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Title: The Arena
       Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891

Author: Various

Editor: B. O. Flower

Release Date: June 27, 2008 [EBook #25909]

Language: English

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THE ARENA.

No. XXIV.

NOVEMBER, 1891.

CONTENTS.

641

A PARADISE OF GAMBLERS.

BY EDGAR FAWCETT.

Many religious journals throughout the country have poured eulogies upon the pious head of our Postmaster General because of his raid against all letters bearing the least uncanny relation to that abhorred criminal body, the Louisiana Lottery. In one sense this action is not ill-advised; the national laws against gambling are distinct, and even if they were unjust their existence would be no excuse for their infringement. The highly moral action of Mr. Wanamaker, however, happening as it does at a time when his own relations with the hazards and plots of Wall Street have grown the talk of our entire country, teem with a suggestion that should be patent to thousands. If gnats are strained at and camels are swallowed, there is certainly a pardonable satire in congratulating those who devour the latter on their noteworthy powers of digestion. As an immoral institution the Louisiana Lottery, evil as it is, cannot be compared with Monte Carlo, which arrays itself in facile splendors of enticement and smiles in mirrors and gildings on the rash gamesters whom it ruins. But the Louisiana Lottery, which of late it has become the fashion to revile, devises its chief gains in a much less faulty manner. For such disbursements as one dollar, two dollars, five dollars, a good deal of golden expectancy and anticipation can be enjoyed, and there is no confirmed proof whatever that the citizens who are rash enough to expend these massive amounts have ever been swindled at the monthly New642 Orleans drawings. Indeed, they have ample proof, if they care to sift it, that somebody in Maine, or Indiana, or California, has received a small fortune for part of a ticket purchased at the same cheap terms as their own. Naturally, unless they were complete fools, they knew previous to their investment that the chances against them were extremely large, and that their prospect of winning anything very handsome was about equal to that of their being struck by lightning or having an unknown relative leave them a fat legacy. Could it once be proved that the Louisiana Lottery is really dishonest in its dealings—really more dishonest than the bright-lit bar-room that shiningly says to one, “Come and get drunk in me if you choose, but if you don’t choose drink only as much as you want in me, and if you don’t choose to enter me at all, avoid me forever and a day”—then the iniquity of the whole organization could not be scorned in terms too harsh. But at present all indictments against this particular species of gambling would seem to be just as airy as those against the alluring tavern. The “prohibition extremists” are like lawyers who can never make their case, yet are incessantly fuming against their own failure. These extremists forget that their shadowy moral client is plaintiff in a kind of curious divorce-suit, where the defendant is human nature and the co-respondent human will. It is most probable that men will continue to get drunk just so long as education remains for them an incident force of inferior potency. As to their liking and upholding certain milder games of chance (after the style of the Greeks, let us say, at their very highest period of culture), that is perhaps not an educational question at all, but one of simple diversion. There are kinds of gambling, however, with which no believer in racial progress will admit that the loftier forms of civilization can possibly deal, and foremost among these must be counted the reckless license, the odious libertinage of venture which now shames a republic never tired of vaunting its virtues to the transatlantic monarchies from which it sprang.

He who would note and study, in all their terror, melancholy, and pathos, the selfishness and avarice of his fellow-men, might search the whole known globe and never find a field for his observations at once more fruitful and more discouraging than that of Wall Street. To realize in its full643 glare of vicious vulgarity the influence of this environment, let us take the case of some refined young man just after he has quitted school and entered the office of a thrifty broker—perhaps a warm friend of his father, who hugs the keenly American doctrine that a youth should be put in the way of piling dollars together as quickly as possible after he leaves the educational leash. By degrees this young man will discover that the only difference between Wall Street and a huge, crowd-engirt gaming-table is one between simplicity and complexity. He will see that the play of the former is far more difficult to learn and that it requires a number of croupiers instead of one. He will see that these croupiers are in most cases men whose names posterity will hand down, if it hands them down at all, as those of stony egotists, and sometimes of gigantic thieves. He will gradually gain insight into certain of their methods, as when, only a few years back, one or two of them seized an entire railroad under cover of what was the merest parody of purchase and opposed both to law and to public policy, afterward defending their outrage in the courts through the brazen aid of venal judges and bringing to Albany (headquarters of their attempted theft) a great carload of New York ruffians, each with a proxy in his soiled and desperate hand—an instrument almost as illegal as the pistol which those hands had doubtless too often fingered if not fired amid the squalor of their owners’ native slums.[1]

The neophyte in speculators’ creeds and customs may amuse himself, however, with reminiscences like the preceding only in a sense of that proud historic retrospect which concerns past radiant records of “the street.” He may, if so minded, con other pages of its noble archives, and dazzle his young brain with admiration for the shining exploits of “Black Friday,” an occasion when greed held one of its most sickening revels, and a clique of merciless financiers gathered together so many millions of gold coin that its price bred fright among the holders of depreciating stocks. Agony, ruin, the demolition of firesides, resulted from this infamous “corner” wrought by a league of miserly zealots. But our young student of Wall Street annals will soon harden644 his nerves against any silly commiseration. As well soil the glory of Lexington or Bunker Hill by brooding over the pangs of those who were its victims. All great victories necessitate bloodshed. It is not every man who can wrest vast wealth from the turmoils of a “Black Friday.” … And so, after turning the pages of a revolting chronicle, all of which teem with calamity to the many and plethoric gain to the bullying and insolent few, he surveys that active boil and ferment of the present, seeking to discern there some course of trick and scheme by which he too may fatten his purse, even though he blunts conscience into a callous nullity. Between old days and new he finds but slight difference. Rises and panics prevail now as then. The “margin,” beloved of the wily broker, first lures and then robs the trustful buyer. “Pools,” open and secret, grasping and malicious, may wreak at any hour disasters on the unwary. “Points” are given by one operator to another with the same mendacious glibness as of yore. The market is now dull with the torpor of a sleeping cobra, now aflame, like that reptile, with treacherous and poisonous life. In its repose as in its excitement our novice begins to know it, fear it, and heartily love it besides. The chances are nine out of ten that he loves it too much and fears it too little. Its hideous vulgarity has ceased to shock him. Its “bulls,” with their often audacious purchases of stock for which they do not pay but out of whose random fluctuations in value they expect to reap thousands from the “bears,” who sell in a like blind, betting-ring fashion; its devices of “spreads,” and of “straddles,” which are combinations of “puts” and “calls” whereby the purchaser limits his loss and at the same time suits the chances of his winning to those of vacillant prices themselves; its unblushing compromises on the part of debtors with creditors, fifty cents on the dollar being frequently paid by bankrupts to the extent of one, two, or three hundred thousand dollars, in order that they may resume their highly legitimate undertakings and perhaps grow rich again in company with their fellow-gamblers; all these, and many more features of Wall Street life, equally vivid and equally soiled by sordid materialism, have at length wrapped the mind of this young observer in their drastic and sinister spells. When he “starts out for himself,” as he is presently quite sure to do, his ultimate645 success is enormously doubtful. His reign as a leading personality in Wall Street means to have been a Childe Roland who, indeed, to the Dark Tower did actually come. The horn that such a victor lifts to his mouth has been wrought, as one might say, from the bones of some comrade slain in the same arduous pilgrimage, and the peal of triumph which his lips evoke from it might be called a blending of countless wretched cries from the lips of other perished strugglers in the same daring design. Great success with him, if he achieves it, will be—what? An almost Titanic power to torture and affright at will hundreds, thousands of his fellow-men. He will have before him the example of a man who locked up $12,500,000 in one of his riotous assaults against honest stock-exchange dealing—money notoriously not his own. He may desire to imitate that course of behavior which had Samuel Bowles abducted and unlawfully imprisoned because he published in his paper the truth about Wall Street trickery and villany, or which sandbagged Dorman B. Eaton in the streets of New York for having fought with legal weapons of honest denunciation that malodorous craft of a compact between incarnate kleptomania in finance and the unspeakable “boss” burglar of Tammany Ring.

But needless are further details of those abominations on which our rising young aspirant may turn an envious eye. He cannot but acquaint himself with the whole horrid list of chicanery, since its items are rungs of the ladder on which he himself may hereafter seek to mount. If he aims to be a great Wall Street spider he must perforce fully acquaint himself with what material will go toward the spinning of that baleful tissue, his proprietary web. It must be woven, this web, out of perjuries and robberies. Its fibres must mean the heart-strings torn from many a deluded stockholder’s breast, and the morning dew that glitters on it must be the tears of widows and orphans. The laws of a great republic are the foliage (alas, of a tree not too sturdy!) on which its devilish meshes are wrought! There is no exaggeration in stating that the financial history of the past three decades in America has been one of peerless turpitude. Rome under the dying glories of the empire scarcely parallels its knavish gluttonies of illegal seizure. And Wall Street has been the boiling point of all this infectious train646 of outrages against a patient people—one that presumes to rate itself really democratic, and to sneer at countries over seas in which to-day a Crédit Mobilier, a Pacific Railroad atrocity, a Manhattan Railroad brigandage, would make Trafalgar Square or the Place de la Concorde howl with savage tumult.

But let us return to our would-be Wall Street magnate. Suppose he has not the “grit” or the “go” (or whatever it would be termed in that classic purlieu so noted for elegance of every-day rhetoric) either to crown himself with the tarnished crown of a monetary “king” or even to hold a gilt-edged but scandal-reeking portfolio at the footstool of some such reigning tyrant. In this case he may join the great rank-and-file of those whose pockets have become irremediably voided and who seldom refer to Wall Street unless with muttered curses while dragging out maimed careers in various far less feverish pursuits; or he may, on the other hand, drift into that humble crowd of petty brokers (“curb-stone” or domiciled) whose incomes vary from fifteen hundred to as many thousands a year, and who pass hours each day in envy, whether secret or open, of the dignitaries towering above them. As one of these inferior persons his existence will continue, no doubt, until he changes it for the tomb: and meanwhile what sort of an existence has it been? All the finer human aims have appealed to him as pearls appeal to swine. He has, perhaps, possessed faculties which might have allowed him to shine ably and yet honorably in the state or national congress, whose votes his friends and rivals, to ensure the passage of their unscrupulous railroad-bills, have bought so often and with such bloodless depravity. But these faculties have been miserably misused. He may have loved some woman, and married her, and begotten children by her; domestic affection may have warmed his being, just as it does that of many a day-laborer. But in the arid air of Wall Street all his intellectual and ethical possibilities will have wilted and died. Lust for greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering disappointment at not having attained them, will replace the healthier impulses of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of high attainments, unless their coffers brim with lucre, affect him no more than the company of the most unlettered oaf. He becomes, in other words, the typical647 Wall Street man, and he becomes this with a stolid indifference to all known motors of mental betterment.

It is not in any sense an attractive type. The Wall Street men are lilies that toil and spin (“tiger” lilies, one might term them, in remembrance of the old gambler-slang about faro and roulette); but their industries, however distinct, are what the political economists would call those of non-productive consumers. They are active drones, to speak with paradox, in the great hive of human energy. Like all gamesters, all men who live by the turning of the dice-box, they have a devil-may-care demeanor, now and then rather sharply peppered with wit, though wit not always avoidant of the obscene. For the most part, they are as ignorant of the large onward push of human thought as if they were farmers in some remote county of Arkansas. And yet they affect, at all times, an amusing omniscience. To “know it all” is a phrase beloved as sarcasm by their nimble vernacular, and though this (like “Come off!” and “Look here, what are you giving us?”) is a form of speech incessantly on their lips, one is prone sometimes to reflect how amazing is the meagreness of real knowledge which their “knowing it all” piteously represents. They are sometimes keen sportsmen, but a good many scamps, dolts, and cads are that. Their acquaintance with contemporary literature could be summed up by stating that if you should ask an average number of their class whether he had read the last novel of Mr. James, he might pull his moustache (the Wall Street man usually has a moustache, and often a symmetric and well-tended one) desiring to learn whether you had reference or no to G. P. R. James, of the “two horse-men” celebrity. Their ignorance, however, is not equal to their self-sufficiency. Almost whenever the average Wall Street man goes into good society he makes himself more pronounced there by his assurance than his culture. Of the latter quality he has so little that the best clubs of which he is a member tolerate rather than accept him. In most cases he is deplorably curt of speech and brusque of deportment. Suavity, repose, that kindliness which is the very marrow and pith of high-breeding, shock you in his manners as acutely by their absence as if they were rents in his waistcoat or gapes in his boot-leather. The “bluff,” impudence, and swagger of the Stock Exchange cling to him in society648 like burrs to the hair of horse or dog. He would be far more endurable, this socially rampant and ubiquitous Wall Street man, if he revealed the least shred of respect for those ideas and faiths on which his hard, cold course of living has necessarily trampled rough-hooved. He is so bright and intelligent, as a rule, that you wonder why he is so phenomenally vulgar. But his brightness and intelligence are of the quality, nearly always, that throws into hysteric giggles the “summer girl” on piazzas of third-rate hotels. Ordinarily, too, he has not the faintest conception of how deeply and darkly he bores people who would live apart from him, from his bejewelled and supercilious wife (her pretty head always goes an inch further backward when “Tom” or “Dick” has “made a strike in stocks”), and from the French maid, with her frilled cap, whom his children gabble to in their grammarless American-French, but whose unctuous idioms are Sanscrit alike to madame and himself.

Conceive that you or I shall wish to talk with the ordinary Wall Street man, on the piazza of his watering-place hotel, on the deck of his record-breaking steamer. (When he goes to Europe, which he incessantly does, he invariably takes a record-breaking steamer in preference to all others.) What does he know? What can he tell us? Politics? He reproduces, if he be a Republican, the last tirade of his favorite newspaper in behalf of protection and Mr. Blaine. If he be a Democrat he will spout the last editorial of his favorite newspaper in favor of free trade and Mr. Cleveland. History? The Wall Street man rarely knows in what year Columbus discovered America, and would be in straits wild enough to horrify that talented arch-prig, Mr. Andrew Lang, if you mentioned either Cortes or Pizarro. Fiction? He admired Robinson Crusoe when a boy, and since then he has read a few translated volumes of Dumas the elder. Poetry? He doesn’t like it “for a cent”; but he once did come across something (by Tennyson or Longfellow—he forgets which) called “Beautiful Snow.” That “fetched him,” and “laid over” any other verse he recollects.

Here, let us insist, is no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were, with the oil of his own slippery speculations. If he resents the honest drawing of his well-known649 features, why, so much the better. His indignation may be fraught with wholesome reactions. Perhaps he will have his defenders—interested ones, of course. We may pluck the cactus-flower with hands cased in buckskin, and swear that it harbors no sting below its roseate and silken cockade of bloom. Prejudice is too often the saucepan on which we cook our criticisms; and when these are done to a turn we cast the vessel into a dust-bin, trying with mighty valor of volition to forget that it even exists as old iron.

Never was more blatant humbug aired than that about our “brilliant” Wall Street financiers. Their “brilliancy” is merely a repulsive egotism in one of its worst forms,—that of cupidity. They are like misers with longer, quicker, and more sinewy fingers than other misers, in the gathering together of dollars. Their shrewdness may be exceptional, but a quality which consists half in accurate guessing and half in bullying defiance is hardly worthy of the name. As for their “nerve” and “coolness,” these are not endowments that in such connection can be admired or praised. For surely the gambler who cannot face bravely those very slings and arrows of variant if not always outrageous fortune which form the chief indices of his dingy profession, cuts a mean enough figure in the cult of it. “Jim” Fisk had traits like these, but who now applauds them? As well admire the courage of a house-breaker in scaling a garden-wall at midnight, or his exquisite tact in selecting a bed-chamber well-stored with jewels and money. The so-called “great men” of Wall Street are foes of society—foes merciless and malign. Their “generalship,” their “Napoleonic” attributes are terms coined by people of their own damaging class, people with low motives, with even brutish morals. It is time that this age of ours, so rich in theoretic if impracticable humanitarianisms, forebore to flatter the spirits which work against it in its efforts toward higher and wiser achievement. The anarchists hanged in Chicago were men of mistaken purpose and fatuous belief. But at least they were conceivably sincere, however dangerous to peace and order. These czars and tycoons of finance, on the other hand, are scoffers at the integrity of the commonweal, and have for their Lares and Penates hideous little gods carved by their own misanthropy from the harsh granite of self-worship. Every new conspiracy to amass millions through650 wrecking railroads, through pouring vast sums upon the stock market, through causing as vast sums to disappear from public use, stains them blacker with the proof of their horrible inhumanity. Even death does not always end their monstrous rapine, for when they pay what is called the debt of nature they too often fling, in their wills, a posthumous sneer at that still larger debt owed to their fellow-creatures, and make some eldest son their principal heir. Charity may get a few niggardly thousands from them, and handsome bequests usually go to their younger children; yet the bulk of the big gambler’s treasure passes intact to one who will most probably guard with avid custody the alleged prestige of its possession.

But we should remember that on many occasions it is not even a game of chance with these potentates of Wall Street. They play, as it were, with marked cards, and can predict to a certainty, having such mighty capital at their disposal, just how and when particular stocks will rise or fall. Spreading abroad deceitful rumors through their little subservient throngs of henchmen brokers, they create untold ravage and despair. Fearful cruelty is shown by them then. The law cannot reach it, though years of imprisonment would be far too good for it. Families are plunged into penury by their subtly circulated frauds; forgery and embezzlement in hundreds of individual cases result; banks are betrayed and shattered; disgrace and suicide are sown broadcast like seeds fecund in poison. One often marvels that assassination does not spring up in certain desperate human hearts as a vengeance against these appalling wrongs. Murder is ghastly enough, in whatever shape it meets us, and from whatever cause. But if Lincoln and Garfield fell the prey of mad fanatics, it seems all the stranger, as it is all the more fortunate, that agonized and ill-governed human frenzy should thus far happily have spared us new public shudders at new public crimes.

Conjecture may indeed waste its liveliest ardors in seeking to determine what place this nineteenth century of ours will hold among the centuries which have preceded and are destined to follow it. But there is good reason to believe, after all, that in one way it will be held remarkable, perhaps even unique,—as an age of violent contrasts, violent extremes. Here we are, seeking (however pathetically) to651 grapple with problems whose solution would wear an almost millennial tinge. There are men among us—and men of august intellects, too—who urge upon society the adoption of codes and usages which would assume, if practically treated, that the minds and characters of mortals are little short of angelic. And coevally with these dreamers of grand socialistic improvement, we are met by such evidence as that of Wall Street, its air foul with the mephitic exhalations that rise from dead and rotting principle. When the state is corrupt, and large bodies of its citizens are not only corrupt but wholly scornful of every fraternal and philanthropic purpose as well,—when communities like this of Wall Street, cold-blooded, shameless, injurious, are bowed to as powers, instead of being shunned as pests, then the ideals of such men as Karl Marx and his disciples loom distant and indefinite on the horizon of the future. Tritest of metaphors though it may be, all civilization is a garden, and in this garden of our own western tillage Wall Street towers to-day like a colossal weed, with roots deep-plunging into a soil they desiccate and de-fertilize. When and whose will be the extirpating hand?

Here dawns a question with which some modern Sphinx may defy some coming Œdipus. Let us hope it will prove a question so adequately answered that the evil goddess using it as a challenge—the conventional deity of injustice, duplicity, and extortion—will dramatize her compulsory response to it by casting herself headlong into the sea!

652

PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE—WHICH?

BY HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE, M. C.

The advocates of free trade in this country at the present time are very unlike Emerson’s “fine young Oxford gentlemen” who said “there was nothing new, and nothing true, and no matter.” They not only believe their pet doctrine to be true, but they seem to assume that it is also new. They further treat it as if it were an exact science and a great moral question as well. Unwarranted assumptions merely confuse and this question of national economic policy is too important to be clouded with confusions. It is worth while, therefore, to look at these assumptions one by one and try, before attempting any discussion of the tariff, to clear the ground from cant and to see the question exactly as it is.

In the first place, the question of free trade or protection is in no sense a moral one. Free traders are prone to forget that their great prophet, Adam Smith, drew this distinction very plainly at the outset. He wrote two important works. One of them all the world has read. It is called “The Wealth of Nations,” deals with the selfish interests of mankind, and embodies the author’s political economy. The other is an equally elaborate work entitled “The Moral Sentiments.” It is the complement of “The Wealth of Nations,” which is devoted to the selfish side of human nature and the world at large has found no trouble in forgetting it. Adam Smith himself was under no confusion of mind as to his subject when he wrote about political economy. He knew that he was dealing with questions of a selfish character, of an enlightened selfishness, no doubt, but none the less questions of self-interest. He never for a moment thought of putting his political economy on a plane of pure morality.

When the great political movement toward free trade began in England, it was largely a movement of the middle classes and of the industrial interests of Great Britain. The great middle class of England, which furnishes the backbone and sinew of the nation, is essentially a moral class, and653 in appealing to it the political leader is always tempted to put forward the moral aspect of his theme, even if he has to twist his argument and his facts to find one. The manufacturers of England believed that free trade would be profitable, but it soothed them to be assured that the system was also highly moral. It is to the Manchester School, therefore, that we owe the attempt to give to the entire free trade system a moral coloring for which the narrower question of the repeal of the corn laws afforded an opportunity. Our own free traders for the most part are devout followers of the Manchester School, and take all their teachings and practices with little discrimination. They are essentially imitative. The anti-corn law agitators pointed their arguments by exhibiting loaves of bread of different sizes, and so our free traders, during a campaign, have gone about in carts and held up pairs of trousers, a more humorous if less intelligent form of object lesson. They attempt, too, in like fashion, to give the weight of morality to their doctrines. Unfortunately for them, inasmuch as everyone likes to be moral at some one’s else expense, their position is untenable. Adam Smith’s distinction was a broad and sound one; and deeply important as political economy and questions of tariff are, they are in no sense matters of morals. They are purely questions of self-interest, of profit and loss, and can be decided properly on these grounds alone.

In the second place, the assumption made tacitly, at least, if not avowedly, that political economy is an exact science is wholly misleading. Political economy covers a wide range of subjects of which the tariff is only one; but in none of its branches is it an exact science. Modern investigation has, no doubt, revealed certain economic laws which we may fairly say operate with reasonable certainty, but this is a very different proposition from that which would make the conclusions of economists in all directions as absolute as those of mathematicians. Political economy, in fact, does not differ greatly in this respect from history, because both deal with subjects where the conditions and sympathies of men and women play a large part, and where human passions are deeply engaged. In fields like these, where the personal equation of humanity plays a controlling part, it is absurd to attempt to argue as if we were dealing with a mathematical formula. There may be a philosophy of political economy654 as there is of history; there may be scientific methods of dealing with it and certain economic laws, subject to many exceptions, which we may consider to be established, but nevertheless it is as far from being an exact science as one can conceive. The exact science notion is the misconception of cloistered learning which can build impregnable systems where there are none to attack them, but which has no idea of the practical difficulties of an unsympathetic world where the precious system must meet every possible objection and not merely those devised by its framers. In discussing a question of political economy, therefore, it is well to bear in mind that we are handling a subject where new facts are always entering in to modify old conclusions, and where there are many conditions, the effect of which it is impossible to calculate.

In the third place, the ardent tariff reformer at the present moment always discourses upon his subject as if he had some perfectly new truth to lay before the world from which it would be as impossible to differ, unless one was illiterate or corrupt, as from the conclusion of Galileo in regard to the movement of the earth. In one of our recent political campaigns I quoted an argument of Hamilton’s in favor of protection from his famous Report of Manufactures. Thereupon one of my opponents in a public speech, referring to this quotation, said it would be as sensible to adopt Hamilton’s views on the tariff as to go back to stage coaches simply because those vehicles were the means of conveyance in Hamilton’s time. I could not help wondering what my learned opponent would have thought if I had retorted that, by parity of reasoning, we ought to reject the “Wealth of Nations” because Adam Smith flourished a little earlier than Hamilton, and stage coaches were used in his day also. The simple truth is that there is nothing very new to-day in the question of free trade or protection. The subject is one which has been under consideration for some time. It has received great developments in the last hundred years, and is still so far from the last word that it is safest not to be too dogmatic about it.

In this matter of the tariff, then, we have before us a question which is not new, which is not moral, but which deals simply with matters of self-interest according to the dictates of an enlightened selfishness. What is the condition of the655 question of free trade to-day in its practical aspect? Fifty years ago, roughly speaking, the movement for it in England became successful, and the English people abandoned a protective tariff which they had maintained for some centuries and adopted the free trade tariff which they have to-day. The latter system has had a thorough trial in England under the most favorable circumstances. If there is any country in the world which, by its situation, its history and its condition, is adapted for free trade, England is that country. If free trade, therefore, is the certain and enormous benefit which its advocates assert, and if it is the only true system for nations to adopt, its history in England ought to prove the truth of these propositions. How near has free trade come to performing all that its original promoters claimed in its behalf? How brilliant has been its success in practise? One thing at least is certain: it has not been such an overwhelming and glittering success as to convince any other civilized nation of its merits. England stands alone to-day, as she has stood for the last fifty years, the one free trade nation in the world. Possibly England of all the nations may be right and everybody else may be wrong, but there is, at least, a division of opinion so respectable that we may assume, with all due reverence for our free trade friends, that there are two sides to this question as to many others.

Let us look for a moment at some of the early promises. Free trade, according to its originators, was to usher in an era of peace and good-will. It was, in its extension, to put an end to wars. It has certainly not brought peace to England, which has had a petty war of some sort on her hands almost every year since the free trade gospel was preached. I do not mean to say that this is in the least due to free trade, but it is quite obvious that free trade did not stop fighting. The prosperity of England has, of course, been undeniably great, and it has been especially great among the vast industrial and manufacturing interests which supported the free trade policy. Possibly they have thriven better under this system than they would have done under the old one, but this must remain mere speculation, and as we know that some protected countries have prospered as much if not more than England, the prosperity argument has little weight. There are, however, other fields where we need not rely on conjecture. Has free trade been an656 unquestionable benefit not merely to the industrial but to all classes in England? It certainly has not put an end to strikes, for strikes have never been more frequent anywhere than they have been in Great Britain of late years. It does not seem to have perceptibly diminished poverty, if we may judge from such recent books as “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” and “Through Darkest England.” The state of Ireland has not been indicative of a healing and life-giving prosperity. In a word the great problems of labor, of poverty, and of over-population seem as severe in free trade England as in protective countries. Free trade again does not seem to have prevented the rise of trusts and syndicates, nor to have stopped the accumulation of vast wealth in a few hands. In other words, there is no evidence that free trade has had any effect on the most serious questions of the day, which touch the welfare of the great masses of the people. All that can be said is that the manufacturing and industrial interests of Great Britain seem to have thriven under it. For a system which arrogates to itself absolute truth, this is a meagre showing.

Free trade has not demonstrated its infallibility in the single country where it has been tried. The question, therefore, for the people of the United States is, whether under their conditions it is well to make the change which England made nearly fifty years ago, and to adopt a system of which the success has been doubtful in its chosen field. In order to decide the question intelligently we must put aside all vague confusions about an exact science which will work the same results everywhere because it operates under an immutable law. Even if free trade had been a brilliant and conclusive success in England, of which there is no proof, does it follow that it would be a better system for us? We have, to begin with, in our possession, instead of a small island a continent capable of almost every variety of natural production and mechanical industry. This is also a new country and a young country. We have been developing our resources rapidly for the last hundred years, but they are still not fully developed. The policy of the United States, although with many fluctuations, has been in the main to develop all our natural and mechanical opportunities to their fullest extent. The free trader is always ready with the terse statement that, “You cannot make yourself rich by taxing657 yourself,” followed by a freshly humorous allusion to lifting one’s self by one’s boot-straps. He then feels that he has met the case. If political economy and the financial policy of nations were as simple as this argument seems to imply, life would be an easier thing both for nations and individuals. Unluckily the problems of mankind which engage their interests and passions cannot be solved by cheap aphorisms. The statement of the free trader about taxing yourself in order to grow rich has a final and conclusive sound, but it is simply sound. There are, for example, plenty of towns in New England which have built factories and relieved certain persons from taxation in order to secure their capital and industry, and the additional population and the increased taxes which have thus come to the town have made it rich or at least richer than it was before. It is quite possible to adjust taxes or to offer bounties or premiums in such a way as to add to the aggregate wealth of the community.

The free trader’s question is not really pertinent. The point is not whether you will tax yourself in order to grow rich, but whether you will so frame your tax laws and so raise your revenues as to discriminate in favor of your own production and your own wages against the production and wages of other countries, or whether, on the other hand, you will let everything strictly alone and leave the country to come out the best way it can. The general policy of the United States has been to give encouragement to the domestic producer and manufacturer, and maintenance to high rates of wages, by laying duties in such a way as to discriminate in their favor against those outside. The result, speaking broadly, has been to put the United States as a competitor into countless lines of new industries. The effect of the competition of the United States, added to that already existing in the rest of the world, has been to reduce the world’s prices in the products of those industries according to the well-known laws of competition. Hence comes the lowering of prices to the consumer in protected articles, a fact which is the cause of much satiric laughter to the free trader because he can neither deny nor explain it.

The practical question now before the people of the United States is twofold: shall we protect new and nascent industries, and shall we continue to guard existing industries and658 existing rates of wages against an undue competition? John Stuart Mill admits the soundness of the former policy, and with that admission protectionists may be content. In fact, it may be doubted whether any intelligent man would argue to-day that it would have been wiser for the United States never to have built up any industries, but to have remained a purely agricultural community, dependent on Europe for everything in the way of manufacture. I think we may assume that the wisdom of protecting nascent industries in a country with such capacities and resources as the United States can hardly be questioned.

Nevertheless, the most hotly contested feature of the McKinley bill was that which continued the policy of protecting nascent industries in certain products, and notably that of the manufacture of tin plate. If the protection of nascent industries at the beginning of this century was a sound policy, then it is a sound policy to industries of that description to-day. Whether we have tin mines or not (and it now appears that we have) there is no reason on the surface why we should not buy our Straits tin and manufacture tin plate as well as England. Some Democratic newspapers appear to have an idea that the tin mines of Cornwall and Wales make a monopoly in this direction for England. They forget that to-day the tin used by England comes chiefly from the Straits, and she can buy it there on no better terms than the United States. If the policy of protection to nascent industries is sound, then the tariff of 1890 is sound in this direction, and we should seek its results in the new industries which have been started since it became a law.

In the second branch, the question of whether we should continue protection to industries already established is one largely of degree and of discretion. Where a removal of the duty would mean either a heavy reduction of wages or a stopping of existing industries with the rise of prices consequent upon the withdrawal of the United States from the world’s competition, then the removal of the duty would be a misfortune. It would be a misfortune not only to the industry which was ruined and to the wage earners who were reduced to idleness or poverty, but it would be an injury to the consumer because it would in a short time raise the price of the world’s production diminished by our withdrawal. In industries where no such results could possibly be659 feared, or where the production of the article is not possible in the United States, it would certainly be wise to remove duties, and this has been the purpose of the protectionists and of the Republican party.

The policy of protection has received its most recent expression in this country in the tariff of 1890. It is a truism that no tariff bill, whether passed by free traders or protectionists, can hope to be perfect. It is sure to have defects in detail and some inequalities. The McKinley bill was not exempt from error, but the question for the people to decide now is whether it is well to abandon the protective policy and substitute that of free trade. In 1888 the cry was that we must get rid of the surplus revenue and that that necessity made a revision of the tariff imperative. The Republican party since it has been in power has taken two hundred and forty-six millions of the accumulated surplus and paid off the bonded indebtedness of the country to that amount. It has also, by the removal of the duty on sugar and other articles, reduced the annual surplus revenue some fifty or sixty millions. The danger from the surplus, therefore (and it was a very real danger), is at an end. No party need be called upon now to dispose of the annual surplus which was taking so many millions out of the channels of trade. The question between the parties and before the country on this issue is very much simpler than it was. It is whether we shall repeal the tariff of 1890, abandon the protective system and take up free trade, or whether we shall maintain the protective system, making such amendments to the law as may from time to time seem necessary.

I have tried to state the general argument upon the question of free trade or protection in its broadest way. It only remains to bring forward so far as possible the facts which show, in part at least, the results of the tariff of 1890, for upon those results as a whole its justification or condemnation must rest. It is important to know first whether the new industries which the McKinley bill was designed to encourage have begun to start, and second, whether the bill has had the disastrous effect in raising prices which was so loudly asserted and prophesied by its opponents at the last election.

I will give first a table showing comparative prices before and after the tariff of 1890 of some of the cotton fabrics660 most commonly used. They are all protected industries and ought to have been advanced in price if any part of the assertions made by the advocates of free trade during the last campaign were true.

PRICES OF PRINT GOODS SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE MCKINLEY TARIFF PASSED COMPARED WITH THEIR PRESENT PRICES.

BLEACHED SHIRTINGS AND SUITINGS.

GINGHAMS AND WASH FABRICS.

661

I give now a table comparing the market quotations for 1890 of the articles which enter most largely into the cost of living, with those for the same period in 1891:—

662

663

If the articles given in the foregoing table be classified we find the following results as to the rise and fall of prices before and after the tariff of 1890.

From these tables it is obvious that there has been, in the first place, no general rise of prices such as was confidently predicted by the panic-mongers of last year. On the contrary, the large majority of prices show a downward tendency. But more important than this is the fact made obvious by these tables that the price of the protected product has not risen. The foreign goods have advanced in some instances and been shut out in consequence, but domestic goods have taken their places, the price being kept down by domestic competition. In a word these tables prove that except for the enormous reduction in the cost of sugar, the new664 tariff has had but slight effect if any on the course of prices of the necessaries of life, and that the statements of the free traders as to a general rise of prices was entirely false.

The following extract is from a letter from one of the largest wholesale clothing firms in Boston. It tells its own story:—

As to the development of manufacturing under the McKinley bill I will quote first the opinion of a disinterested witness. The British Consular General at New York, in his report of May 8, 1891, speaks as follows:—

To give a complete list of the new industries started since the passage of the McKinley bill would be impossible, and would occupy more space than The Arena could spare. I give, therefore, a partial list compiled from the Boston Commercial Bulletin, and covering only the first three months after the passage of the law, that is, from Oct. 1, 1890. These are the months most unfavorable to the bill, but the statistics show what the growth of new and old industries has been under the tariff of 1890 in three months, and indicate what the future increase is likely to be.

SHOES AND LEATHER.

COTTON.

WOOLLEN.

POTTERY AND GLASS.

PAPER AND PULP.

IRON AND STEEL.

METAL WORKING.

MACHINERY AND HARDWARE.

TIN PLATE.

The following firms are manufacturing tin-plate, or building new mills or additions to old ones for that purpose.

There is one other charge which was freely made against the tariff of 1890, that deserves a brief answer. It was said that the McKinley bill would stop trade with other countries, and that it raised duties “all along the line.”

A plain tale from the “Statement of Foreign Commerce and Immigration,” published by the Treasury Department for June, 1891, puts this accusation down very summarily.

670

BISMARCK IN THE GERMAN PARLIAMENT.

BY EMILIO CASTELAR.

I cannot pardon the historian Bancroft, loved and admired by all, for having one day, blinded by the splendors of a certain illustrious person’s career, compared an institution like the new German empire with such an institution as the secular American Republic. The impersonal character of the latter and the personal character of the former place the two governments in radical contrast. In America the nation is supreme—in Germany, the emperor. In the former the saviour of the negroes—redeemer and martyr—perished almost at the beginning of his labors. His death did not delay for one second the emancipation of the slave which had been decreed by the will of the nation, immovable in its determinations, through which its forms and personifications are moved and removed. In America the President in the full exercise of his functions is liable to indictment in a criminal court; he is nevertheless universally obeyed, not on account of his personality and still less on account of his personal prestige, but on account of his impersonal authority, which emanates from the Constitution and the laws. It little matters whether Cleveland favors economic reaction during his government, if the nation, in its assemblies, demands stability. The mechanism of the United States, like that of the universe, reposes on indefectible laws and uncontrollable forces. Germany is in every way the antithesis of America; it worships personal power. To this cause is due the commencement of its organization in Prussia, a country which was necessarily military since it had to defend itself against the Slavs and Danes in the north, and against the German Catholics in the south. Prussia was constituted in such a manner that its territory became an intrenched camp, and its people a nation in arms. Nations, even though they be republican, which find it necessary to organize themselves on a military model, ultimately671 relinquish their parliamentary institutions and adopt a Cæsarian character and aspect. Greece conquered the East under Alexander; Rome extended her empire throughout the world under Cæsar; France, after her victories over the united kings, and the expedition to Egypt under Bonaparte, forfeited her parliament and the republic to deliver herself over to the emperor and the empire. Consequently the terms emperor and commander-in-chief appear to be the synonyms in all languages. And by virtue of this synonymy of words the Emperor of Germany exercises over his subjects a power very analogous to that which a general exercises over his soldiers. Bismarck should have known this. And knowing this truth—intelligible to far less penetrating minds than his—Bismarck should in his colossal enterprise have given less prominence to the emperor and more to Germany. He did precisely the contrary of what he should have done. The Hohenzollern dynasty has distinguished itself beyond all other German dynasties by its moral nature and material temperament of pure and undisguised autocracy. The Prussian dynasty has become more absolute than the Catholic and imperial dynasties of Germany. A Catholic king always finds his authority limited by the Church, which depends completely on the Pope, whereas a Prussian monarch grounds his authority on two enormous powers, the dignity of head of the State, and that of head of the Church. The autocratic character native to the imperial dynasties of Austria is greatly limited by the diversity of races subjected to their dominion and to the indispensable assemblies of the diet around his imperial majesty.

But a king of Prussia, always on horseback, leader in military times, defender of a frontier greatly disputed by formidable enemies, whose soil looks like a dried-up marsh from which the ancient Slav race had been obliged to drain off the water, is required to direct his subjects as a general does an army. The intellectual, political, and military grandeur of Frederick the Great augmented this power and assured it to his descendants for a long epoch. It has happened to each king of Prussia since that time to perform some colossal task, grounded in an irreducible antinomy. Frederick William II. devoted himself to the reconciliation of Calvinism and Lutheranism as divided in his672 days as during the thirty years war, which was maintained by the heroism of Gustavus Adolphus, and repressed by the exterminating sword of Wallenstein. Frederick William IV. endeavored to unite Christianity and Pantheism in his philosophical lucubrations; the Protestant churches were deprived of their churchyards and statues by virtue of and in execution of Royal Lutheran mandates, as was also the Catholic Cathedral of Cologne, restored to-day in more brilliant liturgical splendor with the sums paid for pontifical indulgences. Bismarck did as he liked with the empire when it was ruled by William I., and did not foresee what would be the irremissible and natural issue of the system to which he lent his authority and his name. When William I. snatched his crown from the altar, as Charlemagne might have done, and clapped it on his head, repeating formulas suited to Philip II. and Charles V., the minister was silent and submitted to these blasphemies, derived from the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings, because they increased his own ministerial power, exercised under a presidency and governorship chiefly nominal and honorary. But a thinker of his force, a statesman of his science, a man of his greatness, should have remembered what physiologists have demonstrated with regard to heredity, and should have known that it was his duty and that of the nation and the Germans to guard against some atavistic caprice which would strike at his own power. The predecessor of Frederick the Great was a monomaniac and the predecessor of William the Strong was a madman. Could Bismarck not foresee that by his leap backwards he ran the risk of lending himself to the fatal reproduction of these same circumstances, of transcendental importance to the whole estate, nay, to the whole nation? A king of Bavaria singing Wagner’s operas among rocks and lakes; a brother of the king of Bavaria resembling Sigismund de Caldéron by his epilepsy and insanity; Prince Rudolph showing that the double infirmity inherent in the paternal lineage of Charles the Rash and in the maternal line of Joanna the Mad continues in the Austrians; a recent king of Prussia itself shutting himself up in his room as in a gaol, and obliged by fatality to abdicate the throne of his forefathers during his lifetime in favor of the next heir, must prove, as they have done, what is the result of braving the maledictions of the oracle673 of Delphi, and the catastrophes of the twins of Œdipus with such persistency, in this age, in important and mature communities, which cannot become diseased, much less cease to exist when certain privileged families sicken and die. Not that I would ask people to do what is beyond their power and prohibited by their honor. There was no necessity, as a revolutionist might imagine, to overturn the dynasty. A very simple solution of the problem would have been to take against the probable extravagances of the Fredericks and Williams of Prussia the same precautions that were taken in England against the Georges of Hanover. These last likewise suffered from mental disorders. And so troubled were they by their afflictions that they were haunted by a grave inclination to prefer their native, though unimportant hereditary throne in the Germany of their forefathers to the far more important kingdom conferred on them by the parliamentary decision of England. But the English, to obviate this, showed themselves a powerful nation and respected the dynasty. Bismarck wished to make the king absolute in Prussia; he desired that a Cæsar should reign over Germany; and to-day the king and the Cæsar are embodied in a young man who has set aside the old Chancellor, and believes himself to have received from heaven, together with the right to represent God on this earth, the omnipotence and omniscience of God himself. Can it be doubted any longer that history reveals an inherent providential justice? To-day we see it unfold itself as if to show us that the distant perspectives of the past live in the present and extend throughout futurity.

II.

Bismarck was on his guard against Frederick the Good, from whom a progressive policy was expected on account of his philosophical ideas, and a liberal and parliamentary government on account of the domestic influences which surrounded him. Knowing the humanitarian tendencies which sparkled in his disappointed mind, and the ascendency exercised over his diseased heart by the loved Empress Victoria, Bismarck availed himself of the terrible infirmity with which implacable fate afflicted the second Lutheran Emperor of Germany, and retained the imperial power in his own person, as though William I. were not dead. The enormous674 corpse of the latter, like that of Frederick Barbarossa, made a subject for analogous legends by German tradition, was replaced by another corpse, and in the decomposition consequent to his frightful infirmity, the unfortunate Frederick III. seems to have realized the title of a celebrated Spanish drama, “To Govern After Death” (Reinar Despues de Morir). All that he could do, when already ravaged by cancer, when the microbes of a terrible disease, like the worms of the sepulchre, were attacking and destroying him, was to open up a vista to timid hope, and to publish certain promises animated by an exalted humaneness, in spite of and unknown to the Chancellor who was not consulted in these declarations, which might be said to have descended from heaven on the wings of the angel of death. Bismarck went to and fro among the doctors, who naturally refused to declare the terrible disease mortal, and prepared to vanquish the moribund will of Frederick and the British notions of his widow, fearing that when the last breath of the imperial life had ceased the whole policy of Germany would have to be changed, as a scene in a theatre must be changed if it has been hissed. It was certain that there was as great a difference between the ideas of the Emperor William I. and those of Frederick III., separated by so brief a space, as between those of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and those of the Emperor Frederick II., his successor, after the long period of two hundred years had changed the capital features of the Middle Ages; the first was an unalloyed Catholic, notwithstanding his dissidences with the Guelph cities, and even with the Pope a stern Cæsar, like the good Roman Cæsars in time of war and defence, a veritable orthodox crusader, whose piety was concealed as in a colossal mountain whence he awaited the reconquest of outraged Jerusalem by the Christians; whereas the second was an almost Pantheistic poet and philosopher, whose Catholicity was mingled with Orientalism, who was equally given to the discussion of theological and of scientific questions, who followed the crusades in fulfilment of an hereditary tradition, who penetrated into the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre by virtue of an extraordinary covenant with the infidel, and whose own beliefs were so cosmopolitan that they brought down a sentence of excommunication upon himself and of interdiction upon his kingdom. To Pope Innocent III., the former typified the675 Catholic emperor of the Middle Ages; Frederick II. appeared to him very much the same as in our days the Lutheran emperor appeared to Prince Bismarck, who took every possible precaution against the humanitarianism and parliamentarism of his dying pupil, and at the same time impelled his eldest son, the next heir to the crown, with all his influence and advice towards absolutist principles and reactionary propensities. No upright mind can ever forget the terrible desecration committed when, a few days before the death of his father, young William spoke of the empire as of a possession which it was to be understood he had already entered upon, and awarded the arm and head of his iron Chancellor the title of arm and head connatural with the Cæsarian institution. I know of no statesman in history who has given, under analogous circumstances, such proof of want of foresight as was given by Bismarck, comprehensible only if the body could assume the authority of the will, as did his, and if the intelligence could disappear, as did his, in an hydropic and unquenchable desire for power. Frederick, holding progressive ideas opposed to those of Bismarck and of William, would have greatly considered public opinion, and on account of that consideration would have perhaps respected, till the hour of his death, the Pilot, who, dejected by the new direction of public government, inferred that irreparable evil must result therefrom. When Maurice of Saxony trod on the heels of Charles V., whom he had defeated at Innsbruck, he was asked why he did not capture so rich a booty, and replied: “Where should I find a cage large enough for such a big bird?” Assuredly the conscience and mind of such a parliamentarian and philosopher as was Frederick III., must have addressed to him a similar question when he inwardly meditated sacrificing the Chancellor’s person and prescinding his power: “Where should I find a place outside the government for such a man, who would struggle under bolts and chains, making the whole state tremble in sympathy with his own agitation?” The experience and talent of Frederick, together with his respect for public opinion, led him to retain Bismarck at his post, subject only to some slight restrictions. But the Chancellor, in his shortsightedness, filled young William’s head with absolutist ideas; spurred and excited him to display impatience with his poor father; and when thus nurtured, his ward opened his mouth to satisfy676 his appetite, he swallowed up the Chancellor as a wild beast devours a keeper.

It was the hand of Providence!

III.

The onus of blame devolves on Bismarck’s native ideas, which persisted in him from his cradle and resisted the revelations of his own personal experience as well as the spirit of our progressive age. In Bismarck there always subsisted the rural fibre of the Pomeranian rustic, in unison with the demon of feudal superstition and intolerance. In politics and religion he was born, like certain of the damned in “Dante’s Inferno,” with his head turned backwards by destiny. A quarrelsome student, a haughty noble, pleased only with his lands and with the privileges ascribed to the land owner, incapable of understanding the ideal of natural right and the contexture of parliamentary government, a Christian of merely external routine and formalist liturgy, he excited in the pusillanimous Frederick William, in his earliest counsels and during his early influence in the crisis of ‘48, a horror of democratic principles and progressist schools which led him to salute the corpses of his own victims, stretched out on the beds of his own royal palace, and to prostrate himself at the feet of Austria in the terrible humiliation of Olmutz, that political and moral Jena of the civil wars of the Germanic races. Very perspicuous in discerning the slightest cloud that might endanger the privileges of the monarchy and aristocracy, he was blind of an incurable blindness with respect to the discernment of the breath of life contained in the febrile agitations of new Germany, which discharged from its revolutionary tripod sufficient magnetism and electricity between the tempests, similar to those which flash, and thunder, and fulminate, from the summits of all the Sinais of all histories, to inflame a higher soul in any other more progressive society. The world cannot understand that he should have been perturbed by the external clamor of the revolution, when the idea of Germanic unity had become condensed in the soul of the nation, revealing itself by volcanic eruptions, like an incipient or radiant star; he could not understand how the Congress of Frankfort, cursed by him, foreshadowed the future, as though677 inspired by tongues of fire; and could not avail himself of all that ether whose comet-like violence, cooled down in the course of time, was to compose the new German nationality, and was to give it a greater fatherland where its inherent genial nature should glow and expand. In his shortsightedness, in his lack of progressive spirit, in his want of the prophetic gift, he imagined the principle of Germanic unity lost at Olmutz, like the principle of Italian unity at Novara, and ridiculed those who, certain of the immortality of such principles, foretold for both a Passover of Resurrection. He never understood the innermost essence and intrinsic substance of the principle, to which it owes its force and glory, sufficiently to adopt it, until he had witnessed its success in Italy, insulted in his speeches during the tempestuous dawn of the new common idea. It is on this account that I am rendered indignant by any comparison of Bismarck and Cavour, as I am rendered equally indignant by a comparison of Washington and Bonaparte. The father of the Saxon fatherland of America, and the father of the Italian fatherland in Europe, alike rendered worship to goodness, and never deviated from right in any degree; whereas the founders of French imperialism and of Germanic imperialism, much addicted to violence and very vain of their conquests, relinquished something as great and as fragile and sinister as the works produced by the genius of evil and outer darkness in all theogony. In the last years of the reign of Napoleon III., during the discussion of a message in the French Legislative Corps, Rouher extolled the public and private virtues of the emperor. My late lamented friend, Jules Favre, replied to him in a speech worthy of Demosthenes: “You may be content to be the minister of such a Marcus Aurelius; to such paltry dignities, I prefer the higher privilege of calling myself a citizen of a free country.” Bismarck preferred to maintain himself in power by the help of his kings—quite the contrary of what Gladstone does, who maintains his sovereign. Whom can he blame but himself? Emperors are accustomed to be ferocious with their favorites when they are weary of them. Just as Tiberius expelled Sejanus, just as Nero killed Seneca, just as John II. hanged D. Alvaro de Luna, just as Philip II. persecuted Antonio Perez till he died, just as Philip III. beheaded D. Rodrigo Caldéron, William II. has morally678 beheaded Bismarck, without any other motive than his imperial caprice. Sic volo, sic jubeo. So now will the Chancellor venture to present himself in parliament because he has been dismissed from the royal palace like a lackey? Quæ te dementia cæpit? When, after Waterloo, Napoleon, adopting the theatrical style of an Italian artiste, suitable to his tragical disposition, and repeating a few badly learned Plutarchesque phrases, suitable to the classical education of his age, asked the English, his enemies, to accord him hospitality, as in ancient times Themistocles might have petitioned his enemies the Persians, the English replied by sending him to St. Helena. Bismarck in disfavor and disgrace solicits an asylum from his enemies, the commons, whom he has never defeated, yet whom he has always disdained. And as the English condemned their troublesome guest to live on a gloomy little island, the electors condemn their repugnant petitioner to a second ballot. But the Chancellor will be completely undeceived; he possesses no qualifications whatever for the position he has chosen. An orator, a great orator, he one day failed to keep his pledged word, and the apostate word condemns him to never regain the executive power through its intervention. In the sessions of parliament he will resemble the plucked and cackling hen thrown by the Sophists into Socrates’ lecture-room. The admired Heine, so fertile in genial ideas, represented the gods of Phidias and Plato, besides being downfallen and vagabond, selling rabbit skins on the seashore, and being forced to light brushwood fires by which to warm their benumbed bodies during the winter nights. To-day the writers, salaried by Bismarck, known as reptiles, now turn on him, for a similar salary, the venomous fangs which he formerly aimed at his innumerable enemies. And yonder, in the parliament where formerly he strode in with sabre, and belt, and spurred boots, a helmet under his arm, a cuirass on his breast, he will now enter like a chicken-hearted charity-school boy, and that assembly which he formerly whipped with a strong hand, like school-boys, laughed at and caricatured in often brutal sarcasm, ridiculed at every instant, ignored in the calculation of the budget and the army estimates during long years, and sometimes divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity679 and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon.

IV.

In few statesmen has it been seen so clearly as in the case of the Chancellor that no great man can make himself greater than a great idea. Opposed to the Germanic union in the commencement of its creative period, at the time of the revolution of ‘48, he accepted it much later, not so much of his own initiative and free will as in obedience to the teachings of unpleasant experiences. Between his anti-union and almost feudal speeches which softened the disaster of Olmutz, and his conversion, more than fourteen years ensued, the whole space of time which extended from the dawn of the revolution to the triumph of Italy. In that conversion lay the veritable glory of his life, and he proved therein, by successive and tardy gradations, that he could tenaciously avail himself of his courage, and lead up to the triumph of the newly created and loved project with marvellous art. The policy developed against Austria at Frankfort by its snares, by its traps, by its deceits, and by its tricks, exhibited him to history as a prodigy of cunning and foresight, in whom the enthusiasm of a living sentiment was associated with computations of consummate dexterity. His embassy to Paris and to St. Petersburg, where he united against Austria persons so opposed to concord as Napoleon and Alexander, each for his own part determined to do nothing which might increase the power of Germany, surpassed in cleverness everything ever achieved in celebrated combinations by such diplomats as Talleyrand and Metternich, the two illustrious models of political strategy. The inclusion of Austria in the incidents of the duchies of the River Elbe and the jugglery done with the territory acquired with its direct assent, in addition to the preparation of the final stroke for the presidency of the Germanic federation, by means of a war prepared with cunning stealth and carried out with rapid triumph, are among the greatest feats for which praises and deifications are due to him and which testify to his merit. I cannot forget that to his efforts we owe the ruin of Austrian despotism, and of Napoleonic Cæsarism; the re-establishment of Hungarian independence;680 the return of Italy’s long lost provinces to her bosom; the end of the Pope’s temporal power, and the fortunate occasion of the new birth of the republic in France. In his schemes Bismarck forwarded a higher ideal of progress and, consciously or unconsciously, he—than whom nobody was ever more inspired by motives and triumphant in his undertakings—has served the universal interests of the democracy. But he has achieved his undeniable victories by means and procedures which have not fitted him for the position of a German deputy, and do not lend him any force, either moral or material, for his new elective office. The whole of his great edifice is founded on a complete oblivion of parliamentary traditions, to-day courted lovingly by its most crafty enemy, whose inconstancy is extraordinary. Reservedness, dissimulation, secrecy, deceit, double meanings in words, what by analogy with the former we call duplicity of character, treaties made by stealth, midnight conspiracies, imposition of taxes not voted by parliament, levies arbitrarily decreed by the executive without authorization and even without consultation as in Asia, the right of conquest practised in the light of reason, violent annexations which dismembered one nation for the glory of another—such is the sum total of fatal traditions which Bismarck now solicits to be allowed to continue by means of free discussion, and in the bosom of open parliament. Palmerston and Gortchakoff cannot hop in the same bag. The minion of a Czar and the representative of a nation cannot be united in one and the same person. What programme can Bismarck develop to his colleagues which will have the moral character of necessary work? Moreover, the divine word called human eloquence descends only on the lips of that apostleship which redeems a nation from slavery and impels it forward. You could not understand Daniel defending the kings of Babylon, Demosthenes defending Philip, Cicero defending Mark Antony, O’Connell defending the landlords of Ireland, and Vergniaud or Mirabeau defending the absolute kings of France. If Bismarck accepts the liberal and tolerant policy of to-day, will he not thereby countenance the emperor who has ridiculed him and Caprivi who has audaciously seated himself in that exalted position from which Bismarck thought never to fall before his death? The great man is a poor appraiser of ideas, accepting them from every quarter whence they681 blow to him if only they will fill his sails and propel his bark; but he will never understand what mischief he could work to his enemies by opposing a programme of advanced democratic reform to the imperial programme whose fixity resembles the rigidity of death. But what liberty can he invoke—he who has disavowed and injured all liberties? Not personal liberty—abused and trampled on constantly by his menials; not commercial liberty, sold for thirty pieces of silver after the Germanic Zollverein had brought great wealth to Prussia; not religious liberty, placed in grave danger by complacency with anti-Jewish preachers and by the May laws; not scientific liberty, after having persecuted every department of science—even history—and invested the state with full power to enforce the teaching of official doctrines everywhere and by everybody; not industrial liberty, wasted away by the regulation of labor which has transformed the workshops into garrisons, and made of the workmen an army. What remains for him to do? He has absolutely no resource at his disposal with which to undertake a campaign of active opposition. In social questions nothing is more worn out and useless than his pontifical socialism. This species of abortion has lately resulted in advancing the parturition of increased aspirations of the laborers, and as every kind of abortion leaves the womb which bears it, has done so violently. His law for the insurance of workmen, though dating only from ‘82, is already tottering in almost decrepit decay. He even admitted himself that it needed perfecting by means of a law that should establish compulsory corporations, like the ancient guilds, which proposal was objected to by the workmen themselves, more inclined to Saxon individualism and revolutionary co-operation than to his socialism, in which he saw salvation, and which they regarded as pedantic and hybrid. Bismarck’s system had no justification and derogated all laws of ethics and justice. With his Utopian schemes the professors in their lecture-rooms endeavored to excite the Socialists, who, if they had listened and demanded their realization would have been exposed to be shot down in the streets by the soldiery, without anyone being able even to raise a protest against such indignities being possible in the country. Even his foreign policy can scarcely be justified; however skilful may have been the diplomatic and military preparations which led to his first682 triumph, it has proved a perplexed and confused policy since his final triumph. The Chancellor had no other alternative than to come to an agreement either with France and England against Russia, or else with Russia against France and England. To come to an arrangement with France against Russia necessitated the restitution of Alsace and Lorraine; to come to an understanding with Russia, it was necessary to permit the Russians to enter Constantinople. By these perplexities which shut out all hope of retaliation from France, thus exciting its colonial appetite, and which opened to Russia the path to the Bosphorus in a final eastern war, detaining her for a time in St. Stephens and preparing the two Bulgarias for an Austrian protectorate, Bismarck could have extricated himself from danger from both Russia and France when the bonds of the Triple Alliance were loosened at Rome by the fall of Crispi, and at Vienna by the Treaty of Commerce. We have not spoken of the Chancellor as an argonaut, of the Chancellor as a colonizer. All that he has been able to do, after having given occasion for enormous difficulties with Australia and England, with the United States and Spain, placing himself and placing us in danger of war for the Carolines, has been to break poor unlucky Emin Pasha’s backbone, and to barter the protectorate of Zanzibar for the sponge known as Heligoland. And may thanks be given to William II. and to Caprivi for having, at such small cost, got over the difficulties of the Socialist laws of his home policy, and the colonial entanglements of his foreign policy. Bismarck may believe an old admirer of his personality and of his genius, though an adversary of his policy, and of the government dependent on that policy. Society, like nature, devours everything that it does not need. The death of William I., the Cæsar; the death of Roon, the organizer; the death of Moltke, the strategist, all say to him that the species of men to which he belongs is fading out and becoming extinct. Modern science teaches that extinct species do not re-appear. Bossuet would say that the Eternal has destroyed the instrument of His providential work, because it is already useless. Remain, then, Bismarck, in retirement, and await, without neurotic impatience, the final judgment of God and of history.

683

THE DOUBTERS AND THE DOGMATISTS.

BY PROF. JAMES T. BIXBY, PH.D.

An eminent ecclesiastic of the Church of England not long ago characterized the present age as pre-eminently the age of doubt, and lamented that whether he took up book, or magazine, or sermon, he was confronted with some form of it.

This picture of our age is not an unjust one. The modern mind is thoroughly wide awake and has quite thrown off the leading-strings of ancient timidity. It looks all questions in the face and demands to be shown the real facts in every realm. All the traditions of history, the laws of science, the principles of morals are overhauled, and the foundations on which they rest relentlessly probed. And our modern curiosity can see no reason why it should cease its investigations when it comes to the frontiers of religion. It deems no dogma too old to be summoned before its bar; no council nor conclave too sacred to be asked for its credentials; no pope or Scripture too venerable to be put in the witness-box and cross-examined as to its accuracy or authority. In all the churches there is a spirit of inquiry abroad; almost every morning breeze brings us some new report of heresy, or the baying of the sleuth-hounds of orthodoxy, as they scent some new trail of infidelity; and the slogan of dogmatic controversy echoes from shore to shore.

As we look around the ecclesiastical horizon, we find agitation and controversy on all sides. In one denomination, it is the question of the salvation of the heathen; in another, that of the virgin birth of Christ and the apostolic succession; in a third, it is the invasion of doubt as to the eternal torment of the wicked; in a fourth, the evidential value of the miracles; in a fifth, the grand questions included under the higher criticism of the Scriptures and the relative authority of reason and the Bible. In Congregational, Episcopalian, Baptist, Universalist, and Presbyterian folds, it is the same, everywhere some heresy to be disciplined,684 some doubt to be suppressed, some doctrinal battle hotly waged.

To the greater part of the Church, this epidemic of scepticism is a subject of grave alarm. Unbelief seems to them, as to Mr. Moody, the worst of sins; and they consider the only proper thing to do with it, is to follow the advice of the Bishop of London, some years ago, and fling doubt away as you would a loaded shell. They apparently look upon Christianity as a huge powder magazine, which is likely to explode if a spark of candid inquiry comes near it.

Others, on the contrary, fold their arms indifferently and regard this new spirit of investigation as only an evanescent breeze, which can produce no serious result upon the citadel of faith. A third party hail it with exultation as the first trumpet blast of the theological Götterdæmerung, the downfall of all divine powers and the destruction of the Christian superstition, to give place to the naked facts of scientific materialism.

What estimate, then, shall we put on this tendency?

In the first place we must recognize that it is a serious condition; that it is no momentary eddy, but a permanent turn in the current of the human mind. Humanity is looking religion square in the face, without any band over its eyes, in a way it never has before; and when humanity once gets its eyes open to such questions,—it is in vain to try to close them, before the questions have been thoroughly examined. Certainly, Protestantism cannot call a halt upon this march. For it was Protestantism itself, proclaiming at the beginning of her struggle with Rome the right of private judgment, which started the modern mind upon this high quest; and Protestantism is therefore bound in logic and honor to see it through to the end, whatever that end may be.

And in the next place, I believe that quest will end in good. Why the champions of faith should regard doubt as devil-born, rather than a providential instrument in God’s hand, is something I do not understand. If doubt humbles the Church and acts as a thorn in its flesh, may not such chastening be providential, quite as much as the things which puff it up? As Luther well expressed it, “We say to our Lord, that if he will have his church, he must keep it, for we cannot. And if we could, we should be the proudest asses under heaven.” As Attila was the scourge of God to685 the Roman world, when God needed to clear that empire out of the way, as he built his new Christendom, so may not doubt be the scourge of God to the easy-going, sleepy, too credulous piety of to-day, which gulps down all the husks of faith so fast that it never gets a taste of the kernel?

Yes, doubt is often the needed preparation for obtaining truth. We must clear out the thorny thicket of superstition before we can begin to raise the sweet fruit of true religion.

There are times when careful investigation is rightly called for. When doubting Thomas demanded to see the print of the nails, and touch and handle the flesh of the risen Christ, before he would believe in the resurrection of his Lord, his demand for the most solid proof of the great marvel was a wise and commendable one; one for which all subsequent generations of Christians are deeply indebted to him. To believe without evidence, or to suppress doubt where it legitimately arises, is both fostering superstition and exposing ourselves to error and danger. What shall we say of the merchant who refuses to entertain any question about the seaworthiness of his vessel, but sends her off across the Atlantic undocked and unexamined, piously trusting her to the Lord? Shall we commend him? or not rather charge him with culpable negligence? And what we say of such a merchant seems to me just what we should say of the Christian who refuses to investigate the seaworthiness of that ship of faith which his ancestors have left him. In astronomy, in politics, in law, we demand what business the dead hand of the past has on our lip, our brain, our purse? Why should the dead hand of an Augustine or Calvin be exempt from giving its authority? Why should these mediæval glimpses of truth be given the right to close our eyes to-day from seeing what we ourselves can see and speaking forth what we can hear of heavenly truth?

In all other departments of knowledge, investigation has brought us up to a higher outlook, where we see the true relations of things better than before. In all other branches, God has given us new light, so that we discern things more as they really are. Science has risen by making a ladder of its earlier errors and by treading them under foot, reaching to higher truths. The Bible itself is the growth of ages; and Christian doctrine and Christian creeds have been the evolution of a still longer period. The dogmas of the churches686 are most manifold and conflicting. Is it not rather immodest and absurd for each church to claim infallibility for its present creed, and that wisdom died when the book of Revelation closed the Bible, or the Council of Trent or the Westminster Assembly adjourned its sitting? It seems to me that the churches ought, instead, to be willing and anxious to receive whatever new light God may grant them to-day, and with the potent clarifying processes of reason, separate the pure gold of religion from the dross and alloys of olden superstition and misguided judgment.

But to the modern devotees of dogma, any subjection of it to the cleansing of the reason seems shocking. The forefront of Dr. Briggs’ recent offending, for which he is about to be formally tried as a heretic, is that he admits errors in the Bible and gives reason (by which he means, as he explains, not merely the understanding, but also the conscience and the religious instinct in man), a conjoint place with the Bible and the Church in the work of salvation and the attainment of divine truth. To the modern dogmatist, these positions seem sceptical and pernicious. But to the philosopher, who knows the laws of human nature, to every scholar who knows the actual history of the Bible, these positions seem only self-evident. That in the Scriptures there are innumerable errors in science, mistakes in history, prophecies that were never fulfilled, contradictions and inconsistencies between different books and chapters,—these are facts of observation which every Biblical student knows full well. Granting, for the sake of the argument, that the Bible was given originally by infallible divine dictation, yet the men who wrote down the message were fallible; the men who copied it were fallible; the men who translated it (some of it twice over, first from Hebrew to Greek, and then from Greek to English) were fallible; and the editors, who from the scores of manuscripts, by their personal comparison and decisions between the conflicting readings, patched together our present text, were most fallible. And when thus a Bible reader has got his text before him, how can he understand it, except by using his own reason and judgment? Instruments, again, most fallible.

How is it possible, then, to get Bible-truth independently of the reason or in entire exemption from error? The only way would be to say, that not only was the Bible verbally687 inspired, but all its authors, copyists, editors, and pious readers were also infallibly inspired. As in the old Hindoo account of how the world was supported, the earth was said to be held up on pillars, and the pillars on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and when the defender of the faith was asked what, then, did the tortoise rest on, he sought to save himself in his quandary, by roundly asserting that “it was tortoise all the way down”;—so the defender of the infallibility of the Scripture has to take refuge in “inspiration all the way down.” But if this be so, ought not the modern scripture editors and revisers, translators and Biblical professors also to be inspired, as much as those of King James’ day or the printers at the Bible house? And thus we reach, as the reductio ad absurdum of this argument, this result: that Tischendorff, and Koenen, and the Hebrew professors, among whom Doctor Briggs is a foremost authority, while accused of heresy are really themselves the very channels of infallible inspiration.

The sincere investigators into the character of the Bible and the nature of Christ are charged with exalting human reason above the word of God. But as soon as the subject is investigated and a Professor Swing or a Mr. MacQueary corroborates his interpretation by the Scripture itself, or Doctor Briggs shows his views to be sustained by history, by philosophy, by a profounder study of both nature and the Bible, then the ground is shifted, and it is maintained that it is not a question whether the views are true, but whether they conform to the creed; that the Catechism is not to be judged by the Bible or the facts in the case, but Bible and facts are to be interpreted by the words of the Confession; and if they do not agree with this, then heresy and infidelity are made manifest. The question is not whether the water of truth be found, but whether it is drunk out of an orthodox bottle, with the Church’s label glued firmly upon it. The pretext for the charge of heresy against these eminent Biblical scholars is that they are undermining the Bible; but in conducting the trial, prosecutors themselves refuse to abide by the testimony of the Scriptures to decide the matter and erect above them soul creed or catechism.

But let us stop for a moment and ask whence came these creeds and catechisms themselves? What else was their origin than out of the reason of man; out of the brains of688 scholars, as they in former years criticised and interpreted the same Scripture, and nature, and laws of God? And these scholars of the past were quite as fallible, quite as partisan, and far less well informed than our scholars to-day. Thus it is the dogmatists themselves who exalt the reason of man above the word of God, forbidding us to listen to the more direct voice of God in our own soul; forbidding us to decipher the revelations which the Divine Hand has written on the rocks, and tree, and animal structure, and even frowning upon that profounder study of the Scripture called the higher criticism, but bidding us accept, in its stead, the man-made substitute of some council or assembly of former generations.

There have undoubtedly been periods when the doubt with which the Church had to deal was mainly frivolous or carnal; a passionate rebellion of the worldly nature, attacking the essential truths of religion. But such is not the nature of the doubt which is at present occupying the public eye; such is not the doubt most characteristic of our generation. It proceeds from serious motives. It is a doubt marked by essential reverence and loyalty to truth. It is a desire for more solid foundations; for the attainment of the naked realities of existence. It is a necessary incident of the great intellectual awakening of our century. As the modern intellect comes back on Sunday from its week-day explorations of the history of Rome, or the myths of Greece, or the religious ideas of Buddha or Zoroaster, it must return to the contemplation of the Christian dogmas under new influences. It will necessarily demand what better evidence the law of Moses or the creed of Nicea has than the law of Mana or the text of the Zendavesta? The scepticism of our age is not so much directed against the great truths of religion as against the man-made dogmas that have usurped the sacred seat. If irreverent, scoffing scepticism were to be found anywhere to-day, it would most likely be found manifested among the throng of young men gathered at our most progressive University,—Harvard. But Dr. Lyman Abbot, after several weeks’ association with the students there, and a careful study of their states of mind, not long ago testified, that “if they are sceptical, it is because they are too serious-minded and too true to accept convictions ready made, traditional creeds for personal beliefs, or church formularies for a life of devotion.” Now to call such a state of mind irreligious689 or infidel is most unjust. The irreligion lies rather with those who make a fetish of the Bible and substitute a few pet texts from it; that sustain their own private opinions, in place of that divine light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The real infidels are they who reject the revelation which God is making us continually in the widening light of modern knowledge, and by a species of ecclesiastical lynching, condemn, before trial, the sincere, painstaking, and careful scholars and reverent disciples of Christ, who are so earnestly seeking after truth, because the results of their learned researches do not agree with the prejudices of their anathematizers. It is with no less cogency of argument than nobility of feeling that Dr. Briggs replied to his assailants: “If it be heresy to say that rationalists, like Martineau, have found God in the reason, and Roman Catholics, like Newman, have found God in the Church, I rejoice in such heresy, and I do not hesitate to say that I have less doubt of the salvation of Martineau and Newman than I have of the modern Pharisees who would exclude such noble men,—so pure, so grand, the ornaments of Great Britain and the prophets of the age,—from the kingdom of God.”

Scepticism and religious questioning are, then, no sins; they are not irreligious. But surely they do vex the Church. What shall the Church do about them? In the first place, we should not try to suppress them. Nor should we tell religious inquirers to shut their eyes and put the poppy pillow of faith beneath their heads and go to sleep again, and dream. They have got their eyes wide open and they are determined to know whether those sweet visions which they had on faith’s pillow are any more than illusions. Nor will they be satisfied and cease to think, by having a creed of three hundred or fifteen hundred year’s antiquity recited to them. The modern intellects that have taken Homer to pieces, and excavated Agamemnon’s tomb, and unwound the mummy wrappings of the Pharaohs, that have weighed the stars and chained the lightnings, are not to be awed by any old-time sheepskin or any council of bishops. They demand the facts in the case; fresh manna to satisfy their heart hunger; the solid realities of personal experience. No. It is too late to-day for the churchmen to play the part of Mrs. Partington, and sweep back the Atlantic tide of modern thought with their little ecclesiastical broom. The old ramparts are broken690 through and we must give the flood its course. The only spirit to meet it in is that of frankness and friendliness. Let us not foster in these questioning minds the suspicion that there is any part of religion that we are afraid to have examined. We smile at the bigoted Buddhist who, when the European attempted to prove by the microscope that the monk’s scruples against eating animal food were futile (inasmuch as in every glass of water he drank he swallowed millions of little living creatures), smashed the microscope for answer, as if that altered at all the facts. But are not many of the heresy-hunters in Christendom quite as foolish in their efforts to smash the microscope of higher criticism, or the telescope of evolution, and suppress the testimony which nature, and reason, and scholarship every day present afresh?

Let us, therefore, give liberty, yes, even sympathy, to these perplexed souls who are struggling with the great problems of religion.

And secondly, let us be honest with them, and not claim more certainty for religious doctrines or more precise and absolute knowledge about divine and heavenly things than we have. One of the great causes of modern doubt is, unquestionably, the excessive claims that theology has made. It has not been content with preaching the simple truths necessary to a good life; that we have a Maker to whom we are responsible,—a divine Friend to help us, a divine voice within to teach us right and wrong; that in the life that is to follow this, each shall be judged according to his deeds, and that in the apostles and prophets, especially the spotless life of Jesus, we have the noble patterns of the holy life set up before us for our imitation; a revelation of moral and religious truth all sufficient for salvation. The Church has not been content with these almost self-evident truths; but it must go on, to make most absolute assertions about God’s foreknowledge, and foreordination, and triune personality; and the eternal punishment of the wicked, and the double nature and pre-existence of Christ,—things not only vague and inconsistent, but contradictory to our sense of justice and right. It must go on to make manifold assertions about the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the Bible and the details of the future life and the fall of human nature, which are utterly incredible to rational minds. And the worst of it is, that all these things are bound up in one great theological691 system, and poor, anxious inquirers are told that they must either take all or none; and so (soon coming face to face with some palpable inconsistency or incredibility) they not unnaturally give up the whole. Trace out the religious history of the great sceptics,—the Voltaires, the Bradlaughs, the Ingersolls, the Tom Paines,—and you will see that the origin of their scepticism has almost always been in a reaction from the excessive assumptions of the ecclesiastics themselves. It is too fine spun and arrogant orthodoxy that is itself responsible for half of the heterodoxy of which it complains.

Let the Church, then, be honest, and claim no more than it ought. Let it respect and encourage honesty in every man in these sacred matters. The Church itself should say to the inquirer: You are unfaithful to your God if you go not where He, by the candle of the Lord (i. e., the reason and conscience he has placed within you), leads you. And when a man in this reverent and sincere spirit pursues the path of doubt, how often does he find it circling around again toward faith and conducting him to the Mount of Zion! The true remedy for scepticism is deeper investigation. As all sincere doubt is at bottom a cry of the deeper faith that only that which is true and righteous is divine, so all earnest doubt, thought through to the end, pierces the dark cloud and comes out in the light and joy of higher convictions. It lays in the dust our philosophic and materialistic idols and brings us to the one Eternal Power, the ever-living Spirit, manifested in all, that Spirit whose name is truth, whose word is love.

You remember, perhaps, the story of the climber among the Alps, who, having stepped off a precipice, as he thought, frantically grasped, as he fell, a projecting root and held on in an agony of anticipated death, for hours, until, utterly exhausted, he at last resigned himself to destruction, and let go of his support, to fall gently on the grassy ledge beneath, only a few inches below his feet. So when we resign ourselves to God’s hand, our fall, be it little or be it great, lands us gently in the everlasting arms that are ever underneath.

Do not fear, then, to wrestle with doubt, or to follow its leadings. Out of every sincere soul-struggle, your faith shall come forth stronger and calmer. And do not hesitate692 to proclaim your new convictions when they have become convictions. Such is the encouragement and sympathy that the Church should give the candid questioner.

On the other hand, it may wisely caution him, not to be precipitate in publishing his doubt. Let him wait till it has become more than a doubt; till it has become a settled and well-considered conclusion, before he inflicts it upon his neighbor. The very justification for doubting the accepted opinion, the sacredness of truth, commands caution and firm conviction that our new view is something more than a passing caprice of the mind, before we publish it. But when the doubter is sure of this, then let him no longer silence his highest thoughts.

Again, the Church is justified in cautioning the doubter not to be proud of his doubt as a doubt. There is no more merit, it is well to remember, in disbelieving than in believing; and if your opinions have, as yet, only got to the negative state and you have no new positive faith or philosophy to substitute for the old, you are doing your neighbor a poor service in taking away from him any superstition, however illogical, that sustains his heart and strengthens his virtue.

And further, let me say, I would dislike very much to have you contented with doubt. Doubt makes a very good spade to turn up the ground, but a very poor kind of spiritual food for a daily diet. It is a useful, often an indispensable half-way shelter in the journey of life; but a very cold home in which to settle down as the end of that journey.

In all our deepest hours, when our heart is truly touched, or our mind satisfied, we believe. It is each soul’s positive faith, however unconventional or perhaps unconscious that faith may be, that sustains its hope, that incites its effort, that supports it through the trials of life. Any doubt, even, that is earnest and to be respected, is really an act of faith, faith in a higher law than that of human creeds; in a more direct revelation, within ourselves, in our own sense of justice and consistency, than in any manuscript or print.

The very atheist, who in the name of truth repudiates the word God, is really manifesting (in his own different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in the divine righteousness and its lawful claim on every human soul.

She is right who sings:693—

Finally, and most important of all, let us not worry ourselves so much about the intellectual opinions of men; but look rather to their spiritual condition. The church ought to think less of creed and more of character. The essence of faith lies not in correct conclusions upon doctrinal points; but in righteousness, and love, and trustful submission to God’s will. No scepticism concerning dogmas touches the heart of religion. If that seems at all heretical, let me cite good orthodox authority. I might quote Bishop Thirlwall, of the Church of England, in his judgment concerning Colenso’s attack upon the accuracy of the history of the Exodus in the Pentateuch, that “this story, nay, the whole history of the Jewish people, has no more to do with our faith as Christians, than the extraction of the cube or the rule of three.” Or I might quote Canon Farrar’s weighty words, in a recent article in the Christian World, upon the true test of religion. “The real question,” he declares, “to ask about any form of religious belief, is: Does it kindle the fire of love? Does it make the life stronger, sweeter, purer, nobler? Does it run through the whole society like a cleansing flame, burning up that which is mean and base, selfish and impure? If it stands that test it is no heresy.” That answers the question as aptly as it does manfully. And to the same effect is the noble sermon of Dr. Heber Newton a few weeks ago, in which he subordinated the question of the denominational fold to the higher interests of the Christian flock; and that notable saying of Dr. MacIlvaine’s at the Presbyterian Presbytery the other day, when, quoting the admission of one evangelical minister, that it was the Unitarian Martineau who had saved his soul and kept his Christian faith from shipwreck, he added significantly, “You must first find God in your soul before you can find Him elsewhere.” Yes, the prime and essential thing is to find God in the soul; to worship him in spirit, by a pure conscience, a loyal will, a heart full of devotion to God’s righteousness and love to all our kind. This is to worship God in truth. And what have Calvin’s five points, or the composite origin of the Pentateuch, or the virgin birth of Christ to do with694 such worship? If a man likes to believe them, very well. But if he cannot honestly credit them, why should we shut the doors of the church against him and threaten him with excommunication? Were these the requirements that Jesus Christ laid on his disciples? Not at all. Look all through the Sermon on the Mount, study the Golden Rule, and the Parable of the Good Samaritan, or the conditions Jesus lays down in his picture of the last judgment as the conditions of approval by the heavenly Judge, and see if you find anything there about the infallibility of Scripture, or the Apostolic succession, or the Deity of Christ, or any other of the dogmas on account of which the ecclesiastical disciplinarians would drive out the men whom they are pursuing as heretics. How grimly we may fancy Satan (if there be any Satan) smiling to himself as he sees great Christian denominations wrought up to a white heat over such dogmas and definitions, while the practical atheism, and pauperism, and immorality of our great metropolis is passed over with indifference.

Sunday after Sunday, the Christian pulpit complains that the great masses of the people keep away from their communion tables and do not even darken their doors.

Does not the fault really lie in the folly—I may almost say sin,—of demanding of men to believe so many things that neither reason nor enlightened moral sense can accept, and making of these dogmas five-barred gates through which alone there is any admission to heaven?

If we wish the Church to regain its hold on thinking men it must simplify and curtail its creeds; it must recognize that the love of God is not measured by the narrowness of human prejudice, and that God’s arms are open to receive every honest searcher after truth. Let him come with all his doubts, provided he comes with a pure heart and brings forth the fruits of righteousness. Let us no longer pretend that it is necessary for a Christian life to know all the mysteries of God. Let it no longer be thought a mark of wickedness for a man honestly to hold a conviction different from the conventional standard; but let us respect one another’s independent search and judgment of truth. True faith consists not in any special theory of God or His ways, but in the uplifting of our spirit to touch His spirit, and the diffusing of whatever grace or gift we have received from Him in generous good-will amongst our fellows.695

If the Christian Church is to go forward successfully again in the power and spirit of that Master whom it constantly invokes as “the way, the truth, and the life,” it must make that way and life its guiding truth. It must aim constantly at greater simplicity in its teaching, and a broader, more fraternal co-operation in Christian work. Its motto should be the motto of the early Church, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” Then shall a new and grander career open before its upward footsteps.

696

THE SIOUX FALLS DIVORCE COLONY AND SOME NOTED COLONISTS.

BY JAMES REALF, JR.

The thriving city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has recently been pitchforked into unjust notoriety by certain irresponsible correspondents of certain sensational and habitually inveracious newspapers that infest New York and Chicago. It has been represented as having an easy divorce mill that constantly grinds out divorces of a more or less bogus nature. This is fundamentally false. The laws of South Dakota are liberal, but they are strictly interpreted. These unscrupulous newspapers, whom it is unnecessary to name, have gone still further in their distortion of truth, dissemination of error and attempted degradation of the high and noble calling of journalism. They have made false and unwarranted statements about the laws of the Dakotas and of the United States generally on the subject of divorce. Nor is this all in their race for a temporary and unsubstantial circulation,—they have maligned certain unfortunate and meritorious women and men, and added insult to injury by publishing bogus portraits of beautiful ladies whose misfortunes should have provoked respectful sympathy rather than coarse insinuation and vulgar ridicule. Because these women were prominent in what has been termed the Divorce Colony of Sioux Falls, either from social rank in their former spheres, or by reason of the legal peculiarities enmeshing their cases, they are legitimate subjects for honest journalistic treatment, and some of them, triumphing over the natural shrinkingness of their sex, for the sake of truth and for the sake of other women who may need examples and incitements to achieve freedom from dishonoring marriages, are perfectly willing to sacrifice their own personal desires for obscurity and have their lives and their cases properly presented. I have even prevailed on a few to permit the use of their photographs to add to the personal interest of this article.

697

The case of greatest interest, perhaps, because it has a transatlantic notoriety, is that of Eva Lylyan Lynch-Blosse, an English lady, who came to Sioux Falls early last winter and attracted almost instantly the respectful attention of the citizens. Not because she was a strikingly beautiful woman, for a student of statues might find some faults in her features, but because out of the shy, violet eyes a high, indomitable spirit occasionally gleamed and a stray flash from them, combined with her radiant freshness of complexion and perfect grace of figure and of carriage, would light up the common sordid streets of the common masculine mind and turn them, for the nonce, into vistas of imagination.

Some persons, passing us, inspire the thought: There goes a being with a strange life-history, or full of great capacities, moral or mental. Such was, undoubtedly, the chief component of her charm, felt equally by the grave and learned lawyer, ex-Judge Garland, who conducted her case, and by the street-loungers who respectfully hastened to make way for her passage. It was the high character that radiated from her, scorning the conventionalities that conspire to belittle her sex, determined to be free and not afraid of being a pioneer in baffling the barbarism of her native laws. A singular story hers, that demands to be told in full, since it is full of inspiration to oppressed womanhood everywhere.

The daughter of an English clergyman, she married at seventeen Lieut. Edward Falconer Lynch-Blosse, an Irishman of good family, but bad habits. In a few months this girl-wife discovered not only that she had mistaken for affection what was merely the gratified vanity of a boarding-school miss when wooed by a good-looking uniform, but that there was absolutely nothing in the nature of the animated uniform on which even respect could be built. Active brutality was soon begun by the lieutenant. Simple adultery not being a sufficient amusement for his hours of ease, he tried to compel his refined and delicate wife to receive his paid paramours as her associates; and on her demurring, he became mad with indignation and proceeded to discipline her, according to the Englishman’s time-honored right of violence. As a minor but very embarrassing matter to a sensitive woman, he plunged into debt and forced her to contend with and pacify his duns out of her private fortune,698 and even worried her into an attempt to raise money for him by pledging her annuity, though, luckily, no Jew in London was plucky enough to take a long risk on the life of the wife of so brutal a husband. This daily inferno of disgust and terror the woman endured for three years, for the barbarous English law requires the woman, not the man, to prove extreme cruelty besides adultery; and cruelty is often not so easy to prove, for Englishmen, as a rule, do not beat their wives on the housetops. It is generally a strictly boudoir performance, with locked doors and the rabble excluded, as befits the solemnity of such a marital right. At last, owing to the lieutenant’s culpable carelessness in castigation, she was able to go to court with plenty of provable cruelty. But here again the barbarous English law stepped in and said: “This is all very true, but wait a bit. You shall have a decree nisi,” which meant that she must wait six months and then a certain musty, overpaid, and underworked humbug, styled the Queen’s Proctor, after hobnobbing with an attorney-general, would, if his dinner agreed with him, confirm the decree and make it final. During this suspense the ineffably mean uniform that had been masquerading as a man was visited by an idea, and wrote a letter to Mrs. Lynch-Blosse depicting himself as on the brink of starvation and consumption, and begging for some money. The woman’s pity was aroused. She had once fancied for a brief while, with the undeveloped heart of girlhood, that she liked this empty, tinkling symbol of a man. She wrote him a kind letter enclosing the money. It takes but little imagination to understand what such a creature would do with the cash; that he would hasten to celebrate the success of his cunning by a revel at which he could brag to some loose companion how neatly he had cheated a generous and noble woman. But he did something more, almost inconceivable in its baseness; he took that letter to the Queen’s Proctor and showed it to that archive of centuried insapience as a proof that there had been collusion in the case, that his wife and he were really on good terms, and that he was anxious to regain her. The Proctor took his word, and without going into the case further, when the six months were up, refused to confirm the decree. And then her friends said: “You had better give up. England has decided that you cannot be free.” And her lawyers said: “Even with fresh evidence699 it would be foolish to re-open the fight. The action of the Queen’s Proctor is so insurmountable.” But the woman said to herself: “Though England has decided that I must be a slave, nevertheless I will be free.” Meantime Lieutenant Lynch-Blosse, after endeavoring to blacken his wife’s character in his regiment, and getting soundly thrashed for his pains, eloped with a light-headed Scotch peeress whose husband, Lord Torphichen, promptly obtained a divorce, with the custody of his children, and the elopers fled the kingdom, leaving a small army of swindled tradesmen who are still exceedingly anxious to discover their whereabouts. When last heard of, the ex-uniform was living in Chicago under an alias, and he will probably remain one of the many English ornaments of this country, for the same English law that permits a man to castigate his wife in moderation is excessively severe if he swindles tradesmen.

Mrs. Lynch-Blosse obtained her Dakotan divorce on the ground of adultery, the evidence being the record of the Scotch suit of Lord Torphichen against Lady Torphichen, otherwise styled the Right Hon. Ellen Frances Gordon, and apart from the wrongs, the beauty, and the pioneer courage of Mrs. Lynch-Blosse, picturesque as they made it, her case possesses profound interest to the legal mind. It adds to the weight of such cases as except to the old rule of domicile (Ditson v. Ditson, 4 R. I., 87; Harding v. Alden, 9 Mo. 140; Hollister v. Hollister, 6 Pa. St., 449; Derby v. Derby, 14 Ill. App., 645) by showing that where a husband is guilty of such conduct as would entitle even to a limited divorce, the wife is at liberty to establish a separate jurisdictional domicile. Moreover, Mrs. Lynch-Blosse might have obtained a divorce on grounds less strong than she did, for a divorce good at the place of domicile will be sustained in England, though the same grounds would have been insufficient to obtain it there. (Harvey v. Farnie, L. R. 8 App. Cas. 43; Turner v. Thompson, L. R., 13 P. D. 37.) Of this law, probably, comity of nations is the chief component. Those who admire moral courage and feel a glow of indignation at the fact that, in order to secure her natural right to own herself, a woman in the closing years of the nineteenth century has to spend thousands of dollars, travel thousands of miles, and sojourn among strangers, may be glad to know that since her freedom she has married an English gentleman700 of high character, and is living restfully in a charming little cottage on the banks of what Macaulay calls, in his picturesque way, “the river of the ten thousand masts.” The great, feverous heart of London throbs near.

Another very interesting personage in the Sioux Falls Divorce Colony, is Mrs. James G. Blaine, Jr., now living in a cosy cottage on the fashionable avenue with her sister, Miss Nevins, her son, James G. Blaine, 3d, and her maids. When Marie Nevins, piquantly pretty, witty, and accomplished, made a stolen match with the ungreat son of one of America’s greatest political figures, she little dreamed what the hands of the Fates—who are sometimes the Furies—were spinning for her; yet she wears her robes of sorrow with some of that grace of patience which comes to her sex like an instinct born of centuried servitude. How her husband ever fascinated so fascinatingly elusive a creature is a mystery to all who know him and a miracle to all who know her; but who has ever guessed the riddle of a woman’s heart? Surely no man yet known to the world, except possibly Balzac, and he only occasionally by some sort of electric, psychological accident. The true story of Mrs. Blaine’s infelicities has been carefully hidden from the public, although some superserviceable, would-be friends have now and then busied themselves with starting absurd rumors, as if for the fun of contradicting them; for instance, a precious yarn spun lately to the effect that Mrs. Blaine, senior, looked down on her daughter-in-law as not aristocratic enough to have married a Blaine. How intrinsically absurd is such an idea in connection with a family as close to what Lincoln called “the plain people”—and as really proud of so being—as that of the famous Republican leader! Blaine is a man so thoroughly democratic that only a very stupid enemy of his could have invented such a piece of self-convicting nonsense; for if aristocracy entered into the question, Mrs. James G. Blaine, Jr., could make a better showing than her spouse, since, if it confers any quasi-patent of nobility in this country to have a distinguished father, it must give a larger halo of social splendor to have a distinguished grandfather, etc., etc. Now, Mrs. Blaine, Jr., had a grandsire who was a power in his day, a forceful, brilliant man, Samuel Medary, who was successively governor of three States, Ohio, Kansas, and Minnesota. Mrs.701 Blaine, Jr., apart from her marital misfortunes, deserves much sympathy for her physical fate. Just lately her leg was broken again and her surgeons fear that her lameness must be perpetual. Yet the talk about her going on the stage has some basis, and no one who ever talked with her, and enjoyed the prismatic play of her facial expression and the flexions of her vibrant voice, could doubt her fitness for certain popular rôles. Nor need her lameness defeat her of success. A play of mingled pathos and humor could be written for a lame heroine. One excellent writer has offered to do it, and Hamlin Garland could do it excellently. Balzac in his marvellous book, “The Alkahest,” declares that she is blest among women, who, having some great bodily defect, nevertheless wins a man’s affections, for she never loses her hold on them, and it might very easily be the same with a lame actress and the affections of the public.

As to Mrs. Blaine’s case an immense interest is felt, an interest which lies not alone in the points of law. Mrs. Blaine, Jr., is a Catholic, and her example in taking this step contrary to the custom of her church is likely to be fruitful. It is a pretty safe prophecy that the next Pope will see the advisability of returning to the policy of the church prevalent before the Council of Trent, and will allow a wiser freedom to his spiritual subjects in this matter of divorce. Hearts were created before creeds, and the primal laws of God still possess, and exert in emergencies, their ancient vigor of eminent domain.

It is noticeable that nearly all the women in the colony have children, and nearly all are women of unusual grace or beauty, or mental gift—sometimes all three in one.

A very interesting person occasionally seen on the streets with a little golden-haired boy is Mrs. Mina Hubbard, formerly of Redbank, N. J. She has one of those olive, oval faces so often met in the south of Spain, and she has a voice whose beauty and volume are equally impressive. One day in the cosy, dozy little Methodist Church last summer she happened to join in the singing, and several pious nappers were sweetly startled from their theologic dreams. After that event there was such a marked increase in the masculine attendance that the lady’s modesty took fright, and she refrained from the pleasure of church-going. When I asked her if she had lost her fondness for Methodism and music,702 she replied archly: “Oh, no! I am extremely fond of going to church and hearing good congregational music, but I can restrain myself.”

Hon. Thomas D. Worrall, M. D., who has recently obtained a divorce and now lives in Sioux Falls, is another person of note. Born in England sixty-five years ago, he came to America young, moved to Boston and achieved reputation as an anti-slavery orator, even when the peerless Phillips was in his first blaze. Then he went to Colorado, was a member of the territorial legislature, and wrote his name largely and honorably on her early annals. Horace Greeley, who liked him heartily, persuaded him next to accept a professorship in New York in the American College of Medicine. Two years later, going to New Orleans, he became a member of the famous Warmouth Legislature, and as sanitary physician to New Orleans, added to his world-wide host of friends. While in England, in 1873, his lectures on the resources of the Mississippi Valley attracted wide attention, and he was greeted on his return by an ovation in the New Orleans Academy of Music. Colorado again claimed him for seven happy, industrious years, marked by an eloquent defence of the Denver Mining Exposition, for which they presented him with a cabinet of minerals that, according to experts, is intrinsically worth $5,000, though it would take vastly more to buy it from a man so covetous of honor. Removing to Washington, he published a curious little book called “Slander and Defamation of Character.”

Sickness came to this learned and benevolent man, and he went to London for treatment, but famous surgeons, after operating, could give him no hope, and he came back to his adopted country to die. To his amazement he found his home broken up, his valuable furniture sold, his wife gone. “The mystery of the case,” he has said, “is that my wife and I never had the least falling out. Her desertion of me in my old age and supposed last illness was like lightning out of a clear sky. The thought came to me, ‘Dying man that I am, it will be sweet to die free.’” He then came West and settled in Sioux Falls, and either the invigorating climate, or the inspiration of freedom, or the shock of his wife’s desertion (for in some diseases a sudden shock delays or defeats death by effecting an electric change in the bodily currents setting restward) have worked a marvellous change,703 for to-day this amiable and accomplished old man is the picture of health and vital power.

There are many other cases of great interest in the Divorce Colony at Sioux Falls, but this plain statement of a few is enough to show how grossly the personnel and character of the colony have been slandered by certain sensational and corrupt newspaper correspondents. For more than six months I have studied the conduct and natures of the persons who compose the divorce colony, and every reputable citizen of Sioux Falls will substantiate my statement that, with possibly three exceptions, the divorce seekers have been remarkable for the inherent justice of their suits and the dignity of their behavior during their residence in this town. The attempt to give them and the place an unenviable notoriety, made by certain newspapers, is a stain on American journalism. Men and women suffer enough before they seek a divorce court. It is ghoulish to pursue them in the press with misrepresentation and ridicule, or with exposure of their marital miseries. Divorce is not merely a legal right of the individual; it is often a moral duty which ought to be demanded by society from a truly dignified woman or man; for to cohabit where there is no love between husband and wife, worse still where the atmosphere has become surcharged with hate, and to foist on society children begotten and reared in an atmosphere that may crush out every noble impulse and lofty desire, besides the subtle discords of heredity that must mark their temperaments, is not merely a most pathetic blunder for the parties primarily affected, but a wrong to the race—a crime against civilization.

704

THE WOMAN MOVEMENT.

BY LUCINDA B. CHANDLER.

The woman movement is a world-wide fact. An agitation which has gathered impetus and strength during more than forty years is a significant phenomenon in the realm of mind and of social progress.

Since, in 1848, the rebellion of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the humiliating position accorded them as delegates to an international convention in London, England, led them to inaugurate the “woman’s rights” movement in this country, at Seneca Falls, New York, the growth of this “mustard seed” of truth has become a “great tree” whose branches overshadow continents, and the thought and active moral forces of nations “dwell in the branches thereof.”

If not from “Greenland’s icy mountains,” at least from the boundaries of the United States and British America to “India’s coral strand,” the onsweeping wave of woman’s elevation is steadily advancing.

Ramabai in India seeking the deliverance of the child widow, who has no earthly existence, nor any hope of one beyond mortal life except as a wife, and who, as a widow, is but an outcast, this woman missionary from the opposite side of the globe has clasped hands and is in heart-fellowship with her American sisters who are still seeking the enlargement of woman’s freedom and opportunities in this favored country.

It was a logical position that besieged the ballot as the first agency of deliverance in our land. The suffrage is, under our form of government and constitutional rights, the badge of equality.

Everywhere, in Church and State, woman was discriminated against, and the distinguishing disability imposed upon her by law and custom was her suppressed opinion and will in the administration of affairs.

In the church she might contribute her labor, carry forward705 enterprises to pay the minister’s salary, furnish the edifice, support social movements that would tend to increase membership, and sustain the religious services; but, were she a machine, minus brains, choice, or will, she could be no more completely a nonentity when the pastor was to be chosen, the amount of his salary fixed, or any matters of finance or administration decided upon.

The acceptance of her work for its support was the only recognition of her individuality, or her common share in the institution. She was cudgelled with Paul in the Church and with her inability to fight by the State.

Muscular force having been, and still widely held to be, the bulwark of civilization, and submission to the authority of man socially and ecclesiastically the measure of her religious excellence, at least of the excellence of the wifely portion of womanhood, woman has been a cipher at the left-hand side of the unit man in both civil and religious institutions.

But the evolution of brains, which is nature’s method of human development, has unsettled this standard of civilization and the relation of the sexes. The woman who thinks has come, and the struggle is no longer one of muscle, nor can it ever again become so.

The woman of the future can no more be remanded to the merely patient plodder in kitchen and nursery, with no horizon but the cook-stove and cradle illuminated by the weekly church service, than the lightning printing-press of to-day can be remanded to the clumsy instrument of a century ago, or the electric light to the tallow dip.

If the demand of woman for equal opportunity to win all the prizes of life, and to control her special function, involving the most serious and sacred responsibilities to the race, and the necessity of her own growth and advancement,—if this new demand is one that is not worthy the consent and co-operation of men and institutions, the mistake was fatal which permitted her to learn the alphabet.

This mistake, if mistake it was, has extended its mighty influence in widening circles through the past three centuries. Francois Saintonge, a young widow of France, toward the close of the sixteenth century, obtained the consent of her father to teach some girls to read if she would give her lessons at five o’clock in the morning. Without706 bed, bread, or fire, she and her five pupils stayed the first night in the house for which the only fifty pounds she possessed were paid. Simultaneously a young girl in Italy made an effort to set in motion the brain cells of the girls of her country by giving them a chance to learn the alphabet.

The heroic courage of women in striving to attain the weapons of intelligence affords evidence of the invincible proceeding of evolution inherent in the constitution of humanity.

The woman movement is demonstration of the power of thought beyond the power of muscle; it is evidence that the intangible forces of mind are superior to the external material powers of muscle, and sword, and bullet. It is reassuring to forecast that, spite of the present inefficacy, or but very limited success of woman’s protest against barbarous laws and usages, and the destructive errors and vices of the degree of civilization we have reached, the protest is a prophecy that the moral elevation of the race is to be the result of woman’s increased intelligence and equipment, and of her ascent to the full proportions of womanhood.

As a builder of material structures and enterprises, man is a superb success. The bridge, the triumphs of architecture, the steam engine, the almost intelligent machine are marvellous manifestations of inventive genius, and of the uses of muscle.

But the statistics of social progress in morals do not bear testimony to masculine superiority as builder of the higher humanity. A man has elaborated “The New Education,” but he allowed, without stint, that the moral elevation aimed at cannot be achieved except by the equal opportunity and co-operation of woman.

In the administration of affairs and the institution of government man is not a success. His first resort and last reliance is upon force. Harmony, and justice, and fraternity, and purity, and honesty cannot be brought into human society by fighting, nor evolved by the methods of force. Neither the ballot nor the bullet, the legislature nor the policeman, can make people honest or morally upright and sound.

The promotion of individual integrity, honesty, benevolence, and purity are the great requirements of humanity707 and of civilization. The infusion of the gentler, more persuasive influences and methods of feminine nature, and the higher quality and freedom of motherhood, are the only possible means of advancing the race to the altitude which the best specimens prefigure as the possibility of all.

The laws of Christendom and the usages of all civilizations are based upon the idea of the superiority and supremacy of masculine quality and of force. Upon the supposition that the husband is the bread winner and provider, he is virtually in law and actually in fact as effectually the owner of his wife and children as though he had bought them for a sum, as is still the custom among some primitive peoples on the planet.

In the Orient the idea that woman possesses a soul is rejected with contempt. But in the more spiritualized Occident where she is considered to be the possessor of a soul, she is by law, and oftentimes by usage, not allowed to be possessor of her body.

Christianity in its inception and in its primitive purity accomplished for woman the dignity of being possessor of a soul. She is still, even in the most degenerate churchianity, counted responsible as a soul, and accorded equal hope of redemption and of future equal standing in another stage of existence.

But this fact, too, has bred in woman rebellion against the estimate of her inferiority still held in the Church by many of the priestly order, and actualized in the majority of Protestant denominations, and universally in the Roman Catholic Church, by her exclusion from equal powers and opportunities in its administration and equal positions of honor and influence.

Having learned the alphabet woman has also learned to interpret Scripture, and having read the New Testament, she knows that her adorable Saviour left no theological system, creed, nor sanction of the supremacy and dominion of male over female.

The woman movement is setting the perception of mind feminine over against the conceptions and speculations, the theological systems and interpretations, of the mind masculine, in the realm of the religious quality of human nature.

It is on this ground that a higher standpoint for human progress is to be achieved. Woman is becoming the possessor708 of her brains and of an equipment that will facilitate her use of them. When through generations of experience she has fully learned her true position in the order of the universe and of human unfoldment, a new created world of humanity will blossom on this old earth.

Man is normally the builder in the material realm. It is his to press the more tangible elements and forces into the service of man’s material and intellectual needs, and to master and subdue the earth. It is woman’s to become builder in the spiritual realm of the higher nature. It is woman’s first’ to give bias to the brain cells and soul impulses of ante-natal and post-natal infantile life. It is woman’s, the normal mother and teacher, to look, and feel, and speak into impressible child life, the fine ennobling sentiments, the solid truths of social relations, the sterling principles of rightness, and honor, and honesty, and fraternal love.

This trained experience and exercise of motherhood is a precious wealth that the race needs to carry it on and up toward its perfectness.

All that was pronounced “good,” in man, in “the beginning” is innate in human nature. Social life and social relations are the life school in which this “good”-ness can be educed, strengthened, matured, in the individual.

Woman is not only the creative agency for building bodies, but the perfecting agency to build character, and to gestate and bring to birth the higher nature in humanity. Woman is man’s mother spiritually as well as physically. He is to be born into his spiritual life through the divine feminine, as he has been born into the physical life through the natural (or physical) feminine.

It is to this end that evolution is in every direction placing woman to-day in the foreground and quickening her to make new demands upon the resources of intelligence and moral power.

Having furnished to the child the “three R’s,” manual training, industrial habits, and quickening the higher sentiments with a solid foundation of principles of right conduct and pure habits, are more important to the advancement of the human race than literary researches, languages, or higher mathematics. To know the physiological and psychological processes of embryotic growth, and the possible influences of709 motherhood over the coming child, and how to neutralize poor heredity, would achieve more for race elevation than the combined wisdom of schools and pulpits minus these.

There would be no need of laws for the suppression of vicious literature, were all mothers faithful and capable of pre-empting the plastic mind and imagination of childhood by intelligent explanations and true statements concerning the origin of life, and the vital purities and sanctities that can save every child from demoralization and debauchery. The boy who has been blest with a wise conscientious motherhood is not the boy to dwell in secret on lascivious thoughts and vile communications, nor will he be led away by vicious associations.

The true place of woman in the order of all things, is a link between the material and spiritual, especially in her creative function.

Woman is more intuitive. She sees, seizes upon, grasps, where man toils to question, investigate, prove, demonstrate. She is touched by the secret springs of life, and vibrates in response, like the Æolian harp.

“When men are as good as their obituaries, and when women are as good as men think they are, the recording angel in heaven can take his long needed vacation.”

The woman movement indicates that women ought to have an opportunity to become “as good as men think they are.” It is impossible that men shall hold a higher ideal of woman than it is possible for woman to become. But first she must be free. Free to think, act, live, study, experiment, exercise judgment, assume and be held to responsibilities. She does not need man’s protection except that he shall protect her from himself, i. e., protect her from the invasion and intrusion of his wishes, opinion, and will, his dictation and demand.

Equality before the law is a right principle and therefore should obtain, especially under our Constitution. But what woman needs is personal freedom to be the most womanly woman.

Under legal disability, marital subjection, and ecclesiastically assigned inferiority, woman has been bred to servility in mind and morals. She does not need training in the tricks of caucus and wire-pulling politics, but she does need freedom and choice of action that will give her the powers of her own mind and nature in full possession, as a woman.

710She does not need that men shall instruct her what a woman ought to be, but she needs to be let alone to find out for herself this precious and important knowledge.

It is not an incident or an accident that the agitation of woman’s advancement and the agitation of industrial reform are simultaneous movements. The priority of woman’s demand for equal rights before the law in this country, has placed woman in literature, on the platform, in the press, and even in the political field of action, in the position of co-worker with man to achieve the highest outcome and greatest blessing of civilization, the right of every person to an opportunity to achieve subsistence, and the right of every worker to the full reward of his labor.

Already in Kaweah Colony in California, woman is an equal participator in the administration of affairs. She has equal opportunity to achieve subsistence and equal pay for her labor.

The star of equity, justice, and fraternity, is shining in the west. When the fraternal order of society is established, woman as mother will be, in her training and her conception of her high office, and in the position and advantage provided for her, exalted as the artist of humanity.

She will be so furnished mentally, and so provided for materially, that she can furnish to her babes what no textbooks, or Scripture, or statutes can convey to them. The mother who can recite to her children the songs of the American poets, the character of Dickens, and Eliot, and Scott, who can portray the noble characters of Lincoln and Lucretia Mott, who is able to devote the time required to entertain her children, will become the most effective moral educator.

The woman of the good time coming will not hold lightly the moral education of labor, for she will learn that many solid virtues are carved into the beautiful character by the blessed exercise that manual industry and regular duties alone can furnish.

But she will have leisure also to cultivate the finer sentiments, and paint for the admiration of her babes the grand ideals of noble manhood and womanhood.

Two problems belong to the woman question in the not remote future.

First, the industrial and financial independence of woman.

She must have this to acquire the dignity and moral strength711 of self-support, and that wifehood and motherhood shall be assumed by her solely according to the dictates of her heart, and the sanction of her best judgment. Second, the financial independence of motherhood, without a bread-winning occupation, that her time, energies, and talents may be devoted to the careful training and moral and religious education of her children.

The opportunities for single women to achieve subsistence in the realm of intellectual and sedentary occupations especially, are increasing. But co-operative housekeeping of some kind is the only hope for mothers to be saved from overwork and worry, and to have leisure for the proper training and entertaining of their children.

The provision in Kaweah Colony for the maintenance and education of orphan children, or of children whose parents are disabled by sickness or calamity, is another feature that is commendable in its wisdom and justice.

The paternal and maternal community of voluntary co-operators is the brightest dream of human association we can imagine.

If woman is to become the wise, sensible, self-helpful, cultured mother, with proper opportunity to exercise maternal function for the highest good of the future child, and without being herself dragged into a spiritless machine, we must have her fortified, not only by a “higher education,” but a better home environment.

The woman question involves and forecasts a higher social order, industrial evolution, economic adjustment, moral advancement, and the adoption of the “New Education,” which will develop and cultivate in harmony all the powers and talents belonging to the threefold nature of humanity.

712

NEW TESTAMENT SYMBOLISMS.

BY PROF. S. P. WAIT.

Although the many doctrines built up about the personality of Jesus attribute to him in some peculiar sense the relation of sonship with God, he does not so say of himself, but by every word and work declares a common spiritual fatherhood and human brotherhood. When Nicodemus testified to his superior power, Jesus did not trace its origin to a special interposition of Providence in his birth or life, but he made of general application the law that governed his conception by the emphatic assertion that all men must realize themselves as begotten and born from above before they can understand the forces of the unseen universe within and without. He affirmed the kingdom of God and of heaven to be latent in the life of man, and promised no peace for the soul here or hereafter until its innate capabilities for wisdom, love, and power for good are developed and exercised. His precepts and example would be foolishness and a stumbling-block, his character an unattainable ideal, were it other than the first fruit ripened on the tree of life, the promise of a perfected race.

We only apprehend its vital value, as we can trace in our own experience and that of others, the growth and fruition of that seed-principle of Truth around which the New Testament story has been crystallized. This re-conception of the Christ is, like the first one, essentially of the soul and intrinsically immaculate. It then matters little when or by whom the Gospels and Epistles were originally written; for the book as a whole is lifted forever above the level of legend and myth, on the one hand, and that of a merely historical narrative on the other, because the persons and events mentioned and described represent laws and principles permanent in operation, and reveal faculties whose reality and value we are daily called upon to demonstrate. We can, when we so will it, verify, each in his own subjective consciousness, all that the wondrous story of nineteen centuries ago relates as having713 taken place in the outward objective world of form and phenomena. For unto every “excellent Theophilus,” every lover of the good and true, the gospel of the Christ is, through the conscience, reconveyed, even as delivered by those who from the first have been its messengers.

The faith of Abraham and law of Moses, the line of patriarch, priest, and prophet, that linked the life of Jesus with that of primitive man, we find repictured in the working of those evolutionary forces that constitute each one of us an epitome of the past, a miniature of society. As children of earth we give due credit to each factor in heredity and environment that makes us what we are as we pass through planes of physical, intellectual, and moral development. But a still higher kingdom of consciousness is at hand, which forces us to feel that as brethren of the Son of Man we are also sons of God.

In every wilderness of human life that stands instead of the oncoming paradise, a voice of preparation loudly calls. It is the self-same cry which of old the Baptist first sent forth, and which the Nazarene with emphasis took up. This watchword, Repent ye, repent ye! means, as metanoia always meant, newness and rightness of thought, and consequently a thorough and abiding betterment of motive, character, disposition and habit, in every department and relation of individual and social human life. To effect this transformation from ignorance to knowledge, from selfishness to its opposite, is eternally the mission of that principle of truth personified as Jesus. We recognize its saving power only as it is set up within us as a rule of thought and action. When we pattern after it, we then realize all sin to be just what the Hebrew chattah and the Greek amartia indicate, i. e., a missing of the mark, a lack of conformity to type, the type being man finished in his creation, harmoniously developed, physically, intellectually, morally, spiritually. And we learn that sins are not forgiven by the setting aside of any law, or the amelioration of the consequences of the violation of law, knowingly, or unknowingly; but by the ordination in the nature of things of those agencies that tend, even though it be through the penalty of pain, to bring us to the knowledge of, and obedience to, every law written in the body and mind of man and governing his environment seen or unseen. Sin is incompletion, immaturity, unwholeness, ignorance, as well as the violation714 of some understood and accepted moral code. As the green fruit on the tree is forgiven for its unripeness by the baptism of sunlight, moisture, and all other forces needed to mature it, so man forgives and is forgiven by the impartation of strength where weakness is in body or in mind, by the diffusion of science to take the place of superstition, and by every other sure though slow, as we count time, redemptive evolutionary trend. The only sin unpardonable in this æon or the next is non-receptivity to the spirit that in every age impels to righteousness. So long as man keeps his eyes closed, he cannot be forgiven for being in a state of darkness. But it is an utterly unthinkable as well as unscriptural idea that there be any so perverse as to refuse throughout an endless time, to look upon the glory of a world of light and color, when by opening the windows of the soul they can exchange their trouble and unrest for peace that will not pass away.

As for the babe of Bethlehem there was no other birthplace than a manger, so when the universal Christ is cradled in our souls, its resting place is in the midst of a well-nurtured animalism. The Herod of a ruling selfishness seeks to obliterate the loftier ideal. But while he summons all his strength to prevent the embodiment of the new thought, there are other faculties that perceive the star of promise and follow it as a harbinger of truth.

The years of Jesus’ life of which we have no record, save the one instance of his questioning and answering the wise ones in the temple, represent the time of preparation, discipline, study, culture, contemplation, necessary to fit us to give to others the benefit of our experience and attainment. For no one can lift another to a higher round of the ladder of life than that upon which he stands himself.

The immersion in the Jordan shows a willingness to conform to existing customs, when no principle is sacrificed thereby and a point of contact with the masses can thus be established, so that the truth symbolized by the rite of baptism can be shown forth through the action of those formative, purifying, spiritual forces that sustain to the psychical realm the same relation that water bears to the physical world.

The temptation of Jesus is typical of the time of testing that comes to every one who takes a step in advance of the715 age in which he lives. The principle of resistance called Satan confronts such an one at the very outset of his mission, and seemingly insuperable obstacles arise as foes to his progress. But he who first meets and masters all inward opposition, through knowledge of the law and allegiance thereto, can conquer every outward phase of hybrid beast and human, whose selfish pride and cruel greed have been well imaged as a devil with cloven foot and fiendish face.

The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of spiritual axioms. It lays before us the law of love for the neighbor, as the very instinct of self-preservation. Not to do for others as we would be done by, is to fail to furnish food, raiment, and shelter for our own souls. Physical and intellectual man gains worldly strength and honor as he takes to himself and retains riches and knowledge regardless of the rights of others. In contradistinction to this, the spiritual man gets treasure and wisdom imperishable, as he serves his fellow men, and freely gives of whatsoever he may have, of which his neighbor stands in need.

The beatitudes, with which the speech begins, such as man never spake before, tell, in a symbolism that is self-evidently true, the way by which alone, real happiness is won. We are blessed or cursed of God, through the working of His laws immutable, according as our relation to those laws is one of knowledge and obedience, or of ignorance and perversity. As, in the Hebrew tongue the words we render, “to curse,” and “to bless,” run back to the same root idea, so in point of fact, the very suffering which, sooner or later, comes to us when we are out of touch with the divine order of love to God and love to man, is the means appointed to bring us to that harmony which all must gain.

The lowest things are often seen to signify the things most high. A parable, paraballo, is that which “throws before” us such concrete imagery as best serves to foreshadow and to fit the mind to understand a certain abstract principle. As we become disciples, “learners” of the Truth, we find it speaks to us only through such emblems as enable us to reason from the things we do already know to those concerning which we wish to be informed. The words of Jesus went forth full-freighted with vitality. They were truly spirit and life, because charged with a virtue that can only come from a soul in submission to the law by his lips enunciated.716 Hence we see why, in the mystical language with which the Gospel of St. John begins, he is called the Logos, Reason or Word of God, from God and one with God, because he reveals the divine thought concerning man, inherently perfect from the first, but requiring time and space for its outworking. That human individuality may be maintained, man is uplifted only over the fulcrum of his own will. This volitional power is the ray in us of that Creative Energy whose name Jehovah signifies, I will be what I will to be. Thus, then, oneness with God is not sameness with God, nor the absorption of human personality in the Infinite Being. It is simply a state to be reached in our progressive creation where we will come to a knowledge of the laws of life, and will consciously co-operate with those divine decrees governing the origin, nature, and destiny of the soul. To illustrate the possibility of such achievement and exemplify the way of its attainment, was the mission of the Christ. But it has been so much easier to idolatrously worship his person than to embody his principles, that ceremonials and doctrines have been substituted for the life he lived. This is a sufficient reason for the manifestly unsaved condition that the so-called Christian world still exhibits in all manner of bigotry and disease, social unrest and iniquity.

The name Jesus signifies “that which makes whole.” So we find the one who bore it, true to his title, healing the bodies of men and giving to their souls a cure for sorrow. Yet, even he was made to feel that of himself he could do nothing, so keenly was he conscious of the fact that every self-denying sympathetic soul becomes a mediator, through whom the reconstructive forces of the universe make their impress felt upon the race. He speaks of prayer and faith, as mental states to be entered into and maintained, if we would be and do the best we can. His injunctions in reference to prayer correspond well with the meaning of the Greek verb euchomai which we render “to pray,” and which signifies to put forth effort rightly, i. e., along the lines of laws understood. He said that true prayer is not the repetition of any words, nor the asking for that which we may think it best that we should have. For the spiritual man knows that his labor for others insures of himself the results that are best. So the discourse of Jesus in this connection defines prayer, in its highest sense, as an inward, not an outward attitude; a state of mental receptivity717 to the guidance of truth and desire for the good of others, always to be observed, not the mere utterance of terms of petition or praise. He tells us to withdraw into the soul’s most secret place, where God already sits enthroned, and there commune with Him.

Before in spirit and with understanding we can in thought, and word, and deed, articulate Our Father! we must pass back in review through all the cycles that have rolled around, since this old earth of ours first turned in space. We then behold the most attenuate form of matter of which we can conceive, as a condensation of creative energy, yet but a matrix fitted for the reception of a planet seed or soul. We recognize a divine involution as the antecedent and causation of all so-called natural evolution. We see each link in the chain of being, from least to greatest, from the simplest to the most complex; grass, herb, and tree, fish, reptile, bird, and beast, as multiple yet orderly expressions of the immanence and permanence of the fatherhood of God. We view the creation of man as His highest handiwork, in which the seed of human life, bearing latent within it every high attribute and potency possessed by its celestial source, is placed or planted in a prepared material environment. We look back through the ages upon the travail of this our soul, and are satisfied as we see it gradually rising to the mastery and reformation of the physical form and animal soul, in which and with which it has been tabernacled to gain a necessary experience. From savagery to civilization, through planes of physical, intellectual, and moral consciousness we pass, borne upward by the overshadowing power of God to realize the omnipresence of its fatherhood. From this right starting-point there follows of necessity a conception of that vital fraternity of man which makes us members of one body, and which precludes the possibility of the gaining of a lasting good by any individual part thereof without a benefit to all.

Each other portion of the prayer of prayers is seen to have a correspondingly deep significance, when carefully analyzed, although formulated as an object lesson in our spiritual kindergarten, the church. The name of God we hallow, but not as did the ancient Israelites, by refusing even to mention the sacredly incommunicable Yahweh. For we have learned that the right name is what expresses the nature of that718 which is named. So that the only way in which we can reverence the name of God or Christ is by the consecration of our time and talent to the expression of all the God-like, Christ-like qualities with which, as human beings, we are gifted.

What foolishness, if not blasphemy, it would be for us to ask that the will of God should be obeyed in the world about us, when His laws of gravitation and chemical affinity, crystallization and cell-growth, rule supremely in each of earth’s kingdoms. But the constant aspiration of our hearts should be that the elements of earthiness within us, that militate against the expression of our highest ideals, shall hear and heed a juster rule than that of selfishness. For no outward act of legislation can usher in heaven’s kingdom on the earth, in human institutions, until many individuals have by its inward presence been guided and illumined.

For a sufficiency of material food from day to day, we rightly ask by the proper use of each faculty and member God has given us, to compel the earth to yield up its resources for our sustenance, which it would do in ample abundance for all, were it not for the inordinate greed and lust, or the gross lethargy, of that many-phased, still unhumanized beast that man has to conquer in himself. But happy is he who hungers for the manna of law and the bread of truth, whose prayer is a sincere desire to be so fed thereon that there shall be such strength in the muscles of his soul as shall make of him a power for good to all with whom he comes in contact.

As to our enemies, we can no longer cherish feelings of resentment toward anyone, however they may misconstrue our purest motive, or malign our best intent. We see that every one must show, when tested, the exact degree of growth he has attained. Hence, the slander and persecution, the “all manner of evil” falsely arrayed against us, we apprehend as the necessary means to determine our fidelity to the truth to which we have pledged allegiance, and to prove that what is of good cannot come to naught though all the powers of earth and hell be set against it. To forgive, aphiemi, is to cause advancement, to bear away burdens. Thus we see it as an axiom that only as we aid the weak, instruct the ignorant, develop the undeveloped, can we receive in turn what we most need to carry us farther forward on the upward path.

Lead us not into temptation, is what we silently say when719 our thought and action show that we have well learned the lessons that were for us in past trial and tribulation, and so order our course that the leading of His laws, by which alone God ever guides, brings to us joy instead of pain. Then, whatsoever may betide, as men count weal or woe, we see the gold pass from the fire freed from its base alloy. Then all the prayer is answered as with the eye of the prophet to whom the future is as now, we see the soul delivered from, born out of evil, poneros, which well represents the six days or epochs of labor, strife, and friction, of gestation in materiality, that precede and prepare the way for the Sabbath day to dawn.

The word “amen” is a Hebrew term for faith, which it defines as a firm prop or support, a foundation that abides. It pictures to us faith, not as emotion or credulity, nor the mere belief in, or acceptance of, some formulated creed; but as that clear assurance of what the present will produce or what the future has in store, which can only come as we perceive how God, by laws immutable, has ruled throughout the past. And faithful prayer is oneness of the will of man with that of God, through knowledge of His laws and glad obedience thereto. Thus, this word, as a symbol, stands for that which is the first and last of all true prayer.

The works of Jesus, like his words, were all of a symbolic character, in that each so-called miracle foreshadowed a result to be realized as a common heritage of men through the age-lasting evolution of the same intelligence that then produced the transient tokens of its presence. In the New Testament there are four words used, in the original Greek, which have been translated as descriptive of miraculous occurrences.

Their basic meaning is as follows: 1, dunamis, power, energy, a faculty or ability to do; 2, ergon, a work, an arrangement in order, with purpose and skill; 3, teras, to turn, to resolve, to excite wonder or fear; 4, semeion, the word most frequently employed, indicates a sign, mark, or token by which a thing is shown, something used to represent something else. Our word “miracle” is often and erroneously used for a phenomenon supposed to have occurred outside the realm of law. Yet, in the strictest sense, the bursting of a blade of grass from out the ground, the conception and birth of any form of life, are as stupendous miracles, marks of creative power, as the mind of man can ever contemplate.

The wise and great in any department of progress have always720 towered like gods above their fellowmen. The natural product of their lives has been a constant miracle to those about them. In spiritualizing the story of the prodigies performed by Jesus, we would not question the psychic power, transforming virtue of such an one as he, who was fitted to convey a re-creative influence to the world. But we would wish to show how far those phenomenal evidences of power and intelligence transcended the domain of mediumistic wonder-working or spiritistic occultism. This is easily accomplished as we continue to apply the same principle of interpretation that has already shown us that the supposed miraculous conception and birth of the Christ was but a consummation of the plan, and in obedience to the same laws by which the heavens were made, the earth begotten and born, mineral and vegetable kingdoms formed and sustained, animal life brought forth and evolved, and, finally, man progressively created in the image, according to the likeness of his God. Because the same spiritual nature that the typical man so perfectly embodied has been begotten in our souls and is seeking to express itself along the lines he pointed out, the truth, of which his so-called miracles were illustrative and prophetical, is made apparent. His walking on the sea of Galilee, or bidding its tempestuous waves be still, was not so marvelous a proof of power as has been the advancement of the principle he represented upon the seething ocean of humanity, causing the tumultuous tides of lust and passion, sin and ignorance to subside. The literal narrative of the miraculous draught of fishes vouchsafed to the disciples affords but a feeble symbol of the abundant life that has come to men and nations who have cast their nets, put forth their efforts, in obedience to the injunctions of the Law-giver of the New Testament.

The wonder of the marriage-feast is re-performed as Christ attends the wedding of our souls to truth, that union which cannot by man be put asunder. As this takes place the water turns to wine; that within our mental make-up which before was unformed, unstable, in a condition of flux and change, becomes vivified with creative power, and bubbles and sparkles with newness of life and inspiration, refreshing and stimulating the soul with higher emotions and desires, imparting to the very cells and tissues of the body a reconstructive tendency to health.

721By the breaking of the bread of life, the hidden manna of the Word, the reality behind appearance, the multitude of faculties is fed and that unseen assembly nourished whose lives are linked with ours at this Lord’s Supper of the soul. Blinded perceptions are restored to sight from day to day, and gifted with a constantly enlarging field of vision in the realm of truth and law. The understanding that was deaf vibrates with joy in response to the call of a salvatory science. The antitypes of palsied arm and crippled foot, which are the lack of power to do and of ability to advance in a higher, mental life, are healed by the transforming touch that makes its impress on the soul when first made conscious, that by its own free will its highest ideals are to become realities. Even those who have been so earth-bound and selfish as to be lifeless, cold, and dead to the knowledge of God and love to the neighbor are commencing to arise in answer to the spirit of the approaching altruistic age. Accompanying this present resurrection, the veil is being rent that for so long has intervened between this life and the next. And although no outward cloud is sundered for a personal Messiah to descend to rule as temporal prince, the denser fogs of a gross materialism are parting fast before the rising glory of that day whose dawn we see afar on the horizon. For the signs are many and are strikingly apparent that those splendid souls, the wisely great ones of the past, the saviors and educators of the race, are to co-operate with us in the formation of that kingdom and republic which their prophetic vision saw and fervent words foretold. Then, as a spiritual reality, will we understand the truth symbolized by the doctrines of the church concerning the resurrection of the dead and communion with the saints, as the first fruits of them that slept appear to us. And what is now prefigured by the phenomena and personations of modern spiritualism, will then become a blessed fact as our missing loved ones labor with us for our and their redemption and the good of all mankind. Had they been permitted, or were they able, to return for any other purpose, the result would be the furtherance of selfishness and materiality. Spiritualism, with its convincing tests of an unseen intelligence, and its crude communications, sustains the same relation to the angelic intercourse which it simulates, that the symbolic conversion, baptism, and bread and wine of the church bear722 to the organic experiences of a true life. They are all, alike, signs and forms, shadows cast before the substance drawing nigh, the Christ that is to be.

Our present space will not permit us now to even touch upon, much less delineate, the all-important principles symbolized by the recorded martyrdom of Jesus, and the doctrine of atonement. But they, and all the eschatology of the Gospels, and with which the apocalyptic book of riddles is filled, will be readily unravelled as we still farther trace the working of those laws already seen, that are not restricted in their operation by relations of time and space, but govern through the ages the travail of the embodied or disembodied soul. Suffice it then to say that hell and heaven are not the names of places to which the wicked or the good are called upon to go. Sheol, Gehenna, Hades, Tartarus, and the opposite Kingdom of God, are terms expressing symbolically the experiences and conditions of undeveloped and developed souls here as well as hereafter.

723

THE TRUE POLITICS FOR PROHIBITION AND LABOR.

BY EDWIN C. PIERCE.

A vast body of American citizens have a deep concern in the temperance cause, and are bound in conscience to do their utmost to give early success to the movement for the legal suppression of the drinking saloon, which they rightly regard as the fountain of intemperance. Some of them are rich and some of them are poor. Some of them are conservative and some of them of radical tendency as to questions concerning wealth. They belong to the industrious, intelligent, moral, and patriotic reserves of the country. With them in sympathy is the motherhood of America. I think it is only fair to say, and that all social reformers should see, that the radical prohibition constituency—dispersed now in several political parties—is larger than the following commanded by any other single reform idea, and it is distinguished by exceptional persistency. There is also a large and increasing body of American citizens absorbed in what is called the labor question. Some of them are rich and some of them are poor. Some of them are also on the side of prohibition and some of them are hostile or indifferent.

The labor question is the question of social justice, and no question can be higher than that. Stated in other terms, the labor question is the question of how to approximate more nearly to an equal distribution of wealth, not so much of the wealth already amassed by society as of the wealth that is to be produced by labor in the future. Now, while there are very few people who think that entire equality of fortune in this world is either possible or desirable; every free democracy will wish to work towards equality of social condition, looking forward to a glorious time when uninvited poverty shall be outgrown, when manhood shall be of more social weight than wealth.

There is as much high moral sentiment put into the labor724 question to-day, as ever was put into any crusade against any form of oppression or evil.

If, however, only the radicals with fixed convictions and unflagging zeal were counted, neither of these humane causes would have a majority of American voters. Deeply interested in both, I frankly confess that I do not believe either prohibition or labor can win alone. As we study our political history, we find that political issues are not carried except in combination, and as part of the policy of a political party to the cohesion and the power of which many issues and many forces contribute. We are not under the Swiss referendum; we are a representative republic, with two legislative chambers, each constituted in a peculiar way. Our national life is complex. To hold in party association the six millions or more of American men whose support, continued for years, is necessary to carry a great measure, requires the proper connection with the past, and trenchant dealing with the present which is full of imperious demands. Abraham Lincoln was not borne into the presidency in 1860 solely by the strength of the anti-slavery issue, but found necessary support in Pennsylvania from the committal of the Republicans to the protective principle, while in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and the West generally, he was greatly aided by the homestead issue. Several distinct issues have usually been involved in our presidential elections. Exceptions are presented by the victories of sentiment or tendency under the extraordinary leadership of Jefferson in 1800, and in the extraordinary demonstration for General Jackson and Democracy in 1828.

Successful parties in the United States, as in England, have generic rather than specific names. Federalist, Democratic-Republican, Whig, Democratic, and Republican; all represent popular triumphs and administrations of the government. Anti-Masonic, Liberty, American, Free Soil, Greenback, Prohibition, Labor,—these party names represent no partisan victories. In the Cabinet of the first President of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson was Secretary of State, and Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. To each of them Washington submitted the question whether Congress had power to incorporate a bank. Jefferson, believing popular liberty safe only in a strict construction of the Constitution, denied the power to create a bank because725 no such power is expressed, or is strictly necessary to the exercise of any power expressly granted. Hamilton, believing that a liberal construction of the Constitution was essential to the development of America, answered that Congress had the power, that the power was incidental to the national character of the government. He construed the grant of “necessary” powers in these words: “It is a common mode of expression to say that it was necessary for a government or a person to do this or that thing, when nothing more is intended or understood than that interests of the government or person require or may be promoted by the doing of this or that thing. The imagination can be at no loss for exemplifications on the use of the word in this sense. And it is the true one, in which it is to be understood as used in the Constitution.” The Supreme Court, quoting these very words with approval, has adopted Hamilton’s construction. With the writing of those two opinions in the Cabinet of Washington, the enduring lines of party division in America were drawn. There ought to be early recognition of the fact, that in case a new party of the people shall be formed, a party determined upon reform of existing abuses and oppressions, upon the suppression of the liquor traffic as we know it, upon the overthrow of every semblance of plutocracy, upon opening to every child of the American democracy an equality of opportunity as yet unknown, resort must be had to those broad, liberal, and constructive constitutional doctrines which the existing Democratic party steadily opposes, and which the Republican party does not sufficiently apply for the benefit of the masses. It is the duty and opportunity of the prohibitionists to make such a party. A party going to Thomas Jefferson for a baptism of Democratic feeling, and content with no sprinkling, and to the school of Hamilton for its constitutionalism, can supplant the Republicans, and only such a party can meet the case of labor. The woollen manufacturers of Massachusetts have just remonstrated against further reduction of the hours of labor unless the reduction be uniform in all the manufacturing States, and they made the significant suggestion that Congress has power to establish uniform hours of labor. Congress does have that power as a part of the power to regulate commerce. The eight-hour day can only come in this country by act of Congress, and the construction that sustains such an act sustains726 national regulation of the liquor traffic. The general welfare of the Union is involved in each case. American industry is a unit so far as the interests of American homes require the rule of uniformity, and the home life of America is a unit so far as it needs that protection which, in order to be complete, must come from the national authority. I venture to suggest that one thing that has hindered the cementing of the alliance between labor and prohibition, is the tendency of the prohibitionists while recognizing the importance of labor problems to insist that prohibition must come first. The labor men will never go into any party that puts it quite in that way. Is it not sufficient to claim urgency for the prohibition issue, to say that no work should take precedence of prohibition in party performance? I think the time has come when this issue can be taken up by a political party and I recommend a party that shall declare for prohibition with the same emphasis with which the Republican party declared for protection in 1884 and in 1888. I think, however, that the party that carries a bill for national control of the manufacture and traffic in liquors through Congress, to be signed by a President chosen with a knowledge of his prohibition principles, will have to have a good running mate for its prohibition issue. Yet I believe the prohibition plank in the platform of the great progressive party, lineally descending, would be the centre of attraction and of repulsion. I grant that. But the balance will be so kept that multitudes who take, at first at least, a livelier interest in some other measure which also is promoted by party ascendancy, will vote for partisan prohibition because it is the policy of the party of human progress with which they are keeping step.

I refrain from going at length into a discussion of labor issues. Shall prohibitionists come out for State Socialism, shall they pledge themselves to make that economic nationalism which is now only a prophecy and an ideal, a political fact when they came into administration? No political party should do this. But the word socialism is a word of good meaning. It means fraternity, industry upon a Christian basis. In the discussion that impends in this country, concerning the rights and the wrongs of the wage-earners, and concerning the demands for relief, constantly growing louder, of the agricultural producing classes, the question arises in727 the mind at the outset, whether our policy, state and national, shall be based upon the laissez faire doctrine, the “let alone” principle; or upon the principle of the intervention of public opinion through the agency of government to effect the ends of justice and of aid to the weaker classes whether by regulative laws, or by the assumption by the public (through local, state, or national government, as the nature of the case may require,) of such business or industrial enterprises as are natural monopolies or can be best performed by the people collectively. I say this question arises in the mind at the outset, but after all, it is, I think, not a question requiring much argument in this day of the world; because, although there are some men more busy with their own daily duties than attentive to the world’s progress who are apt, from time to time, to raise this question, appealing in favor of the “let alone” principle, it is really a question already decided. The people both in England and in America have grown quite away from laissez faire doctrine, the tendency is strong and constantly increasing in the direction of increase of governmental intervention to redress the social balance. I believe it is impossible that this tendency should be arrested. I believe it would not be in the interest of humanity to arrest it. There is a vast field for individualism, and in that field it is eminently useful. There is a field also for society, for the State. The needs of the people in this country to-day are such, the thought of the masses is advancing so rapidly in the direction indicated that no political party can long hold power that does not accept the socialistic tendency and prudently experiment in that direction. There is, in point of fact, no other possible direction in which society can move, and it cannot stand still. From the necessity for some intervention in aid of the weaker classes against the operation of the laws of demand and supply, it follows that “no class legislation” is not a good cry for a labor party.

The land question should have a distinct recognition as a true reform issue, and while committal to the policy signified by the term single tax, in its entirety, should be avoided, land speculation and monopoly should be condemned as a monstrous evil, and against that evil should be directed such special taxation of land values as will check and ultimately destroy it, without too rudely disturbing existing values.728

Government ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and of the anthracite coal mines, should be favored.

Gas, electric lights, and street railroads should be municipalized.

Legislation, reducing gradually and prudently the hours of labor, should be given urgency.

National aid to education, unwisely neglected by the Republicans, is strong with labor, and will be stronger the more it is discussed. Prohibitionists should advocate universal suffrage with universal education.

Educational tests for the suffrage offer too easy a repose for the conservatism of wealth, and to advocate them is to touch the wrong note, that of distrust rather than trust in the masses. Stand with Jefferson for Democracy and education, not for education first and the ballot afterwards. Go to the magnificent oration of Wendell Phillips, “The Scholar in a Republic,” for the courage and wisdom to say with that friend of prohibition and labor, that “crime and ignorance have the same right to vote that virtue has…. The right to choose your governor rests on precisely the same foundation as the right to choose your religion.” “Thank God for His method of taking bonds of wealth and culture to share all their blessings with the humblest soul He gives to their keeping.” “Universal suffrage,—God’s church, God’s school, God’s method of gently binding men into commonwealths in order that they may at last melt into brothers.” All attempts to identify prohibition or labor with free trade should be abandoned.

No large extension of our market for manufactures in Spanish America or in other foreign countries is possible, if we are to reduce hours of labor, abolish child labor, call married women from factory to home, and raise wages in America, regardless of the effect upon the cost of production. Labor reform, the socialistic tendency require a rigid adherence to the protective system. But reliance upon the home market will not only make labor legislation possible, but will be economic wisdom as well, for by education, by suppressing the saloon, by shortening hours, by increasing wages, we can indefinitely increase the capacity of our own people to consume. The McKinley tariff will work out its own salvation; for the friends of labor or prohibition to attack it is a fatal mistake. Prohibition, labor reform, and729 protection are natural allies, and in the party of the future will be united. Whoever wishes to form a new party for prohibition and for labor, will do well to appropriate rather than discard the historic Republican issues. Let the reformers catch the Republicans bathing and steal their clothes, albeit they already have some garments of their own which are very good. If a Democrat, for the sake of temperance or labor, or any issue, will leave the Democratic party, he has outgrown the constitutional doctrines of that party, and will not cling to its economic theories. If he brings a traditional prejudice in favor of government by the masses rather than by classes, he brings what is needed. When the period of political readjustment, not yet surely begun, is over, the Republican party will have been supplanted by a party inheriting many distinguishing articles of its creed; but the Democratic party will remain as the party of obstruction, claiming descent from Jefferson but not the true representative of the eternal truths with which his name is associated. Around the anti-national idea the ultra-conservatives, the cormorants of society, the panderers to vice, the white-liners of the South will rally. The true Democrats, with a unanimity hitherto unknown, will appreciate the utility of the national idea and will demonstrate that our Constitution was indeed intended “to live and take effect in all successions of ages.” The popular party, at once conservative and radical, will demonstrate by its habitual self-restraint, by its scrupulous regard for justice, by the honorable methods which it shall observe and exact, by its prudence in legislation, that the Democracy in the plentitude of its powers, is most truly conservative of all that vast store of good which the past hands down.

730

SUNDAY AT THE WORLD’S FAIR.

BY WM. H. ARMSTRONG.

The question of closing on Sunday the gates of the World’s Fair is one that not only interests our nation but also the nations of the world.

On September 3, eighty members of the National World’s Fair Commission, and one hundred members of the Board of Lady Managers, listened to the arguments of representatives of the American Sabbath Union for closing the World’s Fair Sundays. The arguments for Sunday closing were presented by Col. Elliott F. Shepard, President of the American Sabbath Union; Rev. Dr. S. F. Scoville, President of Wooster University, Ohio; Rev. T. A. Fenley, Secretary of the Philadelphia Sabbath Association; Gen. O. O. Howard; Col. Alex. F. Bacon; Hon. L. S. Coffin; Rev. F. L. Patton, President of Princeton University; Dr. P. S. Henson of Chicago; and Mrs. T. B. Carse, as the representative of the W. C. T. U.

On reading the addresses and petitions presented by the above named persons, I was surprised to see the diversity of names given to the first day of the week. Some called it “the Sabbath day,” others “Sunday,” while another class termed it “the American Sabbath”—none of them having Bible authority for the names given. This inadvertence might be excused if these gentlemen were not poising as moulders of public thought and teachers of Bible truth, while they are endeavoring to palm off Sunday upon the National Columbian Commission as a “holy day,” for which they cannot produce Bible authority.

Nowhere in the Bible can they find any command to keep Sunday as a “holy day,” neither can they there find where the Jewish Sabbath was ever changed to the first day of the week—Sunday. This change was made by Constantine’s edict, in 321 a.d., which was the first law either ecclesiastical or civil by which the sabbatical observance of Sunday was known to have been ordained. Does anyone claim that731 Constantine was inspired? The sabbatical observance of Sunday, as prescribed by Constantine, or of “the American Sabbath,” as prescribed by statutory law, is yielding obedience to the commandments of man and not of God, and all their advocates are confronted with the Scripture: “But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” Matt. xv. 9.

As Dr. Francis L. Patton, of Princeton University, was the only speaker who attempted to speak on the Biblical aspect of the Sunday question, I shall direct my remarks to him. The doctor is quoted as saying: “The Ten Commandments represent the high water mark of morality. The Jew had contributed the greatest feature of the civilization of the nineteenth century. The Sabbath had become the inheritance of every civilized nation. God had issued His command as to the observance of the Sabbath, and that command was imperative.” These words would be more appropriate coming from a Pharisee, but when spoken by a Gentile claiming to be a minister of the New Testament, 2 Cor. iii. 6, they come with bad grace, and are not in harmony with the Scriptures.

The Ten Commandments made on Sinai were delivered to the Jews alone and never were intended for the Gentiles, for Paul said: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves.” Rom. ii. 14. An appeal to the law itself shows that it was always and only addressed to the house of Israel, “to you and your children, to your man servants, and maid servants, and to thy stranger that is within thy gates.” It cannot be proven that God ever commanded a Gentile to keep the Sabbath. “The Ten Commandments,” says Luther, “do not apply to us Gentiles and Christians, but only to the Jews.” “A law,” says Grotius, “obliges only those to whom it is given, and to whom the Mosaic law is given, itself declares: ‘hear, O Israel.’”

When the Gentiles first began to accept Jesus Christ, we read in Acts xv. that the Apostles, elders, and brethren at Jerusalem wrote them letters as follows: “Forasmuch as we have heard, that certain which went out from us have troubled you with words, subverting your souls, saying, Ye must be circumcised, and keep the law; to732 whom we gave no such commandment…. For it seemeth good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if you keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.” Here is freedom for the Gentiles from the Ten Commandments and especially the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, the most valued of the ten.

Romans ii. 14 plainly shows “the Gentiles had not the law,” and this constituted a mark of distinction between Jew and Gentile. But had the law been also given to the Gentiles, the Jewish nation would not have been fenced off from the rest of the world by it. The very fact that they were a separate people under the law proves that their code was not a universal law. Paul said: “For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law.” Gal. v. 3. This is clear, only the circumcised Jew and proselyte was under the law.

In favor of the Mosaic law, many advocates say that all municipal governments are based upon it; but this only proves that it is not of the Kingdom of Christ, because his kingdom is not of this world. Christ’s law is the “ministration of Spirit” “the law of the spirit of life written in the heart.” The Sinai law was the “ministration of death” written on stone. Moses’ law only gave the knowledge of sin, Christ’s law gives a far more exquisite knowledge of sin, and contains the remedy for its removal.

We find, in Matt, xxviii. 18-20, and Mark xvi. 15-20, the final universal commission of Christ, his imperative orders to all teachers and preachers in the Kingdom of God. Everything else is excluded but Christ’s Gospel, and his commands. They stand out against every form of sin, and they only are to be preached to sinners as a means of conviction and salvation, and to believers as their present rule of life; and to show that he is not subjected to, nor in need of any former code, he announces the fact that “All power is given me in heaven and earth.” Here Christ sets up his supreme authority, removes all temporary systems, and demands subjection to his own gospel and commandments.

It would have been more appropriate for the members of the American Sabbath Union, in their petitions to the733 National Columbian Commission, to subscribe themselves “many Israelites,” for they preach the law of commandments more than the Spirit of the Lord, which is life and liberty. Paul describes them, viz.: “But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament: which vail is done away in Christ. But even unto this day when Moses is read, the vail is upon their hearts. Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away.” 2 Cor. iii. 14-16.

Doctor Patton is credited with saying: “If the nation and fair should yield obedience to the fourth commandment they would be in a fair way to the other nine.” I wish, while the doctor was speaking, that the Apostle Paul could have stepped in and delivered several of his old sermons such as he delivered to the Galatians who, as Christians, were trying to keep the law of Moses. I select a few of his observations, viz.: “Man is not justified by the works of the law. For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse. But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for the just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith; but after faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. But if ye be led of the Spirit ye are not under the law.” Gal. ii. 16; iii. 10, 11, 12, 24, 25; v. 4, 14, 18.

Paul also tells those “foolish Galatians”: “But now, after ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain.” Gal. iv. 9-11. I can see how Paul would be also afraid of these Sunday agitators, as they spend much of their time in the observance-worship of days, months, times, and years.

Under the old covenant God’s laws were written on tables of stone, while under the new covenant we receive the promise, viz.: “This is the covenant I will make with them734 after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them.” Heb. x. 16.

All who consider “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” applies to them, should keep the day in the exact manner prescribed for the Israelites. There are seventy-seven positive commands from God to the children of Israel regarding the keeping of the Sabbath day holy to Him. Now, I ask what Bible authority has Doctor Patton, or any of the Sabbath day advocates for ignoring or abridging any of these seventy-seven commands? To obey the law, no wood or water must be borne; no fire built; no victuals cooked; no domestic animals must be worked, even to drive to the house of worship. To do any of these were a violation of the fourth commandment. Is there a member of the American Sabbath Union who keeps the law for which they are clamoring? These agitators rush to Chicago, with petitions signed by hundreds of thousands, and say: “If the fair is opened Sunday it will force tens of thousands of employees to work Sunday,” while their petitioners are forcing hundreds of thousands of their employees to do even extra work in getting up their best dinners for the clergy and visiting brethren on Sunday; this they do though the fourth commandment says: “Thou shalt have no work done,” “that thy man servant and thy maid servant-may rest as well as thou.” Deut. v. 12-14.

No one can deny the necessity and benefit of man resting one day in seven; but when any set of men attempt to make our legal rest day “a holy day,” and prescribe certain modes and forms of rest by demanding that the nation discard their newspapers, conveniences, and amusements—which are means of rest to the majority—because they call them sins if enjoyed on Sunday, it is in order for us to “speak out” and ask these reformers to produce their authority.

No man has the right of dictating to another how he shall rest. What is rest for one man would be an unpleasant strain upon another; to illustrate: The church people, mostly the wealthy class who are not bound with labor’s chains, can do as they please, enjoy all the amusements—the ball, theatre, lecture, concert, card-party, etc.,—throughout the week, so when Sunday comes it is a rest for them to ride to church, glide up the aisles, listen to the deep, solemn sounding tones735 of the organ, glance around at the rich toilets, hear a pleasing short lecture, greet friends, and return home for a nice dinner. The poor laboring man who has none of these things would feel out of place among all that culture, wealth, and luxury, so he must seek other diversions.

The members of the American Sabbath Union remind one of the Scribes and Pharisees, who brought unto Jesus a woman taken in adultery and said unto him: “Now Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned, but what sayest thou?” Jesus, totally disregarding Mosaic law, said unto them: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” So we can apply these words of Jesus to “the Sunday agitators”—as law breakers—and say unto them, he that is not breaking any of Moses’ laws among you, let him first cast a stone at the managers of the World’s Fair.

When Jesus came bringing the light of the new covenant, he showed how unimportant was this question, for we cannot find in the New Testament where he ever recommended anyone to keep the Sabbath day holy. On the contrary, he and his disciples were accused of breaking the Sabbath by the hypocritical Scribes and Pharisees.

“The poor we have always with us,” and to alleviate as much as possible the misery of the less fortunate is one of the noblest missions of life. From dark, dust-begrimed habitations of a hot city comes a cry whose burden is “Fresh Air.” So throw wide open the gates of the World’s Fair on Sundays, that the wage worker may find rest and enjoyment; for the rich can rest when they please—the poor must take recreation when they can. Sectism is blinding humanity and turning them from the old pathway to Jesus, the Son of God, who came to save man from his sins. This “one day worship” is not enough, for God claims our services each and every day, as every day is given us by Him. God certainly must be jealous of nations to-day serving Satan six days in the week and then worshipping Sunday (Constantine’s law) or Saturday (Moses’ law) instead of Him. For their Sunday worship is mostly vain show and pomp, fashioned as a crowd bedecked for a theatrical performance, all of which is forbidden in the Bible (1 Tim. ii. 9-11), which they profess to follow.

736

TURNING TOWARDS NIRVANA.

BY E. A. ROSS.

It needs no very long stay in Europe to detect a strange drooping of spirit. The rank corn and cotton optimism of the West quickly feels the deep sadness that lurks behind French balls, Prussian parades, and Italian festivals. Europe, when once you pry beneath its surface and find what its people are thinking and feeling, seems cankered and honeycombed with pessimism. You need go but a little way beyond the table d’hote and the guide book to feel the chill of despondency. Without taking into account this new mood, it is vain to try to understand the latest in art, music, fiction, poetry, thought, politics. The one word “despair” is the key that opens up the meaning of Ibsen’s dramas, and Tolstoi’s ethics, of Zola’s novels, and Carmen Sylva’s poems, of Bourget’s romances, and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. It is the spiritual bond that connects Wagner’s operas with Turgenieff’s novels, Amiel’s journal with Marie Bashkirtseff’s diary. Naturalism in fiction, “decadence” in poetry, realism in art, tragedy in music, scepticism in religion, cynicism in politics, and pessimism in philosophy, all spring from the same root. They are the means by which the age records its feelings of disillusionment.

The broad basis of the sadness of Europe to-day is keen political disappointment. Forty years ago everybody hailed the policy of free trade, peace, and international exhibitions as ushering in the era

As if in mockery of these hopes came that terrific relapse of civilization between 1855 and 1870. Then came a pause, and hope might have revived had not the war epoch left behind it a strange and appalling condition.

737No one so unfortunate as to live between the Bosphorus and the English Channel can view without dread the course Continental Europe has taken since 1870. The armies have increased until France and Germany alone have over six millions of soldiers. The Great Powers have now three armed men for every two of ten years ago. “Our armaments,” says Premier Crispi, “are ruining Europe for the benefit of America.” In a paper picked up in a Venetian café I read these lines:—

Can we wonder that the European despairs? He finds himself aboard a train that seems speeding to sure destruction. Neither pope, nor churches, nor peace societies, nor alliances nor votes, can check its course. Nothing, it seems, can save Europe from the fatal plunge into the abyss of war. A shot on the Alsatian frontier, a plot hatched in a Servian barrack-room, or a riot in the Armenian quarter of Constantinople, may kindle a strife that may last, Von Moltke tells us, for thirty years.

It is true that many alarms have proved false, but then it is the steady strain that tells on the mood. It is pathetic to see on the continent, how men fear to face the future. Public speakers dwell upon the glories of former times. The churches seek to revive the spirit of the Middle Ages. In schools there is immense interest in history, archæology, and the classics. The age yearns to lose itself in the past, and delights in genre pictures of the naive olden time, or of life in remote valleys untouched by the breath of progress. No one has heart to probe the next decade, to ask, “Where shall we be in ten years,—in fifty years?” The outlook is bounded by the next Sunday in the park or the theatre. The people throw themselves into the pleasures of the moment with the desperation of doomed men who hear the ring of the hammer on the scaffold. Ibsen, applying an old sailor’s superstition to the European ship of state, tells how one night he stood on the deck and looked738 down on the throng of passengers, each the victim of some form of brooding melancholy or dark presentiment, and as he looked he seemed to hear a voice crying, “There’s a corpse on board!”

With the growth of armies has come a gloomier view of life. The vision of the nations “lapped in universal law” has vanished, and the new phrase, “struggle for existence,” seems to sum up human history. War has been raised to the dignity of a means of progress and killing has been consecrated by biology. Not long ago three noted men, Count Von Moltke, General Wolseley, and Ex-Minister Phelps, declared it vain to hope for a time when wars should vanish from the earth. In Germany the youth are filled with the brutal cynicism of Prince Bismarck. “Blood and iron does it,” said a Berlin divinity student to me. “You can no more stop war than you can stop the thunderbolt when two clouds meet charged with opposite electricities.” “No,” said another, “Europe has too many people, too much pressure on the boundaries. There must be a war now and then to thin them out.”

With loss of faith in moral progress men have lost faith in political progress. The ideals of ‘48 are passé. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles. The imperialism of Bismarck, the foe of popular government and champion of divine right, rules the hour. To the fighting type of society the politics of industrial democracy seem absurd. You cannot set up the hustings in an armed camp of twenty-eight millions. Kings and nobles, rank and privilege, police, spies, and censors—all those hoary abuses that roused the men of ‘48,—are deemed necessary to a strong military state. They are hallowed by the new phrase of political fatalism “historical continuity.”

This drift of thought cannot but lead to a despairing view. Civilization seems to have lost itself in a cul-de-sac. Progress has ended in an aimless discontent. The schools have produced, according to Bismarck, ten times as many overeducated young men as there are places to fill. The thirst for culture has produced a great, hungry, intellectual proletariat. The forces of darkness are still strong, and it seems sometimes as if the Middle Ages will swallow up everything won by modern struggles. The Liberal wonders at moments if he be not really fighting against destiny.739 Often in his Culturkampf with Ultramontanism has he proved the truth of Gambetta’s saying, “Le clericalism, voila l’ennemi!”

Science, too, has had its share in disturbing men’s minds. Science, during the last twenty years, has been most successful in studying the past. It has traced the origin of institutions and followed the upward path of man. It has lifted the veil of mystery. It says, “See, I can show you how our feelings arose. I will lay bare the root of modesty, of filial piety, sexual love, patriotism, loyalty, justice, honor, æsthetic delight, conscience, religion, fear of God. I will explain the origin of institutions like the household, the church, the state. I will show the rise of prayer, worship, sacrifice, marriage-customs, ceremonies social forms, and laws. Nothing is found mysterious, nothing unique, nothing divine. There is no need of looking for a stream of tendency, an influx from another source, the descent of a new power. The notion of a soul from a spiritual world encysted in customs and feelings developed upon it by nature, is a myth. Man is a formation. The race has accommodated itself to its environment as a stream to its bed. The manifold adaptation of Nature to man is really the adaptation of man to Nature. To marvel at it is as if the cake should marvel at the fit of the dough-pan. Everything in man is the outcome of forces and conditions still present with us. Man and his civilization are held suspended in protoplasm and sunlight. Let but a plague sweep us away to-day, and to-morrow would begin the second evolution of man.”

But science, not content with tracing institutions, has been analyzing personality. We see now that there can never again be such an orgie of the Ego as that led by Fichte and Hegel. The doctrines of transmission and inheritance have attacked the independence of the individual. Science finds no ego, self or will that can maintain itself against the past. Heredity rules our lives like that supreme primeval necessity that stood above the Olympian gods. “It is the last of the fates,” says Wilde, “and the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know.” It is the “divinity that shapes our ends” and hurls down the deities of freedom and choice. Science dissolves the personality into temperaments and susceptibilities,740 predispositions, and transmitted taints, atavisms, and reversions. It finds the soul not a spiritual unit, but a treacherous compound of strange contradictions and warring tendencies, with traces of spent passion and vestiges of ancient sins, with echoes of forgotten deeds and survivals of vanished habits. We are “possessed” not by demons but by the dead. These are in Ibsen’s drama the real ghosts which throng our lives and haunt our footsteps, remorseless as the furies. We are followed by the shades of our ancestors who visit us, not with midnight squeak and gibber, but in the broad noonday, speaking with our speech, and doing with our deed. We are bound to a destiny fixed before birth, and choice is the greatest of illusions. The world is indeed a stage, and life is but a hollow ceremony, spontaneous enough to the eye, but wherein the actors recite speeches and follow stage directions written for them long before they were born. Thus science grinds color for our modern Rembrandts.

The final blow to the old notion of the ego is given by the doctrine of multiple individuality. Science tells of the conscious and the sub-conscious, of the higher nerve centres and the lower, of the double cerebrum and the wayward ganglia. It hints at the many voiceless beings that live out in our body their joy and pain, and scarce give sign, dwellers in the sub-centres, with whom, it may be, often lies the initiative when the conscious centre thinks itself free. This I is, no doubt, a hierarchy or commonwealth of psychical units that at death dissolves and sinks below the threshold of consciousness.

It is plain, then, that the swift spread of science has brought men into a new universe. Few there are that can adorn the new home with ornaments saved from the old. For most men the universe which science tells of rises about them unsightly and barn-like, with bare walls and naked rafters, and until art can beautify the walls, and poetry gild the rafters, men will have that appalling feeling of being nowhere at home, that awful sinking as if the bottom were dropping out of all things.

The last great motive to despair is supplied by Indo-German philosophy. Under the headship of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, there has grown up of late a black pessimism rooted in Hindoo thought, and allied to that741 strange exotic cult of Eastern religions that has enabled Neo-Buddhism to proselyte even in Christian Europe. Its success has been brilliant. In twenty years Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious” has reached its tenth German edition, entered all the great languages of Europe, and called forth a vast literature of its own. Thoroughly in touch with modern culture and gifted with a striking style, Hartmann is to-day, perhaps, the best read philosopher on the continent.

Hartmann dwells upon the sorrow inherent in all existence. Happiness, whether expected in one’s own life, in an ecstatic life beyond the grave, or in the far future of humanity, is an illusion. The breaking through this illusion is progress. Consciousness itself is built on pain. Life is an evil best cured by quenching the will to live. The world is a mistake—a stupendous blunder of the blind unconscious. From it there is no escape until the world is hurled back into nothingness by a supreme effort of the collective human will. To bring about this replunge into Nirvana is the goal of the world process. The vast scheme of nature, the slow growth of mind up the long scale of organic forms, the high intelligence that crowns the summit of life—all these exist to bring forth the pessimist. He alone has gained true culture, and reached a rational insight into the emptiness of existence. He alone has rent the veil of Maya and pierced the last illusion. His task is to waken humanity, now tossing on its bed of pain, from the spell of the great alluring world-dream. By showing the vanity of endeavor he is to still the fatal lust for life and bring all men to despair and longing for Nirvana. Thus does he become the true savior of mankind; for at this point the world, obeying the desperate resolve of the human race, will vanish utterly,

The pessimistic temper of the age reveals itself in every field where mood finds utterance. Every book that makes a sensation does it by virtue of the phase of despair it presents. Every drama that creates a furore does it by uncovering some new tragic element in life. Anything optimistic falls flat. The literary men of Europe are recklessly underbidding each other in the attempt to show742 that life is sadder, or meaner, or baser, or emptier than had been supposed. The cynic and the pessimist share public attention. Not that European writers are insincere. The authors and thinkers themselves have been the first to feel the Zeitgeist. They have written as they have because they have found the melancholy view of life the most fruitful thing in recent culture. They have found it the richest in novelty, surprises, images, scenes, reflections, effects, and sensations. The worthlessness of life is an idea that agrees with science, meets the mood of the age, and fires the imagination of the artist.

The French, Norwegian, and Russian realism of the last decade is the utterance of later pessimism. For the term “realism” describes something more than an art. It describes an ethical view. It means the conviction of Flaubert: “You may fatten the human beast, give him straw up to his belly, and gild his manger; but he remains a brute, say what you will.” The realists are filled with the scientific notions of human nature. They base romances on psychology, physiology, or pathology. They study Darwin, and Spencer, and Ribot. They look constantly for the traces of the savage cave-dweller. The great masters,—Tolstoï, Zola, Ibsen, Maupassant, Flaubert, Gautier, Loti, Bourget,—as well as their swarms of disciples, are ever on the watch for marks of decadence, or for vestiges of the brute in man’s instincts and passions. To the old romanticism of Victor Hugo they oppose blunt truth-telling and remorseless analysis. They spare no illusions. “Love, marriage, family,” cries Tolstoi’s hero, “are lies, lies, lies!”

This same ethical spirit is shared by realism in art. A painter seeking in the work-house a model for his “job,” an actress visiting the hospital to learn how to simulate dying,—these show the modern appetite for the morbid. Modern music, too, does not escape the times’ spirit. The sad Titanic works of Wagner, the friend and disciple of Schopenhauer, bear witness to the mystical affinity of music and despair.

Most of our great critics of life,—Saint Beauve, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Scherer, Amiel, Tolstoï, and Ruskin—have felt, or at least recognized, the powerful fascination of the new evangel of bafflement and despair.743

The hastiest glance at recent European poetry shows the prominence of the mystery of pain. Poetry from Byron, Leopardi, and Heine, to Pushkin and Carmen Sylva, Baudelaire and Matthew Arnold, has circled about the tragedy of suffering and disenchantment. Even Tennyson sadly asks in a recent poem:—

Since the time of Goethe, poetry has turned from Hellenic to Hindoo sources. Cultured Europe seizes with a strange eagerness on the sublime, dreamy conceptions that underlie Hindoo pantheism—Sansara, the unabiding pain-world; Nirvana world of rest and re-absorption; the deceptive veil of Maya, the wheel of life, the melting bubbles poured from the bowl of Saki, the Brahma fallen from unity and serenity into multiplicity and pain, the illusion of birth and death, the evil of all individual existence, the retreat from life, the euthanasia of the will and the return to non-existence,—these with their rich train of imagery thrill the jaded and blasé European with a rare and profound emotion. Besides these spoils, the poet of to-day revels in the results of later metaphysics. The naïve balance of pleasure and pain is disturbed. Suffering becomes an almost supernatural fact hid in a halo of mystery, and is not to be blotted out by any quantity of joy. One single pang is enough to condemn the world as worse than nothingness. This inexplicable fact of suffering takes on a mystical meaning, and becomes thereby the pivot of a new faith. And so, as the altar lights of the old worship of sorrow grow dim, there rises the legend of a suffering unconscious.

744

THE HEART OF THE WOODS.

BY WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE.

Twilight fell softly over Beersheba, beautiful Beersheba. It is going into history now with its sad old fancies and its quaint old legends,—its record of happiness and of heartbreak,—those two opposing, yet closely interwoven inevitables which always belong to a summer resort.

But Beersheba is different from the rest, in that the railroads have never found it; and it goes into history a monument to the old days when the wealthy among the southern folk flocked to the mountains, and to Beersheba—queen of the hill country of Tennessee.

The western sky, where it seemed to slope down toward Dan, had turned to gaudy orange; the east was hazy and dimly purple, streaked with long lines of shadow, resembling, in truth, some lives we remember to have noticed, lives that for all the sombre purple were still blotched with the heavier shadows of pain that is never spoken.

It was inexpressibly lonely; true, a cowbell tingled in the distance, and now and then a fox barked in a covert of Dark Hollow, that almost impenetrable jungle that lies along the “Back Bone,” a narrow, zigzag ridge stretching from Dan to Beersheba.

Dan, modest little Dan, seven furlongs distant from queenly Beersheba, with its one artistic little house refusing in spite of time and weather, and that more deadly foe, renters, to be other than pretty and picturesque, as it nestles like a little gray dove in its nest of cedar and wild pine. A very dreamful place is Dan, dreamful and safe.

Safe, so thought the man leaning upon the low fence that inclosed the old ante-bellum graveyard that was a part of Beersheba also. For in the olden days people came by families and family connections, bringing their servants and carriages. And those who died at Beersheba were left sleeping in the little graveyard—a quiet spot, shut in by old cedars and rustling laurel. A very solemn little resting-place,745 with the cedars moaning, and the winds soughing, as if in continual lament for the dead left to their care. Among the quiet sleepers was one concerning whom the man leaning upon the fence never tired of thinking, while he made, by instinct it seemed to him, a daily pilgrimage to her grave. It was marked by a long, narrow shaft, exceedingly small at the top. Midway the shaft a heart, chased out of the yellow, moss-stained marble, a heart pierced by a bullet. He had brushed the moss aside long ago to read the quaint yet fascinating inscription:—

He had heard the story of the sleeper underneath often, often. It is one of the legends now, of Beersheba. Yet he thought of it with peculiar interest, that twilight time, as he stood leaning upon the low fence while the sun set over Dan. His face, with the after-glow of sunset full upon it, was not a face in keeping with the quiet scene about him. It was not a youthful face, although handsome. Yet the lines upon it were not the lines made by time: a stronger enemy than time had left his mark there. Dissipation was written in the ruddy complexion, the bloated flesh, and the bloodshot eye. The continual movement of the hand feeling along the whitewashed plank, or fingering, unconsciously, the trigger of the loaded rifle, testified, in a dumb way, to the derangement of the nervous system which had been surrendered to that most debasing of all passion, drink. He had sought the invigorating mountains, the safety of isolation, to do for him that which an abused and deadened will refused to do. It is a terrible thing to stand alone with the wreck of one’s self. It is worse to set the Might-Have-Been side by side with the Is, and know that it is everlastingly too late to alter the colorings of either picture.

His was an hereditary passion, an iniquity of the father visited upon the son. Against such there is no law, and for such no remedy.

He thought bitterly of these things as he stood leaning upon the graveyard fence. His life was a graveyard, a tangle of weeds, a plat of purposes overgrown with rank despair. He had struggled since he could remember. All his life had been one terrible struggle. And now, he knew that it was useless, he understood that the evil was hereditary, and746 to conquer it, or rather to free himself from it, there was but one alternative. He glanced down at the rifle resting against his knee. He did not intend to endure the torture any very great while longer. He possessed the instincts of a gentleman,—the cravings of a beast. The former had won him something of friends and sympathy,—and love. The latter had cost him all the other had won. For coming across the little graveyard in a straight line with the shadows of the old cedars, her arms full of the greens and tender wild blossoms of the mountain, was the one woman he had loved. She had done her best to “reform” him. The world called it a “reform.” If reform meant a new birth, that was the proper name for it, he thought, as he watched her coming down the shadow-line, and tried to think of her as another man’s wife; this woman he loved, and who had loved him.

He saw her stop beside a little mound, kneel down, and carefully dividing her flowers, place the half of them upon a child’s grave. Her face was wet with tears when she arose, and crossing over to the tall, yellow shaft, placed the remainder of the offering at its base. She stood a moment, as if studying the odd inscription. And when she turned away he saw that the tears were gone, and a hopeless patience gave the sweet face a tender beauty.

“‘Oh, Shiloh! Shiloh!’”

He heard her repeat the melancholy words as she moved away from the old shaft, and opening the gate he waited until she should pass out.

“Donald!”

“I couldn’t help it, Alice. You are going away to-morrow; it is the last offence. You will forgive it because it is the last.”

“You ought not to follow me in this way, it isn’t honorable. See! I have been to put some flowers on my little baby’s grave.” She glanced back, as she stood, her hand upon the gate, at the little flower-bedecked grave where two months before she had buried her only child.

“You shared your treasures with the other,” he said, indicating the tall shaft.

“I always do,” said she. “There is something about that grave that touches me with singular pity. I feel as if it were myself who is buried there. I think the girl must have died of a broken heart.”747

“Have you never heard the story?” said Donald. “I suppose it might be called a broken heart, although the doctors gave it the more agreeable title of ‘heart disease.’ It is very well for the world that doctors do not call things by their right name always. Now, if I should be found dead to-morrow morning in my little room at Dan, the doctors would pronounce me a victim of ‘apoplexy,’ or ‘heart failure.’ That would be very generous of the doctors so far as I am concerned. But would it not be more generous to struggling humanity to say the truth: ‘This man died of delirium tremens,—killed himself with whiskey. Now you other sots take warning.’”

“Donald Rives!” the sad eyes, full of unspoken pity, not unmixed with regret, sought his.

“Truth,” said Donald. “And truth, Alice, is always best. The world, the sick moral world, cannot be healed with falsehood. But the woman sleeping there—she has a pretty story. Will you wait while I tell it—you are going away to-morrow.”

She glanced down the road, dim with the twilight.

“The others are gone on to Dan, to see the moon rise,” she said hesitatingly.

“We will follow them there in a moment,” said Donald. “I have a fancy for telling you that story.”

He laughed, a nervous, mirthless kind of laugh, and slipped his rifle to his other hand.

“She had a lover in the army, you understand. She was waiting here with hundreds of others until ‘the cruel war should cease.’ One day when there had been a great battle, a messenger came to Beersheba, bringing news for her. He brought a letter, and she came across the little court there at Beersheba, and received it from the messenger’s own hand. She tore it open and read the one line written there. Then the white page fluttered to the ground. She placed her hands upon her heart as if the bullet had pierced her. ‘Oh, Shiloh! Shiloh!’ That was all she said or did. The ball from old Shiloh did its work. The next day they buried her up there under the cedars. The letter had but one line: ‘Shot at Shiloh, fatally,’ and signed by the captain of the company who had promised to send news of the battle. Just a line; but enough to break a heart. Hearts break easily, sweetheart.”748

She looked at him with her earnest eyes full of tears.

“Do you think hers broke?” she asked. “I do not. She merely went to him.”

“As I should go to you, if you were to die, because I cannot live without you.”

“Hush! I am nothing to you now. Only a friend who loves you, and would help you if she could, but she is powerless.”

“O Alice, do not say that. Do not give me over in that hopeless way to ruin. Do not abandon me now.”

“Donald,” the voice was very low, and sweet, and—strong. “There was a time I thought to help you. I did my best and—failed. It is too late now. I am married. You who could not put aside your passion for the girl whose heart was yours, and whom you loved sincerely, could not, assuredly, put it by for the woman whose love, and life, and duty are pledged to another. Yet, you know I feel for you. You know what it is to be tempted, so alas! do I. Wait! stand back. There is this difference. You know what it is to yield; but I have that little mound back there”—she nodded toward the little flower-decked grave,—“the dead help me, the sleeper underneath is my strength. If I were dead now, I would come to you, and help you. Do that which, living, I failed in doing. Come, now; let us go on and see yon moon rise over Dan. The others have gone long ago.”

They passed out, and the little gate swung to its place. The dead at Beersheba were left alone again. Left to their tranquil slumbers. Tranquil? Aye, it is only the living who are eager and unhappy.

Down the shadowy road they passed, those two whose lives had met, and mingled, and parted again. Those two so necessary to each other, and who, despite the necessity, must touch hands and part.

‘Tis said God makes for every human soul a counterpart, a soul-helper. If this be so, then is it true that every soul must find its counterpart, since God does not work by half, and knows no bungling in His work. That other self is somewhere,—on this earth, or else in some other sphere. The souls are separated, perhaps, by death, or even by some human agency. What of that? Soul will seek soul; will find its counterpart and perform its work, its own half share, though death and vast eternity should roll between.749

They passed on, those two wishing for and needing each the other. Wishing until God heard, and made the wish a prayer, and answered it, in His own time and manner.

At the crossing of the roads where one turns off to Dan, the mountain preacher’s little cabin stood before them. Nothing, and yet it had a bearing on their lives. On his, at all events.

Before the door, leaning upon the little low gate, an old man with white hair and beard was watching the gambols of two children playing with a large dog. The cabin, old and weatherworn, the man, the tumbledown appearance of things generally, formed a strange contrast with the magnificence of nature visible all around. To Donald, with his southern ideas of ease and elegance, there was something repulsive in the scene. But the woman was evidently more charitable.

“Good evening, parson,” she called, “we are going over to Dan to watch the moon rise.”

“Yes, yes,” said the old man. “An’ hadn’t ye better leave the gun, sir? There’s no use luggin’ that to Dan. An’ ye’ll find it here ‘ginst you come back.”

“Why, we’re going back another route,” they told him; not dreaming what that route would be.

“You have a goodly country, parson,” said Donald, “and so near heaven one ought to find peace here.”

“It be not plentiful,” said the old man. “An’ man be born to trouble as the sparks go upward. But all be bretherin, by the grace o’ God, an’ bound alike for Canaan.”

They passed on, bearing the old man’s meaning in their hearts. All bound upon one common road for Canaan.

Oh, Israel! Israel! the wandering in the wilderness still goes on. The Promised Land still lies ahead, and wanderers in earth’s wilderness still seek it, panting and dying with none to strike a rock in Horeb.

The Promised Land! what glimpses of that glorious country are vouchsafed, mere glimpses, from those rugged heights, such as were granted him, who, weary with his wanderings, sought Pisgah’s top to die.

Sometimes, when the mists are lifted and the sun shines through the rifted clouds, what dreams, what visions, what communion with those whom the angels met upon the mountain. They thought upon it, those two, as they passed on to Dan.

750To Dan, through the broad gate artistically set with palings of green and white. Under the sweet old cedars deep down into the heart of the woods, with the solemn mountains rising, grim and mysterious, in the twilight. Down the great bluff where the tinkle of falling water tells of the spring hidden in the dim wood’s shadowy heart. The golden arrows of sunset are put out one by one by the shadow-hands of the twilight hidden in the haunted hemlocks. One star rises above the tree’s and peeps down to find itself quivering in the dusky pool. A little bird flits by with an evening hymn fluttering in its throat.

They stopped at the foot of the bluff and seated themselves upon a fallen tree, the rifle resting, the stock upon the ground, the muzzle against the tree, between them.

Between them, the loaded rifle. She herself had placed it there. They had scarcely spoken, but words are weak; feeling is strong—and silent. His heart was breaking; could words help that? It was she who spoke at last, nestling closer to him a moment, then quickly drawing back. Her hand had touched the iron muzzle of the gun—it was cold, and it reminded her. She drew her hands together and folded them, palm to palm, between her knees, and held them there, lest the sight of his agony drag them from duty and honor. She could not bear to look at him, she could only speak to him, with her eyes turned away toward the distant mountains.

“Donald,” her voice was low and very steady, “there are so many mistakes made, dear, and my marriage was one of them. But, the blunder having been committed, I must abide by it. And who knows if, after all, it be a mistake? Who can understand, and who dares judge God’s plans? But right cannot grow from wrong. We part. But I shall not leave you, Donald. Here in the heart of the woods—”

“Don’t!” he lifted his face, white with agony. “Your suffering can but increase mine. Go back, dear, and forget. Our paths crossed too late, too late. Go back, and leave me to my lonely struggles. I shall miss you, oh, my beloved,—” the words choked him, “forget, forget—”

“Never!” again she moved toward him, and again drew back. The iron muzzle had touched her shoulder, warningly. She still held her hands fast clasped between her knees. Suddenly she loosed them; opened them, looked at751 them; so frail, so small, so delicately womanly as they were. He, too, saw them, the dear hands, and made a motion to clasp them, restrained himself, and groaned. She understood, and her whole soul responded. The old calm was gone; the wife forgotten. It was only the woman that spoke as she slipped from her place beside him, to the ground at his feet; and extended the poor hands toward him.

“Donald, O Donald!” she sobbed. “Look at my hands. How frail they are, and weak, and white, and clean. Aye, they are clean, Donald. Take them in your own; hold them fast one moment, for they are worthy. But oh, my beloved, if they falter or go wrong, those little hands, who would pity their polluted owner? Not you, oh, not you. I know the sequel to such madness. Help me to keep them clean. Help me—oh, help me!”

She lifted them pleadingly, the tears raining down her cheeks. She, the strong, the noble, appealing to him. In that moment she became a saint, a being to be worshipped afar off, like God.

“Help me!” She appealed to him, to his manhood which he had supposed dead so long the hollow corpse would scarcely hear the judgment trump.

Her body swayed to and fro with the terrible struggle. Aye, she knew what it was to be tempted. She who would have died for that poor drunkard’s peace. But that little mound—that little child’s grave on the hill—“Help me!” She reeled forward and he sprang to clasp her. The rifle slipped its place against the log; but it was between them still; the iron muzzle pointed at her heart. There was a flash, a sharp report, and she fell, just missing the arms extended to receive her.

“O my God!” the cry broke from him, a wild shriek, torn from his inmost heart. “O my God! my God! I have killed her. Alice! oh, speak to me! speak to me before my brain goes mad.” He had dropped beside her, on his knees, and drawn the poor face to his bosom. She opened her eyes and nestled there, closer to his heart. There was no iron muzzle between them now. She smiled, and whispered, softly:—

“In the heart of the woods. O Love; O Love!”

And seeing that he understood, she laid her hand upon his bosom, gasped once, and the little hands were safe.752 They would never “go wrong” now, never. Even love, which tempts the strongest into sin, could never harm them now, those little dead hands.

“In the heart of the woods.” It was there they buried her, beside that broken-hearted one whose life went with the tidings from old Shiloh, in the little mountain graveyard in the woods between Dan and Beersheba.

As for him, her murderer, they said, “the accident quite drove him mad.” Perhaps it did; he thought so, often; only that he never called it by the name of accident.

“It was God’s plan for helping me,” he told himself during those slow hours of torture that followed. There were days and weeks when the very mention of the place would tear his very soul. Then the old craving returned. Drink; he could forget, drown it all if only he could return to the old way of forgetting. But something held him back. What was it? God? No, no. God did not care for such as he, he told himself. He was alone; alone forever now. One night there was a storm, the cedars were lashed and broken, and the windows rattled and shook with the fury of the wind. The rain beat against the roof in torrents. The night was wild, as he was. Oh, he, too, could tear, and howl, and shriek. Tear up the very earth, he thought, if only he let his demon loose.

He arose and threw on his clothes. He wanted whiskey; he was tired of the struggle, the madness, the despair. A mile beyond there was a still, an illicit concern, worked only at night. He meant to find it. His brain was giving way, indeed. Had already given way, he thought, as he listened to the wind calling him, the storm luring him on to destruction. The very lightning beckoned him to “come and be healed.” Healed? Aye, he knew what it was that healed the agonies of mind which physics could not reach. He knew, he knew. He had been a fool to think he would forego this healing.

He laughed as he tore open the door and stepped out into the night. The cool rain struck upon his burning brow as he plunged forward into the arms of the darkness. He had gone but two steps when the fever that had mounted to his brain began to cool. And the wind—he paused. Was it speaking to him, that wild, midnight wind? “‘In the heart of the woods. O Love, O Love!’”

753There was a shimmery glister of lightning among the shadowy growth. Was it a figure, a form of a woman beckoning him, guiding him. He turned away from the midnight still, and followed that shimmery light, straight to the little graveyard in the woods, and fell across the little new mound there, and sobbed like a child that has rebelled and yielded. A soft presence breathed among the shadows; a soft presence that crept to his bosom when he opened his arms, his face still pressed against the soft, new sod. A strange, sweet peace came to him, such as he had never felt before, filling him with restful, chastened, and exquisite sadness. The storm passed by after awhile, and the rain fell softly—as the dew falls on flowers. And he arose and went home, with the chastened peace upon him, and the old passionate pain gone forever.

… … … .

But as the summers drifted by, year after year, he returned. He became a familiar comer to the humble mountain folk, where summer twilight times they saw him leaning on the parson’s little gate, conversing with the old man of the “Promised Land” toward which, as “brethren,” they were travelling. Sometimes they talked of the blessed dead—the dear, dear dead who are permitted to return to give help to their loved ones.

Aye, he believes it, knows it, for the old temptation assails him no more forever. That is enough to know.

And in the heart of the woods in the dewy twilight, or at the solemn midnight, she comes to meet him, unseen but felt, and walks with him again along the way from Dan to Beersheba. He holds communion with her there, and is satisfied and strengthened.

God knows, God knows if it be true, she meets him there. But life is no longer agony and struggle with him. And often when he starts upon his lonely walks, he hears the wind passing through the ragged cedars with a low, tremulous soughing and bends his ear to listen. “In the heart of the woods, O Love, O Love.”

And he understands at last how to those passed on is vouchsafed a power denied the human helper, and that she who would have been his guide and comforter now gave him better guardianship—a watchful and a holy spirit.

754

EDITORIAL NOTES.

PHARISAISM IN PUBLIC LIFE.

The poisonous and corrupting influence of Pharisaism is noticeable in every strata of society, as vicious and odious to-day as when the great Galilean, with the supreme contempt of a pure and genuine soul, denounced in such withering terms those who pretended to be what they were not. Evil and repulsive as hypocrisy must ever appear, it assumes colossal proportions as a moral crime, when it masquerades in the robes of official authority, for nothing so surely undermines all respect for law in the mind of the masses as exhibitions of insincerity, inconsistency, and Pharisaism by those invested with power. The people are not so slow witted as the few who take pride in their superior brilliancy imagine. They quickly detect insincerity or hypocrisy; but unfortunately, they frequently do not discriminate between the offender and the office in the nation or the communion which he disgraces. Pharisaism within the Church, far more than assaults from without, has destroyed the old-time influence of theology over the popular mind; while the same results are clearly manifest in our political fabric. In the latter sphere, hypocrisy is doubly odious, in that while undermining the confidence of the people in law, justice, and government, it places far greater power in the hands of pretentious individuals than would be tolerated were it not for their profession of superior virtue, and thus enables persons who are of small moral stature, or who through defective training and unfortunate environment are thoroughly narrow and bigoted, to wield despotic power, often bringing swift and severe punishment on those far less guilty in the eye of the moral law than themselves. Believing as I do that Pharisaism is to-day one of the greatest evils which menace the stability of our government and the continued advance of civilization along the highway of enlightened progress, I feel it an urgent duty to frankly and freely discuss some notable recent illustrations which to unprejudiced minds take on the cast of Pharisaism, and are symptomatic of a condition which presages the moral decline of a nation. For if history teaches one lesson more impressively than another, it is that in which she emphasizes the fact that when Pharisaism becomes enthroned in power, when hypocrisy mantles insincerity and depravity, the soul of a people goes out; and though the form or shadow of former greatness may remain for a time, like the oak which remains standing after the tap-root has been eaten out, vitality, growth, and life have vanished.

The first case which calls for attention is that of Joseph A. Britton, and it impressively illustrates the evils which will sooner or later come755 to any people who permit the Pharisaical element to arrogate authority, or who legalize the infringement of liberty by authorizing the establishment of a censorship of morals, especially when power is lodged in the hands of persons who have a penchant for delving in moral sewers, and are not hedged about with restrictions which make them legally responsible for wrong doing. Mr. Britton, it will be remembered, was long Mr. Comstock’s closest counselor and most efficient aid. In the course of time, however, he withdrew from his former commander in order to establish an association somewhat similar to that presided over by Mr. Comstock. Such societies will naturally ever prove very alluring to men of a certain class, owing to the unwarranted power given to individuals, by which they are enabled to persecute those in no way guilty of crime, and who, after innocence is established, have no redress for the great expense and wrongs inflicted by the irresponsible censorship. The new organization was styled “The Society for the Enforcement of Criminal Law,” and Mr. Britton has been from its inception its leading spirit. About a year ago, exercising a power, which, if permitted at all, should always be confined to a responsible judiciary, he caused the arrest of the president of the American News Company, for selling some of the works of Count Tolstoi and Balzac.[2]

The courts promptly dismissed the case, but Mr. Farrelly had no redress for the expense, the harassment, and lost time incident to this unjust arrest. Since then Mr. Britton has had much trouble with the courts and officers of law, who thoroughly distrust the man.[3] He, however, has been posing as a virtuous martyr, declaring that the police and judiciary are all subsidized: that it is impossible for him to suppress the crimes of gamblers, saloon keepers, and the proprietors of disorderly houses on account of the officers being in collusion with the offenders. It is proper to state also that counter-charges have been freely made in the daily press, and this gentleman who assumes the role of one peculiarly fitted to unearth and punish sinners, has been charged with using his office for blackmailing purposes. Of the truth or falsity of the charges I know nothing, but the latest revelation relating to Mr. Britton’s career certainly gives color to some of the charges which have been made against him. It seems that while sincere and756 innocent persons who mistakenly support these mischievous organizations by freely giving hard earned dollars to such persons as the gentleman in question, vainly hoping that their contribution will aid in exterminating gambling, Mr. Britton has been recklessly indulging in gambling himself. For a time fortune favored him. He won, and drew the money, but later, luck deserted him and our pseudo-reformer lost quite heavily. [4]Being pressed for the amount of his gambling debts, aggregating $1,085, he gave a check which his creditor, Mr. Robt. G. Irving, alleges was returned as worthless. He then gave notes, the first two of which have come due but have not been paid; consequently his creditor now seeks redress in the courts. Mr. Britton, probably feeling that his usefulness as a censor of morals will be seriously impaired by this unfeeling revelation, displays considerable indignation while admitting his guilt. He says in the column of one of the New York dailies:—

And this is a specimen of the men which a Christian people are supporting and encouraging, owing to their loud and pharisaical protestations of superior virtue. The words spoken by the great Nazarene teacher, and which ring down the corridor of the ages, apply to-day as aptly as when in old Judea he said, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness. Even so ye outwardly appear righteous, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”

Another instance of the evil of clothing Pharisaism with power was forcibly illustrated in the recent prosecution of the Rev. J. B. Caldwell, editor of Christian Life. This noteworthy case illustrates most painfully the fact that an innocent and noble-minded man, who has committed no crime, is liable to be arrested as a common felon and placed at great expense, though perfectly innocent, as was the case in this instance. Yet in spite of this great crime the wronged man has no redress, while the real criminals, they who caused the persecution of the innocent, are in no way amenable to the law. This case also emphasizes the danger flowing757 from Pharisaism, in its liability to persecute those who criticise it. The possibilities of evil from this source cannot be over-estimated, for it looks toward the suppression of free thought and an untrammeled press and the establishing of a moral, political, and religious despotism. Briefly stated, the facts in the case of the Chicago editor are as follows: In November of 1889, Mr. Caldwell published an earnest plea for Marital Purity, by Rev. C. E. Walker, a Congregational minister of good standing. The paper was not coarse or repulsive, but an earnest plea for one of the most vital and noble reforms imaginable. No notice was taken of this publication by either Mr. Comstock’s agent in Chicago, by Mr. Comstock, or the postal authorities. Month after month passed, yet no notice was taken; at last more than six months after the publication of Rev. C. E. Walker’s paper, the editor of Christian Life criticised the action of the anti-vice society and the postal department in the case of Mr. Harman. After this, however, the publication of Mr. Walker’s paper seemed to assume in the eyes of our censors of public morals criminal proportions, and Mr. Caldwell was arrested, one of the chief charges being the circulation of the paper on “Marital Purity,” published in November, 1889. He was arrested in October, 1890, almost a year after the publication of the paper objected to by the censors. Now there are two points emphasized in this case which are worthy the serious consideration of thoughtful people. If the post-office inspector at Chicago, or Mr. Comstock, or if the postal department at Washington regarded this paper published in November, 1889, as obscene and believed it came within the limits of the law, why did these three argus-eyed censors of public morals wink at the offence for eleven months and take no step against the editor, until after he had condemned the post-office department and the anti-vice society? If they were right in taking action, almost a year after the offence, were they not guilty of culpable neglect in paying no attention to it for ten months, or until after they had been criticised by Mr. Caldwell? From the Christian Life I clip a few lines which are important as bearing upon this point:—

If Mr. Comstock, as his letter to the Woman’s Journal indicates, regarded the mailing of Christian Life a violation of the postal laws, why was no notice taken of it by him or his Chicago agent for almost a year? Why this culpable dereliction of duty until after the anti-vice society and the postal department had been criticised by Mr. Caldwell? It matters not, for the point I wish to emphasize, whether the persecution758 of Mr. Caldwell, was, as appearances would lead one to infer, a retaliatory stroke in punishment for presuming to criticise the postal department and anti-vice society, or whether the censorship was asleep for the space of ten months and only chanced to wake up after the editor pointed out the iniquity of their proceedings in a case where they had shown uncalled-for vigilance. The fact as shown forth indicates the power and possibilities for evil inherent in an enactment which permits any censorship to wield such power without attaching severe penalties in the event of its being unjustly wielded, for sooner or later, unless these safeguards are present, evils of the gravest character will follow.

The other serious evil which this case most signally emphasizes, cannot be too frequently or strongly stated, and that is, the cruel wrong, the great injustice which a citizen of this republic may suffer, when perfectly innocent, while those who have persecuted him and are guilty of a serious offence before the moral law, escape unscathed. Thus, we find in this case, after many months of weary suspense, months of harassment and anxious thought, and after being put to an expense which to one in Mr. Caldwell’s circumstances was very large, when his case came up for trial before one of the ablest judges in the city, it was promptly dismissed, the judge ruling that the defendant had not violated the law, as had been charged. He was allowed to go forth a free man, but he had no redress against those who had unjustly persecuted him. He was in no way recompensed for the money which he had had to expend to establish his innocence, or paid for the great anxiety and harassment of soul he suffered. The spectacle of an innocent man robbed by the process of law of his money and peace of mind, yet left with no redress, is humiliating to every person who loves justice. A nation may sometimes err on the side of mercy with safety, but no government can afford to be guilty of a palpable injustice even to one of her humblest citizens.

Still another illustration of Pharisaism comes to my mind, a case peculiarly deplorable, because the individual stands so high in the councils of our nation, as well as occupies so prominent a seat in the Christian synagogue. I refer to the case touched upon by Mr. Fawcett in his admirable essay on a “Gambler’s Paradise.” Probably thousands of persons who had applauded the Postmaster-General’s persistent efforts to crush out lotteries, were amazed beyond measure on seeing in the metropolitan press, day after day, statements to the effect that the Postmaster-General had speculated heavily in Reading stock, and was losing vast sums. The press even went so far as to intimate that his credit was no longer good, and so general was the impression that telegrams from different portions of the country were received, inquiring if this high official had failed. To those who had fondly believed that the Postmaster-General was actuated solely by a sincere desire to destroy gambling in his active crusade against the lotteries, these uncontradicted statements from Wall Street came as a rude awakening,—a most painful revelation;759 for evil as lotteries are, in common with everything that fosters a love for chance and the mania for gambling, it could not be truthfully urged that the lottery was nearly so pernicious in its influence, as that great maelstrom of moral death, that realm of professional gamblers,—Wall Street. The lottery took from one to ten dollars from thousands of pockets monthly, and was a positive evil, in that, while taking these small sums, it fostered the appetite for gambling. But Wall Street is ever sweeping away numbers of fortunes, incidentally driving many of its victims to the suicide’s grave, some to State’s prison, and in a hundred other ways is it poisoning life, and interfering with the happiness of thousands; more, its baleful influence touches most intimately tens of thousands, who in no way are responsible for its existence.

As has been justly observed by a recent thoughtful writer: “The lottery is legalized in only one State in the Union, but gambling in grain is legalized in every State. The lottery is a small evil indeed compared with the speculation shark, who gambles on the price of the very bread our wives and children eat, and puts our daily bread in pawn to squeeze an added cent out of the palm of poverty. No one has to buy a lottery ticket, and it is a man’s own act if he takes the chances of that game, but bread for his little ones he has to buy and in doing so is at the mercy of the gambler.”

Another phase of Wall Street speculation which makes it vicious above other methods of gambling, is seen in the fact that the kings of the street when they engage in a well matured deal, play with “loaded dice.” There is no chance so far as they are concerned. When these highly respectable gamblers who are worth many millions quietly arrange a movement which will greatly increase their holdings they deliberately set to work to mislead the public. Coolly and with the deliberation of master minds they deceive the “street;” and as a result, ruin to many attends success to the few, while with every such movement lives go out in darkness, reputations are ruined, and families are reduced from affluence to penury. Even at the very time when we were informed by the daily press that the Postmaster-General, through the manipulation of the “little wizard,” was losing enormous sums of money, more than one man was driven to suicide by the sudden turn in affairs and one or more banks were forced to the wall. How many happy homes were wrecked, and men of moderate fortunes were reduced to penury by this well-directed stroke of Mr. Gould, will of course never be known, and if the Postmaster-General had chanced to be on the side of the wizard in this gambling deal, would he not have been morally responsible for a share of the wreck and ruin wrought? Nay, more, was he not, as an active participant in this great game of chance, morally responsible to a certain degree? Is there any essential difference between gambling by spending ten dollars for a lottery ticket or ten thousand dollars in railroad stock, which you have been led to believe will be bulled to a fictitious value and which you hope to be able to unload on some one760 else at an enormous advance? In each instance it is purely a game of chance for all save those who are within the Wall Street ring, who control sufficient money and stocks to dictate the course of the game and to whom there is no risk. The Louisiana lottery is a positive evil, a cancerous sore on the body politic. But Wall Street is a far greater evil; it is a cancer whose roots have already fastened upon the vitals of our political, educational, and religious institutions; an evil which nothing can remedy, save a political revolution of the great earnest masses of our people. The pulpit is abashed in its presence because so many leading lights and pillars in each wealthy congregation are connected with the “street,” which is the polite way of designating “gamblers” who delve in stock speculation. The press, with honorable and noble exceptions, wink at this great plague spot, while loudly crying for laws to correct comparatively harmless evils. The political parties depend too much upon the kings of the “Street” for the sinews of war in great campaigns, to lift a voice against it. The “Saloon” and the “Street,” two colossal curses, cast their swart and portentous shadow over the palaces and hovels of a great nation, yet by virtue of their power, the Church and State, the clergy and the politicians, remain silent or temporize in their presence. The Republic needs to-day, as never before, true men in every official station,—men who are clean, conscientious, frank, and upright; men who, while strictly honorable and pure in life and action, are also broad-minded, tolerant, and large-brained; men unswayed by partisanship or bigotry; statesmen rather than politicians; and, above all, men that are in no wise tainted with Pharisaism.

CANCER SPOTS IN METROPOLITAN LIFE.

Some months ago I wrote of a phase of wretchedness in our great cities, which I designated “Uninvited Poverty.” I confined myself to the examination of those who may be properly designated the helpless victims of adverse fate. There are other phases of misery, however, which result from sin, on the part of the immediate sufferers. In my former paper I spoke of suffering where the wretchedness sprang from sin at the head of the social fountain. But I now wish to notice especially misery, degradation, and moral eclipse, resulting directly from giant evils, which are tolerated in all our large cities, though known to every thoughtful person, from judge to artisan, from clergyman to sexton, from editor to reporter, from wealthy matron to the humble sewing woman. Every earnest thinker knows that there are evils feeding the furnaces of physical, mental, and moral destruction; that there are flourishing nurseries, common schools, and universities of crime, degradation, and death. Yet the great churches slumber on, their melodious chimes call the self-satisfied to cushioned seats where are heard expositions of ancient lore and legends of a vanished past, with incidental and general reference to the conditions of to-day, enabling the children of wealth, who vainly imagine they are761 the disciples of Jesus, to spend a comfortable hour and perchance contribute to carrying the Gospel to some nature-favored heathen land, never as yet cursed by rum and other evils which flourish with tropical luxuriance in all civilized countries, and which ever follow with blighting, corroding, and life-destroying influence in the wake of our boasted modern civilization. Two great evils confront every thoughtful American citizen to-day. One the oppression of the poor and the unfortunate; the other, the omnipresent cancer spots in metropolitan life, the infection of which is reaching the highest circles of Boulevard society and penetrating the cellars of the tenement houses. Recently a little work has been published which deals chiefly with what we may term the “cancer spots of social life” in one of America’s great cities.[5] It is prepared by an earnest Christian gentleman, who has had a committee of conscientious men and women investigating the actual conditions in the social cellar of Chicago. The author states that his purpose is not to show that Chicago is an exception to the general rule in regard to poverty, crime, or degradation. He merely desires to indicate deplorable facts as they exist in this great city to show how dire destitution is working havoc with the children of men almost under the shadow of the palaces of those who profess to be Christians. He cites as an illustration of the extreme poverty in Chicago the fact that when the compulsory education law went into effect, the inspectors found in the squalid region, a great number of children so destitute, that they were absolutely unfit to attend school; decency forbidding that the sexes in far more than semi-nude condition should mingle in the school-rooms, and although a number of noble-hearted ladies banded together and decently clothed three hundred of these almost naked boys and girls, they were compelled to admit the humiliating fact that they had only reached the outskirts, while the great mass of poverty had not been touched. A faint idea of the extent of poverty in this one city may be gained from the following facts from the record of one of the city police stations.

On one night last February, one hundred and twenty-four destitute homeless men begged for shelter in the cells; of this number sixty-eight were native born Americans. The station was so crowded, that in one cell, eight by nine and a half feet, fourteen men passed the night, some standing a part of the night, while others lay packed like sardines. After a time, those on the floor exchanged places with the poor creatures who had been standing. The following incident related is as typical as it is pathetic: An old man, cold, homeless, destitute, not knowing where to lay his head, was seen to take a shovel and deliberately break a window in a store opposite a police station. He was immediately arrested. “What did you do that for?” demanded the officer. “‘Cos I was hungry and cold and knew if you got me I could have food and shelter.” He was taken care of after he had broken the law. There is something radically wrong with social conditions which compel men who find762 every avenue from exposure and starvation closed, to become lawbreakers in order to live. Some months ago, one of the Chicago dailies instituted an inquiry to find out as nearly as possible the number of men out of work in that city; the returns gave a total of 40,000 adults who had nothing to do. In connection with this fact I quote from the author of “Chicago’s Dark Places”:—

One laboring man being interrogated by one of the commissioners who gathered the facts for the author of this work, replied to the question, “What can you say for those who won’t work, who are commonly called the ‘bums of society’?” in such a thoughtful and suggestive way that I give his words verbatim.

It is not, however, with the uninvited poverty which flourishes in every great city of America that the work chiefly deals. It paints most thrillingly the darker and more terrible side of social conditions; where763 crime and debauchery mingle with poverty; where every breath of air is heavy with moral contagion. I have only space to notice briefly two of the great evils described,—the saloon and the disreputable concert halls, as these seem to me the greatest curses touched upon.

THE SALOON CURSE.

First in the list of crime-producing, soul-destroying evils of metropolitan life, rises the saloon, the deadly upas of the nineteenth century civilization, the black plague of moral life. In Chicago there are about 5,600 saloons. During the year ending March 1, 1891, observes the author of “Chicago’s Dark Places,” the expenditure for beer in Chicago alone was not less than forty million dollars ($40,000,000). He continues:—

Another well-taken point is the lawlessness of the saloon power. It is essentially a law-defying, crime-breeding, and disorder-producing element, a terrible arraignment, yet no one can question the truth of the last two charges, while its lawless character is seen in the facts set forth in this volume wherein it is shown, (1) that the Brewer’s Association pays the costs of all the suits and defends all of its members, whether they have violated the laws or not. (2) The saloons are required to close on Sunday, yet a large number totally ignore the law, running every Sunday. (3) They are required not to sell to minors without a764 written order from parents or guardian, and yet there are thousands of saloons which pay no attention to this requirement. (4) They are forbidden to harbor women of bad repute, and yet we are informed that one saloon in Chicago keeps from twenty-five to forty harlots, while in hosts of other saloons special arrangements are made for the gratifying of all forms of nameless immorality which springs from lust fed and inflamed by rum.

The influence of the saloon on the young is one of the most serious phases of the many-sided evils of the liquor traffic. All persons who know anything about the effect of strong drink freely indulged in, know that like opium, it weakens when it does not destroy the moral nature; it wipes out the line of moral rectitude from mental discernment; it feeds the fires of animal passion as coal feeds a furnace; it drys up the soul and shrivels the higher impulses and nobler aspirations of its victims. Yet we are told that in a saloon under one of the newspaper offices in Chicago one night, fourteen boys and girls from fourteen to seventeen years of age were seen to enter; and to show that this is an evil by no means confined to Chicago, facts gathered from other reliable sources are cited from which we find that nine hundred and eighty-three young men and boys were seen to enter nineteen saloons in Albany, Indiana, one evening within one hour and a half. On a certain evening in Milwaukee four hundred sixty-eight persons were seen to enter a single saloon, most of whom were young men and boys.

The question is often asked how it is that society tolerates such a confessed violator of law and order as the saloon has demonstrated itself to be. If an individual defied the law as a large number of the saloon keepers do, he would be quickly punished. Nay, more, if a poor, starving man steals a loaf of bread to appease his gnawing hunger, or to save the life of his starving family, he is sent to prison, that the majesty of the law may be vindicated. But when a saloon-keeper breaks the law in keeping open on Sunday in selling liquor to minors, or in making his saloon a rendezvous for women of bad repute, nothing is said because (1) of the moral apathy throughout the web and woof of Christian society; (2) professing Christians are more loyal to party-hacks and demagogues than they are to their own homes and their country, (3) the saloon is a unit in its voting strength, loyal to its tools and relentless to its foes, and the voting power of the saloon element in any great city when united with the voting strength of the Christian element in either of the great parties, turns the scales for the minions of the rum power. Let me illustrate. In Chicago there is about 5,600 saloons. These saloons will average not less than two voters to the saloon, the proprietor and the bar-keeper; as a matter of fact, I expect four votes would come nearer the correct figures, as numbers of saloons have several bar-tenders. But placing the number at two, we have a voting strength of 11,200. Now each one in this army can surely influence four persons, many can influence from six to765 ten votes, but placing the figures at four, we have the enormous total of 44,800 voters to be added to the 11,200 engaged in the traffic, giving a startling aggregate of 56,000 voters, which the saloon power can count on with reasonable certainty, when any measure affecting its interests is to be acted upon, or when persons are to be elected who can enforce or ignore laws enacted to restrict the liquor evil. This argument presented to the political parties is usually irresistible; they simply permit the saloon element to dictate its policy and its candidates. And against this army of home destroyers, this solid battalion of evil, this power which prostitutes political integrity, destroys virtue, breeds crime, fills prisons with victims and homes with misery, and requires the expenditure on the part of the government of millions of dollars in punishing the criminals and the paupers it annually makes,—I say against this army engaged under the banner of the rum traffic, what counteracting opposition is springing from the home loving, the upright and pure-minded citizens of our great cities? What concerted action is the church with her tens of thousands of communicants putting forth? It would be an easy matter to thwart the allied power of rum, if a few persons in every church and every society for ethical improvement were ablaze with moral enthusiasm, and wise enough to adopt lines of action similar to those successfully carried out by the liquor interest. For example: Suppose in every church four or six earnest men and women form a league for the protection of the home; let them secure the pledge of every voter in the church who has love for his fellow-men and respect for decent government, that he will vote for no man for any office who patronizes the saloon, who fraternizes with the liquor element, or who is supported by the rum shops, and that he will use all honorable means to further good government, by seeking the advancement to office of pure and upright citizens. Something like that would be all that would be necessary for the general membership to sign. Then let each league appoint an executive committee of three or five to act precisely as do officers in an army, to confer with the executive committee of other leagues to secretly arrange or map out a campaign, and to give commands to the army. It would be an easy matter to poll the saloon vote in such a way as to ascertain exactly where it stood in cases where there was a question as to the position of candidates, after which the word could be given that no votes be cast for the choice of the saloon element. I am speaking now chiefly of municipal elections, as they most intimately affect the saloon power in our great cities. If something like this policy was followed, and every church had its active league, it would not be long before there would be enrolled on the side of pure government and true morality, an army far eclipsing in strength and number the rum element, an army that could easily turn the balance of power into the hands of high-minded citizens, who would enforce the laws with equal justice, without fear or favor. I merely throw out this as a hint of what might be accomplished, because it has become fashionable766 for good but easy-going people to dismiss these matters with the remark that nothing practical can be done to meet the demoralizing and degrading power of the saloon.

HOT BEDS OF SOCIAL POLLUTION.

Chicago has many dark places, not the least among which are the low theatres, the concert halls, and other similar resorts where immorality nourishes as it flourished in Rome during that long moral night when Messalina dragged down an already debauched court to unspeakable debasement, when Nero thirsted for blood and wallowed in the sewers of moral degradation, and when Domitian’s frightful cruelty only equaled his gross sensualism. The saloon, the black plague of nineteenth century life, overlaps all other degrading evils, its miasma of death fills every rendezvous of degradation, and until its ever increasing power is checked, nay, more, until its power in American politics is broken, other allies in crime, debauchery, and moral death will flourish. By the side of the rum curse flourishes, as our author points out, the low theatres and concert halls, but he wisely observes that these places must not be confounded with the first-class and reputable houses, whose managers are ceaselessly striving to entertain and elevate their patrons. Music may be made one of the most inspiring and ennobling agencies, while the theatre holds a power for the education and elevation of the masses possessed by few other popular agencies, for it appeals simultaneously to the eye, the ear, and the heart of the people. It possesses the power of educating while it entertains, it may be made to elevate while it amuses. I am profoundly convinced that Victor Hugo was right when he claimed that the theatre held possibilities of the widest and most far-reaching character for the education and enlightenment of the masses; and when the leaders of moral thought and reform work come to realize this, they will call to their aid this most powerful agent for touching, thrilling, and swaying the heart of the people which a noble cause can summon. But while the possibilities for good possessed by the theatre are well-nigh inestimable, its capacity for evil is no less marked. In many of our large cities to-day low theatres and concert-halls, masquerading under the robes of respectability, are feeding all that is vilest and most repulsive in life. In these places in Chicago there are nightly enacted practically above board the same revolting scenes which marked the lowest depths of human debasement in the day of Rome’s greatest depravity. To feed the rum-inflamed lusts of men, the managers of these craters of bestiality and depravity have nightly exhibitions which mark the nadir to which abandoned womanhood can sink. No one can enter those dens of infamy without inhaling the contagion of moral death. The records of the commissioners who investigated the concert halls and low theatres sickens one much as the frightful revelation of Mr. Stead sickened while it appalled the civilized world. And let it be remembered that this unutterable social depravity767 is flourishing in a city richly jewelled, with magnificent temples dedicated to Deity; a city which contains the moral power to quickly banish her monstrous evils, if the conspiracy of silence be broken and the leaders of thought be brave and wise enough to boldly move in concert against the great forces which every thoughtful man and woman admit are, more than aught else, the source of social demoralization, crime, and human degradation. If the Church has any mission worthy of serious thought at this juncture of civilization, that mission is to overcome these evils, to cleanse society of these plague spots, and avert the spread of that moral degradation which, unless checked, will as surely sap away the life of our Republic as it has destroyed proud civilizations of older days.

THE POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.

When one turns from a view of the magnitude of these giant evils, fostered by our social conditions, to a contemplation of the great moral power resting in the hands of the Christian ministry, he may well ask whether the nineteenth century clergy of the palatial, stone, heaven-piercing, turreted temples are not materialists, on whose souls the life and teachings of their reputed Master work no greater spell than they did with the Sadducees of old, who regarded that great life, burning at white heat with moral enthusiasm and holy love, as a troublesome interloper, a disturber of religion and society worthy of death. With a few noble exceptions,—who are bravely battling for justice, for the poor, and for the light to be thrown into the dark places, our city clergymen merit arraignment at the bar of civilization for burying their talents, for trifling away the power which has been given them as standard bearers of the cause of human brotherhood and universal justice; for truckling to wealth and cringing before a cynical and supercilious element who, by an unhappy chance, wield some influence and succeed in making the superficial imagine they represent popular sentiment and culture. It is a crying shame to-day, that with the magnificent intellectual power and influence swayed by the great divines who preside over the wealthy temples of Boston, there should be such frightful wretchedness within cannon shot of their churches and the homes of their wealthy parishioners; or that with the brilliancy and power represented in the pulpit of Chicago, there should be such iniquity flourishing unrestrained as depicted in “Chicago’s Dark Places.” Whether the clergy can be aroused to recognize its duty and be touched by the world of wretchedness and sin sufficiently to dare to assail our present evil condition, is a question of vital importance, inasmuch as it wields a vast moral influence. Unto the clergy much has been given, and if its members believe the impressive declaration of their great Leader, from them much will be demanded. Their responsibility is as great as their apathy is marked; an indifference which768 springs from timidity or ignorance. If from timidity or fear that honesty of thought and a brave unmasking of evil conditions would cost them their positions, they have no right to bear aloft the banner of Him who rejected all life’s comforts, all honor of the rich and cultured, respect, power, and popularity; who, turning His back at once on ease and conventional thought, chose to live without a roof, save the azure dome, that by mingling among the poor, the sin-diseased and miserables of his people, He might ease their suffering, bring sunshine into their darkened and wretched abodes, and lift them from the sewers of animality into the pure health-giving and soul-inspiring atmosphere of true spirituality. If on the other hand (and I believe this is the chief reason), our clergymen are ignorant of the deep degradation and the dire want which is flourishing within cannon shot of their homes, they are treating with culpable contempt the life and teachings of Jesus, who constantly mingled with this class, never weary in seeking to aid them, and who taught so solemnly and impressively that His mission was “to seek and to save those who were lost, to preach the Gospel to the poor, to heal the broken hearted, to preach liberty to the captives, and opening the prison to them that are bound, and to comfort all that mourn.”

WHAT THE CLERGY MIGHT ACCOMPLISH.

If the clergymen of our great cities would carry out the example set by their Master, would refuse to take the words of those who are blinded and callous by conventional thought and the indifference which comes to sordid natures long accustomed to mingle with wretchedness, and themselves frequently visit the exiles of society in the cities where they dwell; if its members would for one day in each week visit the miserables of society, I doubt not that the pulpit would soon become a most powerful battery of moral power and light, which would, in a surprisingly short time, revolutionize our conditions, so that in the place of thousands of people, sandwiched in dens of indescribable squalor, we would see healthful apartment houses; instead of horrible drinking dens and rendezvous of degradation and debauchery, flourishing and rank as tropical forests, we would find temperance eating-houses; social club houses where every evening the poor man and his family could spend an hour, looking through the paper of the day, enjoying the illustrations and the intellectual worth of our periodical literature, or, if they chose, hear in other rooms lectures or charcoal talks dealing with practical pictures of life, of history, travels, social problems, and other themes of value, and where at a very moderate price healthful and nutritious food could be enjoyed. Well-supported industrial schools would also blossom where now only here and there we find a school struggling for existence and handicapped for want of means for its proper carrying on.

769

INDEX TO THE FOURTH VOLUME OF
The Arena.

• Æonian Punishment., 209.
• Allen. Rev. T. Ernest, Spencer’s Doctrine of Inconceivability., 94.
• Another View of Newman., 475.
• Armstrong. William H., Sunday and the World’s Fair., 730.
• Austrian Postal Banking System. The, 468.
• 
  Baxter. Sylvester, The Austrian Postal Banking System., 468.
• Bellamy. Rev. Francis, The Tyranny of all the People., 180.
• Better Part. The, 104.
• Bismarck in the German Parliament., 670.
• Bixby. Prof. James T.,
  • Doubters and Dogmatists., 683.
  • Evolution and Christianity., 55.
• Blavatsky. Mme., at Adyar., 579.
• Boughton, Prof. Willis, University Extension., 452.
• Bradsby. H. C., Leaderless Mobs., 570.
• Brook. The, 122.
• Buchanan. Prof. Jos. Rodes, Revolutionary Measures and Neglected Crimes., 77, 192.
• 
  Campbell. Helen, The Working Women of To-day., 329.
• Cancer Spots in Metropolitan Life. 760.
• Castelar. Emilio, Bismarck and the German Parliament., 670.
• Chambers. Julius, The Chivalry of the Press., 25.
• Chandler. Lucinda B., The Woman Movement., 704.
• Chivalry of the Press. The, 25.
• Conflict between Ancient and Modern Thought in the Presbyterian Church. The, 253.
• Conway. Moncure D., Madame Blavatsky at Adyar., 579.
• 
  Davis. C. Wood, Should the Nation Own the Railways?, 152, 273.
• DeBury. Mme. Blaze, The Unity of Germany., 257.
• Decade of Retrogression. A, 365.
• Dickinson. Prof. Mary L., Individuality in Education., 322.
• Divorce Colony. The Sioux Falls, 696.
• Doubters and the Dogmatists. The, 683.
• Dromgoole. Will Allen,
  • The Better Part., 104.
  • Old Hickory’s Ball., 373.
  • A Grain of Gold., 621.
  • The Heart of the Woods., 744.
• 
  Education. Individuality in, 322.
• Edwards. Amelia B., My Home Life., 299.
• Emancipation through Nationalism., 591.
• Epoch-marking Drama. An, 247.
• Era of Woman, The, 375.
• Evening at the Corner Grocery. An, 504.
• Evolution and Christianity., 55.
• Extrinsic Significance of Constitutional Government in Japan., 440.
• 
  Fashion’s Slaves., 401.
• Fawcett. Edgar,
  • Plutocracy and Snobbery in New York., 142.
  • A Paradise of Gamblers., 641.
• Flammarion. Camille, The Unknown., 10, 160.
• Flower. B. O.,
  • Society’s Exiles., 37.
  • Optimism Real and False., 125.
  • The Pessimistic Cast of Modern Thought., 127.
  • An Epoch-marking Drama., 247.
  • The Present Revolution in Theological Thought., 249.
  • 770The Conflict between Ancient and Modern Thought in the Presbyterian Church., 253.
  • The Era of Woman., 382.
  • Fashion’s Slaves., 401.
  • Religious Intolerance To-day., 633.
  • Social Conditions under Louis XV., 635.
  • Pharisaism in Public Life., 754.
  • Cancer Spots in Metropolitan Life., 760.
  • The Saloon., 763.
  • Hot-beds of Social Pollution., 766.
  • The Power and Responsibility of the Christian Ministry., 767.
  • What the Clergy Might Accomplish., 768.
• French Republic. Some Weak Spots in, 561.
• 
  Gærtner. Dr. Frederick, The Microscope., 615.
• Garland. Hamlin,
  • A Prairie Heroine., 223.
  • An Evening at the Corner Grocery., 504.
  • Mr. and Mrs. James A. Herne., 543.
• Grain of Gold. A, 621.
• 
  Harben. Will N., He Came and Went Again., 494.
• Harvest and Laborers in the Psychical Field., 391.
• Hassell. R. B., The Independent Party and Money at Cost., 340.
• Hawthorne. Julian, The New Columbus., 1.
• Healing through the Mind., 530.
• Heart of the Woods. The, 744.
• He Came and Went Again., 494.
• Heiress of the Ridge. The, 114.
• Herne. Mr. and Mrs. James A., 543.
• Holmes. Oliver Wendell, 129.
• Hot-beds of Social Pollution., 766.
• 
  Independent Party and Money at Cost. The, 340.
• Individuality in Education., 322.
• Inter-Migration., 487.
• Irrigation Problem in the Northwest. The, 69.
• 
  Leaderless Mobs., 570.
• Lodge. Hon. Henry Cabot, Protection or Free Trade, Which?, 652.
• Lorimer. Rev. Geo. C., The Newer Heresies., 385.
• Lowell. James Russell, 513.
• 
  Madame Blavatsky at Adyar., 579.
• Manley. Rev. W. E., Æonian Punishment., 209.
• Martyn. Rev. Carlos D., Un-American Tendencies., 431.
• McCrackan. W. D., The Swiss and American Constitutions., 172.
• Microscope. The, 615.
• Myers. Frederic W. H., Harvest and Laborers in the Psychical Field., 391.
• My Home Life., 299.
• 
  Nationalism. Emancipation through, 591.
• Nationalism. The Tyranny of, 311.
• Negro Question. The, 219.
• New Columbus. The, 1.
• Newer Heresies. The, 385.
• Newman. Another View of, 475.
• New Testament Symbolisms., 712.
• Nirvana. Turning toward, 736.
• 
  Oishi. Kuma, Extrinsic Significance of Constitutional Government in Japan., 440.
• Old Hickory’s Ball., 373.
• Optimism. Real and False, 125.
• O Thou Who Sighest for a Broader Field., 503.
• 
  Paradise of Gamblers. A, 641.
• Pattee. Chas. H., Recollections of Old Play-Bills., 604.
• Pessimistic Cast of Modern Thought. The, 127.
• Pharisaism in Public Life., 754.
• Pierce. Edwin, True Politics for Prohibition and Labor., 723.
• Plutocracy and Snobbery in New York., 142.
• Pope Leo on Labor., 459.
• Power and Responsibility of the Christian Ministry. The, 767.
• Prairie Heroine. A, 223.
• Present Revolution in Theological Thought. The, 249.
• Preston. Thomas B., Pope Leo on Labor., 459.
• 771Prohibition and Labor. True Politics for, 723.
• Protection or Free Trade, Which?, 652.
• Psychic Experiences, 353.
• 
  Realf. James, Jr.,
  • The Irrigation Problem in the Northwest., 69.
  • The Sioux Falls Divorce Colony., 696.
• Recollections of Old Play-Bills., 604.
• Religious Intolerance To-day., 633.
• Revolutionary Measures and Neglected Crimes., 77, 192.
• Ross. E. A., Turning toward Nirvana., 736.
• 
  Saloon. The, 763.
• Salter. William M., Another View of Newman., 475.
• Savage. Philip H., The Brook., 122.
• Savage. Rev. Minot J., The Tyranny of Nationalism., 311.
• Scarborough. Prof. W. S., The Negro Question., 219.
• Schindler. Rabbi Solomon, Inter-Migration., 487.
• Should the Nation Own the Railways?, 152, 273.
• Sioux Falls Divorce Colony. The, 696.
• Social Conditions under Louis XV., 635.
• Society’s Exiles., 37.
• Some Weak Spots in the French Republic., 561.
• Spencer’s Doctrine of Inconceivability., 94.
• Stanton. Elizabeth Cady, Where Must Lasting Progress Begin?, 293.
• Stanton. Theodore, Some Weak Spots in the French Republic., 561.
• Stewart. George,
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, 129.
  • James Russell Lowell., 513.
• Sunday and the World’s Fair., 730.
• Swiss and American Constitutions. The, 172.
• 
  True Politics for Prohibition and Labor., 723.
• Turning toward Nirvana., 736.
• Tyranny of All the People. The, 180.
• Tyranny of Nationalism. The, 311.
• 
  Un-American Tendencies., 431.
• Underwood. Sara A., Psychic Experiences., 353.
• Unity of Germany. The, 257.
• University Extension., 452.
• Unknown. The, 10, 160.
• 
  Wait. Prof. Sheridan P., New Testament Symbolisms., 712.
• Wakeman, Thaddeus B., Emancipation by Nationalism., 591.
• What the Clergy Might Accomplish., 768.
• Where Must Lasting Progress Begin?, 293.
• Wischnewetzky. Florence Kelley, A Decade of Retrogression., 365.
• Wolcott. Julia Anna, O Thou Who Sighest for a Broader Field., 503.
• Woman Movement. The, 704.
• Wood. Henry, Healing through the Mind., 530.
• Working Women of To-day. The, 329.
• World’s Fair. Sunday and the, 730.

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