UNCLE • • SAM 
 
 AND 
 
 OLD • WOFkLD 
 CONQUERORS 
 
 BY- WM -NORMAN 
 GUTHPvIE 
 
 BRENTANO'S 
 MANHATTAN 
 NEW YORK 
 19 15 
 
Class 
 
 
 'j^ 
 
 ,MMlLi 
 
 Book 
 
 Copyright N". 
 
 COPXRIGHT DEPOSm 
 
UNCLE SAM AND OLD WORLD CONQUERORS 
 
UNCLE SAM 
 
 AND 
 
 OLD WORLD CONQUERORS 
 
 being the Seventh Division 
 
 OF 
 
 UNCLE SAM, A SATIRICAL PRELUDE 
 
 BY 
 
 William Norman Guthrie 
 
 BRENTANO'S 
 MANHATTAN, NEW YORK 
 
 1915 
 
4*> 
 
 /<?*'o: 
 
 Copyright 1915 
 
 By Wm. Nobmak Outhrib 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 NaW YORK 
 SHBBWOOD PBB88 
 
 MAR 23 1916 
 
 C1.A427359 
 
Hebication 
 
 SCo fter tdljam 3 met at **g>etoanee" 
 
 janli hJitft tDftom 3 fjatie fareb eber sfince— 
 jnayble QKHeje^t anb J'ar WBt^t, ^utf) anb €a£(t- 
 QSHttfiout tofiom ttits( tiab not been conteibeb, 
 
 ?[SHtiateber merit tfite toorfc of imagination map tiabe 
 JBelongsi of rigfjt, 
 jKnb i£i gratefuUp as^critieb. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 I. 
 
 TO publish the fragment of a work of imagination would seem 
 to argue haste and fear. Why not wait until the work is a 
 completed whole before appearing in print? What is good in 
 literature can afford to abide its time. It does not depend upon 
 the verdict of the contemporary if the author is truly consecrated, 
 that is, urges no personal demand. Why should he not selflessly 
 devote his life to his ideal even at the risk of appealing post- 
 humously to posterity ? 
 
 All such considerations have been conscientiously weighed and 
 set aside as irrelevant. This work is the fruit of a life-long pas- 
 sion, of an enthusiasm more and more cruelly and clearly compell- 
 ing to definite and often most uncongenial utterance. 
 
 What is intended to constitute a challenge to one's people 
 should not be the product of any individual as such. What is post- 
 humously published is fatally finished beyond further shaping by 
 the author^s mind. It should have the living co-operation of the 
 contemporary. A national ideal should be therefore projected in 
 an unconscious and anonymous co-mentation. The thought and 
 the feeling of the many individuals, that is to say, should be caught 
 up in a larger social interest, which utters the folk-genius in im- 
 perative forms. Some artist should then appear to unify and con- 
 trol the spiritual material thus perfected. By this process more or 
 less have been actually fashioned the world's greatest masterpieces. 
 
 But to-day we are aU, everywhere, particularly in our country, 
 the victims of rapid transit, and of the swift means of indiscriminate 
 communication. The individual, the group, the mass are not 
 granted the leisure and freedom from self-conscious criticism. The 
 reporter, the professional writer, the publicist bring all to the light, 
 good and bad, fair and foul — which from some points of view 
 may constitute a blessing, but for the slow maturing of deep and 
 passionate convictions, without sophisticated supervision or selfish 
 consideration of expediency, must seem to the idealist most unfor- 
 
FOEEWORD 
 
 tunate. How shall a civilized Dew nation to-day arrive at an im- 
 perative consciousness of peculiar destiny, have reverence for its 
 own gradually revealing genius, interrogate the holy oracles of 
 historic life, become aware of the mystical tendencies below the 
 level of political will and cheap advantage? 
 
 Our thinking and feeling then, as individuals and as a people, 
 carried on shamelessly in the open, violates the laws of the spirit, 
 and excludes a priori the Muses. Silent, brooding, meditation, 
 evocation, transfiguration are not possible to a people whose glass 
 houses have no roofs, whose temples are marts, whose groves are 
 show places, whose private retreats are penetrated by the X-ray. 
 
 An author who would fain serve his people, by transmitting to 
 them a suggestion of some holy vision, which he believes is forced 
 upon him, must attempt to produce artificially as best he can the 
 conditions for such prophetic service. He must withdraw and medi- 
 tate and wait, and wrestle with the angel, and refuse any blessing 
 in the dawn, save the revelation of the wrestler's divine name and 
 character. 
 
 He must, after due preparation, having studied the past of his 
 people, having got so his running start as it were, abandon him- 
 self in the leap forward into the future, at the cost of any ap- 
 parent folly or fanatical absurdity. He must also be in constant 
 relation with contemporary movements, yet somehow discriminate 
 between the significant and insignificant. He must, however, in 
 addition, after having imposed upon himself the required technic, 
 obtain so far as possible the co-operation of those who like himself 
 creatively cherish national ideals, in order that by their expres- 
 sions of agreement and difference he may correct what is merely 
 idiosyncratic in his vision or method of work, in order that their 
 final product may in some measure express the people, and not some 
 special set, some class, some peculiar cult, some freakish individual 
 reaction to the trend of the times. 
 
 It is not claimed that artificial methods of reproducing the con- 
 ditions, out of which spontaneously arose inspired prophecy, will 
 secure the desired result : a contemporary utterance, that is to say, 
 of the best in a people. The individual who is moved to answer 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 such a social call may turn out to be inadequate as man or as talent. 
 The social-psychological mode of procedure adopted may at first 
 prove impractical, erroneous. Nevertheless, it will have been well 
 that some individual, however unsuited to the task, should have 
 undergone its hazard, that the method, however, blundering, should 
 have been applied. There is nothing succeeds better than success 
 except a great failure, or a failure in a great effort. Success is 
 most of the time due to the undue easiness of the work undertaken, 
 the relative lowness of the aim. He who attempts what is truly 
 worth while and fails, elicits, provokes and challenges. Others 
 will attain for the very reason that he dared and failed. 
 
 It is not by conceit that the impossible is undertaken, for con- 
 ceit invariably selects, in its prudent self-regard, the line of least 
 resistance. Egomania may attempt the impossible, yet surely fails, 
 from a lack of that social co-ordination which only modesty se- 
 cures. If there is to be success to-day for genuine prophecy, or 
 convinced imaginative preaching to the contemporary, it must 
 venture to be independent, to be certain of its call and com- 
 mission, to be modest, to appeal for co-operation in the matter of 
 definition and artistic expression of common ideas and ideals; to 
 be, in a word, strictly democratic, self-subordinating, and yet in- 
 sistent in essential faith and demonic will. 
 
 Because the task then is so difficult, the chances of failure so 
 many and various, the probable disaster so ridiculous, the reader 
 of this book may be sure of the sincerity of the present writer. 
 For many years he has lent himself to the enthusiasm that pos- 
 sessed him. He has bought his leisure for this, his most real and 
 inevitable work, by other work socially useful, which was a by- 
 product of the same, or in the nature of preparatory discipline. He 
 has resolved now, after much searching of heart, to take the public 
 completely into his confidence, and he trusts that the response of 
 the reader will be sufficiently articulate and vital to serve as a 
 hand-rail, so to say, on the sheer verges of the abysses gaping either 
 side of his forward path to a national work. 
 
 This publication is but a section of a preliminary part. It 
 might be called the keystone of the arch through which we propose 
 
FOREWOED 
 
 to enter a greater structure. Its appearance is an evidence of a de- 
 sire for criticism, and the expression of sympathy if such be possi- 
 ble. It is in itself, while a fragment, complete, provided the gen- 
 eral purpose of the entire work be understood, that is, provided the 
 correct point of view be taken, demanded by the perspective of the 
 picture. Omitting then all personal matter, a brief statement will 
 be made which should permit the "gentle or ungentle reader'' to 
 approve or censure discreetly, and therefore profitably, unto the 
 common good. 
 
 II. 
 
 The United States are singular among the nations in that they 
 started adult. They never were an infant nation. The people were 
 self-conscious from the beginning; protected by two oceans, they 
 fancied themselves irresponsible to the claims of the larger world. 
 The enormous extent of our country made the attainment of a def- 
 inite common ideal all but impossible, as shown most clearly in our 
 prolonged and uncertain revolutionary struggle and our vacillatory 
 efforts to set up a general government. During the last half cen- 
 tury, the Atlantic as a barrier has well-nigh disappeared, and the 
 northern Atlantic states find themselves more or less reduced un- 
 awares to a colonial attitude of admiration and imitation, that is of 
 spiritual dependence. The Pacific Ocean also has shrunk until the 
 Orient all but threatens our sense of security, of ability to main- 
 tain in the future our own civilization true to its genius. In 
 the great region between the extremes, we are governed more by a 
 resentment against old-world leadership, than by a clear conscious- 
 ness of our own aspirations. The nation has furthermore to turn 
 an inherited curse into a blessing — almost ten per cent, of the 
 population being of a different and still dependent race, so that a 
 very large section of the country has hardly leisure to think and 
 feel independently of one obsessing problem. The belief to-day in 
 progressive democracy is threatened by the cult of efficiency, which, 
 recognizing the need of discipline, pushes ajar the door for 
 exploitation and tyranny. Liberty unto self-government by the best 
 in us, has been misinterpreted to large masses of incoming popula- 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 tion as material self-indulgeiice and political license. Clearly if 
 this swift analysis of our peculiar situation be correct, what we 
 need is to set going a myth which shall startle or woo us to such 
 self-consciousness and self-respect as will save us from unthink- 
 ing idiotic self-adulation or from a just as vitiating despondency 
 and despair. A people that asks any and every stranger on the 
 gang plank for his opinion of a great country and its institutions, 
 sorely needs to have its own image projected on a vast scale. 
 Spooks are invulnerable and do not resent brickbats or rotten 
 eggs. One can always refuse to admit any likeness in the portrait, 
 or deny that it is a work of art, and cast the unlucky dauber 
 into outer darkness. 
 
 Now a mnh, that shall bring a people to seK-consciousness, 
 must be native, popular; not arbitrary, individuaKstically con- 
 ceived. The present writer was, therefore, compelled to accept as 
 the hero of his myth 'TJncle Sam,^' and adopt as the destination 
 of his progress in the spirit, through prosperity and adversity, the 
 figure of "Brother Jonathan." How shall Uncle Sam, the pro- 
 jection of all that is vital but vulgar in us as a people, the common 
 denominator of us all, be transfigured into what is selfless and sub- 
 lime, and immortally alluring? When it flashed across the mind 
 of the author, the suggestion came not abstract but concrete. He 
 beheld him colossal, reaching to the very zenith, against the back- 
 ground of our banner, the striated rainbows of eternal stone, the 
 Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Uncle Sam had been driven 
 from the Atlantic coast, in some time that is not yet, thank God, 
 by hordes of unassimilated rebellious peoples. They had been 
 robbed of their old-world gods, their folk loyalties and rituals of 
 life, but they had been given instead no God other or better than 
 their belly, and they had come to conceive of Uncle Sam, the vital 
 and vulgar incarnation of a national tradition imposed on them 
 by geographic accident, as no longer necessary, and had driven, 
 him, indeed, to the last ditch, where they dared not pursue him 
 only for lack of knowledge of the precipitous trails. Uncle Sam, 
 as one may guess, is a self-complacent grass widower. The wife of 
 his youth, the Goddess of Liberty, could, we gather, as he grew in 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 insolent prosperity, endure him no longer. She had borne him 
 five daughters, the sections of the country, by name in the myth. 
 Jessamine Magnolia, Priscilla, Hope or Hooplah for short, Minna 
 or Minnehaha, and Goldibrass. Uncle Sam has no son ; that is, no 
 single national ideal. At least, he thinks he has none, though the 
 Goddess of Liberty has borne him one in absence, of whom he 
 wots not yet, and for whom he yearns with almost pathetic earnest- 
 ness. The canyon, the last ditch, the Grand Canyon, is a strange 
 place where anyone is subject, on the least excuse, to immediate 
 hallucination. Thoughts there are things in a very shocking sense, 
 that appear instantaneously and presume to force themselves on 
 the reckless evoker's attention. Any idea, therefore, which Uncle 
 Sam may hit upon and momentarily fancy, projects itself for 
 dramatic inspection in phantasmal beauty or absurdity. Uncle Sam 
 has sought refuge in the last ditch, the great crack of the earth^s 
 cooling crust, actuated by a desperate hope or rather life preserva- 
 tive instinct. He would fain appeal to the devil. Now the devil 
 turns out to be Pan, not Satan ; and Pan turns out to be the revela- 
 tion of God as external will, to whom Uncle Sam cannot yield him- 
 self, no matter how great his present need. Even a good God, who 
 commands, is after all a tyrant, and Uncle Sam rightly refuses to be 
 drawn by any but the bands of love. The African, the Indian and 
 the Jew, his great problems, turn out to be each in a peculiar way of 
 providential service. The son of Uncle Sam manifests himself to 
 his father, in the direct last moment, as a Balder the Beautiful, 
 as a David to Jonathan, or rather as the Christ-to-be, the divine 
 ideal incarnate in a higher, yet natural, man. 
 
 These are the general terms of a popular myth, and appeared 
 to the author suddenly after year-long quest, and seemed to him in- 
 evitably inherent in the situation, rather than the products of his- 
 own temperament or personal will. The action of the myth fell 
 spontaneously into three parts, during the first of which Uncle Sam 
 was under the spiritual dominion of that spirit which historically 
 uttered itself most distinctly in Andrew Jackson, the spread eagle 
 patriotism, the big stick, supposedly hickory, yet suspected of be- 
 ing papier mache. In the second division. Uncle Sam realizes 
 
FOKEWOKD 
 
 the pathetically humorous mood of perhaps his deepest imculti- 
 vated nature, revealed historically in Abraham Lincoln. Under the 
 spell of one who seems fain to take the place of the Goddess of 
 Liberty in Uncle Sam^s affection (who is nicknamed Circe, and 
 Delilah, and by any other name would be as fair and as dangerous), 
 he falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep, so that he lies at the mercy 
 of his enemies. His daughters have deserted him for grotesque bride- 
 grooms in the same class as the whale of Jonah, or the cathedral 
 gargoyle. Only Sambo Hilarious, the negro, kneels terror-stricken 
 yet loyal at his head, and brings Brer Rabbit into action, the old 
 mythic spirit of the moon, to drive away the narrowing ring of the 
 savage woK pack. In the third part Uncle Sam awakes to find him- 
 self helpless, encircled by his human enemies, unwilling to accept the 
 terms of Pan who alone might help, and finally brought by his son, 
 the national ideal revealed to him in his true relation, to accept 
 adoption by Hiawatha, and initiation into the aboriginal nature-re- 
 ligion, whereby he realizes the last glorious change into that char^ 
 acter, which was historically realized in the individual Greorge Wash- 
 ington. His enemies hail him now as Brother Jonathan, and the 
 curtain drops. 
 
 In such terms as these, on such a scale, naif, impertinent, has the 
 myth of Uncle Sam revealed itself to the author. The mode of ex- 
 pression which it seemed to necessitate should be naif, fantastic, gro- 
 tesque, escaping the fall into the ridiculous by not attempting to 
 scale the heights of the sublime. If the dignity and vastness of the 
 conception cannot vindicate themselves, no rhetoric surely will se- 
 cure for them respect. A huge spectacle, a pageant realized in 
 writing, that shall vary from folk song and doggerel to oration and 
 epigram or lyric, passing through all varieties of dialogue, sug- 
 gested itself imperatively as the only adequate means of expression. 
 Accentual verse and poetic prose must mingle. The spirit of 
 Americanism must be absorbed, bygone points of view, expressed in 
 historic phrases, must jostle racy and latter-day idioms and in- 
 solent imaginative slang, the paradox must startle or aggravate, 
 the telescope figure must shock, and suggest the unspoken, ay, the 
 unspeakable. Plagiarism cannot be thought of. Indeed the in- 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 dividual author must at once resign himself to the pressing stream 
 of the myth, and forego fastidiousness and vanity, making no 
 claim whatever to individual originality. 
 
 After having proceeded for some years on these general prin- 
 ciples, the writer suspected the generic kinship of his undertaking 
 to the boyish lie of Aristophanes, to the Gargantuan high spirits 
 of Rabelais. Such affinities, if real, are interesting, and if re- 
 alized would constitute no rebuke. The present is child of the 
 past, and the future must inevitably be projected in the guise of 
 experience. 
 
 III. 
 
 After the scenario of the whole work had been developed in the 
 course of three years, and the author approached the stage of the 
 writer, he discovered the necessity of prefacing his pageant with a 
 satiric prelude, which should explain how there came to be an 
 TJncle Sam at all, and what he is, clearly to criticise the past, from 
 the instinctive point of view of the American, approving his vital 
 self-confidence, yet rebuking his ignorance and insolence. This 
 satirical prelude shaped itself in the following fashion : 
 
 I. (Episode) The Sam family in the Grand Canyon. 
 
 II. (Interlude) A great symbolic storm in the Canyon, and 
 the Teutonic element in our nature manifested by the God Thor 
 and the Christmas tree (the first unforeseen experience of Uncle 
 Sam in spectacular revelatory hallucination). 
 
 III. (Episode) The raising of Benjamin Franklin, the teach- 
 er of Uncle Sam's youth, and the problem of his integration. The 
 resolve to refer the whole matter to a committee of great Ameri- 
 cans, necessarily therefore dead. ^'Uncle Bemif' retires to "King- 
 dom Come,'' thence to summon the right membership for the com- 
 mittee, and suggests that meanwhile Uncle Sam "study history" ! 
 
 IV. (Interlude) Uncle Sam, desiring to be amused, summons 
 the "great king who ate grass," and the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar 
 appears, with whom Uncle Sam impertinently hobnobs. The God- 
 
FOEEWORD 
 
 dess Ishtar also then appears, who breaks into hell and out again to 
 accomplish her ladylike purpose. All which serves to make clear 
 to Uncle Sam that law and piety and feminism, like many other 
 modem things, pre-existed his own advent. 
 
 V. (Episode) Colonial history is reviewed in significant per- 
 sons who are rejected by Uncle Sam as unsuitable candidates for 
 his committee, since they were but transient phases of his national 
 beginning. 
 
 VI. (Interlude) During the second absence of ^TJncle Ben- 
 ny,^^ who is now in quest of more national figures, he interviews the 
 builder of the Great Pyramid, the King Khafra, whose diorite 
 statue is one of the treasures of the Louvre, and sees the king- 
 god anticipate apotheosis, to crown a system of aristocratic pater- 
 nalism. Uncle Sam indignantly drives out the tyrant, summoning 
 against him the God of the Demos, of the ITile-mud, Osiris. 
 
 VII. (Episode) Unci© Sam is brought to some degree of self- 
 knowledge, finally accepts and instructs his committee, and excited- 
 ly witnesses the conflict between the modern expression of efficient 
 'Hjenevolent despotism,^' Bismarck, and George Washington, the 
 steadfast believer in the unmanifest genius of the people, the 
 elicitor of individual initiative by the progressive experience of 
 self-government. 
 
 VIII. (Interlude) The night being far spent. Uncle Sam in 
 the dawn witnesses the fervent sun worship of the prophet 
 Zarathustra. To his amazement, he finds the best of his own old- 
 fashioned Puritanism anticipated, and surpassed in ancient Iran, 
 and the strange doctrine of the redemption of the devil explains to 
 him much of his apparently nonsensical optimism. The demands 
 of Zarathustra, however, are so austere, that he refuses to be con- 
 verted to the doctrine of the ancient Gathas. 
 
 IX. (Episode) As he is about to call out the family from the 
 cave in which they have sought shelter for the night. Uncle Sam 
 is visited by three strange inspired geniuses : Blake, Beethoven and 
 Turner, each of whom proposes to educate him aesthetically, by 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 hie own peculiar vision of the Grand Canyon. Uncle Sam refuses 
 to surrender what he deems his original view for that of any old- 
 world genius, however startling and attractive. 
 
 X. (Postlude) Uncle Sam avenges himself on Blake, Bee- 
 thoven and Turner, showing them his original vision of the 
 Grand Canyon, the City of the three "B's,'' — Bouncing, Beautiful 
 and Beatific, his new Jerusalem, not come down from heaven, but 
 which he has erected to suit himself as he believes out of novel ma- 
 terials. From the manholes in Uncle Sam's great, preposterous, 
 supposedly original New Jerusalem swarm the sons of Jacob, the 
 supplanter, who make good their prior claim to it as their very 
 own, and propose to retain Uncle Sam as the occupant with his 
 family of the porter's lodge. Uncle Sam, who insists that whenever 
 he says "it ain't, it ain't," stamps his foot in indignation, and finds 
 himself, presto change, back at the mouth of the cave. Sambo 
 Hilarious ringing the triangle for breakfast. He is a sadder and a 
 wiser national genius, realizing that much, which he supposed 
 to be original and self -expressive, is merely an unconscious tradition 
 from other ages, and borrowing from an alien race, which he can- 
 not assimilate by subjecting his inner life to their arrogant 
 dominion. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Such is the bare outline of the Satirical Prelude which lies com- 
 pleted in manuscript before the author. The seventh section of the 
 prelude, being peculiarly timely, lies now printed before the reader, 
 and challenges him, asking for no praise or blame save such as 
 shall sincerely get expression after the reader has subjected him- 
 self to such spell as the idea of the book may have for him, and may 
 manage to be transmitted through the art thereof and style. The 
 author cannot hope to please all ; perhaps not even to please many. 
 He may unintentionally insult some. He has done his best so far, 
 and suggests that the reader do now his best, so as to render com- 
 posite authorship perhaps possible even in these self-conscious times 
 of ours in America. 
 
POEEWORD 
 
 To endite satire freely, nay, it would seem insolently, directed 
 against one's country, though its government be conducted by dis- 
 cussion, lays any author open to charges of spiritual treason, from 
 any knave and coward, as well as from every conventionally loyal 
 patriot. Only he, however, who burns with a passion for as yet un- 
 realizable national ideals would run the risk of such inevitable 
 misrepresentation. Surely no honest reader of ^HJncle Sam and 
 Old World Conquerors'* will for one instant doubt the urgent and 
 ardent longing for greater phases of development in people and 
 nation, which have actuated and upheld, and now prompt and up- 
 hold the writer, through all very natural self-doubt, ay, and 
 through fears also of being an outcast in the eyes of his fellows. 
 He cannot but be confessed to labor, however mistakenly per- 
 chance, for the birth of a new and nobler patriotism. Truly not a 
 New England has been his conception, but a new Europe, or rather 
 a super-Europe, in which the "hyphen" will not be anathema, only 
 because all and sundry shall, in and through their encouraged 
 variety and idiosyncrasy, cherish one common transcendent politi- 
 cal faith and social hope. 
 
 William Noeman Guthrie. 
 
Analytic Table of Contents for 
 
 UNCLE SAM AND OLD WORLD CONQUERORS 
 
 Being the Seventli Dmsion of 
 
 ^'UNCLE SAM, A SATIRICAL PRELUDE" 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Uncle Sam and His Polyglot Kettle 3^ 
 
 II. His Bbag Song and His Incantation 23- 
 
 III. His Reading of His Nine Doubles 39^ 
 
 IV. His Shadow and His Thbee Yet Invisible Phantom Selves 55 
 
 V. The Final Selection of the Ck)MMnTEE of Pacification. . . 71 
 
 VI. A Nightmare Vision of Old World Conquerors 91 
 
 VII. Uncle Sam's Parting Instructions to His Committee 101 
 
 VIII. The Muse of History, Incognito, and Her Present Day 
 
 Protagonist 119 
 
 IX. Bite-the-Marrow and the Violated Constitution: Scene I. 
 
 of the Bismarck Puppet Show 131 
 
 X. The "Doctored" Telegram, or Military Necessity: Scene 
 
 II. OF THE Bismarck Puppet Show 141 
 
 XI. Bite-the-Marrow and Our Bill of High Taxes: Scene III. 
 
 OF THE Bismarck Puppet Show 151 
 
 XII. Bite-the-Marrow ant) the Father of His Country: Scene 
 
 IV. OF THE Bismarck Puppet Show 161 
 
 XIII. Uncle Sam's Epilogue to the Puppet Show 173 
 
I. 
 
 UNCLE SAM AND HIS POLYGLOT KETTLE 
 
(Samho Hilarious brings a note to Uncle Sam) 
 Uncle Sam — ^What are you breaking-in for on this sacred 
 
 situation ? 
 Jessamine Magnolia — Hurrah, for the dark Osiris ! 
 GrOLDiBRASS — Whose physiognomy scared away King Khafrah! 
 Peiscilla — 'With the suggestion of miscegenation. 
 Sambo Hilarious — Who's King Khafrah, Boss? All I knoVs, I 
 
 was asked to bring this communication to your attention. 
 Jessamine Magnolia — ^A billet-doux from the Lady Circe! 
 
 Wants us all to settle down for the night. 
 Uncle Sam — Lucky dog to fetch such perfumed baggage. {Opens 
 
 and reads the letter) So, so. Bad omens in the sky? Tell her 
 
 I'm something of an astrologist myself. Whaf s that blazes 
 
 away yonder? 
 Jessamine Magnolia — Jupiter in Capricorn. 
 Peiscilla — The kneecap of the grand man, according to Sweden- 
 
 borg. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Good, that means I've got to stay up all night at 
 my devotions, and can't rock the baby. And what's that, Jessie ? 
 
 Jessamine Magnolia — ^Venus ! 
 
 Unclb Sam — Ha, sets very early. She's mighty nearly evening 
 star. And that true-blue and red broncho-buster? 
 
 Jessamine Magnolia— Arcturus, in the shepherd's horn. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Isn't batting an eye-lash, and keeping close look- 
 out, too, on the Big Dipper. Wants his share, I guess, of the 
 punch! Ha! Ha! That means, being interpreted, everybody 
 works but father, who's only got to provide the breakfast bacon. 
 
 Sambo Hilarious — But she can't drop, she says, a lid for one 
 wink, 'cause of all the spooky goings-on out on this here ve- 
 randa. . . . 
 
 Uncle Sam — Of our improvised royal residence, eh? It's cer- 
 tainly impressive. 
 
 3 
 
UNCLE SAM AND HIS 
 
 Sambo Hiulbious — And she ain^t 'special respectful in her 
 nomenclature, while she's about it. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Goldy, or Hoopie, or Haha, wont you return, to 
 please her, and convey a polite message to our Lady Dolorous 
 of Daffadowndilly, our Grande-Dame-sans-merci, as your re- 
 spective elders would like to call her? Tell her authoritatively 
 from me, sleep, all the sweeter when wooed and won under 
 difficulties, and is then the best leauty doctor — ^beats a mani- 
 cure for replenishing one's stock of feminine tact, and a pedi- 
 cure for shining up the loud and soft brass pedals of one's 
 understanding. 
 
 Whooplah- Whoop — We don't want to retire. Dad. 
 
 GoLDiBRASS — Not while such rare high jinks are on the tapis. 
 
 Minnehaha — History and religion sandwiched by vaudeville acts 
 beats a razzle dazzle. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Can't you be trusted alone with the missive. Sambo ? 
 
 Sambo Hilaeious — Sure Boss, I'll take the missal, but — - — 
 
 Peiscilla — ^If if s a missal some one ought to do the illuminations 
 
 on the margin. 
 Sambo Hilaeious — Just what I was about to prevaricate. 
 Peiscilla — Intimate! or Asseverate! 
 
 Sambo Hilarious — ^Exactly, Miss. I'll do. Boss, exactly as you 
 procrastinate. 
 
 GoLDiBEASS — ^He'U get something effective to its destination. 
 
 Uncle Sam — 'Cross between sky-rocket and gargoyle. And watch 
 him pour the whale-oil all over the war-zone waters, trust his 
 cautious wooUy pate for that. Now then, seriously, it's time to 
 court Morpheus. Here's a new jingle made up on purpose to 
 persuade you: Comment on a text of Uncle Benjamin. Never 
 heard it before? 
 
 "Early to bed and early to rise 
 Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"? 
 4 
 
POLYGLOT KETTLE 
 
 GoLDiBEASS — Because it works well with a man, are you sure it 
 
 would bring out the best 
 
 Uncle Sam — In a fair lady? Pat objection, and I kaew it was 
 coming, so I modernized the same for feminists: — 
 
 Betimes to your rock-ribbed downies 
 
 And pillows crammed with crushed granite, 
 Then the fairies will come and the brownies. 
 With Puck, who the joker and clown is. 
 To tickle your fancy and fan it! 
 
 Set a going a new world tomorrow 
 
 Half minstrel-show and half circus; 
 For in Dreamland Banks you can borrow 
 By mortgage on worry and sorrow 
 
 New courage to work it, and work us ! 
 
 GOLDIBRASS — Fine, Dad, superfine, but makes a poor lullaby. 
 
 Whooplah- Whoop — Honestly, haven't you given out enough blue 
 ribbons for one day at your spookshow? 
 
 Minnehaha — Can't you knock off for an hour or two, and at- 
 tend solely to us? 
 
 Uncle Sam— What am I doing but that? Who gets the fun, and 
 the education, and the polish? It's for your sakes I'm trying 
 to put Uncle Benny in a corner, so he can't blame us for any 
 failure in materializing on time a committee of amateur states- 
 men and diplomats — nature-geniuses all, and home-raised — to 
 represent us adequately. 
 
 Whooplah- Whoop — Is that so awfully difficult? 
 
 Uncle Sam — I should say so. It involves five several philosophic 
 operations : 
 
 First: You've got to know me. 
 
 Second : To know me, you've got to catch me and hold me for 
 scientific inspection. 
 
 Third : Then you've got, also, to tabulate the possible candi- 
 dates statistically: qualifications, pedigrees, etc., predilec- 
 
 5 
 
UNCLE SAM AND HIS 
 
 tions and prices, cost to raise and keep straight, and get 
 a "hunch" on fate. 
 
 Fourth: Next, ascertain what representation means as a 
 pure theory, and political principle. 
 
 Fifth: Last, what's worst of all, diagram it as a conscien- 
 tious practice 
 
 For eligible limber — ■ 
 Presidential timber! 
 
 So Uncle Benny's solemn injunction at parting was: ^^Study 
 history, Sam." And we've done it at a pretty smart rate ! But 
 brother Nebby, Sister Ishtar, they only showed us how the old 
 world's always ditto, however often and fast you bowled her 
 over and over around the invisible orbital ring of the great uni- 
 versal stellar circus. And the second gulp-it-quick Chautauqua 
 nickleodion course of know-it-all-ogy,- — it merely confirmed me 
 in my ingrained political prejudice: — autocracy, theocracy, 
 plutocracy — they may have the advantage in get-there-on-the- 
 job-never-mar-the-plot efficiency, when the right man's in office 
 — ^but they don't provide for a rainy day, nor life-and-accident- 
 insure you against a numbskull in the line of succession. Bet- 
 ter "the open door to all comers. 
 
 Butchers and plumbers, 
 Heroes and hummers." 
 
 and try out all applicants, civil service exams, and water cure for 
 the clams, and shams, and campaign slams, and auctioning off 
 the public plums to the highest bidder for the honor; and the 
 dirty jobs, as is fair, to the lowest. Give me democracy, the lean 
 and the fat — the foul and the fair, the miss-it by a mile or hair ; 
 and hit the bull's eye pat; — but see, it's duly doctored in any 
 event with high finance ! 
 
 Sing ^^flibberty gibberty," 
 Life, happiness, liberty — 
 To the old tune— "Yankee Doodle" : 
 
 6 
 
POLYGLOT KETTLE 
 
 Who collars the dollars, 
 And totes them and votes them, 
 He's entitled to the buncombe and the boodle. 
 
 But mind you, just for one short term, and look out for rotation 
 of office : a spin or two at the most of the roulette wheel of for- 
 tune : and so everybody's happy, busy chinning and chewing hope 
 — a la peppermint ! 
 
 A mnemonic; in the ^^nick" of time; Nicodemus — Demos- 
 demociacy ! 
 Now for the other bit of Uncle Benny's welcome if unsolicited 
 advice: "Explore your mind, Sam." I call that downright 
 interesting : — 
 
 Dust out the nooks 
 
 And spray the crannies. 
 Iron out the kinks 
 And putty up the chinks. 
 And with pick-axe and hook 
 
 Ascertain, if you can, where the soul of the man is ! 
 
 That's a fine operation when performed on a worthy subject. 
 {Uncle Sam assumes a meditative pose, and after a pause 
 proceeds) 
 
 My glory is one and various. 
 
 Multifarious, vicarious, 
 
 blessed kaleidoscope ! 
 Shake my folk, . . . 
 
 And any crazy assortment makes a masterpiece : 
 Heigh ho, freedom and symmetry! 
 
 And my so-called vice. 
 My municipal scandals? 
 TheVre the winged sandals 
 
 1 don in a trice. 
 On which I ascend 
 
 To hobnob with my friend — 
 *'The Top of the Morning !" 
 
 7 
 
UNCLE SAM AN^D HIS 
 
 How could anybody but I extract any sort of government ? How 
 else, hoaxing the masses of antagonistic, uninitiated, self-seeking 
 stocks of humanity — and interests — give us a possible govern- 
 ment? — any one given result — any policy? 
 
 So even my Bosses, you see, are not to be condemned with- 
 out a hearing! And lots of allowance for peculiar circum- 
 stances and conditions! Hurrah! 
 
 Anyway, you observe, here I am for good and all, unique. 
 
 Not to be duplicated or superseded. 
 
 So you gather, girls, I've come back from our tour-of-the- 
 world uncorrupted. Simon-pure American 
 
 And, girls, you may add: I've come back from that Egyp- 
 tian hocus-pocus with a great notion that was aMays in the 
 back of my head, vague and wonderful : — 
 
 HE was just a pretender ! 
 I am the real scion and ancestor in one ! 
 I am immortal, 
 I can't grow old. 
 
 I'm reborn different ever, yet the same, 
 Eeincarnate in every generation. 
 ' Every new mood's just a new note 
 Struck in the great gamut of ME. 
 
 And don't cast reflections on the harmonics and overtones 
 And the rumble of stained glass 
 To the middle of the fiddle. 
 Or the fairy flageolet, 
 
 Or the big tooters in the box of whistles ! 
 But I'm no egoist ! 
 It's for others I exist 
 That need me and don't know it. 
 And freed me. 
 Decreed me. 
 
 And yet would impede me, 
 Pm the poem myself and the poet. 
 
 8 
 
POLYGLOT KETTLE 
 
 And who^ll declare 
 
 Auto-diagnosis 
 
 Isn't fair? 
 
 In homeopathic doses — 
 
 Good for the skin, 
 
 And the liver, 
 
 The teeth, and the spleen, and the hair? 
 
 Now what have any one of you girls to object against iny little say ? 
 
 GoLDiBRASS — I should think you'd have to be strictly quarantined 
 against your family, for you wouldn't like it if they got the dis- 
 ease as badly. 
 
 Uncle Sam — 'What's that, you saucy chit? Is this the way you 
 help me to know myself — diametrically? intrinsically? 
 
 Whooplah- Whoop — I should suggest. Dad, take us for a mirror. 
 Aren't we all your proud progeny? And don't we between us 
 project and objectify your most secret hankering ? 
 
 Uncle Sam — Oh, of course, that's what children are for — with 
 ordinary folk: to give the parents a liberal education in seK- 
 knowledge; seeing themselves taken to pieces and put together 
 again! But that wouldn't do with me. You'd only make me 
 see myself as others see me; not as I AM. 
 
 Jessamine Magnolia — I should say, then. Father, look at your 
 historic collection of curios and masterpieces — the accimiulations 
 of a long and useful life. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Shucks ! Such things are forced on a fellow by the 
 accident of the excursion-ticket, the Baedeker routing, the 
 fire sale and bargain counter, and your hired adviser and 
 agent. They don't express your inmost, unrevealed, deeper-than- 
 self-scrutiny Essence and Reality? 
 
 Priscilla — I should point to your poets and prophets. They 
 might be duly consulted, Father. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Emerson, or Bret Harte? Poe, or Mark Twain? 
 Lanier, or Whitman? Which first? last? and all the time? 
 I should like to unearth one of them who dared at his peril to 
 
 9 
 
UNCLE SAM AND HIS 
 
 X-Eay me, and photo my Swedenborgian remains ! For all my 
 broil and bluster, I'm very cunning, and shy, and blushful, and 
 damn-you-if-you-do-it, and damn-you-if -you-don't ! I have re- 
 jected all "teachers that a new thing taught, and preachers that 
 a true thing prought/' Into the waste-basket I determined 
 long ago with all impudent seers, and overseers, and similar 
 vermin ! Of course I don't object to highbrow makers of books, 
 that invent an excuse for a noble acreage of half -morocco ! 
 
 Minnehaha — ^Well, Dad, you've always been a hero-worshipper! 
 Can't you get at yourself that way? 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Heroes ? Not on your life, child. Of course they're 
 sport once in a while. But no joss-house choke full of home- 
 made gods for me! Of course I like a merry-go-round at a 
 fair for the tots: the whole menagerie jigging to a brass band. 
 First a ride on the camel, then on the lion, then on the ostrich, 
 and always in the saddle, or riding the head, holding on to the 
 ears or horns or beak of the beast ; and always in motion ! But 
 such toys, they aren't up to straws for showing you which 
 way the wind blows ! Girls, I've got to study my Self 
 
 "Seriously, profoundly, essentially. 
 Guided and inspired providentially." 
 
 And if you were around, anyone of you, you might with a little 
 make-up and a hired costume fool my parental fondness into 
 identifying myself with you! Not until I've settled this one all- 
 important, critical-romantic, sovereignly practical question can 
 I have rest. And all the world's as much interested in it as my- 
 self. So my study isn't really egoistic; it's mystico-altruistic and 
 fistic-artistic, so to say. 
 
 Who am I? 
 
 Who in me is ME? 
 
 If I break up on inspection — on spectrum-analysis, or rather 
 spectral psycho-analysis — into spooks, which of them, pray, indi- 
 cates the cardinal sin? is the core of ME? If I'm multiple, 
 composite — what are the ingredients? what's the right propor- 
 
 10 
 
POLYGLOT KETTLE 
 
 tion ? the patented formula of the prescription, which Dr. Provi- 
 dence wants administered to his patient — Posterity? 
 
 GoLDiBRAss — Ha, ha, so you're a pill? 
 
 Whooplah- Whoop — A whole drug store ! 
 
 GoLDiBRAss — A case of erosion! 
 
 Jessamine Magnolia — ^An illicit still! 
 
 Minnehaha — ^And a dynamite mill .... 
 
 pRisciLLA — For a Fourth of July explosion! 
 
 Uncle Sam — Indeed, it's hugely preposterous. 
 
 And would make for Gargantuan laughter, 
 
 If Providence really didn't fashion and foster us 
 
 As we are — for some solemn august hereafter ! 
 
 I'm something Tragico-Comic, Lyric-Idyllic, grotesque, 
 
 With Bible on parlor-table, and ledger and 'phone on my desk. 
 
 First I pin-prick my spirit, squirt Brown-Sequard lymph 
 in it, 
 
 Thro' the spheres then I cake-walk, in tune with the infinite ! 
 
 Ta, ta, — I'm portentous, — 
 
 And who shall prevent us 
 
 High stepping as a giraffe with pink poke-bonnet over his 
 Sunday pompadour? 
 Thanks, girls. Shoofly. Much obliged for your two tickets, you 
 reverend seniors. And the rest haven't any? So much the 
 better! The sooner will I be thrown back for counsel on my 
 essential Self. (His daughters retire into the cave. Uncle Sam 
 opening the tickets and adjusting his glasses, scrutinizes, and 
 soliloquizes) Now let's propose the rival tickets to the people — 
 that's me. 
 
 Jessamine Magnolia? Well-known to be romantic, chival- 
 rous; adores picturesque war-heroes; strictly monogamous and 
 passionate. 
 
 There we have it: George Washington! ''StonewalV Jack- 
 son! Robert E. Lee! Whew! How am I going to make my ob- 
 jection mildly but effectively articulate? 
 
 11 
 
UXCLE SAM AND HIS 
 
 ''Stonewair'? great strategist — ^proud of him; British, Ger- 
 mans, French study him; but got on the wrong side; then, too, 
 a tinge of fanaticism and fatalism make a man dangerous. 
 Can^t tell what he'll be up to next, and you can't stop him at 
 it by fatherly advice. 
 
 Lee? Excellent character, brilliant soldier, virtuous, un- 
 selfish, loyal to his State, and a Unionist to boot; but hope- 
 lessly old-fashioned preference for the underdog ! And wouldn't 
 sell his name as a business advertisement after the surrender. 
 Can't have him. As good general and chivalrous gentleman, 
 he'd merely duplicate the father of his country. He'd con- 
 tribute no special element — except that of being on the side that 
 failed; and that argues a hopeless unfitness for my present 
 business. 
 
 As for the only George? He was no respecter of persons, or 
 parties; he'd overbear congress, and browbeat the nation; 
 wouldn't yield to pleas of unpopularity or opposition; and even 
 Franklin with all his tact couldn't manage him if they differed. 
 Of course he never was the lay-figure his grateful countrymen 
 have made out of him ; was real human when you caught him off 
 his guard; could roll on the ground with ear-splitting laughter 
 at a practical joke; could break loose like a volcano when a 
 sharper thought he would fool him at a horse trade; was a fine 
 judge of real estate, and had a passion for corner lots and the 
 unearned increment; could dance with a lady all night and 
 never know he really killed her ; liked to pray all by himself out 
 in the snow and sleet like a whole meeting-house afire; but all 
 the same, he was too wise, too patient, too proud, too tolerant, 
 too great, too undemocratic. Besides, he affected the grand 
 style ; had a fancy for coaches, royal levees, wouldn't shake hands 
 like a pump-handle, held his head too high; moreover, I never 
 liked that name, ''George/' anyhow ! And his body — ^had to lie 
 on his own estate. Lady Washington (mark that : widow Martha 
 — "Lady" !), she didn't want his remains to be a foundation stone 
 for the capitol, the constitution, and the machinery of govern- 
 
 12 
 
POLYGLOT KETTLE 
 
 ment. Women always know a thing or two, and I reckon she 
 knew best. 
 
 Can't use your ticket, Jessie, I'm sorry. Whafs more, ifs 
 too military for a civilian people. 
 
 Now lefs scrutinize Priscilla's proposition. She's the 
 scholar of the family; is thrifty and nifty, if a trifle drifty and 
 shifty these days. 
 
 Slier man! Farragut! Grant! Donnerwetter ! William Tecum- 
 seh ? I like the march to the sea, old fellow ; but then you were 
 a pretender: falsely credited with saying '^ar is hell!" when 
 you didn't actually say it, but only prove it was — to the enemy's 
 coxmtry. You're fine to see ride on a gilded horse with flying 
 mane and tail — proudly prancing over prostrate Georgia's pine- 
 bough — a winged lady-angel skimming the landscape ahead and 
 shooing the flies away with her palm-branch in front of you; 
 and your eye steady on the far horizon-sea beyond anybody's 
 reach but yours I You're fine sculpture, I admit, picturesque, 
 demonic; but not a very persuasive person. Then, too, the 
 grandsons of the Johnnie Eebs have unaccountable prejudices 
 against you ! 
 
 Farragut f Oh, well bom in Tennessee? but entered the 
 U. S. navy at very early age, which makes up for the acci- 
 dental birth? Still, who cares about slow little sleepy 
 Mobile? Now if you'd captured Boston, that might have been 
 of national interest. Who even recalls the Merrimac or the 
 Monitor in these days of submarines — except in the Old Do- 
 minion where time's stationary? Of course your love-letter to 
 your wife was fine, and makes my heart go pittipat still. A good 
 naval leader, I grant you; but a diplomat? I'd rather not risk 
 you, when I look you square in the eyes ! 
 
 Grant? his tomb is weU and good enough — fine situation 
 if you don't like the architecture; — and his initials were well 
 chosen by his parents; and he said: ^^Let us have peace"; and 
 he drank the right whiskey, to be sure, — the only sort worth 
 having, proved such by licking the other fellow ! At Appomattox 
 
 13 
 
UNCLE SAM AND HIS 
 
 he was big-hearted — a trifle too much so, to some folk's taste. 
 He wrote good memoirs against time, and died game. But he 
 didn't know how to choose, and watch his friends. He let him- 
 self be shabbily used. That reconstruction graft grew too rank, 
 by half. And the third-term-bug buzzed about a mighty deal too 
 realistically. Those things aren't good to think about in the rosy 
 dawn. Then that Civil War — now the records are all collected 
 and the printing bills over-paid — ^honestly, it looks not much 
 nearer to our times (but for the immortal pension lists) than 
 Nebuchadnezzar or Khafrah. There's nothing more coming out 
 of it tomorrow, and the day after. Can't even make it a safe 
 topic for conversation till you can get the heroes of both sides 
 into one single hall of fame. But by that time the issue between 
 them will be so dead it will have to be resurrected, and trans- 
 lated by specialists. 
 
 No, Prissy, sorry, I can't do it ; not even out of fondness for 
 the odor of sanctity emitted by the Jonathan Edwards brand 
 of brimstone, and the sweet balm of Gilead emanating from the 
 Emersonian flowery quagmire, and the Thoreauian brier-roses 
 cuddling among the lichen-grey boulders, and the haunting 
 shudders of witch-burning and soul-branding St. Nathaniel 
 chased up and down my youthful back. 
 
 Too bad, too bad, no election after all. 
 
 What's this I find stuck in my hat-band? Author — Anony- 
 mous? One of the most prolific I know. ''Suggestions for a 
 national anthem in answer to your advertisement to nromote the 
 mutual understanding of Yank and Johnnie Eeb" ? Let's inspect 
 the document. 
 
 Noble statesman, take due notice. 
 
 'Tis the unchanging law embedded 
 Deep in Nature: North is stalwart, 
 South incompetent, hot-headed. 
 
 So, in the North of Old New England 
 
 All are stout and sturdy freemen; 
 South, on the rock-ribbed coasts, they're fickle 
 
 Amorous molly-coddle seamen. 
 
 14 
 
POLYGLOT KETTLE 
 
 So, in the North of gay Kentucky 
 
 Men are staid and sober-minded; 
 But in the South of slow Ohio 
 
 Shiftless, hot and passion-blinded. 
 
 " 'Way down South'' in North Carolina 
 
 Folks of course are gracious, pliant; 
 North, up-state in South Carolina, 
 
 Calm, judicious, self-reliant. 
 
 Change the boundary lines, and presto 
 
 Change the people, — who await your 
 Legal action to exhibit 
 
 Divers brands of human nature! 
 
 Wonder who got this off ? Trying to make fun sacrilegiously 
 of my sectional prejudices! Must be Goldy. "\\rhat ho, who 
 goes there and breaks in upon my sacrosanct meditations ? 
 
 GoLDiBRASS — Why, Dad, they dared me to, so here goes! Fm 
 about to act a little charade for your private illumination, from 
 which you may derive a lesson incidentally in symbolic botany. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Where are your specimens? 
 
 GoLDiBRAss — Can't you see? My lap's choke full, like Ophelia's. 
 But my hair sha'n't float down the Suwanee river, and catch in 
 the tit-willows. Now mark. Dad, each particular exhibit as I 
 produce it, designate it, characterize it, — and don't fail to ob- 
 serve its sad, sad end ! Semper eadem, and E plurihus unum is 
 my double motto. But first I sing you the song of the census- 
 man to heat the uplift-pot ! ( Goldihrass sings) 
 
 From the tripod, lo, hangs my sooty witch-kettle, 
 
 With my broomstick I stir up the brew. 
 And I toss my ingredients, and watch them all settle 
 
 And soak and bubble and stew. 
 
 When, say, for a century the living and dead agree 
 
 On mutual admiration. 
 They develop a snobbery fast founded on pedigree — 
 
 For jobbery, and the robbery of the nation. 
 
 15 
 
UNCLE SAM AND HIS 
 
 From Washington to Jackson your stock's Anglo-Saxon ; 
 
 But before then and since then your diet, sir ? 
 Kind heaven, deliver us ! 'Twas almighty omniverous, 
 
 And you haven't the face to deny it, sir. 
 
 Of course we sling English (slang to ragtime by preference) 
 
 And for business reasons all want to ; 
 Bad linguists by statute won't change, — 'with due deference 
 
 To the beauties of Esperanto. 
 
 So the language is a fixture. But in morals and manners, 
 
 In aesthetic and political attitude ? 
 There's a change in the canned goods in spite of the canners, 
 
 Tho' the label's the same — out of gratitude ! 
 
 Perhaps you can't thrive on mere truth ; but at any rate 
 With a pinch you could season your fiction. 
 
 And promote, with your old, new progenitors to venerate : 
 Since additions don't imply contradiction ! 
 
 Expand so your patriotism, and diminish hypocrisy ; 
 
 Get the utmost variety in unity ; 
 And trust to the genius of universal democracy. 
 
 And keep open your door : Opportunity ! 
 
 Now, the pot's well heated with doggerel, we'll proceed to the 
 thick of the plot. Here's a shamrock, and a splinter of a his- 
 toric shillelah, and a chip of the blarney-stone — for Pat from the 
 Emerald Isle. And a hare-bell (bonny-blue-bell, he caUs it) — 
 and a touch-me-not thistle-down, flying to seed the country 
 side, for Andrew — ^not so merry as he might be — and unco' 
 canny for a' that ; and for Taffy — why I can't think of any suit- 
 able flower ; — say heartsease, or a yellow violet. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Whaf s all your flower-garden, child, going to do in 
 the soup? 
 
 GoLDiBRASs — Don't interrupt the cook. Taste her concoction with 
 a wooden spoon later, when it develops a scum ! Here's a mar- 
 guerite and a plain swamp-flag (they style fleur-de-lys, or de- 
 
 16 
 
POLYGLOT KETTLE 
 
 lirxe, don't they?) for France, and a little cosmetic and per- 
 fume smuggled in the latest hat. Here's a cornflower — sky- 
 blue — for German Gemiith, and head of purple cabbage guil- 
 lotined by Prussian efficiency, and twig of the Christmas spruce. 
 Here's a dandelion that will have to do duty for the Norse folk 
 and their cousins: flower — color of hair, and saw-teeth of the 
 leaf — for the grip they get on the grain of your felled tree of 
 knowledge when they're Ibsenish or Strindbergian. Then here's 
 a scarlet poppy and a yellow jessamine for Spain, and a pinch 
 of manana. And for Portugal ? A grapevine-tendril, and a red- 
 pepper will do ! And for Russia ? Why, here's a huge flowering 
 leek, and a spray of cedar. For Hungary ? A flycatcher ! For 
 Bohemia? A jack-in-the-pulpit ! And for Italy? A laurel- 
 leaf, a fig-leaf, a zucca, and a ripe olive. And for Greece? 
 The acanthus leaf, a narcissus and a clove of garlic! And for 
 the Balkan confederacy ? A particolored dahlia ! Or, if you like 
 the details, a larkspur for Latin Roumania ; a snapdragon for the 
 Serb, a chickweed for Montenegro, Johnnie-jump-ups for the 
 bully Bulgar! Belgium? She's a peony — passee. Holland's a 
 cowslip, and a rollypoUy Edam cheese. And the juniper ? Guess 
 who it's for. "Oh, Mother dear, Jerusalem !" If s for Jacob, the 
 supplanter, and his swarming progeny. 
 
 Now can you think of the mess to which we'll treat Esau? 
 No vulgar pottage this time! And all are going to be boiled 
 down in one liquor, and issue as one live golden-rod, see it? 
 Isn't it a sceptre to be proud of ? and a hundred and fifty-seven 
 varieties of it at that, all over the land ! 
 
 But hark! There's objection raised to its sovereignty. The 
 pollen, some specialists declare, encourages hay fever ! So, to be 
 on the safe side, war on the golden-rod ! Exterminate it like the 
 Bubonic rat ! And that's an allegory, too. Peruse, sir, now your 
 directories and your bluebooks, and your who's-whos, and all 
 your social Bibles. Aren't all the contents Simon-pure, true-to- 
 type, blue-blooded ancestral style ? 
 
 17 
 
UNCLE SAM AND HIS 
 
 Did you slap, sir, a tax on 
 The pure Anglo-Saxon 
 
 That he hides his top-knot so shyly? 
 Up, and sing him my ballad 
 Of the census-man's salad; 
 
 With a qnery then honor him highly : — 
 "Which? The sunny, or the dewy side 
 Would you choose of race-suicide?" 
 While you wink at the coroner slyly! 
 
 Ah, what have you been fed on, Dad, seven days of the week the 
 year around? And where's the thoroughbred committee to rep- 
 resent your Hash, which by any name from Goolash to Chop- 
 suey, would taste as fair on your polychrome bill of fare ? And 
 this too is (ladling out some of the brew) (see how green it is?) 
 the poultice that has been applied to all sores: — race-suicide, 
 scarcity in scullery maids and flunkies, shortage in dividends of 
 transportation companies, low earnings of employment bureau 
 managers, charity experts, and sociological flabbergasters ! 
 
 Now I wish you luck, Dad. Watch the pot. If 11 boil OTer 
 sooner or later in spite of the proverb, and too soon, may be! 
 But mind it doesn't spatter your fair linen and mar your fine 
 white goatee! And don't imagine all this is a nightmare, rele- 
 gated to — up yonder on the summit of the canyon-cliffs. If s in 
 our little inside, you know — and very particularly squirmy! 
 
 '^Godwot, 
 The pot's hot, 
 And forget me not," 
 Quoth the Hottentot 
 To the visionary 
 Missionary 
 He had got 
 Into the pot! 
 
 Good-night. 
 
 18 
 
POLYGLOT KETTLE 
 
 Uncle Sam — Well Gk)ldie is a rogue, but I don^t dote on this kiiid 
 of '^poetry'' that hobnobs so indecently with truth ! 
 
 But what was the spike I was going to drive into the devil's 
 coflBn lid, before Uncle Benny comes back from kingdom come 
 to quiz me, and probe me, and find if I've made up my mind? 
 Ha, yes I Where does reside, in the ultimate analysis — the truth, 
 the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ? Where ? 
 
 19 
 
II. 
 
 HIS BRAG SONG AND HIS INCANTATION 
 
II. 
 
 WiU you sit forever, sway-back in your rock'r at ease, 
 
 Argufying with a prying, or dying old Socrates? 
 
 Will you spoon out a chunk from your ice-cream freezer 
 
 To cool your enthusiasm for Brutus and Caesar? 
 
 Or deep with a Wordsworth to the heart of his lakes peer 
 
 In the hope you may capture the secret of Shakespeare ? 
 
 Or agonize, wondering for a doctrine how could a 
 
 Sane human forsake his young family like Buddha? 
 
 Will you indite a new Bible, and with boredom cram it, 
 
 To procure it authority by the sword — like Mahomet? 
 
 Or manage world-empires relying, sir, wholly on 
 
 Your star, intrigue and publicity — as Napoleon? 
 
 Or if progress of civilization be a hideous misnomer — 
 
 Why, rub up your Greek, and go gunning with Homer ! 
 
 It all seems easy and highly convincing 
 
 While you take it for granted, like the virtue of ginseng ! 
 
 Yet this cult, sir, of genius is choke-full of hypocrisy, 
 
 And worse, a death blow at the soul of democracy. 
 
 Shall you deify less than one man in a million, say ? 
 
 Every dog his day ! If no starts of great brilliancy. 
 
 It doubtless is due to the ubiquitous diffusion 
 
 Of light in our heavens, we've to thank for the illusion 
 
 That insures us self-reliance in alliance with humility. 
 
 Individual initiative, and social stability ! 
 
 For even those deified overadvertised geniuses- 
 Imposed on humanity for both noble and mean uses, — 
 Who secured them their luminance, and endorsed them with 
 
 authority ? 
 If not the people as a whole, then a goodly majority ? 
 For, when first but a few gave loyal approbation—- 
 They had discerned a practical campaign of education, 
 Divining a deep-seated mystical demand, sir. 
 For the proffered supply — to their prayer a fit answer. 
 
 23 
 
UNCLE'S BEAa SONiG 
 
 Bid they divide then the mass, like political promoters 
 
 Into parties so equal of disciplined voters 
 
 That they marshalled a controllable competent margin 
 
 And their victory was hailed, and the new gods writ large in 
 
 The school manuals to create so a classical preference, 
 
 A deepsouled awe, or a civilized deference? 
 
 If s a game myseK have played at not seldom, 
 
 .When IVe hewn at my foes like Agag and f ell'd 'em ! 
 
 And I opine there's an ethical justification for such procedure 
 
 If only so you can save your creed, your 
 
 Sacred flag, your inheritance, your history 
 
 And immortal soul too ! 
 
 Now hearken, a mystery ! 
 
 Every hour is made glorious (or rather every minute is) 
 By the birth in our country of a score of divinities; 
 But we whittle them down till they're usable, sortable 
 To the size, and distinction that are safely supportable. 
 Yet so long as we're glutted with food predigested 
 And scholarly reasons for our being infested 
 By alien traditions that worry and weary us, 
 (Trade-reasons, academic, at bottom, not mysterious) 
 "We'll experience no original, aboriginal himger, — 
 Such as all men rejoiced in when the world was yoimger, — 
 For their own, their thitherto unrevealed essence 
 In progressive effervescence, and divine rejuvenescence, — 
 Which projected is — God, and whose cult is — religion ; 
 Which either side hell — ^to rest a high bridge on — 
 Erects vast piers generation by generation 
 We pass over in triumph to our deification ! 
 
 Such my exultant faith, my exalted self-assurance. 
 My folks are unconquerable. Hope and endurance 
 Rise perennially equal to courage and genius. 
 'And, to Fate's decree a complacent and serene ^^yes" 
 Blindfold we utter. For there boils up a geyser, 
 
 24 
 
AN-D IlSrCANTAT'ION 
 
 And blazes a crater of wisdom wiser 
 
 Than prudent policy, from deeps unconscious. 
 
 From heights beyond knowledge on the ocean we launch us — 
 
 The Unknown ; while our supreme, our spiritual fiat 
 
 Creates for us th' ultimate goal we fly at ! 
 
 But where is the mortal can endure at the helm 
 
 Of our storm- vexed vessel? So lest honor overwhelm 
 
 His reason, and Caesarism somewhere take root in him, 
 
 We prod him, and harrow — let nothing bear fruit in him— - 
 
 With yelping curs surround his station. 
 
 And relieve him soon by pre-established rotation 
 
 Of office. Precluding thereby the trained professional. 
 
 We cheer on our amateurs in endless processional. 
 
 However, in and thro' them 'tis I — ever I — 
 
 The One and the Only — ^make live, or let die; 
 
 With subtle inspiration overrule every blunder: 
 
 Yea, I — the One, I — the Only, I — ^the Ever, 
 
 The contradictory, manifold, mystical and clever ! 
 
 Ah, might I behold in vision at length 
 
 My vitality, my cunning, my wisdom, my strength 
 
 And elicit and extricate from the vulgar and common 
 
 My infinite Self; for my worship summon 
 
 My total variety ! (Uncle Sam cries out in mock seri&as man- 
 ner) Appear, thou dreaded 
 
 Thou terrifying, monstrous, thou hydra-headed . . . 
 
 {He stares with amazement when actually nine phantom Uncle 
 Sams of identical features appear seated, cross-legged on 
 the ground) 
 
 Ha, — who be ye here who mock me and beard me in 
 
 My own hemisphere hitherto all feared me and revered me in? 
 
 {Recovering his composure) 
 
 Might you gentlemen be the sons of Goddess Prosperity? 
 
 Male muses, who, resembling me, challenge posterity 
 
 To declare who is who in our magical circle? 
 
 {Mock mystically) 
 
 25 
 
UNCLE'S BRAG SONG 
 
 You've heard of the Verteber doubtless (that will work ill 
 
 Ujiless exercised duly with practical austerity), 
 
 "Where secretly resides — pure virtue, and verity — 
 
 Your link of prenatal and posthumous incarnations ? 
 
 The Yerteber, whence for ecstatical vibrations, 
 
 Or prehensile attachment simian or leonine, 
 
 Once th' caudal appendage waved gloriously free, Nine? 
 
 Now whenever this Verteber (anonymous, unornamental), 
 
 Ye press to Mother Earth in posture Oriental 
 
 And ye entwine (to confine in a rotatory circumlocution 
 
 Your animal magnetism for concentric execution) 
 
 Those legs, seven-league-booted, you've never put flesh on — 
 
 You can raise as I've heard an exhilirating spook-session ! 
 
 Is it so you have happened? (Draws deep breath and awaits 
 
 reply) Do I practice ventriloquy 
 Unawares, that I raise nine echoes to my soliloquy? 
 Your pertinacious reserve may I rouse to contradiction ? 
 Are you myth ? Are you legend ? Are you fact, sirs, or fiction ? 
 Have at you, dumb fakirs, and spurious yogis, ; 
 
 And let anyone protest who no bluffer and rogue is ! 
 
 For all my incantation, the apparitions persist? 
 
 And insolent silence prevails? i 
 
 I have heard (I believe, on good authority) some time or other, 
 
 that when alone, (mutterseelen allein, as my sweet High 
 
 Dutchman phrases it) 
 In certain yet unascertainable states, 
 There supervenes a panic, 
 A mist suffuses all ; 
 
 And, without knowing how, nor leastwise wiUing to, 
 One dissolves the intimate bonds that integrate 
 That singular, agglutinative Somewhat 
 Selected and concreted thro' years from infancy 
 Out of the elements inherent within us. 
 Subtly kneaded up with remembered and forgotten 
 Reactions to our ever-shifting environment; 
 
 26 
 
AND INCANTATION 
 
 Together with all spontaneous irresistible 
 
 Whims and moods of the soul — • 
 
 Irrelevant perhaps, and once free to be or not to be, 
 
 But wrought now fatally into the texture of our being — 
 
 These, together, and more — ever so much more maybe — 
 
 Do constitute our established 
 
 Immortal Personality. 
 
 Now, when the bond you can't see. 
 
 Finer than the floating gossamer in a spring morn, 
 
 Spim with filaments of the invisible 
 
 Stronger than adamant. 
 
 Is loosened momentarily — 
 
 With the dissolution of the actual, else inevitable — 
 
 See! 
 
 All the forlorn might-have-beens. 
 
 That survive in our regions infernal. 
 
 Dance in a vaguer-than-graveyard moonshine 
 
 Their awesome saraband; — 
 
 Ay, weirder still, more gruesome. 
 
 The unbegotten maybe's and shallbe's, reserved for future 
 existences 
 
 Prenatally appear. 
 
 Demean themselves as in a dream 
 
 Before our astonished eye. 
 
 If lost then in the mazes of our vision. 
 
 We but acquiesce in their gambols, 
 
 Grant them friendly leave, or better, magnanimous en- 
 couragement — 
 
 (Entirely at ease as to our essential sanity, 
 
 -Confident we can reassume at will 
 
 Whensoever we list 
 
 Our, ah, so much overestimated selfhood) — 
 
 If we wink then, seeming not to notice. 
 
 If, evasively fixing them unawares. 
 
 We woo them to disport themselves 
 
 And enact their several parts 
 
 27 
 
UISrCLE'S BRAG SONG 
 
 On the still stage of hallucinatory apparition, 
 
 In a dream whose wayward course 
 
 We no wise desire to determine ; — 
 
 And they do verily reveal their very selves : 
 
 Tender, violent, rapacious, delicate 
 
 Illumined, brutal; — 
 
 Then, then, I have heard 
 
 (And I say "sobeit" with all my being!) 
 
 Out of their frightful, heartrending or soul-melting freedom 
 
 Observed so with impartial, poised. 
 
 Sensitive, sympathetic understanding, — 
 
 (Aloof, yet yearning shyly, mysteriously 
 
 To be involved in the weird spectacle, 
 
 To include them all, absorb them intimately) ; — 
 
 Then, then, perchance 
 
 Innocently, totally without connivance 
 
 Somewhat is wont to insinuate itself, 
 
 !N"estle as a holy stowaway in the hold of our being; 
 
 Some atavistic, or prophetic aspect. 
 
 Some cognate, but half-realized intimation. 
 
 Then, then at last. 
 
 When the phantoms flee, abashed, self-banished. 
 
 Or drawn imperiously of some cosmical necessity 
 
 Into the invisible, the non-existent — 
 
 And the 'Soul insists as aforetime 
 
 •On its egoistic, unrivalled. 
 
 Self-evident allness and sufficiency; — : 
 
 Why, it awakens to its old being. 
 
 But bedewed, hoarfrosted so to say or enaureoled, 
 
 Enhanced in mood, enriched in intuition. 
 
 Wiser, kinder, more alluring. 
 
 Hallowed of a sense of mystery. 
 
 Echo-haunted ever after 
 
 With the unmistakable waft of genius from beyond I 
 
AND INCANTATION 
 
 Ha, ha ! 
 Isn't that so? 
 And what now? 
 
 This is the kind of translunary experience 
 Vouchsafed to me, the highly favored. 
 By your unsolicited 
 Obtrusive presences? 
 Then, gentlemen, take heart of grace. 
 I will not prance, nor paw the air, nor invoke electrocution. 
 I merely order up the curtain gaily, 
 And cry out, full-chested: 
 
 ^'Let the trained animals perform ! Hip-hip, hurrah !'* 
 And you can count on me to elect and make my own 
 Any eccentric but invaluable aspect 
 Of my all 'round extra-personal personality 
 You shall succeed in bringing temptingly to'iny notice 
 By worthy impersonation ... 
 Intended of course in the first place altruistimlly, — 
 (With no side glance at box oiOfice returns 
 Or publicity, or artistic incense in one's flattered nosladil)'— ■' 
 For the enlargement altogether in comprehensive view. 
 The deepening in introspection. 
 The heightening in aspiration 
 (If such thing, gentlemen, may be!) 
 Of my hitherto unsuspected but all-sufficient 
 Self-knowledge-and-appreciation! 
 
 {All nine phantom Uncle Sams calmly fasten their staring eyes 
 on him as if he did not exists and they fixed a hlanh wall be- 
 yond him) 
 
 Where's that wall each of you f ocusses 
 With such pertinacious inquisitive, far-away gaze? 
 Straight through me — ^you penetrate to the abyss? 
 Yet you're disposed in a circle about me ? 
 Evidently there's no such wall, then, 
 Such ultimate cynosure, such abyss. 
 Wherefore, as you're all mum, 
 
 29 
 
FNCLE'S BRAG SONG 
 
 And there's no cat would want your tongues for tidbit, 
 
 I confidently declare: you're non-existent! 
 
 There now ! 
 
 What next? 
 
 When I say to anything: You ain't — it ain't! 
 
 Can you object? 
 
 I deny you, not half-way, but downright and altogether. 
 
 What? You don't even wink when I deign 
 
 To give you specific warning of your peril so? 
 
 I admit, were you audibly worth refuting, 
 
 I might condescend, be graciously induced by you. 
 
 To argue and conclusively prove, convincingly persuade you too. 
 
 That, since I declare you non-existent. 
 
 You're just paradoxical hallucinations. 
 
 Phantoms gendered of phantoms 
 
 In the clogging fogs of hysteria. 
 
 Exhalations from the squalid bogs of introspection — 
 
 And everglades of melancholia ! 
 
 But I prefer to assert my naked authority. 
 
 Do you hear ? 
 
 Either pack. 
 
 Or crack. 
 
 Or explain away your insolent pretence 
 
 To existence and sense ! 
 
 {All nine phantom Uncle Sams most actively and facetiously 
 nod and winh at one another; then indulge irritatingly in 
 cacchinations, sputters, and abdominal contortions. Thereupon, 
 they hrealc into articulate hut confused cries as follows) : 
 
 Ha! ha! ha! Ho! ho! ho! 
 
 How? How? How? 
 
 Isn't he amusing? Our patience abusing! 
 
 Garrulous? querulous? fatuous? preposterous? 
 
 Silly-romantic? bacchantic? frantic? 
 
 In one word — ' 
 
 Delicately absurd ? 
 
 30 
 
AND INCANTATION 
 
 {Here the voices come to express a common idea, sequently 
 rv uttering words that combine together to what follows) 
 
 Unworthy we should waste on him a word! But if we can't 
 quite deign to talk to him — we can talk at him — ^by projecting a 
 joint delegate — a sort of Theophrastus Bombastus — to the Nth 
 power — a central vicarious Voice — ^to do duty for Our noble 
 multiple being, and project to this super-Booby — an audible 
 expression of our composite group-consciousness — something 
 spectral — automatic — irresponsible — whose dignity can't suffer 
 — ^rendering us so base a service — as to confer with such an in- 
 terlocutor — and put his megalomania to confusion ! 
 
 Whoop it up, whoop — ■ 
 
 Nor doubt nor droop — 
 
 Great Voice of the group — 
 
 Ay, bow thee and stoop — 
 
 To the ear of this monstrous Nincompoop ! 
 
 Uncle Sam — That's the way you propose and purpose to address 
 your Uncle Sam ? We'll teach you court manners. 
 (Uncle Sam clubs them promiscuously, hut his violent blows 
 smite the empty air and recoil, so that he loops and cavorts, to 
 the increasing tumultuous hilarity of the assembled Nine. At 
 length, the announced hollow Collective Voice spealcs) 
 
 Spectral Voice — Have you exhausted your exquisitely entertain- 
 ing fit of wanton assertiveness ? Pray, behave henceforth more 
 suavely. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Where do you proceed from? Out of the middle 
 of nowhere? Might you reside in my hat? {He examines it, 
 puts it back on his head) I'll be totally jiggered ! (He feels in 
 his trouser pockets) Where am I at? 
 
 Spectral Voice — Don't imagine our wisdom could proceed out of 
 secret and sacred recesses of you! Bow yourself before the in- 
 evitable^ — since you have compelled our candid asseveration of 
 truth and goodness. Eesume your usurper's seat ? imperturb- 
 able, unteachable, prima-facie assumption, did you by any mis- 
 chance conceive yourself unique ? What a pitiful error ! You with- 
 
 31 
 
UNCLE'S BRAG SONG 
 
 out rivals ? There are more United States, by-gone and to-come, 
 than are provided for in your entire geography. Shocking, eh? 
 God made only you — little you — and gave you an ungodly 
 monopoly — did He ? — of your singular self ? Most unlikely ! And 
 He entitled you to private peculiar access to light and immortal 
 life? What a disastrous mistake! The past was dead, was it? 
 The contemporary present — outside of and beyond yourself — 
 effete, degenerate ? And to question the dogma of your absolute 
 solitary self-sufficience is the unforgiveable sin? Nay, worse, 
 Use majesU, to be expiated on some perennial DeviFs Island of 
 your withering contempt? Treason to your Godship? Pshaw! 
 Faugh ! As you are wont to phrase it — ^Poppycock ! 
 
 Moderate, dear braggart, your extravagant pretensions. You 
 are but One of ten. And we Nine, a clear majority, are super- 
 ior vastly to you; not in numbers only, but in definite attain- 
 ments. 
 
 Uncle Sam — -Liars, I can turn any one of you inside out, and 
 outside in again, like a darned wornout sock ! 
 
 Specteal Voice — You underestimate our versatility. What any- 
 one of us can't do — we can achieve in partnership. For we live 
 by co-operative peace. We substantiate the claims one of an- 
 other. We are no haunting monotone, not even a rapturous 
 melody of succession. We constitute, you see, a new thing 
 psychologically, a chord! Had we been struck together (which 
 fortunately you couldn't so far contrive to do) — then, pray, where 
 would you be ? We are individually and corporately : Discovery, 
 Invention, Politics, Salesmanship, Promotion, Progress, Consti- 
 tutionality, Emotional Realization, Ideal Contagion, The Soul of 
 the Many aspiring to become the total divine whole. 
 
 Now what are you beside all that? You wanted to know 
 your infinite variety? Your profundity? Your ubiquity? 
 
 You were in a hurry to tip your hat (so you implied in your 
 mixture of excoriating vituperation and self -idolatry) to your 
 prospective apotheosis ? 
 
 32 
 
AND INCANTATION 
 
 At least you were modest in this — ^you viewed it as a near- 
 at-hand divine event, and not a competently completed process ! 
 Since now you boasted so impotently and evoked us so per- 
 emptorily, we deemed you must at least have gotten out that 
 pending patent on your contumacious self ; and we agreed to pay 
 you a friendly visit, not proposing at all to infringe on your 
 unquestionable unique right; and therefore it is we encircled 
 you curiously with our simultaneous corruscation. 
 
 For our own sake, on account of our much lamented outer 
 resemblance to you, we are sorry you have proved in error, and 
 therefore mortal. We have dethroned you and humbled you — ■ 
 you, who ought to make a specialty of some really novel ac- 
 complishment never seen on land or sea, some vivid virgin auto- 
 eugenic originality! We have proved you, beyond dispute, at 
 least in your now observable nascent state, only one of many, 
 backward and crude; ay, the least reasonable and real tithe 
 of the whole you aren't, and can't hope yet to become: so far 
 as we can see ! 
 
 This, by the spectral Echo uniting all our inaudible voices, 
 our common spokesman, the subtle haunter and mocker, WE, 
 duly convened and assembled, have agreed to convey to you on 
 behalf of us all, confining ourselves so far to parliamentary 
 terms; We, you understand, your unappreciated rivals and 
 superiors, Sam. 
 
 And We, with the utmost amenity, protest how no one could 
 in any wise foresee that our inquiry into your spiritual status 
 would, by your own defect and collapse, degenerate into an 
 inquest. 
 
 We intended friendly vivisection, and not this cruel and pre- 
 sumably all-but-futile autopsy. 
 
 Uncle Sam {Scratching his head in great perplexity, half-angry 
 and half-amused) — ^By my own inmost, persistent, invincible 
 Essence and Ubiquity (thanks for that word!) you're dead 
 \\Tong, each and all of you. It's primarily a case of mistaken 
 identity. You got the wrong corpse by the ear. I can prove 
 
 33 
 
UNCLE'S BRAa SONG 
 
 an alibi to your smashing but amicable victory! I may be all 
 sorts of a "smart aleck" and idiot and bluffer — in public: thafs 
 my little way. But in private, you just ought to see me ! Heaven 
 preserve your addled brains from scrambling at the premature 
 thought of what I then am ! 
 
 And, what's more, you've been powerfully imprudent — that 
 you surely have. No one ever twitted me with impunity. I'm 
 not behind-hand catching any man's trick-of-the-trade "on-the- 
 fly" when sparking from the rotating sandstone ! Any man's got 
 a knack or esoteric specialty? I'm fatal as a spiritual baby- 
 snatcher, brain-thief, and soul-picker. 
 
 Boys, you're done for. You might as well unpack your out- 
 fit for my leisurely inspection. Open your grips, and green-bags. 
 
 I bet you my hat 
 
 My stovepipe, my bunting-trimmed. 
 
 My only stargirt, fuzzy-rimmed, 
 OhokefuU of hot air in the gape of its gap, — 
 
 and bedecked see, for the nonce (just my magic!) with violet 
 wreaths a la Ophelia, and sunflowers a la Goliath of Gath — I bet 
 you that inestimable celestial Treasure — 
 
 I can spot you ! 
 And then I've got you. 
 Ay, and I'll blot you 
 Off the map. 
 
 (Uncle Sam has during the preceding speech taken possession 
 of the centre of the ring of phantoms of himself) 
 I dare you here and now to contradict me. That is, if you let 
 me deal with you one at a time, and psycho-analyse you out of 
 your grab-bag into my vestpocket. I'll fetch you, and you'll 
 never get yourself restored, except with my fool-friendly con- 
 nivance. That's my dare. Only let me deal with you seriatim. 
 
 Spectral Voice — For your sake we will submit to the improper 
 conditions you impose; for, in nature, we are to be taken col- 
 lectively. 
 
 34 
 
AND INCANTATION 
 
 Uncle Sam — Ay, ay, a mere blind. But I'U prove you chumps 
 one at a time. At least I'U prove I know you so well by heart, 
 I don't have to look at you with a glass eye. And mind you, 
 I'll venture more than my Hat ! I'll put up my SeK as the stake. 
 See here, whoever I can't read rightly — 
 
 Whoever the rest of you 
 
 ShaU think has licked me, 
 
 He shall be me. 
 
 But if any of you've tricked me 
 Or I do get the best of you 
 
 I'll beat you all to superfine pulp. 
 
 And swallow you down at one gurgling gulp. 
 There, sealed with psychic science. 
 Is my exultant defiance ! 
 
 Spectral Voice — ^We agree to be you, or you we ! 
 
 35 
 
III. 
 
 HIS READING OF HIS NINE DOUBLES 
 
III. 
 
 (Uncle Sam goes straight to the first one of the ring of fig- 
 ures whose masks are all alike; as he progresses in his descrip- 
 tion the particular phantom he addresses comes to resemble the 
 character which he assigns to it and finally drops the mash) 
 
 Uncle Sam — I'm going to paint your portraits true Holland 
 Dutch a la Franz Hals, not delicate and pensive a la Holbein 
 or a la Memmling. Get my idea ? Step up, Number One. Jona- 
 than Hayseed — ^Devil-may-care might be your patronymic. Back- 
 woodsman? Indian killer? In slushy rhetoric, the noble 
 pioneer ? Got a mule, a goat, a cur-dog, a woman, and a bunch 
 of kids? That's your outfit, plus a cart, an axe, and a dozen 
 odd tools ? Fell trees and char the stumps for a clearing ? 'Slap 
 together logs with mud-plaster for camp ? Add, may be, a lean- 
 to next season, and the third year a front wall with windows 
 and door? Woman scratches for the grub, totes water, and 
 raises young in dozen lots? You gully-wash the land, with a 
 crop or two, and indianize; or sell out, and move on with your 
 waxing tribe of progeny, to repeat the operation just beyond the 
 fringe, tiU you get landlocked in the mountains by civilization? 
 There you starve, opine, reckon, whittle, tote your gun, run a 
 still, pick off excisemen, or kill each other when you heave in. 
 sight, (leaders of a blooH" feud, or to clear a court-room, maybe,) 
 till you're safely extinct — or migrate singly and lose your 
 identity in the big town ? 
 
 Haste makes waste. Drink ruined you. You were once, they 
 say, a first-rate ancestor. Eaised three presidents out of hand. 
 But you're a has-been, old fellow. Fetch out your bandana, or 
 your coat sleeve, so you don't let the tears for your defunct self 
 trickle down into your own hairy bosom. 
 
 I've got you, eh ? Can't stutter ? Squeak even ? Just squirm ? 
 
 All right. Number One's unmasked, and, therefore, palpably 
 annexed. 
 
 39 
 
HIS BEADING OF 
 
 See, boys, I^m a pretty good occult physiognomist, phre- 
 nologist and all-around practising telepath. 
 
 Nine, minus one — is eight? Am I quite right? 
 {Uncle Sam confronts his second phantom self) 
 
 Desperately restless when the fever's on you, a kind of hermit 
 then, whose unknown God is gold, you — ^you're the composite 
 miner-man? Get grubstaked, start off with donkey, yellow dog, 
 pick and shovel, and pans. Stick it out in the searing sun up 
 and down gulches and canyons nosing about for a prospect — or, 
 like a gopher rat, down holes you drill into the live rock? And 
 never a voice, a human touch. Talk to yourself, or feel your 
 own arm to be dead sure you're still alive and right there where 
 you think you are ? 
 
 Struck it rich again and again, but it did you no good. 
 You got back to what you call "civilization" — where the devil 
 set his red-lights to flaring, and took back all you beat him out 
 of by solitude, starvation, thirst, and terrors of soul. Grub- 
 staked for the last time, you left your bones bleaching up some 
 creek, and God ha' mercy on the dog and the donkey ? 
 
 There was something queer and awful about you. You 
 weren't vicious. But when you got yourself equipped for whole- 
 sale business, and took to ripping hills, gulches, valleys, and 
 went in for choking navigable rivers and bogs with silt — ^you'd 
 have washed away my whole continent to the bottom of the sea, 
 if I hadn't knocked you out — you, with my almighty balled fist 
 of the law. 
 
 When you're associated like prairie dogs up in some God- 
 forsaken waste you've laid out for all the world like a giant 
 graveyard — in spite of your fierceness and daring, the gin-mill 
 gets your wages, and the organized owner works the govern- 
 ment, till you run amuck, and I don't blame you if you dynamite 
 like a Jack-the-ripper on a whopping scale. That's your last 
 state, and lots worse than the first, by no fault of yours. 
 
 It's sad, but soon you'll be just a bygone hearsay to lie about 
 in make-believe books. 
 
 40 
 
HIS NINE DOUBLES 
 
 Have I nailed you fast— Specimen Number Two — in my bug 
 collection ? 
 
 Eight, by my reckoning, minus one, leaves seven. 
 
 (Uncle Sam confronts the third, while the former two seem to 
 he now his friendly witnesses, showing hy their facial play when 
 they enjoy his scoring a point, whereas the others remain still 
 totally impassive) 
 
 Anyone who'd look at you hard could tell you're no Vandal, 
 Hun, Cossack or Tartar. You're just my old friend the cow- 
 puncher, broncho-buster, paint-the-town-red artist and lynch- 
 law trapeze-performer! You were a good fellow, straight, and 
 free, and fearless, and quiet, till a hornet stung you, and you 
 got to roister and act mean. You loved the arid mesas, and the 
 wide opaline plains. You hated the tame drove of himians. 
 You rode thro' the chapperal like a king, or a demon. You 
 were a lightning bolt at rounding up the herd, at heading off 
 a stampede. You started out with a grim smile to beard the bliz- 
 zard alone, to locate the cattle, and you took big chances just 
 to do up your job clean to a finish. You loved to rope, to throw 
 and brand. You were a specialist in mavericks. You loved to 
 ride down and noose the mustang, break him bareback to your 
 will, your life like a bowie-knife between your teeth. You were 
 homesick for the lonesome song of the coyote to the moon, the 
 bark of the prairie dog, the scream and swoop of the eagle. You 
 drank, and you scrapped, and you swore; quick on the trigger, 
 not over particular about the neck you wrung. And women? 
 they were just another sort of cattle or incredible goddesses — 
 couldn't ever quite tell which ! 
 
 Heaven bless you ! The cowcatcher, the barbed-wire fences 
 drove you out. You're almost gone, the more's the pity ! Shake, 
 old boy, you don't mind, do you, now that I detect, recognize 
 and expose you ? 
 
 Seven, I suspect, minus one's just about half-a-dozen. Keep 
 tab on my bookkeeping, you staring idiot-idols of Bogus, Alias 
 & Co., incorporated to do business as me ! Ha, Ha ! 
 
 41 
 
HIS READING- OF 
 
 (Uncle Sam addresses himself to the fourth phantom) 
 
 You^re Jack Robinson, get-folks-on the list! Easton Wesfs 
 your surname, "Eat 'em alive'' your title ; real hustle-doctor, and 
 step-lively artist. Sow wind, to reap orders ! Goods indifferent. 
 Can handle any line as well, on an hour's notice! Sandhills, 
 waterlots, slickest style in pokers, pianofortes, toothpicks or 
 canned carrots; sea-salt for dyspepsia, or charcoal tablets for 
 the complexion — or the other way around; Cumberland plateau- 
 chestnut-oak-acorn hygienic breakfast-grits, or doublequick 
 steam-roller for neat facial massage; any lightning device for 
 the total suppression of comfort and the final elimination of 
 leisure ! 
 
 Zigzag over the map, and do the towns, as if you were eat- 
 ing Queen Anne cherries off the tree. Scalp the rainbow and 
 bottle the borealis. Just to divert your customers. Jolly, and 
 wine and dine, and bluff and bully, and take 'em to the best show, 
 wallop 'em with anecdotes and folk-saws, and pepper them with 
 the current events, travelogues, and political tips. 
 
 It's a point of honor with you to worm your way into the 
 confidence of a shark, extract the grouch of a jungle man-eater, 
 thaw out the bank-account of a polar bear, and unload a new 
 brand of brimstone in Hades. You study homo sapiens, and 
 shape him up true to his name if he isn't, decorating him on 
 graduation with a diploma from your itinerant school of 
 experience. 
 
 You're a gay diffuser of progressive discontent, a dispenser 
 of ambition. There can't be over-production, for you'd gener- 
 ate any required overconsumption between Sundays. Where 
 you've been, there's demand; and supply foUows, as laughter 
 on the heels of a racy joke. 
 
 Some folks declare you're a nuisance. You hog it in the 
 sleepers, at the show, at the taxi-stands; but then ifs you who 
 make the hotels sprout thick as toadstools thro' the wilderness, 
 with bars and barbers and manicure-maidens, so you're properly 
 entitled to the grub that makes the butterfly, spending other 
 folks' money for the best good of your fellow-men. You're my 
 
 42 
 
HIS ISTINE DOUBLES 
 
 up-to-date empire builder, and therefore I\e got a kind word 
 for you, tho^ you're disfranchised somehow, like the army man — 
 or the convict. 
 
 Other folks say you're just vulgar, sordid, flippant, and light 
 of love. But you're friendly, would do a kindness to a dead- 
 beat, and fetch your mother-in-law the last life-preserver. You 
 can't afford, perhaps, to be super-elegant or squeamish as long 
 as folks are just folks. You love your family in your own way 
 at long distance, more than most people do theirs at close range ; 
 and you whoop it up in your own shy soul with some sort of fake 
 — old or new, doesn't make any great difference to you, so it 
 keeps you in hard times from losing your nerve, or your death- 
 grip — on human nature. You fear only one horror this side 
 damnation, and that's a long vacation; for you don't want to 
 expire prematurely of boredom, and cheat the poor dear insur- 
 ance companies. 
 
 Say, don't die till you've got the whole country neatly curry- 
 combed, for you do keep my ideas in circulation, and are the 
 touchstone of democracy. 
 
 {Uncle 8am grins, and the '^'drummer" returns the salute as 
 Uncle Sam proceeds to the fifth phantom) 
 
 I know you by names as many as the weeds in Uncle 
 Jephtha's corn patch. I'll call you though for short Elijah 
 Daniel Eaise-Hell Pax-Vobiscum, importer of cast-off ideas and 
 exporter of tall-talk! Soapbox, barbecue-stump, collapsible 
 lyceum platform, old-fashioned pulpit, ofl&cial rostrum — all's in- 
 different — ^mere local color, with lay-out, setting, and get-up to 
 mat^ho For it's always the same joyful, hocus-pocus flimflam- 
 mer, honest as a weathervane, steadfast in a veering wind, 
 straightforward and unblushing as a phonograph! Democracy 
 finds all along its articulate collective voice in you ! 
 
 Some folks say you're a contemptible liar and hypocrite. 
 The truth is you were wound up tight before Adam's time, and 
 have got to go off. So you gurgle like a sucking dove and coo 
 like a camel, and yodle like a cuckaloo, and snort like a bull- 
 
 43 
 
HIS READINa OF 
 
 buffalo, and trumpet like an elephant, grunt like a hippo, and 
 sob like a tapir, and simper like a goggle-eyed sea-lion, and 
 squeal like a walrus, and chew straw like a rhino, and snort and 
 cavort like the Old Man of the Rockies when the forked light- 
 ning touches him on the topknot. You mew and you spit, and 
 toot and caterwaul like a covey of wild cats at a caucus. Then 
 for a change, you shiver like an aspen in June moonlight, 
 dimple like a spring veiled with maidenhair, joggle like a whole 
 line of linen in a gale; ere you dive like a wounded whale into 
 your icewater pitcher to emerge thence revived like a long-sup- 
 pressed cloudburst. Now you groan like a live-oak, cork-screw- 
 ing and grinding to snuff in a cyclone, and let drive a Jovian 
 stemutration, to shake terra firma, so that judgment's on for the 
 remnant, and a Labor Day excursion back to earth for the dead 
 and damned ! 
 
 you can do it in several keys and styles : theological, politi- 
 cal, cultural, philanthropical, economic, gastronomic, millennial 
 or social-rescue. It doesn't matter much to you, or anybody — 
 so you're the pyrotechnic waterspout, and hail ostrich eggs 
 hard-boiled, and spangle the midnight with a dandelion-and- 
 dahlia-pattern, and suffuse the auditorium with alternately 
 pulsing red and blue lights, with violet shimmers thrown in for 
 afterglow; so — ^you get up an overhead collision between a 
 monocled comet and a loose-jointed meteor; so — ^you spray the 
 social spirit with bug poison, and launch a squadron of super- 
 dreadnoughts on our sainted mother's tears; so — ^you coin me 
 into catchwords and saw me up into platform planks; so — ^you 
 jack up Solomon's temple and put goldbrick foundations under ; 
 so — ^you pull to pieces the throne of the Almighty, and dovetail 
 and peg and rivet it together with up-to-date claptrap, and 
 shellac it over fresh with made-to-order slang. 
 
 You're useful. You sweat the criminal boredom out of a 
 tired people. They stamp, they howl, get converted and have 
 the D.T.^s without those deleterious after effects. When they 
 lapse from grace the day after, and return to sober sense and 
 the savings banks, they spontaneously agree to let the profes- 
 
 44 
 
HIS NINE DOUBLES 
 
 fiionals run the government for their own benefit (business be- 
 ing business), and to let the church hobble along as before for 
 the climbers, the snobs, the jejune goody-goodies — and the im- 
 mune to thought. 
 
 Oh, popular education is slow ! But how else would your 
 job pay, making it so interesting and wholesome, like a cross 
 between a cock fight and a sarsaparilla sundae? 
 
 (Uncle Sam turns to the next, leaving the orator to swell like a 
 pouter pigeon) 
 
 You^re my blithesome perpetual-motionist, and as much bet- 
 ter than your predecessor as action's an improvement on words. 
 
 Action! action! 
 
 Disinterested addiction. 
 
 To faction 
 
 And friction ! 
 
 Expulsion, 
 
 Convulsion, 
 
 Suction 
 
 And ruction, 
 
 my wonderful human dynamo! 
 
 Keep, keep folks busy. 
 
 Dance them all dizzy. 
 
 And pledge 'em to temperance while you dine 'em and 
 wine 'em 1 
 
 You jolt, heave up and juggle till your soul's in joyful jeop- 
 ardy ; till the atmosphere glitters and tingles with your self -gen- 
 erating ozone, everybody's bath-tub's full of electric eels, and 
 life's one unmitigated fricassee of delight! 
 
 What can't and don't you do? Boom Job's ash heap into a 
 first-class residence town? lick Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards in* 
 differently, anything that's fierce and not too dangerous on the 
 horizon line? mix up the oceans, which is highly immoral? and 
 kick around the banking system, just for healthy exercise ? 
 
 You're for everything nobody wants, till you make them like 
 it in spite of them. You're against everything you don't do, or 
 
 45 
 
HIS READING OF 
 
 do do when others dare to do it, till everybody swears nobody 
 ever did it, or thought of it. 
 
 You're Elijah cornering the priests of Baal — ^telescoped with 
 Samson working the jawbone of an ass. You damn Ananias up 
 and down, and elope with Sapphira overnight on the sly. If s 
 entertaining. Never a dull hour, and serious knowledge and 
 technical business somehow get whizzed through between whacks 
 of your hickory slap-stick. 
 
 Ho for a club, a club, with knobs of molten brass-buttons, 
 and spikes of gun-metal! And the country prospers, and the 
 devil is there to take the next fellow — ^unless he benefits remotely 
 by your preservation of national resources 1 
 
 What could I do without you? 
 
 You're my man of all work, my Jack of all trades, and master 
 of more! Issues? Why you pick 'em off any prickly pear and 
 persimmon tree. Tariffs of iniquity? infamously violated states 
 rights? Recall of wives? referendum for sun spots and un- 
 scrupulous eclipses? annexation of the moons to Jupiter? ex- 
 pansion of the belt of Saturn? extension of improved roads to 
 Venus, when she's evening star? and making hell-for-sartin 
 those mythical canals in Mars ? 
 
 You excoriate, you corrugate, you copperline our inside 
 against the day we've got to gulp down the whole bristling solar 
 system, and parts adjacent. You scorch the atmosphere five 
 miles up. You emit million-mile-long shoots and streamers 
 from your private photosphere. You sputter spooks from your 
 spiritistic sparking plugs. You stick your little finger into the 
 teething mouth of infant industries, and everybody's prepared to 
 die, and cheerfully at that, having beheld the ultimate atomic 
 conglomeration, and heard the dernier cri in the music of the 
 spheres ! 
 
 (The sixth phantom winks at Uncle Sam, who chuckles good- 
 naturedly then looks long and quizzically at the seventh) 
 
 Don't get alarmed. I sha'n't give it up yet. I admit this 
 seventh — this Babylonian day-of-rest — is harder to unriddle than 
 the rest of you common, weekday good fellows. 
 
 46 
 
HIS NINE DOUBLES 
 
 Ha, that sets me on the trail. 
 
 Hammurabi? Wasn^t there such a swashbuckler got tables 
 of handy directions from his God? Then Moses plagiarized? 
 or maybe filched from Hindu Manu, from the Persian Avesta, 
 and cornered all the composite credit without so much as a thank 
 you ma^am ? You used to run the shop, but you don't quite now. 
 You sneak your name into an anonymous firm, and set up your 
 shingle in a sanctimi. Don't need to fake omniscience these days. 
 Chaps ''as knows law" come too cheap. But for form's sake, you 
 still keep precedents in pickle behind scary sheep-skin backs. 
 
 Who ever calculated your orbit? Now you shoot out on a 
 parabola, and you angle in the interstellar void; then you crook 
 and coil and backslide and loop-the-loop, so Eve's steady 
 couldn't track your trail, and ever untie his own bowknots in a 
 coon's age. 
 
 You're sedate, and solemn, and massage your raison d'etre 
 with dog-latin. But watch you through closed doors tickle your 
 tout-ensemble with a technicality as feathery as the foot of a 
 gnat! And you're not without adventurous spirit. Just to see 
 you tilt and drive at all the bubbles of progress with a legal 
 point, mounted on a British Magna Charta quarter-staff! And 
 you're courageous — with other people's interests when your pro- 
 fessional afflatus blows you away. Not much of a case, and a 
 favorable decision might cost your client his bottom dollar — ^but 
 by Saint Jehoshaphat — ^what a beautiful bit of litigation ! 
 
 When you legislate, you're practical. You see to it life 
 doesn't lose interest by serious interference with big crooks, blue 
 bottles and yellow jackets, but the bonny buzzy flies you all glue 
 fast in the tanglefoot. If you make a mistake, well, what you do, 
 I guess you can undo for a consideration, or work out a reason- 
 able construction, and there's joy among Carlyle's captains of 
 industry and the magnates of the yacht club ! By fat fees and 
 ingenious delays you promote peace among the rich, and culti- 
 vate a spirit of resignation in the deserving poor. When you 
 contemplate an unprincipled newborn social babe, you adminis- 
 ter first aid to the injured in a trice, and swaddle up his inno- 
 
 47 
 
HIS EEADINO OF 
 
 cent limbs with rubber that won't give. When there's a head of 
 common sense looming up on the horizon, you exhume and fur- 
 bish up a dead-letter, and level it, and aim and let drive; and 
 the horizon is warranted safe-and-sane again for a decade or two. 
 
 You know you pretend to be Roman and British, to date 
 back to Justinian and so forth, but I fancy nothing of the sort is 
 the case. You're just my old New England conscience, trans- 
 lated out of the vulgar tongue ; or maybe you're my down-south 
 love of sport, sworn to make my fighting instinct acquire craft 
 and cunning, and justify my combativeness with imputed prin- 
 ciple and well-bred indirection. 
 
 You know I'm going to sidetrack you, till you quit trying to 
 run my freight trains up a heavy grade by turning off the steam 
 and fixing the airbrakes ? 
 
 (Uncle Sam leaves the seventh much disconcerted^ and a hit 
 angry, and envisages the eighth) 
 
 Ha, ha, I can see you think you're an extra big bug, but the 
 chameleon isn't a circumstance to you. You can swap bones to 
 suit conditions, as well as hide. When you're whitewashed and 
 gilt-edged I can't abide you. When you're brutal and a gaUant 
 bugaboo, and make good muckraking Sunday-supplement mate- 
 rial, you're cute in your peculiar way. If you know how to buy 
 respectability with continental junkets, pious endowments and 
 lifetime monuments to your memory, you can even induce the 
 guileless pew to remember you in prayer should you contract an 
 abrasion ! 
 
 When you're a big-bellied tiger-eye in your spider-web, every 
 thread spun out of yourself, and made fast in a snarl of human 
 interest; a plumed chief with your feudal clans oath-bound to 
 die for you and the swag, and your underground system of cata- 
 combs handy, where you make vice profitable only to the mid- 
 dle-men, and discouraging to the victim, why, you're sinister but 
 not altogether devilish. When you tax the rich for rotten public 
 improvements, and throttle business that won't kotow to you — 
 as the self-appointed representative of the vridely distributed 
 
 48 
 
HIS NINE DOUBLES 
 
 "plain people'^ — ^you promote economic equilibrium, and are a 
 political educator of the well-to-do. 
 
 When you play the upstart robber-baron and hog coal mines, 
 virgin forest, water-rights, railroads, to squeeze the country like 
 a lemon and call it development, you^re a menace, but you're easy 
 to suppress; and maybe you are a trustee for Plato's republic 
 while you think yourself a monstrous grand-mogul. 
 
 When you manipulate values, and magnetize the people's 
 precious savings against a rainy day into your private vaults, on 
 an excursion ticket of which the return trip expires before it gets 
 there — ^then you're a vulgar, sleight-of-hand professor, and need 
 stripes badly to advertise your talent at par. 
 
 Of course you do it to save the rest of us from mammon, but 
 we'd rather dispose of our filthy lucre for our personal comfort 
 than procure you a deserved corner ia damnation. 
 
 But the time I loathe you is when you play public benefactor 
 and saviour of society, when you work up a panic and then hurry 
 your first aid to the injured, buying up everything cheap with 
 the people's borrowed spare cash for your own greater gain, and 
 then boost prices and sell out to the survivors, and are hailed 
 as a booming patriot ! Or when you get behind bars (propheti- 
 cally?) and induce honest enterprises to realize on the credit of 
 posterity — just as long as you can sell securities — ^you honest 
 soul, and guarantor of the proletariat's prosperity; and when 
 you can't sell — to Hell with the puppets that danced on your 
 wires, and you retire to found a feudal family ! 
 
 I must admit to watch you scratch in your own junkpile and 
 dig up a crest and a coat-of-arms ; to see you erect a pompous 
 lookout on the daily auto-congestion ; to watch you travel, dena- 
 ture, annex a title, and naturalize abroad — ^that's gruelling fun. 
 
 When you stay at home tho', self-sacrificingly, and see your 
 name posted everywhere as a benefactor, and reform us till 
 we're proud of our gullibility and our meekness under expert 
 management; when you rig us out a national business adminis- 
 tration, create country-wide sentiment under your sacred and 
 far-sighted direction of the organs of public opinion, open new 
 
 49 
 
HIS EEADINO OF 
 
 fields to exploitation out of political sympathy, finance a profit- 
 able little war or two to recruit our stock of heroes, and collect 
 incidentally on the foreign investments you induced us to risk? 
 Oh — ^you may be a bad-tasting antidote to save us from the easy- 
 going optimism that's undermining our constitution ! 
 
 But, do you know tho', there are times when you look big, 
 and I feel I\e got to let you grow bigger, so we may have the 
 biggest pumpkin in the village show; and there are other times 
 (look out, they might come to stay !) when I want to clean house 
 and swat the tarantula with my broom; when I dream of first hir- 
 ing you to smoke yourself out, and then of deodorizing you as 
 bone dust after mutual exposure and wholesale electrocution. For 
 then you take a base advantage of our generous faith in human 
 nature, our boyish hero-worship, our good-natured acknowledg- 
 ment of things, that's disgustingly shabby and low. 
 
 (Uncle Sam leaves the eighth almost shocked, and childishly 
 dejected, hut holes hack once more) 
 
 Old man, take timely warning. I'd hate to have a lynching 
 in the immediate family. (With restored good humor) 
 
 Now, for the last — ^but not least. A whopper, and only just 
 hatched. What a heaven-sent relief ! You make goodness as dan- 
 gerous and full of thrills as a career of crime. War, famine, 
 plagues — ^they're your opportunities. You're either rich, or you 
 hold a mighty affluent thought by the shirt-tail — and you scheme 
 out the network of benevolent canals, and operate the sluices 
 for a graduated flow. 
 
 Say, your features are a wee bit feminine? Your wrinkles 
 of care and human sorrow, your hollow eyes with the searchlight 
 stare, and the shine of withheld tears — ^they're mere make-up, 
 aren't they ? And your dainty goatee is glued on ? 
 
 Soon you'll have girdled the earth with wanton welfare work, 
 and you can defy any wretch to escape. You'll glory in the slum 
 when it's piped with hair-tonic, hygienic complexion-wash and 
 vegetable milk. Automatic sprays operated for compulsory dis- 
 infection in every hole in the wall! Pneumatic tubes distrib- 
 
 60 
 
HIS NINE DOUBLES 
 
 uting glass eyes and false teeth I Double-jointed cork legs, 
 better than nature's back numbers, supplied to aU comers, and 
 twilight sleep amputation thrown in free. 
 
 Thanks to you, punishment for crime will become a much 
 appreciated privilege, so the hypocrite will die out, and reform 
 turn into a new-fangled sport — so perilous and unnecessary! 
 You'll eliminate the incompetents by the three-generation sys- 
 tem of supervised eugenics, and then get the bankrupt coffin trust 
 to turn out sanitary candy-boxes, cradles, go-carts and rattles for 
 the superannuated ! 
 
 Meanwhile you'll found research bureaus — and work all the 
 bacilli thro' hitherto inconceivable developments, so you can run 
 the whole gamut of disease, until self-preservation becomes for 
 mankind a fine art, with an exquisite technique so complicated 
 we'll have no leisure at all to live or to die. 
 
 When you've run out of physical problems (gutter-cats, mangy 
 dogs and spavined horses being eliminated) you'll turn your at- 
 tention with your corps of transmogrified doctors and redeemed 
 nurses to tackle with scaling ladders the corporate public souL 
 
 All unreformed parsons will be chloroformed, and moderate 
 health shall be made inevitable. No apathy or boredom, antip- 
 athy for the ugly, no degrading domestic partiality; instead, a 
 universally diffused bland idiocy ! No dangerous sense of humor 
 shall be permitted to survive. Instead, a solemn consciousness 
 of eternal and infinite obligation to make everyone think as 
 you do! Vulgar delight in brute strength and unmitigated 
 natural bumptiousness will be altered into a perpetual hankering 
 after a better world, where there shall be an adequate supply of 
 unfortunates for each and all to benefit ! Meanwhile, every day 
 his nostrum, and as in the past so in the future 1 
 
 It was once emancipation for niggers only ! It was once tem- 
 perance for the down-and-outs. It will soon be aesthetic danc- 
 ing for the domestic hog, free eau-de-cologne and automatic tin 
 mice for old maids' cats ! 
 
 51 
 
END OP SECTION THREE 
 
 It shall be plum-piiddiiig with grapeshot for raisins to pro- 
 mote mastication in the church militant! Easeful peonies en- 
 forced as buttonholes by law to distinguish bachelors in public, 
 for the convenience of the summer resort promoter and the idiot 
 asylum recruiter. 
 
 Joy to you, and keep your benevolent soul on the dead jump, 
 and don't give over ere the whole world's spick-and-span, like 
 an aluminum chafing-dish to cook tipsy old Sol's universal Welsh 
 rarebit I 
 
 513 
 
IV. 
 
 HIS SHADOW AND HIS THREE YET IXMSIBLE 
 PHANTOM SEL\1ES 
 
IV. 
 
 Kjiowledge is power, isn't it? 
 
 Now that I have mind-read you, will you surrender? I'll 
 spare you all if you but confess my prowess and obey. 
 
 (The nine phantom Uncle Sams unmask, each with his several 
 expression and hody-huild, look at one another, suggesting that 
 every other be spokesman. At last the '^ Philanthropist** reluct^ 
 antly accepts the imposed duty) 
 
 Ninth Uncle Sam — ^We don't think you've quite demonstrated 
 your vaunted superiority, Sam. You still cast a shadow, your- 
 self, for all your knowledge of us, which you can't fail to admit 
 is discreditable for a spiritual being. Yes, a shadow and one even 
 you can't fail to perceive. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Like the groimd hog, eh? So another spell of 
 winter's due? What? That poor thing, you mean? My 
 shadow? Never noticed it before. That's so. 
 {After a moments hesitation, as if he had a sudden new idea. 
 Uncle Sam arranges a loutonniere, which he gets out of his 
 hat, in his coat lapel, moves about, assumes several aesthetic 
 poses, and bows to his shadow, which is cast by the bonfire under 
 the melting-pot) 
 
 The thing persists and capers about and apes me right along. 
 (Addressing the shadow) What do you think you are? 
 (All the nine phantom Uncle Sams, who laughed freely at Uncle 
 Sam's paces and jig steps and affected poses when endeavoring to 
 escape his shadow, become most serious, and intensely interested, 
 not to say a trifle alarmed) 
 
 Uncle Sam — I know you, pshaw! You're just trying to be. 
 You've had a deucedly hard time keeping up the bluff. You're 
 my forlorn art-sense ! You're my pale, pouting poesy, you're my 
 daintily purposeful delight in the ineffable ! 
 
 (Uncle Sam strikes a suitable attitude, and apostrophizes the 
 flickering shadow he now casts directly against the rock wall) 
 
 55 
 
UNCLE SAM^S SHADOW 
 
 When I look at you, I ache in every bone; it's all so tooth- 
 somely ordinary, so quaintly sad. Ifs the old swimming-hole, 
 blue-jeans, rail-splitting, that draw tears, done in oils, or dialect. 
 Now ifs an ode to Influenza, the empty chair at the opera, or 
 "Peace, perfect peace" in the chicken-coop. Ifs the mountains 
 of the moon looking cheerily cheesy. Ifs any sort of syrupy 
 sobstuff or uplift gargle. 
 
 Thafs one style of you! 
 
 Then another, see? Jags to jocose or jejune Jeremiah 
 jingles! Or, maybe, you explore awful jaws creepily between 
 tusks of crunching stalagmites and stalactites over a retractile 
 tongue, like an octopus tentacle, right into the maw of Never- 
 more; and you wake up insane and dote on a thimibscrew, and 
 sing litanies beholding the skeleton in the closet of your ante- 
 diluvian lady-love ! And aU because, over here, life's too cheaply 
 prosperous and lacks the proper excitement of political perse- 
 cution ! 
 
 Now for another phase of you! you "cousin" the cloud and 
 ^'beehive-hole" the sun, and lilt of little green leaves, and lick up 
 the maudlin honey-clover voluptuously— and you melt into a 
 mawkish sop of sweetness, to serve quick in a minute, colonial 
 pewter, germ-free saucer for the doll-babies. 
 
 And still another pose of you, my shadow! You spit raw 
 hunks of polar-bear, or hippopotamus-steak at a national bar- 
 becue, and celebrate and sing and singe yourself by the sizzling 
 fire of love-of -country, tiU the continent has hydrophobia; then 
 you auction off your criminal proclivities without a blush — and 
 Hegelianize the Declaration of Independence, and apostrophize 
 the metropolitan city-directory! 
 
 You haven't struck your gait yet, or you'd materialize, and 
 not just shadow me. Ifs all right to have your ear to the 
 ground, but the buffaloes aren't coming, nor the iron horse, but 
 something that's neither on feet nor wheels nor sled-runners. 
 Sniff the zenith ! Ifs no angels, nor aeroplanes ! Listen ! Ifs 
 no Singer machine. Can't you guess ? You've got to satisfy the 
 
 56 
 
AND PHAllsTTOM SELVES 
 
 insatiate ME with the divine, and when yon do it you won't 
 make any "^^est sellers^' and get ''spotlight' and free advertising. 
 Fll chastise hiTn I love, and prove him so, the price of post- 
 humous acceptance — as ME ! ! ! 
 
 {Tlie shadow rises from the ground, becomes enormous, a palpi- 
 tant golden haze enveloping all the scene, then shrinks to the 
 outlines of Uncle Sam hut covers him with a living shimmer of 
 radiancy. The nine unmasked phantoms are terrified, and 
 promptly ''freeze" hack to their former stolid, strange, hostile 
 uniform-visaged appearance. Uncle Sam hursts into boyish 
 delight) 
 
 Hnirah! Now I've got a lightning-bng glow aU over, an 
 astral phosphorescence. Who'd have thought there was snch lots 
 in my much despised shadow? Eh? You never thought it, you 
 nine male muses of mine? (Uncle Sam looks sidelong at them 
 for sympathy, and is dumbfounded on perceiving that they have 
 quietly reverted to their previous impassive and hostile state) 
 
 Ukcle Sam — ^What? All I've done so elaborately to conquer each 
 of you singly is undone in a twinkle ? Thaf s not fair play. 
 
 I know you through and through, and by right of knowledge 
 I can incorporate you, or cast you into outer darkness. Thanks 
 to you, I've made shift to enjoy life — by shifts. 
 
 Specteal Voice — Though you deem we are so exceeding well- 
 known to you, and you reckon yourself (particularly since you've 
 got yourself illuminated), so superior, what are you more than 
 a phantasmal sum total? An abstraction pretentiously person- 
 ated ? While we are luscious, concrete. Each of us has his own 
 centre of reality and interest in himself. Taken aU together, are 
 we not all there is of you? And we know each other, and com- 
 bine to a unity that preserves distinctness of the parts; so our 
 self-knowledge is nine-fold; while you, you have made your di- 
 visions unreal, mere imaginary lines on the map, and are central- 
 ized, featureless. You tyrannize over your own substance. You 
 melt yourself up, and then cool off in a haphazard, shapeless 
 
 57 
 
UNCLE SAM'iS SHADOW 
 
 lump. So we are entitled, even if you identify us individually, 
 to defy you as One incomprehensible Social Whole. 
 
 (Uncle Sam hangs his head somewhat abashed; then with no 
 hluff, and more radiant than ever, and his eyes shining benevo- 
 lently, he admits) 
 
 Uncle Sam — There's some truth in what you say — ^more than I 
 like to admit to myself. But tho' you've got my limitations pat, 
 you have missed my creative centre. All things counted and dis- 
 counted, there's a deal more of me than you Nine — ^not reckoning 
 my shadow that I've gobbled down to my greater glory. (Dream- 
 ily, melting with a peculiar tenderness) 
 
 Did you ever envisage my golden-rule fool-idealist, my poet 
 laureate of vidgar reality? My variety-in-unity maniac? 
 Prophet of the golden age of direct self-government? If the 
 people's rule is bad, so much the better, saith he, for it will work 
 out to a higher civilization ! Multiply checks and counterchecks, 
 and aflSrm the right Source of authority, even at the risk of 
 political paralysis ! Belief in the people, the whole people, and 
 nothing but the people. He sings of Columbus and Lincoln. 
 He wrote the immortal Declaration and projected the Constitu- 
 tion. He's none of you and yet he IS in my heart! 
 
 And Where's my other idealist who dreams a greater people 
 and race? Every refugee's welcome, every outraged dreamer 
 and rebel, every political criminal and social outcast, every runa- 
 way from exploitation and robbery! Every race-talent, every 
 tradition, every hitherto undeveloped latent genius! and aU, 
 together, to give us some day the people fit for our political and 
 social Heaven of freedom ! No stock's to monopolize, no instru- 
 ment in the orchestra is to fail of his part — even if if s a rhyth- 
 mic pause. Every little boy, begotten and bom of polyglot 
 forebears, who knows but it's he starts the ultimate Breed, pal- 
 pitant with the oversoul, to justify philharmonicaUy aU the 
 blunders, vulgarity, graft, swagger and silliness that's gone 
 before ? 
 
 Where's this Idealist? Not in you. He's in my head! 
 
 58 
 
AND PHANTOM SELVES 
 
 And there's a third, the actuating mystery, the transfignriiig 
 and creative spirit. He's our One Whither — for onr manifold 
 whences we can't adumbrate. He represents all that has been 
 and is to be — simultaneously in a present we can't yet project. 
 When he comes, he couldn't prescribe clerk morals for genius, 
 nor ladylike manners for the militant soul. He won't offer a 
 rubber ring for young America to teethe with. Not he ! 
 
 Perhaps, who knows, he peeped at us in individual disguise 
 at the very start, and took a hand in things — an exceptional per- 
 son — a glorious freak — the Father of his country? 
 
 Be that as it may, he's the God you can hope to reproduce as 
 you worship. He's in the yolk of every American egg. And 
 every man of all my folk has some kinship with him. Every 
 vice contributes to his greater virtue, and every vulgarity is as- 
 similated, and transfigured to some new refinement, delicacy and 
 nobility in him. When he finally appears — ^we are. When we 
 adore him, we transmute, and become adorable; and the whole 
 world's just the quivering halo of our special Incarnate God! 
 
 And where is He now? Who of you has even ventured to 
 dream of himf You don't believe in him? Ha, thafs where 
 we differ. He's in my spirit and lives already so, though neither 
 my heart nor my mind can adequately realize him. 
 
 So — ^there now, you nine claimants of my heritage, with all 
 your merits, what a whopping lot is lacking to you ! My three 
 supremes aren't prepared to manifest yet in some rough-and- 
 ready, larger-than-life, typical spook — like you Nine. And I am 
 the common, integrating, immanent factor. 
 
 I'm the tie that binds — you to them, and them to yon. 
 
 'And I hear the Great God coming. 
 
 Asia has had many chances. 
 
 Europe's lost several. 
 
 America ? Oh, America ? Why, her past is yet to come. And 
 I am it. That past is me, you hear? So ifs self-evident I'm 
 her only Present and Future too ! 
 
 Now, my bullies, my bubbles, my buzzards, why don't you ad- 
 journ sine die — to where you belong? 
 
 5^ 
 
UNCLE SAM'S SHADOW 
 
 (The nine Uncle Sams, each in his own person, nods and says) 
 The Nine — We have decided to stay with you. 
 Uncle Sam — Eh? You know when you have a good thing? But 
 
 some of you are dodos and mastodons ! 
 The Nine — No ghost is too ancient to haunt you, and none 
 
 too recent. 
 Uncle Sam — You're vampires ? I knew it ! 
 The Nine — ^We're ghosts of the living; at least we hope bo. 
 Uncle Sam — And who's really alive but me? So you pretend to 
 
 be me ? illicit extrusions of my substance ? 
 The Nine — ^We are you — and you are — I, as each one says it, 
 
 and means it. 
 Uncle Sam — Pack off to the void, the abyss, the outer darkness. 
 
 I can dispense with you all stupendously well. 
 The Nine — (We know better. You couldn't do without us; 
 
 so we prefer to disobey rather than fail you. 
 Uncle Sam — That's very considerate. But I take it upon myself 
 
 herewith to disband, dissipate, and exorcise you — at least pro 
 
 tern. Isn't that clear? I want to be alone! Beat it, till you 
 
 boot the skyline and kick the nadir into a cocked hat. 
 The Nine — ^We cling to you loyally in spite of your hasty temper. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Ha, so? I can't shake you ? Can't fold you up and 
 flutter you off like dead leaves in the wind ? 
 (Uncle Sam fixes each one searchingly — and grows blandly 
 amazed) 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Well, Sam, when you can't manage a thing here and 
 now, you adjourn to the antipodes, and into the middle of next 
 week, to inaugurate another policy. 
 
 Perhaps, gentlemen, you're bound by a quizzical, metaphysi- 
 cal umbilical cord to the Great Mother ? 
 
 I see. Of course you blush assent. I won't insist on fur- 
 ther embarrassing inquiry. Since I can't shake you, or sheer you 
 off from my quintessence, I'll just hospitably take you in. You 
 understand? Into my inmost intimacy, I mean, where you'll 
 
 60 
 
AND PHANTOM SELVES 
 
 do no harm at all — ^just constitute a holiday-temperance jag for 
 your ethereal imperial uncle ! 
 
 So now, a toast is in order to the blessed thirteen of us. 
 "Where's my loving cup ? Ha, my hat will have to do. As for the 
 liquor ? Who needs any these days. Ozone — sparkling and pop- 
 ping the corks of your ideas ! Dry toasts are the most hilarious, 
 if psychologically flavored and stirred with a stick of the occult. 
 
 So, ho, my pioneer, my cowpuncher, prospector and gopher 
 rat, my boost-and-boom peddler on an inter-ocean toot, my 
 hot-air respirator and boredom extirpator, my belly-buster and 
 man on horseback, my Puritan conscience transmogrified, 
 my graft-expert and life-extractor, my social-surplus saviour — 
 you Nine; and myself (who claim I am you all), and my poet 
 shadow in particular, who merged with me so happily; and for 
 full measure the three you never beheld — my people-glorifier, 
 my Eugene in the genitive case, and last of all my final type and 
 deity, who are implicit in me, of whom the ages hitherto were 
 not worthy ; all of us, you see, and all of us you don't see, taken 
 together a la alligator! For who knows what there would be, 
 if the thirteen were one, got integrated, and so entirely too 
 great — even to smite the spheres ? 
 
 Thirteen? You recoil? There's something iu superstition? 
 One too few, or too many ? You'd like my shadow back, to make 
 it fourteen? He's where he does most good — inside of me — 
 and what's more, thoroughly fused and identified by this. 
 {Uncle Sam making a speaking tube out of both fists and talk- 
 ing into the pit of his stomach) Tra-la, little fellow, I've got a 
 daiuty job for you. Do over my little ditty to the tune of Annie 
 Eoonie, or Willow-tit-willow. 
 
 Here's, then, to us all ! {Lifts his hat as a loving cup, and 
 pledges the nine phantom Uncle Sams) 
 
 A Toast to the blessed thirteen ! 
 A Neo-pythagorean 
 Glorious battle-paean! 
 
 61 
 
UN"CLE SAM'S SHADOW 
 
 Whaf s to be — includes what hath been ; 
 
 But ifs more, more, more 
 
 Than ever was dreamed of yore. 
 So let's sing and bring it to being, 
 And pray for its hastening and freeing : 
 
 The God we can BE, and adore ! 
 
 {Dithyramb of Uncle Sam's Mystical Number Thirteen) 
 
 A 
 
 Men hymned of old the sacred three ; 
 Father, mother, and child. 
 Three sides of one mystical figure, 
 A symbol of life's true unity — 
 No solitary tyrant : the living, ay. 
 The mutually self -adoring divinity ! 
 Holy, holy, most holy ! 
 
 n 
 
 Men sang of old the song of the four; 
 The world-square diverse and equal. 
 The rise and the set of the sun-orb, 
 Th' twain poles of the whirling earth | 
 'Tis the manifest, manifold reality, — 
 Contenting, bewildering, all-inclusive :- 
 Glorious, glorious, most glorious ! 
 
 M 
 
 So they chanted the tone of the human five:— 
 For, vital, man standeth at the centre, and 
 The four comers of the world thither bow to him. 
 
AND PHANTOM SELVES 
 
 Yea, pursue him as he mounts the sky-summit, 
 Where all things in radiance he gathereth : 
 The world in him brought to self-knowledge ! 
 Beautiful! beautiful! beautiful! 
 
 
 
 So they intoned the spell of the awful six : — 
 
 The fourfold horizon; in his zenith 
 
 The noon sun rideth, down driving 
 
 The shadow to the nethermost depth, where 
 
 None living may pursue. ^Tis the world, with its 
 
 Ever-triumphing good, yet with evil too: — 
 
 Mysterious, mysterious, how mysterious ! 
 
 Knit together, twain world's coequal — ' 
 (With his zenith each and his nadir,) and 
 The twelve star-signs of the zodiac 
 Stand about the ecliptic resplendent ! 
 Or, impose thou on the masterless world 
 God's intimate home-love as law, and lo — 
 In twelve, the full cycle perfection ! 
 
 So ended the hymn of the ancient order. 
 
 But One hath arrived now, and behold 
 
 A vaster vision ! I shout to you 
 
 My dithyramb in sacredest fury : 
 
 Hark ! horrible, impious blasphemy ! 
 
 The closed perfection shall be transcended :- 
 
 Eevelation, revelation, revelation ! 
 
 63 
 
UNCLE SAM'S SHADOW 
 
 Lo, the cycle perfection once closed, I open it 
 With innovation, initiative^ freedom ! 
 Of old, was the ancient not new once? 
 And not truer when primevally newer so? 
 When spontaneous, irresistible, wonderful? 
 Old hemisphere, tremble lest it blast thee, 
 My creation, new creation, my creation ! 
 
 (Uncle Sam pauses, looks at the cycle of Nine, who seem hypno- 
 tized, and as if transfusing all their vital powers into him) 
 
 Ha, ha, boys ! Drink the Empyrean, 
 
 And whoop it up with me ! 
 
 Sing to my lucky number ! 
 
 It is mine, you understand, my monopoly ! 
 
 And I always knew it instinctively when they slandered it. 
 
 A baker's dozen, forsooth, they called it? 
 
 Then I baked a new loaf, in my oven of affliction. 
 
 Of the ancient Bread of Life. 
 
 For I tell you, there hath arisen 
 
 And ascended to the zenith, and been received in glory. 
 
 In the band of cosmic brotherhood, 
 
 A New constellation, mine, mine, mine ! 
 
 Thirteen states in one nation. 
 
 Celestial and infernal and Eternal! 
 
 Ay, my lucky number. 
 
 Feared and hated 
 
 Superstitiously, — 
 
 Traduced how stupidly, viciously, 
 
 My plucky number 
 
 That surpasses 
 
 All that hath been victorious, — 
 
 That begetteth from molten masses 
 
 The unknown disastrous, uproarious, 
 
 64 
 
AND PHANTOM SELVES 
 
 More beautiful and ever more glorious! 
 
 Behold it is I, translated. 
 
 The fated. 
 
 The new created ! 
 
 And my flag, 
 
 My sky-rag — 
 
 You can^t brag 
 
 Too loudly, 
 
 Nor wave too proudly — 
 
 Floating, flaring, flapping 
 
 To the stars' hand-clapping ! 
 
 Reverent and devout to you. 
 
 It is I, even I, who shout to you : 
 
 You can't hang too high ! 
 
 And you sha'n't die ! 
 
 And cry 
 
 To whoso dareth ask ''why?'': 
 
 " 'Tis because 
 
 Naught daunts or awes 
 
 Life's law of laws. 
 
 And a spirit of life am I !" 
 
 (Uncle Sam, after madly waving his hat, looks about very much 
 pleased to he, so far as he can see, alone) 
 
 Ha, ha, boys! My song has been too much for your several 
 hypertrophied brags. You've got telescoped, incorporated, di- 
 gested. And you're very, very, very happy, I know, who best 
 ought to, being perfectly acquainted with your whereabouts and 
 present doings. All's well that ends well, isn't it ? And to think 
 that I managed all this by my sole self, with an immortal Neo- 
 pythagorean dithyramb improvised on the spot! Who needs to 
 worry about army, or navy, coast defences, and air fleets ? 
 
 (Benjamin Franklin enters and watches Uncle Sam with a quiet, 
 benign amusement) 
 
 And what's in order now? 
 
 6B 
 
UNCLE SAM'S SHADOW 
 
 Why a little apposite brag-song in my own honor, I guess 
 
 likely. 
 ^'Ha! Ha! 
 I did it. 
 
 I couldn't kick out the impudent pretenders. 
 They always came back fatally like boomerangs. 
 How! now? 
 
 I gobbled my shadow, and became straightway a glow-worm, 
 A lightning-bug tousling the ^rose of dawn' ! 
 I sang of Progress, Evolution 
 Beyond foreseen conclusions and prophetic limits, 
 And they faded into me, 
 Calmly, unanimously; 
 They were saved the bother of being distinct, separate, 
 
 external. 
 They are henceforth identified, diffused, and eternal 
 With my identity, diffusion and eternity. 
 
 total, delicate, benevolent assimilation! 
 
 Yet I have established my autocracy democratically 
 By the vote for voluptuously desired 
 Nirvanic extinction in . . . 
 What is all embracing and sufficient — ^ME! 
 And I have established so my single yet complex con- 
 sciousness I 
 
 1 have vanquished that needlessly explicit and wasteful 
 
 variety ! 
 I have even absorbed the prophetically projected 
 Implicit revelations — for they elected 
 To fill me to aeonian satiety! 
 Having soared high-flown 
 Lo, I stand full grown 
 In my station. 
 
 And by that simple yet subtle operation — 
 As of old — 
 Sublimely alone V 
 
 66 
 
AND PHANTOM SELVES 
 
 (As Uncle Sam has sung his boastful song, the glow has grad- 
 ually faded out of him and he looks down astonished at his 
 person) 
 
 Uncle Sam — 
 
 Ha, what^s this? 
 
 My phosphorescence gone ? 
 
 So much the better, I must suppose ! 
 
 For who would shine as a star, be fragrant as a rose? 
 
 Inconvenient accomplishment, dubious bliss ! 
 
 Fd rather rely on my brain and my brawn ! ! 
 
 iWhat ? Who goes there ? You, Benny ? Was it not I after all, 
 but you, perhaps, who worked the spell? and reduced chaos to 
 cosmos ? the dark to a modest rational twilight ? and set me here 
 in my right mind, nobly arrayed in my every-day togs ? 
 
 (Benjamin Franhlin shakes his head comically, in denial) 
 
 Oh, you needn't refuse to confess the truth. You're the only 
 one, dead or alive, I could allow to snatch my peculiar laurels 
 from me. If if s you did it, I owe you a debt for obligingly let- 
 ting me think I was doing it while it happened; — for it was a 
 monstrous Job: sanifying, clarifying, and unifying me after I 
 indulged in this oriental auto-psycho-analysis. 
 
 Now, thank heaven, we are bound once more in common 
 sense, and can attend to practical affairs of state. Sit down, 
 Uncle Benny, and lef s have it out once and for all. You have 
 spied out the enemy, and come to what conclusion about them? 
 
 67 
 
THE FINAL SELECTION OF THE COMMITTEE 
 OF PACIFICATION 
 
Benjamin Franklin — ' 
 
 "Knaves and nettles are akin 
 Stroke them kindly, and thejr'U sting." 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^So, you're like me, veering to a more strenuous do- 
 mestic policy? Still, couldn't we somehow manage to spare 
 ourselves so much remorse ? A gallon or two of the milk of hu- 
 man kindness should suffice to drug them, and then we would 
 manage their affairs in the interim. When they sober up they'd 
 never care to own they hadn't been compos mentis, and they 
 would pretend to agree with all we've done, and that they, in- 
 deed, voted it so. Isn't that a pleasanter way of dealing with 
 the situation? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — 
 
 "Drink and drink more and still unsatisfied; 
 Drink till drink drowned him, and he thirsty died." 
 
 Uncle 'Sam — Your saws always make Pat cut his own limb from 
 the tree trunk, and precipitate him headlong into the briers! 
 Do you think a little liberal education, and moral and religious 
 culture — non-sectarian and seemingly atheistic — would minister 
 to ungodly pride in these invading hordes? Would that be a 
 dangerous expedient? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — 
 
 "To be proud of knowledge, is to be blind with light. 
 To be proud of virtue, is to be poisoned with an overdose of 
 the antidote." 
 
 Uncle Sam — I see, it's absurd. Still, you would agree it might 
 work out well ; and with my invariable luck, anything that's pos- 
 sible is more than likely. I've been a fool, I own it. I've fed 
 them fat, and made them suppose that comfort's a mark of 
 nobility. They're political parvenus, and they haven't the 
 proper sense of the inherited good fortune of being native 
 Americans. 
 
 71 
 
HIS FINAL COMMITTEE 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — 
 
 "No blood is as old 
 As mud or gold." 
 
 Uncle Sam — 'So you suggest the cure for mud-slinging is a mud- 
 bath, and for gold-greed, an overdose of aurum potabile? I 
 guess it wouldn^t take forty acres of bad land and two legs of a 
 mule apiece to turn any one of the worst radicals into an all- 
 fired conservative. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — I didn't mean to imply that dollars count 
 more than the man, or that mud is fairer than a fair dame. 
 
 But what I did mean is, there's no use making them feel 
 they can never really penetrate into the inmost circle. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^And get certificated as adopted progeny — of our 
 Colonial dames and sires? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — As long as the female section of your 
 population systematically covers domestic labor with unjust con- 
 tempt, are you surprised that only foreigners will serve in your 
 home? As long as you revive the false standards on which the 
 old nobilities rested, what appears to have been the use of abolish- 
 ing titles, and primogeniture and entail ? 
 
 Can't you see that a fated social exclusion hurts worse than 
 a tax on tea? Eemember, Sam, set up desert and good man- 
 ners, and social interest as the standard, and all will go to school 
 and pay the tuition fee to become acceptable. As for the pedi- 
 gree, in ten generations my descendant has exactly — notice, ifs 
 an unpronounceable fraction — l/l,022th part of my egregious 
 person, probably his only noteworthy ancestor. 
 
 Uncle Sam — iSo, you argue for the children of the soil, and that 
 they're all one with angels from heaven, if they have or get the 
 right stuff, and accept the constitution? That seems fair. But 
 I tell you it isn't feasible. There's our women folk to reckon 
 with — as you shrewdly observed — and they're unbudgeable, unre- 
 constructed, and they, tho' I hate to admit it, they do boss 
 the ranch. 
 
 72 
 
OF PACIFICATION 
 
 I'm deadly sick of all this negotiation. If my detractors 
 knew how dangerous I am when unduly provoked, I think 
 they'd come to terms. I just feel like exploding — and scattering 
 annihilation. 
 
 These arid sands need extensive lime deposits ; and as for the 
 immediate requirements of the atmosphere, we could get a 
 million incubators and raise buzzards enough in no time. And 
 if you ever set your mind on destruction — not to mention Tesla, 
 Marconi, 'Maxim and my own native wizards — Fulton, Morse, 
 Wilbur Wright, my great juggler Edison, and my prophet 
 Burbank, I just wonder what would be left of this inhuman ref- 
 use? I guess we've pretty nearly by this hardened our hearts 
 Teutonically against unprofitable sentiment. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — 
 
 "The brave and the wise can pity and excuse. 
 Where cowards and fools no mercy refuse." 
 
 Uncle Sam — 'What, you've not turned "peace at any price" ? Oh, 
 I see, you're poking fun at me ! Yes, yes, there's no getting out 
 of it. I started out this way, and there's no use getting the laugh 
 on me by my losing my temper. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — I'm glad your device — not so exceedingly 
 novel a resort of exasperated human nature — is put off to a more 
 convenient season. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Yes, yes, we'll do everything decently and in order. 
 Discover at once a committee fit to represent me, and trust to 
 palaver, diplomacy, and appeals to the invisible beauty of the 
 average soul. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — But why, my son, don't we at the least 
 affect despatch — that virtue incumj)ent on men in whom reposes 
 as a trust the direction of public affairs? We Colonials, you 
 know, were not ready to impute pre-eminence to any man of an- 
 other commonwealth, without most excellent cause. Yet all 
 alike acknowledged His Excellency, the general-in-chief, as even 
 more extraordinarily distinguished for his knowledge of men 
 
 73 
 
HIS FINAL COMMITTEE 
 
 and astute judgment of policies, than for the possession of the 
 talents peculiar to the soldier and the administrator. 
 
 Unci^ Bam — ^But I\e changed my mind. There sha'n't be more 
 than four fingers to my right hand, and the thumb shall be re- 
 served to myself. Then in case of a tie I'll cast the decisive 
 vote. Novr, can you see the Father of his Country as one of the 
 four — with you as the middle finger ? He may have been modest, 
 you know, but he had a sufficient sense of his singular worth, and 
 what became his dignity. I always cherished a shrewd suspi- 
 cion that if those British military men had been less uppish 
 with him in his youth, who knows whether he'd have been so 
 strong for my unfashionable cause in later life? He wouldn't 
 have preferred tatters to style ! Not he, who ordered, according 
 to his original formulas, his own clothes, always made of the 
 best materials in the latest London swagger ! 
 
 Of course, at bottom, ifs just only reverence and gratitude 
 prompt me to exclude him from our official committee. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — ^And, furthermore, you think you could 
 in any event avail yourself of his judgment ? Now thanks to his 
 noble nature you may. He sent you upon my request his en- 
 grossed opinion as to the most suitable persons to be selected for 
 this important mission; altho' I assure you he was very properly 
 reluctant to obtrude, unsolicited by yourself, his opinion. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Good! Let's inspect his ticket. It can't hurt. 
 
 There's safety in the multitude of counsellors. 
 Benjamin Franklin — Which usually lead to determinations in 
 
 agreement with whatsoever one pleased before consultation. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Acute you are ! I never resent one more suggestion 
 
 from even the best and wisest of men. 
 Benjamin Franklin — Shall I read off the roll of honor? 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Do, do; and as tho' you were at the court of the 
 French Louis. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — Nathaniel Greene, dashing and ingenious 
 campaigner. Eobert Morris, of Willing & Morris, merchants, 
 
 74 
 
OF PACIFICATION 
 
 well known and respected in Philadelphia. Colonel Alexander 
 
 Hamilton, mightier with the pen even than with the sword. 
 
 Jonathan TmmbnU, Grovernor's assistant, deputy-governor, and, 
 
 finally, governor of the great state of Connecticut forty-nine 
 
 years all told. 
 Uncle Sam — Must have been slow as molasses in zero weather, 
 
 or hadn^t they but one male nutmeg? Let^s consider them 
 
 seriatim, verbatim and literatim. 
 Benjamin Franklin — -You remember Nathaniel Greene? 
 Uncle Sam — Thank you. I^m not in my second dotage. TaU, he 
 
 was, strong, vigorous. I like his looks: broad of the brows, a 
 
 trifle full in the cheeks, like a boy stealing apples. His frank, 
 
 big eyes do my heart good. 
 Benjamin Franklin — He was of Quaker persuasion. 
 Uncle Sam — That's not against him, since he was of fighting 
 
 stock aU the same. If his father was a first-day preacher, from 
 
 second day to sixth he was an honest if sooty blacksmith and be- 
 
 powdered miller! 
 Benjamin Frai^klin — ^Born in stubborn little Rhode Island — 
 
 the last plantation to accept the Constitution. 
 Uncle Sam — He mended that record, settling in hot-headed 
 
 Georgia. 
 Benjamin Franklin — He outwitted Cornwallis from Catawba 
 
 to Dan. 
 Uncle Sam — -Any colonial leader was liable to do that, by just 
 
 pitting naked horse sense and gumption and geography, got by 
 
 jogging, against tactical rules and official maps. 
 Benjamin Franklin — Extremely ingenious and inventive too 
 
 was he. 
 Uncle Sam — Made up those amphibious vehicles — ^keels for the 
 
 swollen rivers, and cart-wheels for the rutty roads? Yes, that 
 
 was cute ! 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — He enjoyed the entire confidence of the 
 army of the South. 
 
 75 
 
HIS FINAL COMMITTEE 
 
 UncIaE Sam — Yet didn't, somehow, make a national success? 
 Thaf s where I touch his weak spot. Any corporal ought to be 
 restlessly biding his time to become commander-in-chief. Can 
 you see him in the shoes of His Excellency? Not I. Perhaps 
 that recommended him, you know. Even great men favor the 
 loyal second-rater. Let's consider the next nominee. Forgotten 
 him almost by this. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — Robert Morris. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Ay, so many of that name. Meant originally Moor- 
 ish, I believe? Moorish dance and then, just country good- 
 fellowship ? 
 
 Can't place him at all. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — Truly, you amaze me. He was one of our 
 real benefactors. In deed, that is, and not in word only. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Wait a minute. This Robert Bruce must have done 
 some whopping thing. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — Nothing, it seems, that looms very large 
 in any mind now. He merely financed the Revolution. 
 
 Uncle Sam — And at a profit, eh? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — No charges were ever proven. 
 
 Uncle Sam — That's to his credit immensely — after oflBcial in- 
 vestigations conducted under his own supervision? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — Seriously, he saved the credit of the colo- 
 nies. It can be truthfully said that it was he, therefore, who 
 established American Independence. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Ah, I remember now. It was he tried to economize 
 in the army appropriations by reducing the number of the of- 
 ficers and augmenting that of the privates? If so, that really 
 was unusually smart. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — He filled honorably the office of Superin- 
 tendent of Finance, and was also Agent of Marine, to nurse the 
 unfortunate infant navy. He didn't think one could carry on a 
 war to victory on quibbles and puns. He furnished the army with 
 lead and rations. And the good ship America, there wasn't 
 
 76 
 
OF PACIFICATION 
 
 money to finish, he gave to King Louis to square his country's 
 overdue obligations. 
 Uncle Sam— And get rid incidentally of a bad investment ? Very 
 handsome I 
 
 According to you, then, he did aU the dirty work, and didn't 
 give a continental for calumny. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — He tried to rouse the inefficient, mutually 
 distrustful state-legislatures from their torpor. For a long time 
 it seemed as though he were preaching to the dead. He effected 
 a loan with the French General, staking his personal estate and 
 honor as security. I understand the nature and difficulty of such 
 services, because, while not privileged to render them, I did a 
 little financing in early life. I was not unconnected vdth the 
 commissariat. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Ha, ha, yes, you did go in for supplying the British 
 with mules in the French Indian wars! But was he really 
 straight like you? 
 
 Benjamin Fkanklin — 'He was much maligned by the irrespon- 
 sible, but the substantial men of his day honored him. 
 
 Uncle Sam — *And of course he died — a multi-miUionaire ! 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — ^^Sad to relate, no. He was tracked from 
 place to place by bailiffs, and in the end suffered imprisonment at 
 Prune Street for debt as a bankrupt. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^You don't mean to say he failed 9 Scandalous ! 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — Yes, but with honor. And he advised his 
 son to keep ever within bounds. "You will grow rich fast 
 enough,'' said he, "and enjoy yourself much more than if you 
 overstrain as I have done, and try to provide too amply for your 
 family." He was a man of imagination, but he was ahead of his 
 times. He bore ill fortune with philosophy and dignified cour- 
 age to the last. 
 
 Uncle Sam — I guess we can't have both a General and a financier 
 on a committee that's to deal with that rabble tea-party up yon- 
 der. They mightn't like it at all. I must admit, it would hardly 
 
 77 
 
HIS FINAL COMMITTEiB 
 
 be complimentary ! A General — who never capitalized politically 
 his successes, and a financier-^who managed public affairs glor- 
 iously, and yet let his own suffer by an unnatural divorce ? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — ^You're very cynical and severe, Samuel; 
 and I don^t see how you dare to attach such disproportionate 
 importance to success, when so much of it, as you best know, is 
 luck or lack of temptation. 
 
 Uncle Sam — I'm peculiar, maybe, but I can't help it. So, 
 "Next!" I say. 
 
 Benjamin Fbanklin — ^Alexander Hamilton: the intimate heart- 
 ener of our General-in-chief and the strong right arm of our 
 first President, the chief joint author of the Federalist. 
 
 Uncle SAM^Ay, ay, I remember him quite well. A staunch 
 friend of strong central government; and he, mind you, just 
 next to his great principal. It's perfectly self-evident and 
 natural. If he'd had his way, that Newport Yankee King from 
 the old Dominion wouldn't have remained a mere old wives' 
 tale! 
 
 Think of it, too, he was born in Bermuda — a foreigner under 
 the British flag ! 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — As to the flag, who of us saw a better float 
 over his cradle? 
 
 Uncle Sam — Tut, tut. Where I saw the light, there wasn't ever 
 an}i:hing foreign: and I guess you, for one, were naturalized be- 
 fore birth in your inmost predestination. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — lAt all events, Hamilton was loyally brave 
 and efficient. He gave his life for his adopted country, all the 
 more his, mind you, because of will, and not of accident — ^his. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Do you call birth an accident? Well, well; but be 
 that as it may. I call that election to grace. 
 
 No, I can't forgive him his lack of insight into character. 
 Why, didn't he know what that political swash-buckler was after 
 — Aaron Burr, Emperor of Blennerhasset and near-President of 
 the United States? And if he saw into his traitor soul, why 
 hadn't he the moral courage to refuse his own loyal body, that 
 
 78 
 
OF PACIFICATION 
 
 was mine, not his, as a target for the villain ? And if he hadn't 
 
 that, why then was he so soft as not to shoot his challenger 
 
 through the heart first, and settle the score with his conscience 
 
 later? 
 Benjamin Franklin — ^It was an unfortunate and reprehensible 
 
 custom among gentlemen. 
 Uncle Sam — Tut, tut. I wont have a near-suicide on any life 
 
 and death mission of mine. 
 Benjamin Franklin — ^I hesitate now to name the last: Jonathan. 
 
 TrumbuU, the capable organizer and civil administrator. 
 
 Uncle Sam — And permanent governor ? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — He was a true and stalwart friend ; a great 
 helper of our cause throughout our dark days. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Brother Jonathan? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — That, they say, was but a jesting address 
 of his admirer, the General-in-chief . 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^A reference to David's little death-ditty "Sweeter 
 than love of Woman"? How many, I wonder? Because he 
 could be found in sacred scripture, didn't he come very near to 
 ousting me from my unrivalled place as the National Genius? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — Your taste is very precise, and somewhat 
 biased by personal considerations. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^So it should be, in selecting colleagues worthy of 
 my admirable boyhood counsellor and friend. 
 
 I wont have one of those four worthies. No man without 
 proper instinct of self-preservation, or what I term sanctifigump- 
 tion; no man who hasn't the kind of tough constitution to sur- 
 vive till he's a pronounced success; no one who's born in Liver- 
 pool and winds up in prison for debt; no man who was content 
 to live and die in his own state without a continental ambition ! 
 They were all good men and true, as proved by the fact that they 
 won and retained the friendship and good opinion of His Excel- 
 lency. But I want pickings from a wider field in time and 
 space than your narrow colonial cow pasture ! 
 
 79 
 
HIS FIKAL COMMITTEE 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — So we're back where we started, like the 
 hunted hare or fox. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Like the sun and the moon too, Benny. And we've 
 
 got one inestimable advantage — a clean slate! Besides, I've an 
 
 f idea. You nominate the best man yon can think of (always 
 
 • omitting my honored Lord of Mount Vernon on the Potomac), 
 
 and let your choice in turn do likewise, and so on. 
 
 IBenjamin Franklin — ^But if you find fault with them — 
 frivolously ? 
 
 Uncle Sam— 'I'll waive petty objections, except such as well up out 
 of my inner consciousness with irresistible fury like an oil 
 gusher. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — -At length I see the day gild the Eastern 
 hills! 
 
 My nominee derives from Welsh lineage. His antecedents 
 looked on Mount Snowdon. By fits, the ancestral mountain 
 haunted him; at least, he was moodish and erratic. His bursts 
 of enthusiasm alternated with hesitancies and spells of keen criti- 
 cism. He was, in a word, a poet, but his frenzied fancy moved 
 in the domain of practical interests. He dreamed, but it was 
 only of the actual welfare of his fellow-men to the remotest gen- 
 erations. Then too, he had always most excellent good fortune 
 at moments of danger and difficulty. 
 
 Uncle Sam — "Good luck's" more than half of sane genius. So 
 far, so good. And "practical"? Was he that? It's the mark of 
 a genuine inspiration! 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — He abhorred strife, and was therefore a 
 reluctant revolutionist. Perhaps, like Morris, he hoped at first 
 for a reconciliation with the mother country. Once started, how- 
 ever, nothing could stop him. The trail of his logic caught fire. 
 
 Uncle Sam— ^Ah, he went on a bee line to the limit ! I like that. 
 Always makes interesting reading. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin— He couldn't help it. It was like the 
 divinely ordained madness of an ancient prophet: Civil liberty, 
 
 80 
 
OF PACIFICATION 
 
 freedom of thought, separation of Church and State, education^ 
 for the plain man ! And, always, Liberty ! 
 
 Uncle ^am — And yet he wasn't a mere theorist? He made things 
 happen and hum? 
 
 Benjamin Feanklin — ^Well, he wasn't so consistent but that he 
 didn't refrain from acquiring a bad title cheap, when it pro- 
 cured for his people a claim to half a continent! At first he 
 was afraid of the Constitution, as likely to foster tyranny; but 
 he was converted to it, when once himself invested with the pre- 
 rogatives of the supreme executive, which, it is said, he used like 
 a benevolent monocrat. 
 
 Uncle Sam — 1 can forgive all that, because of his hitching his 
 horse to the White House fence. I dote on his fervent belief in 
 the people. Of course, he was a sceptic as to revealed religion? 
 
 Benjamin Feanklin — ^He set forth a broad religion of states- 
 manship and of civilized humanitarian kindness. He was strong, 
 too, in aSirming that his theories of government were founded in 
 eternal truth, so he didn't lack for dogma. As to his eschatology 
 — I can say he looked to the Golden Age of free inquiry ahead. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^And once he had a whopping majority back of him, 
 he could whack a minority into shape and induce it to see light ? 
 
 Benjamin Feanklin — And yet he feared that if a navy were built 
 up to respectable size it would bring to birth a disposition to 
 "swagger and hector" hopelessly, inimical to free institutions. He 
 believed that he himself was merely the representative of a sov- 
 ereign people, and his will therefore absolute for the time being as 
 the people's will. He wanted to imify and nationalize the states. 
 Although a Virginian first and last, and objecting in theory to 
 national improvements, he promoted all that might "make lines 
 of separation disappear" until the "interests of all were identi- 
 fied." For he foresaw that "only so and gradually could their 
 union be cemented with indissoluble ties." 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Enough ! Agreed. The author of the immortal Dec- 
 laration shall be easily the second on our committee of Pacifica- 
 tion. He had his faults, but he composed the first Chapter in 
 
 81 
 
HIS FIKAL COMMITTEE 
 
 my Genesis : Intelligent public opinion is the voice of God ; All 
 natural rights are inalienable, by sale or contract; Government 
 exists to secure these rights, and not for the emolument of the 
 governing classes ; The test of its justice is in the consent of the 
 governed ; The people has an innate right to inaugurate reforms 
 — the right of private judgment being extended from the individ- 
 ual conscience to the people as a whole, in matters of happiness 
 and safety here below ; And yet, for all our determination to have 
 no grand Mogul or other nuisances, we shall go it slow, and 
 tolerate no upsets for light and transient reasons. That was a 
 Political Gospel ! 
 
 Ho, here, sage of Monticello, you're wanted, if you did get 
 eaten out of house and home from sheer pride of hospitality. 
 And for all your six feet, haven't you got a refined and delicate 
 countenance ? But your eyes dodge mine — I guess you had your 
 little secrets. Almost tempts one to believe that undignified 
 tittle-tattle about lady killing and secret disregard of the color 
 line! 
 
 Come, I'll forgive you your hatred of G. W.'s levees, I'm not 
 so dead sure about them myself. And I'll forgive your sly, round- 
 about ways of assailing his character, when you were a member of 
 his official household. That may have been conscientious in you, 
 although it wasn't very square. And I'll forgive you all 
 your reckless insinuations as to the duty of rebellion, when the 
 character of the governor happens to be judged "infamous" by 
 the populace that isn't privileged to know the inside facts of 
 the case! 
 
 See up yonder? That's what the rabble appeals to now. Go 
 and make amends for those little slips of yours, Thomas of 
 Monticello ! And say, for all your petty weaknesses, I like you, 
 though I can't tell why, Guess you were all-fired magnetic. 
 Let's shake. 
 
 Thomas Jefferson — I'm afraid it is difiicult for us. 
 
 Uncle Sam — To see ourselves as others see us? Oh, you mean 
 you're to me impalpable still ? Our hands can't grip each other ? 
 
 8^ 
 
OF PACIFICATION 
 
 Well then, Benny, do it for ine. I guess historical Spooks can 
 fetch each other^s pump-handle effectively. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — Now, Samuel, is the honorable Mr. Jeffer- 
 son to select the next man who is most likely in his opinion to 
 prove useful at the crisis we confront ? 
 
 Uncle SAM—^Without a doubt, doubting Thomas. Fix on a 
 first*-rater out of hand. 
 
 Thomas Jefferson— It is a responsibility I shall not shirk. 
 And with your favor, my choice falls on a man robust, agile, 
 wiry, with a long head and slim face, wild shock of straight red- 
 dish hair, and piercing blue eyes. For he vindicates my faith in 
 the plain people. His speech was illiterate. His manners were 
 imcouth. But he was endowed with childlike simplicity, un- 
 flinching courage, and stubborn will. Men said, his were the 
 rugged virtues. "He knew no fear, and gave the devil no 
 quarter." 
 
 Uncle Sam— 'But was he native born ? 
 
 Thomas Jefferson — Of a father, moreover, fresh from Ireland — 
 which illustrates the inherent rights of man. He built a rude 
 log-hut in his clearing in the mountains of North Carolina. 
 When a mere lad, his widowed mother destined him for the 
 sacred ministry. But he refused to avail himself of any oppor- 
 tunities for study. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Native genius, that sprouts right up like a 
 Turk^s head lily, and lifts a spire of multiple splendor on a man- 
 high shaft, to startle the bumble-bees and the humming-birds? 
 
 Thomas Jefferson — He excelled in rough and tumble sports: 
 running, jumping, wrestling. He was brave but mischievous and 
 overbearing; quick and violent of temper. By Hanging Rock 
 he was a prisoner of war at thirteen. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Ha, ha, that's true. He knew enough to honor my 
 mystic number, costing the British his keep, if he couldn't pick 
 them off as a sharp-shooter any more. Lots more useful so, than 
 dead. 
 
 83 
 
HIS PINAL COMMITTEE 
 
 Thomas Jeffeeson — lAt twenty-one he crossed the mountains to 
 
 the wilds of Tennessee. 
 UNOtE Sam — He foresaw a fat thing, and got in on the ground 
 
 floor. Good for him. 
 
 Thomas JeffeesoN' — ^Those were rough days, when the women 
 picked wild berries, and the men hoed corn among the burned 
 stumps of the clearings, while the older settlers were told off 
 to watch, gun in hand, for the redskins. The rest everybody 
 remembers, even a well-read and cultured, up-to-date inhabitant 
 of the Atlantic coast. He practised law, riding through dense 
 forests from settlement to settlement, armed to the teeth and 
 ready for the worst He raised and kept effective, to beat back 
 the Creek savages, an army of imdisciplined settlers with rations 
 of acorns and his brandished pistol under their noses. He cared 
 not one whit for instructions that ran counter to success. He 
 won against the veterans, that had fought Napolean to a stand- 
 still in Spain, at the battle of New Orleans, after terms were 
 agreed upon, and offset so the dishonor of our capital set in 
 flames, and the secret proposals of Massachusetts and Connecticut 
 to conclude an inglorious private peace. 
 
 Uncle Saim — Hurrah for Old Hickory ! Always doted on his grim, 
 hatchet-face and rugged virtues ! Granted the devil no quarter ! 
 Couldn't in a stand-up fight give his enemy the satisfaction of 
 knowing he'd landed — till he packed him off to Kingdom 
 Come ! Hurrah ! 
 
 Of course he had his peccadillos. He whispered into the 
 ears of both my elephant and my donkey that perfidious insin- 
 uation : "To the victor belong the spoils," The tariff was rough- 
 hewn by him and scaled down by way of compromise; and he 
 kicked the great bank, Robert Morris was at such pains to organ- 
 ize, all over the circumambient landscape. Maybe he was wrong. 
 Who can decide at this day? But he was mettlesome and live- 
 ly; fine company for getters of news; kept the atmosphere 
 tingling with his doings. , He was right so far — ^men shall own 
 money, and not money any man ; varied home production is more 
 
 84 
 
OF PACIPICATION 
 
 important than cheapness or even quality of goods consumed; 
 national self-respect comes first every time, correctness of atti- 
 tude and diplomatic suavity long ways after, with other super- 
 fluous baggage. And he did what no other man ever did — ^made 
 South Carolina eat and enjoy her own nettles, French-fried. 
 No nullification ! No nonsense ! He got in his lick first all the 
 time fore and aft] 
 
 Say, old boy, don't be so bashful. You remember when the 
 chief magistracy was first proposed, you protested : ''Don't think 
 of it ! I haven't the first qualifications ! I'm a rough, plain man. 
 The idea is absurd !" But you yielded reluctantly to the good 
 opinions of the discerning, and placed yourself in the hands of 
 your good friends for the best interests of the country; and so 
 your example has been followed since several times. Once in the 
 chair, a yellow jacket couldn't settle within a mile. And your 
 kitchen cabinet sat on the back stoop, while you expounded to 
 them the thing you alone knew — what was good and right in 
 your eyes, on every question under the shining canopy. 
 
 I'm tired singing your praises to the gallery gods, that 
 twinkle, twinkle high in the sky. Inventor of the pocket veto ! 
 Come and stand up for yourself ! 
 
 (Enters Andrew Jackson) 
 
 Ha, ha, Andy my boy, let me introduce you to the founder of 
 
 the first State University, 
 Thomas Jeffeeson — ^Who had the humble merit, sir, however, of 
 
 advocating the union of agriculture with classical learning. 
 Benjamin Franklin — I'm glad to make the acquaintance of so 
 
 honest and zealous a servant of the commonwealth. 
 Uncle Sam — Of course you know each other. And if s your turn 
 
 now to nab us a first-rater who'll join you in my ticklish business. 
 
 Andrew Jackson — I'm greatly obliged for your kind con- 
 sideration. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^And I, for your reputed way of settling a dispute on 
 punctilio. Do you remember? It was between a pure Castilian 
 
 85 
 
HIS FINAL COMMITTEE 
 
 importation and the representative of gay Paree. It would jog- 
 gle my tombstone if I could think of it in my grave ! To see you 
 hopping in on one foot while pulling on your other Jackboot, 
 smack into the august and gracious presences— the mutually ag- 
 grieved ambassadors ! That's the way to settle disputes between 
 senors and monsieurs, and all other hagglers about precedence 
 and bric-a-brac. I'll accept your picked man in advance, you 
 who're grand-dad of lone-star Texas, thro' Sam Houston, that 
 tough son of your Creek campaign days ! 
 
 Andrew Jackson — ^Well, I'm not good at parlez-vousing , and so 
 I've set my heart right off on a man like myself in some ways : 
 straight, downright, coarse, but luckier than I — ^got killed in 
 the nick of time, for his greater fame; and didn't get fooled, 
 like me, by little Martin Van! Raised in a log cabin— like 
 Tippecanoe and myself. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Ha, ha, whooping it up for "the boys as wield the 
 plough and the spade"? Hard-cider camp meetings, and con- 
 versions to the rough-and-ready, hardy, doughty, bend-and-never- 
 break stuff of my brawny West? 
 
 Andrew Jackson — I don't mean the man who died for lack of an 
 overcoat at his inauguration, run plumb crazy by place hunters ! 
 I mean a stouter man; tho' old Tippecanoe did win a great vic- 
 tory in his day. 
 
 Uncle Sam^ — The Rail Splitter, you've in mind? my dear old 
 honest Abe ? 
 
 Benny, what's the matter with us, that we left it to Old 
 Hickory to hit it off like this? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — We think least, it often happens, of those 
 we love best ; and reserve our good manners for strangers. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Here with you. Old Abe ! No delay. This is the hour 
 for your gentle sense of humor. And they say, when you started 
 for Washington, D. C, you went to weed your old Dad's grave, 
 and pay the respect of a tear to Nancy Hanks, or was it maybe 
 your stepmother? You handed out to the old ne'er-do-weels 
 all the credit ! That fetches moisture to my eye every time. 
 
 86 
 
OF PACIFICATION 
 
 {Lincoln appears, very grave and solemn) 
 
 Hip, hip, hurrah, boys ! 
 
 Hug him for me, Andy of the Hermitage, and you too, 
 Thomas of Monticello. 
 
 Not so stand-of&sh. Don't sidle and ogle. Don't bare-back 
 on your dignity. It's a case of pure theory, and of rough-and- 
 ready practice bear-hugging a bit of both, when you three meet, 
 Thomas, Andy and Abe! 
 
 {Turning overjoyed and proud to Benjamin FranUin, who 
 stands benignly aloof) Who ever in all the world from before 
 Noah, and down to my own mighty Duckhunter, and my irre- 
 pressible lion-tamer, and the fair phrase-coiner from Scholar's 
 town, could corrall such a thundering monoculous big four as 
 you — except me, only ME ? Why, I've got to jig for joy — ^posi- 
 tively jig and jiggle. 
 
 {Pointing at Benjamin Franklin) Kind sirs, up yonder, I 
 send you my tact and my common sense. He's chairman, and 
 don't forget — there's a reason. 
 
 {Pointing at Thomas Jefferson) He's my humanitarian en- 
 thusiasm, and my political and economic idealism; honey-sweet 
 to the taste, but mind the sting in the tail. 
 
 {Pointing at Andrew Jachson) — Here's my Handy Andy: 
 Quick action, never stop for etiquette and legal quibbles that 
 would keep you from bagging the big game, and always deal 
 the devil a knockout blow before he bats his eye ! 
 
 {Pointing to Abraham Lincoln) And here's Abraham, my 
 only, my lonely! Linkhorn was his name once? I tell you he 
 was a link-hearts all around, as well as hands. He was justice, 
 gentlemen, sympathy, moral courage and a little homely joke in 
 the darkest hour. 
 
 {Turning to his committee) And the best of it is, boys — 
 with you four as the clover leaf — I can be the stem ; — for I feel 
 somehow as if I'd personally been you, and everyone of you me — 
 just ME and nothing less ! 
 
 87 
 
VI. 
 
 A NIGHTMARE VISION OF OLD WORLD 
 CONQUERORS 
 
VI. 
 
 Uncle Sam (Whispering to Benjamin Franhlin) — Hush! Who'd 
 believe it? There's genius in the Sam family. What's on now 
 isn't any everyday skylarking. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — A case of sleep-walking, it would appear. 
 
 Andrew Jackson — ^Ay, you can't draw the line sharp between 
 madness and religion. Ought to be authority on this point, 
 myself. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — It's Jessamine Magnolia, Mr. Jefferson, 
 you knew her intimately in her infancy. 
 
 Andrew Jackson — 'A prophetess to the rescue? Or will she voo- 
 doo us? 
 
 Uncle Sam {To Lincoln) — ^You ought to know, for it's you 
 brought discipline to bear, in her instance, tho' with malice 
 toward none, as you said, and with charity toward all. Abe, I 
 just bet you, if she's in good trim, she'll make Jael and Deborah 
 green with envy. She's wide awake enough. But once an idea 
 takes a grip on her, stop her if you can. Not a tidal-wave, or an 
 earthquake could, tho' a real barbecue might! Andy, she'll do 
 for us the Miriam vertigo over Pharaoh by the sands of the Eed 
 'Sea, to the yqtj snatch of ragtime Elijah hummed when he 
 slaughtered the Prophets of Baal with such remarkable unanim- 
 ity by the brook Kishon. Ha, ha, but I'm proud of her ! {Look- 
 ing at Jessamine Magnolia fondly) 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — ^She comes straight up to you, looking 
 neither to the right hand nor to the left. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Why should she single out any of you for special 
 attention, when, chosen because of your representative character, 
 you're all really implied in me? {Shaking Tiis fist humorously 
 at the top of the canyon) She isn't saying nothing for nothing, 
 not she ! She's just too full for utterance. Wouldn't care to be 
 in your present situation. When the prodigal daughter returns, 
 she can eat a fatted-calf whole, and I'm sorry for what she'll do 
 
 91 
 
NIGHTMARE VISION OF 
 
 to any Bull of Barfhan that's inconsiderate ! You see my family 
 suffices for all purposes. I've appointed a committee just for 
 form's sake to attend in style to your pacification. But she 
 Cometh, see, the desired of our nation. 
 
 And she'll sing us her ditty 
 Sans maudlin pity. 
 
 Decidedly well-intentioned; 
 For a clean sweep 
 Of your whole heap, — 
 
 No singular casualties mentioned ; 
 Not a widow bereft. 
 Or an orphan left 
 To be comforted, coddled and — pensioned! 
 
 {Jessamine Magnolia^ having solemnly come forward, fixes her 
 abstracted gaze on Uncle Sam) 
 
 father, I fear not the foe, but thy scorn 
 Of their hordes, and their ribald passion. 
 
 For I dreamed that the sun of thy roseate morn. 
 
 And thy golden noon, had sunk forlorn 
 
 In blood and blaze. 
 
 And a murky haze 
 
 On the morrow 
 
 Lifted from deserts charred and ashen 
 
 Their trailing veils of sorrow! 
 
 Uncle Sam — 
 
 Ah, child, thou deemest my star shall 
 
 Be quenched yet in mire at the last ? 
 What heroes can mad hordes marshall 
 
 That thou starest so wan and aghast? 
 
 Lo, I pledge my foes with laughter 
 
 And I blow a blast of my mouth, 
 That about and before them and after 
 
 From North and West and South, ' 
 
 92 
 
OLD WORLD CO^^QUERORS 
 
 In fast Niagaras spilled, run 
 
 Vast roaring jubilant seas — 
 My myriad newborn children, 
 
 To swallow them quick with ease! 
 
 Ha, ha, my old glory emerges. 
 
 With the dew of her morning birth, 
 From dancing golden surges; 
 
 A new heaven on a new earth. 
 
 Jessamine Magnolia (Having seemed to listen^, she suddenly fixes 
 with rapt stare a particular point of the canyon-rim) — 
 
 (HANNIBAL) 
 
 Ha, who is yon mighty man, father — 
 
 Swart, sinewy, massy, keen — 
 That the rabbles of races gather 
 
 And swarm to, as bees to their queen? 
 
 To shatter thy Roman dominion 
 
 With barbaric hate high-soul'd. 
 The ghostly Carthaginian 
 
 Hath sworn his oath as of old. 
 
 Tusked elephants trumpet and thunder. 
 
 And potsherds of vipers hail, 
 And the Roman world quakes under 
 
 Hannibal, terror of Baal ! 
 
 (Turning to another point of the canyon rim she takes up her 
 inspired burden) 
 
 (alaeic) 
 Who shakes like a tawny lion 
 
 His locks, and his blue eyes stare? 
 His wrath — the whirlwind they fly on. 
 
 And the lightning of their glare ? 
 
 93 
 
NIGHTMARE VISION OF 
 
 "To the plains from the moimtaiii passes 
 
 Ho, leap ye, my warriors blithe! — 
 For, the denser and taller the grass is 
 
 The daintier to mow with the scythe. 
 
 ''Be ye fat with surfeit and flaccid, 
 
 'Tis Alaric cleanseth the folk." 
 Thrice Eome hath he ta^en. Lo, he sacks it. 
 
 And guffaws at his Gothic joke ! 
 
 (At another point Jessamine Magnolia, fascijiated and terror- 
 stricken, -fixes another figure) 
 
 (attila) 
 
 What grim, flat head would affright us 
 
 Like a boa's of monstrous size ? 
 With the Hunnish dance of St. Vitus, 
 
 Wide nostrils and glittery eyes? 
 
 From China's wall to the Bosphorus 
 
 A crown of thorns and a rod; 
 From the Rhine to Rome — a cross for us; 
 
 Hail, scourge of a maniac God! 
 
 Lo, Hannibal's, Alaric's fury 
 
 And Attila's madness return. 
 For the oath of Tell in Uri, 
 
 And the faith of our sires we spurn. 
 
 {Jessamine Magnolia, with a tragic gesture, singles out a vision^ 
 ary figure in the centre of the vast concourse) 
 
 (jENGHis khan) 
 
 Ho, yonder the fire and sword of Khorassan, 
 
 Bockhara's sacker, the Khan, 
 To the minareted mosque in triumph doth pass on, 
 
 The Tartar trampler of man 1 
 
 94 
 
OLD WOELD CONQUBROES 
 
 "Iran, and Ind and Cathay, ye amassed your 
 
 Splendor for me ! Here am I ! 
 Where the hay is cut, my steeds shall pasture. 
 
 And splash hot blood to the sky!'' 
 
 So when he expired, the land they harried 
 
 To his capital city, and spread 
 Desolation to right and to left, as they carried 
 
 Earth's lord thro' a lane of the dead! 
 
 {Jessamine Magnolia sweeps the horizon several times, then sud- 
 denly claps her hands and cries with a fresh access of fury) 
 
 (timuelang) 
 Unkempt red hanks; from his lips a drooped crescent; 
 
 Shag brows in his forehead shrink; 
 Deep-socketed narrow eyes, that incessant 
 
 Like a tiger's in sunshine blink. 
 
 From Samarkand his anger savage 
 Doth burn to the frozen waste. 
 And the tropic Ganges his ice-gusts ravage, 
 'Till the Orient sea he faced, 
 
 Where the fever unhorsed and slew the giant! 
 
 In an ebon bier was he swathed, 
 With musk and amber the God-defiant 
 
 In attar of roses bathed! 
 
 But from deep sleep waking, by silver Oxus 
 
 Tamerlane leaps with his spear; 
 From the East he swoops, in the West he blocks us 
 And would choke us with panic fear. 
 
 (Jessamine Magnolia goes up to Uncle Sam, both hands plead- 
 ingly extended to make him see for himself and believe) 
 
 Father, father, my vision wasn't a mere delusion. Yonder 
 they come, united in fell purpose. I can't tell you which is 
 more murderous and dreadful. Hannibal, the Punic demon, 
 
 95 
 
NIGHTMARE VISION OF 
 
 Alaric, the Goth, Attila, the Hun, Jenghis khan, the Tartar, 
 Timurlang, the Mongol ! In life they never met. There wasn't 
 room enough for them at the same time on one earth. But I 
 see them now, I swear to you; I see them, grim, fiendish, hob- 
 nobbing and agreeing together in some hellish design. They 
 only wait the ripe moment — when a million wraths, envies, lusts, 
 greeds, shall combine, and a rebel soul, compacted of them all, 
 shall cry out deep-lunged and desperate for a cause against you, 
 which sha'n't be lacking, for they '11 invent it. And the grim 
 five shall laugh, and seize upon mankind, and knead them to 
 one mass, and toss them like a madness of fire, and harrass them 
 as the wind does the many-waved ocean, so that it needs must 
 rise, and engulf the whole world. 
 
 Oh, father, while it is yet time, invoke the one great-hearted 
 self-oblivious leader whom the earth ever knew. He alone can 
 arise to make dutiful self-effacement glorious! And you have 
 almost forgotten him. I call his name under breath — for he is 
 always near us — and lo, he appears. Then the fiends chatter 
 with fear, their hateful leers fade out, and they are gone ! 
 
 (The horrible conquerors of the ancient world stand up together, 
 clearly visible now to all, as ominous figures against the sTcy. 
 Jackson gets ready to fight them, Jefferson draws bach, screening 
 his eyes to study them the better, Lincoln steps forward, with an 
 outstretched hand, as tho* he believed he could conciliate them, 
 Benjamin Franklin tries to pull Lincoln bach, and beckons to 
 all to look on Washington, who stands now in their midst. The 
 five ancient scourges of the world seem curious rather than ter- 
 rified, but during the ensuing description {which enacts itself) 
 they a/re abashed and fade out)' 
 
 VISION OP WASHINGTON 
 
 Under an elm he took command. 
 
 Under a spreading tree. 
 As it lifted its boughs, so he lifted his hand 
 
 To high heaven for liberty. 
 
 96 
 
OLD WOBLD CONQUEBOES 
 
 And he swore in silence the holy oath. 
 
 His eyes in the living green : 
 "To God we appeal by fearless growth, 
 
 In faith and in hope serene. 
 
 "Will she bud not again, if the winter strip 
 
 Her leaves from the soaring bole? 
 With close-set teeth, unqnivering lip. 
 
 Let the body die for the soul ! 
 In death we'll grapple for sterner hold. 
 
 Fast-rooted in sacred earth; 
 And the sap shall rise, and the buds unfold ; 
 
 New multitudes dancing for mirth V 
 
 magnanimous spirit, thy people fill. 
 
 And incite them from height to height 
 With thy clearness of vision, thy swiftness of will. 
 
 With thy pride in the noble and right ! 
 man sublime, wise and strong. 
 
 Our patriot saint and sage, 
 Of thy fortitude forge us a triumph-song 
 
 With thy godlike battle-rage! 
 
 UncIiE Sam (Recovering from his genuine amazement) — This 
 is passing strange. Spook-raising done to "Old Glory'M Nor 
 ever hitherto did he seem to stand before me with quite such 
 overawing dignity. A wooden God, he? A pasteboard the- 
 atrical property for a safe and sane Fourth-of-Jidy celebration? 
 A fashion plate for a Colonial Dames' Ball. ISTot on my 
 spangled banner! 
 
 To bed, Jessie, and many thanks. Your dad's on to every 
 trick of our enemies. The committee is positively chosen. All 
 I've got to do is — well, to fortify them with a few parting in- 
 junctions. 
 
 97 
 
END OF SECTION SIX 
 
 (Jessamine Magnolia seems to wake up suddenly as out of a trance. 
 
 She holes startled from one member to the other of the 
 
 Committee, hardly seeming to recognize them) 
 
 Where am I? 
 
 (She passes her hand over her forehead, utters a cry, turns and 
 
 runs out, when the shade of George Washington, raised hy her 
 
 visualizing imagination, fades away) 
 
 98 
 
VII. 
 
 UNCLE SAM'S PARTING INSTRUCTIONS 
 TO HIS COMMITTEE 
 
VII. 
 
 ITnci^ Sam — Gentlemen — If a girl in her powerful loyalty can 
 body forth for us such a nightmare, what can't you do to the 
 enemy ? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — That is, if they are imprudent enough and 
 admit us to their confidence. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^As a last resort you could afflict them, I suppose, 
 with an unpleasant visit of the Father of his country. Ifs our- 
 selves encourage prophets of evil, and by our fear fulfil their 
 predictions. Just suppose WE, you four and I, put our heads 
 together, and dovetailed common sense, and got five minutes of 
 genuine co-operative volition, co-ordinated imagination, simul- 
 taneous intellection, and sympathetic co-emotion? Why, we'd 
 make the mountains skip like unicorns and the seven seas purr 
 like Daniel's lions, or coo like doves in a weeping willow. 
 
 But there's been so far a terrible difficulty in the way of such 
 a miracle of unanimity. I could never quite make up my mind 
 as to whom I should trust. Besides, one can't from any single 
 generation pick out mutually complementary leaders such as 
 you, with your noble diversity in unity. What ? Shall I entrust 
 life and death matters to supermen, who can't understand the 
 common fry? Or shall I go fish up a dry creek for minnows? 
 And some claim even they might grow up to be sharks in the 
 day of inordinate prosperity. So, dragnet a puddle for poUy- 
 wogs, that can only, at worst, become bull-frogs in some pool, or 
 nab wigglers that develop to moonlight singers in young love's 
 ear. That's had to be my policy. 
 
 So I'll start my exhortation with a picturesque restatement 
 of this initial difficulty. 
 
 Oh, we've read of all the famous men 
 
 Who made empires rise and fall, 
 But we cursed them, as became us men. 
 
 Who set freedom above all. 
 
 101 
 
OUR UNCLE SAM'S 
 
 Had the oak-tree, had the bay-tree aught 
 
 In conunon with eominoii men ? 
 There's fame for the private patriot — 
 
 For the pure and hiunble — when? 
 
 All who say a "nay'' and mean a "yes" 
 Aren't statesmen but plain knaves! 
 
 And your men of fatal genius ? 
 They are safest in their graves! 
 
 For, willy nilly, they monopolize 
 What's the common people's right, 
 
 And will raise up some new crop o' lies 
 And abuses over night ! 
 
 If you settle then down to little folk 
 Whom you "safe and sane" surmise. 
 
 And chop and lop and whittle folk 
 To the right manageable size — 
 
 From a skittle full of zeros scum 
 
 Isn't skimmed, sir, very rich I 
 Can my people's gods and heroes come 
 
 From a gutter-puddle or ditch ? 
 
 But if honor and privileged rank c'rrupt, say, 
 
 And culture too and wealth — 
 Why, Sam, methinks your public bankruptcy 
 
 Is not creeping on by stealth. 
 
 On the horns of a dilemma, son. 
 
 We are caught, I greatly fear ! 
 Could Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emerson 
 
 With philosophy help us here? 
 
 Say that one advertised extensively 
 
 For a proper popular god, 
 Critically, subtly, pensively 
 
 To invoke and poke and prod ? 
 
 102 
 
PAKTING INSTEUCTIONS 
 
 Wouldn't we get a gay variety: 
 
 A philanthropist with his wad, 
 A brewer with a new brand of piety, 
 
 A clodhopper with his clod ! 
 
 Then, of course on the arrival of 
 Every new-hatched batch sublime, 
 
 We'd work the law of the survival of 
 The fittest over time. 
 
 When we'd chosen at last our favorite. 
 
 Ask him how he dared expect 
 Our endorsement, and what he gave for it — 
 
 Till his name and frame are wrecked. 
 
 When well dead, why, a marmoreal 
 
 Or brazen monstrosity'U attest 
 'Tisn't a man, but a memorial. 
 
 Our good populace love best. 
 
 Andrew Jackson — Samuel, if you've ever really been me, as you 
 were polite enough to confess, you must know that a big fellow's 
 more likely to play fair with you in the long run, even if he has 
 his mad spells. 
 
 Thomas Jefferson — ^I should think it was a question of being 
 truly representative, when the genius cannot well fail of being 
 beneficent. You should trust the humble man for what ser- 
 vices his experience and training make it possible for him to 
 render. But the educated, the peculiarly gifted, they should not 
 be distrusted on principle. Sometimes they are even more sin- 
 cerely democratic than the so-called men of the people. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln — If s all in the man's heart, Sam. When we 
 come to the great things, they level us up, you know, astonish- 
 ingly; and the wren can ride on the eagle's back, if it comes to 
 the worst. 
 
 103 
 
OUR UNCLE SAM'S 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — I should judge that men are never large 
 enough for such a peculiar nation as yours. Don't fear, Sam, 
 that any of us is so tall as to out-top your opportunity ! 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^You don't then think democracy means, as I have 
 been lately told again and again, a deliberate hypocritical cult of 
 incompetency? You can't guess what good it does me to find 
 you keep the old faith; for, at heart, I want to reverence some- 
 thing — if I could only squarely meet it, man to man. 
 
 Andrew Jackson — ^And bigger than yourself, Sam? Thafs 
 where the rub comes in; for maybe you can't squeeze through a 
 needle's eye, or see through the back of your own head. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Would you insinuate that there have been greater — 
 in the past ? That's not true. That shall be a lie, even if it isn't. 
 Let's all deny it together. I've seen Babylon, and Egypt, and I 
 wouldn't give a snap of my fingers for the likes of Greece and 
 Rome. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln — ^But what of a little gully between Carmel 
 and Beersheba — ^toward Horeb, the reputed mount of God ? 
 
 Uncle Sam — Thomas, help me in this matter. Abe has probed 
 the sore spot. If I can't get a brand-new religion, I shall be in 
 constant peril of just going round in the old treadmill. And 
 I don't want to. At the peril of my immortal soul I wont. 
 
 I tried lately to work up a compromise on a sort of new dy- 
 namic thought, that affirms and denies by occult rules, and dem- 
 onstrates the desirable, and derives the impossible by irrefragable 
 logic from absolute premises. You have an affluent mind, and at 
 once you are rich. You are well, you are happy, you love all 
 mankind, everything's right off the bat coleur-de-rose and eau- 
 de-cologne. You touch the button, and principle does it all up 
 brown, and the stalactites and stalagmites in my Mammoth Cave 
 just chew it up alive with dental stabs of light ! 
 
 But I begin to feel already a wee bit as I did after my great 
 Mormon spree. That did make a salt wilderness hump itself 
 and burst into copper mines, so artesian wells spouted every rod 
 or two. It worked wonders in the practical line. Brigham even, 
 
 104 
 
PARTING INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 and his numerous family, helped us to believe more firmly in 
 this poor human nature : with such infinite possibilities of mur- 
 der and arson, and divorce, and disinheritance — yet absolutely 
 not a breath of scandal in his household ! So this latest patented 
 affront of mine to the staid spiritual stick-at-homes and votaries 
 of dignified tradition has done a hulking deal of good. But for 
 aU that, it leaves me with a strange aching void in my loving 
 heart. 
 
 Thomas, Benny — Abe and Andrew of course majm't be able 
 to understand it quite — I want, can you guess what? Fll teU 
 you. I want my long delayed Religious Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence ! Nothing less wiU serve. Sooner or later it has got 
 to come. Then why not now? 
 
 Thomas Jefferson — Thaf s a very audacious programme, al- 
 though, as a private fancy, I cherished the like myself. In what 
 terms should one draw up the document you propose, to make it 
 generally acceptable? 
 
 Uncle Sam — Why not just cut loose? 
 
 Benjamin Feanklin — That's almost too easy to do, and then 
 drift — onto who knows what shoals and rapids ! 
 
 Uncle Sam — I don't mean it that way. Just start afresh, inno- 
 cent and pert, as if nothing had ever happened to cloud our 
 sunshine before. Here's my holy land. Who wants a nobler? 
 Don't the heavens roll around here, and a sight more expansive 
 than around Palestine? For the question resolves itself into 
 another : "Who's really God ?" If He's everywhere, as the best 
 authorities declare, wherever the soul is that worships — why not 
 just house-move Him officially, bag and baggage, from that blood- 
 soaked rag of desert to this wholesome virgin hemisphere ? He'd 
 like it better, I'm positive, for at one stroke He'd get rid of so 
 many inconvenient associations. We could assign Him the 
 National Parks for playgrounds; and for a sanctuary — who ever 
 dreamed such a glory as this mile-deep solid cleft of rainbows? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — I was always very careful not to break with 
 the past too sharply. 
 
 105 
 
OUR UNCLE SAM'S 
 
 Andrew Jackson — Sure, you never can tell. Look at my case. 
 Didn't I get old-time religion late in life, and white-hot at that? 
 
 Uncle Sam — But if we'd had the new variety going, would not 
 your patriotic heart have preferred climbing up golden stairs 
 planned and erected by home talent ? Say, by our greatest Amer- 
 ican architect — Thomas here? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — I'm not sure, Sam, that your proposal is 
 spiritually prudent. Say your heart's old and out of repair. So 
 you have it cut out, on the slim chance that one you have ex- 
 tracted hot from a bull-calf will do your little job better. And 
 maybe it doesn't exactly fit, and meanwhile you lose your con- 
 trol of the vital machine. Have you animal spirits enough to 
 spare for a protracted series of such operations? 
 
 Uncle Sam — Good, Benny ! Heart-swapping's risky sport. But I 
 
 don't quite think your figure fits our case. 
 Benjamin Franklin — Do you dare to look at yourself in a magic 
 looking-glass — ^that shows you the invisible, forgotten, sup- 
 pressed, in yourself? 
 
 Could you, for instance, absolutely accept your history, as it is, 
 without decoration? Geography and climate too, as divinely 
 ordained ? 
 
 Your ethnography, your economic resources, as fatal? And 
 you — ^to be just altogether only what they happen to dictate or 
 suggest? Content not to impose on them an order derived by you 
 from ancient experience ? Do you think you could long manage 
 to stand all alone in a universe disinfected of every tender 
 superstition ? 
 
 Eemember, what we came by is our luck, and not our fault. 
 But if you started to create your world anew from the founda- 
 tions up, wouldn't you feel responsible for gravitation, evolu- 
 tion, respiration, heart-action, digestion, and all the rest of it? 
 You couldn't endure that yet, could you? 
 
 Of course I believe if s just possible — in theory. You might 
 go to work and train souls for generations, and devise a new 
 organ, so to say, on which the spirit would have to play entirely 
 
 106 
 
PARTING INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 new music — revealing itself more stupendously, as our com- 
 patriots hoped to do at Brook Farm; and may be then you could 
 get a chord struck that would make the stars in heaven dance 
 visibly about a golden throne. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Thaf s it, Benny, in a-ring-a-round-a-rosie. You've 
 got my idea exactly. 
 
 Benjamin Feanklin — ^But that implies awful age-long social dis- 
 cipline on a bare chance; and you're somewhat self-indulgent, 
 aren't you? 
 
 Uncle Sam — I'm downright sorry that's got to be put off again for 
 a few more generations. Anyway, we can't make it available for 
 the immediate solution of my present problem. We can't catch 
 up all that Pandemoniimi into a great onward swirl? We can't 
 start a vortex, and have it grow, till aU the things we desired 
 come tilting and yodling to our centre from the uttermost reach- 
 es of the infinite ? No, no, the more's the pity. I see — we've 
 got to go about this, gentlemen, on ordinary business principles. 
 Only common political or economic prizes can be offered for 
 whole-hearted adliesion to my sovereign, native, singular, and 
 collective cause and will ! So be it. You're probably right. But 
 by aU the cow-parsley up and down the milky way, that does seem 
 inordinately hard luck ! 
 
 (Uncle Sam hangs his head in deep meditation) 
 
 Now, isn't it odd 
 
 That you can't have a God 
 
 Brand-new of your own. 
 
 To replace the outgrown? 
 
 If He reaUy is living, 
 
 All-loving, forgiving — 
 
 Why not straightway start over. 
 
 And set us in clover? 
 
 Why not hand us a Bible 
 
 That isn't a libel 
 
 On all we adore? 
 
 107 
 
OUR UNCLE SAM'S 
 
 Good and true to the core. 
 Fresh and simple and clear 
 For the folks that are here — 
 And not for a race 
 That's long lost its place 
 On the map! for folks 
 You could bully, or coax 
 To be decent, and hoax 
 Into holiness ? 
 
 Wait? 
 
 Why, it's all but too late — 
 
 If religion this minute 
 
 Got new life put in it — 
 
 For us workers and schemers, 
 
 Inventors and dreamers. 
 
 Politicians and scholars. 
 
 And chasers of dollars; 
 
 Lest we put our reliance 
 
 In soidless science. 
 
 In efficient appliance. 
 
 And just cheapen to the vulgar — 
 
 Or follow some promulger 
 
 Of manias exotic — 
 
 Ascetic or erotic! 
 
 For a God of our own 
 
 We cry, and we groan 
 
 In secret, and search 
 
 The whole earth ! But in church 
 
 ''Keep stilP they tell us, 
 
 ''Or the Old may be jealous 
 
 And lay waste our age 
 
 In a fatherly rage !" 
 
 But I'd cry Him defiance 
 
 And place my reliance 
 
 In the New — if He'd come. 
 
 108 
 
PARTING INSTRUCTIOISrS 
 
 Are we deaf? Is He dumb? 
 
 Are we blind ? In the dark 
 
 Can we kindle no spark 
 
 To reveal to our seeing 
 
 One mite of His Being? 
 
 We are ready and eager, 
 
 And the fiends beleaguer 
 
 The house of our faith. 
 
 If Thou be no wraith. 
 
 It is time Thou camest; 
 
 With Thine eyes that Thou flamest 
 And madest us glad 
 Like idiots, or MAD ! 
 
 Pardon me, gentlemen. I'm terribly disappointed. I sup- 
 pose I must give it up for the present. But you might as well 
 know how I feel way down in the unsoundable depths of me. 
 
 {After a pause, ivliich none of his chosen men venture to intrude 
 upon, he continues in an artificially cheerful tone) 
 
 Well, gentlemen, to the matter in hand. We must dispense 
 with supernatural assistance, for your kind of a foreign God, you 
 dear deists, is from the nature of the case in favor of both parties 
 to any controversy, from which he is so far removed as to be in- 
 different: and yours — 'Andrew and Abe — I fear me he's sys- 
 tematically for the underdog, provided said dog has no teeth left 
 at all. So, in this case too, he'd be likely to elect a policy of 
 strict neutrality, till the event showed us posthumously which 
 side prevails. 
 
 But don't you forget it. Apollo lost standing after the un- 
 foreseen defeats of Xerxes ! The Greeks remembered the conduct 
 of his Delphic oracle, and the old boy could get handsome statues 
 in his honor, maybe, but mighty little honest respect. 
 
 Andrew Jackson — Sam, I'm always for declaring martial law on 
 the least pretext. 
 
 109 
 
OUE UXCLE SAM'S 
 
 Abjraham Lincoln — ^Fin for remembering that both sides have the 
 same human nature to contend with, and the same right to the 
 protection of our constitution. 
 
 Thomas Jeffekson — I'm for a rapid, progressive extension of 
 Liberty. The time should soon dawn when men's good will and 
 behavior need not to be guaranteed by any coercive compact, 
 much less by the exercise of armed force. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — For my part, Sam, I approve what each has 
 said, with reference to his special view of the situation. But 
 we must keep a strict lookout for the facts, lest we dress them 
 up unawares to resemble familiar bygones, and don't rightly 
 estimate their peculiar and unexperienced aspects. 
 
 Martial law, for instance, administered by a truly large mind 
 and heart, may be more democratic than the government of 
 divided counsels, controlled by the most astute and divisive 
 counsellor. 
 
 Uncle Sam — So you are an unmitigated opportunist, first, last 
 and all the time? Benjamin, I always knew I had been you 
 before I was myself. I just wish though I hadn't forgot so much 
 that I then knew, before I learned the little you don't happen 
 to know. 
 
 With your leave, I'll proceed now to outline our policy for 
 your discretionary use. 
 
 Noisy fools want an upset? It's because they have a griev- 
 ance ? They don't get scope enough ? or they don't handle them- 
 selves right? haven't learned the lines of least resistance leading 
 to prosperity ? I^Tow, an upset, if you're not arrant, restless fools, 
 means for you radicals a favorable set-up! What's now upside 
 down will be necessarily bottom-side-up when you shall have 
 done your work. Of course, you're satisfied that the bottom 
 should be top; and I, for my part, suspect the top could stand 
 being bottom most peculiarly well, for the little while it would 
 have to be ; and if I'm wrong, why, I should say they would just 
 prove they belonged where you had put them ! But the real dif- 
 ficulty is not with the upset or the set-up — supposing you've got 
 
 110 
 
PARTING INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 a notion of the scheme yon want to put through ; 1^11 credit you 
 radicals with that much. What's got to be considered carefully 
 is the sure-enough, bound-to-materialize hack-set. It means de- 
 struction of capital, stored-up energy, savings of life. It means 
 the disruption of the order and of organized methods, so you've 
 got to improvise and teach a new technic ! And meanwhile, 
 more waste! 
 
 Then, worse, you don't at all, my boys, because of this ma- 
 terial loss become spiritual, you know — intellectual, esthetical, 
 moral, religious. Dear me, no ! I've learned better. On the con- 
 trary, you've got to make up for the losses you've sustained, and 
 put on extra steam, and work in three shifts. It means slavery 
 of the higher to the lower in a man. There can't be, in quite a*. 
 while, any margin of leisure for meditation, for soul-floweringo- 
 And maybe there comes unbeknownst another upset you've got no 
 set-up for, and with heaven knows what extra lack-set! 
 
 Now, without your upset and the consequent hack-^et bur 
 present set-up is just about hard enough for a healthy develop- 
 ment of Americanism. Wouldn't you say so yourselves? You 
 grunt and groan as it is, quite sincerely enough. So, my radical 
 friends, reflect! 
 
 Of course, I can appreciate the service of agitators, who use 
 the malcontents, the have-nots, to get improvements and reforms 
 granted by the usually too insolent and grasping "haves" and 
 "got-theres." But if your Coxey's armies were entirely success- 
 ful, you'd inevitably lose your respective jobs— unless you could 
 hire out to the vanquished and ousted; and I should say they 
 might prefer leaders of a more kindred refinement, social 
 subtlety and taste. You'd just be out of a job. That's all the 
 good the upset would do your sort; so, gentlemen, leaders and 
 agitators, now's the time not to press too hard, if you know what's 
 good for your unique and precious selves. 
 
 Now, when I come to reconsider my own set-up, well, 
 I can't honestly find a fault with it. WE'VE got classes ? You 
 don't like the upper crust? And you hate snobs? Then why 
 are the lower levels so laterally subdivided? Striated and 
 
 111 
 
OUR UNCLE iSAM'S 
 
 stratified ad infinitum? My pie's like a skyscraper shortcake 
 with always a crust on top of every lot of crushed berries ! My 
 own scheme simply means: the order of classes is freely 
 permeable. The partitions are like colanders. Anj'^one that's 
 fine enough can wriggle up through the perforations, and be ac- 
 cepted in the just superior level. Of course, if absolutely every- 
 hody wriggled through, where would be the fun to the successful, 
 and the proper rebuke to the left-behinds, who as you know 
 merely go to breeding, and postpone promotion to the next gen- 
 eration — by when every family rejoices in at least one wriggler, 
 who won't recognize his relatives once duly promoted ! 
 
 You complain the holes are too fine, or have got stopped up ? 
 
 What comes too easy isn't appreciated. Give out honors free 
 — and who wants them? Who grows fit for them? Don't you 
 "have-nots'^ enjoy the cheering spectacle of the degenerates who 
 came by everything easy ? Don't you see the top dies off quick ? 
 And what do they die of? Having breakfast served on a gold 
 platter before they've lifted their peepers at noon, by an ape-man 
 who's worth a dozen of them fried on toast ! 
 
 Oh, the curse at the bottom ? That reads : do your damndest, 
 or die ! But then the curse at the top sounds : be a genius, a 
 saint, a "damned-lucky" fellow or — ^rot ! Now which curse, think 
 you, is the heavier in mortifying casualties ? The best man, you 
 swear, comes from below stairs? Nine times in ten, at least? 
 Necessity is the mother of invention? Despair is the father of 
 heroism? Then why, in heaven's name, should we abolish the 
 below-stairs, and rid ourselves prematurely of such wholesome 
 necessity and despair? Perhaps we lack already some salutary 
 pressure, so that the bottom isn't sending up lately to us any 
 Tecumseh Jacksons or any railsplitting Abes ! 
 
 And, that I'm right — don't you see how men born in ease 
 make artificial hardships for themselves, take even in extreme 
 cases vows of poverty, becoming social tramps, and amateur out- 
 casts? Just in order to improve for their souls your much- 
 despised situation ! Don't you suppose the men of pedigree, who 
 have to eke out their self-respect by considerations of their in- 
 
 112 
 
PARTING INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 feriority to their forebears — whom they dress up to look bigger 
 than life out of mistaken pride, don't you suppose that in their 
 heart of hearts they envy your stalwart men of the people, of the 
 swinging stride and insolent independence, who are ancestors, 
 haven't made good yet, but are soon going to, and will then make 
 all bolstered-up scarecrows look like what they are, in the pres- 
 ence of some yet-to-be-begotten God-man ? 
 
 Of course I grant you there's another side, and you your- 
 selves yield reluctant evidence of it. You've got a deep instinct 
 that some sorts of nobility, and fineness, and grandeur, and glad- 
 ness, and delicacy of vision, and subtlety of intelligence, and 
 divinity of will, are got only by the awful process of thinning 
 for idiocy, depravity, frivolity, insanity, suicide, those poor 
 victims of inherited wealth and privileged culture! The rich 
 and successful, who don't rot away or die out, who don't leave 
 all their estates in the female line — don't they as a matter of fact 
 valiantly serve us all ? The criminal is socially useful, you claim, 
 by giving us, through scandal and horror, a vivid new sense of 
 virtue and decency? He suffers and dies that the next gener- 
 ation may be more moral ? 
 
 Now, if you saw to it that there weren't any born rich, how 
 would we other folk (who make our own way or don't; who do 
 aU we can to get pull and graft in a small and crooked style), 
 how would we get even an idea of well-being, and comfort and 
 leisure sumptuously used, of the pride of life, and the elegant 
 vanity, and the delightful absurdity of high spirits? With our 
 souls cramped by thrift, could we even imagine the handsome- 
 ness of a right sort of waste, arrogant, reckless or absent-minded, 
 indifferently natural, and gracefully elegant? 
 
 How would we, aside from such a goal of desire, get the notion 
 of the "gentleman" as such, to torture us in our rough and ready 
 vulgarity, our ill-airease bumptiousness? You know what I 
 mean. He might be possible with any pedigree, but he can't be 
 without unearned wealth. A man, let us say, who at the right 
 time got the right play for every incipient instinct, and matured 
 a charm, a talent, an accomplishment, a knack, a grace and a 
 
 113 
 
OUR UNCLE SAM'S 
 
 suave, delicate, fragrant self -assurance, with a most disinterested 
 uselessness that could at any time put itself to the lowliest 
 uses, if the circumstances or the cruel pressure of an ideal de- 
 manded it ? 
 
 Then too, just as you get your ideas of place and station and 
 of the highbred person, you also get from him and his set the 
 notion of a truly human world! Beings who never have to do 
 anjrthing, who freely will their own restraints, duties of honor, 
 elegancies, fastidious avoidance and taboos, conspire to trans- 
 late all the base needs of existence into fascinating occasions for 
 a fine craft and skill, with frivolities redolent of poetry, with an 
 astute insight into the subtler technique of life. They, you see, 
 can alone abandon the common scale, and sing their little song, 
 for an ear we haven't yet developed, out of sheer overtones. So 
 they make us, spectators of their performances, which we can't 
 hear at all, dream of a life that isn't yet possible even to them, 
 and certainly not to you and me. By their spinning out of non- 
 sense a world of charm, they justify human nature to us in the 
 sweat and the grime, so that when struggling as oakroots with 
 the rocky substratum, we scent the meadowsweet, hear afar off 
 the flutter of the butterfly, and divine the windy waves of shim- 
 mer over the horizon hills. 
 
 You agree then that the useless turns out after due con- 
 sideration to be useful, if it survives its doom of rust and rot, 
 and becomes divine? Granting now, gentlemen, that all this is 
 true (and you know there's something in it you can't down-and- 
 out for the life of you '; you seekers of an upset for the sake of a 
 set-up of your own — and defiers of an inevitable hack-set!) , I ask 
 you in conclusion : Are you breeding the men to help you — and 
 not help themselves first, last and all the time? Are the hun- 
 griest usually they who serve everybody else first, and keep on, 
 till every dish on the platter is empty, and then cook some more ? 
 Of course, the men at the top now know how to serve disinterest- 
 edly, or would soon learn when they were faced by necessity. 
 But would you have them for the servants of the order they de- 
 test and despise? And could you, whom they contemned, bring 
 
 114 
 
PARTING INSTllUCTIOlSrS 
 
 yourselves to entrust them with any power on your behalf ? and if 
 not, wouldn't your set-up be just what youVe got now — when 
 you crashed to the bottom again, after a reign of terror and an 
 orgy of blood, and we were most of us where we'd been before, 
 minus a quiet sense of being at home to stay ? 
 
 Boys, if you want an upset for a set-up, go to breeding first 
 the setters-up and holders-up, and holders-down and getters-on 
 of the system. And until you've bred such plentifully, why, let 
 good enough alone. That's my fatherly advice. 
 
 To be sure I have my sweet, sentimental moods, myself, some- 
 times, when I cry over the slum, and think I can make silk 
 purses out of sow's ears, and real kohinoors out of factory soot ! 
 I tell you, when all of us — mind you, all of us, not a majority, 
 but a unanimous vote — want what every man professes; namely, 
 the best good of every individual, compatible with the best good 
 of us all as a whole, and vice versa, why, then, on my word and 
 honor, I'll agree to call the rabbles' roar at high tide of fume 
 and spume — not sputter and kettledrums, but the sure-enough 
 authoritative voice of God ! 
 
 Meanwhile, I propose to run my little farm myself. Whoever 
 incarnates the mood of the hour is duty-bound to be a mono- 
 crat, more or less, and carry through the behests of a kind Provi- 
 dence, irrespective of bookish scruples. Witness my Thomas! 
 And don't forget my Andrew! And my honest Abe too, he 
 called it a measure of war, for benevolent purposes — to hasten 
 the inevitable end of a fruitless struggle ! Observe that they just 
 had to be tyrants, if they were to be efficient democrats. So, 
 take note, gentlemen : the Prophet of Liberty gets to be on speak- 
 ing terms with the despot ! It's a long way 'round, but extremes 
 do meet. The humble Servant-of-the-people becomes the Man- 
 on-horseback. But mind you, to all appearances only! For 
 there's a difference, and there's a reason : and if s in the heart of 
 Abe, and in the common sense of Benny, and in the stubborn con- 
 science of Andrew, and it's in the practical imagination of 
 Thomas. 
 
 115 
 
END OF SECTION SEVEN 
 
 So, gentlemen, my Committee enjoys my fullest confidence. 
 And mudslinging wont win this campaign. I advise you to rea- 
 son together, and keep cool, and mind your manners. 
 
 Now I'm ready to send you to the front, my four standbys, 
 to intrust you with the whole burden of my prescient soul ! But 
 don't leave me just yet You can't negotiate with people ab- 
 sorbed by a competitive contest in the art of heavy breathing. 
 This canyon is full of terrible realizations of my most secret mis- 
 givings. They're but phantoms of mighirhave-beens and may- 
 be-yets ; but your company will cheer me to the davm. And then 
 don't lef s indulge in pathetic farewells. Just slip away together 
 or singly, and I'll try to endure your absence with characteristic 
 fortitude and nonchalance. 
 
 116 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE MUSE OF HISTORY, INCOGNITO, AND 
 HER PRESENT DAY PROTAGONIST 
 
VIII. 
 
 (Uncle Sam suddenly takes notice of the pot on the tripod) 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Didn't I tell you? There's that pot boiling up. 
 What do you suppose will come out of it? 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — That would depend entirely on the in- 
 gredients you put in. 
 
 Andrew Jackson — I'm not worried about anything that's got to 
 work itself up to such a heat before it can get into action. 
 
 Thomas Jefferson — Anyway, we do not believe any more in a 
 Noah's flood overwhelming the steadfast progress of humanity. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Eight you are. There's never going to be any more 
 Boman monopoly of this terrestrial melon, no more thirty or hun- 
 dred year spats of the nations ; no more black death or dancing 
 mania. It's the day of enlightenment, and ever-spreading benev- 
 olence. The sleeping sickness knows its place in the tropics, 
 and the bubonic goes begging for a rodent, and the yellow jack 
 advertises for a carrier mosquito. 
 
 Andrew Jackson^ — Are you sure all this improvement in exter- 
 nals will help us so much, if our hearts are still unconverted, 
 corrupt, and rebellious ? 
 
 Uncle Sam — If you listen to the croakers, to Bunyan's muck- 
 rakers ! When was there ever a day like this of mine, with all its 
 shortcomings, one-tenth part so decent ? You know, Benny, how 
 you told me to study history. I have, and made a discovery too. 
 
 (Turning to the pot) 
 
 Say, stop sputtering like a volcano ! 
 
 History, Benny, shows herself liable to a bias from this pesti- 
 lent human nature in readers. She has a queer preference for 
 the memorable and picturesque : 
 
 Whenever your roadway's rutty or briery 
 
 It gets jotted at once in your muse's diary; 
 
 When roads are steam-rollered and oiled, a high average 
 
 Has no interest as news in a high-spiced palaver age. 
 
 119 
 
THE MUSE OF HISTORY 
 
 {From the pot there suddenly leaps a ridiculous -figure of an old 
 crone, and she draws out of the pot a screen much larger than it, 
 and various puppets and costumes) 
 
 Muse of Histoey — And who might you be, who know so much of 
 history ? 
 
 Uncle Sam {Turning to the heldaw.e) — -And who might you be, 
 my good woman, who hop in so unseemly a guise into the re- 
 spected presence of my company? 
 
 Muse of History — them, I know very well; entitled too good, 
 I fear, for your present mood. They'd better not witness our 
 interview. 
 
 Uncle Sam — .What I can stand, they can. I ask you again, who 
 do you think you are, for I have my doubt that you're sane. 
 
 Muse of History — I'm the Muse of History. 
 
 Uncle Sam {Laughing and winking at his friends, as if to in- 
 dulge a poor lunatic in her erroneous fancy) — I was just allud- 
 ing, madame, to your foibles. But you see it isn't reasonable to 
 expect that I should recognize so great a notability in such togs ! 
 
 Muse of History — Had no choice. Where could I secure a classi- 
 cal outfit, when I'm tossed out of your melting pot? 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Ha, ha, so you just boiled over, while I wasn't 
 watching? 
 
 Muse of History — I'm not scum, sir, I'm a mighty sputter from 
 the bottom. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Of course the flower of the dregs. I'm glad you go 
 in for dress reform, and not the sun-bath cure. Wants egregious 
 beauty to make that safe. And a rag carpet at least is some pro- 
 tection to the public. 
 
 Muse of History — I'm travelling incog. 
 
 Uncle Sam — 'Good discipline. Takes the conceit out of a brass 
 monkey. 
 
 Muse of History — I'm not without my credentials. 
 
 120 
 
AND HER PROTAGONIST 
 
 Uncle Sam — I should hope not. And what might then be your 
 line of goods? 
 
 Muse of History — "Critical moments illustrated/' ^^eacon lights 
 on the freedom of the seas." "Statesmen's ready relief." "Sta- 
 tistics made plain and veracious." "Thirty-thousand anecdotes 
 — a triple entente." "Handy reprints of prehistoric menus for 
 research workers." 
 
 Uncle Sam — -You haven't all that hid about your person? 
 
 Muse of History — Thaf s the beauty of our scheme : just sign one 
 of my red and white and blue blanks — the flag in one corner — 
 George Washington in the other — and a dime a week. 
 
 Uncle Sam — For eternity, even if you're damned. 
 
 Muse of History — No, only for your natural life. We assume 
 all mortality risks. And you see the effect is magical and im- 
 mediate. Absolutely no pains taken. At once you can belong 
 to a dozen select anti-fat associations, join a score of national 
 mahogany clubs for settling cosmic evolution with oratory and 
 terpsichorean novelties. You can know the world of which you 
 are so distinguished a denizen, as vouched by your brain measure- 
 ments registered ui Who's Who and Bluebooks and Bradstreet; 
 and incidentally manage large charities and crafts and reforma- 
 tories, and keep on speaking and hearing terms with your family 
 by the aid of the graphophone. And, nevertheless, in six weeks 
 at most, you can be perfectly competent, and equipped for a 
 foreign embassy, a cabinet position, or, at a pinch, for the su- 
 preme magistracy of this Democratic land, if you should suddenly 
 be called upon to make that pathetic sacrifice of your private 
 tastes to the interests and trusts. 
 
 Uncle Sam — I never buy what I can pay for. On your lines I'm 
 bomb-proofed and cyclone-ceUared. And you know I don't 
 read. 
 
 Muse of History — That's why, you see, all the time I was ex- 
 plaining our original methods, I slapped up this little collapsible 
 apparatus quick, that all came handily out of my private crazy- 
 
 121 
 
THE MUSE OF HISTORY 
 
 quilt carryall. That's the way we come to the rescue of the na- 
 tive illiterate adult. You love a show, I don't doubt? 
 
 Uncle Sam (Good-humoredly) — Provided I'm not in for it, and 
 it's strictly neutral. 
 
 Muse of History — Oh, to be sure, so you can tote water on both 
 shoulders, and trade at inflated prices with both commisariats. 
 
 Uncue Sam — ^It's undiplomatic to slander a possible customer's 
 inherited policies. I was warned in my youth against tangle- 
 foot alliances. Rooting on the international bleachers is more 
 sport, Sammy, my boy — said Old Father 'William to me when he 
 ducked me in the mill race — than risking your hide and your 
 reputation in the game. So keep cool in the heat of the con- 
 flict, and 
 
 Whenever you can 
 
 Be a fan. 
 
 My man. 
 
 And clap, and hoot 
 
 And stamp and toot, 
 
 And whale with your cane 
 
 The safe and the sane, 
 
 And toss up your hat. 
 
 And scat the cat — 
 
 For it's far the riskier plan, 
 
 My man. 
 
 And what might be the name of your prospective torture 
 imposed on us for our soul's health gratis? 
 
 Muse of History — The best 
 
 Of the past. 
 Recast 
 By request. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^We're game, but mind you, you can't teach us any- 
 thing. All the pasf s good for, nowadays, that it's quite passe 
 is to furnish students of human nature with snakes in alcohol — 
 
 122 
 
AND HEE PEG TAG ONI ST 
 
 and ancestral names (certified off tombstones hopelessly out 
 of plumb) smuggled in by nabobs and snobs. 
 
 Muse of History — But you forget, Sam (for you see, I know it's 
 you and what's the use of my disguising your identity any 
 longer?) one never can tell: — 
 
 I have a way, 
 So they say, 
 
 Of repeating myself inconveniently. 
 Ears and eyes 
 Make you wise. 
 
 If you bear with my weaknesses leniently. 
 
 For the truth 
 In my booth 
 
 With puppet and periwigged phantom I'm 
 To sketch. 
 And to fetch 
 
 You with choice elocution and pantomime ! 
 
 First, let me commend my protagonist, and bid you guess 
 his name from my description : A sworn patriot, like Hannibal, 
 he had a bloodscore to settle : the great criminal — Napoleon — and 
 Louis XIV. before him. Like Alaric, he knew discipline and 
 revered authority, and preferred to fight even against Caesar 
 in Caesar's name. Like Attila, he scorned rest and invoked 
 the cynical demon. Like Jenghis Khan he projected dominion — 
 but not for himself, and nobler therein. Like Timurlang he 
 will haunt the spiritual squalor and sordid wealth of generations 
 that knew him not — with a sense of the sublime. His was stu- 
 pendous energy; will, unflinching; cunning, resourceful and 
 subtle. His next of kin were the cyclone and the volcano. Thor, 
 whose hammer felled the giants; Odin, the single-eyed, whose 
 spear decreed peace and war ; Zeus, who read in the book of fate, 
 were eaglets hatched earlier in the same eyrie as he ! 
 
 Lion and fox in one, a monster and yet seeming natural and 
 genial; a gryphon, a gargoyle, the creation larger than life of 
 
 123 
 
THE MUSE OF HISTORY 
 
 the grotesque genius of the race in a moment of grimness and 
 high spirits! No scruples deflected his direct efficiency. Not 
 squeamish as to means, he forged to the God-appointed end. A 
 Macchiavelli who eompanied with Luther and Kant; a cham- 
 pion of the fierce gods against a sinister tidal wave of chaos 
 and darkness ; a Mohawk on the warpath ; a Caesar Borgia with- 
 out private vice. 
 
 Such, I tell you, was he, and more, tho' all was repressed, 
 constrained — to rule the modern world. Let a braver judge him, 
 an honester, a more disinterested — tho' he donned the livery of 
 Satan! And the earth will groan and raven for greatness of 
 thew and heart for many an age, ere she shall thrill to greet 
 such another stalwart son of her giant youth ! 
 
 Have you guessed whom I mean? 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Can^t imagine. Haven't seen such a horntoad in 
 Texas. Would lock him. up, if he wriggled. No room for him, 
 I guess, outside the padded cell or the electric chair — unless 
 stuffed, or in alcohol. 
 
 Muse of History — Just the same he was worth snapshooting in 
 his jungle habitat and tracking to his lair. The greatest slayer 
 of the bluedevils he, hurling at them the big-bellied butt ! How 
 his oaths pounded the table as the golden blood foamed and 
 flowed in cataracts of roistering good-fellowship! Twenty-eight 
 encounters, dragon vs. dragon, in honor of the lunar period; 
 and woe to what braggart soever bearded in effigy his smooth- 
 shaven foursquare jaw ! Who like him could bid an anecdote in 
 grotesque motley caper and handspring to riotous roars ? 
 
 Ever was he the same daredevil upholder of vested interests ! 
 "Long live privilege, prerogative, arrogant assumption, success- 
 ful usurpation, and the autocratic right divine !" As for the silly 
 burghers — not gentle-born — they dreaded his wild practical 
 jokes and insolent pranks, and nicknamed him the mad squire. 
 Mad, yet with a method; for his ancestral lands — paid. "To 
 the devil with the proletariat!" — by the way of golden profits 
 to the Lord of the Manor ! 
 
 124 
 
AND HER PROTAGONIST 
 
 Do you know my big-bra wned bully yet ? 
 TJncle Sam— -Should think him fetched out of the rag-bag or the 
 junk-pile of the Dark Ages. Might have posed for a prehistoric 
 ancestor of my much esteemed friend. Baron Steuben. 
 
 Muse of History — You're on the trail of his lineage anyway, 
 Sam, if you've crisscrossed the generations a bit. He had a 
 genius that paralyzed opposition. At a glance he shot to the 
 live centre of any debate a shattering bolt of certainty. With 
 wild-beast tenacity he kept his grip on the bleeding issue. He 
 watched Luck at her deal, and read the trumps up every player's 
 sleeve. With alternate courses of policy, thought out to de- 
 tails, foreordered in untrammeled execution — he leaped into the 
 thick of hostile choices and chances. His God was success, the 
 success of his caste first; then of his country for his caste; and 
 he was super stitiously precise in the ritual of his God's worship. 
 He never threatened, never dared either one whit more or 
 less than his utmost accurately reckoned strength would war- 
 rant. When he smote the stroke was exact, fatal, damning, 
 punctiliously, ridiculously adequate. In triumph he was 
 moderate, impartial, no grabber of honors, no coveter of harems, 
 no plotter of a dynastic honor for himself. A monopolizer only 
 of his patent blend of finesse and brutality, at the beck of his 
 atheist's God. 
 
 Uncle Sam — It's a Wagnerian super-Hagen up-to-date you are 
 faking to strut in melodrama and curdle the blood of English 
 sparrows ! Hugo invented him to keep up the war of the worlds, 
 after he got the devil to sniffing over his Les MiserMes, and rec- 
 onciled him to the good and kind God ! 
 
 Muse op History — ^You aren't such a bad critic of fiction, Sam. 
 But you aren't a connoisseur in the facts of history. The chap's 
 real and alive, and he had a poetic afflatus, would blurt itself 
 out in grim paradoxes and scorching metaphors, that realized 
 prophecy for him, enforced a regime, and disinfected his fellows 
 of any refinement, delicacy, piety, or conscientious hesi- 
 
 . tancy, that might hinder; while they smothered in contempt 
 
 135 
 
THE MUSE OF HISTORY 
 
 what he shoved aside or overthrew, barbing his scourge with 
 peasant saws ! "The curry-comb/' "blood and iron," the "mailed 
 fist,'' the "shining armor," the "scrap of paper," the "spiked 
 helmet," the "spurred boot," the "stamp of the heavy heel," 
 ^Hbleeding the enemy white," one's right to "wring the necks of 
 chickens one's hatched," "grandees that had hot water in the pot 
 and set out their steaming platters on the board." So he crashed 
 and swept the tables with a catchword, a watchword, a forward- 
 march for the God Mavors of a reborn Barbarian Rome ! Do you 
 recognize the original of my portrait? "Bite-the-Marrow," the 
 great and the only — >Loyal servant — and promoter of "High 
 taxes"! 
 
 And he's a reality, no invention of mine, the mere's the pity 
 for you, 'Sam ; and ''Honi soit qui mal y pense/* say I ; for he 
 glares to-day larger than life across the seas; six feet two, vast 
 build; massive, clear, firm granite coimtenance, bulging four- 
 square; large, clear, grey, fulminant, inscrutable eyes! Can you 
 see him glare? 
 
 Uncle Sam — Ay, ay, at Johnnie Bull, or maybe at Johnnie 
 Crapaud. And much good may it do them and him at their af- 
 ternoon tea. For, in the end, sure as life, I'll get appointed re- 
 ceiver of a bankrupt Europe & Co. — and then just watch me 
 transfer the securities where they'U do the most good to 
 downtrodden humanity! 
 
 Muse of History — Just so. Uncle Sam; but first you must con- 
 quer him. He's more than a man; he's a principle. Even if he 
 challenges you to mortal combat, he'll arrogate to himself the 
 choice of the weapons and dictate the time and place. That's 
 his way. He's a Colossus of Rhodes, and bestrides the Channel 
 already, and ere you know — the Atlantic will be his gold-fish 
 bowl for submarines. 
 
 His creed, you see in his historic incarnation, was simple. 
 "Absurd?" you say? Well, so be it, but none the less credible, 
 and all the more contagious! "My class first in Prussia; 
 Prussia first in Germany ; Germany first in the world ; My King 
 
 126 
 
AND HER PROTAGONIST 
 
 supreme as Kaiser!^' and, for his private satisfaction, he added 
 some secret clauses : the power behind the throne — the keeper of 
 the x4.ugiist Conscience — myself, Bite-the-Marrow ; and my suc- 
 cessors in the chancellorship — always the genius of each gen- 
 eration ! When he deemed it expedient, he could make his life 
 and death-convictions seem purely chimerical delusions of his 
 enemies, and laugh them out of court with unaffected Homeric 
 geniality. 
 
 Enter Bite-the-Marrow, look out, Sam! 
 
 127 
 
IX. 
 
 BITE-THE-MARROW AND THE VIOLATED 
 CONSTITUTION 
 
IX. 
 
 Scene I. of the Bismarck Puppet Show 
 
 Bismarck — ^Sire, eight long years among the ambassadors of the 
 German states, under the arrogant sway of Austria, have fully 
 convinced me of Prussia's divine destiny. 
 
 William I. — But runs not a wise saw : Fortiter in re, suaviter in 
 modof 
 
 Bismarck — Ay, when I took it upon myself to light my cigar in 
 full meeting at the Austrian president's own, then it was, I broke 
 up his arrogant monopoly, and not by any courteous pro- 
 testations. 
 
 William I. — That was indeed cogent reasoning. But while I 
 heed not your enemies, which are mine also, we may sometimes 
 learn from them. They complain of brow-beating, studied in- 
 solence, cynical brutality, biting sarcasms, provocative ironic 
 serenity. 
 
 Bismarck — ^Was I summoned to my post of danger to deal out 
 holiday compliments all around? Or was it only when I vowed 
 to establish the royal prerogative and prestige in the teeth of an 
 overwhelming majority, that your gracious majesty consented to 
 tear up your abdication? 
 
 William I. — I appreciate your extraordinary difficulties. But 
 may there not be in the very manner of our proposed military re- 
 forms — doubling out of hand the standing army — an unneces- 
 sary challenge to the conservatives, our natural friends, as well 
 as to our opponents, the liberals ? Might we not resort to meas- 
 ures of gradual expansion, and to more conciliatory methods? 
 
 Bismarck — I am deeply indebted, your majesty, for this rare op- 
 portunity to defend myself. I hate no man for any ill he may 
 have thought, or willed, or done to me in my private capacity. 
 The strong bears not malice. He ignores wrongs, biding his 
 time to make friends, or he more than evens the score ! But the 
 enemies of the State ? That is different. They are the enemies of 
 God. Toward them magnanimity were treason. Are they not 
 
 131 
 
BITE-THE- MARROW AND 
 
 already numerous enough ? Do they need encouragement ? i.\nd 
 shall the crown's champion seem afraid of the worst that man 
 can do to him? 
 
 The more violent the excitement about me, the more it be- 
 hooves your servant to keep a cool head, clear vision, and his 
 speech direct, that it may not arouse questioning; or if speech 
 could not but betray secrets, what is left your servant but 
 an apparently contemptuous silence calculated to mislead by am- 
 biguity? Am I a Frenchman or an Italian, that I am accused 
 of dissimulation? Am I not German, ay, and more — ^Prussian? 
 Spoke I not Lettish in childhood, the tongue of our barbarous 
 forebears — that hated a lie worse than death ? 
 
 But, your majesty, I learned long since that among diplo- 
 matic deceivers and trimmers, official self-seekers and hypocrites, 
 the truth is so rare, one may without a blush at any time hazard 
 it naked. As no one will believe that I am so simple a child as 
 to speak my mind, my worst enemy is surest to think I mean the 
 opposite. Afterwards he has only his own stupidity to resent. 
 Alas, it cannot be otherwise ! I must be execrated, decried as a 
 traitor, the archfiend, a very Cataline. But with such insults I 
 nourish my pride. Some day the curs will whine and lick my 
 boots. 
 
 William I. — ^When, however, you think the interests of the coun- 
 try jeopardized, and you move on remorselessly, could you not 
 take partly into your confidence the well-meaning among the 
 leaders ? 
 
 Bismarck — How long would they continue well meaning? The 
 world cannot be trusted with our secrets. It must suppose our 
 policy of army increase due to revolutionary unrest, and intend- 
 ed for domestic repression, to crush out what they are pleased to 
 call 'liberal aspirations" ! And if that is to be the foreign opin- 
 ion, must it not also be the general opinion at home ? 
 
 William I. — Ah, but in a sense, are not their fears right? Need 
 we go to such lengths in establishing the authority of the throne ? 
 
 132 
 
THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 BisiiiARCK — Alas! we have no other course. We must propose 
 nothing less than, by discipline and special education, to make 
 machines of men in the service of the state, for the prompt 
 execution of the decrees of Providence revealed to us. 
 
 How else shall we save Prussia, and unify Germany? 
 
 William I. — Methinks it is just here one may cherish a doubt, lest 
 we extinguish that noble fire the German spirit kindled — the 
 right of private judgment, and our freedom of conscience won 
 with the shedding of so much blood. 
 
 Bismarck — Nay, we shall not rob any man of his private judg- 
 ment, so we predetermine his public conduct by well-established 
 habits and discipline. His conscience shall continue free, but we 
 will take care to foreordain his preferences. In relation to the 
 world of spirit, he shall in his innermost self stand unassailed, 
 nay, fortified the rather. 
 
 Fear not, sire. What your subjects may seem to forfeit in the 
 w^ay of a superficial contemptible personal liberty, they will much 
 more than make good in a passionate, great-souled pride, shar- 
 ing the moral grandeur of their august sovereign. 
 
 William I. — ^With your patriotic policy I am in accord ; but I do 
 not, as you, see that Prussia is surrounded with malice and wick- 
 edness on all sides; that every diplomatic move of our rival is 
 a cunning contrivance to undermine us. He may perchance be 
 won by trust and graciousness. The experiment at least does 
 still seem worth the trying. Think how much happier we should 
 be were our policy as clear, honest and open as it is beneficent. 
 
 Bismarck— Later we may inaugurate a regime of universal good 
 will when we are admittedly supreme. Your majesty forgets 
 that the enemy must at present underestimate and despise us, 
 if with superior resources he is not to compass his evil designs. 
 We must be prepared for the unforeseen which he will let loose 
 upon us, and he shall not dream that we foresaw! Then shall 
 the aggressor turn out the dupe of his own arrogancy ! Nor dare 
 the statesman indulge in too scrupulous and tender a conscience. 
 
 133 
 
BITE-THE- MARROW AND 
 
 Public weal is not attained by the same rules that govern private 
 good. 
 
 Was it not in profound peace, and without losing time to 
 create a plausible pretext, that the great Frederick seized upon 
 Silesia, fulfilling so the manifest destiny of that province, and 
 rounding out strategically and economically his dominions for 
 better self-defence ? Seven years he fought, when kings and em- 
 perors in fond and futile chivalry came to the help of the angry 
 Austrian empress! So he defended valiantly his God-given 
 heritage. 
 
 - Did he not, after, silence Austria and Russia forever, making 
 them overtly accept his principle: namely, the national aggran- 
 dizement of the state to readily defensible frontiers, when he 
 shared with them the spoils of that ever turbulent neighbor, the 
 republican kingdom, the aristocratic republic of Poland, which 
 had so long been a perpetual menace to the peaceful continuance 
 of a rational benevolent despotism across her frontiers ? 
 
 So it was, and only so, boldly, remorselessly, that the great 
 Frederick cemented a military monarchy, and bequeathed to his 
 successors a policy they dare not alter, the essence of which may 
 be stated: German unity shall have one day in Prussia the 
 strong champion so great a cause requires! And if, in idyllic 
 mood, one objects to the military aspect of the monarchy — how 
 else than by the help of a people of soldiers may Germany come 
 into her own? God forefend that Europe be destined (as the 
 Corsican cynically declared) to be one day all Cossack, or all 
 French ! 
 
 Now shall the peerless Frederick be summoned at the bar of 
 Bourgeois morality to answer for his royal conduct, because his 
 mighty hand incorporated benevolently into Prussia the prov- 
 ince essential to her unity, her service to Germany, and some 
 day, God knows, to Europe ? 
 
 William I. — True, our ancestor was governed by a higher code 
 than that of ordinary men. Yet have not the times undergone 
 such changes, that we can hope in the near future to found the 
 
 134 
 
THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 throne on the devotions of a grateful people? Was it not Stein, 
 a liberal statesman, who healed the wounds inflicted by seven 
 years of inevitable war? 
 
 Bismarck — Stein truly administered first-aid-to-the-injured. He 
 domesticated, ay, but he wisely also emasculated democracy. 
 Such a liberal as he was, under like circumstances, I should 
 gladly myself become. He re-established finances by a strict 
 accountability of officers and the elimination of sinecures. He 
 abolished serfdom and made ciphers into citizens, not so much 
 surely out of sentimental S3rmpathy with them, as to raise up a 
 new peasantry from which he might recruit larger armies, and a 
 new bod}^ of burghers who would have a stake in the state. The 
 land he freed from obsolete restrictions, and even opened state- 
 offices and military careers to other than nobles, so as to keep 
 the upper classes alert and upright by fear of a shameing com- 
 petition, and recruit to them the highly gifted who chanced to 
 be born among the less privileged. He taxed the nobles, not so 
 much that the strong should bear, as may seem at first sight de- 
 fensible, greater burdens, but that they should realize their sub- 
 jection to the King, and that the common people should not be 
 roused by apparent injustice to what might, at a critical time, 
 prove a dangerous resentment. All this, in guise of liberalizing, 
 did truly but consolidate the central power. 
 
 Now do we to-day need to get power from the people? We 
 see to it that the people's will flows ever in prearranged channels ! 
 Constitutional government? It is chiefly a new weapon in the 
 hands of the prudent monarch with which to quell irresponsible 
 agitators ! 
 
 William I. — Yet is there not something more in democracy? In 
 the wars of Liberation, it was Scharnhorst's "people's army" that 
 won back the independence of Prussia. 
 
 Bismarck — Exactly, your majesty. And what does our famous 
 tyrannical militarism signify, if not an extension of that sys- 
 tem from times of distress to times of threatened peace? There 
 shall be a wider, yea twice as wide a participation by the people 
 in the glory of serving the state ! And that forsooth is tyranny ? 
 
 135 
 
BITE-THE-M ARROW AND 
 
 William I. — ^Your interpretations of our national life are indeed 
 most enlightening, and bring us encouragement. But my son is 
 a diligent student of history, a keen observer, and a soldier. Now 
 he implores me that we move with extreme caution. He refers 
 back to the Long Parliament and Cromwell ! 
 
 Bismarck — ^Yet note, sire, the differences in the situation. I 
 serve no Stuart, not even a Tudor, but a Hohenzollern. We 
 deal not with a selfish, anarchistic people, like the English. Our 
 people are, thank God, more or less one-minded, stolid and me- 
 chanical. They need to have a standard set them, if they are to 
 attain to their uniform best. Their genius appears in unques- 
 tioning obedience to one single gTeat purpose of their superiors. 
 Schamhorst's national army further extended to its logical 
 limit, merely extends to every able-bodied man the pride and 
 power of self-identification with the sovereign will. Ah, what 
 could be more liberalizing, ennobling, ay, in a very true sense 
 democratizing, than this: One King, one people? 
 
 Think me not, in my enthusiasm, ignorant of all that men 
 say. I learned to handle politicians by driving my cattle to 
 market; to conciliate my fellows, caressing and booting alter- 
 nately my mastiffs. Ah, I shall be hated as never any before 
 me, but men shall gnash their teeth impotently, resorting in vain 
 to public enemy and private assassin. 
 
 When the press ventures to foment discontent and rebellion, 
 I shall clap tight a muzzle on it. WTiere I can't penalize, I can 
 subsidize, and win over friends to the righteous cause. Shall I 
 stop now at anything? 
 
 In any event, at the worst, death on the scaffold, sire, is as 
 honorable in your service as death on the. field of battle. 
 
 William I. — Thou still f orgettest Charles ? 
 
 Bismarck — Nay, sire. But I shall at least, like Strafford, pre- 
 cede the King and give him timely warning. 
 
 AYiLLiAM I. — But the constitution we violate ? 
 
 Bismarck — The constitution should serve the King, not the King 
 the constitution ! 
 
 136 
 
THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 We shall dissolve the Chambers as often as they care to make 
 it necessary. The King shall declare that as the Three Estates 
 cannot agree, he will notwithstanding discharge his solemn and 
 sacred dnty by Prussia, without regard to scraps of paper. 
 
 William I. — It is terrible, but you are right! I see the manifest 
 finger of God in it all. Yet mind you, no war; above all, no 
 provocation ! 
 
 Bismarck — It is to prevent such we labor. Not even against an 
 act of God shall the King be unprepared. Forewarned is fore- 
 armed. Let the enemy beware how he assails us — unawares! 
 
 William I. — ^Having interrogated my faithful minister most 
 freely, and content with what he has replied, I pledge him 
 loyally my endorsement, even to the uttermost. 
 
 (The King greets Bismarclc quietly, and starts to withdraw) 
 
 BiSMAECK — My grateful tjianks. I shall defy sullen looks, gloomy 
 scowls, the murderer's thrust or bullet, the momentary threat of 
 revolution, with a glad heart, a composed spirit! All that we 
 do for the people's defence, against the wiU of them that arro- 
 gate the right to speak on their behalf, will be approved by his- 
 tory. As thy loyal minister, I shall have my exalted station at 
 the foot of thy throne. 
 
 (Exit the King, deeply agitated, hut resolute) 
 
 Bismarck (alone) — ^Good, over-scrupulous, kind-hearted man. 
 Brave, but narrow; honest, but short-sighted; yet true, true to 
 the core. Providence hatli been kind indeed to me. Never stood 
 a man so ready to accomplish what shall forever endure to praise 
 his memory. We shall with such a sovereign unite Germany un- 
 der one sceptre. And it shall not be an elective honor, like that 
 I bade his brother reject; but one of divine right. And all 
 Europe shall yet rejoice as the footstool of the Prussian throne, 
 when Germany undertakes her inevitable destiny, and re- 
 generates the human race ! 
 
 137 
 
THE "DOCTORED" TELEGRAM, OR 
 MILITARY NECESSITY 
 
X. 
 
 /Scene II. of the Bismarck Puppet Show 
 
 {Bismarck enters left with telegram in hand. To the extreme 
 right are seated at their heer Helmuth Karl Bernhardt von 
 Molthe and Alhrecht Theodor Emil von Boon) 
 
 Bismarck — Clearly, the critical hour has struck; as my folk-wis- 
 dom has it, the pear is ripe ! They have come at my invitation. 
 I shall try them first, ere I reveal my entire purpose to those 
 whole-hearted servants of the thick-headed God Mavors. 
 
 {He approaches with slow step to the table, a strangely sphynx- 
 like expression on his massive countenance. The two men 
 glance at each other inquiringly and are about to rise) 
 
 Von Eoon — Does your summons to await you here and your 
 solemn manner portend unforseen misfortune? 
 
 Von Moltkb — Does the telegram you hold bring bad news ? 
 
 {Bismarck folds it up carefully, with a quiet, quizzical satis- 
 faction) 
 
 Bismarck — No ceremony, my honored guests. As for the news, 
 it's the best — or the worst, according to our point of view. 
 
 Von Moltke — ^You have then resolutely clapped your spurs into 
 the flanks of your war-horse, the inevitable? 
 
 Bismarck — I'm sorry you have forgotten my dictum: "The per- 
 sonal conviction of a ruler, however well founded, that war will 
 eventually break out, cannot warrant its promotion." 
 
 Von Moltkb {groaning impatiently) — I often wish this respect- 
 able Prussia of ours were Turkey, with a Muslim fanatic for 
 Sultan, so that we needn't scruple to bring about some magnifi- 
 cently useful "act of God" in the nick of time. 
 
 Bismarck {smiling with affected horror) — How easily we Teutons 
 orientalize ! Shocking sentiment for a Christian soldier. 
 
 Von Moltke — I'm frank to say it doesn't seem shocking to me. 
 What are we three for ? Boon's to work out perfect army-reform. 
 I'm to adapt our strategy, without the enemy's knowledge, to 
 
 141 
 
THE DOCTORED TELEGR'AM 
 
 modern armament and means of transportation. And your 
 noble office? What is it, but to pull the wires judiciously be- 
 hind Jupiter Tonans? 
 
 Bismarck — ^You flatter me, my dear Helmuth — ^not so named 
 for naught. Ay, ay, both courage and light ! But suppose, good 
 friend, your God of the thunderbolts has an inkling of his own 
 time ; and it were instead our part to read his sovereign mind a 
 little in advance of the duller or less attentive, and possess mean- 
 while our souls in patience ? 
 
 Von Roon — Oh, we've gone over our history ad nauseam. 
 
 Voisr MoLTKE — The general staff have forseen every possible cam- 
 paign. I should think by this the army were ready to show 
 whether its teeth are false ! 
 
 Bismarck {laughing good-naturedly) — Friends, good friends, it's 
 feeding time in the carnivora section of the patriotic zoo. 
 
 Von- Roon — One has a right to do a little roaring in private when 
 one suifers for years under this policy of public self-restraint. 
 Year in, year out, what were we but puppets on which raw 
 politicians at the county-fair did target-practice? 
 
 Bismarck — But haven't we since been rewarded with a fat pop- 
 ularity? Ah, we two (to Molthe) we're not like you, you man 
 of gold, pure gold — advertising in vain for a private enemy I 
 
 VoN" Moltke — My task was easier, I suppose, just to fight — not 
 enemies but rust and rot? I'm sick even now of furbishing and 
 polishing up the equipment. 
 
 Von Roon — Leaving out personal zeal, I protest what is ex- 
 pedient for the state is lawful to her ministers, so soon as they 
 have made it legal ; and now, when there is no parliamentary op- 
 position, why any longer delay? 
 
 Bismarck — Luckily army-reform and geography are your 
 specialty, you bom Prussian; as for you, the '^tall and tanned," 
 the "hard and grand" — ^the "taciturn in seven languages," if you 
 were a Dane in your youth 
 
 143 
 
OR MILITARY NECESSITY 
 
 Von Moltke (hrealcs in with some heat) — ^I say, that^s not fair. 
 Can a man help his father taking him abroad when he's five? 
 Mine was merely the case of a Mecklenburger spying out Hol- 
 stein for Prussia. 
 
 Bismarck — True, we should have annexed the island to the main- 
 land sooner if you had been entrusted with the campaign from 
 the start. And who caught the rat in his own hole ? 
 
 Von Moltke — ^But I want my daily bread. Yesterday's is stale. 
 
 Von Roon — Oh, yes, it's all very fine assuaging our patriotic rage 
 with complimentary reminiscences. We want immediate leave to 
 translate ideas into the language of hard fact. Why don't you 
 convince the King with another threat of resignation? Thafs 
 always effective. 
 
 Bismarck — Perhaps we haven't been remiss. But only the logic 
 of events convinces the people at large. 
 
 Von Roon — The people ! One gives them orders ! And besides one 
 may direct and hasten your kind of logic ! 
 
 Von Moltke — lAnd we know you were a past master not so long 
 ago of that sort of resignation to the will of Allah ! 
 
 Von Roon — Yes, hear us out for once ! What else did you sum- 
 mon us for? We appeal to your conscience. Didn't you help 
 make the Schleswig-Holstein tangle so much more intricate, 
 that everybody saw at a glance it had to be cut by the sword? 
 And all the time you were really scheming and contriving to 
 bridge over once for all the gap created by history between South 
 and North, by bringing about and organizing that joint national 
 war against the Dane. You admit your intimate part in aU this 
 objective logic of events? 
 
 Then didn't you astutely arrange a partnership between Prus- 
 sia and our jealous enemy for the administration of our jointly 
 captured provinces? So we showed good will in the sight of all 
 men, and of course we couldn't help that purely geographic God- 
 ordained advantage — the special nearness of said provinces to 
 Prussia? Nor could we help Austria working herself up into 
 an unseemly fury against us over it? And all men beheld our 
 
 143 
 
THE DOCTORED TELEGRAM 
 
 patience, until self-respect demanded that, at the opportune 
 moment, when Austria suspected nothing, we should resent the 
 intolerable insults you had so subtly invited? 
 
 My God, and you dare talk to us, your fellow-workers, about 
 Logic of Events? 
 
 Then, pray, do you think us dunces? After Konigratz — 
 Sadowa, the enemy calls it, for his pride couldn't bear to give 
 his defeat the same name we gave it as our victory! — do you 
 think we can't now see why you stood out against us all from 
 the King down — with only the good Fritz on your side — and 
 wouldn't let us bite off a big hunk of Bohemia, and blocked stub- 
 bornly our triumphant march on Vienna? Ha, ha, we were not 
 so to humble Austria's pride, or inflict incurable wounds, lest 
 perchance we should be let and hindered by her resentment 
 from soon settling our little score with a greater Enemy! 
 
 And note, this was not mere ascetic humanitarianism ; for 
 you let us gobble up all Austria's allies (whose territories we oc- 
 cupied as a matter of precaution at the start of the war) — to pun- 
 ish them spectacularly, and warn anyone who would thereafter 
 take the weaker side in a controversy against us ! 
 
 You it was who brought all this about! You bullied the 
 Muse of History, and the God of Battles could not but fall in 
 with your ideas. Why are you cavilling now about the sanc- 
 tions of law ? You're simply derelict in your duties. Any child 
 can see that! 
 
 Bismarck (laughing loudly) — My dear fellows, this does me 
 worlds of good. I haven't of late been turning the old heavens 
 about their axis at the decent rate that ought to recommend it- 
 self in your opinion to a sober Lord of the Universe ! 
 
 Now, attention! It's my turn. We're not — the more's the 
 pity — in those much-maligned dark ages. One has to consider, 
 or pretend to consider, public opinion; enough at least to choke 
 it off in advance, or inspire it. Our people think they're Chris- 
 tian. So, even a victorious war must be justified by seeming 
 forced upon us in self-defence. No Albigensian crusade these 
 
 144 
 
OR MILITAEY NECESSITY 
 
 days commends itself to us. Now of course, though incon- 
 venient, this scrupulous tenderness of the German soul isn't an 
 insuperable obstacle. A war merely has to be made a people's 
 war by providing for the enemy's figuring — whether he will or no 
 — in the role of aggressor ! It is only important that we should 
 be attacked without visible provocation, and the waves of public 
 opinion carry us, conscientiously resisting, peace-loving states- 
 men, into the abhorrent war ! The whole country bristles with 
 arms! — ^nay, it is an exploding powder magazine. Then — what 
 enemy shall escape alive from the Furor Teutonicus? 
 
 But, gentlemen, one can't always hurry up these little provi- 
 dential arrangements. The enemy sometimes misses his cue in 
 the scene. Sometimes, it isn't the enemy blunders. Read, for 
 instance, this instructive document. 
 
 {Bismarck unfolds the so-called ''Ems telegram/' and spreads it 
 out flat on the table in front of them) 
 
 It blocks our game for a time at least, doesn't it ? 
 
 That upstart — the grande Incapacitee meconnue, will be 
 bound to have his eyes opened. Trying to force our King to 
 pass his personal word that no member of his family should con- 
 sider a unanimous invitation to any throne in the wide world — 
 that was going too far ! As became his dignity, our master stood 
 his ground, and firmly refused, and politely denied the ambassa- 
 dor of the French further access to his royal person on this ques- 
 tion. Let us drink, then, gentlemen, to our diplomatic succeess. 
 One victory at a time. Sober second thought has one more 
 precious chance, and the regime of prudent courtesy is 
 reinaugurated. 
 
 Von Moltkb {striking the table with his fist, and pushing back 
 his chair with disgust) — Donner wetter! And the beast won't 
 have to apologize? We must wink at his palpable intent to 
 humble publicly our sovereign, just that he might toss a sop so 
 to the Paris mob? {Looks utterly indignant and discouraged) 
 
 145 
 
THE DOCTORED TELEGEAM 
 
 Bismarck — Can I help it? Have you forgotten our magnanimous 
 King's invincible reluctance to be dragged into war against his 
 brother of Austria? To be sure, once his fighting blood was up, 
 all went well; and your mobilization and tactics won a swift 
 triumph. Seven weeks — and -finis to that chapter of world-his- 
 tory. It's the first move that costs. {Turning solemnly to Yon 
 Moltke) 
 
 As a matter of strict business, are we equally ready to-day for 
 a greater task ? 
 
 Von Moltke — ^We are. 
 
 Bismarck {smiling) — ^Victory is organized — fore-ordained? 
 
 Von Moltke — ^We can almost indicate the battlefields to the 
 square mile, and set the dates to a day. 
 
 BisjviARCK — Done, then. Let me have that document again. Be- 
 fore I use my discretion to send it to the press — letting the 
 whole world know what transpired between Benedetti and our 
 august King — perhaps we may improve the style a trifle. 
 
 Von Moltke — You will venture to doctor it ? 
 Von Boon — It's only a news dispatch. 
 Von Moltke — ^Shortening the thing won't improve it. 
 {Examining the now altered telegram) 
 
 Von Boon — Not at all. Very clever. Run the two parts together, 
 and we get quite another sense : Benedetti demands evidently an 
 irrevocable pledge; the King flatly refuses and dismisses the 
 ambassador. 
 
 Von Moltke: — ^Ah, I see, this is much better. Before it sounded 
 a parley. Now it trumpets a challenge. But will that suffice? 
 
 Bismarck — The press to-morrow will do the rest. It will be like 
 a red rag waved at the Gallic Bull, and the bull will paw and 
 snort and toss over the milk-pot with one crooked horn, and who 
 in heaven's name will care so very much what cat laps up the 
 
 ' milk? 
 
 146 
 
OR MILITARY NECESSITY 
 
 {Von Moltke and Von Boon still stare at the paper incredulously) 
 
 Von Moltke — If s too good to be true ! 
 
 VoN" RooN — The misconception you create will be corrected. 
 
 Bismarck — No, no. The Paris mob will goad the government of 
 demagogues; and they will force the hand of their pasteboard 
 emperor; and he, for his upstart dynasty's sake, will, in spite of 
 his better judgment and the unpreparedness of his forces, be 
 compelled to declare war on Prussia ! And then, my bully boys, 
 we'll simply have to fight, and might will make again a new 
 chunk of right in this old world ! 
 
 Von Roon (drawing a deep sigh of relief) — ^Our old God isn't 
 dead yet ! We sha'n't go to our graves in disgrace ! 
 
 Von Moltke — If I live to lead our armies in such a war, by 
 heaven, I give the devil leave to fetch away my old carcase when 
 peace is declared. 
 
 (BismarcVs face changes to solemn gravity — he rises slowly 
 from the table, folds up the blue-pencilled telegram) 
 
 Von Roon — What's the matter? Are you ill? 
 
 Von Moltke — Is this your funeral, or rather your iSt. John^s Day 
 bonfire ? 
 
 Bismarck — Oh, I'm merely thinking. All this glee over a suc- 
 cessful bit of editing — ^because we so fabricate a casus belli. . . . 
 You men of the sword are children ! 
 
 VoN RooN — ^Do we not thank God that we have you to guide the 
 state ? 
 
 Von Moltke — ^Will we not seal all your legal documents with the 
 red seals of success? 
 
 {Bismarck shakes his head, walking over to the far edge of the 
 stage) 
 
 VoN RooN — One of his queer fits of the blues. 
 
 Von Moltke — ^He's like a cavern underseas, full of monstrous 
 mysteries. 
 
 147 
 
END OF SECTIOlSr TEN 
 
 {Bismarck soliloquizes) 
 
 I wouldn^t have them otherwise. It's the nature of the beast 
 of prey; claws and teeth aren't for glitter only, but business. 
 Every worthy fellow wants his niche in history. But my God, 
 should the day ever come when some monarch rules in Prussia 
 whose policy lacks in sense of proportion, whose minister lacks 
 the strength and courage to resist under inordinate pressure; 
 and a policy is inaugurated — not of national interest, but mere 
 power and glory for their own vain sakes ; and then the military 
 arm strikes at the heart, and the head? . . . Heaven forbid! 
 That shall never be in Prussia if I can hinder it. I shall thor- 
 oughly educate the heir of my system. 
 
 148 
 
XI. 
 
 BITETHE-MARROW AND OUR BILL OF 
 HIGH TAXES 
 
XI. 
 Scene III. of the Bismarck: Puppet Show 
 
 Uncle Sam — Muse, if you don't whip to the pith of this Prussian 
 pother and skip a dozen acts at least, and get the sap of human 
 interest to flowing freely, I'll kick your Bite-the-Marrow off the 
 boards. 
 
 Muse of History — I'll only exhibit my hero in a few characteris- 
 tic poses. His interview, for instance, with the beaten Emperor 
 of the French; his education of the heir to his system and his 
 dismissal; his ironic consolation by his principal enemy — the 
 '^English woman"; these little characteristic scenes should prove 
 interesting. 
 
 Uncle Sam — Pshaw, cultivate criss-cross, caticorner reading of all 
 heavy literature. Shoot down from northeast corner of the 
 page to southwest corner, and then up from southeast corner to 
 northwest comer; one word to a line suffices you to skim the 
 golden cream of the matter, and leave the blue milk to specialists 
 in boredom. 
 
 Muse of History — Every one his taste, Sam. You deserve to be 
 fed gritty chunks of embalmed beef. In real life every moment's 
 not a thriller, nor every incident a cosmic cataclysm. 
 (Enter Bismarck, pacing up and down, and stopping now and 
 again to pet and talk to hi^ mastiffs) 
 
 Bismarck — He is gone mad, stark mad. Thou mayest well ask 
 who, with thy faithful dog eyes fixed on mine ! It is he, even 
 he into whose hands I, thy master, placed the supreme power 
 — providing for no checks, so confident was I of his heredity, of 
 his education. You doubt? I don't wonder. It's too terrible 
 to be true. Ha, ha ! "No man can ever be a soldier" — says he 
 solemnly (mind, he's not joking), to his sons at their first com- 
 munion — "unless he be a good Christian" ! What then of Alex- 
 ander? Epaminondas? Scipio? Omitting allusions to Caesar 
 and Pompey? They cut quite a swath of dandelions I should 
 opine. 
 
 151 
 
BITE -THE-M ARROW AND 
 
 And to think of it, this jolly lunatic can, in one insane 
 moment, upset the equilibrium, and turn forces loose that will 
 destroy all my long life of cruel audacity, tempered by cruel self- 
 restraint, created for the Eatherland. Up and down, all over 
 Europe, ay to the antipodes, he talks and talks of the Day. What 
 Day ? Is he Gabriel trumpeting the judgment ? ^'^Get yourselves 
 remembered forever like Attila and his Huns/^ That's it. 
 Scare the Chinese to the millionth generation to secure their 
 preference in trade! 
 
 Truly, truly the voice is the voice of Kant, but the hand is 
 the hand of the Florentine, when he cooks the dish for the great 
 feast. Hiss, and call all the eagles together ! What a diplomatic 
 orgy! Rob Nippon of her easy conquests over China. Then 
 sick "Slav peril" on "yellow peril,'' — and let them trounce each 
 other to a grand finish. Pour a little naphtha into his internal 
 economy and encourage political arson, to keep the Slav from 
 taking undue notice on the frontier. That all helps to squeeze 
 the Gallic stocking. Good. Then browbeat and bully the 
 French. As for Albion, she undoubtedly won Malplaquet, Tra- 
 falgar, Waterloo by perfidy. So encourage the Boer with cheap 
 telegrams, and suggest help you won't extend. By this you get 
 Britain loaded with debt and properly humbled at no cost to you. 
 
 But the masterpiece is this friendship with the unspeakable 
 Turk. Own the Sheik-el-UUa, and you can wrest the two great 
 Colonial Empires from their stupid possessors by the preaching 
 of holy wars you don't have to finance, till the Persian Gulf's a 
 Prussian foot tub. 
 
 By all the devils, he has got my lessons letter perfect after a 
 fashion, damnably well; but he ruins all by declamation, pose, 
 spotlight. He'll get caught putting the match to the train, yet, 
 in a melodrama, and end as an international Guy Fawkes ! 
 
 I wrought for the day when the German should cast off the 
 alien yoke of Greece, of Rome as of France, of Britain ; and other 
 yokes, besides. Some day that fin-de-siecle rottenness, that ef- 
 feminate melancholy, that plebeian servility, that hypocrisy of 
 love and peace, which infest modern civilization, must pass away ; 
 
 15^ 
 
BILL OF HIGH TAXES 
 
 and we shall once again set foursquare men on this earth : mas- 
 ters, fearless despots, aristocrats in Prussian uniform — and 
 obedient ordered masses inspired by pride in abject subjection to 
 their world-wide purposes. Then we shall perhaps, under new 
 names, enthrone our race-religion in our souls, and Thor and 
 Odin shall be lords of all mankind through us. 
 
 Something like this have I dreamed ; and we should owe it to 
 our central compactness, our exposure to attack from all sides, 
 our integrity, and our faith above all in the genius of the Ger- 
 man. Our philosophy, our poetry, our music, our morality, our 
 statecraft, should create a spiritual empire over mankind for 
 the noblest race in Europe ! 
 
 But all this will the madman lose; ay, and his place too in 
 the sun, which he got by the momentum I imparted to the 
 machine. 
 
 The stupendous increase at home of wealth and power, the 
 hoarded fruits of diligence and disciplined intelligence, the stu- 
 pendous expansion abroad — our race infiltering our culture with 
 our blood into every people — all this goes down in the Valley 
 of Decision up which he drives the peoples of the earth. ^'On to 
 Armageddon,'^ the madman cries, '^for fatherland, and for the 
 Kaiser, the Elect of God!" Oceans of blood flow, and then 
 squalor, starvation, oppression and the shame of a successful 
 proletariat revolution ! 
 
 He is mad! And it was for this debacle in the end that I 
 withstood his predecessor, when he would have accepted an 
 elective crown ? to have this man wear a crown by right divine — 
 a crown I forged, and bestudded with jewels — products of my 
 brain-anguish, and sweat of my genius? 
 
 Where, pray, is his Moltke? his Eoon? Where, by Valhalla, 
 is his Bismarck, at his side to keep his ears open to truth, his 
 conscience quick, and his will subject to the true commands of 
 Fate? He has only such men at his beck and call as commend 
 their mediocre talents to an insane self-conceit by Byzantine 
 servility. 
 
 153 
 
BITE-T HE-MARROW AND 
 
 He is the God who decrees the new beauty. He draws the 
 fashion-plates for the Ol3rmpians, and Teutonic sculpture is 
 supreme. He is the God who decrees the new goodness. What- 
 ever the drill sergeant willeth in the hour of his drunkenness — 
 that is virtue; and what nation it oppresseth — on pain of mas- 
 sacres and indemnities, and minster ruins — that is God's merci- 
 ful dispensation of love to them. Ho, he is the God who de- 
 creeth truth also. It is what We dictate, what We manufacture 
 for loyal credulity! We make the new logic at Essen so that 
 contradictories agree in our mouth, and facts become malicious, 
 fiction in the teeth of the foe! Shall all the nation catch his 
 madness? Millions simultaneously insane? And shall such 
 madness prevail? 
 
 Ha, but at the least he shall not be able to extirpate my 
 memoirs. They constitute the patriotic document which shall 
 bear witness that at least it was not I willed the world-ruin 
 this madman hath conjured up. They shall know, the people, 
 who has betrayed them for to strut and to pose in the star-part 
 of a cheap melodrama. 
 
 Rage burns my very inmost soul. 
 
 {iWilliam II. enters during last speech, pulling his moustache^ 
 and scowling at the whole horizon, as if practising for the vil- 
 lain's part in a scene. Catching sight of Bismarclc, he addresses 
 him with condescending cordiality) 
 
 William II. — Ha, is it thou, teacher of my callow youth? Did 
 I not learn well by rote thy lessons ? Hear me recite : "Outside 
 opinion of our imperial policy is of no consequence. Call our 
 gainsayers interested falsifiers^ envious slanderers! But — pro- 
 pitiate the pious moral sense of our own people. Our policy is very 
 righteous, although hard and exacting; indeed, the very will 
 of God, kind to his chosen people, whom He would see perfect 
 in virtue. We nurse our strength on land and sea, and accumu- 
 late war treasure and equipment — ^because we are gentle dreamers 
 and desire leisure and repose. But the enemy, alas ! is so easily 
 provoked, cunning and unreasonable. He cannot be pro- 
 
 154 
 
BILL OF HIGH TAXES 
 
 pitiated by uttermost patience and tender solicitude for the com- 
 mon interest; he must, therefore, be held in awe. When he 
 doesn't answer your purpose, with your people, as an irritant, 
 and they begin to protest against discipline and exaction, why, 
 rattle the sword, while emitting unctuous praises of peace. 
 
 ^Toster the foe's resentment of bygone wrongs, carry it to the 
 right pitch, and call the world's attention to these inexplicable 
 fits of passion — most dangerous to the peace-loving neighbor. 
 
 "When the right hour strikes to get room on earth for our 
 teeming population of heroes, make the enemy appear the ag- 
 gressor, wickedly greedy, treacherous, truculent, a conspirer 
 with all the outcast nations, the base-bred hordes and the de- 
 generate races ! 
 
 "Get the conscience of the civilized world, by assorted and 
 edited misinformation, to ache on your side against the per- 
 nicious activities you have secretly or indirectly instigated.'^ 
 
 Thus you see, old teacher, I can get up a detestable war 
 of conquest, as an innocent one of seK-defence, and unite so 
 my mighty people. Teutonicus imperator contra mundum: and 
 the will of the only God, the omnipotent God of the Germans, 
 shall prevail, and his Kingdom come on earth — as it is already 
 in heaven. 
 
 I have studied your doctrine profoundly, so you need have 
 nothing on your conscience, to make you leave your rest, and 
 haunt the living. 
 
 Bismarck — I marvel not thou findest my apparition unwelcome, 
 as was Samuel's of old to Saul. I strove only for national 
 union and integrity. 
 
 William II. — And I drew from thy conclusions as my premises 
 the glorious deduction — "world-subjugation by the custodians 
 of the ideal"— that is, by US. The German is the only male 
 principle, the Celt and the Latin, the female. And God said: 
 Let us have a new race of men ! 
 
 Could your statesmanship foresee, or dare, an end like this? 
 
 155 
 
BITE-THE-MAREOW AND 
 
 Bi&MAEOK — The apocalypse of Antichrist! I forged a great 
 weapon, the Empire, for an Antonine. 
 
 William II. — And, behold, a greater than he is here. 
 
 Bismarck — ^Ay, Nero redivivus, fiddling to the world-conflagration. 
 
 William II. — Frederick, my ancestor, fluted, sir! 
 
 Bismarck — Too true. But you have drummed and tromboned 
 and cymballed, the one-man orchestra of a hundred-armed 
 mountebank ! That is vast progress. 
 
 May I not arouse your virtue by wrath? 
 
 William II. — Bah, you are a contemptible, disgruntled old man. 
 Because I have brought greater things to pass than the poets and 
 prophets of your generation dreamed even in their beer. . . . 
 
 Bismarck — Thou hast got the German eagle lessoned in crowing 
 by the GaUic cock ! I tell thee, await not the end ere thou re- 
 pent. For I have come to warn thee, before it be yet too late to 
 avert thy total ruin. 
 
 William II. — ^Avaunt, dead bird of ill omen! I have been over- 
 patient too long. Ungrateful hanger-on of my august and su- 
 premely great grandsire. . . . 
 
 Bismarck — ^Whom I compelled to reign, ruling faithfully in his 
 name and interest! 
 
 William II. — The lie of a vampire ghost shall not stir up the 
 wrath of the Lord's anointed. I do safely appeal to history. 
 
 Bismarck — Thou that makest history ! 
 
 William II. — I alone can interpret it infallibly, being the live 
 coal at the core thereof. 
 
 Bismarck — Thy insane self-conceit, which made me leave thee to 
 thine own devices, lest I marred my record of perpetual successes 
 with disaster, which thou wert about to make inevitable. . . . 
 
 William II. — There is not room on one earth for thee and me. 
 Off with thee, croaking carrion-crow ! 
 
 156 
 
BILL OF HIGH TAXES 
 
 Bismarck — The ghost of Bismarck is more real than the flesh and 
 blood pigmies of thy machine-made day. 
 
 William II — Help! Help! I ache in my bones! I dissolve, I 
 fade away! Here, Sam — some poems, supreme masterpieces, I 
 wrote for you. Ah, my crown, my imperial crown, the sceptre 
 of my world-rule ! 
 
 {They fall at the feet of Bismarck, William II. having writhed 
 and faded out) 
 
 Bismarck — Better so, at the feet of the ghost than on the brows 
 and in the hand of a vain fool. 
 
 And yet, how I did love thee ! Thy frankness ! Thy insane 
 courage ! Thy proud rectitude ! Ah, to see thee and thy five sons 
 walk abreast — six beplumed soldiers — ^my old eyes filled with 
 tears. Who hath wrought this havoc, and so pitiably destroyed 
 the heir of my system? 
 
 Roon ! Moltke ! All our great work fails us because the great 
 man begets not his equal ! 
 
 Thou crown, thou art now a lie; for the aristocratic prin- 
 ciple perishes. Treacherous heredity! Impotent education! ye 
 guardians of the sceptre. Yours, not mine the Sin. What shall 
 a ghost henceforward do with these? To whom shall he be- 
 queath their custody? Let the crust of the world crack, and 
 the fiery centre pour out its fire-floods! Titans breed dwarfs, 
 take notice! and sane geniuses, paranoiacs! It is enough! 
 Let me begone, woe^s me, to the nouler past of unshaken faith 
 in privilege and primogeniture, the past of honest grandeur in 
 character and valiantly conquered glory! 
 
 157 
 
XII. 
 
 BITE-THE-MARROW AND THE FATHER OF 
 HIS COUNTRY 
 
XII. 
 
 SCE^TE IV. OF THE BiSMARCK PtJPPET ShOW 
 
 Muse of History — (entering upon her own scene as Witch of 
 Endor) — Ay, there was the flaw of thy reasoning, poor ghost. I 
 advise thee, leave these baubles to my kindly care. 
 
 Bismarck — ^And thou wilt dispense them — unto whom? 
 
 Muse of History — The worthiest in each generation, for the 
 Spirit singleth whom it listeth for greatness ; or wilt thou insist 
 on the glory of the degenerate ? 
 
 Bismarck — But are not men like cattle ? 
 
 Muse op History — ^Ay, there thou erredsi By oppression of the 
 masses, through iron discipline, thou throttlest genius in the 
 cradle. 
 
 Bismarck — ^Bah, the true Hercules chokes the snakes with his in- 
 fant fists ! 
 
 Muse of History — But the brutal tyrant or the versatile fool, by 
 right of primogeniture — the accident of birth insuring his cor- 
 ruption thro' sycophantry — thou investest him with the heritage 
 of the patriot and sage ? The strength of thy man-made machine 
 of men, run on the rules of the stud, secures the destruction of 
 the people whose divinely ordered state thou didst make it to 
 appear. 
 
 Bismarck — My punishment, if thou speak sooth, witch, is great. 
 But shall no eventual good result from all my sacrifices? The 
 years spent in the affairs of others whom I strove to aggrandize? 
 The years in which I humbled my straightforward soul to play the 
 spy in alien courts ? The years of ignoble traffic in stolen secrets 
 and documents; ay, worse yet, the years spent in condescending 
 to bottle-feed the conscience of the pious with lukewarm 
 skimmed milk, watered for babes? And all this to force victory 
 three times on a scrupulous humane Hamlet, and unity and de- 
 cision on a nation of Hamlets; that a madman who cries '^ME, 
 and God," who dares to write (and not laugh), "God has indeed 
 supported thee brilliantly, my son," should sacrifice to his child- 
 ish pride and vanity our great Day that was to dawn at last, 
 
 161 
 
VOIS^ BISMARCK AND 
 
 blessing the whole earth with German sunshine. And he brings 
 on instead the shattering Dusk of the Grods ! 
 
 Muse of History — Nay, nay, that is not so. The end of the world 
 cometh not, nor sliall the true sun fail of his dawn. You shall 
 save frivolous, light-hearted France. You shall impart of your 
 virtue to her. Behold her, silent, stalwart, modest, resolute, ter- 
 rible, sublime ! You shall save hypocritical Albion. The spirits 
 of Shakespeare and Milton shall purge her. Eeconsecrated to 
 public ideals shall her people be; reinspired to heroic sacrifice. 
 Ay, and England shall be all her people — ^not one class, that 
 monopolize wealth and station. England shall be tiie single- 
 minded, high-hearted, God-chosen of every class : 
 
 Frpm mine, from mill. 
 From croft, from slum 
 Shall her saviours come, 
 Whom the Spirit shall fill! 
 
 Behold; Iron Chancellor, thou didst not labor in vain. The 
 shams, the shames, the futilities, the snobberies, the knavishness, 
 ay, the base selfishness — are burned up in the conflagration ; and 
 they twain, thy enemies, stand in the fiery furnace noble, purified 
 nations, imperishable, beautiful. 
 
 Bismarck — tShall I have saved my enemies, whom my heart never 
 basely hated, but the land that I passionately loved, shall I have 
 cursed it with a curse ? 
 
 Muse of History — Nay, thou shalt have blessed thy Fatherland 
 ever more. For by circuitous paths already She approaches for 
 whose dispensation thou hast made ready thy people. Behold, 
 it is Liberty, the daughter of Sunshine, that maketh the desert 
 to blossom as the rose. 
 
 Bismarck — Thou meanest the rule of the rabble ? Where then be 
 my kindred — the men whose blood is fire, and whose thews are 
 iron, whom I set in the seat of the scornful forever? 
 
 Muse oy History — Ah, countless shades gather about thee, strick- 
 
 162 
 
GEORGE WASHINGTON 
 
 en of their great folly, and lamentable — that would accuse thee 
 of their downfall. 
 
 BiSMABCK — Them I can hold at bay ; but my country — the kitchen- 
 garden of filthy political dreamers ? 
 
 Muse of History — Ay, the Kants and the Goethes, the Schillers, 
 and the Beethovens, and their greater sons, shall dispense joy 
 and wisdom, and purity and sublime serenity. There shall have 
 come new and greater Steins to serye them as enlightened 
 statesmen. 
 
 Bismarck — Ay, I see, and the ooze will swarm with maggots ! My 
 God, is this writ down in the Book of Fate ? 
 
 Muse of History — Thou didst confess no mere man could see 
 into the hand of Destiny, and read her cards till played. 
 
 Bismarck — Then shall the game cease. I will shatter thy flimsy 
 booth, Beldame History ! Shift for another ! The Play is ended. 
 Rend it, my mastiffs ! To tatters with it ! 
 
 (The booth collapses, hut when the puppet figure of Bismarch 
 vanishes, with its destruction, there looms, colossal, a figure 
 that grows clearer and clearer, each hand resting on a huge 
 sphynx-like mastiff, the flaming eyes fixed basiHsk-lihe on Un- 
 cle Sam) 
 
 Uncle Sam — See, Benny, he thinks he's really important because 
 he spreads himself thin over half the sky like an electric ad- 
 yertisement. But sic semper tyrannis — whether they be Georges 
 or Billies! Virtus sola invicta. Mine, you understand. Deo 
 favente — perennis — ^the pile of my building! Aut haec — aut 
 rmllus — Liberty ! E pluribus Unum, An7iuit coeptis. Joye nods 
 on our new start, and by Jiminy and Vercingetori, whoever the 
 old Gaul was, we'll institute the Novu^ Ordo Sacclorumf And 
 bounce all varmints that aren't stuffed and bug-poisoned. 
 
 If all my ancestral Latin won't make him vamoose, I guess 
 he's a fixture. I'll improve the opportunity for a little curtain 
 lecture to his face. 
 
 163 
 
VON BISMARCK AND 
 
 You're a fraud, old Bite-the-Marrow. I expected to have 
 you put through all your paces for me. You were to have ex- 
 hibited your magnanimity with the vanquished Third Napoleon, 
 author of a Life of CaBsar, and all your sweet reasonableness 
 with Thiers ! And you never even pawed the air ! 
 
 What of that nice exquisite scene in which your properly 
 schooled scion of the imperial line of High Taxes retired you 
 daintily to private life, on the shining toe of his spurred boot? 
 And that delicate thriller, in which the magnanimous empress- 
 mother offered you her sympathy, and her kind offices with her 
 bumptious offspring — which you had taken such excessive care 
 in advance to render of none effect? 
 
 I tell you, you're not a good sport, Bite-the-Marrow. You 
 shouldn't smash the booth to smithereens, because the game be- 
 gins to go against you! You know I rather like you after a 
 fashion. You were a full-blooded genius, if you were unluckily 
 born a titled brute of a bully — so you couldn't help putting your 
 confidence in princes. But one can be kicked by a mule, you 
 know, and not suffer in one's honor. A bepurpled mountebank, 
 his chest like a Christmas-tree, the electric-lit victim of a sys- 
 tem of unearned privilege, he just had to behave as he did. 
 There's no use keeping up a grudge, black as Tophet, against 
 liim. And think how magnificently he's helped me out — de- 
 stroyed all the prestige of tin-soldiering, consigned crowns and 
 sceptres to the pawnshops and the museums ! 
 
 Now, suppose you take a constitutional in the Tuileries, and 
 a preamble among the ruins of Baalbek ? We've got to clear the 
 scenes here for important up-to-date business. 
 
 He doesn't budge, Benny. This bouncing silhouette, this 
 lantern-eyed Matterhorn, takes no gentle hints! How, do 
 you suppose, can I induce him to realize he's a back number, and 
 needs badly a bath in the Styx-mud, and a little draught of Lethe 
 beer, or a Nepenthe shampoo? 
 
 Benjamin Feanklin — Methinks, nephew, he calls your attention 
 scornfully to a gypsy dame in Phrygian cap, who offers you a 
 bargain sale of her pack of specialties. 
 
 164 
 
GEORGE WASHINGTON 
 
 (The gypsy shows her face to Benjamin Franklin as the absent 
 Goddess of Liberty, but fastens her mask so that Uncle Sam 
 does not recognize her) 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^What truck have we here ? 
 
 Gypsy {in a feigned voice) — All the stock in trade, son, of easy 
 democracy. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Who told you my supply was running low? 
 
 Gypsy — Oh, the best appliances will wear out in time. Think of 
 it! Four generations since we set up housekeeping! And a 
 widower has peculiar difficulties. Hired housekeepers are not 
 always careful. It is said they stimulate trade for us gypsies. 
 
 Uncle Sam — I won't buy a thing. 
 
 Gypsy — Then at least you'll examine, and get self-knowledge. 
 Here's the full dinner-pail: made one president — my old cor- 
 nucopia revamped. Here's whitewash: beats tooth-powder; just 
 a magic thimble-full of it expands to a barrel when you begin to 
 apply it liberally to your trusted friends. Here are labels: any 
 goods sell with these, if you lick the carefully sweetened 
 aseptic glue. Here are freak issues: to divide the fools, and 
 give the smart man a chance. Here are planks : smooth-planed 
 and extra-waxed, for platforms, to slide off from when they're 
 weU laid ! Here's drastic legislation a la iSt. Anthony, welcome to 
 Puritans: to make vice interesting. And here's the real excuse 
 for it, immunity, in pink package, for sale: to swell the funds 
 for a good business administration of city affairs. Here's queer 
 reform-fads : to make new reputations ; and prosecutions : to keep 
 the yellow journals in news, and guarantee the escape of reput- 
 able corruptionists. Here's a water-witch: can tell you where 
 gurgle the secret springs of political refreshment ; and the foun- 
 tain of eternal folly for chronic candidates. And, best of all, 
 here's a handy guide to Success. Let me read you some of the 
 most applicable maxims : 
 
 ^'Every citizen mind only his own business." 
 "Nothing is your business but what pays you." 
 "Professionals must run the government — for what's in it." 
 
 165 
 
VON BISMARCK AND 
 
 "Big business makes it worth while to serve the i^eople/' 
 
 "The people are told what's good for their health, and the 
 advertiser pays the bill." 
 
 ^'Appeal is made to public opinion, which, heard through a 
 licensed megaphone, becomes the Voice of God/' 
 
 "Public interest soon flags — particularly if you provide inex- 
 pensive distractions." (N. B. — ^See our toy department 
 for rattles and bugaboos, guaranteed to keep the babies 
 cooing.) 
 
 Unclb Sam — 'What do you think, Benny, of this whole confounded 
 
 outfit? 
 Bbnjamin Franklin — I think the merchandise was manufactured 
 
 to sell. 
 Uncle Sam — ^Hardly, for I sha'n't buy. And who is there you'll 
 
 buncoe in the universe if you can't me? 
 Gypsy — ^You refuse to sample the wares of Liberty ? 
 Uncle 'Sam — ^You're not she, I tell you. I guess I know her; and 
 
 if you pretend to he her, I might forget my manners. 
 Gypsy — Don't lose your temper, Sam, because you're short of 
 
 change. It's a useful line of goods, and cheap — for the money. 
 Unclb Sam — ^Exactly. The little hatchet breaks, when the fool 
 
 and his dime are parted. Cheap at the price, tho' worthless at 
 
 any. If I'm not misinformed — and who dares intimate that's 
 
 possible? — it's the kind of truck has extra cathedral-spired my 
 
 biggest town with my topmost skyscraper. Can't fool me twice 
 
 with the same patent device. 
 Gypsy — -But maybe, if you're so critical, your enemies might like 
 
 some little Christmas remembrances. 
 Uncle Sam — Haven't the cash to spend on my enemies; and for 
 
 beggars I've organized Charity on a polymetropolitan scale. 
 
 (Bite-the-Marrow takes out his purse, and throws gold coins at 
 Liberty) 
 
 Gypsy — ^Help yourself freely, son. All my pack's yours. Your 
 friend in heaven has paid for you. 
 
 166 
 
GEORGE WASHINGTON 
 
 Unci^ Sam — You, Bite-the-Marrow, have the impertinence to 
 think I'm dead broke? You sha'n't treat me at my own fair. 
 (Throws a package of greenbacks at him that shower bach, and 
 the gypsy pichs them up hastily) 
 
 Benjamin Franklin — She has certainly evinced great knowledge 
 of human nature, and deserves to be twice paid. 
 
 Uncle Sam (in some anger) — Away with you! (Kicks the 
 wares off the push-caH) And look to it, I don't get 
 your scalp. (He seizes her Phrygian cap, which he tucks in 
 his belt. Liberty flees, clapping on her mask tight with both 
 hmids. He kicks the staff about) Now that this little incident 
 is done with, I tell you, Benny — I don't like to think it — but, 
 though her mouth was full of deceit, something in her voice 
 struck a familiar chord. 
 
 And as for you, Bite-the-Marrow, I reckon it was mighty po- 
 lite of you to purchase this rubbish for me, but I've had enough 
 of your insolent stare and cynical sneer. I can dispense with 
 your company on so large a scale. 
 
 Shade of Bismarck — Samuel, let me offer you my services. If 
 I must save France, my coxmtry's hereditary foe; and England, 
 whence derived all the bitterness of my life — and the madness, I 
 tell you of the heir of my system — for he derived the virus of 
 insane conceit from the British strain of blood — if I must thus 
 glory in my shame, let me crown all so. 
 
 Unole Sam — ^You couldn't do anything for me. 
 
 Bismarck — ^I could clear out that rabble for you. I practiced on 
 Poles and Socialists, on Ultramontanes and Alsatians. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^Yes, yes, and you'd quite incidentally shackle my 
 feet and manacle my hands. I believe in democracy. My com- 
 mittee can attend to my momentary troubles. And do you sup- 
 pose I could get any good from the arch-enemy of my ideals — 
 of free opportunity, popular initiative? 
 
 BiSMABCK (from a sneer — gradually assuming an expression of 
 siirprise and horror) — ^What, you're not sincere? You believe 
 in a regime of fools and idiots and sycophants lording it over 
 
 167 
 
VO^^ BISMABCK AND 
 
 the intelligent minority because, as you say, they have the 
 price? You believe the Voice of the people, out of a political 
 graphophone, is the Voice of God ? You too then are mad ! 
 
 Uncle Sam — I ? mad ? Guess not. You're just behind the times. 
 Infected with the little Babylon bacillus. By the principle of 
 representation we get the intelligent to act for the less en- 
 lightened. We have the public school system to raise the 
 standard. You ought just to visit my Congress in action ; both 
 houses packed with solid genius and patriotic virtue. 
 
 Bismarck — Horrors! A cave of the winds under a Niagara of 
 claptrap ! 
 
 Uncle Sam — Democracy has her God-sent prophets to guide the 
 debates of her statesmen. 
 
 Bi&MARCK — Phrase-mongers, adulterators of political doctrines, 
 place-hunters, brokers in sinecures! You really believe such 
 folk can help you? I pity you. 
 
 It is a serious case, and I will be your good Samaritan, Sam, 
 in spite of you. The mistake you made was not conscripting in 
 industrial armies the aliens as fast as they kissed your shore. 
 For officers, youM need much-bullied and therefore bullying na- 
 tives. If you hadn't any such disciplined material, you could 
 use the graduates of your penitentiaries, and see that they were 
 kept well filled by stringent enforcement of the laws. Think 
 how, to brassbands and with flags flying, you could have got all 
 the dirty work of the nation done cheap ! At one stroke — aliens 
 Americanized, and convicts turned into valuable government 
 servants ! 
 
 As for your intellectual pretenders, I should adapt to your 
 society our method. It has worked miracles. The more intel- 
 ligent with us a man is, the surer he is to refuse even to specu- 
 late beyond the limits of one particular fenced-in square yard. 
 He burrows himself in, and never even casts a shadow like your 
 groundhog. Every man a goggled specialist, and every man a 
 universal ignoramus. So all the learned citizens become blessed 
 idiots in public matters. 
 
 168 
 
GEORGE WASHINGTON 
 
 The concerns of great interest, involving powers of general- 
 ization and practical will, they too are settled by a committee of 
 experts — rendered dummies, you know, by a subtle application 
 of the same principle — and you are the sole dictator I 
 
 So you get the truth on every question — all information 
 labelled and card-catalogued ; and you can make great prepara- 
 tions for world-movements, while all is done in the open, and 
 you alone are in the secret. 
 
 Uncle Sam — ^You're thick-headed and officious. Don't you know 
 my own nimble wits can find that needle in a haystack — the 
 truth? My little finger's a magnet! My native common sense 
 and ingenuity will improvise anything that's lacking, however 
 fundamental, in two bats of your old eyelids ! Can't I Burbank 
 and Edison you anything under the stars? You're distinctly 
 de trop, Bite-the-Marrow, and what's worse, out of order ! 
 
 Bismarck — I yield only to a greater. 
 
 Uncle Sam — What about your Uncle Sam, then ? 
 
 Bismarck — You! You're not even a ghost like me. You're 
 just a pitiable bungle! You're a composite political scarecrow 
 in motley. 
 
 Uncle Sam — So I'm an animated crazy quilt? See what I'll do 
 to you with my little hatchet. 
 
 George Washington, sorry to disturb you, but I guess I need 
 you now in dead earnest. Just step up a second and show him 
 your fine Houdon countenance, or, better yet, your inspired Rem- 
 brandt Peale Scowl, and I tell you, his blood-and-iron physiog- 
 nomy will need a little dab of stage-paint at every point of the 
 periphery. 
 
 (George Washington steps up, calm and dignified, and confronts 
 Bismarck, who fades out with amazed indignation) 
 
 Uncle Sam — Ha, ha, wasn't that just the finest feat of all ! After 
 our extraordinary diversion, good madam Muse of History, 1 
 
 169 
 
END OF SECTION TWELVE 
 
 suggest that yon do the Jack-in-the-box trick back-end foremost. 
 Into the witch-kettle with yon, right into the melting-pot. Let 
 ns have peace, and a snre-enongh breathing-spell. 
 
 {Muse of History reluctantly moves toward the hoUing pot) 
 
 Muse op History — ^You would boil me alive ? 
 
 Uncle Sam — What you came out of, I guess you can get into. 
 As for the temperature, they say you don't feel it much after it 
 goes above 500 degrees. Shall I have to hurry you up ? 
 
 (Takes the cap of Liberty as a scourge and threatens her) 
 
 Muse of History — Witness, ye heavens, how this is all one gets 
 trying to educate a parvenu Frankenstein. 
 
 (After striking a tragic attitude, am,d cutting a horrible grim- 
 ace at him — in which her eyes pop out monhey-heads, and her 
 tongue shoots at Uncle Sam like a long flame, she jumps into the 
 kettle with unintelligible mutterings) 
 Uncle Sam — Hear her curses in Highbrow lingo? Or is it He- 
 brew ? Does nobody harm, but Noah's dictionary. Now we shall 
 have the dessert. Compensation a la Emerson. 
 
 Presto, my little pot, 
 
 Heave and boil over with roses, 
 
 A lot, and still a lot, 
 
 To tickle our sniffing noses ! 
 
 (The pot begins to rock, then smoke rises in volumes) 
 
 Double quick, or I'll poke you, my Vesuvius! American 
 
 Beauties, mind — ^no other varieties tolerated. Spout, erupt, get 
 
 monstrously busy ! lArmfuls ! 'Cartloads ! 
 
 Ha, the pot obeys. That's what it's for, you see : to boil and 
 
 bubble over with just what I happen to order, red and green and 
 
 prickly, and tickling the olfactory at twenty-four dollars a dozen 
 
 in season. 
 
 Where's the National Genius can hold a candle to your 
 
 Uncle? Not John BuU? Not Chantedar? Not the four Bremen 
 
 musicians on a philharmonic bust ! 
 
 170 
 
XIII. 
 
 UNCLE SAM'S EPILOGUE TO THE 
 PUPPET SHOW 
 
XIII. 
 
 (Uncle Sam recovers himself, looTcing up and suddenly catch- 
 ing sight of the moon) 
 
 Benny, George Washington, see that canyon opening up with 
 moonlit grandeur, timed punctually for our delectation ? Who on 
 such a sublime continent, susceptible of such celestial illumination, 
 has any use for any artistic creed, like the effete people of the 
 old country — or of a social philosophy? You just guess and 
 improvise little passports to heaven like these, if they're needed 
 at St. Peter's gates. Time enough then. No aesthetics! Any 
 fool knows what's beautiful when he sees my canyon. No social 
 science ! Any fool will know what's wise, when he's up against 
 my polychrome ocean of naturalized and home-grown humanity ! 
 
 Benny, you can go now, and be chairman to your committee 
 for the pacification, by parley and dicker, of all those malcon- 
 tents. Explain to them who and what I am, and that will suf- 
 fice, I reckon. 
 
 (Benjamin Franlclin withdraws) 
 BENJAMiif — Good-bye, Sam, and be good to yourself. 
 Uncle Sam — Never fear. Trust me for that. 
 
 (Uncle Sam watches Benjamin Franlclin withdrawing) 
 
 A good old reliable fellow, he, though a wee bit prosy. But 
 it was, just the same, a deep instinct, George dear, made me re- 
 fuse to make you a member of his embassy. I apologize for my 
 apparent lack of appreciation. I always knew you were more 
 than a match for any ; and that colossal Pretender, who proposed 
 to have me sneak up the backstairs to despotism, you made him 
 dissipate away into innocuous desuetude, or the quintessence of 
 the interstellar. If Benny can't manage, I know, at the last, 
 I'll resort to you. 
 
 George Washington — How shall I be able to help you ? 
 
 173 
 
UNCLE SAM ENDS 
 
 Uncle Sam — Oh, by being yourself. 
 
 Q-EORGB Washington — But why are you not— yourself ? 
 
 Uncle Sam — Hang it, George, you're always so serious. Just now 
 I'm feeling happy, and sweet on all mankind. By moonrise 
 splendor all the horrors of Bite-the-Marrow's absurd proposal to 
 reinstate the dark ages like a Paris fashion shall be blessedly 
 forgotten. 
 
 (George Washington has quietly turned to go) 
 
 Uncle Sam — Say, stop here, George dear. No insult meant at 
 all. I always knew you were something too grandly superhuman 
 for imitation ; something we hadn't grown up yet to understand. 
 Somehow I know that in you — and you only, because first in the 
 hearts of our forefathers — ^we have an intimation of our coming 
 race of heroes. You shall beget them through me. And 
 Liberty, I feel it in my deepest heart, she shall yet return to 
 bear them: the true gods of the Final Age! 
 
 ^ Of course I like the lesser fellows of our intermediate stage. 
 They're convenient, and don't shame your man-in-the-street, 
 and your travelling salesman, and your hayseed pumpkin-and- 
 fiugarbeet, and your hog-the-natural-resources, and all the rest 
 •of us. 
 
 Old Hickory Handy Andy was our courageous vulgarity set 
 io useful jobs, clearing out heirlooms from the garret, and 
 making bonfires of dusty, musty prejudices. Poor Eichard, dear 
 Uncle Benny, he was our common sense, without which we 
 couldn't survive and bring to human fruitage the Jeffersonian 
 idealism by which every market garden is to boast of its private 
 twins : the tree of life and the tree of knowledge — with no ser- 
 pent to pervert Eve. And dear old Abe, with his mystical sad- 
 ness, his heartbreaking sympathy, his soul-saving humor — I 
 feel him ache in my bones on any damp day ; for wasn't he bone 
 of my bone after all? But you, George — Oh, you alone fill me 
 
 174 
 
THE PUPPET SHOW 
 
 With a shuddering sense of futurity. 
 With a nobler, manlier purity. 
 With a sane yet godlike security. 
 
 You make me break like the thrushes 
 Into song that buoyantly gushes — 
 So my face with a great pride flushes. 
 
 my country, thou art most glorious 
 
 For this 'mong the nations of earth: 
 That in thee the Spirit victorious 
 
 Shall bring new ideals to birth. 
 
 The soul of the world is not sterile, 
 And new power with new evil shall cope; 
 
 So thou facest the imknown peril 
 With heroical faith and hope. 
 
 Thou art sure that in season thy people 
 Shall beget them their saviours and gods, 
 
 Who the breadth and the height and the deep will 
 Make equal, and even the odds. 
 
 Ha, thou daredst the "muck" and the ^^dirt" use 
 
 A sovereign man to mould. 
 Compact of the homely virtues. 
 New graces ennobling the old. 
 
 Shall my prophet confine then his vision 
 
 To the glories of bygone times ? 
 Shall he hold not despair in derision ? 
 
 And the shame of follies and crimes? 
 
 For the mystery sun-golden and holy 
 
 It floateth ever onward ahead; 
 And, uplifting to honor the lowly, 
 
 The Unborn — shall yet hallow the dead ! 
 
 Here ends the seventh division of "Uncle Sam: A Satirical Prelude.' 
 
 175 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper pro( 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: Sept. 2009 
 
 PreservationTechnolog 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVi 
 
 111 Thomson Park Drive