Chapter III

Abolition of poverty is not all that our reformers propose—they would abolish all that is disagreeable. Let us suppose them to have accomplished their amiable purposes. We have, then, a country in which are no poverty, no contention, no tyranny or oppression, no peril to life or limb, no disease—and so forth. How delightful! What a good and happy people! Alas, no! With poverty have vanished benevolence, providence, and the foresight which, born of the fear of individual want, stands guard at a thousand gates to defend the general good. The charitable impulse is dead in every breast, and gratitude, atrophied by disuse, has no longer a place among human sentiments and emotions. With no more fighting among ourselves we have lost the power of resentment and resistance: a car-load of Mexicans or a shipful of Japanese can invade our fool’s paradise and enslave us, as the Spaniards overran Peru and the British subdued India. (Hailers of “the dawn of the new era” will, I trust, provide that it dawn everywhere at once or here last of all.) Having no oppression to resist and no suffering to experience, we no longer need the courage to defy, nor the fortitude to endure. Heroism is a failing memory and magnanimity a dream of the past; for not only are the virtues known by contrast with the vices, they spring from the same seed, grow in the same soil, ripen in the same sunshine, and perish in the same frost. A fine race of mollycoddles we should be without our sins and sufferings! In a world without evils there would be one supreme evil—existence.

We need not fear any such condition. Progress is infected with the germs of reversion; on the grave of the civilization of to-day will squat the barbarian of to-morrow, “with a glory in his bosom” that will transfigure him the day after. The alternation is one that we can neither hasten nor retard, for our success baffles us. If, for example, we could abolish war, disease and famine, the race would multiply to the point of “standing room only”—a condition prophesying war, disease and famine. Wherefore the wisest prayer is this: “O Lord, make thy servant strong to fight and impotent to prevail.”

1900.

DECADENCE OF THE AMERICAN FOOT

The ultimate destiny of the American foot is a subject which, through an enlightened selfishness, must more and more engage the interest of the American head and the sympathies of the American heart. Even apart from the question of its final fate and place in the scheme of things, the human foot, American and foreign, has many features of peculiar interest. In the singular complexity of its structure, closely (and as the scientists affirm, significantly) resembling that of the hand, lurk possibilities of controversy sufficient in themselves to tempt attention and invite research. In truth this honorable member’s framework may be said to consist mainly of bones of contention. Religion affirms of its arched instep, its flexible toes, its padded sole, and the other peculiarities of its intricate construction an obvious adaptability of means to an end: proof positive of intelligent design, and therefore of an intelligent Designer— _vide_ Whateley, _passim_. Science coldly replies by pointing to the serviceable foot of the bear, which lacks the arched instep, and of the horse, which is without the flexible toes, or toes of any kind, and in which no use is made of the padded sole. To the simple purposes to which the human foot is applied, says the scientist, its complexity is in no sense nor degree contributory; it would perform all its offices equally well if it were a hoof. All the distinguishing features of the human foot, as contrasted with that, for example, of the horse or sheep, he avers to be such, variously modified by long and regrettable disuse, as fit animals for climbing trees and dwelling in the branches. The human foot is, in short, according to this view of the matter, nothing but an expurgated edition of that of the monkey, and a standing evidence of our descent from that tree-dwelling philosopher.

Into this controversy I do not purpose to enter; I prefer to stand afar off and suggest a compromise, whereby each contentionary may retain, with the other’s assent, all that essential part of his belief which is precious to his mind and heart. Let the scientist surrender so much of his theory as is incompatible with the assumption of creative design, the religionist so much of his faith as traverses the assertion of arboreal activity. The new theory, taking broad enough ground for all to stand upon, may be formulated somewhat as follows: The human foot as we have it was designed by an intelligent Power in order to fit mankind for an arboreal future.

Than this nothing could be fairer. It seems acceptable, and I hope it will be accepted by persons of every shade of religious faith and scientific conviction. It leaves the Christian his Adam, the Darwinian his Ape. Revealed in it, as in a magic crystal, we discern the engaging truth that the hope of Heaven and the belief in a more advanced stage of evolution are virtually the same thing—each in its way a prophecy of another and higher life. That we shall enjoy that superior existence in the flesh is a happiness that is but slightly impaired by the circumstance that it will be in the flesh of Posterity. This is a consideration indeed, that does not at all affect the interest of the evolutionist, for he never has had any expectations; and to the religious person there is a peculiar joy inhering in renunciation of his individual hope for the assurance of a racial advantage. In contemplation of Posterity frolicking blithely in its leafy and breezy environment, in shoeless nimbleness arboreally gay, every good soul will accept mortality without a pang.

But I have strayed a long way from the question of the ultimate destiny of the American foot. Be it now confessed in all candor that the compromise theory above propounded has a most dubious relevancy to that subject; for in the sylvan high-jinks of the Coming Man the Coming American will probably have no part. While the human foot in general shows no evidence of ever having been employed in its legitimate duty and future function; while Science is not justified in affirming its degeneracy from long disuse in climbing; nothing is more certain than that the American variety of it is doomed to a fatal atrophy from disuse in walking. In cities the multiplication of street-car lines points unmistakably to a time in the near future when there will be one or more in every street, with possibly a moving sidewalk, supplied with upholstered seats, on each side of the way. The universal use of the “elevator” in public and private buildings, including dwellings, will indubitably be followed by that of tubes for shooting the inmates out of the house and sucking the outmates in. With the general adoption of the traveling carpet, carrying chairs among the several rooms, the last vestigial excuse for the American urban foot will have been effaced, and that member will not lag superfluous on the stage, but in obedience to Nature’s mandate step down and out forthwith.

In the rural districts it will doubtless have a longer lease of life, owing partly to the conservative character of the people, the difficulty of hoeing corn while sitting, the saving badness of the roads—inhibiting vehicular “traffic” by all but the hardiest adventurers—and the intricacy of the trails, which forbids the general use of the steam bicycle in driving home the cows.

Eventually these disabilities will be overcome by American ingenuity, and the rural foot having no longer a function in the physical economy, will be absorbed into the character. Its relegation, with that of its urban congenitor, to Nature’s waste-dump in the tenebrous realm of things that are no more will mark the dawn of a new era in our life and be followed by radical and profound changes, particularly in the tactical movements of infantry.

THE CLOTHING OF GHOSTS

Belief in ghosts and apparitions is general, almost universal; possibly it is shared by the ghosts themselves. We are told that this wide distribution of the faith and its persistence through the ages are powerful evidences of its truth. As to that, I do not remember to have heard the basis of the argument frankly stated; it can be nothing else than that whatever is generally and long believed is true, for of course there can be nothing in the particular belief under consideration making it peculiarly demonstrable by counting noses. The world has more Buddhists than Christians. Is Buddhism therefore the truer religion? Before the day of Galileo there was a general though not quite universal conviction that the earth was a motionless body, the sun passing around it daily. That was a matter in which “the united testimony of mankind” ought to have counted for more than it should in the matter of ghosts, for all can observe the earth and sun, but not many profess to see ghosts, and no one holds that the circumstances in which they are seen are favorable to calm and critical observation. Ghosts are notoriously addicted to the habit of evasion; Heine says that it is because they are afraid of us. “The united testimony of mankind” has a notable knack at establishing only one thing—the incredibility of the witnesses.

If the ghosts care to prove their existence as objective phenomena they are unfortunate in always discovering themselves to inaccurate observers, to say nothing of the bad luck of frightening them into fits. That the seers of ghosts are inaccurate observers, and therefore incredible witnesses, is clear from their own stories. Who ever heard of a naked ghost? The apparition is always said to present himself (as he certainly should) properly clothed, either “in his habit as he lived” or in the apparel of the grave. Herein the witness must be at fault: whatever power of apparition after dissolution may inhere in mortal flesh and blood, we can hardly be expected to believe that cotton, silk, wool and linen have the same mysterious gift. If textile fabrics had that property they would sometimes manifest it independently, one would think—would “materialize” visibly without a ghost inside, a greatly simpler apparition than “the grin without the cat.”

Ask any proponent of ghosts if he think that the products of the loom can “revisit the glimpses of the moon” after they have duly decayed, or, while still with us, can show themselves in a place where they are not. If he have no suspicion, poor man, of the trap set for him, he will pronounce the thing impossible and absurd, thereby condemning himself out of his own mouth; for assuredly such powers in these material things are necessary to the garmenting of spooks.

Now, by the law _falsus in uno falsus in omnibus_ we are compelled to reject all the ghost stories that have ever been seriously told. If the observer (let him be credited with the best intentions) has observed so badly as to think he saw what he did not see, and could not have seen, in one particular, to what credence is he entitled with regard to another? His error in the matter of the “long white robe” or other garment where no long white robe or other garment could be puts him out of court altogether. Resurrection of woolen, linen, silk, fur, lace, feathers, hooks and eyes, buttons, hatpins and the like—well, really, that is going far.

No, we draw the line at clothing. The materialized spook appealing to our senses for recognition of his ghostly character must authenticate himself otherwise than by familiar and remembered habiliments. He must be credentialed by nudity—and that regardless of temperature or who may happen to be present. Nay, it is to be feared that he must eschew his hair, as well as his habiliments, and “swim into our ken” utterly bald; for the scientists tell us with becoming solemnity that hair is a purely vegetable growth and no essential part of us. If he deem these to be hard conditions he is at liberty to remain on his reservation and try to endow us with a terrifying sense of himself by other means.

In brief, the conditions under which the ghost must appear in order to command the faith of an enlightened world are so onerous that he may prefer to remain away—to the unspeakable impoverishment of letters and art.

1902.

SOME ASPECTS OF EDUCATION

When Richard Olney was Secretary of State, “Ouida” (who had nothing to do with the matter) addressed to him a remonstrance against exclusion of illiterate immigrants, explaining that the analphabets in her employ were better servants than those who could read. “I have had for twenty years,” she said, “an old man (what is called ‘the odd man’ in England), and he can be sent with fifty commissions to purchase objects. Detail him orally and he will execute these commissions with no single error.” Illiteracy may be a valuable quality in a servant, but we are not taking in immigrants with a view to the betterment of our domestic service; it may qualify a man to do errands, but as a help to him in reading a ballot it does not amount to much. As a claim to high political preferment it is distinctly less valid than a bald head and a knack at gabble.

Nevertheless, “Ouida” was not altogether wrong. A man is not made intelligent by mere ability to read and write: his little learning is a dangerous thing to himself and to his country. The only reading that such men do is of the most degrading kind: it debases them, mind and heart, gives them a false estimate of their worth, magnifies their woes, and fills them with a sense of their numbers and their power. Eventually they “rise” and have to be shot. Or they succeed, and having first put to death the gifted rascals who incited and led them, they set up a Government of Unreason which they lack the sense to maintain, and their last state is no better than their first. That is the dull, dreary old sequence of events, so familiar to the student of history. That is the beaten path leading back to its beginning, which must be traveled again and again without a break in the monotony of the march. That is Progress—the brute revolt of the ignorant mass, their resubjection by the intelligent few; nowhere justice, nowhere righteousness, everywhere and always force, greed, selfishness and sin. That is the universal struggle—sometimes sluggish, sometimes turbulent, always without an outcome and with no hope of one. Along that hideous path our American free feet are merrily keeping time to the beating of hearts which, swelling to-day with the pride of progress, will shrink to-morrow with the dread of doom.

What then?—is popular education mischievous? Popular education is good for many things; it is not good for the stability of states. Whatever its advantages, it has this disadvantage: it produces “industrial discontent”; and industrial discontent is the first visible symptom of national wreck. Prate as we will of the “dignity of labor,” we convince no one that labor is anything other than a hard, imperious necessity, to be avoided if possible. Education promises avoidance—a promise which to the mass of workers is not, and can not be, kept. It brings to Labor a bitter disappointment which in time is transmuted into political mischief. The only man that labors with a song in his heart is he that knows nothing but to labor. Give him education—enlarge by ever so little the scope of his thought—make him permeable to a sense of the pleasures of life and his own privations, and you set up a quarrel between him and his condition. He may remain in his lowly station, but that will be because he cannot get out of it. He may continue to perform his hard and hateful work, but he will no longer perform it cheerfully and well.

What is the remedy?—educate him still more? Then he will no longer perform it at all—he will die first! Those of us who have tried both may assure him that head-work is harder than hand-work, that it takes more out of one, that its rewards give no greater happiness; he observes that none of us renounces it for the other kind. He does not believe us, and it would not affect him if he did.

What, as a matter of fact, is the public advantage of even that higher education which we tax ourselves more and more to make general? Look at our overcrowded professions, whose “ethics” and practices grow worse and worse from increasing competition. Not one of them is any longer a really “honorable” profession. Look at the monstrous overgrowth of our cities, those congested brains of the nation. They draw to themselves all the output of the colleges and the universities, and as much of that of the country schools as can get a precarious foothold and live—God knows how—in hope to “better its condition.” A pretty picture, truly: a population roughly divisible into a conscienceless crowd of brain-workers who have so “bettered their condition” as to live by prey; a sullen multitude of manual laborers blowing the coals of discontent and plotting a universal overthrow. Above the one perch the primping monkeys of “society,” chattering in meaningless glee; below the other the brute tramp welters in his grime. And with it all a national wealth that amazes the world and profits nobody—the country’s wonder, pride and curse. Still we go on with a maniacal hope, adding school to school, college to college, university to university, and—unconscious provision for their product—almshouses, asylums and prisons in prodigal abundance.

I am far from affirming that the industrial discontent which for more than a half century has been an augmenting menace to our national life, has its sole origin in popular education conjoined with the higher education of too many. For any social phenomenon there is no lack of causes. For this there are, among others, two of special importance. First, the duplication of the labor force by that female competition which, beginning its displacements pretty well up in the scale, drives the unlucky male to lower and lower levels, until forced out of the lowest by invasion by his own sex from higher ones, he finds no rest for the sole of his foot and takes to the road, an irreclaimable tramp. Second, the amazing multiplication of “labor-saving” machinery, whose disadvantages are swift, and advantages slow—which throws men out of work, who starve while awaiting restitution in the lower price of its products, many of which, even when cheap, are imperfectly edible. So I do not say that the schoolmaster is the only pestilence that walketh at noon-day. But I do say—and one with half an eye can observe it for himself and in his own person—that learning in any degree indisposes to manual toil in some degree; that the scholar will not labor musclewise if he can help it, nor with a contented spirit when he can not help it.

In his Founders’ Day address at Stanford University, the President of another university said:

Usually an education will pay, but even when the professions are
crowded and he [the college man] can find no place he is still the
better for it if he will but accept some lower occupation in life.

But “usually” he will not; he will wedge himself into some “profession,” whether he can make an honest living in it or not. And failing to make an honest living, he will make a living that is not honest. In the service of his belly and his back, he will resort to all manner of shady and unprofessional conduct. His competition forces other weak members of his profession into the same crooked courses, to which the public becomes accustomed and indifferent. What was once unprofessional becomes professional and respectable; with every accession of new men, the standard of allowable conduct falls lower, and to-day the learned professions are little more than organized conspiracies to plunder.

The distinguished author of the address is not without dreams of educational expansion. He says:

Let the common people flock by hundreds of thousands to the higher
institutions of learning; then the whole community will be lifted
to a happier level.

As in Germany, where men of university education are as thick as flies and the fields are tilled by women. Then educate the women and the field must be tilled by monkeys. Treading that “happier level” of German civilization are hundreds of thousands of scholars, becomingly stoop-shouldered and fitly be-spectacled, whom a day’s wage of an American farm hand would support in unaccustomed luxury for a week. But not a mother’s son of them will perform manual labor if he can help it. Nor will any of the corresponding class here or elsewhere. To educate “the man with a hoe” is to divorce him from his hoe—a prompt and irrevocable separation. A good deal of hoeing is needful in this world, and not so much lawing and physicking and preaching and writing and painting and the rest of it.

If I were dictator I would abolish every “institution of learning” above the grammar schools, excepting one or two universities. I would make a university in fact, as well as in name. It should not only turn out the finest scholars in the world, but it should be a place of original research in a sense that none of our universities now is. From the grammar school to its portal the student should make his upward way unaided—enough would accomplish the feat and thereby prove their fitness; and those who failed would not be greatly harmed by the effort. I am not quite sure if I should limit the number of students by law; probably that could best be done by the rigor of examinations. Under my dictatorship we would not be a community of “college graduates,” mostly men of prey, but neither should we be so top-heavy that in some social convulsion the country would “turn turtle” and stand on its head.

1897.

THE REIGN OF THE RING

The statement is made on what seems as good authority as in such a matter can be cited that in Europe the custom of wearing finger-rings is “going out”—to “come in” again, doubtless, with renewed vitality. It is hardly to be expected that it will suffer a permanent extinction while human character remains what it is; and the acutest observer can discern no symptoms of change in that. The original impulse moving the gentlemen and ladies of the Stone Age to circumclude their untidy digits with annular sections of the shinbones of their vanquished foemen while awaiting a knowledge of the metals is apparently not nearly exhausted, and we are far less likely to see the end of it than it is to see the end of us. It is more probable, indeed, that the nose-ring will return to bless us than that the finger-ring will add itself to the melancholy list of good things gone before.

Amongst the several tribes of our species the habit of encircling the human finger with something not contemplated in the original design of that variously useful member is almost universal, and it so far antedates history and tradition that by another sort of lying than either it has been outfitted with a divine origin. In ancient Egypt it was ascribed to Osiris, whose priests were distinguished from meaner mortals by finger-rings of a peculiar and mystical design, having a profound significance all the more impressive by reason of its impenetrability to conjecture. Perchol, however, has an ingenious theory that it was intended to puzzle the Egyptologist of the time-to-be; an instance of foresight which one can commend while deploring the unworthy motive at the back of it.

Amongst the ancient Jews rings were symbols of authority, as we see in the case of Joseph, to whom the Pharaoh gave one when he made him Governor; and this was a common use of rings in all antiquity. They were credentials of ambassadors and messengers, and served in place of written commissions, which, frequently it was impossible to give, for the commissioning power could not write, and which would have been ineffective, for most other persons could not read. In matters of business the ring was a power-of-attorney. Its usefulness in this way was suggested, doubtless, by the difficulty of imposture: written authorization may easily be forged, but a ring can not well be obtained from the finger of its owner without his consent.

The attribution of magical and medicinal virtues to rings pervades all ancient and mediæval story. Gyges, King of Lydia, had a ring by which the wearer could become invisible—a result accomplishable, though sometimes too tardily, by our modern plan of going away. One of the Kings of Lombardy had a ring which told him in what direction to travel. It may have contained a compass, though to that theory is opposed the objection that he antedated the invention of that instrument. But (I make the suggestion with humility) may not his have been the compass afterward invented? Medicated rings were in popular use in ancient Rome. An efficacious design for these, according to Trallian, a physician of the fourth century, was Hercules strangling the Nemæan lion. This, he assures us, is, if well engraved, a specific for stomach-ache. Throughout mediæval Europe belief in the healing power of certain rings was widely diffused; but then, as now, persons free from gross superstitions preferred to treat their disorders by touching the relics of saints.

Rings engraved with the names of the Magi were once in great medical repute, but in 1674 a learned prelate threw discredit upon them by showing that the true names were not known, being variously given as Melchior, Balthasar and Jasper; Apellius, Amerus and Damascus; Ator, Sator and Petratoras. As the author of _Ben-Hur_ has given the weight of his authority to the first three names, the healing-ring may with some confidence be engraved with them and pushed back into its old place in public esteem. But before risking any money in the manufacture it would be prudent to test upon a few patients the accuracy of General Wallace’s historical knowledge by administering the names of his choice internally.

A ring presented to Edward the Confessor cured epilepsy, and after the death of the royal owner by another and hardier disease it was preserved as a relic in Westminster Abbey. Rings which had been blessed, or even touched, by the sovereign were for some centuries considered worthy of a place in the British _materia medica_; and such would doubtless command a high price to-day in the American market—not to keep the purchaser in good health, but to make his neighbors sick with envy.

Of all rings possessing magical or medicinal virtues the toadstone ring of our fathers was the most interesting. It was well known to those ingenious naturalists that

the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head,

as Shakspeare was at the trouble to point out. It was customary to set this in a ring and wear it, for it had the useful property of changing color and sweating when poison was about. As poison was one of the commonest means by which our easy-going ancestors accomplished the end of one another’s sojourn in this vale of tears a monitor of that kind was extremely useful to have literally “on hand at meal-time.”

Certain stones were once regarded as having maleficent properties and were never set in rings. A chronicler relates that a certain knight in one of the crusades possessed himself of a costly scimitar belonging to a Saracen whom he had slain, and became so expert in its use that he discarded his own weapon and used the other. But from that time forth he met with nothing but disaster and shame. It was discovered that in fitting the scimitar with a cross-hilt, as Christian piety demanded, the malicious armorer had substituted for one of the gems an emerald, which by some secret process he had disguised. The malign stone and the armorer’s head having been removed the prowess of the knight was again effective and he rose to great distinction and honor. In the folk-lore of some of the riparian peoples along the Danube the topaz was listed as a peculiar possession of the Adversary of Souls. It was held that if one could by force or fraud get a topaz ring upon an enemy’s finger it would be impossible to remove it, and the victim would go, body and soul, to the devil. Advancing enlightenment has effaced these silly superstitions; we now know that the opal only is really malign.

We have it on the authority of Shakspeare that at least Aldermen wore thumb rings, for Falstaff avers that before he was blown up like a bladder by sighing and grief he could have crept through one, being “not an eagle’s talon in the waist.” If the custom had lived till our time Aldermen would have been at considerable expense for thumb-rings, for their fingers are all thumbs everywhere but in the public pocket. As engagements and weddings subtend a pretty wide angle in the circle of human life in modern times the ring is perhaps a more important factor in the happiness of at least one-half the race than ever before; and that half is the more conservative half; it and its customs are not soon parted. Not that engagement rings and wedding rings are a new thing under the sun: amongst several ancient peoples the wedding ring was an institution of prime importance. The bride’s investiture with that sign and symbol of wifehood was not merely in attestation of the wedding; it was the wedding. Divorce consisted in pulling it off, and that simple act—commonly performed by the husband—was not complicated with any questions of counsel fees, alimony and custody of the children.

The finger-ring will probably maintain its “ancient, solitary reign” for some time yet. The custom of wearing it is too deeply rooted in the nature of things, and the root has too many ramifications to be lightly renounced by virtue of any royal rescript of the “queens of fashion” in Paris, London or New York. It is not a mere garden plant growing loosely in the artificial top-soil of human vanity, but a hardy perennial, having a firm hold in many substrata of character and tradition, and eliciting nourishment from all. The finger-ring is on to stay.

FIN DE SIECLE

An end-of-the-century horse is doubtless pretty much the same as a horse of another period, but is there not in literature, art, politics and in intellectual and moral matters generally, an element, a spirit peculiar to the time and not altogether discernible to observation—a something which, not hitherto noted, or at least not so noticeable, now “pervades and animates the whole?” It seems to me that there is. Precisely what is its nature? That is not easy to answer; the thing is felt rather than observed. It is subtle, elusive, addressing, perhaps, only those sensibilities for whose needs of expression our English vocabulary makes little provision. I should with some misgiving call it the note of despair, or, more accurately, desperation. It sounds through the tumult of our lives as the boatswain’s whistle penetrates with a vibrant power the uproar of the storm—the singing and shouting of the wind in the cordage, the hissing of the waves, the shock and thunder of their monstrous buffets as they burst against the ship. O there’s a meaning in the phrase—a significance born of iteration. As certain predictions by their power upon the imagination assist in their own fulfilment, so this haunting phrase has made itself a meaning and shaped the facts to fit it. In the twilight of the century we have prophecies of the coming night, and see ghosts.

We are all dominated by our imaginations and our views are creatures of our viewpoints. To the ordinary mind the end of a century seems the end of one of a series of stages of progress, arranged in straight-away order, and impossible of prolongation. To turn the end of one line is to go back and begin it all _de novo_ on a parallel line—an end of progress, a long leap to the rear, a slow and painful resumption. Of course there is nothing in the facts to correspond to this fanciful and fantastic notion, but it is none the less powerful for that. To the person of that order of mind it undoubtedly seems that with the final year of the century the race will have lost a century of some advantage which he is not likely to see regained. He does not think that—he thinks nothing at all about it—he merely feels so, and can not even formulate the feeling. Quite the same it colors his moods, his character, his very manner of life and action. He has something of the ghastly gaiety of the plague-smitten soldiers in the song, who drank to those already dead and hurrahed for those about to die. The _fin de siècle_ spirit is fairly expressible by an intention to make the most of a vanishing opportunity by doing something out of the common.

Nearly everywhere we observe this spirit translating itself into acts and phenomena. In religion it finds manifestation in repair of “creeds outworn,” in acceptance of modern miracles, in pilgrimages, in strange and futile attempts at unification—even in toleration. In politics it has overspread the earth with anarchism, socialism, communism, woman suffrage and actual antagonism between the sexes. Industrial affairs show it in unnatural animosities and destructive struggles between employers and employees, in wild aspirations for impossible advantages, in resurrection of crude convictions and methods of antiquity. In literature it has given us realism, in art impressionism, and in both as much else that is false and extravagant as it is possible to name. In morals it has gone to the length of denying the expedience of morality. In all civilized countries crime is so augmenting, the sociologists tell us, that national earnings will not much longer be sufficient to support the machinery for its repression. Madness and suicide are advancing “by leaps and bounds,” and wars were never so needless and reasonless as now. Everywhere are a wild welter of action and thought, a cutting loose from all that is conservative and restraining, a “carnival of crime,” a reign of unreason.

Not everywhere: superior to all this madness, tranquil in the midst of it, and to some degree controlling it, stands Science, inaccessible to its malign influence and unaffectable by the tumult. Why?—how? God knows; I only perceive that the scientific mind has an imagination of its own kind. To him who has been trained to accurate observation and definite thought a century of years does not seem to have an end—it is simply one hundred times round the sun; and at the last moment of our _siècle_ we shall be just where we have been a million times before, under no different cosmic conditions. He is not impressed with “the sadness of it,” feels no desperation—sees nothing in it. He keeps his head—which, by the way, is worth keeping.

1898.

TIMOTHY H. REARDEN

In the death of Judge Rearden the world experienced a loss that is more likely adequately to be estimated in another generation than in this. A lawyer dies and his practice passes to others. A judge falls in harness, another is appointed or elected, and the business of the court goes on as before, frequently better. But for the vacant place of a scholar and man of letters there are no applicants. To him there is no successor: neither the President has the appointing power nor the people the power to elect. The vacancy is permanent, the loss irreparable; something has gone out of the better and higher life of the community which can not be replaced, and the void is the dead man’s best monument, invisible but eternal. Other scholars and men of letters will come forward in the new generation, but of none can it be said that he carries forward on the same lines the work of the “vanished hand,” nor declares exactly those truths of nature and art that would have been formulated by the “voice that is still.”

In that elder education which was once esteemed the only needful intellectual equipment of a gentleman, those attainments still commonly, and perhaps preferably, denoted by the word “scholarship,” Judge Rearden was probably without an equal on his side of the continent. Except by his habit of historical and literary allusion—to which he was perhaps somewhat over-addicted—and by that significant something, so difficult to name, yet to the discerning few so obvious, in the thought and speech of learned men, which is not altogether breadth and reach of reason nor altogether subtlety of taste and sentiment—in truth, is compatible with their opposites—except for these indirect disclosures he seldom and to few indeed gave even a hint of the enormous acquired wealth in the treasury of his mind. Graduated from a second-rate college in Ohio with little but a knowledge of Latin and Greek, a studious habit and a disposition so unworldly that it might almost be called unearthly, he pursued his amassment of knowledge with the unfailing diligence of an unfailing love, to the end. He knew not only the classical languages and many of the tongues of modern Europe, but their several dialects as well. To know a language is nothing, but to know its literature from the beginning, and to have incorporated its veritable essence and spirit into mind and character—that is much; and that is what Rearden had done with regard to all these tongues. Doubtless this is not the meat upon which intellectual Cæsars feed; doubtless, too, he did not make that full use of his attainments which the world approves as “practical,” and at which he smiled in his odd, tolerant way, as one may smile at the earnest work of a child making mud pies; yet his was not altogether a barren pen. Of Bret Harte’s bright band of literary coadjutors on the old _Overland Monthly_ he was among the first and best, and at several times, though irregularly and all too infrequently, he enriched _The Californian_ and other periodicals with noble contributions in prose and verse. Among the former were essays on Petrarch and Tennyson; the latter included a poem of no mean merit on the Charleston earthquake, and another which he had intended to read before the George H. Thomas Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, but was prevented by his last illness. Read now in the solemn light that lies along his path through the Valley of the Shadow, the initial stanza seems to have a significance almost prophetic:

Life’s fevered day declines; its purple twilight falling,
Draws lengthening shadows from the broken flanks;
And from the column’s head a viewless chief is calling:
“Guide right—close up the ranks.”

Some of his papers for the Chitchat Club could not easily be matched by selections from the magazines and reviews, and if a collection were made of the pieces that he loved to put out in that wasteful way we should have a volume of notable reading, distinguished for a sharply accented individuality of thought and style.

For a number of years before his death Rearden was engaged in constructing (the word writing here is inadequate) a work on Sappho, which, as I understand the matter, was to be a kind of compendium of all the little that is known and pretty nearly all the much that has been conjectured and said of her. It was to be profusely illustrated by master-hands, copiously annotated and enriched with variorum readings—a book for bookworms. Of its fate I am not advised, but trust that none of this labor of love may be lost. A work which for many years engaged the hand and the heart of such a man can not, of whatever else it may be devoid, lack that distinction which is to literature what it is to character—its life, its glory and its crown.

1892.

THE PASSING OF THE HORSE

Certain admirers of the useful, beautiful, dangerous and senseless beast known to many of them as the “hoss” are promising the creature a life of elegant leisure, with opportunities for mental culture which he has not heretofore enjoyed. Universal use of the automobile in all its actual and possible forms and for all practical purposes in the world’s work and pleasure is to relieve the horse from his onerous service and give him a life of ease “and a perpetual feast of nectared sweets.”

The horse of the future is to do no work, have no cares, be immune to the whip, the saddle, the harness and the unwelcome attentions of the farrier. He is to toil not, neither spin, yet Nebuchadnezzar in all his glory was not stabled and pastured as he is to be. In brief, the automobile is going to make of this bad world a horse elysium, where the tired brute can repose on beds of amaranth and moly, to the eminent satisfaction of his body and his mind.

There is reason to fear that all these hopes will not come to fruitage. It is not seen just why a generation of selfish and somewhat preoccupied human beings who know not the horse as an animal of utility should cherish him as a creature of merit. We have already one pensioner on our bounty who does little that is useful in return for his keep and an incalculable multitude of things which we would prefer that he should not do if he could be persuaded to forego them—the domestic dog, to wit. We are not likely to augment our burden by addition of the obsolete horse. Those of us who, through stress of necessity or the promptings of Paris, have tested our teeth upon him know that he is not very good to eat; he will hardly be cultivated for the table, like the otherwise inutile and altogether unhandsome pig. The present vogue of the horse as a comestible, a viand, is without the knowledge and assent of the consumer, but an abattoir having its outlying corrals gorged with waiting horses would be an object of public suspicion and constabular inquiry. As a provision against human hunger the horse may be considered out of the running. Hard, indeed, were the heart of the father who would regale the returning prodigal with a fatted colt.

There will be no horses in our “leisure class,” for there will be no horses. The species will be as effectually effaced by the automobile as if it had run over them. If the new machine fulfills all the hopes that now begin to cluster about it the man of the future will find a deal of our literature and art unintelligible. To him the equestrian statue, for example, will be an even more astonishing phenomenon than it commonly is to us.

There is a suggestion in all this to our good and great friends, the vegetarians. They do not easily tire of pointing out the brutality of slaughtering animals to get their meat, although it is not obvious that we could eat them alive. We should breed some of these edible creatures anyhow, for they serve other needs than those of appetite; but others, like the late Belgian hare, who virtually passed away as soon as the breeders and dealers failed to convince us that we were eating him, would become extinct. Many millions of meat-bearing animals owe whatever of life we grant them to the fact that we mean eventually to deprive them of it. Seeing that they are so soon to be “done for,” they may not understand what they were “begun for”; but if life is a blessing, as most of us believe and themselves seem to believe, for they manifest a certain reluctance to give it up, why, even a short life is a thing to be thankful for. If we had not intended to kill them they would not have lived at all.

From this superior point of view even the royal sport of slaughtering such preserved game as the English pheasant seems a trifle less brutal than it is commonly affirmed to be by those of us who are not invited to the killing. This argument, too, has an obvious application in the instance of that worthy Russian sect that denies the right of man to enslave horses, oxen, etc. But for man’s fell purpose of enslaving them there would be none.

And what about the American negro? Had it not been for the cruel greed of certain Southern planters and Yankee skippers where would he be? Would he be anywhere? So we see how all things work together for the general good, and evil itself is a blessing in disguise. No African slavery, no American negro; no American negro, no Senator Hanna’s picturesque bill to pension his surviving ancestors. And without that we should indubitably be denied the glittering hope of a similar bill pensioning the entire negro race!

1903.

NEWSPAPERS

I

The influence of some newspapers on republican government is discernibly good; that of the enormous majority conspicuously bad. Conducted by rogues and dunces for dunces and rogues, these are faithful to nothing but the follies and vices of our system, strenuously opposing every intelligent attempt at their elimination. They fetter the feet of wisdom and stiffen the prejudices of the ignorant. They are sycophants to the mob, tyrants to the individual. They constitute a menace to organized society—a peril to government of any kind; and if ever in America Anarchy shall beg to introduce his dear friend Despotism we shall have to thank our vaunted “freedom of the press” as the controlling spirit of the turbulent time, and Lord of Misrule. We may then be grateful too that, like a meteor consumed by friction of the denser atmosphere which its speed compressed, its brightest blaze will be its last. The despot whose path to power it illumined will extinguish it with a dash of ink.