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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Revolution and Other Essays, by Jack London
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Revolution and Other Essays
+
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 11, 2007  [eBook #4953]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REVOLUTION AND OTHER ESSAYS***
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1910 Mills and Boon edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+REVOLUTION AND OTHER ESSAYS
+
+
+                                    BY
+                               JACK LONDON
+
+    "History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to
+    begin as heresies and to end as superstitions."
+
+    HUXLEY.
+
+                          MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
+                             49 RUPERT STREET
+                               LONDON, W.1
+
+   _Copyright in the United States of America_, 1910, _by The Macmillan
+                                Company_.
+
+Contents:
+
+   Revolution
+   The Somnambulists
+   The Dignity of Dollars
+   Goliah
+   The Golden Poppy
+   The Shrinkage of the Planet
+   The House Beautiful
+   The Gold Hunters of the North
+   Foma Gordyeeff
+   These Bones shall Rise Again
+   The Other Animals
+   The Yellow Peril
+   What Life Means to Me
+
+
+
+
+REVOLUTION
+
+
+    "The present is enough for common souls,
+    Who, never looking forward, are indeed
+    Mere clay, wherein the footprints of their age
+    Are petrified for ever."
+
+I received a letter the other day.  It was from a man in Arizona.  It
+began, "Dear Comrade."  It ended, "Yours for the Revolution."  I replied
+to the letter, and my letter began, "Dear Comrade."  It ended, "Yours for
+the Revolution."  In the United States there are 400,000 men, of men and
+women nearly 1,000,000, who begin their letters "Dear Comrade," and end
+them "Yours for the Revolution."  In Germany there are 3,000,000 men who
+begin their letters "Dear Comrade" and end them "Yours for the
+Revolution"; in France, 1,000,000 men; in Austria, 800,000 men; in
+Belgium, 300,000 men; in Italy, 250,000 men; in England, 100,000 men; in
+Switzerland, 100,000 men; in Denmark, 55,000 men; in Sweden, 50,000 men;
+in Holland, 40,000 men; in Spain, 30,000 men--comrades all, and
+revolutionists.
+
+These are numbers which dwarf the grand armies of Napoleon and Xerxes.
+But they are numbers not of conquest and maintenance of the established
+order, but of conquest and revolution.  They compose, when the roll is
+called, an army of 7,000,000 men, who, in accordance with the conditions
+of to-day, are fighting with all their might for the conquest of the
+wealth of the world and for the complete overthrow of existing society.
+
+There has never been anything like this revolution in the history of the
+world.  There is nothing analogous between it and the American Revolution
+or the French Revolution.  It is unique, colossal.  Other revolutions
+compare with it as asteroids compare with the sun.  It is alone of its
+kind, the first world-revolution in a world whose history is replete with
+revolutions.  And not only this, for it is the first organized movement
+of men to become a world movement, limited only by the limits of the
+planet.
+
+This revolution is unlike all other revolutions in many respects.  It is
+not sporadic.  It is not a flame of popular discontent, arising in a day
+and dying down in a day.  It is older than the present generation.  It
+has a history and traditions, and a martyr-roll only less extensive
+possibly than the martyr-roll of Christianity.  It has also a literature
+a myriad times more imposing, scientific, and scholarly than the
+literature of any previous revolution.
+
+They call themselves "comrades," these men, comrades in the socialist
+revolution.  Nor is the word empty and meaningless, coined of mere lip
+service.  It knits men together as brothers, as men should be knit
+together who stand shoulder to shoulder under the red banner of revolt.
+This red banner, by the way, symbolizes the brotherhood of man, and does
+not symbolize the incendiarism that instantly connects itself with the
+red banner in the affrighted bourgeois mind.  The comradeship of the
+revolutionists is alive and warm.  It passes over geographical lines,
+transcends race prejudice, and has even proved itself mightier than the
+Fourth of July, spread-eagle Americanism of our forefathers.  The French
+socialist working-men and the German socialist working-men forget Alsace
+and Lorraine, and, when war threatens, pass resolutions declaring that as
+working-men and comrades they have no quarrel with each other.  Only the
+other day, when Japan and Russia sprang at each other's throats, the
+revolutionists of Japan addressed the following message to the
+revolutionists of Russia: "Dear Comrades--Your government and ours have
+recently plunged into war to carry out their imperialistic tendencies,
+but for us socialists there are no boundaries, race, country, or
+nationality.  We are comrades, brothers, and sisters, and have no reason
+to fight.  Your enemies are not the Japanese people, but our militarism
+and so-called patriotism.  Patriotism and militarism are our mutual
+enemies."
+
+In January 1905, throughout the United States the socialists held
+mass-meetings to express their sympathy for their struggling comrades,
+the revolutionists of Russia, and, more to the point, to furnish the
+sinews of war by collecting money and cabling it to the Russian leaders.
+The fact of this call for money, and the ready response, and the very
+wording of the call, make a striking and practical demonstration of the
+international solidarity of this world-revolution:
+
+"Whatever may be the immediate results of the present revolt in Russia,
+the socialist propaganda in that country has received from it an impetus
+unparalleled in the history of modern class wars.  The heroic battle for
+freedom is being fought almost exclusively by the Russian working-class
+under the intellectual leadership of Russian socialists, thus once more
+demonstrating the fact that the class-conscious working-men have become
+the vanguard of all liberating movements of modern times."
+
+Here are 7,000,000 comrades in an organized, international, world-wide,
+revolutionary movement.  Here is a tremendous human force.  It must be
+reckoned with.  Here is power.  And here is romance--romance so colossal
+that it seems to be beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.  These
+revolutionists are swayed by great passion.  They have a keen sense of
+personal right, much of reverence for humanity, but little reverence, if
+any at all, for the rule of the dead.  They refuse to be ruled by the
+dead.  To the bourgeois mind their unbelief in the dominant conventions
+of the established order is startling.  They laugh to scorn the sweet
+ideals and dear moralities of bourgeois society.  They intend to destroy
+bourgeois society with most of its sweet ideals and dear moralities, and
+chiefest among these are those that group themselves under such heads as
+private ownership of capital, survival of the fittest, and
+patriotism--even patriotism.
+
+Such an army of revolution, 7,000,000 strong, is a thing to make rulers
+and ruling classes pause and consider.  The cry of this army is, "No
+quarter!  We want all that you possess.  We will be content with nothing
+less than all that you possess.  We want in our hands the reins of power
+and the destiny of mankind.  Here are our hands.  They are strong hands.
+We are going to take your governments, your palaces, and all your purpled
+ease away from you, and in that day you shall work for your bread even as
+the peasant in the field or the starved and runty clerk in your
+metropolises.  Here are our hands.  They are strong hands."
+
+Well may rulers and ruling classes pause and consider.  This is
+revolution.  And, further, these 7,000,000 men are not an army on paper.
+Their fighting strength in the field is 7,000,000.  To-day they cast
+7,000,000 votes in the civilized countries of the world.
+
+Yesterday they were not so strong.  To-morrow they will be still
+stronger.  And they are fighters.  They love peace.  They are unafraid of
+war.  They intend nothing less than to destroy existing capitalist
+society and to take possession of the whole world.  If the law of the
+land permits, they fight for this end peaceably, at the ballot-box.  If
+the law of the land does not permit, and if they have force meted out to
+them, they resort to force themselves.  They meet violence with violence.
+Their hands are strong and they are unafraid.  In Russia, for instance,
+there is no suffrage.  The government executes the revolutionists.  The
+revolutionists kill the officers of the government.  The revolutionists
+meet legal murder with assassination.
+
+Now here arises a particularly significant phase which it would be well
+for the rulers to consider.  Let me make it concrete.  I am a
+revolutionist.  Yet I am a fairly sane and normal individual.  I speak,
+and I _think_, of these assassins in Russia as "my comrades."  So do all
+the comrades in America, and all the 7,000,000 comrades in the world.  Of
+what worth an organized, international, revolutionary movement if our
+comrades are not backed up the world over!  The worth is shown by the
+fact that we do back up the assassinations by our comrades in Russia.
+They are not disciples of Tolstoy, nor are we.  We are revolutionists.
+
+Our comrades in Russia have formed what they call "The Fighting
+Organization."  This Fighting Organization accused, tried, found guilty,
+and condemned to death, one Sipiaguin, Minister of Interior.  On April 2
+he was shot and killed in the Maryinsky Palace.  Two years later the
+Fighting Organization condemned to death and executed another Minister of
+Interior, Von Plehve.  Having done so, it issued a document, dated July
+29, 1904, setting forth the counts of its indictment of Von Plehve and
+its responsibility for the assassination.  Now, and to the point, this
+document was sent out to the socialists of the world, and by them was
+published everywhere in the magazines and newspapers.  The point is, not
+that the socialists of the world were unafraid to do it, not that they
+dared to do it, but that they did it as a matter of routine, giving
+publication to what may be called an official document of the
+international revolutionary movement.
+
+These are high lights upon the revolution--granted, but they are also
+facts.  And they are given to the rulers and the ruling classes, not in
+bravado, not to frighten them, but for them to consider more deeply the
+spirit and nature of this world-revolution.  The time has come for the
+revolution to demand consideration.  It has fastened upon every civilized
+country in the world.  As fast as a country becomes civilized, the
+revolution fastens upon it.  With the introduction of the machine into
+Japan, socialism was introduced.  Socialism marched into the Philippines
+shoulder to shoulder with the American soldiers.  The echoes of the last
+gun had scarcely died away when socialist locals were forming in Cuba and
+Porto Rico.  Vastly more significant is the fact that of all the
+countries the revolution has fastened upon, on not one has it relaxed its
+grip.  On the contrary, on every country its grip closes tighter year by
+year.  As an active movement it began obscurely over a generation ago.
+In 1867, its voting strength in the world was 30,000.  By 1871 its vote
+had increased to 1,000,000.  Not till 1884 did it pass the half-million
+point.  By 1889 it had passed the million point, it had then gained
+momentum.  In 1892 the socialist vote of the world was 1,798,391; in
+1893, 2,585,898; in 1895, 3,033,718; in 1898, 4,515,591; in 1902,
+5,253,054; in 1903, 6,285,374; and in the year of our Lord 1905 it passed
+the seven-million mark.
+
+Nor has this flame of revolution left the United States untouched.  In
+1888 there were only 2,068 socialist votes.  In 1902 there were 127,713
+socialist votes.  And in 1904 435,040 socialist votes were cast.  What
+fanned this flame?  Not hard times.  The first four years of the
+twentieth century were considered prosperous years, yet in that time more
+than 300,000 men added themselves to the ranks of the revolutionists,
+flinging their defiance in the teeth of bourgeois society and taking
+their stand under the blood-red banner.  In the state of the writer,
+California, one man in twelve is an avowed and registered revolutionist.
+
+One thing must be clearly understood.  This is no spontaneous and vague
+uprising of a large mass of discontented and miserable people--a blind
+and instinctive recoil from hurt.  On the contrary, the propaganda is
+intellectual; the movement is based upon economic necessity and is in
+line with social evolution; while the miserable people have not yet
+revolted.  The revolutionist is no starved and diseased slave in the
+shambles at the bottom of the social pit, but is, in the main, a hearty,
+well-fed working-man, who sees the shambles waiting for him and his
+children and recoils from the descent.  The very miserable people are too
+helpless to help themselves.  But they are being helped, and the day is
+not far distant when their numbers will go to swell the ranks of the
+revolutionists.
+
+Another thing must be clearly understood.  In spite of the fact that
+middle-class men and professional men are interested in the movement, it
+is nevertheless a distinctly working-class revolt.  The world over, it is
+a working-class revolt.  The workers of the world, as a class, are
+fighting the capitalists of the world, as a class.  The so-called great
+middle class is a growing anomaly in the social struggle.  It is a
+perishing class (wily statisticians to the contrary), and its historic
+mission of buffer between the capitalist and working-classes has just
+about been fulfilled.  Little remains for it but to wail as it passes
+into oblivion, as it has already begun to wail in accents Populistic and
+Jeffersonian-Democratic.  The fight is on.  The revolution is here now,
+and it is the world's workers that are in revolt.
+
+Naturally the question arises: Why is this so?  No mere whim of the
+spirit can give rise to a world-revolution.  Whim does not conduce to
+unanimity.  There must be a deep-seated cause to make 7,000,000 men of
+the one mind, to make them cast off allegiance to the bourgeois gods and
+lose faith in so fine a thing as patriotism.  There are many counts of
+the indictment which the revolutionists bring against the capitalist
+class, but for present use only one need be stated, and it is a count to
+which capital has never replied and can never reply.
+
+The capitalist class has managed society, and its management has failed.
+And not only has it failed in its management, but it has failed
+deplorably, ignobly, horribly.  The capitalist class had an opportunity
+such as was vouchsafed no previous ruling class in the history of the
+world.  It broke away from the rule of the old feudal aristocracy and
+made modern society.  It mastered matter, organized the machinery of
+life, and made possible a wonderful era for mankind, wherein no creature
+should cry aloud because it had not enough to eat, and wherein for every
+child there would be opportunity for education, for intellectual and
+spiritual uplift.  Matter being mastered, and the machinery of life
+organized, all this was possible.  Here was the chance, God-given, and
+the capitalist class failed.  It was blind and greedy.  It prattled sweet
+ideals and dear moralities, rubbed its eyes not once, nor ceased one whit
+in its greediness, and smashed down in a failure as tremendous only as
+was the opportunity it had ignored.
+
+But all this is like so much cobwebs to the bourgeois mind.  As it was
+blind in the past, it is blind now and cannot see nor understand.  Well,
+then, let the indictment be stated more definitely, in terms sharp and
+unmistakable.  In the first place, consider the caveman.  He was a very
+simple creature.  His head slanted back like an orang-outang's, and he
+had but little more intelligence.  He lived in a hostile environment, the
+prey of all manner of fierce life.  He had no inventions nor artifices.
+His natural efficiency for food-getting was, say, 1.  He did not even
+till the soil.  With his natural efficiency of 1, he fought off his
+carnivorous enemies and got himself food and shelter.  He must have done
+all this, else he would not have multiplied and spread over the earth and
+sent his progeny down, generation by generation, to become even you and
+me.
+
+The caveman, with his natural efficiency of 1, got enough to eat most of
+the time, and no caveman went hungry all the time.  Also, he lived a
+healthy, open-air life, loafed and rested himself, and found plenty of
+time in which to exercise his imagination and invent gods.  That is to
+say, he did not have to work all his waking moments in order to get
+enough to eat.  The child of the caveman (and this is true of the
+children of all savage peoples) had a childhood, and by that is meant a
+happy childhood of play and development.
+
+And now, how fares modern man?  Consider the United States, the most
+prosperous and most enlightened country of the world.  In the United
+States there are 10,000,000 people living in poverty.  By poverty is
+meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate
+shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained.
+In the United States there are 10,000,000 people who have not enough to
+eat.  In the United States, because they have not enough to eat, there
+are 10,000,000 people who cannot keep the ordinary 1 measure of strength
+in their bodies.  This means that these 10,000,000 people are perishing,
+are dying, body and soul, slowly, because they have not enough to eat.
+All over this broad, prosperous, enlightened land, are men, women, and
+children who are living miserably.  In all the great cities, where they
+are segregated in slum ghettos by hundreds of thousands and by millions,
+their misery becomes beastliness.  No caveman ever starved as chronically
+as they starve, ever slept as vilely as they sleep, ever festered with
+rottenness and disease as they fester, nor ever toiled as hard and for as
+long hours as they toil.
+
+In Chicago there is a woman who toiled sixty hours per week.  She was a
+garment worker.  She sewed buttons on clothes.  Among the Italian garment
+workers of Chicago, the average weekly wage of the dressmakers is 90
+cents, but they work every week in the year.  The average weekly wage of
+the pants finishers is $1.31, and the average number of weeks employed in
+the year is 27.85.  The average yearly earnings of the dressmakers is
+$37; of the pants finishers, $42.41.  Such wages means no childhood for
+the children, beastliness of living, and starvation for all.
+
+Unlike the caveman, modern man cannot get food and shelter whenever he
+feels like working for it.  Modern man has first to find the work, and in
+this he is often unsuccessful.  Then misery becomes acute.  This acute
+misery is chronicled daily in the newspapers.  Let several of the
+countless instances be cited.
+
+    In New York City lived a woman, Mary Mead.  She had three children:
+    Mary, one year old; Johanna, two years old; Alice, four years old.
+    Her husband could find no work.  They starved.  They were evicted
+    from their shelter at 160 Steuben Street.  Mary Mead strangled her
+    baby, Mary, one year old; strangled Alice, four years old; failed to
+    strangle Johanna, two years old, and then herself took poison.  Said
+    the father to the police: "Constant poverty had driven my wife
+    insane.  We lived at No. 160 Steuben Street until a week ago, when we
+    were dispossessed.  I could get no work.  I could not even make
+    enough to put food into our mouths.  The babies grew ill and weak.
+    My wife cried nearly all the time."
+
+    "So overwhelmed is the Department of Charities with tens of thousands
+    of applications from men out of work that it finds itself unable to
+    cope with the situation."--_New York Commercial_, January 11, 1905.
+
+In a daily paper, because he cannot get work in order to get something to
+eat, modern man advertises as follows:
+
+    "Young man, good education, unable to obtain employment, will sell to
+    physician and bacteriologist for experimental purposes all right and
+    title to his body.  Address for price, box 3466, _Examiner_."
+
+    "Frank A. Mallin went to the central police station Wednesday night
+    and asked to be locked up on a charge of vagrancy.  He said he had
+    been conducting an unsuccessful search for work for so long that he
+    was sure he must be a vagrant.  In any event, he was so hungry he
+    must be fed.  Police Judge Graham sentenced him to ninety days'
+    imprisonment."--_San Francisco Examiner_.
+
+In a room at the Soto House, 32 Fourth Street, San Francisco, was found
+the body of W. G. Robbins.  He had turned on the gas.  Also was found his
+diary, from which the following extracts are made
+
+    "_March_ 3.--No chance of getting anything here.  What will I do?
+
+    "_March_ 7.--Cannot find anything yet.
+
+    "_March_ 8.--Am living on doughnuts at five cents a day.
+
+    "_March_ 9.--My last quarter gone for room rent.
+
+    "_March_ 10.--God help me.  Have only five cents left.  Can get
+    nothing to do.  What next?  Starvation or--?  I have spent my last
+    nickel to-night.  What shall I do?  Shall it be steal, beg, or die?
+    I have never stolen, begged, or starved in all my fifty years of
+    life, but now I am on the brink--death seems the only refuge.
+
+    "_March_ 11.--Sick all day--burning fever this afternoon.  Had
+    nothing to eat to-day or since yesterday noon.  My head, my head.
+    Good-bye, all."
+
+How fares the child of modern man in this most prosperous of lands?  In
+the city of New York 50,000 children go hungry to school every morning.
+From the same city on January 12, a press despatch was sent out over the
+country of a case reported by Dr. A. E. Daniel, of the New York Infirmary
+for Women and Children.  The case was that of a babe, eighteen months
+old, who earned by its labour fifty cents per week in a tenement
+sweat-shop.
+
+    "On a pile of rags in a room bare of furniture and freezing cold,
+    Mrs. Mary Gallin, dead from starvation, with an emaciated baby four
+    months old crying at her breast, was found this morning at 513 Myrtle
+    Avenue, Brooklyn, by Policeman McConnon of the Flushing Avenue
+    Station.  Huddled together for warmth in another part of the room
+    were the father, James Gallin, and three children ranging from two to
+    eight years of age.  The children gazed at the policeman much as
+    ravenous animals might have done.  They were famished, and there was
+    not a vestige of food in their comfortless home."--_New York
+    Journal_, January 2, 1902.
+
+In the United States 80,000 children are toiling out their lives in the
+textile mills alone.  In the South they work twelve-hour shifts.  They
+never see the day.  Those on the night shift are asleep when the sun
+pours its life and warmth over the world, while those on the day shift
+are at the machines before dawn and return to their miserable dens,
+called "homes," after dark.  Many receive no more than ten cents a day.
+There are babies who work for five and six cents a day.  Those who work
+on the night shift are often kept awake by having cold water dashed in
+their faces.  There are children six years of age who have already to
+their credit eleven months' work on the night shift.  When they become
+sick, and are unable to rise from their beds to go to work, there are men
+employed to go on horseback from house to house, and cajole and bully
+them into arising and going to work.  Ten per cent of them contract
+active consumption.  All are puny wrecks, distorted, stunted, mind and
+body.  Elbert Hubbard says of the child-labourers of the Southern
+cotton-mills:
+
+    "I thought to lift one of the little toilers to ascertain his weight.
+    Straightaway through his thirty-five pounds of skin and bones there
+    ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward to tie a broken
+    thread.  I attracted his attention by a touch, and offered him a
+    silver dime.  He looked at me dumbly from a face that might have
+    belonged to a man of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn, and full of
+    pain it was.  He did not reach for the money--he did not know what it
+    was.  There were dozens of such children in this particular mill.  A
+    physician who was with me said that they would all be dead probably
+    in two years, and their places filled by others--there were plenty
+    more.  Pneumonia carries off most of them.  Their systems are ripe
+    for disease, and when it comes there is no rebound--no response.
+    Medicine simply does not act--nature is whipped, beaten, discouraged,
+    and the child sinks into a stupor and dies."
+
+So fares modern man and the child of modern man in the United States,
+most prosperous and enlightened of all countries on earth.  It must be
+remembered that the instances given are instances only, but they can be
+multiplied myriads of times.  It must also be remembered that what is
+true of the United States is true of all the civilized world.  Such
+misery was not true of the caveman.  Then what has happened?  Has the
+hostile environment of the caveman grown more hostile for his
+descendants?  Has the caveman's natural efficiency of 1 for food-getting
+and shelter-getting diminished in modern man to one-half or one-quarter?
+
+On the contrary, the hostile environment of the caveman has been
+destroyed.  For modern man it no longer exists.  All carnivorous enemies,
+the daily menace of the younger world, have been killed off.  Many of the
+species of prey have become extinct.  Here and there, in secluded
+portions of the world, still linger a few of man's fiercer enemies.  But
+they are far from being a menace to mankind.  Modern man, when he wants
+recreation and change, goes to the secluded portions of the world for a
+hunt.  Also, in idle moments, he wails regretfully at the passing of the
+"big game," which he knows in the not distant future will disappear from
+the earth.
+
+Nor since the day of the caveman has man's efficiency for food-getting
+and shelter-getting diminished.  It has increased a thousandfold.  Since
+the day of the caveman, matter has been mastered.  The secrets of matter
+have been discovered.  Its laws have been formulated.  Wonderful
+artifices have been made, and marvellous inventions, all tending to
+increase tremendously man's natural efficiency of in every food-getting,
+shelter-getting exertion, in farming, mining, manufacturing,
+transportation, and communication.
+
+From the caveman to the hand-workers of three generations ago, the
+increase in efficiency for food- and shelter-getting has been very great.
+But in this day, by machinery, the efficiency of the hand-worker of three
+generations ago has in turn been increased many times.  Formerly it
+required 200 hours of human labour to place 100 tons of ore on a railroad
+car.  To-day, aided by machinery, but two hours of human labour is
+required to do the same task.  The United States Bureau of Labour is
+responsible for the following table, showing the comparatively recent
+increase in man's food- and shelter-getting efficiency:
+
+                        Machine Hours           Hand Hours
+Barley (100 bushels)    9                       211
+Corn (50 bushels        34                      228
+shelled, stalks,
+husks and blades cut
+into fodder)
+Oats (160 bushels)      28                      265
+Wheat (50 bushels)      7                       160
+Loading ore (loading    2                       200
+100 tons iron ore on
+cars)
+Unloading coal          20                      240
+(transferring 200
+tons from canal-boats
+to bins 400 feet
+distant)
+Pitchforks (50          12                      200
+pitchforks, 12-inch
+tines)
+Plough (one landside    3                       118
+plough, oak beams and
+handles)
+
+According to the same authority, under the best conditions for
+organization in farming, labour can produce 20 bushels of wheat for 66
+cents, or 1 bushel for 3.5 cents.  This was done on a bonanza farm of
+10,000 acres in California, and was the average cost of the whole product
+of the farm.  Mr. Carroll D. Wright says that to-day 4,500,000 men, aided
+by machinery, turn out a product that would require the labour of
+40,000,000 men if produced by hand.  Professor Herzog, of Austria, says
+that 5,000,000 people with the machinery of to-day, employed at socially
+useful labour, would be able to supply a population of 20,000,000 people
+with all the necessaries and small luxuries of life by working 1.5 hours
+per day.
+
+This being so, matter being mastered, man's efficiency for food- and
+shelter-getting being increased a thousandfold over the efficiency of the
+caveman, then why is it that millions of modern men live more miserably
+than lived the caveman?  This is the question the revolutionist asks, and
+he asks it of the managing class, the capitalist class.  The capitalist
+class does not answer it.  The capitalist class cannot answer it.
+
+If modern man's food- and shelter-getting efficiency is a thousandfold
+greater than that of the caveman, why, then, are there 10,000,000 people
+in the United States to-day who are not properly sheltered and properly
+fed?  If the child of the caveman did not have to work, why, then,
+to-day, in the United States, are 80,000 children working out their lives
+in the textile factories alone?  If the child of the caveman did not have
+to work, why, then, to-day, in the United States, are there 1,752,187
+child-labourers?
+
+It is a true count in the indictment.  The capitalist class has
+mismanaged, is to-day mismanaging.  In New York City 50,000 children go
+hungry to school, and in New York City there are 1,320 millionaires.  The
+point, however, is not that the mass of mankind is miserable because of
+the wealth the capitalist class has taken to itself.  Far from it.  The
+point really is that the mass of mankind is miserable, not for want of
+the wealth taken by the capitalist class, _but for want of the wealth
+that was never created_.  This wealth was never created because the
+capitalist class managed too wastefully and irrationally.  The capitalist
+class, blind and greedy, grasping madly, has not only not made the best
+of its management, but made the worst of it.  It is a management
+prodigiously wasteful.  This point cannot be emphasized too strongly.
+
+In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the
+caveman, and that modern man's food- and shelter-getting efficiency is a
+thousandfold greater than the caveman's, no other solution is possible
+than that the management is prodigiously wasteful.
+
+With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented,
+a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally
+rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to
+labour more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe
+everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of
+little luxuries to everybody.  There would be no more material want and
+wretchedness, no more children toiling out their lives, no more men and
+women and babes living like beasts and dying like beasts.  Not only would
+matter be mastered, but the machine would be mastered.  In such a day
+incentive would be finer and nobler than the incentive of to-day, which
+is the incentive of the stomach.  No man, woman, or child, would be
+impelled to action by an empty stomach.  On the contrary, they would be
+impelled to action as a child in a spelling match is impelled to action,
+as boys and girls at games, as scientists formulating law, as inventors
+applying law, as artists and sculptors painting canvases and shaping
+clay, as poets and statesmen serving humanity by singing and by
+statecraft.  The spiritual, intellectual, and artistic uplift consequent
+upon such a condition of society would be tremendous.  All the human
+world would surge upward in a mighty wave.
+
+This was the opportunity vouchsafed the capitalist class.  Less blindness
+on its part, less greediness, and a rational management, were all that
+was necessary.  A wonderful era was possible for the human race.  But the
+capitalist class failed.  It made a shambles of civilization.  Nor can
+the capitalist class plead not guilty.  It knew of the opportunity.  Its
+wise men told of the opportunity, its scholars and its scientists told it
+of the opportunity.  All that they said is there to-day in the books,
+just so much damning evidence against it.  It would not listen.  It was
+too greedy.  It rose up (as it rises up to-day), shamelessly, in our
+legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the
+toil of children and babes.  It lulled its conscience to sleep with
+prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities, and allowed the suffering
+and misery of mankind to continue and to increase, in short, the
+capitalist class failed to take advantage of the opportunity.
+
+But the opportunity is still here.  The capitalist class has been tried
+and found wanting.  Remains the working-class to see what it can do with
+the opportunity.  "But the working-class is incapable," says the
+capitalist class.  "What do you know about it?" the working-class
+replies.  "Because you have failed is no reason that we shall fail.
+Furthermore, we are going to have a try at it, anyway.  Seven millions of
+us say so.  And what have you to say to that?"
+
+And what can the capitalist class say?  Grant the incapacity of the
+working-class.  Grant that the indictment and the argument of the
+revolutionists are all wrong.  The 7,000,000 revolutionists remain.
+Their existence is a fact.  Their belief in their capacity, and in their
+indictment and their argument, is a fact.  Their constant growth is a
+fact.  Their intention to destroy present-day society is a fact, as is
+also their intention to take possession of the world with all its wealth
+and machinery and governments.  Moreover, it is a fact that the
+working-class is vastly larger than the capitalist class.
+
+The revolution is a revolution of the working-class.  How can the
+capitalist class, in the minority, stem this tide of revolution?  What
+has it to offer?  What does it offer?  Employers' associations,
+injunctions, civil suits for plundering of the treasuries of the
+labour-unions, clamour and combination for the open shop, bitter and
+shameless opposition to the eight-hour day, strong efforts to defeat all
+reform, child-labour bills, graft in every municipal council, strong
+lobbies and bribery in every legislature for the purchase of capitalist
+legislation, bayonets, machine-guns, policemen's clubs, professional
+strike-breakers and armed Pinkertons--these are the things the capitalist
+class is dumping in front of the tide of revolution, as though, forsooth,
+to hold it back.
+
+The capitalist class is as blind to-day to the menace of the revolution
+as it was blind in the past to its own God-given opportunity.  It cannot
+see how precarious is its position, cannot comprehend the power and the
+portent of the revolution.  It goes on its placid way, prattling sweet
+ideals and dear moralities, and scrambling sordidly for material
+benefits.
+
+No overthrown ruler or class in the past ever considered the revolution
+that overthrew it, and so with the capitalist class of to-day.  Instead
+of compromising, instead of lengthening its lease of life by conciliation
+and by removal of some of the harsher oppressions of the working-class,
+it antagonizes the working-class, drives the working-class into
+revolution.  Every broken strike in recent years, every legally plundered
+trades-union treasury, every closed shop made into an open shop, has
+driven the members of the working-class directly hurt over to socialism
+by hundreds and thousands.  Show a working-man that his union fails, and
+he becomes a revolutionist.  Break a strike with an injunction or
+bankrupt a union with a civil suit, and the working-men hurt thereby
+listen to the siren song of the socialist and are lost for ever to the
+_political capitalist_ parties.
+
+Antagonism never lulled revolution, and antagonism is about all the
+capitalist class offers.  It is true, it offers some few antiquated
+notions which were very efficacious in the past, but which are no longer
+efficacious.  Fourth-of-July liberty in terms of the Declaration of
+Independence and of the French Encyclopaedists is scarcely apposite
+to-day.  It does not appeal to the working-man who has had his head
+broken by a policeman's club, his union treasury bankrupted by a court
+decision, or his job taken away from him by a labour-saving invention.
+Nor does the Constitution of the United States appear so glorious and
+constitutional to the working-man who has experienced a bull-pen or been
+unconstitutionally deported from Colorado.  Nor are this particular
+working-man's hurt feelings soothed by reading in the newspapers that
+both the bull-pen and the deportation were pre-eminently just, legal, and
+constitutional.  "To hell, then, with the Constitution!" says he, and
+another revolutionist has been made--by the capitalist class.
+
+In short, so blind is the capitalist class that it does nothing to
+lengthen its lease of life, while it does everything to shorten it.  The
+capitalist class offers nothing that is clean, noble, and alive.  The
+revolutionists offer everything that is clean, noble, and alive.  They
+offer service, unselfishness, sacrifice, martyrdom--the things that sting
+awake the imagination of the people, touching their hearts with the
+fervour that arises out of the impulse toward good and which is
+essentially religious in its nature.
+
+But the revolutionists blow hot and blow cold.  They offer facts and
+statistics, economics and scientific arguments.  If the working-man be
+merely selfish, the revolutionists show him, mathematically demonstrate
+to him, that his condition will be bettered by the revolution.  If the
+working-man be the higher type, moved by impulses toward right conduct,
+if he have soul and spirit, the revolutionists offer him the things of
+the soul and the spirit, the tremendous things that cannot be measured by
+dollars and cents, nor be held down by dollars and cents.  The
+revolutionist cries out upon wrong and injustice, and preaches
+righteousness.  And, most potent of all, he sings the eternal song of
+human freedom--a song of all lands and all tongues and all time.
+
+Few members of the capitalist class see the revolution.  Most of them are
+too ignorant, and many are too afraid to see it.  It is the same old
+story of every perishing ruling class in the world's history.  Fat with
+power and possession, drunken with success, and made soft by surfeit and
+by cessation of struggle, they are like the drones clustered about the
+honey vats when the worker-bees spring upon them to end their rotund
+existence.
+
+President Roosevelt vaguely sees the revolution, is frightened by it, and
+recoils from seeing it.  As he says: "Above all, we need to remember that
+any kind of class animosity in the political world is, if possible, even
+more wicked, even more destructive to national welfare, than sectional,
+race, or religious animosity."
+
+Class animosity in the political world, President Roosevelt maintains, is
+wicked.  But class animosity in the political world is the preachment of
+the revolutionists.  "Let the class wars in the industrial world
+continue," they say, "but extend the class war to the political world."
+As their leader, Eugene V. Debs says: "So far as this struggle is
+concerned, there is no good capitalist and no bad working-man.  Every
+capitalist is your enemy and every working-man is your friend."
+
+Here is class animosity in the political world with a vengeance.  And
+here is revolution.  In 1888 there were only 2,000 revolutionists of this
+type in the United States; in 1900 there were 127,000 revolutionists; in
+1904, 435,000 revolutionists.  Wickedness of the President Roosevelt
+definition evidently flourishes and increases in the United States.
+Quite so, for it is the revolution that flourishes and increases.
+
+Here and there a member of the capitalist class catches a clear glimpse
+of the revolution, and raises a warning cry.  But his class does not
+heed.  President Eliot of Harvard raised such a cry:
+
+"I am forced to believe there is a present danger of socialism never
+before so imminent in America in so dangerous a form, because never
+before imminent in so well organized a form.  The danger lies in the
+obtaining control of the trades-unions by the socialists."  And the
+capitalist employers, instead of giving heed to the warnings, are
+perfecting their strike-breaking organization and combining more strongly
+than ever for a general assault upon that dearest of all things to the
+trades-unions--the closed shop.  In so far as this assault succeeds, by
+just that much will the capitalist class shorten its lease of life.  It
+is the old, old story, over again and over again.  The drunken drones
+still cluster greedily about the honey vats.
+
+Possibly one of the most amusing spectacles of to-day is the attitude of
+the American press toward the revolution.  It is also a pathetic
+spectacle.  It compels the onlooker to be aware of a distinct loss of
+pride in his species.  Dogmatic utterance from the mouth of ignorance may
+make gods laugh, but it should make men weep.  And the American editors
+(in the general instance) are so impressive about it!  The old
+"divide-up," "men-are-_not_-born-free-and-equal," propositions are
+enunciated gravely and sagely, as things white-hot and new from the forge
+of human wisdom.  Their feeble vapourings show no more than a schoolboy's
+comprehension of the nature of the revolution.  Parasites themselves on
+the capitalist class, serving the capitalist class by moulding public
+opinion, they, too, cluster drunkenly about the honey vats.
+
+Of course, this is true only of the large majority of American editors.
+To say that it is true of all of them would be to cast too great obloquy
+upon the human race.  Also, it would be untrue, for here and there an
+occasional editor does see clearly--and in his case, ruled by
+stomach-incentive, is usually afraid to say what he thinks about it.  So
+far as the science and the sociology of the revolution are concerned, the
+average editor is a generation or so behind the facts.  He is
+intellectually slothful, accepts no facts until they are accepted by the
+majority, and prides himself upon his conservatism.  He is an instinctive
+optimist, prone to believe that what ought to be, is.  The revolutionist
+gave this up long ago, and believes not that what ought to be, is, but
+what is, is, and that it may not be what it ought to be at all.
+
+Now and then, rubbing his eyes, vigorously, an editor catches a sudden
+glimpse of the revolution and breaks out in naive volubility, as, for
+instance, the one who wrote the following in the _Chicago Chronicle_:
+"American socialists are revolutionists.  They know that they are
+revolutionists.  It is high time that other people should appreciate the
+fact."  A white-hot, brand-new discovery, and he proceeded to shout it
+out from the housetops that we, forsooth, were revolutionists.  Why, it
+is just what we have been doing all these years--shouting it out from the
+housetops that we are revolutionists, and stop us who can.
+
+The time should be past for the mental attitude: "Revolution is
+atrocious.  Sir, there is no revolution."  Likewise should the time be
+past for that other familiar attitude: "Socialism is slavery.  Sir, it
+will never be."  It is no longer a question of dialectics, theories, and
+dreams.  There is no question about it.  The revolution is a fact.  It is
+here now.  Seven million revolutionists, organized, working day and
+night, are preaching the revolution--that passionate gospel, the
+Brotherhood of Man.  Not only is it a cold-blooded economic propaganda,
+but it is in essence a religious propaganda with a fervour in it of Paul
+and Christ.  The capitalist class has been indicted.  It has failed in
+its management and its management is to be taken away from it.  Seven
+million men of the working-class say that they are going to get the rest
+of the working-class to join with them and take the management away.  The
+revolution is here, now.  Stop it who can.
+
+SACRAMENTO RIVER.
+_March_ 1905.
+
+
+
+
+THE SOMNAMBULISTS
+
+
+    "'Tis only fools speak evil of the clay--
+    The very stars are made of clay like mine."
+
+The mightiest and absurdest sleep-walker on the planet!  Chained in the
+circle of his own imaginings, man is only too keen to forget his origin
+and to shame that flesh of his that bleeds like all flesh and that is
+good to eat.  Civilization (which is part of the circle of his
+imaginings) has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled
+animal known as man.  It is a very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man
+constituted that he squirms on his bit of achievement and believes he is
+garbed in armour-plate.
+
+Yet man to-day is the same man that drank from his enemy's skull in the
+dark German forests, that sacked cities, and stole his women from
+neighbouring clans like any howling aborigine.  The flesh-and-blood body
+of man has not changed in the last several thousand years.  Nor has his
+mind changed.  There is no faculty of the mind of man to-day that did not
+exist in the minds of the men of long ago.  Man has to-day no concept
+that is too wide and deep and abstract for the mind of Plato or Aristotle
+to grasp.  Give to Plato or Aristotle the same fund of knowledge that man
+to-day has access to, and Plato and Aristotle would reason as profoundly
+as the man of to-day and would achieve very similar conclusions.
+
+It is the same old animal man, smeared over, it is true, with a veneer,
+thin and magical, that makes him dream drunken dreams of self-exaltation
+and to sneer at the flesh and the blood of him beneath the smear.  The
+raw animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in
+the crust of the earth.  As he persuades himself against the latter till
+it arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against
+the former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands
+undisguised, a brute like any other brute.
+
+Starve him, let him miss six meals, and see gape through the veneer the
+hungry maw of the animal beneath.  Get between him and the female of his
+kind upon whom his mating instinct is bent, and see his eyes blaze like
+an angry cat's, hear in his throat the scream of wild stallions, and
+watch his fists clench like an orang-outang's.  Maybe he will even beat
+his chest.  Touch his silly vanity, which he exalts into high-sounding
+pride--call him a liar, and behold the red animal in him that makes a
+hand clutching that is quick like the tensing of a tiger's claw, or an
+eagle's talon, incarnate with desire to rip and tear.
+
+It is not necessary to call him a liar to touch his vanity.  Tell a
+plains Indian that he has failed to steal horses from the neighbouring
+tribe, or tell a man living in bourgeois society that he has failed to
+pay his bills at the neighbouring grocer's, and the results are the same.
+Each, plains Indian and bourgeois, is smeared with a slightly different
+veneer, that is all.  It requires a slightly different stick to scrape it
+off.  The raw animals beneath are identical.
+
+But intrude not violently upon man, leave him alone in his somnambulism,
+and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life up which he has
+climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the universe, dreams sordidly
+about his own particular god, and maunders metaphysically about his own
+blessed immortality.
+
+True, he lives in a real world, breathes real air, eats real food, and
+sleeps under real blankets, in order to keep real cold away.  And there's
+the rub.  He has to effect adjustments with the real world and at the
+same time maintain the sublimity of his dream.  The result of this
+admixture of the real and the unreal is confusion thrice confounded.  The
+man that walks the real world in his sleep becomes such a tangled mass of
+contradictions, paradoxes, and lies that he has to lie to himself in
+order to stay asleep.
+
+In passing, it may be noted that some men are remarkably constituted in
+this matter of self-deception.  They excel at deceiving themselves.  They
+believe, and they help others to believe.  It becomes their function in
+society, and some of them are paid large salaries for helping their
+fellow-men to believe, for instance, that they are not as other animals;
+for helping the king to believe, and his parasites and drudges as well,
+that he is God's own manager over so many square miles of earth-crust;
+for helping the merchant and banking classes to believe that society
+rests on their shoulders, and that civilization would go to smash if they
+got out from under and ceased from their exploitations and petty
+pilferings.
+
+Prize-fighting is terrible.  This is the dictum of the man who walks in
+his sleep.  He prates about it, and writes to the papers about it, and
+worries the legislators about it.  There is nothing of the brute about
+_him_.  He is a sublimated soul that treads the heights and breathes
+refined ether--in self-comparison with the prize-fighter.  The man who
+walks in his sleep ignores the flesh and all its wonderful play of
+muscle, joint, and nerve.  He feels that there is something godlike in
+the mysterious deeps of his being, denies his relationship with the
+brute, and proceeds to go forth into the world and express by deeds that
+something godlike within him.
+
+He sits at a desk and chases dollars through the weeks and months and
+years of his life.  To him the life godlike resolves into a problem
+something like this: _Since the great mass of men toil at producing
+wealth_, _how best can he get between the great mass of men and the
+wealth they produce_, _and get a slice for himself_?  With tremendous
+exercise of craft, deceit, and guile, he devotes his life godlike to this
+purpose.  As he succeeds, his somnambulism grows profound.  He bribes
+legislatures, buys judges, "controls" primaries, and then goes and hires
+other men to tell him that it is all glorious and right.  And the
+funniest thing about it is that this arch-deceiver believes all that they
+tell him.  He reads only the newspapers and magazines that tell him what
+he wants to be told, listens only to the biologists who tell him that he
+is the finest product of the struggle for existence, and herds only with
+his own kind, where, like the monkey-folk, they teeter up and down and
+tell one another how great they are.
+
+In the course of his life godlike he ignores the flesh--until he gets to
+table.  He raises his hands in horror at the thought of the brutish
+prize-fighter, and then sits down and gorges himself on roast beef, rare
+and red, running blood under every sawing thrust of the implement called
+a knife.  He has a piece of cloth which he calls a napkin, with which he
+wipes from his lips, and from the hair on his lips, the greasy juices of
+the meat.
+
+He is fastidiously nauseated at the thought of two prize-fighters
+bruising each other with their fists; and at the same time, because it
+will cost him some money, he will refuse to protect the machines in his
+factory, though he is aware that the lack of such protection every year
+mangles, batters, and destroys out of all humanness thousands of
+working-men, women, and children.  He will chatter about things refined
+and spiritual and godlike like himself, and he and the men who herd with
+him will calmly adulterate the commodities they put upon the market and
+which annually kill tens of thousands of babies and young children.
+
+He will recoil at the suggestion of the horrid spectacle of two men
+confronting each other with gloved hands in the roped arena, and at the
+same time he will clamour for larger armies and larger navies, for more
+destructive war machines, which, with a single discharge, will disrupt
+and rip to pieces more human beings than have died in the whole history
+of prize-fighting.  He will bribe a city council for a franchise or a
+state legislature for a commercial privilege; but he has never been
+known, in all his sleep-walking history, to bribe any legislative body in
+order to achieve any moral end, such as, for instance, abolition of
+prize-fighting, child-labour laws, pure food bills, or old age pensions.
+
+"Ah, but we do not stand for the commercial life," object the refined,
+scholarly, and professional men.  They are also sleep-walkers.  They do
+not stand for the commercial life, but neither do they stand against it
+with all their strength.  They submit to it, to the brutality and carnage
+of it.  They develop classical economists who announce that the only
+possible way for men and women to get food and shelter is by the existing
+method.  They produce university professors, men who claim the _role_ of
+teachers, and who at the same time claim that the austere ideal of
+learning is passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence.  They serve
+the men who lead the commercial life, give to their sons somnambulistic
+educations, preach that sleep-walking is the only way to walk, and that
+the persons who walk otherwise are atavisms or anarchists.  They paint
+pictures for the commercial men, write books for them, sing songs for
+them, act plays for them, and dose them with various drugs when their
+bodies have grown gross or dyspeptic from overeating and lack of
+exercise.
+
+Then there are the good, kind somnambulists who don't prize-fight, who
+don't play the commercial game, who don't teach and preach somnambulism,
+who don't do anything except live on the dividends that are coined out of
+the wan, white fluid that runs in the veins of little children, out of
+mothers' tears, the blood of strong men, and the groans and sighs of the
+old.  The receiver is as bad as the thief--ay, and the thief is finer
+than the receiver; he at least has the courage to run the risk.  But the
+good, kind people who don't do anything won't believe this, and the
+assertion will make them angry--for a moment.  They possess several magic
+phrases, which are like the incantations of a voodoo doctor driving
+devils away.  The phrases that the good, kind people repeat to themselves
+and to one another sound like "abstinence," "temperance," "thrift,"
+"virtue."  Sometimes they say them backward, when they sound like
+"prodigality," "drunkenness," "wastefulness," and "immorality."  They do
+not really know the meaning of these phrases, but they think they do, and
+that is all that is necessary for somnambulists.  The calm repetition of
+such phrases invariably drives away the waking devils and lulls to
+slumber.
+
+Our statesmen sell themselves and their country for gold.  Our municipal
+servants and state legislators commit countless treasons.  The world of
+graft!  The world of betrayal!  The world of somnambulism, whose exalted
+and sensitive citizens are outraged by the knockouts of the prize-ring,
+and who annually not merely knock out, but kill, thousands of babies and
+children by means of child labour and adulterated food.  Far better to
+have the front of one's face pushed in by the fist of an honest
+prize-fighter than to have the lining of one's stomach corroded by the
+embalmed beef of a dishonest manufacturer.
+
+In a prize-fight men are classed.  A lightweight fights with a
+light-weight; he never fights with a heavy-weight, and foul blows are not
+allowed.  Yet in the world of the somnambulists, where soar the
+sublimated spirits, there are no classes, and foul blows are continually
+struck and never disallowed.  Only they are not called foul blows.  The
+world of claw and fang and fist and club has passed away--so say the
+somnambulists.  A rebate is not an elongated claw.  A Wall Street raid is
+not a fang slash.  Dummy boards of directors and fake accountings are not
+foul blows of the fist under the belt.  A present of coal stock by a mine
+operator to a railroad official is not a claw rip to the bowels of a
+rival mine operator.  The hundred million dollars with which a
+combination beats down to his knees a man with a million dollars is not a
+club.  The man who walks in his sleep says it is not a club.  So say all
+of his kind with which he herds.  They gather together and solemnly and
+gloatingly make and repeat certain noises that sound like "discretion,"
+"acumen," "initiative," "enterprise."  These noises are especially
+gratifying when they are made backward.  They mean the same things, but
+they sound different.  And in either case, forward or backward, the
+spirit of the dream is not disturbed.
+
+When a man strikes a foul blow in the prize-ring the fight is immediately
+stopped, he is declared the loser, and he is hissed by the audience as he
+leaves the ring.  But when a man who walks in his sleep strikes a foul
+blow he is immediately declared the victor and awarded the prize; and
+amid acclamations he forthwith turns his prize into a seat in the United
+States Senate, into a grotesque palace on Fifth Avenue, and into endowed
+churches, universities and libraries, to say nothing of subsidized
+newspapers, to proclaim his greatness.
+
+The red animal in the somnambulist will out.  He decries the carnal
+combat of the prize-ring, and compels the red animal to spiritual combat.
+The poisoned lie, the nasty, gossiping tongue, the brutality of the
+unkind epigram, the business and social nastiness and treachery of
+to-day--these are the thrusts and scratches of the red animal when the
+somnambulist is in charge.  They are not the upper cuts and short arm
+jabs and jolts and slugging blows of the spirit.  They are the foul blows
+of the spirit that have never been disbarred, as the foul blows of the
+prize-ring have been disbarred.  (Would it not be preferable for a man to
+strike one full on the mouth with his fist than for him to tell a lie
+about one, or malign those that are nearest and dearest?)
+
+For these are the crimes of the spirit, and, alas! they are so much more
+frequent than blows on the mouth.  And whosoever exalts the spirit over
+the flesh, by his own creed avers that a crime of the spirit is vastly
+more terrible than a crime of the flesh.  Thus stand the somnambulists
+convicted by their own creed--only they are not real men, alive and
+awake, and they proceed to mutter magic phrases that dispel all doubt as
+to their undiminished and eternal gloriousness.
+
+It is well enough to let the ape and tiger die, but it is hardly fair to
+kill off the natural and courageous apes and tigers and allow the spawn
+of cowardly apes and tigers to live.  The prize-fighting apes and tigers
+will die all in good time in the course of natural evolution, but they
+will not die so long as the cowardly, somnambulistic apes and tigers club
+and scratch and slash.  This is not a brief for the prize-fighter.  It is
+a blow of the fist between the eyes of the somnambulists, teetering up
+and down, muttering magic phrases, and thanking God that they are not as
+other animals.
+
+GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
+_June_ 1900.
+
+
+
+
+THE DIGNITY OF DOLLARS
+
+
+Man is a blind, helpless creature.  He looks back with pride upon his
+goodly heritage of the ages, and yet obeys unwittingly every mandate of
+that heritage; for it is incarnate with him, and in it are embedded the
+deepest roots of his soul.  Strive as he will, he cannot escape
+it--unless he be a genius, one of those rare creations to whom alone is
+granted the privilege of doing entirely new and original things in
+entirely new and original ways.  But the common clay-born man, possessing
+only talents, may do only what has been done before him.  At the best, if
+he work hard, and cherish himself exceedingly, he may duplicate any or
+all previous performances of his kind; he may even do some of them
+better; but there he stops, the composite hand of his whole ancestry
+bearing heavily upon him.
+
+And again, in the matter of his ideas, which have been thrust upon him,
+and which he has been busily garnering from the great world ever since
+the day when his eyes first focussed and he drew, startled, against the
+warm breast of his mother--the tyranny of these he cannot shake off.
+Servants of his will, they at the same time master him.  They may not
+coerce genius, but they dictate and sway every action of the clay-born.
+If he hesitate on the verge of a new departure, they whip him back into
+the well-greased groove; if he pause, bewildered, at sight of some
+unexplored domain, they rise like ubiquitous finger-posts and direct him
+by the village path to the communal meadow.  And he permits these things,
+and continues to permit them, for he cannot help them, and he is a slave.
+Out of his ideas he may weave cunning theories, beautiful ideals; but he
+is working with ropes of sand.  At the slightest stress, the last least
+bit of cohesion flits away, and each idea flies apart from its fellows,
+while all clamour that he do this thing, or think this thing, in the
+ancient and time-honoured way.  He is only a clay-born; so he bends his
+neck.  He knows further that the clay-born are a pitiful, pitiless
+majority, and that he may do nothing which they do not do.
+
+It is only in some way such as this that we may understand and explain
+the dignity which attaches itself to dollars.  In the watches of the
+night, we may assure ourselves that there is no such dignity; but
+jostling with our fellows in the white light of day, we find that it does
+exist, and that we ourselves measure ourselves by the dollars we happen
+to possess.  They give us confidence and carriage and dignity--ay, a
+personal dignity which goes down deeper than the garments with which we
+hide our nakedness.  The world, when it knows nothing else of him,
+measures a man by his clothes; but the man himself, if he be neither a
+genius nor a philosopher, but merely a clay-born, measures himself by his
+pocket-book.  He cannot help it, and can no more fling it from him than
+can the bashful young man his self-consciousness when crossing a ballroom
+floor.
+
+I remember once absenting myself from civilization for weary months.
+When I returned, it was to a strange city in another country.  The people
+were but slightly removed from my own breed, and they spoke the same
+tongue, barring a certain barbarous accent which I learned was far older
+than the one imbibed by me with my mother's milk.  A fur cap, soiled and
+singed by many camp-fires, half sheltered the shaggy tendrils of my uncut
+hair.  My foot-gear was of walrus hide, cunningly blended with seal gut.
+The remainder of my dress was as primal and uncouth.  I was a sight to
+give merriment to gods and men.  Olympus must have roared at my coming.
+The world, knowing me not, could judge me by my clothes alone.  But I
+refused to be so judged.  My spiritual backbone stiffened, and I held my
+head high, looking all men in the eyes.  And I did these things, not that
+I was an egotist, not that I was impervious to the critical glances of my
+fellows, but because of a certain hogskin belt, plethoric and
+sweat-bewrinkled, which buckled next the skin above the hips.  Oh, it's
+absurd, I grant, but had that belt not been so circumstanced, and so
+situated, I should have shrunk away into side streets and back alleys,
+walking humbly and avoiding all gregarious humans except those who were
+likewise abroad without belts.  Why?  I do not know, save that in such
+way did my fathers before me.
+
+Viewed in the light of sober reason, the whole thing was preposterous.
+But I walked down the gang-plank with the mien of a hero, of a barbarian
+who knew himself to be greater than the civilization he invaded.  I was
+possessed of the arrogance of a Roman governor.  At last I knew what it
+was to be born to the purple, and I took my seat in the hotel carriage as
+though it were my chariot about to proceed with me to the imperial
+palace.  People discreetly dropped their eyes before my proud gaze, and
+into their hearts I know I forced the query, What manner of man can this
+mortal be?  I was superior to convention, and the very garb which
+otherwise would have damned me tended toward my elevation.  And all this
+was due, not to my royal lineage, nor to the deeds I had done and the
+champions I had overthrown, but to a certain hogskin belt buckled next
+the skin.  The sweat of months was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it
+was not a creation such as would appeal to the aesthetic mind; but it was
+plethoric.  There was the arcanum; each yellow grain conduced to my
+exaltation, and the sum of these grains was the sum of my mightiness.
+Had they been less, just so would have been my stature; more, and I
+should have reached the sky.
+
+And this was my royal progress through that most loyal city.  I purchased
+a host of things from the tradespeople, and bought me such pleasures and
+diversions as befitted one who had long been denied.  I scattered my gold
+lavishly, nor did I chaffer over prices in mart or exchange.  And,
+because of these things I did, I demanded homage.  Nor was it refused.  I
+moved through wind-swept groves of limber backs; across sunny glades,
+lighted by the beaming rays from a thousand obsequious eyes; and when I
+tired of this, basked on the greensward of popular approval.  Money was
+very good, I thought, and for the time was content.  But there rushed
+upon me the words of Erasmus, "When I get some money I shall buy me some
+Greek books, and afterwards some clothes," and a great shame wrapped me
+around.  But, luckily for my soul's welfare, I reflected and was saved.
+By the clearer vision vouchsafed me, I beheld Erasmus, fire-flashing,
+heaven-born, while I--I was merely a clay-born, a son of earth.  For a
+giddy moment I had forgotten this, and tottered.  And I rolled over on my
+greensward, caught a glimpse of a regiment of undulating backs, and
+thanked my particular gods that such moods of madness were passing brief.
+
+But on another day, receiving with kingly condescension the service of my
+good subjects' backs, I remembered the words of another man, long since
+laid away, who was by birth a nobleman, by nature a philosopher and a
+gentleman, and who by circumstance yielded up his head upon the block.
+"That a man of lead," he once remarked, "who has no more sense than a log
+of wood, and is as bad as he is foolish, should have many wise and good
+men to serve him, only because he has a great heap of that metal; and
+that if, by some accident or trick of law (which sometimes produces as
+great changes as chance itself), all this wealth should pass from the
+master to the meanest varlet of his whole family, he himself would very
+soon become one of his servants, as if he were a thing that belonged to
+his wealth, and so was bound to follow its fortune."
+
+And when I had remembered this much, I unwisely failed to pause and
+reflect.  So I gathered my belongings together, cinched my hogskin belt
+tight about me, and went away to my own country.  It was a very foolish
+thing to do.  I am sure it was.  But when I had recovered my reason, I
+fell upon my particular gods and berated them mightily, and as penance
+for their watchlessness placed them away amongst dust and cobwebs.  Oh
+no, not for long.  They are again enshrined, as bright and polished as of
+yore, and my destiny is once more in their keeping.
+
+It is given that travail and vicissitude mark time to man's footsteps as
+he stumbles onward toward the grave; and it is well.  Without the bitter
+one may not know the sweet.  The other day--nay, it was but yesterday--I
+fell before the rhythm of fortune.  The inexorable pendulum had swung the
+counter direction, and there was upon me an urgent need.  The hogskin
+belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird my loins.  From my window
+I could descry, at no great distance, a very ordinary mortal of a man,
+working industriously among his cabbages.  I thought: Here am I, capable
+of teaching him much concerning the field wherein he labours--the
+nitrogenic--why of the fertilizer, the alchemy of the sun, the
+microscopic cell-structure of the plant, the cryptic chemistry of root
+and runner--but thereat he straightened his work-wearied back and rested.
+His eyes wandered over what he had produced in the sweat of his brow,
+then on to mine.  And as he stood there drearily, he became reproach
+incarnate.  "Unstable as water," he said (I am sure he did)--"unstable as
+water, thou shalt not excel.  Man, where are _your_ cabbages?"
+
+I shrank back.  Then I waxed rebellious.  I refused to answer the
+question.  He had no right to ask it, and his presence was an affront
+upon the landscape.  And a dignity entered into me, and my neck was
+stiffened, my head poised.  I gathered together certain certificates of
+goods and chattels, pointed my heel towards him and his cabbages, and
+journeyed townward.  I was yet a man.  There was naught in those
+certificates to be ashamed of.  But alack-a-day!  While my heels thrust
+the cabbage-man beyond the horizon, my toes were drawing me, faltering,
+like a timid old beggar, into a roaring spate of humanity--men, women,
+and children without end.  They had no concern with me, nor I with them.
+I knew it; I felt it.  Like She, after her fire-bath in the womb of the
+world, I dwindled in my own sight.  My feet were uncertain and heavy, and
+my soul became as a meal sack, limp with emptiness and tied in the
+middle.  People looked upon me scornfully, pitifully, reproachfully.  (I
+can swear they did.)  In every eye I read the question, Man, where are
+your cabbages?
+
+So I avoided their looks, shrinking close to the kerbstone and by furtive
+glances directing my progress.  At last I came hard by the place, and
+peering stealthily to the right and left that none who knew might behold
+me, I entered hurriedly, in the manner of one committing an abomination.
+'Fore God!  I had done no evil, nor had I wronged any man, nor did I
+contemplate evil; yet was I aware of evil.  Why?  I do not know, save
+that there goes much dignity with dollars, and being devoid of the one I
+was destitute of the other.  The person I sought practised a profession
+as ancient as the oracles but far more lucrative.  It is mentioned in
+Exodus; so it must have been created soon after the foundations of the
+world; and despite the thunder of ecclesiastics and the mailed hand of
+kings and conquerors, it has endured even to this day.  Nor is it unfair
+to presume that the accounts of this most remarkable business will not be
+closed until the Trumps of Doom are sounded and all things brought to
+final balance.
+
+Wherefore it was in fear and trembling, and with great modesty of spirit,
+that I entered the Presence.  To confess that I was shocked were to do my
+feelings an injustice.  Perhaps the blame may be shouldered upon Shylock,
+Fagin, and their ilk; but I had conceived an entirely different type of
+individual.  This man--why, he was clean to look at, his eyes were blue,
+with the tired look of scholarly lucubrations, and his skin had the
+normal pallor of sedentary existence.  He was reading a book, sober and
+leather-bound, while on his finely moulded, intellectual head reposed a
+black skull-cap.  For all the world his look and attitude were those of a
+college professor.  My heart gave a great leap.  Here was hope!  But no;
+he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, searching with the chill of
+space till my financial status stood before him shivering and ashamed.  I
+communed with myself: By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has
+been prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery.  His nerve
+centres of judgment and will have not been employed in solving the
+problems of life, but in maintaining his own solvency by the insolvency
+of others.  He trades upon sorrow and draws a livelihood from misfortune.
+He transmutes tears into treasure, and from nakedness and hunger garbs
+himself in clean linen and develops the round of his belly.  He is a
+bloodsucker and a vampire.  He lays unholy hands on heaven and hell at
+cent. per cent., and his very existence is a sacrilege and a blasphemy.
+And yet here am I, wilting before him, an arrant coward, with no respect
+for him and less for myself.  Why should this shame be?  Let me rouse in
+my strength and smite him, and, by so doing, wipe clean one offensive
+page.
+
+But no.  As I said, he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, and in it
+was the aristocrat's undisguised contempt for the _canaille_.  Behind him
+was the solid phalanx of a bourgeois society.  Law and order upheld him,
+while I titubated, cabbageless, on the ragged edge.  Moreover, he was
+possessed of a formula whereby to extract juice from a flattened lemon,
+and he would do business with me.
+
+I told him my desires humbly, in quavering syllables.  In return, he
+craved my antecedents and residence, pried into my private life,
+insolently demanded how many children had I and did I live in wedlock,
+and asked divers other unseemly and degrading questions.  Ay, I was
+treated like a thief convicted before the act, till I produced my
+certificates of goods and chattels aforementioned.  Never had they
+appeared so insignificant and paltry as then, when he sniffed over them
+with the air of one disdainfully doing a disagreeable task.  It is said,
+"Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of
+victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury"; but he evidently
+was not my brother, for he demanded seventy per cent.  I put my signature
+to certain indentures, received my pottage, and fled from his presence.
+
+Faugh!  I was glad to be quit of it.  How good the outside air was!  I
+only prayed that neither my best friend nor my worst enemy should ever
+become aware of what had just transpired.  Ere I had gone a block I
+noticed that the sun had brightened perceptibly, the street become less
+sordid, the gutter mud less filthy.  In people's eyes the cabbage
+question no longer brooded.  And there was a spring to my body, an
+elasticity of step as I covered the pavement.  Within me coursed an
+unwonted sap, and I felt as though I were about to burst out into leaves
+and buds and green things.  My brain was clear and refreshed.  There was
+a new strength to my arm.  My nerves were tingling and I was a-pulse with
+the times.  All men were my brothers.  Save one--yes, save one.  I would
+go back and wreck the establishment.  I would disrupt that leather-bound
+volume, violate that black skullcap, burn the accounts.  But before fancy
+could father the act, I recollected myself and all which had passed.  Nor
+did I marvel at my new-horn might, at my ancient dignity which had
+returned.  There was a tinkling chink as I ran the yellow pieces through
+my fingers, and with the golden music rippling round me I caught a deeper
+insight into the mystery of things.
+
+OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
+_February_ 1900.
+
+
+
+
+GOLIAH
+
+
+In 1924--to be precise, on the morning of January 3--the city of San
+Francisco awoke to read in one of its daily papers a curious letter,
+which had been received by Walter Bassett and which had evidently been
+written by some crank.  Walter Bassett was the greatest captain of
+industry west of the Rockies, and was one of the small group that
+controlled the nation in everything but name.  As such, he was the
+recipient of lucubrations from countless cranks; but this particular
+lucubration was so different from the average ruck of similar letters
+that, instead of putting it into the waste-basket, he had turned it over
+to a reporter.  It was signed "Goliah," and the superscription gave his
+address as "Palgrave Island."  The letter was as follows:
+
+    "MR. WALTER BASSETT,
+    "DEAR SIR:
+
+    "I am inviting you, with nine of your fellow-captains of industry, to
+    visit me here on my island for the purpose of considering plans for
+    the reconstruction of society upon a more rational basis.  Up to the
+    present, social evolution has been a blind and aimless, blundering
+    thing.  The time has come for a change.  Man has risen from the
+    vitalized slime of the primeval sea to the mastery of matter; but he
+    has not yet mastered society.  Man is to-day as much the slave to his
+    collective stupidity, as a hundred thousand generations ago he was a
+    slave to matter.
+
+    "There are two theoretical methods whereby man may become the master
+    of society, and make of society an intelligent and efficacious device
+    for the pursuit and capture of happiness and laughter.  The first
+    theory advances the proposition that no government can be wiser or
+    better than the people that compose that government; that reform and
+    development must spring from the individual; that in so far as the
+    individuals become wiser and better, by that much will their
+    government become wiser and better; in short, that the majority of
+    individuals must become wiser and better, before their government
+    becomes wiser and better.  The mob, the political convention, the
+    abysmal brutality and stupid ignorance of all concourses of people,
+    give the lie to this theory.  In a mob the collective intelligence
+    and mercy is that of the least intelligent and most brutal members
+    that compose the mob.  On the other hand, a thousand passengers will
+    surrender themselves to the wisdom and discretion of the captain,
+    when their ship is in a storm on the sea.  In such matter, he is the
+    wisest and most experienced among them.
+
+    "The second theory advances the proposition that the majority of the
+    people are not pioneers, that they are weighted down by the inertia
+    of the established; that the government that is representative of
+    them represents only their feebleness, and futility, and brutishness;
+    that this blind thing called government is not the serf of their
+    wills, but that they are the serfs of it; in short, speaking always
+    of the great mass, that they do not make government, but that
+    government makes them, and that government is and has been a stupid
+    and awful monster, misbegotten of the glimmerings of intelligence
+    that come from the inertia-crushed mass.
+
+    "Personally, I incline to the second theory.  Also, I am impatient.
+    For a hundred thousand generations, from the first social groups of
+    our savage forbears, government has remained a monster.  To-day, the
+    inertia-crushed mass has less laughter in it than ever before.  In
+    spite of man's mastery of matter, human suffering and misery and
+    degradation mar the fair world.
+
+    "Wherefore I have decided to step in and become captain of this
+    world-ship for a while.  I have the intelligence and the wide vision
+    of the skilled expert.  Also, I have the power.  I shall be obeyed.
+    The men of all the world shall perform my bidding and make
+    governments so that they shall become laughter-producers.  These
+    modelled governments I have in mind shall not make the people happy,
+    wise, and noble by decree; but they shall give opportunity for the
+    people to become happy, wise, and noble.
+
+    "I have spoken.  I have invited you, and nine of your
+    fellow-captains, to confer with me.  On March third the yacht
+    _Energon_ will sail from San Francisco.  You are requested to be on
+    board the night before.  This is serious.  The affairs of the world
+    must be handled for a time by a strong hand.  Mine is that strong
+    hand.  If you fail to obey my summons, you will die.  Candidly, I do
+    not expect that you will obey.  But your death for failure to obey
+    will cause obedience on the part of those I subsequently summon.  You
+    will have served a purpose.  And please remember that I have no
+    unscientific sentimentality about the value of human life.  I carry
+    always in the background of my consciousness the innumerable billions
+    of lives that are to laugh and be happy in future aeons on the earth.
+
+    "Yours for the reconstruction of society,
+
+                                                                 "GOLIAH."
+
+The publication of this letter did not cause even local amusement.  Men
+might have smiled to themselves as they read it, but it was so palpably
+the handiwork of a crank that it did not merit discussion.  Interest did
+not arouse till next morning.  An Associated Press despatch to the
+Eastern states, followed by interviews by eager-nosed reporters, had
+brought out the names of the other nine captains of industry who had
+received similar letters, but who had not thought the matter of
+sufficient importance to be made public.  But the interest aroused was
+mild, and it would have died out quickly had not Gabberton cartooned a
+chronic presidential aspirant as "Goliah."  Then came the song that was
+sung hilariously from sea to sea, with the refrain, "Goliah will catch
+you if you don't watch out."
+
+The weeks passed and the incident was forgotten.  Walter Bassett had
+forgotten it likewise; but on the evening of February 22, he was called
+to the telephone by the Collector of the Port.  "I just wanted to tell
+you," said the latter, "that the yacht _Energon_ has arrived and gone to
+anchor in the stream off Pier Seven."
+
+What happened that night Walter Bassett has never divulged.  But it is
+known that he rode down in his auto to the water front, chartered one of
+Crowley's launches, and was put aboard the strange yacht.  It is further
+known that when he returned to the shore, three hours later, he
+immediately despatched a sheaf of telegrams to his nine fellow-captains
+of industry who had received letters from Goliah.  These telegrams were
+similarly worded, and read: "The yacht _Energon_ has arrived.  There is
+something in this.  I advise you to come."
+
+Bassett was laughed at for his pains.  It was a huge laugh that went up
+(for his telegrams had been made public), and the popular song on Goliah
+revived and became more popular than ever.  Goliah and Bassett were
+cartooned and lampooned unmercifully, the former, as the Old Man of the
+Sea, riding on the latter's neck.  The laugh tittered and rippled through
+clubs and social circles, was restrainedly merry in the editorial
+columns, and broke out in loud guffaws in the comic weeklies.  There was
+a serious side as well, and Bassett's sanity was gravely questioned by
+many, and especially by his business associates.
+
+Bassett had ever been a short-tempered man, and after he sent the second
+sheaf of telegrams to his brother captains, and had been laughed at
+again, he remained silent.  In this second sheaf he had said: "Come, I
+implore you.  As you value your life, come."  He arranged all his
+business affairs for an absence, and on the night of March 2 went on
+board the _Energon_.  The latter, properly cleared, sailed next morning.
+And next morning the newsboys in every city and town were crying "Extra."
+
+In the slang of the day, Goliah had delivered the goods.  The nine
+captains of industry who had failed to accept his invitation were dead.
+A sort of violent disintegration of the tissues was the report of the
+various autopsies held on the bodies of the slain millionaires; yet the
+surgeons and physicians (the most highly skilled in the land had
+participated) would not venture the opinion that the men had been slain.
+Much less would they venture the conclusion, "at the hands of parties
+unknown."  It was all too mysterious.  They were stunned.  Their
+scientific credulity broke down.  They had no warrant in the whole domain
+of science for believing that an anonymous person on Palgrave Island had
+murdered the poor gentlemen.
+
+One thing was quickly learned, however; namely, that Palgrave Island was
+no myth.  It was charted and well known to all navigators, lying on the
+line of 160 west longitude, right at its intersection by the tenth
+parallel north latitude, and only a few miles away from Diana Shoal.
+Like Midway and Fanning, Palgrave Island was isolated, volcanic and coral
+in formation.  Furthermore, it was uninhabited.  A survey ship, in 1887,
+had visited the place and reported the existence of several springs and
+of a good harbour that was very dangerous of approach.  And that was all
+that was known of the tiny speck of land that was soon to have focussed
+on it the awed attention of the world.
+
+Goliah remained silent till March 24.  On the morning of that day, the
+newspapers published his second letter, copies of which had been received
+by the ten chief politicians of the United States--ten leading men in the
+political world who were conventionally known as "statesmen."  The
+letter, with the same superscription as before, was as follows:
+
+    "DEAR SIR:
+
+    "I have spoken in no uncertain tone.  I must be obeyed.  You may
+    consider this an invitation or a summons; but if you still wish to
+    tread this earth and laugh, you will be aboard the yacht _Energon_,
+    in San Francisco harbour, not later than the evening of April 5.  It
+    is my wish and my will that you confer with me here on Palgrave
+    Island in the matter of reconstructing society upon some rational
+    basis.
+
+    "Do not misunderstand me, when I tell you that I am one with a
+    theory.  I want to see that theory work, and therefore I call upon
+    your cooperation.  In this theory of mine, lives are but pawns; I
+    deal with quantities of lives.  I am after laughter, and those that
+    stand in the way of laughter must perish.  The game is big.  There
+    are fifteen hundred million human lives to-day on the planet.  What
+    is your single life against them?  It is as naught, in my theory.
+    And remember that mine is the power.  Remember that I am a scientist,
+    and that one life, or one million of lives, mean nothing to me as
+    arrayed against the countless billions of billions of the lives of
+    the generations to come.  It is for their laughter that I seek to
+    reconstruct society now; and against them your own meagre little life
+    is a paltry thing indeed.
+
+    "Whoso has power can command his fellows.  By virtue of that military
+    device known as the phalanx, Alexander conquered his bit of the
+    world.  By virtue of that chemical device, gunpowder, Cortes with his
+    several hundred cut-throats conquered the empire of the Montezumas.
+    Now I am in possession of a device that is all my own.  In the course
+    of a century not more than half a dozen fundamental discoveries or
+    inventions are made.  I have made such an invention.  The possession
+    of it gives me the mastery of the world.  I shall use this invention,
+    not for commercial exploitation, but for the good of humanity.  For
+    that purpose I want help--willing agents, obedient hands; and I am
+    strong enough to compel the service.  I am taking the shortest way,
+    though I am in no hurry.  I shall not clutter my speed with haste.
+
+    "The incentive of material gain developed man from the savage to the
+    semi-barbarian he is to-day.  This incentive has been a useful device
+    for the development of the human; but it has now fulfilled its
+    function and is ready to be cast aside into the scrap-heap of
+    rudimentary vestiges such as gills in the throat and belief in the
+    divine right of kings.  Of course you do not think so; but I do not
+    see that that will prevent you from aiding me to fling the
+    anachronism into the scrap-heap.  For I tell you now that the time
+    has come when mere food and shelter and similar sordid things shall
+    be automatic, as free and easy and involuntary of access as the air.
+    I shall make them automatic, what of my discovery and the power that
+    discovery gives me.  And with food and shelter automatic, the
+    incentive of material gain passes away from the world for ever.  With
+    food and shelter automatic, the higher incentives will universally
+    obtain--the spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual incentives that
+    will tend to develop and make beautiful and noble body, mind, and
+    spirit.  Then all the world will be dominated by happiness and
+    laughter.  It will be the reign of universal laughter.
+
+    "Yours for that day,
+
+                                                                 "GOLIAH."
+
+Still the world would not believe.  The ten politicians were at
+Washington, so that they did not have the opportunity of being convinced
+that Bassett had had, and not one of them took the trouble to journey out
+to San Francisco to make the opportunity.  As for Goliah, he was hailed
+by the newspapers as another Tom Lawson with a panacea; and there were
+specialists in mental disease who, by analysis of Goliah's letters,
+proved conclusively that he was a lunatic.
+
+The yacht _Energon_ arrived in the harbour of San Francisco on the
+afternoon of April 5, and Bassett came ashore.  But the _Energon_ did not
+sail next day, for not one of the ten summoned politicians had elected to
+make the journey to Palgrave Island.  The newsboys, however, called
+"Extra" that day in all the cities.  The ten politicians were dead.  The
+yacht, lying peacefully at anchor in the harbour, became the centre of
+excited interest.  She was surrounded by a flotilla of launches and
+rowboats, and many tugs and steamboats ran excursions to her.  While the
+rabble was firmly kept off, the proper authorities and even reporters
+were permitted to board her.  The mayor of San Francisco and the chief of
+police reported that nothing suspicious was to be seen upon her, and the
+port authorities announced that her papers were correct and in order in
+every detail.  Many photographs and columns of descriptive matter were
+run in the newspapers.
+
+The crew was reported to be composed principally of
+Scandinavians--fair-haired, blue-eyed Swedes, Norwegians afflicted with
+the temperamental melancholy of their race, stolid Russian Finns, and a
+slight sprinkling of Americans and English.  It was noted that there was
+nothing mercurial and flyaway about them.  They seemed weighty men,
+oppressed by a sad and stolid bovine-sort of integrity.  A sober
+seriousness and enormous certitude characterized all of them.  They
+appeared men without nerves and without fear, as though upheld by some
+overwhelming power or carried in the hollow of some superhuman hand.  The
+captain, a sad-eyed, strong-featured American, was cartooned in the
+papers as "Gloomy Gus" (the pessimistic hero of the comic supplement).
+
+Some sea-captain recognized the _Energon_ as the yacht _Scud_, once owned
+by Merrivale of the New York Yacht Club.  With this clue it was soon
+ascertained that the _Scud_ had disappeared several years before.  The
+agent who sold her reported the purchaser to be merely another agent, a
+man he had seen neither before nor since.  The yacht had been
+reconstructed at Duffey's Shipyard in New Jersey.  The change in her name
+and registry occurred at that time and had been legally executed.  Then
+the _Energon_ had disappeared in the shroud of mystery.
+
+In the meantime, Bassett was going crazy--at least his friends and
+business associates said so.  He kept away from his vast business
+enterprises and said that he must hold his hands until the other masters
+of the world could join with him in the reconstruction of society--proof
+indubitable that Goliah's bee had entered his bonnet.  To reporters he
+had little to say.  He was not at liberty, he said, to relate what he had
+seen on Palgrave Island; but he could assure them that the matter was
+serious, the most serious thing that had ever happened.  His final word
+was that, the world was on the verge of a turnover, for good or ill he
+did not know, but, one way or the other, he was absolutely convinced that
+the turnover was coming.  As for business, business could go hang.  He
+had seen things, he had, and that was all there was to it.
+
+There was a great telegraphing, during this period, between the local
+Federal officials and the state and war departments at Washington.  A
+secret attempt was made late one afternoon to board the _Energon_ and
+place the captain under arrest--the Attorney-General having given the
+opinion that the captain could be held for the murder of the ten
+"statesmen."  The government launch was seen to leave Meigg's Wharf and
+steer for the _Energon_, and that was the last ever seen of the launch
+and the men on board of it.  The government tried to keep the affair
+hushed up, but the cat was slipped out of the bag by the families of the
+missing men, and the papers were filled with monstrous versions of the
+affair.
+
+The government now proceeded to extreme measures.  The battleship
+_Alaska_ was ordered to capture the strange yacht, or, failing that, to
+sink her.  These were secret instructions; but thousands of eyes, from
+the water front and from the shipping in the harbour, witnessed what
+happened that afternoon.  The battleship got under way and steamed slowly
+toward the _Energon_.  At half a mile distant the battleship blew
+up--simply blew up, that was all, her shattered frame sinking to the
+bottom of the bay, a riff-raff of wreckage and a few survivors strewing
+the surface.  Among the survivors was a young lieutenant who had had
+charge of the wireless on board the _Alaska_.  The reporters got hold of
+him first, and he talked.  No sooner had the _Alaska_ got under way, he
+said, than a message was received from the _Energon_.  It was in the
+international code, and it was a warning to the _Alaska_ to come no
+nearer than half a mile.  He had sent the message, through the speaking
+tube, immediately to the captain.  He did not know anything more, except
+that the _Energon_ twice repeated the message and that five minutes
+afterward the explosion occurred.  The captain of the _Alaska_ had
+perished with his ship, and nothing more was to be learned.
+
+The _Energon_, however, promptly hoisted anchor and cleared out to sea.
+A great clamour was raised by the papers; the government was charged with
+cowardice and vacillation in its dealings with a mere pleasure yacht and
+a lunatic who called himself "Goliah," and immediate and decisive action
+was demanded.  Also, a great cry went up about the loss of life,
+especially the wanton killing of the ten "statesmen."  Goliah promptly
+replied.  In fact, so prompt was his reply that the experts in wireless
+telegraphy announced that, since it was impossible to send wireless
+messages so great a distance, Goliah was in their very midst and not on
+Palgrave Island.  Goliah's letter was delivered to the Associated Press
+by a messenger boy who had been engaged on the street.  The letter was as
+follows:
+
+    "What are a few paltry lives?  In your insane wars you destroy
+    millions of lives and think nothing of it.  In your fratricidal
+    commercial struggle you kill countless babes, women, and men, and you
+    triumphantly call the shambles 'individualism.'  I call it anarchy.
+    I am going to put a stop to your wholesale destruction of human
+    beings.  I want laughter, not slaughter.  Those of you who stand in
+    the way of laughter will get slaughter.
+
+    "Your government is trying to delude you into believing that the
+    destruction of the _Alaska_ was an accident.  Know here and now that
+    it was by my orders that the _Alaska_ was destroyed.  In a few short
+    months, all battleships on all seas will be destroyed or flung to the
+    scrap-heap, and all nations shall disarm; fortresses shall be
+    dismantled, armies disbanded, and warfare shall cease from the earth.
+    Mine is the power.  I am the will of God.  The whole world shall be
+    in vassalage to me, but it shall be a vassalage of peace.
+
+                                                                     "I am
+                                                                 "GOLIAH."
+
+"Blow Palgrave Island out of the water!" was the head-line retort of the
+newspapers.  The government was of the same frame of mind, and the
+assembling of the fleets began.  Walter Bassett broke out in ineffectual
+protest, but was swiftly silenced by the threat of a lunacy commission.
+Goliah remained silent.  Against Palgrave Island five great fleets were
+hurled--the Asiatic Squadron, the South Pacific Squadron, the North
+Pacific Squadron, the Caribbean Squadron, and half of the North Atlantic
+Squadron, the two latter coming through the Panama Canal.
+
+"I have the honour to report that we sighted Palgrave Island on the
+evening of April 29," ran the report of Captain Johnson, of the
+battleship _North Dakota_, to the Secretary of the Navy.  "The Asiatic
+Squadron was delayed and did not arrive until the morning of April 30.  A
+council of the admirals was held, and it was decided to attack early next
+morning.  The destroyer, _Swift VII_, crept in, unmolested, and reported
+no warlike preparations on the island.  It noted several small merchant
+steamers in the harbour, and the existence of a small village in a
+hopelessly exposed position that could be swept by our fire.
+
+"It had been decided that all the vessels should rush in, scattered, upon
+the island, opening fire at three miles, and continuing to the edge of
+the reef, there to retain loose formation and engage.  Palgrave Island
+repeatedly warned us, by wireless, in the international code, to keep
+outside the ten-mile limit; but no heed was paid to the warnings.
+
+"The _North Dakota_ did not take part in the movement of the morning of
+May 1.  This was due to a slight accident of the preceding night that
+temporarily disabled her steering-gear.  The morning of May 1 broke clear
+and calm.  There was a slight breeze from the south-west that quickly
+died away.  The _North Dakota_ lay twelve miles off the island.  At the
+signal the squadrons charged in upon the island, from all sides, at full
+speed.  Our wireless receiver continued to tick off warnings from the
+island.  The ten-mile limit was passed, and nothing happened.  I watched
+through my glasses.  At five miles nothing happened; at four miles
+nothing happened; at three miles, the _New York_, in the lead on our side
+of the island, opened fire.  She fired only one shot.  Then she blew up.
+The rest of the vessels never fired a shot.  They began to blow up,
+everywhere, before our eyes.  Several swerved about and started back, but
+they failed to escape.  The destroyer, _Dart XXX_, nearly made the
+ten-mile limit when she blew up.  She was the last survivor.  No harm
+came to the _North Dakota_, and that night, the steering-gear being
+repaired, I gave orders to sail for San Francisco."
+
+To say that the United States was stunned is but to expose the inadequacy
+of language.  The whole world was stunned.  It confronted that blight of
+the human brain, the unprecedented.  Human endeavour was a jest, a
+monstrous futility, when a lunatic on a lonely island, who owned a yacht
+and an exposed village, could destroy five of the proudest fleets of
+Christendom.  And how had he done it?  Nobody knew.  The scientists lay
+down in the dust of the common road and wailed and gibbered.  They did
+not know.  Military experts committed suicide by scores.  The mighty
+fabric of warfare they had fashioned was a gossamer veil rent asunder by
+a miserable lunatic.  It was too much for their sanity.  Mere human
+reason could not withstand the shock.  As the savage is crushed by the
+sleight-of-hand of the witch doctor, so was the world crushed by the
+magic of Goliah.  How did he do it?  It was the awful face of the Unknown
+upon which the world gazed and by which it was frightened out of the
+memory of its proudest achievements.
+
+But all the world was not stunned.  There was the invariable
+exception--the Island Empire of Japan.  Drunken with the wine of success
+deep-quaffed, without superstition and without faith in aught but its own
+ascendant star, laughing at the wreckage of science and mad with pride of
+race, it went forth upon the way of war.  America's fleets had been
+destroyed.  From the battlements of heaven the multitudinous ancestral
+shades of Japan leaned down.  The opportunity, God-given, had come.  The
+Mikado was in truth a brother to the gods.
+
+The war-monsters of Japan were loosed in mighty fleets.  The Philippines
+were gathered in as a child gathers a nosegay.  It took longer for the
+battleships to travel to Hawaii, to Panama, and to the Pacific Coast.
+The United States was panic-stricken, and there arose the powerful party
+of dishonourable peace.  In the midst of the clamour the _Energon_
+arrived in San Francisco Bay and Goliah spoke once more.  There was a
+little brush as the _Energon_ came in, and a few explosions of magazines
+occurred along the war-tunnelled hills as the coast defences went to
+smash.  Also, the blowing up of the submarine mines in the Golden Gate
+made a remarkably fine display.  Goliah's message to the people of San
+Francisco, dated as usual from Palgrave Island, was published in the
+papers.  It ran:
+
+    "Peace?  Peace be with you.  You shall have peace.  I have spoken to
+    this purpose before.  And give you me peace.  Leave my yacht
+    _Energon_ alone.  Commit one overt act against her and not one stone
+    in San Francisco shall stand upon another.
+
+    "To-morrow let all good citizens go out upon the hills that slope
+    down to the sea.  Go with music and laughter and garlands.  Make
+    festival for the new age that is dawning.  Be like children upon your
+    hills, and witness the passing of war.  Do not miss the opportunity.
+    It is your last chance to behold what henceforth you will be
+    compelled to seek in museums of antiquities.
+
+                                               "I promise you a merry day,
+                                                                 "GOLIAH."
+
+The madness of magic was in the air.  With the people it was as if all
+their gods had crashed and the heavens still stood.  Order and law had
+passed away from the universe; but the sun still shone, the wind still
+blew, the flowers still bloomed--that was the amazing thing about it.
+That water should continue to run downhill was a miracle.  All the
+stabilities of the human mind and human achievement were crumbling.  The
+one stable thing that remained was Goliah, a madman on an island.  And so
+it was that the whole population of San Francisco went forth next day in
+colossal frolic upon the hills that overlooked the sea.  Brass bands and
+banners went forth, brewery wagons and Sunday-school picnics--all the
+strange heterogeneous groupings of swarming metropolitan life.
+
+On the sea-rim rose the smoke from the funnels of a hundred hostile
+vessels of war, all converging upon the helpless, undefended Golden Gate.
+And not all undefended, for out through the Golden Gate moved the
+_Energon_, a tiny toy of white, rolling like a straw in the stiff sea on
+the bar where a strong ebb-tide ran in the teeth of the summer
+sea-breeze.  But the Japanese were cautious.  Their thirty- and
+forty-thousand-ton battleships slowed down half a dozen miles offshore
+and manoeuvred in ponderous evolutions, while tiny scout-boats (lean,
+six-funnelled destroyers) ran in, cutting blackly the flashing sea like
+so many sharks.  But, compared with the _Energon_, they were leviathans.
+Compared with them, the _Energon_ was as the sword of the arch-angel
+Michael, and they the forerunners of the hosts of hell.
+
+But the flashing of the sword, the good people of San Francisco, gathered
+on her hills, never saw.  Mysterious, invisible, it cleaved the air and
+smote the mightiest blows of combat the world had ever witnessed.  The
+good people of San Francisco saw little and understood less.  They saw
+only a million and a half tons of brine-cleaving, thunder-flinging
+fabrics hurled skyward and smashed back in ruin to sink into the sea.  It
+was all over in five minutes.  Remained upon the wide expanse of sea only
+the _Energon_, rolling white and toylike on the bar.
+
+Goliah spoke to the Mikado and the Elder Statesmen.  It was only an
+ordinary cable message, despatched from San Francisco by the captain of
+the _Energon_, but it was of sufficient moment to cause the immediate
+withdrawal of Japan from the Philippines and of her surviving fleets from
+the sea.  Japan the sceptical was converted.  She had felt the weight of
+Goliah's arm.  And meekly she obeyed when Goliah commanded her to
+dismantle her war vessels and to turn the metal into useful appliances
+for the arts of peace.  In all the ports, navy-yards, machine-shops, and
+foundries of Japan tens of thousands of brown-skinned artisans converted
+the war-monsters into myriads of useful things, such as ploughshares
+(Goliah insisted on ploughshares), gasolene engines, bridge-trusses,
+telephone and telegraph wires, steel rails, locomotives, and rolling
+stock for railways.  It was a world-penance for a world to see, and
+paltry indeed it made appear that earlier penance, barefooted in the
+snow, of an emperor to a pope for daring to squabble over temporal power.
+
+Goliah's next summons was to the ten leading scientists of the United
+States.  This time there was no hesitancy in obeying.  The savants were
+ludicrously prompt, some of them waiting in San Francisco for weeks so as
+not to miss the scheduled sailing-date.  They departed on the _Energon_
+on June 15; and while they were on the sea, on the way to Palgrave
+Island, Goliah performed another spectacular feat.  Germany and France
+were preparing to fly at each other's throats.  Goliah commanded peace.
+They ignored the command, tacitly agreeing to fight it out on land where
+it seemed safer for the belligerently inclined.  Goliah set the date of
+June 19 for the cessation of hostile preparations.  Both countries
+mobilized their armies on June 18, and hurled them at the common
+frontier.  And on June 19, Goliah struck.  All generals, war-secretaries,
+and jingo-leaders in the two countries died on that day; and that day two
+vast armies, undirected, like strayed sheep, walked over each other's
+frontiers and fraternized.  But the great German war lord had escaped--it
+was learned, afterward, by hiding in the huge safe where were stored the
+secret archives of his empire.  And when he emerged he was a very
+penitent war lord, and like the Mikado of Japan he was set to work
+beating his sword-blades into ploughshares and pruning-hooks.
+
+But in the escape of the German Emperor was discovered a great
+significance.  The scientists of the world plucked up courage, got back
+their nerve.  One thing was conclusively evident--Goliah's power was not
+magic.  Law still reigned in the universe.  Goliah's power had
+limitations, else had the German Emperor not escaped by secretly hiding
+in a steel safe.  Many learned articles on the subject appeared in the
+magazines.
+
+The ten scientists arrived back from Palgrave Island on July 6.  Heavy
+platoons of police protected them from the reporters.  No, they had not
+see Goliah, they said in the one official interview that was vouchsafed;
+but they had talked with him, and they had seen things.  They were not
+permitted to state definitely all that they had seen and heard, but they
+could say that the world was about to be revolutionized.  Goliah was in
+the possession of a tremendous discovery that placed all the world at his
+mercy, and it was a good thing for the world that Goliah was merciful.
+The ten scientists proceeded directly to Washington on a special train,
+where, for days, they were closeted with the heads of government, while
+the nation hung breathless on the outcome.
+
+But the outcome was a long time in arriving.  From Washington the
+President issued commands to the masters and leading figures of the
+nation.  Everything was secret.  Day by day deputations of bankers,
+railway lords, captains of industry, and Supreme Court justices arrived;
+and when they arrived they remained.  The weeks dragged on, and then, on
+August 25, began the famous issuance of proclamations.  Congress and the
+Senate co-operated with the President in this, while the Supreme Court
+justices gave their sanction and the money lords and the captains of
+industry agreed.  War was declared upon the capitalist masters of the
+nation.  Martial law was declared over the whole United States.  The
+supreme power was vested in the President.
+
+In one day, child-labour in the whole country was abolished.  It was done
+by decree, and the United States was prepared with its army to enforce
+its decrees.  In the same day all women factory workers were dismissed to
+their homes, and all the sweat-shops were closed.  "But we cannot make
+profits!" wailed the petty capitalists.  "Fools!" was the retort of
+Goliah.  "As if the meaning of life were profits!  Give up your
+businesses and your profit-mongering."  "But there is nobody to buy our
+business!" they wailed.  "Buy and sell--is that all the meaning life has
+for you?" replied Goliah.  "You have nothing to sell.  Turn over your
+little cut-throating, anarchistic businesses to the government so that
+they may be rationally organized and operated."  And the next day, by
+decree, the government began taking possession of all factories, shops,
+mines, ships, railroads, and producing lands.
+
+The nationalization of the means of production and distribution went on
+apace.  Here and there were sceptical capitalists of moment.  They were
+made prisoners and haled to Palgrave Island, and when they returned they
+always acquiesced in what the government was doing.  A little later the
+journey to Palgrave Island became unnecessary.  When objection was made,
+the reply of the officials was "Goliah has spoken"--which was another way
+of saying, "He must be obeyed."
+
+The captains of industry became heads of departments.  It was found that
+civil engineers, for instance, worked just as well in government employ
+as before, they had worked in private employ.  It was found that men of
+high executive ability could not violate their nature.  They could not
+escape exercising their executive ability, any more than a crab could
+escape crawling or a bird could escape flying.  And so it was that all
+the splendid force of the men who had previously worked for themselves
+was now put to work for the good of society.  The half-dozen great
+railway chiefs co-operated in the organizing of a national system of
+railways that was amazingly efficacious.  Never again was there such a
+thing as a car shortage.  These chiefs were not the Wall Street railway
+magnates, but they were the men who formerly had done the real work while
+in the employ of the Wall Street magnates.
+
+Wall Street was dead.  There was no more buying and selling and
+speculating.  Nobody had anything to buy or sell.  There was nothing in
+which to speculate.  "Put the stock gamblers to work," said Goliah; "give
+those that are young, and that so desire, a chance to learn useful
+trades."  "Put the drummers, and salesmen, and advertising agents, and
+real estate agents to work," said Goliah; and by hundreds of thousands
+the erstwhile useless middlemen and parasites went into useful
+occupations.  The four hundred thousand idle gentlemen of the country who
+had lived upon incomes were likewise put to work.  Then there were a lot
+of helpless men in high places who were cleared out, the remarkable thing
+about this being that they were cleared out by their own fellows.  Of
+this class were the professional politicians, whose wisdom and power
+consisted of manipulating machine politics and of grafting.  There was no
+longer any graft.  Since there were no private interests to purchase
+special privileges, no bribes were offered to legislators, and
+legislators for the first time legislated for the people.  The result was
+that men who were efficient, not in corruption, but in direction, found
+their way into the legislatures.
+
+With this rational organization of society amazing results were brought
+about.  The national day's work was eight hours, and yet production
+increased.  In spite of the great permanent improvements and of the
+immense amount of energy consumed in systematizing the competitive chaos
+of society, production doubled and tripled upon itself.  The standard of
+living increased, and still consumption could not keep up with
+production.  The maximum working age was decreased to fifty years, to
+forty-nine years, and to forty-eight years.  The minimum working age went
+up from sixteen years to eighteen years.  The eight-hour day became a
+seven-hour day, and in a few months the national working day was reduced
+to five hours.
+
+In the meantime glimmerings were being caught, not of the identity of
+Goliah, but of how he had worked and prepared for his assuming control of
+the world.  Little things leaked out, clues were followed up, apparently
+unrelated things were pieced together.  Strange stories of blacks stolen
+from Africa were remembered, of Chinese and Japanese contract coolies who
+had mysteriously disappeared, of lonely South Sea Islands raided and
+their inhabitants carried away; stories of yachts and merchant steamers,
+mysteriously purchased, that had disappeared and the descriptions of
+which remotely tallied with the crafts that had carried the Orientals and
+Africans and islanders away.  Where had Goliah got the sinews of war? was
+the question.  And the surmised answer was: By exploiting these stolen
+labourers.  It was they that lived in the exposed village on Palgrave
+Island.  It was the product of their toil that had purchased the yachts
+and merchant steamers and enabled Goliah's agents to permeate society and
+carry out his will.  And what was the product of their toil that had
+given Goliah the wealth necessary to realize his plans?  Commercial
+radium, the newspapers proclaimed; and radiyte, and radiosole, and
+argatium, and argyte, and the mysterious golyte (that had proved so
+valuable in metallurgy).  These were the new compounds, discovered in the
+first decade of the twentieth century, the commercial and scientific use
+of which had become so enormous in the second decade.
+
+The line of fruit boats that ran from Hawaii to San Francisco was
+declared to be the property of Goliah.  This was a surmise, for no other
+owner could be discovered, and the agents who handled the shipments of
+the fruit boats were only agents.  Since no one else owned the fruit
+boats, then Goliah must own them.  The point of which is: _that it leaked
+out that the major portion of the world's supply in these precious
+compounds was brought to San Francisco by those very fruit boats_.  That
+the whole chain of surmise was correct was proved in later years when
+Goliah's slaves were liberated and honourably pensioned by the
+international government of the world.  It was at that time that the seal
+of secrecy was lifted from the lips of his agents and higher emissaries,
+and those that chose revealed much of the mystery of Goliah's
+organization and methods.  His destroying angels, however, remained for
+ever dumb.  Who the men were who went forth to the high places and killed
+at his bidding will be unknown to the end of time--for kill they did, by
+means of that very subtle and then-mysterious force that Goliah had
+discovered and named "Energon."
+
+But at that time Energon, the little giant that was destined to do the
+work of the world, was unknown and undreamed of.  Only Goliah knew, and
+he kept his secret well.  Even his agents, who were armed with it, and
+who, in the case of the yacht _Energon_, destroyed a mighty fleet of
+war-ships by exploding their magazines, knew not what the subtle and
+potent force was, nor how it was manufactured.  They knew only one of its
+many uses, and in that one use they had been instructed by Goliah.  It is
+now well known that radium, and radiyte, and radiosole, and all the other
+compounds, were by-products of the manufacture of Energon by Goliah from
+the sunlight; but at that time nobody knew what Energon was, and Goliah
+continued to awe and rule the world.
+
+One of the uses of Energon was in wireless telegraphy.  It was by its
+means that Goliah was able to communicate with his agents all over the
+world.  At that time the apparatus required by an agent was so clumsy
+that it could not be packed in anything less than a fair-sized steamer
+trunk.  To-day, thanks to the improvements of Hendsoll, the perfected
+apparatus can be carried in a coat pocket.
+
+It was in December, 1924, that Goliah sent out his famous "Christmas
+Letter," part of the text of which is here given:
+
+    "So far, while I have kept the rest of the nations from each other's
+    throats, I have devoted myself particularly to the United States.
+    Now I have not given to the people of the United States a rational
+    social organization.  What I have done has been to compel them to
+    make that organization themselves.  There is more laughter in the
+    United States these days, and there is more sense.  Food and shelter
+    are no longer obtained by the anarchistic methods of so-called
+    individualism but are now wellnigh automatic.  And the beauty of it
+    is that the people of the United States have achieved all this for
+    themselves.  I did not achieve it for them.  I repeat, they achieved
+    it for themselves.  All that I did was to put the fear of death in
+    the hearts of the few that sat in the high places and obstructed the
+    coming of rationality and laughter.  The fear of death made those in
+    the high places get out of the way, that was all, and gave the
+    intelligence of man a chance to realize itself socially.
+
+    "In the year that is to come I shall devote myself to the rest of the
+    world.  I shall put the fear of death in the hearts of all that sit
+    in the high places in all the nations.  And they will do as they have
+    done in the United States--get down out of the high places and give
+    the intelligence of man a chance for social rationality.  All the
+    nations shall tread the path the United States is now on.
+
+    "And when all the nations are well along on that path, I shall have
+    something else for them.  But first they must travel that path for
+    themselves.  They must demonstrate that the intelligence of mankind
+    to-day, with the mechanical energy now at its disposal, is capable of
+    organizing society so that food and shelter be made automatic, labour
+    be reduced to a three-hour day, and joy and laughter be made
+    universal.  And when that is accomplished, not by me but by the
+    intelligence of mankind, then I shall make a present to the world of
+    a new mechanical energy.  This is my discovery.  This Energon is
+    nothing more nor less than the cosmic energy that resides in the
+    solar rays.  When it is harnessed by mankind it will do the work of
+    the world.  There will be no more multitudes of miners slaving out
+    their lives in the bowels of the earth, no more sooty firemen and
+    greasy engineers.  All may dress in white if they so will.  The work
+    of life will have become play and young and old will be the children
+    of joy, and the business of living will become joy; and they will
+    compete, one with another, in achieving ethical concepts and
+    spiritual heights, in fashioning pictures and songs, and stories, in
+    statecraft and beauty craft, in the sweat and the endeavour of the
+    wrestler and the runner and the player of games--all will compete,
+    not for sordid coin and base material reward, but for the joy that
+    shall be theirs in the development and vigour of flesh and in the
+    development and keenness of spirit.  All will be joy-smiths, and
+    their task shall be to beat out laughter from the ringing anvil of
+    life.
+
+    "And now one word for the immediate future.  On New Year's Day all
+    nations shall disarm, all fortresses and war-ships shall be
+    dismantled, and all armies shall be disbanded.
+
+                                                                 "GOLIAH."
+
+On New Year's Day all the world disarmed.  The millions of soldiers and
+sailors and workmen in the standing armies, in the navies, and in the
+countless arsenals, machine-shops, and factories for the manufacture of
+war machinery, were dismissed to their homes.  These many millions of
+men, as well as their costly war machinery, had hitherto been supported
+on the back of labour.  They now went into useful occupations, and the
+released labour giant heaved a mighty sigh of relief.  The policing of
+the world was left to the peace officers and was purely social, whereas
+war had been distinctly anti-social.
+
+Ninety per cent. of the crimes against society had been crimes against
+private property.  With the passing of private property, at least in the
+means of production, and with the organization of industry that gave
+every man a chance, the crimes against private property practically
+ceased.  The police forces everywhere were reduced repeatedly and again
+and again.  Nearly all occasional and habitual criminals ceased
+voluntarily from their depredations.  There was no longer any need for
+them to commit crime.  They merely changed with changing conditions.  A
+smaller number of criminals was put into hospitals and cured.  And the
+remnant of the hopelessly criminal and degenerate was segregated.  And
+the courts in all countries were likewise decreased in number again and
+again.  Ninety-five per cent. of all civil cases had been squabbles over
+property, conflicts of property-rights, lawsuits, contests of wills,
+breaches of contract, bankruptcies, etc.  With the passing of private
+property, this ninety-five per cent. of the cases that cluttered the
+courts also passed.  The courts became shadows, attenuated ghosts,
+rudimentary vestiges of the anarchistic times that had preceded the
+coming of Goliah.
+
+The year 1925 was a lively year in the world's history.  Goliah ruled the
+world with a strong hand.  Kings and emperors journeyed to Palgrave
+Island, saw the wonders of Energon, and went away, with the fear of death
+in their hearts, to abdicate thrones and crowns and hereditary licenses.
+When Goliah spoke to politicians (so-called "statesmen"), they obeyed . . .
+or died.  He dictated universal reforms, dissolved refractory
+parliaments, and to the great conspiracy that was formed of mutinous
+money lords and captains of industry he sent his destroying angels.  "The
+time is past for fooling," he told them.  "You are anachronisms.  You
+stand in the way of humanity.  To the scrap-heap with you."  To those
+that protested, and they were many, he said: "This is no time for
+logomachy.  You can argue for centuries.  It is what you have done in the
+past.  I have no time for argument.  Get out of the way."
+
+With the exception of putting a stop to war, and of indicating the broad
+general plan, Goliah did nothing.  By putting the fear of death into the
+hearts of those that sat in the high places and obstructed progress,
+Goliah made the opportunity for the unshackled intelligence of the best
+social thinkers of the world to exert itself.  Goliah left all the
+multitudinous details of reconstruction to these social thinkers.  He
+wanted them to prove that they were able to do it, and they proved it.
+It was due to their initiative that the white plague was stamped out from
+the world.  It was due to them, and in spite of a deal of protesting from
+the sentimentalists, that all the extreme hereditary inefficients were
+segregated and denied marriage.
+
+Goliah had nothing whatever to do with the instituting of the colleges of
+invention.  This idea originated practically simultaneously in the minds
+of thousands of social thinkers.  The time was ripe for the realization
+of the idea, and everywhere arose the splendid institutions of invention.
+For the first time the ingenuity of man was loosed upon the problem of
+simplifying life, instead of upon the making of money-earning devices.
+The affairs of life, such as house-cleaning, dish and window-washing,
+dust-removing, and scrubbing and clothes-washing, and all the endless
+sordid and necessary details, were simplified by invention until they
+became automatic.  We of to-day cannot realize the barbarously filthy and
+slavish lives of those that lived prior to 1925.
+
+The international government of the world was another idea that sprang
+simultaneously into the minds of thousands.  The successful realization
+of this idea was a surprise to many, but as a surprise it was nothing to
+that received by the mildly protestant sociologists and biologists when
+irrefutable facts exploded the doctrine of Malthus.  With leisure and joy
+in the world; with an immensely higher standard of living; and with the
+enormous spaciousness of opportunity for recreation, development, and
+pursuit of beauty and nobility and all the higher attributes, the
+birth-rate fell, and fell astoundingly.  People ceased breeding like
+cattle.  And better than that, it was immediately noticeable that a
+higher average of children was being born.  The doctrine of Malthus was
+knocked into a cocked hat--or flung to the scrap-heap, as Goliah would
+have put it.
+
+All that Goliah had predicted that the intelligence of mankind could
+accomplish with the mechanical energy at its disposal, came to pass.
+Human dissatisfaction practically disappeared.  The elderly people were
+the great grumblers; but when they were honourably pensioned by society,
+as they passed the age limit for work, the great majority ceased
+grumbling.  They found themselves better off in their idle old days under
+the new regime, enjoying vastly more pleasure and comforts than they had
+in their busy and toilsome youth under the old regime.  The younger
+generation had easily adapted itself too the changed order, and the very
+young had never known anything else.  The sum of human happiness had
+increased enormously.  The world had become gay and sane.  Even the old
+fogies of professors of sociology, who had opposed with might and main
+the coming of the new regime, made no complaint.  They were a score of
+times better remunerated than in the old days, and they were not worked
+nearly so hard.  Besides, they were busy revising sociology and writing
+new text-books on the subject.  Here and there, it is true, there were
+atavisms, men who yearned for the flesh-pots and cannibal-feasts of the
+old alleged "individualism," creatures long of teeth and savage of claw
+who wanted to prey upon their fellow-men; but they were looked upon as
+diseased, and were treated in hospitals.  A small remnant, however,
+proved incurable, and was confined in asylums and denied marriage.  Thus
+there was no progeny to inherit their atavistic tendencies.
+
+As the years went by, Goliah dropped out of the running of the world.
+There was nothing for him to run.  The world was running itself, and
+doing it smoothly and beautifully.  In 1937, Goliah made his
+long-promised present of Energon to the world.  He himself had devised a
+thousand ways in which the little giant should do the work of the
+world--all of which he made public at the same time.  But instantly the
+colleges of invention seized upon Energon and utilized it in a hundred
+thousand additional ways.  In fact, as Goliah confessed in his letter of
+March 1938, the colleges of invention cleared up several puzzling
+features of Energon that had baffled him during the preceding years.
+With the introduction of the use of Energon the two-hour work-day was cut
+down almost to nothing.  As Goliah had predicted, work indeed became
+play.  And, so tremendous was man's productive capacity, due to Energon
+and the rational social utilization of it, that the humblest citizen
+enjoyed leisure and time and opportunity for an immensely greater
+abundance of living than had the most favoured under the old anarchistic
+system.
+
+Nobody had ever seen Goliah, and all peoples began to clamour for their
+saviour to appear.  While the world did not minimize his discovery of
+Energon, it was decided that greater than that was his wide social
+vision.  He was a superman, a scientific superman; and the curiosity of
+the world to see him had become wellnigh unbearable.  It was in 1941,
+after much hesitancy on his part, that he finally emerged from Palgrave
+Island.  He arrived on June 6 in San Francisco, and for the first time,
+since his retirement to Palgrave Island, the world looked upon his face.
+And the world was disappointed.  Its imagination had been touched.  An
+heroic figure had been made out of Goliah.  He was the man, or the
+demi-god, rather, who had turned the planet over.  The deeds of
+Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon were as the play of babes
+alongside his colossal achievements.
+
+And ashore in San Francisco and through its streets stepped and rode a
+little old man, sixty-five years of age, well preserved, with a
+pink-and-white complexion and a bald spot on his head the size of an
+apple.  He was short-sighted and wore spectacles.  But when the
+spectacles were removed, his were quizzical blue eyes like a child's,
+filled with mild wonder at the world.  Also his eyes had a way of
+twinkling, accompanied by a screwing up of the face, as if he laughed at
+the huge joke he had played upon the world, trapping it, in spite of
+itself, into happiness and laughter.
+
+For a scientific superman and world tyrant, he had remarkable weaknesses.
+He loved sweets, and was inordinately fond of salted almonds and salted
+pecans, especially of the latter.  He always carried a paper bag of them
+in his pocket, and he had a way of saying frequently that the chemism of
+his nature demanded such fare.  Perhaps his most astonishing failing was
+cats.  He had an ineradicable aversion to that domestic animal.  It will
+be remembered that he fainted dead away with sudden fright, while
+speaking in Brotherhood Palace, when the janitor's cat walked out upon
+the stage and brushed against his legs.
+
+But no sooner had he revealed himself to the world than he was
+identified.  Old-time friends had no difficulty in recognizing him as
+Percival Stultz, the German-American who, in 1898, had worked in the
+Union Iron Works, and who, for two years at that time, had been secretary
+of Branch 369 of the International Brotherhood of Machinists.  It was in
+1901, then twenty-five years of age, that he had taken special scientific
+courses at the University of California, at the same time supporting
+himself by soliciting what was then known as "life insurance."  His
+records as a student are preserved in the university museum, and they are
+unenviable.  He is remembered by the professors he sat under chiefly for
+his absent-mindedness.  Undoubtedly, even then, he was catching glimpses
+of the wide visions that later were to be his.
+
+His naming himself "Goliah" and shrouding himself in mystery was his
+little joke, he later explained.  As Goliah, or any other thing like
+that, he said, he was able to touch the imagination of the world and turn
+it over; but as Percival Stultz, wearing side-whiskers and spectacles,
+and weighing one hundred and eighteen pounds, he would have been unable
+to turn over a pecan--"not even a salted pecan."
+
+But the world quickly got over its disappointment in his personal
+appearance and antecedents.  It knew him and revered him as the
+master-mind of the ages; and it loved him for himself, for his quizzical
+short-sighted eyes and the inimitable way in which he screwed up his face
+when he laughed; it loved him for his simplicity and comradeship and warm
+humanness, and for his fondness for salted pecans and his aversion to
+cats.  And to-day, in the wonder-city of Asgard, rises in awful beauty
+that monument to him that dwarfs the pyramids and all the monstrous
+blood-stained monuments of antiquity.  And on that monument, as all know,
+is inscribed in imperishable bronze the prophecy and the fulfilment: "ALL
+WILL BE JOY-SMITHS, AND THEIR TASK SHALL BE TO BEAT OUT LAUGHTER FROM THE
+RINGING ANVIL OF LIFE."
+
+[EDITORIAL NOTE.--This remarkable production is the work of Harry
+Beckwith, a student in the Lowell High School of San Francisco, and it is
+here reproduced chiefly because of the youth of its author.  Far be it
+from our policy to burden our readers with ancient history; and when it
+is known that Harry Beckwith was only fifteen when the fore-going was
+written, our motive will be understood.  "Goliah" won the Premier for
+high school composition in 2254, and last year Harry Beckwith took
+advantage of the privilege earned, by electing to spend six months in
+Asgard.  The wealth of historical detail, the atmosphere of the times,
+and the mature style of the composition are especially noteworthy in one
+so young.]
+
+
+
+
+THE GOLDEN POPPY
+
+
+I have a poppy field.  That is, by the grace of God and the good-nature
+of editors, I am enabled to place each month divers gold pieces into a
+clerical gentleman's hands, and in return for said gold pieces I am each
+month reinvested with certain proprietary-rights in a poppy field.  This
+field blazes on the rim of the Piedmont Hills.  Beneath lies all the
+world.  In the distance, across the silver sweep of bay, San Francisco
+smokes on her many hills like a second Rome.  Not far away, Mount
+Tamalpais thrusts a rugged shoulder into the sky; and midway between is
+the Golden Gate, where sea mists love to linger.  From the poppy field we
+often see the shimmering blue of the Pacific beyond, and the busy ships
+that go for ever out and in.
+
+"We shall have great joy in our poppy field," said Bess.  "Yes," said I;
+"how the poor city folk will envy when they come to see us, and how we
+will make all well again when we send them off with great golden
+armfuls!"
+
+"But those things will have to come down," I added, pointing to numerous
+obtrusive notices (relics of the last tenant) displayed conspicuously
+along the boundaries, and bearing, each and all, this legend:
+
+    "_Private Grounds_.  _No Trespassing_."
+
+"Why should we refuse the poor city folk a ramble over our field,
+because, forsooth, they have not the advantage of our acquaintance?"
+
+"How I abhor such things," said Bess; "the arrogant symbols of power."
+
+"They disgrace human nature," said I.
+
+"They shame the generous landscape," she said, "and they are abominable."
+
+"Piggish!" quoth I, hotly.  "Down with them!"
+
+We looked forward to the coming of the poppies, did Bess and I, looked
+forward as only creatures of the city may look who have been long denied.
+I have forgotten to mention the existence of a house above the poppy
+field, a squat and wandering bungalow in which we had elected to forsake
+town traditions and live in fresher and more vigorous ways.  The first
+poppies came, orange-yellow and golden in the standing grain, and we went
+about gleefully, as though drunken with their wine, and told each other
+that the poppies were there.  We laughed at unexpected moments, in the
+midst of silences, and at times grew ashamed and stole forth secretly to
+gaze upon our treasury.  But when the great wave of poppy-flame finally
+spilled itself down the field, we shouted aloud, and danced, and clapped
+our hands, freely and frankly mad.
+
+And then came the Goths.  My face was in a lather, the time of the first
+invasion, and I suspended my razor in mid-air to gaze out on my beloved
+field.  At the far end I saw a little girl and a little boy, their arms
+filled with yellow spoil.  Ah, thought I, an unwonted benevolence
+burgeoning, what a delight to me is their delight!  It is sweet that
+children should pick poppies in my field.  All summer shall they pick
+poppies in my field.  But they must be little children, I added as an
+afterthought, and they must pick from the lower end--this last prompted
+by a glance at the great golden fellows nodding in the wheat beneath my
+window.  Then the razor descended.  Shaving was always an absorbing task,
+and I did not glance out of the window again until the operation was
+completed.  And then I was bewildered.  Surely this was not my poppy
+field.  No--and yes, for there were the tall pines clustering austerely
+together on one side, the magnolia tree burdened with bloom, and the
+Japanese quinces splashing the driveway hedge with blood.  Yes, it was
+the field, but no wave of poppy-flame spilled down it, nor did the great
+golden fellows nod in the wheat beneath my window.  I rushed into a
+jacket and out of the house.  In the far distance were disappearing two
+huge balls of colour, orange and yellow, for all the world like
+perambulating poppies of cyclopean breed.
+
+"Johnny," said I to the nine-year-old son of my sister, "Johnny, whenever
+little girls come into our field to pick poppies, you must go down to
+them, and in a very quiet and gentlemanly manner, tell them it is not
+allowed."
+
+Warm days came, and the sun drew another blaze from the free-bosomed
+earth.  Whereupon a neighbour's little girl, at the behest of her mother,
+duly craved and received permission from Bess to gather a few poppies for
+decorative purposes.  But of this I was uninformed, and when I descried
+her in the midst of the field I waved my arms like a semaphore against
+the sky.
+
+"Little girl!" called I.  "Little girl!"
+
+The little girl's legs blurred the landscape as she fled, and in high
+elation I sought Bess to tell of the potency of my voice.  Nobly she came
+to the rescue, departing forthwith on an expedition of conciliation and
+explanation to the little girl's mother.  But to this day the little girl
+seeks cover at sight of me, and I know the mother will never be as
+cordial as she would otherwise have been.
+
+Came dark, overcast days, stiff, driving winds, and pelting rains, day on
+day, without end, and the city folk cowered in their dwelling-places like
+flood-beset rats; and like rats, half-drowned and gasping, when the
+weather cleared they crawled out and up the green Piedmont slopes to bask
+in the blessed sunshine.  And they invaded my field in swarms and droves,
+crushing the sweet wheat into the earth and with lustful hands ripping
+the poppies out by the roots.
+
+"I shall put up the warnings against trespassing," I said.
+
+"Yes," said Bess, with a sigh.  "I'm afraid it is necessary."
+
+The day was yet young when she sighed again:
+
+"I'm afraid, O Man, that your signs are of no avail.  People have
+forgotten how to read, these days."
+
+I went out on the porch.  A city nymph, in cool summer gown and picture
+hat, paused before one of my newly reared warnings and read it through
+with care.  Profound deliberation characterized her movements.  She was
+statuesquely tall, but with a toss of the head and a flirt of the skirt
+she dropped on hands and knees, crawled under the fence, and came to her
+feet on the inside with poppies in both her hands.  I walked down the
+drive and talked ethically to her, and she went away.  Then I put up more
+signs.
+
+At one time, years ago, these hills were carpeted with poppies.  As
+between the destructive forces and the will "to live," the poppies
+maintained an equilibrium with their environment.  But the city folk
+constituted a new and terrible destructive force, the equilibrium was
+overthrown, and the poppies wellnigh perished.  Since the city folk
+plucked those with the longest stems and biggest bowls, and since it is
+the law of kind to procreate kind, the long-stemmed, big-bowled poppies
+failed to go to seed, and a stunted, short-stemmed variety remained to
+the hills.  And not only was it stunted and short-stemmed, but sparsely
+distributed as well.  Each day and every day, for years and years, the
+city folk swarmed over the Piedmont Hills, and only here and there did
+the genius of the race survive in the form of miserable little flowers,
+close-clinging and quick-blooming, like children of the slums dragged
+hastily and precariously through youth to a shrivelled and futile
+maturity.
+
+On the other hand, the poppies had prospered in my field; and not only
+had they been sheltered from the barbarians, but also from the birds.
+Long ago the field was sown in wheat, which went to seed unharvested each
+year, and in the cool depths of which the poppy seeds were hidden from
+the keen-eyed songsters.  And further, climbing after the sun through the
+wheat stalks, the poppies grew taller and taller and more royal even than
+the primordial ones of the open.
+
+So the city folk, gazing from the bare hills to my blazing, burning
+field, were sorely tempted, and, it must be told, as sorely fell.  But no
+sorer was their fall than that of my beloved poppies.  Where the grain
+holds the dew and takes the bite from the sun the soil is moist, and in
+such soil it is easier to pull the poppies out by the roots than to break
+the stalk.  Now the city folk, like other folk, are inclined to move
+along the line of least resistance, and for each flower they gathered,
+there were also gathered many crisp-rolled buds and with them all the
+possibilities and future beauties of the plant for all time to come.
+
+One of the city folk, a middle-aged gentleman, with white hands and
+shifty eyes, especially made life interesting for me.  We called him the
+"Repeater," what of his ways.  When from the porch we implored him to
+desist, he was wont slowly and casually to direct his steps toward the
+fence, simulating finely the actions of a man who had not heard, but
+whose walk, instead, had terminated of itself or of his own volition.  To
+heighten this effect, now and again, still casually and carelessly, he
+would stoop and pluck another poppy.  Thus did he deceitfully save
+himself the indignity of being put out, and rob us of the satisfaction of
+putting him out, but he came, and he came often, each time getting away
+with an able-bodied man's share of plunder.
+
+It is not good to be of the city folk.  Of this I am convinced.  There is
+something in the mode of life that breeds an alarming condition of
+blindness and deafness, or so it seems with the city folk that come to my
+poppy field.  Of the many to whom I have talked ethically not one has
+been found who ever saw the warnings so conspicuously displayed, while of
+those called out to from the porch, possibly one in fifty has heard.
+Also, I have discovered that the relation of city folk to country flowers
+is quite analogous to that of a starving man to food.  No more than the
+starving man realizes that five pounds of meat is not so good as an
+ounce, do they realize that five hundred poppies crushed and bunched are
+less beautiful than two or three in a free cluster, where the green
+leaves and golden bowls may expand to their full loveliness.
+
+Less forgivable than the unaesthetic are the mercenary.  Hordes of young
+rascals plunder me and rob the future that they may stand on street
+corners and retail "California poppies, only five cents a bunch!"  In
+spite of my precautions some of them made a dollar a day out of my field.
+One horde do I remember with keen regret.  Reconnoitring for a possible
+dog, they applied at the kitchen door for "a drink of water, please."
+While they drank they were besought not to pick any flowers.  They
+nodded, wiped their mouths, and proceeded to take themselves off by the
+side of the bungalow.  They smote the poppy field beneath my windows,
+spread out fan-shaped six wide, picking with both hands, and ripped a
+swath of destruction through the very heart of the field.  No cyclone
+travelled faster or destroyed more completely.  I shouted after them, but
+they sped on the wings of the wind, great regal poppies, broken-stalked
+and mangled, trailing after them or cluttering their wake--the most
+high-handed act of piracy, I am confident, ever committed off the high
+seas.
+
+One day I went a-fishing, and on that day a woman entered the field.
+Appeals and remonstrances from the porch having no effect upon her, Bess
+despatched a little girl to beg of her to pick no more poppies.  The
+woman calmly went on picking.  Then Bess herself went down through the
+heat of the day.  But the woman went on picking, and while she picked she
+discussed property and proprietary rights, denying Bess's sovereignty
+until deeds and documents should be produced in proof thereof.  And all
+the time she went on picking, never once overlooking her hand.  She was a
+large woman, belligerent of aspect, and Bess was only a woman and not
+prone to fisticuffs.  So the invader picked until she could pick no more,
+said "Good-day," and sailed majestically away.
+
+"People have really grown worse in the last several years, I think," said
+Bess to me in a tired sort of voice that night, as we sat in the library
+after dinner.
+
+Next day I was inclined to agree with her.  "There's a woman and a little
+girl heading straight for the poppies," said May, a maid about the
+bungalow.  I went out on the porch and waited their advent.  They plunged
+through the pine trees and into the fields, and as the roots of the first
+poppies were pulled I called to them.  They were about a hundred feet
+away.  The woman and the little girl turned to the sound of my voice and
+looked at me.  "Please do not pick the poppies," I pleaded.  They
+pondered this for a minute; then the woman said something in an undertone
+to the little girl, and both backs jack-knifed as the slaughter
+recommenced.  I shouted, but they had become suddenly deaf.  I screamed,
+and so fiercely that the little girl wavered dubiously.  And while the
+woman went on picking I could hear her in low tones heartening the little
+girl.
+
+I recollected a siren whistle with which I was wont to summon Johnny, the
+son of my sister.  It was a fearsome thing, of a kind to wake the dead,
+and I blew and blew, but the jack-knifed backs never unclasped.  I do not
+mind with men, but I have never particularly favoured physical encounters
+with women; yet this woman, who encouraged a little girl in iniquity,
+tempted me.
+
+I went into the bungalow and fetched my rifle.  Flourishing it in a
+sanguinary manner and scowling fearsomely, I charged upon the invaders.
+The little girl fled, screaming, to the shelter of the pines, but the
+woman calmly went on picking.  She took not the least notice.  I had
+expected her to run at sight of me, and it was embarrassing.  There was
+I, charging down the field like a wild bull upon a woman who would not
+get out of the way.  I could only slow down, supremely conscious of how
+ridiculous it all was.  At a distance of ten feet she straightened up and
+deigned to look at me.  I came to a halt and blushed to the roots of my
+hair.  Perhaps I really did frighten her (I sometimes try to persuade
+myself that this is so), or perhaps she took pity on me; but, at any
+rate, she stalked out of my field with great composure, nay, majesty, her
+arms brimming with orange and gold.
+
+Nevertheless, thenceforward I saved my lungs and flourished my rifle.
+Also, I made fresh generalizations.  To commit robbery women take
+advantage of their sex.  Men have more respect for property than women.
+Men are less insistent in crime than women.  And women are less afraid of
+guns than men.  Likewise, we conquer the earth in hazard and battle by
+the virtues of our mothers.  We are a race of land-robbers and
+sea-robbers, we Anglo-Saxons, and small wonder, when we suckle at the
+breasts of a breed of women such as maraud my poppy field.
+
+Still the pillage went on.  Sirens and gun-flourishings were without
+avail.  The city folk were great of heart and undismayed, and I noted the
+habit of "repeating" was becoming general.  What booted it how often they
+were driven forth if each time they were permitted to carry away their
+ill-gotten plunder?  When one has turned the same person away twice and
+thrice an emotion arises somewhat akin to homicide.  And when one has
+once become conscious of this sanguinary feeling his whole destiny seems
+to grip hold of him and drag him into the abyss.  More than once I found
+myself unconsciously pulling the rifle into position to get a sight on
+the miserable trespassers.  In my sleep I slew them in manifold ways and
+threw their carcasses into the reservoir.  Each day the temptation to
+shoot them in the legs became more luring, and every day I felt my fate
+calling to me imperiously.  Visions of the gallows rose up before me, and
+with the hemp about my neck I saw stretched out the pitiless future of my
+children, dark with disgrace and shame.  I became afraid of myself, and
+Bess went about with anxious face, privily beseeching my friends to
+entice me into taking a vacation.  Then, and at the last gasp, came the
+thought that saved me: _Why not confiscate_?  If their forays were
+bootless, in the nature of things their forays would cease.
+
+The first to enter my field thereafter was a man.
+
+I was waiting for him--And, oh joy! it was the "Repeater" himself, smugly
+complacent with knowledge of past success.  I dropped the rifle
+negligently across the hollow of my arm and went down to him.
+
+"I am sorry to trouble you for those poppies," I said in my oiliest
+tones; "but really, you know, I must have them."
+
+He regarded me speechlessly.  It must have made a great picture.  It
+surely was dramatic.  With the rifle across my arm and my suave request
+still ringing in my ears, I felt like Black Bart, and Jesse James, and
+Jack Sheppard, and Robin Hood, and whole generations of highwaymen.
+
+"Come, come," I said, a little sharply and in what I imagined was the
+true fashion; "I am sorry to inconvenience you, believe me, but I must
+have those poppies."
+
+I absently shifted the gun and smiled.  That fetched him.  Without a word
+he passed them over and turned his toes toward the fence, but no longer
+casual and careless was his carriage, I nor did he stoop to pick the
+occasional poppy by the way.  That was the last of the "Repeater."  I
+could see by his eyes that he did not like me, and his back reproached me
+all the way down the field and out of sight.
+
+From that day the bungalow has been flooded with poppies.  Every vase and
+earthen jar is filled with them.  They blaze on every mantel and run riot
+through all the rooms.  I present them to my friends in huge bunches, and
+still the kind city folk come and gather more for me.  "Sit down for a
+moment," I say to the departing guest.  And there we sit in the shade of
+the porch while aspiring city creatures pluck my poppies and sweat under
+the brazen sun.  And when their arms are sufficiently weighted with my
+yellow glories, I go down with the rifle over my arm and disburden them.
+Thus have I become convinced that every situation has its compensations.
+
+Confiscation was successful, so far as it went; but I had forgotten one
+thing; namely, the vast number of the city folk.  Though the old
+transgressors came no more, new ones arrived every day, and I found
+myself confronted with the titanic task of educating a whole cityful to
+the inexpediency of raiding my poppy field.  During the process of
+disburdening them I was accustomed to explaining my side of the case, but
+I soon gave this over.  It was a waste of breath.  They could not
+understand.  To one lady, who insinuated that I was miserly, I said:
+
+"My dear madam, no hardship is worked upon you.  Had I not been
+parsimonious yesterday and the day before, these poppies would have been
+picked by the city hordes of that day and the day before, and your eyes,
+which to-day have discovered this field, would have beheld no poppies at
+all.  The poppies you may not pick to-day are the poppies I did not
+permit to be picked yesterday and the day before.  Therefore, believe me,
+you are denied nothing."
+
+"But the poppies are here to-day," she said, glaring carnivorously upon
+their glow and splendour.
+
+"I will pay you for them," said a gentleman, at another time.  (I had
+just relieved him of an armful.)  I felt a sudden shame, I know not why,
+unless it be that his words had just made clear to me that a monetary as
+well as an aesthetic value was attached to my flowers.  The apparent
+sordidness of my position overwhelmed me, and I said weakly: "I do not
+sell my poppies.  You may have what you have picked."  But before the
+week was out I confronted the same gentleman again.  "I will pay you for
+them," he said.  "Yes," I said, "you may pay me for them.  Twenty
+dollars, please."  He gasped, looked at me searchingly, gasped again, and
+silently and sadly put the poppies down.  But it remained, as usual, for
+a woman to attain the sheerest pitch of audacity.  When I declined
+payment and demanded my plucked beauties, she refused to give them up.
+"I picked these poppies," she said, "and my time is worth money.  When
+you have paid me for my time you may have them."  Her cheeks flamed
+rebellion, and her face, withal a pretty one, was set and determined.
+Now, I was a man of the hill tribes, and she a mere woman of the city
+folk, and though it is not my inclination to enter into details, it is my
+pleasure to state that that bunch of poppies subsequently glorified the
+bungalow and that the woman departed to the city unpaid.  Anyway, they
+were my poppies.
+
+"They are God's poppies," said the Radiant Young Radical, democratically
+shocked at sight of me turning city folk out of my field.  And for two
+weeks she hated me with a deathless hatred.  I sought her out and
+explained.  I explained at length.  I told the story of the poppy as
+Maeterlinck has told the life of the bee.  I treated the question
+biologically, psychologically, and sociologically, I discussed it
+ethically and aesthetically.  I grew warm over it, and impassioned; and
+when I had done, she professed conversion, but in my heart of hearts I
+knew it to be compassion.  I fled to other friends for consolation.  I
+retold the story of the poppy.  They did not appear supremely interested.
+I grew excited.  They were surprised and pained.  They looked at me
+curiously.  "It ill-befits your dignity to squabble over poppies," they
+said.  "It is unbecoming."
+
+I fled away to yet other friends.  I sought vindication.  The thing had
+become vital, and I needs must put myself right.  I felt called upon to
+explain, though well knowing that he who explains is lost.  I told the
+story of the poppy over again.  I went into the minutest details.  I
+added to it, and expanded.  I talked myself hoarse, and when I could talk
+no more they looked bored.  Also, they said insipid things, and soothful
+things, and things concerning other things, and not at all to the point.
+I was consumed with anger, and there and then I renounced them all.
+
+At the bungalow I lie in wait for chance visitors.  Craftily I broach the
+subject, watching their faces closely the while to detect first signs of
+disapprobation, whereupon I empty long-stored vials of wrath upon their
+heads.  I wrangle for hours with whosoever does not say I am right.  I am
+become like Guy de Maupassant's old man who picked up a piece of string.
+I am incessantly explaining, and nobody will understand.  I have become
+more brusque in my treatment of the predatory city folk.  No longer do I
+take delight in their disburdenment, for it has become an onerous duty, a
+wearisome and distasteful task.  My friends look askance and murmur
+pityingly on the side when we meet in the city.  They rarely come to see
+me now.  They are afraid.  I am an embittered and disappointed man, and
+all the light seems to have gone out of my life and into my blazing
+field.  So one pays for things.
+
+PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
+_April_ 1902.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHRINKAGE OF THE PLANET
+
+
+What a tremendous affair it was, the world of Homer, with its
+indeterminate boundaries, vast regions, and immeasurable distances.  The
+Mediterranean and the Euxine were illimitable stretches of ocean waste
+over which years could be spent in endless wandering.  On their
+mysterious shores were the improbable homes of impossible peoples.  The
+Great Sea, the Broad Sea, the Boundless Sea; the Ethiopians, "dwelling
+far away, the most distant of men," and the Cimmerians, "covered with
+darkness and cloud," where "baleful night is spread over timid mortals."
+Phoenicia was a sore journey, Egypt simply unattainable, while the
+Pillars of Hercules marked the extreme edge of the universe.  Ulysses was
+nine days in sailing from Ismarus the city of the Ciconians, to the
+country of the Lotus-eaters--a period of time which to-day would breed
+anxiety in the hearts of the underwriters should it be occupied by the
+slowest tramp steamer in traversing the Mediterranean and Black Seas from
+Gibraltar to Sebastopol.
+
+Homer's world, restricted to less than a drummer's circuit, was
+nevertheless immense, surrounded by a thin veneer of universe--the Stream
+of Ocean.  But how it has shrunk!  To-day, precisely charted, weighed,
+and measured, a thousand times larger than the world of Homer, it is
+become a tiny speck, gyrating to immutable law through a universe the
+bounds of which have been pushed incalculably back.  The light of Algol
+shines upon it--a light which travels at one hundred and ninety thousand
+miles per second, yet requires forty-seven years to reach its
+destination.  And the denizens of this puny ball have come to know that
+Algol possesses an invisible companion, three and a quarter millions of
+miles away, and that the twain move in their respective orbits at rates
+of fifty-five and twenty-six miles per second.  They also know that
+beyond it are great chasms of space, innumerable worlds, and vast star
+systems.
+
+While much of the shrinkage to which the planet has been subjected is due
+to the increased knowledge of mathematics and physics, an equal, if not
+greater, portion may be ascribed to the perfection of the means of
+locomotion and communication.  The enlargement of stellar space,
+demonstrating with stunning force the insignificance of the earth, has
+been negative in its effect; but the quickening of travel and
+intercourse, by making the earth's parts accessible and knitting them
+together, has been positive.
+
+The advantage of the animal over the vegetable kingdom is obvious.  The
+cabbage, should its environment tend to become worse, must live it out,
+or die; the rabbit may move on in quest of a better.  But, after all, the
+swift-footed creatures are circumscribed in their wanderings.  The first
+large river almost inevitably bars their way, and certainly the first
+salt sea becomes an impassable obstacle.  Better locomotion may be
+classed as one of the prime aims of the old natural selection; for in
+that primordial day the race was to the swift as surely as the battle to
+the strong.  But man, already pre-eminent in the common domain because of
+other faculties, was not content with the one form of locomotion afforded
+by his lower limbs.  He swam in the sea, and, still better, becoming
+aware of the buoyant virtues of wood, learned to navigate its surface.
+Likewise, from among the land animals he chose the more likely to bear
+him and his burdens.  The next step was the domestication of these useful
+aids.  Here, in its organic significance, natural selection ceased to
+concern itself with locomotion.  Man had displayed his impatience at her
+tedious methods and his own superiority in the hastening of affairs.
+Thenceforth he must depend upon himself, and faster-swimming or
+faster-running men ceased to be bred.  The one, half-amphibian, breasting
+the water with muscular arms, could not hope to overtake or escape an
+enemy who propelled a fire-hollowed tree trunk by means of a wooden
+paddle; nor could the other, trusting to his own nimbleness, compete with
+a foe who careered wildly across the plain on the back of a half-broken
+stallion.
+
+So, in that dim day, man took upon himself the task of increasing his
+dominion over space and time, and right nobly has he acquitted himself.
+Because of it he became a road builder and a bridge builder; likewise, he
+wove clumsy sails of rush and matting.  At a very remote period he must
+also have recognized that force moves along the line of least resistance,
+and in virtue thereof, placed upon his craft rude keels which enabled him
+to beat to windward in a seaway.  As he excelled in these humble arts,
+just so did he add to his power over his less progressive fellows and lay
+the foundations for the first glimmering civilizations--crude they were
+beyond conception, sporadic and ephemeral, but each formed a necessary
+part of the groundwork upon which was to rise the mighty civilization of
+our latter-day world.
+
+Divorced from the general history of man's upward climb, it would seem
+incredible that so long a time should elapse between the moment of his
+first improvements over nature in the matter of locomotion and that of
+the radical changes he was ultimately to compass.  The principles which
+were his before history was, were his, neither more nor less, even to the
+present century.  He utilized improved applications, but the principles
+of themselves were ever the same, whether in the war chariots of Achilles
+and Pharaoh or the mail-coach and diligence of the European traveller,
+the cavalry of the Huns or of Prince Rupert, the triremes and galleys of
+Greece and Rome or the East India-men and clipper ships of the last
+century.  But when the moment came to alter the methods of travel, the
+change was so sweeping that it may be safely classed as a revolution.
+Though the discovery of steam attaches to the honour of the last century,
+the potency of the new power was not felt till the beginning of this.  By
+1800 small steamers were being used for coasting purposes in England;
+1830 witnessed the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; while
+it was not until 1838 that the Atlantic was first crossed by the
+steamships _Great Western_ and _Sirius_.  In 1869 the East was made
+next-door neighbour to the West.  Over almost the same ground where had
+toiled the caravans of a thousand generations, the Suez Canal was dug.
+Clive, during his first trip, was a year and a half _en route_ from
+England to India; were he alive to-day he could journey to Calcutta in
+twenty-two days.  After reading De Quincey's hyperbolical description of
+the English mail-coach, one cannot down the desire to place that
+remarkable man on the pilot of the White Mail or of the Twentieth
+Century.
+
+But this tremendous change in the means of locomotion meant far more than
+the mere rapid transit of men from place to place.  Until then, though
+its influence and worth cannot be overestimated, commerce had eked out a
+precarious and costly existence.  The fortuitous played too large a part
+in the trade of men.  The mischances by land and sea, the mistakes and
+delays, were adverse elements of no mean proportions.  But improved
+locomotion meant improved carrying, and commerce received an impetus as
+remarkable as it was unexpected.  In his fondest fancies James Watt could
+not have foreseen even the approximate result of his invention, the
+Hercules which was to spring from the puny child of his brain and hands.
+An illuminating spectacle, were it possible, would be afforded by
+summoning him from among the Shades to a place in the engine-room of an
+ocean greyhound.  The humblest trimmer would treat him with the
+indulgence of a child; while an oiler, a greasy nimbus about his head and
+in his hand, as sceptre, a long-snouted can, would indeed appear to him a
+demigod and ruler of forces beyond his ken.
+
+It has ever been the world's dictum that empire and commerce go hand in
+hand.  In the past the one was impossible without the other.  Rome
+gathered to herself the wealth of the Mediterranean nations, and it was
+only by an unwise distribution of it that she became emasculated and lost
+both power and trade.  With a just system of economics it is highly
+probable that for centuries she could have held back the welling tide of
+the Germanic peoples.  When upon her ruins rose the institutions of the
+conquering Teutons, commerce slipped away, and with it empire.  In the
+present, empire and commerce have become interdependent.  Such wonders
+has the industrial revolution wrought in a few swift decades, and so
+great has been the shrinkage of the planet, that the industrial nations
+have long since felt the imperative demand for foreign markets.  The
+favoured portions of the earth are occupied.  From their seats in the
+temperate zones the militant commercial nations proceed to the
+exploitation of the tropics, and for the possession of these they rush to
+war hot-footed.  Like wolves at the end of a gorge, they wrangle over the
+fragments.  There are no more planets, no more fragments, and they are
+yet hungry.  There are no longer Cimmerians and Ethiopians, in
+wide-stretching lands, awaiting them.  On either hand they confront the
+naked poles, and they recoil from unnavigable space to an intenser
+struggle among themselves.  And all the while the planet shrinks beneath
+their grasp.
+
+Of this struggle one thing may be safely predicated; a commercial power
+must be a sea power.  Upon the control of the sea depends the control of
+trade.  Carthage threatened Rome till she lost her navy; and then for
+thirteen days the smoke of her burning rose to the skies, and the ground
+was ploughed and sown with salt on the site of her most splendid
+edifices.  The cities of Italy were the world's merchants till new trade
+routes were discovered and the dominion of the sea passed on to the west
+and fell into other hands.  Spain and Portugal, inaugurating an era of
+maritime discovery, divided the new world between them, but gave way
+before a breed of sea-rovers, who, after many generations of attachment
+to the soil, had returned to their ancient element.  With the destruction
+of her Armada Spain's colossal dream of colonial empire passed away.
+Against the new power Holland strove in vain, and when France
+acknowledged the superiority of the Briton upon the sea, she at the same
+time relinquished her designs upon the world.  Hampered by her feeble
+navy, her contest for supremacy upon the land was her last effort and
+with the passing of Napoleon she retired within herself to struggle with
+herself as best she might.  For fifty years England held undisputed sway
+upon the sea, controlled markets, and domineered trade, laying, during
+that period, the foundations of her empire.  Since then other naval
+powers have arisen, their attitudes bearing significantly upon the
+future; for they have learned that the mastery of the world belongs to
+the masters of the sea.
+
+That many of the phases of this world shrinkage are pathetic, goes
+without question.  There is much to condemn in the rise of the economic
+over the imaginative spirit, much for which the energetic Philistine can
+never atone.  Perhaps the deepest pathos of all may be found in the
+spectacle of John Ruskin weeping at the profanation of the world by the
+vandalism of the age.  Steam launches violate the sanctity of the
+Venetian canals; where Xerxes bridged the Hellespont ply the filthy
+funnels of our modern shipping; electric cars run in the shadow of the
+pyramids; and it was only the other day that Lord Kitchener was in a
+railroad wreck near the site of ancient Luxor.  But there is always the
+other side.  If the economic man has defiled temples and despoiled
+nature, he has also preserved.  He has policed the world and parked it,
+reduced the dangers of life and limb, made the tenure of existence less
+precarious, and rendered a general relapse of society impossible.  There
+can never again be an intellectual holocaust, such as the burning of the
+Alexandrian library.  Civilizations may wax and wane, but the totality of
+knowledge cannot decrease.  With the possible exception of a few trade
+secrets, arts and sciences may be discarded, but they can never be lost.
+And these things must remain true until the end of man's time upon the
+earth.
+
+Up to yesterday communication for any distance beyond the sound of the
+human voice or the sight of the human eye was bound up with locomotion.
+A letter presupposed a carrier.  The messenger started with the message,
+and he could not but avail himself of the prevailing modes of travel.  If
+the voyage to Australia required four months, four months were required
+for communication; by no known means could this time be lessened.  But
+with the advent of the telegraph and telephone, communication and
+locomotion were divorced.  In a few hours, at most, there could be
+performed what by the old way would have required months.  In 1837 the
+needle telegraph was invented, and nine years later the Electric
+Telegraph Company was formed for the purpose of bringing it into general
+use.  Government postal systems also came into being, later to
+consolidate into an international union and to group the nations of the
+earth into a local neighbourhood.  The effects of all this are obvious,
+and no fitter illustration may be presented than the fact that to-day, in
+the matter of communication, the Klondike is virtually nearer to Boston
+than was Bunker Hill in the time of Warren.
+
+A contemporaneous and remarkable shrinkage of a vast stretch of territory
+may be instanced in the Northland.  From its rise at Lake Linderman the
+Yukon runs twenty-five hundred miles to Bering Sea, traversing an almost
+unknown region, the remote recesses of which had never felt the
+moccasined foot of the pathfinder.  At occasional intervals men wallowed
+into its dismal fastnesses, or emerged gaunt and famine-worn.  But in the
+fall of 1896 a great gold strike was made--greater than any since the
+days of California and Australia; yet, so rude were the means of
+communication, nearly a year elapsed before the news of it reached the
+eager ear of the world.  Passionate pilgrims disembarked their outfits at
+Dyea.  Over the terrible Chilcoot Pass the trail led to the lakes, thirty
+miles away.  Carriage was yet in its most primitive stage, the road
+builder and bridge builder unheard of.  With heavy packs upon their backs
+men plunged waist-deep into hideous quagmires, bridged mountain torrents
+by felling trees across them, toiled against the precipitous slopes of
+the ice-worn mountains, and crossed the dizzy faces of innumerable
+glaciers.  When, after incalculable toil they reached the lakes, they
+went into the woods, sawed pine trees into lumber by hand, and built it
+into boats.  In these, overloaded, unseaworthy, they battled down the
+long chain of lakes.  Within the memory of the writer there lingers the
+picture of a sheltered nook on the shores of Lake Le Barge, in which half
+a thousand gold seekers lay storm-bound.  Day after day they struggled
+against the seas in the teeth of a northerly gale, and night after night
+returned to their camps, repulsed but not disheartened.  At the rapids
+they ran their boats through, hit or miss, and after infinite toil and
+hardship, on the breast of a jarring ice flood, arrived at the Klondike.
+From the beach at Dyea to the eddy below the Barracks at Dawson, they had
+paid for their temerity the tax of human life demanded by the elements.
+A year later, so greatly had the country shrunk, the tourist, on
+disembarking from the ocean steamship, took his seat in a modern railway
+coach.  A few hours later, at Lake Bennet, he stepped aboard a commodious
+river steamer.  At the rapids he rode around on a tramway to take passage
+on another steamer below.  And in a few hours more he was in Dawson,
+without having once soiled the lustre of his civilized foot-gear.  Did he
+wish to communicate with the outside world, he strolled into the
+telegraph office.  A few short months before he would have written a
+letter and deemed himself favoured above mortals were it delivered within
+the year.
+
+From man's drawing the world closer and closer together, his own affairs
+and institutions have consolidated.  Concentration may typify the chief
+movement of the age--concentration, classification, order; the reduction
+of friction between the parts of the social organism.  The urban tendency
+of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities.
+There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked
+the evil.  Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city
+which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of
+domestic happiness.  Between the two, night and morning, by electric
+road, steam railway, and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class
+population.  And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement
+evil.  In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist.  Improvement
+in road-beds and the means of locomotion, a tremor of altruism, a little
+legislation, and the city by day will sleep in the country by night.
+
+What a play-ball has this planet of ours become!  Steam has made its
+parts accessible and drawn them closer together.  The telegraph
+annihilates space and time.  Each morning every part knows what every
+other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing.  A discovery in a German
+laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within twenty-four
+hours.  A book written in South Africa is published by simultaneous
+copyright in every English-speaking country, and on the following day is
+in the hands of the translators.  The death of an obscure missionary in
+China, or of a whisky smuggler in the South Seas, is served up, the world
+over, with the morning toast.  The wheat output of Argentine or the gold
+of Klondike is known wherever men meet and trade.  Shrinkage or
+centralization has been such that the humblest clerk in any metropolis
+may place his hand on the pulse of the world.  And because of all this,
+everywhere is growing order and organization.  The church, the state;
+men, women, and children; the criminal and the law, the honest man and
+the thief, industry and commerce, capital and labour, the trades and the
+professions, the arts and the sciences--all are organizing for pleasure,
+profit, policy, or intellectual pursuit.  They have come to know the
+strength of numbers, solidly phalanxed and driving onward with singleness
+of purpose.  These purposes may be various and many, but one and all,
+ever discovering new mutual interests and objects, obeying a law which is
+beyond them, these petty aggregations draw closer together, forming
+greater aggregations and congeries of aggregations.  And these, in turn,
+vaguely merging each into each, present glimmering adumbrations of the
+coming human solidarity which shall be man's crowning glory.
+
+OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
+_January_ 1900.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL
+
+
+Speaking of homes, I am building one now, and I venture to assert that
+very few homes have received more serious thought in the planning.  Let
+me tell you about it.  In the first place, there will be no grounds
+whatever, no fences, lawns, nor flowers.  Roughly, the dimensions will be
+forty-five feet by fifteen.  That is, it will be fifteen feet wide at its
+widest--and, if you will pardon the bull, it will be narrower than it is
+wide.
+
+The details must submit to the general plan of economy.  There will be no
+veranda, no porch entrances, no grand staircases.  I'm ashamed to say how
+steep the stairways are going to be.  The bedrooms will be seven by
+seven, and one will be even smaller.  A bedroom is only good to sleep in,
+anyway.  There will be no hallway, thank goodness.  Rooms were made to go
+through.  Why a separate passage for traffic?
+
+The bath-room will be a trifle larger than the size of the smallest
+bath-tub--it won't require so much work to keep in order.  The kitchen
+won't be very much larger, but this will make it easy for the cook.  In
+place of a drawing-room, there will be a large living-room--fourteen by
+six.  The walls of this room will be covered with books, and it can serve
+as library and smoking-room as well.  Then, the floor-space not being
+occupied, we shall use the room as a dining-room.  Incidentally, such a
+room not being used after bedtime, the cook and the second boy can sleep
+in it.  One thing that I am temperamentally opposed to is waste, and why
+should all this splendid room be wasted at night when we do not occupy
+it?
+
+My ideas are cramped, you say?--Oh, I forgot to tell you that this home I
+am describing is to be a floating home, and that my wife and I are to
+journey around the world in it for the matter of seven years or more.  I
+forgot also to state that there will be an engine-room in it for a
+seventy-horse-power engine, a dynamo, storage batteries, etc.; tanks for
+water to last long weeks at sea; space for fifteen hundred gallons of
+gasolene, fire extinguishers, and life-preservers; and a great store-room
+for food, spare sails, anchors, hawsers, tackles, and a thousand and one
+other things.
+
+Since I have not yet built my land house, I haven't got beyond a few
+general ideas, and in presenting them I feel as cocksure as the unmarried
+woman who writes the column in the Sunday supplement on how to rear
+children.  My first idea about a house is that it should be built to live
+in.  Throughout the house, in all the building of it, this should be the
+paramount idea.  It must be granted that this idea is lost sight of by
+countless persons who build houses apparently for every purpose under the
+sun except to live in them.
+
+Perhaps it is because of the practical life I have lived that I worship
+utility and have come to believe that utility and beauty should be one,
+and that there is no utility that need not be beautiful.  What finer
+beauty than strength--whether it be airy steel, or massive masonry, or a
+woman's hand?  A plain black leather strap is beautiful.  It is all
+strength and all utility, and it is beautiful.  It efficiently performs
+work in the world, and it is good to look upon.  Perhaps it is because it
+is useful that it is beautiful.  I do not know.  I sometimes wonder.
+
+A boat on the sea is beautiful.  Yet it is not built for beauty.  Every
+graceful line of it is a utility, is designed to perform work.  It is
+created for the express purpose of dividing the water in front of it, of
+gliding over the water beneath it, of leaving the water behind it--and
+all with the least possible wastage of stress and friction.  It is not
+created for the purpose of filling the eye with beauty.  It is created
+for the purpose of moving through the sea and over the sea with the
+smallest resistance and the greatest stability; yet, somehow, it does
+fill the eye with its beauty.  And in so far as a boat fails in its
+purpose, by that much does it diminish in beauty.
+
+I am still a long way from the house I have in my mind some day to build,
+yet I have arrived somewhere.  I have discovered, to my own satisfaction
+at any rate, that beauty and utility should be one.  In applying this
+general idea to the building of a house, it may be stated, in another and
+better way; namely, construction and decoration must be one.  This idea
+is more important than the building of the house, for without the idea
+the house so built is certain to be an insult to intelligence and
+beauty-love.
+
+I bought a house in a hurry in the city of Oakland some time ago.  I do
+not live in it.  I sleep in it half a dozen times a year.  I do not love
+the house.  I am hurt every time I look at it.  No drunken rowdy or
+political enemy can insult me so deeply as that house does.  Let me tell
+you why.  It is an ordinary two-storey frame house.  After it was built,
+the criminal that constructed it nailed on, at the corners
+perpendicularly, some two-inch fluted planks.  These planks rise the
+height of the house, and to a drunken man have the appearance of fluted
+columns.  To complete the illusion in the eyes of the drunken man, the
+planks are topped with wooden Ionic capitals, nailed on, and in, I may
+say, bas-relief.
+
+When I analyze the irritation these fluted planks cause in me, I find the
+reason in the fact that the first rule for building a house has been
+violated.  These decorative planks are no part of the construction.  They
+have no use, no work to perform.  They are plastered gawds that tell lies
+that nobody believes.  A column is made for the purpose of supporting
+weight; this is its use.  A column, when it is a utility, is beautiful.
+The fluted wooden columns nailed on outside my house are not utilities.
+They are not beautiful.  They are nightmares.  They not only support no
+weight, but they themselves are a weight that drags upon the supports of
+the house.  Some day, when I get time, one of two things will surely
+happen.  Either I'll go forth and murder the man who perpetrated the
+atrocity, or else I'll take an axe and chop off the lying, fluted planks.
+
+A thing must be true, or it is not beautiful, any more than a painted
+wanton is beautiful, any more than a sky-scraper is beautiful that is
+intrinsically and structurally light and that has a false massiveness of
+pillars plastered on outside.  The true sky-scraper _is_ beautiful--and
+this is the reluctant admission of a man who dislikes humanity-festering
+cities.  The true sky-scraper is beautiful, and it is beautiful in so far
+as it is true.  In its construction it is light and airy, therefore in
+its appearance it must be light and airy.  It dare not, if it wishes to
+be beautiful, lay claim to what it is not.  And it should not bulk on the
+city-scape like Leviathan; it should rise and soar, light and airy and
+fairylike.
+
+Man is an ethical animal--or, at least, he is more ethical than any other
+animal.  Wherefore he has certain yearnings for honesty.  And in no way
+can these yearnings be more thoroughly satisfied than by the honesty of
+the house in which he lives and passes the greater part of his life.
+
+They that dwelt in San Francisco were dishonest.  They lied and cheated
+in their business life (like the dwellers in all cities), and because
+they lied and cheated in their business life, they lied and cheated in
+the buildings they erected.  Upon the tops of the simple, severe walls of
+their buildings they plastered huge projecting cornices.  These cornices
+were not part of the construction.  They made believe to be part of the
+construction, and they were lies.  The earth wrinkled its back for
+twenty-eight seconds, and the lying cornices crashed down as all lies are
+doomed to crash down.  In this particular instance, the lies crashed down
+upon the heads of the people fleeing from their reeling habitations, and
+many were killed.  They paid the penalty of dishonesty.
+
+Not alone should the construction of a house be truthful and honest, but
+the material must be honest.  They that lived in San Francisco were
+dishonest in the material they used.  They sold one quality of material
+and delivered another quality of material.  They always delivered an
+inferior quality.  There is not one case recorded in the business history
+of San Francisco where a contractor or builder delivered a quality
+superior to the one sold.  A seven-million-dollar city hall became thirty
+cents in twenty-eight seconds.  Because the mortar was not honest, a
+thousand walls crashed down and scores of lives were snuffed out.  There
+is something, after all, in the contention of a few religionists that the
+San Francisco earthquake was a punishment for sin.  It was a punishment
+for sin; but it was not for sin against God.  The people of San Francisco
+sinned against themselves.
+
+An honest house tells the truth about itself.  There is a house here in
+Glen Ellen.  It stands on a corner.  It is built of beautiful red stone.
+Yet it is not beautiful.  On three sides the stone is joined and pointed.
+The fourth side is the rear.  It faces the back yard.  The stone is not
+pointed.  It is all a smudge of dirty mortar, with here and there bricks
+worked in when the stone gave out.  The house is not what it seems.  It
+is a lie.  All three of the walls spend their time lying about the fourth
+wall.  They keep shouting out that the fourth wall is as beautiful as
+they.  If I lived long in that house I should not be responsible for my
+morals.  The house is like a man in purple and fine linen, who hasn't had
+a bath for a month.  If I lived long in that house I should become a
+dandy and cut out bathing--for the same reason, I suppose, that an
+African is black and that an Eskimo eats whale-blubber.  I shall not
+build a house like that house.
+
+Last year I started to build a barn.  A man who was a liar undertook to
+do the stonework and concrete work for me.  He could not tell the truth
+to my face; he could not tell the truth in his work.  I was building for
+posterity.  The concrete foundations were four feet wide and sunk three
+and one-half feet into the earth.  The stone walls were two feet thick
+and nine feet high.  Upon them were to rest the great beams that were to
+carry all the weight of hay and the forty tons of the roof.  The man who
+was a liar made beautiful stone walls.  I used to stand alongside of them
+and love them.  I caressed their massive strength with my hands.  I
+thought about them in bed, before I went to sheep.  And they were lies.
+
+Came the earthquake.  Fortunately the rest of the building of the barn
+had been postponed.  The beautiful stone walls cracked in all directions.
+I started, to repair, and discovered the whole enormous lie.  The walls
+were shells.  On each face were beautiful, massive stones--on edge.  The
+inside was hollow.  This hollow in some places was filled with clay and
+loose gravel.  In other places it was filled with air and emptiness, with
+here and there a piece of kindling-wood or dry-goods box, to aid in the
+making of the shell.  The walls were lies.  They were beautiful, but they
+were not useful.  Construction and decoration had been divorced.  The
+walls were all decoration.  They hadn't any construction in them.  "As
+God lets Satan live," I let that lying man live, but--I have built new
+walls from the foundation up.
+
+And now to my own house beautiful, which I shall build some seven or ten
+years from now.  I have a few general ideas about it.  It must be honest
+in construction, material, and appearance.  If any feature of it, despite
+my efforts, shall tell lies, I shall remove that feature.  Utility and
+beauty must be indissolubly wedded.  Construction and decoration must be
+one.  If the particular details keep true to these general ideas, all
+will be well.
+
+I have not thought of many details.  But here are a few.  Take the
+bath-room, for instance.  It shall be as beautiful as any room in the
+house, just as it will be as useful.  The chance is, that it will be the
+most expensive room in the house.  Upon that we are resolved--even if we
+are compelled to build it first, and to live in a tent till we can get
+more money to go on with the rest of the house.  In the bath-room no
+delights of the bath shall be lacking.  Also, a large part of the
+expensiveness will be due to the use of material that will make it easy
+to keep the bathroom clean and in order.  Why should a servant toil
+unduly that my body may be clean?  On the other hand, the honesty of my
+own flesh, and the square dealing I give it, are more important than all
+the admiration of my friends for expensive decorative schemes and
+magnificent trivialities.  More delightful to me is a body that sings
+than a stately and costly grand staircase built for show.  Not that I
+like grand staircases less, but that I like bath-rooms more.
+
+I often regret that I was born in this particular period of the world.
+In the matter of servants, how I wish I were living in the golden future
+of the world, where there will be no servants--naught but service of
+love.  But in the meantime, living here and now, being practical,
+understanding the rationality and the necessity of the division of
+labour, I accept servants.  But such acceptance does not justify me in
+lack of consideration for them.  In my house beautiful their rooms shall
+not be dens and holes.  And on this score I foresee a fight with the
+architect.  They shall have bath-rooms, toilet conveniences, and comforts
+for their leisure time and human life--if I have to work Sundays to pay
+for it.  Even under the division of labour I recognize that no man has a
+right to servants who will not treat them as humans compounded of the
+same clay as himself, with similar bundles of nerves and desires,
+contradictions, irritabilities, and lovablenesses.  Heaven in the
+drawing-room and hell in the kitchen is not the atmosphere for a growing
+child to breathe--nor an adult either.  One of the great and selfish
+objections to chattel slavery was the effect on the masters themselves.
+
+And because of the foregoing, one chief aim in the building of my house
+beautiful will be to have a house that will require the minimum of
+trouble and work to keep clean and orderly.  It will be no spick and span
+and polished house, with an immaculateness that testifies to the tragedy
+of drudge.  I live in California where the days are warm.  I'd prefer
+that the servants had three hours to go swimming (or hammocking) than be
+compelled to spend those three hours in keeping the house spick and span.
+Therefore it devolves upon me to build a house that can be kept clean and
+orderly without the need of those three hours.
+
+But underneath the spick and span there is something more dreadful than
+the servitude of the servants.  This dreadful thing is the philosophy of
+the spick and span.  In Korea the national costume is white.  Nobleman
+and coolie dress alike in white.  It is hell on the women who do the
+washing, but there is more in it than that.  The coolie cannot keep his
+white clothes clean.  He toils and they get dirty.  The dirty white of
+his costume is the token of his inferiority.  The nobleman's dress is
+always spotless white.  It means that he doesn't have to work.  But it
+means, further, that somebody else has to work for him.  His superiority
+is not based upon song-craft nor state-craft, upon the foot-races he has
+run nor the wrestlers he has thrown.  His superiority is based upon the
+fact that he doesn't have to work, and that others are compelled to work
+for him.  And so the Korean drone flaunts his clean white clothes, for
+the same reason that the Chinese flaunts his monstrous finger-nails, and
+the white man and woman flaunt the spick-and-spanness of their spotless
+houses.
+
+There will be hardwood floors in my house beautiful.  But these floors
+will not be polished mirrors nor skating-rinks.  They will be just plain
+and common hardwood floors.  Beautiful carpets are not beautiful to the
+mind that knows they are filled with germs and bacilli.  They are no more
+beautiful than the hectic flush of fever, or the silvery skin of leprosy.
+Besides, carpets enslave.  A thing that enslaves is a monster, and
+monsters are not beautiful.
+
+The fireplaces in my house will be many and large.  Small fires and cold
+weather mean hermetically-sealed rooms and a jealous cherishing of heated
+and filth-laden air.  With large fire-places and generous heat, some
+windows may be open all the time, and without hardship all the windows
+can be opened every little while and the rooms flushed with clean pure
+air.  I have nearly died in the stagnant, rotten air of other people's
+houses--especially in the Eastern states.  In Maine I have slept in a
+room with storm-windows immovable, and with one small pane five inches by
+six, that could be opened.  Did I say slept?  I panted with my mouth in
+the opening and blasphemed till I ruined all my chances of heaven.
+
+For countless thousands of years my ancestors have lived and died and
+drawn all their breaths in the open air.  It is only recently that we
+have begun to live in houses.  The change is a hardship, especially on
+the lungs.  I've got only one pair of lungs, and I haven't the address of
+any repair-shop.  Wherefore I stick by the open air as much as possible.
+For this reason my house will have large verandas, and, near to the
+kitchen, there will be a veranda dining-room.  Also, there will be a
+veranda fireplace, where we can breathe fresh air and be comfortable when
+the evenings are touched with frost.
+
+I have a plan for my own bedroom.  I spend long hours in bed, reading,
+studying, and working.  I have tried sleeping in the open, but the lamp
+attracts all the creeping, crawling, butting, flying, fluttering things
+to the pages of my book, into my ears and blankets, and down the back of
+my neck.  So my bedroom shall be indoors.
+
+But it will be, not be of, indoors.  Three sides of it will be open.  The
+fourth side will divide it from the rest of the house.  The three sides
+will be screened against the creeping, fluttering things, but not against
+the good fresh air and all the breezes that blow.  For protection against
+storm, to keep out the driving rain, there will be a sliding glass, so
+made that when not in use it will occupy small space and shut out very
+little air.
+
+There is little more to say about this house.  I am to build seven or ten
+years from now.  There is plenty of time in which to work up all the
+details in accord with the general principles I have laid down.  It will
+be a usable house and a beautiful house, wherein the aesthetic guest can
+find comfort for his eyes as well as for his body.  It will be a happy
+house--or else I'll burn it down.  It will be a house of air and sunshine
+and laughter.  These three cannot be divorced.  Laughter without air and
+sunshine becomes morbid, decadent, demoniac.  I have in me a thousand
+generations.  Laughter that is decadent is not good for these thousand
+generations.
+
+GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
+_July_ 1906.
+
+
+
+
+THE GOLD HUNTERS OF THE NORTH
+
+
+    "Where the Northern Lights come down a' nights to dance on the
+    houseless snow."
+
+"Ivan, I forbid you to go farther in this undertaking.  Not a word about
+this, or we are all undone.  Let the Americans and the English know that
+we have gold in these mountains, then we are ruined.  They will rush in
+on us by thousands, and crowd us to the wall--to the death."
+
+So spoke the old Russian governor, Baranov, at Sitka, in 1804, to one of
+his Slavonian hunters, who had just drawn from his pocket a handful of
+golden nuggets.  Full well Baranov, fur trader and autocrat, understood
+and feared the coming of the sturdy, indomitable gold hunters of
+Anglo-Saxon stock.  And thus he suppressed the news, as did the governors
+that followed him, so that when the United States bought Alaska in 1867,
+she bought it for its furs and fisheries, without a thought of its
+treasures underground.
+
+No sooner, however, had Alaska become American soil than thousands of our
+adventurers were afoot and afloat for the north.  They were the men of
+"the days of gold," the men of California, Fraser, Cassiar, and Cariboo.
+With the mysterious, infinite faith of the prospector, they believed that
+the gold streak, which ran through the Americas from Cape Horn to
+California, did not "peter out" in British Columbia.  That it extended
+farther north, was their creed, and "Farther North" became their cry.  No
+time was lost, and in the early seventies, leaving the Treadwell and the
+Silver Bow Basin to be discovered by those who came after, they went
+plunging on into the white unknown.  North, farther north, they
+struggled, till their picks rang in the frozen beaches of the Arctic
+Ocean, and they shivered by driftwood fires on the ruby sands of Nome.
+
+But first, in order that this colossal adventure may be fully grasped,
+the recentness and the remoteness of Alaska must be emphasized.  The
+interior of Alaska and the contiguous Canadian territory was a vast
+wilderness.  Its hundreds of thousands of square miles were as dark and
+chartless as Darkest Africa.  In 1847, when the first Hudson Bay Company
+agents crossed over the Rockies from the Mackenzie to poach on the
+preserves of the Russian Bear, they thought that the Yukon flowed north
+and emptied into the Arctic Ocean.  Hundreds of miles below, however,
+were the outposts of the Russian traders.  They, in turn, did not know
+where the Yukon had its source, and it was not till later that Russ and
+Saxon learned that it was the same mighty stream they were occupying.
+And a little over ten years later, Frederick Whymper voyaged up the Great
+Bend to Fort Yukon under the Arctic Circle.
+
+From fort to fort, from York Factory on Hudson's Bay to Fort Yukon in
+Alaska, the English traders transported their goods--a round trip
+requiring from a year to a year and a half.  It was one of their
+deserters, in 1867, escaping down the Yukon to Bering Sea, who was the
+first white man to make the North-west Passage by land from the Atlantic
+to the Pacific.  It was at this time that the first accurate description
+of a fair portion of the Yukon was given by Dr. W. H. Ball, of the
+Smithsonian Institution.  But even he had never seen its source, and it
+was not given him to appreciate the marvel of that great natural highway.
+
+No more remarkable river in this one particular is there in the world;
+taking its rise in Crater Lake, thirty miles from the ocean, the Yukon
+flows for twenty-five hundred miles, through the heart of the continent,
+ere it empties into the sea.  A portage of thirty miles, and then a
+highway for traffic one tenth the girth of the earth!
+
+As late as 1869, Frederick Whymper, fellow of the Royal Geographical
+Society, stated on hearsay that the Chilcat Indians were believed
+occasionally to make a short portage across the Coast Range from salt
+water to the head-reaches of the Yukon.  But it remained for a gold
+hunter, questing north, ever north, to be first of all white men to cross
+the terrible Chilcoot Pass, and tap the Yukon at its head.  This happened
+only the other day, but the man has become a dim legendary hero.  Holt
+was his name, and already the mists of antiquity have wrapped about the
+time of his passage.  1872, 1874, and 1878 are the dates variously
+given--a confusion which time will never clear.
+
+Holt penetrated as far as the Hootalinqua, and on his return to the coast
+reported coarse gold.  The next recorded adventurer is one Edward Bean,
+who in 1880 headed a party of twenty-five miners from Sitka into the
+uncharted land.  And in the same year, other parties (now forgotten, for
+who remembers or ever hears the wanderings of the gold hunters?) crossed
+the Pass, built boats out of the standing timber, and drifted down the
+Yukon and farther north.
+
+And then, for a quarter of a century, the unknown and unsung heroes
+grappled with the frost, and groped for the gold they were sure lay
+somewhere among the shadows of the Pole.  In the struggle with the
+terrifying and pitiless natural forces, they returned to the primitive,
+garmenting themselves in the skins of wild beasts, and covering their
+feet with the walrus _mucluc_ and the moosehide moccasin.  They forgot
+the world and its ways, as the world had forgotten them; killed their
+meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in famine, and
+searched unceasingly for the yellow lure.  They crisscrossed the land in
+every direction, threaded countless unmapped rivers in precarious
+birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes and dogs broke trail through
+thousands of miles of silent white, where man had never been.  They
+struggled on, under the aurora borealis or the midnight sun, through
+temperatures that ranged from one hundred degrees above zero to eighty
+degrees below, living, in the grim humour of the land, on "rabbit tracks
+and salmon bellies."
+
+To-day, a man may wander away from the trail for a hundred days, and just
+as he is congratulating himself that at last he is treading virgin soil,
+he will come upon some ancient and dilapidated cabin, and forget his
+disappointment in wonder at the man who reared the logs.  Still, if one
+wanders from the trail far enough and deviously enough, he may chance
+upon a few thousand square miles which he may have all to himself.  On
+the other hand, no matter how far and how deviously he may wander, the
+possibility always remains that he may stumble, not alone upon a deserted
+cabin, but upon an occupied one.
+
+As an instance of this, and of the vastness of the land, no better case
+need be cited than that of Harry Maxwell.  An able seaman, hailing from
+New Bedford, Massachusetts, his ship, the brig _Fannie E. Lee_, was
+pinched in the Arctic ice.  Passing from whaleship to whaleship, he
+eventually turned up at Point Barrow in the summer of 1880.  He was
+_north_ of the Northland, and from this point of vantage he determined to
+pull south of the interior in search of gold.  Across the mountains from
+Fort Macpherson, and a couple of hundred miles eastward from the
+Mackenzie, he built a cabin and established his headquarters.  And here,
+for nineteen continuous years, he hunted his living and prospected.  He
+ranged from the never opening ice to the north as far south as the Great
+Slave Lake.  Here he met Warburton Pike, the author and explorer--an
+incident he now looks back upon as chief among the few incidents of his
+solitary life.
+
+When this sailor-miner had accumulated $20,000 worth of dust he concluded
+that civilization was good enough for him, and proceeded "to pull for the
+outside."  From the Mackenzie he went up the Little Peel to its
+headwaters, found a pass through the mountains, nearly starved to death
+on his way across to the Porcupine Hills, and eventually came out on the
+Yukon River, where he learned for the first time of the Yukon gold
+hunters and their discoveries.  Yet for twenty years they had been
+working there, his next-door neighbours, virtually, in a land of such
+great spaces.  At Victoria, British Columbia, previous to his going east
+over the Canadian Pacific (the existence of which he had just learned),
+he pregnantly remarked that he had faith in the Mackenzie watershed, and
+that he was going back after he had taken in the World's Fair and got a
+whiff or two of civilization.
+
+Faith!  It may or may not remove mountains, but it has certainly made the
+Northland.  No Christian martyr ever possessed greater faith than did the
+pioneers of Alaska.  They never doubted the bleak and barren land.  Those
+who came remained, and more ever came.  They could not leave.  They
+"knew" the gold was there, and they persisted.  Somehow, the romance of
+the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped
+hold of them and would not let them go.  Man after man of them, after the
+most terrible privation and suffering, shook the muck of the country from
+his moccasins and departed for good.  But the following spring always
+found him drifting down the Yukon on the tail of the ice jams.
+
+Jack McQuestion aptly vindicates the grip of the North.  After a
+residence of thirty years he insists that the climate is delightful, and
+declares that whenever he makes a trip to the States he is afflicted with
+home-sickness.  Needless to say, the North still has him and will keep
+tight hold of him until he dies.  In fact, for him to die elsewhere would
+be inartistic and insincere.  Of three of the "pioneer" pioneers, Jack
+McQuestion alone survives.  In 1871, from one to seven years before Holt
+went over Chilcoot, in the company of Al Mayo and Arthur Harper,
+McQuestion came into the Yukon from the North-west over the Hudson Bay
+Company route from the Mackenzie to Fort Yukon.  The names of these three
+men, as their lives, are bound up in the history of the country, and so
+long as there be histories and charts, that long will the Mayo and
+McQuestion rivers and the Harper and Ladue town site of Dawson be
+remembered.  As an agent of the Alaska Commercial Company, in 1873,
+McQuestion built Fort Reliance, six miles below the Klondike River.  In
+1898 the writer met Jack McQuestion at Minook, on the Lower Yukon.  The
+old pioneer, though grizzled, was hale and hearty, and as optimistic as
+when he first journeyed into the land along the path of the Circle.  And
+no man more beloved is there in all the North.  There will be great
+sadness there when his soul goes questing on over the Last
+Divide--"farther north," perhaps--who can tell?
+
+Frank Dinsmore is a fair sample of the men who made the Yukon country.  A
+Yankee, born, in Auburn, Maine, the _Wanderlust_ early laid him by the
+heels, and at sixteen he was heading west on the trail that led "farther
+north."  He prospected in the Black Hills, Montana, and in the Coeur
+d'Alene, then heard a whisper of the North, and went up to Juneau on the
+Alaskan Panhandle.  But the North still whispered, and more insistently,
+and he could not rest till he went over Chilcoot, and down into the
+mysterious Silent Land.  This was in 1882, and he went down the chain of
+lakes, down the Yukon, up the Pelly, and tried his luck on the bars of
+McMillan River.  In the fall, a perambulating skeleton, he came back over
+the Pass in a blizzard, with a rag of shirt, tattered overalls, and a
+handful of raw flour.
+
+But he was unafraid.  That winter he worked for a grubstake in Juneau,
+and the next spring found the heels of his moccasins turned towards salt
+water and his face toward Chilcoot.  This was repeated the next spring,
+and the following spring, and the spring after that, until, in 1885, he
+went over the Pass for good.  There was to be no return for him until he
+found the gold he sought.
+
+The years came and went, but he remained true to his resolve.  For eleven
+long years, with snow-shoe and canoe, pickaxe and gold-pan, he wrote out
+his life on the face of the land.  Upper Yukon, Middle Yukon, Lower
+Yukon--he prospected faithfully and well.  His bed was anywhere.  Winter
+or summer he carried neither tent nor stove, and his six-pound
+sleeping-robe of Arctic hare was the warmest covering he was ever known
+to possess.  Rabbit tracks and salmon bellies were his diet with a
+vengeance, for he depended largely on his rifle and fishing-tackle.  His
+endurance equalled his courage.  On a wager he lifted thirteen
+fifty-pound sacks of flour and walked off with them.  Winding up a
+seven-hundred-mile trip on the ice with a forty-mile run, he came into
+camp at six o'clock in the evening and found a "squaw dance" under way.
+He should have been exhausted.  Anyway, his _muclucs_ were frozen stiff.
+But he kicked them off and danced all night in stocking-feet.
+
+At the last fortune came to him.  The quest was ended, and he gathered up
+his gold and pulled for the outside.  And his own end was as fitting as
+that of his quest.  Illness came upon him down in San Francisco, and his
+splendid life ebbed slowly out as he sat in his big easy-chair, in the
+Commercial Hotel, the "Yukoner's home."  The doctors came, discussed,
+consulted, the while he matured more plans of Northland adventure; for
+the North still gripped him and would not let him go.  He grew weaker day
+by day, but each day he said, "To-morrow I'll be all right."  Other
+old-timers, "out on furlough,", came to see him.  They wiped their eyes
+and swore under their breaths, then entered and talked largely and
+jovially about going in with him over the trail when spring came.  But
+there in the big easy-chair it was that his Long Trail ended, and the
+life passed out of him still fixed on "farther north."
+
+From the time of the first white man, famine loomed black and gloomy over
+the land.  It was chronic with the Indians and Eskimos; it became chronic
+with the gold hunters.  It was ever present, and so it came about that
+life was commonly expressed in terms of "grub"--was measured by cups of
+flour.  Each winter, eight months long, the heroes of the frost faced
+starvation.  It became the custom, as fall drew on, for partners to cut
+the cards or draw straws to determine which should hit the hazardous
+trail for salt water, and which should remain and endure the hazardous
+darkness of the Arctic night.
+
+There was never food enough to winter the whole population.  The A. C.
+Company worked hard to freight up the grub, but the gold hunters came
+faster and dared more audaciously.  When the A. C. Company added a new
+stern-wheeler to its fleet, men said, "Now we shall have plenty."  But
+more gold hunters poured in over the passes to the south, more
+_voyageurs_ and fur traders forced a way through the Rockies from the
+east, more seal hunters and coast adventurers poled up from Bering Sea on
+the west, more sailors deserted from the whale-ships to the north, and
+they all starved together in right brotherly fashion.  More steamers were
+added, but the tide of prospectors welled always in advance.  Then the N.
+A. T. & T.  Company came upon the scene, and both companies added
+steadily to their fleets.  But it was the same old story; famine would
+not depart.  In fact, famine grew with the population, till, in the
+winter of 1897-1898, the United States government was forced to equip a
+reindeer relief expedition.  As of old, that winter partners cut the
+cards and drew straws, and remained or pulled for salt water as chance
+decided.  They were wise of old time, and had learned never to figure on
+relief expeditions.  They had heard of such things, but no mortal man of
+them had ever laid eyes on one.
+
+The hard luck of other mining countries pales into insignificance before
+the hard luck of the North.  And as for the hardship, it cannot be
+conveyed by printed page or word of mouth.  No man may know who has not
+undergone.  And those who have undergone, out of their knowledge, claim
+that in the making of the world God grew tired, and when He came to the
+last barrowload, "just dumped it anyhow," and that was how Alaska
+happened to be.  While no adequate conception of the life can be given to
+the stay-at-home, yet the men themselves sometimes give a clue to its
+rigours.  One old Minook miner testified thus: "Haven't you noticed the
+expression on the faces of us fellows?  You can tell a new-comer the
+minute you see him; he looks alive, enthusiastic, perhaps jolly.  We old
+miners are always grave, unless were drinking."
+
+Another old-timer, out of the bitterness of a "home-mood," imagined
+himself a Martian astronomer explaining to a friend, with the aid of a
+powerful telescope, the institutions of the earth.  "There are the
+continents," he indicated; "and up there near the polar cap is a country,
+frigid and burning and lonely and apart, called Alaska.  Now, in other
+countries and states there are great insane asylums, but, though crowded,
+they are insufficient; so there is Alaska given over to the worst cases.
+Now and then some poor insane creature comes to his senses in those awful
+solitudes, and, in wondering joy, escapes from the land and hastens back
+to his home.  But most cases are incurable.  They just suffer along, poor
+devils, forgetting their former life quite, or recalling it like a
+dream."  Again the grip of the North, which will not let one go--for
+"_most cases are incurable_."
+
+For a quarter of a century the battle with frost and famine went on.  The
+very severity of the struggle with Nature seemed to make the gold hunters
+kindly toward one another.  The latch-string was always out, and the open
+hand was the order of the day.  Distrust was unknown, and it was no
+hyperbole for a man to take the last shirt off his back for a comrade.
+Most significant of all, perhaps, in this connection, was the custom of
+the old days, that when August the first came around, the prospectors who
+had failed to locate "pay dirt" were permitted to go upon the ground of
+their more fortunate comrades and take out enough for the next year's
+grub-stake.
+
+In 1885 rich bar-washing was done on the Stewart River, and in 1886
+Cassiar Bar was struck just below the mouth of the Hootalinqua.  It was
+at this time that the first moderate strike was made on Forty Mile Creek,
+so called because it was judged to be that distance below Fort Reliance
+of Jack McQuestion fame.  A prospector named Williams started for the
+outside with dogs and Indians to carry the news, but suffered such
+hardship on the summit of Chilcoot that he was carried dying into the
+store of Captain John Healy at Dyea.  But he had brought the news
+through--_coarse gold_!  Within three months more than two hundred miners
+had passed in over Chilcoot, stampeding for Forty Mile.  Find followed
+find--Sixty Mile, Miller, Glacier, Birch, Franklin, and the Koyokuk.  But
+they were all moderate discoveries, and the miners still dreamed and
+searched for the fabled stream, "Too Much Gold," where gold was so
+plentiful that gravel had to be shovelled into the sluice-boxes in order
+to wash it.
+
+And all the time the Northland was preparing to play its own huge joke.
+It was a great joke, albeit an exceeding bitter one, and it has led the
+old-timers to believe that the land is left in darkness the better part
+of the year because God goes away and leaves it to itself.  After all the
+risk and toil and faithful endeavour, it was destined that few of the
+heroes should be in at the finish when Too Much Gold turned its
+yellow-treasure to the stars.
+
+First, there was Robert Henderson--and this is true history.  Henderson
+had faith in the Indian River district.  For three years, by himself,
+depending mainly on his rifle, living on straight meat a large portion of
+the time, he prospected many of the Indian River tributaries, just missed
+finding the rich creeks, Sulphur and Dominion, and managed to make grub
+(poor grub) out of Quartz Creek and Australia Creek.  Then he crossed the
+divide between Indian River and the Klondike, and on one of the "feeders"
+of the latter found eight cents to the pan.  This was considered
+excellent in those simple days.  Naming the creek "Gold Bottom," he
+recrossed the divide and got three men, Munson, Dalton, and Swanson, to
+return with him.  The four took out $750.  And be it emphasized, and
+emphasized again, _that this was the first Klondike gold ever shovelled
+in and washed out_.  And be it also emphasized, _that Robert Henderson
+was the discoverer of Klondike_, _all lies and hearsay tales to the
+contrary_.
+
+Running out of grub, Henderson again recrossed the divide, and went down
+the Indian River and up the Yukon to Sixty Mile.  Here Joe Ladue ran the
+trading post, and here Joe Ladue had originally grub-staked Henderson.
+Henderson told his tale, and a dozen men (all it contained) deserted the
+Post for the scene of his find.  Also, Henderson persuaded a party of
+prospectors bound for Stewart River, to forgo their trip and go down and
+locate with him.  He loaded his boat with supplies, drifted down the
+Yukon to the mouth of the Klondike, and towed and poled up the Klondike
+to Gold Bottom.  But at the mouth of the Klondike he met George Carmack,
+and thereby hangs the tale.
+
+Carmack was a squawman.  He was familiarly known as "Siwash" George--a
+derogatory term which had arisen out of his affinity for the Indians.  At
+the time Henderson encountered him he was catching salmon with his Indian
+wife and relatives on the site of what was to become Dawson, the Golden
+City of the Snows.  Henderson, bubbling over with good-will, open-handed,
+told Carmack of his discovery.  But Carmack was satisfied where he was.
+He was possessed by no overweening desire for the strenuous life.  Salmon
+were good enough for him.  But Henderson urged him to come on and locate,
+until, when he yielded, he wanted to take the whole tribe along.
+Henderson refused to stand for this, said that he must give the
+preference over Siwashes to his old Sixty Mile friends, and, it is
+rumoured, said some things about Siwashes that were not nice.
+
+The next morning Henderson went on alone up the Klondike to Gold Bottom.
+Carmack, by this time aroused, took a short cut afoot for the same place.
+Accompanied by his two Indian brothers-in-law, Skookum Jim and Tagish
+Charley, he went up Rabbit Creek (now Bonanza), crossed into Gold Bottom,
+and staked near Henderson's discovery.  On the way up he had panned a few
+shovels on Rabbit Creek, and he showed Henderson "colours" he had
+obtained.  Henderson made him promise, if he found anything on the way
+back, that he would send up one of the Indians with the news.  Henderson
+also agreed to pay for his service, for he seemed to feel that they were
+on the verge of something big, and he wanted to make sure.
+
+Carmack returned down Rabbit Creek.  While he was taking a sleep on the
+bank about half a mile below the mouth of what was to be known as
+Eldorado, Skookum Jim tried his luck, and from surface prospects got from
+ten cents to a dollar to the pan.  Carmack and his brother-in-law staked
+and hit "the high places" for Forty Mile, where they filed on the claims
+before Captain Constantine, and renamed the creek Bonanza.  And Henderson
+was forgotten.  No word of it reached him.  Carmack broke his promise.
+
+Weeks afterward, when Bonanza and Eldorado were staked from end to end
+and there was no more room, a party of late comers pushed over the divide
+and down to Gold Bottom, where they found Henderson still at work.  When
+they told him they were from Bonanza, he was nonplussed.  He had never
+heard of such a place.  But when they described it, he recognized it as
+Rabbit Creek.  Then they told him of its marvellous richness, and, as
+Tappan Adney relates, when Henderson realized what he had lost through
+Carmack's treachery, "he threw down his shovel and went and sat on the
+bank, so sick at heart that it was some time before he could speak."
+
+Then there were the rest of the old-timers, the men of Forty Mile and
+Circle City.  At the time of the discovery, nearly all of them were over
+to the west at work in the old diggings or prospecting for new ones.  As
+they said of themselves, they were the kind of men who are always caught
+out with forks when it rains soup.  In the stampede that followed the
+news of Carmack's strike very few old miners took part.  They were not
+there to take part.  But the men who did go on the stampede were mainly
+the worthless ones, the new-comers, and the camp hangers on.  And while
+Bob Henderson plugged away to the east, and the heroes plugged away to
+the west, the greenhorns and rounders went up and staked Bonanza.
+
+But the Northland was not yet done with its joke.  When fall came on and
+the heroes returned to Forty Mile and to Circle City, they listened
+calmly to the up-river tales of Siwash discoveries and loafers'
+prospects, and shook their heads.  They judged by the calibre of the men
+interested, and branded it a bunco game.  But glowing reports continued
+to trickle down the Yukon, and a few of the old-timers went up to see.
+They looked over the ground--the unlikeliest place for gold in all their
+experience--and they went down the river again, "leaving it to the
+Swedes."
+
+Again the Northland turned the tables.  The Alaskan gold hunter is
+proverbial, not so much for his unveracity, as for his inability to tell
+the precise truth.  In a country of exaggerations, he likewise is prone
+to hyperbolic description of things actual.  But when it came to
+Klondike, he could not stretch the truth as fast as the truth itself
+stretched.  Carmack first got a dollar pan.  He lied when he said it was
+two dollars and a half.  And when those who doubted him did get
+two-and-a-half pans, they said they were getting an ounce, and lo! ere
+the lie had fairly started on its way, they were getting, not one ounce,
+but five ounces.  This they claimed was six ounces; but when they filled
+a pan of dirt to prove the lie, they washed out twelve ounces.  And so it
+went.  They continued valiantly to lie, but the truth continued to outrun
+them.
+
+But the Northland's hyperborean laugh was not yet ended.  When Bonanza
+was staked from mouth to source, those who had failed to "get in,"
+disgruntled and sore, went up the "pups" and feeders.  Eldorado was one
+of these feeders, and many men, after locating on it, turned their backs
+upon their claims and never gave them a second thought.  One man sold a
+half-interest in five hundred feet of it for a sack of flour.  Other
+owners wandered around trying to bunco men into buying them out for a
+song.  And then Eldorado "showed up."  It was far, far richer than
+Bonanza, with an average value of a thousand dollars a foot to every foot
+of it.
+
+A Swede named Charley Anderson had been at work on Miller Creek the year
+of the strike, and arrived in Dawson with a few hundred dollars.  Two
+miners, who had staked No. 29 Eldorado, decided that he was the proper
+man upon whom to "unload."  He was too canny to approach sober, so at
+considerable expense they got him drunk.  Even then it was hard work, but
+they kept him befuddled for several days, and finally, inveigled him into
+buying No. 29 for $750.  When Anderson sobered up, he wept at his folly,
+and pleaded to have his money back.  But the men who had duped him were
+hard-hearted.  They laughed at him, and kicked themselves for not having
+tapped him for a couple of hundred more.  Nothing remained for Anderson
+but to work the worthless ground.  This he did, and out of it he took
+over three-quarters of a million of dollars.
+
+It was not till Frank Dinsmore, who already had big holdings on Birch
+Creek, took a hand, that the old-timers developed faith in the new
+diggings.  Dinsmore received a letter from a man on the spot, calling it
+"the biggest thing in the world," and harnessed his dogs and went up to
+investigate.  And when he sent a letter back, saying that he had never
+seen "anything like it," Circle City for the first time believed, and at
+once was precipitated one of the wildest stampedes the country had ever
+seen or ever will see.  Every dog was taken, many went without dogs, and
+even the women and children and weaklings hit the three hundred miles of
+ice through the long Arctic night for the biggest thing in the world.  It
+is related that but twenty people, mostly cripples and unable to travel,
+were left in Circle City when the smoke of the last sled disappeared up
+the Yukon.
+
+Since that time gold has been discovered in all manner of places, under
+the grass roots of the hill-side benches, in the bottom of Monte Cristo
+Island, and in the sands of the sea at Nome.  And now the gold hunter who
+knows his business shuns the "favourable looking" spots, confident in his
+hard-won knowledge that he will find the most gold in the least likely
+place.  This is sometimes adduced to support the theory that the gold
+hunters, rather than the explorers, are the men who will ultimately win
+to the Pole.  Who knows?  It is in their blood, and they are capable of
+it.
+
+PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
+_February_ 1902.
+
+
+
+
+FOMA GORDYEEFF
+
+
+    "What, without asking, hither hurried _Whence_?
+    And, without asking, _Whither_ hurried hence!
+    Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
+    Must drown the memory of that insolence!"
+
+"Foma Gordyeeff" is a big book--not only is the breadth of Russia in it,
+but the expanse of life.  Yet, though in each land, in this world of
+marts and exchanges, this age of trade and traffic, passionate figures
+rise up and demand of life what its fever is, in "Foma Gordyeeff" it is a
+Russian who so rises up and demands.  For Gorky, the Bitter One, is
+essentially a Russian in his grasp on the facts of life and in his
+treatment.  All the Russian self-analysis and insistent introspection are
+his.  And, like all his brother Russians, ardent, passionate protest
+impregnates his work.  There is a purpose to it.  He writes because he
+has something to say which the world should hear.  From that clenched
+fist of his, light and airy romances, pretty and sweet and beguiling, do
+not flow, but realities--yes, big and brutal and repulsive, but real.
+
+He raises the cry of the miserable and the despised, and in a masterly
+arraignment of commercialism, protests against social conditions, against
+the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution of
+the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power.  It is to be
+doubted strongly if the average bourgeois, smug and fat and prosperous,
+can understand this man Foma Gordyeeff.  The rebellion in his blood is
+something to which their own does not thrill.  To them it will be
+inexplicable that this man, with his health and his millions, could not
+go on living as his class lived, keeping regular hours at desk and stock
+exchange, driving close contracts, underbidding his competitors, and
+exulting in the business disasters of his fellows.  It would appear so
+easy, and, after such a life, well appointed and eminently respectable,
+he could die.  "Ah," Foma will interrupt rudely--he is given to rude
+interruptions--"if to die and disappear is the end of these
+money-grubbing years, why money-grub?"  And the bourgeois whom he rudely
+interrupted will not understand.  Nor did Mayakin understand as he
+laboured holily with his wayward godson.
+
+"Why do you brag?"  Foma, bursts out upon him.  "What have you to brag
+about?  Your son--where is he?  Your daughter--what is she?  Ekh, you
+manager of life!  Come, now, you're clever, you know everything--tell me,
+why do you live?  Why do you accumulate money?  Aren't you going to die?
+Well, what then?"  And Mayakin finds himself speechless and without
+answer, but unshaken and unconvinced.
+
+Receiving by heredity the fierce, bull-like nature of his father plus the
+passive indomitableness and groping spirit of his mother, Foma, proud and
+rebellious, is repelled by the selfish, money-seeking environment into
+which he is born.  Ignat, his father, and Mayakin, the godfather, and all
+the horde of successful merchants singing the paean of the strong and the
+praises of merciless, remorseless _laissez faire_, cannot entice him.
+Why? he demands.  This is a nightmare, this life!  It is without
+significance!  What does it all mean?  What is there underneath?  What is
+the meaning of that which is underneath?
+
+"You do well to pity people," Ignat tells Foma, the boy, "only you must
+use judgment with your pity.  First consider the man, find out what he is
+like, what use can be made of him; and if you see that he is a strong and
+capable man, help him if you like.  But if a man is weak, not inclined to
+work--spit upon him and go your way.  And you must know that when a man
+complains about everything, and cries out and groans--he is not worth
+more than two kopeks, he is not worthy of pity, and will be of no use to
+you if you do help him."
+
+Such the frank and militant commercialism, bellowed out between glasses
+of strong liquor.  Now comes Mayakin, speaking softly and without satire:
+
+"Eh, my boy, what is a beggar?  A beggar is a man who is forced, by fate,
+to remind us of Christ; he is Christ's brother; he is the bell of the
+Lord, and rings in life for the purpose of awakening our conscience, of
+stirring up the satiety of man's flesh.  He stands under the window and
+sings, 'For Christ's sa-ake!' and by that chant he reminds us of Christ,
+of His holy command to help our neighbour.  But men have so ordered their
+lives that it is utterly impossible for them to act in accordance with
+Christ's teaching, and Jesus Christ has become entirely superfluous to
+us.  Not once, but, in all probability, a thousand times, we have given
+Him over to be crucified, but still we cannot banish Him from our lives
+so long as His poor brethren sing His name in the streets and remind us
+of Him.  And so now we have hit upon the idea of shutting up the beggars
+in such special buildings, so that they may not roam about the streets
+and stir up our consciences."
+
+But Foma will have none of it.  He is neither to be enticed nor cajoled.
+The cry of his nature is for light.  He must have light.  And in burning
+revolt he goes seeking the meaning of life.  "His thoughts embraced all
+those petty people who toiled at hard labour.  It was strange--why did
+they live?  What satisfaction was it to them to live on the earth?  All
+they did was to perform their dirty, arduous toil, eat poorly; they were
+miserably clad, addicted to drunkenness.  One was sixty years old, but he
+still toiled side by side with young men.  And they all presented
+themselves to Foma's imagination as a huge heap of worms, who were
+swarming over the earth merely to eat."
+
+He becomes the living interrogation of life.  He cannot begin living
+until he knows what living means, and he seeks its meaning vainly.  "Why
+should I try to live life when I do not know what life is?" he objects
+when Mayakin strives with him to return and manage his business.  Why
+should men fetch and carry for him? be slaves to him and his money?
+
+"Work is not everything to a man," he says; "it is not true that
+justification lies in work . . . Some people never do any work at all,
+all their lives long--yet they live better than the toilers.  Why is
+that?  And what justification have I?  And how will all the people who
+give their orders justify themselves?  What have they lived for?  But my
+idea is that everybody ought, without fail, to know solidly what he is
+living for.  Is it possible that a man is born to toil, accumulate money,
+build a house, beget children, and--die?  No; life means something in
+itself. . . .  A man has been born, has lived, has died--why?  All of us
+must consider why we are living, by God, we must!  There is no sense in
+our life--there is no sense at all.  Some are rich--they have money
+enough for a thousand men all to themselves--and they live without
+occupation; others bow their backs in toil all their life, and they
+haven't a penny."
+
+But Foma can only be destructive.  He is not constructive.  The dim
+groping spirit of his mother and the curse of his environment press too
+heavily upon him, and he is crushed to debauchery and madness.  He does
+not drink because liquor tastes good in his mouth.  In the vile
+companions who purvey to his baser appetites he finds no charm.  It is
+all utterly despicable and sordid, but thither his quest leads him and he
+follows the quest.  He knows that everything is wrong, but he cannot
+right it, cannot tell why.  He can only attack and demolish.  "What
+justification have you all in the sight of God?  Why do you live?" he
+demands of the conclave of merchants, of life's successes.  "You have not
+constructed life--you have made a cesspool!  You have disseminated filth
+and stifling exhalations by your deeds.  Have you any conscience?  Do you
+remember God?  A five-kopek piece--that is your God!  But you have
+expelled your conscience!"
+
+Like the cry of Isaiah, "Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your
+misfortunes that shall come upon you," is Foma's: "You blood-suckers!
+You live on other people's strength; you work with other people's hands!
+For all this you shall be made to pay!  You shall perish--you shall be
+called to account for all!  For all--to the last little tear-drop!"
+
+Stunned by this puddle of life, unable to make sense of it, Foma
+questions, and questions vainly, whether of Sofya Medynsky in her
+drawing-room of beauty, or in the foulest depths of the first chance
+courtesan's heart.  Linboff, whose books contradict one another, cannot
+help him; nor can the pilgrims on crowded steamers, nor the verse writers
+and harlots in dives and boozingkens.  And so, wondering, pondering,
+perplexed, amazed, whirling through the mad whirlpool of life, dancing
+the dance of death, groping for the nameless, indefinite something, the
+magic formula, the essence, the intrinsic fact, the flash of light
+through the murk and dark--the rational sanction for existence, in
+short--Foma Gordyeeff goes down to madness and death.
+
+It is not a pretty book, but it is a masterful interrogation of life--not
+of life universal, but of life particular, the social life of to-day.  It
+is not nice; neither is the social life of to-day nice.  One lays the
+book down sick at heart--sick for life with all its "lyings and its
+lusts."  But it is a healthy book.  So fearful is its portrayal of social
+disease, so ruthless its stripping of the painted charms from vice, that
+its tendency cannot but be strongly for good.  It is a goad, to prick
+sleeping human consciences awake and drive them into the battle for
+humanity.
+
+But no story is told, nothing is finished, some one will object.  Surely,
+when Sasha leaped overboard and swam to Foma, something happened.  It was
+pregnant with possibilities.  Yet it was not finished, was not decisive.
+She left him to go with the son of a rich vodka-maker.  And all that was
+best in Sofya Medynsky was quickened when she looked upon Foma with the
+look of the Mother-Woman.  She might have been a power for good in his
+life, she might have shed light into it and lifted him up to safety and
+honour and understanding.  Yet she went away next day, and he never saw
+her again.  No story is told, nothing is finished.
+
+Ah, but surely the story of Foma Gordyeeff is told; his life is finished,
+as lives are being finished each day around us.  Besides, it is the way
+of life, and the art of Gorky is the art of realism.  But it is a less
+tedious realism than that of Tolstoy or Turgenev.  It lives and breathes
+from page to page with a swing and dash and go that they rarely attain.
+Their mantle has fallen on his young shoulders, and he promises to wear
+it royally.
+
+Even so, but so helpless, hopeless, terrible is this life of Foma
+Gordyeeff that we would be filled with profound sorrow for Gorky did we
+not know that he has come up out of the Valley of Shadow.  That he hopes,
+we know, else would he not now be festering in a Russian prison because
+he is brave enough to live the hope he feels.  He knows life, why and how
+it should be lived.  And in conclusion, this one thing is manifest: Foma
+Gordyeeff is no mere statement of an intellectual problem.  For as he
+lived and interrogated living, so in sweat and blood and travail has
+Gorky lived.
+
+PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
+_November_ 1901.
+
+
+
+
+THESE BONES SHALL RISE AGAIN
+
+
+Rudyard Kipling, "prophet of blood and vulgarity, prince of ephemerals
+and idol of the unelect"--as a Chicago critic chortles--is dead.  It is
+true.  He is dead, dead and buried.  And a fluttering, chirping host of
+men, little men and unseeing men, have heaped him over with the uncut
+leaves of _Kim_, wrapped him in _Stalky & Co._, for winding sheet, and
+for headstone reared his unconventional lines, _The Lesson_.  It was very
+easy.  The simplest thing in the world.  And the fluttering, chirping
+gentlemen are rubbing their hands in amaze and wondering why they did not
+do it long ago, it was so very, very simple.
+
+But the centuries to come, of which the fluttering, chirping gentlemen
+are prone to talk largely, will have something to say in the matter.  And
+when they, the future centuries, quest back to the nineteenth century to
+find what manner of century it was--to find, not what the people of the
+nineteenth century thought they thought, but what they really thought,
+not what they thought they ought to do, but what they really did do, then
+a certain man, Kipling, will be read--and read with understanding.  "They
+thought they read him with understanding, those people of the nineteenth
+century," the future centuries will say; "and then they thought there was
+no understanding in him, and after that they did not know what they
+thought."
+
+But this is over-severe.  It applies only to that class which serves a
+function somewhat similar to that served by the populace of old time in
+Rome.  This is the unstable, mob-minded mass, which sits on the fence,
+ever ready to fall this side or that and indecorously clamber back again;
+which puts a Democratic administration into office one election, and a
+Republican the next; which discovers and lifts up a prophet to-day that
+it may stone him to-morrow; which clamours for the book everybody else is
+reading, for no reason under the sun save that everybody else is reading
+it.  This is the class of whim and caprice, of fad and vogue, the
+unstable, incoherent, mob-mouthed, mob-minded mass, the "monkey-folk," if
+you please, of these latter days.  Now it may be reading _The Eternal
+City_.  Yesterday it was reading _The Master Christian_, and some several
+days before that it was reading Kipling.  Yes, almost to his shame be it,
+these folk were reading him.  But it was not his fault.  If he depended
+upon them he well deserves to be dead and buried and never to rise again.
+But to them, let us be thankful, he never lived.  They thought he lived,
+but he was as dead then as he is now and as he always will be.
+
+He could not help it because he became the vogue, and it is easily
+understood.  When he lay ill, fighting with close grapples with death,
+those who knew him were grieved.  They were many, and in many voices, to
+the rim of the Seven Seas, they spoke their grief.  Whereupon, and with
+celerity, the mob-minded mass began to inquire as to this man whom so
+many mourned.  If everybody else mourned, it were fit that they mourn
+too.  So a vast wail went up.  Each was a spur to the other's grief, and
+each began privately to read this man they had never read and publicly to
+proclaim this man they had always read.  And straightaway next day they
+drowned their grief in a sea of historical romance and forgot all about
+him.  The reaction was inevitable.  Emerging from the sea into which they
+had plunged, they became aware that they had so soon forgotten him, and
+would have been ashamed, had not the fluttering, chirping men said,
+"Come, let us bury him."  And they put him in a hole, quickly, out of
+their sight.
+
+And when they have crept into their own little holes, and smugly laid
+themselves down in their last long sleep, the future centuries will roll
+the stone away and he will come forth again.  For be it known: _That man
+of us is imperishable who makes his century imperishable_.  That man of
+us who seizes upon the salient facts of our life, who tells what we
+thought, what we were, and for what we stood--that man shall be the
+mouthpiece to the centuries, and so long as they listen he shall endure.
+
+We remember the caveman.  We remember him because he made his century
+imperishable.  But, unhappily, we remember him dimly, in a collective
+sort of way, because he memorialized his century dimly, in a collective
+sort of way.  He had no written speech, so he left us rude scratchings of
+beasts and things, cracked marrow-bones, and weapons of stone.  It was
+the best expression of which he was capable.  Had he scratched his own
+particular name with the scratchings of beasts and things, stamped his
+cracked marrowbones with his own particular seal, trade-marked his
+weapons of stone with his own particular device, that particular man
+would we remember.  But he did the best he could, and we remember him as
+best we may.
+
+Homer takes his place with Achilles and the Greek and Trojan heroes.
+Because he remembered them, we remember him.  Whether he be one or a
+dozen men, or a dozen generations of men, we remember him.  And so long
+as the name of Greece is known on the lips of men, so long will the name
+of Homer be known.  There are many such names, linked with their times,
+which have come down to us, many more which will yet go down; and to
+them, in token that we have lived, must we add some few of our own.
+
+Dealing only with the artist, be it understood, only those artists will
+go down who have spoken true of us.  Their truth must be the deepest and
+most significant, their voices clear and strong, definite and coherent.
+Half-truths and partial-truths will not do, nor will thin piping voices
+and quavering lays.  There must be the cosmic quality in what they sing.
+They must seize upon and press into enduring art-forms the vital facts of
+our existence.  They must tell why we have lived, for without any reason
+for living, depend upon it, in the time to come, it will be as though we
+had never lived.  Nor are the things that were true of the people a
+thousand years or so ago true of us to-day.  The romance of Homer's
+Greece is the romance of Homer's Greece.  That is undeniable.  It is not
+our romance.  And he who in our time sings the romance of Homer's Greece
+cannot expect to sing it so well as Homer did, nor will he be singing
+about us or our romance at all.  A machine age is something quite
+different from an heroic age.  What is true of rapid-fire guns,
+stock-exchanges, and electric motors, cannot possibly be true of
+hand-flung javelins and whirring chariot wheels.  Kipling knows this.  He
+has been telling it to us all his life, living it all his life in the
+work he has done.
+
+What the Anglo-Saxon has done, he has memorialized.  And by Anglo-Saxon
+is not meant merely the people of that tight little island on the edge of
+the Western Ocean.  Anglo-Saxon stands for the English-speaking people of
+all the world, who, in forms and institutions and traditions, are more
+peculiarly and definitely English than anything else.  This people
+Kipling has sung.  Their sweat and blood and toil have been the motives
+of his songs; but underlying all the motives of his songs is the motive
+of motives, the sum of them all and something more, which is one with
+what underlies all the Anglo-Saxon sweat and blood and toil; namely, the
+genius of the race.  And this is the cosmic quality.  Both that which is
+true of the race for all time, and that which is true of the race for all
+time applied to this particular time, he has caught up and pressed into
+his art-forms.  He has caught the dominant note of the Anglo-Saxon and
+pressed it into wonderful rhythms which cannot be sung out in a day and
+which will not be sung out in a day.
+
+The Anglo-Saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a sea robber.  Underneath
+his thin coating of culture, he is what he was in Morgan's time, in
+Drake's time, in William's time, in Alfred's time.  The blood and the
+tradition of Hengist and Horsa are in his veins.  In battle he is subject
+to the blood-lusts of the Berserkers of old.  Plunder and booty fascinate
+him immeasurably.  The schoolboy of to-day dreams the dream of Clive and
+Hastings.  The Anglo-Saxon is strong of arm and heavy of hand, and he
+possesses a primitive brutality all his own.  There is a discontent in
+his blood, an unsatisfaction that will not let him rest, but sends him
+adventuring over the sea and among the lands in the midst of the sea.  He
+does not know when he is beaten, wherefore the term "bulldog" is attached
+to him, so that all may know his unreasonableness.  He has "some care as
+to the purity of his ways, does not wish for strange gods, nor juggle
+with intellectual phantasmagoria."  He loves freedom, but is dictatorial
+to others, is self-willed, has boundless energy, and does things for
+himself.  He is also a master of matter, an organizer of law, and an
+administrator of justice.
+
+And in the nineteenth century he has lived up to his reputation.  Being
+the nineteenth century and no other century, and in so far different from
+all other centuries, he has expressed himself differently.  But blood
+will tell, and in the name of God, the Bible, and Democracy, he has gone
+out over the earth, possessing himself of broad lands and fat revenues,
+and conquering by virtue of his sheer pluck and enterprise and superior
+machinery.
+
+Now the future centuries, seeking to find out what the nineteenth century
+Anglo-Saxon was and what were his works, will have small concern with
+what he did not do and what he would have liked to do.  These things he
+did do, and for these things will he be remembered.  His claim on
+posterity will be that in the nineteenth century he mastered matter; his
+twentieth-century claim will be, in the highest probability, that he
+organized life--but that will be sung by the twentieth-century Kiplings
+or the twenty-first-century Kiplings.  Rudyard Kipling of the nineteenth
+century has sung of "things as they are."  He has seen life as it is,
+"taken it up squarely," in both his hands, and looked upon it.  What
+better preachment upon the Anglo-Saxon and what he has done can be had
+than _The Bridge Builders_? what better appraisement than _The White
+Man's Burden_?  As for faith and clean ideals--not of "children and gods,
+but men in a world of men"--who has preached them better than he?
+
+Primarily, Kipling has stood for the doer as opposed to the dreamer--the
+doer, who lists not to idle songs of empty days, but who goes forth and
+does things, with bended back and sweated brow and work-hardened hands.
+The most characteristic thing about Kipling is his lover of actuality,
+his intense practicality, his proper and necessary respect for the
+hard-headed, hard-fisted fact.  And, above all, he has preached the
+gospel of work, and as potently as Carlyle ever preached.  For he has
+preached it not only to those in the high places, but to the common men,
+to the great sweating thong of common men who hear and understand yet
+stand agape at Carlyle's turgid utterance.  Do the thing to your hand,
+and do it with all your might.  Never mind what the thing is; so long as
+it is something.  Do it.  Do it and remember Tomlinson, sexless and
+soulless Tomlinson, who was denied at Heaven's gate.
+
+The blundering centuries have perseveringly pottered and groped through
+the dark; but it remained for Kipling's century to roll in the sun, to
+formulate, in other words, the reign of law.  And of the artists in
+Kipling's century, he of them all has driven the greater measure of law
+in the more consummate speech:
+
+    Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience.
+    Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
+       Make ye sure to each his own
+       That he reap what he hath sown;
+    By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.
+
+--And so it runs, from McAndrew's _Law_, _Order_, _Duty_, _and
+Restraint_, to his last least line, whether of _The Vampire_ or _The
+Recessional_.  And no prophet out of Israel has cried out more loudly the
+sins of the people, nor called them more awfully to repent.
+
+"But he is vulgar, he stirs the puddle of life," object the fluttering,
+chirping gentlemen, the Tomlinsonian men.  Well, and isn't life vulgar?
+Can you divorce the facts of life?  Much of good is there, and much of
+ill; but who may draw aside his garment and say, "I am none of them"?
+Can you say that the part is greater than the whole? that the whole is
+more or less than the sum of the parts?  As for the puddle of life, the
+stench is offensive to you?  Well, and what then?  Do you not live in it?
+Why do you not make it clean?  Do you clamour for a filter to make clean
+only your own particular portion?  And, made clean, are you wroth because
+Kipling has stirred it muddy again?  At least he has stirred it
+healthily, with steady vigour and good-will.  He has not brought to the
+surface merely its dregs, but its most significant values.  He has told
+the centuries to come of our lyings and our lusts, but he has also told
+the centuries to come of the seriousness which is underneath our lyings
+and our lusts.  And he has told us, too, and always has he told us, to be
+clean and strong and to walk upright and manlike.
+
+"But he has no sympathy," the fluttering gentlemen chirp.  "We admire his
+art and intellectual brilliancy, we all admire his art and intellectual
+brilliancy, his dazzling technique and rare rhythmical sense; but . . .
+he is totally devoid of sympathy."  Dear!  Dear!  What is to be
+understood by this?  Should he sprinkle his pages with sympathetic
+adjectives, so many to the paragraph, as the country compositor sprinkles
+commas?  Surely not.  The little gentlemen are not quite so infinitesimal
+as that.  There have been many tellers of jokes, and the greater of them,
+it is recorded, never smiled at their own, not even in the crucial moment
+when the audience wavered between laughter and tears.
+
+And so with Kipling.  Take _The Vampire_, for instance.  It has been
+complained that there is no touch of pity in it for the man and his ruin,
+no sermon on the lesson of it, no compassion for the human weakness, no
+indignation at the heartlessness.  But are we kindergarten children that
+the tale be told to us in words of one syllable?  Or are we men and
+women, able to read between the lines what Kipling intended we should
+read between the lines?  "For some of him lived, but the most of him
+died."  Is there not here all the excitation in the world for our sorrow,
+our pity, our indignation?  And what more is the function of art than to
+excite states of consciousness complementary to the thing portrayed?  The
+colour of tragedy is red.  Must the artist also paint in the watery tears
+and wan-faced grief?  "For some of him lived, but the most of him
+died"--can the heartache of the situation be conveyed more achingly?  Or
+were it better that the young man, some of him alive but most of him
+dead, should come out before the curtain and deliver a homily to the
+weeping audience?
+
+The nineteenth century, so far as the Anglo-Saxon is concerned, was
+remarkable for two great developments: the mastery of matter and the
+expansion of the race.  Three great forces operated in it: nationalism,
+commercialism, democracy--the marshalling of the races, the merciless,
+remorseless _laissez faire_ of the dominant bourgeoisie, and the
+practical, actual working government of men within a very limited
+equality.  The democracy of the nineteenth century is not the democracy
+of which the eighteenth century dreamed.  It is not the democracy of the
+Declaration, but it is what we have practised and lived that reconciles
+it to the fact of the "lesser breeds without the Law."
+
+It is of these developments and forces of the nineteenth century that
+Kipling has sung.  And the romance of it he has sung, that which
+underlies and transcends objective endeavour, which deals with race
+impulses, race deeds, and race traditions.  Even into the steam-laden
+speech of his locomotives has he breathed our life, our spirit, our
+significance.  As he is our mouthpiece, so are they his mouthpieces.  And
+the romance of the nineteenth-century man as he has thus expressed
+himself in the nineteenth century, in shaft and wheel, in steel and
+steam, in far journeying and adventuring, Kipling has caught up in
+wondrous songs for the future centuries to sing.
+
+If the nineteenth century is the century of the Hooligan, then is Kipling
+the voice of the Hooligan as surely as he is the voice of the nineteenth
+century.  Who is more representative?  Is _David Harum_ more
+representative of the nineteenth century?  Is Mary Johnston, Charles
+Major, or Winston Churchill?  Is Bret Harte?  William Dean Howells?
+Gilbert Parker?  Who of them all is as essentially representative of
+nineteenth-century life?  When Kipling is forgotten, will Robert Louis
+Stevenson be remembered for his _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, his
+_Kidnapped_ and his _David Balfour_?  Not so.  His _Treasure Island_ will
+be a classic, to go down with _Robinson Crusoe_, _Through the
+Looking-Glass_, and _The Jungle Books_.  He will be remembered for his
+essays, for his letters, for his philosophy of life, for himself.  He
+will be the well beloved, as he has been the well beloved.  But his will
+be another claim upon posterity than what we are considering.  For each
+epoch has its singer.  As Scott sang the swan song of chivalry and
+Dickens the burgher-fear of the rising merchant class, so Kipling, as no
+one else, has sung the hymn of the dominant bourgeoisie, the war march of
+the white man round the world, the triumphant paean of commercialism and
+imperialism.  For that will he be remembered.
+
+OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
+_October_ 1901.
+
+
+
+
+THE OTHER ANIMALS
+
+
+American journalism has its moments of fantastic hysteria, and when it is
+on the rampage the only thing for a rational man to do is to climb a tree
+and let the cataclysm go by.  And so, some time ago, when the word
+_nature-faker_ was coined, I, for one, climbed into my tree and stayed
+there.  I happened to be in Hawaii at the time, and a Honolulu reporter
+elicited the sentiment from me that I thanked God I was not an authority
+on anything.  This sentiment was promptly cabled to America in an
+Associated Press despatch, whereupon the American press (possibly annoyed
+because I had not climbed down out of my tree) charged me with paying for
+advertising by cable at a dollar per word--the very human way of the
+American press, which, when a man refuses to come down and be licked,
+makes faces at him.
+
+But now that the storm is over, let us come and reason together.  I have
+been guilty of writing two animal-stories--two books about dogs.  The
+writing of these two stories, on my part, was in truth a protest against
+the "humanizing" of animals, of which it seemed to me several "animal
+writers" had been profoundly guilty.  Time and again, and many times, in
+my narratives, I wrote, speaking of my dog-heroes: "He did not think
+these things; he merely did them," etc.  And I did this repeatedly, to
+the clogging of my narrative and in violation of my artistic canons; and
+I did it in order to hammer into the average human understanding that
+these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by
+instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning.  Also, I
+endeavoured to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I
+hewed them to the mark set by scientific research, and awoke, one day, to
+find myself bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers.
+
+President Roosevelt was responsible for this, and he tried to condemn me
+on two counts.  (1) I was guilty of having a big, fighting bull-dog whip
+a wolf-dog.  (2) I was guilty of allowing a lynx to kill a wolf-dog in a
+pitched battle.  Regarding the second count, President Roosevelt was
+wrong in his field observations taken while reading my book.  He must
+have read it hastily, for in my story I had the wolf-dog kill the lynx.
+Not only did I have my wolf-dog kill the lynx, but I made him eat the
+body of the lynx as well.  Remains only the first count on which to
+convict me of nature-faking, and the first count does not charge me with
+diverging from ascertained facts.  It is merely a statement of a
+difference of opinion.  President Roosevelt does not think a bull-dog can
+lick a wolf-dog.  I think a bull-dog can lick a wolf-dog.  And there we
+are.  Difference of opinion may make, and does make, horse-racing.  I can
+understand that difference of opinion can make dog-fighting.  But what
+gets me is how difference of opinion regarding the relative fighting
+merits of a bull-dog and a wolf-dog makes me a nature-faker and President
+Roosevelt a vindicated and triumphant scientist.
+
+Then entered John Burroughs to clinch President Roosevelt's judgments.
+In this alliance there is no difference of opinion.  That Roosevelt can
+do no wrong is Burroughs's opinion; and that Burroughs is always right is
+Roosevelt's opinion.  Both are agreed that animals do not reason.  They
+assert that all animals below man are automatons and perform actions only
+of two sorts--mechanical and reflex--and that in such actions no
+reasoning enters at all.  They believe that man is the only animal
+capable of reasoning and that ever does reason.  This is a view that
+makes the twentieth-century scientist smile.  It is not modern at all.
+It is distinctly mediaeval.  President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, in
+advancing such a view, are homocentric in the same fashion that the
+scholastics of earlier and darker centuries were homocentric.  Had the
+world not been discovered to be round until after the births of President
+Roosevelt and John Burroughs, they would have been geocentric as well in
+their theories of the Cosmos.  They could not have believed otherwise.
+The stuff of their minds is so conditioned.  They talk the argot of
+evolution, while they no more understand the essence and the import of
+evolution than does a South Sea Islander or Sir Oliver Lodge understand
+the noumena of radio-activity.
+
+Now, President Roosevelt is an amateur.  He may know something of
+statecraft and of big-game shooting; he may be able to kill a deer when
+he sees it and to measure it and weigh it after he has shot it; he may be
+able to observe carefully and accurately the actions and antics of
+tomtits and snipe, and, after he has observed it, definitely and
+coherently to convey the information of when the first chipmunk, in a
+certain year and a certain latitude and longitude, came out in the spring
+and chattered and gambolled--but that he should be able, as an individual
+observer, to analyze all animal life and to synthetize and develop all
+that is known of the method and significance of evolution, would require
+a vaster credulity for you or me to believe than is required for us to
+believe the biggest whopper ever told by an unmitigated nature-faker.
+No, President Roosevelt does not understand evolution, and he does not
+seem to have made much of an attempt to understand evolution.
+
+Remains John Burroughs, who claims to be a thorough-going evolutionist.
+Now, it is rather hard for a young man to tackle an old man.  It is the
+nature of young men to be more controlled in such matters, and it is the
+nature of old men, presuming upon the wisdom that is very often
+erroneously associated with age, to do the tackling.  In this present
+question of nature-faking, the old men did the tackling, while I, as one
+young man, kept quiet a long time.  But here goes at last.  And first of
+all let Mr. Burroughs's position be stated, and stated in his words.
+
+"Why impute reason to an animal if its behaviour can be explained on the
+theory of instinct?"  Remember these words, for they will be referred to
+later.  "A goodly number of persons seem to have persuaded themselves
+that animals do reason."  "But instinct suffices for the animals . . .
+they get along very well without reason."  "Darwin tried hard to convince
+himself that animals do at times reason in a rudimentary way; but Darwin
+was also a much greater naturalist than psychologist."  The preceding
+quotation is tantamount, on Mr. Burroughs's part, to a flat denial that
+animals reason even in a rudimentary way.  And when Mr. Burrough denies
+that animals reason even in a rudimentary way, it is equivalent to
+affirming, in accord with the first quotation in this paragraph, that
+instinct will explain every animal act that might be confounded with
+reason by the unskilled or careless observer.
+
+Having bitten off this large mouthful, Mr. Burroughs proceeds with serene
+and beautiful satisfaction to masticate it in the following fashion.  He
+cites a large number of instances of purely instinctive actions on the
+part of animals, and triumphantly demands if they are acts of reason.  He
+tells of the robin that fought day after day its reflected image in a
+window-pane; of the birds in South America that were guilty of drilling
+clear through a mud wall, which they mistook for a solid clay bank: of
+the beaver that cut down a tree four times because it was held at the top
+by the branches of other trees; of the cow that licked the skin of her
+stuffed calf so affectionately that it came apart, whereupon she
+proceeded to eat the hay with which it was stuffed.  He tells of the
+phoebe-bird that betrays her nest on the porch by trying to hide it with
+moss in similar fashion to the way all phoebe-birds hide their nests when
+they are built among rocks.  He tells of the highhole that repeatedly
+drills through the clap-boards of an empty house in a vain attempt to
+find a thickness of wood deep enough in which to build its nest.  He
+tells of the migrating lemmings of Norway that plunge into the sea and
+drown in vast numbers because of their instinct to swim lakes and rivers
+in the course of their migrations.  And, having told a few more instances
+of like kidney, he triumphantly demands: "Where now is your much-vaunted
+reasoning of the lower animals?"
+
+No schoolboy in a class debate could be guilty of unfairer argument.  It
+is equivalent to replying to the assertion that 2+2=4, by saying: "No;
+because 12/4=3; I have demonstrated my honourable opponent's error."
+When a man attacks your ability as a foot-racer, promptly prove to him
+that he was drunk the week before last, and the average man in the crowd
+of gaping listeners will believe that you have convincingly refuted the
+slander on your fleetness of foot.  On my honour, it will work.  Try it
+some time.  It is done every day.  Mr. Burroughs has done it himself,
+and, I doubt not, pulled the sophistical wool over a great many pairs of
+eyes.  No, no, Mr. Burroughs; you can't disprove that animals reason by
+proving that they possess instincts.  But the worst of it is that you
+have at the same time pulled the wool over your own eyes.  You have set
+up a straw man and knocked the stuffing out of him in the complacent
+belief that it was the reasoning of lower animals you were knocking out
+of the minds of those who disagreed with you.  When the highhole
+perforated the icehouse and let out the sawdust, you called him a lunatic
+. . .
+
+But let us be charitable--and serious.  What Mr. Burroughs instances as
+acts of instinct certainly are acts of instincts.  By the same method of
+logic one could easily adduce a multitude of instinctive acts on the part
+of man and thereby prove that man is an unreasoning animal.  But man
+performs actions of both sorts.  Between man and the lower animals Mr.
+Burroughs finds a vast gulf.  This gulf divides man from the rest of his
+kin by virtue of the power of reason that he alone possesses.  Man is a
+voluntary agent.  Animals are automatons.  The robin fights its
+reflection in the window-pane because it is his instinct to fight and
+because he cannot reason out the physical laws that make this reflection
+appear real.  An animal is a mechanism that operates according to
+fore-ordained rules.  Wrapped up in its heredity, and determined long
+before it was born, is a certain limited capacity of ganglionic response
+to eternal stimuli.  These responses have been fixed in the species
+through adaptation to environment.  Natural selection has compelled the
+animal automatically to respond in a fixed manner and a certain way to
+all the usual external stimuli it encounters in the course of a usual
+life.  Thus, under usual circumstances, it does the usual thing.  Under
+unusual circumstances it still does the usual thing, wherefore the
+highhole perforating the ice-house is guilty of lunacy--of unreason, in
+short.  To do the unusual thing under unusual circumstances, successfully
+to adjust to a strange environment for which his heredity has not
+automatically fitted an adjustment, Mr. Burroughs says is impossible.  He
+says it is impossible because it would be a non-instinctive act, and, as
+is well known animals act only through instinct.  And right here we catch
+a glimpse of Mr. Burroughs's cart standing before his horse.  He has a
+thesis, and though the heavens fall he will fit the facts to the thesis.
+Agassiz, in his opposition to evolution, had a similar thesis, though
+neither did he fit the facts to it nor did the heavens fall.  Facts are
+very disagreeable at times.
+
+But let us see.  Let us test Mr. Burroughs's test of reason and instinct.
+When I was a small boy I had a dog named Rollo.  According to Mr.
+Burroughs, Rollo was an automaton, responding to external stimuli
+mechanically as directed by his instincts.  Now, as is well known, the
+development of instinct in animals is a dreadfully slow process.  There
+is no known case of the development of a single instinct in domestic
+animals in all the history of their domestication.  Whatever instincts
+they possess they brought with them from the wild thousands of years ago.
+Therefore, all Rollo's actions were ganglionic discharges mechanically
+determined by the instincts that had been developed and fixed in the
+species thousands of years ago.  Very well.  It is clear, therefore, that
+in all his play with me he would act in old-fashioned ways, adjusting
+himself to the physical and psychical factors in his environment
+according to the rules of adjustment which had obtained in the wild and
+which had become part of his heredity.
+
+Rollo and I did a great deal of rough romping.  He chased me and I chased
+him.  He nipped my legs, arms, and hands, often so hard that I yelled,
+while I rolled him and tumbled him and dragged him about, often so
+strenuously as to make him yelp.  In the course of the play many
+variations arose.  I would make believe to sit down and cry.  All
+repentance and anxiety, he would wag his tail and lick my face, whereupon
+I would give him the laugh.  He hated to be laughed at, and promptly he
+would spring for me with good-natured, menacing jaws, and the wild romp
+would go on.  I had scored a point.  Then he hit upon a trick.  Pursuing
+him into the woodshed, I would find him in a far corner, pretending to
+sulk.  Now, he dearly loved the play, and never got enough of it.  But at
+first he fooled me.  I thought I had somehow hurt his feelings and I came
+and knelt before him, petting him, and speaking lovingly.  Promptly, in a
+wild outburst, he was up and away, tumbling me over on the floor as he
+dashed out in a mad skurry around the yard.  He had scored a point.
+
+After a time, it became largely a game of wits.  I reasoned my acts, of
+course, while his were instinctive.  One day, as he pretended to sulk in
+the corner, I glanced out of the woodshed doorway, simulated pleasure in
+face, voice, and language, and greeted one of my schoolboy friends.
+Immediately Rollo forgot to sulk, rushed out to see the newcomer, and saw
+empty space.  The laugh was on him, and he knew it, and I gave it to him,
+too.  I fooled him in this way two or three times; then be became wise.
+One day I worked a variation.  Suddenly looking out the door, making
+believe that my eyes had been attracted by a moving form, I said coldly,
+as a child educated in turning away bill-collectors would say: "No my
+father is not at home."  Like a shot, Rollo was out the door.  He even
+ran down the alley to the front of the house in a vain attempt to find
+the man I had addressed.  He came back sheepishly to endure the laugh and
+resume the game.
+
+And now we come to the test.  I fooled Rollo, but how was the fooling
+made possible?  What precisely went on in that brain of his?  According
+to Mr. Burroughs, who denies even rudimentary reasoning to the lower
+animals, Rollo acted instinctively, mechanically responding to the
+external stimulus, furnished by me, which led him to believe that a man
+was outside the door.
+
+Since Rollo acted instinctively, and since all instincts are very
+ancient, tracing back to the pre-domestication period, we can conclude
+only that Rollo's wild ancestors, at the time this particular instinct
+was fixed into the heredity of the species, must have been in close,
+long-continued, and vital contact with man, the voice of man, and the
+expressions on the face of man.  But since the instinct must have been
+developed during the pre-domestication period, how under the sun could
+his wild, undomesticated ancestors have experienced the close,
+long-continued, and vital contact with man?
+
+Mr. Burroughs says that "instinct suffices for the animals," that "they
+get along very well without reason."  But I say, what all the poor
+nature-fakers will say, that Rollo reasoned.  He was born into the world
+a bundle of instincts and a pinch of brain-stuff, all wrapped around in a
+framework of bone, meat, and hide.  As he adjusted to his environment he
+gained experiences.  He remembered these experiences.  He learned that he
+mustn't chase the cat, kill chickens, nor bite little girls' dresses.  He
+learned that little boys had little boy playmates.  He learned that men
+came into back yards.  He learned that the animal man, on meeting with
+his own kind, was given to verbal and facial greeting.  He learned that
+when a boy greeted a playmate he did it differently from the way he
+greeted a man.  All these he learned and remembered.  They were so many
+observations--so many propositions, if you please.  Now, what went on
+behind those brown eyes of his, inside that pinch of brain-stuff, when I
+turned suddenly to the door and greeted an imaginary person outside?
+Instantly, out of the thousands of observations stored in his brain, came
+to the front of his consciousness the particular observations connected
+with this particular situation.  Next, he established a relation between
+these observations.  This relation was his conclusion, achieved, as every
+psychologist will agree, by a definite cell-action of his grey matter.
+From the fact that his master turned suddenly toward the door, and from
+the fact that his master's voice, facial expression, and whole demeanour
+expressed surprise and delight, he concluded that a friend was outside.
+He established a relation between various things, and the act of
+establishing relations between things is an act of reason--of rudimentary
+reason, granted, but none the less of reason.
+
+Of course Rollo was fooled.  But that is no call for us to throw chests
+about it.  How often has every last one of us been fooled in precisely
+similar fashion by another who turned and suddenly addressed an imaginary
+intruder?  Here is a case in point that occurred in the West.  A robber
+had held up a railroad train.  He stood in the aisle between the seats,
+his revolver presented at the head of the conductor, who stood facing
+him.  The conductor was at his mercy.
+
+But the conductor suddenly looked over the robber's shoulder, at the same
+time saying aloud to an imaginary person standing at the robber's back:
+"Don't shoot him."  Like a flash the robber whirled about to confront
+this new danger, and like a flash the conductor shot him down.  Show me,
+Mr. Burroughs, where the mental process in the robber's brain was a shade
+different from the mental processes in Rollo's brain, and I'll quit
+nature-faking and join the Trappists.  Surely, when a man's mental
+process and a dog's mental process are precisely similar, the
+much-vaunted gulf of Mr. Burroughs's fancy has been bridged.
+
+I had a dog in Oakland.  His name was Glen.  His father was Brown, a
+wolf-dog that had been brought down from Alaska, and his mother was a
+half-wild mountain shepherd dog.  Neither father nor mother had had any
+experience with automobiles.  Glen came from the country, a half-grown
+puppy, to live in Oakland.  Immediately he became infatuated with an
+automobile.  He reached the culmination of happiness when he was
+permitted to sit up in the front seat alongside the chauffeur.  He would
+spend a whole day at a time on an automobile debauch, even going without
+food.  Often the machine started directly from inside the barn, dashed
+out the driveway without stopping, and was gone.  Glen got left behind
+several times.  The custom was established that whoever was taking the
+machine out should toot the horn before starting.  Glen learned the
+signal.  No matter where he was or what he was doing, when that horn
+tooted he was off for the barn and up into the front seat.
+
+One morning, while Glen was on the back porch eating his breakfast of
+mush and milk, the chauffeur tooted.  Glen rushed down the steps, into
+the barn, and took his front seat, the mush and milk dripping down his
+excited and happy chops.  In passing, I may point out that in thus
+forsaking his breakfast for the automobile he was displaying what is
+called the power of choice--a peculiarly lordly attribute that, according
+to Mr. Burroughs, belongs to man alone.  Yet Glen made his choice between
+food and fun.
+
+It was not that Glen wanted his breakfast less, but that he wanted his
+ride more.  The toot was only a joke.  The automobile did not start.
+Glen waited and watched.  Evidently he saw no signs of an immediate
+start, for finally he jumped out of the seat and went back to his
+breakfast.  He ate with indecent haste, like a man anxious to catch a
+train.  Again the horn tooted, again he deserted his breakfast, and again
+he sat in the seat and waited vainly for the machine to go.
+
+They came close to spoiling Glen's breakfast for him, for he was kept on
+the jump between porch and barn.  Then he grew wise.  They tooted the
+horn loudly and insistently, but he stayed by his breakfast and finished
+it.  Thus once more did he display power of choice, incidentally of
+control, for when that horn tooted it was all he could do to refrain from
+running for the barn.
+
+The nature-faker would analyze what went on in Glen's brain somewhat in
+the following fashion.  He had had, in his short life, experiences that
+not one of all his ancestors had ever had.  He had learned that
+automobiles went fast, that once in motion it was impossible for him to
+get on board, that the toot of the horn was a noise that was peculiar to
+automobiles.  These were so many propositions.  Now reasoning can be
+defined as the act or process of the brain by which, from propositions
+known or assumed, new propositions are reached.  Out of the propositions
+which I have shown were Glen's, and which had become his through the
+medium of his own observation of the phenomena of life, he made the new
+proposition that when the horn tooted it was time for him to get on
+board.
+
+But on the morning I have described, the chauffeur fooled Glen.  Somehow
+and much to his own disgust, his reasoning was erroneous.  The machine
+did not start after all.  But to reason incorrectly is very human.  The
+great trouble in all acts of reasoning is to include all the propositions
+in the problem.  Glen had included every proposition but one, namely, the
+human proposition, the joke in the brain of the chauffeur.  For a number
+of times Glen was fooled.  Then he performed another mental act.  In his
+problem he included the human proposition (the joke in the brain of the
+chauffeur), and he reached the new conclusion that when the horn tooted
+the automobile was _not_ going to start.  Basing his action on this
+conclusion, he remained on the porch and finished his breakfast.  You and
+I, and even Mr. Burroughs, perform acts of reasoning precisely similar to
+this every day in our lives.  How Mr. Burroughs will explain Glen's
+action by the instinctive theory is beyond me.  In wildest fantasy, even,
+my brain refuses to follow Mr. Burroughs into the primeval forest where
+Glen's dim ancestors, to the tooting of automobile horns, were fixing
+into the heredity of the breed the particular instinct that would enable
+Glen, a few thousand years later, capably to cope with automobiles.
+
+Dr. C. J. Romanes tells of a female chimpanzee who was taught to count
+straws up to five.  She held the straws in her hand, exposing the ends to
+the number requested.  If she were asked for three, she held up three.
+If she were asked for four, she held up four.  All this is a mere matter
+of training.  But consider now, Mr. Burroughs, what follows.  When she
+was asked for five straws and she had only four, she doubled one straw,
+exposing both its ends and thus making up the required number.  She did
+not do this only once, and by accident.  She did it whenever more straws
+were asked for than she possessed.  Did she perform a distinctly
+reasoning act? or was her action the result of blind, mechanical
+instinct?  If Mr. Burroughs cannot answer to his own satisfaction, he may
+call Dr. Romanes a nature-faker and dismiss the incident from his mind.
+
+The foregoing is a trick of erroneous human reasoning that works very
+successfully in the United States these days.  It is certainly a trick of
+Mr. Burroughs, of which he is guilty with distressing frequency.  When a
+poor devil of a writer records what he has seen, and when what he has
+seen does not agree with Mr. Burroughs's mediaeval theory, he calls said
+writer a nature-faker.  When a man like Mr. Hornaday comes along, Mr.
+Burroughs works a variation of the trick on him.  Mr. Hornaday has made a
+close study of the orang in captivity and of the orang in its native
+state.  Also, he has studied closely many other of the higher animal
+types.  Also, in the tropics, he has studied the lower types of man.  Mr.
+Hornaday is a man of experience and reputation.  When he was asked if
+animals reasoned, out of all his knowledge on the subject he replied that
+to ask him such a question was equivalent to asking him if fishes swim.
+Now Mr. Burroughs has not had much experience in studying the lower human
+types and the higher animal types.  Living in a rural district in the
+state of New York, and studying principally birds in that limited
+habitat, he has been in contact neither with the higher animal types nor
+the lower human types.  But Mr. Hornaday's reply is such a facer to him
+and his homocentric theory that he has to do something.  And he does it.
+He retorts: "I suspect that Mr. Hornaday is a better naturalist than he
+is a comparative psychologist."  Exit Mr. Hornaday.  Who the devil is Mr.
+Hornaday, anyway?  The sage of Slabsides has spoken.  When Darwin
+concluded that animals were capable of reasoning in a rudimentary way,
+Mr. Burroughs laid him out in the same fashion by saying: "But Darwin was
+also a much greater naturalist than psychologist"--and this despite
+Darwin's long life of laborious research that was not wholly confined to
+a rural district such as Mr. Burroughs inhabits in New York.  Mr.
+Burroughs's method of argument is beautiful.  It reminds one of the man
+whose pronunciation was vile, but who said: "Damn the dictionary; ain't I
+here?"
+
+And now we come to the mental processes of Mr. Burroughs--to the
+psychology of the ego, if you please.  Mr. Burroughs has troubles of his
+own with the dictionary.  He violates language from the standpoint both
+of logic and science.  Language is a tool, and definitions embodied in
+language should agree with the facts and history of life.  But Mr.
+Burroughs's definitions do not so agree.  This, in turn, is not the fault
+of his education, but of his ego.  To him, despite his well-exploited and
+patronizing devotion to them, the lower animals are disgustingly low.  To
+him, affinity and kinship with the other animals is a repugnant thing.
+He will have none of it.  He is too glorious a personality not to have
+between him and the other animals a vast and impassable gulf.  The cause
+of Mr. Burroughs's mediaeval view of the other animals is to be found,
+not in his knowledge of those other animals, but in the suggestion of his
+self-exalted ego.  In short, Mr. Burroughs's homocentric theory has been
+developed out of his homocentric ego, and by the misuse of language he
+strives to make the facts of life agree with his theory.
+
+After the instances I have cited of actions of animals which are
+impossible of explanation as due to instinct, Mr. Burroughs may reply:
+"Your instances are easily explained by the simple law of association."
+To this I reply, first, then why did you deny rudimentary reason to
+animals? and why did you state flatly that "instinct suffices for the
+animals"?  And, second, with great reluctance and with overwhelming
+humility, because of my youth, I suggest that you do not know exactly
+what you do mean by that phrase "the simple law of association."  Your
+trouble, I repeat, is with definitions.  You have grasped that man
+performs what is called _abstract_ reasoning, you have made a definition
+of abstract reason, and, betrayed by that great maker of theories, the
+ego, you have come to think that all reasoning is abstract and that what
+is not abstract reason is not reason at all.  This is your attitude
+toward rudimentary reason.  Such a process, in one of the other animals,
+must be either abstract or it is not a reasoning process.  Your
+intelligence tells you that such a process is not abstract reasoning, and
+your homocentric thesis compels you to conclude that it can be only a
+mechanical, instinctive process.
+
+Definitions must agree, not with egos, but with life.  Mr. Burroughs goes
+on the basis that a definition is something hard and fast, absolute and
+eternal.  He forgets that all the universe is in flux; that definitions
+are arbitrary and ephemeral; that they fix, for a fleeting instant of
+time, things that in the past were not, that in the future will be not,
+that out of the past become, and that out of the present pass on to the
+future and become other things.  Definitions cannot rule life.
+Definitions cannot be made to rule life.  Life must rule definitions or
+else the definitions perish.
+
+Mr. Burroughs forgets the evolution of reason.  He makes a definition of
+reason without regard to its history, and that definition is of reason
+purely abstract.  Human reason, as we know it to-day, is not a creation,
+but a growth.  Its history goes back to the primordial slime that was
+quick with muddy life; its history goes back to the first vitalized
+inorganic.  And here are the steps of its ascent from the mud to man:
+simple reflex action, compound reflex action, memory, habit, rudimentary
+reason, and abstract reason.  In the course of the climb, thanks to
+natural selection, instinct was evolved.  Habit is a development in the
+individual.  Instinct is a race-habit.  Instinct is blind, unreasoning,
+mechanical.  This was the dividing of the ways in the climb of aspiring
+life.  The perfect culmination of instinct we find in the ant-heap and
+the beehive.  Instinct proved a blind alley.  But the other path, that of
+reason, led on and on even to Mr. Burroughs and you and me.
+
+There are no impassable gulfs, unless one chooses, as Mr. Burroughs does,
+to ignore the lower human types and the higher animal types, and to
+compare human mind with bird mind.  It was impossible for life to reason
+abstractly until speech was developed.  Equipped with swords, with tools
+of thought, in short, the slow development of the power to reason in the
+abstract went on.  The lowest human types do little or no reasoning in
+the abstract.  With every word, with every increase in the complexity of
+thought, with every ascertained fact so gained, went on action and
+reaction in the grey matter of the speech discoverer, and slowly, step by
+step, through hundreds of thousands of years, developed the power of
+reason.
+
+Place a honey-bee in a glass bottle.  Turn the bottom of the bottle
+toward a lighted lamp so that the open mouth is away from the lamp.
+Vainly, ceaselessly, a thousand times, undeterred by the bafflement and
+the pain, the bee will hurl himself against the bottom of the bottle as
+he strives to win to the light.  That is instinct.  Place your dog in a
+back yard and go away.  He is your dog.  He loves you.  He yearns toward
+you as the bee yearns toward the light.  He listens to your departing
+footsteps.  But the fence is too high.  Then he turns his back upon the
+direction in which you are departing, and runs around the yard.  He is
+frantic with affection and desire.  But he is not blind.  He is
+observant.  He is looking for a hole under the fence, or through the
+fence, or for a place where the fence is not so high.  He sees a
+dry-goods box standing against the fence.  Presto!  He leaps upon it,
+goes over the barrier, and tears down the street to overtake you.  Is
+that instinct?
+
+Here, in the household where I am writing this, is a little Tahitian
+"feeding-child."  He believes firmly that a tiny dwarf resides in the box
+of my talking-machine and that it is the tiny dwarf who does the singing
+and the talking.  Not even Mr. Burroughs will affirm that the child has
+reached this conclusion by an instinctive process.  Of course, the child
+reasons the existence of the dwarf in the box.  How else could the box
+talk and sing?  In that child's limited experience it has never
+encountered a single instance where speech and song were produced
+otherwise than by direct human agency.  I doubt not that the dog is
+considerably surprised when he hears his master's voice coming out of a
+box.
+
+The adult savage, on his first introduction to a telephone, rushes around
+to the adjoining room to find the man who is talking through the
+partition.  Is this act instinctive?  No.  Out of his limited experience,
+out of his limited knowledge of physics, he reasons that the only
+explanation possible is that a man is in the other room talking through
+the partition.
+
+But that savage cannot be fooled by a hand-mirror.  We must go lower down
+in the animal scale, to the monkey.  The monkey swiftly learns that the
+monkey it sees is not in the glass, wherefore it reaches craftily behind
+the glass.  Is this instinct?  No.  It is rudimentary reasoning.  Lower
+than the monkey in the scale of brain is the robin, and the robin fights
+its reflection in the window-pane.  Now climb with me for a space.  From
+the robin to the monkey, where is the impassable gulf? and where is the
+impassable gulf between the monkey and the feeding-child? between the
+feeding-child and the savage who seeks the man behind the partition? ay,
+and between the savage and the astute financiers Mrs. Chadwick fooled and
+the thousands who were fooled by the Keeley Motor swindle?
+
+Let us be very humble.  We who are so very human are very animal.
+Kinship with the other animals is no more repugnant to Mr. Burroughs than
+was the heliocentric theory to the priests who compelled Galileo to
+recant.  Not correct human reason, not the evidence of the ascertained
+fact, but pride of ego, was responsible for the repugnance.
+
+In his stiff-necked pride, Mr. Burroughs runs a hazard more humiliating
+to that pride than any amount of kinship with the other animals.  When a
+dog exhibits choice, direction, control, and reason; when it is shown
+that certain mental processes in that dog's brain are precisely
+duplicated in the brain of man; and when Mr. Burroughs convincingly
+proves that every action of the dog is mechanical and automatic--then, by
+precisely the same arguments, can it be proved that the similar actions
+of man are mechanical and automatic.  No, Mr. Burroughs, though you stand
+on the top of the ladder of life, you must not kick out that ladder from
+under your feet.  You must not deny your relatives, the other animals.
+Their history is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the
+abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself.  By them you stand or
+fall.  What you repudiate in them you repudiate in yourself--a pretty
+spectacle, truly, of an exalted animal striving to disown the stuff of
+life out of which it is made, striving by use of the very reason that was
+developed by evolution to deny the possession of evolution that developed
+it.  This may be good egotism, but it is not good science.
+
+PAPEETE, TAHITI.
+_March_ 1908.
+
+
+
+
+THE YELLOW PERIL
+
+
+No more marked contrast appears in passing from our Western land to the
+paper houses and cherry blossoms of Japan than appears in passing from
+Korea to China.  To achieve a correct appreciation of the Chinese the
+traveller should first sojourn amongst the Koreans for several months,
+and then, one fine day, cross over the Yalu into Manchuria.  It would be
+of exceptional advantage to the correctness of appreciation did he cross
+over the Yalu on the heels of a hostile and alien army.
+
+War is to-day the final arbiter in the affairs of men, and it is as yet
+the final test of the worth-whileness of peoples.  Tested thus, the
+Korean fails.  He lacks the nerve to remain when a strange army crosses
+his land.  The few goods and chattels he may have managed to accumulate
+he puts on his back, along with his doors and windows, and away he heads
+for his mountain fastnesses.  Later he may return, sans goods, chattels,
+doors, and windows, impelled by insatiable curiosity for a "look see."
+But it is curiosity merely--a timid, deerlike curiosity.  He is prepared
+to bound away on his long legs at the first hint of danger or trouble.
+
+Northern Korea was a desolate land when the Japanese passed through.
+Villages and towns were deserted.  The fields lay untouched.  There was
+no ploughing nor sowing, no green things growing.  Little or nothing was
+to be purchased.  One carried one's own food with him and food for horses
+and servants was the anxious problem that waited at the day's end.  In
+many a lonely village not an ounce nor a grain of anything could be
+bought, and yet there might be standing around scores of white-garmented,
+stalwart Koreans, smoking yard-long pipes and chattering,
+chattering--ceaselessly chattering.  Love, money, or force could not
+procure from them a horseshoe or a horseshoe nail.
+
+"Upso," was their invariable reply.  "Upso," cursed word, which means
+"Have not got."
+
+They had tramped probably forty miles that day, down from their
+hiding-places, just for a "look see," and forty miles back they would
+cheerfully tramp, chattering all the way over what they had seen.  Shake
+a stick at them as they stand chattering about your camp-fire, and the
+gloom of the landscape will be filled with tall, flitting ghosts,
+bounding like deer, with great springy strides which one cannot but envy.
+They have splendid vigour and fine bodies, but they are accustomed to
+being beaten and robbed without protest or resistance by every chance
+foreigner who enters their country.
+
+From this nerveless, forsaken Korean land I rode down upon the sandy
+islands of the Yalu.  For weeks these islands had been the dread
+between-the-lines of two fighting armies.  The air above had been rent by
+screaming projectiles.  The echoes of the final battle had scarcely died
+away.  The trains of Japanese wounded and Japanese dead were trailing by.
+
+On the conical hill, a quarter of a mile away, the Russian dead were
+being buried in their trenches and in the shell holes made by the
+Japanese.  And here, in the thick of it all, a man was ploughing.  Green
+things were growing--young onions--and the man who was weeding them
+paused from his labour long enough to sell me a handful.  Near by was the
+smoke-blackened ruin of the farmhouse, fired by the Russians when they
+retreated from the riverbed.  Two men were removing the debris, cleaning
+the confusion, preparatory to rebuilding.  They were clad in blue.
+Pigtails hung down their backs.  I was in China!
+
+I rode to the shore, into the village of Kuelian-Ching.  There were no
+lounging men smoking long pipes and chattering.  The previous day the
+Russians had been there, a bloody battle had been fought, and to-day the
+Japanese were there--but what was that to talk about?  Everybody was
+busy.  Men were offering eggs and chickens and fruit for sale upon the
+street, and bread, as I live, bread in small round loaves or buns.  I
+rode on into the country.  Everywhere a toiling population was in
+evidence.  The houses and walls were strong and substantial.  Stone and
+brick replaced the mud walls of the Korean dwellings.  Twilight fell and
+deepened, and still the ploughs went up and down the fields, the sowers
+following after.  Trains of wheelbarrows, heavily loaded, squeaked by,
+and Pekin carts, drawn by from four to six cows, horses, mules, ponies,
+or jackasses--cows even with their newborn calves tottering along on puny
+legs outside the traces.  Everybody worked.  Everything worked.  I saw a
+man mending the road.  I was in China.
+
+I came to the city of Antung, and lodged with a merchant.  He was a grain
+merchant.  Corn he had, hundreds of bushels, stored in great bins of
+stout matting; peas and beans in sacks, and in the back yard his
+millstones went round and round, grinding out meal.  Also, in his back
+yard, were buildings containing vats sunk into the ground, and here the
+tanners were at work making leather.  I bought a measure of corn from
+mine host for my horses, and he overcharged me thirty cents.  I was in
+China.  Antung was jammed with Japanese troops.  It was the thick of war.
+But it did not matter.  The work of Antung went on just the same.  The
+shops were wide open; the streets were lined with pedlars.  One could buy
+anything; get anything made.  I dined at a Chinese restaurant, cleansed
+myself at a public bath in a private tub with a small boy to assist in
+the scrubbing.  I bought condensed milk, bitter, canned vegetables,
+bread, and cake.  I repeat it, cake--good cake.  I bought knives, forks,
+and spoons, granite-ware dishes and mugs.  There were horseshoes and
+horseshoers.  A worker in iron realized for me new designs of mine for my
+tent poles.  My shoes were sent out to be repaired.  A barber shampooed
+my hair.  A servant returned with corn-beef in tins, a bottle of port,
+another of cognac, and beer, blessed beer, to wash out from my throat the
+dust of an army.  It was the land of Canaan.  I was in China.
+
+The Korean is the perfect type of inefficiency--of utter worthlessness.
+The Chinese is the perfect type of industry.  For sheer work no worker in
+the world can compare with him.  Work is the breath of his nostrils.  It
+is his solution of existence.  It is to him what wandering and fighting
+in far lands and spiritual adventure have been to other peoples.  Liberty
+to him epitomizes itself in access to the means of toil.  To till the
+soil and labour interminably with rude implements and utensils is all he
+asks of life and of the powers that be.  Work is what he desires above
+all things, and he will work at anything for anybody.
+
+During the taking of the Taku forts he carried scaling ladders at the
+heads of the storming columns and planted them against the walls.  He did
+this, not from a sense of patriotism, but for the invading foreign devils
+because they paid him a daily wage of fifty cents.  He is not frightened
+by war.  He accepts it as he does rain and sunshine, the changing of the
+seasons, and other natural phenomena.  He prepares for it, endures it,
+and survives it, and when the tide of battle sweeps by, the thunder of
+the guns still reverberating in the distant canyons, he is seen calmly
+bending to his usual tasks.  Nay, war itself bears fruits whereof he may
+pick.  Before the dead are cold or the burial squads have arrived he is
+out on the field, stripping the mangled bodies, collecting the shrapnel,
+and ferreting in the shell holes for slivers and fragments of iron.
+
+The Chinese is no coward.  He does not carry away his doors amid windows
+to the mountains, but remains to guard them when alien soldiers occupy
+his town.  He does not hide away his chickens and his eggs, nor any other
+commodity he possesses.  He proceeds at once to offer them for sale.  Nor
+is he to be bullied into lowering his price.  What if the purchaser be a
+soldier and an alien made cocky by victory and confident by overwhelming
+force?  He has two large pears saved over from last year which he will
+sell for five sen, or for the same price three small pears.  What if one
+soldier persist in taking away with him three large pears?  What if there
+be twenty other soldiers jostling about him?  He turns over his sack of
+fruit to another Chinese and races down the street after his pears and
+the soldier responsible for their flight, and he does not return till he
+has wrenched away one large pear from that soldier's grasp.
+
+Nor is the Chinese the type of permanence which he has been so often
+designated.  He is not so ill-disposed toward new ideas and new methods
+as his history would seem to indicate.  True, his forms, customs, and
+methods have been permanent these many centuries, but this has been due
+to the fact that his government was in the hands of the learned classes,
+and that these governing scholars found their salvation lay in
+suppressing all progressive ideas.  The ideas behind the Boxer troubles
+and the outbreaks over the introduction of railroad and other foreign
+devil machinations have emanated from the minds of the literati, and been
+spread by their pamphlets and propagandists.
+
+Originality and enterprise have been suppressed in the Chinese for scores
+of generations.  Only has remained to him industry, and in this has he
+found the supreme expression of his being.  On the other hand, his
+susceptibility to new ideas has been well demonstrated wherever he has
+escaped beyond the restrictions imposed upon him by his government.  So
+far as the business man is concerned he has grasped far more clearly the
+Western code of business, the Western ethics of business, than has the
+Japanese.  He has learned, as a matter of course, to keep his word or his
+bond.  As yet, the Japanese business man has failed to understand this.
+When he has signed a time contract and when changing conditions cause him
+to lose by it, the Japanese merchant cannot understand why he should live
+up to his contract.  It is beyond his comprehension and repulsive to his
+common sense that he should live up to his contract and thereby lose
+money.  He firmly believes that the changing conditions themselves
+absolve him.  And in so far adaptable as he has shown himself to be in
+other respects, he fails to grasp a radically new idea where the Chinese
+succeeds.
+
+Here we have the Chinese, four hundred millions of him, occupying a vast
+land of immense natural resources--resources of a twentieth-century age,
+of a machine age; resources of coal and iron, which are the backbone of
+commercial civilization.  He is an indefatigable worker.  He is not dead
+to new ideas, new methods, new systems.  Under a capable management he
+can be made to do anything.  Truly would he of himself constitute the
+much-heralded Yellow Peril were it not for his present management.  This
+management, his government, is set, crystallized.  It is what binds him
+down to building as his fathers built.  The governing class, entrenched
+by the precedent and power of centuries and by the stamp it has put upon
+his mind, will never free him.  It would be the suicide of the governing
+class, and the governing class knows it.
+
+Comes now the Japanese.  On the streets of Antung, of Feng-Wang-Chang, or
+of any other Manchurian city, the following is a familiar scene: One is
+hurrying home through the dark of the unlighted streets when he comes
+upon a paper lantern resting on the ground.  On one side squats a Chinese
+civilian on his hams, on the other side squats a Japanese soldier.  One
+dips his forefinger in the dust and writes strange, monstrous characters.
+The other nods understanding, sweeps the dust slate level with his hand,
+and with his forefinger inscribes similar characters.  They are talking.
+They cannot speak to each other, but they can write.  Long ago one
+borrowed the other's written language, and long before that, untold
+generations ago, they diverged from a common root, the ancient Mongol
+stock.
+
+There have been changes, differentiations brought about by diverse
+conditions and infusions of other blood; but down at the bottom of their
+being, twisted into the fibres of them, is a heritage in common--a
+sameness in kind which time has not obliterated.  The infusion of other
+blood, Malay, perhaps, has made the Japanese a race of mastery and power,
+a fighting race through all its history, a race which has always despised
+commerce and exalted fighting.
+
+To-day, equipped with the finest machines and systems of destruction the
+Caucasian mind has devised, handling machines and systems with remarkable
+and deadly accuracy, this rejuvenescent Japanese race has embarked on a
+course of conquest the goal of which no man knows.  The head men of Japan
+are dreaming ambitiously, and the people are dreaming blindly, a
+Napoleonic dream.  And to this dream the Japanese clings and will cling
+with bull-dog tenacity.  The soldier shouting "Nippon, Banzai!" on the
+walls of Wiju, the widow at home in her paper house committing suicide so
+that her only son, her sole support, may go to the front, are both
+expressing the unanimity of the dream.
+
+The late disturbance in the Far East marked the clashing of the dreams,
+for the Slav, too, is dreaming greatly.  Granting that the Japanese can
+hurl back the Slav and that the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon
+race do not despoil him of his spoils, the Japanese dream takes on
+substantiality.  Japan's population is no larger because her people have
+continually pressed against the means of subsistence.  But given poor,
+empty Korea for a breeding colony and Manchuria for a granary, and at
+once the Japanese begins to increase by leaps and bounds.
+
+Even so, he would not of himself constitute a Brown Peril.  He has not
+the time in which to grow and realize the dream.  He is only forty-five
+millions, and so fast does the economic exploitation of the planet hurry
+on the planet's partition amongst the Western peoples that, before he
+could attain the stature requisite to menace, he would see the Western
+giants in possession of the very stuff of his dream.
+
+The menace to the Western world lies, not in the little brown man, but in
+the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man
+undertake their management.  The Chinese is not dead to new ideas; he is
+an efficient worker; makes a good soldier, and is wealthy in the
+essential materials of a machine age.  Under a capable management he will
+go far.  The Japanese is prepared and fit to undertake this management.
+Not only has he proved himself an apt imitator of Western material
+progress, a sturdy worker, and a capable organizer, but he is far more
+fit to manage the Chinese than are we.  The baffling enigma of the
+Chinese character is no baffling enigma to him.  He understands as we
+could never school ourselves nor hope to understand.  Their mental
+processes are largely the same.  He thinks with the same thought-symbols
+as does the Chinese, and he thinks in the same peculiar grooves.  He goes
+on where we are balked by the obstacles of incomprehension.  He takes the
+turning which we cannot perceive, twists around the obstacle, and,
+presto! is out of sight in the ramifications of the Chinese mind where we
+cannot follow.
+
+The Chinese has been called the type of permanence, and well he has
+merited it, dozing as he has through the ages.  And as truly was the
+Japanese the type of permanence up to a generation ago, when he suddenly
+awoke and startled the world with a rejuvenescence the like of which the
+world had never seen before.  The ideas of the West were the leaven which
+quickened the Japanese; and the ideas of the West, transmitted by the
+Japanese mind into ideas Japanese, may well make the leaven powerful
+enough to quicken the Chinese.
+
+We have had Africa for the Afrikander, and at no distant day we shall
+hear "Asia for the Asiatic!"  Four hundred million indefatigable workers
+(deft, intelligent, and unafraid to die), aroused and rejuvenescent,
+managed and guided by forty-five million additional human beings who are
+splendid fighting animals, scientific and modern, constitute that menace
+to the Western world which has been well named the "Yellow Peril."  The
+possibility of race adventure has not passed away.  We are in the midst
+of our own.  The Slav is just girding himself up to begin.  Why may not
+the yellow and the brown start out on an adventure as tremendous as our
+own and more strikingly unique?
+
+The ultimate success of such an adventure the Western mind refuses to
+consider.  It is not the nature of life to believe itself weak.  There is
+such a thing as race egotism as well as creature egotism, and a very good
+thing it is.  In the first place, the Western world will not permit the
+rise of the yellow peril.  It is firmly convinced that it will not permit
+the yellow and the brown to wax strong and menace its peace and comfort.
+It advances this idea with persistency, and delivers itself of long
+arguments showing how and why this menace will not be permitted to arise.
+To-day, far more voices are engaged in denying the yellow peril than in
+prophesying it.  The Western world is warned, if not armed, against the
+possibility of it.
+
+In the second place, there is a weakness inherent in the brown man which
+will bring his adventure to naught.  From the West he has borrowed all
+our material achievement and passed our ethical achievement by.  Our
+engines of production and destruction he has made his.  What was once
+solely ours he now duplicates, rivalling our merchants in the commerce of
+the East, thrashing the Russian on sea and land.  A marvellous imitator
+truly, but imitating us only in things material.  Things spiritual cannot
+be imitated; they must be felt and lived, woven into the very fabric of
+life, and here the Japanese fails.
+
+It required no revolution of his nature to learn to calculate the range
+and fire a field gun or to march the goose-step.  It was a mere matter of
+training.  Our material achievement is the product of our intellect.  It
+is knowledge, and knowledge, like coin, is interchangeable.  It is not
+wrapped up in the heredity of the new-born child, but is something to be
+acquired afterward.  Not so with our soul stuff, which is the product of
+an evolution which goes back to the raw beginnings of the race.  Our soul
+stuff is not a coin to be pocketed by the first chance comer.  The
+Japanese cannot pocket it any more than he can thrill to short Saxon
+words or we can thrill to Chinese hieroglyphics.  The leopard cannot
+change its spots, nor can the Japanese, nor can we.  We are thumbed by
+the ages into what we are, and by no conscious inward effort can we in a
+day rethumb ourselves.  Nor can the Japanese in a day, or a generation,
+rethumb himself in our image.
+
+Back of our own great race adventure, back of our robberies by sea and
+land, our lusts and violences and all the evil things we have done, there
+is a certain integrity, a sternness of conscience, a melancholy
+responsibility of life, a sympathy and comradeship and warm human feel,
+which is ours, indubitably ours, and which we cannot teach to the
+Oriental as we would teach logarithms or the trajectory of projectiles.
+That we have groped for the way of right conduct and agonized over the
+soul betokens our spiritual endowment.  Though we have strayed often and
+far from righteousness, the voices of the seers have always been raised,
+and we have harked back to the bidding of conscience.  The colossal fact
+of our history is that we have made the religion of Jesus Christ our
+religion.  No matter how dark in error and deed, ours has been a history
+of spiritual struggle and endeavour.  We are pre-eminently a religious
+race, which is another way of saying that we are a right-seeking race.
+
+"What do you think of the Japanese?" was asked an American woman after
+she had lived some time in Japan.  "It seems to me that they have no
+soul," was her answer.
+
+This must not be taken to mean that the Japanese is without soul.  But it
+serves to illustrate the enormous difference between their souls and this
+woman's soul.  There was no feel, no speech, no recognition.  This
+Western soul did not dream that the Eastern soul existed, it was so
+different, so totally different.
+
+Religion, as a battle for the right in our sense of right, as a yearning
+and a strife for spiritual good and purity, is unknown to the Japanese.
+
+Measured by what religion means to us, the Japanese is a race without
+religion.  Yet it has a religion, and who shall say that it is not as
+great a religion as ours, nor as efficacious?  As one Japanese has
+written:
+
+"Our reflection brought into prominence not so much the moral as the
+national consciousness of the individual. . . . To us the country is more
+than land and soil from which to mine gold or reap grain--it is the
+sacred abode of the gods, the spirit of our forefathers; to us the
+Emperor is more than the Arch Constable of a Reichsstaat, or even the
+Patron of a Kulturstaat; he is the bodily representative of heaven on
+earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy."
+
+The religion of Japan is practically a worship of the State itself.
+Patriotism is the expression of this worship.  The Japanese mind does not
+split hairs as to whether the Emperor is Heaven incarnate or the State
+incarnate.  So far as the Japanese are concerned, the Emperor lives, is
+himself deity.  The Emperor is the object to live for and to die for.
+The Japanese is not an individualist.  He has developed national
+consciousness instead of moral consciousness.  He is not interested in
+his own moral welfare except in so far as it is the welfare of the State.
+The honour of the individual, _per se_, does not exist.  Only exists the
+honour of the State, which is his honour.  He does not look upon himself
+as a free agent, working out his own personal salvation.  Spiritual
+agonizing is unknown to him.  He has a "sense of calm trust in fate, a
+quiet submission to the inevitable, a stoic composure in sight of danger
+or calamity, a disdain of life and friendliness with death."  He relates
+himself to the State as, amongst bees, the worker is related to the hive;
+himself nothing, the State everything; his reasons for existence the
+exaltation and glorification of the State.
+
+The most admired quality to-day of the Japanese is his patriotism.  The
+Western world is in rhapsodies over it, unwittingly measuring the
+Japanese patriotism by its own conceptions of patriotism.  "For God, my
+country, and the Czar!" cries the Russian patriot; but in the Japanese
+mind there is no differentiation between the three.  The Emperor is the
+Emperor, and God and country as well.  The patriotism of the Japanese is
+blind and unswerving loyalty to what is practically an absolutism.  The
+Emperor can do no wrong, nor can the five ambitious great men who have
+his ear and control the destiny of Japan.
+
+No great race adventure can go far nor endure long which has no deeper
+foundation than material success, no higher prompting than conquest for
+conquest's sake and mere race glorification.  To go far and to endure, it
+must have behind it an ethical impulse, a sincerely conceived
+righteousness.  But it must be taken into consideration that the above
+postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our
+belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves
+which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies.  So be it.  The
+world is whirling faster to-day than ever before.  It has gained impetus.
+Affairs rush to conclusion.  The Far East is the point of contact of the
+adventuring Western people as well as of the Asiatic.  We shall not have
+to wait for our children's time nor our children's children.  We shall
+ourselves see and largely determine the adventure of the Yellow and the
+Brown.
+
+FENG-WANG-CHENG, MANCHURIA.
+_June_ 1904,
+
+
+
+
+WHAT LIFE MEANS TO ME
+
+
+I was born in the working-class.  Early I discovered enthusiasm,
+ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became the problem of my
+child-life.  My environment was crude and rough and raw.  I had no
+outlook, but an uplook rather.  My place in society was at the bottom.
+Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, both of the
+flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and
+tormented.
+
+Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to my mind the only
+way out was up.  Into this edifice I early resolved to climb.  Up above,
+men wore black clothes and boiled shirts, and women dressed in beautiful
+gowns.  Also, there were good things to eat, and there was plenty to eat.
+This much for the flesh.  Then there were the things of the spirit.  Up
+above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses of the spirit, clean and noble
+thinking, keen intellectual living.  I knew all this because I read
+"Seaside Library" novels, in which, with the exception of the villains
+and adventuresses, all men and women thought beautiful thoughts, spoke a
+beautiful tongue, and performed glorious deeds.  In short, as I accepted
+the rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine
+and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all
+that made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and
+misery.
+
+But it is not particularly easy for one to climb up out of the
+working-class--especially if he is handicapped by the possession of
+ideals and illusions.  I lived on a ranch in California, and was hard put
+to find the ladder whereby to climb.  I early inquired the rate of
+interest on invested money, and worried my child's brain into an
+understanding of the virtues and excellences of that remarkable invention
+of man, compound interest.  Further, I ascertained the current rates of
+wages for workers of all ages, and the cost of living.  From all this
+data I concluded that if I began immediately and worked and saved until I
+was fifty years of age, I could then stop working and enter into
+participation in a fair portion of the delights and goodnesses that would
+then be open to me higher up in society.  Of course, I resolutely
+determined not to marry, while I quite forgot to consider at all that
+great rock of disaster in the working-class world--sickness.
+
+But the life that was in me demanded more than a meagre existence of
+scraping and scrimping.  Also, at ten years of age, I became a newsboy on
+the streets of a city, and found myself with a changed uplook.  All about
+me were still the same sordidness and wretchedness, and up above me was
+still the same paradise waiting to be gained; but the ladder whereby to
+climb was a different one.  It was now the ladder of business.  Why save
+my earnings and invest in government bonds, when, by buying two
+newspapers for five cents, with a turn of the wrist I could sell them for
+ten cents and double my capital?  The business ladder was the ladder for
+me, and I had a vision of myself becoming a bald-headed and successful
+merchant prince.
+
+Alas for visions!  When I was sixteen I had already earned the title of
+"prince."  But this title was given me by a gang of cut-throats and
+thieves, by whom I was called "The Prince of the Oyster Pirates."  And at
+that time I had climbed the first rung of the business ladder.  I was a
+capitalist.  I owned a boat and a complete oyster-pirating outfit.  I had
+begun to exploit my fellow-creatures.  I had a crew of one man.  As
+captain and owner I took two-thirds of the spoils, and gave the crew
+one-third, though the crew worked just as hard as I did and risked just
+as much his life and liberty.
+
+This one rung was the height I climbed up the business ladder.  One night
+I went on a raid amongst the Chinese fishermen.  Ropes and nets were
+worth dollars and cents.  It was robbery, I grant, but it was precisely
+the spirit of capitalism.  The capitalist takes away the possessions of
+his fellow-creatures by means of a rebate, or of a betrayal of trust, or
+by the purchase of senators and supreme-court judges.  I was merely
+crude.  That was the only difference.  I used a gun.
+
+But my crew that night was one of those inefficients against whom the
+capitalist is wont to fulminate, because, forsooth, such inefficients
+increase expenses and reduce dividends.  My crew did both.  What of his
+carelessness he set fire to the big mainsail and totally destroyed it.
+There weren't any dividends that night, and the Chinese fishermen were
+richer by the nets and ropes we did not get.  I was bankrupt, unable just
+then to pay sixty-five dollars for a new mainsail.  I left my boat at
+anchor and went off on a bay-pirate boat on a raid up the Sacramento
+River.  While away on this trip, another gang of bay pirates raided my
+boat.  They stole everything, even the anchors; and later on, when I
+recovered the drifting hulk, I sold it for twenty dollars.  I had slipped
+back the one rung I had climbed, and never again did I attempt the
+business ladder.
+
+From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other capitalists.  I had the
+muscle, and they made money out of it while I made but a very indifferent
+living out of it.  I was a sailor before the mast, a longshoreman, a
+roustabout; I worked in canneries, and factories, and laundries; I mowed
+lawns, and cleaned carpets, and washed windows.  And I never got the full
+product of my toil.  I looked at the daughter of the cannery owner, in
+her carriage, and knew that it was my muscle, in part, that helped drag
+along that carriage on its rubber tyres.  I looked at the son of the
+factory owner, going to college, and knew that it was my muscle that
+helped, in part, to pay for the wine and good fellowship he enjoyed.
+
+But I did not resent this.  It was all in the game.  They were the
+strong.  Very well, I was strong.  I would carve my way to a place
+amongst them and make money out of the muscles of other men.  I was not
+afraid of work.  I loved hard work.  I would pitch in and work harder
+than ever and eventually become a pillar of society.
+
+And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that was of the
+same mind.  I was willing to work, and he was more than willing that I
+should work.  I thought I was learning a trade.  In reality, I had
+displaced two men.  I thought he was making an electrician out of me; as
+a matter of fact, he was making fifty dollars per month out of me.  The
+two men I had displaced had received forty dollars each per month; I was
+doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month.
+
+This employer worked me nearly to death.  A man may love oysters, but too
+many oysters will disincline him toward that particular diet.  And so
+with me.  Too much work sickened me.  I did not wish ever to see work
+again.  I fled from work.  I became a tramp, begging my way from door to
+door, wandering over the United States and sweating bloody sweats in
+slums and prisons.
+
+I had been born in the working-class, and I was now, at the age of
+eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started.  I was down in the
+cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which
+it is neither nice nor proper to speak.  I was in the pit, the abyss, the
+human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization.
+This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to
+ignore.  Lack of space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only
+that the things I there saw gave me a terrible scare.
+
+I was scared into thinking.  I saw the naked simplicities of the
+complicated civilization in which I lived.  Life was a matter of food and
+shelter.  In order to get food and shelter men sold things.  The merchant
+sold shoes, the politician sold his manhood, and the representative of
+the people, with exceptions, of course, sold his trust; while nearly all
+sold their honour.  Women, too, whether on the street or in the holy bond
+of wedlock, were prone to sell their flesh.  All things were commodities,
+all people bought and sold.  The one commodity that labour had to sell
+was muscle.  The honour of labour had no price in the marketplace.
+Labour had muscle, and muscle alone, to sell.
+
+But there was a difference, a vital difference.  Shoes and trust and
+honour had a way of renewing themselves.  They were imperishable stocks.
+Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew.  As the shoe merchant sold
+shoes, he continued to replenish his stock.  But there was no way of
+replenishing the labourer's stock of muscle.  The more he sold of his
+muscle, the less of it remained to him.  It was his one commodity, and
+each day his stock of it diminished.  In the end, if he did not die
+before, he sold out and put up his shutters.  He was a muscle bankrupt,
+and nothing remained to him but to go down into the cellar of society and
+perish miserably.
+
+I learned, further, that brain was likewise a commodity.  It, too, was
+different from muscle.  A brain seller was only at his prime when he was
+fifty or sixty years old, and his wares were fetching higher prices than
+ever.  But a labourer was worked out or broken down at forty-five or
+fifty.  I had been in the cellar of society, and I did not like the place
+as a habitation.  The pipes and drains were unsanitary, and the air was
+bad to breathe.  If I could not live on the parlour floor of society, I
+could, at any rate, have a try at the attic.  It was true, the diet there
+was slim, but the air at least was pure.  So I resolved to sell no more
+muscle, and to become a vendor of brains.
+
+Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge.  I returned to California and
+opened the books.  While thus equipping myself to become a brain
+merchant, it was inevitable that I should delve into sociology.  There I
+found, in a certain class of books, scientifically formulated, the simple
+sociological concepts I had already worked out for myself.  Other and
+greater minds, before I was born, had worked out all that I had thought
+and a vast deal more.  I discovered that I was a socialist.
+
+The socialists were revolutionists, inasmuch as they struggled to
+overthrow the society of the present, and out of the material to build
+the society of the future.  I, too, was a socialist and a revolutionist.
+I joined the groups of working-class and intellectual revolutionists, and
+for the first time came into intellectual living.  Here I found
+keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits; for here I met strong and
+alert-brained, withal horny-handed, members of the working-class;
+unfrocked preachers too wide in their Christianity for any congregation
+of Mammon-worshippers; professors broken on the wheel of university
+subservience to the ruling class and flung out because they were quick
+with knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind.
+
+Here I found, also, warm faith in the human, glowing idealism,
+sweetnesses of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom--all the
+splendid, stinging things of the spirit.  Here life was clean, noble, and
+alive.  Here life rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and glorious;
+and I was glad to be alive.  I was in touch with great souls who exalted
+flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the
+starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of
+commercial expansion and world empire.  All about me were nobleness of
+purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights were sunshine and
+starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and
+blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ's own Grail, the warm human,
+long-suffering and maltreated, but to be rescued and saved at the last.
+
+And I, poor foolish I, deemed all this to be a mere foretaste of the
+delights of living I should find higher above me in society.  I had lost
+many illusions since the day I read "Seaside Library" novels on the
+California ranch.  I was destined to lose many of the illusions I still
+retained.
+
+As a brain merchant I was a success.  Society opened its portals to me.
+I entered right in on the parlour floor, and my disillusionment proceeded
+rapidly.  I sat down to dinner with the masters of society, and with the
+wives and daughters of the masters of society.  The women were gowned
+beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they
+were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below
+in the cellar.  "The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady were sisters under
+their skins"--and gowns.
+
+It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me.
+It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet
+little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their prattle
+the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic.  And they were
+so sentimentally selfish!  They assisted in all kinds of sweet little
+charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they
+ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends
+stained with the blood of child labour, and sweated labour, and of
+prostitution itself.  When I mentioned such facts, expecting in my
+innocence that these sisters of Judy O'Grady would at once strip off
+their blood-dyed silks and jewels, they became excited and angry, and
+read me preachments about the lack of thrift, the drink, and the innate
+depravity that caused all the misery in society's cellar.  When I
+mentioned that I couldn't quite see that it was the lack of thrift, the
+intemperance, and the depravity of a half-starved child of six that made
+it work twelve hours every night in a Southern cotton mill, these sisters
+of Judy O'Grady attacked my private life and called me an "agitator"--as
+though that, forsooth, settled the argument.
+
+Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves.  I had expected to
+find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean,
+noble, and alive.  I went about amongst the men who sat in the high
+places--the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the professors,
+and the editors.  I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, automobiled
+with them, and studied them.  It is true, I found many that were clean
+and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were not _alive_.  I do verily
+believe I could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands.
+Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there
+were merely the unburied dead--clean and noble, like well-preserved
+mummies, but not alive.  In this connection I may especially mention the
+professors I met, the men who live up to that decadent university ideal,
+"the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence."
+
+I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their diatribes
+against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons with which to
+shoot down strikers in their own factories.  I met men incoherent with
+indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the same
+time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more
+babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.
+
+I talked in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans, and steamer-chairs
+with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little travelled they
+were in the realm of intellect.  On the other hand, I discovered that
+their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed.  Also,
+I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned, was nil.
+
+This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director and
+a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans.  This
+gentleman, who collected fine editions and was an especial patron of
+literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of a
+municipal machine.  This editor, who published patent medicine
+advertisements and did not dare print the truth in his paper about said
+patent medicines for fear of losing the advertising, called me a
+scoundrelly demagogue because I told him that his political economy was
+antiquated and that his biology was contemporaneous with Pliny.
+
+This senator was the tool and the slave, the little puppet of a gross,
+uneducated machine boss; so was this governor and this supreme court
+judge; and all three rode on railroad passes.  This man, talking soberly
+and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had
+just betrayed his comrades in a business deal.  This man, a pillar of the
+church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, worked his shop girls
+ten hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby directly encouraged
+prostitution.  This man, who endowed chairs in universities, perjured
+himself in courts of law over a matter of dollars and cents.  And this
+railroad magnate broke his word as a gentleman and a Christian when he
+granted a secret rebate to one of two captains of industry locked
+together in a struggle to the death.
+
+It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime--men
+who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean
+and noble, but who were not alive.  Then there was a great, hopeless
+mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean.  It did not sin
+positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and ignorantly by
+acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting by it.  Had it been
+noble and alive it would not have been ignorant, and it would have
+refused to share in the profits of betrayal and crime.
+
+I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlour floor of society.
+Intellectually I was as bored.  Morally and spiritually I was sickened.
+I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my unfrocked preachers,
+broken professors, and clean-minded, class-conscious working-men.  I
+remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was
+all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and
+ethical romance.  And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy
+Grail.
+
+So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and where I
+belonged.  I care no longer to climb.  The imposing edifice of society
+above my head holds no delights for me.  It is the foundation of the
+edifice that interests me.  There I am content to labour, crowbar in
+hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals, idealists, and
+class-conscious working-men, getting a solid pry now and again and
+setting the whole edifice rocking.  Some day, when we get a few more
+hands and crowbars to work, we'll topple it over, along with all its
+rotten life and unburied dead, its monstrous selfishness and sodden
+materialism.  Then we'll cleanse the cellar and build a new habitation
+for mankind, in which there will be no parlour floor, in which all the
+rooms will be bright and airy, and where the air that is breathed will be
+clean, noble, and alive.
+
+Such is my outlook.  I look forward to a time when man shall progress
+upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a
+finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day,
+which is the incentive of the stomach.  I retain my belief in the
+nobility and excellence of the human.  I believe that spiritual sweetness
+and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day.  And last of
+all, my faith is in the working-class.  As some Frenchman has said, "The
+stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the
+polished boot descending."
+
+NEWTON, IOWA.
+_November_ 1905.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REVOLUTION AND OTHER ESSAYS***
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