Chapter II (1)

Mr. Nicholas Smith, while United States consul at Liege, wrote, or caused to be written, an official report, wickedly, wilfully and maliciously designed to abridge the privileges, augment the ills and impair the honorable status of the domestic dog. In the very beginning of this report Mr. Smith manifests his animus by stigmatizing the domestic dog as an “hereditary loafer;” and having “hurled the allegation,” affirms “the dawn of a (Belgian) new era” wherein the pampered menial will loaf no more. There is to be no more sun-soaking on door mats having a southern exposure, no more usurpation of the warmest segment of the family semicircle, no more personal solicitation of cheer at the domestic board. The dog’s place in the social scale is no longer to be determined by considerations of sentiment, but will be the result of cold commercial calculation, and so fixed as best to serve the ends of industrial expediency. All this in Belgium, where the dog is already in active service as a beast of burden and draught; doubtless the transition to that humble condition from his present and immemorial social elevation in less advanced countries will be slow and characterized by bitter factional strife. America, especially, although ever accessible to the infection of new and profitable ideas, will be slow to accept so radical a subversion of a social superstructure that almost may be said to rest upon the domestic dog as a basic verity.

The dogs are our only true “leisure class” (even our tramps are sometimes compelled to engage in such simple industries as are possible in the county jail) and we are justly proud of them. Dogs toil not, neither spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not a dog. Instead of making them hewers of wood and drawers of water, it would be more consonant with the Anglomaniacal and general Old World spirit, now so dominant in the councils of the nation, to make them “hereditary legislators.” And Mr. Smith must permit me to add, with a special significance, that history records an instance of even a horse making a fairly good consul.

Mr. Smith avers with obvious satisfaction that in Liege twice as many draught dogs as horses are seen in the streets, attached to vehicles. He regards “a gaily painted cart” drawn by “a well fed dog” and driven by a well fed (and gaily painted) woman as a “pleasing vision.” I do not; I should prefer to see the dog sitting at the receipt of steaks and chops and the lady devoting herself to the amelioration of the condition of the universe and the manufacture of poetry and stories that are not true. A more pleasing vision, too, one endeared to eye and heart by immemorial use and wont, is that of stranger and dog indulging in the pleasures of the chase—stranger a little ahead—while the woman in the case manifests a characteristically compassionate solicitude lest the gentleman’s trousers do not match Fido’s mustache. It is, indeed, impossible to regard with any degree of approval the degradation to commercial utility of two so noble animals as Dog and Woman; and if Man had joined them together by driving-reins I should hope that God would put them asunder, even if the reins were held by Dog. There would no doubt be a distinct gain as well as a certain artistic fitness in unyoking the strong-minded female of our species from the chariot of progress and yoking her to the apple-cart or fish-wagon, but imminence of the draughtwoman is not foreshadowed in the report of our consul at Liege.

Mr. Smith’s estimate of the number of dogs in this country at seven millions is a moderate one, it must be confessed, and can hardly have been based on observations by moonlight in a suburban village; his estimate of the effective strength of the average dog at five hundred pounds is probably about right, as will be attested by any intelligent boy who in a campaign against an orchard has experienced detention by the Cerberus of the place. Taking his own figures, Mr. Smith calculates that we have in this country three-and-a-half billion pounds of “idle dog power.” But this statement is more ingenious than ingenuous; it gives, as doubtless it was intended to give, the impression that we have only idle dogs, whereas of all mundane forces the domestic dog is most easily stirred to action. His expense of energy in pursuit of the harmless, necessary flea, for example, is prodigious; and he is not infrequently seen in chase of his own tail, with an activity scarcely inferior. If there is anything worth while in accepted theories of the conversion and conservation of force these gigantic energies are by no means wasted; they reappear as heat, light and electricity, modifying climate, reducing gas bills and assisting in propulsion of street cars. Even in baying the moon and terrifying visitors and bypassers, the dog releases a certain amount of vibratory force which through various mutations of its wave-length may do its part in cooking a steak or gratifying the olfactory nerve by throwing fresh perfume on the violet. Evidently the commercial advantages of deposing the dog from his position of Exalted Personage and subduing him to that of Motor would not be all clear gain. He would no longer have the spirit to send, Whitmanwise, his barbarous but beneficent yawp over the housetops, nor the leisure to throw off vast quantities of energy by centrifugal efforts at the conquest of his tail. As to the fleas, he would accept them with apathetic satisfaction as preventives of thought upon his fallen fortunes.

Having observed with attention and considered with seriousness, a respectable authority declares his conviction that the dog, as we have the happiness to know him, is dreadfully bored by civilization. This is one of the gravest accusations that the friends of progress and light have been called out to meet—a challenge that it is impossible to ignore and unprofitable to evade; for the dog as we have the happiness to know him is the only dog that we have the happiness really to know. The wolf is hardly a dog within the meaning of the law, nor is the scalp-yielding coyote, whether he howls or merely sings and plays the piano; moreover, these are beyond the pale of civilization and outside the scope of our sympathies.

With the dog it is different. His place is among us; he is with us and of us—a part of our life and love. If we are maintaining and promoting a condition of things that fatigues him it is befitting that we mend our ways lest, shaking the carpet dust from his feet and the tenderloin steaks from his teeth, he depart from our midst and connect himself with the enchanted life of the thrilling barbarian. We can not afford to lose him. The cynophobes may call him a “survival” and sneer at his exhausted mandate—albeit, as Darwin points out, they are indebted for their sneer to his own habit of uncovering his teeth to bite; they may seek to cast opprobrium upon the nature of our affection for him by pronouncing it hereditary—a bequest from our primitive ancestors, for whom he performed important service in other ways than depriving visitors of their tendons; but quite the same we should miss him at his meal time and in the (but for him) silent watches of the night. We should miss his bark and his bite, the feel of his forefeet upon our shirt-fronts, the frou-frou of his dusty sides against our nether habiliments. More than all, we should miss and mourn that visible yearning for chops and steaks, which he has persuaded us to accept as the lovelight of his eye and a tribute to our personal worth. We must keep the dog, and to that end find means to abate his weariness of us and our ways.

Doubtless much might be done to reclaim our dogs from their uncheerful state of mind by abstention from debate on the protective tariff; by excluding them from the churches, at least during the sermons; by keeping them off the streets and out of hearing when rites of prostration are in performance before visiting notables; by forbidding anyone to read aloud in their hearing the more phrenetic articles in the newspapers, and by educating them to the belief that labor and capital are illusions. A limitation of the annual output of popular novels would undoubtedly reduce the dejection, which could be still further mitigated by abolition of the more successful magazines. If the dialect story or poem could be prohibited, under severe penalties, the sum of night-howling (erroneously attributed to lunar influence) would experience an audible decrement, which, also, would enable the fire department to augment its own uproar without reproach. There is, indeed, a considerable number of ways in which we might effect a double reform—promoting the advantage of Man, as well as medicating the mental fatigue of Dog. For another example, it would be “a boon and a blessing to men” if society would put to death, or at least banish, the millman or manufacturer who persists in apprising the entire community many times a day by means of a steam whistle that it is time for his oppressed employees (every one of whom has a gold watch) to go to work or to leave off. Such things not only make a dog tired, they make a man mad. They answer with an accented affirmative Truthful James’s plaintive inquiry,

Is civilization a failure,
Or is the Caucasian played out?

Unquestionably, from his advantageous point of view as a looker-on at the game, the dog is justified in the conviction that they are.

THE ANCESTRAL BOND

A well-known citizen of Ohio once discovered another man of the same name exactly resembling him, and writing a “hand” which, including the signature, he was unable to distinguish from his own. The two men were unable to discover any blood relationship between them. It is nevertheless almost certain that a relationship existed, though it may have been so remote a degree that the familiar term “forty-second cousin” would not have exaggerated the slenderness of the tie. The phenomena of heredity seem to me to have been inattentively noted, its laws imperfectly understood, even by Herbert Spencer and the prophets. My own small study in this amazing field convinces me that a man is the sum of his ancestors; that his character, moral and intellectual, is determined before his birth. His environment with all its varied suasions, its agencies of good and evil; breeding, training, interest, experience and the rest of it—have less to do with the matter and can not annul the sentence passed upon him at conception, compelling him to be what he is.

Man is the hither end of an immeasurable line extending back to the ultimate Adam—or, as we scientists prefer to name him, Protoplasmos. Man travels, not the mental road that he would, but the one that he must—is pushed this way and that by the resultant of all the forces behind him; for each member of the ancestral line, though dead, yet pusheth. In one of what Dr. Holmes calls his “medicated novels,” _The Guardian Angel_, this truth is most admirably and lucidly set forth with abundant instance and copious exposition. Upon another work of his—in which he erroneously affirms the influence of circumstance and environment—let us lay a charitable hand and fling it into the fire.

Clearly all a man’s ancestors have not equal power in shaping his character. Conceiving them, according to our figure, as arranged in line behind him and influential in the ratio of their individuality, we shall get the best notion of their method by supposing them to have taken their places in an order somewhat independent of chronology and a little different from their arrangement behind his brother. Immediately at his back, with a controlling hand (a trifle skinny) upon him, may stand his great-grandmother, while his father may be many removes arear. Or the place of power may be held by some fine old Asian gentleman who flourished before the confusion of tongues on the plain of Shinar; or by some cave-dweller who polished the bone of life in Bythynia and was perhaps a respectable and honest troglodyte.

Sometimes a whole platoon of ancestors appears to have been moved backward or forward _en bloc_, not, we may be sure, capriciously, but in obedience to some law that we do not understand. I know a man to whose character not an ancestor since the seventeenth century appears to have contributed an element. Intellectually he is a contemporary of John Dryden, whom naturally he reveres as the greatest of poets. There was another who inherited his handwriting from his great-grandfather, although trained to “the Spencerian system” that he tried vainly to acquire. Furthermore, his handwriting followed the same order of progressive development as that of his great-grandfather. At the age of twenty he wrote exactly as that ancestor did at the same age, and, although at forty-five his chirography was nothing like what it was even ten years before, it was accurately like his great-grandfather’s at forty-five. Discovery of some old letters showed him how his great-grandfather wrote, and accounted for the dissimilarity of his own handwriting to that of any known member of his family, or his teachers.

To suppose that such individual traits as the configuration of the body, the color of the hair and eyes, the shape of hands and feet, the thousand-and-one subtle characteristics that make family resemblances, are transmissible, and that the form, texture and capacities of the brain which fix the kind and degree of natural intellect, are _not_ transmissible, is illogical. We see that certain actions, such as gestures, gait, and so forth, resulting from the most complex concurrences of brain, nerves and muscles, are hereditary. Is it reasonable to suppose that the brain alone of all the organs performs its work according to its own sweet will, free from congenital tendencies? Is it not a familiar fact that racial characteristics are persistent?—that one race is stupid and indocile, another quick and intelligent? Does not each generation of a race inherit the intellectual qualities of the preceding generation? How could this be true of generations if it were not true of individuals?

As to stirpiculture, the intelligent and systematic breeding of men and women with a view to improvement of the species—it is a thing of the far future. It is hardly in sight. Yet, what splendid possibilities it carries! Two or three generations of as careful breeding as we bestow on horses, dogs and pigeons would do more good than all the penal, reformatory and educating agencies of the world accomplish in a thousand years. It is the one direction in which human effort to “elevate the race” can be assured of a definitive, speedy and adequate success. It is hardly better than nonsense to prate of any good coming to the race through (for example) medical science, which is mainly concerned in reversing the beneficent operation of natural laws and saving the inefficient to perpetuate their inefficiency. Our entire system of charities is open to the same objection; it preserves the incapables whom Nature is trying to “weed out.” This not only debases the race physically, intellectually and morally, but constantly increases the rate of debasement. The proportion of criminals, paupers and the several kinds of “inmates” augments its horrible percentage yearly. On the other hand, our wars destroy the capable; so thus we make inroads upon the vitality of the race from two directions. We preserve the feeble and extirpate the strong. He who in view of this amazing folly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the human race toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose Olympian heights are inaccessible—the Titans of fact can never scale them to storm its ancient, solitary reign.

THE RIGHT TO WORK

All kinds of relief, charitable or other, doubtless tend to perpetuation of pauperism, inasmuch as paupers are thereby kept alive; and living paupers unquestionably propagate their unthrifty kind more diligently than dead ones. It is not true, though, that relief interferes with Nature’s beneficent law of the survival of the fittest, for the power to excite sympathy and obtain relief is a kind of fitness. I am still a devotee of the homely primitive doctrine that mischance, disability or even unthrift, is not a capital crime justly and profitably punishable by starvation. I still regard the Good Samaritan with a certain toleration and Jesus Christ’s tenderness to the poor as something more than a policy of obstruction.

Who is more truly “deserving” than an able-bodied man out of work through no delinquency of will and no default of effort? Is hunger to him and his less poignant than to the feeble in body and mind whom we support for nothing in almshouse or asylum? Are cold and exposure less disagreeable to him than to them? Is not his claim to the right to live as valid as theirs if backed by the will to pay for life with work? And in denial of his claim is there not latent a far greater peril to society than inheres in denial of theirs? So unfortunate and dangerous a creature as a man able and willing to work, yet having no work to do, should be unknown outside the literature of satire. Doubtless there would be enormous difficulties in devising a practicable and beneficent system, and doubtless the reform, like all permanent and salutary reforms, will have to grow. The growth, naturally, will be delayed by opposition of the workingmen themselves—precisely as they oppose prison labor from ignorance that labor makes opportunity to labor.

It matters not that nine in ten of all our tramps and vagrants are such from choice, and are irreclaimable degenerates as well; so long as one worthy man is out of employment and unable to obtain it our duty is to provide it by law. Nay, so long as industrial conditions are such that so pathetic a phenomenon is possible we have not the moral right to disregard that possibility. The right to employment being the right to life, its denial is, in a sense, homicide. It should be needless to point out the advantages of its concession. It would preserve the life and self-respect of him who is needy through misfortune, and supply an infallible means of detection of his criminal imitator, who could then be dealt with as he deserves, without the lenity that finds justification in doubt and compassion. It would diminish crime, for an empty stomach has no morals. With a wage rate lower than the commercial, it would disturb no private industries by luring away their workmen, and with nothing made to sell, there would be no competition with private products. Properly directed, it would give us much that we shall not otherwise have.

It is difficult to say if our laws relating to vagrancy and vagrants are more cruel or more absurd. If not so atrocious they would evoke laughter; if less ridiculous we should read them with indignation. Here is an imaginary conversation:

THE LAW: It is forbidden to you to rob. It is forbidden to you to steal. It is forbidden to you to beg.

THE VAGRANT: Being without money, and denied employment, I am compelled to obtain food, shelter and clothing in one of these ways, else I shall be hungry and cold.

THE LAW: That is no affair of mine. Yet I am considerate—you are permitted to be as hungry as you like and as cold as may suit you.

THE VAGRANT: Hungry and cold, yes, and many thanks to you; but if I go naked I am arrested for indecent exposure. You require me to wear clothing.

THE LAW: You’ll admit that you need it.

THE VAGRANT: But not that you provide a way for me to get it. No one will give me shelter at night; you forbid me to sleep in a straw stack.

THE LAW: Ungrateful man! We provide a cell.

THE VAGRANT: Even when I obey you, starving all day and freezing all night, and holding my tongue about it, I am liable to arrest for being “without visible means of support.”

THE LAW: A most reprehensible condition.

THE VAGRANT: One thing has been overlooked—a legal punishment for soliciting work.

THE LAW: True; I am not perfect.

TAKING ONESELF OFF

A person who loses heart and hope through a personal bereavement is like a grain of sand on the seashore complaining that the tide has washed a neighboring grain out of sight. He is worse, for the bereaved grain can not help itself; it has to be a grain of sand and play the game of tide, win or lose; whereas he can quit—by watching his opportunity can “quit a winner.” For sometimes we do beat “the man that keeps the table”—never in the long run, but infrequently and out of small stakes. But this is no time to “cash in” and go, for you can not take your little winning with you. The time to quit is when you have lost a big stake, your foolish hope of eventual success, your fortitude and your love of the game. If you stay in the game, which you are not compelled to do, take your losses in good temper and do not whine about them. They are hard to bear, but that is no reason why you should be.

But we are told with tiresome iteration that we are “put here” for some purpose (not disclosed) and have no right to retire until “summoned”—it may be by small-pox, it may be by the bludgeon of a blackguard, it may be by the kick of a cow; the “summoning” Power (said to be the same as the “putting” Power) has not a nice taste in the choice of messengers. That argument is not worth attention, for it is unsupported by either evidence or anything resembling evidence. “Put here.” Indeed! And by the keeper of the table! We were put here by our parents—that is all that anybody knows about it; and they had no authority and probably no intention.

The notion that we have not the right to take our own lives comes of our consciousness that we have not the courage. It is the plea of the coward—his excuse for continuing to live when he has nothing to live for—or his provision against such a time in the future. If he were not egotist as well as coward he would need no excuse. To one who does not regard himself as the center of creation and his sorrows as throes of the universe, life, if not worth living, is also not worth leaving. The ancient philosopher who was asked why he did not die if, as he taught, life was no better than death, replied: “Because death is no better than life.” We do not know that either proposition is true, but the matter is not worth considering, for both states are supportable—life despite its pleasures and death despite its repose.

It was Robert G. Ingersoll’s opinion that there is rather too little than too much suicide in the world—that people are so cowardly as to live on long after endurance has ceased to be a virtue. This view is but a return to the wisdom of the ancients, in whose splendid civilization suicide had as honorable place as any other courageous, reasonable and unselfish act. Antony, Brutus, Cato, Seneca—these were not of the kind of men to do deeds of cowardice and folly. The smug, self-righteous modern way of looking upon the act as that of a craven or a lunatic is the creation of priests, philistines and women. If courage is manifest in endurance of profitless discomfort it is cowardice to warm oneself when cold, to cure oneself when ill, to drive away mosquitoes, to go in when it rains. The “pursuit of happiness,” then, is not an “unalienable right,” for it implies avoidance of pain.

No principle is involved in this matter; suicide is justifiable or not, according to circumstances; each case is to be considered on its merits, and he having the act under advisement is sole judge. To his decision, made with whatever light he may chance to have, all honest minds will bow. The appellant has no court to which to take his appeal. Nowhere is a jurisdiction so comprehensive as to embrace the right of condemning the wretched to life.

Suicide is always courageous. We call it courage in a soldier merely to face death—say to lead a forlorn hope—although he has a chance of life and a certainty of “glory.” But the suicide does more than face death; he incurs it, and with a certainty, not of glory, but of reproach. If that is not courage we must reform our vocabulary.

True, there may be a higher courage in living than in dying. The courage of the suicide, like that of the pirate, is not incompatible with a selfish disregard of the rights of others—a cruel recreancy to duty and decency. I have been asked: “Do you not think it cowardly for a man to end his life, thereby leaving his family in want?” No, I do not; I think it selfish and cruel. Is not that enough to say of it? Must we distort words from their true meaning in order more effectually to damn the act and cover its author with a greater infamy? A word means something; despite the maunderings of the lexicographers, it does not mean whatever you want it to mean. “Cowardice” means a shrinking from danger, not a shirking of duty. The writer who allows himself as much liberty in the use of words as he is allowed by the dictionary-maker and by popular consent is a bad writer. He can make no impression on his reader, and would do better service at the ribbon-counter.

The ethics of suicide is not a simple matter; one can not lay down laws of universal application, but each case is to be judged, if judged at all, with a full knowledge of all the circumstances, including the mental and moral make-up of the person taking his own life—an impossible qualification for judgment. One’s time, race and religion have much to do with it. Some peoples, like the ancient Romans and the modern Japanese, have considered suicide in certain circumstances honorable and obligatory; among ourselves it is held in disfavor. A man of sense will not give much attention to considerations of this kind, excepting in so far as they affect others, but in judging weak offenders they are to be taken into the account. Speaking generally, I should say that in our time and country the persons here noted (and some others) are justified in removing themselves, and that in some of them it is a duty:

One afflicted with a painful or loathsome and incurable disease.

One who is a heavy burden to his friends, with no prospect of their relief.

One threatened with permanent insanity.

One irreclaimably addicted to drunkenness or some similarly destructive or offensive habit.

One without friends, property, employment or hope.

One who has disgraced himself.

Why do we honor the valiant soldier, sailor, fireman? For obedience to duty? Not at all; that alone—without the peril—seldom elicits remark, never evokes enthusiasm. It is because he faced without flinching the risk of that supreme disaster, or what we feel to be such—death. But look you: the soldier braves the danger of death; the suicide braves death itself! The leader of the forlorn hope may not be struck. The sailor who voluntarily goes down with his ship may be picked up or cast ashore. It is not certain that the wall will topple until the fireman shall have descended with his precious burden. But the suicide—his is the foeman that has never missed a mark, his the sea that gives nothing back; the wall that he mounts bears no man’s weight. And his, at the end of it all, is the dishonored grave where the wild ass of public opinion

Stamps o’er his head but can not break his sleep.

A MONUMENT TO ADAM

It is believed that every just-minded and right-feeling American will experience a glow of gratification in the assurance that after ages of indifference, neglect, and even contumelious disparagement, Adam is at last to have a monument. The proposal to erect a “suitable memorial” to the good forefather is singularly touching; in a tranquil, business-like way it gets a tolerably firm footing in the sympathies and sentiments of the human heart, quietly occupying the citadel of the affections before the unready conservatisms of habit, prejudice, and unreason can recover from their surprise to repel it. It will be difficult for even the most impenitent obstructionist to utter himself cogently in opposition; the promoters of the filial scheme will have the argument as much their own way as have the promoters of temperance, chastity, truth, and honor. The comparison is ominous, but not entirely discouraging, inasmuch as the builders of monuments are less dependent on “right reason and the will of God” than the builders of character. Stones are not laid in logic; even the men of the plains of Shinar, desperately wrong-headed as in the light of Revelation we now perceive them to have been, and ghastly incapable of adding an inch to their moral stature, succeeded in piling up a fairish testimonial to their own worth, and would no doubt have achieved the top course had it not happened that suddenly each appeared to be of a different mind, so that in the multitude of counselors there was little wisdom. Dr. Noah Webster being dead—heaven rest him!—and the reporters of the press being easily propitiated with libations of news, there is not likely to be any tampering with the American tongue that will not be a distinct advantage to it; so we may reasonably expect the stones of the Adamite monument to be appropriately inscribed. Many reasons occur why this ought to be so. Of Adam, even more than of Washington it may justly be said that he was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” In truth, he was first in everything and all round.

To the patriot the plan of erecting to him a fitting memorial will especially commend itself: it is an American, and therefore a superior, plan. Contrast its glossy originality with the threadbare second-handedness of the project to import Cleopatra’s other needle! The religious mind will not fail to discover in the proposal a kind of special providence for the arrest and eventual overthrow of Infidelity, against whose dark disciples it will lift a finger of permanent admonition. Can even the most flippant scoffer look up at the reverend pile and doubt the Mosaic account of creation? If the architect have only the sagacity to omit the date of erection, and the subscribers the self-denial to forego the glory of displaying their names on it, will not posterity naturally come to think that he whose virtues it commemorates “reposes beneath”? True, the wily scientist, alarmed for his theory, or touched with a sentiment of filial piety as _he_ understands it, may countercheck by building a similar monument to the recent Ourang-Outang, the remote Ascidian, or the ultimate Bathybius. He may even have the prudent audacity to put up a stone to the memory of that unthinkable, and therefore irrefutable, Missing Link—as the groping pagan of antiquity with his single gleam of spiritual light erected an altar “To the Unknown God.” If the hardy Evolutionist do anything of this kind it will be a clear infringement of the _leges non scriptæ_ of copyright. Justice, religion, and reason alike will dictate the upsetting of his profane memorial with as little compunction as the wave felt for Caliban’s designs in the sea-sand.

That the Adam monument project is seriously entertained there can be no intelligent doubt: in the list of its founders is publicly mentioned a name which, for better or for worse, is inseparably linked with that of the Great Progenitor—the name of Mark Twain, whose sobs at the paternal tomb have reverberated through the world with an authenticating energy that makes the erection of the monument a matter of comparatively trifling importance, after all.

1878.

HYPNOTISM

We are all hypnotists. Every human being has in some degree the power to influence the thought and action of another, or some others, by what we will consent to call “hypnotic suggestion,” though the term, while serviceable, is inaccurate. Most of us have the power in varying degrees of feebleness, but few know how to apply what they have of it; but some have it so strong as to be able to control an unresisting will. Assent, however, is not always, nor usually, to be inferred from consent, even when consent is given in good faith; there is such a thing as unconscious resistance. In those having no knowledge of hypnotism, resistance is the natural attitude, for they think that susceptibility to control implies a weak will or a low intelligence, which is an error. At least the contrary view is supported by my own observation; and I accept some things, despite the fact that I have observed them to be true.

The mysterious force which in its more spectacular manifestations we call hypnotism, and one form of which is known as “mind-reading,” is at the back of all kinds and degrees of affection and persuasion. Why is one person loved better than another person more worthy of love? Because he has more “personal magnetism.” This term is an old acquaintance; for many decades we have been using it to signify an engaging manner. We thought it a figurative expression; that is why it commended itself to us. But it denotes a fact with literalness; some persons have a quality, or rather a property, which actually does draw other persons toward and to them, as a magnet attracts steel; and it is the same property in magnet and in man, and can be augmented by the scientific use of apparatus. A favorite “subject” of mine when blindfolded and turned loose in a room and commanded to find a hidden object will sometimes fail. But she never fails if the object is a horse-shoe magnet.

Did you ever, by oral argument, convince anyone that he was wrong and you right? Not often, of course, but sometimes, you think. If you are a member of Congress you are very sure about it; that is what you are a member of Congress for. I venture to believe that you never did. It was by unconscious hypnotism that you did the trick. Your argument (on the cogency and eloquence of which I congratulate you) served only to hold your victim’s attention to the matter in hand. Without it he might have thought you wanted him to become a horse, and would indubitably have neighed and pranced.

In the Twenty-first Century, doubtless, a legislator will owe his election to the confidence of his constituents in his ability to exert this kind of suasion. The candidate who can not by the power of his unaided eye compel his opponent to eat shoe-blacking and jump over a broomstick will not have the ghost of a chance at the polls.

Suppose, madam, that your husband had relied upon argument to convince you that you ought to marry him. Of course he did have to plead long and hard—that is conceded; but suppose that while doing so he had always worn green spectacles. Or suppose that in all his long and arduous courtship he had never looked you squarely (and impudently) in the eyes—gloated upon you. I deem it certain, madam, that you would now be the wife of a wiser man, probably a deaf mute.

In our present stage of controversial progress speech is not without a certain clumsy utility. It enables you to apprise your opponent of the views to which you invite his allegiance. But for the purpose of inducing him to accept them it is destitute of effect—is not at all superior to the plunk-plunking of a banjo, or that favorite political argument, the braying of a brass band. Your success in convincing another person depends upon (1) the degree of your hypnotic power, (2) your opportunities of exerting it and (3) his susceptibility to it. In brief, the business of converting the several kinds of heathens is a thing which, like checking the too rapid increase of population, cannot be done by talking. I have tried to show you how it can be done if you have the gift. If you have not, be thankful, for you will escape much defamation from those who believe hypnotism a kind of sorcery liable to the basest abuses and practised only for purposes of sin. Is it possible so to practice it? Why, yes, if I can hypnotize a thief I can make him steal. If I can hypnotize a bad girl—but that would be needless. Whatever in one’s normal state one is willing to do, or wants to do, one can be made to do by hypnotic control. That is as far as the power can go; it cannot make a sinner out of a saint, a demagogue out of a gentleman, nor a mute out of Theodore Roosevelt.

AT THE DRAIN OF THE WASH-BASIN

The Prohibitionists, good souls, are funny. They are all “down upon” license—high or low—because it is a legal “recognition” of the liquor trade. As reasonably they might condemn fines for misdemeanor as legal recognition of misdemeanor. Until the liquor trade is forbidden it is legally recognized, whether licensed or not. Why can not militant aquarians accustom themselves to think of a license fee as an _ante facto_ fine? I am not loaded down with controversial weapons for the fray between liquor and water; I love neither the one liquid nor the other; but I enjoy the quarrels of others, am enamored of effective means in battle and should be miserable if I had failed to point out to any combatant in any contention how he could obtain an honest advantage.

Do I not drink water? Yes, a little—when instigated by thirst. Does any one drink it under any other circumstances? Does any one drink it because he likes it?—or rather, does any one like it when not suffering from a disagreeable disorder? We take water as medicine for the disease thirst. It is to be considered as a remedial agent—but so vilely compounded in nature’s laboratory and so distasteful to the normal palate that the world in all ages has been virtually united in avoiding it. Nothing has so stimulated human ingenuity and invited such constant investments as the discovery, invention and manufacture of palatable substitutes for plain water; and nothing could be more unphilosophical than to attribute this universal movement to perversity or caprice. Extravagant as are some of its manifestations, deplorable as are some of its consequences, at the back of it all, as at the back of every wide and persistent trend of human activity, is some imperious and unsleeping necessity.

Consider, if you will be so good, what “drinking-water” actually is. It is the world’s sewage. It is what that dirty boy, the earth, has washed his face with. The wells, rivers and rills are nature’s slop-buckets, and the lowland springs are not much better; all soluble substances on or near the surface of the earth eventually get into them. Melted mountain snow is pure enough, but by the time it reaches the lip of the flatlander it is a solution of abomination. It is macerated man. It is hydrate of dead dog with an infusion of all that is untidy—infested with germs of nameless plagues, carrying ferocious anthropophagi and loaded with mordant minerals. By many scientists it is held that age is simply a disease caused, mainly, by cumulative deposits of lime and other inorganic matter in the organs of the body, most of them taken in water. If our drink were free of minerals and depeopled of its little reptiles it is probable that we might live a thousand years and die of the minerals and reptiles in our food—those of us who are not shot or hanged.

The protagonists of water tell us that it is the natural drink of man. We drink it for economy, from ignorance or inattention, from hereditary habit bequeathed to us by barbarian ancestors who had nothing else and knew not the sacred grape. They ate beetles, too, stale fish and one another. Were these the natural food of man? Man has no natural food and drink; he takes what he can get. An infant race is like an infant individual: whatever it can lay its hands on goes into its dauby mouth. Water, _pure_ water, has one merit—it is cheap; and one disadvantage—it is not good.

Mr. Prohibitionist would like to deprive me of wine by law; not because that would make me happier: it would make _him_ happier. As long as I cannot prevent him from trying, I fancy that I don’t wish to, and execute a multitude of fine sentiments about the virtue of tolerance and the advantages of free speech. But give me the power, and the first time I catch him rolling his rebuking eye at my wineglass I will fill up his well.

GODS IN CHICAGO

In the death of Mr. W. J. Gunning theology incurred a serious loss. The deceased was an intelligent and painstaking collector of gods, and at the time of his death was in the service of the Committee on Gods, of the “World’s Fair” in Chicago. He had already got together about five hundred deities, some of them exceedingly powerful, and was on his way around the world on the lookout for more. It is believed that he would have enriched the pantheon of the fair with some singularly fine exhibits if he had been spared, for he was a most accomplished theologian, knew exactly where to lay his hand on any deity that he needed in his business, and whenever he went godding was blessed (under Providence) with a large take. He was an honest collector, a kind and considerate provider, and left behind him a wide circle of Celestial Powers bewailing their loss.

The advantage of having a first-rate collection of gods at a world’s fair is obvious. Hitherto the study of comparative theology has been beset with dispiriting difficulties, many of which will vanish in the light that such a collection will pour upon the science. In actual presence of the wood and stone which the heathen in his blindness bows down to we shall be able to trace resemblances and relationships hitherto undiscerned and even unsuspected. We shall know, perhaps, why the religion of the Inquots is somewhat similar to that of the Abemjees when we see (if such is the fact) that the gods of both these widely separated tribes have availed themselves of the advantages of the tail. We shall perhaps find the missing link between the Hindu’s mild disposition and his adoration of the “idol of hope and slaughter.” Better than all, we shall by actual scrutiny of the mongrel and measly gods of other and inferior nations be confirmed in the True Faith, as in this favored land we have the happiness to know it.

That the goddery will be a point of chief attraction goes without saying. A temple in which, satisfying the two mightiest needs of his spiritual nature, one may both scoff and pray will have a powerful fascination for the truly religious. There the visiting stranger from the overseas can perform appropriate rites before the deity of his fathers and execute feats of contumelious disdain—short of actual demolition—before the hideous and senseless images adored of those not delivered from error’s chain. Even to the wicked person who has justly incurred the ancient reproach that he “tears down but does not build up,” the god-show will have a certain value as displaying everywhere the kind of things he tears down and nowhere the kind he is expected to build up—whereby he shall be put into better esteem and kicked and cuffed with abated assiduity. There is one disquieting possibility—one haunting thought that grows amain to apprehension: What will be the effect of setting up a multitude of gods in a city which has not hitherto tolerated one? It was well, though, to make the experiment, even as a missionary measure; and if the lakeside pantheon had served to lure the world’s pious to their financial doom the Chicagonese might have become a profoundly religious people, attentive to pilgrims and blandly assuring them that it was no trouble to show gods.

1892.

FOR LAST WORDS

The special kind of telephone designed to be affixed to the bedside of one who may have the bad luck to suffer from some infectious or contagious disease is a thoughtful provision for a crying need. By means of the instrument so placed, the patient’s friends are able to converse to him, read and sing at him, and, in general, give him the benefit of their society without danger of getting back more than they bestow. The plan is of admirable simplicity and nothing could be better—for the friends. There must be a certain satisfaction in possessing one end of a telephone at the other end of which there is one who cannot get away—one who has to listen to as many helloes as may be thought good for him, and to submit to the question, “Is that you?” when you know that it is he, as frequently as you choose to afflict him with it. That he is heartily wishing but impotently unable to transmit his disorder through the wire adds something to the joy of the situation.

One of the advantages of the sick-bed telephone lies in the fact that it can be used for preservation of “last words.” Hitherto those only of men who died surrounded by attentive friends have had a chance of getting before the public; those of the unfortunate infectionary, isolated from his race and dying in a pesthouse, assisted by hireling physicians and unsympathetic nurses, have been lost to the world. No matter how many years of his life the patient may have been engaged in their composition and rehearsal; no matter how “neat and opprobrious” they were, they fell upon unappreciative ears, and were not recorded. Under the new _régime_ the patient as his fire fails may summon his friends to the telephone, launch at them his Parthian platitude and die in the pleasant consciousness that posterity will have profit of his death. Whether, like Falstaff, he choose to give his remarks a reminiscent character and “babble o’ green fields;” confine himself to the historical method, like Daniel Webster with his memorable “I still live;” assume the benevolent pose, and, like Charles II, urge the survivors not to let some “poor Nelly” starve; the exclamatory, like the late President Garfield, who, according to one Swaim, said “O Swaim!” and let it go at that; or the merely idiotic, like the great Napoleon with his “_Tête d’armée_,” the faithful telephone will be there, ready and willing to transmit (and transmute) the sentiment, admonition, statement or whatever it may be.

To persons intending to make this use of the telephone a word of counsel may not be impertinent. As no human being, however well-eared, ever understood the telephone until it had repeated itself a number of times in response to his demands for more light, and as the moribund are not commonly in very good voice, it will be wise to begin the “last words” while there is yet a little reserve fund of life and strength remaining, for repetition and explanation.

THE CHAIR OF LITTLE EASE

Not many years ago, as I remember, a deal of deprecatory talk was in evolution about a certain Governor of a Persian province, who was said to have been boiled alive by order of the Shah. Our shouting and shrilling in this matter were not altogether becoming, considering whose progeny we are. It is not so very long since all the nations of Europe practised boiling alive—commonly in oil, which was thought to impart a fine discomfort to the person so unlucky as to be in the cauldron. In England boiling was the legal punishment for poisoners for a long time, beginning in 1531, in the reign of Henry VII. Among those who suffered this discomfort was a man mentioned in the chronicle of the Grey Friars, who was let down into the kettle by a chain until he was done. He, however, was not boiled in oil—just plain. Some of the items of an expense account relating to the execution of Friar Stone at Canterbury are interesting in their homely way:

Paid 2 men that sat by the kettle and parboiled him 1s
To 3 men that carried his quarters to the gates and set them up 1s
For a woman that scoured the kettle 2d

With regard to that last item one cannot repress the flame of a consuming curiosity to know if the scouring was done before or afterward. If afterward, the poor woman seems to have been miserably underpaid.

But call it a long time ago, protesting that the tendency to boil one another has exhausted its impetus, or, if you please, worked itself out of our clarifying blood. But the year 1790 is not so far back, and burning at the stake probably generates an uneasiness to which that of the oil-boiled gentry of the earlier period was nowise superior. It was in the year mentioned—in the reign of his most gracious Majesty George, the third of that name—that burning at the stake ceased to be the legal penalty for “coining,” which was accounted “treason,” and murder of a husband, which was “petty treason.” But wife-killers and coiners, male, were hanged. The last woman burned alive departed this life, I think, in 1789. Men are living to-day whose fathers were living then and may, as children, have played in the ashes.

Still (it may be urged) it was not actually we who did it: in our milder day we have neither the cauldron nor the stake. Ah, but we have the dynamo. We have the custom of putting a small percentage of our assassins into an “electrical chair” and doing them to death by pressing a button—a process to which in defiance of two languages we have given the name “electrocution.” For encouragement of the rising young assassin, physicians assure us that this gives a painless death.

The physicians know nothing about it; for anything they know to the contrary, death by electricity may be the most frightful torment that it is possible for any of nature’s forces or processes to produce. The agony may be not only inconceivably great, but to the sufferer it may seem to endure for a period inconceivably long. That many of the familiar physical indications of suffering are absent (though “long, shuddering sighs” and “straining at the straps” are not certainly symptoms of joy) is very little to the purpose when we know that electricity paralyzes the muscles by whose action pain is familiarly manifested. We know that it paralyzes all the seats of sensation, for that matter, and puts an end to possibilities of pain. That is only to say that it kills. But by what secret and infernal pang may not all this be accompanied or accomplished? Through what unnatural exaltation of the senses may not the moment of its accomplishing be commuted into unthinkable cycles of time? Of all this the physicians can have no more knowledge than so many toads under stones.

It is probable, at least it is possible, that a “victim’s” sum of suffering from his instantaneous pervasion with enough of the fluid to kill him is no less than if it were leisurely rilled through him a little faster than he could bear until he should die of it that way. Theories of the painlessness of sudden death appear to be based mostly upon the fact that those who undergo it make no entries of their sensations in their diaries. It is to be wished that they would be more thoughtful and less selfish. The man smitten by lightning, or widely distributed by a hitch in the proceedings at a powder mill, owes a duty to his fellow men of which he commonly appears to have but an imperfect sense. A careful and analytic record of his sensations at every stage of his mischance would be a precious contribution to medical literature. Published under some such title as _A Diary of Sudden Death; by a Public-Spirited Observer on the Inside_ it would serve many useful purposes, and also profit the publisher. What we most need—next to more doctors at executions—is some person having experience of the matter, to tell us fairly in inoffensive English, interlarded with “Soche-sorte Latin as physickers doe use,” just how it feels to be dead all over at once.

A GHOST IN THE UNMAKING