Chapter II: Part 2

The prevalent habit of going to Europe is curious. For that matter the habits of contemporary Americans are very curious--the motor-car habit so conspicuous just now, their travel habit, much cultivated by farmers in winter and by city people in summer. They are remarkable habits; instructive, no doubt; expensive, but somehow at present there is money for them. Cordelia says she has traveled, and need not go on the road again for some time. I haven’t, but I am content to wait until it is convenient. This town of New York is trying to live in in some ways, but it can be said for it that here a great many things are brought to the door. There are pictures here, and very pleasing objects in the shop windows, and a variety of people, and spoken languages enough to satisfy the most ambitious, and a mighty interesting assortment of architecture, and more making while you wait. Some Americans in time past have been to Europe to good purpose--as witness our newer architecture--and some keep going there to pretty good purpose every year. That makes it the easier to stay at home and say _Cœlum non animum_ to oneself, and grub along. Cordelia and I bestow some of our spare attention on the growth of characters. They don’t seem to grow so very much on the road. Intelligence and powers of comparison may get a boost in the school of itineracy, but character not so probably. Corlear Van Terminal has been to Europe once or twice every year since I can remember, and gads constantly when at home, and all but sleeps in a motor-car, and yet, so far as I can see, he’s always just the same as he was the last time. I can’t see that he’s got ahead one lap. Chapman says the soul of man requires to be fed on the Bible and the Greek poets. One can do that at home, and one can work at home, and have faith and endure and plug along--all quite useful to character, and as developing in some ways as travel and Europe can be in others.

Cordelia and I have been reading about the Wesleys and the characters they got and how they got them. There were eighteen children or thereabouts, and a dozen or so grew up. Fine people, too; admirable stock and developed by discipline, privation, and pious training, all tempered by affection, humor, and lots of quality in the trainers. It makes you feel that character is a very expensive product, and hardly to be had at the ten-cent store where we and our contemporaries are prone to go for it.

The Wesleys were poor; very much poorer than is thought at all suitable in these times, even for the reverend clergy or for the teachers of our youth. The father was a clergyman; the mother was a lady of excellent abilities and education, and they lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Food was plain and hard to get in that family, and raiment was only slightly related to embellishment, and sickness was frequent and poverty perpetual; but with what audacity those Wesleys took hold on life! It makes our timid overtures look like mill-pond voyaging. Really it is wholesome to sit by the window, within ear-shot of the rattle of the street-cars and the chug-chug of the automobiles, and read of the past straits of the straitened and the courage of the bold, and observe on what shoulders of men and women, and through what bogs of privation, civilization has come along.

Not that the Wesleys had a preference for privation. The Reverend Samuel scrambled actively to maintain his family, but the increasing family outran his best diligence. We have changed all that. Families are less apt to outrun the paternal diligence in these days. So far as numbers go, they trudge along respectfully behind the census man and look over his shoulder at the figures. But that change is all in the day’s work, and springs out of changed conditions. People in our time are not curious enough about the processes of nature to raise very large families in order that they may watch near at hand the workings of the rule about the survival of the fittest. What they can observe of the application of that rule in written biography and among the neighbors seems to suffice, and in their own personal speculation they seem to care for no more progeny than they think they can contrive survival for, whether they are fittest or not. So butts in man, and tries to adjust the processes of nature to match his judgment and his taste in expenditure.

When it gets hot Cordelia will be going off to her father’s country palace in Connecticut, varying that experience in due time by a sojourn in my father’s country palace in New Jersey, and I shall spend with her so much of the time as my urban duties permit. That will save us from dependence on any fresh-air funds this year. Parents are a considerable convenience, especially nowadays, when so many of them have learned their place, and especially in this town of New York, where it costs all you can earn to provide a winter habitation, and where the young wives of earnest workers like me are apt to be a good deal out of a job in summer. Much more systematic provision is made to carry my kind of man through the summer than for Cordelia’s kind of woman--the clubs, for example. For man and wife at our stage of life parents, duly qualified and equipped, are a very suitable and timely provision. Indeed, I feel sometimes that the worthlessness and miscellaneous degeneracy of parents in these times is exaggerated. I don’t say this by way of casting an anchor to the windward, nor out of mere magnanimity, but because I honestly think so. People say that parental authority is all gone. Some think it good riddance; others lament. Since democracy came to be the fashion everybody wants his own way more than formerly, and gets it rather more, children included. But parental direction is still a factor in life, and parental influence is enormous, and influence gets to the springs of action and character even more effectually than dogmatic authority. It is much harder for a fool father to blight a Mirabeau nowadays, and those Wesley parents that I spoke of might in our time have meddled less with their daughters’ marriages, thereby, possibly, avoiding some disasters; for the Wesley girls chose ill, but their parents, in choosing for them, chose still worse. Parents doubtless realize the limitations of their calling better than they did, and a good deal more is done in these days than formerly to piece out their deficiencies and help them with their duties. Doctors give them better advice than the Wesley parents got; schools in this country--in spite of the constant stream of criticism and deprecation which schools endure--average surely a great deal better than schools did fifty years ago. The raising and training of the young, being as important a matter as there is in sight, has had protracted attention from some of the best minds, and has had money showered on it in a huge profusion. All that has been more or less helpful to parents, but it does not warrant the idea, so popular among current commentators, that parents have come to be supernumeraries on the public stage. That is a ridiculous notion, the absurdity of which would be demonstrated in about half a day if parents universally should quit work and take a half-holiday.

We ought to save a little money this summer living on our fathers. It is a grand way to save. I don’t know of a better. It makes frugality possible without self-denial--at least without privation. They say there is excellent sport to be got out of self-denial, and I read that saving money and the repression of the impulse to spend it make like everything for the development of character. I dare say that is so. It is all a part of self-control, and of government by intelligence instead of by impulse. And self-control, including timely and suitable repression of expenditure, means freedom, and power to give, and the power to do, and the power to jump in and seize an opportunity. Possibly I can acquire the accomplishment of not buying some things that I want, even though I have the money to pay for them. That will be a wonderful acquisition to me, though I have got so far as to be mighty particular about what I buy on credit. One has got to get as far as that if he is going to get married on such an income as ours.

That was a great stroke--getting married. I don’t see how I had the nerve to do it. Probably I hadn’t. I dare say we got married on Cordelia’s nerve, for when you come down to the facts it was she who took most of the chances, and really made the choice. To choose and to decide things seem in our day to be very largely women’s work. I am more and more impressed with that as I go more and more to Cordelia to get her views. I get them on pretty much everything except points of law. I am the specialist on that and on the earning of money, but she is the specialist on the arrangement of life. I guess she is an obedient wife, but in practice I seem to make suggestions and she to make decisions. She makes them with great consideration and indulgence for me, and with a degree of judgment that saves me much mental effort. The opportunities of mental effort that I enjoy below Canal Street, between ten o’clock and six, suffice to keep my mind exercised, and I am no glutton about making unnecessary mental efforts after I get uptown. Perhaps that simplifies life for Cordelia. I wonder what women do whose husbands don’t have to work!

III

COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT

We have been out to Orange County to spend a week-end with the Peytons. They are about our age, but differ from us in condition in that they have adequate means of support. Archie Peyton got them by inheritance, and they are very ample and enable Archie and Eleanor to have all the desirable things and do everything they want to. They try conscientiously to live up to their opportunities, making pretty hard work of it, but that’s natural, for it _is_ hard work. They went abroad in the summer, and now they are providing country lodging and food and sport for their available friends. This sport is golf and tennis and road exercises, relieved by dabs of riding after hounds, for the Orange County Hunt meets out in their country. Eleanor says it’s nice, except that they have to invite too many people who have had too much to eat and are trying to get thin, whereas it would be more satisfactory to be inviting people who have had too little to eat and were trying to get fat.

That’s not why they asked us, for we had been living on our parents all summer and were quite plump. They have got motor-cars, horses, butlers, valets, chrysanthemums, greenhouses, and all the apparatus of pride. For us on sixty dollars a week it is rather expensive even to nibble at it. We can’t do it often, but we saved money living on our parents, and the fall is a grand season, and to fill one’s lungs with the air of it and one’s vision with autumn colors is worth some fiscal strain, and it always does me good, too, spiritually even more than physically, to get over a little easy country on a horse. Besides, Archie is my client, and that’s important. I have discovered that one of the great secrets of prosperity and advancement in this world, especially in the profession that I affect, is to have one’s coevals grow up and prosper and have business, especially law business, that somebody must be paid to do. When people have these opportunities of lawful gain to bestow they seem to like to bestow them on habitual friends, provided that they have any and can persuade themselves that they are competent. A great deal of opportunity goes by association--is bound to.

To be honest, I did not make all these discoveries solely on my own hook. Though they are simple enough. Major Brace expounded some of them to me after dinner. He gave me great encouragement in the effort to exist. Promotion, he said, cometh neither from the East nor the West, but from the cemetery, so it was almost sure to come to any one that could hold out; and in the long run a man who was sober, competent and diligent, and intelligent about his associations couldn’t very well miss it. There were so many advantageous jobs to distribute and each generation had them in turn, as the world and what is in it came to be its property. Moreover, as things go now and with us, each generation has a lot more things and opportunities and good employments than the generation that preceded it, not only absolutely, but _per capita_, because the increase of wealth and business is outrunning the increase of population. It wasn’t a scramble, the Major insisted, for a share in a limited quantity of goods, but for an unlimited quantity, and the harder the scramble the more there was to distribute.

All that came out of a discussion whether we should restrict our wants or try to satisfy them. Try to satisfy them, the Major said. Effort in that direction enriches and develops civilization. It tends to increase the supply of commodities. It is not the satisfied people, nor the people who are content to go without, that make civilization go forward, but the unsatisfied ones, who want a lot of things they have not got, and get out and go after them and build railroads and factories and improve agriculture and invent machinery and multiply automobiles and take an interest in aeroplanes and try to accumulate money and keep it employed.

“Are you doing all those things, Major?” said I.

“Me? Oh no! I belong to the police. My job is to help to keep order and protect property. I never had one of the large-sized appetites for commodities--just food, clothes, shelter, money in the bank, and something to give away, and protection against rainy days, and enough to keep my wife and children off the Charity Organization when I get run over by a motor-car--that’s all I want. You see, I’m a lazy man and like to read the newspaper and invite my soul, and everything I can’t get by working five or six hours a day I go without. Don’t take me for a pattern. I haven’t got the progress of civilization really at heart.”

“The express-drivers help it on, I suppose, Major, when they strike for more pay?” They were striking at that time.

“No doubt. All that should help distribution, provided the funds they are all striking to share exist in sufficient quantity. Distribution is next in importance to production. You’ve got to have something to distribute, and strikes are not immediately helpful to production, as you may have noticed, but the organization of labor ought to be helpful to distribution. Only nowadays when an important strike is won the cost of it is immediately shifted onto the general public by a gentle elevation of prices.”

The Major is a lawyer and practises considerably as a trustee, and is doubtless more concerned with the philosophy of business than if his energies were enlisted in selling goods and wresting a profit out of it. “Mankind can be eased considerably in this earthly competition,” he went on, “by great increases of production, great extensions of agriculture and manufacturing and transportation, and great economies in all of them, provided that distribution fairly keeps pace with production.” It comes nearer to doing so, he thought, than all the exhorters and socialist people admit, because products have to find a market; but when it comes to that, this is a fairly roomy world, with many mouths and backs in it, and transportation is cheap and markets are world-wide, and goods as yet don’t necessarily pile up on any of us because there are a lot of them produced.

And so the Major argued in effect that one way to help bring on the millennium was to increase the production and distribution of commodities. I suppose that _is_ one way. There must be some connection between the millennium and civilization. The millennium isn’t going to swoop down on a world that has no meat in the house and where half the people live in trees. It is true that it was not a lack of commodities that drove Eve to eat the apple and brought on working for a living, and most of us realize that man cannot live by bread alone, and that with binsful of commodities on every corner free for the taking the world would not be saved nor the folks in it satisfied and happy. What an interesting simplification of wants would happen in that case, and how quickly people would come to ascertain what they really needed and refuse to be loaded up with anything else! Still, there is a connection between human progress and wants and the commodities that appease them. A missionary’s daughter told me once about her father’s experience with the South-African blacks. Now and then he would make a convert, and always, if it was a thorough job, the convert would begin to reach out after civilization--some clothes, a bigger dwelling--presently, I dare say, a top-hat. It wasn’t all mere acquisitiveness, either, for some of the incidents of conversion were inconvenient, especially the troublesome domestic readjustment called for by the theory of the sufficiency of one wife. Of course, the millennium may swoop down and find us running about in skins or less, and living on roots, but I bet it won’t. It is much more likely to be welcomed by flocks of aeroplanes to an enormously productive earth, worked for all it is worth by people intelligent enough to have abolished poverty and solved the problem of distribution.

What does man want here below, anyway? Room and bath, food, clothes, a newspaper, and a job and fair opportunities to better himself. He has got the newspaper already. In this country, at least, there are enough newspapers to go around, and in the cities any one who declines to buy one can supply himself out of the first ash barrel. There is nothing so cheap as newspapers, and that is a consequence of the pressure of commodities on the market. The advertiser pays all but a cent’s worth of the cost of the newspaper, and would gladly pay that, no doubt, but for the fear of arousing the reader’s suspicions. How much this has to do with the fact that I hear of likely young men who come out of the nurseries of learning and look wistfully at the newspapers and fail to see attractive jobs on them and go away and do something else, I don’t know. It may be that likely young men never did troop in large swarms into newspapering. Banking usually looks better to them, because men get rich at it, and law because a knowledge of it is no hindrance in any calling.

The supply of rooms and baths is not so nearly equal to human needs as the supply of newspapers, but it is gaining on the population. Out there at the Peytons’ house, for example, it has caught up. In all the newer country houses hereabouts the great architectural feature is room and bath. In a Long Island house just completed that I inspected last spring before the family moved in there were between twenty and twenty-five bathrooms. There were three in the family, with a liability to guests if the owner’s wife ever succeeded in getting rested. I thought this marked a considerable forward stride in civilization. Church unity still hangs back a bit, but we are getting pretty strong on plumbing, and the millennium may find us with a bath apiece.

The Peytons hadn’t so many bathrooms, because their house was not so large as the Long Island house, and they had to save part of it for clothed appearances; but they had many, and Cordelia and I admired them very much. Living in a six-hundred-dollar New York flat makes marvelously for the appreciation of space, light, air, and running water. Of course the Peytons’ country house had all these blessings, and, besides, was delightfully fresh and clean and embellished with very pleasing adornments. “No doubt, Cordelia,” said I, “you might have had a set of things like this if you had shown a little timely judgment.” “Possibly;” said Cordelia; “this is a nice set, too. How many bathrooms shall _we_ need, Peregrine?”

“One--two--four--six; six will do us, I think, with a little management and a few extra sets of bath-robes and slippers. We don’t want to keep a plumber. To have more than a dozen makes a home too much like a hotel.”

But there are a number of things that we shall want before we have even one house with even six bathrooms in it. I do not greatly covet a superfluity of bathrooms, though enough of them is one of the great luxuries of our time. Hot water is one of the leading valuables of life--one of the things that help to reconcile humanity to civilization and to offset its interference with such privileges as living out-of-doors and not having newspapers. That has long been appreciated. I believe the Greeks liked hot water and made provision to have it. Certainly the Romans liked it and went in strong for baths. The English have liked it and had it in fair quantity, along with daily deluges of cold water. We Americans delight in it and have more of it already, I suppose, than any people ever had before, and our supply is constantly increasing and constantly spreading from the cities to the country. It is cheap, as things go, and there is fair prospect that there will eventually be enough to go around. To have a universal supply of hot water and newspapers and a long start toward a universal supply of what we call education is doing not so ill as things go. I can wait for the six bathrooms, or even three. We have one now. One is a great blessing. I suppose it is our egotism that makes us more or less indifferent to what is not ours and cannot be for the present. What most of us want is the next thing--the thing almost within our reach. We don’t think about the things that are altogether beyond the scope of our fortunes. We do not covet them, nor are we jealous of our neighbors who have them, unless we conclude that we have too little because they have too much. If the competition seems to us fair, we rather like to see prizes go to those who can win them, for a life with prizes in it for winners, even material prizes, looks richer and more attractive to most of us than a life planned on the principle of a division of the gate money among all who come in.

Do you notice how strong the propensity is among all the fairly comfortable people to consider their own condition and their own standards as normal and truly desirable, and those of other folks, whether they have more or less, as a little off? I think that propensity is a wonderful provision for human happiness. We value, as a rule, what seems the best thing obtainable for ourselves. Whether it is abundance or a stimulating degree of privation, we incline to think it is a good thing for us and a better thing than other people have who have something different.

“Cordelia,” said I, while we were talking about the bathroom, “you might have got a better set of things with some other man, but he would not have the experience or the discipline that I shall have by the time I have acquired the set of things that you ought eventually to get with _me_.” There you are! We think we’re better off than the Peytons because we haven’t got so much as they have, and better off than the Goves because we’ve got more (mostly prospective) than they have. _We_ are the standard. We laugh at ourselves, but surely it’s a fine thing to have so strong a bent toward toleration of things as they are, and expectation of being pleased with them as they’re going to be. I suppose it is just a different form of this same self-satisfaction that makes the teetotalers want to vote away everybody’s grog, and the college authorities insist that all the boys shall want to be high scholars like themselves, and the appeased women deprecate the agitations of the unappeased for woman’s suffrage.

Probably Cordelia and I are exceptionally resigned to our condition; more so than the average of mankind. Yes, I suspect that is so, but I suspect also that it is only a provisional resignation. We reached out and got the next thing--each other. That was highly satisfactory and a good deal better than if we had waited for something else. But this reaching out for the next thing seems to be a continuing process, and I suspect it has to go on till stopping-time, and that satisfaction in life is pretty closely geared to the ability to maintain it effectively. That is not altogether a soothing reflection, but I don’t know that it is desirable that all reflections should be soothing. A fair proportion of them ought to be stimulating. I observe that I read the writings of the efficient when my energies are high, and when they are low find solace in those of the lazy--only they must not be too lazy to write. Some of the very best writers were lazy, and struggled with it. Maybe it’s hard work to be a writer, but then it’s hard work to be _much_ of anything. But that’s nothing! Nobody wastes sympathy, or ought to, on hard workers, provided they get in fair measure what they go out after. And one of the greatest things they get is increased ability to work hard. This is not entirely my discovery. It was suggested by an aged friend, but as far as I have experimented with it I think it is so. Of course, the suggestion was accompanied by a reminder in quotation-marks that life would be endurable except for its pleasures, but that’s not to be accepted too confidently. It depends on the pleasures and whether they please or not. There are a lot of things that are labeled “pleasure,” and most of them are price-marked in more or less forbidding figures, but the considerable satisfactions of life seem to be conditions of the mind which may be related to living conditions that cost money, but which are not themselves price-marked in figures that are at all plain. There’s polo, a good, lively pleasure and fairly high-priced and consumptive also of time, but I judge the main value of active sports of that sort to aspiring men is indirect. They contribute to a physical efficiency which is useful just so far as it promotes mental efficiency--sanity and activity of mind, spontaneity of thought and speech and power. No doubt for some men sports are a form of discipline. They train some spirits to exertion, and make for energy and supply driving force for work, but, dear me, they take a lot of time and tend to consume more energy than they furnish. They are fine for boys, soldiers, Englishmen, and people with a disposition to grow fat, and an excellent vacation employment for some people, but I suspect there is an economic warrant for the disposition of the common run of American adults to intrust the transaction of their active sports to persons who can give their whole time to them, and whose skilful exertions it is restful now and then to watch.

I remember my classmate Hollaway saying one day of a group of sporty young gentlemen whom we were discussing, “The things that seem to amuse them would not give me pleasure.” That was true. Hollaway liked to _think_. That was the way he had most of his fun. He was willing to put in enough physical exertion to make his machinery run smoothly, and liked, as a rule, to do it quickly and have it over, but he got his fun out of what went on in his head, and in talk. He practised and enjoyed all the mental processes, observation, cogitation, consideration, reflection, rumination, imagination, and the rest, with resulting and accompanying discourse. Nobody around had more fun than Hollaway. Somebody said he had a “happy activity of the soul.” Maybe that is out of Emerson. I’ll ask Cordelia, who confesses to some acquaintance with Emerson. But, anyhow, the happy activity of the soul is good to have and not visibly price-marked nor denied necessarily, like the opera and polo, to the impecunious.

Going out to visit the Peytons was an enlivening change, and gave us new topics for discourse and reflection, but the best of it was to talk about it with Cordelia. I like the tranquillity of being married--married, that is, to Cordelia. Visiting the Peytons is a bit of embroidery on the fabric of life, but coming home to the flat and staying in all the evening and reading as many of the contemporary periodicals as I can manage to get hold of and get time to explore, and talking to Cordelia--that is the very web of life. I seldom have the sense of justification in life so strongly as in these domesticated discourses with Cordelia. I have got her to reading the contemporary periodicals and the newspapers and keeping some track of what is going on in the world. I don’t know what kind of radicals we will turn out to be if we keep our minds on that diet. But I get the other point of view down-town, where my employment is largely to assist my boss to help gentlemen with property to adjust the management of their concerns to laws contrived with intent to retard their processes of acquisition. It is nip and tuck in these days between the gentlemen who make the progressive political periodicals and the gentlemen who control the railroads and banks and trusts and their employees, to determine who is going to run the country. As things are, the country is run, after a fashion. The wheels do turn, and production and distribution are accomplished. To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and the production is pretty wasteful compared with what the professional economists say it might be, and the stream of distribution runs so lumpy that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion of the Lord’s will seems to be done, and hopeful people calculate that the proportion is increasing, though you might not always think so to read the progressive periodicals. A large part of the happy activity of nature consists of the big creatures eating the little ones, but we complain awfully about it when we think we see it going on in human society, and the law, whose humble but aspiring servant I am, was invented to check it. Everything that is invented to check that propensity tends to develop an appetite of its own. The law, the church, the walking delegate, all have in them the ingredients of voracity, and I dare say the same ingredients are latent in the progressive periodicals. Who has the brains to govern will govern, and the mere substitution of lean masters for fat ones is not necessarily an advantage. I suppose it is largely our own consciousness of that that restrains us from taking the country away from the interests and giving it to the periodicals; and besides, of course, it is harder, because the interests hang on so to what is theirs, and the law, which is me, finds so many obstacles to detaching them.

Well, practising law all day below Canal Street in the interest of the interests, and reading the progressive periodicals all the evening--there’s such a raft of them--in the interest of righteousness, altruism, and the people, ought to make me a very broad-minded person--so broad-minded probably that I shall lose sense of direction and fetch up in the driver’s place on a Brooklyn street-car.

And yet probably not, with Cordelia as a partner. I have consulted her about going to the Assembly. Not that anybody wants me to go there, but it looks interesting. I wish my boss would employ me to go there and see that I did not starve. But he couldn’t very well. I would be a legislator in the employ of an employee of the interests, and all the fun would be gone. Father and Father-in-law might finance me, but neither of them is that much of a patriot. If I were employed by one of the periodicals there would be less scandal in that, but that’s not a practical thought. I dare say that I shall have to make considerably more progress in the practice of my profession before I can go to Albany, and by that time I shall have become too valuable to myself and dependent associates to be spared to go there. After all, I got married, and I suppose that is as fatal an indiscretion as a person of my attenuated means should permit himself at this stage of his endeavors. It is about politics very much as it is about getting married--if you wait till you’re ready, you can’t. It seems as if everything had to be shot on the wing. We ought to be governed by people of independent means. They are the only people who can afford the employment. But most people who have independent means have a point of view to match, and there you are--it isn’t quite the point of view of a large proportion of the governed. Just so contradictory things are, and yet, after all, it’s that that makes the game.

My, my! We have been married nearly a year, and have not yet repented. Our circumstances improve a little from month to month. Besides The Firm’s regular contribution to my maintenance, I pick up odd jobs now and then on my own account. Father and Father-in-law take occasional chances in the lottery of my accomplishments by sending me bits of business, and I pick up other bits from other people. I have even made literary compositions, and tried, not always fruitlessly, to sell them. That is a good enough game, if one dared give himself to it, but, except as compounded with politics, economics, or public service of some sort, it leads away from law, so I don’t follow it hard.

IV

THE BABY

Undoubtedly the baby makes a great difference. He fills up the flat, for one thing. I foresee that he will turn us out of it. Nevertheless he is valuable, and probably worth his space even in New York. His name is Samuel French. Cordelia named him after her father. She is extremely pleased with him. So is Matilda Finn, so is my mother, so is my mother-in-law. Even the trained assistant to nature who was here to welcome him seemed very pleased to meet Samuel, and both his grandfathers have been around to inspect him, and have approved and duly benefacted him. Neither of these aged but still profitable men has had a grandchild before, and they seem to like it. As for me, naturally I am like to burst with the pride at being associated, however humbly, with an achievement so important. Father-in-law is building a new room on to his summer palace in Connecticut, with a view, I think, to the more convenient entertainment of his new descendant, and I think that nothing but consideration for my fiscal incapacity withholds him from building Cordelia a country house. By various expedients I have swelled our sixty dollars a week to about seventy, which is a grateful gain, and appreciable in spite of the demands of the Post-office, the public transportation companies, the market-men, and the other agencies of depletion, so corroding to the fiscal being; but even--let me see, seven times fifty-two weeks--but even $3,640 is not an annual income that seems equal to the maintenance of two residences. I guess if we are to have a suburban home it must be an all-the-year-round home for the present, and father-in-law’s place in Connecticut is not just the right place for that. It is some miles from the station, and involves maintenance of horsepower of some sort, and of course that is unspeakable except as father-in-law provides it. Our lay would be a villa about the length of a baseball ground from the station, or, better still, something five cents from Wall Street by tunnel or trolley, and you catch the car on the next corner.

But think of the crowd on the car!

No, I won’t think of it. It is the common lot hereabouts, and I should be able to stand my share of it, which I would not get in full, anyhow, because, being a lawyer, I can leave home a little later, and leave for home usually a little earlier or later than the great body of the workers for a living.

My new responsibility has brought me a variety of new appreciations. As a parent I find I have new sentiments about parents, and increased esteem and regard for them as pillars that uphold life and direct it. Beyond doubt, they are fine for upholding grandchildren. No doubt there would be considerably more grandchildren in our world if there were more grandparents who recognized their responsibilities and made provision, as a matter of course, to meet them. But that does not accord with the lively individualism of our generation. Not only are we all desirous of independent life, but our parents prefer it for us. Accordingly, when we get above the social plane in which independent life for man and wife can be maintained for twenty dollars a week, marriage is apt to come late. There are immense advantages about that social plane in which twenty dollars a week is a complete living, and the wife is cook and housemaid, wife, mother, and nurse all in one, and the state provides education, and the doctor adjusts his charges to your income, and all the man has to look after is food, clothes, shelter, and pocket money! I hope the people who are born with a call on that phase of existence appreciate their luck. To rise to the twenty-dollar-a-week phase must be full of satisfactions, but to drop to it is quite another matter. Whatever starting-point is dealt out to us, it is from that point that we have to go on, and, whether we like it or not, the point at which it behooves us to arrive is measured from the point at which we start.

Raising babies must have been very much simplified by the invention of the kodak. There is no attitude, expression, sentiment, costume, or absence of costume of Samuel that this handy little instrument has not perpetuated. And inasmuch as Samuel varies and progresses from hour to hour, acquiring personality, weight, and accomplishments, changing in his features and developing new resemblances, the click of the kodak is almost as frequent in our flat as the whir of the sewing-machine. When infants had to run to the photographer’s for every new picture, I don’t see how they got their natural rest. You know they sleep about eighteen hours a day. One would think that with all that somnolence a baby would be no more trouble than a dormouse, but Samuel is almost a complete occupation. As an example of woman’s work he qualifies by being never done. When he is asleep he is about to waken, and when he is awake he is about to sleep, and either way he is either taking nourishment or about to take it, or taking a bath, or changing his clothes, or acquiring ideas, or taking first lessons in language. Since I have known him I sympathize with the woman who thought it just as easy to raise six children as one, because one took up all your time, and six couldn’t do more.

I never saw Cordelia so much amused with anything, and I admit to being, myself, more diverted and entertained than I should have thought possible. I had a puppy once that was a delight, so cheerful, so prodigal of affectionate welcomes, and so incessant in his activities. Mother has got him now. She appropriated him--or he her--and kept him, she said, to remind her of me. But Samuel beats the puppy. He does not get around as briskly yet as the puppy did, but he has the same delight in very simple toys, and a similar liveliness of mind, and a like capacity to be pleased. He is quite a lot like that puppy as he was when I first got him.

I didn’t need anything to increase my interest in getting home at night. Cordelia attended to that. But Samuel has increased it. He is awake when I get home, and, though he is usually getting ready to go to bed, he always expresses a flattering satisfaction at meeting me again, and has interesting details of progress to report, and smiles, and puts out arms, and makes inarticulate noises, and sits in my lap, and makes an inventory of my accessible properties.

And, of course, there is a great deal to be told about him, including the day’s report of what has been said of him by admiring friends, and of the visits he has made and received, and, now and then, statistics of his weight and progress in intelligence and activity. I think Cordelia talks to Matilda Finn and her various visitors about him all day, and then to me about him most of the evening. It is surprising that so small a carcass should afford so much discourse.

We have entered him at a suitable school, which is perhaps another token of the incompleteness of my emancipation. You know that for some years past some of the boarding-schools have been so highly esteemed, for one reason or another, by unemancipated parents that they have coveted the privilege of having their sons go to them, and, to insure getting it, have entered their boys’ names at those schools as soon as they were born. So I entered Samuel at the school where I went myself. If that implied incompleteness of emancipation in me, I don’t care. Samuel must have his chance. It is enough for _me_ to be emancipated. Emancipation is a personal affair, like conversion, and no one ought to try to force his emancipation on any one else, least of all a parent on a child. Samuel may prefer the old order, and by the time he grows up we may have the wherewithal to enable him to experiment with it if there is any of it left. I don’t know that there will be, and, to be sure, when did life offer a bigger or more uncertain speculation than this that Samuel yawns and gapes in the face of? Perhaps I ought not to call it uncertain, except as to times and means and details, but that’s enough; and as to those the uncertainty is ample. The great task that is doing now seems to be the improvement of the common lot. No doubt that is always going on when civilization is in its forward moods, but nowadays there is uncommon urgency about it, and remarkable command and handling of the progressive forces, and apparent enfeeblement of the powers of resistance. It is very attractive, very hopeful, but I suppose no thoughtful person denies that it is possible to improve the common lot so much and so fast as to force society into the hands of a receiver. That is one possibility that little Samuel is up against, and for that matter so are his parents; for the receivership may come, and reorganization after it, before Samuel is old enough to sit into the game.

My! my! what will you see, little son? All the women voting, all the trades-unions joined under a single head, armies abolished, the immediate will of majorities the supreme and only law, detachable marriage, detachable judges, detachable constitutions?

You may, you may; and so may your parents, for that matter, and are as likely to, perhaps, as you are. But stay with us, none the less. There seems always to be good sport in this world for good sports--no matter what may be going on. Folks lived, and liked to live, hereabouts when the men walked between plow-handles with a rifle across their shoulders, and they can stand considerable variations in public habits without losing the appetite for life. An unchanging order is bound to grow tiresome, always did, always will; though outside of China it is hard to find one, and even there the old order is moving now. We must try to make a good sport of Samuel; one who will be interested in life no matter what, and, when new rules are making, have a say about them.

I don’t see why I hang back so about votes for women. At times I think I am not opposed. I think I don’t care. But I read all the opposed discourse that has any sense in it with sympathy, and all the _pro_ discourse in a critical spirit, rejoicing when it seems to me unsound. It is true enough that there is no compelling reason why I should want votes for women. _My_ proprietors don’t want them. Mother sniffs at them. Cordelia is observant, with very much such an instinctive leaning toward the _antis_ as I have. Why should I excite myself about “equal suffrage” when my ladies like things better as they are? Aren’t mother and Cordelia representative women? A great deal more so, I think, than most of the suffragists. The mass of women hereabouts don’t seem to be concerned about voting. The suffragists in agitating to make them concerned seem to be trying to create an artificial want. They go about to persuade women that they are oppressed, and are rated politically with insane persons, criminals, and aliens.

Now, what is all that? Is it progress, or is it mischief? Is it based on a mistaken conception of women’s job, or is it a natural detail of the redistribution of powers and privileges that appears to be going on? Am I opposed because I am a pig and a stand-patter and an old fogy? Are votes worth so much fuss, anyhow, and is it going to make any vital difference whether American women have them or not?

I don’t know that it is. The women and the men are so inextricably bound together that it is inconceivable that with woman suffrage the vote should divide in proportions materially different from what happens now. But that’s not a reason for letting suffrage come. I do think that at present men and women do not long work together on the same level at the same tasks. Where women come in either they work under the direction of men or the men go out. The departments of life in which they rule--and there are plenty of them--are those in which men do not compete. I don’t think they can compete with men as voters or as organizers and directors of political government. If the suffragists get their votes for women, they will get an enlarged electorate controlled by men as now. And why should it be expected that the controlling men in that case will be better than they are now? Are the mass of women wiser, more honest, and better judges of men than the mass of men? I don’t think so. I think men and women are just mates. There seems to be a woman to match every man, but different from him, and a man to match almost every woman. It is not sensible to compare a superior woman with an ordinary or inferior man, and point out that she is fitter to vote than he is. Of course she is, but that does not touch the real question, which is whether government will be better conducted with votes for all women than it is now.

Those agitators talk about the “injustice” of depriving women of the ballot. They might as well talk of the injustice of the refusal of water to run uphill. There’s no injustice about it. It is nature. If it can be bettered, all right. Water will run uphill if there is enough pressure behind it. But if injustice has been done woman about her vote, it was done when she was born female and not male, and the appeal from that lies to the higher court.

Was there any done? Take it by and large, is it a misfortune to born a girl and not a boy? That may happen to any of us any time we happen to be born. It’s a toss-up. It’s not the slightest credit to us to be born male, and certainly it should not be the slightest discredit to us to be born female; but according as we are born male or female we are born to different duties. If political government is one of the male duties, civilization will not get ahead by having men loosen their hold on it. For my part I suppose that down in the intricacies of my composition I have an instinctive conviction, or hunch, that political government is a male attribute, and that out of that comes my objection to abdicate, or even dilute, my share of it. Instinctive convictions have great weight in these matters, though the surface arguments they put out may be inadequate or mistaken, as the anti-suffrage arguments are so apt to be. The suffragist expounders demolish them, and think that they have accomplished something; but, alas! the demolition of puerile arguments leaves the question just where it was, with the pith of it still untouched. Still I think the agitation does good, bothering people like me, and making us think; asking us, What does belong to women, then, if not votes? How else are you going to give them equal life? What does justice demand for them if not the suffrage?

If the males since the beginning of time have overestimated their importance and erred in regarding themselves as specialists in government, then it is only a matter of time when we shall be disabused of that error and shaken down into our rightful places. But if government--meaning political government rather than domestic--really prospers better in the long run in the hands of males, in their hands it is likely to stay--the substance of it certainly, however that shadow we call a vote may flutter off, and wherever it may alight.

Nothing happens without a cause. If the men are to be abased, doubtless it will be for their abundant sins. If they will not work as men should, they will lose their jobs. If they will not govern as men should, they will be governed. History is a record of the strong races subduing the weak, and the wise the foolish, to the end that strength and wisdom shall prevail in human affairs. In these days of Monroe doctrines and alliances and arbitration treaties those harsh processes seem to have been superseded. Is this invasion by women of the province of men a new expedient of Nature to preserve the competition that is essential to human progress?

We cannot beat Nature. She is obdurate, resourceful, impossible to fool, with a trick to meet every trick that is offered her. She seems determined that man shall come to something and plays man against man to make him better himself, and is probably equal, if occasion demands it, to play one half of him against the other. For of course that is what woman is--the other half of man. There cannot be a real competition between the two halves, for they are inseparably joined and have to pull each other along. But for all that, they are distinct individuals, and one in a given period may make faster progress than the other, with a good deal of disturbance of relations and equities and ideas. What man gets, woman gets; what woman gets, man gets. When woman gets education, liberty, opportunity, protection, the whole race gets those benefits.

Then shall we say that when woman gets the vote the race is that much ahead? It may be, but to me it has not been so revealed up to these presents. Who gave man strength gave him dominion. If he loses dominion it will be because he has either misused his strength or lost it.