V A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE

I remark the disposition of contemporary American families to regulate their church-going by the inclination of the ladies. I suppose it will soon happen that Cordelia and I will go to church when Cordelia feels it to be desirable, and that when she stays at home it will look more profitable to me to stay at home with her. Although that means that we will go pretty regularly, it is not quite as it should be, any more than that I should go without my dinner when she has a failure of the appetite. But it seems apt to be so with contemporary Protestant people who get married. Even if the male has a previous habit of church-going, and convictions or preferences in favor of it, the woman is apt to be captain in that particular, and to assume command of the family conscience. That is an item in the contemporary slump of the male in the business of directing the course of life. He tries to keep a hand of his own on politics, but in the concerns of religion easily falls into the practice of looking to the woman to make his decisions and remind him of his practices. Which is feeble of him, for, as between religion and politics, religion is decidedly the more important, for it shapes and inspires and regulates the whole of life, politics included, whereas politics is no more than a detail.

When I think of women and their needs and powers and rights, and their office in life—as I do a great deal nowadays, with Cordelia to observe and those suffragists prodding at the subject all the time—I have bursts of momentary conviction to the effect that if women go on assimilating four-fifths of the available religion and leaving nine-tenths of the alcohol and nearly all the tobacco to the men, they will govern our world before we know it. The Turks understand better. The male Turks make a specialty of piety, go without rum, and share tobacco liberally with their women; so to be a male Turk is still a relatively powerful condition, though I understand the Turkish ladies are restless nowadays, in spite of sweetmeats and cigarettes, and are covetous of education, and suspect that there should be more coming to them than they are getting.

Cordelia has intimated that that observation of mine about men having strength, and therefore dominion, is something of a bluff. She is too polite to contradict it, but not too polite to stir me to further reflections about it. Are men stronger? Have they dominion?

There is no doubt that the average man we see about can hit harder than the average woman. He can also run faster and make better time up a tree, so that he seems to have the best of it, physically, both in offense and escape. If you come to translate these powers into practical contemporary factors he can usually earn more money at present than she can, and is much less vulnerable in the reputation. It may be argued that this superiority in male abilities is not the work of nature at all, but a consequence of male malignancy and oppression, and that if woman had a fair show to get her due development she could stand up to man when he put up his hooks, and run him down when he ran away. So Olive Schreiner seems to feel about it. Man’s power to make more money than woman is challenged as an injustice. Perhaps it is an injustice in many cases. Perhaps our industrial system is not adjusted yet to women’s undomestic work in schools and factories and offices, and maybe the payroll will be revised in time in women’s favor. Still I think man’s superior money-making powers are of a piece with his power to hit harder and run faster. Money-getting seems to be more in the line of his natural job than of hers. He is less distracted from it by other leanings than she is. I guess he will always be the head money-getter, though very likely her claim on what he gets may come to rest even more on a basis of natural right than it does at present. It is a very much respected claim as it is, and supported by law and sentiment.

Man is superior in some kinds of bodily strength, and apparently in some kinds of mental strength, too, but does it give him dominion? Some, I think. It seems to give him a good deal of dominion among savages, and less and less as civilization increases. Probably it would give him more if he were not inferior in some of the kinds of strength, and in some other respects that we are not used to classify as strength, but which offset it. There are war-powers and peace-powers. Admitting, in spite of Kipling’s she-bear poem, that man’s war-powers beat woman’s, how about peace-powers? Of course they are enormous. If she uses them for offense, she can spoil the man’s cake at any time. There is no living without women, and to be assigned to one of them and have her contrive that there shall be no living with her makes a serious dilemma. I have discussed this matter with our old friend Major Brace, and he has illuminated it with such wisdom as his great age (as he says) has enabled him to supply. “We can’t do anything, Peregrine,” he said, “but try our utmost [of course he really said damnedest] to make them happy, and hope that they will be good.” He told me a story about a house-painter he once knew in the country who had some ferrets. “I noticed when looking at the ferrets,” the Major said, “that he had a padlock on the place where he kept them, and he let me know, somehow, that he carried the key in his pocket and let nobody but himself meddle with them. I took note of that, because it seemed to me that the ferrets being part of the domestic establishment, the natural way would have been to leave the key in the house when he was away and intrust the ferrets to his wife. But that was not his way, and I set him down in my mind as a believer in male dominion and an upholder of the authority of the head of the house. And, accordingly, when I heard about a year later that his wife had eloped with the butcher I wasn’t at all surprised. No doubt he had felt about her as he had about the ferrets—that she was his property. I heard that he was extremely put out when she ran away, and took it so much to heart that he left the village. I suppose he didn’t know any better, though of course it is possible that the woman was a fool and couldn’t be trusted. Her going off with the butcher implies a certain carelessness, though not necessarily a lack of intelligence.

“You see, Peregrine, one measure of the liberty of women is the intelligence of man. And it works the other way round, too. A man who is intelligent enough to prefer a free woman for his companion will plan and take thought to have one; and a woman who is clever enough to prefer a free man will take thought to keep her man free and still keep him. That’s what all decent people do nowadays who are passably wise, and I suppose it is what such people have been doing, not always, perhaps, but easily since the time of Adam. And I dare say the better-grade animals do the like.”

I asked the Major if he thought Kipling was right about the she-bear and the superior offensiveness of females. He said he thought there was a good deal of meat in Kipling’s verses, and that few intelligent men came to be half a century old without having had to take thought of the intensity of the female disposition. “Somehow, Peregrine,” said he, “they seem to be a little nearer nature than we are. The primitive creature seems to survive in them a little more perceptibly than it does in us. And it is a very valuable survival—very valuable—and fit to receive the most respectful consideration, because, as Kipling intimates, it is a factor in the continuation of the race. When a man has a wise wife who loves him, as you and I have, Peregrine, it is his business to get the benefit of everything she has. All her strength as well as his is needed in their common business. If he troubles her with his limitations, checks her initiative, and ignores her dissent, it is as bad for the common interest as when she does the like to him. He should attend to her risings-up and her sittings-down, and when at times the primitive creature rises up in her, his best procedure often is neither to run nor to try to rule the storm, but to sit down in the sand, wrap his burnoose around his head, and keep his face attentively to leeward until the gale blows out and calm re-eventuates. Then, in due time, she will dig him out again, if necessary, and he will have much less to unsay and repent of than if he had talked back. And usually, if he has been attentive, he will have learned something that it is valuable to know.

“Lord love us,” went on the Major, “I hate subdued wives. I hate subdued husbands also, but subdued wives worse, if possible, because what subdues a wife is usually such an offensive combination of egotism and stupidity. And yet I know quite able men who bully their wives and have checked their wives’ development and diminished their abilities by doing so. It is a shocking waste, although it is to admire the wives who bear it. That is apt to be the best thing they can do, under the circumstances. You see, in marriage that suggestion of Scripture about cutting off the right hand that offends has only limited application. Man or woman of us, when we have stood up in church and acquired a right hand of the opposite gender, we have need to go mighty slow about casting it from us. To read the divorce statistics, and about the growth of that practice in this country in the last twenty years, you’d think divorce was on the way to become a universal habit. But I guess it won’t. I guess when the ratio has reached a point where it provides duly for the irresponsible, intemperate, light-minded, and unfortunate, the increase will stop, and maybe, if civilization improves, the figures will begin to run the other way. That may seem optimistic, but I can’t think that woman’s extraordinary gift for living with man, and man’s surprising talent for getting along with woman, are going to perish or be wasted.”

My coevals that I meet are still talking about football; not exclusively, of course, but with perseverance and of a lively appearance of interest. Talking about it has some obvious advantages over playing it, but I never learned to be really expert in either. Cordelia and I saved quantities of money last fall staying away from football games. Also quite a lot in staying away from the great final series in professional baseball. Also time and strength on both of these items. If our circumstances had been four or five times as easy and Samuel could have spared us, we would have enriched our experience of contemporary life by taking in several of these contests. As studies in crowdology they are mighty good and leave permanent impressions behind them. And they are interesting socially and anthropologically. And sometimes they are pretty good as sport—the football games better, I think, than before the rules were changed. But as it was, it was a very easy economy for us. Cordelia said she had been to football games and didn’t believe there were any important new thrills left in them for her; and we read a lot about them in the papers and were content, though I don’t think football really makes first-class newspaper reading. I can’t follow the ball in type even as well as from the seats, and I only get the score and the spectacular features. The worst of it is I cannot care inordinately who wins. Of course, the players do. They ought to. And so should the undergraduates and persons just emerged from that condition. But I don’t understand why such large masses of adult people contrive to care so much—if they really do—whether Harvard beats Yale, or either of them beats Princeton, or whether the Army or the Navy wins.

I am getting deplorably careless in my feelings in this great subject. To be sure, when there is a big game I want to know how it has gone, and buy the latest evening paper and take it home and assimilate, and discuss a little, its disclosures about what the score was and why it was so. But however it turns out it doesn’t affect my appetite for dinner, nor my interest in food, and I can’t talk about it more than half an hour. And when the Sunday paper comes with all the details I am apt to get interested in other news and skip the football stories altogether, or until late at night.

Really, I am ashamed. It comes, no doubt, with increase of years and the pressure of responsibilities and concern about the more vital details of human existence. Cordelia reviles me and says I am getting older than my years. Maybe I am, mentally, though she is just about as much interested in football as I am, and no more. I suppose sport naturally falls into a secondary place in the thoughts of people who have a living to make and rent to pay and a child to raise. If everybody was like us, sport might languish, and that would be a pity. I’m glad they’re not. The Pharisee was not so far out, perhaps, in thanking God he was not like other men. The trouble was, he did not go on and thank God that other men were not like him. There needs to be great variety in the world if all the jobs are to get attention. I’m thankful that the prosperity of football does not depend on me, and that I can be bored by it without detriment to the great cause of sport, because, I suppose, it really is a great cause, and related to the perpetuation of vigor and virility in men.

I have been thinking about celibates. There is something to be said for persons to whom celibacy comes natural. To most persons it does not come natural. It never did to me, for instance. I hate it when it is forced, and object with what may be a Protestant detestation to vows that bind people to it; but there are marvelously useful people in the ranks of the unmarried.

Brookfield, a contemporary whose line is education, has been telling me a story about a rich man, named Thompson, who has got interested in the improvement of mankind. Somebody said the other day that the men who get rich are those who are able to get more out of other people than other people get out of them. That is a very plausible definition and good as far as it goes, but the story I heard made me realize that it doesn’t cover all the ground, and that many rich men are creators of wealth. This Thompson that I heard of had extraordinary brains for business. He could think to the bottom of propositions, and think out all their details and perceive whether they could be made profitable and how. He got at business almost as young as Alexander Hamilton, for his parents, who were good people, both died when he was fifteen and left him, as you might say, with his hat on, going out to look for means of support. He went to a big town and got a job with a good concern. At the end of three years he was ill, probably from overwork. His employer told him to go away and stay two months and get rested. He went, and stayed six weeks, and came back with the biggest bunch of orders that the firm had ever had. His employer saw then that he was incorrigible, and pretty soon he took him into partnership.

Now there comes another likeness to Hamilton. The boy wanted to know more, and determined that when he had got money enough he would quit work and go off and study. He calculated that he would have a million dollars by the time he was twenty-six, and he thought that would do. He actually did get his million and something to spare at twenty-six (and this is not a newspaper story, either; Brookfield told it to me), and actually did pull out and go off to Europe and spent three years in France and Germany improving his mind. Now comes in his gift of celibacy, in which he was quite different from Hamilton—who never had any discernible talent that way—and from me. Instead of getting married and raising a family, and having a flower-garden and horses and cows—this being before they had invented automobiles—and enjoying life, he did not get married at all. I don’t know why not. Maybe he didn’t know how and was too old to learn; maybe somebody else persuaded the girl that he aspired to persuade. At any rate, he didn’t marry, but came home and made lots more money, and finally retired from active business and set his wits to see what he could do to make the world better. Now he lives on twelve or fifteen thousand a year, and spends most of his strength and his surplus income and more or less of his principal chiefly on one considerable enterprise that combines philanthropy and education. But he is dragged back into business now and then, Brookfield told me, when a commercial rescue job offers, that looks so difficult that nobody else will touch it.

Of course, celibacy has no particular bearing on Thompson’s usefulness except that he was qualified to get along with it, and it left him entirely free to spend himself in trying to better the general conditions of life. It is not news that there are always some mighty useful bachelors about. Still less is it news that there are many indispensable spinsters. I suppose the sentiment that everybody must get married and have four children has got some open seams in it; but a life is the thing that folks like best to leave in the world, and with reason, for, on the whole, a life, if it is good enough, lasts the best of anything, and leaves the most imperishable effects.

It is too soon yet to say if my son Samuel is going to leave an imperishable effect in the world, but he is doing well, and the more perishable effects have already been found to be so little suited to him that one of his grandmothers has given him a modern rag-doll—an elegant creation that comes from a shop—and the other a teddy-bear. Teddy-bears are scarcer in the toy shops than they were, because the current of politics has rolled on, but they can still be had and may yet become more plentiful. Samuel lives a care-free life. In that respect he is an example and encouragement to us all. He assumes no responsibility about anything, takes his nourishment without turning a hair or sweating so much as one bead, and shows indifference to the primal curse. It is cheering and strengthening to have such a spirit in the family.

Ben Bowling, who came home with me to dinner the other night, has some of Samuel’s quality. Ben likes life and does not care what happens. I threatened him with universal prohibition and the total disappearance of potable grog from Christendom. He said it would never happen so, but if it did he didn’t care. He drank too much, anyhow, and if there was nothing to drink it would be good for his health and save him lots of money. I threatened him with woman suffrage. He refused even to object; said checkers was still checkers after all the pieces had got into the king-row, and as good a game as ever, though with differences of detail. I threatened him with stagnation of all industrial activity as the result of enforcing the Sherman law. He didn’t care; said he worked too hard, anyway, and needed a rest; could eat very simple food at a pinch; was too fat; was threatened with an unsuitable entanglement of the affections, and might escape the bag if the times were hard enough. Then we all talked about the Sherman law. I see in the papers that the consumption of alcoholic drinks in the United States last year was the greatest on record. No wonder, when you think how much the Sherman law has been talked over: a dry subject on which you get no further and sink into despondency unless buoyed up. It is funny to see the sagacity of the country flunked, apparently, by that problem. What Ben and I agree on is so, and we agreed that the Sherman law, grinding out prosecutions and disorganizing business because public opinion could not settle on any plan to improve or amend it, was not unlike the silver-purchase law that kept loading silver into the Treasury and scaring off gold until Cleveland finally got it repealed. We did not agree that the Sherman law ought to be repealed, but did agree that it might elect the next President. Also that neither party was satisfied with any one who was running for nomination, though that is perhaps not an unusual condition when nomination is still five or six months off. But Ben did not care. He was attentive, interested, and amused, but hoped to stay aboard, no matter what the weather was, and help in navigation if his services were required. He and Samuel are reassuring.

Another thing I find reassuring is the glimpses I get now and then of men who are at work providing government for the country; especially unadvertised men whom few people ever hear of, who hold no office and aspire to none; whose pictures are never in the papers, nor their names in the reporter’s books or the mouths of the multitude. I heard the other day about one such person (Brookfield told me), a man of sufficient fortune—a million, I dare say—not a celibate like Thompson, but married and with a few children; a shrewd, experienced, thoughtful man, whose interest in life is and always has been politics, to handle the machinery of it and get the best results compatible with the material offered to pass laws and fill the offices, and the prejudices and mental disabilities of the voters. “I have known that man,” Brookfield said, “for eighteen years, and watched him play politics all that time; plan and direct; weigh men and choose between them; use their talents and abilities when they had them: put them in places where they belonged when he could; put in the next-best man when he couldn’t. He always played fair; always wanted the best man, the best law, and the best principle that he could see, and never wanted anything for himself except the fun of playing the game. You couldn’t drive him into office. He never tried to make a penny out of legislation. The less he was seen and heard of the better he liked it, but he recognized politics as the great man’s game, and he liked to play it. No doubt the sense of power was pleasant to him, but his use of power was entirely conscientious, and the source of his power was never money, but the confidence that men had in his sagacity and his unselfishness. Back in him somewhere there was, of course, a sense of duty and a belief in certain principles of government, and a sort of unconscious consecration to the desire to see our experiment in government go well and to see the country prosper. But the immediate interest that kept his mind busy was just a delight in guiding the political affairs of men.”

I dare say Brookfield’s man is an exceptional political boss; but I dare say, also, that in so far as we have, or ever have had, or will have, decent government, we owe it to somebody who has had a call to provide it for us, and has had the talents necessary to make his call effective. The rare thing about Brookfield’s man, as he described him, was his self-effacement and superiority to vanity. He loved to play the game, but not only never thought of the gate money, but never cared to be a grandstand player. To do the job and do it well brought him the joy of a true artist in his art. As I said, I have felt encouraged about the future of politics in this country since I heard about him. If he had been a saint I wouldn’t have been so much encouraged, but Brookfield represented him as a mere human being, like any of us, looking about for things that interested his mind and made life taste good, and finding them supremely in politics. It is an encouragement to find that our politics is so good a game that folks with money and brains enough to experiment with pleasures will play at it purely for their inward satisfaction, and without attention even to the applause. Of course, men of that temperament and that high degree of sagacity and self-control are rare, but we have our share of men with an insight into cause and effect, and an understanding of the human mind both in the individual and in the crowd, and with ability to hear what is going on when they put their ears to the ground, and with a lively interest in human affairs that must surely draw them into politics whenever they see that politics is a paramount interest. We have no picturesque Dukes of Devonshire drudging dutifully at government without vanity or political ambition, as fathers drudge for their families, and as Washington, maybe, drudged for us, but I believe we have a native product of our own that does like work, and quite as often with intelligence, because the work calls to them and because they not only feel the responsibilities of civilization, but find delight in undertaking them.

And why not, to be sure! What else is there in life that is so fruitful in recompenses as a cheerful undertaking of the responsibilities of civilization? Mine are represented mainly, as yet, by Cordelia and Samuel, but I mean to undertake lots more. I see quantities of them about waiting to be undertaken. So does Cordelia, who is one of the most active and responsible of responsibilities, and, being less tied up to wage-earning than I am, gives more attention to putting props under civilization.