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Title: The Arena
       Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891

Author: Various

Editor: B. O. Flower

Release Date: January 4, 2007 [EBook #20281]

Language: English

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THE ARENA.

No. XXI.

AUGUST, 1891.




[Illustration: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (signed "Sincerely yours
Elizabeth Cady Stanton")]




THE UNITY OF GERMANY.

BY MME. BLAZE DE BURY.

"THE IDEA WHENCE SPRANG THE FACT."[1]

     [1] "L'Allemagne lepnis, Leibniz. Essai sur le
          Développement de la Conscience Nationale en Allemagne."
          By Prof. Lévy Brühl, Paris. 1 vol. Hachette, 1890.

Since the Great French Revolution of 1789 and its immediate
consequence in the military despotism of Bonaparte, nothing has
occurred that has so convulsed the Old World and so altered the
conditions of men and things, as the establishment of the United
German Empire in 1870. The men of our time are obliged to know how
this event came about, or remain in ignorance of all that has happened
during the twenty years following it--that is, to ignore their own
political status.

Now two records of this enormous change in all our destinies exist; as
yet there are but two, and modern men are bound in duty to take
cognizance of them. One is the famous "History," written in Germany by
Heinrich von Sybel; the other the work of Prof. Lévy Brühl, published
in France. Both must be read.[2]

     [2] "History of the Creation of United Germany." 5 vols.
         Heinrich v. Sybel, Berlin, 1890.

The remarkable book of M. Lévy Brühl on the reconstruction of the
German Empire cannot be read by itself or separated from the scarcely
less remarkable one of Heinrich von Sybel, the fifth and latest volume
of which has just appeared. The two require to be studied together,
for though starting from opposite standpoints, they explain each other
and distinctly show the impartial reader where to recognize the _real
raison d' ètre_ of German unity. When Sybel speaks, as he constantly
does, of the creation of Germanic unity, after the war of 1870, he, as
a matter of fact, adopts the French theory, while the independent
French writer exposes from a far more German point of view, what have
been and what are the causes underlying the present formation of the
various component parts of Germany into a State. The title of either
tells sufficiently its own tale. Sybel proclaims at once the:--

"_Begründing des Deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm!_" whilst Lévy Brühl
announces the progress of the "_National Conscience as Developed in a
Race._"

Sybel's is the narrative of a past that is doubly ended, the past of a
country and of a political system, the past of Prussia as personified
by the Hohenzollerns, and of a military and oligarchical absolutism as
represented by Prince Bismarck and Marshal Von Moltke. It is the
chronicle of an epoch whose glories, from 1700 to 1870, none can
dispute, but whose _real life_ was extinct, and whose capacity of
future expansion in its original sense was stopped at Sédan, or a few
months later, at Versailles. Sybel conceives his history as a
thoroughly well-trained functionary must conceive it; he is brought up
in traditional conventionalities, and is rather even an official than
a "public" servant.

The foreign author, on the contrary, feels what has lurked during long
ages in the soul of the innominate throng of the people, and been
expressed in the thoughts and impulses of such men as Hagern,
Scharnhorst, Gueiseman, and Stein, _Germans_, patriots who taught
Prussia to speak, think, act, and embody the inspirations, passions,
and instincts of a whole land; arousing the conscience and vindicating
the honor of seemingly divided communities whose hearts were already
_one_.

No sooner had M. Lévy Brühl's book appeared than the effect was
evident; it was felt that it told the _true truth_ (_"la verité
vraie"_) as the French say; that it set forth the real _"raison d'
ètre"_ of the astounding achievement that had taken the world by
surprise, puzzling the patented politicians on one bank of the Rhine
almost as much as those upon the other.[3]

      [3] Few events since the deceptions and catastrophes of
          the war itself ever produced the sudden impression of
          Lévy Brühl's boldly outspoken, utterly impartial book.
          Published in the first days of last September (1890),
          in one week it was famous throughout all France where
          serious literature does not reap renown quickly. M. M.
          Lairesse De Vogüé, Bourdeau, Sorel, all welcomed it as
          a revelation, in the _Débats, Revues des Deux Mondes_,
          and elsewhere, and its real title was awarded it in the
          _Temps_, by M. Albert Sorel, whose experience and
          competence as an historical critic has never been
          denied, and who unhesitatingly proclaimed it, _Le Fuit
          et l'Idée_, namely, the announcement of the ruling
          national idea whence the fact of German unity was
          immediately derived.

The public of the whole universe will remember that at the time of the
Emperor Frederick's death the great question first arose as to who
was the initiator (or inventor) of the "United German Empire," and
from all sides poured forth the declarations of eye and ear witnesses;
this was the moment of the Gessellen-incident, and the outbreak of
hostility between Prince Bismarck and Baron de Rozzenbach and Gustav
Freitag, the novelist, and the celebrated jurisconsult for whose
illegal imprisonment the high-handed chancellor had later to atone.
But there apparently resulted from all these disputes that, as the
glory of "priority of invention" was so eagerly sought for, there must
have been an "inventor!" That was in reality the point on which Sybel
"spoke," and he therefore entitled his "history" that of the
"_Creation of the German United Empire, by William_ I."

This it was not; but this was at the same time the view it suited the
vanity of the French nation to take of it; accordingly, Sybel's theory
was rapidly accepted, and French public opinion did its utmost to
cause the unity of Germany, as recognized in 1871, to be regarded as
an accident, the creation of one man, promoted, for that matter
ungrudgingly, to the rank of the "greatest European statesman," but
whose work, being that of an individual, and therefore accidental,
might quite conceivably be eventually undone. Sybel's theory, being
official and Bismarckian, puts forth in truth the French conception,
and is, as a matter of fact, the very opposite of the national German
one.

The Germans who agreed with Sybel were the men of the old regime, with
far less, be it said, of the "cute" chancellor himself, than of
Marshal Moltke, the chancellor being far more distant from the
materialism of the "Grand Fritz" with his "big battalions" than were
the veterans (however glorious) of the drilled and disciplined
Prussian army. Bismarck was divided between two creeds: he knew too
much psychology to believe solely in the supremacy of pipeclay, but he
was at the same time not averse to the creation of a revived German
empire by his own genius.

Hence chiefly the confusion; for men's minds were confused,--in France
determinedly, and even in Germany, (owing to the still enduring force
of obsolete opinions and antiquated habits of thought and action)
uncertain.

When the war had once clearly shown what its end would be, they were
few who could appreciate it. In France where were they who had ever
heard the truth about "1806 and Jéna"? or who, after the 4th
September, '70, were capable of realizing that the just retribution
for Jéna was Sédan? All glory was given to one man--to Bismarck.
For the six long months, till March, '71, he was the
arch-destroyer--nothing else was taken into account; if _he_ chose to
establish a new holy Roman empire, of course he could do it; but it
would be the work of his Titanic will, and nothing on earth could
resist--_since France could not!_ Thus reasoned French vanity, and if
this curious condition of the public mind in France be not understood,
the reconstitution of united Germany into a great cohesive state will
never be rightly attained as a matter of fact.

France, therefore, continued (and did so until quite lately) to hold
to the individual or accidental theory of a military unity achieved by
fortuitous victories, to which the constant agitations of a whole
people for hundreds of years, were in no sense conducive. Another fact
that must also be acknowledged is, that this theory once firmly
established, any remorse for the mysterious crimes of Napoleon I. was
diminished if not erased. On the contrary, his conquests, his violent
despotism, his wonderful supremacy--unjust in every sense, immoral,
tyrannical, equally acquired and forfeited by the Corsican Invader,
was regarded as an example; when defeat had to be recognized as
undeniable, the national delusion soon came to take the form of
retrieval, and the notion gained ground that what _la chance_ or the
luck of a great statesman had put together, might, from the same
cause, be taken to pieces again!

Granted the principle of personal intervention, of the success of
either one man or of even a group of two or three leading spirits, who
was the original inventor, who the doer of the deed, the framer of the
fact that threatened the world with a new master?

This query was not started for eighteen long years; not until the
catastrophe that threatened the House of Hohenzollern with the loss of
its noblest son, served to recall to the mind of all Europe what a
thorough hero and citizen, what a perfect, undeviating German the
crown prince had always been.

The first emperor of United Germany, the agent of the illustrious
chancellor's will, had gone to his eternal rest when the German mind
began to reflect that only a dying man stood between the late ruler
and a boy emperor! But was not that dying man the creator (if creator
there had been) of the restored Teutonic state? Did not the revived
empire spring from the races in which Prussia was incarnate? was it
not in good earnest the Hohenzollern line, the descendant of the Great
Elector that answered for the regeneration? Thence the dispute between
the partisans of Bismarck and those of Frederick III. Supposing a
creation according to both Heinrich von Sybel and the chroniclers of
French vain-gloriousness, who was the creator? The answer of history
was, "No one." The German nation--or truer still, the thought of all
Germany, for long ages, was the genuine source, it was the very soul
of the entire people that from the ancient Germania of the Roman,
breathed anew in the remnants of its primeval entity and clamored for
its old integrity.

But we must not outstrip chronology; the first record of the events of
the war of 1870, and of the mighty changes brought on thereby, is that
of Sybel, not altogether wrongly entitled an "historical monument."
Professor Sybel's five volumes do, assuredly, constitute a _history
founded on documentary evidence_, if ever such a one existed, but for
that very reason they are, perhaps, somewhat wanting in actual life.
They are fashioned after the methods employed and approved of in
bygone days, and present rather the character of a register than a
record of deeds done by living men. As far as the testimony of hard,
dry acts went, it is probably impeachable; but we then come to the
question, Is documentary evidence in such a case sufficient to give
_all_ that is true? Is not truth, where human impulses and
irrationalities are concerned, derived from sources lying higher than
the regions sacred to "Blue Books"? Whereas it was to the certificates
vouchsafed by state papers, and instruments of such like order, that
Sybel's reliability was chiefly due. Once admit the value of these
vouchers (and their corroborative weight none can deny), and it
becomes difficult to overrate the importance of Sybel's still
unconcluded "_Begründung des Deutschen Reiches_."

The reader who for the first time takes cognizance of the contents of
these formidable volumes, is overwhelmed by the amount of attestations
they present him with, by his own inability to refute them, or by
counter statements substitute a truer appreciation of what did really
occur. The dry narrative of mere fact is thus, but the impression it
should produce as of a fact lived through is wanting.

This history of Professor Sybel's is a Prussian one; for which it is
obvious that such extraordinary materials would not have been
furnished him had it not been tacitly understood that his final
verdict must be completely favorable to the Emperor Wilhelm I. and his
powerful minister.

In the curious and wide-spreading complications, whence eventually
resulted the Franco-German war of 1870, there are two distinct parts:
the part before hostilities broke out, and the part after the victory
of the Germans might be inevitably foreseen: the first period counts
in its _dramatis personæ_ all the states and all the statesmen of
Europe. From the Crimean War to the cession of Venetia to Italy
through France, there is not an event that is not a connecting link in
a long serpentine chain. At the moment this may have escaped the eye,
but, once fixed in its one perspective of distance, the chain shows
unbroken and all is far less than has been supposed,--occasioned by
any arts, manoeuvres, or intrigues of the chief actors; the vulgar
notions of Prince Bismarck's incessant wiles, or of Louis Napoleon's
base designs against his neighbors may be discarded as relatively
subordinate. The incidents that marked the gigantic game of chess
played (not in Europe only) from the overthrow of the Orleans dynasty
to the death of Friedrich III. and the fall of Bismarck in the winter
of last year were neither the outcome of individual Machiavelianism
nor entirely attributable to chance; both were all but in equal degree
cause and effect. The actors personally in each case replied to the
suggestions of circumstances they had but indirectly helped to bring
about.

From 1848-50 to 1889-90, observe the rapid succession of so-called
"unexpected" events: The rise to the rule of Democracy in France; the
restoration to power of the despotic Bonapartist empire, whence issued
the revival of the nationalistic theory, leading on one side to
revolution, on the other to conservative resistance and the supremacy
of a warlike state like Prussia. We need go no further for the
determining cause of the two sovereign influences! Cavour and
Bismarck, the two men who predominate our half century, spring from a
common necessity, and in reality emerge from the conference of 1856,
misnamed the "Crimean Race!"

"I was the egg," the chancellor was wont to say, "whence my royal
master foresaw that unity might perhaps be hatched;" and on Orsini's
scaffold the Piedmontese seer knew full well that the Corsican
Carbonaro could not elude the fate lying in wait for him, disguised in
the freedom of Italy. You can dissever none of these facts one from
the other, and we now approach the "one man principle." The
protagonists stand face to face, rather than side by side, but both
are equally the unconscious promoters of that antagonism between
Germany and France which, in fact, has shaped, and still shapes, the
whole policy of Europe.

From this single grand outline, all the minor lines either start, or
towards it tend, indirectly, in convergent curves.

From the vast system formed by the monster-questions--United Germany,
the Latin races, the East, the future of catholicism and the papacy,
the strife of liberty against despotism--from all these parent
problems you can detach none of the smaller incidents of the age; you
are obliged to take count of the little Danish Campaign, which taught
Prussia those deficiencies, impelling her directly to the attainment
of her future military omnipotence, and which, under the abortive
attempts of the Saxon minister, M. de Beust,* gave a timid reminder to
Germany of what her unity had been and might once again be. Each
incident, however local or however remote, formed a feature of the
whole; between 1854 and 1870, you cannot ignore the would-be secession
of the Southern Confederates, which ended in making "all America" the
counterpoise to our older world--neither dare you neglect the Indian
meeting whence England issued, clad in moral as in political glory,
and gave the noblest sign of the Christian significancy of the
Victorian Era; all holds together, men and facts succeed each other in
quick alternation; the light that fades on one hand shines with
dazzling glare on the other. Cavour dies. Greatest of all, and genuine
creator, with his disappearance the equilibrium is endangered. Right
ceases to reign, force asserts itself, and Bismarck, ironhanded,
invincible, holds sway over a scared, unresisting, one may say a
_soulless_ world.

This is the turning-point. The one man theory apparently endures; but
physically and morally, the vision of disintegration rises,
threatening all; and whence the "New Order" is to come, above all
morally, none divine.

We reach here the close of the preliminary period. Up to the 4th of
September, 1870, and for a few years beyond, State policy is the
proper name for whatever occurs; we deal to a large extent with
mathematical quantities, with impersonal obstructions. Statesmen and
statecraft are in their place, and fill it; individuals, however
distinguished, are, as it were, sheathed in collective symbols and
represented by principles. Documentary evidence suffices now!
Treaties, minutes, diplomatic reports, instruments of all
descriptions, are really the requisite agents of this inanimate
diplomatic narration. State papers are the adequate expression, the
exclusive speech of mere states, and of this speech Heinrich v. Sybel
is one of the foremost living masters.

It would be next to impossible to find anywhere a loftier, clearer, or
more minutely correct record of what preceded and caused the war of
'70, than in the earlier volumes of Sybel's "History"; for up to the
reverses of France, and the substitution of German for French
predominance, we are still--in all connected with Germany,--in
presence of the Prussia of the past, of the Prussia whose social
conditions were fixed by Frederick the Great. Men are simply pawns
upon the board; their fate has no influence on others--the fate of
kings, queens, and high chivalric orders, is alone of any import to
the constituted realm. Nations obey and question not. They are
represented by mouldy, defunct formulæ, and as yet no living popular
voice, save that of the revolution of 1789, has been raised to ask
where was the underlying life of the innominate crowd? But the
revolution spoke too loudly, and like the tragedy queen in Hamlet,
"protested too much."

In external Europe, and mostly in over-drilled Prussia, the _élite_
only spoke, and under strict military surveillance, exercised by
privilege of birth, the officer's uniform remained the sign of all
title to pre-eminence.

For these reasons this history must be accepted as the perfect
chronicle of the occurrences which marked the time before and
immediately after the fall of Sédan.

When later the dormant life that was underneath awoke, breathed, and
became manifest, Sybel's official tone no longer struck the true note;
the heart of peoples had begun to beat, and disturbed its vibrations.
Humanity was astir everywhere, and setting the barriers of etiquette
at defiance. Not only were dry registers based on blue books
insufficient, but the failure of the vital power that engenders other
and further life began to be felt. There was no pulse; the current was
stagnant, had no onward flow.

When this moment came, the truth of the narrative ceased. Henceforth,
it told of only the things of another age, and told them in the
dialect of a bygone tongue. It was the official report of what had
taken place in Old Russia written involuntarily under the omnipotent
but benumbing inspiration of the spirit of caste.


II.

When the volume of M. Lévy Brühl appeared in September of last year,
its name was instantaneously found for it by one of the leaders of
historical criticism in France. Ere one week had passed, M. Albert
Sorel had christened it "_l' Idée elle Fait_,"[4] and the public of
Paris had ratified the title by all but universal acclaim.

      [4] "_Le Temps_," 9th September, 1890.

In those words M. Sorel proclaimed the concrete sense of the book, and
no doubt was left as to what was the meaning of the author who had so
freely undertaken to investigate the "developments of the German
national conscience."

The pith of the whole lies in Professor Brühl's own expression: "In
German unity," he says, "the idea precedes everything else, engenders
the fact _l'est l'Unité nationale d'abord; Unité l'etat ensuite_," and
nowhere in any historical phenomenon has the idea had a larger part to
claim. But here you have at once to get rid of what, in Sybel's
narrative, rests on mere documentary evidence! All anachronisms have
to be set aside. As against the vigor of Lévy Brühl's living men, the
make-believe of the past, with its caste-governed puppets, stares you
in the face. After the rout at Sédan, after the startling
transmutation of long dormant but still live ideas into overwhelming
facts, you realize how entirely the mere Prussian chronicle of events
in their official garb deals with what is forever extinct. These dead
players have lost their significancy; they but simulate humanity from
the outside,--are simply "embroidered vestments stuffed like dolls
with bran," or like the moth-eaten uniforms of the great Frederick in
the gallery at Potsdam.

When Lévy Brühl, alluding to Stein and his searching reforms after the
disasters of later years, says: "_Il voulait une nation vivante_" he
wanted a living nation! He unchains the great idea from the bondage
where it had lain for centuries, and whence the men of 1813 set it
loose; he reinstates the past even to its legendary sources, and
evokes memories which were those of heroic ages, and which had still
power to inspire the present, and re-create what had once so
splendidly lived. This life is in truth the German idea in its utmost
truth; it was life and power that these men wanted, the life born in
them from their earliest hour and kept sacred through all time by
their poetry, their song, their native tongue.

It is all this which is German and not Prussian. The Hohenzollerns
have nothing to do with all this idealism,--and it is this which
constitutes the peculiar and sovereign spirit of German unity to which
the modern philosophy of Frederick II. was so long a stranger, and to
which the Iron Chancellor became a hearty convert only at the close;
the chivalrous element of the great elector is but a link between what
had been the Holy Roman Empire and what is to be the national union
after Leipsic and the War of Freedom--culminating in its supreme and
inevitable consequence in 1871. The heroes (and they were heroes) of
the distant North were as Brandenburgers, "electors," component parts,
be it not forgotten, of a Teutonic whole, "of one great heart," (as
Bunsen wrote long years ago to Lord Houghton),[5] "though we did not
know it."

      [5] Life of Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, by
          Wemyss Reid. 2 vols. London, 1891.

Perhaps the greatest superiority of Professor Lévy Brühl lies in the
unity of description he employs in order to bring home to the reader
the unity of the subject he treats. He sees the whole as a whole, as
it really is, all being contained in all, and nothing in past or
present omitted. This is the truth of the Germanic oneness of species,
and the failure to conceive it of most writers of our day is the chief
cause of confusion. It is a vast, coherent vision of things taken in
by mind and eye from the _Niebelungen Lied_ to the wholesale captivity
of the French army, in the autumn of 1870, and when not thus
conceived, incomplete. To those who lived in and through the period
comprised between the war of the Danish Duchies and the re-conquest
of Alsace-Lorraine, no item of even prehistoric times can remain
absent; the spirit of German unity is everywhere, pervades everything,
and those alone who thoroughly master this are capable of painting it
to others' senses.

It is very well to take a Leibniz or Frederick the Great for a
starting-point, but it all goes immeasurably farther back than that.
Luther and his Bible open one large historic gate. The Bible heads
all! In 1813, writes General Clausewitz to the so-called Great Gascon,
the prime impetus was a religious one, and his own words are: "If I
could only hang a Bible to the equipments of my troopers I could do
with them all that Cromwell did with his Ironsides!" Two centuries
before, this had been the feeling of Gustavus Adolphus, who fought for
Protestant Germany with his Bible at his saddle-bow.

Luther is the one predominant Teuton of the centuries, after the close
of the middle ages, and though he ceases to be present in the flesh in
1516, he never dies. The inspiration of the German soul endures and
lives in every variety of art or expression. Luther is perpetuated in
Handel, and technically, even his "_Feste Burg_" is the first note of
the "_Inspirate_" in "_I Know That My Redeemer Liveth!_"

It is only the most inattentive of historical students who can afford
to ignore this. No modern æsthetician from the Rhine to the Spree
affects to dispute the succession of Teutonic thought, in its various
forms of passion, from Beethoven to Goethe, from Schiller, Jean Paul,
or Weber, or Ravner, or Kleist, or Immermann, down to the latest high
priest of the pre-historic cult--down to Richard Wagner himself! It
was precisely this that the Emperor Frederick knew as crown prince,
and that the chancellor had to learn. With the crown prince all was
present. The farthest past was with him; the leaves of the _uralte_
forests had whispered their dream lore in his ears as in those of the
_Siegfried_ of the Niebelungen; he had seen Otto von Wittelsbach
strike dead his very Kaiser for breach of faith[6] and stood by at the
Donnersberg, when mighty Rudolph's son slew Adolf of Napan for his
base attempt at usurpation. He knew it all, legend or chronicle; no
secret was hidden from him, and the national pulse beat in him with
fiery throb from the first hour when the national conscience had been
touched. The chancellor was chilled by his own statecraft, and the
king, as he then was, had witnessed the Napoleonic wars.

      [6] The heroic founder of the Bavarian monarchy, Otho of
          Writtelsbach, was betrayed shamefully by his friend,
          the Emperor Philip, of Suabia, and slew him for his
          treachery. This is one of the oldest dramas on the
          German stage.

Between the crown prince and Bismarck, however, there existed one
point of contact. Each was a _Deutsche Student_, and there, later on,
was to be found the true conversion of the chancellor to national
ideas.

As in every genuine lover of his country (and that Prince Bismarck
is), there lay latent in the famous "White Cuirassier" the same ideal
capacity of warlike action and intellectuality that so distinguished
Frederick II. No one understood better the complex son of Carlyle's
roystering barrack hero, no one knew in reality more deeply that the
ideas planted by him in men's minds were those of the majesty of
intelligence, of the royalty of humanity's brain power.

Count Bismarck proved his political foresight by the rapidity with
which he seized on the Schleswig-Holstein question as being the axis
on which turned the entire evolution (if ever it should be possible!)
of the imperial German unity. About that he hesitated not one moment.
He adopted the whole theory of Dahlmann, who alone spoke it out in
words in 1848-9, but he feared to plunge at one leap into the vortex
of his own threatening conclusions and tried for several years to
stave off the "pay day." He was somewhat slower to recognize the
identity of feeling through all the Germanic races, to realize the
equally strong vibration, the psychologic harmony quivering through
heart and soul from North to South, through the mysteriously hidden
dramas of fifteen hundred years. He believed himself a narrow
Particularist Borussian, a "Pomeranian Giant," and let a score of
years go by before clearly making out by touch that the strange change
of tonality, of sound, and significance that superposed the patriotism
of the South to that of the North was a mere inharmonic change, and
that according to the rotation of the two circles, each, in reality,
underlay the other in turn.

It would be a fatal mistake to imagine that M. von Bismarck allowed
himself to be led into the Danish campaign. He did nothing to bring it
about, but the instant it showed itself on the cards he took advantage
of it in the most predetermined, authoritative way, leaving his
Austrian accomplice and victim no possibility of escape. From the hour
when, in 1853, he boarded Count Richberg on the Carlsbad Railroad, and
forced his enemy of the _Francfort Bund_ to become his humble servant
and carry out all his designs, to the hour when, in 1865, he drove
Franz Joseph to sign the Condiminium on what he knew was a mere waste
paper, he was resolved to turn to account the extraordinary
opportunity offered him by the incredible blindness and insensate
terror of revolution of his allies. In the Austrians, the dread of
what the smaller States, encouraged by Hungary, might attempt,
paralyzed every other consideration, and besides that, the abortive
little plans of Count Beust, in Saxony, served to point out to him
what other Germans were, in a purely German sense, thinking of, and he
decided that the grand historic game thrust upon his perceptions and
waited for by all around him, should be played by himself alone. Then
he played it, not before seeing at once what it must entail, but by no
means assured that he could win.

And then, they who watched him nearest and knew him best, know how he
played that game, mindful of every event that filled the long history
of the past, living over again all the struggles, all the glories and
defeats of all the European nations far or near, finding examples both
to imitate or avoid, losing sight of nothing, from Gregory VII. to
Gutenberg, from papal obscurantism to the Reformation's blaze of
light; from Wallenstein's murder to the treaty of Utrecht; from
Richelieu to the scaffold of Louis XVI., and while calculating every
catastrophe, keeping steadily on his way.

This, the fearful period between the Crimean War, when first Cavour
stepped forth to the incident of Ems, when the die was cast, this was
the really magnificent passage in the great chancellor's career, for
this was the time of possible doubt when responsibility lay so heavy
that to elude it might be called prudence, and which to have survived
is already a proof of superiority over common humanity.

And here we assert the true grandeur of the precursor,--of the one
whom we have called the inventor, and who undeniably was so--of
Cavour! There can be no question that his own intimate familiarity
with the details of the Bond of Virtue and the War of Freedom[7] of
the glorious epoch when modern Germany headed and achieved the
victorious movement against the world's debasement,--brought
distinctly to Bismarck's mental vision the splendor of Cavour's
impossibly unequal contest for Italian freedom! The situations were
essentially much alike, but so much grander for the Italian statesman,
Italy's odds being so immeasurably longer! But still the likeness came
out, and the future chancellor could in no way aspire to be an
initiator. The end was still a gigantic one, and one to which no true,
brave patriot dared be false as an ideal,--but how as to the
execution? As to the practical means of carrying out conceptions that
might daily be doomed to alteration?

      [7] The celebrated victory of the Great Elector, that made
          Prussia into a kingdom.

There it was again that the figure of Cavour arose supreme; his long,
inexhaustible patience, his undying hopes, his sacrifices day by day
of the very springs of life for a self-imposed duty,--these were his
titles to immortal fame, these constituted his sovereign right to
success. But was not the worst probation over when Waterloo was won,
and was it not an accepted theory that the Vienna Congress had settled
all the vexed questions of ancient Europe? Any further movement,
therefore, might seem merely a disturbance. This, for conservative
statesmen above all, was a dilemma.

Germany had liberated not Germany only, but the world in 1813, and had
already had her Cavours!

There was no denying it: the Cavour of Germany was Stein. But was the
work done? Had the Congress of Vienna settled anything, for was that
still left to do without which the independence and well-being of
forty millions of Germans was unguaranteed, and the peace of all
Europe uninsured? If so, what remained to be achieved? to complete
what the German Cavour, the Precursor Stein, had begun, to embody and
make real the glorious dreams of which Queen Louise had been the
symbol, the Joan of Arc?[8]

      [8] I would recommend every student of history to read
          attentively the extraordinary article of M. Paleologue
          in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ entitled "_La Reine
          Louise de Prusse Comment se Fait une Legende_." It is a
          poetic but true suite to Professor Lévy Brühl's
          magnificent study.

That, indeed, brought the Hohenzollerns on the scene, and lent to
prosaic history its legend, giving to Frederick's "big battalions" the
white-robed heroine who should lead them on.

Whether, through the long years of indecision, during which disorder
and revolution seemed the danger to be averted, the future
"Chancellor of Iron" matured his plans after the manner of Newton, by
"forever thinking of them" is still a question to be adequately
answered by himself alone. This much is certain that when, in 1863-64,
the subject of the Duchies cast its shadow on the path, it revealed
its importance to Bismarck, as it had done fourteen years previously
to Dahlmann, and stood forth distinctly as the initial syllable of the
one mystical word, _Unity_.

_Schleswig-Holstein_ was, as a matter of fact, and by all its several
complications, the German question; it was its sign and portent, and
if action of some sort were not taken thereupon, the door set ajar was
closed upon the future, for a generation at least. Palmerston's
declaration, than which no unwiser one was ever made, touching the
insanity of the man who should seek to understand the enigma of the
Danish Duchies, was adopted in England solely from the dense and
inconceivable ignorance of the British mind on all German topics, and
the equally inexplicable but inborn dislike of all British politicians
to grapple with any serious study of them.

It was the problem to which no German of the North could show
indifference; and it was the one subject which brought Prussia to the
fore, and put her reigning house in the van, forcing the Hohenzollerns
into predominance. This was a crucial point, and wondrous to record!
the will of Bismarck on that exceedingly curious detail brought the
Hapsburgs together with the Hohenzollerns; Frederick with
Marie-Therèse, Wallenstein's camp with Rebels, in an unescapable
atmosphere of rank Germanism!

But here again the first step of the forthcoming ruler was taken in
obedience to an irresistible, though, perhaps, unavowed, national
suggestion. The sense of _all_ that the past had given to German
history, to the power of German thought, formed a part of Bismarck's
very nature, and spite of the timidity of his experienced statecraft,
he could not disobey the promptings of the German conscience.

When the quick-witted French public applied to Professor Lévy Brühl's
work the title of "The idea whence comes the fact," they awarded it
its permanent signification; it is the development of the German
conscience that causes the imperial unity of Germany, and no one is
more thoroughly aware of that than the famous chancellor.

We feel with whomsoever was a witness of the crowning struggle, that
nothing can even paint its gigantic character more aptly than the
concluding phrase of the now famous French historian:--

... "Thus was formed the virtual German nation,--the nation that
willed to be, and for long years could not be because reality refused
to bear out practically all its ideals. It was in truth, _l'ame qui
cherche un corps_!"

These words can never be improved upon. The chancellor knows their
truth, as the _Kronprinz_ knew it, but the years lying between them
threw a certainty of glory into one which the other could not attain
to,--and Bismarck, too, was a man of old Prussia, of her ancient
traditions and formalities, while the crown prince was modern amongst
moderns--a soldier, yes! but pre-eminently a man, a citizen; but
though each felt his conviction differently, its strength was one and
the same in both.

The unity of Germany was the creation of no individual. German unity
and the imperial unity sprang from the whole past of German history
and German thought. The State existing now is the outcome of Germany's
own self, of the idea, of the soul of Germany.




"SHOULD THE NATION OWN THE RAILWAYS?"[9]

BY C. WOOD DAVIS.

PART II.--THE ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL OWNERSHIP.

      [9] The first part of this admirable essay appeared in July
          ARENA.


First would be the stability and practical uniformity of rates now
impossible, as they are subject to change by hundreds of officials,
and are often made for the purpose of enriching such officials. State
and federal laws have had the effect of making discriminations less
public and less numerous, but it is doubtful if they are less
effective in enriching officials and their partners, although it may
be necessary to be more careful in covering tracks. That they are
continued is within the cognizance of every well-informed shipper, and
are made clear by such cases as that of Counselman and Peasley, now
before the United States Supreme Court. Counselman and Peasley--one a
large shipper and the other a prominent railway official--refused to
testify before a United States grand jury upon the plea that to do so
might criminate themselves; the federal law making it a criminal
offence to make or benefit by discriminating rates. Counselman had
been given rates on corn, some five cents less per hundred pounds than
others, from Kansas and Nebraska points to Chicago.

The outrageous character of this discrimination will appear when we
reflect that five cents per one hundred pounds is an enormous profit
on corn that the grower has sold at from eighteen to twenty-two cents
per one hundred pounds, and that such a margin would tend to drive
every one but the railway officials and their secret partners out of
the trade, as has practically been the case on many western roads.
Doubtless such rates are sometimes made in order to take the commodity
over a certain line, and there is no divide with the officials; but
the effect upon the competitors of the favored shipper and the public
is none the less injurious, and such practices would not obtain under
national ownership, when railway users would be treated with honesty
and impartiality, which the experience of half a century shows to be
impossible with corporate ownership.

Referring to the rate question in their last report, the Interstate
Commerce Commission says: "If we go no farther than the railroad
managers themselves for information, we shall not find that it is
claimed that railroad service, as a whole, is conducted without unjust
discriminations."

"If rates are secretly cut, or if rebates are given to large shippers,
the fact of itself shows the rates which are charged to the general
public are unreasonable, for they are necessarily made higher than
they ought to be in order to provide for the cut or to pay the
rebate."

"If the carrier habitually carries a great number of people free, its
regular rates are made the higher to cover the cost; if heavy
commissions are paid for obtaining business, the rates are made the
higher that the net revenues may not suffer in consequence; if
scalpers are directly or indirectly supported by the railroad
companies, the general public refunds to the companies what the
support costs."

The Commission quotes a Chicago railway manager as saying: "Rates are
absolutely demoralized and neither shippers, passengers, railways, or
the public in general make anything by this state of affairs. Take
passenger rates for instance; they are very low; but who benefits by
the reduction? No one but the scalpers.... In freight matters the case
is just the same. Certain shippers are allowed heavy rebates, while
others are made to pay full rates.... The management is dishonest on
all sides, and there is not a road in the country that can be accused
of living up to the interstate law. Of course when some poor devil
comes along and wants a pass to save him from starvation, he has
several clauses of the interstate act read to him; but when a rich
shipper wants a pass, why he gets it at once."

From years of ineffectual efforts on the part of State and national
legislatures and commissions to regulate the rate business, it would
appear that the only remedy is national ownership, which would place
the rate-making power in one body with no inducement to act otherwise
than fairly and impartially, and this would simplify the whole
business and relegate an army of traffic managers, general freight
agents, soliciting agents, brokers, scalpers, and hordes of traffic
association officials to more useful callings while relieving the
honest user of the railway of intolerable burthens.

Under corporate control, railways and their officials have taken
possession of the majority of the mines which furnish the fuel so
necessary to domestic and industrial life, and there are but few
coalfields where they do not fix the price at which so essential an
article shall be sold, and the whole nation is thus forced to pay
undue tribute.

Controlling rates and the distribution of cars, railway officials have
driven nearly all the mine owners who have not railways or railway
officials for partners, to the wall. For instance, in Eastern Kansas,
on the line of the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway Company, were two
coal companies, whose plants were of about equal capacity, and several
individual shippers. The railway company and its officials became
interested in one of the coal companies, and such company was, by the
rebate and other processes, given rates which averaged but forty per
cent. of the rates charged other shippers, the result being that all
the other shippers were driven out of the business, a part of them
being hopelessly ruined before giving up the struggle. In addition to
gross discriminations in rates this railway company practised worse
discriminations in the distribution of cars; for instance, during one
period of five hundred and sixty-four days, as was proven in court,
they delivered to the Pittsburg Coal Company, 2,371 empty cars to be
loaded with coal, although such company had sale for, and capacity to
produce and load, during the same period, more than 15,000 cars.
During the same time this railway company delivered to the Rogers Coal
Company, in which the railway company and C. W. Rogers, its
vice-president and general manager, were interested, no less than
15,483 coal cars, while four hundred and fifty-six were delivered to
individual shippers. In other words, the coal company owned in large
part by the railway and its officials was given eighty-two per cent.
of all the facilities to get coal to market, although the other
shippers had much greater combined capacity than had the Rogers Coal
Company.

During the last four months of the period named, and when the
Pittsburg Coal Company had the plant, force, and capacity to load
thirty cars per day, they received an average of one and a fourth cars
per day, resulting, as was intended, in the utter ruin of a
prosperous business and the involuntary sale of the property, while
the railway coal company, the railway officials, and the accommodating
friends who operated the Rogers Coal Company, made vast sums of money;
and when all other shippers had thus been driven off the line the
price of coal was advanced to the consumer.

On another railway, traversing the same coal-field, the railway or its
officials became interested in the Keith & Perry Coal Company--the
largest coal company doing business on the line--and here the plan
seems to have been, in addition to the manipulation of rates, to
starve other mine operators out, and force them to sell their coal to
the Keith & Perry Company, by failing to furnish the needed cars to
those who did not sell their coal to the Keith & Perry Company at a
very low price.

When the Keith & Perry Company had a great demand for coal, such
parties as sold the product of their mines to that company were
furnished with cars, but for the other operators cars were not to be
had, such cars as were brought to the field being assigned to such
parties as were loading to the Keith & Perry Company, because that
company furnished the coal consumed by the locomotives of the railway.

One operator, after being for years forced in this way to sell his
product to the Keith & Perry Company, or see his several plants stand
idle, has, in recent months, been obliged to build some seven miles of
railway in order to reach four different roads, and thus have a
fighting chance for cars, although all these railways are provided
with coal mines owned by the corporations or their officials.

In Arkansas, Jay Gould, or his railway company, own coal mines and the
coal is transported to the neighboring town at low rates, and there is
an ample supply of cars for such mines; but the owners of an adjoining
mine are forced to haul their coal some eighteen miles to the same
town in wagons, as the rates charged them over Mr. Gould's railway are
so high as to absorb the value of the coal at destination.

Not only are individuals thus oppressed, but for reasons which only
the initiated can fathom there are seemingly purposeless
discriminations against localities, as shown in the following extract
from the _Coal Trade Journal_ of March 25, 1891.

     "Capt. Thomas H. Bates, before the railroad committee of the
     Colorado Senate, said: The Grand River Coal & Coke Company
     mine their coal in Garfield County, about fifty miles west
     of Leadville, and all they sell in Denver, Colorado Springs,
     and Pueblo, has to be hauled through Leadville. At Leadville
     the individual consumer has to pay $7.00 per ton for this
     coal, while in Denver, with an additional haul of 150 miles,
     the coal from the same mines is delivered to the individual
     consumer for $5.50 per ton. The Colorado Coal & Iron Company
     produce all the anthracite coal sold in Colorado. It is
     mined at Crested Butte, which is 150 miles nearer Leadville
     than Denver, yet this coal is sold in Leadville for $9.00 to
     the individual consumer, while the same coal is hauled 150
     miles farther, and sold to the individual consumer for an
     advance of twenty-five cents per ton over the Leadville
     price, and is sold in Denver for $7.10 per ton in carload
     lots."

With the government operating the railways, discriminations would
cease, as would individual and local oppression; and we may be sure
that an instant and absolute divorce would be decreed between railways
and their officials on one side, and commercial enterprises of every
name and kind on the other.

There are but three countries of any importance where the railways are
operated by corporations permitted to fix rates, as in all others the
government is the ultimate rate-making power: these are Great Britain,
Canada, and the United States; and while the British government
exercises a more effective control than we do, there are many and
oppressive discriminations, and complaints are loud and frequent, and
English farmers find it necessary to unite for the purpose of securing
protection from corporate oppression, as is shown by the following
from the Liverpool _Courier_ of January 29, 1891.


     LANCASHIRE FARMERS AND RAILWAY RATES.

     After the counsel given them yesterday by Mr. A. B. Forwood,
     of Ormskirk, it may be expected that the Liverpool District
     Farmers' Club will be on the watch for tangible evidence of
     their grievances against the railway companies.... Under
     certain circumstances competition operates to the advantage
     of the public, and rival carriers are constrained to convey
     goods from place to place at moderate charges; but where a
     company is not held in check, the tendency is for rates to
     advance. In many cases, too, special interests of the
     companies are promoted at the expense of localities, and
     even individuals are subjected to the wrong of preferential
     charges. (There are no complaints in Britain that these
     discriminations are practised for the purpose of enriching
     the officials.) Hence the necessity for the Railway
     Commission to regulate the magnates of the iron road, who
     when left without restraint pay little regard to interests
     other than those of their shareholders.

Although Mr. Acworth fails to mention this phase of English railway
administration, it would appear that the evils of discrimination are
common under corporate management in Great Britain, and that they are
inherent to and inseparable from such management; and that the
questions of rates, discriminations, and free traffic in fuel can be
satisfactorily adjusted only by national ownership, and if for no
other reasons such ownership is greatly to be desired.

The failure to furnish equipment to do the business of the tributary
country promptly is one of the greater evils of corporate
administration, enabling officials to practise most injurious and
oppressive forms of discrimination, and is one that neither federal
nor State commission pays much attention to. With national ownership a
sufficiency of cars would be provided. On many roads the funds that
should have been devoted to furnishing the needed equipment, and which
the corporations contracted to provide when they accepted their
charters, have been divided as construction profits or, as in the case
of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and many others, diverted to the
payment of unearned dividends, while the public suffers from this
failure to comply with charter obligations; yet Mr. Dillon informs us
that the citizen commits an impertinence when he inquires why contract
obligations, which are the express consideration for the exceptional
powers granted, are not performed.

Another great advantage which would result from national ownership
would be such an adjustment of rates that traffic would take the
natural short route, and not, as under corporate management, be sent
around by the way of Robin Hood's barn, when it might reach
destination by a route but two thirds as long, and thus saving the
unnecessary tax to which the industries of the country are subjected.
That traffic can be sent by these round-about routes at the same or
less rates than is charged by the shorter ones is _prima facie_
evidence that rates are too high. If it costs a given sum to transport
a specific amount of merchandise a thousand miles, it is clear that it
will cost a greater sum to transport it fifteen hundred; and yet
traffic is daily diverted from the thousand mile route to the fifteen
hundred one, and carried at the same or lower rates than is charged by
the shorter line. It is evident, that if the long route can afford to
do the business for the rates charged, that the rates charged by the
shorter are excessive in a high degree.

Under government management, traffic would take the direct route, as
mail matter now does, and the industries of the country be relieved of
the onerous tax imposed by needless hauls. Only those somewhat
familiar with the extent of the diversions from direct routes can form
any conception of the aggregate saving that would be effected by such
change as would result from national ownership, and which may safely
be estimated as equal to two and a half per cent. of the entire cost
of the railway service, or $25,000,000 per annum.

With the government operating the railways there would be a great
reduction in the number of men employed in towns entered by more than
one line. For instance, take a town where there are three or more
railways, and we find three (or more) full-fledged staffs, three (or
more) expensive up-town freight and ticket offices, three (or more)
separate sets of all kinds of officials and employees, and three (or
more) separate depots and yards to be maintained. Under government
control these staffs--except in very large cities--would be reduced to
one, and all trains would run into one centrally located depot;
freight and passengers be transferred without present cost, annoyance,
and friction, and public convenience and comfort subserved, and added
to in manner and degree almost inconceivable.

Economies which would be affected by such staff reductions, would more
than offset any additions to the force likely to be made at the
instance of politicians, thus eliminating that objection; such saving
may be estimated at $20,000,000 per annum.

With the nation owning the railways the great number of expensive
attorneys now employed, with all the attendant corruption of the
fountains of justice, could be dispensed with; and there would be no
corporations to take from the bench the best legal minds, by offering
three or four times the federal salary; nor would there be occasion
for a justice of the Supreme Court of Kansas to render a decision that
a corporation chartered by Kansas for the sole purpose of building a
railway in that State has the right and power under such charter to
guarantee the bonds of corporations building railways in Old or New
Mexico, and shortly after writing such decision be carted all over the
seaboard States in one of the luxurious private cars of such
corporation. Under national ownership such judges would pay their
travelling expenses in some other way, and be transported in the
ordinary manner, and not half as many judges would travel on passes.
There are many judges whose decisions any number of passes would not
affect; but if passes are not to have any effect upon legislation and
litigation, why are congressmen, legislators, judges, and other court
officials singled out for this kind of martyrdom? If the men who
attain these positions remained private citizens, would passes be
thrust upon them?

Although the reports of the Victorian Commissioners show, in detail,
all the expenditures of railway administration, yet not one dollar is
set down for attorneys' salaries or for legal expenses, and it is
presumed that the ordinary law officers of the government attend to
the little legal business arising, and yet judging from reports made
by Kansas roads, the expenditures of the corporate owned railways of
the United States for attorneys' salaries and other legal expenses,
are at least two per cent. of the entire cost of operating the roads,
and yearly aggregate some $14,000,000, all of which is taken directly
from railway users, and is a tax which would be saved under national
ownership, as United States district attorneys could attend to such
legal business as might arise. This expenditure is incurred in endless
controversies between the corporations, in wrecking railways, in
plundering the shareholders, in contending against State and federal
regulation, in manipulating elections and legislation, and in wearing
out such citizens as seek legal redress for some of the many
outrageous acts of oppression practised by the corporations. Once the
government was in control, these lawyers would be relegated to some
employment where they would do less harm, even if not engaged in a
more honorable vocation than that of trying to defeat justice by the
use of such questionable means as the control of the vast revenues of
the corporations place in their hands.

Is it possible that the railway companies can legitimately use
anything like $14,000,000 yearly in protecting their rights in the
courts?

The president of the Union Pacific tells us that: "The courts are open
to redress all real grievances of the citizen."

There is probably no man in the United States better aware than is
Sidney Dillon that no citizen, unless he has as much wealth as the
president of the Union Pacific, can successfully contest a case of any
importance in the courts with one of these corporations which make a
business, as a warning to other possible plaintiffs, of wearing out
the unfortunate plaintiff with the law's costly delays; and failing
this do not hesitate to spirit away the plaintiff's witnesses, and to
pack and buy juries--retaining a special class of attorneys for this
work--the command of great corporate revenues enabling them to
accomplish their ends, and to utterly ruin nearly every man having the
hardihood to seek Mr. Dillon's lauded legal redress, and when they
have accomplished such nefarious object, the entire cost is charged
back to the public, and collected in the form of tolls upon traffic.
Laws are utterly powerless to restrain the corporations, and Mr.
Dillon tells us how easy it is to evade them by pleading compliance,
when there has been no compliance, and then having the expert servants
of the corporation swear there has been.

With the government operating the railways, every citizen riding would
pay fare adding immensely to the revenues. Few have any conception of
the proportion who travel free, and half a century's experience
renders it doubtful if the pass evil--so much greater than ever was
the franking privilege--can be eliminated otherwise than by national
ownership. From the experience of the writer, as an auditor of railway
accounts, and as an executive officer issuing passes, he is able to
say that fully ten per cent. travel free, the result being that the
great mass of railway users are yearly mulcted some $30,000,000 for
the benefit of the favored minority; hence it is evident that if all
were required to pay for railway services, as they are for mail
services, the rates might be reduced ten per cent. or more, and the
corporate revenues be no less, and the operating expenses no more. In
no other country--unless it be under the same system in Canada--are
nine tenths of the people taxed to pay the travelling expenses of the
other tenth. By what right do the corporations tax the public that
members of Congress, legislators, judges, and other court officials
and their families may ride free? Why is it that when a legislature is
in session passes are as plentiful as leaves in the forest in autumn?

The writer, as an executive officer of a railway company having
authority to issue passes, has, during a session of the legislature,
signed vast numbers of blank passes at the request of the legislative
agents of such company, and under instructions of the president of the
corporation to furnish such lobby agents with all the passes they
should ask for. No reports of passes issued are made either to State
or federal governments, or to confiding shareholders, and should such
reports be asked for, by State or nation, in order to measure the
extent of this evil, the Sidney Dillons would rush into print and tell
us it was a piece of impertinence for any citizen (or the public) to
inquire into the extent of or the manner in which the corporations
dispensed their favors. The only way to kill this monster is to put
the instruments of transportation under such control as only national
ownership can give. Laws and agreements between the corporations have
been proven, time and again, wholly ineffective even to lessen this
great and corrupting evil.

In every conceivable way are the net revenues of the corporations
depleted, and needless burthens imposed upon the public, but one of
the worst is the system of paying commissions for the diversion of
traffic to particular lines, often the least direct. The more common
practice is to pay such commissions to agents of connecting lines
where it is possible to send the traffic over any one of two or more
routes, and the one which may, by the payment of such commission,
secure the carrying of the passenger (or merchandise) may be the least
desirable, and the one which would never have been taken but for the
prevarications of an agent bribed by a commission to make false
representations as to the desirableness of the route he selects for
the confiding passenger.

This is but one of many phases of the commission evil, another being
that these sums are ultimately paid, not by the corporations, but by
the users of the railways, and but for the payment of such commissions
the rates might be reduced in like amounts. Aside from commissions
paid for diverting passenger traffic great sums are paid for
"influencing" and "routing" freight traffic, and these sums, while
paid to outsiders, or so-called brokers, are frequently divided with
railway officials. When the writer was in charge of the transportation
accounts of a railway running east from Chicago, it was a part of his
duties to certify to the correctness of the vouchers on which
commission payments were made, and he became aware of the fact that
one Chicago brokerage firm was being paid a commission of from three
to five cents per hundred pounds on nearly all the flour, grain,
packing house, and distillery products being shipped out of Chicago
over this railway, no matter where such shipments might originate,
many of them, in fact, originating on and far west of the Mississippi
River; and when he objected to certifying to shipments with which it
was clear that the Chicago parties could have had nothing to do, he
was told, by the manager, that his duties ended when he had
ascertained and certified that such shipments had been made from
Chicago station. From investigations instituted by the writer, he soon
learned that some one connected with the management was deeply
interested in the payment of the largest sums possible as commissions.

The corporations have ineffectually wrestled with the commission evil,
and any number of agreements have been entered into to do away with
it; but it is so thoroughly entrenched, and so many officials have an
interest in its perpetuation, that they are utterly powerless in the
presence of a system which imposes great and needless burthens upon
their patrons, but which will die the day the government takes
possession of the railways, as then there will be no corporations
ready to pay for the diversion of traffic. National ownership alone
can dispose of an administrative evil that, from such data as is
obtainable, appears to cost the public from $20,000,000 to $25,000,000
per annum.

[10]Mr. Meany, in his _Sun_ article, summarizes six causes for the
diminution of railway dividends and remarks: "It is unnecessary to
dwell at any great length upon the first five mentioned reasons, but
too much could not be said on the sixth. It is now nearly seven years
since James McHenry of London (and New York, Pennsylvania & Ohio
Railway litigation fame) openly charged railway managers, in an
interview published in the _Sun_, with criminal collusion in the
matter of securing extraordinary privileges and unapproachable
contracts with their several corporations for favored fast freight
lines, express routes, bridge companies, etc., etc., in all the
benefits of which such managers shared to a very great extent. On that
occasion Mr. McHenry was promptly cried down. Would he be cried down
to-day?"

     [10] Mr. John P. Meany, editor of Poor's Manual of Railroads,
          in the New York _Sun_ of January 12, 1891.

As a rule, American railways pay the highest salaries in the world for
those engaged in directing business operations, but such salaries are
not paid because transcendant talents are necessary to conduct the
ordinary operations of railway administration, but for the purpose of
checkmating the chicanery of corporate competitors. In other words,
these exceptionally high salaries are paid for the purpose, and
because their recipients are believed to have the ability to hold up
their end in unscrupulous corporate warfare where, as one railway
president expressed it, "the greatest liar comes out ahead." With the
government operating the railways, there would be no conflicting
interests necessitating the employment of such costly officials whose
great diplomatic talents might well be dispensed with, while the
running of trains, and the conduct of the real work of operating the
roads, could be left to the same officials as at moderate salaries now
perform such duties, and consolidation of all the conflicting
interests in the hands of the government will enable the public to
dispense with the services of the high priced managers now almost
exclusively engaged in "keeping even with the other fellow," as well
as with the costly staffs assisting such managers in keeping even, and
the savings resulting may be estimated at from $4,000,000 to
$5,000,000 per year.

Government control will enable railway users to dispense with the
services of such high priced umpires as Mr. Aldace F. Walker, as well
as of all the other officials of sixty-eight traffic associations,
fruitlessly laboring to prevent each of five hundred corporations from
getting the start of its fellows, and trying to prevent each of the
five hundred from absorbing an undue share of the traffic. It appears
that each of these costly peace-making attachments has an average of
seven corporations to watch.

Referring to traffic associations, and their vain endeavors to keep
the corporations within sight of commercial ethics, the Interstate
Commerce Commission says: "But the most important provisions of the
law have not so often been directly violated as they have
been nullified through devices, carefully framed with legal
assistance,--here is one of the places where the high-priced lawyer
gets in his work--with a view to this very end, and in the belief that
when brought to legal test the device hit upon would not be held by
the courts to be so distinctly opposed to the terms of the law as to
be criminally punishable." In this connection, it is well to remember
what Mr. Dillon tells us of the ease with which the laws can be
evaded.

With national ownership the expenditures involved in the maintenance
of traffic associations would be saved, and railway users relieved of
a tax that, judging from the reports of a limited number of
corporations of their contributions towards the support of such
organizations, must annually amount to between four and five million
dollars.

Of the six hundred corporations operating railways, probably five
hundred maintain costly general offices, where president, treasurer,
and secretary pass the time surrounded by an expensive staff. The
majority of such offices are off the lines of the respective
corporations, in the larger cities, where high rents are paid, and
great expenses entailed, that proper attention may be given to the
bolstering or depressing the price of the corporation's shares, as the
management may be long or short of the market. So far as the utility
of the railways is concerned as instruments of anything but
speculation, such offices and officers might as well be located in the
moon, and their cost saved to the public. The average yearly cost of
such offices (and officers) is more than $50,000, and the transfer of
the railways to the nation would, in this matter alone, effect an
annual saving of more than $25,000,000, as both offices and officials
could be dispensed with, and the service be no less efficient.

Moreover, with the nation owning the railways, the indirect but no
less onerous tax levied upon the industries of the country, by the
thousands of speculators who make day hideous on the stock exchanges,
would be abrogated, as then there would be neither railway share nor
bond for these harpies to make shuttlecocks of, and this would be
another economy due to such ownership.

Railways spend enormous sums in advertising, the most of which
national ownership would save, as it would be no more necessary to
advertise the advantages of any particular line than it is to
advertise the advantages of any given mail route. From reports made by
railway corporations to some of the Western States, it appears that
something over one per cent. of operating expenses are absorbed in
advertising, aggregating something like $7,000,000 per year, of which
we may assume that but $5,000,000 would be saved, as it would still be
desirable to advertise train departures and arrivals.

A still greater expense is involved in the maintenance of freight and
passenger offices off the respective lines, for the purpose of
securing a portion of the competitive traffic. In this way vast sums
are expended in the payment of rents, and the salaries of hordes of
agents, solicitors, clerks, etc., etc. Taking the known expenditures,
for this purpose, of a given mileage, it is estimated that the
aggregate is not less than $15,000,000 yearly, all of which is a tax
upon the public, that would be saved did the government operate the
railways.

Under government control, discriminations against localities would
cease, whereas now localities are discriminated against because
managers are interested in real estate elsewhere, or are interested in
diverting traffic in certain directions; again, under corporate
management, it is for the interest of the company to haul a commodity
as far as possible over its own lines (with the government owning all
the lines this motive will lose its force), and thus traffic is forced
into unnatural channels. For instance: much of the grain from Kansas
should find its way to foreign markets via the short route to the
Gulf, the distance to tide water by this route being less than half
what it is to the Atlantic, yet so opposed to this natural route are
the interests of the majority of the corporations controlling the
traffic associations, which now dictate to the people what routes
their traffic shall take, that the rates to the Gulf are kept so high
as to force the traffic to the Lakes and to the Atlantic; and as all
the railways leading to the Gulf have lines running eastward, the much
lauded corporate competition fails to help out the citizens of Kansas,
who are subjected to the domination of the new tyrant denominated a
"traffic association." With the nation operating the railways, all
this would be changed, and localities favorably located would be able
to reap the benefits which such location should give, and should such
a condition ever obtain, the farmers of western Iowa will not then
ship corn to the drouth-stricken portion of Kansas for fifteen cents
per one hundred pounds, while the Kansas corn grower, living within
seventy-five miles of the same market, is charged ten cents per one
hundred pounds for a haul one eighth as long. By such rates the
railways force the hauling of corn from Iowa to western Kansas, and
then force the corn grower of central Kansas to send his corn
eastward, the result being two long hauls, where one short one would
suffice; but then the corporations would have absorbed less of the
substance of the people.

Another, and an incalculable benefit, which would result from national
ownership, would be the relief of State and national legislation from
the pressure and corrupting practices of railway corporations which
constitute one of the greatest dangers to which Republicaninstitutions
can be subjected. This alone renders the nationalization of the
railways most desirable, and at the same time such nationalization
would have the effect of emancipating a large part of the press from a
galling thraldom to the corporations.

With the nation operating the railways, we may have some hope that
rates will be reduced by some system resembling the Hungarian zone
which has had the effect of diminishing local passenger rates about
forty per cent., resulting in such an increase of traffic as to
greatly increase the revenues of the roads; the average of rates by
ordinary third-class trains being about three fourths of a cent per
mile, and one and a half cents per mile for first-class express
trains.

In Victoria, the parcel or express business is done by the government
railways, and the rates are not one half what they are with us when
farmed out to a second lot of corporations. Space does not permit the
discussion or even the statement of the many salutary phases of
government control, as developed in the various countries of Europe,
and it is not necessary, as there are abundant reasons to be found in
conditions existing at home, for making the proposed change. By far
the most menacing feature of continued corporate ownership is the
power over the money markets which it places in the hands of
unscrupulous men, any half dozen of whom can, at such a time as that
following the failure of the Barings, destroy the welfare of millions,
and plunge the country into all the horrors of a money panic. Whether
it be true or not, there are many who believe that a small coterie,
who had information before the public of the condition of Baring
Brothers and that a block of many millions of American railway
securities held by that house were being (or soon would be) pressed
upon the market, entered into a conspiracy for the purpose of locking
up money and thereby depressing prices in order to secure, at low
cost, the control of certain coveted railways. The railways were
secured, and there is not much doubt that they had been lying in wait
for such a critical condition of the money markets to accomplish this
purpose, which still further enhances their power for evil. With the
railways nationalized, not only would there be no temptation for such
nefarious operations, but the power of such men over values would be
greatly lessened, if not wholly destroyed, as there would be no
railway shares for them to play fast and loose with, and as money,
instead of being tied up in loans on chromos representing little but
water, would seek investment in bona fide enterprises, their
operations would have little influence, and would certainly have no
such baleful power over the industries of the country, as their
ability to affect the value of railway shares--on which such immense
sums are now loaned on call--gives them, they being able by locking up
a few millions when the money market is in the condition, which
obtained at the time of the Baring collapse, to force the calling of
loans and the slaughtering of vast numbers of the shares, carrying the
control of the railways they covet. If only for the purpose of
divesting "The dangerous wealthy classes" of this frightful power,
national ownership would be worth many times its cost, and without
such ownership a score of manipulators are soon likely to be complete
masters of the republic and all its industrial interests; hence, the
question reverts to the form stated in the opening of this paper:
Shall the nation accept as a master a political party that may be
dislodged by the use of the ballot, or shall the republic be dominated
by a master in the form of a score of unscrupulous Goulds,
Vanderbilts, and Huntingtons, who cannot be dislodged, and who never
die?

Assuming that $30,000 per mile is the maximum cost of existing
railways--as is shown in THE ARENA for February,--and that there are
160,000 miles, it would give a total valuation of $4,800,000,000; but
that there may be no complaint that the nation is dealing unfairly
with the owners of much water, it will be well to add twenty-five per
cent. to what will be found to be the outside value of the railways
when condemned under the law of eminent domain, and assuming that
$6,000,000,000 of three per cent. bonds are issued in order to make
payment therefor, and it involves an interest charge of $180,000,000,
to which add $670,000,000, as the cost of maintenance and operation,
and $50,000,000 as a sinking fund, and we have a total annual cost,
for railway service, of $900,000,000 as against a present cost of
$1,050,000,000 ($950,000,000 from traffic earnings, and $85,000,000
from other sources of railway revenue) resulting in a net annual
saving to the public of $150,000,000 to which must be added the other
various savings which it has been estimated would result from
government control, and which, for the convenience of the reader, are
here recapitulated, namely:--

  Saving from consolidation of depots and staffs,           $20,000,000
  Saving from exclusive use of shortest routes,              25,000,000
  Saving in attorneys' salaries and legal expenses,          12,000,000
  Saving from the abrogation of the pass evil,               30,000,000
  Saving from the abrogation of the commission system,       20,000,000
  Saving by dispensing with high priced managers and staffs,  4,000,000
  Saving by disbanding traffic associations,                  4,000,000
  Saving by dispensing with presidents, etc.,                25,000,000
  Saying by abolishing (all but local) offices, solicitors,
    etc.,                                                    15,000,000
  Saving of five-sevenths of the advertising account,         5,000,000
                                                           ------------
  Total savings by reason of better administration,        $160,000,000

It would appear that after yearly setting aside $50,000,000 as a
sinking fund, that there are the best of reasons for believing that
the cost of the railway service would be some $310,000,000 less than
under corporate management.

That $6,000,000,000 is much more than it would cost to duplicate
existing railways, will not be questioned by the disinterested
familiar with late reductions in the cost of construction, and that
such a valuation is excessive is manifest from the fact that it is
much more than the market value of all the railway bonds and shares in
existence.

Mr. John P. Meany, in the _Railway Review_ of February 7, 1891, says:
"It is safe to assume that the market valuation of the entire
$4,500,000,000 of railroad stock in existence, would not average more
than $30 per share, or, say $1,350,000,000 in all," and in his _Sun_
article he states that fully $500,000,000 of this stock is duplicated,
so that the "live" stock outstanding is really but $4,000,000,000,
which at $30 per share would have an aggregate value of
$1,200,000,000. Mr. Meany also states that there are duplications of
bond issues amounting to some $300,000,000 leaving the live
outstanding bonds at $4,500,000,000 and many corporations failing to
pay interest, some issues are selling as low as 12 per cent. of par,
making it safe to call the average market value of bonds 90 per cent.
of their face value, and their aggregate value would be
$4,050,000,000, to which add value of "live" capital stock,
$1,200,000,000, and the total market value of bonds and stock is,
$5,250,000,000, being at the rate of $32,800 per mile for the 160,000
miles in operation.

After many years of familiarity with the turgid and obscure statements
issued by American railway corporations, and which are usually of such
a character that the more they are studied the less the shareholder
knows of the affairs of the corporation, it is very refreshing to read
the report of the Railway Commissioners of any one of the Australasian
colonies, where every item of expenditure is made clear, and where
words are not used for the purpose of misleading.

The last Victorian report shows this new and sparsely settled country
as able to borrow money with which to build national railways, at
three and one half per cent. per annum. How many American corporations
are able to borrow money at such a rate? This saving in the interest
charge directly benefits the public, and is due to national
ownership, and a like saving will be made by the nationalization of
American railways.

This report also shows that while the country is so rugged that in
many cases the gradients are as great as one hundred and thirty feet
per mile, and the cost of labor and supplies more than here, the roads
are operated at less cost, as measured by the expense per train mile,
than in the favored regions of the United States. The Kansas City,
Fort Scott, and Memphis Railway is, admittedly, one of the best
managed and most economically operated railways in the West, and with
an abundance of very cheap coal;[11] low gradients and running more
trains than do the Victorian railways should be operated much more
cheaply, yet the cost of operating this road, as measured by the cost
per train mile,--and this is the best possible criterion of economy in
operation,--is one third greater than on the government owned railways
of Victoria.

     [11] Coal on the line named is worth about $1.50 per ton at
          the mines, while inferior coal is worth $3.75 per ton
          at the mines in Victoria.

An excellent measure of the efficiency of the management is the number
of casualties, as proportioned to the number of passengers carried and
men employed, which is very great in such countries as Russia,
Roumania, and Portugal; but in Victoria, and other Australian
colonies, the proportion is far less than in the United States, more
attention being given to the adoption of such safety devices as
interlocking switches, etc., and all the stations and crossings are
provided with gates, and otherwise better guarded than with us, where
the corporations are much more intent upon paying dividends than in
serving the public, or in saving life and limb, while on the
government-operated railways of Victoria, the management devotes its
attention--with a due regard to economy,--to the convenience, comfort,
and safety of railway users, and employees having no bond or share
holders to provide for. In the United States one of the useless
traffic associations pays its chief umpire nearly as much as Victoria
pays her entire commission.

Those desirous of entering the railway service of Victoria are
subjected to such a rigid examination as to qualifications and
character, that but little more than one third are able to pass the
ordeal, and a high standard of excellence in the personnel of the
service results; when these servants are disabled or worn out by long
service, they are pensioned or given a retiring allowance, and this
system tends to reduce the inclination to strike, as a man who has
been years in the service will long hesitate before he forfeits his
right to a provision of this kind.

All the Australian reports and accounts which have come under the
observation of the writer, are models of conciseness and clearness,
and show that there is nothing inherent in railway accounts rendering
it necessary that they be made obscure and misleading.

Neither in the Australian reports nor in the colonial press is there
the least evidence of discriminations against individuals or
localities, and this one fact is an argument of greater force in favor
of national ownership than all that have ever been advanced against
it.




WHERE MUST LASTING PROGRESS BEGIN?

BY ELIZABETH CADY STANTON.


To the calm observer there is nothing more impressive in society
to-day than the varied and multitudinous associations for the
amelioration of human poverty, ignorance, and crime; and nothing more
depressing than the seeming immense waste of force scattered in these
innumerable directions with results so intangible and undefined. From
all the discussions we hear in the halls of legislation, and on the
popular platform, on the relations of capital and labor, finance, free
trade, land monopoly, taxation, individualism, and socialism, the
rights of women, children, criminals, and animals, one would think
that an entire change must speedily be effected in our theories of
government, religion, and social life, and so there would be if a
small minority, even, honestly believed in these specific reforms. But
alas! our reading minds are yet to be educated into the first
principles of social science; they are yet to learn that our present
theories of life are all false. The old ideas of caste and class, of
rich and poor, educated and uneducated, must pass away, and the many
must no longer suffer that the few may shine. Our religion must teach
the brotherhood of the race, the essential oneness of humanity, and
our government must be based on the broad principles of equal rights
to all. A religion that seeks to make the people satisfied in their
degraded conditions, and releases them from all responsibility for its
continuance, is unworthy our intelligent belief, and a government that
holds half its people in slavery, practically chained where they are
born, in ignorance, poverty, and vice, is unworthy our intelligent
support.

The object of all our specific reforms is to secure equal conditions
for the whole human race. The initiative steps to this end are:--

1. Educate our upper classes, our most intelligent people, into the
belief that our present civilization is based on false principles,
and that the ignorance, poverty, and crime we see about us are the
legitimate results of our false theories.

2. They must be educated to believe that our present conditions and
environments can and will be changed, and that as man is responsible
for the miseries of the race, through his own knowledge and wisdom the
change must come. To-day, men make their God responsible for all human
arrangements, and they quote Scripture to prove that poverty is one of
His wise provisions for the development of all the cardinal virtues. I
heard a sermon preached, not long ago, from the text: "The poor ye
have always with you," in which the preacher dwelt on the virtues of
benevolence and gratitude called out on either side. Poverty, said he,
has been the wise schoolmaster, to teach the people industry, economy,
self-sacrifice, patience, and humility, all those beautiful virtues
that best fit the human soul for the life hereafter. "Blessed are the
poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Thus the lessons
of submission and content have been sedulously taught to oppressed
classes, in the name of God, with fair promises of heaven to come.

The rich must be taught that they have no right to live in luxury
while others starve. The poor must be taught that they, too, have
inalienable rights on this green earth, the right to life, liberty,
and happiness, and to the fruits of their own industry, and it is the
imperative duty of each class to concede the one and demand the other.
The apathy and indifference of the masses in their degraded conditions
are as culpable as the pride and satisfaction of the upper classes in
their superior position.

As the only hope for the lasting progress of the race and a radical
reform in social life lie in the right education of children, their
birth and development is the vital starting-point for the philosopher.
A survey of the various unfortunate classes of society that have
hitherto occupied the time and thought of different orders of
philanthropists, and the little that has been accomplished in our own
lifetime, to go no farther back, gives very little encouragement for
this mere surface work that occupies so many noble men and women in
each generation. In spite of all our asylums and charities, religious
discussion and legislation, the problems of pauperism, intemperance,
and crime are no nearer a satisfactory solution than when our pilgrim
fathers landed on Plymouth Rock, in search of that liberty in thought
and action denied in the old world. The gloomy panorama of misery and
crime moves on, a dark picture in this young civilization.

If we would use the same common sense in the improvement of mankind
that we do in the ordinary affairs of life, we should begin our work
at the foundations of society, in family life, in parenthood, the
source and centre of all these terrible evils whose branches we are
trying to lop off. A family living in an old house, on unhealthy
ground, with water in the cellar, a crumbling foundation, the beams
like sponge, the roof leaking, the chimney full of cracks, would not
spend large sums of money year after year, generation after
generation, in patching up the old house on the same old spot, but
with ordinary wisdom and economy, they would build anew, on higher
ground, with strong foundations, sound timber, substantial chimneys,
and solid roofing. True, they would patch up the old at as little cost
as possible, merely to afford them a shelter until the new home was
built. And all our special reform work to-day is but patching the old,
until with a knowledge of the true laws of social science we can begin
to build the new aright. There is much surface work we must do in
reform, for decency's sake, but all this patching up of ignorant,
diseased, criminal, unfortunate humanity is temporary and transient,
effecting no radical improvement anywhere. The real work that will
tell on all time and the eternities, is building the new life and
character, laying the foundation-stones of future generations in
justice, liberty, purity, peace, and love, the work of the rising
generation of fathers and mothers at this hour. Those of us who have
long since passed the meridian of life, can give you the result of our
experience and researches into social science, but with the young men
and women of this hour rests the hope of the higher civilization which
it is possible for the race to attain through obedience to law. The
lovers of science come back to us from every latitude and longitude,
from their explorations in the mineral, vegetable, and animal
kingdoms, from their observations of the planetary world, bearing the
same message. "All things are governed by law," while man himself who
holds in his own hand the key to all knowledge and power seems never
to be in unison with the grandeur and glory of the world in which he
lives. The picture of struggling humanity through the long past is not
a cheerful one to contemplate. What can be done to mitigate the
miseries of the masses? This thought rests heavily and with increasing
weight on the hearts of all who love justice, liberty, and equality.
The same law of inheritance that hands down the vices of ancestors,
hands down their virtues also, and in a greater ratio, for good is
positive, active, ever vigilant, its worshippers swim up stream
against the current. Could we make all men and women feel their
individual responsibility in the chain of influences that tell on all
time, we could solemnize in our own day such vows for nobler lives as
to make this seeming herculean work light as the wings of angels. If,
henceforward, all the thought, the money, the religious enthusiasm
dedicated to the regeneration of the race, could be devoted to the
generation of our descendants, to the conditions and environments of
parents and children, the whole face of society might be changed
before we celebrate the next centennial of our national life. Science
has vindicated our right to discuss freely whether our ancestors were
apes; let it be as free to ask whether our posterity shall be idiots,
dwarfs, and knaves, and if not, by what change, if any, in our social
institutions, such wretched results may be avoided. Gatton in his work
on "Heredity," says our present civilization is growing too
complicated for our best minds even to grasp, and to meet successfully
the issues of the hour, humanity must be lifted up a few degrees, as
speedily as possible. And where must this radical work begin? The best
hope for the progress of the race in political, religious, and social
life lies in the right birth, education, and development of our
children. Here is the true starting-point for the philosopher.

Let the young man who is indulging in all manner of excesses remember
that in considering the effect of the various forms of dissipation on
himself, his own happiness or danger, he does not begin to measure the
evil of his life. As the high priest at the family altar, his deeds of
darkness will inflict untold suffering on generation after generation.
One of the most difficult lessons to impress on any mind is the power
and extent of individual influence; and parents above all others
resist the belief that their children are exactly what they make
them, no more, no less; like produces like. The origin of ideas was
long a disputed point with different schools of philosophers. Locke
took the ground that the mind of every child born into the world is
like a piece of blank paper; that you may write thereon whatever you
will, but science has long since proved that such idealists as
Descartes were nearer right, that the human family come into the world
with ideas, with marked individual proclivities; that the pre-natal
conditions have more influence than all the education that comes
after. If family peculiarities are transmitted to the third and fourth
generation, the grandson clothed with the same gait, gesture, mode of
thought and expression as the grandfather he has never seen, it is
evident that each individual may reap some advantage and development
from those predecessors whose lives in all matters great and small are
governed by law, by a conscientious sense of duty, not by feeling,
chance, or appetite.

If there is a class of educators who need special preparation
for their high and holy duties, it is those who assume the
responsibilities of parents. Shall they give less thought to immortal
beings than the artist to his landscape or statue.

We wander through the galleries in the old world, and linger before
the works of the great masters, transfixed with the grace and beauty
of the ideals that surround us. And with equal preparation, greater
than these are possible in living, breathing humanity. Go in
imagination from the gallery to the studio of the poor artist, watch
him through the restless days, as he struggles with the conception of
some grand ideal, and then see how patiently he moulds and remoulds
the clay, and when at last, through weary years, the block of marble
is transformed into an angel of light, he worships it, and weeps that
he cannot breathe into it the breath of life. And lo! by his side are
growing up immortal beings to whom he has never given one half the
care and thought bestowed on the silent ones that grace his walls. And
yet the same devotion to a high ideal of human character, would soon
give the world a generation of saints and scholars, of scientists and
statesmen, of glorified humanity such as the world has not yet seen.
Many good people lose heart in trying to improve their surroundings
because they say the influence of one amounts to so little. Remember
it was by the patient toil of generations through centuries that the
Colossus of Rhodes, Diana's Temple at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at
Halicarnassus, the Pyramids at Egypt, the Pharos at Alexandria, the
Hanging Gardens at Babylon, the Olympian Zeus, the seven wonders of
the world, grew day by day into enduring monuments to the greatness of
humanity. By individual effort the grand result was at last achieved.
So the ideal manhood and womanhood, so earnestly prophesied, will
become living realities in the future. Remember it took three hundred
years to build an Egyptian pyramid. Allowing four generations to a
century we have twelve generations of men who passed their lives in
that one achievement. Was not the work of those who first evened the
ground and laid the foundation-stones as important as of those who
laid the capstones at last? Let us, then, begin in our day by the
discussion of these vital principles of social science, to even the
ground and lay the foundation-stones for the greatest wonder the world
is yet to see,--a man in whom the appetites, the passions, the
emotions are all held in allegiance to their rightful sovereign,
_Reason_. The true words and deeds of successive generations will
build up this glorified humanity, fairer than any Parian marble,
grander than any colossal sculpture of the East, more exalted than
spire or dome, boundless in capacity, in aspiration, limitless as
space.




[Illustration: Amelia B. Edwards (signed "Amelia B. Edwards")]




MY HOME LIFE.

BY AMELIA B. EDWARDS.


It has been suggested to me that an article descriptive of my ways and
doings at home might be acceptable to readers of this journal; and it
has furthermore been proposed that I should write the said article
myself. There is a straightforward simplicity of purpose about this
proposition which commends it to me. Also, it has the recommendation
of being quite novel.

As a rule, the person whose home life is to be made the subject of an
article is "interviewed" by a gentleman of the press, who
cross-examines the victim like an old Bailey counsel, and proceeds to
take an inventory of his furniture, like a bailiff.

Now, it seems to me that the conditions under which such a visit is
paid and received are radically unsatisfactory. The person interviewed
must be more or less uncomfortably self-conscious, and one cannot help
doubting whether the interviewer ever succeeds in seeing his subject
and his subject's surroundings in exactly their normal _dishabille_.
It would ask more than Roman virtue not to make the best of one's self
and one's house when both were sitting for a portrait; and difficult
as it is to look natural and feel natural in front of a photographer's
camera, it is ten times more trying _vis-a-vis_ of a reporter's
note-book. As for the temptation to "pose," whether consciously or
unconsciously, it must be well-nigh irresistible. For my own part, I
am but too certain that, instead of receiving such a visitor in my
ordinary working costume, and in a room littered with letters and
papers, I should have inevitably put on a more becoming gown, and have
"tidied up" the library, when the appointed day and hour arrived. Not,
however, being put to this test, I will do my best to present myself
literally "At Home," and in my habit as I live.

Westbury-on-Trym is a village in Gloucestershire separated from
Clifton by about a mile and a half of open down, and distant about
four miles from Bristol terminus. It lies in a hollow at the foot of
two steep hills, one of which is crowned with the woods of Blaise
Castle, and the other with a group of buildings consisting of the
parish church, a charming little Gothic structure known as "The Hall,"
and the national schoolhouse. The church is a fine perpendicular
edifice of considerable antiquity, with a square tower surmounted, in
true West of England style, by a small turret, having a tiny Gothic
spire at one corner. The parishioners are proud of their church, and
with justice. It contains some good stained-glass windows, two
interesting mediæval monuments, and an exceptionally fine organ. "The
Hall" is quite modern, having been built and endowed, in 1867, by a
generous parishioner. The large room seats three hundred people, and
is fitted up with an organ as large and beautiful as that in the
church close by. Village concerts, penny readings, Lent lectures,
charity bazaars, and the like are held here. The building also
contains a reading-room and a small library for the use of the working
classes. My own first attempts at public reading were made on this
village platform, twenty years ago.

A little river flows through the valley, and is crossed by a single
bridge in the lower part of the village. This is the Trym,--an untidy
Trym enough, nowadays,--opaque, muddy, and little better than a ditch.
Yet it was a navigable river some centuries ago, and, according to
tradition, was not unknown to trout. On leaving the village, it takes
a southwesterly course through a pleasant bottom of meadow lands, and
thence between wooded slopes and a romantic "Coombe," much beloved of
artists, till it finally empties itself into the Avon, not far from
the mouth of that tidal river.

There are still some remains of a building at the foot of Westbury
Hill, which in olden times was second only in age and importance to
the church,--namely, "The College." This "College" was a religious
house, founded as far back as A.D. 798, and probably rebuilt some five
centuries later by that famous merchant and public benefactor, William
Canynge, of Bristol, who died there as Dean of the College, and was
buried in the church. Twenty-five years ago, when I first made its
acquaintance, this "College" (a large modernized building with corner
turrets) still presented a stately front to the road. At the back was
a square bell-tower covered from top to bottom with ivy, and a
spacious garden shut in by high walls. It was then a boy's school, and
the big garden used to echo with shouts and laughter on summer
evenings. The bell-tower is the most ancient part of the building, and
according to local tradition, a subterranean passage leads from the
cellarage in the basement to the church on the hillside above. The
story is likely enough to be correct; for a passage of some kind there
certainly is, and it leads apparently in the direction of the church.
A working-man who, with some three or four others, had once tried to
explore it, told me several years ago that, beyond the first few
yards, the tunnel was completely blocked, and the air so foul that it
put the lights out. Whether any subsequent attempt has been made to
force a passage, I do not know; but the whole place is sadly changed
since the time when I used to cast longing glances at the old green
tower from the lane that skirted the garden wall, wishing that I might
some day get permission to sit in a corner under a shady tree on the
other side of that wall, and sketch the tower. The school has long
since broken up for good, and boys and masters have gone their ways.
The old house, after standing vacant for years, was bought at last by
a little local builder, who ran up a row of smart shops in front of
the old turreted façade; let off the house itself in lodgings to poor
families; and re-sold the old bell-tower to the village blacksmith.
The garden wall being pulled down on that side, the tower now stands
at the end of a row of new cottages, forlorn and solitary in the midst
of alien surroundings, a forge and anvil in the basement.

As regards the "great houses" of the place, Westbury-on-Trym
enjoys a curious monopoly of handsome private mansions. These
mansions--spacious, finely built, each standing in its own park-like
grounds--were built for the most part by wealthy Bristol merchants
during the two last centuries--men of wealth, who needed to reside
within an easy drive of the city, and who were content to amass great
fortunes without also desiring to become land-owners. The Bristol
merchants of the present day no longer care to live so near their
business. Railways and steamers enable them to go farther afield; and
so the fine old houses of Westbury, Henbury, Redland, Shirehampton,
Brislington, and other parishes round about the great commercial
centre, have gradually passed into the possession of a class of
moneyed gentry who, having neither trade nor land, are attracted by
the fine climate and beautiful scenery of this part of England. Some
few of these old mansions are renowned for the valuable collections of
paintings and other works of art which they contain; as, for instance,
at Blaise Castle, there is a fine series of specimens of the old
masters purchased at the close of the great war during the first
quarter of the present century by Mr. Harford, grandfather of the
present owner; a series which comprises a fine Guido, several
specimens of the Caracci, Salvator Rosa, etc. At Kings-Weston Park, we
find the family portraits of the de Cliffords purchased, together with
the very fine old house built by Vanbrugh in the time of Charles II.,
by the late owner, Philip Miles, Esq. At Leigh Court, the gallery,
with its famous Leonardo, is known throughout Europe, while many other
art treasures are to be found in the possession of private owners
round about the neighborhood.

It is not to be supposed that the writer and subject of this present
paper resides in semi-royal state in one of these magnificent old
houses. On the contrary, she lives, and has lived for more than a
quarter of a century, with a very dear friend, in a small, irregularly
built house, which together they have from time to time enlarged and
improved, according to their pleasure. That friend--now in her
eighty-seventh year--used, in days long gone by, to gather round her
table many of the wits and celebrities of fifty years ago; but for
her, as for myself, our little country home has been as dear for its
seclusion as for the charm of its neighborhood.

The Larches stands, with some few other houses of like dimensions, on
a space of high-level ground to the eastward of the village. It is
approached by a narrow lane, beyond which lie fields and open country.
Having at first been quite a small cottage, it has been added to by
successive owners, and is, consequently, quite destitute of external
or internal uniformity. My own library, and the bedrooms above it,
are, for the present, the latest additions to the structure; though I
hope some day to build on a little room which I shall not venture to
call a museum, but which shall contain my Egyptian antiquities and
other collections.

The little house stands in one acre of ground, closely walled in, and
surrounded by high shrubs and lofty larch trees. It is up and down a
straight path in the shade of these larch trees that I take my daily
exercise; and if I am to enter into such minor particulars as are dear
to the writers and readers of "At Home" articles, I may mention that a
dial-register is affixed to the wall of a small grape-house at one end
of this path, by means of which I measure off my regular half-mile
before breakfast, my half mile after breakfast, and the mile or more
with which I finish up my pedestrian duties in the late afternoon. To
walk these two miles _per diem_ is a Draconian law which I impose upon
myself during all seasons of the year. When the snow lies deep in
winter, it is our old gardener's first duty in the morning to sweep
"Miss Edwards' path," as well as to clear two or three large spaces on
the lawn, in which the wild birds may be fed. The wild birds, I should
add, are our intimate friends and perennial visitors, for whom we keep
an open _table d'hôte_ throughout the year. By feeding them in summer
we lose less fruit than our neighbors; and by feeding them in winter
we preserve the lives of our little summer friends, whose songs are
the delight of ourselves and our neighbors in the springtime. There
are dozens of nests every summer in the ivy which clusters thickly
around my library windows; and we even carry our hospitality so far as
to erect small rows of model lodging-houses for our birds high up
under the eaves, which they inhabit in winter, and in which many
couples of sparrows and starlings rear their young throughout the
summer.

We will now leave the garden, and go into the house, which stands high
on a grassy platform facing the sunny west. We enter by a wooden
porch, which, as I write, is thickly covered with roses. As soon as
the front door is opened, the incoming visitor finds himself in the
midst of modern Egypt, the walls of the hall being lined with Damascus
tiles and Cairene woodwork, the spoils of some of those Meshrabeeyeh
windows which are so fast disappearing both in Alexandria and Cairo.
In a recess opposite the door stands a fine old chair inlaid with
ivory and various colored woods, which some two hundred years ago was
the Episcopal chair of a Coptic bishop. The rest of the hall furniture
is of Egyptian inlaid work. Every available inch of space on the
walls is filled and over-filled with curiosities of all descriptions.
On one bracket stand an old Italian ewer and plate in wrought brass
work; on another, a Nile "Kulleh" or water bottle, and a pair of cups
of unbaked clay; on others again, jars and pots of Indian, Morocco,
Japanese, Siût, and Algerian ware. Here also, are a couple of funerary
tablets in carved limestone, of ancient Egyptian work; a fragment of
limestone cornice from the ruins of Naukratis; and various specimens
of Majolica, old Wedgewood, and other ware, as well as framed
specimens of Rhodian and Damascus tiles.

If my visitor is admitted at all, which for reasons which I will
presently state is extremely doubtful, he passes through the hall,
leaving the dining-room to his right and the drawing-room to his left,
and is ushered along a passage, also lined with lattice-work, through
a little ante-room, and into my library. This is a fair-sized room
with a bay of three windows at the upper end facing eastward. My
writing-table is placed somewhat near this window; and here I sit with
my back to the light facing whomsoever may be shown into the room.

Sitting thus at my desk, the room to me is full of reminiscences of
many friends and many places. The walls are lined with glazed
bookcases containing the volumes which I have been slowly amassing
from the time I was fourteen or fifteen years of age. I cast my eyes
round the shelves, and I recognize in their contents the different
lines of study which I have pursued at different periods of my life.
Like the geological strata in the side of a cliff, they show the
deposits of successive periods, and remind me, not only of the changes
which my own literary tastes have undergone, but also of the various
literary undertakings in which I have been from time to time engaged.
The shelves devoted to the British poets carry me back to a time when
I read them straight through without a break, from Chaucer to
Tennyson. A large number of histories of England and works of British
biography are due to a time when I was chiefly occupied in writing the
letterpress to "The Photographic Historical Portrait Gallery,"--a very
beautiful publication illustrated with photographs of historical
miniatures, which never reached a second volume, and is now, I
believe, extremely scarce. An equally voluminous series of histories
of Greece and Rome, and of translations of the Greek and Latin poets,
marks the time when I first became deeply interested in classic
antiquity. To this phase also belong the beginnings of those
archæological works which I have of late years accumulated almost to
the exclusion of all other books, as well as my collection of volumes
upon Homer, which nearly fill one division of a bookcase. When I left
London some six and twenty years ago to settle at Westbury-on-Trym, I
also added to my library a large number of works on the fine arts,
feeling, as every lover of pictures must do, that it is necessary, in
some way or another, to make up for the loss of the National Gallery,
the South Kensington Museum, and other delightful places which I was
leaving behind. At this time, also, I had a passion for Turner, and
eagerly collected his engraved works, of which I believe I possess
nearly all. I think I may say the same of Samuel Prout. Of Shakespeare
I have almost as many editions as I have translations of Homer; and of
European histories, works of reference generally, a writer who lives
in the country must, of course, possess a goodly number. Of rare books
I do not pretend to have many. A single shelf contains a few good old
works, including a fine black-letter Chaucer, the Venetian Dante of
1578, and some fine examples of the Elizabethan period. I soon found,
however, that this taste was far too expensive to cultivate. Last of
all, in what I may call the upper Egyptological stratum of my books,
come those on Egypt and Egyptian archæology, a class of works deeply
interesting to those who make Egyptology their study, but profoundly
dull to everybody else.

Such are my books. If, however, I were to show my visitor what I
consider my choicest treasures, I should take down volumes which have
been given to me by friends, some now far distant, others departed.
Here, for instance, is the folio edition of Doré's "Don Quichotte," on
the fly-leaf of which he signs himself as my "_ami affectueux_;" or
some of the works of my dear friend of many years, John Addington
Symonds, especially "Many Moods," which he has dedicated to myself. Or
I would take down the first volume of "The Ring and the Book,"
containing a delightful inscription from the pen of Robert Browning;
or the late Lord Lytton's version of the Odes of Horace, in which is
inserted an interesting letter on the method and spirit of his
translation, addressed to me at the time of its publication. Next to
this stands a presentation copy of Sir Theodore Martin's translation
of the same immortal poems. To most persons these would be more
interesting than other and later presentation volumes from various
foreign savants--Maspero, Naville, Ebers, Wiedemann, and others.

I am often asked how many books I possess, and I can only reply that I
have not the least idea, having lost count of them for many years.
Those which are in sight are attired in purple and fine linen,
beautiful bindings having once upon a time been one of my hobbies; but
behind the beautiful bindings, many of which were executed from my own
designs, are other books in modest cloth and paper wrappers; so that
the volumes are always two rows, and sometimes even three rows deep.
If I had not a tolerably good memory, I should certainly be very much
perplexed by this arrangement, the more especially as my only
catalogue is in my head.

I fear I am allowing myself to say too much about my books; yet, after
all, they represent a large part of myself. My life, since I have
lived at The Larches, has been one of ever-increasing seclusion, and
my books have for many years been my daily companions, teachers, and
friends. Merely to lean back in one's chair now and then--merely to
lean back and look at them--is a pleasure, a stimulus, and in some
sense a gain. For, as it seems to me, there is a virtue which goes out
from even the backs of one's books; and though to glance along the
shelves without taking down a single volume be but a Barmecide feast,
yet the tired brain is consciously refreshed by it.

Although the room is essentially a bookroom, there are other things
than books to which one can turn for a momentary change of thought. In
yonder corner, for instance, stands an easel, the picture upon which
is constantly changed. To-day, it will be a water-color sketch by John
Lewis; to-morrow, an etching by Albert Dürer or Seymour Haden; the
next day, an oil painting by Elihu Vedder, or perhaps an ancient
Egyptian funerary papyrus, with curious pen-and-ink vignettes of gods
and genii surmounting the closely written columns of hieroglyphic
text.

For, you see, I have no wall space in my library upon which to hang
pictures; and yet, I am not happy, and my thoughts are not rightly in
tune, unless I have a picture or two in sight, somewhere about the
room. In the corners, hidden away behind pedestals and curtains, a
quick eye may detect stacks of pictures, ready to be brought out and
put on the easel when needed. On the pedestals stand plaster casts of
busts from antique originals in the Louvre, the Uffizzi Gallery, and
the British Museum; and yonder, beside the arched entrance between the
ante-room and the library, stands a small white marble torso of a
semi-recumbent river god which I picked up years ago from amid the
dusty stores of a little curiosity-shop in one of the small by-streets
near Soho Square. It is a splendid fragment, so powerfully and
learnedly modelled, that no less a critic than the late Charles Blanc
once suggested to me that it might be a trial-sketch by a pupil of
Michael Angelo, or even by the master himself. Curiously enough, this
little masterpiece, which has lost both arms from below the shoulders
and both legs from above the knee, was wrecked before its completion;
the face, the beard, the hair and the back being little more than
blocked out, whereas, the forepart of the trunk is highly finished. On
the opposite side of the archway, in an iron tripod, stands a large
terra-cotta amphora found in the cellar of a Roman villa discovered in
1872, close behind the Baths of Caracalla.

As I happened to be spending that winter in Rome, I went, of course,
to see the new "scavo," and there were the big jars standing in the
cellar, just as in the lifetime of the ancient owner. I need scarcely
say that I bought mine on the spot.

It is such associations as these which are the collector's greatest
pleasures. Each object recalls the place and circumstances of its
purchase, brings back incidents of foreign travel, and opens up long
vistas of delightful memories. For me, every bit of old pottery on the
tops of the bookcases has its history. That Majolica jar painted with
the Medici arms, and those Montelupo plates, were bought in Florence;
those brass salvers with heads of Doges in repoussé work were picked
up in a dark old shop on one of the side canals of Venice. The tall
jars, yellow, green, white, and brown, with grotesque dragon mouths
and twisted handles, are of Gallipoli make, and I got them at a shop
in an out-of-the-way court at the top of a blind alley in Stamboul.

I have said that there are reasons why an intending visitor might,
perchance, fail to penetrate as far as this den of books and
bric-à-brac, and I might allege a considerable number, but they may
all be summed up in the one deplorable fact that there are but
twenty-four hours to the day, and seven days to the week. Time is
precious to me, and leisure is a thing unknown. If, however, the said
visitor is of congenial tastes, has gained admittance, and finds me
less busy than usual, he will, perhaps, be let into the secret of
certain hidden treasures, the existence of which is unsuspected by the
casual caller. For dearer to me than all the rest of my curios are my
Egyptian antiquities; and of these, strange to say, though none of
them are in sight, I have enough to stock a modest little museum.
Stowed away in all kinds of nooks and corners, in upstairs cupboards,
in boxes, drawers, and cases innumerable, behind books, and invading
the sanctity of glass closets and wardrobes, are hundreds, nay,
thousands, of those fascinating objects in bronze and glazed ware, in
carved wood and ivory, in glass, and pottery, and sculptured stone,
which are the delight of archæologists and collectors. Here, for
instance, behind the "_Revue Archeologique_" packed side by side as
closely as figs in a box, are all the gods of Egypt,--fantastic little
porcelain figures plumed and horned, bird-headed, animal-headed, and
the like. Their reign, it is true, may be over in the Valley of the
Nile, but in me they still have a fervent adorer. Were I inclined to
worship them with due antique ceremonial, there are two libation
tables in one of the attics ready to my hand, carved with semblances
of sacrificial meats and drinks; or here, in a tin box behind the
"_Retrospective Review_," are specimens of actual food offerings
deposited three thousand years ago in various tombs at
Thebes--shrivelled dates, lentils, nuts, and even a slice of bread.
Rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, amulets, mirrors, and toilet
objects, once the delight of dusky beauties long since embalmed and
forgotten; funerary statuettes, scarabs, rolls of mummy cloth, and the
like are laid by "in a sacred gloom" from which they are rarely, if
ever, brought forth into the light of day. And there are stranger
things than these,--fragments of spiced and bituminized humanity to be
shown to visitors who are not nervous, nor given to midnight terrors.
Here is a baby's foot (some mother cried over it once) in the Japanese
cabinet in the ante-room. There are three mummied hands behind
"_Allibone's Dictionary of English Authors_," in the library. There
are two arms with hands complete--the one almost black, the other
singularly fair,--in a drawer in my dressing-room; and grimmest of
all, I have the heads of two ancient Egyptians in a wardrobe in my
bedroom, who, perhaps, talk to each other in the watches of the night,
when I am sound asleep. As, however, I am not writing a catalogue of
my collection, I will only mention that there is a somewhat battered
statue of a Prince of Kush standing upright in his packing-case, like
a sentry in a sentry-box, in an empty coach-house at the bottom of the
garden.

It may, perhaps, be objected to my treatment of this subject that I
have described only my "home," and that, being myself, I have not
described Miss Edwards. This is a task which I cannot pretend to
perform in a manner satisfactory either to myself or the reader. My
personal appearance has, however, been so fully depicted in the
columns of some hundreds of newspapers, that I have but to draw upon
the descriptions given by my brethren of the press, in order to fill
what would otherwise be an inevitable gap in the present article. By
one, for instance, I am said to have "coal-black hair and flashing
black eyes"; by another, that same hair is said to be "snow-white";
while a third describes it as "iron-gray, and rolled back in a large
wave." On one occasion, as I am informed, I had "a commanding and
Cassandra-like presence"; elsewhere, I was "tall, slender, and
engaging"; and occasionally I am merely of "middle height" and, alas!
"somewhat inclined to _embonpoint_." As it is obviously so easy to
realize what I am like from the foregoing data, I need say no more on
the subject.

With regard to "my manners and customs" and the course of my daily
life, there is little or nothing to tell. I am essentially a worker,
and a hard worker, and this I have been since my early girlhood. When
I am asked what are my working hours, I reply:--"All the time when I
am not either sitting at meals, taking exercise, or sleeping"; and
this is literally true. I live with the pen in my hand, not only from
morning till night, but sometimes from night till morning. I have, in
fact, been a night bird ever since I came out of the schoolroom, when
I habitually sat up reading till long past midnight. Later on, when I
adopted literature as a profession, I still found that "To steal a
few hours from the night" was to ensure the quietest time, and the
pleasantest, for pen and brain work; and, for at least the last
twenty-five years, I have rarely put out my lamp before two or three
in the morning. Occasionally, when work presses and a manuscript has
to be despatched by the earliest morning mail, I remain at my desk the
whole night through; and I can with certainty say that the last
chapter of every book I have ever written has been finished at early
morning. In summertime, it is certainly delightful to draw up the
blinds and complete in sunlight a task begun when the lamps were
lighted in the evening.

And this reminds me of a little incident--too trivial, perhaps, to be
worth recording--which befell me so long ago as 1873. I had visited
the Dolomites during the previous summer, not returning to England
till close upon Christmastime, and I had been occupied during the
greater part of the spring in preparing that account of the journey
entitled "Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys." Time ran somewhat
short towards the last, as my publishers were anxious to produce the
volume early in June; and when it came to the point of finishing off,
I sat up all through one beautiful night in May, till the farewell
words were written. At the very moment when, with a sigh of
satisfaction, I laid down my pen, a wandering nightingale on the
pear-tree outside my library window, burst into such a flood of song
as I have never heard before or since. The pear-tree was in full
blossom; the sky behind it was blue and cloudless; and as I listened
to the unwonted music, I could not help thinking that, had I been a
pious scribe of the Middle Ages who had just finished a laboriously
written life of some departed saint, I should inevitably have believed
that the bird was a ghostly messenger sent by the good saint himself
to congratulate me upon the completion of my task.




THE TYRANNY OF NATIONALISM.[12]

BY M. J. SAVAGE.

     [12] This article is a reply to "The Tyranny of All the
          People," by the Rev. Francis Bellamy, in July ARENA.


It is a somewhat curious task to which I find myself set. To go on
with it may be to lay myself open to censure on the part of the
"Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." What would have
been thought of the famous Davy Crockett, if he had fired his gun
after the coon had said, "Don't shoot, for I will come right down"?
But the Rev. Francis Bellamy "comes right down" before anybody is in
sight with a gun at all. He argues, indeed, in favor of nationalism;
but, before he begins, he whispers to you, confidentially, that he is
not much of a nationalist after all. Like Bottom, in "Midsummer
Night's Dream," he is anxious not to scare anybody, and so lets out
the secret that he is not a "truly" lion, but is only "taking the
part." In effect he tells the audience that "I will roar you as gently
as a sucking dove."

Let us see, from his own words, how much of a nationalist, and what
kind of a one he really is. "It is not without some question, however,
that I accept the generous challenge." (That is, to reply to the
editor of THE ARENA.) "For I am not sure that I myself believe in the
military type of socialism which the editor seems continually to have
in mind. The book ('Looking Backward') which, more than all others
combined, has brought socialism before American thought, has also
furnished to its opponents a splendidly clear target in its military
organization. It cannot be repeated too often, however, that the army
type is not conceded by socialists to be an essential, even if
nationalistic, socialism."

Later on, speaking of "the hostile critics," he says: "They delight to
picture the superb riot of corruption, if nationalists could have
their way at once. They will never listen, they will never remember,
while nationalists declare they would not have their way at once if
they could. A catastrophe by which nationalistic socialism might be
precipitated would be a deplorable disaster to human progress."

Later still, he brings out the idea that all he seeks is to begin, in
a small way, with towns and cities, and see how it works.

And once more he declares, "We certainly want no nationalism that is
not an orderly development." ... "Nationalism is only a prophecy. It
is too distant to be certainly detailed." ("For _this_ relief, _much
thanks_!") ... "We may be inspired by it as the end towards which
present movements are tending. But each age solves its own problems;
and the passage into the promised land is the issue for another
generation. A nearer view alone can determine where the passage is,
and whether the land is truly desirable....

"Meantime, what our people must vote upon in the present year of grace
is whether great private corporations shall control legislatures and
city councils, and charge their own unquestioned prices for such
public necessities of life as light and transit.... The future is in
the hands of evolution."

This latter paragraph challenges and receives my most unbounded
admiration. It is one of the neatest changes of base I ever witnessed.
I have seen remarkable feats performed by the prestidigitateur on the
stage; but they were clumsy compared with this. I thought it was
nationalism I was looking at. But, "presto, change!" I look again, and
the only thing visible is the question as to "whether great private
corporations shall control legislatures and city councils, and charge
their own unquestio