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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Nonsenseorship, by G. G. Putnam
+
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+Title: Nonsenseorship
+
+Author: G. G. Putnam
+
+Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6678]
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+[This file was first posted on January 12, 2003]
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NONSENSEORSHIP ***
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+
+NONSENSEORSHIP
+
+BY
+
+HEYWOOD BROWN
+GEORGE S. CHAPPELL
+RUTH HALE
+BEN HECHT
+WALLACE IRWIN
+ROBERT KEABLE
+HELEN BULLITT LOWRY
+FREDERICK O'BRIEN
+DOROTHY PARKER
+FRANK SWINNERTON
+H. M. TOMLINSON
+CHARLES HANSON TOWNE
+JOHN V. A. WEAVER
+ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
+and the AUTHOR of "THE MIRRORS of WASHINGTON"
+Edited by G. P. P.
+
+
+SUNDRY OBSERVATIONS
+CONCERNING PROHIBITIONS
+INHIBITIONS AND
+ILLEGALITIES
+
+
+Illustrated By
+RALPH BARTON
+
+
+
+WE HAVE WITH US TODAY
+
+At current bootliquor quotations, Haig & Haig costs twelve dollars a
+quart, while any dependable booklegger can unearth a copy of "Jurgen"
+for about fifteen dollars. Which indicates, at least, an economic
+application of Nonsenseorship.
+
+Its literary, social, and ethical reactions are rather more involved.
+To define them somewhat we invited a group of not-too-serious thinkers
+to set down their views regarding nonsenseorships in general and any
+pet prohibitions in particular.
+
+In introducing those whose gems of protest are to be found in the
+setting of this volume, it is but sportsmanlike to state at the start
+that admission was offered to none of notable puritanical proclivity.
+The prohibitionists and censors are not represented. They require, in
+a levititious literary escapade like this, no spokesman. Their
+viewpoint already is amply set forth. Moreover, likely they would not
+be amusing.... Also, the exponents of Nonsenseorship are victorious;
+and at least the agonized cries of the vanquished, their cynical
+comment or outraged protest, should be given opportunity for
+expression!
+
+Not that we consider HEYWOOD BROUN agonized, cynical, or outraged.
+Indeed, masquerading as a stalwart foe of inhibitions, he starts right
+out, at the very head of the parade, with a vehement advocacy of
+prohibition. His plea (surely, in this setting, traitorous) is to
+prohibit liquor to all who are over thirty years of age! He declares
+that "rum was designed for youthful days and is the animating
+influence which made oats wild." After thirty, presumably, Quaker
+Oats....
+
+And at that we have quite brushed by GEORGE S. CHAPPELL. who serves a
+tasty appetizer at the very threshold, a bubbling cocktail of verse
+defining the authentic story of censorious gloom.
+
+Censorship seems a species of spiritual flagellation to BEN HECHT,
+who, as he says, "ten years ago prided himself upon being as
+indigestible a type of the incoherent young as the land afforded." And
+nonsenseorship in general he regards as a war-born Frankenstein, a
+frenzied virtue grown hugely luminous; "a snowball rolling uphill
+toward God and gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped the shrewd
+janitors of orthodoxy who from age to age were able to keep it within
+bounds."
+
+Then RUTH HALE, who visualizes glowing opportunities for feminine
+achievement in the functionings of inhibited society. "If the world
+outside the home is to become as circumscribed and paternalized as the
+world inside it, obviously all the advantage lies with those who have
+been living under nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to manage
+it."
+
+WALLACE IRWIN is irrepressibly jocose (perhaps because he sailed for
+unprohibited England the day his manuscript was delivered), breaking
+into quite undisciplined verse anent the rosiness of life since the
+red light laws went blue.
+
+"I am not sure, as I write, that this article ever will be printed,"
+says ROBERT KEABLE, the English author of "Simon Called Peter." (It
+is). Mr. Keable, a minister from Africa, wrote of the war as he saw it
+in France, and in a way which offended people with mental blinders. He
+declares that the war quite completely knocked humbug on the head and
+bashed shams irreparably. "Rebels," says he, meaning those who speak
+their mind and write of things as they see them, "must be drowned in a
+babble of words."
+
+And then HELEN BULLITT LOWRY, the exponent of the cocktailored young
+lady of today, averring that to the pocket-flask, that milepost
+between the time that was and the time that is, we owe the single
+standard of drinking. She maintains that the debutantalizing flapper,
+now driven right out in the open by the reformers, is the real
+salvation of our mid-victrolian society.
+
+No palpitating defense of censorship would he expected from FREDERICK
+O'BRIEN of the South Seas, who contributes (and deliciously defines) a
+precious new word to the vocabulary of Nonsenseorship, "Wowzer." The
+nature of a wowzer is hinted in a ditty sung by certain uninhibited
+individuals as they lolled and imbibed among the mystic atolls and
+white shadows:
+
+   "Whack the cymbal! Bang the drum!
+   Votaries of Bacchus!
+   Let the popping corks resound,
+   Pass the flowing goblet round!
+   May no mournful voice be found,
+   Though wowzers do attack us!"
+
+DOROTHY PARKER gives vent to a poignant Hymn of Hate, anent reformers,
+who "think everything but the Passion Play was written by Avery
+Hopwood," and whose dominant desire is to purge the sin from Cinema
+even though they die in the effort. "I hope to God they do," adds the
+author devoutly.
+
+From England, through the eyes of FRANK SWINNERTON, we glimpse
+ourselves as others see us, and rather pathetically. In days gone by,
+lured by reports of America's lawless free-and-easiness, Swinnerton
+says he craved to visit us. But no more. The wish is dead. We have
+become hopelessly moral and uninviting. "I see that I shall after all
+have to live quietly in England with my pipe and my abstemious bottle
+of beer. And yet I should like to visit America, for it has suddenly
+become in my imagining an enormous country of 'Don't!' and I want to
+know what it is like to have 'Don't' said by somebody who is not a
+woman."
+
+Also is raised the British voice of H. M. TOMLINSON, singed with
+satire. He writes as from a palely pure tomorrow when mankind shall
+have reached such a state of complete uniformity of soul, mind and
+body, that "only a particular inquiry will determine a man from a
+woman, though it may fail to determine a fool from a man." Tomlinson's
+imagined nation of the future is "as loyal and homogeneous, as
+contented, as stable, as a reef of actinozoal plasm." And over each
+hearth hangs the sacred Symbol--a portrait of a sheep.
+
+Next is the usually jovial face of CHARLES HANSON TOWNE (that face
+which has launched a thousand quips) now all stern in his unbattled
+struggle with Prohibition, dourly surveying this "land of the spree
+and home of the grave."... "My children," says Towne, "as they sip
+their light wine and beer..." He is, at least, an optimist! But then,
+we are reminded he is also a bachelor.
+
+In his own American language JOHN WEAVER pictures the feelings of an
+old-time saloon habitué when his former friend the barkeep, now rich
+from bootlegging, with a home "on the Drive" and all that, declares
+his socially-climbing daughter quite too good for this particular "Old
+Soak's" son. Weaver's retrospect of "Bill's Place" will bring damp
+eyes to the unregenerate:
+
+   "So neat! And over at the free-lunch counter,
+    Charlie the coon with a apron white like chalk,
+    Dishin' out hot-dogs, and them Boston Beans,
+    And Sad'dy night a great big hot roast ham,
+    Or roast beef simply yellin' to be et,
+    And washed down with a seidel of Old Schlitz!"
+
+"The Puritans disliked the theatre because it was jolly. It was a
+place where people went in deliberate quest of enjoyment." So says
+ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT, who emerges as a sort of economic champion of
+stage morality, though no friend at all of censorship. Despite the
+_mot_ "nothing risqué nothing gained," Woollcott emphatically
+declares the bed-ridden play is not, as a general thing, successful.
+"A blush is not, of course, a bad sign in the box-office," says he,
+developing his theme, "but the chuckle of recognition is better. So is
+the glow of sentiment, so is the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the
+scandalous are less valuable than homely humor, melodramatic
+excitement or pretty sentiment."
+
+And last in this variegated and alphabeted company the anonymous
+AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON" who views the applications of
+nonsenseorship from the standpoint of national politics.
+
+G. P. P.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+We Have With Us Today.
+ G. P. P.
+
+
+Evolution-Another of Those Outlines.
+ GEORGE S. CHAPPELL
+
+
+Nonsenseorship.
+ HEYWOOD BROUN
+
+
+Literature and the Bastinado.
+ BEN HECHT
+
+
+The Woman's Place.
+ RUTH HALE
+
+
+Owed to Volstead.
+ WALLACE IRWIN
+
+
+The Censorship of Thought.
+ ROBERT KEABLE
+
+
+The Uninhibited Flapper.
+ HELEN BULLITT LOWRY
+
+
+The Wowzer in the South Seas.
+ FREDERICK O'BRIEN
+
+
+Reformers: A Hymn of Hate.
+ DOROTHY PARKER
+
+
+Prohibition.
+ FRANK SWINNERTON
+
+
+A Guess at Unwritten History.
+ H. M. TOMLINSON
+
+
+In Vino Demi-Tasse.
+ CHARLES HANSON TOWNE
+
+
+Bootleg.
+ JOHN V. A. WEAVER
+
+
+And the Playwright.
+ ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
+
+
+The Oracle That Always Says "No".
+ THE AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON"
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+George S. Chappell demonstrating his Outline of Censorship.
+
+Heywood Broun finds America suffering from a dearth of Folly.
+
+Ben Hecht chopping away at the ever-forgiving and all-condoning Bugaboo
+of Puritanism.
+
+Ruth Hale as a XXth Century woman guarding the Home Brew.
+
+Wallace Irwin composing under the influence of synthetic gin and Andrew
+Volstead.
+
+Robert Keable urging the Automaton called Citizen to turn on his oppressor.
+
+Helen Bullitt Lowry watching Puritanism set the Flapper free.
+
+Frederick O'Brien finds the South Seas purified and beautified by the
+Missionaries.
+
+Dorothy Parker hating Reformers.
+
+Frank Swinnerton contemplating, from the Tight Little Isle, the two classes
+of prigs developed by Prohibition; those who accept it and those who rebel.
+
+H. M. Tomlinson regarding, with not too great enthusiasm, the Perfect State
+of the Future.
+
+Charles Hanson Towne and the Law.
+
+John V. A. Weaver noticing the bartender who has been thrown out of work
+by Prohibition.
+
+Alexander Woollcott rescuing the Playwright from the awful shears of the
+Censor.
+
+The Periscope of the Author of the Mirrors of Washington is turned toward
+the Great Negative Oracle.
+
+
+
+
+NONSENSEORSHIP
+
+
+
+
+EVOLUTION
+
+_Another of Those Outlines_
+
+
+[Illustration: George S. Chappell demonstrating his Outline of Censorship.]
+
+BY GEORGE S. CHAPPELL
+
+ I
+
+[Sidenote: _Time. The Beginning_.]
+
+ When Adam sat with lovely Eve
+   And. Pressed his Primal suit,
+ There was a ban, if we believe
+   Our Genesis, on fruit.
+ But did it give old Adam pause,
+   This One and only law there was?
+
+ X
+
+[Sidenote: _Nine verses are supposed to elapse_.]
+
+ And then great Moses, on the crest
+   Of Sinai, did devise
+ His tablets, acting for the best,
+   (Though some thought otherwise).
+ At least he showed restraint, for then
+   Man's sins were limited to _Ten_,
+
+ C
+
+[Sidenote: _Ninety-nine verses elapse_.]
+
+ In later days the Romans proud
+   Their famous Code began.
+ And lots of things were not allowed
+   By just Justinian.
+ He wrote a list, stupendous long;
+   _"One Hundred_ Ways of Going Wrong."
+
+ M
+
+[Sidenote: _Nine hundred and ninety-nine verses elapse_.]
+
+ Napoleon, (see Wells's book)
+   Improved the Roman plan
+ By spotting a potential crook
+   In every fellow-man.
+ And by the _Thousand_ off they went
+   To jail, until proved innocent.
+
+ MDCCCCXXII
+
+[Sidenote: _Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine verses
+elapse_.]
+
+ Now in the change-about complete
+   Since Adam Passed from View.
+ For apples we are urged to eat
+   And all else is taboo.
+ A _Million_ laws hold us in thrall,
+   And we serenely break them all!
+
+
+
+
+NONSENSEORSHIP
+
+
+[Illustration: Heywood Broun finds America suffering from a dearth of
+Folly.]
+
+HEYWOOD BROUN
+
+A censor is a man who has read about Joshua and forgotten Canute. He
+believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin
+whistle and a raised right hand. For after all it is life with which
+he quarrels. Censorship is seldom greatly concerned with truth.
+Propriety is its worry and obviously impropriety was allowed to creep
+into the fundamental scheme of creation. It is perhaps a little
+unfortunate that no right-minded censor was present during the first
+week in which the world was made. The plan of sex, for instance, could
+have been suppressed effectively then and Mr. Sumner might have been
+spared the dreadful and dangerous ordeal of reading "Jurgen" so many
+centuries later.
+
+Indeed, if there had only been right-minded supervision over the
+modelling of Adam and Eve the world could worry along nicely without
+the aid of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Suppression of
+those biological facts which the Society includes in its definition of
+Vice is now impossible. Concealment is really what the good men are
+after. Somewhat after the manner of the Babes in the Woods they would
+cover us over with leaves. For men and women they have figs and for
+babies they have cabbages.
+
+It must have been a censor who first hit upon the notion that what you
+don't know won't hurt you. We doubt whether it is a rule which applies
+to sex. Eve left Eden and took upon herself a curse for the sake of
+knowledge. It seems a little heedless of this heroism to advocate that
+we keep the curse and forget the knowledge. The battle against
+censorship should have ended at the moment of the eating of the apple.
+At that moment Man committed himself to the decision that he would
+know all about life even though he died for it. Unfortunately, under
+the terms of the existence of mortals one decision is not enough. We
+must keep reaffirming decisions if they are to hold. Even in Eden
+there was the germ of a new threat to degrade Adam and Eve back to
+innocence. When they ate the apple an amoeba in a distant corner of
+the Garden shuddered and began the long and difficult process of
+evolution. To all practical purposes John S. Sumner was already born.
+
+To us the whole theory of censorship is immoral. If its functions were
+administered by the wisest man in the world it would still be wrong.
+But of course the wisest man in the world would have too much sense to
+be a censor. We are not dealing with him. His substitutes are
+distinctly lesser folk. They are not even trained for their work
+except in the most haphazard manner. Obviously a censor should be the
+most profound of psychologists. Instead the important posts in the
+agencies of suppression go to the boy who can capture the largest
+number of smutty post cards. After he has confiscated a few gross he
+is promoted to the task of watching over art. By that time he has been
+pretty thoroughly blasted for the sins of the people. An extraordinary
+number of things admit of shameful interpretations in his mind.
+
+For instance, the sight of a woman making baby clothes is not
+generally considered a vicious spectacle in many communities, but it
+may not be shown on the screen in Pennsylvania by order of the state
+board of censors. In New York Kipling's Anne of Austria was not
+allowed to "take the wage of infamy and eat the bread of shame" in a
+screen version of "The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House." Thereby a
+most immoral effect was created. Anne was shown wandering about quite
+casually and drinking and conversing with sailors who were perfect
+strangers to her, but the censors would not allow any stigma to be
+placed upon her conduct. Indeed this decision seems to support the
+rather strange theory that deeds don't matter so long as nothing is
+said about them.
+
+The New York picture board is peculiarly sensitive to words. Upon one
+occasion a picture was submitted with the caption, "The air of the
+South Seas breathes an erotic perfume." "Cut out 'erotic,'" came back
+the command of the censors.
+
+In Illinois, Charlie Chaplin was not allowed to have a scene in "The
+Kid" in which upon being asked the name of the child he shook his head
+and rushed into the house, returning a moment later to answer, "Bill."
+That particular board of censors seemed intent upon keeping secret the
+fact that there are two sexes.
+
+Of course, it may be argued that motion pictures are not an art and
+that it makes little difference what happens to them. We cannot share
+that indifference. Enough has been done in pictures to convince us
+that very beautiful things might be achieved if only the censors could
+be put out of the way. Not all the silliness of the modern American
+picture is the fault of the producers. Much of the blame must rest
+with the various boards of censorship. It is difficult to think up
+many stories in which there is no passion, crime, or birth. As a
+matter of fact, we are of the opinion that the entire theory of motion
+picture censorship is mistaken. The guardians of morals hold that if
+the spectator sees a picture of a man robbing a safe he will thereby
+be moved to want to rob a safe himself. In rebuttal we offer the
+testimony of a gentleman much wiser in the knowledge of human conduct
+than any censor. Writing in "The New Republic," George Bernard Shaw
+advocated that hereafter public reading-rooms supply their patrons
+only with books about evil characters. For, he argued, after reading
+about evil deeds our longings for wickedness are satisfied
+vicariously. On the other hand there is the danger that the public may
+read about saints and heroes and drain off its aspirations in such
+directions without actions.
+
+We believe this is true. We once saw a picture about a highwayman
+(that was in the days before censorship was as strict as it is now)
+and it convinced us that the profession would not suit us. We had not
+realized the amount of compulsory riding entailed. The particular
+highwayman whom we saw dined hurriedly, slept infrequently, and
+invariably had his boots on. Mostly he was being pursued and hurdling
+over hedges. It left us sore in every muscle to watch him. At the end
+of the eighth reel every bit of longing in our soul to be a
+swashbuckler had abated. The man in the picture had done the
+adventuring for us and we could return in comfort to a peaceful
+existence.
+
+Florid literature is the compensation for humdrummery. If we are ever
+completely shut off from a chance to see or read about a little
+evil-doing we shall probably be moved to go out and cut loose on our
+own. So far we have not felt the necessity. We have been willing to
+let D'Artagnan do it.
+
+Even so arduous an abstinence as prohibition may be made endurable
+through fictional substitutes. After listening to a drinking chorus in
+a comic opera and watching the amusing antics of the chief comedian
+who is ever so inebriated we are almost persuaded to stay dry.
+Prohibition is perhaps the climax of censorship. It has the advantage
+over other forms of suppression in that at least it represents a
+sensible point of view. Yet, we are not converted. There are things in
+the world far more important than hard sense.
+
+One of the officials of the Anti-Saloon League gave out a statement
+the other day in which he endeavored to show all the benefits provided
+by prohibition. But he did it with figures. There was a column showing
+the increase of accounts in savings banks and another devoted to the
+decrease of inmates in hospitals, jails and almshouses. From a
+utilitarian point of view the figures, if correct, could hardly fail
+to be impressive, but little has been said by either side about the
+spiritual aspects of rum. Unfortunately there are no statistics on
+that, and yet it is the one phase of the question which interests us.
+Some weeks ago we happened to observe a letter from a man who wrote to
+one of the newspapers protesting against the proposed settlement in
+Ireland on the ground that, "It's so damned sensible." We have
+somewhat the same feeling about prohibition. It is a movement to take
+the folly out of our national life and there is no quality which
+America needs so sorely.
+
+If enforcement ever becomes perfect this will be a nation composed
+entirely of men who wear rubbers, put money in the bank, and go to bed
+at ten. That fine old ringing phrase, "This is on me," will be gone
+from the language. Conversation will be wholly instructive, for in
+fifty years the last generation capable of saying, "Do you remember
+that night--?" will have been gathered to its fathers.
+
+Of course, there is no denying the shortsightedness of the forces of
+rum. They cannot escape their responsibility for having aided in the
+advent of Prohibition. They were slow to see the necessity of some
+form of curtailment and limitation of the traffic. Such moves as they
+did make were entirely wrong-headed. For instance, we had ordinances
+providing for the early closing of cafés. Instead of that we should
+have had laws forbidding anybody to sell liquor except between the
+hours of 8 P.M. and 5 A.M. Daytime drinking was always sodden, but
+something is necessary to make night worth while. Man is more than the
+beasts, and he should not be driven into dull slumber just because the
+sun has set.
+
+The invention of electricity, liquor, cut glass mirrors, and cards
+made man the master of his environment rather than its slave. Now that
+liquor is gone all the other factors are mockery. Card playing has
+become merely an extension of the cruel and logical process of the
+survival of the fittest. The fellow with the best hand wins, instead
+of the one with the best head. Nobody draws four cards any more or
+stands for a raise on an inside straight. The thing is just cut-throat
+and scientific and wholly mercenary.
+
+The kitty is gone. Nobody cares to come in to a common fund for the
+purchase of mineral water and cheese sandwiches. And with the passing
+of the kitty the most promising development of co-operation and
+communism in America has gone. It was prophetic of a more perfectly
+organized society. In the days of the kitty the fine Socialistic ideal
+of, "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his
+needs," was made specific and workable. And the inspiring romantic
+tradition of Robin Hood was also carried over into modern life. The
+kitty robbed only the rich and left the poor alone.
+
+But now none of us will contribute unquestionably to the material
+comfort of others. Each must keep his money for the savings bank.
+
+Perhaps, something of the old friendly rivalry may be revived. In a
+hundred years it may be that men will meet around a table and that one
+will say to the other, "What have you got?"
+
+"I've got $9,876.32 in first mortgages and gilt-edged securities."
+
+"That's good. You win."
+
+But somehow or other we doubt it.
+
+Another mistake which was made in the policy of compromising with the
+drys was the agreement that liquor should not be served to minors. On
+the contrary, the provision should have been that drink ought not to
+be permitted to any man more than thirty years of age. Liquor was
+never meant to be a steady companion. It was the animating influence
+which made oats wild. Work and responsibility are the portion of the
+mature man. Rum was designed for youthful days when the reckless
+avidity for experience is so great that reality must be blurred a
+little lest it blind us.
+
+We happened to pick up a copy of "The Harvard Crimson" the other day
+and read: "The first freshman smoker will be held at 7.45 o'clock this
+evening in the living room of the Union. P. H. Theopold, '25, Chairman
+of the Smoker Committee, will act as Chairman, introducing Clark
+Hodder, '25, and J. H. Child, '25, the Class President and Secretary
+respectively. After the speeches there will be a motion picture, and
+some vaudeville by a magician from Keith's. Ginger ale, crackers, and
+cigarettes will be served. All freshmen are invited to attend."
+
+They used to be called Freshmen Beer Nights and in those days the
+possibility of friendship at first sight was not fantastic. We feel
+sure that it cannot be done on ginger ale. The urge for democracy does
+not dwell in any soft drink. The speeches will be terrible, for there
+will be no pleasant interruptions of "Aw, sit down," from the man in
+the back of the room. If somebody begins to sing, "P. H. Theopold is a
+good old soul," it is not likely to carry conviction. Not once during
+the evening will any speaker confine himself to saying, "To Hell with
+Yale!" and falling off the table. Probably the magician will not be
+able to find anything in the high hat except white rabbits.
+
+Although we have seen no first hand report of that freshman smoker, we
+feel sure that it was only a crowded self-conscious gathering of a
+number of young men who said little and went home early.
+
+Even from the standpoint of the strictest of abstainers there must be
+some regret for the passing of rum. What man who lived through the bad
+old days does not remember the thrill of rectitude which came to him
+the first time he said, "Make mine a cigar."
+
+Though they have taken away our rum from us we have our memories. Not
+all the days have been dull gray. Back in the early pages of our diary
+is the entry about the trip which we made to Boston with William F----
+in the hard winter of 1907. It was agreed that neither of us should
+drink the same sort of drink twice. Staunch William achieved nineteen
+varieties, but we topped him with twenty-four. Upon examination we
+observe that the entry in the memory book was made several days later.
+The handwriting is a little shaky. But for that adventure we might
+have lived and died entirely ignorant of the nature of an Angel Float.
+
+In those days human sympathy was wider. F. M. W. seemed in many
+respects a matter-of-fact man, but it was he who chanced upon the 59th
+street Circle just before dawn and paused to call the attention of all
+bystanders to the statue of Columbus.
+
+"Look at him," he said. "Christopher Columbus! He discovered America
+and then they sent him back to Spain in chains."
+
+He wept, and we realized for the first time that under a rough
+exterior there beat a heart of gold.
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND THE BASTINADO
+
+
+[Illustration: Ben Hecht chopping away at the ever-forgiving and
+all-condoning Bugaboo of Puritanism.]
+
+BEN HECHT
+
+Surveying the trend of modern literature one must, unless one's mental
+processes be complicated with opaque prejudices, wonder at the
+provoking laxity of the national censorship. I write from the
+viewpoint of an aggrieved iconoclast.
+
+It becomes yearly more obvious that the duly elected, commissioned and
+delegated high priests of the nation's morale are growing blind to the
+dangers which assail them. If not, then how does it come that such
+enemies of the public weal as H. L. Mencken, Floyd Dell, Sherwood
+Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Dos Passos, Mr. Cabell, Mr. Rascoe, Mr.
+Sandburg, Mr. Sinclair Lewis are not in jail? How does it come
+Professor Frinck of Cornell is not in jail? Bodenheim, Margaret
+Anderson, Mr. John Weaver are not in jail.
+
+Were I the President of the United States sworn to uphold the dignity
+of its psychopathic repressions, pledged on a stack of Bibles to
+promote the relentless pursuit and annihilation of other people's
+happiness, I would have begun my reign by clapping H. L. Mencken into
+irons forthwith. Mr. Cabell, I would have sent to Russia. Sherwood
+Anderson I would have boiled in oil.
+
+But what is the situation? Observe these gentlemen and their kin
+enjoying not only their bodily liberty but allowed to prosper on the
+royalties derived from the sale of incendiary volumes designed to
+destroy the principles upon which the integrity of the commonwealth
+depends. The spectacle is one aggravating to an iconoclast. There is
+no affront as distressing as the tolerance of one's enemies.
+
+Mr. H. L. Mencken is, perhaps, the outstanding victim of this
+depravity of indifference which more and more characterizes the enemy.
+Mr. Mencken, hurling himself for ten years against the Bugaboo of
+Puritanism--a fearless and wonderfully caparisoned Knight of Alarums,
+Prince of Darkness, Evangel of Chaos--Mr. Mencken pauses for a moment
+out of breath casting about slyly for fresher and deadlier weapons and
+lo! the Bugaboo with a gentle smile reaches out and embraces him and
+plants the kiss of love on both his cheeks, strokes his hair
+wistfully, and invites him to sit on the front porch. Alas, poor
+Mencken! It is the fate that awaits us all. Zarathustra in the
+market-place feeding ground glass to the populace is gathered to the
+bosom of the City Fathers and gleefully enrolled as a member of the
+Guild.
+
+This is no idle rhetoric. Dissent in the Republic has come upon hard
+ways. Ten years ago the name of Mencken would have stood against the
+world. Today no college freshman, no lowly professor, no charity
+worker, or local alderman too puritanical to do him homage.
+
+Whereupon the argument is that an era of enlightenment has set in,
+that this same Mencken and his contemporary throat-cutters have
+vanquished the Bugaboo, and that, as a result, a spirit of high
+intellectual life prevails through the land. The proletaire have risen
+and are thumbing their nose at the gods. Brander Matthews has sent in
+a five years' subscription to the Little Review. The Comstocks
+overcome with the vision of their ghastly complexes are appealing to
+Sigmund Freud for advice and relief. But the argument is superficial.
+"Victory!" cry the iconoclasts grinding their teeth at the absence of
+a foe.
+
+But it is a victory that rankles in the soul. The foe is not
+vanquished but, seemingly, bored to death has fallen asleep. It is, in
+any event, a phenomenon. Many generalizations offer themselves as
+solace.
+
+The first paradox of this phenomenon is that Puritanism, beaten to a
+pulp by an ever-increasing herd of first, second, third, and fourth
+rate iconoclasts, has triumphed completely in the legislatures of the
+country. With every new volume exposing the gruesome mainsprings of
+the national virtue, further taboos and restrictions crowd themselves
+into the statute books.
+
+In a sense it would seem as if the _bete populaire_, becoming
+increasingly drunk with the consciousness of its own power, is
+elatedly preoccupied in cutting off its own nose, tying itself up into
+knots, and kicking itself in the rear, proclaiming simultaneously and
+in triumphant tones, "Observe how powerful I am. I can pass laws
+making ipecac a compulsory diet."
+
+Whereupon the laws are passed and the noble masses with heroic
+grimaces fall to devouring ipecac, to the confusion of all free-born
+stomachs. In fact this species of ballot flagellatism, this diverting
+pastime of hitting itself on the head with a stuffed club has
+gradually elevated the body politic to the enviable position occupied
+by the all-powerful king of Fernando Po. This mysterious being lives
+in the lowest depths of the crater of Riabba. His power is in direct
+ratio to the taboos which hem him in. Convinced that bathing is a
+crime against his dignity, that sunlight is incompatible with his
+royal lineage; convinced that his prestige is dependent upon a weekly
+three days' fast and a cautious observation of the taboos against all
+variants of social intercourse--piously convinced of these astounding
+things, the all-powerful monarch of Fernando Po sits year in and year
+out motionless on his throne in the lowest depths of the crater of
+Riabba, awed by himself and overcome with the contemplation of his
+all-powerfulness. We have here, I trust, an illuminating analogy.
+
+The Republic, like this King of Fernando Po, imposes daily upon itself
+new taboos, new rituals. Yet there is the phenomenon of its tolerance
+toward the idol breakers. From the lowest depths of the crater of
+Riabba in which he sits enthroned the monarch of the Laongos condemns
+to death with a twitch of his brows all who seek to question the
+sanctity of the taboos. But this other occupant of the crater of
+Riabba-our Republic-raises gentle eyes to the idol wreckers, to the
+taboo destroyers. An occasional, "tut tut" escapes him. And nothing
+more.
+
+Whereupon the argument is that our monarch of the pit is an impotent
+fellow. Again, a superficial deduction. For behold the censorships
+with which he belabors himself.
+
+Censorship, almost extinct in the restriction of the national
+literature, thrives in every other field. Censorships abound. Food,
+drink, movies, politics, baseball, diversion, dress--all these are
+under the jurisdiction of a continually aroused censorship. The
+pulpits and editorial pages emit sonorous hymns of taboo. Every
+caption writer is an Isaiah, every welfare worker fancies himself the
+handwriting on the wall. Unchallenged by the vote of the masses or by
+any outward evidence of mass dissent, the platitudes pile up, the
+nation is filled from morning to morning with stentorian clamor.
+Puritanism in a frenetic finale approaches a climax.
+
+But, and we tiptoe towards the crux of this phenomenon, the Bacchanal
+of Presbyterianism is an artificial climax. Unlike the day of the
+later Caesars, the populace does not abandon itself in imitation of
+its Neros and Caligulas. Instead, we have the spectacle of a populace
+apathetic toward the spirit of its time.
+
+The Puritan debauch is the logical culmination of the anti-Paganism
+and backworldism launched two hundred centuries back. The Christian
+ethic, to the bewildered chagrin of its advocates, has triumphed. Not
+a triumph this time that offers itself as a cloak for Jesuitism,
+colonization, or empire juggling. But an unimpeachable triumph
+entirely beyond the control of the most adroit of the choir-Machiavellis.
+
+In other words the body politic finds itself betrayed by its own
+platitudes. A moral frenzy animates its horizon. But it is a frenzy of
+idea escaped control, an idea grown too huge and luminous to direct
+any longer. The moral frenzy of the war was the moral frenzy of such
+an idea--virtue become a Frankenstein. This virtue--the Golden Rule,
+the Thou Shalt Nots, the thousand and one unassailable maxims, adages,
+old saws invented chiefly for the protection of the weak and the
+solace of the inferior--this virtue has taken itself out of the hands
+of its hitherto adroit worshippers. A snowball rolling uphill toward
+God and gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped the shrewd
+janitors of orthodoxy who from age to age were able to keep it within
+bounds.
+
+Thus in the war, confronted with the platitude that the world must be
+made safe for democracy and with the further platitude that democracy
+and equality were the goals of Christianity and with a dozen similar
+platitudes none of which had any authentic contact with the life of
+the nation, thus confronted, the proletaire was forced to lift itself
+up by its boot straps and rise to the defence of a Frankenstein
+idealism of which it was the parent-victim. Disillusionment with the
+causes of the war has, however, served no high purpose. The
+Frankenstein God, the Frankenstein virtue is still enshrined in the
+Heaven of the Copy Books. And we find the proletaire still
+worshipping, albeit with the squirmings and grimacings, a horrible
+idealization of itself.
+
+The Thou Shalt Nots have escaped. They increase and multiply with a
+life of their own. Logic is the most irresponsible of the manias which
+operate in life. Logic demands that ideas be carried to their climax
+and this demand, as inexorable as Mr. Newton's law, has made a
+Frankenstein of the unsuspecting Galilean.
+
+Hypnotized by the demands of logic, bewildered by the contemplation of
+this code of backworldism which he himself seems somehow to have
+created, the ballot maniac stands riveted at the polls and sacrifices
+to his own image by hitting himself on the head with further virtuous
+restrictions--a gesture necessary to prevent his own image from giving
+him the lie. He must, in other words, prove himself as virtuous,
+whenever public demonstration demands, as the Frankenstein platitudes
+proclaim him to be.
+
+The Puritanism of the nation, remorselessly upheld by its laws and its
+public factotums is an extraneous and artificial pose into which the
+blundering proletaire has tricked itself. There are innumerable
+consequences. We have, firstly, the spectacle of the masses disporting
+themselves slyly in the undertow of cynicism.
+
+"Modesty," bellows Sir Frankenstein from pulpit and press, "is a
+cardinal virtue." "Right O," echoes the feminine contingent and
+promptly bobs its hair, shortens its skirts, and rolls down its socks.
+
+"Abstinence, sobriety, are an economic and spiritual necessity,"
+bellows Sir Frankenstein. Whereupon the male contingent votes the land
+dry and gets drunk.
+
+From the foregoing we may derive glimmers of truth concerning the
+public tolerance of iconoclasts. "Main Street," a volume fathered by
+Mencken, Freud, and the other Chaos-Bringers, leaps into prominence as
+a best seller. It is devoured and acclaimed by the ballot maniac who
+reads it, smacks his lips over its "truths" and sallies forth to vote
+further canonizations of hypocrisy into the legal code. Even I, who
+ten years ago prided myself upon being as indigestible a type of the
+Incoherent Young as the land afforded, find myself for one month a
+best seller [Footnote: "Erik Dorn," Mr. Hecht's first novel.--Ed.] on
+my native heath. Woe the prophet who is with honor in his country! He
+will flee in disgust in quest of hair shirts and a bastinado.
+
+Thus, the citizens. With the left hand they greet the iconoclasts and
+hand them royalties. With the right hand they pass further laws for
+the iconoclasts to denounce. A phenomenon results. With the thought of
+the masses becoming more and more neutral in the highty-tighty war
+between Good and Evil, the laws created by these same masses grow more
+and more rabid. But it must be borne in mind that although the masses,
+carried away by flagellant impulses, assist in the creation of these
+laws, in the main, they are laws, self-created platitudes which give
+birth to new platitudes. Logic is the most pernicious of the Holy
+Ghosts responsible for the conception of undesirable Gods.
+
+I am prepared now to make further revelations. The foregoing, although
+bristling with inconsistencies, seems to me, nevertheless, a ground
+work. I will begin the apocalyptic finale with a resume of the
+choir-leaders, the high priests, the Mahatmas of Sir Frankenstein.
+
+Item one: It is obvious that the laws of the land being the ghastly
+climaxes of artificial logic and not of human desires or biological
+necessities, therefore the salaried apostles of these laws must
+function similarly outside nature.
+
+The high priests, it develops indeed upon investigation, diligently
+lickspittling to Sir Frankenstein, have no following. The masses are
+not going to Heaven in their wake. They, the high priests, are
+magically out of touch with their worshippers. And from day to day
+they grow further out of touch until they are to be seen high in the
+clouds tending the fugitive altars that are soaring toward God on
+their own power.
+
+These high priests are the creatures elected, commissioned and
+delegated by the proletaire to perpetuate its grandiose and impossible
+image. And this they do. They are the custodians of the public morals,
+meaning the protectors of the huge trick mirror out of which the
+complexes, neurasthenias, and morbid fears of the public stare back at
+it in the guise of Virtue, Honor, Decency, and Love. These custodians
+are also, to leap into the denouement, the censors here under
+discussion; censors not only tolerated but insisted upon by the people
+to annoy and harass them and inspire them to further ballot
+flagellations in order that they, the people, may be spared the
+disaster of discovering themselves different from what two hundred
+centuries of self-idealization have driven them into believing
+themselves to be.
+
+This, the high priests do. In every village, hamlet and farm they have
+their say. They chastise. They make things fit for decent people to
+see or wear or drink, and people flattered to death at the idea of
+being considered decent submit piously to the distastement
+infringements and taboos.
+
+All-powerful are the censors. But despite this all-powerfulness they
+labor under a wretched handicap. They are stupid. Stupidity is the
+paradox to be found most often in all-powerful Gods. They are stupid,
+the censors. And the Devil is clever. The Seven Arts which are the
+Seven Incarnations of Dionysius, the Seven Masks of an unrepentant
+Lucifer, elude them in the horrific struggle. Or at least partially
+elude them. Occasionally a cloven hoof is spied and sliced to the
+bone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We return now with proud and tranquil ease to the beginning of this
+tale, to the phenomenon of a tolerated literary iconoclasm in a land
+alive with caterwaulings of virtue.
+
+As hinted above not all the Arts escape, nor do any of them escape all
+the time. Music, whose sly and terrible vices were for centuries
+unperceived by the high priests, has been brought to earth in places.
+"Jazz Incites to Sin. Syncopation is Devil's Ally." Discovered! One
+reads the morning paper and feels a return of hope. The High Priests
+are aroused. They have disembowelled an ally. There is hope then of a
+bloody fray. Another Edition and they will be on our own heads,
+swinging their snickersnees. Mencken will be arrested and burned in
+public. Anderson will be strung up by the heels and his estates
+confiscated. There will be war--red war, and we in the army of the
+iconoclasts growling impotently at each other will face about and have
+at them with hullaballo and manifesto and snickersnee in turn.
+
+"Nude Painting Banned From Window. Nab Store Keeper." We read on. The
+snickersnee swings towards the vitals of Hollywood. "Movie Magnate
+Charges Work of Art Cut; Sues Censors. Seeks Redress in Courts."
+
+Valhalla! They are closing in. Another forced march and they are upon
+us.
+
+Alas, our coffee cools as we wait impatiently for the alarms to sound.
+We are intact. Mencken still lives. Anderson still lives. The tide of
+battle sweeps us by, passes us up, and there's the end to it.
+
+Again, our victory rankling, we cast about for reasons. Do not the
+censors read our books? Yes, the censors read our books. And
+scratching their necks pensively and immediately below their left
+ears, the censors fall asleep. Our books were over their heads. Our
+broadsides aimed for their vitals whizzed by their ears and lulled
+them into slumber. A hideous victory is in our hands.
+
+Voltaire blew God out of France for a century. But that was because
+God was still an emotion in his day and not a Frankenstein of logic.
+He blew up the high priests. But that was because the high priests
+still had enough intelligence in that time to know what constituted an
+epoch-shaking explosion.
+
+Our enemies the censors, the hallelujah flingers, commissioned,
+elected, delegated by the proletaire are not worthy our steel. Having
+no longer any contact with the masses, they need no genius to
+perpetuate themselves. The masses care not what they are so long as
+they are. Figureheads for Frankenstein, they need only shriek
+themselves blue and their will, will be done. Shrewdness,
+intelligence, are qualities non-essential since virtue, no longer
+feeding upon shrewdness and intelligence, fattens upon its own
+monstrous logic.
+
+The high priests are vital to the lie which man has created for
+himself as a heaven and out of which his own image leers godlike back
+at him. They are vital for nothing else.
+
+Therefore our immunity. Since they need no grey matter, they have
+none. And unable to understand us, they ignore us. And if we grow too
+insistent, as has Mencken, they put an end to the business by
+embracing us and pulling our fangs by disgusting us with their
+stupidity.
+
+Given free reign under the conditions herein outlined, the youth of
+the land is abandoning itself to a safe and sane orgie of iconoclasm.
+Satanic epigrams cloud the air of the very market-place. Poets, column
+conductors, hack literary reviewers, hack romancers, lecturers,
+realists, imagists, and all are gloatingly engaged in sacking the
+Temple, in thumbing their nose at the taboos.
+
+In fact so widespread is the unlicensed and unrebuked iconoclasm of
+the day that a great disgust is being born in the hearts of the
+pioneers. Every dog has his paradox, every hack his anti-Christ, they
+bewail. And surveying the horizon despairingly they see no enemy
+rushing upon them with the wind.
+
+There are, of course, scattered here and there among the keepers of
+the Seal, observant priests. They omit isolated groans. They launch
+Quixotic sorties. But they retire and collapse without waiting combat.
+To their denunciation of "degenerate, sinful and corrupting cesspools
+of alleged art" (I quote from a review of some of my own work
+appearing in an issue of the Springfield (Ill.) _Republican_),
+there is no answering response. They are left abandoned, the Fiery
+Cross burning down to their fingers and flickering out. They cannot be
+glorified into an enemy.
+
+On the whole I fear for the result. Ideas favor a bloody battle-ground
+for birthplace. And here we stand, drawn up in battle array
+discharging broadsides of "Winesburgs, Ohios," "Main Streets,"
+"Cornhuskers" and the like; flying our colors valiantly--but there is
+no battle. The enemy sleeps. Or the enemy wakes up and issues an
+indifferent invitation that we stay to tea.
+
+Comrade Dreiser may demur at all this and, peeling his vest, reveal us
+wounds, honorable wounds acquired in honorable battle. And further, he
+may regale us with tales of hair shirts and bastinadoes suffered by
+him in the Republic. But alas, he is Telemachus, grey-bearded and full
+of memories. And the youth of Athens, fallen upon softer ways, listen
+with envious incredulity to such tall tales.
+
+
+
+
+THE WOMAN'S PLACE
+
+
+[Illustration: Ruth Hale as a XXth Century woman guarding the Home Brew.]
+
+RUTH HALE
+
+At last the women of this country are about to perform a great
+service--not one of those courtesy services about which so much is so
+volubly said and so little is done in repayment--but a good sturdy
+performance, that will probably bring these magnificent men folks
+right to their knees.
+
+They are going to teach the unfortunates how to live under
+prohibitions and taboos. Of course there has never been any
+prodigality of freedom in this country--or any other--but what there
+was belonged to the men. The women had to take to the home and stay
+there. So the two sexes adjusted themselves to life with this
+difference, that the women had to do all the outwitting and
+circumventing, all the little smart twists and turns, all the cunning
+scheming by which people snatch off what they want without appearing
+to, whereas men got their much or little by prosily sticking their
+hands out for it.
+
+This developed, naturally, not only somewhat diverse temperaments, hut
+also greatly diverse equipments. When men cannot get what they want
+now by either asking or paying for it, they have no more resources.
+Bless them, they must return into the home, where the secret has been
+perfected for centuries on centuries of how to hoard a private stock
+and how to find a bootlegger. Under the steadily growing
+nonsenseorship regime, they are obliged to come and take lessons from
+the lately despised group of creatures to whom nonsenseorship is a
+well-thumbed story. If the world outside the home is to become as
+circumscribed and paternalized as the world inside it, obviously all
+the advantage lies with those who have been living under
+nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to manage it.
+
+Thus woman moves over from her dull post as keeper of the virtues to
+the far more important and exciting post as keeper of the vices. It is
+not an ideal power which she thus acquires. But then none of this is
+about ideals. This is just a little practical 'study in what is going
+to happen, and why. Taboos never yet have added a cubit to the stature
+of the soul of humanity. They have nearly always been the chattering
+children of fear and pure idiocy. They have always tried to throw the
+race back on to all fours, and have left the nobility of standing
+upright wholly out of account.
+
+The taboos which have surrounded women time out of mind have been so
+puerile and imbecile that one quite non-partisanly wonders why on
+earth they have been allowed to continue. A second thought
+demonstrates, of course, that fear has had the major part in it, and
+that skill in cheating has gone so far as practically to nullify the
+privations of the taboo.
+
+But one must put by this hankering after nobility, and accept the
+plain fact that fear is the dominant human motive. What the race would
+do if fear were conquered, or at least faced sternly eye to eye, is
+staggering to contemplate. Perhaps God looks upon that vision. It may
+be that which gives Him patience. But man at best gives it one
+terrified squint in a lifetime. All behavior must take fear into
+account.
+
+The man who lately brought back from the Amazon Basin news of a
+fear-dispelling drug used there by a savage tribe, would have been
+carried home from the steamer on the shoulders of his compatriots if
+for one moment he had been believed. His drug may do all he claimed
+for it, but a country which boasts a Volstead in full stride cannot
+force itself to take him seriously. The only likely part of his story
+was that the tribes who prepared the drug would put to instant death
+any woman who happened either to learn how to prepare it or did
+actually get some of it into her.
+
+We recognize that part as familiar. We have made the same fight here
+against the fearless woman as the savages made on the Amazon. The only
+thing we were never smart enough to apply was the moral of the Kipling
+story about the two greatest armies in the world: the men who believed
+that they could not die till their time came, against those who wanted
+to die as soon as possible. It was from one or the other of these two
+kinds of fearlessness that women have trained themselves in wisdom.
+This is the wisdom which moves them to secret laughter when they find
+their brothers in the throes of Volstead and Krafts. And it is from
+this wisdom that they will teach them all to be happy, though
+prohibited.
+
+It is an unfortunate fact that humanity will not behave itself. It
+does not really warm to any of the current virtues. When the
+Eighteenth Amendment says it must not drink hard liquors, its inner
+heart's desire is to drink them, even beyond its normal, and usual
+capacity. Prohibition is, it is true, one of the strikingly
+superimposed virtues. It has nothing whatever to recommend it in man's
+true feelings, and this is not true of many of the civilized traits,
+though probably not any of them meets with entire approval. We do
+think that before anything approaching a real art of living is
+perfected among us, the present ethical system will be wholly
+outmoded. Meanwhile, pressure brought to bear on the least welcome of
+all virtues is merely going to make bad behavior worse. But that is
+Volstead's business, not ours. Let him do battle with that octopus,
+while we bring up reinforcements to his enemies. Women know all about
+how to be bad and comfortable while the law goes on trying to make
+them good and otherwise. Just look at a few of the things on which
+they have cut their teeth.
+
+We do not know, unfortunately, just at what point in her history woman
+went under the long siege of her taboos. Whether the system of keeping
+her publicly helpless and interdicted goes before church and state, or
+was the result of them, there is now no history to tell us. But
+certainly she always had one supreme power and one supreme weakness,
+and somewhere in time, her more neutrally equipped male companion
+played the one against her, to save his own skin from being stripped
+by the other.
+
+But if the past is foggy, the present is not. We do know what is now,
+and has for a long time been, a shocking list of what she must not be
+allowed to do.
+
+She cannot own and control her own property, for instance, except here
+and there in the world. Perhaps the theory was that she could not
+create property. But one would have said that such of it as she
+inherited she had as sound a right to as that that her brother
+inherited. But no such common sense notion prevailed. No matter how
+she came by it, it became her husband's as soon as she married. The
+law has always behaved as if a woman became a half-wit the moment she
+married. Seeing what she deliberately lost by it, perhaps the law is
+right. She lost control of her possessions, including herself. She
+lost her citizenship, and she lost her name, though this by custom and
+not by law. And finally, she never could acquire control even over her
+own children, which certainly she did create. We do not know how many
+of these disabilities would have been excused on the ground that they
+were for her own good. It seems likelier that they came under the head
+of that fine old abstraction, the general good. No longer back than
+1914, H. G. Wells, in "Social Forces in England and America" observed
+that they would probably never be able to give women any real freedom
+because there were the children to consider. Mr. Wells did not appear
+to know that he was bridging a horrible conflict in terms with a
+pretty fatuity. Nor did he later give himself pause when, towards the
+end of the book, he complained that all the babies were being had by
+the low grade women, while the high grade ones were quite insensible
+to their duties.
+
+It was possibly with an unruliness of this kind in contemplation that
+the law decided that women should know nothing of birth control. Now
+there's a taboo for you. Many of our very best people--the moral
+element, so called--will not even speak the words. But that
+prohibition, like all the others, has its side door--may one say its
+small-family entrance? The women who do not know all there is to know
+about it are just those poor, isolated, and ignorant women
+economically starved who should be the first to be told.
+
+Consider the quaintest, we think, of all the proscriptions against
+women--that they cannot have citizenship in their own right. What is
+citizenship if it is not the assumption, made by the State, that
+because you were born within it, and had grown used to it and fond of
+it, and were attached to it by all the associations of blood ties,
+friendships, and what not, you were therefore entitled to take part in
+it, and could be called on to give it service? If citizenship is a
+mere legal figment, by what right do States send their citizens to
+war? Yet women are theoretically transferred, body and bone, heart,
+memory, and soul, to whatever country or nation their husbands happen
+to give allegiance to. Isadora Duncan, born in California, of
+generations of Californians, and American all her life, has lately
+married a young Russian poet. Hereafter she must enter her country as
+an alien immigrant--if it so happens that the quota is not closed.
+Does anybody in his senses imagine that Isadora Duncan has been
+changed, or could be changed, for better or worse? An opera singer who
+was in danger during the war of losing her position at the
+Metropolitan Opera House because she was an enemy alien, went forth
+and married an American. By that means she was actually supposed to
+have been made over into an American. Can naïveté go further?
+
+For our present purposes we merely want to point out that what is done
+to one woman in the name of the public good is craftily used by the
+next one to serve her own ends. There is a terrifying proportion of
+women in America today who can vote, without knowing a word of our
+language, without participating in one particle of our common life,
+because their husbands have taken on American citizenship. They
+wouldn't be allowed to become American citizens if they wanted to, by
+any other means.
+
+There are scores and scores of these legal absurdities conscripting
+the activities of women. Twenty books could be written about them, and
+probably will be. But we must leave them, with such representation as
+these few instances afford, and go from, the body of taboos that are
+done in the name of the good of the State, to that collection done for
+Woman's own personal good.
+
+Some of these are legal and some are not, but they are all operative.
+They are all things she has to go around, or under. She cannot serve
+on juries. She is always righteously barred from courtrooms when there
+is to be testimony concerning sex. Woman, the mother of children, the
+realist of sex compared to whom the most sympathetic of males is at
+best an outsider, is to be "protected" from a few scandalous
+narratives. Of course all women know that they are barred from juries
+not because the happenings in court would shock or even surprise them,
+but because they would embarrass their far more sensitive and finicky
+men. So what they wish to know of court proceedings, they learn from
+their good men, in the pleasant privacy of their homes. If the juries
+are so much the worse for this sort of thing, and they are, the matter
+cannot be helped by the ladies, dear knows, and the men would die
+almost any death liefer than that of ravaged modesty.
+
+Probably the most ungrateful of the restrictions on females is that
+forbidding them to hold office in churches. This has been put on all
+sorts of high grounds, chief among them being that women could do so
+much abler work in little auxiliaries of their own. This contention
+was challenged about two years ago in the House of Commons, by Maud
+Royden, the English Lay Evangelist to whom the pulpits of London are
+forbidden, with one or two exceptions. Miss Royden, whose preaching
+was being bitterly opposed by several members of the House, annoyed
+them all considerably by saying that the Church of England had already
+had two women as its absolute head. This was denied in a great
+sputter, to which Miss Royden replied, "How about Queen Elizabeth and
+Queen Victoria?" Well, this happened to be something that nobody could
+gainsay, but into the wrathy silence which followed, one member of the
+House rose to his feet and let the cat right out of the bag. If women
+were given church authority, he said, they would refuse to accept
+their husbands' authority in their homes, and England would go to rack
+and ruin. This is one of the few recorded occasions when a taboo-er so
+far forgot himself, and American church potentates do not like to be
+reminded of it. Within a month, one of the Protestant sects in this
+country has given women the right to hold minor offices, but three
+others, in general convention, refused even to consider it.
+
+Again we are going to rest our case on selected instances, and return
+to a consideration of how these walled-in women have learned to live
+comfortably and with some self-respect behind the garrison wall. It is
+this, after all, which they must now teach their men.
+
+The first thing that happened to the woman who married was that she
+became legally non-existent. But though she was scratched off the
+public books, she couldn't exactly be scratched out of her husband's
+scheme of general well-being. Neither could the race make great
+strides without her. After everything in the world had been done to
+make her as harmless as possible, she still remained non-ignorable.
+Two courses were open to her; and she has always used whichever of the
+two was necessary at the time. She could be so sweet and beguiling, so
+full of blandishments, that man rushed out to bring her all and more
+than she had been prohibited from having. Or she could terrify him,
+both by her temper and her biological superiority, into stopping his
+entire precious machinery against her, and thanking his stars that he
+could get off with a whole skin.
+
+Of course these things have not always worked out just so. There have
+been the tragic mischances. But in the main, an oppressed people learn
+how to outsmile or outsnarl the oppressor. The Eighteenth Amendment
+may yet live to wish it was dead. Mr. Volstead seems to have believed
+that the nonsenseorship game was new and exciting, and could be
+trusted to carry itself by storm. Not while the ancient wisdom of
+long-borne bans and communicadoes looked out of the female eye. There
+was a body of experts in existence of whom, apparently, he had never
+even heard.
+
+He never once thought how the twentieth century was to become known as
+the Century of The Home, with the home brew, and the subscription
+editions, and the sagacities of women. If he should complain that
+there is no honor and fine living in all of this, we shall have to
+agree with him. But we can answer that by guile we have preserved our
+joys, and cleared our way out from the shadows of his big totem pole.
+If we have but little magnificence, we have as much as anybody can
+ever have who is hounded by the legal virtues. And if we may keep a
+little gaiety for life, by that much do we make him bite the dust. It
+isn't pretty, but it's art.
+
+
+
+
+OWED TO VOLSTEAD
+
+
+[Illustration: Wallace Irwin composing under the influence of synthetic
+gin and Andrew Volstead.]
+
+WALLACE IRWIN
+
+I--_First Round_
+
+   Prune extract and bright alcohol, so wooden
+     One kills its flavor in rank fusel oil!
+   C2-H3-HO--a rather good 'un
+     To mix with fruity syrups in our toil
+   To give our social meetings after dark
+   Their necessary spark!
+   And you, most heavenly twins,
+     Born of one mother--
+   Although our woe begins
+   When, through our mortal sins,
+     We can't tell which from 'tother--
+   Ethyl
+   And Methyl!
+   Like Ike
+   And Mike
+   Strangely you look alike.
+   Like sisters I have met
+   You're very hard to tell apart--and yet
+   The one consoles more gently than a wife;
+   The other turns and cripples you for life.
+
+   Such spirits as these, and many more I summon
+   From many a poisoned tin,
+   Or many a bottle falsely labelled "Gin."
+   Or many a vial pathetic,
+   Yclept "Synthetic."
+   Like Dante on his joy-ride Seeing Hell,
+   Fain would I take you down
+   Through sulphurous fires and caverns bilious brown
+   Into the Land of Mystery and Smell
+   Where Satan steweth
+   And home-breweth
+   While thirsty hooch-hounds yell
+   Their blackest curse,
+   Or worse:
+   "Vol-darn our souls with each Vol-blasted dram
+   That burns our throats and isn't worth a dam!
+   We drink, yet how we dread it--
+   Vol-stead it!"
+     They've said it.
+
+II--_Short Intermission to Change Meter_
+
+   In Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three
+   A. Lincoln set the darkies free;
+   In Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
+   A. Volstead muzzled the canteen
+   And freed the millions, great and small,
+   From bondage to King Alcohol.
+
+
+   Was it not thoughtful, good and kind
+   For such a man of such a mind
+   To show an interest so grand
+   In his misguided native land?
+   And don't these statements illustrate
+   Our Nation's progress up to date?
+   We're freedom-loving and we're brave
+   And simply cannot stand a slave.
+   And when a crisis needs a man
+   From Mass, or Tex. or Conn, or Kan.
+   That man steps forward, firm of chin--
+   So Andrew Volstead came from Minn.
+
+   He came from Minn, to show the world
+   That gin is wrong
+   And rye is strong
+   And Scotch to limbo should be hurled.
+   Thus with his spotless flag unfurled
+   He went against the Demon Rum
+   Who snarled, "I vum!"
+   Got sort of numb,
+   Rolled up his eyes, lay down and curled
+   While all the saints of heaven above
+   (Including Mr. Bryan's Dove)
+   Cried "Rah-rah-rah!
+   And siss-boom-ah!
+   Three cheers for Health and Christian Love!
+   But, Andrew dear--
+   Say, now, look here!
+   You're not including wine and beer!"
+
+   Then Andrew Volstead squared his chin
+   And answered briefly, "Sin is sin."
+   No compromise
+   With the King of Lies!
+   Both liquor thick and liquor thin
+   We'll cease to tax
+   And use the axe
+   Invented by the Man from Minn.
+   For right is right and wrong is wrong--
+   A spell has cursed the world too long.
+
+   The curse of drink--
+   Stop, friends, and think
+   How, reft of spirits weak or strong,
+   My Nation will be purified
+     Of all corruptions vile.
+   The lamb and lion, side by side,
+     Will smile and smile and smile.
+   The workman when his day is o'er
+   Will hurry to his cottage door
+     To kiss his loving wife;
+   He'll lay his wages in her hand
+   And peace will settle on the land
+     Without a trace of strife.
+   The criminals will cease to swarm,
+   Forgers and burglars will reform
+   And minor crimes will so abate
+   That lower courts--now open late--
+   Will close and let the magistrate
+     Go to the zoo
+     Or read _Who's Who_.
+   In short I do anticipate
+   A thinner, cooler human race,
+   Its system cleansed of every trace
+     Of inner fire
+     And hot desire
+   And passions spurring to disgrace.
+   "'Tis simple," said the Man from Minn.,
+   "To cure the world of mortal sin--
+     Just legislate against it."
+   Then up spake Congress with a roar,
+   "We never thought of that before.
+     Let's go!"
+           And they commenced it.
+
+
+III--_Tone Picture's Suggesting Conditions in U. S. A. Some Two
+Years After Alcoholic Stimulants Had Been Legislated out of
+Business_
+
+1
+
+   Grandma's sitting in her attic,
+   Oiling up her automatic.
+   Mid-Victorian is her style,
+   Prim yet gentle is her smile
+   As she fits the cartridges
+   One by one, and softly says:
+
+   "Grandson is a Dry Enforcer.
+     Grandpa is a Legger--
+   All for one and one for all--
+     I'll never die a beggar.
+   Bill brings booze from Montreal,
+     Grandpa lets him through--
+   Oh, life's been rosy for us folks
+     Since the red-light laws went blue."
+
+2
+
+  Pretty Sadie, aged fourteen,
+   To a lamp-post clings serene.
+   "What's the matter?" some may ask.
+   On her hip she wears a flask
+   Labelled "Tonic for the Hair"--
+   "Hic," says Sadie, "we should care!"
+
+  "Father is a corner druggist--
+     Why should I abstain?
+   Brother is a counterfeiter,
+     Printing labels plain.
+   I can buy grain alcohol
+     As all the neighbors do;
+   And if you treat me right I'll lend
+     My formula to you."
+
+3
+
+   Sits the plumber, man of metal.
+   Joining gas-pipes to a kettle.
+   'Neath the bed his wife is lying
+   Rather silent--she is dying
+   From some gin her husband gave her.
+   He's too busy now to save her.
+
+   "Things," he sings, "are looking upward;
+     I am making stills.
+   Soon we'll cook the stuff by wholesale,
+     Running twenty 'mills.'
+   What we make and how we make it
+     Doesn't cut no ice.
+   Anything you sell in bottles
+     Brings the standard price."
+
+4
+
+   In the gutter, quite besotted,
+   Lies the drunkard, sadly spotted.
+   People pass with unmoved faces--
+   Why remark such commonplaces?
+   Just another Volstead duckling,
+   Rolling in the gutter chuckling:
+
+   "Over seas of milk and water,
+     Angels' wings a-flappin',
+   Now we're purified and holy,
+     Things like me can't happen.
+   Liquor's gone and gone forever--
+     Even the word is lewd:
+   Otherwise there's somethin' makes me
+     Feel like I was stewed."
+
+IV--_Finale--A Short Interview with the Human Stomach_
+
+   Last night as I lay on my pillow,
+     Last night when they'd put me to bed
+   I spoke to my dear little tummy
+     And wept at the words that I said:
+
+   "My sensitive, beautiful tummy
+     That once was so rosy and pure!
+   My dainty, fastidious tummy--
+     O what have you had to endure?
+
+   "You once were inclined to be fussy;
+     You turned at inferior rye;
+   You moped at a dubious vintage
+     And shrieked if the gin wasn't dry.
+
+   "But now you are covered with bunions
+     And spongy and morbid and blue;
+   You bite in the night like an adder--
+     O say, what has happened to you?"
+
+   Then my sullen and sinister tummy
+     Rose slowly and spoke to my brain;
+   "Say, boss, what's the stuff you've been drinking
+     That fills me with nothing but pain?
+
+   "Today you had 'cocktails' for luncheon--
+     They tasted like sulphured cologne.
+   They--were followed by poisonous highballs
+     That fell in my depths like a stone.
+
+   "I am dripping with bootlegger brandy,
+     I ooze with synthetical gin;
+   And the beer that you make in the kitchen--
+     Ah, dire are the wages of sin!
+
+   "The cursed saloon has departed,
+     And well we are rid of the plague;
+   But I'm weary of furniture polish
+     With the counterfeit label of Haig.
+
+   "Yea, gone is the old-fashioned brewery
+     And the gilded cafe is no more...."
+   Here my tummy jumped over the pillow
+     And fell in a fit on the floor,
+
+
+
+
+THE CENSORSHIP OF THOUGHT
+
+
+[Illustration: Robert Keable urging the Automaton called Citizen to turn
+on his oppressor.]
+
+ROBERT KEABLE
+
+I knew a man, about a year ago, who published a novel upon which the
+critics fell with such fury this side the water at least, that whether
+in the body or out of the body, such was ultimately his state of
+bewilderment, he could not tell, and if I am asked to discuss
+"Prohibitions, Inhibitions and Illegalities" it is natural that the
+incident should be foremost in my mind. True, it is becoming
+increasingly the fashion for a parson to preach a sermon without
+announcing text, but modern preaching, like brief bright brotherly
+breezy modern services, does not seem to cut much ice. Therefore we
+will hark back to the manner of our forefathers and take the incident
+for a text. It affords an admirable example of nonsenseorship.
+
+As is always done in approved sermons (but humbly entreating your
+forbearance, which is less common) let us consider the context, let us
+review the circumstances of the case in point. Our author left the
+lonely heart of Africa for the theatre of war in France. He left a
+solitude, a freedom, a beauty, of which he had become enamoured, for
+that assemblage of all sorts of all nations, in a cockpit of din and
+fury, known as the Western Front. He expected this, that, and the
+other; mainly he found the other, that, and this. Being desirous of
+serving the God of things as they are, he pondered, he observed, and,
+his heart burning within him, he wrote. He had no opportunity of
+writing in France, so he wrote on his return, away up in the
+Drakensberg mountains, alone, with the clean veld wind blowing about
+him and the nearest town an hour's ride away, and that but three
+houses when he reached it. He had seen vivid things and it chanced he
+was able to write vividly. There were twenty chapters in his novel and
+he wrote them in twenty days.
+
+The novel finished, the MS. of it was despatched to nine publishing
+firms in succession, who silently but swiftly refused it. It only went
+to the tenth at all because there is luck in a round number, and it
+found a home because it found a free man. On the eve of its
+appearance, it was hung up for a month because it was felt that
+whereas the booksellers might display a book containing a certain
+passage which referred to a woman's bosom, they would not do so if it
+contained a plural synonym. (I offer abject apologies for these
+dreadful details.) And when it finally appeared, the main portion of
+the English Press cried to heaven against it, and a smaller section
+clamoured for disciplinary action. For a hectic month the author, who
+had simply and plainly written of things as they were, honestly
+without conception that anyone existed who would doubt their truth or
+the obvious necessity for saying them, sat amazed before the storm.
+
+Now that incident, unimportant to the world at large as it is, does
+afford an admirable example of that censorship which is about us at
+every turn. True, in this case, the official censor remained silent.
+Although prepared to read passages from Holy Scripture in the
+witness-box, and challenge a denial of the facts, the author was not
+called upon to do so. He had previously given slight hints of the
+truth about the racial situation in South Africa in another book and
+had had that volume censored out of existence, but perhaps because
+this present work merely touched on morals the official censor decided
+to give him rope with which to hang himself.
+
+He was hung, of course, rightly and convincingly, hung by the neck
+till he was dead. Thus a clergyman who took the book from a
+circulating library because of its Scriptural title, and whose
+daughters wrapped it in _The Church Times_ and read it over the
+week-end, declined to meet him at dinner. A bishop cut him in the
+street. Very rightly and properly too. The book honestly, simply,
+undisguisedly, told the truth. Since then America has been good enough
+to recognise it.
+
+But this is at least the first consideration of British censorship
+today: it must suppress the truth about most of the important things
+in life. Take the allied case of the Unknown Warrior. We are told that
+he was a crusader, that he was glad to die in a noble cause, that his
+valour deserved the Victoria Cross and his religion Westminster Abbey.
+In short he was a saint. But, one protests (a bit bewildered because
+it sounds so good) that was not the man I knew. The man I knew lived
+next door and was a damned good chap. The man I knew chucked up his
+business and left his home and risked his life because everybody was
+doing it, because it seemed there was a real mess-up, because one had
+to.
+
+Also, it was a change. Oddly enough, Adam goes out from a modern
+office or a modern factory in order to hoe up weeds in the sweat of
+his brow and in danger of his life with barely a regret for the
+Paradise he has to leave. Besides Eve went with him. God, there were
+Eves in France! Women who knew how to make a man forget, women who
+didn't count the cost, women who loved for love's sake. And for this
+and other causes, the Unknown Warrior was extraordinarily bored at
+having to die, except that he came not to care so much so long as he
+was sure he was only to be asked to die. As for his valour--Well, said
+he, it's no use grousing, and if it's a question of bayonets, it had better
+be mine in the other chap's stomach. Besides we English-speaking
+peoples don't shout about our valour. And as for religion--Well,
+if there's a God why doesn't He stop this bloody war, or, anyway,
+where the blazes is He?
+
+There you are. It's abominable to write like that. Here it is in
+print; isn't it disgraceful? You see, it happens to be true. But if
+men said that, loud enough and enough of them, there would be no more
+wars. No more wars? There would be no more Downing Street either, and
+an American army would march, as like as not, on Washington.
+Disgraceful! It's so disgraceful that I am not sure, as I write, that
+this article will ever be printed.
+
+Now since the War it is noticeable that the spirit of censorship has
+very visibly increased its activities among us. There is little doubt
+of that and there is little doubt of the reason for it. The War, by
+tearing down shams and by stripping men and women to the essentials,
+forced many to see things as they are. The old lies were no use in
+that hour, nor the old conventions and beliefs. Men learned to look
+beyond them, and they learned not to be afraid to look. Partly it was
+no use being afraid in the War and men got out of the habit, and
+partly, having looked, they saw something so much better ahead. Or
+again the trend of modern civilisation was so unarguably revealed in
+all the stark horror of its inhumanity that men saw suddenly that it
+was better to be brave and revolt and be killed than be cowardly and
+submit and live.
+
+A great many of those who saw did not survive to tell the tale, but
+some did. There are more men and women about today who are not to be
+put off with humbugs than ever there were before. Such folk make up an
+element in Society which the censors know to be something more than
+dangerous. They are men who cannot easily be bribed for they have seen
+through the worth of the bribe, who cannot be intimidated because they
+no longer fear, and who cannot be cheated because they have seen true
+values. Hence your new censorship and its methods. Rebels must be
+drowned in a babble of words. They must be suppressed by the action of
+the unthinking masses rolled up upon them. They must be ground to
+powder lest they should turn the world upside down.
+
+That, then, is the basis of censorship. Fear. You can do most things
+in England today except tell the truth, or, at any rate, except tell
+the truth in such a way that people will believe you. At the time of
+the French Revolution there was a broadsheet in circulation which
+showed on one side Louis XVI in his coronation robes. He was a fine
+figure of a man. His flowing wig descended majestically to his broad
+shoulders and his shapely leg, thrust forth, dominated a world. But on
+the reverse, a pimply shrunken figure emerged from the bath. Shortly
+after publication they had a revolution in France.
+
+Now the War circulated such another broadsheet in the world. Here is
+the official side of it. Marriage is made in heaven. Politicians are
+earnest, devoted men. One's own country always fights for Right
+without Fear and without Reproach. Millionaires are nearly always
+philanthropists. Capitalism is a just, kindly, and reasonable basis
+for Society. The General Confession has become the national prayer of
+Englishmen. Modern Civilisation is thoroughly healthy and every day it
+gets better and better. It is so. It must be so. _What's that?_
+You have known a politician. . . . Your friend is married and. . . .
+Brother, it is impossible. You must not say so anyway: the whole
+fabric of Society will be shaken. You must not think so for a moment.
+
+_You must not think so_. That is the creed of the new censorship.
+And very sensible, too. It is an odd thing that the Middle Ages of the
+Inquisition were so nonsensical, judged by our standards. Grand
+inquisitors cared remarkably little how a man thought provided he did
+not say what he thought too publicly. If he went to church once a year
+he might be a Jew for all their interference. If he signed the
+Thirty-nine Articles he might use a rosary in his own home. If
+Columbus thought the world was round, he was welcome to go and see,
+but if Galileo said that the Church was wrong for saying the world was
+flat, there was nothing for it but to shut him up in prison. It was
+all rather stupid, but it was interesting.
+
+For above all things, the limits of censorship were well defined.
+Censorship was based on hypotheses. It was conceived that Almighty God
+had established St. Peter as a censor of public faith and morals, but
+it was not maintained that he was established as the censor of art and
+literature and life. There was thus originality in all these affairs.
+In a mediaeval town every house was different, in a mediaeval
+cathedral no two pillars were alike, and in the dress of a mediaeval
+crowd was captured the colours of the rainbow. With an odd result. Men
+laughed at the devil in the freedom of their souls. They tweaked his
+tail on carven misericords, and in the mystery play he was invariably
+cast for the clown.
+
+Further, and in close accord with this, a pleasant feature of the old
+Inquisition was that it tried and burnt you for the good of your own
+soul, and despite all calumnies and mis-representations on the part of
+later writers, that remained to the end the main motive of the rack
+and of the stake. Personally I find it hard to suppose that some such
+consideration in any way lightened the last hours of the victim, but
+at least it enlightens our judgment of the inquisitor. Heresy was to
+him, quite honestly, a form of lunacy. Public opinion agreed with him.
+It was a species of moral and mental hydrophobia, and the mass of men
+no more desired to be converted to heresy than we desire to be bitten
+by mad dogs. In their simple souls they abhorred and feared the thing.
+They attended an auto-da-fé as an act of faith, piety, and rejoicing.
+They might have been a Paris crowd watching the last hours of such a
+social pest and terror as Landru, except that it probably occurred to
+few of the Parisian sightseers to pray for that murderer's soul.
+
+But the modern Inquisition, the neo-censorship, is out, not to save my
+soul, but the souls of my contemporaries. It does not imagine that I
+am preaching a hideous thing from which all men will revolt; it
+imagines that I am offering them something which they will gladly and
+readily accept. It does not judge me and my sayings and doings from
+the standpoint of an accredited representative of society, but from
+the standpoint of a non-accredited governor of society. It silences me
+for fear that I may be followed, not lest I should be damned. It does
+not censor me for speaking or acting against an established order in
+which everyone believes, but for speaking or acting against an order
+in which practically everyone has ceased to believe. "Burn him," cried
+Torquemada; "he has spoken what no one thinks." "Bury him," cries your
+modern censor; "he has thought what no one speaks."
+
+Thus, today, the point is that you may not think. All the energies of
+the censorship are bent towards the prohibition of thought. For one
+penny, every morning, even if you are an Englishman in Paris, a daily
+newspaper will tell you what to think and castigate you if you think
+otherwise. No, it is three halfpence in Paris. But that is the idea.
+That is the great conspiracy. Certain news-items are regaled to me,
+certain news-items are suppressed, in order that I may not think
+amiss. Certain books are refused me, certain plays must not be
+produced, certain fashions are taboo, certain things may not be done,
+lest, by any chance, I should form the habit of thinking, lest I
+should step out of the throng and be myself. Lest I should make a
+venture of personal opinion, and be right.
+
+The odd thing is that the average man lends himself to the deception
+and even plays his part in the great game. Of course he is not
+altogether to blame. The psychology of the method is so truly
+conceived. It is dinned into him so repeatedly that things are so,
+that black is white and white is black, that if you see it in
+Bottomley's _John Bull_ it is so, that he honestly comes to
+believe the bunkum. For he, too, fears at his heart. He is a
+conservative animal. Men used to burn a heretic because they believed
+in God; now they censor him out of existence because if they did not
+believe in the Northcliffe press they would have nothing whatever in
+which to believe. Men used to believe in the Ten Commandments; now
+they accept Prohibition because if they did not accept some authority
+they would have to govern themselves. Men used to believe the Bible;
+now they believe the daily papers because if they did not they would
+be compelled to lift up their eyes and look on life.
+
+But Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the whole truth and nothing but the
+truth a while ago. "If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what
+others think of him, unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the
+principles of the majority of his contemporaries you must discredit in
+his eyes the authoritative voice of his own soul. He may be a docile
+citizen; he will never be a man." And Bernard Shaw was not far out
+when, in the Introduction to _Man and Super-Man_, he pointed out
+what amiable honest gentlemen the free-booters who built the Rhine
+castles were compared with your modern millionaires, newspaper-owners,
+and political bosses. The robber-baron risked his neck. The
+robber-baron played a game. The robber-baron mostly warred on his own
+mates who were also playing the game. But the robber-baron of today
+would enslave the souls of men because he has forgotten how else to
+enjoy himself.
+
+The net result then is that we are fast abandoning any attempt to
+think for ourselves. Not merely is any attempt at original thought or
+action cleverly stifled with pillows much as the princes were
+smothered in the Tower, but the censors of our freedom shout so loudly
+and supply us with mental goods so cheaply that in the end we have no
+real mental power of choice left. A million advertisements tell me
+that all decent people shave with Apple-Blossom soap, and with
+Apple-Blossom soap I shave. A score of papers tell me Germany is
+undertaxed and can pay Reparations, and I sit quiet while France
+occupies the Ruhr. Or vice-versa, as the case or another may be. Every
+child goes to school and every school is under Government control and
+every Government teaches that it is good for you to be governed and
+for the world that it should govern. A few years ago we were told that
+we had to be organised and schooled and managed because the nation was
+at war, but the thing is fast becoming a habit, and we have now to be
+managed and schooled and organised because the nation is at peace.
+
+It is indeed just here that censorship has gone mad. It must have been
+horribly unpleasant to burn at the stake, but at least you had the
+satisfaction of knowing that the man who lit the faggots had some
+shadow of reason behind him. He had at least an hypothesis. He acted
+reasonably in its application. He believed something; he believed it
+with some horse-sense; and he acted as the saviour of Society. But
+today our censors have nothing behind them. No one supposes them to be
+more moral, more charitable, more instructed than other men; still
+less does anyone suppose them to be more inspired or dowered with
+divine right. They do not defend a faith for which they, too, would
+die; they merely bolster up a position because in so doing they find
+bread and butter. They do not object to innovators because what they
+innovate is bad; they object to innovators because they innovate. They
+do not object to us because they believe that we tell lies; they
+object because they know that we tell the truth.
+
+This, then, is all very well, but what is the end to be? The
+theologians have always said that Almighty God left man free to sin
+because He did not want automatons. It is exactly here, however, that
+your modern censors improve on the Deity. They do want automatons.
+Only automatons will face liquid fire and poison gas. Only automatons
+will live in a jerry-built cottage in a modern town and pay heavily
+for the privilege. Only automatons will vote correctly at elections
+and keep the political business going and allow everything to run on
+smoothly for the next war. Only automatons will agree to the
+lengthening of skirts from the knee to the ankle. And only automatons
+will acquiesce in a system of morality which is not built on divine
+revelation or even on social necessity, but on exploded superstitions
+and sex domination and the conventions of the propertied classes.
+
+Thus the devil is coming surely hut steadily into his own. We have
+already half-accepted an inverted order, allowing that all the good
+tunes are his and attributing to him things which he knows well enough
+he has no right to call his own. In a few years we shall neither use
+tobacco nor the grape, gifts of the good God, nor dance nor choose our
+own clothes nor laugh nor think. We shall scurry hither and thither
+before the flick of the devil's tail and be ready for the burning. We
+shall have sold our birthright of daring for an insipid mess of
+pottage: sold our right to choose and to spare, to slay and to leave
+alive, to be glad and to be sorry, to be martyrs if we would be, to
+explore, to risk, to win. We shall be docile and respectable, and the
+standard of our docility and respectability will have been set by men
+no better and no worse than we are. We shall be sober by act of
+Parliament, and moral--if it be morality--because we have lost the
+notion of being anything else. We shall be of no use whatever to God,
+and precious small beer for the devil.
+
+And is there no way of escape? There truly is, Let any man ask the
+first censor that he sees by what authority he is censoring and who
+gave him that authority. Let him ask by what standards he is judging
+and in whose interests, and let him tell him what he thinks of his
+standards and interests. Let him say BOO and see how foolish the goose
+can look. Laugh, for Neo-Puritanism cannot stand laughter. Much else
+it can stand, but not that. Don't argue; the old enemy is mighty good
+at words. Don't hit; there are few of you strong enough. But laugh,
+laugh honestly, and go on laughing, for it is the only invincible
+weapon in the world. There is no more merry music either, and it is
+the melody for--Men.
+
+
+
+
+THE UNINHIBITED FLAPPER
+
+
+[Illustration: Helen Bullitt Lowry watching Puritanism set the
+Flapper free.]
+
+HELEN BULLITT LOWRY
+
+Two generations ago the girl was "damned." One generation ago she was
+"ruined." Now, according to the best authorities and her own
+valuation, she has just played out of luck.
+
+So that for the reformers and prohibitionists, the censors and the
+woman's club resolutionists! Their bi-product is Miss Twentieth
+Century Unlimited, the one uninhibited creature in a Volsteaded
+civilisation. Controls--of liquor and of birth--have given us The
+Flapper. The official reformers, reinforcing the sagging inhibitions
+and corsets of the nineteenth century, were just the final impetus
+needed to drive her out into the open.
+
+The flapper is released from the strangle hold that is throttling the
+rest of us. If somebody makes a law for her, she promptly and blithely
+breaks it, the pocket flask for the moment being the outward and
+visible sign of the spirit--and spirits--of her wide-flung rebellion.
+It is the milepost between the time that was and the time that is,
+that flask, and to it we owe the single standard of drinking.
+
+A half generation ago the sub-debs did not indulge in anything more
+relaxing than coca cola. And even first and second year debbies did
+their drinking from glasses issued by the hostess, not in triplicate.
+If a young man of the period imported a flask from the outside, that
+young man was promptly dropped from polite society, no matter how
+stringent was the shortage of dancing beaux. They called a flask a
+"bottle of whiskey" in those days.
+
+Wild oats were reserved for the boys at college. If you were of Eve's
+sheltered sex, you really had to become a member of the Fast Young
+Married Crowd before you could get a look in. That Fast Young Married
+Crowd was the first to come out of the biological fastnesses of the
+Mid-Victorian era into the cocktails and jazz of our Mid-Victrolian
+period.
+
+Moral: You had to keep yourself the kind of a girl you'd been told a
+man wanted to marry, if you ever wanted to join in a cocktail party
+and slide down the banisters uninhibited--as rumor had it the Fast
+Young Married Crowd was doing on its orgies. Over the border of
+matrimony lay the mysteries of the gay wild life.
+
+In that era before our morals were legislated, being "that kind of a
+girl" was a trying responsibility. There was an approved technique
+that every wise virgin had to master. It consisted of letting each
+man, on whom she conferred her favors, think that she really was in
+love with him. She called it "being engaged." And,--if perchance she
+came to possess a harem of fiancés,--remember that the young things of
+the period were not so well able to conduct their own courtings as our
+present-day emancipated flappers. They still had to depend on what the
+tide washed in. They still did their picking from those that picked
+them--and sorted 'em over at their leisure.
+
+Then, too, a half generation ago, we had not read our Freud. We did
+not know the jargon of sex. Both man and girl were apt to call "in
+love" the emotion which our present-day young things frankly call
+something else. Thus came it that the petting parties of the period
+operated under the left wing of a near-engagement.
+
+Yet there was a weakness to the system. Each fiance had the lordly
+impression that he "possessed" the lady of his choice. And the minute
+the male feels that he possesses a woman, he can get all the
+psychology of "riding away" and leaving her. Our Freudian flappers are
+better strategians. Man simply can't labor under the impression that
+he possesses a young person, if her lingo is calling the once sacred
+kiss just a "flash of pash." Applied slang is a great leveller of
+romance.
+
+For times have changed since it was good form for a maid to avoid the
+crass mention of sex. With prohibition has come such an outburst of
+Get Moral Quick legislation that the reaction is now being felt
+throughout the length and breadth of the flapper. The legislators
+would lengthen the skirts to protect the defenceless male from a
+chance thought of legs and the like. Whereat the flapper retaliates by
+conversing pretty ceaselessly about--well, say associated subjects.
+
+Last season the writer, being of the genus Successfully Single, woke
+up with a start to realize that two desirables had toyed with her
+hook--and retreated. One of them had even exited, uttering a fatal
+accusation about a "trammelled soul." Such a warning calls for a
+taking of stock. And this is what I found: Because of the flappers and
+the way they run shop, the whole technique of the man game has
+changed. My method, alas, had become as out of style as a pompadour
+Gibson hat. Where once girls pretended to know less and to have
+experienced less than they actually had, now they pretend to more.
+Therein lie all the law and the social profits. Therefore Rule One of
+these dauntless rebels reads: It is not an insult but a compliment for
+an admirer to explain that his intentions are frankly carnivorous.
+
+To my ten-year-old technique had still been clinging the cobwebs of
+the past, when even Launcelot's intentions were painted as slightly
+honorable. But now--the shades of Alfred Lord Tennyson help us!--it
+has become the smart procedure to take Man's bold bad intentions right
+out into the conversation and pretend to be tempted by them.
+
+The truth of the matter is that those pseudo-engagements of the
+fox-trot decade really were furnishing a charge account psychology.
+Man could close his eyes and whisper, "Some day, my own," and still go
+nicely on a _Ladies' Home Journal_ cover design of "Under the
+Mistletoe." But, when our flapper is not even pretending to him that
+she is going to marry him, and when he is not even pretending to
+himself that he is going to marry her--well, the whole sex game has
+then been put on a frank cash and carry basis.
+
+Mark well, however, these worldly-wise young things of this the third
+year of our Prohibition are not necessarily less virtuous technically
+than their own crinolined grandmothers. Only these days they are not
+bragging about their virtue.
+
+"And have all the men afraid of you, for fear they'll be responsible
+for teaching you something," explains one practical miss. "Men like to
+find you in stock, ready-taught. We know how to take care of
+ourselves--so we let them think what they want." In short, the whole
+new game, as the earnest disciple from the half generation ago learned
+it, is not to reveal the dark secret that you abide by the Ten
+Commandments. Man must not suspect that you are unattainable. He must
+just think that he has not attained you--yet. If you want to compete
+with the flappers, you've got to play by the flapper rules. Check your
+conversational inhibitions!
+
+And if by chance there be any inhibitions left over, Prohibition has
+obligingly introduced new opportunities for privacy, that will help
+you check them too. When a couple strays off now from group formation,
+there's a perfectly good alibi available of finding a sheltered spot
+for a drink. Where once it really wasn't good form to go to a man's
+hotel room, now it is the national custom for the owner of hootch to
+register a casket for his jewel--and then invite the young things in,
+one by one. A flapper these nights can retire to that hotel bedroom
+for an hour in the middle of a dance. The girl is not "talked about,"
+and the place is not "pulled." Even the house detective knows that she
+is innocently drinking a drink.
+
+Thus has this rebel young generation forced out into the open country
+with it all the contented young women in their late twenties and early
+thirties, who may not have been feeling rebellious at all. And the
+wives of forty-five also, to compete all over again for their own
+husbands. For "poaching" on the wifely preserves has become the
+favorite flapper sport!
+
+"Married men," having been forbidden to unmarried young persons for
+three chaste generations, our flappers, bi-product of inhibition, are
+promptly appropriating the husbands. This one item of the flapper raid
+on the married men has done more than the entire twentieth century put
+together to change the smug structure of American society, and bring
+us back to normalcy.
+
+Before 1865 no Southern belle considered herself worth her salt unless
+all the courtly old married men in the country kissed her hand and
+competed with the young blades for her quadrilles. But when black
+persons stopped buttoning up the shoes of the Quality, America entered
+upon her 1870's, her sombre brown stone fronts, and her cloistered
+husbands. The money for doing society had simply passed into the hands
+of the descendants of Miles Standish and Priscilla, who carried their
+consciences into their sober mansions with them. The Age of Innocence
+was upon us, and has clung close ever since.
+
+From that fatal day on to 1917 each oncoming debutante was taught by
+her mother to give unto the genus, married man, her most impersonal
+manner, lest she provoke his "undesirable attentions." If poaching was
+done, it was from behind a tree. Unmarried girls knew that their place
+was not in somebody else's home in those days. The wives could protect
+their preserves by the simple expedient of "talking about" any
+unmarried young female caught on the married reservations.
+
+And so it came to pass that the pick of the men were posted, because,
+as fast as a callow youth gets worth marrying, somebody promptly
+marries him. The Fast Young Married Crowd was a closed corporation and
+played exclusively within itself; the female of the species had to
+compete only with females of equal tonnage. The only sylph-like
+temptation that a husband could encounter was a dissolute person whose
+reputation had already been ruined--and she didn't count, because
+nobody invited her to parties anyway. A wife could get as fat as she
+wanted to in those days.
+
+Even today that same leisurely life might exist for the wives. Even
+today the wives might be resting their feet under the bridge tables,
+secure in the consciousness that no bobbed haired young poacher was
+daring to dance with their husbands, if they had just let prohibitions
+enough alone--if they had only not been swept away by the high sport
+of gossiping about our Wild Young People, which struck the country in
+the summer of 1920. This gossip was an intrinsic phase of the virtue
+wave which always immediately precedes a crime wave.
+
+The wives just at this point, instead of sitting tight, made the
+strategic mistake of turning the full force of the ammunition of
+gossip, which should have been saved for defending husbands from
+poachers, into an offensive attack on the flapper's lip stick, on her
+cigarettes, and on her petting parties. Whenever two or three wives
+were gathered together, their topic was our Wild Young People. That
+summer, too, saw the launching of that now seasoned romance about the
+checking of corsets. The resolutions at clubs were being resolved. The
+preachers were sermonizing. The up-state legislators were drafting
+bills against flappers' smoking cigarettes.
+
+Human nature can be pushed just so far. Instead of reforming, the
+young things apparently decided one might as well lose a reputation
+for stealing a husband as for smoking a cigarette. The whole arsenal
+for combating poachers blew up.
+
+To make matters worse, in the excitement of the virtue wave our Wild
+Young People had been attacked as a group instead of as individuals.
+That was the second mistake. The whole strength of gossip consists in
+selecting one member of the clan for calumny, to stand out disgraced
+and alone among her exemplary sisters. Because the flappers had been
+gossiped about _en masse_, the whole reason for not being
+gossiped about had ceased. The poacher of that half generation ago had
+been the kind of a girl who stalked her game alone.
+
+But, when all the girls in town are seeking to steal your husband,
+what are you going to do about it, if you are a woman of forty-five
+with a heaviness around the hips and a disinclination to learn the
+camel walk? Nor can you get the poachers off the scent by crossing the
+trail with an eligible bachelor. Logically, the young things should
+have enough sense to ignore a preempted husband and attend to the
+serious business of getting themselves husbands. But they haven't.
+They seem to prefer the husbands of the other women. And curiously,
+the more they engage in this exotic sport of poaching, the less keen
+they become about owning a property for somebody else to poach on.
+
+The real interstate joke on Puritanism is that the flapper, who flaps
+because Puritanism has driven her to it, will automatically bring
+about its cure. The whole vitality of Puritanism rests on the
+unswerving principle of letting not thy right hand know what thy left
+hand doeth, if thy left hand is doing something it shouldn't.
+Puritanism could not last out a week-end without the able assistance
+of the standardized double life.
+
+And that is just what the flappers refuse to respect. They are even
+insisting on being taken along on the parties, which, by all the rules
+of Rolf and Comstock should be confined to man's double life. Where
+the chorus lady was once the only brand that had the proper and
+improper equipment to jazz up an evening, now mankind has come to
+prefer the flapper, who drinks as much as the Broadwayite, is just as
+peppy and not quite so gold-diggish.
+
+"It is so simple," smiles Barbara nonchalantly blowing her smoke
+rings. "You old dears set man an impossible standard. As he had always
+to be pretending holy emotions whenever he was around you he just
+naturally had to get away half the time, to rest the muscles of his
+inhibitions. Why, you funny old things actually drove man into his
+double life, just as you made all of his best stories have two
+editions, one for a nice girl and one for--well say one not so nice.
+Our crowd has done more than all of your silly old social hygiene
+commissions to bring nearer the single standard--by going part way to
+meet him."
+
+The preachers are wasting their time when they rail that the flappers
+are painting their faces like "fallen women." Of course they are
+painting them that way--for the very good reason that mankind has
+demonstrated too unmistakably that that kind of woman has "a way with
+her."
+
+Not so long ago cosmetics became a moral issue. The curl rag was the
+only beautifier that somehow never lost its odor of sanctity--and that
+was doubtless because curl rags were a perfectly logical part of the
+long-sleeved Canton flannel nightgown civilization. Curls couldn't be
+so very wrong when they were so frightfully unbecoming in the making.
+And so the "good woman" handed over intact to her weaker sister every
+beautifier that the world had been eight thousand years accumulating.
+
+Slowly, timidly the allurements returned. The talcum powder bought for
+baby surreptitiously reached the nose. When the half generation ago
+was young, we had adopted a certain lip salve, just one shade darker
+than the way lips come, explaining, to save our reputations, that we
+were keeping our lips from chapping. Rouge too had come coyly,
+back--but--and here's the gist of the whole matter--in polite society
+paint was put on to imitate nature.
+
+We were still doing our make-up as man conducted his double life--with
+intent to deceive the general public. We still belonged at heart to
+the Puritan era, in spite of our wicked fox-trot. All may have been
+artificial below the neck, from our Gossard corsets with their phalanx
+of garters on to our hobble skirts. But above the neck, we pretended
+it was natural.
+
+The flapper has changed all that. She has turned the lady up side
+down, as well as the world. For the flapper is _au naturale_
+below the neck. Above the neck she is the most artificially and
+entertainingly painted creature that has graced society since Queen
+Elizabeth. With one bold stroke of a passionately red lip stick, she
+has painted out Elaine the Fair and the later-day noble Christie Girl
+and painted in an exotic young person, meet to compete alike with a
+Ziegfield show girl, with a heaven-born Egyptian princess or even a
+good Queen Bess, who could not move her face after it was dressed up
+for the morning. And Bess was the Virgin Queen. The American-Victorian
+is indeed the only era in history when cosmetics became a moral issue.
+Even in dour Cromwellian England, rouge registered the wrong politics
+but not immorality. We are merely getting back to normalcy in
+cosmetics--back behind the dun wall of the Victorian era.
+
+And it is the flapper who has done it for us. What's more, she has
+done it frankly and purposefully--because the reformer, in his naive
+innocence, has explained to her that what she is doing is wicked and
+will get that kind of "results." Similarly those of 'em who had not
+yet taken off their corsets at dances, promptly did so when shocked
+elders began repeating the corset checking story. Dear heart, the only
+reason that they had not done so before was because the little dears
+hadn't heard that the worst people were using ribs instead of
+whalebone that season.
+
+Vice would die out from disuse, if the reformers did not advertise.
+
+
+
+
+THE WOWZER IN THE SOUTH SEAS
+
+
+[Illustration: Frederick O'Brien finds the South Seas purified and
+beautified by the Missionaries.]
+
+FREDERICK O'BRIEN
+
+All over the South Seas the censor has had his day. From New Guinea to
+Easter Island, he has made his rules and enforced them. Often he wrote
+glowing pages of prose and poetry about his accomplishments, for
+reading in Europe and America. He was usually sincere, and determined.
+He felt that it was up to him to make over the native races to suit
+his own ideas of what pleased God and himself. When he had the lower
+hand, he prayed and strove in agony to change the wicked hearts of his
+flock to Clapham or Andover standards; he suffered the contumelies of
+heathen jibes, and now and again--often enough to make a cartoon
+popular--he was hotpotted or baked on hot stones as a "long pig." When
+he converted the king or chief, and he always directed his sacred
+ammunition at the upper classes, he took advantage of every inch of
+spiritual and governmental club put in his hand, and smote the pagan
+hip and thigh. His sole effort was to make the South Seas safe for
+theocracy, and to _strafe_ Satan.
+
+Of course, he was a missionary. It is doubtful if any other urge than
+a religious one could have infused into those canny migrants of the
+past century the extraordinary zeal that characterized their singular
+labors in the exquisite and benighted isles of the tropics.
+
+To leave the melancholy and futuristic atmosphere of seminaries and
+bethels where the ghosts and penalties of millions of sins cast down
+their hearts, where few baths and drab clothes, dark homes and poor
+food, made all conscious of dwelling in a vale of tears, and after
+half a year or more of hard, ship fare and the rough discipline of a
+tossing windjammer, to find themselves in the most magnificent scenes
+on the globe, and amid the richest bounty, was trial enough of the
+unstable soul of man. That they--most of them--resisted the
+temptations of the tropical demon, that they continued to preach fire
+and brimstone, to remain flocked and shod, pantaletted and stayed, is
+proof enough of their cementation to the rock of ages.
+
+The men were even subjected to direr spells. They were youths, the
+rude boys of farm and hamlet, schooled in simple studies, untried by
+the wiles of siren blandishments. If married, their courtships had
+been without passion, and their wedded years without competition, and
+generally without other incidents than children.
+
+A typical union of this kind I find in an old diary of the wife of one
+of the most famous propagandists of the American God in Polynesia. He
+was of Yale and Andover, and she of Bradford, the daughter of a
+Marlboro deacon. She was twenty-four and he a little older when her
+cousin called upon her at her Marlboro home, to ask if she would
+"become connected with a missionary now an entire stranger, attach
+herself to a little band of pilgrims, and visit the distant land of
+Hawaii."
+
+"What could I say? We thoroughly discussed the subject. Next week is
+the anticipated, dreaded interview of final decision. Last night I
+could neither eat nor close my eyes in sleep."
+
+The suitor came. "The early hours of the evening were devoted to
+refreshments, to free family sociality, to singing, and to evening
+worship. Then one by one the family dispersed, leaving two of similar
+aspirations, introduced as strangers, to separate at midnight as
+interested friends.
+
+"In the forenoon, the sun had risen high in the heavens, when it
+looked down upon two of the children of earth giving themselves wholly
+to their heavenly Father, receiving each other from his hand as his
+good gift, pledging themselves to each other as close companions in
+the race of life, consecrating themselves and their all to a life-work
+among the heathen."
+
+After six months on the wave, she approaches the "land of darkness
+whither I am bound. When I reflect on the degradation and misery of
+the inhabitants, follow them into the eternal world, and forward to
+the great day of retribution, all my petty sufferings dwindle to a
+point."
+
+They anchor, and "soon the islanders of both sexes came paddling out
+in their canoes, with their island fruit. The men wore girdles, and
+the women a slight piece of cloth wrapped around them, from the hips
+downward. To a civilized eye their covering seemed to be revoltingly
+scanty. But we learned that it was a full dress for daily occupation."
+
+The note of nudity this really remarkable woman struck at her first
+sight of the welcoming savages, was the keynote of the new domination
+of the islands from Hawaii to Australia. The censors were convinced
+that it was a state of ungodliness. Their reasoning was based on the
+fig leaf tied about them by the first man and woman when they became
+conscious of sin, and it proceeded to the logical teaching that the
+less of the body exposed the more godly the condition. When they found
+this nakedness associated with a relation of the sexes utterly opposed
+to their own, and when, especially, the first white wives on the South
+Sea beaches, found the joyous, handsome, frolicsome women of the
+islands, making ardent love to their husbands, the innate heinousness
+of bodily bareness became fixed as a guiding star towards bringing the
+infidel to the true worship.
+
+Clothe them and sanctify them, became the motto. From the wondrous
+Marquesas valleys to the American naval station of Samoa, the bonnet,
+the bonnet of a half century ago, is the requirement of decency in the
+coral or bamboo church, as it is in the temples of New York. The
+nightgown or Mother Hubbard of Connecticut became the proper female
+attire for natives in the house of God, and thus, by gradual
+establishment of a fashion, in their straw homes, and everywhere.
+Chiefesses were induced to don calico, and chiefs the woolen or denim
+trousers of refinement. The trader came to sell them, and so business
+followed the Bible. Tattooing, which, with the Polynesians and
+Melenesians, was probably a race memory of clothing in a less tropical
+clime, was condemned bitterly by the white censors as causing nudity.
+A man or woman whose legs and body were covered with marvellous
+arabesques and gaudy pictures of palms and fish was not apt to hide
+them under garments.
+
+And here the censor also had an ally in the trader. The two joined,
+unwittingly, to break down both the old morale of the pagan and the
+new morality of the converts. The censorious cleric said that the Lord
+disliked nakedness, or, at least, that unclothedness was unvirtuous,
+while the seller of calico and alcohol advised the purchase of his
+goods for the sake of style. He ridiculed tattooing and nudity, but he
+also laughed with ribaldry at the religious arguments. The confused
+indigene, driven by admonition and shame put on the hot and griming
+stuffs, and finally, had them kept on him by statute. The censor in
+the South Seas achieved his highest reach of holy effort. He had made
+into law the _mores_ his sect or tribe had coined into morals,
+and was able to punish by civil tribunal the evildoers who refused to
+abide by his conception of the divine wish.
+
+But here, old Mother Nature revolted. All over the world it would
+appear that she is not in touch with the divinity that shapes the ends
+of the censors. The clothing donned by the natives of the South Seas
+killed them. They sweated and remained foul; they swam, and kept on
+their garments; they were rained on, and laid down in calico and wool,
+They abandoned the games and exercises which had made them the finest
+physical race in the world, and took up hymn books and tools. The
+physical plagues of the whites decimated them. They passed away as the
+_tiaré_ Tahiti withers indoors. The censored returned to the rich
+earth which had bred them, and taught them its secrets and demands.
+Only a mournful remnant remains to observe the censorship.
+
+But the curious spirit of inversion which tries to make the assumed
+infinite of a finite nature, which had sacrificed a race to an
+invented god, persists even in the South Seas. One of the most
+distinguished authors, who has chosen that delectable clime for his
+researches was arrested for napping on his own _paepae_ partly
+clothed. The parson informed upon him, and the _gendarme_ fined
+him. In the British South Seas, where I was recently, prohibition had
+cast a blight upon the more poetical whites. I remember one night when
+my vessel was anchored for a few hours in the roadstead of a lonely
+island, a group of civil servants and a minister of the Church of
+England had come aboard to buy what comforts they might from our
+civilized caravan. They sat on deck clinking glasses occasionally,
+talking of cities where a man might be freed from the "continuous
+spying of the uncoo good." That was the phrase they used, being
+English or Scots, and when the word was passed that we up-anchored
+with the turn of the tide at midnight, they sang in a last burst of
+lively furor a song of Dionysian regret. One stanza lingers with me:--
+
+   Whack the cymbal! Bang the drum!
+   Votaries of Bacchus!
+   Let the popping corks resound,
+   Pass the flowing goblet round!
+   May no mournful voice be found,
+   Though wowzers do attack us!
+
+In the darkness I called to them as they went down the gangway into
+their boat, "What is a wowzer?"
+
+"'E's a bloomin' ---- 'oo wants to do unto others wot 'e's bleedin'
+well done to 'imself."
+
+The wowzers are more active in Hawaii, the most temperate portion of
+Polynesia, than in the Maori isles of New Zealand. A law passed at the
+last session of the Hawaiian legislature prohibits "any person over
+fourteen years of age from appearing upon the streets of Honolulu in a
+bathing suit unless covered suitably by an outer garment reaching at
+least to the knees." There is a ferment in Honolulu over the arrest
+and punishment of offenders against this new censorship. It is the
+result of the control by the spiritual, or perhaps, lineal,
+descendants of the first South Sea censors, of the great
+grand-children of those men who wore the girdles of leaves at the
+landing of the Marlboro school teacher a hundred years ago. The
+girdle-wearers are members of the Hawaiian legislature--soon to be
+succeeded by Japanese-native-born--and the censors, likely, are wives
+of financiers and sugar factors. Again the feeble remnant of the
+Hawaiian race voted against the girdle.
+
+A friend of mine, grandson of the estimable missionary and his bride
+of the New England of a century ago, thus comments upon the law in a
+paper sent to me:--
+
+The facts which caused the passage of the law were, that certain
+residents of Waikiki were donning their bathing suits at home, walking
+across and along the public streets to the sea and returning in the
+same state of undress.
+
+If the bathing suits had been of the old-style no objection to this
+would have been made. The woman's bathing suit of the olden days were
+a cumbrous swaddling garment, high-necked, long-sleeved, full-skirted,
+bloomer-breeched and stockinged.
+
+Simultaneously with the outbreak of the street parade era, above
+noted, there came with spontaneous-combustion-like rapidity, a radical
+change in the style of female bathing suits "on the street at
+Waikiki."
+
+First the sleeves, then the stockings, then the skirts, then the main
+portion of the garment covering the legs, successively disappeared,
+until the low-necked, sleeveless, legless one-piece suit became "the
+thing"; and women clad in garments scantier than the scantiest on the
+ballet stage, were parading Kalakaua avenue in the vicinity of the
+Moana hotel, to the scandal and disgust of some; the devouring gaze of
+others; and the interested inspection of whomsoever chose to inspect!
+
+It was a startling sight to the uninitiated--probably unduplicated in
+any other civilized country.
+
+The South Pacific or the heart of Africa would probably have to be
+visited to find virtuous women so scantily clad, making such
+exhibition of their persons in public-more particularly on the public
+streets.
+
+This scantiness of dress became the subject of protest, of
+justification, of discussion in press, in public and in private
+throughout the community.
+
+The practice was violently attacked as tending to lewdness and
+scandal; as vigorously defended as a question of personal taste and
+liberty, and as a matter concerning safety and comfort in swimming.
+
+Those "old-style suits" he refers to, "full-skirted, bloomer-breeched"
+were the godly ones brought to Hawaii by the censors, but which
+gradually disappeared with the influx of rich tourists from America,
+and the importation by Honolulu merchants of the flimsier and less
+concealing kind. This new generation of whites that has sought escape
+from the "cumbrous, swaddling garment" embraces the flapper, who at
+Waikiki is a beautiful and wholesome sight. Browned by years of
+exposure to the beach sun, charmingly modelled, and with the grace and
+freedom of limb of the surf-board rider and canoeist, she has no
+consciousness of guilt in her emergence dripping from the sea, in her
+lying in the breeze upon the sand, nor in her walks to and from her
+bungalow nearby. And she refuses to be censored.
+
+The commentator, proprietor of the oldest newspaper in the islands,
+and himself a noted diplomat, lawyer and revolutionist--he took up a
+rifle against Liliuokalani--says so:--
+
+The law has been observed by a few, ignored by a few, and caricatured
+by the many. It is not an uncommon thing to see a woman walking the
+streets in Waikiki in the scantiest of bathing suits, with drapery of
+the flimsiest suspended from her shoulders and floating behind upon
+the breeze.
+
+The police have made a few feeble and spasmodic attempts to persuade
+observance of the law, with some ill-advised attempts to enforce
+individual ideas of propriety on the beach itself.
+
+On the whole, the law is either openly and flagrantly violated or
+rendered farcical by the contemptuous manner of its semi-observance.
+
+And, cautiously but firmly, the grandson of the first missionaries to
+Hawaii, himself living six decades in Honolulu, a church member and
+supporter of all evangelical and commercial progress, gives advice to
+the people of his territory. Urging that those opposed to the bathing
+suit law try legally to secure its repeal, but that all obey it while
+it is on the statute books, he says:--
+
+As to the question of attire on the beach, there are modest and
+immodest women to be found everywhere, regardless of their clothes. It
+is impossible to legislate modesty into a person who is innately
+immodest, and it is therefore useless to try and do so. The attire of
+a woman on the beach at Waikiki as well as her conduct elsewhere,
+should therefore be left to the individual woman herself.
+
+That is the last word of a very shrewd, wealthy, experienced,
+religious son of censors. But wowzerism dies hard in America or in the
+South Seas. The Anglo-Saxon American has it in his blood as an
+inheritance from the rise of Puritanism four hundred years ago, while
+with many it is an idiosyncrasy to be explained by the glands
+regulating personality. In fact, I feel that this is the enemy the
+would-be free must fight. We must attack and extirpate the wowzerary
+gland.
+
+
+
+
+REFORMERS: A HYMN OF HATE
+
+
+[Illustration: Dorothy Parker hating Reformers.]
+
+DOROTHY PARKER
+
+   I hate Reformers;
+   They raise my blood pressure.
+
+   There are the Prohibitionists;
+   The Fathers of Bootlegging.
+   They made us what we are to-day--
+   I hope they're satisfied.
+   They can prove that the Johnstown flood,
+   And the blizzard of 1888,
+   And the destruction of Pompeii
+   Were all due to alcohol.
+   They have it figured out
+   That anyone who would give a gin daisy a friendly look
+   Is just wasting time out of jail,
+   And anyone who would stay under the same roof
+   With a bottle of Scotch
+   Is right in line for a cozy seat in the electric chair.
+   They fixed things all up pretty for us;
+   Now that they have dried up the country,
+   You can hardly get a drink unless you go in and order one.
+   They are in a nasty state over this light wines and beer idea;
+   They say that lips that touch liquor
+   Shall never touch wine.
+   They swear that the Eighteenth Amendment
+   Shall be improved upon
+
+   Over their dead bodies--
+   Fair enough!
+   Then there are the Suppressors of Vice;
+   The Boys Who Made the Name of Cabell a Household Word.
+   Their aim is to keep art and letters in their place;
+   If they see a book
+   Which does not come right out and say
+   That the doctor brings babies in his little black bag,
+   Or find a painting of a young lady
+   Showing her without her rubbers,
+   They call out the militia.
+   They have a mean eye for dirt;
+   They can find it
+   In a copy of "What Katy Did at School,"
+   Or a snapshot of Aunt Bessie in bathing at Sandy Creek,
+   Or a picture postcard of Moonlight in Bryant Park.
+   They are always running around suppressing things,
+   Beginning with their desires.
+   They get a lot of excitement out of life,--
+   They are constantly discovering
+   The New Rabelais
+   Or the Twentieth Century Hogarth.
+   Their leader is regarded
+   As the representative of Comstock here on earth.
+   How does that song of Tosti's go?--
+   "Good-bye, Sumner, good-bye, good-bye."
+
+   There are the Movie Censors,
+   The motion picture is still in its infancy,--
+   They are the boys who keep it there.
+   If the film shows a party of clubmen tossing off ginger ale,
+   Or a young bride dreaming over tiny garments,
+   Or Douglas Fairbanks kissing Mary Pickford's hand,
+   They cut out the scene
+   And burn it in the public square.
+   They fix up all the historical events
+   So that their own mothers wouldn't know them.
+   They make Du Barry Mrs. Louis Fifteenth,
+   And show that Anthony and Cleopatra were like brother and sister,
+   And announce Salome's engagement to John the Baptist,
+   So that the audiences won't go and get ideas in their heads.
+   They insist that Sherlock Holmes is made to say,
+   "Quick, Watson, the crochet needle!"
+   And the state pays them for it.
+   They say they are going to take the sin out of cinema
+   If they perish in the attempt,--
+   I wish to God they would!
+
+
+   And then there are the All-American Crabs;
+   The Brave Little Band that is Against Everything.
+   They have got up the idea
+   That things are not what they were when Grandma was a girl.
+   They say that they don't know what we're coming to,
+   As if they had just written the line.
+   They are always running a temperature
+   Over the modern dances,
+   Or the new skirts,
+   Or the goings-on of the younger set.
+   They can barely hold themselves in
+   When they think of the menace of the drama;
+   They seem to be going ahead under the idea
+   That everything but the Passion Play
+   Was written by Avery Hopwood.
+   They will never feel really themselves
+   Until every theatre in the country is razed.
+   They are forever signing petitions
+   Urging that cigarette-smokers should be deported,
+   And that all places of amusement should be closed on Sunday
+   And kept closed all week.
+   They take everything personally;
+   They go about shaking their heads,
+   And sighing, "It's all wrong, it's all wrong,"--
+   They said it.
+
+   I hate Reformers;
+   They raise my blood pressure.
+
+
+
+
+PROHIBITION
+
+
+[Illustration: Frank Swinnerton contemplating, from the Tight Little Isle,
+the two classes of prigs developed by Prohibition; those who accept it and
+those who rebel.]
+
+FRANK SWINNERTON
+
+I shall never forget the shock I received when an American woman,
+newly arrived in England, gave me her impressions of London. She was
+distinctly pleased with the town, and when I rather foolishly asked if
+she had been terrified by our celebrated policemen, she said, "Why,
+no. I was in a taxicab yesterday, and the driver went right on past
+the policeman's hand, stealing round where he'd no business to go. And
+the policeman just said, 'Here, where you going? D'you want the whole
+of England?' Why, in New York, if he'd done that, he'd have been in
+prison inside of five minutes!"
+
+I wonder if it will be understood how terrible disillusion on such a
+scale can be. I had been thinking of the United States for so long as
+the home of the free and the easy that it was hard to bring myself to
+the belief that the police there were both peremptory and severe. I
+had thought them all Irishmen of the humorous, or "darlint" type. It
+seems I was mistaken. The little--I am now afraid misleading--
+paragraphs which from time to time appear in the English papers,
+saying that there has been a hold-up on Fifth Avenue, or that the
+Chief of Police in some great city has been found to be the head
+of a gang of international assassins, that things called Tammany and
+graft and saloons flourish there without let or hindrance, had
+attracted me to the United States. I wanted to live in such a country.
+Here, I said, is a place where every man's hand is for himself, where
+the revolver plays its true part, and where, with the aid of a
+humorous Irish policeman, who will find me stunned by a sandbag and
+take me to his little home in 244th Street and reveal the fact that he
+is descended from Cuchulain, I can be happy.
+
+At first I thought that my friend must be exaggerating. Not lightly
+was I prepared to let my dream go. But I am afraid that my confidence
+in America as the home of freedom needs a tonic. She may have been
+right, although it seems unbelievable. When I thought the problem out
+clearly I came to the conclusion that there was a sinister sound about
+that comment upon our policemen. Were they losing control of us?
+Apparently not. I had trouble on the road with a policeman over the
+rear light of my car. There is no doubt that England is efficiently
+policed. And so my mind stole back to America with a new uneasiness. I
+recollected tales which I had heard about sumptuary laws regulating
+the dress of American women, both in and out of the water. I saw the
+police invading restaurants and snatching cigarettes from the mouths
+of women. I saw drink being driven underground by Prohibition. I began
+to question whether I should really like to live in the United States
+after all. I asked those of my friends who had been to America.
+
+They told me that if I visited America I should be regaled privately
+with champagne from the huge reserves of private wine-cellars, but
+that as a resident I should be forbidden to drink anything that
+enlivened me. It was a great shock. I am not yet recovered from it. I
+see that I shall after all have to live quietly in England with my
+pipe and my abstemious bottle of beer. And yet I should like to visit
+America, for it has suddenly become in my imagining an enormous
+country of "Don't!" and I want to know what it is like to have "Don't"
+said by somebody who is not a woman.
+
+I have always hated the word "Don't." I hated it as a child, and I
+hate it still. It is a nasty word, a chilling word, associated with
+feelings of resentment, of discipline, of prohibition. Yes, that is
+it, of course, Prohibition. I find that it is Prohibition which makes
+my throat so dry. I thought it was a human characteristic, when
+anybody said, "You're not to do that!" to do it at once in case there
+should be any misunderstanding. I should be frightened to say "Don't!"
+to anybody, because I feel sure it would precipitate unpleasantness.
+Is America so different from the rest of the world that it likes
+having "Don't!" said to it? I cannot think that. What occurs to me is
+that America has not yet worked out of its system the strain that the
+English Puritan fathers brought with them. It is a melancholy thought
+to me that it is really ancient English repression that is responsible
+for the present state of affairs. I feel very guilty, particularly as
+I have seen an article about myself in an English newspaper headed "A
+Modern Puritan." It is really I, and people like me, who have caused
+the great drink restrictions in the United States. I bow my head.
+
+The truth is, I suppose, that people in the United States take life
+more seriously than we do in England. If you read any of the books
+which have been written in this country during the ages to show what
+sort of community is the ideal--I refer to such works as "Utopia" and
+"News from Nowhere"--there is never any difference between them on one
+point. All the dwellers in these ideal states appear to be thoroughly
+idle. They have practically no work to do at all. All their time is
+spent in talk and sylvan wandering, with music and dancing round
+maypoles. There is no mistaking the fact that the Englishman's idea of
+life is confirmed and justifiable laziness. He wants what he calls
+leisure. Charles Lamb, a typically English author, wrote a poem
+beginning "Who first invented work?" He came to the conclusion that it
+must have been the Devil. The inference is clear. Observation confirms
+my view. It is not to be doubted that the average Englishman spends
+his life in scheming to make somebody else do the work that lies
+nearest to his hand.
+
+Americans must be different. I believe they really like work. And I
+will give the Prohibitionists this handsome admission. I also work
+much better without stimulants. I mean, much harder. But on the other
+hand, I am less happy. Does an American feel happy in his work? Does
+the act of work give him a satisfaction which is not felt by an
+Englishman? I think that must be the explanation. But on the other
+hand there is this question of Puritanism. We tried it in England, and
+we had a severe reaction to libertinism. We maintain Puritanism only
+in our suburban districts, where there is exceedingly close scrutiny
+of all matters pertaining to conduct; and in our theatres. In the
+suburbs it does not much matter, although it rather cramps our
+suburban style; but in the theatre it drives some of us to
+distraction. I will explain why.
+
+Supposing a man wants to write a play, he at once thinks of getting it
+produced. An unproduced play is like an unpublished novel: practically
+speaking it does not exist. The author can read it, of course, and his
+wife can assure him that it is a great deal better than anything she
+has seen or read for years; but the author and his wife are both
+haunted by the fact that there is a masterpiece which is lying--not
+fallow, but unused and sterile. They grow dissatisfied. The savour of
+life is lost for them. They develop persecution mania, grow very
+conceited, and finally come to believe that only they of all the men
+and women alive truly grasp the essentials of life. They say, if this
+were the silly muck that most authors write, it would be produced, and
+then we should have our car and our servants and diamonds and titles
+and all the paraphernalia of happiness. As it is, we are doomed to
+silence and poverty, simply because George is too much of an artist to
+lower himself by writing what the public wants, and what the censor
+will pass. For I have not been outlining the diseased state of mind of
+the merely incompetent man who writes something that nobody will look
+at. I have been giving details of one of those men who have a moral
+message, and who desire greatly to spread it by means of the stage. He
+has written, let us say, a play in which the name of God appears, or a
+play wherein a young woman has a baby and does not wish to have a
+husband. The censor says that there must be no mention of God in plays
+performed on the public stage, and that young women who have babies
+must either have husbands or come to early graves of their own
+seeking. Very well, what happens? I have described the state of mind
+of a husband and wife who have a pet child--a play--which is lying
+heavy on their minds and hearts and hands. They are ripe for any
+temptation of the devil. And it comes. It always comes.
+
+The devil dresses himself up in the guise of a Sunday play-producing
+society. The play is surreptitiously performed in a theatre to which
+admission can be obtained only by members banded together for just
+such emergencies. It is very badly acted by actors and actresses who
+have not been able to spare sufficient time from their daily work to
+learn their parts as well as they should have done. The audience comes
+full of a smug self-satisfaction at the thought that it is excessively
+intellectual and select, and that it alone can appreciate blasphemy or
+the vagaries of neurotic young women. It sits intellectually in the
+theatre, and watches the play. The author sits intellectually in his
+box, and intellectually accepts the plaudits of the audience. He lives
+thereafter in a highly intellectual atmosphere. He is driven to become
+a member of the secret play-producing society, and to watch other
+plays of a character not suited to the requirements of the censorship.
+He is morally a ruined man. He will never any more be a decent member
+of society, for he has become an intellectual. He has been taught to
+despise ordinary human beings, for they do not want to be wicked or
+silly, except in the normal humdrum way, and they have not seen his
+play and are not members of his play-producing society. He discovers
+that the censored is the only good art. He is driven to the reading of
+all sorts of Continental drama. He is made into an anti-English
+propagandist. He is like the person in the song, who,
+
+"Praises every century but this, and every country but his own."
+
+He has been lost for human kind, and is wedded to intellectualism and
+a sense of superiority to others for the rest of his miserable life.
+He institutes a new system of censorship of his own. It takes the form
+of sneering at and condemning anything that does not conform to his
+own ideas. He sniffs at all sorts of innocently happy people who are
+inoffensively pursuing their noisy course through life. He begins to
+hate noise. He makes a virtue of his abstention from ordinary
+pleasures. He speaks condescendingly of the "hoi polloi." As I said,
+he is ruined. He is no longer a man that one can talk to with any
+comfort, for his sense of superiority is intolerable.
+
+To me there is nothing more terrible than the sense of superiority to
+others. It arises, not from merit or the consciousness of merit, but
+from sheer tin-like flimsiness of character. It arises from limited
+sympathies. The really great man, and the really sagacious man, is one
+to whom nothing is contemptible. To him, even the follies of his
+fellow-passengers are manifestations of human nature, revelations of
+the material from which scholars and politicians no less than
+drunkards and inconstants are gradually in course of time developed.
+Somebody described "conceit" to me the other day as egotism in which
+contempt for others is involved. It was agreed between us that egotism
+was normal, since happiness is not to be attained without a sense of
+personal utility to the world, and no objection was urged against it.
+Vanity was to be tolerated, because it was definitely social--a
+recognition of the existence and value of the good opinion of others;
+but never sense of superiority. And the sense of rebellion should be
+added to this other sense, as equally to be regretted. A young woman
+whose incredible acts of folly had spoiled half-a-dozen lives,
+including her own, recently encountered a young man whom she had
+jilted on the eve of her marriage to another, whom she had also left.
+The young man, still smarting under his ill-treatment, reproached her.
+He said, "What you want, my dear, is discipline." "Pooh!" she
+answered. "I'm _above_ discipline!" The poor young man retired,
+unequal to the conversation. But the young woman went on her way,
+defiant and self-infatuated, believing that she really was superior to
+the opinions of others, the common decencies of conduct, the
+inevitable give and take of ordinary life. Driven to folly by lack of
+balance, she was learning to justify her folly by the argument for
+rebellion. Whether she will ever learn to control her actions I do not
+know, but rebelliousness from a fueling that one is too good to be
+governed by normal standards is not only arrogant and unsocial. It is
+silly. It is, to my mind, a criminal form of silliness. But it is one
+very widely accepted by the young and the unimaginative. It must
+therefore be recognized and combated.
+
+ It springs, perhaps, from disordered shame, which makes children
+noisily act in defiance of authority, particularly if there are others
+present to overhear. No children are worse-behaved than those who are
+over-controlled. The word "don't" at the breakfast-table produces more
+acts of violent rebellion than any amount of parental weakness.
+Unimaginativeness begets unimaginativeness. Rigidity in one person
+creates a counter-rigidity in the other. There is a thwarting upon
+both sides, a mutual shackle upon sweetness and understanding. A
+wildness of action arises, with loss of affection, respect,
+self-respect. And the vicious part of it is that children (we are all
+children, for we never grew up in human relations), once they are
+embarked upon an evil course, are driven by vanity to continue upon
+that course until they are exhausted, going from defiance to defiance;
+and ultimately building up a whole sophisticated gospel of axioms
+whereby rebellion is given warrant and virtue. The gospel of rebellion
+we know to be specious and without justification; but it is essential
+to us, as human beings, to maintain self-approval for our acts. If we
+cannot do this socially, by comparative standards, we do it
+unsocially, by subversion of those standards. Rebels are only prigs
+turned upside down or inside out.
+
+The great defect of prohibition is that when it can be enforced by law
+it makes rebels who think there is something inconceivably clever in
+doing secretly that which the law forbids. They learn to think there
+is some subtle merit in evading the law. They encourage others to
+break the law, and so develop cliques and finally new and silly
+conventions. Or, prohibition has another effect. It makes a whole
+class who accept its rulings, and gradually these people, owing to a
+peculiarity which all gregarious animals seem to have, begin to
+believe that unless all are of their persuasion and of their number
+the fault lies with the rebels. First of all they consider themselves
+superior to the rebels, and despise them. Then, when they find that
+the rebels think that _they_ are the superior class, in defying
+the law or the convention, a new set of notions arises, and this set
+of notions leads to persecution and to war. You cannot introduce any
+restrictive or prohibitive measure without developing fanatical
+conceit, narrow-mindedness, and intolerance, both in those who welcome
+the measure and in those who seek to ignore and even to defy its
+rulings.
+
+The Puritanical attitude is almost wholly repressive, and naturally
+invokes force to aid its repressive measures. It did so in England
+centuries ago in the matter of the theatre, and we are living among
+all the rotten plays which have been written since, and the theatre is
+for the most part a place of ignominious diversion. The play-producing
+societies have nothing to produce that is worth producing, because the
+atmosphere which causes such plays as are written to be produced
+privately is not the healthy atmosphere from which masterpieces arise.
+It is an atmosphere impregnated with priggishness and a sense of
+superiority. It is an atmosphere, if there can be such a thing, of
+sterility. The same thing happens in other matters, and I do not feel
+at all certain that it may not happen with drink. If you say men are
+not to drink you create two new classes. There is of course the
+existing class that does not care for drink and is afraid of its
+effects to the point of wishing to keep it away from those who do like
+drink. That class already flourishes in most communities, and so I do
+not place it among any two classes which are created by the
+prohibition. The two classes are as follows-the class that submits,
+and gradually develops priggishness and self-satisfaction at being in
+the majority, and the class that rebels, and gradually develops
+priggishness and self-satisfaction at being in the minority. Both
+classes are objectionable, and I do not know which is the worse. They
+are both inevitable in a world of prohibitions, and if the United
+States, to which we are all looking as the real hope for intelligent
+civilization, is going to take away our beer and turn us into
+supporters of play-producing societies I cannot think what will happen
+to the world. Better a wicked world than a virtuous one. Better a
+world in which we can hope that there are people worse than ourselves
+than a world where we know that there cannot be any better.
+
+
+
+
+A GUESS AT UNWRITTEN HISTORY
+
+
+[Illustration: H. M. Tomlinson regarding, with not too great enthusiasm,
+the Perfect State of the Future.]
+
+H. M. TOMLINSON
+
+That fairly violent scuffling during the years 1914-1918, the opening
+skirmishes of the war between Organization and Liberty which our
+fore-fathers named so strangely the "War to End War," did not appear
+to conclude satisfactorily for the victorious nations, especially
+England. Actually it was an excellent ground for the founding of that
+Perfect State which, in the centuries that followed, arose on the
+lines laid largely by chance and the exigencies of that early
+scramble. Yet it is possible the victorious statesmen may not have
+guessed that they had done really well. The name by which the war of
+those remote years was popularly known is enough to show that the
+difficulties faced by those men at the end of the war may have
+obscured the good they had done. That name is itself clear evidence of
+the not unpleasing credulity and ridiculous but innocent desire of the
+people of that time.
+
+After all, those peoples were not so long out of the Neolithic Age.
+Their memory was still strong of the freedom of their earlier
+wanderings when they could go where they liked, work at what suited
+them, eat and drink what pleased them, choose who should be their
+chief, and worship in any Temple which promised most personal
+benefits. It was, then, natural for them to make so amusing a mistake
+in the naming of their "Great War." They not only certainly imagined
+they were ending War, but they imagined, too, they had a right to end
+it, thinking that not only War, but every other act of the State, was
+for their decision. Their Governors, therefore, judged it wise to
+allow them this illusion to play with, so to distract their attention
+from the reality, which they would have resented. This illusion was
+known as Popular Government.
+
+We may laugh at it now, but in those days the directing minds of great
+nations found that common illusion no laughing matter. Some who
+laughed at it openly discovered they had laughed on the wrong side of
+the guillotine. It is usual in this era of science, when control by
+the Holy State of the national mass-power, both of body and mind, is
+complete, and when national emotion is raised by Press and Pulpit
+whenever it is required and put wherever it is wanted, to ridicule the
+laxity of the statesmen who directed the nations in that early war. A
+little reflection, however, shows us that that laxity is but apparent.
+Those statesmen went as far as they dared, and dared a little more
+with each success they won. They discovered that control may be gained
+by announcing control to be necessary for some quite innocent object,
+and then using and retaining the power thus acquired for a real but
+undivulged purpose. Sheep, we are aware, never understand they are
+securely folded till the completing hurdle of the circuit is in its
+place, and then they soon forget it, and begin grazing; for all sheep
+want is grass, and perhaps a turnip or two to give content in a
+limited pasture.
+
+It would be wrong for us, nevertheless, to blame those early folk for
+not understanding, as finely as we do, the true science of government
+to be complete and unquestioned mastery. We have learned much since
+then. Let us look back to those days for a moment, to get the just
+perspective. One of the first significant things we notice is that
+those people were free to criticize their politicians--baaing across
+the hurdles, as it were. That was why they had to have explained to
+them the "Objects of the War." They actually did not want to die. They
+were reluctant to go to battle unless they knew why they were going.
+True, it was easy enough to find a reason to satisfy them, but it is
+necessary for us to remember that they would not submit to mutilation
+and death without some reason. Much as their governors may have
+desired it, those primitives would not agree willingly to the total
+surrender of conscience, individual liberty, and of life, to
+"politicians," as the High Priests of the Holy State were then
+familiarly named. Individual conscience, therefore, had to be cajoled,
+had to be bamboozled, had to be hypnotized; and a man's liberty could
+not be taken from him unless he was helpless, or was looking, under
+clever political finger-pointing, the other way.
+
+It was this almost intractable matter of personal conscience and
+liberty which was the cause of the angry disappointment following the
+Versailles Treaty which, illustrating still further the need for
+subtle tact in dealing with our hairy forefathers, was called a Peace
+Treaty.
+
+What a light is thrown upon those distant days and peoples when that
+ancient document, the fragmentary relic of which is now treasured in
+the museum at Tobolsk, is examined with even the little knowledge we
+possess of the events immediately following it! For a time, we must
+believe, humanity then was deliriously bereft. One could almost
+believe the moon had a greater pull in those years.
+
+"No more secret diplomacy!" historians tell us was one of the cries
+of the soldiers as they went to battle. There is considerable ground,
+too, for accepting the amusing traditional tale that even at the end
+of the war the then President of the American Republic (mainly
+confined at the time to the Western Continent), declared the first
+point for the guidance of the Peace Conference must be an open
+discussion of the covenant. And the first thing to happen when the war
+ended was the closing of the door of the council room by the
+peacemakers, who, naturally, were the very men with no other interest
+till that moment but the full pursuit of war; yet nobody noticed the
+door was shut, though nobody could hear what was going on inside the
+room. The faith in their politicians held by the natives of the
+backyard communities into which Europe was then divided--on the very
+eve, we see now, of the full continental control of international
+man-power by consolidated finance--was the measure of their annoyance
+when, too late, naturally, the fact that the old shackles from which
+they had been promised freedom were noticed to be riveted upon them
+several links tighter.
+
+But it is not their faith, so happily youthful, which so reveals their
+ingenious minds as their resultant annoyance. That resentment
+illuminates the essential fact for us in studying their mentality as
+social animals. They really did accept without question, with open and
+receptive mouths and eyes shut, what was considered pleasing enough to
+fortify them in the trials of warfare. They were, difficult though it
+is for us to understand it, too vacant and generous to realize that
+the "Objects of the War" were but figments nicely calculated to get
+them busy. The figments--we must give credit to the leaders of the
+time-were indeed not un-imaginatively conjured up. Those inducing
+visions worked. They were accepted readily, and even with delight. It
+was sincerely believed that the pleasing dreams were substantial, that
+those chromatic vapours evoked by gifted statesmen were veritable
+promises of divine favor for meritorious endurance.
+
+From that we can the more easily go with understanding to a study of
+the consequences of that attractive faith of undisciplined peoples so
+difficult to grasp for modern students, who witness daily the
+admirable submission of our own uniform herds to the divine ordinances
+of the High Priests of the Sacred Entity the State. Why, we even learn
+that the survivors of the not inconsiderable armies returned from the
+battlefields of 1918 with the innocent conviction that the gentlemen
+of England would keep a bond as faithfully as common soldiers! The
+hardest tasks of the statesmen of those days arose out of such
+extraordinary expectations, out of the ruinous supposition of the
+childish-minded that the honoring of a bond, the fulfilment of a
+promise in return for benefits received, is equally incumbent on
+everybody!
+
+With that knowledge we begin to realise the difficulties of their
+statesmen. A careful computation shows us that in England, where
+indeed the lavish promises had been most picturesque, and where the
+tough idea of personal liberty took longest to kill, it required just
+four years of severe disciplinary measures and dry bread to reduce the
+masses generally to a pale, obedient, and constructive spirit. At
+first they would not work unless they wanted to, and then only at
+their own price. They pointed, when answering their masters, to the
+fact that the best-fed people never worked at all, and lived in the
+best houses. They refused to cancel the official contracts made with
+them, even when ordered to do so by the police. They behaved indeed,
+those ex-soldiers, as though it had been _their_ war. Such a
+state of mind we in these days really find impossible to elucidate. It
+is rather like trying to read the spots on a giraffe. It is as
+inscrutable as the once general opinion that the community has a right
+to decide upon its own affairs.
+
+Today we have reached that point in the evolution of society when
+uniformity is known to be more desirable, because more comfortable
+than liberty; and uniformity is impossible without compulsion. A man
+with a free and contentious mind is a danger to the community, for he
+destroys its ease. He compels his fellows to active thought, if only
+to refute him. This is a dissipation of energy, and a local weakening
+of the structure of the State. It is historically true that a few men
+with ranging and questioning minds have sometimes injected so strong
+an original virus of thought that the community has been changed in
+form and nature.
+
+It was the mistake of the earlier nations to give little attention to
+these troublesome and subversive fellows, who always thought more of
+the truth than they did even of the inviolability of the High Priests
+of the State. They preferred to die rather than surrender the
+out-dated rights of man. Therefore they had to die. The rights of man
+cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a nation's perfect
+uniformity. It was many centuries before man realized that the only
+freedom worth having is freedom from the necessity for individual
+thought. Perfectly unembarrassed freedom, freedom in which the mind
+may be empty and sunny, and assured happily of not the slightest
+interruption from any unsanctioned unofficial idea, became possible to
+a community only after the sanitary measures were devised which
+sufficed against unexpected epidemics of speculative thinking.
+
+This, we are sadly aware, took time; for the brightly-colored hopes
+sent skyward so long ago as 1914, and the vistas discovered as a
+consequence by young men whose eyes till then had been resting safely
+on the ground, and the daring and lively questioning that was aroused
+by the incessant nudging of sleeping minds, coincided, as it unluckily
+happened, with the beginnings when the "Great War" ended, of
+mass-production and international finance, so developing problems of
+government, the solving of which could not be reconciled with any
+admission of individual liberty and personal right. It was, therefore,
+the elimination of the notion of justice and liberty from common
+opinion which occupied statesmen from 1918 onwards.
+
+Gradually the true social morality has been evolved--that one citizen
+should be so like all other citizens that his only distinguishing
+characteristic is his number; that the right ideal of citizenship,
+plain for all to follow, and ensuring the stability of society, is to
+be so loyal to the Holy State that an expression of a man's views in a
+gathering of his fellows will rouse no more curiosity than a glass of
+water. Obviously so desirable a similarity of mind and character,
+making disputation impossible, and preventing all dislike of the
+ordinances of the Sacred Entity, or Cabal of Inviolable Dispensers, a
+uniformity in which war and peace become merely the national output of
+a vast machine controlled by the Central Will, has been developed only
+through ages of Press Suggestion, popular education with a bias that
+was designed but was scarcely noticeable, the seizing and retaining of
+opportunities by legislators whenever public opinion was sufficiently
+diverted, and a development of chemical science and aeronautics which
+has been encouraged by the enlightened directors of the major
+industries.
+
+The war which began in 1914 showed quite clearly, for example, the
+value of the Censorship. The instituting of this office was never
+questioned, for it was based on man's first impulse of obedience to
+superiors when faced by a sudden danger, caused by his fear of the
+unknown. More than that, the English were in a lucky state of
+exaltation at the time, and were ready to sacrifice everything to save
+from destruction what they were told was the ancient, exquisite, and
+priceless civilization of France. They did save it; but in the
+prolonged and costly process they learned more than they had known
+before of that civilization, as well as of their own; and so much of
+their fear of losing either was evaporated. By that time, anyhow,
+criticism was useless, because the Censorship then was empowered to
+deal even with a derisive cough when Authority was solemnly giving
+orders. Once the office of the Censor was set in its place unnoticed
+in a time of public nervousness and excitement, the rest was easy, for
+it became possible to bring all criticism within a law which was
+elastic enough to be extended even to those figments which merely
+worked on the timidity of unbalanced minds.
+
+It became unpatriotic to express a dislike for margarine, when butter
+was prohibited. It was unpatriotic for a blind hunchback with heart
+disease to protest that he was no soldier, if he were ordered to the
+Front. For though the Censor, in the early period of that war, dealt
+merely with news and opinions which might aid the enemy, yet, as the
+value of adding to a nation's enemies became apparent to Authority, it
+became necessary to turn into enemies of the State those who denounced
+profiteers for turning blood into money, those who denounced generals
+for wasting the lives of boys in purposeless actions, those who spoke
+against the spending of the nation's resources to succor needy
+contractors, and those who asked whether the war was to go on till all
+were dead, or whether it might be stopped profitably at any time by
+using a little common sense. Luckily for the welfare of the community,
+this need for recognizing as enemies all, at home and abroad, who
+differed from the decision of the Central Will, a need which was the
+natural flower of that confidence which Authority acquired through
+discovering the ease of control, put within the power of the Censor by
+the time of the Peace Conference every possible form of protest, every
+call for light, every cry of pain, every demand that such a "horrible
+nonsense" as war should cease from human affairs, every plea for
+compassion and generosity.
+
+Thus the problem of perfect government was engendered and simplified.
+It was at last possible to ensure, at least outwardly, a semblance of
+uniformity. The rest was a matter of evolution, till today only a
+particular enquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may
+fail to determine a fool from a man. All are alike, all agree with
+what is officially announced by the Sacred Entity, and the nation is
+as loyal and homogeneous, as contented, as stable and industrious, as
+a reef of actinozoal plasm. Thus the Perfect State has been built like
+a rock. The City of God has at last arisen; and in each of the uniform
+homes of its neuters, or workers, there is to be found the Patriotic
+Symbol--a portrait of a Sheep, enjoined by law to hang in a principal
+place, and bearing the legend "God Bless this Loyal Face."
+
+Here, however, we see at once that such a right condition of the
+public mind could never have been acquired by a Censorship, by a mere
+prohibition, that is, of individual thinking and acting. That ensures
+merely a simulacrum of homogeneity. The appearance of general
+acquiescence may exist, though not the real thing. It is easy to
+compel men to do what they would not do freely if allowed an
+opportunity for their reason to work. The problem was to prevent the
+working of reason. Today, as we know, an order is issued by The
+Chosen, and is followed by a campaign in the Press, and by revivals
+exhorted from the Pulpit. There is no chance for the intrusion of
+reason.--No facts are ever issued for reason to work upon, no
+questioning is ever allowed. The suggestions of the Press and Pulpit
+prompt loyalty and obedience, and what might, in early times, have
+been resented as ridiculous, becomes the mode; and thus, if any rebels
+exist, it is but briefly, for they are denounced as solitary and
+repugnant independents. A suggestion becomes public opinion because
+the majority of people accept it without knowing there is reason to
+question the suggestion; and the minority also accept it in the end
+through weariness of an unpleasant and even dangerous distinction.
+
+Yet not, observe, all the minority. It was the experience of our
+forefathers that unsuspected centres of infection always remained, and
+were not discovered till they had poisoned large areas of the country.
+Some bold fellow, here and there, had withstood all efforts at
+intimidation, and in time made others as courageous as himself. A
+means had to be found to eliminate the possibility of infection by
+original minds, or clearly the Holy State could not consider itself
+safe. Here, indeed, we see the hardest of the problems statesmen of
+the past had to solve. From the mere negation of the Censorship, a
+positive advance had to be made to the obliteration of original
+thought. This at first, necessarily, was but tentative, and only the
+confidence gained through successful experiment enabled governments at
+last to find where the real trouble lay.
+
+It was supposed, at first, that the destruction of subversive
+political tracts and the persecution of radical views would be enough.
+Yet, of course, it was learned that as fast as these were cropped,
+growth elsewhere had become vigorous. The human intelligence is
+natively prone to look towards new things. Then it was that, after a
+long suspicion of the origin of ideals, great statesmen were led to an
+examination of classic literature and a study of the arts. Then they
+saw, what they might have known sooner, that in the very institutions
+supported by the State, the Public Libraries and Art Galleries, were
+actually preserved the potent ideals which demeaned that general
+opinion which the State was laboring to establish.
+
+The famous Day of Release was ordered. This was ordained to free
+mankind from its heritage of the spirit. A test was made, and by that
+test any book or picture or poem which could not be approved or
+understood by native deacons of Solomon Island missions (who were
+imported for the purpose) was at once extirpated. This checked a great
+deal of the troublesome growth of the mind. Music, however, was
+strangely forgotten; and it was proved that the great revolution which
+burst out in Europe 120 years after the "Great War" began in the
+emotion occasioned by the continued playing of the compositions of one
+Beethoven, whose work is now fortunately lost, and other music which
+remained in favor in spite of the official insistence on the use of
+the steam saxophone for public concerts. Men, wherever they dared,
+insisted on having the best. And though the records were at length
+destroyed, the tenacious memories of a few fanatics and cranks
+preserved much of the old music, and that usually of the worst and
+most disloyal.
+
+Here we see another step had to be taken by men in control of the
+State. The memory of what was classical was kept though in an
+ever-fading condition, and now and again some point of memory
+fructified to almost its original suggestive beauty in the
+fortuitously abnormal brain of a genius, and thus the state work of
+hygiene had to be done over again; for curiously enough people
+everywhere rose like a tide, and moved spontaneously towards these
+manifestations of liberty and beauty, and away from their loyalty to
+the God-State. A method, therefore, had to be discovered, first for
+obliterating what remained in the public memory of what was magical
+and rebellious, and then for the elimination of any possibility of
+original genius arising; and genius was, it was seen, first and last,
+the cause of all the trouble.
+
+The destruction of all great works of art was followed, fifty years
+later, by the Period of Purging. All who were denounced for having
+quoted forbidden poetry, or for humming forbidden music, were
+executed. Such malefactors, who refused to forget, obviously could not
+be allowed to live. This gave a long period of peace, in which the
+Sacred Entity, the Unassailable Authority, took concrete form. Even
+so, the destruction of the treasures of the past, and of all memory of
+them, did not prevent the spontaneous appearance, now and then, of
+extraordinary men who, by divination it would seem, perceived a
+flatness and monotony in society, a sameness of common thought, and
+who laughed at the estimable uniform flocks; often, indeed, stampeding
+them.
+
+Now science had its turn. It was more than a century since the works
+of Darwin and other philosophers had been burned. Young students who
+showed an aptitude for science, and so were potentially dangerous,
+were taken early within the Sacred Precincts, initiated into the
+mysteries of the Priests, and were given work and safety under the
+shadow of the Entity. They rarely went wrong; and when they did they
+went further or were heard of no more.
+
+These men of science were set the problem of finding a method of
+sterilizing the unfit, that is, people who showed any decadent
+tendency to originality. All the increase of population by that time
+was occasioned under the direction of the High Priests, so that the
+Holy State had not only the power of dealing death, but of bringing
+new life. The new life, it is evident, had to be determined, as far as
+possible, by a scientific specification of a perfect citizen; and in
+the course of a century or two, through the destruction of
+intelligence wherever it inadvertently appeared, through the selection
+of parents sufficiently loyal and docile to accept marriage
+immediately when ordered by officials, and by certain signs, such as
+lustiness, by which, at a birth, the skilled Public Watchers who
+accompanied midwives were made suspicious of the new-born as possible
+enemies of the State, at last mankind arrived at its present
+perfection, content, and happiness, with hardly an intellectual doubt
+or a sign of suspicious joy to mar the whole serene horizon of the
+Holy State's exactitude.
+
+Yet, we dare ask, had it not been for that little "War to End War" of
+1914-1918, so innocently named by our forefathers who had too much
+liberty to know what they were talking about, would the possibility of
+our present social tranquility have arisen? It is hardly likely. The
+freedom we enjoy from all criticism, from all interruptions of mind
+and spirit, an internal peace which is indeed never broken except by
+the lethal germs of our modern wars that, in the due course of nature,
+obliterate every week or so a few of our cities, was a lucky chance
+that was seized upon by public-spirited legislators who had the
+prescience to know its value.
+
+
+
+
+IN VINO DEMI-TASSE
+
+
+[Illustration: Charles Hanson Towne and the Law.]
+
+CHARLES HANSON TOWNE
+
+The Young-Old Philosopher and I were sitting in one of the innumerable
+restaurants in New York where the sanctity of the law is about as much
+considered as a bicycle ride up Mt. Etna. At the next table--indeed,
+all around us--rich red wine was being poured into little cups.
+
+"The new motto of America should be '_In vino demi-tasse_,'" my
+friend said, smiling. And I quite agreed with him. For it is being
+done everywhere; in the most exalted circles, and in the lowest. Poor
+old human nature, which an organized minority are so bent upon
+changing overnight, cannot be altered; and, all the emphasis in a
+supposedly free country having been placed upon not drinking, the
+prohibitionists are wondering why so many of us care for liquid
+refreshment.
+
+There is too much _verboten_ in America today. I can remember the
+time, not so long ago, when no dinner-party was counted a success
+unless four or five cocktails were served before we sat down at the
+table. But that era passed. It was soon evident that such foolishness
+would lead to grave disaster--if not to the grave; and the young
+business man who was seen to consume even one glass of beer at
+luncheon was frowned upon, catalogued as unsteady, even in the face of
+the fact that perhaps the most efficient people in the world were
+automatic beer-drinkers.
+
+As to drinking, in America we had other ideas. Big Business, which has
+become such a potent factor among us, and more a part of our national
+consciousness than Art and Letters ever will be, of its own volition
+placed a ban upon immoderate drinking; and the sane among us--of whom
+there were still many--gladly fell in line, and either went
+periodically upon the water-wagon or took a nip only occasionally when
+the cares of life weighed too heavily and insistently upon us.
+
+Why, then, the Reformers? Why the Uplift Workers? Why the Extremists?
+Not content with a great and wise people working out their own
+salvation from within, they must step forth in solemn battalions, and
+make us pure and holy--from without.
+
+We resent them. There is no reason why an entire nation should be
+indicted for the sins and failings of a few. It would be quite as
+sensible to forbid connubial bliss because there are a handful of
+libertines in the world.
+
+The cry goes up, however, that the next generation will be so much
+better because of our enforced good behavior now. I am afraid that I
+am not enough of an altruist to care so definitely about the morals of
+a race unborn. I feel that my children, looking over the files of our
+newspapers, as they sip their light wine and beer, may smile and say,
+"Poor grandpa! He had so little self-control that the Government had
+to put the screws on him and his friends. Too bad! They must have been
+a fast set in his day. And yet--he left us a pretty good heritage of
+health and strength. We wonder if he was such an awful devil as
+history makes out."
+
+The truth is that nothing, in moderation, ever hurt anybody. That is
+why the wise among us are against Prohibition and strongly for
+Temperance. Normal men do not like to be coddled. If coddling is done,
+however, they like to pick their coddlers. We don't like a lean and
+sour-visaged Prohibitionist making a fuss over us, feeling our pulse,
+taking our temperature, smoothing our brow. The whole trouble with the
+world today, as a sane man views it, is that there has been altogether
+too much coddling of the physically and mentally unfit.
+
+We have become, through drifting, a nation of hypocrites. We make laws
+so fast that the bewildered citizen cannot follow them. We add
+amendment after amendment to our Constitution, and then laugh at what
+we have done, the while we secretly rebel. We have few convictions,
+and we refuse to face issues squarely and honestly. We pretend to be
+virtuous before the rest of the world; but we are like the ostrich
+which hides its head in the sands. We pretend that, just as the
+eugenists think of the physical attributes of the coming generation,
+we consider the mental attributes--and we turn around and raise a race
+of bootleggers. We permit our enormous foreign population to see us at
+our legislative work; and then we go proudly and sanctimoniously to
+restaurants and allow Italian, German and French waiters to pour red
+wine into our demi-tasses.
+
+Oh, we are not in our cups--only in our half-cups. It would all be
+very amusing were it not so terribly serious. For we are rapidly
+floating toward trouble; and, hypocritically enough, we will not admit
+it. When it is said, since the tragedy of Prohibition, that the
+reformers will next snatch our cigars and cigarettes out of our
+mouths, we shrug our shoulders, smile and pass on, saying, "Oh, no!
+_that_ would be going _too_ far!"--in the face of what already
+has been accomplished in this land of the spree and the home of
+the grave.
+
+Yes, we have become grave indeed. For there can be no doubt that there
+is a feeling of great unhappiness and unrest in America now. One hears
+the most solid citizens saying, "I do not try to save any more; I
+merely live from day to day, hoping against hope that things will
+right themselves, and that the old order will somehow return."
+
+Who gets a long-term lease nowadays? Those of us who are old enough to
+remember the simplicity and peace of the golden 'Eighties and
+'Nineties are appalled at the nervous tension and complexities of this
+hour. We are all catalogued and tagged, just as they are in that
+Prussia we so recently and fervently despised; and we are hounded by
+income-tax investigators, surrounded by a horde of spies who search
+our luggage, pry into our kitchens to see if we are making home brew,
+raided in restaurants--and laughed at by king-ridden and shackled
+Europeans.
+
+It isn't pleasant to realize that you are burdened with taxes partly
+to cover the salaries of Federal Officers whose delicate duty it is to
+spy upon you. And then when you walk out and talk to the police-man on
+your street, he will whisper in your ear that he knows where he can
+get you some delicious ale, and see to it that it is safely delivered
+at your door. This is the America, deny it as we will, that we are
+living in today. I confess that I hang my head a bit, and am ashamed
+to look a Frenchman in the face.
+
+Not long ago, at a dinner, I asked a certain politician--I refuse to
+grace him with the name of statesman, though he has ambitions to be
+known as such--why, if he believed in the Volstead Act, he still
+consumed whiskey. His answer was intended to be amusing; to me it was
+disgraceful. Said he: "I am drinking as much as I can in order to
+lessen the supply for the other fellow."
+
+And just a while back I went to a banquet at a country club near New
+York. Two policemen in uniform were sent by the local authorities to
+"guard the place" while much liquor was poured. These minions of the
+sacred law were openly served with highballs, and laughed at the
+Constitution of the United States, the while they drank. Everyone at
+that party was loud in denunciation of Prohibition and what has come
+in its wake, yet went on dancing with the casual remark that it was of
+no consequence that they broke the law, since everyone was doing
+it--and everyone always would.
+
+Uphold the law, no matter what is injected into it, I have heard
+people cry. That, it seems to me, is mere Teutonic stupidity, and has
+no part in the attitude of thinking men and women in a land like
+America. I suppose, arguing thus, that if a law were passed tomorrow
+prohibiting the carrying of, say, hand-bags or canes, they would feel
+it incumbent upon themselves, as good Americans, to fall into line,
+bow the knee and whisper meekly, "All right, O most beloved country! I
+obey!"
+
+A good American, as I understand it, is not one who ignorantly stands
+for the letter of the law, no matter what that law may be. A good
+American is one who tries to set his country right; one who looks
+beyond the present ungenerous attitude of the fanatics; one who
+visualizes the future and prays that our liberty may not be further
+jeopardized, for the good of the generations that are to follow us.
+
+We fought to rid the world of autocracy, yet we have suddenly become
+the most autocratic nation on earth. Prohibition is a symbol of the
+death of freedom. The issue at stake is as clear-cut as taxation
+without representation; and our legislators should remember a certain
+well-known Boston tea-party. There would have been no United States of
+America unless a few honest men with sound convictions had rebelled
+and protested against tyranny. The right kind of rebel makes the right
+kind of citizen.
+
+I have heard a few people liken one's duty in the matter of the draft
+to the Prohibition law. If we obeyed a summons to fight, whether we
+liked fighting or not, we should likewise obey the law regarding
+drinking, they contend. The two things are as separated as the Poles.
+In 1914, and thereafter, civilization itself was at stake; and that
+man would have been blind indeed who did not see the stern and
+clear-cut issues before us all. We leaped to arms because we wanted to
+protect humanity, because the death-knell of democracy was sounding.
+Prohibition, these same people would tell us, should be enforced to
+save poor, weak humanity and civilization again, and we should fight
+to that end. Yet as long as the world has been moving, civilized man
+has been consuming a certain amount of alcohol, and has been in no
+serious danger of going down to disaster. We have progressed through
+the ages, despite our cheerful cups of wine; and though of course a
+few imbeciles have dropped from the line, the rest of us have been
+none the worse--in fact, sometimes a little better--for our occasional
+libations. Let anyone deny this who has ever, for a moment even, been
+in Arcady! And the dreadful and incontrovertible fact remains that the
+sober nations have not proved themselves superior to those who drink
+in moderation.
+
+Who are happy over Prohibition? First, the Prohibitionists themselves,
+and, secondly, the bootleggers. The more the lid is clamped on in our
+great cities, the more rejoicing goes on in that mysterious inner and
+under circle which dispenses liquor, and will continue to dispense it,
+I fear, until the end of time. Whenever there is a "drive" on in New
+York to "mop up the place," prices soar to the skies, and the illicit
+trade waxes brisker than ever. No wonder the bootleggers grow
+happy--and rich; and evade the income tax which the rest of us must
+pay.
+
+I am not sympathetic toward those who say that they have been driven
+to excessive drinking because a certain obnoxious law has been passed.
+The only way to fight Prohibition is to fight it soberly; it is the
+jingled and jangled arguments of bar-room bores that hurt the cause of
+the men and women who are moderate drinkers, and who wish with all
+their hearts to see a return to common sense in our country.
+
+We Americans never do anything piecemeal. Probably at the root of all
+our strange fanaticism about drink was the thought that the saloon had
+better go; that it was time for such foul places to disappear. The
+pendulum had to swing all the way. If it would swing back a little; if
+the Government would step in and control the liquor traffic, do away
+with spirits, except for medicinal purposes, and give the people light
+wine and beer, a truce could be declared over night. Drunkenness
+should be made a prison offence. No matter who the offender against
+public decency is he should be lodged in jail. Whether one is a
+so-called gentleman coming out of his club, or the meanest tramp in
+the streets, he should be punished. There would be no visible
+drunkenness if a law like this were passed and rigorously enforced.
+
+I am afraid that so long as grapes grow on vines and apples on trees;
+so long as fermentation is one of Nature's processes, there can be no
+such thing as Prohibition. And the Biblical justification for drinking
+is pleasant reading for those who like, now and then, a little wine at
+their dinner tables. Yet there are fanatics who rise up and shout that
+the wine Christ caused to appear at the marriage feast of Cana was not
+intoxicating. What divination is theirs which makes them so positive?
+If water was just as good, why did not water remain in the casks?
+
+If we would spend more time making laws that worked for good, rather
+than for evil--and Graft is a great evil; if we would realize that it
+is not so much our concern to make the other fellow good as to make
+him happy, as Stevenson so beautifully puts it--then, I say, we would
+be better employed than we are today with our foolish, fussy bills and
+acts, mandates, precepts and restrictions.
+
+I believe firmly in local option in all things; but there is no reason
+why New York, or any other great city, should live as Kansas and Idaho
+live. I prefer New York because a big city gives me a spiritual uplift
+that a prairie town does not. It is my privilege to live where I
+desire. I like to hear fine music, to come in contact with
+intellectuals; to go to plays that are worth while; to read books that
+satisfy my soul. I find such a life in New York. I have no quarrel
+with the man who prefers the silence and loneliness of forests and
+plains. He may be far happier than I. But I do insist that if I let
+him alone, he also should let me alone. Throbbing cities thrill me:
+cities with their glamour, their wonder, their enchantment, their
+dreams of agate and stone, their lofty towers that plunge to the very
+skies and kiss the clouds. I happen to like the innocent laughter in a
+glass of champagne. You may call it wicked hilarity. But the
+Continental manner of living appeals to me. I like the color and
+warmth and fervor of life; and people who drink red wine with their
+meals seem to me to be more cosmopolitan than those who do not. All
+this seems part of the pageant of life to me. I am not provincial, and
+I do not care to be made provincial by unintelligent and unimaginative
+law-makers.
+
+It may be that I am entirely wrong. I do not know. But I do know that
+it seems utterly unreasonable to force me to abstain from wine if I
+wish it, just because there are a few heavy imbibers of whiskey in the
+world. I think it is a far more serious matter to have practically all
+of us law-breakers than to have one-half of one per cent of us
+drunkards.
+
+Let us have done with insincere, inelastic laws, and get back to
+wisdom and truth and sanity.
+
+
+
+
+BOOTLEG
+
+
+[Illustration: John V. A. Weaver noticing the bartender who has been thrown
+out of work by Prohibition.]
+
+JOHN V. A. WEAVER
+
+(With a graceful bow to Don Marquis)
+
+   You heard me! How many times I got to tell you?
+   Them is my words: you leave that girl alone.
+   Leave her alone, you hear? Leave her alone!
+   You think I'll have my son foolin' around
+   A little snippy rat that's all stuck-up,
+   And thinks my son's not good enough for her?
+   "Yeh," that's what Bill says, "Yeh, it's like I say;
+   Ellen is got swell friends up on the Drive;
+   I'm sorry she had to break a date with Fred.
+   But still, you know, the world is changed a lot,
+   And we changed with it. You're about the same,
+   But me--well, I been gettin' right along,
+   And honest, Jack, you see the sense yourself--
+   Why should I let my daughter marry a clerk?"
+
+
+   Can you believe it? Why, I damn near fainted.
+   His daughter too good for the likes of us!
+   Of course I got so mad I couldn't see!
+   Of course I pasted him square in the eye!
+   And if I catch him sayin' things about me
+   I'll knock his stuck-up head off! And I tell you,
+   If you go near the dirty oilcan's place,
+   And crawl around that snippy brat of his,
+   I'll kick you out into the street to stay.
+   You hear that? Eight out in the street you go!
+   The nerve! The dirty, lousy, low-down crook!
+   A Bootleg gettin' stuck-up over money!
+   The world is crazy, that's all there is to it!
+   Crazy, I tell you! All turned upside-down!
+
+   Listen. It's fifteen years I know this Bill.
+   Them good old days, most every afternoon
+   On the way home from the lumber yards I'd drop in
+   And get a beer, and gas around a while.
+   That was my second home, I useta say,
+   And Bill's Place was a home you could be proud of.
+   Say. The old woman never kep' a floor
+   As clean as Bill's was. And the brass spittoons
+   And rail-you could of shaved lookin' in one.
+   And all the glasses polished! And the tables
+   So neat! And over at the free-lunch counter,
+   Charlie the coon with a apron white like chalk,
+   Dishin' out hot-dogs, and them Boston Beans,
+   And Sad'dy nights a great big hot roast ham,
+   Or roast beef simply yellin' to be et,
+   And washed down with a seidel of old Schlitz!
+
+   Oh, say, that sure was fun, and don't forget it.
+   Old Ed, and Tom, and Baldy Frank McGee,
+   And the two Bentleys, we was all the reg'lars.
+   It was our meetin'-place. And there we stood,
+   And Lord! The rows about the government,
+   And arguin! and all about the country,
+   How it was goin' to the dogs. And maybe
+   Somebody'd start a song, and old Pop Dikes
+   Would have to quit the checker-game in the corner
+   That him and Fat Connell was always playin',
+   And never gettin' through. I never seen
+
+   No bums come in and stay for more'n a minute;
+   Bill didn't like to have no drunks around;
+   He made 'em hit the air. Well, some of us,
+   Of course, might get just a wee mite too much
+   Under the belt, but who did that ever hurt?
+   At least we knowed the licker wasn't poison.
+   And when somebody would get very lit
+   Bill was right there to try and make him stop;
+   I can't see how it ever hurt us any.
+
+   And Bill! He was some barkeep! One swell guy!
+   A pleasant word for everybody, always,
+   Straight as a string, and just the whole world's friend.
+   I never saw a guy was liked so much.
+   He hardly took a drink, just a cigar,
+   And oncet a while a pony, say, of lager.
+   And my, the way that bird could tell a story!
+   Why, many a time I laughed until I cried.
+   And if it happened I was out of dough,
+   Bill was right there to make a little loan.
+   Generous, that was Bill, and one good pal.
+   A great old place it was, that place of Bill's.
+   Them was the happy days!-them was the days.
+
+   I never will forget that good-bye party
+   The night that Prohibition was wished on us.
+   You bet it wasn't any rough-house then.
+   We all stood 'round the bar, solemn and quiet,
+   And couldn't hardly think of what to say.
+   Bill--it was funny what had happened to him.
+   He didn't crack a smile the whole blame night.
+   He just would shake his head, and bite his lips,
+   And gosh, the way his eyes was shootin' fire.
+   The last thing that he said before I left,
+   "By God, I'll get back at 'em, you just wait!
+   I'm closing here. But don't you fret--I'll get 'em--
+   The dirty, pussy-footin' lousy skunks!"
+
+
+   I had to go home early. And the next day
+   I seen the wagons comin' to take the bar
+   And all the furniture. I felt like cryin'.
+
+   Well, you know what this prohibition is.
+
+
+   Bill goes away, and stays about three months.
+   And then one day I meets him on the street.
+   "Well, Jack," he says, "You want some real good gin?"
+   "Just what I need," I says. "All right," he says,
+   "You come down to the house at nine o'clock.
+   I'll fix you up. I'll give you half a case
+   Four Bucks a bottle."... "Four a bottle!" I says,
+   Thinkin' he must be kiddin'. "Sure," he says,
+   "I got to make my profit. There's the risk.
+   This is good stuff. I made it by myself.
+   I guarantee that it won't make you sick."
+   "I'm sick already, just from hearin' the price.
+   No thanks. Not now," I says. He says all right,
+   But when I want some, just remember him.
+
+   And so, of course, later I did want some,
+   And had to pay that much, and even more;
+   But hell, what can you do? So long's you're sure
+   The stuff ain't goin' to burn your insides out,
+   You got to pay the price. And all the friends
+   That Bill had useta have is customers,
+
+   And all get stung the same. And dozens more.
+   Them old days Bill was one fine friend for sure,
+   Happy and nice and straight and generous.
+   And now to think he high-brows you and me!
+   A great big house he's got, and a new Packard,
+   And di'monds for his wife, that scrubbed the floors
+   Back in the days when he was only barkeep.
+   That's what this Prohibition done for him,
+   And what's it do for me, I'd like to know?
+   It makes a crook of me, the same as him,
+   Only I'm losin' money, and he gets it.
+   Why, say, I catch myself all of the time
+   Laughin' about this Prohibition law,
+   And figgerin' new ways how I could break it.
+   And that's the way it is with everybody.
+   We get to see that one law is a joke,
+   And think it's smart to bust it all to pieces.
+   And pretty soon there's all the other laws,
+   And how're you goin' to keep from think' likewise
+   About a thing like stealin', and all that?
+   No wonder that we got these here now crime waves!
+   No wonder everybody is a crook!
+
+
+   But that ain't what I'm sayin' to you now!
+   You leave that stuck-up little Jane alone!
+   They's plenty of girls that's pretty in the world--
+   You leave that dirty oilcan's daughter be.
+   Ten years ago she used to run around
+   And rush the can for me and other folks.
+   Now she's a real swell lady! Damn her eyes,
+   And Bill's, and them there pussy-footin' fish!
+   The world is, crazy! And I'm goin' nuts!
+   High-tonin' me! You hear me? If I catch you
+   Foolin' around that girl, I kick you out,
+   So fast you won't know what has ever hit you!
+
+   A bootleg's daughter! Hell!
+
+
+
+
+AND THE PLAYWRIGHT
+
+
+[Illustration: Alexander Woollcott rescuing the Playwright from the awful
+shears of the Censor.]
+
+ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
+
+Every American playwright goes about his work these days oppressed by
+a foreboding. He suspects that before long a censor is going to
+materialize out of thin air to take stern and morose charge of the
+American theatre. It is true that no statutory precipitation of such
+an agent has been definitely proposed. It is true that the policeman
+from the nearest corner has not gone so far as to drop around and warn
+him that he'd better be careful. Nevertheless, he has the foreboding.
+He perceives dimly that a desire to chasten the stage is in the air.
+And he is right. It, is. It has been ever since the war.
+
+Of course an itch to lay hands on the theatre was begetting
+restlessness in the American bosom considerably prior to April 6,
+1917. It is part of this country's Puritan inheritance to believe that
+playgoing is somehow bad, that an enjoyment and patronage of the
+theatre is sinful. This belief flows as an unconscious undercurrent in
+the thought even of those clergymen who try pathetically hard to seem
+and be liberal and unpharisaical, the kind who always begin their
+lectures on Avery Hopwood by saying that they yield to no one in their
+admiration and respect for the many splendid ladies and gentlemen of
+the stage whom they are proud to number among their acquaintances.
+
+Shaw, in his comparatively mild-mannered preface to "The Showing Up
+of Blanco Posnet," recognizes the Puritan hostility to the theatre, but,
+somewhat perversely, ascribes it to the fact that the _promenoirs_
+have always been used as show-windows by the courtesans of each
+generation. I suspect, however, that that hostility was more deeply
+rooted. The Puritans disliked the theatre because it was jolly. It was
+a place where people went in deliberate quest of enjoyment. And you
+weren't supposed to do that on earth. Plenty of time for that later on.
+
+When I was a knee-breeched schoolboy in Philadelphia, some of the more
+dissipated of us used to organize Saturday excursions to Keith's old
+Eighth Street Theatre, a vaudeville temple known to the natives as the
+Buy-Joe. Fortified with a quarter and some sandwiches, one went at
+eleven in the morning and hung on till the edge of midnight. To my
+genuine surprise and confusion, I gathered that some of our classmates
+not only avoided these orgies, but sincerely believed that we, who
+indulged in them were simply courting Hell's fire. They stayed at home
+and, I suppose, read "Elsie Dinsmore."
+
+It so happens that I never encountered that book during my formative
+years, but was in my hopelessly corrupted thirties before ever I saw a
+copy. Even then, it did not lack interest. And one passage, at least,
+richly rewarded a glance through its pages. It seems that Elsie,
+arriving from somewhere, reached some city in the late evening. Her
+father (a rakish, devil-may-care fellow who thought it was all right
+for Elsie to play the piano on Sunday) met her at the station and
+engaged a cabriolet to take her across town to whatever shelter had
+been selected for the night. As they were bowling along one of the
+principal streets, Elsie noticed a building which the author described
+in shuddering accents as having, if I remember correctly, "a lighted
+façade." The tone, if not the precise words of the description, rather
+suggested that here was a gambling hell whose lower circles were
+dedicated to rites of nameless infamy. Elsie shrank back into the
+cloistered shadows of the cab. "Oh, father," she cried in hurt
+bewilderment, "what kind of place was that?" Smitten, apparently, with
+a certain remorse that he had suffered her virginal eyes to reflect so
+scabrous a spot, he put a sheltering arm around her and said, sadly:
+"That, little daughter, was a THEATRE."
+
+At which limp climax, perhaps, you smile a little. But it is well to
+remember that the children who were molded by "Elsie Dinsmore" are now
+grown up and can be detected voting warmly at every election. Many of
+them kicked over the traces long ago, but there are also many who are
+reading Harold Bell Wright today. They admire Henry Ford. They sit
+enthralled at the feet of Dr. John Roach Straton. And, not wryly but
+with undiscouraged faith, they vote away for the Hylans and the
+Hardings of each recurrent crisis. They brought the bootlegger into
+existence and, at a rallying cry lifted by anyone against the theatre,
+they will come scurrying intently from a thousand unsuspected flats
+and two-story houses.
+
+They are the more responsive to such cries since the war. That might
+have been foreseen by any one at all familiar with the psychopathology
+of reform. A cigarette addict who, in a spartan moment, swears off
+smoking, is familiar enough with the inner gnaw that robs him of his
+sleep and roils his dinner for days and days. His body, long
+habituated to the tobacco, had dutifully taken on the business of
+manufacturing its antidote. When the tobacco is abruptly removed, the
+body continues for a while to turn out the antidote as usual and
+during that while, that antidote goes roaming angrily through the
+system, seeking something to oppose and destroy.
+
+A somewhat analogous condition has agitated the body politic ever
+since the late Fall of 1918. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment
+had robbed the prohibitionists of their chief excitement; then the
+signing of the Armistice took away the glamor of public-spiritedness
+from all those good people who had had such a splendid time keeping an
+eye on their presumably treasonable neighbors. Behold, then, the Busy
+Body (which is in every one of us) all dressed up and nowhere to go.
+The itch became tremendous. The moving pictures caught it first. No
+wonder the American playwright is uneasy. He ought to be.
+
+He dreads a censorship of the theatre because he suspects (not without
+reason) that it will be corrupt, that it will work foolishly, and
+that, having taken and relished an inch, it will take an ell.
+
+He is the more uneasy because he realizes that the theatre presents a
+special incitement and a special problem--a problem altogether
+different from that presented by the bookstall, for instance. The
+play, once produced, is open to all the world. It may have been
+written with the thought that it would amuse Franklin P. Adams, but it
+is attended (in a body) by the Unintelligentsia. It may have been
+heavily seasoned in the hope that it would jounce the rough boy of
+Baltimore, H. L. Mencken-and lo, there in the third row on the aisle,
+is Dr. Frank Crane, being made visibly ill by it. Your playwright may
+write a piece to touch the memories and stir the hearts of elderly
+sinners, but he has to face the fact that the girls from Miss Spence's
+school may come fluttering to it, row on row.
+
+On his desk is a seductive two-volume assemblage of "Poetica Erotica,"
+edited by T. R. Smith, the antiquarian. It is a book which, if
+flaunted, would agitate the Postmaster General, stir up the Grand
+Jury, and make the Society for the Suppression of Vice call a special
+mass-meeting. It is managed as a commercial article by a system of
+furtive, semi-private sales which probably enhance its value as a
+source of revenue and yet shut the mouth of the heirs of Anthony
+Comstock. A folder announces that the juicy Satyr icon of Petronius
+Arbiter will shortly issue from the same presses. And so on,
+endlessly. It is a neat arrangement but one which cannot be imitated
+by the playwright. When he wants to be naughty, he must make up his
+mind to being naughty right out on the street-corner where every one
+can see him.
+
+And though, in the moments when he is disposed to temporize, he
+sometimes thinks that suspect plays might, like saucy novels, be first
+inspected in manuscript, he knows full well that no such tactics are
+really feasible in the theatre. Your publisher, inwardly hot with
+resentment, may nevertheless take the occasional precaution of showing
+the script of a thin-ice book to the authorities--even to the
+self-constituted ones--thereby forestalling prosecution by agreeing to
+delete in advance such phrases and incidents as seem likely to agitate
+those authorities unduly. But the flavor and significance of a play
+depends too much on the manner of its performance and cannot be
+clearly forecast prior to that performance any more than the hue of a
+goblet can be guessed before the wine is poured. I can testify to
+that--I, who in my time, have seen players make a minx out of Ophelia,
+a mild-mannered mouse out of Katherine, an honest woman out of Lady
+Macbeth and a benevolent old gentleman out of Shylock. I have seen
+French players cast as the servants of Petruchio invade "The Taming of
+the Shrew" with a comic pantomime in which they fought for their turns
+at the keyhole of Petruchio's bedroom wherein Kate was being subjected
+to a little off-stage taming. It would have amused Shakespeare
+immoderately, I imagine, and certainly it would have surprised him.
+Until his piece is spoken, even the author cannot tell--and
+thereafter, from night to night, he cannot be sure.
+
+That is why there is the quality of an eternal fable in the pathetic
+old tale of the stagehand who had always felt that, if chance would
+ever give him even the smallest of rôles, he would show these actors
+where their shortcomings were. He would not drone out even the least
+important and most perfunctory of speeches. Not he. Into every
+syllable he would pour real meaning, real conviction. At last, after
+twenty years of yearning from the wings, chance did rush him on as an
+understudy. Unfortunately, he was assigned to the role of the page in
+"King John," who must march into the throne-room and announce the
+approach of Philip the Bastard.
+
+So, it seems apparent that any real supervision of the theatre must
+function with relation to produced plays and cannot deal with mere
+unembodied and undetermined manuscripts.
+
+Our playwright's suspicion that such supervision, if managed by a
+politically appointed censor, would work foolishly, are justified by
+all he has heard of such functionaries as they have worked in other
+fields and in other lands. This was true of the gag which the doughty
+Brieux finally pried off the mouth of the French playwright. It has
+certainly been true of the mild and intermittent discipline to which
+the remote and slightly puzzled Lord Chamberlain has subjected the
+English dramatists. Indeed, when their mutinous mutterings finally
+jogged Parliament into inspecting his activities, the Lord Chamberlain
+was somewhat taken aback by the tactics of Shaw, who, instead of
+hissing him for forbidding public performances of certain Shaw and
+Ibsen plays, derided and denounced him instead for the plays he had
+_not_ suppressed. And indeed, for every play which the Lord
+Chamberlain has suppressed, the old playgoer of London could point to
+five which, had he been more intelligent, he might more reasonably
+have suppressed in its place.
+
+But after all those scuffles on the Strand do seem part of the strange
+customs of a fusty-dusty never-never land. So our American playwright
+turns, instead, to the purifications effected nearer home. He looks
+apprehensively into the matter of the movies. As an occasional
+scenario writer, he has been instructed by bulletins sent out for his
+guidance, little watch-your-step leaflets which list the alterations
+ordered in earlier pictures by the august Motion Picture Commission of
+the State of New York. Most of them are fussy little disapprovals of
+language used in the titles. You mustn't say: "I shall kill Lester
+Crope." Better say: "I shall destroy the false Lester Crope" or
+something like that. You mustn't say "roué." You mustn't say: "I don't
+like that rich old roué hanging around you." Better say: "I don't like
+that rich old sport." And when, in a moment of self-indulgence, a
+title-writer allowed himself the luxury of writing "In a moment of
+madness, I wronged a woman," the Censor seems to have turned scarlet
+and issued the following order: "Substitute for 'wronged' the word
+'offended' or something similar."
+
+"Or something similar." Somehow, that seems to recall an old "Spanish
+for Beginners" textbook which bade me not bother with the "tutoyer"
+business as it would not be needed during my travels in Spain, unless
+I married there "or something similar."
+
+At all events, no playwright can be scoffed at as an alarmist who
+ventures to fear that a censorship of the drama will, in practice, be
+foolish. At the thought of such frivolous and fatuous blue-pencillings
+of his next drama (which is to be his master-piece, by the way) our
+playwright becomes profoundly depressed and every time he goes out to
+dinner or finds himself with a small, cornered audience at the club,
+he winds up the talk on this bugaboo of his.
+
+Out of the resulting prattle, two widespread impressions always come
+to the top, two familiar comments on the subject which, whenever
+questionable plays are mentioned, seem to emerge as regularly and as
+automatically as does the applause which follows the rendition of
+Dixie by any restaurant orchestra in New York. Both comments are
+absurd.
+
+One comes from the man who can be counted on to say: "They tell me
+that show at the Eltinge--What's it called? 'Tickling Tottie's
+Tummy?'--well, they say it's pretty raw. Certainly does beat all how
+there are some men who just have to see a show soon's they hear it's
+smutty. I can't understand it."
+
+This might be called the Comment Ingenuous. A man who never fails to
+edge into any group whence the bent head and the hoarse chuckle tells
+him that a shady story is on, a man who would have to think hard to
+name a friend of his to whom he would not rush with the latest
+scandalous anecdote brought in by the drummers from Utica--such a man
+will, nevertheless, express a pious surprise when the crowds flock to
+see the latest Hopwood farce just because it is advertised as
+indecorous. It is not known why he is surprised.
+
+Or, if he is not surprised, then he falls over backward and makes the
+Comment Cynical. When he hears that "Under Betty's Bolster" is making
+a fortune while "The Grey Iconoclast" is playing to empty benches next
+door, he gives a sardonic little laugh (which he reserves for just
+such occasions) and says: "Of course. You might have known. Old
+Channing Pollock was right when he said: 'Nothing risqué, nothing
+gained.' Don't the smutty shows always make money? Doesn't the public
+invariably stampede to the most bedridden plays? Isn't the
+pornographic play the most valuable of all theatrical properties?"
+
+To which rhetorical questions, the answer in each case, as it happens,
+is "No." The blush is not, of course, a bad sign in the box-office.
+But the chuckle of recognition is a better one. So is the glow of
+sentiment. So is the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the scandalous
+have a smaller and less active market than homely humor, for instance,
+or melodramatic excitement or pretty sentiment. When "Aphrodite" was
+brought here from Paris, it was, for various reasons, impossible to
+recapture for the translated dramatization the flavor of abnormal
+eroticism which lent the book a certain phosphorescent glow at home.
+So its producers relied on lots and lots of nudity to give it réclame
+here. At this the Hearst papers did some rather pointed blushing and
+the next morning, there was a grand scrimmage at the box-office and
+seats were hawked about for grotesque prices. Whereupon the Comment
+Cynical could be heard on all sides. But when at the end of the season
+or so later, "Aphrodite" was withdrawn with a shortage of a hundred
+and ninety thousand dollars or so on its books, the Cynics were too
+engrossed with some other play to mention the fact. To be sure that
+shortage was more than made up next season on the road, but it ought
+to be mentioned that "Aphrodite" knew the indignity of many and many
+an empty row in New York.
+
+The great fortunes, as a matter of fact, are made with plays like "Peg
+o' My Heart" and "The First Year," both as pure as the driven snow. It
+is true that Avery Hopwood has grown rich on his royalties. But not so
+rich as Winchell Smith, who has dealt exclusively with sweetness and
+light. Also those who laugh most caustically over the Hopwood estate
+usually find it convenient to ignore the fact that the greatest single
+contribution to it has been made by "The Bat," at which Dr. Straton
+might conceivably faint from excitement but at which he would have to
+work pretty hard to do any blushing.
+
+So much for the familiar catch-words and their validity. A little
+discouraged by the fatuity of all lay discussion, our playwright may
+be pictured as retreating to the clubrooms of the American Dramatists
+and there finding his fellow-craftsmen all busy as bees on scenarios
+overflowing with not particularly original sin. They are turning them
+out hurriedly with an "After-me-the-deluge" gleam in their haunted
+eyes. Some such despairing courtship of disaster may be needed to
+explain the jostling procession of harlots which marked the American
+Drama in the season of 1921-1922. An unprecedentedly large percentage
+of the heroines had either just been ruined (or were just about to be
+ruined) as the first curtain rose. Also the plays wallowed in a
+defiant squalor of language which, five years before, would have
+called out the reserves.
+
+The privilege to indulge in such didos is not, as a matter of fact,
+especially dear to them. They do not really prize unduly the right to
+use the word "slut" once in every act. They can even bear up whenever
+a law forbids disrobing on the stage. They know that most pruriency in
+the theatre derives from the old frustrations sealed up and festering
+in the mind of the onlooker who detects it. They suspect, from what
+little reading they have managed in the psychology of outlets, that
+the more mock-raping there is done on the stage of the local opera
+house, the less real raping will be done on the greensward of the
+nearest park. But they know, too, that the force of modesty is one of
+the strongest and most ancient instincts of civilized man, that
+probably it is a sound and healthy one, inextricably involved in the
+race's instinct of self-preservation and self-perpetuation. Anyway,
+they feel that the discussion draws them into matters unarguable.
+
+They dread a Censor most for fear his appetite will grow by what it
+feeds on. They know that the Lord Chamberlain began by exorcising
+obscenity from the English theatre and ended by banning so fiercely
+Puritanical a play as "Mrs. Warren's Profession" because it admitted
+the existence of brothel-keeping as a business and by shutting up such
+innocent merriment as "The Mikado" because its jocularity might offend
+the (at the moment) dear Japanese.
+
+Most American playwrights would derive a certain enjoyment from
+watching a posse of citizens in wrathful pursuit of one of those
+theatrical managers who are big brothers to the trembling crones that
+totter up to you on the _Boulevard des Italiens_ and try to sell
+you a few obscene postal-cards. But most American playwrights would
+feel a genuine apprehension lest such a posse, confused in its values
+and its mission, might then turn and lock up Eugene O'Neill because of
+the rough talk that lends veracity to "The Hairy Ape" or because of
+the steady scrutiny which has the effect of stripping naked the
+unhappy creatures of his play called "Diff'rent."
+
+They would be perfectly willing to co-operate with a State official
+appointed to prevent the use of naughty words on the American stage,
+but they darkly suspect that he would then require every heroine to
+bring a letter from her pastor and would end by interfering with all
+plays which suggested, for instance, that government had been known,
+from time to time, to prove corrupt, wealth to become oppressive and
+law, on rare occasions, to seem just a wee bit unjust. They are minded
+to resist any supervision of the theatre's manners for fear it might
+shackle in time the theatre's thought. Today or tomorrow they may be
+seen temporizing or at least negotiating with the forces of
+suppression in any community, but they are really seeking all the time
+to frustrate those forces. And will so seek ever and always, law or no
+law. It was just such frustration they were seeking when after a
+season of ruined heroines (and ruined managers) they all gravely sat
+down in April, 1922, and drew up a panel of 300 pure-minded citizens
+from which a jury could be called to pass on any play complained of.
+
+And they have the comfort of knowing that any such supervision, today
+or tomorrow, legalized or roundabout, mild or incessant, is bound to
+be superficial, spasmodic and largely formal. They know that in the
+long run the theatre in each day and community, will manage somehow to
+express the taste of that day and community. They know that it is
+among the sweet revenges of life that the o'er-leaping censor always
+defeats himself.
+
+They derive a curious comfort from the story of the reviewer for a
+Boston journal who once described a musician as remaining seated
+through a concert in the pensive attitude of Buddha contemplating his
+navel. It is a story within whose implications lies all that has ever
+been said, or ever will be said, about censorship. The copy-readers
+and make-up men, it seems, could see nothing especially infamous in
+their reviewer's little simile. As poor George Sampson said of the
+outraged Mrs. Wilfer's under-petticoat: "We know it's there." At all
+events, the offending word passed all the sentries and was printed as
+written, when, too late, it caught the horrified eye of the
+proprietor. At the sight of so crassly physical a term in the chaste
+columns of his own paper, he rushed to the telephone at the club and
+called up the managing editor. That word must come out. But the paper
+was already on the presses. Even as they spoke, these were whirling
+out copy after copy. Too late to reset? Yes, much too late. But was
+there not still some remedy which would keep at least part of the
+edition free from that dreadful word? Wasn't it still possible to rout
+out the type at that point, to chisel the word away and leave a blank?
+Yes, that was possible. So the presses were halted, the one word was
+scraped out, the presses whirred again and the review, with a gape in
+the line, went up and down Beacon Street. Whereat Boston that night
+shook with a mighty laughter--the contented laughter of the
+unregenerate.
+
+
+
+
+THE ORACLE THAT ALWAYS SAYS "NO"
+
+
+[Illustration: The Periscope of the Author of the Mirrors of Washington
+is turned toward the Great Negative Oracle.]
+
+THE AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON"
+
+Has anyone ever stopped to think what the nonsenseorship would do to
+our suppressed desires? A little while ago suppressed desires were
+one's own affair. One fondled them in the skeleton closet of his
+consciousness and was as proud of them as anyone with a haunted house
+is of his right, title and interest in a ghost.
+
+They proved to him that though he went to church on Sunday and was
+respectably married to only one woman, he was really beneath his
+correct exterior a whale of a fellow, who might have been, had he but
+let himself go, a Casanova or at least a Byron. He patted himself on
+the back for keeping unruly instincts in subjection. He applauded
+himself for what he might be and for what he was. He got it coming and
+going. It was a pleasant age.
+
+But now is he permitted to have his own secret museum of virility? I
+speak only of the sex which has my deepest sympathy.
+
+No. The nonsenseorship regards him with suspicion. He must go and have
+even that part of him which lies below the level of his consciousness
+dragged forth by experts in the interests of society, and if there is
+anything hidden in him which might not be exhibited on the movie
+screens, he must have it sublimated. He cannot even have suppressed
+desires. He cannot be a devil of a fellow even to himself. He cannot
+be his own censor any longer, he must submit himself to outside
+censoring, to the nonsenseorship.
+
+It all came about this way. First to establish divine right somewhere
+in modern government, the doctrine was set up that the public mind was
+infallible. Thereafter, naturally, attention centered on the public
+mind. What was it that it had this wonderful quality of always being
+right? Experience showed that it was not a thinking mind. Since it was
+not, then the thinking mind was anti-social.
+
+Then our very best American philosophers, and some French ones, for
+the support of mass opinion, developed a system which set forth that
+reason always led you into traps and that the only mind to trust was
+the irrational, instinctive or intuitional mind. Thus the
+nonsenseorship, with excellent philosophic support put the ban upon
+thinking. Now, I do not contend that many suffer seriously from this
+restriction. For, after all, thinking is hard work and may cheerfully
+be foregone in the general interest.
+
+But does the nonsenseorship rest content with its achievement? If the
+instinctive part of us is so important, let us have a look at it, says
+society; perhaps something anti-social may be unearthed there. A
+Viennese explores this area of the mind. He discovers what society
+would forbid, merely hidden away. Civilization has merely pressed it
+into dark corners, as the law has crowded the blackjack artist into
+alleys and dens of thieves. The psychic police are put on our trail.
+They must nab every suppressed desire and send it to the reform school
+for re-education into something beautiful and serviceable. We may not
+be unhappy, neurotic, mad; our complexes must be inspected. We must
+suppress our reason, we may not suppress our desire; the
+nonsenseorship says so, and to persuade us, its experts offer us the
+reward of health and greater usefulness if we make this further
+surrender.
+
+Now, although as I have said we let reason go at the behest of the
+nonsenseorship without so much as a word of protest, we do not give up
+our suppressed desires so easily and without a fight.
+
+As a result we see the nonsenseorship in a new light. We feel it more
+keenly now than ever before. It is revealed as the Procrustean bed
+which cramps us up until we ache inside. If there is anything the
+matter with us, if we are introverted, introspective, neurotic,
+complicated, have too much ego or too little ego, are dyspeptic, sick,
+sore, inhibited, regressive, defeated or too successful, unhappy,
+cruel or too kind, if we differ ever so slightly from the enforced
+average, it is because censorship presses upon us. And the cure for
+censorship is more censorship. Have your psychic insides censored; if
+you would be a perfect 36 mentally and morally, with the Hart,
+Schaffner & Marxed soul which modern society wills that you shall
+have, conform not only without but within, and be "splendidly null"! I
+think it is the sudden realization that just a little more of
+individuality, our hidden individuality, is threatened, which makes
+the nonsenseorship irk us now as it never did before.
+
+The race has always had it, but in the beginning it was a crude and
+simple thing, troubling itself only with externals. A woman whose
+official duty it is to look after the virtue of the movies in
+Pennsylvania or Ohio, will not permit on the screen any suggestion
+that there is a physiological relation between a mother and a child.
+This method of protecting the race has its roots back in the primitive
+mind of mankind. When men really did not understand how children came
+about, births were catastrophic. A woman at a certain moment had to
+disappear into the wilderness; she came back having found a baby under
+a cabbage leaf. Any contact with her while she was making her
+discovery might bring pestilence and death to the tribe.
+
+We still believe in the pestilence even if we no longer have faith in
+the cabbage leaf. The lady censor of Ohio or Pennsylvania is the tribe
+driving the pregnant woman into the wilderness. On the whole the tribe
+did it better than we do; it only removed the offender and the mental
+life of the little community went on just as before. We keep the
+offender amongst us and close our minds. Our simple ancestors covered
+no more with the fig leaf than they thought it necessary to hide; we
+wear the fig leaf over our eyes: that is the nonsenseorship.
+
+Mr. Griffith recently brought out a cinema spectacle called "Orphans
+in the Storm," which presented many scenes from the French Revolution.
+Now it was not long ago that we Americans were all rather proud of the
+French Revolution. We had had a revolution of our own and we thought
+with satisfaction that the French had caught theirs from us. We were
+as pleased about it as the little boy is when the neighbor's little
+boy catches the mumps from him. He sees an enlargement of his ego in
+the swollen neck of his playmate.
+
+All that is changed now. Mr. Griffith picturing the triumphant mob in
+Paris had to fill his screens with preachments against Bolshevism,
+which had as much to do with his subject as captions about the rape of
+the Sabine woman would have had to do with it. It is as if the little
+boy had been taught to believe that by never saying the word mumps, he
+could save his playmate from tumefying glands.
+
+Soon some committee of morons which attends to the keeping of our
+intellects on the level with their own will exclude from the schools
+all histories which contain the words "the American Revolution." We
+must call it the War for American Independence. That is putting the
+fig leaf over our eyes. That is the nonsenseorship.
+
+But before we decide whether or not we shall refuse to yield up our
+suppressed desires as we have surrendered our reason to it, with the
+approval of our leading philosopher, Mr. William James, let us
+consider some of the advantages of the nonsenseorship. Perhaps it will
+prove worth while to give up this little internal privilege.
+
+First there is the simplicity of consulting the so-called public mind.
+The favorite aphorism of the politician and his friend and spokesman
+the editor is: "The public is always right upon a moral issue." This
+means that if the politician or the propagandist can present a
+question to the people in such a way that he can win his end by having
+the public respond in the negative, he is sure of success. It is as if
+society depended for its guidance upon the word of an oracle, a great
+stone image, out of which the priests had only succeeded in producing
+one response, a sound very much like, "No." The trick would consist of
+so framing your question that the word "no" would give you approval
+for your designs. That is the art of laying before the public a "moral
+issue" upon which it is inevitably right.
+
+Suppose, in a society ruled by the stone image, you wanted to make war
+upon your neighbor. You would frame your question thus: "Shall we
+stand by idly and pusillanimously while our neighbor invades our land
+and rapes our women?" This is a moral issue of the deepest sanctity.
+You would present it. The priests would do their little something
+somewhere out of sight. From the great stone image would come a bellow
+which resembled "No." You would have won on a moral issue and would
+then be licensed to invade your neighbor's territory and rape his
+women.
+
+Now you will perceive certain advantages in an oracle which can only
+say one word. You know in advance what its answer will be. Suppose the
+great stone image could have said either "yes" or "no." Suppose its
+answer had been "yes" to your righteous question? It would have been
+embarrassing. You could no longer say with such perfect confidence,
+"It is always right upon a moral issue."
+
+Suppose you were capital and you desired to reduce wages. You would
+not go to the temple and say, "Shall we reduce wages?" That would not
+be a moral issue upon which the answer would be right. You would ask,
+"Shall we tamely acquiesce while the labor unions import the Russian
+revolution into our very midst?" The great stone voice always to be
+trusted on moral issues would thunder, "No."
+
+Or suppose you were labor; for my oracle is even-handed--and you
+wished to extend your organization--you would go to the temple and
+propound the inquiry, "Shall we be eaten alive by the war profiteers?"
+The always moral voice would at least whisper "No"
+
+It will be observed that in consulting the oracle whose answer is
+known in advance, the only skill required consists in so framing the
+question that you will get a louder roar of "no" than the other side
+can with its question. If you can always do this you can say with
+perfect confidence that old granite lungs "is always right upon a
+moral issue."
+
+That is the art of being a great popular leader.
+
+Would anyone exchange a voice like that as a ruler for the wisdom of
+the world's ten wisest men? We laugh at the Greeks for their practice
+of consulting the oracle at Delphi and rightly, for our oracle beats
+theirs which used to hedge in its answers and leave them in doubt.
+Ours never equivocates; we know its answer beforehand, for the public
+mind is compounded of prejudices, fears, herd instincts, youthful
+hatred of novelty, all easily calculable.
+
+It has been my duty for many years to tell what public opinion is on
+many subjects. My method, more or less unconscious, has been to say to
+myself, "The public is made up largely of the unthinking. Such and
+such misinformation has been presented to it. Such and such prejudices
+and fears have been aroused. Its answer is invariably negative. The
+result is so and so." It is thus that judges of public opinion
+invariably proceed. They do not find the popular will reflected in the
+newspapers. They know it as a chemist knows a reaction, from
+familiarity with the elements combined. At least such a mind is highly
+convenient.
+
+And after all who does make the best censor, or nonsenseor or whatever
+you choose to call it? Was it not written, "The child is censor to the
+man?" Well, if it was not it ought to have been, and it is now.
+Consider the child as it arrives in the family. Forthwith there is not
+merely the One Subject which may never be mentioned. There are a
+hundred subjects. A guard is upon the lips. The little ears must be
+kept pure.
+
+Now, when we set up the establishment of democracy we did take a child
+into our household. I have discussed elsewhere [Footnote: Chapter V,
+_Behind the Mirrors_] the parentage of this infant born of
+Rousseau and Thérèse, his moron mistress. The public mind is a child
+mind because in the first place the mob mind of men is primitive,
+youthful and undeveloped, and again because by the wide diffusion of
+primary instruction, we have steadily increased the number of persons
+with less than adult mentality who contribute to the forming of public
+opinion. In the nature of the case, fifty per cent. of the public must
+be sub-normal, that is, youthful mentality. We have reached down to
+the level of nonsense for our guide. That is why we call it in this
+book the nonsenseorship.
+
+Every one who has watched the growth of a child's vocabulary has
+observed that it learns to say "no," many months, perhaps more than a
+year, before it ever says "yes." An infant which took to saying "yes"
+before it did "no" would violate all precedents, would scandalize its
+parents, and would grow up to be a revolutionist. It would have an
+attitude toward life with which men should not be born and which
+parents and society would find subversive. On the instinct for saying
+"no" rests all our institutions, from the family to the state. It
+should exhibit itself early and become a confirmed habit before the
+dangerous "yes" emerges.
+
+Besides, the child needs to say "no" long before it needs to say
+"yes." Foolish parents feed it mentally as they feed it physically,
+out of a bottle. If it had not its automatic facility of
+regurgitation, both mental and physical, it would suffer from
+excesses. Its "no" is its mental throwing up.
+
+The public mind is still in the no-saying, the mental regurgitative
+stage. But is not that ideal for the nonsenseorship? Does a censor
+ever have need of any other word but "no"?
+
+I have now established the convenience of an oracle whose answer "no"
+can always be foreseen; and the fitness of the child mind for saying
+"no," as well as the perfect adaptation of the single word vocabulary
+to the purposes of the nonsenseorship.
+
+One of the important ends which a "no" always serves is maintaining
+the _status quo_. We all cling precariously to a whirling planet.
+We hate change for fear of somehow being spilled off into space. The
+nonsenseorship of the child mind is splendidly conservative. The baby
+in the habit of receiving its bottle from its nurse will go hungry
+rather than take it from its mother or father. Gilbert was wrong.
+Every child is not born a little radical or a little conservative.
+
+Reaching down for the child mind in society, with some misgivings, we
+have been delighted to find it the strongest force making for
+stability. An amusing thing happened when Mr. Hearst some years ago
+sought readers in a lower level of intelligence than any journalist
+had till then explored. To interest the child mind he employed the old
+device of pictures, his favorite illustration portraying the
+Plunderbund. Now, persons who thought the cartoon of the Plunderbund
+looked like themselves, viewed the experiment with alarm. But Mr.
+Hearst was right. He proved to be as he said he was, "our greatest
+conservative force." The surest guardians of our morals and of our
+social order are precisely Mr. Hearst's readers, who learned the
+alphabet spelling out P-L-U-N-D-E-R-B-U-N-D. They watch keenly and
+with reprobation in Mr. Hearst's press our slightest divagations.
+
+De Gourmont, writing of education, asks: "Is it necessary to cultivate
+at such pains in the minds of the young, hatred of what is new?" And
+he says it is done only because the teacher naturally hates everything
+that has come into the world since he won his diploma. But no; De
+Gourmont is mistaken. It is because we teach the young what it is
+socially beneficial that they should learn, having regard also for
+their aversion to novelty, to the bottle from any other than the
+accustomed hands.
+
+And we find in the child mind--and foster it by education--"the will
+to believe," that great American virtue. It requires an immense "will
+to believe" to grow up in the family and in society, looking at the
+elders and at all that is established, and accepting all the
+information that mankind has slowly accumulated and which teachers
+patiently offer. If the young once doubted, once thought--but
+unfortunately they do not! Anyway, we do find in the child mind, which
+forms the nonsenseorship, the "will to believe,"--of immense social
+utility.
+
+Now, the "will to believe"--like teeth which decay if not used upon
+hard food, or muscles which grow flabby if they have not hard work to
+perform--must be given something for its proper exercise. In a chapter
+on "The Duty of Lying," in his brilliant book _Disenchantment_,
+Mr. C. E. Montague shows what may be done with "the will to believe,"
+developed as it has at last been. "During the war the art of
+Propaganda was little more than born." In the next war, "the whole sky
+would be darkened with flights of tactical lies, so dense that the
+enemy would fight in a veritable 'fog of war' darker than London's own
+November brews, and the world would feel that not only the Angel of
+Death was abroad, but the Angel of Delusion too, and would hear the
+beating of two pairs of wings." And what may be done with the "will to
+believe" in time of war has immense lessons for the days of peace. A
+British Tommy, quoted by Mr. Montague, summed the moral advantages up:
+"They tell me we've pulled through at last all right because our
+propergander dished up better lies than what the Germans did. So I say
+to myself: 'If tellin' lies is all that bloody good in war, what
+bloody good is tellin' truth in peace?'" What "bloody good" is it,
+when you have ready to hand the well-trained "will to believe," which
+those who censored reason for its social disutility set up as the most
+serviceable attribute of the human mind?
+
+I think I have written enough to prove that the child mind at the
+bottom of nonsenseorship is the effective base of stability. But the
+heart of man desires also permanency. Is there reasonable assurance
+that we shall always be able to keep the guiding principles of our
+national life, the nonsenseorship, a child mind?
+
+It is true that we have reached as far down, through our press and
+through our public men, to the levels of the low I. Q. as it is
+practicable to go, until we grant actual children and not merely
+mental children an even larger share than they now have in the forming
+of public opinion; for this is, as you know, "the age of the child."
+
+And no great further advance is likely to be made in the mechanical
+means of uniting the whole 100,000,000 people of this country in a
+24-hour a day, 365 days a year, mass meeting. The cheap newspaper, the
+moving picture, instant telegraphic bulletin going everywhere, the
+broadcasting wireless telephone, and the Ford car, have accomplished
+all that can be hoped toward giving the widely-scattered population
+the responsiveness of a mob.
+
+But though perhaps we may never lower the I. Q. of the nonsenseorship,
+no further triumphs being possible in that direction, there is no
+reason why education, what we call "creating an enlightened public
+opinion," should not always maintain for us the child mind as it now
+is with all its manifold advantages.
+
+Somewhere in Bartlett there is, or ought to be, a quotation which
+reads like this: "The god who always finds us young and always keeps
+us so." That is education; it always finds us young and always keeps
+us so.
+
+It catches us when our minds are merely acquisitive, storing up
+impressions and information; and it prolongs that period of
+acquisition to maturity by always throwing facts in our way. Its
+purpose is not to "sow doubts," far from it, for that would have for
+its ideal mere intelligence and not social usefulness. It develops
+instead the "will to believe," and this serves the needs of the
+propagandists, who, as Mr. Will H. Hayes is reported to have said of
+the movies, "shake the rattle which keeps the American child amused so
+that it forgets its aches and pains." We may safely trust education to
+keep the American mind infantile, merely acquisitive and not critical.
+And thus the nonsenseorship seems sure to be perpetuated, and we reach
+the ideal of all the ages, society in its permanent and final form.
+Here we are, here we may rest.
+
+These considerations persuade me at least that we should make the
+utmost sacrifices for so perfect a social means as we now have. Let
+the nonsenseorship invade the secret closets of our personality and
+rummage out our most cherished suppressed desires. Let us have nothing
+that we may call our own. For my part, I shall spend the proceeds of
+this article upon one of the new social police, a psycho-analyst.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Nonsenseorship, by G. G. Putnam
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NONSENSEORSHIP ***
+
+This file should be named nsnss10.txt or nsnss10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, nsnss11.txt
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