Chapter III

The good American is, as a rule, pretty hard upon roguery, but he atones for his austerity by an amiable toleration of rogues. His only requirement is that he must personally know the rogues. We all “denounce” thieves loudly enough if we have not the honor of their acquaintance. If we have, why, that is different—unless they have the actual odor of the slum or the prison about them. We may know them guilty, but we meet them, shake hands with them, drink with them and, if they happen to be wealthy, or otherwise great, invite them to our houses, and deem it an honor to frequent theirs. We do not “approve their methods”—let that be understood; and thereby they are sufficiently punished. The notion that a knave cares a pin what is thought of his ways by one who is civil and friendly to himself appears to have been invented by a humorist. On the vaudeville stage of Mars it would probably have made his fortune.

I know men standing high in journalism who to-day will “expose” and bitterly “denounce” a certain rascality and to-morrow will be hobnobbing with the rascals whom they have named. I know legislators of renown who habitually raise their voices against the dishonest schemes of some “trust magnate,” and are habitually seen in familiar conversation with him. Indubitably these be hypocrites all. Between the head and the heart of a man of this objectionable kind is a wall of adamant, and neither knows what the other is doing.

If social recognition were denied to rogues they would be fewer by many. Some would only the more diligently cover their tracks along the devious paths of unrighteousness, but others would do so much violence to their consciences as to renounce the disadvantages of rascality for those of an honest life. An unworthy person dreads nothing so much as the withholding of an honest hand, the slow, inevitable stroke of an ignoring eye.

We have rich rogues because we have “respectable” persons who are not ashamed to take them by the hand, to be seen with them, to say that they know them. In such it is treachery to censure them; to cry out when robbed by them is to turn state’s evidence.

One may smile upon a rascal (most of us do so many times a day) if one does not know him to be a rascal, and has not said he is; but knowing him to be, or having said he is, to smile upon him is to be a hypocrite—just a plain hypocrite or a sycophantic hypocrite, according to the station in life of the rascal smiled upon. There are more plain hypocrites than sycophantic ones, for there are more rascals of no consequence than rich and distinguished ones, though they get fewer smiles each. The American people will be plundered as long as the American character is what it is; as long as it is tolerant of successful knaves; as long as American ingenuity draws an imaginary distinction between a man’s public character and his private—his commercial and his personal. In brief, the American people will be plundered as long as they deserve to be plundered. No human law can stop it, none ought to stop it, for that would abrogate a higher and more salutary law: “As ye sow ye shall reap.”

In a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst is the passage following:

“The story of all our Lord’s dealings with sinners leaves upon the mind the invariable impression, if only the story be read sympathetically and earnestly, that He always felt kindly towards the transgressor, but could have no tenderness of regard toward the transgression. There is no safe and successful dealing with sin of any kind save as that distinction is appreciated and made a continual factor in our feelings and efforts.”

If Dr. Parkhurst will read his New Testament more understandingly he will observe that Christ’s kindly feeling to transgressors was not to be counted on by sinners of every kind, and it was not always in evidence; for example, when he flogged the moneychangers out of the temple. Nor is Dr. Parkhurst himself any too amiably disposed toward the children of darkness. It was not by mild words and gentle means that he hurled the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. Such revolutions as he set afoot are not made with spiritual rosewater; there must be the contagion of a noble indignation fueled with harder wood than abstractions. The people can not be mustered and incited to action by the spectacle of a man fighting something that does not fight back. It was men that Dr. Parkhurst was trouncing—not their crimes—not Crime. He may fancy himself “dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,” but in reality he does not hate hate but hates the hateful, and scorns, not scorn but the scornworthy.

It is singular with what tenacity this amusing though mischievous superstition keeps its hold upon the human mind—this grave, _bona fide_ personification of abstractions and the funny delusion that it is possible to hate or love them. Sin is not a thing; there is no existing object corresponding to any of the mere counter-words that are properly named abstract nouns. One can no more hate sin or love virtue than one can hate a vacuum (which Nature—itself imaginary—was once by the scientists of the period solemnly held to do) or love one of the three dimensions. We may think that while loving a sinner we hate the sin, but that is not so; if anything is hated it is other sinners of the same kind, who are not quite so close to us.

The French have a saying to the effect that to know all is to pardon all; and doubtless with an omniscient insight into the causes of character we should find the field of moral responsibility pretty thickly strewn with extenuating circumstances very suitable indeed for consideration by a god who has had a hand in besetting “with pitfall and with gin” the road we are to “wander in.” But I submit that universal forgiveness would hardly do as a working principle. Even those who are most apt and facile with the incident of the woman taken in adultery commonly cherish a secret respect for the doctrine of eternal damnation; and some of them are known to pin their faith to the penal code of their state. Moreover, there is some reason to believe that the sinning woman, being “taken,” was penitent—they usually are when found out.

“But,” says Citizen Goodheart, who thinks with difficulty, “shall I throw over my friend when he is ‘in trouble’?” Yes, when convinced that he deserves to be in trouble; throw him all the harder and the further because he is your friend. In addition to his particular offense against society he has disgraced _you_. If there are to be lenity and charity let them go to the criminal who has foreborne to involve you in his shame. It were a pretty state of affairs if an undetected scamp, fearing exposure, could make you a co-defendant by so easy a precaution as securing your acquaintance and regard. Don’t throw the first stone, of course, but when convinced that your friend is a proper target, heave away with a right hearty good-will, and let the stone be of serviceable weight and delivered with a good aim.

I care nothing for principles—they are lumber and rubbish. What concerns our happiness and welfare, as affectable by our fellowmen, is conduct. “Principles, not men,” is a rogue’s cry; rascality’s counsel to stupidity, the noise of the duper duping on his dupe. He shouts it most loudly and with the keenest sense of its advantage who most desires inattention to his own conduct, or to that forecast of it, his character. As to sin, that has an abundance of expounders and is already universally known to be wicked. What more can be said against it, and why go on repeating that? The thing is a trifle wordworn, whereas the sinner cometh up as a flower every day, fresh, ingenuous and inviting. Sin is not at all dangerous to society; what does all the mischief is the sinner. Crime has no arms to thrust into the public treasury and the private; no hands with which to cut a throat; no tongue to wreck a reputation withal. I would no more attack it than I would attack an isosceles triangle, or Hume’s “phantasm floating in a void.” My chosen enemy must be something that has a skin for my switch, a head for my cudgel—something that can smart and ache. I have no quarrel with abstractions; so far as I know they are all good citizens.

ON KNOWING ONE’S BUSINESS—AN INSTANCE

No series of connected and consecutive military events has been so closely analyzed by military students as those marking the first Italian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. All expounders of the military art who have had the good fortune to live since its principles were so wonderfully illustrated by that campaign have delighted to use its incidents in exposition. Every student has early learned that he could not afford to neglect it. Even to the “general reader,” unacquainted with the mysteries of strategy and tactics, who in the darkness of his ignorance cherishes the error that war is fortuitous fighting loosely directed to results by physical courage and the will of God, the history of these brilliant operations can hardly fail, when lucidly related, to prove interesting and charming beyond the power of fiction. As related by the mere “historian,” with his port-fire and blood-fumes to emotionalize the situation, it is doubtless as dull reading as the literature of the heart generally. What, in brief, _was_ this remarkable campaign?

In the month of March, 1796, Bonaparte, a boy of twenty-six, untried in independent command, was intrusted with an army of some forty thousand badly clad and inadequately supplied men, with which to invade Italy. He was opposed by Beaulieu, with a well equipped force, Austrians and Sardinians, of fifty thousand. The Alps and Apennines were between. Bonaparte began active operations on the eleventh day of April, 1796. On the seventh day of April, 1797, at Leoben, near Vienna, he received the Austrian Emperor’s emissaries, who came to sue for peace, and the war was at an end. During this period of one year less four days, with forces averaging forty-six thousand opposed to forces averaging sixty-one thousand he had in fifteen pitched battles routed one Sardinian army and the six Austrian armies successively sent to drive him out of Italy, only to be driven out themselves. His losses during the campaign in killed, wounded and prisoners were about equal to the numbers of his army at the outset. The losses that he inflicted upon the enemy were no fewer than one hundred and twenty thousand men and vast quantities of _material_.

How were these astonishing feats of arms performed? Not by the superior courage of his soldiers, for the Austrians then, as they are now, were a brave and warlike people. Not by the “will of God,” whose agency is to the military eye nowhere discernible, and whose political predilections are still unknown. Nor were these admirable results due to “luck,” the “favors of fortune,” the “magic” of genius. They were brought about by the very commonplace method of knowing his business thoroughly and applying the knowledge. There is nothing miraculous in that. It is an open secret which Napoleon himself has explained:

“In war nothing is accomplished but by calculation. During a campaign, whatever is not profoundly considered in all its details is without result. Every enterprise should be systematically conducted; chance alone can not bring success.”

I should be sorry to be understood as affirming the possibility of such military success as Napoleon’s to the mere student of military art, devoid of Napoleon’s genius. On the other hand, Napoleon’s genius would have been futile without his mastery of the art. Military art is no exception to art in general; for eminent achievement is required great natural aptitude, _plus_ a comprehensive and minute knowledge of the business in hand. Given these two requisites in the commander, and the army is multiplied by two. For many generations, doubtless, the French will boast of Montenotte, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram; but every intelligent soldier’s view is that on all these historic fields there was but one victor. To quote his words again:

“It was not the Roman army that conquered Gaul, but Cæsar; it was not the Carthaginian army which, at the gates of Rome, made the Eternal City tremble, but Hannibal; it was not the Macedonian army that marched as far as the Indus, but Alexander; it was not the Prussian army that defended Prussia for seven years against the three most powerful states of Europe, but Frederick.”

The contrary view—the theory of the insignificance of the individual—so persistently urged a generation ago by Mill, and so eagerly accepted by the young philosophers of his period, derives no support from military history. Tolstoi, it is true, is in full, if somewhat belated, advocacy of it, and professes to find confirmation in the events that he relates in his military novels. And it must be confessed that, as he relates them, they indubitably do seem to justify his view that leaders do not truly lead. With the splendid irresponsibility of the fictionist, he shows that the French people having incurred, somehow, a blind, reasonless impulse to go gadding about Europe, caught up Napoleon, as a stream bursting out of its banks might catch up a sheep or a log, and pushed him along before them. A careful study of the progress through Italy will, I think, show that at least he did something toward reducing the friction incident to the movement.

Any one really believing in unimportance of the individual must be prepared to affirm that a chance bullet finding a lodgment in the brain of the commander of the Army of Italy at Montenotte would have made but little difference in the conduct of the campaign and the later history of Europe; and any one prepared to affirm this may justly boast himself impregnable to argument, through induration of the understanding.

The history of the military operations that we have been considering has never been better told than in a book entitled _Napoleon Bonaparte’s First Campaign_—it should be remembered that he was then simply General Bonaparte. The author of the book is Lieutenant Herbert H. Sargent,[1] of the Army. Nothing could well exceed the clarity with which the author has told his story; and nothing that I have seen in military literature is more admirable than his professional but untechnical comments on its successive stages. Everything is made so clear that the benighted civilian of the anti-West Point sort, the fearfully and wonderfully bepistoled swashbuckler of the frontier, the gilded whiskey-soldier of the National Guard and even the self-taught strategist of the press can comprehend it all without a special revelation from Heaven. Those conscious of a desire, however vague and formless, to acquire such a knowledge of military science and art as will give them a keener interest in “war news” that is not “bluggy” than they ever had in that which reeks with gore and “multiplies the slain” will find in Lieutenant Sargent a guide, philosopher and friend for whom they cannot be sufficiently thankful to the God that bestowed him.

1895.

[1] After distinguished service as colonel of volunteers in the Cuban
and Philippine wars, this great soldier is now retired as major in
the regular army. Before retirement he published two other books,
_The Campaign of Marengo_ and _The Campaign of Santiago de Cuba_,
both characterized by all the qualities so conspicuous in his
first book—qualities that are themselves a fine result of “knowing
one’s business.”

1912.

A TRADE OF REFUGE

There is no security—even the life of a steeple-climber is held by a precarious tenure. One cannot always be clinging to a spire in “the intense inane;” one must sometimes descend to “this place of wrath and tears” in order to eat and write poetry for the newspapers; and then the manifold perils besetting a surface existence begin their deadly work, and man that is born of woman is of few days and full of surprises.

Once upon a time, ’tis said, a foolhardy steeple-jack took his life in his hands and ventured down among us. Doubtless he wanted but little here below; certainly he did not want that little long, for he made acquaintance with a trolley car and passed away forthwith. If in the moment of disaster “beneath thy wheels, O Juggernath,” it was granted to him to hear the comforting “I told you so” of some fellow craftsman in midheaven, how acutely he must have sympathized with us unfortunates condemned to dwell in the midst of alarms from the cradle to the grave!

Our hard lot must have touched him nearly; participation in its disadvantages must have brought it home to his business and bosom with a more compelling compassion than that of the tempest-tossed mariner who prays, “God help the poor devils on shore such a night as this!” In the consciousness of that sympathy—transient though it necessarily had to be—let us take heart and hope, to confront the perils of our environment. Let us walk our appointed ways among them with no less circumspection, but a superior resignation.

We cannot all be steeple-climbers. We cannot all go down to the sea in ships and know

The exulting sense, the pulse’s maddening play,
That thrill the wanderer on the trackless way

as he reflects on his immunity from the insistent vehicle, the stealthy sewer gas, the subterranean steam boiler, the Conqueror Dog and all the other maleficent agencies unknown to a life on the ocean wave.

Some there must be to till the soil (mostly malarial), some to hold the offices, some to feed the dogs, some to tear up the streets, and many—oh, so many!—to write poetry for the magazines. Ships must be built for the happy, happy mariner, and steeples to exalt the prudent climber above the perilous region of industrial discontent. The timorous aviator, in pursuit of longevity must be supplied with his apparatus. By rustic and urban industries soldiers must be maintained in the security of service _in partibus infidelium_ where the devastating open coalhole comes not to execute its prank, and missionaries outfitted to grasp the longevital advantages of labor among the cannibals. In the formation of trusts to bring the producer and consumer together in the poor-house we must toil in the pestilential atmosphere of Wall Street. The necessity of making “elevators” to dispose of the surplus population in our congested cities is imperious.

Most of these needful activities have to be conducted on the surface of the land, amidst the horrors of peace and the deadly devices of an advanced civilization. It requires the greater and more courageous part of the population to carry them on; only a few shrinking souls can afford to seek safety on the steeples. But the lives of these have a peculiar value to the millions engaged in the perilous trades that go on below them. They are survivals of the time that was, forerunners of the time to be. They serve to remind us of that blessed barbarism—that golden age when our sylvan forefather gave himself a chance to live out half his life; and in this dark period of transition they foreshadow that brighter and better time when the land will be studded with abundant steeples of refuge for all excepting condemned criminals and enough ruffian officers of the law to operate, for their extinction, a few of the more deadly appliances and modern conveniences of civilization.

The steeple-jack is a precious possession—let him not be cast out. In order that he may not be compelled to incur the perils of the street, let him be clothed and fed with a kite.

THE DEATH PENALTY