Chapter II

“It is a physician’s mission to cure disease and alleviate suffering,” says Dr. Nehemiah Nickerson. “There is a point beyond which he can not cure disease; after that it is his duty to alleviate suffering.”

A mission implies a mandate; a mandate an authority superior to that of the missionary. I do not know from what higher authority a physician derives his own, nor who has the right to lay down the lines within which his activity must lie. Within the civil and the moral law he is a free agent—free to observe or disregard the customs of his trade, as conscience may determine. He has no mandate, no mission.

It is true, however, that to cure disease and to alleviate suffering are purposes commonly recognized as important among those belonging to the practice of medicine. Having failed to accomplish the first, how far may a physician go in accomplishing the second?—that is a question that finds no answer in any imaginary mandate. It is not even answered by the Decalogue, for the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has so many obvious and necessary limitations that its value as a guide to conduct is virtually nothing. Dr. Nickerson believes he may go so far as to kill the patient he can not cure. Moreover, he candidly affirms his habit of doing so. I am told that he is a distinguished physician; there is apparently nothing in his frank avowal to lessen his distinction. It would not surprise, indeed, if his fame should take attention from even the officers of the law. To make himself an object of lively interest in quarters where the several kinds of distinction in his profession are commonly overlooked he has only to descend from generals to particulars, naming the patients whom he has turned out of the frying-pan of physical pain into whatever state awaited them, and the means (under Providence) which he employed to that end.

A man may be the best judge of what he is for, but by laymen unskilled in physic it is usually held that a physician’s business is not only to cure disease and alleviate suffering, but to prolong life—to save it altogether being impossible, for all must eventually die. But laymen have no mandate always to be right; now and again they have been in error. The righteousness and expediency of releasing an incurable sufferer from the horrors of life should not be clouded and discredited by an erring advocacy.

When a horse or a dog incurs the mischance of a broken back no question is raised as to the propriety of “putting it out of its misery.” Unable to cure it, we kill it, and in doing so feel a comfortable sense of benevolence, a consciousness of having performed a disagreeable duty, of having discharged an obligation inseparable from our dominion over the beasts of the field. It may be said that in the instance of a human being similarly incurable the dominion is lacking. But that does not go to the root of the matter, and is, moreover, untrue; for a helpless man is as much subject to our power as a helpless animal, and as much a charge upon our good will. And in many cases he is as little capable of deciding wisely what is good for him. A wounded bird or squirrel will manifest a strong indisposition to be “put out of misery,” by struggling to escape into the bush; a man will sometimes beg for death, even when he does not know himself incurable. If there should be a difference in the treatment of the two in respect of the matter in hand it would seem that the beast should be spared and the man killed.

But Dr. Nickerson’s critics think that a different rule should hold, because the man is an immortal soul, whereas the beast is a thing of to-day, divinely ordained to “perish.” To this it may be said in reply: All the stronger reason for a reversal of our practice, for in putting the man out of his misery you would not really kill, but only change, him; but the animal having only one life, in taking that you make him “poor indeed,” depriving him of all that he has.

That the man is an immortal soul is, however, a proposition which, after centuries of discussion, remains unsettled; and those who hold Dr. Nickerson’s view must in conscience forego the advantage of the argument which their generous opponents try to thrust upon them. If we actually knew human beings to be immortal many of the current popular objections to killing them would disappear, and not only soldiers but physicians and assassins could work at their trades with a comparatively free hand, along lines of usefulness not always and entirely divergent. Surely there could be no great wrong in “removing” a good Christian, whether he were ill at ease or not: to translate him to the shining altitudes of Paradise is distinctly to augment the sum of human happiness. For that matter, it would not be difficult to demonstrate logically the proposition that any Christian may rightly slay any other Christian upon whom he can lay his hands. True, he is forbidden by his religion to do so. All the more noble and generous of him to invite eternal punishment in order to abridge his brother’s season of earthly trial, insure him against backsliding and usher him at once into the Kingdom of Delights. In point of mere expediency a general observance of this high duty is open to the objection that it would somewhat reduce the church militant in point of numerical strength. But this is perhaps a digression.

It is urged that not knowing the purposes of the Creator in creating and giving us life, we should endure (and make our helpless friends endure) whatever ills befall, lest by death we ignorantly frustrate the divine plan. Merely pausing to remark that the plan of an omnipotent Deity is not easily frustrated, I should like to point out that in this very ignorance of the purpose of existence lies a justification of putting an end to it. I did not ask for existence; it was thrust upon me without my assent. As He who gave it has permitted it to become an affliction to me, and has not apprised me of its advantages to others or to Himself, I am not bound to assume that it has any such advantages. If when in my despair I ask why I ought to continue a life of suffering I am uncivilly denied an answer, I am not bound to believe, and in lack of light may be unable to believe, that the answer if given would satisfy me. So the game having gone against me and the dice appearing to be loaded, I may rightly and reasonably quit.

That is the way that a logical patient would probably reason if incurable and in great pain. I confess my inability to discern the fallacy of his argument. Indeed, it seems to me that so far as concerns baffling the divine purpose the patient who calls in a physician and tries to recover is more obviously guilty of attempting to do that than the patient who tries to die. To an understanding that accepts life as a gift from God, illness might very naturally seem a divine intimation of God’s altered mind. To one thinking after that fashion voluntary death would necessarily appear as cheerful submission to the divine will, and the taking of medicine as impious rebellion.

The right of suicide implies and carries with it the right to put to death a sufferer incurably ill; for the relief which we claim for ourselves we cannot righteously deny to those in our care. We would naturally expect a medical advocate of suicide to kill a patient occasionally, as humanity may suggest and opportunity serve. Dr. Nickerson’s frankness is shocking, but on a survey of the entire question it seems a good deal easier to point out his infractions of the law than his disloyalty to reason and the higher sentiments which distinguish us from the priests that perish.

1899.

THE SCOURGE OF LAUGHTER

The world is growing wiser. Ancient Error is drawing off his defeated forces, the rear guard blinking in the destructive light of reason and science. It has now been ascertained that wrinkles are not caused by care and grief, but by laughing. Such is the dictum of an eminent physician, and it is becoming in us laymen to accept it with due humility and govern ourselves accordingly, subduing the rebellious diaphragm and mortifying the countenance. More easily said than done, doubtless, but what that is easily done is worth doing?

It is to be feared that much of the laughing that is done has its energizing motive in some fundamental principle of human nature not affectable by human will; that we frequently laugh from causes beyond our control, between which and the thing we think we laugh at there is no other relation than coincidence in point of time. That which we happen to have in attention at the time of the mysterious impulse is mistaken as the cause of the impulse and thought comic, whereas it has no such character, and under other circumstances would have been thought a very serious matter. This view is abundantly confirmed by observation. Men have been known to laugh even when reading the work of the professional humorist, when listening to a story at a club, when in the very presence of a negro minstrel. It is difficult, indeed, to mention environing conditions so dispiriting as to assure gravity.

But there is a kind of laughter essentially different in origin. It is not spontaneous, but induced. It has not, like death, all seasons for its own—is not a purely subjective phenomenon, like hereditary gout, but requires the conspiracy of occasion and stimulation by something outside the laughter; for examples a candidate’s assurance of devotion to the public interest, a pig standing on its head, or an editorial article by Deacon George Harvey.

It is clear that by diligence, vigilance and determination this latter kind of laughter can be greatly reduced in frequency, intensity and duration, and its ravages upon the human countenance stayed to that extent. We have only to keep ourselves out of the way of its exciting causes. If we find ourselves within ear-shot of the candidate attesting his love of the people we can close our ears and retire. Seeing a pig preparing to stand on its head, we may turn away our eyes and fix the mind upon some solemn subject—Mark Twain at the grave of Adam, or Adam at the grave of Mark Twain. Catching the sense of a Harvey editorial we can lay down the paper and put a stone on it. So shall our faces retain their pristine smoothness, enabling us to falsify with impunity the family Bible record with regard to date of birth.

It is of course impossible to enumerate here many of the things to be sought or avoided in order not to laugh and grow wrinkled, but two are so obviously important that they force themselves forward for mention. Our reading should be confined as much as possible to the comic weeklies, and we should give a wide berth to those dailies which deem it their duty to rebuke the commercial spirit of the age. It is believed that by taking these two precautions against the furrowing fingernails of Mirth one can retain a fresh and youthful rotundity of countenance to the end of one’s days and transmit it to those who come after.

THE LATE LAMENTED

How long one must be dead before his “relics”—including not only his remains proper, but the several appurtenances thereunto belonging—cease to be “sacred,” is a question which has never been settled. London was once divided in opinion, or rather in feeling, as to the propriety of publicly exhibiting the body-linen worn by Charles I when that unhappy monarch had the uncommon experience of losing his head. Not only was this underwear shown, but also some of the royal hair which was cut away by the headsman. Many persons considered the exhibition distasteful and in a measure sacrilegious. But the entire body of the great Rameses has been dug out and is freely shown without provoking a protest.

Rameses was a mightier king than Charles, and a more famous. He was the veritable Pharaoh of sacred history whose daughter (who, I regret to say, was also his wife) found the infant Moses in the bulrushes. He could also point with pride to his record in profane history, and was, altogether, a most respectable person. Between the power, splendor and civilization of the Egypt of Rameses and the England of Charles there is no comparison: in the imperishable glory of the former the latter seems a nation of savage pigmies. Why, then, are the actual remains of the one monarch considered a fit and proper “exhibit” in a museum and the mere personal adornments of the other too sacred for desecration by the public eye? Probably political and ethnic considerations have something to do with it: perhaps in Cairo the sentiment would be the other way, though the stoical indifference of successive Egyptian Governments to mummy-mining by the thrifty European does not sustain that view.

Schliemann and many of his moling predecessors have dug up and removed the sleeping ancients from what these erroneously believed to be their last resting-places in Asia Minor and the other classic countries, without rebuke, and the funeral urn of an illustrious Roman can be innocently haled from its pigeon-hole in a _columbarium_. We open the burial mounds of our Indian predecessors and pack off their skulls with never a thought of wrong, and even the bones of our own early settlers when in course of removal to make way for a new city hall are treated with but scant courtesy. There seems to be no statute of limitations applicable to the sanctity of tombs; every case is judged on its merits, with a certain loose regard to local conditions and considerations of expediency.

It was an ancient belief that the shade of even the most worthy deceased could not enter Elysium so long as the body was unburied, but no provision was made for expulsion of those already in if their bodies were exhumed and used as “attractions” for museums. So we may reasonably hope that the companions of Agamemnon contemplate the existence of Schliemanns with philosophic indifference; and doubtless Rameses the Great, who, according to the religion of his country, had an immortality conditioned on the preservation of his mortal part, is as well content that it lie in a museum as in a pyramid.

DETHRONEMENT OF THE ATOM

It is of course to be expected that the advance of scientific knowledge will destroy, here and there, a cherished illusion. It was so when Darwin showed us that we are not made of mud, but have “just growed.” At least that is what Darwin is by many held to have done, and deep is their resentment. In a general way it may be said that the path of scientific progress is strewn with the mouldering bones of our dearest creations.

To this melancholy company must now be added the precious Atom. It has had a fairly long reign, has the atom; the youths who first worshiped at its shrine are in the lean and slippered pantaloon stage of existence. It will be all the harder for them to see their idol depedestaled.

That the atom was the ultimate unit of matter, the absolute smallest thing in the universe, a fraction incapable of further division—that is what we had been commanded to believe by those in authority over the many things of science. And with such powers of conviction as we are gifted withal we had believed.

Now, what do we hear—what do we hear? Why, that an atom is an aggregation of electrons! These are so much smaller than atoms that the latter can be easily conceived as cut in halves—nay, chopped into hash. Before the inven—that is to say, the discovery—of the electron such a thing as that was unthinkable. So, at each enlargement of the field of knowledge the human mind receives new powers. The time may come when we shall be able (with an effort) to conceive the division of an electron.

The difference in magnitude, or rather minitude, between our old friend the atom and this new though doubtless excellent thing, the other thing, is characteristically expounded thus:

“If an electron is represented by a sphere an inch in diameter, an atom on the same scale is a mile and a half. Or, if an atom is represented by the size of a theater, an electron is represented on the same scale by a printer’s full stop.”

The electron, it seems, is not only unthinkably little; it is impalpable, invisible, inaudible and probably insipid and inodorous. In brief, it is immaterial. It is not matter, though matter is composed of it. That is easy to understand if one has a scientific mind.

Not only are electrons immaterial, or at least inconceivably attenuated; they are immense distances apart—immense in comparison with their bulk. Likewise, they are inconceivably rapid in motion about a common center. The electrons forming a single atom are analogous to our solar system, but whether there is a big electron in the center science does not as yet tell us.

When a steam hammer descends upon a piece of steel it merely strikes the outside of an infinite aggregation of moving, impalpable things widely separated in space. But they stop the hammer.

Scientists know these facts, and we know that they know them—this is our delightful part in the matter. But we do not know how they know them—that is not granted to our humble degree of merit. As we grow in grace, we may perhaps hope to be told, preferably in words of one syllable, how they learned it all; how they count the electrons; how they measure them; with what kind of instrument they determine their actual and comparative magnitudes, and so forth. No doubt the columns of the newspapers are open to them for explanation and exposition even now.

In the meantime let us be pleasant about it. It is more amiable to believe without comprehending than to comprehend without believing.

DOGS FOR THE KLONDIKE

The spectacle of great tides of men sweeping hither and thither across the face of the globe under suasion of so mean a passion as cupidity, as the waters of ocean are led by the moon, is more spectacular than pleasant. See in it however much one prophetically may of future empire and civilizations growing where none grew before—hear as one can on every breeze that blows from the newest and richest placers the hum of the factory to be, the song of the plowman (such as it is) and the drone of the Sunday sermon, replacing “the petulant pop of the pistol”—yet one can not be altogether insensible to the hideousness of the motive out of which all these pleasing results are to come. Doubtless in looking at the pond-lily a healthy mind makes light account of the muck and slime at the bottom of the pond, whence it derives its glories; but while the muck and slime only are in evidence, the water and the flower mere presumptions of the future, the case is a trifle different.

It is conceded that out of this mad movement to the Klondike great good may come. Many of those who go to dig will remain to plow, jocundly driving their teams afield to tickle the tundra till it laughs in pineapples, bananas and guavas. It is not denied that great cities (with roof-gardens and slums) will rise like exhalations along the mighty Yukon, nor that that noble stream will know the voice of the gondolier and the lute of the lover. In place of the moose and the caribou, the patient camel will kneel in the shade of palms to receive his cargo of dates, spices and native silks.

But just now the Klondike region is a trifle raw. In the stark simplicity of life there men do not veil their characters with a shining hypocrisy; all, by their presence in that unutterable country, being convicted of the greed for gold, every man feels that it is useless to profess any of the virtues; as the discharged inmate of a reformatory institution has no choice but a life of crime. Later, when the beneficent influences that track the miner to his gulch shall have set up a more complex social system under which the presumption of a base motive may be less strong, we shall hear, doubtless, of Dawsonians and even Skagwegians who would take the trouble to deny an accusation of theft and to affirm a disposition to go to church between drinks on a Sunday.

Ugly as these “rushes” to mining regions seem to one unskilled in use of the muck-rake and a stranger to avarice—discouraging as they are to the good optimist, and correspondingly delightful to his natural enemy, the wicked pessimist—yet it must be confessed that in the present rush there is one feature that goes far in mitigation of its general unpleasantness: it has created in distant and unwholesome regions a demand for the domestic dog.

For the first time in his immemorial existence this comfortable creature has thrown open to him a wide field of usefulness of exactly the kind that he deserves—a long way from the comforts of home, imperfectly supplied with beef-steaks, cold as blazes, with plenty of hard work and the worst society in the world!

“Good long-haired dogs” are “quoted” in Dawson at one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars. Such prices ought to result in drawing all that kind of dogs out of the rest of the country, which in itself would be a great public benefaction; for the popular belief in the superior virtues of the long-haired dog is a lamentable error. The type and exemplar of that variety, the so-called Newfoundland, is, in point of general, all-round unworth, superior to any living thing that we have the advantage to know. Not only is his bite more deadly than that of the ordinary snapdog, but that of the fleas which he cherishes is peculiarly insupportable. The fleas of all other dogs merely sadden; those of the Newfoundland madden to crime! His fragrance, moreover, is less modest than that of even the Skye terrier; it is distinctly declarative. A charming fiction ascribes to him a tender solicitude for drowning persons, especially children; but history may be searched in vain for a single authentic proof—and history is not over-scrupulous in the matter of veracity. Every one has heard and read of rescues from drowning, by Newfoundland dogs, but no human being ever saw one. It is to be hoped that the hyperborean demand for “good long-haired dogs” will not fall upon heedless ears.

The Great Dane is not a “long-haired” dog, but he is large and strong, and should be wanted in the Klondike country. His size and strength would there be his best recommendations; here they are his worst. Having a giant’s strength he uses it as a giant, and his multiplication in the land is a terror and a curse. His manner of unloading a bicycle has been justly described as the acme of inconsiderateness. Moreover, he is increasing all the time in magnitude as well as in quantity; at his present rate of growth he will within a decade or so overtop the horse and outnumber the sheep. There will be no resisting him. But what an excellent roadster he would be in Alaska! The brevity of his hair is really an advantage: in calculating his load less allowance will need to be made for icicles. Indubitably the value of a Great Dane in Dawson is at least one thousand dollars.

The most pernicious varieties of the species—the small animated pestilences upon which our ladies waste so much of the affection which, it is reverently submitted, might with better results be bestowed upon the males of their own species—these pampered laplings are unfortunately not useful for draught purposes in the Arctic. One of them could not pull a tin plate from Squottacoota to Nickalinqua. So they are not “quoted” in the Dawson market reports. But something has been overlooked: the incomparable excellence of their flesh! It is respectfully suggested that a few of these curled darlings and glossy sweethearts be sent to the Klondike, suitably canned and spiced as commercial samples. The miners may be assured that the flesh is not only wholesome, but is entirely free from that objectionable delicacy that distinguishes, for example, the yellow-legged pullet; it is honestly rank and strong and has plenty of “chew” in it—just the right kind of meat for founders of empires and heralds of civilization. A dozen cans of Dandy Dinmont or King Charles Spaniel should have in Dawson an actual value of three thousand dollars, but doubtless could be supplied at a much smaller price. So much as that would hardly be needed in any one outfit, for such is the nutritious property of small dog that most persons would find a single can of it enough.

We are able to supply all Alaska and the Northwest Territory with dogs and with dog. Every township has always a surplus. I invite attention to our peerless canine wealth and to the eminent fitness of its units for service on the northern trails and along the northern alimentary canal. Before purchasing elsewhere let the judicious Klondiker examine our stock. He is too far away to look at it, but when the wind is in the southeast that is needless.

1898.

MONSTERS AND EGGS

The Gila Monster has at last succeeded in disclosing to Science the trend of his appetite toward that comestible with the strong foreign accent, the gull’s egg. That the product of the merry sea-fowl is the creature’s regular diet in his desert habitat circumjacent to Death Valley is a proposition so obvious that one would have thought it self-evident, even to him on whose humble birth fair science frowned not; yet the discovery appears to have been made by accident, as is so frequently the case with great truths which seem so simple when we come to know them.

Now that his Monstership’s favorite food is no longer a matter of controversy to scientists and concern to the tenderfoot, we may reasonably hope that the interesting but hitherto misunderstood and calumniated reptile may be domesticated among us; for there is no longer a doubt of our ability to support him in the style to which he is accustomed, nourishing him to a proper growth and suitable flavor for the table.

In the gastronomical curriculum of the southern Red Man the Gila Monster has always held an honorable place when well roasted by exposure to the climate of his choice; and that aboriginal trencherman’s dietetic practices have frequently pointed the way to reform at the tables of the Paleface, a notable instance being his advocacy of the potato and the tobacco leaf, in the consumption of which he had long been happy before he discovered Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh. In the spud and the quid we have, doubtless, his best benefactions to Caucasian gastronomy; but if the seed of his example with regard to the Gila Monster do not fall upon the stony soil of a reasonless conservatism the minor pleasures of existence may be augmented by an addition distinctly precious, and the female gull be accepted and venerated as a philanthropist of the deepest dye.

By knowledge not only of the gratifying fact that the Monster eats gulls’ eggs, but of the at least interesting one that he does _not_ eat the Eastern tourist, we attain to something like an understanding of his disposition, which is seen to be peaceable and humane. It is therefore probable that he is no more venomous when he bites than poisonous when bitten. The current stories attesting the noxiousness of his tooth have their origin, perhaps, in a strong sense of his destitution of beauty; for it must be frankly confessed that the impulchritude of his expression and general make-up is disquieting to the last degree. But, for that matter, so is that of the toad—not only the horned toad, which is known to be harmless, but the common hop-toad of the garden, whose bite is believed by some to be actually wholesome. Shakspeare was of a different conviction, but Shakspeare was not very strong in zoology, nor was he over-conscientious in verification of all the statements that he put into the mouths of his characters—a circumstance which seems to have been overlooked by those who are most addicted to quoting him.

Science having done so much for the Gila Monster and, in a sense, made him its own, will be expected by the public to carry the good work forward by settling, once for all, the vexed question of his brotherhood to the rattlesnake and the woman scorned. Is he really venomous? With a view to determining the point it is to be hoped that some unselfish investigator may permit himself to be bitten by the accused; and I think a very proper person to make the experiment is Dr. Theodore Roosevelt, the illustrious zoölogist who wrote the monograph on the invertebracy of the spineless cactus.

MUSIC

Let him to whom, as to me, nature has denied “an ear for music,” or circumstance an opportunity for its education, take heart and comfort: he has escaped a masterful temptation to commit nonsense in the first degree. Doubtless there are music makers and music lovers who can write and speak of the art with a decent regard to the demands of common sense, but doubtless they don’t; their history is a record of ignored opportunities. As to the others—the chaps who push in between our hearing and our understanding—they possibly “play by note,” but they write “by ear.” They say whatever sounds well to themselves, and there they leave it. Theirs is the art of sound and they expound its principles with due observance of its results: in speaking of it they are satisfied to make a pleasant noise. The louder the noise of their exposition, the more glorious the art which it expounds. As members of mystic brotherhoods are bound by oath not to divulge the solemn secrets which they do not possess; as the married have a tacit undertaking to wreathe their chains with flowers, smile away their wounds, and exhibit as becoming ornaments the handles of the daggers rusting in their hearts; as priesthoods plate with gold their empty shrines; as the dead swear in stone and brass that they were virtuous and great—so the musical are in conspiracy to magnify and exalt their art. It is a pretty art: it is rich in elements of joy, purveying to the sense a refined and keen delight. But it is not what they say it is. It is not what the uninitiated believe it. What is?

I am led to these reflections—provoked were the better word—by reading one Krehbiel. “Wagner,” Mr. Krehbiel explains, “strove to express artistic truths, not to tickle the ear, and therefore his work will stand, while Italian opera, which is founded on sensual enjoyment, must pass away.” A more amusing _non sequitur_ it would be difficult for the most accomplished logician to construct. Because the city is founded on a rock it will topple down! I think I could name several sorts of sensual enjoyment which give promise of enduring as long as the senses. Among them I should give a high place to whatever kind of music the sense of hearing most enjoys. If posterity is going to be such an infinite fool as to stop its ears to sounds which please them, I thank Heaven that I live in antiquity.

The enjoyment of music is a purely sensual enjoyment. It “tickles the ear,” and it does nothing else. The ear being skilfully tickled after the fashion which the composer and the executant understand, emotion ensues; but not thought, save by association—by memory. Music does not touch the springs of the intellect. It never generated a process of reasoning, nor expressed a truth, “artistic” or other, which could be formulated in a definitive proposition. It has no intellectual character whatever. I have heard this disputed scores of times, but never by one who had himself much intellect. And, in truth, musicians, if I must say it, are not commonly distinguished above their fellows by mental capacity. The greater their gift, the less they know; and when you find a tremendously skilful and enthusiastic executant you will have as nearly sensual an animal as you care to catch.

To those having knowledge of the essential meaning of music, its original place among the influences that wrought their results upon primitive man, this will seem natural and sequent. Music was originally vocal; before men became wise enough and deft enough to make instruments they merely sang, as the birds do now, and certain animals—the latter pretty badly, it must be confessed. But why did the primitive man and woman sing? To commend themselves in the matter of love, as the birds do, and the beasts. Abundant vestiges of this practice survive among us. The young woman who bangs her piano and her hair has a single motive in the double habit. She is hardly conscious of it; she has inherited it along with the desire to brandish her eyes, and otherwise manslay. Consider, my tuneless youth, how slender is your chance in rivalry with the fellow who can sing. He will “knock you out” with a bar of music better than a Chinese highbinder could with a bar of iron. It did not occur to our good arboreal ancestor (him of the prehensile tail, aswing upon his branch) to address his wood-notes wild to a mixed audience for gate-money; he sought to charm a single pair of ears, and those more hairy than critical. Later, as the race went on humaning, there grew complexity of sentiment and varying emotional needs, for the gratification whereof song took on a matching complexity and variance. There were war songs, and death songs, and hunting songs, harvest songs and songs of adoration. Wood and metal were taught to perform acceptably.

The shells of tortoises were made to sing,
And, touched in tenderness, the captive string.

Did it ever occur to you, intelligent reader, that the simplest musical instrument is a more astonishing invention than the talking phonograph? But the human love-tone is the soul and base of the system; and should men and women henceforth be born happily married the entire musical edifice would fade and vanish like a palace of clouds.

MALFEASANCE IN OFFICE

In these days of societies for the prevention of this and that, why can not we have a Society for the Prevention of Malfeasance in Office? More than half of all the money paid in taxes is in one way or another stolen. From the humblest janitorship up to the chief magistracy of the state (both inclusive) the offices are held by men of whom a majority are as scurvy knaves as many of those in the penitentiaries. There is no exaggeration in this statement; it is literally, absolutely true. Then why, it may be asked, does not the press expose all this corruption? For many reasons, among them these: the corruption of the press; the circumstance that malfeasance in office is no news; the absence of a public opinion that will do more than passively approve, whereas the private animosities engendered by exposure are active, implacable, and dangerous; the absence of such a society as the one suggested. An additional reason may be called, softly, the rascality of the courts. Not all horses are sorrel, and not all judges rogues. Not all pigs have spiral tails, nor all prosecuting attorneys crooked morals. Nevertheless he who lightly incurs law suits, relying upon the justice of his cause, has no need to wear motley, for assuredly none will think him other than a fool.

It is in our courts that officers and members of the Society for the Prevention of Malfeasance in Office would be least welcome and most terrifying. Their presence would be to our boss-made judges and thrifty district attorneys what the sudden apparition of the late Mr. Henry Bergh used to be to draygentlemen engaged in tormenting their horses. It would be easy, without stopping to take thought or breath, to name a score of judges of our higher courts, in present incumbency or newly retired, whose perturbations from that cause would attain to the dignity of a panic.

The thing is easily feasible. It requires, mainly, liberal endowment by that class of the wealthy whose interests do not lie in the stability of misgovernment. Zealous and incorruptible officers to investigate, able attorneys to prosecute, honest newspapers to assist and spread the light. These will come of themselves. A few successful prosecutions of official offenders, a few impeachments and removals, a few hitherto invincible rascals sent to the penitentiary, a little educating of the people to the fact that a new power for good is risen among them, and money will come in abundantly. Rightly conducted the Society will become a popular favorite, accredited alike by alliance of the wise and hostility of knaves, and fairly good government by unofficial supervision become an accomplished fact. Apparently there is no other way whereby it may be obtained.

Of course the Society need not be named what I have called it, and the scope of its activity should be greater than that name implies. It should aim to prevent (by exposure and punishment) not only malfeasance in office, but all manner of sins and stupidities in public life. Our existing machinery for obtaining honest and intelligent government is altogether inadequate; it breaks down at all points and—fatal defect!—it is not automatic. The laws do not enforce themselves—not even the laws for enforcing the laws. The “wheels of justice” are easily “blocked” because nobody is concerned to put his shoulder to them. Who will come forward and provide a motor for this inert and sluggish mechanism? Here is as good an opportunity for distinction as one can want. But let no one seek to grasp it who has not a strong hand and a hard head; there will be bloody noses and cracked crowns enow, God wot. If one have a taste for fighting he can have it by the bellyful. If he enjoy ridicule, calumniation, persecution, they shall come to him in quantity to fit his appetite. Maylike he shall have knowledge of how it feels to sleep in field-feathers on stone. But assuredly there are for that man, if he be of the right kidney, an imperishing renown and “the thanks of millions yet to be.” Let him stand forth. Let him fall to and organize. Let him tout the country for subscriptions and begin. In the end he shall find that the little fire that he kindled has spread over all the land with a crackling consumption of rascalry; and his children’s children shall warm them in the memory.

1881.

FOR STANDING ROOM

At no time in the world’s history have the relations between laborers and employers of labor received so much attention as now. All men who think are thinking of them, the meditation being quickened by the importance of the interests involved, the sharp significance of some of their observed phenomena and the conditions entailing them. Among these last, one of the most important is overpopulation in civilized countries; and it is only in such countries that any controversy has arisen between—to speak in the current phrase—capital and labor. Despite the magnitude and frequency of modern wars, the population of all civilized countries increases in the most astonishing way. In the six great nations of Europe the increase since the Napoleonic wars has been between fifty and sixty per cent. In this country our progression is geometrical—we double our population every twenty-five years!

Conquest and commerce have brought the whole world under contribution to the strong nations. Inter-communication has reduced the areas of privation and almost effaced those of famine. Railways and steamships and banks and exchanges have diminished the friction between producer and consumer. By sanitary and medical science the average length of human life has been increased. Chemistry has taught us how to fertilize the fields, forestry and engineering how to prevent both inundation and drought, invention how to master the adverse forces of Nature and make alliance with the friendly ones by labor-saving machinery, so that the work of one man will now sustain many in idleness—with no lack of persons who by birth, breeding, disposition and taste are eligible to sustentation. The milder sway of modern government, the elimination of the “gory tyrant” as a factor in the problem of existence and the better protection of property and life have had, even directly, no mean influence on the death rate. These and many other causes have combined to make the conditions of life so comparatively easy that an extraordinary impetus has been given to the business of living; mankind may be said to have taken it up as a congenial pursuit. The cloud of despair that shadowed the face of all Europe during those centuries of misrule and ignorance fitly called the Dark Ages has lifted, and multitudes are thronging into the sunshine. It is not a perfect beam, but its warmth and lumination are incomparably superior to anything of which the older generations ever dreamed. But the result is over population, and the result of over population is war, pestilence, famine, rapine, immorality, ignorance, anarchy, despotism, slavery, decivilization—depopulation!

This is man’s eternal round; this is the course of “progress”; in this circle moves the “march of mind.” The one goal of civilization is barbarism; to the condition whence it emerged a nation must return, and every invention, every discovery, every beneficent agency hastens the inevitable end. An ancient civilization would last a thousand years; confined to the same boundaries, a modern civilization would exhaust itself in half that time; but by emigration and interchange we uphold ourselves till all can go down together. One people cannot relapse till all similar peoples are ready.

Already we discern ominous instances of the working of the universal law. Consciously or unconsciously, all the modern statesmen of Europe are contesting for “territorial aggrandizement.” They desire both extension of boundaries and colonial possessions. They quarrel with the statesmen of neighboring nations on this pretext and on that, and send their armies of invasion to capture and hold provinces. They dispatch their navies to distant seas to take possession of unconsidered islands. They must have more of the earth’s surface upon which to settle their surplus populations. All the wars of modern Europe have that ultimate, underlying cause.

The battle knows not why it is fought. It is for standing room. If it were not for the horrors of war the horrors of peace would be appalling. Peace is more fatal than war, for all must die, and in peace more are born. The bullet forestalls the pestilence by proffering a cleaner and decenter death.

What has all this to do with the labor question? “Industrial discontent” has many causes, but the chief is over-population. (In this country it is as yet a “coming event,” but its approach is rapid, and already it has “cast its shadow before.”) Where there are too many producers they are thinned out to make an army, which serves the double purpose of keeping the rest of them in subjection and resisting the pressure from without. Armies are to fight with; no nation dares long maintain one in idleness; it is too costly for a toy; the people burn to see it put to practical use. They do not love it; they promise themselves the advantage of seeing it killed; but when the killing begins their blood is up and they want to go soldiering.

Our labor troubles—our strikes, boycotts, riots, dynamitation, can have but one outcome. We are not exempt from the inexorable. We shall soon hear a general clamor for increase of the army—to protect us against aggression from the east and the west. We shall have the army.

That is as far as one cares to follow the current of events into the dubious regions of prediction. What lies beyond is momentous enough to be waited for; but any man who fails to discern the profound significance of the events amongst which he is moving to-day may justly boast himself impregnable to the light.

THE JEW

A noted Jewish rabbi has been uttering his mind concerning “manufacturers of mixed marriages”—clergymen, that is to say, who marry Christians to Jewesses and Jews to Christianesses. In the opinion of this gentleman of God such marriages are accursed, and those of his pious brethren who assist the devil in bringing them about are imperfectly moral. Doubtless it is desirable that the parties to a marriage should cherish the same form of religious error, lest in their zeal to save each other’s immortal part they lay too free a hand upon the part that is mortal. But domestic infelicity is not the evil that the learned doctor has in apprehension: what he fears is nothing less momentous than the extinction of Judaism! On consideration it appears not unlikely that in a general blending of races that result would ensue. But what then?—will the hand of some great anarch let the curtain fall and universal darkness cover all? Will the passing of Judaism be attended with such discomfortable befallings as the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds?

Good old Father Time has seen the genesis, development, decay and effacement of thousands of religions far more ancient and quite as well credentialed as that of Israel. The most daring of that faith’s expounders will hardly claim for it an age exceeding a half-dozen millenniums; whereas the least venturesome anthropologian will affirm for the human race an antiquity of hundreds. It is hardly likely that the world has ever been without great religions, of which all but a few (so new that they smell of paint and varnish) are as dead as the dodo. No portents foreshadowed their extinction, no cataclysms followed. The world went spinning round the sun in its immemorial way; men lived and loved, fought, laughed, cursed, lied, gathered gold and dreamed of an after-life as before. No mourners follow the hearse of a dead religion, no burial service is read at the grave. Does the good rabbi really believe that the faith which he professes, rooted in time, will flourish in eternity? Can he suppose that its fate will be different from that of its predecessors, whose temples, rearing their fronts in great cities, the seats of mighty civilizations in every part of the habitable globe, have perished with the empires that they adorned, and left not a vestige nor a memory behind? Does he think that of all the incalculable religions that have swept in successive dream-waves the ocean of mystery his alone marks a continuous current setting toward some shining shore of truth and life and bearing thither all ships obedient to its trend?

I can not help thinking that the pious rabbi would better serve his people by less zeal in broadening and blackening the delimiting lines by which their foolish fathers circumscribed their sympathies and interests and made their race a peculiar people, peculiarly disliked. The best friend of the Jews is not he who confirms them in their narrow and resented exclusiveness, but he who persuades them of its folly, advises them to a larger life than is comprised in rites and rituals, the ceremonies and symbolisms of a long-dead past, and strives to show them that the world is wider than Judea and God more than a private tutor to the children of Israel.

Why do they fear effacement by absorption? If the entire Jewish race should disappear (as sooner or later all races do) that would not mean that the Jews were dead, but that Judaism was dead. No single life would have gone out because of that, and all that is good in the race would live, suffusing and perhaps ennobling the characters of races having still a name. All that is useful and true in Jewish law and Jewish letters and Jewish art would be preserved to the world; the rest could well be spared. Even the rabbis’ occupation would not be gone: they would thrive as priests of another faith. Man is not likely to cease forming himself into “congregations,” for he likes to see his teachers “close to.” Even if preaching were abolished many kinds of light and profitable employment would remain.

As matters now are, mixed marriages—between Jew and Gentile—are not to be advised. But matters are now not as they should be, nor does our holy friend’s teaching tend to make them so. Let the Jew learn why he is subject to hate and persecution by the Gentile. It is not, as he professes to think, and doubtless does think, because his ancestors, ages ago, denied the Godhood and demanded the life of another Jew. Other races and sects deny Christ without offense; and the Gentile who daily crucifies him afresh is no less active in dislike of the Jew than the most devout Christian of them all. Christ and Christianity have nothing to do with it. Nor is the explanation found in the Jew’s superior thrift, nor in any of those commercial qualities whereby, legitimately or illegitimately, he gets the better of his Gentile competitor; though those advantages too pitilessly used against a stupid and improvident peasantry have sometimes compelled his expatriation by sovereigns who cared no more what he believed than what he ate.

The Christians will cease to dislike and persecute the Jews when the Jews abandon their affronting claim to special and advantageous relations with the Lord of All. The claim would be no less irritating if well founded, as many Christians believe that once it was. When has it not been observed that a favorite child is hated by its brothers and sisters? Did not the brethren of Joseph seek his undoing? In missing the lesson of it the Jew “recks not his own rede.” When was it not thought an insult to say, “I am holier than thou,” and when did not small minds “strike back” with brutal hands? The Christian mind is a small mind, the Christian hand a brutal hand.

The Jew may reply: “I do not say so; in the pulpit I forbear to denounce other peoples and other creeds as outside the law and devoid of the divine grace.” In words he does not say so, but he says so with emphasis in his care to preserve his racial and religious isolation; in his practice of self-mutilation and the affronting reasons in which he disguises his consciousness of the shame of it; in his maintenance of a spiritual quarantine; in the diligence with which he repairs time’s ravages in his Great Wall, lest Nature take advantage of the breach and some caroling Gentile youth leap lightly through to claim a Jewish maid. In a thousand ways, all having for purpose the safeguarding of his racial isolation in a ghetto of his own invention, the orthodox Jew shouts aloud his conviction of his superior holiness and peculiar worth. Naturally, the echo is not unmixed with Christian denial, formulated too frequently into unrighteous decrees by the voice of authority.

None than I can have a greater regard for the Jewish character, as found at its best in the higher types of the Jewish people, and not found at all in those members of the race who alone are popularly thought of as Jews. None than I can have a deeper detestation of the spirit at the back of persecution of the Jews, in all its forms and degrees. Rather than have a hand in it I would have no hand. Yet I venture to say that if a high degree of contributory negligence, constituting a veritable invitation to evil, is foolish the calamity entailed is entitled to a place in the list of expectable phenomena; and if a certain presumptuous self-righteousness is bad its natural and inevitable punishment is not entirely undeserved.

In the mud that the Christian hand flings at the Jew there is a little gold; in the Christian’s dislike of him there is what the assayers and analysts call “a trace” of justice. He who thinks that whole races of men, through long periods of time, hate for nothing has considered history to little purpose and knows not well the constitution of the human mind. It should seriously be considered whether, not the chief, but the initial, fault may not be that of the Jew, who was not always the unaggressive non-combatant, the long-suffering victim, that centuries of oppression and repression have tended to make him. If we may believe his own historical records, which the Christian holds in even higher veneration than he does himself, he was once a very bad neighbor. No worse calamity could then befall a feeble people than the attention of an Israelite king. Believing themselves the salt of the earth, his warlike subjects had always in pickle a rod for every Gentile back. Every contiguous tribe which did not accept their God incurred their savage hatred, expressed in incredible cruelties. They ruled their little world with an iron hand, dealing damnation round and forcing upon their neighbors a currency of bloody noses and cracked crowns. Even now they have not renounced their irritating claim to primacy in the scale of being, though no longer able to assert it with fire and sword. It is significant, however, that here in the new world, at a long remove from the inspiring scenes of their petty power and gigantic woes—their parochial glory and imperial abjection—they have somewhat abated the arrogance of their pretensions; and in obvious consequence, the brutal Christian hand is lifted more languidly against them in service of a softened resentment.

Being neither Christian nor Jew, and with only an intellectual interest in their immemorial feud, I find in it, despite its most tragic and pathetic incidents, something essentially comic—something to bring a twinkle to the eye of an Apuleius and draw the merriment of a Rabelais, “laughing sardonically in his easy chair.” That two races of reasoning beings, inhabiting one small planet and having the same sentiments, passions, virtues, vices and interests, should pass loveless centuries, distrusting, hating and damaging each other is so ludicrous a proposition that no degree of familiarity with it as a fact suffices to deprive it altogether of its opéra bouffe character. Nevertheless it is not to be laughed away. It must be dealt with seriously, if at all; and it is encouraging to observe that more and more it is taking attention in this country, where it can be considered with less heat, and therefore more light, than elsewhere.

If the Jew cares for justice he must learn, first, that it does not exist in this world, and second, that the least intolerable form of injustice goes by favor with the hand of fellowship; and the hand of fellowship is not offered to him who stands austerely apart saying: “I am holier than thou.” America has given to the Jews political and civic equality. If they want more more is attainable. But it is their move.

1898.

WHY THE HUMAN NOSE HAS A WESTERN EXPOSURE

When Bishop Berkeley had the good luck to write,

Westward the course of empire takes it way,

he suggested a question which has not, to my knowledge, been adequately answered: Why? Why do all the world’s peoples that move at all move ever toward the west, a human tide, obedient to the suasion of some mysterious power, setting up new “empires” superior to those enfeebled by time, as is the fate of empires? Many a thoughtful observer has confessed himself unable to name the law at the back or front of the movement. Yet a law there must be: things of that kind do not come about by accident.

A natural law is one thing, a cause is another, and the cause of this universal tendency to “go West” may not lie too deep for discovery. May it not be that the glory of the sunset has something to do with it?—has all to do with it, for that matter. In civilization sunsets count for little—we know too much. We know that the magical landscapes of the sunset are “airy nothings”—optical illusions. But we inherit instincts from primitive ancestors to whom they were less unreal. The savage is a poet who

Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind,

reading into the visible aspects of nature many a meaning which in the light of exact knowledge we have read out of them. Not a Grecian of the whole imaginative race that had sight of Proteus rising from the sea and heard old Triton blow his wreathèd horn could beat him at that. He knows that beyond the mountains that he dares not scale, and beyond the sea-horizon that he has not the means to transgress, lies a land wherein are all beauty and possibilities of happiness. To him the crimson lakes, purple promontories, golden coasts and happy isles of cloudland are veritable presentments of actual regions below. He never bothers his shaggy pate with the question “Can such things be?”—his eyes tell him that they are. Why should he not have ever in heart the wish to reach and occupy the delectable realm to which the sun daily points the way and sometimes discloses? That is the way he feels about it and his forefathers felt about it, as is shown in the myths and legends of many tribes. And because they so felt we have from them the wanderlust that lures us ever a-west.

To this hypothesis it may be objected that the cloudscapes of the sunrise ought, logically, to offset the others, giving the race a divided urge. But the primitive ancestor was not an early riser; he was a notorious sluggard, as is the savage of to-day, and seldom saw the sunrise—so seldom that its fascination did not get into the blood of him and from his into ours. Even when he did see the cloudlands of the dawn he was not in a frame of mind to observe them, being engrossed in rounding up the early cave-bear or preparing an astonishment for his sleeping enemy. But the chromatic glories of the country reflected in the sunset sky took his attention when it was most alert. Moreover, those of the dawn are distinctly inferior, as we are assured by credible witnesses who have observed them, through the happy chance of having been up all night companioning the katydids and whip-poor-wills.

Transcriber’s Notes:

- Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
- Blank pages have been removed.
- A few obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected,
otherwise inconsistent spelling has been left as is.