TANGENTIAL VIEWS

SOME PRIVATIONS OF THE COMING MAN

A GERMAN physician of some note once gave it out as his solemn conviction that civilized man is gradually but surely losing the sense of smell through disuse. It is a fact that we have noses less keen than the savages; which is well for us, for we have a dozen “well-defined and several” bad odors to their one. It is possible, indeed, that it is to the alarming prevalence of bad odors that our olfactory inferiority is in some degree due: civilized man’s habit of holding his nose has begotten in that organ an obedient habit of holding itself. This by the way, leaves both his hands free to hold his tongue, though as a rule he prefers to make another and less pleasing use of them. With a nose dowered with primitive activity civilized man would find it difficult to retain his supremacy over the forces of Nature; her assassinating odors would engage him in a new struggle for existence, incomparably more arduous than any of which he has present experience. And herein we get an intimation of a hitherto unsuspected cause of the rapid decadence of savage peoples when brought into contact with civilization. Various causes doubtless are concerned, but the slaughter-house, the glue factory, the gas main, the sewer and the other sources of exhalations that “rise like the steam of rich-distilled perfumes” (which in no other quality they resemble) are the actual culprits. Unprepared with a means of defense at the point where he is most accessible to assault, the reclaimed savage falls into a decline and accepting the Christian religion for what he conceives it to be worth, turns his nose to the wall and dies in the secret hope of an inodorous eternity.

With effacement of the sense of smell we shall doubtless lose the feature which serves as intake to what it feeds upon; and that will in many ways be an advantage. It will, for example, put a new difficulty in the way of that disagreeable person, the caricaturist—rather, it will shear him of much of his present power. The fellow never tires of furnishing forth the rest of us incredibly snouted in an infinite variety of wicked ways. When noses are no more, caricature will have stilled some of its thunder and we can all venture to be eminent.

Meantime, history is full of noses, as is the literature of imagination—some of them figuratively, some literally, shining beacons that splendor “the dark backward and abysm of time.” Of the world’s great, it may almost be said that by their noses we know them. Where would have been Cyrano de Bergerac in modern story without his nose? By the unlearned it is thought that the immortal Bardolph is a creation of Shakspeare’s genius. Not so; an ingenious scholar long ago identified him as an historical character who but for the poet’s fine appreciation of noses might have blushed eternally unseen. It is nothing that his true name is no longer in evidence in the annals of men; as Bardolph his fame is secure from the ravening tooth of time.

Even when a nasal peculiarity is due to an accident of its environment it confers no inconsiderable distinction, apart from its possessor’s other and perhaps superior claims to renown, as in the instances of Michael Angelo, Tycho Brahe and the beloved Thackeray, in whose altered frontispiece we are all the more interested because of his habit of dipping it in the Gascon wine.

The spreading nose of Socrates was no doubt a source of great regret to him, whether its faults and failings were of Xanthippe’s making or, as Zopyrus had the incivility to inform him, inherited from drunken, thieving and lascivious ancestors; yet who would willingly forego the emotions and sentiments inspired by that unusual nose? It seems a precious part of his philosophy.

The connection between the poetic eminence of Ovid and the noses from which his family, the Nasones, derived its name is doubtless more than accidental, and to our knowledge of his hereditary nasal equipment, albeit we know not the precise nature of the endowment, must be ascribed a part of our interest in his work. He to whom the secret of metamorphosis was an open book is not affirmed to have made any attempt to alter the family feature, as he doubtless would have done had he not recognized its essential relation to his genius.

Plutarch declares that Cicero owed his surname to the fact that his nose had the shape of a vetch—cicer. Anyhow, his nose was as remarkable as his eloquence, in its different way. Gibbon and the late Prince Gortschakoff had noses uncommonly minute for men of commanding ability, which may have been a good thing for them, compelling them to rely upon their own endeavors to make their mark in the world. He who cannot climb to eminence upon his own nose will naturally seek another footing. Addison had a smooth Grecian nose, significantly suggestive of his literary style. Tennyson’s nose was long; so are some of his sermons in verse. Julius Cæsar, too, was gifted with a long nose, which a writer in a recent review has aptly called “enterprising.” That Cæsar was an enterprising man some of his contemporaries could feelingly have attested.

The nose of Dante—ah, there was a nose! What words could do it justice? It is one of history’s most priceless possessions. One hesitates to say what powers and potencies lay latent in that superb organ; one can only regret that he did not give more time to the cultivation of its magnificent possibilities and less to evening up matters between himself and his enemies when peopling Hell as he had the happiness to conceive it.

Considering how many of the world’s great and good men have been distinguished from their inferiors by noses of note and consequence, it is difficult to understand that such “gifts of grace divine” as these uncommon protuberances should be so sensitive to the blaze and blare of publicity. One would expect that in the fierce light that beats about an uncommon nose its fortunate owner would bask as contentedly as a python in the noon-day sun, happy in the benign beam and proud of every inch of his revealed identity.

To art, effacement of the nose will be of inestimable benefit. In statuary, for example, we shall be able to hurl a qualified defiance at Time the iconoclast, who now hastens to assail our cherished carven images in that most vulnerable part, the nose, tweaking it off and throwing it away almost before the sculptor’s own nose is blue and cold beneath the daisies. In the statue of the future there will be no nose, consequently no damage to it; and although the statue may when new and perfect differ but little from the mutilated antiques that we now have, there will be a certain satisfaction in knowing that it has not been “retouched.” In the case of portrait-statues and busts the advantage is obvious. When the nose goes the likeness goes with it; all men will look pretty nearly alike, and a bust or statue will serve about as well for one man as for another.

Perhaps the best effect of all will be felt in literature. To that capital bore of letters, the scribbling physiognomist, the nose is almost as necessary as to the caricaturist. He is never done finding strength of mind and spirit in large noses, though the small ones of Gibbon and Gortschakoff shrieked against his creed, and intellectual feebleness in “pugs,” though Kosciusko’s was the puggest of its time. When there are no noses the physiognomist can base no theories on them. It would be worth something to live long enough to be rid of even a part of his gabble.

The conditions under which we live may so alter that the sense of smell may be again advantageous in the struggle for existence, and by the survival of those in whom it is keenest regain its pristine place in our meager equipment of powers and capacities. But philosophers to whom millstones are transparent will deem it significant that the sense in question and the facial feature devoted to its service have fallen into something of the disrepute that foretokens deposal. It is now hardly polite to speak of smells and smelling, without the use of softened language; and the nose is frequently subjected to contumelious and jocose remark unwarranted by anything in its personal appearance or the nature of its pursuits. It is as if man had withdrawn his lip-service from the nasal setting sun.

It is, then, well understood, even outside of “scientific circles,” that the incompossibility of civilization and the human nose is more than a golden dream of the optimist. Indubitably that once indispensable organ is falling into the sere and yellow leaf of disuse, and in the course of a few thousand generations will have been wiped off the face of the earth. Its utility as an organ of sense decreases year by year—except as a support for the kind of eyeglasses bearing its name in French; not a sufficiently important service to warrant nature in preserving it. The final effacement has been foreseen from the earliest dawn of art. The ancient Grecian sculptors, for example, who were great trimmers and were ever eager to know which way the physiognomical cat would jump, tried to represent the human face of the future rather than that of their period; and it is noticeable that most of their statues and busts are distinguished by a striking lack of nose, as above intimated. That is justly regarded as a most significant circumstance—a prophecy of the conclusion now reached by modern science working along other lines. The Coming Man is to be noseless—that is settled; and there are not wanting those who support with enthusiasm the doctrine that he is to be hairless as well.

It is to be observed that these two effects, planing down of the human nose and uprooting of the human hair, are to be brought about differently—at least the main agency in the one case is different from that in the other. The nose is departing from among us because of its high sense of duty. Most of the odors of civilization being distinctly disagreeable, and in the selection of our food chemical analysis having taken the place of olfactory investigation, there is little for the modern nose to do that the modern nose-owner is willing to have done.

One of the most useful of all our natural endowments is what I may venture to call the conscience of the organs. None of the bodily organs is willing to be maintained in a state of idleness and dependence—to eat the bread of charity, so to speak. Whenever for any cause one of them is put upon the retired list and deprived of its functions and just influence in the physical economy it begins to withdraw from the scheme of things by atrophy. It withers away, and the place that knew it knows it no more forever. That is what is occurring in the instance of the human nose. We make very little use of it in testing our food—it has, in truth, lost its cunning in that way—in tracking our game, or in taking note of a windward enemy; albeit to most of the enemies of the race the nose is almost as good an annunciator as the organs which they more consciously address. So the idle nose is leaving us—more in sorrow than in anger, let us hope.

With the hair the case is different. It goes, not merely because its mandate is exhausted, but because it is really detrimental to us in the struggle for existence. Its departure is an instance, pure and simple of the survival of the fittest. Little reflection is required to show the superior fitness of the man that is bald. Baldness is respectability, baldness is piety, rectitude and general worth. Persons holding responsible and well-salaried positions are commonly bald—bank presidents especially. The prosperous merchant is usually of shining pate; the heads of most of the great corporations are thinly thatched. Of two otherwise equal applicants for a position of trust and profit, who would not instinctively choose the bald one, or, both being bald, the balder? Having, therefore, a considerable advantage, the bald person naturally lives longer than his less gifted competitor (any one can observe that he is usually the older) and leaves a more numerous progeny, inheriting the paternal endowment of precarious hair. In a few generations more those varieties of our species known as the Mophead and the Curled Darling will doubtless have become extinct, and the barber (Homo loquax) will have followed them into oblivion.

Another German physician (named Müller—the German physician who is not named Müller has had a narrow escape) points out the increasing prevalence of baldness and declares it hereditary. That many human beings are born partly bald is not, I take it, what he means, but that the tendency to lose the hair early in life is transmitted from father to son. It is understood that the ladies have nothing to do with the matter; they are never bald, but the hair of none of them, I understand, is so long and thick as it once was.

It is difficult to offset such facts as these with facts of a contrary sort. Cowboys and artists—sometimes poets—are found with long hair, but long hair is not thought to be an advantage to them, if, indeed, any hair at all is. For wiping the bowie-knife, the paint brush or the pen, hair, no doubt, is useful, but hardly more so than the coat-sleeve. Even in these instances, then, where at first thought there might seem to be a relation of cause and effect between length of hair and length of life, the appearance is fallacious. A bald-headed cowboy would, however, be less liable to scalping by the Red Man. It appears, then, that Dr. Müller’s cheerful prediction regarding the heads of Posterity rests upon a foundation of truth.

Some of the doctor’s arguments, however, seem erroneous. For example, he thinks the masculine fashion of cutting off the hair an evidence that men instinctively know hair to be injurious—that is to say, a disadvantage in the struggle for existence. This I can not admit; it does not follow, for testators have a fashion of cutting off legatees-expectant, yet legatees-expectant are not injurious—until known to be cut off; and then the testator’s struggle for existence is commonly finished. Capitalists have a fashion of cutting off coupons; it hardly needs to be pointed out that coupons are not amongst the malign influences tending to the shortening of life.

I have tried (with some success, I hope) to show that hair is a disadvantage, but this view derives no support from the scissors. If the hair of men were obviously, conspicuously beneficial; if it made them healthy, wealthy and as wise as they care to be; if they needed it in their business; if they could not at all get on without it—they would doubtless cut it a little oftener and a little closer than they do now. Men are that way.

The truth of the matter is plain enough. Men become bald because they keep cutting their hair. Every man has a certain amount of capillary energy, so to say. He can produce such a length of hair and no more, as the spider can spin only so much web and then must cease to be a spinster. By cutting the hair we keep it exhausting its allowance of energy by growth; when all is gone growth stops, and the roots, having no longer a use, decay. By letting their hair grow as long as it will women retain it. The difference is the same as that between two coils of rope, equal in length, one of which is constantly payed out, the other not. If this explanation do not compose the immemorial controversy about the cause of men’s baldness the prospect of its composure by that phenomenon’s universality will be hailed with delight by all who love a quiet life. The first generation to forget that men ever had hair will be the first to know the happiness of peace; the succeeding one will begin a dispute about the cause of hair in woman.

An important discovery made and stated with confidence is that to the human tooth, also, civilization is hateful and insupportable. Dr. Denison Pedley, whose name carries great weight (and would to whomsoever it might belong) examined the teeth of no fewer than 3,114 children, and only 707 had full sets of sound ones. That was in England; what would be shown by a look-in at the mouths of the young of a more highly civilized race—say the Missourians—one shudders to conjecture. That nearly all the savages whom one meets have good enough teeth is a matter of common observation; and missionaries in some of the remoter parts of Starkest Africa attest this fact with much feeling. Yet in all enlightened countries the prosperous dentist abounds in quantity.

But perhaps the most significant testimony is that of another English gentleman, with another honored name—J. K. Mummery, who examined every skull that he could lay his eyes on during twenty years. He affirms an almost total absence of caries among the oldest specimens, those belonging to the Stone Age. Among the Celts, who succeeded these, and who knew enough to make metal weapons, but not enough to refrain from using them, the decayed tooth was an incident of more frequent occurrence; and the Roman conquest introduced it in great profusion. When the Romans were driven out they took their back teeth along with them, but the flawless incisor, the hale bicuspid are afterward rarely encountered. Craniologists affirm a similar state of things wherever there have been successive or overlapping civilizations: the skulls all tell the same story—their vote is unanimous. If the alarming progress of enlightenment be not stayed the hairless and noseless man of the future will undoubtedly subsist, not as we, upon his neighbor, but upon spoon-victuals and memories of the past.

CIVILIZATION OF THE MONKEY

PROFESSOR GARNER, who has penetrated the mystery of the sibilants and gutturals with which monkeys prefer to converse, is said to entertain the glittering hope that by means of his discoveries these contemporary ancestors of ours may be elevated to civilization. The prospect is fascinating exceedingly. It opens to conjecture an almost limitless domain of human interest. It illuminates, with a light as of revelation, numberless paths of endeavor leading to glorious goals of achievement.

The crying need of our time is more civilization. We have made a rather lamentable failure in the attempt to elevate certain of the lower races, such as the Chinese, the Sabbatarians and the Protectionists; and to still others we have imparted only dim and transient gleams of our great light. Some, indeed, we have civilized so imperfectly that they might almost as well have been left in outer darkness; for example, the Negroes of the South. Our utmost efforts—aided, in many instances, by the shotgun, the bloodhound and the fagot-and-stake—have given a faulty result, and many of these obdurate persons remain, as the late Parson Brownlow would have said, “steeped to the nose and chin in political profligacy,” voting the Republican ticket whenever permitted. For four centuries we have hunted the Red Indian from cover to cover, and he is not a very nice Red Indian yet, some of his vices and superstitions differing widely from our own. The motorcarman, shutting his eyes to the glory and advantage of enlightenment, still urges his indocile apparatus along the line of least insistence; and the organist from the overseas practices his black art at the street corner, inaccessible to reclamation. A hundred urban tribes might be named among civilization’s irreclaimables, without mentioning any of the religious sects. At every turn the gentleman who is desirous of making-over his faulty fellow-men encounters a baffling apathy or a spirited hostility to change.

Possibly the higher quadrumana may prove more pregnable to light and reason—more willing to become as we. Perhaps when we can all talk Monkey we shall be able to set forth the advantages of our happy state more graphically than we have succeeded in doing in any of the tongues—including our own—known to the wicked and stiff-necked generations mentioned. In that sparkling speech we may, for example, make it clear that a condition in which nine-tenths of the reformed monkeys will live a life of toil and discomfort, holding their subsistence by the most precarious tenure, is conspicuously subserviceable to that chastened and humble frame of mind which is so joyously different from the empty intellectual pride that comes of pelting one another with cocoanuts and depending from branches by prehensile tails. Perhaps in the pithecan vocabulary is such copiousness that we can easily set forth the unspeakable profit of living a long way from where we want to go at a considerable peril to life and limb—which is what steam and electricity enable us to do. We may reasonably hope to be able to convince the gorilla of the futility of his habit of beating his breast and roaring when in the presence of the enemy; the history of a few of our great battles, carefully translated into his noble tongue, will make him first endure, then pity, then embrace our more effective military methods, to the unspeakable benefit of his heart and mind. Adequately civilized, the gorilla will beat his enemy’s breast and let that creature do the roaring.

Certain advantages of urban life—an invention of civilization—ought to be comparatively easy of exposition in an attractive way. The practice of abolishing the hours of rest by means of lights and rattling vehicles; of generating sewer-gas and conducting it into dwellings; of loading the atmosphere with beautiful brown smoke and assorted exhalations before taking it into the lungs; of drinking whisky, or water from cow pastures; of eating animals that have been a long time dead,—of all these and many other blessings of civilization the monkeys can acquire knowledge, desire and, eventually, possession. Doubtless we shall have some small difficulty in explaining the advantages of the incaudate state (for civilization implies renunciation of the tail), the comfortableness of the stiff hat and shirt collar (for civilization entails clothing), the grace of the steel-pen coat, the beauty of the skin-tight sleeve and the sanitary effect of the corset; but if the monkey language, unlike that of the Houyhnhnms, supplies facilities for “saying the thing that is not” we shall eventually convince our arboreal pupils that black is not only white but a beautiful écru green.

The next step will naturally be the investing them with citizenship and the right to vote according to the dictates of the bosses. When by that investiture they have been duly instated in “the seats of power,” the monkeys will form one of the most precious of our political elements, though hardly distinguishable from some of the political elements with which we are now blest. Their enfranchising will be no radical innovation; it will merely make the political pile complete—though the possible defection of the philosopher element in the near future may somewhat mar the symmetry of the edifice until the gap can be stopped by enfranchisement of dogs and horses.

Even if all this is but the gorgeous dream of a too hopeful optimism, it is nevertheless good to know that Professor Garner can understand Monkey. If we fail to persuade the monkeys forward along the line of progress to our advanced position it will be pleasant to have from them an occasional word of cheer and welcome as we are led back to theirs.

THE SOCIALIST—WHAT HE IS, AND WHY

AMERICAN socialism is not a political doctrine; it is a state of mind. A man is an active socialist because he is afflicted with congenital insurgency: he was born a rebel. He rebels, not only against “the established order” in government, but against pretty nearly everything that takes his attention and enlists his thought, though not many things do. He is hospitable to only one idea at a time, in the service of which he foregoes the advantage of knowing much of anything else. He commonly, however, has an observing eye and a deep disesteem for the decent customs and conventionalities of his time and place. The man in jail for publication of immoralities is always a socialist, and the socialist “organ” has usually a profitable “line” of indecent advertisements.

As the socialist erroneously regards the criminal, so he is himself rightly to be regarded. He is no heretic to be reclaimed, but a patient to be restrained. He is sick. You cannot cure him; it is useless to say to him: “Thou ailest here and there”; it is useless to say anything to him but “Thou shalt not.” His unreason is what he is a socialist with. That, too, is the cause of his inefficiency in the competitions of life, for which, naturally, he would substitute something “more nearly to the heart’s desire”—an order of things in which all would share the rewards of efficiency. Always it is the incapable who most loudly preaches the gospel of Equality and Fraternity—which, being interpreted, means stand and deliver and look pleasant about it. In the Cave of Adullam the credentialing shibboleth is “Love me, damn you, as I love myself.”

A distinguishing feature of socialism as we have the happiness to know it in this country is its servitude to anarchism. In theory the two are directly antithetical. They are the North and the South Pole of political thought, leagues and leagues removed from zones of intellectual fertility. Anarchism says: “Ye shall have no law”; socialism: “Law is all that ye shall have.” They “pool their issues” and make common cause, but let them succeed in their work of destruction and their warfare would not be accomplished: there would remain the congenial task of destroying each other. The present alliance is no figure of speech. It is a fact, unknown to the follow-my-leader socialist, but not to his leader; not to observers having acquaintance with the proselyting methods of the time; not at the headquarters of anarchism in Paterson, New Jersey, where a great body of socialist “literature” is written, printed and set going. He who is not sufficiently “advanced” for anarchism is persuaded to socialism. The babe is fed with malted milk until strong enough for the double-distilled thunder-and-lightning of a more candid purveyance. Whatever makes for discontent brings nearer the reign of reprisal.

Our good friends who think with their tongues and pens are ever clamant about the national perils alurk in luxury: it causes decay in men and states, blights patriotism, invites invasion, impoverishes the paupers and bites a dog. Luxury will make a boy strike his father (feebly) and persuade the old man to a life of shame. It is well known that it so enervated the Romans that they fell off the map. One does not need to believe all that, nor any of it. The wealthy, living under sanitary conditions, well housed, well fed, clean, free from fatigue (which is a poison) are, as a class, distinctly superior to the poor, physically, mentally and morally. It is among the well-to-do that gymnasia flourish and athletic clubs abound. Your all-around athlete is commonly in possession of a comfortable income; the hardy out-of-door sports are practiced almost exclusively by those who do not have to do manual labor. The top-hatted clubman can manhandle the hulking day-laborer with ease and accuracy. His female is larger and fitter than the other gentleman’s underfed and overworked mate, and brings forth a better quality of young. All this is obvious to any but the most delinquent observation; yet wealth and its attendant luxury are prophecies and forerunners of the decay of nations.

To one having knowledge of the prevalence and power of some of the primal brute passions of the human mind the reason is clear enough: riches and luxurious living provoke envy in the vast multitude to whom they are inaccessible through lack of efficiency; and from envy to revenge and revolution the transition is natural and easy.

In the youth of a nation there is virtual equality of fortunes—all are poor. Sixty years ago there were probably not a half dozen millionaires in America; the number now is not definitely known, but it runs into thousands; that of persons of less but considerable wealth—enough to take attention—into the hundreds of thousands. Poverty used to be rather proud of our millionaires; they were so few that the poor man seldom or never saw them, to mark the contrast between their abundance and his privation. Now the two are everywhere neighbors. The poor man sees “the idle rich” (who mostly work like beavers) in their carriages, while himself walks and, if it please him so to do, “takes their dust.” He looks into the windows of ballrooms and erroneously believes that the gorgeous creatures within are happier than he. If he happen to be so intellectual as to be distinguished in letters, art or some other profitless pursuit as to be sought by them, all the keener is his sense of the difference; all the more humiliating his inability to suffer their particular kind of disillusion. Partly because of that and partly because he is not a thinker but a feeler, the poet, the artist or the musician is almost invariably an audible socialist. True, some of these “intellectuals” (they might better be called emotionals) are themselves fairly thrifty and prosperous, and in the redistribution of wealth which many of them impudently propose would be first to experience the mischance of “restitution.” But doubtless they do not expect their blessed “new order of things” to come in their day. Meantime there are profit and a certain picturesqueness in “hailing the dawn” of a better one, just as if it had already struck “the Sultan’s tower with a shaft of light.”

The socialist notion appears to be that the world’s wealth is a fixed quantity, and A can acquire only by depriving B. He is fond of figuring the rich as living upon the poor—riding on their backs, as Tolstoi (staggering under the weight of his wife, to whom he had given his vast estate) was pleased to signify the situation. The plain truth of the matter is that the poor live mostly on the rich—entirely unless with their own hands they dig a bare subsistence out of their own farms or gravel claims; if they do better than that they are not poor. A man may remain in poverty all his life and be not only of no advantage to his fellow poor men, but by his competition in the labor market a harm to them; for in the abundance of labor lies the cause of low wages, as even a socialist knows. As a consumer the man counts for little, for he consumes only the bare necessaries of life. But, if he pass from poverty to wealth he not only ceases to be a competing laborer; he becomes a consumer of everything that he used to want—all the luxuries by production of which nine-tenths of the labor class live he now buys. He has added his voice to the chorus of demand. All the industries of the world are so interrelated and interdependent that none is unaffected in some infinitesimal degree by the new stimulation. The good that he has done by passing from one class into another is not so obvious as it would be if his wants were all supplied by one versatile producer, purveying to him alone, but the sum of it is the same. Yet the socialist finds a pleasure in directing attention to the brass hoofs of the millionaire executing his joyous jig upon an empty stomach—that of the prostrate pauper,—poets, muckrakers, demagogues and other audibles fitly celebrating the performance with howls of sensibility.

A socialist was damning the wicked extravagance of the rich. A thoughtful person said: “In New York City was a wealthy family, the Bradley Martins. They were driven out of the country by public indignation because they spent their money with a free hand. In the same city was a wealthy man named Russell Sage. He was no less reviled and calumniated, because he spent as little as he could and lent the rest. In which instance was our ‘fierce democracie’ wise and righteous?”

The answer was prompt and, O, so copious! Before it ceased to flow that philosopher was a mile away from the subject, lost in an impenetrable forest of words.

Of course Russell Sage was no less valuable an asset to the “wage slave” than the Bradley Martins, for there is no way by which one can get profit or pleasure out of money except by paying it out, either by his own hand directly, or indirectly by the hand of another, for wages to labor. Eventually, sooner or later, it all reaches the pocket of the producer, the workingman.

We have so good a country here that more than a million a year of Europe’s poor come over to share its advantages. In the patent fact that it is a land of opportunity and prosperity we feel a justifiable pride; yet the crowning proof and natural result of this—the great number that do prosper—“the multitude of millionaires”—has come to be resented as an intolerable wrong, and he who is most clamorous for opportunity (which he has never for a moment been without) most austerely condemns those who have made the best use of it. An instinctive antipathy to all in prosperity is the common ground upon which anarchists and socialists stand to debate their several interpretations of anarchism and socialism. On that rock they build their church, and the gates of—the quotation is imperfectly applicable: the gates are friendly and hospitable to denominationaries of their faith.

Another thing that these worthies have in common—and in common with many unassorted sentimentaliters and effemininnies in this age of unreason—is sympathy with crime. No avowed socialist but advocates a rosewater penology that coddles the felon who has broken into prison to enjoy a life of peace and plenty; none but would expel the warden and flog the turnkey. All are proponents of the holy homily; all deny that punishment deters from crime, although the discharged convict never renews his offense until driven by hunger or again persuaded by his poor brute brain that he can escape detection; he does not enter and rob the first house that he comes to, nor murder the first enemy that he meets.

That there are honest, clean-minded patriotic socialists goes without saying. They are theorists and dreamers with a knowledge of life and affairs a little profounder than that of a horse but not quite so profound as that of a cow. But the “movement” as a social and political force is, in this country, born of envy, the true purpose of its activities, revenge. In the shadow of our national prosperity it whets its knife for the throats of the prosperous. It unleashes the hounds of hate upon the track of success—the only kind of success that it covets and derides.

How bit and bridle this wild ass of civilization? How make the socialist behave himself, as in Germany, or unmask himself, as in France? It looks as if this cannot be done. It looks as if we may eventually have to prevent the multiplication of millionaires by setting a legal limit to private fortunes. By some such cowardly and statesmanlike concession we may perhaps anticipate and forestall the more drastic action of our political Apaches, incited by Envy, wrecker of empires and assassin of civilization. Meantime, let us put poppies in our hair and be Democrats and Republicans.

1910.

GEORGE THE MADE-OVER

THE English have a distinctly higher and better opinion of Washington than is held in this country. Washington, if he could have a choice in the matter, would indubitably prefer his position in the minds of educated Englishmen to the one that he holds “in the hearts of his countrymen”—not the one that he is said to hold. The superior validity of the English view is due to the better view-point. It is remote, as the American will be when several more generations shall have passed and Americans are devoid (as Englishmen are devoid now) of passions and prejudices engendered in the heat of our “Revolution.” We should remember that it was not to the English a revolution, but a small and distant squabble, which cut no great figure in the larger affairs in which they were engaged; and the very memory of it was nearly effaced in that of the next generation by the stupendous events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. To ears filled with the thunders of Waterloo, the crepitating echoes of the spat at Bunker Hill were inaudible.

No benign personage in the calendar of secular saints is really less loved than Washington. The romancing historians and biographers have adorned him with a thousand impossible virtues, naturally, and in so dehumanizing him have set him beyond and above the longest reach of human sympathies. His character, as it pleased them to create it, is like nothing that we know about and care for. He is a monster of goodness and wisdom, with about as much of light and fire as the snow Adam of the small boy playing at creation on the campus of a public school. The Washington-making Frankensteins have done their work so badly that their creature is an insupportable bore, diffusing an infectious dejection. Try to fancy an historical novel or drama with him for hero—a poem with him for subject! Possibly such have been written; I do not recall any at the moment, and the proposition is hardly thinkable. The ideal Washington is a soulless conception, absolutely without power on the imagination. Within the area of his gelid efflation the flowers of fancy open only to wither, and any sentiment endeavoring to transgress the boundary of that desolate domain falls frosted in its flight.

Some one—Colonel Ingersoll, I fancy—has said that Washington is a steel engraving. That is hardly an adequate conception, being derived from the sense of sight only; the ear has something to say in the matter, and there is much in a name. Before my studies of his character had effaced my childish impression I used always to picture him in the act of bending over a tub.

There are two George Washingtons—the natural and the artificial. They are now equally “great,” but the former was chokefull of the old Adam. He swore like “our army in Flanders,” loved a bottle like a brother and had an inter-colonial reputation as a lady-killer. He was, indeed, a singularly interesting and magnetic old boy—one whom any sane and honest lover of the picturesque in life and character would deem it an honor and an education to have known in the flesh. He is now known to but few; you must dig pretty deeply into the tumulus of rubbishy panegyric—scan pretty closely the inedited annals of his time, in order to see him as he was. Criss-crossed upon these failing parchments of the past are the lines of the sleek Philistine, the smug patriot and the lessoning moraler, making a palimpsest whereof all that is legible is false and all that is honest is blotted out. The detestable anthropolater of the biographical gift has pushed his glowing pen across the page, to the unspeakable darkening of counsel. In short, Washington’s countrymen see him through a glass dirtily. The image is unlovely and unloved. You can no more love and revere the memory of the biographical George Washington than you can an isosceles triangle or a cubic foot of interstellar space.

The portrait-painters began it—Gilbert Stuart and the rest of them. They idealized all the humanity out of the poor patriot’s face and passed him down to the engravers as a rather sleepy-looking butcher’s block. There is not a portrait of Washington extant which a man of taste and knowledge would suffer to hang on the wall of his stable. Then the historians jumped in, raping all the laurels from the brows of the man’s great contemporaries and piling them in confusion upon his pate. They made him a god in wisdom, and a giant in arms; whereas, in point of ability and service, he was but little, if at all, superior to any one of a half-dozen of his now over-shadowed but once illustrious co-workers in council and camp, and in no way comparable with Hamilton. He towers above his fellows because he stands upon a pile of books.

The supreme indignity to the memory of this really worthy man has been performed by the Sunday-scholiasts, the pietaries, the truly good, the example-to-American-youth folk. These canting creatures have managed to nake him of his last remaining rag of flesh and drain out his ultimate red corpuscle of human blood. In order that he may be acceptable to themselves they have made him a bore to everyone else. To give him value as an “example” to the unripe intelligences of their following they have whitewashed him an inch thick, draped him, fig-leafed him and gilded him out of all semblance to man. To prepare his character for the juvenile moral tooth they have boned it, and to make it digestible to the juvenile moral paunch, unsalted it by maceration in the milk-and-water of their own minds. And so we have him to-day. In a single century the great-hearted gentleman of history has become the good boy of literature—the public prig. Washington is the capon of our barnyard Pantheon—revised and edited for the table.

JOHN SMITH’S ANCESTORS

READER mine, wisest of mortals that you are, do you feel sure that you know how to deal with a proposition, which is at the same time unquestionable and impossible—which must be true, yet can not be true? Do you know just what degree of intellectual hospitality to give to such a proposition—whether to receive and entertain it (and if so how) or cast it from you, and how to do that? Possibly you were never consciously at bay before a proposition of that kind, and therefore lack the advantage of skill in its disposal. Attend, then, O child of mortality—consider and be wise:

You have, or have had, two parents—whom God prosper if they live and rest if dead. Each of them had two parents; in other words, you had at some time and somewhere four grandparents, and right worthy persons they were, I’ll be sworn, albeit you may not be able to name them without stopping to take thought. Of great-grandparents you surely had no fewer than eight—that is to say, no further away than three generations your ancestors numbered eight persons, now in heaven. In countries which are pleased to call themselves civilized and enlightened “a generation” means about thirty-four years. Not long ago it meant thirty-three, but improved methods of distribution, sanitation and so forth have added a year to the average duration of human life, though they have not pointed out any profitable use to make of the addition. All this amounts to saying (acceptably, I trust) that at each remove of thirty-four years back toward Adam and his time you double the number of your ancestors. Among so many some, naturally, were truly modest persons, and I don’t know that you would care to have so much said about them as I shall have to say; so, if you please, we will speak of Mr. John Smith’s instead.

John Smith, then, whom I know very well, and greatly esteem, and who is approaching middle age, had, about 34 years ago, two ancestors. About 102 years ago, say in the year of grace 1792, he had eight—though he did not have himself. You can do the rest of the figuring yourself if you care to go on and are unwilling to take my word for what follows—the astonishing state of things which I am about to thrust upon your attention. Just keep doubling the number of John Smith’s ancestors until you get the number 1,073,741,824. Now when do you suppose it was that Mr. Smith had that number of living ancestors? Make your calculation, allowing 34 years for each time that you have multiplied by two, and you will find that it was about the year 879. It seems a rather modern date and a goodish number of persons to be concerning themselves, however unconsciously, in the begetting of Neighbor John, but that is not “where it hurts.” The point is that the number of his ancestors, so far as we have gone, is about the number of the earth’s inhabitants at that date—little and big; white, black, brown, yellow and blue; males, females and girls. I do not care to point out Mr. Smith’s presumption in professing himself an Anglo-Saxon—with all that mixed blood in the veins of him; perhaps he has never made this calculation and does not know from just what stock he has the honor to have descended, though truly this distinguished scion of an illustrious race might seem to be justified in calling himself a Son of Earth.

But is he not more than that? In the generation immediately preceding the one under consideration the number of the gentleman’s ancestors must have been twice as great, namely, 2,147,483,648—more than two thousand millions, or some five hundred millions more than Earth is infested with even now. Where did all those people live?—in Mars? And to what political or other causes was due the migration to Earth, en masse, of their sons and daughters in the next generation?

Does the reader care to follow up Mr. Smith’s long illustrious line any further—back to the wee, sma’ years of the Christian era, for example? Well and good, but I warn him that geometrical progression, as he has already observed, “counts up.” Long before his calculations have reached back to the first merry Christmas he will find Mr. Smith’s ancestors—if they were really all terrestrial in their habits—piled many-deep over the entire surface of all the continents, islands and ice-floes of this distracted globe. A decent respect for the religious convictions of my countrymen forbids me even to hint at what the calculation would show if carried back to the time of Adam and Eve.

It will perhaps be observed that I have left out of consideration the circumstance that John Smith (my particular John) is not the sole living inhabitant of Earth to-day: there are others, though mostly of the same name, whose ancestors would somewhat swell the totals. In mercy to the reader I have ignored them, one man being sufficient for my purpose.

Must not John Smith have had all those ancestors? Certainly. Could all those ancestors of John Smith have existed? Certainly not. Have I not, therefore, as I promised to do, conducted the reader against “a proposition which is at the same time unquestionable and impossible”—a statement “which must be true, yet can not be true”? According to the best of my belief he is there. And there I leave him. Any gentleman not content to remain there with his face to the wall is at liberty to go over it or through it if he can. Doubtless the world will be delighted to hear him expose the fallacy of my reasoning and the falsehood of my figures. And I shall be pleased myself.

1894.

THE MOON IN LETTERS

FOR some months my friends had been benumbing the membranes of my two ears with praises of the then newest literary pet, who exulted in a name disagreeably suggestive of Death on a Pale Horse, Mr. H. Rider Haggard, and I meekly assented to his greatness. They had insisted that I read him, but this monstrous demand I had hitherto had the strength to resist. But we all have our moments of weakness, so I squandered twenty-five cents on the “Seaside” edition of the great man’s greatest work, King Solomon’s Mines. On page 84 I found something that interested me, something astronomical, showing how keenly the famous author observes the commonest phenomena of nature. Turning down a leaf and bearing the matter in mind, I read on. At page 97 I turned down another leaf, and at page 112 a third. On these three pages are related astronomical events occurring in Africa on the evening of June 2, the evening of June 3, and at about midday June 4, respectively. Let us summarize them by quotation: June 2 (p. 84): “The sun sunk and the world was wreathed in shadows. But not for long, for see, in the east there is a glow, then a bent edge of silver light, and at last the full bow of the crescent moon peeps above the plain.”

June 3 (p. 97): “About 10 the full moon came up in splendor.”

June 4 (p. 112): “I glanced up at the sun and to my intense joy saw that we had made no mistake. On the edge of its brilliant surface was a faint rim of shadow.” Which grows to a total eclipse.

What else ensues I am unable to say. A writer who believes that the new moon can rise in the east soon after sunset and the full moon at 10 o’clock; who thinks the second of these remarkable phenomena can occur twenty-four hours after the first, and itself be followed some fourteen hours later by an eclipse of the sun—such a man may be a gifted writer, but I am not a gifted reader. I wash my mind of him, and sentence him to the good opinion of his admirers.

Another sinner on my list of authors ignorant in respect of the moon’s movements and phases is William Black. In the third chapter of his Princess of Thule is the following sentence: “Was Sheila about to sing in this clear strange twilight while they sat there and watched the yellow moon come up behind the Southern hills?” The spectacle of the moon rising in the south is one which Heaven has denied to all except the characters in Black’s novels. It is not surprising that Sheila “was about to sing”: she must have felt something of the exultation which swells the bosom of that favored child of Destiny, the small boy who has crept in under the canvas when the menagerie people are painting the tiger.

It may be borne in mind that Black’s south-rising moon came up during the twilight—that is to say, shortly after sunset. It would be, therefore, nearly “half-full” to the eye of the terrestrial observer; but referring to a later hour of the same evening Black says: “There into the beautiful dome rose the golden crescent of the moon, warm in color as though it still retained the last rays of the sunset.” Concerning the last clause of this astonishing sentence it may be asked from what source Black supposed the moon’s light to be derived, or if he regarded her as self-luminous. The truth probably is that he had no definite ideas about the matter at all. He was in the same comfortable mental state as the worthy countryman who, being asked what he thought of total depravity, promptly replied that if it was in the Bible he was in favor of it.

In dismissing Black I can not forbear to add that even if the moon could rise in the south; even if rising in the south it should continue rising into the dome when it should be setting; even if rising in the south soon after sunset a half-moon, as it would necessarily be, and continuing to rise into the dome when it should be setting, it could dwindle to a crescent, it could not be of a warm color. The crescent moon is as cold in color as a new dime—almost as cold as a quarter-dollar. In a bench-show of astronomers I doubt if Black would have been awarded a blue ribbon.

I have been reading a story by Mr. Edgar Saltus: “A Maid of Athens”—a story which, like a forgotten candle, burns on well enough to the end and then dies in its own grease. But that is not the point; I find this passage:

“Beneath descending night, the sky was gold-barred and green. In the east the moon glittered like a sickle of tin.”

I shall have to add Mr. Saltus to my company of authors with private systems of astronomy. The imagination robust enough to conceive a crescent moon in the east at nightfall might even claim a place in a dime museum.

Spielhagan has his full moon on the horizon at midnight by the castle clock.

But the novelists are not alone in their ignorance of what is before their eyes all their blessed lives: the poets know no more than they. In her Songs of the Night-Watches Jean Ingelow compels “a slender moon” to “float up from behind” a person looking at the sunset sky, and afterward makes the full moon “behind some ruined roof swim up” at daybreak. To rout out the moon so early and make it get up, when it must have been up all night attending to its duty as a full moon of orderly habits, is a trifle heartless. In “Daylight and Moonlight,” Longfellow, who seems imperfectly to have known how the latter was produced, tells of a time when at midday he saw the moon

Now if it was sailing high at noon it must have been, as seen from earth, nearly on a line with the sun—that is to say, but little more than “new”—that is to say, invisible in the daytime. But that is not the worst of this business. A new moon is not only invisible at noon, but sets soon after sunset, and would give but little light if it did not. Yet this unearthly observer after relating how night came on adds:

It is mournful to think that this popular poet lived out his long serene life without anybody suspecting his condition, nor offering him the comforts of an asylum.

I have found similar blunders in the poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schiller, Moore, Shelley, Tennyson and Bayard Taylor. Of course a poet is entitled to any kind of universe that may best suit his purpose, and if he could give us better poetry by making the moon rise “full-orbed” in the northwest and set like a “tin sickle” in the zenith I should go in for letting him have his fling. But I do not discern any gain in “sweetness and light” from these despotic readjustments of the relations among sun, earth and moon, and must set it all down to the account of ignorance, which, in any degree and however excusable, is not a thing to be admired. Concerning nothing is it more general, more deep, more dark, more invincible, nor withal, more needless, than it is with regard to movements and visible aspects of our satellite. How one can have eyes and not know the pranks of the several heavenly bodies is possibly obvious to Omniscience, but a finite mind cannot rightly understand it.

We will suppose that our planet is without a satellite. The nights are brilliant or starless, as the clouds may determine, but in all the measureless reaches of space is no world having a visible disk, with vicissitudes of light and shadow. One day a famous man of science announces in the public prints a startling discovery. He has found an orb, smaller than the earth but of considerable magnitude, moving in such a direction and at such a rate of speed that at a stated time the next year it will have approached our sphere so closely as to be caught by its attractive power and held, a prisoner, wheeling round and round in a vain endeavor to escape. He goes on to explain that the invisible tether will be, astronomically speaking, but a stone’s throw in length: the captive world will have in fact the astonishing propinquity of only a quarter of a million miles! We shall be able to see, even with unassisted eyes, the very mountains and valleys upon its surface, while a glass of moderate power will show, not only these mountains (many times higher than those of our own orb) with perfect definition, their long black shadows projected upon the plains, but will reveal the details of extinct craters wide enough to engulf a terrestrial province, and how deep Heaven knows. Upon this strange new world, the great man goes on to say, we shall be able to observe the mutations of its day and night, tracing the lines of its dawn and sunset exactly as, if we were there, we could observe the more rapid changes upon the body of our own planet; and surely it would be worth something to stand away from our spinning orb and take in all its visible vicissitudes in one comprehensive view.

It is easy to see the effect of such an announcement, verified by the apparition of the orb at the calculated place and time. All the civilized nations would be in a ferment. The newspapers would be full of the subject. Journalism would be conducted by the astronomers and nothing but the coming orb would be talked of; many would go mad from excitement. And when the celestial monster, moving aimless through space, should swim into the earth’s attraction and go whirling in its new orbit how we should study it, attentive to its every visible aspect, alertly sensible to its changes and profoundly moved by the desolate sublimity of its stupendous scenery. For a half of every lunar month the churches, lyceums, theaters—all the places of instruction or amusement where people now assemble by artificial light would close at sunset and the whole population would take to the hills. Colleges, societies and clubs would be founded for the new knowledge; every human being, with opportunity and capacity, would become a specialist in selenography and selenology—a lunar expert, devoted to his science. Not to know all about the moon would be considered as discreditable as illiteracy is considered now. Well, the moon we have always with us, and not one man in a thousand nor one author in a hundred knows any more about it than that it is frequently invisible and commonly not round. On other subjects there is less ignorance: at least three in a thousand know that the stars are not the same as the planets, though two of the three are unable to say what is a planet and what is a star.

That immortal ass, “the average man,” sees with nothing but his eyes. To him a planet or a star is only a point of light—a bright dot, a golden fly-speck on “the sky.” He does not see it as a prodigious globe swimming through the unthinkable depths of space. With only the heavens for company the poor devil is bored. When out alone on a clear night he wants to get himself home to his female and young and—unfailing expedient of intellectual vacuity—go to bed. The glories and splendors of the firmament are no more to him than a primrose was to Peter Bell. Let us leave him snoring pigly in his blankets and turn to other themes, not forgetting that he is our lawful ruler, nor permitted to forget the insupportable effects of his ferocious rule.

1903.

COLUMBUS

THE human mind is affected with a singular disability to get a sense of an historical event without a gigantic figure in the foreground overtopping all his fellows. As surely as God liveth, if one hundred congenital idiots were set adrift in a scow to get rid of them, and, borne by favoring currents into eyeshot of an unknown continent, should simultaneously shout, “Land ho!” instantly drowning in their own drool, we should have one of them figuring in history ever thereafter with a growing glory as an illustrious discoverer of his time. I do not say that Columbus was a navigator and discoverer of that kind, nor that he did anything of that kind in that way; the parallel is perfect only in what history has done to Columbus; and some seventy millions of Americans are authenticating the imposture all they know how. In this whole black business hardly one element of falsehood is lacking.

Columbus was not a learned man, but an ignorant. He was not an honorable man, but a professional pirate. He was, in the most hateful sense of the word, an adventurer. His voyage was undertaken with a view solely to his own advantage, the gratification of an incredible avarice. In the lust of gold he committed deeds of cruelty, treachery and oppression for which no fitting names are found in the vocabulary of any modern tongue. To the harmless and hospitable peoples among whom he came he was a terror and a curse. He tortured them, he murdered them, he sent them over the sea as slaves. So monstrous were his crimes, so conscienceless his ambition, so insatiable his greed, so black his treachery to his sovereign, that in his mere imprisonment and disgrace we have a notable instance of “the miscarriage of justice.” In the black abysm of this man’s character we may pile falsehood upon falsehood, but we shall never build the monument high enough to top the shadow of his shame. Upon the culm and crown of that reverend pile every angel will still look down and weep.

We are told that Columbus was no worse than the men of his race and generation—that his vices were “those of his time.” No vices are peculiar to any time; this world has been vicious from the dawn of history, and every race has reeked with sin. To say of a man that he is like his contemporaries is to say that he is a scoundrel without excuse. The virtues are accessible to all. Athens was vicious, yet Socrates was virtuous. Rome was corrupt, but Marcus Aurelius was not corrupt. To offset Nero the gods gave Seneca. When literary France groveled at the feet of the third Napoleon Hugo stood erect.

It will be a dark day for the world when infractions of the moral law by A and B are accepted as justification of the sins of C. But even in the days of Columbus men were not all pirates; God inspired enough of them to be merchants to serve as prey for the others; and while turning his honest penny by plundering them, the great Christopher was worsted by a Venetian trading galley and had to pickle his pelt in a six-mile swim to the Portuguese coast, a wiser and a wetter thief. If he had had the hard luck to drown we might none of us have been Americans, but the gods would have missed the revolting spectacle of an entire people prostrate before the blood-beslubbered image of a moral idiot, performing solemn rites of adoration with a litany of lies.

In comparison with the crimes of Columbus his follies cut a sorry figure. Yet the foolhardy enterprise to whose failure he owes his fame is entitled to distinction. With sense enough to understand the earth’s spheroid form (he thought it pear-shaped) but without knowledge of its size, he believed that he could reach India by sailing westward and died in the delusion that he had done so—a trifling miscalculation—a matter of eight or ten thousands of miles. If this continent had not happened to lie right across his way he and his merry men would all have gone fishing, with themselves for bait and the devil a hook among them. Firmness is persistence in the right; obstinacy is persistence in the wrong. With the light that he had, Columbus was so wildly, dismally and fantastically wrong that his refusal to turn back was nothing less than pig-headed unreason, and his crews would have been abundantly justified in deposing him. The wisdom of an act is not to be determined by the outcome, but by the performer’s reasonable expectation of success. And after all, the expedition failed lamentably. It accomplished no part of its purpose, but by a happy chance it accomplished something better—for us. As to the red Indians, such of them as have been good enough to assist in apotheosis of the man whom their ancestors had the deep misfortune to discover may justly boast themselves the most magnanimous of mammals.

And when all is conceded there remains the affronting falsehood that Columbus discovered America. Surely in all these drunken orgies of beatification—in all this carnival of lies there should be found some small place for Lief Ericsson and his wholesome Northmen, who discovered, colonized and abandoned this continent five hundred years before, and of whom we are forbidden to think as corsairs and slave-catchers. The eulogist is always a calumniator. The crown that he sets upon the unworthy head he first tears from the head that is worthy. So the honest fame of Lief Ericsson is cast as rubbish to the void, and the Genoese pirate is pedestaled in his place.

But falsehood and ingratitude are sins against Nature, and Nature is not to be trifled with. Already we feel, or ought to feel, the smart of her lash. Our follies are finding us out. Our Columbian Exhibition has for its chief exhibit our national stupidity, and displays our shame. Our Congress “improves the occasion” to make a disgraceful surrender to the Chadbands and Stigginses of churches by a bitter observance of the Sabbath. Managers of the show steal the first one thousand dollars that come into their hands by bestowing them upon a schoolgirl related to one of themselves, for a “Commemoration Ode” as long as the language and as foolish as its grammar—the ragged, tagless and bobtailed yellow dog of commemoration odes. And this while Whittier lived to suffer the insult, and Holmes to resent it. What further exhibits of our national stupidity and lack of moral sense space has been engaged for in the world’s contempt one can only conjecture. In the meantime state appropriations are being looted, art is in process of caricature, literature is debauched, and we have a Columbian Bureau of Investigation and Suppression with a daily mail as voluminous as that of a commercial city. If at the finish of this revealing revelry self-respecting Americans shall not have lost through excessive use the power to blush, and all Europe the ability to laugh, another Darwin should write another book on the expression of the emotions in men and animals.

That nothing might be lacking to the absurdity of the scheme, the falsehood marking all the methods of its execution, we must needs avail ourselves of an alteration in the calendar and have two anniversary celebrations of one event. And in culmination of this comedy of falsehood, the later date must formally open, with dedicatory rites, an exhibition which will not be open for six months. One falsehood begets another and another in the line of succession, until the father of them all shall have colonized his whole progeny upon the congenial soil of this new Dark Continent.

Why should not the four-hundredth anniversary of the rediscovery of America have been made memorable by fitly celebrating it with a becoming sense of the stupendous importance of the event, without thrusting into the forefront of the rites the dismal personality of the very small man who made the find? Could not the most prosperous and vain people of the earth see anything to celebrate in the four centuries between San Salvador and Chicago but it must sophisticate history by picking that offensive creature out of his shame to make him a central, dominating figure of the festival? Thank Heaven, there is one thing that all the genius of the anthropolaters can not do. Quarrel as we may about the relative claims to authenticity of portraits painted from description, we can not perpetuate the rogue’s visible appearance “in his habit as he lived.” Audible to the ear of the understanding fall with unceasing iteration from the lips of his every statue in every land the words, “I am a lie!”

1892.

THE RELIGION OF THE TABLE

WHEN the starving peasantry of France were bearing with inimitable fortitude their great bereavement in the death of Louis le Grand, how cheerfully they must have bowed their necks to the easy yoke of Philip of Orleans, who set them an example in eating which he had not the slightest objection to their following. A monarch skilled in the mysteries of the cuisine must wield the scepter all the more gently for his schooling in handling the ladle. In royalty, the delicate manipulation of an omelette soufflé is at once an evidence of genius, and an assurance of a tender forbearance in state policy. All good rulers have been good livers, and if most bad ones have been the same this merely proves that even the worst of men have still something divine in them.

There is more in a good dinner than is disclosed by removal of the covers. Where the eye of hunger perceives only a juicy roast that of faith detects a smoking god. A well cooked joint is redolent of religion, and a delicate pasty crisp with charity. The man who can light his after-dinner Havana without feeling full to the neck with all the cardinal virtues is either steeped in iniquity or has dined badly. In either case he is no true man. It is here held that it is morally impossible for a man to dine daily upon the fat of the land in courses and yet deny a future state of existence beatific with beef and ecstatic with all edibles. A falsity of history is that of Heliogabalus dining on nightingales’ tongues. No true gourmet would ever send a nightingale to the shambles so long as scarcer, and therefore, better songsters might be obtained.

It is a fine natural instinct that teaches the hungry and cadaverous to avoid the temples of religion, and a shortsighted and misdirected zeal that would gather them into it. Religion is for the oleaginous, the fat-bellied, chyle-saturated devotees of the table. Unless the stomach be lined with good things, the parson may say as many as he can and his truths shall not be swallowed nor his wisdom inly digested. Probably the highest, ripest, and most acceptable form of worship is performed with a knife and fork; and whosoever on the resurrection morning can produce from amongst the lumber of his cast-off flesh a thin-coated and elastic stomach showing evidences of daily stretchings done in the body will find it his readiest passport and best credential. Surely God will not hold him guiltless who eats with his knife, but if the deadly steel be always well laden with toothsome morsels divine justice will be tempered with mercy to that man’s soul. When the author of The Lost Tales of Miletus represented Sisyphus as capturing his guest, the King of Terrors, and stuffing the old glutton with meat and drink until he became “a jolly, rubicund, tun-bellied Death,” he gave us a tale that needs no “hæc fabula docet” to point out the moral.

I verily believe that Shakspeare writ down Fat Jack at his last gasp, as babbling, not o’ green fields, but o’ green turtle, and that starveling, Colley Cibber, altered the text from sheer envy of a good man’s death. To die well we must live well, is a familiar platitude. Morality is, of course, best promoted by the good quality of our fare, but quantitative excellence is by no means to be despised. Cæteris paribus, the man who eats much is a better Christian than the man who eats little; and he who eats little will live more godly than he who eats nothing.

REVISION DOWNWARD

THE big man’s belief in himself is not surprising, and in respect of a trial of muscular strength it is well founded, but the preference of all nations, their parliaments and people, for tall soldiers is a “survival,” an inherited faith held without examination. Men in battle no longer come into actual personal contact with their enemies in such a way that superior weight and strength are advantageous; and superior size is a disadvantage, for it means a larger mark for bullets.

In our civil war the big men were soonest invalided and sent home. They soonest gave in to the fatigues of campaign and charge. The little fellows, more “wiry” and enduring were the better material. I am compelled to affirm this from personal observation, knowing no other authority, though for so obvious a fact other authority must exist. Incidentally, I may explain that I am nearly six feet long.

What is true of men is true of horses. Strength, which implies size, is necessary in the horse militant, particularly in the artillery; but it is got at the expense of agility and endurance. The “toughest” American horse is the little Western “cayuse,” the “Indian pony” of our early literature.

This matter of so-called “degeneration” in the stature of men and animals has a more than military interest. It is not without meaning that all peoples have traditions of giants, and that all literatures are full of references to a remote ancestry of superior size and strength. Even Homer tells of his heroes before the walls of Troy hurling at one another such stones as ten strong men of his degenerate day could not have lifted from the earth.

The kernel of truth in all this is that the human race is actually decreasing in size. But this is not “degeneration.” It is improvement. Where are the megatherium, the dinosaurus, the mammoth and the mastodon? Where is the pterodactyl? What has happened to the moa and the other gigantic bird whose name I do not at this moment recall—maybe the epiornis? Condemned and executed by Nature for unfitness in the struggle for existence. The elephant, the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros are traveling the same road to extinction, and the late American bison could show them the way.

What is the disadvantage of bulk in animals? Feebleness. For an animal twice as heavy as another of the same species to have the same activity it would have to be not twice as strong, but four times as strong; and for some reason to this deponent unknown, Nature does not make it so. If four times as large, it would need to be sixteen times as strong.

Observe the large birds; the little ones, the swallows and “hummers,” can fly circles around them. The biggest of them can not fly at all and their wings, from disuse, are vestigial. Many insects can fly, not only proportionately faster and farther than even the humming-bird, but actually. Is there, possibly, a lesson in this for the ingenious gentlemen who expect the freight and passenger business of the future to be done in the air?

We are all familiar with the fact that if a man were as strong and agile in proportion as a flea he could leap several miles; one can figure out the exact number for oneself. If as strong as an ant he could shoulder and lug away a six-inch rifle and its carriage. Doubtless in the course of evolution (if evolution is permanent) man (if man is spared) will have the ant’s strength—and the ant’s size.

Considering the advantages that the smaller insects and animalculæ have in the struggle for existence and the wonderful powers and capacities it must have developed in them—which we know, indeed, from such observers as Sir John Lubbock it actually has developed in the ant—I can see no reason to doubt that some of them have attained a high degree of civilization and enlightenment.

To this view it may be said in objection that we, not they, are masters of the world. That has nothing to do with it; to insect civilization dominion may not be at all desirable. But are we masters? Wait till we have subdued the red flea and the house-fly; then, as we lay off our armor, we may more becomingly boast.

1903.

THE ART OF CONTROVERSY

I

ONE who has not lived a life of controversy, yet has some knowledge of its laws and methods, would, I think, find a difficulty in conceiving the infantile ignorance of the race in general as to what constitutes argument, evidence and proof. Even lawyers and judges, whose profession it is to consider evidence, to sift it and pass upon it, are but little wiser in that way than others when the matter in hand is philosophy, or religion, or something outside the written law. Concerning these high themes, I have heard from the lips of hoary benchers so idiotic argument based on so meaningless evidence as made me shudder at the thought of being tried before them on an indictment charging me with having swallowed a neighbor’s step-ladder. Yet doubtless in a matter of mere law these venerable babes would deliver judgment that would be roughly reasonable and approximately right. The theologian, on the contrary, is never so irrational as in his own trade; for, whatever religion may be, theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure, an invention of the devil. It is to religion what law is to justice, what etiquette is to courtesy, astrology to astronomy, alchemy to chemistry and medicine to hygiene. The theologian can not reason, for persons who can reason do not go in for theology. Its name refutes it: theology means discourse of God, concerning whom some of its expounders say that he has no existence and all the others that he can not be known.

I set out to show the folly of men who think they think—to give a few typical examples of what they are pleased to call “evidence” supporting their views. I shall take them from the work of a man of far more than the average intelligence dealing with the doctrine of immortality. He is a believer and thinks it possible that immortal human souls are on an endless journey from star to star, inhabiting them in turn. And he “proves” it thus:

“No one thinks of space without knowing that it can be traversed; consequently the conception of space implies the ability to traverse it.”

But how far? He could as cogently say: “No one thinks of the ocean without knowing that it can be swum in; consequently the conception of ocean implies the ability to swim from New York to Liverpool.” Here is another precious bit of testimony:

“The fact that man can conceive the idea of space without beginning or end implies that man is on a journey without beginning or end. In fact, it is strong evidence of the immortality of man.”

Good—now observe the possibilities in that kind of “reasoning”: The fact that a pig can conceive the idea of a turnip implies that the pig is climbing a tree bearing turnips—which is strong evidence that the pig is a fish. In each of the gentleman’s dicta the first part no more “implies” what follows than it implies a weeping baboon on a crimson iceberg.

Of the same unearthly sort are two more of this innocent’s deliveries:

“The fact that we do not remember our former lives is no proof of our never having existed. We would remember them if we had accomplished something worth remembering.”

Note the unconscious petitio principii involved in the first “our” and the pure assumption in the second sentence.

“We all know that character, traits and habits are as distinct in young children as in adults. This shows that if we had no pre-existence all men would have the same character and traits and appearance, and would be turned out on the same model.”

As apples are, for example, or pebbles, or cats. Unfortunately we do not “all” know, nor does any of us know, nor is it true, that young children have as much individuality as adults. And if we did all know it, or if any of us knew it, or if it were true, neither the fact itself nor the knowledge of it would “show” any such thing as that the differences could be produced by pre-existence only. They might be due to the will of God, or to some agency that no man has ever thought about, or has thought about but has not known to have that effect. In point of fact, we know that such peculiarities of character and disposition as a young child has are not brought from a former life across a gulf whose brinks are death and birth, but are endowments from the lives of others here. They are not individual, but hereditary—not vestigial, but ancestral.

The kind of “argument” here illustrated by horrible example is not peculiar to religious nor doctrinal themes, but characterizes men’s reasoning in general. It is the rule everywhere—in oral discussion, in books, in newspapers. Assertions that mean nothing, testimony that is not evidence, facts having no relation to the matter in hand, and (everywhere and always) the sickening non sequitur: the conclusion that has nothing to do with the premises. I know not if there is another life, but if there is I do hope that to obtain it all will have to pass a rigid examination in logic and the art of not being a fool.

II

In an unfriendly controversy it is important to remember that the public, in most cases, neither cares for the outcome of the fray, nor will remember its incidents. The controversialist should therefore confine his efforts and powers to accomplishment of two main purposes: 1—entertainment of the reader: 2—personal gratification. For the first of these objects no rules can be given; the good writer will entertain and the bad one will not, no matter what is the subject. The second is accomplishable (a) by guarding your self-respect; (b) by destroying your adversary’s self-respect; (c) by making him respect you, against his will, as much as you respect yourself; (d) by provoking him into the blunder of permitting you to despise him. It follows that any falsification, prevarication, dodging, misrepresentation or other cheating on the part of one antagonist is a distinct advantage to the other, and by him devoutly to be wished. The public cares nothing for it, and if deceived will forget the deception; but he never forgets. I would no more willingly let my opponent find a flaw in my truth, honesty and frankness than in fencing I would let him beat down my guard. Of that part of victory which consists in respecting yourself and making your adversary respect you you can be always sure if you are worthy of respect; of that part which consists in despising him and making him despise himself you are not sure; that depends on his skill. He may be a very despicable person yet so cunning of fence—that is to say, so frank and honest in writing—that you will not find out his unworth. Remember that what you want is not so much to disclose his meanness to the reader (who cares nothing about it) as to make him disclose it to your private discernment. That is the whole gospel of controversial strategy.

You are one of two gladiators in the arena: your first duty is to amuse the multitude. But as the multitude is not going to remember very long after leaving the show who was victorious, it is not worth while to take any hurts for a merely visible advantage. So fight as to prove to yourself and to your adversary that you are the abler swordsman—that is, the more honorable man. Victory in that is important, for it is lasting, and is enjoyed ever afterward when you see or think of the vanquished. If in the battle I get a foul stroke, that is a distinct gain, for I never by any possibility forget that the man who delivered it is a foul man. That is what I wanted to think him, and the very thing which he should most strenuously have striven to prevent my knowing. I may meet him in the street, at the club, any place where I can not help it; under whatever circumstances he becomes present to my consciousness I find a fresh delight in recalling my moral superiority and in despising him anew. Is it not strange, then, that ninety-nine disputants in a hundred deliberately and in cold blood concede to their antagonists this supreme and decisive advantage in pursuit of one which is merely illusory? Their faults are, first, of course, lack of character; second, lack of sense. They are like an enraged mob engaged in hostilities without having taken the trouble to know something of the art of war. Happily for them, if they are defeated they do not know it: they have not even the sense to ascribe their sufferings to their wounds.

1899.

IN THE INFANCY OF “TRUSTS”

THE battle against the “trusts” is conspicuously “on.” I venture to predict that it will fail, and to think that it ought to fail. That it ought to fail is, in this bad world, no good reason for thinking that it will; there is a strong numerical presumption the other way. For doubting the success of this “movement” there are reasons having nothing to do with the righteousness or unrighteousness of the cause. One is that the entire trend of our modern civilization is toward combination and aggregation. In the “concert of the great powers” of Europe we see its most significant, most beneficent and grandest manifestation. Denounce it how we will, fight it as we may, we are powerless to stay its advance in any department of human activity, social, industrial, commercial, military, political. It is the dominant phenomenon of our time. Labor combines into “unions,” capital into “trusts,” and each aggregation is powerful in everything except in combating its own methods in the other. The newspaper denounces the one or the other—and joins a syndicate of newspapers. “Department stores” spring up all over the land, draw the fire of the demagogue and are impotently condemned in the platform of the political trust that he adorns. Our great hotels are examples of the same centripetal law, and offices move to the center into buildings overlooking the church spires. Small farms are disappearing; railways absorb other railways and by pooling interests with those unabsorbed, evoke impotent legislation and vain “decisions.” Cities swallow and digest their suburbs. There are such things as guilds of authors; tramps devastate in organized bodies, and there has been even a congress of religions.

In the larger politics we observe the same tendency to aggregation; everywhere the unit of control is enlarging. In the Western Hemisphere we have had Pan-American congresses and seen the genesis of the Dominion of Canada. The United States have set up, and must henceforth maintain, what is virtually a protectorate of American Republics—a policy which commits us to their defense in every dispute with a European power, gives us a living interest in all their affairs and makes every square foot of South America in some sense United States territory.

Beyond the Atlantic it is the same. The entire continent of Africa is being parted among a few European nations already swollen to enormous growth by vast accretions of colonial dominion. And all over the world colonial federation is in the air. In Europe itself states are drawn together into kingdoms, kingdoms into empires. United Italy and United Germany are conspicuous and significant examples. Whether in the Other World a movement is afoot to establish Greater Heaven by annexing Hell neither the celestial ambassadors have informed us from the pulpit, nor the infernal from the tribune.

Multiplication of international “conventions” and “treaties” is one of the most striking of contemporary political phenomena. They are a minor species of international federation, attesting and perpetuating a community of interest which statesmen no longer venture to ignore. By some hopeful spirits they are regarded as preliminary committee-work of Tennyson’s “Parliament of Man.” International arbitration is a blind step in the same direction, profitable chiefly as evidence of the general trend. The set of the currents of human interests is from all points of the compass toward fewer and fewer nuclei of control. We may dislike the direction—may clamor against the current that seems to be affecting a particular interest, but we can neither stay nor turn it. We may utter (from the pocket) our disrelish of the “trust,” the “combine,” the “monopoly”; they are phases of the movement and we shall shriek in vain.

A few of the public advantages of combinations in production may be mentioned. Economy is the most obvious. A syndicate or trust requires just as many miners to dig a million tons of coal, for example, as a dozen independent companies did; but it does not require nearly so many salaried officers, nor nearly so many expensive offices. The man who is in danger of “losing his place” is not the laborer, yet it is the laborers who are loudest in their wail. A little reflection will suggest many other ways in which economy of production is served by combination; but deeper reflection, with some knowledge of commercial phenomena, is required to make it clear that economy of production benefits anybody but the producer. It is of some potential advantage, at least, to the consumer that the producer is able, without bankruptcy, to lower the price of the product if Heaven should put it into his heart to do so.

Stability of employment is promoted by combination of capital. A single concern employing ten thousand workmen will not hold them subject to the whims and caprices of a single mind conscious of its ability to replace them, as is the case with a man employing only a dozen. To a rich corporation carrying on a large business a strike means a great loss; to a score of small concerns it means a comparatively small loss each, and is incurred with a light heart. Labor may be very sure of having its demands attentively considered by those who cannot afford to be a day without it.

A great part of the clamor against trusts is the honest expression of a belief (promoted by many writers on political economy) that in commercial matters the only influence concerned in reduction of price is competition. Nearly all workingmen are more or less discontented with the “competitive system” in industrial affairs, but few have learned to challenge its benignity in trade. Competition is, in fact, only one of the several forces concerned in cheapening commodities and, generally speaking, not by any means the most considerable. It requires only a brief experience in producing and selling to convince an intelligent man that his prosperity is to be found in the large sales of his product that come of low prices. Having control of his market and a free hand in the management of his business such a man studies to reduce his selling price to the lowest possible point. An enlightened selfishness moves him to undersell himself whenever he can, as if he were his own competitor.

Not all men managing large commercial affairs are intelligent. Some of the trusts are organized and conducted with a view to enhancing rather than reducing prices; but these are bound to fail. By tempting the small concerns to remain in or re-enter the field, the trust cuts its own throat. Its primary purpose is to “crush out” the independent “small dealer,” and this it can do in only one way—lure away his customers by underselling him. If consumers really think that is so wicked a thing to do they have the remedy in their own hands. Let them refuse to leave the small dealer, and continue to pay him the higher price. This course would entail a bit of sacrifice, maybe, but it would have the merit of freedom from cant and hypocrisy. I know of nothing more ludicrous than the spectacle of these solemn consumers appealing to the law and public opinion to avenge upon the trusts the injuries of themselves and the small dealer—they having no injuries to avenge and the small dealer only such as themselves have inflicted by assisting the trusts to pluck him. The trust is condemned when it puts up prices, for that harms the consumer; it is condemned when it puts them down, for that harms the small dealer. In either case, both consumer and small dealer make common cause against the enemy that can harm neither without helping the other. If the history of human folly shows anything more absurd surely the historian must have been Rabelais, “laughing sardonically in his easy chair.”

The trusts, it is feared, will become too rich and powerful to be controlled. I do not think so. The reason that some of them already defy the power of the states is that, being so few, they have not until now attracted the serious attention of legislatures. And even now our anti-trust legislation is more concerned with the impossible task of abolition and prevention than with the practicable one of regulation. When we have learned by blundering what we can not do we shall easily enough learn what we can do, and find it quite sufficient. Governmental ownership and governmental control are what we are coming to by leaps and bounds; and with the industries and trade of the country in fewer hands the task of regulating them will be greatly simplified, for it is easier to manage one defendant in a single jurisdiction than many in a hundred.

But, it will be asked, is this to become a nation of employees working for a few hundreds of taskmasters? Not at all. The spirited and provident employee can become his own employer and the employer of others by investing his savings in the stock of a trust. The greater its gains, the greater will be his share of them. The “crushed out” small dealer, too, can recoup himself by becoming a part of what crushed him out. Naturally the tendency of the trusts will be to “work the stock market,” to “put up jobs” on the small investors, and so forth. Prevention of that sort of thing is a legitimate purpose for legislation, and promises better results than “drastic” measures to destroy the trusts themselves. To do the latter the laws would have to be drawn so as to forbid any commercial enterprise requiring more capital than its manager could himself supply. That would be a strange law which should undertake to fix the amount of capital to be combined under one management, or limit the number of persons permitted to supply it; yet nothing less “drastic” will “down the trusts.” And that would not, for it would be unconstitutional in every state of the Union. As a contribution to the literature of humor it would be slightly better than an apothegm by Josh Billings, but distinctly inferior to that Northwestern statute making it a felony to conduct a “department store”—every country store being of that felonious character.