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Title: The Forum

October 1914

Author: Various

Release Date: August 8, 2017 [EBook #55299]

Language: English

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THE FORUM

FOR OCTOBER 1914

THE WAR

CHARLES VALE

IN each of the nations now engaged in the European conflict, a large number of people of all classes—the vast majority of people of all classes—did not want war, and would have done all in their power to avert it: for they knew, more or less completely, the price of war; and they knew also, more or less completely, in spite of the inadequacy of all the churches through all the centuries, that war cannot possibly be reconciled with Christianity, with civilization, with humanity, decency, and the most rudimentary common sense. But when hostilities had actually been commenced, each of the nations was practically a unit with regard to the prosecution of the war to its final and terrible conclusion. With the exception of a few professional agitators or eccentric fanatics, who have gleaned scant sympathy for their antics, every citizen or subject of each country has placed implicit faith in the justice of the nation’s cause and has been prepared to give, ungrudgingly, the last full measure of devotion. Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and all the great and small oversea commonwealths, colonies and dominions of Great Britain have come forward in the time of stress to offer new strength to the United Kingdom and new pledges of a United Empire. In the Fatherland, every man and woman has accepted the issue as inevitable, has held the cause of Kaiser and country as sacred and supreme, and has shrunk from no sacrifice to ensure the fulfilment of the long-cherished dream of victory, security and expansion. In France, where the ghosts of the dead that von Moltke required have not yet ceased to walk o’ nights, (they will have new companionship now), there is no doubt in the mind of man, woman or child that la Patrie is waging a holy war for liberty and honor against the ruthless aggression of an arrogant and pitiless foe. In Russia, Austria, Servia, and whatever countries may have been dragged into the vortex week by week, there is a similar spirit, a similar belief in the justice of the national cause and the calculated injustice of the enemy’s plans. And in Belgium, always the victim of her unneighborly neighbors’ feuds, a people dedicated to peace has been flung into the hell of butchery and flames. Verily, Macbeth hath murther’d sleep!

In these United States, there has been little attempt to transcend race-limitations, so far as concerns the aliens within our borders, and those hyphenated-Americans who have rushed with virulence into a wordy warfare, intent, not on establishing the truth, but on giving publicity, ad nauseam, to their own special, and specially obnoxious, prejudices. The American nation, and every individual in it, has a clear right to hold and express a definite opinion: but it must be an opinion formed in conformity with the American character and the American freedom from entanglements of inherited and unreasoned bias. No other opinion is worth, here and now, a moment’s consideration; and no other opinion should dare to voice itself in this country, which has ties with almost all the peoples of the world—ties of blood and friendship, but not of bloodshed and hysteria.

America alone, of the great Powers of the world, is in a position to exercise free and calm reflection and to form a free and just judgment. The value of her decision has already been made manifest, through the efforts of every country involved in the war to influence American sentiment and gain American good will. A peculiar responsibility therefore rests upon us to avoid the banalities of the various special pleaders, and to form our judgment soberly and in good faith, nothing extenuating, and setting down naught in malice. And one of the first thoughts that should occur to us, one of the most significant and pregnant thoughts, is that which I have expressed in my first paragraph. Europe is a house divided against itself: but each nation in Europe has proclaimed the sanctity of its cause; each nation conceives that it has, or is entitled to have, the special protection of Providence; each nation is sending its men to death and claiming patient sacrifice from its women.

What does this mean? Is there such little sense of logic in the world that it is impossible to distinguish right from wrong, so that nation may rise against nation, each convinced of its own probity, and each unable to attribute anything but evil motives to its adversaries? Can self-delusion be carried so far that black and white exchange values according to the chances of birth and environment? Have Christianity and civilization achieved this remarkable result, that the peoples of the world are like quarrelsome children in a disorderly nursery?

It is very clear that the world’s sense of logic must rank with the world’s sense of humor, when presumably learned professors, unchecked and unridiculed, take nationalism and egoism as the premises of their argument and from them deduce, with great skill, obvious nonsense. The lesson of incompetence and shallowness is driven home when baseless rumors from one half of Europe are countered with fantastic inventions fabricated by our alien patriots for the purpose of influencing public opinion. It is the old appeal of ignorance and stupidity to ignorance and stupidity, and the American public will not greatly appreciate the poor compliment that has been paid to it.

As an aid to impartiality and quiet thinking, let us first retrace the immediate and superficial causes of the war. Austria, dismayed and incensed by the murder of the heir to the throne at Serajevo on June 28, and considering the murder as the culmination of long-continued Servian scheming and enmity, delivered to Servia an ultimatum so framed that no nation, however small in territory or in courage, could possibly have accepted it without reservations. The Servian reply went to the extreme limits of concession, and an understanding should easily have been reached on that basis. Austria, however, was apparently resolved upon Servia’s abject submission, or upon war. She refused to accept the reply as in any way satisfactory, and opened hostilities.

It is clear, then, that Austria was primarily responsible for the actual commencement of the conflagration. Undoubtedly she had provocation, of the kind that stirs tremendously the sentiment of the nation involved, but is less easily understood in its full intensity by those at a distance. But the point that should be particularly noticed is that a country which was temporarily excited beyond all self-control should have been able to take the initiative and plunge Europe into war. And it should be remembered that Austria’s resentment toward Servia was scarcely greater than the resentment of the Serbs toward the nation that had violated the Treaty of Berlin and permanently appropriated Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet, in rebuttal, Austria might well assert that she had a vested interest in the provinces to which, in a score or so of years, she had given prosperity unsurpassed in southeastern Europe, in place of the anarchy and ruin entailed by four centuries of misrule, and civil and religious faction-conflicts.

The first step taken, the next was assured. Austria knew perfectly well that Russia, the protagonist in that drama of Pan-Slavism of which several scenes have already been presented, would take immediate steps in accordance with her rôle, and repeat her lines so sonorously that they would echo throughout the continent. But the Dual Monarchy, wounded and embittered, did not care: she could see before her, at the worst, no harsher fate than she would have to face, without external war, in a few years, or perhaps months. Only war, it seemed, could save the dynasty from destruction and the aggregation of races from dissolution. Relying upon the immediate help of Germany, and the ultimate assistance of Italy (her traditional foe, but technical ally), she refused to draw back or to temporise.

In discussing the attitude of Germany, and the action of the Kaiser, it is necessary to make full allowance for the strength and sincerity of the German foreboding, for many a year, that the clash between Slav and Teuton was bound to come sooner or later. The Russian forces were being massed ostensibly to prevent Austria from coercing Servia. As Austria had provoked the outbreak of hostilities, should she have been left to take the consequences? Would Russia, after eliminating Franz Josef’s heterogeneous empire, have resisted the temptation to claim France’s help in the congenial task of humbling Germany? The situation was not without its subtleties, after Austria had made the first decisive move. But under what circumstances did Austria make that move? Was she encouraged by the assurance of German coöperation?

The point to be particularly noted is that Germany, as the ally of Austria, was entitled to full warning of any step that would make war inevitable. Did Austria give that warning? If not, why not? Is the Kaiser a weakling, to be ordered hither and thither at the whim of Franz Josef? The assumption will find few supporters. Yet it is quite clear that the Kaiser either knew and approved of the substance and purpose of Austria’s ultimatum, or—mirabile dictu—was willing to forgive the incredible slight of being totally ignored, and commit his country and his army to the support of an act of aggression with regard to which he had not even been consulted.

Carefully leaving the horns of this dilemma for the self-impalement of any too-ardent enthusiast who may wish to run without reading, we pass on to France, compelled, by the terms of her understanding with Russia, to take her place in the firing line. Without entering into the ultra-refinements of politics and discussing the question whether France, or any other country, would have paid for present neutrality and the violation of solemn engagements by subsequently being devoured in detail, or reduced to vassalage, by a victory-swollen Germany, we may point out that an alliance entered into primarily to safeguard the peace of Europe and the balance of power has been the means of dragging France into a war with which she had no direct concern. Such is the irony of protective diplomacy!

Great Britain has rested her case on the publication, without comment, of the whole of the diplomatic exchanges that preceded her own intervention after the violation of the neutrality of Belgium. Her claim that she exerted her influence until the final moment in the interests of peace is sustained beyond cavil: but the point to be remembered particularly is whether a more decisive and uncompromising attitude at an earlier stage would not have been preferable. Germany would then have had no doubt as to Great Britain’s final alignment, and with a kindly word from Italy that neutrality was the best that could be expected from her, a reconsideration of the whole position might have been forced before the final, fatal moments had passed, and were irrevocable.

It is unnecessary to prolong this cursory review of immediate causes and conditions, nor does it greatly matter how the positions of the different countries have been stated. The mood of a moment may add or subtract a little coloring, without changing the fundamental facts. But is it possible for any man, however impartial he may desire to be, to state those facts now, accurately, clearly, and in such relation and sequence that only one inevitable conclusion can be drawn?

It may be possible, though it would be difficult: but it would not be worth while. For the war has not been due to, and does not depend upon, recent events; and however those events may be viewed or summarized, the only fact of importance is the one already emphasized: that every nation which has been drawn into the conflict counts its cause just and its conscience clear.

In the face of such unanimity of national feeling, it is absurd to discuss superficial conditions only, or to assume that they are of any real importance. For, apart from neutral America, and the few hundreds of really educated and intelligent men and women in each country who constitute the brains and conserve the manners of their nation, it is impossible to find any just basis for criticism and judgment. The average national is concerned with presenting an ex parte statement (in which, perhaps, he believes implicitly) rather than with discovering the actual truth, whosoever may be vindicated or discredited. The average national may therefore be disregarded, and the supreme appeal be made, not to the common folly of the nations, but to the common sense of those who have risen beyond national limitations and national littlenesses.

In the first place, that much-quoted and entirely despicable confession of faith, “My country, right or wrong, first, last and all the time,” may well be relegated,—first, last and for whatever time may remain before a kindly Providence blots out this incredible little world of seething passions and ceaseless pain and cruelty,—to the limbo of antique curiosities. Nothing can be sillier, and more contemptible, than such pseudo-patriotism, based on utter selfishness, utter ignorance, and abysmal stupidity. The country which commits a crime, or makes a grave mistake, is in the position of an individual who commits a crime or makes a grave mistake; and no fanfare of trumpets or hypnotism of marching automata, helmeted and plumed, should confuse the issue and vitiate judgment. Mere nationalism, unregulated by intelligence, is simply one of the most irritating and blatant forms of egoism. Nationality itself depends upon so many complex conditions that the ordinary semi-intelligent man can scarcely unravel the niceties of history and discover to whom his heartfelt allegiance is really due. He therefore accepts the untutored sentiment of his immediate environment. He is essentially provincial, not patriotic. Alsace and Lorraine, with their various vicissitudes, may profitably be studied by the curious, in this connection.

Until provincialism, of the type which has been so prominent in recent controversies, can be eliminated or controlled, the settlement of the more tragic issues of the time must be undertaken boldly by those who have indubitably grown up, forsaking leading strings and the nursery, the toys of childhood and the irresponsibility of childhood. All the Governments of Europe, in which a few brilliant men are undoubtedly enrolled, have failed now, as they have failed repeatedly before, to perform their elementary duties and save their countries from the horrors of unnecessary war. Generation after generation, the peoples of Europe have been carefully led by their Governments into successive orgies of slaughter, in which the allies of one campaign have been the enemies of the next. The whole course of European history during the last hundred years (we need not go further back: we are not responsible for the dead centuries) has been indeed a subject for Olympian laughter. What has been achieved by the unending succession of wars, with all their attendant miseries and deadly consequences? Merely the necessity for increased armaments, constant watchfulness, perpetual strain—and more war. Could there be a clearer proof of the futility of war?

The Governments of Europe have failed because each, in greater or less degree, has embodied the provincialism of its own section of the armed and suspicious world. There have been a few notable exceptions to the general rule of conventional mediocrity: but where have we found the statesman who could break away altogether from the old stupid methods, and by the sheer force of character and principle inaugurate a new era of civilized diplomacy, as Bismarck inaugurated a new era of veneered barbarism? In America, we are beginning to see the value and the fruits of government based on fairness to all nations and justice to all individuals: but neither here, nor in Europe, has the significance of the new statesmanship yet been fully recognized. Europe, indeed, still regards us with more than a little suspicion, contempt, and imperfectly concealed condescension: it has heard and seen Roosevelt, unfortunately, and the lingering impressions of crudity have not been weakened. Will it listen to us now, and realize that the New World has in verity something to offer to the Old in its time of special tribulation? For Wilson, not Roosevelt, stands for the spirit of America, the voice of America, and her chosen contribution to the civilization of the Twentieth Century.

It seems strange, perhaps, to talk of civilization in these dark days, when primitive passions and primitive methods have flung an ineradicable stain of blood across a whole continent. Yet only the coward will bend to temporary defeat, or ridicule, or pessimism. It is the task of the strong to turn disaster into triumph, and to frame a new international polity built on sure foundations. The diplomacy based on national antipathies must be made impossible by the new understanding of the criminal folly of provincialism, the new comprehension of nation by nation. For the true causes of the present war cannot be discovered in mere incidents of July and August. They go further back, and are rooted in ignorance, misconception, prejudice, selfishness.

I do not wish to accuse or exonerate any of the countries that have turned Europe into a stage for the rehearsal of Christianity’s masterpiece, the rollicking farce Hell on Earth. There have been enough already to inflame racial resentments and flood the press with taunts and recriminations. Ours is a bigger and worthier task: to assuage, not to incense; to re-create order from chaos; to prepare the way for peace, and for what must follow peace.

Recrimination is so useless now. We have to face the future: we cannot undo the past. We have learnt our lesson, surely, once for all: shall the spectre of militarism again loom devilishly through such a nightmare as Europe has endured for the last decade? Animosities and jealousies may die out: France has forgotten Fashoda, England has forgiven Russia for the blunder of the Dogger Bank. But the expectation of war, the preparation for war, the whole habit and incidence of militarism, must lead sooner or later to the clash. If the guns were not ready, if the nations had to be drilled and armed before they could be hurled at each others’ throats, there would be time for reflection, for the subsidence of passions, for the revival of dignity and decency. Militarism damns both the menacer and the menaced. All the nations have suffered from that curse, Germany, perhaps, the worst of all. The world has not yet forgotten Bismarck’s gospel of blood and iron, so relentlessly preached and practised. The inevitable results of the blood-and-iron doctrine, modernized as the dogma of the “mailed fist,” can be seen to-day in the cataclysm that has swept Europe. The pity of it, and the shame of it, that all the skill of all the statesmen of the great Powers could produce no better result than a continent divided into two armed camps, waiting for the slaughter that was bound to come!

As for Russia, and the assumed Slavonic menace, one must tread somewhat diffidently where George Bernard Shaw has rushed in with characteristic Shavian impetuosity. The world owes to Mr. Shaw the discovery of a new nationality—himself; and it is impossible for any citizen of the world to ignore the obligation. But even if Russia achieves her never-forgotten dream of Constantinople and a purified St. Sophia, Europe and civilization will not necessarily stand aghast, trembling at each rumor of Cossack brutalities. Tennyson, who foresaw the aërial navies “grappling in the central blue,” indeed proclaimed, in one of the most execrable of his sonnets, that—

“… The heart of Poland hath not ceased

To quiver, though her sacred blood doth drown

The fields, and out of every smouldering town

Cries to Thee, lest brute power be increased

Till that o’ergrown barbarian in the East

Transgress his ample bounds to some new crown:

Cries to Thee, ‘Lord, how long shall these things be,

How long this icy-hearted Muscovite

Oppress the region?’…”

(I quote from memory, deprecating caustic correction). But, in spite of anti-Semitic atrocities (are the hands of other nations so clean now? They were foul once), and in spite of the blunders of a rigid bureaucracy, the Russian nation is not necessarily a menace to civilization: it has within it the elements of a wonderful idealism, and whether autocracy may remain, or may not remain, as the outward and visible form of government, the spirit of democracy is leavening the people, and “Holy Russia” has in truth already been sanctified by the blood of her innumerable martyrs—sometimes, perhaps, misguided and mistaken; but offering to the world an example of idealism and self-sacrifice that should surely dispel the nightmare of Russian brutishness.

I may record here, quite irrelevantly, my own fervent wish (irrevocably established at the immature age of twelve years) that Poland, with few of her limbs amputated, should be replaced upon the map as an independent, and again powerful, nation. It was one of my earliest dreams that I should be awakened at the dawn of a wintry day, and urged by a delegation of Polish magnates to accept the one throne of Europe that had been, and still should be, open to conspicuous (and electoral) merit. That wish has not yet been gratified, and candor compels me to attribute it to the delightful influence of the elder Dumas, from whom I derived also my most enduring impressions of St. Bartholomew, Catherine de Medici, Mazarin, Louis XIII, Richelieu, Buckingham, Louis XIV, Louise de la Vallière, d’Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, Porthos, and other immortals. India, I confess, held me equally spellbound: for many months I hesitated between the succession to Aurungzebe (why should I now spell the name differently?) and the crown of Stanislaus. That hesitation has been fatal: I am still throneless.

Others may be throneless (the Mills of God grind steadily) before final peace comes to the different warring nations. They have sowed in their various ways, and will reap the ripened harvests. But how long shall the childish quarrel of country with country be permitted and encouraged by those who should have learnt a little wisdom, in this twentieth century of perpetual miracles? Let us have done, once for all, with petty jealousies and absurd misunderstandings. Let us blot out, without regret and without the least compassion, the evil records and results of insincerity and manufactured hatred. Let us extinguish, finally and irresuscitably, those fires of malice and flagrant nonsense that have been fed assiduously by the fools and knaves of the world.

Nowhere will you find a decent man, emancipated from the leading-strings of prejudice and unafraid of the bludgeonings of militarist authority, who does not condemn the present war, and all wars, as useless, damnable, anachronistic and inexcusable. We have learnt so much, in these later years; we have adventured in strange ways, and silently borne strange reproaches. We have come very near to God, and talked with Him by wireless, remedying the inconsistencies of the prophets and filling in the gaps left blank by the poets. And shall we still be bound by the gibes and gyves of the mediævalists? The Middle Ages served their purpose: but why extend them to the confusion of modern chronology? We have seen God, as no generation before has seen Him. Let us then live, and not die, until the grave be digged, and the night overshadow us at last.

SEEN THROUGH MOHAMMEDAN SPECTACLES

ACHMED ABDULLAH

ALTHOUGH my father was a Muslim of the old Central-Asian school, a Hegirist, of mixed Arab and Moghul blood, he had sent me to England and the Continent for my school and university education. But boys are much more broad-minded than grown-up men, and so my schoolmates and I never worried about the fact that we had different customs, religion, civilization, and atavistic tendencies.

It was only after my return to the borderland of Afghanistan and India, and after I had assumed once more native garb and speech, that I began to feel myself an alien among those Europeans and Anglo-Indians with whom I was brought into contact.

For the first time in my life I felt the ghastly meaning of the words “Racial Prejudice,” that cowardly, wretched caste-mark of the European and the American the world over, that terrible blight which modern Christianity has forced on the world. And it chilled me to the bone and I wondered….

In Europe I had known many Asiatics who visited the universities there. And we were the equals of the Europeans, the Christians, in intellect and culture, and decidedly their superiors, being Muslim, in cleanliness and courage. We were not only familiar with the European classics which were the basis of their culture, but we were also thoroughly versed in the literature and history of India and Central Asia, things of which they knew less than an average Egyptian donkey-boy. We were polyglots: we had mastered half a dozen European languages, while even a smattering of Arabic or Turki or Chinese was a rare exception amongst them. We all of us knew at least three Asian languages to perfection. And finally we had a practical knowledge of English, French and German political ideals and systems, while to them the name of even such great Asian reformers as Asoka and Akbar and Aurangzeb were absolutely unknown.

In physical strength, virility, power of endurance and recuperation we were immeasurably their superiors. And we were not picked men, but plain, average Asian gentlemen.

And yet, when I returned to my own land, there was that superior smile, that nasty, patronizing attitude, that insufferable “Holier than Thou” atmosphere about all of them whom I happened to meet.

They made me feel that I was of the East and they of the West; and they tried to make me feel—with no success—that they were the salt of the earth, while the men of my faith and race were but the lowly dung.

Not even the bridge of personal friendship seemed able to span this gulf, this abyss which I could feel more than I could define it; and so I folded my tent and travelled; I studied India from South to North, I visited Siberia, Egypt, Malta, Algeria, Turkey, Tunis, and the Haussa country, wandering in all the lands where East and West rub elbows, and I investigated calmly, I compared without too much bias.

Finally I bent my steps Northward, to see with my own eyes and according to the limits of my own understanding the working of Christian civilization, and to study the dominant Western Faith in the lands where it rules supreme.

I was looking for a bridge with which to span the chasm, and I failed miserably. Christian hypocrisy, Christian intolerance, savage Christian ignorance frustrated me right and left.

But I learned one thing, perhaps two.

They spoke to me of Europe which they knew, and they spoke of India which they did not know. They were what the world calls educated, well-read people: and indeed they had read many books by eminent Christian travellers, savants, and historians about the great Peninsula. But the mirror of their souls reflected only distorted pictures. They had no conception of the vastness of my land, they had never heard of the great Asian conquerors and statesmen, they were entirely ignorant of our wonderful literature.

But still they spoke of India … fluently, patronizingly.

They spoke of plague and cholera and famine and wretched sanitation and cruelties unspeakable. But they did not understand me when I told them that the teeming millions of Hindu peasantry somehow manage to enjoy their careless lives to the full, and are really much more satisfied than the European peasants or the small American farmers.

I did not argue: I simply stated facts. But I discovered that it is a titanic, heart-breaking task to prove the absurdity of anything which the Christians have made up their minds to accept as true. I found arrayed against me an iron phalanx of preconceived opinions and misconstrued lessons of history. I began to understand that even amongst educated people there can exist opinion without thought, and that my two arch-foes were the Pharisee intolerance which is the caste-mark and the blighting curse of the Christian the world over, and the other Aryan vice: an unconscious generalization of those ideas which have been adopted for the sake of convenience and self-flattery, and in strict and delightfully naïve disregard of truth. The whole I found to be spiced with religious hypocrisy; and is there a lower form of hypocrisy than that which makes a man pretend for his own material or spiritual purposes that a thing is good which in his inmost heart he knows to be bad? The sincerity of such people is on a par with that of him who, being debarred by a doctor from constant drinking, proclaims that he is a reformed character and prates to his friends about the delights of temperance.

I learned that to fathom the murky depths of stupidity and intolerance of the Christians of to-day, we should have a latter-day Moses Maimonides amongst us, to write another Moreh Nebukim, another Guide for the Perplexed.

And then I made up my mind to attack that structure of ignorance and misunderstanding, that jumble of generalization and hyperdeduction, that idiotic racial self-confidence and national self-consciousness which breeds Pharisee intolerance, which destroys individual inquiry and unprejudiced opinion, and which sounds the death-knell of procreativeness.

The Hindu peasants say that it is a mistake to judge the quality of a whole field of rice by testing one grain only. But the Europeans, the Americans, who judge us have never even tested a solitary grain and only know about its quality from hearsay.

Not that they are afraid to voice what they miscall their opinions. Only instead of having the courage of their own convictions, they have the courage of somebody else’s convictions, not knowing that the most obtuse ignorance is superior to dangerous, second-hand knowledge.

They are eternally quoting the words of some writer whom they think infallible. And there was chiefly one clever little jingle which was on the lips of everybody with whom I tried to discuss the relations between Orient and Occident. They used it as the final proof to settle the argument and to preclude all further appeal to the tribunal of common sense and common verity, and it ran as follows:

“East is East, and West is West,

And never the twain shall meet.”

I admire Kipling, chiefly because he is one of the few Europeans who have studied the East with both intelligence and sympathy. From my Oriental point of view I class his books with those of Max Müller, Sir Alfred Lyall, Captain Sir Richard Burton, Pierre Loti, John Campbell Oman, Victoria de Bunsen, Colonel Malleson, W. D. Whitney, William Crooke, and two or three other Pandits.

But I became sick to death of that smooth little jingle about the East and the West. I found it everywhere, until it haunted me in my dreams.

I would buy the gaudy Sunday edition of an American newspaper and I would read the gruesome story of how a high-caste Mandchoo had beaten and tortured his beautiful French wife … and, by the Prophet, the picturesque account would wind up with an appeal to the intelligent American reader not to wonder at the blue-beard Mandarin’s cruelty, because the poet states that East is East and West is West.

In the morning I would see in the Petit Journal how the unspeakable Turk had invaded a peaceful Armenian settlement, had shot the males, outraged the females, and roasted the babes over an open fire, and how I should also suppress my natural indignation at such atrocities, because the East is naturally the East.

And at night, before smoking the farewell cigarette of the dying day, I would discover in The Graphic harrowing accounts of child-marriages in Hindustan, and would be instructed that the reason for such a barbarous custom was contained in the poet’s statement that “never the twain shall meet.”

Do you wonder that every night, in my dreams, I strangled Mr. Kipling slowly and deliciously with a thin silken cord? But of course you do not wonder; for I am an Afghan … and … well …

“East is East and West is West.”

II

Assumed racial superiority is a foregone conclusion in the minds of the so-called Aryans of Europe and of America.

I was in Paris when the world rang with the war-glories of Nippon, and afterwards, when for a while it seemed as if the bloodless Young Turk revolution would meet with success.

There we had at last two specific instances of Oriental nations working out their own salvation against tremendous odds: Japan threatened by the Russian Goliath, and Turkey a prey to the wrangling and the selfish machinations of all Europe, of all lying Christendom.

But the effect on the conceit of the Aryans was less than nothing. The people of Europe and of America are blind to the Writing on the Wall. They have sealed their ears against the murmuring voices of Awakening Asia.

Are they afraid to listen?

Now and then, when not engaged in discussing the latest tango or divorce case, they do read and talk about the awakening of China, the commercial conquests and aggressive policy of Japan, and the smouldering fires of United Islam, but without experiencing the least abating influence on their artificially nurtured racial and religious conceit. Peacefully and stupidly the Christians, the “white races,” continue to misread the lessons of history and the signs of the times.

They are afraid to see the brutal, naked truth.

Once I watched an ostrich bury his head in the sand….

They have established the amusing dogma that the so-called White and Christian countries are the superior countries, just because they are White and Christian.

I have established a slightly different dogma, and, being a charitable and entirely guileless Oriental, I will make a present of it to my Aryan friends:

You Westerns feel so sure of your superiority over us Easterns that you refuse even to attempt a fair or correct interpretation of past and present historical events. You deliberately stuff the minds of your growing generations with a series of ostensible events and shallow generalities, because you wish to convince them for the rest of their lives how immeasurably superior you are to us, how there towers a range of differences between the two civilizations, how East is only East, and the West such a glorious, wonderful, unique West.

In Tancred, that brilliant Oriental, the Earl of Beaconsfield, in devoting a few lines to a great Bishop of the Church of England, really pictures the typical Christian such as he stinks in our nostrils from Morocco to Kharbin. For the noble Jewish Peer characterizes the Right Reverend Gentleman as a man who combined great talents for action with very limited powers of thought, who was bustling, energetic, versatile, gifted with an indomitable perseverance and stimulated by an ambition that knew no repose, with a capacity for mastering details and an inordinate passion for affairs, who could permit nothing to be done without his interference, and who consequently was perpetually involved in transactions which were either failures or blunders.

In material progress you have led the world for the last two or three centuries. By the True Prophet … all of three hundred years!

And like all parvenus, you are so astonished at your success, so pleased with yourselves, that you imagine your present hegemony in the race for material progress to be a guarantee for the future. But there is not even the shadow of an excuse for such an assumption, unless it be the fact that the Christian mind is diseased with racial and religious megalomania. There is not a single historical parallel which justifies your pleasant superstition that your present leadership, which after all is of very recent birth, will show greater stability than any of those many alien, ancient civilizations which long ago came from the womb of eternity, to go back whence they sprang.

Nations as well as men are judged by two factors: by their virtues, and by their vices.

As to virtues, what have you Christians done for the general uplift of the world which could not be matched by a random look into the pages of Oriental history? And as to vices, is there any degeneracy rampant amongst us which is not equalled by the degeneracy of the Western lands?

History has an unpleasant knack of repeating itself; and the helot of to-day has the disagreeable habit of being the master of to-morrow, regardless of race and color and creed. I would like to return to earth about three hundred years from to-day, just to observe how my descendants, who will have intermarried with Chinese and Japanese, will succeed in ruling their colonies in Europe and in America. And I do hope that the Chinese blood of my descendants will not be too preponderant: otherwise, taking a leaf out of European and American colonization, and thus forcing their own food-laws on the subject races, they might force their White and Christian subjects to eat roast puppy-dog.

Human nature is the same the world over, and there never was an originally superior race or people. Some nations have founded powerful civilizations which lasted for a shorter or a longer period, but it was never the racial force which caused it, but rather the irresistible swing of circumstances.

It was Kismet.

III

“But we are Aryans, don’t you understand?… Aryans, the salt of the earth….”

“Aryans” … I know the word, I find myself on familiar ground.

My teachers at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Berlin had taught me that the Aryans were a Central-Asian race, a “white” race, who conquered Europe and India, and who were of such superior intellectual and physical fibre that they made themselves masters wherever they went. And when I inquired about those Aryans who invaded India, I was told that right there they showed their wonderful metal: for brought face to face with teeming millions of dark aborigines, they established a caste-system of which the higher strata represent to this day the descendants of the white-skinned and therefore high-minded invaders, while the sweeper, the menial, the village laborer is the scion of the dark-skinned, conquered Dravidians.

To an Oriental this is of course a ridiculous and lying assumption. For even the purest of Aryan tribes in Hindustan, for instance the Rajpoots, have intermarried extensively with at least two other races. This superstition is not a new invention. It is as old as the beginning of things, and that much-praised work, the Veda, is only a chronicle of the ancient conceit of the Aryans, a conceit to which the lying and barbarous intolerance of modern Christianity has given a sharp and poisonous edge.

Yet even the Veda speaks of intermarriages between the Aryans and the original lords of the soil of India.

The caste system was not a bright invention to put a lasting stamp of inferiority on the conquered aborigines, but it is the outcome of a slow evolutionary process, due to the machinations of Brahmin priests who wished to preserve the profits arising from their sacerdotal profession within a restricted circle of families. These Brahmins had increased their ranks and influence by drawing recruits from the devil-worshipping priests of the aboriginal jungle tribes. Thus, how can there ever have been a question of preserving or establishing a permanency of racial superiority through the medium of caste, since at the very beginning of the system the race had lost its purity?

No. Your wonderful Aryan kinsmen in India were absorbed by the “inferior” races whom they conquered, just as the Normans were absorbed by the Saxon Englishmen, the Alexandrian Greeks by the Egyptians, the Mongols of the Golden Horde by the Chinese, just as the strong always absorb the weak, and just as, a few hundred years hence, we shall absorb you.

To-day Christian England is ruling India, and the English Raj is just, fair-minded, tolerant, and equitable. This is true, and it is also true that the last Moghuls disgraced the throne of Delhi and shattered Hindustan. But what can you prove by it?

Others have ruled India successfully before Asia had ever heard of England.

Akbar, the Moghul Emperor, enforced tolerance and justice in those barbaric days when the life of a Jew in Europe was at the kind mercy of an ignorant and brutal Christian rabble. He, the Muslim, built and endowed Hindu temples and charitable institutions while his European contemporaries were periodically burning down the synagogues and were trying to extend the sway of the gentle Christ with the effective help of murder and torture. He, and before him his father’s successor on the throne of Delhi, Shir Shah, the Afghan usurper, attempted to found an Indian empire “broad-based upon the people’s will,” long before the days of Voltaire, Robespierre, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais. He settled land revenue on an equitable basis while the peasants of Europe were groaning under the heavy and humiliating burden of serfdom.

You say that his successors did not live up to the high standard established by this greatest of Moghul princes?

But we find fitting parallels in the history of Christian Europe. For were not the successors of Theodosius as degenerate as those of Akbar? Did not, in Macaulay’s words, the imbecility and disputes of Charlemagne’s descendants bring contempt on themselves and destruction to their subjects?

Or take the civilization of ancient Rome.

It was partially saved from ruin by the Asians, the Syro-Christians, who brought the word of the great Jewish Rabbi across the Adriatic. Judaism is an Oriental creed, and what is your famed European Christianity if not “Judaism for the Masses”?

The Asian genius of Christ and his Hebrew apostles saved the Aryan genius from stagnation and stupidity, and brought the first faint glimmer of light into the barbaric darkness of Northern Europe.

The Asian Christians succeeded in Aryan Rome, and just as long as the Asians ruled, the traditional cupidity and cruelty of Aryan Rome were softened by the broadly tolerant humanity of Asia. But as soon as the Syro-Christians were in the minority and the Christians of European stock in the majority, persecution and intolerance commenced, and the word of the great Oriental Prophet Jesus Christ was sadly mutilated and misunderstood by that superior race, the “Whites.”

But even then you could not rid yourselves of our subtle Asian influence. I know your gifts of energy and your spirit of progress; but we men of Asia have a power of resistance and a capacity for rapid recuperation which you can never fathom.

Could you break the spirit or the virility of the Jew? You have tortured him, you have exiled him, and you have burnt him on the stake for the greater glory of God … and he rules you to-day.

Again, look at the history of your Europeanized Christian Church, and observe what happened:

The Asian spirit flourished again in Protestantism and the Reformation. Many of your Protestant reformers were semi-Jewish, semi-Oriental in spirit. Anti-Trinitarianism was preached in Siena, and God ceased to be a mathematical problem. The Decalogue and the Apocalypse were studied. Chairs of Hebrew philosophy and philology were founded at French and German universities; and the Calvinists and the Presbyterians were altogether of the old Testament, of Asia, in spirit and sentiment.

Your famous Reformation was only a return to the Ebionism of the Asian Evangelists. One of the greatest events in your history, it was a most complete and vindicating triumph for the spirit of that Asia which you attempt to despise and patronize in your ignorance and intolerance.

Must we sit at your feet? Shall the pupil teach the master?

We taught you to read, to write, and to think. We gave you your religion and your few ideals. We have done more for you than you can ever do for us. We freed you from your ancient bondage of superstitions and idolatry. We gave you the first sparks of science and literature. We paved the way for your material progress.

Without our help you would still be tattooed and inarticulate barbarians.

But you have been getting out of hand, and are sinking back into the old slough of ignorance and crass intolerance.

And so perhaps some day, after we Mohammedans have finished converting Asia and Africa to the Faith of Islam (and we are doing steady work in that direction), we may send another Tamerlane into Europe, reinforced by an army of a few million Asians who laugh in the face of death, and finish the job.

IV

You speak of Oriental mystery, of Oriental romance.

Are we Asians then like Molière’s bourgeois who spoke prose all his life without knowing it? Is there really a veil of mystery about us?

No, no. The Most High God did not take the trouble to create two different types of human beings, one to work on the banks of the Seine, and the other to sing His praises on the shore of the Ganges. There is no veil, no mystery, no romance … except the veil of Christian ignorance, the romance of Christian imagination, the mystery of Christian want of desire to know.

There is perhaps a latent search after knowledge and truth in your hearts’ souls. But your inborn selfishness forces you to believe that a healthy portion of ignorance is the best medicine against the ravages of the dangerous malady which is called Tolerance. Just a little effort would teach you that there is no mystery about us, no abyss which separates you from us. But your ignorance is your bliss and provides you with a sort of righteous bias. It also sheds a holy and therefore eminently Christian halo around your attitude of meddlesome interference in the affairs of Asia and North Africa. Of course you only interfere because of your laudable intention to show us the true path to civilization and salvation. And if accidentally you increase your own power and wealth, if you impoverish the native whom you attempt to “save,” if you incite strife where no strife existed before you imported soldiers and bibles and missionaries and whisky and some special brands of “white” diseases … well … Allah is Great….

The mystery which is supposed to shroud the Orient is a lying invention of Christendom destined to give a semblance of justice to your selfish, harmful meddlings in the affairs, religions, politics and customs of other countries.

If you wish to conquer with the right of fire and the might of sword, go ahead and do so, or at least say so. It would be a motive which we Muslim, being warriors, could understand and appreciate. But do not clothe your greed for riches and dominion in the hypocritical, nasal, sing-song of a heaven-decreed Mission to enlighten the poor native, a Pharisee call of duty to spread the word of your Saviour, your lying intention to uplift the ignorant Pagan.

Drop your mask of consummate beatitude in the contemplation of the spiritual joys, the Christian and therefore very sanitary plumbing you are endeavoring to confer upon us. Stop being liars and hypocrites: and you will cease being what you are to-day:

The most hated and the most despised men in the length and breadth of Asia and North Africa.

And I am not exaggerating. I am really putting it mildly so as not to hurt your feelings.

Let me point out just one instance: the Young Turk Revolution.

You, the apostles of freedom and constitutional government and half a dozen assorted fetishes, what was your attitude then?

You allowed Austria, your trusted steward of other people’s property since the Berlin Congress of Thieves, to steal this property, the fertile provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. You looked on calmly while the Bulgar mountebank annexed Turkish territory in time of peace. You passed resolutions, full of blatant Christian hypocrisy and Christian lies; but you never raised a finger in our behalf, in behalf of that justice and humanity which you proudly claim as your caste-right. The whole affair was a piece of brigandage, carried on under the much-patched cloak of that whining cant which has made modern Christianity an ugly by-word in Asia and North Africa.

You united in your endeavors to establish an independent and constitutionally governed Roumania, a free Servia, a modern Greece and Bulgaria, and, more recently, an autonomous Macedonia, under the pretext that Turkey, being controlled with an iron rod by a despotic Sultan and an intolerably exalted Sheykh-ul-Islam, was not fit to govern Christian races.

But you obstruct Mohammedan Turkey’s efforts to introduce and enforce the very principles of liberty and popular government which in former years you had been advocating as a sine qua non in the administration of your precious Christian protégés.

An ounce of baptismal water makes such a difference, does it not?

I believe that I am the mouthpiece of a great majority of my fellow-Muslim and my fellow-Asians when I state that the Jesuit policy of Europe during the political travail of Young Turkey, when the Osmanli attempted to crystallize his newly found liberty, will do more to fan the red embers of fighting Pan-Islam into living, leaping flames than any other political event since the Berlin treaty.

We have suffered long enough a series of deliberate moral insults and material injuries at the hands of selfish, canting, lying Christianity, and we are still capable of tremendous energies when Islam is in danger.

And who can deny that Islam is in danger?

Your attitude during the Balkan troubles proved to us that the liberty which you deem necessary to the Christian Balkans is a negligible quantity when applied to the followers of the Prophet Mohammed who inhabit the same peninsula.

And I could mention a dozen instances to prove that you yourselves are forcing on the world the coming struggle between Asia, all Asia, against Europe and America, against Christendom, in other words.

You are heaping up material for a Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia Holy War, a gigantic Day of Reckoning, an invasion of a new Attila and Tamerlane … who will use rifles and bullets, instead of lances and spears.

You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so you must be taught with the whirling swish of the sword when it is red.

V

You claim that altruism and the virtues are the monopoly of your creed and your race.

But in reality the teachings of Jesus are not a particle more apt to lead his followers in the golden path than are the sayings of the Lord Buddha, the laws of Moses, the wisdom of Confucius, or the words of the Koran. True tolerance, true altruism teaches us that what is right in Peking may be wrong on the shores of Lake Tchaad, and what is wrong in a Damascus bazaar may be right at a Kansas ice-cream social.

Such true tolerance is far broader than the limits of professing Christianity, than the limits of any established, cut-and-dried creed. It is as broad as the Seven Holy Rivers of Hindustan and as vast as Time. The creed of mutual sympathy is a very old creed: even amongst the troglodytes chosen spirits must have known it, the red-haired barbarians of Gaul must have heard of it, and amongst the lizard-eating Arabs of pre-Islamic days it must have found adherents. It is a human truth, a human principle which is the common property of mankind East and West; but Christian hegemony in worldly affairs has killed it, has blighted it with the curse of the cross.

Intrinsic unselfishness and abstract goodness is older than the Gospel, the Koran, the Veda, or any other religious book. Being at the very core of that civilization from which all changes spring, it is in itself eternally unchangeable, be it clothed in the words of the Sermon on the Mount, the Prophet Mohammed’s three great principles of Compassion, Charity, and Resignation, or the famed edict of the Emperor Asoka, who many centuries before the days of Jesus declared to the world that “a man must not do reverence to his own sect by disparaging that of another man.”

THE SHROUD

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

DEATH, I say, my heart is bowed

Unto thine,—O mother!

This red gown will make a shroud

Good as any other!

(I, that would not wait to wear

My own bridal things,

In a dress dark as my hair

Made my answerings.

I, to-night, that till he came

Could not, could not wait,

In a gown as bright as flame

Held for them the gate.)

Death, I say, my heart is bowed

Unto thine,—O mother!

This red gown will make a shroud

Good as any other!

NEW LOYALTIES FOR OLD CONSOLATIONS

H. A. OVERSTREET

TO most persons the conception of a godless world is the conception of a world with the bottom dropped out. It is a world from which all the high values, all the splendid consolations have disappeared. This is true even for many who feel that they cannot, in reason, any longer believe in a personal God. For all their honest disbelief, the world has turned grey for them. It has lost its old wonder and joy. It has become a dead world.

It is interesting to ask ourselves whether all this need be true; whether the high values and the finer consolations may not be just as real when the belief in a personal God has vanished. With the vanishing of that belief, of course, the whole attitude toward the universe is altered. Hopes and comforts that were deeply and warmly of the older order of beliefs have no place in the new order; while loyalties and aspirations that were the breath of its life are become meaningless and without force. But may not new loyalties and aspirations, hopes and comforts find their place strongly and inspiringly in the later order of belief?

It will be interesting, as an answer to this question, to ask how differently a society would behave all of whose members, disbelieving utterly in the reality of a personal God, had no other thought of the divine life than that it was their own larger and more ideal existence.

I remember at the time of the San Francisco earthquake passing one of the cathedrals of the city and finding its broad stone steps, covering a goodly portion of a city square, black with kneeling worshippers. There could be no question of their reason for being there. They were setting themselves right with their God, hoping that in the fervor of their devotion he would have mercy upon them and save them from destruction. So on shipboard in times of great danger one will find the passengers gathered in the cabin praying to God for deliverance,—always, to be sure, with the proviso, “Yet if it be thy will that we perish, thy will be done!”

These are dramatic but typical instances of what occurs constantly in homes and churches where people pray to a personal deity. Could such an attitude of prayer have any meaning for a man who disbelieved in a personal deity? Obviously not. Would he cease to pray? It all depends upon what one is to mean by prayer.

Prayer of the kind indicated is an effort to secure assistance in circumstances where the normal human means fail. Normally, for example, if a man would have bread, he sets about to plant the proper seed, or grind the flour, or mix the dough. He finds out, in short, the laws that govern the production or manufacture of breadstuffs; and he does not expect to secure his desired result until he has accommodated himself in all the requisite ways to these laws and conditions. If a man would save himself from a burning house, he looks for a fire-escape, or a rope, or calls for a ladder; again accommodating his action to the fundamental conditions of the situation. But if the heavens are long without rain and the seed dry up, or the fire burns away the means of escape, the man, at the end of his human resources, calls to another power for help.

Such a call for help is based upon two assumptions, which in some respects scarcely support each other. They are the assumption, first, that there is a power able to control to his beneficent purposes forces that are humanly uncontrollable; but, second, that this power will not act unless attracted by very special and fervent appeal. The latter fact, that special appeal is needed, may be due to the God’s impotence, his inability to be in all places at once: he does the best he can, hurrying hither and thither from one distressing circumstance to another. Or it may be due to his demand that his creatures shall continually turn their minds to him, an attitude which he succeeds in securing in them for the most part only when they are hard pressed with danger.

Stated thus baldly, it would be difficult even on the naïve planes of religious thought to find persons who would acknowledge either that their God was a jealous god, refusing help until all the requisite ceremonies of abasement and supplication had been fulfilled, or that he was a finite God, half distracted by the imploring voices calling to him from all quarters of his universe. And yet, in prayer as it is ordinarily practised, both of these views are more or less unconsciously mingled. What prevents the emergence of their absurdity into clear consciousness is the relatively healthy thought underlying all prayer that if a man would secure something for himself he must himself spend some effort in the process. Ex nihilo nihil. In situations that pass beyond all his power of practical human control, there is nothing for him to do but to give his mere effort of adoration and hope.

On the higher levels of religious experience, this semi-magical conception of prayer grows increasingly in ill-repute. The thought is more and more in evidence that if God wished to prevent certain distresses, he would do so of his own beneficent accord. A request for specific aid, in short, would insinuate in him, either a failure to know in all circumstances what was best to be done, or an inability to keep wholly abreast of the tasks which he ought to perform. To save the majesty of God, prayer must become simply a turning of the mind to him, not for specific help, but for that general uplift of spirit which comes from the contemplation of his supreme perfection.

Here obviously is the germ of a higher and radically different conception of prayer. In the more naïve conception, help was to come from the “power not ourselves”; in the maturer conception, help is to come through the stimulation in ourselves of our own highest powers—a stimulation effected by the turning of our minds and spirits to the highest conceivable Reality.

The efficacy of prayer, in short, in this conception of it, will lie not in what it brings to us from without, but what it effects within,—what powers, efforts, aspirations it develops in us. Let us return to the kneeling worshippers. As they bowed their heads in fervent supplication, other men and women were distributing bread and clothing to destitute families, or were building shelters, or were clearing the streets of débris, or were patrolling with gun on shoulder against criminal disorder. Is it correct to say, as the older religions have always said, that the latter were engaged wholly in earthly affairs, while the former were entering the higher life of God and the spirit? Or is it truer to hold that the digging away of débris was a far more effective and powerful prayer to God than supplication to him for help?

The kneeling worshippers were indeed turning their minds to their highest conceivable Reality. It was a Reality that they hoped would do things for them. But the diggers of débris, or the distributers of bread and clothing, were likewise, unconsciously no doubt, but in actual effect, turning their minds to their highest Reality. Face to face with the destruction of those things that give order and beauty and power to life, they were thinking (in their unconscious selves) of what a city for men and women and children ought to be and could be. It ought not to be a tumbled mass of bricks and burning wood; it ought not to be filled with starving people; it ought not to be given over to looters and murderers; it ought to be a city clean, ordered, happy. With their smoke-blinded eyes, they may not have seen far beyond the immediate demands of their ideal; but ideal it nevertheless was to which they lifted their souls in service. With all its vague inadequacy, it was for them then and there their highest Reality, their God—the ideal life in their members—to which they felt that they must devote themselves with full power of brain and muscle. They asked nothing of this their God; rather it was their God that asked everything of them, that stimulated them to the full, devoted summoning of all their essential powers.

When a child lies sick unto death, what is the effective form of prayer? If the divine life, as we have held, is our own ideal life, prayer to such God is the tireless, unflinching effort to bring some measure of that ideal life to realization. The death of a little child of causes that might be controlled is hardly in keeping with the ideal of life. Hence devotion to the ideal calls for every straining of effort,—the loving care, the ceaseless watching, the sacrifice of pleasure and comforts to purchase the best knowledge and skill to save the little life. This is the essential prayer; not the bowing in helpless misery and supplication before a God who needs to be called from some far forgetfulness to his proper tasks.

During recent winter storms, when New York was filled with hundreds of thousands of unemployed, several hundred of these unfortunate men, as reported by The New York Times, marched through the snow-filled streets to one of the large evangelical churches where the weekly prayer meeting was being held. As they filed in, consternation spread among the worshippers. Their minister, however, stopped the oncoming crowd and asked them what they wanted. “We want shelter for the night in your church,” they said. The minister, looking at his cushioned pews, replied that he could not permit it. “But cannot we sleep in the basement?” they asked. No, the minister said, they could not, and he advised them to leave the church quietly, at the same time whispering to one of his congregation to call up the police. The police came in due order and rough-handled the men; and the prayers to God were resumed. Meanwhile, at another place in the city, a great body of men and women were gathered, drawn together at the instance of the American Association for Labor Legislation, to consider ways and means for relieving the distressing conditions of unemployment. At the latter meeting men spoke of municipal employment bureaus, of scientific plans for unemployment insurance; they brought forth facts and figures to prove the possibility of regulating business in such a way as to prevent the alternation of slack and rush seasons. They did not mention God. And yet one wonders whether their earnest and forceful deliberations were not a far more fervent prayer to God, a far more devoted yielding of themselves to the power of their ideal selves than the windy prayer of that minister (or of his people) who trusted his God so poorly that he called in the city’s police to help Him out of an ugly scrape.

Once the divine life is believed to be not a beneficent Person other than ourselves to whom we may call for help, but the finer life that lives potentially in ourselves, prayer ceases to be a semi-magic formula applicable to an order of existence beyond our own. Prayer is then nothing more or less than the turning of mind and spirit to the service of the ideal that lives in us. And it is most effectually realized not by departing from human activity, by yielding oneself to a power not oneself; but rather by a vigorous turning to the problems and difficulties of our life and enlisting every last shred of effort to set them right.

It follows then that there is prayer wherever there is service, service of any kind that makes for life-betterment. The chemist who learns a new control has received an answer to his year-long prayer; the physician who finds the saving serum has prayed long and fervently and has been heard of his God. The business man who finds a way of juster coöperation with his men need never have named the word God or joined in holy adoration. But he has prayed—to his ideal of human brotherhood; and has prayed so vigorously that his God has heard and answered.

But in each case the God that has heard and answered has been the deeper possibilities of these men’s own life—their ideal life—which they, by their loyal devotion, have wrought out of mere possibility into some manner of actuality.

II

This in part is what prayer must mean when the old devotion to the personal God has vanished. The last shred of its supernatural, semi-magical connotation will have disappeared. If things worth while are to be done; if life values are to be accomplished and preserved, it must be by a knowledge and control of the conditions of their accomplishment. The devotion to the ideal in us presupposes therefore the most strenuous and persistent effort to learn these modes of control, to understand the deep and intricate ways of life, and to bend every power—of mind and body, of science and art—to bring life into harmony with their fundamental demands.

The situation may be illustrated by the contrast between the older and the newer ways of offering thanks to God for great benefits received. In the older days a man would pray, “O God, if thou wilt save the life of my child, there shall be so many candles burning before thine altar”; or “There shall be a new chapel added to thy house of prayer.” The burning candles and the new chapel may have served human purposes,—certainly the candle-makers had their small benefit of it; but the essential thought was not service to mankind, but tribute to God. When, however, the personal God has vanished and there is no divine life but our own deeper and more ideal existence, how shall a man give thanks for deliverance? Any man who has helped wife and nurse and doctors to fight with all the power that human knowledge and skill can command for the life of his child, knows that out of the deep thanksgiving of his heart the thing that he would most wish to do thereafter would be to bend every effort to make such saving knowledge and skill accessible to fathers and mothers of other children, or to extend that knowledge and develop that skill to the saving of lives from still deeper distresses. He will build a hospital or endow a chair in medical research, or he will send his small contribution to some agency that makes for the amelioration of life conditions. And he will do this not as a tribute to a God who delights in adoration, but in simple devotion to the ideal of a more adequate human life.

Or, indeed, he might found a church or endow a minister. For are we to suppose that church and minister are to disappear when God the Perfect Person no longer lives to hear the old supplications? But it will be a very different church from the churches with which we are familiar. The church of to-day still lingers in its animistic and magical memories. The church services are supposed to have vital efficacy for the saving of men’s souls, not simply in the ordinary way of stimulating them by precept and example to better living, but by performing for them and with them certain rites pleasing to God. There is still in the minds of most churchmen something efficacious about the very attendance upon divine worship. It is an act which God enjoins and which he rewards when it is faithfully performed. It is like the pagan custom of bringing gifts to the altar: the god demands the gifts and rewards the bringer of gifts for his lowly obedience. It is true that the more enlightened churches are rapidly outgrowing this belief in the ceremonial efficacy of church service; but it would not be difficult to show that it still persists in so great measure as very definitely to color the word “religious” with the meaning “that which pertains to divine ceremonial.” The sharp line of demarcation between “religious” and “secular” is but the expression of this animistic and supernatural survival in religion.

But even churches that have largely outgrown belief in the saving efficacy of supernatural ceremonial, who believe that attendance upon church service is wholly for the sake of inspiration to better living, seek to secure that inspiration by pointing the worshipper to the perfect God, or to his beloved Son. One may doubtless get inspiration from the tireless work of a Burbank, or a Curie, or a Florence Nightingale. If the church, however, uses such sources of inspiration, it is only by the way. Its fundamental source is the Perfect Person, the Eternal God. The church has the special function of calling men from their secular activities, of pointing upward to that great Guide and Friend and Provider in whose name and through whose power they are to live.

The new type of church will indeed call men to the remembrance of the divine life—it will point upward—but it will be their own divine life to which it will call them. It will find their divine life in their own ideals and in their loyal service of these ideals. Hence its primary interest will be not in what some perfect God wants of men, but what the God in themselves wants of them,—what types of things they long for, what powers of mind and body they are willing to devote to securing them. It will make far more difference to the new church whether its communicant is fighting child labor with all his power of mind and soul than whether he is a regular attendant upon weekly prayers. Indeed, it will know no true and rounded prayer save actual service. Hence its body of communicants will be first and foremost men and women engaged in human service. The condition for admission to the new church will be not a profession of faith but an exhibition of deed. Does a man care enough for anything worth while to put strenuous effort into its accomplishment; does he care for it not for his own sake primarily but for the sake of enhancing the life of his fellows and his world—it may be to discover a cancer cure, or to invent a dishwasher, or to make a better school—such a man or woman is welcomed into the new church. However circumscribed his ideal may be, inasmuch as it is an ideal of service it is the divine in him that is coming to life. He is already a worshipper.

By this token, there will be no place in the new church for the man who is anxious about his soul or who thinks much of what will happen to him after death. He belongs properly in the congregation of self-seekers; not in the church of the divine life.

The new church, in short, will be primarily a clearing-house of service, to which men will go not to save their souls but to save their world. It will be a spiritual centre, so to speak, of all service-activities; a place for comparing notes, for learning of each other, for the heartening of one another in their worthful tasks. The leader of such a church will be a man not only deeply interested in and in touch with the agencies and activities of human betterment, but versed likewise in the fundamental sciences that make for a finer direction and control of life. His theology will be not an occult research of supernatural relationships and powers, but physics and chemistry, biology and sociology, ethics and philosophy—all the fundamental approaches, in short, to the problem of human self-realization.

III

Yet splendid as such religious life may be conceded to be, it will apparently lack one of the primary consolations of the older belief, the assurance, namely, that the fundamental government of the world is just and good. “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.” If, as we have been urging, God is not in his heaven, it may indeed, for all we know to the contrary, be all wrong with the world. A few years ago we were very much perturbed by certain conclusions reached by the accredited masters of science. The universe was running down, they said, and would end a lifeless, frozen mass. The thought of an ever-living God was then a comfort against such ominous prophecy. If God lives, it follows that all things of value will live, that the world cannot go to ultimate ruin.

That old prophecy, however, of a frozen and lifeless world no longer has honor in our land. Recent discoveries of new types of energy, a more penetrating analysis both of the mathematics and mechanics of the situation, show the prophecy to have been made on wholly insufficient and insecure grounds. The old dogmatic materialism has had to give way to a critical and open-minded evolutionism which tends more and more to regard the cosmic process as one of expanding power, in which the values for which we deeply care—conscious life, purposive direction, science, art, morality—appear to have a place of growing security and effectiveness. And yet the evolutionism of the day, unlike the older religious thought, finds no cosmic certainty upon which it may utterly bank. The universe, with all the high values that have been achieved, may indeed go to ruin. There is no absolute guarantee for the future. All that modern evolutionism can say to us is that looking over such history of the world as is accessible, and analyzing the processes there found, it seems highly probable that the line of the future will be a line of advance, an advance from relative disorganization to organization, from a large degree of mechanical indifference to increasing organic solidarity and integration, from antagonisms and conflicts to mutuality and coöperation. But it is only probable. There is no God who holds the destiny in his hands and makes it certain of accomplishment.

In view of this uncertainty as to the world’s government and outcome, it may be asked whether the new type of religion will not be weaker in moral and spiritual vigor than the old. Do not vigor and initiative spring from hope and sure confidence in the fundamental rightness of the world? In answer to this one has but to ask the question: in what type of situation does the human character grow strong and heroic,—that in which there is no doubt of the happy outcome, in which the individual plays his part, assured that nothing can happen wrongly; or that in which the outcome is uncertain, in which the individual realizes that he must fight his way, knowing not whether victory or defeat will greet him, but assured only that whatever happens, he must fight and fight to the end? Is it unfair to say that the old religion with its confident, childlike resting on God (“He loves the burthen”) developed a type of character that was not, in the mass, conspicuously heroic? “God knows best”; “It will all come out right”; “Thy will be done”—these are not expressions of fighting men; they are expressions of men who resign themselves to the ruling of powers greater than themselves. A civilization characterized by such an attitude will not be one strenuously alive to eliminate the sorry evils of life. But the men who believe that the issue of the universe is in doubt, that there is no powerful God to lead the hosts to victory, will, if they have the stuff of men in them, strike out their manliest to help whatever good there is in the world to win its way against the forces of evil. A civilization of such men will be a tough-fibred civilization, strenuous to fight, grimly ready, like the Old Guard, to die but never surrender.

There is, in short, something subtly weakening about the optimism of the traditional religions. Like the historic soothing syrup, with its unadvertised opiate, it soothes the distress not by curing the disease but by temporarily paralyzing the function. “To trust God nor be afraid” means in most cases—not all—to settle back from a too anxious concern about the evils of the world. “God will take care of his own!” How different is this from the attitude: “The task is ours and the whole world’s and we must see it through!”

IV

But from another point of view there was an element of power in the older religion which seems at first blush to be utterly lacking in the type of new religion we are describing. A prominent world-evangelist of the Young Men’s Christian Association was recently lecturing to the college students of New York City on the ethical and religious life. It was significant to note that most of his talk to students concerned itself with temptations and that the invariable outcome of each talk was that the one infallible means of meeting temptation was to realize God’s presence in one’s life, to companion with God, to feel him near and watchful, ever sympathetic, ever ready with divine help. Students do indeed get power from that kind of belief. They feel themselves before an all-seeing eye, a hand is on their shoulder, a voice is in their ear; and when the difficult moment comes they are not alone. How utterly uncompanioned, how lonely, on the other hand, must be the student who knows no beneficent, all-seeing, and all-caring Father. When his difficult moment comes he stands in desolate isolation. Victory or defeat then must hang upon his own puny strength and wavering determination. It is a favorite argument with Roman Catholics that the belief in God is the one surest guard against the sexual irregularity of young men. Remove God, the one strong bulwark, from their lives, and the flood of their passions will sweep them to their destruction.

Such considerations as these must indeed give one pause; yet I feel assured that they need not hold us long. How does a man get strength for right living? He begins—in his childhood as in the childhood of the race—by getting it through fear. The child is told, upon pain of punishment, not to do certain things. There will come a time when it will know why it ought not to do these things; but in its first months and, in a degree, through its early years, it refrains from doing them simply by reason of the pressure of the superior power of its parents. Later it refrains through unconscious imitation and affection. It lives in the light and love of its parents; and it consciously and unconsciously shapes its life after the pattern of their lives. When difficulties press, the child flees to the mother or the father for comfort and advice. Those are delicious days, of warm trust and joy and loving security. The child nestles up against the stronger power of those it loves. But the child grows to manhood and womanhood. Whence then does it get its strength for right living? The fear of the infant days, the imitation and affection of childhood and youth are now transformed into a new attitude,—an understanding of the reason in the right and the unreason in the wrong. There are many factors and influences that now take the place of parent power and affection: the love and admiration of one’s group, the customs of one’s people, the stimulus of great persons. But the essential power now is the power of insight—of so understanding the forces and principles of life that one’s whole self is surrendered in deep reverence and service to the things that ought to be. Assuredly, no character is mature until it has reached this last stage. There is indeed something beautiful about the boy who in the midst of temptation goes to his father and talks it all out with him; who clings to the father’s hand to lead him safely through the dangerous ways. But the boy is only on the way to moral and spiritual maturity; he is not yet morally and spiritually mature.

The doctrine that the great evangelist and the evangelical churches in general preach is a doctrine admirably adapted to a condition of moral and spiritual immaturity; it is a doctrine, in short, for little boys and girls; it is not a doctrine for morally and spiritually mature men and women. I doubt even, in fact, whether it is a doctrine for college youths and maidens; for I note in my own relations with college men and women that there is among them the growing consciousness of right for right’s sake, a growing cleanness and earnestness of life; and this is so, I take it, not because they believe such conduct and attitude to be commanded or because they are aware of a heavenly Father who watches, but because their eyes have been opened to see the truth and the truth has made them free.

I believe that the problem of how to teach a young man to meet temptation is a deeply serious problem. But I believe small good will come of falling back upon the old easy expedient of half-frightening, half-cajoling the young man into submission by reminding him of the all-watching eye and the all-considering heart of the great Father. That way is so easy that it is really unfair to the victims. It is like hypnotizing a man into morality. The way of the new religion is the harder but more lasting, more self-respecting way of developing the whole moral self of the boy and the youth and the man,—beginning far back in childhood and unremittingly, understandingly continuing the training, until when the child becomes the youth and the youth the man, righteousness is the firm, sweet habit of his life. We human beings have an inveterate love of shirking our tasks. We neglect the essential moral culture of the infant and the child; we let the moments and the days slip by in the life of the youth without putting any hard thought upon his training in self-control, in courage, in moral insight; and then suddenly, when signs of danger begin to show in the young man, we grow panic-stricken and implore him to call on God to save him. The fact is that the task was ours and we shirked it. Ours was the responsibility; and we had no right to put it off on a miracle-working Deity.

“When half-gods go,” says Emerson, “the gods arrive.” When once we give up this easy way of moral and religious hypnosis; when once we believe that God, the watchful policeman of the universe, no longer exists, we shall solemnly and seriously take up the task we have so long cast upon a deity’s shoulders—our task of shaping and directing and making strong the moral possibilities of the children we bring into the world. From the old consolation, in short, of divine protection, we shall awake to a new loyalty to our fundamental moral obligations.

It is significant in this connection to note that the farther we go back in the history of religion, the more the moral reference of situations is secondary and the supernatural reference primary. The ten commandments, for example, were first of all a divine behest, and only secondarily a series of laws founded on the essential requirements of human well-being. But as we come nearer to our own day, the moral quality of situations tends more and more to usurp the primacy of the old supernatural reference. The limit of such evolution is the disappearance altogether of the supernatural, the evaluation, ultimately, of all situations and activities in terms of their inherent good or bad for the life of humanity and the world.

*   *   *   *   *

The old loyalty, in short, was the loyalty of loving children; the new loyalty is the loyalty of strong-charactered men and women. Has the time come for moral and spiritual maturity? To some of us there is no longer an alternative. “When I was a child I spake as a child; I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” In the light of spiritual maturity, the god of magic, the god of miraculous power, the god of loving protection, the god of all-seeing care—the Parent God—must give way to the God that is the very inner ideal life of ourselves, our own deep and abiding possibilities of being; the God in us that stimulates us to what is highest in value and power.

THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

August 18, 1914

MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN:

I suppose that every thoughtful man in America has asked himself during the last troubled weeks what influence the European war may exert upon the United States; and I take the liberty of addressing a few words to you in order to point out that it is entirely within our own choice what its effects upon us will be, and to urge very earnestly upon you the sort of speech and conduct which will best safeguard the nation against distress and disaster.

The effect of the war upon the United States will depend upon what American citizens say and do. Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.

The spirit of the nation in this critical matter will be determined largely by what individuals and society and those gathered in public meetings do and say; upon what newspapers and magazines contain; upon what our ministers utter in their pulpits, and men proclaim as their opinions on the streets.

The people of the United States are drawn from many nations and chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and inevitable that there should be the utmost variety of sympathy with regard to the issues and circumstances of the conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the momentous struggle.

It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to allay it. Those responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy responsibility; responsibility for no less a thing than that the people of the United States, whose love of their country, and whose loyalty to its government should unite them as Americans, all bound in honor and affection to think first of her and her interests, may be divided into camps of hostile opinions, hot against each other, involved in the war itself in impulse and opinion, if not in action.

Such diversions among us would be fatal to our peace of mind and might seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak the counsels of peace and accommodation, not as a partisan, but as a friend.

I venture, therefore, my fellow countrymen, to speak a solemn word of warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides.

The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another. My thought is of America. I am speaking, I feel sure, the earnest wish and purpose of every thoughtful American that this great country of ours, which is, of course, the first in our thoughts and in our hearts, should show herself in this time of peculiar trial a nation fit beyond others to exhibit the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate action; a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels, and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.

Shall we not resolve to put upon ourselves the restraint which will bring to our people the happiness and the great lasting influence for peace we covet for them?

WOODROW WILSON

ATAVISM

KARL REMER

THE city had withstood its besiegers for a long time. The guns on the mountain had poured down shot, the guns on the north and on the south had battered the old walls. The walls had crumbled and fallen. The walls were old and they had been considered picturesque for so long that it was as if they had forgotten the sturdy virtues of their youth.

Through the breaches came the soldiers. Tribesmen they seemed of the old days of the Grand Khan.

The soldiers were thinking. They were not accustomed to thought. Was it true, ran their thoughts, that their leader had promised that there would be no looting? He had promised, this they knew, that there would be no looting after he entered the city. What was the meaning of that “he”? Did it mean the army or did it mean the general? Did it mean the soldiers? There was the rumor that the general could not leave his present quarters for three days. Rain, or snow, or ice, or drought prevented. What was the meaning of that? Did it mean three days of fine, bloody looting?

The soldiers entered the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan they poured in. Through one gate, through two gates, through three gates they came. It was a sullen business and silently did they press forward. They had not made up their minds about those three days. They were not sure about the general. Perhaps he was playing one of his grim jokes. Was he, perhaps, already within the city? He had promised before many that there would be no looting. The foreigner, the Jesus-religion man in black clothes, had stood beside him. It was hard to tell, where foreigners were concerned, how much to believe. Foreigners were an unusual sort of people. Most of them did not look dangerous, but any one of them might have power. It was one of the inexplicable things about foreigners that one could never tell the amount of power a foreigner had by the amount he used. To have power and not use it, to have rice and not eat it—strange men these foreigners.

The soldiers poured into the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan they came; but not like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan. The loot and the fun were before them, yet they restrained themselves.

The soldiers were yellow and clad in yellow, and they poured through the gates as the yellow Yangtsze pours between its banks. Silver and silks were before them, but the hand was withheld from the knife and a sullen silence was around them.

Some one began it. There came a curse and an answer, a taunt and a gunshot. So it began.

Here was a shop boarded, bolted, and locked. A crowd of soldiers gathered before it. They demanded that the shop be opened. No reply came from within. The demand was repeated and emphasized with a blow of a rifle butt against the boards. Still there was no reply. More gun butts fell upon the boards and they began to creak and snap. A scared man within began to dicker for life, property, and family. He paid and paid high—for nothing. The shop was broken open. Stripped and wounded, the man was sent down the street. His goods became the playthings of the soldiers. His wife lay above, outraged and stabbed. His daughter was in the hands of other tormentors. At the command of the soldiers, his son began carrying his father’s goods and piling them as the soldiers directed. There was a look of death upon the boy’s face; he was sick and weary. The soldiers demanded more silver. The boy knew there was no more. He knew that his father had paid it all to save the family. He was so sadly sure he would not look. The soldiers cut him down and went their way.

There was a ricksha coolie who had sunk frightened against a wall in a side street. He had hidden his family, but he, himself, had come forth from hiding in the hope of much work and large pay. With quaking knees he had pulled loads of loot for the soldiers. At last the horror had overcome him and here he cowered against a wall. He was called but he could not move. He knew that he could not pass down the bloody streets again. The call was repeated and still he did not move. They shot him as he lay and took his ricksha from him. That street also, a little street and a quiet one, had its spreading mark of red.

A poor barber lay trembling upon his bamboo bed. He had no family and few friends. Why had he not run away? He lay thinking and thinking but he could think of no good reason. As he lay thus they came upon his shop. Down came the boards. He paid them all his savings, a pitifully small sum, and they demanded his wife and children. They killed him because he had neither the one nor the other. “For,” said they, “no honest man is without a family.”

There was a girl of eighteen whom the soldiers seized. Guile or temporary insanity prompted her to play her part as if with pleasure. She smiled on them and shrugged her shoulders most coquettishly. She bandied jokes with them and made advances. A petty officer accepted her advances and, later, had her beaten to death. The soldiers approved. “These people must be taught,” said they, “that modesty is a woman’s duty.”

For two days the riot continued. For two nights there was no sleep but the sleep of death. The moans of the women, the groans of the men, fire and fresh alarms made sleep a thing that seemed years away. The city was red and the blood flowed. Loot and the lives of men, silver and the bodies of women, these things did the victors take as is old custom in China. Then came the third day and the general.

The foreigner in black clothes, the man of the religion of Jesus, had lived through these two days and two nights. “One can never tell,” said the soldiers, “what power these foreigners have.” “That is the foreigner’s house,” said the soldiers, “let it alone.”

The foreigner had lived through the two days and the two nights, but he had not slept. He had been thinking of the promise of the general. “There will be no looting after I enter the city”—these were the general’s words and the man who had spoken them had not yet entered. As a joke the speech was not bad, but too much blood and no sleep spoils the taste for jokes.

The general entered with an important noise of trumpets. Where he rode the looting stopped. He seemed weary, however, and did not ride far. The smoke of the many fires may have hurt his eyes. The day may have been too hot. In any case the general seemed discreetly weary and discreetly blind.

The man of the religion of Jesus came to the general. His words were to the point. “Is this the way you keep promises?” he asked.

The general did not like directness and he did not care to argue. “There is no looting,” he said, and with a smile he pointed down the street.

“There is looting everywhere except before your eyes.”

“There is none,” said the general. It was characteristic of him to add, “What there is must be stopped.”

“By whom?” asked the foreigner.

“Take one hundred men,” said the general, “go up and down in the city. If you see looting or outrage, cut off the guilty man’s head. As for myself, I have seen none.”

The foreigner hesitated, but thoughts came to him of the last two days. If he did nothing, who would act? Opportunity seemed to him duty. So in despair and rage he agreed and at the head of his hundred he set out.

They came suddenly to a corner where a soldier was searching a dead man’s clothes. Here was guilt so plain no proof was needed. The man was quickly sentenced and in another moment his head was off. “Justice,” said the foreigner to himself, “must upon occasion be swift.”

They came upon a house where a widow and her young daughter lived. The house was small and until now it had been overlooked. A noise of scuffling caused the foreigner to look within. The younger woman lay bruised and naked upon the floor, the mother was still struggling with her assailant. Two heads fell and the foreigner smiled. “Payment,” said he to himself, “is a thing dear to the Lord. Here two have paid.”

The hundred and their leader came upon a half-crazed soldier who was trying to run up a narrow street with two mattresses which he had stolen. The mattresses brushed the sides of the buildings upon the narrow street so that, as the man’s load struck gate or door-post upon the one side or the other, the man reeled as a drunken man does. They caught him and made him kneel upon those very mattresses. The hundred went on and the man’s head was left resting softly upon the stolen goods. The mattresses were becoming red. “The blood of justice is red also,” said the foreigner.

Thus did the man of the religion of Jesus and his hundred make progress through this city of great suffering.

They seized a soldier carrying a woman. She was groaning. He protested that he was carrying her to shelter. The man had earrings and a chain in his belt. The woman’s ears were bleeding. The good knife descended and again punishment found guilt.

They went on and as they went there came a great joy into the heart of the foreigner. “These people,” said he to himself, “are children and they need a lesson. By God’s help they shall have it. Many lessons are hard but many must be learned.”

They seized an old soldier who was picking up the trinkets that had been dropped before a jewelry shop. He swore that he had robbed no man, but the man in black decided against him and off came his head.

As the hundred passed on they sent fear before them and left a trail of red justice behind them. The joy burned brighter in the heart of the man in black. “Have I not talked to these people of the justice of God?” said he to himself. “Now they are seeing it. Now they will know it to be swift and terrible. A knife with a keen blade, a judge with a clean heart, these things this people needs.”

They came upon two soldiers who were quarrelling over the division of a sable coat. Each had an end and the altercation was proceeding over the outstretched garment. They protested that they had bought the coat not two hours before and that they had paid for it. One begged piteously for his life, but the man in black shook his head.

So the expedition of the hundred became a thing of blood and more blood. The heart of the man of the religion of Jesus was filled with a grim ecstasy. It seemed to dance within him. “Am I not,” he chanted to himself, “a messenger of the Lord to a sinful people? With what measure they have measured, have I measured unto them. As they have pitied others, so have I pitied them. Blood must flow, for blood alone can cleanse. Blood alone can cleanse.”

A young soldier was caught as he climbed the stairs of a small house. He was brought into the street and told to kneel. “I have heard of your Jesus and his forgiveness,” he said; “now I know.” He knelt with a sort of dignity, the dignity that death brings to the brave, and his head fell.

His words struck through the blood fever to the heart of the man in black. For a second he closed his eyes and when he opened them again he saw with his old clearness. He knew that blood is blood and shame came over him.

He sent back his hundred, saying: “Go. I have done wrong.”

He came to his own house and to his own small room where a crucifix hung above the bed. He knelt and remained for a long time with his eyes fixed upon the figure. The words, “Father, forgive them,” came from his lips as from the lips of a stranger. For two days and for two nights he had not slept. He sank slowly to the floor and lay still before the quiet figure on the cross.

THE CHANGING TEMPER AT HARVARD

GILBERT V. SELDES

THIS article is not intended in any sense as a reply to the Confessions of a Harvard Man published several months ago in THE FORUM by Mr. Harold E. Stearns. The importance of those articles, as Mr. Stearns had reason to point out, lay not so much in what they told about Harvard as in what they told about him. Precisely. Analyses of the temper of Young America have their place. The temper of Harvard itself, however, is something quite apart, and it is to that alone that this article is devoted. The importance of it lies only in the number of significant and true things it tells about Harvard.

And that, perhaps, is importance enough. I say this in none of that college spirit which makes a man believe that his college, because it is his, is singled out for the peculiar attentions of the high gods who brood over academic welfare. A change, such as I am describing, if it took place at any other college, would be quite as important. The fact is that it could have taken place nowhere else.

Which brings us to the old Harvard and the popular misconceptions of its character. It was supposed to create a type of man, effeminate, detached, affecting superiority, incapable, and snobbish. Certainly men of this order did graduate from Harvard, but the great truth is that there was no Harvard type; there were always Harvard men, but there was never a “Harvard man.” The importance of this distinction is inestimable, because it points to the fundamental thing in the older Harvard life: its insistence upon individuality. In that the old Harvard struck deep through superficial things and came at once upon the fundamental thing identical in democracy and in aristocracy. It bestowed each man in accordance with his deserts and, following Hamlet’s dictum, according to its own nobility; and gave him according to his needs and according to his powers. Like every truly democratic institution, Harvard was aristocratic; like every truly aristocratic institution, Harvard was democratic. At the very moment when it was supposed to be breeding aristocratic snobs, Harvard was fulfilling the great mission of democratic institutions in encouraging each man to be himself as greatly and completely as he could. At the very moment when it was supposed to exercise a mean and narrowing influence over its students, it was fulfilling the great mission of cultural institutions in helping each man to a ripening of his powers, to enlargement of his interests, and to widening of his sympathies. Its effeminates went to war against dirt and danger and disease; its snobs devoted themselves to the advancement of social justice; its detached men became bankers and mill-owners and journalists; one of its weaklings conquered the world. The great thing was that in all of them the old impulse to a deep and full life remained; the tradition of culture was beginning to prosper. So that Harvard could send out a statesman who was interested in the Celtic revival, a littérateur with a fondness for baseball, a financier who appreciated art and a philosopher who appreciated life. At the same time it graduated thousands of men who took with them into professional life and into business life a feeling, perhaps only a memory, of the variety and excellence of human achievement—men who without pride or shame, which are equally snobbish, tried to substitute discipline and cultivation for disorder and barbarity. It is no petty accomplishment.

To achieve it Harvard had to stand with bitter determination against the current sweeping toward the practical, the immediate, the successful. At the same time it bought its cherished democracy of thought at the price of social anarchy. The college as a body made very little effort to protect or to comfort its individuals. It was assumed that he who came could make his own way; if the way were hard, so much the better! The triumph would be sweeter. The great fraternities grew in strength, possibly because there was no countervailing force issuing from the college itself. But there was never a determined organized attempt to make the individual life of the undergraduate happy or comfortable. In its place there was a huge, inchoate, and tremendously successful attempt to make the intellectual life of the individual interesting and productive. Each man found his own; fought to win his place, struggled against loneliness and despair, and emerged sturdier in spirit, younger and braver and better. Some fell. They were the waste products of a civilization which was harsh, selfish in its interests, generous in its appreciations, a microcosm of life. A pity that some should have to fall! But it would be a greater pity if for them the battle should cease. Because the fighting was always fair. The strength which developed in many a man in his efforts to make a paper, or a club, or even in qualifying to join some little group of men, was often the basis of a successful life. With it came an intensification of personality; the absence of a set type made the suppression of the individual at Harvard almost impossible. I am certain that no one with a personality worth preserving ever lost it there.

I wonder whether those who speak and write about democracy at our colleges ever realize the importance of this intellectual freedom. Mr. Owen Johnson is not unconscious of it, yet his whole attack upon the colleges, practically unchallenged, was on account of their lack of social democracy. It is considered a dreadful thing among us that rich A should not want to talk to poor B; but it would never occur to us to be shocked if they had nothing to say to each other except small talk about baseball or shop talk about courses. And if the choice is between social promiscuity and intellectual freedom, we must say, “Let their ways be apart eternally, so long as they are free.”

The terrible fact is that the undergraduate in his effort to attain social unity has sacrificed the liberty of thought. It would be indelicate for a Harvard man, however generous, to condemn other colleges. Let Mr. Johnson speak for Yale: “It is ruled by the tyranny of the average, the democracy of a bourgeois commonplaceness.” And an undergraduate wrote in The Yale Literary Magazine that “we are accounted for as one conglomeration of body first, head next, and last and least, soul. As one we go to chapel, as one our parental authorities would like to see us pastured at Commons, and as one we are educated.” For Princeton The Nassau Lit writes this significant editorial: “It is not long before the freshman learns that a certain kind of thinking, too, is quite necessary here, and from that time on, until graduation, the same strong influence is at work, until the habit of conforming has become a strongly ingrained second nature…. Four years of this … results in a certain fixity of ideas…. We are brought up under the sway of what seems to us a rather bourgeois conventionality.”

Apart from the fact that the term “bourgeois,” contradictory to the aristo-democratic ideal in essence, occurs in two of these statements, I do not think that they call for extended comment. These things, at least, no man has been able to say of Harvard; even to this day there remains a fierce, jealous, almost joyous tradition of intellectual freedom—in spite of all!

I say “in spite of all,” because I am now leaving the old Harvard and am about to record the deep conversion of recent years which says a prosperous and Philistine No to everything the old Harvard has said, and which is surrendering its spirit to the very forces against which the old Harvard made its arm strong and its heart of triple brass. I do not mean that Harvard will cease to be great; I do mean that it may cease to be Harvard. It is hard to deal with a phenomenon of this sort solely by means of actualities. I am describing the disintegration of a social background, the subsidence of one tone and the emergence, not yet complete, of another. But, yielding to the present insistence upon “facts,” I shall name a number of significant developments which indicate the nature of what I have called the changing temper at Harvard.

They are of two orders, social and intellectual. In the first group we have the senior and freshmen dormitories; a new insistence upon class lines; a new emphasis upon college spirit and with it a disquieting resurgence of that great abomination, “college life”; a change of attitude toward our much maligned “Harvard indifference” and “Harvard snobbery.” In the second class come the group system as opposed to the free elective system, the failure of cultural activities, the contempt for dilettantism, the emergence of the scholar. The last phenomenon is mentioned out of no overbearing desire to be either thorough or fair; it has a significance of its own.

Superficially the most striking of these changes is the extraordinary importance attached to class lines. It will be remembered that when President Wilson tried to reform Princeton with the Oxford system as a model, he was balked by precisely this feeling of class unity. At Harvard the thing was not unknown; but it was not important. Princeton men rejoice that their freshmen are compelled to wear caps, black shirts and corduroy trousers for the first three months of the year, so that no snobbery may develop! To the healthy Harvard man this seems sheer insanity—democracy run to seed. Such solicitude for promiscuity seems to intend a horrible mistrust of something, and certainly a beautiful misapprehension of what democracy means. I am speaking not from mere personal experience, but from that of generations of Harvard men, when I say that it has been possible for a man to go through his four years without knowing more than ten men in his own class intimately, yet acquiring all that college could give by knowing the finest spirits in a whole college cycle. The new order will change all this. It will not forbid a man to seek his acquaintances outside his class; but it will suggest and presently it may insist that his duty to his class can only be fulfilled by cultivating the acquaintance of all who entered college on the same day as he. We may live to see the time when Harvard will emulate the Yale man’s boast that he knew all his classmates (but one) by their first names!

The outward forms of this change are the senior and freshmen dormitories. The former resulted from the great schism of 1909 when the Gold Coast was defeated in the vote for class officers by the poorer men living in and about the Yard. It was considered intolerable that a class should be so divided and a decided effort was made to get the rich society men to live in the Yard, beside their poorer fellow-students, during their senior year. This has been a great success! A group of men, friends for three years, bound by steady companionship and natural affinities, occupy one entry of Hollis. Another group, equally bound by totally different sympathies and activities, occupy another. They nod to each other as they come from class. If a man in one group is taking the same course in Engineering as a man in the other, they may discuss a problem or denounce a “stiff” hour exam. in common. There their ways part. It seems inconceivable that the heads of a great college should have been able to believe that the mere accident of adjacent rooms could actually be the basis, or even the beginnings, of a true democratic spirit of fraternity. And—let me anticipate—if the college had not ignominiously failed in its effort to supply a true basis of fraternity, it would not now be driven to a method so childish and so artificial as that of class grouping.

But if the senior dormitories are merely silly, what can be said of the plan to house all the freshmen together in a group of buildings far removed from the centre of college activities? It is not here a question of whether they “will work,” but of the spirit which prompted their foundation. They will not be as bad as their opponents may imagine, because nothing will break down the tradition of free intercourse, and the man who writes or the man who jumps will inevitably seek out his own. But it is certainly a weakening of Harvard’s moral fibre that an effort should be made to “help along” the freshmen, instead of compelling them to fight their own way. That the change really drives into the spirit of Harvard can be judged by these significant instances of the attitude taken toward the new scheme by graduates, undergraduates, and by the college authorities. First consider the testimony of an alumni organization secretary. In a conversation he said, “We have found it the hardest thing in the world to persuade graduates that Harvard needs freshmen dormitories. They are perfectly willing to subscribe for dorms, but they balk at the freshmen restriction.” Among the undergraduates there exists a peculiar feeling of relief that they came to Harvard before the buildings were up. Even those who defend them and say that they “will be a good thing for the freshies,” do not regret that the “good thing” was not for them. Articles have been written in undergraduate publications defending them, but I do not know a single man in the present (1914) senior class who passionately regrets that they were not built four years ago. And finally from the college itself came distinct and explicit denial that there is any intention of tucking the freshmen into bed at nine o’clock each night. Hein!

And the result: a wonderful renaissance of the demand for “college spirit.” College spirit is, of course, nothing in the world but undergraduate jingoism. The desire to cheer his team is one which no man can afford to miss, but it points to an undeniable falling off in democracy when the “rah-rah” spirit can dominate a college and call those who will not yield to it unfaithful and unworthy. Under that tyranny Harvard is already beginning to suffer. Further, men are beginning to be urged to do things not because they want to do them, but for Harvard’s sake. They are urged to back their teams for the sake of the college and its reputation. It will seem incredible, but there actually appeared in the columns of an undergraduate publication an ominous exhortation “not to be behind Yale” in showing our spirit.

Disagreeable as these things are, they are inconsidered trifles beside the change of attitude which has taken place in regard to the serious work of the college. I cling, in spite of successive disillusions, to the belief that the function of the college is to create a tradition of culture: it is not to create gentlemen or scholars unless it can effect the combination of both, and it is certainly not to prepare men for success in business. Success in life is a different matter. College should not spoil a man for life; it should enable him to appreciate life, make him “able and active in distinguishing the great from the petty.” That is what culture means; and that is precisely what Harvard has decided not to do. Emphasis there has borrowed from emphasis everywhere. The advantage of President Lowell’s system of course grouping is that the undergraduate is no longer able to take 17 uncorrelated courses and achieve a degree; he must know a good deal about one thing at least. But aside from the obvious fact that a great many freshmen are incapable of choosing their life work and choose what is easiest for them, the group system has a terrible defect. It has come about that men choose their group from worthy or unworthy reasons and consider that they have acquired all the good of a college career if they have done creditable work in that particular group. The other courses are merely “fillers.” The majority of men are content to concentrate, to narrow their interests, and the whole meaning of college, which is to prepare the way for future enlargement of sympathies, has been lost. Figures cannot be cited for or against this assertion. But some tendencies now discernible at Harvard may be illuminating.

First, the scholar has emerged. He has become respectable; he has also become a specialist, Economics, Government and the practical sciences being the favored groups. Second, there has grown up a great and loud contempt for the dilettante and æsthete. I hope these words will not be misunderstood. The dilettante at Harvard is any man who writes, thinks, talks well, is not particularly athletic and does not go to the moving-picture shows which have become the chief attraction at the Harvard Union. (This last, by the way, is not fantasy but fact; the “movie” has proved the great agent for class solidarity at Harvard). An æsthete at Harvard is one who has any diversity of interests and activities. At Harvard it is almost a crime to be interested in art, anarchism, literature, music, pageantry, dancing, acting; to write poetry or fiction, to talk English, to read French (except de Maupassant) for pleasure. Mr. Eric Dawson, whose article in The Yale Lit I have already quoted, advises the Yale man to keep it darkly secret “if he cares for etchings, prefers Beethoven to Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and Meredith to Meredith Nicholson.” It is a terrible commentary on Harvard’s intellectual life that the words should be applicable now.

They are. Within the past three years the degeneration of every cultural activity has been persistently rapid. The Lampoon alone resists, and it is marked by its satire on all the new movements. The Socialist Club was founded in 1909. Its boast that it included the active intelligence of the college was always a gross exaggeration, but it was in itself active and intelligent. This year it is practically dead; free, incisive thinking has gone out of fashion. The Dramatic Club started at about the same time with high ideals and even higher achievement. Its record for the past two years has been one of protracted failure. (There is some excuse; other organizations have taken some of its most talented actors.) The activity is too “detached” for Harvard men of the brave new stripe. Even more disastrous has been the career of The Harvard Monthly—The Atlantic Monthly of the colleges—which was founded about thirty years ago and has had on its boards such men as George Santayana, Professor George P. Baker, Robert Herrick, Norman Hapgood, and a host of other distinguished men. It always lacked popular appeal, but there were always enough men at Harvard to produce a superior magazine and almost enough readers to make the production worth while. Within the last few years it has been found almost impossible to keep the Monthly going, and its dissolution is imminent. It may combine with The Advocate, another paper of other ideals, once graced with infinite wit, now failing because that too is out of fashion. It is possible that these activities may revive, that succeeding generations will take up the slack. That is the work of individuals. The creation of a receptive body is the work of the college, and that has been forgotten.

And if you ask what the Harvard man is doing, what he is talking about, while these activities are being ruined before his eyes, the answer is not merely as Mr. Stearns gave it, that the Harvard man talks smut. So do most other men. The terrible thing is that the Harvard man talks very little else that is worth listening to. Lectures, cuts, assignments, exams, and shows; baseball, daily news (a mere “Did you see that?” conversation), steam engines; girls, parties, class elections, piffling nonsense—that is the roster of the college man. I am terribly conscious of the intolerable stupidity of “intellectual” conversation; I do not wish that conversation at college should consist of nothing but considerations of the Fourfold Root. But it does seem rather unfortunate that the men who are, theoretically, to be the leaders of the next generation, should never talk or think about art, should have no interest in ideas, should be ignorant of philosophy and impatient of fine thinking, should use their own tongue as a barbarous instrument, should be loud and vulgar of speech, commonplace in manner, entirely lacking in distinction of spirit and mind.

The college has failed to make intelligent activity the basis of democracy; there is no community of interest in things of the mind or spirit and that is why artificial means, with the peril they bring to the individual, are resorted to. How far President Lowell is responsible for that which has happened in his administration is a question I cannot answer. He has seen the signs of his time; he has warned Harvard of the terrible danger which has come to it with the decadence of individual study and independent reading. He is trying to make intellectual activity the basis of Harvard’s democracy at the very moment when he is the ablest of those who in reality help to sustain all that I have here ventured to criticise.

It has been in no reactionary spirit. I have not intended to say that Harvard actually produces the type I have described. The truth is that it does so little to refine what it gets. The care of the superior individual, which always results in the greatest benefit to all, has ceased to engross the college. The new order will not be of the same heterogeneous excellence. That change all suffer, and all resent. Granted that the new Harvard will be glorious and great, was there not room, besides all the State colleges and the technical schools, for its intransigeant detachment, its hopeless struggle for a “useless” culture? It will be said that for such a training men should go to smaller colleges, like Amherst, where they will receive the special attention they may deserve. But I think of what William James said once of Harvard, and I wonder what Harvard men, and what the country, will do when they realize that it can never be said again:

“The true Church was always the invisible Church. The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons…. As a nursery for independent and lonely thinkers … Harvard still is in the van…. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product!”

THE NEW STEERAGE

FRANCIS BYRNE HACKETT

ELEVEN hundred of us, perhaps twelve hundred, were booked steerage from Liverpool to New York. We had been brought to the dock at noon, away from our friends, though we heard the vessel was not to leave till five. On the other side of a stone pier rose the huge Lusitania with her four funnels. Everyone on our tender moved expectantly forward. There was an official cry: “Britishers first!” The chosen of the Lord! But the horde of ignorant foreigners came surging ahead. Miscellaneously we crowded up the gangway. Another gangway sloped for us on to the Lusitania. Several British policemen and stewards faced us to keep us in line. At so many guardian angels we began to feel depressed.

Medical inspection. The instant we put foot on the deck of the Lusitania, this was our first business.

“Have your Inspection Tickets ready.” Before we could inquire what was going to happen, it was happening. We were passed in a slow trickle between two officials. “Take off your hat.” “Take off your glasses.” I stood blinking while the doctor deftly plucked up my eyelids. He waved me ahead, my ungranulated eyelids made harsh by the handling. Hundreds were before us on the deck, and those from behind began to press on our heels with the inevitable “myself first” impulse of human beings. We were a medley of races, Swedes, Greek, English and Welsh, Irish, Russian Jews, Poles, mute Lithuanian peasants, and men from a Northern race who turned out to be Finns. It was almost as cosmopolitan as the Third Avenue Elevated. We advanced with repeated hesitations and conscious slowness. A woman turned white in the crush and had to be helped to a seat near an open porthole. In front of me, a 12-year-old boy, dead beat, leaned against his big brother—and under his arm, if you please, wearily hugged a camp stool. “Why doesn’t he sit on the stool?” The mother, a thin, strained, admirable creature, whose face showed the fine wrinkles of a life too intent, allowed me to open the stool for him. From his low seat he rewarded me more than once with a look of confidence and smiling good-nature. They had travelled by rail all night, the mother volunteered, from a town in Wales. They were on their way at last to join the father in California. “I have two more in California”—the mother pointed to her children, who cheerfully smiled.

Women and children. During that weary wait I observed them here and there, standing submissively for three-quarters of an hour. At length, after the long halt, the tension was relieved, and we moved again, this time past another doctor. “Take off your hat.” The doctor had apparently to inspect the unnaturalized polls on which that morning we had paid a four dollar tax. He was a man of great perception, the doctor, and the actual examination was an affair of split seconds. On completing the circuit of the deck our yellow Inspection Tickets (given to us at the office in the morning when we had paid our $37.50 for the passage) received their first stamp. The Cunard Line accepted us as healthy live stock.

My Inspection Ticket said Room H 22, and a steward took me there. There were seven other occupants. Most of them were taking their ease in their berths and smoking. They were all English or American. I responded to their cheery hello, but their carbonic gas was strong, and the portholes proved to be immovable. I sat down on a lower berth, bumped my head against the top one, and had hardly room for my knees in the aisle. My carbonic gas did not improve the air. I felt discouraged, and went out. Nearby I saw a most capacious 4-berth room, and there was a vacancy in it. Henri Bergson says that “life proceeds by insinuation.” I felt less gloomy. I found the bedroom steward and asked him whether I could be changed. He was amicable but not quite concrete, a bit of a Jesuit. About this time word flashed by that we were back at the Landing Stage for the cabin passengers: deferring the affairs of moment, I went on deck.

We all pushed aft for a good view, only to find a rope stretched across the deck, and a grim sailor guarding it. “That’s all the scope you get.” We flattened back against one another. And they let down a beautiful canopied gangway for the upper classes.

Braided officers stood in a row to receive, on a nice clear deck. All the stewards were lined up in fresh white coats. Against the sky line we studied the new angles of hat plumes. On they stepped with leisured gait, with an air of distinguished fatigue. “The daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks, walking and mincing as they go.” Indifferently they handed their light burdens to the now demure stewards. I looked around at my comrades back of the rope. A child in arms next to me chortled as he bandaged his mother’s eyes. She gently removed the bandage, only to be blinded again. Behind me, a buxom Swede looked open-eyed at her feathered sisters abaft. Everywhere the interest was intense and simple. I turned again to envisage the daughters of Zion. As in another world they moved—a world where policemen are unnecessary, where stewards are spring-heeled, where officers stand in line, where eyelids are not officially scrutinized nor polls inspected, where the gangway has a canopy and weariness is consoled. I admired “the bravery of their anklets, and the cauls and the crescents; the pendants, and the bracelets and the mufflers.” Must it not be delightful, said I to myself, to merit so much attention from everyone, and to be so prettily arrayed? Must it not be pleasant to have eyelids so immune, and to have a quite uninspected poll?

The last piece of first-class baggage rolled aboard. Giant hawsers strained, and were released. It was departure. From my coign at a deck porthole the Landing Stage came into focus. I confess I exclaimed. As far as the eye could reach, on the water and street levels, the glance of thousands on thousands was rivetted on the vessel as she cautiously edged away. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sky innocently blue. All indifferent to us in the background stood the massive city of Liverpool, concentrated on affairs, but no less indifferent to the city itself ranged this childlike, almost awestruck, army of curiosity, silently intent on us as we receded into the river. From our porthole (I was joined by a Syrian) we could not help a glow of pride. My companion was not able to vent his feelings in English, but he was quite moved. His was an Indian-like head—high cheekbones, thin lips, hard, beady eyes. He dwelt on the vast crowd, ejaculating “ah-ye-ye-ye,” and clucking his tongue. I smiled at his solid wonderment. Then he craned out of the porthole to view the water far, far below. I followed suit. He pointed down, and gave a significant, cheerfully reckless laugh. I laughed, too. We were in for it, and no mistake.

The steamer’s first evening was spent, doing nothing, out in the Mersey. The tide was in some way blameworthy. It seemed inefficient of nature, but as we lay opposite Liverpool the night-lights came out, definite and serene and friendly, and I took out my mental clutch.

Time came for supper. I reserved for the morning the mysteries of the cuisine. I had earlier gone below to the pantry, after some talk with a humane steward, and to my surprise I had been allowed to help myself to a cup of tea.

The first evening was one of extraordinary activity. Still in their best clothes, around our half of the entire deck poured streams and streams of passengers. It was almost impossible to tread one’s way. And in several places these streams turned themselves into dancing whorls, where volunteers with a concertina had appeared. I happen to like the concertina, and I enjoyed it during five entire days, though not so much the concertina as the movement of life which it promoted. There were never any deck sports, nor games, nor organized distraction. But, except for one awful seasick period, there was endless dancing and singing. On this first evening I stood in the rings that framed the waltzers, and my blood raced with their pleasure. The Swedes in particular took part much and well. They occasionally ventured on those new forms, but only for dancing reasons. When Swedes really want to hug each other, they do it openly and for its own sake.

To increase the friendliness of the evening, everyone was willing to talk a little. I chatted with a Russian, a Greek, an Englishwoman and an Englishman. He was a young and unhappy Englishman, and in disgust at the ignorant foreigner. I later learned that he made up the difference and was allowed to go second class.

At 9 p.m., tired of repeated searches for my bedroom steward (he was dishing out in the pantry most of the time), I went to the assistant chief steward of the third class to see if I could be transferred to the 4-berth room. He’d see, he said in a serious bass voice, he’d let me know. At 9.30 p.m. he again told me he’d see. Whether he has yet seen or not I have no means of discovering. At 10 p.m. I took the berth, with the consent of the other men in the cabin. I gave my tip to the bedroom steward, as I guessed he was the less Tammanyized. The assistant chief steward was a strong character, free from numerical superstition. He asked 13 cents for five penny stamps.

In my room the bedding proved simple—a coarse white bag of straw for mattress, and one dark blue horse blanket for clothing. A small pouch of straw served as pillow. No linen, of course, and no frills of any kind. There was an iron spring frame. I found it ascetic but clean. The single blanket was not enough. I used my rug, and my fellow passengers used overcoats and rugs, too. The mattresses, I was told, serve just one trip. They are dumped overboard as soon as the steamer is out to sea on the return voyage. In my bed I was the only living creature present.

Those who rose early had advantages. They had first use of the tin basin in their own room, or of the bowls in the general washing room. They had a bid for the solitary bath tub in male steerage. They were up in time to be allowed to walk all the way aft, and look down the wide lane of jade and white in the wake of the Lusitania. And they were in time for the first sitting.

Those who did not rise early had to listen to the tramplings that began long before sunrise. Despite this, I got up late. Fifty of us waited over half an hour outside an iron grill at the head of the dining room stairs. The dining room is quite inadequate, so there had to be four sittings—first come, first served. When we reached below we took seats where we could. There was an understanding, however, by which Britishers were grouped together. This was made effectual by stewards who stood where the ways parted, and thrust Jews and Poles and mid-Europeans to one side, and Britishers and Scandinavians to the other.

On the whole, the food during the trip was edible. I could not eat the bacon or the beef. I did not try the eggs. The tea was vile and usually not very hot. The coffee was vile. But the bread, served in individual loaves, was most palatable. The Swedish bread was excellent. The oatmeal was edible, even with the wretchedly thin condensed or dried milk. We had herrings and at another time sausages, and both were fair. The potatoes were always excellently boiled and good of their kind, but the browned potatoes were invariably overcooked and not fit to serve. The cold meats for supper could be eaten. The boiled rice was insipid. The stewed prunes and stewed apricots were palatable. I had very good baked beans and navy beans, good pea soup and fair broth. I had no complaints to make of the food. I never decided whether it was butter or margarine, but I ate it willingly. It certainly had not that callously metallic taste that margarine used to have.

The service was on bold, wholesale lines. Twenty sat at each table, and there were two equipments of bread and butter, sugar, salt, pepper and vinegar. A disconsolate plant decorated each table. One steward took charge of each ten people. I sat at a different table practically every time, and most of my companions were delightfully obliging and unaggressive. Only those who so wished had to stand up and harpoon their bread roll. There were a few tiresome people who damned the food and failed to pass the salt. The stewards were elusive, or rather that one-tenth part of a steward who was your share. I regretted on one occasion to discover egg shells in my dessert, and the next day I was pained to find a knob of beef in my stewed apples. My sympathetic steward remarked: “Puts you a bit off, don’t it?” It do.

From about five in the morning till eleven at night these stewards are working. Work is a good thing. It is strange that the stewards look unhealthy and fatigued. It is due to the inherent inferiority of stewards.

Queenstown was the distraction for several hours on the first day out. The Cunard and White Star Lines have just discerned that the harbor is unsafe for big boats. At what point of profit, I wondered, would Queenstown harbor suddenly and miraculously become safe again?

As we left the coast of Ireland there came an unctuous swell upon the sea. You would not think it could upset anyone, but when I ascended after dinner I was horrified. Rows of passengers lay where they were stricken, all too evidently ill, ghosts of their braver selves. The stewards were in the dining room and could not come, and did not come, for well over an hour. For well over an hour no effort at all was made to clean the decks. I now understood this grave disadvantage of third class, to which the company itself contributes. But there was much kindness to the decimated, and much tolerance. Later I admired immensely the work of the matrons. I seldom met three more splendid, capable, sympathetic women. There were superior passengers who despised the childishness with which simpler people gave in. I myself laughed when I saw a girl lying with complete abandon plumb on top of another girl. The grim sailor heard me and muttered: “Only an ignorant person’d laugh at anyone was seasick.”

During this distressing hour a Russian came flying to the master at arms. “The doctor! the doctor!” “You can’t have the doctor,” said the man in blue, not unkindly. “We can’t help seasickness. It’s got to be expected.” “The doctor! Not seaseek! dead!” He made a ghastly face. “Oh, all right,” said the master-at-arms, and we went straight below.

Terrific pleading calls shook the cabin. “Sonya! Sonya!” The master-at-arms walked right in, and emerged supporting a sack-like girl, very white and inert. “You could cut the air with a knife,” murmured the weary master-at-arms. He assisted her on deck, and she was wooed to consciousness.

At this time, on the enclosed deck, there was much commotion. A striking red-haired Jewess, clad in green, had fainted and was put sitting on a bench. A venerable Jew appealed to her excitedly while an earnest young soul at the other side cried for water. It made me furious to see the limp woman propped up, but they were evidently playing according to the rules of a different league. The water at last came and much to my surprise the earnest soul put it to her own lips. But not to drink it. In her the Chinese laundryman had an efficient rival. She was the most active geyser I ever saw. After a time there was a feeble motion of protest, to the regret of the delighted spectators.

On the open deck during this weather the Jews monopolized one corner. I counted thirty of them huddled inseparably together in their misery, like snakes coiled in the cold. As they began to recover, a leg would wiggle from under one blanket, and a head be thrust out from under another. Later they sat up and drank their tea out of glasses, nibbling the sugar. They soon littered the place with apple peels and orange peels. After generations of inhibition they probably needed to be told that they were permitted by a merciful dispensation to use the sea as a waste basket.

As the sea fell slumberously still, life recovered its audacity. Again the decks became clamorous, multitudinous. People thronged the promenade, or swarmed on the benches that do duty for deck chairs. They began smoking everywhere again, and out came the stewards and the Black Crowd to enjoy a sociable cigarette. There was little to do but talk, until the dancing began. The grim sailor looked pityingly on Babel, as he patrolled the Second Class partition. He was for smaller ships. “On a smaller ship,” he deigned to remark, “you can come up and throw your weight around.”

Differences in manners obtruded. The third day out a youth emerged whom I took to be a swineherd from the beech forests of Croatia. He was not handsome. His fringe encroached upon his little eyes. His chin was unformed. Up over his trousers, as if he had just waded through the piggery, his socks were drawn. There he stood, plastic youth, a hand in his pocket, pivotting a heel, surveying the world through his own hirsute thatch. Suddenly, deliberately, he blew his nose Adam-like. A Swedish woman next me turned livid. “De dirty pig.” I felt myself the brother of a Swede. The Croatian saw us but beheld us not. His mouth ajar, he ruminated afresh on the fleshpots of Croatia. Raw material, simple even to the verge of our ancestral slime. I prayed “God be with thee,” and looked elsewhere.

That evening amid the throng which waited for admittance to the dining room appeared a Greek. The glaring electric light concentrated on that swart face, flung-out chest, and bared neck. He was incredibly blasphemous and incredibly self-important. “Seventy-five dollars, see. American money!” He showed his money to us, and gave a chuckle. His lip curled. “They only Hunkies,” indicating his companions who connected themselves with him by slavish eyes. “I in America before, Christ, yes!” His eye roved boldly, and he showed his white teeth. “I got more money still, you bet your life. When I get over I marry no Hunkie. I marry Henglish girl. Yeh, Christ, you bet!” He antagonized us, and yet we watched him eagerly. He lapped up our interest. Overcome with the savor of attention, he incontinently spat. I drew away. “It’s a’ right,” he said half-obsequiously, “I know what I do. I no’ spit on American.” He felt too much kinship to spit on an American.

So things happen, but only in the steerage. At the door of the café below, you will not find a Polish count informing the steward: “I marry a Henglish girl. No penniless Hunkie for me.” Nor will the first-class steward answer: “Who cares? Who’ll buy a beer?”

In all these days, among all these peoples, there was no friction. Some youths did start to make boisterous fun of two barefooted Italian women, walking up and down in bright petticoat and kerchief. But the Italians smiled and skipped back and sat down, and there was no more “fun.” Between congruous people intercourse was easy and frank. The fresh-hued Scandinavians were exceptionally lively. A little English group revolved quietly together, with a private afternoon teapot for central sun. Another little group, including two girls in service, a cotton spinner and a grocery clerk, often sat in the prow and talked amiably about anything from the food on board to their notion of a God. They say that “sociability proceeds from weakness.” Steerage, at any rate, is highly sociable. In some cases it was also frankly amatory. The attractive girls, so soon well known, seemed to have no fear of the predatory males. They took each other lightly. But at 9.30 p.m., all the feminine kind, even the rebellious, had to leave their conquests and go below. This rule was enforced to the letter.

Two days before landing we had another medical experience. We learned that American citizens in the third class were immune from smallpox and need not be troubled on that score, but that aliens in the third class must all be vaccinated. It was said there were ways of evading this, but I found none. For several hours we were assembled while the women filed in. After an hour in line, our turn came to enter the surgery improvised in the companionway. On a table flamed a number of small spirit lamps, over which the stewards sterilized the metal scrapers. I bared my arm, as per orders from a pasty youth. The doctor answered my queries by taking my arm, scraping it gently and applying the lymph. “It is not our law,” he said politely. “Take this chap,” motioned a bullet-headed assistant, and I was shoved to another group. “Rub it off,” whispered a friendly scullion, but I let it stay, out of curiosity. The new group crowded around another big table. An additional hour’s standing brought up my turn to answer the clerk’s questions. He recorded on the manifesto that I was destined for Brooklyn and had friends. This was added to the facts I had provided when I engaged passage. I was now catalogued for Ellis Island.

The day before landing there was, I believe, another medical inspection. We got in line for it, but the crowd simply disregarded the stewards, and I never even saw the doctor. On that evening the barriers were partly down, and the Goths and Huns invaded two decks.

It was Friday morning before we came into the yellow waters of the harbor, and passed under the cliffs of Manhattan. Already a fissure had appeared in the steerage. On one side, separated from us more and more, went the naturalized citizens, each armed with his papers. On the other, we aliens congregated, to be shipped in due time to Ellis Island.

It was an inhuman morning, a morning of harrowing strain and confusion. Though the inspection of baggage amounted to nothing in itself, especially as there had been no preliminary declaration, there was the uncertainty, and the three hours’ delay. Searching for baggage, waiting for inspectors, hectored and shouted at, the poorer immigrants reminded one of Laocoön. And then we had to wait for the boat to Ellis Island, and we had to lug our hand baggage with us for the hours that were to come. This fact alone made the day an ordeal for all except the strongest, a brute ordeal to which wealthier folk would not submit for two successive days.

On the Ellis Island boat we were crammed like cattle. “Move up, I say, move up. God! move UP, you damned kike!” So spoke our burly exemplar of American citizenship. We “moved up” until the last square foot of floor was shut off from sight by close-packed bodies. We coöperated with the U. S. Government as well as we could to provide conditions for another Slocum disaster. When such a disaster does occur on one of these old boats, every editor in the country will demand with magnificent emphasis: “Fix the responsibility!” Let us by all means wait till the steed is stolen.

Ellis Island basked in the sun. It was handsome and trim and restful, after the swarming pier. We entered the fine examination building single file, always lugging our suitcases and bundles and bags and wraps and boxes and babies.

Medical inspection, a real inspection this time. We passed through a cleverly arranged aisle, and at each angle a new doctor in khaki sought for blemishes. I finally impinged on a man who asked me if I could see well without my glasses. I answered: “Not at all.” He leaned over, and made two crosses in blue chalk on my raincoat. At the exit from this trap an attendant wrote another little piece on my raincoat, “Vis.,” short for vision. I was allowed to lay down my bags, and sit and wait for half an hour.

When the special examiners were ready, we were led up a corridor and shown into a bright room. Around the walls were men and boys in all stages of dress and undress, as at a bathing beach.

“Ken you read English?” I said yes. “Read that over there.” A familiar oculist test card hung on the wall. Being already so tired that I would have welcomed deportation, I resentfully choked out: “B, T B R, F E B D,” and so on. “All right, doc.,” said the attendant, and a civil man at a high desk silently handed me an initialled slip. Outside this was taken, and my dilapidated Inspection Ticket was stamped “Specially Examined.” I had passed the test, and went back for my baggage to the ante-room. A woman there, flushed and petulant, commented on her being examined. The attendant turned away contemptuously. “Aw, she’s ben hittin’ the pipe, or somethin’.”

Up the steps into the great hall I proceeded. It resembled a big waiting room, where to my delight benches ran the length of the room. It was now nearly three, and I had neglected to eat anything all day. In the particular bench decided by my Inspection Ticket, I emphatically sat down.

At the far end of these benches ran a long screen at right angles. In that screen were a number of gates. Each gate was guarded by a seated official with our manifestoes on the desk before him. Through those gates we immigrants were being sieved into the United States.

At last I was in the sieve. The guardian of the gate was kind of voice. “You have a brother in Brooklyn, eh?” “How much money have you got?” I was not asked to show it. “All right, pass on. No, there is nothing further. You can go as far as you like now!” Two of us from the Lusitania whipped down the steps, bags and all, and delivered up our Inspection Tickets at a last, final door. The sun shone outside. The air was fresh. The light danced on the sea. There were no more policemen, stewards, masters-at-arms, doctors, baggage examiners, attendants, inspectors. I drew a deep breath, and tried to forget the benefits of civilization.

On the ferry to New York there mingled future Americans from the Anchor Line and the Red Star Line, as well as from the Cunard. Already I could find only a few of my former companions. Some had gone before. Some were still on the Island. In the present crowd they were absorbed, obliterated. The little world of the Lusitania was already annexed by America, as a little meteor is annexed by the burning star. I regretted this absorption, this obliteration. For six days I had belonged to them, and they had belonged to me. I thought of their geniality, their simplicity, their naturalness, their long-suffering. I was sorry to say good-bye.

THE C. T. U.

GEORGE CRAM COOK

THE battle began Monday morning when Assistant Professor Clark seated himself facing the President in the President’s office.

“I want permission,” said the lanky, trim-bearded young man, “for Vida Martin, who is here raising money for the striking button-cutters of Manistee, to speak in Assembly Hall.”

The President’s grey eyes opened a little wider, then narrowed shrewdly. He swung a little in his swivel chair, and pulled his graceful iron-grey moustache. Then he said gently: “Would you regard it as proper for the University to take sides to that extent in an industrial dispute?”

“We listened to Judge Graham’s Menace of Syndicalism.”

“An address which was general. This is a specific conflict.”

“Judge Graham talked about it.”

“In illustration of his general point. Miss Martin, I understand, talks of nothing else. She is an extreme radical—a professional firebrand. I am surprised to find a man of your standing in sympathy with her ideas.”

“I’m not—altogether,” replied Clark. “That is scarcely a sufficient reason for not listening to them. I want our students to hear her side of the case—undistorted.”

“We cannot lend unsound cases the weight of university authority,” said the President.

“Judge Graham’s case was thoroughly unsound,” said Clark. “Vida Martin is, as you say, an extreme radical. But we have listened to an extreme reactionary. If it is the policy of the University not to take sides, it cannot invite him to speak and refuse to let her. Her subject, I ought to say, is general—the Ideals of Syndicalism. As to her soundness: she knows industrial unionism from the inside—her own experience as organizer. She knows its leaders personally. All Judge Graham knows is his own prejudice against labor and some newspaper stories.”

The President swung back to his desk and arranged some papers.

Clark sat there looking irritatingly thorough.

“What made you take the responsibility of discussing this with Vida Martin?” the President demanded.

“I met her on the train from Manistee last night. I used to know her at Hull House. She spoke of the dismissal of Brooks and Gleason here last year for insisting on their right to express their real ideas, and made the sweeping claim that there is no free speech in any American university. I said I’d disprove that by getting Assembly Hall for her. If she can’t have it, it seems to bear out her charge against us.”

“Haven’t you yourself enjoyed freedom of speech here?”

“Yes, I have. But frankly, I’m afraid I’ve never had anything to say that was dangerous.”

“Afraid! Your talk with Miss Martin seems to have had a singular effect on your point of view.”

“It has,” admitted Clark. “I never put such new life into the thinking of any student as she put into mine last night. Six years ago in Chicago she was not unlike me. If the labor movement makes her what she is and the University makes me what I am—there’s something wrong with the University. I think we should try to understand her.”

“By all means—those of us who have not already done so.”

Clark smiled.

“Understanding her is one thing,” said the President, nettled, “and giving her violent doctrines such sanction by the University as you propose is quite another. You’ve been carried off your feet. When you regain your balance you’ll thank me for not granting this wild request of yours. Is there anything further you wish to say?”

Clark rose to go. “Only that I regret this failure—of the University.”

“It’s not the University that’s in danger of failing, Mr. Clark,” said the President significantly.

Having sufficiently endangered his career to no purpose, Mr. Clark strode out of the Liberal Arts’ Building, past the black bulletin boards on which the announcement of Vida Martin’s lecture would not appear. He marched down the old flagstone walk beneath the oaks and budding maples and across to the hotel—a three-story brick building painted slate-grey.

There, with a local labor leader and the editor of a Bohemian paper who were helping her organize her meeting for the following night, he found Vida Martin, a trim, strong woman of thirty, not yet at the height of her vivid powers.

She handed Clark the first draft of a handbill. To his dismay it announced as the place of her meeting—Assembly Hall.

“That’s gone to the printers,” she said casually.

“I—I’m sorry,” said Clark. “I have misled you. My confidence in the University’s impartiality was misplaced. You must let me stand the difference in your printing bill. You have been refused the use of Assembly Hall.”

Vida Martin smiled at him the smile of a wicked minx. “You didn’t mislead me a bit, dear Kenton Clark,” she said. “I have already engaged the Opera House for to-morrow night.”

Dear Kenton Clark stared at the handbill. “Engaged the Opera House and printed Assembly Hall on your dodgers!”

She nodded. “My æsthetic sense,” she explained. “I thought how nice it would look to have a cunning red line through ‘Assembly Hall’ and ‘Opera House’ stamped on in red with a rubber stamp. Don’t you love to use a rubber stamp?”

As the guile of the agitator dawned on him he started to disapprove.

“It’s just a shame,” she said, catching his expression, “for me to come contaminating the innocent professorial mind with the spectacle of fighting tactics.”

He laughed. “The professorial mind isn’t wholly infantile. The University deserves what you’re going to give it. I shall announce your meeting in my classes.”

“Have you something else to do when you lose your job? Do you know that one of your Regents, H. P. Denton, owes his appointment to Steve Treadley of the Manistee Button Factory?”

“Rather than be controlled by considerations like that I will lose my job!” Clark replied hotly.

That was the mood in which he marched to his eleven o’clock lecture.

After it, at noon, he came down the central walk amid the sweaters and corduroys and fresh-filled pipes of the gossiping throng which carries books in straps, books in green bags, and books in spilly armfuls. His friend Guthrie of the English Department overtook him.

“What’s this about Vida Martin?” Guthrie inquired. “They say you’re lambasting the University because it won’t let her set up her soap-box in Assembly Hall.”

“Subtract the cheap fling and you have the idea,” Clark answered.

Guthrie shook his fine, big head. “Well,” he reflected, “you’re unmarried. But it isn’t a chip you have on your shoulder. It’s a log.”

“John,” said Clark, “your education is hideously defective. You’ve got to meet Vida Martin and learn what a soapbox is. Come to lunch with her now.”

Guthrie said he couldn’t because his wife was expecting him.

“Telephone her and come,” insisted Clark.

With an adventurous sense of breaking with routine and doing something interestingly dangerous, Guthrie telephoned, and came.

Five minutes after he met her he was quarrelling like an old friend with Vida Martin—over Thompson and Geddes’ “rustic reinterpretation” of evolution. Vida would none of it, holding that Nature’s creative centres are now great cities—where evolution is kept entirely too busy making a new kind of soul in women to bother with bugs and things.

Of the woman’s revolution Guthrie had a literary knowledge, but in his cooped life Vida was the first who embodied it—the first who viewed life with the unshockable tolerance of science, the first whose mental background was wholly non-theological, the first even who was wholly conscious of her economic independence and its implications. The new ideas and feelings alive in her made him see the paleness of what he had got from those plays, novels, and sociology books. The quiet fearlessness with which she gave him and Kenton Clark to understand that she had laid aside ready made morality, “the parasite code of woman subordinate,” took his scholarly breath. She had replaced it, he gathered, not with another code, but with a habit of discrimination “confronting apparent good and evil with armed light—the Ithuriel spear of woman free.” So unprofessorily the professor phrased it when the thoughts she stirred in him began to sing. He was not aware of it, but they sang the sooner because her heavy black hair had copper glints in it and the joy of thinking made her eyes such wells of light.

“I’ve been thirteen years here in my treadmill,” he said to her as he was leaving. “You, from your wonderful cities, make me realize that I have taught all the life out of my old knowledge. I need new contacts with the life of to-day. I must have more significant things to teach. I want to see all I can of you while you’re here, and then—it would help to keep in touch with you and your world through letters.”

He started to ask her and Clark to dinner, but reflected that he must first go home and lead up to that.

“There’s a living soul,” said Kenton Clark when Guthrie had gone.

“And with a flickering creativeness,” Vida added. “I wonder if anything could gather the flickers into a flame?”

“A passion for a woman,” Clark surmised.

“Or a cause.”

Afterwards they remembered her saying that, and looking back it seemed a premonition.

II

When he reached home that afternoon, Guthrie expended half an hour’s skilled energy in overcoming Mrs. Guthrie’s instinctive objections to the unusual, and the dinner invitation went over the telephone to Clark and Vida Martin.

Guthrie’s mind was full of glow and movement. His impulse was to draw in from Vida Martin as with a deep inhalation all the modernity he had missed—not merely her thoughts but her way of thinking, her inner feeling and her technique of conveying it. Her manner he felt to be not her own unaided invention but a social growth—a collaboration of many men and women moving in the same direction. He felt a need of moving with them.

The most tangible thing for him was an accent of sincerity in Vida which compelled her listener into an answering sincerity. He coveted the secret of that social power—the power of being and doing that. It rested down on a greater democracy than he had known—upon her sense of oneness with others, her feeling of non-superiority, her assumption: “You and I are fundamentally alike.”

He wanted to be with her long enough to catch that feeling, to have and to use it, giving it forth in turn to others. What a power to fill his students with! The teacher in him craved that secret of living. He wanted it to transmit; he wanted it as seed to sow in a more human seminar than he had yet conducted.

It meant scrutinizing, accepting and conveying the actual human truth about one’s own feelings and motives—without thought of whether they were or were not admirable. It meant the acceptance of one’s self as the most authentic human document—a desire and firm resolution not to embellish or in any way falsify that text in the mind of another.

One couldn’t do that and continue to set one’s self up professor-like as an example to youth. The power could be exerted only by taking youth completely into his confidence. Only one’s real, uncensored thoughts and impulses as they sprang out of one’s own nature had that quality he sought. He felt that he needed the help of Vida, with her long habit of truthful self-revelation, in learning to read that intricate, much disregarded text—himself.

In his new spirit he spoke to Mrs. Guthrie about the secret he wanted to acquire from Vida Martin, hoping to rouse in Anna a desire to acquire it for herself.

But Anna Guthrie was not prepared to take John’s grouping of himself and her as two human beings who had something to learn from a third. She was hurt that her husband should find in another woman something valuable which she herself lacked, and she thought him perfectly brutal in the bald way he came out with it. Things like that which would hurt people ought to be concealed. She herself concealed such things.

“Practising sincerity is like making a bargain,” Guthrie reflected. “It takes two. Not everyone is ready for it.”

To Vida arriving with Clark for dinner, Mrs. Guthrie was conventionally gracious—a manner she put on as she took off the all-over apron which protected her next to best dress in the hot kitchen. The green young Bohemian girl there was chiefly useful to Mrs. Guthrie as a topic of heartfelt conversation.

Vida avoided it by starting some talk with Lucy and Harold, aged ten and eight, who sat at a little table behind her. By the time she had them laughing Mrs. Guthrie’s prejudice began to thaw.

Their father noted their expressiveness with Vida. “They get it too,” he reflected. “They’re more human than I’ve realized. Anna and I have had too much the ideal of a child as a little obeying machine.”

When Mrs. Guthrie heard that the evening paper had a story about Vida’s exclusion from the University and Clark’s insubordination, she was perturbed by the question: “What will the President’s wife say of my having such a woman to dinner?”

The discussion which gave that dinner its importance sprang from Guthrie’s deploring, à propos of the danger of Clark’s dismissal, the fact that a professor could not act in accordance with his own judgment in such a matter without endangering his position. He gave a dozen instances of tyranny which seemed to have created in him only a sort of reflected personal resentment against particular presidents and regents.

“Why do you scholars allow the power to remove you to be placed in the hands of outsiders like the regents?” asked Vida, whose mind worked promptly from individuals to the system they stood for.

“Oh, that can’t be changed,” said Guthrie, off-hand.

“Why not?” she challenged.

“It’s as natural as sunrise,” he said. “We’re all controlled through bread and butter channels.”

“Other classes of workers are testing out ways of controlling their own bread and butter. Bread and butter freedom is precisely what the world now needs and seeks. Are university professors less capable of thought than button-cutters?”

“No,” said Clark. “But less capable of concerted action. We’re too confoundedly jealous and individualistic to work together.”

“How do you know that?” Vida demanded. “Have you ever tried it? With things as they are you certainly can’t fulfil your social function. You’ll either have to get together and secure your freedom or remain in a position where you cannot really influence your students.”

“But they do influence them!” protested Mrs. Guthrie.

“About all the students look to us for,” said Clark, “is credits. A credit costs on the average so much time and attention. A little more and they resent your overcharge, a little less and they gloat because they’ve been able to underpay.”

“Imagine their having such an attitude toward a live man dealing with live ideas!” exclaimed Vida. “Toward Bernard Shaw, for instance, lecturing on the necessity of extending to unmarried women the right to have children!”

Mrs. Guthrie looked apprehensively at Lucy and then at the young Bohemian girl who was bringing in the dessert. “Fortunately,” she said, “our professors do not care to deal with things like that.”

“No,” said Vida, “they prefer to let society continue unwarned its present insane treatment of illegitimacy.”

“There’s no question about our lack of freedom,” said Guthrie hastily, “nor about our need of it. But what means do you suggest to us, Miss Martin, for gaining it?”

“Well,” said Vida, “here’s Kenton Clark, one of the best economists in the country, in danger of being kicked out for recommending my lecture. Brooks and Gleason went the same way last year. Who kicks you out?”

“The President,” said Guthrie. “He holds his authority, however, from omnipotent Regents who can kick him out—and frequently do.” That idea seemed rather pleasant to Guthrie. He smiled at it.

“Why don’t you elect your own Regents and your own President—as Americans should?” asked Vida. “Why not insist that you shall be removable only by vote of your own colleagues? It’s absurd that a body of men as highly trained as a university faculty should not be self-governing.”

“Yes, yes,” said Guthrie, “it is absurd. But here’s the existing system. What force is capable of transforming it?”

“Organization,” said Vida, fresh from her button-cutters. “How many college teachers are there?”

“Twenty-eight thousand,” said Guthrie. “Five thousand of ‘em women.”

“But not five thousand of ’em men,” said Kenton Clark with a malicious chuckle.

“They would be—with power,” said Vida. “I’d like to see it. The scholar would become a real force. It would be good to see thinking married again to doing, after the long divorce that has made them both sterile.”

“There’s plenty of powder lying loose in discontented faculties,” Clark mused. “If only it could be rammed together and—touched with flame.”

“Be the flame!” cried Vida. “A movement nation-wide may sweep out from John Guthrie and Kenton Clark.”

Mrs. Guthrie pushed back her chair energetically, indicating that dinner was over. “Shall we go to the parlor?” she said. The three were so absorbed they did not hear.

“Could we get a dozen men who’d hold together, Guthrie?” said Clark.

“There are more than a dozen—twice that many—radicals in the faculty,” said Guthrie. “Whether they’d hold together——”

“The Regents would have to think a bit before they fired a dozen men,” said Clark.

He and Guthrie tried to see how to get the substance of the labor union idea without taking the name or the form. Vida told them the name was immaterial, the form essential. “You can’t get the strength of organization without organizing,” she said.

Their instinct was against applying the working-class method to their profession. They raised the difficulty of equal pay for unequal work and mulled around over it till Vida gave them up. “You’ve been too carefully selected,” she said. “It’s temperamental. No real revolutionist becomes a college professor.”

That set Clark and Guthrie persuading her of the advantages of the union—which college teachers certainly had the brains to perceive.

“Yes,” said Vida, “but the will to achieve them, the spirit to fight for them, the power to make sacrifices for them?”

Mrs. Guthrie sprang up. The movement, which drew all eyes to her, placed her unintentionally near Vida. “I don’t want Harold and Lucy sacrificed!” she cried.

Her primeval cry made Vida’s hand leap out and press hers for an instant. Mrs. Guthrie wavered between hostility to Vida’s doctrines and the attraction of that wave of sympathy which swept her like a physical force.

“The wives of the button-cutters are facing that to-night,” said Vida, her voice deepening. “Don’t you see why, Mrs. Guthrie? Through the present danger they seek the children’s greater safety.”

“Sit down, Anna,” said Guthrie. “This talk is going to lead to something.”

“It shouldn’t!” exclaimed Mrs. Guthrie. “It must not!” She turned to Vida. “The men who take the first steps—they will lose their positions. My husband’s salary is all we have. For a father of a family—it would be criminal. We can live very well as we are, John, as we always have. The Regents have even appointed a committee to see about raising salaries.”

“Our despotism is benevolent,” said Clark, “—if we’re submissive enough.”

“Our positions are insecure now,” said Guthrie. “To hold them some of us have to sacrifice the best that’s in us.”

“If it’s that or the children——” said Mrs. Guthrie.

“Don’t worry, Anna,” said Guthrie. “If we go into this it will be because we see it will make us more secure, not less.”

Mrs. Guthrie went to the children’s table, leaned over Lucy’s chair, and drew the girl’s head against her breast.

“What do you think, Lucy?” asked Vida.

“Papa ought not to have to do his work wrong to get money for us to live,” said Lucy. She rose and went to her father, who put his arm around her and hugged her.

Harold made a dive for the other arm. “I’ve got six dollars in my bank, Papa,” he said. “I’ll get along without the Indian suit and only buy the bow and arrow.”

III

In one of his classes next day Professor Guthrie, à propos of a literary-historical question of intellectual freedom, talked of the survival in American university government of the heretic-expelling machinery of the theocratic seventeenth century college. He said no professor who had a mind and spoke it was safe, and recommended the lecture of the syndicalist leader Vida Martin that night as promising to develop some new ideas on academic freedom.

It had never occurred to the students, accepting things as they found them, that it did not exist.

Vida’s handbills appeared with the cunning red line through “Assembly Hall.” Groups of students on the steps talked of the button-cutters’ strike, of syndicalism, of Judge Graham and Vida Martin. There was hot denunciation and defence of Professor Guthrie’s daring new ideas. He had stated the argument in the preface of Shaw’s Getting Married. The insulation between the university and the thought of the living world was broken.

A newspaper clipping about Vida Martin’s activity in university circles reached Regent H. P. Denton of Manistee, who caught a train from there that afternoon and called upon the President.

Some of the professors in the Opera House that night were furious at Vida Martin’s attack—the contrast she drew between striking button-cutters and submissive professors—her characterization of them as thinkers who dare not think. It seemed unjust to them because their submissiveness was a life-long habit and unconscious.

Some who realized this said it was stinging but salutary.

Hostile or friendly they felt the speaker’s personal force—the unfamiliar union in her mind of carefulness and fire.

During the lecture one ambitious assistant professor left to inform the President that he had been attacked in an alleged exposure of a connection between factory owners of Manistee and the Board of Regents.

The student president of the Y. W. C. A. who had recently acquired a taste for being shocked was disappointed because Vida advanced none of the ideas she was supposed to entertain regarding free love.

Mrs. Guthrie was in the dress circle with her husband and Clark. Reporters were watching them as the probable centre of a new storm in the faculty.

When Vida came to that “militant union which can restore the scholar’s dignity and through the fearlessness of freedom make the university teacher a living force as in the days of Abelard,” she surprised Clark and Guthrie by relating it closely to the syndicalist ideal. The organized college teachers should ultimately form a section of that part of the “one big union” which controlled education—a body of six hundred thousand teachers. She looked ahead to a far, fine goal. “Aside from its present, practical, fighting advantages,” she said, “this organization is a necessity as germ of a social organ essential to the future. It should be the crown of the crafts composing industrial society, not aloof from the working-class in disdainful superiority, but understanding its solidarity with all—free but responsible, governed not from without as now by the economic control of another class represented by Regents, but from within by the high technical conscience of the guild.” There a bigger vision of it opened to her unexpectedly. She spoke as awed by something mystic in her own unforeseen words. “The Scholars’ Guild,” she repeated. “It might become the central organ of the world’s new mind!”

That closed her lecture religiously. While the bulk of the audience was moving out—full of little explosions of argument—a number of instructors and young professors gathered around the lecturer near the stage door under the balcony. She found them surcharged with facts, and feelings, about the way they were governed.

When Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie reached the group, Sanders of the sociology department was talking energetically about recent magazine criticism of universities. “It’s unpenetrative,” he said. “They seem unable to see anything but undemocratic student fraternities. They don’t get in as far as the fundamental undemocracy of unelected governing bodies—much less to the revolutionary idea of a craft organization of teachers.”

“The last is new,” said a statistics man. “The editor of Science has been hammering for years on election of president by faculty.”

“The University of Washington has a big committee working on undemocratic government,” said Hastings the mathematician.

“So’s Illinois,” said some one.

“Cornell’s talking of letting full professors vote for a third of its board of trustees,” said a professor of engineering.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” said Vida, “if you put yourselves in a position to compel such an elementary right as self-government, instead of waiting to have a third of it bestowed—perhaps?”

“Certainly,” said the engineer. “The right is only secure if based on our own power to get and hold it.”

“We ought to have got together last year when Brooks and Gleason were fired,” said Hastings.

“Better late than never,” muttered Sanders. “We might save the next man.”

“Yes,” said Searles of the French section, “but what some of us want to know is why we have not heard of this militant union. It’s all right in the right hands. But who’s responsible for the idea? When and where did it start? Whom can one write to about it? Why isn’t it represented in our own faculty?”

Vida set her lips and looked at Clark and Guthrie. The iron was hot.

Clark struck. “It started in this faculty last night,” he said. The attention of the group, which included two newspaper men, centred upon him. “I was one of those present.”

There was a little thrill at the courage of his declaration. Vida loved him for it.

“I was another,” said Professor Guthrie.

Mrs. Guthrie caught his arm. “John!” she exclaimed beseechingly. The word filled the group with a sense of drama and danger.

“As senior in that discussion,” said Guthrie, unshaken, “I regard it as my duty now to invite others who feel possibilities in a movement for freer government to meet and consider plans.”

“When?” asked Searles promptly.

“And where?” Two or three spoke at once.

Mrs. Guthrie turned away despairingly and sank down in a theatre seat. The thing was going.

“I suggest my rooms now,” said Clark.

“I will join you there as soon as I have taken Mrs. Guthrie home,” said Guthrie. The footsteps of the pair echoed in the emptied auditorium as they went out.

The college teachers asked Vida Martin to give them the benefit of her organizing experience, and nine of them went to Clark’s rooms.

There two of them, one a specialist on the American revolution, cautiously declined to commit themselves to any action at that time, but the revolutionists increased their number from two to seven.

They threshed their way through a lot of instinctive, irrational objections to formal organization, and planned to dragnet the faculty for members. In a few days, as things were going, they could make their position impregnable.

That the organization they sought was essentially a union of their craft became so clear that a scorn of disguising names like league, association, and federation prevailed even against the statistician’s sarcastic suggestion that they dub themselves “Brain Workers, No. 1.”

“Professors’ Union” was rejected, not on account of its openness to ridicule, but because it did not include instructors and assistants. In order not to exclude small institutions “college” prevailed over “university.”

When they went home that night, glowing with their new communal hope, Guthrie was chairman and Clark secretary of the first local of the C. T. U.

IV

The brunt of battle fell next day on Guthrie. His eleven o’clock lecture was interrupted by a messenger with a note asking him to call at the President’s office at noon.

When he faced the Ruler in his swivel chair, that representative of things as they are was friendly of manner but meant business.

“I want to talk to you about you and Clark,” he said. “I have asked for Clark’s resignation, and I am extremely anxious not to have to ask for yours.”

“Clark dismissed!” exclaimed Guthrie. He realized that the President was striking too quickly for them, and groped for defence.

“I warn you fairly that the Regents are behind me,” said the President. “You have your choice of severing with that preposterous organization formed in Clark’s rooms last night or with the University.”

“You may not find it so simple a matter to dismiss teachers merely because they choose to form an organization,” said Guthrie, stiffening. “It is an open acknowledgment that freedom of action does not exist. Moreover, it is not two men you dismiss, if any, but—a considerable number.”

“I have reason to think not,” replied the President.

Guthrie was weakened by his lack of information, and by the fear that his colleagues had gone to pieces.

“Make no mistake,” said the President. “I am prepared to dismiss seven—if necessary. There are other reasons for your own dismissal. You supported Clark in his insubordination with regard to Vida Martin.”

“Since you did refuse to let her speak in the University what was there wrong in saying so?”

“Clark’s tone. And yesterday you came out astonishingly for sex-radicalism. The student president of the Y. W. C. A. came to me and protested, saying a professor in this institution had no right to corrupt the youth of the State with any such doctrine as unmarried motherhood.”

“Because I presented Shaw’s argument!” exclaimed Guthrie indignantly. “If you are going to adopt this girl’s point of view you will be compelled to maintain the position that the ideas of the most conspicuous living English writer shall not be mentioned to students of English in this University!”

“Well, Guthrie, you must know where the fathers and mothers of this State would stand in a fight about that. You cannot expect the University to rise higher than its source, and its source is the community.”

“The University has no reason for existence unless it rises higher than the rest of the community,” said Guthrie. “It is nothing if it is not able to lift itself out of the community’s inertia and maintain itself against the community’s prejudice. If you had not condemned without inquiry that organization formed last night, you might find that it contains the possibility of raising the faculty into precisely that commanding position.”

“I know the purpose of your organization, Professor Guthrie. Its success would mean the end of all directing authority. An executive could not discipline men upon whose votes he was dependent for continuance in his position.”

“That is absurd,” said Guthrie scornfully. “An English premier, dependent upon a parliamentary majority, possesses power enough to govern the British Empire. He is not able to dismiss members of Parliament. There’s no reason why the head of a university should have any such power. There is altogether too much disciplining of teachers for acting on their own honest convictions.”

“I won’t argue that matter of opinion,” said the President. “The fact is plain that you have placed yourself at the head of an organization directed squarely against the legally constituted authority of this University, and unless you drop it you go.”

Guthrie sat silent, facing what he felt must be a vain sacrifice of himself—and nothing gained for his cause. He heard the rushing click of typewriters through the closed door of an adjoining office. Their frequent tiny bells of warning gave him a sense of time moving too fast, events crowding too close.

The President rose and walked slowly up and down the room. “Can you afford it, Guthrie?” he said kindly. “How about your life insurance? Will it lapse if you stop payment? How about your house? Still paying for it?”

“You are remarkably well informed as to my private affairs,” said Guthrie coldly.

“You have given me reason to be. Your children are approaching their most expensive years. How about their education? Do you want Harold and Lucy Guthrie to sink back into the untrained, ignorant class?”

“That’s the fiendish cruelty of this!” cried Guthrie. He saw the eager face of Harold offering to sacrifice his little Indian suit. “That’s where you’ve got me,” he said despondently. “No wonder one of the Regents offered to double Clark’s salary if he would marry. There’s something hellish in a system that makes a slave of a man through the needs of his children!”

“It is doubtful if any other university will want you when it becomes known why you left here,” mused the President. “Don’t do it, Guthrie. You’ve been a living influence with our students. Many an old grad. is grateful to you for kindling in him here a life-long love of letters. You ought to go on doing that for twenty years.”

“It’s just because I do not want to stop being a living influence—— A man must grow or ossify. Yesterday a new world of thought, a new secret of living, a new sincerity, came to birth in my mind. You want me to kill it. That is not being a living influence. That is spiritual infanticide. It means my extinction as a free teacher. And deserting that organization I helped to form last night—that means dishonor!”

“No,” said the President emphatically. “You cannot be expected to sacrifice your career and your family because you happened to be carried away in a dramatic moment worked up by a professional agitator. You’ll see that within a month. This means your salvation from some wild ideas and wilder conduct.”

With an air of relaxing from strain the President dropped back easily in his chair. “That woman must be clever, Guthrie. Isn’t she?”

“She’s more than clever,” said Guthrie. “She’s a brave and skilful fighter for a great cause—a thing I cannot be. I cannot even face what every married button-cutter faces when he goes on strike!”

Partially realizing how low Guthrie was sinking in his own estimation, the President was not the man to let sympathy keep him from gaining his end. “Well, Guthrie,” he said, “I take it that chiefly on account of your children I may count on your withdrawing from the College Teachers’ Union.” He smiled. “I say nothing more about the sex-radicalism, for I feel sure you will yourself see the need of soft-pedalling that in the classroom and in public. I am heartily glad you are still going to be with us.”

Guthrie went out of the President’s office like a man who has been drugged. With an instinct to hide from every eye, he sought the noonday solitude of his seminar room, let the door lock behind him, and at the head of the long green table sank into that chair they called the chair of English.

There, in the hour of his degradation, he felt prophetically the ennui of the next twenty years—the dead thoughts he would there utter and reiterate—the bored young faces——

What had become of the interestingness of ideas? Where was that passion for the hard and glorious quest of the true truth within? Why had he been so fiercely bent on shaping new channels for his energy? He had no energy. His thwarted force flowed away from his will where it meant health and conquest into a morbid intensity of emotion—the road to melancholia.

He stiffened up. There was one pain he must meet now. There was that desire to hide to overcome—a self-revelation harder than any he had ever thought to make. There was shame to endure. “I have to tell her,” he said.

He rose and left his solitude, went down the deserted central walk, and over to the drab-colored hotel. He looked between the open double doors into the dining room. There were a dozen people. At the table by the window in the corner where he had sat with them two days before were Kenton Clark and Vida. They beckoned eagerly to Guthrie.

He found himself strangely unwilling to cross alone the moderately large square room. Its floor of alternate light and dark wooden strips seemed like a great open space in which something evil must happen. He yielded to the irrational fear which impelled him to slip around close to the wall.

Without waiting for him to take off his overcoat or sit down, Clark flashed news of his own dismissal—too much aglow with the war they were going to wage to perceive anything wrong with Guthrie.

“Searles wanted all six to resign!” said Clark in a low, eager voice. “Corking spirit, but we decided not. Six is too few. With six more—! If we’d only had a little more time! Never mind. The idea is sound. We’ll put it through. We’re going to raise a fund. I’ll give my whole time to it as organizer. Sit down, man, sit down!”

Guthrie shook his head.

Vida rose with sudden solicitude, came close and laid her hand on his arm. “What has happened to you, Mr. Guthrie?” she asked, so low that Clark barely heard.

“You are happy people,” said Guthrie, for a moment permitting her searching eyes to fathom his. “You will fight beautifully. I have failed you. The children were too much for me. I have caved in. I keep my job. I’m done for.”

He turned away, unable to endure their eyes. “Good-bye,” he said, and started back along the wall.

Clark sprang up, napkin in hand, knocking a knife to the floor. “Oh, here!” he protested.

Vida, with compassionate eyes on the retreating figure of Guthrie, stopped Clark with a gesture.

“That’s final,” she said. “He’s crushed. There’s no use torturing him.”

THE CARDINAL’S GARDEN

Villa Albani

WITTER BYNNER

HERE in this place which I myself did plan,

With poplars, oaks and fountains,—and with sculpture,

The rounded body of the soul of beauty—

Here in this garden, by my own command

I sit alone under the freshening twilight.

Not to my eyes shall be made visible

Ever again morning or noon or twilight,—

Not to my eyes—which are my servants now

No longer, save as servants in the grave.

But to my forehead and my finger-tips

The days give touch of bud and opening

And of their bloom and of their hovering fall.

The morrow shall be born with sighs and rain,

But this is peace, this twilight, this is pause

Between the sunny and the rainy day,

Pause for the elements, and pause for me,

As though it were a silver brook that ran

Between a blinded day and blinded night,—

Between the dust of life and the dust of death.

Why shall I sit here? Why are colonnades

And paths and pagan statuaries more

Adroitly dear to my unseeing eyes

Than all the beaded letters of the Books

And colorings of all the bended Saints?

Because I hear the stealing feet of peace

Among these marbles more than anywhere,

Than in that cell itself where I have been

True Christian and exemplar of the Creed

To my own heart. There, not a Cardinal

In a red pageantry of holiness

Before all comers, but a penitent

In humble nakedness before my God,

I found the potency of Jesus Christ….

And yet it is not there but here that I

Find peace. Sometimes I think that Hell hath set

An outer court for me within my garden,

That it may mock me better in its own!

But whether Hell or rank mortality,

This garden which I builded for my body

Is the one garden now wherein my soul

Finds comfort, benediction of the twilight.

There in my cell, drawn on the walls, arise

Old memories of craft and violence,

Of lust for carven images of beauty:

How in the night I sent my men to take

That obelisk which I had offered twice

Its value for and been refused,—to bring

That obelisk and set it in my garden.

The Prince of Palestrina never dared

(Such has my might been) to recover it!

Still I can see him gaping at the trick

And wishing he might strangle me, the trickster!

And though these eyes that cannot see would make

Me now no quick report if that same obelisk

Should be abstracted on a newer night,

Yet how these fingers and this heart would know!

Why shall my tears fall, as I sit among

My oaks and poplars, fountains and my sculptures,

Before my cypresses and Sabine hills?

Have I not seen them all a thousand times?

Are they not vanity? Would I behold

Them more? Life, to an aged Cardinal,

Blind and enfeebled, should but celebrate

The Sacrifice of Jesus Christ who died.

Time should grow short for prayer and preparation.

Why is it then that life has seemed to pace

More than enough its little path of vigil,

But not to know the endless path of beauty

Beyond the entrance and the mere beginning!

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour

Of death!… And, even while thou prayest, I,

Who should incessantly be praying also,

I who am Cardinal and might be Pope,

Sit with my blind eyes full of Pagan glory!—

Sappho, Apollo and Antinous,

And Orpheus parting from Eurydice!

First falls the breath before the drop of rain.

Before the rain shall follow, I have strength,

Praise God, still to support myself among

These marble temples, columns and museums,

These deities of beauty and of time.

Hail, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with Thee!

The obelisk is here. It has not been

Retaken. Pray for us now and at the hour

Of death! And I shall enter at my door

And seek the chimney-piece and stand before

My young Antinous from Tivoli,

With lotos in his hair and hands, who once

Belonged to Hadrian. And I shall touch

Again the garment of Eurydice,—

And wonder—when that final mortal touch

Summons Eurydice, summons my soul,

And when she turns and enters and is dark—

If Christ shall follow her and sing to her.

LADY ANOPHELES

E. DOUGLAS HUME

I HOLD no brief for the mosquito. She has always treated me as a mere restaurant, and I have provided her with so many meals that I feel all obligations to be already on her side. Also, her extreme talkativeness is almost as objectionable as her voracious appetite. Any one who has been kept awake by her buzz-z-z, buzz-z-z, buzz-z-z, on a tropical night must have come to the conclusion that “good will to all men” can never be strained to include good will to all insects. Moreover, the fact that the lady of the species alone feasts upon blood seems a reflection on the female sex. Yet, so it is: her husband is a harmless vegetarian.

All the same, when a sense of justice is strong, one does resent the misdemeanors of man being laid at the door of even the most exasperating insect. Certainly the sturdiest viewpoint of disease is to regard it as the outcome of inattention, personal or general, to one or other of nature’s observances. Instead, nowadays, parasitic organisms are blamed for most of the aches and pains of humanity, while their distributors are searched for in the realm of insects and animals. The mosquito has, perhaps, fallen a prey to her own weakness. Had she talked less, it is possible that she might have evaded her doubtful celebrity. As it is, she stands accused of being concerned with a no less formidable array of maladies than elephantiasis, yellow fever, dengue, and malaria.

Let us here concern ourselves with the last-mentioned, and the hungry suspect, whose name has been coupled with the disease, her Ladyship Anopheles.

She may at once be singled out from her fellows by her habit of discreet silence and her odd proclivity for standing on her head when resting and feeding. Other mosquitoes remain on all fours, or rather, all sixes, when dining. This acrobatic insect is, as everyone knows, accused of inoculating her human prey with a protozoon, or microscopic animal organism, which in its turn is held responsible for the heats and chills, the aches, the pains, the languor, all the miseries of malaria. The idea is a simple one, requiring little intelligence to be understood. Is it rude to ask, what wonder that it has become popular? Less marvel, too, when one reflects that the theory is safeguarded by dividing Anophelines into a variety of groups, and claiming that the guilty must be the right sort, and yet further, the right sort duly infected.

Now, the means of infection must come about through the insect having feasted on a malarial subject. That its subsequent bite might poison the healthy sounds a contingent by no means unlikely. The drawback to this probability is that the mosquito possesses the feminine characteristic of fastidiousness. Malarial subjects are the very ones avoided by her hungry Ladyship. Here I may interject that I am not writing of insects under control. What a famished mosquito may or may not eat during the course of an experiment, I am not concerned with. I refer to mosquitoes in a natural state, and personal experience has made me observe that the one benefit of malaria consists in the freedom it confers from mosquito bites. Though these insects are in the habit of treating me as a very Ritz or a Carlton among restaurants, periods of malaria always freed me from their ravages. They like their food to be of the best, and the blood freest from fever is the provender for their delectation. During nineteen years of tropical life, my mother never experienced a single attack of malaria; yet she was always the chief pièce de résistance for every mosquito within her vicinity. It may be noticed that the individuals least susceptible to malaria are those most feasted upon by mosquitoes, including the suspects, though whether these be Anopheles Umbrosus, Anopheles Maculatus, Anopheles Christophersi, Anopheles Albimanus, Anopheles Argyritarsis, or any others of high-sounding title, I should certainly not presume to discriminate.

Why should this general evidence count for less than the few experimental cases upon which the mosquito theory is built up? These latter are mostly conspicuous by their weakness. Take, for example, the mosquito-proof hut placed at Ostia, and inhabited for three months by Dr. Sambon, Dr. Low, Mr. Terzi, and their servants. What analogy does this well-ventilated erection, raised above the soil, bear to many of the insanitary homesteads of the Campagna? What analogy is there between its healthy inhabitants, further fortified by zest for a theory in dire need of proof, and the permanent dwellers in those unpropitious surroundings? If we admit strength in the case of the infected mosquitoes sent to the London Tropical School, whose stings are said to have produced attacks of fever in the late Dr. Thurburn Manson and Mr. George Warren, we must also remember that Abele Sola in the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, according to the account quoted by Herms in his Malaria: Cause and Control, is claimed to have fallen a victim to this disease from the bites of mosquitoes that had developed from larvæ in his own room, and therefore could not be reckoned as infected. Moreover, they numbered hardly any Anophelines, and of the very few present, it was not known whether any stung the patient. Yet, according to the modern theory, Anophelines alone could have been responsible for the mischief. The proverbial grain of salt seems a necessary condiment for the cases of experimenters.

In the short space at our disposal, we are not concerning ourselves with the micro-organism, first discovered in Algiers by Dr. Laveran, and considered to be the parasite of malaria. Without in the least committing oneself to a general belief in the germ-theory of disease, there may, here and there, be maladies produced by parasites. Yet, apparently, fever, bearing all the clinical symptoms of malaria, may occur without the presence in the blood of such organisms, no matter whether parasitic or inbred. On page 8 of the Medical Report of the Federated Malay States’ Government reference is made to an unusual swarm of sandflies, and the following commentary is given. “Whether sandfly fever exists we are not prepared to say, but many cases with all the clinical symptoms were noted and no malarial parasite was detected on blood examination.” Hence the sandflies come under suspicion! Might not another moral be drawn, and that is that fever may be due to causes less crude than the inoculation of parasites by objectionable insects?

The conditions that produce mosquitoes seem to be the same as the conditions that produce malaria, and, in any case, it is these that must be attacked, no matter whether Lady Anopheles be proved innocent or in any measure guilty. The mysteries that surround the subject, the occasional outbursts of disease when areas have been drained, the usual method of improvement, the occasional betterment of health when the reverse process of flooding has taken place, may possibly be explained by the law of subsoil water. Dr. Charles Creighton writes in his History of Epidemics in Britain (p. 278): “According to that law, the dangerous products of fermentation arise from the soil when the pores of the ground are either getting filled with water after having been long filled with air, or are getting filled with air after having been long filled with water. It is the range of the fluctuation in the ground-water, either downwards or upwards, that determines the risk to health.”

However, far be it from me to descant upon the mysterious causes of malaria. My object is only to try to prove the unwisdom of rivetting attention upon the anopheline mosquito. Deductions as to her innocence may be drawn from the accusations endeavoring to prove her guilty. We are told how noticeable among troops the difference in fever rate has been between those that slept on shore and those that remained on board ship in malarious districts. But as the mosquito is free to come aboard too, how does that statement tell against her? I remember a host of such insect invaders on the Sydney, the French mail boat, when anchored at feverish Saigon. We carried a shipload away with us, and when out at sea they feasted on me to such an extent that I arrived at Singapore looking as though stricken with a rash, but otherwise none the worse for their greediness.

Again I was scarred for a long period after the venomous attacks of mosquitoes and sandflies combined at Kuala Klang, on the Malay coast, in its old days of fever, before it started a new sanitary career under the name of Port Swettenham. Yet these myriad bites produced fever of no sort, although I was at that time pronounced a malarial subject. I did not remain in Kuala Klang long enough to be affected by its unhealthiness; but, had Lady Anopheles been justly blamed, the terrible biting I underwent should have taken effect, irrespective of my removal. On the contrary, my own experience of fever was connected entirely with locality and never with mosquitoes. Intermittent fever, the genuine article, with its burnings, its icings, its whole programme of miseries, had me constantly in its grip during residence at a particular house in Kuala Lumpur, the Capital of the Federated Malay States. My one compensation was freedom from mosquito bites. When I left that abode, fever left me, and soon after mosquitoes began to feed on me again with infinite relish. What matter? It was a proof of sound blood, freedom from that worse scourge, malaria!

To turn from the personal to what is far more important, the general, let us consider the Medical Reports from that haunt of malaria, the Malay Peninsula.

The year 1911 in the Federated Malay States held the unpleasant distinction of being particularly malarious. The mosquito theorists explained as cause a great influx of, often, unhealthy coolies from India, and much clearing of land, which distributed the mosquitoes, and drove them into the houses and among the inhabitants. But, if mosquitoes be culpable, why should this same year have also been particularly unhealthy in regard to most diseases, phthisis excepted? Yet the Medical Report for 1912 shows that, concomitantly with a fall in malaria, 1,010 fewer cases of dysentery were this year treated in hospital. There were 77 notified cases of smallpox, as against 286 in 1911; 29 cases of cholera, as against 620; and 5,676 cases of beri-beri, as against 6,402. The greater prevalence of disease in general in 1911 surely shows that the causes for its specific forms must be deeper seated than mere insect bites. Yet so dominating is the fashion to rivet attention on such factors as these that fundamental troubles, even when known, appear often to be unheeded.

The F. M. S. Medical Report for 1912 provides a good instance, taken from the portion dealing with the Institute for Medical Research, Kuala Lumpur.

On page 25 it states that the occurrence of several cases of bubonic plague in and near Kuala Lumpur rendered it advisable to consider the possibility of the disease appearing as an epidemic and measures to avert such a calamity. A short paragraph refers to reported cases of plague, and then follow nearly four pages devoted to rats. Toward the bottom of the fourth page come the pregnant words: “Nearly 50 per cent. of the plague-infected rats came from the small stretch of Ampang Street, about 150 yards long.” The short description of this small area surely reveals a source of danger. “At the back of most of the houses there is a kitchen or bathing-place from which an open brick drain, covered with planks, runs through the house to the front of the shop and under the pavement of the five-foot way into one open drain at the side of the street. The plank covering of the house-drain is usually buried beneath sacks of grain or other heavy articles, so that the drain is not often cleaned. The open cement street-drain forms a convenient highway for rats, which can readily gain access to the house by the unprotected house-drains leading into it. Some eighty yards away the main drain empties into the Klang River, here a shallow and muddy stream with irregular, foul banks covered with reeds, rank grass and collections of garbage.” Now, who could expect rats to keep well in the vicinity of such a drain “not often cleaned,” and such a river, “shallow and muddy,” with “foul banks covered with collections of garbage”? Surely gratitude is due to the rodents, who, being nearer the level of the bad conditions, get ill first, and thus give human beings a fair warning of the sickness likely also to be their due, unless surroundings are made healthy for all animals, four-legged and two-legged. Yet, actually the Report has not a commentary upon these palpable ills, and, though it has by no means exhausted itself on the subject of rats, proceeds to vary the topic with fleas, the meteorological conditions that affect these high-jumpers, and the uses of guinea-pigs as flea-traps. The results of searching questions to medical men on the subject of flea bites are even given. “Of eighteen who replied one stated that he had never been bitten by a flea in his life” (p. 31). Most people must wish they were equally lucky. But not a single mention again of the uncleaned drains and the river choked with garbage during the course of pages all the more diverting because intended so seriously.

When such open evils can be so ignored, what wonder that the more occult sources of malaria should not be arrived at? And when will they be understood while accusations against particular insects require to be held in reverence as dogmas? In the F. M. S. Report for 1911 Dr. Sansom allows (p. 3) “there exists in the minds of a great many people a doubt whether the mosquito carries malaria or any other disease”; and proceeds to add “until this heresy has been corrected.” Heresy indeed! Is not free thought the first fundamental of science? Having thus labelled disbelief in his theory, Dr. Sansom in his next Report for 1912 has to admit (p. 5), “I have visited many (rubber) estates where anti-malarial work has not been completed or even begun, so that infection remains as bad or nearly as bad as ever, yet, from the time the laborers have been fed, down has come the death-rate.” If food has so much to do with the trouble, why lay all the blame on Lady Anopheles?

And just as too little food helped to make the coolies ill, is it not likely, if it be not rude to ask, that too much food was part cause for the malaria that troubled the prosperous members of the community of Kuala Lumpur, the Federal Capital, so long as a need of drainage left much to be desired in their surroundings? Who acquainted with the Far East does not recall the many courses of the Chinese cook, and the constant refilling of the champagne glass at dinner parties? There seems small wonder that the carnivorous feeder and spirituous drinker from a chilly latitude should fall a victim in the East to malarial and other fevers: and this without any assistance from Lady Anopheles or her sister mosquitoes. To her a meed of praise would seem due, for where the mosquito exists there is proof of a need of drainage, clearance, and general sanitary attention. But man, who has stoned the prophets throughout the ages, equally execrates the insects that come as warnings.

That non-proven is the verdict upon Lady Anopheles’ guilt seems well shown by Dr. Fraser’s Report, incorporated with the general Medical Report for the Federated Malay States for the year 1911.

After rather shakily chanting the orthodox creed of the mosquito theory, Dr. Fraser negatives faith by fact in the most heretical manner. “It appears to have been assumed on inadequate grounds,” he writes, “that a small number of malaria-carrying species in an area is necessarily associated with a low incidence of the disease. Certain observations made in the course of the present inquiry would appear to controvert this view. On some estates where the maximum spleen and parasite rates prevailed few anophelines of any sort were to be found, while in other areas, where malaria-carrying anophelines were numerous, these rates were low. Also it was noted that where different classes of laborers were under identical conditions so far as the mosquito factor is concerned, such as free and indentured laborers on the same estate, the parasite rates varied widely in the two groups. It is clear that factors affecting the general well-being of laborers, such as the quality of the food supply, housing, etc., are by no means negligible in the prevention of malaria, as they are equally not negligible in the prevention of other diseases. To these factors attention must be directed as well as to measures which aim at the reduction of mosquitoes, if the disease is to be combated successfully in the conditions which obtain in this country.”

Precisely! We must attend to general sanitation and personal hygiene, and then, having removed the beam from our own eye, we may be able to see clearly to cast out the mote in the eye of the Lady Anopheles.

SUMMONS

MARY LERNER

WITH the velvet springiness of turf under his feet, the sense of urge and strain, as of something inexorably drawing him, relaxed at last; the blind hurry slackened. Out of the whirl came quiet and ordered perception, out of the breathless confusion, peace. And the years which his journey seemed to have consumed ran together and were as a single night. Between white cloud-fleets, the Irish sky began to show blue as Mary’s cloak, and the soft May morning was sweet with dripping green things,—thorn and gorse and heather. Christopher knew from the well-remembered “feel” of the air that the west wind was due to resume its hearty music. Almost out of sight above, a lark sang, and he could see innumerable swallows diving and skimming. At once, the old rhyme of The Seven Sleepers, forgotten these thirty years, rose to his lips like a bubble to the surface of a stream;—

“The corncrake and the watersnake,

The cuckoo and the swallow,

The bee, the bat, the butterfly—”

All these tiny sleepers were awake to-day; himself awake, too, and aware, with some super-awareness, of the last stages of his oft-promised journey home, achieved at length after the long, oppressive interval of weariness and restraint. This interval was fast receding now, and he made no effort to recall it, for he was eager to slough off all memory of that heavy weakness as well as all shackles of solicitous and hampering devotion. He’d had his will at last, however, though how he could not well imagine; and here he was, free of them all,—comely, stylish wife; modern, masterful daughters. They could spare themselves the pain of drawing long faces over him; he’d no mind to give up with his visit home unpaid.

A good, dutiful family, no doubt, God have them in his care; but this was a time when a man must cut free of all bonds of maturer years and turn to the land that gave him birth,—and to his mother, long unvisited, but by no means forgotten. Many a money-order had crossed the counter at the country post-office, and of late, many a cheque. But the first years had been bitterly hard, and all the years breathlessly busy. That land over-seas took you and drove you whether or no; but its rewards were adequate.

Foot-loose on the old sod now, no longer earthbound but light with a marvellous buoyancy, the reek of peat in his nostrils, the corncrake’s homely tune in his ears. His eyes strained forward for familiar landmarks, carrying always before them the expectant image of a white cot in a green hollow. Uplifted by an exhilaration that seemed stranger to any possible fatigue, he pressed on again, this time with a pleasant sense of anticipation in place of the former gnawing avidity, keenly alive to the delights of this long-desired green world, brilliant with sunshine yet fresh from frequent rains, and rocked with the rising wind.

At last the silver stretches of the Shannon appeared, and a certain well-known white ribbon of road, winding among farms. As he went, the trees began to take on the look of friendly faces;—tall beeches, whispering limes, blackthorn bushes, white with blossom. A field of gorse, ablaze with yellow spikes of bloom, sent out its heavy bitter-sweet perfume. Grassy hills, lined with grey stone walls, beckoned him, each with its happy memory.—The brook! where trout hung under the bank and water-cress wove its green mazes. The sight of its pebbly bed recalled the chilly prickle of gooseflesh on adventurous legs. He leaned over the rude railing to watch its spring rush, giving himself to its cool voice, its freshness on his face. He felt clean now at last of the dusty breath of cities.—Here, too, were the elder bushes, all abloom. To think of the “scouting guns” he’d hollowed out of their pithy stalks, filling them with water by means of a piston-like wadded stick to discharge on good-natured passersby!

The happy sense of expectancy quickened. He topped a sudden rise, and there, secure between two steep hillsides, drowsed the object of his quest; a low, stone cot, whitewashed, with thatched roof and overhanging eaves. What beds under that cosy roof!—of live-plucked goose feathers (well he remembered grappling the kicking bird between his knees!), mounted on heavily “platted” straw, and yielding such sleep as no bed in the new world could afford. As he looked, the high wind seemed suddenly stilled, and everything appeared to wait breathlessly. From the chimney, a thread of smoke crept up, straight as a string in the quiet air.

Then, along the lane, he suddenly descried a group of children, whom he knew at once for his youngest sister’s. Impatient of this reminder of a new day and a new generation, he drew aside till they should have passed, for he was passionately desirous that, for to-day at least, everything should seem as it had been. The children charged past, laughing and calling, fair heads and dark, apple cheeks and clear eyes, as if there were no stranger within miles of them. And their heedless youth and vivid life made him all at once an alien and unreal creature.

Thrusting aside this unwelcome impression, Christopher pressed on to the house. A little old man with a black cutty between his lips was taking the sun in the garden, his narrow shoulders humped under a shiny coat. Christopher cast a careless glance at him; his father, though not tall, was a personable man, a man of thews and solidity. This old one would be some charity guest of his mother’s.—“Ye’ll have us eaten out of house and home with your beggars,” his father used to protest. “Every tramp between here and Gingleticooch has you covered with blessings. I wonder we don’t be rolling in gold, the good wishes we do be enj’ying.”

At the gate, Christopher caught the scent of wild hedge-roses, of sweet-briar and hawthorn, spilling a fragrance as of honeysuckle. At once the years rolled back, the old boyish yearnings kindled. His mother!—her arms would be open to him still, despite all delays and neglect. She was never the one to “fault” him, whatever the blame. As he neared the low doorway, he glimpsed the blue ware on the dark oak dresser, the black, shining kettle on the hob, the long table spread with homespun white linen. On the trimly swept hearth, turf glowed, and beside it, his mother sat in her high-backed chair, bending over her heavy prayer-book.

Through all the years he had thought of her as a tall woman still in the prime of her days, though he knew well she was long past seventy, and though she had reported herself in laborious letters as “growing down like a cow’s tail.” All images of her had flaunted a blue and yellow print, French calico, which had delighted his childhood; blue as cornflowers and hung with golden chains. To her years he had conceded grey hair, softly waving under a lacy cap above a face still fresh and pink.

She wore to-day no chain-decked gown of cornflower blue, no roses in her withered cheeks. A cap, indeed, did crown her, coarse, but lily-white, and it shook ceaselessly with the trembling of her head. Yet, though her face was seamed beyond recognition and her full grey eyes sunken under lids plucked into innumerable tiny wrinkles, he knew at once that it was she; and the sight of her shrivelled body caused a contraction to close about his own frame. Her hands, twisted, spidery, and corded with blue veins, clutched at his heart. Where were the strong, firm hands that had so often lifted and soothed him,—dragged him home howling, too, and soundly smacked him?—He found himself longing for that heavy hand on his shoulder as for the kiss of his beloved.

He crossed the flags and spoke her name, holding out eager arms. Just then, the house-door blew back with a clap and she turned her head and looked past him unseeingly, shivering a little as at the sharp mountain wind.

“She does not know me,” he thought, conscience-stricken. “My fault!—how could she? I’ll not be alarming her with a stranger’s face.” Then, as she dropped her dim eyes to her book again: “She cannot see far. ’Tis old and weak her eyes are—she thinks it’s himself. I’ll go see can I find and prepare him; ’twill be best for him to break the news.”

So great was the comfort the place bestowed, however, that he must watch her a few minutes, drawing near behind her chair. The years fell away and he felt as if he had recovered the very heart of his lost youth. A little four-legged stool stood close beside her skirts, and he longed to sit at her knee as he used, leaning his head against her and staring into the dull glow of the peat. The old ballads she used to sing to him there!—fresh conned from sheets bought at the fair and set to tunes of her own adaptation; the stories of “the people” who steal and change children; the saucer of cream you must set out All Hallows’ Eve for the fairies; the long Christmas candle of welcome, which burned before the open door against the coming of the Infant Saviour. What prayers grew on that hearth-stone!—rosaries for May nights, litanies. The rigors of fasting and abstinence he had known; black fasts, too, cheerfully kept. There had been then no timorous seeking of dispensation.—A question of health? Nonsense; a question of backsliders and turncoats! Men lived not by bread alone in those days, but by “the faith,” valiantly.

Drawn to her irresistibly, he looked over her shoulder at the swaying book, eager to mark her special May devotion to Our Lady.—Would she be saying, “Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Grace,” or reiterating, “Morning Star, Pray for us; Health of the Weak, Pray for us; Comforter of the Afflicted——”? He bent his head to the black-marged page. She was tracing with tremulous finger, “Prayers for the Dead.”

A chill breath touched him and he drew back a little. For whom did her old eyes read the prayer? Eager to share her mourning, he gently laid hand on her bony shoulder, but she did not turn at his touch; only bent her head the lower over her book and let a little rising murmur escape her moving lips.

At her failure to respond, he shuddered with a sudden uncanny sense of remoteness. Then a terrible desolation seized him. “She’s not herself any more, that’s it; childish, and they never told me. I’m too late, then. She’ll never see me more. And I meant to come, always; God knows, I meant to come.”

Fearing to alarm the quiet figure with an outburst of the grief that choked him, he slipped out and sought the old bench under the hedge. Here the tranquillity of the little farm laid a soothing hand on him,—the sight of the speckledy hens pecking in the long grass; the white goats tethered at a safe distance from sheltered heaps of potatoes; a red cow, deep in the lush grass of the meadow, who swung her head threateningly at a decrepit setter that limped across her path. For a moment, looking at the old dog, he thought: “That’ll be Sojer; he’ll know me.” But at once, with newly swelling heart, he realized that many springs had drifted the white blossom of the thorn across old Sojer’s grave. A friendly yearning made him rise and seek this other dog, so like the companion of barefoot jaunts; a descendant of the old fellow’s, no doubt,—a bond across the hostile years.

At the touch of his hand, the setter cowered away, shivering in every limb, his dark soft eyes full of anguished terror. When Christopher tried to speak reassuringly, the dog set up a sobbing whine, and, struggling to uncertain feet, hobbled for the house with his red-feathered tail between his legs.

On Christopher, as he stood there in the sunny morning, a chill dark descended, and he felt isolated beyond the farthest star. Foreboding shuddered through him, but he cried obstinately, “No, I’ll not accept it! It can’t have come to me yet.” But, in spite of his gallant refusal, he turned, like a child from the night, to his mother, as if that little, age-worn woman could soothe his terror as of old.

From the door, he saw her still seated on the hearth, which looked ominously black now and desolate. Her bent finger held the dread place in her book, and, with her right hand, she caressed the head of the old setter, who was crowding to her knees and whining woefully. For the first time, Christopher heard the broken quaver of her voice.

“Eh, Princie, what ails you, doggie?—Are you feeling it, too? There’s a power of terrible things about, the day. Waking up of me I mistrusted it sore, and now I’m certain sure, for three times the kettle’s after dancing on the hearth, and I’ve seen a tall shadow cast in the full sun.—’Tis our boy, Christy, I’m thinking. He’s gone. A young man yet, and I to be left sitting here alone. My grief! that I’ll never see the lad more.—Christy, Christy, the best son!—but there, every crow thinks her own bird the white one.—Whisht, Princie; be quiet, let you. I must be reading the prayers for my son.”

And standing there in the sunlit doorway, Christopher knew indeed that, by this time, it was, as she said, too late. He would never see her more, as men see one another. Yet no sudden terror, no dread of things unknown could wholly rob him of the consolation of her presence, and, even as he felt this dream-scene, too, relentlessly slip from him, he was able to savor the exquisite satisfaction of fulfilment, the transcendent solace of release. Rest! and he had been so harried; completion, and life had been so long! Green hills to blot out remembrance of dusty cities, fresh winds after the smother of narrow streets. “I’ll come back one day, be sure of that,” he’d told her, and through all warring circumstances, he had stood committed to that promise. Now, freely, triumphantly, he had made good his word.

FASHION AND FEMINISM

NINA WILCOX PUTNAM

HITHERTO, dress reform has always proved a failure. And this is because dress reform has usually been only the effort of a few scattered individuals to force their personal taste upon the world. And while social consciousness is often awakened by the daring examples of such pioneers, all real social growth comes from a collective consciousness, which is born in a body of people, by reason of some economic or moral pressure which affects them all. When such a body begins to murmur of a reform, that reform is almost certain of accomplishment. And such a murmur, concerning dress, can be heard to-day among those women who are banded together by the fight they are making for freedom.

Dress seems, at first glance, to be one of the least important of the questions which modern women are taking up: but the smallest examination into its practical aspects reveals the fact that it affects all their other interests—not as a mere expression of vanity, but as a serious economic factor.

When we women first entered factories and workshops in numbers, we met unfair conditions on every side. This was particularly true of the garment trades, which were among the first to employ a great many women. And when we met this unfair treatment, women dreamed of legislating virtue into manufacturers. But it can’t be done! And now it is dawning upon the consciousness of a number of women that the way to reform clothing manufacturers, textile manufacturers, etc., the way to cut down insane speeding, overwork, underpay, is to change our insane conception of clothing—to strive to make it a normal, useful thing, instead of a hampering, exotic, extravagant thing, which works one group of women to death at a miserable wage, because a far smaller group of parasitic women wish to be arrayed like peacocks! Knowing this to be true, one naturally turns to the fundamental question, and asks—what is dress—what is fashion? And what, indeed, is dress? Is it simply a means of protection from cold? A concession to so-called modesty, a means of displaying wealth, and advertising leisure? Of attracting the opposite sex? It has been all of these in the past, and many of the same factors are still apparent in our present-day use of garments: but a new interpretation of the word has come in with our new industrial conditions. Dress is an enormous economic factor the world over, and nowhere more so than in America, where it is an over-exploited industry, whose markets have been stretched abnormally, not only by the increasing production of inferior articles, but by a psychological factor, far more potent even than the law of normal supply and demand; and that factor is Fashion: a purely hypothetical need of change in order to meet a purely hypothetical standard, which is entirely ephemeral and continually altered, artificially.

Year after year, we are made to put the money we begrudge, that we can ill afford, money we would honestly rather put into other things; money, often, that we have not got, into that particular twist to skirt or coat or hat which will keep us as ridiculous-looking as our neighbor, while, at the same time, safe from his ridicule; in other words, to save ourselves the discomforts of being out of style. And yet, detesting fashion, as I think the majority of us do in our most secret hearts, we are often hypnotized by it to such an extent that free action is prevented.

If the number and character could be estimated of those people who have stayed away from entertainments for lack of a new gown, or dress suit, or some accessory thereof, almost every human being who has ever received an invitation would probably be included in the list. That people stay away from church for the same reason is traditional, and a favorite method of imprisonment has always been to take away formal clothing, and substitute loose garments. This trick has been successful in the instance of white slavery, for it is found that the girls are unwilling to go out into the street in the brilliant “parlor clothes” furnished to them.

So deeply rooted is this fear of being wrongly dressed, and so serious may its consequences become, that it is high time that an examination into the forces behind the accepted forms of fashions be made, and our slavish adherence, not only to fashion, but often to discomfort, be shown for what it is, a chimera which we ourselves protect, and which gives a lot of more or less unscrupulous business men their opportunity.

Most people believe that fashion is a matter of our own free choice and approval; but this is not actually the case. For there is in existence to-day such a thorough understanding between the big combine of designers, department stores, wholesalers, manufacturers, textile-mill owners, etc., that our pocket-books are drained by them as systematically and coöperatively as though they belonged to a single corporation: and their profits actually and directly depend upon the extent to which they can play upon our hysterical fear of not being dressed “correctly.” Of course, the first principle of playing their game is to get control of fashion itself, to be able to swing the public taste by forcing constantly changing styles upon it: in other words, garments must not be permitted to continue in use until they wear out. Before a garment has come to a state of disuse, a radically new model must be presented which will make the old one look ridiculous by comparison. In the cheapest grades of manufactured garments, whose purchasers, it is safe to suppose, would keep a garment until it was worn out, by reason of poverty, the desired change is accomplished through the use of shoddy and inferior stuff.

The dress of the rich woman will be discarded at the slightest hint of a change in style, while its cheaper imitations, worn by the poor, are made of stuff deliberately calculated to last only for a season of three months! Needless to say, the fact is not advertised to the working-woman who spends her savings on a suit at a price varying from five to eighteen dollars!

But, to a certain extent, this scheme of constant changing has reacted against the manufacturers, especially those engaged in articles pertaining to dress, rather than the garment makers. These former are completely at the mercy of the most apparently insignificant change in fashion. As a natural result, there is a tremendous lot of bribery coming the way of the designer and the retailer. “Swing the fashion my way!” is the constant cry of those who make trimmings, such as buttons, braids, fringes, laces, etc., and it makes all the difference between success, and, sometimes, bankruptcy, to the manufacturer, whether or not dozens of little silk buttons are being used on women’s tailored suits, or if there are two bone buttons less on men’s coat sleeves. And the same thing is true of the fringe maker or lace factory. For instance, since the introduction of the narrow skirts which women have been wearing for the past three years, the lace business has been nearly ruined. The close-fitting dress permits of no lace-trimmed lingerie: the ruffled petticoat is a thing of the past, and it was to the white goods manufacturers that the imitation lace man sold his wares. On the other hand, the introduction of pleated chiffon, as a substitute, has raised the occupation of side-pleating from a scattered, ill-paid basis, comparable to that of a cobbler, to the status of a real business.

But while change of fashion leaves one or another trade high and dry in turn, lack of change is still more deadly, especially to the textile mills. For two years, 1911-12, women varied the making of their garments only very slightly. The textile mills lost thousands of dollars in consequence, and, at last, in the summer of 1912 began a campaign to alter conditions. Their methods were so flagrant that they would have been funny if they had not been so disgraceful. Everywhere they offered bribes to designers. “Draw full skirts,” they said; “draw pleated skirts, and draped gowns and draped waists; we want to sell our overstock!” The current fashion was taking only six or eight yards of material to a gown, and the obvious way of improving the matter was to establish a demand for gowns which would require fourteen to eighteen yards instead, or gowns which would require the more profitable full-width materials; above all, gowns which the old, straight styles could not be remodelled to imitate! The bribery was as well handled as political “favors,” and as to the result, behold the manner in which our women are swathed in mummy fashion to-day!

That people should wear any clothing which is not exactly suited to their need and honest desires seems too ridiculous to be true, and yet that is exactly what most people do, usually without thinking of the matter. How many men really like to wear a stiff collar, or a dress suit? Or how many like to wear dark, thick suits in summer instead of a kind of glorified pajama? And women! How long will they continue to wear corsets? Not one really wants to. But it is not so much these blatant ills of dress which harass one. It is the useless accessories, the keeping up of irrelevant trimmings and embellishments, the elaborate fastenings, which are the real annoyance.

Not for an instant is it suggested that people should cease to make themselves attractive in appearance, or that uniformity of dress ought to be adopted. On the contrary, a greater individuality is to be desired, but, above all, comfort and convenience. One should be able to wear what one pleases without coercion of any kind or the impertinence of criticism from some one whose tastes happen to differ. To one man a collar may be a comfort; to another it is an abomination. And there should be no rule, written or unwritten, which compels either to sacrifice his comfort and tastes to the other.

The true feminist recognizes that one woman may like to swathe herself in draperies, and the next may prefer the plainest, freest form of garment; and that one should be made to feel uncomfortable and ill-at-ease because big financial interests have approved one rather than the other, is an outrage upon the right to mental and physical liberty!

GERMOPHOBIA

HELEN S. GRAY

SEVERAL years ago Dr. Charles B. Reed of Chicago obtained considerable notoriety by the invention of a cat-trap or gibbet to be baited with catnip and operated in back yards. The accounts in the newspapers related that he had found four dangerous kinds of germs on a cat’s whiskers and was therefore urging the extermination of cats as a menace to health; that Dr. William McClure, of Wesley Hospital, was examining microscopically hairs from cats’ fur to ascertain how many different kinds of germs there were on it; and that the secretary of the Chicago Board of Health had issued a statement that cats are “extremely dangerous to humanity.” From Topeka came the report that six different kinds of deadly germs had been found on a cat’s fur and that the Board of Health had in consequence issued a mandate that Topeka cats must be sheared or killed! But why stop with shearing them? There are germs on their skins. And now public penholders in banks and post-offices are under suspicion; an investigation is being made by the Kansas Board of Health, The St. Louis Republic states, and individual penholders may have to be supplied. From time to time a health board official or some other doctor gives out a statement for publication condemning handshaking as a dangerous and reprehensible practice.

The hair of horses, cows, and dogs is full of germs, which they disseminate. Germs are everywhere. Why should cats’ whiskers be an exception to the rule? If Thomas and Tabby could retaliate and examine doctors’ whiskers, doubtless numerous virulent varieties of germs would be found there. Doctors are a menace to public health, for they disseminate germs. Therefore, exterminate the doctors! But perhaps, being doctors, they don’t carry germs. Their persons are sacred. Germs are afraid of them and keep at a respectful distance.

All the leading works on bacteriology admit that a person may have germs of diphtheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or any other disease within his body without having any of those diseases. Since that is the case, it is obvious that germs of themselves cannot cause disease. They do no harm in a body that is in a healthy condition. But so prejudiced is the medical profession on the subject of germs that the true causes of disease are overlooked and disregarded.

Among the four kinds of germs found on a cat’s whiskers, Dr. Reed mentions a germ “which causes a variety of infectious diseases, including kidney disease.” As if any one ever got kidney disease because he unwittingly swallowed some germs of the kind found in diseased kidneys, if he had not abused those organs by gross eating or gross drinking! But it relieves the individual of all responsibility for his condition to put the blame on germs and the cat. There is no personal stigma attached to such a cause; for it is commonly supposed that anybody is liable to be attacked by germs, that, like rain that falleth upon both the just and the unjust, germs attack both healthy persons as well as those whose bodies are saturated with auto-toxemia.

An inspection of the family dietary usually reveals the cause of a man’s untimely demise. But his death is piously attributed to an inscrutable visitation of Providence. His wife drapes herself in crêpe, observes all the conventions of grief, and overworks her lachrymose glands for a season. His friends pass resolutions of condolence, lamenting that their dear brother has been “called to his eternal rest,” a flattering implication that he had so overworked himself during his brief span of life that he needed an eternity of rest in which to recuperate, and was entitled to it as a reward. Whereas the only thing overworked was his digestive organs in disposing of his wife’s cooking.

If deadly germs are found on cats’ whiskers, what of it? It is as valuable a contribution to science to know how many and what kind of germs are to be found on cats’ whiskers as to know how many devils can be balanced on the point of a needle. Verily, a fool and his time are soon parted.

That a cat has germs on her fur and whiskers does not prove that she is a menace to health; but doctors are often a menace to life and health. Much of the surgery performed is unnecessary and frequently results in death. Vaccination and the administering of serums and antitoxins are frequently followed by death or impaired health. One of the gravest charges against the prescribing of medicines is that they suppress or mask the symptoms and do not remove the cause of the disease, but leave the patient to continue in the error of his ways until overtaken again by the same trouble or an equivalent that has cropped out in some other place; and by that time the malady has perhaps reached a fatal stage.

In some respects doctors are like cats. They caterwaul, and occasionally they purr. When a woman patient calls at a doctor’s office and he does not know just what is the matter with her or what to do to cure her, if he belongs to a certain type in the profession, he holds her hand and purrs and is so sympathetic that she leaves his office in a transport, walks on air, and goes home convinced that no one understands her case as well as he does. Or else he tells her how beautiful she looked on the operating table. After such a subtle appeal to her vanity she pays without demur his bill of $300 or $400.

He takes great care not to offend his patients by telling them unpleasant truths, but instead resorts to delicate flattery. If a woman comes to his office suffering from some ailment brought on chiefly by eating devitalized foods, he purrs softly while he determines the latitude and longitude of her pain and gently inquires if she has had a shock recently. She thinks hard for a moment and recalls that she has had, that the news of the death of a child of an intimate friend was broken to her abruptly. Yes, that must have been what caused her condition.

Lacking the ability to direct patients headed for perdition by reason of wrong living how to live so that they can regain their health while continuing their work where they are, he sometimes recommends a change of climate or that they take a rest. Change of scene or occupation usually affords some slight temporary alleviation that the patients regard as a cure.

When patients have a cold or the grippe, instead of making plain to them what laws of health they have violated and that their illness is a direct result, the doctor, it not infrequently happens, tells them that it is “going around.” Colds and grippe are consequently in the popular mind of mysterious origin, and the victims complacently regard themselves as blameless but unfortunate.

It is because the medical profession teaches people to look outside of themselves for the causes of their maladies that we see such spectacles as Caruso, obliged to break professional engagements that would have yielded him $100,000, ascribing his case of grippe to external influences. “I like everything in New York except its colds and grippe,” he is quoted as saying in an interview. “I think I can boast that I have had the most expensive case of grippe on record. It has cost me $100,000. The public says I am a great singer. I should be a greater man if I were a scientist who could drive grippe out of the country. See if you can’t drive it out of New York before I come back.”

Note the boast. As if ill-health and operations were something to be proud of! Instead of telling our acquaintances of our ailments in the expectation of getting their sympathy, we ought to be ashamed to be sick. They may understand what internal conditions colds, grippe, and other ailments presuppose, and have a feeling of repulsion toward us, not of sympathy.

The germ theory of disease is in great vogue at present with the regular—or allopathic, as it is sometimes called—school of medicine. Some of the leading physicians of other schools, however, predict that the day is not far distant when the contagiousness and infectiousness of disease through germs, vaccination, the injection of serums as preventives or cures, and the resorting to the use of medicines by deluded people as a substitute for correcting their habits of living, will be generally regarded as superstitions. When that day comes, we shall cease this Pharisaical self-righteous attitude, this dread and suspicion of others as germ-laden, and face the truth that we build our own diseases.

Even some of the regulars do not hold orthodox views; for instance, Dr. Charles Creighton, an eminent English physician. He has made a special study of epidemics and was engaged to write an article for the Encyclopædia Britannica on vaccination. At that time he was a believer in it, but changed his views when he investigated the subject. What he wrote was omitted from the American editions. “As a medical man,” he once declared, “I assert that vaccination is an insult to common sense; that it is superstitious in its origin, unsatisfactory in theory and practice, and useless and dangerous in its character.” He testified before the British Royal Commission on Vaccination that in his opinion vaccination affords no protection whatever. He has written several books on the subject.

If germs are not the cause of disease, then what is? To this Dr. J. H. Tilden, of Denver, one of the most distinguished of those who do not accept the germ theory of disease as true, makes answer as follows. I quote excerpts taken here and there from his writings in A Stuffed Club Magazine on the subject of the causes and cure of disease, the germ theory, contagion and infection, and immunity.

“Disease is brought about by obstructions and inhibitions of vital processes…. The basis is chronic auto-intoxication from food poisoning. It is brought about by abusing the body in many ways … by living wrongly in whatever way…. Bad habits of living enervate—weaken—the body, and in consequence elimination is impaired…. The inability of the organism to rid itself of waste products brings on auto-toxemia. This systemic derangement is ready at all times to join with exciting causes to create anything from a pimple to a brain abscess and from a cold to consumption. Without this derangement, injuries and such contingent influences as are named exciting causes would fail to create disease. This is the constitutional derangement that is necessary before we can have such local manifestations as tonsillitis, pneumonia, and appendicitis…. Every disease is looked upon as an individuality; which is no more the truth than that words are made up of letters independent of the alphabet. As truly as that every word must go back to the alphabet for its letter elements, so must every disease go back to auto-toxemia for its initial elements…. There can be no independent organic action in health or disease.”

If drugs, serums, etc., do not cure disease, what does? Correcting whatever habits caused it; for instance, eating too much, bolting food, neglect of bathing, ventilation, and exercise, harboring worry, jealousy, or other destructive emotions, and living on a haphazard dietary of carelessly and ignorantly cooked foods. “Nature cures when there is any curing done, but nature must have help by way of removal of obstructions to normal functioning.” There is nothing spectacular about a real cure. It means self-discipline.

“Germs are in all bodies in health and in disease…. I do not recognize them as a primary or real cause of disease any more than drafts or any such so-called causes; at most germs can be only exciting causes…. They are innocent until made noxious by their environment. They are victims and partakers of it. They act upon it and are reacted upon by it. As they must be amenable to environmental law, the same as everything else, they necessarily change when their environment changes. Because of a change in their habitat, the germs that are native change from a non-toxic state into one of toxicity…. They are not something extraneous to the human organism, but are the products of lowered vitality in the individual, of lost resistance…. Microbes are toxic when the fluids of their habitat have become toxic—when the resistance of the body has fallen below the point at which the fluids maintain their chemico-physiological equilibrium and decomposition sets in; it is at this stage that germs multiply rapidly; they absorb the poison that is generating, and it is not strange that their products are poisonous, for the changed bodily fluids on which they feed are toxic…. My theory is that the toxicity of germs is due to being saturated with poisonous gases. The germs of typhoid fever, for example, are not poisonous until the patient is sufficiently broken down to cause the generation of toxic gases, after which all the fluids and solids of the body take on a septic state, poisoned by the absorbed gas…. Bacteria are not the cause of disease; wrong living, which puts the system into such a condition that the bacteria can readily multiply, is the real cause; the bacteria are simply necessary results…. Germs are scavengers. When an environment becomes crowded with them, it means that there is a great accumulation of waste in a state of decay…. They are normal to a certain limit in our bodies. If they become more numerous, common sense and reason would say that they must be a necessary factor in the process of elimination, or, if not a necessary factor, lost resistance has permitted them to multiply beyond the restrictions set to them by an ideal physical condition or normal resistance.”

To those who accept the germ theory, it seems that there must be specific germs to account for the different types of disease. The leaders among those who reject it are able to explain satisfactorily without it why all sick people do not have the same disease. They give as the reasons for variation geographical location, the domestic and local environment, the season of the year, atmospheric conditions (e. g., hot, humid weather favoring putrefaction both in the digestive tract and in animal and vegetable matter outside it), defective anatomism, congenital or acquired, injuries, age, occupation, temperament, food, habits, and mode of living.

“Immunization means that normal alkalinity of the fluids of the body exists…. Health is the only immunity against disease. If there is any state that man can be put into that will cause him to be less liable to come under disease-producing influences than full health, then law and order is not supreme and the world must be the victim of caprice, haphazard, and chance.”

“Epidemics and endemics feed upon the auto-toxemic and stop where there are none…. The belief of the medical profession that contagion and infection pass from one human being to another—from a sick man to a healthy man—is an old superstition unworthy of this age. Disease will not go from person to person, unless they are in a physical condition that renders them susceptible and unless environmental states favor decomposition—those of the household and the general atmosphere where the proper amount of oxygen is deficient. So-called contagious and infectious diseases are self-limited. If it were not for this self-limitation, the world would be depopulated every time an epidemic of a severe character succeeds in getting a start. But the medical profession believes that vaccination and antitoxin do what nature has been doing since the world began, namely, set a limit to the spread of disease.”

“Tuberculosis is a seed disease. The seed must come from a previous case,” Dr. J. N. McCormack, official itinerant lecturer of the American Medical Association and “mouthpiece of 80,000 doctors,” as he terms himself, is wont to declare in the plea that he is sent out to make all over the country for the establishment of a “national department of health and education to bring the benefactions of modern medical science to every household.” But if one contracts tuberculosis from the germs of another case and he in turn from some one else, how did the first case that ever happened originate? ask the leaders among those who reject the germ theory. Did the causes that produced the first case of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, measles, diphtheria, or other diseases commonly regarded as contagious or infectious, quit the business after producing one case, disappear, and go out of existence, or do they still operate and cause all the cases that occur? That troublesome first case is the missing link in the chain of the theory; but it happened so long ago that it has been lost sight of, and doctors are seldom embarrassed by being asked to account for it.

I know a druggist’s family in which all of the six children had adenoids. Adenoids are not regarded as contagious, so far as I have ever heard. So contagion cannot be made the scapegoat in this instance. The children had adenoids because the mode of living was the same for all. In like manner, when several members of a family contract tuberculosis, diphtheria, or measles, do they not get the disease because they all lived in the same manner and were exposed to like influences, instead of through contagion or infection with germs? Disease is sometimes spread, however, through the contagion of fear and suggestion.

The opponents of vaccination and serum therapy deny that the use of vaccines and serums has served to check the spread of disease. They hold that epidemics are less prevalent and less virulent now than formerly because of improved sanitary conditions, such as drainage of the soil, municipal disposal of garbage, street cleaning, water and sewer systems, the consequent increased facilities for bathing and household cleanliness, etc.

A false theory of cause not only leads to a false theory of cure, but diverts attention from the real issue. For example, in the Middle Ages and later, in England people used to empty garbage and other refuse in the yards and streets, and in consequence a plague broke out from time to time. Instead of attributing it to the accumulated filth, they accused the Jews of poisoning the wells. So, too, in the case of a girl on whose neck a gland enlarged to the size of an egg; there was at once talk as to whether it was tuberculous in nature. Her mother wondered, if it was tuberculosis, if Minnie got it from the cat! She had always played with the cat a great deal. In this she reflected current medical talk in the papers. She could not understand how it could happen. There was no tuberculosis on either side of the family, and Minnie had always been so strong and healthy. Before she was twenty-five there was nothing left of Minnie’s front teeth but a few black snags—evidence of her having lived largely on sweets, starches, and meat, and that she had not been healthy. But her mother never thought of looking in that direction for the cause.

So long as people are led to believe that vaccines and serums are a safeguard, they do not seek others, but continue to live in filthy surroundings and to have injurious habits of living. In the mad chase after imaginary protection, real immunity is overlooked and lost sight of.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

RICHARD BUTLER GLAENZER

AND ONE ANSWERED: Lord,

Of a truth, brave Lord,

I am all the follies and yet

I have sinned not blindly,

But bravely, as a man; so let

My punishment be brave,

Albeit courage win not Heaven.

What hast thou done, brave man?

All things that man can do, brave Lord.

Whatsoever Hell thou choose,

That Hell is thine.

AND ONE ANSWERED: Lord,

Of a truth, kind Lord,

I am weak but humble, and yet

I have erred not often,

And kindly have I been; so let

Thy judgment be as kind,

Howbeit meekness gain not Heaven.

What hast thou done, kind man?

All things that man would do, kind Lord.

Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,

That Heaven is thine.

AND ONE ANSWERED: Lord,

Of a truth, O Lord,

Who am I to answer?… And yet …

I have lived, Life-Giver,

And O, how sweet was life! so let

Its sweetness cling and lo,

I shall but live again … in Heaven.

What hast thou done, O man?

Thou only knowest true, O Lord.

Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,

That Heaven is Mine.

THE AMERICAN FARMER AS A COÖPERATOR

E. E. MILLER

WHEN one speaks or hears of coöperation among farmers, it seems the natural thing to think first of Denmark or Ireland. These and other European countries have made so much greater progress in the business organization of farmers and farm life than America has, that it is almost inevitable that they should be held up to us as examples of what we might but do not accomplish. Various reasons are advanced for this American backwardness in what is unquestionably one of the great economic movements of our time. The American farmer’s individualism and dislike of restraint is often given as the reason. Professor G. Harold Powell goes so far as to say that “the investment of the farmer must be threatened by existing social and economic conditions before he can overcome his individualism sufficiently and can develop a fraternal spirit strong enough to pull with his neighbors in coöperative team work.” There is no doubt much truth in this, but I am inclined to think that lack of knowledge as to how to coöperate has been almost as much a hindering factor as has lack of desire to coöperate. The attempts at coöperation among farmers have been sufficiently numerous, if they had been successful, to have made coöperative effort in rural communities a familiar form of activity to us all. As it is, instances of really successful coöperative ventures among farmers, while rather impressive as an aggregate, amount to very little indeed compared with the vast volume of yet unorganized business carried on by them.

Europe seems to have had wiser leaders in the coöperative work, as well as more docile followers. The American passion for bigness has largely ruled both leaders and followers. Where the Old World peoples were content to begin with small organizations for a definite purpose and let these organizations grow and develop into powerful institutions, the farmers of America have thought in terms of a continent, tried to organize nationwide societies to transact every kind of business—and failed lamentably. It has been only a few years since a great noise was made by a society which proposed to unite all farmers in one great society which should fix a minimum price on all farm products and so settle matters out of hand. Just a year or two ago Farmers’ Union leaders in the South were telling the cotton farmers that only a great national organization could be of any real help in the marketing of their crop. The disastrous failures of the big organizations which were going to “finance the cotton crop” and the successes along various lines attained by some local and county organizations have discredited these leaders who mistook rhetoric for business sense and possibly also taught them a few things they needed to know.

The great trouble with farmers’ coöperative organizations in this country has been that they were too loosely organized and attempted to do too much. It is just beginning to dawn on the mind of the average farmer that a coöperative business must be conducted on the same general lines as an individual business and that he cannot secure the benefits of coöperation without giving up some of the privileges of individual action. He is learning, too, not to despise the day of small things.

The lesson has been learned by some, however, in the long years of struggle for fair prices and fair treatment by the commercial world, and here and there all over the country are to be found groups of farmers who have found out the principles of business coöperation and put them into action to their own decided profit. These organizations are interesting not only for what they have done, but also for what they teach.

Take the Southern Produce Company, of Norfolk, Virginia, for example. This association was organized in 1870 and now has 400 members. It handles most of the truck grown in the vicinity of Norfolk, handling for outsiders—at a fixed percentage—as well as for its own members. It not only sells the truck the members grow, but buys their seeds, fertilizers and other supplies. It has bought and equipped an experimental farm near Norfolk, turning it over to the State to run, and lately has erected a six-story office building in the city, building and lot costing $135,000. All this has been done without putting in a dollar except for the capital stock which is limited to $15,000.

Equally notable successes have been attained by the Hood River apple growers and the citrus fruit growers of California. The organization of these growers has not only resulted in better prices to the growers, but in a standard quality of goods and less fluctuation of prices in the retail markets. Since California growers learned to market their oranges and lemons through organization, there has been brought about a uniformity of distribution which “has resulted in a lower retail price to the consumer and gives a larger proportion of the retail price to the producer.” These very successful organizations have one definite purpose—to sell the fruit their members grow. They are organized on strictly business principles. Each member’s crop virtually belongs to the association, and is picked, graded, packed, and sold as the association directs. Details of cultivation and spraying which may affect the quality of the fruit are also looked after by the association, and the grower has no right to sell his fruit except through the association. In the case of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange this right to the privilege of handling the crop is claimed in the first place by the Local Exchange against the grower, next by the District Exchange against the Local Exchange, and finally by the General Exchange against the District Exchange. It is an up-to-date business organization these men have; the grower belongs to a Local Exchange, the Locals form District Exchanges, and these, in turn, the General Exchange. Each is independent in matters that concern it only, but all must submit to the general voice in matters which may be of concern to all.

Fruit and truck crops seem to be especially adapted to coöperative marketing; or possibly the uncertainty of profit in their production and the big share of the final price absorbed by the middlemen have forced fruit and truck growers to coöperate to a greater extent than farmers in most other lines. At any rate there are quite a few successful coöperative associations among these growers. In Texas such an association does a business of $1,500,000 annually. The Grand Junction Fruit Growers’ Association, of Colorado, is another notable success. California nut growers market their product through a coöperative organization. Florida citrus growers claim to have raised the net price received by growers for oranges from $1.15 in 1909-10 to $1.96 for the season 1912-13. Western North Carolina fruit growers have organized, as have Georgia peach growers, and fruit raisers in many other sections. In an Alabama town a truckers’ association with 190 members has standardized its products until it obtains prices considerably above those secured by individuals, and from a small beginning has grown to be the most important business concern of its town.

These stories might be duplicated many times; and it is not too much to say that the fruit growers and truckers are rapidly coming to realize the benefits of coöperative organization. I do not believe it any wild prophecy to say that within a dozen years the trucker seeking a location will inquire into the marketing organization conducted by his fellow truckers just as he now inquires into the locality’s shipping facilities. And some time all the local coöperative organizations marketing perishable truck and fruit will unite to conduct a great central marketing exchange. Then the present-day scarcities of certain fruits and vegetables at one town, while in another these same products are decaying and going to waste, will be avoided.

Coming back from the things that may be to the things that are, it is worth while to note that in 1911 2,120 out of a total of 6,284 creameries in the United States were conducted on coöperative lines, and that of 3,846 cheese factories, 349 were coöperative. In Minnesota 608 out of 838 creameries were coöperative. In Wisconsin 347 creameries out of 1,000 and 244 cheese factories out of 1,784.

In these as in other lines of business coöperative associations are largely localized. A successful coöperative creamery in a locality helps to organize other creameries near it on a coöperative basis, and so on. Similarly, the successful coöperative rural stores of the country are largely grouped in Minnesota and Wisconsin, having spread from one or two unusually successful ventures in small towns. The coöperative grain elevators of the country are mostly located in Iowa, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Illinois, although Nebraska and Kansas have over a hundred each. Where one farmers’ telephone line is organized another is likely to follow, and whole counties have been covered in this way.

In short, the coöperative spirit is like the little leaven which spreads and spreads until it leavens the whole lump.

It is not only that a successful coöperative enterprise leads to the establishment of similar enterprises in nearby communities. More notable and striking still is the fact that a successful coöperative enterprise in a rural community seems often to put new life into the whole community and to give the farmers entirely new conceptions of their own capacities and the possibilities of their vocation.

Take, for example, the story of Svea, Minnesota, as told by a recent visitor to that town—a visitor, by the way, who went to Svea simply to see how the farmers there were working together and what profits they had from so doing. I quote:

“In Svea they have established and operated thus far without one single failure, a coöperative creamery, a coöperative telephone company, a coöperative grain elevator, a coöperative stock-shipping association, a coöperative store, a coöperative insurance company, a coöperative bank (now forming). Moreover, they also have as a result of what we may term coöperative effort, a thoroughly equipped high school with agricultural and domestic science teaching, a consolidated church with a resident pastor, a school library and a State teaching library, neighborhood social meetings three times a month under church influences. They have made their neighborhood a reading neighborhood. Almost every farmer takes two to four farm papers and other reading matter in proportion.

“In other words, the Svea farmers have become ‘business men’ as surely as commercial men in the towns, and are doubling their profits as a result, while they are at the same time developing a high degree of culture and that satisfying social life, without which mere money is valueless, while also maintaining moral and spiritual influences which town life tends to destroy.”

The first enterprise was the creamery which was started in 1896. It paid so well that the coöperative telephone line came four years later; and, having once learned how much it helped them to work together, they have continued all along to find out new ways in which they could coöperate for the upbuilding of the community. The coöperative store, strictly on the Rochdale plan, was started in 1909, and to show how coöperation pays, the experience of the town pastor may be cited. He took $100 stock in the store, giving his note in payment. He then went on for a year buying goods from the store at the usual retail prices. When settlement was made, ten months later, it was found that the dividends due him—the rebate on his purchases—amounted to $150.60. He had, without spending a cent or paying any extra prices for merchandise, cancelled his note and the interest on it and acquired a balance of $44.60. In other words, if he had bought his goods from a regular merchant, he would have paid that merchant $150.60 in net profits, whereas by coöperating with his neighbors and trading with himself so to speak, he was enabled to return the whole sum to his own pocket. With such examples of the benefits of coöperation before their eyes, it seems but natural that the farmers of Svea should be the prosperous, progressive, broad-minded, hopeful folks they are said to be—the sort of folks who are able and willing to vote upon themselves a tax of $1.70 on the hundred dollars of property to build and equip the kind of high school they want.

Take, as another example of how the coöperative leaven works, Catawba County, North Carolina. The farmers and other business men of this county decided some five years ago that they needed a county fair. They got together and had it—a fair with liberal prizes but without entrance or admission fees. Everything was free to all who came, and the authorities saw to it that there was nothing to injure or deceive anyone who came. The fakers and cheap side shows which are the big end of some fairs were not allowed to stop in Hickory where the fair was held. The fair was a success, and has been a success since. Last year the townspeople did not feel inclined to contribute to it, but the farmers had learned how to work with each other in the meanwhile and they went ahead and had a fair just the same, out in an oak grove surrounding a rural high school. Fifty horses and mules on exhibition, 50 pure-bred cattle and other exhibits to match. Those who have attended Southern fairs will know at once from the livestock entries that this was truly a good county fair. I doubt if these farmers could have held this fair, however, if it had not been for the coöperative creamery. This institution, established in 1910, when the farmers found themselves developing a dairy industry without a convenient market, has been the coöperative leaven in Catawba County. It was started with a capital of $1,500, the money being borrowed and the machinery purchased from a creamery “promoted” somewhere in Georgia by the agent of a creamery-selling concern which persuaded the farmers that if they got a creamery outfit the cows would somehow come to it. The creamery was a success from the start; soon it began a new work of service by handling the farmers’ eggs on a coöperative basis, teaching them how to produce and market eggs of quality while securing more than the regular market price for these eggs. The lesson was quickly learned: it paid farmers to work together. Now they have a farmers’ building and loan association, a “Sweet Potato Growers’ Association,” rural school improvement associations, women’s clubs, and are preparing for a coöperative laundry. The women meet and discuss the needs of their schools—as many women do—and then lay out a plan of action and go to work to supply the needs—as too many women do not. The Farmers’ Union in one district recently made a complete survey of that district and can now tell just what each farmer reads, what he does for his neighborhood, almost what he thinks, in so far as thoughts may be determined by actions and conditions. In short, “Catawba is a live county,” as any North Carolinian will tell the inquirer, and coöperation among the farmers has made it live.

At first thought it may seem strange that the intellectual and moral progress of a rural community should be so quickened by business coöperation among the farmers, but a little thought will show why this must almost necessarily be so. It is beyond question that the lack of organization, of unity of purpose and concert of action, is as great a hindrance to rural progress and development as is the traditional conservatism and inertia of the individual farmer. The farmer has simply not learned how to use all the multitudinous committees and boards and sundry group organizations which the city dweller has found so effective in many ways. Once the farmer gets into the habit of working with his neighbor for a common end, he sees all sorts of desirable ends to be worked for, and if a “divine discontent” with existing evils or needs is present in the community—as it usually is—it is almost certain to be no longer hemmed up in the hearts of two or three persons but set free in the consciousness of the whole community. Then action follows.

The man who would improve social and moral conditions in the country districts can make no more effective start than to organize the farmers into coöperative business associations. The American farmer has, it seems to me, demonstrated himself an efficient and whole-hearted coöperator, when once he learns the trick and gets the habit.

And he is learning rapidly. Before me, as I write, are reports from various Southern States of coöperative tobacco and cotton warehouses, coöperative and semi-coöperative stores, produce-selling exchanges, fertilizer and supply buying associations, cotton marketing associations, coöperative buying of machinery and livestock, and so on. There is even an account of a coöperative church—a whole community uniting to make the church a social centre and a help to all. The work of rural organization, either for business purposes or for intellectual development and social improvement, has just begun; but it is something that a beginning has been made, and I, for one, am not yet willing to admit that the American farmer is inferior to the farmers of any other country in either common sense or neighborly feeling. Unless he is so deficient, he will become as good a coöperator as any of them, for both his business interests and his sense of neighborliness demand a new organization of country life to fit the new conditions of our time.

RELIGION IN THE MODERN NOVEL

LOUISE MAUNSELL FIELD

OF all the many accusations brought against our much abused young twentieth century, there is none more popular than that of materialism. For all its deficiencies, whether artistic, social or ethical, this parrot-cry furnishes a convenient explanation; but unfortunately for those who welcome such catch-phrases as a ready means of avoiding any necessity for trying to exercise their disused and rusty thinking apparatus, convenient and accurate are seldom—perhaps never—synonymous. If this age of ours really is what it has so frequently been called by capable judges, the Age of the Social Conscience, that fact is in itself ample disproof of materialism; for if conscience in its every manifestation be not spiritual, what is? True, we have done away with the old scorn of the body and of that generality once known as “the world,” but this is simply the natural result of an increased knowledge which has compelled an altered point of view, making such contempt appear rather childish. And because the new social conscience has developed so largely outside the orthodox church, it is not therefore any the less religious. Indeed, it is in very great measure the immediate cause of that re-awakened interest in what may for clearness’ sake be defined as strictly religious ideas which is now showing itself in so many ways and places, and especially in the modern novel.

That this new religious interest seldom takes a dogmatic form is probably one reason why the average reader has been and still is so slow to recognize it—of course we are in no way concerned here with those latter-day successors to the Elsie books which provide psychic water-gruel for the senile-minded of all ages—yet in the stirrings of a more or less vague discomfort he has become aware of those electric currents of spiritual unrest which are penetrating down even to the most respectable of the quarter-educated well-to-do. There is something more than a little pathetic in the way these latter welcome such an attempt to manipulate words, to stretch the ancient formulas and render them broad enough to contain modern ethics and modern knowledge, as was shown in Mr. Winston Churchill’s The Inside of The Cup—a novel whose popularity was due at least as much to its discussion of religious as to its treatment of social problems. For there is no class in the community whose size, the multiplicity of books and opportunities for learning taken into consideration, is so astonishingly great as is that of the half and quarter educated well-to-do.

The best of those modern novels in which the present-day religious interest reveals itself in its most significant aspect often treat it shyly, almost timidly. For with the crumbling of the ancient cosmogony and its dependent beliefs the old cock-sure attitude became obsolete. The writer no longer says, “This is the truth; no decent or sensible person will deny it”; but instead: “This is my opinion—what experience has given me; take it for what it is or may be worth.” Very frequently it is only the consciousness of things spiritual which is clearly shown; their nature, with a deeper reverence than that of yore, is left indeterminate. Here and there appears an author whose belief is as detailed as that of Will Levington Comfort: usually, however, it is rather a reaching out, a sense of things unseen, the mental attitude one of obedience to Abt Vogler’s advice: “Consider, and bow the head.”

In this as in so many other phases of our modern thought and experience H. G. Wells has succeeded in stating lucidly that of which the majority of people are but more or less dimly aware. It is indeed particularly interesting to note the growth of spiritual and religious interest in Mr. Wells. Decidedly materialistic in much of his earlier work, it is only when Marriage is reached that we find the hero, Trafford, deploring the fact that his wife and himself have won “no religion to give them”—i. e. their children—“no sense of a general purpose.” And, though foreshadowed in other stories, not until The Passionate Friends of last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in faltering, merely human speech, which is often—it might be safe to say, always—the very crux of the religious spirit as it appears in the modern novel. Stephen Stratton, who relates the experience, has reached the crisis of his life and knows not where to go nor what to do when, as he phrases it: “The great stillness that is behind and above and around the world of sense did in some way communicate with me … commanding me to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind.” And having told him what his share in this work is to be, “the stillness” bids him: “Make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter.” And Stephen, though he cries out, “But who are you?” obeys.

Detailed at greater or less length, it is this occasional awareness of communication with the Power outside and beyond “the world of sense” which is the shape in which religion is most likely to appear in the modern novel. Sometimes, as in John Ward, M. D., this awareness, usually touched upon lightly, almost furtively, is clearly and strongly emphasized, but very seldom, and then under a slightly different aspect. The destruction of the old formulas has resulted in an instinctive distrust of creeds, an instinctive shrinking from anything which bears even the least appearance of an attempt to make new ones. The situation portrayed in William Arkwright’s able, yet curiously uneven book, The Trend, wherein he shows his mystic, purely spiritual singer as escaping, horror-stricken, from an orthodox church service and denouncing it as an insult to God, is typical, though extreme. For the revolt against the materialism of Haeckel and his followers—not of Darwin and Huxley, who were not materialists and repudiated the name with the utmost vigor—has been accompanied by a revolt against the materialism in religion which rendered it vulnerable to the onslaughts of historical and scientific criticism. “We claim and we shall wrest from theology,” said John Tyndall, “the entire domain of cosmological theory.” The event has proved him a true prophet—and helped men to disentangle religion from theology.

The whole movement of the modern novel, indeed, has been toward a spiritualization which embodies within itself an essentially religious feeling; only this spiritualization not being of the monastic and ascetic kind which so long swayed the imaginations of men, but of a social or humanistic order, has frequently been mistaken for other than its real self. It constitutes, too, a force active in all the affairs of life rather than one principally confined to certain of its details, and this fact can be glimpsed, sometimes from one angle, sometimes from another, in the more ephemeral as well as in the best examples of our twentieth century fiction. In an article published in the May issue of The Forum attention was called to the change which has taken place in the character of the fiction hero, who has lost his idle elegance and become a worker. That this work should so often be a part of the struggle for human betterment or a joining in the endeavor to right some especial wrong is both a portion of and a testimony to the idealistic spirit which quickens the modern novel, as is also the companion fact that its drama is in many notable instances mainly a psychic one. More and more is the inward effect thrusting the outward event into a position of subordinate interest; the story of a murder becomes an account not of the efforts to trace the slayer, but of the result of the deed upon his soul. The most interesting and important chapter of The Devil’s Garden is that wherein William Dale reviews the inner life which has been so turbulent, while the outer was so calm; The Debit Account has little to say of Jeffries’s career in the realm of finance but very much about his mental attitude toward himself and that “world without trifles” in which he lived; despite a charming heroine and an absorbing plot it is the influence of failure upon the character of Ralph Lingham which is the matter of supreme importance in When Love Flies out o’ the Window.

To call this confused mass of struggle and revolt and aspiration “religion” may seem to many persons unjust and perhaps even a trifle shocking; but that is because of the popular confounding of religions which are many with religion, which is one in essence, whether it be manifested under the Buddhistic form of quietism or the social service activities within and without the present-day church. Modern thought has made the old-time easy shifting of responsibility impossible, and the changed belief which this involves, enforcing the conviction that the world is to be saved and the Kingdom of God established on earth not by miraculous intervention but by the earnest labor in well-doing of many generations of devoted men and women, has had even among those who deny it an incalculably powerful effect. It may be too that the new humanitarianism which causes us to view with horror conditions which our forefathers regarded with more or less equanimity and makes reform one of the most familiar of words is to some extent due to the desire to escape from any effort to measure and explain the Infinite with mere finite instruments. Since the days when knowledge destroyed the foundations of that ancient stately tower of faith and authority which men had believed was based on truth’s very rock, this attempt to find a working theory of life which shall not imply any dogmatic response to the riddles of the universe has been made in directions innumerable, and is being so made to-day; only, the way of escape by “practical” social labor has become more popular than any other and is a road along which travel in divers manners all sorts and conditions of men—among them many who would vehemently and even indignantly deny that religious and spiritual problems had anything whatever to do with their chosen path.

In the modern novel as in the modern world religion has come to be more and more a matter of service and aspiration; less and less a matter of accordance with fixed rules and formulas. And upon this, as upon so many other aspects of life, the writer of to-day can express himself with a freedom which only a few years ago would have brought down torrents of wrath upon his head. What in our parents’ time would have been said of The Trend, for example, or even of A Man’s World?

Thus religion in the modern novel evinces itself principally in four distinct ways: in revolt against the worn-out, cramping traditions; in a broad humanitarianism which has increased sympathy and given a fresh and vivid and impelling meaning to the word duty; in a quickened spirituality that has removed punishment and reward from the hereafter and even from the world of matter to the living human soul; and in a reaching out, vaguely, gropingly, but never futilely, toward “the stillness,” “the Ultimate Force,” “the Unknown Power,” or whatever term men prefer to use in their desire to get away from the old anthropomorphic conceptions, and yet express their consciousness of the Infinite and Divine. For “the obstinate questioning of invisible things” which began so soon as man developed from the primeval ape-forms and became Man, still goes on and will go on, in all probability, so long as the race endures; only the shape and manner of the questioning has changed as humanity has slowly learned something of its ability to mould its own destiny, the duty and privilege which it possesses of working out its own salvation. There have been many periods in the world’s history when that questioning found few to voice it aloud, yet always after such a pause it has been renewed with fresh and greater vigor. One of these pauses came in the last century; to-day the questioning resounds all about us, and one of the means through which it is being uttered most clearly is the modern novel.

GIOVANNITTI

Poet of the Wop

KENNETH MACGOWAN

THERE are probably a lot of technical errors in Giovannitti’s poems.[1] I didn’t notice. And perhaps that is one of the tests of great poetry,—not the faults that you can’t find because they’re not there, but the faults that will not be discovered. Something else absorbs you.

The significant thing is that here we have a new sort of poet with a new sort of song. And doubtless because of this song it will be many years before we see his greatness. For the song that he sings is not a pleasant song. It is the song of the people as he learned it in the Lawrence strike and hummed it over in the jails of Salem. He and his song are products of something that few Americans yet understand. We do not comprehend the labor problem of the unskilled, just as we do not comprehend the I. W. W. that has come out of it. A poet has arisen to explain.

Now the I. W. W. is no mere labor union; the A. F. of L. is enough. Giovannitti is no mere poet of labor; we have had plenty of such. He is not singing of labor alone. He is not prating of the dignity of work—you can’t find it in the situation the I. W. W. faces. He is no aristocrat of handiwork, like the A. F. of L. He sings the people behind the work—active or idle, skilled or not—“Plebs, Populace, People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat.” He cries the awakening of that great mass of mankind that has always been typified as Labor because earning its bread in the sweat of its brow was its one common attribute—the primordial curse. He looks beyond work to emancipation:

Think! If your brain will but extend

As far as what your hands have done,

If but your reason will descend

As deep as where your feet have gone,

The walls of ignorance shall fall

That stood between you and your world.…

Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn,

Crouched at your feet the world lies still—

It has no power but your brawn,

It knows no wisdom but your will.

Behind your flesh, and mind, and blood,

Nothing there is to live and do,

There is no man, there is no god,

There is not anything but you.

Against him Giovannitti finds the world—the world even of his own kind, bound in the chains of the past. The police, the law, the Church, another age shackling this, he has met them all in Massachusetts, arrayed against even the first steps toward his industrial democracy. The business of his verse is to destroy. In The Cage—the prisoner’s pen in which he stood for murder—he deals with the mummy of authority. In The Walker he has painted the prison as no man, not even Wilde, has done. And the Church—even the Christ whom so many socialists are confessing that they may be numbered with the sheep—that also he denies. Christ, the heavy-laden carpenter, was still a man of peace. Giovannitti has his own sermon, “The Sermon on the Common”: “Blessed are the strong in freedom’s spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of the earth.”

Materialistic—like all these socialists? Giovannitti has his answer ready for you: “While happiness be not our goal, but simply the way to get there.”

Neither materialism nor happiness is likely to trouble the average American. What bothers him is “violence.” And there is no disguising the fact that violence is an essential part of the I. W. W. and its faith. Love is as great a part, of course; but hate must spring just as quickly from the cruelty of the world of the few as love from the brotherhood of the world of the many. Giovannitti and his friends want something and they want it badly. They are ready to take it peaceably: Giovannitti pictures the spirit of Helen Keller as the Christ of loving forgiveness—the only true Christ—offering peace to the grinder of the faces of the poor. But, if love and forgiveness fail, there is another savior waiting, and a violent savior:

… The sombre one whose brow

Is seared by all the fires and ne’er will bow

Shall come forth, both his hands upon the hilt.

Whatever its future, the I. W. W. has accomplished one tremendously big thing—a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags and violence and sabotage. And that is the individual awakening of “illiterates” and “scum” to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and the rights of their part in it. They have learned more than class-consciousness; they have learned consciousness of self. The I. W. W. is making the “wop” into a thinker. And that is what Giovannitti wrote in his Proem when he said of his own verses:

They are the blows of my own sledge

Against the walls of my own jail.

[1] Arrows in the Gale. By Arturo Giovannitti. The Hillacre Book House.

EMERSON

A Mystic Who Lives Again in His Journals[2]

WARREN BARTON BLAKE

EMERSON has been “discovered” again—this time in the France that he tried hard and vainly to understand. It all began with the publication of a critical biography by Madame Dugard in 1907. I was in Paris then, and read it, and was most of all struck by the comically dressy effect, in translation, of the simple lines beginning:

Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home.

In French, they correspond to an Emerson dressed in eighteenth century style, with wig and sword:

Adieu, monde orgueilleux, je retourne au foyer;

Tu n’es pas mon ami, je ne suis pas le tien…

Yet the book is a good introduction to Emerson, and, since 1907, Madame Dugard and others have translated several volumes of essays for the French public. I wonder if they have won a reading—outside the university and professionally literary groups; I wonder if Frenchmen see far beyond what Robert G. Ingersoll called the “baked-bean side of his genius”? As the late Perpetual Secretary of the Immortals said, when the French Academy “crowned” the Dugard book:

“Emerson’s influence in America, like Ruskin’s in England, is a curious illustration of the need for an ideal which, at certain moments, the man of action, the Anglo-Saxon, feels. Such was the empire of contemplative monks over barbarian chiefs and of mystics over feudal armies. It was Emerson’s fortune to launch his ideas at a time when America was largely without them…. Emerson, knowing that the great danger of democracy is atrophy of the individual conscience, set himself to preaching individualism—the necessity of a high culture, the search for an ideal.”

II

Eight years ago, when I read Mme. Dugard’s volume, I was youthful—with all of youth’s intolerance. It seemed no mere coincidence that Emerson’s father recorded his birth in his diary between a dry note on the “Election Sermon” and a report of a session of his literary club at Mr. Adams’s. Cheerful youth, not needing reassurance concerning the excellence of this world as an abiding place, is unlikely to set a high value on what contemporary reviewers, even in the American religious press, found to praise in Emerson’s essays: “Their lofty cheer, and spirit-stirring notes of courage and hope.” I certainly had no conception of Emerson’s influence upon my father’s generation—an influence so great that Carlyle called his friend a new era in our history; so great that when some clergymen complained that he was leading young men to hell, Father Taylor remarked: “It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but I am certain he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.” Then again, I had no sympathy with Emerson because it seemed to me, in spite of all the long words and imported transcendentalism—or, partly, on account of them—that he didn’t “get anywhere.” (I sometimes feel so still—but the charge is less damnatory. I do not wonder that Moncure Conway wrote of Emerson setting free in his heart—in his heart, notice—“a winged thought that sang a new song and soared—whither?”)

Emerson’s dependence upon intuitions and praises of them as the springs of action and organ of inspiration conferring wisdom upon man seemed the less respectable because I hadn’t read Bergson—who has made intuitions more than ever fashionable. Emerson lived in the spirit-world—a quite different place from any trodden by the student in Paris who is at home in the world of the Sorbonne and the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the world of flesh-and-blood. To healthy youth, nothing is much more repugnant than the Wordsworthian ideal of wise passivity, while the notion of a Buddhistic Nirvana seems murderous of “Nature”—however you define her. Moreover, I know not how to direct my inexorable thoughts, Emerson avows, and scarcely appears to think any direction of them needful. His best thoughts steal upon him in silence, and Truth flies out of the window when Will enters in by the door. “There is never a fine aspiration but is on its way to its body or institution,” he confidently asserts. Too confidently, it seemed to me. Emerson, aged thirty, wrote that a system-grinder hates the truth; he loved the truth, and therefore—therefore?—side-stepped system. It was not till much later that he uttered the heartfelt cry: “If Minerva offered me a gift and an option, I would say, give me continuity. I am tired of scraps….

“‘The Asmodæan feat be mine

To spin my sand-bags into twine.’”

Perhaps the scrappiness of Emerson is less distressing to the youthful mind, eternally and quite needlessly refreshed by the comedy of life on every side of it, than the Emersonian “trick of solitariness,” that he played as a Harvard undergraduate not less but perhaps rather more than as the Concord sage. When Madame Dugard’s book on Emerson was published in Paris, I sat down and wrote a critique—stored with Roussellian analogies, à la Irving Babbitt. I was full of Rousseau then, and I piled on sentences that I meant to be cruel and crushing—not of Professor Babbitt, or Jean-Jacques, or Madame Dugard, but of poor Emerson. I showed my article, unfinished, to a dear friend—wiser than I; and then tore it up. Here is a part of the letter I had from my friend commenting on the little essay:

“I find your point that Emerson, the preacher of individualism, was himself thin-blooded and barren of true personality, interesting: whether or not it is true. I never happened to find it put just so before, and should certainly never have thought of it. But I suppose, after all, a certain kind of individuality might be expressed by impersonality as well as by any other instrument. I’ve only glanced through the Dugard book, but the point of view seems to be the conventional one that Emerson was too far removed from the stress and pain of life to touch very closely vibrant, struggling souls. As you translate, ‘he fills only the full, reassures only the optimists.’ I suppose that is true enough. And yet—and yet, is any life so full that it does not need refilling; or any optimism so complete and so unshaken that it does not need reassurance, expression, from an articulate, a stronger spirit? Isn’t optimism with many people a religious yearning rather than any truly temperamental attribute; a thing to be struggled for, and cherished, and reinforced from without? Whatever forces from within may have urged Emerson toward idealism and optimism, wasn’t he at least equally an idealist, and optimist, from conviction, or faith, or whatever else you call the semi-religious element? The Emersonian idealism is more, I am sure, than the natural overflow of a serenely poetic disposition—to which you try to reduce it. You must not forget that essay of his on Destiny—Destiny, man’s heroic, large-spirited friend, man’s bolster against Fate (discouraging and enervating personage!).

“I suppose that it is fair enough to complain that Emerson gives light without heat, but how many writers throw off much heat and little light—to say nothing of ‘darkness visible’…. Not many philosophers and poets and friends of ours yield us both forms of power. Perhaps the combination of the two—light and, well, at least warmth—is the most remarkable thing about Christ and his system.”

I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now that I have read in President Eliot’s centenary essay on the great New Englander his confession that he too, “as a young man,” found the writings of Emerson “unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, … speculative, and visionary.” It is only after one has suffered from living that one fully values Emerson—only as one is gradually educated himself, in experience’s school, that one appreciates his worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot calls “natural” rather than supernatural religion.

III

For this descendant of a line of Yankee ministers, there is no dividing line between the secular and the sacred. To Emerson, life is itself sacred; and the universe no less holy than the Ark of the Tabernacle—

So nigh is grandeur to our dust

So nigh is God to man.

“Christianity is wrongly conceived by all such as take it for a system of doctrines,” he wrote in his diary as a young man—thereby fortifying in some sort what Augustine Birrell was to say half a century later: “You cannot, however dogmatically inclined, construct a theology out of Emerson.” His stress was placed—as he was persuaded Christ’s was—upon moral truth; and at thirty he wrote: “I feel myself pledged, if health and opportunity be granted me, to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence.” Demonstrate? Emerson never did succeed in “demonstrating” very much. In Dr. Eliot’s words, here was no logician or reasoner, but “a poet who wrote chiefly in prose.” But his prose is certainly no less poetic than his poetry. The inspiration is in both cases moral; and, to paraphrase—

His every line, of noble origin,

Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.

Yet Emerson was intolerant of cant about immortality. “I notice that as soon as writers broach this subject they begin to quote. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”[3]

Emerson demonstrates, after death, one meaning of immortality by living again in his “Journal”—the tenth volume of which has just come to my book-shelf. Some complain of prolixity, but to read this Journal is to find the measure of the man: and that is all the more cheering to the lazy reader in that Emerson is far from being immeasurable. He set down from day to day not only the record of events and personages who impressed him, but many stray thoughts and reflections. He swept into his Journal all the chips from his workshop, and stored there all the rough materials he meant to carve and fabricate and ornament. Workshop? The word is decidedly unpoetical, and perhaps inapt; for, as Madame Dugard points out, he made of his soul a lyre whose strings vibrated to all the winds of the spirit (his spirit, that is); and in his Journal he notes these passing vibrations in phrases where words like flow, flee, flux, fugitive, fugacious, current, stream, undulation, occur and recur. Undeniably he sometimes forced himself; he acknowledged that his talent, like the New England soil, is good only while he works it. “If I cease to task myself, I have no thoughts.” And adds: “This is a poor sterile Yankeeism. What I admire and love is the generous and spontaneous soil which flowers and fruits at all seasons.” Many of his memoranda he developed later in the essay form—a procedure suspected by his own contemporaries[4] —but I like the mere scraps. Very perfectly do they express the eagerly searching, earnestly austere man: reflecting all his sincerity and incompleteness just as the beautiful paragraphs they piled up as their sole monuments mirror the minds of Joubert in France and Amiel in Switzerland. There is no humbug here, though there are some few fallacies to reward those who read principally to prove, at the author’s expense, their own astuteness. Emerson fully realized—at fifty—what his deficiencies were; he called himself an intellectual chiffonier, with a Jew’s rag-bag of brocade remnants and velvets and torn cloth-of-gold. Truth to tell, he is all this no less in his essays than in these Journals—and is a literary architect no more than his friend Montaigne. As he repeated his lectures, and they gained in polish and conciseness, the defect still sometimes remained: he built more than one excellent house without stairs. It is in momentary flashes of intuitive communication with the great spirits—lightning flashes that suddenly light up the black night in which we spend most of our time—that his genius shines. Somewhere in his Journal he writes:

“One man sees the fact or object, and another sees the power of it; one the triangle, and the other the cone which is generated by the revolution of the triangle.”

He who has so often been reproached with aloofness looked at many common facts, and saw what we see there—and beyond. His first lesson of religion is that things seen are temporal, unseen things eternal; yet is the temporal much for the eternally-minded, who preserves the all-important sense of wonder. “Now that man was ready, the horse was brought,” he writes; and continues:

“The timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be conceded. To us Americans it seems to have fallen as a political aid. We could not have held the vast North America together which now we engage to do. It was strange, too, that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific, a railroad, a ship-road, a telegraph, and in short, a perfect communication in every manner for all nations,—’twas strange to see how it was secured. The good World-Soul understands us well.”

Nowise was Emerson a Ruskinian. To the railroad he says—“like the courageous Lord Mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming: ‘Let it come in Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.’” And this assurance is all the more welcome as one of the not too frequent flashes of his humor.

IV

While an author is often the worst-qualified critic of individual books or passages in his own work, he has almost always expressed somewhere the final criticism of his total. So it is with Emerson. On one page he defines for us the type of idealism of which he was an exponent:

“We are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a sensation…. Character is more to us…. Religion makes us idealists.”

On another page, he writes:

“Malthus existed to say, Population outruns food: Owen existed to say, ‘Given the circumstance, the man’s given. I can educate a tiger’: Swedenborg, that inner and outer correspond: Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to the attractions; Bentham, the greatest good of the greatest number. But what do you exist to say?”

It is no tragedy if this sower of good seed said no one thing, and only repeated many unequally wise counsels, and, by the wireless telegraph of sympathetic genius, spelled out the dots and dashes that, for the rest of us, unschooled in science, might have remained dots and dashes till the day of judgment. Emerson’s contemporaries greatly needed the man and his serene preaching—so undisturbed—while

Theist, atheist, pantheist

Define and wrangle how they list.

To paraphrase Thureau-Dangan, Emerson’s was the empire of the contemplative monks over barbarian axe-men and sword-bearers. To-day, while the prosperous shudder at every murmur of social unrest, and the not-prosperous are drunk with heady wines; while society is, as in Emerson’s day, still “devoured by a secret melancholy,” disguised in a hundred forms of madness; while the nations still glare at one another from behind their breast-works, and the classes still war or hate (with ever deepening consciousness of class): while all these things are so, democracy’s “great dangers” may well remain the vulgarizing of the arts, contempt of contemplation, “the atrophy of the individual conscience.” Emerson somehow soothes this conscience without putting it to sleep. His courageous faith in Destiny, his cheering theory of compensations, his deathless hope, his healthy, exaggerated individualism: here are counter-irritants for more than one of Time’s diseases. “If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.” And Emerson did indeed “make free”; he was Emancipator, “not of black bodies, but of the minds of white men.”

[2] Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820-1872. With Annotations. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Ten Volumes.

[3] “Emerson refused to dogmatize about what is necessarily obscure at present.”—John Albee, Recollections of Emerson. Emerson wrote in his essay on Experience: “In accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.” This is not far from the point of view of James, Bergson, and, nowadays, Sir Oliver Lodge. If Emerson “refused to dogmatize” about the uncertainties of the future life, he had all the same his nobler convictions. He writes in his Journal: “I know my soul is immortal if it were only by the sublime emotion I taste in reading these lines of Swedenborg: ‘The organical body with which the soul clothes itself is here compared to a garment, because a garment invests the body, and the soul also puts off the body and casts it away as old clothes (exuviæ), when it emigrates by means of death from the natural world into its own spiritual world.’”

[4] In Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for June, 1870, we read: “Rumor attributes to Ralph Waldo Emerson a peculiar method of composition. He keeps, it is said, a commonplace book into which go every striking thought, curious metaphor, keen epigram, which his own mind incubates or his various reading discovers. When he is called on for a lecture, he goes to his commonplace book. He culls from its pages enough of its best material for an hour’s instruction or entertainment. Connection is immaterial….”

NOTE

The continuation of The World of H. G. Wells series, by Van Wyck Brooks, is postponed in consequence of the war.

CORRESPONDENCE

The War

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—The war and the new problems created by it are engrossing the attention of the entire British nation. Outwardly the life of London goes on pretty much as usual. Under the surface there is a tremendous lot of fermentation and premonition. It seems certain that the war will be accompanied or followed by a social readjustment on a scale hitherto undreamed of—and this readjustment will be entirely in a democratic and socialistic direction.

That a great financial crisis is due one can hardly doubt. So far the weaker elements in the commercial and industrial world have been carried along by artificial support, but that cannot go on indefinitely. Whether the moratorium be extended or not, the crash must come sooner or later. People are realizing this, and it has already caused a tremendous awakening. In the end it will mean additional surrenders on the part of the wealthy classes. The Kaiser has solved not only the Ulster and suffrage questions, as some one said the other day, but the whole question of social reorganization. What would have had to be taken under ordinary circumstances will now be given. This may seem an optimistic view of the whole thing, and may prove unwarranted at this point or that, but on the whole I think it will be found absolutely correct. A spirit of self-sacrifice is in the air, and I think the German war machine will prove possessed of just enough initial impetus to prevent that spirit from petering out without tangible manifestation. The more the Germans win to begin with, the longer the war becomes protracted, the more thoroughly will the spirit for which their ruling class stands be killed in the end.

Just how the financial precariousness of the European situation will affect America no one can hope to foretell with any certainty. It is possible that the distress of one continent will bring a “boom” to the other. But I doubt it. I believe that we shall have to suffer with the rest of the Western World, and if that proves so, it means that we shall have an outbreak of internal strife hardly less serious than the external strife on this side of the water. We are indeed—turn wherever we may—on the threshold of grave and portentous events, and may the Spirit of Life grant us all strength and patience and faith to live through them. There is a great darkness ahead of us—an ordeal of fire for the whole civilized portion of mankind—but beyond it awaits us the long, sunlit day of world-wide peace.

EDWIN BJÖRKMAN

LONDON

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—I have just read your September editorial on War. How powerfully and terribly you write on the subject. I hope it may be read everywhere.

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

CHICAGO

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—I am an old man. I watch with pain, almost with incredulity, the spectacle that Europe presents to the world. I see England fighting “lest the lights of freedom go out throughout the world.” I see Germany fighting lest God and civilization be obliterated by barbarians. I see France fighting for her honor, her freedom, her existence. I see everywhere murder, and misunderstanding. So I write to you to thank you for the attitude you have taken: the big attitude. It will be remembered. It will have effects that, when you are old, as I am to-day, will bring you contentment. You have fought a better fight than any of the commanders in the field.

SENEX

CINCINNATI

“Piety”

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—Your correspondent “Twentieth Century” who writes under the above heading in the August FORUM is surely in a bad temper. His letter is good evidence in favor of the theory that our beliefs are determined by our wishes. He objects strongly to the doctrines propounded in the tract he mentions, particularly to the use of the word “damned,” and, if he had the power, would stop the publication of such objectionable matter.

The only reason he gives for this is that he dislikes it very much and won’t have Christianity of that brand at any price.

Now why is he so hot about it? Why does he use such epithets as “stupid,” “disgusting,” “criminal lunatics,” etc.? If these doctrines are false, no one will be hurt by them—it may even be that some will be restrained from evil deeds by the teaching. On the other hand, if they are true, and no one can demonstrate their untruth, he and all those who despise the warning may find themselves in sorry case. Anyway Christians will try to get on without him and may be encouraged to know that the faith is still able to arouse such violent opposition.

J. P. DUNLOP

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—Thank you for sending me the proof of Mr. Dunlop’s letter. Mr. Dunlop has evidently rigid convictions which no discussion could modify. He may justly retort that I myself have convictions which I am unwilling to modify. But that would not be true. I am willing to modify any and every conviction that I have, if new evidence and new advances in knowledge make it clear that I have been partly or wholly at fault. But Mr. Dunlop clings fast to what he considers the faith of his fathers, though the thinking world has long discarded the idea of a God of Love who is supposed to punish his children for their faults in this life by consigning them to the flames of hell, in which they will suffer eternally the agonizing torments of fire. It is impossible to reason with the well-meaning and sincere, but utterly ignorant, people who are capable of believing such absurdities.

I am glad that “Christians will try to get on without me.” I shall certainly succeed in getting on without the so-called Christianity which teaches that morality must depend essentially upon the fear of hell, not upon the love of God; and I will cheerfully take the risk of being punished for refusing to believe that God is in reality a fiend.

Mr. Dunlop assumes that I was in a bad temper when I wrote my previous letter. A certain sæva indignatio against lies and hypocrisy, wilful or unwilful, is entirely justified. Was Christ himself icily cold when he swept the money-changers and brawlers from the Temple? Did he speak in measured academic platitudes?

Mr. Dunlop does not realize that he believes what he believes merely because he has never used his brain, never investigated or tried to distinguish between the essential truth and the inevitable accretions of falsehood and folly. If he had been born in pagan times, he would probably have remained a pagan. In one age or country he would have sacrificed to Moloch: in another he would have worshipped Bacchus. But, of course, he cannot understand this.

I used the epithets “stupid,” “disgusting,” etc., because they seemed to me the most appropriate in connection with such a travesty of reason and religion as the tract referred to presented. And Mr. Dunlop is quite wrong when he says that “if these doctrines are false, no one will be hurt by them.” Generations of men, women and children have been hurt by them; hampered and cramped and narrowed by them; prevented from living their full, free lives, and driven from the comprehension and sustaining power of Christ’s Christianity by such grotesque inventions of little minds, striving to measure their God by their own paltry standards.

As I said before, it is time that the narrow-minded reactionaries should be taught that they are not the pillars of the true Church and the pillars of the ideal society that they have supposed themselves to be; they are neither good, nor pious, nor useful. They are the real enemies of knowledge, reason, Christ and God. They try to murder childhood with ghastly lies about hell-fire; they try to enchain manhood and womanhood in shackles of mediæval, nonsensical, character-rotting superstitions.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

NEW YORK

American Industrial Independence

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—The peril of dependence on foreign nations for production and over-sea transportation is demonstrated in the European war of 1914 as never before.

The loss of human life in this war will be appalling, the resulting sacrifice of the fruits of the labor of generations inestimable, and the loss of capital will be enormous.

We must use our best judgment to prevent these disastrous conditions from weakening our industrial capacity. This is the time when we should think and think hard about conserving and developing industrial independence.

We have issued the following announcement:

“To American Producers: Please report to us any article or articles (raw material or finished product) of use in agriculture, mining or manufacture in the United States, for the supply of which we are dependent upon any foreign country.”

We shall take up every article thus reported, investigate the possibility of successful production at home, and urge upon Americans the desirability of such changes in our existing tariff system as shall create new industries in every line where we are now partly or wholly dependent on foreign countries.

A. D. JUILLIARD

Chairman, Executive Committee,

The American Protective Tariff League.

NEW YORK

Eugenics in Wisconsin

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—As supplementary to your editorial on Eugenic Tests, which appeared in the August issue of THE FORUM, I am submitting herewith my editorial on the general subject, which appeared in The Milwaukee Daily News recently. As, of course, you know, Wisconsin, at the last session of its legislature, placed on its statute books a law requiring certain examinations and tests to be made before the intending groom could secure a license to marry. The law provoked widespread discussion and far from general approval. It was thought, in some quarters, to be too drastic to be capable of full and complete compliance. However, it is still on our statute books, and while some of its most drastic provisions, like the laboratory tests, are not being insisted upon, the belief is general that the law is doing some good along new and, heretofore, untried lines. It gives notice that something beside matrimonial misery must be a condition precedent to the marriage relation.

However, your editorial suggestion that popular education rather than drastic legal enactments should be employed to secure a reasonable standard of health preceding marriage, is undoubtedly sound and should lead to what ought be the much-desired condition. Legislation, here as elsewhere, is not the panacea of all the matrimonial ills of which we know. But silence is an inexcusable crime in the premises.

DUANE MOWRY

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN

The Fourth Dimension

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,—With due deference to your valued journal, the article of Claude Bragdon, Learning to Think in Terms of Spaces, in your August number, is essentially illogical. The writer thus introduces his subject: “A point, moving in an unchanging direction, traces out a line; a line, moving in a direction at right angles to its length, traces out a plane; a plane, moving in a direction at right angles to its two dimensions, traces out a solid. Should a solid move in a direction at right angles to its every dimension, it would trace out, in four dimensional space, a hypersolid.”

Now this may pass current in blackboard geometry, but does not hold good in the abstract. The physical point is indeed extended to represent the line, and the physical line, to represent the plane, etc. But these concrete objects are not to be conceived as true geometrical figures, which are not movable, for motion presupposes sensuous experience. Only matter is movable. The true geometrical line is not the extension of the point, nor is the cube formed by the extension of the plane. When a point “moves” it is no longer a point, and when a cube “moves” it becomes annihilated.

“Student,” in a letter upon the same subject, speaks of a division of a cube into smaller cubes. But when a part of a geometrical figure is conceived the first figure is of necessity annihilated.

Mr. Bragdon, after expatiating upon the vastness of the firmament, makes this extraordinary conclusion: “Viewed in relation to this universe of suns, our particular sun and its satellites shrink to a point. That is, the earth becomes no-dimensional.” The last word is in italics. Now this is manifestly a misconception, since the most minute atom, notwithstanding its insignificance in proportion to the universe, cannot be considered as an abstraction, which a point really is. Those who are not satisfied with the intuitive evidence of the limitation of space to three dimensions, solely because no logical proof can be adduced of this limitation, would do well to read the essay of Schopenhauer on The Methods of Mathematics, in which is cited as an instance of the undue importance of logical demonstration the controversy on the theory of parallels. The eleventh axiom of Euclid “asserts that two parallel lines inclining toward each other if produced far enough must meet,—a truth which is supposed to be too complicated to pass as self-evident and thus requires a demonstration…. It is quite arbitrary where we draw the line between what is directly certain and what has first to be demonstrated.” (The italics are mine.)

I believe with Schopenhauer, who quotes Descartes and Sir W. Hamilton in support of his contention, that the science of mathematics has no cultural value. Far from affording “a new way of looking at the world,” as Mr. Bragdon tries to convince us, “its only direct use is that it can accustom restless and unsteady minds to fix their attention.” That such mental concentration may be woefully misdirected is instanced in the cases of Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky, reference to whom by Mr. Bragdon is alone sufficient to cause a sniff of suspicion.

Indeed your author himself, while evidently well versed in bookish mathematics, has been unable to free his mind of its limitations. Upon a basis of phrases devoid of significance he builds his extravagantly mystical speculation, which dissolves in the light of reason, “into air, thin air.”

PHILIP J. DORETY, M. D.

TRENTON, N. J.

EDITORIAL NOTES

Soldiers of All Nations

IT is difficult to realize that while this note is being written, men are dying, every moment: not in the fulness of time, for the glory of God and their own rest; but unduly and by wanton violence, in the prime of manhood, with the whole making and purpose of their lives incomplete and unrenewable. They lie in strange places, and must sleep, not uncompanioned, but uncoffined and without memorial: mere broken bits of life-stuff, shattered from the resemblance of humanity by machines that must be fed with the food that women travail for, and pray for, and, losing, break their hearts. Well, may they sleep soundly, these soldiers of all nations who will march no more to music, nor answer the reveille at dawn! God be gracious to them, gallant men all, if graciousness be needed where they have gone now!

Paying the Cost

IF the death of warriors were war’s only penalty, men perhaps might be forgiven for their battles, since heroes are made known by them. But the world has gone to school again, to learn the lesson that is enforced with cannons; and it knows the whole cost of war, and is paying it, and will continue to pay it for many a year. In this country, we have not contributed much, so far: only a hundred millions officially, and who shall say how many millions unofficially, in disorganized industry? But they have paid a large sum in Belgium, where the prices are plainly marked; they have paid in France (it is an ill winter that follows unreaped and rotting harvests); they have paid in Austria; and the bill for the other countries is being added up.

Christianity and Civilization

BUT it is not true that Christianity has broken down, or that civilization has broken down, as some have said in the first flush of their indignation and sorrow. Civilization and Christianity have never yet been tried in the world, so they cannot very well have broken down. What we have had, so far, has been a pseudo-Christianity and a pseudo-civilization. It is not so much that we have been deliberately insincere, perhaps; but we have not faced life and the problems of life as they should be faced; we have accepted the imitation instead of insisting upon the genuine thing; we have given lip-worship, but not heart-worship.

Rebuilding

WE are living, and some of us are dying, in strange, wonderful, terrible days. There is no room for pessimism or for bravado. Barbarism is showing us what deeds it can produce. We must answer with deeds.

Let no man who has held high rank in the Government of any country think now that he has done well or deserves acclamations. So far as his vision led him, he may have tried to do his duty, with foresight, devotion, faithfulness. Yet he has failed. The Government which cannot save its country from war has failed, whatever its other achievements. The new ideas, the new hopes, have not been fully comprehended. And so suspicion and enmity have been allowed to grow steadily, and the thought of war has been constantly in men’s minds, as the inevitable end to which the world was drifting.

The thought of war should have been as impossible as the thought of murder. The press of all nations, instead of pandering to misunderstanding and animosities, should have educated the people, day by day and year by year, until the curse of nationalism was lifted from the world.

For nationalism has been a curse, and will remain a curse, so long as devotion to one country can involve enmity to any other. We are brothers in one boat, as we pass from the unknown to the unknown. Let us learn to understand each other.

Benedict XV

THE election of Cardinal della Chiesa was certainly unexpected, and it may be hoped that this element of surprise will be extended to his general policies. But if his Holiness continues, as Pontiff, to carry out the principles of the Archbishop of Bologna, the Church will lose far more than she can gain. What is needed now is not a saint or a scholar or a skilful administrator, though saintliness and scholarship and executive talent are admirable qualifications. If the Church is to do anything more than merely mark time, or actually lose ground, she requires as her head now a man of profound imagination and unswerving courage. The tendency of the Papacy has been too much toward mechanical routine, the neglect of new opportunities, the discountenancing of new ideas, the refusal of new life. The creative genius of the great artist, the incommunicable imaginative insights of the great novelist or poet or painter, could give the Vatican a new leadership in the spiritual affairs of mankind. We have seen the Pope who condemned Modernism dying of a broken heart because Europe was turned into a field of desolation and slaughter. The impotence of the Pontiff to secure some regard for Christian teachings amongst supposedly Christian nations, is at once the measure of the Church’s weakness and the condemnation of her methods. In the spirit of the Modernists, if not in the spirit of Modernism itself, Benedict XV could remove many of the mountains that stand in the way of the direct line for the Twentieth Century, Limited. Mountains may be picturesque: but, in the wrong place, they are merely a nuisance.

Uncensored

THE press has not had an easy task in attempting to gratify the natural desire of the public for dramatic details of the war operations. But even after making the fullest allowances for all difficulties, whether due to the censorship, to broken communications, or to the indiscretions of partisans, one can scarcely congratulate the newspaper world as a whole upon its achievements. In New York, for instance, there have been two or three papers which have maintained reasonable standards; but most of the papers have published and republished so-called news of a kind that should never have found public record. Why should any journal waste time in announcing, in large type, that “the Servians swear that the enemy will never enter the capital so long as one house stands and one Servian lives”? This is mere bombastic rubbish, and has nothing to do with the patriotism and fortitude of the Servians. The appearance of perpetual “war extras,” with no additional information, but with immense scareheads, is another unpleasant sign of the shallowness and insincerity that we permit in these busy days. Frothy journalism may flourish for the moment: but the public has a better memory than it is sometimes supposed to possess.

“Civilized Warfare”

SOME one, somewhere, appears to be laboring under a rather serious mistake, or we should not have been exposed so frequently during the last few weeks to the phrase “civilized warfare.” There is no such thing, of course, as civilized warfare. All war is necessarily barbaric in its methods, and ludicrous in its assumption of semi-decency. When nations go out, in the name of God, to mangle and destroy their fellow-creatures, they are reverting to the primitive profession of murder. The glory of war is the glory of murder, however it may be embellished by infantile brains.

We have heard much of atrocities and “uncivilized” outrages. Probably most of the stories are utterly false: but even if they were true, they would only be in full accord with the whole purpose, methods, and disgrace of war.

Let us realize, very clearly, that war is necessarily and always murderous and barbaric, and let us abandon the pretence that we are shocked at the annihilation of towns, the rape of women, the slaughter of children, the desolation of once-prosperous communities. These are the trimmings of war. If we order the feast, let us pay for it; but let us, in the name of all decency, give up the pretence that we are either civilized or Christianized.

Saintless Petrograd

THE official change from St. Petersburg to Petrograd removes the intrusive saint from the Russian capital. The city was named after Peter the Great, of somewhat uncouth memory, and the subsequent sanctification by the rest of Europe was perhaps a tribute to the religious reputation of Holy Russia.

Now that the Ice has been broken, such cities as Florence, for example, may begin to assert their right to be known, even in the Anglo-Saxon world, by their real and native names.

Thumbs Down

IN his clever, whimsical and symbolistic play, Androcles and the Lion, Mr. George Bernard Shaw has fallen—or a zealous proof-reader has made it appear that he has fallen—into the usual error of “thumbs down,” as the death signal.

It is strange that this mistake should be so widely prevalent, and should even be repeated by the Encyclopædia Britannica. But the error, like ’round for round and laid for lay, will no doubt pass steadily through the years.

However, anyone who has not yet read Mr. Shaw’s little play should do so at once, paying special attention to Ferrovius.

The Earl of Whisky

THE oddities of childhood are rarely understood completely, even in these days of ingenious educational devices. The child lives and moves and has his being in his own world. He may emerge at moments, he may seem to understand or be understood by the great confederation of blundering adults: but he must go back as soon as possible to the realm of his real allegiance, where fact and fancy, dreams, doubts and discoveries are so cunningly intermingled.

Why do we forget our own childhood, and turn deaf ears and unseeing eyes to the sounds and sights that once we should have comprehended so easily? The world of flame, the glory of color, the music in the winds and the darkness, the actuality of romance, the strange limits and restrictions of knowledge! Can you remember when the earth stretched twelve miles out, beyond doubt, and perhaps a little further? Or the immense significance of double figures when the tenth birthday painted a huge 10 across the entire sky, but nobody else particularly noticed the phenomenon? Or the fantastic associations of certain names from time to time, so that to live in Champagne would have seemed a comic-opera infliction, and a Duke of Burgundy was as Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque as a Marquess of Claret, or an Earl of Whisky, or Baron Beer?

Yet we have long had Sir Loin, and scarcely remember the cause of that famous knighting; and now we have our copper kings, beef barons, pork princes, and what not. Perhaps we are not so remote from the whimsicalities of childhood as we have imagined, after all.

Jaded Appetites

A RECENT advertisement of a well-known New York restaurant announced: “Whether it is in luncheon, dinner or supper, you will find in our menu of delicious cold specialties, ready for your selection at our buffet in the main dining room, creations to tempt the most jaded of appetites.”

It is comforting to know that the grossly overfed man or woman need not starve. When the appetite fails through constant indulgence, it can be tempted to new excesses by these “delicious cold specialties,” and so enough nourishment may be secured to preserve life.

It is indeed a pitiable spectacle to see the forlorn victim of piggishness sadly regarding a menu that can no longer entice him to abuse his stomach. Let him now take heart and visit the restaurant that has learnt how to “tempt the most jaded of appetites.”

It is a noble work that this restaurant is doing; one well worthy of our civilization.

But who will tempt the unjaded appetites of the slum-dwellers?

Transcriber’s Note

Dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings were left unchanged.

Footnotes were moved to the end of the section to which they pertain.

Raised caps replaced dropped caps at the beginning of each article and poem.

Spelling changes:

‘conciousness’ to ‘consciousness’ …class-consciousness…

‘prmitive’ to ‘primitive’ …primitive profession of murder…

Two lines were omitted by the editor of THE FORUM in the poem by Giovannitti. The omitted lines read:

And from its bloody pedestal

The last god, Terror, shall be hurled.

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Table of Contents

THE FORUM

THE WAR

SEEN THROUGH MOHAMMEDAN SPECTACLES

THE SHROUD

NEW LOYALTIES FOR OLD CONSOLATIONS

THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

ATAVISM

THE CHANGING TEMPER AT HARVARD

THE NEW STEERAGE

THE C. T. U.

THE CARDINAL’S GARDEN

LADY ANOPHELES

SUMMONS

FASHION AND FEMINISM

GERMOPHOBIA

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

THE AMERICAN FARMER AS A COÖPERATOR

RELIGION IN THE MODERN NOVEL

GIOVANNITTI

EMERSON

NOTE

CORRESPONDENCE

EDITORIAL NOTES

Transcriber’s Note