Title: The Forum - October 1914
Author: Various
Language: English
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THE FORUM

FOR OCTOBER 1914



THE WAR

CHARLES VALE


In each of the nations now engaged in the European conflict, a large
number of people of all classes—the vast majority of people of all
classes—did not want war, and would have done all in their power to
avert it: for they knew, more or less completely, the price of war;
and they knew also, more or less completely, in spite of the
inadequacy of all the churches through all the centuries, that war
cannot possibly be reconciled with Christianity, with civilization,
with humanity, decency, and the most rudimentary common sense. But
when hostilities had actually been commenced, each of the nations was
practically a unit with regard to the prosecution of the war to its
final and terrible conclusion. With the exception of a few
professional agitators or eccentric fanatics, who have gleaned scant
sympathy for their antics, every citizen or subject of each country
has placed implicit faith in the justice of the nation’s cause and has
been prepared to give, ungrudgingly, the last full measure of
devotion. Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and all the great
and small oversea commonwealths, colonies and dominions of Great
Britain have come forward in the time of stress to offer new strength
to the United Kingdom and new pledges of a United Empire. In the
Fatherland, every man and woman has accepted the issue as inevitable,
has held the cause of Kaiser and country as sacred and supreme, and
has shrunk from no sacrifice to ensure the fulfilment of the
long-cherished dream of victory, security and expansion. In France,
where the ghosts of the dead that von Moltke required have not yet
ceased to walk o’ nights, (they will have new companionship now), there
is no doubt in the mind of man, woman or child that _la Patrie_ is
waging a holy war for liberty and honor against the ruthless
aggression of an arrogant and pitiless foe. In Russia, Austria,
Servia, and whatever countries may have been dragged into the vortex
week by week, there is a similar spirit, a similar belief in the
justice of the national cause and the calculated injustice of the
enemy’s plans. And in Belgium, always the victim of her unneighborly
neighbors’ feuds, a people dedicated to peace has been flung into the
hell of butchery and flames. Verily, Macbeth hath murther’d sleep!

In these United States, there has been little attempt to transcend
race-limitations, so far as concerns the aliens within our borders,
and those hyphenated-Americans who have rushed with virulence into a
wordy warfare, intent, not on establishing the truth, but on giving
publicity, _ad nauseam_, to their own special, and specially
obnoxious, prejudices. The American nation, and every individual in
it, has a clear right to hold and express a definite opinion: but it
must be an opinion formed in conformity with the American character
and the American freedom from entanglements of inherited and
unreasoned bias. No other opinion is worth, here and now, a moment’s
consideration; and no other opinion should dare to voice itself in
this country, which has ties with almost all the peoples of the
world—ties of blood and friendship, but not of bloodshed and
hysteria.

America alone, of the great Powers of the world, is in a position to
exercise free and calm reflection and to form a free and just
judgment. The value of her decision has already been made manifest,
through the efforts of every country involved in the war to influence
American sentiment and gain American good will. A peculiar
responsibility therefore rests upon us to avoid the banalities of the
various special pleaders, and to form our judgment soberly and in good
faith, nothing extenuating, and setting down naught in malice. And one
of the first thoughts that should occur to us, one of the most
significant and pregnant thoughts, is that which I have expressed in
my first paragraph. Europe is a house divided against itself: but each
nation in Europe has proclaimed the sanctity of its cause; each nation
conceives that it has, or is entitled to have, the special protection
of Providence; each nation is sending its men to death and claiming
patient sacrifice from its women.

What does this mean? Is there such little sense of logic in the world
that it is impossible to distinguish right from wrong, so that nation
may rise against nation, each convinced of its own probity, and each
unable to attribute anything but evil motives to its adversaries? Can
self-delusion be carried so far that black and white exchange values
according to the chances of birth and environment? Have Christianity
and civilization achieved this remarkable result, that the peoples of
the world are like quarrelsome children in a disorderly nursery?

It is very clear that the world’s sense of logic must rank with the
world’s sense of humor, when presumably learned professors, unchecked
and unridiculed, take nationalism and egoism as the premises of their
argument and from them deduce, with great skill, obvious nonsense. The
lesson of incompetence and shallowness is driven home when baseless
rumors from one half of Europe are countered with fantastic inventions
fabricated by our alien patriots for the purpose of influencing public
opinion. It is the old appeal of ignorance and stupidity to ignorance
and stupidity, and the American public will not greatly appreciate the
poor compliment that has been paid to it.

As an aid to impartiality and quiet thinking, let us first retrace the
immediate and superficial causes of the war. Austria, dismayed and
incensed by the murder of the heir to the throne at Serajevo on June
28, and considering the murder as the culmination of long-continued
Servian scheming and enmity, delivered to Servia an ultimatum so
framed that no nation, however small in territory or in courage, could
possibly have accepted it without reservations. The Servian reply went
to the extreme limits of concession, and an understanding should
easily have been reached on that basis. Austria, however, was
apparently resolved upon Servia’s abject submission, or upon war. She
refused to accept the reply as in any way satisfactory, and opened
hostilities.

It is clear, then, that Austria was primarily responsible for the
actual commencement of the conflagration. Undoubtedly she had
provocation, of the kind that stirs tremendously the sentiment of the
nation involved, but is less easily understood in its full intensity
by those at a distance. But the point that should be particularly
noticed is that a country which was temporarily excited beyond all
self-control should have been able to take the initiative and plunge
Europe into war. And it should be remembered that Austria’s resentment
toward Servia was scarcely greater than the resentment of the Serbs
toward the nation that had violated the Treaty of Berlin and
permanently appropriated Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet, in rebuttal, Austria
might well assert that she had a vested interest in the provinces to
which, in a score or so of years, she had given prosperity unsurpassed
in southeastern Europe, in place of the anarchy and ruin entailed by
four centuries of misrule, and civil and religious faction-conflicts.

The first step taken, the next was assured. Austria knew perfectly
well that Russia, the protagonist in that drama of Pan-Slavism of
which several scenes have already been presented, would take immediate
steps in accordance with her rôle, and repeat her lines so sonorously
that they would echo throughout the continent. But the Dual Monarchy,
wounded and embittered, did not care: she could see before her, at the
worst, no harsher fate than she would have to face, without external
war, in a few years, or perhaps months. Only war, it seemed, could
save the dynasty from destruction and the aggregation of races from
dissolution. Relying upon the immediate help of Germany, and the
ultimate assistance of Italy (her traditional foe, but technical
ally), she refused to draw back or to temporise.

In discussing the attitude of Germany, and the action of the Kaiser,
it is necessary to make full allowance for the strength and sincerity
of the German foreboding, for many a year, that the clash between Slav
and Teuton was bound to come sooner or later. The Russian forces were
being massed ostensibly to prevent Austria from coercing Servia. As
Austria had provoked the outbreak of hostilities, should she have been
left to take the consequences? Would Russia, after eliminating Franz
Josef’s heterogeneous empire, have resisted the temptation to claim
France’s help in the congenial task of humbling Germany? The situation
was not without its subtleties, after Austria had made the first
decisive move. But under what circumstances did Austria make that
move? Was she encouraged by the assurance of German coöperation?

The point to be particularly noted is that Germany, as the ally of
Austria, was entitled to full warning of any step that would make war
inevitable. Did Austria give that warning? If not, why not? Is the
Kaiser a weakling, to be ordered hither and thither at the whim of
Franz Josef? The assumption will find few supporters. Yet it is quite
clear that the Kaiser either knew and approved of the substance and
purpose of Austria’s ultimatum, or—_mirabile dictu_—was willing to
forgive the incredible slight of being totally ignored, and commit his
country and his army to the support of an act of aggression with
regard to which he had not even been consulted.

Carefully leaving the horns of this dilemma for the self-impalement of
any too-ardent enthusiast who may wish to run without reading, we pass
on to France, compelled, by the terms of her understanding with
Russia, to take her place in the firing line. Without entering into
the ultra-refinements of politics and discussing the question whether
France, or any other country, would have paid for present neutrality
and the violation of solemn engagements by subsequently being devoured
in detail, or reduced to vassalage, by a victory-swollen Germany, we
may point out that an alliance entered into primarily to safeguard the
peace of Europe and the balance of power has been the means of
dragging France into a war with which she had no direct concern. Such
is the irony of protective diplomacy!

Great Britain has rested her case on the publication, without comment,
of the whole of the diplomatic exchanges that preceded her own
intervention after the violation of the neutrality of Belgium. Her
claim that she exerted her influence until the final moment in the
interests of peace is sustained beyond cavil: but the point to be
remembered particularly is whether a more decisive and uncompromising
attitude at an earlier stage would not have been preferable. Germany
would then have had no doubt as to Great Britain’s final alignment,
and with a kindly word from Italy that neutrality was the best that
could be expected from her, a reconsideration of the whole position
might have been forced before the final, fatal moments had passed, and
were irrevocable.

It is unnecessary to prolong this cursory review of immediate causes
and conditions, nor does it greatly matter how the positions of the
different countries have been stated. The mood of a moment may add or
subtract a little coloring, without changing the fundamental facts.
But is it possible for any man, however impartial he may desire to be,
to state those facts now, accurately, clearly, and in such relation
and sequence that only one inevitable conclusion can be drawn?

It may be possible, though it would be difficult: but it would not be
worth while. For the war has not been due to, and does not depend
upon, recent events; and however those events may be viewed or
summarized, the only fact of importance is the one already emphasized:
that every nation which has been drawn into the conflict counts its
cause just and its conscience clear.

In the face of such unanimity of national feeling, it is absurd to
discuss superficial conditions only, or to assume that they are of any
real importance. For, apart from neutral America, and the few hundreds
of really educated and intelligent men and women in each country who
constitute the brains and conserve the manners of their nation, it is
impossible to find any just basis for criticism and judgment. The
average national is concerned with presenting an _ex parte_ statement
(in which, perhaps, he believes implicitly) rather than with
discovering the actual truth, whosoever may be vindicated or
discredited. The average national may therefore be disregarded, and
the supreme appeal be made, not to the common folly of the nations,
but to the common sense of those who have risen beyond national
limitations and national littlenesses.

In the first place, that much-quoted and entirely despicable
confession of faith, “My country, right or wrong, first, last and all
the time,” may well be relegated,—first, last and for whatever time
may remain before a kindly Providence blots out this incredible little
world of seething passions and ceaseless pain and cruelty,—to the
limbo of antique curiosities. Nothing can be sillier, and more
contemptible, than such pseudo-patriotism, based on utter selfishness,
utter ignorance, and abysmal stupidity. The country which commits a
crime, or makes a grave mistake, is in the position of an individual
who commits a crime or makes a grave mistake; and no fanfare of
trumpets or hypnotism of marching automata, helmeted and plumed,
should confuse the issue and vitiate judgment. Mere nationalism,
unregulated by intelligence, is simply one of the most irritating and
blatant forms of egoism. Nationality itself depends upon so many
complex conditions that the ordinary semi-intelligent man can scarcely
unravel the niceties of history and discover to whom his heartfelt
allegiance is really due. He therefore accepts the untutored sentiment
of his immediate environment. He is essentially provincial, not
patriotic. Alsace and Lorraine, with their various vicissitudes, may
profitably be studied by the curious, in this connection.

Until provincialism, of the type which has been so prominent in recent
controversies, can be eliminated or controlled, the settlement of the
more tragic issues of the time must be undertaken boldly by those who
have indubitably grown up, forsaking leading strings and the nursery,
the toys of childhood and the irresponsibility of childhood. All the
Governments of Europe, in which a few brilliant men are undoubtedly
enrolled, have failed now, as they have failed repeatedly before, to
perform their elementary duties and save their countries from the
horrors of unnecessary war. Generation after generation, the peoples
of Europe have been carefully led by their Governments into successive
orgies of slaughter, in which the allies of one campaign have been the
enemies of the next. The whole course of European history during the
last hundred years (we need not go further back: we are not
responsible for the dead centuries) has been indeed a subject for
Olympian laughter. What has been achieved by the unending succession
of wars, with all their attendant miseries and deadly consequences?
Merely the necessity for increased armaments, constant watchfulness,
perpetual strain—and more war. Could there be a clearer proof of the
futility of war?

The Governments of Europe have failed because each, in greater or less
degree, has embodied the provincialism of its own section of the armed
and suspicious world. There have been a few notable exceptions to the
general rule of conventional mediocrity: but where have we found the
statesman who could break away altogether from the old stupid methods,
and by the sheer force of character and principle inaugurate a new era
of civilized diplomacy, as Bismarck inaugurated a new era of veneered
barbarism? In America, we are beginning to see the value and the
fruits of government based on fairness to all nations and justice to
all individuals: but neither here, nor in Europe, has the significance
of the new statesmanship yet been fully recognized. Europe, indeed,
still regards us with more than a little suspicion, contempt, and
imperfectly concealed condescension: it has heard and seen Roosevelt,
unfortunately, and the lingering impressions of crudity have not been
weakened. Will it listen to us now, and realize that the New World has
in verity something to offer to the Old in its time of special
tribulation? For Wilson, not Roosevelt, stands for the spirit of
America, the voice of America, and her chosen contribution to the
civilization of the Twentieth Century.

It seems strange, perhaps, to talk of civilization in these dark days,
when primitive passions and primitive methods have flung an
ineradicable stain of blood across a whole continent. Yet only the
coward will bend to temporary defeat, or ridicule, or pessimism. It is
the task of the strong to turn disaster into triumph, and to frame a
new international polity built on sure foundations. The diplomacy
based on national antipathies must be made impossible by the new
understanding of the criminal folly of provincialism, the new
comprehension of nation by nation. For the true causes of the present
war cannot be discovered in mere incidents of July and August. They go
further back, and are rooted in ignorance, misconception, prejudice,
selfishness.

I do not wish to accuse or exonerate any of the countries that have
turned Europe into a stage for the rehearsal of Christianity’s
masterpiece, the rollicking farce _Hell on Earth_. There have
been enough already to inflame racial resentments and flood the press
with taunts and recriminations. Ours is a bigger and worthier task: to
assuage, not to incense; to re-create order from chaos; to prepare the
way for peace, and for what must follow peace.

Recrimination is so useless now. We have to face the future: we cannot
undo the past. We have learnt our lesson, surely, once for all: shall
the spectre of militarism again loom devilishly through such a
nightmare as Europe has endured for the last decade? Animosities and
jealousies may die out: France has forgotten Fashoda, England has
forgiven Russia for the blunder of the Dogger Bank. But the
expectation of war, the preparation for war, the whole habit and
incidence of militarism, must lead sooner or later to the clash. If
the guns were not ready, if the nations had to be drilled and armed
before they could be hurled at each others’ throats, there would be
time for reflection, for the subsidence of passions, for the revival
of dignity and decency. Militarism damns both the menacer and the
menaced. All the nations have suffered from that curse, Germany,
perhaps, the worst of all. The world has not yet forgotten Bismarck’s
gospel of blood and iron, so relentlessly preached and practised. The
inevitable results of the blood-and-iron doctrine, modernized as the
dogma of the “mailed fist,” can be seen to-day in the cataclysm that
has swept Europe. The pity of it, and the shame of it, that all the
skill of all the statesmen of the great Powers could produce no better
result than a continent divided into two armed camps, waiting for the
slaughter that was bound to come!

As for Russia, and the assumed Slavonic menace, one must tread
somewhat diffidently where George Bernard Shaw has rushed in with
characteristic Shavian impetuosity. The world owes to Mr. Shaw the
discovery of a new nationality—himself; and it is impossible for any
citizen of the world to ignore the obligation. But even if Russia
achieves her never-forgotten dream of Constantinople and a purified
St. Sophia, Europe and civilization will not necessarily stand aghast,
trembling at each rumor of Cossack brutalities. Tennyson, who foresaw
the aërial navies “grappling in the central blue,” indeed proclaimed,
in one of the most execrable of his sonnets, that—

     “… The heart of Poland hath not ceased
      To quiver, though her sacred blood doth drown
      The fields, and out of every smouldering town
      Cries to Thee, lest brute power be increased
      Till that o’ergrown barbarian in the East
      Transgress his ample bounds to some new crown:
      Cries to Thee, ‘Lord, how long shall these things be,
      How long this icy-hearted Muscovite
      Oppress the region?’…”

(I quote from memory, deprecating caustic correction). But, in spite
of anti-Semitic atrocities (are the hands of other nations so clean
now? They were foul once), and in spite of the blunders of a rigid
bureaucracy, the Russian nation is not necessarily a menace to
civilization: it has within it the elements of a wonderful idealism,
and whether autocracy may remain, or may not remain, as the outward
and visible form of government, the spirit of democracy is leavening
the people, and “Holy Russia” has in truth already been sanctified by
the blood of her innumerable martyrs—sometimes, perhaps, misguided
and mistaken; but offering to the world an example of idealism and
self-sacrifice that should surely dispel the nightmare of Russian
brutishness.

I may record here, quite irrelevantly, my own fervent wish
(irrevocably established at the immature age of twelve years) that
Poland, with few of her limbs amputated, should be replaced upon the
map as an independent, and again powerful, nation. It was one of my
earliest dreams that I should be awakened at the dawn of a wintry day,
and urged by a delegation of Polish magnates to accept the one throne
of Europe that had been, and still should be, open to conspicuous (and
electoral) merit. That wish has not yet been gratified, and candor
compels me to attribute it to the delightful influence of the elder
Dumas, from whom I derived also my most enduring impressions of St.
Bartholomew, Catherine de Medici, Mazarin, Louis XIII, Richelieu,
Buckingham, Louis XIV, Louise de la Vallière, d’Artagnan, Athos,
Aramis, Porthos, and other immortals. India, I confess, held me
equally spellbound: for many months I hesitated between the succession
to Aurungzebe (why should I now spell the name differently?) and the
crown of Stanislaus. That hesitation has been fatal: I am still
throneless.

Others may be throneless (the Mills of God grind steadily) before
final peace comes to the different warring nations. They have sowed in
their various ways, and will reap the ripened harvests. But how long
shall the childish quarrel of country with country be permitted and
encouraged by those who should have learnt a little wisdom, in this
twentieth century of perpetual miracles? Let us have done, once for
all, with petty jealousies and absurd misunderstandings. Let us blot
out, without regret and without the least compassion, the evil records
and results of insincerity and manufactured hatred. Let us extinguish,
finally and irresuscitably, those fires of malice and flagrant
nonsense that have been fed assiduously by the fools and knaves of the
world.

Nowhere will you find a decent man, emancipated from the
leading-strings of prejudice and unafraid of the bludgeonings of
militarist authority, who does not condemn the present war, and all
wars, as useless, damnable, anachronistic and inexcusable. We have
learnt so much, in these later years; we have adventured in strange
ways, and silently borne strange reproaches. We have come very near to
God, and talked with Him by wireless, remedying the inconsistencies of
the prophets and filling in the gaps left blank by the poets. And
shall we still be bound by the gibes and gyves of the mediævalists?
The Middle Ages served their purpose: but why extend them to the
confusion of modern chronology? We have seen God, as no generation
before has seen Him. Let us then live, and not die, until the grave be
digged, and the night overshadow us at last.



SEEN THROUGH MOHAMMEDAN SPECTACLES

ACHMED ABDULLAH


Although my father was a Muslim of the old Central-Asian school, a
Hegirist, of mixed Arab and Moghul blood, he had sent me to England
and the Continent for my school and university education. But boys are
much more broad-minded than grown-up men, and so my schoolmates and I
never worried about the fact that we had different customs, religion,
civilization, and atavistic tendencies.

It was only after my return to the borderland of Afghanistan and
India, and after I had assumed once more native garb and speech, that
I began to feel myself an alien among those Europeans and
Anglo-Indians with whom I was brought into contact.

For the first time in my life I felt the ghastly meaning of the words
“Racial Prejudice,” that cowardly, wretched caste-mark of the European
and the American the world over, that terrible blight which modern
Christianity has forced on the world. And it chilled me to the bone
and I wondered….

In Europe I had known many Asiatics who visited the universities
there. And we were the equals of the Europeans, the Christians, in
intellect and culture, and decidedly their superiors, being Muslim, in
cleanliness and courage. We were not only familiar with the European
classics which were the basis of their culture, but we were also
thoroughly versed in the literature and history of India and Central
Asia, things of which they knew less than an average Egyptian
donkey-boy. We were polyglots: we had mastered half a dozen European
languages, while even a smattering of Arabic or Turki or Chinese was a
rare exception amongst them. We all of us knew at least three Asian
languages to perfection. And finally we had a practical knowledge of
English, French and German political ideals and systems, while to them
the name of even such great Asian reformers as Asoka and Akbar and
Aurangzeb were absolutely unknown.

In physical strength, virility, power of endurance and recuperation we
were immeasurably their superiors. And we were not picked men, but
plain, average Asian gentlemen.

And yet, when I returned to my own land, there was that superior
smile, that nasty, patronizing attitude, that insufferable “Holier
than Thou” atmosphere about all of them whom I happened to meet.

They made me feel that I was of the East and they of the West; and
they tried to make me feel—with no success—that they were the salt
of the earth, while the men of my faith and race were but the lowly
dung.

Not even the bridge of personal friendship seemed able to span this
gulf, this abyss which I could feel more than I could define it; and
so I folded my tent and travelled; I studied India from South to
North, I visited Siberia, Egypt, Malta, Algeria, Turkey, Tunis, and
the Haussa country, wandering in all the lands where East and West rub
elbows, and I investigated calmly, I compared without too much bias.

Finally I bent my steps Northward, to see with my own eyes and
according to the limits of my own understanding the working of
Christian civilization, and to study the dominant Western Faith in the
lands where it rules supreme.

I was looking for a bridge with which to span the chasm, and I failed
miserably. Christian hypocrisy, Christian intolerance, savage
Christian ignorance frustrated me right and left.

But I learned one thing, perhaps two.

They spoke to me of Europe which they knew, and they spoke of India
which they did not know. They were what the world calls educated,
well-read people: and indeed they had read many books by eminent
Christian travellers, savants, and historians about the great
Peninsula. But the mirror of their souls reflected only distorted
pictures. They had no conception of the vastness of my land, they had
never heard of the great Asian conquerors and statesmen, they were
entirely ignorant of our wonderful literature.

But still they spoke of India … fluently, patronizingly.

They spoke of plague and cholera and famine and wretched sanitation
and cruelties unspeakable. But they did not understand me when I told
them that the teeming millions of Hindu peasantry somehow manage to
enjoy their careless lives to the full, and are really much more
satisfied than the European peasants or the small American farmers.

I did not argue: I simply stated facts. But I discovered that it is a
titanic, heart-breaking task to prove the absurdity of anything which
the Christians have made up their minds to accept as true. I found
arrayed against me an iron phalanx of preconceived opinions and
misconstrued lessons of history. I began to understand that even
amongst educated people there can exist opinion without thought, and
that my two arch-foes were the Pharisee intolerance which is the
caste-mark and the blighting curse of the Christian the world over,
and the other Aryan vice: an unconscious generalization of those ideas
which have been adopted for the sake of convenience and self-flattery,
and in strict and delightfully naïve disregard of truth. The whole I
found to be spiced with religious hypocrisy; and is there a lower form
of hypocrisy than that which makes a man pretend for his own material
or spiritual purposes that a thing is good which in his inmost heart
he knows to be bad? The sincerity of such people is on a par with that
of him who, being debarred by a doctor from constant drinking,
proclaims that he is a reformed character and prates to his friends
about the delights of temperance.

I learned that to fathom the murky depths of stupidity and intolerance
of the Christians of to-day, we should have a latter-day Moses
Maimonides amongst us, to write another _Moreh Nebukim_, another _Guide
for the Perplexed_.

And then I made up my mind to attack that structure of ignorance and
misunderstanding, that jumble of generalization and hyperdeduction,
that idiotic racial self-confidence and national self-consciousness
which breeds Pharisee intolerance, which destroys individual inquiry
and unprejudiced opinion, and which sounds the death-knell of
procreativeness.

The Hindu peasants say that it is a mistake to judge the quality of a
whole field of rice by testing one grain only. But the Europeans, the
Americans, who judge us have never even tested a solitary grain and
only know about its quality from hearsay.

Not that they are afraid to voice what they miscall their opinions.
Only instead of having the courage of their own convictions, they have
the courage of somebody else’s convictions, not knowing that the most
obtuse ignorance is superior to dangerous, second-hand knowledge.

They are eternally quoting the words of some writer whom they think
infallible. And there was chiefly one clever little jingle which was
on the lips of everybody with whom I tried to discuss the relations
between Orient and Occident. They used it as the final proof to settle
the argument and to preclude all further appeal to the tribunal of
common sense and common verity, and it ran as follows:

     “East is East, and West is West,
      And never the twain shall meet.”

I admire Kipling, chiefly because he is one of the few Europeans who
have studied the East with both intelligence and sympathy. From my
Oriental point of view I class his books with those of Max Müller, Sir
Alfred Lyall, Captain Sir Richard Burton, Pierre Loti, John Campbell
Oman, Victoria de Bunsen, Colonel Malleson, W. D. Whitney, William
Crooke, and two or three other Pandits.

But I became sick to death of that smooth little jingle about the East
and the West. I found it everywhere, until it haunted me in my dreams.

I would buy the gaudy Sunday edition of an American newspaper and I
would read the gruesome story of how a high-caste Mandchoo had beaten
and tortured his beautiful French wife … and, by the Prophet, the
picturesque account would wind up with an appeal to the intelligent
American reader not to wonder at the blue-beard Mandarin’s cruelty,
because the poet states that East is East and West is West.

In the morning I would see in the _Petit Journal_ how the
unspeakable Turk had invaded a peaceful Armenian settlement, had shot
the males, outraged the females, and roasted the babes over an open
fire, and how I should also suppress my natural indignation at such
atrocities, because the East is naturally the East.

And at night, before smoking the farewell cigarette of the dying day,
I would discover in _The Graphic_ harrowing accounts of
child-marriages in Hindustan, and would be instructed that the reason
for such a barbarous custom was contained in the poet’s statement that
“never the twain shall meet.”

Do you wonder that every night, in my dreams, I strangled Mr. Kipling
slowly and deliciously with a thin silken cord? But of course you do
not wonder; for I am an Afghan … and … well …

     “East is East and West is West.”


II

Assumed racial superiority is a foregone conclusion in the minds of
the so-called Aryans of Europe and of America.

I was in Paris when the world rang with the war-glories of Nippon, and
afterwards, when for a while it seemed as if the bloodless Young Turk
revolution would meet with success.

There we had at last two specific instances of Oriental nations
working out their own salvation against tremendous odds: Japan
threatened by the Russian Goliath, and Turkey a prey to the wrangling
and the selfish machinations of all Europe, of all lying Christendom.

But the effect on the conceit of the Aryans was less than nothing. The
people of Europe and of America are blind to the Writing on the Wall.
They have sealed their ears against the murmuring voices of Awakening
Asia.

Are they afraid to listen?

Now and then, when not engaged in discussing the latest tango or
divorce case, they do read and talk about the awakening of China, the
commercial conquests and aggressive policy of Japan, and the
smouldering fires of United Islam, but without experiencing the least
abating influence on their artificially nurtured racial and religious
conceit. Peacefully and stupidly the Christians, the “white races,”
continue to misread the lessons of history and the signs of the times.

They are afraid to see the brutal, naked truth.

Once I watched an ostrich bury his head in the sand….

They have established the amusing dogma that the so-called White and
Christian countries are the superior countries, just because they are
White and Christian.

I have established a slightly different dogma, and, being a charitable
and entirely guileless Oriental, I will make a present of it to my
Aryan friends:

You Westerns feel so sure of your superiority over us Easterns that
you refuse even to attempt a fair or correct interpretation of past
and present historical events. You deliberately stuff the minds of
your growing generations with a series of ostensible events and
shallow generalities, because you wish to convince them for the rest
of their lives how immeasurably superior you are to us, how there
towers a range of differences between the two civilizations, how East
is only East, and the West such a glorious, wonderful, unique West.

In _Tancred_, that brilliant Oriental, the Earl of Beaconsfield, in
devoting a few lines to a great Bishop of the Church of England,
really pictures the typical Christian such as he stinks in our
nostrils from Morocco to Kharbin. For the noble Jewish Peer
characterizes the Right Reverend Gentleman as a man who combined great
talents for action with very limited powers of thought, who was
bustling, energetic, versatile, gifted with an indomitable
perseverance and stimulated by an ambition that knew no repose, with a
capacity for mastering details and an inordinate passion for affairs,
who could permit nothing to be done without his interference, and who
consequently was perpetually involved in transactions which were
either failures or blunders.

In material progress you have led the world for the last two or three
centuries. By the True Prophet … all of three hundred years!

And like all parvenus, you are so astonished at your success, so
pleased with yourselves, that you imagine your present hegemony in the
race for material progress to be a guarantee for the future. But there
is not even the shadow of an excuse for such an assumption, unless it
be the fact that the Christian mind is diseased with racial and
religious megalomania. There is not a single historical parallel which
justifies your pleasant superstition that your present leadership,
which after all is of very recent birth, will show greater stability
than any of those many alien, ancient civilizations which long ago
came from the womb of eternity, to go back whence they sprang.

Nations as well as men are judged by two factors: by their virtues,
and by their vices.

As to virtues, what have you Christians done for the general uplift of
the world which could not be matched by a random look into the pages
of Oriental history? And as to vices, is there any degeneracy rampant
amongst us which is not equalled by the degeneracy of the Western
lands?

History has an unpleasant knack of repeating itself; and the helot of
to-day has the disagreeable habit of being the master of to-morrow,
regardless of race and color and creed. I would like to return to
earth about three hundred years from to-day, just to observe how my
descendants, who will have intermarried with Chinese and Japanese,
will succeed in ruling their colonies in Europe and in America. And I
do hope that the Chinese blood of my descendants will not be too
preponderant: otherwise, taking a leaf out of European and American
colonization, and thus forcing their own food-laws on the subject
races, they might force their White and Christian subjects to eat
roast puppy-dog.

Human nature is the same the world over, and there never was an
originally superior race or people. Some nations have founded powerful
civilizations which lasted for a shorter or a longer period, but it
was never the racial force which caused it, but rather the
irresistible swing of circumstances.

It was Kismet.


III

“But we are Aryans, don’t you understand?… Aryans, the salt of the
earth….”

“Aryans” … I know the word, I find myself on familiar ground.

My teachers at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Berlin had
taught me that the Aryans were a Central-Asian race, a “white” race,
who conquered Europe and India, and who were of such superior
intellectual and physical fibre that they made themselves masters
wherever they went. And when I inquired about those Aryans who invaded
India, I was told that right there they showed their wonderful metal:
for brought face to face with teeming millions of dark aborigines,
they established a caste-system of which the higher strata represent
to this day the descendants of the white-skinned and therefore
high-minded invaders, while the sweeper, the menial, the village
laborer is the scion of the dark-skinned, conquered Dravidians.

To an Oriental this is of course a ridiculous and lying assumption.
For even the purest of Aryan tribes in Hindustan, for instance the
Rajpoots, have intermarried extensively with at least two other races.
This superstition is not a new invention. It is as old as the
beginning of things, and that much-praised work, the Veda, is only a
chronicle of the ancient conceit of the Aryans, a conceit to which the
lying and barbarous intolerance of modern Christianity has given a
sharp and poisonous edge.

Yet even the Veda speaks of intermarriages between the Aryans and the
original lords of the soil of India.

The caste system was not a bright invention to put a lasting stamp of
inferiority on the conquered aborigines, but it is the outcome of a
slow evolutionary process, due to the machinations of Brahmin priests
who wished to preserve the profits arising from their sacerdotal
profession within a restricted circle of families. These Brahmins had
increased their ranks and influence by drawing recruits from the
devil-worshipping priests of the aboriginal jungle tribes. Thus, how
can there ever have been a question of preserving or establishing a
permanency of racial superiority through the medium of caste, since at
the very beginning of the system the race had lost its purity?

No. Your wonderful Aryan kinsmen in India were absorbed by the
“inferior” races whom they conquered, just as the Normans were
absorbed by the Saxon Englishmen, the Alexandrian Greeks by the
Egyptians, the Mongols of the Golden Horde by the Chinese, just as the
strong always absorb the weak, and just as, a few hundred years hence,
we shall absorb you.

To-day Christian England is ruling India, and the English Raj is just,
fair-minded, tolerant, and equitable. This is true, and it is also
true that the last Moghuls disgraced the throne of Delhi and shattered
Hindustan. But what can you prove by it?

Others have ruled India successfully before Asia had ever heard of
England.

Akbar, the Moghul Emperor, enforced tolerance and justice in those
barbaric days when the life of a Jew in Europe was at the kind mercy
of an ignorant and brutal Christian rabble. He, the Muslim, built and
endowed Hindu temples and charitable institutions while his European
contemporaries were periodically burning down the synagogues and were
trying to extend the sway of the gentle Christ with the effective help
of murder and torture. He, and before him his father’s successor on
the throne of Delhi, Shir Shah, the Afghan usurper, attempted to found
an Indian empire “broad-based upon the people’s will,” long before the
days of Voltaire, Robespierre, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais. He settled
land revenue on an equitable basis while the peasants of Europe were
groaning under the heavy and humiliating burden of serfdom.

You say that his successors did not live up to the high standard
established by this greatest of Moghul princes?

But we find fitting parallels in the history of Christian Europe. For
were not the successors of Theodosius as degenerate as those of Akbar?
Did not, in Macaulay’s words, the imbecility and disputes of
Charlemagne’s descendants bring contempt on themselves and destruction
to their subjects?

Or take the civilization of ancient Rome.

It was partially saved from ruin by the Asians, the Syro-Christians,
who brought the word of the great Jewish Rabbi across the Adriatic.
Judaism is an Oriental creed, and what is your famed European
Christianity if not “Judaism for the Masses”?

The Asian genius of Christ and his Hebrew apostles saved the Aryan
genius from stagnation and stupidity, and brought the first faint
glimmer of light into the barbaric darkness of Northern Europe.

The Asian Christians succeeded in Aryan Rome, and just as long as the
Asians ruled, the traditional cupidity and cruelty of Aryan Rome were
softened by the broadly tolerant humanity of Asia. But as soon as the
Syro-Christians were in the minority and the Christians of European
stock in the majority, persecution and intolerance commenced, and the
word of the great Oriental Prophet Jesus Christ was sadly mutilated
and misunderstood by that superior race, the “Whites.”

But even then you could not rid yourselves of our subtle Asian
influence. I know your gifts of energy and your spirit of progress;
but we men of Asia have a power of resistance and a capacity for rapid
recuperation which you can never fathom.

Could you break the spirit or the virility of the Jew? You have
tortured him, you have exiled him, and you have burnt him on the stake
for the greater glory of God … and he rules you to-day.

Again, look at the history of your Europeanized Christian Church, and
observe what happened:

The Asian spirit flourished again in Protestantism and the
Reformation. Many of your Protestant reformers were semi-Jewish,
semi-Oriental in spirit. Anti-Trinitarianism was preached in Siena,
and God ceased to be a mathematical problem. The Decalogue and the
Apocalypse were studied. Chairs of Hebrew philosophy and philology
were founded at French and German universities; and the Calvinists and
the Presbyterians were altogether of the old Testament, of Asia, in
spirit and sentiment.

Your famous Reformation was only a return to the Ebionism of the Asian
Evangelists. One of the greatest events in your history, it was a most
complete and vindicating triumph for the spirit of that Asia which you
attempt to despise and patronize in your ignorance and intolerance.

Must we sit at your feet? Shall the pupil teach the master?

We taught you to read, to write, and to think. We gave you your
religion and your few ideals. We have done more for you than you can
ever do for us. We freed you from your ancient bondage of
superstitions and idolatry. We gave you the first sparks of science
and literature. We paved the way for your material progress.

Without our help you would still be tattooed and inarticulate
barbarians.

But you have been getting out of hand, and are sinking back into the
old slough of ignorance and crass intolerance.

And so perhaps some day, after we Mohammedans have finished converting
Asia and Africa to the Faith of Islam (and we are doing steady work in
that direction), we may send another Tamerlane into Europe, reinforced
by an army of a few million Asians who laugh in the face of death, and
finish the job.


IV

You speak of Oriental mystery, of Oriental romance.

Are we Asians then like Molière’s bourgeois who spoke prose all his
life without knowing it? Is there really a veil of mystery about us?

No, no. The Most High God did not take the trouble to create two
different types of human beings, one to work on the banks of the
Seine, and the other to sing His praises on the shore of the Ganges.
There is no veil, no mystery, no romance … except the veil of
Christian ignorance, the romance of Christian imagination, the mystery
of Christian want of desire to know.

There is perhaps a latent search after knowledge and truth in your
hearts’ souls. But your inborn selfishness forces you to believe that
a healthy portion of ignorance is the best medicine against the
ravages of the dangerous malady which is called Tolerance. Just a
little effort would teach you that there is no mystery about us, no
abyss which separates you from us. But your ignorance is your bliss
and provides you with a sort of righteous bias. It also sheds a holy
and therefore eminently Christian halo around your attitude of
meddlesome interference in the affairs of Asia and North Africa. Of
course you only interfere because of your laudable intention to show
us the true path to civilization and salvation. And if accidentally
you increase your own power and wealth, if you impoverish the native
whom you attempt to “save,” if you incite strife where no strife
existed before you imported soldiers and bibles and missionaries and
whisky and some special brands of “white” diseases … well … Allah
is Great….

The mystery which is supposed to shroud the Orient is a lying
invention of Christendom destined to give a semblance of justice to
your selfish, harmful meddlings in the affairs, religions, politics
and customs of other countries.

If you wish to conquer with the right of fire and the might of sword,
go ahead and do so, or at least say so. It would be a motive which we
Muslim, being warriors, could understand and appreciate. But do not
clothe your greed for riches and dominion in the hypocritical, nasal,
sing-song of a heaven-decreed Mission to enlighten the poor native, a
Pharisee call of duty to spread the word of your Saviour, your lying
intention to uplift the ignorant Pagan.

Drop your mask of consummate beatitude in the contemplation of the
spiritual joys, the Christian and therefore very sanitary plumbing you
are endeavoring to confer upon us. Stop being liars and hypocrites:
and you will cease being what you are to-day:

The most hated and the most despised men in the length and breadth of
Asia and North Africa.

And I am not exaggerating. I am really putting it mildly so as not to
hurt your feelings.

Let me point out just one instance: the Young Turk Revolution.

You, the apostles of freedom and constitutional government and half a
dozen assorted fetishes, what was your attitude then?

You allowed Austria, your trusted steward of other people’s property
since the Berlin Congress of Thieves, to steal this property, the
fertile provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. You looked on calmly
while the Bulgar mountebank annexed Turkish territory in time of
peace. You passed resolutions, full of blatant Christian hypocrisy and
Christian lies; but you never raised a finger in our behalf, in behalf
of that justice and humanity which you proudly claim as your
caste-right. The whole affair was a piece of brigandage, carried on
under the much-patched cloak of that whining cant which has made
modern Christianity an ugly by-word in Asia and North Africa.

You united in your endeavors to establish an independent and
constitutionally governed Roumania, a free Servia, a modern Greece and
Bulgaria, and, more recently, an autonomous Macedonia, under the
pretext that Turkey, being controlled with an iron rod by a despotic
Sultan and an intolerably exalted Sheykh-ul-Islam, was not fit to
govern Christian races.

But you obstruct Mohammedan Turkey’s efforts to introduce and enforce
the very principles of liberty and popular government which in former
years you had been advocating as a _sine qua non_ in the
administration of your precious Christian protégés.

An ounce of baptismal water makes such a difference, does it not?

I believe that I am the mouthpiece of a great majority of my
fellow-Muslim and my fellow-Asians when I state that the Jesuit policy
of Europe during the political travail of Young Turkey, when the
Osmanli attempted to crystallize his newly found liberty, will do more
to fan the red embers of fighting Pan-Islam into living, leaping
flames than any other political event since the Berlin treaty.

We have suffered long enough a series of deliberate moral insults and
material injuries at the hands of selfish, canting, lying
Christianity, and we are still capable of tremendous energies when
Islam is in danger.

And who can deny that Islam is in danger?

Your attitude during the Balkan troubles proved to us that the liberty
which you deem necessary to the Christian Balkans is a negligible
quantity when applied to the followers of the Prophet Mohammed who
inhabit the same peninsula.

And I could mention a dozen instances to prove that you yourselves are
forcing on the world the coming struggle between Asia, all Asia,
against Europe and America, against Christendom, in other words.

You are heaping up material for a Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia Holy
War, a gigantic Day of Reckoning, an invasion of a new Attila and
Tamerlane … who will use rifles and bullets, instead of lances and
spears.

You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so you must be
taught with the whirling swish of the sword when it is red.


V

You claim that altruism and the virtues are the monopoly of your creed
and your race.

But in reality the teachings of Jesus are not a particle more apt to
lead his followers in the golden path than are the sayings of the Lord
Buddha, the laws of Moses, the wisdom of Confucius, or the words of
the Koran. True tolerance, true altruism teaches us that what is right
in Peking may be wrong on the shores of Lake Tchaad, and what is wrong
in a Damascus bazaar may be right at a Kansas ice-cream social.

Such true tolerance is far broader than the limits of professing
Christianity, than the limits of any established, cut-and-dried creed.
It is as broad as the Seven Holy Rivers of Hindustan and as vast as
Time. The creed of mutual sympathy is a very old creed: even amongst
the troglodytes chosen spirits must have known it, the red-haired
barbarians of Gaul must have heard of it, and amongst the
lizard-eating Arabs of pre-Islamic days it must have found adherents.
It is a human truth, a human principle which is the common property of
mankind East and West; but Christian hegemony in worldly affairs has
killed it, has blighted it with the curse of the cross.

Intrinsic unselfishness and abstract goodness is older than the
Gospel, the Koran, the Veda, or any other religious book. Being at the
very core of that civilization from which all changes spring, it is in
itself eternally unchangeable, be it clothed in the words of the
Sermon on the Mount, the Prophet Mohammed’s three great principles of
Compassion, Charity, and Resignation, or the famed edict of the
Emperor Asoka, who many centuries before the days of Jesus declared to
the world that “a man must not do reverence to his own sect by
disparaging that of another man.”



  THE SHROUD

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY


  Death, I say, my heart is bowed
    Unto thine,—O mother!
  This red gown will make a shroud
    Good as any other!

  (I, that would not wait to wear
    My own bridal things,
  In a dress dark as my hair
    Made my answerings.

  I, to-night, that till he came
    Could not, could not wait,
  In a gown as bright as flame
    Held for them the gate.)

  Death, I say, my heart is bowed
    Unto thine,—O mother!
  This red gown will make a shroud
    Good as any other!



NEW LOYALTIES FOR OLD CONSOLATIONS

H. A. OVERSTREET


To most persons the conception of a godless world is the conception of
a world with the bottom dropped out. It is a world from which all the
high values, all the splendid consolations have disappeared. This is
true even for many who feel that they cannot, in reason, any longer
believe in a personal God. For all their honest disbelief, the world
has turned grey for them. It has lost its old wonder and joy. It has
become a dead world.

It is interesting to ask ourselves whether all this need be true;
whether the high values and the finer consolations may not be just as
real when the belief in a personal God has vanished. With the
vanishing of that belief, of course, the whole attitude toward the
universe is altered. Hopes and comforts that were deeply and warmly of
the older order of beliefs have no place in the new order; while
loyalties and aspirations that were the breath of its life are become
meaningless and without force. But may not new loyalties and
aspirations, hopes and comforts find their place strongly and
inspiringly in the later order of belief?

It will be interesting, as an answer to this question, to ask how
differently a society would behave all of whose members, disbelieving
utterly in the reality of a personal God, had no other thought of the
divine life than that it was their own larger and more ideal
existence.

I remember at the time of the San Francisco earthquake passing one of
the cathedrals of the city and finding its broad stone steps, covering
a goodly portion of a city square, black with kneeling worshippers.
There could be no question of their reason for being there. They were
setting themselves right with their God, hoping that in the fervor of
their devotion he would have mercy upon them and save them from
destruction. So on shipboard in times of great danger one will find
the passengers gathered in the cabin praying to God for
deliverance,—always, to be sure, with the proviso, “Yet if it be thy
will that we perish, thy will be done!”

These are dramatic but typical instances of what occurs constantly in
homes and churches where people pray to a personal deity. Could such
an attitude of prayer have any meaning for a man who disbelieved in a
personal deity? Obviously not. Would he cease to pray? It all depends
upon what one is to mean by prayer.

Prayer of the kind indicated is an effort to secure assistance in
circumstances where the normal human means fail. Normally, for
example, if a man would have bread, he sets about to plant the proper
seed, or grind the flour, or mix the dough. He finds out, in short,
the laws that govern the production or manufacture of breadstuffs; and
he does not expect to secure his desired result until he has
accommodated himself in all the requisite ways to these laws and
conditions. If a man would save himself from a burning house, he looks
for a fire-escape, or a rope, or calls for a ladder; again
accommodating his action to the fundamental conditions of the
situation. But if the heavens are long without rain and the seed dry
up, or the fire burns away the means of escape, the man, at the end of
his human resources, calls to another power for help.

Such a call for help is based upon two assumptions, which in some
respects scarcely support each other. They are the assumption, first,
that there is a power able to control to his beneficent purposes
forces that are humanly uncontrollable; but, second, that this power
will not act unless attracted by very special and fervent appeal. The
latter fact, that special appeal is needed, may be due to the God’s
impotence, his inability to be in all places at once: he does the best
he can, hurrying hither and thither from one distressing circumstance
to another. Or it may be due to his demand that his creatures shall
continually turn their minds to him, an attitude which he succeeds in
securing in them for the most part only when they are hard pressed
with danger.

Stated thus baldly, it would be difficult even on the naïve planes of
religious thought to find persons who would acknowledge either that
their God was a jealous god, refusing help until all the requisite
ceremonies of abasement and supplication had been fulfilled, or that
he was a finite God, half distracted by the imploring voices calling
to him from all quarters of his universe. And yet, in prayer as it is
ordinarily practised, both of these views are more or less
unconsciously mingled. What prevents the emergence of their absurdity
into clear consciousness is the relatively healthy thought underlying
all prayer that if a man would secure something for himself he must
himself spend some effort in the process. _Ex nihilo nihil._ In
situations that pass beyond all his power of practical human control,
there is nothing for him to do but to give his mere effort of
adoration and hope.

On the higher levels of religious experience, this semi-magical
conception of prayer grows increasingly in ill-repute. The thought is
more and more in evidence that if God wished to prevent certain
distresses, he would do so of his own beneficent accord. A request for
specific aid, in short, would insinuate in him, either a failure to
know in all circumstances what was best to be done, or an inability to
keep wholly abreast of the tasks which he ought to perform. To save
the majesty of God, prayer must become simply a turning of the mind to
him, not for specific help, but for that general uplift of spirit
which comes from the contemplation of his supreme perfection.

Here obviously is the germ of a higher and radically different
conception of prayer. In the more naïve conception, help was to come
from the “power not ourselves”; in the maturer conception, help is to
come _through the stimulation in ourselves of our own highest
powers_—a stimulation effected by the turning of our minds and
spirits to the highest conceivable Reality.

The efficacy of prayer, in short, in this conception of it, will lie
not in what it brings to us from without, but what it effects
within,—what powers, efforts, aspirations it develops in us. Let us
return to the kneeling worshippers. As they bowed their heads in
fervent supplication, other men and women were distributing bread and
clothing to destitute families, or were building shelters, or were
clearing the streets of débris, or were patrolling with gun on
shoulder against criminal disorder. Is it correct to say, as the older
religions have always said, that the latter were engaged wholly in
earthly affairs, while the former were entering the higher life of God
and the spirit? Or is it truer to hold that the digging away of débris
was a far more effective and powerful prayer to God than supplication
to him for help?

The kneeling worshippers were indeed turning their minds to their
highest conceivable Reality. It was a Reality that they hoped would do
things for them. But the diggers of débris, or the distributers of
bread and clothing, were likewise, unconsciously no doubt, but in
actual effect, turning their minds to their highest Reality. Face to
face with the destruction of those things that give order and beauty
and power to life, they were thinking (in their unconscious selves) of
what a city for men and women and children _ought to be and could be_.
It ought not to be a tumbled mass of bricks and burning wood; it ought
not to be filled with starving people; it ought not to be given over
to looters and murderers; it ought to be a city clean, ordered, happy.
With their smoke-blinded eyes, they may not have seen far beyond the
immediate demands of their ideal; but ideal it nevertheless was to
which they lifted their souls in service. With all its vague
inadequacy, it was for them then and there their highest Reality,
their God—the ideal life in their members—to which they felt that
they must devote themselves with full power of brain and muscle. They
asked nothing of this their God; rather it was their God _that asked
everything of them_, that stimulated them to the full, devoted
summoning of all their essential powers.

When a child lies sick unto death, what is the effective form of
prayer? If the divine life, as we have held, is our own ideal life,
prayer to such God is the tireless, unflinching effort to bring some
measure of that ideal life to realization. The death of a little child
of causes that might be controlled is hardly in keeping with the ideal
of life. Hence devotion to the ideal calls for every straining of
effort,—the loving care, the ceaseless watching, the sacrifice of
pleasure and comforts to purchase the best knowledge and skill to save
the little life. This is the essential prayer; not the bowing in
helpless misery and supplication before a God who needs to be called
from some far forgetfulness to his proper tasks.

During recent winter storms, when New York was filled with hundreds of
thousands of unemployed, several hundred of these unfortunate men, as
reported by _The New York Times_, marched through the snow-filled
streets to one of the large evangelical churches where the weekly
prayer meeting was being held. As they filed in, consternation spread
among the worshippers. Their minister, however, stopped the oncoming
crowd and asked them what they wanted. “We want shelter for the night
in your church,” they said. The minister, looking at his cushioned
pews, replied that he could not permit it. “But cannot we sleep in the
basement?” they asked. No, the minister said, they could not, and he
advised them to leave the church quietly, at the same time whispering
to one of his congregation to call up the police. The police came in
due order and rough-handled the men; and the prayers to God were
resumed. Meanwhile, at another place in the city, a great body of men
and women were gathered, drawn together at the instance of the
American Association for Labor Legislation, to consider ways and means
for relieving the distressing conditions of unemployment. At the
latter meeting men spoke of municipal employment bureaus, of
scientific plans for unemployment insurance; they brought forth facts
and figures to prove the possibility of regulating business in such a
way as to prevent the alternation of slack and rush seasons. They did
not mention God. And yet one wonders whether their earnest and
forceful deliberations were not a far more fervent prayer to God, a
far more devoted yielding of themselves to the power of their ideal
selves than the windy prayer of that minister (or of his people) who
trusted his God so poorly that he called in the city’s police to help
Him out of an ugly scrape.

Once the divine life is believed to be not a beneficent Person other
than ourselves to whom we may call for help, but the finer life that
lives potentially in ourselves, prayer ceases to be a semi-magic
formula applicable to an order of existence beyond our own. Prayer is
then nothing more or less than the turning of mind and spirit to the
service of the ideal that lives in us. And it is most effectually
realized not by departing from human activity, by yielding oneself to
a power not oneself; but rather by a vigorous turning to the problems
and difficulties of our life and enlisting every last shred of effort
to set them right.

It follows then that there is prayer wherever there is service,
_service of any kind_ that makes for life-betterment. The chemist who
learns a new control has received an answer to his year-long prayer;
the physician who finds the saving serum has prayed long and fervently
and has been heard of his God. The business man who finds a way of
juster coöperation with his men need never have named the word God or
joined in holy adoration. But he has prayed—to his ideal of human
brotherhood; and has prayed so vigorously that his God has heard and
answered.

But in each case the God that has heard and answered has been the
deeper possibilities of these men’s own life—their ideal life—which
they, by their loyal devotion, have wrought out of mere possibility
into some manner of actuality.


II

This in part is what prayer must mean when the old devotion to the
personal God has vanished. The last shred of its supernatural,
semi-magical connotation will have disappeared. If things worth while
are to be done; if life values are to be accomplished and preserved,
it must be by a knowledge and control of the conditions of their
accomplishment. The devotion to the ideal in us presupposes therefore
the most strenuous and persistent effort to learn these modes of
control, to understand the deep and intricate ways of life, and to
bend every power—of mind and body, of science and art—to bring life
into harmony with their fundamental demands.

The situation may be illustrated by the contrast between the older and
the newer ways of offering thanks to God for great benefits received.
In the older days a man would pray, “O God, if thou wilt save the life
of my child, there shall be so many candles burning before thine
altar”; or “There shall be a new chapel added to thy house of prayer.”
The burning candles and the new chapel may have served human
purposes,—certainly the candle-makers had their small benefit of it;
but the essential thought was not service to mankind, but tribute to
God. When, however, the personal God has vanished and there is no
divine life but our own deeper and more ideal existence, how shall a
man give thanks for deliverance? Any man who has helped wife and nurse
and doctors to fight with all the power that human knowledge and skill
can command for the life of his child, knows that out of the deep
thanksgiving of his heart the thing that he would most wish to do
thereafter would be to bend every effort to make such saving knowledge
and skill accessible to fathers and mothers of other children, or to
extend that knowledge and develop that skill to the saving of lives
from still deeper distresses. He will build a hospital or endow a
chair in medical research, or he will send his small contribution to
some agency that makes for the amelioration of life conditions. And he
will do this not as a tribute to a God who delights in adoration, but
in simple devotion to the ideal of a more adequate human life.

Or, indeed, he _might_ found a church or endow a minister. For are we
to suppose that church and minister are to disappear when God the
Perfect Person no longer lives to hear the old supplications? But it
will be a very different church from the churches with which we are
familiar. The church of to-day still lingers in its animistic and
magical memories. The church services are supposed to have vital
efficacy for the saving of men’s souls, not simply in the ordinary way
of stimulating them by precept and example to better living, but by
performing for them and with them certain rites pleasing to God. There
is still in the minds of most churchmen something efficacious about
the very attendance upon divine worship. It is an act which God
enjoins and which he rewards when it is faithfully performed. It is
like the pagan custom of bringing gifts to the altar: the god demands
the gifts and rewards the bringer of gifts for his lowly obedience. It
is true that the more enlightened churches are rapidly outgrowing this
belief in the ceremonial efficacy of church service; but it would not
be difficult to show that it still persists in so great measure as
very definitely to color the word “religious” with the meaning “that
which pertains to divine ceremonial.” The sharp line of demarcation
between “religious” and “secular” is but the expression of this
animistic and supernatural survival in religion.

But even churches that have largely outgrown belief in the saving
efficacy of supernatural ceremonial, who believe that attendance upon
church service is wholly for the sake of inspiration to better living,
seek to secure that inspiration by pointing the worshipper to the
perfect God, or to his beloved Son. One may doubtless get inspiration
from the tireless work of a Burbank, or a Curie, or a Florence
Nightingale. If the church, however, uses such sources of inspiration,
it is only by the way. Its fundamental source is the Perfect Person,
the Eternal God. The church has the special function of calling men
from their secular activities, of pointing upward to that great Guide
and Friend and Provider in whose name and through whose power they are
to live.

The new type of church will indeed call men to the remembrance of the
divine life—it will point upward—but it will be their own divine
life to which it will call them. It will find their divine life in
their own ideals and in their loyal service of these ideals. Hence its
primary interest will be not in what some perfect God wants of men,
but what the God in themselves wants of them,—what types of things
they long for, what powers of mind and body they are willing to devote
to securing them. It will make far more difference to the new church
whether its communicant is fighting child labor with all his power of
mind and soul than whether he is a regular attendant upon weekly
prayers. Indeed, it will know no true and rounded prayer save actual
service. Hence its body of communicants will be first and foremost men
and women engaged in human service. The condition for admission to the
new church will be not a profession of faith but an exhibition of
deed. Does a man care enough for anything worth while to put strenuous
effort into its accomplishment; does he care for it not for his own
sake primarily but for the sake of enhancing the life of his fellows
and his world—it may be to discover a cancer cure, or to invent a
dishwasher, or to make a better school—such a man or woman is
welcomed into the new church. However circumscribed his ideal may be,
inasmuch as it is an ideal of service it is the divine in him that is
coming to life. He is already a worshipper.

By this token, there will be no place in the new church for the man
who is anxious about his soul or who thinks much of what will happen
to him after death. He belongs properly in the congregation of
self-seekers; not in the church of the divine life.

The new church, in short, will be primarily a clearing-house of
service, to which men will go not to save their souls but to save
their world. It will be a spiritual centre, so to speak, of all
service-activities; a place for comparing notes, for learning of each
other, for the heartening of one another in their worthful tasks. The
leader of such a church will be a man not only deeply interested in
and in touch with the agencies and activities of human betterment, but
versed likewise in the fundamental sciences that make for a finer
direction and control of life. His theology will be not an occult
research of supernatural relationships and powers, but physics and
chemistry, biology and sociology, ethics and philosophy—all the
fundamental approaches, in short, to the problem of human
self-realization.


III

Yet splendid as such religious life may be conceded to be, it will
apparently lack one of the primary consolations of the older belief,
the assurance, namely, that the fundamental government of the world is
just and good. “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.” If,
as we have been urging, God is not in his heaven, it may indeed, for
all we know to the contrary, be all wrong with the world. A few years
ago we were very much perturbed by certain conclusions reached by the
accredited masters of science. The universe was running down, they
said, and would end a lifeless, frozen mass. The thought of an
ever-living God was then a comfort against such ominous prophecy. If
God lives, it follows that all things of value will live, that the
world cannot go to ultimate ruin.

That old prophecy, however, of a frozen and lifeless world no longer
has honor in our land. Recent discoveries of new types of energy, a
more penetrating analysis both of the mathematics and mechanics of the
situation, show the prophecy to have been made on wholly insufficient
and insecure grounds. The old dogmatic materialism has had to give way
to a critical and open-minded evolutionism which tends more and more
to regard the cosmic process as one of expanding power, in which the
values for which we deeply care—conscious life, purposive direction,
science, art, morality—appear to have a place of growing security and
effectiveness. And yet the evolutionism of the day, unlike the older
religious thought, finds no cosmic certainty upon which it may utterly
bank. The universe, with all the high values that have been achieved,
_may_ indeed go to ruin. There is no absolute guarantee for the
future. All that modern evolutionism can say to us is that looking
over such history of the world as is accessible, and analyzing the
processes there found, it seems highly probable that the line of the
future will be a line of advance, an advance from relative
disorganization to organization, from a large degree of mechanical
indifference to increasing organic solidarity and integration, from
antagonisms and conflicts to mutuality and coöperation. But it is only
probable. There is no God who holds the destiny in his hands and makes
it certain of accomplishment.

In view of this uncertainty as to the world’s government and outcome,
it may be asked whether the new type of religion will not be weaker in
moral and spiritual vigor than the old. Do not vigor and initiative
spring from hope and sure confidence in the fundamental rightness of
the world? In answer to this one has but to ask the question: in what
type of situation does the human character grow strong and
heroic,—that in which there is no doubt of the happy outcome, in
which the individual plays his part, assured that nothing can happen
wrongly; or that in which the outcome is uncertain, in which the
individual realizes that he must fight his way, knowing not whether
victory or defeat will greet him, but assured only that whatever
happens, he must fight and fight to the end? Is it unfair to say that
the old religion with its confident, childlike resting on God (“He
loves the burthen”) developed a type of character that was not, in the
mass, conspicuously heroic? “God knows best”; “It will all come out
right”; “Thy will be done”—these are not expressions of fighting men;
they are expressions of men who resign themselves to the ruling of
powers greater than themselves. A civilization characterized by such
an attitude will not be one strenuously alive to eliminate the sorry
evils of life. But the men who believe that the issue of the universe
is in doubt, that there is no powerful God to lead the hosts to
victory, will, if they have the stuff of men in them, strike out their
manliest to help whatever good there is in the world to win its way
against the forces of evil. A civilization of such men will be a
tough-fibred civilization, strenuous to fight, grimly ready, like the
Old Guard, to die but never surrender.

There is, in short, something subtly weakening about the optimism of
the traditional religions. Like the historic soothing syrup, with its
unadvertised opiate, it soothes the distress not by curing the disease
but by temporarily paralyzing the function. “To trust God nor be
afraid” means in most cases—not all—to settle back from a too
anxious concern about the evils of the world. “God will take care of
his own!” How different is this from the attitude: “The task is ours
and the whole world’s and we must see it through!”


IV

But from another point of view there was an element of power in the
older religion which seems at first blush to be utterly lacking in the
type of new religion we are describing. A prominent world-evangelist
of the Young Men’s Christian Association was recently lecturing to the
college students of New York City on the ethical and religious life.
It was significant to note that most of his talk to students concerned
itself with temptations and that the invariable outcome of each talk
was that the one infallible means of meeting temptation was to realize
God’s presence in one’s life, to companion with God, to feel him near
and watchful, ever sympathetic, ever ready with divine help. Students
do indeed get power from that kind of belief. They feel themselves
before an all-seeing eye, a hand is on their shoulder, a voice is in
their ear; and when the difficult moment comes they are not alone. How
utterly uncompanioned, how lonely, on the other hand, must be the
student who knows no beneficent, all-seeing, and all-caring Father.
When his difficult moment comes he stands in desolate isolation.
Victory or defeat then must hang upon his own puny strength and
wavering determination. It is a favorite argument with Roman Catholics
that the belief in God is the one surest guard against the sexual
irregularity of young men. Remove God, the one strong bulwark, from
their lives, and the flood of their passions will sweep them to their
destruction.

Such considerations as these must indeed give one pause; yet I feel
assured that they need not hold us long. How does a man get strength
for right living? He begins—in his childhood as in the childhood of
the race—by getting it through fear. The child is told, upon pain of
punishment, not to do certain things. There will come a time when it
will know why it ought not to do these things; but in its first months
and, in a degree, through its early years, it refrains from doing them
simply by reason of the pressure of the superior power of its parents.
Later it refrains through unconscious imitation and affection. It
lives in the light and love of its parents; and it consciously and
unconsciously shapes its life after the pattern of their lives. When
difficulties press, the child flees to the mother or the father for
comfort and advice. Those are delicious days, of warm trust and joy
and loving security. The child nestles up against the stronger power
of those it loves. But the child grows to manhood and womanhood.
Whence then does it get its strength for right living? The fear of the
infant days, the imitation and affection of childhood and youth are
now transformed into a new attitude,—an understanding of the reason
in the right and the unreason in the wrong. There are many factors and
influences that now take the place of parent power and affection: the
love and admiration of one’s group, the customs of one’s people, the
stimulus of great persons. But the essential power now is the power of
_insight_—of so understanding the forces and principles of life that
one’s whole self is surrendered in deep reverence and service to the
things that ought to be. Assuredly, no character is mature until it
has reached this last stage. There is indeed something beautiful about
the boy who in the midst of temptation goes to his father and talks it
all out with him; who clings to the father’s hand to lead him safely
through the dangerous ways. But the boy is only on the way to moral
and spiritual maturity; he is not yet morally and spiritually mature.

The doctrine that the great evangelist and the evangelical churches in
general preach is a doctrine admirably adapted to a condition of moral
and spiritual immaturity; it is a doctrine, in short, for little boys
and girls; it is not a doctrine for morally and spiritually mature men
and women. I doubt even, in fact, whether it is a doctrine for college
youths and maidens; for I note in my own relations with college men
and women that there is among them the growing consciousness of right
for right’s sake, a growing cleanness and earnestness of life; and
this is so, I take it, not because they believe such conduct and
attitude to be commanded or because they are aware of a heavenly
Father who watches, but because their eyes have been opened to see the
truth and the truth has made them free.

I believe that the problem of how to teach a young man to meet
temptation is a deeply serious problem. But I believe small good will
come of falling back upon the old easy expedient of half-frightening,
half-cajoling the young man into submission by reminding him of the
all-watching eye and the all-considering heart of the great Father.
That way is so easy that it is really unfair to the victims. It is
like hypnotizing a man into morality. The way of the new religion is
the harder but more lasting, more self-respecting way of developing
the whole moral self of the boy and the youth and the man,—beginning
far back in childhood and unremittingly, understandingly continuing
the training, until when the child becomes the youth and the youth the
man, righteousness is the firm, sweet habit of his life. We human
beings have an inveterate love of shirking our tasks. We neglect the
essential moral culture of the infant and the child; we let the
moments and the days slip by in the life of the youth without putting
any hard thought upon his training in self-control, in courage, in
moral insight; and then suddenly, when signs of danger begin to show
in the young man, we grow panic-stricken and implore him to call on
God to save him. The fact is that the task was ours and we shirked it.
Ours was the responsibility; and we had no right to put it off on a
miracle-working Deity.

“When half-gods go,” says Emerson, “the gods arrive.” When once we give
up this easy way of moral and religious hypnosis; when once we believe
that God, the watchful policeman of the universe, no longer exists, we
shall solemnly and seriously take up the task we have so long cast
upon a deity’s shoulders—_our_ task of shaping and directing and
making strong the moral possibilities of the children we bring into
the world. From the old consolation, in short, of divine protection,
we shall awake to a new loyalty to our fundamental moral obligations.

It is significant in this connection to note that the farther we go
back in the history of religion, the more the moral reference of
situations is secondary and the supernatural reference primary. The
ten commandments, for example, were first of all a divine behest, and
only secondarily a series of laws founded on the essential
requirements of human well-being. But as we come nearer to our own
day, the moral quality of situations tends more and more to usurp the
primacy of the old supernatural reference. The limit of such evolution
is the disappearance altogether of the supernatural, the evaluation,
ultimately, of all situations and activities in terms of their
inherent good or bad for the life of humanity and the world.

       *     *     *     *     *

The old loyalty, in short, was the loyalty of loving children; the new
loyalty is the loyalty of strong-charactered men and women. Has the
time come for moral and spiritual maturity? To some of us there is no
longer an alternative. “When I was a child I spake as a child; I
understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish
things.” In the light of spiritual maturity, the god of magic, the god
of miraculous power, the god of loving protection, the god of
all-seeing care—the Parent God—must give way to the God that is the
very inner ideal life of ourselves, our own deep and abiding
possibilities of being; the God _in us_ that stimulates us to what is
highest in value and power.



THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

_August 18, 1914_


MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN:

I suppose that every thoughtful man in America has asked himself
during the last troubled weeks what influence the European war may
exert upon the United States; and I take the liberty of addressing a
few words to you in order to point out that it is entirely within our
own choice what its effects upon us will be, and to urge very
earnestly upon you the sort of speech and conduct which will best
safeguard the nation against distress and disaster.

The effect of the war upon the United States will depend upon what
American citizens say and do. Every man who really loves America will
act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of
impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.

The spirit of the nation in this critical matter will be determined
largely by what individuals and society and those gathered in public
meetings do and say; upon what newspapers and magazines contain; upon
what our ministers utter in their pulpits, and men proclaim as their
opinions on the streets.

The people of the United States are drawn from many nations and
chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and inevitable that
there should be the utmost variety of sympathy with regard to the
issues and circumstances of the conflict. Some will wish one nation,
others another, to succeed in the momentous struggle.

It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to allay it. Those
responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy responsibility;
responsibility for no less a thing than that the people of the United
States, whose love of their country, and whose loyalty to its
government should unite them as Americans, all bound in honor and
affection to think first of her and her interests, may be divided into
camps of hostile opinions, hot against each other, involved in the war
itself in impulse and opinion, if not in action.

Such diversions among us would be fatal to our peace of mind and might
seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as
the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to
play a part of impartial mediation and speak the counsels of peace and
accommodation, not as a partisan, but as a friend.

I venture, therefore, my fellow countrymen, to speak a solemn word of
warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential
breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of
passionately taking sides.

The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during
these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in
thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as
well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference
of one party to the struggle before another. My thought is of America.
I am speaking, I feel sure, the earnest wish and purpose of every
thoughtful American that this great country of ours, which is, of
course, the first in our thoughts and in our hearts, should show
herself in this time of peculiar trial a nation fit beyond others to
exhibit the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of
self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate action; a nation that
neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own
counsels, and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest
and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.

Shall we not resolve to put upon ourselves the restraint which will
bring to our people the happiness and the great lasting influence for
peace we covet for them?

                             WOODROW WILSON



ATAVISM

KARL REMER


The city had withstood its besiegers for a long time. The guns on the
mountain had poured down shot, the guns on the north and on the south
had battered the old walls. The walls had crumbled and fallen. The
walls were old and they had been considered picturesque for so long
that it was as if they had forgotten the sturdy virtues of their
youth.

Through the breaches came the soldiers. Tribesmen they seemed of the
old days of the Grand Khan.

The soldiers were thinking. They were not accustomed to thought. Was
it true, ran their thoughts, that their leader had promised that there
would be no looting? He had promised, this they knew, that there would
be no looting after he entered the city. What was the meaning of that
“he”? Did it mean the army or did it mean the general? Did it mean the
soldiers? There was the rumor that the general could not leave his
present quarters for three days. Rain, or snow, or ice, or drought
prevented. What was the meaning of that? Did it mean three days of
fine, bloody looting?

The soldiers entered the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan
they poured in. Through one gate, through two gates, through three
gates they came. It was a sullen business and silently did they press
forward. They had not made up their minds about those three days. They
were not sure about the general. Perhaps he was playing one of his
grim jokes. Was he, perhaps, already within the city? He had promised
before many that there would be no looting. The foreigner, the
Jesus-religion man in black clothes, had stood beside him. It was hard
to tell, where foreigners were concerned, how much to believe.
Foreigners were an unusual sort of people. Most of them did not look
dangerous, but any one of them might have power. It was one of the
inexplicable things about foreigners that one could never tell the
amount of power a foreigner had by the amount he used. To have power
and not use it, to have rice and not eat it—strange men these
foreigners.

The soldiers poured into the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand
Khan they came; but not like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan. The loot
and the fun were before them, yet they restrained themselves.

The soldiers were yellow and clad in yellow, and they poured through
the gates as the yellow Yangtsze pours between its banks. Silver and
silks were before them, but the hand was withheld from the knife and a
sullen silence was around them.

Some one began it. There came a curse and an answer, a taunt and a
gunshot. So it began.

Here was a shop boarded, bolted, and locked. A crowd of soldiers
gathered before it. They demanded that the shop be opened. No reply
came from within. The demand was repeated and emphasized with a blow
of a rifle butt against the boards. Still there was no reply. More gun
butts fell upon the boards and they began to creak and snap. A scared
man within began to dicker for life, property, and family. He paid and
paid high—for nothing. The shop was broken open. Stripped and
wounded, the man was sent down the street. His goods became the
playthings of the soldiers. His wife lay above, outraged and stabbed.
His daughter was in the hands of other tormentors. At the command of
the soldiers, his son began carrying his father’s goods and piling
them as the soldiers directed. There was a look of death upon the
boy’s face; he was sick and weary. The soldiers demanded more silver.
The boy knew there was no more. He knew that his father had paid it
all to save the family. He was so sadly sure he would not look. The
soldiers cut him down and went their way.

There was a ricksha coolie who had sunk frightened against a wall in a
side street. He had hidden his family, but he, himself, had come forth
from hiding in the hope of much work and large pay. With quaking knees
he had pulled loads of loot for the soldiers. At last the horror had
overcome him and here he cowered against a wall. He was called but he
could not move. He knew that he could not pass down the bloody streets
again. The call was repeated and still he did not move. They shot him
as he lay and took his ricksha from him. That street also, a little
street and a quiet one, had its spreading mark of red.

A poor barber lay trembling upon his bamboo bed. He had no family and
few friends. Why had he not run away? He lay thinking and thinking but
he could think of no good reason. As he lay thus they came upon his
shop. Down came the boards. He paid them all his savings, a pitifully
small sum, and they demanded his wife and children. They killed him
because he had neither the one nor the other. “For,” said they, “no
honest man is without a family.”

There was a girl of eighteen whom the soldiers seized. Guile or
temporary insanity prompted her to play her part as if with pleasure.
She smiled on them and shrugged her shoulders most coquettishly. She
bandied jokes with them and made advances. A petty officer accepted
her advances and, later, had her beaten to death. The soldiers
approved. “These people must be taught,” said they, “that modesty is a
woman’s duty.”

For two days the riot continued. For two nights there was no sleep but
the sleep of death. The moans of the women, the groans of the men,
fire and fresh alarms made sleep a thing that seemed years away. The
city was red and the blood flowed. Loot and the lives of men, silver
and the bodies of women, these things did the victors take as is old
custom in China. Then came the third day and the general.

The foreigner in black clothes, the man of the religion of Jesus, had
lived through these two days and two nights. “One can never tell,”
said the soldiers, “what power these foreigners have.” “That is the
foreigner’s house,” said the soldiers, “let it alone.”

The foreigner had lived through the two days and the two nights, but
he had not slept. He had been thinking of the promise of the general.
“There will be no looting after I enter the city”—these were the
general’s words and the man who had spoken them had not yet entered.
As a joke the speech was not bad, but too much blood and no sleep
spoils the taste for jokes.

The general entered with an important noise of trumpets. Where he rode
the looting stopped. He seemed weary, however, and did not ride far.
The smoke of the many fires may have hurt his eyes. The day may have
been too hot. In any case the general seemed discreetly weary and
discreetly blind.

The man of the religion of Jesus came to the general. His words were
to the point. “Is this the way you keep promises?” he asked.

The general did not like directness and he did not care to argue.
“There is no looting,” he said, and with a smile he pointed down the
street.

“There is looting everywhere except before your eyes.”

“There is none,” said the general. It was characteristic of him to
add, “What there is must be stopped.”

“By whom?” asked the foreigner.

“Take one hundred men,” said the general, “go up and down in the city.
If you see looting or outrage, cut off the guilty man’s head. As for
myself, I have seen none.”

The foreigner hesitated, but thoughts came to him of the last two
days. If he did nothing, who would act? Opportunity seemed to him
duty. So in despair and rage he agreed and at the head of his hundred
he set out.

They came suddenly to a corner where a soldier was searching a dead
man’s clothes. Here was guilt so plain no proof was needed. The man
was quickly sentenced and in another moment his head was off.
“Justice,” said the foreigner to himself, “must upon occasion be
swift.”

They came upon a house where a widow and her young daughter lived. The
house was small and until now it had been overlooked. A noise of
scuffling caused the foreigner to look within. The younger woman lay
bruised and naked upon the floor, the mother was still struggling with
her assailant. Two heads fell and the foreigner smiled. “Payment,”
said he to himself, “is a thing dear to the Lord. Here two have paid.”

The hundred and their leader came upon a half-crazed soldier who was
trying to run up a narrow street with two mattresses which he had
stolen. The mattresses brushed the sides of the buildings upon the
narrow street so that, as the man’s load struck gate or door-post upon
the one side or the other, the man reeled as a drunken man does. They
caught him and made him kneel upon those very mattresses. The hundred
went on and the man’s head was left resting softly upon the stolen
goods. The mattresses were becoming red. “The blood of justice is red
also,” said the foreigner.

Thus did the man of the religion of Jesus and his hundred make
progress through this city of great suffering.

They seized a soldier carrying a woman. She was groaning. He protested
that he was carrying her to shelter. The man had earrings and a chain
in his belt. The woman’s ears were bleeding. The good knife descended
and again punishment found guilt.

They went on and as they went there came a great joy into the heart of
the foreigner. “These people,” said he to himself, “are children and
they need a lesson. By God’s help they shall have it. Many lessons are
hard but many must be learned.”

They seized an old soldier who was picking up the trinkets that had
been dropped before a jewelry shop. He swore that he had robbed no
man, but the man in black decided against him and off came his head.

As the hundred passed on they sent fear before them and left a trail
of red justice behind them. The joy burned brighter in the heart of
the man in black. “Have I not talked to these people of the justice of
God?” said he to himself. “Now they are seeing it. Now they will know
it to be swift and terrible. A knife with a keen blade, a judge with a
clean heart, these things this people needs.”

They came upon two soldiers who were quarrelling over the division of
a sable coat. Each had an end and the altercation was proceeding over
the outstretched garment. They protested that they had bought the coat
not two hours before and that they had paid for it. One begged
piteously for his life, but the man in black shook his head.

So the expedition of the hundred became a thing of blood and more
blood. The heart of the man of the religion of Jesus was filled with a
grim ecstasy. It seemed to dance within him. “Am I not,” he chanted to
himself, “a messenger of the Lord to a sinful people? With what
measure they have measured, have I measured unto them. As they have
pitied others, so have I pitied them. Blood must flow, for blood alone
can cleanse. Blood alone can cleanse.”

A young soldier was caught as he climbed the stairs of a small house.
He was brought into the street and told to kneel. “I have heard of
your Jesus and his forgiveness,” he said; “now I know.” He knelt with
a sort of dignity, the dignity that death brings to the brave, and his
head fell.

His words struck through the blood fever to the heart of the man in
black. For a second he closed his eyes and when he opened them again
he saw with his old clearness. He knew that blood is blood and shame
came over him.

He sent back his hundred, saying: “Go. I have done wrong.”

He came to his own house and to his own small room where a crucifix
hung above the bed. He knelt and remained for a long time with his
eyes fixed upon the figure. The words, “Father, forgive them,” came
from his lips as from the lips of a stranger. For two days and for two
nights he had not slept. He sank slowly to the floor and lay still
before the quiet figure on the cross.



THE CHANGING TEMPER AT HARVARD

GILBERT V. SELDES


This article is not intended in any sense as a reply to the
_Confessions of a Harvard Man_ published several months ago in THE
FORUM by Mr. Harold E. Stearns. The importance of those articles, as
Mr. Stearns had reason to point out, lay not so much in what they told
about Harvard as in what they told about him. Precisely. Analyses of
the temper of Young America have their place. The temper of Harvard
itself, however, is something quite apart, and it is to that alone
that this article is devoted. The importance of it lies only in the
number of significant and true things it tells about Harvard.

And that, perhaps, is importance enough. I say this in none of that
college spirit which makes a man believe that his college, because it
is his, is singled out for the peculiar attentions of the high gods
who brood over academic welfare. A change, such as I am describing, if
it took place at any other college, would be quite as important. The
fact is that it could have taken place nowhere else.

Which brings us to the old Harvard and the popular misconceptions of
its character. It was supposed to create a type of man, effeminate,
detached, affecting superiority, incapable, and snobbish. Certainly
men of this order did graduate from Harvard, but the great truth is
that there was no Harvard type; there were always Harvard men, but
there was never a “Harvard man.” The importance of this distinction is
inestimable, because it points to the fundamental thing in the older
Harvard life: its insistence upon individuality. In that the old
Harvard struck deep through superficial things and came at once upon
the fundamental thing identical in democracy and in aristocracy. It
bestowed each man in accordance with his deserts and, following
Hamlet’s dictum, according to its own nobility; and gave him according
to his needs and according to his powers. Like every truly democratic
institution, Harvard was aristocratic; like every truly aristocratic
institution, Harvard was democratic. At the very moment when it was
supposed to be breeding aristocratic snobs, Harvard was fulfilling the
great mission of _democratic_ institutions in encouraging each man to
be himself as greatly and completely as he could. At the very moment
when it was supposed to exercise a mean and narrowing influence over
its students, it was fulfilling the great mission of _cultural_
institutions in helping each man to a ripening of his powers, to
enlargement of his interests, and to widening of his sympathies. Its
effeminates went to war against dirt and danger and disease; its snobs
devoted themselves to the advancement of social justice; its detached
men became bankers and mill-owners and journalists; one of its
weaklings conquered the world. The great thing was that in all of them
the old impulse to a deep and full life remained; the tradition of
culture was beginning to prosper. So that Harvard could send out a
statesman who was interested in the Celtic revival, a littérateur with
a fondness for baseball, a financier who appreciated art and a
philosopher who appreciated life. At the same time it graduated
thousands of men who took with them into professional life and into
business life a feeling, perhaps only a memory, of the variety and
excellence of human achievement—men who without pride or shame, which
are equally snobbish, tried to substitute discipline and cultivation
for disorder and barbarity. It is no petty accomplishment.

To achieve it Harvard had to stand with bitter determination against
the current sweeping toward the practical, the immediate, the
successful. At the same time it bought its cherished democracy of
thought at the price of social anarchy. The college as a body made
very little effort to protect or to comfort its individuals. It was
assumed that he who came could make his own way; if the way were hard,
so much the better! The triumph would be sweeter. The great
fraternities grew in strength, possibly because there was no
countervailing force issuing from the college itself. But there was
never a determined organized attempt to make the individual life of
the undergraduate happy or comfortable. In its place there was a huge,
inchoate, and tremendously successful attempt to make the intellectual
life of the individual interesting and productive. Each man found his
own; fought to win his place, struggled against loneliness and
despair, and emerged sturdier in spirit, younger and braver and
better. Some fell. They were the waste products of a civilization
which was harsh, selfish in its interests, generous in its
appreciations, a microcosm of life. A pity that some should have to
fall! But it would be a greater pity if for them the battle should
cease. Because the fighting was always fair. The strength which
developed in many a man in his efforts to make a paper, or a club, or
even in qualifying to join some little group of men, was often the
basis of a successful life. With it came an intensification of
personality; the absence of a set type made the suppression of the
individual at Harvard almost impossible. I am certain that no one with
a personality worth preserving ever lost it there.

I wonder whether those who speak and write about democracy at our
colleges ever realize the importance of this intellectual freedom. Mr.
Owen Johnson is not unconscious of it, yet his whole attack upon the
colleges, practically unchallenged, was on account of their lack of
social democracy. It is considered a dreadful thing among us that rich
A should not want to talk to poor B; but it would never occur to us to
be shocked if they had nothing to say to each other except small talk
about baseball or shop talk about courses. And if the choice is
between social promiscuity and intellectual freedom, we must say, “Let
their ways be apart eternally, so long as they are free.”

The terrible fact is that the undergraduate in his effort to attain
social unity has sacrificed the liberty of thought. It would be
indelicate for a Harvard man, however generous, to condemn other
colleges. Let Mr. Johnson speak for Yale: “It is ruled by the tyranny
of the average, the democracy of a bourgeois commonplaceness.” And an
undergraduate wrote in _The Yale Literary Magazine_ that “we are
accounted for as one conglomeration of body first, head next, and last
and least, soul. As one we go to chapel, as one our parental
authorities would like to see us pastured at Commons, and as one we
are educated.” For Princeton _The Nassau Lit_ writes this
significant editorial: “It is not long before the freshman learns that
a certain kind of thinking, too, is quite necessary here, and from
that time on, until graduation, the same strong influence is at work,
until the habit of _conforming_ has become a strongly ingrained second
nature…. Four years of this … results in a certain fixity of ideas….
We are brought up under the sway of what seems to us a rather
bourgeois conventionality.”

Apart from the fact that the term “bourgeois,” contradictory to the
aristo-democratic ideal in essence, occurs in two of these statements,
I do not think that they call for extended comment. These things, at
least, no man has been able to say of Harvard; even to this day there
remains a fierce, jealous, almost joyous tradition of intellectual
freedom—in spite of all!

I say “in spite of all,” because I am now leaving the old Harvard and
am about to record the deep conversion of recent years which says a
prosperous and Philistine No to everything the old Harvard has said,
and which is surrendering its spirit to the very forces against which
the old Harvard made its arm strong and its heart of triple brass. I
do not mean that Harvard will cease to be great; I do mean that it may
cease to be Harvard. It is hard to deal with a phenomenon of this sort
solely by means of actualities. I am describing the disintegration of
a social background, the subsidence of one tone and the emergence, not
yet complete, of another. But, yielding to the present insistence upon
“facts,” I shall name a number of significant developments which
indicate the nature of what I have called the changing temper at
Harvard.

They are of two orders, social and intellectual. In the first group we
have the senior and freshmen dormitories; a new insistence upon class
lines; a new emphasis upon college spirit and with it a disquieting
resurgence of that great abomination, “college life”; a change of
attitude toward our much maligned “Harvard indifference” and “Harvard
snobbery.” In the second class come the group system as opposed to the
free elective system, the failure of cultural activities, the contempt
for dilettantism, the emergence of the scholar. The last phenomenon is
mentioned out of no overbearing desire to be either thorough or fair;
it has a significance of its own.

Superficially the most striking of these changes is the extraordinary
importance attached to class lines. It will be remembered that when
President Wilson tried to reform Princeton with the Oxford system as a
model, he was balked by precisely this feeling of class unity. At
Harvard the thing was not unknown; but it was not important. Princeton
men rejoice that their freshmen are compelled to wear caps, black
shirts and corduroy trousers for the first three months of the year,
so that no snobbery may develop! To the healthy Harvard man this seems
sheer insanity—democracy run to seed. Such solicitude for promiscuity
seems to intend a horrible mistrust of something, and certainly a
beautiful misapprehension of what democracy means. I am speaking not
from mere personal experience, but from that of generations of Harvard
men, when I say that it has been possible for a man to go through his
four years without knowing more than ten men in his own class
intimately, yet acquiring all that college could give by knowing the
finest spirits in a whole college cycle. The new order will change all
this. It will not forbid a man to seek his acquaintances outside his
class; but it will suggest and presently it may insist that his duty
to his class can only be fulfilled by cultivating the acquaintance of
all who entered college on the same day as he. We may live to see the
time when Harvard will emulate the Yale man’s boast that he knew all
his classmates (but one) by their first names!

The outward forms of this change are the senior and freshmen
dormitories. The former resulted from the great schism of 1909 when
the Gold Coast was defeated in the vote for class officers by the
poorer men living in and about the Yard. It was considered intolerable
that a class should be so divided and a decided effort was made to get
the rich society men to live in the Yard, beside their poorer
fellow-students, during their senior year. This has been a great
success! A group of men, friends for three years, bound by steady
companionship and natural affinities, occupy one entry of Hollis.
Another group, equally bound by totally different sympathies and
activities, occupy another. They nod to each other as they come from
class. If a man in one group is taking the same course in Engineering
as a man in the other, they may discuss a problem or denounce a
“stiff” hour exam. in common. There their ways part. It seems
inconceivable that the heads of a great college should have been able
to believe that the mere accident of adjacent rooms could actually be
the basis, or even the beginnings, of a true democratic spirit of
fraternity. And—let me anticipate—_if the college had not
ignominiously failed in its effort to supply a true basis of
fraternity, it would not now be driven to a method so childish and so
artificial as that of class grouping_.

But if the senior dormitories are merely silly, what can be said of
the plan to house all the freshmen together in a group of buildings
far removed from the centre of college activities? It is not here a
question of whether they “will work,” but of the spirit which prompted
their foundation. They will not be as bad as their opponents may
imagine, because nothing will break down the tradition of free
intercourse, and the man who writes or the man who jumps will
inevitably seek out his own. But it is certainly a weakening of
Harvard’s moral fibre that an effort should be made to “help along”
the freshmen, instead of compelling them to fight their own way. That
the change really drives into the spirit of Harvard can be judged by
these significant instances of the attitude taken toward the new
scheme by graduates, undergraduates, and by the college authorities.
First consider the testimony of an alumni organization secretary. In a
conversation he said, “We have found it the hardest thing in the world
to persuade graduates that Harvard needs freshmen dormitories. They
are perfectly willing to subscribe for dorms, but they balk at the
freshmen restriction.” Among the undergraduates there exists a
peculiar feeling of relief that they came to Harvard before the
buildings were up. Even those who defend them and say that they “will
be a good thing for the freshies,” do not regret that the “good thing”
was not for them. Articles have been written in undergraduate
publications defending them, but I do not know a single man in the
present (1914) senior class who passionately regrets that they were
not built four years ago. And finally from the college itself came
distinct and explicit denial that there is any intention of tucking
the freshmen into bed at nine o’clock each night. _Hein!_

And the result: a wonderful renaissance of the demand for “college
spirit.” College spirit is, of course, nothing in the world but
undergraduate jingoism. The desire to cheer his team is one which no
man can afford to miss, but it points to an undeniable falling off in
democracy when the “rah-rah” spirit can dominate a college and call
those who will not yield to it unfaithful and unworthy. Under that
tyranny Harvard is already beginning to suffer. Further, men are
beginning to be urged to do things not because they want to do them,
but for Harvard’s sake. They are urged to back their teams for the
sake of the college and its reputation. It will seem incredible, but
there actually appeared in the columns of an undergraduate publication
an ominous exhortation “not to be behind Yale” in showing our spirit.

Disagreeable as these things are, they are inconsidered trifles beside
the change of attitude which has taken place in regard to the serious
work of the college. I cling, in spite of successive disillusions, to
the belief that _the function of the college is to create a tradition of
culture_: it is not to create gentlemen or scholars unless it can effect
the combination of both, and it is certainly not to prepare men for
success _in business_. Success in life is a different matter. College
should not spoil a man for life; it should enable him to appreciate
life, make him “able and active in distinguishing the great from the
petty.” That is what culture means; and that is precisely what Harvard
has decided not to do. Emphasis there has borrowed from emphasis
everywhere. The advantage of President Lowell’s system of course
grouping is that the undergraduate is no longer able to take 17
uncorrelated courses and achieve a degree; he must know a good deal
about one thing at least. But aside from the obvious fact that a great
many freshmen are incapable of choosing their life work and choose
what is easiest for them, the group system has a terrible defect. It
has come about that men choose their group from worthy or unworthy
reasons and consider that they have acquired all the good of a college
career if they have done creditable work in that particular group. The
other courses are merely “fillers.” The majority of men are content to
concentrate, to narrow their interests, and the whole meaning of
college, which is to prepare the way for future enlargement of
sympathies, has been lost. Figures cannot be cited for or against this
assertion. But some tendencies now discernible at Harvard may be
illuminating.

First, the scholar has emerged. He has become respectable; he has also
become a specialist, Economics, Government and the practical sciences
being the favored groups. Second, there has grown up a great and loud
contempt for the dilettante and æsthete. I hope these words will not
be misunderstood. The dilettante at Harvard is any man who writes,
thinks, talks well, is not particularly athletic and does not go to
the moving-picture shows which have become the chief attraction at the
Harvard Union. (This last, by the way, is not fantasy but fact; the
“movie” has proved the great agent for class solidarity at Harvard).
An æsthete at Harvard is one who has any diversity of interests and
activities. At Harvard it is almost a crime to be interested in art,
anarchism, literature, music, pageantry, dancing, acting; to write
poetry or fiction, to talk English, to read French (except de
Maupassant) for pleasure. Mr. Eric Dawson, whose article in _The Yale
Lit_ I have already quoted, advises the Yale man to keep it darkly
secret “if he cares for etchings, prefers Beethoven to Alexander’s
Ragtime Band, and Meredith to Meredith Nicholson.” It is a terrible
commentary on Harvard’s intellectual life that the words should be
applicable now.

They are. Within the past three years the degeneration of every
cultural activity has been persistently rapid. _The Lampoon_ alone
resists, and it is marked by its satire on all the new movements. The
Socialist Club was founded in 1909. Its boast that it included the
active intelligence of the college was always a gross exaggeration,
but it was in itself active and intelligent. This year it is
practically dead; free, incisive thinking has gone out of fashion. The
Dramatic Club started at about the same time with high ideals and even
higher achievement. Its record for the past two years has been one of
protracted failure. (There is some excuse; other organizations have
taken some of its most talented actors.) The activity is too
“detached” for Harvard men of the brave new stripe. Even more
disastrous has been the career of _The Harvard Monthly_—_The Atlantic
Monthly_ of the colleges—which was founded about thirty years ago and
has had on its boards such men as George Santayana, Professor George
P. Baker, Robert Herrick, Norman Hapgood, and a host of other
distinguished men. It always lacked popular appeal, but there were
always enough men at Harvard to produce a superior magazine and almost
enough readers to make the production worth while. Within the last few
years it has been found almost impossible to keep the _Monthly_ going,
and its dissolution is imminent. It may combine with _The Advocate_,
another paper of other ideals, once graced with infinite wit, now
failing because that too is out of fashion. It is possible that these
activities may revive, that succeeding generations will take up the
slack. That is the work of individuals. The creation of a receptive
body is the work of the college, and that has been forgotten.

And if you ask what the Harvard man is doing, what he is talking
about, while these activities are being ruined before his eyes, the
answer is not merely as Mr. Stearns gave it, that the Harvard man
talks smut. So do most other men. The terrible thing is that the
Harvard man talks very little else that is worth listening to.
Lectures, cuts, assignments, exams, and shows; baseball, daily news (a
mere “Did you see that?” conversation), steam engines; girls, parties,
class elections, piffling nonsense—that is the roster of the college
man. I am terribly conscious of the intolerable stupidity of
“intellectual” conversation; I do not wish that conversation at
college should consist of nothing but considerations of the Fourfold
Root. But it does seem rather unfortunate that the men who are,
theoretically, to be the leaders of the next generation, should never
talk or think about art, should have _no_ interest in ideas, should be
ignorant of philosophy and impatient of fine thinking, should use
their own tongue as a barbarous instrument, should be loud and vulgar
of speech, commonplace in manner, entirely lacking in distinction of
spirit and mind.

The college has failed to make intelligent activity the basis of
democracy; there is no community of interest in things of the mind or
spirit and that is why artificial means, with the peril they bring to
the individual, are resorted to. How far President Lowell is
responsible for that which has happened in his administration is a
question I cannot answer. He has seen the signs of his time; he has
warned Harvard of the terrible danger which has come to it with the
decadence of individual study and independent reading. He is trying to
make intellectual activity the basis of Harvard’s democracy at the
very moment when he is the ablest of those who in reality help to
sustain all that I have here ventured to criticise.

It has been in no reactionary spirit. I have not intended to say that
Harvard actually produces the type I have described. The truth is that
it does so little to refine what it gets. The care of the superior
individual, which always results in the greatest benefit to all, has
ceased to engross the college. The new order will not be of the same
heterogeneous excellence. That change all suffer, and all resent.
Granted that the new Harvard will be glorious and great, was there not
room, besides all the State colleges and the technical schools, for
its intransigeant detachment, its hopeless struggle for a “useless”
culture? It will be said that for such a training men should go to
smaller colleges, like Amherst, where they will receive the special
attention they may deserve. But I think of what William James said
once of Harvard, and I wonder what Harvard men, and what the country,
will do when they realize that it can never be said again:

“The true Church was always the invisible Church. The true Harvard is
the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and
independent and often very solitary sons…. As a nursery for
independent and lonely thinkers … Harvard still is in the van….
Our undisciplinables are our proudest product!”



THE NEW STEERAGE

FRANCIS BYRNE HACKETT


Eleven hundred of us, perhaps twelve hundred, were booked steerage
from Liverpool to New York. We had been brought to the dock at noon,
away from our friends, though we heard the vessel was not to leave
till five. On the other side of a stone pier rose the huge
_Lusitania_ with her four funnels. Everyone on our tender moved
expectantly forward. There was an official cry: “Britishers first!”
The chosen of the Lord! But the horde of ignorant foreigners came
surging ahead. Miscellaneously we crowded up the gangway. Another
gangway sloped for us on to the _Lusitania_. Several British policemen
and stewards faced us to keep us in line. At so many guardian angels
we began to feel depressed.

Medical inspection. The instant we put foot on the deck of the
_Lusitania_, this was our first business.

“Have your Inspection Tickets ready.” Before we could inquire what was
going to happen, it was happening. We were passed in a slow trickle
between two officials. “Take off your hat.” “Take off your glasses.” I
stood blinking while the doctor deftly plucked up my eyelids. He waved
me ahead, my ungranulated eyelids made harsh by the handling. Hundreds
were before us on the deck, and those from behind began to press on
our heels with the inevitable “myself first” impulse of human beings.
We were a medley of races, Swedes, Greek, English and Welsh, Irish,
Russian Jews, Poles, mute Lithuanian peasants, and men from a Northern
race who turned out to be Finns. It was almost as cosmopolitan as the
Third Avenue Elevated. We advanced with repeated hesitations and
conscious slowness. A woman turned white in the crush and had to be
helped to a seat near an open porthole. In front of me, a 12-year-old
boy, dead beat, leaned against his big brother—and under his arm, if
you please, wearily hugged a camp stool. “Why doesn’t he sit on the
stool?” The mother, a thin, strained, admirable creature, whose face
showed the fine wrinkles of a life too intent, allowed me to open the
stool for him. From his low seat he rewarded me more than once with a
look of confidence and smiling good-nature. They had travelled by rail
all night, the mother volunteered, from a town in Wales. They were on
their way at last to join the father in California. “I have two more
in California”—the mother pointed to her children, who cheerfully
smiled.

Women and children. During that weary wait I observed them here and
there, standing submissively for three-quarters of an hour. At length,
after the long halt, the tension was relieved, and we moved again,
this time past another doctor. “Take off your hat.” The doctor had
apparently to inspect the unnaturalized polls on which that morning we
had paid a four dollar tax. He was a man of great perception, the
doctor, and the actual examination was an affair of split seconds. On
completing the circuit of the deck our yellow Inspection Tickets
(given to us at the office in the morning when we had paid our $37.50
for the passage) received their first stamp. The Cunard Line accepted
us as healthy live stock.

My Inspection Ticket said Room H 22, and a steward took me there.
There were seven other occupants. Most of them were taking their ease
in their berths and smoking. They were all English or American. I
responded to their cheery hello, but their carbonic gas was strong,
and the portholes proved to be immovable. I sat down on a lower berth,
bumped my head against the top one, and had hardly room for my knees
in the aisle. My carbonic gas did not improve the air. I felt
discouraged, and went out. Nearby I saw a most capacious 4-berth room,
and there was a vacancy in it. Henri Bergson says that “life proceeds
by insinuation.” I felt less gloomy. I found the bedroom steward and
asked him whether I could be changed. He was amicable but not quite
concrete, a bit of a Jesuit. About this time word flashed by that we
were back at the Landing Stage for the cabin passengers: deferring the
affairs of moment, I went on deck.

We all pushed aft for a good view, only to find a rope stretched
across the deck, and a grim sailor guarding it. “That’s all the scope
you get.” We flattened back against one another. And they let down a
beautiful canopied gangway for the upper classes.

Braided officers stood in a row to receive, on a nice clear deck. All
the stewards were lined up in fresh white coats. Against the sky line
we studied the new angles of hat plumes. On they stepped with leisured
gait, with an air of distinguished fatigue. “The daughters of Zion are
haughty and walk with stretched forth necks, walking and mincing as
they go.” Indifferently they handed their light burdens to the now
demure stewards. I looked around at my comrades back of the rope. A
child in arms next to me chortled as he bandaged his mother’s eyes.
She gently removed the bandage, only to be blinded again. Behind me, a
buxom Swede looked open-eyed at her feathered sisters abaft.
Everywhere the interest was intense and simple. I turned again to
envisage the daughters of Zion. As in another world they moved—a
world where policemen are unnecessary, where stewards are
spring-heeled, where officers stand in line, where eyelids are not
officially scrutinized nor polls inspected, where the gangway has a
canopy and weariness is consoled. I admired “the bravery of their
anklets, and the cauls and the crescents; the pendants, and the
bracelets and the mufflers.” Must it not be delightful, said I to
myself, to merit so much attention from everyone, and to be so
prettily arrayed? Must it not be pleasant to have eyelids so immune,
and to have a quite uninspected poll?

The last piece of first-class baggage rolled aboard. Giant hawsers
strained, and were released. It was departure. From my coign at a deck
porthole the Landing Stage came into focus. I confess I exclaimed. As
far as the eye could reach, on the water and street levels, the glance
of thousands on thousands was rivetted on the vessel as she cautiously
edged away. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sky innocently blue. All
indifferent to us in the background stood the massive city of
Liverpool, concentrated on affairs, but no less indifferent to the
city itself ranged this childlike, almost awestruck, army of
curiosity, silently intent on us as we receded into the river. From
our porthole (I was joined by a Syrian) we could not help a glow of
pride. My companion was not able to vent his feelings in English, but
he was quite moved. His was an Indian-like head—high cheekbones, thin
lips, hard, beady eyes. He dwelt on the vast crowd, ejaculating
“ah-ye-ye-ye,” and clucking his tongue. I smiled at his solid wonderment.
Then he craned out of the porthole to view the water far, far below. I
followed suit. He pointed down, and gave a significant, cheerfully
reckless laugh. I laughed, too. We were in for it, and no mistake.

The steamer’s first evening was spent, doing nothing, out in the
Mersey. The tide was in some way blameworthy. It seemed inefficient of
nature, but as we lay opposite Liverpool the night-lights came out,
definite and serene and friendly, and I took out my mental clutch.

Time came for supper. I reserved for the morning the mysteries of the
cuisine. I had earlier gone below to the pantry, after some talk with
a humane steward, and to my surprise I had been allowed to help myself
to a cup of tea.

The first evening was one of extraordinary activity. Still in their
best clothes, around our half of the entire deck poured streams and
streams of passengers. It was almost impossible to tread one’s way.
And in several places these streams turned themselves into dancing
whorls, where volunteers with a concertina had appeared. I happen to
like the concertina, and I enjoyed it during five entire days, though
not so much the concertina as the movement of life which it promoted.
There were never any deck sports, nor games, nor organized
distraction. But, except for one awful seasick period, there was
endless dancing and singing. On this first evening I stood in the
rings that framed the waltzers, and my blood raced with their
pleasure. The Swedes in particular took part much and well. They
occasionally ventured on those new forms, but only for dancing
reasons. When Swedes really want to hug each other, they do it openly
and for its own sake.

To increase the friendliness of the evening, everyone was willing to
talk a little. I chatted with a Russian, a Greek, an Englishwoman and
an Englishman. He was a young and unhappy Englishman, and in disgust
at the ignorant foreigner. I later learned that he made up the
difference and was allowed to go second class.

At 9 p.m., tired of repeated searches for my bedroom steward (he was
dishing out in the pantry most of the time), I went to the assistant
chief steward of the third class to see if I could be transferred to
the 4-berth room. He’d see, he said in a serious bass voice, he’d let
me know. At 9.30 p.m. he again told me he’d see. Whether he has yet
seen or not I have no means of discovering. At 10 p.m. I took the
berth, with the consent of the other men in the cabin. I gave my tip
to the bedroom steward, as I guessed he was the less Tammanyized. The
assistant chief steward was a strong character, free from numerical
superstition. He asked 13 cents for five penny stamps.

In my room the bedding proved simple—a coarse white bag of straw for
mattress, and one dark blue horse blanket for clothing. A small pouch
of straw served as pillow. No linen, of course, and no frills of any
kind. There was an iron spring frame. I found it ascetic but clean.
The single blanket was not enough. I used my rug, and my fellow
passengers used overcoats and rugs, too. The mattresses, I was told,
serve just one trip. They are dumped overboard as soon as the steamer
is out to sea on the return voyage. In my bed I was the only living
creature present.

Those who rose early had advantages. They had first use of the tin
basin in their own room, or of the bowls in the general washing room.
They had a bid for the solitary bath tub in male steerage. They were
up in time to be allowed to walk all the way aft, and look down the
wide lane of jade and white in the wake of the _Lusitania_. And they
were in time for the first sitting.

Those who did not rise early had to listen to the tramplings that
began long before sunrise. Despite this, I got up late. Fifty of us
waited over half an hour outside an iron grill at the head of the
dining room stairs. The dining room is quite inadequate, so there had
to be four sittings—first come, first served. When we reached below
we took seats where we could. There was an understanding, however, by
which Britishers were grouped together. This was made effectual by
stewards who stood where the ways parted, and thrust Jews and Poles
and mid-Europeans to one side, and Britishers and Scandinavians to the
other.

On the whole, the food during the trip was edible. I could not eat the
bacon or the beef. I did not try the eggs. The tea was vile and
usually not very hot. The coffee was vile. But the bread, served in
individual loaves, was most palatable. The Swedish bread was excellent.
The oatmeal was edible, even with the wretchedly thin condensed or
dried milk. We had herrings and at another time sausages, and both
were fair. The potatoes were always excellently boiled and good of
their kind, but the browned potatoes were invariably overcooked and
not fit to serve. The cold meats for supper could be eaten. The boiled
rice was insipid. The stewed prunes and stewed apricots were
palatable. I had very good baked beans and navy beans, good pea soup
and fair broth. I had no complaints to make of the food. I never
decided whether it was butter or margarine, but I ate it willingly. It
certainly had not that callously metallic taste that margarine used to
have.

The service was on bold, wholesale lines. Twenty sat at each table,
and there were two equipments of bread and butter, sugar, salt, pepper
and vinegar. A disconsolate plant decorated each table. One steward
took charge of each ten people. I sat at a different table practically
every time, and most of my companions were delightfully obliging and
unaggressive. Only those who so wished had to stand up and harpoon
their bread roll. There were a few tiresome people who damned the food
and failed to pass the salt. The stewards were elusive, or rather that
one-tenth part of a steward who was your share. I regretted on one
occasion to discover egg shells in my dessert, and the next day I was
pained to find a knob of beef in my stewed apples. My sympathetic
steward remarked: “Puts you a bit off, don’t it?” It do.

From about five in the morning till eleven at night these stewards are
working. Work is a good thing. It is strange that the stewards look
unhealthy and fatigued. It is due to the inherent inferiority of
stewards.

Queenstown was the distraction for several hours on the first day out.
The Cunard and White Star Lines have just discerned that the harbor is
unsafe for big boats. At what point of profit, I wondered, would
Queenstown harbor suddenly and miraculously become safe again?

As we left the coast of Ireland there came an unctuous swell upon the
sea. You would not think it could upset anyone, but when I ascended
after dinner I was horrified. Rows of passengers lay where they were
stricken, all too evidently ill, ghosts of their braver selves. The
stewards were in the dining room and could not come, and did not come,
for well over an hour. For well over an hour no effort at all was made
to clean the decks. I now understood this grave disadvantage of third
class, to which the company itself contributes. But there was much
kindness to the decimated, and much tolerance. Later I admired
immensely the work of the matrons. I seldom met three more splendid,
capable, sympathetic women. There were superior passengers who
despised the childishness with which simpler people gave in. I myself
laughed when I saw a girl lying with complete abandon plumb on top of
another girl. The grim sailor heard me and muttered: “Only an ignorant
person’d laugh at anyone was seasick.”

During this distressing hour a Russian came flying to the master at
arms. “The doctor! the doctor!” “You can’t have the doctor,” said the
man in blue, not unkindly. “We can’t help seasickness. It’s got to be
expected.” “The doctor! Not seaseek! dead!” He made a ghastly face.
“Oh, all right,” said the master-at-arms, and we went straight below.

Terrific pleading calls shook the cabin. “Sonya! Sonya!” The
master-at-arms walked right in, and emerged supporting a sack-like
girl, very white and inert. “You could cut the air with a knife,”
murmured the weary master-at-arms. He assisted her on deck, and she
was wooed to consciousness.

At this time, on the enclosed deck, there was much commotion. A
striking red-haired Jewess, clad in green, had fainted and was put
sitting on a bench. A venerable Jew appealed to her excitedly while an
earnest young soul at the other side cried for water. It made me
furious to see the limp woman propped up, but they were evidently
playing according to the rules of a different league. The water at
last came and much to my surprise the earnest soul put it to her own
lips. But not to drink it. In her the Chinese laundryman had an
efficient rival. She was the most active geyser I ever saw. After a
time there was a feeble motion of protest, to the regret of the
delighted spectators.

On the open deck during this weather the Jews monopolized one corner.
I counted thirty of them huddled inseparably together in their misery,
like snakes coiled in the cold. As they began to recover, a leg would
wiggle from under one blanket, and a head be thrust out from under
another. Later they sat up and drank their tea out of glasses,
nibbling the sugar. They soon littered the place with apple peels and
orange peels. After generations of inhibition they probably needed to
be told that they were permitted by a merciful dispensation to use the
sea as a waste basket.

As the sea fell slumberously still, life recovered its audacity. Again
the decks became clamorous, multitudinous. People thronged the
promenade, or swarmed on the benches that do duty for deck chairs.
They began smoking everywhere again, and out came the stewards and the
Black Crowd to enjoy a sociable cigarette. There was little to do but
talk, until the dancing began. The grim sailor looked pityingly on
Babel, as he patrolled the Second Class partition. He was for smaller
ships. “On a smaller ship,” he deigned to remark, “you can come up and
throw your weight around.”

Differences in manners obtruded. The third day out a youth emerged
whom I took to be a swineherd from the beech forests of Croatia. He
was not handsome. His fringe encroached upon his little eyes. His chin
was unformed. Up over his trousers, as if he had just waded through
the piggery, his socks were drawn. There he stood, plastic youth, a
hand in his pocket, pivotting a heel, surveying the world through his
own hirsute thatch. Suddenly, deliberately, he blew his nose
Adam-like. A Swedish woman next me turned livid. “De dirty pig.” I
felt myself the brother of a Swede. The Croatian saw us but beheld us
not. His mouth ajar, he ruminated afresh on the fleshpots of Croatia.
Raw material, simple even to the verge of our ancestral slime. I
prayed “God be with thee,” and looked elsewhere.

That evening amid the throng which waited for admittance to the dining
room appeared a Greek. The glaring electric light concentrated on that
swart face, flung-out chest, and bared neck. He was incredibly
blasphemous and incredibly self-important. “Seventy-five dollars, see.
American money!” He showed his money to us, and gave a chuckle. His
lip curled. “They only Hunkies,” indicating his companions who
connected themselves with him by slavish eyes. “I in America before,
Christ, yes!” His eye roved boldly, and he showed his white teeth.
“I got more money still, you bet your life. When I get over I marry no
Hunkie. I marry Henglish girl. Yeh, Christ, you bet!” He antagonized
us, and yet we watched him eagerly. He lapped up our interest.
Overcome with the savor of attention, he incontinently spat. I drew
away. “It’s a’ right,” he said half-obsequiously, “I know what I do. I
no’ spit on American.” He felt too much kinship to spit on an
American.

So things happen, but only in the steerage. At the door of the café
below, you will not find a Polish count informing the steward: “I
marry a Henglish girl. No penniless Hunkie for me.” Nor will the
first-class steward answer: “Who cares? Who’ll buy a beer?”

In all these days, among all these peoples, there was no friction.
Some youths did start to make boisterous fun of two barefooted Italian
women, walking up and down in bright petticoat and kerchief. But the
Italians smiled and skipped back and sat down, and there was no more
“fun.” Between congruous people intercourse was easy and frank. The
fresh-hued Scandinavians were exceptionally lively. A little English
group revolved quietly together, with a private afternoon teapot for
central sun. Another little group, including two girls in service, a
cotton spinner and a grocery clerk, often sat in the prow and talked
amiably about anything from the food on board to their notion of a
God. They say that “sociability proceeds from weakness.” Steerage, at
any rate, is highly sociable. In some cases it was also frankly
amatory. The attractive girls, so soon well known, seemed to have no
fear of the predatory males. They took each other lightly. But at 9.30
p.m., all the feminine kind, even the rebellious, had to leave their
conquests and go below. This rule was enforced to the letter.

Two days before landing we had another medical experience. We learned
that American citizens in the third class were immune from smallpox
and need not be troubled on that score, but that aliens in the third
class must all be vaccinated. It was said there were ways of evading
this, but I found none. For several hours we were assembled while the
women filed in. After an hour in line, our turn came to enter the
surgery improvised in the companionway. On a table flamed a number of
small spirit lamps, over which the stewards sterilized the metal
scrapers. I bared my arm, as per orders from a pasty youth. The doctor
answered my queries by taking my arm, scraping it gently and applying
the lymph. “It is not our law,” he said politely. “Take this chap,”
motioned a bullet-headed assistant, and I was shoved to another group.
“Rub it off,” whispered a friendly scullion, but I let it stay, out of
curiosity. The new group crowded around another big table. An
additional hour’s standing brought up my turn to answer the clerk’s
questions. He recorded on the manifesto that I was destined for
Brooklyn and had friends. This was added to the facts I had provided
when I engaged passage. I was now catalogued for Ellis Island.

The day before landing there was, I believe, another medical
inspection. We got in line for it, but the crowd simply disregarded
the stewards, and I never even saw the doctor. On that evening the
barriers were partly down, and the Goths and Huns invaded two decks.

It was Friday morning before we came into the yellow waters of the
harbor, and passed under the cliffs of Manhattan. Already a fissure
had appeared in the steerage. On one side, separated from us more and
more, went the naturalized citizens, each armed with his papers. On
the other, we aliens congregated, to be shipped in due time to Ellis
Island.

It was an inhuman morning, a morning of harrowing strain and
confusion. Though the inspection of baggage amounted to nothing in
itself, especially as there had been no preliminary declaration, there
was the uncertainty, and the three hours’ delay. Searching for
baggage, waiting for inspectors, hectored and shouted at, the poorer
immigrants reminded one of Laocoön. And then we had to wait for the
boat to Ellis Island, and we had to lug our hand baggage with us for
the hours that were to come. This fact alone made the day an ordeal
for all except the strongest, a brute ordeal to which wealthier folk
would not submit for two successive days.

On the Ellis Island boat we were crammed like cattle. “Move up, I say,
move up. God! move UP, you damned kike!” So spoke our burly exemplar
of American citizenship. We “moved up” until the last square foot of
floor was shut off from sight by close-packed bodies. We coöperated
with the U. S. Government as well as we could to provide conditions
for another Slocum disaster. When such a disaster does occur on one of
these old boats, every editor in the country will demand with
magnificent emphasis: “Fix the responsibility!” Let us by all means
wait till the steed is stolen.

Ellis Island basked in the sun. It was handsome and trim and restful,
after the swarming pier. We entered the fine examination building
single file, always lugging our suitcases and bundles and bags and
wraps and boxes and babies.

Medical inspection, a real inspection this time. We passed through a
cleverly arranged aisle, and at each angle a new doctor in khaki
sought for blemishes. I finally impinged on a man who asked me if I
could see well without my glasses. I answered: “Not at all.” He leaned
over, and made two crosses in blue chalk on my raincoat. At the exit
from this trap an attendant wrote another little piece on my raincoat,
“Vis.,” short for vision. I was allowed to lay down my bags, and sit
and wait for half an hour.

When the special examiners were ready, we were led up a corridor and
shown into a bright room. Around the walls were men and boys in all
stages of dress and undress, as at a bathing beach.

“Ken you read English?” I said yes. “Read that over there.” A familiar
oculist test card hung on the wall. Being already so tired that I
would have welcomed deportation, I resentfully choked out: “B, T B R,
F E B D,” and so on. “All right, doc.,” said the attendant, and a
civil man at a high desk silently handed me an initialled slip.
Outside this was taken, and my dilapidated Inspection Ticket was
stamped “Specially Examined.” I had passed the test, and went back for
my baggage to the ante-room. A woman there, flushed and petulant,
commented on her being examined. The attendant turned away
contemptuously. “Aw, she’s ben hittin’ the pipe, or somethin’.”

Up the steps into the great hall I proceeded. It resembled a big
waiting room, where to my delight benches ran the length of the room.
It was now nearly three, and I had neglected to eat anything all day.
In the particular bench decided by my Inspection Ticket, I
emphatically sat down.

At the far end of these benches ran a long screen at right angles. In
that screen were a number of gates. Each gate was guarded by a seated
official with our manifestoes on the desk before him. Through those
gates we immigrants were being sieved into the United States.

At last I was in the sieve. The guardian of the gate was kind of
voice. “You have a brother in Brooklyn, eh?” “How much money have you
got?” I was not asked to show it. “All right, pass on. No, there is
nothing further. You can go as far as you like now!” Two of us from
the _Lusitania_ whipped down the steps, bags and all, and delivered up
our Inspection Tickets at a last, final door. The sun shone outside.
The air was fresh. The light danced on the sea. There were no more
policemen, stewards, masters-at-arms, doctors, baggage examiners,
attendants, inspectors. I drew a deep breath, and tried to forget the
benefits of civilization.

On the ferry to New York there mingled future Americans from the
Anchor Line and the Red Star Line, as well as from the Cunard. Already
I could find only a few of my former companions. Some had gone before.
Some were still on the Island. In the present crowd they were
absorbed, obliterated. The little world of the _Lusitania_ was already
annexed by America, as a little meteor is annexed by the burning star.
I regretted this absorption, this obliteration. For six days I had
belonged to them, and they had belonged to me. I thought of their
geniality, their simplicity, their naturalness, their long-suffering.
I was sorry to say good-bye.



THE C. T. U.

GEORGE CRAM COOK


The battle began Monday morning when Assistant Professor Clark seated
himself facing the President in the President’s office.

“I want permission,” said the lanky, trim-bearded young man, “for Vida
Martin, who is here raising money for the striking button-cutters of
Manistee, to speak in Assembly Hall.”

The President’s grey eyes opened a little wider, then narrowed
shrewdly. He swung a little in his swivel chair, and pulled his
graceful iron-grey moustache. Then he said gently: “Would you regard
it as proper for the University to take sides to that extent in an
industrial dispute?”

“We listened to Judge Graham’s Menace of Syndicalism.”

“An address which was general. This is a specific conflict.”

“Judge Graham talked about it.”

“In illustration of his general point. Miss Martin, I understand,
talks of nothing else. She is an extreme radical—a professional
firebrand. I am surprised to find a man of your standing in sympathy
with her ideas.”

“I’m not—altogether,” replied Clark. “That is scarcely a sufficient
reason for not listening to them. I want our students to hear her side
of the case—undistorted.”

“We cannot lend unsound cases the weight of university authority,”
said the President.

“Judge Graham’s case was thoroughly unsound,” said Clark. “Vida Martin
is, as you say, an extreme radical. But we have listened to an extreme
reactionary. If it is the policy of the University not to take sides,
it cannot invite him to speak and refuse to let her. Her subject, I
ought to say, is general—the Ideals of Syndicalism. As to her
soundness: she knows industrial unionism from the inside—her own
experience as organizer. She knows its leaders personally. All Judge
Graham knows is his own prejudice against labor and some newspaper
stories.”

The President swung back to his desk and arranged some papers.

Clark sat there looking irritatingly thorough.

“What made you take the responsibility of discussing this with Vida
Martin?” the President demanded.

“I met her on the train from Manistee last night. I used to know her
at Hull House. She spoke of the dismissal of Brooks and Gleason here
last year for insisting on their right to express their real ideas,
and made the sweeping claim that there is no free speech in any
American university. I said I’d disprove that by getting Assembly Hall
for her. If she can’t have it, it seems to bear out her charge against
us.”

“Haven’t you yourself enjoyed freedom of speech here?”

“Yes, I have. But frankly, I’m afraid I’ve never had anything to say
that was dangerous.”

“Afraid! Your talk with Miss Martin seems to have had a singular
effect on your point of view.”

“It has,” admitted Clark. “I never put such new life into the thinking
of any student as she put into mine last night. Six years ago in
Chicago she was not unlike me. If the labor movement makes her what
she is and the University makes me what I am—there’s something wrong
with the University. I think we should try to understand her.”

“By all means—those of us who have not already done so.”

Clark smiled.

“Understanding her is one thing,” said the President, nettled, “and
giving her violent doctrines such sanction by the University as you
propose is quite another. You’ve been carried off your feet. When you
regain your balance you’ll thank me for not granting this wild request
of yours. Is there anything further you wish to say?”

Clark rose to go. “Only that I regret this failure—of the
University.”

“It’s not the University that’s in danger of failing, Mr. Clark,” said
the President significantly.

Having sufficiently endangered his career to no purpose, Mr. Clark
strode out of the Liberal Arts’ Building, past the black bulletin
boards on which the announcement of Vida Martin’s lecture would not
appear. He marched down the old flagstone walk beneath the oaks and
budding maples and across to the hotel—a three-story brick building
painted slate-grey.

There, with a local labor leader and the editor of a Bohemian paper
who were helping her organize her meeting for the following night, he
found Vida Martin, a trim, strong woman of thirty, not yet at the
height of her vivid powers.

She handed Clark the first draft of a handbill. To his dismay it
announced as the place of her meeting—Assembly Hall.

“That’s gone to the printers,” she said casually.

“I—I’m sorry,” said Clark. “I have misled you. My confidence in the
University’s impartiality was misplaced. You must let me stand the
difference in your printing bill. You have been refused the use of
Assembly Hall.”

Vida Martin smiled at him the smile of a wicked minx. “You didn’t
mislead me a bit, dear Kenton Clark,” she said. “I have already
engaged the Opera House for to-morrow night.”

Dear Kenton Clark stared at the handbill. “Engaged the Opera House and
printed Assembly Hall on your dodgers!”

She nodded. “My æsthetic sense,” she explained. “I thought how nice it
would look to have a cunning red line through ‘Assembly Hall’ and
‘Opera House’ stamped on in red with a rubber stamp. Don’t you love to
use a rubber stamp?”

As the guile of the agitator dawned on him he started to disapprove.

“It’s just a shame,” she said, catching his expression, “for me to
come contaminating the innocent professorial mind with the spectacle
of fighting tactics.”

He laughed. “The professorial mind isn’t wholly infantile. The
University deserves what you’re going to give it. I shall announce
your meeting in my classes.”

“Have you something else to do when you lose your job? Do you know
that one of your Regents, H. P. Denton, owes his appointment to Steve
Treadley of the Manistee Button Factory?”

“Rather than be controlled by considerations like that I _will_
lose my job!” Clark replied hotly.

That was the mood in which he marched to his eleven o’clock lecture.

After it, at noon, he came down the central walk amid the sweaters and
corduroys and fresh-filled pipes of the gossiping throng which carries
books in straps, books in green bags, and books in spilly armfuls. His
friend Guthrie of the English Department overtook him.

“What’s this about Vida Martin?” Guthrie inquired. “They say you’re
lambasting the University because it won’t let her set up her soap-box
in Assembly Hall.”

“Subtract the cheap fling and you have the idea,” Clark answered.

Guthrie shook his fine, big head. “Well,” he reflected, “you’re
unmarried. But it isn’t a chip you have on your shoulder. It’s a log.”

“John,” said Clark, “your education is hideously defective. You’ve got
to meet Vida Martin and learn what a soapbox is. Come to lunch with
her now.”

Guthrie said he couldn’t because his wife was expecting him.

“Telephone her and come,” insisted Clark.

With an adventurous sense of breaking with routine and doing something
interestingly dangerous, Guthrie telephoned, and came.

Five minutes after he met her he was quarrelling like an old friend
with Vida Martin—over Thompson and Geddes’ “rustic reinterpretation”
of evolution. Vida would none of it, holding that Nature’s creative
centres are now great cities—where evolution is kept entirely too
busy making a new kind of soul in women to bother with bugs and
things.

Of the woman’s revolution Guthrie had a literary knowledge, but in his
cooped life Vida was the first who embodied it—the first who viewed
life with the unshockable tolerance of science, the first whose mental
background was wholly non-theological, the first even who was wholly
conscious of her economic independence and its implications. The new
ideas and feelings alive in her made him see the paleness of what he
had got from those plays, novels, and sociology books. The quiet
fearlessness with which she gave him and Kenton Clark to understand
that she had laid aside ready made morality, “the parasite code of
woman subordinate,” took his scholarly breath. She had replaced it, he
gathered, not with another code, but with a habit of discrimination
“confronting apparent good and evil with armed light—the Ithuriel
spear of woman free.” So unprofessorily the professor phrased it when
the thoughts she stirred in him began to sing. He was not aware of it,
but they sang the sooner because her heavy black hair had copper
glints in it and the joy of thinking made her eyes such wells of
light.

“I’ve been thirteen years here in my treadmill,” he said to her as he
was leaving. “You, from your wonderful cities, make me realize that I
have taught all the life out of my old knowledge. I need new contacts
with the life of to-day. I must have more significant things to teach.
I want to see all I can of you while you’re here, and then—it would
help to keep in touch with you and your world through letters.”

He started to ask her and Clark to dinner, but reflected that he must
first go home and lead up to that.

“There’s a living soul,” said Kenton Clark when Guthrie had gone.

“And with a flickering creativeness,” Vida added. “I wonder if
anything could gather the flickers into a flame?”

“A passion for a woman,” Clark surmised.

“Or a cause.”

Afterwards they remembered her saying that, and looking back it seemed
a premonition.


II

When he reached home that afternoon, Guthrie expended half an hour’s
skilled energy in overcoming Mrs. Guthrie’s instinctive objections to
the unusual, and the dinner invitation went over the telephone to
Clark and Vida Martin.

Guthrie’s mind was full of glow and movement. His impulse was to draw
in from Vida Martin as with a deep inhalation all the modernity he had
missed—not merely her thoughts but her way of thinking, her inner
feeling and her technique of conveying it. Her manner he felt to be
not her own unaided invention but a social growth—a collaboration of
many men and women moving in the same direction. He felt a need of
moving with them.

The most tangible thing for him was an accent of sincerity in Vida
which compelled her listener into an answering sincerity. He coveted
the secret of that social power—the power of being and doing that. It
rested down on a greater democracy than he had known—upon her sense
of oneness with others, her feeling of non-superiority, her
assumption: “You and I are fundamentally alike.”

He wanted to be with her long enough to catch that feeling, to have
and to use it, giving it forth in turn to others. What a power to fill
his students with! The teacher in him craved that secret of living. He
wanted it to transmit; he wanted it as seed to sow in a more human
seminar than he had yet conducted.

It meant scrutinizing, accepting and conveying the actual human truth
about one’s own feelings and motives—without thought of whether they
were or were not admirable. It meant the acceptance of one’s self as
the most authentic human document—a desire and firm resolution not to
embellish or in any way falsify that text in the mind of another.

One couldn’t do that and continue to set one’s self up professor-like
as an example to youth. The power could be exerted only by taking
youth completely into his confidence. Only one’s real, uncensored
thoughts and impulses as they sprang out of one’s own nature had that
quality he sought. He felt that he needed the help of Vida, with her
long habit of truthful self-revelation, in learning to read that
intricate, much disregarded text—himself.

In his new spirit he spoke to Mrs. Guthrie about the secret he wanted
to acquire from Vida Martin, hoping to rouse in Anna a desire to
acquire it for herself.

But Anna Guthrie was not prepared to take John’s grouping of himself
and her as two human beings who had something to learn from a third.
She was hurt that her husband should find in another woman something
valuable which she herself lacked, and she thought him perfectly
brutal in the bald way he came out with it. Things like that which
would hurt people ought to be concealed. She herself concealed such
things.

“Practising sincerity is like making a bargain,” Guthrie reflected.
“It takes two. Not everyone is ready for it.”

To Vida arriving with Clark for dinner, Mrs. Guthrie was
conventionally gracious—a manner she put on as she took off the
all-over apron which protected her next to best dress in the hot
kitchen. The green young Bohemian girl there was chiefly useful to
Mrs. Guthrie as a topic of heartfelt conversation.

Vida avoided it by starting some talk with Lucy and Harold, aged ten
and eight, who sat at a little table behind her. By the time she had
them laughing Mrs. Guthrie’s prejudice began to thaw.

Their father noted their expressiveness with Vida. “They get it too,”
he reflected. “They’re more human than I’ve realized. Anna and I have
had too much the ideal of a child as a little obeying machine.”

When Mrs. Guthrie heard that the evening paper had a story about
Vida’s exclusion from the University and Clark’s insubordination, she
was perturbed by the question: “What will the President’s wife say of
my having such a woman to dinner?”

The discussion which gave that dinner its importance sprang from
Guthrie’s deploring, _à propos_ of the danger of Clark’s dismissal,
the fact that a professor could not act in accordance with his own
judgment in such a matter without endangering his position. He gave a
dozen instances of tyranny which seemed to have created in him only a
sort of reflected personal resentment against particular presidents
and regents.

“Why do you scholars allow the power to remove you to be placed in the
hands of outsiders like the regents?” asked Vida, whose mind worked
promptly from individuals to the system they stood for.

“Oh, that can’t be changed,” said Guthrie, off-hand.

“Why not?” she challenged.

“It’s as natural as sunrise,” he said. “We’re all controlled through
bread and butter channels.”

“Other classes of workers are testing out ways of controlling their
own bread and butter. Bread and butter freedom is precisely what the
world now needs and seeks. Are university professors less capable of
thought than button-cutters?”

“No,” said Clark. “But less capable of concerted action. We’re too
confoundedly jealous and individualistic to work together.”

“How do you know that?” Vida demanded. “Have you ever tried it? With
things as they are you certainly can’t fulfil your social function.
You’ll either have to get together and secure your freedom or remain
in a position where you cannot really influence your students.”

“But they do influence them!” protested Mrs. Guthrie.

“About all the students look to us for,” said Clark, “is credits. A
credit costs on the average so much time and attention. A little more
and they resent your overcharge, a little less and they gloat because
they’ve been able to underpay.”

“Imagine their having such an attitude toward a live man dealing with
live ideas!” exclaimed Vida. “Toward Bernard Shaw, for instance,
lecturing on the necessity of extending to unmarried women the right
to have children!”

Mrs. Guthrie looked apprehensively at Lucy and then at the young
Bohemian girl who was bringing in the dessert. “Fortunately,” she
said, “our professors do not care to deal with things like that.”

“No,” said Vida, “they prefer to let society continue unwarned its
present insane treatment of illegitimacy.”

“There’s no question about our lack of freedom,” said Guthrie hastily,
“nor about our need of it. But what means do you suggest to us, Miss
Martin, for gaining it?”

“Well,” said Vida, “here’s Kenton Clark, one of the best economists in
the country, in danger of being kicked out for recommending my
lecture. Brooks and Gleason went the same way last year. Who kicks you
out?”

“The President,” said Guthrie. “He holds his authority, however, from
omnipotent Regents who can kick _him_ out—and frequently do.”
That idea seemed rather pleasant to Guthrie. He smiled at it.

“Why don’t you elect your own Regents and your own President—as
Americans should?” asked Vida. “Why not insist that you shall be
removable only by vote of your own colleagues? It’s absurd that a body
of men as highly trained as a university faculty should not be
self-governing.”

“Yes, yes,” said Guthrie, “it is absurd. But here’s the existing
system. What force is capable of transforming it?”

“Organization,” said Vida, fresh from her button-cutters. “How many
college teachers are there?”

“Twenty-eight thousand,” said Guthrie. “Five thousand of ‘em women.”

“But not five thousand of ’em men,” said Kenton Clark with a malicious
chuckle.

“They would be—with power,” said Vida. “I’d like to see it. The
scholar would become a real force. It would be good to see thinking
married again to doing, after the long divorce that has made them both
sterile.”

“There’s plenty of powder lying loose in discontented faculties,”
Clark mused. “If only it could be rammed together and—touched with
flame.”

“Be the flame!” cried Vida. “A movement nation-wide may sweep out from
John Guthrie and Kenton Clark.”

Mrs. Guthrie pushed back her chair energetically, indicating that
dinner was over. “Shall we go to the parlor?” she said. The three were
so absorbed they did not hear.

“Could we get a dozen men who’d hold together, Guthrie?” said Clark.

“There are more than a dozen—twice that many—radicals in the
faculty,” said Guthrie. “Whether they’d hold together——”

“The Regents would have to think a bit before they fired a dozen men,”
said Clark.

He and Guthrie tried to see how to get the substance of the labor
union idea without taking the name or the form. Vida told them the
name was immaterial, the form essential. “You can’t get the strength
of organization without organizing,” she said.

Their instinct was against applying the working-class method to their
profession. They raised the difficulty of equal pay for unequal work
and mulled around over it till Vida gave them up. “You’ve been too
carefully selected,” she said. “It’s temperamental. No real
revolutionist becomes a college professor.”

That set Clark and Guthrie persuading her of the advantages of the
union—which college teachers certainly had the brains to perceive.

“Yes,” said Vida, “but the will to achieve them, the spirit to fight
for them, the power to make sacrifices for them?”

Mrs. Guthrie sprang up. The movement, which drew all eyes to her,
placed her unintentionally near Vida. “I don’t want Harold and Lucy
sacrificed!” she cried.

Her primeval cry made Vida’s hand leap out and press hers for an
instant. Mrs. Guthrie wavered between hostility to Vida’s doctrines
and the attraction of that wave of sympathy which swept her like a
physical force.

“The wives of the button-cutters are facing that to-night,” said Vida,
her voice deepening. “Don’t you see why, Mrs. Guthrie? Through the
present danger they seek the children’s greater safety.”

“Sit down, Anna,” said Guthrie. “This talk is going to lead to
something.”

“It shouldn’t!” exclaimed Mrs. Guthrie. “It must not!” She turned to
Vida. “The men who take the first steps—they will lose their
positions. My husband’s salary is all we have. For a father of a
family—it would be criminal. We can live very well as we are, John,
as we always have. The Regents have even appointed a committee to see
about raising salaries.”

“Our despotism is benevolent,” said Clark, “—if we’re submissive
enough.”

“Our positions are insecure _now_,” said Guthrie. “To hold them
some of us have to sacrifice the best that’s in us.”

“If it’s that or the children——” said Mrs. Guthrie.

“Don’t worry, Anna,” said Guthrie. “If we go into this it will be
because we see it will make us more secure, not less.”

Mrs. Guthrie went to the children’s table, leaned over Lucy’s chair,
and drew the girl’s head against her breast.

“What do you think, Lucy?” asked Vida.

“Papa ought not to have to do his work wrong to get money for us to
live,” said Lucy. She rose and went to her father, who put his arm
around her and hugged her.

Harold made a dive for the other arm. “I’ve got six dollars in my
bank, Papa,” he said. “I’ll get along without the Indian suit and only
buy the bow and arrow.”


III

In one of his classes next day Professor Guthrie, _à propos_ of a
literary-historical question of intellectual freedom, talked of the
survival in American university government of the heretic-expelling
machinery of the theocratic seventeenth century college. He said no
professor who had a mind and spoke it was safe, and recommended the
lecture of the syndicalist leader Vida Martin that night as promising
to develop some new ideas on academic freedom.

It had never occurred to the students, accepting things as they found
them, that it did not exist.

Vida’s handbills appeared with the cunning red line through “Assembly
Hall.” Groups of students on the steps talked of the button-cutters’
strike, of syndicalism, of Judge Graham and Vida Martin. There was hot
denunciation and defence of Professor Guthrie’s daring new ideas. He
had stated the argument in the preface of Shaw’s _Getting Married_.
The insulation between the university and the thought of the living
world was broken.

A newspaper clipping about Vida Martin’s activity in university
circles reached Regent H. P. Denton of Manistee, who caught a train
from there that afternoon and called upon the President.

Some of the professors in the Opera House that night were furious at
Vida Martin’s attack—the contrast she drew between striking
button-cutters and submissive professors—her characterization of them
as thinkers who dare not think. It seemed unjust to them because their
submissiveness was a life-long habit and unconscious.

Some who realized this said it was stinging but salutary.

Hostile or friendly they felt the speaker’s personal force—the
unfamiliar union in her mind of carefulness and fire.

During the lecture one ambitious assistant professor left to inform
the President that he had been attacked in an alleged exposure of a
connection between factory owners of Manistee and the Board of
Regents.

The student president of the Y. W. C. A. who had recently acquired a
taste for being shocked was disappointed because Vida advanced none of
the ideas she was supposed to entertain regarding free love.

Mrs. Guthrie was in the dress circle with her husband and Clark.
Reporters were watching them as the probable centre of a new storm in
the faculty.

When Vida came to that “militant union which can restore the scholar’s
dignity and through the fearlessness of freedom make the university
teacher a living force as in the days of Abelard,” she surprised Clark
and Guthrie by relating it closely to the syndicalist ideal. The
organized college teachers should ultimately form a section of that
part of the “one big union” which controlled education—a body of six
hundred thousand teachers. She looked ahead to a far, fine goal.
“Aside from its present, practical, fighting advantages,” she said,
“this organization is a necessity as germ of a social organ essential
to the future. It should be the crown of the crafts composing
industrial society, not aloof from the working-class in disdainful
superiority, but understanding its solidarity with all—free but
responsible, governed not from without as now by the economic control
of another class represented by Regents, but from within by the high
technical conscience of the guild.” There a bigger vision of it opened
to her unexpectedly. She spoke as awed by something mystic in her own
unforeseen words. “The Scholars’ Guild,” she repeated. “It might
become the central organ of the world’s new mind!”

That closed her lecture religiously. While the bulk of the audience
was moving out—full of little explosions of argument—a number of
instructors and young professors gathered around the lecturer near the
stage door under the balcony. She found them surcharged with facts,
and feelings, about the way they were governed.

When Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie reached the group, Sanders of the sociology
department was talking energetically about recent magazine criticism
of universities. “It’s unpenetrative,” he said. “They seem unable to
see anything but undemocratic student fraternities. They don’t get in
as far as the fundamental undemocracy of unelected governing
bodies—much less to the revolutionary idea of a craft organization of
teachers.”

“The last is new,” said a statistics man. “The editor of
_Science_ has been hammering for years on election of president by
faculty.”

“The University of Washington has a big committee working on
undemocratic government,” said Hastings the mathematician.

“So’s Illinois,” said some one.

“Cornell’s talking of letting full professors vote for a third of its
board of trustees,” said a professor of engineering.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” said Vida, “if you put yourselves in a
position to compel such an elementary right as self-government,
instead of waiting to have a third of it bestowed—perhaps?”

“Certainly,” said the engineer. “The right is only secure if based on
our own power to get and hold it.”

“We ought to have got together last year when Brooks and Gleason were
fired,” said Hastings.

“Better late than never,” muttered Sanders. “We might save the next
man.”

“Yes,” said Searles of the French section, “but what some of us want
to know is why we have not heard of this militant union. It’s all
right in the right hands. But who’s responsible for the idea? When and
where did it start? Whom can one write to about it? Why isn’t it
represented in our own faculty?”

Vida set her lips and looked at Clark and Guthrie. The iron was hot.

Clark struck. “It started in this faculty last night,” he said. The
attention of the group, which included two newspaper men, centred upon
him. “I was one of those present.”

There was a little thrill at the courage of his declaration. Vida
loved him for it.

“I was another,” said Professor Guthrie.

Mrs. Guthrie caught his arm. “John!” she exclaimed beseechingly. The
word filled the group with a sense of drama and danger.

“As senior in that discussion,” said Guthrie, unshaken, “I regard it
as my duty now to invite others who feel possibilities in a movement
for freer government to meet and consider plans.”

“When?” asked Searles promptly.

“And where?” Two or three spoke at once.

Mrs. Guthrie turned away despairingly and sank down in a theatre seat.
The thing was going.

“I suggest my rooms now,” said Clark.

“I will join you there as soon as I have taken Mrs. Guthrie home,”
said Guthrie. The footsteps of the pair echoed in the emptied
auditorium as they went out.

The college teachers asked Vida Martin to give them the benefit of her
organizing experience, and nine of them went to Clark’s rooms.

There two of them, one a specialist on the American revolution,
cautiously declined to commit themselves to any action at that time,
but the revolutionists increased their number from two to seven.

They threshed their way through a lot of instinctive, irrational
objections to formal organization, and planned to dragnet the faculty
for members. In a few days, as things were going, they could make
their position impregnable.

That the organization they sought was essentially a union of their
craft became so clear that a scorn of disguising names like league,
association, and federation prevailed even against the statistician’s
sarcastic suggestion that they dub themselves “Brain Workers, No. 1.”

“Professors’ Union” was rejected, not on account of its openness to
ridicule, but because it did not include instructors and assistants.
In order not to exclude small institutions “college” prevailed over
“university.”

When they went home that night, glowing with their new communal hope,
Guthrie was chairman and Clark secretary of the first local of the C.
T. U.


IV

The brunt of battle fell next day on Guthrie. His eleven o’clock
lecture was interrupted by a messenger with a note asking him to call
at the President’s office at noon.

When he faced the Ruler in his swivel chair, that representative of
things as they are was friendly of manner but meant business.

“I want to talk to you about you and Clark,” he said. “I have asked
for Clark’s resignation, and I am extremely anxious not to have to ask
for yours.”

“Clark dismissed!” exclaimed Guthrie. He realized that the President
was striking too quickly for them, and groped for defence.

“I warn you fairly that the Regents are behind me,” said the
President. “You have your choice of severing with that preposterous
organization formed in Clark’s rooms last night or with the
University.”

“You may not find it so simple a matter to dismiss teachers merely
because they choose to form an organization,” said Guthrie,
stiffening. “It is an open acknowledgment that freedom of action does
not exist. Moreover, it is not two men you dismiss, if any, but—a
considerable number.”

“I have reason to think not,” replied the President.

Guthrie was weakened by his lack of information, and by the fear that
his colleagues had gone to pieces.

“Make no mistake,” said the President. “I am prepared to dismiss
_seven_—if necessary. There are other reasons for your own dismissal.
You supported Clark in his insubordination with regard to Vida
Martin.”

“Since you did refuse to let her speak in the University what was
there wrong in saying so?”

“Clark’s tone. And yesterday you came out astonishingly for
sex-radicalism. The student president of the Y. W. C. A. came to me
and protested, saying a professor in this institution had no right to
corrupt the youth of the State with any such doctrine as unmarried
motherhood.”

“Because I presented Shaw’s argument!” exclaimed Guthrie indignantly.
“If you are going to adopt this girl’s point of view you will be
compelled to maintain the position that the ideas of the most
conspicuous living English writer shall not be mentioned to students
of English in this University!”

“Well, Guthrie, you must know where the fathers and mothers of this
State would stand in a fight about that. You cannot expect the
University to rise higher than its source, and its source is the
community.”

“The University has no reason for existence unless it rises higher
than the rest of the community,” said Guthrie. “It is nothing if it is
not able to lift itself out of the community’s inertia and maintain
itself against the community’s prejudice. If you had not condemned
without inquiry that organization formed last night, you might find
that it contains the possibility of raising the faculty into precisely
that commanding position.”

“I know the purpose of your organization, Professor Guthrie. Its
success would mean the end of all directing authority. An executive
could not discipline men upon whose votes he was dependent for
continuance in his position.”

“That is absurd,” said Guthrie scornfully. “An English premier,
dependent upon a parliamentary majority, possesses power enough to
govern the British Empire. He is not able to dismiss members of
Parliament. There’s no reason why the head of a university should have
any such power. There is altogether too much disciplining of teachers
for acting on their own honest convictions.”

“I won’t argue that matter of opinion,” said the President. “The fact
is plain that you have placed yourself at the head of an organization
directed squarely against the legally constituted authority of this
University, and unless you drop it you go.”

Guthrie sat silent, facing what he felt must be a vain sacrifice of
himself—and nothing gained for his cause. He heard the rushing click
of typewriters through the closed door of an adjoining office. Their
frequent tiny bells of warning gave him a sense of time moving too
fast, events crowding too close.

The President rose and walked slowly up and down the room. “Can you
afford it, Guthrie?” he said kindly. “How about your life insurance?
Will it lapse if you stop payment? How about your house? Still paying
for it?”

“You are remarkably well informed as to my private affairs,” said
Guthrie coldly.

“You have given me reason to be. Your children are approaching their
most expensive years. How about their education? Do you want Harold
and Lucy Guthrie to sink back into the untrained, ignorant class?”

“That’s the fiendish cruelty of this!” cried Guthrie. He saw the eager
face of Harold offering to sacrifice his little Indian suit. “That’s
where you’ve got me,” he said despondently. “No wonder one of the
Regents offered to double Clark’s salary if he would marry. There’s
something hellish in a system that makes a slave of a man through the
needs of his children!”

“It is doubtful if any other university will want you when it becomes
known why you left here,” mused the President. “Don’t do it, Guthrie.
You’ve been a living influence with our students. Many an old grad. is
grateful to you for kindling in him here a life-long love of letters.
You ought to go on doing that for twenty years.”

“It’s just because I do not want to stop being a living influence——
A man must grow or ossify. Yesterday a new world of thought, a new
secret of living, a new sincerity, came to birth in my mind. You want
me to kill it. That is not being a living influence. That is spiritual
infanticide. It means my extinction as a free teacher. And deserting
that organization I helped to form last night—that means dishonor!”

“No,” said the President emphatically. “You cannot be expected to
sacrifice your career and your family because you happened to be
carried away in a dramatic moment worked up by a professional
agitator. You’ll see that within a month. This means your salvation
from some wild ideas and wilder conduct.”

With an air of relaxing from strain the President dropped back easily
in his chair. “That woman must be clever, Guthrie. Isn’t she?”

“She’s more than clever,” said Guthrie. “She’s a brave and skilful
fighter for a great cause—a thing I cannot be. I cannot even face
what every married button-cutter faces when he goes on strike!”

Partially realizing how low Guthrie was sinking in his own estimation,
the President was not the man to let sympathy keep him from gaining
his end. “Well, Guthrie,” he said, “I take it that chiefly on account
of your children I may count on your withdrawing from the College
Teachers’ Union.” He smiled. “I say nothing more about the
sex-radicalism, for I feel sure you will yourself see the need of
soft-pedalling that in the classroom and in public. I am heartily glad
you are still going to be with us.”

Guthrie went out of the President’s office like a man who has been
drugged. With an instinct to hide from every eye, he sought the
noonday solitude of his seminar room, let the door lock behind him,
and at the head of the long green table sank into that chair they
called the chair of English.

There, in the hour of his degradation, he felt prophetically the ennui
of the next twenty years—the dead thoughts he would there utter and
reiterate—the bored young faces——

What had become of the interestingness of ideas? Where was that
passion for the hard and glorious quest of the true truth within? Why
had he been so fiercely bent on shaping new channels for his energy?
He had no energy. His thwarted force flowed away from his will where
it meant health and conquest into a morbid intensity of emotion—the
road to melancholia.

He stiffened up. There was one pain he must meet now. There was that
desire to hide to overcome—a self-revelation harder than any he had
ever thought to make. There was shame to endure. “I have to tell her,”
he said.

He rose and left his solitude, went down the deserted central walk,
and over to the drab-colored hotel. He looked between the open double
doors into the dining room. There were a dozen people. At the table
by the window in the corner where he had sat with them two days before
were Kenton Clark and Vida. They beckoned eagerly to Guthrie.

He found himself strangely unwilling to cross alone the moderately
large square room. Its floor of alternate light and dark wooden strips
seemed like a great open space in which something evil must happen. He
yielded to the irrational fear which impelled him to slip around close
to the wall.

Without waiting for him to take off his overcoat or sit down, Clark
flashed news of his own dismissal—too much aglow with the war they
were going to wage to perceive anything wrong with Guthrie.

“Searles wanted all six to resign!” said Clark in a low, eager voice.
“Corking spirit, but we decided not. Six is too few. With six more—!
If we’d only had a little more time! Never mind. The idea is sound.
We’ll put it through. We’re going to raise a fund. I’ll give my whole
time to it as organizer. Sit down, man, sit down!”

Guthrie shook his head.

Vida rose with sudden solicitude, came close and laid her hand on his
arm. “What has happened to you, Mr. Guthrie?” she asked, so low that
Clark barely heard.

“You are happy people,” said Guthrie, for a moment permitting her
searching eyes to fathom his. “You will fight beautifully. I have
failed you. The children were too much for me. I have caved in. I keep
my job. I’m done for.”

He turned away, unable to endure their eyes. “Good-bye,” he said, and
started back along the wall.

Clark sprang up, napkin in hand, knocking a knife to the floor. “Oh,
here!” he protested.

Vida, with compassionate eyes on the retreating figure of Guthrie,
stopped Clark with a gesture.

“That’s final,” she said. “He’s crushed. There’s no use torturing him.”



  THE CARDINAL’S GARDEN

  _Villa Albani_

  WITTER BYNNER


    Here in this place which I myself did plan,
  With poplars, oaks and fountains,—and with sculpture,
  The rounded body of the soul of beauty—
  Here in this garden, by my own command
  I sit alone under the freshening twilight.
    Not to my eyes shall be made visible
  Ever again morning or noon or twilight,—
  Not to my eyes—which are my servants now
  No longer, save as servants in the grave.
  But to my forehead and my finger-tips
  The days give touch of bud and opening
  And of their bloom and of their hovering fall.
    The morrow shall be born with sighs and rain,
  But this is peace, this twilight, this is pause
  Between the sunny and the rainy day,
  Pause for the elements, and pause for me,
  As though it were a silver brook that ran
  Between a blinded day and blinded night,—
  Between the dust of life and the dust of death.
    Why shall I sit here? Why are colonnades
  And paths and pagan statuaries more
  Adroitly dear to my unseeing eyes
  Than all the beaded letters of the Books
  And colorings of all the bended Saints?
  Because I hear the stealing feet of peace
  Among these marbles more than anywhere,
  Than in that cell itself where I have been
  True Christian and exemplar of the Creed
  To my own heart. There, not a Cardinal
  In a red pageantry of holiness
  Before all comers, but a penitent
  In humble nakedness before my God,
  I found the potency of Jesus Christ….
    And yet it is not there but here that I
  Find peace. Sometimes I think that Hell hath set
  An outer court for me within my garden,
  That it may mock me better in its own!
  But whether Hell or rank mortality,
  This garden which I builded for my body
  Is the one garden now wherein my soul
  Finds comfort, benediction of the twilight.
  There in my cell, drawn on the walls, arise
  Old memories of craft and violence,
  Of lust for carven images of beauty:
  How in the night I sent my men to take
  That obelisk which I had offered twice
  Its value for and been refused,—to bring
  That obelisk and set it in my garden.
  The Prince of Palestrina never dared
  (Such has my might been) to recover it!
  Still I can see him gaping at the trick
  And wishing he might strangle me, the trickster!
  And though these eyes that cannot see would make
  Me now no quick report if that same obelisk
  Should be abstracted on a newer night,
  Yet how these fingers and this heart would know!
    Why shall my tears fall, as I sit among
  My oaks and poplars, fountains and my sculptures,
  Before my cypresses and Sabine hills?
  Have I not seen them all a thousand times?
  Are they not vanity? Would I behold
  Them more? Life, to an aged Cardinal,
  Blind and enfeebled, should but celebrate
  The Sacrifice of Jesus Christ who died.
  Time should grow short for prayer and preparation.
  Why is it then that life has seemed to pace
  More than enough its little path of vigil,
  But not to know the endless path of beauty
  Beyond the entrance and the mere beginning!
  Pray for us sinners now and at the hour
  Of death!… And, even while thou prayest, I,
  Who should incessantly be praying also,
  I who am Cardinal and might be Pope,
  Sit with my blind eyes full of Pagan glory!—
  Sappho, Apollo and Antinous,
  And Orpheus parting from Eurydice!
    First falls the breath before the drop of rain.
  Before the rain shall follow, I have strength,
  Praise God, still to support myself among
  These marble temples, columns and museums,
  These deities of beauty and of time.
  Hail, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with Thee!
  The obelisk is here. It has not been
  Retaken. Pray for us now and at the hour
  Of death! And I shall enter at my door
  And seek the chimney-piece and stand before
  My young Antinous from Tivoli,
  With lotos in his hair and hands, who once
  Belonged to Hadrian. And I shall touch
  Again the garment of Eurydice,—
  And wonder—when that final mortal touch
  Summons Eurydice, summons my soul,
  And when she turns and enters and is dark—
  If Christ shall follow her and sing to her.



LADY ANOPHELES

E. DOUGLAS HUME


I hold no brief for the mosquito. She has always treated me as a mere
restaurant, and I have provided her with so many meals that I feel all
obligations to be already on her side. Also, her extreme talkativeness
is almost as objectionable as her voracious appetite. Any one who has
been kept awake by her buzz-z-z, buzz-z-z, buzz-z-z, on a tropical
night must have come to the conclusion that “good will to all men” can
never be strained to include good will to all insects. Moreover, the
fact that the lady of the species alone feasts upon blood seems a
reflection on the female sex. Yet, so it is: her husband is a harmless
vegetarian.

All the same, when a sense of justice is strong, one does resent the
misdemeanors of man being laid at the door of even the most
exasperating insect. Certainly the sturdiest viewpoint of disease is
to regard it as the outcome of inattention, personal or general, to
one or other of nature’s observances. Instead, nowadays, parasitic
organisms are blamed for most of the aches and pains of humanity,
while their distributors are searched for in the realm of insects and
animals. The mosquito has, perhaps, fallen a prey to her own weakness.
Had she talked less, it is possible that she might have evaded her
doubtful celebrity. As it is, she stands accused of being concerned
with a no less formidable array of maladies than elephantiasis, yellow
fever, dengue, and malaria.

Let us here concern ourselves with the last-mentioned, and the hungry
suspect, whose name has been coupled with the disease, her Ladyship
Anopheles.

She may at once be singled out from her fellows by her habit of
discreet silence and her odd proclivity for standing on her head when
resting and feeding. Other mosquitoes remain on all fours, or rather,
all sixes, when dining. This acrobatic insect is, as everyone knows,
accused of inoculating her human prey with a protozoon, or microscopic
animal organism, which in its turn is held responsible for the heats
and chills, the aches, the pains, the languor, all the miseries of
malaria. The idea is a simple one, requiring little intelligence to
be understood. Is it rude to ask, what wonder that it has become
popular? Less marvel, too, when one reflects that the theory is
safeguarded by dividing Anophelines into a variety of groups, and
claiming that the guilty must be the right sort, and yet further, the
right sort duly infected.

Now, the means of infection must come about through the insect having
feasted on a malarial subject. That its subsequent bite might poison
the healthy sounds a contingent by no means unlikely. The drawback to
this probability is that the mosquito possesses the feminine
characteristic of fastidiousness. Malarial subjects are the very ones
avoided by her hungry Ladyship. Here I may interject that I am not
writing of insects under control. What a famished mosquito may or may
not eat during the course of an experiment, I am not concerned with. I
refer to mosquitoes in a natural state, and personal experience has
made me observe that the one benefit of malaria consists in the
freedom it confers from mosquito bites. Though these insects are in
the habit of treating me as a very Ritz or a Carlton among
restaurants, periods of malaria always freed me from their ravages.
They like their food to be of the best, and the blood freest from
fever is the provender for their delectation. During nineteen years of
tropical life, my mother never experienced a single attack of malaria;
yet she was always the chief _pièce de résistance_ for every mosquito
within her vicinity. It may be noticed that the individuals least
susceptible to malaria are those most feasted upon by mosquitoes,
including the suspects, though whether these be _Anopheles Umbrosus_,
_Anopheles Maculatus_, _Anopheles Christophersi_, _Anopheles
Albimanus_, _Anopheles Argyritarsis_, or any others of high-sounding
title, I should certainly not presume to discriminate.

Why should this general evidence count for less than the few
experimental cases upon which the mosquito theory is built up? These
latter are mostly conspicuous by their weakness. Take, for example,
the mosquito-proof hut placed at Ostia, and inhabited for three months
by Dr. Sambon, Dr. Low, Mr. Terzi, and their servants. What analogy
does this well-ventilated erection, raised above the soil, bear to
many of the insanitary homesteads of the Campagna? What analogy is
there between its healthy inhabitants, further fortified by zest for a
theory in dire need of proof, and the permanent dwellers in those
unpropitious surroundings? If we admit strength in the case of the
infected mosquitoes sent to the London Tropical School, whose stings
are said to have produced attacks of fever in the late Dr. Thurburn
Manson and Mr. George Warren, we must also remember that Abele Sola in
the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, according to the account quoted by
Herms in his _Malaria: Cause and Control_, is claimed to have fallen a
victim to this disease from the bites of mosquitoes that had developed
from larvæ in his own room, and therefore could not be reckoned as
infected. Moreover, they numbered hardly any Anophelines, and of the
very few present, it was not known whether any stung the patient. Yet,
according to the modern theory, Anophelines alone could have been
responsible for the mischief. The proverbial grain of salt seems a
necessary condiment for the cases of experimenters.

In the short space at our disposal, we are not concerning ourselves
with the micro-organism, first discovered in Algiers by Dr. Laveran,
and considered to be the parasite of malaria. Without in the least
committing oneself to a general belief in the germ-theory of disease,
there may, here and there, be maladies produced by parasites. Yet,
apparently, fever, bearing all the clinical symptoms of malaria, may
occur without the presence in the blood of such organisms, no matter
whether parasitic or inbred. On page 8 of the Medical Report of the
Federated Malay States’ Government reference is made to an unusual
swarm of sandflies, and the following commentary is given. “Whether
sandfly fever exists we are not prepared to say, but many cases
_with all the clinical symptoms_ were noted and _no malarial parasite
was detected_ on blood examination.” Hence the sandflies come under
suspicion! Might not another moral be drawn, and that is that fever
may be due to causes less crude than the inoculation of parasites by
objectionable insects?

The conditions that produce mosquitoes seem to be the same as the
conditions that produce malaria, and, in any case, it is these that
must be attacked, no matter whether Lady Anopheles be proved innocent
or in any measure guilty. The mysteries that surround the subject, the
occasional outbursts of disease when areas have been drained, the
usual method of improvement, the occasional betterment of health when
the reverse process of flooding has taken place, may possibly be
explained by the law of subsoil water. Dr. Charles Creighton writes in
his _History of Epidemics in Britain_ (p. 278): “According to that
law, the dangerous products of fermentation arise from the soil when
the pores of the ground are either getting filled with water after
having been long filled with air, or are getting filled with air after
having been long filled with water. It is the range of the fluctuation
in the ground-water, either downwards or upwards, that determines the
risk to health.”

However, far be it from me to descant upon the mysterious causes of
malaria. My object is only to try to prove the unwisdom of rivetting
attention upon the anopheline mosquito. Deductions as to her innocence
may be drawn from the accusations endeavoring to prove her guilty. We
are told how noticeable among troops the difference in fever rate has
been between those that slept on shore and those that remained on
board ship in malarious districts. But as the mosquito is free to come
aboard too, how does that statement tell against her? I remember a
host of such insect invaders on the _Sydney_, the French mail boat,
when anchored at feverish Saigon. We carried a shipload away with us,
and when out at sea they feasted on me to such an extent that I
arrived at Singapore looking as though stricken with a rash, but
otherwise none the worse for their greediness.

Again I was scarred for a long period after the venomous attacks of
mosquitoes and sandflies combined at Kuala Klang, on the Malay coast,
in its old days of fever, before it started a new sanitary career
under the name of Port Swettenham. Yet these myriad bites produced
fever of no sort, although I was at that time pronounced a malarial
subject. I did not remain in Kuala Klang long enough to be affected by
its unhealthiness; but, had Lady Anopheles been justly blamed, the
terrible biting I underwent should have taken effect, irrespective of
my removal. On the contrary, my own experience of fever was connected
entirely with locality and never with mosquitoes. Intermittent fever,
the genuine article, with its burnings, its icings, its whole
programme of miseries, had me constantly in its grip during residence
at a particular house in Kuala Lumpur, the Capital of the Federated
Malay States. My one compensation was freedom from mosquito bites.
When I left that abode, fever left me, and soon after mosquitoes began
to feed on me again with infinite relish. What matter? It was a proof
of sound blood, freedom from that worse scourge, malaria!

To turn from the personal to what is far more important, the general,
let us consider the Medical Reports from that haunt of malaria, the
Malay Peninsula.

The year 1911 in the Federated Malay States held the unpleasant
distinction of being particularly malarious. The mosquito theorists
explained as cause a great influx of, often, unhealthy coolies from
India, and much clearing of land, which distributed the mosquitoes,
and drove them into the houses and among the inhabitants. But, if
mosquitoes be culpable, why should this same year have also been
particularly unhealthy in regard to most diseases, phthisis excepted?
Yet the Medical Report for 1912 shows that, concomitantly with a fall
in malaria, 1,010 fewer cases of dysentery were this year treated in
hospital. There were 77 notified cases of smallpox, as against 286 in
1911; 29 cases of cholera, as against 620; and 5,676 cases of
beri-beri, as against 6,402. The greater prevalence of disease in
general in 1911 surely shows that the causes for its specific forms
must be deeper seated than mere insect bites. Yet so dominating is the
fashion to rivet attention on such factors as these that fundamental
troubles, even when known, appear often to be unheeded.

The F. M. S. Medical Report for 1912 provides a good instance, taken
from the portion dealing with the Institute for Medical Research,
Kuala Lumpur.

On page 25 it states that the occurrence of several cases of bubonic
plague in and near Kuala Lumpur rendered it advisable to consider the
possibility of the disease appearing as an epidemic and measures to
avert such a calamity. A short paragraph refers to reported cases of
plague, and then follow nearly four pages devoted to rats. Toward the
bottom of the fourth page come the pregnant words: “Nearly 50 per
cent. of the plague-infected rats came from the small stretch of
Ampang Street, about 150 yards long.” The short description of this
small area surely reveals a source of danger. “At the back of most of
the houses there is a kitchen or bathing-place from which an open
brick drain, covered with planks, runs through the house to the front
of the shop and under the pavement of the five-foot way into one open
drain at the side of the street. The plank covering of the house-drain
is usually buried beneath sacks of grain or other heavy articles, so
that the drain is not often cleaned. The open cement street-drain
forms a convenient highway for rats, which can readily gain access to
the house by the unprotected house-drains leading into it. Some eighty
yards away the main drain empties into the Klang River, here a shallow
and muddy stream with irregular, foul banks covered with reeds, rank
grass and collections of garbage.” Now, who could expect rats to keep
well in the vicinity of such a drain “not often cleaned,” and such a
river, “shallow and muddy,” with “foul banks covered with collections
of garbage”? Surely gratitude is due to the rodents, who, being nearer
the level of the bad conditions, get ill first, and thus give human
beings a fair warning of the sickness likely also to be their due,
unless surroundings are made healthy for all animals, four-legged and
two-legged. Yet, actually the Report has not a commentary upon these
palpable ills, and, though it has by no means exhausted itself on the
subject of rats, proceeds to vary the topic with fleas, the
meteorological conditions that affect these high-jumpers, and the uses
of guinea-pigs as flea-traps. The results of searching questions to
medical men on the subject of flea bites are even given. “Of eighteen
who replied one stated that he had never been bitten by a flea in his
life” (p. 31). Most people must wish they were equally lucky. But not
a single mention again of the uncleaned drains and the river choked
with garbage during the course of pages all the more diverting because
intended so seriously.

When such open evils can be so ignored, what wonder that the more
occult sources of malaria should not be arrived at? And when will they
be understood while accusations against particular insects require to
be held in reverence as dogmas? In the F. M. S. Report for 1911 Dr.
Sansom allows (p. 3) “there exists in the minds of a great many people
a doubt whether the mosquito carries malaria or any other disease”;
and proceeds to add “until this heresy has been corrected.” Heresy
indeed! Is not free thought the first fundamental of science? Having
thus labelled disbelief in his theory, Dr. Sansom in his next Report
for 1912 has to admit (p. 5), “I have visited many (rubber) estates
where anti-malarial work has not been completed _or even begun_,
so that infection remains as bad or nearly as bad as ever, yet, from
the time the laborers have been fed, down has come the death-rate.” If
food has so much to do with the trouble, why lay all the blame on Lady
Anopheles?

And just as too little food helped to make the coolies ill, is it not
likely, if it be not rude to ask, that too much food was part cause
for the malaria that troubled the prosperous members of the community
of Kuala Lumpur, the Federal Capital, so long as a need of drainage
left much to be desired in their surroundings? Who acquainted with the
Far East does not recall the many courses of the Chinese cook, and the
constant refilling of the champagne glass at dinner parties? There
seems small wonder that the carnivorous feeder and spirituous drinker
from a chilly latitude should fall a victim in the East to malarial
and other fevers: and this without any assistance from Lady Anopheles
or her sister mosquitoes. To her a meed of praise would seem due, for
where the mosquito exists there is proof of a need of drainage,
clearance, and general sanitary attention. But man, who has stoned the
prophets throughout the ages, equally execrates the insects that come
as warnings.

That non-proven is the verdict upon Lady Anopheles’ guilt seems well
shown by Dr. Fraser’s Report, incorporated with the general Medical
Report for the Federated Malay States for the year 1911.

After rather shakily chanting the orthodox creed of the mosquito
theory, Dr. Fraser negatives faith by fact in the most heretical
manner. “It appears to have been assumed on inadequate grounds,” he
writes, “that a small number of malaria-carrying species in an area is
necessarily associated with a low incidence of the disease. Certain
observations made in the course of the present inquiry would appear to
controvert this view. On some estates where the maximum spleen and
parasite rates prevailed few anophelines of any sort were to be found,
while in other areas, where malaria-carrying anophelines were
numerous, these rates were low. Also it was noted that where different
classes of laborers were under identical conditions so far as the
mosquito factor is concerned, such as free and indentured laborers on
the same estate, the parasite rates varied widely in the two groups.
It is clear that factors affecting the general well-being of laborers,
such as the quality of the food supply, housing, etc., are by no means
negligible in the prevention of malaria, as they are equally not
negligible in the prevention of other diseases. To these factors
attention must be directed as well as to measures which aim at the
reduction of mosquitoes, if the disease is to be combated successfully
in the conditions which obtain in this country.”

Precisely! We must attend to general sanitation and personal hygiene,
and then, having removed the beam from our own eye, we may be able to
see clearly to cast out the mote in the eye of the Lady Anopheles.



SUMMONS

MARY LERNER


With the velvet springiness of turf under his feet, the sense of urge
and strain, as of something inexorably drawing him, relaxed at last;
the blind hurry slackened. Out of the whirl came quiet and ordered
perception, out of the breathless confusion, peace. And the years
which his journey seemed to have consumed ran together and were as a
single night. Between white cloud-fleets, the Irish sky began to show
blue as Mary’s cloak, and the soft May morning was sweet with dripping
green things,—thorn and gorse and heather. Christopher knew from the
well-remembered “feel” of the air that the west wind was due to resume
its hearty music. Almost out of sight above, a lark sang, and he could
see innumerable swallows diving and skimming. At once, the old rhyme
of _The Seven Sleepers_, forgotten these thirty years, rose to his
lips like a bubble to the surface of a stream;—

     “The corncrake and the watersnake,
      The cuckoo and the swallow,
      The bee, the bat, the butterfly—”

All these tiny sleepers were awake to-day; himself awake, too, and
aware, with some super-awareness, of the last stages of his
oft-promised journey home, achieved at length after the long,
oppressive interval of weariness and restraint. This interval was fast
receding now, and he made no effort to recall it, for he was eager to
slough off all memory of that heavy weakness as well as all shackles
of solicitous and hampering devotion. He’d had his will at last,
however, though how he could not well imagine; and here he was, free
of them all,—comely, stylish wife; modern, masterful daughters. They
could spare themselves the pain of drawing long faces over him; he’d
no mind to give up with his visit home unpaid.

A good, dutiful family, no doubt, God have them in his care; but this
was a time when a man must cut free of all bonds of maturer years and
turn to the land that gave him birth,—and to his mother, long
unvisited, but by no means forgotten. Many a money-order had crossed
the counter at the country post-office, and of late, many a cheque.
But the first years had been bitterly hard, and all the years
breathlessly busy. That land over-seas took you and drove you whether
or no; but its rewards were adequate.

Foot-loose on the old sod now, no longer earthbound but light with a
marvellous buoyancy, the reek of peat in his nostrils, the corncrake’s
homely tune in his ears. His eyes strained forward for familiar
landmarks, carrying always before them the expectant image of a white
cot in a green hollow. Uplifted by an exhilaration that seemed
stranger to any possible fatigue, he pressed on again, this time with
a pleasant sense of anticipation in place of the former gnawing
avidity, keenly alive to the delights of this long-desired green
world, brilliant with sunshine yet fresh from frequent rains, and
rocked with the rising wind.

At last the silver stretches of the Shannon appeared, and a certain
well-known white ribbon of road, winding among farms. As he went, the
trees began to take on the look of friendly faces;—tall beeches,
whispering limes, blackthorn bushes, white with blossom. A field of
gorse, ablaze with yellow spikes of bloom, sent out its heavy
bitter-sweet perfume. Grassy hills, lined with grey stone walls,
beckoned him, each with its happy memory.—The brook! where trout hung
under the bank and water-cress wove its green mazes. The sight of its
pebbly bed recalled the chilly prickle of gooseflesh on adventurous
legs. He leaned over the rude railing to watch its spring rush, giving
himself to its cool voice, its freshness on his face. He felt clean
now at last of the dusty breath of cities.—Here, too, were the elder
bushes, all abloom. To think of the “scouting guns” he’d hollowed out
of their pithy stalks, filling them with water by means of a
piston-like wadded stick to discharge on good-natured passersby!

The happy sense of expectancy quickened. He topped a sudden rise, and
there, secure between two steep hillsides, drowsed the object of his
quest; a low, stone cot, whitewashed, with thatched roof and
overhanging eaves. What beds under that cosy roof!—of live-plucked
goose feathers (well he remembered grappling the kicking bird between
his knees!), mounted on heavily “platted” straw, and yielding such
sleep as no bed in the new world could afford. As he looked, the high
wind seemed suddenly stilled, and everything appeared to wait
breathlessly. From the chimney, a thread of smoke crept up, straight
as a string in the quiet air.

Then, along the lane, he suddenly descried a group of children, whom
he knew at once for his youngest sister’s. Impatient of this reminder
of a new day and a new generation, he drew aside till they should have
passed, for he was passionately desirous that, for to-day at least,
everything should seem as it had been. The children charged past,
laughing and calling, fair heads and dark, apple cheeks and clear
eyes, as if there were no stranger within miles of them. And their
heedless youth and vivid life made him all at once an alien and unreal
creature.

Thrusting aside this unwelcome impression, Christopher pressed on to
the house. A little old man with a black cutty between his lips was
taking the sun in the garden, his narrow shoulders humped under a
shiny coat. Christopher cast a careless glance at him; _his_ father,
though not tall, was a personable man, a man of thews and solidity.
This old one would be some charity guest of his mother’s.—“Ye’ll have
us eaten out of house and home with your beggars,” his father used to
protest. “Every tramp between here and Gingleticooch has you covered
with blessings. I wonder we don’t be rolling in gold, the good wishes
we do be enj’ying.”

At the gate, Christopher caught the scent of wild hedge-roses, of
sweet-briar and hawthorn, spilling a fragrance as of honeysuckle. At
once the years rolled back, the old boyish yearnings kindled. His
mother!—her arms would be open to him still, despite all delays and
neglect. She was never the one to “fault” him, whatever the blame. As
he neared the low doorway, he glimpsed the blue ware on the dark oak
dresser, the black, shining kettle on the hob, the long table spread
with homespun white linen. On the trimly swept hearth, turf glowed,
and beside it, his mother sat in her high-backed chair, bending over
her heavy prayer-book.

Through all the years he had thought of her as a tall woman still in
the prime of her days, though he knew well she was long past seventy,
and though she had reported herself in laborious letters as “growing
down like a cow’s tail.” All images of her had flaunted a blue and
yellow print, French calico, which had delighted his childhood; blue
as cornflowers and hung with golden chains. To her years he had
conceded grey hair, softly waving under a lacy cap above a face still
fresh and pink.

She wore to-day no chain-decked gown of cornflower blue, no roses in
her withered cheeks. A cap, indeed, did crown her, coarse, but
lily-white, and it shook ceaselessly with the trembling of her head.
Yet, though her face was seamed beyond recognition and her full grey
eyes sunken under lids plucked into innumerable tiny wrinkles, he knew
at once that it was she; and the sight of her shrivelled body caused a
contraction to close about his own frame. Her hands, twisted, spidery,
and corded with blue veins, clutched at his heart. Where were the
strong, firm hands that had so often lifted and soothed him,—dragged
him home howling, too, and soundly smacked him?—He found himself
longing for that heavy hand on his shoulder as for the kiss of his
beloved.

He crossed the flags and spoke her name, holding out eager arms. Just
then, the house-door blew back with a clap and she turned her head and
looked past him unseeingly, shivering a little as at the sharp
mountain wind.

“She does not know me,” he thought, conscience-stricken. “My
fault!—how could she? I’ll not be alarming her with a stranger’s
face.” Then, as she dropped her dim eyes to her book again: “She
cannot see far. ’Tis old and weak her eyes are—she thinks it’s
himself. I’ll go see can I find and prepare him; ’twill be best for
him to break the news.”

So great was the comfort the place bestowed, however, that he must
watch her a few minutes, drawing near behind her chair. The years fell
away and he felt as if he had recovered the very heart of his lost
youth. A little four-legged stool stood close beside her skirts, and
he longed to sit at her knee as he used, leaning his head against her
and staring into the dull glow of the peat. The old ballads she used
to sing to him there!—fresh conned from sheets bought at the fair and
set to tunes of her own adaptation; the stories of “the people” who
steal and change children; the saucer of cream you must set out All
Hallows’ Eve for the fairies; the long Christmas candle of welcome,
which burned before the open door against the coming of the Infant
Saviour. What prayers grew on that hearth-stone!—rosaries for May
nights, litanies. The rigors of fasting and abstinence he had known;
black fasts, too, cheerfully kept. There had been then no timorous
seeking of dispensation.—A question of health? Nonsense; a question
of backsliders and turncoats! Men lived not by bread alone in those
days, but by “the faith,” valiantly.

Drawn to her irresistibly, he looked over her shoulder at the swaying
book, eager to mark her special May devotion to Our Lady.—Would she
be saying, “Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Grace,” or reiterating,
“Morning Star, Pray for us; Health of the Weak, Pray for us; Comforter
of the Afflicted——”? He bent his head to the black-marged page. She
was tracing with tremulous finger, “Prayers for the Dead.”

A chill breath touched him and he drew back a little. For whom did her
old eyes read the prayer? Eager to share her mourning, he gently laid
hand on her bony shoulder, but she did not turn at his touch; only
bent her head the lower over her book and let a little rising murmur
escape her moving lips.

At her failure to respond, he shuddered with a sudden uncanny sense of
remoteness. Then a terrible desolation seized him. “She’s not herself
any more, that’s it; childish, and they never told me. I’m too late,
then. She’ll never see me more. And I meant to come, always; God
knows, I meant to come.”

Fearing to alarm the quiet figure with an outburst of the grief that
choked him, he slipped out and sought the old bench under the hedge.
Here the tranquillity of the little farm laid a soothing hand on
him,—the sight of the speckledy hens pecking in the long grass; the
white goats tethered at a safe distance from sheltered heaps of
potatoes; a red cow, deep in the lush grass of the meadow, who swung
her head threateningly at a decrepit setter that limped across her
path. For a moment, looking at the old dog, he thought: “That’ll be
Sojer; he’ll know me.” But at once, with newly swelling heart, he
realized that many springs had drifted the white blossom of the thorn
across old Sojer’s grave. A friendly yearning made him rise and seek
this other dog, so like the companion of barefoot jaunts; a descendant
of the old fellow’s, no doubt,—a bond across the hostile years.

At the touch of his hand, the setter cowered away, shivering in every
limb, his dark soft eyes full of anguished terror. When Christopher
tried to speak reassuringly, the dog set up a sobbing whine, and,
struggling to uncertain feet, hobbled for the house with his
red-feathered tail between his legs.

On Christopher, as he stood there in the sunny morning, a chill dark
descended, and he felt isolated beyond the farthest star. Foreboding
shuddered through him, but he cried obstinately, “No, I’ll not accept
it! It can’t have come to me yet.” But, in spite of his gallant
refusal, he turned, like a child from the night, to his mother, as if
that little, age-worn woman could soothe his terror as of old.

From the door, he saw her still seated on the hearth, which looked
ominously black now and desolate. Her bent finger held the dread place
in her book, and, with her right hand, she caressed the head of the
old setter, who was crowding to her knees and whining woefully. For
the first time, Christopher heard the broken quaver of her voice.

“Eh, Princie, what ails you, doggie?—Are you feeling it, too? There’s
a power of terrible things about, the day. Waking up of me I
mistrusted it sore, and now I’m certain sure, for three times the
kettle’s after dancing on the hearth, and I’ve seen a tall shadow cast
in the full sun.—’Tis our boy, Christy, I’m thinking. He’s gone. A
young man yet, and I to be left sitting here alone. My grief! that
I’ll never see the lad more.—Christy, Christy, the best son!—but
there, every crow thinks her own bird the white one.—Whisht, Princie;
be quiet, let you. I must be reading the prayers for my son.”

And standing there in the sunlit doorway, Christopher knew indeed
that, by this time, it was, as she said, too late. He would never see
her more, as men see one another. Yet no sudden terror, no dread of
things unknown could wholly rob him of the consolation of her
presence, and, even as he felt this dream-scene, too, relentlessly
slip from him, he was able to savor the exquisite satisfaction of
fulfilment, the transcendent solace of release. Rest! and he had been
so harried; completion, and life had been so long! Green hills to blot
out remembrance of dusty cities, fresh winds after the smother of
narrow streets. “I’ll come back one day, be sure of that,” he’d told
her, and through all warring circumstances, he had stood committed to
that promise. Now, freely, triumphantly, he had made good his word.



FASHION AND FEMINISM

NINA WILCOX PUTNAM


Hitherto, dress reform has always proved a failure. And this is
because dress reform has usually been only the effort of a few
scattered individuals to force their personal taste upon the world.
And while social consciousness is often awakened by the daring
examples of such pioneers, all real social growth comes from a
collective consciousness, which is born in a body of people, by reason
of some economic or moral pressure which affects them all. When such a
body begins to murmur of a reform, that reform is almost certain of
accomplishment. And such a murmur, concerning dress, can be heard
to-day among those women who are banded together by the fight they are
making for freedom.

Dress seems, at first glance, to be one of the least important of the
questions which modern women are taking up: but the smallest
examination into its practical aspects reveals the fact that it
affects all their other interests—not as a mere expression of vanity,
but as a serious economic factor.

When we women first entered factories and workshops in numbers, we met
unfair conditions on every side. This was particularly true of the
garment trades, which were among the first to employ a great many
women. And when we met this unfair treatment, women dreamed of
legislating virtue into manufacturers. But it can’t be done! And now
it is dawning upon the consciousness of a number of women that the way
to reform clothing manufacturers, textile manufacturers, etc., the way
to cut down insane speeding, overwork, underpay, is to change our
insane conception of clothing—to strive to make it a normal, useful
thing, instead of a hampering, exotic, extravagant thing, which works
one group of women to death at a miserable wage, because a far smaller
group of parasitic women wish to be arrayed like peacocks! Knowing
this to be true, one naturally turns to the fundamental question, and
asks—what _is_ dress—what is fashion? And what, indeed, is dress? Is
it simply a means of protection from cold? A concession to so-called
modesty, a means of displaying wealth, and advertising leisure? Of
attracting the opposite sex? It has been all of these in the past, and
many of the same factors are still apparent in our present-day use of
garments: but a new interpretation of the word has come in with our
new industrial conditions. Dress is an enormous economic factor the
world over, and nowhere more so than in America, where it is an
over-exploited industry, whose markets have been stretched abnormally,
not only by the increasing production of inferior articles, but by a
psychological factor, far more potent even than the law of normal
supply and demand; and that factor is Fashion: a purely hypothetical
need of change in order to meet a purely hypothetical standard, which
is entirely ephemeral and continually altered, artificially.

Year after year, we are made to put the money we begrudge, that we can
ill afford, money we would honestly rather put into other things;
money, often, _that we have not got_, into that particular twist to
skirt or coat or hat which will keep us as ridiculous-looking as our
neighbor, while, at the same time, safe from his ridicule; in other
words, to save ourselves the discomforts of being out of style. And
yet, detesting fashion, as I think the majority of us do in our most
secret hearts, we are often hypnotized by it to such an extent that
free action is prevented.

If the number and character could be estimated of those people who
have stayed away from entertainments for lack of a new gown, or dress
suit, or some accessory thereof, almost every human being who has ever
received an invitation would probably be included in the list. That
people stay away from church for the same reason is traditional, and a
favorite method of imprisonment has always been to take away formal
clothing, and substitute loose garments. This trick has been
successful in the instance of white slavery, for it is found that the
girls are unwilling to go out into the street in the brilliant “parlor
clothes” furnished to them.

So deeply rooted is this fear of being wrongly dressed, and so serious
may its consequences become, that it is high time that an examination
into the forces behind the accepted forms of fashions be made, and our
slavish adherence, not only to fashion, but often to discomfort, be
shown for what it is, _a chimera which_ _we ourselves protect_, and
which gives a lot of more or less unscrupulous business men their
opportunity.

Most people believe that fashion is a matter of our own free choice
and approval; but this is not actually the case. For there is in
existence to-day such a thorough understanding between the big combine
of designers, department stores, wholesalers, manufacturers,
textile-mill owners, etc., that our pocket-books are drained by them
as systematically and coöperatively as though they belonged to a
single corporation: and their profits actually and directly depend
upon the extent to which they can play upon our hysterical fear of not
being dressed “correctly.” Of course, the first principle of playing
their game is to get control of fashion itself, to be able to swing
the public taste by forcing constantly changing styles upon it: in
other words, garments must _not be permitted to continue in use until
they wear out_. Before a garment has come to a state of disuse, a
radically new model must be presented which will make the old one look
ridiculous by comparison. In the cheapest grades of manufactured
garments, whose purchasers, it is safe to suppose, would keep a
garment until it was worn out, by reason of poverty, the desired
change is accomplished through the use of shoddy and inferior stuff.

The dress of the rich woman will be discarded at the slightest hint of
a change in style, while its cheaper imitations, worn by the poor,
_are made of stuff deliberately calculated to last only for a season
of three months_! Needless to say, the fact is not advertised to the
working-woman who spends her savings on a suit at a price varying from
five to eighteen dollars!

But, to a certain extent, this scheme of constant changing has reacted
against the manufacturers, especially those engaged in articles
pertaining to dress, rather than the garment makers. These former are
completely at the mercy of the most apparently insignificant change in
fashion. As a natural result, there is a tremendous lot of bribery
coming the way of the designer and the retailer. “Swing the fashion my
way!” is the constant cry of those who make trimmings, such as
buttons, braids, fringes, laces, etc., and it makes all the difference
between success, and, sometimes, bankruptcy, to the manufacturer,
whether or not dozens of little silk buttons are being used on women’s
tailored suits, or if there are two bone buttons less on men’s coat
sleeves. And the same thing is true of the fringe maker or lace
factory. For instance, since the introduction of the narrow skirts
which women have been wearing for the past three years, the lace
business has been nearly ruined. The close-fitting dress permits of no
lace-trimmed lingerie: the ruffled petticoat is a thing of the past,
and it was to the white goods manufacturers that the imitation lace
man sold his wares. On the other hand, the introduction of pleated
chiffon, as a substitute, has raised the occupation of side-pleating
from a scattered, ill-paid basis, comparable to that of a cobbler, to
the status of a real business.

But while change of fashion leaves one or another trade high and dry
in turn, lack of change is still more deadly, especially to the
textile mills. For two years, 1911-12, women varied the making of
their garments only very slightly. The textile mills lost thousands of
dollars in consequence, and, at last, in the summer of 1912 began a
campaign to alter conditions. Their methods were so flagrant that they
would have been funny if they had not been so disgraceful. Everywhere
they offered bribes to designers. “Draw full skirts,” they said; “draw
pleated skirts, and draped gowns and draped waists; we want to sell
our overstock!” The current fashion was taking only six or eight yards
of material to a gown, and the obvious way of improving the matter was
to establish a demand for gowns which would require fourteen to
eighteen yards instead, or gowns which would require the more
profitable full-width materials; above all, gowns which the old,
straight styles _could not be remodelled to imitate_! The bribery was
as well handled as political “favors,” and as to the result, behold
the manner in which our women are swathed in mummy fashion to-day!

That people should wear any clothing which is not exactly suited to
their need and honest desires seems too ridiculous to be true, and yet
that is exactly what most people do, usually without thinking of the
matter. How many men really like to wear a stiff collar, or a dress
suit? Or how many like to wear dark, thick suits in summer instead of
a kind of glorified pajama? And women! How long will they continue to
wear corsets? Not one really wants to. But it is not so much these
blatant ills of dress which harass one. It is the useless accessories,
the keeping up of irrelevant trimmings and embellishments, the
elaborate fastenings, which are the real annoyance.

Not for an instant is it suggested that people should cease to make
themselves attractive in appearance, or that uniformity of dress ought
to be adopted. On the contrary, a greater individuality is to be
desired, but, above all, comfort and convenience. One should be able
to wear what one pleases without coercion of any kind or the
impertinence of criticism from some one whose tastes happen to differ.
To one man a collar may be a comfort; to another it is an abomination.
And there should be no rule, written or unwritten, which compels
either to sacrifice his comfort and tastes to the other.

The true feminist recognizes that one woman may like to swathe herself
in draperies, and the next may prefer the plainest, freest form of
garment; and that one should be made to feel uncomfortable and
ill-at-ease because big financial interests have approved one rather
than the other, is an outrage upon the right to mental and physical
liberty!



GERMOPHOBIA

HELEN S. GRAY


Several years ago Dr. Charles B. Reed of Chicago obtained considerable
notoriety by the invention of a cat-trap or gibbet to be baited with
catnip and operated in back yards. The accounts in the newspapers
related that he had found four dangerous kinds of germs on a cat’s
whiskers and was therefore urging the extermination of cats as a
menace to health; that Dr. William McClure, of Wesley Hospital, was
examining microscopically hairs from cats’ fur to ascertain how many
different kinds of germs there were on it; and that the secretary of
the Chicago Board of Health had issued a statement that cats are
“extremely dangerous to humanity.” From Topeka came the report that
six different kinds of deadly germs had been found on a cat’s fur and
that the Board of Health had in consequence issued a mandate that
Topeka cats must be sheared or killed! But why stop with shearing
them? There are germs on their skins. And now public penholders in
banks and post-offices are under suspicion; an investigation is being
made by the Kansas Board of Health, _The St. Louis Republic_ states,
and individual penholders may have to be supplied. From time to time a
health board official or some other doctor gives out a statement for
publication condemning handshaking as a dangerous and reprehensible
practice.

The hair of horses, cows, and dogs is full of germs, which they
disseminate. Germs are everywhere. Why should cats’ whiskers be an
exception to the rule? If Thomas and Tabby could retaliate and examine
doctors’ whiskers, doubtless numerous virulent varieties of germs
would be found there. Doctors are a menace to public health, for they
disseminate germs. Therefore, exterminate the doctors! But perhaps,
being doctors, they don’t carry germs. Their persons are sacred. Germs
are afraid of them and keep at a respectful distance.

All the leading works on bacteriology admit that a person may have
germs of diphtheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or any
other disease within his body without having any of those diseases.
Since that is the case, it is obvious that germs of themselves cannot
cause disease. They do no harm in a body that is in a healthy
condition. But so prejudiced is the medical profession on the subject
of germs that the true causes of disease are overlooked and
disregarded.

Among the four kinds of germs found on a cat’s whiskers, Dr. Reed
mentions a germ “which causes a variety of infectious diseases,
including kidney disease.” As if any one ever got kidney disease
because he unwittingly swallowed some germs of the kind found in
diseased kidneys, if he had not abused those organs by gross eating or
gross drinking! But it relieves the individual of all responsibility
for his condition to put the blame on germs and the cat. There is no
personal stigma attached to such a cause; for it is commonly supposed
that anybody is liable to be attacked by germs, that, like rain that
falleth upon both the just and the unjust, germs attack both healthy
persons as well as those whose bodies are saturated with auto-toxemia.

An inspection of the family dietary usually reveals the cause of a
man’s untimely demise. But his death is piously attributed to an
inscrutable visitation of Providence. His wife drapes herself in
crêpe, observes all the conventions of grief, and overworks her
lachrymose glands for a season. His friends pass resolutions of
condolence, lamenting that their dear brother has been “called to his
eternal rest,” a flattering implication that he had so overworked
himself during his brief span of life that he needed an eternity of
rest in which to recuperate, and was entitled to it as a reward.
Whereas the only thing overworked was his digestive organs in
disposing of his wife’s cooking.

If deadly germs are found on cats’ whiskers, what of it? It is as
valuable a contribution to science to know how many and what kind of
germs are to be found on cats’ whiskers as to know how many devils can
be balanced on the point of a needle. Verily, a fool and his time are
soon parted.

That a cat has germs on her fur and whiskers does not prove that she
is a menace to health; but doctors are often a menace to life and
health. Much of the surgery performed is unnecessary and frequently
results in death. Vaccination and the administering of serums and
antitoxins are frequently followed by death or impaired health. One of
the gravest charges against the prescribing of medicines is that they
suppress or mask the symptoms and do not remove the cause of the
disease, but leave the patient to continue in the error of his ways
until overtaken again by the same trouble or an equivalent that has
cropped out in some other place; and by that time the malady has
perhaps reached a fatal stage.

In some respects doctors are like cats. They caterwaul, and
occasionally they purr. When a woman patient calls at a doctor’s
office and he does not know just what is the matter with her or what
to do to cure her, if he belongs to a certain type in the profession,
he holds her hand and purrs and is so sympathetic that she leaves his
office in a transport, walks on air, and goes home convinced that no
one understands her case as well as he does. Or else he tells her how
beautiful she looked on the operating table. After such a subtle
appeal to her vanity she pays without demur his bill of $300 or $400.

He takes great care not to offend his patients by telling them
unpleasant truths, but instead resorts to delicate flattery. If a
woman comes to his office suffering from some ailment brought on
chiefly by eating devitalized foods, he purrs softly while he
determines the latitude and longitude of her pain and gently inquires
if she has had a shock recently. She thinks hard for a moment and
recalls that she has had, that the news of the death of a child of an
intimate friend was broken to her abruptly. Yes, that must have been
what caused her condition.

Lacking the ability to direct patients headed for perdition by reason
of wrong living how to live so that they can regain their health while
continuing their work where they are, he sometimes recommends a change
of climate or that they take a rest. Change of scene or occupation
usually affords some slight temporary alleviation that the patients
regard as a cure.

When patients have a cold or the grippe, instead of making plain to
them what laws of health they have violated and that their illness is
a direct result, the doctor, it not infrequently happens, tells them
that it is “going around.” Colds and grippe are consequently in the
popular mind of mysterious origin, and the victims complacently regard
themselves as blameless but unfortunate.

It is because the medical profession teaches people to look outside of
themselves for the causes of their maladies that we see such
spectacles as Caruso, obliged to break professional engagements that
would have yielded him $100,000, ascribing his case of grippe to
external influences. “I like everything in New York except its colds
and grippe,” he is quoted as saying in an interview. “I think I can
boast that I have had the most expensive case of grippe on record. It
has cost me $100,000. The public says I am a great singer. I should be
a greater man if I were a scientist who could drive grippe out of the
country. See if you can’t drive it out of New York before I come
back.”

Note the boast. As if ill-health and operations were something to be
proud of! Instead of telling our acquaintances of our ailments in the
expectation of getting their sympathy, we ought to be ashamed to be
sick. They may understand what internal conditions colds, grippe, and
other ailments presuppose, and have a feeling of repulsion toward us,
not of sympathy.

The germ theory of disease is in great vogue at present with the
regular—or allopathic, as it is sometimes called—school of medicine.
Some of the leading physicians of other schools, however, predict that
the day is not far distant when the contagiousness and infectiousness
of disease through germs, vaccination, the injection of serums as
preventives or cures, and the resorting to the use of medicines by
deluded people as a substitute for correcting their habits of living,
will be generally regarded as superstitions. When that day comes, we
shall cease this Pharisaical self-righteous attitude, this dread and
suspicion of others as germ-laden, and face the truth that we build
our own diseases.

Even some of the regulars do not hold orthodox views; for instance,
Dr. Charles Creighton, an eminent English physician. He has made a
special study of epidemics and was engaged to write an article for the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ on vaccination. At that time he was a
believer in it, but changed his views when he investigated the
subject. What he wrote was omitted from the American editions. “As a
medical man,” he once declared, “I assert that vaccination is an
insult to common sense; that it is superstitious in its origin,
unsatisfactory in theory and practice, and useless and dangerous in
its character.” He testified before the British Royal Commission on
Vaccination that in his opinion vaccination affords no protection
whatever. He has written several books on the subject.

If germs are not the cause of disease, then what is? To this Dr. J. H.
Tilden, of Denver, one of the most distinguished of those who do not
accept the germ theory of disease as true, makes answer as follows. I
quote excerpts taken here and there from his writings in _A Stuffed
Club Magazine_ on the subject of the causes and cure of disease, the
germ theory, contagion and infection, and immunity.

“Disease is brought about by obstructions and inhibitions of vital
processes…. The basis is chronic auto-intoxication from food
poisoning. It is brought about by abusing the body in many ways …
by living wrongly in whatever way…. Bad habits of living
enervate—weaken—the body, and in consequence elimination is
impaired…. The inability of the organism to rid itself of waste
products brings on auto-toxemia. This systemic derangement is ready at
all times to join with exciting causes to create anything from a
pimple to a brain abscess and from a cold to consumption. Without this
derangement, injuries and such contingent influences as are named
exciting causes would fail to create disease. This is the
constitutional derangement that is necessary before we can have such
local manifestations as tonsillitis, pneumonia, and appendicitis….
Every disease is looked upon as an individuality; which is no more the
truth than that words are made up of letters independent of the
alphabet. As truly as that every word must go back to the alphabet for
its letter elements, so must every disease go back to auto-toxemia for
its initial elements…. There can be no independent organic action in
health or disease.”

If drugs, serums, etc., do not cure disease, what does? Correcting
whatever habits caused it; for instance, eating too much, bolting
food, neglect of bathing, ventilation, and exercise, harboring worry,
jealousy, or other destructive emotions, and living on a haphazard
dietary of carelessly and ignorantly cooked foods. “Nature cures when
there is any curing done, but nature must have help by way of removal
of obstructions to normal functioning.” There is nothing spectacular
about a real cure. It means self-discipline.

“Germs are in all bodies in health and in disease…. I do not
recognize them as a primary or real cause of disease any more than
drafts or any such so-called causes; at most germs can be only
exciting causes…. They are innocent until made noxious by their
environment. They are victims and partakers of it. They act upon it
and are reacted upon by it. As they must be amenable to environmental
law, the same as everything else, they necessarily change when their
environment changes. Because of a change in their habitat, the germs
that are native change from a non-toxic state into one of toxicity….
They are not something extraneous to the human organism, but are the
products of lowered vitality in the individual, of lost resistance….
Microbes are toxic when the fluids of their habitat have become
toxic—when the resistance of the body has fallen below the point at
which the fluids maintain their chemico-physiological equilibrium and
decomposition sets in; it is at this stage that germs multiply
rapidly; they absorb the poison that is generating, and it is not
strange that their products are poisonous, for the changed bodily
fluids on which they feed are toxic…. My theory is that the toxicity
of germs is due to being saturated with poisonous gases. The germs of
typhoid fever, for example, are not poisonous until the patient is
sufficiently broken down to cause the generation of toxic gases, after
which all the fluids and solids of the body take on a septic state,
poisoned by the absorbed gas…. Bacteria are not the cause of
disease; wrong living, which puts the system into such a condition
that the bacteria can readily multiply, is the real cause; the
bacteria are simply necessary results…. Germs are scavengers. When
an environment becomes crowded with them, it means that there is a
great accumulation of waste in a state of decay…. They are normal to
a certain limit in our bodies. If they become more numerous, common
sense and reason would say that they must be a necessary factor in the
process of elimination, or, if not a necessary factor, lost resistance
has permitted them to multiply beyond the restrictions set to them by
an ideal physical condition or normal resistance.”

To those who accept the germ theory, it seems that there must be
specific germs to account for the different types of disease. The
leaders among those who reject it are able to explain satisfactorily
without it why all sick people do not have the same disease. They give
as the reasons for variation geographical location, the domestic and
local environment, the season of the year, atmospheric conditions (e.
g., hot, humid weather favoring putrefaction both in the digestive
tract and in animal and vegetable matter outside it), defective
anatomism, congenital or acquired, injuries, age, occupation,
temperament, food, habits, and mode of living.

“Immunization means that normal alkalinity of the fluids of the body
exists…. Health is the only immunity against disease. If there is
any state that man can be put into that will cause him to be less
liable to come under disease-producing influences than full health,
then law and order is not supreme and the world must be the victim of
caprice, haphazard, and chance.”

“Epidemics and endemics feed upon the auto-toxemic and stop where
there are none…. The belief of the medical profession that contagion
and infection pass from one human being to another—from a sick man to
a healthy man—is an old superstition unworthy of this age. Disease
will not go from person to person, unless they are in a physical
condition that renders them susceptible and unless environmental
states favor decomposition—those of the household and the general
atmosphere where the proper amount of oxygen is deficient. So-called
contagious and infectious diseases are self-limited. If it were not
for this self-limitation, the world would be depopulated every time an
epidemic of a severe character succeeds in getting a start. But the
medical profession believes that vaccination and antitoxin do what
nature has been doing since the world began, namely, set a limit to
the spread of disease.”

“Tuberculosis is a seed disease. The seed must come _from a previous
case_,” Dr. J. N. McCormack, official itinerant lecturer of the
American Medical Association and “mouthpiece of 80,000 doctors,” as he
terms himself, is wont to declare in the plea that he is sent out to
make all over the country for the establishment of a “national
department of health and education to bring the benefactions of modern
medical science to every household.” But if one contracts tuberculosis
from the germs of another case and he in turn from some one else, how
did the first case that ever happened originate? ask the leaders among
those who reject the germ theory. Did the causes that produced the
first case of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, measles,
diphtheria, or other diseases commonly regarded as contagious or
infectious, quit the business after producing one case, disappear, and
go out of existence, or do they still operate and cause all the cases
that occur? That troublesome first case is the missing link in the
chain of the theory; but it happened so long ago that it has been lost
sight of, and doctors are seldom embarrassed by being asked to account
for it.

I know a druggist’s family in which all of the six children had
adenoids. Adenoids are not regarded as contagious, so far as I have
ever heard. So contagion cannot be made the scapegoat in this
instance. The children had adenoids because the mode of living was the
same for all. In like manner, when several members of a family
contract tuberculosis, diphtheria, or measles, do they not get the
disease because they all lived in the same manner and were exposed to
like influences, instead of through contagion or infection with germs?
Disease is sometimes spread, however, through the contagion of fear
and suggestion.

The opponents of vaccination and serum therapy deny that the use of
vaccines and serums has served to check the spread of disease. They
hold that epidemics are less prevalent and less virulent now than
formerly because of improved sanitary conditions, such as drainage of
the soil, municipal disposal of garbage, street cleaning, water and
sewer systems, the consequent increased facilities for bathing and
household cleanliness, etc.

A false theory of cause not only leads to a false theory of cure, but
diverts attention from the real issue. For example, in the Middle Ages
and later, in England people used to empty garbage and other refuse in
the yards and streets, and in consequence a plague broke out from time
to time. Instead of attributing it to the accumulated filth, they
accused the Jews of poisoning the wells. So, too, in the case of a
girl on whose neck a gland enlarged to the size of an egg; there was
at once talk as to whether it was tuberculous in nature. Her mother
wondered, if it was tuberculosis, if Minnie got it from the cat! She
had always played with the cat a great deal. In this she reflected
current medical talk in the papers. She could not understand how it
could happen. There was no tuberculosis on either side of the family,
and Minnie had always been so strong and healthy. Before she was
twenty-five there was nothing left of Minnie’s front teeth but a few
black snags—evidence of her having lived largely on sweets, starches,
and meat, and that she had not been healthy. But her mother never
thought of looking in that direction for the cause.

So long as people are led to believe that vaccines and serums are a
safeguard, they do not seek others, but continue to live in filthy
surroundings and to have injurious habits of living. In the mad chase
after imaginary protection, real immunity is overlooked and lost sight
of.



  MEASURE FOR MEASURE

  RICHARD BUTLER GLAENZER


  AND ONE ANSWERED: Lord,
  Of a truth, brave Lord,
  I am all the follies and yet
  I have sinned not blindly,
  But bravely, as a man; so let
  My punishment be brave,
  Albeit courage win not Heaven.
  _What hast thou done, brave man?_
  All things that man can do, brave Lord.
  _Whatsoever Hell thou choose,
  That Hell is thine._

  AND ONE ANSWERED: Lord,
  Of a truth, kind Lord,
  I am weak but humble, and yet
  I have erred not often,
  And kindly have I been; so let
  Thy judgment be as kind,
  Howbeit meekness gain not Heaven.
  _What hast thou done, kind man?_
  All things that man would do, kind Lord.
  _Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,
  That Heaven is thine._

  AND ONE ANSWERED: Lord,
  Of a truth, O Lord,
  Who am I to answer?… And yet …
  I have lived, Life-Giver,
  And O, how sweet was life! so let
  Its sweetness cling and lo,
  I shall but live again … in Heaven.
  _What hast thou done, O man?_
  Thou only knowest true, O Lord.
  _Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,
  That Heaven is Mine._



THE AMERICAN FARMER AS A COÖPERATOR

E. E. MILLER


When one speaks or hears of coöperation among farmers, it seems the
natural thing to think first of Denmark or Ireland. These and other
European countries have made so much greater progress in the business
organization of farmers and farm life than America has, that it is
almost inevitable that they should be held up to us as examples of
what we might but do not accomplish. Various reasons are advanced for
this American backwardness in what is unquestionably one of the great
economic movements of our time. The American farmer’s individualism
and dislike of restraint is often given as the reason. Professor G.
Harold Powell goes so far as to say that “the investment of the farmer
must be threatened by existing social and economic conditions before
he can overcome his individualism sufficiently and can develop a
fraternal spirit strong enough to pull with his neighbors in
coöperative team work.” There is no doubt much truth in this, but I am
inclined to think that lack of knowledge as to how to coöperate has
been almost as much a hindering factor as has lack of desire to
coöperate. The attempts at coöperation among farmers have been
sufficiently numerous, if they had been successful, to have made
coöperative effort in rural communities a familiar form of activity to
us all. As it is, instances of really successful coöperative ventures
among farmers, while rather impressive as an aggregate, amount to very
little indeed compared with the vast volume of yet unorganized
business carried on by them.

Europe seems to have had wiser leaders in the coöperative work, as
well as more docile followers. The American passion for bigness has
largely ruled both leaders and followers. Where the Old World peoples
were content to begin with small organizations for a definite purpose
and let these organizations grow and develop into powerful
institutions, the farmers of America have thought in terms of a
continent, tried to organize nationwide societies to transact every
kind of business—and failed lamentably. It has been only a few years
since a great noise was made by a society which proposed to unite all
farmers in one great society which should fix a minimum price on all
farm products and so settle matters out of hand. Just a year or two
ago Farmers’ Union leaders in the South were telling the cotton
farmers that only a great national organization could be of any real
help in the marketing of their crop. The disastrous failures of the
big organizations which were going to “finance the cotton crop” and
the successes along various lines attained by some local and county
organizations have discredited these leaders who mistook rhetoric for
business sense and possibly also taught them a few things they needed
to know.

The great trouble with farmers’ coöperative organizations in this
country has been that they were too loosely organized and attempted to
do too much. It is just beginning to dawn on the mind of the average
farmer that a coöperative business must be conducted on the same
general lines as an individual business and that he cannot secure the
benefits of coöperation without giving up some of the privileges of
individual action. He is learning, too, not to despise the day of
small things.

The lesson has been learned by some, however, in the long years of
struggle for fair prices and fair treatment by the commercial world,
and here and there all over the country are to be found groups of
farmers who have found out the principles of business coöperation and
put them into action to their own decided profit. These organizations
are interesting not only for what they have done, but also for what
they teach.

Take the Southern Produce Company, of Norfolk, Virginia, for example.
This association was organized in 1870 and now has 400 members. It
handles most of the truck grown in the vicinity of Norfolk, handling
for outsiders—at a fixed percentage—as well as for its own members.
It not only sells the truck the members grow, but buys their seeds,
fertilizers and other supplies. It has bought and equipped an
experimental farm near Norfolk, turning it over to the State to run,
and lately has erected a six-story office building in the city,
building and lot costing $135,000. All this has been done without
putting in a dollar except for the capital stock which is limited to
$15,000.

Equally notable successes have been attained by the Hood River apple
growers and the citrus fruit growers of California. The organization
of these growers has not only resulted in better prices to the
growers, but in a standard quality of goods and less fluctuation of
prices in the retail markets. Since California growers learned to
market their oranges and lemons through organization, there has been
brought about a uniformity of distribution which “has resulted in a
lower retail price to the consumer and gives a larger proportion of
the retail price to the producer.” These very successful organizations
have one definite purpose—to sell the fruit their members grow. They
are organized on strictly business principles. Each member’s crop
virtually belongs to the association, and is picked, graded, packed,
and sold as the association directs. Details of cultivation and
spraying which may affect the quality of the fruit are also looked
after by the association, and the grower has no right to sell his
fruit except through the association. In the case of the California
Fruit Growers’ Exchange this right to the privilege of handling the
crop is claimed in the first place by the Local Exchange against the
grower, next by the District Exchange against the Local Exchange, and
finally by the General Exchange against the District Exchange. It is
an up-to-date business organization these men have; the grower belongs
to a Local Exchange, the Locals form District Exchanges, and these, in
turn, the General Exchange. Each is independent in matters that
concern it only, but all must submit to the general voice in matters
which may be of concern to all.

Fruit and truck crops seem to be especially adapted to coöperative
marketing; or possibly the uncertainty of profit in their production
and the big share of the final price absorbed by the middlemen have
forced fruit and truck growers to coöperate to a greater extent than
farmers in most other lines. At any rate there are quite a few
successful coöperative associations among these growers. In Texas such
an association does a business of $1,500,000 annually. The Grand
Junction Fruit Growers’ Association, of Colorado, is another notable
success. California nut growers market their product through a
coöperative organization. Florida citrus growers claim to have raised
the net price received by growers for oranges from $1.15 in 1909-10 to
$1.96 for the season 1912-13. Western North Carolina fruit growers
have organized, as have Georgia peach growers, and fruit raisers in
many other sections. In an Alabama town a truckers’ association with
190 members has standardized its products until it obtains prices
considerably above those secured by individuals, and from a small
beginning has grown to be the most important business concern of its
town.

These stories might be duplicated many times; and it is not too much
to say that the fruit growers and truckers are rapidly coming to
realize the benefits of coöperative organization. I do not believe it
any wild prophecy to say that within a dozen years the trucker seeking
a location will inquire into the marketing organization conducted by
his fellow truckers just as he now inquires into the locality’s
shipping facilities. And some time all the local coöperative
organizations marketing perishable truck and fruit will unite to
conduct a great central marketing exchange. Then the present-day
scarcities of certain fruits and vegetables at one town, while in
another these same products are decaying and going to waste, will be
avoided.

Coming back from the things that may be to the things that are, it is
worth while to note that in 1911 2,120 out of a total of 6,284
creameries in the United States were conducted on coöperative lines,
and that of 3,846 cheese factories, 349 were coöperative. In Minnesota
608 out of 838 creameries were coöperative. In Wisconsin 347
creameries out of 1,000 and 244 cheese factories out of 1,784.

In these as in other lines of business coöperative associations are
largely localized. A successful coöperative creamery in a locality
helps to organize other creameries near it on a coöperative basis, and
so on. Similarly, the successful coöperative rural stores of the
country are largely grouped in Minnesota and Wisconsin, having spread
from one or two unusually successful ventures in small towns. The
coöperative grain elevators of the country are mostly located in Iowa,
the Dakotas, Minnesota and Illinois, although Nebraska and Kansas have
over a hundred each. Where one farmers’ telephone line is organized
another is likely to follow, and whole counties have been covered in
this way.

In short, the coöperative spirit is like the little leaven which
spreads and spreads until it leavens the whole lump.

It is not only that a successful coöperative enterprise leads to the
establishment of similar enterprises in nearby communities. More
notable and striking still is the fact that a successful coöperative
enterprise in a rural community seems often to put new life into the
whole community and to give the farmers entirely new conceptions of
their own capacities and the possibilities of their vocation.

Take, for example, the story of Svea, Minnesota, as told by a recent
visitor to that town—a visitor, by the way, who went to Svea simply
to see how the farmers there were working together and what profits
they had from so doing. I quote:

“In Svea they have established and operated thus far without one
single failure, a coöperative creamery, a coöperative telephone
company, a coöperative grain elevator, a coöperative stock-shipping
association, a coöperative store, a coöperative insurance company, a
coöperative bank (now forming). Moreover, they also have as a result
of what we may term coöperative effort, a thoroughly equipped high
school with agricultural and domestic science teaching, a consolidated
church with a resident pastor, a school library and a State teaching
library, neighborhood social meetings three times a month under church
influences. They have made their neighborhood a reading neighborhood.
Almost every farmer takes two to four farm papers and other reading
matter in proportion.

“In other words, the Svea farmers have become ‘business men’ as surely
as commercial men in the towns, and are doubling their profits as a
result, while they are at the same time developing a high degree of
culture and that satisfying social life, without which mere money is
valueless, while also maintaining moral and spiritual influences which
town life tends to destroy.”

The first enterprise was the creamery which was started in 1896. It
paid so well that the coöperative telephone line came four years
later; and, having once learned how much it helped them to work
together, they have continued all along to find out new ways in which
they could coöperate for the upbuilding of the community. The
coöperative store, strictly on the Rochdale plan, was started in 1909,
and to show how coöperation pays, the experience of the town pastor
may be cited. He took $100 stock in the store, giving his note in
payment. He then went on for a year buying goods from the store at
the usual retail prices. When settlement was made, ten months
later, it was found that the dividends due him—the rebate on his
purchases—amounted to $150.60. He had, without spending a cent or
paying any extra prices for merchandise, cancelled his note and the
interest on it and acquired a balance of $44.60. In other words, if he
had bought his goods from a regular merchant, he would have paid that
merchant $150.60 in net profits, whereas by coöperating with his
neighbors and trading with himself so to speak, he was enabled to
return the whole sum to his own pocket. With such examples of the
benefits of coöperation before their eyes, it seems but natural that
the farmers of Svea should be the prosperous, progressive,
broad-minded, hopeful folks they are said to be—the sort of folks who
are able and willing to vote upon themselves a tax of $1.70 on the
hundred dollars of property to build and equip the kind of high school
they want.

Take, as another example of how the coöperative leaven works, Catawba
County, North Carolina. The farmers and other business men of this
county decided some five years ago that they needed a county fair.
They got together and had it—a fair with liberal prizes but without
entrance or admission fees. Everything was free to all who came, and
the authorities saw to it that there was nothing to injure or deceive
anyone who came. The fakers and cheap side shows which are the big end
of some fairs were not allowed to stop in Hickory where the fair was
held. The fair was a success, and has been a success since. Last year
the townspeople did not feel inclined to contribute to it, but the
farmers had learned how to work with each other in the meanwhile and
they went ahead and had a fair just the same, out in an oak grove
surrounding a rural high school. Fifty horses and mules on exhibition,
50 pure-bred cattle and other exhibits to match. Those who have
attended Southern fairs will know at once from the livestock entries
that this was truly a good county fair. I doubt if these farmers could
have held this fair, however, if it had not been for the coöperative
creamery. This institution, established in 1910, when the farmers
found themselves developing a dairy industry without a convenient
market, has been the coöperative leaven in Catawba County. It was
started with a capital of $1,500, the money being borrowed and the
machinery purchased from a creamery “promoted” somewhere in Georgia by
the agent of a creamery-selling concern which persuaded the farmers
that if they got a creamery outfit the cows would somehow come to it.
The creamery was a success from the start; soon it began a new work of
service by handling the farmers’ eggs on a coöperative basis, teaching
them how to produce and market eggs of quality while securing more
than the regular market price for these eggs. The lesson was quickly
learned: it paid farmers to work together. Now they have a farmers’
building and loan association, a “Sweet Potato Growers’ Association,”
rural school improvement associations, women’s clubs, and are
preparing for a coöperative laundry. The women meet and discuss the
needs of their schools—as many women do—and then lay out a plan of
action and go to work to supply the needs—as too many women do not.
The Farmers’ Union in one district recently made a complete survey of
that district and can now tell just what each farmer reads, what he
does for his neighborhood, almost what he thinks, in so far as
thoughts may be determined by actions and conditions. In short,
“Catawba is a live county,” as any North Carolinian will tell the
inquirer, and coöperation among the farmers has made it live.

At first thought it may seem strange that the intellectual and moral
progress of a rural community should be so quickened by business
coöperation among the farmers, but a little thought will show why this
must almost necessarily be so. It is beyond question that the lack of
organization, of unity of purpose and concert of action, is as great a
hindrance to rural progress and development as is the traditional
conservatism and inertia of the individual farmer. The farmer has
simply not learned how to use all the multitudinous committees and
boards and sundry group organizations which the city dweller has found
so effective in many ways. Once the farmer gets into the habit of
working with his neighbor for a common end, he sees all sorts of
desirable ends to be worked for, and if a “divine discontent” with
existing evils or needs is present in the community—as it usually
is—it is almost certain to be no longer hemmed up in the hearts of
two or three persons but set free in the consciousness of the whole
community. Then action follows.

The man who would improve social and moral conditions in the country
districts can make no more effective start than to organize the
farmers into coöperative business associations. The American farmer
has, it seems to me, demonstrated himself an efficient and
whole-hearted coöperator, when once he learns the trick and gets the
habit.

And he is learning rapidly. Before me, as I write, are reports from
various Southern States of coöperative tobacco and cotton warehouses,
coöperative and semi-coöperative stores, produce-selling exchanges,
fertilizer and supply buying associations, cotton marketing
associations, coöperative buying of machinery and livestock, and so
on. There is even an account of a coöperative church—a whole
community uniting to make the church a social centre and a help to
all. The work of rural organization, either for business purposes or
for intellectual development and social improvement, has just begun;
but it is something that a beginning has been made, and I, for one, am
not yet willing to admit that the American farmer is inferior to the
farmers of any other country in either common sense or neighborly
feeling. Unless he is so deficient, he will become as good a
coöperator as any of them, for both his business interests and his
sense of neighborliness demand a new organization of country life to
fit the new conditions of our time.



RELIGION IN THE MODERN NOVEL

LOUISE MAUNSELL FIELD


Of all the many accusations brought against our much abused young
twentieth century, there is none more popular than that of
materialism. For all its deficiencies, whether artistic, social or
ethical, this parrot-cry furnishes a convenient explanation; but
unfortunately for those who welcome such catch-phrases as a ready
means of avoiding any necessity for trying to exercise their disused
and rusty thinking apparatus, convenient and accurate are
seldom—perhaps never—synonymous. If this age of ours really is what
it has so frequently been called by capable judges, the Age of the
Social Conscience, that fact is in itself ample disproof of
materialism; for if conscience in its every manifestation be not
spiritual, what is? True, we have done away with the old scorn of the
body and of that generality once known as “the world,” but this is
simply the natural result of an increased knowledge which has
compelled an altered point of view, making such contempt appear rather
childish. And because the new social conscience has developed so
largely outside the orthodox church, it is not therefore any the less
religious. Indeed, it is in very great measure the immediate cause of
that re-awakened interest in what may for clearness’ sake be defined
as strictly religious ideas which is now showing itself in so many
ways and places, and especially in the modern novel.

That this new religious interest seldom takes a dogmatic form is
probably one reason why the average reader has been and still is so
slow to recognize it—of course we are in no way concerned here with
those latter-day successors to the Elsie books which provide psychic
water-gruel for the senile-minded of all ages—yet in the stirrings of
a more or less vague discomfort he has become aware of those electric
currents of spiritual unrest which are penetrating down even to the
most respectable of the quarter-educated well-to-do. There is
something more than a little pathetic in the way these latter welcome
such an attempt to manipulate words, to stretch the ancient formulas
and render them broad enough to contain modern ethics and modern
knowledge, as was shown in Mr. Winston Churchill’s _The Inside of The
Cup_—a novel whose popularity was due at least as much to its
discussion of religious as to its treatment of social problems. For there
is no class in the community whose size, the multiplicity of books and
opportunities for learning taken into consideration, is so astonishingly
great as is that of the half and quarter educated well-to-do.

The best of those modern novels in which the present-day religious
interest reveals itself in its most significant aspect often treat it
shyly, almost timidly. For with the crumbling of the ancient cosmogony
and its dependent beliefs the old cock-sure attitude became obsolete. The
writer no longer says, “This is the truth; no decent or sensible person
will deny it”; but instead: “This is my opinion—what experience has
given me; take it for what it is or may be worth.” Very frequently it is
only the consciousness of things spiritual which is clearly shown; their
nature, with a deeper reverence than that of yore, is left indeterminate.
Here and there appears an author whose belief is as detailed as that of
Will Levington Comfort: usually, however, it is rather a reaching out, a
sense of things unseen, the mental attitude one of obedience to Abt
Vogler’s advice: “Consider, and bow the head.”

In this as in so many other phases of our modern thought and experience
H. G. Wells has succeeded in stating lucidly that of which the majority
of people are but more or less dimly aware. It is indeed particularly
interesting to note the growth of spiritual and religious interest in Mr.
Wells. Decidedly materialistic in much of his earlier work, it is only
when _Marriage_ is reached that we find the hero, Trafford, deploring
the fact that his wife and himself have won “no religion to give
them”—i. e. their children—“no sense of a general purpose.” And,
though foreshadowed in other stories, not until _The Passionate Friends_
of last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious
experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that
sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in
faltering, merely human speech, which is often—it might be safe to
say, always—the very crux of the religious spirit as it appears in
the modern novel. Stephen Stratton, who relates the experience, has
reached the crisis of his life and knows not where to go nor what to
do when, as he phrases it: “The great stillness that is behind and
above and around the world of sense did in some way communicate with
me … commanding me to turn my face now to the great work that lies
before mankind.” And having told him what his share in this work is to
be, “the stillness” bids him: “Make use of that confusedly striving
brain that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter.”
And Stephen, though he cries out, “But who are you?” obeys.

Detailed at greater or less length, it is this occasional awareness of
communication with the Power outside and beyond “the world of sense”
which is the shape in which religion is most likely to appear in the
modern novel. Sometimes, as in _John Ward, M. D._, this awareness,
usually touched upon lightly, almost furtively, is clearly and
strongly emphasized, but very seldom, and then under a slightly
different aspect. The destruction of the old formulas has resulted in
an instinctive distrust of creeds, an instinctive shrinking from
anything which bears even the least appearance of an attempt to make
new ones. The situation portrayed in William Arkwright’s able, yet
curiously uneven book, _The Trend_, wherein he shows his mystic,
purely spiritual singer as escaping, horror-stricken, from an orthodox
church service and denouncing it as an insult to God, is typical,
though extreme. For the revolt against the materialism of Haeckel and
his followers—not of Darwin and Huxley, who were not materialists and
repudiated the name with the utmost vigor—has been accompanied by a
revolt against the materialism in religion which rendered it
vulnerable to the onslaughts of historical and scientific criticism.
“We claim and we shall wrest from theology,” said John Tyndall, “the
entire domain of cosmological theory.” The event has proved him a true
prophet—and helped men to disentangle religion from theology.

The whole movement of the modern novel, indeed, has been toward a
spiritualization which embodies within itself an essentially religious
feeling; only this spiritualization not being of the monastic and
ascetic kind which so long swayed the imaginations of men, but of a
social or humanistic order, has frequently been mistaken for other
than its real self. It constitutes, too, a force active in all the
affairs of life rather than one principally confined to certain of its
details, and this fact can be glimpsed, sometimes from one angle,
sometimes from another, in the more ephemeral as well as in the best
examples of our twentieth century fiction. In an article published in
the May issue of The Forum attention was called to the change which
has taken place in the character of the fiction hero, who has lost his
idle elegance and become a worker. That this work should so often be a
part of the struggle for human betterment or a joining in the endeavor
to right some especial wrong is both a portion of and a testimony to
the idealistic spirit which quickens the modern novel, as is also the
companion fact that its drama is in many notable instances mainly a
psychic one. More and more is the inward effect thrusting the outward
event into a position of subordinate interest; the story of a murder
becomes an account not of the efforts to trace the slayer, but of the
result of the deed upon his soul. The most interesting and important
chapter of _The Devil’s Garden_ is that wherein William Dale reviews
the inner life which has been so turbulent, while the outer was so
calm; _The Debit Account_ has little to say of Jeffries’s career in
the realm of finance but very much about his mental attitude toward
himself and that “world without trifles” in which he lived; despite a
charming heroine and an absorbing plot it is the influence of failure
upon the character of Ralph Lingham which is the matter of supreme
importance in _When Love Flies out o’ the Window_.

To call this confused mass of struggle and revolt and aspiration
“religion” may seem to many persons unjust and perhaps even a trifle
shocking; but that is because of the popular confounding of religions
which are many with religion, which is one in essence, whether it be
manifested under the Buddhistic form of quietism or the social service
activities within and without the present-day church. Modern thought
has made the old-time easy shifting of responsibility impossible, and
the changed belief which this involves, enforcing the conviction that
the world is to be saved and the Kingdom of God established on earth
not by miraculous intervention but by the earnest labor in well-doing
of many generations of devoted men and women, has had even among those
who deny it an incalculably powerful effect. It may be too that the
new humanitarianism which causes us to view with horror conditions
which our forefathers regarded with more or less equanimity and makes
reform one of the most familiar of words is to some extent due to the
desire to escape from any effort to measure and explain the Infinite
with mere finite instruments. Since the days when knowledge destroyed
the foundations of that ancient stately tower of faith and authority
which men had believed was based on truth’s very rock, this attempt to
find a working theory of life which shall not imply any dogmatic
response to the riddles of the universe has been made in directions
innumerable, and is being so made to-day; only, the way of escape by
“practical” social labor has become more popular than any other and is
a road along which travel in divers manners all sorts and conditions
of men—among them many who would vehemently and even indignantly deny
that religious and spiritual problems had anything whatever to do with
their chosen path.

In the modern novel as in the modern world religion has come to be
more and more a matter of service and aspiration; less and less a
matter of accordance with fixed rules and formulas. And upon this, as
upon so many other aspects of life, the writer of to-day can express
himself with a freedom which only a few years ago would have brought
down torrents of wrath upon his head. What in our parents’ time would
have been said of _The Trend_, for example, or even of _A Man’s World_?

Thus religion in the modern novel evinces itself principally in four
distinct ways: in revolt against the worn-out, cramping traditions; in
a broad humanitarianism which has increased sympathy and given a fresh
and vivid and impelling meaning to the word duty; in a quickened
spirituality that has removed punishment and reward from the hereafter
and even from the world of matter to the living human soul; and in a
reaching out, vaguely, gropingly, but never futilely, toward “the
stillness,” “the Ultimate Force,” “the Unknown Power,” or whatever
term men prefer to use in their desire to get away from the old
anthropomorphic conceptions, and yet express their consciousness of
the Infinite and Divine. For “the obstinate questioning of invisible
things” which began so soon as man developed from the primeval
ape-forms and became Man, still goes on and will go on, in all
probability, so long as the race endures; only the shape and manner of
the questioning has changed as humanity has slowly learned something
of its ability to mould its own destiny, the duty and privilege which
it possesses of working out its own salvation. There have been many
periods in the world’s history when that questioning found few to
voice it aloud, yet always after such a pause it has been renewed with
fresh and greater vigor. One of these pauses came in the last century;
to-day the questioning resounds all about us, and one of the means
through which it is being uttered most clearly is the modern novel.



GIOVANNITTI

_Poet of the Wop_

KENNETH MACGOWAN


There are probably a lot of technical errors in Giovannitti’s
poems.[1] I didn’t notice. And perhaps that is one of the tests of
great poetry,—not the faults that you can’t find because they’re not
there, but the faults that will not be discovered. Something else
absorbs you.

The significant thing is that here we have a new sort of poet with a
new sort of song. And doubtless because of this song it will be many
years before we see his greatness. For the song that he sings is not a
pleasant song. It is the song of the people as he learned it in the
Lawrence strike and hummed it over in the jails of Salem. He and his
song are products of something that few Americans yet understand. We
do not comprehend the labor problem of the unskilled, just as we do
not comprehend the I. W. W. that has come out of it. A poet has arisen
to explain.

Now the I. W. W. is no mere labor union; the A. F. of L. is enough.
Giovannitti is no mere poet of labor; we have had plenty of such. He
is not singing of labor alone. He is not prating of the dignity of
work—you can’t find it in the situation the I. W. W. faces. He is no
aristocrat of handiwork, like the A. F. of L. He sings the people
behind the work—active or idle, skilled or not—“Plebs, Populace,
People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat.” He cries the awakening of that
great mass of mankind that has always been typified as Labor because
earning its bread in the sweat of its brow was its one common
attribute—the primordial curse. He looks beyond work to emancipation:

  Think! If your brain will but extend
    As far as what your hands have done,
  If but your reason will descend
    As deep as where your feet have gone,

  The walls of ignorance shall fall
    That stood between you and your world….

  Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn,
    Crouched at your feet the world lies still—
  It has no power but your brawn,
    It knows no wisdom but your will.

  Behind your flesh, and mind, and blood,
    Nothing there is to live and do,
  There is no man, there is no god,
    There is not anything but you.

Against him Giovannitti finds the world—the world even of his own
kind, bound in the chains of the past. The police, the law, the
Church, another age shackling this, he has met them all in
Massachusetts, arrayed against even the first steps toward his
industrial democracy. The business of his verse is to destroy. In
_The Cage_—the prisoner’s pen in which he stood for murder—he deals
with the mummy of authority. In _The Walker_ he has painted the prison
as no man, not even Wilde, has done. And the Church—even the Christ
whom so many socialists are confessing that they may be numbered with
the sheep—that also he denies. Christ, the heavy-laden carpenter, was
still a man of peace. Giovannitti has his own sermon, “The Sermon on
the Common”: “Blessed are the strong in freedom’s spirit; for theirs
is the kingdom of the earth.”

Materialistic—like all these socialists? Giovannitti has his answer
ready for you: “While happiness be not our goal, but simply the way to
get there.”

Neither materialism nor happiness is likely to trouble the average
American. What bothers him is “violence.” And there is no disguising
the fact that violence is an essential part of the I. W. W. and its
faith. Love is as great a part, of course; but hate must spring just
as quickly from the cruelty of the world of the few as love from the
brotherhood of the world of the many. Giovannitti and his friends want
something and they want it badly. They are ready to take it peaceably:
Giovannitti pictures the spirit of Helen Keller as the Christ of
loving forgiveness—the only true Christ—offering peace to the
grinder of the faces of the poor. But, if love and forgiveness fail,
there is another savior waiting, and a violent savior:

    … The sombre one whose brow
  Is seared by all the fires and ne’er will bow
  Shall come forth, both his hands upon the hilt.

Whatever its future, the I. W. W. has accomplished one tremendously
big thing—a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags and
violence and sabotage. And that is the individual awakening of
“illiterates” and “scum” to an original, personal conception of
society and the realization of the dignity and the rights of their
part in it. They have learned more than class-consciousness; they have
learned consciousness of self. The I. W. W. is making the “wop” into a
thinker. And that is what Giovannitti wrote in his _Proem_ when he
said of his own verses:

  They are the blows of my own sledge
    Against the walls of my own jail.

     [1] _Arrows in the Gale._ By Arturo Giovannitti. The Hillacre
     Book House.



EMERSON

_A Mystic Who Lives Again in His Journals_[2]

WARREN BARTON BLAKE


Emerson has been “discovered” again—this time in the France that he
tried hard and vainly to understand. It all began with the publication
of a critical biography by Madame Dugard in 1907. I was in Paris then,
and read it, and was most of all struck by the comically dressy
effect, in translation, of the simple lines beginning:

  Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home.

In French, they correspond to an Emerson dressed in eighteenth century
style, with wig and sword:

  Adieu, monde orgueilleux, je retourne au foyer;
  Tu n’es pas mon ami, je ne suis pas le tien…

Yet the book is a good introduction to Emerson, and, since 1907,
Madame Dugard and others have translated several volumes of essays for
the French public. I wonder if they have won a reading—outside the
university and professionally literary groups; I wonder if Frenchmen
see far beyond what Robert G. Ingersoll called the “baked-bean side of
his genius”? As the late Perpetual Secretary of the Immortals said,
when the French Academy “crowned” the Dugard book:

     “Emerson’s influence in America, like Ruskin’s in England,
     is a curious illustration of the need for an ideal which, at
     certain moments, the man of action, the Anglo-Saxon, feels.
     Such was the empire of contemplative monks over barbarian
     chiefs and of mystics over feudal armies. It was Emerson’s
     fortune to launch his ideas at a time when America was
     largely without them…. Emerson, knowing that the great
     danger of democracy is atrophy of the individual conscience,
     set himself to preaching individualism—the necessity of a
     high culture, the search for an ideal.”


II

Eight years ago, when I read Mme. Dugard’s volume, I was
youthful—with all of youth’s intolerance. It seemed no mere
coincidence that Emerson’s father recorded his birth in his diary
between a dry note on the “Election Sermon” and a report of a session
of his literary club at Mr. Adams’s. Cheerful youth, not needing
reassurance concerning the excellence of this world as an abiding
place, is unlikely to set a high value on what contemporary reviewers,
even in the American religious press, found to praise in Emerson’s
essays: “Their lofty cheer, and spirit-stirring notes of courage and
hope.” I certainly had no conception of Emerson’s influence upon my
father’s generation—an influence so great that Carlyle called his
friend a new era in our history; so great that when some clergymen
complained that he was leading young men to hell, Father Taylor
remarked: “It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but I am certain
he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.”
Then again, I had no sympathy with Emerson because it seemed to me, in
spite of all the long words and imported transcendentalism—or,
partly, on account of them—that he didn’t “get anywhere.” (I
sometimes feel so still—but the charge is less damnatory. I do not
wonder that Moncure Conway wrote of Emerson setting free in his
heart—in his _heart_, notice—“a winged thought that sang a new song
and soared—whither?”)

Emerson’s dependence upon intuitions and praises of them as the
springs of action and organ of inspiration conferring wisdom upon man
seemed the less respectable because I hadn’t read Bergson—who has
made intuitions more than ever fashionable. Emerson lived in the
spirit-world—a quite different place from any trodden by the student
in Paris who is at home in the world of the Sorbonne and the
Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the world of flesh-and-blood. To
healthy youth, nothing is much more repugnant than the Wordsworthian
ideal of wise passivity, while the notion of a Buddhistic Nirvana
seems murderous of “Nature”—however you define her. Moreover, I know
not how to direct my inexorable thoughts, Emerson avows, and scarcely
appears to think any direction of them needful. His best thoughts
steal upon him in silence, and Truth flies out of the window when Will
enters in by the door. “There is never a fine aspiration but is on its
way to its body or institution,” he confidently asserts. Too
confidently, it seemed to me. Emerson, aged thirty, wrote that a
system-grinder hates the truth; he loved the truth, and
therefore—therefore?—side-stepped system. It was not till much later
that he uttered the heartfelt cry: “If Minerva offered me a gift and
an option, I would say, give me continuity. I am tired of scraps….

  “‘The Asmodæan feat be mine
    To spin my sand-bags into twine.’”

Perhaps the scrappiness of Emerson is less distressing to the youthful
mind, eternally and quite needlessly refreshed by the comedy of life
on every side of it, than the Emersonian “trick of solitariness,” that
he played as a Harvard undergraduate not less but perhaps rather more
than as the Concord sage. When Madame Dugard’s book on Emerson was
published in Paris, I sat down and wrote a critique—stored with
Roussellian analogies, à la Irving Babbitt. I was full of Rousseau
then, and I piled on sentences that I meant to be cruel and
crushing—not of Professor Babbitt, or Jean-Jacques, or Madame Dugard,
but of poor Emerson. I showed my article, unfinished, to a dear
friend—wiser than I; and then tore it up. Here is a part of the
letter I had from my friend commenting on the little essay:

     “I find your point that Emerson, the preacher of
     individualism, was himself thin-blooded and barren of true
     personality, interesting: whether or not it is true. I never
     happened to find it put just so before, and should certainly
     never have thought of it. But I suppose, after all, a
     certain kind of individuality might be expressed by
     impersonality as well as by any other instrument. I’ve only
     glanced through the Dugard book, but the point of view seems
     to be the conventional one that Emerson was too far removed
     from the stress and pain of life to touch very closely
     vibrant, struggling souls. As you translate, ‘he fills only
     the full, reassures only the optimists.’ I suppose that is
     true enough. And yet—and yet, is any life so full that it
     does not need refilling; or any optimism so complete and so
     unshaken that it does not need reassurance, _expression_,
     from an articulate, a stronger spirit? Isn’t optimism with
     many people a religious yearning rather than any truly
     temperamental attribute; a thing to be struggled for, and
     cherished, and reinforced from without? Whatever forces from
     within may have urged Emerson toward idealism and optimism,
     wasn’t he at least equally an idealist, and optimist, from
     conviction, or faith, or whatever else you call the
     semi-religious element? The Emersonian idealism is more, I
     am sure, than the natural overflow of a serenely poetic
     disposition—to which you try to reduce it. You must not
     forget that essay of his on Destiny—Destiny, man’s heroic,
     large-spirited friend, man’s bolster against Fate
     (discouraging and enervating personage!).

     “I suppose that it is fair enough to complain that Emerson
     gives light without heat, but how many writers throw off
     much heat and little light—to say nothing of ‘darkness
     visible’…. Not many philosophers and poets and friends of
     ours yield us both forms of power. Perhaps the combination
     of the two—light and, well, at least _warmth_—is the most
     remarkable thing about Christ and his system.”

I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now
that I have read in President Eliot’s centenary essay on the great New
Englander his confession that he too, “as a young man,” found the
writings of Emerson “unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, …
speculative, and visionary.” It is only after one has suffered from
living that one fully values Emerson—only as one is gradually
educated himself, in experience’s school, that one appreciates his
worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social
organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot
calls “natural” rather than supernatural religion.


III

For this descendant of a line of Yankee ministers, there is no
dividing line between the secular and the sacred. To Emerson, life is
itself sacred; and the universe no less holy than the Ark of the
Tabernacle—

     So nigh is grandeur to our dust
     So nigh is God to man.

“Christianity is wrongly conceived by all such as take it for a system
of doctrines,” he wrote in his diary as a young man—thereby
fortifying in some sort what Augustine Birrell was to say half a
century later: “You cannot, however dogmatically inclined, construct a
theology out of Emerson.” His stress was placed—as he was persuaded
Christ’s was—upon moral truth; and at thirty he wrote: “I feel myself
pledged, if health and opportunity be granted me, to demonstrate that
all necessary truth is its own evidence.” Demonstrate? Emerson never
did succeed in “demonstrating” very much. In Dr. Eliot’s words, here
was no logician or reasoner, but “a poet who wrote chiefly in prose.”
But his prose is certainly no less poetic than his poetry. The
inspiration is in both cases moral; and, to paraphrase—

  His every line, of noble origin,
  Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.

Yet Emerson was intolerant of cant about immortality. “I notice that
as soon as writers broach this subject they begin to quote. I hate
quotations. Tell me what you know.”[3]

Emerson demonstrates, after death, one meaning of immortality by
living again in his “Journal”—the tenth volume of which has just come
to my book-shelf. Some complain of prolixity, but to read this Journal
is to find the measure of the man: and that is all the more cheering
to the lazy reader in that Emerson is far from being immeasurable. He
set down from day to day not only the record of events and personages
who impressed him, but many stray thoughts and reflections. He swept
into his Journal all the chips from his workshop, and stored there all
the rough materials he meant to carve and fabricate and ornament.
Workshop? The word is decidedly unpoetical, and perhaps inapt; for, as
Madame Dugard points out, he made of his soul a lyre whose strings
vibrated to all the winds of the spirit (_his_ spirit, that is); and
in his Journal he notes these passing vibrations in phrases where
words like _flow_, _flee_, _flux_, _fugitive_, _fugacious_, _current_,
_stream_, _undulation_, occur and recur. Undeniably he sometimes
forced himself; he acknowledged that his talent, like the New England
soil, is good only while he works it. “If I cease to task myself, I
have no thoughts.” And adds: “This is a poor sterile Yankeeism. What I
admire and love is the generous and spontaneous soil which flowers and
fruits at all seasons.” Many of his memoranda he developed later in
the essay form—a procedure suspected by his own contemporaries[4]—but
I like the mere scraps. Very perfectly do they express the eagerly
searching, earnestly austere man: reflecting all his sincerity and
incompleteness just as the beautiful paragraphs they piled up as their
sole monuments mirror the minds of Joubert in France and Amiel in
Switzerland. There is no humbug here, though there are some few
fallacies to reward those who read principally to prove, at the
author’s expense, their own astuteness. Emerson fully realized—at
fifty—what his deficiencies were; he called himself an intellectual
chiffonier, with a Jew’s rag-bag of brocade remnants and velvets and
torn cloth-of-gold. Truth to tell, he is all this no less in his
essays than in these Journals—and is a literary architect no more than
his friend Montaigne. As he repeated his lectures, and they gained in
polish and conciseness, the defect still sometimes remained: he built
more than one excellent house without stairs. It is in momentary
flashes of intuitive communication with the great spirits—lightning
flashes that suddenly light up the black night in which we spend most
of our time—that his genius shines. Somewhere in his Journal he writes:

     “One man sees the fact or object, and another sees the power
     of it; one the triangle, and the other the cone which is
     generated by the revolution of the triangle.”

He who has so often been reproached with aloofness looked at many
common facts, and saw what we see there—and beyond. His first lesson
of religion is that things seen are temporal, unseen things eternal;
yet is the temporal much for the eternally-minded, who preserves the
all-important sense of wonder. “Now that man was ready, the horse was
brought,” he writes; and continues:

     “The timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be
     conceded. To us Americans it seems to have fallen as a
     political aid. We could not have held the vast North America
     together which now we engage to do. It was strange, too,
     that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific,
     a railroad, a ship-road, a telegraph, and in short, a
     perfect communication in every manner for all
     nations,—’twas strange to see how it was secured. _The
     good World-Soul understands us well._”

Nowise was Emerson a Ruskinian. To the railroad he says—“like the
courageous Lord Mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was
coming: ‘Let it come in Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.’” And
this assurance is all the more welcome as one of the not too frequent
flashes of his humor.


IV

While an author is often the worst-qualified critic of individual
books or passages in his own work, he has almost always expressed
somewhere the final criticism of his total. So it is with Emerson. On
one page he defines for us the type of idealism of which he was an
exponent:

     “We are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a
     sensation…. Character is more to us…. Religion makes us
     idealists.”

On another page, he writes:

     “Malthus existed to say, Population outruns food: Owen
     existed to say, ‘Given the circumstance, the man’s given. I
     can educate a tiger’: Swedenborg, that inner and outer
     correspond: Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to
     the attractions; Bentham, the greatest good of the greatest
     number. _But what do you exist to say?_”

It is no tragedy if this sower of good seed said no one thing, and
only repeated many unequally wise counsels, and, by the wireless
telegraph of sympathetic genius, spelled out the dots and dashes that,
for the rest of us, unschooled in science, might have remained dots
and dashes till the day of judgment. Emerson’s contemporaries greatly
needed the man and his serene preaching—so undisturbed—while

     Theist, atheist, pantheist
     Define and wrangle how they list.

To paraphrase Thureau-Dangan, Emerson’s was the empire of the
contemplative monks over barbarian axe-men and sword-bearers. To-day,
while the prosperous shudder at every murmur of social unrest, and the
not-prosperous are drunk with heady wines; while society is, as in
Emerson’s day, still “devoured by a secret melancholy,” disguised in a
hundred forms of madness; while the nations still glare at one another
from behind their breast-works, and the classes still war or hate
(with ever deepening consciousness of class): while all these things
are so, democracy’s “great dangers” may well remain the vulgarizing of
the arts, contempt of contemplation, “the atrophy of the individual
conscience.” Emerson somehow soothes this conscience without putting
it to sleep. His courageous faith in Destiny, his cheering theory of
compensations, his deathless hope, his healthy, exaggerated
individualism: here are counter-irritants for more than one of Time’s
diseases. “If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The
mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.” And Emerson
did indeed “make free”; he was Emancipator, “not of black bodies, but
of the minds of white men.”


     [2] _Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820-1872._ With
     Annotations. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson
     Forbes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Ten Volumes.

     [3] “Emerson refused to dogmatize about what is necessarily
     obscure at present.”—John Albee, _Recollections of Emerson_.
     Emerson wrote in his essay on _Experience_: “In accepting the
     leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning
     the immortality of the soul or the like, but _the universal
     impulse to believe_, that is the material circumstance and is
     the principal fact in the history of the globe.” This is not far
     from the point of view of James, Bergson, and, nowadays, Sir
     Oliver Lodge. If Emerson “refused to dogmatize” about the
     uncertainties of the future life, he had all the same his nobler
     convictions. He writes in his _Journal_: “I know my soul is
     immortal if it were only by the sublime emotion I taste in
     reading these lines of Swedenborg: ‘The organical body with which
     the soul clothes itself is here compared to a garment, because a
     garment invests the body, and the soul also puts off the body and
     casts it away as old clothes (_exuviæ_), when it emigrates by
     means of death from the natural world into its own spiritual
     world.’”

     [4] In _Harper’s New Monthly Magazine_ for June, 1870, we read:
     “Rumor attributes to Ralph Waldo Emerson a peculiar method of
     composition. He keeps, it is said, a commonplace book into which
     go every striking thought, curious metaphor, keen epigram, which
     his own mind incubates or his various reading discovers. When he
     is called on for a lecture, he goes to his commonplace book. He
     culls from its pages enough of its best material for an hour’s
     instruction or entertainment. Connection is immaterial….”



NOTE

The continuation of _The World of H. G. Wells_ series, by Van Wyck
Brooks, is postponed in consequence of the war.



CORRESPONDENCE


_The War_

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—The war and the new problems created by it are engrossing
the attention of the entire British nation. Outwardly the life of
London goes on pretty much as usual. Under the surface there is a
tremendous lot of fermentation and premonition. It seems certain that
the war will be accompanied or followed by a social readjustment on a
scale hitherto undreamed of—and this readjustment will be entirely in
a democratic and socialistic direction.

That a great financial crisis is due one can hardly doubt. So far the
weaker elements in the commercial and industrial world have been
carried along by artificial support, but that cannot go on
indefinitely. Whether the moratorium be extended or not, the crash
must come sooner or later. People are realizing this, and it has
already caused a tremendous awakening. In the end it will mean
additional surrenders on the part of the wealthy classes. The Kaiser
has solved not only the Ulster and suffrage questions, as some one
said the other day, but the whole question of social reorganization.
What would have had to be taken under ordinary circumstances will now
be given. This may seem an optimistic view of the whole thing, and may
prove unwarranted at this point or that, but on the whole I think it
will be found absolutely correct. A spirit of self-sacrifice is in the
air, and I think the German war machine will prove possessed of just
enough initial impetus to prevent that spirit from petering out
without tangible manifestation. The more the Germans win to begin
with, the longer the war becomes protracted, the more thoroughly will
the spirit for which their ruling class stands be killed in the end.

Just how the financial precariousness of the European situation will
affect America no one can hope to foretell with any certainty. It is
possible that the distress of one continent will bring a “boom” to the
other. But I doubt it. I believe that we shall have to suffer with the
rest of the Western World, and if that proves so, it means that we
shall have an outbreak of internal strife hardly less serious than the
external strife on this side of the water. We are indeed—turn
wherever we may—on the threshold of grave and portentous events, and
may the Spirit of Life grant us all strength and patience and faith to
live through them. There is a great darkness ahead of us—an ordeal of
fire for the whole civilized portion of mankind—but beyond it awaits
us the long, sunlit day of world-wide peace.

                             EDWIN BJöRKMAN
  LONDON


[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—I have just read your September editorial on War. How
powerfully and terribly you write on the subject. I hope it may be read
everywhere.

                             GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
  CHICAGO


[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—I am an old man. I watch with pain, almost with
incredulity, the spectacle that Europe presents to the world. I see
England fighting “lest the lights of freedom go out throughout the
world.” I see Germany fighting lest God and civilization be
obliterated by barbarians. I see France fighting for her honor, her
freedom, her existence. I see everywhere murder, and misunderstanding.
So I write to you to thank you for the attitude you have taken: the
big attitude. It will be remembered. It will have effects that, when
you are old, as I am to-day, will bring you contentment. You have
fought a better fight than any of the commanders in the field.

                             SENEX
  CINCINNATI


“_Piety_”

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—Your correspondent “Twentieth Century” who writes under the
above heading in the August FORUM is surely in a bad temper. His
letter is good evidence in favor of the theory that our beliefs are
determined by our wishes. He objects strongly to the doctrines
propounded in the tract he mentions, particularly to the use of the
word “damned,” and, if he had the power, would stop the publication of
such objectionable matter.

The only reason he gives for this is that he dislikes it very much and
won’t have Christianity of that brand at any price.

Now why is he so hot about it? Why does he use such epithets as
“stupid,” “disgusting,” “criminal lunatics,” etc.? If these doctrines
are false, no one will be hurt by them—it may even be that some will
be restrained from evil deeds by the teaching. On the other hand, if
they are true, and no one can demonstrate their untruth, he and all
those who despise the warning may find themselves in sorry case.
Anyway Christians will try to get on without him and may be encouraged
to know that the faith is still able to arouse such violent opposition.

                             J. P. DUNLOP
  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA


[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—Thank you for sending me the proof of Mr. Dunlop’s letter.
Mr. Dunlop has evidently rigid convictions which no discussion could
modify. He may justly retort that I myself have convictions which I am
unwilling to modify. But that would not be true. I am willing to
modify any and every conviction that I have, if new evidence and new
advances in knowledge make it clear that I have been partly or wholly
at fault. But Mr. Dunlop clings fast to what he considers the faith of
his fathers, though the thinking world has long discarded the idea of
a God of Love who is supposed to punish his children for their faults
in this life by consigning them to the flames of hell, in which they
will suffer eternally the agonizing torments of fire. It is impossible
to reason with the well-meaning and sincere, but utterly ignorant,
people who are capable of believing such absurdities.

I am glad that “Christians will try to get on without me.” I shall
certainly succeed in getting on without the so-called Christianity
which teaches that morality must depend essentially upon the fear of
hell, not upon the love of God; and I will cheerfully take the risk of
being punished for refusing to believe that God is in reality a fiend.

Mr. Dunlop assumes that I was in a bad temper when I wrote my previous
letter. A certain _sæva indignatio_ against lies and hypocrisy, wilful
or unwilful, is entirely justified. Was Christ himself icily cold when
he swept the money-changers and brawlers from the Temple? Did he speak
in measured academic platitudes?

Mr. Dunlop does not realize that he believes what he believes merely
because he has never used his brain, never investigated or tried to
distinguish between the essential truth and the inevitable accretions
of falsehood and folly. If he had been born in pagan times, he would
probably have remained a pagan. In one age or country he would have
sacrificed to Moloch: in another he would have worshipped Bacchus.
But, of course, he cannot understand this.

I used the epithets “stupid,” “disgusting,” etc., because they seemed
to me the most appropriate in connection with such a travesty of
reason and religion as the tract referred to presented. And Mr. Dunlop
is quite wrong when he says that “if these doctrines are false, no one
will be hurt by them.” Generations of men, women and children have
been hurt by them; hampered and cramped and narrowed by them;
prevented from living their full, free lives, and driven from the
comprehension and sustaining power of Christ’s Christianity by such
grotesque inventions of little minds, striving to measure their God by
their own paltry standards.

As I said before, it is time that the narrow-minded reactionaries
should be taught that they are not the pillars of the true Church and
the pillars of the ideal society that they have supposed themselves to
be; they are neither good, nor pious, nor useful. They are the real
enemies of knowledge, reason, Christ and God. They try to murder
childhood with ghastly lies about hell-fire; they try to enchain
manhood and womanhood in shackles of mediæval, nonsensical,
character-rotting superstitions.

                             TWENTIETH CENTURY
  NEW YORK


_American Industrial Independence_

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—The peril of dependence on foreign nations for production
and over-sea transportation is demonstrated in the European war of
1914 as never before.

The loss of human life in this war will be appalling, the resulting
sacrifice of the fruits of the labor of generations inestimable, and
the loss of capital will be enormous.

We must use our best judgment to prevent these disastrous conditions
from weakening our industrial capacity. This is the time when we
should think and think hard about conserving and developing industrial
independence.

We have issued the following announcement:

     “_To American Producers_: Please report to us any
     article or articles (raw material or finished product) of
     use in agriculture, mining or manufacture in the United
     States, for the supply of which we are dependent upon any
     foreign country.”

We shall take up every article thus reported, investigate the
possibility of successful production at home, and urge upon Americans
the desirability of such changes in our existing tariff system as
shall create new industries in every line where we are now partly or
wholly dependent on foreign countries.

                             A. D. JUILLIARD
                      Chairman, Executive Committee,
                  The American Protective Tariff League.
  NEW YORK


_Eugenics in Wisconsin_

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—As supplementary to your editorial on _Eugenic Tests_,
which appeared in the August issue of THE FORUM, I am submitting
herewith my editorial on the general subject, which appeared in _The
Milwaukee Daily News_ recently. As, of course, you know, Wisconsin,
at the last session of its legislature, placed on its statute books a
law requiring certain examinations and tests to be made before the
intending groom could secure a license to marry. The law provoked
widespread discussion and far from general approval. It was thought,
in some quarters, to be too drastic to be capable of full and complete
compliance. However, it is still on our statute books, and while some
of its most drastic provisions, like the laboratory tests, are not
being insisted upon, the belief is general that the law is doing some
good along new and, heretofore, untried lines. It gives notice that
something beside matrimonial misery must be a condition precedent to
the marriage relation.

However, your editorial suggestion that popular education rather than
drastic legal enactments should be employed to secure a reasonable
standard of health preceding marriage, is undoubtedly sound and should
lead to what ought be the much-desired condition. Legislation, here as
elsewhere, is not the panacea of all the matrimonial ills of which we
know. But silence is an inexcusable crime in the premises.

                             DUANE MOWRY
  MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN


_The Fourth Dimension_

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—With due deference to your valued journal, the article of
Claude Bragdon, _Learning to Think in Terms of Spaces_, in your August
number, is essentially illogical. The writer thus introduces his
subject: “A point, moving in an unchanging direction, traces out a
line; a line, moving in a direction at right angles to its length,
traces out a plane; a plane, moving in a direction at right angles to
its two dimensions, traces out a solid. Should a solid move in a
direction at right angles to its every dimension, it would trace out,
in four dimensional space, a hypersolid.”

Now this may pass current in blackboard geometry, but does not hold
good in the abstract. The physical point is indeed extended to
represent the line, and the physical line, to represent the plane,
etc. But these concrete objects are not to be conceived as true
geometrical figures, which are not movable, for motion presupposes
sensuous experience. Only matter is movable. The true geometrical line
is not the extension of the point, nor is the cube formed by the
extension of the plane. When a point “moves” it is no longer a point,
and when a cube “moves” it becomes annihilated.

“Student,” in a letter upon the same subject, speaks of a division of
a cube into smaller cubes. But when a part of a geometrical figure is
conceived the first figure is of necessity annihilated.

Mr. Bragdon, after expatiating upon the vastness of the firmament,
makes this extraordinary conclusion: “Viewed in relation to this
universe of suns, our particular sun and its satellites shrink to a
point. That is, the earth becomes no-dimensional.” The last word is in
italics. Now this is manifestly a misconception, since the most minute
atom, notwithstanding its insignificance in proportion to the
universe, cannot be considered as an abstraction, which a point really
is. Those who are not satisfied with the intuitive evidence of the
limitation of space to three dimensions, solely because no logical
proof can be adduced of this limitation, would do well to read the
essay of Schopenhauer on _The Methods of Mathematics_, in which is
cited as an instance of the undue importance of logical demonstration
the controversy on the theory of parallels. The eleventh axiom of
Euclid “asserts that two parallel lines inclining toward each other if
produced far enough must meet,—a truth which is supposed to be too
complicated to pass as self-evident and thus requires a demonstration….
_It is quite arbitrary where we draw the line between what is directly
certain and what has first to be demonstrated._” (The italics are
mine.)

I believe with Schopenhauer, who quotes Descartes and Sir W. Hamilton
in support of his contention, that the science of mathematics has no
cultural value. Far from affording “a new way of looking at the
world,” as Mr. Bragdon tries to convince us, “its only direct use is
that it can accustom restless and unsteady minds to fix their
attention.” That such mental concentration may be woefully misdirected
is instanced in the cases of Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky,
reference to whom by Mr. Bragdon is alone sufficient to cause a sniff
of suspicion.

Indeed your author himself, while evidently well versed in bookish
mathematics, has been unable to free his mind of its limitations. Upon
a basis of phrases devoid of significance he builds his extravagantly
mystical speculation, which dissolves in the light of reason, “into
air, thin air.”

                             PHILIP J. DORETY, M. D.
  TRENTON, N. J.



EDITORIAL NOTES


_Soldiers of All Nations_

It is difficult to realize that while this note is being written, men
are dying, every moment: not in the fulness of time, for the glory of
God and their own rest; but unduly and by wanton violence, in the
prime of manhood, with the whole making and purpose of their lives
incomplete and unrenewable. They lie in strange places, and must
sleep, not uncompanioned, but uncoffined and without memorial: mere
broken bits of life-stuff, shattered from the resemblance of humanity
by machines that must be fed with the food that women travail for, and
pray for, and, losing, break their hearts. Well, may they sleep
soundly, these soldiers of all nations who will march no more to
music, nor answer the reveille at dawn! God be gracious to them,
gallant men all, if graciousness be needed where they have gone now!


_Paying the Cost_

If the death of warriors were war’s only penalty, men perhaps might be
forgiven for their battles, since heroes are made known by them. But
the world has gone to school again, to learn the lesson that is
enforced with cannons; and it knows the whole cost of war, and is
paying it, and will continue to pay it for many a year. In this
country, we have not contributed much, so far: only a hundred millions
officially, and who shall say how many millions unofficially, in
disorganized industry? But they have paid a large sum in Belgium,
where the prices are plainly marked; they have paid in France (it is
an ill winter that follows unreaped and rotting harvests); they have
paid in Austria; and the bill for the other countries is being added
up.


_Christianity and Civilization_

But it is not true that Christianity has broken down, or that
civilization has broken down, as some have said in the first flush of
their indignation and sorrow. Civilization and Christianity have
never yet been tried in the world, so they cannot very well have
broken down. What we have had, so far, has been a pseudo-Christianity
and a pseudo-civilization. It is not so much that we have been
deliberately insincere, perhaps; but we have not faced life and the
problems of life as they should be faced; we have accepted the
imitation instead of insisting upon the genuine thing; we have given
lip-worship, but not heart-worship.


_Rebuilding_

We are living, and some of us are dying, in strange, wonderful,
terrible days. There is no room for pessimism or for bravado.
Barbarism is showing us what deeds it can produce. We must answer with
deeds.

Let no man who has held high rank in the Government of any country
think now that he has done well or deserves acclamations. So far as
his vision led him, he may have tried to do his duty, with foresight,
devotion, faithfulness. Yet he has failed. The Government which cannot
save its country from war has failed, whatever its other achievements.
The new ideas, the new hopes, have not been fully comprehended. And so
suspicion and enmity have been allowed to grow steadily, and the
thought of war has been constantly in men’s minds, as the inevitable
end to which the world was drifting.

The thought of war should have been as impossible as the thought of
murder. The press of all nations, instead of pandering to
misunderstanding and animosities, should have educated the people, day
by day and year by year, until the curse of nationalism was lifted
from the world.

For nationalism _has_ been a curse, and will remain a curse, so
long as devotion to one country can involve enmity to any other. We
are brothers in one boat, as we pass from the unknown to the unknown.
Let us learn to understand each other.


_Benedict XV_

The election of Cardinal della Chiesa was certainly unexpected, and it
may be hoped that this element of surprise will be extended to his
general policies. But if his Holiness continues, as Pontiff, to carry
out the principles of the Archbishop of Bologna, the Church will lose
far more than she can gain. What is needed now is not a saint or a
scholar or a skilful administrator, though saintliness and scholarship
and executive talent are admirable qualifications. If the Church is to
do anything more than merely mark time, or actually lose ground, she
requires as her head now a man of profound imagination and unswerving
courage. The tendency of the Papacy has been too much toward
mechanical routine, the neglect of new opportunities, the
discountenancing of new ideas, the refusal of new life. The creative
genius of the great artist, the incommunicable imaginative insights of
the great novelist or poet or painter, could give the Vatican a new
leadership in the spiritual affairs of mankind. We have seen the Pope
who condemned Modernism dying of a broken heart because Europe was
turned into a field of desolation and slaughter. The impotence of the
Pontiff to secure some regard for Christian teachings amongst
supposedly Christian nations, is at once the measure of the Church’s
weakness and the condemnation of her methods. In the spirit of the
Modernists, if not in the spirit of Modernism itself, Benedict XV could
remove many of the mountains that stand in the way of the direct line
for the Twentieth Century, Limited. Mountains may be picturesque: but,
in the wrong place, they are merely a nuisance.


_Uncensored_

The press has not had an easy task in attempting to gratify the
natural desire of the public for dramatic details of the war
operations. But even after making the fullest allowances for all
difficulties, whether due to the censorship, to broken communications,
or to the indiscretions of partisans, one can scarcely congratulate
the newspaper world as a whole upon its achievements. In New York, for
instance, there have been two or three papers which have maintained
reasonable standards; but most of the papers have published and
republished so-called news of a kind that should never have found
public record. Why should any journal waste time in announcing, in
large type, that “the Servians swear that the enemy will never enter
the capital so long as one house stands and one Servian lives”? This
is mere bombastic rubbish, and has nothing to do with the patriotism
and fortitude of the Servians. The appearance of perpetual “war
extras,” with no additional information, but with immense scareheads,
is another unpleasant sign of the shallowness and insincerity that we
permit in these busy days. Frothy journalism may flourish for the
moment: but the public has a better memory than it is sometimes
supposed to possess.


“_Civilized Warfare_”

Some one, somewhere, appears to be laboring under a rather serious
mistake, or we should not have been exposed so frequently during the
last few weeks to the phrase “civilized warfare.” There is no such
thing, of course, as civilized warfare. All war is necessarily
barbaric in its methods, and ludicrous in its assumption of
semi-decency. When nations go out, in the name of God, to mangle and
destroy their fellow-creatures, they are reverting to the primitive
profession of murder. The glory of war is the glory of murder, however
it may be embellished by infantile brains.

We have heard much of atrocities and “uncivilized” outrages. Probably
most of the stories are utterly false: but even if they were true,
they would only be in full accord with the whole purpose, methods, and
disgrace of war.

Let us realize, very clearly, that war is necessarily and always
murderous and barbaric, and let us abandon the pretence that we are
shocked at the annihilation of towns, the rape of women, the slaughter
of children, the desolation of once-prosperous communities. These are
the trimmings of war. If we order the feast, let us pay for it; but
let us, in the name of all decency, give up the pretence that we are
either civilized or Christianized.


_Saintless Petrograd_

The official change from St. Petersburg to Petrograd removes the
intrusive saint from the Russian capital. The city was named after
Peter the Great, of somewhat uncouth memory, and the subsequent
sanctification by the rest of Europe was perhaps a tribute to the
religious reputation of Holy Russia.

Now that the Ice has been broken, such cities as Florence, for
example, may begin to assert their right to be known, even in the
Anglo-Saxon world, by their real and native names.


_Thumbs Down_

In his clever, whimsical and symbolistic play, _Androcles and the Lion_,
Mr. George Bernard Shaw has fallen—or a zealous proof-reader has made
it appear that he has fallen—into the usual error of “thumbs down,”
as the death signal.

It is strange that this mistake should be so widely prevalent, and
should even be repeated by the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. But the
error, like ’round for round and laid for lay, will no doubt pass
steadily through the years.

However, anyone who has not yet read Mr. Shaw’s little play should do
so at once, paying special attention to Ferrovius.


_The Earl of Whisky_

The oddities of childhood are rarely understood completely, even in
these days of ingenious educational devices. The child lives and moves
and has his being in his own world. He may emerge at moments, he may
seem to understand or be understood by the great confederation of
blundering adults: but he must go back as soon as possible to the
realm of his real allegiance, where fact and fancy, dreams, doubts and
discoveries are so cunningly intermingled.

Why do we forget our own childhood, and turn deaf ears and unseeing
eyes to the sounds and sights that once we should have comprehended so
easily? The world of flame, the glory of color, the music in the winds
and the darkness, the actuality of romance, the strange limits and
restrictions of knowledge! Can you remember when the earth stretched
twelve miles out, beyond doubt, and perhaps a little further? Or the
immense significance of double figures when the tenth birthday painted
a huge 10 across the entire sky, but nobody else particularly
noticed the phenomenon? Or the fantastic associations of certain
names from time to time, so that to live in Champagne would have
seemed a comic-opera infliction, and a Duke of Burgundy was as
Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque as a Marquess of Claret, or an Earl of
Whisky, or Baron Beer?

Yet we have long had Sir Loin, and scarcely remember the cause of that
famous knighting; and now we have our copper kings, beef barons, pork
princes, and what not. Perhaps we are not so remote from the
whimsicalities of childhood as we have imagined, after all.


_Jaded Appetites_

A recent advertisement of a well-known New York restaurant announced:
“Whether it is in luncheon, dinner or supper, you will find in our
menu of delicious cold specialties, ready for your selection at our
buffet in the main dining room, creations to tempt the most jaded of
appetites.”

It is comforting to know that the grossly overfed man or woman need
not starve. When the appetite fails through constant indulgence, it
can be tempted to new excesses by these “delicious cold specialties,”
and so enough nourishment may be secured to preserve life.

It is indeed a pitiable spectacle to see the forlorn victim of
piggishness sadly regarding a menu that can no longer entice him to
abuse his stomach. Let him now take heart and visit the restaurant
that has learnt how to “tempt the most jaded of appetites.”

It is a noble work that this restaurant is doing; one well worthy of
our civilization.

But who will tempt the unjaded appetites of the slum-dwellers?



Transcriber’s Note:

Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings were left
unchanged.

Spelling changes:

  ‘conciousness’ to ‘consciousness’ …class-consciousness…
  ‘prmitive’ to ‘primitive’ …primitive profession of murder…

The two lines omitted from the quoted poem by Giovannitti read:

  And from its bloody pedestal
    The last god, Terror, shall be hurled.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Forum - October 1914" ***

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