fact together
+with the one I have already stated, that in order to get an important
+job in the "movies," a girl must regularly and as a matter of course
+part with her virtue.</p>
+
+<p>You will be told, no doubt, that this is a slanderous statement, so let
+me give you a little evidence. I happened within the past year to be in
+the private office of a well known moving picture producer, a man who is
+married, and takes care to tell you that he loves his wife. He was
+producing a play, the heroine of which was supposed to be a daughter of
+Puritan New England. To play this part he had engaged a chaste girl, and
+as a result was in the midst of a queer trouble, which he poured out to
+me. His "leading man" had refused to act with this girl, insisting that
+no girl could act a part of love unless she had had passionate
+experience; no such thing had ever been heard of in moving pictures
+before. Likewise, the director agreed that no girl who is chaste could
+act for the screen, and the producer asked my advice about it. Mr.
+William Allen White, of Kansas, was present in the office, and
+authorizes me to state that he substantiates this anecdote. We both
+advised the producer to stand by the girl, and he did so; and the
+picture went out, and proved to be what in trade parlance is termed a
+"frost"; that is to say, your children didn't care for it, and it cost
+the producer something like a hundred thousand dollars to make this
+attempt to defy the conventions of the moving picture world.</p>
+
+<p>I will tell you another story. I have a friend, a prominent man in Los
+Angeles, who was appealed to by a young lady who wished to act in the
+"movies." My friend introduced<a name="vol_ii_page_018" id="vol_ii_page_018"></a> this young lady to a very prominent
+screen actor, who in turn introduced her to one of the biggest producers
+in America, one of the men whose "million dollar feature pictures" are
+regularly exploited. The producer examined the young lady's figure, and
+told her that she would "do"; he added, quite casually, and as a matter
+of course, that she would be expected to "pay the price." The young lady
+took exception to this proposition, and gave up the chance. She told my
+friend about it, and he, being a man of the world, accustomed to dealing
+with the foibles of his fellowmen, wrote a note to the actor, explaining
+that inasmuch as this young lady had been socially introduced to him,
+and by him socially introduced to the manager, she should not have been
+expected to "pay the price." To this the actor answered that my friend
+was correct, and he would see the manager about it. The manager conceded
+the point, and the young lady got her chance in the "movies" and made
+good without "paying the price." This story tells you all you need to
+know about the difference in sex ethics that society applies to the
+"lady" and to the daughter of the common people.</p>
+
+<p>You know, of course, what is the stock theme of all moving pictures&mdash;the
+virtuous daughter of the people, who resists all temptations, and is
+finally rescued from her would-be seducer by the strong and sturdy arm
+of a male doll. Could one ask a more perfect illustration of capitalist
+hypocrisy than the fact that the girl who plays this role is required to
+pay with her virtue for the privilege of playing it! And if you know
+anything about young girls, you can watch her playing it on the screen,
+and see from her every gesture that what I am telling you is true. My
+wife knows young girls, and I took her, the other day, to see a moving
+picture. She said: "I have solved a problem. When I come home on the
+street-cars, it happens that I ride with a lot of young girls from the
+high school. I have been watching them, and I couldn't imagine what was
+the matter with them. All simple, girlish straightforwardness is gone
+out of them; they are making eyes, in the strangest manner&mdash;and at
+nobody; just practicing, apparently. They wear yearning facial
+expressions; when they start to walk, they do not walk, but writhe and
+wiggle. I thought there must be some nervous eye and lip disease got
+abroad in the school. But now, when I go to a moving picture, I discover
+what it means. They are imitating the 'stars' on the screen!"<a name="vol_ii_page_019" id="vol_ii_page_019"></a></p>
+
+<p>In these pictures, you know, there are "ingenues," young girls engaged
+in making a happy ending to the story by capturing a rich lover; and
+then there are "vamps," engaged in seducing young men, or breaking up
+some happy home. In old-style melodrama it was possible to tell the
+"ingenue" from the "vamps"; the former would trip lightly, and glance
+coyly out of the corners of her eyes, while the "vamp" moved with slow,
+languished writhing, blinking heavy-lidded, sinister eyes. But
+now-a-days the "vamps" have learned to pose as "ingenues," and the
+"ingenues" are as vicious as the "vamps"; they both make the same
+glances, and culminate in the same sensual swoon. It is all sex, and
+nothing else&mdash;except revolvers and fighting, and wild rushing about.</p>
+
+<p>And then, too, there are the musical comedies, made wholly out of sex,
+being known as "girl shows," or more frankly still, "leg shows." A row
+of half naked women, prancing and gyrating on the stage, and in front of
+them rows of bald-headed old men, gazing at them greedily; also college
+boys, or boys too imbecile to get through college, sending in their
+cards with boxes of costly flowers. You will be shocked as you read my
+plain statements of fact, but if you are the average American, you will
+take your family to a musical show which has come straight from the
+brothels of Paris, every allusion of which is obscene. I remember once
+being in a small town in the South, when one of these "road shows"
+arrived from New York, and I realized that this institution was simply a
+traveling house of ill fame; the whole male portion of the town was
+a-quiver with excitement, a mixture of lust and fear.</p>
+
+<p>I live in Southern California, one of many places in America where the
+idle rich gather for their diversion. The country is dotted with
+palatial hotels, and a golden flood of pleasure-seekers come in every
+winter. I have talked with some of the college boys in this part of the
+country, and also with teachers who try to save the boys; they report
+these "swell" hotels as hot-beds of vice, haunted by married women with
+automobiles, and nothing to do, who wish to go into the canyons for
+sexual riots. Even elderly women, white-haired women, old enough to be
+your grandmother! I have had them pointed out to me in these hotels,
+their cheeks and lips covered with rouge, with pink silk tights on their
+calves, and nothing else almost up to their knees and nothing at all<a name="vol_ii_page_020" id="vol_ii_page_020"></a>
+half way down their backs. These old women seek to prey on boys, wanting
+their youth, and being willing to lavish money upon them. They are
+preying on your boys&mdash;you prosperous business men, who have preached the
+gospel of "each for himself," and are proud of your skill to prey upon
+society. You heap up your fortunes, and call it success, and are secure
+and happy. You have made your children safe against want, you think; but
+how are you going to make them safe against the "vamps" who prey upon
+the overwhelming excitements of youth, and betray your sons before your
+very eyes&mdash;teaching them lust in their youth, so that love may never be
+born in their stunted hearts? All the haunts of "gilded vice" are
+thriving, and somebody's boy is paying the interest on the capital, to
+say nothing of paying the police.</p>
+
+<p>Many years ago I paid a call upon Anthony Comstock, head of the Society
+for the Prevention of Vice. Comstock was an old-style Puritan, and many
+insist that he was likewise an old-style grafter. However that may be,
+he had a collection of the literature of pornography which would cause
+any man to hesitate in condemning his activities. There is a vast
+traffic in this kind of thing; it is sold by pack-peddlers all over the
+country, and it is sold in little shops in the neighborhood of public
+schools. You may be sure that in your school there are some boys who
+know where to get it, even though they will not tell what they know. I
+will describe just one piece that a school boy brought to me, a
+catalogue of obscene literature, for sale in Spain, and to be ordered
+wholesale. You know how men with wares to sell will expend their
+imaginations and exhaust their vocabulary in describing to you the
+charms of each particular article for sale. Here was a catalogue of one
+or two hundred pages, listing thousands of items, pictures, pamphlets
+and books, and various implements of vice, all set forth in that
+imitation ecstasy of department stores and seed catalogues: here was
+"something neat," here was a "fancy one," this one was "a peach," and
+that one was "a winner."</p>
+
+<p>When I was a lad, I was tramping in the Adirondack mountains and was
+picked up by an itinerant photographer. We rode all day together, and he
+became friendly, and showed me some obscene pictures. Presently he
+discovered that he was dealing with a young moralist, and apparently it
+was the first time he had ever had that experience; he talked<a name="vol_ii_page_021" id="vol_ii_page_021"></a> honestly,
+and we became friends on a different basis. This man had a wife and
+children at home, but he traveled all over the mountains, and was like
+the sailor with a girl in every port. Also he was thoroughly familiar
+with all forms of unnatural vice, and took this also as a matter of
+course, and spread it on his journeys.</p>
+
+<p>The other day I read a statement by a prominent physician in New York;
+he had been talking with a police captain, and had asked him to state
+what in his opinion was the most significant development in the social
+life of New York. The answer was, "The spread of male prostitution."
+Here is a subject to which I have to admit my courage is unequal. I
+cannot repeat the jokes which I have heard young men tell about these
+matters, and about the attitude of the police to them. Suffice it to say
+that these hideous forms of vice are now the commonplace of the
+under-world of all our great cities. The other day a friend of mine was
+talking with a prostitute who had left a high-class resort, where the
+price charged was ten dollars, and gone to live in a "fifty-cent house,"
+frequented by sailors. She was asked the reason, and her explanation
+was, "The sailors are natural." Dr. William J. Robinson has written in
+his magazine an account of the haunts in Berlin which are frequented by
+the victims of unnatural vice, there allowed to meet openly and to
+solicit. Frank Harris, in his "Life of Oscar Wilde," tells how when that
+scandal was at its height, and further exposure threatened, swarms of
+the most prominent men in England suddenly discovered that it was
+advisable for them to travel on the Continent. The great public schools
+of England are rotten with these practices; the younger boys learn them
+from the older ones, and are victims all the rest of their lives. And
+the corruption is creeping through our own social body&mdash;and you think
+that all you have to do is not to know about it!</p>
+
+<p>My friend Floyd Dell, reading this manuscript, insists that this chapter
+and the one following are too severe. In case others should agree with
+him, I quote two newspaper items which appear while I am reading the
+proofs. The first is from an interview with H. Gordon Selfridge, the
+London merchant, telling his impressions of America. He tells about the
+"flappers," and then about the "shifters."</p>
+
+<p>"The other is the newly exploited 'shifters.' The 'shifters' are an
+organization of mushroom growth among high school<a name="vol_ii_page_022" id="vol_ii_page_022"></a> girls and boys which
+is spreading through the eastern States and winning converts among
+youngsters. It is described as the 'flapper Ku Klux,' and its emblem, if
+worn by a girl, according to high school teachers and children's society
+leaders who oppose it, to be nothing more nor less than an invitation to
+be kissed.</p>
+
+<p>"To call it an organization even is exaggeration, for the 'shifters' are
+better described as a secret understanding without any responsible head.</p>
+
+<p>"From being a seemingly harmless group whose emblem was originally a
+brass paper clip fastened in the coat lapel it has developed by rapid
+strides. Manufacturers of emblems are coining money by the sale of
+hands, palm outstretched. The significance is take what you want or, as
+the motto of the order says, 'be a good fellow; get something for
+nothing.' One of the principles is to 'do' one's parents, referred to as
+'they.'"</p>
+
+<p>The second item is an Associated Press despatch:</p>
+
+<p>"ST. LOUIS, March 10.&mdash;In reiterating his statement that a girls' and a
+boys' secret organization requiring that all applicants must have
+violated the moral code before admission was granted, existed in a local
+high school, Victor J. Miller, president of the Board of Police
+Commissioners, tonight named the Soldan High School as the one in which
+the alleged immoral conditions exist. The school is attended largely by
+children of the wealthy West End citizens.<a name="vol_ii_page_023" id="vol_ii_page_023"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXI" id="CHAPTER_XXXI"></a>CHAPTER XXXI<br /><br />
+SEX AND THE "SMART SET"</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Portrays the moral customs of those who set the fashion in our
+present-day world.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have discussed what is happening to our young people; let us next
+consider what our mature people are doing. Having mentioned conditions
+in England, I will give a glimpse of London "high life" two years before
+the war.</p>
+
+<p>As a visiting writer, I was invited to luncheon at the home of a woman
+novelist, whose books at that time were widely read both in her country
+and here. Present at the luncheon was a prominent publisher, who I
+afterwards learned was the lady's lover; also the lady's grown and
+married son. The publisher looked like a buxom hunting squire, but the
+lady told me that he was very unhappy, because his wife would not
+divorce him. The lady had just come from a week-end party at the home of
+an earl, who at this moment occupies one of the highest posts in the
+gift of the British Empire. Things had gone comically wrong at this
+country house party, she said, because the hostess had failed to
+remember that Lord So-and-so was at present living with Lady
+Somebody-else. One of the duties of hostesses at house parties, it
+appears, is to know who is living with whom, in order that they may be
+put in connecting rooms. In this case his Lordship had been grouchy, and
+everybody's pleasure had been spoiled.</p>
+
+<p>This produced a discussion of the subject of marriage, and the son
+remarked that marriage was like an old slipper; you wore it, because you
+had got used to it, but you did not talk about it, because it was
+unimportant and stupid. I went away, and happened to mention these
+matters to a friend, who had met this woman novelist in Nice. The
+novelist had there, in a group of people, been introduced to a young
+girl who was suffering from neurasthenia. "My dear," said the novelist,
+affectionately, "what you need is to have an illegitimate baby."</p>
+
+<p>This, you will say, is the "old world," and you always<a name="vol_ii_page_024" id="vol_ii_page_024"></a> knew that it was
+corrupt. If so, let me tell you a few things that I have seen among the
+"upper circles" of our own great and virtuous democracy. My first
+acquaintance with New York "society" came after the publication of "The
+Jungle." As the author of that book I was a sensation, almost as much so
+as if I had won the heavy-weight championship of the world. Out of
+curiosity I accepted an invitation for a weekend amid what is called the
+"hunting set" of Long Island. Here was a gorgeous palace with many
+tapestries, and soft-footed servants, and decanters and cocktails at
+every stage of one's journey about the place, like coaling stations on
+the trade routes of the British Empire. One of the first sights that
+caught my young eye was a large and stately lady in semi-undress,
+smoking a big black cigar. If I were to mention her name, every
+newspaper reader in America would know her; and before I had been
+introduced to her, I heard two young men in evening dress make an
+obscene remark about her, and what she was waiting for that evening.</p>
+
+<p>I discovered quickly that, while there was a great deal of sex among
+these people, there was very little love. There was principally a wish
+to score cleverly and subtly at the expense of another person's
+feelings. It is called the "smart set," you understand, and I will give
+you an idea of how "smart" it is. I was walking down a passage with a
+lady, and on a couch sat another lady, side by side with a certain very
+famous lawyer, whose golden eloquence you have probably listened to from
+platforms, and whom for the purpose of this anecdote I will name Jones.
+Mr. Jones and the lady on the sofa were sitting very close together, and
+my companion, with a bright smile over her shoulder, called out: "Be
+careful, Mary; you'll be scattering a lot of little Joneses around here
+if you don't watch out!" Quite "continental," you perceive; and a long
+way from the Puritanism of our ancestors!</p>
+
+<p>From there I went to the billiard-room, and observed a young man of
+fashion trying to play billiards when he was half drunk. It was a funny
+spectacle, and they took away his cigarette by force, for fear he would
+drop it on the cloth of the billiard table. Pretty soon he was telling
+about a racing meet, and an orgy with negro women in a stable. Therefore
+I returned to where the ladies were gathered, and one middle-aged
+matron, who had read widely, including some of my books, engaged me in
+serious conversation. I came later on to<a name="vol_ii_page_025" id="vol_ii_page_025"></a> know her rather well, and she
+told me her views of love; the source of all the sex troubles of
+humanity was that they took the relationship seriously. Modern
+discoveries made it unnecessary to attach importance to it. She herself,
+acting upon this theory, probably had had relations with&mdash;my friends,
+reading the proofs of this book, beg me to omit the number of men,
+because you would not believe me!</p>
+
+<p>You may argue that this is not typical; say that I fell into the
+clutches of some particular group of degenerates. All I can tell you is
+that these people are as "socially prominent" as any in New York City. I
+will say furthermore that I have sat in the home of the best known
+corporation lawyer in America, who was paid a million dollars to
+organize the steel trust&mdash;the late James B. Dill, at that time a member
+of the Court of Appeals of New Jersey&mdash;and have heard him "muck-rake"
+his business friends by the hour with stories of that sort. I have heard
+him tell of the "steel crowd" hiring a trolley car and a load of
+prostitutes and champagne, and taking an all-night trip from one city to
+another, smashing up both the car and the prostitutes. I have heard him
+tell of sitting on the deck of a Sound steamer, and overhearing two of
+his Wall Street associates and their wives arranging to trade partners
+for the night.</p>
+
+<p>I have mentioned a lady who had a great many lovers. Once in the
+dining-room of a club on Fifth Avenue, commonly known as "the
+Millionaires'," a companion pointed out various people, many of whom I
+had read about in the newspapers, and told me funny stories about them.
+"See that old boy with a note-book," said my host. "That is Jacob
+So-and-so, and he is entering up the cost of his lunch. He keeps
+accounts of everything, even of his women. He told me he had had over a
+thousand, and they had cost him over a million."</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to say what is the most terrible thing in capitalist
+society, but among the most terrible are assuredly the old men. The
+richest and most powerful banker in America was in his sex habits the
+merry jest of New York society. He took toward women the same attitude
+as King Edward VII; if he wanted one, he went up and asked for her, and
+it made no difference who she was, or where she was. This man's personal
+living expenses were five thousand dollars a day, and all women
+understood that they might have anything within reason.<a name="vol_ii_page_026" id="vol_ii_page_026"></a></p>
+
+<p>When I was a boy, living in New York, there was a certain aged
+money-lender about whom one read something in the newspapers almost
+every day. He was a prominent figure, because he was worth eighty
+millions, yet wore an old, rusty black suit, and saved every penny.
+Every now and then you would read in the paper how some woman had been
+arrested for attempting to blackmail him in his office. It seemed
+puzzling, because you wouldn't think of him as a likely subject for
+blackmail. Some years later I met Dorothy Richardson, author of "The
+Long Day," a very fine book which has been undeservedly forgotten. Miss
+Richardson had been a reporter for the New York <i>Herald</i>, and had been
+sent to interview this old money-lender. She was ushered into his
+private office, and as soon as the attendant had gone out and closed the
+door, the old man came up, and without a word of preliminaries grabbed
+her in his arms like a gorilla. She fought and scratched, and got out,
+and was wise enough to say nothing about it; therefore there was nothing
+published about another attempt to blackmail the aged money-lender!</p>
+
+<p>What this means is that men of unlimited means live lives of unbridled
+lust, and then in their old age they are helpless victims of their own
+impulses. There was a certain enormously wealthy United States Senator
+from West Virginia, who came very near being Vice President of the
+United States. This doddering old man would go about the streets of
+Washington with a couple of very decorous and carefully trained
+attendants; and whenever an attractive young woman would pass on the
+street, or when one would approach the Senator, these two attendants
+would quietly slip their arms into his and hold him fast. They would do
+this so that the ordinary person would not suspect what was going on,
+but would think the old man was being supported.</p>
+
+<p>You do not have to take these things on my word; the newspapers are full
+of them all the time, and they are proven in court. Just now as I write,
+the president of the most powerful bank in America is claiming in court
+that his children are not his own, but that their father is an Indian
+guide. His wife, on the other hand, is accusing the banker of having
+played the role of husband to several other women. He would take these
+women traveling on his yacht, which, quaintly enough, was termed the
+"Modesty."</p>
+
+<p>Also the papers have been full of the "Hamon case."<a name="vol_ii_page_027" id="vol_ii_page_027"></a> Here is a wealthy
+man, Republican National Committeeman from Oklahoma, who is about to go
+to Washington to advise our new President whom to appoint to office from
+that state. Before he goes, he casts off his mistress, and she shoots
+him. She was his secretary, it appears, and helped him to make his
+fortune; she has made many friends, and a million dollars is spent to
+save her life. The prosecuting attorney calls her a "painted snake," and
+accuses her of having sat week after week "displaying to the jury
+twenty-four inches of silk stockinged shin-bone." The jury, apparently
+unable to withstand this allurement, acquits the woman, and she
+announces that she intends to bring suit under the man's will to get his
+money! Also, she is going into the "movies," and tells us that it is to
+be "for educational purposes." Everything in our capitalist society must
+be "educational," you understand. It was P. T. Barnum who discovered
+that the American people would flock to look at a five-legged calf, if
+it was presented as "educational."</p>
+
+<p>The moving pictures and the theatres are the honey-pots which gather the
+feminine beauty and youthful charm of our country for the convenience of
+rich men's lust. These girls swarm in the theatrical agencies, and in
+the artists' studios; they starve for a while, and finally they yield.
+In every great city there are thousands of men of wealth, whose only
+occupation is to prey upon such girls. I know a certain theatrical
+manager, the most famous in the United States, a sensual, stout little
+Jew. He is a man of culture and subtle insight, and in the course of his
+conversation he described to me, quite casually and as a matter of
+course, the charm of deflowering a virgin. Nothing could equal that
+sensation; the first time was the last.</p>
+
+<p>Many years ago there was a horrible scandal in New York. The most famous
+architect in America was murdered, and the newspapers probed into his
+life, and it was revealed to us that many of the most famous artists and
+men about town in New York maintained elaborate studios, equipped with
+every luxury, all the paraphernalia of all the vices of the ages; and
+through these places there flowed an endless stream of beautiful young
+girls. In every large city in America you will find an "athletic club,"
+and if you go there and listen to the gossip, you discover that there
+are scores of idle rich men with automobiles and private apartments, and
+a staff of procurers<a name="vol_ii_page_028" id="vol_ii_page_028"></a> used in preying, not merely upon young girls, but
+also upon young boys. And these are not merely the children of the poor,
+they are the children of all but the rich and powerful. In the "movies"
+you see pictures of girls lured into automobiles, and carried out into
+the country, or seduced by means of "knock-out drops," and you think
+this is just "melodrama"; but it is happening all the time. In every big
+city of our country the police know that hundreds of young girls
+disappear every year. At a recent convention of police chiefs in
+Washington, it was stated, from police records, that sixty thousand
+girls disappear every year in the United States, leaving no trace.
+Unless the parents happen to be in position to make a fuss, not even the
+names of the girls are published in the newspapers. I do not ask you to
+believe such things on my word; believe District Attorney Sims of
+Chicago, who made the most thorough study of this subject ever made in
+America, and wrote:</p>
+
+<p>"When a white slave is sold and landed in a house or dive she becomes a
+prisoner.... In each of these places is a room having but one door, to
+which the keeper holds the key. Here are locked all the street clothes,
+shoes and ordinary apparel.... The finery provided for the girls is of a
+nature to make their appearance on the street impossible. Then in
+addition to this handicap, the girl is placed at once in debt to the
+keeper for a wardrobe.... She cannot escape while she is in debt, and
+she can never get out of debt. Not many of the women in this class
+expect to live more than ten years&mdash;perhaps the average is less. Many
+die painful deaths by disease, many by consumption, but it is hardly
+beyond the truth to say that suicide is their general expectation."<a name="vol_ii_page_029" id="vol_ii_page_029"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXII" id="CHAPTER_XXXII"></a>CHAPTER XXXII<br /><br />
+SEX AND THE POOR</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and the
+diseases which result from it.)</p></div>
+
+<p>It is manifest that the rich cannot indulge in vices, without drawing
+the poor after them; and in addition to this, the poor have their own
+evil instincts, which fester in neglect. There were several hundred
+thousand dark rooms, that is rooms without light or ventilation, in New
+York City before the war. Now the country is reported to be short a
+million homes, and in New York City working girls are sleeping six or
+eight in a room. In the homes of the poor in the slums, parents and
+children and boarders all sleep in one room indiscriminately, and the
+world moves back to that primitive communism, in which incest is an
+everyday affair, and little children learn all the vices there are. I
+have in my hand a pamphlet by a physician, in charge of a hospital in
+New York, who in fifteen years has examined nine hundred children who
+have been raped, and the age of the youngest was eight months! I have
+another pamphlet by a settlement worker, who discusses the problem of
+the thousands of deserted wives, most of them with children, many with
+children yet unborn. As I write, there are millions of men out of work
+in our country, and these men are desperate, and they quit and take to
+the road. They join the army of the casual workers, the "blanket
+stiffs"; and, of course, the more there are of these men, the more
+prostitutes there have to be, and the more homosexuality there will
+inevitably be.</p>
+
+<p>Also the girls are out of work, and are on the streets. Many years ago I
+visited the mill towns of New England, "she-towns" they are called, and
+one of the young fellows said to me that you could buy a girl there for
+the price of a sandwich. Read "The Long Day," to which I have previously
+referred, and see how our working girls live. Dorothy Richardson
+describes her room-mate, who read cheap novels which she found in the
+gutter weeklies. She read them over and over; when she had got to the
+bottom of the<a name="vol_ii_page_030" id="vol_ii_page_030"></a> pile, she began again, because her mind was so weak that
+she had forgotten everything. And then one day Miss Richardson happened
+to be groping in a corner of a closet, and came upon a great pile of
+bottles, and examined them, and was made sick with horror&mdash;abortion
+mixtures.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. William J. Robinson, an authority on the subject, estimates that
+there are one million abortions in the United States every year. Some of
+these are accidental, caused by venereal disease, but the vast majority
+are deliberate acts, crimes under the law, murder of human life. Dr.
+Robinson also estimates, from the many thousands of cases which come to
+him, that ninety-five per cent of all men have at some time practiced
+self-abuse. He is a strenuous opponent of what he calls "hysteria" on
+the subject of venereal disease, and insists that its prevalence is
+exaggerated; that instead of one person in ten being syphilitic, as is
+commonly stated, the proportion is only one in twenty. He insists that
+the percentage of persons having had gonorrhea is only twenty-five per
+cent, instead of seventy-five or eighty-five. I find that other
+authorities generally agree in the statement that fifty per cent of
+young men become infected with some venereal disease before they reach
+the age of thirty. The Committee of Seven in New York estimated in 1903
+that there were two hundred thousand cases of syphilis in the city, and
+eight hundred thousand of gonorrhea. There were villages in France
+before the war in which twenty-five per cent of the inhabitants were
+syphilitic, and in Russia there were towns in which it was said that
+every person was syphilitic. We may safely say that these latter are the
+only towns in Europe in which there was not an enormous increase of this
+disease during and since the war.</p>
+
+<p>What are the consequences of these diseases? The consequences are
+frightful suffering, not merely to persons guilty of immorality, but to
+innocent persons. Dr. Morrow, generally recognized as the leading
+authority on this subject, estimates that ten per cent of all wives are
+infected with venereal disease by their husbands; he estimates that
+thirty per cent of all the infected women in New York were wives who had
+got the disease from their husbands. It is estimated that thirty per
+cent of all the births, where either parent has syphilis, result in
+abortions. It is estimated that fifty per cent of childlessness in
+marriage is caused by gonorrhea, and <a name="vol_ii_page_031" id="vol_ii_page_031"></a>twenty-five per cent of all
+existing blindness. In Germany, before the war, there were thirty
+thousand persons born blind from this cause. It is estimated that
+ninety-five per cent of all abdominal operations performed upon women
+are due to gonorrhea. And any of these horrors may fall upon persons who
+lead lives of the strictest chastity. There was a case reported in
+Germany of 236 children who contracted venereal disease from swimming in
+a public bath.</p>
+
+<p>All these things are products of our system of
+marriage-plus-prostitution. They are all part of that system, and no
+study of the system is complete without them. Everywhere throughout
+modern civilization prostitution is an enormous and lucrative industry.
+In New York it is estimated to give employment to two hundred thousand
+women, to say nothing of the managers, and the runners, and the men who
+live off the women. There are thousands of resorts, large and small,
+high-priced and cheap, and the police know all about it, and derive a
+handsome income from it. And you find it the same in every great city of
+the world; in every port where sailors land, or every place where crowds
+of men are expected. If there is to be a football game, or a political
+convention, the managers of the industry know about it, and while they
+may never have heard the libel that Socialism preaches sexual license,
+they all know that capitalism practices it, and they provide the
+necessary means. In the United States there are estimated to be a half a
+million prostitutes, counting the inmates of houses alone.</p>
+
+<p>During the late war, at the army bases in France, the British government
+maintained official brothels; but if you published anything about this
+in England, you ran a chance of having your paper suppressed. During the
+occupation of the Rhine country, the French sent in negro troops,
+savages from the heart of Africa, whose custom it is to cut off the ears
+of their enemies in battle; and the French army compelled the German
+population to supply white women for these troops. I have quoted in "The
+Brass Check" a pious editorial from the Los Angeles <i>Times</i>, bidding the
+mothers of America be happy, because "our boys in France" were safe in
+the protecting arms of the Y. M. C. A. and the Knights of Columbus. I
+dared not publish at this time a passage which I had clipped from the
+London <i>Clarion</i>, in which A. M. Thompson told how he watched the
+"doughboys" in the cafés<a name="vol_ii_page_032" id="vol_ii_page_032"></a> of Paris, with a girl on each knee, and a
+glass of wine in each hand.</p>
+
+<p>I will add one little anecdote, giving you a glimpse of the sex
+conventions of war. The American army made desperate efforts to keep
+down venereal disease, and required all men to report to their
+regimental surgeon immediately after having had sex relations. Our army
+moved into Coblentz, and the regulations strictly forbade any
+fraternizing with the inhabitants. But immediately it was discovered
+that there was an increase of disease, and investigation was made, and
+revealed that men had been ceasing to report to the surgeons, because
+they were afraid of being punished for having "fraternized with the
+enemy." So a new order was issued, providing that having sexual
+intercourse would not be considered as "fraternizing." I do not know any
+better way to distinguish my ideal of morality from the military ideal,
+than to say that according to my understanding of it, the sex
+relationship should always and everywhere imply and include
+"fraternizing."</p>
+
+<p>Finally, in concluding this picture of our present-day sex arrangements,
+there is a brief word to be said about divorce. In the year 1916, the
+last statistics available as I write, there were just over a million
+marriages in the United States, and there were over one hundred and
+twelve thousand divorces. This would indicate that one marriage in every
+nine resulted in shipwreck. But as a matter of fact the proportion is
+greater, because the marriages necessarily precede the divorces, and the
+proportion of divorces in 1916 should be calculated upon the number of
+marriages which took place some five or ten years previously. Of the one
+million marriages in 1916, we may say that one in seven or one in eight
+will end in the divorce courts. Let this suffice for a glimpse of the
+system of marriage-plus-prostitution&mdash;a field of weeds which we have
+somehow to plow up and prepare for a harvest of rational and honest
+love!<a name="vol_ii_page_033" id="vol_ii_page_033"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXXIII<br /><br />
+SEX AND NATURE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of natural or
+physical disharmony.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Elie Metchnikoff, one of the greatest of scientists, wrote a book
+entitled "The Nature of Man," in which he studied the human organism
+from the point of view of biology, demonstrating that in our bodies are
+a number of relics of past stages of evolution, no longer useful, but
+rather a source of danger and harm. We have, for example, in the inner
+corner of the eye a relic of that third eyelid whereby the eagle is
+enabled to look at the sun. This is a harmless relic. But we have also
+an appendix, a degenerate organ of digestion, or gland of secretion,
+which now serves as a center of infection and source of danger. We have
+likewise a lower bowel, a survival of our hay-eating days, and a cause
+of autointoxication and premature death. Among the sources of trouble,
+Metchnikoff names the fact that the human male possesses a far greater
+quantity of sexual energy than is required for purposes of procreation.
+This becomes a cause of disharmony and excess, it causes man to wreck
+his health and destroy himself.</p>
+
+<p>Manifestly, this is a serious matter; for if it is true, our efforts to
+find health and happiness in love are doomed to failure, and Lecky is
+right when he describes the prostitute as the "guardian of virtue," the
+eternal and necessary scapegoat of humanity. But I do not believe it is
+true; I think that here is one more case of the endless blundering of
+scientists and philosophers who attempt to teach physiology, politics,
+religion and law, without having made a study of economics. I do not
+believe that the sex troubles of mankind are physiological in their
+nature, but have their origin in our present system of class privilege.
+I believe they are caused, not by the blunders of nature, but by the
+blunders of man as a social animal.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take a glimpse at primitive man. I choose the Marquesas Islands,
+because we have complete reports about<a name="vol_ii_page_034" id="vol_ii_page_034"></a> them from numerous observers.
+Here was a race of people, not interfered with by civilization, who
+manifested all that overplus of sexual energy to which Metchnikoff calls
+attention. They placed no restraint whatever upon sex activity, they had
+no conception of such an idea. Their games and dances were sex play, and
+so also, in great part, was their religion. Yet we do not find that they
+wrecked themselves. Physically speaking, they were one of the most
+perfect races of which we have record. Both the men and women were
+beautiful; they were active and strong from childhood to old age,
+and&mdash;here is the significant thing&mdash;they were happy. They were a
+laughing, dancing, singing race. They hardly knew grief or fear at all.
+They knew how to live, and they enjoyed every process and aspect of
+their lives, just as children do, naively and simply. This included
+their sex life; and I think it assures us that there can be no such
+fundamental physical disharmony in the human organism as the great
+Russian scientist thought he had discovered.</p>
+
+<p>Is it not a fact that throughout nature a superfluity of any kind of
+energy or product may be a source of happiness, rather than of distress?
+Consider the singing of the birds! Or consider nature's impulse to cover
+a field with useless plants, and how by a little cunning, we are able to
+turn it into a harvest for our own use! In the life of our bodies one
+may show the same thing again and again. We have within us the
+possibility of and the impulse toward more muscular activity than our
+survival makes necessary; but we do not regard this additional energy as
+a curse of nature, and a peril to our lives&mdash;we turn out and play
+baseball. We have an impulse to see more than is necessary, so we climb
+mountains, or go traveling. We have an impulse to hear more, so we go to
+a concert. We have an impulse to think more, so we play chess, or whist,
+or write books and accumulate libraries. Never do we think of these
+activities as signs of an irrevocable blunder on the part of nature.</p>
+
+<p>But about the activities of love we feel differently; and why is this?
+If I say that it is because we have an unwholesome and degraded attitude
+toward love, because, as a result of religious superstition we fear it,
+and dare not deal with it honestly, the reader may suspect that I am
+preparing to hint at some self-indulgence, some form of sex orgy such as
+the "turkey trot" and the "bunny hug" and the "grizzly<a name="vol_ii_page_035" id="vol_ii_page_035"></a> bear," the
+"shimmy" and the "toddle" and the "cuddle." I hasten to explain that I
+do not mean any of the abnormalities and monstrosities of present-day
+fashionable life. Neither do I mean that we should set out to emulate
+the happy cannibals in the South Seas. In the Book of the Mind I set
+forth as carefully as I knew how, the difference between nature and man,
+the life of instinct and the life of reason. It is my conviction that if
+civilized life is to go on, there must be a far wider extension of
+judgment and self-control in human affairs; our lost happiness will be
+found, not by going "back to nature," but by going forward to a new and
+higher state, planned by reason and impelled by moral idealism.</p>
+
+<p>But we find ourselves face to face with horrible sex disorders, and a
+great scientist tells us they are nature's tragic blunder, of which we
+are the helpless victims. Manifestly, the way to decide this question is
+to go to nature, and see if primitive people, having the same physical
+organism as ours, had the same troubles and spent their lives in the
+same misery. If they did, then it may be that we are doomed; but if they
+did not, then we can say with certainty that it is not nature, but
+ourselves, who have blundered. Our task then becomes to apply reason to
+the problem; to take our present sex arrangements, our field of
+bad-smelling weeds, and plow it thoroughly, and sow it with good seed,
+and raise a harvest of happiness in love. It is my belief that,
+admitting true love&mdash;honest and dignified and rational love&mdash;it is
+possible to pour into it any amount of sex energy, to invent a whole new
+system of beautiful and happy love play.<a name="vol_ii_page_036" id="vol_ii_page_036"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXXIV<br /><br />
+LOVE AND ECONOMICS</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due to the
+displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.)</p></div>
+
+<p>If the cause of our sex disorders is not physiological, what is it?
+Everything in nature must have a cause, and this includes human nature,
+the actions and feelings of men, both as individuals and as groups. We
+hear the saying: "You can't change human nature"; but the fact is that
+human nature is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can
+watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, and if we
+had the intelligence to use the forces now at our command, we could mold
+human nature, as precisely as a brewer converts a carload of hops into a
+certain brand of beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and
+virtue are products like vinegar."</p>
+
+<p>Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and class
+privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and the natural
+sources of wealth by a group. This enables the privileged group to live
+in idleness upon the labor of the rest of society; it confers unlimited
+power with practically no responsibility&mdash;a strain which not one human
+being in a thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the
+past five thousand years is one demonstration after another that the
+conferring upon a class of power without responsibility means the
+collapse of that class and the downfall of its civilization.</p>
+
+<p>So far as concerns the ruling class male, what the system of privilege
+does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge his sex desires. What
+it does for the female is to submit her to the male desires, and to
+abolish that mutuality in sex, that interaction between male and female
+influence, which is the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a
+predatory society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of class as
+well as of sex, and the result is the perverting of sexual selection,
+and a constantly increasing tendency towards the survival of the unfit.<a name="vol_ii_page_037" id="vol_ii_page_037"></a></p>
+
+<p>In a state of nature the males compete among themselves for the favor of
+the female. The female is not raped, nor is she kidnapped; on the
+contrary, she exercises her prerogative, she inspects the various male
+charms which are set before her, and selects those which please her,
+according to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak
+and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce themselves, and the
+procreating is done by the highest specimens of the type.</p>
+
+<p>But now we have a world which is ruled by money, in which opportunity,
+and indeed survival, depend upon money, and the whole tendency of
+society is to make money standards supreme. We do not like to admit
+this, of course; our instincts revolt against it, and our higher
+faculties reinforce the revolt, so we carefully veil our money motives,
+and invent polite phrases to conceal them. You will hear people deny it
+is money which determines admission into what is called "society," the
+intimate life of the ruling class. They will tell you that it is not
+money, it is "good taste," "refinement," "charm of personality," and so
+on. But if you analyze all these things, you speedily discover that they
+are made out of money; they are symbols of the possession of money,
+devised by those who possess it, as a means of keeping themselves apart
+from those who do not possess it. I would safely defy a member of the
+ruling class to name a single element in what he calls "refinement," or
+"good taste," that is not in its ultimate analysis a symbol of the
+possession of money. Let it be the pronunciation of a word, or the cut
+of a coat, or the method of handling a fork&mdash;whatever it may be, it is
+part of a code, revealing that the person, or more important yet, the
+ancestors of the person, have belonged to the leisure class, and have
+had time and opportunity to learn to do things in a certain precise
+conventional way. I say "conventional," for very frequently these tests
+have no relationship whatever to reality. Considered as a matter of
+common sense and convenience, it is a great deal better to eat peas with
+a spoon than with a fork, and to use both a knife and fork in eating
+lettuce; but if you eat peas with a spoon, or use a knife on lettuce,
+every member of the ruling class will instantly know that you are an
+interloper, as much so as if you took to throwing the china at your
+hostess.</p>
+
+<p>Our culture is a money culture, our standards are money<a name="vol_ii_page_038" id="vol_ii_page_038"></a> standards, and
+our sex decisions are based upon money, not upon love. Any man can have
+money in our society, provided the accident of birth favors him, and it
+is everywhere known that any man who has money can get a wife. It is
+certainly not true that any man with <i>no</i> money can get a wife, and it
+is true that most men who have little money have to take wives who have
+less&mdash;that is, who belong to a lower class, according to the world's
+standards. The average young girl of the propertied classes is trained
+for marriage as for any other business. She is taught to be sexually
+cold, but to imitate sexual excitement deliberately, so as to arouse it
+in the male, and to keep herself surrounded with a swarm of males; this
+being the basis of her prestige, the factor which will cause the
+"eligible" man, the "catch," to desire her. In polite society this
+proceeding is known as "coquetry," or "charm," and it would be no
+exaggeration to say that seventy-five per cent of all the novels so far
+written in the world are expositions of this activity; also that when we
+go to the theater, we go in order to watch and sympathize with these
+manifestations of pecuniary sexuality.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule the young girl knows what she is doing, but she is taught to
+camouflage it, to preserve her "innocence." She would not dream of
+marrying for money; she wants to marry something "distinguished"&mdash;that
+is to say, something which has received the stamp of approval from a
+world which approves money. She wants to marry somebody who is
+"elegant," who is in "good form"; she wants to marry without having to
+think about the horrid subject of money at all, and so she is carefully
+chaperoned, and confined to a world where nothing but money is to be
+met. In Tennyson's poem, "The Northern Farmer," the old fellow is
+coaching his son on the subject of marriage, and they are driving along
+a road, and the farmer listens to his horses' hoofs, and they are
+saying, "Proputty, proputty, proputty!" The farmer sums up in one
+sentence the doctrine of pecuniary marriage as it is taught to the
+ruling class virgin: "Doän't thee marry for money, but goä wheer money
+is."</p>
+
+<p>In this process, of course, the ruling class virgin must spend a great
+deal of money in order to keep up her own prestige; and when she is
+married, she must spend it to keep up the prestige of her unmarried
+sisters, and then of her children. As a result of this, the only ruling
+class males<a name="vol_ii_page_039" id="vol_ii_page_039"></a> who can afford to marry are the rich ones. There are always
+some who are richer, and these are the most desirable; so the tendency
+with each generation is to put the period of marriage further off; the
+man has to wait until he has accumulated enough "proputty" to satisfy
+the girl of his desires&mdash;a girl whom he admires because of her pecuniary
+prestige. He delays, and meantime he satisfies his passions with the
+daughters of the poor. As a result of this, when he does finally come to
+marry, he is apt to be unlovely and unlovable. The woman frequently does
+not love him at all, but takes him cold-bloodedly because he is
+"eligible"; in that case she is a cold and "sexless" wife. Or else,
+after she has married him she discovers his unloveliness, and either
+decides that all men are selfish brutes, and reconciles herself to a
+celibate life, or else she goes out and preys upon the domestic
+happiness of other women.<a name="vol_ii_page_040" id="vol_ii_page_040"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXV" id="CHAPTER_XXXV"></a>CHAPTER XXXV<br /><br />
+MARRIAGE AND MONEY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher form of
+prostitution known as the "marriage of convenience.")</p></div>
+
+<p>I realize that all these sex problems are complicated. Every case is
+individual, and in no two cases can you give exactly the same
+explanation. But it is my thesis that whatever the cause, if you trace
+down the causes of the cause, you will find economic inequality and
+class privilege. It is evident in the lives of the rich, and it is even
+more evident in the lives of the poor, who are not permitted the luxury
+of pretense. The poor live in a world dominated by forces which they
+seldom understand, subjected to enormous pressure which crushes and
+destroys them, without their being able to see it or touch it. In the
+world of the poor there is first of all poverty; there is insecurity of
+employment and insufficiency of wage, and the daily and hourly terror of
+starvation and ruin. Above this is a world of power and luxury, a
+wonderland of marvels and thrills, seen through a colored mist of
+romance. The working-class girl, born to drudgery and perpetual
+child-bearing, has a brief hour in which her cheeks are red and her
+beauty is ripe; and out of the heaven above her steps a male creature
+panoplied in the armor of ruling class prestige&mdash;that is to say, a dress
+suit&mdash;and scattering about him a shower of automobile rides, jewelry and
+candy and flowers. She opens her arms to him; and then, when her brief
+hour of rapture is past, she becomes the domestic drudge of some
+workingman, or else the inmate of a brothel.</p>
+
+<p>It is a custom of social workers and church people, seeking data about
+these painful subjects, to interview numbers of prostitutes, and
+question them as to the causes of their "fall"; so you read statistics
+to the effect that seventeen per cent of prostitution has an economic
+cause, that twenty-six per cent is caused by love of finery, etc. These
+pious people, employed by the ruling class to maintain ruling class
+prestige by demonstrating that wage slavery has nothing to do with<a name="vol_ii_page_041" id="vol_ii_page_041"></a>
+white slavery, attain their purpose by restricting the word "economic"
+to food and shelter; forgetting that young girls do not live by bread
+alone, but also by ribbons, and silk stockings, and moving picture
+shows, and trips to Coney Island, and everything else that gives a
+momentary escape from drudgery into joy. We all understand, of course,
+that the daughters of the rich are entitled to joy, and we provide them
+with it as a matter of course; but the daughters of the poor are
+supposed to work in a cotton mill ten or eleven hours a day from
+earliest childhood, and the joy we provide for them is vicarious. As a
+woman poet sets it forth:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry">
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">"The golf links lie so near the mill</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 2em;">That almost every day</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: .25em;">The laboring children can look out</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 2em;">And see the men at play."</span></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Some years ago my wife and I were invited to meet Mrs. Mary J. Goode, a
+keeper of brothels in the "Tenderloin," who had revolted against the
+system of police graft, and had exposed it in the newspapers. My wife
+questioned her closely as to the psychology of people in her business,
+and she insisted that the majority of prostitutes were not oversexed,
+nor were they feeble minded; they were women who had loved and trusted,
+and had been "thrown down." As Mrs. Goode phrased it, they said to
+themselves: "Never again! After this, they'll pay!"</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, the causes of prostitution are so largely economic
+that the other factors are hardly worth mentioning. The sale of sex is
+unknown in savage society, and would be unknown in a Socialist society.
+If here and there some degenerate individual would rather sell her sex
+than do her share of honest labor in a free and just world, such an
+individual would become a patient in the psychopathic ward of a public
+hospital. Economic forces drive women to prostitution, first, by direct
+starvation, and second, by teaching them money standards of prestige,
+the ideal of living without working, which is the heaven achieved by the
+rich and longed for by the poor. Contributory to the process are
+policemen, politicians, and judges who protect the property of the rich,
+and prey upon the disinherited; also newspaper editors, college
+professors, priests of God and preachers<a name="vol_ii_page_042" id="vol_ii_page_042"></a> of Jesus, who attribute the
+social evil to "original sin," or the "weakness of human nature."</p>
+
+<p>So far as men are concerned, economic forces operate by three main
+channels; late marriage, loveless marriage, and drudgery in wives. You
+will find patronizing and maintaining the brothels the following kinds
+of males; first, young boys who have been taught that it is "manly" to
+gratify their sex impulses; second, young men who take it for granted
+that they cannot afford to marry; third, old bachelors who have looked
+at marriage and decided that it is not a paying proposition; fourth,
+married men who have been picked out for their money, and have come to
+the conclusion that "good women" are necessarily sexless; and finally,
+married men whose wives have lost the power to charm them by continuous
+childbearing, and the physical and nervous strain of domestic slavery.</p>
+
+<p>This latter applies not merely to the wives of the poor. It applies to
+members of the middle classes, and even of the richer classes, because
+the job of managing many servants is often as trying as the doing of
+one's own work. To explain how domestic drudgery is caused by economic
+pressure would require a little essay in itself. The home is the place
+where the man keeps his sex property apart under lock and key, and it
+is, therefore, the portion of our civilization least influenced by
+modern ideas. Women still drudge in separate kitchens and nurseries, as
+they have drudged for thousands of years. They cook their dinners over
+separate fires, and have each their own little group of children,
+generally ill cared for, because the work is done by an untrained
+amateur. Moreover, the prestige of this home has to be kept up, because
+the social position and future prosperity of the man depend upon it. The
+children must be dressed in frilled and starched clothing, which makes
+them miserable, and wears out the tempers and pocketbooks of the
+mothers. Costly entertainments must be given, and twice a day a meal
+must be prepared for the father of the family&mdash;all good wives have
+learned the ancient formula for the retention of masculine affections:
+"Feed the brute!" Living in a world of pecuniary prestige, every
+particle of the woman's surplus energy must go into some form of
+ostentation, into buying or making things which are futile and
+meaningless. In such a blind world, dazed by such a struggle, women
+become irritable, they lose their sex<a name="vol_ii_page_043" id="vol_ii_page_043"></a> charm, they forget all about
+love; so the husband gives up hoping for the impossible, accepts the
+common idea that love and marriage are incompatible, and adopts the
+formula that what his wife doesn't know will not hurt her.</p>
+
+<p>And step by step, as economic evolution progresses, as vested wealth
+becomes more firmly established and claims for itself a larger and
+larger share of the total product of society&mdash;so step by step you find
+the pecuniary ideals becoming more firmly established, you find marriage
+becoming more and more a matter of property, and less and less a matter
+of love. In European countries there may still be some love marriages
+among the poor, but in the upper classes there is no longer any pretense
+of such a thing, and if you spoke of it you would be considered absurd.
+In countries of fresh and naive commercialism, like America, the women
+select the men because of their money prestige; but in Germany, the
+process has gone a step further&mdash;the men are so firmly established in
+their class positions that they insist upon being bought with a fortune.
+The same is true when titled foreigners condescend to visit our "land of
+the dollar." They will stoop to a vulgar American wife only in case her
+parents will make a direct settlement of a fortune upon the husband, and
+then they take her back home, and find their escape from boredom in the
+highly cultivated mistresses of their own land.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere on the Continent, and in Great Britain also, it is accepted
+that marriages are matters of business, and only incidentally and very
+slightly of affection. The initiative is commonly taken, not by the
+young people, but by the heads of the families. Preliminary protocols
+are exchanged, and then the family solicitors sit down and bargain over
+the matter. If they were making a deal for a carload of hams, they would
+be governed by the market price of hams at the moment, also by the
+reputation of that particular brand of ham; and similarly, in the case
+of marriage, they are governed by the prestige of the family names, and
+the market price of husbands prevailing. Always the man exacts a cash
+settlement, and in Catholic countries he becomes the outright owner of
+all the property of his wife, thus reducing her completely to the status
+of a chattel. If any young couple dares to break through these laws of
+their class, the whole class unites to trample them down. One of the
+greatest of English novelists, George Meredith, wrote his greatest
+novel, "The Ordeal<a name="vol_ii_page_044" id="vol_ii_page_044"></a> of Richard Feverel," to show how, under the most
+favorable circumstances, the union of a ruling class youth with a
+farmer's daughter could result in nothing but shipwreck.</p>
+
+<p>The country in which the property marriage is most firmly established is
+probably France; and in France the rights of nature are recognized in a
+kind of supplementary union, which constitutes what is known as the
+"domestic triangle," or in the French language, "<i>la vie trois</i>." The
+young girl of the French ruling classes is guarded every moment of her
+life like a prisoner in jail. She is sold in marriage, and is expected
+to bear her husband an heir, possibly two or three children. After that,
+she is considered, not under the law or by the church, but by the
+general common sense of the community, to be free to seek satisfaction
+of her love needs. Her husband has mistresses, and she has a lover, and
+to that lover she is faithful, and in her dealings with him she is
+guided by an elaborate and subtle code. Practically all French fiction
+and drama deal with this "life in threes," and the complications and
+tragedies which result from it. I name one novel, simply because it
+happens to be the last that I myself have read, "The Red Lily," by
+Anatole France.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, every human being knows in his heart that this is a monstrous
+arrangement, and there are periods of revolt when real feeling surges up
+in the hearts of men, and we have stories of true love, young and
+unselfish love, such for example as Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," or
+St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," or Halévy's "L'Abbe Constantin."
+Everybody reads these stories and weeps over them, but everybody knows
+that they are like the romantic shepherds and shepherdesses of the
+ancient régime; they never had any existence in reality, and are not
+meant to be taken seriously. If anybody attempts to carry them into
+action, or to preach them seriously to the young, then we know that we
+are dealing with a disturber of the foundations of the social order, a
+dangerous and incendiary villain, and we give him a name which sends a
+shudder down the spine of every friend of law and order&mdash;we call him a
+"free-lover."</p>
+
+<p>I see before my eyes the wretch cowering upon the witness stand, and the
+virtuous district attorney, who has perhaps spent the previous night in
+a brothel, pointing a finger of accusing wrath into his face, and
+thundering, "Do you believe in free love?" The wretch, if he is wise,
+will not hesitate<a name="vol_ii_page_045" id="vol_ii_page_045"></a> or parley; he will not ask what the district attorney
+means by love, or what he means by freedom. Here in very truth is a case
+where "he who hesitates is lost!" Let the wretch instantly answer, No,
+he does not believe in free love, he believes in love that pays cash as
+it goes; he believes in love that investigates carefully the prevailing
+market conditions, decides upon a reasonable price, has the contract in
+writing, and lives up to the bargain&mdash;"till death do us part." If the
+witness be a woman, let the answer be that she believes in slave love;
+that she expects to be sold for the benefit of her parents, the prestige
+of her family and the social position of her future offspring. Let her
+say that she will be a loyal and devoted servant, and will never do
+anything at any time to invalidate the contract which is signed for her
+by her parents or guardians.<a name="vol_ii_page_046" id="vol_ii_page_046"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXXVI<br /><br />
+LOVE VERSUS LUST</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it should be
+followed and when repressed.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have considered the sex disorders of our age and their causes. We
+have now to grope our way towards a basis of sanity and health in these
+vital matters.</p>
+
+<p>Consider man, as Metchnikoff describes him, with his overplus of sex
+energy. From early youth he is besieged by impulses and desires, and as
+a rule is left entirely uninstructed on the subject, having to pick up
+his ideas from the conversation of older lads, who have nothing but
+misinformation and perversions to give him. Nearly all these older lads
+declare and believe that it is necessary to gratify the sex impulse,
+that physically it is harmful not to do so. I have even heard physicians
+and trainers maintain that idea. Opposed to them are the official
+moralists and preachers of religion, who declare that to follow the sex
+impulse, except when officially sanctioned by the church, is to commit
+sin.</p>
+
+<p>At different times in my life I have talked with all kinds of people,
+young and old, men and women, doctors and clergymen, teachers and
+trainers of athletes, and a few wise and loving mothers who have talked
+with their own boys and other boys. As a result I have come to agree
+with neither side in the debate. I believe that there is a distinction
+which must be drawn, and I ask you to consider it carefully, and bear it
+in mind in all that I say on the problem of happiness and health in sex.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that a normal man is one being, manifesting himself in various
+aspects, physical, emotional, intellectual. I believe that all these
+aspects of human activity go normally together, and cannot normally be
+separated, and that the separation of them is a perversion and source of
+harm. I believe that the sex impulse, as it normally manifests itself,
+and would manifest itself in a man if he were living a normal life, is
+an impulse which includes every aspect of the man's being. It is not
+merely physical desire and emotional excitement;<a name="vol_ii_page_047" id="vol_ii_page_047"></a> it is intellectual
+curiosity, a deep and intense interest, not merely in the body, but in
+the mind and heart and personality of the woman.</p>
+
+<p>I appreciate that there is opportunity for controversy here. As a matter
+of psychology, it is not easy to separate instinct from experience, to
+state whether a certain impulse is innate or acquired. Some may argue
+that savages know nothing about idealism in sex, neither do those modern
+savages whom we breed in city slums; some may make the same assertion
+concerning a great mass of loutish and sensual youths. We have got so
+far from health and soundness that it is hard to be sure what is
+"normal" and what is "ideal." But without going into metaphysics, I
+think we can reasonably make the following statement concerning the sex
+impulse at its first appearance in the average healthy youth in
+civilized societies; that this impulse, going to the roots of the being,
+affecting every atom of energy and every faculty, is accompanied, not
+merely by happiness, but by sympathetic delight in the happiness of the
+woman, by interest in the woman, by desire to be with her, to stay with
+her and share her life and protect her from harm. In what I have to say
+about the subject from now on, I shall describe this condition of being
+and feeling by the word "love."</p>
+
+<p>But now suppose that men should, for some reason or other, evolve a set
+of religious ideas which denied love, and repudiated love, and called it
+a sin and a humiliation; or suppose there should be an economic
+condition which made love a peril, so that the young couple which
+yielded to love would be in danger of starvation, or of seeing their
+children starve. Suppose there should be evolved classes of men and
+women, held by society in a condition of permanent semi-starvation;
+then, under such conditions, the impulse to love would become a trap and
+a source of terror. Then the energies of a great many men would be
+devoted to suppressing love and strangling it in themselves; then the
+intellectual and spiritual sanctions of love would be withdrawn, the
+beauty and charm and joy would go out of it, and it would become a
+starving beggar at the gates, or a thief skulking in the night-time, or
+an assassin with a dagger and club. In other words, sex would become all
+the horror that it is today, in the form of purchased vice, and more
+highly purchased marriage, and secret shame, and obscure innuendo. So we
+should<a name="vol_ii_page_048" id="vol_ii_page_048"></a> have what is, in a civilized man, a perversion, the possibility
+of love which is physical alone; a purely animal thing in a being who is
+not purely animal, but is body, mind and spirit all together. So it
+would be possible for pitiful, unhappy man, driven by the blind urge of
+nature, to conceive of desiring a woman only in the body, and with no
+care about what she felt, or what she thought, or what became of her
+afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>That purely physical sex desire I will indicate in our future
+discussions by the only convenient word that I can find, which is lust.
+The word has religious implications, so I explain that I use it in my
+own meaning, as above. There is a great deal of what the churches call
+lust, which I call true and honest love; on the other hand, in Christian
+churches today, there are celebrated innumerable marriages between
+innocent young girls and mature men of property, which I describe as
+legalized and consecrated lust.</p>
+
+<p>We are now in position to make a fundamental distinction. I assert the
+proposition that there does not exist, in any man, at any time of his
+life, or in any condition of his health, a necessity for yielding to the
+impulses of lust; and I say that no man can yield to them without
+degrading his nature and injuring himself, not merely morally, but
+mentally, and in the long run physically. I assert that it is the duty
+of every man, at all times and under all circumstances, to resist the
+impulses of lust, to suppress and destroy them in his nature, by
+whatever expenditure of will power and moral effort may be required.</p>
+
+<p>I know physicians who maintain the unpopular thesis that serious damage
+may be done to the physical organism of both man and woman by the long
+continued suppression of the sex-life. Let me make plain that I am not
+disagreeing with such men. I do not deny that repression of the sex-life
+may do harm. What I do deny is that it does any harm to repress a
+physical desire which is unaccompanied by the higher elements of sex;
+that is to say, by affection, admiration, and unselfish concern for the
+sex-partner and her welfare. When I advise a man to resist and suppress
+and destroy the impulse toward lust in his nature, I am not telling him
+to live a sexless life. I am telling him that if he represses lust, then
+love will come; whereas, if he yields to lust, then love may never come,
+he may make himself incapable of love,<a name="vol_ii_page_049" id="vol_ii_page_049"></a> incapable of feeling it or of
+trusting it, or of inspiring it in a woman. And I say that if, on the
+other hand, he resists lust, he will pour all the energies of his being
+into the channels of affection and idealism. Instead of having his
+thoughts diverted by every passing female form, his energies will become
+concentrated upon the search for one woman who appeals to him in
+permanent and useful ways. We may be sure that nature has not made men
+and women incompatible, but on the contrary, has provided for
+fulfillment of the desires of both. The man will find some woman who is
+looking for the thing which he has to offer&mdash;that is, love.</p>
+
+<p>And now, what about the suppression of love? Here I am willing to go as
+far as any physician could desire, and possibly farther. Speaking
+generally, and concerning normal adult human beings, I say that the
+suppression of love is a crime against nature and life. I say that long
+continued and systematic suppression of love exercises a devastating
+effect, not merely upon the body, but upon the mind and all the energies
+of the being. I say that the doctrine of the suppression of love, no
+matter by whom it is preached, is an affront to nature and to life, and
+an insult to the creator of life. I say that it is the duty of all men
+and women, not merely to assert their own right to love, but to devote
+their energies to a war upon whatever ideas and conventions and laws in
+society deny the love-right.</p>
+
+<p>The belief that long continued suppression of love does grave harm has
+been strongly reinforced in the last few years by the discovery of
+psycho-analysis, a science which enables us to explore our unconscious
+minds, and lay bare the secrets of nature's psychic workshop. These
+revelations have made plain that sex plays an even more important part
+in our mental lives than we realized. Sex feeling manifests itself, not
+merely in grown people, but in the tiniest infants; in these latter it
+has of course no object in the opposite sex, but the physical sensations
+are there, and some of their outward manifestations; and as the infant
+grows, and realizes the outside world, the feelings come to center upon
+others, the parents first of all. These manifestations must be guided,
+and sometimes repressed; but if this is done violently, by means of
+terror, the consequences may be very harmful&mdash;the wrong impulses or the
+terrors may survive as a "complex" in the unconscious mind, and cause a
+long chain of nervous disorders<a name="vol_ii_page_050" id="vol_ii_page_050"></a> and physical weaknesses in the adult.
+These things are no matter of guesswork, they have been proven as
+thoroughly as any scientific discovery, and are used in a new technic of
+healing. Of course, as with every new theory, there are unbalanced
+people who carry it to extremes. There are fanatics of Freudianism who
+talk as if everything in the human unconsciousness were sex; but that
+need not blind us to the importance of these new discoveries, and the
+confirmation they bring to the thesis that sane and normal love, wisely
+guided by common sense and reasoned knowledge, is at a certain period of
+life a vital necessity to every sound human being.<a name="vol_ii_page_051" id="vol_ii_page_051"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXXVII<br /><br />
+CELIBACY VERSUS CHASTITY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(The ideal of the repression of the sex impulse, as against the
+ideal of its guidance and cultivation.)</p></div>
+
+<p>There are two words which we need in this discussion, and as they are
+generally used loosely, they must now be defined precisely. The two
+words are celibacy and chastity. We define celibacy as the permanent and
+systematic suppression of love. We define chastity, on the other hand,
+as the permanent and systematic suppression of lust. Chastity, as the
+word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing for it; it
+is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially in the young, of
+consecrating their beings to the search for love, and to becoming worthy
+for love. In that sense we regard chastity as one of the most essential
+of virtues in the young. It is widely taught today, but ineffectively,
+because unintelligently and without discrimination; because, in other
+words, it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and
+one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases.</p>
+
+<p>The origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. At a certain
+stage in human development the eyes of the mind are opened, and to some
+man comes a revelation of the life of altruism and sympathetic
+imagination. To use the common phrase, the man discovers his spiritual
+nature. But under the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside
+him is in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and
+trample it into the mire. One of the most powerful of these destructive
+agencies, as it seems to the man, is sex. By means of sex he is laid
+hold upon by strange and terrible creatures who do not understand his
+higher vision, but seek only to prey upon him, and use him for their
+convenience. At the worst they rob him of everything, money, health,
+time and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they put
+him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. In the words of a
+wise old man of the world, Francis Bacon, "He who marries and has
+children gives hostages to fortune." In a world wherein war, pestilence,
+and famine held sway,<a name="vol_ii_page_052" id="vol_ii_page_052"></a> the man of family had but slight chance of
+surviving as a philosopher or prophet or saint. Discovering in himself a
+deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, he
+imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away to the desert,
+and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and lashed himself with whips,
+and allowed worms and lice to devour his body, in the effort to destroy
+in himself the impulse of sex.</p>
+
+<p>So the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, not of much use,
+but better than nothing; and so we still have in the world celibate
+priesthoods, and what is more dangerous to our social health, we have
+the old, degraded notions of the essential vileness of the sex
+relationship&mdash;notions permeating all our thought, our literature, our
+social conventions and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true
+wisdom and health and happiness in love.</p>
+
+<p>I say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral disease; it is
+a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her energies to breaking
+it down, and she always succeeds. There never has been a celibate
+religious order, no matter how noble its origin and how strict its
+discipline, which has not sooner or later become a breeding place of
+loathsome unnatural vices. And sooner or later the ideal begins to
+weaken, and common sense to take its place, and so we read in history
+about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who have "nieces"
+and attractive servant girls. Make the acquaintance of any police
+sergeant in any big city of America, and get him to chatting on friendly
+terms, and you will discover that it is a common experience for the
+police in their raids upon brothels to catch the representatives of
+celibate religious orders. As one old-timer in the "Tenderloin" of New
+York said to me, "Of course, we don't make any trouble for the good
+fathers." Nor was this merely because the old sergeant was an Irishman
+and a Catholic; it was because deep down in his heart he knew, as every
+man knows, that the craving of a man for the society and companionship
+of a woman is an overwhelming craving, which will break down every
+barrier that society may set against it.</p>
+
+<p>There is another form of celibacy which is not based upon religious
+ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely selfish in its nature.
+It is unorganized and unreasoned, and is known as "bachelorhood"; it has
+as its complements the<a name="vol_ii_page_053" id="vol_ii_page_053"></a> institutions of old maidenhood and of
+prostitution. Both forms of celibacy, the religious and the economic,
+are entirely incompatible with chastity, which is only possible where
+love is recognized and honored. Chastity is a preparation for love; and
+if you forbid love, whether by law, or by social convention, or by
+economic strangling, you at once make chastity a Utopian dream. You may
+preach it from your pulpits until you are black in the face; you may
+call out your Billy Sundays to rave, and dance, and go into convulsions;
+you may threaten hell-fire and brimstone until you throw whole audiences
+into spasms&mdash;but you will never make them chaste. On the contrary,
+strange and horrible as it may seem, those very excitements will turn
+into sexual excitements before your eyes! So subtle is our ancient
+mother nature, and so determined to have her own way!</p>
+
+<p>The abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of womanhood, its
+distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, is not yet dead in the
+world. It is in our very bones, and is forever appearing in new and
+supposed to be modern forms. Take a man like Tolstoi, who gained
+enormous influence, not merely in Russia, but throughout the world among
+people who think themselves liberal&mdash;humanitarians, pacifists,
+philosophic anarchists. Tolstoi's notions about sex, his teachings and
+writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one continuous
+manifestation of disease. All through his youth and middle years, as an
+army officer, popular novelist, and darling of the aristocracy, his life
+was one of license, and the attitude toward women he thus acquired, he
+never got out of his thoughts to his last day. Gorky, meeting him in his
+old age, reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole
+attitude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome slyness.</p>
+
+<p>But Tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the great moral
+consciences of humanity. He looked about him at a world gone mad with
+greed and hate, and he made convulsive efforts to reform his own spirit
+and escape the power of evil. As regards sex, his thought took the form
+of ancient Christian celibacy. Man must repudiate the physical side of
+sex, he must learn to feel toward women a "pure" affection, the
+relationship of brother and sister. In his novel, "Resurrection,"
+Tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a beautiful peasant girl
+and conceives for her such a noble and<a name="vol_ii_page_054" id="vol_ii_page_054"></a> generous emotion; but gradually
+the poison of physical sex-desire steals into his mind, he seduces her,
+and she becomes a prostitute. Later in life, when he discovers the crime
+he has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, and
+wins her to God and goodness by the unselfish and unsexual love which he
+should have maintained from the beginning.</p>
+
+<p>It was Tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward this kind of
+love, and when it was pointed out to him that if this doctrine were to
+be applied universally, the human race would become extinct, his answer
+was that there was no reason to fear that, because only a few people
+would be good enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! Here
+you see the reincarnation of the old Christian notion that we are
+"conceived in sin and born in iniquity." We may be pure and good, and
+cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life continue. Some choose to
+sin, and these sinners hand down their sinful qualities to the future;
+and so virtue and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile
+crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom God has
+sent to call down destruction upon a world which He had made&mdash;through
+some mistake never satisfactorily explained!</p>
+
+<p>It is easy nowadays to persuade intelligent people to laugh at such a
+perverted view of life; but the truth is that this attitude toward sex
+is written, not merely into our religious creeds and formulas, but into
+most of our laws and social conventions. It is this, which for
+convenience I will call the "monkish" view of love, which prevents our
+dealing frankly and honestly with its problems, distinguishing between
+what is wrong and what is right, and doing anything effective to remedy
+the evils of marriage-plus-prostitution. That is why I have tried so
+carefully to draw the distinction between what I call love and what I
+call lust; between the ideal of celibacy, which is a perversion, and the
+idea of chastity, which must form an essential part of any regimen of
+true and enduring love.<a name="vol_ii_page_055" id="vol_ii_page_055"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXXVIII<br /><br />
+THE DEFENSE OF LOVE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses passionate love, its sanction, its place in life, and
+its preservation in marriage.)</p></div>
+
+<p>I have before me as I write a newspaper article by Robert Blatchford, a
+great writer and great man. He is dealing with the subject of "Love and
+Marriage," and his doctrine is summed up in the following sentences:
+"There is a difference between loving a woman and falling in love with
+her. The love one falls into is a sweet illusion. But that fragrant
+dream does not last. In marriage there are no fairies."</p>
+
+<p>This expresses one of the commonest ideas in the world. Passionate love
+is one thing, and marriage is another and different thing, and it is no
+more possible to reconcile them than to mix oil and water. Our notions
+of "romantic" love took their rise in the Middle Ages, from the songs
+and narratives of the troubadours, and this whole tradition was based
+upon the glorification of illegitimate and extra-marital love. That
+tradition has ruled the world of art ever since, and rules it today. I
+do not exaggerate when I say that it is the conventional view of grand
+opera and the drama, of moving pictures and novels, that impassioned and
+thrilling love is found before marriage, and is found in adultery and in
+temptations to adultery, but is never found in marriage. I have a pretty
+varied acquaintance with the literature of the world, and I have sat and
+thought for quite a while, without being able to recall a single
+portrait of life which contradicts this thesis; and certainly anyone
+familiar with literature could name ten thousand novels and dramas and
+grand operas which support the thesis.</p>
+
+<p>English and American Puritanism have beaten the tradition down to this
+extent: the novelist portrays the glories and thrills of young love, and
+carries it as far as the altar and the orange blossoms and white ribbons
+and showers of rice&mdash;and stops. He leaves you to assume that this
+delightful rapture continues forever after; but he does not attempt to
+show it to you&mdash;he would not dare attempt to show it, because<a name="vol_ii_page_056" id="vol_ii_page_056"></a> the
+general experience of men and women in marriage would make him
+ridiculous. So he runs away from the issue; if he tells you a story of
+married life, it is a story of a "triangle"&mdash;the thrills of love
+imperiling marriage, and either crushed out, or else wrecking the lives
+of the victims. Such is the unanimous testimony of all our arts today,
+and I submit it as evidence of the fact that there must be something
+vitally wrong with our marriage system.</p>
+
+<p>Personally, I am prepared to go as far as the extreme sex-radical in the
+defense of love and the right to love. I believe that love is the most
+precious of all the gifts of life. I accept its sanctions and its
+authority. I believe that it is to be cherished and obeyed, and not to
+be run away from or strangled in the heart. I believe that it is the
+voice of nature speaking in the depths of us, and speaking from a wisdom
+deeper than we have yet attained, or may attain for many centuries to
+come. And when I say love, I do not mean merely affection. I do not mean
+merely the habit of living in the same home, which is the basis of
+marriage as Blatchford describes it. What I mean is the love of the
+poets and the dreamers, the "young love" which is thrill and ecstasy, a
+glorification and a transfiguration of the whole of life. I say that,
+far from giving up this love for marriage, it is the true purpose of
+marriage to preserve this love and perpetuate it.</p>
+
+<p>To save repetition and waste of words, let us agree that from now on
+when I use the word love, I mean the passionate love of those who are
+"in love." I believe that it is the right of men and women to be "in
+love," and that there is no true marriage unless they are "in love," and
+stay "in love." I believe that it is possible to apply reason to love,
+to learn to understand love and the ways of love, to protect it and keep
+it alive in marriage. Blatchford writes the sentence, "Matrimony cannot
+be all honeymoon." I answer that assuredly it can be, and if you ask me
+how I know, I tell you that I know in the only way we really know
+anything&mdash;because I have proven it in my own life. I say that if men and
+women would recognize the perpetuation of the honeymoon as the purpose
+of marriage, and would devote to that end one-hundredth part of the
+intelligence and energy they now devote to the killing of their fellow
+human beings in war, we might have an end to the wretched "romantic
+tradition" which makes the most sacred emotion of the human<a name="vol_ii_page_057" id="vol_ii_page_057"></a> heart into
+a sneak-thief skulking in the darkness, entering our lives by back
+alleys and secret stairways&mdash;while greed and worldly pomp, dullness and
+boredom, parade in by the front entrance.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, what is love&mdash;young love, passionate love, the love
+of those who "fall in"? I know a certain lady, well versed in worldly
+affairs, who says that it is at once the greatest nonsense and the
+deadliest snare in the world. This lady was trained as a "coquette";
+she, and all the young ladies she knew, made it their business to cause
+men to fall in love with them, and their prestige was based upon their
+skill in that art. So to them "love" was a joke, and men "in love" were
+victims, whether ridiculous or pitiable. To this I answer that I know
+nothing in life that cannot be "faked"; but an imitation has value only
+as it resembles something that is real, and that has real value.</p>
+
+<p>I am aware that it is possible for a society to be so corrupted, so
+given up to the admiration of imitations, of the paint and powder and
+silk-stocking-clad-ankle kind of love, that true and genuine love
+interest, with its impulse to self-sacrifice and self-consecration, is
+no longer felt or understood. I am aware that in such a society it is
+possible for even the very young to be so sophisticated that what they
+take to be love is merely vanity, the worship of money, and the grace
+and charm which the possession of money confers. I have known girls who
+were "head over heels" in love, and thought it was with a man, when
+quite clearly they were in love with a dress suit or a social position.
+In such a society it is hard to talk about natural emotions, and deep
+and abiding and disinterested affections.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, amid all the false conventions, the sham glories and
+cowardices of our civilization, there abides in the heart the craving
+for true love, and the idea of it leaps continually into flame in the
+young. In spite of the ridicule of the elders, in spite of blunders and
+tragic failures, in spite of dishonesties and deceptions&mdash;nevertheless,
+it continues to happen that out of a thousand maidens the youth finds
+one whose presence thrills him with a new and terrible emotion, whose
+lightest touch makes him shiver, almost makes his knees give way.</p>
+
+<p>If you will recall what I have written about instinct and reason, you
+will know that I am not a blind worshipper of<a name="vol_ii_page_058" id="vol_ii_page_058"></a> our ancient mother
+nature. I am not humble in my attitude toward her, but perfectly willing
+to say when I know more than she does. On the other hand, when I know
+nothing or next to nothing, I am shy of contradicting my ancient mother,
+and disposed to give respectful heed to her promptings. One of the
+things about which we know almost nothing at present is the subject of
+eugenics. We are only at the beginning of trying to find out what
+matings produce the best offspring. Meantime, we ought to consider those
+indications which nature gives us, just as we consider her advice about
+what food to eat and what rest to take.</p>
+
+<p>It is not my idea that science will ever take men and women and marry
+them in cold blood, as today we breed our cattle. What I think will
+happen is that young men and women will meet one another, as they do at
+present, and will find the love impulse awakening; they will then submit
+their love to investigation, as to whether they should follow that
+impulse, or should wait. In other words, I do not believe that science
+will ever do away with the raptures of love, but will make itself the
+servant of these raptures, finding out what they mean, and how their
+precious essence may be preserved.</p>
+
+<p>I perfectly understand that the begetting of children is not the only
+purpose of love. The children have to be reared and trained, which means
+that a home has to be founded, and the parents have to learn to
+co-operate. They have to have common aims in life, and temperaments
+sufficiently harmonious so that they can live in the house together
+without tearing each other's eyes out. This means that in any civilized
+society all impulses of love have to be subjected to severe criticism. I
+intend, before long, to show just how I think parents and guardians
+should co-operate with young people in love; to help them to understand
+in advance what they are doing, and how it may be possible for them to
+make their love permanent and successful. For the moment I merely state,
+to avoid any possible misunderstanding, that I am the last person in the
+world to favor what is called "blind" love, the unthinking abandonment
+to an impulse of sex passion. What I am trying to show is that the
+passionate impulse, the passionate excitement of the young couple, is
+the material out of which love and marriage are made. Passion is a part
+of us, and a fundamental part. If we do not find a place for it<a name="vol_ii_page_059" id="vol_ii_page_059"></a> in
+marriage, it will seek satisfaction outside of marriage, and that means
+lying, or the wrecking of the marriage, or both.</p>
+
+<p>Passion is what gives to love and marriage its vitality, its energy, its
+drive; in fact, it gives these qualities to the whole character. It is a
+vivifying force, transfiguring the personality, and if it is crushed and
+repressed, the whole life of that person is distorted. Yet it is a fact
+which every physician knows, that millions of women marry and live their
+whole lives without ever knowing what passionate gratification is. As a
+consequence of this, millions of men take it for granted that there are
+"good" women and "bad" women, and that only the latter are interesting.
+This, of course, is simply one of the abnormalities caused by the
+supplanting of love by money as a motive in marriage. Love becomes a
+superfluity and a danger, and all the forces of society, including
+institutionalized religion, combine to outlaw it and drive it
+underground. Or we might say that they lock it in a dungeon&mdash;and that
+the supreme delight of all the painters, poets, musicians, dramatists
+and novelists of all climes and all periods of history, is to portray
+the escape of the "young god" from these imprisonments. The story is
+told in six words of an old English ballad: "Love will find out the
+way!"</p>
+
+<p>Is it not obvious that there must be something vitally wrong with our
+institutions and conventions in matters of sex, when here exists this
+eternal war between our moralists and our artists? Why not make up our
+minds what we really believe; whether it is true that poets are, as
+Shelley said, "the unacknowledged legislators of mankind," or whether
+they are, as Plato declared, false teachers and seducers of the young.
+If they are the latter, let us have done with them, let us drive them
+from the state, together with lovers and all other impassioned persons.
+But if, on the other hand, it is truth the poets tell about life, then
+let us take the young god out of his dungeon, and bring him into our
+homes by the front door, and cast out the false gods of vanity and greed
+and worldly prestige which now sit in his place.<a name="vol_ii_page_060" id="vol_ii_page_060"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXXIX<br /><br />
+BIRTH CONTROL</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the greatest of
+man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's enslavement, and
+placing the keys of life in his hands.)</p></div>
+
+<p>I assume that you have followed my argument, and are prepared to
+consider seriously whether it may be possible to establish love in
+marriage as the sex institution of civilized society. If you really wish
+to bring such an institution into existence, the first thing you have to
+do is to accomplish the social revolution; that is, you must wipe out
+class control of society, and prestige based upon money exploitation.
+But that is a vast change, and will take time, and meanwhile we have to
+live, and wish to live with as little misery as possible. So the
+practical question becomes this: Suppose that you, as an individual,
+wish to find as much happiness in love as may now be possible, what
+counsel have I to offer? If you are young, you wish this advice for
+yourself; while if you are mature, you wish it for your children. I will
+put my advice under four heads: First, marriage for love; second, birth
+control; third, early marriage; fourth, education for marriage.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these we have considered at some length. A part of the
+process of social revolution is personal conversion; the giving up by
+every individual of the worldly ideal, the surrender of luxury and
+self-indulgence, the consecrating of one's life to self education and
+the cause of social justice. And do not think that that is an easy
+thing, or an unimportant thing, a thing to be taken for granted. On the
+contrary, it is something that most of us have to struggle with at every
+hour of our lives, because respect for property and worldly conventions
+has become one of our deepest instincts; our whole society is poisoned
+with it, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I have
+known in my life who have completely escaped from it. It is not merely a
+question of refusing to marry except for love, it is a question of
+refusing to love except for honest and worthy qualities. It is a
+question of saving our children from the damnable forces of<a name="vol_ii_page_061" id="vol_ii_page_061"></a> snobbery,
+which lay siege to their young minds and destroy the best impulses of
+their hearts, while we in our blindness are still thinking of them as
+babies.</p>
+
+<p>Of the other three topics that I have suggested, I begin with birth
+control, because it is the most fundamental and most important. Without
+birth control there can be no freedom, no happiness, no permanence in
+love, and there can be no mastery of life. Birth control is one of the
+great fundamental achievements of the human reason, as important to the
+life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing.
+Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind
+also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us
+animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel.</p>
+
+<p>Ever since the dawn of history, and probably for long ages before that,
+our race has been struggling against this blind insanity of nature.
+Poor, bewildered Theodore Roosevelt stormed at what he called "race
+suicide," thinking it was some brand new and terrible modern corruption;
+but nowhere do we find a primitive tribe, nowhere in history do we find
+a race which did not seek to save itself from overgrowth and consequent
+starvation. They did not know enough to prevent conception, but they did
+the best they could by means of abortion and infanticide. And because
+today superstition keeps the priceless knowledge of contraception from
+the vast majority of women, these crude, savage methods still prevail,
+and we have our million abortions a year in the United States. Assuming
+that something near one-fourth our population consists of women capable
+of bearing children, we have one woman in twenty-five going through this
+agonizing and health-wrecking experience every year. They go through
+with it, you understand, regardless of everything&mdash;all the moralists and
+preachers and priests with their hell fire and brimstone. They go
+through with it because we have both marriage without love, and love
+without marriage; also because we permit some ten or twenty per cent of
+our total population to suffer the pangs of perpetual starvation,
+because more than half our farms are mortgaged or occupied by tenants,
+and some ten or twenty per cent of our workers are out of jobs all the
+time.</p>
+
+<p>Some of our women know about birth control. They are the rich women, who
+get what they want in this world. They object to the humiliations and
+inconveniences of child bearing,<a name="vol_ii_page_062" id="vol_ii_page_062"></a> and some of them raise one or two
+children, and others of them raise poodle dogs. Also, our middle classes
+have found out; our doctors and lawyers and college professors, and
+people of that sort. But we deliberately keep the knowledge from our
+foreign populations, by the terrors which the church has at its command.
+And what is the practical consequence of this procedure? It is that
+while all our Anglo-Saxon stock, those who founded our country and
+established its institutions, are gradually removing themselves from the
+face of the earth, our ignorant and helpless populations, whether in
+city slums or on tenant farms, are multiplying like rabbits. Read Jack
+London's "The Valley of the Moon" and see what is happening in
+California. You will find the same thing happening in any portion of the
+United States where you take the trouble to use your own eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I try to repress such impulses toward race prejudice as I find in
+myself. I am willing to admit for the sake of this argument that in the
+course of time all the races that are now swarming in America,
+Portuguese and Japanese and Mexican and French-Canadian and Polish and
+Hungarian and Slovakian, are capable of just as high intellectual
+development as our ancestors who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
+But no one who sees the conditions under which they now live can deny
+that it will take a good deal of labor, teaching them and training them,
+as well as scrubbing them, to accomplish that result. And what a waste
+of energy, what a farce it makes of culture, to take the people who have
+already been scrubbed and taught and trained for self-government, and
+exterminate them, and raise up others in their place! It seems time that
+we gave thought to the fundamental question, whether or not there is
+something self-destroying in the very process of culture. Unless we can
+answer this we might as well give up our visions and our efforts to lift
+the race.</p>
+
+<p>Theodore Roosevelt stormed at birth control for something like ten
+years, and it would be interesting if we could know how many Anglo-Saxon
+babies he succeeded in bringing into the world by his preachments. If
+what he wanted was to correct the balance between native and foreign
+births, how much more sensible to have taught birth control to those
+poor, pathetic, half-starved and overworked foreign mothers of our slums
+and tenant farms! I can wager that for every Anglo-Saxon baby that
+Theodore Roosevelt brought into the world<a name="vol_ii_page_063" id="vol_ii_page_063"></a> by his preachings, he could
+have kept out ten thousand foreign slum babies, if only he had lent his
+aid to Margaret Sanger!</p>
+
+<p>Ah, but he wanted all the babies to be born, you say! I see before me
+the face of a certain devout old Christian lady, known to me, who
+settles the question by the Bible quotation, "Be fruitful and multiply."
+But what avails it to follow this biblical advice, if we allow one out
+of five of the new-born infants to perish from lack of scientific care
+before they are two years old? What avails it if we send them to school
+hungry, as we do twenty-two per cent of the public school children of
+New York City? What avails it if we allow venereal disease to spread, so
+that a large percentage of the babies are deformed and miserable? What
+avails it if, when they are fully grown, we can think of nothing better
+to do with them than to take them by millions at a time and dress them
+up in uniforms and send them out to be destroyed by poison gases? Would
+it not be the part of common sense to establish universal birth control
+for at least a year or two&mdash;until we have learned to take care of our
+newly born babies, and to feed our school children, and to protect our
+youths from vice, and to abolish poverty and war from the earth?</p>
+
+<p>These are the social aspects of birth control. There are also to be
+considered what I might call the personal aspects of it. Because young
+people do not know about it, and have no way to find out about it, they
+dare not marry, and so the amount of vice in the world is increased.
+Because married women do not know about it, love is turned to terror,
+and marital happiness is wrecked. Because the harmless and proper
+methods are not sensibly taught, people use harmful methods, which cause
+nervous disorders, and wreck marital happiness, and break up homes.
+Thorough and sound knowledge about birth control is just as essential to
+happiness in marriage as knowledge of diet is necessary to health, or as
+knowledge of economics is necessary to intelligent action as a voter and
+citizen. The suppression by law of knowledge of birth control is just as
+grave a crime against human life as ever was committed by religious
+bigotry in the blackest days of the Spanish Inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>Now this law stands on the statute books of our country, and if I should
+so much as hint to you in this book what you need to know, or even where
+you can find out about it, I should be liable to five years in jail and
+a fine of $5,000, and<a name="vol_ii_page_064" id="vol_ii_page_064"></a> every person who mailed a copy of this book, or
+any advertisement of this book, would be in the same plight. But there
+is not yet a law to prohibit agitation against the law, so the first
+thing I say to every reader of this book is that they should obtain a
+copy of the <i>Birth Control Review</i>, published at 104 Fifth Avenue, New
+York, and also should join the Voluntary Parenthood League, 206
+Broadway, New York. Get the literature of these organizations and
+circulate them and help spread the light!</p>
+
+<p>As to the knowledge which you need, the only advice I am allowed to give
+is that you should seek it. Seek it, and persist in seeking, until you
+find it. Ask everyone you know; and ask particularly among enlightened
+people, those who are willing to face the facts of human life and trust
+in reason and common sense. I do not know if I am violating the law in
+thus telling you how to find out about birth control. One of the
+charming features of this law, and others against the spreading of
+knowledge, is that they will never tell you in advance what you may say,
+but leave you to say it and take your chances! I believe that I am not
+violating any law when I tell you that there are half a dozen simple,
+inexpensive, and entirely harmless methods of preventing undesired
+parenthood without the destruction of the marital relationship.</p>
+
+<p>I am one of those who for many years believed that the destruction of
+the marital relationship was the only proper and moral method. I was
+brought up to take the monkish view of love. I thought it was an animal
+thing which required some outside justification. I had been taught
+nothing else; but now I have had personal experience of other
+justifications of love, and I believe that love is a beautiful and
+joyful relationship, which not merely requires no other justification,
+but confers justification upon many other things in life.</p>
+
+<p>I used to believe in that old ideal of celibacy, thinking it a fine
+spiritual exercise. But since then I have looked out on life, and have
+found so many interesting things to do, so much important work calling
+for attention, that I do not have to invent any artificial exercises for
+my spirit. I have looked at humanity, and brought myself to recognize
+the plain common sense fact&mdash;that whatever superfluous energy I may have
+to waste upon artificial spirituality, the great mass of the people have
+no such energy to spare. They need all their<a name="vol_ii_page_065" id="vol_ii_page_065"></a> energies to get a living
+for themselves and for their wives and little ones. They have their sex
+impulses, and will follow them, and the only question is, shall they
+follow them wisely or unwisely? The religious people decide that sexual
+indulgence is wrong, and they impose a penalty&mdash;and what is that
+penalty? A poor, unwanted little waif of a soul, which never sinned, and
+had nothing to do with the matter, is brought into a hostile world, to
+suffer neglect, and perhaps starvation&mdash;in order to punish parents who
+did not happen to be sufficiently strong willed to practice continence
+in marriage!</p>
+
+<p>I used to believe that there was benefit to health and increase of
+power, whether physical or mental, in the celibate life. I have tried
+both ways of life, and as a result I know that that old idea is
+nonsense. I know now that love is a natural function. Of course, like
+any other function it can be abused; just as hunger may become gluttony,
+sleeping may become sluggishness, getting the money to pay one's way
+through life may become ferocious avarice. But we do not on this account
+refuse ever to eat or sleep or get money to pay our debts. I do not say
+that I believe, I say I know, that free and happy love, guided by wisdom
+and sound knowledge, is not merely conducive to health, but is in the
+long run necessary to health.</p>
+
+<p>People who condemn birth control always argue as if one wished to teach
+this knowledge indiscriminately to the young. Perhaps it is natural that
+those who oppose the use of reason should assume that others are as
+irrational as themselves. All I can say is that I no more believe in
+teaching birth control to the young than I believe in feeding beefsteak
+to nursing infants. There is a period in life for beefsteaks&mdash;or, if my
+vegetarian friends prefer, for lentil hash and peanut butter sandwiches;
+in exactly the same way there is a time for teaching the fundamentals of
+sex, and another time for teaching the art of happiness in marriage,
+which includes birth control. That brings me, by a very pleasant
+transition, to the other two subjects which I have promised to discuss:
+early marriage and education for marriage.<a name="vol_ii_page_066" id="vol_ii_page_066"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XL" id="CHAPTER_XL"></a>CHAPTER XL<br /><br />
+EARLY MARRIAGE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the duty of
+parents in respect to them.)</p></div>
+
+<p>I have shown how economic forces in our society make for later and later
+marriage; and at the present time economic forces are so overwhelming
+that all other forces are hardly worth mentioning in comparison. You
+are, let us say, the mother of a boy of eighteen, and you have what you
+call "common sense"&mdash;meaning thereby a grasp of the money facts of life.
+If your darling boy of eighteen should come to you with a grave face and
+announce, "Mother dear, I have met the girl I love, and we have decided
+that we want to get married"&mdash;you would consider that the most absurd
+thing you had ever heard in all your born days, and you would tell the
+lad that he was a baby, and to run along and play. If he persisted in
+his crazy notion, you and your husband and all the brothers and sisters
+and relatives and friends both of the boy and the girl would set to
+work, by scolding and ridiculing, to make life a misery for them, and
+ninety-nine times out of a hundred you would break down the young
+couple's marital intention.</p>
+
+<p>But now, let us try another supposition. Let us suppose that your
+darling boy of eighteen should come to you again and say, "Mother dear,
+some of the boys are going to spend this evening in a brothel, and I
+have decided to go along." Would you think that was the most absurd
+thing you had ever heard in all your born days? Or would you answer,
+"Yes, of course, my boy; that is what I had in mind when I made you give
+up the girl you loved"? No, you would not answer that. But here is the
+vital fact&mdash;it doesn't matter what you would answer, for you would never
+have a chance to answer. When a mother's darling wants to get married,
+he comes and asks his mother's blessing; but never does a mother's
+darling ask a blessing before he goes with the other boys to a brothel.
+He just goes. Maybe he borrows the money from some other fellow, and<a name="vol_ii_page_067" id="vol_ii_page_067"></a>
+next day tells you he went to a theater. Or maybe he picks up some poor
+man's daughter on the street, and takes her into the park, or up on the
+roof of a tenement. Some such thing he does, to find satisfaction for an
+instinct which you in your worldly wisdom or your heavenly piety spurn
+and ridicule.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to exaggerate. If you are an exceptionally wise and
+tactful mother, you may keep the confidence of your boy, and guide him
+day by day through his temptations and miseries, and keep him chaste.
+But the more you try that, the more apt you will be to come to my
+conclusion, that late marriage is a crime against the race; the more
+aware you will be of the danger, either that his boy friends may break
+him down, or that some lewd woman may come to his bedroom in the
+night-time. Never will you be able to be quite sure that he is not lying
+to you, because of his shame, and the pain he cannot bear to inflict
+upon you. Never will you be quite sure that he is not hiding some cruel
+disease, sneaking off to some quack who takes his money and leaves him
+worse than before&mdash;until finally he shoots off his head, as happened to
+a nephew of an old and dear friend of mine.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the problem of the mother of a son; and now, what about the
+mother of a daughter? This seems much simpler; because your daughter is
+not generally troubled with sex cravings, and if you teach her the
+proprieties, and see that she is carefully chaperoned, you may
+reasonably hope that she will be chaste. But some day you expect that
+she will marry; and then comes your problem. If you are the usual
+mother, you are looking for some one who can maintain her in the state
+of life to which she is accustomed. If a fairy prince would come along,
+or a plaster saint, you would be pleased; but failing that, you will
+take a successful business man, one who has made his way in the world
+and secured himself a position. But turn back to the figures I gave you
+a while ago. If this man is thirty years of age, there is at least a
+fifty-fifty chance that he has had some venereal disease; and while the
+doctors claim to cure these diseases absolutely, we must bear in mind
+that doctors are human, and sometimes claim more than they perform.
+Every doctor will admit, if you pin him down, that these diseases burrow
+deeply into the tissues, and many times are supposed to be cured when
+they are only hidden.<a name="vol_ii_page_068" id="vol_ii_page_068"></a></p>
+
+<p>Here is, in a nutshell, the problem of the mother of a daughter. If you
+marry your daughter at seventeen to a lad of her own age, you have a
+very good chance of marrying her to a person who is chaste. If you marry
+her to a man of twenty-five, you have perhaps one chance in a hundred.
+If you marry her to a man of thirty-five, you have perhaps one chance in
+ten thousand. You may not like these facts; I do not like them myself;
+but I have learned that facts are none the less facts on that account.</p>
+
+<p>You know the average society bud of eighteen, and her attitude to a boy
+of the same age. She regards him as a child; and you think, perhaps,
+that it is natural for a girl to be interested in men of thirty-five and
+even forty-five. But I tell you that it is not natural, it is simply one
+of the perversions of pecuniary sex. The girl is interested in such men,
+because all her young life she has been carefully coached for the
+marriage market; because she is dressed for it, and solemnly brought
+out, and introduced to other players of this exciting game of marriage
+for money, with its incredible prizes of automobiles and jewels and
+palaces full of servants, and magic check-books that never grow empty.
+But suppose that, instead of regarding her as a prize in a lottery, you
+let her grow up naturally, and taught her the truth about herself, both
+body and mind; suppose that, instead of dressing her in ways
+deliberately contrived to emphasize her sex, you put her in a simple
+uniform, and taught her to be honest and straightforward, instead of
+mincing and coy; suppose she played athletic games with boys of her own
+age, and invited them to her home, not for "jazz" dancing and stuffing
+cake and candy, but for the sharing of good music and literature and
+art&mdash;don't you think that maybe this girl might become interested in a
+lad of her own age, and choose him with some understanding of his real
+self?</p>
+
+<p>You take it for granted that young people should not marry until they
+can "afford it." But stop and consider, is not this a relic of old days?
+Always it takes time, and deliberate effort of the reason, to adjust our
+conventions to new facts; so face this fact&mdash;marriage today does not
+necessarily mean children, it may just mean love. It involves little
+more expense, because the young people need cost no more together than
+they cost in the separate homes of their parents. If they are children
+of the poor, they are already taking care<a name="vol_ii_page_069" id="vol_ii_page_069"></a> of themselves. If they are
+children of the moderately well off, their parents expect to support
+them while they are getting an education; and why can they not just as
+well live together, and the parents of each contribute their share? Let
+the parents of the boy give him, not merely what it costs to keep him at
+home, but also the sums which otherwise the boy would pay to the
+brothels. By this argument I do not mean that I favor keeping young
+people financially dependent upon their parents. My own son is working
+his own way through college, and I should be glad to see every young man
+doing the same. All that I am saying is that if parents are going to
+support their children while they are getting an education, they might
+just as well support them married as single, instead of penalizing
+matrimony by making all allowances cease at that point.</p>
+
+<p>I know a certain ardent feminist, who is all for late marriage for
+women, and abhors my ideas on this subject. She wants women to get a
+chance to develop their personalities; whereas I want to sacrifice them
+to the frantic exigencies of the male animal! Young things of seventeen
+and eighteen have no idea what they are, or what they want from life;
+the mating impulse is a blind frenzy in them, and they must be taught to
+control it, just as they are taught not to kill when they are angry!</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, I point out that young ladies in colleges and in
+ballrooms give a lot of time and thought to sex, even though they do not
+call it by that inelegant term. I very much question whether, if we
+should apply our wisdom to the task of getting our young people happily
+mated before we sent them off to college, we should not get a lot more
+serious study out of them than we now do, with all their "fussing" and
+flirting and dancing.</p>
+
+<p>Second, I am willing to make heroic moral efforts, where I see any
+chance of adequate results, but I have examined the facts, and
+definitely made up my mind that it is not worth while, in our present
+stage of culture, to preach to the mass of men the doctrine that they
+should abstain from sex experience until they are twenty-five or thirty
+years of age. You may storm at them, but they only laugh at you; you may
+pass laws, and try to put them in jail, but you only provide a harvest
+for blackmailers and grafters. As to sacrificing the girl, my answer is
+simply that I believe in love;<a name="vol_ii_page_070" id="vol_ii_page_070"></a> and in this I think the girl will agree
+with me, if you will let her! I have never heard any qualified person
+maintain that it hurts a girl to respond to love at the age of seventeen
+or eighteen; nor do I think that it hurts a boy, provided that he is
+taught the virtues of moderation and self-restraint. Without these, it
+will hurt him to eat; but that is no argument for starving him. As for
+the question of his maturity and power to judge, we are able at present
+to keep him from marrying anybody, so I think we might reasonably hope
+to keep him from marrying a wanton or a slut. Certainly we might find
+somebody better than the peroxide blonde he now picks up in front of the
+moving picture palace.</p>
+
+<p>The question, at what ages we shall advise our young couple to have
+children, is a separate one, depending upon many circumstances. First,
+of course, they should not have any until they are able financially to
+maintain them. As to the age at which it is physically advisable, that
+is a question to be settled by physicians and physiologists. I myself
+had the idea that the proper age would be when the woman had attained
+her full stature; but my friend Dr. William J. Robinson sends me some
+statistics from the Johns Hopkins Hospital <i>Bulletin</i>, which startle me.
+This publication for January, 1922, gives the results in five hundred
+childbirths, in which the mother's age was from twelve to sixteen years
+inclusive. It appears that pregnancy and labor at these ages are no more
+dangerous than in older women; but on the other hand, the duration of
+the labor is actually shorter, and the size of the children is not
+inferior. These facts are so contrary to the general impression that I
+content myself with calling attention to them, and leave the commenting
+to be done by feminists and others who oppose themselves to the idea of
+early marriage.<a name="vol_ii_page_071" id="vol_ii_page_071"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLI" id="CHAPTER_XLI"></a>CHAPTER XLI<br /><br />
+THE MARRIAGE CLUB</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to avoid
+unhappy marriages.)</p></div>
+
+<p>I will make the assumption that you would like to have a trial of my
+cure for prostitution. You would like to do something right here and
+now, without waiting for the social revolution. Very well: I propose
+that you shall find a few other parents of boys and girls who are in
+revolt against our system of hidden vice, and that you will meet and
+form a modern marriage club. Only you won't call it that, of course; you
+will tactfully describe it as a literary society, or a social circle, or
+an Epworth League. The parents who run it will know what it is for, just
+as they do today; the only difference being that it will exist to
+promote love matches instead of money matches. It happens that I am
+myself a tactless sort of a person, not skillful at avoiding saying what
+I mean. So, in this chapter, I shall content myself with setting forth
+exactly what this marriage club will do, and leaving it to more clever
+people to supply the necessary camouflage.</p>
+
+<p>This club will begin by correcting the most stupid of all our
+educational blunders, the assumption of the necessary immaturity of the
+young. Our young people nowadays have ten times as much chance to learn
+and ten times as much stimulus to learn as we had; and it is a generally
+safe assumption that they know much more than we think they do, and are
+ready to learn every sensible and interesting thing. I am carrying on an
+epistolary acquaintance with a little miss of twelve, who has read half
+a dozen of my books&mdash;among the "worst" of them&mdash;and writes me letters of
+grave appreciation. I have talked on Socialism to a thousand school
+children, and had them question me for an hour, and heard just as worth
+while questions as I have heard from an audience of bankers. Never in my
+life have I talked about real things with children that I did not find
+them proud to be treated seriously, and eager to show that<a name="vol_ii_page_072" id="vol_ii_page_072"></a> they were
+worthy of that honor. A great part of our foolishness with children is
+due to the emptiness of our own heads.</p>
+
+<p>These parents will delegate one man and one woman to make a thorough
+study of the sex education of the young. Of course, there is knowledge
+about sex which has to be given to the very youngest child, and more and
+more must be given as they grow older and ask more questions. But what I
+have in mind here is that detailed and precise knowledge which must be
+given to the young when they approach the period of puberty. At this age
+of fourteen or fifteen the man will take each of the boys apart, and the
+woman will take each of the girls, and will explain to them what they
+need to know. This duty will not be trusted to parents, for parents have
+an imbecile fear of talking straight to their children, and try to get
+by with rubbish about bees and flowers. Let every child know that the
+days of the hole-and-corner sex business is forever past, and that here
+is an instructed person, who talks real American, and knows what he is
+talking about, and will deal with facts, instead of with evasions.</p>
+
+<p>This club will help to educate the youngsters, and also to give them a
+good time, developing both their minds and bodies, and learning to know
+them thoroughly. When they are sixteen each one will have another talk,
+this time about marriage and what it means; learning that it is not
+merely flirtations and delicious thrills, but a business partnership,
+and the deepest and best of all friendships. So when John finds that he
+likes Mary best of all the girls he knows, this won't be a subject for
+"kidding" and sly innuendo, and blushes and simpering on Mary's part,
+but an occasion for decent and sensible talk about what each of them
+really is, and what each thinks the other to be. If they think they are
+in love, then there will be a council of the elder statesmen, to
+consider that case, and what are the chances of happiness in that love.
+This may sound forbidding, but it is exactly what is done at
+present&mdash;only it is not done honestly and frankly, and therefore does
+not carry proper weight with the young people.</p>
+
+<p>I am an opponent of long engagements, but I am also an opponent of no
+engagements at all; I know no truer proverb than "Marry in haste and
+repent at leisure." It would be my idea that a very young couple should
+announce their<a name="vol_ii_page_073" id="vol_ii_page_073"></a> engagement, and then wait six months, and be consulted
+again about the matter, and have a chance to withdraw with no hard
+feelings, if either party thought best. If they wished to go on, they
+might be asked to wait another six months, if their elders felt very
+certain there were reasons to doubt the wisdom of the match.</p>
+
+<p>There are, of course, people who, because of disease or physical defect,
+should never be allowed to marry; and others who might marry, but should
+not be allowed to have children. There should be laws providing for such
+cases, requiring physical examination before marriage, and in extreme
+cases providing for a simple and harmless surgical operation to prevent
+the hopelessly unfit from passing on their defects to the future. But
+dealing for the moment with normal young persons, members of our modern
+marriage club, I should say that if, after they have listened to the
+warning of their elders, and have waited for a decent interval to think
+things over, they still remain of the opinion that they can make a
+successful marriage, then it is up to the elders to wish them luck. I
+have known of young couples who have refused to heed warnings, and
+regretted it; but I have known of others who went ahead and had their
+own way and proved they were right. There is a form of wisdom called
+experience and there is another form called love.</p>
+
+<p>I hear the worldly and cynical rail at the blindness of "young love,"
+and I can see the truth in what they say; but also I can see the deeper
+truth in the magic dreams of the young soul. Here is a youth who adores
+a girl, and you know the girl, and it is comical to you, because you
+know she is not any of the things the youth imagines. But who are you
+that claim to know the last thing about a human soul? Look into your
+own, and see how many different things you are! Look back, if you can,
+to the time when you were young, and remember the visions and the hopes.
+They have lost all reality to you now; but who can say how many of them
+you might have made real if there had been one other person who believed
+in them, and loved them, and would not give them up?</p>
+
+<p>I write this; and then I think of the other side&mdash;the fools that I have
+known in love! The trusting women, marrying rotten men to reform them!
+The pitiful people who think that fine phrases and sentimentality can
+take the place of<a name="vol_ii_page_074" id="vol_ii_page_074"></a> facts! I implore my young couples to sit down and
+face the realities of their own natures, to decide what they are, and
+what they want to be&mdash;and if there is going to be any change, let it be
+made and tried out before marriage! I implore them to begin now to
+control their desires by their reason and judgment; to begin, each of
+them at the very outset, to carry their share of the burdens and do
+their share of the hard work. I implore them to value independence and
+self-reliance in the other, and never above all things to marry from
+pity, which is a worthy emotion in its place, but has nothing to do with
+sex, which should be an affair between equals, a matter of partnership
+and not of parasitism. I think that, on the whole, the most dreadful
+thing in love is the use of it for preying, for the securing of favors
+and advantages of any sort, whether by men or by women.<a name="vol_ii_page_075" id="vol_ii_page_075"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLII" id="CHAPTER_XLII"></a>CHAPTER XLII<br /><br />
+EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that we have the
+right and the duty to teach it.)</p></div>
+
+<p>I assume now that our young couple have definitely made up their minds,
+and that the wedding day is near. They are therefore, both the man and
+the woman, in position to receive information as to the physical aspects
+of their future experience. This information is now for the most part
+possessed only by pathologists&mdash;who impart it too late, after people
+have blundered and wrecked their lives. The opponents of birth control
+ask in horror if you would teach it to the young; I am now able to
+answer just when I would teach it; I would teach it to these young
+couples about to marry. I would make it by law compulsory for every
+young couple to attend a school of marriage, and to learn, not merely
+the regulation of conception, but the whole art of health and happiness
+in sex.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the words, "a school of marriage," strike you as funny. When I
+was young I remember that Pulitzer founded a school of journalism, and
+all newspaper editors made merry&mdash;they knew that journalism could only
+be learned in practice. But nowadays every city editor gives preference
+to an applicant who has taken a college course in reporting; they have
+learned that journalism can be taught, just like engineering and
+accounting. In the same way I assert that marriage can be taught, and
+the art of love, physical, mental, moral, and even financial; I think
+that the day will come when enlightened parents would no more dream of
+trusting their tender young daughter to a man who had not taken a course
+in sex, than they would go up in an aeroplane with a pilot who knew
+nothing about an engine.</p>
+
+<p>The knowledge which I possess upon the art of love I would be glad to
+give you in this book; but unfortunately, if I were to do so, my book
+would be suppressed, and I should be sent to jail.</p>
+
+<p>Some ten or twelve years ago I received a pitiful letter<a name="vol_ii_page_076" id="vol_ii_page_076"></a> from a man who
+was in state's prison in Delaware, charged with having imparted
+information as to birth control. Under our amiable legal system, a
+perfectly innocent man may be thrown into jail, and kept there for a
+year or two before he is tried, and if he is without money or friends,
+he might as well be buried alive. I went to Wilmington to call on the
+United States attorney who had caused the indictment in this case, and
+had an illuminating conversation with him. The official was anxious to
+justify what he had done. He assured me that he was no bigot, but on the
+contrary an extremely liberal man, a Unitarian, a Progressive, etc. "But
+Mr. Sinclair," he said, "I assure you this prisoner is not a reformer or
+humanitarian or anything like that. He is a depraved person. Look, here
+is something we found in his trunk when we arrested him; a pamphlet,
+explaining about sex relations. See this paragraph&mdash;it says that the
+pleasure of intercourse is increased if it is prolonged."</p>
+
+<p>I looked at the pamphlet, and then I looked at the attorney. "Do you
+think you have stated the matter quite fairly?" I asked. "Apparently the
+purpose is to explain that the emotions of women are more slow to be
+aroused than those of men, and that husbands failing to realize this,
+often do not gratify their wives."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said the other, "do you consider that a subject to be
+discussed?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me if I discuss it just a moment," I replied. "Do you happen to
+know whether the statement is a fact?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't. It may be, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"You have never investigated the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>The legal representative of our government was evidently annoyed by my
+persistence. "I have not," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>"But then, suppose I were to tell you that thousands of homes have been
+broken up for lack of just that bit of knowledge; that tens of thousands
+of marriages are miserable for lack of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Surely, Mr. Sinclair, you exaggerate!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. I could prove to you by one medical authority after
+another, that if the desire of a woman in marriage is roused, and then
+left ungratified, the result is nervous strain, and in the long run it
+may be nervous breakdown."</p>
+
+<p>The above covers only one detail of the pamphlet in question. I read
+some pages of it, and argued them out with<a name="vol_ii_page_077" id="vol_ii_page_077"></a> the attorney. It was a
+perfectly simple, straightforward exposition of facts about the
+physiology of sex; and one of the reasons a man was to be sent to jail
+for several years was&mdash;not that he had circulated such a pamphlet, not
+that he had showed it to young people, but merely that he had it in his
+trunk!</p>
+
+<p>There is an honest and very useful book, written by an English
+physician, Dr. Marie C. Stopes, entitled "Married Love," published by
+Dr. Wm. J. Robinson of New York, a specialist of authority and
+integrity. The book deals with just such vital facts in a perfectly
+dignified and straightforward manner; yet Dr. Robinson has been hounded
+by the postoffice department because of it; he was convicted and forced
+to pay a fine of $250, and the book was barred from the mails!</p>
+
+<p>I have so much else of importance to say in this Book of Love that it
+would not be sensible to jeopardize it by causing a controversy with our
+official censors of knowledge. Therefore I will merely say in general
+terms that men and women differ, not merely as a sex, but as
+individuals, and every marriage is a separate problem. Every couple has
+to solve it in the intimacy of their love life, and for this there are
+needed, first of all, gentleness on the part of the man, especially in
+the first days of the honeymoon; and on the part of both at all times
+consideration for the other's welfare and enjoyment, and above all,
+frankness and honesty in talking out the subject. Reticence and shyness
+may be virtues elsewhere, but they have no place in the intimacies of
+the sex life; if men and women will only ask and answer frankly, they
+can find out by experience what makes the other happy, and what causes
+pain.</p>
+
+<p>We are dealing here with the most sacred intimacy of life, and one of
+the most vital of life's problems. It is here, in the marriage bed, that
+the divorce problem is to be settled, and likewise the problem of
+prostitution; for it is when men and women fail to understand each
+other, and to gratify each other, that one or the other turns cold and
+indifferent, perhaps angry and hateful&mdash;and then we have passions
+unsatisfied, and ranging the world, breaking up other homes and
+spreading disease. So I would say to every young couple, seek knowledge
+on this subject. Seek it without shame from others who have had a chance
+to acquire it. Seek it also<a name="vol_ii_page_078" id="vol_ii_page_078"></a> from nature, our wise old mother, who knows
+so much about her children!</p>
+
+<p>Be natural; be simple and straightforward; and beware of fool notions
+about sex. If you will look in the code of Hammurabi, which is over four
+thousand years old, you will see the provision that a man who has
+intercourse with a menstruating woman shall be killed. In Leviticus you
+will read that both the man and the woman are to be cast out from their
+people. You will find that most people still have some such notion,
+which is without any basis whatever in health. And this is only one
+illustration of many I might give of ignorance and superstition in the
+sex life. I would give this as one very good rule to bear in mind; your
+love life exists for the happiness and health of yourself and your
+partner, and not for Hammurabi, nor Moses, nor Jehovah, nor your
+mother-in-law, nor anybody else on the earth or above it.</p>
+
+<p>Great numbers of people believe that women are naturally less passionate
+than men, and that marital happiness depends upon men's recognizing
+this. Of course, there are defective individuals, both men and women;
+but the normal woman is every bit as passionate as a man, if once she
+has been taught; and if love is given its proper place in life, and
+monkish notions not allowed to interfere, she will remain so all through
+life, in spite of child-bearing or anything else. I say to married
+couples that they should devote themselves to making and preserving
+passionate gratification in love; because this is the bright jewel in
+the crown of marriage, and if lovers solve this problem, they will find
+other problems comparatively simple.<a name="vol_ii_page_079" id="vol_ii_page_079"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLIII" id="CHAPTER_XLIII"></a>CHAPTER XLIII<br /><br />
+THE MONEY SIDE OF MARRIAGE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of
+matrimony.)</p></div>
+
+<p>So far we have discussed marriage as if it consisted only of love. But
+it is manifest that this is not the case. Marriage is every-day
+companionship, and also it is partnership in a complicated business. In
+our school of marriage therefore we shall teach the rights and duties of
+both partners to the contract, and shall face frankly the money side of
+the enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first facts we must get clear is that the economics of
+marriage are in most parts of the world still based upon the subjection
+of woman, and are therefore incompatible with the claims of woman as a
+partner and comrade. They will never be right until the social
+revolution has abolished privilege, and the state has granted to every
+woman a maternity endowment, with a mother's pension for every child
+during the entire period of the rearing and education of that child.
+Until this is done, the average woman must look to some man for the
+support of her child, and that, by the automatic operation of economic
+force, makes her subject to the whims of the man. What women have to do
+is to agitate for a revision of the property laws of marriage; and
+meantime to see that in every marriage there is an extra-legal
+understanding, which grants to the woman the equality which laws and
+conventions deny her.</p>
+
+<p>When I was a boy my mother had a woman friend who, if she wanted to go
+downtown, would borrow a quarter from my mother. This woman's husband
+was earning a generous salary, enough to enable him to buy the best
+cigars by the box, and to keep a supply of liquors always on hand; but
+he gave his wife no allowance, and if she wanted pocket money she had to
+ask him for it, each time a separate favor. Yet this woman was keeping a
+home, she was doing just as hard work and just as necessary work as the
+man. Manifestly, this was a preposterous arrangement. If a woman<a name="vol_ii_page_080" id="vol_ii_page_080"></a> is
+going to be a home-maker for a husband, it is a simple, common-sense
+proposition that the salary of the husband shall be divided into three
+parts&mdash;first, the part which goes to the home, the benefit of which is
+shared in common; second, the part which the husband has for his own
+use; and third, the part which the wife has for hers. The second and
+third parts should be equal, and the wife should have hers, not as a
+favor, but as a right. If the two are making a homestead, or running a
+farm, or building up a business, then half the proceeds should be the
+woman's; and it should be legally in her name, and this as a matter of
+course, as any other business contract. If the woman does not make a
+home, but merely displays fine clothes at tea parties, that is of course
+another matter. Just what she is to do is something that had better be
+determined before marriage; and if a man wants a life-partner, to take
+an interest in his work, or to have a useful work of her own, he had
+better choose that kind of woman, and not merely one that has a pretty
+face and a trim ankle.</p>
+
+<p>The business side of marriage is something that has to be talked out
+from time to time; there have to be meetings of the board of directors,
+and at these meetings there ought to be courtesy and kindness, but also
+plain facts and common sense, and no shirking of issues. Love is such a
+very precious thing that any man or woman ought to be willing to make
+money sacrifices to preserve it. But on the other hand, it is a fact
+that there are some people with whom you cannot be generous; the more
+you give them, the more they take, and with such people the only safe
+rule is exact justice. Let married couples decide exactly what
+contribution each makes to the family life, and what share of money and
+authority each is entitled to.</p>
+
+<p>I might spend several chapters discussing the various rocks on which I
+have seen marriages go to wreck. For example, extravagance and worldly
+show; clothes for women. In Paris is a "demi-monde," a world of brutal
+lust combined with riotous luxury. The women of this "half-world" are in
+touch with the world of art and fashion, and when the rich costumers and
+woman-decorators want what they call ideas, it is to these lust-women
+they go. The fashions they design are always depraved, of course; always
+for the flaunting of sex, never for the suggestion of dignity and grave
+intelligence. At several seasons of the year these lust-women are
+decked<a name="vol_ii_page_081" id="vol_ii_page_081"></a> out and paraded at the race-courses and other gathering places
+of the rich, and their pictures are published in the papers and spread
+over all the world. So forthwith it becomes necessary for your wife in
+Oshkosh or Kalamazoo to throw away all the perfectly good clothes she
+owns, and get a complete new outfit&mdash;because "they" are wearing
+something different. Of course the costume-makers have seen that it is
+extremely different, so as to make it impossible for your wife and
+children to be happy in their last season's clothes. I have a winter
+overcoat which I bought fourteen years ago, and as it is still as good
+as new I expect to use it another fourteen years, which will mean that
+it has cost me a dollar and a half per year. But think what it would
+have cost me if I had considered it necessary each year to have an
+overcoat cut as the keepers of French mistresses were cutting theirs!</p>
+
+<p>But then, suppose you put it up to your wife and daughters to wear
+sensible clothes, and they do so, and then they observe that on the
+street your eyes turn to follow the ladies in the latest disappearing
+skirt? The point is, you perceive, that you yourself are partly to blame
+for the fashions. They appeal to a dirty little imp you have in your own
+heart, and when the decent women discover that, it makes them blazing
+hot, and that is one of the ways you may wreck your domestic happiness
+if you want to. Unless I am greatly mistaken, when the class war is all
+over we are going to see in our world a sex war; but it is not going to
+be between the men and the women, it is going to be between the mother
+women and the mistress women, and the mistress women are going to have
+their hides stripped off.</p>
+
+<p>Men wreck marriage because they are promiscuous; and women wreck it
+because they are parasites. Woman has been for long centuries an
+economic inferior, and she has the vices of the subject peoples and
+tribes. Now there are some who want to keep these vices, while at the
+same time claiming the new privileges which go with equality. Such a
+woman picks out a man who is sensitive and chivalrous; who knows that
+women suffer handicaps, pains of childbirth, physical weakness, and who
+therefore feels impelled to bear more than his share of the burdens. She
+makes him her slave; and by and by she gets a child, and then she has
+him, because he is bowed down with awe and worship, he thinks<a name="vol_ii_page_082" id="vol_ii_page_082"></a> that such
+a miracle has never happened in the world before, and he spends the rest
+of his life waiting on her whims and nursing her vanities. I note that
+at the recent convention of the Woman's Party they demanded their rights
+and agreed to surrender their privileges. There you have the final test
+by which you may know that women really want to be free, and are
+prepared to take the responsibilities of freedom.<a name="vol_ii_page_083" id="vol_ii_page_083"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLIV" id="CHAPTER_XLIV"></a>CHAPTER XLIV<br /><br />
+THE DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should endeavor to
+preserve it.)</p></div>
+
+<p>So far in this discussion we have assumed that love means monogamous
+love. We did so, for the reason that we could not consider every
+question at once. But we have promised to deal with all the problems of
+sex in the light of reason; and so we have now to take up the question,
+what are the sanctions of monogamy, and why do we refuse sanction to
+other kinds of love?</p>
+
+<p>First, let us set aside several reasons with which we have nothing to
+do. For example, the reason of tradition. It is a fact that Anglo-Saxon
+civilization has always refused legal recognition to non-monogamous
+marriage. But then, Anglo-Saxon civilization has recognized war, and
+slavery, and speculation, and private property in land, and many other
+things which we presume to describe as crimes. If tradition cannot
+justify itself to our reason, we shall choose martyrdom.</p>
+
+<p>Second, the religious reason. This is the one that most people give. It
+is convenient, because it saves the need of thinking. Suffice it here to
+say that we prefer to think. If we cannot justify monogamy by the facts
+of life, we shall declare ourselves for polygamy.</p>
+
+<p>What are the scientific and rational reasons for monogamy? First among
+them is venereal disease. This may seem like a vulgar reason, but no one
+can deny that it is real. There was a time, apparently, when mankind did
+not suffer from these plagues, and we hope there may be such a time
+again. I shall not attempt to prescribe the marital customs for the
+people of that happy age; I suspect that they will be able to take care
+of themselves. Confining myself to my lifetime and yours, I say that the
+aim of every sensible man and woman must be to confine sex relations to
+the smallest possible limits. I know, of course, that there are
+prophylactics, and the army and navy present statistics to show that
+they succeed in a great proportion of cases. But if you are<a name="vol_ii_page_084" id="vol_ii_page_084"></a> one of
+those persons in whose case they don't succeed, you will find the
+statistics a cold source of comfort to you.</p>
+
+<p>John and Mary go to the altar, or to the justice of the peace, and John
+says: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow." But the formula is
+incomplete; it ought to read: "And likewise with the fruits of my wild
+oats." Marriage is a contract wherein each of the contracting parties
+agrees to share whatever pathogenic bacteria the other party may have or
+acquire; surely, therefore, the contract involves a right of each party
+to have a say as to how many chances of infection the other shall incur.
+John goes off on a business trip, and is lonesome, and meets an
+agreeable widow, and figures to himself that there is very little chance
+that so charming a person can be dangerous. But maybe Mary wouldn't
+agree with his calculations; maybe Mary would not consider it a part of
+the marriage bargain that she should take the diseases of the agreeable
+widow. What commonly happens is that Mary is not consulted; John revises
+the contract in secret, making it read that Mary shall take a chance at
+the diseases of the widow. How can any thinking person deny that John
+has thus committed an act of treason to Mary?</p>
+
+<p>I know that there are people who don't mind running such chances; that
+is one reason why there are venereal diseases. All I can say is that the
+sex-code set forth in this book is based upon the idea that to deliver
+mankind from the venereal plague, we wish to confine the sex
+relationship within the narrowest limits consistent with health,
+happiness and spiritual development; and that to this end we take the
+young and teach them chastity, and we marry them early while they are
+clean, and then we call upon them to make the utmost effort to make a
+success of that union, and to make it a matter of honor to keep the
+marital faith. We do this with some hope of effectiveness, because we
+have made our program consistent with the requirements of nature, the
+genuine needs of love both physical and spiritual.</p>
+
+<p>The second argument for monogamy is the economic one. We have dreamed a
+social order where every child will be guaranteed maintenance by the
+state, and where women will be free from dependence on men. What will be
+the love arrangements of men and women under this new order is another
+problem which we leave for them to decide, in the certainty that they
+will know more about it than we do. Meantime,<a name="vol_ii_page_085" id="vol_ii_page_085"></a> we are for the present
+under the private property régime, and have to love and marry and raise
+our children accordingly. The children must have homes, and if they are
+to be normal children, they must have both the male and female influence
+in their lives; which means that their parents must be friends and
+partners, not quarreling in secret. This argument, I know, is one of
+expediency. I have adopted it, after watching a great number of people
+try other than monogamous sex arrangements, and seeing their chances of
+happiness and success wrecked by the pressure of economic forces. To
+rebel against social compulsion may be heroism, and again it may be
+merely bad judgment. For my part, the world's greatest evil is poverty,
+the cause of crime, prostitution and war. I concentrate my energies upon
+the abolishing of that evil, and I let other problems wait.</p>
+
+<p>The third reason is that monogamy is economical of human time and
+thought. The business of finding and wooing a mate takes a lot of
+energy, and adjustment after marriage takes more. To throw away the
+results of this labor and do it all over again is certainly not common
+sense. Of course, if you bake a cake and burn it, you have to get more
+material and make another try; but that is a different matter from
+baking a cake with the deliberate intention of throwing it away after a
+bite or two.</p>
+
+<p>The advocates of varietism in love will here declare that we are begging
+the question. We are assuming that love and the love chase are not
+worthy in themselves, but merely means to some other end. Can it be that
+love delights are the keenest and most intense that humans can
+experience, and that all other purposes of life are contributory to
+them? Certainly a great deal of art lends support to this idea, and many
+poets have backed up their words by their deeds. As Coleridge phrased
+it:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry">
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0.25em;">Whatever stirs this mortal frame,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0.25em;">All are but ministers of Love</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0.25em;">And feed his sacred flame."</span></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>This is a question not to be played with. Experimenting in love is
+costly, and millions have wrecked their lives by<a name="vol_ii_page_086" id="vol_ii_page_086"></a> it. The sex urge in us
+is imperious and cruel; it wants nothing less than the whole of us,
+body, mind and spirit, and ofttimes it behaves like the genii in the
+bottle&mdash;it gets out, and not all the powers in the universe can get it
+back. I have talked with many men about sex and heard them say that it
+presents itself to them as an unmitigated torment, something they would
+give everything they own to be free of. And these, mind you, not men
+living in monasteries, trying to repress their natural impulses, but men
+of the world, who have lived freely, seeking pleasure and taking it as
+it came. The primrose path of dalliance did not lead them to peace, and
+the pursuit of variety in love brought them only monotony.</p>
+
+<p>I stop and think of one after another of these sex-ridden people, and I
+cannot think of one whom I would envy. I know one who in a frenzy of
+unhappiness seized a razor and castrated himself. I think of another, a
+certain classmate in college whom I once stopped in a conversation,
+remarking: "Did you ever realize what a state you have got your mind
+into? Everything means sex to you. Every phrase you hear, every idea
+that is suggested&mdash;you try to make some sort of pun, to connect it
+somehow or other with sex." The man thought and said, "I guess that's
+true." The idea had never occurred to him before; he had just gone on
+letting his instincts have their way with him, without ever putting his
+reason upon the matter.</p>
+
+<p>That was a crude kind of sex; but I think of another man, an idealist
+and champion of human liberty. One of the forms of liberty he maintained
+was the right to love as many women as he pleased, and although he was a
+married man, one hardly ever saw him that he was not courting some young
+girl. As a result, his mental powers declined, and he did little but
+talk about ideas. I do not know anyone today who respects him&mdash;except a
+few people who live the same sort of life. The thought of him brings to
+my mind a sentence of Nietzsche&mdash;a man who surely stood for freedom of
+personality: "I pity the lovers who have nothing higher than their
+love."</p>
+
+<p>A question like this can be decided only by the experience of the race.
+Some will make love the end and aim of life, and others will make it the
+means to other ends, and we shall see which kind of people achieve the
+best results, which<a name="vol_ii_page_087" id="vol_ii_page_087"></a> kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the
+most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the
+experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough of it and
+quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I
+know others who are still in it&mdash;and I watch their lives and find them
+to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is
+based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful
+"free lovers." Of course, I know some noble and sincere people who do
+not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but
+these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor
+than if they were duly married.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine
+permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in
+love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content
+yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining
+together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in
+which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon
+the sacred intimacy of sex! You can learn to take sex lightly, of
+course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true
+and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires
+some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals
+mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love,
+and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men
+and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it
+seriously&mdash;and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the
+rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we
+learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and
+making us truly social creatures.</p>
+
+<p>Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in
+her glorification of the sex-corruptions of capitalist society. She
+indicted American literature for its "bourgeois" qualities&mdash;among these
+the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with
+their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of sex promiscuity as
+they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to
+remark that "one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly
+be." That sounds like a paradox,<a name="vol_ii_page_088" id="vol_ii_page_088"></a> but it is really a profound truth, and
+the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in
+the sex relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to
+those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no
+reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety.<a name="vol_ii_page_089" id="vol_ii_page_089"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLV" id="CHAPTER_XLV"></a>CHAPTER XLV<br /><br />
+THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold another
+to the pledge of love.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the same who had me sent
+to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, as I have narrated in "The Brass
+Check." I remember arguing with him concerning his ideas of sex, which
+were of the freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put the
+great unanswerable question: "What are you going to do about the problem
+of jealousy?" And I had no response at hand; for jealousy is truly a
+most cruel and devastating and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you
+escape it, if you are going to preserve monogamy?</p>
+
+<p>The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down all the prejudices
+against sexual promiscuity. Free and unlimited license was every
+person's right, and for any other person to interfere was enslavement,
+for any other person to criticize was superstition. But the power of
+superstition is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men
+resentful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of
+their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disapproval of
+jealousy.</p>
+
+<p>Other men, less purely physiological in their attitude to sex, have
+wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. G. Wells has a novel,
+"In the Days of the Comet," in which he portrays two men, both nobly and
+truly in love with the same woman. One in a passion of jealousy is about
+to murder the other, when a great social transformation is magically
+brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to universal love, and
+the two men nobly and lovingly share the same woman. Shelley also
+dreamed this dream, inviting two women to share him. I have known others
+who tried it, but never permanently. I do not say that it never has
+succeeded, or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing
+the future&mdash;I am trying to give practical advice to people, for the
+conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on<a name="vol_ii_page_090" id="vol_ii_page_090"></a> this point is
+that polygamous and polyandrous experiments in modern capitalist society
+cost more than they are worth.</p>
+
+<p>I once knew a certain high school teacher, who believed religiously in
+every kind of freedom. When she married, she and her husband, an artist,
+made a vow against jealousy; but as it worked out, this vow meant that
+the wife had a steady job and took care of the husband, while he loafed
+and loved other women. When finally she grew tired of it, he accused her
+of being jealous; also, she had brought it down to the matter of money!
+I know another woman, an Anarchist, widely known as a lecturer on sex
+freedom. She laid down the general principle of unlimited personal
+freedom for all, and she tried to live up to her faith. She entered into
+a "free union" with a certain man, and when she discovered that he was
+making love to another woman, in the presence of a friend of mine she
+threw a vase of flowers at his head. You see, her general principles had
+clashed with another general principle, to the effect that a person who
+feels deep and strong love inevitably desires that love to endure, and
+cannot but suffer to see it preyed upon and destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>Let us first consider the question, just what are the true and proper
+implications of monogamous love? The Roman Catholic church advocates
+"monogamy," and understands thereby that a man and woman pledge
+themselves "till death do us part," and if either of them cancels this
+arrangement it is adultery and mortal sin. I hope that none of my
+readers understands by "monogamy" any such system of spiritual
+strangulation. My own idea is rather what some churchman has
+sarcastically described by the term "progressive polygamy." I believe
+that a man and woman should pledge their faith in love, and should keep
+that faith, and endeavor with all their best energies to make a success
+of it; they should strive each to understand the other's needs, and
+unselfishly to fulfill them, within the limits of fair play. But if,
+after such an effort has been truly made, it becomes clear that the
+union does not mean health and happiness for one of the parties, that
+party has a right to withdraw from it, and for any government or church
+or other power to deny that right is both folly and cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>Now, on the basis of this definition of monogamy&mdash;or, if you prefer, of
+progressive polygamy&mdash;we are in position to say what we think about
+jealousy. If two people pledge<a name="vol_ii_page_091" id="vol_ii_page_091"></a> their faith, and one breaks it, and the
+other complains, we do not call that jealousy, but just common decency.
+Neither do we call it jealousy if one expects the other to avoid the
+appearance of guilt; for love is a serious thing, not to be played with,
+and I think that a person who truly loves will do everything possible to
+make clear to the beloved that he is keeping and means to keep the
+plighted faith.</p>
+
+<p>You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in endeavoring thus to
+distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable jealousy, and calling
+the former by some other name. It does not make much difference about
+words, provided I make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole
+string of words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and cannot be
+discussed without preliminary explanations and distinctions; religion,
+for example, and morality, and aristocracy, and justice, to name only a
+few. Most people's thinking about marriage and love has been made like
+soup in a cheap restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of scraps and
+notions from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian monkery
+and Renaissance license, absurdly called "romance." So before you can do
+any thinking about a problem like jealousy, you have to agree to use the
+word to mean something definite, whether good or bad.</p>
+
+<p>We shall take jealousy as a "bad" word, and use it to mean the setting
+up, by a man or woman, of some claim to the love of another person,
+which claim cannot be justified in the court of reason and fair play.
+This includes, in the first place, all claims based upon a courtship,
+not ratified by marriage. It is to the interest of society and the race
+that men and women should be free to investigate persons of the other
+sex, and to experiment with the affections before pledges of marriage
+are made. If sensible customs of love and just laws of marriage were
+made, there would be no excuse for a woman's giving herself to a man
+before marriage; she should be taught not to do it, and then if she does
+it, the risk is her own, and the disgusting perversion of venality and
+greed known as the "breach of promise suit" should be unknown in our
+law. The young should be taught that it is the other person's right to
+change his mind and withdraw at any time before marriage; whatever pains
+and pangs this may cause must be borne in silence.</p>
+
+<p>The second kind of jealousy is that which seeks to keep<a name="vol_ii_page_092" id="vol_ii_page_092"></a> in the marriage
+bond a person who is not happy in it and has asked to be released. The
+law sanctions this kind of cowardly selfishness, which manifests itself
+every day on the front pages of our newspapers&mdash;a spectacle of monstrous
+and loathsome passions unleashed and even glorified. Husbands set the
+bloodhounds of the law after wives who have fled with some other man,
+and send the man to a cell, and drag the woman back to a loveless home.
+Wives engage private detectives, and trail their husbands to some "love
+nest," and then ensue long public wrangles, with washing of filthy
+linen, and the matter is settled by a "separation." The virtuous wife,
+who may have driven the man away by neglect or vanity or stupidity, is
+granted a share of his earnings for the balance of her life; and two
+more people are added to the millions who are denied sexual happiness
+under the law, and are thereby impelled to live as law violators.</p>
+
+<p>For this there is only one remedy conceivable. We have banned
+cannibalism and slavery and piracy and duelling, and we must ban one
+more ancient and cruel form of human oppression, the effort to hold
+people in the bonds of sex by any other power save that of love. I am
+aware that the reactionaries who read this book will take this sentence
+out of its context and quote it to prove that I am a "free lover." I
+shall be sorry to have that done, but even so, I was not willing to live
+in slavery myself, and I am not willing to advocate it for others. I am
+aware that there are degenerate and defective individuals, and that we
+have to make special provision for them, as I shall presently set forth;
+but the average, normal human being must be free to decide what is love
+for him, and what is happiness for him. Every person in the world will
+have to deny himself the right to demand love where love is not freely
+given, and all lovers in the world will have to hold themselves ready to
+let the loved one go if and when the loved one demands it. I am aware
+that this is a hard saying, and a hard duty, but it is one that life
+lays upon us, and one that there is no escaping.<a name="vol_ii_page_093" id="vol_ii_page_093"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLVI" id="CHAPTER_XLVI"></a>CHAPTER XLVI<br /><br />
+THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and one of the
+means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.)</p></div>
+
+<p>You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about the "divorce
+evil," and you will find that to the preacher or editor this "evil"
+consists of the fact that more and more people are refusing to stay
+unhappily married. It does not interest these moralizers if the
+statistics show that it is women who are getting most of the divorces,
+and that the meaning of the phenomenon is that women are refusing to
+continue living with drunken and dissolute men. To the clergy, the
+breaking of a marriage is an evil <i>per se</i>, and regardless of
+circumstances. They know this because God has told them so, and in the
+name of God they seek to keep people tied in sex unions which have come
+to mean loathing instead of love.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I will assert it as a mathematical certainty that a considerable
+percentage of marriages must fail. It is essential to progress that
+human beings should grow, both mentally and spiritually, and manifestly
+they cannot all grow in the same way. If they grow differently, must
+they not sometimes lose the power to make each other happy in the
+marital bonds? Who does not know the man who masters life and becomes a
+vital force, while his wife remains dull and empty? If such a man
+changes wives, the world in general denounces him as a selfish beast;
+but the world does not know nor does it care about those thousands of
+men who, not caring to be branded as selfish beasts, fulfill the needs
+of their lives by keeping mistresses in secret.</p>
+
+<p>I knew a certain country school teacher, one of the most narrowly
+conventional young women imaginable, who was engaged to a middle-aged
+business man. He went to New York on a business trip, and stayed a
+couple of months, and wrote her that he had met some Anarchists, and had
+discovered that all he had read about them in the newspapers was false,
+and that they were the true and pure idealists to whom the rest of his
+life must be devoted. The young lady was horrified; nor was she any
+happier when she came to New York and met her<a name="vol_ii_page_094" id="vol_ii_page_094"></a> fiancé's new friends. She
+ought in common sense to have broken the engagement; but she was in
+love, and she married, as many another fool woman does, with the idea of
+"reforming" the man. She failed, and was utterly and unspeakably
+wretched.</p>
+
+<p>I know another man, a conservative capitalist of narrow and aggressive
+temper, whose wife turned into an ardent Bolshevik. The man thinks that
+all Bolsheviks should be shut up in jail for life, while the wife is
+equally certain that all jails should be razed to the ground and all
+Bolsheviks placed in control of the government. These two people have
+got to a point where they cannot sit down to the breakfast table without
+flying into a quarrel. I know another case of a modern scientist, an
+agnostic, whose wife, a half-educated, sentimental woman, took to
+dabbling in mysticism, and drove him wild by setting up an image of
+Buddha in her bedroom, and consorting with "swamis" in long yellow
+robes. I know another whose wife turned into an ultra-pious Catholic,
+and turned over the care of his domestic life to a priest. Is it not
+obvious that the only possible solution of such problems lies in
+divorce? Unless, indeed, we are all of us going to turn over the care of
+our domestic lives to the priests!</p>
+
+<p>Our grandfathers and grandmothers believed one thing, and believed the
+same thing when they were seventy as when they were twenty; so it was
+possible for them to dwell in domestic security and permanence till
+death did them part. But we are learning to change our minds; and
+whether what we believe is better or worse than what our ancestors
+believed, at least it is different. Also we are coming to take what we
+believe with more seriousness; the intellectual life means more and more
+to us, and it becomes harder and harder for us to find sexual and
+domestic happiness with a partner who does not share our convictions,
+but, on the contrary, may be contributing to the campaign funds of the
+opposition party.</p>
+
+<p>I do not mean by this that people should get a divorce as soon as they
+find they differ about some intellectual idea; on the contrary, I have
+advocated that they should do everything possible to understand and to
+tolerate each other. But it is a fact that intellectual convictions are
+the raw material out of which characters and lives are made, and it is
+inevitable that some characters and lives that fit quite well at twenty
+should fit very badly at thirty or forty. When we refuse divorce under
+such<a name="vol_ii_page_095" id="vol_ii_page_095"></a> circumstances we are not fostering marriage, as we fondly imagine;
+we are really fostering adultery. It is a fact that not one person in
+ten who is held by legal or social force in an unhappy sex union will
+refrain from seeking satisfaction outside; and because these outside
+satisfactions are disgraceful, and in some cases criminal, they seldom
+have any permanence. Therefore it follows that "strict" divorce laws,
+such as the clerical propaganda urges upon us, are in reality laws for
+the promotion of fornication and prostitution.</p>
+
+<p>There is a short story by Edith Wharton, in which the "divorce evil" is
+exhibited to us in its naked horror; the story called "The Other Two,"
+in the volume "The Descent of Man." A society woman has been divorced
+twice and married three times, and by an ingenious set of circumstances
+the woman and all three of the men are brought into the same
+drawing-room at the same time. Just imagine, if you can, such an
+excruciating situation: a woman, her husband, and two men who used to be
+her husbands, all compelled to meet together and think of something to
+say! I cite this story because it is a perfect illustration of the
+extent to which the "divorce problem" is a problem of our lack of sense.
+Mrs. Wharton will, I fear, consider me a very vulgar person if I assert
+that there is absolutely no reason whatever why any of those four people
+in her story should have had a moment's discomfort of mind, except that
+they thought there was. There is absolutely nothing to prevent a man and
+woman who used to be married from meeting socially and being decent to
+each other, or to prevent two men from being decent to each other under
+such circumstances. I would not say that they should choose to be
+intimate friends&mdash;though even that may be possible occasionally.</p>
+
+<p>I know, because I have seen it happen. In Holland I met a certain
+eminent novelist and poet, a great and lovable man. I visited his home,
+and met his wife and two little children, and saw a man and woman living
+in domestic happiness. The man had also two grown sons, and after a few
+days he remarked that he would like me to meet the mother of these young
+men. We went for a walk of a mile or so, and met a lady who lived in a
+small house by herself, and who received us with a friendly welcome and
+talked with us for a couple of hours about music and books and art. This
+lady had been the writer's wife for ten years or so, and there had been
+a terrible uproar when they voluntarily parted. But they had refused to<a name="vol_ii_page_096" id="vol_ii_page_096"></a>
+pay attention to this uproar; they understood why they did not wish to
+remain husband and wife any longer, but they did not consider it
+necessary to quarrel about it, nor even to break off the friendship
+which their common interests made possible. The two women in the case
+were not intimate, I gathered, but they frequently met at the homes of
+others, and found no difficulty in being friendly. I suggest to Mrs.
+Wharton that this story is at least as interesting as the one she has
+told; but I fear she will not care to write it, because apparently she
+considers it necessary that people who are well bred and refined should
+be the helpless victims of destructive manias.<a name="vol_ii_page_097" id="vol_ii_page_097"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLVII" id="CHAPTER_XLVII"></a>CHAPTER XLVII<br /><br />
+THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the circumstances under which society has the right to
+forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have quoted the old maxim, "Marry in haste and repent at leisure,"
+and we suggested that parents and guardians should have the right to ask
+the young to wait before marriage, and make certain of the state of
+their hearts. We have now the same advice to give concerning divorce;
+the same claim to enter on behalf of society&mdash;that it has and should
+assert the right to ask people to delay and think carefully before
+breaking up a marriage.</p>
+
+<p>What interest has society in the restriction of divorce? What affair is
+it of any other person if I choose to get a divorce and marry a new wife
+once a month? There are many reasons, not in any way based upon
+religious superstition or conventional prejudice. In the first place,
+there are or may be children, and society should try to preserve for
+every child a home with a father and a mother in it. Second, there are
+property rights, of which every marriage is a tangle, and the settlement
+of which the law should always oversee. Third, there is the question of
+venereal disease, which society has an unquestionable right to keep
+down, by every reasonable restriction upon sexual promiscuity. And
+finally, there is the respect which all men and women owe to love. It
+seems to me that society has the same right to protect love against
+extreme outrage, as it has to forbid indecent exposure of the person on
+the street.</p>
+
+<p>There is in successful operation in Switzerland a wise and sane divorce
+law, based upon common sense and not upon superstition. A couple wish to
+break their marriage, and they go before a judge, and in private
+session, as to a friendly adviser, they tell their troubles. He gives
+them advice about their disagreement, and sends them away for three
+months to think it over. At the end of three months, if they still
+desire a divorce, they meet with him again. If he still thinks there is
+a chance of reconciliation, he has the right to require them to wait
+another three months. But if at the end of this second period<a name="vol_ii_page_098" id="vol_ii_page_098"></a> they are
+still convinced that the case is hopeless, and that they should part,
+the judge is required to grant the divorce. You may note that this is
+exactly what I have suggested concerning young couples who become
+engaged. In both cases, the parties directly interested have the right
+to decide their own fate, but the rest of the world requires them to
+think carefully about it, and to listen to counsel. Except for grave
+offenses, such as adultery, insanity, crime or venereal disease, I do
+not think that anyone should receive a divorce in less than six months,
+nor do I think that any personal right is contravened by the imposing of
+such a delay.</p>
+
+<p>Next, what are we going to say to the right, or the claim to the right,
+on the part of a man or woman, to be married once a year throughout a
+lifetime? In order to illustrate this problem, I will tell you about a
+certain man known to me. In his early life he spent a couple of years in
+a lunatic asylum. He lays claim to extraordinary spiritual gifts, and
+uses the language of the highest idealism known. He is a man of culture
+and good family, and thus exerts a peculiar charm upon young women of
+refinement and sensitiveness. To my knowledge he was three times married
+in six years, and each time he deserted the woman, and forced her to
+divorce him, and to take care of herself, and in one case of a child. In
+addition, he had begotten one child out of marriage, and left the mother
+and child to starve. For ten years or so I used to see him about once in
+six months, and invariably he had a new woman, a young girl of fine
+character, who had been ensnared by him, and was in the agonizing
+process of discovering his moral and mental derangement. Yet there was
+absolutely nothing in the law to place restraint upon this man; he could
+wander from state to state, or to the other side of the world, preying
+upon lovely young girls wherever he went.</p>
+
+<p>This particular man happens to call himself a "radical"; but I could
+tell you of similar men in the highest social circles, or in the
+political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world; they are in
+every rank of life, and are just as definitely and certainly menaces to
+human welfare and progress as pirates on the high seas or highwaymen on
+the road. Nor are they confined to the males; the world is full of women
+who use their sex charms for predatory purposes, and some of them are
+far too clever for any law that you or I can contrive at present. But I
+think we might begin by refusing to let any man or<a name="vol_ii_page_099" id="vol_ii_page_099"></a> woman have more than
+two divorces in one lifetime, in any state or part of the world. If any
+man or woman tries three times to find happiness in love, and fails each
+time, we have a right to assume that the fault must lie with that
+person, and not with the three partners.</p>
+
+<p>I think we may go further yet; having made wise laws of love and
+marriage, taking into consideration all human needs, we have a right to
+require that men and women shall obey the laws. At present the great
+mass of the public has sympathy for the law-breaker; just as, in old
+days, the peasants could not help admiring the outlaw who resisted
+unjust land laws and robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist
+régime, we can not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even
+though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore. But when
+we have made sex laws that we know are just and sensible&mdash;then we shall
+consider that we have the right to restrain sex criminals, and in
+extreme cases we shall avail ourselves of the skill of science to
+perform a surgical operation which will render him unable in future to
+prey upon the love needs of people who are placed at his mercy by their
+best qualities, their unselfishness and lack of suspicion.</p>
+
+<p>We clear out foul-smelling weeds from our garden, because we wish to
+raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein. There lives in
+California a student of plant life, who has shown us what we can do, not
+by magic or by superhuman efforts, but simply by loving plants, by
+watching them ceaselessly, understanding their ways, and guiding their
+sex-life to our own purposes. We can perform what to our ignorant
+ancestors would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all
+sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own kind, and
+survive forever if we give them proper care. In other words, Luther
+Burbank has shown us that we can "change plant nature."</p>
+
+<p>There flash back upon my memory all those dull, weary, sick human
+creatures, who have repeated to me that dull, weary, sick old formula,
+"You cannot change human nature." I do not think I am indulging either
+in religious superstition or in blind optimism, but am speaking
+precisely, in saying that whenever human beings get ready to apply
+experimental science to themselves, they can change human nature just as
+they now change plant nature. By putting human bodies together in love,
+we make new bodies of children more beautiful<a name="vol_ii_page_100" id="vol_ii_page_100"></a> than any who have yet
+romped on the earth; and in the same way, by putting minds and souls
+together, we can make new kinds of minds and souls, different from those
+we have previously known, and greater than either the man-soul or the
+woman-soul alone.</p>
+
+<p>Also, by that magic which is the law of mind and soul life, each new
+creation can be multiplied to infinity, and shared by all other minds
+and souls that live in the present or may live in the future. We have
+shown elsewhere how genius multiplies to infinity the joy and power of
+life by means of the arts; and one of the greatest of the arts is the
+art of love. Consider the great lovers, the true lovers, of history&mdash;how
+they have enriched the lives of us all. It does not make any difference
+whether these men and women lived in the flesh, or in the brain of a
+poet&mdash;we learn alike from Dante and Beatrice, from Abélard and Héloïse,
+from Robert and Elizabeth Browning, from Tristan and Isolde, from Romeo
+and Juliet, what is the depth and the splendor of this passion which
+lies hidden within us, and how it may enrich and vivify and glorify all
+life.<a name="vol_ii_page_101" id="vol_ii_page_101"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_FOUR" id="PART_FOUR"></a>PART FOUR<br /><br />
+
+THE BOOK OF SOCIETY</h2>
+
+<p><a name="vol_ii_page_102" id="vol_ii_page_102"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="vol_ii_page_103" id="vol_ii_page_103"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLVIII" id="CHAPTER_XLVIII"></a>CHAPTER XLVIII<br /><br />
+THE EGO AND THE WORLD</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant and in
+primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment to life.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have now to consider the relationship of man to his fellows, with
+whom he lives in social groups. Upon this problem floods of light have
+been thrown by the new science of psycho-analysis. I will try to give,
+briefly and in simple language, an idea of these discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>One of the laws of biology is that every individual, in his development,
+reproduces the history of the race; so that impulses and mental states
+of a child reveal to us what our far-off ancestors loved and feared. The
+same thing is discovered to be true of neurotics, people who have failed
+in adjusting themselves to civilized life, and have gone back, in some
+or all of their mental traits, to infantile states. If we analyze the
+unconscious minds of "nervous patients," and compare them with what we
+find in the minds of infants, and in savages, we discover the same
+dreams, the same longings and the same fears.</p>
+
+<p>The mental life of man begins in the womb. We cannot observe that life
+directly, but we know that it is there, because there cannot be organic
+life without mind to direct it, and just as there is an unconscious mind
+that regulates the bodily processes in adults, so in the embryo there
+must be an unconscious mind to direct the flow of blood, the building of
+bones, muscle, eyes and brain. The mental life of that unborn creature
+is of course purely egotistical; it knows nothing outside itself, and it
+finds this universe an agreeable place&mdash;everything being supplied to it,
+promptly and perfectly, without effort of its own.</p>
+
+<p>But suddenly it gets its first shock; pain begins, and severe
+discomfort, and the creature is shoved out into a cold world, yelling in
+protest against the unsought change. And from that moment on, the
+new-born infant labors to adjust itself to an entirely new set of
+conditions. Discomforts trouble it, and it cries. Quickly it learns that
+these cries are<a name="vol_ii_page_104" id="vol_ii_page_104"></a> answered, and satisfaction of its needs is furnished.
+Somehow, magically, things appear; warm and dry covering, a trickle of
+delicious hot milk into its mouth. At first the infant mind has no idea
+how all this happens; but gradually it comes to realize objects outside
+itself, and it forms the idea that these objects exist to serve its
+wants. Later on it learns that there are particular sounds which attach
+to particular objects, and cause them to function. The sound "Mama," for
+example, produces a goddess clothed in beauty and power, performing
+miracles. So the infant mind arrives at the "period of magic gestures"
+and the "period of magic words"; corresponding to a certain type of myth
+and belief which we find in every race and tribe of human being that now
+exists or ever has existed on earth. All these stories about magic
+wishes and magic rings and magic spells of a thousand sorts; and nowhere
+on earth a child which does not listen greedily to such fancies! The
+reason is simply that the child has passed through this stage of mental
+life, and so recently that the feelings are close to the surface of his
+consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>But gradually the infant makes the painful discovery that not everything
+in existence can be got to serve him; there are forces which are proof
+against his magic spells; there are some which are hostile, and these
+the infant learns to regard with hatred and fear. Sometimes hatred and
+fear are strangely mixed with admiration and love. For example, there is
+a powerful being known as "father," who is sometimes good and useful,
+but at other times takes the attention of the supremely useful "mother,"
+the source of food and warmth and life. So "father" is hated, and in
+fancy he is wished out of the way&mdash;which to the infant is the same thing
+as killing. Out of this grows a whole universe of fascinating mental
+life, which Freud calls by the name "the &OElig;dipus complex"&mdash;after the
+legend of the Greek hero who murdered his father and committed incest
+with his mother, and then, when he discovered what he had done, put out
+his own eyes. There is a mass of legends, old as human thought,
+repeating this story; we cannot be sure whether they have grown out of
+the greeds and jealousies of this early wish-life of the infant, or
+whether they had their base in the fact that there was a stage in human
+progress in which the father really was killed off by the sons.</p>
+
+<p>This latter idea is discussed by Freud, in his book, "Totem<a name="vol_ii_page_105" id="vol_ii_page_105"></a> and Taboo."
+It appears that primitive man lived in hordes, which were dominated by
+one old male, who kept all the women to himself, and either killed the
+young males, or drove them out to shift for themselves; so the young men
+would combine and murder their father. The forming of human society, of
+marriage and the family, depended upon one factor, the decision of the
+young victors to live and let live. The only way they could do this was
+to agree not to quarrel over the women of their own group, but to seek
+other women from other groups. This may account for what is known as
+"exogamy," an almost universal marriage custom of primitive man, whereby
+a man named Jones is barred by frightful taboos from the women named
+Jones, but is permitted relations with all the women named Smith.</p>
+
+<p>To return to our infant: he is in the midst of a painful process of
+adjusting himself to the outside world; discovering that sometimes all
+his magic words and gestures fail, his wishes no longer come true. There
+are beings outside him, with wills of their own, and power to enforce
+them; he has to learn to get along with these beings, and give up his
+pleasures to theirs. These processes which go on in the infant soul, the
+hopes and the terrors, the griefs and the angers, are of the profoundest
+significance for the later adult life. For nothing gets out of the mind
+that has once got into it; the infantile cravings which are repressed
+and forgotten stay in the unconscious, and work there, and strive still
+for expression. The conscious mind will not tolerate them, but they
+escape in the form of fairy-tales and stories, of dreams and delusions,
+slips of the tongue, and many other mental events which it is
+fascinating to examine. Also, if we are weakened by ill health or
+nervous strain, these infantile wishes may take the form of "neuroses,"
+and fully grown people may take to stammering, or become impotent, or
+hysterical, or even insane, because of failures of adjustment to life
+that happened when they were a year or two old. These things are known,
+not merely as a matter of theory, but because, as soon as by analysis
+these infant secrets are brought into consciousness and adjusted there,
+the trouble instantly ceases.</p>
+
+<p>So it appears that the whole process of human life, from the very hour
+of birth, consists of the correct adjustment of men and women in
+relation to their fellows. Not merely is man a social being, but all the
+prehuman ancestors of men,<a name="vol_ii_page_106" id="vol_ii_page_106"></a> for ages upon geologic ages, have been
+social beings; they have lived in groups, and their survival has
+depended upon their success in fitting themselves snugly into group
+relationships. Failure to make correct adjustments means punishment by
+the group, or by enemies outside the group; if the failure is serious
+enough, it means death. We may assert that the task of understanding
+one's fellow men, and making one's self understood by them, is the most
+important task that confronts every individual.</p>
+
+<p>And if we look about the world at present, the most superficial of us
+cannot fail to realize that the task is far from being correctly
+performed. So many people unhappy, so many striving for what they cannot
+get! So many having to be locked behind bars, like savage beasts,
+because they demand something which the world is resolved not to let
+them have! So many having to be killed, by rifles and machine-guns, by
+high explosive shells and poison gas&mdash;because they misunderstood the
+social facts about them, and thought they could fulfill some wishes
+which the rest of mankind wanted them to repress! As I read the
+psycho-analyst's picture of the newly born infant with its primitive
+ego, its magic cries and magic gestures, I cannot be sure how much of it
+is sober science and how much is mordant irony&mdash;a sketch of the mental
+states of the men and women I see about me&mdash;whole classes of men and
+women, yes, even whole nations!</p>
+
+<p>The effort of the following chapters will be to interpret to men and
+women the world which they have made, and to which they are trying to
+adjust themselves. More especially we shall try to show how, by better
+adjustments, men may change both themselves and the world, and make both
+into something less cruel and less painful, more serene and more certain
+and more free.<a name="vol_ii_page_107" id="vol_ii_page_107"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLVIX" id="CHAPTER_XLVIX"></a>CHAPTER XLVIX<br /><br />
+COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and the part which
+selfishness and unselfishness play in the development of social
+life.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Pondering the subject of this chapter, I went for a stroll in the
+country, and seating myself in a lonely place, became lost in thought;
+when suddenly my eye was caught by something moving. On the bare, hot,
+gray sand lay a creature that I could see when it moved and could not
+see when it was still, for it was exactly the color of the ground, and
+fitted the ground tightly, being flat, and having its edges scalloped so
+that they mingled with the dust. It was a lizard, covered with heavy
+scales, and with sharp horns to make it unattractive eating. At the
+slightest motion from me it vanished into a heap of stones, so quickly
+that my eye could scarcely follow it.</p>
+
+<p>This creature, you perceive, is in its actions and its very form an
+expression of terror; terror of devouring enemies, of jackals that
+pounce and hawks that swoop, and also of the hot desert air that seeks
+to dry out its few precious drops of moisture. Practically all the
+energies of this creature are concentrated upon the securing of its own
+individual survival. To be sure, it will mate, but the process will be
+quick, and the eggs will be left for the sun to hatch out, and the baby
+lizards will shift for themselves&mdash;that is to say, they will be
+incarnations of terror from the moment they open their eyes to the
+light.</p>
+
+<p>The jackal seeks to pounce upon the lizard, and so inspires terror in
+the lizard; but when you watch the jackal you find that it exhibits
+terror toward more powerful foes. You find that the hawk, which swoops
+upon the lizard, is equally quick to swoop away when it comes upon a man
+with a gun. This preying and being preyed upon, this mixture of cruelty
+and terror, is a conspicuous fact of nature; if you go into any orthodox
+school or college in America today, you will be taught that it is
+nature's most fundamental law, and governs all living things. If you
+should take a course in political<a name="vol_ii_page_108" id="vol_ii_page_108"></a> economy under a respectable
+professor, you would find him explaining that such cruelty-terror
+applies equally in human affairs; it is the basis of all economic
+science, and the effort to escape from it is like the effort to lift
+yourself by your boot-straps.</p>
+
+<p>The professor calls this cruelty-terror by the name "competition"; and
+he creates for his own purposes an abstract being whom he names "the
+economic man," a creature who acts according to this law, and exists
+under these conditions. One of the professor's formulas is the so-called
+"Malthusian law," that population presses always upon the limits of
+subsistence. Another is "the law of diminishing returns of agriculture,"
+that you can get only so much product out of a certain piece of land, no
+matter how much labor and capital you put into it. Another is Ricardo's
+"iron law of wages," that wages cannot rise above the cost of living.
+Another is embodied in the formula of Adam Smith, that "Competition is
+the life of trade." The professor enunciates these "laws," coldly and
+impersonally, as becomes the scientist; but if you go into the world of
+business, you find them set forth cynically, in scores of maxims and
+witticisms: "Dog eat dog," "the devil take the hindmost," "business is
+business," "do others or they will do you."</p>
+
+<p>Evidently, however, there is something in man which rebels against these
+"natural" laws. In our present society man has set aside six days in the
+week in which to live under them, and one day in the week in which to
+preach an entirely different and contradictory code&mdash;that of Christian
+ethics, which bids you "love your neighbor," and "do unto others as you
+would they should do unto you." Between these Sunday teachings and the
+week-day teachings there is eternal conflict, and one who takes pleasure
+in ridiculing his fellow men can find endless opportunity here. The
+Sunday preachers are forbidden to interfere with the affairs of the
+other six days; that is called "dragging politics into the pulpit." On
+the other hand, incredible as it may seem, there are professors of the
+week-day doctrine who call themselves Christians, and believe in the
+Sunday doctrine, too. They manage this by putting the Sunday doctrine
+off into a future world; that is, we are to pounce upon one another and
+devour one another under the "iron laws" of economics so long as we live
+on earth, but in the next world we shall play on golden harps and have<a name="vol_ii_page_109" id="vol_ii_page_109"></a>
+nothing to do but love one another. If anybody is so foolish as to apply
+the Sermon on the Mount to present-day affairs, we regard him as a
+harmless crank; if he persists, and sets out to teach others, we call
+him a Communist or a Pacifist, and put him in jail for ten or twenty
+years.</p>
+
+<p>In the Book of the Mind, I have referred to Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a
+Factor in Evolution," which I regard as one of the epoch-making books of
+our time. Kropotkin clearly proves that competition is not the only law
+of nature, it is everywhere modified by co-operation, and in the great
+majority of cases co-operation plays a larger part in the relations of
+living creatures than competition. There is no creature in existence
+which is entirely selfish; in the nature of the case such a creature
+could not exist&mdash;save in the imaginations of teachers of special
+privilege. If a species is to survive, some portion of the energies of
+the individual must go into reproduction; and steadily, as life
+advances, we find the amount of this sacrifice increasing. The higher
+the type of the creature, the longer is the period of infancy, and the
+greater the sacrifice of the parent for the young. Likewise, most
+creatures make the discovery that by staying together in herds or
+groups, and learning to co-operate instead of competing among
+themselves, they increase their chances of survival. You find birds that
+live in flocks, and other birds, like hawks and owls and eagles, that
+are solitary; and you find the co-operating birds a thousand times as
+numerous&mdash;that is to say, a thousand times as successful in the struggle
+for survival. You find that all man's brain power has been a social
+product; the supremacy he has won over nature has depended upon one
+thing and one alone&mdash;the fact that he has managed to become different
+from the "economic man," that product of the imagination of the
+defenders of privilege.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that both competition and co-operation are necessary to
+every individual, and the health of the individual and of the race lies
+in the proper combination of the two. If a creature were wholly
+unselfish&mdash;if it made no effort to look after its own individual
+welfare&mdash;it would be exterminated before it had a chance to reproduce.
+If, on the other hand, it cannot learn to co-operate, its progeny stand
+less chance of survival against creatures which have learned this
+important lesson. We have a nation of a 110,000,000 people, who have
+learned to co-operate to a certain limited extent.<a name="vol_ii_page_110" id="vol_ii_page_110"></a> Some of us realize
+how vastly the happiness of these millions might be increased by a
+further extension of co-operation; but we find ourselves opposed by the
+professors of privilege&mdash;and we wish that these gentlemen would go out
+and join the lizards of the desert sands or the sharks of the sea,
+creatures which really practice the system of "laissez faire" which the
+professors teach.</p>
+
+<p>The plain truth is that we cannot make a formula out of either
+competition or co-operation. We cannot settle any problem of economics,
+of business or legislation, by proclaiming, for example, that
+"Competition is the life of trade." Competition may just as well turn
+out to be the death of trade; it depends entirely upon the kind of
+competition, and the stage of trade development to which it is applied.
+In the early eighteenth century, when that formula of Adam Smith was
+written, competition was observed to keep down prices and provide
+stimulus to enterprise, and so to further abundant production. But the
+time came when the machinery for producing goods was in excess, not
+merely of the needs of the country, but of the available foreign
+markets, and then suddenly the large-scale manufacturers made the
+discovery that competition was the death of trade to them. They
+proceeded, as a matter of practical common sense, and without consulting
+their college professors, to abolish competition by forming trusts. We
+passed laws forbidding them to do this, but they simply refused to obey
+the laws. In the United States they have made good their refusal for
+thirty-five years, and in the end have secured the blessing of the
+Supreme Court upon their course.</p>
+
+<p>So now we have co-operation in large-scale production and marketing. It
+is known by various names, "pools," "syndicates," "price-fixing,"
+"gentlemen's agreements." It is a blessing for those who co-operate, but
+it proves to be the death of those who labor, and also of those who
+consume, and we see these also compelled to combine, forming labor
+unions and consumers' societies. Each side to the quarrel insists that
+the other side is committing a crime in refusing to compete, and our
+whole social life is rent with dissensions over this issue. Manifestly,
+we need to clear our minds of dead doctrines; to think out clearly just
+what we mean by competition, and what by co-operation, and what is the
+proper balance between the two.<a name="vol_ii_page_111" id="vol_ii_page_111"></a></p>
+
+<p>I have been at pains in this book to provide a basis for the deciding of
+such questions. It is a practical problem, the fostering of human life
+and the furthering of its development. We cannot lay down any fixed
+rule; we have to study the facts of each case separately. We shall say,
+this kind of competition is right, because it helps to protect human
+life and to develop its powers. We shall say, this other kind of
+competition is wrong because it has the opposite effect. We shall say,
+perhaps, that some kind was right fifty years ago, or even ten years
+ago, because it then had certain effects; but meantime some factor has
+changed, and it is now having a different effect, and therefore ought to
+be abolished.</p>
+
+<p>There has never been any kind of human competition which men did not
+judge and modify in that way; there is no field of human activity in
+which ethical codes do not condemn certain practices as unfair. The
+average Englishman considers it proper that two men who get into a
+dispute shall pull off their coats, and settle the question at issue by
+pummeling each other's noses. But let one of these men strike his
+opponent in the groin, or let him kick his shins, and instantly there
+will be a howl of execration. Likewise, an Anglo-Saxon man who fights
+with the fists has a loathing for a Sicilian or Greek or other
+Mediterranean man who will pull a knife. That kind of competition is
+barred among our breeds; and also the kind which consists of using
+poisons, or of starting slanders against your opponent.</p>
+
+<p>If you look back through history, you find many forms of competition
+which were once eminently respectable, but now have been outlawed. There
+was a time, for example, when the distinction we draw between piracy and
+sea-war was wholly unknown. The ships of the Vikings would go out and
+raid the ships and seaports of other peoples, and carry off booty and
+captives, and the men who did that were sung as heroes of the nation.
+The British sea-captains of the time of Queen Elizabeth&mdash;Drake,
+Frobisher, and the rest of them&mdash;are portrayed in our school books as
+valiant and hardy men, and the British colonies were built on the basis
+of their activities; yet, according to the sea laws in force today, they
+were pirates. We regard a cannibal race with abhorrence; yet there was a
+time when all the vigorous races of men were cannibals, and the habit of
+eating your enemies in<a name="vol_ii_page_112" id="vol_ii_page_112"></a> battle may well have given an advantage to the
+races which practiced it.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, you find sentimental people who reject all
+competition on principle, and would like to abolish every trace of it
+from society, and especially from education. But stop and consider for a
+moment what that would mean. Would you abolish, for example, the
+competition of love, the right of a man to win the girl he wants? You
+could not do it, of course; but if you could, you would abolish one of
+the principal methods by which our race has been improved. Of course,
+what you really want is, not to abolish competition in love, but to
+raise it to a higher form. There is an old saying, "All's fair in love
+and war," but no one ever meant that. You would not admit that a man
+might compete in love by threatening to kill the girl if she preferred a
+rival. You would not admit that he might compete by poisoning the other
+man. You would not admit that he might compete by telling falsehoods
+about the other man. On the other hand, if you are sensible, you admit
+that he has a right to compete by making his character known to the
+girl, and if the other man is a rascal, by telling the girl that.</p>
+
+<p>Would you abolish the competition of art, the effort of men to produce
+work more beautiful and inspiring than has ever been known before? Would
+you abolish the effort of scientists to overthrow theories which have
+hitherto been accepted? Obviously not. You make these forms of
+competition seem better by calling them "emulation," but you do not in
+the least modify the fact that they involve the right of one person to
+outdo other persons, to supplant them and take away something from them,
+whether it be property or position or love or fame or power. In that
+sense, competition is indeed the law of life, and you might as well
+reconcile yourself to it, and learn to play your part with spirit and
+good humor.</p>
+
+<p>Also, you might as well train your children to it. You will find you
+cannot develop their powers to the fullest without competition; in fact,
+you will be forced to go back and utilize forms of competition which are
+now out of date among adults. I have told in the Book of the Body how I
+myself tried for ten years or more to live without physical competition,
+and discovered that I could not; I have had to take up some form of
+sport, and hundreds of thousands of other men<a name="vol_ii_page_113" id="vol_ii_page_113"></a> have had the same
+experience. What is sport? It is a deliberate going back, under
+carefully devised rules, to the savage struggles of our ancestors. The
+very essence of real sport is that the contestants shall, within the
+rules laid down, compete with each other to the limit of their powers.
+With what contempt would a player of tennis or baseball or whist regard
+the proposition that his opponent should be merciful to him, and let him
+win now and then! Obviously, these things have no place in the game, and
+to be a "good sport" is to conform to the rules, and take with enjoyment
+whatever issue of the struggle may come.</p>
+
+<p>But then again, suppose you are competing with a child; obviously, the
+conditions are different. You no longer play the best you can, you let
+the child win a part of the time; but you do not let the child know
+this, or it would spoil the fun for the child. You pretend to try as
+hard as you know how, and you cry out in grief when you are beaten, and
+the child crows with delight. And yet, that does not keep you from
+loving the child, or the child from loving you.</p>
+
+<p>The purpose of this elaborate exposition is to make clear the very vital
+point that a certain set of social acts may be right under some
+conditions, and desperately wrong under other conditions. They may be
+right in play, and not in serious things; they may be right in youth,
+and not in maturity; they may be right at one period of the world's
+development, while at another period they are destructive of social
+existence. If, therefore, we wish to know what are right and wrong
+actions in the affairs of men, if we wish to judge any particular law or
+political platform or program of business readjustment, the first thing
+we have to do is to acquire a mass of facts concerning the society to
+which the law or platform or program, is to be applied. We need to ask
+ourselves, exactly what will be the effect of that change, applied in
+that particular way at that particular time. In order to decide
+accurately, we need to know the previous stages through which that
+society has passed, the forces which have been operating in it, and the
+ways in which they have worked.</p>
+
+<p>But also we must realize that the lessons of history cannot ever be
+accepted blindly. The "principles of the founders" apply to us only in
+modified form; for the world in which we live today is different from
+any world which has ever been before, and the world tomorrow will be
+different yet. We<a name="vol_ii_page_114" id="vol_ii_page_114"></a> are the makers of it, and the masters of it, and what
+it will be depends to some extent upon our choice. In fact, that is the
+most important lesson of all for us to learn; the final purpose of all
+our thought about the world is to enable us to make it a happier and a
+better world for ourselves and our posterity to live in.<a name="vol_ii_page_115" id="vol_ii_page_115"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_L" id="CHAPTER_L"></a>CHAPTER L<br /><br />
+ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and whether
+there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.)</p></div>
+
+<p>In the letters of Thomas Jefferson is found the following passage:</p>
+
+<p>"All eyes are open or opening to the rights of man. The general spread
+of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable
+truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their
+backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them
+legitimately, by the grace of God."</p>
+
+<p>This, which Jefferson, over a hundred years ago, described as a
+"palpable truth," is still a long way from prevailing in the world. We
+are trying in this book not to take anything for granted, so we do not
+assume this truth, but investigate it; and we begin by admitting that
+there are many facts which seem to contradict it, and which make it more
+difficult of proof than Jefferson realized. It is not enough to point
+out the lack of saddles on the backs, and of boots and spurs on the feet
+of newly born infants; for the fact is that men are not exploited
+because of saddles, nor is the exploiting accomplished by means of boots
+and spurs. It is done by means of gold and steel, banks and credit
+systems, railroads, machine-guns and battleships. And while it is not
+true that certain races and classes are born with these things on them,
+they are born to the possession of them, and the vast majority of
+mankind are without them all their lives, and without the ability to use
+them even if they had them.</p>
+
+<p>The doctrine that "all men are created equal," or that they ought to be
+equal, we shall describe for convenience as the democratic doctrine. It
+first came to general attention through Christianity, which proclaimed
+the brotherhood of all mankind in a common fatherhood of God. But even
+as taught by the Christians, the doctrine had startling limitations. It
+was several centuries before a church council summoned the courage to
+decide that women were human beings,<a name="vol_ii_page_116" id="vol_ii_page_116"></a> and had souls; and today many
+devout Christians are still uncertain whether Japanese and Chinese and
+Filipinos and Negroes are human beings, and have souls. I have heard old
+gentlemen in the South gravely maintain that the Negro is not a human
+being at all, but a different species of animal. I have heard learned
+men in the South set forth that the sutures in the Negro skull close at
+some very early age, and thus make moral responsibility impossible for
+the black race. And you will find the same ideas maintained, not merely
+as to differences of race and color, but as to differences of economic
+condition. You will find the average aristocratic Englishman quite
+convinced that the "lower orders" are permanently inferior to himself,
+and this though they are of the same Anglo-Saxon stock.</p>
+
+<p>For convenience I will refer to the doctrine that there is some natural
+and irremovable inferiority of certain races or classes, as the
+aristocratic doctrine. I will probably startle some of my readers by
+making the admission that if there is any such natural or irremovable
+inferiority, then a belief in political or economic equality is a
+blunder. If there are certain classes or races which cannot think, or
+cannot learn to think as well as other classes and races, those mentally
+inferior classes and races will obey, and they will be made to obey, and
+neither you nor I, nor all the preachers and agitators in the world,
+will ever be able to arrange it otherwise. Suppose we could do it, we
+should be committing a crime against life; we should be holding down the
+race and aborting its best development.</p>
+
+<p>Is there any such natural and irremovable inferiority in human beings?
+When we come to study the question we find it complicated by a different
+phenomenon, that of racial immaturity, which we have to face frankly and
+get clear in our minds. One of the most obvious facts of nature is that
+of infancy and childhood. We have just pointed out that if you are
+competing with a child, you do it in an entirely different way and under
+an entirely different set of rules, and if you fail to do this, you are
+unfair and even cruel to the child. And it is a fact of our world that
+there are some races more backward in the scale of development than
+other races. You may not like this fact, but it is silly to try to evade
+it. People who live in savage huts and beat on tom-toms and fight with
+bows and arrows and cannot count beyond<a name="vol_ii_page_117" id="vol_ii_page_117"></a> a dozen&mdash;such people are not
+the mental or moral equals of our highly civilized races, and to treat
+them as equals, and compete with them on that basis, means simply to
+exterminate them. And we should either exterminate them at once and be
+done with it, or else make up our minds that they are in a childhood
+stage of our race, and that we have to guide them and teach them as we
+do our children.</p>
+
+<p>There is no more useful person than the wise and kind teacher. But
+suppose we saw some one pretending to be a teacher to our children,
+while in reality enslaving and exploiting them, or secretly robbing and
+corrupting them&mdash;what would we say about that kind of teacher? The name
+of that teacher is capitalist commercialism, and his profession is known
+as "the white man's burden"; his abuse of power is the cause of our
+present racial wars and revolts of subject peoples. A fair-minded man,
+desirous of facing all the facts of life, hardly knows what stand to
+take in such a controversy; that is, hardly knows from which cause the
+colored races suffer more&mdash;the white man's exploitation, or their own
+native immaturity.</p>
+
+<p>To say that certain races are in a childhood stage, and need instruction
+and discipline, is an entirely different thing from saying they are
+permanently inferior and incapable of self-government. Whether they are
+permanently inferior is a problem for the man of science, to be
+determined by psychological tests, continued possibly over more than one
+generation. We have not as yet made a beginning; in fact, we have not
+even acquired the scientific impartiality necessary to such an inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, all that we can do is to look about us and pick up
+hints where we can. In places like Massachusetts, where Negroes are
+allowed to go to college and are given a chance to show what they can
+do, they have not ousted the white man, but many of them have certainly
+won his respect, and one finds charming and cultured men among them, who
+show no signs of prematurely closed up skulls. And one after another we
+see the races which have been held down as being inferior, developing
+leadership and organization and power of moral resistance. The Irish are
+showing themselves today one of the most vigorous and high-spirited of
+all races. The Hindus are developing a movement which in the long run
+may prove more powerful than the white man's gold and<a name="vol_ii_page_118" id="vol_ii_page_118"></a> steel. The
+Egyptians, the Persians, the Filipinos, the Koreans, are all devising
+ways to break the power of capitalist newspaper censorship. How sad that
+the subject races of the world have to get their education through
+hatred of their teachers, instead of through love!</p>
+
+<p>Of course, these rebel leaders are men who have absorbed the white man's
+culture, at least in part; practically always they are of the younger
+generation, which has been to the white man's schools. But this is the
+very answer we have been seeking&mdash;as to whether the race is permanently
+inferior, or merely immature and in need of training. It is not only
+among the brown and black and yellow races that progress depends upon
+the young generations; that is a universal fact of life.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of this argument we shall assume that the Christian or
+democratic theory has the weight of probability on its side, and that
+nature has not created any permanently and necessarily inferior race or
+class. We shall assume that the heritage of culture is a common
+heritage, open to all our species. We shall not go so far as the
+statement which Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence,
+that "all men are created free and equal"; but we shall assert that they
+are created "with certain inalienable rights," and that among these is
+the right to maintain their lives and to strive for liberty and
+happiness. Also, we shall say that there will never be peace or order in
+the world until they have found liberty, and recognition of their right
+to happiness.<a name="vol_ii_page_119" id="vol_ii_page_119"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LI" id="CHAPTER_LI"></a>CHAPTER LI<br /><br />
+RULING CLASSES</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained, and
+what sanction it can claim.)</p></div>
+
+<p>It is possible to conceive an order of nature in which all individuals
+were born and developed exactly alike and with exactly equal powers.
+Such is apparently the case with lower animals, for example the ants and
+the bees. But among human beings there are great differences; some are
+born idiots and some are born geniuses. Even supposing that we are able
+to do away with blindness and idiocy, it is not likely that we can ever
+make a race of uniform genius. There will always be some more capable
+minds, who will discover new powers of life, and will compel the others
+to learn from them. It is to the interest of the race that this learning
+should be done as quickly as possible. In other words, the great problem
+of society is how to recognize superior minds and put them in authority.</p>
+
+<p>We look back over history, and discover a few wise men, and many rulers;
+but very, very rarely does it happen that the ruler is a wise man, or a
+friend of wise men. Far more often we find the ruler occupied in
+suppressing the wise man and his wisdom. There was a ruler who allowed
+the mob to crucify Jesus, and another who ordered Socrates to drink the
+hemlock, and another who tortured Galileo, and another who chopped off
+the head of Sir Walter Raleigh&mdash;and so on through a long and tragic
+chronicle. And even when the accident of a wise ruler occurs he is apt
+to be surrounded by a class of parasites and corrupt officials who are
+busy to thwart his will.</p>
+
+<p>The general run of history is this: some group seizes power by force,
+and holds it by the same means, and seeks to augment and perpetuate it.
+Those who win the power are frequently men of energy and practical
+sense, and do fairly well as governors; but they are never able to hand
+on their virtues, and their line becomes corrupted by sensuality and
+self-indulgence, and the subject classes are plundered and driven to
+revolt. Often the revolt fails, but in the course<a name="vol_ii_page_120" id="vol_ii_page_120"></a> of time it succeeds,
+and there is a new dynasty, or a new ruling class, sometimes a little
+better than the old, sometimes worse.</p>
+
+<p>How shall one judge whether the new régime is better or worse?
+Obviously, this is a most important question; it has to do, not merely
+with history, but with our daily affairs, our voting. As one who has
+read some tens of thousands of pages of history, and has pondered its
+lessons with heart-sickness and despair, I lay down this general law by
+which revolts and changes of power may be judged: If the change results
+in the holding of power by a smaller number of people, it is a reaction;
+but if the change results in distributing the power among a larger group
+of the community, then that community has made a step in advance.</p>
+
+<p>I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central American
+country&mdash;Guatemala, I think&mdash;which showed 130 revolutions in less than a
+hundred years. Some rascal gets together a gang, and seizes the
+government and plunders its revenue. When he has plundered too much,
+some other rascal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang.
+Such "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for the
+Richard Harding Davis type of fiction; but we do not consider them as
+having any relationship to progress. We describe them as "palace"
+revolutions.</p>
+
+<p>But compare with this the various English revolutions. We write learned
+histories about them, and describe England as "the Mother of
+Parliaments." The reason for this is that when there was political
+discontent in England, the protesting persons proceeded to organize
+themselves, and to understand their trouble and to remedy it. They had
+the brain power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and
+when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling class to
+give way, they brought about a wider extension of liberty, a wider
+distribution of power. Tennyson has pictured England as a state "where
+freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." We today,
+reading its history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the
+word "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a
+community to move forward slowly than to move forward rapidly and then
+move backward nearly as far.</p>
+
+<p>We have pointed out several times the important fact of biology that
+change does not necessarily mean progress from<a name="vol_ii_page_121" id="vol_ii_page_121"></a> any rational or moral
+point of view. Degeneration is just as real a fact as progress, and it
+does not at all follow that because things change they are changing for
+the better. It is worth while to repeat this in discussing human
+society, for it is just as true of governments and morals as of living
+species. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundredfold the
+machinery of wealth production, and only be increasing luxury and
+wantonness and graft. A nation may change its governmental forms, its
+laws and social conventions, and boast noisily of these changes in the
+name of progress, while as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the
+road to ruin which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I
+can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you can judge,
+and that is the test already indicated: Is the actual, effective power
+of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller percentage of the
+population than before the change took place?</p>
+
+<p>You will note the words "actual, effective power." Nothing is more
+familiar in human life than for forms to survive after the spirit which
+created them is dead; and nothing is more familiar than the use of these
+forms as masks to deceive the populace. There have been many times in
+history when people have gone on voting, long after their votes ceased
+to count for anything; there have been many times when people have gone
+through the motions of freedom long after they have been slaves. Mexico
+under Diaz had one of the most perfect of constitutions, and was in
+reality one of the most perfect of despotisms; and we Americans are
+sadly familiar with political democracies which do not work.</p>
+
+<p>Shall we, therefore, join the pessimists and say that history is a blind
+struggle for useless power, and that the notion of progress is a
+delusion? I do not think so; on the contrary, I think it is easily to be
+demonstrated that there has been a steady increase in the amount of
+knowledge possessed by the race, and in the spread of this knowledge
+among the whole population. I think that through most of the period of
+written history we can trace a real development in human society. I
+think we can analyze the laws of this development, and explain its
+methods; and I think this knowledge is precious to us, because it
+enables us to accelerate the process and to make the end more certain.
+This task, the analysis of social evolution, is the task we have next to
+undertake.<a name="vol_ii_page_122" id="vol_ii_page_122"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LII" id="CHAPTER_LII"></a>CHAPTER LII<br /><br />
+THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the series of changes through which human society has
+passed.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have now to consider, briefly, the history of man as a social being,
+the groups he has formed, and the changes in his group systems.
+Everything in life grows, and human societies are no exception to the
+rule. They have undergone a long process of evolution, which we can
+trace in detail, and which we find conforms exactly to the law laid down
+by Herbert Spencer; a process whereby a number of single and similar
+things become different parts of one complex thing. In the case of human
+societies the units are men and women, and social evolution is a process
+whereby a small and simple group, in which the individuals are
+practically alike, grows into a large and complex group, in which the
+individuals are widely different, and their relations one to another are
+complicated and subtle.</p>
+
+<p>There are two powerful forces pressing upon human beings, and compelling
+them to struggle and grow. The first of these forces is fear, the need
+of protection against enemies; the second is hunger, the need of food
+and the means of producing and storing food. The first causes the
+individual to combine with his fellows and establish some form of
+government, and this is the origin of political evolution. The second
+causes him to accumulate wealth, and to combine industrially, and this
+is the origin of economic evolution. Because the first force is a little
+more urgent, we observe in the history of human society that evolution
+in government precedes evolution in industry.</p>
+
+<p>I made this statement some twenty years ago, in an article in "Collier's
+Weekly." I wrote to the effect that man's first care was to secure
+himself against his enemies, and that when he had done this he set out
+to secure his food supply. "Collier's" called upon the late Professor
+Sumner of Yale University, a prize reactionary and Tory of the old
+school, to answer me; and Professor Sumner made merry over my statement,
+declaring<a name="vol_ii_page_123" id="vol_ii_page_123"></a> that man sought for food long before he was safe from his
+enemies. Some years later, when Sumner died, one of his admirers wrote
+in the New York "Evening Post" that he had completely overwhelmed me,
+and I had acknowledged my defeat by failing to reply&mdash;something which
+struck me as very funny. It was, of course, possible that Sumner had
+overwhelmed me, but to say that I had considered myself overwhelmed was
+to attribute to me a degree of modesty of which I was wholly incapable.
+As a matter of fact, I had had my usual experience with capitalist
+magazines; "Collier's Weekly" had promised to publish my rejoinder to
+Sumner, but failed to keep the promise, and finally, when I worried
+them, they tucked the answer away in the back part of the paper, among
+the advertisements of cigars and toilet soaps.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Sumner is gone, but he has left behind him an army of pupils,
+and I will protect myself against them by phrasing my statement with
+extreme care. I do not mean to say that man first secures himself
+completely against his enemies, and then goes out to hunt for a meal. Of
+course he has to eat while he is countering the moves of his enemies; he
+has to eat while he is on the march to battle, or in flight from it. But
+ask yourself this question: which would you choose, if you had to
+choose&mdash;to go a couple of days with nothing to eat, or to have your
+throat cut by bandits and your wife and children carried away into
+slavery? Certainly you would do your fighting first, and meantime you
+would scratch together any food you could. While you were devoting your
+energies to putting down civil war, or to making a treaty with other
+tribes, or to preparing for a military campaign, you would continue to
+get food in the way your ancestors had got it; in other words, your
+economic evolution would wait, while your political evolution proceeded.
+But when you had succeeded in putting down your enemies, and had a long
+period of peace before you, then you would plant some fields, and
+domesticate some animals, or perhaps discover some new way of weaving
+cloth&mdash;and so your industrial life would make progress.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to see why Professor Sumner wished to confuse this issue. He
+could not deny political evolution, because it had happened. He despised
+and feared political democracy, but it was here, and he had to speak
+politely to it, as to a tiger that had got into his house. But
+industrial democracy<a name="vol_ii_page_124" id="vol_ii_page_124"></a> was a thing that had not yet happened in the
+world; it was only a hope and a prophecy, and therefore a prize old Tory
+was free to ridicule it. I remember reading somewhere his statement&mdash;the
+notion that democracy had anything to do with industry, or could in any
+way be applied to industry, was a piece of silliness. So, of course, he
+sought to demolish my idea that there was a process of evolution in
+economic affairs, paralleling the process of political evolution which
+had already culminated in democracy.</p>
+
+<p>Let us consider the process of political evolution, briefly and in its
+broad outlines. Take any savage tribe; you find it composed of
+individuals who are very much alike. Some are a little stronger than
+others, a little more clever, more powerful in battle; but the
+difference is slight, and when the tribe chooses someone to lead them,
+they might as well choose one man as another. They all have a say in the
+tribe councils, both men and women; their "rights" in the tribe are the
+same. They are, of course, slaves to ignorance, to degrading
+superstition and absurd taboos; but these things apply to everyone
+alike, there is no privileged caste, no hereditary inequality.</p>
+
+<p>But little by little, as the tribe grows in numbers, and in power and
+intelligence, as it comes to capture slaves in battle, and to unite with
+other tribes, there comes to be an hereditary chieftain and a group of
+his leading supporters, his courtiers and henchmen. When the society has
+evolved into the stage which we call barbarism, there is a permanent
+superior caste; there are hereditary priests, who have in their keeping
+the favor of the gods; and there is a subject population of slaves.</p>
+
+<p>The society moves on into the feudal stage, in which the various grades
+and classes are precisely marked off, each with its different functions,
+its different privileges and rights and duties. The feudal
+principalities and duchies war and struggle among themselves; they are
+united by marriage or by conquest, and presently some stronger ruler
+brings a great territory under his power, and we have what is called a
+kingdom; a society still larger, still more complex in its organization,
+and still more rigid in its class distinctions. Take France, under the
+ancient régime, and compare a courtier or noble gentleman with a serf;
+they are not only different before the law, they are different in the
+language they use, in the clothes they wear, in the ideas they hold;
+they are<a name="vol_ii_page_125" id="vol_ii_page_125"></a> different even in their bodies, so that the gentleman regards
+the serf as an inferior species of creature.</p>
+
+<p>The kings warred among themselves and emperors arose. The ultimate ideal
+in Europe was a political society which should include the whole
+continent, and this ideal was several times almost attained. But it is
+the rule of history that wherever a large society is built upon the
+basis of privilege and enslavement, the ruling classes prove morally and
+intellectually unequal to the burden put upon them; they become
+corrupted, and their rule becomes intolerable. This happened in Europe,
+and there came political revolutions&mdash;first in England, which
+accomplished it by gradual stages, and then in the French monarchy, and
+quite recently in a dozen monarchies and empires, large and small.</p>
+
+<p>What precisely is this political revolution? Let us consider the case of
+France, where the change was sudden, and the issues precisely drawn.
+King Louis XIV had said, "I am the state." To a person of our time that
+might seem like boasting, but it was merely an assertion of the existing
+political fact. King Louis was the state by universal consent, and by
+divine authority, as all men believed. The army was his army, the navy
+was his navy, and wars, when he made them, were his wars. Everyone in
+the state was his subject, and all the property of the state was his
+personal, private property, to dispose of as he pleased. The government
+officials carried out his will, and members of the nobility held the
+land and ruled in his name.</p>
+
+<p>But now suddenly the people of France overthrew the king, and put him to
+death, and drove the nobles into exile; they seized the power of the
+French state, and proclaimed themselves equal citizens in the state,
+with equal voices in its government and equal rights before the law. So
+we call France a republic, and describe this form of society as
+political democracy. It is the completion of the process of political
+evolution, and you will see that it moves in a sort of spiral; having
+completed a circle and got back where it was before, but upon a higher
+plane. The citizens of a modern republic are equal before the law, just
+as were the members of the savage tribe; but the political organization
+is vastly larger, and infinitely more complicated, and every individual
+lives his life upon a higher level, because he shares in the benefits of
+this more highly organized and more powerful state.<a name="vol_ii_page_126" id="vol_ii_page_126"></a>.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LIII" id="CHAPTER_LIII"></a>CHAPTER LIII<br /><br />
+INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Examines the process of evolution in industry and the stage which
+it has so far reached.)</p></div>
+
+<p>And now let us consider the process of industrial evolution. We shall
+find it to be exactly the same thing, reproducing the changes in another
+field of activity. You may picture two gigantic waves sweeping over the
+ocean. In some places the waves are far apart, and in other places they
+are closer together; for a time they may mingle, and perhaps their bases
+always mingle. It would be easy for a critic to point out how political
+affairs play a leading part in industrial evolution, and vice versa; it
+would be easy to argue that property rules the political state, or
+again, that the main function of the political state is to protect
+property. As I have said, man has to fight his enemies, and he has to
+seek food, and often he has to do the two things at the same time; but
+nevertheless, broadly speaking, we observe two great waves, sweeping
+over human society, and most of the time these waves are clearly
+separated and easily distinguished.</p>
+
+<p>Industry in a savage tribe is, like government, simple and uniform; all
+the members of the tribe get their living in the same way. One may be a
+little more expert as a fisherman, another as a gatherer of cocoanuts,
+but the fisherman gathers cocoanuts and the cocoanut-gatherer fishes. In
+the days of primitive communism there is little economic strife and
+little change; but as slavery comes in, and the private property system,
+there begins industrial war&mdash;the members of the tribe trade with one
+another, and argue over prices, and gradually some get the better of
+others, they accumulate slaves and goods, and later on they appropriate
+the land to their private use. Of course, the men who do this are often
+the rulers of the tribe, and so politics and industry are mixed; but
+even assuming that the state never interfered, assuming that the
+government allowed business affairs to work themselves out in their own
+way, the tendency of competition is always to end in monopoly. The big
+fish eat the little fish, the strong gain advantage over the weak, the
+rich grow richer, and the poor<a name="vol_ii_page_127" id="vol_ii_page_127"></a> grow relatively poorer. As the amount of
+trading increases, and men specialize in the arts of bargaining, we see
+again and again how money concentrates in the hands of a few. It does
+this, even when the political state tries to prevent it; as, for
+example, when the princes and dukes of the Middle Ages would torture the
+Jewish money-lenders and take away their treasure, but the Jews never
+failed to grow rich again.</p>
+
+<p>It is when political evolution has completed itself, and a republic has
+been set up, that a free field is given to economic forces to work
+themselves out to their logical end. We have seen this in the United
+States, where we all started pretty much on the same economic level, and
+where political tyranny has had little hold. Our civilization is a
+civilization of the trader&mdash;the business man, as we call him; and we see
+how big business absorbs little business, and grows constantly larger
+and more powerful. We are familiar with what we call "graft," the use by
+business men of the powers of government to get trade advantage for
+themselves, and we have a school of old-time thinkers, calling
+themselves "Jeffersonian Democrats," who insist that if only there had
+never been any government favors, economic equality and democracy would
+have endured forever in our country. But it is my opinion that
+government has done far more to prevent monopoly and special privilege
+in business than to favor it; and nevertheless, monopoly has grown.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, the tendency toward concentration in business, the
+absorption of the small business by the big business, is an irresistible
+natural process, which neither can be nor should be hindered. The
+condition of competition, whether in politics or in industry, is never a
+permanent one, and can never be made permanent; it is a struggle which
+automatically brings itself to an end. Large-scale production and
+distribution is more economical than small-scale, and big business has
+irresistible advantages of credit and permanence over little business.
+As we shall presently show, the blind and indiscriminate production of
+goods under the competitive system leads to the glutting of markets and
+to industrial crises. At such times the weaker concerns are weeded out
+and the strong ones take their trade; and as a result, we have the
+modern great corporation, the most powerful machine of production yet
+devised by man, and which corresponds in every aspect to the monarchy in
+political society.<a name="vol_ii_page_128" id="vol_ii_page_128"></a></p>
+
+<p>We are accustomed to speak of our "captains of industry," our "coal
+kings," and "beef barons" and "lords of steel," and we think we are
+using metaphors; but the universality of these metaphors points to a
+fundamental truth in them. As a matter of fact, our modern captain of
+industry fills in the economic world exactly the same functions as were
+filled in ancient days by the head of a feudal state. He has won his
+power in a similar struggle, and he holds it by similar methods. He
+rules over an organization of human beings, arranged, economically
+speaking, in grades and classes, with their authorities and privileges
+and duties precisely determined, as under the "ancient régime." And just
+as King Louis said, "I am the state," so Mr. Armour considers that he is
+Armour &amp; Co., and Mr. Morgan considers that he is the house of Morgan,
+and that the business exists for him and is controlled by him under
+divine authority.</p>
+
+<p>If I am correct in my analysis of the situation, this process of
+industrial evolution is destined to complete itself, as in the case of
+the political state. The subject populations of industry are becoming
+more and more discontented with their servitude, more and more resentful
+of that authority which compels them to labor while others reap the
+benefit. They are organizing themselves, and preparing for a social
+transformation which will parallel in every detail the revolution by
+which our ancestors overthrew the authority of King George III over the
+American colonies, and made inhabitants of those colonies no longer
+subjects of a king, but free and equal citizens of a republic. I expect
+to see a change throughout the world, which will take the great
+instruments of production which we call corporations and trusts, out of
+the hands of their present private owners, and make them the property,
+either of the entire community, or of those who do the work in them.
+This change is the "social revolution," and when it has completed
+itself, we shall have in that society an Industrial Republic, a form of
+business management which constitutes economic democracy.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the world's political revolutions has been written almost
+exclusively by aristocratic or bourgeois historians; that is to say, by
+men who, whatever their attitude toward political democracy, have no
+conception of industrial democracy, and believe that industrial strife
+and enslavement are the normal conditions of life. If, however, you will
+read<a name="vol_ii_page_129" id="vol_ii_page_129"></a> Kropotkin's "Great French Revolution," you will be interested to
+discover how important a part was played in this revolution by economic
+forces. Underneath the political discontent of the merchants and middle
+classes lay a vast mass of social discontent of the peasants and
+workers. It was the masses of the people who made the revolution, but it
+was the middle classes who seized it and turned it to their own ends,
+putting down attempts toward economic equality, and confining the
+changes, so far as possible, to the political field.</p>
+
+<p>And everywhere throughout history, if you study revolutions, you find
+that same thing happening. You find, for example, Martin Luther fighting
+for the right to preach the word of God without consulting the Pope; but
+when the peasants of Germany rose and sought to set themselves free from
+feudal landlords, Luther turned against them, and called upon the
+princes to shoot them down. "The ass needs to be beaten, and the
+populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand." The landlords and
+propertied classes of England were willing to restrict the power of the
+king, and to give the vote to the educated and well-to-do; but from the
+time of Jack Cade to our own they shoot down the poor.</p>
+
+<p>But meantime, the industrial process continues; the modern factory
+system brings the workers together in larger and larger groups, and
+teaches them the lesson of class consciousness. So the time of the
+workers draws near. The first attempt in modern times to accomplish the
+social revolution and set up industrial democracy was in the Paris
+Commune. When the French empire collapsed, after the war with Germany in
+1871, the workers of Paris seized control. They were massacred, some
+50,000 of them, and the propertied classes of France established the
+present bourgeois republic, which has now become the bulwark of reaction
+throughout the Continent of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Next came the Russian revolution of 1905, and this was an interesting
+illustration of the relation between the two waves of social progress.
+Russia was a backward country industrially, and according to theory not
+at all prepared for the social revolution. But nowadays the thoughts of
+men circulate all over the world, and the exiles from Russia had
+absorbed Marxian ideas, and were not prepared to accept a purely
+political freedom. So in 1905, after the Japanese war, when the people
+rose and forced the Czar to grant a parliament,<a name="vol_ii_page_130" id="vol_ii_page_130"></a> the extremists made an
+effort to accomplish the social revolution at the same time. The
+peasants began to demand the land, and the workers the factories;
+whereupon the capitalists and middle classes, who wanted a parliament,
+but did not want Socialism, went over to the side of reaction, and both
+the political and social revolutions were crushed.</p>
+
+<p>But then came the great war, for which Russia with her incompetent
+government and her undeveloped industry was unprepared. The strain of it
+broke her down long before the other Allies, and in the universal
+suffering and ruin the Russian people were again forced to rise. The
+political revolution was accomplished, the Czar was imprisoned, and the
+Douma reigned supreme. Middle class liberalism throughout the world gave
+its blessings to this revolution, and hastened to welcome a new
+political democracy to the society of nations. But then occurred what to
+orthodox democratic opinion has been the most terrifying spectacle in
+human history. The Russian people had been driven too far towards
+starvation and despair; the masses had been too embittered, and they
+rose again, overthrowing not only their Czar and their grand dukes, but
+their capitalists and land-owners. For the first time in history the
+social revolution established itself, and the workers were in control of
+a great state. Ever since then we have seen exactly what we saw in
+Europe from 1789 onward, when the first political republic was
+established, and all the monarchies and empires of the world banded
+themselves together to stamp it out. We have witnessed a campaign of
+war, blockade, intrigue and propaganda against the Soviet government of
+Russia, all pretending to be carried on in the name of the Russian
+people, and for the purpose of saving them from suffering&mdash;but all
+obviously based upon one consideration and one alone, the fear that an
+effort at industrial self-government might possibly prove to be a
+success.</p>
+
+<p>Whether or not the Soviets will prove permanent, no one can say. But
+this much is certain; just as the French revolution sent a thrill around
+the world, and planted in the hearts of the common people the wonderful
+dream of freedom from kings and ruling classes, just so the Russian
+revolution has brought to the working masses the dream of freedom from
+masters and landlords. Everywhere in capitalist society this ferment is
+working, and in one country after another we<a name="vol_ii_page_131" id="vol_ii_page_131"></a> see the first pangs of the
+new birth. Also we see capitalists and landlords, who once found
+"democracy," "free speech" and "equality before the law" useful formulas
+to break down the power of kings and aristocrats, now repudiating their
+old-time beliefs, and going back to the frankest reaction. We see, in
+our own "land of the free," the government refusing to reprint the
+Declaration of Independence during the war, and arresting men for
+quoting from it and circulating it; we even see the Department of
+Justice refusing to allow people to reprint the Sermon on the Mount!<a name="vol_ii_page_132" id="vol_ii_page_132"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LIV" id="CHAPTER_LIV"></a>CHAPTER LIV<br /><br />
+THE CLASS STRUGGLE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses history as a battle-ground between ruling and subject
+classes, and the method and outcome of this struggle.)</p></div>
+
+<p>There is a theory of social development, sometimes called the
+materialistic interpretation of history, and sometimes the economic
+interpretation of history. It is one of the contributions to our thought
+which we owe to Karl Marx, and like all the rest of Marxian theory, it
+is a subject of embittered controversy, not merely between Socialists
+and orthodox economists, but between various schools of revolutionary
+doctrine. For my part, I have never been a great hand for doctrine,
+whether ancient or modern; I am not much more concerned with what Marx
+taught than I am with what St. Paul taught, or what Martin Luther
+taught. My advice is to look at life with your own eyes, and to state in
+simple language the conclusions of your own thinking.</p>
+
+<p>Man is an eating animal; he has also been described as a tool-making
+animal, and might be described as an ideal-making animal. There is a
+tendency on the part of those who specialize in the making of ideals to
+repudiate the eating and the tool-making sides of man; which accounts
+for the quarrel between the Marxians and the moralists. All through
+history you find new efforts of man to develop his emotional and
+spiritual nature, and to escape from the humiliating limitations of the
+flesh. These efforts have many of them been animated by desperate
+sincerity, but none of them have changed the fundamental fact that man
+is an eating animal, an animal insufficiently provided by nature against
+cold, and with an intense repugnance to having streams of cold water run
+down back of his neck. The religious teachers go out with empty purse,
+and "take no thought for the morrow"; but the forces of nature press
+insistently upon them, and little by little they make compromises, they
+take to shelter while they are preaching, they consent to live in
+houses, and even to own houses, and to keep a bank account. So they make
+terms with the powers of this world, and the powers of<a name="vol_ii_page_133" id="vol_ii_page_133"></a> this world,
+which are subtle, and awake to their own interests, find ways to twist
+the new doctrine to their ends.</p>
+
+<p>So the new religion becomes simply another form of the old hypocrisy;
+and it comes to us as a breath of fresh air in a room full of corruption
+when some one says, "Let us have done with aged shams and false
+idealisms. Let us face the facts of life, and admit that man is a
+physical animal, and cannot do any sane and constructive thinking until
+he has food and shelter provided. Let us look at history with unblinking
+eyes, and realize that food and shelter, the material means of life, are
+what men have been seeking all through history, and will continue to
+seek, until we put production and distribution upon a basis of justice,
+instead of a basis of force."</p>
+
+<p>Such is, as simply as I can phrase it, the materialistic interpretation
+of history. Put into its dress of scientific language it reads: the
+dominant method of production and exchange in any society determines the
+institutions and forms of that society. I do not think I exaggerate in
+saying that this formula, applied with judgment and discrimination, is a
+key to the understanding of human societies.</p>
+
+<p>Wherever man has moved into the stage of slavery and private property
+there has been some group which has held power and sought to maintain
+and increase it. This group has set the standards of behavior and belief
+for the community, and if you wish to understand the government and
+religion, the manners and morals, the philosophy and literature and art
+of that community, the first thing you have to do is to understand the
+dominant group and its methods of keeping itself on top. This statement
+applies, not merely to those cultural forms which are established and
+ordained by the ruling class; it applies equally well to the
+revolutionary forms, the behavior and beliefs of those who oppose the
+ruling class. For men do not revolt in a vacuum, they revolt against
+certain conditions, and the form of their revolt is determined by the
+conditions. Take, for example, primitive Christianity, which was
+certainly an effort to be unworldly, if ever such an effort was made by
+man. But you cannot understand anything about primitive Christianity
+unless you see it as a new form of slave revolt against Roman
+imperialism and capitalism.</p>
+
+<p>The theory of the class struggle is the master key to the bewilderments
+and confusions of history. Always there is a<a name="vol_ii_page_134" id="vol_ii_page_134"></a> dominant class, holding
+the power of the state, and always there are subject classes; and sooner
+or later the subject classes begin protesting and struggling for wider
+rights. When they think they are strong enough, they attempt a revolt,
+and sometimes they succeed. If they do, they write the histories of the
+revolt, and their leaders become heroes and statesmen. If they fail, the
+histories are written by their oppressors, and the rebels are portrayed
+as criminals.</p>
+
+<p>One of the commonest of popular assumptions is that if the rebels have
+justice on their side, they are bound to succeed in the long run; but
+this is merely the sentimental nonsense that is made out of history. It
+is perfectly possible for a just revolt to be crushed, and to be crushed
+again and again; just as it is possible for a child which is ready to be
+born to fail to be born, and to perish miserably. The fact that the
+Huguenots had most of the virtue and industry and intelligence of France
+did not keep them from being slaughtered by Catholic bigots, and
+reaction riveted upon the French people for a couple of hundred years.
+The fact that the Moors had most of the industry of Spain did not keep
+them from being driven into exile by the Inquisition, and the
+intellectual life of the Spanish people strangled for three hundred or
+four hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>Some eight hundred years ago our ancestors in England brought a cruel
+and despotic king to battle, and conquered him, and on the field of
+Runnymede forced him to sign a grant of rights to Englishmen. That
+document is known as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter, and everyone who
+writes political history today recognizes it as one of the greatest of
+man's achievements, the beginning of a process which we hope will bring
+freedom and equality before the law to every human being on earth.</p>
+
+<p>And now we have come to the stage in our industrial affairs, when the
+organized workers seek to bring the monarchs of industry into the
+council chamber, and force them to sign a similar Great Charter, which
+will grant freedom and self-government to the workers. Just as King John
+was forced to admit that the power to tax and spend the public revenue
+belonged to the people of England, and not to the ruler; just so the
+workers will establish the principle that the finances of industry are a
+public concern, that the books are to be opened, and prices fixed and
+wages paid by the democratic vote of the citizens of industry. If that
+change is<a name="vol_ii_page_135" id="vol_ii_page_135"></a> accomplished, the historian of the future will recognize it
+as another momentous step in progress; and he will heed the protests of
+the lords of industry, that they are being deprived of their freedom to
+do business, and of their sacred legal rights to their profits, as
+little as he heeded the protests of King John against the "treason" and
+"usurpation" and infringement of "divine right" by the rebellious
+barons.<a name="vol_ii_page_136" id="vol_ii_page_136"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LV" id="CHAPTER_LV"></a>CHAPTER LV<br /><br />
+THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and the effect of
+this system upon the minds of the workers.)</p></div>
+
+<p>In the beginning man got his living by hunting and fishing. Then he took
+to keeping flocks and herds, and later by slow stages he settled down to
+agriculture. With the introduction of slavery and the ownership of the
+land by ruling classes, there came to be a subject class of workers, who
+toiled on the land from dawn to dark, year in and year out, and got, if
+they were fortunate, an existence for themselves and their families.
+Whether these workers were called slaves or serfs or peasants, whether
+their product was taken from them in the form of taxes by the king, or
+of rent by the landlord, made no difference; the workers were bound to
+the soil, like the beasts with which they lived in intimate contact.
+They were drafted into armies, and made to fight for their lords and
+masters; they suffered pestilence and famine, fire and slaughter; but
+with infinite patience they would rebuild their huts, and dig and plant
+again, whether for the old master or for a new one.</p>
+
+<p>In the early days these workers made their own crude tools and weapons;
+but very early there must have been some who specialized in such arts,
+and with the growth of towns and communications came a new kind of
+labor, based upon a new system. Some enterprising man would buy slaves,
+or hire labor, and obtain a supply of raw material, and manufacture
+goods to be bartered or sold. He would pay his workers enough to draw
+them from the land, and would sell the product for what he could get,
+and the difference would be his profit. That was capitalism, and at
+first it was a thing of no importance, and the men who engaged in it had
+no social standing. But princes and lords needed weapons and supplies
+for their armies, and the men who could furnish these things became more
+and more necessary, and the states which encouraged them were the ones
+which rose to power. Merchants and sea-traders became the intimates of
+kings, and by<a name="vol_ii_page_137" id="vol_ii_page_137"></a> the time of the Roman empire, capitalism was a great
+world power, dominating the state, using the armies of the state for its
+purposes. It went down with the rest of Roman civilization, but in the
+Middle Ages it began once more to revive, and by the end of the
+eighteenth century the merchants and money lenders of France, with their
+retainers, the lawyers and journalists, were powerful enough to take the
+control of society.</p>
+
+<p>Then, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, came the invention of
+machinery and of the power process. Capitalism began to grow like a
+young giant among pygmies. In the course of a century it has ousted all
+other methods of production, and all other forms of social activity. A
+hundred years ago the British House of Commons was a parliament of
+landlords; today it is a Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association. Out
+of the 707 members of the British House of Commons, 361 are members of
+the "Federation of British Industries," the labor-smashing organization
+of British "big business." And the same is true of every other
+parliament and congress in the modern capitalist state. Practically all
+the wealth of the world today is produced by the capitalist method, and
+distributed under capitalist supervision, and therefore capitalist ideas
+prevail in our society, to the practical exclusion of all other ideas. I
+have shown in "The Profits of Religion" how these ideas dominate the
+modern church, and in "The Brass Check" how they dominate the modern
+press. I plan to write two books, to show how they dominate education
+and literature.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred years ago an industry consisted of a half a dozen or a dozen
+men, working under the personal supervision of an owner, and using crude
+hand tools. Today it consists of a gigantic trust, owning and managing
+scores and perhaps hundreds of mills and factories, each employing
+thousands of workers. A corporation like the Steel Trust owns enough of
+the sources of its raw material to give it practical monopoly; it owns a
+fleet of vessels especially designed for ore-carrying; it owns its
+private railroads, to deliver the ore to the mills. Through its system
+of dummy directorates it has practical control of the main railroads
+over which it distributes its products; also of banks and trust
+companies and insurance companies, to gather the money of the public to
+finance its undertakings. It owns huge office buildings,<a name="vol_ii_page_138" id="vol_ii_page_138"></a> and vast
+tracts of land upon which the homes of its workers are built. It has a
+private army for the defense of its property&mdash;a complete army of
+cavalry, infantry and artillery, including a large and highly efficient
+secret service department, with a host of informers and spies. It has
+newspapers for the purpose of propaganda, and it controls the government
+of every village, town and city in which it has important interests. If
+you will take the trouble to visit a "steel town," and make inquiries
+among public officials, newspaper men, and others who are "on the
+inside," you will discover that those in authority consider it necessary
+and proper that "steel" should control, and are unable to conceive any
+other condition of affairs. If you go to other parts of the country,
+where other great industries are located, you find it taken for granted
+that "copper" should control, or "lumber," or "coal," or "oil," or
+whatever it may be.</p>
+
+<p>Under the system of large scale capitalism, labor is a commodity, bought
+and sold in the market like any other commodity. Some years ago Congress
+was requested to pass a law contradicting this fundamental fact of world
+capitalism. Congress passed a law, very carefully worded so that no one
+could be sure what it meant, and a few years later the Supreme Court
+nullified the law. But all through this political and legal controversy
+the status of labor remained exactly the same; there was a "labor
+market," consisting of those members of the community who, in the
+formula of Marx, had nothing but their labor power to sell. These
+competed for recognition at the factory gates, and highly skilled
+foremen selected those who offered the largest quantity of labor power
+for the stated wage.</p>
+
+<p>So entirely impersonal is this process that there are great industries
+in America in which ninety per cent of the common labor force is hired
+and fired all over again in the course of a year. These men are put to
+work in gangs, under a system which enables one picked man to set the
+pace, and compel all the others to keep up with him, under penalty of
+being discharged. This process is known as "speeding up," and its
+purpose is to obtain from each worker the greatest quantity of energy in
+exchange for his daily wage. In the steel industry men work twelve hours
+a day for six days in the week, and then finish with a twenty-four-hour
+day. If they do not work so long in other industries, it is because
+experience has<a name="vol_ii_page_139" id="vol_ii_page_139"></a> proven that the greatest quantity of energy can be
+obtained from them in a shorter time. There are very few men who can
+stand this pace for long. Those who are not crippled or killed in
+accidents are broken down at forty, and all the great corporations
+recognize this fact. Their foremen pick out the younger men, and
+practically all concerns have an age rule, and never hire men above
+forty or forty-five.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not in this book go into details concerning the fate of the
+worker under the profit system. I have written two novels, "The Jungle"
+and "King Coal," in which the facts are portrayed in detail, and it
+seems the part of common sense to refer the reader to these text-books.
+It will suffice here to set forth the main outlines of the situation. In
+every capitalist country of the world the masses of the people are
+herded into industries, in whose profits they have no share, and in
+whose welfare they have no interest. They do not know the people for
+whom they work; they have no human relationship, either with their work
+or with their employers. They see the surplus of their product drawn off
+to maintain a class of idlers, whose activities they know only through
+the scandals of the divorce courts and the luxury-love of the moving
+picture screen. They compete with one another for jobs, and bid down one
+another's wages; and if they attempt to organize and end this
+competition, their efforts are broken by newspaper propaganda and
+policemen's clubs. At the same time they know that monopoly, open or
+secret, prevails in the fixing of prices, and so they find the struggle
+to "get ahead" a losing one. In America it used to be possible for the
+young and energetic to "go West"; but now the wave of capitalism has
+reached the Pacific coast and been thrown back, and there is no more
+frontier.</p>
+
+<p>The man who works on the land has been through all the ages a solitary
+man. He is better friends with his horse and his cow than with his
+fellow humans. He is brutalized by incessant toil, he lives amid dirt
+and the filth of animals, he is, in the words of Edwin Markham:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry">
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">"A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: .25em;">Stunted and stunned, a brother to the ox."</span></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>He is a victim of natural forces which he does not understand, and
+inevitably therefore he is superstitious. Being alone,<a name="vol_ii_page_140" id="vol_ii_page_140"></a> he is helpless
+against his masters, and only utter desperation drives him to revolt.</p>
+
+<p>But consider the capitalist system&mdash;how different the conditions of its
+workers! Here they are gathered into city slums, and their wits are
+sharpened by continual contact with their fellows. The printing press
+makes cheap the spread of information, and the soap-box makes it even
+cheaper. Any man with a grievance can shout aloud, and be sure of an
+audience to listen, and he can get a great deal said before the company
+watchman or the policeman can throttle him. Moreover, the modern worker
+is not struggling with drought and tempest and hail; he does not see his
+labors wiped out by volcanic eruption or lightning stroke; he is dealing
+with machinery, something that he himself has made, and that he fully
+understands. If a machine gets out of order, he does not fall down upon
+his knees and pray to God to fix it. All the training of his life
+teaches him the relationship of cause and effect, the adjustment of
+means to ends. So the modern worker, as a necessary consequence of his
+daily work, is practical, skeptical, and unsentimental in his
+psychology. And what is more, he is making all the rest of society of
+the same temperament. He is building roads out into the country, and
+building machines to roll over them; he is running telephone lines and
+sending newspapers and magazines and moving picture shows to the peasant
+and the farmer; so the young peasants and farmers hunger for the city,
+and they learn to fix machinery instead of praying to God.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the psychology of the modern working class; and the supreme
+achievement of their sharpened wits is an understanding of the
+capitalist process. As a matter of fact they did not make this discovery
+for themselves; it was made for them by middle-class men, lawyers and
+teachers and writers&mdash;Fourier, Owen, Marx, Lassalle. The modern doctrine
+is called by various names: Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Bolshevism,
+Syndicalism, Collectivism. Later on I shall define these various terms,
+and point out the distinctions between them. For the moment I emphasize
+the factor they all have in common, and which is fundamental: they wish
+to break the power of class ownership and control of the instruments and
+means of production; they wish to replace private capitalism by some
+system under which the<a name="vol_ii_page_141" id="vol_ii_page_141"></a> instruments and means of production are
+collectively owned and operated; and they look to the non-owning class,
+the proletarian, as the motive power by which this change is to be
+compelled. I shall in future refer to this as the "social revolutionary"
+doctrine; taking pains to explain that the word "revolutionary" is to be
+divested of its popular meaning of physical violence. It is perfectly
+conceivable that the change may be brought about peaceably, and I shall
+try to show before long that in modern capitalist states the decision as
+to whether it is brought about peaceably or by violence rests with the
+present masters of industry.<a name="vol_ii_page_142" id="vol_ii_page_142"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LVI" id="CHAPTER_LVI"></a>CHAPTER LVI<br /><br />
+THE CAPITALIST PROCESS</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(How profits are made under the present industrial system and what
+becomes of them.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have next to examine the structure of the capitalist order, basing
+our argument on facts which are admitted by everyone, including the most
+ardent defenders of the present system.</p>
+
+<p>All men have to have certain material things which we describe as goods.
+As these goods do not produce themselves, it is necessary that some
+should work. The workers must have tools; also they must have access to
+the land and the sources of raw materials. These means of production are
+owned by some individuals in the community, and this ownership gives
+them power to direct the work of the rest. Those who own the land and
+the natural sources of wealth we call capitalists, or business men, and
+those who do not own these things, or whose share in them is
+insignificant, are the proletariat, or working class.</p>
+
+<p>If you state to the average American that there is a capitalist class
+and a proletariat in this country, he will point out that many who are
+now members of the capitalist class were originally members of the
+proletariat; they have worked hard and saved, and accumulated property.
+But this is merely confusing the issue. The fact that some proletarians
+turn into capitalists and some capitalists into proletarians is
+important to the individuals concerned, but it does not alter the fact
+that there are two classes, capitalist and proletarian. Consider, by way
+of illustrating, a field with trees growing on it; we have earth, and we
+have trees, and the distinction between them is unmistakable. The roots
+of the trees go down into the earth, and take up portions of the earth
+and turn it into tree. The leaves and the dead branches fall, and in the
+course of time are turned once more to earth. There are all sorts of
+stages between earth and tree, and between tree and earth; but you would
+not therefore say that the word "earth" and the word "tree" are
+misnomers.<a name="vol_ii_page_143" id="vol_ii_page_143"></a></p>
+
+<p>The working men go to the business man and apply for work. The business
+man gives them work, and takes their product, and offers it in the
+market at a price which allows him a profit above cost. If he can sell
+at a profit, he repeats the process, and the worker has a job. If he
+cannot sell at a profit, the worker is out of a job. Here and there may
+be a benevolent business man who, rather than turn his workers out of a
+job, will sell his goods at cost, or even for a short time at a loss;
+but if he keeps the factory going simply for the benefit of his workers,
+and with no expectation of ever making a profit, that is a form of
+charity, and not the common system under which our business is now
+carried on.</p>
+
+<p>So it appears that the worker is dependent for his wages upon the
+ability of the business man to make a profit. The worker's life is
+inextricably bound up with the profit of the capitalist&mdash;no profit for
+the capitalist, no life for the worker. The capitalist, going out to
+look for markets for his goods, is seeking, not merely profit for
+himself, but life for his workers.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the business man pays a certain percentage of his total receipts
+for labor, another percentage for raw materials, another percentage for
+his overhead charges, and the rest is profit in various forms, rent to
+the landlord, interest to the bondholder, dividends to the stockholder.
+All this total sum goes to human individuals, and each has thus a
+certain amount of money to spend. They pay it over to other individuals
+for goods or services, and so the money keeps circulating, and business
+keeps going. That is as deep as the average mind probes into the
+process.</p>
+
+<p>But let us probe a little deeper. It is evident that, in the course of
+all this exchanging of goods, some individuals get a larger share than
+other individuals. Our government collects an income tax, and thus we
+have statistics representing what people are willing to admit about the
+share they get. In 1917 it appeared that, speaking roughly, one family
+out of six had an income of over $1,000 a year, and one family out of
+twelve had an income of over $2,000. But there were 19,000 families
+which admitted incomes of over $50,000 a year, and 300 with over
+$1,000,000 a year.</p>
+
+<p>Now the families that get less than a thousand dollars a year obviously
+have to spend the greater part of their income upon their immediate
+living expenses. But the families that<a name="vol_ii_page_144" id="vol_ii_page_144"></a> get $50,000 a year do not need
+to spend everything, and most of them take the greater part of their
+income and reinvest it&mdash;that is, they spend it upon the creating of new
+machinery of production, railroads, mills, factories, office buildings,
+the whole elaborate structure of capitalist industry.</p>
+
+<p>Exactly what proportion of the total product of industry is thus taken
+and reinvested no one can say; but this we know, our cities are growing
+at an enormous rate, our manufacturing power is increasing by leaps and
+bounds, we are perfecting processes which enable one man to do the work
+of a hundred men, which increase the product of one man's labor a
+hundredfold. All this goes on blindly, automatically; a Niagara of goods
+of all sorts is poured out, and we call it "prosperity."</p>
+
+<p>But then suddenly a strange and bewildering thing happens. All at once,
+and without warning, orders fall off, values begin to drop, business
+collapses, factories are shut down, and millions of men are thrown out
+of jobs. Merchants look at one another with blanched faces; each one has
+been counting on paying his bills with the profits he was going to make,
+and now his profits are gone, and he can't pay. The newspapers and
+magazines keep insisting that it can't be true, that business is going
+to revive next week, that prosperity is just ahead. But the factories
+stay shut, and the millions of men stay idle.</p>
+
+<p>This is the condition in which we find ourselves as I write this book.
+It has been happening regularly in our history every ten years or so,
+ever since America started; we have had a hundred years to reflect upon
+it and to probe into the causes of it, and such is business intelligence
+in the most enlightened country in the world, you may search the pages
+of our newspapers from the first column of millionaire divorce suits to
+the last column of "situations wanted," and nowhere can you find one
+word to explain this mysterious calamity of "hard times"&mdash;how it comes
+to happen to our social system, or what could be done to prevent it! To
+supply this deficiency in present day thinking is our next task.<a name="vol_ii_page_145" id="vol_ii_page_145"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LVII" id="CHAPTER_LVII"></a>CHAPTER LVII<br /><br />
+HARD TIMES</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing, and why
+abundant production brings distress instead of plenty.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Let us picture a small island inhabited by six men. One of these men
+fishes, another hunts, another gathers cocoanuts, another raises goats
+for clothing, and so on. The six men among them produce by their labor
+all the necessities of their lives, and they exchange their products
+with one another. The island is productive, and each of the men is free,
+and makes his exchanges on equal terms; on that basis the industry of
+the island can continue indefinitely, and there will never be any
+trouble. There may sometimes be over-production, but it will not cause
+anyone to starve. If the fisherman is unusually lucky one day, he will
+be able to take a vacation for a few days, living on his fish and the
+products he exchanges for his fish. For the sake of convenience in
+future reference, I will describe this happy island as a "free" society;
+meaning that each of the members of this society has access on equal
+terms to the sources of wealth, and each owns the product of his own
+labor, without paying tribute to any one else for the right to labor, or
+to exchange his products.</p>
+
+<p>But now let us suppose that one of the men on the island is strong and
+aggressive; he takes a club and knocks down the other five men, and
+compels them to sign a piece of paper agreeing that hereafter he is the
+president of the land development company of the island, the chief
+stockholder in the goat-raising company, and owner of the fishing
+concession and the cocoanut grove; also, that hereafter goods shall not
+be bartered in kind, but shall be exchanged for money, and that he is
+the banker, and also the government, with the right to issue money. In
+this society you will find that the real work, the actually productive
+work, is done by five men, instead of by six, and these five do not get
+the full value of their labor. The fisherman will fish, but his product
+will no longer belong to himself; he will get part of it as wages, while
+the "business man" takes charge of the balance. So<a name="vol_ii_page_146" id="vol_ii_page_146"></a> when there is a
+lucky day, there will be prosperity in the fishing industry, but this
+prosperity will not benefit the fisherman; he will have only his wage,
+and when he has caught too many fish, he will not have a few days'
+vacation, but will be out of a job.</p>
+
+<p>And exactly the same thing will happen to the goat-herd. He will
+probably have work all the year round, because goats have to be tended,
+but he will get barely enough to keep him alive, and the surplus skins
+and milk will go to the owner of the no-longer-happy island. Perhaps it
+will occur to the owner that the man who raises cocoanuts might also
+keep an eye on the goats, and so the goat-herd will be permanently out
+of a job, and will turn into what is called a tramp, or vagrant.
+Inasmuch as everything to eat on the island belongs to the owner, the
+ex-goat-herd will be tempted to become a criminal, and so it will be
+necessary for the owner to arm the cocoanut man with a club and make him
+into a policeman; or perhaps he will organize the fisherman and the
+hunter into a militia for the preservation of law and order. They will
+be glad to serve him, because, owing to the extreme productivity of the
+island, they will be out of jobs a great part of the time, and but for
+the generosity of the business man, would have no way of earning a
+living.</p>
+
+<p>But suppose that the cocoanut man should invent a machine for gathering
+a year's supply of nuts in a week; suppose the fisherman should devise a
+scheme to fill his boat with fish in a few minutes; and suppose that as
+a result of these inventions the business man got so rich that he moved
+to Paris, and no longer saw his workers, or even knew their names. Under
+these conditions you can see that overproduction and unemployment might
+increase on the island; and also the business man might seem less human
+and lovable to his wage slaves, and might need a larger police force. It
+might even happen that he would discover the need of a propaganda
+department, in order to keep his police force loyal, and a secret
+service to make sure that agitators did not get into the schools.</p>
+
+<p>The five islanders, having filled all the barns and storehouses, would
+be turned out to starve; and when they asked the reason, they would be
+told it was because they had produced a surplus of food. This may sound
+grotesque, but it is what is being said to 5,000,000 men in America as I
+write. There are clothing-workers who are going about in<a name="vol_ii_page_147" id="vol_ii_page_147"></a> rags, and they
+are told it is because they have produced too much clothing. There are
+shoe-workers whose shoes are falling off their feet, and they are told
+it is because they have produced too many shoes. There are carpenters
+who have no homes, and they are told that a great many homes are needed,
+but unfortunately it doesn't pay the builders to go ahead just now. This
+may sound like a caricature, but it happens to be the most prominent
+single fact in the consciousness of 5,000,000 Americans at the close of
+the year 1921. No wonder they are discontented with the present order.</p>
+
+<p>The solution of the mystery is so simple that the 5,000,000 unemployed
+cannot be kept permanently from understanding it. The reason the five
+men on the island are starving is because one man owns the island and
+the others own nothing. If the island were community property, the five
+men would each own a share of the contents of the barns and storehouses,
+and would not be starving. If the 100,000,000 people of America owned
+the productive machinery of America, then instantly the unemployment
+crisis would pass like an evil dream. The farm-workers who need shoes
+would exchange their food with the starving shoe-workers, and the
+starving shoe-workers would have jobs. They would want clothing, and so
+the clothing-makers would start to work; and so on all the way down the
+line. There is only one thing necessary to make this possible, and that
+is the thing which we have agreed to call the social revolution.<a name="vol_ii_page_148" id="vol_ii_page_148"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LVIII" id="CHAPTER_LVIII"></a>CHAPTER LVIII<br /><br />
+THE IRON RING</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles production,
+and makes true prosperity impossible.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have seen that in an exploiting society there is a surplus which is
+taken by the exploiter; and that under the modern system this surplus
+must be sold at a profit before production can continue. The vital fact
+in such a society is that the worker has not the money to buy back all
+that he produces; therefore it is inevitable that a surplus product
+should accumulate. When this happens, production must be cut down, and
+during that period the worker is without a job, and without means of
+living. The fact that he needs the product does not help him; the point
+is that he has not the money to buy it. In such a society the productive
+machinery is never used to the full. The machinery is controlled by a
+profit-seeking interest, seeking an opportunity to make sales, and
+restricting production according to the prospect of sales. So the actual
+product bears no relationship to the possible product, and people who
+live in an exploiting society can form no conception of true prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>For, you see, the market is limited by the competitive wage system. We
+have seen that in our own rich, prosperous country only one family out
+of six has more than $1,000 a year income; only one family out of twelve
+has $2,000 a year. It does not make any difference that the warehouses
+are bursting with goods; a family constitutes a market of so many
+dollars a year, and then, so far as the profit system is concerned, that
+family is non-existent; that family stops consuming, and the productive
+machinery is halted to that extent.</p>
+
+<p>I have been accustomed to portray the profit system under the simile of
+an iron ring riveted about the body of a baby. That ring would cause the
+baby some discomfort at the beginning, but it would not be serious, and
+the baby would get used to it. But as the baby grew the trouble caused
+by the ring would increase, and finally there would come a time<a name="vol_ii_page_149" id="vol_ii_page_149"></a> when
+the baby would be suffering from a whole complication of troubles, and
+for each of these troubles there would be but one remedy&mdash;break the
+ring. Does the baby cry all the time? Break the ring! Is its digestion
+defective? Break the ring! Is it threatened with convulsions or with
+blood poisoning? Break the ring!</p>
+
+<p>Here is our industrial society, growing at a rate never equalled by any
+human baby; and here is this iron ring riveted about its middle. Here is
+poverty, here is unemployment, here is graft, here is crime, here is war
+and plague and famine; and for all these evils there is but one cause,
+and but one remedy. Break the ring! Set production free from the
+strangulation of the profit system.</p>
+
+<p>I will admit that there may have been a time in the history of the
+social infant when this ring was necessary. I admit that if the great
+industrial machine was to be constructed, it was necessary that the mass
+of the people should consume only part of what they produced, and should
+allow the balance to be reinvested as capital. But now it has been done,
+and the process is complete. We have a machine capable of producing many
+times more than we can consume; shall we still go on building that
+machine? Shall we go on starving ourselves, to save the money, to
+multiply over and over again the products, in order that we may be
+thrown out of work, and be starved even more completely?</p>
+
+<p>A few generations ago we had in colonial America a society that in part
+at least was "free." In that society everybody got the necessities of
+life. They did not have the modern Sunday supplement and the moving
+picture show, but they had bread and meat and good substantial clothing,
+and furniture so well made that we still preserve it. The children in
+those days grew up to be strong and sturdy men and women, who would have
+seen nothing to envy in the bodies or minds of the slum population of
+New York and Chicago. In short, they had all the true necessities of
+life; and yet their work was done by hand, the power process was unknown
+and undreamed of.</p>
+
+<p>Now comes modern machinery, and multiplies the productive power of the
+hand laborer by five, by ten, sometimes by a hundred. Here, for example,
+is the "Appeal to Reason" selling millions of cheap books for ten cents
+apiece, and making a profit on it; installing a gigantic press which
+takes<a name="vol_ii_page_150" id="vol_ii_page_150"></a> paper, sheet after sheet, prints 128 pages of a book at one
+impression, and folds and stitches and binds the books, all in one
+process, and turns them out complete at the rate of 10,000 copies per
+hour. Here is a factory which turns out 100,000 automobiles a month.
+Here is a mill which turns out many millions of yards of cloth a month.
+If our colonial ancestors had been told about these marvels, they would
+have said instantly: "Then, of course, everybody in that society will
+have all the books they want, and all the clothing they want, and all
+the automobiles. Everybody in that society will have five or ten or one
+hundred times as much goods as we have."</p>
+
+<p>Imagine the bewilderment of our colonial ancestor if he had been told:
+"The majority of the people in that society will not have so much of the
+real necessities of life as you have. They will have a few cheap
+trinkets, designed to tickle their senses; they will have cheap
+newspapers, carefully contrived to keep their minds vacant and to keep
+them contented with their lot; they will have moving picture shows
+constructed for the same purpose; but all their material things will be
+flimsy, put together for show and not for permanence; their food will be
+adulterated, their clothing will be shoddy, everything they have will be
+made, not for their service, but for the profit of some one who lives by
+selling to them. The average wage earned by those who do the work of
+this new machine civilization will be less than half the amount
+necessary to purchase the necessities of a decent life, and one-tenth of
+the total population will be living in such poverty that they are unable
+to maintain physical fitness, or to rear their children into full sized
+men and women."<a name="vol_ii_page_151" id="vol_ii_page_151"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LIX" id="CHAPTER_LIX"></a>CHAPTER LIX<br /><br />
+FOREIGN MARKETS</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Considers the efforts of capitalism to save itself by marketing
+its surplus products abroad, and what results from these efforts.)</p></div>
+
+<p>If our analysis of present-day society is correct, we have the enormous
+populations of the modern industrial countries, living always on the
+verge of starvation, their chance for survival depending at all times
+upon the ability of their employers to find a profitable market for a
+surplus of goods. At first the employer seeks that market at home; but
+when the home markets are glutted, he goes abroad; and so develops the
+phenomenon of foreign trade and rivalry for foreign trade, as the basic
+fact of capitalism, and the fundamental cause of modern war.</p>
+
+<p>Let us get clear a simple distinction concerning foreign trade. There is
+a kind of trade which is normal, and would thrive in a "free" society.
+In the United States we can produce nearly all the necessities of life,
+but there are a few which we cannot produce&mdash;rubber, for example, and
+bananas, and good music. These things we wish to import. We buy them
+from other countries, and incur a debt, which we pay with products which
+the other countries need from us; wheat, for example, and copper, and
+moving pictures with cowboys in them. This is equal exchange, and a
+natural phenomenon. A "free" society would produce such surplus goods as
+were necessary to procure the foreign products that it desired. When it
+had produced that much, the workers would stop and take a vacation until
+they wanted more foreign products.</p>
+
+<p>But under capitalism we have an entirely different condition&mdash;we produce
+a surplus of goods which we <i>have</i> to sell in order to keep our
+factories running, and to keep our working population from starving. And
+note that it does not help us to get back an equal quantity of foreign
+goods in exchange. We must have what we call "a favorable balance"; that
+is, we must have other people going into debt to us, so<a name="vol_ii_page_152" id="vol_ii_page_152"></a> that we can be
+continually shipping out more goods than we take back; continually
+piling up credits which we can "negotiate," or turn into cash, so that
+we can go on and repeat the process of making more goods, selling them
+for more profits, and putting the surplus into the form of more
+machinery, to make still more goods and still more profits.</p>
+
+<p>And then, after a while, we come upon this embarrassing phenomenon;
+nations which buy and do not sell must either do it by sending us gold,
+or by our giving them credit. The sending of gold cannot go on
+indefinitely, because then we should have all the gold, and if other
+nations had none that would destroy their credit. On the other hand,
+business cannot be done by credit indefinitely; for the very essence of
+credit is a promise to pay, and payment can only be made in goods, and
+how can we take the goods without ruining our own industry?</p>
+
+<p>Fifteen years ago I pointed this out in a book. The argument was
+irrefutable, and the conclusion inescapable, but the few critics who
+noted it repeated their usual formula about "dreamers and theorists."
+Now, however, the business mills have ground on, and what was theory has
+become fact before our eyes. We have trusted the nations of Europe for
+some $10,000,000,000 worth of goods, and they are powerless to pay, and
+if they did pay, they would bankrupt American industry. France wishes to
+collect an enormous indemnity from Germany, but nobody can figure out
+how this indemnity can be paid without ruining French industry. The
+French have demanded coal from Germany, and have got more than they can
+use, and are "dumping" it in Belgium and Holland, with the result that
+the British coal industry is ruined. The French clamor that the Germans
+must pay for the destruction they wrought in Northern France, and the
+Germans offer to send German workmen to rebuild the ruined towns; but
+the French denounce this as an insult&mdash;it would deprive French
+workingmen of their jobs! So I might continue for pages, pointing out
+the manifold absurdities which result from a system of industry for the
+profit of a few, instead of for the use of all.</p>
+
+<p>Ever since I first began to read the newspapers, some twenty-five or
+thirty years ago, all our political life has been nothing but the
+convulsions of a social body tortured by the constricting ring of the
+profit system. Everywhere one group<a name="vol_ii_page_153" id="vol_ii_page_153"></a> struggling for advantage over
+another group, and politicians engaged in playing one interest against
+another interest! My boyhood recollections of public life consist of
+campaign slogans having to do with the tariff: "production and
+prosperity," "reciprocity," "the full dinner pail," "the foreigner pays
+the tax," etc.</p>
+
+<p>The workingman, under the profit system, is like a man pounding away at
+a pump. He can get a thin trickle of water from the spout of the pump if
+he works hard enough, but in order to get it he has to supply ten times
+as much to some one who has tapped the pipe. But the tapping has been
+done underground, where the workingman cannot see it. All the workingman
+knows is that there is no job for him if the products of "cheap foreign
+labor" are allowed to be "dumped" on the American market. That is
+obvious, and so he votes for a tax on foreign imports, high enough to
+enable his own employer to market at a profit. He does not realize that
+he is thus raising the price of everything that he buys, and so leaving
+himself worse off than he was before.</p>
+
+<p>All governments are delighted with this tariff device, because they are
+thus enabled to get money from the public without the public's knowing
+it. "The foreigner pays the tax," we are told, and as a result of this
+arrangement the steel trust just before the war was selling its product
+at a high price to the American people, and taking its surplus abroad
+and selling it to the foreigner at half the domestic price. And we see
+this same thing in every line of manufacture, and all over the world. We
+see one nation after another withdrawing itself as a market for
+manufactured products, and entering the lists as a marketer. One more
+nation now able to fill all its own needs, and going out hungrily to
+look for foreign customers, adding to the glut of the world's
+manufactured products and the ferocity of international competition!</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the Civil War the total exports of the United States
+averaged approximately $300,000,000, and the total imports were about
+the same. In 1892 the exports first touched $1,000,000,000, while the
+imports were about nine-tenths of that sum. In the year 1913 the exports
+were nearly $2,500,000,000, while the imports were $600,000,000 less;
+and in the year 1920 our exports were over $8,000,000,000 and our
+imports a little over $5,000,000,000! So we have a "favorable<a name="vol_ii_page_154" id="vol_ii_page_154"></a> balance"
+of almost $3,000,000,000 a year&mdash;and as a result we are on the verge of
+ruin!</p>
+
+<p>This "iron ring" of overproduction and lack of market exercises upon our
+industrial body a steady pressure, a slow strangling. But because the
+body is in convulsions, struggling to break the ring, the pressure of
+the ring is worse at some times than at others. We have periods of what
+we call "prosperity," followed by periods of panic and hard times. You
+must understand that only a small part of our business is done by means
+of cash payments, whether in gold or silver or paper money. Close to 99%
+of our business is done by means of credit, and this introduces into the
+process a psychological factor. The business man expects certain
+profits, and he capitalizes these expectations. Business booms, because
+everybody believes everybody else's promises; credit expands like a huge
+balloon, with the breath of everybody's enthusiasm. But meantime real
+business, the real market, remains just what it was before; it cannot
+increase, because of the iron ring which restricts the buying power of
+the mass of the people by the competitive wage. So presently the time
+comes when somebody realizes that he has over-capitalized his hopes; he
+curtails his orders, he calls in his money, and the impulse thus started
+precipitates a crash in the whole business world. We had such a crash in
+1907, and I remember a Wall Street man explaining it in a magazine
+article entitled, "Somebody Asked for a Dollar."</p>
+
+<p>We learned one lesson by that panic; at least, the big financial men
+learned it, and had Congress pass what is called the "Federal Reserve
+Act," a provision whereby in time of need the government issues
+practically unlimited credit to banks. This, of course, is fine for the
+banks; it puts the credit of everybody else behind them, and all they
+have to do is to stop lending money&mdash;except to the big insiders&mdash;and sit
+back and wait, while the little men go to the wall, and the mass of us
+live on our savings or starve. We saw this happen in the year 1920, and
+for the first time we had "hard times" without having a financial panic.
+But instead we see prices staying high&mdash;because the banks have issued so
+much paper money and bank credits.<a name="vol_ii_page_155" id="vol_ii_page_155"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LX" id="CHAPTER_LX"></a>CHAPTER LX<br /><br />
+CAPITALIST WAR</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Shows how the competition for foreign markets leads nations
+automatically into war.)</p></div>
+
+<p>In a discussion of the world's economic situation, published in 1906,
+the writer portrayed the ruling class of Germany as sitting in front of
+a thermometer, watching the mercury rising, and knowing that when it
+reached the top, the thermometer would break. This thermometer was the
+German class system of government, and the mercury was the Socialist
+vote. In 1870 the vote was 30,000, in 1884 it was 549,000, in 1893 it
+was 1,876,000, in 1903 it was 3,008,000, in 1907 it was 3,250,000, in
+1911 it was 4,250,000. Writing between 1906 and 1913, I again and again
+pointed out that this increase was the symptom of social discontent in
+Germany, caused by the overproduction of invested capital throughout the
+world, and the intensification of the competition for world markets. I
+pointed out that a slight increase in the vote would be sufficient to
+transfer to the working class of Germany the political power of the
+German state; and I said that the ruling class of Germany would never
+permit that to happen&mdash;when it was ready to happen Germany would go to
+war, to seize the trade privileges of some other nation.</p>
+
+<p>There was a time when wars were caused by national and racial hatreds.
+There are still enough of these venerable prejudices left in the world,
+but no student of the subject would deny that the main source of modern
+wars is commercial rivalry. In 1917 we sent Eugene V. Debs to prison for
+declaring that the late world war was a war of capitalist greed. But two
+years later President Wilson, who had waged the war, declared in a
+public speech that everybody knew it had been a war of commercial
+rivalries.</p>
+
+<p>The aims of modern war-makers are two. First, capitalism must have raw
+materials, including coal and oil, the sources of power, and gold and
+silver, the bases of credit. Parts of the world which are so unfortunate
+as to be rich in these substances become the bone of contention between
+rival financial groups, organized as nations. Some sarcastic writer has
+defined a "backward" nation as one which has gold mines and no navy. We
+are horrified to read of the<a name="vol_ii_page_156" id="vol_ii_page_156"></a> wars of the French monarchs, caused by the
+jealous quarrels of mistresses; but in 1905 we saw Russia and Japan go
+to war and waste a million lives because certain Russian grand dukes had
+bribed certain Chinese mandarins and obtained concessions of timber on
+the Yalu River. We now observe France and Germany vowed to undying hate
+because of iron mines in Lorraine, and the efforts of France to take the
+coal mines of Silesia from Germany, and give them to Poland, which is
+another name for French capitalism.</p>
+
+<p>The other end sought by the war-makers is markets for manufactured
+products, and control of trade routes, coaling stations and cables
+necessary to the building up of foreign trade. England has been
+"mistress of the seas" for some 300 years, which meant that her traders
+had obtained most of these advantages. But then came Germany, with her
+newly developed commercialism, shoving her rival out of the way. The
+Englishman was easy-going; he liked to play cricket, and stop and drink
+tea every afternoon. But the German worked all day and part of the
+night; he trained himself as a specialist, he studied the needs of his
+customers&mdash;all of which to the Englishman was "unfair" competition. But
+here were the populations of the crowded slums, dependent for their
+weekly wage and their daily bread upon the ability of the factories to
+go on turning out products! Here was the ever-blackening shadow of
+unemployment, the mutterings of social discontent, the agitators on the
+soap-boxes, the workers listening to them with more and more eager
+attention, and the journalists and politicians and bankers watching this
+phenomenon with a ghastly fear.</p>
+
+<p>So came the great war. Social discontent was forgotten over night, and
+England and France plunged in to down their hated rival, once and for
+all time. Now they have succeeded: Germany's ships have been taken from
+her, and likewise her cables and coaling stations; the Berlin-Bagdad
+Railroad is a forgotten dream; the British sit in Constantinople, and
+the traffic goes by sea. American capitalism wakes up, and rubs its eyes
+after a debauch of Presbyterian idealism, and discovers that it has paid
+out some $20,000,000,000, in order to confer all these privileges and
+advantages upon its rivals!</p>
+
+<p>Ever since I can remember the world, there have been peace societies; I
+look back in history and discover that ever since there have been wars,
+there have been prophets declaiming<a name="vol_ii_page_157" id="vol_ii_page_157"></a> against them in the name of
+humanity and God. As I write, there is a great world conference on
+disarmament in session in Washington, and all good Americans hope that
+war is to be ended and permanent peace made safe. All that I can do at
+this juncture is to point out the fundamental and all-controlling fact
+of present-day economics: that for the ruling class of any country to
+agree to disarmament and the abolition of war, is for that class to sign
+its own death warrant and cut its own throat. American capitalism can
+survive on this earth only by strangling and destroying Japanese
+capitalism and British capitalism, and doing it before long. The
+far-sighted capitalists on both sides know that, and are making their
+preparations accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>What the members of the peace societies and the diplomats of the
+disarmament conferences do is to cut off the branches of the tree of
+war. They leave the roots untouched, and then, when the tree continues
+to thrive, they are astounded. I conclude this chapter with a concrete
+illustration, cut from my morning newspaper. We went to war against
+German militarism, and to make the world safe for democracy&mdash;meaning
+thereby capitalist commercialism. We commanded the German people to
+"beat their swords into plough-shares"; that is, to set their Krupp
+factories to making tools of peace; and they did so. We saddled them
+with an enormous indemnity, making them our serfs for a generation or
+two, and compelling them to hasten out into the world markets, to sell
+their goods and raise gold to pay us. And now, how does their behavior
+strike us? Do we praise their industry, and fidelity to their
+obligations? Here are the headlines of a news despatch, published by the
+Los Angeles Times on December 10, 1921, at the top of the front page,
+right hand column, the most conspicuous position in the paper. Read it,
+and understand the sources of modern war!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"><i>NEW ATTACK BY BERLIN</i><br />
+
+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;<br />
+
+DUMPING GOODS BY WHOLESALE<br />
+
+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;<br />
+
+Cheap German Trash Puts Thousands of Americans Out of Employment<br />
+
+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;<br />
+Glove Plants Shut Down and Potash Industry Killed by Teuton
+Intrigue</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="vol_ii_page_158" id="vol_ii_page_158"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXI" id="CHAPTER_LXI"></a>CHAPTER LXI<br /><br />
+THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Shows how much wealth we could produce if we tried, and how we
+proved it when we had to.)</p></div>
+
+<p>One of the commonest arguments in defense of the present business system
+runs as follows: The amount of money which is paid to labor is greatly
+in excess of the amount which is paid to capital. Suppose that tomorrow
+you were to abolish all dividends and profits, and divide the money up
+among the wage workers, how much would each one get? The sum is figured
+for some big industry, and it is shown that each worker would get one or
+two hundred dollars additional per year. Obviously, this would not bring
+the millennium; it would hardly be worth while to take the risk of
+reducing production in order to gain so small a result.</p>
+
+<p>But now we are in position to realize the fallacy of such an argument.
+The tax which capital levies upon labor is not the amount which capital
+takes for itself, but the amount which it prevents labor from producing.
+The real injury of the profit system is not that it pays so large a
+reward to a ruling class; it is the "iron ring" which it fastens about
+industry, barring the workers from access to the machinery of production
+except when the product can be sold for a profit. Labor pays an enormous
+reward to the business man for his management of industry, but it would
+pay labor to reward the business man even more highly, if only he would
+take his goods in kind, and would permit labor, after this tax is paid,
+to go on making those things which labor itself so desperately needs.</p>
+
+<p>But, you see, the business man does not take his goods in kind. The
+owner of a great automobile factory may make for himself one automobile
+or a score of automobiles, but he quickly comes to a limit where he has
+no use for any more, and what he wants is to sell automobiles and "make
+money." He does not permit his workers to make automobiles for
+themselves, or for any one else. He reserves the product of the factory
+for himself, and when he can<a name="vol_ii_page_159" id="vol_ii_page_159"></a> no longer sell automobiles at a profit, he
+shuts the workers out and automobile-making comes to an end in that
+community. Thus it appears that the "iron ring" which strangles the
+income of labor, strangles equally the income of capital. It paralyzes
+the whole social body, and so limits production that we can form no
+conception of what prosperity might and ought to be.</p>
+
+<p>Consider the situation before the war. We were all of us at work under
+the competitive system, and with the exception of a few parasites,
+everybody was occupied pretty close to the limit of his energy. If any
+one had said that it would be possible for our community to pitch in and
+double or treble our output, you would have laughed at him. But suddenly
+we found ourselves at war, and in need of a great increase in output,
+and we resolved one and all to achieve this end. We did not waste any
+time in theoretical discussions about the rights of private capital, or
+the dangers of bureaucracy and the destruction of initiative. Our
+government stepped in and took control; it took the railroads and
+systematized them, it took the big factories and told them exactly what
+to make, it took the raw materials and allotted them, where they were
+needed, it fixed the prices of labor, and ordered millions of men to
+this or that place, to this or that occupation. It even seized the
+foodstuffs and directed what people should eat. In a thousand ways it
+suppressed competition and replaced it by order and system. And what was
+the result?</p>
+
+<p>We took five million of our young men, the very cream of our industrial
+force, and withdrew them from all productive activities; we put them
+into uniforms, and put them through a training which meant that they
+were eating more food and wearing more clothing and consuming more goods
+than nine-tenths of them had ever done in their lives before. We built
+camps for them, and supplied them with all kinds of costly products of
+labor, such as guns and cartridges, automobiles and airplanes. We
+treated two million of them to an expensive trip to Europe, and there we
+set them to work burning up and destroying the products of industry, to
+the value of many billions of dollars. And not only did we supply our
+own armies, we supplied the armies of all our allies. We built millions
+of dollars worth of ships, and we sent over to Europe, whether by
+private business or by government loans,<a name="vol_ii_page_160" id="vol_ii_page_160"></a> some $10,000,000,000 worth of
+goods&mdash;more than ten years of our exports before the war.</p>
+
+<p>All the labor necessary to produce all this wealth had to be withdrawn
+from industry, so far as concerned our domestic uses and needs. It would
+not be too much to say that from domestic industry we withdrew a total
+of ten million of our most capable labor force. I think it would be
+reasonable to say that two-thirds of our productive energies went to war
+purposes, and only one-third was available for home use. And yet, we did
+it without a particle of real suffering. Many of us worked hard, but few
+of us worked harder than usual. Most of us got along with less wheat and
+sugar, but nobody starved, nobody really suffered ill health, and our
+poor made higher wages and had better food than ever in their lives
+before. If this argument is sound, it proves that our productive
+machinery is capable, when properly organized and directed, of producing
+three times the common necessities of our population. Assuming that our
+average working day is nine hours, we could produce what we at present
+consume by three hours of intelligently directed work per day.</p>
+
+<p>Let us look at the matter from another angle. Just at present the hero
+of the American business man is Herbert Hoover; and Mr. Hoover recently
+appointed a committee, not of Socialists and "Utopians," but of
+engineering experts, to make a study of American productive methods. The
+report showed that American industry was only thirty-five or forty per
+cent efficient. Incidentally, this "Committee on Waste" assessed, in the
+case of the building industry, sixty-five per cent of the blame against
+management and only twenty-one per cent against labor; in six
+fundamental industries it assessed fifty per cent of the blame against
+management and less than twenty-five per cent against labor. Fifteen
+years ago a professor of engineering, Sidney A. Reeve by name, made an
+elaborate study of the wastes involved in our haphazard and planless
+industrial methods, and embodied his findings in a book, "The Cost of
+Competition." His conclusion was that of the total amount of energy
+expended in America, more than seventy per cent was wasted. We were
+doing one hundred per cent of work and getting thirty per cent of
+results. If we would get one hundred per cent of results, we should
+produce three and one-third times as much wealth,<a name="vol_ii_page_161" id="vol_ii_page_161"></a> and the income of our
+workers would be increased one or two thousand dollars a year.</p>
+
+<p>Robert Blatchford in his book, "Merrie England," has a saying to the
+effect that it makes all the difference, when half a dozen men go out to
+catch a horse, whether they spend their time catching the horse or
+keeping one another from catching the horse. Our next task will be to
+point out a few of the ways in which good, honest American business men
+and workingmen, laboring as intelligently and conscientiously as they
+know how, waste their energies in keeping one another from producing
+goods.<a name="vol_ii_page_162" id="vol_ii_page_162"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXII" id="CHAPTER_LXII"></a>CHAPTER LXII<br /><br />
+THE COST OF COMPETITION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine, those
+which are obvious and those which are hidden.)</p></div>
+
+<p>The United States government is by far the largest single business
+enterprise in the United States; and a study of congressional
+appropriations in 1920, made by the United States Bureau of Standards,
+reveals the fact that ninety-three per cent of the total income of the
+government went to paying for past wars or preparing for future wars. We
+have shown that modern war is a product of the profit system, and if
+civilized nations would put their industry upon a co-operative basis,
+they could forget the very idea of war, and we should then receive
+fourteen times as much benefit from our government as we receive at
+present; we should have fourteen times as good roads, fourteen times as
+many schools, fourteen times as prompt a postoffice and fourteen times
+as efficient a Congress. What it would mean to industry to abolish war
+is something wholly beyond the power of our imagination to conceive; for
+along with ninety-three per cent of our government money there goes into
+military preparation the vast bulk of our intellectual energy and
+inventive genius, our moral and emotional equipment.</p>
+
+<p>Next, strikes and the losses incidental to strikes, and the costs of
+preparing against strikes. This includes, not merely the actual loss of
+working time, it includes police and militia, private armies of gunmen,
+and great secret service agencies, whose total income runs up into
+hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Industrial warfare is simply
+the method by which capitalists and workers determine the division of
+the product of industry; as if two men should co-operate in raising
+poultry, and then fall to quarrelling over the ownership of the eggs,
+and settle the matter by throwing the eggs at each other's heads.</p>
+
+<p>Next, bankruptcy. Statistics show that regularly some ten per cent of
+our business enterprises fail every year. Take any block occupied by
+little business men, grocers and haberdashers<a name="vol_ii_page_163" id="vol_ii_page_163"></a> and "notions," and you
+will see that they are always changing. Each change represents a human
+tragedy, and the total is a frightful waste of human energy; it happens
+because we can think of no better way to distribute goods than to go
+through the work of setting up a business, and then discover that it
+cannot succeed because the neighborhood is already overstocked with that
+kind of goods.</p>
+
+<p>Next, fires which are a result of bankruptcy. You may laugh, perhaps,
+thinking that I am making a joke; but every little man who fails in
+business knows that he has a choice of going down in the social scale,
+or of setting fire to his stock some night, and having a big insurance
+company set him on his feet again. The result is that a certain
+percentage of bankrupts do regularly set fire to their stores. Some
+fifteen years ago there was published in "Collier's Weekly" a study of
+the costs to society of incendiary fires. The Fire Underwriters'
+Association estimated the amount as a quarter of a billion dollars a
+year; and all this cost, you understand, is paid out of the pockets of
+those who insure their homes and their stores, and do not burn them
+down.</p>
+
+<p>From this follows the costs of insurance, and the whole insurance
+industry, which is inevitable under the profit system, but is entire
+waste so far as true production is concerned. Big enterprises like the
+Steel Trust do not carry insurance, and neither does the United States
+Postoffice. They are wealthy enough to stand their own losses. A
+national co-operative enterprise would be in the same position, and the
+whole business of collecting money for insurance and keeping records and
+carrying on lawsuits would be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>Next, advertising. It would be no exaggeration to say that seventy per
+cent of the material published in American newspapers and magazines
+today is pure waste; and therefore seventy per cent of the labor of all
+the people who cut down forests and manufacture and transport paper and
+set up type and print and distribute publications is wasted. There is,
+of course, a small percentage of advertising that is useful, but most of
+it is boasting and falsehood, and even where it tells the truth it
+simply represents the effort of a merchant to persuade you to buy in his
+store instead of in a rival store&mdash;an achievement which is profitable to
+the merchant, but utterly useless to society as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>This same statement applies to all traveling salesmen, and<a name="vol_ii_page_164" id="vol_ii_page_164"></a> to a great
+percentage of middlemen. It applies also to a great part of delivery
+service. If you live in a crowded part of any city, you see a dozen milk
+wagons pass your door every morning, doing the work which could be done
+exactly as well by one. That is only one case out of a thousand I might
+name.</p>
+
+<p>Next, crime. I have already discussed the crime of arson, and I might
+discuss the crimes of pocket-picking, burglary, forgery, and a hundred
+others in the same way. I am aware of the fact that there may be a few
+born criminals; there may be a few congenital cheats, whom we should
+have to put in hospitals. But we have only to consult the crime records,
+during the war and after the war, in order to see that when jobs are
+hunting men there are few criminals, and when men are hunting jobs there
+are many criminals. I have no figures as to the cost of administering
+justice in the United States&mdash;policemen, courts and jails&mdash;but it must
+be hundreds of millions of dollars every year.</p>
+
+<p>I have discussed at great length the suppression of the productive power
+of society. I should not fail to mention the suppression of the
+inventive power of society, a factor less obvious, but probably in the
+long run even greater. Every one familiar with the inside of a big
+industry knows that hundreds and even thousands of useful processes are
+entirely suppressed, because it would not pay one particular concern to
+stand the expense of the changes involved. You know how, during the war,
+our government brought all the makers of engines together and perfected
+in triumph a "Liberty motor." But now we have gone back to private
+interest and competition, and each concern is jealously engaged in
+guarding its own secrets, and depriving industry as a whole of the
+benefit of everything that it learns. Each is spying upon the others,
+stealing the secrets of the others, stealing likewise from those who
+invent new ideas&mdash;and thus discouraging them from inventing any more.</p>
+
+<p>I use this word "discourage," and I might write a chapter upon it. What
+human imagination can conceive the amount of social energy that is lost
+because of the factor of discouragement, directly caused by the
+competitive method? Who can figure what it means to human society that a
+great percentage of the people in it should be haunted by fear of one
+sort or another&mdash;the poor in fear of unemployment, sickness and
+starvation, the little business man in fear of bankruptcy and<a name="vol_ii_page_165" id="vol_ii_page_165"></a> suicide,
+the big business man in fear of hard times and treachery of his
+competitors, the idle rich in fear of robbery and blackmail, and the
+whole community in fear of foreign war and domestic tumult!</p>
+
+<p>Anyone might go on and elaborate these factors that I have named, and
+think of scores of others. Anyone familiar with business life or with
+industrial processes would be able to put his finger on this or that
+enormous saving which he would be able to make if he and all his rivals
+could combine and come to an agreement. This has been proven over and
+over again in large-scale industry; it is the fact which has made of
+large-scale industry an overwhelming power, sucking all the profits to
+itself, reaching out and taking in new fields of human activity, and
+setting at naught all popular clamor and even legal terrors. How can
+anyone, seeing these facts, bring himself to deny that if we did
+systematize production and make it one enterprise, precisely adapted to
+one end, we should enormously increase the results of human labor, and
+the benefit to all who do the world's work?</p>
+
+<p>A good deal of this waste we can stop when we get ready, and other parts
+of it our bountiful mother nature will replace. When in a world war we
+kill some ten or twenty millions of the flower of our young manhood, we
+have only to wait several generations, and our race will be as good as
+ever. But, on the other hand, there is some waste that can never be
+repaired, and this is the thing truly frightful to contemplate. When we
+dig the iron ore out of the bowels of the earth and rust it away in
+wars, we are doing something our race can never undo. And the same is
+true of many of our precious substances: phosphorus, sulphur, potash.
+When we cut down the forests from our mountain slopes, and lay bare the
+earth, we not merely cause floods and washouts, and silt up our harbors,
+we take away from the surface of our land the precious life-giving soil,
+and make a habitable land into a desert, which no irrigating and
+reforesting can ever completely restore. The Chinese have done that for
+many centuries, and we are following in their footsteps; more than six
+hundred million wagon-loads of our best soil are washed down to the sea
+every year! If you wish to know about these matters, I send you to a
+book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth," by Herbert Quick. It is one of the
+most heart-breaking books you ever read, yet it is merely a quiet
+statement of the facts about our present commercial anarchy.<a name="vol_ii_page_166" id="vol_ii_page_166"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXIII" id="CHAPTER_LXIII"></a>CHAPTER LXIII<br /><br />
+SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the state, and
+the idea of its management by the trade unions.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Let us now assume that we desire to abolish the wastes of the
+competitive method, and to put our industry on a basis of co-operation.
+How should we effect the change, and how should we run our industry
+after it was done?</p>
+
+<p>Let us take the United States Steel Corporation. What change would be
+necessary to the socializing of this concern? United States Steel is
+owned by a group of stockholders, and governed by a board of directors
+elected by them. The owners are now to be bought out with government
+bonds, and the board of directors retired. It may also be necessary to
+replace a certain number of the higher executive officials, who are
+imbued entirely with the point of view of this board, and have to do
+with finance, rather than with production. Of course, some other
+governing authority would have to be put in control. What would this
+authority be? There are several plans before the world, several
+different schools of thought, which we shall consider one by one.</p>
+
+<p>First, the Socialist program. The Socialist says, "Consider the
+postoffice, how that is run. It is run by the President, who appoints a
+Postmaster-General as his executive. Let us therefore turn the steel
+industry over to the government, and let the President appoint another
+member of his cabinet, a Director of Steel; or let there be a
+commission, similar to the Interstate Commerce Commission, or the
+various war industry boards." Any form of management of the steel
+industry which provides for its control and operation by our United
+States government is Socialism of one sort or another.</p>
+
+<p>There has been, of late, a great deal of dissatisfaction with
+government, on the part of the general public, and also of labor. The
+postoffice clerks, for example, complain that they are inadequately paid
+and autocratically managed, deprived of their rights not merely as
+workers but as citizens. The steel workers complain that when they go on
+strike against their masters, the<a name="vol_ii_page_167" id="vol_ii_page_167"></a> government sends in troops and
+crushes their strike, regardless of the rights or wrongs of it. In order
+to meet such tactics, labor goes into politics, and elects here and
+there its own representatives; but these representatives become
+mysteriously affected by the bureaucratic point of view, and even where
+they try hard, they do not accomplish much for labor. Therefore, labor
+becomes disgusted with the political process, and labor men do not
+welcome the prospect of being managed by government.</p>
+
+<p>If you ask such men, they will say: "No; the politicians don't know
+anything about industry, and can't learn. The people who know about
+industry are those who work in it. The true way to run an industry is
+through an organization of the workers, both of hand and brain. The true
+way to run the Steel Trust is for all the workers in it, men and women,
+high and low, to be recognized by law as citizens of that industry; each
+shop must elect its own delegates to run that shop, and elect a delegate
+to a central parliament of the industry, and this industry in turn must
+elect delegates to a great parliament or convention of all the delegates
+of all the industries. In such a central gathering every one would be
+represented, because every person would be a producer of some sort, and
+whether he was a steel worker or a street sweeper or a newsboy, he would
+have a vote at the place where he earns his living, and would have a say
+in the management of his job. The great central parliament would elect
+an executive committee and a president, and so we should have a
+government of the workers, by the workers, for the workers." This idea
+is known as Syndicalism, derived from the French word "syndicat,"
+meaning a labor union. Since the Russian revolution it has come to be
+known as soviet government, "soviet" being the Russian word for trade
+council.</p>
+
+<p>Now, taking these two ideas of Socialism and Syndicalism, it is evident
+that they may be combined in various ways, and applied in varying
+degrees. It is perfectly conceivable, for example, that the people of
+the United States might elect a president pledged to call a parliament
+of industry, and to delegate the control of industry to this parliament.
+He might delegate the control to a certain extent, and provide for its
+extension, step by step; so our society might move into Syndicalism by
+the way of Socialism. You have only to put your mind on the
+possibilities of the situation to realize that one method shades into
+the other with a great variety of stages.<a name="vol_ii_page_168" id="vol_ii_page_168"></a></p>
+
+<p>Consider next the stages between capitalism and Socialism. We have in
+the United States some industries which are purely capitalistic; for
+example, the Steel Trust, which is privately owned, and has been
+powerful enough, not merely to suppress every effort of its workers to
+organize, but every effort of the government to regulate it. On the
+other hand, the United States Postoffice represents State Socialism;
+although the workers have been forbidden to organize, and the management
+of the industry is so arbitrary that I have always preferred to call it
+State Capitalism. Likewise the United States army and navy represent
+State Socialism. When we had the job of putting the Kaiser out of
+business, we did not hire Mr. Rockefeller to do it; it never once
+occurred to our advocates of "individualism," of "capitalist enterprise
+and initiative," to suggest that we should hire out our army and navy,
+or employ the Steel Trust or the Powder Trust to organize its own army
+and navy to do the fighting for us. Likewise, for the most part, we run
+the job of educating our children by the method of municipal Socialism.
+We run our libraries in the same way, and likewise our job of fire
+protection.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to note how in every country the line between
+capitalism and Socialism is drawn in a different place. In America we
+run practically all our libraries for ourselves, but it would seem to us
+preposterous to think of running our theatres. In Europe, however, they
+have state-owned theatres, which set a far higher standard of art than
+anything we know at home. Also, they have state-owned orchestras and
+opera-houses, something we Americans leave to the subscriptions of
+millionaires. In Europe it seems perfectly natural to the people that
+the state should handle their telegrams in connection with the
+postoffice; but if you urge government ownership of the telegraphs in
+the United States, they tell you that the proposition is "socialistic,"
+and that saves the need of thinking about it. We take it for granted
+that our cities could run the libraries&mdash;even though we were glad when
+Carnegie came along and saved us the need of appropriating money for
+buildings. Just why a city should be able to run a library, and should
+not be able to run an opera-house, or a newspaper, is something which
+has never been made clear to me.</p>
+
+<p>Let us next examine the stages between capitalism and Syndicalism. A
+great many large corporations are making experiments in what they call
+"shop management," allowing the workers<a name="vol_ii_page_169" id="vol_ii_page_169"></a> membership in the boards of
+directors and a voice in the conditions of their labor. This is
+Syndicalism so far as it goes. Likewise it is Syndicalism when the
+clothing workers and the clothing manufacturers meet together and agree
+to the setting up of a permanent committee to work out a set of rules
+for the conduct of the industry, and to fix wages from time to time.
+Obviously, these things are capable of indefinite extension, and in
+Europe they are being developed far more rapidly. For example, in Italy
+the agricultural workers are organized, and are gradually taking
+possession of the great estates, which are owned by absentee landlords.
+They wage war upon these estates by means of sabotage and strikes, and
+then they buy up the estates at bargain prices and develop them by
+co-operative labor. This has been going on in Italy for ten years, and
+has become the most significant movement in the country. It is a triumph
+of pure Syndicalism; and such is the power of pure capitalism in the
+United States that the American people have not been allowed to know
+anything about this change.</p>
+
+<p>Next, what are the stages between Socialism and Syndicalism? These also
+are infinite in number and variety. As a matter of fact, there are very
+few Socialists who advocate State Socialism without any admixture of
+Syndicalism. The regular formula of the Socialist party is "the social
+ownership and democratic control of the instruments and means of
+production;" and what the phrase "democratic control" means is simply
+that you introduce into your Socialist mixture a certain flavoring of
+Syndicalism, greater or less, according to your temperament. In the same
+way there are many Syndicalists who are inclined toward Socialism. In
+every convention of radical trade unionists, such as, for example, the
+I. W. W., you find some who favor political action, and these will have
+the same point of view as the more radical members of the Socialist
+party, who urge a program of industrial as well as political action.<a name="vol_ii_page_170" id="vol_ii_page_170"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXIV" id="CHAPTER_LXIV"></a>CHAPTER LXIV<br /><br />
+COMMUNISM AND ANARCHISM</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the idea of a
+society without compulsion, and how these ideas have fared in
+Russia.)</p></div>
+
+<p>The Russian revolution has familiarized us with the word Communism. In
+the beginning of the revolutionary movement Communism denoted what we
+now call Socialism; for example, the Communist Manifesto of Marx and
+Engels became the platform of the Social-democratic parties. But because
+most of these parties supported their governments during the war, the
+more radical elements have now rejected the word Socialism, and taken up
+the old word Communism. In the Russian revolution the Communists went so
+far as to seize all the property of the rich, and so the word Communism
+has come to bear something of its early Christian significance.</p>
+
+<p>It is obvious that here, too, it is a question of degree, and Socialism
+will shade into Communism by an infinite variety of stages, depending
+upon what forms of property it is decided to socialize. The Socialist
+formula commonly accepted is that "goods socially used shall be socially
+owned, and goods privately used shall be privately owned." If you own a
+factory, it will be taken by the state, or by the workers, and made
+social property like the postoffice; but no Socialist wants to socialize
+your clothing, or your books, any more than he wants to socialize your
+toothbrush.</p>
+
+<p>But when you come to apply this formula, you run quickly into
+difficulties. Suppose you are a millionaire, and own a palace with one
+or two hundred rooms, and a hundred servants. Do you use that socially,
+or do you use it privately? And suppose there is a scarcity of houses,
+and thousands of children are dying of tuberculosis in crowded tenement
+rooms? You own a dozen automobiles, and do you use them all privately? I
+point out to you that in time of emergency the capitalist state does not
+hesitate over such a problem; it seizes your palace and turns it into a
+hospital, it takes all your cars and uses them to carry troops. It
+should be obvious that a proletarian state would be tempted by this
+precedent.<a name="vol_ii_page_171" id="vol_ii_page_171"></a></p>
+
+<p>The Communists also have a formula, which reads: "From each according to
+his ability, to each according to his necessity." I do not see how any
+sensitive person can deny that this is an extremely fine statement of an
+ideal in social life. We take it quite for granted in family life; if
+you knew a family in which that rule did not apply, you would consider
+it an unloving and uncivilized family. I believe that when once industry
+has been socialized, and we have a chance to see what production can
+become, we shall find ourselves quickly adopting that family custom as
+our law, for all except a few congenital criminals and cheats. We shall
+find that we can produce so much wealth that it is not worth while
+keeping count of unimportant items. If today you meet someone on the
+street and ask him for a match or a pin, you do not think of offering to
+pay him. This is an automatic consequence of the cheapness of matches
+and pins. Once upon a time you were stopped on the road every few miles
+and made to pay a few cents toll. I remember seeing toll-gates when I
+was a boy, but I don't think I have seen one for twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>In exactly the same way, under socialized industry, we shall probably
+make street-car traffic free, and then railroad traffic; we shall
+abolish water meters and gas meters and electric light meters, also
+telephone charges, except perhaps for long distances, and telegraph
+tolls for personal messages. Then, presently, we shall find ourselves
+with such a large wheat crop that we shall make bread free; and then
+music and theatres and clothing and books. At present we use furniture
+and clothing as a means of manifesting our economic superiority to our
+fellowmen. One of the most charming books in our language is Veblen's
+"Theory of the Leisure Class," in which these processes are studied. We
+shall, of course, have to raise up a new generation, unaccustomed to the
+idea of class and of class distinction, before we could undertake to
+supply people with all the clothing they wanted free of charge.</p>
+
+<p>The Russian theorists made haste to carry out these ideas all at once;
+they tried to leap several centuries in the evolution of Russian
+society. They ordained complete Communism in land; but the peasants
+would have nothing to do with such notions&mdash;each wanted his own land,
+and what he produced on it. The Soviets have now been forced to give
+way, not merely to the peasants, but to the traders; and so we see once
+again that it is better to take one step forward than to take several
+steps<a name="vol_ii_page_172" id="vol_ii_page_172"></a> forward and then several steps backward. The Russian revolution
+is not yet completed, so no one can say how many steps backward it will
+be forced to take.</p>
+
+<p>This revolution was an interesting combination of the ideas of Socialism
+and Syndicalism. The trade unionists seized the factories, and made an
+effort at democratic control of industry. At the same time the state was
+overthrown by a political party, the Bolsheviks, who set up a
+dictatorship of the proletariat. Because of civil war and outside
+invasion, the democratic elements in the experiment have been more and
+more driven into the background, and the authority of the state has
+correspondingly increased. This causes us to think of the Soviet system
+as necessarily opposed to democracy, but this is not in any way a
+necessary thing. There is no inevitable connection between industrial
+control by the workers and a dictatorship over the state. In Germany the
+state is proceeding to organize a national parliament of industry, and
+to provide for management of the factories by the labor unions. The
+Italian government has promised to do the same thing. These, of course,
+are capitalist governments, and they will keep their promises only as
+they are made to; but it is a perfectly possible thing that in either of
+these countries a vote of the people might change the government, and
+put in authority men who would really proceed to turn industry over to
+the control of the workers. That would be the Soviet or Syndicalist
+system, brought about by democratic means, without dictatorship or civil
+war.</p>
+
+<p>Another group of revolutionary thinkers whose theories must be mentioned
+are the Anarchists. The word Anarchy is commonly used as a synonym for
+chaos and disorder, which it does not mean at all. It means the absence
+of authority; and it is characteristic of people's view of life that
+they are unable to conceive of there being such a thing as order, unless
+it is maintained by force. The theory of the Anarchist is that order is
+a necessity of the human spirit, and that people would conform to the
+requirements of a just order by their own free will and without external
+compulsion. The Anarchist believes that the state is an instrument of
+class oppression, and has no other reason for being. He wishes the
+industries to be organized by free associations of the people who work
+in them.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the greatest of the world's moral teachers have been Anarchists:
+Jesus, for example, and Shelley and Thoreau and Tolstoi, and in our time
+Kropotkin. These men voiced the<a name="vol_ii_page_173" id="vol_ii_page_173"></a> highest aspirations of the human
+spirit, and the form of society which they dreamed is the one we set
+before us as our final goal. But the world does not leap into perfection
+all at once, and meantime here we have the capitalist system and the
+capitalist state, and what attitude shall we take to them? There are
+impassioned idealists who refuse to make any terms with injustice, or to
+submit to compulsion, and these preach the immediate destruction of
+capitalist government, and capitalist government responds with prison
+and torture, and so we have some Anarchists who throw bombs.</p>
+
+<p>There are those who call themselves "philosophic" Anarchists, wishing to
+indicate thereby that they preach this doctrine, but do not attempt to
+carry it into action as yet. Some among these verge toward the Communist
+point of view, and call themselves Communist-anarchists; such was
+Kropotkin, whose theories of social organization you will find in his
+book "The Conquest of Bread." There are others who call themselves
+Syndicalist-anarchists, finding their centers of free association in the
+radical labor unions.</p>
+
+<p>After the Russian revolution, the Anarchists found themselves in a
+dilemma, and their groups were torn apart like every other party and
+class in Russia. Here was a new form of state set up in society, a
+workers' state, and what attitude should the Anarchists take toward
+that? Many of them stood out for their principles, and resisted the
+Bolshevik state, and put the Bolsheviks under the embarrassing necessity
+of throwing them into jail. We good orthodox Americans, who are
+accustomed to dump Socialists and Communists and Syndicalists and
+Anarchists all together into one common kettle, took Emma Goldman and
+Alexander Berkman and shipped them over to Russia, where we thought they
+belonged. Now our capitalist newspapers find it strange that these
+Anarchists do not like the Russian government any better than they like
+the American government!</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, a great many Anarchists have suddenly found
+themselves compelled by the Russian situation to face the facts of life.
+They have decided that a government is not such a bad thing after
+all&mdash;when it is your own government! Robert Minor, for example, has
+recanted his Anarchist position, and joined the Communists in advocating
+the dropping of all differences among the workers, all theories as to
+the future, and concentrating upon the immediate task of overthrowing
+capitalist<a name="vol_ii_page_174" id="vol_ii_page_174"></a> government and keeping it overthrown. In every civilized
+nation the Russian revolution has had this effect upon the extreme
+revolutionists. It has given them a definite aim and a definite program
+upon which they can unite; it has presented to capitalist government the
+answer of force to force; it has shown the masters of industry in
+precise and definite form what they have to face&mdash;unless they set
+themselves immediately and in good faith to the task of establishing
+real democracy in industry.<a name="vol_ii_page_175" id="vol_ii_page_175"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXV" id="CHAPTER_LXV"></a>CHAPTER LXV<br /><br />
+SOCIAL REVOLUTION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(How the great change is coming in different industries, and how we
+may prepare to meet it.)</p></div>
+
+<p>From a study of the world's political revolutions we observe that a
+variety of governmental forms develop, and that different circumstances
+in each country produce different institutions. Suppose that back in the
+days of the French monarchy some one asked you how France was going to
+be governed as a political republic; how would elections be held, what
+would be the powers of the deputies, who would choose the premier, who
+would choose the president, what would be the duties of each? Who can
+explain why in France and England the executive is responsible to the
+parliament and must answer its questions, while in the United States the
+executive is an autocrat, responsible to no one for four years? Who
+could have foreseen that in England, supposed to remain a monarchy, the
+constitution would be fluid; while in America, supposed to be a
+democracy, the constitution would be rigid, and the supreme power of
+rejecting changes in the laws would be vested in a group of reactionary
+lawyers appointed for life? There will be similar surprises in the
+social revolution, and similar differences between what things pretend
+to be and what they are.</p>
+
+<p>I used to compare the social revolution to the hatching of an egg. You
+examine it, and apparently it is all egg; but then suddenly something
+begins to happen, and in a few minutes it is all chicken. If, however,
+you investigate, you discover that the chicken had been forming inside
+the egg for some time. I know that there is a chicken now forming inside
+our social egg; but having realized the complexity of social phenomena,
+I no longer venture to predict the exact time of the hatching, or the
+size and color of the chicken.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it is more useful to compare the social revolution to a
+child-birth. A good surgeon knows what is due to happen, but he knows
+also that there are a thousand uncertainties, a thousand dangerous
+possibilities, and all he can do is to watch the process and be prepared
+to meet each emergency as it arises.<a name="vol_ii_page_176" id="vol_ii_page_176"></a> The birth process consists of one
+pang after another, but no one can say which pang will complete the
+birth, or whether it will be completed at all. Karl Marx is author of
+the saying that "force is the midwife of progress," so you may see that
+I am not the inventor of this simile of child-birth.</p>
+
+<p>There are three factors in the social revolution, each of which will
+vary in each country, and in different parts of the country, and at
+different periods. First, there is the industrial condition of the
+country, a complex set of economic factors. The industrial life of
+England depends primarily on shipping and coal. In the United States
+shipping is of less importance, and railroads take the place. In the
+United States the eastern portion lives mainly by manufacture, the
+western by agriculture, while the south is held a generation behind by a
+race problem. In France the great estates were broken up, and
+agriculture fell into the hands of peasant proprietors, who are the main
+support of French capitalism. In Prussia the great estates were held
+intact, and remained the basis of a feudal aristocracy. In America land
+changes hands freely, and therefore one-third of our farms are
+mortgaged, and another third are worked by tenants. In Russia there was
+practically no middle class, while in the United States there is
+practically nothing but middle class; the rich have been rich for such a
+short while that they still look middle class and act middle class, in
+spite of all their efforts, while the working class hopes to be middle
+class and is persuaded that it can become middle class. Such varying
+factors produce in each country a different problem, and make inevitable
+a different process of change.</p>
+
+<p>The second factor is the condition of organization and education of the
+workers. This likewise varies in every country, and in every part of
+every country. There is a continual struggle on the part of the workers
+to organize and educate themselves, and a continual effort on the part
+of the ruling class to prevent this. In some industries in America you
+find the workers one hundred per cent organized, and in other industries
+you find them not organized at all. It is obvious that in the former
+case the social change, when it comes, will be comparatively simple,
+involving little bloodshed and waste; in the latter case there will be
+social convulsions, rioting and destruction of property, disorganization
+of industry and widespread distress.</p>
+
+<p>The third factor is the state of mind of the propertied classes, the
+amount of resistance they are willing to make to<a name="vol_ii_page_177" id="vol_ii_page_177"></a> social change. I have
+done a great deal of pleading with the masters of industry in my
+country; I have written appeals to Vincent Astor and John D.
+Rockefeller, to capitalist newspapers and judges and congressmen and
+presidents. I have been told that this is a waste of my time; that these
+people cannot learn and will not learn, and that it is foolish to appeal
+either to their hearts or their understanding. But I perceive that the
+class struggle is like a fraction; it has a numerator and a denominator,
+and you can increase the fraction just as well by decreasing the
+denominator as by increasing the numerator. To vary the simile, here are
+two groups of men engaged in a tug of war, and you can affect the result
+just as decisively by persuading one group to pull less hard, as by
+persuading the other group to pull harder.</p>
+
+<p>Picture to yourself two factories. In factory number one the owner is a
+hard-driving business man, an active spirit in the so-called "open-shop"
+campaign. He believes in his divine right to manage industry, and he
+believes also in the gospel of "all that the traffic will bear." He
+prevents his men from organizing, and employs spies to weed out the
+radicals and to sow dissensions. When a strike comes, he calls in the
+police and the strike-breaking agencies, and in every possible way he
+makes himself hated and feared by his workers. Then some day comes the
+unemployment crisis, and a wave of revolt sweeping over the country. The
+workers seize that factory and set up a dictatorship of the proletariat
+and a "red terror." If the owner resists, they kill him; in any case,
+they wipe out his interest in the business, and do everything possible
+to destroy his power over it, even to his very name. They run the
+business by a shop committee, and you have for that particular factory a
+Syndicalist, or even Anarchist form of social reconstruction.</p>
+
+<p>Now for factory number two, whose owner is a humane and enlightened man,
+studying social questions and realizing his responsibility, and the
+temporary nature of his stewardship. He gives his people the best
+possible working conditions, he keeps open books and discusses wages and
+profits with them, he educates the young workers, he meets with their
+union committees on a basis of free discussion. When the unemployment
+crisis comes and the wave of revolt sweeps the country, this man and his
+workers understand one another. He says: "I can no longer pay profits,
+and so I can no longer keep going under the profit system; but if you
+are ready to run the plant, I am<a name="vol_ii_page_178" id="vol_ii_page_178"></a> ready to help you the best I can."
+Manifestly, this man will continue the president of the corporation, and
+if he trains his sons wisely, they will keep his place; so, instead of
+having in that factory a dictatorship and a terror, you will have a
+constitutional monarchy, gradually evolving into a democratic republic.<a name="vol_ii_page_179" id="vol_ii_page_179"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXVI" id="CHAPTER_LXVI"></a>CHAPTER LXVI<br /><br />
+CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they afford to do
+it, and what will be the price?)</p></div>
+
+<p>The problem of whether the social revolution shall be violent or
+peaceable depends in great part upon our answer to the question of
+confiscation versus compensation. We are now going to consider, first,
+the abstract rights and wrongs of the question, and, second, the
+practical aspects of it.</p>
+
+<p>There is a story very popular among single taxers and other advocates of
+freedom of the land. An English land-owner met a stranger walking on his
+estate, and rebuked him for trespassing. Said the stranger, "You own
+this land?" Said the other, "I do." "And how did you get it?" "I
+inherited it from my father." "And how did your father get it?" "He
+inherited it from his father." So on for half a dozen more ancestors,
+until at last the Englishman answered, "He fought for it." Whereupon the
+stranger took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and said, "I'll
+fight you for it."</p>
+
+<p>This is all there is to say on the subject of the abstract rights of
+land titles. There is no title to land which is valid on a historical
+basis. Everything rests upon fraud and force, continued through endless
+ages of human history. We in the United States took most of our land
+from the Indians, and in the process our guiding rule was that the only
+good Injun was a dead Injun. We first helped the English kings to take
+large sections of our country from the French and Spanish, and then we
+took them from the English king by a violent revolution. We purchased
+our Southwestern states from Mexico, but not until we had taken the
+precaution of killing some thousands of Mexicans in war, which had the
+effect of keeping down the purchase price. It would be a simple matter
+to show that all public franchises are similarly tainted with fraud.
+Proudhon laid down the principle that "property is theft," and from this
+principle it is an obvious conclusion that society has the right to
+scrap all paper titles to wealth, and to start the world's industries
+over again on the basis of share and share alike.<a name="vol_ii_page_180" id="vol_ii_page_180"></a></p>
+
+<p>But stop and consider for a moment. "Property is theft," you say. But go
+to your corner grocery, and tell the grocer that you deny his title to
+the sack of prunes which he exhibits in front of his counter. He will
+tell you that he has paid for them; but you answer that the prunes were
+raised on stolen land, and shipped to him over a railroad whose
+franchise was obtained by bribery. Will that convince the grocer? It
+will not. Neither will it convince the policeman or the judge, nor will
+it convince the voters of the country. Most people have a deeply rooted
+conviction that there are rights to property now definitely established
+and made valid by law. If you have paid taxes on land for a certain
+period, the land "belongs" to you; and I am sure you might agitate from
+now to kingdom come without persuading the American people that New
+Mexico ought to be returned to Mexico, or the western prairies to the
+Indian tribes.</p>
+
+<p>Such are the facts; now let us apply them to the right of exploitation,
+embodied in the ownership of a certain number of bonds or shares of
+stock in the United States Steel Corporation. "Pass a law," says the
+Socialist, "providing for the taking over of United States Steel by the
+government." At once to every owner comes one single thought&mdash;are you
+going to buy this stock, or are you going to confiscate it? If you
+attempt confiscation, the courts will declare the law unconstitutional;
+and you either have to defy the courts, which is revolutionary action,
+or to amend the constitution. If you adopt the latter course, you have
+before you a long period of agitation; you have to carry both houses of
+Congress by a two-thirds majority, and the legislatures of three-fourths
+of the States. You have to do this in the face of the most bitter and
+infuriated opposition of those who are defending what they regard as
+their rights. You have to meet the arguments of the entire capitalist
+press of the country, and you have the certainty of widespread bribery
+of your elected officials.</p>
+
+<p>The prospect of doing all this under the forms of law seems extremely
+discouraging; so come the Syndicalists, saying, "Let us seize the
+factories, and stop the exploitation at the point of production." So
+come the Communists, saying, "Let us overthrow capitalist government,
+and break the net of bourgeois legality, and establish a dictatorship of
+the proletariat, which will put an end to privilege and class domination
+all at once." What are we to say to these different programs?</p>
+
+<p>Suppose we buy out the stockholders of United States Steel,<a name="vol_ii_page_181" id="vol_ii_page_181"></a> and issue
+to them government bonds, what have we accomplished? Nothing, say the
+advocates of confiscation; we have changed the form of exploitation, but
+the substance of it remains the same. The stockholders get their money
+from the United States government, instead of from the United States
+Steel Corporation; but they get their money just the same&mdash;the product,
+not of their labor, but of the labor of the steel workers. Suppose we
+carried out the same procedure all along the line; suppose the
+government took over all industries, and paid for their securities with
+government bonds. Then we should have capitalism administered by a
+capitalist government, instead of by our present masters of industry; we
+should have a state capitalism, instead of a private capitalism; we
+should have the government buying and selling products, and exploiting
+labor, and paying over the profits to an hereditary privileged class.
+The capitalist system would go on just the same, except that labor would
+have one all-powerful tyrant, instead of many lesser tyrants, as at
+present.</p>
+
+<p>So argue the advocates of confiscation. And the advocates of purchase
+reply that in buying the securities of United States Steel, we should
+fix the purchase price at the present market value of the property, and
+that price, once fixed, would be permanent; all future unearned
+increment of the steel industry would belong to the government instead
+of to private owners. Consider, for example, what happened during the
+world war. When I was a boy, soon after the Steel Trust was launched,
+its stock was down to something like six dollars, and I knew small
+investors who lost every dollar they had put in. But during the war,
+steel stock soared to a hundred and thirty-six dollars per share; it
+paid dividends of some thirty per cent per year, and accumulated
+enormous surpluses besides.</p>
+
+<p>The same thing was true of practically all the big corporations.
+According to Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, there were coal companies
+which paid as high as eight hundred per cent per year; that is to say,
+the profits in one year were eight times the total investment. Assuming
+that our government bonds paid five per cent, it appears that the owners
+of these coal companies got one hundred and sixty times as much under
+our present private property system as they would have got under a
+system of state purchase. Even completely dominated by capitalism as our
+courts are today, they would not dare require us to pay for industries
+more than six per cent on the market value<a name="vol_ii_page_182" id="vol_ii_page_182"></a> of the investment; and from
+what I know of the inside graft of American big business that would be
+restricting the private owners to less than one-fourth of what they are
+getting at present.</p>
+
+<p>We have already pointed out the economies that can be made by putting
+industry under a uniform system. But all these, important as they are,
+amount to little in comparison with the one great consideration, which
+is that by purchasing large scale industry, we should break the "iron
+ring"; we should thenceforth be able to do our manufacturing for use
+instead of for profit, and so we should put an end to unemployment. Our
+cheerful workers would throng into the factories, to produce for
+themselves instead of for masters; and in one year of that we should so
+change the face of our country that a return to the system of private
+ownership would be unthinkable. In one year we could raise production to
+such a point that the interest on the bonds we had issued would be like
+the crumbs left over from a feast.<a name="vol_ii_page_183" id="vol_ii_page_183"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXVII" id="CHAPTER_LXVII"></a>CHAPTER LXVII<br /><br />
+EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its chances for
+success in the United States.)</p></div>
+
+<p>I am aware that the suggestion of paying for the industries we socialize
+will sound tame and uninspiring to a lot of ardent young radicals of my
+acquaintance. They will shake their heads sadly and say that I am
+getting middle-aged and tired. We have seen in Russia and Hungary and
+other places, so many illustrations of the quick and easy way to
+expropriate the expropriators that now there is in every country a
+considerable group of radicals who will hear to no program less
+picturesque than barricades and councils of action.</p>
+
+<p>In considering this question, I set aside all considerations of abstract
+right or wrong, the justification for violence in the overthrow of
+capitalist society. I put the question on the basis of cash, pure and
+simple. It will cost a certain amount of money to buy out the owners,
+and that money will have to be paid, as it is paid at present, out of
+the labor of the useful workers. The workers don't want to pay any more
+than they have to; the question they must consider is, which way will
+they have to pay most. The advocates of the dictatorship of the
+proletariat are lured by the delightful prospect of not having to pay
+anything; and if that were really possible it would undoubtedly be the
+better way. But we have to consider this question: Is the program of not
+having to pay anything a reality, or is it only a dream? Suppose it
+should turn out that we have to pay anyhow, and that in the case of
+violent revolution we pay much more, and in addition run serious risk of
+not getting what we pay for?</p>
+
+<p>Here are enormous industries, running at full blast, and it is proposed
+that some morning the workers shall rise up and seize them, and turn out
+the owners and managers, and run the industries themselves. Will anybody
+maintain that this can be done without stopping production in those
+factories for a single day? Certainly production must stop during the
+time you are<a name="vol_ii_page_184" id="vol_ii_page_184"></a> fighting for possession; and the cruel experience of
+Russia proves that it will stop during the further time you are fighting
+to keep possession, and to put down counter-revolutionary conspiracies.
+Also, alas, it will stop during the time you are looking for somebody
+who knows how to run that industry; it will stop during the time you are
+organizing your new administrative staff. You may discover to your
+consternation that it stops during the time you are arranging to get
+other industries to give you credit, and to ship you raw materials; also
+during the time you are finding the workers in other industries who want
+your product, and are able to pay for it with something that you can
+use, or that you can sell in a badly disorganized market.</p>
+
+<p>And all the time that you are arranging these things, you are going to
+have the workers at your back, not getting any pay, or being paid with
+your paper money which they distrust, and growling and grumbling at you
+because you are not running things as you promised. You see, the mass of
+the workers are not going to understand, because you haven't made them
+understand; you have brought about the great change by your program of a
+dictatorship, of action by an "enlightened minority"; and now you have
+the terror that the unenlightened majority may be won back by their
+capitalist masters, and may kick you out of control, or even stand you
+up against a wall and shoot you by a firing squad. And all the time you
+are worrying over these problems, who can estimate the total amount the
+factory might have been producing if it had been running at full blast?
+Whatever that difference is, remember, it is paid by the workers; and
+might that sum not just as well have been used to buy out the owners?</p>
+
+<p>If we were back in the old days of hand labor and crude, unorganized
+production, I admit that the only way to benefit the slaves might be to
+turn out the masters by force. But here we have a social system of
+infinite complexity, a delicate and sensitive machine, which no one
+person in the world, and no group of persons understands thoroughly. In
+the running of such a machine a slight blunder may cost a fortune; and
+certainly all the skill, all the training, all the loyal services of our
+expert engineers and managers is needed if we are to remodel that
+machine while keeping it running. The amount of wealth which we could
+save by the achieving of that feat would be sufficient to maintain a
+class of owners in idleness and luxury<a name="vol_ii_page_185" id="vol_ii_page_185"></a> for a generation; and so I say,
+with all the energy and conviction I possess, <i>pay them</i>! Pay them
+anything that is necessary, in order to avoid civil war and social
+disorganization! Pay them so much that they can have no possible cause
+of complaint, that the most hide-bound capitalistic-minded judge in the
+country cannot find a legal flaw in the bargain! Pay them so that every
+engineer and efficiency expert and manager and foreman and stenographer
+and office-boy will stay on the job and work double time to put the
+enterprise through! Pay them such a price that even Judge Gary and John
+D. Rockefeller will be willing to help us do the job of social
+readjustment!</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes," my young radical friends will say, "that sounds all very
+beautiful, but it's the old Utopian dream of brotherhood and class
+co-operation. That will never happen on this earth, until you have first
+abolished capitalism." My answer is, it could happen tomorrow if we had
+sufficient intelligence to make it happen. That it does not happen is
+simply absence of intelligence. And will anyone maintain that it is the
+part of an intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent course than he
+knows? What is the use of our intelligence, if we abdicate its
+authority, and give ourselves up to programs of action which we know are
+blind and destructive and wasteful? We may see a great vessel going on
+the rocks; we may feel certain that it is going, in spite of everything
+we can do; but shall we fail to do what we can to make those in the
+vessel realize how they might get safely into the harbor?</p>
+
+<p>We have had the Russian revolution before us for four years. Mankind
+will spend the next hundred years in studying it, and still have much to
+learn, but the broad outlines of the great experiment are now plain
+before our eyes. Russia was a backward country, and she tried to fight a
+modern war, and it broke her down. She had practically no middle class,
+and her ruling class was rotten, and so the revolutionists had their
+chance, and they seized it. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that
+they came to the rescue of Russia, saving her from the hands of those
+who were trying to force her to fight, when she was utterly exhausted
+and incapable of fighting.</p>
+
+<p>Anyhow, here was your dictatorship of the proletariat. It turned out all
+the executive experts, or nearly all of them, because they were tainted
+with the capitalist psychology; and then straightway it had to call them
+back and make terms with them, because industry could not be run without
+them. And of<a name="vol_ii_page_186" id="vol_ii_page_186"></a> course these engineers and managers sabotaged the
+revolution&mdash;every non-proletarian sabotaged it, both inside Russia and
+outside. You denounced this, and protested against this, but all the
+same it happened; it was human nature that it should happen, and it is
+one of the things you have to count on, in any and every country where
+you attempt the social revolution by minority action.</p>
+
+<p>They have got power in Russia, and they dream of getting power in
+America in the same way. But there is no such disorganization in our
+country as there was in Russia, and it would take a generation of civil
+strife to bring us to such a condition. We have a middle class,
+powerful, thoroughly organized, and thoroughly conscious. Moreover, this
+class has ideals of majority rule, which are bred in its very bones; and
+while they have never realized these ideals, they think they have, and
+they are prepared to fight to the last gasp in that belief. All that the
+leaders of Moscow have to do is to bring about an attempt at forcible
+revolution, and they will discover in American society sufficient power
+of organization and of brutal action to put their movement out of
+business for a generation.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred years ago we had chattel slavery firmly fixed as the
+industrial system of one-half of these United States. To far-seeing
+statesmen it was manifest that chattel slavery was a wasteful system,
+and that it could not exist in competition with free labor. There was a
+great American, Henry Clay, who came forward with a proposition that the
+people of the United States, through their government, should raise the
+money, about a billion dollars, and compensate the owners of all the
+slaves and set them free. For most of his lifetime Henry Clay pleaded
+for that plan. But the masters of the South were making money fast; they
+knew how to handle the negro as a slave, they could not imagine handling
+him as a free laborer, and they would not hear to the plan. On the other
+side of Mason and Dixon's line were fanatical men of "principle," who
+said that slavery was wrong, and that was the end of it. There is a
+stanza by Emerson discussing this question of confiscation versus
+compensation:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry">
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Pay ransom to the owner</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">And fill the bag to the brim.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Who is the owner? The slave is owner,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">And ever was. Pay him.</span></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><a name="vol_ii_page_187" id="vol_ii_page_187"></a></p>
+
+<p>This, you see, is magnificent utterance, but as economic philosophy it
+is reckless and unsound. The abolitionists of the North took up this
+poem, and the slave power of the South answered with a battle-song:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry">
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">War to the hilt,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Theirs be the guilt,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Who fetter the freeman to ransom the slave!</span></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>And so the issue had to be fought out. It cost a million human lives and
+five billions of treasure, and it set American civilization back a
+generation. And now we confront exactly the same kind of emergency, and
+are coming to exactly the same method of solution. We have white
+wage-slaves clamoring for their freedom, and we have business men making
+money out of them, and exercising power over them, and finding it
+convenient and pleasant. They are going to fight it out in a civil war,
+and which side is going to win I am not sure. But when the historians
+come to write about it a couple of generations from now, let them be
+able to record that there were a few men in the country who pleaded for
+a sane and orderly and human solution of the problem, and who continued
+to voice their convictions even in the midst of the cruel and wasteful
+strife!<a name="vol_ii_page_188" id="vol_ii_page_188"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXVIII" id="CHAPTER_LXVIII"></a>CHAPTER LXVIII<br /><br />
+THE PROBLEM OF THE LAND</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the land values tax as a means of social readjustment,
+and compares it with other programs.)</p></div>
+
+<p>The writer of this book has been watching the social process for twenty
+years, trying to figure out one thing&mdash;how the change from competition
+to co-operation can be brought about with the minimum of human waste. He
+has come to realize that the first step is a mental one; to get the
+people to want the change. That means that the program must be simple,
+so that the masses can understand it. As a social engineer you might
+work out a perfect plan, but find yourself helpless, because it was hard
+to explain. As illustration of what I mean, I cite the single tax, a
+theory which has a considerable hold in America, but which politically
+has been utterly ineffective.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago a devoted enthusiast in Southern California, Luke North,
+started what he called the "Great Adventure" to set free the idle land.
+In the campaign of 1918 I gave my help to this movement, and when it
+failed I went back and took stock, and revised my conclusions concerning
+the single tax. Theoretically the movement has a considerable percentage
+of right on its side. Land, in the sense that single taxers use it,
+meaning all the natural sources of wealth, is certainly an important
+basis of exploitation, and if you were to tax land values to the full
+extent, you would abolish a large portion of privilege&mdash;just how large
+would be hard to figure. I was perfectly willing to begin with that
+portion, so I helped with the "Great Adventure." But a practical test
+convinced me that it could never persuade a majority of the people.</p>
+
+<p>The single tax proposal is to abolish all taxes except the tax on land
+values. Then come the associations of the bankers and merchants and real
+estate speculators, crying in outraged horror, "What? You propose to let
+the rich man's stocks and bonds go free? You propose to put no tax on
+his cash in the vaults and on his wife's jewels? You propose to abolish
+the income tax and the inheritance tax, and put all the costs of
+government on the poor man's lot?"</p>
+
+<p>Now, of course, I know perfectly well that the rich man dodges most of
+his income tax and most of his inheritance<a name="vol_ii_page_189" id="vol_ii_page_189"></a> tax. I know that he pays a
+nominal pittance on his cash in the bank and on his wife's jewels, and
+likewise on his stocks and bonds. I know that the corporations issuing
+these stocks and bonds would be far more heavily hit by a tax on the
+natural resources they own; they could not evade this tax, and they know
+it, and that is why they are moved to such deep concern for the fate of
+the poor man and his lot. I know that the tax on the poor man's lot
+would be infinitesimal in comparison with the tax on the great
+corporation. But how can I explain all this to the poor man? To
+understand it requires a knowledge of the complexities of our economic
+system which the voters simply have not got.</p>
+
+<p>How much easier to take the bankers and speculators at their word! To
+answer, "All right, gentlemen, since you like the income and inheritance
+taxes, the taxes on stocks and bonds and money and jewels, we will leave
+these taxes standing. Likewise, we assent to your proposition that the
+poor man should not pay taxes on his lot, while there are rich men and
+corporations in our state holding twenty million acres of land out of
+use for purposes of speculation. We will therefore arrange a land values
+tax on a graduated basis, after the plan of the income tax; we will
+allow one or two thousand dollars' worth of land exempt from all
+taxation, provided it is used by the owner; and we will put a graduated
+tax on all individuals and corporations owning a greater quantity of
+land, so that in the case of individuals and corporations owning more
+than ten thousand dollars' worth of land, we will take the full rental
+value, and thus force all idle land into the market."</p>
+
+<p>Now, the provision above outlined would have spiked every single
+argument used by the opposition to the "Great Adventure" in California
+in 1918; it would have made the real intent of the measure so plain as
+to win automatically the additional votes needed to carry the election.
+But I tried for three years, without being able to persuade a single one
+of the "Great Adventure" leaders to recognize this plain fact. The
+single taxer has his formula, the land values tax and no other tax, and
+all else is heresy. Actually, the president of a big single tax
+organization in the East declared that by the advocacy of my idea I had
+"betrayed the single tax!" We may take this as an illustration of the
+difference between dogmatism and science in the strategy of the class
+struggle.</p>
+
+<p>I first suggested my program immediately after the war,<a name="vol_ii_page_190" id="vol_ii_page_190"></a> with the
+provision that the land thrown on the market should be purchased by the
+state, and used to establish co-operative agricultural colonies for the
+benefit of returned soldiers. But we have preferred to have our returned
+soldiers stay without work, or to displace the men and women who had
+been gallantly "doing their bit." By this means we soon had five million
+men out of work, and many other millions bitterly discontented with
+their wages. Again I took up the proposition for a graduated land tax,
+with the suggestion that the money should be used to provide a pension,
+first for every dependent man or woman over sixty years of age in the
+country, and second for every child in the country whose parents were
+unable properly to support it, whether because they were dead or sick or
+unemployed.</p>
+
+<p>You may note that in advocating this program, you would not have to
+convert anybody to any foreign theories, nor would you have to use any
+long words; you would not have to say anything against the constitution,
+nor to break any law, nor to give occasion for patriotic mobs to tar and
+feather you. To every poor man in your state you could say, "If you own
+your own house and lot, this bill will lift the taxes from both, and
+therefore it will mean fifty or a hundred dollars a year in your pocket.
+If you do not own a home, it will take millions of idle acres out of the
+hands of the speculators, and break the price of real estate, so that
+you can have either a lot in the city or a farm in the country with
+ease."</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, you could say, "This measure will have the effect of
+drawing the unemployed from the cities at once, and so stopping the
+downward course of wages. At the same time that wages hold firm, the
+cost of food will go down, because there will be millions more men
+working on the land. In addition to that, the state will have an
+enormous income, many millions of dollars a year, taken exclusively from
+those who are owning and not producing. This money will be expended in
+saving from suffering and humiliation the old people of the country, who
+have worked hard all their lives and have been thrown on the scrap-heap;
+also in making certain that every child in the country has food enough
+and care enough to make him into a normal and healthy human being, so
+that he can do his share of work in the world and pay his own way
+through life."</p>
+
+<p>I submit the above measure to those who believe that the road to social
+freedom lies by some sort of land tax. But before<a name="vol_ii_page_191" id="vol_ii_page_191"></a> you take it up I
+invite you to consider whether there may not be some other way, even
+easier. There is a homely old saying to the effect that "molasses
+catches more flies than vinegar"; and I am always looking for some way
+that will get the poor what they want, without frightening the rich any
+more than necessary.</p>
+
+<p>I know a certain type of radical whom this question always exasperates.
+He answers that the opposition will be equally strong to any plan; the
+rich will do anything for the poor except get off their backs&mdash;and so
+on. In reply I mention that among the most ardent radicals I know are
+half a dozen millionaires; I know one woman who is worth a million, who
+pleads day and night for social revolution, while the people who work
+for her are devoted and respectful wage slaves. Herbert Spencer said
+that his idea of a tragedy was a generalization killed by a fact. I
+shall not say that the existence of millionaire Socialists and parlor
+Bolsheviks kills the theory of the class struggle, but I certainly say
+it compels us to take thought of the rich as well as of the poor in
+planning the strategy of our campaign.</p>
+
+<p>And manifestly, if we want to consider the rich, the very last device we
+shall use is that of a tax. Nobody likes to pay taxes; everybody agrees
+in classifying taxes with death. Each feels that he is paying more than
+his share already; each knows that the government which collects the tax
+is incompetent or worse. Stop and recall what we have proven about the
+"iron ring"; the possibilities of production latent in our society.
+Realize the bearings of this all-important fact, that we can offer to
+mankind a social revolution which will make everybody richer, instead of
+making some people poorer! Exactly how to do this is the next thing we
+have to inquire.<a name="vol_ii_page_192" id="vol_ii_page_192"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXIX" id="CHAPTER_LXIX"></a>CHAPTER LXIX<br /><br />
+THE CONTROL OF CREDIT</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of
+industry, and may play in the freeing of industry.)</p></div>
+
+<p>How is it that the rich are becoming richer? The single taxer answers
+that it is by monopoly of the land, the natural sources of wealth; the
+Socialist answers that it is by the control of the machinery of
+production. But if you go among the rich and make inquiry, you speedily
+learn that these factors, large as they are, amount to little in
+comparison with another factor, the control of credit. There are hosts
+of little capitalists and business men who deal in land and produce
+goods with machinery, but the men who make the real fortunes and
+dominate the modern world are those who control credit, and whose
+business is, not the production of anything, but speculation and the
+manipulation of markets.</p>
+
+<p>"Money makes the mare go," our ancestors used to say; and money today
+determines the destiny of empires. What is money? We think of it as gold
+and silver coins, and pieces of engraved paper promising to pay gold and
+silver coins. But the report of the U. S. Comptroller of the Currency
+for 1919 shows that the business of the country was done, 5% by such
+means and 95 % by checks; so, for practical purposes, we may say that
+money consists of men's willingness to trust other men, or groups or
+organizations of men, when they make written promise to pay. In other
+words, money is credit; and the control of credit means the control of
+industry. The problem of social readjustment is mainly but the problem
+of taking the control of credit out of the hands of private individuals,
+and making it a public or social function.</p>
+
+<p>Who controls credit today? The bankers. And how do they control it? We
+give it to them; we, the masses of the people, who take them our money
+and leave it with them. A very little real money in hand becomes, under
+our banking system, the basis of a great amount of imaginary money. The
+Federal Reserve law requires that banks shall hold in reserve from
+seven<a name="vol_ii_page_193" id="vol_ii_page_193"></a> to thirteen per cent of demand deposits; which means, in
+substance, that when you leave a dollar with a banker, the banker is
+allowed, under the law, to turn that dollar into anywhere from seven to
+thirteen dollars, and lend those dollars out. In addition, he deposits
+his reserves with the Federal Reserve bank, and that bank keeps only
+thirty-five per cent in reserve&mdash;in other words, the seven to thirteen
+imaginary dollars are multiplied again by three.</p>
+
+<p>Under the stress of war, this process of credit inflation has been
+growing like the genii let out of the bottle. Under the law, the Federal
+Reserve banks are supposed to hold a gold reserve of 40% to secure our
+currency. But in December, 1919, these banks held a trifle over a
+billion dollars' worth of gold, while our paper money was over four
+billion. In addition, our banks have over thirty-three billions of
+deposits, and all these are supposed to be secured by gold; in addition,
+there are twenty-five billions of government bonds, and uncounted
+billions of private notes, bonds and accounts, all supposed to be
+payable in gold. So it appears that about one per cent of our
+outstanding money is real, and the rest is imaginary&mdash;that is, it is
+credit.</p>
+
+<p>The point for you to get clear is this: The great mass of this imaginary
+money is created by law, and we have the power to abolish it or to
+change the ownership of it at any time we develop the necessary
+intelligence. Let us consider the ordinary paper money, the one and two
+and five and ten dollar "bills," with which we plain people do most of
+our business. These are Federal Reserve notes, and there are about three
+billions of them; how do they come to be? Why, we grant to the national
+banks by law the right to make this money; the government prints it for
+them, and they put it into circulation. And what does it cost them? They
+pay one per cent for the use of the money; in some cases they pay only
+one-half of one per cent; and then they lend it to us, the people&mdash;and
+what do they charge us? The answer is available in a recent report of
+the U. S. Comptroller of the Currency, as follows:</p>
+
+<p>"I have the record of the loans made by one Texas national bank to a
+hard-working woman who owned a little farm a few miles from town. She
+borrowed, in the aggregate, $2,375, making about thirty loans during the
+year. Listen to the details of the robbery: $162.50 for 30 days at 36
+per cent; $377. for 34 days at 44 per cent; $620.25 for 23 days at 77
+per cent;<a name="vol_ii_page_194" id="vol_ii_page_194"></a> $11. for 30 days at 120 per cent; $21.50 for 30 days at 90
+per cent; $33. for 2 days at 93 per cent; $27. for 15 days at 195 per
+cent; $110. for 30 days at 120 per cent&mdash;that was to buy a horse for her
+plowing; $20 for 48 days at 187 per cent; $6 for 10 days at 720 per
+cent; $7 for 3 days at 2,000 per cent, and so on; every cent paid off by
+what sweat and struggle only God knows."</p>
+
+<p>In Oklahoma, where the legal rate of interest is six per cent, with ten
+per cent as the maximum under special contract, harassed farmers paid
+all the way from 12 to 2400 per cent, with 40 per cent as the average.
+In the case of one bank, the Comptroller proved that not a single
+solitary loan had been made under fifteen per cent. He cited one
+particular case that he asked to be regarded as typical. In the spring
+the farmer went to the bank and arranged for a loan of $200. Out of his
+necessity he was compelled to pay 55 per cent interest charge. Unable to
+meet the note at maturity, he had to agree to 100 per cent interest in
+order to get the renewal. The next renewal forced him up to 125 per
+cent. For four years the thing went on, and all the drudgery of the
+father and the mother and the six children could never keep down the
+terrible interest or wipe out the principal. As a finish the bank
+swooped down and sold him out; the wretched man, barefoot and hungry,
+went to work clearing a swamp, caught pneumonia and died; the county
+buried him, and neighbors raised a purse to send the widow and children
+back to friends in Arkansas.</p>
+
+<p>This is the thing called the Money Trust in action, and this is the
+power we have to take out of private control. It is our first job, and
+all other jobs are in comparison hardly worth mentioning. How are we
+going to do it?</p>
+
+<p>The farmers of North Dakota have shown one way. They took the control of
+their state government into their own hands, and the most important and
+significant thing they did was to start a public bank. The interests
+fought them tooth and nail; not merely the interests of North Dakota,
+not merely of the Northwest, but of the entire United States. They
+fought them in the law courts, up to the United States Supreme Court,
+which decided in favor of the people of North Dakota. Therefore, make
+note of this vital fact&mdash;the most important single fact in the strategy
+of the class struggle&mdash;every state can, under the constitution, have a
+public bank; every city and town can have one, and no court can ever
+forbid it!<a name="vol_ii_page_195" id="vol_ii_page_195"></a></p>
+
+<p>Therefore, I say to all Socialists, labor men and social reformers of
+every shade and variety, nail at the top of your program of action the
+demand for a public bank in your community, to take the control of
+credit out of the hands of speculators and use it for the welfare of the
+people. Make it your first provision that every dollar of public money
+shall be deposited in this bank and every detail of public financing
+handled by this bank; make it your second provision that the purpose of
+this bank shall be to put all private banks out of business, and take
+over their power for the people.</p>
+
+<p>At present, you understand, it is taken for granted that the first
+purpose of the government is to foster the private credit system. Take,
+for example, the postal savings bank. The private banks fought this for
+a generation, and finally they allowed us to have it, on condition that
+it should be turned into a device for collecting money for them. Our
+postal bank turns over all its money to the private banks, at the
+grotesque rate of two per cent interest; and recently I read of the
+director of the postal bank appearing before a convention of bankers,
+asking for some small favor, and humbly explaining that it was not his
+idea to make the postal bank a rival of the private savings banks. Why
+should he not do so? Let us nail it to our radical program that the
+postal savings bank is to fight for business, just as do the private
+banks, and lend its funds direct to the people on good security.</p>
+
+<p>Let our Federal banking system also become the servant of the public
+welfare, and let its energy be devoted to breaking the strangle-hold of
+predatory finance on our industry. Let the government issue all money,
+and use it for the transfer of industry from private into public hands.
+Do we want to socialize our railroads, our coal mines, our telegraphs
+and telephones? Do we want to buy them, in order to avoid the wastes of
+civil war and insurrection? We have agreed that we do; and here we have
+the way of doing it. If the bankers can create, out of our willingness
+to trust them, billions upon billions of imaginary money, then so can
+we, the people of the United States, create money out of our willingness
+to trust ourselves. And do not let anybody fool you for a single second
+by talking about "fiat money" and "inflation of the currency." If you
+are paying twice as much for everything as you did before the war, you
+are paying it because the bankers have doubled the amount of money in
+circulation&mdash;for that reason and that alone. That<a name="vol_ii_page_196" id="vol_ii_page_196"></a> double money the
+bankers own; the only question now to be decided is, who is to own the
+double money that will be created tomorrow?</p>
+
+<p>Make note of the fact that it costs nothing to start a public bank. If
+you want to put the steel trust out of business by competition, you have
+several hundred thousand dollars worth of rolling mills and ore land to
+buy; but the banks can be put out of business by nothing but a law. The
+material parts of a bank, the white marble columns and bronze railings
+and mahogany trimmings, are as nothing compared with the inner soul of a
+bank, its control of the life-blood of your business and mine; and this
+we can have for the taking. We can keep our own "credit"; instead of
+sending it to Wall Street, where speculators use it to bleed us white,
+we can set it to building up our own community, under the direction of
+officials whom we select. Also, we can have our gigantic national bank,
+controlling all our thirty-three billions of dollars of deposits, and
+likewise the hundreds of billions of credit built upon them.</p>
+
+<p>The first time you suggest this plan to a banker or business man, you
+will be told that increase of money by the government does not benefit
+labor or the general consumer; "inflation of the currency" causes prices
+to go up correspondingly. To this I will furnish an effective reply:
+that at the same time the government issues new money, the government
+will also fix prices; and then watch the face of your banker or business
+man! If he is a man who can really think, and is not just repeating like
+a parrot the formulas he has learned from others, he will perceive that
+the combination of currency inflation and price-fixing would catch him
+as the two parts of a nut-cracker catch a nut; and he will know that you
+can take the meat out of him any time you please. He may argue that it
+is not fair; but point out to him that it is exactly what the big banks
+and the trusts have been doing to us right along&mdash;increasing the amount
+of money in circulation, and at the same time raising the prices we pay
+for goods, and so taking out the meat from us nuts!</p>
+
+<p>We have agreed that we do not mean to be unfair either to the banker or
+the manufacturer; we are simply going to stop their being unfair to us.
+We are going to convince them that their power to catch us in a
+nut-cracker is forever at an end. We allow them six per cent on their
+investments, and guarantee them this by turning over to them some of our
+new money&mdash;that is, government bonds. When we have thoroughly<a name="vol_ii_page_197" id="vol_ii_page_197"></a> convinced
+them that they can't get any more, they will take these bonds and quit;
+and thus simply, without violence or destruction of property, we shall
+slide from our present system of commercial cannibalism into the new
+co-operative commonwealth.</p>
+
+<p>We have had "cheap money" campaigns in the United States many times, and
+as this book is written, it becomes evident that we are to have another.
+Henry Ford is advocating the idea, and so is Thomas A. Edison. The
+present writer would like to make plain that in supporting such a
+program, he does it for one purpose, and one only&mdash;the taking over of
+the industries by the community. The creation of state credit for that
+purpose is the next step in the progress of human society; whereas the
+creation of state credit for the continuance of the profit system is a
+piece of futility amounting to imbecility. This distinction is
+fundamental, and is the test by which to judge the usefulness of any new
+program, and the intelligence of those who advocate it.<a name="vol_ii_page_198" id="vol_ii_page_198"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXX" id="CHAPTER_LXX"></a>CHAPTER LXX<br /><br />
+THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses various programs for the change from industrial
+autocracy to industrial democracy.)</p></div>
+
+<p>The program of the railway workers for the democratic management of
+their industry is embodied in the Plumb plan. You may learn about it by
+addressing the weekly paper of the railway brotherhoods, which is called
+"Labor," and is published in Washington, D. C. It appears that our
+transportation industry can be at once socialized, because of a clause
+in the constitution which gives the national government power over
+"roads and communications." Through decades of mismanagement under the
+system of private greed, the railroads have been brought to such a
+financial condition that they will be forced into nationalization,
+whenever we stop them from dipping their fingers into the public
+treasury.</p>
+
+<p>Under the Plumb plan the government is to purchase the roads from their
+present owners, paying with government bonds. The management is to be
+under the control of a board consisting in part of representatives of
+the government, and in part of the workers&mdash;this being a combination of
+the methods of Socialism and Syndicalism. The same program can be
+applied constitutionally to telegraphs and telephones, to interstate
+trolley systems, express companies, oil pipe lines, and all other means
+of interstate communication and distribution.</p>
+
+<p>The Plumb plan also deals with coal and steel and other great
+industries. These could not be nationalized without a constitutional
+amendment, but it appears that in the majority of the constitutions of
+the states are provisions that all corporate charters are held subject
+to the power of the legislature to amend, modify, or revoke the same.
+That gives us a right to take over these corporations through state
+action. The only preliminary is to elect state administrations which
+will represent us, instead of representing the corporations. Also, most
+state constitutions contain the provision that "no corporation shall<a name="vol_ii_page_199" id="vol_ii_page_199"></a>
+issue its stocks or bonds, except for money, labor, or property actually
+received." The word "labor" gives the opening wedge for the Plumb plan.
+The state can purchase these industries, giving bonds in exchange, and
+can issue to the workers labor stock, which stock will carry part
+control of the industry.</p>
+
+<p>Also, the railroad brotherhoods have started their own bank, in
+Cleveland, Ohio, and it is proving an enormous success. Make note of
+this point; every large labor union can have its own bank, to finance
+its industries and its propaganda. Stop and consider how preposterous it
+is that the five million organized workers of the United States should
+deposit their hundreds of millions of savings in capitalist banks, to be
+used to finance private undertakings which crush unions and hold labor
+in bondage. Let every big labor union have its own building, its own
+banking and insurance business, its own vacation camp in the country,
+its own school for training its future leaders. Also, let every labor
+council in every big city start a labor daily, to tell the workers the
+truth and point the way to freedom. Let every farmers' organization
+follow suit; and let these groups get together, to exchange their
+products upon a co-operative basis. Already the railway men are
+arranging with the farmers, to buy the farm products and distribute them
+co-operatively; they are getting together with the clothing workers, to
+have the latter make clothing for them, and with the shoe-workers to
+make shoes.</p>
+
+<p>This is the co-operative movement, which has become the largest single
+industry in Great Britain, and is the backbone of industrial democracy
+and sound radicalism. It is spreading rapidly in America now. It is
+taking the money of the people out of the control of the profit system,
+and diverting it into channels of public service. It is training men to
+believe in brotherhood instead of in greed. It is giving them business
+experience, so that when the time comes the taking over of our
+industrial machine will not have to be done by amateurs, but by men who
+know what co-operation is, and how to make a success of it.</p>
+
+<p>This work will go on more rapidly yet when the workers have united
+politically, and brought into power a government which will assist them
+instead of assisting the bankers. A most interesting program for the
+development of working-class financial credit is known as the "Douglas
+plan," which is advocated by a London weekly, the "New Age," and is
+explained in<a name="vol_ii_page_200" id="vol_ii_page_200"></a> two books, called "Economic Democracy" and "Credit Power
+and Democracy," by Douglas and Orage. This program is in brief that the
+furnishing of credit shall become a function of organized labor, based
+upon the fact that the true and ultimate basis of all credit is the
+power of hand and brain labor to produce wealth. The labor unions, or
+"guilds," shall pay the management of industry and pay capital for the
+use of the industrial plant, and shall finance production and new
+industrial development out of their "credit power," their ability to
+promise production and to keep their promises.</p>
+
+<p>This "Douglas plan" seeks to break the Money Trust by the method of
+Syndicalism. Another method of breaking it, through state regulation of
+bank loans, you will find most completely set forth in an extremely able
+book, "The Strangle Hold," by H. C. Cutting, an American business man,
+whom you may address at San Lorenzo, California. Another method,
+utilizing the third factor in industry, the consumer, is the method of
+banking by consumers' unions. Such are the Raffeisen banks, widely known
+in Germany, and a specimen of which exists in the single tax colony at
+Arden, Delaware. Those who wish to know about the co-operative bank, or
+other forms of co-operation, may apply to the Co-operative League of
+America, 2 West 13th Street, New York, whose president is Dr. James P.
+Warbasse. Information concerning public ownership may be had from the
+Public Ownership League, 127 N. Dearborn Street, Chicago; also from the
+Socialist party, 220 South Ashland Boulevard, Chicago, and from the
+Bureau of Social Research of the Rand School of Social Science, New
+York.</p>
+
+<p>Also, I ought to mention the very interesting plan for social
+reconstruction set forth by Mr. King C. Gillette, inventor of the safety
+razor. This plan you may find in your public library in two encyclopedic
+volumes, "Gillette's Social Redemption," and "Gillette's World
+Solution." The politician seeks to solve the industrial problem by means
+of the state, and the labor leader seeks to solve it by the unions; it
+is to be expected that Mr. Gillette, a capitalist, should seek to solve
+it by means of the corporation. He points out that the modern "trust" is
+the greatest instrument of production yet invented by man; and he asks
+why the people should not form their own "trust," to handle their own
+affairs, and to purchase and take over the industries from their present
+private masters. It is interesting to note that Mr. Gillette's solution
+is fully as radical and thorough-going as those<a name="vol_ii_page_201" id="vol_ii_page_201"></a> of the State Socialists
+or the Syndicalists. The "People's Corporation" which he projects and
+plans some day to launch upon the world would be a gigantic "consumers'
+union," whose "credit power" would speedily dominate and absorb all
+other powers in modern society; it would make us all stockholders, and
+give us our share of the benefits of social productivity.<a name="vol_ii_page_202" id="vol_ii_page_202"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXXI" id="CHAPTER_LXXI"></a>CHAPTER LXXI<br /><br />
+THE NEW WORLD</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning with its money
+aspects; the standard wage and its variations.)</p></div>
+
+<p>It has been indicated that the new society will be different in
+different countries and in different parts of the same country, in
+different industries and at different times. No one can predict exactly
+what it will be, and anyone who tries to predict is unscientific. But
+every man can work out his own ideas of the most economical and sensible
+arrangements for a co-operative society, and in these final chapters I
+set forth my ideas.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first things people ask is, "Will there be money in the new
+society, or how will labor be rewarded and goods paid for?" I answer
+that there will be money, and the business methods of the new society
+will be so nearly the same as at present that in this respect you would
+hardly realize there had been any change. The only difference will be
+that in the new society you will be paid several times as much for your
+labor; or, if you prefer to put it the other way, you will be able to
+buy several times as much with your money. Why should we waste our time
+working out systems of "credit-cards," when we already have a system in
+the form of gold and silver coins and paper currency? Why should we
+bother with "labor checks," when we have a banking and clearing-house
+system, understood by everyone but the illiterate? The only difference
+we shall make is that nobody can get gold and silver coins or paper
+currency, except by performing labor to pay for them; nobody can have
+money in the bank and draw checks against it, until he has rendered to
+society an equivalent amount of service.</p>
+
+<p>When you have earned your money in the new world, you will spend it
+wherever you please, and for whatever you please; the only difference
+being that the price you pay will be the exact labor-cost of producing
+that article, with no deduction for any form of exploitation. As I wrote
+sixteen years ago in "The Industrial Republic," you will be able to get,
+if you insist upon it, a seven-legged spider made of diamonds, and the
+only<a name="vol_ii_page_203" id="vol_ii_page_203"></a> question society will ask is, Have you performed services
+equivalent to the material and labor necessary to the creating of that
+unusual article of commerce? Of course, society won't put it to you in
+that complicated formula; it will simply ask, "Have you got the price?"
+Which, you observe, is exactly the question society asks you at present.</p>
+
+<p>The next thing that everybody wants to know is, "Shall we all be paid
+the same wages?" I answer, yes and no, because there will be three
+systems of payment. There will be a basic wage, which everybody will get
+for every kind of useful service necessary to production; this will be,
+as it were, the foundation of our economic structure. On top of this
+will be built a system of special payments for special services, which
+are of an intellectual nature, and cannot be standardized and dealt with
+wholesale. In addition, there will be for a time a third arrangement,
+applying to agricultural work, which is in a different stage of
+development, and to which different conditions apply.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take, first, our standard wage. The census of our Utopian
+commonwealth reveals that we have ten million able-bodied workers
+engaged in mining, manufacturing, and transportation; this including, of
+course, office-work and management&mdash;everything that enters into these
+industries. By scientific management, the best machinery, and the
+elimination of all possible waste, we find that they produce eighty
+million dollars worth of goods an hour. A portion of this we have to set
+aside to pay for the raw materials which they do not produce, and for
+the upkeep of the plant, and for margin of error&mdash;what our great
+corporations call a surplus. We find that we have fifty million dollars
+per hour left, and that means that we can pay for labor five dollars per
+hour, or twenty dollars for the regular four-hour day. This is our
+standard wage, received by all able-bodied workers.</p>
+
+<p>But quickly we find that our industries are not properly balanced. A
+great many men want to work at the jobs which are clean and pleasant,
+such as delivering mail, and very few want to work at washing dishes in
+restaurants and cleaning the sewers. There is no way we can adjust this,
+except by paying a higher wage, or by reducing the number of hours in
+the working day, which is the same thing. The only other method would be
+to have the state assign men to their work, and that would be
+bureaucracy and slavery, the essence of everything we wish to get away
+from in our co-operative commonwealth.<a name="vol_ii_page_204" id="vol_ii_page_204"></a></p>
+
+<p>What we shall have, so far as concerns our basic industries, is a
+government department, registering with mathematical accuracy the
+condition of supply and demand in all the industries of the country. Our
+demand for shoes is increasing, for some reason or other; a thousand
+more shoe-workers are needed, therefore the price of labor in the shoe
+industry is increased five cents per day&mdash;or whatever amount will draw
+that number of workers from other occupations. On the other hand, there
+are too many people applying for the job of driving trucks, therefore we
+reduce slightly the compensation for this work. There are more men who
+want jobs in Southern California than in Alaska, therefore the payment
+for the same grade of work in Alaska has to be higher. All this is not
+merely speculation, it is not a matter of anybody's choice; it is an
+automatic, self-adjusting system, subject to precise calculations. The
+only change from our present system is from guesswork to exact
+measurement. At present we do not know how many shoes our country will
+require next season, neither do we know how many shoes are going to be
+made, neither do we know how many people can make shoes, nor how many
+would like to learn, nor how many would like to quit that job and take
+to farming. It would be the simplest matter in the world to find out
+these things&mdash;far simpler that it was to register all our possible
+soldiers, and examine them physically and mentally, and train them and
+feed them and ship them overseas to "can the Kaiser."</p>
+
+<p>Of course, we drafted the men for this war job; but in the new world
+nobody is drafted for anything. It is any man's privilege to starve if
+he feels like it; it is his privilege to go out into the mountains and
+live on nuts and berries if he can find them. Nobody makes him go
+anywhere, or makes him work at anything&mdash;unless, of course, he is a
+convicted criminal. To the free citizen all that society has to say is,
+if he buys any products, he must pay for those products with his own
+labor, and not with some other man's labor. Of course, he may steal, or
+cheat, as under capitalism; our new world has laws against stealing and
+cheating, and does its best to enforce them. The difference between the
+capitalist world and our world is merely that we make it impossible for
+any man to get money <i>legally</i> without working.</p>
+
+<p>Under these conditions the average man wishes to work, and the only
+question remaining is, how shall he work? If he wants to work by
+himself, and in his own way, nobody objects<a name="vol_ii_page_205" id="vol_ii_page_205"></a> to it. He is able to buy
+anything he pleases, whether raw materials or finished products. If he
+wants to buy leather and make shoes after his own pattern, no one stops
+him, and if he can find anyone to buy these shoes, he can earn his
+living in that way. He is able to get land for as long a time as he
+wants it, by paying to the state the full rental value of that land, and
+if he wants to farm the land, he can do so, and sell his products. As a
+matter of theory, he is perfectly free to hire others to farm the land
+for him, or with him. There is no law to prevent it, neither is there
+any law to prevent his renting a factory and buying machinery, and
+hiring labor to make shoes.</p>
+
+<p>But, as a matter of practical fact, it is impossible for him to do this,
+because the community is in the business of making shoes, and on an
+enormous scale, with great factories run democratically by the workers,
+and there is very small chance of any private business man being able to
+draw the workers away from these factories. The community factories have
+all the latest machinery; they apply the latest methods of scientific
+management, and they turn out standard shoes at such a rate that private
+competition is unthinkable. Of course, there may be some special kind of
+shoes, involving an intellectual element, in which there can be private
+competition. This kind of manufacture is covered in our second method of
+payment; but before we discuss it, let us settle the problem of our most
+important basic industry, which is agriculture.<a name="vol_ii_page_206" id="vol_ii_page_206"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXXII" id="CHAPTER_LXXII"></a>CHAPTER LXXII<br /><br />
+AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster
+co-operative farming and co-operative homes.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Farming the land is a very ancient industry, and while its tools have
+been improved, its social forms have been the same for a long time. The
+worker on the land is conservative, and the Russian Bolsheviks, who
+tried to rush their peasants into Communism, found that they had only
+succeeded in stopping the production of food. We make no such blunder in
+our new society. We have found a way to abolish speculation in land, and
+exploitation based on land-ownership, while leaving the farmer free to
+run his business in the old way if he wants to.</p>
+
+<p>In our new society we take the full rental value of all land which is
+not occupied and used by the state. The farmer and the city dweller
+alike "own" their land, in the sense that they have the use of it for as
+long as they please, but they pay to the state the rental value of the
+land, minus the improvements. So they cannot speculate in the land or
+rent it out to others; they can only use it, and they only pay for what
+they actually use. They may put improvements on the land, with full
+assurance of having the use and benefit thereof, and they may sell the
+improvements, and the new owner enters into possession, with no
+obligation but to pay the rental value of the unimproved land to the
+state.</p>
+
+<p>The farmer goes on raising his products, and if he wants to drive to
+town and deliver them to his customers, he may do so; but he finds it
+cheaper to market them through the great labor co-operatives and state
+markets. As there is no longer any private interest involved in these
+activities, no one has any interest in cheating him, and he gets the
+full value of the products, less the cost of marketing. If the farmer
+wishes to continue all his life in his old style individualistic method
+of working the land, he is free to do so. But here is what he sees going
+on within a few miles of his place:</p>
+
+<p>The state has bought a square mile of land, and has taken down the
+fences and established an agricultural co-operative for<a name="vol_ii_page_207" id="vol_ii_page_207"></a> purposes of
+experiment and demonstration. The farm is run under the direction of
+experts; the soils are treated with exactly the right fertilizers for
+each crop, the best paying crops are raised, the best seed is used, and
+the best machinery. The workers of this new agricultural co-operative
+receive the standard wage, and they live in homes specially built for
+them, with all the conveniences made possible by wholesale production.
+Also, these co-operators live in a democratic community; they determine
+their own conditions of labor, being represented on the governing board,
+along with the experts appointed by the state.</p>
+
+<p>The farmer watches this experiment, at first with suspicion; but he
+finds that his sons have less suspicion than he has, and his sons keep
+pointing out to him that their little farm is not making the standard
+wage or anything like it; and, moreover, the standard wage is constantly
+increasing, whereas, the price of farm-products is dropping. And here is
+the state, ready to direct new co-operative ventures, inviting a score
+of farmers in the community to combine and buy out the unwilling ones,
+and establish a new co-operative. Sooner or later the old farmer gives
+way; or he dies, and his sons belong to the new world.</p>
+
+<p>So ultimately we have our national agricultural system, in which all the
+requirements of our people are studied, and all the possibilities of our
+soil and climate, and the job of raising the exact quantities of food
+that we need, both for our own use and for export, is worked out as one
+problem. We know how much lumber we need, and we raise it on all our
+hillsides and mountain slopes, and so protect ourselves from floods and
+the denuding of our continent. We know where best to raise our wheat,
+and where best to raise our potatoes and our cabbages, and we do not do
+this by crude hand-labor, nor by the labor of women and children from
+daybreak till dark. We have special machines that plant each crop, and
+other machines that reap it or dig it out of the ground and prepare it
+for market.</p>
+
+<p>A few days ago I read a discussion in the Chamber of Commerce of
+Calcutta. Some one called attention to the wastes involved in the
+current method of handling rubber. One consignment of rubber had been
+sold more than three hundred separate times, and the cost of these
+transactions amounted to three times the value of the rubber. This is
+only one illustration, and I might quote a thousand. If you doubt my
+figures as to the possibility of production in the new society, remind
+yourself that a large percentage of the things you use<a name="vol_ii_page_208" id="vol_ii_page_208"></a> have been bought
+and sold many scores of times before you get them. Consider the cabbage,
+for which you pay six or eight cents a pound in the grocery store, and
+for which the farmer gets, say, half a cent a pound.</p>
+
+<p>In this new world the state has an enormous income, derived from its tax
+on land values. It no longer has to send around men once a year to ask
+you how many diamond rings your wife has, and to tax you on your
+honesty, if you have any. It no longer has to make its money by such
+lying devices as a tariff, therefore its moral being is no longer
+poisoned by a tariff-lobby. It taxes every citizen for the right to use
+that which nature created, and leaves free from taxation that which the
+citizens' own labor created; this kind of taxation is honest, and fair
+to all, because no one can evade it. The state uses the proceeds of this
+land tax in the public services, the libraries and research laboratories
+and information bureaus; in free insurance against fire and flood and
+tempest; and in a pension to every member of society above the working
+age of fifty-five, or below the working age of eighteen. Of course, the
+state might leave it to every man to save up for his old age, but not
+all men are this wise, and the state cannot afford to let the unwise
+ones starve. It is more convenient for the state to figure that all men,
+or nearly all, are going to be old, and to hold back some of their money
+while they are young and strong, in the certainty that when they are
+old, they will appreciate this service. Also the state takes care of the
+sick and incapacitated, and the mentally or physically defective. But we
+do not leave these latter loose in the world to reproduce their defects;
+we have in our new world some sense of responsibility to the future, and
+there is nothing to which we devote more effort than making certain that
+nothing unsound or abnormal is allowed entrance into life.</p>
+
+<p>The problem of the care of children is a complicated one, and our new
+society is in process of solving it. We look back on the old world in
+which the having of children was heavily taxed, in the form of an
+obligation to care for these children until they were old enough to
+work. Then the parents were allowed to exploit the labor of the
+children, so that among the very poor the raising of children was a
+business speculation, like the raising of slaves or poultry. But in our
+new world we consider the interest of the child, and of the society in
+which that child is to be a citizen. We decide that this society must
+have citizens, and that the raising of the future citizens is a<a name="vol_ii_page_209" id="vol_ii_page_209"></a> work
+just exactly as necessary and useful as the raising of a crop of
+cabbages. Therefore, we pay a pension to all mothers while they are
+raising and caring for children. At the same time we assert the right to
+see that this money is wisely spent, and that the child is really cared
+for. If it is neglected, we are quick to take it away from its parents,
+and put it in one of our twenty-four-hour-a-day schools.</p>
+
+<p>We realize that the home is an ancient industry, even more ancient than
+agriculture, and we do not try to socialize it all at once. But just as
+we demonstrate to farmers that the individual farm does not pay, so we
+demonstrate to mothers the wastefulness of the single laundry, the
+single kitchen, the single nursery. We establish community laundries,
+community kitchens, community nurseries, and invite our women to help in
+these activities, and to learn there, under expert guidance, the
+advantages of domestic co-operation. We convince them by showing better
+results in the health and happiness of the children, and in the time and
+strength of the mothers. So, little by little, we widen the field of
+co-operative endeavor, and increase the total product of human labor and
+the total enjoyment of human life.<a name="vol_ii_page_210" id="vol_ii_page_210"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXXIII" id="CHAPTER_LXXIII"></a>CHAPTER LXXIII<br /><br />
+INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses scientific, artistic and religious activities, as a
+superstructure built upon the foundation of the standard wage.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Karl Kautsky, intellectual leader of the German Social-democracy, gives
+in his book, "The Social Revolution," a useful formula as to the
+organization of the future society. This formula is: "Communism in
+material production, Anarchism in intellectual production." It will
+repay us to study this statement, and see exactly what it means.</p>
+
+<p>Material production depends directly upon things; and as there is only a
+limited quantity of things in the world, if any one person has more than
+his share, he deprives some other person to that extent. So there have
+to be strict laws concerning the distribution of material products. But
+with intellectual things exactly the opposite is the case. There is no
+limit in quantity, and any one person can have all he wants without
+interfering with anybody else. Everybody in the world can perform a play
+by Shakespeare, or play a sonata by Beethoven, and everybody can enjoy
+it as much as he pleases without keeping other people from enjoying it
+all they please. Also, material production can be standardized; we can
+have great factories to turn out millions of boxes of matches, each
+match like every other match, and the more alike they are the better.
+But in intellectual affairs we want everyone to be different, or at
+least we want everyone to be free to be different, and if some one can
+become much better than the others, this is the most important kind of
+production in the world, for he may make over our whole intellectual and
+moral life.</p>
+
+<p>For the production of material things our new society has great
+factories owned in common, and run by majority vote of the workers, and
+we place the products of that factory at the disposal of all members of
+society upon equal terms. That is our "Communism in material
+production." On the other hand, in our intellectual production we leave
+everybody free to live his own life, and to associate himself with
+others of like aims, and we place as few restrictions as possible upon
+their activities.<a name="vol_ii_page_211" id="vol_ii_page_211"></a> This is the method of free association, or "Anarchism
+in intellectual production."</p>
+
+<p>Our problem would be simple if material and intellectual production
+never had to mingle. But, as it happens, every kind of intellectual
+production requires a certain amount of material, and every kind of
+material production involves an intellectual element. Therefore, our two
+methods have to be combined, and we have a complex problem which we have
+to solve in a variety of different ways, and upon which we must
+experiment with open minds and scientific temper.</p>
+
+<p>First, let us take the intellectual elements involved in the production
+of purely material things, such as matches and shoes and soap. Let us
+take invention. Naturally, we do not want to go on making matches and
+shoes and soap in the same old way forever. On the contrary, we want to
+stimulate all the workers in these industries to use their wits and
+improve the processes in every possible way. The whole of society has an
+interest in this, and the soap workers have an especial interest. Our
+soap industry has an invention department, with a group of experts
+appointed by the executive committee of the national council of soap
+workers. All soap workers are taxed, say five cents a day, for the
+support of this activity. Likewise the state contributes a generous sum
+out of its income toward the work of soap research. In addition to this,
+the soap industry offers prizes and scholarships for suggestions as to
+the improvement of every detail of the work, and at meetings of every
+local of soap workers somebody makes new suggestions as to methods of
+stimulating their intellectual life&mdash;not merely as regards soap, but as
+regards citizenship, and art and literature, and human life in general.
+Our soap workers, you must understand, are no longer wage-slaves,
+brutalized by toil and poverty; they are free citizens of a free
+society. Our soap workers' local in every city has its own theatre and
+concert hall and lecture bureau, and publishes its own magazine.</p>
+
+<p>Every industry has its immediate intellectual problems, its trade
+journals in which these are discussed, and its research boards in which
+they are worked out. The ambitions of the young workers in that industry
+are concentrated upon getting into this intellectual part of their
+trade. Examinations are held and tests are made to discover the most
+competent men, and written suggestions are considered by boards of
+control. It is, of course, of great importance to every worker that the
+channels<a name="vol_ii_page_212" id="vol_ii_page_212"></a> of promotion should be kept open, and that the man who really
+has inventive talent shall get, not merely distinction and promotion,
+but financial reward, so that he may have time and materials to continue
+his experiments.</p>
+
+<p>This research department, you perceive, is a sort of superstructure,
+built upon the foundation of our standard wage; and this same simile
+applies to numerous other forms of intellectual production. For example,
+our community paper mills turn out paper, and our community printers are
+prepared to turn out millions of books. How shall we determine what is
+to be the intellectual content of these material books? There are many
+different methods. First, there is the method of individualism. A man
+has something to say, and he writes a book; he works in the soap
+factory, and saves a part of his standard wage, and when he has money
+enough he orders the community printers to print his book, and the
+community booksellers to handle it for him, and the community postoffice
+to deliver it for him. Again, a group of men organize themselves into an
+association, or club, or scientific society, and publish books. The
+Authors' League takes up the work of publishing the writings of its
+members, and the Poetry Society does the same.</p>
+
+<p>This is the method of Anarchism, or free association. But there is no
+reason why we should not have along side it the method of Socialism;
+there is no reason why we should not have state publishing houses, just
+as we have state universities and state libraries. The state should
+certainly publish standard works of all sorts, bibles and dictionaries
+and directories, and cheap editions of the classics. In this new world
+our school boards are not chosen by business men for purposes of graft,
+they are chosen by the people to educate our children; so it seems to us
+perfectly natural that the National Educational Association should
+conduct a publication department, and order the printing of the school
+books which the children use.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way, anyone is free to write a play, or to put on a play,
+and invite people to come and see it. But, like the individual farmers
+and the individual mothers of families, the play-producer in our society
+is in competition with great community enterprises, which set a high
+standard and make competition difficult. The same thing applies to the
+opera, and to concerts, and to all the arts and sciences. You can start
+a private hospital if you wish, but you will be in competition with
+public institutions, and you can only succeed if you are a man<a name="vol_ii_page_213" id="vol_ii_page_213"></a> of
+genius&mdash;that is, if you have something to teach, too new and startling
+for the public boards of control to recognize. You try your new method,
+and it works, and that becomes a criticism of the public boards of
+control, and before long the people by their votes turn out the old
+board of control and put you in.</p>
+
+<p>That is politics, you say; but we in our new world do not use the word
+politics as one of contempt. We really believe that public sentiment is
+in the long run the best authority, and the appeal to public sentiment
+is at once a social privilege and a social service. What we strive to do
+is to clear the channels of appeal, and avoid favoritism and stagnation.
+To that end we maintain, in every art and every science and every
+department of human thought, endless numbers of centers of free,
+independent, co-operative activity, so that every man who has an
+inspiration, or a new idea, can find some group to support him or can
+form a new group of his own.</p>
+
+<p>This is our "Anarchism in intellectual production," and it is the method
+under which in capitalist society men organize all their clubs and
+societies and churches. Devout members of the Roman Catholic Church will
+be startled to be told that theirs is an Anarchist organization; but
+nevertheless, such is the case. The Catholic Church owns a great deal of
+property, and speculates in real estate, and to that extent it is a
+capitalist institution. It holds a great many people by fear, and to
+that extent it is a feudal institution. But in so far as members of the
+church believe in it and love it and contribute of their free will to
+its support, they are organizing by the method which all Anarchists
+recommend and desire to apply to the whole of society. Anarchist clubs
+and Christian churches are both free associations for the advocacy of
+certain ideas, the only difference being in the ideas they advocate.</p>
+
+<p>In our new world such organizations have been multiplied many fold, and
+form a vast superstructure of intellectual activity, built upon the
+foundation of the standard wage. In this new world all the people are
+free. They are free, not merely from oppression, but from the fear of
+oppression; they have leisure and plenty, and they take part naturally
+and simply in the intellectual life. The old, of course, have not got
+over the dullness which a lifetime of drudgery impressed upon them, but
+the young are growing up in a world without classes, and in which it
+seems natural that everyone should be educated and everyone should have
+ideas. They earn their standard wage,<a name="vol_ii_page_214" id="vol_ii_page_214"></a> and devote their spare time to
+some form of intellectual or artistic endeavor, and spend their spare
+money in paying writers and artists and musicians and actors to
+stimulate and entertain them.</p>
+
+<p>These latter are the ways of distinction in our new society; these are
+the paths to power. The only rich men in our world are the men who
+produce intellectual goods; the great artists, orators, musicians,
+actors and writers, who are free to serve or not to serve, as they see
+fit, and can therefore hold up the public for any price they care to
+charge. Just now there is eager discussion going on in our world as to
+whether it is proper for an opera singer, or a moving picture star, or a
+novelist, to make a million dollars. Our newspapers are full of
+discussions of the question whether anyone can make a million dollars
+honestly, and whether men of genius should exploit their public. Some
+point out that our most eminent opera singer spends his millions in
+endowing a conservatory of art; but others maintain that it would be
+better if he lowered his prices of admission, and let the public use its
+money in its own way. The extremists are busy founding what they call
+the Ten-cent Society, whose members agree to boycott all singers and
+actors who charge more than ten cents admission, and all moving picture
+stars who receive more than a hundred thousand dollars a year for their
+service. These "Ten-centers" do not object to paying the money, but they
+object to the commercializing of art, and declare especially that the
+moral effect of riches is such that no rich person should ever, under
+any circumstances, be allowed to influence the youth of the nation. In
+this some of the greatest writers join them, and renounce their
+copyrights, and agree to accept a laureateship from some union of
+workers, who pay them a generous stipend for the joy and honor of being
+associated with their names. The greatest poet of our time began life as
+a newsboy, and so the National Newsvenders' Society has adopted him, and
+taken his name, and pays him ten thousand dollars a year for the
+privilege of publishing his works.<a name="vol_ii_page_215" id="vol_ii_page_215"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LXXIV" id="CHAPTER_LXXIV"></a>CHAPTER LXXIV<br /><br />
+MANKIND REMADE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what happens to
+these in the new world.)</p></div>
+
+<p>We have briefly sketched the economic arrangements of the co-operative
+commonwealth. Let us now consider what are the effects of these
+arrangements upon the principal social diseases of capitalism.</p>
+
+<p>The first and most dreadful of capitalism's diseases is war, and the
+economic changes here outlined have placed war, along with piracy and
+slavery, among the half-forgotten nightmares of history. We have broken
+the "iron ring," and are no longer dependent upon foreign concessions
+and foreign markets for the preservation of our social system and the
+aggrandizement of a ruling class. We can stay quietly at home and do our
+own work, and as we produce nearly everything we need, we no longer have
+to threaten our neighbors. Our neighbors know this, and therefore they
+do not arm against us, and we have no pretext to arm against them. We
+take toward all other civilized nations the attitude which we have taken
+toward Canada for the past hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>We have a small and highly trained army, a few regiments of which are
+located at strategic points over the country. This army we regard and
+use as we do our fire department. When there is widespread damage by
+fire or flood or storm or earthquake, we rush the army to the spot to
+attend to the work of rescue and rebuilding. Also, we have a small navy
+in international service; for, of course, we are no longer an
+independent and self-centered nation; we have come to realize that we
+are part of the world community, and have taken our place as one state
+in the International Socialist Federation. We send our delegates to the
+world parliament, and we place our resources at the disposal of the
+world government. However, it now takes but a small army and navy to
+preserve order in the world. We govern the backward nations, but the
+economic arrangements of the world are such that we are no longer driven
+to exploit and oppress them. We send them teachers instead of<a name="vol_ii_page_216" id="vol_ii_page_216"></a> soldiers,
+and as there are really very few people in the world who fight for the
+love of fighting, we have little difficulty in preserving peace. We pay
+the backward peoples a fair price for their products which we need. Our
+world government takes no money out of these countries, but spends it
+for the benefit of those who live in the countries, to teach them and
+train their young generations for self-government.</p>
+
+<p>Next, what are the effects of our new arrangements upon political
+corruption and graft? The social revolution has broken the prestige of
+wealth. Money will buy things, but it no longer buys power, the right to
+rule other men; it no longer buys men's admiration. Everybody now has
+money, and nobody is any longer afraid of starvation. It is no longer
+the fashion to save money&mdash;any more than it is the fashion to carry
+revolvers in drawing-rooms or to wear chain mail in place of
+underclothing. So our political life is cleansed of the money influence.
+People now get power by persuading their fellows, not by buying them or
+threatening them. The world is no longer full of men ravenous for jobs,
+and ready to sell their soul for a "position." So it is no longer
+possible to build up a "machine" based on desire for office.</p>
+
+<p>The changes have resulted in an enormous intensification of our
+political activities. We have endless meetings and debates; we have so
+many propaganda societies that we cannot keep track of them. And some of
+these societies, like the Catholic Church, have a large membership, and
+large sums of money at their disposal. But a few experiments at carrying
+elections by a "campaign-chest" have convinced everybody that to have
+the facts on your side is the only permanent way to political power. Our
+new society is jealous of attempts to establish any sort of ruling
+class, and the surest way to discredit yourself is to advocate any form
+of barrier against freedom of discussion, or the right of the people's
+will to prevail.</p>
+
+<p>Next, what is the status of crime? We have too recently escaped from
+capitalism to have been able to civilize entirely our slum population,
+and we still have occasional crimes of violence, especially crimes of
+passion. But we have almost entirely eliminated those classes of crime
+which had to do with property, and we have discovered that this was
+ninety-five per cent of all crime. We have eliminated them by the simple
+device of making them no longer profitable. Anybody can go into our
+community factories, and under clean and attractive working conditions,<a name="vol_ii_page_217" id="vol_ii_page_217"></a>
+and without any loss of prestige or social position, can earn the means
+of satisfying his reasonable wants by three hours work a day. Almost
+everybody finds this easier than stealing or cheating.</p>
+
+<p>But more important yet, as a factor in abolishing crime, is the
+abolition of class domination and the prestige of wealth. We no longer
+have in our community a ruling class which lives without working, and
+which offers to the weak-minded and viciously inclined the perpetual
+example of luxury. We no longer set much store on jewels and fine
+raiment; we do not make costly things, except for public purposes, where
+all may enjoy them; and nobody stores great quantities of money, because
+everyone has a guarantee of security from the state. So we are gradually
+putting our policemen and jailers and judges and lawyers to constructive
+work.</p>
+
+<p>Next, what about disease? The diseases of poverty are entirely done away
+with. We are now able to apply the knowledge of science to the whole
+community, and so we no longer have to do with tuberculosis and typhoid,
+or with rickets and anæmia in children, or with heavy infant mortality.
+We have sterilized our unfit, the degenerates and the defectives, and so
+do not have to reckon with millions of children from these wretched
+stocks. We now give to the question of public health that prominence
+which in the old days we used to give to war and the suppression of
+crime and social protest. Our public health officers now replace our
+generals and admirals, and we really obey their orders.</p>
+
+<p>Next, as to prostitution. Just as in the case of crime, we are still too
+close to capitalism not to have among us the victims of social
+depravity, both men and women. We still have a great deal of vice which
+springs from untrained animal impulse, and we have some cultivated and
+highly sophisticated pornography. But we have entirely done away with
+commercial vice, and we have done it by cutting the root which nourished
+it. Women in our communities are really free; and by that we do not mean
+the empty political freedom which existed in the days of wage
+slavery&mdash;we mean that women are permanently delivered from economic
+inferiority, by the recognition on the part of the state of the money
+value of their special kind of work, the bearing and training of
+children. This kind of work not merely receives the standard wage, it
+also receives the best surgical and nursing treatment free. Housework
+and home-making are<a name="vol_ii_page_218" id="vol_ii_page_218"></a> legally recognized services; and the woman before
+marriage and after her children have been nursed is free to go into the
+community factories and earn for herself the standard wage, with no loss
+of social position. Consequently, no woman sells her sex, and no man
+buys it.</p>
+
+<p>This does not mean, of course, that we have solved the sex problem in
+our new society. There are two great social problems with which we have
+to deal, the first of these being the sex problem, and the second the
+race problem. Our scientists are occupied with eugenics, and we are
+finding out how to guide our young people in marriage, so that our race
+may be built up, and the ravages of capitalism remedied as quickly as
+possible. Also we are trying to find out the laws of happiness and
+health in love. We are founding societies for the purpose of protecting
+love, and, as hinted in the Book of Love, we have a determined social
+struggle between two groups of women&mdash;the mother-women and the
+mistress-women&mdash;those who take love gravely, as a means of improving the
+race, and those who take it as a decoration, a form of play. Our men are
+embarrassed by having to choose between these groups, and occupy
+themselves with trying to keep the struggle from turning into civil war.</p>
+
+<p>Second, the race problem. Our economic changes have, of course, done
+away with some of the bitterest phases of this strife. White workingmen
+in the North no longer mob and murder negro workingmen for taking their
+jobs, and in the South our land values tax prevents the landlord from
+exploiting either white or negro labor. But our white race is still
+irresistibly bent upon preserving its integrity of blood, and the more
+far-seeing among the negroes have come to realize that there can never
+be any real happiness for them in a society where they are denied the
+higher social privileges. There is a movement for the development of a
+genuine Negro Republic in Africa, and for mass emigration. Also there is
+a proposition, soon to be settled at an election, for the dividing of
+the United States into three districts upon racial lines. First, there
+are to be, in the Far South, three or four states which are inhabited
+and governed solely by negroes, and to which white men may come only as
+temporary visitors; a large group of states in the North which are white
+states, and to which negroes may come only as visitors; and finally, a
+middle group of states, in which both whites and black are allowed to
+live, as at present, but with<a name="vol_ii_page_219" id="vol_ii_page_219"></a> the proviso that no one may live there
+who takes part in any form of racial strife or agitation. This program
+gives to race-conscious negroes their own land, their own civilization,
+their own chance of self-realization; it gives to race-conscious white
+men the same opportunity; and it leaves to those who are not troubled by
+the problem, a country where black and white may dwell in quiet good
+fellowship.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, what has been the effect of our economic changes upon the
+purely personal vices which gave us so much trouble and unhappiness in
+the old days? What, for example, has been the effect upon vanity? You
+should see our new crop of children in our high schools! There are no
+longer any social classes among them; the rich ones do not arrive in
+private automobiles, to make the poor ones envious, and they do not
+isolate themselves in little snobbish cliques. They arrive in community
+automobiles, and all wear uniforms&mdash;one of the simple devices by which
+we repress the impulse of the young toward display of personal egotism.
+They are all full of health and happy play, and their heads are busily
+occupied with interesting ideas. Our girls are trained to thinking,
+instead of to personal adornment; they are developing their minds,
+instead of catching a rich husband by sexual charms. So we have been
+able, in a single generation of training, to make a real and appreciable
+difference in the amount of vanity and self-consciousness to be found
+among our young people.</p>
+
+<p>And the same thing applies to a score of other undesirable qualities,
+which, under the system of competitive commercialism, were
+overstimulated in human beings. In those old days everyone was seeking
+his own survival, and certain qualities which had survival value became
+the principal characteristics of our race. Those qualities were greed
+and persistence in acquisitiveness, cunning and subtlety, also bragging
+and self-assertiveness. In that old world people destroyed their fellows
+in order to make their own safety and power; they wasted goods in order
+to be esteemed, to preserve what they called their "social position."
+But now we have cut the roots of all these vile weeds. We have so
+adjusted the business relationships of men that we do not have to have
+hysterical religious revivals in order to keep the human factors alive
+in their hearts. We have established it as a money fact, which everyone
+quickly realizes, that it pays better to co-operate; there is more
+profit and less bother in being of service to others. So we have
+prepared a soil in<a name="vol_ii_page_220" id="vol_ii_page_220"></a> which virtues grow instead of vices, and we find
+that people become decent and kindly and helpful without exhortation,
+and with no more moral effort than the average man can comfortably make.
+Of course, we have still personal vices to combat, and new virtues to
+discover and to propagate; but this has to do with the future, whereas
+we are here confining ourselves to those things which have been
+demonstrated in our new society.<a name="vol_ii_page_221" id="vol_ii_page_221"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="INDEX_VOL_II" id="INDEX_VOL_II"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+<p class="cb">
+<a href="#vol_ii_A">A</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_B">B</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_C">C</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_D">D</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_E">E</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_F">F</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_G">G</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_H">H</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_I">I</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_J">J</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_K">K</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_L">L</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_M">M</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_N">N</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_O">O</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_P">P</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_Q">Q</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_R">R</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_S">S</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_T">T</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_U">U</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_V">V</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_W">W</a>,
+<a href="#vol_ii_Y">Y</a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p class="nind">
+<a name="vol_ii_A" id="vol_ii_A"></a>Abortion, 6<a href="#vol_ii_page_001">1</a><br />
+Abortions, <a href="#vol_ii_page_030">30</a><br />
+Advertising, <a href="#vol_ii_page_163">163</a><br />
+Agricultural co-operative, <a href="#vol_ii_page_206">206</a><br />
+Anarchism, <a href="#vol_ii_page_210">210</a><br />
+Anarchist, <a href="#vol_ii_page_089">89</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_090">90</a><br />
+Anarchy, <a href="#vol_ii_page_172">172</a><br />
+Anglo-Saxon, <a href="#vol_ii_page_062">62</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_111">111</a><br />
+"Appeal to Reason", <a href="#vol_ii_page_149">149</a><br />
+Aristocratic doctrine, <a href="#vol_ii_page_116">116</a><br />
+Armour, <a href="#vol_ii_page_128">128</a><br />
+Atherton, Gertrude, <a href="#vol_ii_page_087">87</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_B" id="vol_ii_B"></a>Babies, <a href="#vol_ii_page_063">63</a><br />
+Bachelorhood, <a href="#vol_ii_page_052">52</a><br />
+Bacon, Francis, <a href="#vol_ii_page_051">51</a><br />
+Banking system, <a href="#vol_ii_page_192">192</a><br />
+Bankruptcy, <a href="#vol_ii_page_162">162</a><br />
+Barbarism, <a href="#vol_ii_page_124">124</a><br />
+Barnum, P. T., <a href="#vol_ii_page_027">27</a><br />
+Berkman, Alexander, <a href="#vol_ii_page_173">173</a><br />
+Biology, <a href="#vol_ii_page_103">103</a><br />
+Birth control, <a href="#vol_ii_page_061">61</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_076">76</a><br />
+Birth Control Review, <a href="#vol_ii_page_064">64</a><br />
+Blatchford, Robert, <a href="#vol_ii_page_055">55</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_161">161</a><br />
+"Blind" love, <a href="#vol_ii_page_058">58</a><br />
+Bolsheviks, <a href="#vol_ii_page_172">172</a><br />
+Breach of promise suit, <a href="#vol_ii_page_091">91</a><br />
+Brothel, <a href="#vol_ii_page_066">66</a><br />
+Brothels, <a href="#vol_ii_page_031">31</a><br />
+Burbank, Luther, <a href="#vol_ii_page_099">99</a><br />
+Business man, <a href="#vol_ii_page_143">143</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_C" id="vol_ii_C"></a>Capital, <a href="#vol_ii_page_158">158</a><br />
+Capitalism, <a href="#vol_ii_page_136">136</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_168">168</a><br />
+Capitalists, <a href="#vol_ii_page_142">142</a><br />
+Carnegie, <a href="#vol_ii_page_168">168</a><br />
+Catholic Church, <a href="#vol_ii_page_213">213</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_216">216</a><br />
+Celibacy, <a href="#vol_ii_page_051">51</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_052">52</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_064">64</a><br />
+Chastity, <a href="#vol_ii_page_051">51</a><br />
+Chattel slavery, <a href="#vol_ii_page_186">186</a><br />
+Childbirths, <a href="#vol_ii_page_070">70</a><br />
+Children, <a href="#vol_ii_page_070">70</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_072">72</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_085">85</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_208">208</a><br />
+Christianity, <a href="#vol_ii_page_115">115</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_133">133</a><br />
+"Clarion", <a href="#vol_ii_page_031">31</a><br />
+Class struggle, <a href="#vol_ii_page_133">133</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_177">177</a><br />
+Clay, Henry, <a href="#vol_ii_page_186">186</a><br />
+Coleridge, <a href="#vol_ii_page_085">85</a><br />
+"Collier's Weekly", <a href="#vol_ii_page_122">122</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_163">163</a><br />
+Committee on Waste, <a href="#vol_ii_page_160">160</a><br />
+Commune, <a href="#vol_ii_page_129">129</a><br />
+Communism, <a href="#vol_ii_page_010">10</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_170">170</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_210">210</a><br />
+Compensation, <a href="#vol_ii_page_179">179</a><br />
+Competition, <a href="#vol_ii_page_108">108</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_127">127</a><br />
+Competitive wage system, <a href="#vol_ii_page_148">148</a><br />
+"Complex", <a href="#vol_ii_page_049">49</a><br />
+Comstock, Anthony, <a href="#vol_ii_page_020">20</a><br />
+Confiscation, <a href="#vol_ii_page_179">179</a><br />
+Congress, <a href="#vol_ii_page_138">138</a><br />
+Contraception, <a href="#vol_ii_page_061">61</a><br />
+Co-operation, <a href="#vol_ii_page_109">109</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_199">199</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_200">200</a><br />
+Coquetry, <a href="#vol_ii_page_038">38</a><br />
+Corporation, <a href="#vol_ii_page_127">127</a><br />
+Courtship, <a href="#vol_ii_page_091">91</a><br />
+Credit, <a href="#vol_ii_page_152">152</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_154">154</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_192">192</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_200">200</a><br />
+Credit-cards, <a href="#vol_ii_page_202">202</a><br />
+Crime, <a href="#vol_ii_page_164">164</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_216">216</a><br />
+Culture, <a href="#vol_ii_page_062">62</a><br />
+Cutting, H. C., <a href="#vol_ii_page_200">200</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_D" id="vol_ii_D"></a>Dances, <a href="#vol_ii_page_015">15</a><br />
+Debs, Eugene V., <a href="#vol_ii_page_155">155</a><br />
+Degeneration, <a href="#vol_ii_page_121">121</a><br />
+"Demi-monde", <a href="#vol_ii_page_080">80</a><br />
+Democratic doctrine, <a href="#vol_ii_page_115">115</a><br />
+Dictatorship, <a href="#vol_ii_page_180">180</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_183">183</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_185">185</a><br />
+Dill, James B., <a href="#vol_ii_page_025">25</a><br />
+Disarmament, <a href="#vol_ii_page_157">157</a><br />
+Discouragement, <a href="#vol_ii_page_164">164</a><br />
+Disease, <a href="#vol_ii_page_217">217</a><br />
+Divorce, <a href="#vol_ii_page_032">32</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_093">93</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_097">97</a><br />
+Double standard, <a href="#vol_ii_page_005">5</a><br />
+"Douglas plan", <a href="#vol_ii_page_199">199</a><br />
+"Dumping", <a href="#vol_ii_page_152">152</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_E" id="vol_ii_E"></a>Economic evolution, <a href="#vol_ii_page_123">123</a><br />
+Economic man, <a href="#vol_ii_page_108">108</a><br />
+Emerson, <a href="#vol_ii_page_186">186</a><br />
+Emulation, <a href="#vol_ii_page_112">112</a><br />
+Engagements, <a href="#vol_ii_page_072">72</a><br />
+England, <a href="#vol_ii_page_120">120</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_156">156</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_175">175</a><br />
+Eugenics, 58<a name="vol_ii_page_222" id="vol_ii_page_222"></a><br />
+Evolution, <a href="#vol_ii_page_122">122</a><br />
+Exogamy, <a href="#vol_ii_page_105">105</a><br />
+Exploitation, <a href="#vol_ii_page_181">181</a><br />
+Exploiting, <a href="#vol_ii_page_148">148</a><br />
+Exports, <a href="#vol_ii_page_153">153</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_F" id="vol_ii_F"></a>Factory system, <a href="#vol_ii_page_129">129</a><br />
+Farming, <a href="#vol_ii_page_206">206</a><br />
+"Favorable balance", <a href="#vol_ii_page_151">151</a><br />
+Fear, <a href="#vol_ii_page_122">122</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_164">164</a><br />
+Federal Reserve Act, <a href="#vol_ii_page_154">154</a><br />
+Feminist, <a href="#vol_ii_page_069">69</a><br />
+Feudal stage, <a href="#vol_ii_page_124">124</a><br />
+Fires, <a href="#vol_ii_page_163">163</a><br />
+Foreign trade, <a href="#vol_ii_page_151">151</a><br />
+"Free love", <a href="#vol_ii_page_044">44</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_087">87</a><br />
+"Free lover", <a href="#vol_ii_page_092">92</a><br />
+France, <a href="#vol_ii_page_175">175</a><br />
+France, Anatole, <a href="#vol_ii_page_044">44</a><br />
+Freud, <a href="#vol_ii_page_104">104</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_G" id="vol_ii_G"></a>Gens, <a href="#vol_ii_page_009">9</a><br />
+Germany, <a href="#vol_ii_page_155">155</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_156">156</a><br />
+Gillette, King C., <a href="#vol_ii_page_200">200</a><br />
+Goldman, Emma, <a href="#vol_ii_page_173">173</a><br />
+Gonorrhea, <a href="#vol_ii_page_030">30</a><br />
+Goode, Mary J., <a href="#vol_ii_page_041">41</a><br />
+Government, <a href="#vol_ii_page_166">166</a><br />
+"Graft", <a href="#vol_ii_page_127">127</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_216">216</a><br />
+"Great Adventure", <a href="#vol_ii_page_188">188</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_H" id="vol_ii_H"></a>Hammurabi, <a href="#vol_ii_page_078">78</a><br />
+"Hamon case", <a href="#vol_ii_page_026">26</a><br />
+"Hard times", <a href="#vol_ii_page_144">144</a><br />
+Hardy, <a href="#vol_ii_page_013">13</a><br />
+Harris, Frank, <a href="#vol_ii_page_021">21</a><br />
+"High life", <a href="#vol_ii_page_023">23</a><br />
+Home, <a href="#vol_ii_page_042">42</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_209">209</a><br />
+Honeymoon, <a href="#vol_ii_page_056">56</a><br />
+Hoover, Herbert, <a href="#vol_ii_page_160">160</a><br />
+House of Commons, <a href="#vol_ii_page_137">137</a><br />
+Huguenots, <a href="#vol_ii_page_134">134</a><br />
+Human nature, <a href="#vol_ii_page_099">99</a><br />
+Hunger, <a href="#vol_ii_page_122">122</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_I" id="vol_ii_I"></a>Ideals, <a href="#vol_ii_page_132">132</a><br />
+Imports, <a href="#vol_ii_page_153">153</a><br />
+Income tax, <a href="#vol_ii_page_143">143</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_188">188</a><br />
+Industrial evolution, <a href="#vol_ii_page_126">126</a><br />
+Infant, <a href="#vol_ii_page_103">103</a><br />
+Infanticide, <a href="#vol_ii_page_061">61</a><br />
+Inflation, <a href="#vol_ii_page_196">196</a><br />
+Inheritance tax, <a href="#vol_ii_page_188">188</a><br />
+"Ingenues", <a href="#vol_ii_page_019">19</a><br />
+Instinct, <a href="#vol_ii_page_057">57</a><br />
+Insurance, <a href="#vol_ii_page_163">163</a><br />
+Intellectual production, <a href="#vol_ii_page_211">211</a><br />
+"Iron ring", <a href="#vol_ii_page_158">158</a><br />
+Island, <a href="#vol_ii_page_145">145</a><br />
+I. W. W., <a href="#vol_ii_page_169">169</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_J" id="vol_ii_J"></a>James, William, <a href="#vol_ii_page_016">16</a><br />
+Jealousy, <a href="#vol_ii_page_089">89</a><br />
+Jews, <a href="#vol_ii_page_127">127</a>
+<br />v
+<a name="vol_ii_K" id="vol_ii_K"></a>Kautsky, Karl, <a href="#vol_ii_page_210">210</a><br />
+"King Coal", <a href="#vol_ii_page_139">139</a><br />
+Kropotkin, <a href="#vol_ii_page_109">109</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_129">129</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_173">173</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_L" id="vol_ii_L"></a>Labor, <a href="#vol_ii_page_158">158</a><br />
+Labor checks, <a href="#vol_ii_page_202">202</a><br />
+Labor union, <a href="#vol_ii_page_199">199</a><br />
+Laissez faire, <a href="#vol_ii_page_110">110</a><br />
+Land tax, <a href="#vol_ii_page_190">190</a><br />
+Land titles, <a href="#vol_ii_page_179">179</a><br />
+Land values, <a href="#vol_ii_page_208">208</a><br />
+Late marriage, <a href="#vol_ii_page_067">67</a><br />
+Lecky, <a href="#vol_ii_page_006">6</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_033">33</a><br />
+Leviticus, <a href="#vol_ii_page_078">78</a><br />
+Liberty motor, <a href="#vol_ii_page_164">164</a><br />
+London, Jack, <a href="#vol_ii_page_062">62</a><br />
+Los Angeles Times, <a href="#vol_ii_page_157">157</a><br />
+Love, <a href="#vol_ii_page_034">34</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_047">47</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_100">100</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_112">112</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_218">218</a><br />
+Lust, <a href="#vol_ii_page_048">48</a><br />
+Luther, Martin, <a href="#vol_ii_page_129">129</a><br />
+Luxury, <a href="#vol_ii_page_060">60</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_M" id="vol_ii_M"></a>Machinery, <a href="#vol_ii_page_149">149</a><br />
+"Magic gestures", <a href="#vol_ii_page_104">104</a><br />
+Magna Carta, <a href="#vol_ii_page_134">134</a><br />
+Malthusian law, <a href="#vol_ii_page_108">108</a><br />
+Markham, Edwin, <a href="#vol_ii_page_139">139</a><br />
+Marquesas Islands, <a href="#vol_ii_page_033">33</a><br />
+Marriage, <a href="#vol_ii_page_004">4</a><br />
+Marriage club, <a href="#vol_ii_page_071">71</a><br />
+Marriage market, <a href="#vol_ii_page_068">68</a><br />
+Marx, Karl, <a href="#vol_ii_page_132">132</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_138">138</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_176">176</a><br />
+Materialistic interpretation, 132<a name="vol_ii_page_223" id="vol_ii_page_223"></a><br />
+Material production <a href="#vol_ii_page_210">210</a><br />
+Maternity endowment <a href="#vol_ii_page_079">79</a><br />
+Meredith, George <a href="#vol_ii_page_043">43</a><br />
+"Merrie England" <a href="#vol_ii_page_161">161</a><br />
+Metchnikoff, Elie <a href="#vol_ii_page_033">33</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_046">46</a><br />
+Mexico <a href="#vol_ii_page_121">121</a><br />
+Middle class <a href="#vol_ii_page_176">176</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_186">186</a><br />
+Minor, Robert <a href="#vol_ii_page_173">173</a><br />
+Mistress <a href="#vol_ii_page_012">12</a><br />
+Money <a href="#vol_ii_page_037">37</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_192">192</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_202">202</a><br />
+Money Trust <a href="#vol_ii_page_194">194</a><br />
+Monogamy <a href="#vol_ii_page_005">5</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_083">83</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_090">90</a><br />
+Moors <a href="#vol_ii_page_134">134</a><br />
+Moralists <a href="#vol_ii_page_059">59</a><br />
+Morgan <a href="#vol_ii_page_128">128</a><br />
+Mother's pension <a href="#vol_ii_page_079">79</a><br />
+Moving pictures <a href="#vol_ii_page_017">17</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_N" id="vol_ii_N"></a>Negro <a href="#vol_ii_page_218">218</a><br />
+Negroes <a href="#vol_ii_page_116">116</a><br />
+Neuroses <a href="#vol_ii_page_105">105</a><br />
+Neurotics <a href="#vol_ii_page_103">103</a><br />
+North Dakota <a href="#vol_ii_page_194">194</a><br />
+North, Luke <a href="#vol_ii_page_188">188</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_O" id="vol_ii_O"></a>O'Brien, Frederick <a href="#vol_ii_page_010">10</a><br />
+Oedipus complex <a href="#vol_ii_page_104">104</a><br />
+"Open-shop" <a href="#vol_ii_page_177">177</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_P" id="vol_ii_P"></a>Panic <a href="#vol_ii_page_154">154</a><br />
+Parasitism <a href="#vol_ii_page_074">74</a><br />
+Passion <a href="#vol_ii_page_058">58</a><br />
+Permanence <a href="#vol_ii_page_087">87</a><br />
+Piracy <a href="#vol_ii_page_111">111</a><br />
+Pity <a href="#vol_ii_page_074">74</a><br />
+Plumb plan <a href="#vol_ii_page_198">198</a><br />
+Political evolution <a href="#vol_ii_page_123">123</a><br />
+Political revolution <a href="#vol_ii_page_125">125</a><br />
+Politics <a href="#vol_ii_page_213">213</a><br />
+Pornography <a href="#vol_ii_page_020">20</a><br />
+Postal savings bank <a href="#vol_ii_page_195">195</a><br />
+Poverty <a href="#vol_ii_page_040">40</a><br />
+Primitive man <a href="#vol_ii_page_009">9</a><br />
+Privilege <a href="#vol_ii_page_036">36</a><br />
+Professor Sumner <a href="#vol_ii_page_122">122</a><br />
+Profit system <a href="#vol_ii_page_148">148</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_158">158</a><br />
+"Progressive polygamy" <a href="#vol_ii_page_090">90</a><br />
+Proletariat <a href="#vol_ii_page_142">142</a><br />
+Promiscuity <a href="#vol_ii_page_087">87</a><br />
+Property marriage <a href="#vol_ii_page_044">44</a><br />
+Prosperity <a href="#vol_ii_page_144">144</a><br />
+Prostitute <a href="#vol_ii_page_006">6</a><br />
+Prostitution <a href="#vol_ii_page_004">4</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_031">31</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_041">41</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_217">217</a><br />
+Proudhon <a href="#vol_ii_page_179">179</a><br />
+Psycho-analysis <a href="#vol_ii_page_049">49</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_103">103</a><br />
+Public bank <a href="#vol_ii_page_194">194</a><br />
+Publishing <a href="#vol_ii_page_212">212</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_Q" id="vol_ii_Q"></a>Quick, Herbert <a href="#vol_ii_page_165">165</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_R" id="vol_ii_R"></a>Race prejudice <a href="#vol_ii_page_062">62</a><br />
+Race problem <a href="#vol_ii_page_218">218</a><br />
+Racial immaturity <a href="#vol_ii_page_116">116</a><br />
+Raffeisen bank <a href="#vol_ii_page_200">200</a><br />
+Reeve, Sidney A. <a href="#vol_ii_page_160">160</a><br />
+Republic <a href="#vol_ii_page_125">125</a><br />
+Research <a href="#vol_ii_page_212">212</a><br />
+"Resurrection" <a href="#vol_ii_page_053">53</a><br />
+Revolt <a href="#vol_ii_page_134">134</a><br />
+Ricardo <a href="#vol_ii_page_108">108</a><br />
+Richardson, Dorothy <a href="#vol_ii_page_026">26</a><br />
+Ring <a href="#vol_ii_page_148">148</a><br />
+Robinson, Dr. William, J, <a href="#vol_ii_page_021">21</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_030">30</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_070">70</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_077">77</a><br />
+Roman Catholic church <a href="#vol_ii_page_090">90</a><br />
+"Romance" <a href="#vol_ii_page_091">91</a><br />
+"Romantic" love <a href="#vol_ii_page_055">55</a><br />
+Roosevelt <a href="#vol_ii_page_061">61</a><br />
+Rulers <a href="#vol_ii_page_119">119</a><br />
+Russia <a href="#vol_ii_page_129">129</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_185">185</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_S" id="vol_ii_S"></a>Sanger, Margaret <a href="#vol_ii_page_063">63</a><br />
+School of marriage <a href="#vol_ii_page_075">75</a><br />
+Selection <a href="#vol_ii_page_008">8</a><br />
+Sex <a href="#vol_ii_page_008">8</a><br />
+Sex education <a href="#vol_ii_page_072">72</a><br />
+Sex impulse <a href="#vol_ii_page_046">46</a><br />
+Sex problem <a href="#vol_ii_page_218">218</a><br />
+Sex urge <a href="#vol_ii_page_086">86</a><br />
+Sex war <a href="#vol_ii_page_081">81</a><br />
+Shelley <a href="#vol_ii_page_059">59</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_089">89</a><br />
+"She-towns" <a href="#vol_ii_page_029">29</a><br />
+Shop management <a href="#vol_ii_page_168">168</a><br />
+Sienkiewicz <a href="#vol_ii_page_013">13</a><br />
+Sims, District Attorney <a href="#vol_ii_page_028">28</a><br />
+Single tax <a href="#vol_ii_page_188">188</a><br />
+Slavery <a href="#vol_ii_page_010">10</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_126">126</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_136">136</a><br />
+"Smart set" <a href="#vol_ii_page_024">24</a><br />
+Smith, Adam <a href="#vol_ii_page_108">108</a><br />
+Snobbery 61<a name="vol_ii_page_224" id="vol_ii_page_224"></a><br />
+Socialism, <a href="#vol_ii_page_166">166</a><br />
+Social revolution, <a href="#vol_ii_page_128">128</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_147">147</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_175">175</a><br />
+Soviets, <a href="#vol_ii_page_130">130</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_171">171</a><br />
+"Speeding up", <a href="#vol_ii_page_138">138</a><br />
+Spencer, Herbert, <a href="#vol_ii_page_122">122</a><br />
+Spirituality, <a href="#vol_ii_page_064">64</a><br />
+Sport, <a href="#vol_ii_page_113">113</a><br />
+Standard wage, <a href="#vol_ii_page_203">203</a><br />
+Steel Trust, <a href="#vol_ii_page_137">137</a><br />
+Stopes, Dr. Marie C., <a href="#vol_ii_page_077">77</a><br />
+Strikes, <a href="#vol_ii_page_162">162</a><br />
+Syndicalism, <a href="#vol_ii_page_167">167</a><br />
+Syphilis, <a href="#vol_ii_page_030">30</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_T" id="vol_ii_T"></a>Tabu, <a href="#vol_ii_page_009">9</a><br />
+Tariff, <a href="#vol_ii_page_153">153</a><br />
+Taxes, <a href="#vol_ii_page_191">191</a><br />
+Tennyson, <a href="#vol_ii_page_038">38</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_120">120</a><br />
+"The Brass Check", <a href="#vol_ii_page_031">31</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_137">137</a><br />
+"The Conquest of Bread", <a href="#vol_ii_page_173">173</a><br />
+"The Cost of Competition", <a href="#vol_ii_page_160">160</a><br />
+"The Industrial Republic", <a href="#vol_ii_page_202">202</a><br />
+"The Jungle", <a href="#vol_ii_page_139">139</a><br />
+"The Lady", <a href="#vol_ii_page_012">12</a><br />
+"The Long Day", <a href="#vol_ii_page_026">26</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_029">29</a><br />
+"The Nature of Man", <a href="#vol_ii_page_033">33</a><br />
+"The Profits of Religion", <a href="#vol_ii_page_137">137</a><br />
+"The Social Revolution", <a href="#vol_ii_page_210">210</a><br />
+"The Strangle Hold", <a href="#vol_ii_page_200">200</a><br />
+Thompson, A. M., <a href="#vol_ii_page_031">31</a><br />
+Tolstoi, <a href="#vol_ii_page_053">53</a><br />
+"Totem and Taboo", <a href="#vol_ii_page_104">104</a><br />
+"Triangle", <a href="#vol_ii_page_056">56</a>
+<br /><br />
+<a name="vol_ii_U" id="vol_ii_U"></a>Unconscious, <a href="#vol_ii_page_105">105</a><br />
+Unemployment, <a href="#vol_ii_page_147">147</a><br />
+<br />
+"<a name="vol_ii_V" id="vol_ii_V"></a>Vamps", <a href="#vol_ii_page_019">19</a><br />
+Vanity, <a href="#vol_ii_page_219">219</a><br />
+Varietism, <a href="#vol_ii_page_085">85</a><br />
+Venereal disease, <a href="#vol_ii_page_030">30</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_067">67</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_083">83</a><br />
+Voltaire, <a href="#vol_ii_page_036">36</a><br />
+Voluntary Parenthood League, <a href="#vol_ii_page_064">64</a>
+<br />
+<a name="vol_ii_W" id="vol_ii_W"></a>War, <a href="#vol_ii_page_162">162</a><br />
+Wars, <a href="#vol_ii_page_155">155</a><br />
+Waste, <a href="#vol_ii_page_165">165</a><br />
+Wells, H. G., <a href="#vol_ii_page_089">89</a><br />
+Wharton, Edith, <a href="#vol_ii_page_095">95</a><br />
+"Wild oats", <a href="#vol_ii_page_006">6</a><br />
+White man's burden, <a href="#vol_ii_page_117">117</a><br />
+White, William Allen, <a href="#vol_ii_page_017">17</a><br />
+Worker, <a href="#vol_ii_page_140">140</a><br />
+Workers, <a href="#vol_ii_page_176">176</a><br />
+Working class, <a href="#vol_ii_page_140">140</a><br />
+Woman, <a href="#vol_ii_page_012">12</a><br />
+<br />
+"<a name="vol_ii_Y" id="vol_ii_Y"></a>Young love", <a href="#vol_ii_page_056">56</a>, <a href="#vol_ii_page_073">73</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><a name="vol_ii_page_225" id="vol_ii_page_225"></a></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="cb">BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR</p>
+
+<p>Published by the Author, Pasadena, California</p>
+
+<p>Trade Distributors: The Paine Book Co., Chicago, [I].</p>
+
+<p class="cb"><big><big>The Brass Check</big></big></p>
+
+<p class="cb">A Study of American Journalism</p>
+
+<p>Who owns the press and why?</p>
+
+<p>When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda? And
+whose propaganda?</p>
+
+<p>Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is it
+honest material?</p>
+
+<p>No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the
+first time the questions are answered in a book.</p>
+
+<p>The first edition of this book, 23,000 copies, was sold out two weeks
+after publication. Paper could not be obtained for printing, and a
+carload of brown wrapping paper was used. The printings to date amount
+to 144,000 copies. The book is being published in Great Britain and
+colonies, and in translations in Germany, France, Holland, Norway,
+Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Hungary and Japan.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Hermann Bessemer</span>, <i>in the "Neues Journal," Vienna</i>:</p>
+
+<p>"Upton Sinclair deals with names, only with names, with balances,
+with figures, with documents, a truly stunning, gigantic
+fact-material. His book is an armored military train which with
+rushing pistons roars through the jungle of American monsterlies,
+whistling, roaring, shooting, chopping off with Berserker rage the
+obscene heads of these evils. A breath-taking, clutching, frightful
+book is 'The Brass Check.'"</p></div>
+
+<p>(<b>Prices of all books, unless otherwise stated, cloth $1.20, 3 copies $3,
+10 copies $9; paper 60c, 3 copies $1.50, 10 copies $4.50. All prices
+postpaid.</b>)<a name="vol_ii_page_226" id="vol_ii_page_226"></a></p>
+
+<p class="nind"><b><big>THE BOOK OF LIFE</big></b></p>
+
+<p>A book of practical counsel. Volume One&mdash;Mind and Body. Discusses truth
+and its standards, and the basis of health, both mental and physical.
+Tells people how to live, in order to avoid waste and pain, and to find
+happiness and achieve progress.</p>
+
+<p>Volume Two&mdash;Love and Society. Discusses health in sex; love and
+marriage, chastity, monogamy, birth control, divorce. Explains modern
+economic problems, Socialism, revolution, industrial democracy, and the
+future society. Prices of volumes one and two bound in one, cloth $1.50,
+paper $1.00. Either of the two volumes separately, cloth $1.20, paper
+60c.</p>
+
+<p class="nind"><b><big>THE JUNGLE</big></b></p>
+
+<p>This novel, first published in 1906, caused an international sensation.
+It was the best selling book in the United States for a year; also in
+Great Britain and its colonies. It was translated into seventeen
+languages, and caused an investigation by President Roosevelt, and
+action by Congress. The book has been out of print for ten years, and is
+now reprinted by the author at a lower price than when first published,
+although the cost of manufacture has since more than doubled.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there
+been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book
+as has come to Upton Sinclair."&mdash;<i>New York Evening World.</i></p>
+
+<p>"It is a book that does for modern industrial slavery what 'Uncle
+Tom's Cabin' did for black slavery. But the work is done far better
+and more accurately in 'The Jungle' than in 'Uncle Tom's
+Cabin.'"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Arthur Brisbane</span>, <i>in the New York Evening Journal</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p class="nind"><b><big>KING COAL</big></b></p>
+
+<p>A novel of the Colorado coal country.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Clear, convincing, complete."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Lincoln Steffens.</span></p>
+
+<p>"I wish that every word of it could be burned deep into the heart
+of every American."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Adolph Germer.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Debs and the Poets</span>: Edited by Ruth Le Prade, with an introduction
+by Upton Sinclair. A collection of poetry about Debs.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sylvia</span>: A novel of the South.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sylvia's Marriage</span>: A sequel. (Both in cloth only.)</p>
+
+<p class="nind"><b><big>100% A STORY OF A PATRIOT</big></b></p>
+
+<p>Would you like to go behind the scenes and see the "invisible
+government" of your country saving you from the Bolsheviks and the Reds?
+Would you like to meet the secret agents and provocateurs of "Big
+Business," to know what they look like, how they talk and what they are
+doing to make the world safe for democracy? Several of these gentlemen
+have been haunting the home of Upton Sinclair during the past three
+years and he has had the idea of turning the tables and investigating
+the investigators. He has put one of them, Peter Gudge by name, into a
+book, together with Peter's ladyloves, and his wife, and his boss, and a
+whole group of his fellow-agents and their employers.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>From</i> <span class="smcap">Louis Untermeyer,</span> <i>Author of "Challenge," etc.</i>:</p>
+
+<p>"Upton Sinclair has done it again. He has loaded his Maxim (no
+Silencer attached), taken careful aim, and&mdash;bang!&mdash;hit the bell
+plump in the center.</p>
+
+<p>"First of all, '100%' is a story; a story full of suspense, drama,
+'heart interest,' plots, counterplots, high life, low life, humor,
+hate and other passions&mdash;as thrilling as a W. S. Hart movie, as
+interest-crammed as (and a darned sight more truthful than) your
+daily newspaper."</p></div>
+
+<p class="nind"><b><big>THEY CALL ME CARPENTER: A TALE OF THE SECOND COMING</big></b></p>
+
+<p>Narrates how Jesus came to Los Angeles in the year 1921, and what
+happened to Him. To be published in September, 1922.</p>
+
+<p class="nind"><b><big>THE CRY FOR JUSTICE</big></b></p>
+
+<p>An anthology of the literature of social protest, with an introduction
+by Jack London, who calls it "this humanist Holy-book." Thirty-two
+illustrations, 891 pages. Cloth, $1.50; paper, $1.00.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"It should rank with the very noblest works of all time. You could
+scarcely have improved on its contents&mdash;it is remarkable in variety
+and scope. Buoyant, but never blatant, powerful and passionate, it
+has the spirit of a challenge and a battle cry."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Louis Untermeyer.</span></p>
+
+<p>"You have marvelously covered the whole ground. The result is a
+book that radicals of every shade have long been waiting for. You
+have made one that every student of the world's thought&mdash;economic,
+philosophic, artistic&mdash;has to have."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Reginald Wright Kauffman.</span></p></div>
+
+<p class="nind"><b><big>THE PROFITS OF RELIGION</big></b></p>
+
+<p>A study of supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to
+privilege. The first investigation of this subject ever made in any
+language.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"You have put a lot of work into it and you have marshalled your
+facts in, masterly fashion."&mdash;<span class="smcap">William Marion Reedy.</span></p></div>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align="center">The following typographical errors have been corrected by the text
+transcriber:</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">worshiping=>worshipping</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">changes takes place=>changes take place</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">is an impuse=>is an impulse</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">center of continous=>center of continuous</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">a starvling beggar at the gates=>a starving beggar at the gates</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">of fool nations about sex=>of fool notions about sex</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">any personal right in contravened=>any personal right is contravened</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">industrial evoluton=>industrial evolution</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">to the poeple=>to the people</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">Social revoluton=>Social revolution</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">her hands and and feet=>her hands and her feet</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">Liebault=>Liébault</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">Sienkewicz's "Whirlpools"=>Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools"</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">Magna Charta, 134=>Magna Carta, 134</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and
+Body; Vol. II Love and Society, by Upton Sinclair
+
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+</pre>
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and Body;
+Vol. II Love and Society, by Upton Sinclair
+
+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 Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and Body; Vol. II Love and Society
+
+Author: Upton Sinclair
+
+Release Date: November 23, 2011 [EBook #38117]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The
+Book _of_ Life
+
+UPTON SINCLAIR
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOK OF LIFE
+
+
+
+
+_The_
+Book of Life
+
+_By_ UPTON SINCLAIR
+
+VOLUME ONE:
+MIND AND BODY
+
+VOLUME TWO:
+LOVE AND SOCIETY
+
+UPTON SINCLAIR
+PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
+
+WHOLESALE DISTRIBUTORS
+_THE PAINE BOOK COMPANY_
+CHICAGO
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1921, 1922
+BY
+UPTON SINCLAIR
+_All Rights Reserved._
+
+
+                _To_
+           Kate Crane Gartz
+in acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a
+better world, and her fidelity to those
+      who struggle to achieve it.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+The writer of this book has been in this world some forty-two years.
+That may not seem long to some, but it is long enough to have made many
+painful mistakes, and to have learned much from them. Looking about him,
+he sees others making these same mistakes, suffering for lack of that
+same knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This being the case,
+it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus the blunders and
+the pain.
+
+There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year,
+asking him questions, some of them of the strangest. A man is dying of
+cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast? A man is unable to
+make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women? A
+man has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him what to
+do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little time for
+self-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to read? Many
+such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of people,
+earnest, hungry for happiness, and groping as if in a fog. The things
+they most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in the
+newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend. Of these agencies,
+the first is not entirely competent, the second is not entirely honest,
+and the third is not entirely up to date. Nor is there anywhere a book
+in which the effort has been made to give to everyday human beings the
+everyday information they need for the successful living of their lives.
+
+For the present book the following claims may be made. First, it is a
+modern book; its writer watches hour by hour the new achievements of the
+human mind, he reaches out for information about them, he seeks to
+adjust his own thoughts to them and to test them in his own living.
+Second, it is, or tries hard to be, a wise book; its writer is not among
+those too-ardent young radicals who leap to the conclusion that because
+many old things are stupid and tiresome, therefore everything that is
+old is to be spurned with contempt, and everything that proclaims itself
+new is to be taken at its own valuation. Third, it is an honest book;
+its writer will not pretend to know what he only guesses, and where it
+is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally, it is a kind
+book; it is not written for its author's glory, nor for his enrichment,
+but to tell you things that may be useful to you in the brief span of
+your life. It will attempt to tell you how to live, how to find health
+and happiness and success, how to work and how to play, how to eat and
+how to sleep, how to love and to marry and to care for your children,
+how to deal with your fellow men in business and politics and social
+life, how to act and how to think, what religion to believe, what art to
+enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the boys phrase it!
+
+There are several ways for such a book to begin. It might begin with the
+child, because we all begin that way; it might begin with love, because
+that precedes the child; it might begin with the care of the body,
+explaining that sound physical health is the basis of all right living,
+and even of right thinking; it might begin as most philosophies do, by
+defining life, discussing its origin and fundamental nature.
+
+The trouble with this last plan is that there are a lot of people who
+have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; they have creeds and
+catechisms which they know by heart, and if you suggest to them anything
+different, they give you a startled look and get out of your way. And
+then there is another, and in our modern world a still larger class, who
+say, "Oh, shucks! I don't go in for religion and that kind of thing."
+You offer them something that looks like a sermon, and they turn to the
+baseball page.
+
+Who will read this Book of Life? There will be, among others, the great
+American tired business man. He wrestles with problems and cares all
+day, and when he sits down to read in the evening, he says: "Make it
+short and snappy." There is the wife of the tired business man, the
+American perfect lady. She does most of the reading for the family; but
+she has never got down to anything fundamental in her life, and mostly
+she likes to read about exciting love affairs, which she distinguishes
+from the unexciting kind she knows by the word "romance." Then there is
+the still more tired American workingman, who has been "speeded up" all
+day under the bonus system or the piece-work system, and is apt to fall
+asleep in his chair before he finishes supper. Then there is the
+workingman's wife, who has slaved all day in the kitchen, and has a
+chance for a few minutes' intimacy with her husband before he falls
+asleep. She would like to have somebody tell her what to do for croup,
+but she is not sure that she has time to discuss the question whether
+life is worth living.
+
+Yet, I wonder; is there a single one among all these tired people, or
+even among the cynical people, who has not had some moment of awe when
+the thought came stabbing into his mind like a knife: "What a strange
+thing this life is! What am I anyhow? Where do I come from, and what is
+going to become of me? What do I mean, what am I here for?" I have sat
+chatting with three hoboes by a railroad track, cooking themselves a
+mulligan in an old can, and heard one of them say: "By God, it's a queer
+thing, ain't it, mate?" I have sat on the deck of a ship, looking out
+over the midnight ocean and talking with a sailor, and heard him use
+almost the identical words. It is not only in the class-room and the
+schools that the minds of men are grappling with the fundamental
+problems; in fact, it was not from the schools that the new religions
+and the great moral impulses of humanity took their origin. It was from
+lonely shepherds sitting on the hillsides, and from fishermen casting
+their nets, and from carpenters and tailors and shoemakers at their
+benches.
+
+Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a difference
+what you believe about life, how it comes to be, where it is going, and
+what is your place in it. Is there a heaven with a God, who watches you
+day and night, and knows every thought you think, and will some day take
+you to eternal bliss if you obey his laws? If you really believe that,
+you will try to find out about his laws, and you will be comparatively
+little concerned about the success or failure of your business. Perhaps,
+on the other hand, you have knocked about in the world and lost your
+"faith"; you have been cheated and exploited, and have set out to "get
+yours," as the phrase is; to "feather your own nest." But some gust of
+passion seizes you, and you waste your substance, you wreck your life;
+then you wonder, "Who set that trap and baited it? Am I a creature of
+blind instincts, jealousies and greeds and hates beyond my own control
+entirely? Am I a poor, feeble insect, blown about in a storm and
+smashed? Or do I make the storm, and can I in any part control it?"
+
+No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you may be, it will
+pay you to get such things straight: to know a little of what the wise
+men of the past have thought about them, and more especially what
+science with its new tools of knowledge may have discovered.
+
+The writer of this book spent nine years of his life in colleges and
+universities; also he was brought up in a church. So he knows the
+orthodox teachings, he can say that he has given to the recognized wise
+men of the world every opportunity to tell him what they know. Then,
+being dissatisfied, he went to the unrecognized teachers, the
+enthusiasts and the "cranks" of a hundred schools. Finally, he thought
+for himself; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself. As a
+result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or final truth; but
+he has what he might describe as a rough working draft, a practical
+outline, good for everyday purposes. He is going to have confidence
+enough in you, the reader, to give you the hardest part first; that is,
+to begin with the great fundamental questions. What is life, and how
+does it come to be? What does it mean, and what have we to do with it?
+Are we its masters or its slaves? What does it owe us, and what do we
+owe to it? Why is it so hard, and do we have to stand its hardness? And
+can we really know about all these matters, or will we be only guessing?
+Can we trust ourselves to think about them, or shall we be safer if we
+believe what we are told? Shall we be punished if we think wrong, and
+how shall we be punished? Shall we be rewarded if we think right, and
+will the pay be worth the trouble?
+
+Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the simplest
+language possible. I would avoid long words altogether, if I could; but
+some of these long words mean certain definite things, and there are no
+other words to serve the purpose. You do not refuse to engage in the
+automobile business because the carburetor and the differential are
+words of four syllables. Neither should you refuse to get yourself
+straight with the universe because it is too much trouble to go to the
+dictionary and learn that the word "phenomenon" means something else
+than a little boy who can play the piano or do long division in his
+head.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART ONE: THE BOOK OF THE MIND
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+CHAPTER I. THE NATURE OF LIFE                                          3
+
+Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the
+bounds of real truth as distinguished from phrases and
+self-deception.
+
+CHAPTER II. THE NATURE OF FAITH                                        8
+
+Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and
+what we know intuitively; what is implied in the process
+of thinking, and without which no thought could be.
+
+CHAPTER III. THE USE OF REASON                                        12
+
+Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies
+we are compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it.
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY                                    17
+
+Compares the ways of Nature with human morality, and
+tries to show how the latter came to be.
+
+CHAPTER V. NATURE AND MAN                                             21
+
+Attempts to show how man has taken control of Nature,
+and is carrying on her processes and improving upon them.
+
+CHAPTER VI. MAN THE REBEL                                             27
+
+Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason,
+in which man finds himself, and how he can advance to
+a securer condition.
+
+CHAPTER VII. MAKING OUR MORALS                                        31
+
+Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit
+human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human
+reason.
+
+CHAPTER VIII. THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION                                37
+
+Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of
+means to ends, and depends upon the understanding of a
+particular set of circumstances.
+
+CHAPTER IX. THE CHOOSING OF LIFE                                      42
+
+Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is
+best in life, and decide what we wish to make of it.
+
+CHAPTER X. MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR                                     50
+
+Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the
+relative importance of our various duties.
+
+CHAPTER XI. THE MIND AND THE BODY                                     53
+
+Discusses the interaction between physical and mental
+things, and the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed
+causes.
+
+CHAPTER XII. THE MIND OF THE BODY                                     61
+
+Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does
+to the body, and how it can be controlled and made use
+of by the intelligence.
+
+CHAPTER XIII. EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS                              67
+
+Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and
+other methods by which a new universe of life has been
+brought to human knowledge.
+
+CHAPTER XIV. THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY                               74
+
+Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point
+of view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling
+us to live forever?
+
+CHAPTER XV. THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL                                 81
+
+Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of
+spiritism thus put before us.
+
+CHAPTER XVI. THE POWERS OF THE MIND                                   91
+
+Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance
+is slavery, and what science means to the people.
+
+CHAPTER XVII. THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND                                 98
+
+Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to
+preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our
+lives and the lives of all men.
+
+
+PART TWO: THE BOOK OF THE BODY
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. THE UNITY OF THE BODY                                 105
+
+Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is
+not a matter of many different organs and functions, but
+is one problem of one organism.
+
+CHAPTER XIX. EXPERIMENTS IN DIET                                     115
+
+Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and
+his conclusions as to what to eat.
+
+CHAPTER XX. ERRORS IN DIET                                           123
+
+Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they
+play in the making of health and disease.
+
+CHAPTER XXI. DIET STANDARDS                                          134
+
+Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities
+we need, and their money cost.
+
+CHAPTER XXII. FOODS AND POISONS                                      145
+
+Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon
+the system of stimulants and narcotics.
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. MORE ABOUT HEALTH                                     156
+
+Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing,
+bathing and sleep.
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. WORK AND PLAY                                          163
+
+Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and
+the overworked.
+
+CHAPTER XXV. THE FASTING CURE                                        169
+
+Deals with Nature's own remedy for disease, and how to
+make use of it.
+
+CHAPTER XXVI. BREAKING THE FAST                                      177
+
+Discusses various methods of building up the body after
+a fast, especially the milk diet.
+
+CHAPTER XXVII. DISEASES AND CURES                                    182
+
+Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and
+what is known about their cause and cure.
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+THE BOOK OF THE MIND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE NATURE OF LIFE
+
+     (Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the bounds of
+     real truth as distinguished from phrases and self-deception.)
+
+
+If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what Life is. But
+unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The only consolation I can
+find is in the fact that nobody else knows either.
+
+We ask the churches, and they tell us that male and female created He
+them, and put them in the Garden of Eden, and they would have been happy
+had not Satan tempted them. But then you ask, who made Satan, and the
+explanation grows vague. You ask, if God made Satan, and knew what Satan
+was going to do, is it not the same as if God did it himself? So this
+explanation of the origin of evil gets you no further than the Hindoo
+picture of the world resting on the back of a tortoise, and the tortoise
+on the head of a snake--and nothing said as to what the snake rests on.
+
+Let us go to the scientist. I know a certain physiologist, perhaps the
+greatest in the world, and his eager face rises before me, and I hear
+his quick, impetuous voice declaring that he knows what Life is; he has
+told it in several big volumes, and all I have to do is to read them.
+Life is a tropism, caused by the presence of certain combinations of
+chemicals; my friend knows this, because he has produced the thing in
+his test-tubes. He is an exponent of a way of thought called Monism,
+which finds the ultimate source of being in forms of energy manifesting
+themselves as matter; he shows how all living things arise from that and
+sink back into it.
+
+But question this scientist more closely. What is this "matter" that you
+are so sure of? How do you know it? Obviously, through sensations. You
+never know matter itself, you only know its effects upon you, and you
+assume that the matter must be there to cause the sensation. In other
+words, "matter," which seems so real, turns out to be merely "a
+permanent possibility of sensation." And suppose there were to be
+sensations, caused, for example, by a sportive demon who liked to make
+fun of eminent physiologists--then there might be the appearance of
+matter and nothing else; in other words, there might be mind, and
+various states of mind. So we discover that the materialist, in the
+philosophic sense, is making just as large an act of faith, is
+pronouncing just as bold a dogma as any priest of any religion.
+
+This is an old-time topic of disputation. Before Mother Eddy there was
+Bishop Berkeley, and before Berkeley, there was Plato, and they and the
+materialists disputed until their hearers cried in despair, "What is
+Mind? No matter! What is Matter? Never mind!" But a century or two ago
+in a town of Prussia there lived a little, dried-up professor of
+philosophy, who sat himself down in his room and fixed his eyes on a
+church steeple outside the window, and for years on end devoted himself
+to examining the tools of thought with which the human mind is provided,
+and deciding just what work and how much of it they are fitted to do. So
+came the proof that our minds are incapable of reaching to or dealing
+with any ultimate reality whatever, but can comprehend only
+phenomena--that is to say, appearances--and their relations one with
+another. The Koenigsberg professor proved this once for all time,
+setting forth four propositions about ultimate reality, and proving them
+by exact and irrefutable logic, and then proving by equally exact and
+irrefutable logic their precise opposites and contraries. Anybody who
+has read and comprehended the four "antinomies" of Immanuel Kant[A]
+knows that metaphysics is as dead a subject as astrology, and that all
+the complicated theories which the philosophers from Heraclitus to
+Arthur Balfour have spun like spiders out of their inner consciousness,
+have no more relation to reality than the intricacies of the game of
+chess.
+
+     [A] See Paulsen: "Life of Kant."
+
+The writer is sorry to make this statement, because he spent a lot of
+time reading these philosophers and acquainting himself with their
+subtle theories. He learned a whole language of long words, and even the
+special meanings which each philosopher or school of philosophers give
+to them. When he had got through, he had learned, so far as metaphysics
+is concerned, absolutely nothing, and had merely the job of clearing out
+of his mind great masses of verbal cobwebs. It was not even good
+intellectual training; the metaphysical method of thought is a _trap_.
+The person who thinks in absolutes and ultimates is led to believe that
+he has come to conclusions about reality, when as a matter of fact he
+has merely proved what he wants to believe; if he had wanted to believe
+the opposite, he could have proven that exactly as well--as his
+opponents will at once demonstrate.
+
+If you multiply two feet by two feet, the result represents a plain
+surface, or figure of two dimensions. If you multiply two feet by two
+feet by two feet, you have a solid, or figure of three dimensions--such
+as the world in which we live and move. But now, suppose you multiply
+two feet by two feet by two feet by two feet, what does that represent?
+For ages the minds of mathematicians and philosophers have been tempted
+by this fascinating problem of the "fourth dimension." They have worked
+out by analogy what such a world would be like. If you went into this
+"fourth dimension," you could turn yourself inside out, and come back to
+our present world in that condition, and no one of your three-dimension
+friends would be able to imagine how you had managed it, or to put you
+back again the way you belonged. And in this, it seems to me, we have
+the perfect analogy of metaphysical thinking. It is the "fourth
+dimension" of the mind, and plays as much havoc with sound thinking as a
+physical "fourth dimension" would play with--say, the prison system. A
+man who takes up an absolute--God, immortality, the origin of being, a
+first cause, free will, absolute right or wrong, infinite time or space,
+final truth, original substance, the "thing in itself"--that man
+disappears into a fourth dimension, and turns himself inside out or
+upside down or hindside foremost, and comes back and exhibits himself in
+triumph; then, when he is ready, he effects another disappearance, and
+another change, and is back on earth an ordinary human being.
+
+The world is full of schools of thought, theologians and metaphysicians
+and professors of academic philosophy, transcendentalists and
+theosophists and Christian Scientists, who perform such mental
+monkey-shines continuously before our eyes. They prove what they please,
+and the fact that no two of them prove the same thing makes clear to us
+in the end that none of them has proved anything. The Christian
+Scientist asserts that there is no such thing as matter, but that pain
+is merely a delusion of mortal mind; he continues serene in this faith
+until he runs into an automobile and sustains a compound fracture of
+the femur--whereupon he does exactly what any of the rest of us do, goes
+to a competent surgeon and has the bone set. On the other hand, some
+devoted young Socialists of my acquaintance have read Haeckel and
+Dietzgen, and adopted the dogma that matter is the first cause, and that
+all things have grown out of it and return to it; they have seen that
+the brain decays after death, they declare that the soul is a function
+of the brain--and because of such theories they deliberately reject the
+most powerful modes of appeal whereby men can be swayed to faith in
+human solidarity.
+
+The best books I know for the sweeping out of metaphysical cobwebs are
+"The Philosophy of Common Sense" and "The Creed of a Layman," by
+Frederic Harrison, leader of the English Positivists, a school of
+thought established by Auguste Comte. But even as I recommend these
+books, I recall the dissatisfaction with which I left them; for it
+appears that the Positivists have their dogmas like all the rest. Mr.
+Harrison is not content to say that mankind has not the mental tools for
+dealing with ultimate realities; he must needs prove that mankind never
+will and never can have these tools, I look back upon the long process
+of evolution and ask myself, What would an oyster think about
+Positivism? What would be the opinion of, let us say, a young turnip on
+the subject of Mr. Frederic Harrison's thesis? It may well be that the
+difference between a turnip and Mr. Harrison is not so great as will be
+the difference between Mr. Harrison and that super-race which some day
+takes possession of the earth and of all the universe. It does not seem
+to me good science or good sense to dogmatize about what this race will
+know, or what will be its tools of thought. What does seem to me good
+science and good sense is to take the tools which we now possess and use
+them to their utmost capacity.
+
+What is it that we know about life? We know a seemingly endless stream
+of sensations which manifest themselves in certain ways, and seem to
+inhere in what we call things and beings. We observe incessant change in
+all these phenomena, and we examine these changes and discover their
+ways. The ways seem to be invariable; so completely so that for
+practical purposes we assume them to be invariable, and base all our
+calculations and actions upon this assumption. Manifestly, we could not
+live otherwise, and the spread of scientific knowledge is the further
+tracing out of such "laws"--that is to say, the ways of behaving of
+existence--and the extending of our belief in their invariability to
+wider and wider fields.
+
+Once upon a time we were told that "the wind bloweth where it listeth."
+But now we are quite certain that there are causes for the blowing of
+the wind, and when our researches have been carried far enough, we shall
+be able to account for and to predict every smallest breath of air. Once
+we were told that dreams came from a supernatural world; but now we are
+beginning to analyze dreams, and to explain what they come from and what
+they mean. Perhaps we still find human nature a bewildering and
+unaccountable thing; but some day we shall know enough of man's body and
+his mind, his past and his present, to be able to explain human nature
+and to produce it at will, precisely as today we produce certain
+reactions in our test-tubes, and do it so invariably that the most
+cautious financier will invest tens of millions of dollars in a process,
+and never once reflect that he is putting too much trust in the
+permanence of nature.
+
+In many departments of thought great specialists are now working,
+experimenting and observing by the methods of science. If in the course
+of this book we speak of "certainty," we mean, of course, not the
+"absolute" certainty of any metaphysical dogma, but the practical
+certainty of everyday common sense; the certainty we feel that eating
+food will satisfy our hunger, and that tomorrow, as today, two and two
+will continue to make four.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE NATURE OF FAITH
+
+     (Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and what we know
+     intuitively; what is implied in the process of thinking, and
+     without which no thought could be.)
+
+
+The primary fact that we know about life is growth. Herbert Spencer has
+defined this growth, or evolution, in a string of long words which may
+be summed up to mean: the process whereby a number of things which are
+simple and like one another become different parts of one thing which is
+complex. If we observe this process in ourselves, and the symptoms of it
+in others, we discover that when it is proceeding successfully, it is
+accompanied by a sensation of satisfaction which we call happiness or
+pleasure; also that when it is thwarted or repressed, it is accompanied
+by a different sensation which we call pain. Subtle metaphysicians, both
+inside the churches and out, have set themselves to the task of proving
+that there must be some other object of life than the continuance of
+these sensations of pleasure which accompany successful growth. They
+have proven to their own satisfaction that morality will collapse and
+human progress come to an end unless we can find some other motive,
+something more permanent and more stimulating, something "higher," as
+they phrase it. All I can say is that I gave reverent attention to the
+arguments of these moralists and theologians, and that for many years I
+believed their doctrines; but I believe them no longer.
+
+I interpret the purpose of life to be the continuous unfoldment of its
+powers, its growth into higher forms--that is to say, forms more complex
+and subtly contrived, capable of more intense and enduring kinds of that
+satisfaction which is nature's warrant of life. If you wish to take up
+this statement and argue about it, please wait until you have read the
+chapter "Nature and Man," and noted my distinction between instinctive
+life and rational life. For men, the word "growth" does not mean _any_
+growth, _all_ growth, blind and indiscriminate growth. It does not mean
+growth for the tubercle bacillus, nor growth for the anopheles mosquito,
+nor growth for the house-fly, the spider and the louse. Neither do we
+mean that the purpose of man's own life is _any_ pleasure, _all_
+pleasure, blind and indiscriminate pleasure; the pleasure of alcohol,
+the pleasure of cannibalism, the pleasure of the modern form of
+cannibalism which we call "making money." We have survived in the
+struggle for existence by the cooperative and social use of our powers
+of judgment; and our judgment is that which selects among forms of
+growth, which gives preference to wheat and corn over weeds, and to
+self-control and honesty over treachery and greed.
+
+So when we say that the purpose of life is happiness, we do not mean to
+turn mankind loose at a hog-trough; we mean that our duty as thinkers is
+to watch life, to test it, to pick and choose among the many forms it
+offers, and to say: This kind of growth is more permanent and full of
+promise, it is more fertile, more deeply satisfactory; therefore, we
+choose this, and sanction the kind of pleasure which it brings. Other
+kinds we decide are temporary and delusive; therefore we put in jail
+anyone who sells alcoholic drink, and we refuse to invite to our home
+people who are lewd, and some day we shall not permit our children to
+attend moving picture shows in which the modern form of cannibalism is
+glorified.
+
+The reader, no doubt, has been taught a distinction between "science"
+and "faith." He is saying now, "You believe that everything is to be
+determined by human reason? You reject all faith?" I answer, No; I am
+not rejecting faith; I am merely refusing to apply it to objects with
+which it has nothing to do. You do not take it as a matter of faith that
+a package of sugar weighs a pound; you put it on the scales and find
+out--in other words, you make it a matter of experiment. But all the
+creeds of all the religious sects are full of pronouncements which are
+no more matters of faith than the question of the weighing of sugar. Is
+pork a wholesome article of food or is it not? All Christians will
+readily acknowledge that this is a matter to be determined by the
+microscope and other devices of experimental science; but then some Jew
+rises in the meeting and puts the question: Is dancing injurious to the
+character? And immediately all members of the Methodist Episcopal Church
+vote to close the discussion.
+
+What is faith? Faith is the instinct which underlies all being, assuring
+us that life is worth while and honest, a thing to be trusted; in other
+words, it is the certainty that successful growth always is and always
+will be accompanied by pleasure. The most skeptical scientist in the
+world, even my friend the physiologist who proves that life is nothing
+but a tropism, and can be produced by mixing chemicals in
+test-tubes--this eager friend is one of the most faithful men I know. He
+is burning up with the faith that knowledge is worth possessing, and
+also that it is possible of attainment. With what boundless scorn would
+he receive any suggestion to the contrary--for example, the idea that
+life might be a series of sensations which some sportive demon is
+producing for the torment of man! More than that, this friend is burning
+up with the certainty that knowledge can be spread, that his fellow men
+will receive it and apply it, and that it will make them happy when they
+do. Why else does he write his learned books in defense of the
+materialist philosophy?
+
+And that same faith which animates the great monist animates likewise
+every child who toddles off to school, and every chicken which emerges
+from an egg, and every blade of grass which thrusts its head above the
+ground. Not every chicken survives, of course, and all the blades of
+grass wither in the fall; nevertheless, the seeds of grass are spread,
+and chickens make food for philosophers, and the great process of life
+continues to manifest its faith. In the end the life process produces
+man, who, as we shall presently see, takes it up, and judges it, and
+makes it over to suit himself.
+
+You will note from this that I am what is called an optimist; whereas
+some of the great philosophers of the world have called themselves
+pessimists. But I notice with a smile that these are often the men who
+work hardest of all to spread their ideas, and thus testify to the
+worthwhileness of truth and the perfectibility of mankind. There has
+come to be a saying among settlement workers and physicians, who are
+familiar with poverty and its effects upon life, that there are no bad
+babies and good babies, there are only sick babies and well babies. In
+the same way, I would say there are no pessimists and optimists, there
+are only mentally sick people and mentally well people. Everywhere
+throughout life, both animal and vegetable, health means happiness, and
+gives abundant evidence of that fact. All healthy life is satisfactory
+to itself; when it develops reason, it tries to find out why, and this
+is yet another testimony to the fact that having power and using it is
+pleasant. When I was in college the professor would propound the old
+question: "Would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy philosopher?"
+My answer always was: "I would rather be a happy philosopher." The
+professor replied: "Perhaps that is not possible." But I said: "I will
+prove that it is!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE USE OF REASON
+
+     (Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies we are
+     compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it.)
+
+
+The great majority of people are brought up to believe that some
+particular set of dogmas are objects of faith, and that there are
+penalties more or less severe for the application of reason to these
+dogmas. What particular set it happens to be is a matter of geography;
+in a crowded modern city like New York, it is a matter of the particular
+block on which the child is born. A child born on Hester Street will be
+taught that his welfare depends upon his never eating meat and butter
+from the same dish. A child born on Tenth Avenue will be taught that it
+is a matter of his not eating meat on Fridays. A child born on Madison
+Avenue will be taught that it is a question of the precise metaphysical
+process by which bread is changed into human body and wine into human
+blood. Each of these children will be assured that his human reason is
+fallible, that it is extremely dangerous to apply it to this "sacred"
+subject, and that the proper thing to do is to accept the authority of
+some ancient tradition, or some institution, or some official, or some
+book for which a special sanction is claimed.
+
+Has there ever been in the world any revelation, outside of or above
+human reason? Could there ever be such a thing? In order to test this
+possibility, select for yourself the most convincing way by which a
+special revelation could be handed down to mankind. Take any of the
+ancient orthodox ways, the finding of graven tablets on a mountain-top,
+or a voice speaking from a burning bush, or an angel appearing before a
+great concourse of people and handing out a written scroll. Suppose that
+were to happen, let us say, at the next Yale-Harvard football game;
+suppose the news were to be flashed to the ends of the earth that God
+had thus presented to mankind an entirely new religion. What would be
+the process by which the people of London or Calcutta would decide upon
+that revelation? First, they would have to consider the question
+whether it was an American newspaper fake--by no means an easy question.
+Second, they would have to consider the chances of its being an optical
+delusion. Then, assuming they accepted the sworn testimony of ten
+thousand mature and competent witnesses, they would have to consider the
+possibility of someone having invented a new kind of invisible
+aeroplane. Assuming they were convinced that it was really a
+supernatural being, they would next have to decide the chances of its
+being a visitor from Mars, or from the fourth dimension of space, or
+from the devil. In considering all this, they would necessarily have to
+examine the alleged revelation. What was the literary quality of it?
+What was the moral quality of it? What would be the effect upon mankind
+if the alleged revelation were to be universally adopted and applied?
+
+Manifestly, all these are questions for the human reason, the human
+judgment; there is no other method of determining them, there would be
+nothing for any individual person, or for men as a whole to do, except
+to apply their best powers, and, as the phrase is, "make up their minds"
+about the matter. Reason would be the judge, and the new revelation
+would be the prisoner at the bar. Humanity might say, this is a real
+inspiration, we will submit ourselves to it and follow it, and allow no
+one from now on to question it. But inevitably there would be some who
+would say, "Tommyrot!" There would be others who would say, "This new
+revelation isn't working, it is repressing progress, it is stifling the
+mind." These people would stand up for their conviction, they would
+become martyrs, and all the world would have to discuss them. And who
+would decide between them and the great mass of men? Reason, the judge,
+would decide.
+
+It is perfectly true that human reason is fallible. Infallibility is an
+absolute, a concept of the mind, and not a reality. Life has not given
+us infallibility, any more than it has given us omniscience, or
+omnipotence, or any other of those attributes which we call divine. Life
+has given us powers, more or less weak, more or less strong, but all
+capable of improvement and development. Reason is the tool whereby
+mankind has won supremacy over the rest of the animal kingdom, and is
+gradually taking control of the forces of nature. It is the best tool we
+have, and because it is the best, we are driven irresistibly to use it.
+And how strange that some of us can find no better use for it than to
+destroy its own self! Visit one of the Jesuit fathers and hear him seek
+to persuade you that reason is powerless against faith and must abdicate
+to faith. You answer, "Yes, father, you have persuaded me. I admit the
+fallibility of my mortal powers; and I begin by applying my doubts of
+them to the arguments by which you have just convinced me. I was
+convinced, but of course I cannot be sure of a conviction, attained by
+fallible reason. Therefore I am just where I was before--except that I
+am no longer in position to be certain of anything."
+
+You answer in good faith, and take up your hat and depart, closing the
+door of the good father's study behind you. But stop a moment, why do
+you close the door? You close the door because your reason tells you
+that otherwise the cold air outside will blow in and make the good
+father uncomfortable. You put your hat on, because your reason has not
+yet been applied to the problem of the cause of baldness. You step out
+onto the street, and when you hear a sudden noise, you step back onto
+the curbstone, because your reason tells you that an automobile is
+coming, and that on the sidewalk you are safe from it. So you go on,
+using your reason in a million acts of your life whereby your life is
+preserved and developed. And if anybody suggested that the fallibility
+of your reason should cause you to delay in front of an automobile, you
+would apply your reason to the problem of that person and decide that he
+was insane. And I say that just as there is insanity in everyday
+judgments and relationships, so there is insanity in philosophy,
+metaphysics and religion; the seed and source of all this kind of
+insanity being the notion that it is the duty of anybody to believe
+anything which cannot completely justify itself as reasonable.
+
+Nowadays, as ideas are spreading, the champions of dogma are hard put to
+it, and you will find their minds a muddle of two points of view. The
+Jewish rabbi will strive desperately to think of some hygienic objection
+to the presence of meat and butter on the same plate; the Catholic
+priest will tell you that fish is a very wholesome article of food, and
+that anyhow we all eat too much; the Methodist and the Baptist and the
+Presbyterian will tell you that if men did not rest one day in seven
+their health would break down. Thus they justify faith by reason, and
+reconcile the conflict between science and theology. Accepting this
+method, I experiment and learn that it improves my digestion and adds to
+my working power if I play tennis on Sunday. I follow this indisputably
+rational form of conduct--and find myself in conflict with the "faith"
+of the ancient State of Delaware, which obliges me to serve a term in
+its state's prison for having innocently and unwittingly desecrated its
+day of holiness!
+
+If you read Professor Bury's little book, "A History of Freedom of
+Thought," you will discover that there has been a long conflict over the
+right of men to use their minds--and the victory is not yet. The term
+"free thinker," which ought to be the highest badge a man could wear, is
+still almost everywhere throughout America a term of vague terror. In
+the State of California today there is a Criminal Syndicalism Act, which
+provides a maximum of fourteen years in jail for any person who shall
+write or publish or speak any words expressive of the idea that the
+United States government should be overthrown in the same way that it
+was established--that is, by force; only a few months ago the writer of
+this book was on the witness stand for two days, and had the painful,
+almost incredible experience of being battered and knocked about by an
+inquisitive district attorney, who cross-examined him as to every detail
+of his beliefs, and read garbled extracts from his published writings,
+in the effort to make it appear that he held some belief which might
+possibly prejudice the jury against him. The defendant in this case, a
+returned soldier who had spent three years as a volunteer in the
+trenches, and had been twice wounded and once gassed, was accused, not
+merely of approving the Soviet form of government, but also of having
+printed uncomplimentary references to priests and religious
+institutions.
+
+Nowadays it is the propertied class which has taken possession of the
+powers of government, and which presumes to censor the thinking of
+mankind in its own interest. But whether it be priestcraft or whether it
+be capitalism which seeks to bind the human mind, it comes to the same
+thing, and the effort must be met by the assertion that, in spite of
+errors and blunders, and the serious harm these may do, there is no way
+for men to advance save by using the best powers of thinking they
+possess, and proclaiming their conclusions to others. Speaking
+theologically for the moment, God has given us our reasoning powers, and
+also the impulse to use them, and it is inconceivable that He should
+seek to restrict their use, or should give to anyone the power to forbid
+their use. It is His truth which we seek, and His which we proclaim. In
+so doing we perform our highest act of faith, and we refuse to be
+troubled by the idea that for this service He will reward us by an
+eternity of sulphur and brimstone.
+
+Throughout the remainder of this book it will be assumed that the reader
+accepts this point of view, or, at any rate, that he is willing for
+purposes of experiment to give it a trial and see where it leads him. We
+shall proceed to consider the problems of human life in the light of
+reason, to determine how they come to be, and how they can be solved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
+
+     (Compares the ways of nature with human morality, and tries to show
+     how the latter came to be.)
+
+
+Seventy years ago Charles Darwin published his book, "The Origin of
+Species," in which he defied the theological dogma of his time by the
+shocking idea that life had evolved by many stages of progress from the
+diatom to man. This of course did not conform to the story of the Garden
+of Eden, and so "Darwinism" was fought as an invention of the devil, and
+in the interior of America there are numerous sectarian colleges where
+the dread term "evolution" is spoken in awed whispers. Only the other
+day I read in my newspaper the triumphant proclamation of some clergyman
+that "Darwinism" had been overthrown. This reverend gentleman had got
+mixed up because some biologists were disputing some detail of the
+method by which the evolution of species had been brought about. Do
+species change by the gradual elimination of the unfit, or do they
+change by sudden leaps, the "mutation" theory of de Vries? Are acquired
+powers transmitted to posterity, or is the germ plasm unaffected by its
+environment? Concerning such questions the scientists debate. But the
+fact that life has evolved in an ordered series from the lower forms to
+the higher, and that each individual reproduces in embryo and in infancy
+the history of this long process--these facts are now the basis of all
+modern thinking, and as generally accepted as the rotation of the earth.
+
+You may study this process of evolution from the outside, in the
+multitude of forms which it has assumed and in their reactions one to
+another; or you may study it from the inside in your own soul, the
+emotions which accompany it, the impulse or craving which impels it, the
+_elan vital_, as it is called by the French philosopher Bergson. The
+Christians call it love, and Nietzsche, who hated Christianity, called
+it "the will to power," and persuaded himself that it was the opposite
+of love.
+
+You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one entitled
+"Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the complete unmorality
+of nature, and declares that there is no way by which what mankind knows
+as morality can have originated in the process of nature or can be
+reconciled to natural law. This statement, coming from a leading
+agnostic, was welcome to the theologians. But when I first read the
+essay, as a student of sixteen, it seemed to me narrow; I thought I saw
+a standpoint from which the contradiction disappeared. The difference
+between the morality of Christ and the morality of nature is merely the
+difference between a lower and a higher stage of mental development. The
+animal loves and seeks by instinct to preserve the life which it
+knows--that is to say, its own life and the life of its young. The wolf
+knows nothing about the feelings of a deer; but man in his savage state
+develops reasoning powers enough to realize that there are others like
+himself, the members of his own tribe, and he makes for himself taboos
+which forbid him to kill and eat the members of that tribe. At the
+present time humanity has developed its reason and imaginative sympathy
+to include in the "tribe" one or two hundred million people; while to
+those outside the tribe it still preserves the attitude of the wolf.
+
+How came it that a mind so acute as Huxley's went so far astray on the
+question of the evolution of morality? The answer is that this was the
+factory age in England, and the great scientist, a rebel in theological
+matters, was in economics a child of his time. We find him using the
+formulas of bourgeois biology to ridicule Henry George and his plea for
+the freeing of the land. "Competition is the life of trade," ran the
+nineteenth century slogan; and competition was the god of nineteenth
+century biology. Tennyson summed it up in the phrase: "Nature red in
+tooth and claw with ravin;" and this was found convenient by Manchester
+manufacturers who wished to shut little children up for fourteen hours a
+day in cotton mills, and to harness women to drag cars in the coal
+mines, and to be told by the learned men of their colleges and the holy
+men of their churches that this was "the survival of the fittest," it
+was nature's way of securing the advancement of the race.
+
+But now we are preparing for an era of cooperation, and it occurs to our
+men of science to go back to nature and find out what really are her
+ways. If you will read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in
+Evolution," you will find a complete refutation of the old bourgeois
+biology, and a view of nature which reveals in it the germs of human
+morality. Kropotkin points out that everywhere throughout nature it is
+the social and not the solitary animals which are most numerous and most
+successful. There are many millions of ants and bees for every hawk or
+eagle, and certainly in the state of nature there were thousands of deer
+for every lion or tiger that preyed upon them. And all these social
+creatures have their ways of being, which it requires no stress of the
+imagination to compare with the tribal customs and the moral codes of
+mankind. The different animals prey upon one another, but they do not
+prey upon their own species, except in a few rare cases. The only beast
+that makes a regular practice of exploiting his own kind is man.
+
+By hundreds of interesting illustrations Kropotkin shows that mutual aid
+and mutual self-protection are the means whereby the higher forms of
+being have been evolved. Insects and birds and fish, nearly all the
+herbivorous mammals, and even a great many of the carnivores, help one
+another and protect one another. The chattering monkeys in the treetops
+drove out the saber-tooth tiger from the grove because there were so
+many of them, and when they saw him they all set up a shriek and clamor
+which deafened and confused him. And when by and by these monkeys
+developed an opposed thumb, and broke off a branch of a tree for a club,
+and fastened a sharp stone on the end of it for an axe, and fell upon
+the saber-toothed tiger and exterminated him, they did it because they
+had learned solidarity--even as the workers of the world are today
+learning solidarity in the face of the beast of capitalism.
+
+Man has survived by the cunning of his brain, we are told, and that is
+true. But first among the products of that cunning brain has been the
+knowledge that by himself he is the most helpless and pitiful of
+creatures, while standing together and forming societies and developing
+moralities, he is master of the world. He has not yet learned that
+lesson entirely; he has learned it only for his own nation. Therefore he
+takes the highest skill of his hand and the subtlest wit of his brain,
+and uses them to manufacture poison gases. At the present hour he is
+painfully realizing that his poison formulas all become known to the
+tribes whom he calls his enemies, and so it is his own destruction he is
+engaged in contriving. In other words, man has come to a time when his
+mechanical skill, his mastery over the forces of nature, has developed
+more rapidly than his moral sense and his imaginative sympathy. His
+ability to destroy life has become dangerously greater than his desire
+to preserve it. So he confronts the fair face of nature as an insane
+creature, wrecking not merely everything that he himself has built up,
+but everything that nature has built in the ages before him. He is
+striving now with infinite agony to make this fact real to himself, and
+to mend his evil ways; and the first step in that process is to root out
+from his mind the devil's doctrine which in his blindness and greed he
+has himself implanted, that there is any way for him to find real
+happiness, or to make any worth while progress on this earth, by the
+method of inflicting misery and torment upon his fellow men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NATURE AND MAN
+
+     (Attempts to show how man has taken control of nature, and is
+     carrying on her processes and improving upon them.)
+
+
+If the argument of the preceding chapter is sound, human morality is not
+a fixed and eternal set of laws, but is, like everything else in the
+world, a product of natural evolution. We can trace the history of it,
+just as we trace the story of the rocks. It is not a mysterious or
+supernatural thing, it is simply the reaction of man to his environment,
+and more especially to his fellow men. The source of it is that same
+inner impulse, that love of life, that joy in growing, that faith which
+appears to be the soul of all being.
+
+Man is a part of nature and a product of nature; in many fundamental
+respects his ways are still nature's ways and his laws still nature's
+laws. But there are other and even more significant ways in which man
+has separated himself from nature and made himself something quite
+different. In order to reveal this clearly, we draw a distinction
+between nature and man. This is a proper thing to do, provided we bear
+in mind that our classification is not permanent or final. We
+distinguish frogs from tadpoles, in spite of the fact that at one stage
+the creature is half tadpole and half frog. We distinguish the animal
+from the vegetable kingdom, despite the fact that in their lower forms
+they cannot be distinguished.
+
+What, precisely, is the difference between nature and man? The
+difference lies in the fact that nature is apparently blind in her
+processes; she produces a million eggs in order to give life to one
+salmon, she produces countless millions of salmon to be devoured by
+other fish apparently no better than salmon. Poets may take up the
+doctrine of evolution and dress it out in theological garments, talking
+about the "one far off divine event towards which the whole creation
+moves," but for all we can see, nature, apart from man, is just as well
+satisfied to move in circles, and to come back exactly where she
+started. Nature made a whole world of complicated creatures in the
+steamy, luke-warm swamps of the Mesozoic era, and then, as if deciding
+that the pattern of a large body and a small brain was not a success,
+she froze them all to death with a glacial epoch, and we have nothing
+but the bones to tell us about them.
+
+No one understands anything about evolution until he has realized that
+the phrase "the survival of the fittest" does not mean the survival of
+the best from any human point of view. It merely means the survival of
+those capable of surviving in some particular environment. We consider
+our present civilization as "fit"; but if astronomical changes should
+cause another ice age, we should discover that our "fitness" depended
+upon our ability to live on lichens, or on something we could grow by
+artificial light in the bowels of the earth.
+
+So much for our ancient mother, nature. But now--whether we say with the
+theologians that it was divine providence, or with the materialist
+philosophers that it was an accidental mixing of atoms--at any rate it
+has come about that nature has recently produced creatures who are
+conscious of her process, who are able to observe and criticize it, to
+take up her work and carry it on in their own way, for better or for
+worse. Whether by accident or design, there has been on parts of our
+planet such a combination of climate and soil as has brought into being
+a new product of nature, a heightened form of life which we call
+"intelligence." Creation opens its eyes, and beholds the work of the
+creator, and decides that it is good--yet not so good as it might be!
+Creation takes up the work of the creator, and continues it, in many
+respects annulling it, in other respects revising it entirely. Whether a
+sonnet is a better or a higher product than a spider is a question it
+would be futile to discuss; but this, at least, should be clear--nature
+has produced an infinity of spiders, but nature never produced a sonnet,
+nor anything resembling it.
+
+Man, the creature of God, takes over the functions of God. This fact may
+shock us, or it may inspire us; to the metaphysically minded it offers a
+great variety of fascinating problems. Can it be that God is in process
+of becoming, that there is no God until he has become, in us and through
+us? H. G. Wells sets forth this curious idea; and then, of course, the
+bishops and the clergy rise up in indignation and denounce Mr. Wells as
+an upstart and trespasser upon their field. They have been worshipping
+their God for some three or four thousand years, and know that He has
+been from eternity; He created the world at His will, and how shall
+impious man presume to rise up and criticize His product, and imagine
+that he can improve upon it? Man, with his cheap and silly little toys,
+his sonnets and scientific systems, his symphony concerts and such pale
+imitations of celestial harmonies!
+
+Mr. Wells, in his character of God in the making, has created a bishop
+of his own, and no doubt would maintain the thesis that he is a far
+better bishop than any created by the God of the Anglican churches. We
+will leave Mr. Wells' bishop to argue these problems with God's bishops,
+and will merely remind the reader of our warning about these
+metaphysical matters. You can prove anything and everything, whichever
+and however, all or both; and discussions of the subject are merely your
+enunciation of the fact that you have your private truth as you want it.
+It may be that there is an Infinite Consciousness, which carries the
+whole process of creation in itself, and that all the seeming wastes and
+blunders of nature can be explained from some point of view at present
+beyond the reach of our minds. On the other hand it may be that
+consciousness is now dawning in the universe for the first time. It may
+be that it is an accident, a fleeting product like the morning mist on
+the mountain top. On the other hand, it may be that it is destined to
+grow and expand and take control of the entire universe, as a farmer
+takes control of a field for his own purposes. It may be that just as
+our individual fragments of intelligence communicate and merge into a
+family, a club, a nation, a world culture, so we shall some day grope
+our way toward the consciousness of other planets, or of other states of
+being subsisting on this planet unknown to us, or perhaps even toward
+the cosmic soul, the universal consciousness which we call God.
+
+But meantime, all we can say with positiveness is this: man, the
+created, is becoming the creator. He is taking up the world purpose, he
+is imposing upon it new purposes of his own, he is attempting to impose
+upon it a moral code, to test it and discipline it by a new standard
+which he calls economy. To the present writer this seems the most
+significant fact about life, the most fascinating point of view from
+which life can be regarded. The reader who wishes to follow it into
+greater detail is referred to a little book by Professor E. Ray
+Lankester, "The Kingdom of Man"; especially the opening essay, with its
+fascinating title, "Nature's Insurgent Son."
+
+In what ways have the reasoned and deliberate purposes of man revised
+and even supplanted the processes of nature? The ways are so many that
+it would be easier to mention those in which he has not done so. A
+modern civilized man is hardly content with anything that nature does,
+nor willing to accept any of nature's products. He will not eat nature's
+fruits, he prefers the kinds that he himself has brought into being. He
+is not content with the skin that nature has given him; he has made
+himself an infinite variety of complicated coverings. He objects to
+nature's habit of pouring cold water upon him, and so he has built
+himself houses in which he makes his own climate; he has recently taken
+to creating for himself houses which roll along the ground, or which fly
+through the air, or which swim under the surface of the sea; so he
+carries his private climate with him to all these places. It was
+nature's custom to remove her blunders and her experiments quickly from
+her sight. But man has decided that he loves life so well that he will
+preserve even the imbeciles, the lame and the halt and the blind. In a
+state of nature, if a man's eyes were not properly focused, he blundered
+into the lair of a tiger and was eaten. But civilized man despises such
+a method of maintaining the standard of human eyes; he creates for
+himself a transparent product, ground to such a curve that it corrects
+the focus of his eyes, and makes them as good as any other eyes. In ten
+thousand such ways we might name, man has rebelled against the harshness
+of his ancient mother, and has freed himself from her control.
+
+But still he is the child of his mother, and so it is his way to act
+first, and then to realize what he has done. So it comes about that very
+few, even of the most highly educated men, are aware how completely the
+ancient ways of nature have been suppressed by her "insurgent son." It
+is a good deal as in the various trades and professions which have
+developed with such amazing rapidity in modern civilization; the paper
+man knows how to make paper, the shoe man knows how to make shoes, the
+optician knows about grinding glasses, but none of these knows very much
+about the others' specialties, and has no realization of how far the
+other has gone. So it comes about that in our colleges we are still
+teaching ancient and immutable "laws of nature," which in the actual
+practice of men at work are as extinct and forgotten as the dodo. In all
+colleges, except a few which have been tainted by Socialist thought,
+the students are solemnly learning the so-called "Malthusian law," that
+population presses continually upon the limits of subsistence, there are
+always a few more people in every part of the world than that part of
+the world is able to maintain. At any time we increase the world's
+productive powers, population will increase correspondingly, so there
+can never be an end to human misery, and abortion, war and famine are
+simply nature's eternal methods of adjusting man to his environment.
+
+Thus solemnly we are taught in the colleges. And yet, nine out of ten of
+the students come from homes where the parents have discovered the
+modern practice of birth control; all the students are themselves
+finding out about it in one way or another, and will proceed when they
+marry to restrict themselves to two or three children. In vain will the
+ghost of their favorite statesman and hero, Theodore Roosevelt, be
+traveling up and down the land, denouncing them for the dreadful crime
+of "race suicide"--that is to say, their presuming to use their reason
+to put an end to the ghastly situation revealed by the Malthusian law,
+over-population eternally recurring and checked by abortion, war and
+famine! In vain will the ghost of their favorite saint and moralist,
+Anthony Comstock, be traveling up and down the land, putting people in
+jail for daring to teach to poor women what every rich woman knows, and
+for attempting to change the entirely man-made state of affairs whereby
+an intelligent and self-governing Anglo-Saxon land is being in two or
+three generations turned over to a slum population of Italians, Poles,
+Hungarians, Portuguese, French-Canadians, Mexicans and Japanese!
+
+Likewise in every orthodox college the student is taught what his
+professors are pleased to call "the law of diminishing returns of
+agriculture." That is to say, additional labor expended upon a plot of
+land does not result in an equal increase of produce, and the increase
+grows less, until finally you come to a time when no matter how much
+labor you expend, you can get no more produce from that plot of land.
+All professors teach this, because fifty years ago it was true, and
+since that time it has not occurred to any professor of political
+science to visit a farm. And all the while, out in the suburbs of the
+city where the college is located, market gardeners are practicing on an
+enormous scale a new system of intensive agriculture which makes the
+"law of diminishing returns" a foolish joke.
+
+As Kropotkin shows in his book, "Fields, Factories and Workshops," the
+modern intensive gardener, by use of glass and the chemical test-tube,
+has developed an entirely new science of plant raising. He is
+independent of climate, he makes his own climate; he is independent of
+the defects of the soil, he would just as soon start from nothing and
+make his soil upon an asphalt pavement. By doubling his capital
+investment he raises, not twice as much produce, but ten times as much.
+If his methods were applied to the British Isles, he could raise
+sufficient produce on this small surface to feed the population of the
+entire globe.
+
+So we see that by simple and entirely harmless devices man is in
+position to restrict or to increase population as he sees fit. Also he
+is in position to raise food and produce the necessities of life for a
+hundred or thousand times as many people as are now on the earth. But
+superstition ordains involuntary parenthood, and capitalism ordains that
+land shall be held out of use for speculation, or shall be exploited for
+rent! And this is done in the name of "nature"--that old nature of the
+"tooth and claw," whose ancient plan it is "that they shall take who
+have the power, and they shall keep who can"; that ancient nature which
+has been so entirely suppressed and supplanted by civilized man, and
+which survives only as a ghost, a skeleton to be resurrected from the
+tomb, for the purpose of frightening the enslaved. When a predatory
+financier wishes a fur overcoat to protect himself from the cold, or
+when he hires a masseur to keep up the circulation of his blood, you do
+not find him troubling himself about the laws of "nature"; never will he
+mention this old scarecrow, except when he is trying to persuade the
+workers of the world to go on paying him tribute for the use of the
+natural resources of the earth!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MAN THE REBEL
+
+     (Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, in which
+     man finds himself, and how he can advance to a securer condition.)
+
+
+In the state of nature you find every creature living a precarious
+existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the creature survives only
+so long as it keeps itself at the top of its form. The result is the
+maintenance of the type in its full perfection, and, under the
+competitive pressure, a gradual increase of its powers. Excepting when
+sudden eruptions of natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly
+provided with a set of instincts for all emergencies; it is in
+harmonious relationship to its environment, it knows how to do what it
+has to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection.
+But now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, abolishes the
+competitive struggle, and changes at his own insolent will both his
+environment and his reaction thereto.
+
+Man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; they are for
+his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the inconveniences of nature
+and the stresses of the competitive struggle. In a state of nature there
+are no fat animals, but in civilization there are not merely fat
+animals, but fat men to eat the fat animals. In a state of nature no
+animal loafs very long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. But
+man, by his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, and
+also his fellow men. So he produces unlimited wealth for himself; not
+merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he wants, but he builds a
+whole elaborate set of laws and moral customs and religious codes about
+this power, he invents manners and customs and literatures and arts,
+expressive of his superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of
+his ability to enslave and exploit them. So he destroys for his
+imperious self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained
+over him; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thousand
+monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. And each one of
+these diseases and abnormalities is a new life of its own; it develops
+a body of knowledge, a science, and perhaps an art; it becomes the means
+of life, the environment and the determining destiny of thousands,
+perhaps millions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the
+colossal structure which we call civilization--in part still healthy and
+progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer.
+
+What is to be done about this cancer? First of all, it must be
+diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the causes of it
+determined. Man, the rebel, has rejected his mother nature, and has lost
+and for the most part forgotten the instincts with which she provided
+him. He has destroyed the environment which, however harsh to the
+individual, was beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of
+it a gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving pictures
+and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' furnishing
+establishments."
+
+Shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, that he shall
+no longer make asylums for the insane and homes for the defective,
+eye-glasses for the astigmatic and malted milk for the dyspeptic? There
+are some who preach that. Among the multitude of strange books and
+pamphlets which come in my mail, I found the other day a volume from
+England, "Social Chaos and the Way Out," by Alfred Baker Read, a learned
+and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein with all the paraphernalia of
+learning it is gravely maintained that the solution for the ills of
+civilization is a return to the ancient Greek practice of infanticide.
+Every child at birth is to be examined by a committee of physicians, and
+if it is found to possess any defect, or if the census has established
+that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this baby
+shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. You might think that
+this is a joke, after the fashion of Swift's proposal for eating the
+children of famine-stricken Ireland. I have spent some time examining
+this book before I risk committing myself to the statement that it is
+the work of a sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun.
+
+If we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first point we
+have to understand is that nature has nothing to do with it. We cannot
+appeal to nature, because we are many thousands of years beyond her
+sway. We left her when the first ape came down from the treetop and
+fastened a sharp stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable
+good-bye to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and
+altered his diet by means of fire. Therefore, it is no argument to say
+that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." Our choice will lie
+among a thousand different courses, but the one thing we may be sure of
+is that none of them will be "natural." Bairnsfather, in one of his war
+cartoons, portrays a British officer on leave, who got homesick for the
+trenches and went out into the garden and dug himself a hole in the mud
+and sat shivering in the rain all night. And this amuses us vastly; but
+we should be even more amused if any kind of reformer, physician,
+moralist, clergyman or legislator should suggest to us any remedy for
+our ills that was really "according to nature."
+
+Civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no love for nature
+except as an object for the play of his fancy and his wit. He means to
+live his own life, he means to hold himself above nature with all his
+powers. Yet, obviously, he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot
+give his life-blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper
+tissues starve. He must somehow divert the flow of his energies, his
+social blood-stream, so to speak, from the cancer to the healthy growth.
+To abandon the metaphor, man will determine by the use of his reason
+what he wishes life to be; he will choose the highest forms of it to
+which he can attain. He will then, by the deliberate act of his own
+will, devote his energies to those tasks; he will make for himself new
+laws, new moral codes, new customs and ways of thought, calculated to
+bring to reality the ideal which he has formed. So only can man justify
+himself as a creator, so can he realize the benefit and escape the
+penalties of his revolt from his ancient mother.
+
+And then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we have come back to
+nature, only in a new form. Nature, harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind
+as we call her, yet had her deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she
+protected and preserved the type. Man, in his new pride of power, has
+invented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "individualism."
+He lives and works for himself; he chooses to wear silk shirts, and to
+break the speed limit, and to pin ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now
+what he must do with his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from
+degeneration, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old
+mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, as an act
+of high daring: I will protect the species, I will preserve the type! I
+will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic intoxication, because it
+damages the health of my offspring; I will deny myself the amusement of
+sexual promiscuity for the same reason. I will devise imitations of the
+chase and of battle in order that I may keep my physical body up to the
+best standard of nature. Because I understand that all civilized life is
+based upon intelligence, I will acquire knowledge and spread it among my
+fellow men. Because I perceive that civilization is impossible without
+sympathy, and because sympathy makes it impossible for me to be happy
+while my fellow men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my
+energies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all forms
+of exploitation of man by his fellows.
+
+Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay entitled "A
+Moral Equivalent for War." He sets forth the idea that men have loved
+war through the ages because it has called forth their highest efforts,
+has made them more fully aware of the powers of their being. He asks,
+May it not be possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his
+love of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to
+invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the destruction
+of other men and their enslavement, but upon cooperative emulation in
+the unfoldment of the powers of the mind? That this can be done by men,
+I have never doubted. That it will be done, and done quickly, has been
+made certain by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all
+thinking people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been such
+that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization more damage
+than it is able to endure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MAKING OUR MORALS
+
+     (Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit human
+     facts, and there can be no judge of it save human reason.)
+
+
+Assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be accepted, it
+appears that human life is in part at least a product of human will,
+guided by human intelligence. Man finds himself in the position of the
+crew of a ship in the middle of the ocean; he does not know exactly how
+the ship was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but he
+has discovered how the engines are run, and how the ship is steered, and
+the meaning of the compass. So now he takes charge of the ship, and
+keeps it afloat amid many perils; and meantime, on the bridge of the
+vessel, there goes on a furious argument over the question what port the
+ship shall be steered to and what chart shall be used.
+
+It is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile is useful
+because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable are the
+conditions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent the problems with
+which he finds himself confronted. The moral and legal codes of mankind
+may be compared to the steering orders which are given to the helmsman
+of the vessel. Northeast by north, he is told; and if during the night a
+heavy wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard,
+then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direction. If he
+does not do so, he may find that his vessel has swung around and is
+going to some other part of the world. Next morning the passengers may
+wake up and find the ship on the rocks--because the helmsman persisted
+in following certain steering directions which were laid down in an
+ancient Hebrew book two or three thousand years ago!
+
+If life is a continually changing product, then the laws which govern
+conduct must also be continually changing, and morality is a problem of
+continuous adjustment to new circumstances and new needs. If man is free
+to work upon this changing environment, he must be free to make new
+tools and devise new processes. If it is the task of reason to choose
+among many possible courses and many possible varieties of life, then
+clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every detail of his laws
+and customs and moral codes.
+
+This is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of all
+religions. So far as I know there is no religion which does not teach
+that the conduct of man in certain matters has been eternally fixed by
+some higher power, and that it is man's duty to conform to these rules.
+It is considered to be wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact,
+to do so is the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than
+any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be.
+
+Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us take, for a test, the
+Ten Commandments. These commandments were graven upon stone tablets some
+four thousand years ago, and are supposed to have been valid ever since.
+"Thou shalt not kill," is one; others phrase it, "Thou shall do no
+murder"; and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of
+controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former version, while
+if you are a member of the military general staff of your country you
+accept the latter. You maintain the right to kill your fellow men,
+provided that those who do the killing have been previously clad in a
+special uniform, indicating their distinctive function as killers of
+their fellow men. You maintain, in other words, the right of making war;
+and presently, when you get into making war, you find yourself
+maintaining the right to kill, not merely by the old established method
+of the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which destroy
+the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city full at a time.
+
+And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided the
+killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a man who sits upon
+a raised bench and wears a black robe, and perhaps a powdered wig. You
+consider that by the simple device of putting this man into a black robe
+and a powdered wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the
+divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to human reason;
+and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so subjected, you call him
+by the dread name "pacifist," and if he attempts to preach his idea, you
+send him to prison for ten or twenty years, which means in actual
+practice that you kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and
+tubercular infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of
+killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "C. O.," and you bully and
+beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water cure" in your
+dungeons.
+
+Or take the commandment that we shall not commit adultery. Surely this
+is a law about which we can agree! But presently we discover that
+unhappily married couples desire to part, and that if we do not allow
+them to part, we actually cause the commission of a great deal more
+adultery than otherwise. Therefore, our wise men meet together, and
+revise this divine law, and decide that it is not adultery if a man
+takes another wife, provided he has received from a judge an engraved
+piece of paper permitting him to do so. But some of the followers of
+religion refuse to admit this right of mere mortal man. The Catholic
+Church attempts to enforce its own laws, and declares that people who
+divorce and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mortal
+sin. The Episcopal Church does not go quite so far as that; it allows
+the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. Other churches are content
+to accept the state law as it stands. Is it not manifest that all these
+groups are applying human reason, and nothing but human reason, to the
+interpreting and revising of their divine commandments?
+
+Or take the law, "Thou shalt not steal." Surely we can all agree upon
+that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets us nowhere, because we have
+to set up a human court to decide what is "stealing." Is it stealing to
+seize upon land, and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for
+your own, and hand it down to your children forever? Yes, of course,
+that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your
+statement. It is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number of
+years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by law, and
+held unchangeable forever. Also, we run up against the fact that it is
+not stealing, if it is done by the State, by men who have been dressed
+up in the costume of killers before they commit the act.
+
+Again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, while
+other men are starving and dying for lack of land to labor upon? Some of
+us call this stealing, but we are impolitely referred to as "radicals,"
+and if we venture to suggest that anyone should resist this kind of
+stealing, we are sentenced to slow death from malnutrition and
+tubercular infection. Again, is it stealing for a victim of our system
+of land monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of
+his starving child? The law says that this is stealing, and sends the
+man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of mankind protests, and
+I have heard a great many respectable Americans venture so far in
+"radicalism" as to say that they themselves would steal under such
+circumstances.
+
+One could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is enough to
+make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to attempt to talk
+about "divine" rules for human conduct. Regardless of any ideas you may
+hold, or any wishes, you are forced at every hour of your life to apply
+your reason to the problems of your life, and you have no escape from
+the task of judging and deciding. All that you do is to judge right or
+to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery upon yourself
+and upon all who come into contact with you. How much more sensible,
+therefore, to recognize the fact of moral and intellectual
+responsibility; to investigate the data of life with which you have to
+deal, the environment by which you are surrounded, and to train your
+judgment so that you will be able to fit yourself to it with quickness
+and certainty!
+
+"But," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves mankind without
+any guide or authority. How can human beings act, how can they deal with
+one another, if there are no laws, no permanent moral codes?"
+
+The answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of morality does
+not mean at all that there will be no permanent laws and working
+principles. Many of the facts of life are fixed for all practical
+purposes--the purposes not merely of your life and my life, but the life
+of many generations. We are not likely to see in our time the end of the
+ancient Hebrew announcement that "the sins of the father are visited
+upon the children"; therefore it is possible for us to study out a
+course of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down to his
+children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. The Catholic Church
+has had for a thousand years or more the "mortal sin" of gluttony upon
+its list; and today comes experimental science with its new weapons of
+research, and discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the
+arteries, and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will
+ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. Indeed, science has added to
+gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of alcoholic liquor for
+beverage purposes; we have done this in spite of the manifest fact that
+the drinking of wine was not merely an Old Testament virtue, but a New
+Testament religious rite.
+
+To say that human life changes, and that new discoveries and new powers
+make necessary new laws and moral customs, is to say something so
+obvious that it might seem a waste of paper and ink. Man has invented
+the automobile and has crowded himself into cities, and so has to adopt
+a rigid set of traffic regulations. So far as I know, it has never
+occurred to any religious enthusiast to seek in the book of Revelation
+for information as to the advisability of the "left hand turn" at
+Broadway and Forty-second Street, New York, at five o'clock in the
+afternoon. But modern science has created new economic facts, just as
+unprecedented as the automobile; it has created new possibilities of
+spending and new possibilities of starving for mankind; it has made new
+cravings and new satisfactions, new crimes and new virtues; and yet the
+great mass of our people are still seeking to guide themselves in their
+readjustments to these new facts by ancient codes which have no more
+relationship to these facts than they have to the affairs of Mars!
+
+I am acquainted with a certain lady, one of the kindest and most devoted
+souls alive, who seeks to solve the problems of her life, and of her
+large family of children and grand-children, according to sentences
+which she picks out, more or less at random, from certain more or less
+random chapters of ancient Hebrew literature. This lady will find some
+words which she imagines apply to the matter, and will shut her devout
+eyes to the fact that there are other "texts," bearing on the matter,
+which say exactly the opposite. She will place the strangest and most
+unimaginable interpretations upon the words, and yet will be absolutely
+certain that her interpretation is the voice of God speaking directly to
+her. If you try to tell her about Socialism, she will say, "The poor ye
+have always with you"; which means that it is interfering with Divine
+Providence to try to remedy poverty on any large scale. This lady is
+ready instantly to relieve any single case of want; she regards it as
+her duty to do this; in fact, she considers that the purpose of some
+people's poverty is to provide her with a chance to do the noble action
+of relieving it. You would think that the meaning of the sentence,
+"Spare the rod and spoil the child," would be so plain that no one
+could mistake it; but this good lady understood it to mean that God
+forbade the physical chastisement of children, and preferred them
+"spoiled." She held this idea for half a lifetime--until it was pointed
+out to her that the sentence was not in the Bible, but in "Hudibras," an
+old English poem!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION
+
+     (Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of means to
+     ends, and depends upon the understanding of a particular set of
+     circumstances.)
+
+
+Some years ago I used to know an ardent single tax propagandist who
+found my way of arguing intensely irritating, because, as he phrased it,
+I had "no principles." We would be discussing, for example, a protective
+tariff, and I would wish to collect statistics, but discovered to my
+bewilderment that to my single tax friend a customs duty was "stealing"
+on the part of the government. The government had a right to tax land,
+because that was the gift of nature, but it had no right to tax the
+products of human labor, and when it took a portion of the goods which
+anyone brought into a country, the government was playing the part of a
+robber. Of course such a man was annoyed by the suggestion that in the
+early stages of a country's development it might possibly be a good
+thing for the country to make itself independent and self-sufficient by
+encouraging the development of its manufactures; that, on the other
+hand, when these manufactures had grown to such a size that they
+controlled the government, it might be an excellent thing for the
+country to subject them to the pressure of foreign competition, in order
+to lower their value as a preliminary to socializing them.
+
+The reader who comes to this book looking for hard and fast rules of
+life will be disappointed. It would be convenient if someone could lay
+down for us a moral code, and lift from our shoulders the inconvenient
+responsibility of deciding about our own lives. There may be persons so
+weak that they have to have the conditions of their lives thus
+determined for them; but I am not writing for such persons. I am writing
+for adult and responsible individuals, and I bear in mind that every
+individual is a separate problem, with separate needs and separate
+duties. There are, of course, a good many rules that apply to everybody
+in almost all emergencies, but I cannot think of a single rule that I
+would be willing to say I would apply in my life without a single
+exception. "Thou shalt not kill" is a rule that I have followed, so far
+without exception; but as soon as I turn my imagination loose, I can
+think of many circumstances under which I should kill. I remember
+discussing the matter with a pacifist friend of mine, an out-and-out
+religious non-resistant. I pointed out to him that people sometimes went
+insane, and in that condition they sometimes seized hatchets and killed
+anyone in sight. What would my pacifist friend do if he saw a maniac
+attacking his children with a hatchet? It did not help him to say that
+he would use all possible means short of killing the maniac; he had
+finally to admit that if he were quite sure it was a question of the
+life of the maniac or the life of his child, he would kill. And this is
+not mere verbal quibbling, because such things do happen in the world,
+and people are confronted with such emergencies, and they have to
+decide, and no rule is a general rule if it has a single exception.
+There is a saying that "the exception proves the rule," but this is very
+silly; it is a mistranslation of the Latin word "probat," which means,
+not proves, but tests. No exception can prove a rule. What the exception
+does is to test the rule by showing that the result does not follow in
+the exceptional case.
+
+The only kind of rule which can be laid down for human conduct is a rule
+in such general terms that it escapes exceptions by leaving the matter
+open for every man's difference of opinion. Any kind of rule which is
+specific will sooner or later pass out of date. Take, by way of
+illustration, the ancient and well-established virtue of frugality.
+Obviously, under a state of nature, or of economic competition, it is
+necessary for every man to lay by a store "for a rainy day." But suppose
+we could set up a condition of economic security, under which society
+guaranteed to every man the full product of his labor, and the old and
+the sick were fully taken care of--then how foolish a man would seem who
+troubled to acquire a surplus of goods! It would be as if we saw him
+riding on horseback through the main street of our town in a full suit
+of armor!
+
+I devote a good deal of space to this question of a fixed and
+unchangeable morality, because it is one of the heaviest burdens that
+mankind carries upon its back. The record of human history is sickening,
+not so much because of blood and slaughter, but because of fanaticism;
+because wherever the mind of man attempts to assert itself, to escape
+from the blind rule of animal greed, it adopts a set of formulas, and
+proceeds to enforce them, regardless of consequences, upon the whole of
+life. Consider, for example, the rule of the Puritans in England. The
+Puritans glorified conscience, and it is perfectly proper to glorify
+conscience, but not to the entire suppression of the beauty-making
+faculties in man. Macaulay summed up the Puritan point of view in the
+sentence that they objected to bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to
+the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. As a result of
+applying that principle, and lacing mankind in a straight-jacket by
+legislation, England swung back into a reaction under the Cavaliers, in
+which debauchery held more complete sway than ever before or since in
+English life.
+
+This is a hard lesson, but it must be learned: there is no virtue that
+does not become a vice if it is carried to extremes; there is no virtue
+that does not become a vice if it is applied at the wrong time, or under
+the wrong circumstances, or at the wrong stage of human development. In
+fact, we may say that most vices are virtues misapplied. The so-called
+natural vices are simply natural impulses carried to excess, while the
+unnatural vices result from the suppression and distortion of natural
+impulses. The Greeks had as their supreme virtue what they called
+"sophrosune." It is a beautiful word, worth remembering; it means a
+beautiful quality called moderation. We shall find, as we come to
+investigate, that life is a series of compromises among many different
+needs, many different desires, many different duties; and reason sits as
+a wise and patient judge, and appoints to each its proper portion, and
+denies to it an excess which would starve the others. Such is true
+morality, and it is incompatible with the existence of any fixed code,
+whether of human origin or divine.
+
+The fixed morality is a survival of a far-off past, of the days of
+instinct and servitude. Human reason has developed but slowly, and
+perhaps only a few people are as yet entirely capable of taking control
+of their own destiny; perhaps it is really dangerous to think for
+oneself! But if we investigate carefully, we may decide that the danger
+is not so much to ourselves as it is to others. The most evil of all the
+habits that man has inherited from his far-off past is the habit of
+exploiting his fellows, and in order to exploit them more safely the
+ruling castes of priests and kings and nobles and property owners have
+taken possession of the moralities of the world and shaped them for
+their own convenience. They have taught the slave virtues of credulity
+and submission; they have surrounded their teachings with all the
+terrors of the supernatural; they have placed upon rebellion the
+penalties, not merely of this world, but of the next, not merely of the
+dungeon and the rack, but of hellfire and brimstone.
+
+I do not wish to go to extremes and say that the moral codes now taught
+in the world are made wholly in this evil way. As a matter of fact they
+are a queer jumble of the two elements, the slave terrors of the past
+and the common sense of the present. There is not one moral code in the
+world today, there are many. There is one for the rich, and an entirely
+different one for the poor, and the rich have had a great deal more to
+do with shaping the code of the poor than the poor have had to do with
+shaping the code of the rich. There is one code for governments, and an
+entirely different one for the victims of governments. There is one code
+for business, and an entirely different one, a far more human and decent
+one, for friendship. Above all, there is one code for Sunday and another
+code for the other six days of the week. Most of our idealisms and our
+sentimental fine phrases we reserve for our Sunday code, while for our
+every-day code we go back to the rule of the jungle: "Dog eat dog," or
+"Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first." When you
+attempt to suggest a new moral code to our present day moral
+authorities, it is the fine phrases of the Sunday code they bring out
+for exhibition purposes; and perhaps you are impressed by their
+arguments--until Monday morning, when you attempt to apply this code at
+the office, and they stare at you in bewilderment, or burst out laughing
+in your face.
+
+What I am trying to do here is to outline a code that will not be a
+matter of phrases but a matter of practice. It will apply to all men,
+rich as well as poor, and to all seven days of the week. I am not so
+much suggesting a code, as pointing out to you how you can work out your
+own code for yourself. I am suggesting that you should adopt it, not
+because I tell you to, but because you yourself have taken it and tested
+it, precisely as you would test any other of the practical affairs of
+your life--potatoes as an article of diet, or some particular sack of
+potatoes that a peddler was trying to sell to you. It is not yet
+possible for you to be as sure about everything in your life as you can
+be about a sack of potatoes; human knowledge has not got that far; but
+at least you can know what is to be known, and if anything is a matter
+of uncertainty, you can know that. Such knowledge is often the most
+important of all--just as the driver of an automobile wants to know if a
+bridge is not to be depended on.
+
+So I say to you that if you want to find happiness in this life, look
+with distrust upon all absolutes and ultimates, all hard and fast rules,
+all formulas and dogmas and "general principles." Bear in mind that
+there are many factors in every case, there are many complications in
+every human being, there are many sides to every question. Try to keep
+an open mind and an even temper. Try to take an interest in learning
+something new every day, and in trying some new experiment. This is the
+scientific attitude toward life; this is the way of growth and of true
+success. It is inconvenient, because it involves working your brains,
+and most people have not been taught to do this, and find it the hardest
+kind of work there is. But how much better it is to think for yourself,
+and to protect yourself, than to trust your thinking to some group of
+people whose only interest may be to exploit you for their advantage!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE CHOOSING OF LIFE
+
+     (Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is best in
+     life, and decide what we wish to make of it.)
+
+
+We have made the point about evolution, that it may go forward or it may
+go backward. There is no guarantee in nature that because a thing
+changes, it must necessarily become better than it was. On the contrary,
+degeneration is as definitely established a fact as growth, and it is of
+the utmost importance, in studying the problem of human happiness and
+how to make it, to get clear the fact that nature has produced, and
+continues to produce, all kinds of monstrosities and parasites and
+failures and abortions. And all these blunders of our great mother
+struggle just as hard, desire life just as ardently as normal creatures,
+and suffer just as cruelly when they fail. Blind optimism about life is
+just as fatuous and just as dangerous as blind pessimism, and if we
+propose to take charge of life, and to make it over, we shall find that
+we have to get quickly to the task of deciding what our purpose is.
+
+"Choose well, your choice is brief and yet endless," says Carlyle. You
+are driven in your choice by two facts--first, that you have to choose,
+regardless of whether you want to or not; and second, that upon your
+choice depend infinite possibilities of happiness or of misery. The
+interdependence of life is such that you are choosing not merely for the
+present, but for the future; you are choosing for your posterity
+forever, and to some extent you are choosing for all mankind. Matthew
+Arnold has said that "Conduct is three-fourths of life"; but I, for my
+part, have never been able to see where he got his figures. It seems to
+me that conduct is practically everything in life that really counts.
+Conduct is not merely marriage and birth and premature death; it is not
+merely eating and drinking and sleeping: it is thinking and aspiring; it
+is religion and science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the
+lightning and the cyclone, but with the spread of knowledge it is coming
+to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may be even the comet
+and the rising of the sun.
+
+We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous problem of human
+conduct; we are going to ask ourselves the question: What kind of life
+do we want? What kind of life are we going to make? What are the
+standards by which we may know excellence in life, and distinguish it
+from failure and waste and blunder in life? Obviously, when we have done
+this, we shall have solved the moral problem; all we shall have to say
+is, act so that your actions help to bring the desirable things into
+being, and do not act so as to hinder or weaken them.
+
+We shall not be able to go to nature to settle this question for us.
+This is our problem, not nature's. But we shall find, as usual, that we
+can pick up precious hints from her; we shall be wise to study her ways,
+and learn from her successes and her failures. We are proud of her
+latest product, ourselves. Let us see how she made us; what were the
+stages on the way to man?
+
+First in the scale of evolution, it appears, came inert matter. We call
+it inert, because it looks that way, though we know, of course, that it
+consists of infinite numbers of molecules vibrating with speed which we
+can measure even though we cannot imagine it. This "matter" is
+enormously fascinating, and a wise man will hesitate to speak
+patronizingly about it. Nevertheless, considering matter apart from the
+mind which studies it, we decide that it represents a low stage of
+being. We speak contemptuously of stones and clods and lumps of clay. We
+award more respect to things like mountains and tempest-tossed oceans,
+because they are big; in the early days of our race we used to worship
+these things, but now we think of them merely as the raw material of
+life, and we should not be in the least interested in becoming a
+mountain or an ocean.
+
+Almost everyone would agree, therefore, that what we call "life" is a
+higher and more important achievement of nature. And if we wish to grade
+this life, we do so according to its sentience--that is to say, the
+amount and intensity of the consciousness which grows in it. We are
+interested in the one-celled organisms which swarm everywhere throughout
+nature, and we study the mysterious processes by which they nourish and
+beget themselves; we suspect that they have a germ of consciousness in
+them; but we are surer of the meaning and importance of the
+consciousness we detect in some complex organism like a fish or bird.
+We learn to know the signs of consciousness, of dawning intelligence,
+and we esteem the various kinds of creatures according to the amount of
+it they possess. We reject mere physical bigness and mere strength.
+Joyce Kilmer may write:
+
+    "Poems are made by men like me,
+     But only God can make a tree"--
+
+And that seems to us a charming bit of fancy; but the common sense of
+the thing is voiced to us much better in the lines of old Ben Jonson:
+
+    "It is not growing like a tree
+     In bulk doth make man better be."
+
+If we take two animals of equal bulk, the hippopotamus and the elephant,
+we shall be far more interested in the elephant, because of the
+intelligence and what we call "character" which he displays. There are
+good elephants and bad elephants, kind ones and treacherous ones. We
+love the dog because we can make a companion of him; that is, because we
+can teach him to react to human stimuli. Of all animals we are
+fascinated most by the monkey, because he is nearest to man, and
+displays the keenest intelligence.
+
+Someone may say that this is all mere human egotism, and that we have no
+way of really being sure that the life of elephants and hippopotami is
+not more interesting and significant than the life of men. Never having
+been either of these animals, I cannot say with assurance; but I know
+that I have the power to exterminate these creatures, or to pen them in
+cages, and they are helpless to protect themselves, or even to
+understand what is happening to them. So I am irresistibly driven to
+conclude that intelligence is more safe and more worth while than
+unintelligence; in short, that intelligence is nature's highest product
+up to date, and that to foster and develop it is the best guess I can
+make as to the path of wisdom--that is, of intelligence!
+
+When we come to deal with human values, we find that we can trace much
+the same kind of evolution. Back in the days of the cave man, it was
+physical strength which dominated the horde; but nowadays, except in the
+imagination of the small boy, the "strong man" does not cut much of a
+figure. We go once, perhaps, to see him lift his heavy weights and
+break his iron bars, but then we are tired of him. Mere strength had to
+yield in the struggle for life to quickness of eye and hand, to energy
+which for lack of a better name we may call "nervous." The pugilist who
+has nothing but muscle goes down before his lighter antagonist who can
+keep out of his reach, and the crowd loves the football hero who can
+duck and dodge and make the long runs. One might cite a thousand
+illustrations, such as the British bowmen breaking down the heavily
+armored knights, or the quick-moving, light vessels of Britain
+overcoming the huge galleons of Spain. And as society develops and
+becomes more complex, the fighting man becomes less and less a man of
+muscle, and more and more a man of "nerve." Alexander, Caesar and
+Napoleon would have stood a poor chance in personal combat against many
+of their followers. They led, because they were men of energy and
+cunning, able to maintain the subtle thing we call prestige.
+
+Now the world has moved into an industrial era, and who are the great
+men of our time, the men whose lightest words are heeded, whose doings
+are spread upon the front pages of our newspapers? Obviously, they are
+the men of money. We may pretend to ourselves that we do not really
+stand in awe of a Morgan or a Rockefeller, but that we admire, let us
+say, an Edison or a Roosevelt. But Edison himself is a man of money, and
+will tell you that he had to be a man of money in order to be free to
+conduct his experiments. As for our politicians and statesmen, they
+either serve the men of money, or the men of money suppress them, as
+they did Roosevelt. The Morgans and the Rockefellers do not do much
+talking; they do not have to. They content themselves with being obeyed,
+and the shaping of our society is in their hands.
+
+And yet, some of us really believe that there are higher faculties in
+man than the ability to manipulate the stock market. We consider that
+the great inventor, the great poet, the great moralist, contributes more
+to human happiness than the man who, by cunning and persistence,
+succeeds in monopolizing some material necessity of human life. "Poets,"
+says Shelley, "are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." If this
+strange statement is anywhere near to truth, it is surely of importance
+that we should decide what are the higher powers in men, and how they
+may be recognized, and how fostered and developed.
+
+What is, in its essence, the process of evolution from the lower to the
+higher forms of mental life? It is a process of expanding consciousness;
+the developing of ability to apprehend a wider and wider circle of
+existence, to share it, to struggle for it as we do for the life we call
+our "own." The test of the higher mental forms is therefore a test of
+universality, of sympathetic inclusiveness; or, to use commoner words,
+it is a test of enlightened unselfishness.
+
+Every human individual has the will to life, the instinct of
+self-preservation, which persuades him that he is of importance; but the
+test of his development is his ability to realize that, important though
+he may be, he is but a small part of the universe, and his highest
+interests are not in himself alone, his highest duties are not owed to
+himself alone. And as the life becomes more of the intellect, this fact
+becomes more and more obvious, more and more dominating. Men who
+monopolize the material things of the world and their control are
+necessarily self-seeking; but in the realm of the higher faculties this
+element, in the very nature of the case, is forced into the background.
+It is evident that truth is not truth for the Standard Oil Company, nor
+for J. P. Morgan and Company, nor yet for the government of the United
+States; it is truth for the whole of mankind, and one who sincerely
+labors for the truth does so for the universal benefit.
+
+There may be, of course, an element of selfishness in the activities of
+poets and inventors. They may be seeking for fame; they may be hoping to
+make money out of their discoveries; but the greatest men we know have
+been dominated by an overwhelming impulse of creation, and when we read
+their lives, and discover in them signs of petty vanity or jealousy or
+greed, we are pained and shocked. What touches us most deeply is some
+mark of self-consecration and humility; as, for example, when Newton
+tells us that after all his life's labors he felt himself as a little
+child gathering sea-shells on the shore of the great ocean of truth; or
+when Alfred Russel Wallace, discovering that Darwin had been working
+longer than himself over the theory of the origin of species, generously
+withdrew and permitted the theory to go to the world in Darwin's name.
+
+There are three faculties in man, usually described as intellect,
+feeling and will. According as one or the other faculty predominates,
+we have a great scientist, a great poet, or a great moralist. We might
+choose a representative of each type--let us say Newton, Shakespeare and
+Jesus--and spend much time in controversy as to which of the three types
+is the greatest, which makes the greatest contribution to human
+happiness. But it will suffice here to point out that the three
+faculties do not exclude one another; every man must have all three, and
+a perfectly rounded man should seek to develop all three. Jesus was
+considerable of a poet, and we should pay far less heed to Shakespeare
+if he had not been a moralist. Also there have been instances of great
+poets and painters who were scientists--for example, Leonardo and
+Goethe.
+
+The fundamental difference between the scientist and the poet is that
+one is exploring nature and discovering things which actually exist,
+whereas the other is creating new life out of his own spirit. But the
+poet will find that his creations take but little hold upon life, if
+they are not guided and shaped by a deep understanding of life's
+fundamental nature and needs--in other words, if the poet is not
+something of a scientist. And in the same way, the very greatest
+discoveries of science seem to us like leaps of creative imagination; as
+if the mind had completed nature, through some intuitive and sympathetic
+understanding of what nature wished to be.
+
+The point about these higher forms of human activity is that they renew
+and multiply life. We may say that if Jesus had never lived, others
+would have embodied and set forth with equal poignancy the revolutionary
+idea of the equality of all men as children of one common father. And
+perhaps this is true; but we have no way of being sure that it is true,
+and as we look back upon the last nineteen hundred years of human
+history, we are unable to imagine just what the life of mankind during
+those centuries would have been if Jesus had died when he was a baby. We
+do not know what modern thought might have been without Kant, or what
+modern music might have been without Beethoven. We are forced to admit
+that if it had not been for the patient wisdom and persuasive kindness
+of Lincoln, the Slave Power might have won its independence, and America
+today might have been a military camp like Europe, and the lives and
+thoughts of every one of us would have been different.
+
+Or take the activities of the poet. Many years ago the writer was asked
+to name the men who had exercised the greatest influence upon him, and
+after much thought he named three: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. And now
+consider the significance of this reply. One of these people, Shelley,
+was what we call a "real" person; that is, a man who actually lived and
+walked upon the earth. Concerning Hamlet, it is believed there was once
+a Prince of Denmark by that name, but the character who is known to us
+as Hamlet is the creation of a poet's brain. As to the third figure,
+Jesus, the authorities dispute. Some say that he was a man who actually
+lived; others believe that he was God on earth; yet others, very
+learned, maintain that he is a legendary name around which a number of
+traditions have gathered.
+
+To me it does not make a particle of difference which of the three
+possibilities happens to be true about Jesus. If he was God on earth, he
+was God in human form, under human limitations, and in that sense we are
+all gods on earth. And whether he really lived, or whether some poet
+invented him, matters not a particle so far as concerns his effect upon
+others. The emotions which moved him, the loves, the griefs, the high
+resolves, existed in the soul of someone, whether his name were Jesus or
+John; and these emotions have been recorded in such form that they
+communicate themselves to us, they become a part of our souls, they make
+us something different from what we were before we encountered them.
+
+In other words, the poet makes in his own soul a new life, and then
+projects it into the world, and it becomes a force which makes over the
+lives of millions of other people. If you read the vast mass of
+criticism which has grown up about the figure of Hamlet, you learn that
+Hamlet is the type of the "modern man." Shakespeare was able to divine
+what the modern man would be; or perhaps we can go farther and say that
+Shakespeare helped to make the modern man what he is; the modern man is
+more of Hamlet, because he has taken Hamlet to his heart and pondered
+over Hamlet's problem. Or take Don Quixote. No doubt the follies of the
+"age of chivalry" would have died out of men's hearts in the end; but
+how much sooner they died because of the laughter of Cervantes! Or take
+"Les Miserables." Our prison system is not ideal by any means, but it is
+far less cruel than it was half a century ago, and we owe this in part
+to Victor Hugo. Every convict in the world is to some degree a happier
+man because of this vision which was projected upon the world from the
+soul of one great poet. No one can estimate the part which the writings
+of Tolstoi have played in the present revolution in Russia, but this we
+may say with certainty: there is not one man, woman or child in Russia
+at the present moment who is quite the same as he would have been if
+"Resurrection" had never been written.
+
+In discussing the highest faculties of man we have so far refrained from
+using the word "genius." It is a word which has been cheapened by
+misuse, but we are now in position to use it. The things which we have
+just been considering are the phenomena of genius--and we can say this,
+even though we may not know exactly what genius is. Perhaps it is, as
+Frederic Myers asserts, a "subliminal uprush," the welling up into the
+consciousness of some part of the content of the subconscious mind. Or
+perhaps it is something of what man calls "divine." Or perhaps it is the
+first dawning, the first hint of that super-race which will some day
+replace mankind. Perhaps we are witnessing the same thing that happened
+on the earth when glimmerings of reason first broke upon the mind of
+some poor, bewildered ape. We cannot be sure; but this much we can say:
+the man of genius represents the highest activity of the mind of which
+we as yet have knowledge. He represents the spirit of man, fully
+emancipated, fully conscious, and taking up the task of creation; taking
+human life as raw material, and making it over into something more
+subtle, more intense, more significant, more universal than it ever was
+before, or ever would have been without the intervention of this new
+God-man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR
+
+     (Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the relative
+     importance of our various duties.)
+
+
+So now we may say that we know what are the great and important things
+in life. Slowly and patiently, with infinite distress and waste and
+failure, but yet inevitably, the life of man is being made over and
+multiplied to infinity, by the power of the thinking mind, impelled by
+the joy and thrill of the creative action, and guided by the sense of
+responsibility, the instinct to serve, which we call conscience. To
+develop these higher faculties is the task we have before us, and the
+supreme act to which we dedicate ourselves.
+
+So now we are in position to define the word moral. Assuming that our
+argument be accepted, that action is moral which tends to foster the
+best and highest forms of life we know, and to aid them in developing
+their highest powers; that is immoral which tends to destroy the best
+life we know, or to hinder its rapid development.
+
+Let us now proceed to apply these tests to the practices of man; first
+as an individual, and then as a social being. What are my duties to
+myself, and what are my duties to the world about me?
+
+You will note that these questions differ somewhat from those of the old
+morality. Jesus told us, first, that we should love the Lord our God,
+and, second, that we should love our neighbor as ourself. Some would say
+that modern thought has dismissed God from consideration; but I would
+prefer to say that modern thought has decided that the place where we
+encounter God most immediately is in our own miraculously expanding
+consciousness. Our duty toward God is our duty to make of ourselves the
+most perfect product of the Divine Incarnation that we can become. Our
+duty to our neighbor is to help him to do the same.
+
+Of course, as we come to apply these formulas, we find that they overlap
+and mingle inextricably; the two duties are really one duty looked at
+from different points of view. We decide that we owe it to ourselves to
+develop our best powers of thinking, and we discover that in so doing we
+make ourselves better fitted to live as citizens, better equipped to
+help our fellow men. We go out into our city to serve others by making
+the city clean and decent, and we find that we have helped to save
+ourselves from a pestilence.
+
+The most commonly accepted, or at any rate the most commonly preached,
+of all formulas is the "golden rule," "Do unto others as you would have
+them do unto you." This formula is good so far as it goes, but you note
+that it leaves undetermined the all-important question, what _ought_ we
+to want others to do unto us. If I am an untrained child, what I would
+have others do unto me is to give me plenty of candy; therefore, under
+the golden rule, my highest duty becomes to distribute free candy to the
+world. The "golden rule" is obviously consistent with all forms of
+self-indulgence, and with all forms of stagnation; it might result in a
+civilization more static than China.
+
+Or let us take the formula which the German philosopher Kant worked out
+as the final product of his thinking: "Act so that you would be willing
+for your action to become a general rule of conduct." Here again is the
+same problem. There are many possible general rules of conduct. Some
+would prefer one, some others; and there is no possible way of escape
+from the fact that before men can agree what to do, they must decide
+what they wish to make of their lives.
+
+To the formula of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," the
+answer is obvious enough: "Suppose my neighbor is not worthy of as much
+love as myself?" To be sure, it is a perilous thing for me to have to
+decide this question; nevertheless, it may be a fact that I am a great
+inventor, and that my neighbor is a sexual pervert. There is, of course,
+a sense in which I may love him, even so; I may love the deeper
+possibilities of his nature, which religious ecstasy can appeal to and
+arouse. But in spite of all ecstasies and all efforts, it may be that
+his disease--physical, mental and moral--has progressed to such a point
+that it is necessary to confine him, or to castrate him, or even to
+asphyxiate him painlessly. To say that I must love such a man as myself
+is, to say the least, to be vague. We can see how the indiscriminate
+preaching of such a formula would open the flood-gates of sentimentality
+and fraud.
+
+Modern thinking says: Thou shalt love the highest possibilities of life,
+and thou shalt labor diligently to foster them; moreover, because life
+is always growing, and new possibilities are forever dawning in the
+human spirit, thou shalt keep an open mind and an inquiring temper, and
+be ready at any time to begin life afresh.
+
+Such is the formula. It is not simple; and when we come to apply it, we
+find that it constantly grows more complex. When we attempt to decide
+our duty to ourselves, we find that we have in us a number of different
+beings, each with separate and sometimes conflicting duties and needs.
+We have in us the physical man and the economic man, and these clamor
+for their rights, and must have at least a part of their rights, before
+we can go on to be the intellectual man, the moral man, or the artistic
+man. So our life becomes a series of compromises and adjustments between
+a thousand conflicting desires and duties; between the different beings
+which we might be, but can be only to a certain extent, and at certain
+times. We shall see, as we come to investigate one field after another
+of human activity, that we never have an absolute certainty, never an
+absolute right, never an absolute duty; never can we shut our eyes, and
+go blindly ahead upon one course of action, to the exclusion of every
+other consideration! On the contrary, we sit in the seat of
+self-determination as a highly trained and skillful engineer. We keep
+our eyes upon a dozen different gauges; we press a lever here and touch
+a regulator there; we decide that now is a time for speed, and now for
+caution; and knowing all the time that the safety, not merely of
+ourselves, but of many passengers, depends upon the decisions of each
+moment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE MIND AND THE BODY
+
+     (Discusses the interaction between physical and mental things, and
+     the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed causes.)
+
+
+It is our plan, so far as possible, to discuss the problems of the mind
+in one section of this book, and the problems of the body in another;
+but just as we found that we could not separate our duties to ourself
+from our duties to our neighbors, so we find that the mind and the body
+are inextricably interwoven, and that whenever we probe deeply into one,
+we discover the other. The interaction of the mind and the body is a
+fascinating problem into which we must look for a moment, not because we
+expect to solve it, but because it illuminates the whole subject.
+
+The human body is a machine. It takes in carbon and oxygen, and burns
+them, and gives out carbon dioxide and other waste products, and
+develops energy in proportion to the amount of carbon it consumes. This
+machine has its elaborate apparatus of action and reaction, its sensory
+organs where outside stimuli are received, its nerves like telegraph
+wires to carry these impressions, its brain cells to store them and to
+transform them into reactions. We know to some extent how these brain
+cells work. We know what portions of the brain are devoted to this or
+that activity. We know that if we stick a pin into a certain spot we
+shall paralyze the left forefinger. We know that by injecting a certain
+drug, or by breathing a certain gas, we can cause this or that sensation
+or reaction, such as laughing or weeping or mania. We know what poisons
+are generated in the system by anger, and what chemical changes take
+place in a muscle that is tired. All this is part of a vast new science
+which is called bio-chemistry, or the chemistry of life.
+
+Our bodies, therefore, are part of the material universe, and subject to
+the laws or ways of being of this universe. The first of these laws that
+we know is the law of causation. Every change in the universe has its
+cause, and that in turn had another cause; this chain is never broken,
+no matter how far we go, and the same causes universally produce the
+same effects. If you see a ball move on a billiard table, you know that
+the ball did not move itself; you know that something struck the ball or
+tilted the table. You discover that the motion of the ball moves the air
+around it, and the waves of that motion are spread through the room.
+They strike the walls, and the motion is carried on through the walls,
+and if we had instruments sensitive enough, we could feel the motion of
+that billiard ball at the other side of the world, and a few million
+years from now at the most remote of the stars. This is what is called
+the law of the conservation of energy, and when we discover something
+like radium which seems to violate that law by giving out unlimited
+quantities of energy, we investigate and discover a new form of energy
+locked up in the atom. In the disintegration of the atom we have a
+source of power which, when we have learned to use it, will multiply
+perhaps millions of times the powers we are now able to use on this
+earth. But energy, no matter how many times it is transformed, and in
+what strange ways it reappears, always remains, and is never destroyed,
+and never created out of nothing.
+
+My friend the great physiologist once took me into his laboratory and
+showed me a little aquarium in which some minute creatures were wiggling
+about--young sea-urchins, if I remember. The physiologist took a bottle
+containing some chemical, and dropped a single drop into the water, and
+instantly all these little black creatures, which had been darting
+aimlessly in every direction through the water, turned and swam all in
+one direction, toward the light. They swam until they touched the walls
+of the aquarium, and there they stuck, trying their best to swim
+farther. "And now," said my friend, "that is what we call a 'tropism,'
+and all life is a tropism. What you see in that aquarium means that some
+day we shall know just what combination of chemicals causes a human
+being to move this way or that, to do this thing or that. When
+bio-chemistry has progressed sufficiently, we shall be able to make
+human qualities, perhaps in the sperm, perhaps in the embryo, perhaps
+day by day by means of diet or injection."
+
+Said I: "Some day, when bio-chemistry has progressed far enough, you
+will know what combination of chemicals causes a man to vote the
+Democratic or Republican ticket."
+
+"Why not?" answered my friend. (He has a sense of humor about all things
+except this sacred bio-chemistry.)
+
+Said I: "When you have got to that stage, keep the secret carefully, and
+we will fix up a scheme, and a few days before election we will release
+some gas in our big cities, and sweep the country for the Socialist
+ticket."
+
+But jesting aside: if the human body is a material thing, existing in
+the material world and subject to causation, there must be material
+reasons for the actions of human bodies, just the same as for the moving
+of billiard balls. We hear the sound of a billiard ball striking the
+cushion, and we are prepared to accept the idea that the thing we call
+hearing in us is caused by the impinging of sound waves upon our
+eardrums. And if we investigate human beings in the mass, we find every
+reason to believe that they act according to laws, and that there are
+material causes for their acts. If you get up and shout fire in a
+theater, you know how the audience will behave. If you study statistics,
+you can say that in any large city a certain fixed number of human
+beings are going to commit suicide every month; you can even say that
+more are going to commit suicide in the month of June than in any other
+month. You can say that more people are going to die at two o'clock in
+the morning than at any other hour. You know that certain changes in the
+weather will cause all human beings to behave in the same way. You know
+that an increase of prices or an increase of unemployment will cause a
+certain additional number of men to commit crimes, and a certain
+additional number of women to become prostitutes. You know that if a man
+overeats, his thoughts will change their color; he will have what he
+calls "the blues." I might cite a thousand other illustrations to prove
+that human minds are subject to material laws, and therefore to
+investigation by the bio-chemists.
+
+But now, stop a moment. Here you sit reading a book. Something in the
+book pleases you, and you say, "Good!" Perhaps you slap your knee or
+clench your fist. Now here is a motion of your hand, which stirs the air
+about you, and which, according to the laws of energy, will spread its
+effects to the other side of the world, and even to the farthest of the
+stars. Or perhaps the book makes you angry, and you throw it down in
+disgust; an entirely different motion, which will affect the other side
+of the world and the farthest of the stars in an entirely different
+way. The machine of the universe will be forever altered because of that
+slapping of your knee or that throwing down of your book.
+
+And what was the cause of these things? So far as we can see, the
+material cause was exactly the same in each case--the reading of certain
+letters. Two human beings, sitting side by side and reading exactly the
+same letters, might be affected in exactly opposite ways. It seems
+hardly rational to maintain that the material difference of two pairs of
+eyes, moving over exactly the same set of letters, could have resulted
+in two such different motions of the hands. As a matter of fact, the
+very same letters may affect the same person in different ways. The
+composer, Edward MacDowell, once told me how on his birthday his pupils
+sent him a gift, with a card containing some lines from the opera
+"Rheingold," beginning, "O singe fort"--that is, "Oh, sing on." But the
+composer happened, when glancing at the card, to think French instead of
+German, and got the message, "Oh, powerful monkey!" This, of course, was
+disconcerting to a famous piano performer, and his pupils, if they had
+been watching his face, would have seen an unexpected reaction. It seems
+manifest, does it not, that the cause of this difference of reaction was
+not any difference of the letters, but purely a difference of _thought_?
+So it appears that thoughts may change the material universe; they may
+break the chain of causation, and interfere with material events.
+
+Compare the two things, a state of consciousness and say, a steam
+shovel. They are entirely different, and so far as we can see, entirely
+incompatible and unrelated. Can anyone imagine how a thought can turn
+into a steam shovel, or a steam shovel into a thought? We can understand
+how a steam shovel lifts a mass of earth out of the ground, and we can
+understand how a human hand moves a lever which causes the shovel to
+act; but we are unable to conceive how a state of mind--whether it be a
+desire for pay, or an ideal of service, or a vision of the Panama
+Canal--can so affect a steam shovel as to cause it to move. We can sit
+and think motion at a billiard ball for a thousand years, and it does
+not move; but when we think motion at our hand, it moves instantly, and
+passes on the motion to the billiard ball or the steam shovel. When fire
+touches our hand it sends some kind of vibration to the brain, and in
+some inconceivable way that vibration is turned into a state of
+consciousness called pain, and that is turned, "as quick as thought,"
+into another kind of motion, the jerking back of our hand.
+
+So it seems certain that consciousness really does "butt in" on the
+chain of natural causation. And yet, just see in what position this
+leaves the scientist who is investigating life! Imagine if you can, the
+plight of a doctor who wanted to prescribe a diet for a sick person, if
+he knew that every piece of chicken and every piece of fish were free to
+decide of its own impulse whether or not it would be digested in the
+human stomach. But the plight of this doctor would be nothing to the
+plight of the chemist or the biologist or the engineer who was asked to
+do his thinking and his planning in a world containing a billion and a
+quarter human beings, each one a lawless agent, each one a source of new
+and unforeseeable energies, each one acting as a "first cause," and
+starting new chains of activity, tearing the universe to pieces
+according to his own whims. What kind of a universe would that be? It
+would simply be a chaos; there could be no thinking, there could be no
+life in it; there could be no two things the same in it, and no laws of
+any sort.
+
+So then we fall back into the hands of the "determinists," who assert
+one unbreakable chain of natural causation, and regard the human body as
+an automaton. We go back to the bio-chemist, who purposes some day to
+ascertain for us just exactly what molecules of matter in just what
+positions and combinations in the brain cells of William Shakespeare
+caused him to perpetrate a mixed metaphor. We go back to the belief that
+human beings act as they must act, because the clock of life, wound up
+and started, must move in such and such a fashion.
+
+But now, let us see what are the implications of that theory! Here am I
+writing a book, appealing to men to act in certain ways. Of course, I
+know that not all will follow my advice. Some will be foolish--or what
+seems to me foolish. Others will be weak, and will resolve to act in
+certain ways, and then go and act in other ways. But some will be just;
+some will be free; some will use their brains--because, you see, I am
+convinced that they _can_ use their brains! I am convinced that ideas
+will affect and stir them, in complete defiance of the bio-chemist, who
+tells me that they act that way because of certain chemicals in their
+brain cells, and that I write my book because of other chemicals, and
+that my idea that I am writing the book because I want to write it is a
+delusion, and that the whole thing is happening just so because the
+universe was wound up that way.
+
+Now, this an unsolved problem, and I have no solution to offer. What I
+have set forth is in substance one of the four "antinomies" of Kant, and
+you can see for yourself how it is possible to prove either side, and
+impossible to be sure of either. Perhaps there is really a duality in
+life. Perhaps there are two aspects of the universe, the material and
+the spiritual, and perhaps they do not really interact as they seem to,
+but both are guided and determined by some higher reality of life of
+which we know nothing. In that case there would really be a chemical
+equivalent for every thought, and there would be a trace of
+consciousness for every material atom in the universe. Maybe the
+theologians are right, and in the universal consciousness of God the
+whole future exists predetermined. Maybe to God there is no such thing
+as time; the past, the present, and the future are all alike to Him.
+
+There is nothing more painful to the human mind than to have to confess
+its own impotence. Yet I can see no escape from the dilemma we are here
+facing. There is not a man alive who does not assume the freedom of the
+will, who does not show in all his acts that he agrees with old Dr.
+Samuel Johnson: "We know we are free and there's an end on't." Without a
+belief in freedom we cannot get beyond the animal, we cannot become the
+masters of our own souls. And yet, the man who swallows that idea whole,
+and goes out into the world and preaches personal morality to the
+neglect of the fundamental economic facts, the facts of the body in its
+relationship to all other bodies--we know what happens to that man; he
+becomes a shouting fool. Unless he is literally a fool, or a knave, he
+quickly discovers his own futility, and proceeds to use his common
+sense, in spite of all his theories. "Come to Jesus!" cried William
+Booth, and he went out in the streets of London to save souls with a
+bass drum; but presently, in day by day contact with the degradation of
+the London slums, he realized that he could not save souls so long as
+those souls were dwelling in starved and lousy bodies. So William Booth
+with his Salvation Army took to starting night shelters and cast-off
+clothing bureaus!
+
+And of exactly the same sort is the bewilderment which falls to the lot
+of the scientist who is honest and willing to face the facts. The
+bio-chemist with his test tubes and his microscopes and his complex
+apparatus of research sits himself down and accumulates a mass of
+information about the human body. He investigates the diseases of the
+body and learns in detail just how these diseases spread and sometimes
+how they are caused; he can present you with a diagnosis, showing the
+exact stage to which the degeneration of a certain organ has proceeded,
+and perhaps he can suggest to you a change of diet or some drug which
+will, for a time at least, check the process of the breakdown. But in
+other cases he will be perfectly helpless; he will be, as it were,
+buried under the mass of detail which he has accumulated; he will find
+the vital energy depressed, and he will not know any way to renew it.
+But along will come some mental specialist, who in a half hour's talk
+with the patient, by a simple change in the patient's _ideas_, will
+completely make over the patient's life, and set going a new vital
+process which will restore the body to its former health. A religious
+enthusiast may do this, a psychotherapist may do it, a moral genius may
+do it; and the physician with all his learning will find himself like a
+man on the outside of a house, peering in through the windows and trying
+in vain to find out something about the life of the family and its
+guests.
+
+This is humiliating to the chemist and the medical man, but they have to
+face it, because it is a fact. In the seat of authority over the human
+body there sits a higher being which, without any religious
+implications, we may call the soul; or, if it is impossible to get away
+from the religious implication of that word, we will call it the
+consciousness, or the personality. This master of the house of life is
+in many ways dependent upon the house. If the furnace goes out he
+freezes, and if the house takes fire and burns up--well, he disappears
+and leaves no address. But in other ways the master of the house is
+really master, and is a worker of miracles. He does things which we do
+not at all understand, and cannot yet even foresee, but which often
+completely make the house over.
+
+William James, a scientist of real authority, has a wonderful essay,
+"The Powers of Men," in which he sets forth the fact that human beings
+as a general rule make use of only a small portion of the energies which
+dwell in their beings, and that one of our problems is to find the ways
+by which we can draw upon stores of hidden energy which we have within
+us. Also, in a fascinating book, "Varieties of the Religious
+Experience," James has endeavored to study and analyze the phenomena
+which hitherto the physician and the biologist have been disposed to
+ridicule and neglect. But unless I am mistaken, every scientist in the
+end will be forced to come back to the central fact, that life is a
+unity, and that the heart of it is the spirit; that what we call the
+will is not an accident, not a delusion, not some by-product of nature,
+but is the very secret of life; and that behind it is a vast ocean of
+power, which now and then sweeps away all dykes, and floods into the
+human consciousness.
+
+The writer of this book is now a patient and plodding teacher of a
+certain economic doctrine, a preacher of what he might call
+anti-parasitism. He has come to the conclusion that the habit of men to
+enslave their fellows and exploit them and draw their substance from
+them without return--that this habit is destructive to all civilization,
+and is incompatible with any of the higher forms of life, intellectual,
+moral or artistic. He has come to the conclusion that there is no use
+attempting to build a structure of social life until there is a sound
+foundation; in other words, until the capitalist system has been
+replaced by cooperation. But in his youth he was, or thought he was, a
+poet, and touched upon that strange and wonderful thing which we call
+genius. He saw his own consciousness, as it were a leaf driven before a
+mighty tempest of spiritual energy. And he believes that this experience
+was no delusion, but was a revelation of the hidden mysteries of being.
+He still has memories of this startling experience, still hints of it in
+his consciousness; something still leaps in his memory, like a
+race-horse, or like the war-horse of Revelations, which "scenteth the
+battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting." Because
+of these things he can never accept any philosophy which shackles the
+human spirit, he will never in his thought attempt to set bounds to the
+possibilities of human life. The very heart of life beats in us, the
+wonder of it and the glory of it swells like a tide behind us. New
+universes are born in us, or, if you prefer, they are made by us; and
+the process is one of endless joy, of rapture beyond anything that the
+average man can at present imagine, or that any instruments invented by
+science can weigh or measure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE MIND OF THE BODY
+
+     (Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does to the
+     body, and how it can be controlled and made use of by the
+     intelligence.)
+
+
+The importance of the mind in matters of health becomes clearer when we
+understand that what we commonly call our minds--the mental states which
+confront us day by day in our consciousness--are really but a small
+portion of our total mind. In addition to this conscious mind there is
+an enormous mass of our personality which is like a storehouse attached
+to our dwelling, a place to which we do not often go, but to which we
+can go in case of need. This storehouse is our memory, the things we
+know and can recall at will. And then there is another, still vaster
+storehouse--no one has ever measured or guessed the size of it--which
+apparently contains everything that we have ever known, perhaps also
+everything that our ancestors have known. A common simile for the human
+mind is that of an iceberg; a certain portion of it appears above the
+surface of the sea, but there is seven times as much of it floating out
+of sight under the water.
+
+This subconscious mind seems to be the portion most closely united with
+the body. It has its seat in the back parts of the brain, in the spinal
+cord and the greater nervous ganglia, such as the solar plexus. It is
+the portion of our mind which controls the activities of our body, all
+those miraculous things which went on before we first opened our eyes to
+the light, and which go on while we sleep, and never cease until we die.
+When we cut our finger and admit foreign germs to our blood, some
+mysterious power causes millions of our blood corpuscles to be rushed to
+this spot, to destroy and devour the invading enemy. We do not know how
+this is done, but it is an intelligent act, measured and precisely
+regulated, as much so as a railroad time-table. When the supply of
+nourishment in the body becomes low, something issues a notice by way of
+our stomach, which we call hunger; when we take food into the stomach,
+something pours out the gastric juice to digest it; when this digested
+food is prepared and taken up in the blood stream, something decides
+what portion of it shall be turned into muscle, what into brain cells,
+what into hair, what into finger nails. Sometimes, of course, mistakes
+are made and we have diseases. But for the most part all this infinitely
+intricate process goes on day and night without a hitch, and it is all
+the work of what we might call "the mind of the body."
+
+And just as our material bodies are the product of an age-long process
+of development repeated in embryo by every individual, so is this mental
+life a product of long development, and carries memories of this far-off
+process. In our instincts there dwells all the past, not merely of the
+human race, but of all life, and if we should ever succeed in completely
+probing the subconscious mind and bringing it into our consciousness, it
+would be the same as if we were free to ramble about in all the past.
+Huxley set forth the fact that all the history of evolution is told in a
+piece of chalk; and we probably do not exaggerate in saying that all the
+history of the universe is in the subconscious mind of every human
+being. When the partridge which has just come out of the egg sees the
+shadow of the hawk flit by and crouches motionless as a leaf, the
+partridge is not acting upon any knowledge which it has acquired in the
+few minutes since it was hatched. It is acting upon a knowledge
+impressed upon its subconscious mind by the experience of millions of
+partridges, perhaps for tens of thousands of years. When the physician
+lifts the newly born infant by its ankle and spanks it to make it cry,
+the physician is using his conscious reason, because he has learned from
+previous experience, or has been taught in the schools that it is
+necessary for the child's breathing apparatus to be instantly cleared.
+But when the child responds to the spanking with a yell, it is not moved
+by reasoned indignation at an undeserved injury; it is following an
+automatic reaction, as a result of the experience of infants in the
+stone age, experience which in some obscure way has been registered and
+stored in the infant cerebellum.
+
+Science is now groping its way through this underworld of thought.
+Obviously we should have here a most powerful means of influencing the
+body, if by any chance we could control it. We are continually seeking
+in medical and surgical ways to stimulate or to retard activities of the
+body, which are controlled entirely by this subconscious mind. If we are
+suffering intense pain in a joint, we put on a mustard plaster, what we
+call a counter-irritant, to trouble the skin and draw the congested
+blood away from the place of the pain. On the other hand, we may
+stimulate the functions of the intestines by the application of hot
+fomentations, to bring the blood more actively to that region. But if by
+any means we could make clear our wishes to the subconscious mind, we
+should be dealing with headquarters, and should get quicker and more
+permanent results.
+
+Can we by any possibility do this? To begin with, let me tell you of a
+simple experiment that I have witnessed. I once knew a man who had
+learned to control the circulation of his blood by his conscious will. I
+have seen him lay his two hands on the table, both of the same color,
+and without moving the hands, cause one hand to turn red and the other
+to turn pale. And, obviously, so far as this man is concerned, the
+problem of counter-irritants has been solved. He is a mental mustard
+plaster.
+
+And what was done by this man's own will can be done to others in many
+ways. The most obvious is a device which we call hypnotism. This is a
+kind of sleep which affects only the conscious control of the body, but
+leaves all the senses awake. In this hypnotic sleep or "trance" we
+discover that the subconscious mind is a good deal like the Henry Dubb
+of the Socialist cartoons; it is faithful and persistent, very strong in
+its own limited field, but comically credulous, willing to believe
+anything that is told it, and to take orders from any one who climbs
+into the seat of authority. You have perhaps attended one of the
+exhibitions which traveling hypnotists are accustomed to give in country
+villages. You have seen some bumpkin brought upon the stage and
+hypnotized, and told that he is in the water and must swim for his life,
+or that he is in the midst of a hornets' nest, or that his trousers are
+torn in the seat--any comical thing that will cause an audience to howl
+with laughter.
+
+These facts were first discovered nearly a hundred and fifty years ago
+by a French doctor named Mesmer. He was a good deal of a charlatan, and
+would not reveal his secrets, and probably the scientific men of that
+time were glad to despise him, because what he did was so new and
+strange. There is a certain type of scientific mind which sits aloft on
+a throne with a framed diploma above its head, and says that what it
+knows is science and what it does not know is nonsense. And so
+"mesmerism" was left for the quacks and traveling showmen. But half a
+century later a French physician named Liebault took up this method of
+hypnotism, without all the fakery that had been attached to it. He
+experimented and discovered that he could cure not merely phobias and
+manias, fixed ideas, hysterias and melancholias; he could cure definite
+physical diseases of the physical body, such as headache, rheumatism,
+and hemorrhage. Later on two other physicians, Janet and Charcot,
+developed definite schools of "psychotherapy." They rejected hypnotism
+as in most cases too dangerous, but used a milder form which is known as
+"hypnoidization." You would be surprised to know how many ailments which
+baffle the skill of medical men and surgeons yield completely to a
+single brief treatment by such a mental specialist.
+
+All that is necessary is some method to tap the subconscious mind. In
+many cases the subconsciousness knows what is the matter, and will tell
+at once--a secret that is completely hidden from the consciousness. For
+example, a man's hands shake; they have been shaking for years, and he
+has no idea why, but his subconscious mind explains that they first
+began to shake with grief over the death of his wife; also, the
+subconscious mind meekly and instantly accepts the suggestion that the
+time for grief is past, and that the hands will never shake again.
+
+Or here is a woman who has become convinced that worms are crawling all
+over her. Everything that touches her becomes a worm, even the wrinkles
+in her dress are worms, and she is wild with nervousness, and of course
+is on the way to the lunatic asylum. She is hypnotized and sees the
+operator catching these worms one by one and killing them. She is told
+that he has killed the last, but she insists, "No, there is one more."
+The operator clutches that one, and she is perfectly satisfied, and
+completely cured. Her husband writes, expressing his relief that he no
+longer has to "sleep every night in a fish pond." This instance with
+many others is told by Professor Quackenbos in his book, "Hypnotic
+Therapeutics."
+
+Among the most powerful means to influence the subconscious personality
+is religious excitement. Religion has come down to us from ancient
+times, and its fears and ecstasies are a part of our instinctive
+endowment. Those who can sway religious emotions can cure disease, not
+merely fixed ideas, but many diseases which appear to be entirely
+physical, but which psycho-analysis reveals to be hysterical in nature.
+Of course these religious persons who heal by laying on of hands or by
+purely mental means deny indignantly that they are using hypnotism or
+anything like it. I am aware that I shall bring upon myself a flood of
+letters from Christian Scientists if I identify their methods of curing
+with "animal magnetism" and "manipulation," and other devices of the
+devil which they repudiate. All I can say is that their miracles are
+brought about by affecting the subconscious mind; there is no other way
+to bring them about, and for my part I cannot see that it makes a great
+difference whether the subconscious mind is affected by a hand laid on
+the forehead, or by a hand waved in the air, or by an incantation
+pronounced, or by a prayer thought in silence. If you can persuade the
+subconscious mind that God is operating upon it, that God is omnipotent
+and is directing this particular healing, that is the most powerful
+suggestion imaginable, and is the basis of many cures. But if in order
+to achieve this, it is necessary for me to persuade myself that I can
+find some meaning in the metaphysical moonshine of Mother Eddy--why,
+then, I am very sorry, but I really prefer to remain sick.
+
+But such is not the case. You do not have to believe anything that is
+not true; you simply have to understand the machinery of the
+subconscious, and how to operate it. We are only beginning to acquire
+that knowledge, and we need an open mind, free both from the dogmatism
+of the medical men and the fanaticism of the "faith curists." A few
+years ago in London I met a number of people who were experimenting in
+an entirely open-minded way with mental healing, and I was interested in
+their ideas. I happened to be traveling on the Continent, and on the
+train my wife was seized by a very dreadful headache. She was lying with
+her head in my lap, suffering acutely, and I thought I would try an
+experiment, so I put my hand upon her forehead, without telling her what
+I was doing, and concentrated my attention with the greatest possible
+intensity upon her headache. I had an idea of the cause of it; I
+understood that headaches are caused by the irritation of the sensory
+nerves of the brain by fatigue poisons, or other waste matter which the
+blood has not been able to eliminate. I formed in my mind a vivid
+picture of what the blood would have to do to relieve that headache, and
+I concentrated my mental energies upon the command to her subconscious
+mind that it should perform these particular functions. In a few
+minutes my wife sat up with a look of great surprise on her face and
+said, "Why, my headache is gone! It went all at once!"
+
+That, of course, might have been a coincidence; but I tried the
+experiment many times, and it happened over and over. On another
+occasion I was able to cure the pain of an ulcerated tooth; I was able
+to cure it half a dozen times, but never permanently, it always
+returned, and finally the tooth had to come out. My wife experimented
+with me in the same way, and found that she was able to cure an attack
+of dyspepsia; but, curiously enough, she at once gave herself a case of
+dyspepsia--something she had never known in her life before. So now I
+will not allow her to experiment with me, and she will not allow me to
+experiment with her! But we are quite sure that people with psychic
+gifts can definitely affect the subconscious mind of others by purely
+mental means. We are prepared to believe in the miracles of the New
+Testament, and in the wonders of Lourdes, as well as in the healings of
+the Christian Scientists and the New Thoughters, which cannot be
+disputed by any one who is willing to take the trouble to investigate.
+We can face these facts without losing our reason, without ceasing to
+believe that everything in life has a cause, and that we can find out
+this cause if we investigate thoroughly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS
+
+     (Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and other
+     methods by which a whole new universe of life has been brought to
+     human knowledge.)
+
+
+One of the most common methods of exploring the subconscious mind is the
+method of automatic writing. I have never tried this myself, but tens of
+thousands of people are sitting every night with a "ouija" in front of
+them, holding a pencil on a piece of paper and letting their
+subconscious minds write what they please. Most of them are hoping to
+get messages from the dead--a problem which we shall discuss in the next
+chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that automatic writing and
+table rapping and other devices of mediumship have opened up to us a
+vast mass of subconscious mentality. A part of the scientific world
+still takes a contemptuous attitude and calls this all humbug, but many
+of our greatest scientists have been persuaded to investigate, and have
+become convinced that in this mass of subconsciousness there is mingled,
+not merely the mind of the medium, but the minds of all those present,
+and possibly other minds as well. For my part, I do not see how any one
+can study disinterestedly the proceedings of the Society for Psychical
+Research and not become convinced that telepathy at least is one of the
+powers of the subconscious mind.
+
+Telepathy is what is popularly known as "thought transmission." Every
+one must know people who are what is called "psychic," and will know
+what is happening to some friend in another part of the world, or will
+go upstairs because they "sense" that some one wants them, or will go to
+the door because they "have a hunch" that some one is coming. And maybe
+these things are only chance, but you will be unscientific if you do not
+take the trouble to read and learn what modern investigators have
+brought out on such subjects.
+
+This much is certain, and is denied by no competent investigator:
+whatever has been in your mind is there still, and it is possible to
+find a way of tapping the buried memory. An old woman, delirious with
+fever, begins to babble in a strange language, and it is discovered that
+she is talking ancient Hebrew. The woman is entirely illiterate, and her
+conscious memory knows no language but her own, her conscious mind has
+no ideas beyond those of her domestic life and the gossip of the
+village. But investigation is made, and it is discovered that when this
+woman was a girl, she worked in the home of a Hebrew scholar, and heard
+him reading aloud. She did not understand a word of what she heard, and
+was not consciously listening to it; nevertheless, every syllable of it
+had been stored away forever by her subconscious mind. Innumerable cases
+of this sort have been established; and, as a matter of fact, we might
+have been prepared for such discoveries by the memory-feats of the
+conscious mind. It is well known that Mozart, when a child, could listen
+to a new opera, and go home and play it over note for note. At present
+there is a child in America, giving exhibitions in public, carrying on
+thirty games of chess at the same time. There have been others who do
+sums of mental arithmetic, such as multiplying thirty-two figures by
+thirty-two figures, or reciting the Bible backwards.
+
+All this seems incredible; and yet there is something still more
+incredible. Suppose that these same powers, which are stored in our
+subconscious minds, were stored also in the minds of animals! A few
+years ago Maurice Maeterlinck published a book, "The Unknown Guest," in
+the course of which he tells about his experiments with the so-called
+Elberfeld horses: two animals which had been trained for years by their
+owner to give signals by moving their forefeet, and which apparently
+could count and divide and multiply large sums, and extract square and
+cube root, and spell out names, and recognize sounds, scents and colors,
+and read time from the face of a watch. Of course, it is easy to say
+that this is absurd, that the horses must have got some signals from
+their trainer; but, as it happened, they would do their work in the
+absence of their trainer; they would do it in the dark, or with a sack
+over their heads, and the best scientific minds of Germany were unable
+to suggest any test conditions which could not be met. There have been
+many gigantic frauds in the world, and this may have been one of them;
+on the other hand, there have been many new discoveries, and for my part
+I will finish exploring the miracles of the subconscious mind of man,
+before I presume to say that anything is impossible in the subconscious
+mind of a horse or a dog. Also I will wait for some learned person to
+explain to me how the subconscious minds of horses and dogs know enough
+to build and repair their bones and teeth, so cleverly that modern
+architectural and engineering science could teach them nothing. I ask,
+also, if it is possible to find a region in the subconsciousness which
+is common to two people, why is it absurd to suggest that there might be
+a region common to a man and a horse? Why is this any more absurd than
+that they should eat the same food and breathe the same air and feel the
+same affection and be frightened at the same dangers?
+
+The only persons who will be dogmatic about such subjects are the
+persons who are ignorant. Those who take the trouble to investigate,
+discover more wonderful things every day, and they realize that we have
+here a whole universe of knowledge, to which we have as yet barely
+opened the doors. Consider, for example, the facts which we are
+acquiring on the subject of personality and what it means. You would
+say, perhaps, that if there is anything you know positively, it is that
+you are one person, and have never been anybody else, and that your body
+belongs to you, and that nobody else ever has used or ever can use it.
+But what would you say if I told you that tomorrow "you" might cease to
+be, and somebody else might be in possession of your body, walking it
+around and wearing its clothes and spending its money? What if I were to
+tell you that there might be in "you," or in your body, half a dozen
+different personalities which you have never known or dreamed of, and
+that tomorrow there might break out a war between them and "you," as to
+which of the half dozen people should hear with your ears and speak with
+your tongue and walk about with your clothes on? Unless you are familiar
+with the literature of multiple personality, you would surely say that
+this was unbelievable--quite as much so as a mathematical horse!
+
+Let us begin with the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne, who was many
+years ago a perfectly respectable clergyman in a Rhode Island town. One
+day he disappeared, and his family did not hear of him. A year or two
+later there was a store-keeper in a town in Pennsylvania, who suddenly
+came to himself as the Reverend Ansel Bourne, not knowing what he had
+been in the meantime, or how he came to be keeping a store. Under
+hypnotism it developed that he had in him two personalities, and his
+trance personality recollected all that had been happening in the
+meantime and told about it freely.
+
+Or take the still more fascinating case of the young lady who is known
+in the literature of psychotherapy as Miss Beauchamp. Her story is told
+in a book, "The Dissociation of a Personality," by Dr. Morton Prince of
+Boston. Some thirty years ago Miss Beauchamp, a very conscientious and
+dignified young lady, became nervous and ill, and took to doing strange
+things, which were a source of shame and humiliation to her. Under
+hypnotism it was discovered to be a case of multiple personality. The
+other personality, who finally gave herself the name of Sally, was
+entirely different in character from Miss Beauchamp, being mischievous,
+vain, and primitive as a child. She conceived an intense dislike for
+Miss Beauchamp, whom she called by abusive names; at times when she
+could get possession of Miss Beauchamp's body, she delighted in playing
+humiliating tricks upon her enemy, spending her money, running her into
+debt, breaking her engagements, disgracing her before her friends. Sally
+was always well and Miss Beauchamp was always ill, and Sally would take
+the body, for which they fought for possession, and take it for long and
+exhausting walks, and leave it cold and miserable, lost and penniless,
+in the possession of Miss Beauchamp! And of course this made Miss
+Beauchamp more and more a wreck, and Sally took possession of more and
+more of her time. Sally knew everything that Miss Beauchamp did and
+thought, but Miss Beauchamp did not know about Sally. She only knew that
+there were gaps in her life, during which she did things she could not
+explain. And because she did not want her friends to think her insane,
+she would try to hide this dreadful condition of affairs; but Sally
+would spoil her plans by writing letters to her friends, and also by
+writing insulting letters for Miss Beauchamp to find when she took
+possession again.
+
+Then one day, after several years of treatment, there appeared yet
+another personality, who knew nothing about Miss Beauchamp or Sally
+either, and only knew what Miss Beauchamp had known up to some years
+before. Miss Beauchamp had a college education, and wrote and spoke
+French; Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it; the new
+personality did not have a college education at all. Nevertheless,
+after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating as any novel
+you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was the real Miss
+Beauchamp; the others were "split off" personalities. He traced the
+cause to a severe mental shock, and succeeded in the end in combining
+the first Miss Beauchamp with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate
+and wanton Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally
+murdering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but he
+condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sentence. It is a
+"movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I should think it would make
+disconcerting reading to persons who believe that each of us is one
+immortal soul, or "has" one immortal soul, and is responsible for it to
+a personal God.
+
+There is never any end to the problems of these multiple personalities,
+and each case is a test of the judgment and ingenuity of the specialist.
+He will try to make one personality "stick," and will fail, and will
+have to accept another, or a combination of two. In one case, he found
+that he could not get the right personality to "stick" except under
+hypnosis, so he decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and
+the new personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If
+you wish to know more about this subject you can find books in any
+well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of Personality," by H.
+Addington Bruce, because it contains in the appendix an excellent list
+of the literature of the subconscious in all its many aspects.
+
+There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring this
+underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. Some fifteen
+years ago a psychotherapist in New York told me about the discoveries of
+a physician in Vienna, and gave me some pamphlets, written in very
+difficult and technical German. Since then this Professor Freud has been
+translated, and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers
+make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up Jesus
+because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves Christians, and
+in the same way we have no right to blame Freud for all the absurdities
+of the psychoanalysts.
+
+Probably there never was a time in human history when there were not
+people who interpreted dreams, and you can still buy "dream books" for
+twenty-five cents, and learn that a white horse means that you are going
+to get a letter from your sweetheart tomorrow; then you can buy another
+dream book, telling you that a white horse means there is going to be a
+death in your family within the year. Naturally this prejudices thinking
+people against dream analysis; yet, dreams are facts, and every fact has
+its cause, and if you dream about a white horse, there must assuredly be
+some reason for your dreaming this particular thing. Of course we know
+that if you eat mince-pie and welsh-rabbit at midnight, you will dream
+about something terrible; but will it be snakes, or will it be a
+railroad wreck, or will it be white horses trampling over you?
+Obviously, it may be a million different unpleasant things; and what is
+it that picks out this or that from the infinite store of your memory,
+and brings it into the region of half-consciousness which we call the
+dream?
+
+Professor Freud's discovery is in brief that the dream is a
+wish-fulfillment. Our instincts present to our consciousness a great
+mass of impulses and desires, and among these the consciousness selects
+what it pleases, and represses and refuses to recognize or to act upon
+the others. But maybe these decisions are not altogether satisfactory to
+the subconsciousness. The mind of the body is in rebellion against the
+mind--shall we say of reason, or shall we say of society? The mind of
+society, otherwise known as the moral law, says that you shall be a good
+little boy, and shall go to school and learn what you are told, and on
+Sunday go to church and sit very still through a long sermon; whereas,
+the body of a boy would rather be a savage, hunting birds' nests and
+scalping enemies and exploring magic caves full of precious jewels. So
+the subconsciousness of the boy, balked and miserable, awaits its time,
+and finds its satisfaction when the boy is asleep and his moral censor
+has relaxed its control.
+
+This dream mind is not a logical and orderly thing like the conscious
+mind; it is not business-like and civilized, it does not deal in
+abstractions. It is far more interested in things than in words; it does
+not present us with formulas, but with pictures, and with stories of
+weird and wonderful happenings. It is like the mind of the race, which
+we study in legends and religions. It does not tell us that the sun is a
+mass of incandescent hydrogen gas, so and so many miles in diameter; it
+tells us that the sun is a cosmic hero who slays the black dragon of
+night. So the mind of our body presents us with innumerable pictures and
+symbols, exactly such as we find in poetry. There may be, and frequently
+is, dispute as to just what a poet meant by this or that particular
+image, but if we read all the work of any particular poet, we get a
+certain impression of that poet's individuality. If he is always talking
+about the perfume of women's hair and the gleam of the white flesh of
+nymphs in the thickets, we are not left in doubt as to what is wrong
+with this poet.
+
+And just so, when the expert sets to work to examine all the dreams that
+any one person can remember, day after day, sooner or later the expert
+observes that these dreams hover continually about one particular
+subject; and by questioning the person, he can find out what is the
+secret which is troubling the person, perhaps without the person himself
+being aware of it. Of course there are many people who like nothing so
+much as to talk about themselves; and many are spending their time and
+their money on the latest fad of being "psyched," who would, in any
+properly organized world, be put to work at hoeing weeds or washing
+their own clothes. Nevertheless, it is a fact that there are real mental
+disorders in the world, and innumerable honest and earnest people who
+have something the matter with them which they do not understand. Here
+is one way by which the conscientious investigator can find out what the
+trouble is, and make it clear to them, and by establishing harmony
+between their conscious and their subconscious minds, can many times put
+them in the way of health and happiness.
+
+Through psychoanalysis we are enabled to understand the "split"
+personality and its cause. We discover that almost everyone has more or
+less rudimentary forms of multiple personality hidden within him; made
+out of desires and traits which he does not like, or which the world
+forces him to drive into the deeps of his being. These may be evil
+impulses, of sex or violence; they may be the most noble altruisms, or
+artistic yearnings, ridiculous things in a world of "hustle." A quite
+normal man or woman may keep a separate self, apart from the world,
+living a Jekyll life of business propriety and a Hyde life of religious
+or musical ecstasy. Or again, the repressed impulses may integrate
+themselves in the unconscious, and you may have genius or lunacy or
+both--"great wits to madness near allied." The modern knowledge on such
+dark mysteries you may find in Hart's "The Psychology of Insanity."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY
+
+     (Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of
+     view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live
+     forever?)
+
+
+As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own and other
+people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange question: Is it all
+our own mind, and that of other living people, or are we by any chance
+dealing with the minds of those who are dead? A great many earnest
+people, and some very learned people, are fully convinced that the
+latter is the case, and we have now to consider their arguments.
+
+When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost stories, and would
+shudder over them; but I was given to understand that all this was just
+imagination, I must not take ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or
+dragons or nymphs or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts
+seriously--well, such a person would be almost as comical as that
+supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you believe it,
+in those days there actually were people who believed they could learn
+to fly in the air, and spent their time manufacturing machines for this
+purpose! There was a scientist in Washington who had this "bug," and
+built himself a machine and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac
+river. We all laughed at him--we laughed so long and so loud that we
+killed the poor man; and then, a few years later, somebody took that
+machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! But that
+was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not quite so ready to laugh
+at an idea because it was new.
+
+I remember vividly my first meeting with a man who believed in ghosts.
+He was a Unitarian clergyman, the Reverend Minot J. Savage of New York.
+I was sixteen years old, and just breaking out of my theological shell,
+and Doctor Savage helped to pry me loose. He was a grave and kindly man,
+of great learning and intelligence, and I remember vividly my
+consternation when one day he told me--oh, yes, he had seen many ghosts,
+he was accustomed to talk with ghosts every now and then. There was no
+doubt whatever that ghosts existed!
+
+He told me many stories. I remember one so well that I do not have to go
+back to his books to look up the details. It was in the days before the
+Atlantic cable, and he had a friend who took a steamer to England. One
+night Doctor Savage was awakened and found the ghost of his friend
+standing by his bedside. The ship had gone down off the Irish coast, so
+the ghost declared, but the friend did not want Doctor Savage to think
+that he had suffered from the pangs of drowning; he had been struck on
+the left side of the head by a beam of the ship and had been killed
+instantly. Doctor Savage wrote down these circumstances and had them
+witnessed by a number of people, and two or three weeks later he
+received word that the body of his friend had been found on the Irish
+coast, with the left side of the head crushed in.
+
+So then, of course, I studied the subject of ghosts. I have studied it
+off and on ever since, and have read most of the important new
+discoveries and arguments of the psychic researchers. To begin with, I
+will mention the contents of two large volumes, Gurney's "Phantasms of
+the Living." In this book are narrated many hundreds of cases, of which
+Doctor Savage's story is a type. It appears that persons at the moment
+of death, or in times of great mental stress, do somehow have the power
+to communicate with other people, even at the other side of the world. A
+few such cases might be attributed to coincidence or to fraud, but when
+you have so many cases, attested in minute detail by so many hundreds of
+otherwise honest people, you are not being scientific but simply stupid
+if you dismiss the whole subject with contempt.
+
+Gurney discusses the phenomenon and its probable causes. We know, of
+course, that hallucinations are among the most common of psychic
+phenomenon. Your subconscious mind can be caused to see and hear and
+feel anything; likewise it has power to cause you to see and hear and
+feel anything. In practically all cases of multiple personality some of
+the split-off personalities can cause the others to see and hear and
+feel. And the consciousness, you must understand, takes these things to
+be just as real as real things; there is no way you can tell an
+hallucination from reality--except to ask other people about it. And if
+we admit the idea of telepathy, we may say that phantasms are
+hallucinations caused by this means; that is, the subconscious mind of
+your wife or your mother or your friend who is ill or dying, transmits
+to your subconscious mind some vivid impression, which causes your own
+subconscious mind to present to your consciousness a perfect image of
+that person, walking and talking with you, and your consciousness has no
+way of telling but that the image is real.
+
+So much for phantasms of the living. But are there any phantasms of the
+dead? Are there any cases in which the time of the appearance can be
+proven to be subsequent to the time of death? Even this would not prove
+survival, of course; it is perfectly possible that the telepathic
+impulse might be delayed in our own minds, it might not flash into
+consciousness until our own state of mind made it possible. Can we say
+that there are cases in which the facts communicated are such as to
+convince us that the person was already dead, and was telling us
+something as a dead person and not as a living one?
+
+Before we go into this question, let us clear the ground for the subject
+by discussing the survival of personality from a more general
+standpoint. What is it that we want to prove? What are the probabilities
+of its being true? What would be the consequences of its not being true?
+Have we any grounds, other than those of psychic research, for thinking
+that it is true, or that it may be true, or that it ought to be true?
+What, so to speak, are the morals of the doctrine of immortality?
+
+Well, to begin with, the survival of the soul after death and forever is
+one of the principal doctrines of the Christian religion. Many devout
+Christians will read this book, and I will seem to them blasphemous when
+I say that this argument does not concern me. I count myself one of the
+lovers and friends of Jesus, I am presumptuous enough to believe that if
+he were on earth, I would understand him and get along with him
+excellently; but I do not know any reason why I should believe this,
+that, or the other doctrine about life because any religious sect,
+founded upon the name of Jesus, commands me so to believe. I see no more
+reason for adopting the idea of heaven because it is a Christian idea
+than I see for adopting the idea of reincarnation because it is a
+precious and holy idea to hundreds of millions of Buddhists. I have some
+very good friends who are Theosophists, and are quite convinced of this
+idea of reincarnation; that is, that the soul comes back into life over
+and over again in many different bodies, thus completing itself and
+renewing itself and expiating its sins. My Theosophist friends have a
+most elaborate and complicated body of what they consider to be
+knowledge on this subject; yet I have to take the liberty of saying that
+I cannot see that it has any relation to reality. It seems to me as
+completely unproven as any other fairy story, or myth, or legend--for
+example, the seven infernos of Dante, and the elaborate and complicated
+torments that are suffered there.
+
+But, it will be argued, Jesus rose from the dead, and thus proved the
+immortality of the soul. Now, in the first place, there are many learned
+investigators who consider there is insufficient evidence for believing
+that Jesus ever lived; and certainly if this be so, it will be difficult
+to prove that he rose from the dead. Again, it was a common occurrence
+for crucified men not to die; sometimes it happened that their guards
+allowed them to be spirited away--even nowadays we have known of prison
+guards being bribed to allow a prisoner to escape. Again, the events of
+the return of Jesus may have been just such psychic phenomena as we are
+trying in this chapter to explain. Or, once more, they may have been
+purely legends. A very brief study will convince a thinking person that
+the people of that time were ready to believe anything, and to accept
+facts upon such authority, and to make them the basis for a scientific
+conclusion, is simply to be childish.
+
+I shall be told, of course, that it is in the Bible, and therefore it
+must be true. The Bible is inspired, you say; and perhaps this is so.
+But then, a great deal of other literature is inspired, and that does
+not relieve me of the task of comparing these various inspirations, and
+judging them, and picking out what is of use to me. The Bible is the
+literature of the ancient Hebrews for a couple of thousand years. It
+represents what the race mind of a great people for one generation after
+another judged worth recording and preserving. You may get an idea what
+this means, if you will picture to yourself a large volume of English
+literature, containing some Teutonic myths, and the Saxon chronicles,
+and the "Morte d'Arthur," and several of Chaucer's stories, and some
+Irish fairy tales, and some of Bacon's essays, and Shakespeare's "Venus
+and Adonis," and the English prayer book, and the architect's
+specifications for Westminster Abbey, and a good part of "Burke's
+Peerage"; also Blackstone's "Commentaries," a number of Wesley's hymns,
+and Pope's "Essay on Man," and some chapters of Carlyle's "Past and
+Present," and Gladstone's speeches, and Blake's poems, and Captain
+Cook's story of his voyage around the world, and Southey's "Life of
+Nelson," and Morris's "News from Nowhere," and Blatchford's "Merrie
+England," and scores of pages from Hansard, which is the equivalent of
+our Congressional Record. You may find this description irreverent, but
+do not think it is meant so. Do me the honor to get out your Bible and
+look it over from this point of view!
+
+But, you say, if we die altogether when we finish this earthly life,
+what becomes of moral responsibility and the punishment of sins? What
+shall we say to the wicked man to make him be good, if we cannot reward
+him with a heaven and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is
+that we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand years,
+and the results seem to indicate that we might better seek out some
+other method of inducing men to behave themselves. They do not believe
+so completely in heaven and hell these days, but there were times in
+history when they did believe completely, and not merely were the
+believers just as cruel, they were just as treacherous and just as
+gluttonous and just as drunken. If you want to satisfy yourself on this
+point, I refer you to my book "The Profits of Religion," page 129.
+
+Now, as a matter of fact, I think I can discern the outlines of a system
+of rewards and punishments automatically working in the life of men. I
+am not sure that I can prove that the wicked always get punished and the
+virtuous always rewarded; yet, when I stop and think, I am sure that I
+would not care to change places with any of the wicked people that I
+know in this world. Life may not always be "getting" them, but it has a
+way of "getting" their descendants, and I could not be entirely happy if
+I knew that my son and his sons were going to share the fate which I now
+observe befalling, for example, the grand dukes of Russia and their
+children. Life is one thing, and it does not exist for the individual,
+but for the race; its causes and effects do not always manifest
+themselves in one individual, but in a line of descendants. "Why are
+they called dynasties?" asked one of my professors of history; and a
+student brought the session to an end by answering: "Because that is
+what they always seem to do!"
+
+But this is not perfect justice, you will argue. It is not perfect, from
+the point of view of you or me; but then, I ask, what else is there in
+the world that is perfect from that point of view? Why should our
+justice be any more perfect than, for example, our health or our
+thinking or our climate or our government? And, may it not very well be
+that our justice is up to us, in precisely the same way that some of
+these other things are up to us? Maybe what we have to do is to set to
+work to see to it that virtue does always get rewarded and vice does
+always get punished, right here and now, instead of waiting for an
+omnipotent God to attend to it in some hypothetical heaven.
+
+I find this life of mine very wonderful, and enormously interesting. I
+am willing to take it on the terms that it is given, and to try to make
+the best of it; and I do not see that I have any right to dictate what
+shall be given me in some future life. If my father gives me a Christmas
+present, I am happy and grateful; and, of course, if I know that he is
+going to give me another present next Christmas, I am still more happy;
+but I do not see that I have any right to argue that because he gives me
+one Christmas present, he must give me an unlimited number of them, and
+I think it would be very ungrateful of me to refuse to thank him for a
+Christmas present until I had made sure that I was to get one next time!
+
+Neither do I find myself such a wonderful person that I can assert that
+the morality of the universe absolutely depends upon the fact that I am
+immortal. Of course, I should like to live forever, and to know all the
+wonderful things that are going to happen in the world, and if it is
+true that I am so to live, I shall be immensely delighted. But I cannot
+say that it _must_ be true, and all I can do is to investigate the
+probabilities. On this point my view is stated in a sentence of
+Spinoza's: "He who would love God rightly must not desire that God love
+him in return."
+
+To sum up, the question of immortality is purely a question of fact. It
+is one to be approached in a spirit of open-minded inquiry, entirely
+unaffected by hopes or fears or dogmas or moral claims. It is worth
+while to get clear that we may be immortal, even though we do not now
+know it and cannot now prove it; it is possible that all psychic
+research might end in telepathy, and still, when we die, we might wake
+up and find ourselves alive. It might possibly be that some of us are
+immortal and not all of us. It might be that some parts of us are
+immortal and not the rest. It might be that our subconsciousness is
+immortal and not our consciousness. It might be that all of us, or some
+part of us, survive for a time, but not forever. This last is something
+which I myself am inclined to think may be the case.
+
+Also, it seems worthwhile to mention that it is no argument against
+immortality that we cannot imagine it, that we cannot picture a universe
+consisting of uncountable billions of living souls, or what these souls
+would do to pass the time. It may very well be that among these souls
+there is no such thing as time. It may be that they are thoroughly
+occupied in ways beyond our imagining, or again, that they are not
+occupied, and under no necessity of being occupied. Let the person who
+presents such arguments begin by picturing to you how the brain cells
+manage to store up the uncounted millions of memories which you have,
+the thousands of words and combinations of words, and the thoughts which
+go with them, musical notes and tunes, colors and odors and visual
+impressions, memories of the past and hopes of the future and dreams
+that never were. Where are all those hundreds of millions of things, and
+what are they like when they are not in our consciousness, and how do
+they pass the time, and where were they in the hundreds of millions of
+years before we were born, and where will they be in the hundreds of
+millions of years of the future? When our wise men can answer these
+questions completely, it will be time enough for them to tell us about
+the impossibility of immortality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL
+
+     (Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of
+     spiritism thus put before us.)
+
+
+Let us now take up the question of survival of personality after death
+from the strictly scientific point of view; let us consider what facts
+we have, and the indications they seem to give. First, we know that to
+all appearances the consciousness and the subconsciousness are bound up
+with the body. They grow with the body, they decline with the body, they
+seem to die with the body. We can irretrievably damage the consciousness
+by drawing a whiff of cyanogen gas into the lungs, or by sticking a pin
+into the brain, or by clogging one of its tiny blood vessels with waste
+matter. It is terrible to us to think that the mind of a great poet or
+prophet or statesman may be snuffed out of existence in such a way; but
+then, it is no argument against a fact to say that it is terrible.
+Insanity is terrible, war is terrible, pestilence is terrible, so also
+are tigers and poisonous snakes; but all these things exist, and all
+these things have power over the wisest and greatest mind, to put an end
+to its work on this earth at least.
+
+And now we come with the new instrument of psychic research, to probe
+the question: What becomes of this consciousness when it disappears? Can
+we prove that it is still in existence, and is able by any method to
+communicate with us? Those who answer "Yes" argue that the mind of the
+dead person, unable to use its own bodily machinery any longer, manages
+in the hypnotic trance to use the bodily machinery of another person,
+called a "medium," and by it to make some kind of record to identify
+itself.
+
+This, of course, is a strange idea, and requires a good deal of proof.
+The law of probability requires us not to accept an unlikely
+explanation, if there is any more simple one which can account for the
+facts. When we examine the product of automatic writing, table-tipping,
+and other psychic phenomena, we have first to ask ourselves, Is there
+anything in all this which cannot be explained by what we already know?
+Then, second, we have to ask, Is there any other supposition which will
+explain the facts, and which is easier to believe than the spirit
+theory?
+
+These "spirits" apparently desire to convince us of their reality, and
+they tell us many things which are expected to convince us; they tell us
+things which we ourselves do not know, and which spirits might know. But
+here again we run up against the problem of the subconsciousness, with
+its infinite mass of "forgotten" knowledge. It is not so easy for the
+"spirits" to tell us things which we can be sure our subconscious mind
+could not possibly contain. Also, there comes the additional element of
+telepathy. It appears to be a fact that under trance conditions, or
+under any especially exciting conditions of the consciousness, one mind
+can reach out and take something out of another mind, or one mind can
+cause something to be passed over to another mind; and so information
+can be communicated to the mind of a medium, and can appear in automatic
+writing, or in clairvoyance, or in crystal gazing.
+
+One of the most conscientious and earnest of all the investigators of
+this subject was the late Professor Hyslop, who many years ago sought to
+teach me "practical morality" (from the bourgeois point of view) in
+Columbia University. Professor Hyslop worked for fifteen years with a
+medium by the name of Mrs. Piper, who was apparently sincere and was
+never exposed in any kind of fraud. In Professor Hyslop's books you will
+find innumerable instances of amazing facts brought out in Mrs. Piper's
+trances. You will find Professor Hyslop arguing that the only way
+telepathy can account for these facts is by the supposition that there
+is a universal subconscious mind, or that the subconscious mind of the
+medium possesses the power to reach into the subconscious mind of every
+other living person and take out anything from it. But for my part, I
+cannot see that the case is quite so difficult. Professor Hyslop
+recites, for example, how Mrs. Piper would tell him facts about some
+long dead relative--facts which he did not know, but was later able to
+verify. But that proves simply nothing at all, because there could be no
+possible way for Professor Hyslop to be sure that he had never known
+these facts about his relatives. The facts might have been in his
+subconscious mind without having ever been in his conscious mind at all;
+he might have heard people talking about these matters while he was
+reading a book, or playing as a boy, paying no attention to what was
+said.
+
+And then came Sir Oliver Lodge with his investigations. I will say this
+for his work--he was the first person who was able to make real to my
+mind the startling idea that perhaps after all the dead might be alive
+and able to communicate with us. You will find what he has to say in his
+book, "The Survival of Man," and it seems fair that a great scientist
+and a great man should have a chance to convince you of what seem to him
+the most important facts in the world.
+
+Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in the war, and it is claimed that
+he began at once to communicate with his family. Among other things, he
+told them of the existence of a picture, which none of them had ever
+seen or heard of, a group photograph which he described in detail. But,
+of course, other people in this group knew of the existence of the
+photograph, and so we have again the possibility that some member of Sir
+Oliver's family may have taken into his subconscious mind without
+knowing it an impression or description of that picture. If you care to
+experiment, you will find that you can frequently play a part in the
+dreams of a child by talking to it in its sleep; and that is only one of
+a thousand different ways by which some member of a family might
+acquire, without knowing it, information of the existence of a
+photograph.
+
+There is another possibility to be considered--that a portion of the
+consciousness may survive, and not necessarily forever. We are
+accustomed when death takes place to see the body before us, and we know
+that we can preserve the body for thousands of years if we wish. Why is
+it not possible that when conscious life is brought to a sudden end,
+there may remain some portion of the consciousness, or of the
+subconsciousness, cut off from the body, and slowly fading back into the
+universal mind energy, whatever we please to call it? There is a hard
+part of the body, the skeleton, which survives for some time; why might
+there not be a central core of the mind which is similarly tough and
+enduring? Of course, if consciousness is a function of the brain, it
+must decay as the brain decays; but how would it be if the brain were a
+function of the consciousness--which is, so far as I can see, quite as
+likely a guess.
+
+I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility of this idea.
+I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits of those recently
+dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. Of course, you can go to
+any seance in the "white light" district of your city and receive
+communications from the souls of Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander the
+Great and Pocahontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary,
+you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and
+Achilles; but you will not find much reality about any of these people,
+they will not tell you very much about the everyday details of their
+lives. This fact that so much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our
+own time tends to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever.
+How simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles would
+come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to find copies of
+his lost tragedies! You would think that the soul of Sophocles, seeing
+our great need of beauty and wisdom, would be interested to give us his
+works! From genius, operating under the guidance of the conscious mind,
+we get sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums give us
+suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the operation of
+the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, for example, from
+dissociated personalities.
+
+There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, produced by the
+automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who tells us in evident good
+faith that her conscious personality is entirely innocent of Patience,
+and all her thought and doings. Patience writes long novels and dramas
+in a quaint kind of old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing
+about this language. But does she positively know that when she was a
+child, she never happened to be in the room with someone who was reading
+old English aloud? Nothing seems more likely than that her subconscious
+mind heard some quaint, strange language, and took possession of it, and
+built up a personality around it, and even made a new language and a new
+literature from that starting point.
+
+That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subconscious revels. It
+creates new characters, with an imagination infinite and inexhaustible.
+Who has not waked up and been astounded at the variety and reality of a
+dream? Who has not told his dreams and laughed over them? The
+subconscious will play at games, it will act and rehearse elaborate
+roles; it will put on costumes, and delight in being Caesar and Napoleon
+and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Hamlet and Don Quixote and
+Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will even play at being "spirits"! It
+will be mischievous and impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of
+its own importance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's
+most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. It
+will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a grief-stricken family;
+it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," and cause an earnest
+professor of "practical morality" to give up a respectable position in
+Columbia University and write books to convince the world that the dead
+are sending him messages.
+
+Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss Beauchamp.
+Remember that here we are not dealing with any guess work about
+"spirits"; here we have half a dozen different "controls," none of them
+the least bit dead, but all of them a part of the consciousness of one
+entirely alive young lady. A specialist has spent some six years
+investigating the case, day after day, week after week, writing down the
+minute details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant known as
+"Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom you ever held in your
+arms. Sally has love and hate, fear and hope, pain and delight--and
+Sally is a little demon, created entirely out of the subconsciousness of
+a highly refined and conscientious young college graduate of Boston.
+Sally spends Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally pawns
+Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; Sally uses
+Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about Miss Beauchamp;
+Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or makes her hear exactly the
+opposite of what is spoken to her. Yes, and Sally pleads and fights
+frantically for her life; Sally enters into intrigues with other parts
+of Miss Beauchamp, and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who
+is her Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge!
+
+And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a grieving mother,
+and made that mother think she was talking to the ghost of a long lost
+child? Can anybody doubt that Sally could and would play the part of any
+person she had ever known, or of any historic character she had ever
+read about? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the conscious
+Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this, and was horrified
+when she was told about it. So here you have the following situation, no
+matter of guesswork, but definitely established: your dearest friend may
+act as a medium, and in all good faith may bring to the surface some
+part of his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in a
+hundred different roles, and plays upon you with deliberate malice the
+most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks.
+
+And how much worse the situation becomes when to this there is added the
+possibility of conscious fraud! When the medium is a person who is
+taking your money, and thrives by making you believe in the "spirits"
+she produces! You may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of
+the Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, and in row
+after row of tents you may hear, and even see, every kind of spirit you
+ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs.
+And you may see poor farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their
+cheeks, listening to the endearments of their dead children, and to
+wisdom from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a Bowery
+accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years ago by Will Irwin in a
+book called "The Medium Game"; and then--after traveling from one kind
+of medium to another, and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he
+went into a "parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who
+had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most intimate secrets
+of his life!
+
+It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is at work upon a
+device to enable spirits to communicate with the living, if there really
+are spirits seeking to do this. It is Edison's idea that spirits may
+inhabit some kind of infinitely rarefied astral body, and he proposes to
+manufacture an instrument which is sensitive to an impression many
+millions of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This
+should make it easier for the spirits, and should constitute a fairer
+test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is perfected and put to
+work by scientific men, I wish to suggest a few tests which will
+convince me that there really are spirits, and that the results are not
+to be explained by telepathy.
+
+First, assuming that the spirits live forever, there are some useful
+things which were known to the people of ancient time, and are not known
+to anyone living now. For example, let one of the Egyptian craftsmen
+come forward and tell us the secret of their glass-staining, which I
+understand is now a lost art. And then Sophocles, as I have already
+suggested, will tell us where we can find his lost dramas; or if he
+doesn't know where any copies are buried, let him find in the spirit
+world some scribe or librarian or book-lover who can give us this
+priceless information. All over the ancient lands are buried and
+forgotten cities, and in those cities are papyrus scrolls and graven
+tablets and bricks. Infinite stores of knowledge are thus concealed from
+us; and how simple for the ancient ones who possess this information to
+make it known to us, and so to convince us of their reality!
+
+Or, again, supposing that spirits are not immortal, but that they slowly
+fade from life as do their bodies. Suppose that a Raymond Lodge or other
+recently dead soldier wishes to communicate with his father and to
+convince his father that it is really an independent being, and not
+simply a part of the father's subconscious mind--let him try something
+like this. Let the father write six brief notes, and put them in six
+envelopes all alike, and shuffle them up and put them in a hat and draw
+out one of them. Now, assuming that the experimenter is honest, there is
+no living human being who knows the contents of that envelope, and if
+the medium is dipping into the subconscious mind of the experimenter,
+the chances are one in six of the right note being hit upon. Assuming
+that spirits may not be able to get inside an envelope and read a folded
+letter, there is no objection to the experimenter, provided he is
+honest, and provided there are no mirrors or other tricks, holding the
+envelope behind his back, and tearing it open, and spreading it out for
+the convenience of the spirit. And now, if the spirit can read that
+letter correctly every time, we shall be fairly certain that whatever
+force we are dealing with, it is not the subconscious mind of the
+experimenter.
+
+Or, let us take another test. Let us have a roulette wheel in a covered
+box, or hidden away so that no one but the spirit can see it. We spin
+the wheel, and any one of the habitues of Monte Carlo can figure out the
+chance of the little ball dropping into any particular number. If now
+the spirit can tell us each time where we shall find the ball, we shall
+know that we are dealing with knowledge which does not exist either in
+the conscious or the subconscious mind of any living human being.
+
+Among the things that "spirits" have been accustomed to do, since the
+days when they first made their appearance with the Fox sisters in
+America, are the lifting of tables and the ringing of bells and the
+assuming of visible forms. These are what is known as
+"materializations," and when I was a boy, and used to hear people
+talking about these things, there was always one test required: let the
+materializations manifest themselves upon recording instruments
+scientifically devised; let photographs be taken of them, let them be
+weighed and measured, and so on. Well, time has moved forward, and these
+tests have been met, and it appears that "materializations" are
+facts--although it is still as uncertain as ever what they are
+materializations of. An English scientist, Professor Crawford, has
+published a book entitled "The Reality of Psychic Phenomena," in which
+he tells the results of many years of testing materializations by the
+strictest scientific methods. When the medium "levitates" a table--that
+is, causes it to go up in the air without physical contact--it appears
+that her own weight increases by exactly the weight of the table. When
+she exerts any force, which apparently she can do at a distance, the
+recording instruments show the exact counter-force in her own body.
+
+The results of these investigations are calculated at first to take your
+breath away. It begins to appear that the theosophists may be right, and
+that we may have one or more "astral" bodies within or coincident with
+the physical body; and that under the trance conditions we mold and make
+over this "astral" body in accordance with our imaginations, precisely
+as a sculptor molds the clay. At any rate, our subconsciousness has the
+power to project from it masses of substance, and to cause these to take
+all kinds of forms, for example, human faces, which have been
+photographed innumerable times. Or the body can shoot out long rods or
+snaky projections, which lift tables, and exert force which has been
+recorded upon pressure instruments and weighed by scales.
+
+As I write, a friend lends me a fifteen-dollar volume, a translation
+just published of an elaborate work by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, a
+physician of Munich, giving minute details of four years' experiments in
+this field. So rigid was this investigator in his efforts to exclude
+fraud, that not merely was the medium stripped and sewed up in black
+tights, but the "cabinet" in which she sat was a big sack of black
+cloth, everywhere sewed tight by machine. Every crevice of the medium's
+body was searched before and after the tests, and every inch of the
+"cabinet" gone over. The investigators sat within a couple of feet of
+the medium, and would draw back the curtains, and while holding her
+hands and her feet, would watch great masses of filmy gray and white
+stuff exude from the medium's mouth, from her armpits and breasts and
+sides. This would happen in red light of a hundred candle power, by
+which print could be easily read; and the medium would herself
+illuminate the phenomena with a red electric torch. The investigators
+would be privileged to examine these "phantom" forms, to touch them
+gently, and be touched by them--soft and slimy, like the tongue of an
+animal; but sometimes the things would misbehave, and strike them in the
+eye, hurting them.
+
+The medium, a young French girl living in the home of the wife of a
+well-known French playwright, had begun with spiritualist ideas, but
+came to take a matter-of-fact attitude to what happened, and in her
+trances would labor to mold these emanations into hands or faces, as
+requested by those present. She finally succeeded in allowing them to
+separate the soft mucous stuff from her body, and keep it for chemical
+and bacteriological examination. All this time she would be surrounded
+by a battery of cameras, nine at once, some of them inside the cabinet;
+and when the desired emanation was in sight, all these cameras would be
+set off by flashlight, and in the book you have over two hundred such
+photographs, showing faces and hands from every point of view. There are
+even moving-pictures, showing the material coming out of her mouth and
+going back!
+
+It is evident that we have here a whole universe of unexplored
+phenomena; and it seems that many of the old-time superstitions which
+were dumped overboard have now to be dragged back into the boat and
+examined in the light of new knowledge. What could smack more of magic
+and fraud than crystal-gazing? Yet it appears that the subconsciousness
+has power to project an image of its hidden memories into a crystal
+ball, where it may be plainly seen. We find so well-recognized an
+authority as Dr. Morton Prince using this method to enable one of the
+many Miss Beauchamps to recall incidents in her previous life which were
+otherwise entirely lost to her. Likewise this exploration of the
+disintegration of personality enables us to watch in the making all the
+phenomena of trance and ecstasy which have had so much to do with the
+making of religions. We know now how Joan of Arc heard the "voices," and
+we can make her hear more voices or make her stop hearing voices, as we
+prefer. Also we know all about demons and "demoniac possession." We can
+cast out demons--and without having to cause them to enter a herd of
+swine! We may some day be prepared to investigate the wonder stories
+which the Yogis tell us, about their ability to leave their physical
+bodies in a trance, and to appear in England at a few moments' notice
+for the transaction of their spiritual business!
+
+But we want things proven to us, and we don't want the people with whom
+we work to be animated either by religious fanaticism or by money greed.
+We are ready to unlimber our minds, and prepare for long journeys into
+strange regions, but we want to move cautiously, and choose our route
+carefully, and be sure we do not lose our way! We want to deal
+rationally with life; we don't want to make wild guesses, or to choose a
+complicated and unlikely solution when a simple one will suffice. But,
+on the other hand, we must be alive to the danger of settling down on
+our little pile of knowledge, and refusing to take the trouble to
+investigate any more. That is a habit of learned men, I am sorry to say;
+the law of inertia applies to the scientist, as well as to the objects
+he studies. The scientists of our time have had to be prodded into
+considering each new discovery about the subconscious mind, precisely as
+the scientists of Galileo's time had to be prodded to watch him drop
+weights from the tower of Pisa. When he told them that the earth moved
+round the sun instead of the sun round the earth, they tortured him in a
+dungeon to make him take it back, and he did so, but whispered to
+himself, "And yet it moves." And it did move, of course, and continued
+to move. And in exactly the same way, if it be true that we have these
+hidden forces in us, they will continue to manifest themselves, and
+masses of people will continue to flock to Lily Dale, and to pay out
+their hard-earned money, until such a time as our learned men set to
+work to find out the facts and tell us how we can utilize these forces
+without the aid of either superstition or charlatanry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE POWERS OF THE MIND
+
+     (Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance is
+     slavery, and what science means to the people.)
+
+
+We have now completed a brief survey of the mind and its powers.
+Whatever we may have proved or failed to prove, this much we may say
+with assurance: the reader who has followed our brief sketch attentively
+has been disabused of any idea he may have held that he knows it all;
+and this is always the first step towards knowledge.
+
+The mind is the instrument whereby our race has lifted itself out of
+beasthood. It is the instrument whereby we hold ourselves above the
+forces which seek to drag us down, and whereby we shall lift ourselves
+higher, if higher we are to go. How shall we protect this precious
+instrument? How shall we complete our mastery of it? What are the laws
+of the conduct of the mind?
+
+The process of the mind is one of groping outward after new facts, and
+digesting and assimilating them, as the body gropes after and digests
+and assimilates food. The senses bring us new impressions, and we take
+these and analyze them, tear them into the parts which compose them,
+compare them with previous sensations, recognize difference in things
+which seem to be alike, and resemblances in things which seem to be
+different; we classify them, and provide them with names, which are, as
+it were, handles for the mind to grasp. Above all, we seek for causes;
+those chains of events which make what we know as order in the world of
+phenomena. And when the mind has what seems to be a cause, it proceeds
+to test it according to methods it has worked out, the rules and
+principles of experimental science.
+
+It is a comparatively small number of sensations which the body brings
+to the mind of itself; it is a narrow world in which we should live if
+our minds adopted a passive attitude toward life. But some minds possess
+what we call curiosity; they set out upon their own impulse to explore
+life; they discover new laws and make new experiences and new
+sensations for themselves. The mind forms an idea, and at first, after
+the fashion of the ancient Greek philosophers, it glorifies that idea
+and sets it in the seat of divinity. But presently comes the empirical
+method, which refuses authority to any idea unless it can stand the test
+of experiment, and prove that it corresponds with reality. Nowadays the
+thinker amasses his facts, and forms a theory to explain them, and then
+proceeds to try out this theory by the most rigid method that he or his
+critics can devise. If the theory doesn't "work"--that is, if it doesn't
+explain all the facts and stand all the tests--it is thrown away like a
+worn-out shoe. So little by little a body of knowledge is built up which
+is real knowledge; which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can
+use as foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization.
+
+By this method of research man is expanding his universe beyond anything
+that could have been conceived in the pre-scientific days. Hour by hour,
+while we work and play and sleep, the mind of our race is discovering
+new worlds in which our posterity will dwell. For uncounted ages man
+walked upon the earth, surrounded by infinite swarms of bacterial life
+of whose existence he never dreamed. The invisible rays of the spectrum
+beat upon him, and he knew nothing of what they did to him, whether good
+or evil. He lifted his head and saw vast universes of suns, in
+comparison with which his world was a mere speck of dust; yet to him
+these universes were globes or lanterns which some divinity had hung in
+the sky.
+
+One of the most fascinating illustrations of how the mind runs ahead of
+the senses is the story of the planet Uranus, which, less than two
+hundred years ago, had never been beheld by the eye of man. A
+mathematician seated in his study, working over the observations of
+other planets, their motions in relation to their mass and distance,
+discovered that their behavior was not as it should be. At certain times
+none of them were in quite the right place, and he decided that this
+variation must be due to the existence of an unknown body. He worked out
+the problem of what must be the mass and the exact orbit of this body,
+in order for it to be responsible for the variations observed; and when
+he had completed these calculations, he announced to the astronomical
+world, "Turn your telescopes to a certain spot in the heavens at a
+certain minute of a certain night, and you will find a new planet of a
+certain size." And so for the first time the human senses became aware
+of a fact, which by themselves they might not have discovered in all
+eternity.
+
+Now, the importance of exact knowledge concerning a new planet may not
+be apparent to the ordinary man; but if the thing which is discovered
+is, for example, an unknown ray which will move an engine or destroy a
+cancer, then we realize the worthwhileness of research, and the masters
+of the world's commerce are willing to give here and there a pittance
+for the increase of such knowledge. But men of science, who have by this
+time come to a sense of their own dignity and importance, understand
+that there is no knowledge about reality which is useless, no research
+into nature which is wasted. You might say that to describe and classify
+the fleas which inhabit the bodies of rats and ground-squirrels, and to
+study under the microscope the bacteria which live in the blood of these
+fleas--that this would be an occupation hardly worthy of the divinity
+that is in man. But presently, as a result of this knowledge about fleas
+and flea diseases being in existence and available, a bacteriologist
+discovers the secret of the dread bubonic plague, which hundreds of
+times in past history has wiped out a great part of the population of
+Europe and Asia.
+
+Mark Twain tells in his "Connecticut Yankee" how his hero was able to
+overcome the wizard Merlin, because he knew in advance of an eclipse of
+the sun. And this was fiction, of course; but if you prefer fact, you
+may read in the memoirs of Houdin, the French conjurer, how he was able
+to bring the Arab tribes into subjection to the French government by
+depriving the great chieftains of their strength. He gathered them into
+a theatre, and invited their mighty men upon the stage, and there was an
+iron weight, and they were able to lift it when Houdin permitted, and
+not to lift it when he forbade. These noble barbarians had never heard
+of the electro-magnet, and could not conceive of a force that could
+operate through a solid wooden floor beneath their feet.
+
+Such things, trivial as they are, serve to illustrate the difference
+between ignorance and knowledge, and the power which knowledge gives.
+The man who knows is godlike to those who do not know; he may enslave
+them, he may do what he pleases with their lives, and they are powerless
+to help themselves. Anyone who would help them must begin by giving them
+knowledge, real knowledge. There is no such thing as freedom without
+knowledge, and it must be the best knowledge, it must be new knowledge;
+he who goes against new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the
+Chinese who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, and with
+umbrellas over their heads.
+
+Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings and priests and
+ruling castes; but this supreme power has been wrested from them, and
+this is the greatest step in human progress so far taken. "Seek and ye
+shall find," is the law concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall
+be opened unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that
+knowledge is your priceless birthright, and that you should repudiate
+all men and all institutions and all creeds and all formulas which seek
+to keep this heritage from you. Beware of men who bid you believe
+something because it is told you, or because your fathers believed it,
+or because it is written in some ancient book, or embodied in some
+ancient ceremonial. Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at
+the same time beware of the modern spells which have been contrived to
+replace them! Beware of party cries and shibboleths, the idols of the
+forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which are set as snares for
+your feet. Beware of cant--that paraphernalia of noble sentiments,
+artificially manufactured by politicians and newspapers for the purpose
+of blinding you to their knaveries. Remember that you live in a world of
+class conflicts; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged by
+secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately released
+by people who seek to make use of you for purposes which are theirs and
+not yours. In the fairy-tales we used to love, the hero was provided
+with magic protection against the perils of those times; but what hero
+and what magic will guard the modern man against the propaganda of
+militarism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism?
+
+The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can be taught
+sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. There are many
+books on mind and memory training, some of which are useful, and some of
+which are trash. There is an English system widely advertised, called
+"Pelmanism," of which I have personally made no test, but it has won
+endorsements of a great many people who do not give their endorsements
+lightly.
+
+This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in medicine, or
+in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount of charlatanry,
+but there is also genuine knowledge being patiently accumulated and
+standardized. When the United States government had to have an army in a
+hurry it did not make its millions of young men into teamsters or
+aviators at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction
+times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently I visited
+the Whittier Reform School in California, where delinquent boys are
+educated by the state. A boy had been set to work in the tailor shop,
+and it had been found that he was unable to make the buttons and the
+buttonholes of a coat come in the right place. For nine years the state
+of California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been laboring to
+teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; the effort had cost
+some five thousand dollars, to say nothing of all the coats which were
+spoiled, and all the mental suffering of the victim and his teachers.
+Finally someone persuaded the state of California to spend a few
+thousand dollars and install a psychological bureau for the purpose of
+testing all the inmates of the institution; so by a half hour's
+examination the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective.
+Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was only eight
+years old, and so he would never be able to achieve the feat of making
+buttons and buttonholes meet.
+
+This is a new science which you may read about in Terman's "The
+Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal children, it is
+established that certain tasks can be performed at certain ages. A child
+of three can point to his eyes, his nose and his mouth; he can repeat a
+sentence of six syllables, and repeat two digits, and give his family
+name. Older children are asked to look at a picture and then tell what
+they saw; to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according to
+their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note absurdities in
+statements, to count backwards, and to make change. Children of fifteen
+are asked to interpret fables, to reverse the hands of a clock, and so
+on. Of course there are always variations; every child will be better at
+some kinds of tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and
+taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child--which
+may be widely different from its physical age. You may find some whose
+minds have stopped growing altogether, and can only be made to grow by
+special methods of education. Enlightened communities are now conducting
+separate schools for defective children--replacing the old-fashioned
+schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor little
+wretches to learn what was beyond their power.
+
+In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, and in the
+detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast amount of "fake," but
+also the beginning of a science. Our laws do not as yet permit the use
+of automatic writing and the hypnotic trance in the investigation of
+crime, but they have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for
+example, those of memory association. The examiner prepares a list of a
+hundred names of objects, and reads those names one after another, and
+asks the person he is investigating to name the first thing which is
+suggested to him by each word in turn. "Engine" will suggest "steam," or
+perhaps it will suggest "train"; "coat" will suggest "trousers," or
+perhaps it will suggest "pocket," and so on. The examiner holds a
+stop-watch, and notes what fraction of a second each one of these
+reactions takes. The ordinary man, who is not trying to conceal
+anything, will give all his associations promptly, and the reaction
+times will be approximately alike. But suppose the man has just murdered
+somebody with an axe, and buried the body in a cellar with a fire
+shovel, and taken a pocketbook, and a watch, and a locket, and a number
+of various objects, and climbed out of the cellar window by breaking the
+glass; and now suppose that in his list of a hundred objects the
+psychologist introduces unexpectedly a number of these things. In each
+case the first memory association of the criminal will be one which he
+does not wish to give. He will have to find another, and that inevitably
+takes time. One or two such delays might be accidental; but if every
+time there is any suggestion of the murder, or the method or scene of
+the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be sure that
+the conscious mind is interfering with the subconscious mind. The
+difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind is always
+possible to detect, and if you are permitted to be thorough in your
+experiments, you can make certain what is in the subconscious mind that
+the conscious mind is trying to conceal.
+
+Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and expert knowledge
+confers mastery over the shrewdest untrained mind. The only trouble is
+that under our present social system the trained mind is very apt to be
+working in the interest of class privilege. The psychologist who is
+employed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may be as
+little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in making poison
+gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for the extermination of its
+rebellious slaves. But what this proves is not that scientific knowledge
+is untrustworthy, but merely that the workers must acquire it, they must
+have their own organizations and their own experiments in every field.
+To give knowledge to the masses of mankind, slow and painful as the
+process seems, is now the most important task confronting the
+enlightened thinker.
+
+The method of psychoanalysis gives us also much insight into the
+phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may ultimately come to
+understand it. At present we are embarrassed because genius is so often
+closely allied to eccentricity; the supernormal appears in connection
+with the subnormal--and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets
+and painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, adopt
+irresponsibility as their religion; they live in a world of their own,
+they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, or to be true to
+their wives. They are followed by a host of disciples, who adopt the
+defects of the master as a substitute for his qualities. And so there
+grows up a perverted notion of what genius is, and wholly false
+standards of artistic quality. There is nothing mankind needs more than
+sure and exact tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to
+acquire languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability
+to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time shaping
+and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting masses of facts
+and weaving them into a pattern calculated to awaken the emotion in
+others. This is the last and greatest work of the human spirit, and to
+select the men who can do it, and foster their activity, is the ultimate
+purpose of all true science.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND
+
+     (Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to preserve and
+     develop its powers for the protection of our lives and the lives of
+     all men.)
+
+
+Someone wrote me the other day, asking, "When is the best time to
+acquire knowledge?" I answer, "The time is now." It is easier to learn
+things when you are young, but you cannot be young when you want to be,
+and if you are old, the best time to acquire knowledge is when you are
+old. It is true that the brain-cells seem to harden like the body, and
+it is less easy for them to take on new impressions; but it can be done,
+and just as Seneca began to learn Greek at eighty, I know several old
+men whom the recent war has shaken out of their grooves of thought and
+compelled to deal with modern ideas.
+
+But if you are young, then so much the better! Then the divine thrill of
+curiosity is keenest; then your memory is fresh, and can be trained;
+your mind is plastic, and you can form sound habits. You can teach
+yourself to respect truth and to seek it, you can teach yourself
+accuracy, open-mindedness, flexibility, persistence in the search for
+understanding.
+
+First of all, I think, is accuracy. Learn to think straight! Let your
+mind be as a sharp scalpel, penetrating unrealities and falsehoods,
+cutting its way to the facts. When you set out to deal with a certain
+subject, acquire mastery of it, so that you can say, "I know." And yet,
+never be too sure that you know! Never be so sure, that you are not
+willing to consider new facts, and to change your way of thinking if it
+should be necessary. I look about me at the world, and see tigers and
+serpents, dynamite and poison gas and forty-two centimeter shells--yet I
+see nothing in the world so deadly to men as an error of the mind. Look
+at the mental follies about you! Look at the prejudices, the delusions,
+the lies deliberately maintained--and realize the waste of it all, the
+pity of it all!
+
+Every man, it seems, has his pet delusions, which he hugs to his bosom
+and loves because they are his own. If you try to deprive him of those
+delusions, it is as though you tore from a woman's arms the child she
+has borne. I have written a book called "The Profits of Religion," and
+never a week passes that there do not come to me letters from people who
+tell me they have read this book with pleasure and profit, they are
+grateful to me for teaching them so much about the follies and delusions
+of mankind, and it is all right and all true, save for two or three
+pages, in which I deal with the special hobby which happens to be their
+hobby! What I say about all the other creeds is correct--but I fail to
+understand that the Mormon religion is a dignified and inspired
+religion, a gift from on high, and if only I would carefully study the
+"Book of Mormon," I would realize my error! Or it is all right, except
+what I say about the Christian Scientists, or the Theosophists, or
+perhaps one particular sect of the Theosophists, who are different from
+the others. Today there lies upon my desk a letter from a man who has
+read many of my books, and now is grief-stricken because he must part
+company from me; he discovers that I permit myself to speak
+disrespectfully about the Seventh Day Adventist religion, whereas he is
+prepared to show the marvels of biblical prophecy now achieving
+themselves in the world. How could any save a divinely revealed religion
+have foreseen the present movement to establish the Sabbath by law? Yes,
+and presently I shall see the last atom of the prophecy fulfilled--there
+will be a death penalty for failure to obey the Sabbath law!
+
+Cultivate the great and precious virtue of open-mindedness. Keep your
+thinking free, not merely from outer compulsions, but from the more
+deadly compulsions of its own making--from prejudices and superstitions.
+The prejudices and superstitions of mankind are like those diseased
+mental states which are discovered by the psychoanalyst; what he calls a
+"complex" in the subconscious mind, a tangle or knot which is a center
+of disturbance, and keeps the whole being in a state of confusion. Each
+group of men, each sect or class, have their precious dogmas, their
+shibboleths, their sacred words and stock phrases which set their whole
+beings aflame with fanaticism. They have also their phobias, their words
+of terror, which cannot be spoken in their presence without causing a
+brain-storm.
+
+At present the dread word of our time is "Communist."
+
+You can scarcely say the word without someone telephoning for the
+police. And yet, when you meet a Communist, what is he? A worn and
+fragile student, who has thought out a way to make the world a better
+place to live in, and whose crime is that he tells others about his
+idea! Or perhaps you belong to the other side, and then your word of
+terror is the word "Capitalist." You meet a Capitalist, and what do you
+find? Very likely you find a man who is kindly, generous in his personal
+impulses, but bewildered, possibly a little frightened, still more
+irritated and made stubborn. So you realize that nearly all men are
+better than the institutions and systems under which they live; you
+realize the urgent need of applying your reasoning powers to the problem
+of social reorganization.
+
+Cultivate also, in the affairs of your mind, the ancient virtue of
+humility. There is an oldtime poem, which perhaps was in your school
+readers, "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" My answer is,
+for innumerable reasons. The spirit of mortal should be proud and must
+be proud because life throbs in it, and because life is a marvelous
+thing, and the excitement of life is perpetual. Yesterday I met a young
+mother; and of what avail is all the pessimism of poets against the
+pride of a young mother? "Oh!" she cried, and her face lighted up with
+delight. "He said 'Goo'!" Yes, he said "Goo!"--and never since the world
+began had there been a baby which had achieved that marvel. Presently it
+will be, "Look, look, he is trying to walk!" Then he will be getting
+marks at school, and presently he will be displaying signs of genius.
+Always it will take an effort of the mind of that young mother to
+realize that there are other children in the world as wonderful as her
+own; and perhaps it will take many generations of mental effort before
+there will be young mothers capable of realizing that some other child
+is more wonderful than her child.
+
+In other words, it is by a definite process of broadening our minds that
+we come to realize the lives of others, to transfer to them the interest
+we naturally take in our own lives, and to admit them to a state of
+equality with ourselves. This is one of the services the mind must
+render for us; it is the process of civilizing us. And there is another,
+and yet more important task, which is to make clear to us the fact that
+we do not altogether make this life of ours, that there is a universe of
+power and wisdom which is not ours, but on which we draw. "The fear of
+the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," said the Psalmist. We know now
+that fear is an ugly emotion, destructive to life; but it may be
+purified and made into a true humility, which every thinking man must
+feel towards life and its miracles.
+
+Also the man will have joy, because it is given him to share the high,
+marvelous adventure of being. To the pleasures of the body there is a
+limit, and it comes quickly; but the pleasures of the mind are infinite,
+and no one who truly understands them can have a moment of boredom in
+life. To a man who possesses the key to modern thought, who knows what
+knowledge is and where to look for it, the life of the mind is a
+panorama of delight perpetually unrolled before him. To the minds of our
+ancestors there was one universe; but to our minds there are many
+universes, and new ones continually discovered.
+
+The only question is, which one will you choose? Will you choose the
+universe of outer space, the material world of infinity? Consider the
+smallest insect that you can see, crawling upon the surface of the
+earth; small as that insect is in relation to the earth, it is not so
+small, by millions of times, as is the earth in relation to the universe
+made visible to our eyes by the high-power telescope, plus the
+photographic camera, plus the microscope. If you want to know the
+miracles of this world of space, read Arrhenius' "The Life of the
+Universe," or Simon Newcomb's "Sidelights on Astronomy." Suffice it here
+to say that we have a chemistry of the stars, by means of the
+spectroscope; that we can measure the speed and direction of stars by
+the same means; that we have learned to measure the size of the stars,
+and are studying stars which we cannot even see! And then along comes
+Einstein, with his theories of "relativity," and makes it seem that we
+have to revise a great part of this knowledge to allow for the fact that
+not merely everything we look at, but also we ourselves, are flying
+every which way through space!
+
+Or will you choose the universe of the atom, the infinity of the
+material world followed the other way, so to speak? Big as is the
+universe in relation to our world, and big as is our world in relation
+to the insect that crawls on it, the insect is bigger yet in relation to
+the molecules which compose its body; and these in turn are millions of
+millions of times bigger than the atoms which compose them; and then,
+behold, in the atom there are millions of millions of electrons--tiny
+particles of electric energy! We cannot see these infinitely minute
+things, any more than we can see the electricity which runs our trolley
+cars; but we can see their effects, and we can count and measure them,
+and deal with them in complicated mathematical formulas, and be just as
+certain of their existence as we are of the dust under our feet. If you
+wish to explore this wonderland, read Duncan's "The New Knowledge," or
+Dr. Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science."
+
+Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our racial past
+locked up in the secret chambers of our mind? Or will you choose the
+universe of the superconscious, the infinity of genius manifested in the
+arts? By the device of art man not merely creates new life, he tests it,
+he weighs it and measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the
+physicist with the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out
+what works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral and
+spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker of life.
+
+Written words can give but a feeble idea of the wonders that are found
+in these enchanted regions of the mind. Here are palaces of splendor
+beyond imagining, here are temples with sacred shrines, and
+treasure-chambers full of gold and priceless jewels. Into these places
+we enter as Aladdin in the ancient tale; we are the masters here, and
+all that we see is ours. He who has once got access to it--he possesses
+not merely the magic lamp, he possesses all the wonderful fairy
+properties of all the tales of our childhood. His is the Tarnhelm and
+the magic ring which gives him power over his foes; his is the sword
+Excalibur which none can break, and the silver bullet which brings down
+all game, and the flying carpet upon which to travel over the earth, and
+the house made of ginger-bread, and the three wishes which always come
+true, and the philter of love, and the elixir of youth, and the music of
+the spheres, and--who knows, some day he may come upon heaven, with St.
+Peter and his golden key, and the seraphim singing, and the happy blest
+conversing!
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+THE BOOK OF THE BODY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE UNITY OF THE BODY
+
+     (Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is not a
+     matter of many different organs and functions, but is one problem
+     of one organism.)
+
+
+The reader who has followed our argument this far will understand that
+we are seldom willing to think of the body as separate from the mind.
+The body is a machine, to be sure, but it is a machine that has a
+driver, and while it is possible for a sound machine to have a drunken
+and irresponsible driver, such a machine is not apt to remain sound very
+long. Frequently, when there is trouble with the machine, we find the
+fault to be with the driver; in other words, we find that what is needed
+for the body is a change in the mind.
+
+If you wish to have a sound body, and to keep it sound as long as
+possible, the first problem for you to settle is what you want to make
+of your life; you must have a purpose, and confront the tasks of life
+with energy and interest. What is the use of talking about health to a
+man who has no moral purpose? He may answer--indeed, I have heard
+victims of alcoholism answer--"Let me alone. I have a right to go to
+hell in my own way."
+
+I am aware, of course, that the opposite of the proposition is equally
+true. A man cannot enjoy much mental health while he has a sick body. It
+is a good deal like the old question, Which comes first, the hen or the
+egg? The mind and the body are bound up together, and you may try to
+deal with each by turn, but always you find yourself having to deal with
+both. Most physicians have a tendency to overlook the mind, and
+Christian Scientists make a religion of overlooking the body, and each
+pays the penalty in greatly reduced effectiveness.
+
+My first criticism of medical science, as it exists today, is that it
+has a tendency to concentrate upon organs and functions, and to overlook
+the central unity of the system. You will find a doctor who specializes
+in the stomach and its diseases, and is apt to talk as if the stomach
+were a thing that went around in the world all by itself. He will
+discuss the question of what goes into your stomach, and overlook to
+point out to you that your stomach is nourished by your blood-stream,
+which is controlled by your nervous system, which in turn is controlled
+by hope, by ambition, by love, by all the spiritual elements of your
+being. A single pulse of anger or of fear may make more trouble with the
+contents of your stomach than the doctor's pepsins and digestive
+ferments can remedy in a week.
+
+Of course, you may do yourself some purely local injury, and so for a
+time have a purely local problem. You may smash your finger, and that is
+a problem of a finger; but neglect it for a few days, and let blood
+poison set in, and you will be made aware that the human body is one
+organism, and also that, in spite of any metaphysical theories you may
+hold, your body does sometimes dominate and control your mind.
+
+Some one has said that the blood is the life; and certainly the blood is
+both the symbol and the instrument of the body's unity. The blood
+penetrates to all parts of the body and maintains and renews them. If
+the blood is normal, the work of renewal does not often fail. If there
+is a failure of renewal--that is, a disease--we shall generally find an
+abnormal condition of the blood. The distribution of the blood is
+controlled by the heart, a great four-chambered pump. One chamber drives
+the blood to the lungs, a mass of fine porous membranes, where it comes
+into contact with the air, and gives off the poisons which it has
+accumulated in its course through the body, and takes up a fresh supply
+of oxygen. By another chamber of the heart the blood is then sucked out
+of the lungs, and by the next chamber it is driven to every corner of
+the body. It takes to every cell of the body the protein materials which
+are necessary for the body's renewal, and also the fuel materials which
+are to be burned to supply the body's energy; also it takes some thirty
+million millions of microscopic red corpuscles which are the carriers of
+oxygen, and an even greater number of the white corpuscles, which are
+the body's scavengers, its defenders from invasion by outside germs.
+
+There are certain outer portions of the body, such as nails and the
+scales of the skin, which are dead matter, produced by the body and
+pushed out from it and no longer nourished by the blood. But all the
+still living parts of the body are fed at every instant by the stream of
+life. Each cell in the body takes the fuel which it needs for its
+activities, and combines it with the oxygen brought by the red
+corpuscles; and when the task of power-production has been achieved, the
+cell puts back into the blood-stream, not merely the carbon dioxide, but
+many complex chemical products--ammonia, uric acid, and the "fatigue
+poisons," indol, phenol and skatol. The blood-stream bears these along,
+and delivers some to the sweat glands to be thrown out, and some to the
+kidneys, and the rest to the lungs.
+
+All of this complicated mass of activities is in normal health perfectly
+regulated and timed by the nervous system. You lie down to sleep, and
+your muscles rest, and the vital activities slow up, your heart beats
+only faintly; but let something frighten you, and you sit up, and these
+faculties leap into activity, your heart begins to pound, driving a
+fresh supply of blood and vital energy. You jump up and run, and these
+organs all set to work at top speed. If they did not do so, your muscles
+would have no fresh energy; they would become paralyzed by the fatigue
+poisons, and you would be, as we say, exhausted.
+
+All the rest of the body might be described as a shelter and accessory
+to the life-giving blood-stream; all the rest is the blood-stream's
+means of protecting itself and renewing itself. The stomach is to digest
+and prepare new blood material, the teeth are to crush it and grind it,
+the hands are to seize it, the eyes are to see it, the brain is to
+figure out its whereabouts. Man, in his egotism, imagines his little
+world as the center of the universe; but the wise old fellow who lives
+somewhere deep in our subconsciousness and looks after the welfare of
+our blood-stream--he has far better reason for believing that all our
+consciousness and our personality exist for him!
+
+Now, disease is some failure of this blood-stream properly to renew
+itself or properly to protect itself and its various subsidiary organs.
+When you find yourself with a disease, you call in a doctor; and unless
+this doctor is a modern and progressive man, he makes the mistake of
+assuming that the disease is in the particular organ where it shows
+itself. You have, let us say, "follicular tonsilitis." (These medical
+men have a love for long names, which have the effect of awing you, and
+convincing you that you are in desperate need of attention.) Your throat
+is sore, your tonsils are swollen and covered with white spots; so the
+doctor hauls out his little black bag, and makes a swab of cotton and
+dips it, say in lysol, and paints your tonsils. He knows by means of the
+microscope that your tonsils are covered and filled with a mass of
+foreign germs which are feeding upon them; also he knows that lysol
+kills these germs, and he gives you a gargle for the same purpose, puts
+you to bed, and gradually the swelling goes down, and he tells you that
+he has cured you, and sends you a bill for services rendered. But maybe
+the swelling does not go down; maybe it gets worse and you die. Then he
+tells your family that nature was to blame. Nature is to blame for your
+death, but it never occurs to anyone to ask what nature may have had to
+do with your recovery.
+
+I do not know how many thousands of diseases medical science has now
+classified. And for each separate disease there are complex formulas,
+and your system is pumped full of various mineral and vegetable
+substances which have been found to affect it in certain ways. Perhaps
+you have a fever; then we give you a substance which reduces the
+temperature of your blood-stream. It never occurs to us to reflect that
+maybe nature has some purpose of her own in raising the temperature of
+the blood; that this might be, so to speak, the heat of conflict, a
+struggle she is waging to drive out invading germs; and that possibly it
+would be better for the temperature to stay up until the battle is over.
+Or maybe the heart is failing; then our medical man is so eager to get
+something into the system that he cannot wait for the slow process of
+the mouth and the stomach, he shoots some strychnine directly into the
+blood-stream. It does not occur to him to reflect that maybe the heart
+is slowing up because it is overloaded with fatigue poisons, of which it
+cannot rid itself, and that the effect of stimulating it into fresh
+activity will be to leave it more dangerously poisoned than before.
+
+We are dealing here with processes which our ancient mother nature has
+been carrying on for a long time, and which she very thoroughly
+understands. We ought, therefore, to be sure that we know what is the
+final effect of our actions; more especially we ought to be sure that we
+understand the cause of the evil, so that we may remove it, and not
+simply waste our time treating symptoms, putting plasters on a cancer.
+This is the fundamental problem of health; and in order to make clear
+what I mean, I am going to begin by telling a personal experience, a
+test which I made of medical science some twelve or fourteen years ago,
+in connection with one of the simplest and most external of the body's
+problems--the hair. First I will tell you what medical science was able
+to do for my hair, and second what I myself was able to do, when I put
+my own wits to work on the problem.
+
+I had been overworking, and was in a badly run down condition. I was
+having headaches, insomnia, ulcerated teeth, many symptoms of a general
+breakdown; among these I noticed that my hair was coming out. I decided
+that it was foolish to become bald before I was thirty, and that I would
+take a little time off, and spend a little money and have my hair
+attended to. I did not know where to go, but I wanted the best authority
+available, so I wrote to the superintendent of the largest hospital in
+New York, asking him for the name of a reliable specialist in diseases
+of the scalp. The superintendent replied by referring me to a certain
+physician, who was the hospital's "consulting dermatologist," and I went
+to see this physician, whose home and office were just off Fifth Avenue.
+
+He examined my scalp, and told me that I had dandruff in my hair, and
+that he would give me a prescription which would remove this dandruff
+and cause my hair to stop falling out. He charged me ten dollars for the
+visit, which in those days was more money than it is at present. Being
+of an inquiring turn of mind, I tried to get my money's worth by
+learning what there was to learn about the human hair. I questioned this
+gentleman, and he told me that the hair is a dead substance, and that
+its only life is in the root. He explained that barbers often persuade
+people to have their hair singed, to keep it from falling out, and that
+this was an utterly futile procedure, and likewise all shampooing and
+massage, which only caused the hair to fall out more quickly. It was
+better even not to wash the hair too often. All that was needed was a
+mixture of chemicals to kill the dandruff germs; and so I had the
+prescription put up at a drug store, and for a couple of years I
+religiously used it according to order, and it had upon my hair
+absolutely no effect whatever.
+
+So here was the best that medical science could do. But still, I did not
+want to be bald, so I went among the health cranks--people who
+experiment without license from the medical schools. Also, I
+experimented upon myself, and now I know something about the human hair,
+something entirely different from what the rich and successful
+"consulting dermatologist" taught me, but which has kept me from
+becoming entirely bald:
+
+First, the human hair is made by the body, and it is made, like
+everything else in the body, out of the blood-stream. It is perfectly
+true that the dandruff germ gets into the roots, and makes trouble, and
+that the process of killing this germ can be helped by chemicals; but it
+does not take a ten-dollar prescription, it only takes ten cents' worth
+of borax and salt from the corner grocery. (Put a little into a saucer,
+moisten it, rub it into the scalp, and wash it out again.) But
+infinitely more important than this is the fact that healthy hair roots
+are a product of healthy blood, and that unhealthy blood produces sick
+hair roots, which cannot hold in the hair. Most important of all is the
+fact that in order to make healthy hair roots the blood must flow fully
+and freely to these hair roots; whereas I had been accustomed for many
+hours every day of my life to clap around my scalp a tight band which
+almost entirely stopped the circulation of the life-giving blood to my
+sick hair roots. In other words, by wearing civilized hats, I was
+literally starving my hair to death.
+
+As soon as I realized this I took off my civilized hat, and have never
+worn one since. As a rule, I don't wear anything. On the few occasions
+when I go into the city, I wear a soft cap. Now and then I experience
+inconvenience from this--the elevator boy in some apartment house tells
+me to come in by the delivery entrance, or the porter of a sleeping-car
+will not let me in at all. I remember discussing these embarrassments
+with Jack London, who went even further in his defiance of civilization,
+and wore a soft shirt. It was his custom, he said, to knock down the
+elevator boys and sleeping-car porters. I answered that that might be
+all right for him, because he could do it; whereas I was reduced to the
+painful expedient of explaining politely why I went about without the
+customary symbols of my economic superiority.
+
+The "consulting dermatologist" had very solemnly and elaborately warned
+me concerning the danger of moving my hair too violently, and thus
+causing it to come out; but now my investigations brought out the fact
+that moving the hair, that is, massaging the scalp, increases the flow
+of blood to the hair roots, and further increases resistance to disease.
+As for causing the hair to fall out, I discovered that the more quickly
+you cause a hair to fall out, the greater is the chance of your getting
+another hair. If a hair is allowed to die in the root, it kills that
+root forever, but if it is pulled out before it dies, the root will make
+a new hair. Every "beauty parlor" specialist knows this; she knows that
+if a hair is pulled, it grows back bigger and stronger than ever, and so
+to pull out hair is the last thing you must do if you want to get rid of
+hairs!
+
+I know a certain poet, who happens to have been well-endowed with
+physical graces by our mother nature. He finds it worth while to
+preserve them--they being accessory to those amorous experiences which
+form so large a part of the theme of poetry. Anyhow, this poet values
+his beautiful hair, and you will see him sitting in front of his
+fireplace, reading a book, and meanwhile his fingers run here and there
+over his head, and he grabs a bunch of hair and pulls and twists it. He
+has cultivated this habit for many years, and as a result his hair is as
+thick and heavy as the "fuzzy-wuzzies" of Kipling's poem. It is a
+favorite sport of this poet to lure some rival poet into a contest. He
+will mildly suggest that they take hold of each other's hair and have a
+tug of war. The rival poet, all unsuspecting, will accept the challenge,
+and my friend will proceed to haul him all over the place, to the
+accompaniment of howls of anguish from the victim, and howls of glee
+from the victor, who has, of course, a scalp as tough as a rhinoceros
+hide.
+
+I am not a poet, and it is not important that I should be beautiful, and
+I have been too busy to remember to pull my hair; but by giving up tight
+hats, and by limiting the amount of my overworking, I have managed to
+keep what hair I had left when the hair specialist had got through with
+me. I tell this anecdote at the beginning of my discussion of health,
+because it illustrates so well the factors which appear in every case of
+disease, and which you must understand in seeking to remedy the trouble.
+
+We have a phrase which has come down to us from the ancient Latins,
+"vis medicatrix naturae," which means the healing power of nature. So
+long ago men realized that it is our ancient mother who heals our
+wounds, and not the physician. Out of this have grown the cults of
+"nature cure" enthusiasts; and according to the fashion of men, they fly
+to extremes just as unreasonable and as dangerous as those of the "pill
+doctors" they are opposing. I have in mind a man who taught me probably
+more than any other writer on health questions, and with whom I once
+discussed the subject of typhoid, how it seemed to affect able-bodied
+men in the prime of their physical being. This, of course, was contrary
+to the theories of nature cure, and my friend had a simple way of
+meeting the argument--he refused to believe it. He insisted that, as
+with all other germ infections, it must be a question of bodily tone; no
+germ could secure lodgment in the human body unless the body's condition
+was reduced.
+
+"But how can you be sure of that?" I argued. "You know that if you go
+into the jungle, you are not immune against the scorpion or the cobra or
+the tiger. There is nothing in all nature that is safe against every
+enemy. What possible right have you to assert that you are immune
+against every enemy which can attack your blood-stream?"
+
+We shall find here, as we find nearly always, that the truth lies
+somewhere between the extremes of two warring schools. Our race has been
+existing for a long time in a certain environment, and its very
+existence implies superiority to that environment. The weaklings, for
+whom its hardships were too severe, were weeded out; hostile parasites
+invaded their blood-stream and conquered and devoured them. But those
+who survived were able to make in their blood-stream the substances
+known as anti-bodies, the "opsonins," to help the white blood corpuscles
+devour the germs. As the result of their victory, we carry those
+anti-bodies in our system, which gives us immunity to those particular
+diseases, or at any rate gives us the ability to have the diseases
+without dying. Every time we go into a street car, we take into our
+throat and lungs the germs of tuberculosis. Examination proves that we
+carry around with us in our mouths the germs of all the common throat
+and nose diseases, colds, bronchitis, tonsilitis. No matter what
+precautions we might take, no matter if we were to gargle our throats
+every few minutes, we could never get rid of such germs. And they wage
+continual war upon the body's defenses; they batter in vain upon the
+gates of our sound health. But take us to some new environment to which
+we are not accustomed; take us to Panama in the old days of yellow
+fever, or take us to Africa, and let the tsetse fly bite us, and infect
+us with "sleeping sickness." Here are germs to which our systems are not
+accustomed; and before them we are as helpless as the ancient
+knights-at-arms, who had conquered everything in sight, and ruled the
+continent of Europe for many hundreds of years, but were wiped off the
+earth by a chemist mixing gunpowder.
+
+In the Marquesas Islands, in the South Seas, there lived a beautiful and
+happy race of savages, believed to have been descended, long ages ago,
+from Aryan stock. From the point of view of physical perfection, they
+were an ideal race, living a blissful outdoor life, which you may read
+about in Melville's "Typee," and in O'Brien's "White Shadows in the
+South Seas." This race conformed to all the requirements of the nature
+enthusiast. They went practically naked, their houses were open all the
+time, they lived on the abundant fruits of the earth. To be sure, they
+were cannibals, but this was more a matter of religious ceremony than of
+diet. They ate their war captives, but this was only after battle, and
+not often enough to count, one way or the other, in matters of health.
+They had lived for uncounted ages in perfect harmony with their
+environment; they were happy and free; and certainly, if such a thing
+were possible to human beings, they should have been proof against
+germs. But a ship came to one of these islands, and put ashore a sailor
+dying of tuberculosis, and in a few years four-fifths of the population
+of this island had been wiped out by the disease. What tuberculosis left
+were finished by syphilis and smallpox, and today the Marquesans are an
+almost extinct race.
+
+But there is another side to the argument--and one more favorable to the
+nature cure enthusiast. We civilized men, by soft living, by
+self-indulgence and lack of exercise, may reduce the tone of our body
+too far below the standard which our ancestors set for us; and then the
+common disease germs get us, then we have colds, sore throats,
+tuberculosis. The nature cure advocate is perfectly right in saying that
+there is no use treating such diseases; the thing is to restore the body
+to its former tone, so that we may be superior to our normal environment
+and its strains.
+
+You know the poem of the "One Hoss Shay," which was so perfectly built
+in every part that it ran for fifty years and then collapsed all at once
+in a heap. But the human body is not built that way. It always has one
+or more places which are weaker than the others, and which first show
+the effects of strain. In one person it will take the form of dyspepsia,
+in another it will be headaches, in another colds, in another decaying
+teeth, in another hardening of the arteries or stiffening of the joints.
+But whatever the symptoms may be, the fundamental cause is always the
+same, an abnormal condition of the blood-stream, and a consequent
+lowering of the body's tone. Therefore, studying any disease and its
+cure, you have first the emergency question, are there any germs lodged
+in the body, and if so, how can you destroy them? As part of the
+problem, you have to ask whether your blood-stream is normal, and if
+not, what are the methods by which you can make it normal and keep it
+so? Also you have to ask, what are the reasons why your trouble
+manifests itself in this or that particular organ? Is there some
+weakness or defect there, and can the defect be remedied, or can your
+habits be changed so as to reduce the strain on that organ? Are there
+any measures you can take to increase the flow of blood to that organ,
+and to promote its activity? In the study of your health, you will find
+that circumstances differ, and the importance of one factor or the other
+will vary; but you will seldom find any problem in which all these
+factors do not enter, and you will seldom find an adequate remedy unless
+you take all the factors into consideration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+EXPERIMENTS IN DIET
+
+     (Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and his
+     conclusions as to what to eat.)
+
+
+Students of the body assure us that every particle of matter which
+composes it is changed in the course of seven years. It is obvious that
+everything that is a part of the body has at some time to be taken in as
+food; so the problem of our diet today is the problem of what our body
+shall consist of seven years from now, and probably a great deal sooner.
+
+I begin this discussion by telling my own personal experiences with
+food. I am not going to recommend my diet for anyone else; because one
+of the first things I have to say about the subject is that every human
+individual is a separate diet problem. But I am going to try to
+establish a few principles for your guidance, and more especially to
+point out the commonest mistakes. I tell about my own mistakes, because
+it happens that I know them more intimately.
+
+I was brought up in the South, where it is the custom of people to give
+a great deal of time and thought to the subject of eating. Among the
+people I knew it was always taken for granted that there should be at
+least one person in the kitchen devoting all her time to the preparing
+of delicious things for the family to eat. This person was generally a
+negress, and, needless to say, she knew nothing about the chemistry of
+foods, nothing about their constituents or nutritive qualities. All she
+knew was about their taste; she had been trained to prepare them in ways
+that tasted best, and was continually being advised and exhorted and
+sometimes scolded by the ladies of the family on this subject. At the
+table the family and the guests never failed to talk about the food and
+its taste, and not infrequently the cook would be behind the door
+listening to their comments; or else she would wait until after the
+meal, for the report which somebody would bring her.
+
+In addition to this, the ladies of the family were skilled in what is
+called "fancy cooking." They did not bother with the meats and
+vegetables, but they mixed batter cakes, and made all kinds of elaborate
+desserts, and exchanged these treasures and the recipes for them with
+other ladies in the neighborhood. In addition to this, there were
+certain periods of the week and of the year especially devoted to the
+preparing and consuming of great quantities of foods. Once every seven
+days the members of the family expressed their worship of their Creator
+by eating twice as much as usual; and at another time they celebrated
+the birth of their Redeemer by overeating systematically for a period of
+two or three weeks. Needless to say, of course, the children brought up
+in such an environment all had large appetites and large stomachs, and
+their susceptibility to illness was recognized by the setting apart for
+them of a whole classification of troubles--"children's diseases," they
+were called. In addition to children's diseases, there were coughs and
+colds and sore throats and pains in the stomach and constipation and
+diarrhea, which the children shared with their adults.
+
+I had a little more than my share of all these troubles. Always a doctor
+would be sent for, and always he was wise and impressive, and always I
+was impressed. He gave me some pills or a bottle of liquid, a
+teaspoonful every two hours, or something like that--I can hear the
+teaspoon rattle in the glass as I write. I had a profound respect for
+each and every one of those doctors. He was wisdom walking about in
+trousers, and whenever he came, I knew that I was going to get well; and
+I did, which proved the case completely.
+
+Then I grew up, and at the age of eighteen or nineteen became possessed
+of a desire for knowledge, and took to reading and studying literally
+every minute of the day and a good part of the night. I seldom let
+myself go to sleep before two o'clock in the morning, and was always up
+by seven and ready for work again. I did this for ten years or so, until
+nature brought me to a complete stop. During these ten years I was a
+regular experiment station in health; that is, I had every kind of
+common ailment, and had it over and over again, so that I could try all
+the ways of curing it, or failing to cure it, and keep on trying until I
+was sure, one way or the other. I came recently upon a wonderful saying
+by John Burroughs, which will be appreciated by every author. "This
+writing is an unnatural business. It makes your head hot and your feet
+cold, and it stops the digesting of your food."
+
+This trouble with my digestion began when I was writing my second novel,
+camping out on a lonely island at the foot of Lake Ontario. I went to
+see a doctor in a nearby town, and he talked learnedly about dyspepsia.
+The cause of it, he said, was failure of the stomach to secrete enough
+pepsin, and the remedy was to take artificial pepsin, obtained from the
+stomach of a pig. He gave me this pig-pepsin in a bottle of red liquid,
+and I religiously took some after each meal. It helped for a time; but
+then I noticed that it helped less and less. I got so that a simple meal
+of cold meat and boiled potatoes would stay in my stomach for hours, in
+spite of any amount of the pig-pepsin; I would lie about in misery,
+because I wanted to work, and my accursed stomach would not let me.
+
+All the time, of course, I was using my mind on this problem, groping
+for causes. I found that the trouble was worse if I worked immediately
+after eating. I found also that it was worse when I was writing books.
+When I got sufficiently desperate, I would stop writing books and go off
+on a hunting trip. I would tramp twenty miles a day over the mountains,
+looking for deer, and I would come back at night too tired to think, and
+in a week or two every trace of my trouble would be gone. So my life
+regimen came to be--first the writing of a book, and then a hunting trip
+to get over the effects of it. But as time went on, alas, I noticed that
+the recuperation was more slow and less certain. The working times grew
+shorter, and the hunting times grew longer, until finally I had got to a
+point where I couldn't work at all; I would go to pieces in a few days
+if I tried it. It was apparently the end of my stomach, and the end of
+my sleeping, and the end of my writing books. My teeth were decaying,
+not merely outside but inside; I would have abscesses, and most
+frightful agonies to endure. I would lie awake all night, and it would
+seem to me that I could feel my body going to pieces--an extremely
+depressing sensation!
+
+I had been trying experiments all this time. I had been going to one
+doctor after another, and had got to realize that the doctors only
+treated symptoms; they treated the "diseases" when they appeared--but
+nobody ever told you how to keep the "diseases" from appearing. Why
+could there not be a doctor who would look you over thoroughly, and tell
+you everything that was wrong with you, and how to set it right? A
+doctor who would tell you exactly how to live, so that you might keep
+well all the time! I was studying economics, and becoming suspicious of
+my fellow man; it occurred to me that possibly it might be embarrassing
+to a doctor, if he cured all his patients, and taught them how to live,
+so that none of them would ever have to come to him again. It occurred
+to me that possibly this might be the reason why "preventive medicine,"
+constructive health work, was getting so little attention from the
+medical fraternity.
+
+Two things that plagued me were headache and constipation, and they were
+obviously related. For constipation, the world had one simple remedy;
+you "took something" every night or every morning, and thought no more
+about it. My stout and amiable grandmother had drunk a glass of Hunyadi
+water every morning for the last thirty or forty years, and that she
+finally died of "fatty degeneration of the heart" was not connected with
+this in the mind of anyone who knew her. As for the headaches, people
+would tell you this, that, and the other remedy, and I would try
+them--that is, unless they happened to be drugs. I was getting more and
+more shy of drugs. I had some blessed instinct which saved me from
+stimulants and narcotics. I had never used tea, coffee, alcohol or
+tobacco, and in my worst periods of suffering I never took to putting
+myself to sleep with chloral, or to stopping my headaches with
+phenacetin.
+
+At the end of six or eight years of purgatory, I came upon a prospectus
+of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This seemed to me exactly what I wanted;
+this was constructive, it dealt with the body as a whole. So I spent a
+couple of months at the "San," and paid them something like a thousand
+dollars to tell me all they could about myself.
+
+The first thing they told me was that meat-eating was killing me. It was
+perfectly obvious, was it not, that meat is a horrible feeding place for
+germs, that rotten meat is dreadfully offensive, and likewise digested
+meat--consider the excreta of cats, for example! I listened solemnly
+while Doctor Kellogg read off the numbers of billions of bacteria per
+gram in the contents of the colon of a carnivorous person. It certainly
+seemed proper that the author of "The Jungle" should be a vegetarian, so
+I became one, and did my best to persuade myself that I enjoyed the
+taste of the patent meat-substitutes which are served in hundred calory
+portions in the big Sanitarium dining-room.
+
+There also I met Horace Fletcher, and learned to chew every particle of
+food thirty-two times, and often more. I exercised in the Sanitarium
+gymnasium, and watched the sterilized dancing--the men with the men and
+the women with the women. I was patiently polite with the Seventh Day
+Adventist religion, and laid in a supply of postage stamps on Friday
+evening. Finally, and most important of all, I went once a day to the
+"treatment rooms," and had my abdomen doctored alternately with hot
+cloths and ice. By this means I kept up a flow of blood in the
+intestinal tract, and stimulated these organs to activity; so my
+constipation was relieved, and my headaches were less severe--so long as
+I stayed at the Sanitarium, and was boiled and frozen once every day.
+But when I left the Sanitarium, and abandoned the treatments, the
+troubles began to return. Meantime, however, I had written a book in
+praise of vegetarianism--a book which has got into the libraries, and
+cannot be got out again!
+
+I went on to a new variety of health crank, the real "nature cure"
+practitioners. Vegetarianism was not enough, they insisted; the evil had
+begun long before, when man first ruined his food and destroyed its
+nutritive value by means of fire. There was only one certain road to
+health, and that was by the raw food route, the monkey and squirrel
+diet. I had gone out to California for a winter's rest, and decided I
+would give this plan a thorough trial. For five months I lived by
+myself, and the only cooked food I ate was shredded wheat biscuit. For
+the rest I lived on nuts and salads and fresh and dried fruits; and
+during this period I enjoyed such health as I had never known in my life
+before. I had literally not a single ailment. I was not merely well, but
+bubbling over with health. I had a friend who said it cheered him up
+just to see me walk down the street.
+
+I thought that it was entirely the raw food, and that I had solved the
+problem forever; but I overlooked the fact that during those five months
+I had done no hard brain work, no writing. I went back to writing again,
+and things began to go wrong; my wonderful raw foods took to making
+trouble in my stomach--and I assure you that until you try, you have no
+idea the amount of trouble that can be made in your stomach by a load of
+bananas and soaked prunes which has gone wrong! For a year or two I
+agonized; I could not give up my wonderful raw food diet, because I had
+always before me the vision of those months in California, and could
+not understand why it was not that way again.
+
+But the time came when I would eat a meal of raw food, and for hours
+afterwards my stomach would feel like a blown-up football. Then somebody
+gave me a book by Dr. Salisbury on the subject of the meat diet. Of all
+the horrible things in the world, a meat diet sounded to me the worst; I
+had been a vegetable enthusiast for three years, and thought of eating
+meat as you would think of cannibalism. But there has never been a time
+in my life when I would not hear something new, and give it a trial if
+it sounded well; so I read the books of Doctor Salisbury, which have
+long been out of print, and have been curiously neglected by the medical
+profession. Salisbury was a real pioneer, an experimenter. He wrote in
+the days before the germ theory, and so missed his guess regarding
+tuberculosis, but he perceived that most of the common diseases are
+caused by dietetic errors, and he set to work to prove it. He showed
+that hog cholera and army diarrhea are the same disease, and come from
+the same cause. He took a squad of men and fed them on army biscuit for
+two or three weeks, until they were nearly dead, and then he put them on
+a diet of lean beef and completely cured them in a few days. He did this
+same thing with one kind of food after another, and in each case he
+would bring his men as near to death as he dared, and then he would cure
+them. He showed that meat is the only food which contains all the
+elements of nutrition, the only food upon which a person can live for an
+unlimited period. As Salisbury said, "Beef is first, mutton is second,
+and the rest nowhere."
+
+It was his idea that tuberculosis of the lungs is caused by spores of
+fermenting starch clogging the minute blood vessels. He claimed that
+there is an early stage of tuberculosis, in which the spores are
+floating in the blood stream; he put large numbers of patients upon a
+diet of lean beef, ground and cooked, and he cured them of tuberculosis,
+and if one of them would break the diet and yield to a craving for
+starch or sugar, Salisbury claimed that he could find it out an hour or
+two later by examining a drop of their blood under the microscope. In
+his books he described vividly the effects of an excess of starch and
+sugar in the diet. He called it "making a yeast-pot of your stomach";
+and you can imagine how that hit my stomach, full of half digested
+bananas and prunes!
+
+I tried the Salisbury diet, and satisfied myself of this one fact, that
+lean meat is for brain-workers the most easily assimilated of all foods.
+Salisbury claimed that you could not overeat on meat, but I do not
+believe there is any food you cannot overeat on, nor do I believe that
+anyone should try to live on one kind of food. We are by nature
+omnivorous animals. Our digestive tracts are similar to those of hogs
+and monkeys, which eat all varieties of food they can get. One of the
+common errors of the nature cure enthusiast is to cite the monkey and
+the squirrel as fruit and nut-eating animals, when the fact is that
+monkeys and squirrels eat meat when they can get it, and the ardor with
+which they go bird-nesting is evidence enough that they crave it. If
+there is any race of man which is vegetarian, you will find that it is
+from necessity alone. The beautiful South Sea Islanders, who are the
+theme of the raw fooders' ecstasy, spend a lot of their time catching
+fish, and sometimes they kill a pig, and celebrate the event precisely
+as Christians celebrate the birth of their Redeemer.
+
+From this you may be able to guess my conclusions, as the result of much
+painful blundering and experimenting. So far as diet is concerned, I
+belong to no school; I have learned something from each one, and what I
+have learned from a trial of them all is to be shy of extreme statements
+and of hard and fast rules. To my vegetarian friends who argue that it
+is morally wrong to take sentient life, I answer that they cannot go for
+a walk in the country without committing that offense, for they walk on
+innumerable bugs and worms. We cannot live without asserting our right
+to subject the lower forms of life to our purposes; we kill innumerable
+germs when we swallow a glass of grape juice, or for that matter a glass
+of plain water. I shall be much surprised if the advance of science does
+not some day prove to us that there are rudimentary forms of
+consciousness in all vegetable life; so we shall justify the argument of
+Mr. Dooley, who said, in reviewing "The Jungle," that he could not see
+how it was any less a crime to cut off a young tomato in its prime, or
+to murder a whole cradleful of baby peas in the pod!
+
+There is no question that meat-eating is inconvenient, expensive, and
+dirty. I have no doubt that some day we shall know enough to be able to
+find for every individual a diet which will keep him at the top of his
+power, without the maintenance of the slaughter-house. But we do not
+possess that knowledge at present; at least, I personally do not possess
+it. I happen to be one of those individuals--there are many of
+them--with whom milk does not agree; and if you rule out milk and meat,
+you find yourself compelled to get a great deal of your protein from
+vegetable sources, such as peas, beans and nuts. All these contain a
+great deal of starch, and thus there is no way you can arrange your diet
+to escape an excess of starch. Excess of starch, so my experience has
+convinced me, is the deadliest of all dietetic errors. It is also the
+commonest of errors, the cause, not merely of the common throat and nose
+infections, but of constipation, and likewise of diarrhea, of anemia,
+and thus, through the weakening of the blood stream, of all disorders
+that spring from this source--decaying teeth and rheumatism, boils, bad
+complexion, and tuberculosis. Starch foods are the cheapest, therefore
+they form the common diet of the poor, and are responsible for the
+diseases of undernourishment to which the poor are liable.
+
+On the other hand, of course, there are perfectly definite diseases of
+overnourishment; high blood pressure, which culminates in apoplexy;
+kidney troubles, which result from the inability of these organs to
+eliminate all the waste matter that is delivered to them; fatty
+degeneration of the heart, or of the liver, or any of the vital organs.
+You may cause a headache by clogging the blood stream through
+overeating, or you may cause it by eating small quantities of food, if
+those foods are unbalanced, and do not contain the mineral elements
+necessary to the making of normal blood. Whatever the trouble with your
+health, it is my judgment that in two cases out of three you will find
+it dates back to errors in diet. I do not think I exaggerate in saying
+that a knowledge of what to eat and how much to eat is two-thirds of the
+knowledge of how to keep yourself in permanent health.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+ERRORS IN DIET
+
+     (Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they play in
+     the making of health and disease.)
+
+
+It is my purpose in this chapter to lay down a few general principles to
+aid you in the practical problem of selecting the best diet for
+yourself. But it must be made clear at the outset that there can be no
+hard and fast rule. All human bodies are more or less alike, but on the
+other hand all are more or less different. Modern civilization has given
+very few bodies the chance to be perfect; nearly all have some weakness,
+some abnormality, and need some special modification in diet to fit
+their particular problem. The ideal in each case would be a complete
+study of the individual system. Some day, no doubt, medical science will
+analyze the digestive juices and the gland secretions and the
+blood-stream of every human being, and say, you need a certain
+percentage of starch and a certain percentage of protein; you need such
+and such proportion of phosphorus and iron; you should avoid certain
+acids--and so on. But at present we are devoting our science to the task
+of killing and maiming other people, instead of enabling ourselves to
+live in health and happiness; so it is that most of those who read this
+book will be too poor to command the advice of a diet specialist. The
+best you can do is to get a few general ideas and try them out, watching
+your own body and learning its peculiarities.
+
+Human food contains three elements: proteins, fats and carbohydrates.
+The proteins are the body-building material, and the foods which are
+rich in proteins are lean meat, the white of eggs, milk and cheese,
+nuts, peas and beans. A certain amount of this kind of food is needed by
+the body. If it is missing, the body will gradually waste away. If too
+much of it is taken, the body can turn it into energy-making material,
+but this is a wasteful process, and the best evidence appears to be that
+it is a strain upon the system. Experiments conducted by Professor
+Chittenden of Yale have proven conclusively that men can live and
+maintain body weight upon much less protein food than previous dietetic
+standards had indicated.
+
+The fats are found in fat meats and dairy products, and in nuts, olives,
+and vegetable oils. The body is prepared to digest and assimilate a
+certain amount of fat, no one knows how much. I have found in my own
+case that I require a great deal less than people ordinarily eat. I have
+for many years maintained good health upon a diet containing no more fat
+than one gets with lean meat once or twice a day. I never use butter or
+olive oil, nor any fat in cooking. My reason for this is that fats are
+the most highly concentrated form of food, and the easiest upon which to
+overeat. Excess of fat is a cause, not merely of obesity, but also of
+boils and pimples and "pasty" complexion, and other signs of a clogged
+blood-stream.
+
+The third variety of food is the carbohydrates, and of these there are
+two kinds, starches and sugars. Starch is the white material of the
+grains and tubers; the principal food element of bread and cereals,
+rice, potatoes, bananas, and many prepared substances such as
+corn-starch, tapioca, farina and macaroni. Starchy foods compose
+probably half the diet of the average human being. In my own case, they
+compose about one-sixth, so you see to what extent my beliefs differ
+from the common. Starch is not really necessary in the diet at all. I
+have a friend who is subject to headaches, and finds relief from them by
+a diet of meat, salads, and fresh fruits exclusively. The first thing
+that excess of starch or sugar does is to ferment in the system, and
+cause flatulence and gas. But strange as it may seem, if the excess of
+starch is perfectly digested and assimilated into the system, the
+condition may be worse yet, because you may have a great quantity of
+energy-producing material, without the necessary mineral elements which
+the body requires in the handling of it.
+
+If you cremate a human body and study the ashes chemically, you find a
+score or more of mineral salts. You find these in the blood, and no
+blood is normal and no body can be kept normal which does not contain
+the right percentage of these elements. It is not merely that they are
+needed to build bones and teeth; they are needed at every instant for
+the chemistry of the cells. Every time you move a muscle, you fill the
+cells of that muscle with a certain amount of waste matter. You may
+prove how deadly this matter is by binding a tight cord about your arm,
+and then trying to use the arm. We are only at the beginning of
+understanding the subtle chemistry of the body; but this much we know,
+the cells transform the waste products, and they are thrown out of the
+system as ammonia, uric acid, etc.; and for this process the blood must
+have a continual supply of many mineral salts.
+
+So vital are they, and so fatal to health is their absence, that it is
+far better for you to eat nothing at all than to eat improperly balanced
+foods, or foods which are deficient in the organic salts. You may prove
+this to yourself by a simple experiment. Put two chickens in separate
+pens, where nobody can feed them but yourself. Feed one of them on water
+and white bread, or corn starch, or sugar, or any energy-making
+substance which contains little of the mineral elements. Feed the other
+chicken on plain water. You will find that the one which has the food
+will quickly become droopy and sickly; its feathers will fall out, it
+will have what in human beings would be known as headaches, colds, sore
+throats, decaying teeth and boils. At the end of a couple of weeks it
+will be a dead chicken. The one which you feed on water alone will not
+be a happy chicken, neither will it be a fat chicken, but it will be a
+live chicken, and a chicken without disease. I am going later on to
+discuss the subject of fasting. For the present I will merely say that a
+chicken which has nothing but water is living upon its own flesh, and
+therefore has a meat diet, containing the mineral elements necessary to
+the elimination of the fatigue poisons.
+
+I am going to try not to be dogmatic in this book, and not to say things
+that I do not know. I confess to innumerable uncertainties about the
+subject of diet; but one thing I think I do know, and that is that human
+beings should eliminate absolutely from their food those modern
+artificial products, which look so nice, and are so easy to handle, and
+are put up in packages with pretty labels, and have been in some way
+artificially treated to remove the wastes and impurities--including the
+vital mineral salts. Among such food substances I include lard and its
+imitations made from cottonseed oil, white flour, all the prepared and
+refined cereals, polished rice, tapioca, farina, corn starch, and
+granulated and powdered sugar. Any of these substances will kill a
+chicken in a couple of weeks, and the only reason they take a longer
+time to kill you is because you mix them with other kinds of foods. But
+to the extent that you eat them, your diet is deficient; and do not
+console yourself with the idea that the mineral elements will be made up
+from other foods, because you don't know that, and nobody else knows it.
+Nobody knows just how much of any particular organic salt the body
+needs. All we know is that the primitive races, which ate natural foods,
+enjoyed vigorous health, while the American people, who consume the
+greatest proportion of the so-called "refined" foods, have the very best
+dentists and the very worst teeth in the world.
+
+There are many kinds of sugar, found in the sugar-cane and the beet, and
+in all fruits. Sugar may also be made from any form of starch; this is
+glucose, which is put up in cans and sold as an imitation of maple
+syrup. The ordinary granulated and powdered sugar is made by taking from
+the natural syrup every trace of mineral elements; so I have no
+hesitation in saying that the ordinary cane sugar and beet sugar of our
+breakfast tables and our confectionery stores is not a food, but a slow
+poison. The causes of the wonderful progress of American dentistry,
+which is the marvel of the civilized world, are cane sugar, white flour,
+and the frying-pan, each of which dietetic crimes I shall take up in
+turn.
+
+We have the richest country in the world; we eat more food, probably by
+50 per cent, and we waste more food, probably by 500 per cent, than any
+other people in the world; and yet, go to any small farming community in
+America, and what do you find? You find the teeth of the young children
+rotting in their heads, and having to be pulled out before their second
+teeth come. You find these second teeth rotting often before the age of
+twenty. A friend of mine, who knows the American farmer, sums it up this
+way: "He has two things that he requires if he is to be really
+respectable and happy. First, he wants to get all the fireplaces in his
+home boarded up, and all the windows nailed tight; and second, he wants
+to get all his teeth out, and an artificial set installed. Out of the
+farmers' wives in my neighborhood, not one in ten keeps her own teeth
+until she is thirty."
+
+If you go to the Balkans, where the peasants live on sour milk, with
+grains which they grind at home; or to southern Italy and Sicily, where
+they live on cheese and black bread and olives; or among savage people,
+where they hunt and fish and gather the natural fruits, you find old
+men without a single decayed tooth. There must be some reason for this,
+and the reason is found in our denatured grocery-store foods. The
+farmer's wife will gather up her eggs and her butter and cheeses, and
+take them to the store and bring back cans of lard and packages of
+sugar. The farmer will sell his perfectly good wheat and corn meal, and
+bring back in his wagon cases of "refined" cereal foods, for which he
+has paid ten times the price of the grain!
+
+Dentists will tell you that the way candy injures the teeth is by
+sticking to them and fermenting, forming acids, which destroy the tooth
+structure. And that may be a part of the reason. But the principal
+reason why the teeth decay is because the blood-stream is abnormal, and
+is unable to keep up the repairs of the body. Your teeth are living
+structures, just as much as any other part of you, and they will resist
+decay if you supply them with the proper nourishment.
+
+You need sugar; you need a considerable quantity of it every day. Nature
+provides this sugar in combination with the organic salts, and also with
+the precious vitamines, whose function in the body we are only beginning
+to investigate. All the mineral substances which give the color and
+flavor to oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, figs, prunes, raisins--all
+these you take out when you make sugar. Or perhaps you put in some
+imitations of them, made from coal tar chemicals, and drink them at your
+soda fountains! So little appreciation has the American farmer's wife of
+natural fruits, that when she preserves them, she considers it necessary
+to fill them full of cane sugar; in fact, she has a notion that they
+won't keep unless she cooks them up with sugar! So snobbish are we
+Americans about our eating, that we make the best of our foods into
+bywords. We make jokes in our comic papers about the "boarding-house
+prune"; and yet prunes and raisins are among the wholesomest foods we
+have, and if we fed them to our children instead of cakes and candy and
+coal-tar flavorings, our dental industry would rapidly decline.
+
+And the same thing is true of bread. When I was a boy, I thought I had
+to have hot bread at least twice a day, and if I were called upon to eat
+bread that was more than a day old, I felt that I was being badly abused
+by life. I used to read fairy stories, in which something called "black
+bread" was mentioned, something obscure and terrible; the symbol of
+human misery was Cinderella sitting in the ashes and eating a crust of
+dry "black bread." But now since I have studied diet, I have taken my
+place with Cinderella. I can afford to buy whatever kind of bread I
+want; I can have the best white bread, piping hot, three times a day, if
+I want it; but what I eat three times a day is a crust of hard dry
+"black bread."
+
+"Black bread" is the fairy story name for bread made of the whole grain.
+It is eaten that way by the peasant because he has no patent milling
+machinery at his disposal, to fan away the life-giving elements of his
+food. Nearly all the mineral elements of the grain are contained in the
+outer, dark-colored portion. The white part is almost pure starch; and
+when you use white flour, you are not merely starving your blood-stream,
+your bones, and your teeth, you are also depriving the digestive tract
+of the rough material which it is accustomed to handle, and which it
+needs to stimulate it to action. I am aware that whole grain products
+are a trifle less easy of digestion, but we should not pamper and weaken
+our digestive tract any more than we let our muscles get flabby for lack
+of action. We should require our stomachs to handle the ordinary natural
+foods, precisely as we accustom our body to react from cold water, and
+to stand honest hard work.
+
+For ages the Japanese peasants have lived on rice, with a little dried
+fish. Quite recently there began to spread throughout Japan a mysterious
+disease known as beri-beri. It was especially prevalent in the army, and
+so the scientists of Japan set out to discover the cause, and it proved
+to be the modern practice of polishing rice, which takes off the outer
+coating of the grain. Rice is one of the most wholesome of foods, if it
+is eaten in the natural state; but in order to get it in that state in
+this country, you have to find a special food store of the health
+cranks, and have to pay a special price for it. You have to pay a higher
+price for whole wheat bread--because ninety-nine people out of a hundred
+are ignorant, and insist upon having their foodstuffs pretty to look at!
+
+Probably you have read sea stories, and know of the horrors of scurvy.
+Scurvy and beri-beri are similar diseases, with a similar cause. The men
+on the old sailing ships used to have to live on white biscuit and salt
+meat, and they always knew that to recover from their gnawing illness,
+they must get to port and get fresh vegetables and fruits, especially
+onions and lemons, which contain the vitamines as well as the salts. But
+you will see the modern housewife going into the grocery store, and
+surveying the shelves of "package" goods, and in her ignorance picking
+out the scurvy-making products, and frequently paying for them a much
+higher price than for the health-making ones!
+
+Then, when she has got her white flour, and her cane sugar, and her
+lard, she will take it home, and mix it up, and put it in the frying
+pan, and serve it hot to her husband and children. Nature has so
+constituted her husband and children that they digest starch before they
+digest fat; that is to say, the starch is digested mainly in the
+stomach, while the fat is digested mainly after the food has been passed
+on into the small intestine. But by frying the starch before it is
+eaten, the housewife carefully takes each grain of the starch and
+protects it with a little covering of fat. Thus the digestive juices of
+the stomach cannot get at the starch, and the starch goes down into the
+small intestine a good part undigested. If some evil spirit, wishing to
+make trouble for the human organism, had charge of the laying out of our
+diet, he could hardly devise anything worse than that. And yet it would
+be no exaggeration to say that the average American, especially the
+average farmer, eats out of a frying-pan. If his potatoes have to be
+warmed over, they go into the frying-pan; his precious batter-cakes and
+doughnuts are cooked in a frying-pan, and all his precious hot breads
+are mixed with lard. If it were not for the fact that you cannot broil a
+beefsteak over a modern gas range, I would tell you that the first step
+toward health for the average American would be to throw the frying-pan
+out of the window, and to throw the cook-book after it.
+
+The whole modern art of cooking is largely a perversion; a product of
+idleness, vanity, and sensuality. It is one of the monstrous growths
+consequent upon our system of class exploitation. We have a number of
+idle people with nothing to do but eat, and who demonstrate their
+superiority to the rest of us by their knowledge of superior foods, and
+superior ways of preparing them. They have the wealth of the world at
+their disposal, also the services of their fellow man without limit, and
+they set their fellow man to work to enable them to give elaborate
+banquets, and to sit in solemn state and gorge themselves, and to have a
+full account of their behavior published in the next morning's
+newspapers. A great part of this perverse art we owe to what is called
+the "ancient regime" in France--a regime which starved the French
+peasantry until they were black skinned beasts hiding in caves and
+hollow trees. So it comes about that our modern food depravity parades
+itself in French names, and American snobbery requires of its devotees a
+course in the French language sufficient to read a menu card. Needless
+to say, this elaborate gastronomic art has been developed without any
+relation to health, or any thought of the true needs of the body. It is
+one of the products of the predatory system which we can say is absolute
+waste. Having done my own cooking for the past twenty-five years, I make
+bold to say that I can teach anybody all he needs to know about cooking
+in one lesson of half an hour, and that the total amount of cooking
+required for a large family can be done by one person in twenty minutes
+a day.
+
+In the first place, a great many foods do not have to be cooked at all,
+and are made less fit by cooking. In the next place, the only cooking
+that is ever required is a little boiling, or in the case of meat,
+roasting or broiling. In the next place, the art of combining foods in
+cooking is a waste art, because no foods should be combined in cooking.
+Every food has its own natural flavor, which is lost in combination, and
+if anybody is unable to enjoy the natural flavors of simply cooked
+foods, there is one thing to say to that person, and that is to wait
+until he is hungry. Let him take a ten-mile walk in the open air, and he
+will have more interest in his next meal. I am not a fanatic, and have
+no desire to destroy the pleasures of life; I am recommending to people
+that they should seek the higher pleasures of the intellect, and those
+pleasures are not found in standing over a cook stove, nor in compelling
+others to stand over a cook stove. Moreover, I know that the artificial
+mixing of foods to tempt peoples' palates is one of the principal causes
+of overeating, and therefore of ill health, and therefore of the
+ultimate destruction of the pleasures of life.
+
+I went out from the world of cooks before I was twenty. I wanted to
+write a book, and to be let alone while I was doing it. I lived by
+myself, and found out about cooking by practical experience. On a few
+occasions since then, I have lived in a house with a servant, and had
+some cooking done for me, but it was always because somebody else
+wanted it, and against my protest. In the last ten years we have had no
+servant in our home, and because I want my wife to give her energy to
+more important things than feeding me, I do my share of getting every
+meal. We have worked out a system of housekeeping by which we get a meal
+in five minutes, and when we finish it, it takes three minutes to clear
+things away.
+
+If I tell you what I eat, please do not get the impression that I am
+advising you to eat these same things. My diet consists of the foods
+which I have found by long experience agree with me. There are many
+other foods which are just as wholesome, but which I do not eat, either
+because they don't happen to agree with me, or because I don't care for
+them so much. I am fond of fruit, and eat more of that than of anything
+else. It is not a cheap article of diet, but you can save a good deal if
+you buy it in quantities, as I do. A little later I am going to discuss
+the prices of foods.
+
+For breakfast I eat a slice of whole wheat bread, three good-sized
+apples, stewed, and eight or ten dates. It takes practically no time to
+prepare this breakfast. The bread has to be baked, of course, but this
+is done wholesale; we buy four loaves at a time, and it is just as good
+at the end of a couple of weeks as when we buy it. When I lived in the
+world of cooks, I would call for apple sauce; which meant that somebody
+had to pare apples, cut them up, stew them, mix them with sugar, grate a
+little nutmeg over them, set them on ice, and serve them to me on a
+glass dish, with a little pitcher of cream. But now what happens is that
+I put a dozen apples in a big sauce-pan and let them simmer while I am
+eating. We have a rule in our family that we do not do any cooking
+except while we are eating, because if we try it at any other time of
+the day, we get buried in a book or in a manuscript, and forget about it
+until the smoke causes somebody in the street to summon the fire
+department. So the apples for my breakfast were cooked during last
+night's supper; and during the breakfast there will be some vegetable
+cooking for lunch.
+
+At this lunch, which is my "square meal," I eat a large slice of
+beefsteak, say a third of a pound. Jack London used to say that the only
+man who could cook a beefsteak was the fireman of a railway locomotive,
+because he had a hot, clean shovel. The best imitation you can get is a
+hot, clean frying-pan; and when you are sure that it is hot, let it get
+hotter. The whole secret of cooking meat is to keep the juices inside,
+and to do that you must cook it quickly. When you slap it down on a hot
+frying-pan, the meat is seared, and the juices stay inside, and if you
+do not turn it over until it is almost ready to burn, you don't need to
+cook it very long on the other side. That is the one secret of cooking
+worth knowing; it doesn't cost anything, and saves time instead of
+wasting it. As I have never found anybody else capable of learning it, I
+reserve the cooking of the beefsteak as one of my family duties.
+
+To continue the lunch, a slice of whole wheat bread, and a large
+quantity of some fresh salad, such as celery, or lettuce and tomatoes,
+without dressing. For a part of this may be substituted a vegetable, one
+or two beets or turnips, cooked during a previous meal, and warmed up in
+a couple of minutes; and we do not throw away the tops of the turnips
+and beets and celery, we put them on and cook them, and they serve for
+the next day's meal. If you would eat a large quantity of such "greens"
+once a day, you would escape many of the ills that your flesh is at
+present heir to. Finally, for dessert, an orange and a small handful of
+raisins, or one or two figs.
+
+The evening meal will be the same as the breakfast; except once in a
+while when I am especially hungry, and want some meat. I am writing in
+the winter season, so the fruits suggested are those available in
+winter. The menu will be varied with every kind of fruit at the season
+when it is cheapest and most easily obtained. The beefsteak will appear
+at about three meals out of four; occasionally it will be replaced by
+the lean meat of pork or mutton, or by fish. The bread may be replaced
+by rice, or boiled potatoes, either white or sweet, and occasionally by
+graham crackers. I know that these contain a little fat and sugar, but I
+try not to be fanatical about my diet, and the rules I suggest do not
+carry the death penalty. There was a time when I used to allow my
+friends to make themselves miserable by trying to provide me with
+special foods when they invited me to a meal, but now I tell them to
+"forget it," and I politely nibble a little of everything, and eat most
+of what I find wholesome; if there is nothing wholesome, I content
+myself with the pretense of a meal. If I find myself in a restaurant, I
+quite shamelessly get a piece of apple or pumpkin pie, omitting most of
+the crust. As I don't go away from home more than once or twice a month,
+I do not have to worry about such indulgence. The main thing is to
+arrange one's home diet on sound lines, and learn to enjoy the simple
+and wholesome foods, of which there is a great variety obtainable, and
+at prices possible to all but the wretchedly poor.
+
+In conclusion, since everybody likes to have a feast now and then, I
+specify that my diet regimen allows for holidays. Assuming that I am
+your guest for a day, and that you wish to "blow" me, regardless of
+expense, here will be the menu. Breakfast, some graham crackers, a bunch
+of raisins, a can of sliced pineapple in winter, or a big chunk of
+watermelon in summer. Dinner, or lunch, roast pork, a baked apple, a
+baked sweet potato and some spinach. Supper, lettuce, dates, and a dish
+of popcorn flavored with peanut butter. Try this next Christmas!
+
+P. S. After this book had been put into type, I chanced to be looking
+over Herbert Quick's illuminating book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth."
+Discussing the importance of certain organic salts to the body, Dr.
+Quick states: "Animals have been fed, as an experiment, on foods
+deficient in phosphorus. For a while they seemed to do well. Then they
+collapsed. It takes only three months of a ration without phosphorus to
+wreck an animal. Individual creatures were killed after a month of this
+diet, and it was found that the flesh was taking the phosphate--for the
+phosphorus exists in the body in that form--from the bones to supply its
+need. In other words, the body was eating its own bones! When this
+process had robbed the bones to the limit, the collapse came, and the
+animal could never recover."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+DIET STANDARDS
+
+     (Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities we
+     need, and their money cost.)
+
+I think there is no more important single question about health than the
+question of how much food we should eat. It is one about which there is
+a great deal of controversy, even among the best authorities. We shall
+try here for a common-sense solution. At the outset we have to remind
+ourselves of the distinction we tried to draw between nature and man. To
+what extent can civilized man rely upon his instincts to keep him in
+perfect health?
+
+Let us begin by considering the animals. How is their diet problem
+solved? Horses and cattle in a wild state are adjusted to certain foods
+which they find in nature, and so long as they can find it, they have no
+diet problem. Man comes, and takes these animals and domesticates them;
+he observes their habits, and gives to them a diet closely approaching
+the natural one, and they get along fairly well. But suppose the man,
+with his superior skill in agriculture, taking wild grain and planting
+it, reaping and threshing it by machinery, puts before his horse an
+unlimited quantity of a concentrated food such as oats, which the horse
+can never get in a natural state--will that horse's instincts guide it?
+Not at all. Any horse will kill itself by overeating on grain.
+
+I have read somewhere a clever saying, that a farm is a good place for
+an author to live, provided he can be persuaded not to farm it. But once
+upon a time I had not heard that wise remark, and I owned and tried to
+run a farm. I had two beautiful cows of which I was very proud, and one
+morning I woke up and discovered that the cows had got into the pear
+orchard and had been feeding on pears all night. In a few hours they
+both lay with bloated stomachs, dying. A farmer told me afterwards that
+I might have saved their lives, if I had stuck a knife into their
+stomachs to let out the gas. I do not know whether this is true or not.
+But my two dead cows afford a perfect illustration of the reason why
+civilized man cannot rely upon his instincts and his appetites to tell
+him when he has had enough to eat. He can only do this, provided he
+rigidly restricts himself to the foods which he ate in the days when his
+teeth and stomach and bowels were being shaped by the process of natural
+selection. If he is going to eat any other than such strictly natural
+foods, he will need to apply his reason to his diet schedule.
+
+In a state of nature man has to hunt his food, and the amount that he
+finds is generally limited, and requires a lot of exercise to get.
+Explorers in Africa give us a picture of man's life in the savage state,
+guided by his instincts and very little interfered with by reason. The
+savages will starve for long periods, then they will succeed in killing
+a hippopotamus or a buffalo, and they will gorge themselves, and nearly
+all of them will be ill, and several of them will die. So you see, even
+in a state of nature, and with natural foods, restraint is needed, and
+reason and moral sense have a part to play.
+
+What do reason and moral sense have to tell us about diet? Our bodily
+processes go on continuously, and we need at regular intervals a certain
+quantity of a number of different foods. The most elementary experiment
+will convince us that we can get along, maintain our body weight and our
+working efficiency upon a much smaller quantity of food than we
+naturally crave. Civilized custom puts before us a great variety of
+delicate and appetizing foods, upon which we are disposed to overeat;
+and we are slow observers indeed if we do not note the connection
+between this overeating and ill health. So we are forced to the
+conclusion that if we wish to stay well, we need to establish a
+censorship over our habits; we need a different diet regimen from the
+haphazard one which has been established for us by a combination of our
+instincts with the perversions of civilization.
+
+Up to a few years ago, it was commonly taken for granted by authorities
+on diet that what the average man actually eats must be the normal thing
+for him to eat. Governments which were employing men in armies, and at
+road building, and had to feed them and keep them in health, made large
+scale observations as to what the men ate, and thus were established the
+old fashioned "diet standards." They are expressed in calories, which is
+a heat unit representing the quantity of fuel required to heat a certain
+small quantity of water a certain number of degrees. In order that you
+may know what I am talking about, I will give a rough idea of the
+quantity of the more common foods which it takes to make 100 calories:
+one medium sized slice of bread, a piece of lean cooked steak the size
+of two fingers, one large apple, three medium tablespoonfuls of cooked
+rice or potatoes, one large banana, a tablespoonful of raisins, five
+dates, one large fig, a teaspoonful of sugar, a ball of butter the size
+of your thumbnail, a very large head of lettuce, three medium sized
+tomatoes, two-thirds of a glass of milk, a tablespoonful of oil. You
+observe, if you compare these various items, how little guidance
+concerning food is given by its bulk. You may eat a whole head of
+lettuce, weighing nearly a pound, and get no more food value than from a
+half ounce of olive oil which you pour over it. You may eat enough lean
+beefsteak to cover your plate, and you will not have eaten so much as a
+generous helping of butter. A big bowl of strawberries will not count
+half so much as the cream and sugar you put over them. So you may
+realize that when you eat olive oil, butter, cream, and sugar, you are
+in the same danger as the horse eating oats, or as my two cows in the
+pear orchard; and if some day a surgeon has to come and stick a knife
+into you, it may be for the same reason.
+
+The old-fashioned diet standards are as follows: Swedish laborers at
+hard work, over 4,700 calories; Russian workmen at moderate work, German
+soldiers in active service, Italian laborers at moderate work, between
+3,500 and 3,700 calories; English weavers, nearly 3,500 calories;
+Austrian farm laborers, over 5,000 calories. Some twenty years ago the
+United States government made observations of over 15,000 persons, and
+established the following, known as the "Atwater standards": men at very
+hard muscular work, 5,500 calories; men at moderately active muscular
+work, 3,400 calories; men at light to moderate muscular work, 3,050
+calories; men at sedentary, or women at moderately active work, 2,700
+calories.
+
+In the last ten or fifteen years there has arisen a new school of
+dietetic experts, headed by Professors Chittenden and Fisher of Yale
+University. Professor Chittenden has published an elaborate book, "The
+Nutrition of Man," in which he tells of long-continued experiment upon a
+squad of soldiers and a group of athletes at Yale University, also upon
+average students and professors. He has proved conclusively that all
+these various groups have been able to maintain full body weight and
+full working efficiency upon less than half the quantity of protein food
+hitherto specified, and upon anywhere from one-half to two-thirds the
+calory value set forth in the former standards.
+
+When I first read this book, I set to work to try its theories upon
+myself. During the five or six months that I lived on raw food, I took
+the trouble to weigh everything that I ate, and to keep a record. It is,
+of course, very easy to weigh raw foods exactly, and I found that I
+lived an active life and kept physical health upon slightly less than
+2,500 calories a day. I have set this as my standard, and have
+accustomed myself to follow it instinctively, and without wasting any
+thought upon it. Sometimes I fall from grace; for I still crave the
+delightful cakes and candies and ice cream upon which I was brought up.
+I always pay the penalty, and know that I will not get back to my former
+state of health until I skip a meal or two, and give my system a chance
+to clean house. The average man will find the regimen set forth in this
+book austere and awe-inspiring; I do not wish to pose as a paragon of
+virtue, so perhaps I should quote a sarcastic girl cousin, who remarked
+when I was a boy that the way to my heart was with a bag of
+ginger-snaps. I live in the presence of candy stores and never think of
+their existence, but if someone brings candy into the house and puts it
+in front of me, I have to waste a lot of moral energy in letting it
+alone. A few years ago I had a young man as secretary who discovered
+this failing of mine, and used to afford himself immense glee by buying
+a box of chocolates and leaving it on top of my desk. I would give him
+back the box--with some of the chocolates missing--but he would persist
+in "forgetting it" on my desk; he would hide and laugh hilariously
+behind the door, until my wife discovered his nefarious doings, and
+warned me of them.
+
+Professor Chittenden states quite simply the common sense procedure in
+the matter of food quantity. Find out by practical experiment what is
+the very least food upon which you can do your work without losing
+weight. That is the correct quantity for you, and if you are eating
+more, you certainly cannot be doing your body any good, and all the
+evidence indicates that you are doing it harm. You need not have the
+least fear in making this experiment that you will starve yourself.
+Later on, in a chapter on fasting, I shall prove to you that you carry
+around with you in your body sufficient reserve of food to keep you
+alive for eighty or ninety days; and if you draw on a small quantity of
+this you do not do yourself the slightest harm. Cut down the amount of
+your food; eat the bulky foods, which contain less calory value, and
+weigh yourself every day, and you will be surprised to discover how much
+less you need to eat than you have been accustomed to.
+
+One of the things you will find out is that your stomach is easily
+fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a meal consisting of a
+moderate quantity of lean meat, a very little bread, a heaping dish of
+turnip greens, and a big slice of watermelon, you will feel fully
+satisfied, yet you will not have taken in one-third the calory value
+that you would at an ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and
+dessert. The bulky kind of food is that for which your system was
+adapted in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large
+stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you had lived on
+refined and concentrated foods such as butter, sugar, olive oil, cheese
+and eggs. You have a long intestinal tract, adapted to slowly digesting
+foods, and to the work of extracting nutrition from a mass of roughage.
+You have a very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian
+scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the problems of
+health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous stage of evolution,
+and a source of much disease. The best thing you can do with that lower
+bowel is to give it lots of hay, as it requires; in other words, to eat
+the salads and greens which contain cellulose material. This contains no
+food value, and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and
+stimulates it to activity.
+
+If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, it may not be
+digested, and in that case it will fill your system with poisons.
+Second, it may be assimilated, but not burned up by the body. In that
+case it has to be thrown out by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and
+this puts upon these organs an extra strain, to which in the long run
+they may be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up as
+fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to tide you over
+the times when food was scarce. If you were a bear, you would naturally
+want to eat all you could, and be as fat as possible in November, so
+that you might be able to hunt your prey when you came out from your
+winter's sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to eat
+your regular meals all winter; you have established a system of
+civilization which makes you certain of your food, and the place where
+you keep your surplus is in the bank, or sewed up in the mattress, or
+hidden in your stocking. In other words, a civilized man saves money,
+and the habit of storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is
+a survival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health.
+Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra weight around
+with him, but his body has to keep it and tend it; and what are the
+effects of this is fully shown by life insurance tables. People who are
+five or ten per cent over weight have five or ten per cent more chance
+of dying all the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under
+weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of life
+expectation. There is no answer to these figures, which are the result
+of the tabulation of many hundreds of thousands of cases. The meaning of
+them to the fat person is to put himself on a diet of lean meat, green
+vegetables and fresh fruits, until he has brought himself down, not
+merely to the normal fatness of the civilized man, but to the normal
+leanness of the athlete, the soldier on campaign, and the student who
+has more important things to think about than stuffing his stomach.
+
+There is, of course, a certain kind of leanness which is the result of
+ill health. There are wasting diseases; tuberculosis, for example, and
+anemia. There are people who worry themselves thin, and there are a few
+rare "spiritual" people, so-called, who fade away from lack of
+sufficient interest in their bodies. That is not the kind of leanness
+that I mean, but the active, wiry leanness, which sometimes lives a
+hundred years. Nearly always you will find that such people are spare
+eaters; and you will find that our ideal of rosy plumpness, both for
+adults and children, is a wholly false notion. We once had in our home
+as servant an Irish girl, who was what is popularly called "a picture of
+health," with those beautiful flaming cheeks that Irish and English
+women so often have. She was in her early twenties, and nobody who knew
+her had any idea but that her health was perfect. But one morning she
+was discovered in bed with one side paralyzed, and in a couple of weeks
+she was dead with erysipelas. The color in her cheeks had been nothing
+but diseased blood vessels, overloaded with food material; and with the
+blood in that condition, one of the tiny vessels in the brain had become
+clogged.
+
+In the same way I have seen children, two or three years old, plump and
+rosy, and considered to be everything that children should be; but
+pneumonia would hit them, and in two or three days they would be at
+death's door. I do not mean that children should be kept hungry; on the
+contrary, they should have four or five meals a day, so that they do not
+have a chance to become too hungry. But at those meals they should eat
+in great part the bulky foods, which contain the natural salts needed
+for building the body. If a child asks for food, you may give it an
+apple, or you may give it a slice of bread and butter with sugar on it.
+The child will be equally well content in either case; but it is for
+you, with your knowledge of food values, to realize that the bread with
+butter and sugar contains two or three times as much nutriment as the
+apple, but contains practically none of the precious organic salts which
+will make the child's bones and teeth.
+
+So far I have discussed this subject as if all foods grew on bushes
+outside your kitchen door, and all you had to do was to go and pick off
+what you wanted. But as a matter of fact, foods cost money, and under
+our present system of wage slavery, the amount of money the average
+person can spend for food is strictly limited. In a later book I am
+going to discuss the problem of poverty, its causes and remedies. All
+that I can do here is to tell you what foods you ought to have, and if
+society does not pay you enough for your work to enable you to buy such
+foods, you may know that society, is starving you, and you may get busy
+to demand your rights as human beings. Meantime, however, such money as
+you do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of you
+spend it very unwisely indeed.
+
+In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most wholesome
+foods are cheap--often because people do not know enough to value them.
+We insist upon having the choice cuts of meats, because they are more
+tender to the teeth, but the cheaper cuts are exactly as nutritious. We
+insist upon having our meats loaded with fat, although fatness is an
+abnormal condition in an animal, and excess of fat is a grave error in
+diet. I live in a country where jack rabbits are a pest, and in the
+market they sell for perhaps one-fourth the cost of beef, and yet I can
+hardly ever get them, because people value them so little as food; they
+prefer the meat of a hog which has been wallowing in a filthy pen, and
+has been deliberately made so fat that it could hardly walk!
+
+I have already spoken of prunes, a much despised and invaluable food.
+All the dried fruits are rich in food values, and if we could get them
+untreated by chemicals, they would be worth their cost. I was brought up
+to despise the cheaper vegetables, such as cabbage and turnips; I never
+tasted boiled cabbage until I was forty, and then to my great surprise I
+made the discovery that it is good. Raw cabbage is as valuable as any
+other salad; it is a trifle harder to digest for some people, but I do
+not believe in pampering the stomach. Both potatoes and rice are cheap
+and wholesome, if only we would get unpolished rice, and if we would
+leave the skins on the potatoes until after they are cooked. Nearly all
+the mineral salts of the potato are just under the outer skin, and are
+removed by the foolish habit of peeling them.
+
+The prices of food differ so widely at different seasons and in
+different parts of the world, that there is not much profit in trying to
+figure how cheaply a person can live. I have found that I spend for the
+diet I have indicated here, from sixty to eighty cents a day. I do not
+buy any fancy foods, but on the other hand, I do not especially try to
+economize; I buy what I want of the simple everyday foods in their
+season. Most everyone will find that it is a good business proposition
+to buy the foods which he needs to keep in health. If the average
+workingman would add up the money he spends, not merely in the
+restaurants, but in the candy stores, the drug stores, the tobacco
+stores, and the offices of doctors and dentists, he would find, I think,
+that he could afford to buy himself the necessary quantity of wholesome
+natural foods. For a family of three, in the place where I live, enough
+of these foods can be purchased for a dollar a day, and this is about
+one-fourth what common labor is being paid, and one-eighth of what
+skilled labor is being paid. I will specify the foods: a pound and a
+half of shoulder steak, a loaf of whole wheat bread or a box of shredded
+wheat biscuit, a head of cabbage, a pound of prunes, and four or five
+pounds of apples.
+
+There are many ways of saving in the purchase of food if you put your
+mind upon it. If you are buying prunes, you may pay as high as fifty
+cents or a dollar a pound for the big ones, and they are not a bit
+better than the tiny ones, which you can buy for as low as eight cents a
+pound in bulk. When bread is stale, the bakers sell it for half price,
+despite the fact that only then has it become fit to eat. If you buy
+canned peaches, you will pay a fancy price for them, and they will be
+heavy with cane sugar; but if you inquire, you find what are known as
+"pie peaches," put up in gallon tins without sugar, and at about half
+the price. The butcher will sell you what he calls "hamburg steak" at a
+very low price, and if you let him prepare it out of your sight, he will
+fill it with fat and gristle; but let him make some while you watch, and
+then you have a very good food. One of my diet rules is that I do not
+trust the capitalist system to fix me up any kind of mixed or ground or
+prepared foods. I have not eaten sausage since I saw it made in Chicago.
+
+Also there is something to know about the cooking of foods, since it is
+possible to take perfectly good foods and spoil them by bad cooking.
+Once upon a time our family discovered a fireless cooker, and thought
+that was a wonderful invention for an absent-minded author and a wife
+who is given to revising manuscripts. But recent investigations which
+have been made into the nature of the "vitamines," food ferments which
+are only partly understood, suggest that prolonged cooking of food may
+be a great mistake. The starch has to be cooked in order to break the
+cell walls by the expansion of the material inside. Twenty minutes will
+be enough in the case of everything except beans, which need to be
+cooked four or five hours. Meat should be eaten rare, except in the case
+of pork, which harbors a parasite dangerous to the human body; therefore
+pork should always be thoroughly cooked. The white of eggs is made less
+digestible by boiling hard or frying. Eggs should never be allowed to
+boil; put them on in cold water, and take them off as soon as the water
+begins to boil. It is not necessary to cook either fresh fruit or dried.
+The dried fruits may be soaked and eaten raw, but I find that several
+fruits, especially apples and pears, do not agree with me well if they
+are eaten raw, so I stew them for fifteen or twenty minutes. I have no
+objection to canned fruits and vegetables, provided one takes the
+trouble in opening them to make sure there is no sign of spoiling. If
+you put up your own fruits, do not put in any sugar. All you have to do
+is to let them boil for a few minutes, and to seal them tightly while
+they are boiling hot. The whole secret of preserving is to exclude the
+air with its bacteria.
+
+If you live on a farm, you will have no trouble in following the diet
+here outlined, for you can produce for yourselves all the foods that I
+have recommended; only do not make the mistake of shipping out your best
+foods, and taking back the products of a factory, just because you have
+read lying advertisements about them. Take your own wheat and oats and
+corn to the mill, and have it ground whole, and make your own breads and
+cereals. Try the experiment of mixing whole corn meal with water and a
+little salt, and baking it into hard, crisp "corn dodgers." I do not eat
+these--but only because I cannot buy them, and have no time to make
+them.
+
+Another common article of food which I do not recommend is salted and
+smoked meats. I do not pretend to know the effects of large quantities
+of salt and saltpetre and wood smoke upon the human system, but I know
+that Dr. Wiley's "poison squad" proved definitely that a number of these
+inorganic minerals are injurious to health, and I prefer to take fresh
+meat when I can get it. I use a moderate quantity of common salt on meat
+and potatoes, because there seems to be a natural craving for this. I
+know that many health enthusiasts insist that I am thus putting a strain
+on my kidneys, but I will wait until these health enthusiasts make clear
+to me why deer and cattle and horses in a wild state will travel many
+miles to a salt-lick. I have learned that it is easy to make plausible
+statements about health, but not so easy to prove them. For example, I
+was told that it is injurious to drink water at meals, and for years I
+religiously avoided the habit; but it occurred to some college professor
+to find out if this was really true, and he carried on a series of
+experiments which proved that the stomach works better when its contents
+are diluted. The only point about drinking at meals is that you should
+not use the liquid to wash down your food without chewing it.
+
+I can suggest two other ways by which you may save money on food. One is
+by not eating too much, and another is by eating all that you buy. The
+amount of food that is wasted by the people of America would feed the
+people of any European nation. The amount of food that is thrown out
+from any one of our big American leisure class hotels would feed the
+children of a European town. I think it may fairly be described as a
+crime to throw into the garbage pail food which might nourish human
+life. In our family we have no garbage pail. What little waste there is,
+we burn in the stove, and my wife turns it into roses. It consists of
+the fat which we cannot help getting at the butcher's, and the bones of
+meat, and the skins of some fruits and vegetables. It would never enter
+into our minds to throw out a particle of bread, or meat, or other
+wholesome food. If we have something that we fear may spoil, we do not
+throw it out, but put it into a saucepan and cook it for a few minutes.
+If you will make the same rule in your home, you will stop at least that
+much of the waste of American life; and as to the big leisure class
+hotels, and the banquet tables of the rich--just wait a few years, and I
+think the social revolution will attend to them!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+FOODS AND POISONS
+
+     (Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon the
+     system of stimulants and narcotics.)
+
+
+A few years ago there died an old gentleman who had devoted some twenty
+years of his life to teaching people to chew their food. Horace Fletcher
+was his name, and his ideas became a fad, and some people carried them
+to comical extremes. But Fletcher made a real discovery; what he called
+"the food filter." This is the automatic action of the swallowing
+apparatus, whereby nature selects the food which has been sufficiently
+prepared for digestion. If you chew a mouthful of food without ever
+performing the act of swallowing, you will find that the food gradually
+disappears. What happens is that all of it which has been reduced to a
+thin paste will slip unnoticed down your throat, and you may go on
+putting more food into your mouth, and chewing, and can eat a whole meal
+without ever performing the act of swallowing. Fletcher claimed that
+this is the proper way to eat, and that you can train yourself to follow
+this method. I have tried his idea and adopted it. One of my diet rules,
+to which there is no exception, is that if I haven't the time to chew my
+food properly, I haven't the time to eat; I skip that meal.
+
+The habit of bolting food is a source of disease. To be sure, the
+carnivorous animals bolt their food, but they are tougher than we are,
+and do not carry the burden of a large brain and a complex nervous
+system. If you swallow your meals half chewed, and wash them down with
+liquids, you may get away with it for a while, but some day you will pay
+for it with dyspepsia and nervous troubles. And the same thing applies
+to your habit of jumping up from meals and rushing away to work, whether
+it be work of the muscles, or of brain and nerves. Proper digestion
+requires the presence of a quantity of blood in the walls of the stomach
+and digestive tract. It requires the attention of your subconscious
+mind, and this means rest of muscles and brain centers. If you cannot
+rest for an hour after meals, omit that meal, or make it a light one, of
+fruit juices, which are almost immediately absorbed by the stomach, and
+of salads, which do not ferment. You may rest assured that it will not
+hurt you to skip a meal, and make up for it when you have time to be
+quiet. I have been many times in my life under very intense and long
+continued nervous strain; for example, during the Colorado coal strike,
+I led a public demonstration which kept me in a state of excitement all
+the day and a good part of the night several weeks. During this period I
+ate almost nothing; a baked apple and a cup of custard would be as near
+as I would go to a meal, and as a result I came through the experience
+without any injury whatever to my health. I lost perhaps ten pounds in
+weight, but that was quickly made up when I settled back to a normal way
+of life.
+
+I have been on camping trips when I had a great deal of hard work to do,
+carrying a canoe long distances on my back, or paddling it forty miles a
+day. On the mornings of such a trip I have seen a guide cook himself an
+elaborate breakfast of freshly baked bread, bacon, and even beans, and
+make a hearty meal and then go straight to work. My meal, on the
+contrary, would consist of a small dish of stewed prunes, or perhaps
+some huckleberries or raspberries, if they could be found. I will not
+say that I could do as much as the guide, because he was used to it, and
+I was not. But I can say this--if I had eaten his breakfast at the start
+of the day, I would have been dead before night; and I mean the word
+"dead" quite literally. I know a man who started to climb Whiteface
+mountain in the Adirondacks. He climbed half way, and then ate lunch,
+which consisted of nine hard boiled eggs. Then he started to climb the
+rest of the mountain, and dropped dead of acute indigestion.
+
+There are few poisons which can affect the system more quickly, or more
+dangerously, than a mass of food which is not digested. The stomach is
+an ideal forcing-house for the breeding of bacteria. It provides warmth
+and moisture, and you, in your meal, provide the bacteria and the
+material upon which they thrive. Under normal conditions, the stomach
+pours out a gastric juice which kills the bacteria; but let this gastric
+juice for any reason be lacking--because your nervous energy has gone
+somewhere else, or because your blood-stream, from which the gastric
+juice must be made, has been drawn away to the muscles by hard labor;
+then you have a yeast-pot, with great quantities of gases and poisons.
+In acute cases the results are evident enough: violent pains and
+convulsions, followed by coma and the turning black of the body. But
+what you should understand is that you may produce a milder case of such
+poisoning, and may do it day after day habitually, and little by little
+your vital organs will be weakened by the strain.
+
+It does not make any difference at what hour of the twenty-four you take
+the great bulk of your food. It is one of the commonest delusions that
+you get some strengthening effect from your food immediately, and must
+have this strength in order to do hard work. To be sure, there are
+substances, such as grape-sugar, which require practically no digesting;
+you can hold them in the mouth, and they will be digested by the saliva,
+and absorbed at once into the blood-stream. But unless you have been
+starved for a long period you do not need to get your strength in this
+rush fashion. If you ate your normal meals on the previous day, your
+blood-stream is fully supplied with nutriment which has been put through
+a long process of preparation, and you can get up in the morning and
+work all day, if necessary, upon what is already in your system. To be
+sure, you may feel hungry, and even faint, but that is merely a matter
+of habit; your system is accustomed to taking food and expects it. But
+if you are a laborer doing hard work, you can easily train yourself to
+eat a light meal in the morning, and another light meal at noon, and to
+eat a hearty meal when your work is done and you can rest. Two light
+meals and a hearty meal are all that any system needs, and you can prove
+it to yourself by trying it, and watching your weight once a week.
+
+I have tried many experiments, and the conclusion to which I have come
+is that there is no virtue in any particular meal-hours or any
+particular number of meals. For several years I tried the experiment of
+two meals a day. I was living a retired life, and had little contact
+with the world, and I would make a hearty meal at ten o'clock in the
+morning, and another at five in the afternoon. But later on I found that
+inconvenient, and now I take a light breakfast, and two moderate-sized
+meals at the conventional hours of lunch and dinner. I can arrange my
+own time, so after meal times is when I get my reading done. Sometimes,
+when I am tired, I feel sleepy after meals, but I have learned not to
+yield to this impulse. I do not know how to explain this; I have
+observed that animals sleep after eating, and it appears to be a natural
+thing to do; but I know that if I go to sleep after a meal, nature makes
+clear to me that I have made a mistake, and I do not repeat it. I never
+eat at night, and always go to bed on an empty stomach, so I am always
+hungry when I open my eyes in the morning. I never know what it is not
+to be hungry at meal times, and my habits are so regular that I could
+set my watch by my stomach.
+
+Another common habit which is harmful is eating between meals. I have
+known people who are accustomed to nibble at food nearly all the time.
+Shelley records that he tried it as an experiment, thinking it might be
+a convenient way to get digestion done--but he found that it did not
+work. The stomach is apparently meant to work in pulses; to do a job of
+digesting, and then to rest and accumulate the juices for another job.
+It will accustom itself to a certain regime, and will work accordingly,
+but if, when it has half digested a load of food, you pile more food in
+on top, you make as much trouble as you would make in your kitchen if
+you required your cook to prepare another meal before she has cleaned up
+after the last one. Three times a day is enough for any adult to eat.
+Children require to eat oftener, because their bodies are more active,
+and they not merely have to keep up weight, but to add to it. The
+simplest way to arrange matters with children is to give them three good
+meals at the hours when adults eat, and then to give them a couple of
+pieces of fruit between breakfast and lunch, and again between lunch and
+supper. I have never seen a child who would not be satisfied with this,
+when once the habit was established.
+
+I have already spoken of the cooking and serving of food. I consider
+that the "gastronomic art," as it is pompously called, is ninety-nine
+per cent plain rubbish. To be sure, if foods are appetizingly prepared,
+and look good and smell good and taste good, they will cause the gastric
+juices to flow abundantly, as the Russian scientist Pavlov has
+demonstrated by practical experiment with the stomach-pump. But I know
+without any stomach-pump that the best thing to make my gastric juices
+flow is hard work and a spare diet. When I come home from five sets of
+tennis, and have a cold shower and a rub-down, my gastric juices will
+flow for a piece of cold beefsteak and a cold sweet potato, quite as
+well as for anything that is served by a leisure class "chef." Needless
+to say, I want food to be fresh, and I want it to be clean, but I have
+other things to do with my time and money than to pamper my appetites
+and encourage food whims.
+
+If you have a grandmother, or ever had one, you know what grandmothers
+tell you about "hot nourishing food"; but I have tried the experiment,
+and satisfied myself that there is absolutely no difference in
+nourishing qualities between hot food and cold food. If you chew your
+food sufficiently, it will all be ninety-eight and six-tenths degree
+food when it gets to your stomach, and that is the way your stomach
+wants it. Of course, if you have been out in a blizzard, and are
+chilled, and want to restore the body temperature, a hot drink will be
+one of the quickest ways, and if the emergency is extreme, you may even
+add a stimulant. On the other hand, if you are suffering from heat, it
+is sensible to cool your body by a cold drink. But you should use as
+much judgment with yourself as you would with a horse, which you do not
+permit to drink a lot of cold water when he is heated up, and is going
+into his stall to stand still.
+
+I have mentioned the word "stimulants," and this opens a large subject.
+There are drugs which affect the body in two different ways: some excite
+the nerves, and through the nerves the heart and blood-stream, to more
+intense activity; others have the effect of deadening the nerves, and
+dulling the sense of exhaustion and pain. One of these groups is called
+stimulants, and the other is called narcotics; but as a matter of fact
+the stimulants are really narcotics, because they operate by dulling the
+nerves whose function it is to prevent the over-accumulation of fatigue
+poisons; in other words, they keep the nerves and muscles from knowing
+that they are tired, and so they go on working.
+
+It is possible, of course, to conceive of an emergency in which that is
+necessary. Once upon a time, on a hunting trip, I had been traveling all
+day, and was caught in a rain storm, and exhausted and chilled to the
+bone; I had to make camp without a fire, so when I got the tent up I
+wrapped myself in blankets and drank a couple of tablespoons full of
+whiskey. That is the only time I have ever taken whiskey in my life,
+and it warmed me almost instantly, and did me no harm. In the same way
+there were two or three occasions when I was on the verge of a nervous
+breakdown, and could not sleep, and let the doctor give me a sleeping
+powder. But in each case I knew that I was fooling with a dangerous
+habit, and I did no more fooling than necessary. No one should make use
+of either stimulants or narcotics except in extreme emergency, and never
+but a few times in a lifetime. What you should do is to change your
+habits so that you will not need to over-strain.
+
+All these drugs are habit forming; that is to say, they leave the body
+no better, and with a craving for a repetition of the relief. When you
+are tired, it is because your muscles and nerves are storing up fatigue
+poisons more rapidly than your blood-stream can get rid of them. You
+need to know about this condition, and exhaustion and pain are nature's
+protective warning. If you put a stop to the warning, you are as
+unintelligent as the Eastern despots who used to cut off the head of the
+messenger who brought bad tidings. If, when you have a headache, you go
+into a drug store and let the druggist mix you one of those white fizzy
+drinks, what you are doing is not to get rid of the poisons in your
+blood-stream, but merely to reduce the action of your heart, so as to
+keep the blood from pressing so fast into the aching blood vessels and
+nerves. You may try that trick with your heart a number of times, but
+sooner or later you will try it once too often--your heart will stop a
+little bit quicker than you meant it to!
+
+Drugs are poisons, and their action depends upon their poisoning some
+particular portion of the body, and temporarily paralyzing it. And bear
+this in mind, they are none the less poisonous because they are
+"natural" products. You can kill yourself by cyanide of potassium, which
+comes out of a chemist's retort; but you can kill yourself just as dead
+with laudanum, which comes out of a plant, or with the contents of the
+venom sac of a snake. You are poisoning yourself none the less certainly
+if you use alcohol, which is made from the juices of beautiful fruits,
+and has had hosts of famous poets writing songs about it; or you can
+poison yourself with the caffein which you get in a lovely brown bean
+which comes from Brazil, fragrant to the nostrils and delicious to the
+taste. You may drink wine and tea and coffee for a hundred years, and
+have your picture published in the newspapers as a proof that these
+habits conduce to health; but nothing will be said about the large
+number of people who practiced these habits, and didn't live so long,
+and about how long they might have lived if they hadn't practiced these
+habits.
+
+I was brought up in the South, and my "elders" belonged to a generation
+which had grown up in war time. For this reason many of the men both
+drank and smoked to excess, and in my boyhood I lived among them and
+watched them, and with the help of advice from a wise mother, I
+conceived a horror of every kind of stimulant. The alcoholic poets could
+not fool me; I had been in the alcoholic wards of the hospitals. I had
+seen one man after another, beautiful and kindly and gracious men,
+dragged down into a pit of torment and shame.
+
+Alcohol is, I think, the greatest trap that nature ever set for the feet
+of the human race. It is responsible for more degradation and misery
+than any other evil in the world; and I say this, knowing well that my
+Socialist friends will cry, "What about Capitalism?" My answer is that I
+doubt if there ever would have been any Capitalism in the world, if it
+had not been for alcohol. If the workers had not been systematically
+poisoned, and all their savings taken from them by the gin-mill, they
+would never have submitted to the capitalist system, they would have
+built the co-operative commonwealth at the time they were building the
+first factories. I listen to the arguments of my radical friends about
+"personal liberty," but I note that in Russia, when it was a question of
+making a practical revolution and keeping it alive, the first thing the
+leaders did was to drag out the contents of the wine-cellars of the
+palaces, and smash them in the gutters.
+
+Tea and coffee are, of course, much milder in their effects than
+alcohol; you can play with them longer, and the punishment will be less
+severe. But if you make habitual use of them, you will pay the penalty
+which all drugs exact from the system. Your brain and your nerve centers
+will be less sensitive, less capable of working except under the
+influence of drugs; their reacting power will be dulled, and they will
+wear out more quickly. I have watched the slaves of the "morning cup of
+coffee," and know how they suffer when they do not get it. Likewise, I
+have watched the tea drinkers. It is comical to live in England, and see
+all the able-bodied men obliged to leave their work at four o'clock in
+the afternoon, and seek the regular stimulus for their tired nerves. If
+you are to meet anybody, it is always for "tea" that the ceremony is
+set, and if you refuse to drink tea, your hostess will be uncomfortable,
+unable to talk about anything but the strange, incredible notion that
+one can live without tea. I discovered after a while the solution of
+this problem; I would say that I preferred a little hot water, if you
+please, and so my hostess would pour me a cup of hot water, and I would
+sit and gravely sip it, and everybody would be perfectly content: I was
+conforming to the outward appearance of normality, which is what the
+British conventions require.
+
+I have never drunk a cup of coffee, so I do not know what its effect on
+me would be. But some fifteen years ago I drank a glass of very weak
+iced tea at eight o'clock in the evening, and did not get to sleep until
+four or five the next morning. So I know that there is really a drug in
+tea. I know also that I might accustom my system to it, just as I might
+learn to poison my lungs with nicotine without being made immediately
+and suddenly ill; but why should I wish to do this? Life is so
+interesting to me that I do not need to stimulate my brain centers in
+order to appreciate the thrill of it. And when I am tired, I can rest
+myself by listening to music, or by reading a worth-while novel--things
+which I have found do not leave the after effects of nicotine.
+
+I remember the first time I met Jack London. Our meeting consisted in
+good part of his "kidding" me, because I was lacking in the congenial
+vices of the cafe. He told me how much I had missed, because I had never
+been drunk; One ought to try the great adventure, at least once! Poor
+Jack is gone, because his kidneys gave out at forty; and nothing could
+seem more ungracious than to point out that I am still alive, and
+finding life enjoyable. Yet, in this book we are trying to find out how
+to live, and if there are habits which wreck and destroy a magnificent
+physique, and bring a great genius to death at the age of forty--surely
+the rest of us want to know about it, and to be warned in time. I
+mention Jack London in this connection, because he has said the last
+word on the subject of alcohol. Read "John Barleycorn," and especially
+read between the lines of it, and you will not need my argument to
+persuade you to be glad that the Eighteenth Amendment has been written
+into the Constitution, and that it is your duty as a Socialist, not
+merely to obey it, but to vote for its enforcement.
+
+I am proceeding on the assumption that your life is of importance to
+you; that you have a job to do which you know to be worth while, and to
+which you desire to apply your powers. You agree with me that the
+workers of the world are suffering, and that it is necessary for them to
+find their freedom, and that this takes hard work and hard thinking. You
+may say that I exaggerate the amount of harm that is done to the system
+by tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. Well, let us assume that in
+moderate quantities they do no harm at all: even so, I have the right to
+ask you to show that they do some good; otherwise, surely, it is a
+mistake for the workers to spend their savings upon them.
+
+Consider, for example, the amount of money which the wage slaves of the
+world spend upon tobacco. Suppose they could be persuaded for two or
+three years to spend this amount upon good reading matter--do you not
+think there would be an improvement in their condition? Surely you
+cannot maintain that the use of tobacco is necessary to the activities
+of the brain! Surely you do not think that a man has to have a cigarette
+in order to stimulate his thoughts, or to smoke a pipe to rest himself
+after his work is done! I offer myself as evidence in such a
+controversy; I have written as many books as any man in the radical
+movement, and the sum total of my lifetime smoking amounts to one-half
+of one cigarette. I tried that when I was eight years old, and somebody
+told me a policeman would arrest me if he caught me, and I threw away
+the cigarette, and ran and hid in an alley, and have not yet got over my
+scare.
+
+In the "Journal for Industrial Hygiene" for October, 1920, is an article
+entitled "Fatigue and Efficiency of Smokers in a Strenuous Mental
+Occupation." Experiments were conducted among telegraph operators, and
+the result showed that "the heavy smokers of the group show a higher
+output rate at the beginning of the day than the light smokers, but
+their rate falls off more markedly in the late hours, and their
+production for the whole day is definitely less than that of the light
+smokers. The heavy smokers also show less ability than the light smokers
+to respond to increasing pressure of work in the late hours of the day
+by handling their full share of the work presented."
+
+One point upon which every medical authority agrees is--that the use of
+nicotine is of deadly effect upon the immature organism. Half-grown
+youths who smoke cigarettes will never be full-sized men; they will
+never have normal lungs or a normal heart. And likewise, all authorities
+agree about the effect of smoking upon the organism of women. I gave
+what little help I could to the task of helping to set women free, and
+to make them the equals of men; but I was always pained when I
+discovered that some of my feminist friends understood by woman's
+emancipation no more than her right to adopt men's vices. I would say to
+these ardent young female radicals, who cultivate the art of dangling a
+cigarette from their lower lip, and sip cocktails out of coffee-cups in
+Greenwich Village cafes, that they will never be able to bear sound
+children; but I know that this would not interest them--they don't want
+to bear any children at all. So I say that they will never be able to
+think straight thoughts, and will be nervous invalids when they are
+thirty.
+
+We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, and we put several
+millions of our young men into armies, and if there were any of them who
+did not already know how to smoke cigarettes, they learned it under
+official sanction. So now we have a national tobacco bill that runs up
+to two billions, and will insure us a new generation of "Class C"
+rating. Speaking to the young radicals who are reading my books, I say:
+We want to make the world over, to make it a place of freedom and
+kindness, instead of the hell of greed and hate that it is today. For
+that purpose we need a new moral code, and we can never win our victory
+without it. I have attended radical conventions, sitting in unventilated
+halls amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and listening to men wrangle all
+through the day and a great part of the night; I have watched the fatal
+dissensions in the movement, the quarrelings of the right wingers and
+the left wingers and all stages and degrees in between, and I have
+wondered--not jestingly, but in pitying earnest--how much of all those
+personalities and factional misunderstanding had their origin in carbon
+dioxide and nicotine. There is no use suggesting such ideas to the older
+men, whose habits are fixed; but a new generation is coming on, with a
+new vision of the enormous task before it; and is it too much to expect
+of these young men and women, that they shall realize in advance the
+grim tasks they have to do, and shall learn to run the machine of their
+body so as to get out of it the maximum amount of service? Is it too
+much to hope for, that some day we shall have a race of young fighters
+for truth and justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and
+consecrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from wage
+slavery and war?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+MORE ABOUT HEALTH
+
+     (Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing,
+     bathing and sleep.)
+
+
+In discussing the question of health, we have given the greater part of
+the space to the subject of diet, for the reason that experience has
+convinced us that diet is two-thirds of health, and that nearly always
+in disease you find errors of diet playing a part. There are, however,
+other important factors of health, now to be discussed.
+
+Everything of which the body makes use is taken in the form of food and
+drink, with the exception of one substance, the oxygen we get out of the
+air. Every time we draw a breath we take in a certain amount of oxygen,
+and every time we expel a breath, we drive out a certain amount of a gas
+called carbon dioxide, which is what the body makes of the fuel it
+burns. The body can get along for several days without water, and for
+two or three months without food, but it can only get along for two or
+three minutes without oxygen. It should be obvious that when the body
+expels carbon dioxide, with a slight mixture of other more poisonous
+gases, and sucks back what it expects will be a fresh supply of oxygen,
+it wants to get oxygen, and not the same gases it has just expelled, nor
+gases which have been expelled from the lungs of other people.
+
+In the days when primitive man lived outdoors, he did not have to think
+about this problem. When he breathed poison from his lungs, the moving
+air of nature blew it away, and the infinite vegetation of nature took
+the carbon dioxide and turned it back into oxygen. And even when man
+built himself shelters, he was not cunning enough to make them
+air-tight; he had to leave a big hole for the smoke to get out, and
+smaller holes through which to get light. But now our wonderful
+civilization has solved these problems; we make our walls of air-tight
+plaster, and we have invented a substance which will admit light without
+admitting air. So we have the "white plague" of tuberculosis, and so we
+have innumerable minor plagues of coughs and colds and sore throats.
+
+In the summer time the solution of the problem is easy. Have as many
+doors and windows in your home as possible, and keep them open, and have
+nothing in your home to make dust or to retain dust. But then comes
+stormy and cold weather, and you have to close your doors and windows,
+and keep your home at a higher temperature than the air outside. How
+shall you do this, and at the same time get a continual supply of fresh
+air?
+
+I will take the various methods of heating one by one. The problem in
+each case is simple and can be made clear in a sentence or two.
+
+First, the open fireplace. This is a perfect solution, if you have
+enough fuel, and do not have to worry about the waste of heat. An open
+fireplace draws out all the air in the room in a short time, and you do
+not have to bother about opening doors or windows; you may be sure that
+the air is getting in through some cracks, or else the fire would not
+burn.
+
+Second, a wood or coal or gas stove in the room, provided with a proper
+vent, so that all the gases of combustion are drawn up the chimney. This
+changes the air more slowly than an open fireplace, but it does the work
+fairly well. All that you have to be careful about is that your vent is
+sufficiently large and is working properly. If your fire does not
+"draw," you will have smoke or coal-gas in the house, and this is bad
+for the lungs; but worse for the lungs is a gas that you can neither see
+nor smell nor taste, the deadly carbon monoxide. This gas is produced by
+incomplete combustion, and whenever you see yellow flames from gas or
+coal, you are apt to have this poisonous substance. Small quantities of
+it are sufficient to cause violent headaches, and repeated doses of it
+are fatal. Men who work in garages which are not properly ventilated run
+this risk all the time, because carbon monoxide is one of the products
+of imperfect combustion in the gas engine.
+
+Next, the furnace. A furnace sends fresh warm air into your house; the
+only trouble is that it takes out all the moisture, and some authorities
+say that this is bad for the lungs and throat. I do not know whether
+this is true, but all furnaces are supposed to have a water chamber to
+supply moisture to the air, and you should keep a pan of water on every
+stove or radiator in your house.
+
+Next, steam heat, which includes hot-water heating. This is one of the
+abominations of our civilization, and one of the methods by which our
+race is committing suicide. There is nothing wrong about steam heat in
+itself; the room is warmed in a harmless way; but the trouble is it
+stays warm only so long as the doors and windows are kept shut. You are
+in an air-tight box, and can be warm provided you do not mind being
+suffocated. The moment you open a door or window, you have a cold draft
+on your feet, and if you wish to change the air entirely you have to let
+out all the heat; so, of course, you never do change it entirely, but go
+on breathing the same air over and over, and every time you breathe it
+the condition of your body is a little more reduced.
+
+The solution of this problem is not to heat the air in the room, but to
+use your steam coils to heat fresh air, and then drive this air, already
+warmed, into the room, at the same time providing a vent through which
+the old air can be pushed out. This is the hot air system of heating,
+and it requires some kind of engine or dynamo, and therefore is
+expensive. It has been installed in a few office buildings and theaters.
+One of the most perfect systems I ever inspected is in the building of
+the New York Stock Exchange, where the air is warmed in winter, and
+cooled in summer, and freed from dust, and exactly the right quantity is
+supplied. It is a humorous commentary upon our civilization that we take
+perfect care of the breathing apparatus of our stock-gamblers, but pay
+no attention to the breathing apparatus of our senators and congressmen,
+whose one business in life is to use their lungs. The stately old
+building with its white marble domes looks impressive in moving pictures
+and on illustrated postcards, but it has no system of ventilation
+whatever, and is a death-trap to the poor wretches who are compelled to
+spend their days, and sometimes their nights, within its walls. This
+contrast is one symptom of the rise of industrial capitalism and the
+collapse of political democracy.
+
+We have reserved to the last a method of heating which is the worst, and
+can only be described as a crime against health: the use of gas and oil
+stoves set out in the middle of the room, without a vent, and
+discharging their fumes into the room. These stoves are simply
+instruments of slow death, and their manufacture should be prohibited
+by law. In the meantime, what you have to do is to refuse to live in a
+room or to work in an office where such stoves are used. I have heard
+dealers insist that this or the other kind of gas or oil stove was so
+contrived as to consume all the fumes. Do not let anybody fool you with
+such nonsense. There has never been any form of combustion devised which
+consumes all the fumes. No such thing can be, because the products of
+combustion are not combustible. The so-called "wickless blue flame"
+stoves do burn all the oil, and a properly regulated gas stove will burn
+all the gas, but that simply means that it turns the oil and gas into
+carbon dioxide, the very substance which your lungs are working day and
+night to get out of your body.
+
+Moreover, there is no oil or gas stove which ever burns perfectly all
+the time, either because there is too much gas or insufficient air. Oil
+and gas stoves sometimes give a partly yellow flame. You can cause them
+to give a yellow flame at any time by blowing air against them, and that
+yellow flame means imperfect combustion, and a probability of the deadly
+carbon monoxide. These facts are known to every chemist and to every
+student of hygiene, and the fact that civilized people continue to burn
+such oil and gas stoves in their homes and offices is simply one more
+proof that our civilization values human welfare and health at nothing
+whatever in comparison with profits.
+
+Not merely should you see that you have a continuous supply of fresh air
+in your home, but you should try to keep down dust in your home, and
+especially fine particles of lint. Once upon a time our ancestors were
+unable to make houses and floors tight, and so they put rugs on the
+floors and hung tapestries on the walls to keep out the wind. We
+civilized people are able to make both floors and walls absolutely
+tight, and yet we continue to use rugs and curtains, it being the first
+principle of our education that propriety requires us to continue to do
+the things which our ancestors did. I am unable to think of a more silly
+or stupid thing in the world than a rug or a curtain, but I have lived
+in the house with them all my life, because, alas, the ladies cannot be
+happy otherwise. They want their homes to be "pretty," and so they
+continue to set dust traps, and to set themselves futile jobs of house
+cleaning and shopping.
+
+Not all of us are able to be out of doors as much as we ought to be, but
+all of us spend seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four in sleep,
+and this time at least we ought to spend out of doors. I understand that
+this is futile advice to give to the very poor. I was poor myself for
+many years, and had to put all my clothes on at night in order to keep
+warm, and even then I could not always do it. Nevertheless, from the
+time I first realized the importance of ventilation I never slept in a
+room with a closed window.
+
+I say, sleep outdoors if you possibly can. You do not have to be afraid
+of exposure, for cold will not hurt you if you keep your body in proper
+condition. I have slept out in a rubber blanket, with the rain beating
+on my head and face; I have spread a rubber blanket on a hummock in the
+midst of a swamp, and waked up in the morning with my hair and face
+soaked in cold, white fog, but I never caught cold from such things;
+there is no harm whatever in dampness or in "night air," if you are in
+proper condition. Of course, you may get your ears frostbitten in the
+middle of winter, but you can have a sleeping hood to remove that
+danger.
+
+The "nature cure" enthusiasts, who lay so much stress upon an outdoor
+life, also insist that the wearing of clothes is a harmful civilized
+custom. They urge us to take "sun baths" and to "ventilate the skin."
+Now, as a matter of fact, the skin does not breathe, it merely gives out
+moisture, and it does not give out any less because we have clothing on
+us, provided the clothing is dry and clean, and will absorb moisture.
+But bye and bye the clothing becomes loaded with the waste substances
+given out by the skin, and then it will absorb no more, and if you do
+not change your clothing, no doubt it may have some effect upon health.
+
+But the principal evil of civilized clothing is that it binds the body
+and prevents the free play of the muscles, and, more important yet,
+stops the free circulation of the blood. I have already discussed hats,
+which are the principal cause of baldness. I will go to the other
+extremity of the body, and mention tight shoes, which, strange as it may
+seem, cause headaches and colds. You will be able to find a few
+civilized men with normal feet, but you will hardly ever find a woman
+whose toes are not crowded together and misshapen. I have said that the
+human body is one organism, and that it is fed and its health
+maintained by the blood-stream; I say now that the circulation of the
+blood is one thing, and if you block it at any one place, you block it
+everywhere. Of course, not all the blood-stream goes down into the feet,
+but some of it does, and if it is clogged in the feet, and the blood
+vessels cramped and crowded, there is a certain amount of poison kept in
+the system, which the system should have got rid of.
+
+Why do women wear tight shoes? Because the leisure class members of
+their sex have been kept in harems and used as the playthings of men. To
+be fragile and delicate was the thing admired by the masters of wealth,
+and to have small hands and feet was a sign that women belonged to this
+parasite class. Therefore at all hazards women's feet must be kept
+small, even at the expense of their health and happiness; and so they
+put themselves up on several inches of heels, which cause them to toddle
+around like marionettes on a stage, with all their toes crowded down
+into a lump.
+
+Why do men wear tight bands around their scalps, which cause their hair
+to drop out, and tight, stiff columns around their necks, which stop the
+circulation of the blood into their heads, and cause them to have
+headaches instead of ideas? The reason is that for ages the rulers of
+the tribe have wished to demonstrate publicly their superiority to the
+common herd, which does the menial tasks. In England all gentlemen wear
+tall black silk band-boxes on their heads, and in America they have a
+choice among several varieties of round tight boxes. All men who work in
+offices wear stiffly starched collars and cuffs, as a means of
+demonstrating their superiority to the common workers, who have to sweat
+at their necks. I think it is not too much to hope that when class
+exploitation is done away with, we shall also get rid of these class
+symbols, and choose our clothing because it is warm and comfortable, and
+not according to the perverted imbecilities of "style."
+
+The skin gives out perspiration which is greasy; also the skin is
+constantly growing, putting out layers of cells which dry up and are
+worn off. We need to bathe with soap to remove the grease, and we need
+to rub with a towel to brush away the dead cells of the skin, so that
+the pores may be kept open. No one is taking care of his body who does
+not wash and rub it once every twenty-four hours, and once or twice a
+week with warm water and soap. It is often stated that hot baths are
+weakening, but I have never found it so; however, I think it is a bad
+practice to pamper the body, which should be accustomed to the shock of
+cold water. The rule as to bathing, both as to temperature and time, is
+simple. If, after the bath and rub-down, your body has reacted and you
+feel vigorous and fresh, that bath has done you good. If, on the other
+hand, you feel chilled and depressed, then you have been too long in the
+water, or its temperature was too low. Every person has to find his own
+rules in such matters. The only general rule is that as one grows older
+the body reacts less quickly.
+
+All day, as we work and think, we store up more poisons in our cells
+than the body can get rid of, and the time comes when the cells are so
+loaded with poisons that we have to stop for a while, and let our
+blood-stream clean house. The quantity of sleep one needs is a problem
+like that of cold water; each person has to find his own rule. In
+general, one needs less and less sleep as one grows older. Infants sleep
+the greater part of the time; growing children should sleep ten or
+eleven hours, adults seven or eight, and old people, unless they have
+let themselves get fat, generally do not want to sleep more than six,
+and part of this in short naps. When you sleep, your bodily energies
+relax, and you make less heat, therefore you need extra clothing; but
+this clothing should never cover the mouth and nose, nor should it be so
+heavy as to make breathing a burden. If you are in good condition, it
+will do you no harm to be chilly when you sleep, except that you do not
+sleep so soundly. Sleeping too much is just as harmful as sleeping too
+little. Nature will tell you that. The important thing, as in all other
+problems of health, is to have something interesting to think about,
+some exciting work to do in the world, and then you will sleep as little
+as you have too.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+WORK AND PLAY
+
+     (Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and the
+     overworked.)
+
+
+In discussing the important question of exercise, there is one
+fundamental fact to begin with: that our present civilization divides
+men sharply into two classes, those who do not get enough exercise, and
+those who get too much. Obviously it would be folly to make the same
+recommendations to the two classes.
+
+I begin with those who get too much exercise. They include a great
+number, probably the majority of those who do the manual work of the
+world. They include the farmers and the farm-hands, who work from dawn
+to sunset, and sometimes by lantern light. They include also the
+farmers' wives, the kitchen slaves of whom the old couplet tells:
+
+    "Man's work ends from sun to sun,
+     But woman's work is never done."
+
+I am aware that men have worked that way for countless ages, and yet the
+race is still surviving; but I am aware also that men wither up with
+rheumatism, and contract chronic diseases of the kidneys and the blood
+vessels, consequent upon the creation of greater quantities of fatigue
+poisons than the body can regularly eliminate.
+
+I have very little interest in the past, and none whatever in finding
+fault with it. My purpose is to criticize the present for the benefit of
+the future, and therefore I say that modern machinery and the whole
+development of modern large-scale production make it absolutely
+unnecessary that women should slave all their waking hours in kitchens,
+or that men should slave all day. I say it is monstrous folly that men
+should work for twelve-hour stretches in steel mills, and for ten and
+eleven hours in factories and mines. Organized labor has adopted the
+slogan, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for
+play"; but my slogan is "Four hours for work, four hours for study,
+eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for play."
+
+I know, and am prepared to demonstrate to any thinking man, that modern
+civilization can produce, not merely all the necessities, but all the
+comforts of life for every man, woman and child in the community, by the
+expenditure of four hours a day work of the adult, able-bodied men and
+women. So to all the wage slaves of the factories and mines, the fields
+and the kitchens, I say that too much exercise is what is the matter
+with you, and what you need is to get off in a quiet nook in the woods
+and read a good novel, not merely for a few hours, but for a few months,
+until you get over the effects of capitalist civilization. I know that
+not many of you can get away as yet, but I urge you to insist upon
+getting away, to fight for the chance to get away; and I will here
+suggest a few of the novels for you to read when finally you do get
+away. I choose the easy ones, which the dullest and most tired of you
+will love; I say, make up your mind to read these thirty-two books
+before you die, and do not let the world cheat you out of your chance!
+
+Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Charles D.
+Stewart: The Fugitive Blacksmith. W. Clark Russell: The Wreck of the
+Grosvenor. R. L. Stevenson: Treasure Island, Kidnapped. Jack London: The
+Sea Wolf, The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden. Joseph Conrad: Youth. H. G.
+Wells: The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, The Sea Lady, The
+History of Mr. Polly, The Food of the Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreau.
+Upton Sinclair: The Jungle, King Coal, Jimmie Higgins, 100 Per Cent.
+Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie. George Moore: Esther Waters. Frank
+Norris: The Octopus. Brand Whitlock: The Turn of the Balance. De Foe:
+Robinson Crusoe. Fielding: Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild the Great.
+Thackeray: The Adventures of Barry Lyndon. Marmaduke Pickthall: The
+Adventures of Hadji Baba. Blasco Ibanez: The Fruit of the Vine. Frank
+Harris: Montes the Matador. Frederik van Eeden: The Quest. Tolstoi:
+Resurrection.
+
+And now for the people who do not get enough exercise. In the armies of
+King Cyrus it was the law that every man was required to sweat once
+every twenty-four hours, and that is still the law for every business
+man and office-worker and writer of books. There is no substitute for
+it, and there is no health without it. I have heard Dr. Kellogg say that
+the modern woman sends out her health with her washing, and I have
+heard the leisure class ladies at the Sanitarium discuss this cryptic
+utterance and wonder what he meant by it. I know that there is use
+telling leisure class ladies what exercise at the wash-tub would do for
+their abdomens and backs. I will only tell them that unless they can
+find some kind of vigorous activity which keeps them in a free
+perspiration for an hour or two each day, they will never be really
+well, and will never bear children without agony and abortion.
+
+For myself, I have found that the minimum is three or four times a week.
+Unless I get that much hard exercise I am soon in trouble. So my advice
+to the business man is to take off his coat and collar and turn out and
+help his truck-man; my advice to the white collar slave is to get a
+part-time job, and dig ditches the rest of the time. To the man who has
+cares which pursue him, and likewise to the ardent student and
+brain-worker, I say that they should find, not merely exercise, but
+play. The distinction between the two things is important. There can be
+play that is not exercise, for example cards and chess; and, of course,
+there can be exercise that is not play. What you must have is something
+that is both play and exercise; something that not merely causes your
+heart to beat fast, and your lungs to pump fast, and your sweat glands
+to throw out poisons from your body, but something that fully occupies
+your mind and gives your higher brain centers a chance to relax.
+
+Our civilization has very largely destroyed the possibility of play and
+the spirit of play. We civilized people no longer know what play is, and
+regard the desire to play as something abnormal--a form of vice. We
+allow children to play after school hours, and on Saturdays; but for
+grown-up, serious-minded men and women to want to play would be almost
+as disreputable as for them to want to get drunk. What could foe more
+pitiful than the spectacle of tens of thousands of men crowding into our
+baseball parks and amusement fields to watch other men play for them!
+Imagine, if you can, a crowd of people gathering in a restaurant or
+theater to watch other people _eat_ for them! Imagine yourself a man
+from Mars, coming down to a world with so many people in want, and
+finding whole classes of men forbidden to do any work, under penalty of
+disgrace, and compelled, in order to exercise their muscles, to pull on
+rubber straps and lift weights and wave dumb-bells and Indian clubs in
+the air--methods of expending their muscular energy which are
+respectable because they accomplish nothing!
+
+When I was a boy, I was fond of all kinds of games. I was a good tennis
+player, and in the country an incessant hunter and fisherman. When on
+the city streets we boys could not find any other game to play, we would
+get up on the roofs of the houses and throw clothes-pins and snow-balls
+at the "Dagoes" working in the nearby excavations; so we had the fine
+game of being chased by the "Dagoes," with the chance, real or
+imaginary, of having a knife stuck into us. But then, as I grew older,
+and became aware of the pain and misery of the world, I lost my interest
+in games, and for ten years or so I never played; I did nothing but
+study and write. So my health gave way, and I had the problem of
+restoring it, and I spent some twenty years wrestling with this problem,
+before I thoroughly convinced myself on the point that there can be no
+such thing as sound and permanent health without a certain amount of
+play.
+
+I don't think there is any kind of hard physical work I failed to try,
+in the course of my experiments. I rode horseback, and took long walks,
+and climbed mountains, and swam, and dug gardens, and chopped down whole
+groves of trees and cut them up and carried them to the fireplace. I
+have done this latter work for a whole winter in the country, several
+hours every day, and it has done my health no good to speak of; I have
+been ready for a breakdown at the end of it. The reason is that all the
+time I was doing these things with my body, I was going right on working
+my brain. While I was swimming or climbing a mountain or galloping on
+horseback, I was absorbed in the next chapter of the book I was writing,
+so that I literally did not know where I was. I would make up my mind
+that I would not think about my work, and would make desperate efforts
+not to do so; but it was like walking along the edge of a slippery
+ditch--sooner or later I was bound to fall in, and go floundering along,
+unable to get out again!
+
+And the same thing applies to all gymnastic work. I have experimented
+with a dozen different systems of exercises, and with all kinds of water
+treatments; I have used dumb-bells and Indian clubs and Swedish
+gymnastics, MacFadden's exercises in bed, and the Yogi breathing
+exercises, and more kinds of queer things than I can remember now; but
+for me there is only one solution of the problem, which is to have an
+antagonist. It may be a deer I am trying to shoot, or some trout I am
+trying to lure out of their holes; it may be some boys I am trying to
+beat at football or hockey, or it may be the game I know best and find
+most convenient, which is tennis. If it is tennis, then it has to be
+someone who can make me work as hard as I know how; for if it is someone
+I can beat easily, why, before I have been playing ten minutes, I am
+busily working out the next chapter of a book, or answering letters I
+have just got in the mail.
+
+Recently I came upon a book, "The Psychology of Relaxation," by Dr.
+Patrick, in which the theory of this is set forth. Civilized man is
+working his higher brain centers more than his body can stand; his brain
+is running away with him, absorbing a constantly increasing share of his
+energies. True relaxation is only possible where the higher brain
+centers are lulled, and the back lobes of the brain brought into
+activity. One of the means of doing this is alcohol, and that is why
+through the ages all races of men have craved to get drunk. There is a
+method which is harmless, and does not break down the system, and that
+is play. When we become really interested in play, we are as children,
+or as primitive man; we do all the things that our race used to do many
+ages ago; we hunt and fight, we pit our wits against the wits of our
+enemies, and struggle with desperation to get the better of them. If our
+play is physical play, if we are absorbed in a game or bodily contest,
+then we are exerting and developing all those portions of us which
+civilization tends to atrophy and deaden.
+
+There are people who will dispute with you about Socialism, and ask, how
+we are going to provide incentives if we do away with wage slavery. When
+you tell them that activity is natural to human beings, and that if
+there were no work, men and women would have to make some, they shake
+their heads mournfully and tell you about the problem of "human nature."
+But consider games and sports: men do not have to work their bodies, yet
+they go out and deliberately hunt for trouble! They invent themselves
+subtle and complicated games, and are not content until they find people
+who can beat them at it, or at any rate can make them work to the limit
+of their strength, until they are in a dripping perspiration and
+thoroughly exhausted! I may be too optimistic about "human nature," but
+I believe that this is the attitude every normal human being takes
+toward the powers, both mental and physical, which he possesses; he
+wants to use them, and for all they are worth. If you don't believe it,
+just take any group of youngsters, give them a baseball and bat, turn
+them loose in a vacant lot, and watch them "choose up sides" and fall to
+work, screaming and shouting in wild excitement! There are some races of
+the earth which do not yet know baseball, but the Filipinos and the
+Japanese have learned it, and even the war-worn "Poilus" and the
+supercilious "Tommies" condescended to experiment with it. And if you
+think it is only physical competition that young human animals enjoy,
+try them at putting on a play, or printing a magazine, or conducting a
+debate, or building a house--anything whatever that involves healthy
+competition, and is related to the big things of life, but without being
+for the profit of some exploiter! Get clear the plain and simple
+distinction between work and play: play is what you want to do, while
+work is what the profit system makes you do!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE FASTING CURE
+
+     (Deals with nature's own remedy for disease, and how to make use of
+     it.)
+
+
+We have next to consider the various human ailments, what causes them,
+and how they can be remedied. As it happens, I know of a cure that comes
+pretty near being that impossible thing, a "cure-all." At any rate, it
+is so far ahead of all other cures, that a discussion of it will cover
+three-fourths of the subject.
+
+When I was a boy living in New York, there was a man by the name of Dr.
+Tanner, who took a forty-day fast. He was on public exhibition at the
+time, and was supposed to be watched day and night; the newspapers gave
+a great deal of attention to the story, and crowds used to come to gaze
+at him. I remember very well the conversations I heard about the matter.
+People were quite sure that it couldn't be true. The man must be getting
+something to eat on the sly; he must have some nourishment in the water
+he drank; no human being could fast more than five or six days without
+starving to death.
+
+In the year 1910 I published in the United States and England a magazine
+article telling how on several occasions I had fasted ten or twelve
+days, and what I had accomplished by it. I found that I had the same
+difficulty to confront as old Dr. Tanner; I received scores of letters
+from people who called me a "faker," and I read scores of newspaper
+editorials to the same effect. The New York Times published a dispatch
+about three young ladies on Long Island who were trying a three-day
+fast, and the Times commented editorially to the effect that these young
+ladies were "the victims of a shallow and unscrupulous sensationalist."
+
+The notion that human beings can perish for lack of food in a few days
+is deeply rooted in people's minds. Recently a group of eleven Irishmen
+in jail set to work to starve themselves to death, as a protest against
+British rule in their country. Day after day the newspapers reported the
+news from Cork prison, and at about the twentieth day they began to
+state that the prisoners were dying, that the priest had been sent for,
+that their relatives were gathered on the prison steps. Day after day
+such reports continued, through the thirties, and the forties, and the
+fifties, and the sixties, and the seventies. One man died on the
+eighty-eighth day, and MacSwiney died on the seventy-fourth. The other
+nine gave up after ninety-four days and were all restored to health. I
+watched carefully the newspaper and magazine comment on this incident,
+yet I did not see a single remark on the medical aspects of it; I could
+not discover that scientific men had learned anything whatever about the
+ability of the body to go without food for long periods.
+
+Get this clear at the outset: Nobody ever "starved to death" in less
+than two months, and it is possible for a fat person to go without food
+for as long as three or four months. People who "starve to death" in
+shorter times do not die of starvation, but of fright. The first time I
+fasted happened to be at the time of the Messina earthquake. I was
+walking about, perfectly serene and happy, having been without food for
+three days, and I read in my newspaper how the rescue ships had reached
+Messina, and found the population ravenous, in the agonies of
+starvation, some of the people having been without food for seventy-two
+hours! (It sounds so much worse, you see, when you state it in hours.)
+
+The second point to get clear is that the fast is a physiological
+process; that is to say, it is something which nature understands and
+carries through in her own serene and efficient way. When you take a
+fast, you are not carrying out a freak notion of your own, or of mine;
+you are discovering a lost instinct. Every cat and dog knows enough not
+to take food when it is ill; it is only in hospitals conducted by modern
+medical science that the custom prevails of serving elaborate "trays" to
+invalids. I remember a story about a man who made himself a reputation
+and a fortune by curing the pet dogs of the rich. These beautiful little
+creatures, which sleep between silken covers, and have several servants
+to wait upon them, and are fed from gold and silver dishes upon rich and
+elaborately cooked foods, fall victim to as many diseases as their
+mistresses, and they would be brought to this specialist, who conducted
+his dog hospital in an old brickyard. In each one of the compartments of
+the brick kiln he would shut up a dog with a supply of fresh water, a
+crust of stale bread, a piece of bacon rind, and the sole of an old
+shoe; and after a few days he would go back and find that the dog had
+eaten the crust of bread, and then he would write to the owner that the
+dog was on the high road to recovery. He would go back a few days later
+and find that the dog had eaten the piece of bacon rind, and then he
+would write that the dog was very nearly cured. He would wait until the
+dog had eaten the piece of shoe leather, and then he would write that
+the dog was completely cured, and the owner might come and take it away.
+
+Just what is the process of the fast cure? I do not pretend to know
+positively. I can only make guesses, and wait for science to
+investigate. I believe that the main source of the diseases of civilized
+man is improper nutrition, and the clogging of the system with food
+poisons in various stages. And when you fast you do two things: first,
+you stop entirely the fresh supply of those food poisons, and second,
+you allow the whole of the body's digestive and assimilative tract to
+rest--to go to sleep, as it were--so that all the body's energy may go
+to other organs. The body carries with it at all times a surplus store
+of nutriment, which can be taken up and used by the blood stream,
+apparently with much less trouble than is required to convert fresh food
+to the body's uses. In other words, the body can feed on its own tissues
+more easily than it can feed from the stomach. In the fast you may lose
+anywhere from half a pound to two pounds in weight per day, and this
+will be taken, first from your store of fat, and then from your muscular
+tissues. Every part of your muscular tissue will be taken, before
+anything is taken from your vital organs, your nerves or your
+blood-stream. So long as there is a particle of muscular material left,
+so long as you can make even the slightest movement of one finger, you
+are still fasting, and it is only when your muscular tissue is all gone
+that you begin at last to starve. So far as I know, the cases of
+MacSwiney and the other Irishman are the only cases on record where
+fasters have died of starvation.
+
+What the body does during the fast is quite plain, and can be told by
+many symptoms. It begins a thorough house-cleaning, throwing out
+poisonous material by every channel. The perspiration and the breath
+become offensive, the tongue becomes heavily coated, so that you can
+scrape the material off with a knife. I have heard vegetarians explain
+this by saying that when the body is living off its own tissues, it is
+following a cannibal diet; but that is all nonsense, because you can
+live on meat exclusively, and quickly satisfy yourself that none of
+these symptoms occurs. It is evident that the body is taking advantage
+of the opportunity to get rid of waste products; and this will go on for
+ten days, for twenty days, in some cases for as long as forty or fifty
+days; and then suddenly occurs a strange thing: in spite of the
+"cannibal diet" the symptoms all come to a sudden end. The tongue
+clears, the breath becomes sweet, the appetite suddenly awakens.
+
+During the period of a normal fast you lose all interest in food. You
+almost forget that there is such a thing as eating; you can look at food
+without any more desire for it than you have to swallow marbles and
+carpet tacks. But then suddenly appetite returns, as I have explained,
+and you find that you can think of nothing but food. This is what
+students of the subject describe as a "complete fast," and while I do
+not want to go to extremes and say that the "complete fast" will cure
+every case of every disease, I can certainly say this: in the letters
+which have come to me from people who tried the fast at my suggestion,
+there are cases of every kind of common disease. In my book, "The
+Fasting Cure," I give the results in cases reported to me after the
+publication of my first magazine article. I quote two paragraphs:
+
+"The total number of fasts taken was 277, and the average number of days
+was six. There were 90 of five days or over, 51 of ten days or over, and
+six of 30 days or over. Out of the 119 person who wrote to me, 100
+reported benefit, and 17 no benefit. Of these 17 about half give wrong
+breaking of the fast as the reason for the failure. In cases where the
+cure had not proved permanent, about half mentioned that the recurrence
+of the trouble was caused by wrong eating, and about half of the rest
+made this quite evident by what they said. Also it is to be noted that
+in the cases of the 17 who got no benefit, nearly all were fasts of only
+three or four days.
+
+"Following is the complete list of diseases benefited--45 of the cases
+having been diagnosed by physicians: indigestion (usually associated
+with nervousness), 27; rheumatism, 5; colds, 8; tuberculosis, 4;
+constipation, 14; poor circulation, 3; headaches, 5; anaemia, 3;
+scrofula, 1; bronchial trouble, 5; syphilis, 1; liver trouble, 5;
+general debility, 5; chills and fever, 1; blood poisoning, 1; ulcerated
+leg, 1; neurasthenia, 6; locomotor ataxia, 1; sciatica, 1; asthma, 2;
+excess of uric acid, 1; epilepsy, 1; pleurisy, 1; impaction of bowels,
+1; eczema, 2; catarrh, 6; appendicitis, 3; valvular disease of heart, 1;
+insomnia, 1; gas poisoning, 1; grippe, 1; cancer, 1."
+
+There are many diseases with many causes, and some yield more quickly
+than others to the fast. In the first group I put the diseases of the
+digestive and alimentary tract. Stomach and bowel troubles, and the
+nervous disorders occasioned by these, stop almost immediately when you
+fast. Next come disorders of the blood-stream, which are generally a
+second stage of digestive troubles. Everything immediately due to
+impurities of the blood, pimples, boils, and ulcers, inflammation, badly
+healing wounds, etc., respond to a few days of fasting as to the magic
+touch of the old-time legends. When it comes to diseases caused by germ
+infections, you have a double aspect of the problem, and must have a
+double method of attack. I would not like to say that fasting could cure
+such a disease as sleeping sickness, to the germs of which our systems
+are not accustomed, and against which they may well be helpless. On the
+other hand, in the case of common infections, such as colds and sore
+throats, the fast is again the touch of magic. Having been plagued a
+great deal by these ailments in past times, I am accustomed to say that
+I would not trade my knowledge of fasting for everything else that I
+know about health.
+
+The first thing you must do if you want to take a fast is to read the
+literature on the subject and make up your mind that the experiment will
+do you no injury. You should also try to get your relatives to make up
+their minds, because you are nervous when you are fasting, and cannot
+withstand the attacks of the people around you, who will go into a panic
+and throw you into a panic. As I said before, it is quite possible for
+people to die of panic, but I do not believe that anybody ever died of a
+fast. I have known of two or three cases of people dying while they were
+fasting, but I feel quite certain that the fast did not cause their
+death; they would have died anyhow. You must bear in mind that among the
+people who try the fast, a great many are in a desperate condition; some
+have been given up by the doctors, and if now and then one of these
+should die, we may surely say that they died in spite of the fast, and
+not because of it. There is no physician who can save every patient, and
+it would be absurd to expect this. I have read scores of letters from
+people who were at the point of death from such "fatal" diseases as
+Bright's disease, sclerosis of the liver, and fatty degeneration of the
+heart, and were literally snatched out of the jaws of death by beginning
+a fast. I would not like to guess just what percentage of dying people
+in our hospitals might be saved if the doctors would withdraw all food
+from them, but I await with interest the time when medical science will
+have the intelligence to try that simple experiment and report the
+results.
+
+Just the other day in the Los Angeles county jail, a chiropractor went
+on hunger strike, as a protest against imprisonment, and he fasted 41
+days. Then he broke his fast, the reason being given that his pulse was
+down to 54, and he was afraid of dying. I smiled to myself. The normal
+pulse is 70. I have taken my pulse many times at the end of a ten-day
+fast, and it has been as low as 32, and I am not dead yet, and if I wait
+to die from the symptoms of a fast, I expect to live a long time indeed!
+
+The first time I fasted, I felt very weak, and lay around and hardly
+cared to lift my head; if I walked from my bed to the lawn, I was tired
+in the legs. But since then I have grown used to fasting. I have fasted
+for a week probably twenty or thirty times, and on such occasions I have
+gone about my business as if nothing were happening. Of course I would
+not try to play tennis, or to climb a mountain, but it is a fact that on
+the seventh day of a fast in New York, I climbed the five or six flights
+of stairs to the top of the Metropolitan Opera House, and felt no ill
+effects from doing this. I climbed slowly, and was careful not to tire
+myself. The simple rule is not to have anything that you must do on the
+fast, and then do what you feel like doing. Lie down and rest, and read
+a book, and take as much exercise as you find you enjoy. Keep your mind
+quiet and free from worries, and lock out of the house everybody who
+tells you that your heart is going to stop beating in the next few
+minutes, and that you must have an injection of strychnine to start it,
+and some beefsteak and fried onions to "restore your strength." Give
+yourself up to the care of your wise old mother nature, who will attend
+to your heart just as securely and serenely as she attended to it in the
+days before you were born.
+
+By fasting I mean that you take no food whatever. I know some nature
+cure teachers who practice what they call a "fruit fast." All I know is
+that if I eat nothing but fruit, I soon have my stomach boiling with
+fermentation, and also I suffer with hunger; whereas, if I take a
+complete fast, I promptly forget all about food. You must drink all the
+water you can on the fast. This helps nature with her house-cleaning; it
+is well to drink a glass of water every half hour at least. Do not try
+to go without water, and then write me that the fasting cure is a
+failure. Also please do not write and ask me if it will be fasting if
+you take just a little crackers and milk, or some soup, or something
+else that you think doesn't count!
+
+I recommend a dose of laxative to clean out the system at the beginning
+of a fast, because the bowels are apt to become sluggish at once, and
+the quicker you get the system cleansed, the better. It does no good to
+take laxatives if you are going to pile in more food, but if you are
+going to fast, that is a different matter. You should take a full warm
+enema every day during the fast, so long as it brings any results. There
+are some people whose bowels are so frightfully clogged that I have
+known the enema to bring results even in the second and third weeks. On
+the other hand, if there is no solid matter to be removed, a small enema
+every day will suffice. Take a warm bath every day; and needless to say,
+you should get all the fresh air you can, and should sleep as much as
+you can. You may have difficulty in sleeping, because the fast is apt to
+make you nervous and wakeful. I have known people who could not fast
+because they could not sleep, and I have taught them a little trick, to
+put a hot water bottle at the feet, and another on the abdomen, to draw
+the blood away from the head. So they would quickly fall asleep, and
+they got great benefit from their fasts.
+
+You should supply yourself with good music if you can, and with plenty
+of good reading matter. You will be amazed to find how active your mind
+becomes; perhaps you had never known before what a mind you had. Your
+blood has always been so clogged with food poisons that you didn't know
+you could think. My three act play, "The Nature Woman," was conceived
+and written in two days and a half on a fast; but I do not recommend
+this kind of thing--on the contrary, I strongly urge against it, because
+if you work your brain on a fast, you do not get the good from your
+fast, and do not recover so quickly. Put off all your problems until you
+have got your health back, and seek only to divert your mind while
+fasting.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+BREAKING THE FAST
+
+     (Discusses various methods of building up the body after a fast,
+     especially the milk diet.)
+
+
+There remains the question of how to break the fast, and this is the
+most important part of the problem. You may undo all the good of your
+fast by breaking it wrong, and you are a thousand times as apt to kill
+yourself then, as while you are fasting. When your hunger comes back, it
+comes back with a rush, and some people have not the will power to
+control it.
+
+I do not advocate a complete fast in any case except of serious chronic
+disease, and then only under the advice of someone with experience; but
+I advocate a short fast of a week or ten days for almost every common
+ailment, and I know that such a fast will help, even where it may not
+completely cure. You may go on fasting so long as you are quiet and
+happy; but when you find you are becoming too weak for comfort, or for
+the peace of mind of your family physician and your friends, you may
+break your fast, and show them that it is possible to restore your
+strength and body weight, and then they won't bother so much when you
+try it again! Take nothing but liquid foods in the breaking of a fast; I
+recommend the juices of fruits and tomatoes, also meat broths. If you
+have fasted a week or two, take a quarter of a glass; if you have fasted
+a month, take a tablespoonful, and wait and see what the results are.
+Remember that your whole alimentary tract is out of action, and give it
+a chance to start up slowly. Take small quantities of liquid food every
+two hours for the first day. Then you can begin taking larger
+quantities, and on the next day you can try some milk, or a soft poached
+egg, or the pulp of cooked apples or prunes. Do not take any solid food
+until you are quite sure you can digest it, and then take only a very
+little. Do not take any starchy food until the third day.
+
+I have known people to break these rules. I knew a man who broke his
+fast on hamburg steak, and had to be helped out with a stomach pump.
+Once I broke a week's fast with a plate of rich soup, because I was at a
+friend's house and there was nothing else, and I yielded to the claims
+of hospitality, and made myself ill and had to fast for several days
+longer.
+
+The easiest way to break a fast is upon a milk diet. I have seen
+hundreds of people take this diet, and very few who did not get benefit.
+The first time I fasted, which was twelve days, I lost 17 pounds, and I
+took the milk diet for 24 days thereafter, and gained 32 pounds. I took
+it at MacFadden's Sanitarium, where I had every attention. Since then, I
+have many times tried to take a milk diet by myself, but have never been
+able to get it to agree with me. I do not know how to explain this fact;
+I state it, to show how hard it is to lay down general rules. On the
+milk diet you take into your system two or three times as much food as
+you can assimilate, and this is a violation of all my diet rules; but it
+appears that the bacteria which thrive in milk produce lactic acid,
+which is not harmful to the system, and if you do not take other foods
+you may safely keep the system flooded with milk.
+
+After a fast you should begin with small quantities of milk, and by the
+third day you may be taking a full glass of warm milk every half hour or
+every twenty minutes, until you have taken seven or eight quarts per
+day. It is better to take it warm, but sometimes people take it just as
+well without warming. Dr. Porter, who has a book on the milk diet,
+insists upon complete rest, and makes his patients stay in bed.
+MacFadden, on the other hand, recommends gymnastics in the morning
+before the milk, and during the afternoon he recommends a rest from the
+milk for a couple of hours, followed by abdominal exercises to keep the
+bowels open. This is very important during a fast, because you are
+taking great quantities of material into your system and it must not be
+permitted to clog. Therefore take an enema daily, if necessary to a free
+movement. Also take a warm bath daily. Take the juice of oranges and
+lemons if you crave them.
+
+Upon one thing everyone who has had experience with the milk diet
+agrees, and that is the necessity of absolute mental rest. If you
+become excited, or nervous, or angry on a milk diet, you may turn all
+the contents of your stomach into hard curds, and may put yourself into
+convulsions. The wonderful thing about the milk diet is the state of
+physical and mental bliss it makes possible. It is the ideal way of
+breaking a fast, because it leaves you no chance to get hungry; you have
+all the food you want, and your system is bathed in happiness, a sense
+of peace and well-being which is truly marvelous and not to be
+described. You gain anywhere from half a pound to two pounds a day, and
+you feel that you have never before in your life known what perfect
+health could be. The fast sets you a new standard, you discover how
+nature meant you to enjoy life, and never again are you content with
+that kind of half existence with which you managed to worry along before
+you discovered this remedy.
+
+But let me hasten to add that I do not recommend the fast as a regular
+habit of life. The fast is an emergency measure, to enable the body to
+cleanse itself and to cure disease. When you have got your body clean
+and free from disease, it is your business to keep it that way, and you
+should apply your reason to the problem of how to live so that you will
+not have to fast. If you find that you continue to have ailments, then
+you must be eating wrongly, or overworking, or committing some other
+offense against nature; either that, or else you must have some organic
+trouble--a bone in your spine out of place, as the osteopaths tell you,
+or your eyes out of focus, or your appendix twisted and infected. I do
+not claim that the fasting cure will supplant the surgeons and the
+oculists and the dentists. It will not mend your bones if you break
+them, and it will not repair your teeth that are already decayed; but it
+will help to keep your teeth from decaying in the future, and it will
+help you to prepare for a surgical operation, and to recover from it
+more quickly. I had to undergo an operation for rupture a couple of
+years ago, and I fasted for two days before the operation, and for three
+days after it, and I had no particle of nausea from the ether, and was
+able to tend to my mail the day after the operation.
+
+There is one disease for which I hesitate to recommend the fast, and
+that is tuberculosis, because I have been told of cases in which the
+patient lost weight and did not recover it. However, in my tabulation
+of 277 cases, you will note four cases of tuberculosis, and in my book
+is given a letter from a patient who claimed great benefit. If I had the
+misfortune to contract tuberculosis, I would take a three or four day
+fast, followed by a milk diet for a long period. The milk diet is
+pleasant to take, and it cannot possibly do any harm. If it did not
+effect a cure, I would try the Salisbury treatment--that is, lean meat
+ground up and medium cooked, and nothing else, except an abundance of
+hot water between meals. Prof. Irving Fisher wrote me that there is
+urgent need of experiment to determine proper diet in tuberculosis; and
+until these experiments have been made, we can only grope. I am quite
+sure that the "stuffing system," ordinarily used by doctors, is a tragic
+mistake.
+
+In the case of any other disease whatever, even though I might take
+medical or surgical treatment, I would supplement this by a fast,
+because there is no kind of treatment which does not succeed better with
+the blood in good condition. In the case of emergencies, accidents,
+wounds, etc., I would rest assured that recovery would be more prompt if
+I were fasting. When David Graham Phillips was shot, I wrote a letter to
+the New York Call, saying that his doctors had killed him, because they
+had fed him while he was lying in a critical condition in the hospital.
+To take nutriment into the body under such circumstances is the greatest
+of blunders.
+
+The fast will help children, just as it helps adults, only they do not
+need to fast so long. It will help the aged and make them feel young.
+(You need not be afraid to fast, no matter how old you are.) It is, of
+course, an immediate cure for fatness, and strange as it may seem, it is
+also a cure for unnatural thinness. People with ravenous appetites are
+just as apt to be thin as to be fat, because it is not what you eat that
+builds up your body, but only what you assimilate, and if you eat too
+much, you can make it impossible to assimilate anything properly. If you
+take a fast and break it carefully, your body will come to its normal
+weight, and all your functions to their normal activity.
+
+A physician wrote me, taking me to task for listing among the cures
+reported in my tabulation a case of locomotor ataxia. This disease, he
+explained, is caused because a portion of a nerve has been entirely
+destroyed, and it is a disease that is absolutely and positively and
+forever incurable. I answered that I knew this to be the teaching of
+present day medical science, but I invited him to consider for a moment
+what happens in nature. When a crab loses a claw, we do not take it as a
+matter of course that the crab must go about with one claw for the
+balance of its life; nature will make that crab another claw. Man has
+lost the power of replacing a lost leg, but he stills retains the power
+of replacing tissue which has been cut away by a surgeon's knife, and
+medical science takes this as a matter of course. How shall anybody say
+that nature has forever lost the power of rebuilding a bit of nervous
+tissue? How shall anyone say that if the blood-stream is cleansed of
+poisons, and the energy of the whole body restored, one of the results
+may not be the repairing of a broken nerve connection? I invite my
+readers who have ailments, and especially I invite all medical men among
+my readers, to make a fair test of the fasting cure. The results will
+surprise them, and they will quickly be forced to revise their methods
+of treating illness.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+DISEASES AND CURES
+
+     (Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and what is known
+     about their cause and cure.)
+
+
+I begin with the commonest of all troubles, known as a "cold." This name
+implies that the cause of the trouble lies in exposure or chill. All the
+grandmothers of the world are agreed about this. They have a phrase--or
+at least they had it when I was a boy: "You will catch your death."
+Every time I went out in the rain, every time I played with wet feet, or
+sat in a draft, or got under a cold shower, I would hear the formula,
+"You will catch your death."
+
+And, on the other hand, there are the "health cranks," who declare
+vehemently that the name "cold" is a misnomer and a trap for people's
+thoughts. Cold has nothing to do with it, they say, and point to arctic
+explorers who frequently get frozen to death, but do not "catch cold"
+until they get back into the warm rooms of civilization. As for drafts,
+the "health cranks" aver that a draft is merely "fresh air moving";
+which is supposed to settle the matter. However, when you come to think
+about it, you realize that a cyclone is likewise merely "fresh air
+moving," so you have not decided the question by a phrase.
+
+While I was writing these chapters on health I contracted a severe
+cold--which was a joke on me. The history of this cold is as clear in my
+mind as anything human can be, and it will serve for an illustration,
+showing how much truth the grandmothers have on their side, and how much
+the "health cranks" have.
+
+To begin with, I had been overworking. All sorts of appeals come to me;
+hundreds of people write me letters, and I cannot bear to leave them
+unanswered. I accepted calls to speak, and invitations where I had to
+eat a lot of stuff of which my reason disapproves; so one morning I woke
+up with a slight sore throat. I fasted all day, and by evening felt all
+right. But there came another call, and I consented to take a long
+automobile ride on a cold and rainy night, and when I got back home,
+after five or six hours, I was thoroughly chilled, and my "cold" came on
+during the night.
+
+This explanation will, I imagine, be satisfactory to all the
+grandmothers of the world. All the dear, good grandmothers know that an
+automobile ride on a cold, rainy night is enough to give any man "his
+death." But listen, grandmothers! I have lain out watching for deer all
+night in the late fall, with only a thin blanket to cover me, and gotten
+up so stiff with cold that I could hardly move; yet I did not "catch
+cold." When I was a youth, I have ridden a bicycle twenty miles to the
+beach in April, with snow on the ground, and plunged into the surf and
+swam, and then ridden home again. I have bathed in the sea when I had to
+run a quarter of a mile in a bathing suit along a frost-covered pier,
+and with an icy wind blowing through my bones; yet I never took cold
+from that, and never got anything but a feeling of exhilaration. So it
+must be that there is some reason why exposure causes colds at one time
+and not at another.
+
+The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." They understand
+that your blood-stream must be clogged, your bodily tone reduced by bad
+air and lack of exercise, and more especially by over-eating, or by an
+improperly balanced diet. But then most of them go to extremes, and
+insist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my body had
+nothing to do with my cold. But I know otherwise--I have watched the
+thing happen so often. In times when I was run down, the slightest
+exposure would cause me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got
+myself a sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with
+nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with wet feet, or
+by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, when I had been perspiring a
+little. How to explain this I am not sure, but my guess is that you
+drive the blood away from the surface of the body at a time when it is
+weakened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army of the
+white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body to the germs.
+
+I know there are nature curists who argue that germs have nothing to do
+with disease; but they have never been able to convince me--germs are
+too real, and too many, and too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of
+meat exposed to the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will
+settle upon it and begin to feed upon it and to multiply; the meat,
+being dead, is powerless to protect itself. But your nose and throat are
+also meat, and just as good food for the germs. The only difference is
+that this meat is alive, there is a living blood-stream circulating
+through it, and several score billions of the body's own kind of germs,
+the blood corpuscles. If these blood corpuscles are sound and properly
+nourished, and are brought to the place of infection, they are able to
+destroy all the common germs; so it is that you do not have diseases,
+but instead have health. But your health always implies a struggle of
+your organism against other organisms, and it is the business of your
+reason to watch your body and give all the help you can in protecting
+it. Coughs and colds, sore throats and headaches, are the first warnings
+that your defenses are being weakened. As a rule these ailments are not
+serious in themselves, but they are signs of a wrong condition, and if
+you neglect this condition, pretty soon you will find that you have to
+deal with something deadly.
+
+My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, eat nothing for
+twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. If you have a severe cold
+or sore throat, you will be wise to lie in bed for a day or two, by an
+open window. You may also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you
+will find them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous
+membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In the old sad
+days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go to the doctor, and have
+my throat and nose pumped full of black and green and yellow and purple
+liquids, which did me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay
+on for two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and I would
+be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by inches, and not one of
+the doctors could tell me why.
+
+The next most common ailment is a headache, and this means poisons in
+your blood-stream. It may be from improper diet, from alcohol, or drugs,
+or bad air, or nervous excitement. If it is none of these things, then
+you should begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for
+example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths and the
+chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made important
+discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the nervous force which
+directs the blood-stream is carried to the organs of the body by nerves
+which leave the spinal cord through openings between the vertebrae. If
+any of these openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply,
+which means ill-health in that part of the body to which the nerve
+leads. That such trouble can be corrected by straightening the bones of
+the spine, seems perfectly reasonable; but like most people with a new
+idea, the discoverers proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have
+before me an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral
+displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety-five per
+cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per cent being due to
+subluxations of other skeletal segments." Naturally people who believe
+this will devote nearly all their study to the bones and the nervous
+system. But surely, there are other parts of your body which are
+necessary besides bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts
+happen to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not focus
+properly, and you are continually wearing out the optic nerve, thus
+giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia? What if you have an appendix
+that has been twisted and malformed from birth, and is a center of
+infection so long as it remains in the body?
+
+Several years ago I had an experience with the appendix, from which I
+learned something about one of the commonest of human ailments,
+constipation, or sluggishness of the bowels. This is a cause of
+innumerable chronic ailments grouped under the head of auto-intoxication,
+or the poisoning of the body by the absorption into the system of the
+products of fermentation and decay in the bowels. The bowels should move
+freely two or three times every day, and the movements should be soft. I
+suffered from constipation for some twenty years, and tried, I think,
+every remedy known both to science and to crankdom. In the beginning the
+doctors gave me drugs which by irritating the intestinal walls cause
+them to pour out quantities of water, and hurry the irritating
+substances down the intestinal tract. That is all right for an
+emergency; if you have swallowed a poison, or food which is spoiled, or
+if you have overeaten and are ill, get your system cleaned out by any
+and every device. But if you habitually swallow mild poisons, which is
+what all laxatives are, you weaken the intestinal tract, and you have to
+take more and more of these poisons, and you get less results. We may
+set down as positive the statement that drugs are not a remedy for
+constipation.
+
+Next comes diet. Eat the rough and bulky foods, say the nature curists,
+and stimulate the intestinal walls to activity. I tried that. I listened
+to the extreme enthusiasts, and boiled whole wheat and ate it, and
+consumed quantities of bran biscuit, and of a Japanese seaweed which Dr.
+Kellogg prepares, and of petroleum oil, and even the skins of oranges,
+which are most uncomfortable eating, I assure you. I would eat things
+like this until I got myself a case of diarrhea--and so was cured of
+constipation for a time! Strange as it may seem to you, there are even
+people who tell you to eat sand. I listened to them, and ate many
+quarts.
+
+Then there is exercise. MacFadden taught me a whole series of exercises
+for developing the muscles of the abdominal walls and the back, which
+are greatly neglected by civilized man. The fundamental cause of
+constipation is a sluggish life, and to exercise our bodies is a duty;
+but to me it was always an agony of boredom to lie on a bed and wiggle
+my abdomen for a quarter of an hour. The same thing applies to hot water
+treatments, which are effective, but a nuisance and a waste of time. I
+never could keep them up except when I was in trouble.
+
+Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual irritating pain in
+my right side, which I quickly realized must lie in the appendix. I
+tried massage, and hot and cold water treatments, and my favorite
+remedy, a week's fast. The pain disappeared, but it returned, so finally
+I decided, to the dismay of my physical culture friends, to have the
+appendix out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature
+curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of the body,
+which pours an oil or something into the intestinal tract, and so helps
+to prevent constipation. Well, evidently my appendix wasn't doing its
+job, so I took it to a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been
+twisted and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of continuous
+infection. From the time I had that operation, I have never had to think
+about the subject of constipation. This experience suggests to me how
+easy it is for people to make statements about health which have no
+relationship to facts.
+
+I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly well realize
+that if human beings would take proper care of their health, the great
+proportion of surgical operations would be unnecessary. I realize,
+also, that surgeons get paid by the job, and therefore have a money
+interest in operating, and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of
+them will ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is
+true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and that by
+standing a little temporary inconvenience you can save yourself a
+life-time of discomfort.
+
+Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here a natural weakness,
+from which there results a dangerous and uncomfortable affliction.
+Hundreds of thousands of men are going around all their lives wearing
+elaborate and expensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely
+useless, and trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An
+operation takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, and when
+our government drafted its young men into the army and found that
+fourteen in every thousand of them had rupture, it shipped them into the
+hospitals wholesale and sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords
+one case where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there
+were practically no returns from the great number of army cases.
+
+Likewise you find extreme statements repeated concerning the evils of
+vaccination; but if you will read Parkman's "History of the Jesuits in
+North America," you will see the horrible conditions under which the
+Indians lived in the United States--noble savages, you understand,
+entirely uncontaminated by civilized white men, and whole populations
+regularly wiped out every few years by epidemics of smallpox. That these
+epidemics ceased was due to the discovery that by infecting the body
+with a mild form of the disease, it could be made to develop substances
+which render it immune to the deadly form. Here in California we have a
+law which makes vaccination for school children optional, and so we may
+some day have another epidemic to test the theories of the
+anti-vaccinationists.
+
+I know, of course, the dreadful stories of people who have been given
+syphilis and other diseases by impure vaccines. I don't know whether
+such stories are true; but I do know that people who live in houses are
+sometimes killed by earthquakes and by lightning, yet we do not cease to
+live in houses because of this chance. It seems to me that the remedy
+for such vaccination evils is not to abolish vaccination, but to take
+more care in the manufacture of our vaccines.
+
+This danger is removed by using vaccines which are sterile, and are made
+especially for each person. Germs are taken from the sick person, and
+injected into an animal. The body of the animal develops with great
+rapidity the "anti-bodies" necessary to resistance to the germs; and as
+these "anti-bodies" are chemical products, not affected by heat, we can
+take a serum from the animal, sterilize it, and then inject it into the
+system of the patient, thus increasing resistance to the disease. I
+admit that the best way to increase such resistance is to take care of
+your health; but sometimes we confront an emergency, and must use
+emergency remedies. We have serums that really cure diphtheria and
+meningitis, and one that will prevent lock-jaw; anyone who has ever seen
+with his own eyes how the deadly membranes of diphtheria melt away as a
+result of an injection, will be less dogmatic about the efforts of
+science to combat disease.
+
+Of course it is much pleasanter if you can destroy the source of the
+disease, and keep it from getting into the human body. Every few years
+the southern part of our country used to be devastated by yellow fever
+epidemics. Every kind of weird and fantastic remedy was tried; people
+would go around with sponges full of vinegar hung under their noses;
+they would burn the clothing and bedding of those who died of the
+disease; they would wear gloves when they went shopping, so as not to
+touch the money with their hands. But at last medical experimenters
+traced the disease to a certain kind of mosquito, and now, if we drain
+the swamps and screen our houses and stay in doors after sundown, we do
+not get yellow fever, nor malaria either. In the same way, if we keep
+our bodies clean with soap and hot water, we do not get bitten by lice,
+and so do not die of typhus. If we take pains with our drains and water
+supply, so that human excrement does not get into it, and if we destroy
+the filth-carrying housefly, we do not have epidemics of typhoid.
+
+But under conditions of battle it is not possible for men to take these
+precautions, and so when they go into the army they get a dose of
+typhoid serum. And this illustrates the difference between a true or
+hygienic remedy for disease, and a temporary or emergency remedy. If you
+say that you want to abolish war, and with it the need for typhoid
+vaccination, I cheerfully agree with you in this. All that I am trying
+to do is to point out the folly of flying to extremes, and rejecting any
+remedy which may help. What is the use of making the flat statement that
+vaccinations and serums never aid in the cure of disease, when any man
+can see with his own eyes the proof that they do? In the Spanish war,
+before typhoid vaccination, many times more soldiers died of this
+disease than died of bullets; but in the late war there was practically
+no typhoid at all in the army camps. On the other hand, it was noticed
+that the men who had just come in, and who therefore had just been
+vaccinated, were considerably more susceptible to influenza; which shows
+that vaccination does reduce the body condition for a time. The reader
+may say that in this case I am trying to sit on both sides of the fence;
+but the truth is that I am trying to keep an open mind, and to consider
+all the facts, and to avoid making rash statements.
+
+One of the statements you hear most frequently is that drugs can never
+remedy disease, or help in remedying it. Now, I abhor the drugging
+system of the orthodox medical men; I have talked with them, and heard
+them talk with one another, and I know that they will mix up half a
+dozen different substances, in the vague hope that some one of them will
+have some effect. Even when they know definitely the effects they are
+producing, they are in many cases merely suppressing symptoms. On the
+other hand, however, it is a fact that medical science has had for a
+generation or two a specific which destroys the germs of one disease in
+the blood, without at the same time injuring the blood itself. That
+disease is malaria, and the drug is quinine. Of course, the way to avoid
+malaria is to drain the swamps; but you cannot do that all at once, nor
+can you always screen your house and stay in at sundown. When you first
+go into a country, you have no house to screen, and some emergency will
+certainly arise that exposes you to mosquito bites. So you will need
+quinine, and will be foolish not to use it, and know how to use it.
+
+Recently medical chemists discovered another remedy, this time for
+syphilis. It is called salvarsan, and while it does not always cure, it
+frequently does. In laboratories today men are working over the problem
+of constructing a combination of molecules which will destroy the germ
+of sleeping sickness, without at the same time injuring the blood. If
+they find it, they will save hundreds of millions of lives. I do not see
+why we cannot recognize such a possibility, while at the same time
+making use of physical culture, of diet and fasting.
+
+When the manuscript of this book was sent to the printer, there appeared
+in this place a paragraph telling of the work of Dr. Albert Abrams of
+San Francisco, in the diagnosis and cure of disease by means of
+radio-active vibrations. As the book is going to press, the writer finds
+himself in San Francisco, attending Dr. Abrams' clinics; and so he finds
+it possible to give a more extended account of some fascinating
+discoveries, which seem destined to revolutionize medical science. If I
+were to tell all that I have seen with my own eyes in the last twelve
+days, I fear the reader would find his powers of credulity
+overstretched, so I shall content myself with trying to tell, in very
+sober and cautious language, the theory upon which Abrams is working,
+and the technic which he has evolved.
+
+Modern science has demonstrated that all matter is simply the activity
+of electrons, minute particles of electric force. This is a statement
+which no present-day physicist would dispute. The best evidence appears
+to indicate that a molecule of matter is a minute reproduction of the
+universe, a system of electrons whirling about a central nucleus. No eye
+has ever beheld an electron, for it is billions of times smaller than
+anything the microscope makes visible; but we can see the effects of
+electronic activity, and all modern books of physics give photographs of
+such. It is possible to determine the vibration rates of electrons, and
+to Dr. Abrams occurred the idea of determining the vibration rates of
+diseased tissue and disease germs. He discovered that it was invariably
+the same; not merely does all cancerous material, for example, yield the
+same rate, but the blood of a person suffering from cancer yields that
+rate, at all times and under all circumstances. The vibration of cancer,
+of tuberculosis, of syphilis--each is different, uniform and invariable.
+Likewise in the blood are other vibrations, uniform and dependable,
+which reveal the sex and age of the patient, the virulence of the
+disease and the period of its duration--yes, and even the location in
+the body, if there be some definite infected area. So here is a modern
+miracle, an infallible device for the diagnosis of disease. Dr. Abrams
+does not have to see the patient; all he has to have is a drop of blood
+on a piece of white blotting paper, and he sits in his laboratory and
+tells all about it, and somewhere several thousand miles away--in
+Toronto or Boston or New Orleans--a surgeon operates and finds what he
+has been told is there!
+
+And that is only the beginning of the wonder; because, says Abrams, if
+you know the vibration rate of the electrons of germs, you can destroy
+those germs. It used to be a favorite trick of Caruso to tap a glass and
+determine its musical note, and then sing that note at the glass and
+shatter it to bits. It is well known that horses, trotting swiftly on a
+bridge, have sometimes coincided in their step with the vibration of the
+bridge and thus have broken it down. On that same principle this wizard
+of the electron introduces into your body radio-activity of a certain
+rate--and shall I say that he cures cancer and syphilis and tuberculosis
+of many years standing in a few treatments? I will not say that, because
+you would not and could not believe me. I will content myself with
+telling what my wife and I have been watching, twice a day for the past
+twelve days.
+
+The scene is a laboratory, with rows of raised seats at one side for the
+physicians who attend the clinic. There is a table, with the instruments
+of measurement, and Dr. Abrams sits beside it, and before him stands a
+young man stripped to the waist. The doctor is tapping upon the abdomen
+of this man, and listening to the sounds. You will find this the
+weirdest part of the whole procedure, for you will naturally assume that
+this young man is being examined, and will be dazed when some one
+explains that the patient is in Toronto or Boston or New Orleans, and
+that this young man's body is the instrument which the doctor uses in
+the determining of the vibration rates of the patient's blood. Dr.
+Abrams tried numerous instruments, but has been able to find nothing so
+sensitive to electronic activity as a human body. He explains to his
+classes that the spinal cord is composed of millions of nerve fibres of
+different vibration rates; hence a certain rate communicated to the
+body, is automatically sorted out, and appears on a certain precise spot
+of the body in the form of increased activity, increased blood pressure
+in the cells, and hence what all physicians know as a "dull area," which
+can be discovered by what is known as "percussion," a tapping with a
+finger. To map out these areas is merely a matter of long and patient
+experiment; and Abrams has been studying this subject for some twenty
+years--he is author of a text-book on what is known as the "reactions
+of Abrams." So now he provides the world with a series of maps of the
+human body; and he sits in front of his "subject," and his assistant
+places a specimen of blood in a little electrically connected box, and
+sets the rheostat at some vibration number--say fifty--and Dr. Abrams
+taps on a certain square inch of the abdomen of his "subject," and
+announces the dread word "cancer." Then he places the electrode on
+another part of the "subject's" body, and taps some more, and announces
+that it is cancer of the small intestine, left side; some more tapping,
+and he announces that its intensity is twelve ohms, which is severe; and
+pretty soon there is speeding a telegram to the physician who has sent
+this blood specimen, telling him these facts, and prescribing a certain
+vibration rate upon the "oscilloclast," the instrument of radio-activity
+which Dr. Abrams has devised.
+
+Now, you watch this thing for an hour or two, and you say to yourself:
+"Here is either the greatest magician in the history of mankind, or else
+the greatest maniac." You may have come prepared for some kind of fraud,
+but you soon dismiss that, for you realize that this man is desperately
+in earnest about what he is doing, and so are all the physicians who
+watch him. So you seek refuge in the thought that he must be deluding
+himself and them, perhaps unconsciously. But you talk with these men,
+and discover that they have come from all over the country, and always
+for one reason--they had sent blood specimens to Abrams, and had found
+that he never made a mistake; he told them more from a few drops of the
+patient's blood than they themselves had been able to find out from the
+whole patient. And then into the clinic come the doctor's own
+patients--I must have heard sixty or eighty of them tell their story and
+many of them have been lifted from the grave. People ten years blind
+from syphilis who can see; people operated on several times for cancer
+and given up for dying; people with tumors on the brain, or with one
+lung gone from tuberculosis. It is literally a fact that when you have
+sat in Abrams' clinic for a week, all disease loses its terrors.
+
+This, you see, is really the mastery of life. If we can measure and
+control the minute universe of the electron and the atom, we have
+touched the ultimate source of our bodily life. I might take chapters of
+this book to tell you of the strange experiments I have seen in this
+clinic--showing you, for instance, how these vibrations respond to
+thought, how by denying to himself the disease the patient can for a
+few moments cancel in his body the activity of the harmful germs;
+showing how the reactions differ in the different sexes and at different
+ages, and how they respond to different colors and different drugs.
+Abrams' method has revealed the secret of such efficacy as drugs
+possess--their work is done by their radio-activity, and not by their
+chemical properties. Also the problem of vaccination has been
+solved--for Abrams has discovered a dread new disease, which is bovine
+syphilis, originally caused in cattle by human inoculation, and now
+reintroduced in the human being by vaccination, and becoming the agent
+which prepares the soil of the body for such disorders as tuberculosis
+and cancer. And it appears that we can all be rendered immune to these
+diseases, by a few electronic vibrations, introduced into our bodies in
+childhood; so is opened up to our eyes a wonderful vision of a new race,
+purified and made fit for life. So here at last is science justified of
+her optimism, and our faith in human destiny forever vindicated. Take my
+advice, whoever you may be that are suffering, and find out about this
+new work and help to make it known to the world.
+
+There are many romances of medical science, some of them fascinating as
+murder mysteries and big game hunting. Turn to McMasters' "History of
+the People of the United States" and read his account of the terrible
+epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia a hundred years ago; I have
+already referred to the weird and incredible things the people did in
+their effort to ward off this plague--sponges of vinegar under their
+noses and "fever fires" burning in the streets; and then a mosquito
+would fly up and bite them, and in a few hours they would be dead! Or
+what could be stranger than the tracing of the bubonic plague, which has
+cost literally billions of human lives, to a parasite in the blood of
+fleas which live on the bodies of rats! Or what could be more unexpected
+than the tracing of our rheumatic aches and twinges to the root canals
+of the teeth!
+
+One of the common ailments which afflict poor humanity is rheumatism, a
+cause of endless suffering. It was supposed to be due to damp climate
+and exposure, and this is true to a certain extent, in the same way that
+colds are due to exposure. But the investigators realized that there
+must be some bodily condition rendering one susceptible, and they set to
+work to trace this condition down. The pains of rheumatism are caused by
+uric acid settling in the joints of the body. What causes the uric
+acid? Well, there is uric acid in red meat, so let us forbid rheumatic
+people to eat it! But this is overlooking the fact that the human body
+itself is a uric acid factory; and also the fact that uric acid taken
+into the stomach may not remain uric acid by the time it gets to the
+blood-stream. We know that you may eat a great deal of fruit acid
+without necessarily making acid blood. On the other hand, you can make
+acid blood by eating a lot of sugar! So you see it isn't as simple as it
+sounds.
+
+Rheumatism has been traced to its lair, which is found to be the roots
+of the teeth. Here is a part of the body difficult to get at, and as a
+consequence of bad diet and unwholesome ways of living, infections will
+start there, and pus sacs be formed, and the poisons absorbed into the
+blood-stream and distributed through the body. The first thought is to
+draw the infected teeth; but that is a serious matter, because you need
+your teeth to chew your food. So the dentist has to go through a
+complicated process of opening up the tooth and cleaning out the root
+canals, and treating the infected spots at the roots. Then he has to
+fill the tooth all the way down to the roots, leaving no place for
+infection to gather. This, of course, takes time and costs money, and is
+one more illustration of the fact that there is one health law for the
+rich and another health law for the poor.
+
+All the time that I write these chapters about health I feel guilty. I
+know that the wholesome food I recommend costs money, and I know that
+surgery and dentistry cost money--yes, even sunlight and fresh air and
+recreation; even a fast, because you have to rest while you take it, and
+you have to have a roof over your head, and warmth in winter time, and
+somebody to wait upon you when you are weak. I know that for a great
+many of the people who read what I write, all these things are
+impossible of attainment; I know that for the great majority of the
+common people the benefits of science do not exist. Science discovers
+how to prevent disease, but the discoveries are not applied, because the
+profit system controls the world, and the profit system wants the labor
+of the poor, regardless of what happens to their health. If the people
+fall ill, they are thrown upon the scrap heap, and the profit system
+finds others to take their place.
+
+Take, for example, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a germ infection, but
+it practically never gets hold upon a human body except when the body is
+reduced by undernourishment and lack of fresh air. Tuberculosis,
+therefore, is a disease of slums and jails. It is definitely and
+indisputably a disease of poverty. It could be wiped off the face of the
+earth in a single generation; and the same is true of typhus and
+typhoid. There is another whole host of ailments which could be wiped
+out by measures of public hygiene, plus education. This includes all the
+infant diseases, and the deadly venereal diseases. But the profit system
+stands in the way; and so, in these closing paragraphs of this Book of
+the Body, I say that there is one disease which is the deadliest of all,
+and the source of all others, and that disease is poverty.
+
+I know a certain physician to the rich, who is an honest and
+conscientious man. He said, "I loath my work. I am wasting my time. I am
+called in by these fat, over-fed rich people in their leisure class
+hotels, and what am I to say to them? Shall I say to them, 'You are
+living an abnormal life, and you can never be well until you cut out
+root and branch all your habits of self indulgence which are destroying
+you?' But no, I can't say that--not one time in a thousand. I am
+expected to be polite and serious, and to listen to them while they tell
+the long tiresome story of their symptoms, and I have to encourage them,
+and give them some temporary device that will remove some of the
+symptoms of their trouble."
+
+And what should one say to this honest physician? Should one tell him to
+go and be a physician to the poor? Would he be any happier there? He
+could tell the poor the causes of their diseases, and they would listen
+patiently--they are trained to listen, and to accept what they are told.
+Here is a girl living in an inside bedroom in a tenement, and working
+ten or eleven hours a day in an unventilated factory, and she is ill
+with tuberculosis. The physician tells her that she needs plenty of
+fresh air and rest, and a lot of eggs and milk in her diet. He tells her
+that, and he knows that she has as much chance of carrying out his
+orders as of flying to the moon. Or maybe he comes upon a typhoid
+epidemic, and discovers, as happened to a friend of mine in Chicago,
+that there is defective plumbing in some houses owned by the political
+leader of the district. Or maybe it is a case of venereal disease, in a
+young man who was drafted into the army and turned loose amid the joys
+of Paris. Maybe it is just a commonplace, every-day story of a room full
+of school children, 22 per cent of them undernourished, as is the case
+in New York City, and the parents out of work a part of the time, and
+with no possibility in their lives of ever earning enough to feed the
+children properly. When you confront these universal facts of our
+present social order, you realize that the problem of disease is not
+merely a problem of the body, but is a problem of the mind as well; a
+problem of politics and religion and philosophy, of the whole way of
+thinking of the so-called civilized world. A book of health which did
+not point out these facts would be, not a book of health, but a book of
+sham.
+
+But meantime, while we are trying to change the world's ideas, we have
+to live, and we can do our work better if we keep as well as possible. I
+have tried to point out the way; it is, as you can see, a matter in part
+of the body and in part of the mind. All the bodily regime here laid out
+has its basis in mental habits; all wise and wholesome ways of life can,
+at the age when our minds are plastic, be made into "second
+nature"--things which we do automatically, without effort or temptation
+to do otherwise. This is the real secret of true happiness in the
+conduct of our personal lives; to acquire self-control, to rule our
+desires and our passions, not harshly and spasmodically, but serenely,
+as one drives a car which he thoroughly understands. It is in vain that
+we preach freedom to men who have not this self-mastery; as the poet
+tell us: "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves of their own
+compulsion." And of all the personal possessions which man can attain on
+this earth, the most precious is the one of a sound mind controlling a
+sound body. I close this book by quoting some verses written by Sir
+Henry Wotton three hundred years ago, which I have all my life
+considered one of the noblest pieces of poetry in our heritage:
+
+     THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE
+
+    How happy is he born and taught
+      That serveth not another's will;
+    Whose armour is his honest thought
+      And simple truth his utmost skill!
+
+    Whose passions not his masters are,
+      Whose soul is still prepared for death,
+    Not tied unto the world with care
+      Of public fame, or private breath.
+
+    Who envies none that chance doth raise
+      Or vice; who never understood
+    How deepest wounds are given by praise;
+      Nor rules of state, but rules of good:
+
+    Who hath his life from rumours freed,
+      Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
+    Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
+      Nor ruin make accusers great:
+
+    Who God doth late and early pray
+      More of His grace than gifts to lend;
+    And entertains the harmless day
+      With a well-chosen book or friend;
+
+    --This man is freed from servile bands
+      Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;
+    Lord of himself, though not of lands;
+      And having nothing, yet hath all.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Abrams, Dr., 190
+
+Adultery, 33
+
+Adventist, 99
+
+Agriculture, 25
+
+Alcohol, 151
+
+Anti-bodies, 188
+
+Antinomies, 58
+
+Appendix, 186
+
+Arnold, 42
+
+Arrhenius, 101
+
+Automatic writing, 67
+
+
+Bairnsfather, 29
+
+Bathing, 162
+
+Battle Creek Sanitarium, 118
+
+Beauchamp, 70, 85, 89
+
+Beethoven, 47
+
+Bergson, 17
+
+Beri-beri, 128
+
+Bible, 77
+
+Bio-chemist, 59
+
+Black bread, 128
+
+Blood, 106
+
+Body, 53, 105
+
+Booth, 58
+
+Bourne, 69
+
+Bruce, 71
+
+Bury, 15
+
+
+Caffein, 150
+
+Calories, 135
+
+Candy, 137
+
+Capitalist, 100
+
+Carbohydrates, 124
+
+Carbon monoxide, 157
+
+Children, 140, 180
+
+Chiropractors, 174, 184
+
+Chittenden, 136
+
+Christian Scientists, 5, 65, 105
+
+Clothing, 160
+
+Coffee, 151
+
+Colds, 183
+
+Commandments, 32
+
+Communist, 99
+
+Complete fast, 172
+
+Comstock, 25
+
+Conduct, 42
+
+Consciousness, 56
+
+Constipation, 185
+
+Cooking, 129, 142
+
+Crawford, 88
+
+Cyrus, 164
+
+
+Dandruff, 109
+
+Dante, 77
+
+Darwin, 17, 46
+
+Dentistry, 126, 190
+
+Determinists, 57
+
+Diet, 131
+
+Diet Standards, 135
+
+Digestion, 145
+
+Diphtheria, 188
+
+Diseases, 107, 117
+
+Dogs, 17
+
+Draft, 182
+
+Drugs, 118, 150, 185, 189
+
+Dubb, 63
+
+Duncan, 102
+
+Dyspepsia, 117
+
+
+Eddy, 65
+
+Edison, 45, 86
+
+Einstein, 101
+
+Elberfeld horses, 68
+
+Evolution, 8, 17
+
+Exercise, 163
+
+
+Faith, 9
+
+Faith curists, 65
+
+Fast cure, 171
+
+Fatness, 139
+
+Fats, 124
+
+Fever, 108
+
+Fireless cooker, 142
+
+Fireplace, 157
+
+Fisher, 136
+
+Fletcher, 119, 145
+
+Food filter, 145
+
+Fourth dimension, 5
+
+Free thinker, 15
+
+Freud, 71
+
+Fruit fast, 175
+
+Frugality, 38
+
+Frying-pan, 129
+
+Furnace, 157
+
+
+Gargles, 184
+
+Gastronomic art, 148
+
+Genius, 49, 60
+
+George, 18
+
+Germs, 183
+
+God, 22, 50
+
+Goethe, 47
+
+Golden rule, 51
+
+Greens, 132
+
+Gymnastic work, 166
+
+
+Hair, 109
+
+Hallucinations, 75
+
+Hamlet, 48
+
+Happiness, 9
+
+Harrison, 6
+
+Hats, 110
+
+Headache, 122, 150, 184
+
+Health cranks, 182
+
+Heart, 108
+
+Houdin, 93
+
+Hugo, 48
+
+Huxley, 17, 62
+
+Hyslop, 82
+
+
+Iceberg, 61
+
+Infanticide, 28
+
+Instincts, 134
+
+Intelligence, 22
+
+Immortality, 79
+
+Irwin, Will, 86
+
+
+James, 30, 59, 60
+
+Jesus, 47, 48, 50, 51, 76
+
+John Barleycorn, 152
+
+Johnson, 58
+
+Jonson, 44
+
+
+Kant, Immanuel, 4, 47, 51, 58
+
+Kellogg, Doctor, 118, 164, 186
+
+Kilmer, Joyce, 44
+
+Knowledge, 94
+
+Kropotkin, 18, 26
+
+
+Langley, 74
+
+Lankester, Prof. E. Ray, 23
+
+Laxatives, 175, 185
+
+Leanness, 139
+
+Leonardo, 47
+
+Liebault, 64
+
+Life, 3
+
+Lily Dale, 86, 90
+
+Lincoln, 47
+
+Locomotor ataxia, 180
+
+Lodge, Sir Oliver, 83
+
+Lodge, Raymond, 87
+
+London, Jack, 152
+
+
+Macaulay, 39
+
+MacDowell, Edward, 56
+
+MacFadden, 178, 186
+
+MacSwiney, 170
+
+Maeterlinck, Maurice, 68
+
+Malaria, 189
+
+Malthusian law, 25
+
+Marquesans, 113
+
+Materializations, 88
+
+Matter, 3
+
+Meal-hour, 147
+
+Measurement of Intelligence, Terman's, 95
+
+Meat, 121
+
+Medical science, 105
+
+Mesmer, 63
+
+Messina earthquake, 170
+
+Metaphysics, 4
+
+Metchnikoff, 138
+
+Milk diet, 128
+
+Moderation, 39
+
+Monism, 3
+
+Morality, 21, 31, 34, 50
+
+Morgan, 45
+
+Mormon, 99
+
+Mozart, 68
+
+Multiple personality, 69
+
+Mutation, 17
+
+Myers, 49
+
+
+Nature, 21, 24, 29
+
+Nature cure, 160
+
+Nature Woman, 176
+
+Neighbor, 50
+
+Newcomb, Simon, 101
+
+Newton, 47
+
+New York Times, 169
+
+Nicotine, 154
+
+Nietzsche, 17
+
+Novels, 164
+
+Nutrition of Man, 136
+
+
+Oil stoves, 158
+
+Opsonins, 112
+
+Optimism, 42
+
+Osteopaths, 184
+
+Ouija, 67
+
+Overeating, 134
+
+Oxygen, 156
+
+
+Patrick, Dr., 167
+
+Pavlov, 148
+
+Phantasms, 75
+
+Phillips, David Graham, 180
+
+Piper, Mrs., 68
+
+Play, 165
+
+Poisons, 146
+
+Pork, 142
+
+Porter, Dr., 178
+
+Positivists, 6
+
+Poverty, 194
+
+Prices of food, 141
+
+Prince, Dr. Morton, 70, 89
+
+Profits of Religion, 78, 99
+
+Proteins, 123
+
+Prunes, 127
+
+Psychology, 96
+
+Psychotherapy, 64
+
+Puritans, 39
+
+
+Quackenbos, 64
+
+Quinine, 188
+
+Quixote, 48
+
+
+Raisins, 127
+
+Raw food, 119
+
+Read, Alfred Baker, 28
+
+Reason, 13
+
+Refined foods, 126
+
+Relaxation, 167
+
+Religion, 32
+
+Reincarnation, 76
+
+Rest, 146
+
+Revelation, 12
+
+Rheumatism, 193
+
+Rice, 128
+
+Rockefeller, 45
+
+Roosevelt, Theodore, 25, 45
+
+Rugs, 159
+
+Rupture, 187
+
+
+Sabbath, 99
+
+Salisbury, 120
+
+Sally, 70, 85
+
+Salt, 143
+
+Meats, salted, 143
+
+Salts, 124
+
+Salvarsan, 189
+
+Savages, 135
+
+Savage, Rev. Minot J., 74
+
+Schrenck-Notzing, 88
+
+Scurvy, 128
+
+Seneca, 98
+
+Shakespeare, 47
+
+Shelley, 45, 48
+
+Sleep, 162
+
+Sleeping sickness, 113, 173
+
+Smokers, 153
+
+Socialism, 167
+
+Sophocles, 87
+
+Sore throat, 183
+
+Spencer, 8
+
+Spinoza, 79
+
+Spirits, 82
+
+Spiritualists, 86
+
+Starch, 122, 124
+
+Stealing, 33
+
+Steam heat, 158
+
+Stimulant, 149
+
+Stock Exchange, 158
+
+Stomach, 105, 138, 148
+
+Style, 161
+
+Subconscious mind, 61
+
+Sunday code, 40
+
+Sugar, 126
+
+Surgery, 186
+
+Survival, 81
+
+Survival of the fittest, 22
+
+Syndicalism, 15
+
+Syphilis, 189
+
+
+Tanner, Dr., 169
+
+Tariff, 37
+
+Tea, 151
+
+Teeth, 127, 193
+
+Telepathy, 67, 75
+
+Theosophists, 76
+
+Tight shoes, 161
+
+Tobacco, 153
+
+Tolstoi, 49
+
+Tonsilitis, 107
+
+Trance, 63
+
+Tropism, 54
+
+Tuberculosis, 112, 120, 179, 194, 195
+
+Twain, Mark, 93
+
+Typhoid, 112, 188, 192
+
+
+Uranus, 92
+
+Uric acid, 193
+
+
+Vaccination, 187, 189
+
+Vaccines, 188
+
+Vegetarian, 121
+
+Vitamines, 127, 142
+
+
+Wallace, 46
+
+Wells, H. G., 22
+
+Williams, Dr. Henry Smith, 102
+
+Worth, Patience, 84
+
+
+Yellow fever, 188
+
+Yogis, 90
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOK OF LIFE
+
+VOLUME TWO: LOVE AND SOCIETY
+
+                _To_
+           Kate Crane Gartz
+in acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a
+better world, and her fidelity to those
+      who struggle to achieve it.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PART THREE: THE BOOK OF LOVE
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.   THE REALITY OF MARRIAGE                              3
+Discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world,
+and their relation to the ideal of monogamous love.
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.   THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARRIAGE                            8
+Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its history,
+the stages of its development in human society.
+
+CHAPTER XXX.    SEX AND YOUNG AMERICA                                 15
+Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect
+the future generation.
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.    SEX AND THE "SMART SET"                              23
+Portrays the moral customs of those who set the fashion
+in our present-day world.
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.    SEX AND THE POOR                                    29
+Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and
+the diseases which result from it.
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.    SEX AND NATURE                                     33
+Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of
+natural or physical disharmony.
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV.   LOVE AND ECONOMICS                                   36
+Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due
+to the displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.
+
+CHAPTER XXXV.   MARRIAGE AND MONEY                                    40
+Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher
+form of prostitution known as the "marriage of convenience."
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI.   LOVE VERSUS LUST                                     46
+Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it
+should be followed and when repressed.
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII. CELIBACY VERSUS CHASTITY                              51
+
+The ideal of the repression of the sex-impulse, as against
+the ideal of its guidance and cultivation.
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE DEFENSE OF LOVE                                  55
+
+Discusses passionate love, its sanction, its place in life,
+and its preservation in marriage.
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX. BIRTH CONTROL                                          60
+
+Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the
+greatest of man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's
+enslavement, and placing the keys of life in his hands.
+
+CHAPTER XL. EARLY MARRIAGE                                            66
+
+Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the
+duty of parents in respect to them.
+
+CHAPTER XLI. THE MARRIAGE CLUB                                        71
+
+Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to
+avoid unhappy marriages.
+
+CHAPTER XLII. EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE                                  75
+
+Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that
+we have the right and the duty to teach it.
+
+CHAPTER XLIII. THE MONEY SIDE OF MARRIAGE                             79
+
+Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of
+matrimony.
+
+CHAPTER XLIV. THE DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY                                 83
+
+Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should
+endeavor to preserve it.
+
+CHAPTER XLV. THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY                                  89
+
+Discusses the question, to what extent one person may
+hold another to the pledge of love.
+
+CHAPTER XLVI. THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE                                  93
+
+Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and
+one of the means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.
+
+CHAPTER XLVII. THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE                             97
+
+Discusses the circumstances under which society has the
+right to forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.
+
+
+PART FOUR: THE BOOK OF SOCIETY
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII. THE EGO AND THE WORLD                                103
+
+Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant
+and in primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment
+to life.
+
+CHAPTER XLVIX. COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION                          107
+
+Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and
+the part which selfishness and unselfishness play in the
+development of social life.
+
+CHAPTER L. ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY                                 115
+
+Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and
+whether there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.
+
+CHAPTER LI. RULING CLASSES                                           119
+
+Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained,
+and what sanction it can claim.
+
+CHAPTER LII. THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION                         122
+
+Discusses the series of changes through which human
+society has passed.
+
+CHAPTER LIII. INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION                                   126
+
+Examines the process of evolution in industry and the
+stage which it has so far reached.
+
+CHAPTER LIV. THE CLASS STRUGGLE                                      132
+
+Discusses history as a battle-ground between ruling and
+subject classes, and the method and outcome of this
+struggle.
+
+CHAPTER LV. THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM                                    136
+
+Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and
+the effect of this system upon the minds of the workers.
+
+CHAPTER LVI. THE CAPITALIST PROCESS                                  142
+
+How profits are made under the present industrial
+system and what becomes of them.
+
+CHAPTER LVII. HARD TIMES                                             145
+
+Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing,
+and why abundant production brings distress instead of
+plenty.
+
+CHAPTER LVIII. THE IRON RING                                         148
+Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles production,
+and makes true prosperity impossible.
+
+CHAPTER LIX. FOREIGN MARKETS                                         151
+Considers the efforts of capitalism to save itself by marketing
+its surplus products abroad, and what results from
+these efforts.
+
+CHAPTER LX. CAPITALIST WAR                                           155
+Shows how the competition for foreign markets leads
+nations automatically into war.
+
+CHAPTER LXI. THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRODUCTION                         158
+Shows how much wealth we could produce if we tried
+and how we proved it when we had to.
+
+CHAPTER LXII. THE COST OF COMPETITION                                162
+Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine,
+those which are obvious and those which are
+hidden.
+
+CHAPTER LXIII. SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM                             166
+Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the
+state, and the idea of its management by the trade unions.
+
+CHAPTER LXIV. COMMUNISM AND ANARCHISM                                170
+Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the
+idea of a society without compulsion, and how these
+ideas have fared in Russia.
+
+CHAPTER LXV. SOCIAL REVOLUTION                                       175
+How the great change is coming in different industries,
+and how we may prepare to meet it.
+
+CHAPTER LXVI. CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION                           179
+Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they
+afford to do it, and what will be the price?
+
+CHAPTER LXVII. EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS                       183
+Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its
+chances for success in the United States.
+
+CHAPTER LXVIII. THE PROBLEM OF THE LAND                              188
+Discusses the land values tax as a means of social readjustment,
+and compares it with other programs.
+
+CHAPTER LXIX. THE CONTROL OF CREDIT                                  192
+Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of
+industry, and may play in the freeing of industry.
+
+CHAPTER LXX. THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY                                 198
+Discusses various programs for the change from industrial
+autocracy to industrial democracy.
+
+CHAPTER LXXI. THE NEW WORLD                                          202
+Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning
+with its money aspects; the standard wage and its variations.
+
+CHAPTER LXXII. AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION                               206
+Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster
+co-operative farming and co-operative homes.
+
+CHAPTER LXXIII. INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION                              210
+Discusses scientific, artistic, and religious activities, as
+a superstructure built upon the foundation of the standard
+wage.
+
+CHAPTER LXXIV. MANKIND REMADE                                        215
+Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what
+happens to these in the new world.
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+THE BOOK OF LOVE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE REALITY OF MARRIAGE
+
+     (Discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world, and their
+     relation to the ideal of monogamous love.)
+
+
+Just as human beings through wrong religious beliefs torture one
+another, and wreck their lives and happiness; just as through wrong
+eating and other physical habits they make disease and misery for
+themselves; just so they suffer and perish for lack of the most
+elementary knowledge concerning the sex relationship. The difference is
+that in the field of religious ideas it is now permissible to impart the
+truth one possesses. If I tell you there is no devil, and that believing
+this will not cause you to suffer in an eternity of sulphur and
+brimstone, no one will be able to burn me at the stake, even though he
+might like to do so. If I advise you that it is not harmful to eat
+beefsteak on Friday, or to eat thoroughly cooked pork any day of the
+week, neither the archbishops nor the rabbis nor the vegetarians will be
+able to lock me in a dungeon. But if I should impart to you the simplest
+and most necessary bit of knowledge concerning the facts of your sex
+life--things which every man and woman must know if we are to stop
+breeding imbecility and degeneracy in the world--then I should be
+liable, under federal statutes, to pay a fine of $5,000, and to serve a
+term of five years in a federal penitentiary. Scarcely a week passes
+that I do not receive a letter from someone asking for information about
+such matters; but I dare not answer the letters, because I know there
+are agencies, maintained and paid by religious superstition, employing
+spies to trap people into the breaking of this law.
+
+I shall tell you here as much as I am permitted to tell, in the simplest
+language and the most honest spirit. I believe that human beings are
+meant to be happy on this earth, and to avoid misery and disease. I
+believe that they are given the powers of intelligence in order to seek
+the ways of happiness, and I believe that it is a worthy work to give
+them the knowledge they need in order to find happiness.
+
+At the outset of this Book of Love we are going to examine the existing
+facts of the sex relationships of men and women in present-day society.
+We shall discover that amid all the false and dishonest thinking of
+mankind, there is nowhere more falsity and dishonesty than here. The
+whole world is a gigantic conspiracy of "hush," and the orthodox and
+respectable of the world are like worshippers of some god, who spend
+their day-time burning incense before the altar, and in the night-time
+steal the sacred jewels and devour the consecrated offerings. These
+worshippers confront you with the question, do you believe in marriage;
+and they make the assumption that the institution of marriage exists, or
+at some time has existed in the world. But if you wish to do any sound
+thinking about this subject, you must get one thing clear at the outset;
+the institution of marriage is an ideal which has been preached and
+taught, but which has never anywhere, in any society, at any stage of
+human progress, actually existed as the general practice of mankind.
+What has existed and still exists is a very different institution, which
+I shall here describe as marriage-plus-prostitution.
+
+By this statement I do not mean to deny that there are many women, and a
+few men, who have been monogamous all their lives; nor that there are
+many couples living together happily in monogamous marriage. What I mean
+is that, considering society as a whole, wherever you find the
+institution of marriage, you also find, co-existent therewith and
+complementary thereto, the institution of prostitution. Of this double
+arrangement one part is recognized, and written into the law; the other
+part is hidden, and prohibited by law; but those who have to do with
+enforcing the law all know that it exists, and practically all of them
+consider it inevitable, and a great many derive income from it. So I
+say: if you believe in marriage-plus-prostitution, that is your right;
+but if marriage is what you believe in, then your task is to consider
+such questions as these: Is marriage a possible thing? Can it ever
+become the sex arrangement of any society? What are the forces which
+have so far prevented it from prevailing, and how can these forces be
+counteracted?
+
+It is my belief that monogamous love is the most desirable of human sex
+relationships, the most fruitful in happiness and spiritual development.
+The laws and institutions of civilized society pretend to defend this
+relationship, but the briefest study of the facts will convince anyone
+that these laws and institutions are not really meant to protect
+monogamous love. What they are is a device of the property-holding male
+to secure his property rights to women, and more especially to secure
+himself as to the paternity of his heirs. In primitive society, where
+land and other sources of wealth were held in common, and sex monogamy
+was unknown, there was no way to determine paternity, and no reason for
+doing so. But under the system of private property and class privilege,
+it is necessary for some one man to support a child, if it is to be
+supported; and when a man has fought hard, and robbed hard, and traded
+hard, and acquired wealth, he does not want to spend it in maintaining
+another man's child. That he should let himself be fooled into doing so
+is one of the greatest humiliations his fellowmen can imagine. If you
+read Shakespeare's plays, and look up the meaning of old words, so as to
+understand old witticisms and allusions, you will discover that this was
+the stock jest of Shakespeare's time.
+
+In order to protect himself from such ridicule, the man maintained in
+ancient times his right to kill the faithless woman with cruel tortures.
+He maintains today the right to deprive her of her children, and of all
+share in his property, even though she may have helped to earn it. But
+until quite recent times, the beginning of the revolt of women, there
+was never any corresponding penalty for faithlessness in husbands. Under
+the English law today, the husband may divorce his wife for infidelity,
+but the wife must prove infidelity plus cruelty, and the courts have
+held that the cruelty must consist in knocking her down. While I was in
+England, the highest court rendered a decision that a man who brought
+his mistress to his home and compelled his wife to wait upon her was not
+committing "cruelty" in the meaning of the English law.
+
+This is what is known as the "double standard," and the double standard
+prevails everywhere under the system of marriage-plus-prostitution, and
+proves that capitalist "monogamy" is not a spiritual ideal, but a matter
+of class privilege. It is a breach of honor for the ruling class male to
+tamper with the wife of his friend; it is frequently dangerous for him
+to tamper with the young females of his own class; but it is in general
+practice taken for granted that the young females of lower classes are
+his legitimate prey. In England a man may have a marriage annulled, if
+he can prove that the woman he married had what is called a "past"; but
+everybody takes it for granted that the man has had a "past"; it is
+covered by the polite phrase, "sowing his wild oats." Wherever among the
+ruling class you find men bold enough to discuss the facts of the sex
+order they have set up, you find the idea, expressed or implied, that
+this "wild oats" is a necessary and inevitable part of this order, and
+that without it the order would break down. The English philosopher,
+Lecky, making an elaborate study of morals through the ages, speaks of
+the prostitute in the following frank language:
+
+"Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient
+guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless
+happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their
+untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have
+known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble
+form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with
+shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the
+eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."
+
+I invite you to study these sentences and understand them fully.
+Remember that they are the opinion of the most learned historian of sex
+customs who has ever written in English; a man whose authority is
+recognized in our schools, whose books are in every college library.
+William Edward Hartpole Lecky is not in any sense a revolutionist; he is
+a conventional English scholar, an upholder of English law and order and
+patriotism. He is not of my school of thought, but of those who now own
+the world and run it. I quote him, because he tells in plain language
+what kind of world they have made; I invite you to study his words, and
+then judge my statement that the sex arrangement under which we live in
+modern society is not monogamous love, but marriage-plus-prostitution.
+
+It is my hope to point the way to a higher system. I should like to call
+it marriage; but perhaps it would be more precise to call it
+marriage-minus-prostitution. In working it out, we shall have to think
+for ourselves, and discard all formulas. It is obvious that our
+present-day religious creeds, ethical ideals, legal codes, and social
+rewards and punishments have been powerless to protect marriage, or to
+make it the rule in sex relationships. So we shall have to begin at the
+beginning and find new reasons for monogamous love, a new basis of
+marriage other than the protection of private property. We shall have to
+inform ourselves as to the fundamental purposes of sex; we shall have to
+ask ourselves: What are the factors which determine rightness and
+wrongness in the sex relationship? What is love, and what ought it to
+be? These questions we shall try to approach without any fixed ideas
+whatever. We shall decide them by the same tests that we have used in
+our thinking about God and immortality, health and disease. We shall
+ask, not what our ancestors believed, not what God teaches us, not what
+the law ordains, not what is "respectable," nor yet what is "advanced,"
+according to the claim of modern sex revolutionists and "free lovers."
+We shall ask ourselves, what are the facts. We shall ask, what can be
+made to work in practice, what can justify itself by the tests of reason
+and common sense.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARRIAGE
+
+     (Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its history, the
+     stages of its development in human society.)
+
+
+What, in the most elemental form, is sex? It is a difference of function
+which makes it necessary for two organisms to take part in the
+reproduction of the species. The purpose, or at any rate the effect, of
+this sex difference is the mixing of characteristics and qualities. If
+the sex relationship were unnecessary to reproduction, variations might
+begin, and be propagated and carried to extremes in one line of
+inheritance, without ever affecting the rest of the species. Very soon
+there would be no species, or rather an infinity of them; each line of
+descent would fly apart, and become a group all by itself. You have
+perhaps heard people comment on the fact that blondes so frequently
+prefer brunettes, and that tall men are apt to marry short women, and
+vice versa. This is perhaps nature's way of keeping the type uniform, of
+spreading qualities widely and testing them thoroughly. Nature is
+continually trying out the powers of every individual in every species,
+and by the process of sexual selection she chooses, for the reproduction
+of the species, the individuals which are best fitted for survival.
+This, of course, refers to nature, considered apart from man. In human
+society, as I shall presently show, sexual selection has been distorted,
+and partly suppressed.
+
+Sex differentiation and sexual selection exist almost universally
+throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, everywhere save in the
+lowest forms of being. They take strange and startling forms, and like
+everything else in nature manifest amazing ingenuity. People who wish to
+prove this or that about human sex relations will advance arguments from
+nature; but as a matter of fact we can learn nothing whatever from
+nature, except her determination to preserve the products of her
+activity and to keep them up to standard. Sometimes nature will give the
+precedence in power, speed and beauty to the male, and sometimes to the
+female. She is perfectly ruthless, and willing in the accomplishment of
+her purpose to destroy the individuals of either sex. She will content
+the most rabid feminist by causing the female spider to devour her mate
+when his purpose has been accomplished; or by causing the male bee to
+fall from his mating in the air, a disemboweled shell.
+
+As for man, he has won his supremacy over nature by his greater power to
+combine in groups; by his more intense gregarious, or herd instincts,
+which enabled him to fight and destroy creatures which would have
+exterminated him if he had fought them alone. So in primitive society
+everywhere, we find that the individual is subordinated to the group,
+and the "folkways" give but little heed to personal rights. Very
+thorough investigations have been made into the life of primitive man in
+many parts of the world, and the anthropologists are now arguing over
+the exact meaning of the data. We shall not here attempt to decide among
+them, but rest content with the statement that communism and tribal
+ownership is a widespread social form among primitive man, so much so as
+to suggest that it is an early stage in social evolution.
+
+And this communism includes, not merely property, but sex. In the very
+earliest days there was often no barrier whatever to the sex
+relationship; not even between brothers and sisters, nor between parents
+and children. In fact, we find savages who do not know that the sex
+relationship has anything to do with procreation. But as knowledge
+increases, sex "tabus" develop, some wise, and some foolish. From causes
+not entirely clear, but which we discuss in Chapter XLVIII, there
+gradually evolves a widespread form of sex relationship of primitive
+man, the system of the "gens," as it is called. This is the Latin word
+for family, but it does not mean family in the narrow sense of mother
+and father and children, but in the broad sense of all those who have
+blood relationship, however far removed--uncles and aunts and cousins,
+as far as memory can trace. In primitive communism a man is not
+permitted to enter into the sex relationship with a woman of the same
+gens, but with all the women of some other gens. It is difficult for us
+to imagine a society in which all the men named Jones would be married
+to all the women named Smith; but that was the way whole races of
+mankind lived for many thousands of years.
+
+In that primitive communist society, the woman was generally the equal
+of the man. It is true that she did the drudgery of the camp, but the
+man, on the other hand, faced the hardships of battle and the chase on
+land and sea. The woman was as big as the man, and except when
+handicapped by pregnancy, as strong as the man; she was as much
+respected, if not more so. Her children bore her name, and were under
+her control, and she was accustomed to assert herself in all affairs of
+the tribe. In Frederick O'Brien's "White Shadows in the South Seas," you
+may read a comical story of a journey this traveler made into the
+interior of one of the cannibal islands. Everywhere he was treated with
+courtesy and hospitality, but was embarrassed by continual offers from
+would-be wives. In one case a powerful cannibal lady, whose advances he
+rejected, picked him up and proceeded to carry him off, and he was quite
+helpless in her grasp; he might have been a cannibal husband today, if
+it had not been for the intervention of his fellow travelers.
+
+The basis of this sex equality under primitive communism is easy to
+understand. All goods belonged to the tribe, and were shared alike
+according to need. Children were the tribe's most precious possession;
+therefore the woman suffered little handicap from having a child to bear
+and feed. Primitive woman would bear her child by the roadside, and pick
+it up in her arms, and continue her journey; and when she needed food,
+she did not have to beg for it--if there was food for anyone, there was
+food for her and her child. She did her share of the gathering and
+preparing of food, because that was the habit and law of her being; she
+had energies, and had never heard of the idea of not using them.
+
+This primitive communism generally disappears as the tribe progresses.
+We cannot be sure of all the stages of its disappearance, or of the
+causes, but in a general way we can say that it gives way before the
+spread of slavery. In the beginning primitive man does not have any
+slaves, he does not have sufficient foresight or self-restraint for
+that. When he kills his enemies in battle, he builds a fire and roasts
+their flesh and eats them; and those whom he captures alive, he binds
+fast and takes with him, to be sacrificed to his voodoo gods. But as he
+comes to more settled ways of living, and as the tribe grows larger, it
+occurs to the chiefs in battle that the captives would be glad to give
+their labor in return for their lives, and that it would be convenient
+to have some people to do the hard and dirty work. So gradually there
+comes to be a class at the bottom of society, and another class at the
+top. Those who capture the slaves and keep them at work lay claim to the
+products of their labor--at first better weapons and personal
+adornments, then separate homes for the chiefs and priests, separate
+gardens, separate flocks and herds, and--what more natural?--separate
+women.
+
+This process becomes complete when the tribe settles down to
+agriculture, and the ruling classes take possession of the land. When
+once the land is privately owned, classes are fixed, and class
+distinctions become the most prominent fact in society. And step by step
+as this happens, we see women beaten down, from the position of the
+cannibal lady, who could ask for the man she wanted and carry him off by
+force if necessary, to the position of the modern woman, who is
+physically weak, emotionally unstable, economically dependent, and
+socially repressed. You may resent such phrases, but all you have to do
+is to read the laws of civilized countries, written into the statute
+books by men to define the rights and duties of women; you will see that
+everywhere, before the recent feminist revolt, women were classified
+under the law with children and imbeciles.
+
+Maternity imposes on woman a heavy burden, and before the discovery of
+birth control, a burden that is continuous. For nine months she carries
+the child in her body, and then for a year or two she carries it in her
+arms, or on her back; and by that time there is another child, and this
+continues until she is broken down. Having this burden, she cannot
+possibly compete with the unburdened male for the possession of
+property. So wherever there is economic competition; wherever certain
+individuals or classes in the tribe or group are allowed to seize and
+hold the land; wherever the products of labor cease to be the community
+property, and become private property, the objects of economic strife;
+then inevitably and by natural process, woman comes to be placed among
+those who cannot protect themselves--that is, among the children and the
+imbeciles and the slaves. Of course, some children are well cared for,
+and so are some imbeciles, and some slaves, and some women. But they are
+cared for as a matter of favor, not as a matter of their own power. They
+proceed no longer as the cannibal lady, but by adopting and cultivating
+the slave virtues, by making themselves agreeable to their masters, by
+flattering their masters' vanity and sensuality--in other words by
+exercising what we are accustomed to call "feminine charm."
+
+From early barbaric society up to the present day, we observe that there
+are classes of women, just as there are classes of men. The position of
+these classes changes within certain limits, but in broad outline the
+conditions are fixed, and may be easily defined. There is, first of all,
+the ruling class woman. She must have birth; she may or may not have
+wealth, according as to whether the laws of that society or tribe permit
+her to have possessions of her own, or to inherit anything from her
+parents. If she has no wealth, then she will need beauty. She is the
+woman who is selected by the ruling class man to bear his name and his
+children, and to have charge of the household where these children are
+reared, and trained for the inheriting of their father's wealth and the
+carrying on of his position. This confers upon the ruling class woman
+great dignity, and makes her a person of responsibility. She rules, not
+merely over the slaves of the household, but over men of inferior social
+classes, and in a few cases an exceptionally able woman has become a
+queen, and ruled over men of her own class. This ruling class woman has
+been known through all the ages by a special name, and the ways and
+customs regarding her have been studied in an entertaining book, "The
+Lady," by Emily James Putnam.
+
+Next in privilege and position to the "lady" is the mistress, the woman
+who is selected by the ruling class man, not primarily to bear his
+children, but to entertain and divert him. She may, of course, bear
+children also. In barbaric societies, and up to quite recent times, the
+importance of the ruling class man was indicated by the number of
+concubines he had, and the position of these women was hardly inferior
+to that of the wife or queen. In the days of the French monarchy, the
+king's mistress was frequently more important than the queen; she was a
+woman of ability, maintaining her supremacy in the intrigues of the
+court. In ancient Greek society, the "hetairae" were a recognized class,
+and Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, was the most brilliant and most
+conspicuous woman in Athens. In modern France, the position of the
+mistress is recognized by the phrase "demi-monde," or half-world. The
+American plutocracy has developed upon a superstructure of Puritanism,
+and therefore, in America, hypocrisy is necessary. But in the great
+cities of America, the vast majority of the ruling class men keep
+mistresses before marriage, and a great many keep them afterwards; and
+these mistresses are coming to be more and more openly flaunted, and to
+acquire more and more of what is called "social position." It is
+possible now in the "smart set" for a lady to accept the status of
+mistress, delicately veiled, without losing caste thereby, and actresses
+and other free lance women who got their start in life by taking the
+position of mistress, are coming more and more to be recognized as
+"ladies," and to be received into what are called the "best circles."
+
+There remains to be considered the position of the lower class women. In
+barbarous society these women were very little different from slaves.
+They had no rights of their own, except such rights as their master man
+chose to allow them for his own convenience. They were sold in marriage
+by their parents, and they went where they were sold, and obeyed their
+new master. They became his household drudges, and reserved their
+affections for him; if they failed to do this, he stoned them to death,
+or strangled them with a cord and tied them in a sack and threw them
+into the river.
+
+And, of course, the rights of the master man yielded to the rights of
+men of higher classes. The king or nobleman could take any woman he
+wished at any time, and he made laws to this effect and enforced them.
+In feudal society the lord of the manor claimed the right of the first
+night with the wives of his serfs; this was one of the ruling class
+privileges which was abolished in the French revolution. Wherever the
+French revolution did not succeed in affecting land tenure, the right of
+the land owner to prey upon his tenant girls continues as a custom, even
+though it is not written in the law, and would be denied by the
+hypocritical. It prevails in Poland, as you may discover by reading
+Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools"; it prevails in England, as you may discover
+from Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." You will find that it prevails
+in every part of the world where women have poverty and men have wealth
+and prestige, dress suits and automobiles. You will find it wherever
+there are leisure class hotels, or colleges, or other gatherings of
+ruling class young males. You will find it in the theatrical and moving
+picture worlds. It is well understood in the theatrical world of
+Broadway that the woman "star" in the profession gets her start in life
+by becoming the mistress of a manager or "angel." In the moving picture
+world of Southern California it is a recognized convention, known to
+everyone familiar with the business, that a young girl parts with her
+virtue in exchange for an important job.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+SEX AND YOUNG AMERICA
+
+     (Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect the future
+     generation.)
+
+
+Our first task is to consider how people actually behave in the matter
+of sex--as distinguished from the way they pretend to behave. The first
+and most necessary step in the cure of any disease is a correct
+diagnosis, and in this case we have not merely to make the diagnosis,
+but to prove it; because the most conspicuous fact about our present
+sex-arrangements is a mass of organized concealment. Not merely do
+teachers and preachers for the most part suppress all mention of these
+subjects; but the defenders of our present economic disorder are
+accustomed to acclaim the private property regime as the only basis of
+family life. So long as people hold such an idea, there is no use trying
+to teach them anything on the subject. There is no use talking to them
+about monogamous love, because all they understand is hypocrisy. In this
+chapter, therefore, we shall proceed to hold up the mirror in front of
+capitalist morality.
+
+I pause and consider: Where shall I begin? At the top of society, or at
+the bottom? With the city or the country? With the old or the young? I
+think you care most of all about your boys and girls, so I am going to
+tell you what is happening to the youth of America in these days of
+triumphant reaction.
+
+I have a son, about whom naturally I think a great deal; just now he is
+a student at one of our state universities, and he wrote me the other
+day: "I went to a dance, and believe me, father, if you knew what these
+modern dances mean, you would write something about them." I know what
+they mean. They have come to us straight from the brothels of the
+Argentine, among the vilest haunts of vice in the world. Others have
+come from the jungle, where they were natural. The poor creature of the
+jungle has his sex-desire and nothing else; he is not troubled with
+brains, he does not have a complicated social organism to build up and
+protect, consequently he does not need what are called "morals." But we
+civilized people need morals, and we are losing them, and our society is
+disintegrating, going back to the howling and fighting and cannibalism
+of the jungle.
+
+Prof. William James, America's greatest psychologist, tells us that
+going through the motions appropriate to an emotion automatically causes
+that emotion to be felt. If you watch an actor preparing to rush on the
+stage in an emotional scene, you will see him walking about, clenching
+his fists, stamping his feet, making ferocious faces, "working himself
+up." And now, what do you think is going on in the minds of young men
+and women, while with their bodies they are going through procedures
+which are nothing and can be nothing but imitations of sexual contact?
+
+The parents, it appears, are ignorant and unsophisticated, and have left
+it for the children to find out what these dances mean. In Rhode Island,
+one of our oldest states, is Brown College, chosen by New England's
+aristocracy for the education of its sons; and these boys go to social
+affairs in the best homes in Providence, and they call them
+"petting-parties." And here is what they write in their college paper:
+
+"The modern social bud drinks, not too much, often, but enough. She
+smokes unguardedly, swears considerably, and tells 'dirty' stories. All
+in all, she is a most frivolous, passionate, sensation-seeking little
+thing."
+
+This statement, published in a college paper, causes a scandal, and a
+newspaper reporter goes to interview the college boy who edits the
+paper, and this boy talks. He tells how he met a lovely girl at a dance,
+and his heart was thrilled with the rapture of young love. "Frankly,
+between you and me, I was pretty smitten with this particular little
+lady. Felt about her, don't you know, like a real guy feels about the
+girl he could imagine himself married to. Thought she was too nice to
+touch, almost; you know the grave sort of love affair a man always has
+once in a lifetime. Well, we walked a bit, and I guess I didn't say
+much, for a while. I felt plenty--respectfully--just the same. And as we
+turned the corner of one of the buildings here, she grasped my hand.
+Hers was trembling. 'Love and let love is my motto, dearie,' said this
+seraph of my dreams; 'come, we're losing a lot of time getting started.'
+That girl thought I was dead slow. She didn't know that just then I
+imagined the great love of my life was just entering the door. It was
+cruel the way she got down from the pedestal I had built for her."
+
+Suppose I should ask you to name the influence that is having most to do
+with shaping the thoughts of young America--what would you answer?
+Undoubtedly, the moving pictures. It is from the "movies" that your
+children learn what life is; if I can show you that a certain thing is
+in the "movies," you can surely not deny that it is passing every day
+and night into the hearts and minds of millions of our boys and girls.
+Take a vote among the girls, what would they consider the most
+delightful destiny in life; surely nine out of ten would answer, to
+become a screen star, and pose before a world of admirers, and be paid a
+million dollars a year. Make a test and see; and put that fact together
+with the one I have already stated, that in order to get an important
+job in the "movies," a girl must regularly and as a matter of course
+part with her virtue.
+
+You will be told, no doubt, that this is a slanderous statement, so let
+me give you a little evidence. I happened within the past year to be in
+the private office of a well known moving picture producer, a man who is
+married, and takes care to tell you that he loves his wife. He was
+producing a play, the heroine of which was supposed to be a daughter of
+Puritan New England. To play this part he had engaged a chaste girl, and
+as a result was in the midst of a queer trouble, which he poured out to
+me. His "leading man" had refused to act with this girl, insisting that
+no girl could act a part of love unless she had had passionate
+experience; no such thing had ever been heard of in moving pictures
+before. Likewise, the director agreed that no girl who is chaste could
+act for the screen, and the producer asked my advice about it. Mr.
+William Allen White, of Kansas, was present in the office, and
+authorizes me to state that he substantiates this anecdote. We both
+advised the producer to stand by the girl, and he did so; and the
+picture went out, and proved to be what in trade parlance is termed a
+"frost"; that is to say, your children didn't care for it, and it cost
+the producer something like a hundred thousand dollars to make this
+attempt to defy the conventions of the moving picture world.
+
+I will tell you another story. I have a friend, a prominent man in Los
+Angeles, who was appealed to by a young lady who wished to act in the
+"movies." My friend introduced this young lady to a very prominent
+screen actor, who in turn introduced her to one of the biggest producers
+in America, one of the men whose "million dollar feature pictures" are
+regularly exploited. The producer examined the young lady's figure, and
+told her that she would "do"; he added, quite casually, and as a matter
+of course, that she would be expected to "pay the price." The young lady
+took exception to this proposition, and gave up the chance. She told my
+friend about it, and he, being a man of the world, accustomed to dealing
+with the foibles of his fellowmen, wrote a note to the actor, explaining
+that inasmuch as this young lady had been socially introduced to him,
+and by him socially introduced to the manager, she should not have been
+expected to "pay the price." To this the actor answered that my friend
+was correct, and he would see the manager about it. The manager conceded
+the point, and the young lady got her chance in the "movies" and made
+good without "paying the price." This story tells you all you need to
+know about the difference in sex ethics that society applies to the
+"lady" and to the daughter of the common people.
+
+You know, of course, what is the stock theme of all moving pictures--the
+virtuous daughter of the people, who resists all temptations, and is
+finally rescued from her would-be seducer by the strong and sturdy arm
+of a male doll. Could one ask a more perfect illustration of capitalist
+hypocrisy than the fact that the girl who plays this role is required to
+pay with her virtue for the privilege of playing it! And if you know
+anything about young girls, you can watch her playing it on the screen,
+and see from her every gesture that what I am telling you is true. My
+wife knows young girls, and I took her, the other day, to see a moving
+picture. She said: "I have solved a problem. When I come home on the
+street-cars, it happens that I ride with a lot of young girls from the
+high school. I have been watching them, and I couldn't imagine what was
+the matter with them. All simple, girlish straightforwardness is gone
+out of them; they are making eyes, in the strangest manner--and at
+nobody; just practicing, apparently. They wear yearning facial
+expressions; when they start to walk, they do not walk, but writhe and
+wiggle. I thought there must be some nervous eye and lip disease got
+abroad in the school. But now, when I go to a moving picture, I discover
+what it means. They are imitating the 'stars' on the screen!"
+
+In these pictures, you know, there are "ingenues," young girls engaged
+in making a happy ending to the story by capturing a rich lover; and
+then there are "vamps," engaged in seducing young men, or breaking up
+some happy home. In old-style melodrama it was possible to tell the
+"ingenue" from the "vamps"; the former would trip lightly, and glance
+coyly out of the corners of her eyes, while the "vamp" moved with slow,
+languished writhing, blinking heavy-lidded, sinister eyes. But
+now-a-days the "vamps" have learned to pose as "ingenues," and the
+"ingenues" are as vicious as the "vamps"; they both make the same
+glances, and culminate in the same sensual swoon. It is all sex, and
+nothing else--except revolvers and fighting, and wild rushing about.
+
+And then, too, there are the musical comedies, made wholly out of sex,
+being known as "girl shows," or more frankly still, "leg shows." A row
+of half naked women, prancing and gyrating on the stage, and in front of
+them rows of bald-headed old men, gazing at them greedily; also college
+boys, or boys too imbecile to get through college, sending in their
+cards with boxes of costly flowers. You will be shocked as you read my
+plain statements of fact, but if you are the average American, you will
+take your family to a musical show which has come straight from the
+brothels of Paris, every allusion of which is obscene. I remember once
+being in a small town in the South, when one of these "road shows"
+arrived from New York, and I realized that this institution was simply a
+traveling house of ill fame; the whole male portion of the town was
+a-quiver with excitement, a mixture of lust and fear.
+
+I live in Southern California, one of many places in America where the
+idle rich gather for their diversion. The country is dotted with
+palatial hotels, and a golden flood of pleasure-seekers come in every
+winter. I have talked with some of the college boys in this part of the
+country, and also with teachers who try to save the boys; they report
+these "swell" hotels as hot-beds of vice, haunted by married women with
+automobiles, and nothing to do, who wish to go into the canyons for
+sexual riots. Even elderly women, white-haired women, old enough to be
+your grandmother! I have had them pointed out to me in these hotels,
+their cheeks and lips covered with rouge, with pink silk tights on their
+calves, and nothing else almost up to their knees and nothing at all
+half way down their backs. These old women seek to prey on boys, wanting
+their youth, and being willing to lavish money upon them. They are
+preying on your boys--you prosperous business men, who have preached the
+gospel of "each for himself," and are proud of your skill to prey upon
+society. You heap up your fortunes, and call it success, and are secure
+and happy. You have made your children safe against want, you think; but
+how are you going to make them safe against the "vamps" who prey upon
+the overwhelming excitements of youth, and betray your sons before your
+very eyes--teaching them lust in their youth, so that love may never be
+born in their stunted hearts? All the haunts of "gilded vice" are
+thriving, and somebody's boy is paying the interest on the capital, to
+say nothing of paying the police.
+
+Many years ago I paid a call upon Anthony Comstock, head of the Society
+for the Prevention of Vice. Comstock was an old-style Puritan, and many
+insist that he was likewise an old-style grafter. However that may be,
+he had a collection of the literature of pornography which would cause
+any man to hesitate in condemning his activities. There is a vast
+traffic in this kind of thing; it is sold by pack-peddlers all over the
+country, and it is sold in little shops in the neighborhood of public
+schools. You may be sure that in your school there are some boys who
+know where to get it, even though they will not tell what they know. I
+will describe just one piece that a school boy brought to me, a
+catalogue of obscene literature, for sale in Spain, and to be ordered
+wholesale. You know how men with wares to sell will expend their
+imaginations and exhaust their vocabulary in describing to you the
+charms of each particular article for sale. Here was a catalogue of one
+or two hundred pages, listing thousands of items, pictures, pamphlets
+and books, and various implements of vice, all set forth in that
+imitation ecstasy of department stores and seed catalogues: here was
+"something neat," here was a "fancy one," this one was "a peach," and
+that one was "a winner."
+
+When I was a lad, I was tramping in the Adirondack mountains and was
+picked up by an itinerant photographer. We rode all day together, and he
+became friendly, and showed me some obscene pictures. Presently he
+discovered that he was dealing with a young moralist, and apparently it
+was the first time he had ever had that experience; he talked honestly,
+and we became friends on a different basis. This man had a wife and
+children at home, but he traveled all over the mountains, and was like
+the sailor with a girl in every port. Also he was thoroughly familiar
+with all forms of unnatural vice, and took this also as a matter of
+course, and spread it on his journeys.
+
+The other day I read a statement by a prominent physician in New York;
+he had been talking with a police captain, and had asked him to state
+what in his opinion was the most significant development in the social
+life of New York. The answer was, "The spread of male prostitution."
+Here is a subject to which I have to admit my courage is unequal. I
+cannot repeat the jokes which I have heard young men tell about these
+matters, and about the attitude of the police to them. Suffice it to say
+that these hideous forms of vice are now the commonplace of the
+under-world of all our great cities. The other day a friend of mine was
+talking with a prostitute who had left a high-class resort, where the
+price charged was ten dollars, and gone to live in a "fifty-cent house,"
+frequented by sailors. She was asked the reason, and her explanation
+was, "The sailors are natural." Dr. William J. Robinson has written in
+his magazine an account of the haunts in Berlin which are frequented by
+the victims of unnatural vice, there allowed to meet openly and to
+solicit. Frank Harris, in his "Life of Oscar Wilde," tells how when that
+scandal was at its height, and further exposure threatened, swarms of
+the most prominent men in England suddenly discovered that it was
+advisable for them to travel on the Continent. The great public schools
+of England are rotten with these practices; the younger boys learn them
+from the older ones, and are victims all the rest of their lives. And
+the corruption is creeping through our own social body--and you think
+that all you have to do is not to know about it!
+
+My friend Floyd Dell, reading this manuscript, insists that this chapter
+and the one following are too severe. In case others should agree with
+him, I quote two newspaper items which appear while I am reading the
+proofs. The first is from an interview with H. Gordon Selfridge, the
+London merchant, telling his impressions of America. He tells about the
+"flappers," and then about the "shifters."
+
+"The other is the newly exploited 'shifters.' The 'shifters' are an
+organization of mushroom growth among high school girls and boys which
+is spreading through the eastern States and winning converts among
+youngsters. It is described as the 'flapper Ku Klux,' and its emblem, if
+worn by a girl, according to high school teachers and children's society
+leaders who oppose it, to be nothing more nor less than an invitation to
+be kissed.
+
+"To call it an organization even is exaggeration, for the 'shifters' are
+better described as a secret understanding without any responsible head.
+
+"From being a seemingly harmless group whose emblem was originally a
+brass paper clip fastened in the coat lapel it has developed by rapid
+strides. Manufacturers of emblems are coining money by the sale of
+hands, palm outstretched. The significance is take what you want or, as
+the motto of the order says, 'be a good fellow; get something for
+nothing.' One of the principles is to 'do' one's parents, referred to as
+'they.'"
+
+The second item is an Associated Press despatch:
+
+"ST. LOUIS, March 10.--In reiterating his statement that a girls' and a
+boys' secret organization requiring that all applicants must have
+violated the moral code before admission was granted, existed in a local
+high school, Victor J. Miller, president of the Board of Police
+Commissioners, tonight named the Soldan High School as the one in which
+the alleged immoral conditions exist. The school is attended largely by
+children of the wealthy West End citizens.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+SEX AND THE "SMART SET"
+
+     (Portrays the moral customs of those who set the fashion in our
+     present-day world.)
+
+
+We have discussed what is happening to our young people; let us next
+consider what our mature people are doing. Having mentioned conditions
+in England, I will give a glimpse of London "high life" two years before
+the war.
+
+As a visiting writer, I was invited to luncheon at the home of a woman
+novelist, whose books at that time were widely read both in her country
+and here. Present at the luncheon was a prominent publisher, who I
+afterwards learned was the lady's lover; also the lady's grown and
+married son. The publisher looked like a buxom hunting squire, but the
+lady told me that he was very unhappy, because his wife would not
+divorce him. The lady had just come from a week-end party at the home of
+an earl, who at this moment occupies one of the highest posts in the
+gift of the British Empire. Things had gone comically wrong at this
+country house party, she said, because the hostess had failed to
+remember that Lord So-and-so was at present living with Lady
+Somebody-else. One of the duties of hostesses at house parties, it
+appears, is to know who is living with whom, in order that they may be
+put in connecting rooms. In this case his Lordship had been grouchy, and
+everybody's pleasure had been spoiled.
+
+This produced a discussion of the subject of marriage, and the son
+remarked that marriage was like an old slipper; you wore it, because you
+had got used to it, but you did not talk about it, because it was
+unimportant and stupid. I went away, and happened to mention these
+matters to a friend, who had met this woman novelist in Nice. The
+novelist had there, in a group of people, been introduced to a young
+girl who was suffering from neurasthenia. "My dear," said the novelist,
+affectionately, "what you need is to have an illegitimate baby."
+
+This, you will say, is the "old world," and you always knew that it was
+corrupt. If so, let me tell you a few things that I have seen among the
+"upper circles" of our own great and virtuous democracy. My first
+acquaintance with New York "society" came after the publication of "The
+Jungle." As the author of that book I was a sensation, almost as much so
+as if I had won the heavy-weight championship of the world. Out of
+curiosity I accepted an invitation for a weekend amid what is called the
+"hunting set" of Long Island. Here was a gorgeous palace with many
+tapestries, and soft-footed servants, and decanters and cocktails at
+every stage of one's journey about the place, like coaling stations on
+the trade routes of the British Empire. One of the first sights that
+caught my young eye was a large and stately lady in semi-undress,
+smoking a big black cigar. If I were to mention her name, every
+newspaper reader in America would know her; and before I had been
+introduced to her, I heard two young men in evening dress make an
+obscene remark about her, and what she was waiting for that evening.
+
+I discovered quickly that, while there was a great deal of sex among
+these people, there was very little love. There was principally a wish
+to score cleverly and subtly at the expense of another person's
+feelings. It is called the "smart set," you understand, and I will give
+you an idea of how "smart" it is. I was walking down a passage with a
+lady, and on a couch sat another lady, side by side with a certain very
+famous lawyer, whose golden eloquence you have probably listened to from
+platforms, and whom for the purpose of this anecdote I will name Jones.
+Mr. Jones and the lady on the sofa were sitting very close together, and
+my companion, with a bright smile over her shoulder, called out: "Be
+careful, Mary; you'll be scattering a lot of little Joneses around here
+if you don't watch out!" Quite "continental," you perceive; and a long
+way from the Puritanism of our ancestors!
+
+From there I went to the billiard-room, and observed a young man of
+fashion trying to play billiards when he was half drunk. It was a funny
+spectacle, and they took away his cigarette by force, for fear he would
+drop it on the cloth of the billiard table. Pretty soon he was telling
+about a racing meet, and an orgy with negro women in a stable. Therefore
+I returned to where the ladies were gathered, and one middle-aged
+matron, who had read widely, including some of my books, engaged me in
+serious conversation. I came later on to know her rather well, and she
+told me her views of love; the source of all the sex troubles of
+humanity was that they took the relationship seriously. Modern
+discoveries made it unnecessary to attach importance to it. She herself,
+acting upon this theory, probably had had relations with--my friends,
+reading the proofs of this book, beg me to omit the number of men,
+because you would not believe me!
+
+You may argue that this is not typical; say that I fell into the
+clutches of some particular group of degenerates. All I can tell you is
+that these people are as "socially prominent" as any in New York City. I
+will say furthermore that I have sat in the home of the best known
+corporation lawyer in America, who was paid a million dollars to
+organize the steel trust--the late James B. Dill, at that time a member
+of the Court of Appeals of New Jersey--and have heard him "muck-rake"
+his business friends by the hour with stories of that sort. I have heard
+him tell of the "steel crowd" hiring a trolley car and a load of
+prostitutes and champagne, and taking an all-night trip from one city to
+another, smashing up both the car and the prostitutes. I have heard him
+tell of sitting on the deck of a Sound steamer, and overhearing two of
+his Wall Street associates and their wives arranging to trade partners
+for the night.
+
+I have mentioned a lady who had a great many lovers. Once in the
+dining-room of a club on Fifth Avenue, commonly known as "the
+Millionaires'," a companion pointed out various people, many of whom I
+had read about in the newspapers, and told me funny stories about them.
+"See that old boy with a note-book," said my host. "That is Jacob
+So-and-so, and he is entering up the cost of his lunch. He keeps
+accounts of everything, even of his women. He told me he had had over a
+thousand, and they had cost him over a million."
+
+It is impossible to say what is the most terrible thing in capitalist
+society, but among the most terrible are assuredly the old men. The
+richest and most powerful banker in America was in his sex habits the
+merry jest of New York society. He took toward women the same attitude
+as King Edward VII; if he wanted one, he went up and asked for her, and
+it made no difference who she was, or where she was. This man's personal
+living expenses were five thousand dollars a day, and all women
+understood that they might have anything within reason.
+
+When I was a boy, living in New York, there was a certain aged
+money-lender about whom one read something in the newspapers almost
+every day. He was a prominent figure, because he was worth eighty
+millions, yet wore an old, rusty black suit, and saved every penny.
+Every now and then you would read in the paper how some woman had been
+arrested for attempting to blackmail him in his office. It seemed
+puzzling, because you wouldn't think of him as a likely subject for
+blackmail. Some years later I met Dorothy Richardson, author of "The
+Long Day," a very fine book which has been undeservedly forgotten. Miss
+Richardson had been a reporter for the New York _Herald_, and had been
+sent to interview this old money-lender. She was ushered into his
+private office, and as soon as the attendant had gone out and closed the
+door, the old man came up, and without a word of preliminaries grabbed
+her in his arms like a gorilla. She fought and scratched, and got out,
+and was wise enough to say nothing about it; therefore there was nothing
+published about another attempt to blackmail the aged money-lender!
+
+What this means is that men of unlimited means live lives of unbridled
+lust, and then in their old age they are helpless victims of their own
+impulses. There was a certain enormously wealthy United States Senator
+from West Virginia, who came very near being Vice President of the
+United States. This doddering old man would go about the streets of
+Washington with a couple of very decorous and carefully trained
+attendants; and whenever an attractive young woman would pass on the
+street, or when one would approach the Senator, these two attendants
+would quietly slip their arms into his and hold him fast. They would do
+this so that the ordinary person would not suspect what was going on,
+but would think the old man was being supported.
+
+You do not have to take these things on my word; the newspapers are full
+of them all the time, and they are proven in court. Just now as I write,
+the president of the most powerful bank in America is claiming in court
+that his children are not his own, but that their father is an Indian
+guide. His wife, on the other hand, is accusing the banker of having
+played the role of husband to several other women. He would take these
+women traveling on his yacht, which, quaintly enough, was termed the
+"Modesty."
+
+Also the papers have been full of the "Hamon case." Here is a wealthy
+man, Republican National Committeeman from Oklahoma, who is about to go
+to Washington to advise our new President whom to appoint to office from
+that state. Before he goes, he casts off his mistress, and she shoots
+him. She was his secretary, it appears, and helped him to make his
+fortune; she has made many friends, and a million dollars is spent to
+save her life. The prosecuting attorney calls her a "painted snake," and
+accuses her of having sat week after week "displaying to the jury
+twenty-four inches of silk stockinged shin-bone." The jury, apparently
+unable to withstand this allurement, acquits the woman, and she
+announces that she intends to bring suit under the man's will to get his
+money! Also, she is going into the "movies," and tells us that it is to
+be "for educational purposes." Everything in our capitalist society must
+be "educational," you understand. It was P. T. Barnum who discovered
+that the American people would flock to look at a five-legged calf, if
+it was presented as "educational."
+
+The moving pictures and the theatres are the honey-pots which gather the
+feminine beauty and youthful charm of our country for the convenience of
+rich men's lust. These girls swarm in the theatrical agencies, and in
+the artists' studios; they starve for a while, and finally they yield.
+In every great city there are thousands of men of wealth, whose only
+occupation is to prey upon such girls. I know a certain theatrical
+manager, the most famous in the United States, a sensual, stout little
+Jew. He is a man of culture and subtle insight, and in the course of his
+conversation he described to me, quite casually and as a matter of
+course, the charm of deflowering a virgin. Nothing could equal that
+sensation; the first time was the last.
+
+Many years ago there was a horrible scandal in New York. The most famous
+architect in America was murdered, and the newspapers probed into his
+life, and it was revealed to us that many of the most famous artists and
+men about town in New York maintained elaborate studios, equipped with
+every luxury, all the paraphernalia of all the vices of the ages; and
+through these places there flowed an endless stream of beautiful young
+girls. In every large city in America you will find an "athletic club,"
+and if you go there and listen to the gossip, you discover that there
+are scores of idle rich men with automobiles and private apartments, and
+a staff of procurers used in preying, not merely upon young girls, but
+also upon young boys. And these are not merely the children of the poor,
+they are the children of all but the rich and powerful. In the "movies"
+you see pictures of girls lured into automobiles, and carried out into
+the country, or seduced by means of "knock-out drops," and you think
+this is just "melodrama"; but it is happening all the time. In every big
+city of our country the police know that hundreds of young girls
+disappear every year. At a recent convention of police chiefs in
+Washington, it was stated, from police records, that sixty thousand
+girls disappear every year in the United States, leaving no trace.
+Unless the parents happen to be in position to make a fuss, not even the
+names of the girls are published in the newspapers. I do not ask you to
+believe such things on my word; believe District Attorney Sims of
+Chicago, who made the most thorough study of this subject ever made in
+America, and wrote:
+
+"When a white slave is sold and landed in a house or dive she becomes a
+prisoner.... In each of these places is a room having but one door, to
+which the keeper holds the key. Here are locked all the street clothes,
+shoes and ordinary apparel.... The finery provided for the girls is of a
+nature to make their appearance on the street impossible. Then in
+addition to this handicap, the girl is placed at once in debt to the
+keeper for a wardrobe.... She cannot escape while she is in debt, and
+she can never get out of debt. Not many of the women in this class
+expect to live more than ten years--perhaps the average is less. Many
+die painful deaths by disease, many by consumption, but it is hardly
+beyond the truth to say that suicide is their general expectation."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+SEX AND THE POOR
+
+     (Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and the
+     diseases which result from it.)
+
+
+It is manifest that the rich cannot indulge in vices, without drawing
+the poor after them; and in addition to this, the poor have their own
+evil instincts, which fester in neglect. There were several hundred
+thousand dark rooms, that is rooms without light or ventilation, in New
+York City before the war. Now the country is reported to be short a
+million homes, and in New York City working girls are sleeping six or
+eight in a room. In the homes of the poor in the slums, parents and
+children and boarders all sleep in one room indiscriminately, and the
+world moves back to that primitive communism, in which incest is an
+everyday affair, and little children learn all the vices there are. I
+have in my hand a pamphlet by a physician, in charge of a hospital in
+New York, who in fifteen years has examined nine hundred children who
+have been raped, and the age of the youngest was eight months! I have
+another pamphlet by a settlement worker, who discusses the problem of
+the thousands of deserted wives, most of them with children, many with
+children yet unborn. As I write, there are millions of men out of work
+in our country, and these men are desperate, and they quit and take to
+the road. They join the army of the casual workers, the "blanket
+stiffs"; and, of course, the more there are of these men, the more
+prostitutes there have to be, and the more homosexuality there will
+inevitably be.
+
+Also the girls are out of work, and are on the streets. Many years ago I
+visited the mill towns of New England, "she-towns" they are called, and
+one of the young fellows said to me that you could buy a girl there for
+the price of a sandwich. Read "The Long Day," to which I have previously
+referred, and see how our working girls live. Dorothy Richardson
+describes her room-mate, who read cheap novels which she found in the
+gutter weeklies. She read them over and over; when she had got to the
+bottom of the pile, she began again, because her mind was so weak that
+she had forgotten everything. And then one day Miss Richardson happened
+to be groping in a corner of a closet, and came upon a great pile of
+bottles, and examined them, and was made sick with horror--abortion
+mixtures.
+
+Dr. William J. Robinson, an authority on the subject, estimates that
+there are one million abortions in the United States every year. Some of
+these are accidental, caused by venereal disease, but the vast majority
+are deliberate acts, crimes under the law, murder of human life. Dr.
+Robinson also estimates, from the many thousands of cases which come to
+him, that ninety-five per cent of all men have at some time practiced
+self-abuse. He is a strenuous opponent of what he calls "hysteria" on
+the subject of venereal disease, and insists that its prevalence is
+exaggerated; that instead of one person in ten being syphilitic, as is
+commonly stated, the proportion is only one in twenty. He insists that
+the percentage of persons having had gonorrhea is only twenty-five per
+cent, instead of seventy-five or eighty-five. I find that other
+authorities generally agree in the statement that fifty per cent of
+young men become infected with some venereal disease before they reach
+the age of thirty. The Committee of Seven in New York estimated in 1903
+that there were two hundred thousand cases of syphilis in the city, and
+eight hundred thousand of gonorrhea. There were villages in France
+before the war in which twenty-five per cent of the inhabitants were
+syphilitic, and in Russia there were towns in which it was said that
+every person was syphilitic. We may safely say that these latter are the
+only towns in Europe in which there was not an enormous increase of this
+disease during and since the war.
+
+What are the consequences of these diseases? The consequences are
+frightful suffering, not merely to persons guilty of immorality, but to
+innocent persons. Dr. Morrow, generally recognized as the leading
+authority on this subject, estimates that ten per cent of all wives are
+infected with venereal disease by their husbands; he estimates that
+thirty per cent of all the infected women in New York were wives who had
+got the disease from their husbands. It is estimated that thirty per
+cent of all the births, where either parent has syphilis, result in
+abortions. It is estimated that fifty per cent of childlessness in
+marriage is caused by gonorrhea, and twenty-five per cent of all
+existing blindness. In Germany, before the war, there were thirty
+thousand persons born blind from this cause. It is estimated that
+ninety-five per cent of all abdominal operations performed upon women
+are due to gonorrhea. And any of these horrors may fall upon persons who
+lead lives of the strictest chastity. There was a case reported in
+Germany of 236 children who contracted venereal disease from swimming in
+a public bath.
+
+All these things are products of our system of
+marriage-plus-prostitution. They are all part of that system, and no
+study of the system is complete without them. Everywhere throughout
+modern civilization prostitution is an enormous and lucrative industry.
+In New York it is estimated to give employment to two hundred thousand
+women, to say nothing of the managers, and the runners, and the men who
+live off the women. There are thousands of resorts, large and small,
+high-priced and cheap, and the police know all about it, and derive a
+handsome income from it. And you find it the same in every great city of
+the world; in every port where sailors land, or every place where crowds
+of men are expected. If there is to be a football game, or a political
+convention, the managers of the industry know about it, and while they
+may never have heard the libel that Socialism preaches sexual license,
+they all know that capitalism practices it, and they provide the
+necessary means. In the United States there are estimated to be a half a
+million prostitutes, counting the inmates of houses alone.
+
+During the late war, at the army bases in France, the British government
+maintained official brothels; but if you published anything about this
+in England, you ran a chance of having your paper suppressed. During the
+occupation of the Rhine country, the French sent in negro troops,
+savages from the heart of Africa, whose custom it is to cut off the ears
+of their enemies in battle; and the French army compelled the German
+population to supply white women for these troops. I have quoted in "The
+Brass Check" a pious editorial from the Los Angeles _Times_, bidding the
+mothers of America be happy, because "our boys in France" were safe in
+the protecting arms of the Y. M. C. A. and the Knights of Columbus. I
+dared not publish at this time a passage which I had clipped from the
+London _Clarion_, in which A. M. Thompson told how he watched the
+"doughboys" in the cafes of Paris, with a girl on each knee, and a
+glass of wine in each hand.
+
+I will add one little anecdote, giving you a glimpse of the sex
+conventions of war. The American army made desperate efforts to keep
+down venereal disease, and required all men to report to their
+regimental surgeon immediately after having had sex relations. Our army
+moved into Coblentz, and the regulations strictly forbade any
+fraternizing with the inhabitants. But immediately it was discovered
+that there was an increase of disease, and investigation was made, and
+revealed that men had been ceasing to report to the surgeons, because
+they were afraid of being punished for having "fraternized with the
+enemy." So a new order was issued, providing that having sexual
+intercourse would not be considered as "fraternizing." I do not know any
+better way to distinguish my ideal of morality from the military ideal,
+than to say that according to my understanding of it, the sex
+relationship should always and everywhere imply and include
+"fraternizing."
+
+Finally, in concluding this picture of our present-day sex arrangements,
+there is a brief word to be said about divorce. In the year 1916, the
+last statistics available as I write, there were just over a million
+marriages in the United States, and there were over one hundred and
+twelve thousand divorces. This would indicate that one marriage in every
+nine resulted in shipwreck. But as a matter of fact the proportion is
+greater, because the marriages necessarily precede the divorces, and the
+proportion of divorces in 1916 should be calculated upon the number of
+marriages which took place some five or ten years previously. Of the one
+million marriages in 1916, we may say that one in seven or one in eight
+will end in the divorce courts. Let this suffice for a glimpse of the
+system of marriage-plus-prostitution--a field of weeds which we have
+somehow to plow up and prepare for a harvest of rational and honest
+love!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+SEX AND NATURE
+
+     (Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of natural or
+     physical disharmony.)
+
+
+Elie Metchnikoff, one of the greatest of scientists, wrote a book
+entitled "The Nature of Man," in which he studied the human organism
+from the point of view of biology, demonstrating that in our bodies are
+a number of relics of past stages of evolution, no longer useful, but
+rather a source of danger and harm. We have, for example, in the inner
+corner of the eye a relic of that third eyelid whereby the eagle is
+enabled to look at the sun. This is a harmless relic. But we have also
+an appendix, a degenerate organ of digestion, or gland of secretion,
+which now serves as a center of infection and source of danger. We have
+likewise a lower bowel, a survival of our hay-eating days, and a cause
+of autointoxication and premature death. Among the sources of trouble,
+Metchnikoff names the fact that the human male possesses a far greater
+quantity of sexual energy than is required for purposes of procreation.
+This becomes a cause of disharmony and excess, it causes man to wreck
+his health and destroy himself.
+
+Manifestly, this is a serious matter; for if it is true, our efforts to
+find health and happiness in love are doomed to failure, and Lecky is
+right when he describes the prostitute as the "guardian of virtue," the
+eternal and necessary scapegoat of humanity. But I do not believe it is
+true; I think that here is one more case of the endless blundering of
+scientists and philosophers who attempt to teach physiology, politics,
+religion and law, without having made a study of economics. I do not
+believe that the sex troubles of mankind are physiological in their
+nature, but have their origin in our present system of class privilege.
+I believe they are caused, not by the blunders of nature, but by the
+blunders of man as a social animal.
+
+Let us take a glimpse at primitive man. I choose the Marquesas Islands,
+because we have complete reports about them from numerous observers.
+Here was a race of people, not interfered with by civilization, who
+manifested all that overplus of sexual energy to which Metchnikoff calls
+attention. They placed no restraint whatever upon sex activity, they had
+no conception of such an idea. Their games and dances were sex play, and
+so also, in great part, was their religion. Yet we do not find that they
+wrecked themselves. Physically speaking, they were one of the most
+perfect races of which we have record. Both the men and women were
+beautiful; they were active and strong from childhood to old age,
+and--here is the significant thing--they were happy. They were a
+laughing, dancing, singing race. They hardly knew grief or fear at all.
+They knew how to live, and they enjoyed every process and aspect of
+their lives, just as children do, naively and simply. This included
+their sex life; and I think it assures us that there can be no such
+fundamental physical disharmony in the human organism as the great
+Russian scientist thought he had discovered.
+
+Is it not a fact that throughout nature a superfluity of any kind of
+energy or product may be a source of happiness, rather than of distress?
+Consider the singing of the birds! Or consider nature's impulse to cover
+a field with useless plants, and how by a little cunning, we are able to
+turn it into a harvest for our own use! In the life of our bodies one
+may show the same thing again and again. We have within us the
+possibility of and the impulse toward more muscular activity than our
+survival makes necessary; but we do not regard this additional energy as
+a curse of nature, and a peril to our lives--we turn out and play
+baseball. We have an impulse to see more than is necessary, so we climb
+mountains, or go traveling. We have an impulse to hear more, so we go to
+a concert. We have an impulse to think more, so we play chess, or whist,
+or write books and accumulate libraries. Never do we think of these
+activities as signs of an irrevocable blunder on the part of nature.
+
+But about the activities of love we feel differently; and why is this?
+If I say that it is because we have an unwholesome and degraded attitude
+toward love, because, as a result of religious superstition we fear it,
+and dare not deal with it honestly, the reader may suspect that I am
+preparing to hint at some self-indulgence, some form of sex orgy such as
+the "turkey trot" and the "bunny hug" and the "grizzly bear," the
+"shimmy" and the "toddle" and the "cuddle." I hasten to explain that I
+do not mean any of the abnormalities and monstrosities of present-day
+fashionable life. Neither do I mean that we should set out to emulate
+the happy cannibals in the South Seas. In the Book of the Mind I set
+forth as carefully as I knew how, the difference between nature and man,
+the life of instinct and the life of reason. It is my conviction that if
+civilized life is to go on, there must be a far wider extension of
+judgment and self-control in human affairs; our lost happiness will be
+found, not by going "back to nature," but by going forward to a new and
+higher state, planned by reason and impelled by moral idealism.
+
+But we find ourselves face to face with horrible sex disorders, and a
+great scientist tells us they are nature's tragic blunder, of which we
+are the helpless victims. Manifestly, the way to decide this question is
+to go to nature, and see if primitive people, having the same physical
+organism as ours, had the same troubles and spent their lives in the
+same misery. If they did, then it may be that we are doomed; but if they
+did not, then we can say with certainty that it is not nature, but
+ourselves, who have blundered. Our task then becomes to apply reason to
+the problem; to take our present sex arrangements, our field of
+bad-smelling weeds, and plow it thoroughly, and sow it with good seed,
+and raise a harvest of happiness in love. It is my belief that,
+admitting true love--honest and dignified and rational love--it is
+possible to pour into it any amount of sex energy, to invent a whole new
+system of beautiful and happy love play.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+LOVE AND ECONOMICS
+
+     (Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due to the
+     displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.)
+
+
+If the cause of our sex disorders is not physiological, what is it?
+Everything in nature must have a cause, and this includes human nature,
+the actions and feelings of men, both as individuals and as groups. We
+hear the saying: "You can't change human nature"; but the fact is that
+human nature is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can
+watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, and if we
+had the intelligence to use the forces now at our command, we could mold
+human nature, as precisely as a brewer converts a carload of hops into a
+certain brand of beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and
+virtue are products like vinegar."
+
+Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and class
+privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and the natural
+sources of wealth by a group. This enables the privileged group to live
+in idleness upon the labor of the rest of society; it confers unlimited
+power with practically no responsibility--a strain which not one human
+being in a thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the
+past five thousand years is one demonstration after another that the
+conferring upon a class of power without responsibility means the
+collapse of that class and the downfall of its civilization.
+
+So far as concerns the ruling class male, what the system of privilege
+does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge his sex desires. What
+it does for the female is to submit her to the male desires, and to
+abolish that mutuality in sex, that interaction between male and female
+influence, which is the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a
+predatory society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of class as
+well as of sex, and the result is the perverting of sexual selection,
+and a constantly increasing tendency towards the survival of the unfit.
+
+In a state of nature the males compete among themselves for the favor of
+the female. The female is not raped, nor is she kidnapped; on the
+contrary, she exercises her prerogative, she inspects the various male
+charms which are set before her, and selects those which please her,
+according to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak
+and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce themselves, and the
+procreating is done by the highest specimens of the type.
+
+But now we have a world which is ruled by money, in which opportunity,
+and indeed survival, depend upon money, and the whole tendency of
+society is to make money standards supreme. We do not like to admit
+this, of course; our instincts revolt against it, and our higher
+faculties reinforce the revolt, so we carefully veil our money motives,
+and invent polite phrases to conceal them. You will hear people deny it
+is money which determines admission into what is called "society," the
+intimate life of the ruling class. They will tell you that it is not
+money, it is "good taste," "refinement," "charm of personality," and so
+on. But if you analyze all these things, you speedily discover that they
+are made out of money; they are symbols of the possession of money,
+devised by those who possess it, as a means of keeping themselves apart
+from those who do not possess it. I would safely defy a member of the
+ruling class to name a single element in what he calls "refinement," or
+"good taste," that is not in its ultimate analysis a symbol of the
+possession of money. Let it be the pronunciation of a word, or the cut
+of a coat, or the method of handling a fork--whatever it may be, it is
+part of a code, revealing that the person, or more important yet, the
+ancestors of the person, have belonged to the leisure class, and have
+had time and opportunity to learn to do things in a certain precise
+conventional way. I say "conventional," for very frequently these tests
+have no relationship whatever to reality. Considered as a matter of
+common sense and convenience, it is a great deal better to eat peas with
+a spoon than with a fork, and to use both a knife and fork in eating
+lettuce; but if you eat peas with a spoon, or use a knife on lettuce,
+every member of the ruling class will instantly know that you are an
+interloper, as much so as if you took to throwing the china at your
+hostess.
+
+Our culture is a money culture, our standards are money standards, and
+our sex decisions are based upon money, not upon love. Any man can have
+money in our society, provided the accident of birth favors him, and it
+is everywhere known that any man who has money can get a wife. It is
+certainly not true that any man with _no_ money can get a wife, and it
+is true that most men who have little money have to take wives who have
+less--that is, who belong to a lower class, according to the world's
+standards. The average young girl of the propertied classes is trained
+for marriage as for any other business. She is taught to be sexually
+cold, but to imitate sexual excitement deliberately, so as to arouse it
+in the male, and to keep herself surrounded with a swarm of males; this
+being the basis of her prestige, the factor which will cause the
+"eligible" man, the "catch," to desire her. In polite society this
+proceeding is known as "coquetry," or "charm," and it would be no
+exaggeration to say that seventy-five per cent of all the novels so far
+written in the world are expositions of this activity; also that when we
+go to the theater, we go in order to watch and sympathize with these
+manifestations of pecuniary sexuality.
+
+As a rule the young girl knows what she is doing, but she is taught to
+camouflage it, to preserve her "innocence." She would not dream of
+marrying for money; she wants to marry something "distinguished"--that
+is to say, something which has received the stamp of approval from a
+world which approves money. She wants to marry somebody who is
+"elegant," who is in "good form"; she wants to marry without having to
+think about the horrid subject of money at all, and so she is carefully
+chaperoned, and confined to a world where nothing but money is to be
+met. In Tennyson's poem, "The Northern Farmer," the old fellow is
+coaching his son on the subject of marriage, and they are driving along
+a road, and the farmer listens to his horses' hoofs, and they are
+saying, "Proputty, proputty, proputty!" The farmer sums up in one
+sentence the doctrine of pecuniary marriage as it is taught to the
+ruling class virgin: "Doaen't thee marry for money, but goae wheer money
+is."
+
+In this process, of course, the ruling class virgin must spend a great
+deal of money in order to keep up her own prestige; and when she is
+married, she must spend it to keep up the prestige of her unmarried
+sisters, and then of her children. As a result of this, the only ruling
+class males who can afford to marry are the rich ones. There are always
+some who are richer, and these are the most desirable; so the tendency
+with each generation is to put the period of marriage further off; the
+man has to wait until he has accumulated enough "proputty" to satisfy
+the girl of his desires--a girl whom he admires because of her pecuniary
+prestige. He delays, and meantime he satisfies his passions with the
+daughters of the poor. As a result of this, when he does finally come to
+marry, he is apt to be unlovely and unlovable. The woman frequently does
+not love him at all, but takes him cold-bloodedly because he is
+"eligible"; in that case she is a cold and "sexless" wife. Or else,
+after she has married him she discovers his unloveliness, and either
+decides that all men are selfish brutes, and reconciles herself to a
+celibate life, or else she goes out and preys upon the domestic
+happiness of other women.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+MARRIAGE AND MONEY
+
+     (Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher form of
+     prostitution known as the "marriage of convenience.")
+
+
+I realize that all these sex problems are complicated. Every case is
+individual, and in no two cases can you give exactly the same
+explanation. But it is my thesis that whatever the cause, if you trace
+down the causes of the cause, you will find economic inequality and
+class privilege. It is evident in the lives of the rich, and it is even
+more evident in the lives of the poor, who are not permitted the luxury
+of pretense. The poor live in a world dominated by forces which they
+seldom understand, subjected to enormous pressure which crushes and
+destroys them, without their being able to see it or touch it. In the
+world of the poor there is first of all poverty; there is insecurity of
+employment and insufficiency of wage, and the daily and hourly terror of
+starvation and ruin. Above this is a world of power and luxury, a
+wonderland of marvels and thrills, seen through a colored mist of
+romance. The working-class girl, born to drudgery and perpetual
+child-bearing, has a brief hour in which her cheeks are red and her
+beauty is ripe; and out of the heaven above her steps a male creature
+panoplied in the armor of ruling class prestige--that is to say, a dress
+suit--and scattering about him a shower of automobile rides, jewelry and
+candy and flowers. She opens her arms to him; and then, when her brief
+hour of rapture is past, she becomes the domestic drudge of some
+workingman, or else the inmate of a brothel.
+
+It is a custom of social workers and church people, seeking data about
+these painful subjects, to interview numbers of prostitutes, and
+question them as to the causes of their "fall"; so you read statistics
+to the effect that seventeen per cent of prostitution has an economic
+cause, that twenty-six per cent is caused by love of finery, etc. These
+pious people, employed by the ruling class to maintain ruling class
+prestige by demonstrating that wage slavery has nothing to do with
+white slavery, attain their purpose by restricting the word "economic"
+to food and shelter; forgetting that young girls do not live by bread
+alone, but also by ribbons, and silk stockings, and moving picture
+shows, and trips to Coney Island, and everything else that gives a
+momentary escape from drudgery into joy. We all understand, of course,
+that the daughters of the rich are entitled to joy, and we provide them
+with it as a matter of course; but the daughters of the poor are
+supposed to work in a cotton mill ten or eleven hours a day from
+earliest childhood, and the joy we provide for them is vicarious. As a
+woman poet sets it forth:
+
+    "The golf links lie so near the mill
+       That almost every day
+     The laboring children can look out
+       And see the men at play."
+
+Some years ago my wife and I were invited to meet Mrs. Mary J. Goode, a
+keeper of brothels in the "Tenderloin," who had revolted against the
+system of police graft, and had exposed it in the newspapers. My wife
+questioned her closely as to the psychology of people in her business,
+and she insisted that the majority of prostitutes were not oversexed,
+nor were they feeble minded; they were women who had loved and trusted,
+and had been "thrown down." As Mrs. Goode phrased it, they said to
+themselves: "Never again! After this, they'll pay!"
+
+As a matter of fact, the causes of prostitution are so largely economic
+that the other factors are hardly worth mentioning. The sale of sex is
+unknown in savage society, and would be unknown in a Socialist society.
+If here and there some degenerate individual would rather sell her sex
+than do her share of honest labor in a free and just world, such an
+individual would become a patient in the psychopathic ward of a public
+hospital. Economic forces drive women to prostitution, first, by direct
+starvation, and second, by teaching them money standards of prestige,
+the ideal of living without working, which is the heaven achieved by the
+rich and longed for by the poor. Contributory to the process are
+policemen, politicians, and judges who protect the property of the rich,
+and prey upon the disinherited; also newspaper editors, college
+professors, priests of God and preachers of Jesus, who attribute the
+social evil to "original sin," or the "weakness of human nature."
+
+So far as men are concerned, economic forces operate by three main
+channels; late marriage, loveless marriage, and drudgery in wives. You
+will find patronizing and maintaining the brothels the following kinds
+of males; first, young boys who have been taught that it is "manly" to
+gratify their sex impulses; second, young men who take it for granted
+that they cannot afford to marry; third, old bachelors who have looked
+at marriage and decided that it is not a paying proposition; fourth,
+married men who have been picked out for their money, and have come to
+the conclusion that "good women" are necessarily sexless; and finally,
+married men whose wives have lost the power to charm them by continuous
+childbearing, and the physical and nervous strain of domestic slavery.
+
+This latter applies not merely to the wives of the poor. It applies to
+members of the middle classes, and even of the richer classes, because
+the job of managing many servants is often as trying as the doing of
+one's own work. To explain how domestic drudgery is caused by economic
+pressure would require a little essay in itself. The home is the place
+where the man keeps his sex property apart under lock and key, and it
+is, therefore, the portion of our civilization least influenced by
+modern ideas. Women still drudge in separate kitchens and nurseries, as
+they have drudged for thousands of years. They cook their dinners over
+separate fires, and have each their own little group of children,
+generally ill cared for, because the work is done by an untrained
+amateur. Moreover, the prestige of this home has to be kept up, because
+the social position and future prosperity of the man depend upon it. The
+children must be dressed in frilled and starched clothing, which makes
+them miserable, and wears out the tempers and pocketbooks of the
+mothers. Costly entertainments must be given, and twice a day a meal
+must be prepared for the father of the family--all good wives have
+learned the ancient formula for the retention of masculine affections:
+"Feed the brute!" Living in a world of pecuniary prestige, every
+particle of the woman's surplus energy must go into some form of
+ostentation, into buying or making things which are futile and
+meaningless. In such a blind world, dazed by such a struggle, women
+become irritable, they lose their sex charm, they forget all about
+love; so the husband gives up hoping for the impossible, accepts the
+common idea that love and marriage are incompatible, and adopts the
+formula that what his wife doesn't know will not hurt her.
+
+And step by step, as economic evolution progresses, as vested wealth
+becomes more firmly established and claims for itself a larger and
+larger share of the total product of society--so step by step you find
+the pecuniary ideals becoming more firmly established, you find marriage
+becoming more and more a matter of property, and less and less a matter
+of love. In European countries there may still be some love marriages
+among the poor, but in the upper classes there is no longer any pretense
+of such a thing, and if you spoke of it you would be considered absurd.
+In countries of fresh and naive commercialism, like America, the women
+select the men because of their money prestige; but in Germany, the
+process has gone a step further--the men are so firmly established in
+their class positions that they insist upon being bought with a fortune.
+The same is true when titled foreigners condescend to visit our "land of
+the dollar." They will stoop to a vulgar American wife only in case her
+parents will make a direct settlement of a fortune upon the husband, and
+then they take her back home, and find their escape from boredom in the
+highly cultivated mistresses of their own land.
+
+Everywhere on the Continent, and in Great Britain also, it is accepted
+that marriages are matters of business, and only incidentally and very
+slightly of affection. The initiative is commonly taken, not by the
+young people, but by the heads of the families. Preliminary protocols
+are exchanged, and then the family solicitors sit down and bargain over
+the matter. If they were making a deal for a carload of hams, they would
+be governed by the market price of hams at the moment, also by the
+reputation of that particular brand of ham; and similarly, in the case
+of marriage, they are governed by the prestige of the family names, and
+the market price of husbands prevailing. Always the man exacts a cash
+settlement, and in Catholic countries he becomes the outright owner of
+all the property of his wife, thus reducing her completely to the status
+of a chattel. If any young couple dares to break through these laws of
+their class, the whole class unites to trample them down. One of the
+greatest of English novelists, George Meredith, wrote his greatest
+novel, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," to show how, under the most
+favorable circumstances, the union of a ruling class youth with a
+farmer's daughter could result in nothing but shipwreck.
+
+The country in which the property marriage is most firmly established is
+probably France; and in France the rights of nature are recognized in a
+kind of supplementary union, which constitutes what is known as the
+"domestic triangle," or in the French language, "_la vie trois_." The
+young girl of the French ruling classes is guarded every moment of her
+life like a prisoner in jail. She is sold in marriage, and is expected
+to bear her husband an heir, possibly two or three children. After that,
+she is considered, not under the law or by the church, but by the
+general common sense of the community, to be free to seek satisfaction
+of her love needs. Her husband has mistresses, and she has a lover, and
+to that lover she is faithful, and in her dealings with him she is
+guided by an elaborate and subtle code. Practically all French fiction
+and drama deal with this "life in threes," and the complications and
+tragedies which result from it. I name one novel, simply because it
+happens to be the last that I myself have read, "The Red Lily," by
+Anatole France.
+
+Of course, every human being knows in his heart that this is a monstrous
+arrangement, and there are periods of revolt when real feeling surges up
+in the hearts of men, and we have stories of true love, young and
+unselfish love, such for example as Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," or
+St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," or Halevy's "L'Abbe Constantin."
+Everybody reads these stories and weeps over them, but everybody knows
+that they are like the romantic shepherds and shepherdesses of the
+ancient regime; they never had any existence in reality, and are not
+meant to be taken seriously. If anybody attempts to carry them into
+action, or to preach them seriously to the young, then we know that we
+are dealing with a disturber of the foundations of the social order, a
+dangerous and incendiary villain, and we give him a name which sends a
+shudder down the spine of every friend of law and order--we call him a
+"free-lover."
+
+I see before my eyes the wretch cowering upon the witness stand, and the
+virtuous district attorney, who has perhaps spent the previous night in
+a brothel, pointing a finger of accusing wrath into his face, and
+thundering, "Do you believe in free love?" The wretch, if he is wise,
+will not hesitate or parley; he will not ask what the district attorney
+means by love, or what he means by freedom. Here in very truth is a case
+where "he who hesitates is lost!" Let the wretch instantly answer, No,
+he does not believe in free love, he believes in love that pays cash as
+it goes; he believes in love that investigates carefully the prevailing
+market conditions, decides upon a reasonable price, has the contract in
+writing, and lives up to the bargain--"till death do us part." If the
+witness be a woman, let the answer be that she believes in slave love;
+that she expects to be sold for the benefit of her parents, the prestige
+of her family and the social position of her future offspring. Let her
+say that she will be a loyal and devoted servant, and will never do
+anything at any time to invalidate the contract which is signed for her
+by her parents or guardians.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+LOVE VERSUS LUST
+
+     (Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it should be
+     followed and when repressed.)
+
+
+We have considered the sex disorders of our age and their causes. We
+have now to grope our way towards a basis of sanity and health in these
+vital matters.
+
+Consider man, as Metchnikoff describes him, with his overplus of sex
+energy. From early youth he is besieged by impulses and desires, and as
+a rule is left entirely uninstructed on the subject, having to pick up
+his ideas from the conversation of older lads, who have nothing but
+misinformation and perversions to give him. Nearly all these older lads
+declare and believe that it is necessary to gratify the sex impulse,
+that physically it is harmful not to do so. I have even heard physicians
+and trainers maintain that idea. Opposed to them are the official
+moralists and preachers of religion, who declare that to follow the sex
+impulse, except when officially sanctioned by the church, is to commit
+sin.
+
+At different times in my life I have talked with all kinds of people,
+young and old, men and women, doctors and clergymen, teachers and
+trainers of athletes, and a few wise and loving mothers who have talked
+with their own boys and other boys. As a result I have come to agree
+with neither side in the debate. I believe that there is a distinction
+which must be drawn, and I ask you to consider it carefully, and bear it
+in mind in all that I say on the problem of happiness and health in sex.
+
+I believe that a normal man is one being, manifesting himself in various
+aspects, physical, emotional, intellectual. I believe that all these
+aspects of human activity go normally together, and cannot normally be
+separated, and that the separation of them is a perversion and source of
+harm. I believe that the sex impulse, as it normally manifests itself,
+and would manifest itself in a man if he were living a normal life, is
+an impulse which includes every aspect of the man's being. It is not
+merely physical desire and emotional excitement; it is intellectual
+curiosity, a deep and intense interest, not merely in the body, but in
+the mind and heart and personality of the woman.
+
+I appreciate that there is opportunity for controversy here. As a matter
+of psychology, it is not easy to separate instinct from experience, to
+state whether a certain impulse is innate or acquired. Some may argue
+that savages know nothing about idealism in sex, neither do those modern
+savages whom we breed in city slums; some may make the same assertion
+concerning a great mass of loutish and sensual youths. We have got so
+far from health and soundness that it is hard to be sure what is
+"normal" and what is "ideal." But without going into metaphysics, I
+think we can reasonably make the following statement concerning the sex
+impulse at its first appearance in the average healthy youth in
+civilized societies; that this impulse, going to the roots of the being,
+affecting every atom of energy and every faculty, is accompanied, not
+merely by happiness, but by sympathetic delight in the happiness of the
+woman, by interest in the woman, by desire to be with her, to stay with
+her and share her life and protect her from harm. In what I have to say
+about the subject from now on, I shall describe this condition of being
+and feeling by the word "love."
+
+But now suppose that men should, for some reason or other, evolve a set
+of religious ideas which denied love, and repudiated love, and called it
+a sin and a humiliation; or suppose there should be an economic
+condition which made love a peril, so that the young couple which
+yielded to love would be in danger of starvation, or of seeing their
+children starve. Suppose there should be evolved classes of men and
+women, held by society in a condition of permanent semi-starvation;
+then, under such conditions, the impulse to love would become a trap and
+a source of terror. Then the energies of a great many men would be
+devoted to suppressing love and strangling it in themselves; then the
+intellectual and spiritual sanctions of love would be withdrawn, the
+beauty and charm and joy would go out of it, and it would become a
+starving beggar at the gates, or a thief skulking in the night-time, or
+an assassin with a dagger and club. In other words, sex would become all
+the horror that it is today, in the form of purchased vice, and more
+highly purchased marriage, and secret shame, and obscure innuendo. So we
+should have what is, in a civilized man, a perversion, the possibility
+of love which is physical alone; a purely animal thing in a being who is
+not purely animal, but is body, mind and spirit all together. So it
+would be possible for pitiful, unhappy man, driven by the blind urge of
+nature, to conceive of desiring a woman only in the body, and with no
+care about what she felt, or what she thought, or what became of her
+afterwards.
+
+That purely physical sex desire I will indicate in our future
+discussions by the only convenient word that I can find, which is lust.
+The word has religious implications, so I explain that I use it in my
+own meaning, as above. There is a great deal of what the churches call
+lust, which I call true and honest love; on the other hand, in Christian
+churches today, there are celebrated innumerable marriages between
+innocent young girls and mature men of property, which I describe as
+legalized and consecrated lust.
+
+We are now in position to make a fundamental distinction. I assert the
+proposition that there does not exist, in any man, at any time of his
+life, or in any condition of his health, a necessity for yielding to the
+impulses of lust; and I say that no man can yield to them without
+degrading his nature and injuring himself, not merely morally, but
+mentally, and in the long run physically. I assert that it is the duty
+of every man, at all times and under all circumstances, to resist the
+impulses of lust, to suppress and destroy them in his nature, by
+whatever expenditure of will power and moral effort may be required.
+
+I know physicians who maintain the unpopular thesis that serious damage
+may be done to the physical organism of both man and woman by the long
+continued suppression of the sex-life. Let me make plain that I am not
+disagreeing with such men. I do not deny that repression of the sex-life
+may do harm. What I do deny is that it does any harm to repress a
+physical desire which is unaccompanied by the higher elements of sex;
+that is to say, by affection, admiration, and unselfish concern for the
+sex-partner and her welfare. When I advise a man to resist and suppress
+and destroy the impulse toward lust in his nature, I am not telling him
+to live a sexless life. I am telling him that if he represses lust, then
+love will come; whereas, if he yields to lust, then love may never come,
+he may make himself incapable of love, incapable of feeling it or of
+trusting it, or of inspiring it in a woman. And I say that if, on the
+other hand, he resists lust, he will pour all the energies of his being
+into the channels of affection and idealism. Instead of having his
+thoughts diverted by every passing female form, his energies will become
+concentrated upon the search for one woman who appeals to him in
+permanent and useful ways. We may be sure that nature has not made men
+and women incompatible, but on the contrary, has provided for
+fulfillment of the desires of both. The man will find some woman who is
+looking for the thing which he has to offer--that is, love.
+
+And now, what about the suppression of love? Here I am willing to go as
+far as any physician could desire, and possibly farther. Speaking
+generally, and concerning normal adult human beings, I say that the
+suppression of love is a crime against nature and life. I say that long
+continued and systematic suppression of love exercises a devastating
+effect, not merely upon the body, but upon the mind and all the energies
+of the being. I say that the doctrine of the suppression of love, no
+matter by whom it is preached, is an affront to nature and to life, and
+an insult to the creator of life. I say that it is the duty of all men
+and women, not merely to assert their own right to love, but to devote
+their energies to a war upon whatever ideas and conventions and laws in
+society deny the love-right.
+
+The belief that long continued suppression of love does grave harm has
+been strongly reinforced in the last few years by the discovery of
+psycho-analysis, a science which enables us to explore our unconscious
+minds, and lay bare the secrets of nature's psychic workshop. These
+revelations have made plain that sex plays an even more important part
+in our mental lives than we realized. Sex feeling manifests itself, not
+merely in grown people, but in the tiniest infants; in these latter it
+has of course no object in the opposite sex, but the physical sensations
+are there, and some of their outward manifestations; and as the infant
+grows, and realizes the outside world, the feelings come to center upon
+others, the parents first of all. These manifestations must be guided,
+and sometimes repressed; but if this is done violently, by means of
+terror, the consequences may be very harmful--the wrong impulses or the
+terrors may survive as a "complex" in the unconscious mind, and cause a
+long chain of nervous disorders and physical weaknesses in the adult.
+These things are no matter of guesswork, they have been proven as
+thoroughly as any scientific discovery, and are used in a new technic of
+healing. Of course, as with every new theory, there are unbalanced
+people who carry it to extremes. There are fanatics of Freudianism who
+talk as if everything in the human unconsciousness were sex; but that
+need not blind us to the importance of these new discoveries, and the
+confirmation they bring to the thesis that sane and normal love, wisely
+guided by common sense and reasoned knowledge, is at a certain period of
+life a vital necessity to every sound human being.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+CELIBACY VERSUS CHASTITY
+
+     (The ideal of the repression of the sex impulse, as against the
+     ideal of its guidance and cultivation.)
+
+
+There are two words which we need in this discussion, and as they are
+generally used loosely, they must now be defined precisely. The two
+words are celibacy and chastity. We define celibacy as the permanent and
+systematic suppression of love. We define chastity, on the other hand,
+as the permanent and systematic suppression of lust. Chastity, as the
+word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing for it; it
+is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially in the young, of
+consecrating their beings to the search for love, and to becoming worthy
+for love. In that sense we regard chastity as one of the most essential
+of virtues in the young. It is widely taught today, but ineffectively,
+because unintelligently and without discrimination; because, in other
+words, it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and
+one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases.
+
+The origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. At a certain
+stage in human development the eyes of the mind are opened, and to some
+man comes a revelation of the life of altruism and sympathetic
+imagination. To use the common phrase, the man discovers his spiritual
+nature. But under the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside
+him is in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and
+trample it into the mire. One of the most powerful of these destructive
+agencies, as it seems to the man, is sex. By means of sex he is laid
+hold upon by strange and terrible creatures who do not understand his
+higher vision, but seek only to prey upon him, and use him for their
+convenience. At the worst they rob him of everything, money, health,
+time and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they put
+him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. In the words of a
+wise old man of the world, Francis Bacon, "He who marries and has
+children gives hostages to fortune." In a world wherein war, pestilence,
+and famine held sway, the man of family had but slight chance of
+surviving as a philosopher or prophet or saint. Discovering in himself a
+deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, he
+imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away to the desert,
+and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and lashed himself with whips,
+and allowed worms and lice to devour his body, in the effort to destroy
+in himself the impulse of sex.
+
+So the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, not of much use,
+but better than nothing; and so we still have in the world celibate
+priesthoods, and what is more dangerous to our social health, we have
+the old, degraded notions of the essential vileness of the sex
+relationship--notions permeating all our thought, our literature, our
+social conventions and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true
+wisdom and health and happiness in love.
+
+I say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral disease; it is
+a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her energies to breaking
+it down, and she always succeeds. There never has been a celibate
+religious order, no matter how noble its origin and how strict its
+discipline, which has not sooner or later become a breeding place of
+loathsome unnatural vices. And sooner or later the ideal begins to
+weaken, and common sense to take its place, and so we read in history
+about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who have "nieces"
+and attractive servant girls. Make the acquaintance of any police
+sergeant in any big city of America, and get him to chatting on friendly
+terms, and you will discover that it is a common experience for the
+police in their raids upon brothels to catch the representatives of
+celibate religious orders. As one old-timer in the "Tenderloin" of New
+York said to me, "Of course, we don't make any trouble for the good
+fathers." Nor was this merely because the old sergeant was an Irishman
+and a Catholic; it was because deep down in his heart he knew, as every
+man knows, that the craving of a man for the society and companionship
+of a woman is an overwhelming craving, which will break down every
+barrier that society may set against it.
+
+There is another form of celibacy which is not based upon religious
+ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely selfish in its nature.
+It is unorganized and unreasoned, and is known as "bachelorhood"; it has
+as its complements the institutions of old maidenhood and of
+prostitution. Both forms of celibacy, the religious and the economic,
+are entirely incompatible with chastity, which is only possible where
+love is recognized and honored. Chastity is a preparation for love; and
+if you forbid love, whether by law, or by social convention, or by
+economic strangling, you at once make chastity a Utopian dream. You may
+preach it from your pulpits until you are black in the face; you may
+call out your Billy Sundays to rave, and dance, and go into convulsions;
+you may threaten hell-fire and brimstone until you throw whole audiences
+into spasms--but you will never make them chaste. On the contrary,
+strange and horrible as it may seem, those very excitements will turn
+into sexual excitements before your eyes! So subtle is our ancient
+mother nature, and so determined to have her own way!
+
+The abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of womanhood, its
+distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, is not yet dead in the
+world. It is in our very bones, and is forever appearing in new and
+supposed to be modern forms. Take a man like Tolstoi, who gained
+enormous influence, not merely in Russia, but throughout the world among
+people who think themselves liberal--humanitarians, pacifists,
+philosophic anarchists. Tolstoi's notions about sex, his teachings and
+writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one continuous
+manifestation of disease. All through his youth and middle years, as an
+army officer, popular novelist, and darling of the aristocracy, his life
+was one of license, and the attitude toward women he thus acquired, he
+never got out of his thoughts to his last day. Gorky, meeting him in his
+old age, reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole
+attitude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome slyness.
+
+But Tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the great moral
+consciences of humanity. He looked about him at a world gone mad with
+greed and hate, and he made convulsive efforts to reform his own spirit
+and escape the power of evil. As regards sex, his thought took the form
+of ancient Christian celibacy. Man must repudiate the physical side of
+sex, he must learn to feel toward women a "pure" affection, the
+relationship of brother and sister. In his novel, "Resurrection,"
+Tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a beautiful peasant girl
+and conceives for her such a noble and generous emotion; but gradually
+the poison of physical sex-desire steals into his mind, he seduces her,
+and she becomes a prostitute. Later in life, when he discovers the crime
+he has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, and
+wins her to God and goodness by the unselfish and unsexual love which he
+should have maintained from the beginning.
+
+It was Tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward this kind of
+love, and when it was pointed out to him that if this doctrine were to
+be applied universally, the human race would become extinct, his answer
+was that there was no reason to fear that, because only a few people
+would be good enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! Here
+you see the reincarnation of the old Christian notion that we are
+"conceived in sin and born in iniquity." We may be pure and good, and
+cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life continue. Some choose to
+sin, and these sinners hand down their sinful qualities to the future;
+and so virtue and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile
+crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom God has
+sent to call down destruction upon a world which He had made--through
+some mistake never satisfactorily explained!
+
+It is easy nowadays to persuade intelligent people to laugh at such a
+perverted view of life; but the truth is that this attitude toward sex
+is written, not merely into our religious creeds and formulas, but into
+most of our laws and social conventions. It is this, which for
+convenience I will call the "monkish" view of love, which prevents our
+dealing frankly and honestly with its problems, distinguishing between
+what is wrong and what is right, and doing anything effective to remedy
+the evils of marriage-plus-prostitution. That is why I have tried so
+carefully to draw the distinction between what I call love and what I
+call lust; between the ideal of celibacy, which is a perversion, and the
+idea of chastity, which must form an essential part of any regimen of
+true and enduring love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+THE DEFENSE OF LOVE
+
+     (Discusses passionate love, its sanction, its place in life, and
+     its preservation in marriage.)
+
+
+I have before me as I write a newspaper article by Robert Blatchford, a
+great writer and great man. He is dealing with the subject of "Love and
+Marriage," and his doctrine is summed up in the following sentences:
+"There is a difference between loving a woman and falling in love with
+her. The love one falls into is a sweet illusion. But that fragrant
+dream does not last. In marriage there are no fairies."
+
+This expresses one of the commonest ideas in the world. Passionate love
+is one thing, and marriage is another and different thing, and it is no
+more possible to reconcile them than to mix oil and water. Our notions
+of "romantic" love took their rise in the Middle Ages, from the songs
+and narratives of the troubadours, and this whole tradition was based
+upon the glorification of illegitimate and extra-marital love. That
+tradition has ruled the world of art ever since, and rules it today. I
+do not exaggerate when I say that it is the conventional view of grand
+opera and the drama, of moving pictures and novels, that impassioned and
+thrilling love is found before marriage, and is found in adultery and in
+temptations to adultery, but is never found in marriage. I have a pretty
+varied acquaintance with the literature of the world, and I have sat and
+thought for quite a while, without being able to recall a single
+portrait of life which contradicts this thesis; and certainly anyone
+familiar with literature could name ten thousand novels and dramas and
+grand operas which support the thesis.
+
+English and American Puritanism have beaten the tradition down to this
+extent: the novelist portrays the glories and thrills of young love, and
+carries it as far as the altar and the orange blossoms and white ribbons
+and showers of rice--and stops. He leaves you to assume that this
+delightful rapture continues forever after; but he does not attempt to
+show it to you--he would not dare attempt to show it, because the
+general experience of men and women in marriage would make him
+ridiculous. So he runs away from the issue; if he tells you a story of
+married life, it is a story of a "triangle"--the thrills of love
+imperiling marriage, and either crushed out, or else wrecking the lives
+of the victims. Such is the unanimous testimony of all our arts today,
+and I submit it as evidence of the fact that there must be something
+vitally wrong with our marriage system.
+
+Personally, I am prepared to go as far as the extreme sex-radical in the
+defense of love and the right to love. I believe that love is the most
+precious of all the gifts of life. I accept its sanctions and its
+authority. I believe that it is to be cherished and obeyed, and not to
+be run away from or strangled in the heart. I believe that it is the
+voice of nature speaking in the depths of us, and speaking from a wisdom
+deeper than we have yet attained, or may attain for many centuries to
+come. And when I say love, I do not mean merely affection. I do not mean
+merely the habit of living in the same home, which is the basis of
+marriage as Blatchford describes it. What I mean is the love of the
+poets and the dreamers, the "young love" which is thrill and ecstasy, a
+glorification and a transfiguration of the whole of life. I say that,
+far from giving up this love for marriage, it is the true purpose of
+marriage to preserve this love and perpetuate it.
+
+To save repetition and waste of words, let us agree that from now on
+when I use the word love, I mean the passionate love of those who are
+"in love." I believe that it is the right of men and women to be "in
+love," and that there is no true marriage unless they are "in love," and
+stay "in love." I believe that it is possible to apply reason to love,
+to learn to understand love and the ways of love, to protect it and keep
+it alive in marriage. Blatchford writes the sentence, "Matrimony cannot
+be all honeymoon." I answer that assuredly it can be, and if you ask me
+how I know, I tell you that I know in the only way we really know
+anything--because I have proven it in my own life. I say that if men and
+women would recognize the perpetuation of the honeymoon as the purpose
+of marriage, and would devote to that end one-hundredth part of the
+intelligence and energy they now devote to the killing of their fellow
+human beings in war, we might have an end to the wretched "romantic
+tradition" which makes the most sacred emotion of the human heart into
+a sneak-thief skulking in the darkness, entering our lives by back
+alleys and secret stairways--while greed and worldly pomp, dullness and
+boredom, parade in by the front entrance.
+
+In the first place, what is love--young love, passionate love, the love
+of those who "fall in"? I know a certain lady, well versed in worldly
+affairs, who says that it is at once the greatest nonsense and the
+deadliest snare in the world. This lady was trained as a "coquette";
+she, and all the young ladies she knew, made it their business to cause
+men to fall in love with them, and their prestige was based upon their
+skill in that art. So to them "love" was a joke, and men "in love" were
+victims, whether ridiculous or pitiable. To this I answer that I know
+nothing in life that cannot be "faked"; but an imitation has value only
+as it resembles something that is real, and that has real value.
+
+I am aware that it is possible for a society to be so corrupted, so
+given up to the admiration of imitations, of the paint and powder and
+silk-stocking-clad-ankle kind of love, that true and genuine love
+interest, with its impulse to self-sacrifice and self-consecration, is
+no longer felt or understood. I am aware that in such a society it is
+possible for even the very young to be so sophisticated that what they
+take to be love is merely vanity, the worship of money, and the grace
+and charm which the possession of money confers. I have known girls who
+were "head over heels" in love, and thought it was with a man, when
+quite clearly they were in love with a dress suit or a social position.
+In such a society it is hard to talk about natural emotions, and deep
+and abiding and disinterested affections.
+
+Nevertheless, amid all the false conventions, the sham glories and
+cowardices of our civilization, there abides in the heart the craving
+for true love, and the idea of it leaps continually into flame in the
+young. In spite of the ridicule of the elders, in spite of blunders and
+tragic failures, in spite of dishonesties and deceptions--nevertheless,
+it continues to happen that out of a thousand maidens the youth finds
+one whose presence thrills him with a new and terrible emotion, whose
+lightest touch makes him shiver, almost makes his knees give way.
+
+If you will recall what I have written about instinct and reason, you
+will know that I am not a blind worshipper of our ancient mother
+nature. I am not humble in my attitude toward her, but perfectly willing
+to say when I know more than she does. On the other hand, when I know
+nothing or next to nothing, I am shy of contradicting my ancient mother,
+and disposed to give respectful heed to her promptings. One of the
+things about which we know almost nothing at present is the subject of
+eugenics. We are only at the beginning of trying to find out what
+matings produce the best offspring. Meantime, we ought to consider those
+indications which nature gives us, just as we consider her advice about
+what food to eat and what rest to take.
+
+It is not my idea that science will ever take men and women and marry
+them in cold blood, as today we breed our cattle. What I think will
+happen is that young men and women will meet one another, as they do at
+present, and will find the love impulse awakening; they will then submit
+their love to investigation, as to whether they should follow that
+impulse, or should wait. In other words, I do not believe that science
+will ever do away with the raptures of love, but will make itself the
+servant of these raptures, finding out what they mean, and how their
+precious essence may be preserved.
+
+I perfectly understand that the begetting of children is not the only
+purpose of love. The children have to be reared and trained, which means
+that a home has to be founded, and the parents have to learn to
+co-operate. They have to have common aims in life, and temperaments
+sufficiently harmonious so that they can live in the house together
+without tearing each other's eyes out. This means that in any civilized
+society all impulses of love have to be subjected to severe criticism. I
+intend, before long, to show just how I think parents and guardians
+should co-operate with young people in love; to help them to understand
+in advance what they are doing, and how it may be possible for them to
+make their love permanent and successful. For the moment I merely state,
+to avoid any possible misunderstanding, that I am the last person in the
+world to favor what is called "blind" love, the unthinking abandonment
+to an impulse of sex passion. What I am trying to show is that the
+passionate impulse, the passionate excitement of the young couple, is
+the material out of which love and marriage are made. Passion is a part
+of us, and a fundamental part. If we do not find a place for it in
+marriage, it will seek satisfaction outside of marriage, and that means
+lying, or the wrecking of the marriage, or both.
+
+Passion is what gives to love and marriage its vitality, its energy, its
+drive; in fact, it gives these qualities to the whole character. It is a
+vivifying force, transfiguring the personality, and if it is crushed and
+repressed, the whole life of that person is distorted. Yet it is a fact
+which every physician knows, that millions of women marry and live their
+whole lives without ever knowing what passionate gratification is. As a
+consequence of this, millions of men take it for granted that there are
+"good" women and "bad" women, and that only the latter are interesting.
+This, of course, is simply one of the abnormalities caused by the
+supplanting of love by money as a motive in marriage. Love becomes a
+superfluity and a danger, and all the forces of society, including
+institutionalized religion, combine to outlaw it and drive it
+underground. Or we might say that they lock it in a dungeon--and that
+the supreme delight of all the painters, poets, musicians, dramatists
+and novelists of all climes and all periods of history, is to portray
+the escape of the "young god" from these imprisonments. The story is
+told in six words of an old English ballad: "Love will find out the
+way!"
+
+Is it not obvious that there must be something vitally wrong with our
+institutions and conventions in matters of sex, when here exists this
+eternal war between our moralists and our artists? Why not make up our
+minds what we really believe; whether it is true that poets are, as
+Shelley said, "the unacknowledged legislators of mankind," or whether
+they are, as Plato declared, false teachers and seducers of the young.
+If they are the latter, let us have done with them, let us drive them
+from the state, together with lovers and all other impassioned persons.
+But if, on the other hand, it is truth the poets tell about life, then
+let us take the young god out of his dungeon, and bring him into our
+homes by the front door, and cast out the false gods of vanity and greed
+and worldly prestige which now sit in his place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+BIRTH CONTROL
+
+     (Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the greatest of
+     man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's enslavement, and
+     placing the keys of life in his hands.)
+
+
+I assume that you have followed my argument, and are prepared to
+consider seriously whether it may be possible to establish love in
+marriage as the sex institution of civilized society. If you really wish
+to bring such an institution into existence, the first thing you have to
+do is to accomplish the social revolution; that is, you must wipe out
+class control of society, and prestige based upon money exploitation.
+But that is a vast change, and will take time, and meanwhile we have to
+live, and wish to live with as little misery as possible. So the
+practical question becomes this: Suppose that you, as an individual,
+wish to find as much happiness in love as may now be possible, what
+counsel have I to offer? If you are young, you wish this advice for
+yourself; while if you are mature, you wish it for your children. I will
+put my advice under four heads: First, marriage for love; second, birth
+control; third, early marriage; fourth, education for marriage.
+
+The first of these we have considered at some length. A part of the
+process of social revolution is personal conversion; the giving up by
+every individual of the worldly ideal, the surrender of luxury and
+self-indulgence, the consecrating of one's life to self education and
+the cause of social justice. And do not think that that is an easy
+thing, or an unimportant thing, a thing to be taken for granted. On the
+contrary, it is something that most of us have to struggle with at every
+hour of our lives, because respect for property and worldly conventions
+has become one of our deepest instincts; our whole society is poisoned
+with it, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I have
+known in my life who have completely escaped from it. It is not merely a
+question of refusing to marry except for love, it is a question of
+refusing to love except for honest and worthy qualities. It is a
+question of saving our children from the damnable forces of snobbery,
+which lay siege to their young minds and destroy the best impulses of
+their hearts, while we in our blindness are still thinking of them as
+babies.
+
+Of the other three topics that I have suggested, I begin with birth
+control, because it is the most fundamental and most important. Without
+birth control there can be no freedom, no happiness, no permanence in
+love, and there can be no mastery of life. Birth control is one of the
+great fundamental achievements of the human reason, as important to the
+life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing.
+Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind
+also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us
+animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel.
+
+Ever since the dawn of history, and probably for long ages before that,
+our race has been struggling against this blind insanity of nature.
+Poor, bewildered Theodore Roosevelt stormed at what he called "race
+suicide," thinking it was some brand new and terrible modern corruption;
+but nowhere do we find a primitive tribe, nowhere in history do we find
+a race which did not seek to save itself from overgrowth and consequent
+starvation. They did not know enough to prevent conception, but they did
+the best they could by means of abortion and infanticide. And because
+today superstition keeps the priceless knowledge of contraception from
+the vast majority of women, these crude, savage methods still prevail,
+and we have our million abortions a year in the United States. Assuming
+that something near one-fourth our population consists of women capable
+of bearing children, we have one woman in twenty-five going through this
+agonizing and health-wrecking experience every year. They go through
+with it, you understand, regardless of everything--all the moralists and
+preachers and priests with their hell fire and brimstone. They go
+through with it because we have both marriage without love, and love
+without marriage; also because we permit some ten or twenty per cent of
+our total population to suffer the pangs of perpetual starvation,
+because more than half our farms are mortgaged or occupied by tenants,
+and some ten or twenty per cent of our workers are out of jobs all the
+time.
+
+Some of our women know about birth control. They are the rich women, who
+get what they want in this world. They object to the humiliations and
+inconveniences of child bearing, and some of them raise one or two
+children, and others of them raise poodle dogs. Also, our middle classes
+have found out; our doctors and lawyers and college professors, and
+people of that sort. But we deliberately keep the knowledge from our
+foreign populations, by the terrors which the church has at its command.
+And what is the practical consequence of this procedure? It is that
+while all our Anglo-Saxon stock, those who founded our country and
+established its institutions, are gradually removing themselves from the
+face of the earth, our ignorant and helpless populations, whether in
+city slums or on tenant farms, are multiplying like rabbits. Read Jack
+London's "The Valley of the Moon" and see what is happening in
+California. You will find the same thing happening in any portion of the
+United States where you take the trouble to use your own eyes.
+
+Now, I try to repress such impulses toward race prejudice as I find in
+myself. I am willing to admit for the sake of this argument that in the
+course of time all the races that are now swarming in America,
+Portuguese and Japanese and Mexican and French-Canadian and Polish and
+Hungarian and Slovakian, are capable of just as high intellectual
+development as our ancestors who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
+But no one who sees the conditions under which they now live can deny
+that it will take a good deal of labor, teaching them and training them,
+as well as scrubbing them, to accomplish that result. And what a waste
+of energy, what a farce it makes of culture, to take the people who have
+already been scrubbed and taught and trained for self-government, and
+exterminate them, and raise up others in their place! It seems time that
+we gave thought to the fundamental question, whether or not there is
+something self-destroying in the very process of culture. Unless we can
+answer this we might as well give up our visions and our efforts to lift
+the race.
+
+Theodore Roosevelt stormed at birth control for something like ten
+years, and it would be interesting if we could know how many Anglo-Saxon
+babies he succeeded in bringing into the world by his preachments. If
+what he wanted was to correct the balance between native and foreign
+births, how much more sensible to have taught birth control to those
+poor, pathetic, half-starved and overworked foreign mothers of our slums
+and tenant farms! I can wager that for every Anglo-Saxon baby that
+Theodore Roosevelt brought into the world by his preachings, he could
+have kept out ten thousand foreign slum babies, if only he had lent his
+aid to Margaret Sanger!
+
+Ah, but he wanted all the babies to be born, you say! I see before me
+the face of a certain devout old Christian lady, known to me, who
+settles the question by the Bible quotation, "Be fruitful and multiply."
+But what avails it to follow this biblical advice, if we allow one out
+of five of the new-born infants to perish from lack of scientific care
+before they are two years old? What avails it if we send them to school
+hungry, as we do twenty-two per cent of the public school children of
+New York City? What avails it if we allow venereal disease to spread, so
+that a large percentage of the babies are deformed and miserable? What
+avails it if, when they are fully grown, we can think of nothing better
+to do with them than to take them by millions at a time and dress them
+up in uniforms and send them out to be destroyed by poison gases? Would
+it not be the part of common sense to establish universal birth control
+for at least a year or two--until we have learned to take care of our
+newly born babies, and to feed our school children, and to protect our
+youths from vice, and to abolish poverty and war from the earth?
+
+These are the social aspects of birth control. There are also to be
+considered what I might call the personal aspects of it. Because young
+people do not know about it, and have no way to find out about it, they
+dare not marry, and so the amount of vice in the world is increased.
+Because married women do not know about it, love is turned to terror,
+and marital happiness is wrecked. Because the harmless and proper
+methods are not sensibly taught, people use harmful methods, which cause
+nervous disorders, and wreck marital happiness, and break up homes.
+Thorough and sound knowledge about birth control is just as essential to
+happiness in marriage as knowledge of diet is necessary to health, or as
+knowledge of economics is necessary to intelligent action as a voter and
+citizen. The suppression by law of knowledge of birth control is just as
+grave a crime against human life as ever was committed by religious
+bigotry in the blackest days of the Spanish Inquisition.
+
+Now this law stands on the statute books of our country, and if I should
+so much as hint to you in this book what you need to know, or even where
+you can find out about it, I should be liable to five years in jail and
+a fine of $5,000, and every person who mailed a copy of this book, or
+any advertisement of this book, would be in the same plight. But there
+is not yet a law to prohibit agitation against the law, so the first
+thing I say to every reader of this book is that they should obtain a
+copy of the _Birth Control Review_, published at 104 Fifth Avenue, New
+York, and also should join the Voluntary Parenthood League, 206
+Broadway, New York. Get the literature of these organizations and
+circulate them and help spread the light!
+
+As to the knowledge which you need, the only advice I am allowed to give
+is that you should seek it. Seek it, and persist in seeking, until you
+find it. Ask everyone you know; and ask particularly among enlightened
+people, those who are willing to face the facts of human life and trust
+in reason and common sense. I do not know if I am violating the law in
+thus telling you how to find out about birth control. One of the
+charming features of this law, and others against the spreading of
+knowledge, is that they will never tell you in advance what you may say,
+but leave you to say it and take your chances! I believe that I am not
+violating any law when I tell you that there are half a dozen simple,
+inexpensive, and entirely harmless methods of preventing undesired
+parenthood without the destruction of the marital relationship.
+
+I am one of those who for many years believed that the destruction of
+the marital relationship was the only proper and moral method. I was
+brought up to take the monkish view of love. I thought it was an animal
+thing which required some outside justification. I had been taught
+nothing else; but now I have had personal experience of other
+justifications of love, and I believe that love is a beautiful and
+joyful relationship, which not merely requires no other justification,
+but confers justification upon many other things in life.
+
+I used to believe in that old ideal of celibacy, thinking it a fine
+spiritual exercise. But since then I have looked out on life, and have
+found so many interesting things to do, so much important work calling
+for attention, that I do not have to invent any artificial exercises for
+my spirit. I have looked at humanity, and brought myself to recognize
+the plain common sense fact--that whatever superfluous energy I may have
+to waste upon artificial spirituality, the great mass of the people have
+no such energy to spare. They need all their energies to get a living
+for themselves and for their wives and little ones. They have their sex
+impulses, and will follow them, and the only question is, shall they
+follow them wisely or unwisely? The religious people decide that sexual
+indulgence is wrong, and they impose a penalty--and what is that
+penalty? A poor, unwanted little waif of a soul, which never sinned, and
+had nothing to do with the matter, is brought into a hostile world, to
+suffer neglect, and perhaps starvation--in order to punish parents who
+did not happen to be sufficiently strong willed to practice continence
+in marriage!
+
+I used to believe that there was benefit to health and increase of
+power, whether physical or mental, in the celibate life. I have tried
+both ways of life, and as a result I know that that old idea is
+nonsense. I know now that love is a natural function. Of course, like
+any other function it can be abused; just as hunger may become gluttony,
+sleeping may become sluggishness, getting the money to pay one's way
+through life may become ferocious avarice. But we do not on this account
+refuse ever to eat or sleep or get money to pay our debts. I do not say
+that I believe, I say I know, that free and happy love, guided by wisdom
+and sound knowledge, is not merely conducive to health, but is in the
+long run necessary to health.
+
+People who condemn birth control always argue as if one wished to teach
+this knowledge indiscriminately to the young. Perhaps it is natural that
+those who oppose the use of reason should assume that others are as
+irrational as themselves. All I can say is that I no more believe in
+teaching birth control to the young than I believe in feeding beefsteak
+to nursing infants. There is a period in life for beefsteaks--or, if my
+vegetarian friends prefer, for lentil hash and peanut butter sandwiches;
+in exactly the same way there is a time for teaching the fundamentals of
+sex, and another time for teaching the art of happiness in marriage,
+which includes birth control. That brings me, by a very pleasant
+transition, to the other two subjects which I have promised to discuss:
+early marriage and education for marriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+EARLY MARRIAGE
+
+     (Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the duty of
+     parents in respect to them.)
+
+
+I have shown how economic forces in our society make for later and later
+marriage; and at the present time economic forces are so overwhelming
+that all other forces are hardly worth mentioning in comparison. You
+are, let us say, the mother of a boy of eighteen, and you have what you
+call "common sense"--meaning thereby a grasp of the money facts of life.
+If your darling boy of eighteen should come to you with a grave face and
+announce, "Mother dear, I have met the girl I love, and we have decided
+that we want to get married"--you would consider that the most absurd
+thing you had ever heard in all your born days, and you would tell the
+lad that he was a baby, and to run along and play. If he persisted in
+his crazy notion, you and your husband and all the brothers and sisters
+and relatives and friends both of the boy and the girl would set to
+work, by scolding and ridiculing, to make life a misery for them, and
+ninety-nine times out of a hundred you would break down the young
+couple's marital intention.
+
+But now, let us try another supposition. Let us suppose that your
+darling boy of eighteen should come to you again and say, "Mother dear,
+some of the boys are going to spend this evening in a brothel, and I
+have decided to go along." Would you think that was the most absurd
+thing you had ever heard in all your born days? Or would you answer,
+"Yes, of course, my boy; that is what I had in mind when I made you give
+up the girl you loved"? No, you would not answer that. But here is the
+vital fact--it doesn't matter what you would answer, for you would never
+have a chance to answer. When a mother's darling wants to get married,
+he comes and asks his mother's blessing; but never does a mother's
+darling ask a blessing before he goes with the other boys to a brothel.
+He just goes. Maybe he borrows the money from some other fellow, and
+next day tells you he went to a theater. Or maybe he picks up some poor
+man's daughter on the street, and takes her into the park, or up on the
+roof of a tenement. Some such thing he does, to find satisfaction for an
+instinct which you in your worldly wisdom or your heavenly piety spurn
+and ridicule.
+
+I do not wish to exaggerate. If you are an exceptionally wise and
+tactful mother, you may keep the confidence of your boy, and guide him
+day by day through his temptations and miseries, and keep him chaste.
+But the more you try that, the more apt you will be to come to my
+conclusion, that late marriage is a crime against the race; the more
+aware you will be of the danger, either that his boy friends may break
+him down, or that some lewd woman may come to his bedroom in the
+night-time. Never will you be able to be quite sure that he is not lying
+to you, because of his shame, and the pain he cannot bear to inflict
+upon you. Never will you be quite sure that he is not hiding some cruel
+disease, sneaking off to some quack who takes his money and leaves him
+worse than before--until finally he shoots off his head, as happened to
+a nephew of an old and dear friend of mine.
+
+Such is the problem of the mother of a son; and now, what about the
+mother of a daughter? This seems much simpler; because your daughter is
+not generally troubled with sex cravings, and if you teach her the
+proprieties, and see that she is carefully chaperoned, you may
+reasonably hope that she will be chaste. But some day you expect that
+she will marry; and then comes your problem. If you are the usual
+mother, you are looking for some one who can maintain her in the state
+of life to which she is accustomed. If a fairy prince would come along,
+or a plaster saint, you would be pleased; but failing that, you will
+take a successful business man, one who has made his way in the world
+and secured himself a position. But turn back to the figures I gave you
+a while ago. If this man is thirty years of age, there is at least a
+fifty-fifty chance that he has had some venereal disease; and while the
+doctors claim to cure these diseases absolutely, we must bear in mind
+that doctors are human, and sometimes claim more than they perform.
+Every doctor will admit, if you pin him down, that these diseases burrow
+deeply into the tissues, and many times are supposed to be cured when
+they are only hidden.
+
+Here is, in a nutshell, the problem of the mother of a daughter. If you
+marry your daughter at seventeen to a lad of her own age, you have a
+very good chance of marrying her to a person who is chaste. If you marry
+her to a man of twenty-five, you have perhaps one chance in a hundred.
+If you marry her to a man of thirty-five, you have perhaps one chance in
+ten thousand. You may not like these facts; I do not like them myself;
+but I have learned that facts are none the less facts on that account.
+
+You know the average society bud of eighteen, and her attitude to a boy
+of the same age. She regards him as a child; and you think, perhaps,
+that it is natural for a girl to be interested in men of thirty-five and
+even forty-five. But I tell you that it is not natural, it is simply one
+of the perversions of pecuniary sex. The girl is interested in such men,
+because all her young life she has been carefully coached for the
+marriage market; because she is dressed for it, and solemnly brought
+out, and introduced to other players of this exciting game of marriage
+for money, with its incredible prizes of automobiles and jewels and
+palaces full of servants, and magic check-books that never grow empty.
+But suppose that, instead of regarding her as a prize in a lottery, you
+let her grow up naturally, and taught her the truth about herself, both
+body and mind; suppose that, instead of dressing her in ways
+deliberately contrived to emphasize her sex, you put her in a simple
+uniform, and taught her to be honest and straightforward, instead of
+mincing and coy; suppose she played athletic games with boys of her own
+age, and invited them to her home, not for "jazz" dancing and stuffing
+cake and candy, but for the sharing of good music and literature and
+art--don't you think that maybe this girl might become interested in a
+lad of her own age, and choose him with some understanding of his real
+self?
+
+You take it for granted that young people should not marry until they
+can "afford it." But stop and consider, is not this a relic of old days?
+Always it takes time, and deliberate effort of the reason, to adjust our
+conventions to new facts; so face this fact--marriage today does not
+necessarily mean children, it may just mean love. It involves little
+more expense, because the young people need cost no more together than
+they cost in the separate homes of their parents. If they are children
+of the poor, they are already taking care of themselves. If they are
+children of the moderately well off, their parents expect to support
+them while they are getting an education; and why can they not just as
+well live together, and the parents of each contribute their share? Let
+the parents of the boy give him, not merely what it costs to keep him at
+home, but also the sums which otherwise the boy would pay to the
+brothels. By this argument I do not mean that I favor keeping young
+people financially dependent upon their parents. My own son is working
+his own way through college, and I should be glad to see every young man
+doing the same. All that I am saying is that if parents are going to
+support their children while they are getting an education, they might
+just as well support them married as single, instead of penalizing
+matrimony by making all allowances cease at that point.
+
+I know a certain ardent feminist, who is all for late marriage for
+women, and abhors my ideas on this subject. She wants women to get a
+chance to develop their personalities; whereas I want to sacrifice them
+to the frantic exigencies of the male animal! Young things of seventeen
+and eighteen have no idea what they are, or what they want from life;
+the mating impulse is a blind frenzy in them, and they must be taught to
+control it, just as they are taught not to kill when they are angry!
+
+In the first place, I point out that young ladies in colleges and in
+ballrooms give a lot of time and thought to sex, even though they do not
+call it by that inelegant term. I very much question whether, if we
+should apply our wisdom to the task of getting our young people happily
+mated before we sent them off to college, we should not get a lot more
+serious study out of them than we now do, with all their "fussing" and
+flirting and dancing.
+
+Second, I am willing to make heroic moral efforts, where I see any
+chance of adequate results, but I have examined the facts, and
+definitely made up my mind that it is not worth while, in our present
+stage of culture, to preach to the mass of men the doctrine that they
+should abstain from sex experience until they are twenty-five or thirty
+years of age. You may storm at them, but they only laugh at you; you may
+pass laws, and try to put them in jail, but you only provide a harvest
+for blackmailers and grafters. As to sacrificing the girl, my answer is
+simply that I believe in love; and in this I think the girl will agree
+with me, if you will let her! I have never heard any qualified person
+maintain that it hurts a girl to respond to love at the age of seventeen
+or eighteen; nor do I think that it hurts a boy, provided that he is
+taught the virtues of moderation and self-restraint. Without these, it
+will hurt him to eat; but that is no argument for starving him. As for
+the question of his maturity and power to judge, we are able at present
+to keep him from marrying anybody, so I think we might reasonably hope
+to keep him from marrying a wanton or a slut. Certainly we might find
+somebody better than the peroxide blonde he now picks up in front of the
+moving picture palace.
+
+The question, at what ages we shall advise our young couple to have
+children, is a separate one, depending upon many circumstances. First,
+of course, they should not have any until they are able financially to
+maintain them. As to the age at which it is physically advisable, that
+is a question to be settled by physicians and physiologists. I myself
+had the idea that the proper age would be when the woman had attained
+her full stature; but my friend Dr. William J. Robinson sends me some
+statistics from the Johns Hopkins Hospital _Bulletin_, which startle me.
+This publication for January, 1922, gives the results in five hundred
+childbirths, in which the mother's age was from twelve to sixteen years
+inclusive. It appears that pregnancy and labor at these ages are no more
+dangerous than in older women; but on the other hand, the duration of
+the labor is actually shorter, and the size of the children is not
+inferior. These facts are so contrary to the general impression that I
+content myself with calling attention to them, and leave the commenting
+to be done by feminists and others who oppose themselves to the idea of
+early marriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+THE MARRIAGE CLUB
+
+     (Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to avoid
+     unhappy marriages.)
+
+
+I will make the assumption that you would like to have a trial of my
+cure for prostitution. You would like to do something right here and
+now, without waiting for the social revolution. Very well: I propose
+that you shall find a few other parents of boys and girls who are in
+revolt against our system of hidden vice, and that you will meet and
+form a modern marriage club. Only you won't call it that, of course; you
+will tactfully describe it as a literary society, or a social circle, or
+an Epworth League. The parents who run it will know what it is for, just
+as they do today; the only difference being that it will exist to
+promote love matches instead of money matches. It happens that I am
+myself a tactless sort of a person, not skillful at avoiding saying what
+I mean. So, in this chapter, I shall content myself with setting forth
+exactly what this marriage club will do, and leaving it to more clever
+people to supply the necessary camouflage.
+
+This club will begin by correcting the most stupid of all our
+educational blunders, the assumption of the necessary immaturity of the
+young. Our young people nowadays have ten times as much chance to learn
+and ten times as much stimulus to learn as we had; and it is a generally
+safe assumption that they know much more than we think they do, and are
+ready to learn every sensible and interesting thing. I am carrying on an
+epistolary acquaintance with a little miss of twelve, who has read half
+a dozen of my books--among the "worst" of them--and writes me letters of
+grave appreciation. I have talked on Socialism to a thousand school
+children, and had them question me for an hour, and heard just as worth
+while questions as I have heard from an audience of bankers. Never in my
+life have I talked about real things with children that I did not find
+them proud to be treated seriously, and eager to show that they were
+worthy of that honor. A great part of our foolishness with children is
+due to the emptiness of our own heads.
+
+These parents will delegate one man and one woman to make a thorough
+study of the sex education of the young. Of course, there is knowledge
+about sex which has to be given to the very youngest child, and more and
+more must be given as they grow older and ask more questions. But what I
+have in mind here is that detailed and precise knowledge which must be
+given to the young when they approach the period of puberty. At this age
+of fourteen or fifteen the man will take each of the boys apart, and the
+woman will take each of the girls, and will explain to them what they
+need to know. This duty will not be trusted to parents, for parents have
+an imbecile fear of talking straight to their children, and try to get
+by with rubbish about bees and flowers. Let every child know that the
+days of the hole-and-corner sex business is forever past, and that here
+is an instructed person, who talks real American, and knows what he is
+talking about, and will deal with facts, instead of with evasions.
+
+This club will help to educate the youngsters, and also to give them a
+good time, developing both their minds and bodies, and learning to know
+them thoroughly. When they are sixteen each one will have another talk,
+this time about marriage and what it means; learning that it is not
+merely flirtations and delicious thrills, but a business partnership,
+and the deepest and best of all friendships. So when John finds that he
+likes Mary best of all the girls he knows, this won't be a subject for
+"kidding" and sly innuendo, and blushes and simpering on Mary's part,
+but an occasion for decent and sensible talk about what each of them
+really is, and what each thinks the other to be. If they think they are
+in love, then there will be a council of the elder statesmen, to
+consider that case, and what are the chances of happiness in that love.
+This may sound forbidding, but it is exactly what is done at
+present--only it is not done honestly and frankly, and therefore does
+not carry proper weight with the young people.
+
+I am an opponent of long engagements, but I am also an opponent of no
+engagements at all; I know no truer proverb than "Marry in haste and
+repent at leisure." It would be my idea that a very young couple should
+announce their engagement, and then wait six months, and be consulted
+again about the matter, and have a chance to withdraw with no hard
+feelings, if either party thought best. If they wished to go on, they
+might be asked to wait another six months, if their elders felt very
+certain there were reasons to doubt the wisdom of the match.
+
+There are, of course, people who, because of disease or physical defect,
+should never be allowed to marry; and others who might marry, but should
+not be allowed to have children. There should be laws providing for such
+cases, requiring physical examination before marriage, and in extreme
+cases providing for a simple and harmless surgical operation to prevent
+the hopelessly unfit from passing on their defects to the future. But
+dealing for the moment with normal young persons, members of our modern
+marriage club, I should say that if, after they have listened to the
+warning of their elders, and have waited for a decent interval to think
+things over, they still remain of the opinion that they can make a
+successful marriage, then it is up to the elders to wish them luck. I
+have known of young couples who have refused to heed warnings, and
+regretted it; but I have known of others who went ahead and had their
+own way and proved they were right. There is a form of wisdom called
+experience and there is another form called love.
+
+I hear the worldly and cynical rail at the blindness of "young love,"
+and I can see the truth in what they say; but also I can see the deeper
+truth in the magic dreams of the young soul. Here is a youth who adores
+a girl, and you know the girl, and it is comical to you, because you
+know she is not any of the things the youth imagines. But who are you
+that claim to know the last thing about a human soul? Look into your
+own, and see how many different things you are! Look back, if you can,
+to the time when you were young, and remember the visions and the hopes.
+They have lost all reality to you now; but who can say how many of them
+you might have made real if there had been one other person who believed
+in them, and loved them, and would not give them up?
+
+I write this; and then I think of the other side--the fools that I have
+known in love! The trusting women, marrying rotten men to reform them!
+The pitiful people who think that fine phrases and sentimentality can
+take the place of facts! I implore my young couples to sit down and
+face the realities of their own natures, to decide what they are, and
+what they want to be--and if there is going to be any change, let it be
+made and tried out before marriage! I implore them to begin now to
+control their desires by their reason and judgment; to begin, each of
+them at the very outset, to carry their share of the burdens and do
+their share of the hard work. I implore them to value independence and
+self-reliance in the other, and never above all things to marry from
+pity, which is a worthy emotion in its place, but has nothing to do with
+sex, which should be an affair between equals, a matter of partnership
+and not of parasitism. I think that, on the whole, the most dreadful
+thing in love is the use of it for preying, for the securing of favors
+and advantages of any sort, whether by men or by women.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE
+
+     (Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that we have the
+     right and the duty to teach it.)
+
+
+I assume now that our young couple have definitely made up their minds,
+and that the wedding day is near. They are therefore, both the man and
+the woman, in position to receive information as to the physical aspects
+of their future experience. This information is now for the most part
+possessed only by pathologists--who impart it too late, after people
+have blundered and wrecked their lives. The opponents of birth control
+ask in horror if you would teach it to the young; I am now able to
+answer just when I would teach it; I would teach it to these young
+couples about to marry. I would make it by law compulsory for every
+young couple to attend a school of marriage, and to learn, not merely
+the regulation of conception, but the whole art of health and happiness
+in sex.
+
+Perhaps the words, "a school of marriage," strike you as funny. When I
+was young I remember that Pulitzer founded a school of journalism, and
+all newspaper editors made merry--they knew that journalism could only
+be learned in practice. But nowadays every city editor gives preference
+to an applicant who has taken a college course in reporting; they have
+learned that journalism can be taught, just like engineering and
+accounting. In the same way I assert that marriage can be taught, and
+the art of love, physical, mental, moral, and even financial; I think
+that the day will come when enlightened parents would no more dream of
+trusting their tender young daughter to a man who had not taken a course
+in sex, than they would go up in an aeroplane with a pilot who knew
+nothing about an engine.
+
+The knowledge which I possess upon the art of love I would be glad to
+give you in this book; but unfortunately, if I were to do so, my book
+would be suppressed, and I should be sent to jail.
+
+Some ten or twelve years ago I received a pitiful letter from a man who
+was in state's prison in Delaware, charged with having imparted
+information as to birth control. Under our amiable legal system, a
+perfectly innocent man may be thrown into jail, and kept there for a
+year or two before he is tried, and if he is without money or friends,
+he might as well be buried alive. I went to Wilmington to call on the
+United States attorney who had caused the indictment in this case, and
+had an illuminating conversation with him. The official was anxious to
+justify what he had done. He assured me that he was no bigot, but on the
+contrary an extremely liberal man, a Unitarian, a Progressive, etc. "But
+Mr. Sinclair," he said, "I assure you this prisoner is not a reformer or
+humanitarian or anything like that. He is a depraved person. Look, here
+is something we found in his trunk when we arrested him; a pamphlet,
+explaining about sex relations. See this paragraph--it says that the
+pleasure of intercourse is increased if it is prolonged."
+
+I looked at the pamphlet, and then I looked at the attorney. "Do you
+think you have stated the matter quite fairly?" I asked. "Apparently the
+purpose is to explain that the emotions of women are more slow to be
+aroused than those of men, and that husbands failing to realize this,
+often do not gratify their wives."
+
+"Well," said the other, "do you consider that a subject to be
+discussed?"
+
+"Pardon me if I discuss it just a moment," I replied. "Do you happen to
+know whether the statement is a fact?"
+
+"No, I don't. It may be, I suppose."
+
+"You have never investigated the matter?"
+
+The legal representative of our government was evidently annoyed by my
+persistence. "I have not," he answered.
+
+"But then, suppose I were to tell you that thousands of homes have been
+broken up for lack of just that bit of knowledge; that tens of thousands
+of marriages are miserable for lack of it."
+
+"Surely, Mr. Sinclair, you exaggerate!"
+
+"Not at all. I could prove to you by one medical authority after
+another, that if the desire of a woman in marriage is roused, and then
+left ungratified, the result is nervous strain, and in the long run it
+may be nervous breakdown."
+
+The above covers only one detail of the pamphlet in question. I read
+some pages of it, and argued them out with the attorney. It was a
+perfectly simple, straightforward exposition of facts about the
+physiology of sex; and one of the reasons a man was to be sent to jail
+for several years was--not that he had circulated such a pamphlet, not
+that he had showed it to young people, but merely that he had it in his
+trunk!
+
+There is an honest and very useful book, written by an English
+physician, Dr. Marie C. Stopes, entitled "Married Love," published by
+Dr. Wm. J. Robinson of New York, a specialist of authority and
+integrity. The book deals with just such vital facts in a perfectly
+dignified and straightforward manner; yet Dr. Robinson has been hounded
+by the postoffice department because of it; he was convicted and forced
+to pay a fine of $250, and the book was barred from the mails!
+
+I have so much else of importance to say in this Book of Love that it
+would not be sensible to jeopardize it by causing a controversy with our
+official censors of knowledge. Therefore I will merely say in general
+terms that men and women differ, not merely as a sex, but as
+individuals, and every marriage is a separate problem. Every couple has
+to solve it in the intimacy of their love life, and for this there are
+needed, first of all, gentleness on the part of the man, especially in
+the first days of the honeymoon; and on the part of both at all times
+consideration for the other's welfare and enjoyment, and above all,
+frankness and honesty in talking out the subject. Reticence and shyness
+may be virtues elsewhere, but they have no place in the intimacies of
+the sex life; if men and women will only ask and answer frankly, they
+can find out by experience what makes the other happy, and what causes
+pain.
+
+We are dealing here with the most sacred intimacy of life, and one of
+the most vital of life's problems. It is here, in the marriage bed, that
+the divorce problem is to be settled, and likewise the problem of
+prostitution; for it is when men and women fail to understand each
+other, and to gratify each other, that one or the other turns cold and
+indifferent, perhaps angry and hateful--and then we have passions
+unsatisfied, and ranging the world, breaking up other homes and
+spreading disease. So I would say to every young couple, seek knowledge
+on this subject. Seek it without shame from others who have had a chance
+to acquire it. Seek it also from nature, our wise old mother, who knows
+so much about her children!
+
+Be natural; be simple and straightforward; and beware of fool notions
+about sex. If you will look in the code of Hammurabi, which is over four
+thousand years old, you will see the provision that a man who has
+intercourse with a menstruating woman shall be killed. In Leviticus you
+will read that both the man and the woman are to be cast out from their
+people. You will find that most people still have some such notion,
+which is without any basis whatever in health. And this is only one
+illustration of many I might give of ignorance and superstition in the
+sex life. I would give this as one very good rule to bear in mind; your
+love life exists for the happiness and health of yourself and your
+partner, and not for Hammurabi, nor Moses, nor Jehovah, nor your
+mother-in-law, nor anybody else on the earth or above it.
+
+Great numbers of people believe that women are naturally less passionate
+than men, and that marital happiness depends upon men's recognizing
+this. Of course, there are defective individuals, both men and women;
+but the normal woman is every bit as passionate as a man, if once she
+has been taught; and if love is given its proper place in life, and
+monkish notions not allowed to interfere, she will remain so all through
+life, in spite of child-bearing or anything else. I say to married
+couples that they should devote themselves to making and preserving
+passionate gratification in love; because this is the bright jewel in
+the crown of marriage, and if lovers solve this problem, they will find
+other problems comparatively simple.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+THE MONEY SIDE OF MARRIAGE
+
+     (Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of
+     matrimony.)
+
+
+So far we have discussed marriage as if it consisted only of love. But
+it is manifest that this is not the case. Marriage is every-day
+companionship, and also it is partnership in a complicated business. In
+our school of marriage therefore we shall teach the rights and duties of
+both partners to the contract, and shall face frankly the money side of
+the enterprise.
+
+One of the first facts we must get clear is that the economics of
+marriage are in most parts of the world still based upon the subjection
+of woman, and are therefore incompatible with the claims of woman as a
+partner and comrade. They will never be right until the social
+revolution has abolished privilege, and the state has granted to every
+woman a maternity endowment, with a mother's pension for every child
+during the entire period of the rearing and education of that child.
+Until this is done, the average woman must look to some man for the
+support of her child, and that, by the automatic operation of economic
+force, makes her subject to the whims of the man. What women have to do
+is to agitate for a revision of the property laws of marriage; and
+meantime to see that in every marriage there is an extra-legal
+understanding, which grants to the woman the equality which laws and
+conventions deny her.
+
+When I was a boy my mother had a woman friend who, if she wanted to go
+downtown, would borrow a quarter from my mother. This woman's husband
+was earning a generous salary, enough to enable him to buy the best
+cigars by the box, and to keep a supply of liquors always on hand; but
+he gave his wife no allowance, and if she wanted pocket money she had to
+ask him for it, each time a separate favor. Yet this woman was keeping a
+home, she was doing just as hard work and just as necessary work as the
+man. Manifestly, this was a preposterous arrangement. If a woman is
+going to be a home-maker for a husband, it is a simple, common-sense
+proposition that the salary of the husband shall be divided into three
+parts--first, the part which goes to the home, the benefit of which is
+shared in common; second, the part which the husband has for his own
+use; and third, the part which the wife has for hers. The second and
+third parts should be equal, and the wife should have hers, not as a
+favor, but as a right. If the two are making a homestead, or running a
+farm, or building up a business, then half the proceeds should be the
+woman's; and it should be legally in her name, and this as a matter of
+course, as any other business contract. If the woman does not make a
+home, but merely displays fine clothes at tea parties, that is of course
+another matter. Just what she is to do is something that had better be
+determined before marriage; and if a man wants a life-partner, to take
+an interest in his work, or to have a useful work of her own, he had
+better choose that kind of woman, and not merely one that has a pretty
+face and a trim ankle.
+
+The business side of marriage is something that has to be talked out
+from time to time; there have to be meetings of the board of directors,
+and at these meetings there ought to be courtesy and kindness, but also
+plain facts and common sense, and no shirking of issues. Love is such a
+very precious thing that any man or woman ought to be willing to make
+money sacrifices to preserve it. But on the other hand, it is a fact
+that there are some people with whom you cannot be generous; the more
+you give them, the more they take, and with such people the only safe
+rule is exact justice. Let married couples decide exactly what
+contribution each makes to the family life, and what share of money and
+authority each is entitled to.
+
+I might spend several chapters discussing the various rocks on which I
+have seen marriages go to wreck. For example, extravagance and worldly
+show; clothes for women. In Paris is a "demi-monde," a world of brutal
+lust combined with riotous luxury. The women of this "half-world" are in
+touch with the world of art and fashion, and when the rich costumers and
+woman-decorators want what they call ideas, it is to these lust-women
+they go. The fashions they design are always depraved, of course; always
+for the flaunting of sex, never for the suggestion of dignity and grave
+intelligence. At several seasons of the year these lust-women are
+decked out and paraded at the race-courses and other gathering places
+of the rich, and their pictures are published in the papers and spread
+over all the world. So forthwith it becomes necessary for your wife in
+Oshkosh or Kalamazoo to throw away all the perfectly good clothes she
+owns, and get a complete new outfit--because "they" are wearing
+something different. Of course the costume-makers have seen that it is
+extremely different, so as to make it impossible for your wife and
+children to be happy in their last season's clothes. I have a winter
+overcoat which I bought fourteen years ago, and as it is still as good
+as new I expect to use it another fourteen years, which will mean that
+it has cost me a dollar and a half per year. But think what it would
+have cost me if I had considered it necessary each year to have an
+overcoat cut as the keepers of French mistresses were cutting theirs!
+
+But then, suppose you put it up to your wife and daughters to wear
+sensible clothes, and they do so, and then they observe that on the
+street your eyes turn to follow the ladies in the latest disappearing
+skirt? The point is, you perceive, that you yourself are partly to blame
+for the fashions. They appeal to a dirty little imp you have in your own
+heart, and when the decent women discover that, it makes them blazing
+hot, and that is one of the ways you may wreck your domestic happiness
+if you want to. Unless I am greatly mistaken, when the class war is all
+over we are going to see in our world a sex war; but it is not going to
+be between the men and the women, it is going to be between the mother
+women and the mistress women, and the mistress women are going to have
+their hides stripped off.
+
+Men wreck marriage because they are promiscuous; and women wreck it
+because they are parasites. Woman has been for long centuries an
+economic inferior, and she has the vices of the subject peoples and
+tribes. Now there are some who want to keep these vices, while at the
+same time claiming the new privileges which go with equality. Such a
+woman picks out a man who is sensitive and chivalrous; who knows that
+women suffer handicaps, pains of childbirth, physical weakness, and who
+therefore feels impelled to bear more than his share of the burdens. She
+makes him her slave; and by and by she gets a child, and then she has
+him, because he is bowed down with awe and worship, he thinks that such
+a miracle has never happened in the world before, and he spends the rest
+of his life waiting on her whims and nursing her vanities. I note that
+at the recent convention of the Woman's Party they demanded their rights
+and agreed to surrender their privileges. There you have the final test
+by which you may know that women really want to be free, and are
+prepared to take the responsibilities of freedom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+THE DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY
+
+     (Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should endeavor to
+     preserve it.)
+
+
+So far in this discussion we have assumed that love means monogamous
+love. We did so, for the reason that we could not consider every
+question at once. But we have promised to deal with all the problems of
+sex in the light of reason; and so we have now to take up the question,
+what are the sanctions of monogamy, and why do we refuse sanction to
+other kinds of love?
+
+First, let us set aside several reasons with which we have nothing to
+do. For example, the reason of tradition. It is a fact that Anglo-Saxon
+civilization has always refused legal recognition to non-monogamous
+marriage. But then, Anglo-Saxon civilization has recognized war, and
+slavery, and speculation, and private property in land, and many other
+things which we presume to describe as crimes. If tradition cannot
+justify itself to our reason, we shall choose martyrdom.
+
+Second, the religious reason. This is the one that most people give. It
+is convenient, because it saves the need of thinking. Suffice it here to
+say that we prefer to think. If we cannot justify monogamy by the facts
+of life, we shall declare ourselves for polygamy.
+
+What are the scientific and rational reasons for monogamy? First among
+them is venereal disease. This may seem like a vulgar reason, but no one
+can deny that it is real. There was a time, apparently, when mankind did
+not suffer from these plagues, and we hope there may be such a time
+again. I shall not attempt to prescribe the marital customs for the
+people of that happy age; I suspect that they will be able to take care
+of themselves. Confining myself to my lifetime and yours, I say that the
+aim of every sensible man and woman must be to confine sex relations to
+the smallest possible limits. I know, of course, that there are
+prophylactics, and the army and navy present statistics to show that
+they succeed in a great proportion of cases. But if you are one of
+those persons in whose case they don't succeed, you will find the
+statistics a cold source of comfort to you.
+
+John and Mary go to the altar, or to the justice of the peace, and John
+says: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow." But the formula is
+incomplete; it ought to read: "And likewise with the fruits of my wild
+oats." Marriage is a contract wherein each of the contracting parties
+agrees to share whatever pathogenic bacteria the other party may have or
+acquire; surely, therefore, the contract involves a right of each party
+to have a say as to how many chances of infection the other shall incur.
+John goes off on a business trip, and is lonesome, and meets an
+agreeable widow, and figures to himself that there is very little chance
+that so charming a person can be dangerous. But maybe Mary wouldn't
+agree with his calculations; maybe Mary would not consider it a part of
+the marriage bargain that she should take the diseases of the agreeable
+widow. What commonly happens is that Mary is not consulted; John revises
+the contract in secret, making it read that Mary shall take a chance at
+the diseases of the widow. How can any thinking person deny that John
+has thus committed an act of treason to Mary?
+
+I know that there are people who don't mind running such chances; that
+is one reason why there are venereal diseases. All I can say is that the
+sex-code set forth in this book is based upon the idea that to deliver
+mankind from the venereal plague, we wish to confine the sex
+relationship within the narrowest limits consistent with health,
+happiness and spiritual development; and that to this end we take the
+young and teach them chastity, and we marry them early while they are
+clean, and then we call upon them to make the utmost effort to make a
+success of that union, and to make it a matter of honor to keep the
+marital faith. We do this with some hope of effectiveness, because we
+have made our program consistent with the requirements of nature, the
+genuine needs of love both physical and spiritual.
+
+The second argument for monogamy is the economic one. We have dreamed a
+social order where every child will be guaranteed maintenance by the
+state, and where women will be free from dependence on men. What will be
+the love arrangements of men and women under this new order is another
+problem which we leave for them to decide, in the certainty that they
+will know more about it than we do. Meantime, we are for the present
+under the private property regime, and have to love and marry and raise
+our children accordingly. The children must have homes, and if they are
+to be normal children, they must have both the male and female influence
+in their lives; which means that their parents must be friends and
+partners, not quarreling in secret. This argument, I know, is one of
+expediency. I have adopted it, after watching a great number of people
+try other than monogamous sex arrangements, and seeing their chances of
+happiness and success wrecked by the pressure of economic forces. To
+rebel against social compulsion may be heroism, and again it may be
+merely bad judgment. For my part, the world's greatest evil is poverty,
+the cause of crime, prostitution and war. I concentrate my energies upon
+the abolishing of that evil, and I let other problems wait.
+
+The third reason is that monogamy is economical of human time and
+thought. The business of finding and wooing a mate takes a lot of
+energy, and adjustment after marriage takes more. To throw away the
+results of this labor and do it all over again is certainly not common
+sense. Of course, if you bake a cake and burn it, you have to get more
+material and make another try; but that is a different matter from
+baking a cake with the deliberate intention of throwing it away after a
+bite or two.
+
+The advocates of varietism in love will here declare that we are begging
+the question. We are assuming that love and the love chase are not
+worthy in themselves, but merely means to some other end. Can it be that
+love delights are the keenest and most intense that humans can
+experience, and that all other purposes of life are contributory to
+them? Certainly a great deal of art lends support to this idea, and many
+poets have backed up their words by their deeds. As Coleridge phrased
+it:
+
+    "All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
+     Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
+     All are but ministers of Love
+     And feed his sacred flame."
+
+This is a question not to be played with. Experimenting in love is
+costly, and millions have wrecked their lives by it. The sex urge in us
+is imperious and cruel; it wants nothing less than the whole of us,
+body, mind and spirit, and ofttimes it behaves like the genii in the
+bottle--it gets out, and not all the powers in the universe can get it
+back. I have talked with many men about sex and heard them say that it
+presents itself to them as an unmitigated torment, something they would
+give everything they own to be free of. And these, mind you, not men
+living in monasteries, trying to repress their natural impulses, but men
+of the world, who have lived freely, seeking pleasure and taking it as
+it came. The primrose path of dalliance did not lead them to peace, and
+the pursuit of variety in love brought them only monotony.
+
+I stop and think of one after another of these sex-ridden people, and I
+cannot think of one whom I would envy. I know one who in a frenzy of
+unhappiness seized a razor and castrated himself. I think of another, a
+certain classmate in college whom I once stopped in a conversation,
+remarking: "Did you ever realize what a state you have got your mind
+into? Everything means sex to you. Every phrase you hear, every idea
+that is suggested--you try to make some sort of pun, to connect it
+somehow or other with sex." The man thought and said, "I guess that's
+true." The idea had never occurred to him before; he had just gone on
+letting his instincts have their way with him, without ever putting his
+reason upon the matter.
+
+That was a crude kind of sex; but I think of another man, an idealist
+and champion of human liberty. One of the forms of liberty he maintained
+was the right to love as many women as he pleased, and although he was a
+married man, one hardly ever saw him that he was not courting some young
+girl. As a result, his mental powers declined, and he did little but
+talk about ideas. I do not know anyone today who respects him--except a
+few people who live the same sort of life. The thought of him brings to
+my mind a sentence of Nietzsche--a man who surely stood for freedom of
+personality: "I pity the lovers who have nothing higher than their
+love."
+
+A question like this can be decided only by the experience of the race.
+Some will make love the end and aim of life, and others will make it the
+means to other ends, and we shall see which kind of people achieve the
+best results, which kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the
+most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the
+experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough of it and
+quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I
+know others who are still in it--and I watch their lives and find them
+to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is
+based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful
+"free lovers." Of course, I know some noble and sincere people who do
+not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but
+these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor
+than if they were duly married.
+
+It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine
+permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in
+love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content
+yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining
+together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in
+which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon
+the sacred intimacy of sex! You can learn to take sex lightly, of
+course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true
+and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires
+some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals
+mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love,
+and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men
+and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it
+seriously--and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the
+rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we
+learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and
+making us truly social creatures.
+
+Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in
+her glorification of the sex-corruptions of capitalist society. She
+indicted American literature for its "bourgeois" qualities--among these
+the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with
+their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of sex promiscuity as
+they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to
+remark that "one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly
+be." That sounds like a paradox, but it is really a profound truth, and
+the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in
+the sex relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to
+those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no
+reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY
+
+     (Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold another
+     to the pledge of love.)
+
+
+Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the same who had me sent
+to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, as I have narrated in "The Brass
+Check." I remember arguing with him concerning his ideas of sex, which
+were of the freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put the
+great unanswerable question: "What are you going to do about the problem
+of jealousy?" And I had no response at hand; for jealousy is truly a
+most cruel and devastating and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you
+escape it, if you are going to preserve monogamy?
+
+The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down all the prejudices
+against sexual promiscuity. Free and unlimited license was every
+person's right, and for any other person to interfere was enslavement,
+for any other person to criticize was superstition. But the power of
+superstition is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men
+resentful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of
+their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disapproval of
+jealousy.
+
+Other men, less purely physiological in their attitude to sex, have
+wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. G. Wells has a novel,
+"In the Days of the Comet," in which he portrays two men, both nobly and
+truly in love with the same woman. One in a passion of jealousy is about
+to murder the other, when a great social transformation is magically
+brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to universal love, and
+the two men nobly and lovingly share the same woman. Shelley also
+dreamed this dream, inviting two women to share him. I have known others
+who tried it, but never permanently. I do not say that it never has
+succeeded, or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing
+the future--I am trying to give practical advice to people, for the
+conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on this point is
+that polygamous and polyandrous experiments in modern capitalist society
+cost more than they are worth.
+
+I once knew a certain high school teacher, who believed religiously in
+every kind of freedom. When she married, she and her husband, an artist,
+made a vow against jealousy; but as it worked out, this vow meant that
+the wife had a steady job and took care of the husband, while he loafed
+and loved other women. When finally she grew tired of it, he accused her
+of being jealous; also, she had brought it down to the matter of money!
+I know another woman, an Anarchist, widely known as a lecturer on sex
+freedom. She laid down the general principle of unlimited personal
+freedom for all, and she tried to live up to her faith. She entered into
+a "free union" with a certain man, and when she discovered that he was
+making love to another woman, in the presence of a friend of mine she
+threw a vase of flowers at his head. You see, her general principles had
+clashed with another general principle, to the effect that a person who
+feels deep and strong love inevitably desires that love to endure, and
+cannot but suffer to see it preyed upon and destroyed.
+
+Let us first consider the question, just what are the true and proper
+implications of monogamous love? The Roman Catholic church advocates
+"monogamy," and understands thereby that a man and woman pledge
+themselves "till death do us part," and if either of them cancels this
+arrangement it is adultery and mortal sin. I hope that none of my
+readers understands by "monogamy" any such system of spiritual
+strangulation. My own idea is rather what some churchman has
+sarcastically described by the term "progressive polygamy." I believe
+that a man and woman should pledge their faith in love, and should keep
+that faith, and endeavor with all their best energies to make a success
+of it; they should strive each to understand the other's needs, and
+unselfishly to fulfill them, within the limits of fair play. But if,
+after such an effort has been truly made, it becomes clear that the
+union does not mean health and happiness for one of the parties, that
+party has a right to withdraw from it, and for any government or church
+or other power to deny that right is both folly and cruelty.
+
+Now, on the basis of this definition of monogamy--or, if you prefer, of
+progressive polygamy--we are in position to say what we think about
+jealousy. If two people pledge their faith, and one breaks it, and the
+other complains, we do not call that jealousy, but just common decency.
+Neither do we call it jealousy if one expects the other to avoid the
+appearance of guilt; for love is a serious thing, not to be played with,
+and I think that a person who truly loves will do everything possible to
+make clear to the beloved that he is keeping and means to keep the
+plighted faith.
+
+You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in endeavoring thus to
+distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable jealousy, and calling
+the former by some other name. It does not make much difference about
+words, provided I make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole
+string of words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and cannot be
+discussed without preliminary explanations and distinctions; religion,
+for example, and morality, and aristocracy, and justice, to name only a
+few. Most people's thinking about marriage and love has been made like
+soup in a cheap restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of scraps and
+notions from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian monkery
+and Renaissance license, absurdly called "romance." So before you can do
+any thinking about a problem like jealousy, you have to agree to use the
+word to mean something definite, whether good or bad.
+
+We shall take jealousy as a "bad" word, and use it to mean the setting
+up, by a man or woman, of some claim to the love of another person,
+which claim cannot be justified in the court of reason and fair play.
+This includes, in the first place, all claims based upon a courtship,
+not ratified by marriage. It is to the interest of society and the race
+that men and women should be free to investigate persons of the other
+sex, and to experiment with the affections before pledges of marriage
+are made. If sensible customs of love and just laws of marriage were
+made, there would be no excuse for a woman's giving herself to a man
+before marriage; she should be taught not to do it, and then if she does
+it, the risk is her own, and the disgusting perversion of venality and
+greed known as the "breach of promise suit" should be unknown in our
+law. The young should be taught that it is the other person's right to
+change his mind and withdraw at any time before marriage; whatever pains
+and pangs this may cause must be borne in silence.
+
+The second kind of jealousy is that which seeks to keep in the marriage
+bond a person who is not happy in it and has asked to be released. The
+law sanctions this kind of cowardly selfishness, which manifests itself
+every day on the front pages of our newspapers--a spectacle of monstrous
+and loathsome passions unleashed and even glorified. Husbands set the
+bloodhounds of the law after wives who have fled with some other man,
+and send the man to a cell, and drag the woman back to a loveless home.
+Wives engage private detectives, and trail their husbands to some "love
+nest," and then ensue long public wrangles, with washing of filthy
+linen, and the matter is settled by a "separation." The virtuous wife,
+who may have driven the man away by neglect or vanity or stupidity, is
+granted a share of his earnings for the balance of her life; and two
+more people are added to the millions who are denied sexual happiness
+under the law, and are thereby impelled to live as law violators.
+
+For this there is only one remedy conceivable. We have banned
+cannibalism and slavery and piracy and duelling, and we must ban one
+more ancient and cruel form of human oppression, the effort to hold
+people in the bonds of sex by any other power save that of love. I am
+aware that the reactionaries who read this book will take this sentence
+out of its context and quote it to prove that I am a "free lover." I
+shall be sorry to have that done, but even so, I was not willing to live
+in slavery myself, and I am not willing to advocate it for others. I am
+aware that there are degenerate and defective individuals, and that we
+have to make special provision for them, as I shall presently set forth;
+but the average, normal human being must be free to decide what is love
+for him, and what is happiness for him. Every person in the world will
+have to deny himself the right to demand love where love is not freely
+given, and all lovers in the world will have to hold themselves ready to
+let the loved one go if and when the loved one demands it. I am aware
+that this is a hard saying, and a hard duty, but it is one that life
+lays upon us, and one that there is no escaping.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE
+
+     (Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and one of the
+     means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.)
+
+
+You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about the "divorce
+evil," and you will find that to the preacher or editor this "evil"
+consists of the fact that more and more people are refusing to stay
+unhappily married. It does not interest these moralizers if the
+statistics show that it is women who are getting most of the divorces,
+and that the meaning of the phenomenon is that women are refusing to
+continue living with drunken and dissolute men. To the clergy, the
+breaking of a marriage is an evil _per se_, and regardless of
+circumstances. They know this because God has told them so, and in the
+name of God they seek to keep people tied in sex unions which have come
+to mean loathing instead of love.
+
+Now, I will assert it as a mathematical certainty that a considerable
+percentage of marriages must fail. It is essential to progress that
+human beings should grow, both mentally and spiritually, and manifestly
+they cannot all grow in the same way. If they grow differently, must
+they not sometimes lose the power to make each other happy in the
+marital bonds? Who does not know the man who masters life and becomes a
+vital force, while his wife remains dull and empty? If such a man
+changes wives, the world in general denounces him as a selfish beast;
+but the world does not know nor does it care about those thousands of
+men who, not caring to be branded as selfish beasts, fulfill the needs
+of their lives by keeping mistresses in secret.
+
+I knew a certain country school teacher, one of the most narrowly
+conventional young women imaginable, who was engaged to a middle-aged
+business man. He went to New York on a business trip, and stayed a
+couple of months, and wrote her that he had met some Anarchists, and had
+discovered that all he had read about them in the newspapers was false,
+and that they were the true and pure idealists to whom the rest of his
+life must be devoted. The young lady was horrified; nor was she any
+happier when she came to New York and met her fiance's new friends. She
+ought in common sense to have broken the engagement; but she was in
+love, and she married, as many another fool woman does, with the idea of
+"reforming" the man. She failed, and was utterly and unspeakably
+wretched.
+
+I know another man, a conservative capitalist of narrow and aggressive
+temper, whose wife turned into an ardent Bolshevik. The man thinks that
+all Bolsheviks should be shut up in jail for life, while the wife is
+equally certain that all jails should be razed to the ground and all
+Bolsheviks placed in control of the government. These two people have
+got to a point where they cannot sit down to the breakfast table without
+flying into a quarrel. I know another case of a modern scientist, an
+agnostic, whose wife, a half-educated, sentimental woman, took to
+dabbling in mysticism, and drove him wild by setting up an image of
+Buddha in her bedroom, and consorting with "swamis" in long yellow
+robes. I know another whose wife turned into an ultra-pious Catholic,
+and turned over the care of his domestic life to a priest. Is it not
+obvious that the only possible solution of such problems lies in
+divorce? Unless, indeed, we are all of us going to turn over the care of
+our domestic lives to the priests!
+
+Our grandfathers and grandmothers believed one thing, and believed the
+same thing when they were seventy as when they were twenty; so it was
+possible for them to dwell in domestic security and permanence till
+death did them part. But we are learning to change our minds; and
+whether what we believe is better or worse than what our ancestors
+believed, at least it is different. Also we are coming to take what we
+believe with more seriousness; the intellectual life means more and more
+to us, and it becomes harder and harder for us to find sexual and
+domestic happiness with a partner who does not share our convictions,
+but, on the contrary, may be contributing to the campaign funds of the
+opposition party.
+
+I do not mean by this that people should get a divorce as soon as they
+find they differ about some intellectual idea; on the contrary, I have
+advocated that they should do everything possible to understand and to
+tolerate each other. But it is a fact that intellectual convictions are
+the raw material out of which characters and lives are made, and it is
+inevitable that some characters and lives that fit quite well at twenty
+should fit very badly at thirty or forty. When we refuse divorce under
+such circumstances we are not fostering marriage, as we fondly imagine;
+we are really fostering adultery. It is a fact that not one person in
+ten who is held by legal or social force in an unhappy sex union will
+refrain from seeking satisfaction outside; and because these outside
+satisfactions are disgraceful, and in some cases criminal, they seldom
+have any permanence. Therefore it follows that "strict" divorce laws,
+such as the clerical propaganda urges upon us, are in reality laws for
+the promotion of fornication and prostitution.
+
+There is a short story by Edith Wharton, in which the "divorce evil" is
+exhibited to us in its naked horror; the story called "The Other Two,"
+in the volume "The Descent of Man." A society woman has been divorced
+twice and married three times, and by an ingenious set of circumstances
+the woman and all three of the men are brought into the same
+drawing-room at the same time. Just imagine, if you can, such an
+excruciating situation: a woman, her husband, and two men who used to be
+her husbands, all compelled to meet together and think of something to
+say! I cite this story because it is a perfect illustration of the
+extent to which the "divorce problem" is a problem of our lack of sense.
+Mrs. Wharton will, I fear, consider me a very vulgar person if I assert
+that there is absolutely no reason whatever why any of those four people
+in her story should have had a moment's discomfort of mind, except that
+they thought there was. There is absolutely nothing to prevent a man and
+woman who used to be married from meeting socially and being decent to
+each other, or to prevent two men from being decent to each other under
+such circumstances. I would not say that they should choose to be
+intimate friends--though even that may be possible occasionally.
+
+I know, because I have seen it happen. In Holland I met a certain
+eminent novelist and poet, a great and lovable man. I visited his home,
+and met his wife and two little children, and saw a man and woman living
+in domestic happiness. The man had also two grown sons, and after a few
+days he remarked that he would like me to meet the mother of these young
+men. We went for a walk of a mile or so, and met a lady who lived in a
+small house by herself, and who received us with a friendly welcome and
+talked with us for a couple of hours about music and books and art. This
+lady had been the writer's wife for ten years or so, and there had been
+a terrible uproar when they voluntarily parted. But they had refused to
+pay attention to this uproar; they understood why they did not wish to
+remain husband and wife any longer, but they did not consider it
+necessary to quarrel about it, nor even to break off the friendship
+which their common interests made possible. The two women in the case
+were not intimate, I gathered, but they frequently met at the homes of
+others, and found no difficulty in being friendly. I suggest to Mrs.
+Wharton that this story is at least as interesting as the one she has
+told; but I fear she will not care to write it, because apparently she
+considers it necessary that people who are well bred and refined should
+be the helpless victims of destructive manias.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII
+
+THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE
+
+     (Discusses the circumstances under which society has the right to
+     forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.)
+
+
+We have quoted the old maxim, "Marry in haste and repent at leisure,"
+and we suggested that parents and guardians should have the right to ask
+the young to wait before marriage, and make certain of the state of
+their hearts. We have now the same advice to give concerning divorce;
+the same claim to enter on behalf of society--that it has and should
+assert the right to ask people to delay and think carefully before
+breaking up a marriage.
+
+What interest has society in the restriction of divorce? What affair is
+it of any other person if I choose to get a divorce and marry a new wife
+once a month? There are many reasons, not in any way based upon
+religious superstition or conventional prejudice. In the first place,
+there are or may be children, and society should try to preserve for
+every child a home with a father and a mother in it. Second, there are
+property rights, of which every marriage is a tangle, and the settlement
+of which the law should always oversee. Third, there is the question of
+venereal disease, which society has an unquestionable right to keep
+down, by every reasonable restriction upon sexual promiscuity. And
+finally, there is the respect which all men and women owe to love. It
+seems to me that society has the same right to protect love against
+extreme outrage, as it has to forbid indecent exposure of the person on
+the street.
+
+There is in successful operation in Switzerland a wise and sane divorce
+law, based upon common sense and not upon superstition. A couple wish to
+break their marriage, and they go before a judge, and in private
+session, as to a friendly adviser, they tell their troubles. He gives
+them advice about their disagreement, and sends them away for three
+months to think it over. At the end of three months, if they still
+desire a divorce, they meet with him again. If he still thinks there is
+a chance of reconciliation, he has the right to require them to wait
+another three months. But if at the end of this second period they are
+still convinced that the case is hopeless, and that they should part,
+the judge is required to grant the divorce. You may note that this is
+exactly what I have suggested concerning young couples who become
+engaged. In both cases, the parties directly interested have the right
+to decide their own fate, but the rest of the world requires them to
+think carefully about it, and to listen to counsel. Except for grave
+offenses, such as adultery, insanity, crime or venereal disease, I do
+not think that anyone should receive a divorce in less than six months,
+nor do I think that any personal right is contravened by the imposing of
+such a delay.
+
+Next, what are we going to say to the right, or the claim to the right,
+on the part of a man or woman, to be married once a year throughout a
+lifetime? In order to illustrate this problem, I will tell you about a
+certain man known to me. In his early life he spent a couple of years in
+a lunatic asylum. He lays claim to extraordinary spiritual gifts, and
+uses the language of the highest idealism known. He is a man of culture
+and good family, and thus exerts a peculiar charm upon young women of
+refinement and sensitiveness. To my knowledge he was three times married
+in six years, and each time he deserted the woman, and forced her to
+divorce him, and to take care of herself, and in one case of a child. In
+addition, he had begotten one child out of marriage, and left the mother
+and child to starve. For ten years or so I used to see him about once in
+six months, and invariably he had a new woman, a young girl of fine
+character, who had been ensnared by him, and was in the agonizing
+process of discovering his moral and mental derangement. Yet there was
+absolutely nothing in the law to place restraint upon this man; he could
+wander from state to state, or to the other side of the world, preying
+upon lovely young girls wherever he went.
+
+This particular man happens to call himself a "radical"; but I could
+tell you of similar men in the highest social circles, or in the
+political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world; they are in
+every rank of life, and are just as definitely and certainly menaces to
+human welfare and progress as pirates on the high seas or highwaymen on
+the road. Nor are they confined to the males; the world is full of women
+who use their sex charms for predatory purposes, and some of them are
+far too clever for any law that you or I can contrive at present. But I
+think we might begin by refusing to let any man or woman have more than
+two divorces in one lifetime, in any state or part of the world. If any
+man or woman tries three times to find happiness in love, and fails each
+time, we have a right to assume that the fault must lie with that
+person, and not with the three partners.
+
+I think we may go further yet; having made wise laws of love and
+marriage, taking into consideration all human needs, we have a right to
+require that men and women shall obey the laws. At present the great
+mass of the public has sympathy for the law-breaker; just as, in old
+days, the peasants could not help admiring the outlaw who resisted
+unjust land laws and robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist
+regime, we can not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even
+though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore. But when
+we have made sex laws that we know are just and sensible--then we shall
+consider that we have the right to restrain sex criminals, and in
+extreme cases we shall avail ourselves of the skill of science to
+perform a surgical operation which will render him unable in future to
+prey upon the love needs of people who are placed at his mercy by their
+best qualities, their unselfishness and lack of suspicion.
+
+We clear out foul-smelling weeds from our garden, because we wish to
+raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein. There lives in
+California a student of plant life, who has shown us what we can do, not
+by magic or by superhuman efforts, but simply by loving plants, by
+watching them ceaselessly, understanding their ways, and guiding their
+sex-life to our own purposes. We can perform what to our ignorant
+ancestors would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all
+sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own kind, and
+survive forever if we give them proper care. In other words, Luther
+Burbank has shown us that we can "change plant nature."
+
+There flash back upon my memory all those dull, weary, sick human
+creatures, who have repeated to me that dull, weary, sick old formula,
+"You cannot change human nature." I do not think I am indulging either
+in religious superstition or in blind optimism, but am speaking
+precisely, in saying that whenever human beings get ready to apply
+experimental science to themselves, they can change human nature just as
+they now change plant nature. By putting human bodies together in love,
+we make new bodies of children more beautiful than any who have yet
+romped on the earth; and in the same way, by putting minds and souls
+together, we can make new kinds of minds and souls, different from those
+we have previously known, and greater than either the man-soul or the
+woman-soul alone.
+
+Also, by that magic which is the law of mind and soul life, each new
+creation can be multiplied to infinity, and shared by all other minds
+and souls that live in the present or may live in the future. We have
+shown elsewhere how genius multiplies to infinity the joy and power of
+life by means of the arts; and one of the greatest of the arts is the
+art of love. Consider the great lovers, the true lovers, of history--how
+they have enriched the lives of us all. It does not make any difference
+whether these men and women lived in the flesh, or in the brain of a
+poet--we learn alike from Dante and Beatrice, from Abelard and Heloise,
+from Robert and Elizabeth Browning, from Tristan and Isolde, from Romeo
+and Juliet, what is the depth and the splendor of this passion which
+lies hidden within us, and how it may enrich and vivify and glorify all
+life.
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+THE BOOK OF SOCIETY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII
+
+THE EGO AND THE WORLD
+
+     (Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant and in
+     primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment to life.)
+
+
+We have now to consider the relationship of man to his fellows, with
+whom he lives in social groups. Upon this problem floods of light have
+been thrown by the new science of psycho-analysis. I will try to give,
+briefly and in simple language, an idea of these discoveries.
+
+One of the laws of biology is that every individual, in his development,
+reproduces the history of the race; so that impulses and mental states
+of a child reveal to us what our far-off ancestors loved and feared. The
+same thing is discovered to be true of neurotics, people who have failed
+in adjusting themselves to civilized life, and have gone back, in some
+or all of their mental traits, to infantile states. If we analyze the
+unconscious minds of "nervous patients," and compare them with what we
+find in the minds of infants, and in savages, we discover the same
+dreams, the same longings and the same fears.
+
+The mental life of man begins in the womb. We cannot observe that life
+directly, but we know that it is there, because there cannot be organic
+life without mind to direct it, and just as there is an unconscious mind
+that regulates the bodily processes in adults, so in the embryo there
+must be an unconscious mind to direct the flow of blood, the building of
+bones, muscle, eyes and brain. The mental life of that unborn creature
+is of course purely egotistical; it knows nothing outside itself, and it
+finds this universe an agreeable place--everything being supplied to it,
+promptly and perfectly, without effort of its own.
+
+But suddenly it gets its first shock; pain begins, and severe
+discomfort, and the creature is shoved out into a cold world, yelling in
+protest against the unsought change. And from that moment on, the
+new-born infant labors to adjust itself to an entirely new set of
+conditions. Discomforts trouble it, and it cries. Quickly it learns that
+these cries are answered, and satisfaction of its needs is furnished.
+Somehow, magically, things appear; warm and dry covering, a trickle of
+delicious hot milk into its mouth. At first the infant mind has no idea
+how all this happens; but gradually it comes to realize objects outside
+itself, and it forms the idea that these objects exist to serve its
+wants. Later on it learns that there are particular sounds which attach
+to particular objects, and cause them to function. The sound "Mama," for
+example, produces a goddess clothed in beauty and power, performing
+miracles. So the infant mind arrives at the "period of magic gestures"
+and the "period of magic words"; corresponding to a certain type of myth
+and belief which we find in every race and tribe of human being that now
+exists or ever has existed on earth. All these stories about magic
+wishes and magic rings and magic spells of a thousand sorts; and nowhere
+on earth a child which does not listen greedily to such fancies! The
+reason is simply that the child has passed through this stage of mental
+life, and so recently that the feelings are close to the surface of his
+consciousness.
+
+But gradually the infant makes the painful discovery that not everything
+in existence can be got to serve him; there are forces which are proof
+against his magic spells; there are some which are hostile, and these
+the infant learns to regard with hatred and fear. Sometimes hatred and
+fear are strangely mixed with admiration and love. For example, there is
+a powerful being known as "father," who is sometimes good and useful,
+but at other times takes the attention of the supremely useful "mother,"
+the source of food and warmth and life. So "father" is hated, and in
+fancy he is wished out of the way--which to the infant is the same thing
+as killing. Out of this grows a whole universe of fascinating mental
+life, which Freud calls by the name "the [OE]dipus complex"--after the
+legend of the Greek hero who murdered his father and committed incest
+with his mother, and then, when he discovered what he had done, put out
+his own eyes. There is a mass of legends, old as human thought,
+repeating this story; we cannot be sure whether they have grown out of
+the greeds and jealousies of this early wish-life of the infant, or
+whether they had their base in the fact that there was a stage in human
+progress in which the father really was killed off by the sons.
+
+This latter idea is discussed by Freud, in his book, "Totem and Taboo."
+It appears that primitive man lived in hordes, which were dominated by
+one old male, who kept all the women to himself, and either killed the
+young males, or drove them out to shift for themselves; so the young men
+would combine and murder their father. The forming of human society, of
+marriage and the family, depended upon one factor, the decision of the
+young victors to live and let live. The only way they could do this was
+to agree not to quarrel over the women of their own group, but to seek
+other women from other groups. This may account for what is known as
+"exogamy," an almost universal marriage custom of primitive man, whereby
+a man named Jones is barred by frightful taboos from the women named
+Jones, but is permitted relations with all the women named Smith.
+
+To return to our infant: he is in the midst of a painful process of
+adjusting himself to the outside world; discovering that sometimes all
+his magic words and gestures fail, his wishes no longer come true. There
+are beings outside him, with wills of their own, and power to enforce
+them; he has to learn to get along with these beings, and give up his
+pleasures to theirs. These processes which go on in the infant soul, the
+hopes and the terrors, the griefs and the angers, are of the profoundest
+significance for the later adult life. For nothing gets out of the mind
+that has once got into it; the infantile cravings which are repressed
+and forgotten stay in the unconscious, and work there, and strive still
+for expression. The conscious mind will not tolerate them, but they
+escape in the form of fairy-tales and stories, of dreams and delusions,
+slips of the tongue, and many other mental events which it is
+fascinating to examine. Also, if we are weakened by ill health or
+nervous strain, these infantile wishes may take the form of "neuroses,"
+and fully grown people may take to stammering, or become impotent, or
+hysterical, or even insane, because of failures of adjustment to life
+that happened when they were a year or two old. These things are known,
+not merely as a matter of theory, but because, as soon as by analysis
+these infant secrets are brought into consciousness and adjusted there,
+the trouble instantly ceases.
+
+So it appears that the whole process of human life, from the very hour
+of birth, consists of the correct adjustment of men and women in
+relation to their fellows. Not merely is man a social being, but all the
+prehuman ancestors of men, for ages upon geologic ages, have been
+social beings; they have lived in groups, and their survival has
+depended upon their success in fitting themselves snugly into group
+relationships. Failure to make correct adjustments means punishment by
+the group, or by enemies outside the group; if the failure is serious
+enough, it means death. We may assert that the task of understanding
+one's fellow men, and making one's self understood by them, is the most
+important task that confronts every individual.
+
+And if we look about the world at present, the most superficial of us
+cannot fail to realize that the task is far from being correctly
+performed. So many people unhappy, so many striving for what they cannot
+get! So many having to be locked behind bars, like savage beasts,
+because they demand something which the world is resolved not to let
+them have! So many having to be killed, by rifles and machine-guns, by
+high explosive shells and poison gas--because they misunderstood the
+social facts about them, and thought they could fulfill some wishes
+which the rest of mankind wanted them to repress! As I read the
+psycho-analyst's picture of the newly born infant with its primitive
+ego, its magic cries and magic gestures, I cannot be sure how much of it
+is sober science and how much is mordant irony--a sketch of the mental
+states of the men and women I see about me--whole classes of men and
+women, yes, even whole nations!
+
+The effort of the following chapters will be to interpret to men and
+women the world which they have made, and to which they are trying to
+adjust themselves. More especially we shall try to show how, by better
+adjustments, men may change both themselves and the world, and make both
+into something less cruel and less painful, more serene and more certain
+and more free.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIX
+
+COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION
+
+     (Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and the part which
+     selfishness and unselfishness play in the development of social
+     life.)
+
+
+Pondering the subject of this chapter, I went for a stroll in the
+country, and seating myself in a lonely place, became lost in thought;
+when suddenly my eye was caught by something moving. On the bare, hot,
+gray sand lay a creature that I could see when it moved and could not
+see when it was still, for it was exactly the color of the ground, and
+fitted the ground tightly, being flat, and having its edges scalloped so
+that they mingled with the dust. It was a lizard, covered with heavy
+scales, and with sharp horns to make it unattractive eating. At the
+slightest motion from me it vanished into a heap of stones, so quickly
+that my eye could scarcely follow it.
+
+This creature, you perceive, is in its actions and its very form an
+expression of terror; terror of devouring enemies, of jackals that
+pounce and hawks that swoop, and also of the hot desert air that seeks
+to dry out its few precious drops of moisture. Practically all the
+energies of this creature are concentrated upon the securing of its own
+individual survival. To be sure, it will mate, but the process will be
+quick, and the eggs will be left for the sun to hatch out, and the baby
+lizards will shift for themselves--that is to say, they will be
+incarnations of terror from the moment they open their eyes to the
+light.
+
+The jackal seeks to pounce upon the lizard, and so inspires terror in
+the lizard; but when you watch the jackal you find that it exhibits
+terror toward more powerful foes. You find that the hawk, which swoops
+upon the lizard, is equally quick to swoop away when it comes upon a man
+with a gun. This preying and being preyed upon, this mixture of cruelty
+and terror, is a conspicuous fact of nature; if you go into any orthodox
+school or college in America today, you will be taught that it is
+nature's most fundamental law, and governs all living things. If you
+should take a course in political economy under a respectable
+professor, you would find him explaining that such cruelty-terror
+applies equally in human affairs; it is the basis of all economic
+science, and the effort to escape from it is like the effort to lift
+yourself by your boot-straps.
+
+The professor calls this cruelty-terror by the name "competition"; and
+he creates for his own purposes an abstract being whom he names "the
+economic man," a creature who acts according to this law, and exists
+under these conditions. One of the professor's formulas is the so-called
+"Malthusian law," that population presses always upon the limits of
+subsistence. Another is "the law of diminishing returns of agriculture,"
+that you can get only so much product out of a certain piece of land, no
+matter how much labor and capital you put into it. Another is Ricardo's
+"iron law of wages," that wages cannot rise above the cost of living.
+Another is embodied in the formula of Adam Smith, that "Competition is
+the life of trade." The professor enunciates these "laws," coldly and
+impersonally, as becomes the scientist; but if you go into the world of
+business, you find them set forth cynically, in scores of maxims and
+witticisms: "Dog eat dog," "the devil take the hindmost," "business is
+business," "do others or they will do you."
+
+Evidently, however, there is something in man which rebels against these
+"natural" laws. In our present society man has set aside six days in the
+week in which to live under them, and one day in the week in which to
+preach an entirely different and contradictory code--that of Christian
+ethics, which bids you "love your neighbor," and "do unto others as you
+would they should do unto you." Between these Sunday teachings and the
+week-day teachings there is eternal conflict, and one who takes pleasure
+in ridiculing his fellow men can find endless opportunity here. The
+Sunday preachers are forbidden to interfere with the affairs of the
+other six days; that is called "dragging politics into the pulpit." On
+the other hand, incredible as it may seem, there are professors of the
+week-day doctrine who call themselves Christians, and believe in the
+Sunday doctrine, too. They manage this by putting the Sunday doctrine
+off into a future world; that is, we are to pounce upon one another and
+devour one another under the "iron laws" of economics so long as we live
+on earth, but in the next world we shall play on golden harps and have
+nothing to do but love one another. If anybody is so foolish as to apply
+the Sermon on the Mount to present-day affairs, we regard him as a
+harmless crank; if he persists, and sets out to teach others, we call
+him a Communist or a Pacifist, and put him in jail for ten or twenty
+years.
+
+In the Book of the Mind, I have referred to Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a
+Factor in Evolution," which I regard as one of the epoch-making books of
+our time. Kropotkin clearly proves that competition is not the only law
+of nature, it is everywhere modified by co-operation, and in the great
+majority of cases co-operation plays a larger part in the relations of
+living creatures than competition. There is no creature in existence
+which is entirely selfish; in the nature of the case such a creature
+could not exist--save in the imaginations of teachers of special
+privilege. If a species is to survive, some portion of the energies of
+the individual must go into reproduction; and steadily, as life
+advances, we find the amount of this sacrifice increasing. The higher
+the type of the creature, the longer is the period of infancy, and the
+greater the sacrifice of the parent for the young. Likewise, most
+creatures make the discovery that by staying together in herds or
+groups, and learning to co-operate instead of competing among
+themselves, they increase their chances of survival. You find birds that
+live in flocks, and other birds, like hawks and owls and eagles, that
+are solitary; and you find the co-operating birds a thousand times as
+numerous--that is to say, a thousand times as successful in the struggle
+for survival. You find that all man's brain power has been a social
+product; the supremacy he has won over nature has depended upon one
+thing and one alone--the fact that he has managed to become different
+from the "economic man," that product of the imagination of the
+defenders of privilege.
+
+It is evident that both competition and co-operation are necessary to
+every individual, and the health of the individual and of the race lies
+in the proper combination of the two. If a creature were wholly
+unselfish--if it made no effort to look after its own individual
+welfare--it would be exterminated before it had a chance to reproduce.
+If, on the other hand, it cannot learn to co-operate, its progeny stand
+less chance of survival against creatures which have learned this
+important lesson. We have a nation of a 110,000,000 people, who have
+learned to co-operate to a certain limited extent. Some of us realize
+how vastly the happiness of these millions might be increased by a
+further extension of co-operation; but we find ourselves opposed by the
+professors of privilege--and we wish that these gentlemen would go out
+and join the lizards of the desert sands or the sharks of the sea,
+creatures which really practice the system of "laissez faire" which the
+professors teach.
+
+The plain truth is that we cannot make a formula out of either
+competition or co-operation. We cannot settle any problem of economics,
+of business or legislation, by proclaiming, for example, that
+"Competition is the life of trade." Competition may just as well turn
+out to be the death of trade; it depends entirely upon the kind of
+competition, and the stage of trade development to which it is applied.
+In the early eighteenth century, when that formula of Adam Smith was
+written, competition was observed to keep down prices and provide
+stimulus to enterprise, and so to further abundant production. But the
+time came when the machinery for producing goods was in excess, not
+merely of the needs of the country, but of the available foreign
+markets, and then suddenly the large-scale manufacturers made the
+discovery that competition was the death of trade to them. They
+proceeded, as a matter of practical common sense, and without consulting
+their college professors, to abolish competition by forming trusts. We
+passed laws forbidding them to do this, but they simply refused to obey
+the laws. In the United States they have made good their refusal for
+thirty-five years, and in the end have secured the blessing of the
+Supreme Court upon their course.
+
+So now we have co-operation in large-scale production and marketing. It
+is known by various names, "pools," "syndicates," "price-fixing,"
+"gentlemen's agreements." It is a blessing for those who co-operate, but
+it proves to be the death of those who labor, and also of those who
+consume, and we see these also compelled to combine, forming labor
+unions and consumers' societies. Each side to the quarrel insists that
+the other side is committing a crime in refusing to compete, and our
+whole social life is rent with dissensions over this issue. Manifestly,
+we need to clear our minds of dead doctrines; to think out clearly just
+what we mean by competition, and what by co-operation, and what is the
+proper balance between the two.
+
+I have been at pains in this book to provide a basis for the deciding of
+such questions. It is a practical problem, the fostering of human life
+and the furthering of its development. We cannot lay down any fixed
+rule; we have to study the facts of each case separately. We shall say,
+this kind of competition is right, because it helps to protect human
+life and to develop its powers. We shall say, this other kind of
+competition is wrong because it has the opposite effect. We shall say,
+perhaps, that some kind was right fifty years ago, or even ten years
+ago, because it then had certain effects; but meantime some factor has
+changed, and it is now having a different effect, and therefore ought to
+be abolished.
+
+There has never been any kind of human competition which men did not
+judge and modify in that way; there is no field of human activity in
+which ethical codes do not condemn certain practices as unfair. The
+average Englishman considers it proper that two men who get into a
+dispute shall pull off their coats, and settle the question at issue by
+pummeling each other's noses. But let one of these men strike his
+opponent in the groin, or let him kick his shins, and instantly there
+will be a howl of execration. Likewise, an Anglo-Saxon man who fights
+with the fists has a loathing for a Sicilian or Greek or other
+Mediterranean man who will pull a knife. That kind of competition is
+barred among our breeds; and also the kind which consists of using
+poisons, or of starting slanders against your opponent.
+
+If you look back through history, you find many forms of competition
+which were once eminently respectable, but now have been outlawed. There
+was a time, for example, when the distinction we draw between piracy and
+sea-war was wholly unknown. The ships of the Vikings would go out and
+raid the ships and seaports of other peoples, and carry off booty and
+captives, and the men who did that were sung as heroes of the nation.
+The British sea-captains of the time of Queen Elizabeth--Drake,
+Frobisher, and the rest of them--are portrayed in our school books as
+valiant and hardy men, and the British colonies were built on the basis
+of their activities; yet, according to the sea laws in force today, they
+were pirates. We regard a cannibal race with abhorrence; yet there was a
+time when all the vigorous races of men were cannibals, and the habit of
+eating your enemies in battle may well have given an advantage to the
+races which practiced it.
+
+On the other hand, you find sentimental people who reject all
+competition on principle, and would like to abolish every trace of it
+from society, and especially from education. But stop and consider for a
+moment what that would mean. Would you abolish, for example, the
+competition of love, the right of a man to win the girl he wants? You
+could not do it, of course; but if you could, you would abolish one of
+the principal methods by which our race has been improved. Of course,
+what you really want is, not to abolish competition in love, but to
+raise it to a higher form. There is an old saying, "All's fair in love
+and war," but no one ever meant that. You would not admit that a man
+might compete in love by threatening to kill the girl if she preferred a
+rival. You would not admit that he might compete by poisoning the other
+man. You would not admit that he might compete by telling falsehoods
+about the other man. On the other hand, if you are sensible, you admit
+that he has a right to compete by making his character known to the
+girl, and if the other man is a rascal, by telling the girl that.
+
+Would you abolish the competition of art, the effort of men to produce
+work more beautiful and inspiring than has ever been known before? Would
+you abolish the effort of scientists to overthrow theories which have
+hitherto been accepted? Obviously not. You make these forms of
+competition seem better by calling them "emulation," but you do not in
+the least modify the fact that they involve the right of one person to
+outdo other persons, to supplant them and take away something from them,
+whether it be property or position or love or fame or power. In that
+sense, competition is indeed the law of life, and you might as well
+reconcile yourself to it, and learn to play your part with spirit and
+good humor.
+
+Also, you might as well train your children to it. You will find you
+cannot develop their powers to the fullest without competition; in fact,
+you will be forced to go back and utilize forms of competition which are
+now out of date among adults. I have told in the Book of the Body how I
+myself tried for ten years or more to live without physical competition,
+and discovered that I could not; I have had to take up some form of
+sport, and hundreds of thousands of other men have had the same
+experience. What is sport? It is a deliberate going back, under
+carefully devised rules, to the savage struggles of our ancestors. The
+very essence of real sport is that the contestants shall, within the
+rules laid down, compete with each other to the limit of their powers.
+With what contempt would a player of tennis or baseball or whist regard
+the proposition that his opponent should be merciful to him, and let him
+win now and then! Obviously, these things have no place in the game, and
+to be a "good sport" is to conform to the rules, and take with enjoyment
+whatever issue of the struggle may come.
+
+But then again, suppose you are competing with a child; obviously, the
+conditions are different. You no longer play the best you can, you let
+the child win a part of the time; but you do not let the child know
+this, or it would spoil the fun for the child. You pretend to try as
+hard as you know how, and you cry out in grief when you are beaten, and
+the child crows with delight. And yet, that does not keep you from
+loving the child, or the child from loving you.
+
+The purpose of this elaborate exposition is to make clear the very vital
+point that a certain set of social acts may be right under some
+conditions, and desperately wrong under other conditions. They may be
+right in play, and not in serious things; they may be right in youth,
+and not in maturity; they may be right at one period of the world's
+development, while at another period they are destructive of social
+existence. If, therefore, we wish to know what are right and wrong
+actions in the affairs of men, if we wish to judge any particular law or
+political platform or program of business readjustment, the first thing
+we have to do is to acquire a mass of facts concerning the society to
+which the law or platform or program, is to be applied. We need to ask
+ourselves, exactly what will be the effect of that change, applied in
+that particular way at that particular time. In order to decide
+accurately, we need to know the previous stages through which that
+society has passed, the forces which have been operating in it, and the
+ways in which they have worked.
+
+But also we must realize that the lessons of history cannot ever be
+accepted blindly. The "principles of the founders" apply to us only in
+modified form; for the world in which we live today is different from
+any world which has ever been before, and the world tomorrow will be
+different yet. We are the makers of it, and the masters of it, and what
+it will be depends to some extent upon our choice. In fact, that is the
+most important lesson of all for us to learn; the final purpose of all
+our thought about the world is to enable us to make it a happier and a
+better world for ourselves and our posterity to live in.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L
+
+ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY
+
+     (Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and whether
+     there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.)
+
+
+In the letters of Thomas Jefferson is found the following passage:
+
+"All eyes are open or opening to the rights of man. The general spread
+of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable
+truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their
+backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them
+legitimately, by the grace of God."
+
+This, which Jefferson, over a hundred years ago, described as a
+"palpable truth," is still a long way from prevailing in the world. We
+are trying in this book not to take anything for granted, so we do not
+assume this truth, but investigate it; and we begin by admitting that
+there are many facts which seem to contradict it, and which make it more
+difficult of proof than Jefferson realized. It is not enough to point
+out the lack of saddles on the backs, and of boots and spurs on the feet
+of newly born infants; for the fact is that men are not exploited
+because of saddles, nor is the exploiting accomplished by means of boots
+and spurs. It is done by means of gold and steel, banks and credit
+systems, railroads, machine-guns and battleships. And while it is not
+true that certain races and classes are born with these things on them,
+they are born to the possession of them, and the vast majority of
+mankind are without them all their lives, and without the ability to use
+them even if they had them.
+
+The doctrine that "all men are created equal," or that they ought to be
+equal, we shall describe for convenience as the democratic doctrine. It
+first came to general attention through Christianity, which proclaimed
+the brotherhood of all mankind in a common fatherhood of God. But even
+as taught by the Christians, the doctrine had startling limitations. It
+was several centuries before a church council summoned the courage to
+decide that women were human beings, and had souls; and today many
+devout Christians are still uncertain whether Japanese and Chinese and
+Filipinos and Negroes are human beings, and have souls. I have heard old
+gentlemen in the South gravely maintain that the Negro is not a human
+being at all, but a different species of animal. I have heard learned
+men in the South set forth that the sutures in the Negro skull close at
+some very early age, and thus make moral responsibility impossible for
+the black race. And you will find the same ideas maintained, not merely
+as to differences of race and color, but as to differences of economic
+condition. You will find the average aristocratic Englishman quite
+convinced that the "lower orders" are permanently inferior to himself,
+and this though they are of the same Anglo-Saxon stock.
+
+For convenience I will refer to the doctrine that there is some natural
+and irremovable inferiority of certain races or classes, as the
+aristocratic doctrine. I will probably startle some of my readers by
+making the admission that if there is any such natural or irremovable
+inferiority, then a belief in political or economic equality is a
+blunder. If there are certain classes or races which cannot think, or
+cannot learn to think as well as other classes and races, those mentally
+inferior classes and races will obey, and they will be made to obey, and
+neither you nor I, nor all the preachers and agitators in the world,
+will ever be able to arrange it otherwise. Suppose we could do it, we
+should be committing a crime against life; we should be holding down the
+race and aborting its best development.
+
+Is there any such natural and irremovable inferiority in human beings?
+When we come to study the question we find it complicated by a different
+phenomenon, that of racial immaturity, which we have to face frankly and
+get clear in our minds. One of the most obvious facts of nature is that
+of infancy and childhood. We have just pointed out that if you are
+competing with a child, you do it in an entirely different way and under
+an entirely different set of rules, and if you fail to do this, you are
+unfair and even cruel to the child. And it is a fact of our world that
+there are some races more backward in the scale of development than
+other races. You may not like this fact, but it is silly to try to evade
+it. People who live in savage huts and beat on tom-toms and fight with
+bows and arrows and cannot count beyond a dozen--such people are not
+the mental or moral equals of our highly civilized races, and to treat
+them as equals, and compete with them on that basis, means simply to
+exterminate them. And we should either exterminate them at once and be
+done with it, or else make up our minds that they are in a childhood
+stage of our race, and that we have to guide them and teach them as we
+do our children.
+
+There is no more useful person than the wise and kind teacher. But
+suppose we saw some one pretending to be a teacher to our children,
+while in reality enslaving and exploiting them, or secretly robbing and
+corrupting them--what would we say about that kind of teacher? The name
+of that teacher is capitalist commercialism, and his profession is known
+as "the white man's burden"; his abuse of power is the cause of our
+present racial wars and revolts of subject peoples. A fair-minded man,
+desirous of facing all the facts of life, hardly knows what stand to
+take in such a controversy; that is, hardly knows from which cause the
+colored races suffer more--the white man's exploitation, or their own
+native immaturity.
+
+To say that certain races are in a childhood stage, and need instruction
+and discipline, is an entirely different thing from saying they are
+permanently inferior and incapable of self-government. Whether they are
+permanently inferior is a problem for the man of science, to be
+determined by psychological tests, continued possibly over more than one
+generation. We have not as yet made a beginning; in fact, we have not
+even acquired the scientific impartiality necessary to such an inquiry.
+
+In the meantime, all that we can do is to look about us and pick up
+hints where we can. In places like Massachusetts, where Negroes are
+allowed to go to college and are given a chance to show what they can
+do, they have not ousted the white man, but many of them have certainly
+won his respect, and one finds charming and cultured men among them, who
+show no signs of prematurely closed up skulls. And one after another we
+see the races which have been held down as being inferior, developing
+leadership and organization and power of moral resistance. The Irish are
+showing themselves today one of the most vigorous and high-spirited of
+all races. The Hindus are developing a movement which in the long run
+may prove more powerful than the white man's gold and steel. The
+Egyptians, the Persians, the Filipinos, the Koreans, are all devising
+ways to break the power of capitalist newspaper censorship. How sad that
+the subject races of the world have to get their education through
+hatred of their teachers, instead of through love!
+
+Of course, these rebel leaders are men who have absorbed the white man's
+culture, at least in part; practically always they are of the younger
+generation, which has been to the white man's schools. But this is the
+very answer we have been seeking--as to whether the race is permanently
+inferior, or merely immature and in need of training. It is not only
+among the brown and black and yellow races that progress depends upon
+the young generations; that is a universal fact of life.
+
+In the course of this argument we shall assume that the Christian or
+democratic theory has the weight of probability on its side, and that
+nature has not created any permanently and necessarily inferior race or
+class. We shall assume that the heritage of culture is a common
+heritage, open to all our species. We shall not go so far as the
+statement which Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence,
+that "all men are created free and equal"; but we shall assert that they
+are created "with certain inalienable rights," and that among these is
+the right to maintain their lives and to strive for liberty and
+happiness. Also, we shall say that there will never be peace or order in
+the world until they have found liberty, and recognition of their right
+to happiness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LI
+
+RULING CLASSES
+
+     (Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained, and
+     what sanction it can claim.)
+
+
+It is possible to conceive an order of nature in which all individuals
+were born and developed exactly alike and with exactly equal powers.
+Such is apparently the case with lower animals, for example the ants and
+the bees. But among human beings there are great differences; some are
+born idiots and some are born geniuses. Even supposing that we are able
+to do away with blindness and idiocy, it is not likely that we can ever
+make a race of uniform genius. There will always be some more capable
+minds, who will discover new powers of life, and will compel the others
+to learn from them. It is to the interest of the race that this learning
+should be done as quickly as possible. In other words, the great problem
+of society is how to recognize superior minds and put them in authority.
+
+We look back over history, and discover a few wise men, and many rulers;
+but very, very rarely does it happen that the ruler is a wise man, or a
+friend of wise men. Far more often we find the ruler occupied in
+suppressing the wise man and his wisdom. There was a ruler who allowed
+the mob to crucify Jesus, and another who ordered Socrates to drink the
+hemlock, and another who tortured Galileo, and another who chopped off
+the head of Sir Walter Raleigh--and so on through a long and tragic
+chronicle. And even when the accident of a wise ruler occurs he is apt
+to be surrounded by a class of parasites and corrupt officials who are
+busy to thwart his will.
+
+The general run of history is this: some group seizes power by force,
+and holds it by the same means, and seeks to augment and perpetuate it.
+Those who win the power are frequently men of energy and practical
+sense, and do fairly well as governors; but they are never able to hand
+on their virtues, and their line becomes corrupted by sensuality and
+self-indulgence, and the subject classes are plundered and driven to
+revolt. Often the revolt fails, but in the course of time it succeeds,
+and there is a new dynasty, or a new ruling class, sometimes a little
+better than the old, sometimes worse.
+
+How shall one judge whether the new regime is better or worse?
+Obviously, this is a most important question; it has to do, not merely
+with history, but with our daily affairs, our voting. As one who has
+read some tens of thousands of pages of history, and has pondered its
+lessons with heart-sickness and despair, I lay down this general law by
+which revolts and changes of power may be judged: If the change results
+in the holding of power by a smaller number of people, it is a reaction;
+but if the change results in distributing the power among a larger group
+of the community, then that community has made a step in advance.
+
+I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central American
+country--Guatemala, I think--which showed 130 revolutions in less than a
+hundred years. Some rascal gets together a gang, and seizes the
+government and plunders its revenue. When he has plundered too much,
+some other rascal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang.
+Such "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for the
+Richard Harding Davis type of fiction; but we do not consider them as
+having any relationship to progress. We describe them as "palace"
+revolutions.
+
+But compare with this the various English revolutions. We write learned
+histories about them, and describe England as "the Mother of
+Parliaments." The reason for this is that when there was political
+discontent in England, the protesting persons proceeded to organize
+themselves, and to understand their trouble and to remedy it. They had
+the brain power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and
+when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling class to
+give way, they brought about a wider extension of liberty, a wider
+distribution of power. Tennyson has pictured England as a state "where
+freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." We today,
+reading its history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the
+word "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a
+community to move forward slowly than to move forward rapidly and then
+move backward nearly as far.
+
+We have pointed out several times the important fact of biology that
+change does not necessarily mean progress from any rational or moral
+point of view. Degeneration is just as real a fact as progress, and it
+does not at all follow that because things change they are changing for
+the better. It is worth while to repeat this in discussing human
+society, for it is just as true of governments and morals as of living
+species. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundredfold the
+machinery of wealth production, and only be increasing luxury and
+wantonness and graft. A nation may change its governmental forms, its
+laws and social conventions, and boast noisily of these changes in the
+name of progress, while as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the
+road to ruin which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I
+can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you can judge,
+and that is the test already indicated: Is the actual, effective power
+of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller percentage of the
+population than before the change took place?
+
+You will note the words "actual, effective power." Nothing is more
+familiar in human life than for forms to survive after the spirit which
+created them is dead; and nothing is more familiar than the use of these
+forms as masks to deceive the populace. There have been many times in
+history when people have gone on voting, long after their votes ceased
+to count for anything; there have been many times when people have gone
+through the motions of freedom long after they have been slaves. Mexico
+under Diaz had one of the most perfect of constitutions, and was in
+reality one of the most perfect of despotisms; and we Americans are
+sadly familiar with political democracies which do not work.
+
+Shall we, therefore, join the pessimists and say that history is a blind
+struggle for useless power, and that the notion of progress is a
+delusion? I do not think so; on the contrary, I think it is easily to be
+demonstrated that there has been a steady increase in the amount of
+knowledge possessed by the race, and in the spread of this knowledge
+among the whole population. I think that through most of the period of
+written history we can trace a real development in human society. I
+think we can analyze the laws of this development, and explain its
+methods; and I think this knowledge is precious to us, because it
+enables us to accelerate the process and to make the end more certain.
+This task, the analysis of social evolution, is the task we have next to
+undertake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LII
+
+THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION
+
+     (Discusses the series of changes through which human society has
+     passed.)
+
+
+We have now to consider, briefly, the history of man as a social being,
+the groups he has formed, and the changes in his group systems.
+Everything in life grows, and human societies are no exception to the
+rule. They have undergone a long process of evolution, which we can
+trace in detail, and which we find conforms exactly to the law laid down
+by Herbert Spencer; a process whereby a number of single and similar
+things become different parts of one complex thing. In the case of human
+societies the units are men and women, and social evolution is a process
+whereby a small and simple group, in which the individuals are
+practically alike, grows into a large and complex group, in which the
+individuals are widely different, and their relations one to another are
+complicated and subtle.
+
+There are two powerful forces pressing upon human beings, and compelling
+them to struggle and grow. The first of these forces is fear, the need
+of protection against enemies; the second is hunger, the need of food
+and the means of producing and storing food. The first causes the
+individual to combine with his fellows and establish some form of
+government, and this is the origin of political evolution. The second
+causes him to accumulate wealth, and to combine industrially, and this
+is the origin of economic evolution. Because the first force is a little
+more urgent, we observe in the history of human society that evolution
+in government precedes evolution in industry.
+
+I made this statement some twenty years ago, in an article in "Collier's
+Weekly." I wrote to the effect that man's first care was to secure
+himself against his enemies, and that when he had done this he set out
+to secure his food supply. "Collier's" called upon the late Professor
+Sumner of Yale University, a prize reactionary and Tory of the old
+school, to answer me; and Professor Sumner made merry over my statement,
+declaring that man sought for food long before he was safe from his
+enemies. Some years later, when Sumner died, one of his admirers wrote
+in the New York "Evening Post" that he had completely overwhelmed me,
+and I had acknowledged my defeat by failing to reply--something which
+struck me as very funny. It was, of course, possible that Sumner had
+overwhelmed me, but to say that I had considered myself overwhelmed was
+to attribute to me a degree of modesty of which I was wholly incapable.
+As a matter of fact, I had had my usual experience with capitalist
+magazines; "Collier's Weekly" had promised to publish my rejoinder to
+Sumner, but failed to keep the promise, and finally, when I worried
+them, they tucked the answer away in the back part of the paper, among
+the advertisements of cigars and toilet soaps.
+
+Professor Sumner is gone, but he has left behind him an army of pupils,
+and I will protect myself against them by phrasing my statement with
+extreme care. I do not mean to say that man first secures himself
+completely against his enemies, and then goes out to hunt for a meal. Of
+course he has to eat while he is countering the moves of his enemies; he
+has to eat while he is on the march to battle, or in flight from it. But
+ask yourself this question: which would you choose, if you had to
+choose--to go a couple of days with nothing to eat, or to have your
+throat cut by bandits and your wife and children carried away into
+slavery? Certainly you would do your fighting first, and meantime you
+would scratch together any food you could. While you were devoting your
+energies to putting down civil war, or to making a treaty with other
+tribes, or to preparing for a military campaign, you would continue to
+get food in the way your ancestors had got it; in other words, your
+economic evolution would wait, while your political evolution proceeded.
+But when you had succeeded in putting down your enemies, and had a long
+period of peace before you, then you would plant some fields, and
+domesticate some animals, or perhaps discover some new way of weaving
+cloth--and so your industrial life would make progress.
+
+It is easy to see why Professor Sumner wished to confuse this issue. He
+could not deny political evolution, because it had happened. He despised
+and feared political democracy, but it was here, and he had to speak
+politely to it, as to a tiger that had got into his house. But
+industrial democracy was a thing that had not yet happened in the
+world; it was only a hope and a prophecy, and therefore a prize old Tory
+was free to ridicule it. I remember reading somewhere his statement--the
+notion that democracy had anything to do with industry, or could in any
+way be applied to industry, was a piece of silliness. So, of course, he
+sought to demolish my idea that there was a process of evolution in
+economic affairs, paralleling the process of political evolution which
+had already culminated in democracy.
+
+Let us consider the process of political evolution, briefly and in its
+broad outlines. Take any savage tribe; you find it composed of
+individuals who are very much alike. Some are a little stronger than
+others, a little more clever, more powerful in battle; but the
+difference is slight, and when the tribe chooses someone to lead them,
+they might as well choose one man as another. They all have a say in the
+tribe councils, both men and women; their "rights" in the tribe are the
+same. They are, of course, slaves to ignorance, to degrading
+superstition and absurd taboos; but these things apply to everyone
+alike, there is no privileged caste, no hereditary inequality.
+
+But little by little, as the tribe grows in numbers, and in power and
+intelligence, as it comes to capture slaves in battle, and to unite with
+other tribes, there comes to be an hereditary chieftain and a group of
+his leading supporters, his courtiers and henchmen. When the society has
+evolved into the stage which we call barbarism, there is a permanent
+superior caste; there are hereditary priests, who have in their keeping
+the favor of the gods; and there is a subject population of slaves.
+
+The society moves on into the feudal stage, in which the various grades
+and classes are precisely marked off, each with its different functions,
+its different privileges and rights and duties. The feudal
+principalities and duchies war and struggle among themselves; they are
+united by marriage or by conquest, and presently some stronger ruler
+brings a great territory under his power, and we have what is called a
+kingdom; a society still larger, still more complex in its organization,
+and still more rigid in its class distinctions. Take France, under the
+ancient regime, and compare a courtier or noble gentleman with a serf;
+they are not only different before the law, they are different in the
+language they use, in the clothes they wear, in the ideas they hold;
+they are different even in their bodies, so that the gentleman regards
+the serf as an inferior species of creature.
+
+The kings warred among themselves and emperors arose. The ultimate ideal
+in Europe was a political society which should include the whole
+continent, and this ideal was several times almost attained. But it is
+the rule of history that wherever a large society is built upon the
+basis of privilege and enslavement, the ruling classes prove morally and
+intellectually unequal to the burden put upon them; they become
+corrupted, and their rule becomes intolerable. This happened in Europe,
+and there came political revolutions--first in England, which
+accomplished it by gradual stages, and then in the French monarchy, and
+quite recently in a dozen monarchies and empires, large and small.
+
+What precisely is this political revolution? Let us consider the case of
+France, where the change was sudden, and the issues precisely drawn.
+King Louis XIV had said, "I am the state." To a person of our time that
+might seem like boasting, but it was merely an assertion of the existing
+political fact. King Louis was the state by universal consent, and by
+divine authority, as all men believed. The army was his army, the navy
+was his navy, and wars, when he made them, were his wars. Everyone in
+the state was his subject, and all the property of the state was his
+personal, private property, to dispose of as he pleased. The government
+officials carried out his will, and members of the nobility held the
+land and ruled in his name.
+
+But now suddenly the people of France overthrew the king, and put him to
+death, and drove the nobles into exile; they seized the power of the
+French state, and proclaimed themselves equal citizens in the state,
+with equal voices in its government and equal rights before the law. So
+we call France a republic, and describe this form of society as
+political democracy. It is the completion of the process of political
+evolution, and you will see that it moves in a sort of spiral; having
+completed a circle and got back where it was before, but upon a higher
+plane. The citizens of a modern republic are equal before the law, just
+as were the members of the savage tribe; but the political organization
+is vastly larger, and infinitely more complicated, and every individual
+lives his life upon a higher level, because he shares in the benefits of
+this more highly organized and more powerful state.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIII
+
+INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION
+
+     (Examines the process of evolution in industry and the stage which
+     it has so far reached.)
+
+
+And now let us consider the process of industrial evolution. We shall
+find it to be exactly the same thing, reproducing the changes in another
+field of activity. You may picture two gigantic waves sweeping over the
+ocean. In some places the waves are far apart, and in other places they
+are closer together; for a time they may mingle, and perhaps their bases
+always mingle. It would be easy for a critic to point out how political
+affairs play a leading part in industrial evolution, and vice versa; it
+would be easy to argue that property rules the political state, or
+again, that the main function of the political state is to protect
+property. As I have said, man has to fight his enemies, and he has to
+seek food, and often he has to do the two things at the same time; but
+nevertheless, broadly speaking, we observe two great waves, sweeping
+over human society, and most of the time these waves are clearly
+separated and easily distinguished.
+
+Industry in a savage tribe is, like government, simple and uniform; all
+the members of the tribe get their living in the same way. One may be a
+little more expert as a fisherman, another as a gatherer of cocoanuts,
+but the fisherman gathers cocoanuts and the cocoanut-gatherer fishes. In
+the days of primitive communism there is little economic strife and
+little change; but as slavery comes in, and the private property system,
+there begins industrial war--the members of the tribe trade with one
+another, and argue over prices, and gradually some get the better of
+others, they accumulate slaves and goods, and later on they appropriate
+the land to their private use. Of course, the men who do this are often
+the rulers of the tribe, and so politics and industry are mixed; but
+even assuming that the state never interfered, assuming that the
+government allowed business affairs to work themselves out in their own
+way, the tendency of competition is always to end in monopoly. The big
+fish eat the little fish, the strong gain advantage over the weak, the
+rich grow richer, and the poor grow relatively poorer. As the amount of
+trading increases, and men specialize in the arts of bargaining, we see
+again and again how money concentrates in the hands of a few. It does
+this, even when the political state tries to prevent it; as, for
+example, when the princes and dukes of the Middle Ages would torture the
+Jewish money-lenders and take away their treasure, but the Jews never
+failed to grow rich again.
+
+It is when political evolution has completed itself, and a republic has
+been set up, that a free field is given to economic forces to work
+themselves out to their logical end. We have seen this in the United
+States, where we all started pretty much on the same economic level, and
+where political tyranny has had little hold. Our civilization is a
+civilization of the trader--the business man, as we call him; and we see
+how big business absorbs little business, and grows constantly larger
+and more powerful. We are familiar with what we call "graft," the use by
+business men of the powers of government to get trade advantage for
+themselves, and we have a school of old-time thinkers, calling
+themselves "Jeffersonian Democrats," who insist that if only there had
+never been any government favors, economic equality and democracy would
+have endured forever in our country. But it is my opinion that
+government has done far more to prevent monopoly and special privilege
+in business than to favor it; and nevertheless, monopoly has grown.
+
+In other words, the tendency toward concentration in business, the
+absorption of the small business by the big business, is an irresistible
+natural process, which neither can be nor should be hindered. The
+condition of competition, whether in politics or in industry, is never a
+permanent one, and can never be made permanent; it is a struggle which
+automatically brings itself to an end. Large-scale production and
+distribution is more economical than small-scale, and big business has
+irresistible advantages of credit and permanence over little business.
+As we shall presently show, the blind and indiscriminate production of
+goods under the competitive system leads to the glutting of markets and
+to industrial crises. At such times the weaker concerns are weeded out
+and the strong ones take their trade; and as a result, we have the
+modern great corporation, the most powerful machine of production yet
+devised by man, and which corresponds in every aspect to the monarchy in
+political society.
+
+We are accustomed to speak of our "captains of industry," our "coal
+kings," and "beef barons" and "lords of steel," and we think we are
+using metaphors; but the universality of these metaphors points to a
+fundamental truth in them. As a matter of fact, our modern captain of
+industry fills in the economic world exactly the same functions as were
+filled in ancient days by the head of a feudal state. He has won his
+power in a similar struggle, and he holds it by similar methods. He
+rules over an organization of human beings, arranged, economically
+speaking, in grades and classes, with their authorities and privileges
+and duties precisely determined, as under the "ancient regime." And just
+as King Louis said, "I am the state," so Mr. Armour considers that he is
+Armour & Co., and Mr. Morgan considers that he is the house of Morgan,
+and that the business exists for him and is controlled by him under
+divine authority.
+
+If I am correct in my analysis of the situation, this process of
+industrial evolution is destined to complete itself, as in the case of
+the political state. The subject populations of industry are becoming
+more and more discontented with their servitude, more and more resentful
+of that authority which compels them to labor while others reap the
+benefit. They are organizing themselves, and preparing for a social
+transformation which will parallel in every detail the revolution by
+which our ancestors overthrew the authority of King George III over the
+American colonies, and made inhabitants of those colonies no longer
+subjects of a king, but free and equal citizens of a republic. I expect
+to see a change throughout the world, which will take the great
+instruments of production which we call corporations and trusts, out of
+the hands of their present private owners, and make them the property,
+either of the entire community, or of those who do the work in them.
+This change is the "social revolution," and when it has completed
+itself, we shall have in that society an Industrial Republic, a form of
+business management which constitutes economic democracy.
+
+The history of the world's political revolutions has been written almost
+exclusively by aristocratic or bourgeois historians; that is to say, by
+men who, whatever their attitude toward political democracy, have no
+conception of industrial democracy, and believe that industrial strife
+and enslavement are the normal conditions of life. If, however, you will
+read Kropotkin's "Great French Revolution," you will be interested to
+discover how important a part was played in this revolution by economic
+forces. Underneath the political discontent of the merchants and middle
+classes lay a vast mass of social discontent of the peasants and
+workers. It was the masses of the people who made the revolution, but it
+was the middle classes who seized it and turned it to their own ends,
+putting down attempts toward economic equality, and confining the
+changes, so far as possible, to the political field.
+
+And everywhere throughout history, if you study revolutions, you find
+that same thing happening. You find, for example, Martin Luther fighting
+for the right to preach the word of God without consulting the Pope; but
+when the peasants of Germany rose and sought to set themselves free from
+feudal landlords, Luther turned against them, and called upon the
+princes to shoot them down. "The ass needs to be beaten, and the
+populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand." The landlords and
+propertied classes of England were willing to restrict the power of the
+king, and to give the vote to the educated and well-to-do; but from the
+time of Jack Cade to our own they shoot down the poor.
+
+But meantime, the industrial process continues; the modern factory
+system brings the workers together in larger and larger groups, and
+teaches them the lesson of class consciousness. So the time of the
+workers draws near. The first attempt in modern times to accomplish the
+social revolution and set up industrial democracy was in the Paris
+Commune. When the French empire collapsed, after the war with Germany in
+1871, the workers of Paris seized control. They were massacred, some
+50,000 of them, and the propertied classes of France established the
+present bourgeois republic, which has now become the bulwark of reaction
+throughout the Continent of Europe.
+
+Next came the Russian revolution of 1905, and this was an interesting
+illustration of the relation between the two waves of social progress.
+Russia was a backward country industrially, and according to theory not
+at all prepared for the social revolution. But nowadays the thoughts of
+men circulate all over the world, and the exiles from Russia had
+absorbed Marxian ideas, and were not prepared to accept a purely
+political freedom. So in 1905, after the Japanese war, when the people
+rose and forced the Czar to grant a parliament, the extremists made an
+effort to accomplish the social revolution at the same time. The
+peasants began to demand the land, and the workers the factories;
+whereupon the capitalists and middle classes, who wanted a parliament,
+but did not want Socialism, went over to the side of reaction, and both
+the political and social revolutions were crushed.
+
+But then came the great war, for which Russia with her incompetent
+government and her undeveloped industry was unprepared. The strain of it
+broke her down long before the other Allies, and in the universal
+suffering and ruin the Russian people were again forced to rise. The
+political revolution was accomplished, the Czar was imprisoned, and the
+Douma reigned supreme. Middle class liberalism throughout the world gave
+its blessings to this revolution, and hastened to welcome a new
+political democracy to the society of nations. But then occurred what to
+orthodox democratic opinion has been the most terrifying spectacle in
+human history. The Russian people had been driven too far towards
+starvation and despair; the masses had been too embittered, and they
+rose again, overthrowing not only their Czar and their grand dukes, but
+their capitalists and land-owners. For the first time in history the
+social revolution established itself, and the workers were in control of
+a great state. Ever since then we have seen exactly what we saw in
+Europe from 1789 onward, when the first political republic was
+established, and all the monarchies and empires of the world banded
+themselves together to stamp it out. We have witnessed a campaign of
+war, blockade, intrigue and propaganda against the Soviet government of
+Russia, all pretending to be carried on in the name of the Russian
+people, and for the purpose of saving them from suffering--but all
+obviously based upon one consideration and one alone, the fear that an
+effort at industrial self-government might possibly prove to be a
+success.
+
+Whether or not the Soviets will prove permanent, no one can say. But
+this much is certain; just as the French revolution sent a thrill around
+the world, and planted in the hearts of the common people the wonderful
+dream of freedom from kings and ruling classes, just so the Russian
+revolution has brought to the working masses the dream of freedom from
+masters and landlords. Everywhere in capitalist society this ferment is
+working, and in one country after another we see the first pangs of the
+new birth. Also we see capitalists and landlords, who once found
+"democracy," "free speech" and "equality before the law" useful formulas
+to break down the power of kings and aristocrats, now repudiating their
+old-time beliefs, and going back to the frankest reaction. We see, in
+our own "land of the free," the government refusing to reprint the
+Declaration of Independence during the war, and arresting men for
+quoting from it and circulating it; we even see the Department of
+Justice refusing to allow people to reprint the Sermon on the Mount!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIV
+
+THE CLASS STRUGGLE
+
+     (Discusses history as a battle-ground between ruling and subject
+     classes, and the method and outcome of this struggle.)
+
+
+There is a theory of social development, sometimes called the
+materialistic interpretation of history, and sometimes the economic
+interpretation of history. It is one of the contributions to our thought
+which we owe to Karl Marx, and like all the rest of Marxian theory, it
+is a subject of embittered controversy, not merely between Socialists
+and orthodox economists, but between various schools of revolutionary
+doctrine. For my part, I have never been a great hand for doctrine,
+whether ancient or modern; I am not much more concerned with what Marx
+taught than I am with what St. Paul taught, or what Martin Luther
+taught. My advice is to look at life with your own eyes, and to state in
+simple language the conclusions of your own thinking.
+
+Man is an eating animal; he has also been described as a tool-making
+animal, and might be described as an ideal-making animal. There is a
+tendency on the part of those who specialize in the making of ideals to
+repudiate the eating and the tool-making sides of man; which accounts
+for the quarrel between the Marxians and the moralists. All through
+history you find new efforts of man to develop his emotional and
+spiritual nature, and to escape from the humiliating limitations of the
+flesh. These efforts have many of them been animated by desperate
+sincerity, but none of them have changed the fundamental fact that man
+is an eating animal, an animal insufficiently provided by nature against
+cold, and with an intense repugnance to having streams of cold water run
+down back of his neck. The religious teachers go out with empty purse,
+and "take no thought for the morrow"; but the forces of nature press
+insistently upon them, and little by little they make compromises, they
+take to shelter while they are preaching, they consent to live in
+houses, and even to own houses, and to keep a bank account. So they make
+terms with the powers of this world, and the powers of this world,
+which are subtle, and awake to their own interests, find ways to twist
+the new doctrine to their ends.
+
+So the new religion becomes simply another form of the old hypocrisy;
+and it comes to us as a breath of fresh air in a room full of corruption
+when some one says, "Let us have done with aged shams and false
+idealisms. Let us face the facts of life, and admit that man is a
+physical animal, and cannot do any sane and constructive thinking until
+he has food and shelter provided. Let us look at history with unblinking
+eyes, and realize that food and shelter, the material means of life, are
+what men have been seeking all through history, and will continue to
+seek, until we put production and distribution upon a basis of justice,
+instead of a basis of force."
+
+Such is, as simply as I can phrase it, the materialistic interpretation
+of history. Put into its dress of scientific language it reads: the
+dominant method of production and exchange in any society determines the
+institutions and forms of that society. I do not think I exaggerate in
+saying that this formula, applied with judgment and discrimination, is a
+key to the understanding of human societies.
+
+Wherever man has moved into the stage of slavery and private property
+there has been some group which has held power and sought to maintain
+and increase it. This group has set the standards of behavior and belief
+for the community, and if you wish to understand the government and
+religion, the manners and morals, the philosophy and literature and art
+of that community, the first thing you have to do is to understand the
+dominant group and its methods of keeping itself on top. This statement
+applies, not merely to those cultural forms which are established and
+ordained by the ruling class; it applies equally well to the
+revolutionary forms, the behavior and beliefs of those who oppose the
+ruling class. For men do not revolt in a vacuum, they revolt against
+certain conditions, and the form of their revolt is determined by the
+conditions. Take, for example, primitive Christianity, which was
+certainly an effort to be unworldly, if ever such an effort was made by
+man. But you cannot understand anything about primitive Christianity
+unless you see it as a new form of slave revolt against Roman
+imperialism and capitalism.
+
+The theory of the class struggle is the master key to the bewilderments
+and confusions of history. Always there is a dominant class, holding
+the power of the state, and always there are subject classes; and sooner
+or later the subject classes begin protesting and struggling for wider
+rights. When they think they are strong enough, they attempt a revolt,
+and sometimes they succeed. If they do, they write the histories of the
+revolt, and their leaders become heroes and statesmen. If they fail, the
+histories are written by their oppressors, and the rebels are portrayed
+as criminals.
+
+One of the commonest of popular assumptions is that if the rebels have
+justice on their side, they are bound to succeed in the long run; but
+this is merely the sentimental nonsense that is made out of history. It
+is perfectly possible for a just revolt to be crushed, and to be crushed
+again and again; just as it is possible for a child which is ready to be
+born to fail to be born, and to perish miserably. The fact that the
+Huguenots had most of the virtue and industry and intelligence of France
+did not keep them from being slaughtered by Catholic bigots, and
+reaction riveted upon the French people for a couple of hundred years.
+The fact that the Moors had most of the industry of Spain did not keep
+them from being driven into exile by the Inquisition, and the
+intellectual life of the Spanish people strangled for three hundred or
+four hundred years.
+
+Some eight hundred years ago our ancestors in England brought a cruel
+and despotic king to battle, and conquered him, and on the field of
+Runnymede forced him to sign a grant of rights to Englishmen. That
+document is known as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter, and everyone who
+writes political history today recognizes it as one of the greatest of
+man's achievements, the beginning of a process which we hope will bring
+freedom and equality before the law to every human being on earth.
+
+And now we have come to the stage in our industrial affairs, when the
+organized workers seek to bring the monarchs of industry into the
+council chamber, and force them to sign a similar Great Charter, which
+will grant freedom and self-government to the workers. Just as King John
+was forced to admit that the power to tax and spend the public revenue
+belonged to the people of England, and not to the ruler; just so the
+workers will establish the principle that the finances of industry are a
+public concern, that the books are to be opened, and prices fixed and
+wages paid by the democratic vote of the citizens of industry. If that
+change is accomplished, the historian of the future will recognize it
+as another momentous step in progress; and he will heed the protests of
+the lords of industry, that they are being deprived of their freedom to
+do business, and of their sacred legal rights to their profits, as
+little as he heeded the protests of King John against the "treason" and
+"usurpation" and infringement of "divine right" by the rebellious
+barons.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LV
+
+THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM
+
+     (Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and the effect of
+     this system upon the minds of the workers.)
+
+
+In the beginning man got his living by hunting and fishing. Then he took
+to keeping flocks and herds, and later by slow stages he settled down to
+agriculture. With the introduction of slavery and the ownership of the
+land by ruling classes, there came to be a subject class of workers, who
+toiled on the land from dawn to dark, year in and year out, and got, if
+they were fortunate, an existence for themselves and their families.
+Whether these workers were called slaves or serfs or peasants, whether
+their product was taken from them in the form of taxes by the king, or
+of rent by the landlord, made no difference; the workers were bound to
+the soil, like the beasts with which they lived in intimate contact.
+They were drafted into armies, and made to fight for their lords and
+masters; they suffered pestilence and famine, fire and slaughter; but
+with infinite patience they would rebuild their huts, and dig and plant
+again, whether for the old master or for a new one.
+
+In the early days these workers made their own crude tools and weapons;
+but very early there must have been some who specialized in such arts,
+and with the growth of towns and communications came a new kind of
+labor, based upon a new system. Some enterprising man would buy slaves,
+or hire labor, and obtain a supply of raw material, and manufacture
+goods to be bartered or sold. He would pay his workers enough to draw
+them from the land, and would sell the product for what he could get,
+and the difference would be his profit. That was capitalism, and at
+first it was a thing of no importance, and the men who engaged in it had
+no social standing. But princes and lords needed weapons and supplies
+for their armies, and the men who could furnish these things became more
+and more necessary, and the states which encouraged them were the ones
+which rose to power. Merchants and sea-traders became the intimates of
+kings, and by the time of the Roman empire, capitalism was a great
+world power, dominating the state, using the armies of the state for its
+purposes. It went down with the rest of Roman civilization, but in the
+Middle Ages it began once more to revive, and by the end of the
+eighteenth century the merchants and money lenders of France, with their
+retainers, the lawyers and journalists, were powerful enough to take the
+control of society.
+
+Then, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, came the invention of
+machinery and of the power process. Capitalism began to grow like a
+young giant among pygmies. In the course of a century it has ousted all
+other methods of production, and all other forms of social activity. A
+hundred years ago the British House of Commons was a parliament of
+landlords; today it is a Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association. Out
+of the 707 members of the British House of Commons, 361 are members of
+the "Federation of British Industries," the labor-smashing organization
+of British "big business." And the same is true of every other
+parliament and congress in the modern capitalist state. Practically all
+the wealth of the world today is produced by the capitalist method, and
+distributed under capitalist supervision, and therefore capitalist ideas
+prevail in our society, to the practical exclusion of all other ideas. I
+have shown in "The Profits of Religion" how these ideas dominate the
+modern church, and in "The Brass Check" how they dominate the modern
+press. I plan to write two books, to show how they dominate education
+and literature.
+
+A hundred years ago an industry consisted of a half a dozen or a dozen
+men, working under the personal supervision of an owner, and using crude
+hand tools. Today it consists of a gigantic trust, owning and managing
+scores and perhaps hundreds of mills and factories, each employing
+thousands of workers. A corporation like the Steel Trust owns enough of
+the sources of its raw material to give it practical monopoly; it owns a
+fleet of vessels especially designed for ore-carrying; it owns its
+private railroads, to deliver the ore to the mills. Through its system
+of dummy directorates it has practical control of the main railroads
+over which it distributes its products; also of banks and trust
+companies and insurance companies, to gather the money of the public to
+finance its undertakings. It owns huge office buildings, and vast
+tracts of land upon which the homes of its workers are built. It has a
+private army for the defense of its property--a complete army of
+cavalry, infantry and artillery, including a large and highly efficient
+secret service department, with a host of informers and spies. It has
+newspapers for the purpose of propaganda, and it controls the government
+of every village, town and city in which it has important interests. If
+you will take the trouble to visit a "steel town," and make inquiries
+among public officials, newspaper men, and others who are "on the
+inside," you will discover that those in authority consider it necessary
+and proper that "steel" should control, and are unable to conceive any
+other condition of affairs. If you go to other parts of the country,
+where other great industries are located, you find it taken for granted
+that "copper" should control, or "lumber," or "coal," or "oil," or
+whatever it may be.
+
+Under the system of large scale capitalism, labor is a commodity, bought
+and sold in the market like any other commodity. Some years ago Congress
+was requested to pass a law contradicting this fundamental fact of world
+capitalism. Congress passed a law, very carefully worded so that no one
+could be sure what it meant, and a few years later the Supreme Court
+nullified the law. But all through this political and legal controversy
+the status of labor remained exactly the same; there was a "labor
+market," consisting of those members of the community who, in the
+formula of Marx, had nothing but their labor power to sell. These
+competed for recognition at the factory gates, and highly skilled
+foremen selected those who offered the largest quantity of labor power
+for the stated wage.
+
+So entirely impersonal is this process that there are great industries
+in America in which ninety per cent of the common labor force is hired
+and fired all over again in the course of a year. These men are put to
+work in gangs, under a system which enables one picked man to set the
+pace, and compel all the others to keep up with him, under penalty of
+being discharged. This process is known as "speeding up," and its
+purpose is to obtain from each worker the greatest quantity of energy in
+exchange for his daily wage. In the steel industry men work twelve hours
+a day for six days in the week, and then finish with a twenty-four-hour
+day. If they do not work so long in other industries, it is because
+experience has proven that the greatest quantity of energy can be
+obtained from them in a shorter time. There are very few men who can
+stand this pace for long. Those who are not crippled or killed in
+accidents are broken down at forty, and all the great corporations
+recognize this fact. Their foremen pick out the younger men, and
+practically all concerns have an age rule, and never hire men above
+forty or forty-five.
+
+I shall not in this book go into details concerning the fate of the
+worker under the profit system. I have written two novels, "The Jungle"
+and "King Coal," in which the facts are portrayed in detail, and it
+seems the part of common sense to refer the reader to these text-books.
+It will suffice here to set forth the main outlines of the situation. In
+every capitalist country of the world the masses of the people are
+herded into industries, in whose profits they have no share, and in
+whose welfare they have no interest. They do not know the people for
+whom they work; they have no human relationship, either with their work
+or with their employers. They see the surplus of their product drawn off
+to maintain a class of idlers, whose activities they know only through
+the scandals of the divorce courts and the luxury-love of the moving
+picture screen. They compete with one another for jobs, and bid down one
+another's wages; and if they attempt to organize and end this
+competition, their efforts are broken by newspaper propaganda and
+policemen's clubs. At the same time they know that monopoly, open or
+secret, prevails in the fixing of prices, and so they find the struggle
+to "get ahead" a losing one. In America it used to be possible for the
+young and energetic to "go West"; but now the wave of capitalism has
+reached the Pacific coast and been thrown back, and there is no more
+frontier.
+
+The man who works on the land has been through all the ages a solitary
+man. He is better friends with his horse and his cow than with his
+fellow humans. He is brutalized by incessant toil, he lives amid dirt
+and the filth of animals, he is, in the words of Edwin Markham:
+
+    "A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
+     Stunted and stunned, a brother to the ox."
+
+He is a victim of natural forces which he does not understand, and
+inevitably therefore he is superstitious. Being alone, he is helpless
+against his masters, and only utter desperation drives him to revolt.
+
+But consider the capitalist system--how different the conditions of its
+workers! Here they are gathered into city slums, and their wits are
+sharpened by continual contact with their fellows. The printing press
+makes cheap the spread of information, and the soap-box makes it even
+cheaper. Any man with a grievance can shout aloud, and be sure of an
+audience to listen, and he can get a great deal said before the company
+watchman or the policeman can throttle him. Moreover, the modern worker
+is not struggling with drought and tempest and hail; he does not see his
+labors wiped out by volcanic eruption or lightning stroke; he is dealing
+with machinery, something that he himself has made, and that he fully
+understands. If a machine gets out of order, he does not fall down upon
+his knees and pray to God to fix it. All the training of his life
+teaches him the relationship of cause and effect, the adjustment of
+means to ends. So the modern worker, as a necessary consequence of his
+daily work, is practical, skeptical, and unsentimental in his
+psychology. And what is more, he is making all the rest of society of
+the same temperament. He is building roads out into the country, and
+building machines to roll over them; he is running telephone lines and
+sending newspapers and magazines and moving picture shows to the peasant
+and the farmer; so the young peasants and farmers hunger for the city,
+and they learn to fix machinery instead of praying to God.
+
+Such is the psychology of the modern working class; and the supreme
+achievement of their sharpened wits is an understanding of the
+capitalist process. As a matter of fact they did not make this discovery
+for themselves; it was made for them by middle-class men, lawyers and
+teachers and writers--Fourier, Owen, Marx, Lassalle. The modern doctrine
+is called by various names: Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Bolshevism,
+Syndicalism, Collectivism. Later on I shall define these various terms,
+and point out the distinctions between them. For the moment I emphasize
+the factor they all have in common, and which is fundamental: they wish
+to break the power of class ownership and control of the instruments and
+means of production; they wish to replace private capitalism by some
+system under which the instruments and means of production are
+collectively owned and operated; and they look to the non-owning class,
+the proletarian, as the motive power by which this change is to be
+compelled. I shall in future refer to this as the "social revolutionary"
+doctrine; taking pains to explain that the word "revolutionary" is to be
+divested of its popular meaning of physical violence. It is perfectly
+conceivable that the change may be brought about peaceably, and I shall
+try to show before long that in modern capitalist states the decision as
+to whether it is brought about peaceably or by violence rests with the
+present masters of industry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVI
+
+THE CAPITALIST PROCESS
+
+     (How profits are made under the present industrial system and what
+     becomes of them.)
+
+
+We have next to examine the structure of the capitalist order, basing
+our argument on facts which are admitted by everyone, including the most
+ardent defenders of the present system.
+
+All men have to have certain material things which we describe as goods.
+As these goods do not produce themselves, it is necessary that some
+should work. The workers must have tools; also they must have access to
+the land and the sources of raw materials. These means of production are
+owned by some individuals in the community, and this ownership gives
+them power to direct the work of the rest. Those who own the land and
+the natural sources of wealth we call capitalists, or business men, and
+those who do not own these things, or whose share in them is
+insignificant, are the proletariat, or working class.
+
+If you state to the average American that there is a capitalist class
+and a proletariat in this country, he will point out that many who are
+now members of the capitalist class were originally members of the
+proletariat; they have worked hard and saved, and accumulated property.
+But this is merely confusing the issue. The fact that some proletarians
+turn into capitalists and some capitalists into proletarians is
+important to the individuals concerned, but it does not alter the fact
+that there are two classes, capitalist and proletarian. Consider, by way
+of illustrating, a field with trees growing on it; we have earth, and we
+have trees, and the distinction between them is unmistakable. The roots
+of the trees go down into the earth, and take up portions of the earth
+and turn it into tree. The leaves and the dead branches fall, and in the
+course of time are turned once more to earth. There are all sorts of
+stages between earth and tree, and between tree and earth; but you would
+not therefore say that the word "earth" and the word "tree" are
+misnomers.
+
+The working men go to the business man and apply for work. The business
+man gives them work, and takes their product, and offers it in the
+market at a price which allows him a profit above cost. If he can sell
+at a profit, he repeats the process, and the worker has a job. If he
+cannot sell at a profit, the worker is out of a job. Here and there may
+be a benevolent business man who, rather than turn his workers out of a
+job, will sell his goods at cost, or even for a short time at a loss;
+but if he keeps the factory going simply for the benefit of his workers,
+and with no expectation of ever making a profit, that is a form of
+charity, and not the common system under which our business is now
+carried on.
+
+So it appears that the worker is dependent for his wages upon the
+ability of the business man to make a profit. The worker's life is
+inextricably bound up with the profit of the capitalist--no profit for
+the capitalist, no life for the worker. The capitalist, going out to
+look for markets for his goods, is seeking, not merely profit for
+himself, but life for his workers.
+
+Now, the business man pays a certain percentage of his total receipts
+for labor, another percentage for raw materials, another percentage for
+his overhead charges, and the rest is profit in various forms, rent to
+the landlord, interest to the bondholder, dividends to the stockholder.
+All this total sum goes to human individuals, and each has thus a
+certain amount of money to spend. They pay it over to other individuals
+for goods or services, and so the money keeps circulating, and business
+keeps going. That is as deep as the average mind probes into the
+process.
+
+But let us probe a little deeper. It is evident that, in the course of
+all this exchanging of goods, some individuals get a larger share than
+other individuals. Our government collects an income tax, and thus we
+have statistics representing what people are willing to admit about the
+share they get. In 1917 it appeared that, speaking roughly, one family
+out of six had an income of over $1,000 a year, and one family out of
+twelve had an income of over $2,000. But there were 19,000 families
+which admitted incomes of over $50,000 a year, and 300 with over
+$1,000,000 a year.
+
+Now the families that get less than a thousand dollars a year obviously
+have to spend the greater part of their income upon their immediate
+living expenses. But the families that get $50,000 a year do not need
+to spend everything, and most of them take the greater part of their
+income and reinvest it--that is, they spend it upon the creating of new
+machinery of production, railroads, mills, factories, office buildings,
+the whole elaborate structure of capitalist industry.
+
+Exactly what proportion of the total product of industry is thus taken
+and reinvested no one can say; but this we know, our cities are growing
+at an enormous rate, our manufacturing power is increasing by leaps and
+bounds, we are perfecting processes which enable one man to do the work
+of a hundred men, which increase the product of one man's labor a
+hundredfold. All this goes on blindly, automatically; a Niagara of goods
+of all sorts is poured out, and we call it "prosperity."
+
+But then suddenly a strange and bewildering thing happens. All at once,
+and without warning, orders fall off, values begin to drop, business
+collapses, factories are shut down, and millions of men are thrown out
+of jobs. Merchants look at one another with blanched faces; each one has
+been counting on paying his bills with the profits he was going to make,
+and now his profits are gone, and he can't pay. The newspapers and
+magazines keep insisting that it can't be true, that business is going
+to revive next week, that prosperity is just ahead. But the factories
+stay shut, and the millions of men stay idle.
+
+This is the condition in which we find ourselves as I write this book.
+It has been happening regularly in our history every ten years or so,
+ever since America started; we have had a hundred years to reflect upon
+it and to probe into the causes of it, and such is business intelligence
+in the most enlightened country in the world, you may search the pages
+of our newspapers from the first column of millionaire divorce suits to
+the last column of "situations wanted," and nowhere can you find one
+word to explain this mysterious calamity of "hard times"--how it comes
+to happen to our social system, or what could be done to prevent it! To
+supply this deficiency in present day thinking is our next task.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVII
+
+HARD TIMES
+
+     (Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing, and why
+     abundant production brings distress instead of plenty.)
+
+
+Let us picture a small island inhabited by six men. One of these men
+fishes, another hunts, another gathers cocoanuts, another raises goats
+for clothing, and so on. The six men among them produce by their labor
+all the necessities of their lives, and they exchange their products
+with one another. The island is productive, and each of the men is free,
+and makes his exchanges on equal terms; on that basis the industry of
+the island can continue indefinitely, and there will never be any
+trouble. There may sometimes be over-production, but it will not cause
+anyone to starve. If the fisherman is unusually lucky one day, he will
+be able to take a vacation for a few days, living on his fish and the
+products he exchanges for his fish. For the sake of convenience in
+future reference, I will describe this happy island as a "free" society;
+meaning that each of the members of this society has access on equal
+terms to the sources of wealth, and each owns the product of his own
+labor, without paying tribute to any one else for the right to labor, or
+to exchange his products.
+
+But now let us suppose that one of the men on the island is strong and
+aggressive; he takes a club and knocks down the other five men, and
+compels them to sign a piece of paper agreeing that hereafter he is the
+president of the land development company of the island, the chief
+stockholder in the goat-raising company, and owner of the fishing
+concession and the cocoanut grove; also, that hereafter goods shall not
+be bartered in kind, but shall be exchanged for money, and that he is
+the banker, and also the government, with the right to issue money. In
+this society you will find that the real work, the actually productive
+work, is done by five men, instead of by six, and these five do not get
+the full value of their labor. The fisherman will fish, but his product
+will no longer belong to himself; he will get part of it as wages, while
+the "business man" takes charge of the balance. So when there is a
+lucky day, there will be prosperity in the fishing industry, but this
+prosperity will not benefit the fisherman; he will have only his wage,
+and when he has caught too many fish, he will not have a few days'
+vacation, but will be out of a job.
+
+And exactly the same thing will happen to the goat-herd. He will
+probably have work all the year round, because goats have to be tended,
+but he will get barely enough to keep him alive, and the surplus skins
+and milk will go to the owner of the no-longer-happy island. Perhaps it
+will occur to the owner that the man who raises cocoanuts might also
+keep an eye on the goats, and so the goat-herd will be permanently out
+of a job, and will turn into what is called a tramp, or vagrant.
+Inasmuch as everything to eat on the island belongs to the owner, the
+ex-goat-herd will be tempted to become a criminal, and so it will be
+necessary for the owner to arm the cocoanut man with a club and make him
+into a policeman; or perhaps he will organize the fisherman and the
+hunter into a militia for the preservation of law and order. They will
+be glad to serve him, because, owing to the extreme productivity of the
+island, they will be out of jobs a great part of the time, and but for
+the generosity of the business man, would have no way of earning a
+living.
+
+But suppose that the cocoanut man should invent a machine for gathering
+a year's supply of nuts in a week; suppose the fisherman should devise a
+scheme to fill his boat with fish in a few minutes; and suppose that as
+a result of these inventions the business man got so rich that he moved
+to Paris, and no longer saw his workers, or even knew their names. Under
+these conditions you can see that overproduction and unemployment might
+increase on the island; and also the business man might seem less human
+and lovable to his wage slaves, and might need a larger police force. It
+might even happen that he would discover the need of a propaganda
+department, in order to keep his police force loyal, and a secret
+service to make sure that agitators did not get into the schools.
+
+The five islanders, having filled all the barns and storehouses, would
+be turned out to starve; and when they asked the reason, they would be
+told it was because they had produced a surplus of food. This may sound
+grotesque, but it is what is being said to 5,000,000 men in America as I
+write. There are clothing-workers who are going about in rags, and they
+are told it is because they have produced too much clothing. There are
+shoe-workers whose shoes are falling off their feet, and they are told
+it is because they have produced too many shoes. There are carpenters
+who have no homes, and they are told that a great many homes are needed,
+but unfortunately it doesn't pay the builders to go ahead just now. This
+may sound like a caricature, but it happens to be the most prominent
+single fact in the consciousness of 5,000,000 Americans at the close of
+the year 1921. No wonder they are discontented with the present order.
+
+The solution of the mystery is so simple that the 5,000,000 unemployed
+cannot be kept permanently from understanding it. The reason the five
+men on the island are starving is because one man owns the island and
+the others own nothing. If the island were community property, the five
+men would each own a share of the contents of the barns and storehouses,
+and would not be starving. If the 100,000,000 people of America owned
+the productive machinery of America, then instantly the unemployment
+crisis would pass like an evil dream. The farm-workers who need shoes
+would exchange their food with the starving shoe-workers, and the
+starving shoe-workers would have jobs. They would want clothing, and so
+the clothing-makers would start to work; and so on all the way down the
+line. There is only one thing necessary to make this possible, and that
+is the thing which we have agreed to call the social revolution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVIII
+
+THE IRON RING
+
+     (Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles production,
+     and makes true prosperity impossible.)
+
+
+We have seen that in an exploiting society there is a surplus which is
+taken by the exploiter; and that under the modern system this surplus
+must be sold at a profit before production can continue. The vital fact
+in such a society is that the worker has not the money to buy back all
+that he produces; therefore it is inevitable that a surplus product
+should accumulate. When this happens, production must be cut down, and
+during that period the worker is without a job, and without means of
+living. The fact that he needs the product does not help him; the point
+is that he has not the money to buy it. In such a society the productive
+machinery is never used to the full. The machinery is controlled by a
+profit-seeking interest, seeking an opportunity to make sales, and
+restricting production according to the prospect of sales. So the actual
+product bears no relationship to the possible product, and people who
+live in an exploiting society can form no conception of true prosperity.
+
+For, you see, the market is limited by the competitive wage system. We
+have seen that in our own rich, prosperous country only one family out
+of six has more than $1,000 a year income; only one family out of twelve
+has $2,000 a year. It does not make any difference that the warehouses
+are bursting with goods; a family constitutes a market of so many
+dollars a year, and then, so far as the profit system is concerned, that
+family is non-existent; that family stops consuming, and the productive
+machinery is halted to that extent.
+
+I have been accustomed to portray the profit system under the simile of
+an iron ring riveted about the body of a baby. That ring would cause the
+baby some discomfort at the beginning, but it would not be serious, and
+the baby would get used to it. But as the baby grew the trouble caused
+by the ring would increase, and finally there would come a time when
+the baby would be suffering from a whole complication of troubles, and
+for each of these troubles there would be but one remedy--break the
+ring. Does the baby cry all the time? Break the ring! Is its digestion
+defective? Break the ring! Is it threatened with convulsions or with
+blood poisoning? Break the ring!
+
+Here is our industrial society, growing at a rate never equalled by any
+human baby; and here is this iron ring riveted about its middle. Here is
+poverty, here is unemployment, here is graft, here is crime, here is war
+and plague and famine; and for all these evils there is but one cause,
+and but one remedy. Break the ring! Set production free from the
+strangulation of the profit system.
+
+I will admit that there may have been a time in the history of the
+social infant when this ring was necessary. I admit that if the great
+industrial machine was to be constructed, it was necessary that the mass
+of the people should consume only part of what they produced, and should
+allow the balance to be reinvested as capital. But now it has been done,
+and the process is complete. We have a machine capable of producing many
+times more than we can consume; shall we still go on building that
+machine? Shall we go on starving ourselves, to save the money, to
+multiply over and over again the products, in order that we may be
+thrown out of work, and be starved even more completely?
+
+A few generations ago we had in colonial America a society that in part
+at least was "free." In that society everybody got the necessities of
+life. They did not have the modern Sunday supplement and the moving
+picture show, but they had bread and meat and good substantial clothing,
+and furniture so well made that we still preserve it. The children in
+those days grew up to be strong and sturdy men and women, who would have
+seen nothing to envy in the bodies or minds of the slum population of
+New York and Chicago. In short, they had all the true necessities of
+life; and yet their work was done by hand, the power process was unknown
+and undreamed of.
+
+Now comes modern machinery, and multiplies the productive power of the
+hand laborer by five, by ten, sometimes by a hundred. Here, for example,
+is the "Appeal to Reason" selling millions of cheap books for ten cents
+apiece, and making a profit on it; installing a gigantic press which
+takes paper, sheet after sheet, prints 128 pages of a book at one
+impression, and folds and stitches and binds the books, all in one
+process, and turns them out complete at the rate of 10,000 copies per
+hour. Here is a factory which turns out 100,000 automobiles a month.
+Here is a mill which turns out many millions of yards of cloth a month.
+If our colonial ancestors had been told about these marvels, they would
+have said instantly: "Then, of course, everybody in that society will
+have all the books they want, and all the clothing they want, and all
+the automobiles. Everybody in that society will have five or ten or one
+hundred times as much goods as we have."
+
+Imagine the bewilderment of our colonial ancestor if he had been told:
+"The majority of the people in that society will not have so much of the
+real necessities of life as you have. They will have a few cheap
+trinkets, designed to tickle their senses; they will have cheap
+newspapers, carefully contrived to keep their minds vacant and to keep
+them contented with their lot; they will have moving picture shows
+constructed for the same purpose; but all their material things will be
+flimsy, put together for show and not for permanence; their food will be
+adulterated, their clothing will be shoddy, everything they have will be
+made, not for their service, but for the profit of some one who lives by
+selling to them. The average wage earned by those who do the work of
+this new machine civilization will be less than half the amount
+necessary to purchase the necessities of a decent life, and one-tenth of
+the total population will be living in such poverty that they are unable
+to maintain physical fitness, or to rear their children into full sized
+men and women."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIX
+
+FOREIGN MARKETS
+
+     (Considers the efforts of capitalism to save itself by marketing
+     its surplus products abroad, and what results from these efforts.)
+
+
+If our analysis of present-day society is correct, we have the enormous
+populations of the modern industrial countries, living always on the
+verge of starvation, their chance for survival depending at all times
+upon the ability of their employers to find a profitable market for a
+surplus of goods. At first the employer seeks that market at home; but
+when the home markets are glutted, he goes abroad; and so develops the
+phenomenon of foreign trade and rivalry for foreign trade, as the basic
+fact of capitalism, and the fundamental cause of modern war.
+
+Let us get clear a simple distinction concerning foreign trade. There is
+a kind of trade which is normal, and would thrive in a "free" society.
+In the United States we can produce nearly all the necessities of life,
+but there are a few which we cannot produce--rubber, for example, and
+bananas, and good music. These things we wish to import. We buy them
+from other countries, and incur a debt, which we pay with products which
+the other countries need from us; wheat, for example, and copper, and
+moving pictures with cowboys in them. This is equal exchange, and a
+natural phenomenon. A "free" society would produce such surplus goods as
+were necessary to procure the foreign products that it desired. When it
+had produced that much, the workers would stop and take a vacation until
+they wanted more foreign products.
+
+But under capitalism we have an entirely different condition--we produce
+a surplus of goods which we _have_ to sell in order to keep our
+factories running, and to keep our working population from starving. And
+note that it does not help us to get back an equal quantity of foreign
+goods in exchange. We must have what we call "a favorable balance"; that
+is, we must have other people going into debt to us, so that we can be
+continually shipping out more goods than we take back; continually
+piling up credits which we can "negotiate," or turn into cash, so that
+we can go on and repeat the process of making more goods, selling them
+for more profits, and putting the surplus into the form of more
+machinery, to make still more goods and still more profits.
+
+And then, after a while, we come upon this embarrassing phenomenon;
+nations which buy and do not sell must either do it by sending us gold,
+or by our giving them credit. The sending of gold cannot go on
+indefinitely, because then we should have all the gold, and if other
+nations had none that would destroy their credit. On the other hand,
+business cannot be done by credit indefinitely; for the very essence of
+credit is a promise to pay, and payment can only be made in goods, and
+how can we take the goods without ruining our own industry?
+
+Fifteen years ago I pointed this out in a book. The argument was
+irrefutable, and the conclusion inescapable, but the few critics who
+noted it repeated their usual formula about "dreamers and theorists."
+Now, however, the business mills have ground on, and what was theory has
+become fact before our eyes. We have trusted the nations of Europe for
+some $10,000,000,000 worth of goods, and they are powerless to pay, and
+if they did pay, they would bankrupt American industry. France wishes to
+collect an enormous indemnity from Germany, but nobody can figure out
+how this indemnity can be paid without ruining French industry. The
+French have demanded coal from Germany, and have got more than they can
+use, and are "dumping" it in Belgium and Holland, with the result that
+the British coal industry is ruined. The French clamor that the Germans
+must pay for the destruction they wrought in Northern France, and the
+Germans offer to send German workmen to rebuild the ruined towns; but
+the French denounce this as an insult--it would deprive French
+workingmen of their jobs! So I might continue for pages, pointing out
+the manifold absurdities which result from a system of industry for the
+profit of a few, instead of for the use of all.
+
+Ever since I first began to read the newspapers, some twenty-five or
+thirty years ago, all our political life has been nothing but the
+convulsions of a social body tortured by the constricting ring of the
+profit system. Everywhere one group struggling for advantage over
+another group, and politicians engaged in playing one interest against
+another interest! My boyhood recollections of public life consist of
+campaign slogans having to do with the tariff: "production and
+prosperity," "reciprocity," "the full dinner pail," "the foreigner pays
+the tax," etc.
+
+The workingman, under the profit system, is like a man pounding away at
+a pump. He can get a thin trickle of water from the spout of the pump if
+he works hard enough, but in order to get it he has to supply ten times
+as much to some one who has tapped the pipe. But the tapping has been
+done underground, where the workingman cannot see it. All the workingman
+knows is that there is no job for him if the products of "cheap foreign
+labor" are allowed to be "dumped" on the American market. That is
+obvious, and so he votes for a tax on foreign imports, high enough to
+enable his own employer to market at a profit. He does not realize that
+he is thus raising the price of everything that he buys, and so leaving
+himself worse off than he was before.
+
+All governments are delighted with this tariff device, because they are
+thus enabled to get money from the public without the public's knowing
+it. "The foreigner pays the tax," we are told, and as a result of this
+arrangement the steel trust just before the war was selling its product
+at a high price to the American people, and taking its surplus abroad
+and selling it to the foreigner at half the domestic price. And we see
+this same thing in every line of manufacture, and all over the world. We
+see one nation after another withdrawing itself as a market for
+manufactured products, and entering the lists as a marketer. One more
+nation now able to fill all its own needs, and going out hungrily to
+look for foreign customers, adding to the glut of the world's
+manufactured products and the ferocity of international competition!
+
+At the close of the Civil War the total exports of the United States
+averaged approximately $300,000,000, and the total imports were about
+the same. In 1892 the exports first touched $1,000,000,000, while the
+imports were about nine-tenths of that sum. In the year 1913 the exports
+were nearly $2,500,000,000, while the imports were $600,000,000 less;
+and in the year 1920 our exports were over $8,000,000,000 and our
+imports a little over $5,000,000,000! So we have a "favorable balance"
+of almost $3,000,000,000 a year--and as a result we are on the verge of
+ruin!
+
+This "iron ring" of overproduction and lack of market exercises upon our
+industrial body a steady pressure, a slow strangling. But because the
+body is in convulsions, struggling to break the ring, the pressure of
+the ring is worse at some times than at others. We have periods of what
+we call "prosperity," followed by periods of panic and hard times. You
+must understand that only a small part of our business is done by means
+of cash payments, whether in gold or silver or paper money. Close to 99%
+of our business is done by means of credit, and this introduces into the
+process a psychological factor. The business man expects certain
+profits, and he capitalizes these expectations. Business booms, because
+everybody believes everybody else's promises; credit expands like a huge
+balloon, with the breath of everybody's enthusiasm. But meantime real
+business, the real market, remains just what it was before; it cannot
+increase, because of the iron ring which restricts the buying power of
+the mass of the people by the competitive wage. So presently the time
+comes when somebody realizes that he has over-capitalized his hopes; he
+curtails his orders, he calls in his money, and the impulse thus started
+precipitates a crash in the whole business world. We had such a crash in
+1907, and I remember a Wall Street man explaining it in a magazine
+article entitled, "Somebody Asked for a Dollar."
+
+We learned one lesson by that panic; at least, the big financial men
+learned it, and had Congress pass what is called the "Federal Reserve
+Act," a provision whereby in time of need the government issues
+practically unlimited credit to banks. This, of course, is fine for the
+banks; it puts the credit of everybody else behind them, and all they
+have to do is to stop lending money--except to the big insiders--and sit
+back and wait, while the little men go to the wall, and the mass of us
+live on our savings or starve. We saw this happen in the year 1920, and
+for the first time we had "hard times" without having a financial panic.
+But instead we see prices staying high--because the banks have issued so
+much paper money and bank credits.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LX
+
+CAPITALIST WAR
+
+     (Shows how the competition for foreign markets leads nations
+     automatically into war.)
+
+
+In a discussion of the world's economic situation, published in 1906,
+the writer portrayed the ruling class of Germany as sitting in front of
+a thermometer, watching the mercury rising, and knowing that when it
+reached the top, the thermometer would break. This thermometer was the
+German class system of government, and the mercury was the Socialist
+vote. In 1870 the vote was 30,000, in 1884 it was 549,000, in 1893 it
+was 1,876,000, in 1903 it was 3,008,000, in 1907 it was 3,250,000, in
+1911 it was 4,250,000. Writing between 1906 and 1913, I again and again
+pointed out that this increase was the symptom of social discontent in
+Germany, caused by the overproduction of invested capital throughout the
+world, and the intensification of the competition for world markets. I
+pointed out that a slight increase in the vote would be sufficient to
+transfer to the working class of Germany the political power of the
+German state; and I said that the ruling class of Germany would never
+permit that to happen--when it was ready to happen Germany would go to
+war, to seize the trade privileges of some other nation.
+
+There was a time when wars were caused by national and racial hatreds.
+There are still enough of these venerable prejudices left in the world,
+but no student of the subject would deny that the main source of modern
+wars is commercial rivalry. In 1917 we sent Eugene V. Debs to prison for
+declaring that the late world war was a war of capitalist greed. But two
+years later President Wilson, who had waged the war, declared in a
+public speech that everybody knew it had been a war of commercial
+rivalries.
+
+The aims of modern war-makers are two. First, capitalism must have raw
+materials, including coal and oil, the sources of power, and gold and
+silver, the bases of credit. Parts of the world which are so unfortunate
+as to be rich in these substances become the bone of contention between
+rival financial groups, organized as nations. Some sarcastic writer has
+defined a "backward" nation as one which has gold mines and no navy. We
+are horrified to read of the wars of the French monarchs, caused by the
+jealous quarrels of mistresses; but in 1905 we saw Russia and Japan go
+to war and waste a million lives because certain Russian grand dukes had
+bribed certain Chinese mandarins and obtained concessions of timber on
+the Yalu River. We now observe France and Germany vowed to undying hate
+because of iron mines in Lorraine, and the efforts of France to take the
+coal mines of Silesia from Germany, and give them to Poland, which is
+another name for French capitalism.
+
+The other end sought by the war-makers is markets for manufactured
+products, and control of trade routes, coaling stations and cables
+necessary to the building up of foreign trade. England has been
+"mistress of the seas" for some 300 years, which meant that her traders
+had obtained most of these advantages. But then came Germany, with her
+newly developed commercialism, shoving her rival out of the way. The
+Englishman was easy-going; he liked to play cricket, and stop and drink
+tea every afternoon. But the German worked all day and part of the
+night; he trained himself as a specialist, he studied the needs of his
+customers--all of which to the Englishman was "unfair" competition. But
+here were the populations of the crowded slums, dependent for their
+weekly wage and their daily bread upon the ability of the factories to
+go on turning out products! Here was the ever-blackening shadow of
+unemployment, the mutterings of social discontent, the agitators on the
+soap-boxes, the workers listening to them with more and more eager
+attention, and the journalists and politicians and bankers watching this
+phenomenon with a ghastly fear.
+
+So came the great war. Social discontent was forgotten over night, and
+England and France plunged in to down their hated rival, once and for
+all time. Now they have succeeded: Germany's ships have been taken from
+her, and likewise her cables and coaling stations; the Berlin-Bagdad
+Railroad is a forgotten dream; the British sit in Constantinople, and
+the traffic goes by sea. American capitalism wakes up, and rubs its eyes
+after a debauch of Presbyterian idealism, and discovers that it has paid
+out some $20,000,000,000, in order to confer all these privileges and
+advantages upon its rivals!
+
+Ever since I can remember the world, there have been peace societies; I
+look back in history and discover that ever since there have been wars,
+there have been prophets declaiming against them in the name of
+humanity and God. As I write, there is a great world conference on
+disarmament in session in Washington, and all good Americans hope that
+war is to be ended and permanent peace made safe. All that I can do at
+this juncture is to point out the fundamental and all-controlling fact
+of present-day economics: that for the ruling class of any country to
+agree to disarmament and the abolition of war, is for that class to sign
+its own death warrant and cut its own throat. American capitalism can
+survive on this earth only by strangling and destroying Japanese
+capitalism and British capitalism, and doing it before long. The
+far-sighted capitalists on both sides know that, and are making their
+preparations accordingly.
+
+What the members of the peace societies and the diplomats of the
+disarmament conferences do is to cut off the branches of the tree of
+war. They leave the roots untouched, and then, when the tree continues
+to thrive, they are astounded. I conclude this chapter with a concrete
+illustration, cut from my morning newspaper. We went to war against
+German militarism, and to make the world safe for democracy--meaning
+thereby capitalist commercialism. We commanded the German people to
+"beat their swords into plough-shares"; that is, to set their Krupp
+factories to making tools of peace; and they did so. We saddled them
+with an enormous indemnity, making them our serfs for a generation or
+two, and compelling them to hasten out into the world markets, to sell
+their goods and raise gold to pay us. And now, how does their behavior
+strike us? Do we praise their industry, and fidelity to their
+obligations? Here are the headlines of a news despatch, published by the
+Los Angeles Times on December 10, 1921, at the top of the front page,
+right hand column, the most conspicuous position in the paper. Read it,
+and understand the sources of modern war!
+
+       _NEW ATTACK BY BERLIN_
+
+  *       *       *       *       *
+
+     DUMPING GOODS BY WHOLESALE
+
+  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cheap German Trash Puts Thousands of Americans Out of Employment
+
+  *       *       *       *       *
+
+ Glove Plants Shut Down and Potash Industry Killed
+        by Teuton Intrigue
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXI
+
+THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRODUCTION
+
+     (Shows how much wealth we could produce if we tried, and how we
+     proved it when we had to.)
+
+
+One of the commonest arguments in defense of the present business system
+runs as follows: The amount of money which is paid to labor is greatly
+in excess of the amount which is paid to capital. Suppose that tomorrow
+you were to abolish all dividends and profits, and divide the money up
+among the wage workers, how much would each one get? The sum is figured
+for some big industry, and it is shown that each worker would get one or
+two hundred dollars additional per year. Obviously, this would not bring
+the millennium; it would hardly be worth while to take the risk of
+reducing production in order to gain so small a result.
+
+But now we are in position to realize the fallacy of such an argument.
+The tax which capital levies upon labor is not the amount which capital
+takes for itself, but the amount which it prevents labor from producing.
+The real injury of the profit system is not that it pays so large a
+reward to a ruling class; it is the "iron ring" which it fastens about
+industry, barring the workers from access to the machinery of production
+except when the product can be sold for a profit. Labor pays an enormous
+reward to the business man for his management of industry, but it would
+pay labor to reward the business man even more highly, if only he would
+take his goods in kind, and would permit labor, after this tax is paid,
+to go on making those things which labor itself so desperately needs.
+
+But, you see, the business man does not take his goods in kind. The
+owner of a great automobile factory may make for himself one automobile
+or a score of automobiles, but he quickly comes to a limit where he has
+no use for any more, and what he wants is to sell automobiles and "make
+money." He does not permit his workers to make automobiles for
+themselves, or for any one else. He reserves the product of the factory
+for himself, and when he can no longer sell automobiles at a profit, he
+shuts the workers out and automobile-making comes to an end in that
+community. Thus it appears that the "iron ring" which strangles the
+income of labor, strangles equally the income of capital. It paralyzes
+the whole social body, and so limits production that we can form no
+conception of what prosperity might and ought to be.
+
+Consider the situation before the war. We were all of us at work under
+the competitive system, and with the exception of a few parasites,
+everybody was occupied pretty close to the limit of his energy. If any
+one had said that it would be possible for our community to pitch in and
+double or treble our output, you would have laughed at him. But suddenly
+we found ourselves at war, and in need of a great increase in output,
+and we resolved one and all to achieve this end. We did not waste any
+time in theoretical discussions about the rights of private capital, or
+the dangers of bureaucracy and the destruction of initiative. Our
+government stepped in and took control; it took the railroads and
+systematized them, it took the big factories and told them exactly what
+to make, it took the raw materials and allotted them, where they were
+needed, it fixed the prices of labor, and ordered millions of men to
+this or that place, to this or that occupation. It even seized the
+foodstuffs and directed what people should eat. In a thousand ways it
+suppressed competition and replaced it by order and system. And what was
+the result?
+
+We took five million of our young men, the very cream of our industrial
+force, and withdrew them from all productive activities; we put them
+into uniforms, and put them through a training which meant that they
+were eating more food and wearing more clothing and consuming more goods
+than nine-tenths of them had ever done in their lives before. We built
+camps for them, and supplied them with all kinds of costly products of
+labor, such as guns and cartridges, automobiles and airplanes. We
+treated two million of them to an expensive trip to Europe, and there we
+set them to work burning up and destroying the products of industry, to
+the value of many billions of dollars. And not only did we supply our
+own armies, we supplied the armies of all our allies. We built millions
+of dollars worth of ships, and we sent over to Europe, whether by
+private business or by government loans, some $10,000,000,000 worth of
+goods--more than ten years of our exports before the war.
+
+All the labor necessary to produce all this wealth had to be withdrawn
+from industry, so far as concerned our domestic uses and needs. It would
+not be too much to say that from domestic industry we withdrew a total
+of ten million of our most capable labor force. I think it would be
+reasonable to say that two-thirds of our productive energies went to war
+purposes, and only one-third was available for home use. And yet, we did
+it without a particle of real suffering. Many of us worked hard, but few
+of us worked harder than usual. Most of us got along with less wheat and
+sugar, but nobody starved, nobody really suffered ill health, and our
+poor made higher wages and had better food than ever in their lives
+before. If this argument is sound, it proves that our productive
+machinery is capable, when properly organized and directed, of producing
+three times the common necessities of our population. Assuming that our
+average working day is nine hours, we could produce what we at present
+consume by three hours of intelligently directed work per day.
+
+Let us look at the matter from another angle. Just at present the hero
+of the American business man is Herbert Hoover; and Mr. Hoover recently
+appointed a committee, not of Socialists and "Utopians," but of
+engineering experts, to make a study of American productive methods. The
+report showed that American industry was only thirty-five or forty per
+cent efficient. Incidentally, this "Committee on Waste" assessed, in the
+case of the building industry, sixty-five per cent of the blame against
+management and only twenty-one per cent against labor; in six
+fundamental industries it assessed fifty per cent of the blame against
+management and less than twenty-five per cent against labor. Fifteen
+years ago a professor of engineering, Sidney A. Reeve by name, made an
+elaborate study of the wastes involved in our haphazard and planless
+industrial methods, and embodied his findings in a book, "The Cost of
+Competition." His conclusion was that of the total amount of energy
+expended in America, more than seventy per cent was wasted. We were
+doing one hundred per cent of work and getting thirty per cent of
+results. If we would get one hundred per cent of results, we should
+produce three and one-third times as much wealth, and the income of our
+workers would be increased one or two thousand dollars a year.
+
+Robert Blatchford in his book, "Merrie England," has a saying to the
+effect that it makes all the difference, when half a dozen men go out to
+catch a horse, whether they spend their time catching the horse or
+keeping one another from catching the horse. Our next task will be to
+point out a few of the ways in which good, honest American business men
+and workingmen, laboring as intelligently and conscientiously as they
+know how, waste their energies in keeping one another from producing
+goods.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXII
+
+THE COST OF COMPETITION
+
+     (Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine, those
+     which are obvious and those which are hidden.)
+
+
+The United States government is by far the largest single business
+enterprise in the United States; and a study of congressional
+appropriations in 1920, made by the United States Bureau of Standards,
+reveals the fact that ninety-three per cent of the total income of the
+government went to paying for past wars or preparing for future wars. We
+have shown that modern war is a product of the profit system, and if
+civilized nations would put their industry upon a co-operative basis,
+they could forget the very idea of war, and we should then receive
+fourteen times as much benefit from our government as we receive at
+present; we should have fourteen times as good roads, fourteen times as
+many schools, fourteen times as prompt a postoffice and fourteen times
+as efficient a Congress. What it would mean to industry to abolish war
+is something wholly beyond the power of our imagination to conceive; for
+along with ninety-three per cent of our government money there goes into
+military preparation the vast bulk of our intellectual energy and
+inventive genius, our moral and emotional equipment.
+
+Next, strikes and the losses incidental to strikes, and the costs of
+preparing against strikes. This includes, not merely the actual loss of
+working time, it includes police and militia, private armies of gunmen,
+and great secret service agencies, whose total income runs up into
+hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Industrial warfare is simply
+the method by which capitalists and workers determine the division of
+the product of industry; as if two men should co-operate in raising
+poultry, and then fall to quarrelling over the ownership of the eggs,
+and settle the matter by throwing the eggs at each other's heads.
+
+Next, bankruptcy. Statistics show that regularly some ten per cent of
+our business enterprises fail every year. Take any block occupied by
+little business men, grocers and haberdashers and "notions," and you
+will see that they are always changing. Each change represents a human
+tragedy, and the total is a frightful waste of human energy; it happens
+because we can think of no better way to distribute goods than to go
+through the work of setting up a business, and then discover that it
+cannot succeed because the neighborhood is already overstocked with that
+kind of goods.
+
+Next, fires which are a result of bankruptcy. You may laugh, perhaps,
+thinking that I am making a joke; but every little man who fails in
+business knows that he has a choice of going down in the social scale,
+or of setting fire to his stock some night, and having a big insurance
+company set him on his feet again. The result is that a certain
+percentage of bankrupts do regularly set fire to their stores. Some
+fifteen years ago there was published in "Collier's Weekly" a study of
+the costs to society of incendiary fires. The Fire Underwriters'
+Association estimated the amount as a quarter of a billion dollars a
+year; and all this cost, you understand, is paid out of the pockets of
+those who insure their homes and their stores, and do not burn them
+down.
+
+From this follows the costs of insurance, and the whole insurance
+industry, which is inevitable under the profit system, but is entire
+waste so far as true production is concerned. Big enterprises like the
+Steel Trust do not carry insurance, and neither does the United States
+Postoffice. They are wealthy enough to stand their own losses. A
+national co-operative enterprise would be in the same position, and the
+whole business of collecting money for insurance and keeping records and
+carrying on lawsuits would be forgotten.
+
+Next, advertising. It would be no exaggeration to say that seventy per
+cent of the material published in American newspapers and magazines
+today is pure waste; and therefore seventy per cent of the labor of all
+the people who cut down forests and manufacture and transport paper and
+set up type and print and distribute publications is wasted. There is,
+of course, a small percentage of advertising that is useful, but most of
+it is boasting and falsehood, and even where it tells the truth it
+simply represents the effort of a merchant to persuade you to buy in his
+store instead of in a rival store--an achievement which is profitable to
+the merchant, but utterly useless to society as a whole.
+
+This same statement applies to all traveling salesmen, and to a great
+percentage of middlemen. It applies also to a great part of delivery
+service. If you live in a crowded part of any city, you see a dozen milk
+wagons pass your door every morning, doing the work which could be done
+exactly as well by one. That is only one case out of a thousand I might
+name.
+
+Next, crime. I have already discussed the crime of arson, and I might
+discuss the crimes of pocket-picking, burglary, forgery, and a hundred
+others in the same way. I am aware of the fact that there may be a few
+born criminals; there may be a few congenital cheats, whom we should
+have to put in hospitals. But we have only to consult the crime records,
+during the war and after the war, in order to see that when jobs are
+hunting men there are few criminals, and when men are hunting jobs there
+are many criminals. I have no figures as to the cost of administering
+justice in the United States--policemen, courts and jails--but it must
+be hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
+
+I have discussed at great length the suppression of the productive power
+of society. I should not fail to mention the suppression of the
+inventive power of society, a factor less obvious, but probably in the
+long run even greater. Every one familiar with the inside of a big
+industry knows that hundreds and even thousands of useful processes are
+entirely suppressed, because it would not pay one particular concern to
+stand the expense of the changes involved. You know how, during the war,
+our government brought all the makers of engines together and perfected
+in triumph a "Liberty motor." But now we have gone back to private
+interest and competition, and each concern is jealously engaged in
+guarding its own secrets, and depriving industry as a whole of the
+benefit of everything that it learns. Each is spying upon the others,
+stealing the secrets of the others, stealing likewise from those who
+invent new ideas--and thus discouraging them from inventing any more.
+
+I use this word "discourage," and I might write a chapter upon it. What
+human imagination can conceive the amount of social energy that is lost
+because of the factor of discouragement, directly caused by the
+competitive method? Who can figure what it means to human society that a
+great percentage of the people in it should be haunted by fear of one
+sort or another--the poor in fear of unemployment, sickness and
+starvation, the little business man in fear of bankruptcy and suicide,
+the big business man in fear of hard times and treachery of his
+competitors, the idle rich in fear of robbery and blackmail, and the
+whole community in fear of foreign war and domestic tumult!
+
+Anyone might go on and elaborate these factors that I have named, and
+think of scores of others. Anyone familiar with business life or with
+industrial processes would be able to put his finger on this or that
+enormous saving which he would be able to make if he and all his rivals
+could combine and come to an agreement. This has been proven over and
+over again in large-scale industry; it is the fact which has made of
+large-scale industry an overwhelming power, sucking all the profits to
+itself, reaching out and taking in new fields of human activity, and
+setting at naught all popular clamor and even legal terrors. How can
+anyone, seeing these facts, bring himself to deny that if we did
+systematize production and make it one enterprise, precisely adapted to
+one end, we should enormously increase the results of human labor, and
+the benefit to all who do the world's work?
+
+A good deal of this waste we can stop when we get ready, and other parts
+of it our bountiful mother nature will replace. When in a world war we
+kill some ten or twenty millions of the flower of our young manhood, we
+have only to wait several generations, and our race will be as good as
+ever. But, on the other hand, there is some waste that can never be
+repaired, and this is the thing truly frightful to contemplate. When we
+dig the iron ore out of the bowels of the earth and rust it away in
+wars, we are doing something our race can never undo. And the same is
+true of many of our precious substances: phosphorus, sulphur, potash.
+When we cut down the forests from our mountain slopes, and lay bare the
+earth, we not merely cause floods and washouts, and silt up our harbors,
+we take away from the surface of our land the precious life-giving soil,
+and make a habitable land into a desert, which no irrigating and
+reforesting can ever completely restore. The Chinese have done that for
+many centuries, and we are following in their footsteps; more than six
+hundred million wagon-loads of our best soil are washed down to the sea
+every year! If you wish to know about these matters, I send you to a
+book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth," by Herbert Quick. It is one of the
+most heart-breaking books you ever read, yet it is merely a quiet
+statement of the facts about our present commercial anarchy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIII
+
+SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM
+
+     (Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the state, and
+     the idea of its management by the trade unions.)
+
+
+Let us now assume that we desire to abolish the wastes of the
+competitive method, and to put our industry on a basis of co-operation.
+How should we effect the change, and how should we run our industry
+after it was done?
+
+Let us take the United States Steel Corporation. What change would be
+necessary to the socializing of this concern? United States Steel is
+owned by a group of stockholders, and governed by a board of directors
+elected by them. The owners are now to be bought out with government
+bonds, and the board of directors retired. It may also be necessary to
+replace a certain number of the higher executive officials, who are
+imbued entirely with the point of view of this board, and have to do
+with finance, rather than with production. Of course, some other
+governing authority would have to be put in control. What would this
+authority be? There are several plans before the world, several
+different schools of thought, which we shall consider one by one.
+
+First, the Socialist program. The Socialist says, "Consider the
+postoffice, how that is run. It is run by the President, who appoints a
+Postmaster-General as his executive. Let us therefore turn the steel
+industry over to the government, and let the President appoint another
+member of his cabinet, a Director of Steel; or let there be a
+commission, similar to the Interstate Commerce Commission, or the
+various war industry boards." Any form of management of the steel
+industry which provides for its control and operation by our United
+States government is Socialism of one sort or another.
+
+There has been, of late, a great deal of dissatisfaction with
+government, on the part of the general public, and also of labor. The
+postoffice clerks, for example, complain that they are inadequately paid
+and autocratically managed, deprived of their rights not merely as
+workers but as citizens. The steel workers complain that when they go on
+strike against their masters, the government sends in troops and
+crushes their strike, regardless of the rights or wrongs of it. In order
+to meet such tactics, labor goes into politics, and elects here and
+there its own representatives; but these representatives become
+mysteriously affected by the bureaucratic point of view, and even where
+they try hard, they do not accomplish much for labor. Therefore, labor
+becomes disgusted with the political process, and labor men do not
+welcome the prospect of being managed by government.
+
+If you ask such men, they will say: "No; the politicians don't know
+anything about industry, and can't learn. The people who know about
+industry are those who work in it. The true way to run an industry is
+through an organization of the workers, both of hand and brain. The true
+way to run the Steel Trust is for all the workers in it, men and women,
+high and low, to be recognized by law as citizens of that industry; each
+shop must elect its own delegates to run that shop, and elect a delegate
+to a central parliament of the industry, and this industry in turn must
+elect delegates to a great parliament or convention of all the delegates
+of all the industries. In such a central gathering every one would be
+represented, because every person would be a producer of some sort, and
+whether he was a steel worker or a street sweeper or a newsboy, he would
+have a vote at the place where he earns his living, and would have a say
+in the management of his job. The great central parliament would elect
+an executive committee and a president, and so we should have a
+government of the workers, by the workers, for the workers." This idea
+is known as Syndicalism, derived from the French word "syndicat,"
+meaning a labor union. Since the Russian revolution it has come to be
+known as soviet government, "soviet" being the Russian word for trade
+council.
+
+Now, taking these two ideas of Socialism and Syndicalism, it is evident
+that they may be combined in various ways, and applied in varying
+degrees. It is perfectly conceivable, for example, that the people of
+the United States might elect a president pledged to call a parliament
+of industry, and to delegate the control of industry to this parliament.
+He might delegate the control to a certain extent, and provide for its
+extension, step by step; so our society might move into Syndicalism by
+the way of Socialism. You have only to put your mind on the
+possibilities of the situation to realize that one method shades into
+the other with a great variety of stages.
+
+Consider next the stages between capitalism and Socialism. We have in
+the United States some industries which are purely capitalistic; for
+example, the Steel Trust, which is privately owned, and has been
+powerful enough, not merely to suppress every effort of its workers to
+organize, but every effort of the government to regulate it. On the
+other hand, the United States Postoffice represents State Socialism;
+although the workers have been forbidden to organize, and the management
+of the industry is so arbitrary that I have always preferred to call it
+State Capitalism. Likewise the United States army and navy represent
+State Socialism. When we had the job of putting the Kaiser out of
+business, we did not hire Mr. Rockefeller to do it; it never once
+occurred to our advocates of "individualism," of "capitalist enterprise
+and initiative," to suggest that we should hire out our army and navy,
+or employ the Steel Trust or the Powder Trust to organize its own army
+and navy to do the fighting for us. Likewise, for the most part, we run
+the job of educating our children by the method of municipal Socialism.
+We run our libraries in the same way, and likewise our job of fire
+protection.
+
+It is interesting to note how in every country the line between
+capitalism and Socialism is drawn in a different place. In America we
+run practically all our libraries for ourselves, but it would seem to us
+preposterous to think of running our theatres. In Europe, however, they
+have state-owned theatres, which set a far higher standard of art than
+anything we know at home. Also, they have state-owned orchestras and
+opera-houses, something we Americans leave to the subscriptions of
+millionaires. In Europe it seems perfectly natural to the people that
+the state should handle their telegrams in connection with the
+postoffice; but if you urge government ownership of the telegraphs in
+the United States, they tell you that the proposition is "socialistic,"
+and that saves the need of thinking about it. We take it for granted
+that our cities could run the libraries--even though we were glad when
+Carnegie came along and saved us the need of appropriating money for
+buildings. Just why a city should be able to run a library, and should
+not be able to run an opera-house, or a newspaper, is something which
+has never been made clear to me.
+
+Let us next examine the stages between capitalism and Syndicalism. A
+great many large corporations are making experiments in what they call
+"shop management," allowing the workers membership in the boards of
+directors and a voice in the conditions of their labor. This is
+Syndicalism so far as it goes. Likewise it is Syndicalism when the
+clothing workers and the clothing manufacturers meet together and agree
+to the setting up of a permanent committee to work out a set of rules
+for the conduct of the industry, and to fix wages from time to time.
+Obviously, these things are capable of indefinite extension, and in
+Europe they are being developed far more rapidly. For example, in Italy
+the agricultural workers are organized, and are gradually taking
+possession of the great estates, which are owned by absentee landlords.
+They wage war upon these estates by means of sabotage and strikes, and
+then they buy up the estates at bargain prices and develop them by
+co-operative labor. This has been going on in Italy for ten years, and
+has become the most significant movement in the country. It is a triumph
+of pure Syndicalism; and such is the power of pure capitalism in the
+United States that the American people have not been allowed to know
+anything about this change.
+
+Next, what are the stages between Socialism and Syndicalism? These also
+are infinite in number and variety. As a matter of fact, there are very
+few Socialists who advocate State Socialism without any admixture of
+Syndicalism. The regular formula of the Socialist party is "the social
+ownership and democratic control of the instruments and means of
+production;" and what the phrase "democratic control" means is simply
+that you introduce into your Socialist mixture a certain flavoring of
+Syndicalism, greater or less, according to your temperament. In the same
+way there are many Syndicalists who are inclined toward Socialism. In
+every convention of radical trade unionists, such as, for example, the
+I. W. W., you find some who favor political action, and these will have
+the same point of view as the more radical members of the Socialist
+party, who urge a program of industrial as well as political action.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIV
+
+COMMUNISM AND ANARCHISM
+
+     (Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the idea of a
+     society without compulsion, and how these ideas have fared in
+     Russia.)
+
+
+The Russian revolution has familiarized us with the word Communism. In
+the beginning of the revolutionary movement Communism denoted what we
+now call Socialism; for example, the Communist Manifesto of Marx and
+Engels became the platform of the Social-democratic parties. But because
+most of these parties supported their governments during the war, the
+more radical elements have now rejected the word Socialism, and taken up
+the old word Communism. In the Russian revolution the Communists went so
+far as to seize all the property of the rich, and so the word Communism
+has come to bear something of its early Christian significance.
+
+It is obvious that here, too, it is a question of degree, and Socialism
+will shade into Communism by an infinite variety of stages, depending
+upon what forms of property it is decided to socialize. The Socialist
+formula commonly accepted is that "goods socially used shall be socially
+owned, and goods privately used shall be privately owned." If you own a
+factory, it will be taken by the state, or by the workers, and made
+social property like the postoffice; but no Socialist wants to socialize
+your clothing, or your books, any more than he wants to socialize your
+toothbrush.
+
+But when you come to apply this formula, you run quickly into
+difficulties. Suppose you are a millionaire, and own a palace with one
+or two hundred rooms, and a hundred servants. Do you use that socially,
+or do you use it privately? And suppose there is a scarcity of houses,
+and thousands of children are dying of tuberculosis in crowded tenement
+rooms? You own a dozen automobiles, and do you use them all privately? I
+point out to you that in time of emergency the capitalist state does not
+hesitate over such a problem; it seizes your palace and turns it into a
+hospital, it takes all your cars and uses them to carry troops. It
+should be obvious that a proletarian state would be tempted by this
+precedent.
+
+The Communists also have a formula, which reads: "From each according to
+his ability, to each according to his necessity." I do not see how any
+sensitive person can deny that this is an extremely fine statement of an
+ideal in social life. We take it quite for granted in family life; if
+you knew a family in which that rule did not apply, you would consider
+it an unloving and uncivilized family. I believe that when once industry
+has been socialized, and we have a chance to see what production can
+become, we shall find ourselves quickly adopting that family custom as
+our law, for all except a few congenital criminals and cheats. We shall
+find that we can produce so much wealth that it is not worth while
+keeping count of unimportant items. If today you meet someone on the
+street and ask him for a match or a pin, you do not think of offering to
+pay him. This is an automatic consequence of the cheapness of matches
+and pins. Once upon a time you were stopped on the road every few miles
+and made to pay a few cents toll. I remember seeing toll-gates when I
+was a boy, but I don't think I have seen one for twenty years.
+
+In exactly the same way, under socialized industry, we shall probably
+make street-car traffic free, and then railroad traffic; we shall
+abolish water meters and gas meters and electric light meters, also
+telephone charges, except perhaps for long distances, and telegraph
+tolls for personal messages. Then, presently, we shall find ourselves
+with such a large wheat crop that we shall make bread free; and then
+music and theatres and clothing and books. At present we use furniture
+and clothing as a means of manifesting our economic superiority to our
+fellowmen. One of the most charming books in our language is Veblen's
+"Theory of the Leisure Class," in which these processes are studied. We
+shall, of course, have to raise up a new generation, unaccustomed to the
+idea of class and of class distinction, before we could undertake to
+supply people with all the clothing they wanted free of charge.
+
+The Russian theorists made haste to carry out these ideas all at once;
+they tried to leap several centuries in the evolution of Russian
+society. They ordained complete Communism in land; but the peasants
+would have nothing to do with such notions--each wanted his own land,
+and what he produced on it. The Soviets have now been forced to give
+way, not merely to the peasants, but to the traders; and so we see once
+again that it is better to take one step forward than to take several
+steps forward and then several steps backward. The Russian revolution
+is not yet completed, so no one can say how many steps backward it will
+be forced to take.
+
+This revolution was an interesting combination of the ideas of Socialism
+and Syndicalism. The trade unionists seized the factories, and made an
+effort at democratic control of industry. At the same time the state was
+overthrown by a political party, the Bolsheviks, who set up a
+dictatorship of the proletariat. Because of civil war and outside
+invasion, the democratic elements in the experiment have been more and
+more driven into the background, and the authority of the state has
+correspondingly increased. This causes us to think of the Soviet system
+as necessarily opposed to democracy, but this is not in any way a
+necessary thing. There is no inevitable connection between industrial
+control by the workers and a dictatorship over the state. In Germany the
+state is proceeding to organize a national parliament of industry, and
+to provide for management of the factories by the labor unions. The
+Italian government has promised to do the same thing. These, of course,
+are capitalist governments, and they will keep their promises only as
+they are made to; but it is a perfectly possible thing that in either of
+these countries a vote of the people might change the government, and
+put in authority men who would really proceed to turn industry over to
+the control of the workers. That would be the Soviet or Syndicalist
+system, brought about by democratic means, without dictatorship or civil
+war.
+
+Another group of revolutionary thinkers whose theories must be mentioned
+are the Anarchists. The word Anarchy is commonly used as a synonym for
+chaos and disorder, which it does not mean at all. It means the absence
+of authority; and it is characteristic of people's view of life that
+they are unable to conceive of there being such a thing as order, unless
+it is maintained by force. The theory of the Anarchist is that order is
+a necessity of the human spirit, and that people would conform to the
+requirements of a just order by their own free will and without external
+compulsion. The Anarchist believes that the state is an instrument of
+class oppression, and has no other reason for being. He wishes the
+industries to be organized by free associations of the people who work
+in them.
+
+Some of the greatest of the world's moral teachers have been Anarchists:
+Jesus, for example, and Shelley and Thoreau and Tolstoi, and in our time
+Kropotkin. These men voiced the highest aspirations of the human
+spirit, and the form of society which they dreamed is the one we set
+before us as our final goal. But the world does not leap into perfection
+all at once, and meantime here we have the capitalist system and the
+capitalist state, and what attitude shall we take to them? There are
+impassioned idealists who refuse to make any terms with injustice, or to
+submit to compulsion, and these preach the immediate destruction of
+capitalist government, and capitalist government responds with prison
+and torture, and so we have some Anarchists who throw bombs.
+
+There are those who call themselves "philosophic" Anarchists, wishing to
+indicate thereby that they preach this doctrine, but do not attempt to
+carry it into action as yet. Some among these verge toward the Communist
+point of view, and call themselves Communist-anarchists; such was
+Kropotkin, whose theories of social organization you will find in his
+book "The Conquest of Bread." There are others who call themselves
+Syndicalist-anarchists, finding their centers of free association in the
+radical labor unions.
+
+After the Russian revolution, the Anarchists found themselves in a
+dilemma, and their groups were torn apart like every other party and
+class in Russia. Here was a new form of state set up in society, a
+workers' state, and what attitude should the Anarchists take toward
+that? Many of them stood out for their principles, and resisted the
+Bolshevik state, and put the Bolsheviks under the embarrassing necessity
+of throwing them into jail. We good orthodox Americans, who are
+accustomed to dump Socialists and Communists and Syndicalists and
+Anarchists all together into one common kettle, took Emma Goldman and
+Alexander Berkman and shipped them over to Russia, where we thought they
+belonged. Now our capitalist newspapers find it strange that these
+Anarchists do not like the Russian government any better than they like
+the American government!
+
+On the other hand, a great many Anarchists have suddenly found
+themselves compelled by the Russian situation to face the facts of life.
+They have decided that a government is not such a bad thing after
+all--when it is your own government! Robert Minor, for example, has
+recanted his Anarchist position, and joined the Communists in advocating
+the dropping of all differences among the workers, all theories as to
+the future, and concentrating upon the immediate task of overthrowing
+capitalist government and keeping it overthrown. In every civilized
+nation the Russian revolution has had this effect upon the extreme
+revolutionists. It has given them a definite aim and a definite program
+upon which they can unite; it has presented to capitalist government the
+answer of force to force; it has shown the masters of industry in
+precise and definite form what they have to face--unless they set
+themselves immediately and in good faith to the task of establishing
+real democracy in industry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXV
+
+SOCIAL REVOLUTION
+
+     (How the great change is coming in different industries, and how we
+     may prepare to meet it.)
+
+
+From a study of the world's political revolutions we observe that a
+variety of governmental forms develop, and that different circumstances
+in each country produce different institutions. Suppose that back in the
+days of the French monarchy some one asked you how France was going to
+be governed as a political republic; how would elections be held, what
+would be the powers of the deputies, who would choose the premier, who
+would choose the president, what would be the duties of each? Who can
+explain why in France and England the executive is responsible to the
+parliament and must answer its questions, while in the United States the
+executive is an autocrat, responsible to no one for four years? Who
+could have foreseen that in England, supposed to remain a monarchy, the
+constitution would be fluid; while in America, supposed to be a
+democracy, the constitution would be rigid, and the supreme power of
+rejecting changes in the laws would be vested in a group of reactionary
+lawyers appointed for life? There will be similar surprises in the
+social revolution, and similar differences between what things pretend
+to be and what they are.
+
+I used to compare the social revolution to the hatching of an egg. You
+examine it, and apparently it is all egg; but then suddenly something
+begins to happen, and in a few minutes it is all chicken. If, however,
+you investigate, you discover that the chicken had been forming inside
+the egg for some time. I know that there is a chicken now forming inside
+our social egg; but having realized the complexity of social phenomena,
+I no longer venture to predict the exact time of the hatching, or the
+size and color of the chicken.
+
+Perhaps it is more useful to compare the social revolution to a
+child-birth. A good surgeon knows what is due to happen, but he knows
+also that there are a thousand uncertainties, a thousand dangerous
+possibilities, and all he can do is to watch the process and be prepared
+to meet each emergency as it arises. The birth process consists of one
+pang after another, but no one can say which pang will complete the
+birth, or whether it will be completed at all. Karl Marx is author of
+the saying that "force is the midwife of progress," so you may see that
+I am not the inventor of this simile of child-birth.
+
+There are three factors in the social revolution, each of which will
+vary in each country, and in different parts of the country, and at
+different periods. First, there is the industrial condition of the
+country, a complex set of economic factors. The industrial life of
+England depends primarily on shipping and coal. In the United States
+shipping is of less importance, and railroads take the place. In the
+United States the eastern portion lives mainly by manufacture, the
+western by agriculture, while the south is held a generation behind by a
+race problem. In France the great estates were broken up, and
+agriculture fell into the hands of peasant proprietors, who are the main
+support of French capitalism. In Prussia the great estates were held
+intact, and remained the basis of a feudal aristocracy. In America land
+changes hands freely, and therefore one-third of our farms are
+mortgaged, and another third are worked by tenants. In Russia there was
+practically no middle class, while in the United States there is
+practically nothing but middle class; the rich have been rich for such a
+short while that they still look middle class and act middle class, in
+spite of all their efforts, while the working class hopes to be middle
+class and is persuaded that it can become middle class. Such varying
+factors produce in each country a different problem, and make inevitable
+a different process of change.
+
+The second factor is the condition of organization and education of the
+workers. This likewise varies in every country, and in every part of
+every country. There is a continual struggle on the part of the workers
+to organize and educate themselves, and a continual effort on the part
+of the ruling class to prevent this. In some industries in America you
+find the workers one hundred per cent organized, and in other industries
+you find them not organized at all. It is obvious that in the former
+case the social change, when it comes, will be comparatively simple,
+involving little bloodshed and waste; in the latter case there will be
+social convulsions, rioting and destruction of property, disorganization
+of industry and widespread distress.
+
+The third factor is the state of mind of the propertied classes, the
+amount of resistance they are willing to make to social change. I have
+done a great deal of pleading with the masters of industry in my
+country; I have written appeals to Vincent Astor and John D.
+Rockefeller, to capitalist newspapers and judges and congressmen and
+presidents. I have been told that this is a waste of my time; that these
+people cannot learn and will not learn, and that it is foolish to appeal
+either to their hearts or their understanding. But I perceive that the
+class struggle is like a fraction; it has a numerator and a denominator,
+and you can increase the fraction just as well by decreasing the
+denominator as by increasing the numerator. To vary the simile, here are
+two groups of men engaged in a tug of war, and you can affect the result
+just as decisively by persuading one group to pull less hard, as by
+persuading the other group to pull harder.
+
+Picture to yourself two factories. In factory number one the owner is a
+hard-driving business man, an active spirit in the so-called "open-shop"
+campaign. He believes in his divine right to manage industry, and he
+believes also in the gospel of "all that the traffic will bear." He
+prevents his men from organizing, and employs spies to weed out the
+radicals and to sow dissensions. When a strike comes, he calls in the
+police and the strike-breaking agencies, and in every possible way he
+makes himself hated and feared by his workers. Then some day comes the
+unemployment crisis, and a wave of revolt sweeping over the country. The
+workers seize that factory and set up a dictatorship of the proletariat
+and a "red terror." If the owner resists, they kill him; in any case,
+they wipe out his interest in the business, and do everything possible
+to destroy his power over it, even to his very name. They run the
+business by a shop committee, and you have for that particular factory a
+Syndicalist, or even Anarchist form of social reconstruction.
+
+Now for factory number two, whose owner is a humane and enlightened man,
+studying social questions and realizing his responsibility, and the
+temporary nature of his stewardship. He gives his people the best
+possible working conditions, he keeps open books and discusses wages and
+profits with them, he educates the young workers, he meets with their
+union committees on a basis of free discussion. When the unemployment
+crisis comes and the wave of revolt sweeps the country, this man and his
+workers understand one another. He says: "I can no longer pay profits,
+and so I can no longer keep going under the profit system; but if you
+are ready to run the plant, I am ready to help you the best I can."
+Manifestly, this man will continue the president of the corporation, and
+if he trains his sons wisely, they will keep his place; so, instead of
+having in that factory a dictatorship and a terror, you will have a
+constitutional monarchy, gradually evolving into a democratic republic.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVI
+
+CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION
+
+     (Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they afford to do
+     it, and what will be the price?)
+
+
+The problem of whether the social revolution shall be violent or
+peaceable depends in great part upon our answer to the question of
+confiscation versus compensation. We are now going to consider, first,
+the abstract rights and wrongs of the question, and, second, the
+practical aspects of it.
+
+There is a story very popular among single taxers and other advocates of
+freedom of the land. An English land-owner met a stranger walking on his
+estate, and rebuked him for trespassing. Said the stranger, "You own
+this land?" Said the other, "I do." "And how did you get it?" "I
+inherited it from my father." "And how did your father get it?" "He
+inherited it from his father." So on for half a dozen more ancestors,
+until at last the Englishman answered, "He fought for it." Whereupon the
+stranger took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and said, "I'll
+fight you for it."
+
+This is all there is to say on the subject of the abstract rights of
+land titles. There is no title to land which is valid on a historical
+basis. Everything rests upon fraud and force, continued through endless
+ages of human history. We in the United States took most of our land
+from the Indians, and in the process our guiding rule was that the only
+good Injun was a dead Injun. We first helped the English kings to take
+large sections of our country from the French and Spanish, and then we
+took them from the English king by a violent revolution. We purchased
+our Southwestern states from Mexico, but not until we had taken the
+precaution of killing some thousands of Mexicans in war, which had the
+effect of keeping down the purchase price. It would be a simple matter
+to show that all public franchises are similarly tainted with fraud.
+Proudhon laid down the principle that "property is theft," and from this
+principle it is an obvious conclusion that society has the right to
+scrap all paper titles to wealth, and to start the world's industries
+over again on the basis of share and share alike.
+
+But stop and consider for a moment. "Property is theft," you say. But go
+to your corner grocery, and tell the grocer that you deny his title to
+the sack of prunes which he exhibits in front of his counter. He will
+tell you that he has paid for them; but you answer that the prunes were
+raised on stolen land, and shipped to him over a railroad whose
+franchise was obtained by bribery. Will that convince the grocer? It
+will not. Neither will it convince the policeman or the judge, nor will
+it convince the voters of the country. Most people have a deeply rooted
+conviction that there are rights to property now definitely established
+and made valid by law. If you have paid taxes on land for a certain
+period, the land "belongs" to you; and I am sure you might agitate from
+now to kingdom come without persuading the American people that New
+Mexico ought to be returned to Mexico, or the western prairies to the
+Indian tribes.
+
+Such are the facts; now let us apply them to the right of exploitation,
+embodied in the ownership of a certain number of bonds or shares of
+stock in the United States Steel Corporation. "Pass a law," says the
+Socialist, "providing for the taking over of United States Steel by the
+government." At once to every owner comes one single thought--are you
+going to buy this stock, or are you going to confiscate it? If you
+attempt confiscation, the courts will declare the law unconstitutional;
+and you either have to defy the courts, which is revolutionary action,
+or to amend the constitution. If you adopt the latter course, you have
+before you a long period of agitation; you have to carry both houses of
+Congress by a two-thirds majority, and the legislatures of three-fourths
+of the States. You have to do this in the face of the most bitter and
+infuriated opposition of those who are defending what they regard as
+their rights. You have to meet the arguments of the entire capitalist
+press of the country, and you have the certainty of widespread bribery
+of your elected officials.
+
+The prospect of doing all this under the forms of law seems extremely
+discouraging; so come the Syndicalists, saying, "Let us seize the
+factories, and stop the exploitation at the point of production." So
+come the Communists, saying, "Let us overthrow capitalist government,
+and break the net of bourgeois legality, and establish a dictatorship of
+the proletariat, which will put an end to privilege and class domination
+all at once." What are we to say to these different programs?
+
+Suppose we buy out the stockholders of United States Steel, and issue
+to them government bonds, what have we accomplished? Nothing, say the
+advocates of confiscation; we have changed the form of exploitation, but
+the substance of it remains the same. The stockholders get their money
+from the United States government, instead of from the United States
+Steel Corporation; but they get their money just the same--the product,
+not of their labor, but of the labor of the steel workers. Suppose we
+carried out the same procedure all along the line; suppose the
+government took over all industries, and paid for their securities with
+government bonds. Then we should have capitalism administered by a
+capitalist government, instead of by our present masters of industry; we
+should have a state capitalism, instead of a private capitalism; we
+should have the government buying and selling products, and exploiting
+labor, and paying over the profits to an hereditary privileged class.
+The capitalist system would go on just the same, except that labor would
+have one all-powerful tyrant, instead of many lesser tyrants, as at
+present.
+
+So argue the advocates of confiscation. And the advocates of purchase
+reply that in buying the securities of United States Steel, we should
+fix the purchase price at the present market value of the property, and
+that price, once fixed, would be permanent; all future unearned
+increment of the steel industry would belong to the government instead
+of to private owners. Consider, for example, what happened during the
+world war. When I was a boy, soon after the Steel Trust was launched,
+its stock was down to something like six dollars, and I knew small
+investors who lost every dollar they had put in. But during the war,
+steel stock soared to a hundred and thirty-six dollars per share; it
+paid dividends of some thirty per cent per year, and accumulated
+enormous surpluses besides.
+
+The same thing was true of practically all the big corporations.
+According to Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, there were coal companies
+which paid as high as eight hundred per cent per year; that is to say,
+the profits in one year were eight times the total investment. Assuming
+that our government bonds paid five per cent, it appears that the owners
+of these coal companies got one hundred and sixty times as much under
+our present private property system as they would have got under a
+system of state purchase. Even completely dominated by capitalism as our
+courts are today, they would not dare require us to pay for industries
+more than six per cent on the market value of the investment; and from
+what I know of the inside graft of American big business that would be
+restricting the private owners to less than one-fourth of what they are
+getting at present.
+
+We have already pointed out the economies that can be made by putting
+industry under a uniform system. But all these, important as they are,
+amount to little in comparison with the one great consideration, which
+is that by purchasing large scale industry, we should break the "iron
+ring"; we should thenceforth be able to do our manufacturing for use
+instead of for profit, and so we should put an end to unemployment. Our
+cheerful workers would throng into the factories, to produce for
+themselves instead of for masters; and in one year of that we should so
+change the face of our country that a return to the system of private
+ownership would be unthinkable. In one year we could raise production to
+such a point that the interest on the bonds we had issued would be like
+the crumbs left over from a feast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVII
+
+EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS
+
+     (Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its chances for
+     success in the United States.)
+
+
+I am aware that the suggestion of paying for the industries we socialize
+will sound tame and uninspiring to a lot of ardent young radicals of my
+acquaintance. They will shake their heads sadly and say that I am
+getting middle-aged and tired. We have seen in Russia and Hungary and
+other places, so many illustrations of the quick and easy way to
+expropriate the expropriators that now there is in every country a
+considerable group of radicals who will hear to no program less
+picturesque than barricades and councils of action.
+
+In considering this question, I set aside all considerations of abstract
+right or wrong, the justification for violence in the overthrow of
+capitalist society. I put the question on the basis of cash, pure and
+simple. It will cost a certain amount of money to buy out the owners,
+and that money will have to be paid, as it is paid at present, out of
+the labor of the useful workers. The workers don't want to pay any more
+than they have to; the question they must consider is, which way will
+they have to pay most. The advocates of the dictatorship of the
+proletariat are lured by the delightful prospect of not having to pay
+anything; and if that were really possible it would undoubtedly be the
+better way. But we have to consider this question: Is the program of not
+having to pay anything a reality, or is it only a dream? Suppose it
+should turn out that we have to pay anyhow, and that in the case of
+violent revolution we pay much more, and in addition run serious risk of
+not getting what we pay for?
+
+Here are enormous industries, running at full blast, and it is proposed
+that some morning the workers shall rise up and seize them, and turn out
+the owners and managers, and run the industries themselves. Will anybody
+maintain that this can be done without stopping production in those
+factories for a single day? Certainly production must stop during the
+time you are fighting for possession; and the cruel experience of
+Russia proves that it will stop during the further time you are fighting
+to keep possession, and to put down counter-revolutionary conspiracies.
+Also, alas, it will stop during the time you are looking for somebody
+who knows how to run that industry; it will stop during the time you are
+organizing your new administrative staff. You may discover to your
+consternation that it stops during the time you are arranging to get
+other industries to give you credit, and to ship you raw materials; also
+during the time you are finding the workers in other industries who want
+your product, and are able to pay for it with something that you can
+use, or that you can sell in a badly disorganized market.
+
+And all the time that you are arranging these things, you are going to
+have the workers at your back, not getting any pay, or being paid with
+your paper money which they distrust, and growling and grumbling at you
+because you are not running things as you promised. You see, the mass of
+the workers are not going to understand, because you haven't made them
+understand; you have brought about the great change by your program of a
+dictatorship, of action by an "enlightened minority"; and now you have
+the terror that the unenlightened majority may be won back by their
+capitalist masters, and may kick you out of control, or even stand you
+up against a wall and shoot you by a firing squad. And all the time you
+are worrying over these problems, who can estimate the total amount the
+factory might have been producing if it had been running at full blast?
+Whatever that difference is, remember, it is paid by the workers; and
+might that sum not just as well have been used to buy out the owners?
+
+If we were back in the old days of hand labor and crude, unorganized
+production, I admit that the only way to benefit the slaves might be to
+turn out the masters by force. But here we have a social system of
+infinite complexity, a delicate and sensitive machine, which no one
+person in the world, and no group of persons understands thoroughly. In
+the running of such a machine a slight blunder may cost a fortune; and
+certainly all the skill, all the training, all the loyal services of our
+expert engineers and managers is needed if we are to remodel that
+machine while keeping it running. The amount of wealth which we could
+save by the achieving of that feat would be sufficient to maintain a
+class of owners in idleness and luxury for a generation; and so I say,
+with all the energy and conviction I possess, _pay them_! Pay them
+anything that is necessary, in order to avoid civil war and social
+disorganization! Pay them so much that they can have no possible cause
+of complaint, that the most hide-bound capitalistic-minded judge in the
+country cannot find a legal flaw in the bargain! Pay them so that every
+engineer and efficiency expert and manager and foreman and stenographer
+and office-boy will stay on the job and work double time to put the
+enterprise through! Pay them such a price that even Judge Gary and John
+D. Rockefeller will be willing to help us do the job of social
+readjustment!
+
+"Ah, yes," my young radical friends will say, "that sounds all very
+beautiful, but it's the old Utopian dream of brotherhood and class
+co-operation. That will never happen on this earth, until you have first
+abolished capitalism." My answer is, it could happen tomorrow if we had
+sufficient intelligence to make it happen. That it does not happen is
+simply absence of intelligence. And will anyone maintain that it is the
+part of an intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent course than he
+knows? What is the use of our intelligence, if we abdicate its
+authority, and give ourselves up to programs of action which we know are
+blind and destructive and wasteful? We may see a great vessel going on
+the rocks; we may feel certain that it is going, in spite of everything
+we can do; but shall we fail to do what we can to make those in the
+vessel realize how they might get safely into the harbor?
+
+We have had the Russian revolution before us for four years. Mankind
+will spend the next hundred years in studying it, and still have much to
+learn, but the broad outlines of the great experiment are now plain
+before our eyes. Russia was a backward country, and she tried to fight a
+modern war, and it broke her down. She had practically no middle class,
+and her ruling class was rotten, and so the revolutionists had their
+chance, and they seized it. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that
+they came to the rescue of Russia, saving her from the hands of those
+who were trying to force her to fight, when she was utterly exhausted
+and incapable of fighting.
+
+Anyhow, here was your dictatorship of the proletariat. It turned out all
+the executive experts, or nearly all of them, because they were tainted
+with the capitalist psychology; and then straightway it had to call them
+back and make terms with them, because industry could not be run without
+them. And of course these engineers and managers sabotaged the
+revolution--every non-proletarian sabotaged it, both inside Russia and
+outside. You denounced this, and protested against this, but all the
+same it happened; it was human nature that it should happen, and it is
+one of the things you have to count on, in any and every country where
+you attempt the social revolution by minority action.
+
+They have got power in Russia, and they dream of getting power in
+America in the same way. But there is no such disorganization in our
+country as there was in Russia, and it would take a generation of civil
+strife to bring us to such a condition. We have a middle class,
+powerful, thoroughly organized, and thoroughly conscious. Moreover, this
+class has ideals of majority rule, which are bred in its very bones; and
+while they have never realized these ideals, they think they have, and
+they are prepared to fight to the last gasp in that belief. All that the
+leaders of Moscow have to do is to bring about an attempt at forcible
+revolution, and they will discover in American society sufficient power
+of organization and of brutal action to put their movement out of
+business for a generation.
+
+A hundred years ago we had chattel slavery firmly fixed as the
+industrial system of one-half of these United States. To far-seeing
+statesmen it was manifest that chattel slavery was a wasteful system,
+and that it could not exist in competition with free labor. There was a
+great American, Henry Clay, who came forward with a proposition that the
+people of the United States, through their government, should raise the
+money, about a billion dollars, and compensate the owners of all the
+slaves and set them free. For most of his lifetime Henry Clay pleaded
+for that plan. But the masters of the South were making money fast; they
+knew how to handle the negro as a slave, they could not imagine handling
+him as a free laborer, and they would not hear to the plan. On the other
+side of Mason and Dixon's line were fanatical men of "principle," who
+said that slavery was wrong, and that was the end of it. There is a
+stanza by Emerson discussing this question of confiscation versus
+compensation:
+
+    Pay ransom to the owner
+      And fill the bag to the brim.
+    Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
+      And ever was. Pay him.
+
+This, you see, is magnificent utterance, but as economic philosophy it
+is reckless and unsound. The abolitionists of the North took up this
+poem, and the slave power of the South answered with a battle-song:
+
+    War to the hilt,
+    Theirs be the guilt,
+    Who fetter the freeman to ransom the slave!
+
+And so the issue had to be fought out. It cost a million human lives and
+five billions of treasure, and it set American civilization back a
+generation. And now we confront exactly the same kind of emergency, and
+are coming to exactly the same method of solution. We have white
+wage-slaves clamoring for their freedom, and we have business men making
+money out of them, and exercising power over them, and finding it
+convenient and pleasant. They are going to fight it out in a civil war,
+and which side is going to win I am not sure. But when the historians
+come to write about it a couple of generations from now, let them be
+able to record that there were a few men in the country who pleaded for
+a sane and orderly and human solution of the problem, and who continued
+to voice their convictions even in the midst of the cruel and wasteful
+strife!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVIII
+
+THE PROBLEM OF THE LAND
+
+     (Discusses the land values tax as a means of social readjustment,
+     and compares it with other programs.)
+
+
+The writer of this book has been watching the social process for twenty
+years, trying to figure out one thing--how the change from competition
+to co-operation can be brought about with the minimum of human waste. He
+has come to realize that the first step is a mental one; to get the
+people to want the change. That means that the program must be simple,
+so that the masses can understand it. As a social engineer you might
+work out a perfect plan, but find yourself helpless, because it was hard
+to explain. As illustration of what I mean, I cite the single tax, a
+theory which has a considerable hold in America, but which politically
+has been utterly ineffective.
+
+A few years ago a devoted enthusiast in Southern California, Luke North,
+started what he called the "Great Adventure" to set free the idle land.
+In the campaign of 1918 I gave my help to this movement, and when it
+failed I went back and took stock, and revised my conclusions concerning
+the single tax. Theoretically the movement has a considerable percentage
+of right on its side. Land, in the sense that single taxers use it,
+meaning all the natural sources of wealth, is certainly an important
+basis of exploitation, and if you were to tax land values to the full
+extent, you would abolish a large portion of privilege--just how large
+would be hard to figure. I was perfectly willing to begin with that
+portion, so I helped with the "Great Adventure." But a practical test
+convinced me that it could never persuade a majority of the people.
+
+The single tax proposal is to abolish all taxes except the tax on land
+values. Then come the associations of the bankers and merchants and real
+estate speculators, crying in outraged horror, "What? You propose to let
+the rich man's stocks and bonds go free? You propose to put no tax on
+his cash in the vaults and on his wife's jewels? You propose to abolish
+the income tax and the inheritance tax, and put all the costs of
+government on the poor man's lot?"
+
+Now, of course, I know perfectly well that the rich man dodges most of
+his income tax and most of his inheritance tax. I know that he pays a
+nominal pittance on his cash in the bank and on his wife's jewels, and
+likewise on his stocks and bonds. I know that the corporations issuing
+these stocks and bonds would be far more heavily hit by a tax on the
+natural resources they own; they could not evade this tax, and they know
+it, and that is why they are moved to such deep concern for the fate of
+the poor man and his lot. I know that the tax on the poor man's lot
+would be infinitesimal in comparison with the tax on the great
+corporation. But how can I explain all this to the poor man? To
+understand it requires a knowledge of the complexities of our economic
+system which the voters simply have not got.
+
+How much easier to take the bankers and speculators at their word! To
+answer, "All right, gentlemen, since you like the income and inheritance
+taxes, the taxes on stocks and bonds and money and jewels, we will leave
+these taxes standing. Likewise, we assent to your proposition that the
+poor man should not pay taxes on his lot, while there are rich men and
+corporations in our state holding twenty million acres of land out of
+use for purposes of speculation. We will therefore arrange a land values
+tax on a graduated basis, after the plan of the income tax; we will
+allow one or two thousand dollars' worth of land exempt from all
+taxation, provided it is used by the owner; and we will put a graduated
+tax on all individuals and corporations owning a greater quantity of
+land, so that in the case of individuals and corporations owning more
+than ten thousand dollars' worth of land, we will take the full rental
+value, and thus force all idle land into the market."
+
+Now, the provision above outlined would have spiked every single
+argument used by the opposition to the "Great Adventure" in California
+in 1918; it would have made the real intent of the measure so plain as
+to win automatically the additional votes needed to carry the election.
+But I tried for three years, without being able to persuade a single one
+of the "Great Adventure" leaders to recognize this plain fact. The
+single taxer has his formula, the land values tax and no other tax, and
+all else is heresy. Actually, the president of a big single tax
+organization in the East declared that by the advocacy of my idea I had
+"betrayed the single tax!" We may take this as an illustration of the
+difference between dogmatism and science in the strategy of the class
+struggle.
+
+I first suggested my program immediately after the war, with the
+provision that the land thrown on the market should be purchased by the
+state, and used to establish co-operative agricultural colonies for the
+benefit of returned soldiers. But we have preferred to have our returned
+soldiers stay without work, or to displace the men and women who had
+been gallantly "doing their bit." By this means we soon had five million
+men out of work, and many other millions bitterly discontented with
+their wages. Again I took up the proposition for a graduated land tax,
+with the suggestion that the money should be used to provide a pension,
+first for every dependent man or woman over sixty years of age in the
+country, and second for every child in the country whose parents were
+unable properly to support it, whether because they were dead or sick or
+unemployed.
+
+You may note that in advocating this program, you would not have to
+convert anybody to any foreign theories, nor would you have to use any
+long words; you would not have to say anything against the constitution,
+nor to break any law, nor to give occasion for patriotic mobs to tar and
+feather you. To every poor man in your state you could say, "If you own
+your own house and lot, this bill will lift the taxes from both, and
+therefore it will mean fifty or a hundred dollars a year in your pocket.
+If you do not own a home, it will take millions of idle acres out of the
+hands of the speculators, and break the price of real estate, so that
+you can have either a lot in the city or a farm in the country with
+ease."
+
+Furthermore, you could say, "This measure will have the effect of
+drawing the unemployed from the cities at once, and so stopping the
+downward course of wages. At the same time that wages hold firm, the
+cost of food will go down, because there will be millions more men
+working on the land. In addition to that, the state will have an
+enormous income, many millions of dollars a year, taken exclusively from
+those who are owning and not producing. This money will be expended in
+saving from suffering and humiliation the old people of the country, who
+have worked hard all their lives and have been thrown on the scrap-heap;
+also in making certain that every child in the country has food enough
+and care enough to make him into a normal and healthy human being, so
+that he can do his share of work in the world and pay his own way
+through life."
+
+I submit the above measure to those who believe that the road to social
+freedom lies by some sort of land tax. But before you take it up I
+invite you to consider whether there may not be some other way, even
+easier. There is a homely old saying to the effect that "molasses
+catches more flies than vinegar"; and I am always looking for some way
+that will get the poor what they want, without frightening the rich any
+more than necessary.
+
+I know a certain type of radical whom this question always exasperates.
+He answers that the opposition will be equally strong to any plan; the
+rich will do anything for the poor except get off their backs--and so
+on. In reply I mention that among the most ardent radicals I know are
+half a dozen millionaires; I know one woman who is worth a million, who
+pleads day and night for social revolution, while the people who work
+for her are devoted and respectful wage slaves. Herbert Spencer said
+that his idea of a tragedy was a generalization killed by a fact. I
+shall not say that the existence of millionaire Socialists and parlor
+Bolsheviks kills the theory of the class struggle, but I certainly say
+it compels us to take thought of the rich as well as of the poor in
+planning the strategy of our campaign.
+
+And manifestly, if we want to consider the rich, the very last device we
+shall use is that of a tax. Nobody likes to pay taxes; everybody agrees
+in classifying taxes with death. Each feels that he is paying more than
+his share already; each knows that the government which collects the tax
+is incompetent or worse. Stop and recall what we have proven about the
+"iron ring"; the possibilities of production latent in our society.
+Realize the bearings of this all-important fact, that we can offer to
+mankind a social revolution which will make everybody richer, instead of
+making some people poorer! Exactly how to do this is the next thing we
+have to inquire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIX
+
+THE CONTROL OF CREDIT
+
+     (Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of
+     industry, and may play in the freeing of industry.)
+
+
+How is it that the rich are becoming richer? The single taxer answers
+that it is by monopoly of the land, the natural sources of wealth; the
+Socialist answers that it is by the control of the machinery of
+production. But if you go among the rich and make inquiry, you speedily
+learn that these factors, large as they are, amount to little in
+comparison with another factor, the control of credit. There are hosts
+of little capitalists and business men who deal in land and produce
+goods with machinery, but the men who make the real fortunes and
+dominate the modern world are those who control credit, and whose
+business is, not the production of anything, but speculation and the
+manipulation of markets.
+
+"Money makes the mare go," our ancestors used to say; and money today
+determines the destiny of empires. What is money? We think of it as gold
+and silver coins, and pieces of engraved paper promising to pay gold and
+silver coins. But the report of the U. S. Comptroller of the Currency
+for 1919 shows that the business of the country was done, 5% by such
+means and 95 % by checks; so, for practical purposes, we may say that
+money consists of men's willingness to trust other men, or groups or
+organizations of men, when they make written promise to pay. In other
+words, money is credit; and the control of credit means the control of
+industry. The problem of social readjustment is mainly but the problem
+of taking the control of credit out of the hands of private individuals,
+and making it a public or social function.
+
+Who controls credit today? The bankers. And how do they control it? We
+give it to them; we, the masses of the people, who take them our money
+and leave it with them. A very little real money in hand becomes, under
+our banking system, the basis of a great amount of imaginary money. The
+Federal Reserve law requires that banks shall hold in reserve from
+seven to thirteen per cent of demand deposits; which means, in
+substance, that when you leave a dollar with a banker, the banker is
+allowed, under the law, to turn that dollar into anywhere from seven to
+thirteen dollars, and lend those dollars out. In addition, he deposits
+his reserves with the Federal Reserve bank, and that bank keeps only
+thirty-five per cent in reserve--in other words, the seven to thirteen
+imaginary dollars are multiplied again by three.
+
+Under the stress of war, this process of credit inflation has been
+growing like the genii let out of the bottle. Under the law, the Federal
+Reserve banks are supposed to hold a gold reserve of 40% to secure our
+currency. But in December, 1919, these banks held a trifle over a
+billion dollars' worth of gold, while our paper money was over four
+billion. In addition, our banks have over thirty-three billions of
+deposits, and all these are supposed to be secured by gold; in addition,
+there are twenty-five billions of government bonds, and uncounted
+billions of private notes, bonds and accounts, all supposed to be
+payable in gold. So it appears that about one per cent of our
+outstanding money is real, and the rest is imaginary--that is, it is
+credit.
+
+The point for you to get clear is this: The great mass of this imaginary
+money is created by law, and we have the power to abolish it or to
+change the ownership of it at any time we develop the necessary
+intelligence. Let us consider the ordinary paper money, the one and two
+and five and ten dollar "bills," with which we plain people do most of
+our business. These are Federal Reserve notes, and there are about three
+billions of them; how do they come to be? Why, we grant to the national
+banks by law the right to make this money; the government prints it for
+them, and they put it into circulation. And what does it cost them? They
+pay one per cent for the use of the money; in some cases they pay only
+one-half of one per cent; and then they lend it to us, the people--and
+what do they charge us? The answer is available in a recent report of
+the U. S. Comptroller of the Currency, as follows:
+
+"I have the record of the loans made by one Texas national bank to a
+hard-working woman who owned a little farm a few miles from town. She
+borrowed, in the aggregate, $2,375, making about thirty loans during the
+year. Listen to the details of the robbery: $162.50 for 30 days at 36
+per cent; $377. for 34 days at 44 per cent; $620.25 for 23 days at 77
+per cent; $11. for 30 days at 120 per cent; $21.50 for 30 days at 90
+per cent; $33. for 2 days at 93 per cent; $27. for 15 days at 195 per
+cent; $110. for 30 days at 120 per cent--that was to buy a horse for her
+plowing; $20 for 48 days at 187 per cent; $6 for 10 days at 720 per
+cent; $7 for 3 days at 2,000 per cent, and so on; every cent paid off by
+what sweat and struggle only God knows."
+
+In Oklahoma, where the legal rate of interest is six per cent, with ten
+per cent as the maximum under special contract, harassed farmers paid
+all the way from 12 to 2400 per cent, with 40 per cent as the average.
+In the case of one bank, the Comptroller proved that not a single
+solitary loan had been made under fifteen per cent. He cited one
+particular case that he asked to be regarded as typical. In the spring
+the farmer went to the bank and arranged for a loan of $200. Out of his
+necessity he was compelled to pay 55 per cent interest charge. Unable to
+meet the note at maturity, he had to agree to 100 per cent interest in
+order to get the renewal. The next renewal forced him up to 125 per
+cent. For four years the thing went on, and all the drudgery of the
+father and the mother and the six children could never keep down the
+terrible interest or wipe out the principal. As a finish the bank
+swooped down and sold him out; the wretched man, barefoot and hungry,
+went to work clearing a swamp, caught pneumonia and died; the county
+buried him, and neighbors raised a purse to send the widow and children
+back to friends in Arkansas.
+
+This is the thing called the Money Trust in action, and this is the
+power we have to take out of private control. It is our first job, and
+all other jobs are in comparison hardly worth mentioning. How are we
+going to do it?
+
+The farmers of North Dakota have shown one way. They took the control of
+their state government into their own hands, and the most important and
+significant thing they did was to start a public bank. The interests
+fought them tooth and nail; not merely the interests of North Dakota,
+not merely of the Northwest, but of the entire United States. They
+fought them in the law courts, up to the United States Supreme Court,
+which decided in favor of the people of North Dakota. Therefore, make
+note of this vital fact--the most important single fact in the strategy
+of the class struggle--every state can, under the constitution, have a
+public bank; every city and town can have one, and no court can ever
+forbid it!
+
+Therefore, I say to all Socialists, labor men and social reformers of
+every shade and variety, nail at the top of your program of action the
+demand for a public bank in your community, to take the control of
+credit out of the hands of speculators and use it for the welfare of the
+people. Make it your first provision that every dollar of public money
+shall be deposited in this bank and every detail of public financing
+handled by this bank; make it your second provision that the purpose of
+this bank shall be to put all private banks out of business, and take
+over their power for the people.
+
+At present, you understand, it is taken for granted that the first
+purpose of the government is to foster the private credit system. Take,
+for example, the postal savings bank. The private banks fought this for
+a generation, and finally they allowed us to have it, on condition that
+it should be turned into a device for collecting money for them. Our
+postal bank turns over all its money to the private banks, at the
+grotesque rate of two per cent interest; and recently I read of the
+director of the postal bank appearing before a convention of bankers,
+asking for some small favor, and humbly explaining that it was not his
+idea to make the postal bank a rival of the private savings banks. Why
+should he not do so? Let us nail it to our radical program that the
+postal savings bank is to fight for business, just as do the private
+banks, and lend its funds direct to the people on good security.
+
+Let our Federal banking system also become the servant of the public
+welfare, and let its energy be devoted to breaking the strangle-hold of
+predatory finance on our industry. Let the government issue all money,
+and use it for the transfer of industry from private into public hands.
+Do we want to socialize our railroads, our coal mines, our telegraphs
+and telephones? Do we want to buy them, in order to avoid the wastes of
+civil war and insurrection? We have agreed that we do; and here we have
+the way of doing it. If the bankers can create, out of our willingness
+to trust them, billions upon billions of imaginary money, then so can
+we, the people of the United States, create money out of our willingness
+to trust ourselves. And do not let anybody fool you for a single second
+by talking about "fiat money" and "inflation of the currency." If you
+are paying twice as much for everything as you did before the war, you
+are paying it because the bankers have doubled the amount of money in
+circulation--for that reason and that alone. That double money the
+bankers own; the only question now to be decided is, who is to own the
+double money that will be created tomorrow?
+
+Make note of the fact that it costs nothing to start a public bank. If
+you want to put the steel trust out of business by competition, you have
+several hundred thousand dollars worth of rolling mills and ore land to
+buy; but the banks can be put out of business by nothing but a law. The
+material parts of a bank, the white marble columns and bronze railings
+and mahogany trimmings, are as nothing compared with the inner soul of a
+bank, its control of the life-blood of your business and mine; and this
+we can have for the taking. We can keep our own "credit"; instead of
+sending it to Wall Street, where speculators use it to bleed us white,
+we can set it to building up our own community, under the direction of
+officials whom we select. Also, we can have our gigantic national bank,
+controlling all our thirty-three billions of dollars of deposits, and
+likewise the hundreds of billions of credit built upon them.
+
+The first time you suggest this plan to a banker or business man, you
+will be told that increase of money by the government does not benefit
+labor or the general consumer; "inflation of the currency" causes prices
+to go up correspondingly. To this I will furnish an effective reply:
+that at the same time the government issues new money, the government
+will also fix prices; and then watch the face of your banker or business
+man! If he is a man who can really think, and is not just repeating like
+a parrot the formulas he has learned from others, he will perceive that
+the combination of currency inflation and price-fixing would catch him
+as the two parts of a nut-cracker catch a nut; and he will know that you
+can take the meat out of him any time you please. He may argue that it
+is not fair; but point out to him that it is exactly what the big banks
+and the trusts have been doing to us right along--increasing the amount
+of money in circulation, and at the same time raising the prices we pay
+for goods, and so taking out the meat from us nuts!
+
+We have agreed that we do not mean to be unfair either to the banker or
+the manufacturer; we are simply going to stop their being unfair to us.
+We are going to convince them that their power to catch us in a
+nut-cracker is forever at an end. We allow them six per cent on their
+investments, and guarantee them this by turning over to them some of our
+new money--that is, government bonds. When we have thoroughly convinced
+them that they can't get any more, they will take these bonds and quit;
+and thus simply, without violence or destruction of property, we shall
+slide from our present system of commercial cannibalism into the new
+co-operative commonwealth.
+
+We have had "cheap money" campaigns in the United States many times, and
+as this book is written, it becomes evident that we are to have another.
+Henry Ford is advocating the idea, and so is Thomas A. Edison. The
+present writer would like to make plain that in supporting such a
+program, he does it for one purpose, and one only--the taking over of
+the industries by the community. The creation of state credit for that
+purpose is the next step in the progress of human society; whereas the
+creation of state credit for the continuance of the profit system is a
+piece of futility amounting to imbecility. This distinction is
+fundamental, and is the test by which to judge the usefulness of any new
+program, and the intelligence of those who advocate it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXX
+
+THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY
+
+     (Discusses various programs for the change from industrial
+     autocracy to industrial democracy.)
+
+
+The program of the railway workers for the democratic management of
+their industry is embodied in the Plumb plan. You may learn about it by
+addressing the weekly paper of the railway brotherhoods, which is called
+"Labor," and is published in Washington, D. C. It appears that our
+transportation industry can be at once socialized, because of a clause
+in the constitution which gives the national government power over
+"roads and communications." Through decades of mismanagement under the
+system of private greed, the railroads have been brought to such a
+financial condition that they will be forced into nationalization,
+whenever we stop them from dipping their fingers into the public
+treasury.
+
+Under the Plumb plan the government is to purchase the roads from their
+present owners, paying with government bonds. The management is to be
+under the control of a board consisting in part of representatives of
+the government, and in part of the workers--this being a combination of
+the methods of Socialism and Syndicalism. The same program can be
+applied constitutionally to telegraphs and telephones, to interstate
+trolley systems, express companies, oil pipe lines, and all other means
+of interstate communication and distribution.
+
+The Plumb plan also deals with coal and steel and other great
+industries. These could not be nationalized without a constitutional
+amendment, but it appears that in the majority of the constitutions of
+the states are provisions that all corporate charters are held subject
+to the power of the legislature to amend, modify, or revoke the same.
+That gives us a right to take over these corporations through state
+action. The only preliminary is to elect state administrations which
+will represent us, instead of representing the corporations. Also, most
+state constitutions contain the provision that "no corporation shall
+issue its stocks or bonds, except for money, labor, or property actually
+received." The word "labor" gives the opening wedge for the Plumb plan.
+The state can purchase these industries, giving bonds in exchange, and
+can issue to the workers labor stock, which stock will carry part
+control of the industry.
+
+Also, the railroad brotherhoods have started their own bank, in
+Cleveland, Ohio, and it is proving an enormous success. Make note of
+this point; every large labor union can have its own bank, to finance
+its industries and its propaganda. Stop and consider how preposterous it
+is that the five million organized workers of the United States should
+deposit their hundreds of millions of savings in capitalist banks, to be
+used to finance private undertakings which crush unions and hold labor
+in bondage. Let every big labor union have its own building, its own
+banking and insurance business, its own vacation camp in the country,
+its own school for training its future leaders. Also, let every labor
+council in every big city start a labor daily, to tell the workers the
+truth and point the way to freedom. Let every farmers' organization
+follow suit; and let these groups get together, to exchange their
+products upon a co-operative basis. Already the railway men are
+arranging with the farmers, to buy the farm products and distribute them
+co-operatively; they are getting together with the clothing workers, to
+have the latter make clothing for them, and with the shoe-workers to
+make shoes.
+
+This is the co-operative movement, which has become the largest single
+industry in Great Britain, and is the backbone of industrial democracy
+and sound radicalism. It is spreading rapidly in America now. It is
+taking the money of the people out of the control of the profit system,
+and diverting it into channels of public service. It is training men to
+believe in brotherhood instead of in greed. It is giving them business
+experience, so that when the time comes the taking over of our
+industrial machine will not have to be done by amateurs, but by men who
+know what co-operation is, and how to make a success of it.
+
+This work will go on more rapidly yet when the workers have united
+politically, and brought into power a government which will assist them
+instead of assisting the bankers. A most interesting program for the
+development of working-class financial credit is known as the "Douglas
+plan," which is advocated by a London weekly, the "New Age," and is
+explained in two books, called "Economic Democracy" and "Credit Power
+and Democracy," by Douglas and Orage. This program is in brief that the
+furnishing of credit shall become a function of organized labor, based
+upon the fact that the true and ultimate basis of all credit is the
+power of hand and brain labor to produce wealth. The labor unions, or
+"guilds," shall pay the management of industry and pay capital for the
+use of the industrial plant, and shall finance production and new
+industrial development out of their "credit power," their ability to
+promise production and to keep their promises.
+
+This "Douglas plan" seeks to break the Money Trust by the method of
+Syndicalism. Another method of breaking it, through state regulation of
+bank loans, you will find most completely set forth in an extremely able
+book, "The Strangle Hold," by H. C. Cutting, an American business man,
+whom you may address at San Lorenzo, California. Another method,
+utilizing the third factor in industry, the consumer, is the method of
+banking by consumers' unions. Such are the Raffeisen banks, widely known
+in Germany, and a specimen of which exists in the single tax colony at
+Arden, Delaware. Those who wish to know about the co-operative bank, or
+other forms of co-operation, may apply to the Co-operative League of
+America, 2 West 13th Street, New York, whose president is Dr. James P.
+Warbasse. Information concerning public ownership may be had from the
+Public Ownership League, 127 N. Dearborn Street, Chicago; also from the
+Socialist party, 220 South Ashland Boulevard, Chicago, and from the
+Bureau of Social Research of the Rand School of Social Science, New
+York.
+
+Also, I ought to mention the very interesting plan for social
+reconstruction set forth by Mr. King C. Gillette, inventor of the safety
+razor. This plan you may find in your public library in two encyclopedic
+volumes, "Gillette's Social Redemption," and "Gillette's World
+Solution." The politician seeks to solve the industrial problem by means
+of the state, and the labor leader seeks to solve it by the unions; it
+is to be expected that Mr. Gillette, a capitalist, should seek to solve
+it by means of the corporation. He points out that the modern "trust" is
+the greatest instrument of production yet invented by man; and he asks
+why the people should not form their own "trust," to handle their own
+affairs, and to purchase and take over the industries from their present
+private masters. It is interesting to note that Mr. Gillette's solution
+is fully as radical and thorough-going as those of the State Socialists
+or the Syndicalists. The "People's Corporation" which he projects and
+plans some day to launch upon the world would be a gigantic "consumers'
+union," whose "credit power" would speedily dominate and absorb all
+other powers in modern society; it would make us all stockholders, and
+give us our share of the benefits of social productivity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXI
+
+THE NEW WORLD
+
+     (Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning with its money
+     aspects; the standard wage and its variations.)
+
+
+It has been indicated that the new society will be different in
+different countries and in different parts of the same country, in
+different industries and at different times. No one can predict exactly
+what it will be, and anyone who tries to predict is unscientific. But
+every man can work out his own ideas of the most economical and sensible
+arrangements for a co-operative society, and in these final chapters I
+set forth my ideas.
+
+One of the first things people ask is, "Will there be money in the new
+society, or how will labor be rewarded and goods paid for?" I answer
+that there will be money, and the business methods of the new society
+will be so nearly the same as at present that in this respect you would
+hardly realize there had been any change. The only difference will be
+that in the new society you will be paid several times as much for your
+labor; or, if you prefer to put it the other way, you will be able to
+buy several times as much with your money. Why should we waste our time
+working out systems of "credit-cards," when we already have a system in
+the form of gold and silver coins and paper currency? Why should we
+bother with "labor checks," when we have a banking and clearing-house
+system, understood by everyone but the illiterate? The only difference
+we shall make is that nobody can get gold and silver coins or paper
+currency, except by performing labor to pay for them; nobody can have
+money in the bank and draw checks against it, until he has rendered to
+society an equivalent amount of service.
+
+When you have earned your money in the new world, you will spend it
+wherever you please, and for whatever you please; the only difference
+being that the price you pay will be the exact labor-cost of producing
+that article, with no deduction for any form of exploitation. As I wrote
+sixteen years ago in "The Industrial Republic," you will be able to get,
+if you insist upon it, a seven-legged spider made of diamonds, and the
+only question society will ask is, Have you performed services
+equivalent to the material and labor necessary to the creating of that
+unusual article of commerce? Of course, society won't put it to you in
+that complicated formula; it will simply ask, "Have you got the price?"
+Which, you observe, is exactly the question society asks you at present.
+
+The next thing that everybody wants to know is, "Shall we all be paid
+the same wages?" I answer, yes and no, because there will be three
+systems of payment. There will be a basic wage, which everybody will get
+for every kind of useful service necessary to production; this will be,
+as it were, the foundation of our economic structure. On top of this
+will be built a system of special payments for special services, which
+are of an intellectual nature, and cannot be standardized and dealt with
+wholesale. In addition, there will be for a time a third arrangement,
+applying to agricultural work, which is in a different stage of
+development, and to which different conditions apply.
+
+Let us take, first, our standard wage. The census of our Utopian
+commonwealth reveals that we have ten million able-bodied workers
+engaged in mining, manufacturing, and transportation; this including, of
+course, office-work and management--everything that enters into these
+industries. By scientific management, the best machinery, and the
+elimination of all possible waste, we find that they produce eighty
+million dollars worth of goods an hour. A portion of this we have to set
+aside to pay for the raw materials which they do not produce, and for
+the upkeep of the plant, and for margin of error--what our great
+corporations call a surplus. We find that we have fifty million dollars
+per hour left, and that means that we can pay for labor five dollars per
+hour, or twenty dollars for the regular four-hour day. This is our
+standard wage, received by all able-bodied workers.
+
+But quickly we find that our industries are not properly balanced. A
+great many men want to work at the jobs which are clean and pleasant,
+such as delivering mail, and very few want to work at washing dishes in
+restaurants and cleaning the sewers. There is no way we can adjust this,
+except by paying a higher wage, or by reducing the number of hours in
+the working day, which is the same thing. The only other method would be
+to have the state assign men to their work, and that would be
+bureaucracy and slavery, the essence of everything we wish to get away
+from in our co-operative commonwealth.
+
+What we shall have, so far as concerns our basic industries, is a
+government department, registering with mathematical accuracy the
+condition of supply and demand in all the industries of the country. Our
+demand for shoes is increasing, for some reason or other; a thousand
+more shoe-workers are needed, therefore the price of labor in the shoe
+industry is increased five cents per day--or whatever amount will draw
+that number of workers from other occupations. On the other hand, there
+are too many people applying for the job of driving trucks, therefore we
+reduce slightly the compensation for this work. There are more men who
+want jobs in Southern California than in Alaska, therefore the payment
+for the same grade of work in Alaska has to be higher. All this is not
+merely speculation, it is not a matter of anybody's choice; it is an
+automatic, self-adjusting system, subject to precise calculations. The
+only change from our present system is from guesswork to exact
+measurement. At present we do not know how many shoes our country will
+require next season, neither do we know how many shoes are going to be
+made, neither do we know how many people can make shoes, nor how many
+would like to learn, nor how many would like to quit that job and take
+to farming. It would be the simplest matter in the world to find out
+these things--far simpler that it was to register all our possible
+soldiers, and examine them physically and mentally, and train them and
+feed them and ship them overseas to "can the Kaiser."
+
+Of course, we drafted the men for this war job; but in the new world
+nobody is drafted for anything. It is any man's privilege to starve if
+he feels like it; it is his privilege to go out into the mountains and
+live on nuts and berries if he can find them. Nobody makes him go
+anywhere, or makes him work at anything--unless, of course, he is a
+convicted criminal. To the free citizen all that society has to say is,
+if he buys any products, he must pay for those products with his own
+labor, and not with some other man's labor. Of course, he may steal, or
+cheat, as under capitalism; our new world has laws against stealing and
+cheating, and does its best to enforce them. The difference between the
+capitalist world and our world is merely that we make it impossible for
+any man to get money _legally_ without working.
+
+Under these conditions the average man wishes to work, and the only
+question remaining is, how shall he work? If he wants to work by
+himself, and in his own way, nobody objects to it. He is able to buy
+anything he pleases, whether raw materials or finished products. If he
+wants to buy leather and make shoes after his own pattern, no one stops
+him, and if he can find anyone to buy these shoes, he can earn his
+living in that way. He is able to get land for as long a time as he
+wants it, by paying to the state the full rental value of that land, and
+if he wants to farm the land, he can do so, and sell his products. As a
+matter of theory, he is perfectly free to hire others to farm the land
+for him, or with him. There is no law to prevent it, neither is there
+any law to prevent his renting a factory and buying machinery, and
+hiring labor to make shoes.
+
+But, as a matter of practical fact, it is impossible for him to do this,
+because the community is in the business of making shoes, and on an
+enormous scale, with great factories run democratically by the workers,
+and there is very small chance of any private business man being able to
+draw the workers away from these factories. The community factories have
+all the latest machinery; they apply the latest methods of scientific
+management, and they turn out standard shoes at such a rate that private
+competition is unthinkable. Of course, there may be some special kind of
+shoes, involving an intellectual element, in which there can be private
+competition. This kind of manufacture is covered in our second method of
+payment; but before we discuss it, let us settle the problem of our most
+important basic industry, which is agriculture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXII
+
+AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION
+
+     (Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster
+     co-operative farming and co-operative homes.)
+
+
+Farming the land is a very ancient industry, and while its tools have
+been improved, its social forms have been the same for a long time. The
+worker on the land is conservative, and the Russian Bolsheviks, who
+tried to rush their peasants into Communism, found that they had only
+succeeded in stopping the production of food. We make no such blunder in
+our new society. We have found a way to abolish speculation in land, and
+exploitation based on land-ownership, while leaving the farmer free to
+run his business in the old way if he wants to.
+
+In our new society we take the full rental value of all land which is
+not occupied and used by the state. The farmer and the city dweller
+alike "own" their land, in the sense that they have the use of it for as
+long as they please, but they pay to the state the rental value of the
+land, minus the improvements. So they cannot speculate in the land or
+rent it out to others; they can only use it, and they only pay for what
+they actually use. They may put improvements on the land, with full
+assurance of having the use and benefit thereof, and they may sell the
+improvements, and the new owner enters into possession, with no
+obligation but to pay the rental value of the unimproved land to the
+state.
+
+The farmer goes on raising his products, and if he wants to drive to
+town and deliver them to his customers, he may do so; but he finds it
+cheaper to market them through the great labor co-operatives and state
+markets. As there is no longer any private interest involved in these
+activities, no one has any interest in cheating him, and he gets the
+full value of the products, less the cost of marketing. If the farmer
+wishes to continue all his life in his old style individualistic method
+of working the land, he is free to do so. But here is what he sees going
+on within a few miles of his place:
+
+The state has bought a square mile of land, and has taken down the
+fences and established an agricultural co-operative for purposes of
+experiment and demonstration. The farm is run under the direction of
+experts; the soils are treated with exactly the right fertilizers for
+each crop, the best paying crops are raised, the best seed is used, and
+the best machinery. The workers of this new agricultural co-operative
+receive the standard wage, and they live in homes specially built for
+them, with all the conveniences made possible by wholesale production.
+Also, these co-operators live in a democratic community; they determine
+their own conditions of labor, being represented on the governing board,
+along with the experts appointed by the state.
+
+The farmer watches this experiment, at first with suspicion; but he
+finds that his sons have less suspicion than he has, and his sons keep
+pointing out to him that their little farm is not making the standard
+wage or anything like it; and, moreover, the standard wage is constantly
+increasing, whereas, the price of farm-products is dropping. And here is
+the state, ready to direct new co-operative ventures, inviting a score
+of farmers in the community to combine and buy out the unwilling ones,
+and establish a new co-operative. Sooner or later the old farmer gives
+way; or he dies, and his sons belong to the new world.
+
+So ultimately we have our national agricultural system, in which all the
+requirements of our people are studied, and all the possibilities of our
+soil and climate, and the job of raising the exact quantities of food
+that we need, both for our own use and for export, is worked out as one
+problem. We know how much lumber we need, and we raise it on all our
+hillsides and mountain slopes, and so protect ourselves from floods and
+the denuding of our continent. We know where best to raise our wheat,
+and where best to raise our potatoes and our cabbages, and we do not do
+this by crude hand-labor, nor by the labor of women and children from
+daybreak till dark. We have special machines that plant each crop, and
+other machines that reap it or dig it out of the ground and prepare it
+for market.
+
+A few days ago I read a discussion in the Chamber of Commerce of
+Calcutta. Some one called attention to the wastes involved in the
+current method of handling rubber. One consignment of rubber had been
+sold more than three hundred separate times, and the cost of these
+transactions amounted to three times the value of the rubber. This is
+only one illustration, and I might quote a thousand. If you doubt my
+figures as to the possibility of production in the new society, remind
+yourself that a large percentage of the things you use have been bought
+and sold many scores of times before you get them. Consider the cabbage,
+for which you pay six or eight cents a pound in the grocery store, and
+for which the farmer gets, say, half a cent a pound.
+
+In this new world the state has an enormous income, derived from its tax
+on land values. It no longer has to send around men once a year to ask
+you how many diamond rings your wife has, and to tax you on your
+honesty, if you have any. It no longer has to make its money by such
+lying devices as a tariff, therefore its moral being is no longer
+poisoned by a tariff-lobby. It taxes every citizen for the right to use
+that which nature created, and leaves free from taxation that which the
+citizens' own labor created; this kind of taxation is honest, and fair
+to all, because no one can evade it. The state uses the proceeds of this
+land tax in the public services, the libraries and research laboratories
+and information bureaus; in free insurance against fire and flood and
+tempest; and in a pension to every member of society above the working
+age of fifty-five, or below the working age of eighteen. Of course, the
+state might leave it to every man to save up for his old age, but not
+all men are this wise, and the state cannot afford to let the unwise
+ones starve. It is more convenient for the state to figure that all men,
+or nearly all, are going to be old, and to hold back some of their money
+while they are young and strong, in the certainty that when they are
+old, they will appreciate this service. Also the state takes care of the
+sick and incapacitated, and the mentally or physically defective. But we
+do not leave these latter loose in the world to reproduce their defects;
+we have in our new world some sense of responsibility to the future, and
+there is nothing to which we devote more effort than making certain that
+nothing unsound or abnormal is allowed entrance into life.
+
+The problem of the care of children is a complicated one, and our new
+society is in process of solving it. We look back on the old world in
+which the having of children was heavily taxed, in the form of an
+obligation to care for these children until they were old enough to
+work. Then the parents were allowed to exploit the labor of the
+children, so that among the very poor the raising of children was a
+business speculation, like the raising of slaves or poultry. But in our
+new world we consider the interest of the child, and of the society in
+which that child is to be a citizen. We decide that this society must
+have citizens, and that the raising of the future citizens is a work
+just exactly as necessary and useful as the raising of a crop of
+cabbages. Therefore, we pay a pension to all mothers while they are
+raising and caring for children. At the same time we assert the right to
+see that this money is wisely spent, and that the child is really cared
+for. If it is neglected, we are quick to take it away from its parents,
+and put it in one of our twenty-four-hour-a-day schools.
+
+We realize that the home is an ancient industry, even more ancient than
+agriculture, and we do not try to socialize it all at once. But just as
+we demonstrate to farmers that the individual farm does not pay, so we
+demonstrate to mothers the wastefulness of the single laundry, the
+single kitchen, the single nursery. We establish community laundries,
+community kitchens, community nurseries, and invite our women to help in
+these activities, and to learn there, under expert guidance, the
+advantages of domestic co-operation. We convince them by showing better
+results in the health and happiness of the children, and in the time and
+strength of the mothers. So, little by little, we widen the field of
+co-operative endeavor, and increase the total product of human labor and
+the total enjoyment of human life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIII
+
+INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION
+
+     (Discusses scientific, artistic and religious activities, as a
+     superstructure built upon the foundation of the standard wage.)
+
+
+Karl Kautsky, intellectual leader of the German Social-democracy, gives
+in his book, "The Social Revolution," a useful formula as to the
+organization of the future society. This formula is: "Communism in
+material production, Anarchism in intellectual production." It will
+repay us to study this statement, and see exactly what it means.
+
+Material production depends directly upon things; and as there is only a
+limited quantity of things in the world, if any one person has more than
+his share, he deprives some other person to that extent. So there have
+to be strict laws concerning the distribution of material products. But
+with intellectual things exactly the opposite is the case. There is no
+limit in quantity, and any one person can have all he wants without
+interfering with anybody else. Everybody in the world can perform a play
+by Shakespeare, or play a sonata by Beethoven, and everybody can enjoy
+it as much as he pleases without keeping other people from enjoying it
+all they please. Also, material production can be standardized; we can
+have great factories to turn out millions of boxes of matches, each
+match like every other match, and the more alike they are the better.
+But in intellectual affairs we want everyone to be different, or at
+least we want everyone to be free to be different, and if some one can
+become much better than the others, this is the most important kind of
+production in the world, for he may make over our whole intellectual and
+moral life.
+
+For the production of material things our new society has great
+factories owned in common, and run by majority vote of the workers, and
+we place the products of that factory at the disposal of all members of
+society upon equal terms. That is our "Communism in material
+production." On the other hand, in our intellectual production we leave
+everybody free to live his own life, and to associate himself with
+others of like aims, and we place as few restrictions as possible upon
+their activities. This is the method of free association, or "Anarchism
+in intellectual production."
+
+Our problem would be simple if material and intellectual production
+never had to mingle. But, as it happens, every kind of intellectual
+production requires a certain amount of material, and every kind of
+material production involves an intellectual element. Therefore, our two
+methods have to be combined, and we have a complex problem which we have
+to solve in a variety of different ways, and upon which we must
+experiment with open minds and scientific temper.
+
+First, let us take the intellectual elements involved in the production
+of purely material things, such as matches and shoes and soap. Let us
+take invention. Naturally, we do not want to go on making matches and
+shoes and soap in the same old way forever. On the contrary, we want to
+stimulate all the workers in these industries to use their wits and
+improve the processes in every possible way. The whole of society has an
+interest in this, and the soap workers have an especial interest. Our
+soap industry has an invention department, with a group of experts
+appointed by the executive committee of the national council of soap
+workers. All soap workers are taxed, say five cents a day, for the
+support of this activity. Likewise the state contributes a generous sum
+out of its income toward the work of soap research. In addition to this,
+the soap industry offers prizes and scholarships for suggestions as to
+the improvement of every detail of the work, and at meetings of every
+local of soap workers somebody makes new suggestions as to methods of
+stimulating their intellectual life--not merely as regards soap, but as
+regards citizenship, and art and literature, and human life in general.
+Our soap workers, you must understand, are no longer wage-slaves,
+brutalized by toil and poverty; they are free citizens of a free
+society. Our soap workers' local in every city has its own theatre and
+concert hall and lecture bureau, and publishes its own magazine.
+
+Every industry has its immediate intellectual problems, its trade
+journals in which these are discussed, and its research boards in which
+they are worked out. The ambitions of the young workers in that industry
+are concentrated upon getting into this intellectual part of their
+trade. Examinations are held and tests are made to discover the most
+competent men, and written suggestions are considered by boards of
+control. It is, of course, of great importance to every worker that the
+channels of promotion should be kept open, and that the man who really
+has inventive talent shall get, not merely distinction and promotion,
+but financial reward, so that he may have time and materials to continue
+his experiments.
+
+This research department, you perceive, is a sort of superstructure,
+built upon the foundation of our standard wage; and this same simile
+applies to numerous other forms of intellectual production. For example,
+our community paper mills turn out paper, and our community printers are
+prepared to turn out millions of books. How shall we determine what is
+to be the intellectual content of these material books? There are many
+different methods. First, there is the method of individualism. A man
+has something to say, and he writes a book; he works in the soap
+factory, and saves a part of his standard wage, and when he has money
+enough he orders the community printers to print his book, and the
+community booksellers to handle it for him, and the community postoffice
+to deliver it for him. Again, a group of men organize themselves into an
+association, or club, or scientific society, and publish books. The
+Authors' League takes up the work of publishing the writings of its
+members, and the Poetry Society does the same.
+
+This is the method of Anarchism, or free association. But there is no
+reason why we should not have along side it the method of Socialism;
+there is no reason why we should not have state publishing houses, just
+as we have state universities and state libraries. The state should
+certainly publish standard works of all sorts, bibles and dictionaries
+and directories, and cheap editions of the classics. In this new world
+our school boards are not chosen by business men for purposes of graft,
+they are chosen by the people to educate our children; so it seems to us
+perfectly natural that the National Educational Association should
+conduct a publication department, and order the printing of the school
+books which the children use.
+
+In the same way, anyone is free to write a play, or to put on a play,
+and invite people to come and see it. But, like the individual farmers
+and the individual mothers of families, the play-producer in our society
+is in competition with great community enterprises, which set a high
+standard and make competition difficult. The same thing applies to the
+opera, and to concerts, and to all the arts and sciences. You can start
+a private hospital if you wish, but you will be in competition with
+public institutions, and you can only succeed if you are a man of
+genius--that is, if you have something to teach, too new and startling
+for the public boards of control to recognize. You try your new method,
+and it works, and that becomes a criticism of the public boards of
+control, and before long the people by their votes turn out the old
+board of control and put you in.
+
+That is politics, you say; but we in our new world do not use the word
+politics as one of contempt. We really believe that public sentiment is
+in the long run the best authority, and the appeal to public sentiment
+is at once a social privilege and a social service. What we strive to do
+is to clear the channels of appeal, and avoid favoritism and stagnation.
+To that end we maintain, in every art and every science and every
+department of human thought, endless numbers of centers of free,
+independent, co-operative activity, so that every man who has an
+inspiration, or a new idea, can find some group to support him or can
+form a new group of his own.
+
+This is our "Anarchism in intellectual production," and it is the method
+under which in capitalist society men organize all their clubs and
+societies and churches. Devout members of the Roman Catholic Church will
+be startled to be told that theirs is an Anarchist organization; but
+nevertheless, such is the case. The Catholic Church owns a great deal of
+property, and speculates in real estate, and to that extent it is a
+capitalist institution. It holds a great many people by fear, and to
+that extent it is a feudal institution. But in so far as members of the
+church believe in it and love it and contribute of their free will to
+its support, they are organizing by the method which all Anarchists
+recommend and desire to apply to the whole of society. Anarchist clubs
+and Christian churches are both free associations for the advocacy of
+certain ideas, the only difference being in the ideas they advocate.
+
+In our new world such organizations have been multiplied many fold, and
+form a vast superstructure of intellectual activity, built upon the
+foundation of the standard wage. In this new world all the people are
+free. They are free, not merely from oppression, but from the fear of
+oppression; they have leisure and plenty, and they take part naturally
+and simply in the intellectual life. The old, of course, have not got
+over the dullness which a lifetime of drudgery impressed upon them, but
+the young are growing up in a world without classes, and in which it
+seems natural that everyone should be educated and everyone should have
+ideas. They earn their standard wage, and devote their spare time to
+some form of intellectual or artistic endeavor, and spend their spare
+money in paying writers and artists and musicians and actors to
+stimulate and entertain them.
+
+These latter are the ways of distinction in our new society; these are
+the paths to power. The only rich men in our world are the men who
+produce intellectual goods; the great artists, orators, musicians,
+actors and writers, who are free to serve or not to serve, as they see
+fit, and can therefore hold up the public for any price they care to
+charge. Just now there is eager discussion going on in our world as to
+whether it is proper for an opera singer, or a moving picture star, or a
+novelist, to make a million dollars. Our newspapers are full of
+discussions of the question whether anyone can make a million dollars
+honestly, and whether men of genius should exploit their public. Some
+point out that our most eminent opera singer spends his millions in
+endowing a conservatory of art; but others maintain that it would be
+better if he lowered his prices of admission, and let the public use its
+money in its own way. The extremists are busy founding what they call
+the Ten-cent Society, whose members agree to boycott all singers and
+actors who charge more than ten cents admission, and all moving picture
+stars who receive more than a hundred thousand dollars a year for their
+service. These "Ten-centers" do not object to paying the money, but they
+object to the commercializing of art, and declare especially that the
+moral effect of riches is such that no rich person should ever, under
+any circumstances, be allowed to influence the youth of the nation. In
+this some of the greatest writers join them, and renounce their
+copyrights, and agree to accept a laureateship from some union of
+workers, who pay them a generous stipend for the joy and honor of being
+associated with their names. The greatest poet of our time began life as
+a newsboy, and so the National Newsvenders' Society has adopted him, and
+taken his name, and pays him ten thousand dollars a year for the
+privilege of publishing his works.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIV
+
+MANKIND REMADE
+
+     (Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what happens to
+     these in the new world.)
+
+
+We have briefly sketched the economic arrangements of the co-operative
+commonwealth. Let us now consider what are the effects of these
+arrangements upon the principal social diseases of capitalism.
+
+The first and most dreadful of capitalism's diseases is war, and the
+economic changes here outlined have placed war, along with piracy and
+slavery, among the half-forgotten nightmares of history. We have broken
+the "iron ring," and are no longer dependent upon foreign concessions
+and foreign markets for the preservation of our social system and the
+aggrandizement of a ruling class. We can stay quietly at home and do our
+own work, and as we produce nearly everything we need, we no longer have
+to threaten our neighbors. Our neighbors know this, and therefore they
+do not arm against us, and we have no pretext to arm against them. We
+take toward all other civilized nations the attitude which we have taken
+toward Canada for the past hundred years.
+
+We have a small and highly trained army, a few regiments of which are
+located at strategic points over the country. This army we regard and
+use as we do our fire department. When there is widespread damage by
+fire or flood or storm or earthquake, we rush the army to the spot to
+attend to the work of rescue and rebuilding. Also, we have a small navy
+in international service; for, of course, we are no longer an
+independent and self-centered nation; we have come to realize that we
+are part of the world community, and have taken our place as one state
+in the International Socialist Federation. We send our delegates to the
+world parliament, and we place our resources at the disposal of the
+world government. However, it now takes but a small army and navy to
+preserve order in the world. We govern the backward nations, but the
+economic arrangements of the world are such that we are no longer driven
+to exploit and oppress them. We send them teachers instead of soldiers,
+and as there are really very few people in the world who fight for the
+love of fighting, we have little difficulty in preserving peace. We pay
+the backward peoples a fair price for their products which we need. Our
+world government takes no money out of these countries, but spends it
+for the benefit of those who live in the countries, to teach them and
+train their young generations for self-government.
+
+Next, what are the effects of our new arrangements upon political
+corruption and graft? The social revolution has broken the prestige of
+wealth. Money will buy things, but it no longer buys power, the right to
+rule other men; it no longer buys men's admiration. Everybody now has
+money, and nobody is any longer afraid of starvation. It is no longer
+the fashion to save money--any more than it is the fashion to carry
+revolvers in drawing-rooms or to wear chain mail in place of
+underclothing. So our political life is cleansed of the money influence.
+People now get power by persuading their fellows, not by buying them or
+threatening them. The world is no longer full of men ravenous for jobs,
+and ready to sell their soul for a "position." So it is no longer
+possible to build up a "machine" based on desire for office.
+
+The changes have resulted in an enormous intensification of our
+political activities. We have endless meetings and debates; we have so
+many propaganda societies that we cannot keep track of them. And some of
+these societies, like the Catholic Church, have a large membership, and
+large sums of money at their disposal. But a few experiments at carrying
+elections by a "campaign-chest" have convinced everybody that to have
+the facts on your side is the only permanent way to political power. Our
+new society is jealous of attempts to establish any sort of ruling
+class, and the surest way to discredit yourself is to advocate any form
+of barrier against freedom of discussion, or the right of the people's
+will to prevail.
+
+Next, what is the status of crime? We have too recently escaped from
+capitalism to have been able to civilize entirely our slum population,
+and we still have occasional crimes of violence, especially crimes of
+passion. But we have almost entirely eliminated those classes of crime
+which had to do with property, and we have discovered that this was
+ninety-five per cent of all crime. We have eliminated them by the simple
+device of making them no longer profitable. Anybody can go into our
+community factories, and under clean and attractive working conditions,
+and without any loss of prestige or social position, can earn the means
+of satisfying his reasonable wants by three hours work a day. Almost
+everybody finds this easier than stealing or cheating.
+
+But more important yet, as a factor in abolishing crime, is the
+abolition of class domination and the prestige of wealth. We no longer
+have in our community a ruling class which lives without working, and
+which offers to the weak-minded and viciously inclined the perpetual
+example of luxury. We no longer set much store on jewels and fine
+raiment; we do not make costly things, except for public purposes, where
+all may enjoy them; and nobody stores great quantities of money, because
+everyone has a guarantee of security from the state. So we are gradually
+putting our policemen and jailers and judges and lawyers to constructive
+work.
+
+Next, what about disease? The diseases of poverty are entirely done away
+with. We are now able to apply the knowledge of science to the whole
+community, and so we no longer have to do with tuberculosis and typhoid,
+or with rickets and anaemia in children, or with heavy infant mortality.
+We have sterilized our unfit, the degenerates and the defectives, and so
+do not have to reckon with millions of children from these wretched
+stocks. We now give to the question of public health that prominence
+which in the old days we used to give to war and the suppression of
+crime and social protest. Our public health officers now replace our
+generals and admirals, and we really obey their orders.
+
+Next, as to prostitution. Just as in the case of crime, we are still too
+close to capitalism not to have among us the victims of social
+depravity, both men and women. We still have a great deal of vice which
+springs from untrained animal impulse, and we have some cultivated and
+highly sophisticated pornography. But we have entirely done away with
+commercial vice, and we have done it by cutting the root which nourished
+it. Women in our communities are really free; and by that we do not mean
+the empty political freedom which existed in the days of wage
+slavery--we mean that women are permanently delivered from economic
+inferiority, by the recognition on the part of the state of the money
+value of their special kind of work, the bearing and training of
+children. This kind of work not merely receives the standard wage, it
+also receives the best surgical and nursing treatment free. Housework
+and home-making are legally recognized services; and the woman before
+marriage and after her children have been nursed is free to go into the
+community factories and earn for herself the standard wage, with no loss
+of social position. Consequently, no woman sells her sex, and no man
+buys it.
+
+This does not mean, of course, that we have solved the sex problem in
+our new society. There are two great social problems with which we have
+to deal, the first of these being the sex problem, and the second the
+race problem. Our scientists are occupied with eugenics, and we are
+finding out how to guide our young people in marriage, so that our race
+may be built up, and the ravages of capitalism remedied as quickly as
+possible. Also we are trying to find out the laws of happiness and
+health in love. We are founding societies for the purpose of protecting
+love, and, as hinted in the Book of Love, we have a determined social
+struggle between two groups of women--the mother-women and the
+mistress-women--those who take love gravely, as a means of improving the
+race, and those who take it as a decoration, a form of play. Our men are
+embarrassed by having to choose between these groups, and occupy
+themselves with trying to keep the struggle from turning into civil war.
+
+Second, the race problem. Our economic changes have, of course, done
+away with some of the bitterest phases of this strife. White workingmen
+in the North no longer mob and murder negro workingmen for taking their
+jobs, and in the South our land values tax prevents the landlord from
+exploiting either white or negro labor. But our white race is still
+irresistibly bent upon preserving its integrity of blood, and the more
+far-seeing among the negroes have come to realize that there can never
+be any real happiness for them in a society where they are denied the
+higher social privileges. There is a movement for the development of a
+genuine Negro Republic in Africa, and for mass emigration. Also there is
+a proposition, soon to be settled at an election, for the dividing of
+the United States into three districts upon racial lines. First, there
+are to be, in the Far South, three or four states which are inhabited
+and governed solely by negroes, and to which white men may come only as
+temporary visitors; a large group of states in the North which are white
+states, and to which negroes may come only as visitors; and finally, a
+middle group of states, in which both whites and black are allowed to
+live, as at present, but with the proviso that no one may live there
+who takes part in any form of racial strife or agitation. This program
+gives to race-conscious negroes their own land, their own civilization,
+their own chance of self-realization; it gives to race-conscious white
+men the same opportunity; and it leaves to those who are not troubled by
+the problem, a country where black and white may dwell in quiet good
+fellowship.
+
+Finally, what has been the effect of our economic changes upon the
+purely personal vices which gave us so much trouble and unhappiness in
+the old days? What, for example, has been the effect upon vanity? You
+should see our new crop of children in our high schools! There are no
+longer any social classes among them; the rich ones do not arrive in
+private automobiles, to make the poor ones envious, and they do not
+isolate themselves in little snobbish cliques. They arrive in community
+automobiles, and all wear uniforms--one of the simple devices by which
+we repress the impulse of the young toward display of personal egotism.
+They are all full of health and happy play, and their heads are busily
+occupied with interesting ideas. Our girls are trained to thinking,
+instead of to personal adornment; they are developing their minds,
+instead of catching a rich husband by sexual charms. So we have been
+able, in a single generation of training, to make a real and appreciable
+difference in the amount of vanity and self-consciousness to be found
+among our young people.
+
+And the same thing applies to a score of other undesirable qualities,
+which, under the system of competitive commercialism, were
+overstimulated in human beings. In those old days everyone was seeking
+his own survival, and certain qualities which had survival value became
+the principal characteristics of our race. Those qualities were greed
+and persistence in acquisitiveness, cunning and subtlety, also bragging
+and self-assertiveness. In that old world people destroyed their fellows
+in order to make their own safety and power; they wasted goods in order
+to be esteemed, to preserve what they called their "social position."
+But now we have cut the roots of all these vile weeds. We have so
+adjusted the business relationships of men that we do not have to have
+hysterical religious revivals in order to keep the human factors alive
+in their hearts. We have established it as a money fact, which everyone
+quickly realizes, that it pays better to co-operate; there is more
+profit and less bother in being of service to others. So we have
+prepared a soil in which virtues grow instead of vices, and we find
+that people become decent and kindly and helpful without exhortation,
+and with no more moral effort than the average man can comfortably make.
+Of course, we have still personal vices to combat, and new virtues to
+discover and to propagate; but this has to do with the future, whereas
+we are here confining ourselves to those things which have been
+demonstrated in our new society.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Abortion, 61
+
+Abortions, 30
+
+Advertising, 163
+
+Agricultural co-operative, 206
+
+Anarchism, 210
+
+Anarchist, 89, 90
+
+Anarchy, 172
+
+Anglo-Saxon, 62, 111
+
+"Appeal to Reason", 149
+
+Aristocratic doctrine, 116
+
+Armour, 128
+
+Atherton, Gertrude, 87
+
+
+Babies, 63
+
+Bachelorhood, 52
+
+Bacon, Francis, 51
+
+Banking system, 192
+
+Bankruptcy, 162
+
+Barbarism, 124
+
+Barnum, P. T., 27
+
+Berkman, Alexander, 173
+
+Biology, 103
+
+Birth control, 61, 76
+
+Birth Control Review, 64
+
+Blatchford, Robert, 55, 161
+
+"Blind" love, 58
+
+Bolsheviks, 172
+
+Breach of promise suit, 91
+
+Brothel, 66
+
+Brothels, 31
+
+Burbank, Luther, 99
+
+Business man, 143
+
+
+Capital, 158
+
+Capitalism, 136, 168
+
+Capitalists, 142
+
+Carnegie, 168
+
+Catholic Church, 213, 216
+
+Celibacy, 51, 52, 64
+
+Chastity, 51
+
+Chattel slavery, 186
+
+Childbirths, 70
+
+Children, 70, 72, 85, 208
+
+Christianity, 115, 133
+
+"Clarion", 31
+
+Class struggle, 133, 177
+
+Clay, Henry, 186
+
+Coleridge, 85
+
+"Collier's Weekly", 122, 163
+
+Committee on Waste, 160
+
+Commune, 129
+
+Communism, 10, 170, 210
+
+Compensation, 179
+
+Competition, 108, 127
+
+Competitive wage system, 148
+
+"Complex", 49
+
+Comstock, Anthony, 20
+
+Confiscation, 179
+
+Congress, 138
+
+Contraception, 61
+
+Co-operation, 109, 199, 200
+
+Coquetry, 38
+
+Corporation, 127
+
+Courtship, 91
+
+Credit, 152, 154, 192, 200
+
+Credit-cards, 202
+
+Crime, 164, 216
+
+Culture, 62
+
+Cutting, H. C., 200
+
+
+Dances, 15
+
+Debs, Eugene V., 155
+
+Degeneration, 121
+
+"Demi-monde", 80
+
+Democratic doctrine, 115
+
+Dictatorship, 180, 183, 185
+
+Dill, James B., 25
+
+Disarmament, 157
+
+Discouragement, 164
+
+Disease, 217
+
+Divorce, 32, 93, 97
+
+Double standard, 5
+
+"Douglas plan", 199
+
+"Dumping", 152
+
+
+Economic evolution, 123
+
+Economic man, 108
+
+Emerson, 186
+
+Emulation, 112
+
+Engagements, 72
+
+England, 120, 156, 175
+
+Eugenics, 58
+
+Evolution, 122
+
+Exogamy, 105
+
+Exploitation, 181
+
+Exploiting, 148
+
+Exports, 153
+
+
+Factory system, 129
+
+Farming, 206
+
+"Favorable balance", 151
+
+Fear, 122, 164
+
+Federal Reserve Act, 154
+
+Feminist, 69
+
+Feudal stage, 124
+
+Fires, 163
+
+Foreign trade, 151
+
+"Free love", 44, 87
+
+"Free lover", 92
+
+France, 175
+
+France, Anatole, 44
+
+Freud, 104
+
+
+Gens, 9
+
+Germany, 155, 156
+
+Gillette, King C., 200
+
+Goldman, Emma, 173
+
+Gonorrhea, 30
+
+Goode, Mary J., 41
+
+Government, 166
+
+"Graft", 127, 216
+
+"Great Adventure", 188
+
+
+Hammurabi, 78
+
+"Hamon case", 26
+
+"Hard times", 144
+
+Hardy, 13
+
+Harris, Frank, 21
+
+"High life", 23
+
+Home, 42, 209
+
+Honeymoon, 56
+
+Hoover, Herbert, 160
+
+House of Commons, 137
+
+Huguenots, 134
+
+Human nature, 99
+
+Hunger, 122
+
+
+Ideals, 132
+
+Imports, 153
+
+Income tax, 143, 188
+
+Industrial evolution, 126
+
+Infant, 103
+
+Infanticide, 61
+
+Inflation, 196
+
+Inheritance tax, 188
+
+"Ingenues", 19
+
+Instinct, 57
+
+Insurance, 163
+
+Intellectual production, 211
+
+"Iron ring", 158
+
+Island, 145
+
+I. W. W., 169
+
+
+James, William, 16
+
+Jealousy, 89
+
+Jews, 127
+
+
+Kautsky, Karl, 210
+
+"King Coal", 139
+
+Kropotkin, 109, 129, 173
+
+
+Labor, 158
+
+Labor checks, 202
+
+Labor union, 199
+
+Laissez faire, 110
+
+Land tax, 190
+
+Land titles, 179
+
+Land values, 208
+
+Late marriage, 67
+
+Lecky, 6, 33
+
+Leviticus, 78
+
+Liberty motor, 164
+
+London, Jack, 62
+
+Los Angeles Times, 157
+
+Love, 34, 47, 100, 112, 218
+
+Lust, 48
+
+Luther, Martin, 129
+
+Luxury, 60
+
+
+Machinery, 149
+
+"Magic gestures", 104
+
+Magna Carta, 134
+
+Malthusian law, 108
+
+Markham, Edwin, 139
+
+Marquesas Islands, 33
+
+Marriage, 4
+
+Marriage club, 71
+
+Marriage market, 68
+
+Marx, Karl, 132, 138, 176
+
+Materialistic interpretation, 132
+
+Material production 210
+
+Maternity endowment 79
+
+Meredith, George 43
+
+"Merrie England" 161
+
+Metchnikoff, Elie 33, 46
+
+Mexico 121
+
+Middle class 176, 186
+
+Minor, Robert 173
+
+Mistress 12
+
+Money 37, 192, 202
+
+Money Trust 194
+
+Monogamy 5, 83, 90
+
+Moors 134
+
+Moralists 59
+
+Morgan 128
+
+Mother's pension 79
+
+Moving pictures 17
+
+
+Negro 218
+
+Negroes 116
+
+Neuroses 105
+
+Neurotics 103
+
+North Dakota 194
+
+North, Luke 188
+
+
+O'Brien, Frederick 10
+
+Oedipus complex 104
+
+"Open-shop" 177
+
+
+Panic 154
+
+Parasitism 74
+
+Passion 58
+
+Permanence 87
+
+Piracy 111
+
+Pity 74
+
+Plumb plan 198
+
+Political evolution 123
+
+Political revolution 125
+
+Politics 213
+
+Pornography 20
+
+Postal savings bank 195
+
+Poverty 40
+
+Primitive man 9
+
+Privilege 36
+
+Professor Sumner 122
+
+Profit system 148, 158
+
+"Progressive polygamy" 90
+
+Proletariat 142
+
+Promiscuity 87
+
+Property marriage 44
+
+Prosperity 144
+
+Prostitute 6
+
+Prostitution 4, 31, 41, 217
+
+Proudhon 179
+
+Psycho-analysis 49, 103
+
+Public bank 194
+
+Publishing 212
+
+
+Quick, Herbert 165
+
+
+Race prejudice 62
+
+Race problem 218
+
+Racial immaturity 116
+
+Raffeisen bank 200
+
+Reeve, Sidney A. 160
+
+Republic 125
+
+Research 212
+
+"Resurrection" 53
+
+Revolt 134
+
+Ricardo 108
+
+Richardson, Dorothy 26
+
+Ring 148
+
+Robinson, Dr. William, J, 21, 30, 70, 77
+
+Roman Catholic church 90
+
+"Romance" 91
+
+"Romantic" love 55
+
+Roosevelt 61
+
+Rulers 119
+
+Russia 129, 185
+
+
+Sanger, Margaret 63
+
+School of marriage 75
+
+Selection 8
+
+Sex 8
+
+Sex education 72
+
+Sex impulse 46
+
+Sex problem 218
+
+Sex urge 86
+
+Sex war 81
+
+Shelley 59, 89
+
+"She-towns" 29
+
+Shop management 168
+
+Sienkiewicz 13
+
+Sims, District Attorney 28
+
+Single tax 188
+
+Slavery 10, 126, 136
+
+"Smart set" 24
+
+Smith, Adam 108
+
+Snobbery 61
+
+Socialism, 166
+
+Social revolution, 128, 147, 175
+
+Soviets, 130, 171
+
+"Speeding up", 138
+
+Spencer, Herbert, 122
+
+Spirituality, 64
+
+Sport, 113
+
+Standard wage, 203
+
+Steel Trust, 137
+
+Stopes, Dr. Marie C., 77
+
+Strikes, 162
+
+Syndicalism, 167
+
+Syphilis, 30
+
+
+Tabu, 9
+
+Tariff, 153
+
+Taxes, 191
+
+Tennyson, 38, 120
+
+"The Brass Check", 31, 137
+
+"The Conquest of Bread", 173
+
+"The Cost of Competition", 160
+
+"The Industrial Republic", 202
+
+"The Jungle", 139
+
+"The Lady", 12
+
+"The Long Day", 26, 29
+
+"The Nature of Man", 33
+
+"The Profits of Religion", 137
+
+"The Social Revolution", 210
+
+"The Strangle Hold", 200
+
+Thompson, A. M., 31
+
+Tolstoi, 53
+
+"Totem and Taboo", 104
+
+"Triangle", 56
+
+
+Unconscious, 105
+
+Unemployment, 147
+
+
+"Vamps", 19
+
+Vanity, 219
+
+Varietism, 85
+
+Venereal disease, 30, 67, 83
+
+Voltaire, 36
+
+Voluntary Parenthood League, 64
+
+
+War, 162
+
+Wars, 155
+
+Waste, 165
+
+Wells, H. G., 89
+
+Wharton, Edith, 95
+
+"Wild oats", 6
+
+White man's burden, 117
+
+White, William Allen, 17
+
+Worker, 140
+
+Workers, 176
+
+Working class, 140
+
+Woman, 12
+
+
+"Young love", 56, 73
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR
+
+Published by the Author, Pasadena, California
+
+Trade Distributors: The Paine Book Co., Chicago, [I].
+
+
+The Brass Check
+
+A Study of American Journalism
+
+Who owns the press and why?
+
+When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda? And
+whose propaganda?
+
+Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is it
+honest material?
+
+No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the
+first time the questions are answered in a book.
+
+The first edition of this book, 23,000 copies, was sold out two weeks
+after publication. Paper could not be obtained for printing, and a
+carload of brown wrapping paper was used. The printings to date amount
+to 144,000 copies. The book is being published in Great Britain and
+colonies, and in translations in Germany, France, Holland, Norway,
+Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Hungary and Japan.
+
+     HERMANN BESSEMER, _in the "Neues Journal," Vienna_:
+
+     "Upton Sinclair deals with names, only with names, with balances,
+     with figures, with documents, a truly stunning, gigantic
+     fact-material. His book is an armored military train which with
+     rushing pistons roars through the jungle of American monsterlies,
+     whistling, roaring, shooting, chopping off with Berserker rage the
+     obscene heads of these evils. A breath-taking, clutching, frightful
+     book is 'The Brass Check.'"
+
+(=Prices of all books, unless otherwise stated, cloth $1.20, 3 copies $3,
+10 copies $9; paper 60c, 3 copies $1.50, 10 copies $4.50. All prices
+postpaid.=)
+
+
+THE BOOK OF LIFE
+
+A book of practical counsel. Volume One--Mind and Body. Discusses truth
+and its standards, and the basis of health, both mental and physical.
+Tells people how to live, in order to avoid waste and pain, and to find
+happiness and achieve progress.
+
+Volume Two--Love and Society. Discusses health in sex; love and
+marriage, chastity, monogamy, birth control, divorce. Explains modern
+economic problems, Socialism, revolution, industrial democracy, and the
+future society. Prices of volumes one and two bound in one, cloth $1.50,
+paper $1.00. Either of the two volumes separately, cloth $1.20, paper
+60c.
+
+
+THE JUNGLE
+
+This novel, first published in 1906, caused an international sensation.
+It was the best selling book in the United States for a year; also in
+Great Britain and its colonies. It was translated into seventeen
+languages, and caused an investigation by President Roosevelt, and
+action by Congress. The book has been out of print for ten years, and is
+now reprinted by the author at a lower price than when first published,
+although the cost of manufacture has since more than doubled.
+
+     "Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there
+     been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book
+     as has come to Upton Sinclair."--_New York Evening World._
+
+     "It is a book that does for modern industrial slavery what 'Uncle
+     Tom's Cabin' did for black slavery. But the work is done far better
+     and more accurately in 'The Jungle' than in 'Uncle Tom's
+     Cabin.'"--ARTHUR BRISBANE, _in the New York Evening Journal_.
+
+
+KING COAL
+
+A novel of the Colorado coal country.
+
+     "Clear, convincing, complete."--LINCOLN STEFFENS.
+
+     "I wish that every word of it could be burned deep into the heart
+     of every American."--ADOLPH GERMER.
+
+     DEBS AND THE POETS: Edited by Ruth Le Prade, with an introduction
+     by Upton Sinclair. A collection of poetry about Debs.
+
+SYLVIA: A novel of the South.
+
+SYLVIA'S MARRIAGE: A sequel. (Both in cloth only.)
+
+
+100% A STORY OF A PATRIOT
+
+Would you like to go behind the scenes and see the "invisible
+government" of your country saving you from the Bolsheviks and the Reds?
+Would you like to meet the secret agents and provocateurs of "Big
+Business," to know what they look like, how they talk and what they are
+doing to make the world safe for democracy? Several of these gentlemen
+have been haunting the home of Upton Sinclair during the past three
+years and he has had the idea of turning the tables and investigating
+the investigators. He has put one of them, Peter Gudge by name, into a
+book, together with Peter's ladyloves, and his wife, and his boss, and a
+whole group of his fellow-agents and their employers.
+
+     _From_ LOUIS UNTERMEYER, _Author of "Challenge," etc._:
+
+     "Upton Sinclair has done it again. He has loaded his Maxim (no
+     Silencer attached), taken careful aim, and--bang!--hit the bell
+     plump in the center.
+
+     "First of all, '100%' is a story; a story full of suspense, drama,
+     'heart interest,' plots, counterplots, high life, low life, humor,
+     hate and other passions--as thrilling as a W. S. Hart movie, as
+     interest-crammed as (and a darned sight more truthful than) your
+     daily newspaper."
+
+
+THEY CALL ME CARPENTER: A TALE OF THE SECOND COMING
+
+Narrates how Jesus came to Los Angeles in the year 1921, and what
+happened to Him. To be published in September, 1922.
+
+
+THE CRY FOR JUSTICE
+
+An anthology of the literature of social protest, with an introduction
+by Jack London, who calls it "this humanist Holy-book." Thirty-two
+illustrations, 891 pages. Cloth, $1.50; paper, $1.00.
+
+     "It should rank with the very noblest works of all time. You could
+     scarcely have improved on its contents--it is remarkable in variety
+     and scope. Buoyant, but never blatant, powerful and passionate, it
+     has the spirit of a challenge and a battle cry."--LOUIS UNTERMEYER.
+
+     "You have marvelously covered the whole ground. The result is a
+     book that radicals of every shade have long been waiting for. You
+     have made one that every student of the world's thought--economic,
+     philosophic, artistic--has to have."--REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN.
+
+
+THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
+
+A study of supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to
+privilege. The first investigation of this subject ever made in any
+language.
+
+     "You have put a lot of work into it and you have marshalled your
+     facts in, masterly fashion."--WILLIAM MARION REEDY.
+
+	        *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following typographical errors have been corrected by the text
+transcriber:
+
+worshiping=>worshipping
+
+changes takes place=>changes take place
+
+is an impuse=>is an impulse
+
+center of continous=>center of continuous
+
+a starvling beggar at the gates=>a starving beggar at the gates
+
+of fool nations about sex=>of fool notions about sex
+
+any personal right in contravened=>any personal right is contravened
+
+industrial evoluton=>industrial evolution
+
+to the poeple=>to the people
+
+Social revoluton=>Social revolution
+
+her hands and and feet=>her hands and her feet
+
+Liebault=>Liebault
+
+Sienkewicz's "Whirlpools"=>Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools"
+
+Magna Charta, 134=>Magna Carta, 134
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and
+Body; Vol. II Love and Society, by Upton Sinclair
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF LIFE ***
+
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