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Title: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 12 (of 12)
       Dresden Edition--Miscellany

Author: Robert G. Ingersoll

Release Date: February 9, 2012 [EBook #38812]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF INGERSOLL ***




Produced by David Widger








THE WORKS OF ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

By Robert G. Ingersoll

"MY CREED IS THIS: HAPPINESS IS THE ONLY GOOD. THE PLACE TO BE HAPPY IS
HERE. THE TIME TO BE HAPPY IS NOW. THE WAY TO BE HAPPY IS TO HELP MAKE
OTHERS SO."

IN TWELVE VOLUMES, VOLUME XII.

MISCELLANY

1900


Dresden Edition




PROF. VAN BUREN DENSLOW'S "MODERN THINKERS."


IF others who read this book get as much information as I did from the
advance sheets, they will feel repaid a hundred times. It is perfectly
delightful to take advantage of the conscientious labors of those who go
through and through volume after volume, divide with infinite patience
the gold from the dross, and present us with the pure and shining coin.
Such men may be likened to bees who save us numberless journeys by
giving us the fruit of their own.

While this book will greatly add to the information of all who read it,
it may not increase the happiness of some to find that Swedenborg was
really insane. But when they remember that he was raised by a bishop,
and disappointed in love, they will cease to wonder at his mental
condition. Certainly an admixture of theology and "dis-prized love"
is often sufficient to compel reason to abdicate the throne of the
mightiest soul.

The trouble with Swedenborg was that he changed realities into dreams,
and then out of the dreams made facts upon which he built, and with
which he constructed his system.

He regarded all realities as shadows cast by ideas. To him the material
was the unreal, and things were definitions of the ideas of God. He
seemed to think that he had made a discovery when he found that ideas
were back of words, and that language had a subjective as well as an
objective origin; that is that the interior meaning had been clothed
upon. Of course, a man capable of drawing the conclusion that natural
reason cannot harmonize with spiritual truth because in a dream, he had
seen a beetle that could not use its feet, is capable of any absurdity
of which the imagination can conceive. The fact is, that Swedenborg
believed the Bible. That was his misfortune. His mind had been
overpowered by the bishop, but the woman had not utterly destroyed his
heart. He was shocked by the liberal interpretation of the Scriptures,
and sought to avoid the difficulty by giving new meanings consistent
with the decency and goodness of God. He pointed out a way to preserve
the old Bible with a new interpretation. In this way Infidelity could
be avoided; and, in his day, that was almost a necessity. Had Swedenborg
taken the ground that the Bible was not inspired, the ears of the
world would have been stopped. His readers believed in the dogma of
inspiration, and asked, not how to destroy the Scriptures, but for some
way in which they might be preserved. He and his followers unconsciously
rendered immense service to the cause of intellectual enfranchisement
by their efforts to show the necessity of giving new meanings to the
barbarous laws, and cruel orders of Jehovah. For this purpose they
attacked with great fury the literal text, taking the ground that if the
old interpretation was right, the Bible was the work of savage men. They
heightened in every way the absurdities, cruelties and contradictions of
the Scriptures for the purpose of showing that a new interpretation must
be found, and that the way pointed out by Swedenborg was the only one by
which the Bible could be saved.

Great men are, after all the instrumentalities of their time. The heart
of the civilized world was beginning to revolt at the cruelties ascribed
to God, and was seeking for some interpretation of the Bible that kind
and loving people could accept. The method of interpretation found by
Swedenborg was suitable for all. Each was permitted to construct his own
"science of correspondence" and gather such fruits as he might prefer.
In this way the ravings of revenge can instantly be changed to mercy's
melting tones, and murder's dagger to a smile of love. In this way and
in no other, can we explain the numberless mistakes and crimes ascribed
to God. Thousands of most excellent people, afraid to throw away the
idea of inspiration, hailed with joy a discovery that allowed them to
write a Bible for themselves.

But, whether Swedenborg was right or not, every man who reads a book,
necessarily gets from that book all that he is capable of receiving.
Every man who walks in the forest, or gathers a flower, or looks at a
picture, or stands by the sea, gets all the intellectual wealth he is
capable of receiving. What the forest, the flower, the picture or the
sea is to him, depends upon his mind, and upon the stage of development
he has reached. So that after all, the Bible must be a different book to
each person who reads it, as the revelations of nature depend upon the
individual to whom they are revealed, or by whom they are discovered.
And the extent of the revelation or discovery depends absolutely upon
the intellectual and moral development of the person to whom, or by
whom, the revelation or discovery is made. So that the Bible cannot be
the same to any two people, but each one must necessarily interpret it
for himself. Now, the moment the doctrine is established that we can
give to this book such meanings as are consistent with our highest
ideals; that we can treat the old words as purses or old stockings
in which to put our gold, then, each one will, in effect, make a new
inspired Bible for himself, and throw the old away. If his mind is
narrow, if he has been raised by ignorance and nursed by fear, he
will believe in the literal truth of what he reads. If he has a little
courage he will doubt, and the doubt will with new interpretations
modify the literal text; but if his soul is free he will with scorn
reject it all.

Swedenborg did one thing for which I feel almost grateful. He gave an
account of having met John Calvin in hell. Nothing connected with the
supernatural could be more perfectly natural than this. The only thing
detracting from the value of this report is, that if there is a hell, we
know without visiting the place that John Calvin must be there.

All honest founders of religions have been the dreamers of dreams, the
sport of insanity, the prey of visions, the deceivers of others and of
themselves. All will admit that Swedenborg was a man of great intellect,
of vast acquirements and of honest intentions; and I think it equally
clear that upon one subject, at least, his mind was touched, shattered
and shaken.

Misled by analogies, imposed upon by the bishop, deceived by the woman,
borne to other worlds upon the wings of dreams, living in the twilight
of reason and the dawn of insanity, he regarded every fact as a patched
and ragged garment with a lining of the costliest silk, and insisted
that the wrong side, even of the silk, was far more beautiful than the
right.

Herbert Spencer is almost the opposite of Swedenborg. He relies upon
evidence, upon demonstration, upon experience, and occupies himself with
one world at a time. He perceives that there is a mental horizon that
we cannot pierce, and that beyond that is the unknown--possibly the
unknowable. He endeavors to examine only that which is capable of being
examined, and considers the theological method as not only useless,
but hurtful. After all, God is but a guess, throned and established by
arrogance and assertion. Turning his attention to those things that
have in some way affected the condition of mankind, Spencer leaves the
unknowable to priests and to the believers in the "moral government" of
the world. He sees only natural causes and natural results, and seeks to
induce man to give up gazing into void and empty space, that he may give
his entire attention to the world in which he lives. He sees that right
and wrong do not depend upon the arbitrary will of even an infinite
being, but upon the nature of things; that they are relations, not
entities, and that they cannot exist, so far as we know, apart from
human experience.

It may be that men will finally see that selfishness and self-sacrifice
are both mistakes; that the first devours itself; that the second is
not demanded by the good, and that the bad are unworthy of it. It may be
that our race has never been, and never will be, deserving of a martyr.
Sometime we may see that justice is the highest possible form of mercy
and love, and that all should not only be allowed, but compelled to reap
exactly what they sow; that industry should not support idleness, and
that they who waste the spring and summer and autumn of their lives
should bear the winter when it comes. The fortunate should assist
the victims of accident; the strong should defend the weak, and the
intellectual should lead, with loving hands, the mental poor; but
Justice should remove the bandage from her eyes long enough to
distinguish between the vicious and the unfortunate.

Mr. Spencer is wise enough to declare that "acts are called good or bad
according as they are well or ill adjusted to ends;" and he might have
added, that ends are good or bad according as they affect the happiness
of mankind.

It would be hard to over-estimate the influence of this great man. From
an immense intellectual elevation he has surveyed the world of thought.
He has rendered absurd the idea of special providence, born of the
egotism of savagery. He has shown that the "will of God" is not a rule
for human conduct; that morality is not a cold and heartless tyrant;
that by the destruction of the individual will, a higher life cannot
be reached, and that after all, an intelligent love of self extends the
hand of help and kindness to all the human race.

But had it not been for such men as Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer could
not have existed for a century to come. Some one had to lead the way,
to raise the standard of revolt, and draw the sword of war. Thomas Paine
was a natural revolutionist. He was opposed to every government existing
in his day. Next to establishing a wise and just republic based upon
the equal rights of man, the best thing that can be done is to destroy a
monarchy.

Paine had a sense of justice, and had imagination enough to put himself
in the place of the oppressed. He had, also, what in these pages is so
felicitously expressed, "a haughty intellectual pride, and a willingness
to pit his individual thought against the clamor of a world."

I cannot believe that he wrote the letters of "Junius," although the two
critiques combined in this volume, entitled "Paine" and "Junius," make
by far the best argument upon that subject I have ever read. First,
Paine could have had no personal hatred against the men so bitterly
assailed by Junius. Second, He knew, at that time, but little of English
politicians, and certainly had never associated with men occupying the
highest positions, and could not have been personally acquainted with
the leading statesmen of England. Third., He was not an unjust man. He
was neither a coward, a calumniator, nor a sneak. All these delightful
qualities must have lovingly united in the character of Junius. Fourth,
Paine could have had no reason for keeping the secret after coming to
America.

I have always believed that Junius, after having written his letters,
accepted office from the very men he had maligned, and at last became
a pensioner of the victims of his slander. "Had he as many mouths as
Hydra, such a course must have closed them all." Certainly the author
must have kept the secret to prevent the loss of his reputation.

It cannot be denied that the style of Junius is much like that of Paine.
Should it be established that Paine wrote the letters of Junius, it
would not, in my judgment, add to his reputation as a writer. Regarded
as literary efforts they cannot be compared with "Common Sense," "The
Crisis," or "The Rights of Man."

The claim that Paine was the real author of the Declaration of
Independence is much better founded. I am inclined to think that he
actually wrote it; but whether this is true or not, every idea contained
in it had been written by him long before. It is now claimed that the
original document is in Paine's handwriting. It certainly is not in
Jefferson's. Certain it is, that Jefferson could not have written
anything so manly, so striking, so comprehensive, so clear, so
convincing, and so faultless in rhetoric and rhythm as the Declaration
of Independence.

Paine was the first man to write these words, "The United States of
America." He was the first great champion of absolute separation
from England. He was the first to urge the adoption of a Federal
Constitution; and, more clearly than any other man of his time, he
perceived the future greatness of this country.

He has been blamed for his attack on Washington. The truth is, he was
in prison in France. He had committed the crime of voting, against the
execution of the king It was the grandest act of his life, but at that
time to be merciful was criminal. Paine; being an American citizen,
asked Washington, then President, to say a word to Robespierre in
his behalf. Washington remained silent. In the calmness of power, the
serenity, of fortune, Washington the President, read the request of
Paine, the prisoner, and with the complacency of assured fame, consigned
to the wastebasket of forgetfulness the patriot's cry for help.

     "Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
     Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
     A great-sized monster of ingratitudes.
     Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd
     As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
     As done."

In this controversy, my sympathies are with the prisoner.

Paine did more to free the mind, to destroy the power of ministers and
priests in the New World, than any other man. In order to answer his
arguments, the churches found it necessary to attack his character.
There was a general resort to falsehood. In trying to destroy the
reputation of Paine, the churches have demoralized themselves. Nearly
every minister has been a willing witness against the truth. Upon the
grave of Thomas Paine, the churches of America have sacrificed their
honor. The influence of the Hero author increases every day, and there
are more copies of the "Age of Reason" sold in the United States, than
of any work written in defence of the Christian religion. Hypocrisy,
with its forked tongue, its envious and malignant heart, lies coiled
upon the memory of Paine, ready to fasten its poisonous fangs in the
reputation of any man who dares defend the great and generous dead.

Leaving the dust and glory of revolutions, let us spend a moment of
quiet with Adam Smith. I was glad to find that a man's ideas upon the
subject of protection and free trade depend almost entirely upon the
country in which he lives, or the business in which he happens to
be engaged, and that, after all, each man regards the universe as a
circumference of which he is the center. It gratified me to learn that
even Adam Smith was no exception to this rule, and that he regarded
all "protection as a hurtful and ignorant interference," except when
exercised for the good of Great Britain. Owing to the fact that his
nationality quarreled with his philosophy, he succeeded in writing
a book that is quoted with equal satisfaction by both parties. The
protectionists rely upon the exceptions he made for England, and the
free traders upon the doctrines laid down for other countries.

He seems to have reasoned upon the question of money precisely as we
have, of late years, in the United States; and he has argued both sides
equally well. Poverty asks for inflation. Wealth is conservative, and
always says there is money enough.

Upon the question of money, this volume contains the best thing I have
ever read: "The only mode of procuring the service of others, on any
large scale, in the absence of money, is by force, which is slavery.
Money, by constituting a medium in which the smallest services can be
paid for, substitutes wages for the lash, and renders the liberty of
the individual consistent with the maintenance and support of society."
There is more philosophy in that one paragraph than Adam Smith expresses
in his whole work. It may truthfully be said, that without money,
liberty is impossible. No one, whatever his views may be, can read the
article on Adam Smith without profit and delight.

The discussion of the money question is in every respect admirable, and
is as candid as able. The world will sooner or later learn that there is
nothing miraculous in finance; that money is a real and tangible thing,
a product of labor, serving not merely as a medium of exchange but as
a basis of credit as well; that it cannot be created by an act of the
Legislature; that dreams cannot be coined, and that only labor, in some
form, can put, upon the hand of want, Alladin's magic ring.

Adam Smith wrote upon the wealth of nations, while Charles Fourier
labored for the happiness of mankind. In this country, few seem
to understand communism. While here, it may be regarded as vicious
idleness, armed with the assassin's knife and the incendiary's torch, in
Europe, it is a different thing. There, it is a reaction from Feudalism.
Nobility is communism in its worst possible form. Nothing can be worse
than for idleness to eat the bread of industry. Communism in Europe
is not the "stand and deliver" of the robber, but the protest of the
robbed. Centuries ago, kings and priests, that is to say, thieves and
hypocrites, divided Europe among themselves. Under this arrangement, the
few were masters and the many slaves. Nearly every government in the
Old World rests upon simple brute force. It is hard for the many to
understand why the few should own the soil. Neither can they clearly
see why they should give their brain and blood to those who steal their
birthright and their bread. It has occurred to them that they who do the
most should not receive the least, and that, after all, an industrious
peasant is of far more value to the world than a vain and idle king.

The Communists of France, blinded as they were, made the Republic
possible. Had they joined with their countrymen, the invaders would have
been repelled, and some Napoleon would still have occupied the throne.
Socialism perceives that Germany has been enslaved by victory, while
France found liberty in defeat. In Russia the Nihilists prefer chaos to
the government of the bayonet, Siberia and the knout, and these intrepid
men have kept upon the coast of despotism one beacon fire of hope.

As a matter of fact, every society is a species of communism--a kind
of co-operation in which selfishness, in spite of itself, benefits the
community. Every industrious man adds to the wealth, not only of his
nation, but to that of the world. Every inventor increases human power,
and every sculptor, painter and poet adds to the value of human life.
Fourier, touched by the sufferings of the poor as well as by the barren
joys of hoarded wealth, and discovering the vast advantages of combined
effort, and the immense economy of co-operation, sought to find some way
for men to help themselves by helping each other. He endeavored to do
away with monopoly and competition, and to ascertain some method by
which the sensuous, the moral, and the intellectual passions of man
could be gratified.

For my part I can place no confidence in any system that does away, or
tends to do away, with the institution of marriage. I can conceive of no
civilization of which the family must not be the unit.

Societies cannot be made; they must grow. Philosophers may predict, but
they cannot create. They may point out as many ways as they please; but
after all, humanity will travel in paths of its own.

Fourier sustained about the same relation to this world that Swedenborg
did to the other. There must be something wrong about the brain of one
who solemnly asserts that, "the elephant, the ox and the diamond, were
created by the sun; the horse, the lily and the ruby, by Saturn; the
cow, the jonquil and the topaz by Jupiter; and the dog, the violet and
the opal stones by the earth itself."

And yet, forgetting these aberrations of the mind, this lunacy of a
great and loving soul, for one, I hold in tender-est regard the memory
of Charles Fourier, one of the best and noblest of our race.

While Fourier was in his cradle, Jeremy Bentham, who read history when
three years old, played on the violin at five, "and at fifteen detected
the fallacies of Blackstone," was demonstrating that the good was the
useful; that a thing was right because it paid in the highest and best
sense; that utility was the basis of morals; that without allowing
interest to be paid upon money commerce could not exist; and that
the object of all human governments should be to secure the greatest
happiness of the greatest number. He read Hume and Helvetius, threw away
the Thirty-nine Articles, and endeavored to impress upon the English
Law the fact that its ancestor was a feudal savage. He held the past in
contempt, hated Westminster and despised Oxford. He combated the
idea that governments were originally founded on contract. Locke and
Blackstone talked as though men originally lived apart, and formed
societies by agreement. These writers probably imagined that at one time
the trees were separated like telegraph poles, and finally came together
and made groves by agreement. I believe that it was Pufendorf who said
that slavery was originally founded on contract. To which Voltaire
replied:--"If my lord Pufendorf will produce the original contract
_signed by the party who was to be the slave_, I will admit the truth of
his statement."

A contract back of society is a myth manufactured by those in power to
serve as a title to place, and to impress the multitude with the
idea that they are, in some mysterious way, bound, fettered, and even
benefited by its terms.

The glory of Bentham is, that he gave the true basis of morals, and
furnished statesmen with the star and compass of this sentence:--"The
greatest happiness of the greatest number."

Most scientists have deferred to the theologians. They have admitted
that some questions could not, at present, be solved. These admissions
have been thankfully received by the clergy, who have always begged for
some curtain to be left, behind which their God could still exist. Men
calling themselves "scientific" have tried to harmonize the "apparent"
discrepancies between the Bible and the _other_ works of Jehovah. In
this way they have made reputations. They were at once quoted by
the ministers as wonderful examples of piety and learning. These men
discounted the future that they might enjoy the ignorant praise of the
present. Agassiz preferred the applause of Boston, while he lived, to
the reverence of a world after he was dead. Small men appear great only
when they agree with the multitude.

The last Scientific Congress in America was opened with prayer. Think
of a science that depends upon the efficacy of words addressed to the
Unknown and Unknowable!

In our country, most of the so-called scientists are professors in
sectarian colleges, in which Moses is considered a geologist, and
Joshua an astronomer. For the most part their salaries depend upon
the ingenuity with which they can explain away facts and dodge
demonstration.

The situation is about the same in England. When Mr. Huxley saw fit to
attack the Mosaic account of the creation, he did not deem it advisable
to say plainly what he meant. He attacked the account of creation as
given by Milton, although he knew that the Mosaic and Miltonic were
substantially the same. Science has acted like a guest without a wedding
garment, and has continually apologized for existing. In the presence
of arrogant absurdity, overawed by the patronizing airs of a successful
charlatan, it has played the role of a "poor relation," and accepted,
while sitting below the salt, insults as honors.

There can be no more pitiable sight than a scientist in the employ of
superstition dishonoring himself without assisting his master. But there
are a multitude of brave and tender men who give their honest thoughts,
who are true to nature, who give the facts and let consequences shirk
for themselves, who know the value and meaning of a truth, and who have
bravely tried the creeds by scientific tests.

Among the bravest, side by side with the greatest of the world, in
Germany, the land of science, stands Ernst Haeckel, who may be said
to have not only demonstrated the theories of Darwin, but the Monistic
conception of the world. Rejecting all the puerile ideas of a personal
Creator, he has had the courage to adopt the noble words of Bruno:--"A
spirit exists in all things, and no body is so small but it contains a
part of the divine substance within itself, by which it is animated." He
has endeavored--and I think with complete success--to show that there is
not, and never was, and never can be the _Creator_ of anything. There
is no more a personal Creator than there is a personal destroyer. Matter
and force must have existed from eternity, all generation must have been
spontaneous, and the simplest organisms must have been the ancestors of
the most perfect and complex.

Haeckel is one of the bitterest enemies of the church, and is,
therefore, one of the bravest friends of man.

Catholicism was, at one time, the friend of education--of an education
sufficient to make a Catholic out of a barbarian. Protestantism was also
in favor of education--of an education sufficient to make a Protestant
out of a Catholic. But now, it having been demonstrated that real
education will make Freethinkers, Catholics and Protestants both are the
enemies of true learning.

In all countries where human beings are held in bondage, it is a crime
to teach a slave to read and write. Masters know that education is an
abolitionist, and theologians know that science is the deadly foe of
every creed in Christendom.

In the age of Faith, a personal god stood at the head of every
department of ignorance, and was supposed to be the King of kings, the
rewarder and punisher of individuals, and the governor of nations.

The worshipers of this god have always regarded the men in love with
simple facts, as Atheists in disguise. And it must be admitted that
nothing is more Atheistic than a fact. Pure science is necessarily
godless, It is incapable of worship. It investigates, and cannot afford
to shut its eyes even long enough to pray. There was a time when those
who disputed the divine right of kings were denounced as blasphemous;
but the time came when liberty demanded that a personal god should be
retired from politics. In our country this was substantially done in
1776, when our fathers declared that all power to govern came from
the consent of the governed. The cloud-theory was abandoned, and one
government has been established for the benefit of mankind. Our fathers
did not keep God out of the Constitution from principle, but from
jealousy. Each church, in colonial times, preferred to live in single
blessedness rather than see some rival wedded to the state. Mutual
hatred planted our tree of religious liberty. A constitution without a
god has at last given us a nation without a slave.

A personal god sustains the same relation to religion as to politics.
The Deity is a master, and man a serf; and this relation is inconsistent
with true progress. The Universe ought to be a pure democracy--an
infinite republic without a tyrant and without a chain.

Auguste Comte endeavored to put humanity in the place of Jehovah, and no
conceivable change can be more desirable than this. This great man did
not, like some of his followers, put a mysterious something called law
in the place of God, which is simply giving the old master a new name.
Law is this side of phenomena, not the other. It is not the cause,
neither is it the result of phenomena. The fact of succession and
resemblance, that is to say, the same thing happening under the same
conditions, is all we mean by law. No one can conceive of a law
existing apart from matter, or controlling matter, any more than he can
understand the eternal procession of the Holy Ghost, or motion apart
from substance. We are beginning to see that law does not, and cannot
exist as an entity, but that it is only a conception of the mind to
express the fact that the same entities, under the same conditions,
produce the same results. Law does not produce the entities, the
conditions, or the results, or even the sameness of the results.
Neither does it affect the relations of entities, nor the result of such
relations, but it stands simply for the fact that the same causes, under
the same conditions, eternally have produced and eternally will produce
the same results.

The metaphysicians are always giving us explanations of phenomena which
are as difficult to understand as the phenomena they seek to explain;
and the believers in God establish their dogmas by miracles, and then
substantiate the miracles by assertion.

The Designer of the teleologist, the First Cause of the religious
philosopher, the Vital Force of the biologist, and the law of the
half-orthodox scientist, are all the shadowy children of ignorance and
fear.

The Universe is all there is. It is both subject and object;
contemplator and contemplated; creator and created; destroyer and
destroyed; preserver and preserved; and within itself are all causes,
modes, motions and effects.

Unable in some things to rise above the superstitions of his day,
Comte adopted not only the machinery, but some of the prejudices, of
Catholicism. He made the mistake of Luther. He tried to reform the
Church of Rome. Destruction is the only reformation of which that church
is capable. Every religion is based upon a misconception, not only of
the cause of phenomena, but of the real object of life; that is to say,
upon falsehood; and the moment the truth is known and understood, these
religions must fall. In the field of thought, they are briers, thorns,
and noxious weeds; on the shores of intellectual discovery, they are
sirens, and in the forests that the brave thinkers are now penetrating,
they are the wild beasts, fanged and monstrous.

You cannot reform these weeds. Sirens cannot be changed into good
citizens; and such wild beasts, even when tamed, are of no possible use.
Destruction is the only remedy. Reformation is a hospital where the new
philosophy exhausts its strength nursing the old religion.

There was, in the brain of the great Frenchman, the dawn of that happy
day in which humanity will be the only religion, good the only god,
happiness the only object, restitution the only atonement, mistake the
only sin, and affection, guided by intelligence, the only savior of
mankind. This dawn enriched his poverty, illuminated the darkness of
his life, peopled his loneliness with the happy millions yet to be, and
filled his eyes with proud and tender tears.

A few years ago I asked the superintendent of Pere La Chaise if he knew
where I could find the tomb of Auguste Comte. He had never heard even
the name of the author of the "Positive Philosophy." I asked him if
he had ever heard of Napoleon Bonaparte. In a half-insulted tone,
he replied, "Of course I have, why do you ask me such a question?"
"Simply," was my answer, "that I might have the opportunity of saying,
that when everything connected with Napoleon, except his crimes, shall
have been forgotten, Auguste Comte will be lovingly remembered as a
benefactor of the human race."

The Jewish God must be dethroned! A personal Deity must go back to
the darkness of barbarism from whence he came. The theologians must
abdicate, and popes, priests, and clergymen, labeled as "extinct
species," must occupy the mental museums of the future.

In my judgment, this book, filled with original thought, will hasten the
coming of that blessed time.

Washington, D. C., Nov. 29,1879.




PREFACE TO DR. EDGAR C. BEALL'S "THE BRAIN AND THE BIBLE."


THIS book, written by a brave and honest man, is filled with brave and
honest thoughts. The arguments it presents can not be answered by all
the theologians in the world. The author is convinced that the universe
is natural, that man is naturally produced, and that there is a
necessary relation between character and brain. He sees, and clearly
sees, that the theological explanation of phenomena is only a plausible
absurdity, and, at best, as great a mystery as it tries to solve. I
thank the man who breaks, or tries to break, the chains of custom,
creed, and church, and gives in plain, courageous words, the product of
his brain.

It is almost impossible to investigate any subject without somewhere
touching the religious prejudices of ourselves or others. Most people
judge of the truth of a proposition by the consequences upon some
preconceived opinion. Certain things they take as truths, and with this
little standard in their minds, they measure all other theories. If
the new facts do not agree with the standard, they are instantly thrown
away, because it is much easier to dispose of the new facts than to
reconstruct an entire philosophy.

A few years ago, when men began to say that character could be
determined by the form, quantity, and quality of the brain, the
religious world rushed to the conclusion that this fact might destroy
what they were pleased to call the free moral agency of man. They
admitted that all things in the physical world were links in the
infinite chain of causes and effects, and that not one atom of the
material universe could, by any possibility, be entirely exempt from
the action of every other. They insisted that, if the motions of the
spirit--the thoughts, dreams, and conclusions of the brain, were as
necessarily produced as stones and stars, virtue became necessity, and
morality the result of forces capable of mathematical calculation.
In other words, they insisted that, while there were causes for all
material phenomena, a something called the Will sat enthroned above
all law, and dominated the phenomena of the intellectual world. They
insisted that man was free; that he controlled his brain; that he was
responsible for thought as well as action; that the intellectual world
of each man was a universe in which his will was king. They were
afraid that phrenology might, in some way, interfere with the scheme of
salvation, or prevent the eternal torment of some erring soul.

It is insisted that man is free, and is responsible, because he knows
right from wrong. But the compass does not navigate the ship; neither
does it, in any way, of itself, determine the direction that is taken.
When winds and waves are too powerful, the compass is of no importance.
The pilot may read it correctly, and may know the direction the ship
ought to take, but the compass is not a force. So men, blown by the
tempests of passion, may have the intellectual conviction that
they should go another way; but, of what use, of what force, is the
conviction?

Thousands of persons have gathered curious statistics for the purpose of
showing that man is absolutely dominated by his surroundings. By these
statistics is discovered what is called "the law of average." They show
that there are about so many suicides in London every year, so many
letters misdirected at Paris, so many men uniting themselves In marriage
with women older than themselves in Belgium, so many burglaries to one
murder in France, or so many persons driven insane by religion in the
United States. It is asserted that these facts conclusively show
that man is acted upon; that behind each thought, each dream, is the
efficient cause, and that the doctrine of moral responsibility has been
destroyed by statistics.

But, does the fact that about so many crimes are committed on the
average, in a given population, or that so many any things are done,
prove that there is no freedom in human action?

Suppose a population of ten thousand persons; and suppose, further, that
they are free, and that they have the usual wants of mankind. Is it not
reasonable to say that they would act in some way? They certainly would
take measures to obtain food, clothing, and shelter. If these people
differed in intellect, in surroundings, in temperament, in strength, it
is reasonable to suppose that all would not be equally successful. Under
such circumstances, may we not safely infer that, in a little while, if
the statistics were properly taken, a law of average would appear? In
other words, free people would act; and, being different in mind, body,
and circumstances, would not all act exactly alike. All would not be
alike acted upon. The deviations from what might be thought wise, or
right, would sustain such a relation to time and numbers that they could
be expressed by a law of average.

If this is true, the law of average does not establish necessity.

But, in my supposed case, the people, after all, are not free. They have
wants. They are under the necessity of feeding, clothing, and sheltering
themselves. To the extent of their actual wants, they are not free.
Every limitation is a master. Every finite being is a prisoner, and no
man has ever yet looked above or beyond the prison walls.

Our highest conception of liberty is to be free from the dictation of
fellow prisoners.

To the extent that we have wants, we are not free. To the extent that we
do not have wants, we do not act.

If we are responsible for our thoughts, we ought not only to know how
they are formed, but we ought to form them. If we are the masters of our
own minds, we ought to be able to tell what we are going to think at any
future time. Evidently, the food of thought--its very warp and woof--is
furnished through the medium of the senses. If we open our eyes, we
cannot help seeing. If we do not stop our ears, we cannot help hearing.
If anything touches us, we feel it. The heart beats in spite of us.
The lungs supply themselves with air without our knowledge. The blood
pursues its old accustomed rounds, and all our senses act without our
leave. As the heart beats, so the brain thinks. The will is not its
king. As the blood flows, as the lungs expand, as the eyes see, as the
ears hear, as the flesh is sensitive to touch, so the brain thinks.

I had a dream, in which I debated a question with a friend. I thought
to myself: "This is a dream, and yet I can not tell what my opponent is
going to say. Yet, if it is a dream, I am doing the thinking for both
sides, and therefore ought to know in advance what my friend will urge."
But, in a dream, there is some one who seems to talk to us. Our own
brain tells us news, and presents an unexpected thought. Is it not
possible that each brain is a field where all the senses sow the seeds
of thought? Some of these fields are mostly barren, poor, and hard,
producing only worthless weeds; and some grow sturdy oaks and stately
palms; and some are like the tropic world, where plants and trees and
vines seem royal children of the soil and sun.

Nothing seems more certain than that the capacity of a human being
depends, other things being equal, upon the amount, form, and quality
of his brain. We also know that health, disposition, temperament,
occupation, food, surroundings, ancestors, quality, form, and texture
of the brain, determine what we call character. Man is, collectively and
individually, what his surroundings have made him. Nations differ from
each other as greatly as individuals in the same nation. Nations depend
upon soil, climate, geographical position, and countless other facts.
Shakespeare would have been impossible without the climate of England.
There is a direct relation between Hamlet and the Gulf Stream. Dr.
Draper has shown that the great desert of Sahara made negroes possible
in Africa. If the Caribbean Sea had been a desert, negroes might have
been produced in America.

Are the effects of climate upon man necessary effects? Is it possible
for man to escape them? Is he responsible for what he does as a
consequence of his surroundings? Is the mind dependent upon causes?
Does it act without cause? Is every thought a necessity? Can man choose
without reference to any quality in the thing chosen?

No one will blame Mr. Brown or Mr. Jones for not writing like
Shakespeare. Should they be blamed for not acting like Christ? We say
that a great painter has genius. Is it not possible that a certain
genius is required to be what is called "good"? All men cannot be
great. All men cannot be successful. Can all men be kind? Can all men be
honest?

It may be that a crime appears terrible in proportion as we realize
its consequences. If this is true, morality may depend largely upon the
imagination. Man cannot have imagination at will; that, certainly, is
a natural product. And yet, a man's action may depend largely upon the
want of imagination. One man may feel that he really wishes to kill
another. He may make preparations to commit the deed; and yet, his
imagination may present such pictures of horror and despair; he may so
vividly see the widow clasping the mangled corpse; he may so plainly
hear the cries and sobs of orphans, while the clods fall upon the
coffin, that his hand is stayed. Another, lacking imagination, thirsting
only for revenge, seeing nothing beyond the accomplishment of the deed,
buries, with blind-and thoughtless hate, the dagger in his victim's
heart.

Morality, for the most part, is the verdict of the majority.
This verdict depends upon the intelligence of the people; and the
intelligence depends upon the amount, form, and quality of the average
brain.

If the mind depends upon certain organs for the expression of its
thought, does it have thought independently of those organs? Is there
any mind without brain? Does the mind think apart from the brain, and
then express its thought through the instrumentality of the brain?
Theologians tell us that insanity is not a disease of the soul, but of
the brain; that the soul is perfectly untouched; but that the instrument
with which, and through which, it manifests itself, is impaired. The
fact, however, seems to be, that the mind, the something that is the
man, is unconscious of the fact that anything is out of order in the
brain. Insane people insist that they are sane.

If we should find a locomotive off the track, and the engineer using the
proper appliances to put it back, we would say that the machine is
out of order, but the engineer is not. But, if we found the locomotive
upside down, with wheels in air, and the engineer insisting that it
was on the track, and never running better, we would then conclude
that something was wrong, not only with the locomotive, but with the
engineer.

We are told in medical books of a girl, who, at about the age of nine
years, was attacked with some cerebral disease. When she recovered, she
had forgotten all she ever knew, and had to relearn the alphabet, and
the names of her parents and kindred. In this abnormal state, she was
not a good girl; in the normal state, she was. After having lived in the
second state for several years, she went back to the first; and all she
had learned in the second state was forgotten, and all she had learned
in the first was remembered.

I believe she changed once more, and died in the abnormal state. In
which of these states was she responsible? Were her thoughts and
actions as free in one as in the other? It may be contended that, in her
diseased state, the mind or soul could not correctly express itself. If
this is so, it follows that, as no one is perfectly healthy, and as
no one has a perfect brain, it is impossible that the soul should ever
correctly express itself. Is the soul responsible for the defects of the
brain? Is it not altogether more rational to say, that what we call mind
depends upon the brain, and that the child--mind, inherits the defects
of its parent--brain?

Are certain physical conditions necessary to the production of what
we call virtuous actions? Is it possible for anything to be produced
without what we call cause, and, if the cause was sufficient, was it not
necessarily produced? Do not most people mistake for freedom the right
to examine their own chains? If morality depends upon conditions, should
it not be the task of the great and good to discover such conditions?
May it not be possible so to understand the brain that we can stop
producing criminals?

It may be insisted that there is something produced by the brain besides
thought--a something that takes cognizance of thoughts--a something
that weighs, compares, reflects and pronounces judgment. This something
cannot find the origin of itself. Does it exist independently of the
brain? Is it merely a looker-on? If it is a product of the brain, then
its power, perception, and judgment depend upon the quantity, form, and
quality of the brain.

Man, including all his attributes, must have been necessarily produced,
and the product was the child of conditions.

Most reformers have infinite confidence in creeds, resolutions, and
laws. They think of the common people as raw material, out of which
they propose to construct institutions and governments, like mechanical
contrivances, where each person will stand for a cog, rope, wheel,
pulley, bolt, or fuel, and the reformers will be the managers and
directors. They forget that these cogs and wheels have opinions of their
own; that they fall out with other cogs, and refuse to turn with other
wheels; that the pulleys and ropes have ideas peculiar to themselves,
and delight in mutiny and revolution. These reformers have theories that
can only be realized when other people have none.

Some time, it will be found that people can be changed only by changing
their surroundings. It is alleged that, at least ninety-five per cent.
of the criminals transported from England to Australia and other penal
colonies, became good and useful citizens in a new world. Free from
former associates and associations, from the necessities of a hard,
cruel, and competitive civilization, they became, for the most part,
honest people. This immense fact throws more light upon social questions
than all the theories of the world. All people are not able to support
themselves. They lack intelligence, industry, cunning--in short,
capacity. They are continually falling by the way. In the midst of
plenty, they are hungry. Larceny is born of want and opportunity. In
passion's storm, the will is wrecked upon the reefs and rocks of crime.

The complex, tangled web of thought and dream, of perception and memory,
of imagination and judgment, of wish and will and want--the woven wonder
of a life--has never yet been raveled back to simple threads.

Shall we not become charitable and just, when we know that every act is
but condition's fruit; that Nature, with her countless hands, scatters
the seeds of tears and crimes--of every virtue and of every joy; that
all the base and vile are victims of the Blind, and that the good and
great have, in the lottery of life, by chance or fate, drawn heart and
brain?

Washington, December 21, 1881.




PREFACE TO "MEN, WOMEN AND GODS."


NOTHING gives me more pleasure, nothing gives greater promise for the
future, than the fact that woman is achieving intellectual and physical
liberty.

It is refreshing to know that here, in our country, there are thousands
of women who think, and express their thoughts--who are thoroughly
free and thoroughly conscientious--who have neither been narrowed nor
corrupted by a heartless creed--who do not worship a being in heaven
whom they would shudderingly loathe on earth--women who do not stand
before the altar of a cruel faith, with downcast eyes of timid
acquiescence, and pay to impudent authority the tribute of a thoughtless
yes. They are no longer satisfied with being told. They examine for
themselves. They have ceased to be the prisoners of society--the
satisfied serfs of husbands, or the echoes of priests. They demand the
rights that naturally belong to intelligent human beings. If wives, they
wish to be the equals of husbands. If mothers, they wish to rear their
children in the atmosphere of love, liberty and philosophy. They believe
that woman can discharge all her duties without the aid of superstition,
and preserve all that is true, pure, and tender, without sacrificing in
the temple of absurdity the convictions of the soul.

Woman is not the intellectual inferior of man. She has lacked, not mind,
but opportunity. In the long night of barbarism, physical strength and
the cruelty to use it, were the badges of superiority. Muscle was more
than mind. In the ignorant age of Faith, the loving nature of woman was
abused. Her conscience was rendered morbid and diseased. It might almost
be said that she was betrayed by her own virtues. At best she secured,
not opportunity, but flattery--the preface to degradation. She was
deprived of liberty, and without that, nothing is worth the having. She
was taught to obey without question, and to believe without thought.
There were universities for men before the alphabet had been taught to
women. At the intellectual feast, there were no places for wives and
mothers. Even now they sit at the second table and eat the crusts and
crumbs. The schools for women, at the present time, are just far enough
behind those for men, to fall heirs to the discarded; on the same
principle that when a doctrine becomes too absurd for the pulpit, it is
given to the Sunday-school.

The ages of muscle and miracle--of fists and faith--are passing away.
Minerva occupies at last a higher niche than Hercules. Now a word
is stronger than a blow. At last we see women who depend upon
themselves--who stand, self poised, the shocks of this sad world,
without leaning for support against a church--who do not go to the
literature of barbarism for consolation, or use the falsehoods and
mistakes of the past for the foundation of their hope--women brave
enough and tender enough to meet and bear the facts and fortunes of this
world.

The men who declare that woman is the intellectual inferior of man, do
not, and cannot, by offering themselves in evidence, substantiate their
declaration.

Yet, I must admit that there are thousands of wives who still have
faith in the saving power of superstition--who still insist on attending
church while husbands prefer the shores, the woods, or the fields. In
this way, families are divided. Parents grow apart, and unconsciously
the pearl of greatest price is thrown away. The wife ceases to be
the intellectual companion of the husband. She reads _The Christian
Register_, sermons in the Monday papers, and a little gossip about
folks and fashions, while he studies the works of Darwin, Haeckel, and
Humboldt. Their sympathies become estranged. They are no longer mental
friends. The husband smiles at the follies of the wife, and she weeps
for the supposed sins of the husband. Such wives should read this book.
They should not be satisfied to remain forever in the cradle of thought,
amused with the toys of superstition.

The parasite of woman is the priest.

It must also be admitted that there are thousands of men who believe
that superstition is good for women and children--who regard falsehood
as the fortress of virtue, and feel indebted to ignorance for the purity
of daughters and the fidelity of wives. These men think of priests
as detectives in disguise, and regard God as a policeman who prevents
elopements. Their opinions about religion are as correct as their
estimate of woman.

The church furnishes but little food for the mind. People of
intelligence are growing tired of the platitudes of the pulpit--the
iterations of the itinerants. The average sermon is "as tedious as a
twice told tale vexing the ears of a drowsy man."

One Sunday a gentleman, who is a great inventor, called at my house.
Only a few words had passed between us, when he arose, saying that he
must go as it was time for church. Wondering that a man of his mental
wealth could enjoy the intellectual poverty of the pulpit, I asked for
an explanation, and he gave me the following: "You know that I am an
inventor. Well, the moment my mind becomes absorbed in some difficult
problem, I am afraid that something may happen to distract my attention.
Now, I know that I can sit in church for an hour without the slightest
danger of having the current of my thought disturbed."

Most women cling to the Bible because they have been taught that to give
up that book is to give up all hope of another life--of ever meeting
again the loved and lost. They have also been taught that the Bible is
their friend, their defender, and the real civilizer of man.

Now, if they will only read this book--these three lectures, without
fear, and then read the Bible, they will see that the truth or falsity
of the dogma of inspiration has nothing to do with the question of
immortality. Certainly the Old Testament does not teach us that there is
another life, and upon that question even the New is obscure and vague.
The hunger of the heart finds only a few small and scattered crumbs.
There is nothing definite, solid, and satisfying. United with the idea
of immortality we find the absurdity of the resurrection. A prophecy
that depends for its fulfillment upon an impossibility, cannot satisfy
the brain or heart.

There are but few who do not long for a dawn beyond the night. And
this longing is born of and nourished by the heart. Love wrapped in
shadow--bending with tear-filled eyes above its dead, convulsively
clasps the outstretched hand of hope.

I had the pleasure of introducing Miss Gardener to her first audience,
and in that introduction said a few words that I will repeat.

"We do not know, we cannot say, whether death is a wall or a door; the
beginning or end of a day; the spreading of pinions to soar, or the
folding forever of wings; the rise or the set of a sun, or an endless
life that brings the rapture of love to every one.

"Under the seven-hued arch of hope let the dead sleep."

They will also discover, as they read the "Sacred Volume," that it is
not the friend of woman. They will find that the writers of that book,
for the most part, speak of woman as a poor beast of burden, a serf, a
drudge, a kind of necessary evil--as mere property. Surely, a book that
upholds polygamy is not the friend of wife and mother.

Even Christ did not place woman on an equality with man. He said not
one word about the sacredness of home, the duties of the husband to the
wife--nothing calculated to lighten the hearts of those who bear the
saddest burdens of this life.

They will also find that the Bible has not civilized mankind. A book
that establishes and defends slavery and wanton war is not calculated to
soften the hearts of those who believe implicitly that it is the work of
God. A book that not only permits, but commands, religious persecution,
has not, in my judgment, developed the affectional nature of man.
Its influence has been bad and bad only. It has filled the world with
bitterness, revenge and crime, and retarded in countless ways the
progress of our race.

The writer of this volume has read the Bible with open eyes. The mist
of sentimentality has not clouded her vision. She has had the courage
to tell the result of her investigations. She has been quick to discover
contradictions. She appreciates the humorous side of the stupidly
solemn. Her heart protests against the cruel, and her brain rejects the
childish, the unnatural and absurd. There is no misunderstanding between
her head and heart. She says what she thinks, and feels what she says.

No human being can answer her arguments. There is no answer. All the
priests in the world cannot explain away her objections. There is no
explanation. They should remain dumb, unless they can show that the
impossible is the probable--that slavery is better than freedom--that
polygamy is the friend of woman--that the innocent can justly suffer for
the guilty, and that to persecute for opinion's sake is an act of love
and worship.

Wives who cease to learn--who simply forget and believe--will fill the
evening of their lives with barren sighs and bitter tears.

The mind should outlast youth. If when beauty fades, Thought, the deft
and unseen sculptor, hath not left his subtle lines upon the face,
then all is lost. No charm is left. The light is out. There is no flame
within to glorify the wrinkled clay.

Hoffman House, New York, July, 22, 1885.




PREFACE TO "FOR HER DAILY BREAD."


I HAVE read, this story, this fragment of a life mingled with fragments
of other lives, and have been pleased, interested, and instructed. It
is filled with the pathos of truth, and has in it the humor that
accompanies actual experience. It has but little to do with the world
of imagination; certain feelings are not attributed to persons born
of fancy, but it is the history of a heart and brain interested in the
common things of life. There are no kings, no lords, no titled ladies,
but there are real people, the people of the shop and street whom every
reader knows, and there are lines intense and beautiful, and scenes
that touch the heart. You will find no theories of government, no hazy
outlines of reform, nothing but facts and folks, as they have been, as
they are, and probably will be for many centuries to come.

If you read this book you will be convinced that men and women are good
or bad, charitable or heartless, by reason of something within, and not
by virtue of any name they bear, or any trade or profession they follow,
or of any creed they may accept. You will also find that men sometimes
are honest and mean; that women may be very virtuous and very cruel;
that good, generous and sympathetic men are often disreputable, and that
some exceedingly worthy citizens are extremely mean and uncomfortable
neighbors.

It takes a great deal of genius and a good deal of selfdenial to be
very bad or to be very good. Few people understand the amount of energy,
industry, and self-denial it requires to be consistently vicious. People
who have a pride in being good and fail, and those who have a pride in
being bad and fail, in order to make their records consistent generally
rely upon hypocrisy. The people that live and hope and fear in this
book, are much like the people who live and hope and fear in the actual
world. The professor is much like the professor in the ordinary college.
You will find the conscientious, half-paid teacher, the hopeful poor,
the anxious rich, the true lover, the stingy philanthropist, who cares
for people only in the aggregate,--the individual atom being too small
to attract his notice or to enlist his heart; the sympathetic man who
loves himself, and gives, not for the sake of the beggar, but for
the sake of getting rid of the beggar, and you will also find the man
generous to a fault--with the money of others. And the reader will find
these people described naturally, truthfully and without exaggeration,
and he will feel certain that all these people have really lived.

The reader of this story will get some idea as to what is encountered
by a girl in an honest effort to gain her daily bread. He will find how
steep, how devious and how difficult is the path she treads.

There are so few occupations open to woman, so few things in which she
can hope for independence, that to be thrown upon her own resources
is almost equivalent to being cast away. Besides, she is an object of
continual suspicion, watched not only by men but by women. If she does
anything that other women are not doing, she is at once suspected,
her reputation is touched, and other women, for fear of being stained
themselves, withdraw not only the hand of help, but the smile of
recognition. A young woman cannot defend herself without telling the
charge that has been made against her. This, of itself, gives a kind of
currency to slander. To speak of the suspicion that has crawled across
her path, is to plant the seeds of doubt in other minds; to even deny
it, admits that it exists. To be suspected, that is enough. There is no
way of destroying this suspicion. There is no court in which suspicions
are tried; no juries that can render verdicts of not guilty. Most women
are driven at last to the needle, and this does not allow them to live;
it simply keeps them from dying.

It is hard to appreciate the dangers and difficulties that lie in wait
for woman. Even in this Christian country of ours, no girl is safe in
the streets of any city after the sun has gone down. After all, the sun
is the only god that has ever protected woman. In the darkness she has
been the prey of the wild beast in man.

Nearly all charitable people, so-called, imagine that nothing is easier
than to obtain work. They really feel that anybody, no matter what his
circumstances may be, can get work enough to do if he is only willing to
do the work. They cannot understand why any healthy human being should
lack food or clothes. Meeting the unfortunate and the wretched in the
streets of the great city, they ask them in a kind of wondering way, why
they do not go to the West, why they do not cultivate the soil, and why
they are so foolish, stupid, and reckless as to remain in the town. It
would be just as sensible to ask a beggar why he does not start a bank
or a line of steamships, as to ask him why he does not cultivate the
soil, or why he does not go to the West. The man has no money to pay his
fare, and if his fare were paid he would be, when he landed in the
West, in precisely the same condition as he was when he left the East.
Societies and institutions and individuals supply the immediate wants
of the hungry and the ragged, but they afford only the relief of the
moment.

Articles by the thousand have been written for the purpose of showing
that women should become servants in houses, and the writers of these
articles are filled with astonishment that any girl should hesitate to
enter domestic service. They tell us that nearly every family needs a
good cook, a good chambermaid, a good sweeper of floors and washer of
dishes, a good stout girl to carry the baby and draw the wagon, and
these good people express the greatest astonishment that all girls
are not anxious to become domestics. They tell them that they will be
supplied with good food, that they will have comfortable beds and warm
clothing, and they ask, "What more do you want?" These people have
not, however, solved the problem. If girls, as a rule, keep away from
kitchens and chambers, if they hate to be controlled by other women,
there must be a reason. When we see a young woman prefer a clerkship in
a store,--a business which keeps her upon her feet all day, and sends
her to her lonely room, filled with weariness and despair, and when we
see other girls who are willing to sew for a few cents a day rather than
become the maid of "my lady," there must be some reason, and this reason
must be deemed sufficient by the persons who are actuated by it. What is
it?

Every human being imagines that the future has something in store for
him. It is natural to build these castles in Spain. It is natural for
a girl to dream of being loved by the noble, by the superb, and it is
natural for the young man to dream of success, of a home, of a good, a
beautiful and loving wife. These dreams are the solace of poverty; they
keep back the tears in the eyes of the young and the hungry. To engage
in any labor that degrades, in any work that leaves a stain, in any
business the mention of which is liable to redden the cheek, seems to be
a destruction of the foundation of hope, a destruction of the future; it
seems to be a crucifixion of his or her better self. It assassinates the
ideal.

It may be said that labor is noble, that work is a kind of religion, and
whoever says this tells the truth, But after all, what has the truth
to do with this question? What is the opinion of society?--What is the
result? It cures no wound to say that it was wrongfully inflicted.
The opinion of sensible people is one way, the action of society is
inconsistent with that opinion. Domestic servants are treated as
though their employment was and is a degradation. Bankers, merchants,
professional men, ministers of the gospel, do not want their sons
to become the husbands of chambermaids and cooks. Small hands are
beautiful; they do not tell of labor.

I have given one reason; there is another. The work of a domestic is
never done. She is liable to be called at any moment, day or night. She
has no time that she can call her own. A woman who works by the piece
can take a little rest; if she is a clerk she has certain hours of labor
and the rest of the day is her own.

And there is still another reason that I almost hate to give, and that
is this: As a rule, woman is exacting with woman. As a rule, woman does
not treat woman as well as man treats man, or as well as man treats
woman. There are many other reasons, but I have given enough.

For many years, women have been seeking employment other than that of
domestic service. They have so hated this occupation, that they have
sought in every possible direction for other ways to win their bread.
At last hundreds of employments are open to them, and, as a consequence,
domestic servants are those who can get nothing else to do.

In the olden time, servants sat at the table with the family; they were
treated something like human beings, harshly enough to be sure, but
in many cases almost as equals. Now the kitchen is far away from the
parlor. It is another world, occupied by individuals of a different
race. There is no bond of sympathy--no common ground. This is especially
true in a Republic. In the Old World, people occupying menial places
account for their positions by calling attention to the laws--to the
hereditary nobility and the universal spirit of caste. Here, there are
no such excuses. All are supposed to have equal opportunities, and those
who are compelled to labor for their daily bread, in avocations that
require only bodily strength, are regarded as failures. It is this fact
that stabs like a knife. And yet in the conclusion drawn, there is but
little truth. Some of the noblest and best pass their lives in daily
drudgery and unremunerative toil--while many of the mean, vicious and
stupid reach place and power.

This story is filled with sympathy for the destitute, for the
struggling, and tends to keep the star of hope above the horizon of the
unfortunate. After all, we know but little of the world, and have but a
faint conception of the burdens that are borne, and of the courage and
heroism displayed by the unregarded poor. Let the rich read these pages;
they will have a kinder feeling toward those who toil; let the workers
read them, and they will think better of themselves.




PREFACE TO "AGNOSTICISM AND OTHER ESSAYS."


I.

EDGAR FAWCETT--a great poet, a metaphysician and logician--has been for
years engaged in exploring that strange world wherein are supposed to
be the springs of human action. He has sought for something back of
motives, reasons, fancies, passions, prejudices, and the countless tides
and tendencies that constitute the life of man.

He has found some of the limitations of mind, and knows that beginning
at that luminous centre called consciousness, a few short steps bring
us to the prison wall where vision fails and all light dies. Beyond this
wall the eternal darkness broods. This gloom is "the other world" of the
supernaturalist. With him, real vision begins where the sight fails. He
reverses the order of nature. Facts become illusions, and illusions the
only realities. He believes that the cause of the image, the reality, is
behind the mirror.

A few centuries ago the priests said to their followers: The other world
is above you; it is just beyond where you see. Afterward, the astronomer
with his telescope looked, and asked the priests: Where is the world
of which you speak? And the priests replied: It has receded--it is just
beyond where you see.

As long as there is "a beyond," there is room for the priests' world.
Theology is the geography of this beyond.

Between the Christian and the Agnostic there is the difference of
assertion and question--between "There is a God" and "Is there a
God?" The Agnostic has the arrogance to admit his ignorance, while the
Christian from the depths of humility impudently insists that he knows.

Mr. Fawcett has shown that at the root of religion lies the coiled
serpent of fear, and that ceremony, prayer, and worship are ways and
means to gain the assistance or soften the heart of a supposed deity.

He also shows that as man advances in knowledge he loses confidence in
the watchfulness of Providence and in the efficacy of prayer.


II.

SCIENCE.

The savage is certain of those things that cannot be known. He is
acquainted with origin and destiny, and knows everything except that
which is useful. The civilized man, having outgrown the ignorance, the
arrogance, and the provincialism of savagery, abandons the vain search
for final causes, for the nature and origin of things.

In nearly every department of science man is allowed to investigate, and
the discovery of a new fact is welcomed, unless it threatens some creed.

Of course there can be no advance in a religion established by infinite
wisdom. The only progress possible is in the comprehension of this
religion.

For many generations, what is known under a vast number of disguises
and behind many masks as the Christian religion, has been propagated
and preserved by the sword and bayonet--that is to say, by force. The
credulity of man has been bribed and his reason punished. Those who
believed without the slightest question, and whose faith held evidence
in contempt, were saints; those who investigated were dangerous, and
those who denied were destroyed.

Every attack upon this religion has been made in the shadow of human and
divine hatred--in defiance of earth and heaven. At one time Christendom
was beneath the ignorant feet of one man, and those who denied his
infallibility were heretics and Atheists. At last, a protest was
uttered. The right of conscience was proclaimed, to the extent of making
a choice between the infallible man and the infallible book. Those
who rejected the man and accepted the book became in their turn
as merciless, as tyrannical and heartless, as the followers of the
infallible man. The Protestants insisted that an infinitely wise and
good God would not allow criminals and wretches to act as his infallible
agents.

Afterward, a few protested against the infallibility of the book, using
the same arguments against the book that had formerly been used against
the pope. They said that an infinitely wise and good God could not be
the author of a cruel and ignorant book. But those who protested against
the book fell into substantially the same error that had been fallen
into by those who had protested against the man. While they denounced
the book, and insisted that an infinitely wise and good being could not
have been its author, they took the ground that an infinitely wise and
good being was the creator and governor of the world.

Then was used against them the same argument that had been used by the
Protestants against the pope and by the Deists against the Protestants.
Attention was called to the fact that Nature is as cruel as any pope or
any book--that it is just as easy to account for the destruction of the
Canaanites consistently with the goodness of Jehovah as to account for
pestilence, earthquake, and flood consistently with the goodness of the
God of Nature.

The Protestant and Deist both used arguments against the Catholic that
could in turn be used with equal force against themselves. So that there
is no question among intelligent people as to the infallibility of the
pope, as to the inspiration of the book, or as to the existence of the
Christian's God--for the conclusion has been reached that the human mind
is incapable of deciding as to the origin and destiny of the universe.

For many generations the mind of man has been traveling in a circle. It
accepted without question the dogma of a First Cause--of the existence
of a Creator--of an Infinite Mind back of matter, and sought in many
ways to define its ignorance in this behalf. The most sincere worshipers
have declared that this being is incomprehensible,--that he is "without
body, parts, or passions"--that he is infinitely beyond their grasp, and
at the same time have insisted that it was necessary for man not only
to believe in the existence of this being, but to love him with all his
heart.

Christianity having always been in partnership with the state,--having
controlled kings and nobles, judges and legislators--having been
in partnership with armies and with every form of organized
destruction,--it was dangerous to discuss the foundation of its
authority. To speak lightly of any dogma was a crime punishable by
death. Every absurdity has been bastioned and barricaded by the power of
the state. It has been protected by fist, by club, by sword and cannon.

For many years Christianity succeeded in substantially closing the
mouths of its enemies, and lived and flourished only where investigation
and discussion were prevented by hypocrisy and bigotry. The church still
talks about "evidence," about "reason," about "freedom of conscience"
and the "liberty of speech," and yet denounces those who ask for
evidence, who appeal to reason, and who honestly express their thoughts.

To-day we know that the miracles of Christianity are as puerile and
false as those ascribed to the medicine-men of Central Africa or the
Fiji Islanders, and that the "sacred Scriptures" have the same claim to
inspiration that the Koran has, or the Book of Mormon--no less, no more.
These questions have been settled and laid aside by free and intelligent
people. They have ceased to excite interest; and the man who now really
believes in the truth of the Old Testament is regarded with a smile--
looked upon as an aged child--still satisfied with the lullabys and toys
of the cradle.


III.

MORALITY.

It is contended that without religion--that is to say, without
Christianity--all ideas of morality must of necessity perish, and that
spirituality and reverence will be lost.

What is morality?

Is it to obey without question, or is it to act in accordance with
perceived obligation? Is it something with which intelligence has
nothing to do? Must the ignorant child carry out the command of the wise
father--the rude peasant rush to death at the request of the prince?

Is it impossible for morality to exist where the brain and heart are
in partnership? Is there no foundation for morality except punishment
threatened or reward promised by a superior to an inferior? If this be
true, how can the superior be virtuous? Cannot the reward and the threat
be in the nature of things? Can they not rest in consequences perceived
by the intellect? How can the existence or non-existence of a deity
change my obligation to keep my hands out of the fire?

The results of all actions are equally certain, but not equally known,
not equally perceived. If all men knew with perfect certainty that to
steal from another was to rob themselves, larceny would cease. It
cannot be said too often that actions are good or bad in the light of
consequences, and that a clear perception of consequences would control
actions. That which increases the sum of human happiness is moral; and
that which diminishes the sum of human happiness is immoral. Blind,
unreasoning obedience is the enemy of morality. Slavery is not the
friend of virtue. Actions are neither right nor wrong by virtue of what
men or gods can say--the right or wrong lives in results--in the nature
of things, growing out of relations violated or caused.

Accountability lives in the nature of consequences--in their absolute
certainty--in the fact that they cannot be placated, avoided, or bribed.

The relations of human life are too complicated to be accurately and
clearly understood, and, as a consequence, rules of action vary from age
to age. The ideas of right and wrong change with the experience of
the race, and this change is wrought by the gradual ascertaining of
consequences--of results. For this reason the religion of one age fails
to meet the standard of another, precisely as the laws that satisfied
our ancestors are repealed by us; so that, in spite of all efforts,
religion itself is subject to gradual and perpetual change.

The miraculous is no longer the basis of morals. Man is a sentient
being--he suffers and enjoys. In order to be happy he must preserve the
conditions of well-being--must live in accordance with certain facts by
which he is surrounded. If he violates these conditions the result is
unhappiness, failure, disease, misery.

Man must have food, roof, raiment, fireside, friends--that is to say,
prosperity; and this he must earn--this he must deserve. He is no
longer satisfied with being a slave, even of the Infinite. He wishes to
perceive for himself, to understand, to investigate, to experiment; and
he has at last the courage to bear the consequences that he brings upon
himself. He has also found that those who are the most religious are not
always the kindest, and that those who have been and are the worshipers
of God enslave their fellow-men. He has found that there is no necessary
connection between religion and morality.

Morality needs no supernatural assistance--needs neither miracle nor
pretence. It has nothing to do with awe, reverence, credulity, or blind,
unreasoning faith. Morality is the highway perceived by the soul, the
direct road, leading to success, honor, and happiness.

The best thing to do under the circumstances is moral.

The highest possible standard is human. We put ourselves in the places
of others. We are made happy by the kindness of others, and we feel that
a fair exchange of good actions is the wisest and best commerce. We know
that others can make us miserable by acts of hatred and injustice,
and we shrink from inflicting the pain upon others that we have felt
ourselves; this is the foundation of conscience.

If man could not suffer, the words right and wrong could never have been
spoken.

The Agnostic, the Infidel, clearly perceives the true basis of morals,
and, so perceiving, he knows that the religious man, the superstitious
man, caring more for God than for his fellows, will sacrifice his
fellows, either at the supposed command of his God, or to win his
approbation. He also knows that the religionist has no basis for morals
except these supposed commands. The basis of morality with him lies not
in the nature of things, but in the caprice of some deity. He seems to
think that, had it not been for the Ten Commandments, larceny and murder
might have been virtues.


IV.

SPIRITUALITY.

What is it to be spiritual?

Is this fine quality of the mind destroyed by the development of the
brain? As the domain wrested by science from ignorance increases--as
island after island and continent after continent are discovered--as
star after star and constellation after constellation in the
intellectual world burst upon the midnight of ignorance, does the
spirituality of the mind grow less and less? Like morality, is it only
found in the company of ignorance and superstition? Is the spiritual man
honest, kind, candid?--or dishonest, cruel and hypocritical? Does he
say what he thinks? Is he guided by reason? Is he the friend of the
right?--the champion of the truth? Must this splendid quality called
spirituality be retained through the loss of candor? Can we not
truthfully say that absolute candor is the beginning of wisdom?

To recognize the finer harmonies of conduct--to live to the ideal--to
separate the incidental, the evanescent, from the perpetual--to be
enchanted with the perfect melody of truth--open to the influences of
the artistic, the beautiful, the heroic--to shed kindness as the sun
sheds light--to recognize the good in others, and to include the world
in the idea of self--this is to be spiritual.

There is nothing spiritual in the worship of the unknown and unknowable,
in the self-denial of a slave at the command of a master whom he fears.
Fastings, prayings, mutilations, kneelings, and mortifications are
either the results of, or result in, insanity.

This is the spirituality of Bedlam, and is of no kindred with the soul
that finds its greatest joy in the discharge of obligation perceived.


V.

REVERENCE.

What is reverence?

It is the feeling produced when we stand in the presence of our ideal,
or of that which most nearly approaches it--that which is produced by
what we consider the highest degree of excellence.

The highest is reverenced, praised, and admired without qualification.

Each man reverences according to his nature, his experience, his
intellectual development. He may reverence' Nero or Marcus Aurelius,
Jehovah or Buddha, the author of Leviticus or Shakespeare. Thousands of
men reverence John Calvin, Torquemada, and the Puritan fathers; and some
have greater respect for Jonathan Edwards than for Captain Kidd.

A vast number of people have great reverence for anything that is
covered by mould, or moss, or mildew. They bow low before rot and rust,
and adore the worthless things that have been saved by the negligence of
oblivion.

They are enchanted with the dull and fading daubs of the old masters,
and hold in contempt those miracles of art, the paintings of to-day.

They worship the ancient, the shadowy, the mysterious, the wonderful.
They doubt the value of anything that they understand.

The creed of Christendom is the enemy of morality. It teaches that the
innocent can justly suffer for the guilty, that consequences can be
avoided by repentance, and that in the world of mind the great fact
known as cause and effect does not apply.

It is the enemy of spirituality, because it teaches that credulity is of
more value than conduct, and because it pours contempt upon human love
by raising far above it the adoration of a phantom.

It is the enemy of reverence. It makes ignorance the foundation of
virtue. It belittles the useful, and cheapens the noblest of! the
virtues. It teaches man to live on mental alms, and glorifies the
intellectual pauper. It holds candor in contempt, and is the malignant
foe of mental manhood.


VI.

EXISTENCE OF GOD.

Mr. Fawcett has shown conclusively that it is no easier to establish the
existence of an infinitely wise and good being by the existence of what
we call "good" than to establish the existence of an infinitely bad
being by what we call "bad."

Nothing can be surer than that the history of this world furnishes no
foundation on which to base an inference that it has been governed by
infinite wisdom and goodness. So terrible has been the condition of
man, that religionists in all ages have endeavored to excuse God by
accounting for the evils of the world by the wickedness of men. And the
fathers of the Christian Church were forced to take the ground that this
world had been filled with briers and thorns, with deadly serpents
and with poisonous weeds, with disease and crime and earthquake and
pestilence and storm, by the curse of God.

The probability is that no God has cursed, and that no God will bless,
this earth. Man suffers and enjoys according to conditions. The sun
shines without love, and the lightning blasts without hate. Man is the
Providence of man.

Nature gives to our eyes all they can see, to our ears all they can
hear, and to the mind what it can comprehend. The human race reaps the
fruit of every victory won on the fields of intellectual or physical
conflict. We have no right to expect something for nothing. Man will
reap no harvest the seeds of which he has not sown.

The race must be guided by intelligence, must be free to investigate,
and must have the courage and the candor not only to state what is
known, but to cheerfully admit the limitations of the mind.

No intelligent, honest man can read what Mr. Fawcett has written and
then say that he knows the origin and destiny of things--that he knows
whether an infinite Being exists or not, and that he knows whether the
soul of man is or is not immortal.

In the land of--------, the geography of which is not certainly known,
there was for many years a great dispute among the inhabitants as to
which road led to the city of Miragia, the capital of their country, and
known to be the most delightful city on the earth. For fifty generations
the discussion as to which road led to the city had been carried on with
the greatest bitterness, until finally the people were divided into a
great number of parties, each party claiming that the road leading
to the city had been miraculously made known to the founder of that
particular sect. The various parties spent most of their time putting up
guide-boards on these roads and tearing down the guide-boards of others.
Hundreds of thousands had been killed, prisons were filled, and the
fields had been ravaged by the hosts of war.

One day, a wise man, a patriot, wishing to bring peace to his country,
met the leaders of the various sects and asked them whether it was
absolutely certain that the city of Miragia existed. He called their
attention to the facts that no resident of that city had ever visited
them and that none of their fellow-men who had started for the capital
had ever returned, and modestly asked whether it would not be better
to satisfy themselves beyond a doubt that there was such a city, adding
that the location of the city would determine which of all the roads was
the right one.

The leaders heard these words with amazement. They denounced the speaker
as a wretch without morality, spirituality, or reverence, and thereupon
he was torn in pieces.




PREFACE TO "FAITH OR FACT."


I LIKE to know the thoughts, theories and conclusions of an honest,
intelligent man; candor is always charming, and it is a delight to feel
that you have become acquainted with a sincere soul.

I have read this book with great pleasure, not only because I know, and
greatly esteem the author, not only because he is my unwavering friend,
but because it is full of good sense, of accurate statement, of sound
logic, of exalted thoughts happily expressed, and for the further reason
that it is against tyranny, superstition, bigotry, and every form of
injustice, and in favor of every virtue.

Henry M. Taber, the author, has for many years taken great interest
in religious questions. He was raised in an orthodox atmosphere, was
acquainted with many eminent clergymen from whom he endeavored to
find out what Christianity is--and the facts and evidence relied on to
establish the truth of the creeds. He found that the clergy of even the
same denomination did not agree--that some of them preached one way
and talked another, and that many of them seemed to regard the creed as
something to be accepted whether it was believed or not. He found that
each one gave his own construction to the dogmas that seemed heartless
or unreasonable. While some insisted that the Bible was absolutely true
and the creed without error, others admitted that there were mistakes in
the sacred volume and that the creed ought to be revised. Finding these
differences among the ministers, the shepherds, and also finding that
no one pretended to have any evidence except faith, or any facts but
assertions, he concluded to investigate the claims of Christianity for
himself.

For half a century he has watched the ebb and flow of public opinion,
the growth of science, the crumbling of creeds--the decay of the
theological spirit, the waning influence of the orthodox pulpit, the
loss of confidence in special providence and the efficacy of prayer.

He has lived to see the church on the defensive--to hear faith asking
for facts--and to see the shot and shell of science batter into
shapelessness the fortresses of superstition. He has lived to see
Infidels, blasphemers and Agnostics the leaders of the intellectual
world. In his time the supernaturalists have lost the sceptre and have
taken their places in the abject rear.

Fifty years ago the orthodox Christians believed their creeds. To them
the Bible was an actual revelation from God. Every word was true.
Moses and Joshua were regarded as philosophers and scientists. All the
miracles and impossibilities recorded in the Bible were accepted as
facts. Credulity was the greatest of virtues. Everything, except the
reasonable, was believed, and it was considered wickedly presumptuous
to doubt anything except facts. The reasonable things in the Bible could
safely be doubted, but to deny the miracles was like the sin against
the Holy Ghost. In those days the preachers were at the helm. They spoke
with authority. They knew the origin and destiny of the soul. They were
on familiar terms with the Trinity--the three-headed God. They knew the
narrow path that led to heaven and the great highway along which the
multitude were traveling to the Prison of Pain.

While these reverend gentlemen were busy trying to prevent the
development of the brain and to convince the people that the good in
this life were miserable, that virtue wore a crown of thorns and carried
a cross, while the wicked and ungodly walked in the sunshine of joy,
yet that after death the wicked would be eternally tortured and the
good eternally rewarded. According to the pious philosophy the good
God punished virtue, and rewarded vice, in this world--and in the next,
rewarded virtue and punished vice. These divine truths filled their
hearts with holy peace--with pious resignation. It would be difficult
to determine which gave them the greater joy--the hope of heaven for
themselves, or the certainty of hell for their enemies. For the grace of
God they were fairly thankful, but for his "justice" their gratitude
was boundless. From the heights of heaven they expected to witness the
eternal tragedy in hell.

While these good divines, these doctors of divinity, were busy
misinterpreting the Scriptures, denying facts and describing the glories
and agonies of eternity, a good many other people were trying to find
out something about this world. They were busy with retort and crucible,
searching the heavens with the telescope, examining rocks and craters,
reefs and islands, studying plant and animal life, inventing ways to
use the forces of nature for the benefit of man, and in every direction
searching for the truth. They were not trying to destroy religion or to
injure the clergy. Many of them were members of churches and believed
the creeds. The facts they found were honestly given to the world. Of
course all facts are the enemies of superstition. The clergy, acting
according to the instinct of self-preservation, denounced these "facts"
as dangerous and the persons who found and published them, as Infidels
and scoffers.

Theology was arrogant and bold. Science was timid. For some time
the churches seemed to have the best of the controversy. Many of the
scientists surrendered and did their best to belittle the facts and
patch up a cowardly compromise between Nature and Revelation--that is,
between the true and the false.

Day by day more facts were found that could not be reconciled with the
Scriptures, or the creeds. Neither was it possible to annihilate facts
by denial. The man who believed the Bible could not accept the facts,
and the man who believed the facts could not accept the Bible. At
first, the Bible was the standard, and all facts inconsistent with that
standard were denied. But in a little while science became the standard,
and the passages in the Bible contrary to the standard had to be
explained or given up. Great efforts were made to harmonize the mistakes
in the Bible with the demonstrations of science. It was difficult to be
ingenious enough to defend them both. The pious professors twisted and
turned but found it hard to reconcile the creation of Adam with the slow
development of man from lower forms. They were greatly troubled about
the age of the universe. It seemed incredible that until about six
thousand years ago there was nothing in existence but God--and nothing.
And yet they tried to save the Bible by giving new meanings to the
inspired texts, and casting a little suspicion on the facts.

This course has mostly been abandoned, although a few survivals, like
Mr. Gladstone, still insist there is no conflict between Revelation and
Science. But these champions of Holy Writ succeed only in causing the
laughter of the intelligent and the amazement of the honest. The more
intelligent theologians confessed that the inspired writers could not
be implicitly believed. As they personally know nothing of astronomy or
geology and were forced to rely entirely on inspiration, it is wonderful
that more mistakes were not made. So it was claimed that Jehovah cared
nothing about science, and allowed the blunders and mistakes of the
ignorant people concerning everything except religion, to appear in his
supernatural book as inspired truths.

The Bible, they said, was written to teach religion in its highest and
purest form--to make mankind fit to associate with God and his angels.
True, polygamy was tolerated and slavery established, yet Jehovah
believed in neither, but on account of the wickedness of the Jews was in
favor of both.

At the same time quite a number of real scholars were investigating
other religions, and in a little while they were enabled to show that
these religions had been manufactured by men--that their Christs and
apostles were myths and that all their sacred books were false and
foolish. This pleased the Christians. They knew that theirs was the only
true religion and that their Bible was the only inspired book.

The fact that there is nothing original in Christianity, that all the
dogmas, ceremonies and festivals had been borrowed, together with some
mouldy miracles used as witnesses, weakened the faith of some and sowed
the seeds of doubt in many minds. But the pious petrifactions, the
fossils of faith, still clung to their book and creed. While they were
quick to see the absurdities in other sacred books, they were either
unconsciously blind or maliciously shut their eyes to the same
absurdities in the Bible. They knew that Mohammed was an impostor,
because the citizens of Mecca, who knew him, said he was, and they knew
that Christ was not an impostor, because the people of Jerusalem who
knew him, said he was. The same fact was made to do double duty. When
they attacked other religions it was a sword and when their religion was
attacked it became a shield.

The men who had investigated other religions turned their attention to
Christianity. They read our Bible as they had read other sacred books.
They were not blinded by faith or paralyzed by fear, and they found that
the same arguments they had used against other religions destroyed our
own.

But the real old-fashioned orthodox ministers denounced the
investigators as Infidels and denied every fact that was inconsistent
with the creed. They wanted to protect the young and feeble minded. They
were anxious about the souls of the "thoughtless."

Some ministers changed their views just a little, not enough to be
driven from their pulpits--but just enough to keep sensible people
from thinking them idiotic. These preachers talked about the "higher
criticism" and contended that it was not necessary to believe every word
in the Bible, that some of the miracles might be given up and some of
the books discarded. But the stupid doctors of divinity had the Bible
and the creeds on their side and the machinery of the churches was in
their control. They brought some of the offending clergymen to the bar,
and had them tried for heresy, made some recant and closed the mouths
of others. Still, it was not easy to put the heretics down. The
congregations of ministers found guilty, often followed the shepherds.
Heresy grew popular, the liberal preachers had good audiences, while the
orthodox addressed a few bonnets, bibs and benches.

For many years the pulpit has been losing influence and the sacred
calling no longer offers a career to young men of talent and ambition.

When people believed in "special providence," they also believed that
preachers had great influence with God. They were regarded as celestial
lobbyists and they were respected and feared because of their supposed
power.

Now no one who has the capacity to think, believes in special
providence. Of course there are some pious imbeciles who think that
pestilence and famine, cyclone and earthquake, flood and fire are the
weapons of God, the tools of his trade, and that with these weapons,
these tools, he kills and starves, rends and devours, drowns and burns
countless thousands of the human race.

If God governs this world, if he builds and destroys, if back of every
event is his will, then he is neither good nor wise, He is ignorant and
malicious.

A few days ago, in Paris, men and women had gathered together in the
name of Charity. The building in which they, were assembled took fire
and many of these men and women perished in the flames.

A French priest called this horror an act of God.

Is it not strange that Christians speak of their God as an assassin?

How can they love and worship this monster who murders, his children?

Intelligence seems to be leaving the orthodox church. The great divines
are growing smaller, weaker, day by day. Since the death of Henry Ward
Beecher no man of genius has stood in the orthodox pulpit. The ministers
of intelligence are found in the liberal churches where they are allowed
to express their thoughts and preserve their manhood. Some of these
preachers keep their faces toward the East and sincerely welcome the
light, while their orthodox brethren stand with their backs to the
sunrise and worship the sunset of the day before.

During these years of change, of decay and growth, the author of this
book looked and listened, became familiar with the questions raised, the
arguments offered and the results obtained. For his work a better man
could not have been found. He has no prejudice, no hatred. He is by
nature candid, conservative, kind and just. He does not attack persons.
He knows the difference between exchanging epithets and thoughts. He
gives the facts as they appear to him and draws the logical conclusions.
He charges and proves that Christianity has not always been the friend
of morality, of civil liberty, of wives and mothers, of free though and
honest speech. He shows that intolerance is its nature, that it always
has, and always will persecute to the extent of its power, and that
Christianity will always despise the doubter.

Yet we know that doubt must inhabit every finite mind. We know that
doubt is as natural as hope, and that man is no more responsible for his
doubts than for the beating of his heart. Every human being who knows
the nature of evidence, the limitations of the mind, must have "doubts"
about gods and devils, about heavens and hells, and must know that there
is not the slightest evidence tending to show that gods and devils ever
existed.

God is a guess.

An undesigned designer, an uncaused cause, is as incomprehensible to the
human mind as a circle without a diameter.

The dogma of the Trinity multiplies the difficulty by three.

Theologians do not, and cannot believe that the authority to govern
comes from the consent of the governed. They regard God as the monarch,
and themselves as his agents. They always have been the enemies of
liberty.

They claim to have a revelation from their God, a revelation that is the
rightful master of reason. As long as they believe this, they must be
the enemies of mental freedom. They do not ask man to think, but command
him to obey.

If the claims of the theologians are admitted, the church becomes the
ruler of the world, and to support and obey priests will be the business
of mankind. All these theologians claim to have a revelation from their
God, and yet they cannot agree as to what the revelation reveals. The
other day, looking from my window at the bay of New York, I saw many
vessels going in many directions, and yet all were moved by the same
wind. The direction in which they were going did not depend on the
direction of the breeze, but on the set of the sails. In this way the
same Bible furnishes creeds for all the Christian sects. But what would
we say if the captains of the boats I saw, should each swear that his
boat was the only one that moved in the same direction the wind was
blowing?

I agree with Mr. Taber that all religions are founded on mistakes,
misconceptions and falsehoods, and that superstition is the warp and
woof of every creed.

This book will do great good. It will furnish arguments and facts
against the supernatural and absurd. It will drive phantoms from the
brain, fear from the heart, and many who read these pages will be
emancipated, enlightened and ennobled.

Christianity, with its ignorant and jealous God--its loving and
revengeful Christ--its childish legends--its grotesque miracles--its
"fall of man"--its atonement--its salvation by faith--its heaven for
stupidity and its hell for genius, does not and cannot satisfy the free
brain and the good heart.




THE GRANT BANQUET.

Chicago, November 13, 1879.


TWELFTH TOAST.

     * The meteoric display predicted to take place last Thursday
     night did not occur, but there did occur on that evening a
     display of oratorical brilliancy at Chicago seldom if ever
     surpassed. The speeches at the banquet of the Army of the
     Tennessee, taken together, constitute one of the most
     remarkable collections of extemporaneous eloquence on
     record. The principal speakers of the evening were Gen. U.
     S. Grant, Gen. John A. Logan Col. Win, F. Vilas, Gen.
     Stewart L. Woodford, General Pope, Col. R. G. Ingersoll,
     Gen. J. H. Wilson, and "Mark Twain." In an oratorical
     tournament General Grant is, of course, better as a listener
     than as a talker; he is a man of deeds rather than of words.
     The same might be said of General Sherman, though, as
     presiding officer and toast-master of the occasion, his
     impromptu remarks were always pertinent and keen. His advice
     to speakers not to talk longer than they could hold their
     audience, and to the auditors not to drag out their applause
     or to drawl out their laughter, would serve as a good
     standing rule for all similar occasions Colonel Ingersoll
     responded to the twelfth toast, "The Volunteer Soldiers of
     the Union Army, whose Valor and Patriotism saved to the
     world a Government of the People, by the People, and for the
     people."

     Colonel Ingersoll's position was a difficult one. His
     reputation as the first orator in America caused the
     distinguished audience to expect a wonderful display of
     oratory from him. He proved fully equal to the occasion and
     delivered a speech of wonderful eloquence, brilliancy and
     power. To say it was one of the best he ever delivered is
     equivalent to saying it was one of the best ever delivered
     by any man, for few greater orators have ever lived than
     Colonel Ingersoll. The speech is both an oration and a poem.
     It bristles with ideas and sparkles with epigrammatic
     expressions. It is full of thoughts that breathe and words
     that burn. The closing sentences read like blank verse. It
     is wonderful oratory, marvelous eloquence. Colonel
     Ingersoll fully sustained his reputation as the finest
     orator In America.

     Editorial from The Journal Indianapolis, Ind., November
     17,1879.

     The Inter-Ocean remarked yesterday that the gathering and
     exercises at the Palmer House banquet on Thursday evening
     constituted one of the most remarkable occasions known in
     the history of this country. This was not alone because of
     the distinguished men who lent their presence to the scone;
     they were indeed illustrious; but they only formed a part of
     the grand picture that must endure while the memory of our
     great conflict survives. To the eminent men assembled may be
     traced the signal success of the affair, for they gave
     inspiration to the minds and the tongues of others; but it
     was the fruit of that inspiration that rolled like a glad
     surprise across the banqueting sky, and made the 13th of
     November renowned in the calendar of days... When Robert G.
     Ingersoll rose after the speech of General Pope, to respond
     to the toast, "The Volunteer Soldiers," a large part of the
     audience rose with him, and the cheering was long and loud.
     Colonel Ingersoll may fairly be regarded as the foremost
     orator of America, and there was the keenest interest to
     hear him after all the brilliant speeches that had preceded;
     and this interest was not unnmixed with a fear that he would
     not be able to successfully strive against both his own
     great reputation and the fresh competitors who had leaped
     suddenly into the oratorical arena like mighty gladiators
     and astonished the audience by their unexpected eloquence.
     But Ingersoll had not proceeded far when the old fire broke
     out, and flashing metaphor, bold denunciation, and all the
     rich imagery and poetical beauty which mark his great
     efforts stood revealed before the delighted listeners: Long
     before the last word was uttered, all doubt as to the
     ability of the great orator to sustain himself had departed,
     and rising to their feet, the audience cheered till the hall
     rang with shouts. Like Henry, "The forest-born Demosthenes,
     whose thunder shook the Philip of the seas," Ingersoll still
     held the crown within his grasp.

     Editorial from The Inter-Ocean, Chicago, November 15, 1879.


The Volunteer Soldiers of the Union Army, whose Valor and Patriotism
saved to the world "a Government of the People, by the People, and for
the People."

WHEN the savagery of the lash, the barbarism of the chain, and the
insanity of secession confronted the civilization of our country, the
question "Will the great Republic defend itself?" trembled on the lips
of every lover of mankind.

The North, filled with intelligence and wealth--children of
liberty--marshaled her hosts and asked only for a leader. From civil
life a man, silent, thoughtful, poised and calm, stepped forth, and
with the lips of victory voiced the Nation's first and last demand:
"Unconditional and immediate surrender." From that 'moment' the end was
known. That utterance was the first real declaration of real war, and,
in accordance with the dramatic unities of mighty events, the great
soldier who made it, received the final sword of the Rebellion.

The soldiers of the Republic were not seekers after vulgar glory. They
were not animated by the hope of plunder or the love of conquest. They
fought to preserve the homestead of liberty and that their children
might have peace. They were the defenders of humanity, the destroyers
of prejudice, the breakers of chains, and in the name of the future
they slew the monster of their time. They finished what the soldiers of
the Revolution commenced. They re-lighted the torch that fell from their
august hands and filled the world again with light. They blotted
from the statute-book laws that had been passed by hypocrites at
the instigation of robbers, and tore with indignant hands from the
Constitution that infamous clause that made men the catchers of their
fellow-men. They made it possible for judges to be just, for statesmen
to be humane, and for politicians to be honest. They broke the shackles
from the limbs of slaves, from the souls of masters, and from the
Northern brain. They kept our country on the map of the world, and our
flag in heaven. They rolled the stone from the sepulchre of progress,
and found therein two angels clad in shining garments--Nationality and
Liberty.

The soldiers were the saviors of the Nation; they were the liberators of
men. In writing the Proclamation of Emancipation, Lincoln, greatest
of our mighty dead, whose memory is as gentle as the summer air when
reapers, sing amid the gathered sheaves, copied with the pen what Grant
and his brave comrades wrote with swords.

Grander than the Greek, nobler than the Roman, the soldiers of the
Republic, with patriotism as shoreless as the air, battled for the
rights of others, for the nobility of labor; fought that mothers might
own their babes, that arrogant idleness should not scar the back of
patient toil, and that our country should not be a many-headed monster
made of warring States, but a Nation, sovereign, great, and free.

Blood was water, money was leaves, and life, was only common air until
one flag floated over a Republic without a master and without a slave.

And then was asked the question: "Will a free, people tax themselves to
pay a Nation's debt?"

The soldiers went home to their waiting wives, to their glad children,
and to the girls they loved--they went back-to the fields, the shops,
and mines. They had not been demoralized. They had been ennobled.
They were as honest in peace as they had been brave in war. Mocking at
poverty, laughing at reverses, they made a friend of toil. They said:
"We saved the Nation's life, and what is life without honor?" They
worked and wrought with all of labor's royal sons that every pledge
the Nation gave might be redeemed. And their great leader, having put a
shining band of friendship--a girdle of clasped and happy hands--around
the globe, comes home and finds that every promise made in war has now
the ring and gleam of gold.

There is another question still:--Will all the wounds of war be healed?
I answer, Yes. The Southern people must submit,--not to the dictation of
the North, but to the Nation's will and to the verdict of mankind. They
were wrong, and the time will come when they will say that they are
victors who have been vanquished by the right. Freedom conquered them,
and freedom will cultivate their fields, educate their children, weave
for them the robes of wealth, execute their laws, and fill their land
with happy homes.

The soldiers of the Union saved the South as well as the North. They
made us a Nation. Their victory made us free and rendered tyranny in
every other land as insecure as snow upon volcanoes' lips.

And now let us drink to the volunteers--to those who sleep in unknown,
sunken graves, whose names are only in the hearts of those they loved
and left--of those who only hear in happy dreams the footsteps of
return. Let us drink to those who died where lipless famine mocked at
want; to all the maimed whose scars give modesty a tongue; to all who
dared and gave to chance the care and keeping of their lives; to all the
living and to all the dead,--to Sherman, to Sheridan, and to Grant, the
laureled soldier of the world, and last, to Lincoln, whose loving life,
like a bow of peace, spans and arches all the clouds of war.




THIRTEEN CLUB DINNER.

     * Response of Col. R. G. Ingersoll to the sentiment "The
     Superstitions of Public Men," at the regular monthly dinner
     of the Thirteen Club. Monday evening, December 18, 1886.

New York, December 13, 1886,


THE SUPERSTITIONS OF PUBLIC MEN,

MR. CHIEF RULER-AND GENTLEMEN: I suppose that the superstition most
prevalent with public men, is the idea that they are of great importance
to the public. As a matter of fact, public men,--that is to say, men in
office,--reflect the average intelligence of the people, and no more.
A public man, to be successful, must not assert anything unless it is
exceedingly popular. And he need not deny anything unless everybody is
against it. Usually he has to be like the center of the earth,--draw all
things his way, without weighing anything himself.

One of the difficulties, or rather, one of the objections, to a
government republican in form, is this: Everybody imagines that he is
everybody's: master. And the result has been to make most of our public
men exceedingly conservative in the expression of their real opinions.
A man, wishing to be elected to an office, generally agrees with 'most
everybody he meets. If he meets a Prohibitionist, he says: "Of course I
am a temperance man. I am opposed to all excesses; my dear friend,
and no one knows better than myself the evils that have been caused by
intemperance." The next man happens to keep a saloon, and happens to
be quite influential in that part of the district, and the candidate
immediately says to him:--"The idea that these Prohibitionists can take
away the personal liberty of the citizen is simply monstrous!" In a
moment after, he is greeted by a Methodist, and he hastens to say, that
while he does not belong to that church himself, his wife does; that he
would gladly be a member, but does not feel that he is good enough. He
tells a Presbyterian that his grandfather was of that faith, and that he
was a most excellent man, and laments from the bottom of his heart that
he himself is not within that fold. A few moments after, on meeting a
skeptic, he declares, with the greatest fervor, that reason is the only
guide, and that he looks forward to the time when superstition will be
dethroned. In other words, the greatest superstition now entertained by
public men is, that hypocrisy is the royal road to success.

Of course, there are many other superstitions, and one is, that the
Democratic party has not outlived its usefulness. Another is, that the
Republican party should have power for what it has done, instead of what
it proposes to do.

In my judgment, these statesmen are mistaken. The people of the United
States, after all, admire intellectual honesty and have respect for
moral courage. The time has come for the old ideas and superstitions in
politics to be thrown away--not in phrase, not in pretence, but in fact;
and the time has come when a man can safely rely on the intelligence and
courage of the American people.

The most significant fact in this world to-day, is, that in nearly every
village under the American flag the school-house is larger than the
church. People are beginning to have a little confidence in intelligence
and in facts. Every public man and every private man, who is actuated
in his life by a belief in something that no one can prove,--that no one
can demonstrate,--is, to that extent, a superstitious man.

It may be that I go further than most of you, because if I have any
superstition, it is a superstition against superstition. It seems to
me that the first things for every man, whether in or out of office, to
believe in,--the first things to rely on, are demonstrated facts.
These are the corner stones,--these are the columns that nothing can
move,--these are the stars that no darkness can hide,--these are the
true and only foundations of belief.

Beyond the truths that have been demonstrated is the horizon of the
Probable, and in the world of the Probable every man has the right to
guess for himself. Beyond the region of the Probable is the Possible,
and beyond the Possible is the Impossible, and beyond the Impossible are
the religions of this world. My idea is this: Any man who acts in
view of the Improbable or of the Impossible--that is to say of the
Supernatural--is a superstitious man. Any man who believes that he can
add to the happiness of the Infinite, by depriving himself of innocent
pleasure, is superstitious. Any man who imagines that he can make some
God happy, by making himself miserable, is superstitious. Any one who
thinks he can gain happiness in another world, by raising hell with his
fellow-men in this, is simply superstitious. Any man who believes in a
Being of infinite wisdom and goodness, and yet belives that that
Being has peopled a world with failures, is superstitious. Any man who
believes that an infinitely wise and good God would take pains to make
a man, intending at the time that the man should be eternally damned, is
absurdly superstitious. In other words, he who believes that there is,
or that there can be, any other religious duty than to increase the
happiness of mankind, in this world, now and here, is superstitious.

I have known a great many private men who were not men of genius. I
have known some men of genius about whom it was kept private, and I have
known many public men, and my wonder increased the better I knew them,
that they occupied positions of trust and honor.

But, after all, it is the people's fault. They who demand hypocrisy
must be satisfied with mediocrity... Our public men will be better and
greater, and less superstitious, when the people become greater and
better and less superstitious. There is an old story, that we have all
heard, about Senator Nesmith. He was elected a Senator from Oregon. When
he had been in Washington a little while, one of the other Senators said
to him: "How did you feel when you found yourself sitting here in the
United States Senate?" He replied: "For the first two months, I just
sat and wondered how a damned fool like me ever, broke into the Senate.
Since that, I have done nothing but wonder how the other fools got
here."

To-day the need of our civilization is public men who have the courage
to speak as they think. We need a man for President who will not
publicly thank God for earthquakes. We need somebody with the courage to
say that all that happens in nature happens without design, and without
reference to man; somebody who will say that the men and women killed
are not murdered by supernatural beings, and that everything that
happens in nature, happens without malice and without mercy. We want
somebody who will have courage enough not to charge, an infinitely good
and wise Being with all the cruelties and agonies and sufferings of this
world. We want such men in public places,--men who will appeal to the
reason of their fellows, to the highest intelligence of the people; men
who will have courage enough, in this the nineteenth century, to agree
with the conclusions of science. We want some man who will not
pretend to believe, and who does not in fact believe, the stories that
Superstition has told to Credulity.

The most important thing in this world is the destruction of
superstition. Superstition interferes with the happiness of mankind.
Superstition is a terrible serpent, reaching in frightful coils from
heaven to earth and thrusting its poisoned fangs into the hearts of men.
While I live, I am going to do what little I can for the destruction of
this monster. Whatever may happen in another world--and I will take my
chances there,--I am opposed to superstition in this. And if, when I
reach that other world, it needs reforming, I shall do what little I can
there for the destruction of the false.

Let me tell you one thing more, and I am done. The only way to have
brave, honest, intelligent, conscientious public men, men without
superstition, is to do what we can to make the average citizen brave,
conscientious and intelligent. If you wish to see courage in the
presidential chair, conscience upon the bench, intelligence of the
highest order in Congress; if you expect public men to be great enough
to reflect honor upon the Republic, private citizens must have the
courage and the intelligence to elect, and to sustain, such men. I have
said, and I say it again, that never while I live will I vote for any
man to be President of the United States, no matter if he does belong
to my party, who has not won his spurs on some field of intellectual
conflict. We have had enough mediocrity, enough policy, enough
superstition, enough prejudice, enough provincialism, and the time has
come for the American citizen to say: "Hereafter I will be represented
by men who are worthy, not only of the great Republic, but of the
Nineteenth Century."




ROBSON AND CRANE DINNER.

New York, November 21, 1887.

     * The theatre party and supper given by Charles P. Palmer,
     brother of Courtlandt Palmer, on Monday evening were
     unusually attractive in many ways. Mr Palmer has recently
     returned from Europe, and took this opportunity to gather
     around him his old club associates and friends, and to show
     his admiration of the acting of Messrs. Robson and Crane.
     The appearance of Mr. Palmer's fifty guests in the theatre
     excited much interest in all parts of the house. It is not
     often that theatre-goers have the opportunity of seeing in a
     single row, Channcey M. Depew, Gen. William T. Sherman, Gen.
     Horace Porter and Robert G. Ingersoll, with Leonard Jerome
     and his brother Lawrence, Murat Halstead and other well-
     known men in close proximity

     The supper table at Delmonico's was decorated with a lavish
     profusion of flowers rarely approached even at that famous
     restaurant.

     Mr. Palmer was a charming host, full of humor, jollity and
     attention to every guest. He opened the speaking with a few
     apt words. Then Stuart Rodson made some witty remarks, and
     called upon William H. Crane, whose well-rounded speech was
     heartily applauded General Sherman, Chauncey M. Depew,
     General Porter, Lawrence Jerome and Colonel Ingersoll were
     all in their best moods, and the sallies of wit and the
     abundance of genuine humor in their informal addresses kept
     their hearers in almost continuous laughter. Lawrence Jerome
     was in especially fine form. He sang songs, told stories and
     said: "Depew and Ingersoll know so much that intelligence
     has become a drag in the market, and it's no use to tell you
     what a good speech I would have made." J. Seaver Page made
     an uncommonly witty and effective speech. Murat Halstead
     related some reminiscences of his last European tour and of
     his experiences in London with Lawrence and Leonard Jerome,
     which were received with shouts of laughter. Altogether the
     supper was one to be long remembered by all present.--The
     Tribune, New York, November 23, 1887;


TOAST: COMEDY AND TRAGEDY.

I BELIEVE in the medicine of mirth, and in what I might call the
longevity of laughter. Every man who has caused real, true, honest
mirth, has been a benefactor of the human race. In a world like this,
where there is so much trouble--a world gotten up on such a poor
plan--where sometimes one is almost inclined to think that the Deity, if
there be one, played a practical joke--to find, I say, in such a world,
something that for the moment allows laughter to triumph over sorrow,
is a great piece of good fortune. I like the stage, not only because
General Sherman likes it--and I do not think I was ever at the theatre
in my life but I saw him--I not only like it because General Washington
liked it, but because the greatest man that ever touched this grain of
sand and tear we call the world, wrote for the stage, and poured out
a very Mississippi of philosophy and pathos and humor, and everything
calculated to raise and ennoble mankind.

I like to see the stage honored, because actors are the ministers, the
apostles, of the greatest man who ever lived, and because they put
flesh upon and blood and passion within the greatest characters that
the greatest man drew. This is the reason I like the stage. It makes us
human. A rascal never gained applause on the stage. A hypocrite never
commanded admiration, not even when he was acting a clergyman--except
for the naturalness of the acting. No one has ever yet seen any play
in which, in his heart, he did not applaud honesty, heroism, sincerity,
fidelity, courage, and self-denial. Never. No man ever heard a great
play who did not get up a better, wiser, and more humane man; and no man
ever went to the theatre and heard Robson and Crane, who did not go home
better-natured, and treat his family that night a little better than on
a night when he had not heard these actors.

I enjoy the stage; I always did enjoy it. I love the humanity of it. I
hate solemnity; it is the brother of stupidity--always. You never knew a
solemn man who was not stupid, and you never will. There never was a
man of true genius who had not the simplicity of a child, and over whose
lips had not rippled the river of laughter--never, and there never will
be. I like, I say, the stage for its wit and for its humor. I do not
like sarcasm; I do not like mean humor. There is as much difference
between humor and malicious wit as there is between a bee's honey and
a bee's sting, and the reason I like Robson and Crane is that they have
the honey without the sting.

Another thing that makes me glad is, that I live in an age and
generation and day that has sense enough to appreciate the stage; sense
enough to appreciate music; sense enough to appreciate everything
that lightens the burdens of this life. Only a few years ago our dear
ancestors looked upon the theatre as the vestibule of hell; and every
actor was going "the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." In those
good old days, our fathers, for the sake of relaxation, talked about
death and graves and epitaphs and worms and shrouds and dust and hell.
In those days, too, they despised music, cared nothing for art; and
yet I have lived long enough to hear the world--that is, the civilized
world--say that Shakespeare wrote the greatest book that man has ever
read. I have lived long enough to see men like Beethoven and Wagner put
side by side with the world's greatest men--great in imagination--and we
must remember that imagination makes the great difference between men.
I have lived long enough to see actors placed with the grandest and
noblest, side by side with the greatest benefactors of the human race.

There is one thing in which I cannot quite agree with what has been
said. I like tragedy, because tragedy is only the other side of the
shield and I like both sides. I love to spend an evening on the twilight
boundary line between tears and smiles. There is nothing that pleases me
better than some scene, some act, where the smile catches the tears
in the eyes; where the eyes are almost surprised by the smile, and the
smile touched and softened by the tears. I like that. And the greatest
comedians and the greatest tragedians have that power; and, in
conclusion, let me say, that it gives me more than pleasure to
acknowledge the debt of gratitude I owe, not only to the stage, but to
the actors whose health we drink to-night.




THE POLICE CAPTAINS' DINNER.

New York, January 24, 1888.


TOAST: DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES OF THE PRESS.

ONLY a little while ago, the nations of the world were ignorant and
provincial. Between these nations there were the walls and barriers of
language, of prejudice, of custom, of race and of religion. Each
little nation had the only perfect form of government--the only genuine
religion--all others being adulterations or counterfeits.

These nations met only as enemies. They had nothing to exchange but
blows--nothing to give and take but wounds.

Movable type was invented, and "civilization was thrust into the brain
of Europe on the point of a Moorish lance." The Moors gave to our
ancestors paper, and nearly all valuable inventions that were made for a
thousand years.

In a little while, books began to be printed--the nations began to
exchange thoughts instead of blows. The classics were translated. These
were read, and those who read them began to imitate them--began to write
themselves; and in this way there was produced in each nation a local
literature. There came to be an exchange of facts, of theories, of
ideas.

For many years this was accomplished by books, but after a time the
newspaper was invented, and the exchange increased.

Before this, every peasant thought his king the greatest being in the
world. He compared this king--his splendor, his palace--with the
peasant neighbor, with his rags and with his hut. All his thoughts were
provincial, all his knowledge confined to his own neighborhood--the
great world was to him an unknown land.

Long after papers were published, the circulation was small, the means
of intercommunication slow, painful, few and costly.

The same was true in our own country, and here, too, was in a great
degree, the provincialism of the Old World.

Finally, the means of intercommunication increased, and they became
plentiful and cheap.

Then the peasant found that he must compare his king with the kings
of other nations--the statesmen of his country with the statesmen of
others--and these comparisons were not always favorable to the men of
his own country.

This enlarged his knowledge and his vision, and the tendency of this was
to make him a citizen of the world.

Here in our own country, a little while ago, the citizen of each State
regarded his State as the best of all. To love that State more than all
others, was considered the highest evidence of patriotism.

The Press finally informed him of the condition of other States. He
found that other States were superior to his in many ways--in climate,
in production, in men, in invention, in commerce and in influence.
Slowly he transferred the love of State, the prejudice of locality--what
I call mud patriotism--to the Nation, and he became an American in the
best and highest sense.

This, then, is one of the greatest things to be accomplished by
the Press in America--namely, the unification of the country--the
destruction of provincialism, and the creation of a patriotism broad as
the territory covered by our flag.

The same ideas, the same events, the same news, are carried to millions
of homes every day. The result of this is to fix the attention of
all upon the same things, the same thoughts and theories, the same
facts--and the result is to get the best judgment of a nation.

This is a great and splendid object, but not the greatest.

In Europe the same thing is taking place. The nations are becoming
acquainted with each other. The old prejudices are dying out. The people
cf each nation are beginning to find that they are not the enemies of
any other. They are also beginning to suspect that where they have no
cause of quarrel, they should neither be called upon to fight, nor to
pay the expenses of war.

Another thing: The kings and statesmen no longer act as they
formerly did. Once they were responsible only to their poor and
wretched-subjects, whose obedience they compelled at the point of the
bayonet. Now a king knows, and his minister knows, that they must give
account for what they do to the civilized world. They know that kings
and rulers must be tried before the great bar of public opinion--a
public opinion that has been formed by the facts given to them in the
Press of the world. They do not wish to be condemned at that great bar.
They seek not only not to be condemned--not only to be acquitted--but
they seek to be crowned. They seek the applause, not simply of their own
nation, but of the civilized world.

There was for uncounted centuries a conflict between civilization and
barbarism. Barbarism was almost universal, civilization local. The torch
of progress was then held by feeble hands, and barbarism extinguished it
in the blood of its founders. But civilizations arose, and kept rising,
one after another, until now the great Republic holds and is able to
hold that torch against a hostile world.

By its invention, by its weapons of war, by its intelligence,
civilization became capable of protecting itself, and there came a time
when in the struggle between civilization and barbarism the world passed
midnight.

Then came another struggle,--the struggle between the people and their
rulers.

Most peoples sacrificed their liberty through gratitude to some great
soldier who rescued them from the arms of the barbarian. But there came
a time when the people said: "We have a right to govern ourselves." And
that conflict has been waged for centuries.

And I say, protected and corroborated by the flag of the greatest of all
Republics, that in that conflict the world has passed midnight.

Despotisms were softened by parliaments, by congresses--but at last the
world is beginning to say: "The right to govern rests upon the consent
of the governed. The power comes from the people--not from kings. It
belongs to man, and should be exercised by man."

In this conflict we have passed midnight. The world is destined to be
republican. Those who obey the laws will make the laws.

Our country--the United States--the great Republic--owns the fairest
portion of half the world. We have now sixty millions of free people.
Look upon the map of our country. Look upon the great valley of the
Mississippi--stretching from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. See the
great basin drained by that mighty river. There you will see a territory
large enough to feed and clothe and educate five hundred millions of
human beings.

This country is destined to remain as one. The Mississippi River is
Nature's protest against secession and against division.

We call that nation civilized when its subjects submit their differences
of opinion, in accordance with the forms of law, to fellow-citizens who
are disinterested and who accept the decision as final.

The nations, however, sustain no such relation to each other. Each
nation concludes for itself. Each nation defines its rights and its
obligations; and nations will not be civilized in respect of their
relations to each other, until there shall have been established a
National Court to decide differences between nations, to the judgment of
which all shall bow.

It is for the Press--the Press that photographs the human activities
of every day--the Press that gives the news of the world to each
individual--to bend its mighty energies to the unification and the
civilization of mankind; to the destruction of provincialism, of
prejudice--to the extirpation of ignorance and to the creation of a
great and splendid patriotism that embraces the human race.

The Press presents the daily thoughts of men. It marks the progress
of each hour, and renders a relapse into ignorance and barbarism
impossible. No catastrophe can be great enough, no ruin wide-spread
enough, to engulf or blot out the wisdom of the world.

Feeling that it is called to this high destiny, the Press should appeal
only to the highest and to the noblest in the human heart.

It should not be the bat of suspicion, a raven, hoarse with croaking
disaster, a chattering jay of gossip, or a vampire fattening on the
reputations of men.

It should remain the eagle, rising and soaring high in the cloudless
blue, above all mean and sordid things, and grasping only the bolts and
arrows of justice.

Let the Press have the courage always to defend the right, always
to defend the people--and let it always have the power to clutch and
strangle any combination of men, however intellectual or cunning or
rich, that feeds and fattens on the flesh and blood of honest men.

In a little while, under our flag there will be five hundred millions
of people. The great Republic will then dictate to the world--that is to
say, it will succor the oppressed--it will see that justice is done--it
will say to the great nations that wish to trample upon the weak: "You
must not--you shall not--strike." It will be obeyed.

All I ask is--all I hope is--that the Press will always be worthy of the
great Republic.




GENERAL GRANT'S BIRTHDAY DINNER

New York, April 27, 1888.


     * The tribute at Delmonico's last night was to the man
     Grant as a supreme type of the confidence of the American
     Republic in its own strength and destiny. Soldiers over
     whose lost cause the wheels of a thousand cannons rolled,
     and whose doctrines were ground to dust under the heels of
     conquering legions, poured out their souls at the feet of
     the great commander. Magnanimity, mercy, faith--these were
     the themes of every orator. Christian and Infidel, blue and
     gray, Republican and Democrat talked of Grant almost as men
     have come to talk of Washington.

     And, alas! In the midst of it all, with its soft glow of
     lights, its sweet breath of flowers, its throb of music and
     bewildering radiance of banners,  there was a vacant chair.
     Upon it hung a wreath of green, tied with a knot of white
     ribbon. Soldier and statesman and orator walked past that
     chair and seemed to reverence it. It was the seat intended
     for the trumpet tongued advocate of Grant in war, Grant in
     victory, Grant in peace, Grant in adversity--the seat of
     Roscoe Conkling. A little later and a clergyman jostled into
     the vacant chair and brushed the green circlet to the floor.

     Gray and grim old General Sherman presided. About the nine
     round, flower heaped tables were grouped the long list of
     distinguisned men from every walk or life and from every
     section of the country.

     Among the speakers was Ex-Minister Edwards Pierrepont who
     was one of Grant's cabinet and who made a long speech, part
     of which was devoted to explaining the court etiquette of
     dukes and earls and ministers in England, and how an ex-
     President of the United States ranks in Europe when an
     American Minister helps him out. The rest of the speech
     seemed to be an attempt to get up a presidential boom for
     the Prince of Wales.

     When Mr. Pierrepont sat down, General Sherman explained that
     Col. Robert Ingersoll did not want to speak, but a group of
     gentlemen lifted the orator up and carried him forward by
     main force.--New York Herald, April 28,1888.


TOAST: GENERAL GRANT

GEN. SHERMAN and Gentlemen: I firmly believe that any nation great
enough to produce and appreciate a great and splendid man is great
enough to keep his memory green. No man admires more than I do men who
have struggled and fought for what they believed to be right. I admire
General Grant, as well as every soldier who fought in the ranks of the
Union,--not simply because they were fighters, not simply because they
were willing to march to the mouth of the guns, but because they fought
for the greatest cause that can be expressed in human language--the
liberty of man. And to-night while General Mahone was speaking, I could
not but think that the North was just as responsible for the war as the
South. The South upheld and maintained what is known as human slavery,
and the North did the same; and do you know, I have always found in my
heart a greater excuse for the man who held the slave, and lived on his
labor, and profited by the rascality, than I did for a Northern man that
went into partnership with him with a distinct understanding that he was
to have none of the profits and half of the disgrace. So I say, that,
in a larger sense--that is, when we view the question from a philosophic
height--the North was as responsible as the South; and when I remember
that in this very city, _in this very city_, men were mobbed simply for
advocating the abolition of slavery, I cannot find it in my heart to lay
a greater blame upon the South than upon the North. If this had been a
war of conquest, a war simply for national aggrandizement, then I should
not place General Grant side by side with or in advance of the greatest
commanders of the world. But when I remember that every blow was to
break a chain, when I remember that the white man was to be civilized
at the same time the black man was made free, when I remember that this
country was to be made absolutely free, and the flag left without a
stain, then I say that the great General who commanded the greatest army
ever marshaled in the defence of human rights, stands at the head of the
commanders of this world.

There is one other idea,--and it was touched upon and beautifully
illustrated by Mr. Depew. I do not believe that a more merciful general
than Grant ever drew his sword. All greatness is merciful. All greatness
longs to forgive. All true grandeur and nobility is capable of shedding
the divine tear of pity.

Let me say one more word in that direction. The man in the wrong
defeated, and who sees the justice of his defeat, is a victor; and in
this view--and I say it understanding my words fully--the South was as
victorious as the North.

No man, in my judgment, is more willing to do justice to all parts
of this country than I; but, after all, I have a little sentiment--a
little. I admire great and splendid deeds, the dramatic effect of great
victories; but even more than that I admire that "touch of nature which
makes the whole world kin." I know the names of Grant's victories. I
know that they shine like stars in the heaven of his fame. I know them
all. But there is one thing in the history of that great soldier that
touched me nearer and more deeply than any victory he ever won, and that
is this: When about to die, he insisted that his dust should be laid in
no spot where his wife, when she sleeps in death, could not lie by his
side. That tribute to the great and splendid institution that rises
above all others, the institution of the family, touched me even more
than the glories won upon the fields of war.

And now let me say, General Sherman, as the years go by, in America, as
long as her people are great, as long as her people are free, as long
as they admire patriotism and courage, as long as they admire deeds of
self-denial, as long as they can remember the sacred blood shed for
the good of the whole nation, the birthday of General Grant will be
celebrated. And allow me to say, gentlemen, that there is another with
us to-night whose birthday will be celebrated. Americans of the future,
when they read the history of General Sherman, will feel the throb and
thrill that all men feel in the presence of the patriotic and heroic.

One word more--when General Grant went to England, when he sat down
at the table with the Ministers of her Britannic Majesty, he conferred
honor upon them. There is one change I wish to see in the diplomatic
service--and I want the example to be set by the great Republic--I want
precedence given here in Washington to the representatives of Republics.
Let us have some backbone ourselves. Let the representatives of
Republics come first and the ambassadors of despots come in next day. In
other words, let America be proud of American institutions, proud of a
Government by the people. We at last have a history, we at last are a
civilized people, and on the pages of our annals are found as glorious
names as have been written in any language.




LOTOS CLUB DINNER, TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY.

New York, March 22, 1890.

YOU have talked so much of old age and gray hairs and thin locks,
so much about the past, that I feel sad. Now, I want to destroy the
impression that baldness is a sign of age. The very youngest people I
ever saw were bald.

Sometimes I think, and especially when I am at a meeting where they
have what they call reminiscences, that a world with death in it is a
mistake. What would you think of a man who built a railroad, knowing
that every passenger was to be killed--knowing that there was no escape?
What would you think of the cheerfulness of the passengers if every one
knew that at some station, the name of which had not been called out,
there was a hearse waiting for him; backed up there, horses fighting
flies, driver whistling, waiting for you? Is it not wonderful that the
passengers on that train really enjoy themselves? Is it not magnificent
that every one of them, under perpetual sentence of death, after all,
can dimple their cheeks with laughter; that we, every one doomed to
become dust, can yet meet around this table as full of joy as spring is
full of life, as full of hope as the heavens are full of stars?

I tell you we have got a good deal of pluck.

And yet, after all, what would this world be without death? It may be
from the fact that we are all victims, from the fact that we are all
bound by common fate; it may be that friendship and love are born of
that fact; but Whatever the fact is, I am perfectly satisfied that
the highest possible philosophy is to enjoy to-day, not regretting
yesterday, and not fearing to-morrow. So, let us suck this orange of
life dry, so that when death does come, we can politely say to him, "You
are welcome to the peelings. What little there was we have enjoyed."

But there is one splendid thing about the play called Life. Suppose that
when you die, that is the end. The last thing that you will know is
that you are alive, and the last thing that will happen to you is the
curtain, not falling, but the curtain rising on another thought, so
that as far as your consciousness is concerned you will and must live
forever. No man can remember when he commenced, and no man can remember
when he ends. As far as we are concerned we live both eternities,
the one past and the one to come, and it is a delight to me to feel
satisfied, and to feel in my own heart, that I can never be certain that
I have seen the faces I love for the last time.

When I am at such a gathering as this, I almost wish I had had the
making of the world. What a world I would have made! In that world
unhappiness would have been the only sin; melancholy the only crime;
joy the only virtue. And whether there is another world, nobody knows.
Nobody can affirm it; nobody can deny it. Nobody can collect tolls from
me, claiming that he owns a turnpike, and nobody can certainly say that
the crooked path that I follow, beside which many roses are growing,
does not lead to that place. He doesn't know. But if there is such a
place, I hope that all good fellows will be welcome.




MANHATTAN ATHLETIC CLUB DINNER.

New York, December 27, 1890.


TOAST: ATHLETICS AMONG THE ANCIENTS.

THE first record of public games is found in the twentythird Book of the
Iliad. These games were performed at the funeral of Patroclus, and there
were:

First. A chariot race, and the first prize was:

"A woman fair, well skilled in household care."

Second. There was a pugilistic encounter, and the first prize,
appropriately enough, was a mule.

It gave me great pleasure to find that Homer did not hold in high esteem
the victor. I have reached this conclusion, because the poet put these
words in the mouth of Eppius, the great boxer winding up with the
following refined declaration concerning his opponent:

"I mean to pound his flesh and smash his bones."

After the battle, the defeated was helped from the field. He spit
forth clotted gore. His head rolled from side to side, until he fell
unconscious.

Third, wrestling; fourth, foot-race; fifth, fencing; sixth, throwing the
iron mass or bar; seventh, archery, and last, throwing the javelin.

All of these games were in honor of Patroclus. This is the same
Patroclus who, according to Shakespeare, addressed Achilles in these
words:

     "In the battle-field I claim no special praise;
     'Tis not for man in all things to excel--"

     "Rouse yourself, and the weak wanton Cupid
     Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
     And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,
     Be shook to air."

These games were all born of the instinct of self-defence. The chariot
was used in war. Man should know the use of his hands, to the end that
he may repel assault. He should know the use of the sword, to the end
that he may strike down his enemy. He should be skillful with the arrow,
to the same end. If overpowered, he seeks safety in flight--he should
therefore know how to run. So, too, he could preserve himself by the
skillful throwing of the javelin, and in the close encounter a knowledge
of wrestling might save his life.

Man has always been a fighting animal, and the art of self-defence is
nearly as important now as ever--and will be, until man rises to that
supreme height from which he will be able to see that no one can commit
a crime against another without injuring himself.

The Greeks knew that the body bears a certain relation to the soul--that
the better the body--other things being equal--the greater the
mind. They also knew that the body could be developed, and that such
development would give or add to the health, the courage, the endurance,
the self-confidence, the independence and the morality of the human
race. They knew, too, that health was the foundation, the corner-stone,
of happiness.

They knew that human beings should know something about themselves,
something of the capacities of body and mind, to the end that they might
ascertain the relation between conduct and happiness, between temperance
and health.

It is needless to say that the Greeks were the most intellectual of all
races, and that they were in love with beauty, with proportion, with the
splendor of the body and of mind; and so great was their admiration
for the harmoniously developed, that Sophocles had the honor of walking
naked at the head of a great procession.

The Greeks, through their love of physical and mental development, gave
us the statues--the most precious of all inanimate things--of far more
worth than all the diamonds and rubies and pearls that ever glittered in
crowns and tiaras, on altars or thrones, or, flashing, rose and fell on
woman's billowed breast. In these marbles we find the highest types of
life, of superb endeavor and supreme repose. In looking at them we feel
that blood flows, that hearts throb and souls aspire. These miracles of
art are the richest legacies the ancient world has left our race.

The nations in love with life, have games. To them existence is
exultation. They are fond of nature. They, seek the woods and streams.
They love the winds and waves of the sea. They enjoy the poem of the
day, the drama of the year.

Our Puritan fathers were oppressed with a sense of infinite
responsibility. They were disconsolate and sad, and no more thought
of sport, except the flogging of; Quakers, than shipwrecked wretches
huddled on a raft would turn their attention to amateur theatricals.

For many centuries the body was regarded as a decaying; casket, in
which had been placed the gem called the soul, and the nearer rotten the
casket the more brilliant the jewel.

In those blessed days, the diseased were sainted and insanity born
of fasting and self-denial and abuse of the body, was looked upon as
evidence of inspiration. Cleanliness was not next to godliness--it
was the opposite; and in those days, what was known as "the odor of
sanctity" had a substantial foundation. Diseased bodies produced all
kinds of mental maladies. There is a direct relation between sickness
and superstition. Everybody knows that Calvinism was the child of
indigestion.

Spooks and phantoms hover about the undeveloped and diseased, as
vultures sail above the dead.

Our ancestors had the idea that they ought to be spiritual, and that
good health was inconsistent with the highest forms of piety. This
heresy crept into the minds even of secular writers, and the novelists
described their heroines as weak and languishing, pale as lilies, and in
the place of health's brave flag they put the hectic flush.

Weakness was interesting, and fainting captured the hearts of all.
Nothing was so attractive as a society belle with a drug-store
attachment.

People became ashamed of labor, and consequently, of the evidences
of labor. They avoided "sun-burnt mirth"--were proud of pallor, and
regarded small, white hands as proof that they had noble blood within
their veins. It was a joy to be too weak to work, too languishing to
labor.

The tide has turned. People are becoming sensible enough to desire
health, to admire physical development, symmetry of form, and we now
know that a race with little feet and hands has passed the climax and is
traveling toward the eternal night.

When the central force is strong, men and women are full of life to
the finger tips. When the fires burn low, they begin to shrivel at the
extremities--the hands and feet grow small, and the mental flame wavers
and wanes.

To be self-respecting we must be self-supporting.

Nobility is a question of character, not of birth.

Honor cannot be received as alms--it must be earned.

It is the brow that makes the wreath of glory green.

All exercise should be for the sake of development--that is to say, for
the sake of health, and for the sake of the mind--all to the end that
the person may become better, greater, more useful. The gymnast or the
athelete should seek for health as the student should seek for truth;
but when athletics degenerate into mere personal contests, they become
dangerous, because the contestants lose sight of health, as in the
excitement of debate the students prefer personal victory to the
ascertainment of truth.

There is another thing to be avoided by all athletic clubs, and that is,
anything that tends to brutalize, destroy or dull the finer feelings.
Nothing is more disgusting, more disgraceful, than pugilism--nothing
more demoralizing than an exhibition of strength united with ferocity,
and where the very body developed by exercise is mutilated and
disfigured.

Sports that can by no possibility give pleasure, except to the
unfeeling, the hardened and the really brainless, should be avoided.
No gentleman should countenance rabbit-coursing, fighting of dogs, the
shooting of pigeons, simply as an exhibition of skill.

All these things are calculated to demoralize and brutalize not only
the actors, but the lookers on. Such sports are savage, fit only to be
participated in and enjoyed by the cannibals of Central Africa or the
anthropoid apes.

Find what a man enjoys--what he laughs at--what he calls diversion--and
you know what he is. Think of a man calling himself civilized, who is in
raptures at a bull fight--who smiles when he sees the hounds pursue and
catch and tear in pieces the timid hare, and who roars with laughter
when he watches the pugilists pound each other's faces, closing each
other's eyes, breaking jaws and smashing noses. Such men are beneath
the animals they torture--on a level with the pugilists they applaud.
Gentlemen should hold such sports in unspeakable contempt. No man finds
pleasure in inflicting pain.

In every public school there should be a gymnasium.

It is useless to cram minds and deform bodies. Hands should be educated
as well as heads. All should be taught the sports and games that require
mind, muscle, nerve and judgment.

Even those who labor should take exercise, to the end that the whole
body may be developed. Those who work at one employment become deformed.
Proportion is lost. But where harmony is preserved by the proper
exercise, even old age is beautiful.

To the well developed, to the strong, life seems rich, obstacles small,
and success easy. They laugh at cold and storm. Whatever the season may
be their hearts are filled with summer.

Millions go from the cradle to the coffin without knowing what it is
to live. They simply succeed in postponing death. Without appetites,
without passions, without struggle, they slowly rot in a waveless pool.
They never know the glory of success, the rapture of the fight.

To become effeminate is to invite misery. In the most delicate bodies
may be found the most degraded souls. It was the Duchess Josiane whose
pampered flesh became so sensitive that she thought of hell as a place
where people were compelled to sleep between coarse sheets.

We need the open air--we need the experience of heat and cold. We need
not only the rewards and caresses, but the discipline of our mother
Nature. Life is not all sunshine, neither is it all storm, but man
should be enabled to enjoy the one and to withstand the other.

I believe in the religion of the body--of physical development--in
devotional exercise--in the beatitudes of cheerfulness, good health,
good food, good clothes, comradeship, generosity, and above all, in
happiness. I believe in salvation here and now. Salvation from deformity
and disease--from weakness and pain--from ennui and insanity. I believe
in heaven here and now--the heaven of health and good digestion--of
strength and long life--of usefulness and joy. I believe in the builders
and defenders of homes.

The gentlemen whom we honor to-night have done a great work. To their
energy we are indebted for the nearest perfect, for the grandest
athletic clubhouse in the world. Let these clubs multiply. Let the
example be followed, until our country is filled with physical and
intellectual athletes--superb fathers, perfect mothers, and every child
an heir to health and joy.




THE LIEDERKRANZ CLUB, SEIDL-STANTON BANQUET.

New York, April 2, 1891


TOAST: MUSIC, NOBLEST OF THE ARTS.

IT is probable that I was selected to speak about music, because, not
knowing one note from another, I have no prejudice on the subject.

All I can say is, that I know what I like, and, to tell the truth, I
like every kind, enjoy it all, from the hand organ to the orchestra.

Knowing nothing of the science of music, I am not always looking for
defects, or listening for discords. As the young robin cheerfully
swallows whatever comes, I hear with gladness all that is played.

Music has been, I suppose, a gradual growth, subject to the law
of evolution; as nearly everything, with the possible exception of
theology, has been and is under this law.

Music may be divided into three kinds: First, the music of simple time,
without any particular emphasis--and this may be called the music of
the heels; second, music in which time is varied, in which there is
the eager haste and the delicious delay, that is, the fast and slow, in
accordance with our feelings, with our emotions--and this may be
called the music of the heart; third, the music that includes time and
emphasis, the hastening and the delay, and something in addition, that
produces not only states of feeling, but states of thought. This may be
called the music of the head,--the music of the brain.

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language. It was below and
before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. Beneath the waves
is the sea--above the clouds is the sky.

Before man found a name for any thought, or thing, he had hopes and
fears and passions, and these were rudely expressed in tones.

Of one thing, however, I am certain, and that is, that Music was born of
Love. Had there never been any human affection, there never could have
been uttered a strain of music. Possibly some mother, looking in the
eyes of her babe, gave the first melody to the enraptured air.

Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we
feel; and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are
translated into music. Music is the sunshine--the climate--of the soul,
and it floods the heart with a perfect June.

I am also satisfied that the greatest music is the most marvelous
mingling of Love and Death. Love is the greatest of all passions, and
Death is its shadow. Death gets all its terror from Love, and Love
gets its intensity, its radiance, its glory and its rapture, from the
darkness of Death. Love is a flower that grows on the edge of the grave.

The old music, for the most part, expresses emotion, or feeling-,
through time and emphasis, and what is known as melody. Most of the
old operas consist of a few melodies connected by unmeaning recitative.
There should be no unmeaning music. It is as though a writer should
suddenly leave his subject and write a paragraph consisting of nothing
but a repetition of one word like "the," "the," "the," or "if," "if."
"if," varying the repetition of these words, but without meaning,--and
then resume the subject of his article.

I am not saying that great music was not produced before Wagner, but
I am simply endeavoring to show-the steps that have been taken. It was
necessary that all the music should have been written, in order that the
greatest might be produced. The same is true of the drama, Thousands
and thousands prepared the way for the supreme dramatist, as millions
prepared the way for the supreme composer.

When I read Shakespeare, I am astonished that he has expressed so much
with common words, to which he gives new meaning; and so when I hear
Wagner, I exclaim: Is it possible that all this is done with common air?

In Wagner's music there is a touch of chaos that suggests the infinite.
The melodies seem strange and changing forms, like summer clouds, and
weird harmonies come like sounds from the sea brought by fitful winds,
and others moan like waves on desolate shores, and mingled with these,
are shouts of joy, with sighs and sobs and ripples of laughter, and the
wondrous voices of eternal love.

Wagner is the Shakespeare of Music.

The funeral march for Siegfried is the funeral music for all the dead;
Should all the gods die, this music would be perfectly appropriate. It
is elemental, universal, eternal.

The love-music in Tristan and Isolde is, like Romeo and Juliet, an
expression of the human heart for all time. So the love-duet in The
Flying Dutchman has in it the consecration, the infinite self-denial,
of love. The whole heart is given; every note has wings, and rises and
poises like an eagle in the heaven of sound.

When I listen to the music of Wagner, I see pictures, forms, glimpses of
the perfect, the swell of a hip, the wave of a breast, the glance of
an eye. I am in the midst of great galleries. Before me are passing,
the endless panoramas. I see vast landscapes with valleys of verdure
and vine, with soaring crags, snow-crowned. I am on the wide seas, where
countless billows burst into the white caps of joy. I am in the depths
of caverns roofed with mighty crags, while through some rent I see the
eternal stars. In a moment the music, becomes a river of melody, flowing
through some wondrous land; suddenly it falls in strange chasms, and the
mighty cataract is changed to seven-hued foam. .

Great music is always sad, because it tells us of the perfect; and such
is the difference between what we are and that which music suggests,
that even in the vase of joy we find some tears.

The music of Wagner has color, and when I hear the violins, the morning
seems to slowly come. A horn puts a star above the horizon. The night,
in the purple hum of the bass, wanders away like some enormous bee
across wide fields of dead clover. The light grows whiter as the
violins increase. Colors come from other instruments, and then the full
orchestra floods the world with day.

Wagner seems not only to have given us new tones, new combinations, but
the moment the orchestra begins to play his music, all the instruments
are transfigured. They seem to utter the sounds that they have been
longing to utter. The horns run riot; the drums and cymbals join in
the general joy; the old bass viols are alive with passion; the 'cellos
throb with love; the violins are seized with a divine fury, and the
notes rush out as eager for the air as pardoned prisoners for the roads
and fields.

The music of Wagner is filled with landscapes. There are some strains,
like midnight, thick with constellations, and there are harmonies like
islands in the far seas, and others like palms on the desert's edge. His
music satisfies the heart and brain. It is not only for memory; not only
for the present, but for prophecy.

Wagner was a sculptor, a painter, in sound. When he died, the greatest
fountain of melody that ever enchanted the world, ceased. His music will
instruct and refine forever.

All that I know about the operas of Wagner I have learned from Anton
Seidl. I believe that he is the noblest, tenderest and the most artistic
interpreter of the great composer that has ever lived.




THE FRANK B. CARPENTER DINNER.

New York, December 1, 1891

     * There was a notable gathering of leading artists, authors,
     scientists, journalists, lawyer, clergymen and other
     professional men at Sherry's last evening. The occasion was
     a dinner tendered to Mr. F. B. Carpenter, the famous
     portrait and portrait group artist, by his immediate friends
     to celebrate the completion of his new historical painting,
     entitled "International Arbitration," which is to be sent to
     Queen Victoria next week as the gift of a wealthy American
     lady. No such tribute has ever been paid before to an artist
     of-this country. Let us hope that the extraordinary
     attention thus paid to Mr. Carpenter will give our "English
     cousins" some idea of how he is prized and his work indorsed
     at home. The dinner to Mr. Carpenter was a great success--
     most enjoyable in every way. The table was laid in the form
     ol a horse shoe with a train of smilax, and sweet flowers
     extending the entire length of the table, amid pots of
     chrysanthemums and roses. Ex-Minister Andrew D White
     presided in the absence of John Russell

     Young..........Mr. White said: "During the entire course of
     these proceedings we have been endeavoring to find a
     representative of the great Fourth Estate who would present
     its claims in relation to arbitration on this occasion.
     There are present men whose names are household words in
     connection with the press throughout this land. There is
     certainly one distinguished as orator: there is another
     distinguished as a scholar. But they prefer to be silent. We
     will therefore consider that the toast of 'The Press in
     Connection with War and Peace' has been duly honored
     although it has not been responded to, and now there is one
     subject which I think you will consider as coming strangely
     at this late hour. It is a renewal of the subject with which
     we began, and I am to ask to speak to it a man who is
     admired and feared throughout the country. At one moment he
     smashes the most cherished convictions of the country, and
     at another he raises our highest aspirations for the future
     of humanity.

     "It happened several years ago that I was crossing the
     Atlantic, and when I had sufficiently recovered from
     seasickness to sit out on the deck I came across Colonel
     Ingersoll, and of all subjects of discussion you can imagine
     we fell upon the subject of art, and we went at it hot and
     heavy. So I said to him to-night that I had a rod in pickle
     for him and that he was not to know anything about it until
     it was displayed.

     "I now call upon him to talk to us about art, and if he
     talks now as he talked on the deck of the steamer I do not
     know whether it would clear the room, but it would make a
     sensation in this State and country. I have great pleasure
     in announcing Colonel Ingersoll, to speak on the subject of
     art--or on any other subject, for no matter upon what he
     speaks his words are always welcome."

     New York Press, December 2, 1891.


TOAST: ART.

I PRESUME I take about as much interest in what that picture represents
as anybody else. I believe that it has been said this evening that the
world will never be civilized so long as differences between nations
are settled by gun or cannon or sword. Barbarians still settle their
personal differences with clubs or arms, and finally, when they agree
to submit their differences to their peers, to a court, we call them
civilized. Now, nations sustain the same relations to each other that
barbarians sustain; that is, they settle their differences by force;
each nation being the judge of the righteousness of its cause, and its
judgment depending entirely--or for the most part--on its strength; and
the strongest nation is the nearest right. Now, until nations submit
their differences to an international court--a court with the power to
carry its judgment into effect by having the armies and navies of all
the rest of the world pledged to support it--the world will not be
civilized. Our differences will not be settled by arbitration until more
of the great nations set the example, and until that is done, I am in
favor of the United States being armed. Until that is done it will give
me joy to know that another magnificent man-of-war has been launched
upon our waters. And I will tell you why. Look again at that picture.
There is another face; it is not painted there, and yet without it
that picture would not have been painted, and that is the face of U.
S. Grant. The olive branch, to be of any force, to be of any beneficent
power, must be offered by the mailed hand. It must be offered by a
nation which has back of the olive branch the force. It cannot be
offered by weakness, because then it will excite only ridicule. The
powerful, the imperial, must offer that branch. Then it will be accepted
in the true spirit; otherwise not. So, until the world is a little more
civilized I am in favor of the largest guns that can be made and the
best navy that floats. I do not want any navy unless we have the best,
because if you have a poor one you will simply make a present of it to
the enemy as soon as war opens. We should be ready to defend ourselves
against the world. Not that I think there is going to be any war, but
because I think that is the best way to prevent it. Until the whole
world shall have entered into the same spirit as the artist when he
painted that picture, until that spirit becomes general we have got to
be prepared for war. And we cannot depend upon war suasion. If a fleet
of men-of-war should sail into our harbor, talk would not be of any
good; we must be ready to answer them in their own way.

I suppose I have been selected to speak on art because I can speak on
that subject without prejudice, knowing nothing about it. I have on this
subject no hobbies, no pet theories, and consequently will give you not
what I know, but what I think. I am an Agnostic in many things, and the
way I understand art is this: In the first place we are all invisible
to each other. There is something called soul; something that thinks and
hopes and loves. It is never seen. It occupies a world that we call the
brain, and is forever, so far as we know, invisible. Each soul lives in
a world of its own, and it endeavors to communicate with another soul
living in a world of its own, each invisible to the other, and it does
this in a variety of ways. That is the noblest art which expresses the
noblest thought, that gives to another the noblest emotions that this
unseen soul has. In order to do this we have to seize upon the seen, the
visible. In other words, nature is a vast dictionary that we use simply
to convey from one invisible world to another what happens in our
invisible world. The man that lives in the greatest world and succeeds
in letting other worlds know what happens in his world, is the greatest
artist.

I believe that all arts have the same father and the same mother, and no
matter whether you express what happens in these unseen worlds in mere
words--because nearly all pictures have been made with words--or whether
you express it in marble, or form and color in what we call painting, it
is to carry on that commerce between these invisible worlds, and he is
the greatest artist who expresses the tenderest, noblest thoughts to
the unseen worlds about him. So that all art consists in this commerce,
every soul being an artist and every brain that is worth talking about
being an art gallery, and there is no gallery in this world, not in the
Vatican or the Louvre or any other place, comparable with the gallery
in every great brain. The millions of pictures that are in every
brain to-night; the landscapes, the faces, the groups, the millions of
millions of millions of things that are now living here in every brain,
all unseen, all invisible forever! Yet we communicate with each other by
showing each other these pictures, these studies, and by inviting others
into our galleries and showing them what we have, and the greatest
artist is he who has the most pictures to show to other artists.

I love anything in art that suggests the tender, the beautiful. What is
beauty? Of course there is no absolute beauty. All beauty is relative.
Probably the most beautiful thing to a frog is the speckled belly of
another frog, or to a snake the markings of another snake. So there
is no such thing as absolute beauty. But what I call beauty is what
suggests to me the highest and the tenderest thought; something that
answers to something in my world. So every work of art has to be born in
some brain, and it must be made by the unseen artist we call the soul.
Now, if a man simply copies what he sees, he is nothing but a copyist.
That does not require genius. That requires industry and the habit of
observation. But it is not genius; it is not art. Those little daubs and
shreds and patches we get by copying, are pieces of iron that need to be
put into the flame of genius to be molten and then cast in noble forms;
otherwise there is no genius.

The great picture should have, not only the technical part of art, which
is neither moral nor immoral, but in addition some great thought, some
great event. It should contain not only a history but a prophecy. There
should be in it soul, feeling, thought I love those little pictures of
the home, of the fireside, of the old lady, boiling the kettle, the
vine running over the cottage door, scenes suggesting to me happiness,
contentment. I think more of them than of the great war pieces, and I
hope I shall have a few years in some such scenes, during which I shall
not care what time it is, what day of the week or month it is. Just that
feeling of content when it is enough to live, to breathe, to have the
blue sky above you and to hear the music of the water. All art that
gives us that content, that delight, enriches this world and makes life
better and holier.

That, in a general kind of way, as I said before, is my idea of art, and
I hope that the artists of America--and they ought to be as good here as
in any place on earth--will grow day by day and year by year independent
of all other art in the world, and be true to the American or republican
spirit always. As to this picture, it is representative, it is American.
There is one word Mr. Daniel Dougherty said to which I would like to
refer. I have never said very much in my life in defence of England, at
the same time I have never blamed England for being against us during
our war, and I will tell you why. We had been a nation of hypocrites. We
pretended to be in favor of liberty and yet we had four or five millions
of our people enslaved. That was a very awkward position. We had
bloodhounds to hunt human beings and the apostles setting them on; and
while this was going on these poor wretches sought and found liberty
on British soil. Now, why not be honest about it? We were rather a
contemptible people, though Mr. Dougherty thinks the English were wholly
at fault. But England abolished the slave-trade in 1803; she abolished
slavery in her colonies in 1833. We were lagging behind. That is all
there is about it. No matter why, we put ourselves in the position of
pretending to be a free people while we had millions of slaves, and it
was only natural that England should dislike it.

I think the chairman said that there had been no great historic picture
of the signing of the Constitution. There never should be, never! It was
fit, it was proper, to have a picture of the signing of the Declaration
of Independence. That was an honest document. Our people wanted to give
a good reason for fighting Great Britain, and in order to do that they
had to dig down to the bed-rock of human rights, and then they said all
men are created equal. But just as soon as we got our independence
we made a Constitution that gave the lie to the Declaration of
Independence, and that is why the signing of the Constitution never
ought to be painted. We put in that Constitution a clause that the
slave-trade should not be interfered with for years, and another clause
that this entire Government was pledged to hand back to slavery any poor
woman with a child at her breast, seeking freedom by flight. It was a
very poor document. A little while ago they celebrated the one hundredth
anniversary of that business and talked about the Constitution being
such a wonderful thing; yet what was in that Constitution brought on the
most terrible civil war ever known, and during that war they said: "Give
us the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was." And I said then:
"Curse the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was. Don't talk
to me about fighting for a Constitution that has brought on a war like
this; let us make a new one." No, I am in favor of a painting that
would celebrate the adoption of the amendment to the Constitution that
declares that there shall be no more slavery on this soil.

I believe that we are getting a little more free every day--a little
more sensible all the time. A few years ago a woman in Germany made a
speech, in which she asked: "Why should the German mother in pain and
agony give birth to a child and rear that child through industry and
poverty, and teach him that when he arrives at the age of twenty-one it
will be his duty to kill the child of the French mother? And why should
the French mother teach her son, that it will be his duty sometime to
kill the child of the German mother?" There is more sense in that than
in all the diplomacy I ever read, and I think the time is coming when
that question will be asked by every mother--Why should she raise a
child to kill the child of another mother?

The time is coming when we will do away with all this. Man has been
taught that he ought to fight for the country where he was born; no
matter about that country being wrong, whether it supported him or not,
whether it enslaved him and trampled on every right he had, still it was
his duty to march up in support of that country. The time will come when
the man will make up his mind himself whether the country is worth
while fighting for, and he is the greatest patriot who seeks to make
his country worth fighting for, and not he who says, I am for it anyhow,
whether it is right or not. These patriots will be the force Mr. George
was speaking about. If war between this country and Great Britain were
declared, and there were men in both countries sufficient to take a
right view of it, that would be the end of war. The thing would be
settled by arbitration--settled by some court--and no one would dream of
rushing to the field of battle. So, that is my hope for the world; more
policy, more good, solid, sound sense and less mud patriotism.

I think that this country is going to grow. I think it will take in Mr.
Wiman's country. I do not mean that we are going to take any country.
I mean that they are going to come to us. I do not believe in conquest.
Canada will come just as soon as it is to her interest to come, and I
think she will come or be a great country to herself. I do not believe
in those people, intelligent as they are, sending three thousand miles
for information they have at home. I do not believe in their being
governed by anybody except themselves. So if they come we shall be glad
to have them, if they don't want to come I don't want them.

Yes, we are growing. I don't know how many millions of people we have
now, probably over sixty-two if they all get counted; and they are still
coming. I expect to live to see one hundred millions here. I know some
say that we are getting too many foreigners, but I say the more that
come the better. We have got to have somebody to take the places of the
sons of our rich people. So I say let them come. There is plenty of land
here, everywhere. I say to the people of every country, come; do your
work here, and we will protect you against other countries. We will give
you all the work to supply yourselves and your neighbors.

Then if we have differences with another country we shall have a strong
navy, big ships, big guns, magnificent men and plenty of them, and if we
put out the hand of fellowship and friendship they will know there is
no foolishness about it. They will know we are not asking any favor. We
will just say: We want peace, and we tell you over the glistening leaves
of this olive branch that if you don't compromise we will mop the earth
with you.

That is the sort of arbitration I believe in, and it is the only sort,
in my judgment, that will be effectual for all time. And I hope that we
may still grow, and grow more and more artistic, and more and more
in favor of peace, and I pray that we may finally arrive at being
absolutely worthy of having presented that picture, with all that it
implies, to the most warlike nation in the world--to the nation that
first sends the gospel and then the musket immediately after, and says:
You have got to be civilized, and the only evidence of civilization that
you can give is to buy our goods and to buy them now, and to pay for
them. I wish us to be worthy of the picture presented to such a nation,
and my prayer is that America may be worthy to have sent such a token
in such a spirit, and my second prayer is that England may be worthy
to receive it and to keep it, and that she may receive it in the same
spirit that it is sent.

I am glad that it is to be sent by a woman. The gentleman who spoke to
the toast, "Woman as a Peacemaker," seemed to believe that woman brought
all the sorrows that ever happened, not only of war, but troubles of
every kind. I want to say to him that I would rather live with the woman
I love in a world of war, in a world full of troubles and sorrows,
than to live in heaven with nobody but men. I believe that woman is a
peacemaker, and so I am glad that a woman presents this token to another
woman; and woman is a far higher title than queen, in my judgment; far
higher. There are no higher titles than woman, mother, wife, sister, and
when they come to calling them countesses and duchesses and queens, that
is all rot. That adds nothing to that unseen artist who inhabits the
world called the brain. That unseen artist is great by nature and cannot
be made greater by the addition of titles. And so one woman gives to
another woman the picture that prophesies war is finally to cease,
and the civilized nations of the world will henceforth arbitrate their
differences and no longer strew the plains with corpses of brethren.
That is the supreme lesson that is taught by this picture, and I
congratulate Mr. Carpenter that his name is associated with it and
also with the "Proclamation of Emancipation." In the latter work he has
associated his name with that of Lincoln, which is the greatest name
in history, and the gentlest memory in this world. Mr. Carpenter has
associated his name with that and with this and with that of General
Grant, for I say that this picture would never have been possible had
there not been behind it Grant; if there had not been behind it the
victorious armies of the North and the great armies of the South, that
would have united instantly to repel any foreign foe.




UNITARIAN CLUB DINNER.

New York, January 15,1892.


TOAST: THE IDEAL.

MR. PRESIDENT, Ladies and Gentlemen: In the first place, I wish to
tender my thanks to this club for having generosity and sense enough to
invite me to speak this evening. It is probably the best thing the club
has ever done. You have shown that you are not afraid of a man simply
because he does not happen to agree entirely with you, although in a
very general way it may be said that I come within one of you.

So I think, not only that you have honored me--that, I most cheerfully
and gratefully admit--but, upon my word, I think that you have honored
yourselves. And imagine the distance the religious world has traveled
in the last few years to make a thing of this kind possible! You know--I
presume every one of you knows--that I have no religion--not enough to
last a minute--none whatever--that is, in the ordinary sense of that
word. And yet you have become so nearly civilized that you are willing
to hear what I have to say; and I have become so nearly civilized that I
am willing to say what I think.

And, in the second place, let me say that I have great respect for
the Unitarian Church. I have great respect for the memory of Theodore
Parker. I have great respect for every man who has assisted in reaving
the heavens of an infinite monster. I have great respect for every man
who has helped to put out the fires of hell. In other words, I have
great respect for every man who has tried to civilize my race.

The Unitarian Church has done more than any other church--and may be
more than all other churches--to substitute character for creed, and
to say that a man should be judged by his spirit; by the climate of his
heart; by the autumn of his generosity; by the spring of his hope; that
he should be judged by what he does; by the influence that he exerts,
rather than by the mythology he may believe. And whether there be one
God or a million, I am perfectly satisfied that every duty that devolves
upon me is within my reach; it is something that I can do myself,
without the help of anybody else, either in this world or any other.

Now, in order to make myself plain on this subject--I think I was to
speak about the Ideal--I want to thank the Unitarian Church for what
it has done; and I want to thank the Universalist Church, too. They at
least believe in a God who is a gentleman; and that is much more than
was ever done by an orthodox church. They believe, at least, in a
heavenly father who will leave the latch string out until the last
child gets home; and as that lets me in--especially in reference to the
"last"--I have great respect for that church.

But now I am coming to the Ideal; and in what I may say you may not all
agree. I hope you won't, because that would be to me evidence that I am
wrong. You cannot expect everybody to agree in the right, and I cannot
expect to be always in the right myself. I have to judge with the
standard called my reason, and I do not know whether it is right or
not; I will admit that. But as opposed to any other man's, I will bet
on mine. That is to say, for home use. In the first place, I think it
is said in some book--and if I am wrong there are plenty here to correct
me--that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." I think
a knowledge of the limitations of the human mind is the beginning of
wisdom, and, I may almost say, the end of it--really to understand
yourself.

Now, let me lay down this proposition. The imagination of man has the
horizon of experience; and beyond experience or nature man cannot
go, even in imagination. Man is not a creator. He combines; he adds
together; he divides; he subtracts; he does not create, even in the
world of imagination. Let me make myself a little plainer: Not one
here--not one in the wide, wide world can think of a color that he never
saw. No human being can imagine a sound that he has not heard, and
no one can think of a taste that he has not experienced. He can add
to--that is add together--combine; but he cannot, by any possibility,
create.

Man originally, we will say--go back to the age of barbarism, and you
will not have to go far; our own childhood, probably, is as far as is
necessary--but go back to what is called the age of savagery; every man
was an idealist, as every man is to-day an idealist. Every man in savage
or civilized time, commencing with the first that ever crawled out of
a cave and pushed the hair back from his forehead to look at the
sun--commence with him and end with Judge Wright--the last expression
on the God question--and from that cave to the soul that lives in this
temple, everyone has been an idealist and has endeavored to account in
some way for what he saw and for what he felt; in other words, for the
phenomena of nature. The easiest way to account for it by the rudest
savage, is the way it has been accounted for to-night. What makes the
river run? There's a god in it. What makes the tree grow? There's a god
in it. What makes the star shine? There's a god in it. What makes the
sun rise? Why, he is a god himself. And what makes the nightingale sing
until the air is faint with melody? There's a god in it.

They commenced making gods to account for everything that happens; gods
of dreams and gods of love and friendship, and heroism and courage.
Splendid! They kept making more and more. The more they found out in
nature, up to a certain point, the more gods they needed; and they kept
on making gods until almost every wave of the sea bore a god. Gods on
every mountain, and in every vale and field, and by every stream! Gods
in flowers, gods in grass; gods everywhere! All accounting for this
world and for what happened in this world.

Then, when they had got about to the top, when their ingenuity had been
exhausted, they had not produced anything, and they did not produce
anything beyond their own experience. We are told that they were
idolaters. That is a mistake, except in the sense that we are all
idolaters. They said, "Here is a god; let us express our idea of him.
He is stronger than a man; let us give him the body of a lion. He is
swifter than a man; let us give him the wings of an eagle. He is wiser
than a man"--and when a man was very savage he said, "let us give
him the head of a serpent;" a serpent is wonderfully wise; he travels
without feet; he climbs without claws; he lives without food, and he is
of the simplest conceivable form.

And that was simply to represent their idea of power, of swiftness, of
wisdom. And yet this impossible monster was simply made of what man had
seen in nature, and he put the various attributes or parts together
by his imagination. He created nothing. He simply took these parts of
certain beasts, when beasts were supposed to be superior to man in some
particulars, and in that way expressed his thought.

You go into the territory of Arizona to-day, and you will find there
pictures of God. He was clothed in stone, through which no arrow could
pierce, and so they called God the Stone-Shirted whom no Indian could
kill. That was for the simple and only reason that it was impossible to
get an arrow through his armor. They got the idea from the armadillo.

Now, I am simply saying this to show that they were making gods for all
these centuries, and making them out of something they found in nature.
Then, after they got through with the beast business, they made gods
after the image of man; and they are the best gods, so far as I know,
that have been made.

The gods that were first made after the image of man were not made after
the pattern of very good men; but they were good men according to the
standard of that time, because, as I will show you in a moment, all
these things are relative. The qualities or things that we call mercy,
justice, charity and religion are all relative. There was a time when
the victor on the field of battle was exceedingly merciful if he failed
to eat his prisoner; he was regarded as a very charitable gentleman if
he refused to eat the man he had captured in battle. Afterward he
was regarded as an exceedingly benevolent person if he would spare a
prisoner's life and make him a slave.

So that--but you all know it as well as I do or you would not be
Unitarians--all this has been simply a growth from year to year, from
generation to generation, from age to age. And let me tell you the first
thing about these gods that they made after the image of men. After
a time there were men on the earth who were better than these gods in
heaven.

Then those gods began to die, one after another, and dropped from their
thrones. The time will probably come in the history of this world when
an insurance company can calculate the average life of gods as well as
they do now of men; because all these gods have been made by folks. And,
let me say right here, the folks did the best they could. I do not blame
them. Everybody in the business has always done his best. I admit it. I
admit that man has traveled from the first conception up to Unitarianism
by a necessary road. Under the conditions he could have come up in no
other way. I admit all that. I blame nobody. But I am simply trying to
tell, in a very feeble manner, how it is.

Now, in a little while, I say, men got better than their gods. Then the
gods began to die. Then we began to find out a few things in nature, and
we found out that we were supporting more gods than were necessary--that
fewer gods could do the business--and that, from an economical point of
view, expenses ought to be cut down. There were too many temples, too
many priests, and you always had to give tithes of something to each
one, and these gods were about to eat up the substance of the world.

And there came a time when it got to that point that either the gods
would eat up the people or the people must destroy some gods, and of
course they destroyed the gods--one by one and in their places they put
forces of nature to do the business--forces of nature that needed no
church, that needed no theologians; forces of nature that you are under
no obligation to; that you do not have to pay anything to keep working.
We found that the attraction of gravitation would attend to its
business, night and day, at its own expense. There was a great saving.
I wish it were the same with all kinds of law, so that we could all go
into some useful business, including myself.

So day by day, they dispensed with this expense of deities; and the
world got along just as well--a good deal better. They used to think--a
community thought--that if a man was allowed to say a word against a
deity, the god would visit his vengeance upon the entire nation. But
they found out, after a while, that no harm came of it; so they went on
destroying the gods. Now, all these things are relative; and they made
gods a little better all the time--I admit that--till we struck the
Presbyterian, which is probably the worst ever made. The Presbyterians
seem to have bred back.

But no matter. As man became more just, or nearer just, as he became
more charitable, or nearer charitable, his god grew to be a little
better and a little better. He was very bad in Geneva--the three that
we then had. They were very bad in Scotland--horrible! Very bad in New
England--infamous! I might as well tell the truth about it--very bad!
And then men went to work, finally, to civilize their gods, to civilize
heaven, to give heaven the benefit of the freedom of this brave world.
That's what we did. We wanted to civilize religion--civilize what is
known as Christianity. And nothing on earth needed civilization more;
and nothing needs it more than that to-night. Civilization! I am not so
much for the freedom of religion as I am for the religion of freedom.

Now, there was a time when our ancestors--good people, away back, all
dead, no great regret expressed at this meeting on that account--there
was a time when our ancestors were happy in their belief that nearly
everybody was to be lost, and that a few, including themselves, were
to be saved. That religion, I say, fitted that time. It fitted their
geology. It was a very good running mate for their astronomy. It was a
good match for their chemistry. In other words, they were about equal in
every department of human ignorance.

And they insisted that there lived up there somewhere--generally
up--exactly where nobody has, I believe, yet said--a being, an infinite
person "without body, parts, or passions," and yet without passions he
was angry at the wicked every day; without body he inhabited a certain
place; and without parts he was, after all, in some strange and
miraculous manner, organized so that he thought.

And I don't know that it is possible for anyone here--I don't know that
anyone here is gifted with imagination enough--to conceive of such a
being. Our fathers had not imagination enough to do so, at least, and
so they said of this God, that he loves and he hates; he punishes and he
rewards; and that religion has been described perfectly tonight by Judge
Wright as really making God a monster, and men poor, helpless victims.
And the highest possible conception of the orthodox man was, finally,
to be a good servant--just lucky enough to get in--feathers somewhat
singed, but enough left to fly. That was the idea of our fathers. And
then came these divisions, simply because men began to think.

And why did they begin to think? Because in every direction, in all
departments, they were getting more and more information. And then the
religion did not fit. When they found out something of the history of
this globe they found out that the Scriptures were not true. I will not
say not inspired, because I do not know whether they are inspired or
not. It is a question, to me, of no possible importance, whether they
are inspired or not. The question is: Are they true? If they are true,
they do not need inspiration; and if they are not true, inspiration will
not help them. So that is a matter that I care nothing about.

On every hand, I say, they studied and thought. They began to grow--to
have new ideas of mercy, kindness, justice; new ideas of duty--new ideas
of life. The old gods, after we got past the civilization of the Greeks,
past their mythology--and it is the best mythology that man has ever
made--after we got past that, I say, the gods cared very little about
women. Women occupied no place in the state--no place by the hearth,
except one of subordination, and almost of slavery. So the early
churches made God after that image who held women in contempt. It was
only natural--I am not blaming anybody--they had to do it, it was part
of the _must!_

Now, I say that we have advanced up to the point that we demand not only
intelligence, but justice and mercy, in the sky; we demand that--that
idea of God. Then comes my trouble. I want to be honest about it. Here
is my trouble--and I want it also understood that if I should see a man
praying to a stone image or to a stuffed serpent, with that man's wife
or daughter or son lying at the point of death, and that poor savage on
his knees imploring that image or that stuffed serpent to save his
child or his wife, there is nothing in my heart that could suggest the
slightest scorn, or any other feeling than that of sympathy; any other
feeling than that of grief that the stuffed serpent could not answer the
prayer and that the stone image did not feel; I want that understood.
And wherever man prays for the right--no matter to whom or to what he
prays; where he prays for strength to conquer the wrong, I hope his
prayer may be heard; and if I think there is no one else to hear it I
will hear it, and I am willing to help answer it to the extent of my
power.

So I want it distinctly understood that that is my feeling. But here is
my trouble: I find this world made on a very cruel plan. I do not say it
is wrong--I just say that that is the way it seems to me. I may be wrong
myself, because this is the only world I was ever in; I am provincial.
This grain of sand and tear they call the earth is the only world I have
ever lived in. And you have no idea how little I know about the rest of
this universe; you never will know how little I know about it until you
examine your own minds on the same subject.

The plan is this: Life feeds on life. Justice does not always triumph:
Innocence is not a perfect shield. There is my trouble. No matter now,
whether you agree with me or not; I beg of you to be honest and fair
with me in your thought, as I am toward you in mine.

I hope, as devoutly as you, that there is a power somewhere in this
universe that will finally bring everything as it should be. I take a
little consolation in the "perhaps"--in the guess that this is only one
scene of a great drama, and that when the curtain rises on the fifth
act, if I live that long, I may see the coherence and the relation of
things. But up to the present writing--or speaking--I do not. I do not
understand it--a God that has life feed on life; every joy in the world
born of some agony! I do not understand why in this world, over the
Niagara of cruelty, should run this ocean of blood. I do not understand
it. And, then, why does not justice always triumph? Why is not innocence
a perfect shield? These are my troubles.

Suppose a man had control of the atmosphere, knew enough of the secrets
of nature, had read enough in "nature's infinite book of secrecy" so
that he could control the wind and rain; suppose a man had that power,
and suppose that last year he kept the rain from Russia and did not
allow the crops to ripen when hundreds of thousands were famishing and
when little babes were found with their lips on the breasts of dead
mothers! What would you think of such a man? Now, there is my trouble.
If there be a God he understood this. He knew when he withheld his rain
that the famine would come. He saw the dead mothers, he saw the empty
breasts of death, and he saw the helpless babes. There is my trouble. I
am perfectly frank with you and honest. That is my trouble.

Now, understand me! I do not say there is no God. I do not know. As I
told you before, I have traveled but very little--only in this world.

I want it understood that I do not pretend to know. I say I think.
And in my mind the idea expressed by Judge Wright so eloquently and
so beautifully is not exactly true. I cannot conceive of the God he
endeavors to describe, because he gives to that God will, purpose,
achievement, benevolence, love, and no form--no organization--no wants.
There's the trouble. No wants. And let me say why that is a trouble. Man
acts only because he wants. You civilize man by increasing his wants,
or, as his wants increase he becomes civilized. You find a lazy savage
who would not hunt an elephant tusk to save your life. But let him have
a few tastes of whiskey and tobacco, and he will run his legs off for
tusks. You have given him another want and he is willing to work. And
they nearly all started on the road toward Unitarianism--that is to say,
toward civilization--in that way. You must increase their wants.

The question arises: Can an infinite being want anything? If he does and
cannot get it, he is not happy. If he does not want anything, I cannot
help him. I am under no obligation to do anything for anybody who does
not need anything and who does not want anything. Now, there is my
trouble. I may be wrong, and I may get paid for it some time, but that
is my trouble.

I do not see--admitting that all is true that has been said about the
existence of God--I do not see what I can do for him; and I do not see
either what he can do for me, judging by what he has done for others.

And then I come to the other point, that religion so-called, explains
our duties to this supposed being, when we do not even know that he
exists; and no human being has got imagination enough to describe him,
or to use such words that you understand what he is trying to say. I
have listened with great pleasure to Judge Wright this evening, and I
have heard a great many other beautiful things on the same subject--none
better than his. But I never understood them--never.

Now, then, what is religion? I say, religion is all here in this
world--right here--and that all our duties are right here to our
fellow-men; that the man that builds a home; marries the girl that he
loves; takes good care of her; likes the family; stays home nights, as
a general thing; pays his debts; tries to find out what he can; gets all
the ideas and beautiful things that his mind will hold; turns a part
of his brain into a gallery of fine arts; has a host of paintings and
statues there; then has another niche devoted to music--a magnificent
dome, filled with winged notes that rise to glory--now, the man who does
that gets all he can from the great ones dead; swaps all the thoughts he
can with the ones that are alive; true to the ideal that he has here in
his brain--he is what I call a religious man, because he makes the world
better, happier; he puts the dimples of joy in the cheeks of the ones he
loves, and he lets the gods run heaven to suit themselves. And I am not
saying that he is right; I do not know.

This is all the religion that I have; to make somebody else happier if I
can.

I divide this world into two classes--the cruel and the kind; and I
think a thousand times more of a kind man than I do of an intelligent
man. I think more of kindness than I do of genius, I think more of real,
good, human nature in that way--of one who is willing to lend a helping
hand and who goes through the world with a face that looks as if its
owner were willing to answer a decent question--I think a thousand times
more of that than I do of being theologically right; because I do not
care whether I am theologically right or not. It is something that is
not worth talking about, because it is something that I never, never,
never shall understand; and every one of you will die and you won't
understand it either--until after you die at any rate. I do not know
what will happen then.

I am not denying anything. There is another ideal, and it is a beautiful
ideal. It is the greatest dream that ever entered the heart or brain of
man--the Dream of Immortality. It was born of human affection. It did
not come to us from heaven. It was born of the human heart. And when
he who loved, kissed the lips of her who was dead, there came into his
heart the dream: We may meet again.

And, let me tell you, that hope of immortality never came from any
religion. That hope of immortality has helped make religion. It has
been the great oak around which have climbed the poisonous vines of
superstition--that hope of immortality is the great oak.

And yet the moment a man expresses a doubt about the truth of Joshua or
Jonah or the other three fellows in a furnace, up hops some poor little
wretch and says, "Why, he doesn't want to live any more; he wants to
die and go down like a dog, and that is the end of him and his wife and
children." They really seem to think that the moment a man is what
they call an Infidel he has no affections, no heart, no feeling, no
hope--nothing--nothing. Just anxious to be annihilated! But, if the
orthodox creed be true, I make my choice to-night. I take hell. And if
it is between hell and annihilation, I take annihilation.

I will tell you why I take hell in making the first choice. We have
heard from both of those places--heaven and hell. According to the New
Testament there was a rich man in hell, and a poor man, Lazarus, in
heaven. And there was another gentleman by the name of Abraham. The rich
man in hell was in flames, and he called for water, and they told him
they couldn't give him any. No bridge! But they did not express the
slightest regret that they could not give him any water. Mr. Abraham was
not decent enough to say he would if he could; no, sir; nothing. It
did not make any difference to him. But this rich man in hell--in
torment--his heart was all right, for he remembered his brothers; and
he said to this Abraham, "If you cannot go, why, send a man to my five
brethren, so that they will not come to this place!" Good fellow, to
think of his five brothers when he was burning up. Good fellow. Best
fellow we ever heard from on the other side--in either world.

So, I say there is my place. And, incidentally, Abraham at that time
gave his judgment as to the value of miracles. He said, "Though one
should arise from the dead he wouldn't help your five brethren!" "There
are Moses and the prophets." No need of raising people from the dead.

That is my idea, in a general way, about religion; and I want the
imagination to go to work upon it, taking the perfections of one church,
of one school, of one system, and putting them together, just as the
sculptor makes a great statue by taking the eyes from one, the nose from
another, the limbs from another, and so on; just as they make a great
painting from a landscape by putting a river in this place, instead of
over there, changing the location of a tree and improving on what they
call nature--that is to say, simply by adding to, taking from; that is
all we can do. But let us go on doing that until there shall be a church
in sympathy with the best human heart and in harmony with the best human
brain.

And, what is more, let us have that religion for the world we live in.
Right here! Let us have that religion until it cannot be said that they
who do the most work have the least to eat. Let us have that religion
here until hundreds and thousands of women are not compelled to make a
living with the needle that has been called "the asp for the breast
of the poor," and to live in tenements, in filth, where modesty is
impossible.

I say, let us preach that religion here until men will be ashamed to
have forty or fifty millions, or any more than they need, while their
brethren lack bread--while their sisters die from want. Let us preach
that religion here until man will have more ambition to become wise and
good than to become rich and powerful. Let us preach that religion
here among ourselves until there are no abused and beaten wives. Let us
preach that religion until children are no longer afraid of their own
parents and until there is no back of a child bearing the scars of a
father's lash. Let us preach it, I say, until we understand and know
that every man does as he must, and that, if we want better men and
women, we must have better conditions.

Let us preach this grand religion until everywhere, the world over, men
are just and kind to each other. And then, if there be another world,
we shall be prepared for it. And if I come into the presence of an
infinite, good, and wise being, he will say, "Well, you did the best you
could. You did very well, indeed. There is plenty of work for you to do
here. Try and get a little higher than you were before." Let us preach
that one drop of restitution is worth an ocean of repentance.

And if there is a life of eternal progress before us, I shall be as glad
as any other angel to find that out.

But I will not sacrifice the world I have for one I know not of. I will
not live here in fear, when I do not know that that which I fear lives.

I am going to live a perfectly free man. I am going to reap the harvest
of my mind, no matter how poor it is, whether it is wheat or corn or
worthless weeds. And I am going to scatter it. Some may "fall on stony
ground." But I think I have struck good soil to-night.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you a thousand times for your
attention. I beg that you will forgive the time that I have taken, and
allow me to say, once more, that this event marks an epoch in Religious
Liberty in the United States.




WESTERN SOCIETY OF THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC BANQUET.

Chicago, January 31, 1894.

     * Every soldier of the Army of the Potomac: remembers, the
     colors that for two years floated over the headquarters of
     Gen. Meade. Last night when one hundred and fifty men who
     fought in that army gathered around the banquet board at the
     Grand Pacific hotel a fac-simile of that flag floated over
     them. It was a handsome guidon, on one side a field of
     solferino red bearing a life-sized golden eagle surrounded
     by a silver wreath of laurel; on the other were the national
     colors with the names of the corps of the army.

     The fifth annual banquet of the Western Society of the Army
     of the Potomac will be remembered on account of the presence
     of many distinguished men. The cigars had not been lighted
     when Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, escorted by Gen. Newberry and
     Col. Burbanks, came in. The bald head and sparse gray hair
     of the famous orator were recognized by all, and he was
     given a mighty welcome.

     Save for the emblems of the Union and the fac-simile of Gen.
     Meade's flag the decorations were simple. There were no
     flowers, but the soldiers could read on little signs stuck
     up around the tables such names as "Petersburg," "White
     Oak," "Mine Run," "Cold Harbor," "Fair Oaks" and "South
     Mountain." The exercises began and ended with bugle call and
     military song, and the heroes of the Potomac showed that
     they still remembered the words of the songs sung in camp.

     Col. Freeman Connor, the retiring president, acted as
     toastmaster. Seated near him were Maj.-Gen. Nelson Miles,
     United States army; Gen. Newberry, Col. Ingersoll, Thomas B.
     Bryan, Col. James A.. Sexton, Maj. E. A. Blodgett, Fred W.
     Spink, Col. Williston and Maj. Heyle.

     The exercises began with the singing of "America" by all
     Col. Conner made a few remarks and then Col. C. S. McEntee
     presented the new-comer to the society. When Colonel
     Ingersoll was introduced, the veterans jumped up on chairs,
     waved their handkerchiefs and greeted him with a mighty
     shout. The Colonel spoke only fifteen minutes.

     At the conclusion of Colonel Ingersoll's speech he was again
     cheered for several minutes. A motion was made to make him
     an honorary member of the Western Society of the Army of the
     Potomac. The toastmaster in putting the question said: "All
     who are in favor will rise and yell," and every comrade
     yelled.

     --Chicago Record, February 1, 1894.


FIRST of all, I wish to thank you for allowing me to be present. Next, I
wish to congratulate you that you are all alive. I congratulate you
that you were born in this century, the greatest century in the world's
history, the greatest century of intellectual genius and of physical,
mental and moral progress that the world ever knew. I congratulate you
all that you are members of the Army of the Potomac. I believe that
no better army ever marched under the flag of any nation. There was no
difficulty that discouraged you; no defeat that disheartened you. For
years you bore the heat and burden of battle; for years you saw your
comrades torn by shot and shell, but wiping the tears, from your cheeks
you marched on with greater determination than ever to fight to the end.

To the Army of the Potomac belongs the eternal honor of having obtained
finally the sword of Rebellion. I congratulate you because you fought
for the Republic, and I thank you for your courage. For by you the
United States was kept on the map of the world, and our flag was kept
floating. If not for your work, neither would have been there. You
removed from it the only stain that was ever on it. You fought not only
the battle of the Union, but of the whole world.

I congratulate you that you live in a period when the North has attained
a higher moral altitude than was ever attained by any nation. You now
live in a country which believes in absolute freedom for all. In this
country any man may reap what he sows and may give his honest thought to
his fellow-men. It is wonderful to think what this Nation was before the
Army of the Potomac came into existence. It believed in liberty as the
convict believes in liberty. It was a country where men that had honest
thoughts were ostracized. I thank you and your courage for what we are.
Nothing ennobles a man so much as fighting for the right. Whoever fights
for the wrong wounds himself. I believe that every man who fought in the
Union army came out a stronger and a better and a nobler man.

I believe in this country. I am so young and so full of enthusiasm
that I am a believer in National growth. I want this country to be
territorial and to become larger than it is. I want a country worthy of
Chicago. I want to pick up the West Indies, take in the Bermudas,
the Bahamas and Barbadoes. They are our islands. They belong to this
continent and it is a piece of impudence for any other nation to think
of owning them. We want to grow. Such is the extravagance of my ambition
that I even want the Sandwich Islands. They say that these islands are
too far away from us; that they are two thousand miles from our shores.
But they are nearer to our shores than to any other. I want them. I want
a naval station there. I want America to be mistress of the Pacific.
Then there is another thing in my mind. I want to grow North and South.
I want Canada--good people--good land. I want that country. I do not
want to steal it, but I want it. I want to go South with this Nation. My
idea is this: There is only air enough between the Isthmus of Panama and
the North Pole for one flag. A country that guarantees liberty to
all cannot be too large. If any of these people are ignorant, we
will educate them; give them the benefit of our free schools. Another
thing--I might as well sow a few seeds for next fall. I have heard many
reasons why the South failed in the Rebellion, and why with the help of
Northern dissensions and a European hatred the South did not succeed. I
will tell you. In my judgment, the South failed, not on account of its
army, but from other conditions. Luckily for us, the South had always
been in favor of free trade.

Secondly--The South raised and sold raw material, and when the war came
it had no foundries, no factories, and no looms to weave the cloth for
uniforms; no shops to make munitions of war, and it had to get what
supplies it could by running the blockade. We of the North had the
cloth to clothe our soldiers, shops to make our bayonets; we had all the
curious wheels that invention had produced, and had labor and genius,
the power of steam, and the water to make what we needed, and we did
not require anything from any other country. Suppose this whole country
raised raw material and shipped it out, we would be in the condition
that the South was. We want this Nation to be independent of the whole
world. A nation to be ready to settle questions of dispute by war should
be in a condition of absolute independence. For that reason I want all
the wheels turning in this country, all the chimneys full of fire,
all the looms running, the iron red hot everywhere. I want to see all
mechanics having plenty of work with good wages and good homes for their
families, good food, schools for their children, plenty of clothes, and
enough to take care of a child if it happens to take sick. I am for the
independence of America, the growth of America physically, mentally,
and every other way. The time will come when all nations combined cannot
take that flag out of the sky. I want to see this country so that if
a deluge sweeps every other nation from the face of the globe we would
have all we want made right here by our factories, by American brain and
hand.

I thank you that the Republic still lives. I thank you that we are all
lovers of freedom. I thank you for having helped establish a Government
where every child has an opportunity, and where every avenue of
advancement if open to all.




LOTOS CLUB DINNER IN HONOR OF ANTON SEIDL.

New York, February 2, 1895.


MR. PRESIDENT, Mr. Anton Seidl, and Gentlemen: I was enjoying myself
with music and song; why I should be troubled, why I should be called
upon to trouble you, is a question I can hardly answer. Still, as the
president has remarked, the American people like to hear speeches. Why,
I don't know. It has always been a matter of amazement that anybody
wanted to hear me. Talking is so universal; with few exceptions--the
deaf and dumb--everybody seems to be in the business. Why they should be
so anxious to hear a rival I never could understand. But, gentlemen,
we are all pupils of nature; we are taught by the countless things that
touch us on every side; by field and flower and star and cloud and river
and sea, where the waves break into whitecaps, and by the prairie, and
by the mountain that lifts its granite forehead to the sun; all things
in nature touch us, educate us, sharpen us, cause the heart to bud, to
burst, it may be, into blossom; to produce fruit. In common with the
rest of the world I have been educated a little that way; by the things
I have seen and by the things I have heard and by the people I have met.
But there are a few things that stand out in my recollection as having
touched me more deeply than others, a few men to whom I feel indebted
for the little I know, and for the little I happen to be. Those men,
those things, are forever present in my mind. But I want to tell you
to-night that the first man that let up the curtain in my mind, that
ever opened a blind, that ever allowed a little sunshine to straggle in,
was Robert Burns. I went to get my shoes mended, and I had to go with
them. And I had to wait till they were done. I was like the fellow
standing by the stream naked washing his shirt. A lady and gentleman
were riding by in a carriage, and upon seeing him the man indignantly
shouted, "Why don't you put on another shirt when you are washing one?"
The fellow said, "I suppose you think I've got a hundred shirts!"

When I went into the shop of the old Scotch shoemaker he was reading
a book, and when he took my shoes in hand I took his book, which was
"Robert Burns." In a few days I had a copy; and, indeed, gentlemen, from
that time if "Burns" had been destroyed I could have restored more than
half of it. It was in my mind day and night. Burns you know is a little
valley, not very wide, but full of sunshine; a little stream runs down
making music over the rocks, and children play upon the banks; narrow
roads overrun with vines, covered with blossoms, happy children, the hum
of bees, and little birds pour out their hearts and enrich the air. That
is Burns. Then, you must know that I was raised respectably. Certain
books were not thought to be good for the young person; only such books
as would start you in the narrow road for the New Jerusalem. But one
night I stopped at a little hotel in Illinois, many years ago, when we
were not quite civilized, when the footsteps of the red man were still
in the prairies. While I was waiting for supper an old man was reading
from a book, and among others who were listening was myself. I was
filled with wonder. I had never heard anything like it. I was ashamed to
ask him what he was reading; I supposed that an intelligent boy ought to
know. So I waited, and when the little bell rang for supper I hung back
and they went out. I picked up the book; it was Sam Johnson's edition of
Shakespeare. The next day I bought a copy for four dollars. My God!
more than the national debt. You talk about the present straits of the
Treasury! For days, for nights, for months, for years, I read those
books, two volumes, and I commenced with the introduction. I haven't
read that introduction for nearly fifty years, certainly forty-five, but
I remember it still. Other writers are like a garden diligently planted
and watered, but Shakespeare a forest where the oaks and elms toss their
branches to the storm, where the pine towers, where the vine bursts into
blossom at its foot. That book opened to me a new world, another nature.
While Burns was the valley, here was a range of mountains with thousands
of such valleys; while Burns was as sweet a star as ever rose into the
horizon, here was a heaven filled with constellations. That book has
been a source of perpetual joy to me from that day to this; and whenever
I read Shakespeare--if it ever happens that I fail to find some new
beauty, some new presentation of some wonderful truth, or another
word that bursts into blossom, I shall make up my mind that my mental
faculties are failing, that it is not the fault of the book. Those,
then, are two things that helped to educate me a little.

Afterward I saw a few paintings by Rembrandt, and all at once I was
overwhelmed with the genius of the man that could convey so much thought
in form and color. Then I saw a few landscapes by Corot, and I began to
think I knew something about art. During all my life, of course, like
other people, I had heard what they call music, and I had my favorite
pieces, most of those favorite pieces being favorites on account of
association; and nine-tenths of the music that is beautiful to the world
is beautiful because of the association, not because the music is good,
but because of association.. We cannot write a very poetic thing about a
pump or about water works; they are not old enough.

We can write a poetic thing about a well and a sweep and an old
moss-covered bucket, and you can write a poem about a spring, because
a spring seems a gift of nature, something that cost no trouble and no
work, something that will sing of nature under the quiet stars of June.
So, it is poetic on account of association. The stage coach is more
poetic than the car, but the time will come when cars will be poetic,
because human feelings, love's remembrances, will twine around them, and
consequently they will become beautiful. There are two pieces of music,
"The Last Rose of Summer," and "Home Sweet Home," with the music a
little weak in the back; but association makes them both beautiful. So,
in the "Marseillaise" is the French Revolution, that whirlwind and flame
of war, of heroism the highest possible, of generosity, of self-denial,
of cruelty, of all of which the human heart and brain are capable; so
that music now sounds as though its notes were made of stars, and it is
beautiful mostly by association.

Now, I always felt that there must be some greater music somewhere,
somehow. You know this little music that comes back with recurring
emphasis every two inches or every three-and-a-half inches; I thought
there ought to be music somewhere with a great sweep from horizon to
horizon, and that could fill the great dome of sound with winged notes
like the eagle; if there was not such music, somebody, sometime, would
make it, and I was waiting for it. One day I heard it, and I said, "What
music is that?" "Who wrote that?" I felt it everywhere. I was cold. I
was almost hysterical. It answered to my brain, to my heart; not only to
association, but to all there was of hope and aspiration, all my future;
and they said this is the music of Wagner. I never knew one note from
another--of course I would know it from a promissory note--and
was utterly and absolutely ignorant of music until I heard Wagner
interpreted by the greatest leader, in my judgment, in the world--Anton
Seidl. He not only understands Wagner in the brain, but he feels him in
the heart, and there is in his blood the same kind of wild and splendid
independence that was in the brain of Wagner. I want to say to-night,
because there are so many heresies, Mr. President, creeping into this
world, I want to say and say it with all my might, that Robert Burns was
not Scotch. He was far wider than Scotland: he had in him the universal
tide, and wherever it touches the shore of a human being it finds
access. Not Scotch, gentlemen, but a man, a man! I can swear to it,
or rather affirm, that Shakespeare was not English, but another man,
kindred of all, of all races and peoples, and who understood the
universal brain and heart of the human race, and who had imagination
enough to put himself in the place of all.

And so I want to say to-night, because I want to be consistent, Richard
Wagner was not a German, and his music is not German; and why? Germany
would not have it. Germany denied that it was music. The great German
critics said it was nothing in the world but noise. The best interpreter
of Wagner in the world is not German, and no man has to be German to
understand Richard Wagner. In the heart of nearly every man is an AEolian
harp, and when the breath of true genius touches that harp, every man
that has one, or that knows what music is or has the depth and height
of feeling necessary to appreciate it, appreciates Richard Wagner. To
understand that music, to hear it as interpreted by this great leader,
is an education. It develops the brain; it gives to the imagination
wings; the little earth grows larger; the people grow important; and
not only that, it civilizes the heart; and the man who understands
that music can love better and with greater intensity than he ever did
before. The man who understands and appreciates that music, becomes in
the highest sense spiritual--and I don't mean by spiritual, worshiping
some phantom, or dwelling upon what is going to happen to some of us--I
mean spiritual in the highest sense; when a perfume arises from the
heart in gratitude, and when you feel that you know what there is of
beauty, of sublimity, of heroism and honor and love in the human heart.
This is what I mean by being spiritual. I don't mean denying yourself
here and living on a crust with the expectation of eternal joy--that is
not what I mean. By spiritual I mean a man that has an ideal, a great
ideal, and who is splendid enough to live to that ideal; that is what I
mean by spiritual. And the man who has heard the music of Wagner, that
music of love and death, the greatest music, in my judgment, that ever
issued from the human brain, the man who has heard that and understands
it has been civilized.

Another man to whom I feel under obligation whose name I do not know--I
know Burns, Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Wagner, but there are some other
fellows whose names I do not know--is he who chiseled the Venus de Milo.
This man helped to civilize the world; and there is nothing under the
sun so pathetic as the perfect. Whoever creates the perfect has thought
and labored and suffered; and no perfect thing has ever been done except
through suffering and except through the highest and holiest thought,
and among this class of men is Wagner. Let me tell you something
more. You know I am a great believer. There is no man in the world who
believes more in human nature than I do. No man believes more in the
nobility and splendor of humanity than I do; no man feels more grateful
than I to the self-denying, heroic, splendid souls who have made this
world fit for ladies and gentlemen to live in. But I believe that the
human mind has reached its top in three departments. I don't believe
the human race--no matter if it lives millions of years more upon this
wheeling world--I don't believe the human race will ever produce in the
world anything greater, sublimer, than the marbles of the Greeks. I do
not believe it. I believe they reach absolutely the perfection of form
and the expression of force and passion in stone. The Greeks made marble
as sensitive as flesh and as passionate as blood. I don't believe that
any human being of any coming race--no matter how many suns may rise and
set, or how many religions may rise and fall, or how many languages
be born and decay--I don't believe any human being will ever excel the
dramas of Shakespeare. Neither do I believe that the time will ever come
when any man with such instruments of music as we now have, and having
nothing but the common air that we now breathe, will ever produce
greater pictures in sound, greater music, than Wagner. Never! Never! And
I don't believe he will ever have a better interpreter than Anton Seidl.
Seidl is a poet in sound, a sculptor in sound. He is what you might call
an orchestral orator, and as such he expresses the deepest feelings,
the highest aspirations and the in-tensest and truest love of which the
brain and heart of man are capable.

Now, I am glad, I am delighted, that the people here in this city and in
various other cities of our great country are becoming civilized enough
to appreciate these harmonies; I am glad they are civilized at last
enough to know that the home of music is tone, not tune; that the home
of music is in harmonies where you braid them like rainbows; I am glad
they are great enough and civilized enough to appreciate the music
of Wagner, the greatest music in this world. Wagner sustains the same
relation to other composers that Shakespeare does to other dramatists,
and any other dramatist compared with Shakespeare is like one tree
compared with an immeasurable forest, or rather like one leaf compared
with a forest; and all the other composers of the world are embraced in
the music of Wagner.

"Nobody has written anything more tender than he, nobody anything
sublimer than he. Whether it is the song of the deep, or the warble of
the mated bird, nobody has excelled Wagner; he has expressed all that
the human heart is capable of appreciating. And now, gentlemen, having
troubled you long enough, and saying long live Anton Seidl, I bid you
good-night."




LOTOS CLUB DINNER IN HONOR OF REAR ADMIRAL SCHLEY.

New York, November 26, 1898.

     * The Lotos Club did honor to Rear Admiral Winfield Scott
     Schley, and incidentally, to the United States, at its
     clubhouse in Fifth Avenue last night. All day long the
     square, blue pennant, blazoned with the two stars of a Rear
     Admiral, snapped in the wind, signifying to all who saw it
     that the Lotos Clubhouse was for the time being the flagship
     of the erstwhile Flying Squadron.

     Within the home of the club were gathered men who like the
     guest of the evening were prominent in the war with Spain,
     The navy was represented by Capt. Charles D. Sigs-Dee, Capt.
     A. T. Mahan and Captain Goodrich. From the army there was
     Brig. Gen. W F. Randolph, and from civil life many men
     prominent in the business, professional and social life of
     the city. The one impulse that led these men to brave the
     storm was their desire to pay their respects to one of the
     men who had done so much to win laurels for the American
     arms.

     The parlors and dining rooms of the clubhouse wore thrown
     into one in order to accommodate the three hundred men
     present fit the dinner. Smilax covered the walls, save hero
     and there where the American flag was draped in graceful
     folds. From the archway under which the table of honor was
     spread, hung a large National ensign and a Rear Admiral's
     pennant.

     The menu was unique. Etched on a cream-tinted paper appeared
     an open nook, and on the tops of the pages was inscribed,
     "Logge of the Goode Ship Lotos." "Dinner to Rear Admiral
     Winfield Scott Schley, given in the cabin of ye Shippe, Nov.
     26, l898, Lat. 40 degrees 42 minutes 43 seconds north;
     longitude, 74 degrees 3 seconds west."

     On each side of the menu was stretched a string of signal
     flags, giving the orders made famous by Admiral Schley in
     the naval engagement of July 3, 1898. On the second page of
     the menu was a fine etching of the Brooklyn, Admiral
     Schley's flagship. The souvenir menu was inclosed in blue
     paper, upon which were two white stars, the whole
     representing Rear Admiral Schley's pennant.


MR.PRESIDENT, Gentlemen of the Club--Boys: I congratulate all of you and
I congratulate myself, and I will tell you why. In the first place, we
were well born, and we were all born rich, all of us. We belong to a
great race. That is something; that is having a start, to feel that in
your veins flows heroic blood, blood that has accomplished great things
and has planted the flag of victory on the field of war. It is a great
thing to belong to a great race.

I congratulate you and myself on another thing; we were born in a great
nation, and you can't be much of a man without having a nation behind
you, with you; Just think about it! What would Shakespeare have been, if
he had been born in Labrador? I used to know an old lawyer in southern
Illinois, a smart old chap, who mourned his unfortunate surroundings.
He lived in Pinkneyville, and occasionally drank a little too freely of
Illinois wine; and when in his cups he sometimes grew philosophic and
egotistic. He said one day, "Boys, I have got more brains than you have,
I have, but I have never had a chance. I want you just to think of
it. What would Daniel Webster have been, by God, if he had settled in
Pinkneyville?"

So I congratulate you all that you were born in a great nation,
born rich; and why do I say rich? Because you fell heir to a great,
expressive, flexible language; that is one thing. What could a man do
who speaks a poor language, a language of a few words that you could
almost count on your fingers? What could he do? You were born heirs to
a great literature, the greatest in the world--in all the world. All the
literature of Greece and Rome would not make one act of "Hamlet." All
the literature of the ancient world added to all of the modern world,
except England, would not equal the literature that we have. We were
born to it, heirs to that vast intellectual possession.

So I say you were all born rich, all. And then you were very fortunate
in being born in this country, where people have some rights, not as
many as they should have, not as many as they would have if it were not
for the preachers, may be, but where we have some; and no man yet was
ever great unless a great drama was being played on some great stage and
he got a part. Nature deals you a hand, and all she asks is for you to
have the sense to play it. If no hand is dealt to you, you win no money.
You must have the opportunity, must be on the stage, and some great
drama must be there. Take it in our own country. The Revolutionary
war was a drama, and a few great actors appeared; the War of 1812 was
another, and a few appeared; the Civil war another. Where would have
been the heroes whose brows we have crowned with laurel had there been
no Civil war? What would have become of Lincoln, a lawyer in a country
town? What would have become of Grant? He would have been covered with
the mantle of absolute obscurity, tucked in at all the edges, his name
never heard of by any human being not related to him.

Now, you have got to have the chance, and you cannot create it. I heard
a gentleman say here a few minutes ago that this war could have been
averted. That is not true. I am not doubting his veracity, but rather
his philosophy. Nothing ever happened beneath the dome of heaven that
could have been avoided. Everything that is possible happens. That may
not suit all the creeds, but it is true. And everything that is possible
will continue to happen. The war could not have been averted, and the
thing that makes me glad and proud is that it was not averted. I will
tell you why.

It was the first war in the history of this world that was waged
unselfishly for the good of others; the first war. Almost anybody will
fight for himself; a great many people will fight for their country,
their fellow-men, their fellow-citizens; but it requires something
besides courage to fight for the rights of aliens; it requires not only
courage, but principle and the highest morality. This war was waged to
compel Spain to take her bloody hands from the throat of Cuba. That
is exactly what it was waged for. Another great drama was put upon
the boards, another play was advertised, and the actors had their
opportunity. Had there been no such war, many of the actors would never
have been heard of.

But the thing is to take advantage of the occasion when it arrives. In
this war we added to the greatness and the glory of our history. That is
another thing that we all fell heirs to--the history of our people, the
history of our Nation. We fell heirs to all the great and grand things
that had been accomplished, to all the great deeds, to the splendid
achievements either in the realm of mind or on the field of battle.

Then there was another great drama. The first thing we knew, a man in
the far Pacific, a gentleman from Vermont, sailed one May morning into
the bay of Manila, and the next news was that the Spanish fleet had been
beached, burned, destroyed, and nothing had happened to him. I have read
a little history, not much, and a good deal that I have read was not
true. I have read something about our own navy, not much. I recollect
when I was a boy my hero was John Paul Jones; he covered the ocean; and
afterward I knew of Hull and Perry and Decatur and Bainbridge and a good
many others that I don't remember now. And then came the Civil war, and
I remember a little about Farragut, a great Admiral, as great as ever
trod a deck, in my judgment. And I have also read about other admirals
and sailors of the world. I knew something of Drake and I have read the
"Life of Nelson" and several other sea dogs; but when I got the news
from Manila I said, "There is the most wonderful victory ever won upon
the sea;" and I did not think it would ever be paralleled. I thought
such things come one in a box. But a little while afterward another of
Spain's fleets was heard from. Oh, those Spaniards! They have got the
courage of passion, but that is not the highest courage. They have got
plenty of that; but it is necessary to be coolly courageous, and to have
the brain working with the accuracy of an engine--courageous, I don't
care how mad you get, but there must not be a cloud in the heaven of
your judgment. That is Anglo-Saxon courage, and there is no higher type.
The Spaniards sprinkled the holy water on their guns, then banged away
and left it to the Holy Ghost to direct the rest.

Another fleet, at Santiago, ventured out one day, and another great
victory was won by the American Navy. I don't know which victory was
the more wonderful, that at Manila Bay or that at Santiago. The Spanish
ships were, some of them, of the best class and type, and had fine guns,
yet in a few moments they were wrecks on the shore of defeat, gone,
lost.

Now, when I used to read about these things in the olden times, what
ideas I had of the hero! I never expected to see one; and yet to-night I
have the happiness of dining with one, with one whose name is associated
with as great a victory, in my judgment, as was ever won; a victory that
required courage, intelligence, that power of will that holds itself
firm until the thing sought has been accomplished; and that has my
greatest admiration. I thank Admiral Schley for having enriched my
country, for having added a little to my own height, to my own pride, so
that I utter the word America with a little more unction than I ever
did before, and the old flag looks a little brighter, better, and has
an added glory. When I see it now, it looks as if the air had burst into
blossom, and it stands for all that he has accomplished.

Admiral Schley has added not only to our wealth, but to the wealth of
the children yet unborn that are going to come into the great heritage
not only of wealth, but of the highest possible riches, glory, honor,
achievement. That is the reason I congratulate you to-night. And I
congratulate you on another thing, that this country has entered upon
the great highway, I believe, of progress. I believe that the great
nation has the sentiment, the feeling of growth. The successful farmer
wants to buy the land adjoining him; the great nation loves to see its
territory increase. And what has been our history? Why, when we bought
Louisiana from Napoleon, in 1803, thousands of people were opposed to
"imperialism," to expansion; the poor old moss-backs were opposed to it.
When we bought Florida, it was the same. When we took the vast West from
Mexico in 1848 it was the same. When we took Alaska it was the same.
Now, is anybody in favor of modifying that sentiment?

We have annexed Hawaii, and we have got the biggest volcano in the
business. A man I know visited that volcano some years ago and came back
and told me about his visit. He said that at the little hotel they had
a guest-book in which the people wrote their feelings on seeing the
volcano in action. "Now," he said, "I will tell you this so that you
may know how you are spreading out yourself. One man had written in
that book, 'if Bob Ingersoll were here, I think he would change his mind
about hell.'"

I want that volcano. I want the Philippines. It would be simply infamous
to hand those people back to the brutality of Spain. Spain has been
Christianizing them for about four hundred years. The first thing the
poor devils did was to sign a petition asking for the expulsion of the
priests. That was their idea of the commencement of liberty. They are
not quite so savage as some people imagine. I want those islands; I want
all of them, and I don't know that I disagree with the Rev. Mr. Slicer
as to the use we can put them to. I don't know that they will be of any
use, but I want them; they might come handy. And I wanted to pick up
the small change, the Ladrones and the Carolines. I am glad we have got
Porto Rico. I don't know as it will be of any use, but there's no harm
in having the title. I want Cuba whenever Cuba wants us, and I favor
the idea of getting her in the notion of wanting us. I want it in the
interest, as I believe, of humanity, of progress; in other words, of
human liberty. That is what the war was waged for, and the fact that it
was waged for that, gives an additional glory to these naval officers
and to the officers in the army. They fought in the first righteous war;
I mean righteous in the sense that we fought for the liberty of others.

Now, gentlemen, I feel that we have all honored ourselves to-night by
honoring Rear Admiral Schley. I want you to know that long after we
are dead and long after the Admiral has ceased to sail, he will be
remembered, and in the constellation of glory one of the brightest stars
will stand for the name of Winfield Scott Schley, as brave an officer as
ever sailed a ship. I am glad I am here to-night, and again, gentlemen,
I congratulate you all upon being here. I congratulate you that you
belong to this race, to this nation, and that you are equal heirs in the
glory of the great Republic.




ADDRESS TO THE ACTORS' FUND OF AMERICA.

New York, June 5, 1888.


MR. PRESIDENT, Ladies and Gentlemen: I have addressed, or annoyed, a
great many audiences in my life and I have not the slightest doubt that
I stand now before more ability, a greater variety of talent, and more
real genius than I ever addressed in my life.

I know all about respectable stupidity, and I am perfectly acquainted
with the brainless wealth and success of this life, and I know, after
all, how poor the world would be without that divine thing that we call
genius--what a worthless habitation, if you take from it all that genius
has given.

I know also that all joy springs from a love of nature. I know that all
joy is what I call Pagan. The natural man takes delight in everything
that grows, in everything that shines, in everything that enjoys--he has
an immense sympathy with the whole human race.

Of that feeling, of that spirit, the drama is born. People must first be
in love with life before they can think it worth representing. They
must have sympathy with their fellows before they can enter into their
feelings and know what their heart throbs about. So, I say, back of the
drama is this love of life, this love of nature. And whenever a country
becomes prosperous--and this has been pointed cut many times--when a
wave of wealth runs over a land,--behind it you will see all the sons
and daughters of genius. When a man becomes of some account he is worth
painting. When by success and prosperity he gets the pose of a victor,
the sculptor is inspired; and when love is really in his heart, words
burst into blossom and the poet is born. When great virtues appear, when
magnificent things are done by heroines and heroes, then the stage is
built, and the life of a nation is compressed into a few hours, or--to
use the language of the greatest--"turning the accomplishment of many
years into an hour-glass"; the stage is born, and we love it because we
love life--and he who loves the stage has a kind of double life.

The drama is a crystallization of history, an epitome of the human
heart. The past is lived again and again, and we see upon the stage,
love, sacrifice, fidelity, courage--all the virtues mingled with all the
follies.

And what is the great thing that the stage does? It cultivates the
imagination. And let me say now, that the imagination constitutes the
great difference between human beings.

The imagination is the mother of pity, the mother of generosity, the
mother of every possible virtue. It is by the imagination that you are
enabled to put yourself in the place of another. Every dollar that has
been paid into your treasury came from an imagination vivid enough
to imagine himself or herself lying upon the lonely bed of pain, or
as having fallen by the wayside of life, dying alone. It is this
imagination that makes the difference in men.

Do you believe that a man would plunge the dagger into the heart of
another if he had imagination enough to see him dead--imagination enough
to see his widow throw her arms about the corpse and cover his face with
sacred tears--imagination enough to see them digging his grave, and to
see the funeral and to hear the clods fall upon the coffin and the sobs
of those who stood about--do you believe he would commit the crime?
Would any man be false who had imagination enough to see the woman that
he once loved, in the darkness of night, when the black clouds were
floating through the sky hurried by the blast as thoughts and memories
were hurrying through her poor brain--if he could see the white flutter
of her garment as she leaped to the eternal, blessed sleep of death--do
you believe that he would be false to her? I tell you that he would be
true.

So that, in my judgment, the great mission of the stage is to cultivate
the human imagination. That is the reason fiction has done so much good.
Compared with the stupid lies-called history, how beautiful are the
imagined things with painted wings. Everybody detests a thing that
pretends to be true and is not; but when it says, "I am about to
create," then it is beautiful in the proportion that it is artistic, in
the proportion that it is a success.

Imagination is the mother of enthusiasm. Imagination fans the little
spark into a flame great enough to warm the human race; and enthusiasm
is to the mind what spring is to the world. .

Now I am going to say a few words because I want to, and because I have
the chance.

What is known as "orthodox religion" has always been the enemy of the
theatre. It has been the enemy of every possible comfort, of every
rational joy--that is to say, of amusement. And there is a reason for
this. Because, if that religion be true, there should be no amusement.
If you believe that in every moment is the peril of eternal pain--do
not amuse yourself. Stop the orchestra, ring down the curtain, and be as
miserable as you can. That idea puts an infinite responsibility upon the
soul--an infinite responsibility--and how can there be any art, how can
there be any joy, after that? You might as well pile all the Alps on one
unfortunate ant, and then say, "Why don't you play? Enjoy yourself."

If that doctrine be true, every one should regard time as a kind of
dock, a pier running out into the ocean of eternity, on which you sit
on your trunk and wait for the ship of death--solemn, lugubrious,
melancholy to the last degree.

And that is why I have said joy is Pagan. It comes from a love of
nature, from a love of this world, from a love of this life. According
to the idea of some good people, life is a kind of green-room, where you
are getting ready for a "play" in some other country.

You all remember the story of "Great Expectations," and I presume you
have all had them. That is another thing about this profession of acting
that I like--you do not know how it is coming out--and there is this
delightful uncertainty.

You have all read the book called "Great Expectations," written, in
my judgment, by the greatest novelist that ever wrote the English
language--the man who created a vast realm of joy. I love the
joy-makers--not the solemn, mournful wretches. And when I think of the
church asking something of the theatre, I remember that story of "Great
Expectations." You remember Miss Haversham--she was to have been
married some fifty or sixty years before that time--sitting there in the
darkness, in all of her wedding finery, the laces having turned yellow
by time, the old wedding cake crumbled, various insects having made
it their palatial residence--you remember that she sent for that poor
little boy Pip, and when he got there in the midst of all these horrors,
she looked at him and said, "Pip, play!" And if their doctrine be true,
every actor is in that situation.

I have always loved the theatre--loved the stage, simply because it has
added to the happiness of this life. "Oh, but," they say, "is it moral?"
A superstitious man suspects everything that is pleasant. It seems
inbred in his nature, and in the nature of most people. You let such a
man pull up a little weed and taste it, and if it is sweet and good, he
says, "I'll bet it is poison." But if it tastes awful, so that his
face becomes a mask of disgust, he says, "I'll bet you that it is good
medicine."

Now, I believe that everything in the world that tends to make man
happy, is moral. That is my definition of morality. Anything that bursts
into bud and blossom, and bears the fruit of joy, is moral.

Some people expect to make the world good by destroying desire--by a
kind of pious petrifaction, feeling that if you do not want anything,
you will not want anything bad. In other words, you will be good
and moral if you will only stop growing, stop wishing, turn all your
energies in the direction of repression, and if from the tree of life
you pull every leaf, and then every bud--and if an apple happens to get
ripe in spite of you, don't touch it--snakes!

I insist that happiness is the end--virtue the means--and anything
that wipes a tear from the face of man is good. Everything that gives
laughter to the world--laughter springing from good nature, that is the
most wonderful music that has ever enriched the ears of man. And let me
say that nothing can be more immoral than to waste your own life, and
sour that of others.

Is the theatre moral? I suppose you have had an election to-day. They
had an election at the Metropolitan Opera House for bishops, and they
voted forged tickets; and after the election was over, I suppose they
asked the old question in the same solemn tone: "Is the theatre moral?"

At last, all the intelligence of the world admits that the theatre is a
great, a splendid instrumentality for increasing the well-being of man.
But only a few years ago our fathers were poor barbarians. They only
wanted the essentials of life, and through nearly all the centuries
Genius was a vagabond--Art was a servant. He was the companion of the
clown. Writers, poets, actors, either sat "below the salt" or devoured
the "remainder biscuit," and drank what drunkenness happened to leave,
or lived on crumbs, and they had less than the crumbs of respect. The
painter had to have a patron, and then in order to pay the patron, he
took the patron's wife for Venus--and the man, he was the Apollo! So the
writer had to have a patron, and he endeavored to immortalize him in a
preface of obsequious lies. The writer had no courage. The painter,
the sculptor--poor wretches--had "patrons." Some of the greatest of the
world were treated as servants, and yet they were the real kings of the
human race.

Now the public is the patron. The public has the intelligence to see
what it wants. The stage does not have to flatter any man. The actor now
does not enroll himself as the servant of duke or lord. He has the great
public, and if he is a great actor, he stands as high in the public
estimation as any other man in any other walk of life.

And these men of genius, these "vagabonds," these "sturdy vagrants" of
the old law--and let me say one thing right here: I do not believe
that there ever was a man of genius that had not a little touch of the
vagabond in him somewhere--just a little touch of chaos--that is to
say, he must have generosity enough now and then absolutely to forget
himself--he must be generous to that degree that he starts out without
thinking of the shore and without caring for the sea--and that is that
touch of chaos. And yet, through all those years the poets and the
actors lacked bread. Imagine the number of respectable dolts who felt
above them. The men of genius lived on the bounty of the few, grudgingly
given.

Now, just think what would happen, what we would be, if you could blot
from this world what these men have done. If you could take from the
walls the pictures; from the niches the statues; from the memory of man
the songs that have been sung by "The Plowman"--take from the memory of
the world what has been done by the actors and play-writers, and this
great globe would be like a vast skull emptied of all thought.

And let me say one word more, and that is as to the dignity of your
profession.

The greatest genius of this world has produced your literature. I am not
now alluding simply to one--but there has been more genius lavished upon
the stage--more real genius, more creative talent, than upon any
other department of human effort. And when men and women belong to a
profession that can count Shakespeare in its number, they should feel
nothing but pride.

Nothing gives me more pleasure than to speak of
Shakespeare--Shakespeare, in whose brain were the fruits of all thoughts
past, the seeds of all to be--Shakespeare, an intellectual ocean toward
which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and continents of
thought receive their dew and rain.

A profession that can boast that Shakespeare was one of its members, and
that from his brain poured out that mighty intellectual cataract--that
Mississippi that will enrich all coming generations--the man that
belongs to that profession--should feel that no other man by reason of
belonging to some other, can be his superior.

And such a man, when he dies--or the friend of such a man, when that man
dies--should not imagine that it is a very generous and liberal thing
for some minister to say a few words above the corpse--and I do not want
to see this profession cringe before any other.

One word more. I hope that you will sustain this splendid charity. I do
not believe that more generous people exist than actors. I hope you will
sustain this charity. And yet, there was one little thing I saw in
your report of last year, that I want to call attention to. You had
"benefits" all over this country, and of the amount raised, one hundred
and twenty-five thousand dollars were given to religious societies and
twelve thousand dollars to the Actors' Fund--and yet they say actors are
not Christians! Do you not love your enemies? After this, I hope that
you will also love your friends.




THE CHILDREN OF THE STAGE.

New York, March 23, 1899.

     * Col. Robert G. Ingersoll was the special star among stars
     at the benefit given yesterday afternoon at the Fifth Avenue
     Theatre for the Actors' Fund. There were a great many other
     stars and a very long programme. The consequence was that
     the performance began before one o'clock and was not over
     until almost dinner time.

     Usually in such cases the least important performers are
     placed at the beginning and the audience straggles in
     leisurely without worrying a great deal over what it has
     missed. Yesterday, however, it had been announced in advance
     that Col. Ingersoll would start the ball a-rolling and the
     result was that before the overture was finished the house
     was packed to the doors.

     Col. Ingersoll's contribution was a short address delivered
     in his characteristic style of florid eloquence.--The World,
     New York, March 24, 1899.


Disguise it as we may, we live in a frightful world, with evils, with
enemies, on every side. From the hedges along the path of life, leap the
bandits that murder and destroy; and every human being, no matter how
often he escapes, at last will fall beneath the assassin's knife.

To change the figure: We are all passengers on the train of life. The
tickets give the names of the stations where we boarded the car, but
the destination is unknown. At every station some passengers, pallid,
breathless, dead, are put away, and some with the light of morning in
their eyes, get on.

To change the figure again: On the wide sea of life we are all on ships
or rafts or spars, and some by friendly winds are borne to the fortunate
isles, and some by storms are wrecked on the cruel rocks. And yet upon
the isles the same as upon the rocks, death waits for all. And death
alone can truly say, "All things come to him who waits."

And yet, strangely enough, there is in this world of misery, of
misfortune and of death, the blessed spirit of mirth. The travelers on
the path, on the train, on the ships, the rafts and spars, sometimes
forget their perils and their doom.

All blessings on the man whose face was first illuminated by a smile!

All blessings on the man who first gave to the common air the music
of laughter--the music that for the moment drove fears from the heart,
tears from the eyes, and dimpled cheeks with joy!

All blessings on the man who sowed with merry hands the seeds of humor,
and at the lipless skull of death snapped the reckless fingers of
disdain! Laughter is the blessed boundary line between the brute and
man.

Who are the friends of the human race? They who hide with vine and
flower the cruel rocks of fate--the children of genius, the sons and
daughters of mirth and laughter, of imagination, those whose thoughts,
like moths with painted wings, fill the heaven of the mind.

Among these sons and daughters are the children of the stage, the
citizens of the mimic world--the world enriched by all the wealth of
genius--enriched by painter, orator, composer and poet. The world
of which Shakespeare, the greatest of human beings, is still the
unchallenged emperor. These children of the stage have delighted the
weary travelers on the thorny path, amused the passengers on the fated
train, and filled with joy the hearts of the clingers to spars, and the
floaters on rafts.

These, children of the stage, with fancy's wand rebuild the past. The
dead are brought to life and made to act again the parts they played.
The hearts and lips that long ago were dust, are made to beat and speak
again. The dead kings are crowned once more, and from the shadows of the
past emerge the queens, jeweled and sceptred as of yore. Lovers leave
their graves and breathe again their burning vows; and again the white
breasts rise and fall in passion's storm. The laughter that died away
beneath the touch of death is heard again and lips that fell to ashes
long ago are curved once more with mirth. Again the hero bares his
breast to death; again the patriot falls, and again the scaffold,
stained with noble blood, becomes a shrine.

The citizens of the real world gain joy and comfort from the stage.
The broker, the speculator ruined by rumor, the lawyer baffled by the
intelligence of a jury or the stupidity of a judge, the doctor who lost
his patience because he lost his patients, the merchant in the dark days
of depression, and all the children of misfortune, the victims of hope
deferred, forget their troubles for a little while when looking on
the mimic world. When the shaft of wit flies like the arrow of Ulysses
through all the rings and strikes the centre; when words of wisdom
mingle with the clown's conceits; when folly laughing shows her pearls,
and mirth holds carnival; when the villain fails and the right triumphs,
the trials and the griefs of life for the moment fade away.

And so the maiden longing to be loved, the young man waiting for
the "Yes" deferred; the unloved wife, hear the old, old story told
again,--and again within their hearts is the ecstasy of requited love.

The stage brings solace to the wounded, peace to the troubled, and with
the wizard's wand touches the tears of grief and they are changed to the
smiles of joy.

The stage has ever been the altar, the pulpit, the cathedral of the
heart. There the enslaved and the oppressed, the erring, the fallen,
even the outcast, find sympathy, and pity gives them all her tears--and
there, in spite of wealth and power, in spite of caste and cruel pride,
true love has ever triumphed over all.

The stage has taught the noblest lesson, the highest truth, and that is
this: It is better to deserve without receiving than to receive without
deserving. As a matter of fact, it is better to be the victim of
villainy than to be a villain. Better to be stolen from than to be
a thief, and in the last analysis the oppressed, the slave, is less
unfortunate than the oppressor, the master.

The children of the stage, these citizens of the mimic world, are
not the grasping, shrewd and prudent people of the mart; they are
improvident enough to enjoy the present and credulous enough to believe
the promises of the universal liar known as Hope. Their hearts and hands
are open. As a rule genius is generous, luxurious, lavish, reckless and
royal. And so, when they have reached the ladder's topmost round, they
think the world is theirs and that the heaven of the future can have
no cloud. But from the ranks of youth the rival steps. Upon the veteran
brows the wreaths begin to fade, the leaves to fall; and failure sadly
sups on memory. They tread the stage no more. They leave the mimic
world, fair fancy's realm; they leave their palaces and thrones; their
crowns are gone, and from their hands the sceptres fall. At last, in age
and want, in lodgings small and bare, they wait the prompter's call;
and when the end is reached, maybe a vision glorifies the closing scene.
Again they are on the stage; again their hearts throb high; again they
utter perfect words; again the flowers fall about their feet; and as the
curtain falls, the last sound that greets their ears, is the music of
applause, the "bravos" for an encore.

And then the silence falls on darkness.

Some loving hands should close their eyes, some loving lips should leave
upon their pallid brows a kiss; some friends should lay the breathless
forms away, and on the graves drop blossoms jeweled with the tears of
love.

This is the work of the generous men and women who contribute to the
Actors' Fund. This is charity; and these generous men and women have
taught, and are teaching, a lesson that all the world should learn, and
that is this: The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray.




ADDRESS TO THE PRESS CLUB.

New Orleans, February 1, 1898.


LADIES AND GENTLEMEN of the New Orleans

Press Club: I do not remember to have agreed or consented to make any
remarks about the press or anything else on the present occasion, but I
am glad of this opportunity to say a word or two. Of course, I have the
very greatest respect for this profession, the profession of the press,
knowing it, as I do, to be one of the greatest civilizers of the
world. Above all other institutions and all other influences, it is the
greatest agency in breaking down the hedges of provincialism. In olden
times one nation had no knowledge or understanding of another nation,
and no insight or understanding into its life; and, indeed, various
parts of one nation held the other parts of it somewhat in the attitude
of hostility, because of a lack of more thorough knowledge; and,
curiously enough, we are prone to look upon strangers more or less in
the light of enemies. Indeed, enemy and stranger in the old vocabularies
are pretty much of the same significance. A stranger was an enemy. I
think it is Darwin who alludes to the instinctive fear a child has of
a stranger as one of the heritages of centuries of instinctive
cultivation, the handed-down instinct of years ago. And even now it is
a fact that we have very little sympathy with people of a different
country, even people speaking the same language, having the same god
with a different name, or another god with the same name, recognizing
the same principles of right and wrong.

But the moment people began to trade with each other, the moment they
began to enjoy the results of each other's industry and brain, the
moment that, through this medium, they began to get an insight into
each other's life, people began to see each other as they were; and
so commerce became the greatest of all missionaries of civilization,
because, like the press, it tended to do away with provincialism.

You know there is no one else in the world so egotistic as the man who
knows nothing. No man is more certain than the man who knows nothing.
The savage knows everything. The moment man begins to be civilized he
begins to appreciate how little he knows, how very circumscribed in its
very nature human knowledge is.

Now, after commerce came the press. From the Moors, I believe, we
learned the first rudiments of that art which has civilized the world.
With the invention of movable type came an easy and cheap method of
preserving the thoughts and history of one generation to another and
transmitting the life of one nation to another. Facts became immortal,
and from that day to this the intelligence of the world has rapidly and
steadily increased.

And now, if we are provincial, it is our own fault, and if we are
hateful and odious and circumscribed and narrow and peevish and limited
in the light we get from the known universe, it is our own fault.

Day by day the world is growing smaller and men larger. But a few years
ago the State of New York was as large as the United States is to-day.
It required as much time to reach Albany from New York as it now
requires to reach San Francisco from the same city, and so far as the
transmission of thought goes the world is but a hamlet.

I count as one of the great good things of the modern press--as one
of the specific good things--that the same news, the same direction of
thought is transmitted to many millions of people each day. So that the
thoughts of multitudes of men are substantially tending at the same time
along the same direction. It tends more and more to make us citizens
in the highest sense of the term, and that is the reason that I have so
much respect for the press.

Of course I know that the news and opinions are written by folks liable
to the same percentage of error as characterizes all mankind. No one
makes no mistakes but the man who knows everything--no one makes no
mistakes but the hypocrite.

I must confess, however, that there are things about the press of to-day
that I would have changed--that I do not like.

I hate to see brain the slave of the material god. I hate to see money
own genius. So I think that every writer on every paper should be
compelled to sign his name to everything he writes. There are many
reasons why he has a right to the reputation he makes. His reputation
is his property, his capital, his stock in trade, and it is not just
or fair or right that it should be absorbed by the corporation which
employs him. After giving great thoughts to the world, after millions of
people have read his thoughts with delight, no one knows this lonely
man or his solitary name. If he loses the good will of his employer, he
loses his place and with it all that his labor and time and brain have
earned for himself as his own inalienable property, and his corporation
or employer reaps the benefit of it.

There is another reason establishing the absolute equity of this
proposition, a reason pointing in other directions than to the writer
and his rights. It is no more than right to the reader that the opinion
or the narrative should be that of Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown or Mr. So and
So, and not that of, say, the _Picayune_. That is too impersonal. It is
no more than right that a single man should have his honor at stake for
what is said, and not an impersonal something. I know that we are all
liable to believe it if the _Picayune_ says it, and yet, after all,
it is the individual man who is saying it and it is in the interest of
justice that the reader be apprised of the fact.

I believe I have just a little fault to find with the tendency of
the modern press to go into personal affairs--into so-called private
affairs. In saying this, I have no complaint to lodge on my own behalf,
for I have no private affairs. I am not so much opposed to what
is called sensationalism, for that must exist as long as crime is
considered news, and believe me, when virtue becomes news it can only be
when this will have become an exceedingly bad world. At the same time I
think that the publication of crime may have more or less the tendency
of increasing it.

I read not long ago that if some heavy piece of furniture were dropped
in a room in which there was a string instrument, the strings in harmony
with the vibrations of the air made by that noise would take up the
sound. Now a man with a tendency to crime would pick up that criminal
feeling inspiring the act which he sees blazoned forth in all its detail
in the press. In that view of the matter it seems to me better not to
give details of all offences.

Now, as to the matter of being too personal, I think that one of the
results of that sort of journalism is to drive a great many capable and
excellent men out of public life. I heard a little story quite recently
of a man who was being urged for the Legislature, and yet hesitated
because of his fear of newspaper criticism of this character. "I
don't want to run," said he to his wife, who urged that this was an
opportunity to do himself and his friends honor, and that it was a sort
of duty in him. "I would if I were you," said his wife. "Well, but there
is no saying," he responded, "what the newspapers might print about me."
"Why, your life has always been honorable," said she; "they could not
say anything to your disparagement." "But they might attack my father."
"Well, there was nothing in his career of which any one might feel
ashamed. He was as irreproachable as you." "Ay, but they might attack
you and tell of some devilment you went into before we were married."
"Then you better not run," said his wife promptly. I think this fear on
the part of husband and wife is identical with that which keeps many a
great man out of public service.

Now, there is another thing which every one ought to abhor. All men and
newspapers are entirely too apt to criticise the motives of men. It is
a fault common to all good men--except the clergy, of course--this habit
of attacking motives. And whenever we see a man do something which is
great and praiseworthy, let us talk about the act itself and not go
into a speculation or an attack upon the motive which prompted the act.
Attack what a man actually does.

But these are only small matters. The press is the most powerful of all
agencies for the dissemination of intelligence, and as such I hail
it always. It has nearly always been very friendly and kind to me
and certainly I have received at the hands of the New Orleans press a
treatment I shall never forget.

Our Sunday newspapers, to my mind, rank among the greatest institutions
of the present day. One finds in them matter that could not be found in
several hundreds of books,--beautiful thoughts, broad intelligence, a
range of information perfectly startling in its usefulness and perfectly
charming in its entertainment. Contrast, please, how we are enabled by
their good offices to spend the Sabbath, with the descriptions of hell
with all its terrors and all the gloom characterizing the Sabbaths our
forefathers had to spend. The Sunday newspaper is an absolute blessing
to the American people, a picture gallery, short stories, little poems,
a symposium of brain and intelligence and refinement and--divorce
proceedings.

As I have said, the good will and the fair treatment of the American
press have nearly always been my lot. There have been some misguided
people who have said harsh things, but when I remember all the
misguided things I have done, I am inclined to be charitable for their
shortcomings.

I do not know that I have anything else to say, except that I wish you
all good luck and sunshine and prosperity, and enough of it to last you
through a long life.




THE CIRCULATION OF OBSCENE LITERATURE.

     * From "Ingersoll As He Is," by E. M. Macdonald.

"ONE of the charges most persistently made against Colonel Ingersoll is
that during and after the trial of D. M. Bennett, persecuted by Anthony
Comstock, the Colonel endeavored to have the law against sending obscene
literature through the mail repealed. That the charge is maliciously
false is fully shown by the following brief history of events connected
with the prosecution of D. M. Bennett, and Mr. Ingersoll's efforts in
his behalf....

"After Mr. Bennett's arrest in 1877, he printed a petition to Congress,
written by T. B. Wakeman, asking for the _repeal or modification_ of
Comstock's law by which he expected to stamp out the publications of
Freethinkers....

"The connection of Mr. Ingersoll with this petition is soon explained.
Mr. Ingersoll knew of Comstock's attempts to suppress heresy by means of
this law, and when called upon by the Washington committee in charge
of the petition, he allowed his name to go on the petition for
modification, but he told them distinctly and plainly that he was _not_
in favor of the _repeal_ of the law, as he was willing and anxious that
obscenity should be suppressed by all legal means. His sentiments are
best expressed by himself in a letter to the _Boston Journal_. He says:

"'Washington, March 18, 1878.

"'To the Editor of the Boston Journal:

"'My attention has been called to the following article that recently
appeared in your paper:

"'Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, and others, feel aggrieved because Congress,
in 1873, enacted a law for the suppression of obscene literature, and,
believing it an infringement of the rights of certain citizens, and an
effort to muzzle the press and conscience, petition for its repeal. When
a man's conscience permits him to spread broadcast obscene literature,
it is time that conscience was muzzled. The law is a terror only to
evil-doers."

"'No one wishes the repeal of any law for the suppression of obscene
literature. For my part, I wish all such laws rigidly enforced. The only
objection I have to the law of 1873 is, that it has been construed to
include books and pamphlets written against the religion of the day,
although containing nothing that can be called obscene or impure.
Certain religious fanatics, taking advantage of the word "immoral" in
the law, have claimed that all writings against what they are pleased to
call orthodox religion are immoral, and such books have been seized and
their authors arrested. To this, and this only, I object.

"'Your article does me great injustice, and I ask that you will have the
kindness to publish this note.

"'From the bottom of my heart I despise the publishers of obscene
literature. Below them there is no depth of filth. And I also despise
those, who, under the pretence of suppressing obscene literature,
endeavor to prevent honest and pure men from writing and publishing
honest and pure thoughts. Yours truly.

"'R. G. Ingersoll.'


"This is sufficiently easy of comprehension even for ministers, but of
course they misrepresented and lied about the writer. From that day
to this he has been accused of favoring the dissemination of obscene
literature. That the friends of Colonel Ingersoll may know just
how infamous this is, we will give a brief history of the repeal or
modification movement....

"On October 26, the National Liberal League held its Congress in
Syracuse. At this Congress the League left the matter of repeal or
modification of the laws open, taking no action as an organization,
either way, but elected officers known to be in favor of repeal. On
December 10, Mr. Bennett was again arrested. He was tried, and found
guilty; he appealed, the conviction was affirmed, and he was sentenced
to thirteen months' imprisonment at hard labor.

"After the trial Colonel Ingersoll interposed, and endeavored to get
a pardon for Mr. Bennett, who was held in Ludlow street jail pending
President Hayes's reply. The man who occupied the President's office
promised to pardon the Infidel editor; then he went back on his word,
and Mr. Bennett served his term of imprisonment.

"Then preachers opened the sluiceways of vituperation and billingsgate
upon Colonel Ingersoll for having interceded for a man convicted of
mailing obscene literature. The charges were as infamously false then
as they are now, and to show it, it is only necessary to quote
Colonel Ingersoll's words during the year or two succeeding, when
the Freethinkers and the Christians were not only opposing each
other vigorously, but the Freethinkers themselves were divided on the
question. In 1879, while Mr. Bennett was in prison, a correspondent of
the Nashville, Tenn., _Banner_ said that the National Liberal League and
Colonel Ingersoll were in favor of disseminating obscene literature. To
this Colonel Ingersoll replied in a letter to a friend:

"1417 G St., Washington, Aug. 21, 1879.

"'My Dear Sir: The article in the Nashville _Banner_ by "J. L." is
utterly and maliciously false.

"'A petition was sent to Congress praying for the repeal or modification
of certain postal laws, to the end that the freedom of conscience and of
the press should not be abridged.

"'Nobody holds in greater contempt than I the writers, publishers, or
dealers in obscene literature. One of my objections to the Bible is that
it contains hundreds of grossly obscene passages not fit to be read by
any decent man, thousands of passages, in my judgment, calculated to
corrupt the minds of youth. I hope the time will soon come when the
good sense of the American people will demand a Bible with all obscene
passages left out.

"'The only reason a modification of the postal laws is necessary is that
at present, under color of those laws, books and pamphlets are excluded
from the mails simply because they are considered heterodox and
blasphemous. In other words, every man should be allowed to write,
publish, and send through the mails his thoughts upon any subject,
expressed in a decent and becoming manner. As to the propriety of giving
anybody authority to overhaul mails, break seals, and read private
correspondence, that is another question.

"'Every minister and every layman who charges me with directly or
indirectly favoring the dissemination of anything that is impure,
retails what he knows to be a wilful and malicious lie. I remain, Yours
truly,

"'R. G. Ingersoll.'


"Three weeks after this letter was written the National Liberal League
held its third annual Congress at Cincinnati. Colonel Ingersoll was
chairman of the committee on resolutions and platform and unfinished
business of the League. One of the subjects to be dealt with was these
Comstock laws. The following are Colonel Ingersoll's remarks and the
resolutions he presented:

"'It may be proper, before presenting the resolutions of the committee,
to say a word in explanation. The committee were charged with the
consideration of the unfinished business of the League. It seems that
at Syracuse there was a division as to what course should be taken in
regard to the postal laws of the United States. These laws were used
as an engine of oppression against the free circulation of what we
understand to be scientific literature. Every honest man in this country
is in favor of allowing every other human being every right that he
claims for himself. The majority at Syracuse were at that time simply
in favor of the absolute repeal of those laws, believing them to be
unconstitutional--not because they were in favor of anything obscene,
but because they were opposed to the mails of the United States being
under the espionage and bigotry of the church. They therefore demanded
an absolute repeal of the law. Others, feeling that they might be
misunderstood, and knowing that theology can coin the meanest words
to act as the vehicle of the lowest lies, were afraid of being
misunderstood, and therefore they said, Let us amend these laws so that
our literature shall be upon an equality with that of theology. I know
that there is not a Liberal here, or in the United States, that is in
favor of the dissemination of obscene literature. One of the objections
which we have to the book said to be written by God is that it is
obscene.

"'The Liberals of this country believe in purity, and they believe that
every fact in nature and in science is as pure as a star. We do not need
to ask for any more than we want. We simply want the laws of our country
so framed that we are not discriminated against. So, taking that view of
the vexed question, we want to put the boot upon the other foot. We want
to put the charge of obscenity where it belongs, and the committee, of
which I have the honor to be one of the members, have endeavored to do
just that thing. Men have no right to talk to me about obscenity who
regard the story of Lot and his daughters as a fit thing for men, women,
and children to read, and who worship a God in whom the violation of
[_Cheers drowned the conclusion of this sentence so the reporters could
not hear it._] Such a God I hold in infinite contempt.

"'Now I will read you the resolutions recommended by the committee.

"'RESOLUTIONS.

"'Your committee have the honor to submit the following report: "'First,
As to the unfinished business of the League, your committee submits the
following resolutions:

"'Resolved., That we are in favor of such postal laws as will allow the
free transportation through the mails of the United States of all books,
pamphlets, and papers, irrespective of the religious, irreligious,
political, and scientific views they may contain, so that the literature
of science may be placed upon an equality with that of superstition.

"'Resolved, That we are utterly opposed to the dissemination, through
the mails, or by any other means, of obscene literature, whether
"inspired" or uninspired, and hold in measureless contempt its authors
and disseminators.

"'Resolved, That we call upon the Christian world to expunge from the
so-called "sacred" Bible every passage that cannot be read without
covering the cheek of modesty with the blush of shame; and until such
passages are expunged, we demand that the laws against the dissemination
of obscene literature be impartially enforced. '...

"We believe that lotteries and obscenity should be dealt with by State
and municipal legislation, and offenders punished in the county in which
they commit their offence. So in those days we argued for the repeal of
the Comstock laws, as did dozens of others--James Parton, Elizur Wright,
O. B. Frothingham, T. C. Leland, Courtlandt Palmer, and many more whose
names we do not recall. But Colonel Ingersoll did not, and when the
National Liberal League met the next year at Chicago (September 17,
1880), he was opposed to the League's making a pledge to defend every
case under the Comstock laws, and he was opposed to a resolution
demanding a repeal of those laws. The following is what Colonel
Ingersoll said upon the subject:

"'Mr. Chairman, I wish to offer the following resolution in place and
instead of resolutions numbered 5 and 6:

"'Resolved, That the committee of defence, whenever a person has been
indicted for what he claims to have been an honest exercise of the
freedom of thought and expression, shall investigate the case, and if it
appears that such person has been guilty of no offence, then it shall
be the duty of said committee to defend such person if he is unable to
defend himself.'

"'Now, allow me one moment to state my reasons. I do not, I have not, I
never shall, accuse or suspect a solitary member of the Liberal League
of the United States of being in favor of doing any act under heaven
that he is not thoroughly convinced is right. We all claim freedom of
speech, and it is the gem of the human soul. We all claim a right to
express our honest thoughts. Did it ever occur to any Liberal that
he wished to express any thought honestly, truly, and legally that he
considered immoral? How does it happen that _we_ have any interest in
what is known as immoral literature? I deny that the League has any
interest in that kind of literature. Whenever we mention it, whenever we
speak of it, we put ourselves in a false position. What do we want? We
want to see to it that the church party shall not smother the literature
of Liberalism. We want to see to it that the viper of intellectual
slavery shall not sting our cause. We want it so that every honest man,
so that every honest woman, can express his or her honest thought upon
any subject in the world. And the question, and the only question, as to
whether they are amenable to the law, in my mind, is, Were they honest?
Was their effort to benefit mankind? Was that their intention? And no
man, no woman, should be convicted of any offence that that man or woman
did not intend to commit. Now, then, suppose some person is arrested,
and it is claimed that a work written by him is immoral, is illegal.
Then, I say, let our committee of defence examine that case, and if
our enemies are seeking to trample out Freethought under the name of
immorality, and under the cover and shield of our criminal law, then let
us defend that man to the last dollar we have. But we do not wish to put
ourselves in the position of general defenders of all the slush that may
be written in this or any other country. You cannot afford to do it.
You cannot afford to put into the mouth of theology a perpetual and
continual slur. You cannot afford to do it. And this meeting is not the
time to go into the question of what authority the United States may
have over the mails. It is a very wide question. It embraces many
others. Has the Government a right to say what shall go into the mails?
Why, in one sense, assuredly. Certainly they have a right to say you
shall not send a horse and wagon by mail. They have a right to fix some
limit; and the only thing we want is that the literature of liberty, the
literature of real Freethought, shall not be discriminated against.
And we know now as well as if it had been perfectly and absolutely
demonstrated, that the literature of Freethought will be absolutely
pure. We know it, We call upon the Christian world to expunge obscenity
from their book, and until that is expunged we demand that the laws
against obscene literature shall be executed. And how can we, in the
next resolution, say those laws ought all to be repealed? We cannot do
that. I have always been in favor of such an amendment of the law that
by no trick, by no device, by no judicial discretion, an honest, high,
pure-minded man should be subjected to punishment simply for giving his
best and his honest thought. What more do we need? What more can we ask?
I am as much opposed as my friend Mr. Wakeman can be to the assumption
of the church that it is the guardian of morality. If our morality is
to be guarded by that sentiment alone, then is the end come. The natural
instinct of self-defence in mankind and in all organized society is the
fortress of the morality in mankind. The church itself was at one time
the outgrowth of that same feeling, but now the feeling has outgrown the
church. Now, then, we will have a Committee of Defence. That committee
will examine every case. Suppose some man has been indicted, and suppose
he is guilty. Suppose he has endeavored to soil the human mind. Suppose
he has been willing to make money by pandering to the lowest passions
in the human breast. What will that committee do with him then? We will
say, "Go on; let the law take its course." But if, upon reading his
book, we find that he is all wrong, horribly wrong, idiotically wrong,
but make up our minds that he was honest in his error, I will give
as much as any other living man of my means to defend that man. And I
believe you will all bear me witness when I say that I have the cause of
intellectual liberty at heart as much as I am capable of having anything
at heart. And I know hundreds of others here just the same. I understand
that. I understand their motive. I believe it to be perfectly good, but
I truly and honestly think they are mistaken.

If we have an interest in the business, I would fight for it. If our
cause were assailed by law, then I say fight; and our cause is assailed,
and I say fight. They will not allow me, in many States of this Union,
to testify. I say fight until every one of those laws is repealed. They
discriminate against a man simply because he is honest. Repeal such
laws. The church, if it had the power to-day, would trample out every
particle of free literature in this land. And when they endeavor to
do that, I say fight. But there is a distinction wide as the
Mississippi--yes, wider than the Atlantic, wider than all the
oceans--between the literature of immorality and the literature of
Freethought. One is a crawling, slimy lizard, and the other an
angel with wings of light. Now, let us draw this distinction, let us
understand ourselves, and do not give to the common enemy a word covered
with mire, a word stained with cloaca, to throw at us. We thought we had
settled that question a year ago. We buried it then, and I say let it
rot.

"'This question is of great importance. It is the most important one we
have here. I have fought this question; I am ever going to do so, and
I will not allow anybody to put a stain upon me. This question must be
understood if it takes all summer. Here is a case in point. Some lady
has written a work which, I am informed, is a good work, and that has
nothing wrong about it. Her opinions may be foolish or wise. Let this
committee examine that case. If they find that she is a good woman, that
she had good intentions, no matter how terrible the work may be, if
her intentions are good, she has committed no crime. I want the honest
thought. I think I have always been in favor of it. But we haven't the
time to go into all these questions.

"'Then comes the question for this house to decide in a moment whether
these cases should have been tried in the State or Federal court. I
want it understood that I have confidence in the Federal courts of the
nation. There may be some bad judges, there may be some idiotic jurors.
I think there was in that case [of Mr. Bennett]. But the Committee of
Defence, if I understand it, supplied means, for the defence of that
man. They did, but are we ready now to decide in a moment what courts
shall have jurisdiction? Are we ready to say that the Federal courts
shall be denied jurisdiction in any case arising about the mails?
Suppose somebody robs the mails? Before whom shall we try the robber?
Try him before a Federal judge. Why? Because he has violated a Federal
law. We have not any time for such an investigation as this. What we
want to do is to defend free speech everywhere. What we want to do is to
defend the expression of thought in papers, in pamphlets, in books. What
we want to do is to see to it that these books, papers, and pamphlets
are on an equality with all other books, papers, and pamphlets in the
United States mails. And then the next step we want to take, if any man
is indicted under the pretence that he is publishing immoral books,
is to have our Committee of Defence well examine the case; and if we
believe the man to be innocent we will help defend him if he is
unable to defend himself; and if we find that the law is wrong in that
particular, we will go for the amendment of that law. I beg of you to
have some sense in this matter. We must have it. If we don't, upon that
rock we shall split--upon that rock we shall again divide. Let us not do
it. The cause of intellectual liberty is the highest to the human mind.
Let us stand by it, and we can help all these people by this resolution.
We can do justice everywhere with it, while if we agree to the fifth and
sixth resolutions that have been offered I say we lay ourselves open to
the charge, and it will be hurled against us, no matter how unjustly,
that we are in favor of widespread immorality.

"'Mr. Clarke: We are not afraid of it.

"'Colonel Ingersoll: You may say we are not afraid. I am not afraid. He
only is a fool who rushes into unnecessary danger.

"'Mr. Clarke: What are you talking about, anyway?

"'Colonel Ingersoll: I am talking with endeavor to put a little sense
into such men as you. Your very question shows that it was necessary
that I should talk. And now I move that my resolution be adopted.

"'Mr. Wakeman moved that it be added to that portion of the sixth
resolution which recommended the constitution of the Committee of
Defence.

"'Col. Ingersoll: I cannot agree to the sixth resolution. I think nearly
every word of it is wrong in principle. I think it binds us to a course
of action that we shall not be willing to follow; and my resolution
covers every possible case. My resolution binds us to defend every
honest man in the exercise of his right. I can't be bound to say that
the Government hasn't control of its morals--that we cannot trust the
Federal courts--that, under any circumstances, at any time, I am bound
to defend, either by word or money, any man who violates the laws of
this country.

"'Mr. Wakeman: We do not say that.

"'Colonel Ingersoll: I beg of you, I beseech you, not to pass the sixth
resolution. If you do, I wouldn't give that [snapping his fingers] for
the platform. A part of the Comstock law authorizes the vilest possible
trick. We are all opposed to that.

"'Mr. Leland: What is the question?

"'Colonel Ingersoll: Don't let us be silly. Don't let us say we are
opposed to what we are not opposed to. If any man here is opposed to
putting down the vilest of all possible trash he ought to go home.
We are opposed to only a part of the law--opposed to it whenever they
endeavor to trample Freethought under foot in the name of immorality.

Afterward, at the same session of the Congress, the following colloquy
took place between Colonel Ingersoll and T. B. Wakeman:

"'Colonel Ingersoll: You know as well as I that there are certain
books not fit to go through the mails--books and pictures not fit to be
delivered.

"'Mr. Wakeman: That is so.

"'Colonel Ingersoll: There is not a man here who is not in favor, when
these books and pictures come into the control of the United States,
of burning them up when they are manifestly obscene. You don't want any
grand jury there.

"'Mr. Wakeman: Yes, we do.

"'Colonel Ingersoll: No, we don't. When they are manifestly obscene,
burn them up.

"'A delegate: Who is to be judge of that?

"'Colonel Ingersoll: There are books that nobody differs about. There
are certain things about which we can use discretion. If that discretion
is abused, a man has his remedy. We stand for the free thought of this
country. We stand for the progressive spirit of the United States. We
can't afford to say that all these laws should be repealed. If we had
time to investigate them we could say in what they should be amended.
Don't tie us to this nonsense--to the idea that we have an interest in
immoral literature. Let us remember that Mr. Wakeman is sore. He had a
case before the Federal courts, and he imagines, having lost that case,
you cannot depend on them. I have lost hundreds of cases. I have as much
confidence in the Federal courts as in the State courts. I am not to be
a party to throwing a slur upon the Federal judiciary. All we want is
fair play. We want the same chance for our doctrines that others have
for theirs. And how this infernal question of obscenity ever got into
the Liberal League I could never understand. If an innocent man is
convicted of larceny, should we repeal all the laws on the subject? I
don't pretend to be better than other people.

It is easy to talk right--so easy to be right that I never care to have
the luxury of being wrong. I am advocating something that we can stand
upon. I do not misunderstand Mr. Wakeman's motives. I believe they are
perfectly good--that he is thoroughly honest. Why not just say we will
stand by freedom of thought and its expression? Why not say that we
are in favor of amending any law that is wrong? But do not make the
wholesale statement that all these laws ought to be repealed. They ought
not to be repealed. Some of them are good." The law against sending
instruments of vice in the mails is good, as is the law against sending
obscene books and pictures, and the law against letting ignorant hyenas
prey upon sick people, and the law which prevents the getters up of
bogus lotteries sending their letters through the mail.'

"At the evening session of the Congress, on the same day, Mr. Ingersoll
made this speech in opposition to the resolution demanding the repeal of
the Comstock laws:

"'I am not in favor of the repeal of those laws. I have never been, and
I never expect to be. But I do wish that every law providing for the
punishment of a criminal offence should distinctly define the offence.
That is the objection to this law, that it does not define the offence,
so that an American citizen can readily know when he is about to violate
it and consequently the law ought in all probability to be modified
in that regard. I am in favor of every law defining with perfect
distinctness the offence to be punished, but I cannot say by wholesale
these laws should be repealed. I have the cause of Freethought too much
at heart. Neither will I consent to the repeal simply because the church
is in favor of those laws. In so far as the church agrees with me, I
congratulate the church. In so far as superstition is willing to help
me, good! I am willing to accept it. I believe, also, that this League
is upon a secular basis, and there should be nothing in our platform
that would prevent any Christian from acting with us. What is our
platform?--and we ought to leave it as it is. It needs no amendment.
Our platform is for a secular government. Is it improper in a secular
government to endeavor to prevent the spread of obscene literature? It
is the business of a secular government to do it, but if that government
attempts to stamp out Freethought in the name of obscenity, it is then
for the friends of Freethought to call for a definition of the word, and
such a definition as will allow Freethought to go everywhere through all
the mails of the United States. We are also in favor of secular schools.
Good! We are in favor of doing away with every law that discriminates
against a man on account of his belief. Good! We are in favor of
universal education. Good! We are in favor of the taxation of church
property. Good!--because the experience of the world shows that where
you allow superstition to own property without taxing it, it will absorb
the net profits. Is it time now that we should throw into the scale,
against all these splendid purposes, an effort to repeal some postal
laws against obscenity? As well might we turn the League into an engine
to do away with all laws against the sale of stale eggs.

"'What have we to do with those things? Is it possible that Freethought
can be charged with being obscene? Is it possible that, if the charge
is made, it can be substantiated? Can you not attack any superstition
in the world in perfectly pure language? Can you not attack anything you
please in perfectly pure language? And where a man intends right, no law
should find him guilty; and if the law is weak in that respect, let it
be modified. But I say to you that I cannot go with any body of men who
demand the unconditional repeal of these laws. I believe in liberty
as much as any man that breathes. I will do as much, according to my
ability, as any other man to make this an absolutely free and secular
government I will do as much as any other man of my strength and of my
intellectual power to give every human being every right that I claim
for myself. But this obscene law business is a stumbling block. Had it
not been for this, instead of the few people voting here--less than one
hundred--we would have had a Congress numbered by thousands. Had it not
been for this business, the Liberal League of the United States would
to-night hold in its hand the political destiny of the United States.
Instead of that, we have thrown away our power upon a question in which
we are not interested. Instead of that, we have wasted our resources
and our brain for the repeal of a law that we don't want repealed. If
we want anything, we simply want a modification. Now, then, don't stain
this cause by such a course. And don't understand that I am pretending,
or am insinuating, that anyone here is in favor of obscene literature.
It is a question, not of principle, but of means, and I beg pardon
of this Convention if I have done anything so horrible as has been
described by Mr. Pillsbury. I regret it if I have ever endeavored to
trample upon the rights of this Convention.

"'There is one thing I have not done--I have not endeavored to cast
five votes when I didn't have a solitary vote. Let us be fair; let us be
fair. I have simply given my vote. I wish to trample upon the rights
of no one; and when Mr. Pillsbury gave those votes he supposed he had
a right to give them; and if he had a right, the votes would have been
counted. I attribute nothing wrong to him, but I say this: I have the
right to make a motion in this Congress, I have the right to argue that
motion, but I have no more rights than any other member, and I claim
none. But I want to say to you--and I want you to know and feel it--that
I want to act with every Liberal man and woman in this world. I want you
to know and feel it that I want to do everything I can to get every one
of these statutes off our books that discriminates against a man because
of his religious belief--that I am in favor of a secular government,
and of all these rights. But I cannot, and I will not, operate with any
organization that asks for the unconditional repeal of those laws. I
will stand alone, and I have stood alone. I can tell my thoughts to my
countrymen, and I will do it, and whatever position you take, whether
I am with you or not, you will find me battling everywhere for the
absolute freedom of the human mind. You will find me battling everywhere
to make this world better and grander; and whatever my personal conduct
may be, I shall endeavor to keep my theories right. I beg of you,
I implore you, do not pass the resolution No. 6. It is not for our
interest; it will do us no good. It will lose us hosts of honest,
splendid friends. Do not do it; it will be a mistake; and the only
reason I offered the motion was to give the members time to think this
over. I am not pretending to know more than other people. I am perfectly
willing to say that in many things I know less. But upon this subject I
want you to think. No matter whether you are afraid of your sons, your
daughters, your wives, or your husbands, that isn't it--I don't want the
splendid prospects of this League put in jeopardy upon such an issue
as this. I have no more to say. But if that resolution is passed, all I
have to say is that, while I shall be for liberty everywhere, I cannot
act with this organization, and I will not.'

"The resolution was finally adopted, and Colonel Ingersoll resigned his
office of vice-president in the League, and never acted with it again
until the League dropped all side issues, and came back to first
principles--the enforcement of the Nine Demands of Liberalism."

In 1892, writing upon this subject in answer to a minister who had
repeated these absurd charges, Colonel Ingersoll made this offer:

"I will pay a premium of one thousand dollars a word for each and every
word I ever said or wrote in favor of sending obscene publications
through the mails."




CONVENTION OF THE NATIONAL LIBERAL LEAGUE.

Cincinnati, O., September 14.1878.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Allow me to say that the cause nearest my heart,
and to which I am willing to devote the remainder of my life, is the
absolute, the _absolute_, enfranchisement of the human mind. I believe
that the family is the unit of good government, and that every good
government is simply an aggregation of good families. I therefore not
only believe in perfect civil and religious liberty, but I believe in
the one man loving the one woman. I believe the real temple of the human
heart is the hearthstone, and that there is where the sacrifice of life
should be made; and just in proportion as we have that idea in this
country, just in that proportion we shall advance and become a great,
glorious and splendid nation. I do not want the church or the state to
come between the man and wife. I want to do what little I can while I
live to strengthen and render still more sacred the family relation. I
am also in favor of granting every right to every other human being that
I claim for myself; and when I look about upon the world and see how the
children that are born to-day, or this year, or this age, came into a
world that has nearly all been taken up before their arrival; when I see
that they have not even an opportunity to labor for bread; when I see
that in our splendid country some who do the most have the least,
and others who do the least have the most; I say to myself there is
something wrong somewhere, and I hope the time will come when every
child that nature has invited to our feast will have an equal right with
all the others. There is only one way, in my judgment, to bring that
about; and that is, first, not simply by the education of the head, but
by the universal education of the heart. The time will come when a man
with millions in his possession will not be respected unless with those
millions he improves the condition of his fellow-men.

The time will come when it will be utterly impossible for a man to go
down to death, grasping millions in the clutch of avarice. The time will
come when it will be impossible for such a man to exist, for he will be
followed by the scorn and execration of mankind. The time will come
when such a man when stricken by death, cannot purchase the favor of
posterity by leaving a portion of the gains which he has wrung from the
poor, to some church or Bible society for the glory of God.

Now, let me say that we have met together as a Liberal League. We have
passed the same platform again; but if you will read that platform you
will see that it covers nearly every word that I have spoken--universal
education--the laws of science included, not the guesses of
superstition--universal education, not for the next world but for
this--happiness, not so much for an unknown land beyond the clouds as
for this life in this world. I do not say that there is not another
life. If there is any God who has allowed his children to be oppressed
in this world he certainly needs another life to reform the blunders he
has made in this.

Now, let us all agree that we will stand by each other splendidly,
grandly; and when we come into convention let us pass resolutions that
are broad, kind, and genial, because, if you are true Liberals, you will
hold in a kind of tender pity the most outrageous superstitions in
the world. I have said some things in my time that were not altogether
charitable; but, after all, when I think it over, I see that men are as
they are, because they are the result of every thing that has ever been.

Sometimes I think the clergy a necessary evil; but I say, let us be
genial and kind, and let us know that every other person has the same
right to be a Catholic or a Presbyterian, and gather consolation
from the doctrine of reprobation, that he has the same right to be
a Methodist or a Christian Disciple or a Baptist; the same right to
believe these phantasies and follies and superstitions--[_A voice--"And
to burn heretics?"_]

No--The same right that we have to believe that it is all superstition.
But when that Catholic or Baptist or Methodist endeavors to put chains
on the bodies or intellects of men, it is then the duty of every Liberal
to prevent it at all hazards. If we can do any good in our day and
generation, let us do it.

There is no office I want in this world. I will make up my mind as to
the next when I get there, because my motto is--and with that motto I
will close what I have to say--My motto is: One world at a time!




CONVENTION OF THE AMERICAN SECULAR UNION.

Albany, N. Y., September 13, 1885.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: While I have never sought any place in any
organization, and while I never intended to accept any place in any
organization, yet as you have done me the honor to elect me president of
the American Secular Union, I not only accept the place, but tender to
you each and all my sincere thanks.

This is a position that a man cannot obtain by repressing his honest
thought. Nearly all other positions he obtains in that way. But I
am glad that the time has come when men can afford to preserve
their manhood in this country. Maybe they cannot be elected to the
Legislature, cannot become errand boys in Congress, cannot be placed as
weather-vanes in the presidential chair, but the time has come when a
man can express his honest thought and be treated like a gentleman
in the United States. We have arrived at a point where priests do not
govern, and have reached that stage of our journey where we, as Harriet
Martineau expressed it, are "free rovers on the breezy common of the
universe." Day by day we are getting rid of the aristocracy of the air.
We have been the slaves of phantoms long enough, and a new day, a day
of glory, has dawned upon this new world--this new world which is far
beyond the old in the real freedom of thought.

In the selection of your officers, without referring to myself, I think
you have shown great good sense. The first man chosen as vice-president,
Mr. Charles Watts, is a gentleman of sound, logical mind; one who
knows what he wants to say and how to say it; who is familiar with the
organization of Secular societies, knows what we wish to accomplish and
the means to attain it. I am glad that he is about to make this country
his home, and I know of no man who, in my judgment, can do more for the
cause of intellectual liberty.

The next vice-president, Mr. Remsburg, has done splendid work all over
the country. He is an absolutely fearless man, and tells really and
truly what his mind produces. We need such men everywhere.

You know it is almost a rule, or at any rate the practice, in political
parties and in organizations generally, to be so anxious for success
that all the offices and places of honor are given to those who will
come in at the eleventh hour. The rule is to hold out these honors as
bribes for newcomers instead of conferring them upon those who have
borne the heat and burden of the day. I hope that the American Secular
Union will not be guilty of any such injustice. Bestow your honors upon
the men who stood by you when you had few friends, the men who enlisted
for the war when the cause needed soldiers. Give your places to them,
and if others want to join your ranks, welcome them heartily to the
places of honor in the rear and let them learn how to keep step.

In this particular, leaving out myself as I have said, you have done
magnificently well. Mrs. Mattie Krekel, another vice-president, is a
woman who has the courage to express her opinions, and she is all the
more to be commended because, as you know, women have to suffer a little
more punishment than men, being amenable to social laws that are more
exacting and tyrannical than those passed by Legislatures.

Of Mr. Wakeman it is not necessary to speak. You all know him to be an
able, thoughtful, and experienced man, capable in every respect; one
who has been in this organization from the beginning, and who is now
president of the New York society. Elizur Wright, one of the patriarchs
of Freethought, who was battling for liberty before I was born, and who
will be found in the front rank until he ceases to be. You have honored
yourselves by electing James Parton, a thoughtful man, a scholar, a
philosopher, and a philanthropist--honest, courageous, and logical--with
a mind as clear as a cloudless sky. Parker Pillsbury, who has always
been on the side of liberty, always willing, if need be, to stand
alone--a man who has been mobbed many times because he had the goodness
and courage to denounce the institution of slavery--a man possessed
of the true martyr spirit. Messrs. Algie and Adams, our friends from
Canada, men of the highest character, worthy of our fullest confidence
and esteem--conscientious, upright, and faithful.

And permit me to say that I know of no man of kinder heart, of gentler
disposition, with more real, good human feeling toward all the world,
with a more forgiving and tender spirit, than Horace Seaver. He and Mr.
Mendum are the editors of the _Investigator_, the first Infidel paper
I ever saw, and I guess the first that any one of you ever saw--a paper
once edited by Abner Kneeland, who was put in prison for saying, "The
Universalists believe in a God which I do not." The court decided that
he had denied the existence of a Supreme Being, and at that time it was
not thought safe to allow a remark of that kind to be made, and so, for
the purpose of keeping an infinite God from tumbling off his throne, Mr.
Kneeland was put in jail. But Horace Seaver and Mr. Mendum went on with
his work. They are pioneers in this cause, and they have been absolutely
true to the principles of Freethought from the first day until now.

If there is anybody belonging to our Secular Union more enthusiastic and
better calculated to impart something of his enthusiasm to others than
Samuel P. Putnam, our secretary, I do not know him. Courtlandt Palmer,
your treasurer, you all know, and you will presently know him better
when you hear the speech he is about to make, and that speech will speak
better for him than I possibly can. Wait until you hear him, as he is
now waiting for me to get through that you may hear him. He will give
you the definition of the true gentleman, and that definition will be a
truthful description of himself.

Mr. Reynolds is on our side if anybody is or ever was, and Mr.
Macdonald, editor of _The Truth Seeker_, aiming not only to seek the
truth but to expose error, has done and is doing incalculable good in
the cause of mental freedom.

All these men and women are men and women of character, of high purpose;
in favor of Freethought not as a peculiarity or as an eccentricity of
the hour, but with all their hearts, through and through, to the very
center and core of conviction, life, and purpose.

And so I can congratulate you on your choice, and believe that you have
entered upon the most prosperous year of your existence. I believe that
you will do all you can to have every law repealed that puts a hypocrite
above an honest mail. We know that no man is thoroughly honest who does
not tell his honest thought. We want the Sabbath day for ourselves and
our families. Let the gods have the heavens. Give us the earth. If the
gods want to stay at home Sundays and look solemn, let them do it; let
us have a little wholesome recreation and pleasure. If the gods wish to
go out with their wives and children, let them go. If they want to play
billiards with the stars, so they don't carom on us, let them play.

We want to do what we can to compel every church to pay taxes on its
property as other people pay on theirs. Do you know that if church
property is allowed to go without taxation, it is only a question
of time when they will own a large per cent, of the property of the
civilized world? It is the same as compound interest; only give it time.
If you allow it to increase without taxing it for its protection, its
growth can only be measured by the time in which it has to grow. The
church builds an edifice in some small town, gets several acres of land.
In time a city rises around it. The labor of others has added to the
value of this property, until it is worth millions. If this property is
not taxed, the churches will have so much in their hands that they will
again become dangerous to the liberties of mankind. There never will be
real liberty in this country until all property is put upon a perfect
equality. If you want to build a Joss house, pay taxes. If you want
to build churches, pay taxes. If you want to build a hall or temple in
which Freethought and science are to be taught, pay taxes. Let there be
no property untaxed. When you fail to tax any species of property, you
increase the tax of other people owning the rest. To that extent, you
unite church and state. You compel the Infidel to support the
Catholic. I do not want to support the Catholic Church. It is not worth
supporting. It is an unadulterated evil. Neither do I want to reform
the Catholic Church. The only reformation of which that church or any
orthodox church is capable, is destruction. I want to spend no more
money on superstition. Neither should our money be taken to support
sectarian schools. We do not wish to employ any chaplains in the navy,
or in the army, or in the Legislatures, or in Congress. It is useless to
ask God to help the political party that happens to be in power. We want
no President, no Governor "clothed with a little brief authority," to
issue a proclamation as though he were an agent of God, authorized to
tell all his loving subjects to fast on a certain day, or to enter their
churches and pray for the accomplishment of a certain object. It is
none of his business. When they called on Thomas Jefferson to issue
a proclamation, he said he had no right to do it, that religion was a
personal, individual matter, and that the state had no right, no power,
to interfere.

I now have the pleasure of introducing Mr. Courtlandt Palmer, who will
speak to you on the "Aristocracy of Freethought," in my judgment the
aristocracy not only of the present, but the aristocracy of the future.




THE RELIGIOUS BELIEF OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

New York, May 28, 1896.


MY DEAR MR. SEIP: I have carefully read your article on the religious
belief of Abraham Lincoln, and in accordance with your request I will
not only give you my opinion of the evidence upon which you rely, as set
out in your article, but my belief as to the religious opinions of Mr.
Lincoln, and the facts on which my belief rests.

You speak of a controversy between myself and General Collis upon this
subject. A few years ago I delivered a lecture on Mr. Lincoln, in this
city, and in that lecture said that Lincoln, so far as his religious
opinions were concerned, substantially agreed with Franklin,
Jefferson, Paine and Voltaire. Thereupon General Collis wrote me a note
contradicting what I had said and asserting that "Lincoln invoked the
power of Almighty God, not the Deist God, but the God whom he worshiped
under the forms of the Christian church of which he was a member." To
this I replied saying that Voltaire and Paine both believed in God, and
that Lincoln was never a member of any Christian church.

General Collis wrote another letter to which, I think, I made no reply,
for the reason that the General had demonstrated that he knew nothing
whatever on the subject. It was evident that he had never read the life
of Lincoln, because if he had, he would not have said that he was a
member of a church. It was also evident that he knew nothing about the
religious opinions of Franklin, Voltaire or Paine, or he would have
known that they were believers in the existence of a Supreme Being. It
did not seem to me that his letter was worthy of a reply.

Now as to your article: I find in what you have written very little that
is new. I do not remember ever to have seen anything about the statement
of the daughter of the Rev. Mr. Gurley in regard to Lincoln's letters.
The daughter, however, does not pretend to know the contents of the
letters and says that they were destroyed by fire; consequently these
letters, so far as this question is concerned, are of no possible
importance. The only thing in your article tending to show that Lincoln
was a Christian is the following: "I think I can say with sincerity that
I hope I am a Christian. I had lived until my Willie died without
fully realizing these things. That blow overwhelmed me. It showed me
my weakness as I had never felt it before, and I think I can safely say
that I know something of a change of heart, and I will further add that
it has been my intention for some time, at a suitable opportunity, to
make a public religious profession."

Now, if you had given the name of the person to whom this was said, and
if that person had told you that Lincoln did utter these words, then the
evidence would have been good; but you are forced to say that this was
said to an eminent Christian lady. You do not give this lady's name. I
take it for granted that her name is unknown, and that the name of the
person to whom she told the story is also unknown, and that the name
of the man who gave the story to the world is unknown. This falsehood,
according to your own showing, is an orphan, a lonely lie without
father or mother. Such testimony cannot be accepted. It is not even good
hearsay.

In the next point you make, you also bring forward the remarks claimed
to have been made by Mr. Lincoln when some colored people of Baltimore
presented him with a Bible. You say that he said that the Bible was
God's best gift to man, and but for the Bible we could not know right
from wrong. It is impossible that Lincoln should have uttered these
words. He certainly would not have said to some colored people that the
book that instituted human slavery was God's best gift to man; neither
could he have said that but for this book we could not know right from
wrong. If he said these things he was temporarily insane. Mr. Lincoln
was familiar with the lives of Socrates, Epictetus, Epicurus, Zeno,
Confucius, Zoroaster and Buddha, not one of whom ever heard of the
Bible. Certainly these men knew right from wrong. In my judgment they
would compare favorably with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and the Jews
that crucified Christ. These pretended remarks must be thrown away; they
could have been uttered only by an ignorant and thoughtless zealot, not
by a sensible, thoughtful man. Neither can we rely on any new evidence
given by the Rev. Mr. Gurley. If Mr. Gurley at any time claimed that
Lincoln was a Christian, such claim was born of an afterthought. Mr.
Gurley preached a funeral sermon over the body of Lincoln at the White
House, and in that sermon he did not claim that Mr. Lincoln was in any
sense a Christian. He said nothing about Christ. So, the testimony of
the Rev. Mr. Sunderland amounts to nothing. Lincoln did not tell him
that he was a Christian or that he believed in Christ. Not one of the
ministers that claim that Lincoln was a Christian, not one, testifies
that Lincoln so said in his hearing. So, the lives that have been
written of Lincoln by Holland and Arnold are of no possible authority.
Holland knew nothing about Lincoln; he relied on gossip, and was
exceedingly anxious to make Lincoln a Christian so that his Life would
sell. As a matter of fact, Mr. Arnold knew little of Lincoln, and knew
no more of his religious opinions than he seems to have known about the
opinions of Washington.

I find also in your article a claim that Lincoln said to somebody that
under certain conditions, that is to say, if a church had the Golden
Rule for its creed, he would join that church; but you do not give the
name of the friend to whom Lincoln made this declaration. Still, if
he made it, it does not tend to show that he was a Christian. A church
founded on the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would that others
should do unto you," would not in any sense be a Christian church.
It would be an ethical society. The testimony of Mr. Bateman has been
changed by himself, he having admitted that it was colored, that he
was not properly reported; so the night-walking scene given by James
E. Murdoch, does not even tend to show that Lincoln was a Christian.
According to Mr. Murdoch he was praying to the God of Solomon and he
never mentioned the name of Christ. I think, however, Mr. Murdoch's
story is too theatrical, and my own opinion is that it was a waking
dream. I think Lincoln was a man of too much sense, too much tact, to
have said anything to God about Solomon. Lincoln knew that what God did
for Solomon ended in failure, and if he wanted God to do something for
him (Lincoln) he would not have called attention to the other case. So
Bishop Simpson, in his oration or funeral sermon, said nothing about
Lincoln's having been a Christian.

Now, what is the testimony that you present that Lincoln was a
Christian?

First, Several of your witnesses say that he believed in God.

Second, Some say that he believed in the efficacy of prayer.

Third, Some say that he was a believer in Providence.

Fourth, An unknown person says that he said to another unknown person
that he was a Christian.

Fifth, You also claim that he said the Bible was the best gift of God to
man, and that without it we could not have known right from wrong.

The anonymous testimony has to be thrown away, so nothing is left except
the remarks claimed to have been made when the Bible was presented
by the colored people, and these remarks destroy themselves. It
is absolutely impossible that Lincoln could have uttered the words
attributed to him on that occasion. I know of no one who heard the
words, I know of no witness who says he heard them or that he knows
anybody who did. These remarks were not even heard by an "eminent
Christian lady," and we are driven to say that if Lincoln was a
Christian he took great pains to keep it a secret.

I believe that I am familiar with the material facts bearing upon the
religious belief of Mr. Lincoln, and that I know what he thought of
orthodox Christianity. I was somewhat acquainted with him and well
acquainted with many of his associates and friends, and I am familiar
with Mr. Lincoln's public utterances. Orthodox Christians have the habit
of claiming all great men, all men who have held important positions,
men of reputation, men of wealth. As soon as the funeral is over
clergymen begin to relate imaginary conversations with the deceased, and
in a very little while the great man is changed to a Christian--possibly
to a saint.

All this happened in Mr. Lincoln's case. Many pious falsehoods were
told, conversations were manufactured, and suddenly the church claimed
that the great President was an orthodox Christian. The truth is that
Lincoln in his religious views agreed with Franklin, Jefferson, and
Voltaire. He did not believe in the inspiration of the Bible or the
divinity of Christ or the scheme of salvation, and he utterly repudiated
the dogma of eternal pain.

In making up my mind as to what Mr. Lincoln really believed, I do not
take into consideration the evidence of unnamed persons or the contents
of anonymous letters; I take the testimony of those who knew and loved
him, of those to whom he opened his heart and to whom he spoke in the
freedom of perfect confidence.

Mr. Herndon was his friend and partner for many years. I knew Mr.
Herndon well. I know that Lincoln never had a better, warmer, truer
friend. Herndon was an honest, thoughtful, able, studious man, respected
by all who knew him. He was as natural and sincere as Lincoln himself.
On several occasions Mr. Herndon told me what Lincoln believed and what
he rejected in the realm of religion. He told me again and again
that Mr. Lincoln did not believe in the inspiration of the Bible, the
divinity of Christ, or in the existence of a personal God. There was no
possible reason for Mr. Herndon to make a mistake or to color the facts.

Justice David Davis was a life-long friend and associate of Mr. Lincoln,
and Judge Davis knew Lincoln's religious opinions and knew Lincoln as
well as anybody did. Judge Davis told me that Lincoln was a Freethinker,
that he denied the inspiration of the Bible, the divinity of Christ,
and all miracles. Davis also told me that he had talked with Lincoln on
these subjects hundreds of times.

I was well acquainted with Col. Ward H. Lamon and had many conversations
with him about Mr. Lincoln's religious belief, before and after he wrote
his life of Lincoln. He told me that he had told the exact truth in his
life of Lincoln, that Lincoln never did believe in the Bible, or in the
divinity of Christ, or in the dogma of eternal pain; that Lincoln was a
Freethinker.

For many years I was well acquainted with the Hon. Jesse W. Fell, one
of Lincoln's warmest friends. Mr. Fell often came to my house and we had
many talks about the religious belief of Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Fell told me
that Lincoln did not believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures, and
that he denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. Mr. Fell was very liberal
in his own ideas, a great admirer of Theodore Parker and a perfectly
sincere and honorable man.

For several years I was well acquainted with William G. Green, who was
a clerk with Lincoln at New Salem in the early days, and who admired and
loved Lincoln with all his heart. Green told me that Lincoln was always
an Infidel, and that he had heard him argue against the Bible hundreds
of times. Mr. Green knew Lincoln, and knew him well, up to the time of
Lincoln's death.

The Hon. James Tuttle of Illinois was a great friend of Lincoln, and
he is, if living, a friend of mine, and I am a friend of his. He knew
Lincoln well for many years, and he told me again and again that Lincoln
was an Infidel. Mr. Tuttle is a Freethinker himself and has always
enjoyed the respect of his neighbors. A man with purer motives does not
live.

So I place great reliance on the testimony of Col. John G. Nicolay. Six
weeks after Mr. Lincoln's death Colonel Nicolay said that he did not in
any way change his religious ideas, opinions or belief from the time he
left Springfield until the day of his death.

In addition to all said by the persons I have mentioned, Mrs. Lincoln
said that her husband _was not a Christian_. There are many other
witnesses upon this question whose testimony can be found in a book
entitled "Abraham Lincoln, was he a Christian?" written by John E.
Remsburg, and published in 1893. In that book will be found all
the evidence on both sides. Mr. Remsburg states the case with great
clearness and demonstrates that Lincoln was not a Christian.

Now, what is a Christian?

First. He is a believer in the existence of God, the Creator and
Governor of the Universe.

Second. He believes in the inspiration of the Old and New Testaments.

Third. He believes in the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ; that the
Holy Ghost was his father.

Fourth. He believes that this Christ was offered as a sacrifice for the
sins of men, that he was crucified, dead and buried, that he arose from
the dead and that he ascended into heaven.

Fifth. He believes in the "fall of man," in the scheme of redemption
through the atonement.

Sixth. He believes in salvation by faith, that the few are to be
eternally happy, and that the many are to be eternally damned.

Seventh. He believes in the Trinity, in God the Father, God the Son and
God the Holy Ghost.

Now, is there the slightest evidence to show that Lincoln believed in
the inspiration of the Old and New Testaments?

Has anybody said that he was heard to say that he so believed?

Does anybody testify that Lincoln believed in the miraculous birth of
Jesus Christ, that the Holy Ghost was the father or that Christ was or
is God?

Has anybody testified that Lincoln believed that Christ was raised from
the dead?

Did anyone ever hear him say that he believed in the ascension of
Jesus Christ? Did anyone ever hear him assert that he believed in the
forgiveness of sins, or in salvation by faith, or that belief was a
virtue and investigation a crime?

Where, then, is the evidence that he was a Christian?

There is another reason for thinking that Lincoln never became a
Christian.

All will admit that he was an honest man, that he discharged all
obligations perceived, and did what he believed to be his duty. If
he had become a Christian it was his duty publicly to say so. He was
President; he had the ear of the nation; every citizen, had he spoken,
would have listened. It was his duty to make a clear, explicit statement
of his conversion, and it was his duty to join some orthodox church, and
he should have given his reasons. He should have endeavored to reach
the heart and brain of the Republic. It was unmanly for him to keep his
"second birth" a secret and sneak into heaven leaving his old friends to
travel the road to hell.

Great pains have been taken to show that Mr. Lincoln believed in,
and worshiped the one true God. This by many is held to have been his
greatest virtue, the foundation of his character, and yet, the God he
worshiped, the God to whom he prayed, allowed him to be assassinated.

Is it possible that God will not protect his friends?




ORGANIZED CHARITIES.

I HAVE no great confidence in organized charities. Money is left and
buildings are erected and sinecures provided for a good many worthless
people. Those in immediate control are almost, or when they were
appointed were almost, in want themselves, and they naturally hate other
beggars.

They regard persons who ask assistance as their enemies. There is an old
story of a tramp who begged a breakfast. After breakfast another tramp
came to the same place to beg his breakfast, and the first tramp with
blows and curses drove him away, saying at the same time: "I expect to
get dinner here myself."

This is the general attitude of beggar toward beggar.

Another trouble with organized charities is the machinery, the various
methods they have adopted to prevent what they call fraud. They are
exceedingly anxious that the needy, that those who ask help, who have
been without fault, shall be attended to, their rule apparently being to
assist only the unfortunate perfect.

The trouble is that Nature produces very few specimens of that kind. As
a rule, men come to want on account of their imperfections, on account
of their ignorance, on account of their vices, and their vices are born
of their lack of capacity, of their want of brain. In other words, they
are failures of Nature, and the fact that they need help is not their
own fault, but the fault of their construction, their surroundings.

Very few people have the opportunity of selecting their parents, and it
is exceedingly difficult in the matter of grandparents. Consequently,
I do not hold people responsible for hereditary tendencies, traits and
vices. Neither do I praise them for having hereditary virtues.

A man going to one of these various charitable establishments is
cross-examined. He must give his biography. And after he has answered
all the supercilious, impudent questions, he is asked for references.

Then the people referred to are sought out, to find whether the
statements made by the applicant are true. By the time the thing is
settled the man who asked aid has either gotten it somewhere else or
has, in the language of the Spiritualists, "passed over to the other
side."

Of course this does not trouble the persons in charge of the organized
charities, because their salaries are going on.

As a rule, these charities were commenced by the best of people. Some
generous, philanthropic man or woman gave a life to establish a "home,"
it may be, for aged women, for orphans, for the waifs of the pavements.

These generous people, filled with the spirit of charity, raised a
little money, succeeded in hiring or erecting a humble building, and the
money they collected, so honestly given, they honestly used to bind up
the wounds and wipe away the tears of the unfortunate, and to save, if
possible, some who had been wrecked on the rocks and reefs of crime.

Then some very rich man dies who had no charity and who would not have
left a dollar could he have taken his money with him. This rich man, who
hated his relatives and the people he actually knew, gives a large sum
of money to some particular charity--not that he had any charity, but
because he wanted to be remembered as a philanthropist.

Then the organized charity becomes rich, and the richer the meaner, the
richer the harder of heart and the closer of fist.

Now, I believe that Trinity Church, in this city, would be called an
organized charity. The church was started to save, if possible, a few
souls from eternal torment, and on the plea of saving these souls money
was given to the church.

Finally the church became rich. It is now a landlord--has many buildings
to rent. And if what I hear is true there is no harder landlord in the
city of New York.

So, I have heard it said of Dublin University, that it is about the
hardest landlord in Ireland.

I think you will find that all such institutions try to collect the very
last cent, and, in the name of pity, drive pity from their hearts.

I think it is Shakespeare who says, "Pity drives out pity," and he must
have had organized charities in his mind when he uttered this remark. Of
course a great many really good and philanthropic people leave vast sums
of money to charities.

I find that it is sometimes very difficult to get an injured man, or one
seized with some sudden illness, taken into a city hospital. There are
so many rules and so many regulations, so many things necessary to be
done, that while the rules are being complied with the soul of the sick
or injured man, weary of the waiting, takes its flight. And after the
man is dead, the doctors are kind enough to certify that he died of
heart failure.

So--in a general way--I speak of all the asylums, of all the homes for
orphans. When I see one of those buildings I feel that it is full of
petty tyranny, of what might be called pious meanness, devout deviltry,
where the object is to break the will of every recipient of public
favor.

I may be all wrong. I hope I am. At the same time I fear that I am
somewhere near right.

You may take our prisons; the treatment of prisoners is often infamous.
The Elmira Reformatory is a worthy successor of the Inquisition, a
disgrace, in my judgment, to the State of New York, to the civilization
of our day. Every little while something comes to light showing the
cruelty, the tyranny, the meanness, of these professional distributers
of public charity--of these professed reformers.

I know that they are visited now and then by committees from the
Legislature, and I know that the keepers of these places know when the
"committee" may be expected.

I know that everything is scoured and swept and burnished for the
occasion; and I know that the poor devils that have been abused or
whipped or starved, fear to open their mouths, knowing that if they
do they may not be believed and that they will be treated afterward as
though they were wild beasts.

I think these public institutions ought to be open to inspection at all
times. I think the very best men ought to be put in control of them.
I think only those doctors who have passed, and recently passed,
examinations as to their fitness, as to their intelligence and
professional acquirements, ought to be put in charge.

I do not think that hospitals should be places for young doctors to
practice sawing off the arms and legs of paupers or hunting in the
stomachs of old women for tumors. I think only the skillful, the
experienced, should be employed in such places. Neither do I think
hospitals should be places where medicine is distributed by students to
the poor.

Ignorance is a poor doctor, even for the poor, and if we pretend to be
charitable we ought to carry it out.

I would like to see tyranny done away with in prisons, in the
reformatories, and in all places under the government or supervision of
the State.

I would like to have all corporal punishment abolished, and I would also
like to see the money that is given to charity distributed by charity
and by intelligence. I hope all these institutions will be overhauled.

I hope all places where people are pretending to take care of the poor
and for which they collect money from the public, will be visited, and
will be visited unexpectedly and the truth told.

In my judgment there is some better way. I think every hospital,
every asylum, every home for waifs and orphans should be supported by
taxation, not by charity; should be under the care and control of the
State absolutely.

I do not believe in these institutions being managed by any individual
or by any society, religious or secular, but by the State. I would no
more have hospitals and asylums depend on charity than I would have the
public school depend on voluntary contributions.

I want the schools supported by taxation and to be controlled by the
State, and I want the hospitals and asylums and charitable institutions
founded and controlled and carried on in the same way. Let the property
of the State do it.

Let those pay the taxes who are able. And let us do away forever with
the idea that to take care of the sick, of the helpless, is a charity.
It is not a charity. It is a duty. It is something to be done for our
own sakes. It is no more a charity than it is to pave or light the
streets, no more a charity than it is to have a system of sewers.

It is all for the purpose of protecting society and of civilizing
ourselves.




SPAIN AND THE SPANIARDS.


SPAIN has always been exceedingly religious and exceedingly cruel. That
country had an unfortunate experience. The Spaniards fought the Moors
for about seven hundred or eight hundred years, and during that time
Catholicism and patriotism became synonymous. They were fighting the
Moslems. It was a religious war. For this reason they became intense in
their Catholicism, and they were fearful that if they should grant the
least concession to the Moor, God would destroy them. Their idea was
that the only way to secure divine aid was to have absolute faith, and
this faith was proved by their hatred of all ideas inconsistent with
their own.

Spain has been and is the victim of superstition. The Spaniards expelled
the Jews, who at that time represented a good deal of wealth and
considerable intelligence. This expulsion was characterized by infinite
brutality and by cruelties that words can not express. They drove
out the Moors at last. Not satisfied with this, they drove out the
Moriscoes. These were Moors who had been converted to Catholicism.

The Spaniards, however, had no confidence in the honesty of the
conversion, and for the purpose of gaining the good will of God, they
drove them out. They had succeeded in getting rid of Jews, Moors and
Moriscoes; that is to say, of the intelligence and industry of Spain.
Nothing was left but Spaniards; that is to say, indolence, pride,
cruelty and infinite superstition. So Spain destroyed all freedom of
thought through the Inquisition, and for many years the sky was livid
with the flames of the _Auto da fe_; Spain was busy carrying fagots
to the feet of philosophy, busy in burning people for thinking, for
investigating, for expressing honest opinions. The result was that a
great darkness settled over Spain, pierced by no star and shone upon by
no rising sun.

At one time Spain was the greatest of powers, owner of half the world,
and now she has only a few islands, the small change of her great
fortune, the few pennies in the almost empty purse, souvenirs of
departed wealth, of vanished greatness. Now Spain is bankrupt, bankrupt
not only in purse, but in the higher faculties of the mind, a nation
without progress, without thought; still devoted to bull fights and
superstition, still trying to affright contagious diseases by religious
processions. Spain is a part of the mediaeval ages, belongs to an ancient
generation. It really has no place in the nineteenth century.

Spain has always been cruel. S. S. Prentice, many years ago, speaking
of Spain said: "On the shore of discovery it leaped an armed robber, and
sought for gold even in the throats of its victims." The bloodiest pages
in the history of this world have been written by Spain. Spain in Peru,
in Mexico, Spain in the low countries--all possible cruelties come back
to the mind when we say Philip II., when we say the Duke of Alva, when
we pronounce the names of Ferdinand and Isabella. Spain has inflicted
every torture, has practiced every cruelty, has been guilty of every
possible outrage. There has been no break between Torquemada and
Weyler, between the Inquisition and the infamies committed in Cuba.

When Columbus found Cuba, the original inhabitants were the kindest and
gentlest of people. They practiced no inhuman rites, they were good,
contented people. The Spaniards enslaved them or sought to enslave them.
The people rising, they were hunted with dogs, they were tortured, they
were murdered, and finally exterminated. This was the commencement of
Spanish rule on the island of Cuba. The same spirit is in Spain to-day
that was in Spain then. The idea is not to conciliate, but to coerce,
not to treat justly, but to rob and enslave. No Spaniard regards a
Cuban as having equal rights with himself. He looks upon the island as
property, and upon the people as a part of that property, both equally
belonging to Spain.

Spain has kept no promises made to the Cubans and never will. At last
the Cubans know exactly what Spain is, and they have made up their minds
to be free or to be exterminated. There is nothing in history to equal
the atrocities and outrages that have been perpetrated by Spain upon
Cuba. What Spain does now, all know is only a repetition of what Spain
has done, and this is a prophecy of what Spain will do if she has the
power.

So far as I am concerned, I have no idea that there is to be any war
between Spain and the United States. A country that can't conquer Cuba,
certainly has no very flattering chance of overwhelming the United
States. A man that cannot whip one of his own boys is foolish when he
threatens to clean out the whole neighborhood. Of course, there is
some wisdom even in Spain, and the Spaniards who know anything of this
country know that it would be absolute madness and the utmost extreme
of folly to attack us. I believe in treating even Spain with perfect
fairness. I feel about the country as Burns did about the Devil: "O wad
ye tak' a thought an' mend!" I know that nations, like people, do as
they must, and I regard Spain as the victim and result of conditions,
the fruit of a tree that was planted by ignorance and watered by
superstition.

I believe that Cuba is to be free, and I want that island to give a new
flag to the air, whether it ever becomes a part of the United States
or not. My sympathies are all with those who are struggling for their
rights, trying to get the clutch of tyranny from their throats; for
those who are defending their homes, their firesides, against tyrants
and robbers.

Whether the Maine was blown up by the Spaniards is still a question. I
suppose it will soon be decided. In my own opinion, the disaster came
from the outside, but I do not know, and not knowing, I am willing
to wait for the sake of human nature. I sincerely hope that it was an
accident. I hate to think that there are people base and cruel enough
to commit such an act. Still, I think that all these matters will be
settled without war.

I am in favor of an international court, the members to be selected
by the ruling nations of the world; and before this court I think all
questions between nations should be decided, and the only army and the
only navy should be under its direction, and used only for the purpose
of enforcing its decrees. Were there such a court now, before which
Cuba could appear and tell the story of her wrongs, of the murders, the
assassinations, the treachery, the starvings, the cruelty, I think that
the decision would instantly be in her favor and that Spain would be
driven from the island. Until there is such a court there is no need of
talking about the world being civilized.

I am not a Christian, but I do believe in the religion of justice, of
kindness. I believe in humanity. I do believe that usefulness is the
highest possible form of worship. The useful man is the good man, the
useful man is the real saint. I care nothing about supernatural myths
and mysteries, but I do care for human beings. I have a little short
creed of my own, not very hard to understand, that has in it no
contradictions, and it is this: Happiness is the only good. The time to
be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is
to make others so.

I think this creed if adopted, would do away with war. I think it would
destroy superstition, and I think it would civilize even Spain.




OUR NEW POSSESSIONS.


AS I understand it, the United States went into this war against Spain
in the cause of freedom. For three years Spain has been endeavoring
to conquer these people. The means employed were savage. Hundreds
of thousands were starved. Yet the Cubans, with great heroism, were
continuing the struggle. In spite of their burned homes, their wasted
fields, their dead comrades, the Cubans were not conquered and still
waged war. Under those circumstances we said to Spain, "You must
withdraw from the Western World. The Cubans have the right to be free!"
They have been robbed and enslaved by Spanish officers and soldiers.
Undoubtedly they were savages when first found, and undoubtedly they are
worse now than when discovered--more barbarous. They wouldn't make
very good citizens of the United States; they are probably incapable
of self-government, but no people can be ignorant enough to be justly
robbed or savage enough to be rightly enslaved. I think that we should
keep the islands, not for our own sake, but for the sake of these
people.

It was understood and declared at the time, that we were not waging war
for the sake of territory, that we were not trying to annex Cuba, but
that we were moved by compassion--a compassion that became as stern as
justice. I did not think at the time there would be war. I supposed that
the Spanish people had some sense, that they knew their own condition
and the condition of this Republic. But the improbable happened, and
now, after the successes we have had, the end of the war appears to be
in sight, and the question arises: What shall we do with the Spanish
islands that we have taken already, or that we may take before peace
comes?

Of course, we could not, without stultifying ourselves and committing
the greatest of crimes, hand back Cuba to Spain. But to do that would be
no more criminal, no more infamous, than to hand back the Philippines.
In those islands there are from eight to ten millions of people.

As far as the Philippines are concerned, I think that we should endeavor
to civilize them, and to do this we should send teachers, not preachers.
We should not endeavor to give them our superstition in place of
Spanish superstition. They have had superstition enough. They don't
need churches, they need schools. We should teach them our arts; how to
cultivate the soil, how to manufacture the things they need. In other
words, we should deal honestly with them, and try our best to make them
a self-supporting and a self-governing people. The eagle should spread
its wings over those islands for that and for no other purpose. We can
not afford to give them to other nations or to throw fragments of them
to the wild beasts of Europe. We can not say to Russia, "You may have a
part," and to Germany, "You may have a share," and to France, "You take
something," and so divide out these people as thieves divide plunder.
That we will never do.

There is, moreover, in my mind, a little sentiment mixed with this
matter. Manila Bay has been filled with American glory. There was won
one of our greatest triumphs, one of the greatest naval victories of the
world--won by American courage and genius. We can not allow any other
nation to become the owner of the stage on which this American drama was
played. I know that we can be of great assistance to the inhabitants of
the Philippines. I know that we can be an unmixed blessing to them, and
that is the only ambition I have in regard to those islands. I would no
more think of handing them back to Spain than I would of butchering the
entire population in cold blood. Spain is unfit to govern. Spain has
always been a robber. She has never made an effort to civilize a human
being. The history of Spain, I think, is the darkest page in the history
of the world.

At the same time I have a kind of pity for the Spanish people. I feel
that they have been victims--victims of superstition. Their blood has
been sucked, their energies have been wasted and misdirected, and they
excite my sympathies. Of course, there are many good Spaniards, good
men, good women. Cervera appears to be a civilized man, a gentleman, and
I feel obliged to him for his treatment of Hobson. The great mass of
the Spaniards, however, must be exceedingly ignorant. Their so-called
leaders dare not tell them the truth about the progress of this war.
They seem to be afraid to state the facts. They always commence with a
lie, then change it a little, then change it a little more, and may be
at last tell the truth. They never seem to dare to tell the truth at
first, if the truth is bad. They put me in mind of the story of a man
telegraphing to a wife about the condition of her husband. The first
dispatch was, "Your husband is well, never better." The second was,
"Your husband is sick, but not very." The third was, "Your husband is
much worse, but we still have hope." The fourth was, "You may as well
know the truth--we buried your husband yesterday." That is about the way
the Spanish people get their war news.

That is why it may be incorrect to assume that peace is coming quickly.
If the Spaniards were a normal people, who acted as other folks do, we
might prophesy a speedy peace, but nobody has prophetic vision enough
to tell what such a people will do. In spite of all appearances, and all
our successes, and of all sense, the war may drag on. But I hope not,
not only for our own sake, but for the sake of the Spaniards themselves.
I can't help thinking of the poor peasants who will be killed, neither
can I help thinking of the poor peasants who will have to toil for many
years on the melancholy fields of Spain to pay the cost of this war. I
am sorry for them, and I am sorry also for the widows and orphans, and
no one will be more delighted when peace comes.

The argument has been advanced in the National Senate and elsewhere,
that the Federal Constitution makes no provision for the holding of
colonies or dependencies, such as the Philippines would be; that we can
only acquire them as territories, and eventually must take them in
as States, with their population of mixed and inferior races. That is
hardly an effective argument.

When this country was an infant, still in its cradle, George Washington
gave the child some very good advice; told him to beware of entangling
alliances, to stay at home and attend to his own business. Under the
circumstances this was all very good. But the infant has been growing,
and the Republic is now one of the most powerful nations in the world,
and yet, from its infant days until now, good, conservative people have
been repeating the advice of Washington. It was repeated again and again
when we were talking about purchasing Louisiana, and many Senators and
Congressmen became hysterical and predicted the fall of the Republic if
that was done. The same thing took place when we purchased Florida, and
again when we got one million square miles from Mexico, and still again
when we bought Alaska. These ideas about violating the Constitution and
wrecking the Republic were promulgated by our great and wise statesmen
on all these previous occasions, but, after all, the Constitution seems
to have borne the strain. There seems to be as much liberty now as there
was then, and, in fact, a great deal more. Our Territories have given us
no trouble, while they have greatly added to our population and vastly
increased our wealth.

Beside this, the statesmen of the olden time, the wise men with whom
wisdom was supposed to have perished, could not and did not imagine the
improvements that would take place after they were gone. In their time,
practically speaking, it was farther from New York to Buffalo than it is
now from New York to San Francisco, and so far as the transportation of
intelligence is concerned, San Francisco is as near New York as it would
have been in their day had it been just across the Harlem River. Taking
into consideration the railways, the telegraphs and the telephones, this
country now, with its area of three million five hundred thousand square
miles, is not so large as the thirteen original colonies were; that is
to say, the distances are more easily traveled and more easily overcome.
In those days it required months and months to cross the continent. Now
it is the work of four or five days.

Yet, when we came to talk about annexing the Hawaiian Islands, the
advice of George Washington was again repeated, and the older the
Senator the fonder he was of this advice. These Senators had the idea
that the Constitution, having nothing in favor of it, must contain
something, at least in spirit, against it. Of course, our fathers had
no idea of the growth of the Republic. We have, because with us it is a
matter of experience. I don't see that Alaska has imperiled any of the
liberties of New York. We need not admit Alaska as a State unless it has
a population entitling it to admission, and we are not bound to take in
the Sandwich Islands until the people are civilized, until they are fit
companions of free men and free women. It may be that a good many of our
citizens will go to the Sandwich Islands, and that, in a short time,
the people there will be ready to be admitted as a State. All this the
Constitution can stand, and in it there is no danger of imperialism.

I believe in national growth. As a rule, the prosperous farmer wants to
buy the land that adjoins him, and I think a prosperous nation has the
ambition of growth. It is better to expand than to shrivel; and, if our
Constitution is too narrow to spread over the territory that we have
the courage to acquire, why we can make a broader one. It is a very easy
matter to make a constitution, and no human happiness, no prosperity,
no progress should be sacrificed for the sake of a piece of paper with
writing on it; because there is plenty of paper and plenty of men to do
the writing, and plenty of people to say what the writing should be.
I take more interest in people than I do in constitutions. I regard
constitutions as secondary; they are means to an end, but the dear,
old, conservative gentlemen seem to regard constitutions as ends in
themselves.

I have read what ex-President Cleveland had to say on this important
subject, and I am happy to say that I entirely disagree with him. So,
too, I disagree with Senator Edmunds, and with Mr. Bryan, and with
Senator Hoar, and with all the other gentlemen who wish to stop the
growth of the Republic. I want it to grow.

As to the final destiny of the island possessions won from Spain, my
idea is that the Philippine Islands will finally be free, protected, it
may be for a long time, by the United States. I think Cuba will come to
us for protection, naturally, and, so far as I am concerned, I want
Cuba only when Cuba wants us. I think that Porto Rico and some of those
islands will belong permanently to the United States, and I believe Cuba
will finally become a part of our Republic.

When the opponents of progress found that they couldn't make the
American people take the back track by holding up their hands over the
Constitution, they dragged in the Monroe doctrine. When we concluded not
to allow Spain any longer to enslave her colonists, or the people who
had been her colonists, in the New World, that was a very humane and
wise resolve, and it was strictly in accord with the Monroe doctrine.
For the purpose of conquering Spain, we attacked her fleet in Manila
Bay, and destroyed it. I can not conceive how that action of ours can
be twisted into a violation of the Monroe doctrine. The most that can be
said is, that it is an extension of that doctrine, and that we are now
saying to Spain, "You shall not enslave, you shall not rob, anywhere
that we have the power to prevent it."

Having taken the Philippines, the same humanity that dictated the
declaration of what is called the Monroe doctrine, will force us to act
there in accordance with the spirit of that doctrine. The other day I
saw in the paper an extract, I think, from Goldwin Smith, in which
he says that if we were to bombard Cadiz we would give up the Monroe
doctrine. I do not see the application. We are at war with Spain, and we
have a right to invade that country, and the invasion would have nothing
whatever to do with the Monroe doctrine. War being declared, we have
the right to do anything consistent with civilized warfare to gain the
victory. The bombardment of Cadiz would have no more to do with the
Monroe doctrine than with the attraction of gravitation. If, by the
Monroe doctrine is meant that we have agreed to stay in this hemisphere,
and to prevent other nations from interfering with any people
on this hemisphere, and if it is said that, growing out of this, is
another doctrine, namely, that we are pledged not to interfere with
any people living on the other hemisphere, then it might be called a
violation of the Monroe doctrine for us to bombard Cadiz. But such is
not the Monroe doctrine. If, we being at war with England, she should
bombard the city of New York, or we should bombard some city of England,
would anybody say that either nation had violated the Monroe doctrine? I
do not see how that doctrine is involved, whether we fight at sea or on
the territory of the enemy.

This is the first war, so far as I know, in the history of the world
that has been waged absolutely in the interest of humanity; the only
war born of pity, of sympathy; and for that reason I have taken a deep
interest in it, and I must say that I was greatly astonished by the
victory of Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay. I think it one of the most
wonderful in the history of the world, and I think all that Dewey
has done shows clearly that he is a man of thought, of courage and of
genius. So, too, the victory over the fleet of Cervera by Commodore
Schley, is one of the most marvelous and the most brilliant in all
the annals of the world. The marksmanship, the courage, the absolute
precision with which everything was done, is to my mind astonishing.
Neither should we forget Wainwright's heroic exploit, as commander of
the Gloucester, by which he demonstrated that torpedo destroyers have
no terrors for a yacht manned by American pluck. Manila Bay and Santiago
both are surpassingly wonderful. There are no words with which to
describe such deeds--deeds that leap like flames above the clouds and
glorify the whole heavens.

The Spanish have shown in this contest that they possess courage, and
they have displayed what you might call the heroism of desperation,
but the Anglo-Saxon has courage and coolness--courage not blinded by
passion, courage that is the absolute servant of intelligence. The
Anglo-Saxon has a fixedness of purpose that is never interfered with by
feeling; he does not become enraged--he becomes firm, unyielding, his
mind is absolutely made up, clasped, locked, and he carries out his
will. With the Spaniard it is excitement, nervousness; he becomes
frantic. I think this war has shown the superiority, not simply of our
ships, or our armor, or our guns, but the superiority of our men, of
our officers, of our gunners. The courage of our army about Santiago was
splendid, the steadiness and bravery of the volunteers magnificent. I
think that what has already been done has given us the admiration of the
civilized world.

I know, of course, that some countries hate us. Germany is filled with
malice, and has been just on the crumbling edge of meanness for months,
wishing but not daring to interfere; hateful, hostile, but keeping just
within the overt act. We could teach Germany a lesson and her ships
would go down before ours just the same as the Spanish ships have done.
Sometimes I have almost wished that a hostile German shot might be
fired. But I think we will get even with Germany and with France--at
least I hope so.

And there is another thing I hope--that the good feeling now existing
between England and the United States may be eternal. In other words,
I hope it will be to the interests of both to be friends. I think the
English-speaking peoples are to rule this world. They are the kings of
invention, of manufactures, of commerce, of administration, and they
have a higher conception of human liberty than any other people. Of
course, they are not entirely free; they still have some of the rags and
tatters and ravelings of superstition; but they are tatters and they are
rags and they are ravelings, and the people know it. And, besides all
this, the English language holds the greatest literature of the world.




A FEW FRAGMENTS ON EXPANSION.


A NATION rises from infancy to manhood and sinks from dotage to death.
I think that the great Republic is in the morning of her life--the sun
just above the horizon--the grass still wet with dew.

Our country has the courage and enthusiasm of youth--her blood flows
full--her heart beats strong and her brow is fair. We stand on
the threshold of a great, a sublime career. All the conditions are
favorable--the environment kind. The best part of this hemisphere is
ours. We have a thousand million acres of fertile land, vast forests,
whole States underlaid with coal; ranges of mountains filled with
iron, silver and gold, and we have seventy-five millions of the most
energetic, active, inventive, progressive and practical people in the
world. The great Republic is a happy combination of mind and muscle, of
head and heart, of courage and good nature. We are growing. We have the
instinct of expansion. We are full of life and health. We are about to
take our rightful place at the head of the nations. The great powers
have been struggling to obtain markets. They are fighting for the trade
of the East. They are contending for China. We watched, but we did
not act. They paid no attention to us or we to them. Conditions have
changed. We own the Hawaiian Islands. We will own the Philippines.

Japan and China will be our neighbors--our customers. Our interests must
be protected. In China we want the "open door," and we will see to it
that the door is kept open. The nation that tries to shut it, will get
its fingers pinched. We have taught the Old World that the Republic must
be consulted. We have entered on the great highway, and we are destined
to become the most powerful, the most successful and the most generous
of nations. I am for expansion. The more people beneath the flag the
better. Let the Republic grow..


I BELIEVE in growth. Of course there are many moss-back conservatives
who fear expansion. Thousands opposed the purchase of Louisiana from
Napoleon, thousands were against the acquisition of Florida and of the
vast territory we obtained from Mexico. So, thousands were against the
purchase of Alaska, and some dear old mummies opposed the annexation
of the Sandwich Islands, and yet, I do not believe that there is an
intelligent American who would like to part with one acre that has
been acquired by the Government. Now, there are some timid, withered
statesmen who do not want Porto Rico--who beg us in a trembling,
patriotic voice not to keep the Philippines. But the sensible people
feel exactly the other way. They love to see our borders extended.
They love to see the flag floating over the islands of the
tropics,--showering its blessings upon the poor people who have been
robbed and tortured by the Spanish. Let the Republic grow! Let us spread
the gospel of Freedom! In a few years I hope that Canada will be ours--I
want Mexico--in other words, I want all of North America. I want to see
our flag waving from the North Pole.

I think it was a mistake to appoint a peace commission. The President
should have demanded the unconditional surrender of Cuba, Porto Rico
and the Philippines. Spain was helpless. The war would have ended on our
terms, and all this commission nonsense would have been saved. Still, I
make no complaint. It will probably come out right, though it would have
been far better to have ended the business when we could--when Spain
was prostrate. It was foolish to let her get up and catch her breath and
hunt for friends.

ONLY a few days ago our President, by proclamation, thanked God for
giving us the victory at Santiago. He did not thank him for sending the
yellow fever. To be consistent the President should have thanked him
equally for both. Man should think; he should use all his senses; he
should examine; he should reason. The man who cannot think is less than
man; the man who will not think is a traitor to himself; the man who
fears to think is superstition's slave. I do not thank God for the
splendid victory in Manila Bay. I don't know whether he had anything
to do with it; if I find out that he did I will thank him readily.
Meanwhile, I will thank Admiral George Dewey and the brave fellows who
were with him.

I do not thank God for the destruction of Cervera's fleet at Santiago.
No, I thank Schley and the men with the trained eyes and the nerves of
steel, who stood behind the guns. I do not thank God because we won
the battle of Santiago. I thank the Regular Army, black and white--the
Volunteers--the Rough Riders, and all the men who made the grand charge
at San Juan Hill. I have asked, "Why should God help us to whip Spain?"
and have been answered: "For the sake of the Cubans, who have been
crushed and ill-treated by their Spanish masters." Then why did not God
help the Cubans long before? Certainly, they were fighting long enough
and needed his help badly enough. But, I am told, God's ways are
inscrutable. Suppose Spain had whipped us; would the Christians then say
that God did it? Very likely they would, and would have as an excuse,
that we broke the Sabbath with our base-ball, our bicycles and bloomers.




IS IT EVER RIGHT FOR HUSBAND OR WIFE TO KILL RIVAL?


HOW far should a husband or wife go in defending the sanctity of home?

Is it right for the husband to kill the paramour of his wife?

Is it right for the wife to kill the paramour of her husband?

These three questions are in substance one, and one answer will be
sufficient for all.

In the first place, we should have an understanding of the real relation
that exists, or should exist, between husband and wife.

The real good orthodox people, those who admire St. Paul, look upon the
wife as the property of the husband. He owns, not only her body, but her
very soul. This being the case, no other man has the right to steal
or try to steal this property. The owner has the right to defend his
possession, even to the death. In the olden time the husband was
never regarded as the property of the wife. She had a claim on him for
support, and there was usually some way to enforce the claim. If
the husband deserted the wife for the sake of some other woman, or
transferred his affections to another, the wife, as a rule, suffered in
silence. Sometimes she took her revenge on the woman, but generally she
did nothing. Men killed the "destroyers" of their homes, but the women,
having no homes, being only wives, nothing but mothers--bearers of babes
for masters--allowed their destroyers to live.

In recent years women have advanced. They have stepped to the front.
Wives are no longer slaves. They are the equals of husbands. They have
homes to defend, husbands to protect and "destroyers" to kill. The
rights of husbands and wives are now equal. They live under the same
moral code. Their obligations to each other are mutual. Both are bound,
and equally bound, to live virtuous lives.

Now, if A falls in love with the wife of B, and she returns his love,
has B the right to kill him? Or if A falls in love with the husband of
B, and he returns her love, has B the right to kill her?

If the wronged husband has the right to kill, so has the wronged wife.

Suppose that a young man and woman are engaged to be married, and that
she falls in love with another and marries him, has the first lover a
right to kill the last?

This leads me to another question: What is marriage? Men and women
cannot truly be married by any set or form of words, or by any
ceremonies however solemn, or by contract signed, sealed and witnessed,
or by the words or declarations of priests or judges. All these put
together do not constitute marriage. At the very best they are only
evidences of the fact of marriage--something that really happened
between the parties. Without pure, honest, mutual love there can be no
real marriage. Marriage without love is only a form of prostitution.
Marriage for the sake of position or wealth is immoral. No good,
sensible man wants to marry a woman whose heart is not absolutely his,
and no good, sensible woman wants to marry a man whose heart is not
absolutely hers. Now, if there can be no real marriage without mutual
love, does the marriage outlast the love? If it is immoral for a woman
to marry a man without loving him, is it moral for her to live as the
wife of a man whom she has ceased to love? Is she bound by the words, by
the ceremony, after the real marriage is dead? Is she so bound that the
man she hates has the right to be the father of her babes?

If a girl is engaged and afterward meets her ideal, a young man whose
presence is joy, whose touch is ecstasy, is it her duty to fulfill her
engagement? Would it not be a thousand times nobler and purer for her to
say to the first lover: "I thought I loved you; I was mistaken. I belong
heart and soul to another, and if I married you I could not be yours."

So, if a young man is engaged and finds that he has made a mistake, is
it honorable for him to keep his contract? Would it not be far nobler
for him to tell her the truth?

The civilized man loves a woman not only for his own sake, but for
her sake. He longs to make her happy--to fill her life with joy. He
is willing to make sacrifices for her, but he does not want her to
sacrifice herself for him. The civilized husband wants his wife to be
free--wants the love that she cannot help giving him. He does not want
her, from a sense of duty, or because of the contract or ceremony, to
act as though she loved him, when in fact her heart is far away. He
does not want her to pollute her soul and live a lie for his sake. The
civilized husband places the happiness of his wife above his own. Her
love is the wealth of his heart, and to guard her from evil is the
business of his life.

But the civilized husband knows when his wife ceases to love him that
the real marriage has also ceased. He knows that it is then infamous for
him to compel her to remain his wife. He knows that it is her right
to be free--that her body belongs to her, that her soul is her own. He
knows, too, if he knows anything, that her affection is not the slave of
her will.

In a case like this, the civilized husband would, so far as he had
the power, release his wife from the contract of marriage, divide his
property fairly with her and do what he could for her welfare. Civilized
love never turns to hatred.

Suppose he should find that there was a man in the case, that another
had won her love, or that she had given her love to another, would it
then be his right or duty to kill that man? Would the killing do any
good? Would it bring back her love? Would it reunite the family? Would
it annihilate the disgrace or the memory of the shame? Would it lessen
the husband's loss?

Society says that the husband should kill the man because he led the
woman astray.

How do we know that he betrayed the woman? Mrs. Potiphar left many
daughters, and Joseph certainly had but few sons. How do we know that
it was not the husband's fault? She may for years have shivered in the
winter of his neglect. She may have borne his cruelties of word and deed
until her love w'as dead and buried side by side with hope. Another man
comes into her life. He pities her. She looks and loves. He lifts her
from the grave. Again she really lives, and her poor heart is rich with
love's red blood. Ought this man to be killed? He has robbed no husband,
wronged no man. He has rescued a victim, released an innocent prisoner
and made a life worth living. But the brutal husband says that the wife
has been led astray; that he has been wronged and dishonored, and that
it is his right, his duty, to shed the seducer's blood. He finds the
facts himself. He is witness, jury, judge and executioner. He forgets
his neglect, his cruelties, his faithlessness; forgets that he drove her
from his heart, remembers only that she loves another, and then in the
name of justice he takes the life of the one she loves.

A husband deserts his wife, leaves her without money, without the means
to live, with his babes in her arms. She cannot get a divorce; she must
wait, and in the meantime she must live. A man falls in love with her
and she with him. He takes care of her and the deserted children. The
"wronged" husband returns and kills the "betrayer" of his wife. He
believes in the sacredness of marriage, the holiness of home.

It may be admitted that the deserted wife did wrong, and that the man
who cared for her and her worse than fatherless children also did wrong,
but certainly he had done nothing for which he deserved to be murdered.

A woman finds that her husband is in love with another woman, that he
is false, and the question is whether it is her right to kill the other
woman. The wronged husband has always claimed that the man led his wife
astray, that he had crept and crawled into his Eden, but now the wronged
wife claims that the woman seduced her husband, that she spread the
net, wove the web and baited the trap in which the innocent husband was
caught. Thereupon she kills the other woman.

In the first place, how can she be sure of the facts? How does she know
whose fault it was? Possibly she was to blame herself.

But what good has the killing done? It will not give her back her
husband's love. It will not cool the fervor of her jealousy. It will not
give her better sleep or happier dreams.

It would have been far better if she had said to her husband: "Go with
the woman you love. I do not want your body without your heart, your
presence without your love."

So, it would be better for the wronged husband to say to the unfaithful
wife: "Go with the man you love. Your heart is his, I am not your
master. You are free."

After all, murder is a poor remedy. If you kill a man for one wrong, why
not for another? If you take the law into your own hands and kill a man
because he loves your wife and your wife loves him, why not kill him for
any injury he may inflict on you or yours?...

In a civilized nation the people are governed by law. They do not
redress their own wrongs. They submit their differences to courts. If
they are wronged they appeal to the law. Savages redress what they call
their wrongs. They appeal to knife or gun. They kill, they assassinate,
they murder; and they do this to preserve their honor. Admit that the
seducer of the wife deserves death, that the woman who leads the husband
astray deserves death, admit that both have justly forfeited their
lives, the question yet remains whether the wronged husband and the
wronged wife have the right to commit murder.

If they have this right, then there ought to be some way provided for
ascertaining the facts. Before the husband kills the "betrayer," the
fact that the wife was really led astray should be established, and the
"wronged" husband who claims the right to kill, should show that he had
been a good, loving and true husband.

As a rule, the wives of good and generous men are true and faithful.
They love their homes, they adore their children. In poverty and
disaster they cling the closer. But when husbands are indolent and mean,
when they are cruel and selfish, when they make a hell of home, why
should we insist that their wives should love them still?

When the civilized man finds that his wife loves another he does not
kill, he does not murder. He says to his wife, "You are free."

When the civilized woman finds that her husband loves another she does
not kill, she does not murder. She says to her husband, "I am free."
This, in my judgment, is the better way. It is in accordance with a far
higher philosophy of life, of the real rights of others. The civilized
man is governed by his reason, his intelligence; the savage by his
passions. The civilized, man seeks for the right, regardless of himself;
the savage for revenge, regardless of the rights of others.

I do not believe that murder guards the sacredness of home, the purity
of the fireside. I do not believe that crime wins victories for virtue.
I believe in liberty and I believe in law. That country is free where
the people make and honestly uphold the law. I am opposed to a redress
of grievances or the punishment of criminals by mobs and I am equally
opposed to giving the "wronged" husbands and the "wronged" wives the
right to kill the men and women they suspect. In other words, I believe
in civilization.

A few years ago a merchant living in the West suspected that his wife
and bookkeeper were in love. One morning he started for a distant city,
pretending that he would be absent for a couple of weeks. He came back
that night and found the lovers occupying the same room. He did not kill
the man, but said to him: "Take her; she is yours. Treat her well
and you will not be troubled. Abuse or desert her and I will be her
avenger."

He did not kill his wife, but said: "We part forever. You are entitled
to one-half of the property we have accumulated. You shall have it.
Farewell!"

The merchant was a civilized man--a philosopher.




PROFESSOR BRIGGS.

To the study of the Bible he has given the best years of his life. When
he commenced this study he was probably a devout believer in the plenary
inspiration of the Scripture--thought that the Bible was without an
error; that all the so-called contradictions could be easily explained.
He had been educated by Presbyterians and had confidence in his
teachers.

In spite of his early training, in spite of his prejudices, he was led,
in some mysterious way, to rely a little on his own reason. This was
a dangerous thing to do. The moment a man talks about reason he is on
dangerous ground. He is liable to contradict the "Word of God." Then he
loses spirituality and begins to think more of truth than creed. This is
a step toward heresy--toward Infidelity.

Professor Briggs began to have doubts about some of the miracles.
These doubts, like rats, began to gnaw the foundations of his faith. He
examined these wonderful stories in the light of what is known to have
happened, and in the light of like miracles found in the other sacred
books of the world. And he concluded that they were not quite true. He
was not ready to say that they were actually false; that would be too
brutally candid.

I once read of an English lord who had a very polite gamekeeper. The
lord wishing to show his skill with the rifle fired at a target. He and
the gamekeeper went to see where the bullet had struck. The gamekeeper
was first at the target, and the lord cried out: "Did I miss it?"

"I would not," said the gamekeeper, "go so far as to say that your
lordship missed it, but--but--you didn't hit it."

Professor Briggs saw clearly that the Bible was the product, the growth
of many centuries; that legends and facts, mistakes, contradictions,
miracles, myths and history, interpolations, prophecies and dreams,
wisdom, foolishness, justice, cruelty, poetry and bathos were mixed,
mingled and interwoven. In other words, that the gold of truth was
surrounded by meaner metals and worthless stones.

He saw that it was necessary to construct what might be called a sacred
smelter to divide the true from the false.

Undoubtedly he reached this conclusion in the interest of what he
believed to be the truth. He had the mistaken but honest idea that a
Christian should really think. Of course, we know that all heresy
has been the result of thought. It has always been dangerous to grow.
Shrinking is safe.

Studying the Bible was the first mistake that Professor Briggs made,
reasoning was the second, and publishing his conclusions was the third.
If he had read without studying, if he had believed without reasoning,
he would have remained a good, orthodox Presbyterian. He probably read
the works of Humboldt, Darwin and Haeckel, and found that the author
of Genesis was not a geologist, not a scientist. He seems to have his
doubts about the truth of the story of the deluge. Should he be blamed
for this? Is there a sensible man in the wide world who really believes
in the flood?

This flood business puts Jehovah in such an idiotic light.

Of course, he must have known, after the "fall" of Adam and Eve, that he
would have to drown their descendants. Certainly it would have been
more merciful to have killed Adam and Eve, made a new pair and kept the
serpent out of the Garden of Eden. If Jehovah had been an intelligent
God he never would have created the serpent. Then there would have been
no fall, no flood, no atonement, no hell.

Think of a God who drowned a world! What a merciless monster! The
cruelty of the flood is exceeded only by its stupidity.

Thousands of little theologians have tried to explain this miracle. This
is the very top of absurdity. To explain a miracle is to destroy it.
Some have said that the flood was local. How could water that rose over
the mountains remain local?

Why should we expect mercy from a God who drowned millions of men, women
and babes? I would no more think of softening the heart of such a God
by prayer than of protecting myself from a hungry tiger by repeating
poetry.

Professor Briggs has sense enough to see that the story of the flood
is but an ignorant legend. He is trying to rescue Jehovah from the
frightful slander. After all, why should we believe the unreasonable?
Must we be foolish to be virtuous? The rain fell for forty days; this
caused the flood. The water was at least thirty thousand feet in depth.
Seven hundred and fifty feet a day--more than thirty feet an hour, six
inches a minute; the rain fell for forty days. Does any man with sense
enough to eat and breathe believe this idiotic lie?

Professor Briggs knows that the Jews got the story of the flood from the
Babylonians, and that it is no more inspired than the history of "Peter
Wilkins and His Flying Wife." The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is
another legend.

If those cities were destroyed sensible people believe the phenomenon
was as natural as the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii. They do
not believe that in either case it was the result of the wickedness of
the people.

Neither does any thinking man believe that the wife of Lot was changed
or turned into a pillar of salt as a punishment for having looked back
at her burning home. How could flesh, bones and blood be changed to
salt? This presupposes two miracles. First, the annihilation
of the woman, and second, the creation of salt. A God cannot
annihilate or create matter. Annihilation and creation are both
impossible--unthinkable. A grain of sand can defy all the gods. What was
Mrs. Lot turned to salt for? What good was achieved? What useful lesson
taught? What man with a head fertile enough to raise one hair can
believe a story like this?

Does a man who denies the truth of this childish absurdity weaken the
foundation of virtue? Does he discourage truth-telling by denouncing
lies? Should a man be true to himself? If reason is not the standard,
what is? Can a man think one way and believe another? Of course he can
talk one way and think another. If a man should be honest with himself
he should be honest with others. A man who conceals his doubts lives a
dishonest life. He defiles his own soul.

When a truth-loving man reads about the plagues of Egypt, should he
reason as he reads? Should he take into consideration the fact that like
stories have been told and believed by savages for thousands of years?
Should he ask himself whether Jehovah in his efforts to induce the
Egyptian King to free the Hebrews acted like a sensible God? Should he
ask himself whether a good God would kill the babes of the people on
account of the sins of the king? Whether he would torture, mangle and
kill innocent cattle to get even with a monarch?

Is it better to believe without thinking than to think without
believing? If there be a God can we please him by believing that he
acted like a fiend?

Probably Professor Briggs has a higher conception of God than the author
of Exodus. The writer of that book was a barbarian--an honest barbarian,
and he wrote what he supposed was the truth. I do not blame him for
having written falsehoods. Neither do I blame Professor Briggs for
having detected these falsehoods. In our day no man capable of reasoning
believes the miracles wrought for the Hebrews in their flight through
the wilderness. The opening of the sea, the cloud and pillar, the
quails, the manna, the serpents and hornets are no more believed than
the miracles of the Mormons when they crossed the plains.

The probability is that the Hebrews never were in Egypt. In the Hebrew
language there are no Egyptian words, and in the Egyptian no Hebrew.
This proves that the Hebrews could not have mingled with the Egyptians
for four hundred and thirty years. As a matter of fact, Moses is a myth.
The enslavement of the Hebrews, the flight, the journey through the
wilderness existed only in the imagination of ignorance.

So Professor Briggs has his doubts about the sun and moon having been
stopped for a day in order that Gen. Joshua might kill more heathen.
Theologians have gathered around this miracle like moths around a flame.
They have done their best to make it reasonable. They have talked about
refraction and reflection, about the nature of the air having been
changed so that the sun was visible all night. They have even gone
so far as to say that Joshua and his soldiers killed so many that
afterward, when thinking about it, they concluded that it must have
taken them at least two days.

This miracle can be accounted for only in one way. Jehovah must have
stopped the earth. The earth, turning over at about one thousand miles
an hour--weighing trillions of tons--had to be stopped. Now we know that
all arrested motion changes instantly to heat. It has been calculated
that to stop the earth would cause as much heat as could be produced by
burning three lumps of coal, each lump as large as this world.

Now, is it possible that a God in his right mind would waste all that
force? The Bible also tells us that at the same time God cast hailstones
from heaven on the poor heathen. If the writer had known something of
astronomy he would have had more hailstones and said nothing about the
sun and moon.

Is it wise for ministers to ask their congregations to believe this
story? Is it wise for congregations to ask their ministers to believe
this story? If Jehovah performed this miracle he must have been insane.
There should be some relation, some proportion, between means and ends.
No sane general would call into the field a million soldiers and a
hundred batteries to kill one insect. And yet the disproportion of means
to the end sought would be reasonable when compared with what Jehovah is
claimed to have done.

If Jehovah existed let us admit that he had some sense.

If it should be demonstrated that the book of Joshua is all false, what
harm could follow? There would remain the same reasons for living a
useful and virtuous life; the same reasons against theft and murder.
Virtue would lose no prop and vice would gain no crutch. Take all the
miracles from the Old Testament and the book would be improved. Throw
away all its cruelties and absurdities and its influence would be far
better.

Professor Briggs seems to have doubts about the inspiration of Ruth. Is
there any harm in that? What difference does it make whether the story
of Ruth is fact or fiction; history or poetry? Its value is just the
same. Who cares whether Hamlet or Lear lived? Who cares whether
Imogen and Perdita were real women or the creation of Shakespeare's
imagination?

The book of Esther is absurd and cruel. It has no ethical value. There
is not a line, a word in it calculated to make a human being better. The
king issued a decree to kill the Jews. Esther succeeded in getting this
decree set aside, and induced the king to issue another decree that
the Jews should kill the other folks, and so the Jews killed some
seventy-five thousand of the king's subjects. Is it really important to
believe that the book of Esther is inspired? Is it possible that Jehovah
is proud of having written this book? Does he guard his copyright with
the fires of hell? Why should the facts be kept from the people? Every
intelligent minister knows that Moses did not write the Pentateuch; that
David did not write the Psalms, and that Solomon was not the author of
the song or the book of Ecclesiastes. Why not say so?

No intelligent minister believes the story of Daniel in the Lion's den,
or of the three men who were cast into the furnace, or the story of
Jonah. These miracles seem to have done no good--seem to have convinced
nobody and to have had no consequences. Daniel w'as miraculously saved
from the lions, and then the king sent for the men who had accused
Daniel, for their wives and their children, and threw them all into
the den of lions and they were devoured by beasts almost as cruel as
Jehovah. What a beautiful story! How can any man be wicked enough to
doubt its truth?

God told Jonah to go to Nineveh. Jonah ran away, took a boat for another
place. God raised a storm, the sailors became frightened, threw Jonah
overboard, and the poor wretch was swallowed and carried ashore by a
fish that God had prepared. Then he made his proclamation in Nineveh.
Then the people repented and Jonah was disappointed. Then he became
malicious and found fault with God. Then comes the story of the gourd,
the worm and the east wind, and the effect of the sun on a bald-headed
prophet. Would not this story be just as beautiful with the storm and
fish left out? Could we not dispense with the gourd, the worm and the
east wind?

Professor Briggs does not believe this story. He does not reject it
because he is wicked or because he wishes to destroy religion, but
because, in his judgment, it is not true. This may not be religious, but
it is honest. It may not become a minister, but it certainly becomes a
man.

Professor Briggs wishes to free the Old Testament from interpolations,
from excrescences, from fungus growths, from mistakes and falsehoods.

I am satisfied that he is sincere, actuated by the noblest motives.

Suppose that all the interpolations in the Bible should be found and the
original be perfectly restored, what evidence would we have that it was
written by inspired men? How can the fact of inspiration be established?
When was it established? Did Jehovah furnish anybody with a list of
books he had inspired? Does anybody know that he ever said that he had
inspired anybody? Did the writer of Genesis claim that he was inspired?
Did any writer of any part of the Pentateuch make the claim? Did the
authors of Joshua, Judges, Kings or Chronicles pretend that they had
obtained their facts from Jehovah? Does the author of Job or of the
Psalms pretend to have received assistance from God?

There is not the slightest reference to God in Esther or in Solomon's
Song. Why should theologians say that those books were inspired? The
dogma of inspiration rests on no established fact. It rests only on
assertion--the assertion of those who have no knowledge on the subject.
Professor Briggs calls the Bible a "holy" book. He seems to think that
much of it was inspired; that it is in some sense a message from God.
The reasons he has for thinking so I cannot even guess. He seems also to
have his doubts about certain parts of the New Testament. He is not
certain that the angel who appeared to Joseph in a dream was entirely
truthful, or he is not certain that Joseph had the dream.

It seems clear that when the gospel according to Matthew was first
written the writer believed that Christ was a lineal descendant of
David, through his father, Joseph. The genealogy is given for the
purpose of showing that the blood of David flowed in the veins of
Christ. The man who wrote that genealogy had never heard that the Holy
Ghost was the father of Christ. That was an afterthought.

How is it possible to prove that the Holy Ghost was the father of
Christ? The Holy Ghost said nothing on the subject. Mary wrote nothing
and we have no evidence that Joseph had a dream.

The divinity of Christ rests upon a dream that somebody said Joseph had.

According to the New Testament, Mary herself called Joseph the father
of Christ. She told Christ that Joseph, his father, had been looking for
him. Her statement is better evidence than Joseph's dream--if he really
had it. If there are legends in Holy Scripture, as Professor Briggs
declares, certainly the divine parentage of Christ is one of them. The
story lacks even originality. Among the Greeks many persons had gods for
fathers. Among Hindoos and Egyptians these god-men were common. So in
many other countries the blood of gods was in the veins of men. Such
wonders, told in Sanscrit, are just as reasonable as when told in
Hebrew--just as reasonable in India as in Palestine. Of course, there
is no evidence that any human being had a god for a father, or a goddess
for a mother. Intelligent people have outgrown these myths. Centaurs,
satyrs, nymphs and god-men have faded away. Science murdered them all.

There are many contradictions in the gospels. They differ not only on
questions of fact, but as to Christianity itself. According to Matthew,
Mark and Luke, if you will forgive others God will forgive you. This
is the one condition of salvation. But in John we find an entirely
different religion. According to John you must be born again and
believe in Jesus Christ. There you find for the first time about
the atonement--that Christ died to save sinners. The gospel of John
discloses a regular theological system--a new one. To forgive others is
not enough. You must have faith. You must be born again.

The four gospels cannot be harmonized. If John is true the others are
false. If the others are true John is false. From this there is no
escape. I do not for a moment suppose that Professor Briggs agrees with
me on these questions. He probably regards me as a very bad and wicked
man, and my opinions as blasphemies. I find no fault with him for that.
I believe him to be an honest man; right in some things and wrong in
many. He seems to be true to his thought and I honor him for that.

He would like to get all the stumbling-blocks out of the Bible, so
that a really thoughtful man can "believe." If theologians cling to
the miracles recorded in the New Testament the entire book will be
disparaged and denied. The "Gospel ship" is overloaded. Somethings must
be thrown overboard or the boat will go down. If the churches try to
save all they will lose all.

They must throw the miracles away. They must admit that Christ did not
cast devils out of the bodies of men and women--that he did not cure
diseases with a word, or blindness with spittle and clay; that he had no
power over winds and waves; that he did not raise the dead; that he was
not raised from the dead himself, and that he did not ascend bodily to
heaven. These absurdities must be given up, or in a little while the
orthodox ministers will be preaching the "tidings of great joy" to
benches, bonnets and bibs.

Professor Briggs, as I understand him, is willing to give up the
absurdest absurdities, but wishes to keep all the miracles that
can possibly be believed. He is anxious to preserve the important
miracles--the great central falsehoods--but the little lies that were
told just to embellish the story--to furnish vines for the columns--he
is willing to cast aside.

But Professor Briggs was honest enough to say that we do not know the
authors of most of the books in the Bible; that we do not know who wrote
the Psalms or Job or Proverbs or the Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes or
the Epistle to the Hebrews. He also said that no translation can ever
take the place of the original Scriptures, because a translation is at
best the work of men. In other words, that God has not revealed to us
the names of the inspired books. That this must be determined by us.
Professor Briggs puts reason above revelation. By reason we are to
decide what books are inspired. By reason we are to decide whether
anything has been improperly added to those books. By reason we are to
decide the real meaning of those books.

It therefore follows that if the books are unreasonable they are
uninspired. It seems to me that this position is absolutely correct.
There is no other that can be defended. The Presbyterians who pretend to
answer Professor Briggs seem to be actuated by hatred.

Dr. Da Costa answers with vituperation and epithet. He answers no
argument; brings forward no fact; points out no mistake. He simply
attacks the man. He exhibits the ordinary malice of those who love their
enemies.

President Patton, of Princeton, is a despiser of reason; a hater of
thought. Progress is the only thing that he fears. He knows that
the Bible is absolutely true. He knows that every word is inspired.
According to him, all questions have been settled, and criticism said
its last word when the King James Bible was printed. The Presbyterian
Church is infallible, and whoever doubts or denies will be damned.
Morality is worthless without the creed. This, is the religion, the
philosophy, of Dr. Patton. He fights with the ancient weapons, with
stone and club. He is a private in Captain Calvin's company, and he
marches to defeat with the courage of invincible ignorance.

I do not blame the Presbyterian Church for closing the mouth of
Professor Briggs. That church believes the Bible--all of it--and the
members did not feel like paying a man for showing that it was not all
inspired. Long ago the Presbyterians stopped growing. They have been
petrified for many years. Professor Briggs had been growing. He had
to leave the church or shrink. He left. Then he joined the Episcopal
Church. He probably supposed that that church preferred the living to
the dead. He knew about Colenso, Stanley, Temple, Heber Newton, Dr.
Rainsford and Farrar, and thought that the finger and thumb of authority
would not insist on plucking from the mind the buds of thought.

Whether he was mistaken or not remains to be seen.

The Episcopal Church may refuse to ordain him, and by such refusal put
the bigot brand upon its brow.

The refusal cannot injure Professor Briggs. It will leave him where
it found him--with too much science for a churchman and too much
superstition for a scientist; with his feet in the gutter and his head
in the clouds.

I admire every man who is true to himself, to his highest ideal, and who
preserves unstained the veracity of his soul.

I believe in growth. I prefer the living to the dead. Men are superior
to mummies. Cradles are more beautiful than coffins. Development is
grander than decay. I do not agree with Professor Briggs. I do not
believe in inspired books, or in the Holy Ghost, or that any God has
ever appeared to man. I deny the existence of the supernatural. I know
of no religion that is founded on facts.

But I cheerfully admit that Professor Briggs appears to be candid, good
tempered and conscientious--the opposite of those who attack him. He is
not a Freethinker, but he honestly thinks that he is free.




FRAGMENTS.


CLOVER.

     * A letter written to Col. Thomas Donaldson, of Philadelphia,
     declining an invitation to be a guest of the Clover Club of
     that city.

I regret that I cannot be "in clover" with you on the 28th instant.

A wonderful thing is clover! It means honey and cream,--that is to say,
industry and contentment,--that is to say, the happy bees in perfumed
fields, and at the cottage gate "bos" the bountiful serenely chewing
satisfaction's cud, in that blessed twilight pause that like a
benediction falls between all toil and sleep.

This clover makes me dream of happy hours; of childhood's rosy cheeks;
of dimpled babes; of wholesome, loving wives; of honest men; of springs
and brooks and violets and all there is of stainless joy in peaceful
human life.

A wonderful word is "clover"! Drop the "c," and you have the happiest
of mankind. Drop the "r," and "c," and you have left the only thing that
makes a heaven of this dull and barren earth. Drop the "r," and there
remains a warm, deceitful bud that sweetens breath and keeps the peace
in countless homes whose masters frequent clubs. After all, Bottom was
right:

"Good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow."

Yours sincerely and regretfully,

R. G. INGERSOLL.

Washington, D. C., January 16, 1883.

*****

SUPERSTITION puts belief above goodness--credulity above virtue.

Here are two men. One is industrious, frugal, honest, generous. He has
a happy home--loves his wife and children--fills their lives with
sunshine. He enjoys study, thoughts, music, and all the subtleties of
Art--but he does not believe the creed--cares nothing for sacred books,
worships no god and fears no devil.

The other is ignorant, coarse, brutal, beats his wife and children--but
he believes--regards the Bible as inspired--bows to the priests, counts
his beads, says his prayers, confesses and contributes, and the Catholic
Church declares and the Protestant Churches declare that he is the
better man.

The ignorant believer, coarse and brutal as he is, is going to heaven.
He will be washed in the blood of the Lamb. He will have wings--a harp
and a halo.

The intelligent and generous man who loves his fellow-men--who develops
his brain, who enjoys the beautiful, is going to hell--to the eternal
prison.

Such is the justice of God--the mercy of Christ.

*****

WHILE reading the accounts of the coronation of the Czar, of the
pageants, processions and feasts, of the pomp and parade, of the
barbaric splendor, of cloth of gold and glittering gems, I could not
help thinking of the poor and melancholy peasants, of the toiling,
half-fed millions, of the sad and ignorant multitudes who belong body
and soul to this Czar.

I thought of the backs that have been scarred by the knout, of the
thousands in prisons for having dared to say a whispered word for
freedom, of the great multitude who had been driven like cattle along
the weary roads that lead to the hell of Siberia.

The cannon at Moscow were not loud enough, nor the clang of the bells,
nor the blare of the trumpets, to drown the groans of the captives.

I thought of the fathers that had been torn from wives and children for
the crime of speaking like men.

And when the priests spoke of the Czar as the "God-selected man," the
"God-adorned man," my blood grew warm.

When I read of the coronation of the Czarina I thought of Siberia. I
thought of girls working in the mines, hauling ore from the pits with
chains about their waists; young girls, almost naked, at the mercy
of brutal officials; young girls weeping and moaning their lives away
because between their pure lips the word Liberty had burst into blossom.

Yet law neglects, forgets them, and crowns the Czarina. The injustice,
the agony and horror in this poor world are enough to make mankind
insane.

Ignorance and superstition crown impudence and tyranny. Millions of
money squandered for the humiliation of man, to dishonor the people.

Back of the coronation, back of all the ceremonies, back of all the
hypocrisy there is nothing but a lie.

It is not true that God "selected" this Czar to rule and rob a hundred
millions of human beings.

It is all an ignorant, barbaric, superstitious lie--a lie that pomp and
pageant, and flaunting flags, and robed priests, and swinging censers,
cannot change to truth.

Those who are not blinded by the glare and glitter at Moscow see
millions of homes on which the shadows fall; see millions of weeping
mothers, whose children have been stolen by the Czar; see thousands of
villages without schools, millions of houses without books, millions and
millions of men, women and children in whose future there is no star and
whose only friend is death.

The coronation is an insult to the nineteenth century.

Long live the people of Russia!

*****

MUSIC.--The savage enjoys noises--explosion--the imitation of thunder.
This noise expresses his feeling. He enjoys concussion. His ear and
brain are in harmony. So, he takes cognizance of but few colors. The
neutral tints make no impression on his eyes. He appreciates the flames
of red and yellow. That is to say, there is a harmony between his brain
and eye. As he advances, develops, progresses, his ear catches other
sounds, his eye other colors. He becomes a complex being, and there has
entered into his mind the idea of proportion. The music of the drum no
longer satisfies him. He sees that there is as much difference between
noises and melodies as between stones and statues. The strings in
Corti's Harp become sensitive and possibly new ones are developed.

The eye keeps pace with the ear, and the worlds of sound and sight
increase from age to age.

The first idea of music is the keeping of time--a recurring emphasis at
intervals of equal length or duration. This is afterward modified--the
music of joy being fast, the emphasis at short intervals, and that of
sorrow slow.

After all, this music of time corresponds to the action of the blood and
muscles. There is a rise and fall under excitement of both. In joy the
heart beats fast, and the music corresponding to such emotion is quick.
In grief--in sadness, the blood is delayed. In music the broad division
is one of time. In language, words of joy are born of light--that which
shines--words of grief of darkness and gloom. There is still another
division: The language of happiness comes also from heat, and that of
sadness from cold.

These ideas or divisions are universal. In all art are the light and
shadow--the heat and cold.

*****

OF COURSE ENGLAND has no love for America. By England I mean the
governing class. Why should monarchy be in love with republicanism, with
democracy? The monarch insists that he gets his right to rule from
what he is pleased to call the will of God, whereas in a republic the
sovereign authority is the will of the people. It is impossible that
there should be any real friendship between the two forms of government.

We must, however, remember one thing, and that is, that there is an
England within England--an England that does not belong to the titled
classes--an England that has not been bribed or demoralized by those
in authority; and that England has always been our friend, because that
England is the friend of liberty and of progress everywhere. But the
lackeys, the snobs, the flatterers of the titled, those who are willing
to crawl that they may rise, are now and always have been the enemies of
the great Republic.

It is a curious fact that in monarchical governments the highest
and lowest are generally friends. There may be a foundation for this
friendship in the fact that both are parasites--both live on the labor
of honest men. After all, there is a kinship between the prince and the
pauper. Both extend the hand for alms, and the fact that one is jeweled
and the other extremely dirty makes no difference in principle--and the
owners of these hands have always been fast friends, and, in accordance
with the great law of ingratitude, both have held in contempt the people
who supported them.

One thing we must not forget, and that is that the best people of
England are our friends. The best writers, the best thinkers are on our
side. It is only natural that all who visit America should find some
fault. We find fault ourselves, and to be thin-skinned is almost a plea
of guilty. For my part, I have no doubt about the future of America.
It not only is, but is to be for many, many generations, the greatest
nation of the world.

I DO not care so much where, as with whom, I live. If the right folks
are with me I can manage to get a good deal of happiness in the city or
in the country. Cats love places and become attached to chimney-corners
and all sorts of nooks--but I have but little of the cat in me, and
am not particularly in love with places. After all, a palace without
affection is a poor hovel, and the meanest hut with love in it is a
palace for the soul.

If the time comes when poverty and want cease for the most part to
exist, then the city will be far better than the country. People
are always talking about the beauties of nature and the delights of
solitude, but to me some people are more interesting than rocks and
trees. As to city and country life I think that I substantially agree
with Touchstone:

"In respect that it is solitary I like it very well; but in respect
that it is private it is a very vile life. Now, in respect it is in the
fields it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the court it is
tedious."

*****

WHAT do I think of the lynchings in Georgia?

I suppose these outrages--these frightful crimes--make the same
impression on my mind that they do on the minds of all civilized
people. I know of no words strong enough, bitter enough, to express my
indignation and horror. Men who belong to the "superior" race take a
negro--a criminal, a supposed murderer, one alleged to have assaulted a
white woman--chain him to a tree, saturate his clothing with kerosene,
pile fagots about his feet. This is the preparation for the festival.
The people flock in from the neighborhood--come in special trains from
the towns. They are going to enjoy themselves.

Laughing and cursing they gather about the victim. A man steps from the
crowd--a man who hates crime and loves virtue. He draws his knife, and
in a spirit of merry sport cuts off one of the victim's ears. This he
keeps for a trophy--a souvenir. Another gentlemen fond of a jest cuts
off the other ear. Another cuts off the nose of the chained and
helpless wretch. The victim suffered in silence. He uttered no groan, no
word--the one man of the two thousand who had courage.

Other white heroes cut and slashed his flesh. The crowd cheered. The
people were intoxicated with joy. Then the fagots were lighted and the
bleeding and mutilated man was clothed in flame.

The people were wild with hideous delight. With greedy eyes they watched
him burn; with hungry ears they listened for his shrieks--for the music
of his moans and cries. He did not shriek. The festival was not quite
perfect.

But they had their revenge. They trampled on the charred and burning
corpse. They divided among themselves the broken bones. They wanted
mementos--keepsakes that they could give to their loving wives and
gentle babes.

These horrors were perpetrated in the name of justice. The savages who
did these things belong to the superior race. They are citizens of the
great Republic. And yet, it does not seem possible that such fiends are
human beings. They are a disgrace to our country, our century and the
human race.

Ex-Governor Atkinson protested against this savagery. He was threatened
with death. The good people were helpless. While these lynchers murder
the blacks they will destroy their own country. No civilized man wishes
to live where the mob is supreme. He does not wish to be governed by
murderers.

Let me say that what I have said is flattery compared with what I feel.
When I think of the other lynching--of the poor man mutilated and hanged
without the slightest evidence, of the negro who said that these murders
would be avenged, and who was brutally murdered for the utterance of a
natural feeling--I am utterly at a loss for words.

Are the white people insane? Has mercy fled to beasts? Has the United
States no power to protect a citizen? A nation that cannot or will not
protect its citizens in time of peace has no right to ask its citizens
to protect it in time of War.

*****

OUR COUNTRY.--Our country is all we hope for--all we are. It is the
grave of our father, of our mother, of each and every one of the sacred
dead.

It is every glorious memory of our race. Every heroic deed. Every act of
self-sacrifice done by our blood. It is all the accomplishments of the
past--all the wise things said--all the kind things done--all the poems
written and all the poems lived--all the defeats sustained--all the
victories won--the girls we love--the wives we adore--the children we
carry in our hearts--all the firesides of home--all the quiet springs,
the babbling brooks, the rushing rivers, the mountains, plains and
woods--the dells and dales and vines and vales.

*****

GIFT GIVING.--I believe in the festival called Christmas--not in the
celebration of the birth of any man, but to celebrate the triumph of
light over darkness--the victory of the sun.

I believe in giving gifts on that day, and a real gift should be given
to those who cannot return it; gifts from the rich to the poor, from the
prosperous to the unfortunate, from parents to children.

There is no need of giving water to the sea or light to the sun. Let us
give to those who need, neither asking nor expecting return, not even
asking gratitude, only asking that the gift shall make the receiver
happy--and he who gives in that way increases his own joy.

*****

We have no right to enslave our children. We have no right to bequeath
chains and manacles to our heirs. We have no right to leave a legacy of
mental degradation.

Liberty is the birthright of all. Parents should not deprive their
children of the great gifts of nature. We cannot all leave lands and
gold to those we love; but we can leave Liberty, and that is of more
value than all the wealth of India.

The dead have no right to enslave the living. To worship ancestors is to
curse posterity. He who bows to the Past insults the Future; and allows,
so to speak, the dead to rob the unborn. The coffin is good enough in
its way, but the cradle is far better. With the bones of the fathers
they beat out the brains of the children.

*****

RANDOM THOUGHTS.--The road is short to anything we fear.

     Joy lives in the house beyond the one we reach.
     In youth the time is halting, slow and lame.
     In age the time is winged and eager as a flame.
     The sea seems narrow as we near the farther shore.

Youth goes hand in hand with hope--old age with fear. .

Youth has a wish--old age a dread.

In youth the leaves and buds seem loath to grow.

Youth shakes the glass to speed the lingering sands.

Youth says to Time: O crutched and limping laggard, get thee wings.

The dawn comes slowly, but the Westering day leaps like a lover to the
dusky bosom of the Ethiop night.

*****

I THINK that all days are substantially alike in the long run. It is no
worse to drink on Sunday than on Monday. The idea that one day in the
week is holy is wholly idiotic. Besides, these closing laws do no good.

Laws are not locks and keys. Saloon doors care nothing about laws. Law
or no law, people will slip in, and then, having had so much trouble
getting there, they will stay until they stagger out. These nasty,
meddlesome, Pharisaic, hypocritical laws make sneaks and hypocrites. The
children of these laws are like the fathers of the laws. Ever since I
can remember, people have been trying to make other people temperate by
intemperate laws. I have never known of the slightest success. It is
a pity that Christ manufactured wine, a pity that Paul took heart and
thanked God when he saw the sign of the Three Taverns; a pity that
Jehovah put alcohol in almost everything that grows; a great pity that
prayer-meetings are not more popular than saloons; a pity that our
workingmen do not amuse themselves reading religious papers and the
genealogies in the Old Testament.

Rum has caused many quarrels and many murders.

Religion has caused many wars and covered countless fields with dead.

Of course, all men should be temperate,--should avoid excess--should
keep the golden path between extremes--should gather roses, not thorns.
The only way to make men temperate is to develop the brain.

When passions and appetites are stronger than the intellect, men are
savages; when the intellect governs the passions, when the
passions are servants, men are civilized. The people need
education--facts--philosophy. Drunkenness is one form of intemperance,
prohibition is another form. Another trouble is that these little laws
and ordinances can not be enforced.

Both parties want votes, and to get votes they will allow unpopular laws
to sleep, neglected, and finally refuse to enforce them. These spasms of
virtue, these convulsions of conscience are soon over, and then comes a
long period of neglectful rest.

*****

THE OLD AND NEW YEAR.--For countless ages the old earth has been making,
in alternating light and shade, in gleam and gloom, the whirling circuit
of the sun, leaving the record of its flight in many forms--in leaves of
stone, in growth of tree and vine and flower, in glittering gems of many
hues, in curious forms of monstrous life, in ravages of flood and flame,
in fossil fragments stolen from decay by chance, in molten masses hurled
from lips of fire, in gorges worn by waveless, foamless cataracts of
ice, in coast lines beaten back by the imprisoned sea, in mountain
ranges and in ocean reefs, in islands lifted from the underworld--in
continents submerged and given back to light and life.

Another year has joined his shadowy fellows in the wide and voiceless
desert of the past, where, from the eternal hour-glass forever fall the
sands of time. Another year, with all its joy and grief, of birth and
death, of failure and success--of love and hate. And now, the first day
of the new o'er arches all. Standing between the buried and the babe, we
cry, "Farewell and Hail!"--January 1,1893.

*****

KNOWLEDGE consists in the perception of facts, their
relations--conditions, modes and results of action. Experience is the
foundation of knowledge--without experience it is impossible to know.
It may be that experience can be transmitted--inherited. Suppose that an
infinite being existed in infinite space. He being the only existence,
what knowledge could he gain by experience? He could see nothing, hear
nothing, feel nothing. He would have no use for what we call the senses.
Could he use what we call the faculties of the mind? He could not
compare, remember, hope or fear. He could not reason. How could he
know that he existed? How could he use force? There was in the universe
nothing that would resist--nothing.

*****

Most men are economical when dealing with abundance, hoarding gold and
wasting time--throwing away the sunshine of life--the few remaining
hours, and hugging to their shriveled hearts that which they do not and
cannot even expect to use. Old age should enjoy the luxury of giving.
How divine to live in the atmosphere, the climate of gratitude! The men
who clutch and fiercely hold and look at wife and children with eyes
dimmed by age and darkened by suspicion, giving naught until the end,
then give to death the gratitude that should have been their own.

*****

DEATH OF THE AGED.

     * From a letter of condolence written to a friend on the
     death of his mother.

After all, there is something tenderly appropriate in the serene death
of the old. Nothing is more touching than the death of the young, the
strong. But when the duties of life have all been nobly done; when the
sun touches the horizon; when the purple twilight falls upon the past,
the present, and the future; when memory, with dim eyes, can scarcely
spell the blurred and faded records of the vanished days--then,
surrounded by kindred and by friends, death comes like a strain of
music. The day has been long, the road weary, and the traveler gladly
stops at the welcome inn.

Nearly forty-eight years ago, under the snow, in the little town
of Cazenovia, my poor mother was buried. I was but two years old. I
remember her as she looked in death. That sweet, cold face has kept my
heart warm through all the changing years.

*****

     There is no cunning art to trace
     In any feature, form or face,

     Or wrinkled palm, with criss-cross lines
     The good or bad in peoples' minds.

     Nor can we guess men's thoughts or aims
     By seeing how they write their names.

     We could as well foretell their acts
     By getting outlines of their tracks.

     Ourselves we do not know--how then
     Can we find out our fellow-men?

     And yet--although the reason laughs--

     We like to look at autographs--

     And almost think that we can guess
     What lines and dots of ink express.


     * From the autograph collection of Miss Eva Ingersoll
     Farrell.

     August 11, 1892. R. G. Ingersoll.

*****

The World is Growing Poor.--Darwin the naturalist, the observer,
the philosopher, is dead. Wagner the greatest composer the world has
produced, is silent. Hugo the poet, patriot and philanthropist, is at
rest. Three mighty rivers have ceased to flow. The smallest insect was
made interesting by Darwin's glance; the poor blind worm became the
farmer's friend--the maker of the farm,--and even weeds began to dream
and hope.

*****

But if we live beyond life's day and reach the dusk, and slowly travel
in the shadows of the night, the way seems long, and being weary we ask
for rest, and then, as in our youth, we chide the loitering hours. When
eyes are dim and memory fails to keep a record of events; when ears are
dull and muscles fail to obey the will; when the pulse is low and the
tired heart is weak, and the poor brain has hardly power to think,
then comes the dream, the hope of rest, the longing for the peace of
dreamless sleep.

*****

SAINTS.--The saints have poisoned life with piety. They have soured the
mother's milk. They have insisted that joy is crime--that beauty is a
bait with which the Devil captures the souls of men--that laughter leads
to sin--that pleasure, in its every form, degrades, and that love itself
is but the loathsome serpent of unclean desire. They have tried to
compel men to love shadows rather than women--phantoms rather than
people.

The saints have been the assassins of sunshine,--the skeletons at
feasts. They have been the enemies of happiness. They have hated the
singing birds, the blossoming plants. They have loved the barren and
the desolate--the croaking raven and the hooting owl--tombstones, rather
than statues.

And yet, with a strange inconsistency, happiness was to be enjoyed
forever, in another world. There, pleasure, with all its corrupting
influences, was to be eternal. No one pretended that heaven was to be
filled with self-denial, with fastings and scourgings, with weepings and
regrets, with solemn and emaciated angels, with sad-eyed seraphim, with
lonely parsons, with mumbling monks, with shriveled nuns, with days of
penance and with nights of prayer.

Yet all this self-denial on the part of the saints was founded in the
purest selfishness. They were to be paid for all their sufferings in
another world. They were "laying up treasures in heaven." They had made
a bargain with God. He had offered eternal joy to those who would make
themselves miserable here. The saints gladly and cheerfully accepted the
terms. They expected pay for every pang of hunger, for every groan,
for every tear, for every temptation resisted; and this pay was to bean
eternity of joy. The selfishness of the saints was equaled only by the
stupidity of the saints.

It is not true that character is the aim of life. Happiness should be
the aim--and as a matter of fact is and always has been the aim,
not only of sinners, but of saints. The saints seemed to think that
happiness was better in another world than here, and they expected this
happiness beyond the clouds. They looked upon the sinner as foolish to
enjoy himself for the moment here, and in consequence thereof to suffer
forever. Character is not an end, it is a means to an end. The object of
the saint is happiness hereafter--the means, to make himself miserable
here. The object of the philosopher is happiness here and now, and
hereafter,--if there be another world.

If struggle and temptation, misery and misfortune, are essential to
the formation of what you call character, how do you account for the
perfection of your angels, or for the goodness of your God? Were the
angels perfected through misfortune? If happiness is the only good in
heaven, why should it not be considered the only good here?

In order to be happy, we must be in harmony with the conditions of
happiness. It cannot be obtained by prayer,--it does not come from
heaven--it must be found here, and nothing should be done, or left
undone, for the sake of any supernatural being, but for the sake of
ourselves and other natural beings.

The early Christians were preparing for the end of the world. In their
view, life was of no importance except as it gave them time to prepare
for "The Second Coming." They were crazed by fear. Since that time, the
world not coming to the expected end, they have been preparing for "The
Day of Judgment," and have, to the extent of their ability, filled the
world with horror. For centuries, it was, and still is, their business
to destroy the pleasures of this life. In the midst of prosperity they
have prophesied disaster. At every feast they have spoken of famine, and
over the cradle they have talked of death. They have held skulls before
the faces of terrified babes. On the cheeks of health they see the worms
of the grave, and in their eyes the white breasts of love are naught but
corruption and decay.

*****

THE WASTE FORCES OF NATURE.--For countless years the great cataracts, as
for instance, Niagara, have been singing their solemn songs, filling the
savage with terror, the civilized with awe; recording its achievements
in books of stone--useless and sublime; inspiring beholders with the
majesty of purposeless force and the wastefulness of nature.

Force great enough to turn the wheels of the world, lost, useless.

So with the great tides that rise and fall on all the shores of the
world--lost forces. And yet man is compelled to use to exhaustion's
point the little strength he has.

This will be changed.

The great cataracts and the great tides will submit to the genius of
man. They are to be for use. Niagara will not be allowed to remain a
barren roar. It must become the servant of man. It will weave robes
for men and women. It will fashion implements for the farmer and the
mechanic. It will propel coaches for rich and poor. It will fill streets
and homes with light, and the old barren roar will be changed to songs
of success, to the voices of love and content and joy.

Science at last has found that all forces are convertible into each
other, and that all are only different aspects of one fact.

So the flood is still a terror, but, in my judgment, the time will
come when the floods will be controlled by the genius of man, when the
tributaries of the great rivers and their tributaries will be dammed
in such a way as to collect the waters of every flood and give them
out gradually through all the year, maintaining an equal current at all
times in the great rivers.

We have at last found that force occupies a circle, that Niagara is a
child of the Sun--that the sun shines, the mist rises, clouds form, the
rain falls, the rivers flow to the lakes, and Niagara fills the heavens
with its song. Man will arrest the falling flood; he will change its
force to electricity; that is to say, to light, and then force will have
made the circuit from light to light.

*****

ARE Men's characters fully determined at the age of thirty?

It depends, first, on what their opportunities have been--that is to
say, on their surroundings, their education, their advantages; second,
on the shape, quality and quantity of brain they happen to possess;
third, on their mental and moral courage; and, fourth, on the character
of the people among whom they live.

The natural man continues to grow. The longer he lives, the more he
ought to know, and the more he knows, the more he changes the views and
opinions held by him in his youth. Every new fact results in a change of
views more or less radical. This growth of the mind may be hindered
by the "tyrannous north wind" of public opinion; by the bigotry of
his associates; by the fear that he cannot make a living if he becomes
unpopular; and it is to some extent affected by the ambition of the
person; that is to say, if he wishes to hold office the tendency is to
agree with his neighbor, or at least to round off and smooth the corners
and angles of difference. If a man wishes to ascertain the truth,
regardless of the opinions of his fellow-citizens, the probability is
that he will change from day to day and from year to year--that is, his
intellectual horizon will widen--and that what he once deemed of great
importance will be regarded as an exceedingly small segment of a greater
circle.

Growth means change. If a man grows after thirty years he must
necessarily change. Many men probably reach their intellectual height
long before they have lived thirty years, and spend the balance of their
lives in defending the mistakes of their youth. A great man continues to
grow until his death, and growth--as I said before--means change. Darwin
was continually finding new facts, and kept his mind as open to a new
truth as the East is to the rising of another sun. Humboldt at the age
of ninety maintained the attitude of a pupil, and was, until the moment
of his death, willing to learn.

The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn. The less a man
knows, the more positive, a? is that he knows everything.

The smallest minds mature the earliest. The less there is to a man the
quicker he attains his growth. I have known many people who reached
their intellectual height while in their mother's arms. I have known
people who were exceedingly smart babies to become excessively stupid
people. It is with men as with other things. The mullein needs only a
year, but the oak a century, and the greatest men are those who have
continued to grow as long as they have lived. Small people delight in
what they call consistency--that is, it gives them immense pleasure to
say that they believe now exactly as they did ten years ago. This simply
amounts to a certificate that they have not grown--that they have not
developed--and that they know just as little now as they ever did.
The highest possible conception of consistency is to be true to the
knowledge of to-day, without the slightest reference to what your
opinion was years ago.

There is another view of this subject. Few men have settled opinions
before or at thirty. Of course, I do not include persons of genius. At
thirty the passions have, as a rule, too much influence; the intellect
is not the pilot. At thirty most men have prejudices rather than
opinions--that is to say, rather than judgments--and few men have lived
to be sixty without materially modifying the opinions they held at
thirty.

As I said in the first place, much depends on the shape, quality and
quantity of brain; much depends on mental and moral courage. There are
many people with great physical courage who are afraid to express their
opinions; men who will meet death without a tremor and will yet hesitate
to express their views.

So, much depends on the character of the people among whom we live. A
man in the old times living in New England thought several times before
he expressed any opinion contrary to the views of the majority. But
if the people have intellectual hospitality, then men express their
views--and it may be that we change somewhat in proportion to the
decency of our neighbors. In the old times it was thought that God was
opposed to any change of opinion, and that nothing so excited the auger
of the deity as the expression of a new thought. That idea is fading
away.

The real truth is that men change their opinions as long as they grow,
and only those remain of the same opinion still who have reached the
intellectual autumn of their lives; who have gone to seed, and who are
simply waiting for the winter of death. Now and then there is a brain
in which there is the climate of perpetual spring--men who never grow
old--and when such a one is found we say, "Here is a genius."

Talent has the four seasons: spring, that is to say, the sowing of the
seeds; summer, growth; autumn, the harvest; winter, intellectual death.
But there is now and then a genius who has no winter, and, no matter
how many years he may live, on the blossom of his thought no snow falls.
Genius has the climate of perpetual growth.

*****

THE MOIETY SYSTEM.--The Secretary of the Treasury recommends a revival
of the moiety system. Against this infamous step every honest citizen
ought to protest.

In this country, taxes cannot be collected through such
instrumentalities. An _informer_ is not indigenous to our soil. He
always has been and always will be held in merited contempt.

Every inducement, by this system, is held out to the informer to become
a liar. The spy becomes an officer of the Government. He soon becomes
the terror of his superior. He is a sword without a hilt and without a
scabbard. Every taxpayer becomes the lawful prey of a detective whose
property depends upon the destruction of his prey.

These informers and spies are corrupters of public morals. They resort
to all known dishonest means for the accomplishment of what they pretend
to be an honest object. With them perjury becomes a fine art. Their
words are a commodity bought and sold in courts of justice.

This is the first phase. In a little while juries will refuse to believe
them, and every suit in which they are introduced will be lost by the
Government. Of this the real thieves will be quick to take advantage. So
many honest men will have been falsely charged by perjured informers and
moiety miscreants, that to convict the guilty will become impossible.
If the Government wishes to collect the taxes it must set an honorable
example. It must deal kindly and honestly with the people. It must
not inaugurate a vampire system of espionage. It must not take it for
granted that every manufacturer and importer is a thief, and that all
spies and informers are honest men.

The revenues of this country are as honestly paid as they are expended.
There has been as much fair dealing outside as inside of the Treasury
Department.

But, however that may be, the informer system will not make them honest
men, but will in all probability produce exactly the opposite result.
If our system of taxation is so unpopular that the revenues cannot be
collected without bribing men to tell the truth; if our officers must
be offered rewards beyond their salaries to state the facts; if it is
impossible to employ men to discharge their duties honestly, then let
us change the system. The moiety system makes the Treasury Department
a vast vampire sucking the blood of the people upon shares. Americans
detest informers, spies, detectives, turners of State's evidence,
eavesdroppers, paid listeners, hypocrites, public smellers, trackers,
human hounds and ferrets. They despise men who "suspect" for a living;
they hate legal lyers-in-wait and the highwaymen of the law. They abhor
the betrayers of friends and those who lead and tempt others to commit
a crime in order that they may detect it. In a monarchy, the detective
system is a necessity. The great thief has to be sustained by smaller
ones.--December 4,1877.

*****

LANGUAGE.--Most people imagine that men have always talked; that
language is as old as the race; and it is supposed that some language
was taught by some mythological god to the first pair. But we now know,
if we know anything, that language is a growth; that every word had to
be created by man, and that back of every word is some want, some wish,
some necessity of the body or mind, and also a genius to embody that
want or that wish, to express that thought in some sound that we call a
word.

At first, the probability is that men uttered sounds of fear, of
content, of anger, or happiness. And the probability is that the first
sounds or cries expressed such feelings, and these sounds were nouns,
adjectives, and verbs.

After a time, man began to give his ideas to others by rude pictures,
drawings of animals and trees and the various other things with which he
could give rude thoughts. At first he would make a picture of the whole
animal. Afterward some part of the animal would stand for the whole, and
in some of the old picture-writings the curve of the nostril of a horse
stands for the animal. This was the shorthand of picture-writing. But it
was a long journey to where marks would stand, not for pictures, but for
sounds. And then think of the distance still to the alphabet. Then to
writing, so that marks took entirely the place of pictures. Then the
invention of movable type, and then the press, making it possible to
save the wealth of the brain; making it possible for a man to leave not
simply his property to his fellow-man, not houses and lands and dollars,
but his ideas, his thoughts, his theories, his dreams, the poetry and
pathos of his soul. Now each generation is heir to all the past.

If we had free thought, then we could collect the wealth of the
intellectual world. In the physical world, springs make the creeks and
brooks, and they the rivers, and the rivers empty into the great sea. So
each brain should add to the sum of human knowledge. If we deny freedom
of thought, the springs cease to gurgle, the rivers to run, and the
great ocean of knowledge becomes a desert of barren, ignorant sand.

*****

THIS IS AN AGE OF MONEY-GETTING, of materialism, of cold, unfeeling
science. The question arises, Is the world growing less generous, less
heroic, less chivalric?

Let us answer this. The experience of the individual is much like the
experience of a generation, or of a race. An old man imagines that
everything was better when he was young; that the weather could then be
depended on; that sudden changes are recent inventions. So he will tell
you that people used to be honest; that the grocers gave full weight and
the merchants full measure, and that the bank cashier did not spend the
evening of his days in Canada.

He will also tell you that the women were handsome and virtuous. There
were no scandals then, no divorces, and that in religion all were
orthodox--no Infidels. Before he gets through, he will probably tell you
that the art of cooking has been lost--that nobody can make biscuit now,
and that he never expects to eat another slice of good bread.

He mistakes the twilight of his own life for the coming of the night
of universal decay and death. He imagines that that has happened to the
world, which has only happened to him. It does not occur to him that
millions at the moment he is talking are undergoing the experience of
his youth, and that when they become old they will praise the very days
that he denounces.

The Garden of Eden has always been behind us. The Golden Age, after all,
is the memory of youth--it is the result of remembered pleasure in the
midst of present pain.

To old age youth is divine, and the morning of life cloudless.

So now thousands and millions of people suppose that the age of true
chivalry has gone by and that honesty has about concluded to leave the
world. As a matter of fact, the age known as the age of chivalry was the
age of tyranny, of arrogance and cowardice. Men clad in complete armor
cut down the peasants that were covered with leather, and these soldiers
of the chivalric age armored themselves to that degree that if they fell
in battle they could not rise, held to the earth by the weight of
iron that their bravery had got itself entrenched within. Compare the
difference in courage between going to war in coats of mail against
sword and spear, and charging a battery of Krupp guns!

The ideas of justice have grown larger and nobler. Charity now does,
without a thought, what the average man a few centuries ago was
incapable of imagining. In the old times slavery was upheld, and
imprisonment for debt. Hundreds of crimes--or rather misdemeanors--were
punishable by death. Prisons were loathsome beyond description.
Thousands and thousands died in chains. The insane were treated like
wild beasts; no respect was paid to sex or age. Women were burned and
beheaded and torn asunder as though they had been hyenas, and children
were butchered with the greatest possible cheerfulness.

So it seems to me that the world is more chivalric, more generous,
nearer just and fair, more charitable, than ever before.

*****

THE COLORED MAN is doing well. He is hungry for knowledge. Their
children are going to school. Colored boys are taking prizes in the
colleges. A colored man was the orator of Harvard. They are industrious,
and in the South many are becoming rich. As the people, black and white,
become educated they become better friends. The old prejudice is the
child of ignorance. The colored man will succeed if the South succeeds.
The South is richer to-day than ever before, more prosperous, and both
races are really improving. The greatest danger in the South, and for
that matter all over the country, is the mob. It is the duty of every
good citizen to denounce the mob. Down with the mob.

*****

FREEDOM OF RELIGION is the destruction of religion. In Rome, after
people were allowed to worship their own gods, all gods fell into
disrepute. It will be so in America. Here is freedom of religion, and
all devotees find that the gods of other devotees are just as good as
theirs. They find that the prayers of others are answered precisely as
their prayers are answered.

The Protestant God is no better than the Catholic, and the Catholic is
no better than the Mormon, and the Mormon is no better than Nature for
answering prayers. In other words, all prayers die in the air which they
uselessly agitate. There is undoubtedly a tendency among the Protestant
denominations to unite. This tendency is born of weakness, not of
strength. In a few years, if all should unite, they would hardly have
power enough to obstruct, for any considerable time, the march of the
intellectual host destined to conquer the world. But let us all be
good natured; let us give to others all the rights that we claim for
ourselves. The future, I believe, has both hands full of blessings for
the human race.

*****

THE DEISTS AND NATURE.--We who deny the supernatural origin of the
Bible, must admit not only that it exists, but that it was naturally
produced. If it is not supernatural, it is natural. It will hardly
do for the worshipers of Nature to hold the Bible in contempt, simply
because it is not a supernatural book.

The Deists of the last century made a mistake. They proceeded to show
that the Bible is immoral, untrue, cruel and absurd, and therefore came
to the conclusion that it could not have been written by a being of
infinite wisdom and goodness,--the being whom they believed to be the
author of Nature. Could not infinite wisdom and goodness just as easily
command crime as to permit it? Is it really any worse to order the
strong to slay the weak, than to stand by and refuse to protect the
weak?

After all, is Nature, taken together, any better than the Bible? If God
did not command the Jews to murder the Canaanites, Nature, to say
the least, did not prevent it. If God did not uphold the practice of
polygamy, Nature did. The moment we deny the supernatural origin of the
Bible, we declare that Nature wrote its every word, commanded all its
cruelties, told all its falsehoods. The Bible is, like Nature, a mixture
of what we call "good" and "bad,"--of what appears, and of what in
reality is.

The Bible must have been a perfectly natural production not only, but
a necessary one. There was, and is, no power in the universe that could
have changed one word. All the mistakes in translation were necessarily
made, and not one, by any possibility, could have been avoided. That
book, like all other facts in Nature, could not have been otherwise than
it is. The fact being that Nature has produced all superstitions, all
persecution, all slavery, and every crime, ought to be sufficient to
deter the average man from imagining that this power, whatever it may
be, is worthy of worship.

There is good in Nature. It is the nature in us that perceives the evil,
that pursues the right. In man, Nature not only contemplates herself,
but approves or condemns her actions. Of course, "good" and "bad" are
relative terms, and things are "good" or "bad" as they affect man well
or ill.

Infidels, skeptics,--that is to say, Freethinkers, have opposed the
Bible on account of the bad things in it, and Christians have upheld it,
not on account of the bad, but on account of the good. Throw away the
doctrine of inspiration, and the Bible will be more powerful for good
and far less for evil. Only a few years ago, Christians looked upon the
Bible as the bulwark of human slavery. It was the word of God, and for
that reason was superior to the reason of uninspired man. Had it been
considered simply as the work of man, it would not have been quoted to
establish that which the man of this age condemns. Throw away the idea
of inspiration, and all passages in conflict with liberty, with science,
with the experience of the intelligent part of the human race, instantly
become harmless. They are no longer guides for man. They are simply
the opinions of dead barbarians. The good passages not only remain, but
their influence is increased, because they are relieved of a burden.

No one cares whether the truth is inspired or not. The truth is
independent of man, not only, but of God. And by truth I do not mean
the absolute, I mean this: Truth is the relation between things and
thoughts, and between thoughts and thoughts. The perception of this
relation bears the same relation to the logical faculty in man, that
music does to some portion of the brain--that is to say, it is a
mental melody. This sublime strain has been heard by a few, and I am
enthusiastic enough to believe that it will be the music of the future.

For the good and for the true in the Old and New Testaments I have the
same regard that I have for the good and true, no matter where they may
be found. We who know how false the history of to-day is; we who know
the almost numberless mistakes that men make who are endeavoring to tell
the truth; we who know how hard it is, with all the facilities we now
have--with the daily press, the telegraph, the fact that nearly all can
read and write--to get a truthful report of the simplest occurrence,
must see that nothing short of inspiration (admitting for the moment the
possibility of such a thing,) could have prevented the Scriptures from
being filled with error.

*****

AT LAST, THE SCHOOLHOUSE is larger than the church. The common people
have, through education, become uncommon. They now know how little is
really known by kings, presidents, legislators, and professors. At last,
they are capable of not only understanding a few questions, but they
have acquired the art of discussing those that no one understands. With
the facility of the cultured, they can now hide behind phrases and make
barricades of statistics. They understand the sophistries of the upper
classes; and while the cultured have been turning their attention to
the classics, to the dead languages, and the dead ideas that they
contain,--while they have been giving their attention to ceramics,
artistic decorations, and compulsory prayers, the common people have
been compelled to learn the practical things. They are acquainted with
facts, because they have done the work of the world.

*****

CRUELTY.--Sometimes it has seemed to me that cruelty is the climate of
crime, and that generosity is the Spring, Summer and Autumn of virtue.
Every form of wickedness, of meanness, springs from selfishness, that is
to say, from cruelty. Every good man hates and despises the wretch who
abuses wife and child--who rules by curses and blows and makes his home
a kind of hell. So, no generous man wishes to associate with one who
overworks his horse and feeds the lean and fainting beast with blows.

The barbarian delights in inflicting pain. He loves to see his victim
bleed,--but the civilized man staunches blood, binds up wounds and
decreases pain. He pities the suffering animal as well as the suffering
man.

He would no more inflict wanton wounds upon a dog than on a man. The
heart of the civilized man speaks for the dumb and helpless.

A good man would no more think of flaying a living animal than of
murdering his mother. The man who cuts a hoof from the leg of a horse is
capable of committing any crime that does not require courage. Such an
experiment can be of no use. Under no circumstances are hoofs taken from
horses for the good of the horses any more than their heads would be cut
off.

Think of the pain inflicted by separating the hoof of a living horse
from the flesh! If the poor beast could speak what would he say? The
same knowledge could be obtained by cutting away the hoof of a dead
horse. Knowledge of every bone, ligament, artery and vein, of every
cartilage and joint can be obtained by the dissection of the dead.
"But," says the biologist, "we must dissect the living."

Well, millions of living animals have been cut in pieces; millions of
experiments have been tried; all the nerves have been touched; every
possible agony has been inflicted that ingenuity could invent and
cruelty accomplish. Many volumes have been published filled with
accounts of these experiments, giving all the details and the results.
People who are curious about such things can read these reports. There
is no need of repeating these savage experiments. It is now known how
long a dog can live with all the pores of his skin closed, how long he
can survive the loss of his skin, or one lobe of his brain, or both of
his kidneys, or part of his intestines, or without his liver, and there
is no necessity of mutilating and mangling thousands of other dogs to
substantiate what is already known.

Of what possible use is it to know just how long an animal can live
without water--at what time he becomes insane from thirst, or blind or
deaf?

*****

THE WORLD'S FAIR will do great good. A great many thousand people of the
Old World will for the first time understand the new; will for the first
time appreciate what a free people can do. For the first time they will
know the value of free institutions, of individual independence, of
a country where people express their thoughts, are not afraid of
each other, not afraid to try--a people so accustomed to success
that disaster is not taken into calculation. Of course, we have great
advantages. We have a new half of the world. We have soil better than is
found in other countries, and the soil is new and generous and anxious
to be cultivated. So we have everything in hill and mountain that
man can need--silver, and gold, and iron beyond computation--and, in
addition to all that, our people are the most inventive. We sustain
about the same relation to invention that Italy in her palmy days did to
art, or that Spain did to superstition.

And right here it may be well enough to say that I think it was
exceedingly unfortunate that this country was discovered under the
auspices of Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella were a couple of wretches. The
same year that Columbus discovered America, these sovereigns expelled
the Jews from Spain, and the expulsion was accompanied by every outrage,
by every atrocity to which man--that is to say, savage man--that is to
say, the superstitious savage--is capable of inflicting.

The Spaniards came to America and destroyed two civilizations far better
than their own. They were natural robbers, buccaneers, and thought
nothing of murdering thousands for gold. I am perfectly willing to
celebrate the fact of discovery, but for the sovereigns of Spain I am
not willing to celebrate, except, perhaps their deaths. There is at
least some joy to be extracted from that.

In spite of the untoward circumstances under which the continent was
discovered and settled, there is one thing that counteracted to a
certain degree the influence of the Old World in the New. Possibly we
owe our liberty to the Indians. If there had been no hostile savages on
this continent, the kings and princes of the Old World would have taken
possession and would have divided it out among their favorites. They
tried to do that, but their favorites could not take possession. They
had to fight for the soil and in the conflict of centuries they found
that a good fighter was a good citizen, and the ideas of caste were
slowly lost.

Then another thing was of benefit to us. The settlers felt that they
had earned the soil; that they had fought for it, gained it by their
sufferings, their courage, their selfdenial, and their labor; and the
idea crept into their heads that the kings in Europe, who had done
nothing, had no right to dictate to them.

Thus at first the spirit of caste was destroyed by respectability
resting on usefulness. The spirit of subserviency to the Old World also
died, and the people who had rescued the land made up their minds not
only to own it, but to control it. They were also firmly convinced that
the profits belonged to them. In this way manhood was recognized in the
New World. In this way grew up the feeling of nationality here.

What I wish to see celebrated in this great exposition are the triumphs
that have been achieved in this New World. These I wish to see above
all. At the same time I want the best that labor and thought have
produced in all countries. It seems to me that in the presence of the
wonderful machines, of those marvelous mechanical contrivances by which
we take advantage of the forces of nature, by which we make servants of
the elemental powers--in the presence, I say, of these, it seems to me
respect for labor must be born. We shall begin to appreciate the men of
use instead of those who have posed as decorations. All the beautiful
things, all the useful things, come from labor, and it is labor that has
made the world a fit habitation for the human race.

Take from the World's Fair what labor has produced--the work of the
great artists--and nothing will be left. What have the great conquerors
to show in this great exhibition? What shall we get from the Caesars and
the Napoleons? What shall we get from popes and cardinals? What shall
we get from the nobility? From princes and lords and dukes? What excuse
have they for having existence and for having lived on the bread earned
by honest men? They stand in the show-windows of history, lay figures,
on which fine goods are shown, but inside the raiment there is nothing,
and never was. This exposition will be the apotheosis of labor. No man
can attend it without losing, if he has any sense at all, the spirit
of caste; or, if he still maintains it, he will put the useful in the
highest class, and the useless, whether carrying sceptres or dishes for
alms, in the lowest.--October, 1892.

*****

THE SAVAGE made of the river, the tree, the mountain, a fetich. He put
within, or behind these things, a spirit--according to Mr. Spencer, the
spirit of a dead ancestor. This is considered by the modern Christian,
and in fact by the modern philosopher, as the lowest possible phase of
the religious idea. To put behind the river or the tree, or within them,
a spirit, a something, is considered the religion of savagery; but
to put behind the universe, or within it, the same kind of fetich, is
considered the height of philosophy.

For my part, I see no possible distinction in these systems, except that
the view of the savage is altogether the more poetic. The _fetich_ of
the savage is the _noumenon_ of the Greek, the _God_ of the theologian,
the _First Cause_ of the metaphysician, the _Unknowable_ of Spencer.

*****

THE UNTHINKABLE.--It is admitted by all who have thought upon the
question that a First Cause is unthinkable--that a creative power
is beyond the reach of human thought. It therefore follows that the
miraculous is unthinkable. There is no possible way in which the human
mind can even think of a miracle. It is infinitely beyond our power of
conception. We can conceive of the statement, but not of the thing. It
is impossible for the intellect to conceive of a clay pot producing oil.
It is impossible to conceive even, of human life being perpetuated in
the midst of fire. This is just as unthinkable as that twice two are
twenty-seven. A man can say that three times three are two, but it
is impossible to think of any such thing--that is, to think of such a
statement as true. A man may say that he heard a stone sing a song and
heard it afterward repeat a part of Milton's "Paradise Lost." Now, I can
conceive of a man telling such a falsehood, but I cannot conceive of the
thing having happened.

*****

CAN HUMAN TESTIMONY Overcome the Apparently Impossible Without
Explanation?--It can only be believed by a philosophic mind when
explained--that is to say, by being destroyed as a miracle, and
persisting simply as a fact.

Now, I say that a miracle is unthinkable because a power above Nature,
a power that created Nature, is unthinkable. And if a power above
Nature be unthinkable, the miracles claiming to be supernatural are
unthinkable. In other words, all consequences flowing from a belief in
an infinite Creator are necessarily unthinkable.

*****

EDOUARD REMENYI.--This week the great violinist, Edouard Remenyi, as my
guest, visited the Bass Rocks House, Cape Ann, Mass., and for three days
delighted and entranced the fortunate idlers of the beach. He played
nearly all the time, night and day, seemingly carried away with his own
music. Among the many selections given, were the andante from the Tenth
Sonata in E flat, also from the Twelfth Sonata in G minor, by Mozart.
Nothing could exceed the wonderful playing of the selections from the
Twelfth Sonata. A hush as of death fell upon the audience, and when he
ceased, tears fell upon applauding hands. Then followed the Elegie from
Ernst; then "The Ideal Dance" composed by himself--a fairy piece, full
of wings and glancing feet, moonlight and melody, where fountains fall
in showers of pearl, and waves of music die on sands of gold--then came
the "Barcarole" by Schubert, and he played this with infinite spirit,
in a kind of inspired frenzy, as though music itself were mad with joy;
then the grand Sonata in G, in three movements, by Beethoven.--August,
1880.

Remenyi's Playing.--In my mind the old tones are still rising and
falling--still throbbing, pleading, beseeching, imploring, wailing like
the lost--rising winged and triumphant, superb and victorious--then
caressing, whispering every thought of love--intoxicated, delirious with
joy--panting with passion--fading to silence as softly and imperceptibly
as consciousness is lost in sleep.

*****

THE KINDERGARTEN is perfectly adapted to the natural needs and desires
of children. Most children dislike the old system and go "unwillingly
to school." They feel imprisoned and wait impatiently for their liberty.
They learn without understanding and take no interest in their lessons.
In the Kindergarten there is perfect liberty, and study is transformed
into play. To learn is a pleasure. There are no wearisome tasks--no
mental drudgery--nothing but enjoyment,--the enjoyment of natural
development in natural ways. Children do not have to be driven to the
Kindergarten. To be kept away is a punishment.

The experience in many towns and cities justifies our belief that the
Kindergarten is the only valuable school for little children. They are
brought in contact with actual things--with forms and colors--things
that can be seen and touched, and they are taught to use their hands and
senses--to understand qualities and relations, and all is done under
the guise of play. We agree with Froebel who said: "Let us live for our
children."

*****

THE METHODIST CHURCH STATISTICS.--First. In 1800, a resolution in favor
of gradual emancipation was defeated.

Second. In 1804, resolutions passed requiring ministers to exhort slaves
to be obedient to their masters.

Third. In 1808, everything about laymen owning slaves Stricken out.

Fourth. In 1820, a resolution that ministers should not hold slaves was
defeated.

Fifth. In 1836, a resolution passed that the Methodist Church opposed,
abolition of slavery--one hundred and twenty to fourteen.

Sixth. In 1845-1846, the Methodist Church divided--Bishop Andrews owned
slaves.

Seventh. As late as 1860 there were over ten thousand Methodists who
were slaveholders in the M. E. Church, North.

*****

117 East 21st Str., N. Y.

     * Response to an invitation to a dinner and a billiard
     tournament at the Manhattan Athletic Club, New York City.

Feby. 18, 1899.

My Dear Dr. Ranney:

I go to Boston to-morrow. So, you see it is impossible for me to be with
you on the 22d inst. I would like to make a few remarks on "orthodox
billiards." The fact is that the whole world is a table, we are the
balls and Fate plays the game. We are knocked and whacked against each
other,--followed and drawn--whirled and twisted, pocketed and spotted,
and all the time we think that we are doing the playing. But no matter,
we feel that we are in the game, and a real good illusion is, after all,
it may be, the only reality that we know. At the same time, I feel
that Fate is a careless player--that he is always a little nervous and
generally forgets to chalk his cue. I know that he has made lots of
mistakes with me--lots of misses.

With many thanks, I remain, yours always.

R. G. Ingersoll.

*****

THOUGHTS ON CHRISTMAS, 1891.--It is beautiful to give one day to the
ideal--to have one day apart; one day for generous deeds, for good will,
for gladness; one day to forget the shadows, the rains, the storms of
life; to remember the sunshine, the happiness of youth and health; one
day to forget the briers and thorns of the winding path, to remember the
fruits and flowers; one day in which to feed the hungry, to salute
the poor and lowly; one day to feel the brotherhood of man; one day
to remember the heroic and loving deeds of the dead; one day to get
acquainted with children, to remember the old, the unfortunate and the
imprisoned; one day in which to forget yourself and think lovingly of
others; one day for the family, for the fireside, for wife and children,
for the love and laughter, the joy and rapture, of home; one day in
which bonds and stocks and deeds and notes and interest and mortgages
and all kinds of business and trade are forgotten, and all stores and
shops and factories and offices and banks and ledgers and accounts and
lawsuits are cast aside, put away and locked up, and the weary heart and
brain are given a voyage to fairyland.

Let us hope that such a day is a prophecy of what all days will be.

*****

THE ORTHODOX PREACHERS are several centuries in the rear. They all love
the absurd, and glory in believing the impossible. They are also as
conservative as though they were dead--good people--the leaders of those
who are going backward.

*****

     The Man who builds a home erects a temple.
     The flame upon the hearth is the sacred fire.
     He who loves wife and children is the true worshiper.
     Forms and ceremonies, kneelings and fastings are born of selfish fear.
     A good deed is the best prayer.
     A loving life is the best religion.
     No one knows whether the Unknown is worthy of worship or not.

*****

WE TWO, THE DOUBTING BRAIN AND HOPING HEART, with somber thought and
radiant wish, in dusk and dawn, in light and shade 'neath star and
sun, together journeying toward the night. And then the end, sighs the
doubting brain--but there is no end, says the hoping heart. O Brain! if
you knew, you would not doubt. O Heart! if you knew, you would not hope.

*****

RIGHTS AND DUTIES spring from the same source. He who has no rights
has no duties. Without liberty there can be no responsibility and no
conscience. Man calls himself to an account for the use of his power,
and passes judgment upon himself. The standard of such judgment we call
conscience. In the proportion that man uses his liberty, his power, for
the good of all, he advances, becomes civilized. Civilization does not
consist merely in invention, discovery, material advancement, but
in doing justice. By civilization is meant all discoveries, facts,
theories, agencies, that add to the happiness of man.

*****

AT BAY.--Sometimes in the darkness of night I feel as though surrounded
by the great armies of effacement--that the horizon is growing
smaller every moment--that the final surrender is only postponed--that
everything is taking something from me--that Nature robs me with her
countless hands--that my heart grows weaker with every beat--that even
kisses wear me away, and that every thought takes toll of my brief life.

*****

THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY.*--One year of perfect health--of countless
smiles--of wonder and surprise--of growing thought and love--was duly
celebrated on this day, and all paid tribute to the infant queen. There
were whirling things that scattered music as they turned--and boxes
filled with tunes--and curious animals of whittled wood--and ivory rings
with tinkling bells--and little dishes for a fairy-feast--horses that
rocked, and bleating sheep and monstrous elephants of painted tin. A
baby-tender, for a tender babe, garments of silk and cushions wrought
with flowers, and pictures of her mother when a babe--and silver dishes
for another year--and coach and four and train of cars--and bric-a-brac
for a baby's house--and last of all, a pearl, to mark her first round
year of life and love.

     * Written on the first anniversary of his grandchild, Eva
     Ingersoll-Brown, August 27, 1892.

*****

SHELLEY.--The light of morn beyond the purple hills--a palm that lifts
its coronet of leaves above the desert's sands--an isle of green in some
far sea--a spring that waits for lips of thirst--a strain of music heard
within some palace wrought of dreams--a cloud of gold above a setting
sun--a fragrance wafted from some unseen shore.

*****

FATE.--Never hurried, never delayed, passionless, pitiless, patient,
keeping the tryst--neither early nor late--there, on the very stroke and
center of the instant fixed.

*****

QUIET, and introspective calm come with the afternoon. Toward evening
the mind grows satisfied and still. The flare and flicker of youth are
gone, and the soul is like the flame of a lamp where the air is at rest.
Age discards the superfluous, the immaterial, the straw and chaff, and
hoards the golden grain. The highway is known, and the paths no longer
mislead. Clouds are not mistaken for mountains.

*****

THE OLD MAN has been long at the fair. He is acquainted with the
jugglers at the booths. His curiosity has been satisfied. He no longer
cares for the exceptional, the monstrous, the marvelous and deformed. He
looks through and beyond the gilding, the glitter and gloss, not only
of things, but of conduct, of manners, theories, religions and
philosophies. He sees clearer. The light no longer shines in his eyes.

*****

The time will come when even selfishness will be charitable for its own
sake, because at that time the man will have grown and developed to that
degree that selfishness demands generosity and kindness and justice. The
self becomes so noble that selfishness is a virtue. The lowest form of
selfishness is when one is willing to be happy, or wishes to be happy,
at the expense or the misery of another. The highest form of selfishness
is when a man becomes so noble that he finds his happiness in making
others so. This is the nobility of selfishness.

*****

CUBA fell upon her knees--stretched her thin hands toward the great
Republic. We saw her tear-filled eyes--her withered breasts--her dead
babes--her dying--her buried and unburied dead. We heard her voice, and
pity, roused to action by her grief, became as stern as justice, and
the great Republic cried to Spain: "Sheathe the dagger of assassination;
take your bloody hand from the throat of the helpless; and take your
flag from the heaven of the Western World."

*****

Perhaps I have reached the years of discretion. But it may be that
discretion is the enemy of happiness. If the buds had discretion there
might be no fruit. So it may be that the follies committed in the spring
give autumn the harvest.--August 11,1892.

*****

Dickens wrote for homes--Thackeray for clubs. Byron did not care for the
fireside--for the prattle of babes--for the smiles and tears of humble
life. He was touched by grandeur rather than goodness,--loved storm and
crag and the wild sea. But Burns lived in the valley, touched by the
joys and griefs of lowly lives.

Imagine amethysts, rubies, diamonds, emeralds and opals mingled as
liquids--then imagine these marvelous glories of light and color changed
to a tone, and you have the wondrous, the incomparable voice of Scalchi.

*****

THE ORGAN.--The beginnings--the timidities--the half
thoughts--blushes--suggestions--a phrase of grace and feeling--a
sustained note--the wing on the wind--confidence--the flight--rising
with many harmonies that unite in the voluptuous swell--in the
passionate tremor--rising still higher--flooding the great dome with the
soul of enraptured sound.

*****

NEW MEXICO is a most wonderful country. It is a ragged miser with
billions of buried treasure. It looks as if Nature had guarded her
silver and gold with enough desolation to deter all but the brave.

*****

WHY SHOULD THE INDIAN SUMMER of a life be lost--the long, serene, and
tender days when earth and sky are friends? The falling leaves disclose
the ripened fruit--and so the flight of youth with dreams and fancies
should show the wealth of bending bough.

*****

Give milk to babes, and wine to youth. But for old age, when ghosts
of more than two-score years are wandering on the traveled road, the
fragrant tea, that loosens gossip's tongue, is best.--December 25,1892.

     [From a letter thanking a friend for a Christmas present of
     a chest of tea.]

*****

ON MEMORIAL DAY our hearts blossom in gratitude as we lovingly remember
the brave men upon whose brows Death, with fleshless hands, placed the
laurel wreath of fame.

*****

THE SOUL IS AN ARCHITECt--it builds a habitation for itself--and as the
soul is, is the habitation. Some live in dens and caves, and some in
lowly homes made rich with love, and overrun with vine and flower.

*****

SCIENCE at last holds with honest hand the scales wherein are weighed
the facts and fictions of the world. She neither kneels nor prays, she
stands erect and thinks. Her tongue is not a traitor to her brain. Her
thought and speech agree.

*****

THE NEGRO who can pass me in the race of life will receive my
admiration, and he can count on my friendship. No man ever lived who
proved his superiority by trampling on the weak.

*****

RELIGION is like a palm tree--it grows at the top. The dead leaves are
all orthodox, while the new ones and the buds are all heretics.

*****

MEMORY is the miser of the mind; forgetfulness the spendthrift.

*****

HOPE is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.

*****

THE FIRES OF THE NEXT WORLD sustain the same relation to churches that
those in this world sustain to insurance companies.

*****

Now and then there arises a man who on peril's edge draws from the
scabbard of despair the sword of victory.

*****

The falling leaf that tells of autumn's death is, in a subtler sense, a
prophecy of spring.

*****

Vice lives either before Love is born, or after Love is dead.

*****

Intellectual freedom is only the right to be honest.

*****

I believe that finally man will go through the phase of religion before
birth.

*****

When shrill chanticleer pierces the dull ear of morn.

*****

Orthodoxy is the refuge of mediocrity.

*****

The ocean is the womb of all that will be, the tomb of all that has
been.

*****

Jealousy never knows the value of a fact.

Envy cannot reason, malice cannot prophesy.

*****

Love has a kind of second sight.

*****

I have never given to any one a sketch of my life. According to my idea
a life should not be written until it has been lived.--July 1, 1888.




EFFECT OF THE WORLD'S FAIR ON THE HUMAN RACE.


THE Great Fair should be for the intellectual, mechanical, artistic,
political and social advancement of the world. Nations, like small
communities, are in danger of becoming provincial, and must become
so, unless they exchange commodities, theories, thoughts, and ideals.
Isolation is the soil of ignorance, and ignorance is the soil of
egotism; and nations, like individuals who live apart, mistake
provincialism for perfection, and hatred of all other nations for
patriotism. With most people, strangers are not only enemies, but
inferiors. They imagine that they are progressive because they know
little of others, and compare their present, not with the present of
other nations, but with their own past.

Few people have imagination enough to sympathize with those of a
different complexion, with those professing another religion or speaking
another language, or even wearing garments unlike their own. Most people
regard every difference between themselves and others as an evidence of
the inferiority of the others. They have not intelligence enough to put
themselves in the place of another if that other happens to be outwardly
unlike themselves.

Countless agencies have been at work for many years destroying the
hedges of thorn that have so long divided nations, and we at last are
beginning to see that other people do not differ from us, except in the
same particulars that we differ from them. At last, nations are becoming
acquainted with each other, and they now know that people everywhere are
substantially the same. We now know that while nations differ outwardly
in form and feature, somewhat in theory, philosophy and creed,
still, inwardly--that is to say, so far as hopes and passions are
concerned--they are much the same, having the same fears, experiencing
the same joys and sorrows. So we are beginning to find that the virtues
belong exclusively to no race, to no creed, and to no religion; that the
humanities dwell in the hearts of men, whomever and whatever they
may happen to worship. We have at last found that every creed is of
necessity a provincialism, destined to be lost in the universal.

At last, Science extends an invitation to all nations, and places at
their disposal its ships and its cars; and when these people meet--or
rather, the representatives of these people--they will find that, in
spite of the accidents of birth, they are, after all, about the same;
that their sympathies, their ideas' of right and wrong, of virtue and
vice, of heroism and honor, are substantially alike. They will find that
in every land honesty is honored, truth respected and admired, and that
generosity and charity touch all hearts.

So it is of the greatest importance that the inventions of the world
should be brought beneath one roof. These inventions, in my judgment,
are destined to be the liberators of mankind. They enslave forces and
compel the energies of nature to work for man. These forces have no
backs to feel the lash, no tears to shed, no hearts to break.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes What we call
civilized by increasing his wants. As his necessities increase, he
becomes industrious and energetic. If his heart does not keep pace with
his brain, he is cruel, and the physically or mentally strong enslave
the physically or mentally weak. At present these inventions, while they
have greatly increased the countless articles needed by man, have to
a certain extent enslaved mankind. In a savage state there are few
failures. Almost any one succeeds in hunting and fishing. The wants are
few, and easily supplied. As man becomes civilized, wants increase; or
rather as wants increase, man becomes civilized. Then the struggle for
existence becomes complex; failures increase.

The first result of the invention of machinery has been to increase the
wealth of the few. The hope of the world is that through invention man
can finally take such advantage of these forces of nature, of the weight
of water, of the force of wind, of steam, of electricity, that they will
do the work of the world; and it is the hope of the really civilized
that these inventions will finally cease to be the property of the few,
to the end that they may do the work of all for all.

When those who do the work own the machines, when those who toil control
the invention, then, and not till then, can the world be civilized or
free. When these forces shall do the bidding of the individual, when
they become the property of the mechanic instead of the monopoly, when
they belong to labor instead of what is called capital, when these great
powers are as free to the individual laborer as the air and light
are now free to all, then, and not until then, the individual will be
restored and all forms of slavery will disappear.

Another great benefit will come from the Fair. Other nations in some
directions are more artistic than we, but no other nation has made
the common as beautiful as we have. We have given beauty of form to
machines, to common utensils, to the things of every day, and have thus
laid the foundation for producing the artistic in its highest possible
forms. It will be of great benefit to us to look upon the paintings and
marbles of the Old World. To see them is an education.

The great Republic has lived a greater poem than the brain and heart of
man have as yet produced, and we have supplied material for artists and
poets yet unborn; material for form and color and song. The Republic is
to-day Art's greatest market.

Nothing else is so well calculated to make friends of all nations as
really to become acquainted with the best that each has produced.

The nation that has produced a great poet, a great artist, a great
statesman, a great thinker, takes its place on an equality with other
nations of the world, and transfers to all of its citizens some of the
genius of its most illustrious men.

This great Fair will be an object lesson to other nations. They will see
the result of a government, republican in form, where the people are the
source of authority, where governors and presidents are servants--not
rulers. We want all nations to see the great Republic as it is, to study
and understand its growth, development and destiny. We want them to know
that here, under our flag, are sixty-five millions of people and that
they are the best fed, the best clothed and the best housed in the
world. We want them to know that we are solving the great social
problems, and that we are going to demonstrate the right and power of
man to govern himself. We want the subjects of other nations to see
aland filled with citizens--not subjects; aland in which the pew is
above the pulpit; where the people are superior to the state; where
legislators are representatives and where authority means simply the
duty to enforce the people's will.

Let us hope above all things that this Fair will bind the nations
together closer and stronger; and let us hope that this will result in
the settlement of all national difficulties by arbitration instead of
war. In a savage state, individuals settle their own difficulties by
an appeal to force. After a time these individuals agree that their
difficulties shall be settled by others. This is the first great step
toward civilization. The result is the establishment of courts. Nations
at present sustain to each other the same relation that savage does
to savage. Each nation is left to decide for itself, and it generally
decides according to its strength--not the strength of its side of the
case, but the strength of its army. The consequence is that what is
called "the Law of Nations" is a savage code. The world will never be
civilized until there is an international court. Savages begin to be
civilized when they submit their difficulties to their peers. Nations
will become civilized when they submit their difficulties to a great
court, the judgments of which can be carried out, all nations pledging
the co-operation of their armies and their navies for that purpose.

If the holding of the great Fair shall result in hastening the coming of
that time it will be a blessing to the whole world.

And here let me prophesy: The Fair will be worthy of Chicago, the
most wonderful city of the world--of Illinois, the best State in the
Union--of the United States, the best country on the earth. It will
eclipse all predecessors in every department. It will represent the
progressive spirit of the nineteenth century. Beneath its ample roofs
will be gathered the treasures of Art, and the accomplishments of
Science. At the feet of the Republic will be laid the triumphs of our
race, the best of every land.--The illustrated World's Fair, Chicago,
November, 1891.




SABBATH SUPERSTITION.


THE idea that one day in the week is better than the others and should
be set apart for religious purposes; that it should be considered holy;
that no useful work should be done on that day; that it should be given
over to pious idleness and sad ceremonies connected with the worship of
a supposed Being, seems to have been originated by the Jews.

According to the Old Testament, the Sabbath was marvelously sacred for
two reasons; the first being, that Jehovah created the universe in six
days and rested on the seventh: and the second, because the Jews had
been delivered from the Egyptians.

The first of these reasons we now know to be false; and the second has
nothing, so far as we are concerned, to do with the question.

There is no reason for our keeping the seventh day because the Hebrews
were delivered from the Egyptians.

The Sabbath was a Jewish institution, and, according to the Bible, only
the Jews were commanded to keep that day. Jehovah said nothing to the
Egyptians on that subject; nothing to the Philistines, nothing to the
Gentiles.

The Jews kept that day with infinite strictness, and with them this
space of time known as the Sabbath became so holy that he who violated
it by working was put to death. Sabbath-breaking and murder were equal
crimes. On the Sabbath the pious Jew would not build a fire in his
house. He ate cold victuals and thanked God. The gates of the city were
closed. No business was done, and the traveler who arrived at the city
on that day remained outside until evening. If he happened to fall, he
remained where he fell until the sun had gone done.

The early Christians did not hold the seventh day in such veneration.
As a matter of fact, they ceased to regard it as holy, and changed the
sacred day from the seventh to the first. This change was really made
by Constantine, because the first day of the week was the Sunday of the
Pagans; and this day had been given to pleasure and recreation and to
religious ceremonies for many centuries.

After Constantine designated the first day to be kept and observed by
Christians, our Sunday became the sacred time.

The early Christians, however, kept the day much as it had been kept by
the Pagans. They attended church in the morning, and in the afternoon
enjoyed themselves as best they could..

The Catholic Church fell in with the prevailing customs, and to
accommodate itself to Pagan ways and superstitions, it agreed, as far as
it could, with the ideas of the Pagan.

Up to the time of the Reformation, Sunday had been divided between the
discharge of religious duties and recreation.

Luther did not believe in the sacredness of the Sabbath. After church he
enjoyed himself by playing games, and wanted others to do the same.

Even John Calvin, whose view had been blurred by the "Five Points,"
allowed the people to enjoy themselves on Sunday afternoon.

The reformers on the continent never had the Jewish idea of the
sacredness of the Sabbath.

In Geneva, Germany and France, all kinds of innocent amusement were
allowed on that day; and I believe the same was true of Holland.

But in Scotland the Jewish idea was adopted to the fullest extent. There
Sabbath-breaking was one of the blackest and one of the most terrible
crimes. Nothing was considered quite as sacred as the Sabbath.

The Scotch went so far as to take the ground that it was wrong to save
people who were drowning on Sunday, the drowning being a punishment
inflicted by God. Upon the question of keeping the Sabbath most of the
Scottish people became insane.

The same notions about the holy day were adopted by the Dissenters in
England, and it became the principal tenet in their creed.

The Puritans and Pilgrims were substantially crazy about the sacredness
of Sunday. With them the first day of the week was set apart for
preaching, praying, attending church, reading the Bible and studying
the catechism. Walking, riding, playing on musical instruments, boating,
swimming and courting, were all crimes.

No one had the right to be happy on that blessed day. It was a time of
gloom, sacred, solemn and religiously stupid.

They did their best to strip their religion of every redeeming feature.
They hated art and music--everything calculated to produce joy. They
despised everything except the Bible, the church, God, Sunday and the
creed.

The influence of these people has been felt in every part of our
country. The Sabbath superstition became almost universal. No laughter,
no smiles on that day; no games, no recreation, no riding, no walking
through the perfumed fields or by the winding streams or the shore of
the sea. No communion with the subtile beauties of nature; no wandering
in the woods with wife and children, no reading of poetry and fiction;
nothing but solemnity and gloom, listening to sermons, thinking about
sin, death, graves, coffins, shrouds, epitaphs and ceremonies and the
marvelous truths of sectarian religion, and the weaknesses of those
who were natural enough and sensible enough to enjoy themselves on the
Sabbath day.

So universal became the Sabbath superstition that the Legislatures of
all the States, or nearly all, passed laws to prevent work and enjoyment
on that day, and declared all contracts void relating to business
entered into on Sunday.

The Germans gave us the first valuable lesson on this subject. They
came to this country in great numbers; they did not keep the American
Sabbath. They listened to music and they drank beer on that holy day.
They took their wives and children with them and enjoyed themselves;
yet they were good, kind, industrious people. They paid their debts and
their credit was the best.

Our people saw that men could be good and women virtuous without
"keeping" the Sabbath.

This did us great good, and changed the opinions of hundreds of
thousands of Americans.

But the churches insisted on the old way. Gradually our people began
to appreciate the fact that one-seventh of the time was being stolen by
superstition. They began to ask for the opening of libraries, for music
in the parks and to be allowed to visit museums and public places on the
Sabbath.

In several States these demands were granted, and the privileges have
never been abused. The people were orderly, polite to officials and to
each other.

In 1876, when the Centennial was held at Philadelphia, the Sabbatarians
had control. Philadelphia was a Sunday city, and so the gates of the
Centennial were closed on that day.

This was in Philadelphia where the Sabbath superstition had been so
virulent that chains had been put across the streets to prevent stages
and carriages from passing at that holy time.

At that time millions of Americans felt that a great wrong was done by
closing the Centennial to the laboring people; but the managers--most
of them being politicians--took care of themselves and kept the gates
closed.

In 1876 the Sabbatarians triumphed, and when it was determined to hold a
world's fair at Chicago they made up their minds that no one should look
upon the world's wonders on the Sabbath day.

To accomplish this pious and foolish purpose committees were appointed
all over the country; money was raised to make a campaign; persons were
employed to go about and arouse the enthusiasm of religious people;
petitions by the thousand were sent to Congress and to the officers
of the World's Fair, signed by thousands of people who never saw them;
resolutions were passed in favor of Sunday closing by conventions,
presbyteries, councils and associations. Lobbyists were employed to
influence members of Congress. Great bodies of Christians threatened to
boycott the fair and yet the World's Fair is open on Sunday.

What is the meaning of this? Let me tell you. It means that in this
country the Scotch New England Sabbath has ceased to be; it means that
it is dead. The last great effort for its salvation has been put forth,
and has failed. It belonged to the creed of Jonathan Edwards and the
belief of the witch-burners, and in this age it is out of place.

There was a time when the minister and priest were regarded as the
foundation of wisdom; when information came from the altar, from the
pulpit; and when the sheep were the property of the shepherd.

That day in intelligent communities has passed. We no longer go to the
minister or the church for information. The orthodox minister is
losing his power, and the Sabbath is now regarded as a day of rest, of
recreation and of pleasure.

The church must keep up with the people. The minister must take another
step. The multitude care but little about controversies in churches, but
they do care about the practical questions that directly affect their
daily lives.

Must we waste one day in seven; must we make ourselves unhappy or
melancholy one-seventh of the time?

These are important questions and for many years the church in our
country has answered them both in the affirmative, and a vast number of
people not Christians have also said "yes" because they wanted votes, or
because they feared to incite the hatred of the church.

Now in this year of 1893 a World's Fair answered this question in the
negative, and a large majority of the citizens of the Republic say that
the officers of the Fair have done right.

This marks an epoch in the history of the Sabbath. It is to be sacred
in a religious sense in this country no longer. Henceforth in the United
States the Sabbath is for the use of man.

Many of those who labored for the closing of the Fair on Sunday took the
ground that if the gates were opened, God would visit this nation with
famine, flood and fire.

It hardly seems possible that God will destroy thousands of women and
children who had nothing to do with the opening of the Fair; still, if
he is the same God described in the Christian Bible, he may destroy our
babes as he did those of the Egyptians. It is a little hard to tell in
advance what a God of that kind will do.

It was believed for many centuries that God punished the
Sabbath-breaking individual and the Sabbath-breaking nation. Of course
facts never had anything to do with this belief, and the prophecies
of the pulpit were never fulfilled. People who were drowned on Sunday,
according to the church, lost their lives by the will of God. Those
drowned on other days were the victims of storm or accident. The nations
that kept the Sabbath were no more prosperous than those that broke the
sacred day. Certainly France is as prosperous as Scotland.

Let us hope, however, that these zealous gentlemen who have predicted
calamities were mistaken; let us be glad that hundreds of thousands of
workingmen and women will be delighted and refined by looking at the
statues, the paintings, the machinery, and the countless articles of use
and beauty gathered together at the great Fair, and let us be glad that
on the one day that they can spare from toil, the gates will be open to
them.




A TRIBUTE TO GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE.


TWO articles have recently appeared attacking the motives of George
Jacob Holyoake. He is spoken of as a man governed by a desire to please
the rich and powerful, as one afraid of public opinion and who in the
perilous hour denies or conceals his convictions.

In these attacks there is not one word of truth. They are based upon
mistakes and misconceptions.

There is not in this world a nobler, braver man. In England he has done
more for the great cause of intellectual liberty than any other man
of this generation. He has done more for the poor, for the children of
toil, for the homeless and wretched than any other living man. He has
attacked all abuses, all tyranny and all forms of hypocrisy. His weapons
have been reason, logic, facts, kindness, and above all, example. He has
lived his creed. He has won the admiration and respect of his bitterest
antagonists. He has the simplicity of childhood, the enthusiasm of
youth and the wisdom of age. He is not abusive, but he is clear and
conclusive.. He is intense without violence--firm without anger. He has
the strength of perfect kindness. He does not hate--he pities. He does
not attack men and women, but dogmas and creeds. And he does not attack
them to get the better of people, but to enable people to get the better
of them. He gives the light he has. He shares his intellectual wealth
with the orthodox poor. He assists without insulting, guides without
arrogance, and enlightens without outrage. Besides, he is eminent for
the exercise of plain common sense. He knows that there are wrongs
besides those born of superstition--that people are not necessarily
happy because they have renounced the Thirty-nine Articles--and that
the priest is not the only enemy of mankind. He has for forty years been
preaching and practicing industry, economy, self-reliance, and kindness.
He has done all within his power to give the workingman a better home,
better food, better wages, and better opportunities for the education
of his children. He has demonstrated the success of co-operation--of
intelligent combination for the common good. As a rule, his methods have
been perfectly legal. In some instances he has knowingly violated the
law, and did so with the intention to take the consequences. He would
neither ask nor accept a pardon, because to receive a pardon carries
with it the implied promise to keep the law, and an admission that
you were in the wrong. He would not agree to desist from doing what he
believed ought to be done, neither would he stain his past to brighten
his future, nor imprison his soul to free his body. He has that happy
mingling of gentleness and firmness found only in the highest type of
moral heroes. He is an absolutely just man, and will never do an act
that he would condemn in another. He admits that the most bigoted
churchman has a perfect right to express his opinions not only, but
that he must be met with argument couched in kind and candid terms. Mr.
Holyoake is not only the enemy of a theological hierarchy, but he is
also opposed to mental mobs. He will not use the bludgeon of epithet.

Perfect fairness is regarded by many as weakness. Some people have
altogether more confidence in their beliefs than in their own arguments.
They resort to assertion. If what they assert be denied, the "debate"
becomes a question of veracity. On both sides of most questions there
are plenty of persons who imagine that logic dwells only in adjectives,
and that to speak kindly of an opponent is a virtual surrender.

Mr. Holyoake attacks the church because it has been, is, and ever will
be the enemy of mental freedom, but he does not wish to deprive the
church even of its freedom to express its opinion against freedom. He
is true to his own creed, knowing that when we have freedom we can take
care of all its enemies.

In one of the articles to which I have referred it is charged that Mr.
Holyoake refused to sign a petition for the pardon of persons convicted
of blasphemy. If this is true, he undoubtedly had a reason satisfactory
to himself. You will find that his action, or his refusal to act, rests
upon a principle that he would not violate in his own behalf.

Why should we suspect the motives of this man who has given his life
for the good of others? I know of no one who is his mental or moral
superior. He is the most disinterested of men. His name is a synonym
of candor. He is a natural logician--an intellectual marksman. Like an
unerring arrow his thought flies to the heart and center. He is
governed by principle, and makes no exception in his own favor. He is
intellectually honest. He shows you the cracks and flaws in his own
wares. He calls attention to the open joints and to the weakest links.
He does not want a victory for himself, but for truth. He wishes to
expose and oppose, not men, but error. He is blessed with that cloudless
mental vision that appearances cannot deceive, that interest cannot
darken, and that even ingratitude cannot blur. Friends cannot induce
and enemies cannot drive this man to do an act that his heart and brain
would not applaud. That such a character was formed without the aid
of the church, without the hope of harp or fear of flame, is a
demonstration against the necessity of superstition.

Whoever is opposed to mental bondage, to the shackles wrought by cruelty
and worn by fear, should be the friend of this heroic and unselfish man.

I know something of his life--something of what he has suffered--of what
he has accomplished for his fellow-men. He has been maligned, imprisoned
and impoverished. "He bore the heat and burden of the unregarded day"
and "remembered the misery of the many." For years his only recompense
was ingratitude. At last he was understood. He was recognized as an
earnest, honest, gifted, generous, sterling man, loving his country,
sympathizing with the poor, honoring the useful, and holding in supreme
abhorrence tyranny and falsehood in all their forms. The idea that this
man could for a moment be controlled by any selfish motive, by the
hope of preferment, by the fear of losing a supposed annuity, is
simply absurd. The authors of these attacks are not acquainted with Mr.
Holyoake. Whoever dislikes him does not know him.

Read his "Trial of Theism"--his history of "Co-operation in England"--if
you wish to know his heart--to discover the motives of his life--the
depth and tenderness of his sympathy--the nobleness of his nature--the
subtlety of his thought--the beauty of his spirit--the force and volume
of his brain--the extent of his information--his candor, his kindness,
his genius, and the perfect integrity of his stainless soul.

There is no man for whom I have greater respect, greater reverence,
greater love, than George Jacob Holyoake.--

August 8, 1883.




AT THE GRAVE OF BENJAMIN W. PARKER.

     * This was the first tribute ever delivered by Colonel
     Ingersoll at a grave. Mr. Parker himself was an Agnostic,
     was the father of Mrs. Ingersoll, and was always a devoted
     friend and admirer of the Colonel even before the latter's
     marriage with his daughter.


Peoria, Ill., May 24, 1876.

FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS: To fulfill a promise made many years ago, I wish
to say a word.

He whom we are about to lay in the earth, was gentle, kind and loving
in his life. He was ambitious only to live with those he loved. He was
hospitable, generous, and sincere. He loved his friends, and the friends
of his friends. He returned good for good. He lived the life of a child,
and died without leaving in the memory of his family the record of an
unkind act. Without assurance, and without fear, we give him back to
Nature, the source and mother of us all.

With morn, with noon, with night; with changing clouds and changeless
stars; with grass and trees and birds, with leaf and bud, with flower
and blossoming vine,--with all the sweet influences of nature, we leave
our dead.

Husband, father, friend, farewell.




A TRIBUTE TO EBON C. INGERSOLL

Washington, D. C., May 31, 1879.

     * The funeral of the Hon. E. C. Ingersoll took place
     yesterday afternoon at four o'clock, from his late
     residence, 1403 K Street The only ceremony at the house,
     other than the viewing of the remains, was a most affecting
     pathetic, and touching address by Col. Robert G. ingersoll,
     brother of the deceased. Not only the speaker, but every one
     of his hearers were deeply affected. When he began to read
     his eloquent characterization of the dead man his eyes at
     once filled with tears. He tried to hide them, but he could
     not do it, and finally he bowed his head upon the dead man's
     coffin in uncontrollable grief It was only after some delay,
     and the greatest efforts a self-mastery, that Colonel
     Ingersoll was able to finish reading his address. When he
     had ceased speaking, the members of the bereaved family
     approached the casket and looked upon the form which it
     contained, for the last time. The scene was heartrending.
     The devotion of all connected with the household excited
     the sympathy of all and there was not a dry eye to be seen.
     The pall-bearers--Senator William B. Allison, Senator James
     G. Blaine, Senator David Davis, Senator Daniel W Voorhees.
     Representative James A. Garfield, Senator A. S Paddock,
     Representative Thomas Q. Boyd of Illinois, the Hon. Ward H.
     Lermon, ex-Congressman Jere Wilson, and Representative Adlai
     E. Stevenson of Illinois--then bore the remains to the
     hearse, and the lengthy cortege proceeded to the Oak Hill
     Cemetery, where the remains were interred, in the presence
     of the family and friends, without further ceremony.--
     National Republican, Washington, D. C., June 3, 1879.


DEAR FRIENDS: I am going to do that which the dead oft promised he would
do for me.

The loved and loving brother, husband, father, friend, died where
manhood's morning almost touches noon, and while the shadows still were
falling toward the west.

He had not passed on life's highway the stone that marks the highest
point; but being weary for a moment, he lay down by the wayside, and
using his burden for a pillow, fell into that dreamless sleep that
kisses down his eyelids still. While yet in love with life and raptured
with the world, he passed to silence and pathetic dust.

Yet, after all, it may be best, just in the happiest, sunniest hour
of all the voyage, while eager winds are kissing every sail, to dash
against the unseen rock, and in an instant hear the billows roar above a
sunken ship. For whether in mid-sea or 'mong the breakers of the farther
shore, a wreck at last must mark the end of each and all. And every
life, no matter if its every hour is rich with love and every moment
jeweled with a joy, will, at its close, become a tragedy as sad and deep
and dark as can be woven of the warp and woof of mystery and death.

This brave and tender man in every storm of life was oak and rock; but
in the sunshine he was vine and flower. He was the friend of all heroic
souls. He climbed the heights, and left all superstitions far below,
while on his forehead fell the golden dawning of the grander day.

He loved the beautiful, and was with color, form, and music touched to
tears. He sided with the weak, the poor, and wronged, and lovingly
gave alms. With loyal heart and with the purest hands he faithfully
discharged all public trusts.

He was a worshiper of liberty, a friend of the oppressed. A thousand
times I have heard him quote these words: "_For Justice all place a
temple, and all season, summer_." He believed that happiness is the only
good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only
religion, and love the only priest. He added to the sum of human joy;
and were every one to whom he did some loving service to bring a blossom
to his grave, he would sleep tonight beneath a wilderness of flowers.

Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two
eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud,
and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless
lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of
death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.

He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the
return of health, whispered with his latest breath, "I am better now."
Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas, of fears and tears, that
these dear words are true of all the countless dead.

The record of a generous life runs like a vine around the memory of our
dead, and every sweet, unselfish act is now a perfumed flower.

And now, to you, who have been chosen, from among the many men he loved,
to do the last sad office for the dead, we give his sacred dust.

Speech cannot contain our love. There was, there is, no gentler,
stronger, manlier man.




A TRIBUTE TO THE REV. ALEXANDER CLARK.

Washington, D. C. July 13, 1879.


UPON the grave of the Reverend Alexander Clark I wish to place one
flower. Utterly destitute of cold, dogmatic pride, that often passes for
the love of God; without the arrogance of the "elect;" simple, free, and
kind--this earnest man made me his friend by being mine. I forgot that
he was a Christian, and he seemed to forget that I was not, while each
remembered that the other was at least a man.

Frank, candid, and sincere, he practiced what he preached, and looked
with the holy eyes of charity upon the failings and mistakes of men. He
believed in the power of kindness, and spanned with divine sympathy the
hideous gulf that separates the fallen from the pure.

Giving freely to others the rights that he claimed for himself, it never
occurred to him that his God hated a brave and honest unbeliever. He
remembered that even an Infidel had rights that love respects; that
hatred has no saving power, and that in order to be a Christian it is
not necessary to become less than a human being. He knew that no one can
be maligned into kindness; that epithets cannot convince; that curses
are not arguments, and that the finger of scorn never points toward
heaven. With the generosity of an honest man, he accorded to all the
fullest liberty of thought, knowing, as he did, that in the realm of
mind a chain is but a curse.

For this man I felt the greatest possible regard. In spite of the taunts
and jeers of his brethren, he publicly proclaimed that he would treat
Infidels with fairness and respect; that he would endeavor to convince
them by argument and win them with love. He insisted that the God
he worshiped loved the well-being even of an Atheist. In this grand
position he stood almost alone. Tender, just, and loving where others
were harsh, vindictive, and cruel, he challenged the admiration of every
honest man. A few more such clergymen might drive calumny from the lips
of faith and render the pulpit worthy of esteem.

The heartiness and kindness with which this generous man treated me can
never be excelled. He admitted that I had not lost, and could not lose,
a single right by the expression of my honest thought. Neither did he
believe that a servant could win the respect of a generous master by
persecuting and maligning those whom the master would willingly forgive.

While this good man was living, his brethren blamed him for having
treated me with fairness. But, I trust, now that he has left the shore
touched by the mysterious sea that never yet has borne, on any wave, the
image of a homeward sail, this crime will be forgiven him by those who
still remain to preach the love of God.

His sympathies were not confined within the prison, of a creed, but ran
out and over the walls like vines, hiding the cruel rocks and rusted
bars with leaf and flower. He could not echo with his heart the fiendish
sentence of eternal fire. In spite of book and creed, he read "between
the lines" the words of tenderness and love, with promises for all the
world.. Above, beyond, the dogmas of his church--humane even to the
verge of heresy--causing some to doubt his love of God because he
failed to hate his unbelieving fellow-men, he labored for the welfare of
mankind and to his work gave up his life with all his heart.




AT A CHILD'S GRAVE.

Washington, D. C., January 8, 1882.


MY FRIENDS: I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I
wish to take from every grave its fear. Here in this world, where life
and death are equal kings, all should be brave enough to meet what all
the dead have met. The future has been filled with fear, stained and
polluted by the heartless past. From the wondrous tree of life the buds
and blossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth,
patriarchs and babes sleep side by side.

Why should we fear that which will come to all that is? We cannot tell,
we do not know, which is the greater blessing--life or death. We cannot
say that death is not a good. We do not know whether the grave is the
end of this life, or the door of another, or whether the night here
is not somewhere else a dawn. Neither can we tell which is the more
fortunate--the child dying in its mother's arms, before its lips have
learned to form a word, or he who journeys all the length of life's
uneven road, painfully taking the last slow steps with staff and crutch.

Every cradle asks us "Whence?" and every coffin "Whither?" The poor
barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions just
as well as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearful
ignorance of the one, is as consoling as the learned and unmeaning words
of the other. No man, standing where the horizon of a life has touched a
grave, has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain and tears.

May be that death gives all there is of worth to life. If those we press
and strain within our arms could never die, perhaps that love would
wither from the earth. May be this common fate treads from out the paths
between our hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate. And I had rather
live and love where death is king, than have eternal life where love is
not. Another life is nought, unless we know and love again the ones who
love us here.

They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have
no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be,
tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest. We know
that through the common wants of life--the needs and duties of each
hour--their grief will lessen day by day, until at last this grave will
be to them a place of rest and peace--almost of joy. There is for them
this consolation: The dead do not suffer. If they live again, their
lives will surely be as good as ours. We have no fear. We are all
children of the same mother, and the same fate awaits us all. We, too,
have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living--Hope for the
dead.




A TRIBUTE TO JOHN G. MILLS.

Washington, D. C., April 15, 1883.


MY FRIENDS: Again we are face to face with the great mystery that
shrouds this world. We question, but there is no reply. Out on the wide
waste seas, there drifts no spar. Over the desert of death the sphinx
gazes forever, but never speaks.

In the very May of life another heart has ceased to beat. Night has
fallen upon noon. But he lived, he loved, he was loved. Wife and
children pressed their kisses on his lips. This is enough. The longest
life contains no more. This fills the vase of joy.

He who lies here, clothed with the perfect peace of death, was a kind
and loving husband, a good father, a generous neighbor, an honest
man,--and these words build a monument of glory above the humblest
grave. He was always a child, sincere and frank, as full of hope as
Spring. He divided all time into to-day and to-morrow. To-morrow was
without a cloud, and of to-morrow he borrowed sunshine for to-day. He
was my friend. He will remain so. The living oft become estranged; the
dead are true. He was not a Christian. In the Eden of his hope there
did not crawl and coil the serpent of eternal pain. In many languages
he sought the thoughts of men, and for himself he solved the problems of
the world. He accepted the philosophy of Auguste Comte. Humanity was his
God; the human race was his Supreme Being. In that Supreme Being he put
his trust. He believed that we are indebted for what we enjoy to the
labor, the self-denial, the heroism of the human race, and that as we
have plucked the fruit of what others planted, we in thankfulness should
plant for others yet to be.

With him immortality was the eternal consequences of his own acts. He
believed that every pure thought, every disinterested deed, hastens the
harvest of universal good. This is a religion that enriches poverty;
that enables us to bear the sorrows of the saddest life; that peoples
even solitude with the happy millions yet to live,--a religion born
not of selfishness and fear, but of love, of gratitude, and hope,--a
religion that digs wells to slake the thirst of others, and gladly bears
the burdens of the unborn.

But in the presence of death, how beliefs and dogmas wither and decay!
How loving words and deeds burst into blossom! Pluck from the tree
of any life these flowers, and there remain but the barren thorns of
bigotry and creed.

All wish for happiness beyond this life. All hope to meet again
the loved and lost. In every heart there grows this sacred flower.
Immortality is a word that Hope through all the ages has been whispering
to Love. The miracle of thought we cannot understand. The mystery of
life and death we cannot comprehend. This chaos called the world has
never been explained. The golden bridge of life from gloom emerges, and
on shadow rests. Beyond this we do not know. Fate is speechless, destiny
is dumb, and the secret of the future has never yet been told. We love;
we wait; we hope. The more we love, the more we fear. Upon the tenderest
heart the deepest shadows fall. All paths, whether filled with thorns
or flowers, end here. Here success and failure are the same. The rag of
Wretchedness and the purple robe of power all difference and distinction
lose in this democracy of death. Character survives; goodness lives;
love is immortal.

And yet to all a time may come when the fevered lips of life will long
for the cool, delicious kiss of death--when tired of the dust and glare
of day we all shall hear with joy the rustling garments of the night.

What can we say of death? What can we say of the dead? Where they have
gone, reason cannot go, and from thence revelation has not come. But let
us believe that over the cradle Nature bends and smiles, and lovingly
above the dead in benediction holds her outstretched hands.




A TRIBUTE TO ELIZUR WRIGHT.

New York. December 19, 1885.


ANOTHER hero has fallen asleep--one who enriched the world with an
honest life.

Elizur Wright was one of the Titans who attacked the monsters, the
Gods, of his time--one of the few whose confidence in liberty was never
shaken, and who, with undimmed eyes, saw the atrocities and barbarisms
of his day and the glories of the future.

When New York was degraded enough to mob Arthur Tappan, the noblest of
her citizens; when Boston was sufficiently infamous to howl and hoot at
Harriet Martineau, the grandest Englishwoman that ever touched our soil;
when the North was dominated by theology and trade, by piety and piracy;
when we received our morals from merchants, and made merchandise of our
morals, Elizur Wright held principle above profit, and preserved his
manhood at the peril of his life.

When the rich, the cultured, and the respectable,--when church members
and ministers, who had been "called" to preach the "glad tidings," and
when statesmen like Webster joined with bloodhounds, and in the name
of God hunted men and mothers, this man rescued the fugitives and gave
asylum to the oppressed.

During those infamous years--years of cruelty and national
degradation--years of hypocrisy and greed and meanness beneath the reach
of any English word, Elizur Wright became acquainted with the orthodox
church. He found that a majority of Christians were willing to enslave
men and women for whom they said that Christ had died--that they would
steal the babe of a Christian mother, although they believed that the
mother would be their equal in heaven forever. He found that those who
loved their enemies would enslave their friends--that people who when
smitten on one cheek turned the other, were ready, willing and anxious
to mob and murder those who simply said: "The laborer is worthy of his
hire."

In those days the church was in favor of slavery, not only of the body
but of the mind. According to the creeds, God himself was an infinite
master and all his children serfs. He ruled with whip and chain, with
pestilence and fire. Devils were his bloodhounds, and hell his place of
eternal torture.

Elizur Wright said to himself, why should we take chains from bodies and
enslave minds--why fight to free the cage and leave the bird a prisoner?
He became an enemy of orthodox religion--that is to say, a friend of
intellectual liberty.

He lived to see the destruction of legalized larceny; to read the
Proclamation of Emancipation; to see a country without a slave, a flag
without a stain. He lived long enough to reap the reward for having
been an honest man; long enough for his "disgrace" to become a crown of
glory; long enough to see his views adopted and his course applauded by
the civilized world; long enough for the hated word "abolitionist" to
become a title of nobility, a certificate of manhood, courage and true
patriotism.

Only a few years ago, the heretic was regarded as an enemy of the human
race. The man who denied the inspiration of the Jewish Scriptures was
looked upon as a moral leper, and the Atheist as the worst of criminals.
Even in that day, Elizur Wright was grand enough to speak his honest
thought, to deny the inspiration of the Bible; brave enough to defy
the God of the orthodox church--the Jehovah of the Old Testament, the
Eternal Jailer, the Everlasting Inquisitor.

He contended that a good God would not have upheld slavery and polygamy;
that a loving Father would not assist some of his children to enslave or
exterminate their brethren; that an infinite being would not be unjust,
irritable, jealous, revengeful, ignorant, and cruel.

And it was his great good fortune to live long enough to find the
intellectual world on his side; long enough to know that the greatest'
naturalists, philosophers, and scientists agreed with him; long enough
to see certain words change places, so that "heretic" was honorable
and "orthodox" an epithet. To-day, the heretic is known to be a man of
principle and courage--one blest with enough mental independence to
tell his thought. To-day, the thoroughly orthodox means the thoroughly
stupid.

Only a few years ago it was taken for granted that an "unbeliever" could
not be a moral man; that one who disputed the inspiration of the legends
of Judea could not be sympathetic and humane, and could not really love
his fellow-men. Had we no other evidence upon this subject, the noble
life of Elizur Wright would demonstrate the utter baselessness of these
views.

His life was spent in doing good--in attacking the hurtful, in defending
what he believed to be the truth. Generous beyond his means; helping
others to help themselves; always hopeful, busy, just, cheerful; filled
with the spirit of reform; a model citizen--always thinking of the
public good, devising ways and means to save something for posterity,
feeling that what he had he held in trust; loving Nature, familiar
with the poetic side of things, touched to enthusiasm by the beautiful
thought, the brave word, and the generous deed; friendly in manner,
candid and kind in speech, modest but persistent; enjoying leisure
as only the industrious can; loving and gentle in his family;
hospitable,--judging men and women regardless of wealth, position or
public clamor; physically fearless, intellectually honest, thoroughly
informed; unselfish, sincere, and reliable as the attraction of
gravitation. Such was Elizur Wright,--one of the staunchest soldiers
that ever faced and braved for freedom's sake the wrath and scorn and
lies of place and power.

A few days ago I met this genuine man. His interest in all human
things was just as deep and keen, his hatred of oppression, his love of
freedom, just as intense, just as fervid, as on the day I met him first.
True, his body was old, but his mind was young, and his heart, like
a spring in the desert, bubbled over as joyously as though it had the
secret of eternal youth. But it has ceased to beat, and the mysterious
veil that hangs where sight and blindness are the same--the veil that
revelation has not drawn aside--that science cannot lift, has fallen
once again between the living and the dead.

And yet we hope and dream. May be the longing for another life is but
the prophecy forever warm from Nature's lips, that love, disguised as
death, alone fulfills. We cannot tell. And yet perhaps this Hope is but
an antic, following the fortunes of an uncrowned king, beguiling grief
with jest and satisfying loss with pictured gain. We do not know.

But from the Christian's cruel hell, and from his heaven more heartless
still, the free and noble soul, if forced to choose, should loathing
turn, and cling with rapture to the thought of endless sleep.

But this we know: good deeds are never childless. A noble life is never
lost. A virtuous action does not die. Elizur Wright scattered with
generous hand the priceless seeds, and we shall reap the golden grain.
His words and acts are ours, and all he nobly did is living still.

Farewell, brave soul! Upon thy grave I lay this tribute of respect and
love. When last our hands were joined, I said these parting words: "Long
life!" And I repeat them now.




A TRIBUTE TO MRS. IDA WHITING KNOWLES.

New York, Dec, 16, 1887.


MY FRIENDS: Again we stand in the shadow of the great mystery--a shadow
as deep and dark as when the tears of the first mother fell upon the
pallid face of her lifeless babe--a mystery that has never yet been
solved.

We have met in the presence of the sacred dead, to speak a word of
praise, of hope, of consolation.

Another life of love is now a blessed memory--a lingering strain of
music.

The loving daughter, the pure and consecrated wife, the sincere friend,
who with tender faithfulness discharged the duties of a life, has
reached her journey's end.

A braver, a more serene, a more chivalric spirit--clasping the loved and
by them clasped--never passed from life to enrich the realm of death.
No field of war ever witnessed greater fortitude, more perfect, smiling
courage, than this poor, weak and helpless woman displayed upon the bed
of pain and death.

Her life was gentle and her death sublime. She loved the good and all
the good loved her.

There is this consolation: she can never suffer more; never feel again
the chill of death; never part again from those she loves. Her heart can
break no more. She has shed her last tear, and upon her stainless brow
has been set the wondrous seal of everlasting peace.

When the Angel of Death--the masked and voiceless--enters the door of
home, there come with her all the daughters of Compassion, and of these
Love and Hope remain forever.

You are about to take this dear dust home--to the home of her girlhood,
and to the place that was once my home. You will lay her with neighbors
whom I have loved, and who are now at rest. You will lay her where my
father sleeps.

     "Lay her i' the earth,
     And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
     May violets spring."

I never knew, I never met, a braver spirit than the one that once
inhabited this silent form of dreamless clay.




A TRIBUTE TO HENRY WARD BEECHER.

New York, June 26,1887.


HENRY WARD BEECHER was born in a Puritan penitentiary, of which
his father was one of the wardens--a prison with very narrow and
closely-grated windows. Under its walls were the rayless, hopeless and
measureless dungeons of the damned, and on its roof fell the shadow of
God's eternal frown. In this prison the creed and catechism were primers
for children, and from a pure sense of duty their loving hearts were
stained and scarred with the religion of John Calvin.

In those days the home of an orthodox minister was an inquisition in
which babes were tortured for the good of their souls. Children then,
as now, rebelled against the infamous absurdities and cruelties of the
creed. No Calvinist was ever able, unless with blows, to answer the
questions of his child. Children were raised in what was called "the
nurture and admonition of the Lord"--that is to say, their wills were
broken or subdued, their natures were deformed and dwarfed, their
desires defeated or destroyed, and their development arrested or
perverted. Life was robbed of its Spring, its Summer and its Autumn.
Children stepped from the cradle into the snow. No laughter, no
sunshine, no joyous, free, unburdened days. God, an infinite detective,
watched them from above, and Satan, with malicious leer, was waiting
for their souls below. Between these monsters life was passed. Infinite
consequences were predicated of the smallest action, and a burden
greater than a God could bear was placed upon the heart and brain of
every child. To think, to ask questions, to doubt, to investigate,
were acts of rebellion. To express pity for the lost, writhing in the
dungeons below, was simply to give evidence that the enemy of souls had
been at work within their hearts.

Among all the religions of this world--from the creed of cannibals who
devoured flesh, to that of Calvinists who polluted souls--there is none,
there has been none, there will be none, more utterly heartless and
inhuman than was the orthodox Congregationalism of New England in the
year of grace 1813. It despised every natural joy, hated pictures,
abhorred statues as lewd and lustful things, execrated music, regarded
nature as fallen and corrupt, man as totally depraved and woman as
somewhat worse. The theatre was the vestibule of perdition, actors the
servants of Satan, and Shakespeare a trifling wretch whose words
were seeds of death. And yet the virtues found a welcome, cordial and
sincere; duty was done as understood; obligations were discharged; truth
was told; self-denial was practiced for the sake of others, and many
hearts were good and true in spite of book and creed.

In this atmosphere of theological miasma, in this hideous dream of
superstition, in this penitentiary, moral and austere, this babe first
saw the imprisoned gloom. The natural desires ungratified, the laughter
suppressed, the logic brow-beaten by authority, the humor frozen by
fear--of many generations--were in this child, a child destined to rend
and wreck the prison's walls.

Through the grated windows of his cell, this child, this boy, this man,
caught glimpses of the outer world, of fields and skies. New thoughts
were in his brain, new hopes within his heart. Another heaven bent above
his life. There came a revelation of the beautiful and real.

Theology grew mean and small. Nature wooed and won and saved this mighty
soul.

Her countless hands were sowing seeds within his tropic brain. All
sights and sounds--all colors, forms and fragments--were stored within
the treasury of his mind. His thoughts were moulded by the graceful
curves of streams, by winding paths in woods, the charm of quiet country
roads, and lanes grown indistinct with weeds and grass--by vines that
cling and hide with leaf and flower the crumbling wall's decay--by
cattle standing in the summer pools like statues of content.

There was within his words the subtle spirit of the season's change--of
everything that is, of everything that lies between the slumbering seeds
that, half awakened by the April rain, have dreams of heaven's blue, and
feel the amorous kisses of the sun, and that strange tomb wherein the
alchemist doth give to death's cold dust the throb and thrill of life
again. He saw with loving eyes the willows of the meadow-streams grow
red beneath the glance of Spring--the grass along the marsh's edge--the
stir of life beneath the withered leaves--the moss below the drip of
snow--the flowers that give their bosoms to the first south wind that
wooes--the sad and timid violets that only bear the gaze of love from
eyes half closed--the ferns, where fancy gives a thousand forms with but
a single plan--the green and sunny slopes enriched with daisy's silver
and the cowslip's gold.

As in the leafless woods some tree, aflame with life, stands like a rapt
poet in the heedless crowd, so stood this man among his fellow-men.

All there is of leaf and bud, of flower and fruit, of painted insect
life, and all the winged and happy children of the air that Summer holds
beneath her dome of blue, were known and loved by him. He loved the
yellow Autumn fields, the golden stacks, the happy homes of men, the
orchard's bending boughs, the sumach's flags of flame, the maples
with transfigured leaves, the tender yellow of the beech, the wondrous
harmonies of brown and gold--the vines where hang the clustered spheres
of wit and mirth. He loved the winter days, the whirl and drift of
snow--all forms of frost--the rage and fury of the storm, when in the
forest, desolate and stripped, the brave old pine towers green and
grand--a prophecy of Spring. He heard the rhythmic sounds of Nature's
busy strife, the hum of bees, the songs of birds, the eagle's cry, the
murmur of the streams, the sighs and lamentations of the winds, and all
the voices of the sea. He loved the shores, the vales, the crags and
cliffs, the city's busy streets, the introspective, silent plain, the
solemn splendors of the night, the silver sea of dawn, and evening's
clouds of molten gold. The love of nature freed this loving man.

One by one the fetters fell; the gratings disappeared, the sunshine
smote the roof, and on the floors of stone, light streamed from open
doors. He realized the darkness and despair, the cruelty and hate, the
starless blackness of the old, malignant creed. The flower of pity grew
and blossomed in his heart. The selfish "consolation" filled his eyes
with tears. He saw that what is called the Christian's hope is, that,
among the countless billions wrecked and lost, a meagre few perhaps
may reach the eternal shore--a hope that, like the desert rain, gives
neither leaf nor bud--a hope that gives no joy, no peace, to any great
and loving soul. It is the dust on which the serpent feeds that coils in
heartless breasts.

Day by day the wrath and vengeance faded from the sky--the Jewish God
grew vague and dint--the threats of torture and eternal pain grew vulgar
and absurd, and all the miracles seemed strangely out of place. They
clad the Infinite in motley garb, and gave to aureoled heads the cap and
bells.

Touched by the pathos of all human life, knowing the shadows that fall
on every heart--the thorns in every path, the sighs, the sorrows, and
the tears that lie between a mother's arms and death's embrace--this
great and gifted man denounced, denied, and damned with all his heart
the fanged and frightful dogma that souls were made to feed the eternal
hunger--ravenous as famine--of a God's revenge.

Take out this fearful, fiendish, heartless lie--compared with which all
other lies are true--and the great arch of orthodox religion crumbling
falls.

To the average man the Christian hell and heaven are only words. He has
no scope of thought. He lives but in a dim, impoverished now. To him the
past is dead--the future still unborn. He occupies with downcast eyes
that narrow line of barren, shifting sand that lies between the flowing
seas. But Genius knows all time. For him the dead all live and breathe,
and act their countless parts again. All human life is in his now, and
every moment feels the thrill of all to be.

No one can overestimate the good accomplished by this marvelous,
many-sided man. He helped to slay the heart-devouring monster of the
Christian world. He tried to civilize the church, to humanize the
creeds, to soften pious breasts of stone, to take the fear from mothers'
hearts, the chains of creed from every brain, to put the star of hope
in every sky and over every grave. Attacked on every side, maligned
by those who preached the law of love, he wavered not, but fought
whole-hearted to the end.

Obstruction is but virtue's foil. From thwarted light leaps color's
flame. The stream impeded has a song.

He passed from harsh and cruel creeds to that serene philosophy that has
no place for pride or hate, that threatens no revenge, that looks on sin
as stumblings of the blind and pities those who fall, knowing that in
the souls of all there is a sacred yearning for the light. He ceased
to think of man as something thrust upon the world--an exile from
some other sphere. He felt at last that men are part of Nature's
self--kindred of all life--the gradual growth of countless years; that
all the sacred books were helps until outgrown, and all religions rough
and devious paths that man has worn with weary feet in sad and painful
search for truth and peace. To him these paths were wrong, and yet all
gave the promise of success. He knew that all the streams, no matter how
they wander, turn and curve amid the hills or rocks, or linger in the
lakes and pools, must some time reach the sea. These views enlarged his
soul and made him patient with the world, and while the wintry snows of
age were falling on his head, Spring, with all her wealth of bloom, was
in his heart.

The memory of this ample man is now a part of Nature's wealth. He
battled for the rights of men. His heart was with the slave. He stood
against the selfish greed of millions banded to protect the pirate's
trade. His voice was for the right when freedom's friends were few. He
taught the church to think and doubt. He did not fear to stand
alone. His brain took counsel of his heart. To every foe he offered
reconciliation's hand. He loved this land of ours, and added to its
glory through the world. He was the greatest orator that stood within
the pulpit's narrow curve. He loved the liberty of speech. There was no
trace of bigot in his blood. He was a brave and generous man.

With reverent hands, I place this tribute on his tomb.




A TRIBUTE TO ROSCOE CONKLING.

     Delivered before the New York State Legislature, at Albany,
     N. Y, May 9,1888.


ROSCOE CONKLING--a great man, an orator, a statesman, a lawyer, a
distinguished citizen of the Republic, in the zenith of his fame and
power has reached his journey's end; and we are met, here in the city of
his birth, to pay our tribute to his worth and work. He earned and held
a proud position in the public thought. He stood for independence, for
courage, and above all for absolute integrity, and his name was known
and honored by many millions of his fellow-men.

The literature of many lands is rich with the tributes that gratitude,
admiration and love have paid to the great and honored dead. These
tributes disclose the character of nations, the ideals of the human
race. In them we find the estimates of greatness--the deeds and lives
that challenged praise and thrilled the hearts of men.

In the presence of death, the good man judges as he would be judged. He
knows that men are only fragments--that the greatest walk in shadow, and
that faults and failures mingle with the lives of all.

In the grave should be buried the prejudices and passions born of
conflict. Charity should hold the scales in which are weighed the deeds
of men. Peculiarities, traits born of locality and surroundings--these
are but the dust of the race--these are accidents, drapery, clothes,
fashions, that have nothing to do with the man except to hide his
character. They are the clouds that cling to mountains. Time gives us
clearer vision. That which was merely local fades away. The words of
envy are forgotten, and all there is of sterling worth remains. He who
was called a partisan is a patriot. The revolutionist and the outlaw are
the founders of nations, and he who was regarded as a scheming, selfish
politician becomes a statesman, a philosopher, whose words and deeds
shed light.

Fortunate is that nation great enough to know the great.

When a great man dies--one who has nobly fought the battle of a life,
who has been faithful to every trust, and has uttered his highest,
noblest thought--one who has stood proudly by the right in spite of jeer
and taunt, neither stopped by foe nor swerved by friend--in honoring
him, in speaking words of praise and love above his dust, we pay a
tribute to ourselves.

How poor this world would be without its graves, without the memories of
its mighty dead. Only the voiceless speak forever.

Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support
the State.

Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave
and independent man--the man of stainless integrity, of will and
intellectual force. Such men are the Atlases on whose mighty shoulders
rest the great fabric of the Republic. Flatterers, cringers, crawlers,
time-servers are the dangerous citizens of a democracy. They who gain
applause and power by pandering to the mistakes, the prejudices and
passions of the multitude, are the enemies of liberty.

When the intelligent submit to the clamor of the many, anarchy begins
and the Republic reaches the edge of chaos. Mediocrity, touched with
ambition, flatters the base and calumniates the great, while the true
patriot, who will do neither, is often sacrificed.

In a government of the people a leader should be a teacher--he should
carry the torch of truth.

Most people are the slaves of habit--followers of custom--believers in
the wisdom of the past--and were it not for brave and splendid souls,
"the dust of antique time would lie unswept, and mountainous error be
too highly heaped for truth to overpeer." Custom is a prison, locked
and barred by those who long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the
keeping of the dead.

Nothing is grander than when a strong, intrepid man breaks chains,
levels walls and breasts the many-headed mob like some great cliff that
meets and mocks the innumerable billows of the sea.

The politician hastens to agree with the majority--insists that their
prejudice is patriotism, that their ignorance is wisdom;--not that
he loves them, but because he loves himself. The statesman, the
real reformer, points out the mistakes of the multitude, attacks the
prejudices of his countrymen, laughs at their follies, denounces
their cruelties, enlightens and enlarges their minds and educates the
conscience--not because he loves himself, but because he loves and
serves the right and wishes to make his country great and free.

With him defeat is but a spur to further effort. He who refuses to
stoop, who cannot be bribed by the promise of success, or the fear of
failure--who walks the highway of the right, and in disaster stands
erect, is the only victor. Nothing is more despicable than to reach fame
by crawling,--position by cringing.

When real history shall be written by the truthful and the wise, these
men, these kneelers at the shrines of chance and fraud, these brazen
idols worshiped once as gods, will be the very food of scorn, while
those who bore the burden of defeat, who earned and kept their
self-respect, who would not bow to man or men for place or power, will
wear upon their brows the laurel mingled with the oak.

Roscoe Conkling was a man of superb courage.

He not only acted without fear, but he had that fortitude of soul that
bears the consequences of the course pursued without complaint. He was
charged with being proud. The charge was true--he was proud. His knees
were as inflexible as the "unwedgeable and gnarled oak," but he was
not vain. Vanity rests on the opinion of others--pride, on our own. The
source of vanity is from without--of pride, from within. Vanity is a
vane that turns, a willow that bends, with every breeze--pride is
the oak that defies the storm. One is cloud--the other rock. One is
weakness--the other strength.

This imperious man entered public life in the dawn of the
reformation--at a time when the country needed men of pride, of
principle and courage. The institution of slavery had poisoned all
the springs of power. Before this crime ambition fell upon its
knees,--politicians, judges, clergymen, and merchant-princes bowed low
and humbly, with their hats in their hands. The real friend of man was
denounced as the enemy of his country--the real enemy of the human race
was called a statesman and a patriot. Slavery was the bond and pledge of
peace, of union, and national greatness. The temple of American liberty
was finished--the auction-block was the corner-stone.

It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political
blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the
cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable
Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.

Think of the honored statesmen of that ignoble time who wallowed in this
mire and who, decorated with dripping filth, received the plaudits of
their fellow-men. The noble, the really patriotic, were the victims of
mobs, and the shameless were clad in the robes of office.

But let us speak no word of blame--let us feel that each one acted
according to his light--according to his darkness.

At last the conflict came. The hosts of light and darkness prepared
to meet upon the fields of war. The question was presented: Shall the
Republic be slave or free? The Republican party had triumphed at the
polls. The greatest man in our history was President elect. The victors
were appalled--they shrank from the great responsibility of success. In
the presence of rebellion they hesitated--they offered to return the
fruits of victory. Hoping to avert war they were willing that slavery
should become immortal. An amendment to the Constitution was proposed,
to the effect that no subsequent amendment should ever be made that in
anyway should interfere with the right of man to steal his fellow-men.

This, the most marvelous proposition ever submitted to a Congress of
civilized men, received in the House an overwhelming majority, and the
necessary two-thirds in the Senate. The Republican party, in the moment
of its triumph, deserted every principle for which it had so gallantly
contended, and with the trembling hands of fear laid its convictions on
the altar of compromise.

The Old Guard, numbering but sixty-five in the House, stood as firm
as the three hundred at Thermopylae. Thad-deus Stevens--as maliciously
right as any other man was ever wrong--refused to kneel. Owen Lovejoy,
remembering his brother's noble blood, refused to surrender, and on the
edge of disunion, in the shadow of civil war, with the air filled with
sounds of dreadful preparation, while the Republican party was retracing
its steps, Roscoe Conkling voted No. This puts a wreath of glory on his
tomb. From that vote to the last moment of his life he was a champion of
equal rights, staunch and stalwart.

From that moment he stood in the front rank. He never wavered and he
never swerved. By his devotion to principle--his courage, the splendor
of his diction,--by his varied and profound knowledge, his conscientious
devotion to the great cause, and by his intellectual scope and grasp, he
won and held the admiration of his fellow-men.

Disasters in the field, reverses at the polls, did not and could not
shake his courage or his faith. He knew the ghastly meaning of defeat.
He knew that the great ship that slavery sought to strand and wreck was
freighted with the world's sublimest hope.

He battled for a nation's life--for the rights of slaves--the dignity
of labor, and the liberty of all. He guarded with a father's care the
rights of the hunted, the hated and despised. He attacked the savage
statutes of the reconstructed States with a torrent of invective, scorn
and execration. He was not satisfied until the freedman was an American
Citizen--clothed with every civil right--until the Constitution was his
shield--until the ballot was his sword.

And long after we are dead, the colored man in this and other lands will
speak his name in reverence and love. Others wavered, but he stood
firm; some were false, but he was proudly true--fearlessly faithful unto
death.

He gladly, proudly grasped the hands of colored men who stood with him
as makers of our laws, and treated them as equals and as friends. The
cry of "social equality" coined and uttered by the cruel and the base,
was to him the expression of a great and splendid truth. He knew that no
man can be the equal of the one he robs--that the intelligent and unjust
are not the superiors of the ignorant and honest--and he also felt, and
proudly felt, that if he were not too great to reach the hand of help
and recognition to the slave, no other Senator could rightfully refuse.

We rise by raising others--and he who stoops above the fallen, stands
erect.

Nothing can be grander than to sow the seeds of noble thoughts and
virtuous deeds--to liberate the bodies and the souls of men--to earn
the grateful homage of a race--and then, in life's last shadowy hour,
to know that the historian of Liberty will be compelled to write your
name.

There are no words intense enough,--with heart enough--to express my
admiration for the great and gallant souls who have in every age and
every land upheld the right, and who have lived and died for freedom's
sake.

In our lives have been the grandest years that man has lived, that Time
has measured by the flight of worlds.

The history of that great Party that let the oppressed go free--that
lifted our nation from the depths of savagery to freedom's cloudless
heights, and tore with holy hands from every law the words that
sanctified the cruelty of man, is the most glorious in the annals of our
race. Never before was there such a moral exaltation--never a party with
a purpose so pure and high. It was the embodied conscience of a nation,
the enthusiasm of a people guided by wisdom, the impersonation of
justice; and the sublime victory achieved loaded even the conquered with
all the rights that freedom can bestow.

Roscoe Conkling was an absolutely honest man. Honesty is the oak around
which all other virtues cling. Without that they fall, and groveling
die in weeds and dust. He believed that a nation should discharge its
obligations. He knew that a promise could not be made often enough, or
emphatic enough, to take the place of payment. He felt that the promise
of the Government was the promise of every citizen--that a national
obligation was a personal debt, and that no possible combination of
words and pictures could take the place of coin. He uttered the splendid
truth that "the higher obligations among men are not set down in writing
signed and sealed, but reside in honor." He knew that repudiation was
the sacrifice of honor--the death of the national soul. He knew that
without character, without integrity, there is no wealth, and that
below poverty, below bankruptcy, is the rayless abyss of repudiation.
He upheld the sacredness of contracts, of plighted national faith, and
helped to save and keep the honor of his native land. This adds another
laurel to his brow.

He was the ideal representative, faithful and incorruptible. He believed
that his constituents and his country were entitled to the fruit of
his experience, to his best and highest thought. No man ever held the
standard of responsibility higher than he. He voted according to his
judgment, his conscience. He made no bargains--he neither bought nor
sold.

To correct evils, abolish abuses and inaugurate reforms, he believed was
not only the duty, but the privilege, of a legislator. He neither sold
nor mortgaged himself. He was in Congress during the years of vast
expenditure, of war and waste--when the credit of the nation was loaned
to individuals--when claims were thick as leaves in June, when the
amendment of a statute, the change of a single word, meant millions, and
when empires were given to corporations. He stood at the summit of his
power--peer of the greatest--a leader tried and trusted. He had the
tastes of a prince, the fortune of a peasant, and yet he never swerved.
No corporation was great enough or rich enough to purchase him. His vote
could not be bought "for all the sun sees, or the close earth wombs, or
the profound seas hide." His hand was never touched by any bribe, and
on his soul there never was a sordid stain. Poverty was his priceless
crown.

Above his marvelous intellectual gifts--above all place he ever
reached,--above the ermine he refused,--rises his integrity like some
great mountain peak--and there it stands, firm as the earth beneath,
pure as the stars above.

He was a great lawyer. He understood the frame-work, the anatomy, the
foundations of law; was familiar with the great streams and currents and
tides of authority.

He knew the history of legislation--the principles that have
been settled upon the fields of war. He knew the maxims,--those
crystallizations of common sense, those hand-grenades of argument. He
was not a case-lawyer--a decision index, or an echo; he was original,
thoughtful and profound. He had breadth and scope, resource, learning,
logic, and above all, a sense of justice. He was painstaking and
conscientious--anxious to know the facts--preparing for every attack,
ready for every defence. He rested only when the end was reached. During
the contest, he neither sent nor received a flag of truce. He was
true to his clients--making their case his. Feeling responsibility, he
listened patiently to details, and to his industry there were only the
limits of time and strength. He was a student of the Constitution. He
knew the boundaries of State and Federal jurisdiction, and no man
was more familiar with those great decisions that are the peaks and
promontories, the headlands and the beacons, of the law.

He was an orator,--logical, earnest, intense and picturesque. He laid
the foundation with care, with accuracy and skill, and rose by "cold
gradation and well balanced form" from the corner-stone of statement
to the domed conclusion. He filled the stage. He satisfied the eye--the
audience was his. He had that indefinable thing called presence. Tall,
commanding, erect--ample in speech, graceful in compliment, Titanic
in denunciation, rich in illustration, prodigal of comparison and
metaphor--and his sentences, measured and rhythmical, fell like music on
the enraptured throng.

He abhorred the Pharisee, and loathed all conscientious fraud. He had a
profound aversion for those who insist on putting base motives back
of the good deeds of others. He wore no mask. He knew his friends--his
enemies knew him.

He had no patience with pretence--with patriotic reasons for unmanly
acts. He did his work and bravely spoke his thought.

Sensitive to the last degree, he keenly felt the blows and stabs of the
envious and obscure--of the smallest, of the weakest--but the greatest
could not drive him from conviction's field. He would not stoop to
ask or give an explanation. He left his words and deeds to justify
themselves.

He held in light esteem a friend who heard with half-believing ears the
slander of a foe. He walked a highway of his own, and kept the company
of his self-respect. He would not turn aside to avoid a foe--to greet or
gain a friend.

In his nature there was no compromise. To him there were but two
paths--the right and wrong. He was maligned, misrepresented and
misunderstood--but he would not answer. He knew that character speaks
louder far than any words. He was as silent then as he is now--and his
silence, better than any form of speech, refuted every charge.

He was an American--proud of his country, that was and ever will be
proud of him. He did not find perfection only in other lands. He did
not grow small and shrunken, withered and apologetic, in the presence
of those upon whom greatness had been thrust by chance. He could not
be overawed by dukes or lords, nor flattered into vertebrate-less
subserviency by the patronizing smiles of kings. In the midst of
conventionalities he had the feeling of suffocation. He believed in the
royalty of man, in the sovereignty of the citizen, and in the matchless
greatness of this Republic.

He was of the classic mould--a figure from the antique world. He had
the pose of the great statues--the pride and bearing of the intellectual
Greek, of the conquering Roman, and he stood in the wide free air as
though within his veins there flowed the blood of a hundred kings.

And as he lived he died. Proudly he entered the darkness--or the
dawn--that we call death. Unshrinkingly he passed beyond our horizon,
beyond the twilight's purple hills, beyond the utmost reach of human
harm or help--to that vast realm of silence or of joy where the
innumerable dwell, and he has left with us his wealth of thought and
deed--the memory of a brave, imperious, honest man, who bowed alone to
death.




A TRIBUTE TO RICHARD H. WHITING.

New York, May 24., 1888.


MY FRIENDS: The river of another life has reached the sea.

Again we are in the presence of that eternal peace that we call death.

My life has been rich in friends, but I never had a better or a truer
one than he who lies in silence here. He was as steadfast, as faithful,
as the stars.

Richard H. Whiting was an absolutely honest man. His word was gold--his
promise was fulfillment--and there never has been, there never will be,
on this poor earth, any thing nobler than an honest, loving soul.

This man was as reliable as the attraction of gravitation--he knew
no shadow of turning. He was as generous as autumn, as hospitable as
summer, and as tender as a perfect day in June. He forgot only himself,
and asked favors only for others. He begged for the opportunity to
do good--to stand by a friend, to support a cause, to defend what he
believed to be right.

He was a lover of nature--of the woods, the fields and flowers. He was
a home-builder. He believed in the family and the fireside--in the
sacredness of the hearth.

He was a believer in the religion of deed, and his creed was to do good.
No man has ever slept in death who nearer lived his creed.

I have known him for many years, and have yet to hear a word spoken of
him except in praise.

His life was full of honor, of kindness and of helpful deeds. Besides
all, his soul was free. He feared nothing, except to do wrong. He was
a believer in the gospel of help and hope. He knew how much better, how
much more sacred, a kind act is than any theory the brain has wrought.

The good are the noble. His life filled the lives of others with
sunshine. He has left a legacy of glory to his children. They can
truthfully say that within their veins is right royal blood--the blood
of an honest, generous man, of a steadfast friend, of one who was true
to the very gates of death.

If there be another world, another life beyond the shore of this,--if
the great and good who died upon this orb are there,--then the noblest
and the best, with eager hands, have welcomed him--the equal in honor,
in generosity, of any one that ever passed beyond the veil.

To me this world is growing poor. New friends can never fill the places
of the old.

Farewell! If this is the end, then you have left to us the sacred memory
of a noble life. If this is not the end, there is no world in which you,
my friend, will not be loved and welcomed. Farewell!




A TRIBUTE TO COURTLANDT PALMER.

New York, July 26, 1888.

MY FRIENDS: A thinker of pure thoughts, a speaker of brave words, a doer
of generous deeds has reached the silent haven that all the dead have
reached, and where the voyage of every life must end; and we, his
friends, who even now are hastening after him, are met to do the last
kind acts that man may do for man--to tell his virtues and to lay with
tenderness and tears lay ashes in the sacred place of rest and peace.

Some one has said, that in the open hands of death we find only what
they gave away.

Let us believe that pure thoughts, brave words and generous deeds can
never die. Let us believe that they bear fruit and add forever to the
well-being of the human race. Let us believe that a noble, self-denying
life increases the moral wealth of man, and gives assurance that the
future will be grander than the past.

In the monotony of subservience, in the multitude of blind followers,
nothing is more inspiring than a free and independent man--one who gives
and asks reasons; one who demands freedom and gives what he demands; one
who refuses to be slave or master. Such a man was Courtlandt Palmer, to
whom we pay the tribute of respect and love.

He was an honest man--he gave the rights he claimed. This was the
foundation on which he built. To think for himself--to give his thought
to others; this was to him not only a privilege, not only a right, but a
duty.

He believed in self-preservation--in personal independence--that is to
say, in manhood.

He preserved the realm of mind from the invasion of brute force, and
protected the children of the brain from the Herod of authority.

He investigated for himself the questions, the problems and the
mysteries of life. Majorities were nothing to him. No error could be old
enough--popular, plausible or profitable enough--to bribe his judgment
or to keep his conscience still.

He knew that, next to finding truth, the greatest joy is honest search.

He was a believer in intellectual hospitality, in the fair exchange of
thought, in good mental manners, in the amenities of the soul, in the
chivalry of discussion.

He insisted that those who speak should hear; that those who question
should answer; that each should strive not for a victory over others,
but for the discovery of truth, and that truth when found should be
welcomed by every human soul.

He knew that truth has no fear of investigation--of being understood.
He knew that truth loves the day--that its enemies are ignorance,
prejudice, egotism, bigotry, hypocrisy, fear and darkness, and that
intelligence, candor, honesty, love and light are its eternal friends.

He believed in the morality of the useful--that the virtues are the
friends of man--the seeds of joy.

He knew that consequences determine the quality of actions, and "that
whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap."

In the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte he found the framework of
his creed. In the conclusions of that great, sublime and tender soul he
found the rest, the serenity and the certainty he sought.

The clouds had fallen from his life. He saw that the old faiths were
but phases in the growth of man--that out from the darkness, up from
the depths, the human race through countless ages and in every land had
struggled toward the ever-growing light.

He felt that the living are indebted to the noble dead, and that each
should pay his debt; that he should pay it by preserving to the extent
of his power the good he has, by destroying the hurtful, by adding to
the knowledge of the world, by giving better than he had received; and
that each should be the bearer of a torch, a giver of light for all that
is, for all to be.

This was the religion of duty perceived, of duty within the reach of
man, within the circumference of the known--a religion without mystery,
with experience for the foundation of belief--a religion understood by
the head and approved by the heart--a religion that appealed to reason
with a definite end in view--the civilization and development of the
human race by legitimate, adequate and natural means--that is to say, by
ascertaining the conditions of progress and by teaching each to be noble
enough to live for all.

This is the gospel of man; this is the gospel of this world; this is the
religion of humanity; this is a philosophy that comtemplates not with
scorn, but with pity, with admiration and with love all that man has
done, regarding, as it does, the past with all its faults and virtues,
its sufferings, its cruelties and crimes, as the only road by which the
perfect could be reached.

He denied the supernatural--the phantoms and the ghosts that fill
the twilight-land of fear. To him and for him there was but one
religion--the religion of pure thoughts, of noble words, of self-denying
deeds, of honest work for all the world--the religion of Help and Hope.

Facts were the foundation of his faith; history was his prophet; reason
his guide; duty his deity; happiness the end; intelligence the means.

He knew that man must be the providence of man.

He did not believe in Religion and Science, but in the Religion of
Science--that is to say, wisdom glorified by love, the Savior of our
race--the religion that conquers prejudice and hatred, that drives all
superstition from the mind, that ennobles, lengthens and enriches life,
that drives from every home the wolves of want, from every heart the
fiends of selfishness and fear, and from every brain the monsters of the
night.

He lived and labored for his fellow-men. He sided with the weak and poor
against the strong and rich. He welcomed light. His face was ever toward
the East.

According to his light he lived. "The world was his country--to do good
his religion." There is no language to express a nobler creed than this;
nothing can be grander, more comprehensive, nearer perfect. This was the
creed that glorified his life and made his death sublime.

He was afraid to do wrong, and for that reason was not afraid to die.

He knew that the end was near. He knew that his work was done. He stood
within the twilight, within the deepening gloom, knowing that for the
last time the gold was fading from the West and that there could not
fall again within his eyes the trembling lustre of another dawn. He knew
that night had come, and yet his soul was filled with light, for in that
night the memory of his generous deeds shone out like stars.

What can we say? What words can solve the mystery of life, the mystery
of death? What words can justly pay a tribute to the man who lived
to his ideal, who spoke his honest thought, and who was turned aside
neither by envy, nor hatred, nor contumely, nor slander, nor scorn, nor
fear?

What words will do that life the justice that we know and feel?

A heart breaks, a man dies, a leaf falls in the far forest, a babe is
born, and the great world sweeps on.

By the grave of man stands the angel of Silence.

No one can tell which is better--Life with its gleams and shadows, its
thrills and pangs, its ecstasy and tears, its wreaths and thorns, its
crowns, its glories and Golgothas, or Death, with its peace, its rest,
its cool and placid brow that hath within no memory or fear of grief or
pain.

Farewell, dear friend. The world is better for your life--The world is
braver for your death.

Farewell! We loved you living, and we love you now.




A TRIBUTE TO MRS. MARY H. FISKE.

At Scottish Rite Hall, New York, February 6, 1889.


MY FRIENDS: In the presence of the two great mysteries, Life and Death,
we are met to say above this still, unconscious house of clay, a few
words of kindness, of regret, of love, and hope.

In this presence, let us speak of the goodness, the charity, the
generosity and the genius of the dead.

Only flowers should be laid upon the tomb. In life's last pillow there
should be no thorns.

Mary Fiske was like herself--she patterned after none. She was a genius,
and put her soul in all she did and wrote. She cared nothing for roads,
nothing for beaten paths, nothing for the footsteps of others--she went
across the fields and through the woods and by the winding streams, and
down the vales, or over crags, wherever fancy led. She wrote lines that
leaped with laughter and words that were wet with tears. She gave us
quaint thoughts, and sayings filled with the "pert and nimble spirit of
mirth." Her pages were flecked with sunshine and shadow, and in every
word were the pulse and breath of life.

Her heart went out to all the wretched in this weary world--and yet she
seemed as joyous as though grief and death were nought but words. She
wept where others wept, but in her own misfortunes found the food of
hope. She cared for the to-morrow of others, but not for her own. She
lived for to-day.

Some hearts are like a waveless pool, satisfied to hold the image of a
wondrous star--but hers was full of motion, life and light and storm.

She longed for freedom. Every limitation was a prison's wall. Rules were
shackles, and forms were made for serfs and slaves.

She gave her utmost thought. She praised all generous deeds; applauded
the struggling and even those who failed.

She pitied the poor, the forsaken, the friendless. No one could fall
below her pity, no one could wander beyond the circumference of her
sympathy. To her there were no outcasts--they were victims. She knew
that the inhabitants of palaces and penitentiaries might change
places without adding to the injustice of the world. She knew that
circumstances and conditions determine character--that the lowest and
the worst of our race were children once, as pure as light, whose cheeks
dimpled with smiles beneath the heaven of a mother's eyes. She thought
of the road they had traveled, of the thorns that had pierced their
feet, of the deserts they had crossed, and so, instead of words of scorn
she gave the eager hand of help.

No one appealed to her in vain. She listened to the story of the poor,
and all she had she gave. A god could do no more.

The destitute and suffering turned naturally to her. The maimed and hurt
sought for her open door, and the helpless put their hands in hers.

She shielded the weak--she attacked the strong.

Her heart was open as the gates of day. She shed kindness as the sun
sheds light. If all her deeds were flowers, the air would be faint with
perfume. If all her charities could change to melodies, a symphony would
fill the sky.

Mary Fiske had within her brain the divine fire called genius, and in
her heart the "touch of nature that makes the whole world kin."

She wrote as a stream runs, that winds and babbles through the shadowy
fields, that falls in foam of flight and haste and laughing joins the
sea.

A little while ago a babe was found--one that had been abandoned by
its mother--left as a legacy to chance or fate. The warm heart of Mary
Fiske, now cold in death, was touched. She took the waif and held it
lovingly to her breast and made the child her own.

We pray thee, Mother Nature, that thou wilt take this woman and hold her
as tenderly in thy arms, as she held and pressed against her generous,
throbbing heart, the abandoned babe.

We ask no more.

In this presence, let us remember our faults, our frailties, and the
generous, helpful, self-denying, loving deeds of Mary Fiske.




A TRIBUTE TO HORACE SEAVER.

At Paine Hall, Boston, August 25, 1889.

     * The eulogy pronounced at the funeral of Horace Shaver In
     Paine Hall last Sunday was the tribute of one great man to
     another. To have Robert G. Ingersoll speak words of praise
     above the silent form is fame; to deserve these words is
     immortality.--The Boston Investigator, August 28, 1889.


HORACE SEAVER was a pioneer, a torch-bearer, a toiler in that great
field we call the world--a worker for his fellow-men. At the end of his
task he has fallen asleep, and we are met to tell the story of his long
and useful life--to pay our tribute to his work and worth.

He was one who saw the dawn while others lived in night. He kept his
face toward the "purpling east" and watched the coming of the blessed
day.

He always sought for light. His object was to know--to find a reason for
his faith--a fact on which to build.

In superstition's sands he sought the gems of truth; in superstition's
night he looked for stars.

Born in New England--reared amidst the cruel superstitions of his age
and time, he had the manhood and the courage to investigate, and he had
the goodness and the courage to tell his honest thoughts.

He was always kind, and sought to win the confidence of men by sympathy
and love. There was no taint or touch of malice in his blood. To him
his fellows did not seem depraved--they were not wholly bad--there was
within the heart of each the seeds of good. He knew that back of every
thought and act were forces uncontrolled. He wisely said: "Circumstances
furnish the seeds of good and evil, and man is but the soil in which
they grow." Horace Seaver was crowned with the wreath of his own deeds,
woven by the generous hand of a noble friend. He fought the creed, and
loved the man. He pitied those who feared and shuddered at the thought
of death--who dwelt in darkness and in dread.

The religion of his day filled his heart with horror.

He was kind, compassionate, and tender, and could not fall upon his
knees before a cruel and revengeful God--he could not bow to one
who slew with famine, sword and fire--to one pitiless as pestilence,
relentless as the lightning stroke. Jehovah had no attribute that he
could love.

He attacked the creed of New England--a creed that had within it
the ferocity of Knox, the malice of Calvin, the cruelty of Jonathan
Edwards--a religion that had a monster for a God--a religion whose
dogmas would have shocked cannibals feasting upon babes.

Horace Seaver followed the light of his brain--the impulse of his heart.
He was attacked, but he answered the insulter with a smile; and even he
who coined malignant lies was treated as a friend misled. He did not
ask God to forgive his enemies--he forgave them himself. He was sincere.
Sincerity is the true and perfect mirror of the mind. It reflects the
honest thought. It is the foundation of character, and without it there
is no moral grandeur.

Sacred are the lips from which has issued only truth. Over all wealth,
above all station, above the noble, the robed and crowned, rises the
sincere man. Happy is the man who neither paints nor patches, veils nor
veneers. Blessed is he who wears no mask.

The man who lies before us wrapped in perfect peace, practiced no art to
hide or half conceal his thought. He did not write or speak the double
words that might be useful in retreat. He gave a truthful transcript of
his mind, and sought to make his meaning clear as light.

To use his own words, he had "the courage which impels a man to do
his duty, to hold fast his integrity, to maintain a conscience void
of offence, at every hazard and at every sacrifice, in defiance of the
world."

He lived to his ideal. He sought the approbation of himself. He did not
build his character upon the opinions of others, and it was out of the
very depths of his nature that he asked this profound question:

"What is there in other men that makes us desire their approbation, and
fear their censure more than our own?"

Horace Seaver was a good and loyal citizen of the mental republic--a
believer in, intellectual hospitality, one who knew that bigotry is
born of ignorance and fear--the provincialisms of the brain. He did
not belong to the tribe, or to the nation, but to the human race. His
sympathy was wide as want, and, like the sky, bent above the suffering
world.

This man had that superb thing called moral courage--courage in its
highest form. He knew that his thoughts were not the thoughts of
others--that he was with the few, and that where one would take his
side, thousands would be his eager foes. He knew that wealth would
scorn and cultured ignorance deride, and that believers in the creeds,
buttressed by law and custom, would hurl the missiles of revenge and
hate. He knew that lies, like snakes, would fill the pathway of his
life--and yet he told his honest thought--told it without hatred and
without contempt--told it as it really was. And so, through all his
days, his heart was sound and stainless to the core.

When he enlisted in the army whose banner is light, the honest
investigator was looked upon as lost and cursed, and even Christian
criminals held him in contempt. The believing embezzler, the orthodox
wife-beater, even the murderer, lifted his bloody hands and thanked God
that on his soul there was no stain of unbelief.

In nearly every State of our Republic, the man who denied the
absurdities and impossibilities lying at the foundation of what is
called orthodox religion, was denied his civil rights. He was not
canopied by the aegis of the law. He stood beyond the reach of sympathy.
He was not allowed to testify against the invader of his home, the
seeker for his life--his lips were closed. He was declared dishonorable,
because he was honest. His unbelief made him a social leper, a pariah,
an outcast. He was the victim of religious hate and scorn. Arrayed
against him were all the prejudices and all the forces and hypocrisies
of society. All mistakes and lies were his enemies. Even the Theist was
denounced as a disturber of the peace, although he told his thoughts in
kind and candid words. He was called a blasphemer, because he sought to
rescue the reputation of his God from the slanders of orthodox priests.

Such was the bigotry of the time, that natural love was lost. The
unbelieving son was hated by his pious sire, and even the mother's heart
was by her creed turned into stone.

Horace Seaver pursued his way. He worked and wrought as best he could,
in solitude and want. He knew the day would come. He lived to be
rewarded for his toil--to see most of the laws repealed that had made
outcasts of the noblest, the wisest, and the best. He lived to see the
foremost preachers of the world attack the sacred creeds. He lived to
see the sciences released from superstition's clutch. He lived to see
the orthodox theologian take his place with the professor of the
black art, the fortune-teller, and the astrologer. He lived to see
the greatest of the world accept his thought--to see the theologian
displaced by the true priests of Nature--by Humboldt and Darwin, by
Huxley and Haeckel.

Within the narrow compass of his life the world was changed. The
railway, the steamship, and the telegraph made all nations neighbors.
Countless inventions have made the luxuries of the past the necessities
of to-day. Life has been enriched, and man ennobled. The geologist has
read the records of frost and flame, of wind and wave--the astronomer
has told the story of the stars--the biologist has sought the germ of
life, and in every department of knowledge the torch of science sheds
its sacred light.

The ancient creeds have grown absurd. The miracles are small and mean.
The inspired book is filled with fables told to please a childish world,
and the dogma of eternal pain now shocks the heart and brain.

He lived to see a monument unveiled to Bruno in the city of Rome--to
Giordano Bruno--that great man who two hundred and eighty-nine years ago
suffered death for having proclaimed the truths that since have
filled the world with joy. He lived to see the victim of the church a
victor--lived to see his memory honored by a nation freed from papal
chains.

He worked knowing what the end must be--expecting little while he
lived--but knowing that every fact in the wide universe was on his side.
He knew that truth can wait, and so he worked patient as eternity.

He had the brain of a philosopher and the heart of a child.

Horace Seaver was a man of common sense.

By that I mean, one who knows the law of average. He denied the Bible,
not on account of what has been discovered in astronomy, or the length
of time it took to form the delta of the Nile--but he compared the
things he found with what he knew.

He knew that antiquity added nothing to probability--that lapse of time
can never take the place of cause, and that the dust can never gather
thick enough upon mistakes to make them equal with the truth.

He knew that the old, by no possibility, could have been more wonderful
than the new, and that the present is a perpetual torch by which we know
the past.

To him all miracles were mistakes, whose parents were cunning and
credulity. He knew that miracles were not, because they are not.

He believed in the sublime, unbroken, and eternal march of causes and
effects--denying the chaos of chance, and the caprice of power.

He tested the past by the now, and judged of all the men and races of
the world by those he knew.

He believed in the religion of free thought and good deed--of character,
of sincerity, of honest endeavor, of cheerful help--and above all, in
the religion of love and liberty--in a religion for every day--for
the world in which we live--for the present--the religion of roof and
raiment, of food, of intelligence, of intellectual hospitality--the
religion that gives health and happiness, freedom and content--in the
religion of work, and in the ceremonies of honest labor.

He lived for this world; if there be another, he will live for that.

He did what he could for the destruction of fear--the destruction of
the imaginary monster who rewards the few in heaven--the monster who
tortures the many in perdition.

He was a friend of all the world, and sought to civilize the human race.

For more than fifty years he labored to free the bodies and the souls
of men--and many thousands have read his words with joy. He sought the
suffering and oppressed. He sat by those in pain--and his helping hand
was laid in pity on the brow of death.

He asked only to be treated as he treated others. He asked for only what
he earned, and had the manhood cheerfully to accept the consequences of
his actions. He expected no reward for the goodness of another.

But he has lived his life. We should shed no tears except the tears of
gratitude. We should rejoice that he lived so long.

In Nature's course, his time had come. The four seasons were complete
in him. The Spring could never come again. The measure of his years was
full.

When the day is done--when the work of a life is finished--when the gold
of evening meets the dusk of night, beneath the silent stars the tired
laborer should fall asleep. To outlive usefulness is a double death.
"Let me not live after my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff of younger
spirits."

When the old oak is visited in vain by Spring--when light and rain no
longer thrill--it is not well to stand leafless, desolate, and alone. It
is better far to fall where Nature softly covers all with woven moss and
creeping vine.

How little, after all, we know of what is ill or well! How little of
this wondrous stream of cataracts and pools--this stream of life, that
rises in a world unknown, and flows to that mysterious sea whose shore
the foot of one who comes has never pressed! How little of this life we
know--this struggling ray of light 'twixt gloom and gloom--this strip of
land by verdure clad, between the unknown wastes--this throbbing moment
filled with love and pain--this dream that lies between the shadowy
shores of sleep and death!

We stand upon this verge of crumbling time. We love, we hope, we
disappear. Again we mingle with the dust, and the "knot intrinsicate"
forever falls apart.

But this we know: A noble life enriches all the world.

Horace Seaver lived for others. He accepted toil and hope deferred.
Poverty was his portion. Like Socrates, he did not seek to adorn his
body, but rather his soul with the jewels of charity, modesty, courage,
and above all, with a love of liberty.

Farewell, O brave and modest man!

Your lips, between which truths burst into blossom, are forever closed.
Your loving heart has ceased to beat. Your busy brain is still, and from
your hand has dropped the sacred torch.

Your noble, self-denying life has honored us, and we will honor you.

You were my friend, and I was yours. Above your silent clay I pay this
tribute to your worth.

Farewell!




A TRIBUTE TO LAWRENCE BARRETT.

At the Broadway Theatre, New York, March 22, 1891.


MY heart tells me that on the threshold of my address it will be
appropriate for me to say a few words about the great actor who has
just fallen into that sleep that we call death. Lawrence Barrett was my
friend, and I was his. He was an interpreter of Shakespeare, to whose
creations he gave flesh and blood. He began at the foundation of his
profession, and rose until he stood next to his friend--next to one who
is regarded as the greatest tragedian of our time--next to Edwin Booth.

The life of Lawrence Barrett was a success, because he honored himself
and added glory to the stage.

He did not seek for gain by pandering to the thoughtless, ignorant or
base. He gave the drama in its highest and most serious form. He shunned
the questionable, the vulgar and impure, and gave the intellectual,
the pathetic, the manly and the tragic. He did not stoop to conquer--he
soared. He was fitted for the stage. He had a thoughtful face, a vibrant
voice and the pose of chivalry, and besides he had patience, industry,
courage and the genius of success.

He was a graceful and striking Bassanio, a thoughtful Hamlet, an intense
Othello, a marvelous Harebell, and the best Cassius of his century.

In the drama of human life, all are actors, and no one knows his part.
In this great play the scenes are shifted by unknown forces, and the
commencement, plot and end are still unknown--are still unguessed. One
by one the players leave the stage, and others take their places. There
is no pause--the play goes on. No prompter's voice is heard, and no one
has the slightest clue to what the next scene is to be.

Will this great drama have an end? Will the curtain fall at last? Will
it rise again upon some other stage? Reason says perhaps, and Hope still
whispers yes. Sadly I bid my friend farewell, I admired the actor, and I
loved the man.




A TRIBUTE TO WALT WHITMAN.

Camden, N. J., March 30, 1892.

MY FRIENDS: Again we, in the mystery of Life, are brought face to face
with the mystery of Death. A great man, a great American, the most
eminent citizen of this Republic, lies dead before us, and we have met
to pay a tribute to his greatness and his worth.

I know he needs no words of mine. His fame is secure. He laid the
foundations of it deep in the human heart and brain. He was, above all
I have known, the poet of humanity, of sympathy. He was so great that he
rose above the greatest that he met without arrogance, and so great
that he stooped to the lowest without conscious condescension. He never
claimed to be lower or greater than any of the sous of men.

He came into our generation a free, untrammeled spirit, with sympathy
for all. His arm was beneath the form of the sick. He sympathized with
the imprisoned and despised, and even on the brow of crime he was great
enough to place the kiss of human sympathy.

One of the greatest lines in our literature is his, and the line is
great enough to do honor to the greatest genius that has ever lived.
He said, speaking of an outcast: "Not till the sun excludes you do I
exclude you."

His charity was as wide as the sky, and wherever there was human
suffering, human misfortune, the sympathy of Whitman bent above it as
the firmament bends above the earth.

He was built on a broad and splendid plan--ample, without appearing to
have limitations--passing easily for a brother of mountains and seas and
constellations; caring nothing for the little maps and charts with which
timid pilots hug the shore, but giving himself freely with recklessness
of genius to winds and waves and tides; caring for nothing as long as
the stars were above him. He walked among men, among writers, among
verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors,
with the unconscious majesty of an antique god.

He was the poet of that divine democracy which gives equal rights to
all the sons and daughters of men. He uttered the great American voice;
uttered a song worthy of the great Republic. No man ever said more
for the rights of humanity, more in favor of real democracy, of real
justice. He neither scorned nor cringed, was neither tyrant nor slave.
He asked only to stand the equal of his fellows beneath the great flag
of nature, the blue and stars.

He was the poet of Life. It was a joy simply to breathe. He loved the
clouds; he enjoyed the breath of morning, the twilight, the wind, the
winding streams. He loved to look at the sea when the waves burst into
the whitecaps of joy. He loved the fields, the hills; he was acquainted
with the trees, with birds, with all the beautiful objects of the earth.
He not only saw these objects, but understood their meaning, and he used
them that he might exhibit his heart to his fellow-men.

He was the poet of Love. He was not ashamed of that divine passion that
has built every home in the world; that divine passion that has painted
every picture and given us every real work of art; that divine passion
that has made the world worth living in and has given some value to
human life.

He was the poet of the natural, and taught men not to be ashamed of that
which is natural. He was not only the poet of democracy, not only the
poet of the great Republic, but he was the poet of the human race. He
was not confined to the limits of this country, but his sympathy went
out over the seas to all the nations of the earth.

He stretched out his hand and felt himself the equal of all kings and of
all princes, and the brother of all men, no matter how high, no matter
how low.

He has uttered more supreme words than any writer of our century,
possibly of almost any other. He was, above all things, a man, and above
genius, above all the snow-capped peaks of intelligence, above all art,
rises the true man. Greater than all is the true man, and he walked
among his fellow-men as such.

He was the poet of Death. He accepted all life and all death, and he
justified all. He had the courage to meet all, and was great enough and
splendid enough to harmonize all and to accept all there is of life as a
divine melody.

You know better than I what his life has been, but let me say one
thing. Knowing, as he did, what others can know and what they cannot,
he accepted and absorbed all theories, all creeds, all religions, and
believed in none. His philosophy was a sky that embraced all clouds and
accounted for all clouds. He had a philosophy and a religion of his own,
broader, as he believed--and as I believe--than others. He accepted all,
he understood all, and he was above all.

He was absolutely true to himself. He had frankness and courage, and he
was as candid as light. He was willing that all the sons of men should
be absolutely acquainted with his heart and brain. He had nothing to
conceal. Frank, candid, pure, serene, noble, and yet for years he was
maligned and slandered, simply because he had the candor of nature.
He will be understood yet, and that for which he was condemned--his
frankness, his candor--will add to the glory and greatness of his fame.

He wrote a liturgy for mankind; he wrote a great and splendid psalm of
life, and he gave to us the gospel of humanity--the greatest gospel that
can be preached.

He was not afraid to live, not afraid to die. For many years he and
death were near neighbors. He was always willing and ready to meet
and greet this king called death, and for many months he sat in the
deepening twilight waiting for the night, waiting for the light.

He never lost his hope. When the mists filled the valleys, he looked
upon the mountain tops, and when the mountains in darkness disappeared,
he fixed his gaze upon the stars.

In his brain were the blessed memories of the day, and in his heart were
mingled the dawn and dusk of life.

He was not afraid; he was cheerful every moment. The laughing nymphs of
day did not desert him. They remained that they might clasp the hands
and greet with smiles the veiled and silent sisters of the night. And
when they did come, Walt Whitman stretched his hand to them. On one side
were the nymphs of the day, and on the other the silent sisters of the
night, and so, hand in hand, between smiles and tears, he reached his
journey's end.

From the frontier of life, from the western wave-kissed shore, he
sent us messages of content and hope, and these messages seem now like
strains of music blown by the "Mystic Trumpeter" from Death's pale
realm.

To-day we give back to Mother Nature, to her clasp and kiss, one of the
bravest, sweetest souls that ever lived in human clay.

Charitable as the air and generous as Nature, he was negligent of all
except to do and say what he believed he should do and should say.

And I to-day thank him, not only for you but for myself, for all the
brave words he has uttered. I thank him for all the great and splendid
words lie has said in favor of liberty, in favor of man and woman, in
favor of motherhood, in favor of fathers, in favor of children, and I
thank him for the brave words that he has said of death.

He has lived, he has died, and death is less terrible than it was
before. Thousands and millions will walk down into the "dark valley of
the shadow" holding Walt Whitman by the hand. Long after we are dead the
brave words he has spoken will sound like trumpets to the dying.

And so I lay this little wreath upon this great mans tomb. I loved him
living, and I love him still.




A TRIBUTE TO PHILO D. BECKWITH.

Dowagiac, Mich., January 25, 1893.


LADIES and Gentlemen: Nothing is nobler than to plant the flower of
gratitude on the grave of a generous man--of one who labored for the
good of all--whose hands were open and whose heart was full.

Praise for the noble dead is an inspiration for the noble living.

Loving words sow seeds of love in every gentle heart. Appreciation is
the soil and climate of good and generous deeds.

We are met to-night not to pay, but to acknowledge a debt of gratitude
to one who lived and labored here--who was the friend of all and who for
many years was the providence of the poor. To one who left to those who
knew him best, the memory of countless loving deeds--the richest legacy
that man can leave to man.

We are here to dedicate this monument to the stainless memory of Philo
D. Beckwith--one of the kings of men.

This monument--this perfect theatre--this beautiful house of
cheerfulness and joy--this home and child of all the arts--this temple
where the architect, the sculptor and painter united to build and
decorate a stage whereon the drama with a thousand tongues will tell
the frailties and the virtues of the human race, and music with her
thrilling voice will touch the source of happy tears.

This is a fitting monument to the man whose memory we honor--to one,
who broadening with the years, outgrew the cruel creeds, the heartless
dogmas of his time--to one who passed from superstition to science--from
religion to reason--from theology to humanity--from slavery to
freedom--from the shadow of fear to the blessed light of love and
courage. To one who believed in intellectual hospitality--in the perfect
freedom of the soul, and hated tyranny, in every form, with all his
heart.

To one whose head and hands were in partnership constituting the firm
of Intelligence and Industry, and whose heart divided the profits with
his fellow-men. To one who fought the battle of life alone, without the
aid of place or wealth, and yet grew nobler and gentler with success.

To one who tried to make a heaven here and who believed in the blessed
gospel of cheerfulness and love--of happiness and hope.

And it is fitting, too, that this monument should be adorned with the
sublime faces, wrought in stone, of the immortal dead--of those who
battled for the rights of man--who broke the fetters of the slave--of
those who filled the minds of men with poetry, art, and light--of
Voltaire, who abolished torture in France and who did more for liberty
than any other of the sons of men--of Thomas Paine, whose pen did as
much as any sword to make the New World free--of Victor Hugo, who wept
for those who weep--of Emerson, a worshiper of the Ideal, who filled
the mind with suggestions of the perfect--of Goethe, the
poet-philosopher--of Whitman, the ample, wide as the sky--author of the
tenderest, the most pathetic, the sublimest poem that this continent has
produced--of Shakespeare, the King of all--of Beethoven, the divine,--of
Chopin and Verdi and of Wagner, grandest of them all, whose music
satisfies the heart and brain and fills imagination's sky--of George
Eliot, who wove within her brain the purple robe her genius wears--of
George Sand, subtle and sincere, passionate and free--and with
these--faces of those who, on the stage, have made the mimic world as
real as life and death.

Beneath the loftiest monuments may be found ambition's worthless dust,
while those who lived the loftiest lives are sleeping now in unknown
graves.

It may be that the bravest of the brave who ever fell upon the field of
ruthless war, was left without a grave to mingle slowly with the land he
saved.

But here and now the Man and Monument agree, and blend like sounds that
meet and melt in melody--a monument for the dead--a blessing for the
living--a memory of tears--a prophecy of joy.

Fortunate the people where this good man lived, for they are all his
heirs--and fortunate for me that I have had the privilege of laying this
little laurel leaf upon his unstained brow.

And now, speaking for those he loved--for those who represent the
honored dead--I dedicate this home of mirth and song--of poetry and
art--to the memory of Philo D. Beckwith--a true philosopher--a real
philanthropist.




A TRIBUTE TO ANTON SEIDL.

     A telegram read at the funeral services in the Metropolitan
     Opera House, New York City, March 31, 1898.

IN the noon and zenith of his career, in the flush and glory of success,
Anton Seidl, the greatest orchestral leader of all time, the perfect
interpreter of Wagner, of all his subtlety and sympathy, his heroism and
grandeur, his intensity and limitless passion, his wondrous harmonies
that tell of all there is in life, and touch the longings and the hopes
of every heart, has passed from the shores of sound to the realm of
silence, borne by the mysterious and resistless tide that ever ebbs but
never flows.

All moods were his. Delicate as the perfume of the first violet, wild as
the storm, he knew the music of all sounds, from the rustle of leaves,
the whisper of hidden springs, to the voices of the sea.

He was the master of music, from the rhythmical strains of irresponsible
joy to the sob of the funeral march.

He stood like a king with his sceptre in his hand, and we knew that
every tone and harmony were in his brain, every passion in his breast,
and yet his sculptured face was as calm, as serene as perfect art. He
mingled his soul with the music and gave his heart to the enchanted air.

He appeared to have no limitations, no walls, no chains. He seemed to
follow the pathway of desire, and the marvelous melodies, the sublime
harmonies, were as free as eagles above the clouds with outstretched
wings.

He educated, refined, and gave unspeakable joy to many thousands of his
fellow-men. He added to the grace and glory of life. He spoke a language
deeper, more poetic than words--the language of the perfect, the
language of love and death.

But he is voiceless now; a fountain of harmony has ceased. Its inspired
strains have died away in night, and all its murmuring melodies are
strangely still.

We will mourn for him, we will honor him, not in words, but in the
language that he used.

Anton Seidl is dead. Play the great funeral march. Envelop him in music.
Let its wailing waves cover him. Let its wild and mournful winds sigh
and moan above him. Give his face to its kisses and its tears.

Play the great funeral march, music as profound as death. That will
express our sorrow--that will voice our love, our hope, and that will
tell of the life, the triumph, the genius, the death of Anton Seidl.




A TRIBUTE TO DR. THOMAS SETON ROBERTSON.

New York September 8, 1898.


IN the pulseless hush of death, silence seems more expressive, more
appropriate--than speech. In the presence of the Great Mystery, the
great mystery that waits to enshroud us all, we feel the uselessness of
words. But where a fellow-mortal has reached his journey's end--where
the darkness from which he emerged has received him again, it is but
natural for his friends to mingle with their grief, expressions of their
love and loss.

He who lies before us in the sleep of death was generous to his
fellow-men. His hands were always stretched to help, to save. He pitied
the friendless, the unfortunate, the hopeless--proud of his skill--of
his success. He was quick to decide--to act--prompt, tireless, forgetful
of self. He lengthened life and conquered pain--hundreds are well and
happy now because he lived. This is enough. This puts a star above the
gloom of death.

He was sensitive to the last degree--quick to feel a slight--to resent
a wrong--but in the warmth of kindness the thorn of hatred blossomed. He
was not quite fashioned for this world. The flints and thorns on life's
highway bruised and pierced his flesh, and for his wounds he did
not have the blessed balm of patience. He felt the manacles, the
limitations--the imprisonments of life and so within the walls and bars
he wore his very soul away. He could not bear the storms. The tides,
the winds, the waves, in the morning of his life, dashed his frail bark
against the rocks.

He fought as best he could, and that he failed was not his fault.

He was honest, generous and courageous. These three great virtues were
his. He was a true and steadfast friend, seeing only the goodness of the
ones he loved. Only a great and noble heart is capable of this.

But he has passed beyond the reach of praise or blame--passed to the
realm of rest--to the waveless calm of perfect peace.

The storm is spent--the winds are hushed--the waves have died along the
shore--the tides are still--the aching heart has ceased to beat, and
within the brain all thoughts, all hopes and fears--ambitions, memories,
rejoicings and regrets--all images and pictures of the world, of
life, are now as though they had not been. And yet Hope, the child of
Love--the deathless, beyond the darkness sees the dawn. And we who knew
and loved him, we, who now perform the last sad rites--the last that
friendship can suggest--"will keep his memory green."

Dear Friend, farewell! "If we do meet again we shall smile indeed--if
not, this parting is well made." Farewell!




A TRIBUTE TO THOMAS CORWIN.

Lebanon, Ohio, March 5, 1899.

     * An Impromptu preface to Colonel Ingersoll's lecture at
     Lebanon, Ohio.


LADIES and Gentlemen: Being for the first time where Thomas Corwin lived
and where his ashes rest, I cannot refrain from saying something of
what I feel. Thomas Corwin was a natural orator--armed with the sword of
attack and the shield of defence.

Nature filled his quiver with perfect arrows. He was the lord of logic
and laughter. He had the presence, the pose, the voice, the face
that mirrored thoughts, the unconscious gesture of the orator. He had
intelligence--a wide horizon--logic as unerring as mathematics--humor as
rich as autumn when the boughs and vines bend with the weight of ripened
fruit, while the forests flame with scarlet, brown and gold. He had wit
as quick and sharp as lightning, and like the lightning it filled the
heavens with sudden light.

In his laughter there was logic, in his wit wisdom, and in his humor
philosophy and philanthropy. He was a supreme artist. He painted
pictures with words. He knew the strength, the velocity of verbs, the
color, the light and shade of adjectives.

He was a sculptor in speech--changing stones to statues. He had in
his heart the sacred something that we call sympathy. He pitied the
unfortunate, the oppressed and the outcast His words were often wet
with tears--tears that in a moment after were glorified by the light of
smiles. All moods were his. He knew the heart, its tides and currents,
its calms and storms, and like a skillful pilot he sailed emotion's
troubled sea. He was neither solemn nor dignified, because he was
neither stupid nor egotistic. He was natural, and had the spontaneity
of winds and waves. He was the greatest orator of his time, the grandest
that ever stood beneath our flag. Reverently I lay this leaf upon his
grave.




A TRIBUTE TO ISAAC H. BAILEY.

New York, March 27, 1899.


MY FRIENDS: When one whom we hold dear has reached the end of life and
laid his burden down, it is but natural for us, his friends, to pay the
tribute of respect and love; to tell his virtues, to express our sense
of loss and speak above the sculptured clay some word of hope.

Our friend, about whose bier we stand, was in the highest, noblest sense
a man. He was not born to wealth--he was his own providence, his own
teacher. With him work was worship and labor was his only prayer. He
depended on himself, and was as independent as it is possible for man to
be. He hated debt, and obligation was a chain that scarred his flesh. He
lived a long and useful life. In age he reaped with joy what he had cown
in youth. He did not linger "until his flame lacked oil," but with his
senses keen, his mind undimmed, and with his arms filled with gathered
sheaves, in an instant, painlessly, unconsciously, he passed from
happiness and health to the realm of perfect peace. We need not mourn
for him, but for ourselves, for those he loved.

He was an absolutely honest man--a man who kept his word, who fulfilled
his contracts, gave heaped and rounded measure and discharged all
obligations with the fabled chivalry of ancient knights. He was
absolutely honest, not only with others but with himself. To his last
moment his soul was stainless. He was true to his ideal--true to his
thought, and what his brain conceived his lips expressed. He refused to
pretend. He knew that to believe without evidence was impossible to
the sound and sane, and that to say you believed when you did not, was
possible only to the hypocrite or coward. He did not believe in the
supernatural. He was a natural man and lived a natural life. He had no
fear of fiends. He cared nothing for the guesses of inspired savages;
nothing for the threats or promises of the sainted and insane.

He enjoyed this life--the good things of this world--the clasp and
smile of friendship, the exchange of generous deeds, the reasonable
gratification of the senses--of the wants of the body and mind. He was
neither an insane ascetic nor a fool of pleasure, but walked the
golden path along the strip of verdure that lies between the deserts of
extremes.

With him to do right was not simply a duty, it was a pleasure. He had
philosophy enough to know that the quality of actions depends upon
their consequences, and that these consequences are the rewards and
punishments that no God can give, inflict, withhold or pardon.

He loved his country, he was proud of the heroic past, dissatisfied
with the present, and confident of the future. He stood on the rock
of principle. With him the wisest policy was to do right. He would not
compromise with wrong. He had no respect for political failures who
became reformers and decorated fraud with the pretence of philanthropy,
or sought to gain some private end in the name of public good. He
despised time-servers, trimmers, fawners and all sorts and kinds of
pretenders.

He believed in national honesty; in the preservation of public faith.
He believed that the Government should discharge every obligation--the
implied as faithfully as the expressed. And I would be unjust to his
memory if I did not say that he believed in honest money, in the best
money in the world, in pure gold, and that he despised with all his
heart financial frauds, and regarded fifty cents that pretended to be a
dollar, as he would a thief in the uniform of a policeman, or a criminal
in the robe of a judge.

He believed in liberty, and liberty for all. He pitied the slave and
hated the master; that is to say, he was an honest man. In the dark days
of the Rebellion he stood for the right. He loved Lincoln with all his
heart--loved him for his genius, his courage and his goodness. He
loved Conkling--loved him for his independence, his manhood, for his
unwavering courage, and because he would not bow or bend--loved him
because he accepted defeat with the pride of a victor. He loved Grant,
and in the temple of his heart, over the altar, in the highest niche,
stood the great soldier.

Nature was kind to our friend. She gave him the blessed gift of humor.
This filled his days with the climate of Autumn, so that to him even
disaster had its sunny side. On account of his humor he appreciated and
enjoyed the great literature of the world. He loved Shakespeare, his
clowns and heroes. He appreciated and enjoyed Dickens. The characters of
this great novelist were his acquaintances. He knew them all; some were
his friends and some he dearly loved. He had wit of the keenest
and quickest. The instant the steel of his logic smote the flint of
absurdity the spark glittered. And yet, his wit was always kind.
The flower went with the thorn. The targets of his wit were not made
enemies, but admirers.

He was social, and after the feast of serious conversation he loved the
wine of wit--the dessert of a good story that blossomed into mirth. He
enjoyed games--was delighted by the relations of chance--the curious
combinations of accident. He had the genius of friendship. In his nature
there was no suspicion. He could not be poisoned against a friend.
The arrows of slander never pierced the shield of his confidence. He
demanded demonstration. He defended a friend as he defended himself.
Against all comers he stood firm, and he never deserted the field until
the friend had fled. I have known many, many friends--have clasped the
hands of many that I loved, but in the journey of my life I have never
grasped the hand of a better, truer, more unselfish friend than he who
lies before us clothed in the perfect peace of death. He loved me living
and I love him now.

In youth we front the sun; we live in light without a fear, without a
thought of dusk or night. We glory in excess. There is no dread of loss
when all is growth and gain. With reckless hands we spend and waste and
chide the flying hours for loitering by the way.

The future holds the fruit of joy; the present keeps us from the feast,
and so, with hurrying feet we climb the heights and upward look with
eager eyes. But when the sun begins to sink and shadows fall in front,
and lengthen on the path, then falls upon the heart a sense of loss, and
then we hoard the shreds and crumbs and vainly long for what was cast
away. And then with miser care we save and spread thin hands before
December's half-fed flickering flames, while through the glass of time
we moaning watch the few remaining grains of sand that hasten to their
end. In the gathering gloom the fires slowly die, while memory dreams of
youth, and hope sometimes mistakes the glow of ashes for the coming of
another morn.

But our friend was an exception. He lived in the present; he enjoyed
the sunshine of to-day. Although his feet had touched the limit of
four-score, he had not reached the time to stop, to turn and think:
about the traveled road. He was still full of life and hope, and had the
interest of youth in all the affairs of men.

He had no fear of the future--no dread. He was ready for the end. I have
often heard him repeat the words of Epicurus: "Why should I fear death?
If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that
which cannot exist when I do?"

If there is, beyond the veil, beyond the night called death, another
world to which men carry all the failures and the triumphs of this life;
if above and over all there be a God who loves the right, an honest man
has naught to fear. If there be another world in which sincerity is a
virtue, in which fidelity is loved and courage honored, then all is well
with the dear friend whom we have lost.

But if the grave ends all; if all that was our friend is dead, the
world is better for the life he lived. Beyond the tomb we cannot see. We
listen, but from the lips of mystery there comes no word. Darkness and
silence brooding over all. And yet, because we love we hope. Farewell!
And yet again, Farewell!

And will there, sometime, be another world? We have our dream. The idea
of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart,
beating with its countless waves against the sands and rocks of time
and fate, was not born of any book or of any creed. It was born of
affection. And it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and
clouds of doubt and darkness, as long as love kisses the lips of death.
We have our dream!




JESUS CHRIST.

     * An unfinished lecture which Colonel Ingersoll commenced a
     few days before his death.


FOR many centuries and by many millions of people, Christ has been
worshiped as God. Millions and millions of eulogies on his character
have been pronounced by priest and layman, in all of which his praises
were measured only by the limitations of language--words were regarded
as insufficient to paint his perfections.

In his praise it was impossible to be extravagant. Sculptor, poet and
painter exhausted their genius in the portrayal of the peasant, who was
in fact the creator of all worlds.

His wisdom excited the wonder, his sufferings the pity and his
resurrection and ascension the astonishment of the world.

He was regarded as perfect man and infinite God. It was believed that
in the gospels was found the perfect history of his life, his words and
works, his death, his triumph over the grave and his return to heaven.
For many centuries his perfection, his divinity--have been defended by
sword and fire.

By the altar was the scaffold--in the cathedral, the dungeon--the
chamber of torture.

The story of Christ was told by mothers to their babes. For the most
part his story was the beginning and end of education. It was wicked to
doubt--infamous to deny.

Heaven was the reward for belief and hell the destination of the denier.

All the forces of what we call society, were directed against
investigation. Every avenue to the mind was closed. On all the highways
of thought, Christians placed posts and boards, and on the boards were
the words "No Thoroughfare," "No Crossing." The windows of the soul
were darkened--the doors were barred. Light was regarded as the enemy of
mankind.

During these Christian years faith was rewarded with position,
wealth and power. Faith was the path to fame and honor. The man who
investigated was the enemy, the assassin of souls. The creed was
barricaded on every side, above it were the glories of heaven--below
were the agonies of hell. The soldiers of the cross were strangers to
pity. Only traitors to God were shocked by the murder of an unbeliever.
The true Christian was a savage. His virtues were ferocious, and
compared with his vices were beneficent. The drunkard was a better
citizen than the saint. The libertine and prostitute were far nearer
human, nearer moral, than those who pleased God by persecuting their
fellows.

The man who thought, and expressed his thoughts, died in a dungeon--on
the scaffold or in flames.

The sincere Christian was insane. His one object was to save his soul.
He despised all the pleasures of sense. He believed that his nature was
depraved and that his desires were wicked.

He fasted and prayed--deserted his wife and children--inflicted tortures
on himself and sought by pain endured to gain the crown. * * *




LIFE.

     * Written for Mr. Harrison Grey Fiske, editor of The New
     York Dramatic Mirror, December 18,1886.


BORN of love and hope, of ecstasy and pain, of agony and fear, of tears
and joy--dowered with the wealth of two united hearts--held in happy
arms, with lips upon life's drifted font, blue-veined and fair, where
perfect peace finds perfect form--rocked by willing feet and wooed to
shadowy shores of sleep by siren mother singing soft and low--looking
with wonder's wide and startled eyes at common things of life and
day--taught by want and wish and contact with the things that touch the
dimpled flesh of babes--lured by light and flame, and charmed by color's
wondrous robes--learning the use of hands and feet, and by the love
of mimicry beguiled to utter speech--releasing prisoned thoughts from
crabbed and curious marks on soiled and tattered leaves--puzzling the
brain with crooked numbers and their changing, tangled worth--and so
through years of alternating day and night, until the captive grows
familiar with the chains and walls and limitations of a life.

And time runs on in sun and shade, until the one of all the world is
wooed and won, and all the lore of love is taught and learned again.
Again a home is built with the fair chamber wherein faint dreams, like
cool and shadowy vales, divide the billowed hours of love. Again the
miracle of a birth--the pain and joy, the kiss of welcome and the
cradle-song drowning the drowsy prattle of a babe.

And then the sense of obligation and of wrong--pity for those who toil
and weep--tears for the imprisoned and despised--love for the generous
dead, and in the heart the rapture of a high resolve.

And then ambition, with its lust of pelf and place and power, longing to
put upon its breast distinction's worthless badge. Then keener thoughts
of men, and eyes that see behind the smiling mask of craft--flattered no
more by the obsequious cringe of gain and greed--knowing the uselessness
of hoarded gold--of honor bought from those who charge the usury of
self-respect--of power that only bends a coward's knees and forces
from the lips of fear the lies of praise. Knowing at last the unstudied
gesture of esteem, the reverent eyes made rich with honest thought, and
holding high above all other things--high as hope's great throbbing star
above the darkness of the dead--the love of wife and child and friend.

Then locks of gray, and growing love of other days and half-remembered
things--then holding withered hands of those who first held his, while
over dim and loving eyes death softly presses down the lids of rest.

And so, locking in marriage vows his children's hands and crossing
others on the breasts of peace, with daughters' babes upon his knees,
the white hair mingling with the gold, he journeys on from day to day to
that horizon where the dusk is waiting for the night.--At last, sitting
by the holy hearth of home as evening's embers change from red to gray,
he falls asleep within the arms of her he worshiped and adored, feeling
upon his pallid lips love's last and holiest kiss.

*****

Fac-simile of the Last Letter written by Ingersoll


Urn Containing the Ashes of Ingersoll










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