THE 
 UNCIVILWAR 
 
 PORTER 
 
 BROWNE 
 
Class J3_Si,_^ 
 Book /Q^aS 
 
 COPmiGHT DEPOSm 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 PORTER EMERSON BROWNE 
 
THE 
 
 UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 BY 
 
 PORTER EMERSON BROWNE 
 
 AUTHOR OF " SCARS AND STRIPES." ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 MAY kO iSiB 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1917, 1918, 
 BY THE McCLURE PUBLICATIONS, INC. 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ©CLA499320 
 
%' 
 
 TO 
 
 CHARLES HANSON TOWNE 
 
 WHO MADE POSSIBLE THIS VOLUME 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 One 
 
 The Uncivil War 
 
 PAGE 
 II 
 
 Two 
 
 Plain Bill Hohenzollern 
 
 39 
 
 Three 
 
 Please Face Right! . 
 
 6i 
 
 Four 
 
 The Alcoholocaust . 
 
 75 
 
 Five 
 
 Extravagance vs. Economy 
 
 lOI 
 
 Six 
 
 The Foreign Language Press 
 
 • 123 
 
 Seven 
 
 Cabaretrogression 
 
 . 143 
 
 Eight 
 
 E. Flurribus Unum! . 
 
 . 167 
 
CHAPTER ONE 
 
 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 **/^^NE of the main reasons why America has 
 V^ had such a hard time getting into this war," 
 said my friend, thoughtfully, " is that, when they 
 started the present world conflict, the Germans 
 sprung on humanity an entirely new kind of war. 
 And one so amazingly different from any war with 
 which Americans had ever been connected that 
 for a long time they didn't believe what they were 
 seeing was really so — like the farmer who gazing 
 upon a giraffe for the first time, waggled his head 
 and remarked, weakly, *Go on! There ain't no 
 such animal ! ' 
 
 '* Up to August, 1914,'" he went on, " war had 
 been a very simple and elementary sort of affair, 
 much like a fist fight, on a large scale. Two nations 
 got sore at each other. And bango ! they went at it, 
 horse, foot and dragons; fist, feet and paving blocks; 
 no holds barred and the devil take the undermost! 
 
 11 
 
12 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 Men were simply men; and nations simply men en 
 masse, having the same qualities, the same ideas, the 
 same ideals, the same tempers and the same tem- 
 peraments that had governed their actions, in civil 
 life with, added to them, the new qualities that their 
 new life had adduced. 
 
 " Going to war didn't change them. They were 
 the same men they had been before, only now 
 engaged in a different occupation. Consequently 
 they brought with them into this new business the 
 same virtues and the same vices that had been theirs 
 all along. If their word had been good before, it 
 was good now. If they had been kindly and merci- 
 ful before, they were kindly and merciful now. 
 And if, by reason of being brutal, or untrustworthy, 
 or treacherous, or mean, or mendacious, they had 
 been scowled on by their comrades in times of peace, 
 so were they scowled on by their comrades in time 
 of war. War wasn't a new and highly specialized 
 occupation, demanding a whole new set of emotions, 
 ideas and ethics; it was merely a new application of 
 the old emotions, ideas and ethics. Consequently, 
 in the old days, a man beat his ploughshare into a 
 sword, and went slamming away gaily at his foe; 
 and when he had completely and successfully licked 
 that foe, he beat his sword back into a ploughshare 
 and went back to work again. Women and children 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 13 
 
 entered into wars in those days not at all. They 
 comprized the audience. It was not thought neces- 
 sary to slaughter little children asleep in bed that 
 the common ideals of a nation's manhood might be 
 realized. As a matter of fact, the slaughter of 
 women and children was frowned upon. It was 
 deemed, and rightly, that the common ideals of a 
 nation's manhood that comprized any such low- 
 down trick as murdering women and children were 
 not worthy of realization in the first place. The 
 men just got together and fought it out. And when 
 one side was licked, that side acknowledged it; and 
 the other side complimented it on the game fight it 
 had put up. And they shook hands and went home 
 to their regular business of running a corner grocery, 
 or a railroad, or something. 
 
 "Consider for a moment. Barring the Indian 
 wars, which were a simple process, and a sort of 
 combination of being waylaid by a thug and having 
 your hair cut by a cursory barber, we find that our 
 first so-called regular war was the one yclept 
 Revolutionary. 
 
 " This was the simplest known form of war — a 
 sort of Type I A. In this war, any man that had 
 a squirrel rifle, a couple of pounds of powder, a 
 handful of bullets, a good heart and a sense of duty 
 became automatically a soldier. And, be it added 
 
14 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 in those days the aforesaid accoutrements were as 
 component a part of the equipment of any gentle- 
 man as are now a safety razor and a bank account. 
 
 " Whereby, in that period, going to war was a 
 simple thing. All a man had to do was to grab his 
 equipment in one hand, kiss his wife with the other, 
 go out and hide behind a stone wall and slam loose 
 at the first man he saw coming down the road all 
 dressed up like a target. 
 
 " It took thirty-seven minutes to load one of the 
 cannon of the day with a ball that looked like a 
 close-up of a liver pill, and anybody that was a suf- 
 ficiently good runner to keep a half a mile between 
 himself and his enemy was comparatively safe. 
 And fighting became so much like doing a Mara- 
 thon, that the enemy, who were accustomed to train 
 on beer, mixed ale, beer, roast beef, beer, mashed 
 potato, beer, custard pie, beer, nuts, beer, raisins, 
 beer, comfits and beer, lost all enthusiasm after the 
 first few miles and went back to winter quarters on 
 the corner of Broadway and Battery Place, which 
 was then the Heart of the City, and sat the war out 
 in a cold and haughty indifference. When Corn- 
 wallis surrendered at Yorktown, they were disap- 
 pointed but not surprised. 
 
 " Our next experience was with the Mexican War. 
 We read about it in the newspapers. 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 15 
 
 " Then came the Civil War. 
 
 " The Civil War v^as our first, last and only real 
 war. As to why it was called a civil war, was al- 
 ways more or less of a mystery until we had the 
 German, or Uncivil, war with which to contrast 
 it. . . . After looking at the Made in Germany 
 product any little old war looks civil, even polite, 
 and you might go so far as to say punctilious. 
 
 " Not that there was not much bloodshed, much 
 bitterness, in the Civil War. There was. And 
 yet it was still the primitive form of war, as were 
 indeed all wars until there came upon a stricken 
 world the new patent, with Made in Germany 
 stamped upon its bloody base. The Civil War was 
 a war of fighting and of killing. But it was a war 
 of man against man, virile, clean and as merciful as 
 war can be made. 
 
 " It was, like the other wars of our ancestors, 
 simple, manly, honourable war made necessary, as 
 indeed has war always been made necessary when 
 necessary it has been made, by the blindness and 
 folly of an overweening adversary. 
 
 " So much for the wars that we had known. And 
 now to consider the new war — the super war of the 
 German. 
 
 '' In order for us to regard the subject compre- 
 hendingly and understandingly, suppose we go back 
 
16 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 and consider the question, ' What is war in the first 
 place ? ' 
 
 " Reduced to its simplest terms, war is the con- 
 flict of ideas physically demonstrated. In other 
 words, war is a difference of opinion translated into 
 physical action. 
 
 " For example, you and I have an argument. 
 
 " Being a couple of rational human beings with a 
 distinct aversion to black eyes and bloody noses, we 
 sit quietly down and discuss the matter. If we 
 agree, well and good. If not, we part with mutual 
 disrespect, and no harm is done. 
 
 " But suppose, we are not rational human beings. 
 Suppose we are irrational, like most human beings. 
 We start in to argue. But, argument getting us 
 nowhere, we begin to get mad. I call you names. 
 You call me names back. Then I cuss at you. And 
 you cuss back. That makes me madder; so I give 
 you a poke in the nose. That makes you madder, 
 and you kick me in the shins. And then, in a split 
 second, we're rolling on the floor, hitting and biting 
 and gouging, and the war is on ! 
 
 " And the reason for this is that while life has 
 its mental and its spiritual side as well as its phys- 
 ical, the physical side is the final expression of the 
 physical in the physical world. 
 
 " The spiritual quality is by far the highest in 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 17 
 
 man. The mental comes next. But both of these 
 facets of the individual are abstract. When a party 
 wants to get concrete action, he busts loose into the 
 physical. Neither spirituality nor mentality ever 
 chopped a cord of wood, or killed a chicken, or 
 cashed a check at the bank. It is a physical world 
 in which we live ; and physical things must be phys- 
 ically done. 
 
 " Not that we do not recognize the spiritual and 
 the mental. The spiritual and the mental are to the 
 physical precisely what the captain and the engineer 
 are to the ship. The one guides, the other controls, 
 the physical thing in which they live. But the 
 physical and the mental cannot control unless they 
 are in direct application to, and coordinated with, 
 the physical; the captain and the engineer couldn't 
 run the ship if they were seated thirty-two miles 
 away, in the back room of a saloon, or a beauty 
 parlour, or a Society of the Friends of the Universal 
 Dove, or something, any more than they could 
 stop a runaway horse by sitting on the front-porch 
 and thinking how benighted it is of horses to run 
 away; no more than you can prevent a Nubian lion 
 from eating you by calling upon the forces of spirit- 
 uality to make him desist. Spirituality may be your 
 game. But it's over the lion's head. All he under- 
 stands is the physical, and plenty of it. Your soul 
 
18 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 may go marching on. But your short ribs and your 
 loin chops will form pleasant pabulum for his leo- 
 nine family against the hungers of the coming morn. 
 
 " It is at this interesting, and you might even say 
 crucial, point that fall down so hard on their concave 
 brows the Amos Pinchots and the Jane Addamses 
 of the period. They reason that because they deem 
 themselves solely and potently spiritual, they can 
 stay at home and guide the ship, and heave coal 
 under its engines merely by sending out thought 
 waves. They reason that because they are spiritual, 
 all the rest of life, human and inhuman, must climb 
 up to their level to attack them. Which is per- 
 fectly sound reasoning, if, meanwhile, you are 
 willing to let your physical being become the phys- 
 ical prey of whoever and whatever wants to attack 
 it physically. 
 
 " For, deprecate the physical as you will, you've 
 got to remember that your spirit would have a 
 darned lonesome time at a bridge party if it didn't 
 have your body to handle the cards and trump your 
 partner's ace for it. I can imagine no greater 
 height of futility than for a flock of bodiless spirits 
 to sit around and try to knit actual mufflers for 
 physical soldiers. 
 
 *' No, sir, so long as you have a physical being, 
 you've got to recognize and protect that physical 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 19 
 
 being. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is to 
 commit suicide and go back with the spirits where 
 you belong. As long as the spiritual walks around 
 in a physical envelope, it's got to protect that 
 envelope physically if it wants to continue to walk 
 around. The structure of physical life is like the 
 structure of a physical building — only as firm as 
 its physical foundation makes it. Amos and Jane 
 may live with their spiritual heads in the clouds. 
 But their physical feet are right down here on Main 
 Street along with those of the rest of us. The fact 
 that they can't see down as far as that doesn't 
 change the fact in the least. Bryan can't see his 
 feet either. But that doesn't mean that they aren't 
 there. 
 
 " Take children. Children, whose little brains 
 are as yet undeveloped, naturally are very close to 
 the physical. Spirituality develops with the intel- 
 lect. But the physical is born within us. We eat 
 before we think. Even as we think before we 
 talk. — At least, some of us do. 
 
 "Did you ever watch a bunch of children, at 
 play? 
 
 " A difference of opinion arises — about which 
 one should have a certain lollypop; or not whisper 
 to somebody else. 
 
 " Do you, then, behold said adolescents going into 
 
20 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 a sombre tribunal as to the equities of the case? 
 Do you see formed a juvenile Hague Tribunal to 
 adjudicate the matter ? You do not. You see one 
 child take a wallop at the other child's most ad- 
 jacent portion. You see the other child put up a 
 howl and wallop him back. And unless there be 
 older and wiser heads to interfere, somebody's due 
 to go home with a scratched nose and a puffed eye. 
 Which is because only the physical is recognized by 
 the physical. 
 
 " And it is in this childish, impulsive, generous, 
 viciousless warfare that has lain the only expe- 
 rience with warfare that has been ours — that has 
 been America's. 
 
 '* But what, then, was Germany's idea of war? 
 
 ** It was not an idea that sprung to life full- 
 blown, like Felix, or whoever it was, arising from 
 the ashes. Forty years of incubation it took to 
 bring it to its ghastly, amazing, horrible perfection. 
 
 " ' War,' said this German Idea, forty years ago, 
 * is hell. We are going to make war. Therefore 
 we are going to raise, — I mean, make, — hell. And 
 since we are going to raise, — I mean make, — hell, 
 it's up to us to make the hottest and the helliest kind 
 of a hell that German efficiency can manufacture — 
 hell with the blower on, so to speak. Wherefore, 
 let us get together all our hellish ingenuity and all 
 
THEUNCIYILWAR 21 
 
 our hellish efficiency and all our hellish thorough- 
 ness and make a new kind of Made in Germany hell 
 that will make the old-fashioned orthodox English, 
 or American, or French hell look like a home-made 
 ice-box. 
 
 " ' Of course,' went on the German Idea, * we 
 can't hope to make so complete and perfect a hell 
 as this right off the bat. It may take us years, or 
 even decades, or generations. But make it we 
 will!' 
 
 "And they did! Of all the highly perfected 
 products ever manufactured in Germany, this Ger- 
 man Hellwar is the last word. 
 
 "To make a war, the first thing that a nation 
 must have is public opinion. 
 
 " So the German idea subsidized the press ; cor- 
 rupted the schools; debauched religion, art and 
 science to its ends. 
 
 "Then under the guise of a paternal interest in 
 its subjects, it proceeded to educate, clothe and feed 
 its people. But there was a catch in it. It did not 
 let them educate themselves. It educated them. 
 Which is another way of saying that it did not teach 
 them to think ; but thought for them. It furnished 
 them thoughts as it furnished them food and 
 clothes. And as the German people accepted the 
 one, so did they accept the others. 
 
22 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 "It taught them that they were a super race of 
 super men. It taught them that they were God's 
 chosen people. It taught them that what they did, 
 and were told to do, was right because it was God's 
 wish. It turned an apparently domestic nation into 
 a race of pure religious fanatics, save that the 
 Fatherland was their God, instead of God Him- 
 self. 
 
 "In so teaching, they found that the accepted 
 standards of rnorals and ethics of other nations did 
 not coincide with effective pursuance of the plans 
 they had in mind. So they substituted others, that 
 did. 
 
 " It was right to kill, if for the Kaiser and Ger- 
 many. It was right to rape, and murder, and burn 
 and torture if it made for the successful material 
 advancement of the Kaiser and the Fatherland. 
 Your oath and your pledged word were nothing if 
 they stood between you and the course the Kaiser 
 and the Fatherland had chosen to pursue. 
 
 " Slaughter and slavery terrify conquered peo- 
 ples. Germany must conquer peoples. Germany 
 must terrify conquered peoples to keep them con- 
 quered. Therefore it is right for Germany to 
 slaughter and enslave conquered peoples. 
 
 " As simple as two and two ! Isn't it ? 
 
 " By controlling the destinies of all her inmates ; 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 23 
 
 by a system of mental, moral, ethical, artistic and re- 
 ligious soup kitchens, the German Idea saw that the 
 brain of the German nation was fed only the 
 mental food that it wanted it to have. And as 
 what goes into the stomach forms the blood, so what 
 goes into the brain forms the ideas and ideals. 
 
 " And the German Idea saw to it, and saw to it 
 well, that there could exist in the hearts and souls 
 of the people no love, no tenderness, no sympathy 
 which would distract from the singleness of their 
 purpose as religious fanatics and world masters. A 
 man might love his wife to breed her for the Father- 
 land. He might love his children for future cannon 
 fodder. If there by any chance remained within 
 him a further hunger for sentiment, it could be 
 jazzed out of him with goose stepping and iron 
 crosses, and in yelling his head off for the Kaiser 
 and the Fatherland; which was by way of being 
 what is commonly known as a whipsaw. The more 
 of a sucker he became, the more he yelled for the 
 Kaiser, and the more he yelled for the Kaiser, the 
 more of a sucker he became. He was playing the 
 middle from both ends; and was done before he 
 started. 
 
 " Furthermore, to satisfy what scruples of con- 
 science he might have, if any, there was carefully 
 inculcated into him the belief that God was a Ger*- 
 
24 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 man official who came in somewhere between the 
 Kaiser and Von Hindenberg, and that anything the 
 Kaiser ordered, God would O. K. without the slight- 
 est hesitation. 
 
 " Frightfulness? It is God's command, given 
 through His commander-in-chief, the Kaiser ! 
 
 " Non-combatants maimed and tortured ? 
 Women with their breasts cut off? Little babies 
 with bleeding stumps where once were hands ? The 
 submarines with their toll of murdered women and 
 children? Helpless crews ruthlessly drowned? 
 Poison gas, and equally poison propaganda? The 
 murder of the wounded upon the battlefields ? The 
 bombardment of sleeping cities with gas and shrap- 
 nel? Torture and crucifixion and starving of 
 prisoners ? Servia, a butchered nation ? Armenia, 
 weltering in the blood lust of its conquering foe? 
 Belgium, raped and tortured and enslaved? Mur- 
 der, and robbery and arson, pillage and rape and 
 slaughter ? 
 
 *' God commanded it, through His lord, the 
 Kaiser ! 
 
 *' Back to the very foundations of civilization it- 
 self have ridden these two, the German Kaiser 
 and his personal Gott, to tear down and de- 
 spoil and ravish, with their hordes of slaves red- 
 handed. 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 25 
 
 "The foundation of civilization is the contract 
 When you can take no man's word for anything, 
 civilization ceases. 
 
 " Civilization emerged from the bone-glutted 
 caves of the past when the first man of the Stone 
 Age said to his neighbour, ' I will not kill you if you 
 will not kill me/ And when the second man gave, 
 and kept, his word, civilization was born. 
 
 " Not even so much of honour as was necessary 
 to save its own life has Germany retained in its na- 
 tional scheme of things. Its pledged word it has 
 confessed to be valueless; even its own allies dis- 
 trust and fear it. Nor any nation on earth has 
 aught for Germany but hate, fear, distrust, con- 
 tempt, loathing. It has come to be the one pariah 
 nation that the world has ever known ! 
 
 " Their Kaiser himself has said that the German 
 sword shall make the world respect Germany ! 
 
 " As though the sword ever made anybody respect 
 
 anything Did the blacksnake whip make the 
 
 slave respect its master? Fear, perhaps; but re- 
 spect ? Never ! 
 
 " So you can follow the cold German logic from 
 which have been stripped all emotion, all decency, all 
 morality, all idealism, all beauty, all humanity. So 
 they have created a human machine, as merciless as 
 a plague, as relentless as a flood, as impersonal as a 
 
26 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 famine. Neither youth nor age, good or bad, 
 women nor boys, old men nor maidens, neither 
 works of beauty nor labours of love it spares — a 
 thing relentless, inhuman, unhuman, that would 
 grind the world beneath its iron wheels and leave it 
 but a bleeding pulp. 
 
 " So the German Idea. Do you begin to see the 
 wonderful, the amazing completeness? 
 
 " First forty years of careful preparation, mental, 
 immoral and physical. Forty years of painstaking 
 corruption of an entire people through debauched 
 newspapers, textbooks, churches. Forty years of 
 bastardized art and distorted literature. Forty 
 years of subtle and pleasant slavery of the brains 
 and bodies of an entire race. Forty years 
 of commercial, industrial and mechanical appli- 
 cation. And out of all, the creation of a great 
 incongruous, terrible Juggernaut with, for its crush- 
 ing wheels millions of men, for its cogs millions of 
 women, for its fuel miUions and more millions of 
 children ! 
 
 " In other wars, a small per cent of the male 
 population of a nation went spontaneously to the 
 front, with but very little preparation of any 
 kind. 
 
 " But here you have a nation of sixty-eight mil- 
 lions of people going to war as a unit ! Merciless 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 27 
 
 masters. Mental, moral, physical slaves. And re- 
 ligious fanatics all! And if any one question the 
 religious fanaticism, remind them that the very 
 essence of all religious wars has been the ruthless 
 destruction of the churches, the works of art, and 
 the civilization of the conquered ; and let them think 
 of Rheims, of Arras, or Louvain. 
 
 " But in all the colossal, the marvellous, the amaz- 
 ing completeness of their preparations, the Germans 
 overlooked one bet. On one thing they did not 
 figure. 
 
 " It is sentiment. 
 
 " Can you find within the German teachings, or 
 documents, or pronunciamentos, or journals, or 
 writings of the last generation any sort of human 
 sentiment whatsoever? Is there anything of love, 
 or pity, or compassion, of sympathy, or tenderness, 
 or sorrow? 
 
 *' Not so you could notice it ! It is Germany must 
 have this, and Germany will have that. Those who 
 stand against German might will be taught a bitter 
 lesson. The German people are the chosen people 
 of God who has absolutely no interest whatsoever 
 in any other branch of the so-called human race. 
 The only love they have had has been for them- 
 selves ; the only pity or compassion for such of their 
 own people who have made the blood sacrifice for 
 
28 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 their own crimes ; the only sorrow to their own fail- 
 ure to ravish the world according to schedule. 
 
 " The only sentiment that the once sentimental 
 (along certain pompous, or household, lines) Ger- 
 man people have retained has been perverted into a 
 sort of megalomaniacal paranoia of self-aggran- 
 dizement and takes the form of being willing to 
 allow themselves and their children to murder and 
 to be murdered if it will but add to the glory of 
 the Kaiser and to the well-known reputation for 
 gentleness, modesty, tenderness, forbearance and 
 loving kindness of the misunderstood German race. 
 They will buy Christmas gifts for their own chil- 
 dren. But Belgian babies they hang on hooks out- 
 side butcher shops. 
 
 " In the grotesque obsession that has come upon 
 them every tenet, every creed of honourable warfare 
 has been lost. Anything, any means, no matter how 
 horrible, how bestial, to win! The absolute elimi- 
 nation of sane sentiment. Insane logic reduced to 
 the nth power, and beyond ! 
 
 " This, then, their great mistake. 
 
 " For, be it known, life is half practical, half 
 sentimental. And in the fair middle ground that 
 lies between must one live who would live life as life 
 must be lived. And when man puts out of 
 his life sentiment and softness, placing in its stead 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 29 
 
 but the cold mercilessness of logic, it may mark in 
 some ways a great strength, but it marks a greater 
 weakness. 
 
 "In proof of this you have but to consider 
 grandma. If you are a pure sentimentalist, when 
 the dear old lady gets along in years, you close up 
 the shop and stay home all day holding her hand and 
 bust yourself buying her flowers, and port wine and 
 antimacassars and things. If, on the other hand, 
 you are a pure practicalist, you figure that since the 
 old dame is too antique to bear children and take in ' 
 washing, the best thing you can do is to take her out 
 in the backyard and shoot her. 
 
 " So, you see, it is in the middle ground, and only 
 there, that lies salvation for both her and your- 
 self. 
 
 " Sentiment is soul. Sentiment is the earthly 
 manifestation of spirituality. Show me a good 
 man; and I will show you a spiritual man. Show 
 me a great man; and I will show you a spiritual 
 man ; show me a man whose work will live upon the 
 earth, and I will show you a spiritual man. 
 Through all the ages it is the work of the spiritually 
 and the sentimentally balanced that has lived. And 
 those who have murdered love with logic, pity with 
 ruthlessness, compassion with ambition, mercy with 
 hate, have ever gone down, trampled in the dust of 
 
30 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 their own defeats. Where is Washington to- 
 day? . . . And where Attila? 
 
 " And the reason ? It is very simple. It is be- 
 cause the sentiment that means spirituality is the 
 pilot of the ship. Throw overboard the pilot, and 
 the ship may run for a time. But in the end, no 
 matter how great, how perfect the ship, no matter 
 how competent the engineer, it will go upon the 
 rocks. Only the pilot knows how to navigate the 
 oceans of the world. As only the spirit knows how 
 to sail the seas of life. 
 
 " And so it is with Germany. Blindly efficient 
 in mind and work, yet is she blind in spirit. Of all 
 the sentiment that should be hers, she has but the 
 blind lust for spoil, for riches, for dominion. She 
 wants nothing spiritual. Has she ever said so? 
 Has she ever cried out for the rights of free peoples ? 
 For the benefits of universal peace? Is there be- 
 hind all her bloody mouthings anything of making 
 the world better for old men, for old women, for 
 little children? 
 
 " Her talk is only of boundaries ; of commerce; of 
 wealth; physical, physical, and more physical. Et 
 praeterea nihil. She wants only to feed her own 
 slaves into the gaping maw of War until, of its very 
 glut, it shall loll upon its swinish side, and let her 
 have for her own the booty of the world. That is 
 
THEUNCIVILWAR 31 
 
 all. . . . This world is all she asks. Of what may 
 lie beyond, she thinks no more than thinks the lion, 
 or the wolf. . . . 
 
 " But it is this very sentiment that marks the dif- 
 ference between man and beast. So that, when the 
 Germans flung from themselves, with the useless 
 panoply of peace, this same sentiment, they tore 
 down the very barrier that separated them from the 
 beast. It is possible for any man, who denies his 
 soul, and recognizes only his body, his bodily desires 
 and his bodily lusts, to become as the beast, and 
 worse. For he has a man's brain with which to out- 
 animalize the beast itself. Even as he can grow 
 beauty in his soul, he can grow hair upon his body 
 and claws upon his hands. . . . And this, autoc- 
 racy stands ever ready to help him do. . . . And 
 man grows toward the beast. 
 
 " And this, democracy cannot do. Man's instinct 
 is toward good. His instinct is toward the spiritual 
 and the sentimental. His soul in times of trouble 
 turns to the Mystery of Life, hoping for comfort, 
 praying for consolation and for surcease. In a 
 democracy, man creates his own ideals; thinks his 
 own thoughts. And so he grows. And toward the 
 spiritual. 
 
 '' True it is that democracies are lower in military 
 efficiency; in tribal coordination. But they are 
 
32 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 raised, meantime, in the spirituality that, after all, 
 is the governing force of earthly life. And so it 
 turns out that what is in the beginning, democracy's 
 weakness, turns out in the end to be its strength. 
 The beast can fight. But man has ever vanquished 
 beast because, while he can assume so far as he 
 needs must, the qualities of the beast, he has other 
 qualities that the beast lacks. The beast fights with 
 ferocity, man with courage and with patience. 
 The beast flings itself upon its prey. Man presses 
 slowly to the kill. The beast has blood lust. Man 
 has vision. The beast wants but to destroy. 
 Man desires to build. As the centuries have 
 taught us, life cherishes man. But beasts he de- 
 stroys. 
 
 " And that is why the men of France and England 
 and America and Italy — the men of democracy! — 
 will subdue in the end the tiger of Germany, and the 
 jackals of Austria and Hungary and Turkey and 
 Bulgaria. 
 
 ** And what will come of it all? this bath of blood 
 in which the world has been plunged ? 
 
 "Who knows? 
 
 ** But one thing we should remember. It is this : 
 That it is but a few centuries, since no peace-loving 
 man upon this earth went to his toil of a morning 
 save with a weapon in his hand, and dread within his 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 33 
 
 heart. War was the one business upon this earth to 
 which a gentleman might aspire. And peace but the 
 necessary interval of recuperation from the latest 
 war, and preparation for the coming. Warfare was 
 normality, peace an abnormal condition that meant 
 merely suspense. 
 
 ■ * It is these facts that make the more bitterly in- 
 congruous the present belief among certain men here 
 in America that the present war will end war upon 
 this earth ; men who thereby take their stand against 
 universal military training and service. 
 
 " The wish, in his good time, has fathered many 
 a thought. But none more understandably fatuous, 
 more sympathetically fallacious, than this! 
 
 " The fact that a few nations have grown in moral 
 idealistic stature until they have attained an ap- 
 preciation and an understanding of the values and 
 blessings of peace to a point where they have been 
 willing to lay themselves defenceless to, and helpless 
 before, war, does not mean that war has vanished, 
 or will vanish, from the world. More hkely, if we 
 continue to lie down in a supine and fatuous help- 
 lessness in the very maws of death, peace will vanish 
 from the earth ; as indeed, it has. 
 
 " The lamb of peace does not, merely by disbeliev- 
 ing in the lion of war, rid the world of him. The 
 lion eats the lamb and rids the world of peace. 
 
34 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 "A world police force may be possible. It may- 
 be effective for a time. And yet what is to prevent 
 half of the world policemen from getting together 
 and making war on the other half? 
 
 " A world tribunal we had. But what happens 
 if the criminal nation refuses to permit his case to be 
 adjudicated and elects to fight? Which is pre- 
 cisely what did happen, and is happening now. 
 
 " Man is but human. A chain is only as strong 
 as its weakest link. 
 
 " Who shall control Russia, drunk in her debauch 
 of unaccustomed democracy? Who shall control 
 Mexico ? How large a police force must we have to 
 control a criminal nation of ninety millions of peo- 
 ple, or of a hundred and eighty millions? which 
 refuses to be arrested and come along peace- 
 ably? 
 
 " When may not another ruler come, like the 
 Kaiser, to debauch a nation into a gang of mur- 
 derers? When may not another plot against the 
 peace of the world be hatched, and planned, and 
 sprung, mightier than the forces organized to sup- 
 press and control it ? 
 
 '' Who, of us of America, is wise enough to know 
 what the future has in store and when it will unstore 
 it? 
 
 " But one thing we do know. Washington said 
 
THE UNCIVIL WAR 35 
 
 to this the country that he upbuilt, ' In time of peace, 
 prepare for war.' 
 
 " Whatever others may think, I hold that Wash- 
 ington was no fool. Washington knew the world, 
 and its politics. Beyond that, he knew human 
 nature. 
 
 '* By disregarding his advice we have been caught 
 once in the humiliating position where only the 
 navy of England and the gallant armies of France 
 have stood between us and the murder of our men, 
 the rape of our women, the mutilation of our chil- 
 dren. Shall we be so fatuous, so supine, so utterly 
 without vision, as to make the same mistake again? 
 
 " We should have Universal Military Training 
 and Service, Not the training and service that of 
 necessity means war. But the training and service 
 that mean protection from war; that mean national 
 spirit; that mean health and strength and honour 
 and realization to our boys and our men, to our 
 girls and our women; the training and service that, 
 for the first time in our national life have really 
 made our melting pot actually melt ! 
 
 " This training and this service we should have. 
 We should have it now. And we should have it 
 for all time 1 " 
 
CHAPTER TWO 
 
 PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLERN 
 
CHAPTER TWO 
 
 PLAIN BILL IIOHENZOLLERN 
 
 MY friend shook his head sadly. 
 "What's the matter?" I queried. 
 
 " Did you ever stop to think," he asked, " how 
 deeply, and how thoroughly almost everything in 
 this world is concealed beneath a mass of hokum, 
 buncombe and claptrap ? " 
 
 I waited. 
 
 ** When a surgeon wants to find out what's the 
 matter with a man's body," my friend continued, 
 ''he peels off the man's clothes and goes over him 
 with a clinical thermometer and a stethoscope. But 
 when the world wants to find out what's the matter 
 with a man's soul, it is perfectly willing to examine 
 him through a criminal record, a sob squad or a 
 couple of bales of gold lace, as the case may be. It 
 escapes the eyes of the world completely that a man 
 is merely a man, born of woman, with two legs and 
 two arms and a couple of eyes and a more or less 
 rotten disposition; that it makes no difference 
 whether he was born in a mansion or a manger, 
 whether his father was a king or a carpenter, or 
 
40 THEUNCIYILWAR 
 
 whether he was born with a gold spoon in his mouth 
 or only a tongue. 
 
 " No, the poor, old besotted world goes on giving 
 each and every individual a cradle valuation that he 
 never has, never could and never will possess. 
 
 " Mike the Bite's old woman gives birth to a 
 small, red-headed, freckled hunk of humanity and 
 the limited public that is cognizant of this unimpor- 
 tant event murmurs something about the old lady 
 running true to form, and immediately loses all in- 
 terest in the affair. On the other hand, her imperial 
 highness the Grand Duchess of Worms and Taxis 
 presents to an anxiously awaiting empire a small, 
 marasmus infant about the size and consistency and 
 intelligence of a rotten apple, and the entire populace 
 sits up on its haunches and howls with glee. It 
 doesn't stop to think for a minute that the open- face 
 progeny of Mike and his better four-fifths may 
 well grow up to a rugged, honest, honourable citizen, 
 or even president of the United States, while the 
 chances are a million to one against the scion of 
 Worms and Taxis ever proving anything but im- 
 possible raw material that will defy the best efforts 
 of the most expensive collection of human agri- 
 culturalists ever gathered together under one can- 
 vas ; and that, while the aforesaid son of Mike and 
 his wife will grow to be a useful citizen, all that the 
 
PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLEEN 41 
 
 above-mentioned scion can ever possibly become will 
 be a national disgrace and an international menace. 
 
 ** So the best it gives Mike's son is a common 
 school education, if the schools aren't too crowded, 
 while the scion of Worms and Taxis gets both in 
 large quantities. Mike the Bite's son, after over- 
 coming a million handicaps and leading a useful 
 and constructive life, is liable to wind up at last in 
 a wooden kimono in Potter's Field; while the 
 Wormful and Taxicabbing scion, after having had 
 spent on him enough money to pay the national debt 
 of China, finally succumbs to wine, women and 
 song, though very little song, and at length is mowed 
 away in a mausoleum that looks like the power 
 station at Cos Cob, Connecticut. 
 
 " Thus goes the world, batting around like a blind 
 dog in a butcher's shop, treading on the plants and 
 cultivating the weeds, yanking up the June peas 
 and carefully cossetting the poison ivy. . . . What 
 would you think of a miner that sedulously saved 
 the quartz and threw the gold away? Yet that's 
 precisely what the world has been doing. It's been 
 doing it since the early Silurian Epoch. And I sup- 
 pose it'll keep on doing it until Gabriel blows his 
 horn, or the millennium comes, or some other little 
 thing like that happens to give it a jolt. . . . Bu^ 
 it makes one mighty sick, at that." 
 
42 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 My friend paused. ... I didn't interrupt. At 
 length he continued : 
 
 " As the most startling case in point, look," he 
 said, "the well known and justly unpopular Kaiser 
 William of Hohenzollern. Notwithstanding the 
 fact that we have been fighting him for ten months, 
 and all other decent people in the world for three 
 years and more, how do we still consider him ? As 
 a man? Not at all. And yet that is all he is, and 
 hardly that. 
 
 " And still even we, who are pleased to consider 
 ourselves exponents of democracy in the world, have 
 fallen for the same old bunk that monarchs since 
 the year one have used to fool and befuddle their 
 followers. 
 
 "Trace the pomp and splendour of monarchies 
 back to the beginning and you'll find that a monarch 
 is the direct descendant of an idol. 
 
 "The great curse of humanity is the lack of 
 imagination. To humanity the abstract is like the 
 cowslip — just the abstract, nothing more. Hu- 
 manity can't visualize a thing unless it sees it. 
 Humanity must also have something to worship and 
 something to fear. Humanity, like children, can't 
 be good for good's sake. It must have a reward to 
 inspire, and a punishment to dread. Hence idols; 
 idols that would give you a whole flock of wives 
 
PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLERN 43 
 
 and a good corn crop to feed 'em on, if you behaved 
 yourself; and make you certainly hard to find if you 
 didn't. 
 
 " But an idol, while highly successful as a stimu- 
 lant and a deterrent, proved somewhat unsatis- 
 factory when it came to the mundane management 
 of human affairs. So, coincidentally with his de- 
 velopment, we find arriving on earth the tribal chief. 
 The tribal chief was supposed to be the wisest (also 
 the toughest) lad in the community. He and the 
 idol were supposed to get their heads together and 
 dope, things out, and the rest was easy. Further- 
 more, they were great little pals, and what they 
 didn't whisper into each other's shell-like, or cauli- 
 flower, ears, wasn't worth bothering about. 
 
 " It was but a short step from the tribal chief to 
 the monarch, a monarch being but a tribal chief 
 whose business has grown so that he has had to put 
 in a spur track and take on a couple more book- 
 keepers in the office. 
 
 *' The early monarch was elected like a president 
 in Mexico. He killed all the other candidates and 
 then it was plain sailing. When another candidate 
 became strong enough to kill him, he resigned, and 
 said successful candidate took his place. Being 
 king in those days was a short life, but a merry one 
 while it lasted. You could help yourself to the best 
 
44 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 house in the village, and all the wives you wanted, 
 and you couldn't possibly get into any trouble (bar- 
 ring a Successful Aspirant) because you made up 
 the laws out of your own head as you went along. 
 
 ** It was about this time that there came into 
 vogue that naive sentiment that the king could do no 
 wrong. You bet your life he couldn't! He fixed 
 that all right before he started. 
 
 "As I have suggested, the monarch business in 
 those days was competitive. Divine right was 
 effective only until along came another party with 
 an even more divine left. But kings were greatly 
 honoured while they lasted. They could outdrink, 
 outrun, outflirt and outfight any of their subjects, so 
 no wonder they were looked up to. And besides it 
 wasn't a bit safe to be hypercritical about a party 
 who stood six feet six in what should have been his 
 socks and who could treat a yearling bull like a pet. 
 The surest way to commit suicide in those days was 
 to go out on the corner of Main Street and Wash- 
 ington Boulevard and make invidious remarks about 
 the current monarch. Also as he was the lad from 
 whom all worldly blessings flowed, he was not un- 
 naturally surrounded by a gang of fawning syco- 
 phants. He also commanded the best financial, 
 artistic, literary and scientific brains by merely 
 sending out a squad of gendarmes to bring 'em in. 
 
PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLERN 45 
 
 " As time sped by, the same thing happened to the 
 monarch business that afterward evolved in this 
 country in the oil, steel and butcher businesses. A 
 few unusually efficient kings hogged the whole 
 works, and formed a trust. Non-union monarchs 
 had their chance to sell out or be thrown out. Some 
 of them came into the trust and were allowed to re- 
 tain their crowns and their cufif links. Others were 
 stepped on, as they rightly deserved. And the Mon- 
 arch Business was at last put on a sound, financial 
 basis, and became as safe as a church. 
 
 " And then what happened? Like many an indi- 
 vidual, monarchs were able to stand adversity, but 
 not prosperity. As the business began to settle 
 down, the monarchs began to settle down with it; 
 and they soon became fat and effete. They put 
 open plumbing and thermostats into their palaces. 
 When they went to bed early Monday morning, full 
 of optimism and non-freezing solution, they'd leave 
 a call for Thursday afternoon. Themselves waxing 
 too fat to fight, they began to employ others to 
 do it for them; and it soon got so that the heaviest 
 thing a monarch could lift was his sceptre ; and when 
 he went out on a brewery horse for a morning's 
 canter, it was only a question as to which would first 
 crack under the strain. 
 
 " A few of the monarchs at last began to get onto 
 
46 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 the fact that this would never do. Hitherto, their 
 sole claim to their august jobs had been that they 
 could lick any other aspirant thereto. Now at last 
 finding themselves in a physical condition where 
 carrying themselves around constituted a hard day's 
 work, they decided that something must be done. 
 Since they could no longer keep up the bluff by their 
 physical prowess, it must be accomplished some 
 other way. But one bluff is as good as the next if 
 properly put across. So all they had to do was to 
 take up bluff No. 2, hitherto long neglected, but 
 lying fallow for their needs. And bluff No. 2 was 
 Flumdiddle. 
 
 " They hopped to it blithely. Discarding the 
 sheet-iron union suit that for so long had invested 
 the monarchial form with the external attributes of 
 a Green Mountain base burner, they loaded them- 
 selves all up with gold lace and jewels and titles and 
 epaulettes and crosses, single and double, to say 
 nothing of ribbons, and garters, and swords and 
 Prime Ministers' things until just to look at them 
 was like seeing the finale of a musical comedy. 
 
 ** By keeping themselves in storage warehouses 
 with gold roofs, and refusing to let people look at 
 them except through smoked glasses, and giving 
 themselves large boosts in the newspapers, they 
 finally got people to believe that they and Destiny 
 
PLAIN RILL HOHENZOLLERN 47 
 
 were bosom friends and what they didn't know 
 wasn't in the book. And the populace, always 
 willing, nay, even anxious, to fool themselves, fell 
 for this new bluff just as besottedly as they had for 
 the old, and entered right into the game without 
 even an intermission. And the monarchs, finding 
 out they could bunk 'em a whole lot easier with 
 flumdiddle even than they had with prowess, heaved 
 a satisfied sigh. . . . 
 
 "You don't believe? . . . How long, do you 
 think, would a king last whose name was George 
 B. Muggins, and who went around in a Mackinaw 
 jacket, and congress gaiters, chewing a straw ? . . . 
 The Czar was a very altitudinous little party as 
 long as he lived in a union station and had a window 
 dresser for a valet. But look what happened to 
 him when he came out into the backyard of the 
 palace garbed only in a pair of overalls and a snow 
 shovel. They couldn't bump him quick enough ! 
 
 " But the monarch business, like all other good 
 things, had to come to an end. And the end began 
 to come when, of the arrogant security that had been 
 theirs, they took it out of the competitive class and 
 made it hereditary. A well established business can 
 stand darned near anything except heredity. The 
 minute you substitute an accident of birth for a 
 competent control, that minute marks your arrival 
 
48 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 at the top of the toboggan slide. And when the 
 marasmus scion of Worms and Taxis started in to 
 take the place of old Eric the Vermillion, the stuff, 
 as the French have it, was off! A barber shop 
 couldn't have stood the strain, let alone a mon- 
 archy ! 
 
 " No, sir, when the vermin-lined cape of royalty 
 fell from the broad shoulders of the gent with the 
 reinforced concrete fists and descended automati- 
 cally upon the seventeen-inch shoulders, receding 
 chin and pear-shaped head of his first born, the end 
 w^as in sight. Left to its competitive form, the 
 monarch business might have gone on for reons. 
 But making it a family graft was too much for it. 
 And before long it began to take on that annemic 
 appearance of one of those North Carolina families 
 that won't marry a perfect stranger like a second 
 cousin. 
 
 " So it was that, in 1914 when broke the Great 
 War, the monarch business had become practically 
 a vanishing industry. France had discarded it. In 
 England it had become but a romantic form ; as in 
 Belgium, and in Italy. . . . Pressed flowers lying 
 between the pages of an old book. . . . 
 
 *' In but one country in the world did this hoary- 
 headed old monstrosity toss its mediaeval mane in 
 primeval abandon. That was in Germany. There 
 
PLAIN BILL IIOHENZOLLERN 49 
 
 flourished like the green bay tree all the old hokum, 
 all the old buncombe, all the old claptrap, all the old 
 flumdiddle. Divine Right, there was, and iron 
 crosses, and uniforms that would make a May pole 
 look like half mourning. The Kaiser and God were 
 fast friends. And above all, the hokum of phrase- 
 ology; everything to do with this archaic abortion 
 was buried beneath a panoply of words through 
 which the light never penetrated. It was his im- 
 perial majesty this, and her imperial majesty that; 
 and the imperial exchequer, and the imperial coun- 
 sellor, and the imperial Prince What Not chewing 
 on his imperial teething ring, or getting an imperial 
 ache in his imperial tummy. And the imperial 
 Kaiser goose stepped his imperial soldiers around to 
 please his imperial whim, stopping once in a while 
 to imperially give God a few imperial words of con- 
 descending compliment on His humble efforts in 
 behalf of the imperial empire. 
 
 " In good sooth had Germany become the land of 
 the few and the home of the bunk ! 
 
 " Now, peeling off the situation all the tin foil and 
 gold bands and iron crosses and whiskers and things, 
 and getting out the old stethoscope, what do we 
 find to be the real truth about Germany and the 
 Kaiser? 
 
 " Germany has a civilization something like that 
 
50 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 of the Incas, only not so good. On a tenth century 
 idea, she has built up a twentieth-century efficiency. 
 She has taken from the twentieth-century all that 
 its science could give her, and yanked it back with 
 her into its tenth-century lair, blood-stained and 
 bone filled. And from this rotten hole, she glim- 
 mers and glowers and gluts like any Stone Age 
 barbarian. 
 
 " For you've got to remember that it's only within 
 the last few hundred years that war has been re- 
 garded as a terrible thing. Before that war was the 
 normal condition of the world, and peace merely the 
 vacation that enabled one to recuperate from the 
 latest war, and get ready for the next. The view- 
 point of humanity was like that of the head-hunter 
 who considers that day as utterly wasted that finds 
 him not faring forth in quest of a human cranium 
 to put on the parlour mantel. 
 
 " Thus, Germany, of her tenth-century civiliza- 
 tion, believes and believing, practises. All her writ- 
 ings, all her teaciiings, all her efforts, have been going 
 on for the last forty years in recuperating from the 
 war she then fought, and getting ready for this that 
 she is fighting. It was only that we other nations, 
 having come to find that peace has its pleasures after 
 all, and that killing and rol)bing your fellow men, 
 women and children is a low form of amusement, 
 
PLAIN BILL HOIIENZOLLERN 51 
 
 were too generous to believe that we had within our 
 midst so benighted and anachronistic a nation. It 
 takes the murder of children peacefully at school to 
 make us credit it; and even then it is hard for us to 
 believe. Poison gases, and liquid fire, the enslave- 
 ment of the conquered, rape, murder, pillage, arson, 
 the use of human bodies for fat fertilizer and pigs' 
 feed — all these things our stunned intelligence, 
 aghast, refuses to credit, even to comprehend. But 
 it behooves us to start to commence to begin to get 
 ready to understand, and to do it now. Otherwise 
 we'll find a practical and personal conviction tliat 
 will begin when we spit up our lungs in little pieces 
 and end only when we find ourselves hanging in the 
 imperial smoke-house and waiting to be fried in neat 
 rashers with the imperial eggs for the imperial 
 breakfast. 
 
 ** And the Kaiser? Stripped of his imperial 
 hokum and his august buncombe, he is no more and 
 no less than any other roughneck who is capable of 
 collecting a gang of vicious or misguided followers 
 and terrorizing a community. Monk Eastman, or 
 Geronimo, or Captain Kidd, or Bill Hohenzollern, 
 it's all the same thing in principle ; in magnitude only 
 lies the difference. For where they counted their 
 followers by ones. Bill counts his by millions. As 
 they planned their raids on individuals, so plans he 
 
52 T 11 i: V N C 1 V I L W A K 
 
 his raid on nations. As thcv sliot or killed or en- 
 slaved their vielinis by tens, so does he shoot or kill 
 or enslave his vietinis by thousands and hundreds 
 of thousands. Init I'ill and (kM-oninio were the 
 only ones to nuirder little ehildren. 
 
 "So, in K)i4, we tind Bill with a piece of lead 
 pipe up his sleeve and a i;at in his pocket, peeking in 
 the parlour window o\ the Triple l\ntente. where 
 Mr. Alphonse France, Mr. J. 1>. luigland and little 
 Mr. Albert Relgiuni are talking^ politics, and busi- 
 ness, and how late the spring is, and my, what a lot 
 of rain we've had this year, while Mrs. bVance, and 
 Mrs. luigland and Mrs. Belgium are sitting around 
 knitting and telling one another what cute things the 
 children have been saying. 
 
 " Behind Bill, in the shadow, one can dindv see 
 the bulking form of Bull von Kluck, the well-known 
 yegg whose iinger prints are in every police station, 
 and Eat 'Km Up jack Hindenberg. the Prussian 
 stick-up man. as well as Gentleman Joe Falkenhayn, 
 the second story worker. Back of them in the 
 gloom, are the hazy figures of the rest of the gang, 
 among whom sits Ihihapjiy llapsburg. the Austrian, 
 picking at his sideburns and wondering how he hap- 
 pened to get there in the tirst place. 
 
 '* ' They ain't lookin', are they, Bill? ' gruflly nuit- 
 ters Hindenberg. 
 
I'KAIN lilJ.J. If O H J:XXOJ>f. KRX .Jo 
 
 " * Nary a peek,' says Bill. * The poor dubs is as 
 peaceful and unsuspecting as a lot of kittens under a 
 stove.' 
 
 '"Good/ says Von Kluck, rubbing his hands, 
 
 gleefully. 
 
 " ' I choose the little guy,' says Bill's son, young 
 Bill, commonly knovv^n as Rat Face, * I can lick him 
 too easy! And after we clean up this joint, let's all 
 go after that fat guy Uncle Sam, that lives in the 
 big house just across the pond. lie ain't looking, 
 neither, the poor stiff! And he's richcr'n mud! 
 Why, he'd be a pick-up ! ' 
 
 " And then at the word, they knock out the win- 
 dow and leap into the room. 
 
 " Little Mr. Belgium puts up a brave fight. But 
 he hasn't a chance. In no time they've bounced a 
 brick off his head and he's out. 
 
 " But it gives tima for Mr. France to go home and 
 get his gun, and for Mr. England to reach his house 
 and call to his sons to come to the rescue. But it's 
 only by the grace of God and little Mr. Belgium that 
 the raid is even resisted. . . . And it's nearly three 
 years before Uncle Sam gets his head out from un- 
 der the bedclothes and realizes what's going on, and 
 begins to try to remember where he put his gun the 
 last time he came in with it in 1898. 
 
 " And there you have 'em, thinking, and working, 
 
54 THEUNCIYILWAR 
 
 and acting precisely like any other gang of bur- 
 glars. 
 
 " But of course, way down deep, it's the fault of a 
 system; a system of thought, a system of govern- 
 ment, a system of civilization; or better, the lack 
 thereof. And it is of this rotten and archaic system 
 that the Kaiser is a spoiled product. 
 
 " The German Idea is a kiss on the hand of those 
 above, and a kick in the face for those beneath. 
 The Kaiser, being on top, has had all the kisses. 
 From the time he first opened his eyes, and his face, 
 on earth, he has had everything his own way. He 
 was Little Jack Horner and the world was his pie. 
 Every time he made a bum remark all Germany 
 sat up and said, ' Ain't he cute ! ' He was taught 
 that the country was his, and the people his, and the 
 soldiers his. And he could march 'em around, or 
 bust 'em in two and throw 'em in the alley as his im- 
 perial mood saw imperially fit. 
 
 *' He had two miles of uniforms and was a gen- 
 eral or an admiral or something in everything from 
 the Imperial Death's Head Hussars to the Imperial 
 Boy Scouts. And he nicknamed himself the War 
 Lord in much the same spirit, but with deeper re- 
 sults, as Booth Tarkington's Penrod might call him- 
 self Red Eye, the Trapper. In other words, he was, 
 in Germany, what is technically known as the Candy 
 
PLAIX BILL HOHEXZOLLERN 55 
 
 Kid, or the Fair Haired Child. Is it any wonder 
 that on growing up he became a murderous old 
 megalomaniac ? Up to the time the war started, his 
 record, to paraphrase Mr. Dooley, was that he had 
 been a fairly shrewd business man, a successful flirt, 
 a ten cents on the dollar failure as a husband, an 
 ardent military fan and was about to play off a tie 
 in the long-distance mileage championship with ex- 
 President Taft. 
 
 " As a further means of groping amid the 
 flumdiddle, let's suppose he had been born in Amer- 
 ica, of similar condition, station and parent- 
 age. 
 
 " His father, William Hohenzollem, St., would 
 probably have inherited a large steel business, 
 founded by his father, Old George W. Hohen- 
 zollem, on the nucleus of a lot of other concerns 
 which he iron- or double-crossed and absorbed. 
 When young Bill came along, everything was going 
 great with the family finances. 
 
 " Early in his youth, he evidenced a strong fond- 
 ness for things military; but on joining the boy 
 scouts, he got into an unfortunate altercation with a 
 hornet's nest with the result that he sort of lost his 
 enthusiasm. The fact that he was supposed to take, 
 instead of give, orders also militated against his 
 complete enjoyment. At which he decided that 
 
56 THE UNCIYIL WAR 
 
 soldiering was a frost and would have none of 
 it. 
 
 " Spoiled as a child by over-indulgent parents, 
 Bill was a sort of public pest until it came time to 
 send him to college. 
 
 " Once there, he attempted on the strength of his 
 father's money and reputation to tell all the other 
 lads where to head in at. The other lads stood it 
 just exactly one-eighth of one minute. Following 
 which, they took him by the jeans and slammed him 
 to the disappearing lake recently presented by an- 
 other well-known and with himself justly-popular 
 steel baron. On emerging from the lake, Bill was 
 made to sit in a rose bush, with a toothpick in each 
 hand, and sing Pull for the Shore, Sailors, until the 
 others got tired of listening. That night he partook 
 of his supper from the mantelpiece. 
 
 " He didn't make any of the teams in college be- 
 cause he wasn't good enough. He was once caught 
 beating a polo pony with a mallet; what happened 
 to Bill at the hands of his indignant fellow play- 
 ers made the pony's experience seem like a pleas- 
 ure. 
 
 " When he graduated from college, his father 
 took him into the office. He gave him three dollars 
 a week to start. After that, he put him on the road, 
 covering the New England States and as far west as 
 
PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLEHN 57 
 
 Buffalo. Bill wanted to marry a chorus girl; but 
 father sent him to Siberia big game shooting, where 
 he soon forgot her. Afterward he came back and 
 married the daughter of Jason B. Wiggs, the well- 
 known head of the banking firm of Wiggs, Watkins 
 & Company, with branch offices in London, Paris, 
 Berlin, Vienna, Havana and Buenos Aires. 
 
 *'0n the death of his father, he succeeded to the 
 business which, with the aid of a couple of his 
 father's old managers, Henry J. Hindenburg and K. 
 Percy Falkenhayn, he is managing to keep going, 
 although it's a moral certainty that when these two 
 beauties die off some of the old line boys will pin 
 something on Bill and it won't be a rose. 
 
 '' That is the probable story that would have been 
 Bill Hohenzollern's had he been a regular citizen of 
 a regular country. There is one other alternative. 
 Had his parents persisted in spoiling him, he would 
 probably have landed in Matteawan as a dangerous 
 paranoiac. 
 
 " As it is, he serves well to illustrate the terrible 
 results that must come from the placing in absolute 
 power of the mentally, morally and spiritually unfit. 
 Lots of things can be withstood by lots of people. 
 But not even a whole world can stand heredity. 
 
 ''Also," my friend continued, "if Bill's fellows 
 had had sense enough to make him sit in a rose bush 
 
58 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 and sing Pull for the Shore, Sailors, the German 
 liners would still be sailing regularly, and some mil- 
 lions of men and women and children that are now 
 entirely defunct would be sitting down to a happy 
 dinner and thinking that life is really a very pleasant 
 thing after all. Think it over." 
 
 I have been. ... I still am. . . . 
 
CHAPTER THREE 
 
 PLEASE FACE RIGHT 1 
 
CHAPTER THREE 
 
 PLEASE FACE RIGHT! 
 
 «« XT TELL," said my friend, "it's certainly be- 
 VV ginning to look like a terrible mess." 
 
 "The war?" I queried. 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 "What with Russia fallen flat on its whiskers; 
 with the German forces advancing benevolently to 
 protect that prostrate country against itself even if 
 it has to kill all the inhabitants to do it; with the 
 Bolsheviki holding their sessions on a flat car bound 
 east and ratifying peace treaties with Germany 
 faster than Germany can dictate 'em; with the whole 
 Eastern front disorganized and the war boiling all 
 over a surprised hinterland from Riga to Odessa and 
 from Dan to Beersheba and from soup to nuts, it 
 looks as though Old Man Mars was planning to 
 settle down among us for quite a spell. 
 
 " It's funny how all wars seem to be so gaudily 
 misjudged. At the start, everybody always says, 
 'This war? Oh, my dear sir! It can't last over 
 three months at the outside ! ' And when, at the end 
 
 61 
 
62 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 of three months, it begins to commence to only get 
 started, you hear people declare, ' Well, of course I 
 was wrong in that estimate. But it can't last a 
 year ! It simply can't ! ' And then, at the end of 
 the year, you hear 'em say, ' Yes, but you see, we 
 didn't know how badly things would break. But it 
 can't last two years, that's certain ! ' And so on. 
 The false optimism of the human race would be, to 
 borrow a word recently and unjustly made popular, 
 tragical if it weren't so pathetic; almost as tragical 
 as the false pessimism of the gentleman when, asked 
 how long he thought the war would last, observed 
 that he didn't know; but that he thought the first 
 fifteen years were going to be the hardest. 
 
 " The truth of the matter is that the war is going 
 to last until we win it. Having said that, it be- 
 comes our manifest duty to shut up and go to 
 work. 
 
 " One of the main troubles in this country is that 
 it has been, during the last twelvemonth, alternately 
 the playground of Pollyannas, and Glooms. 
 
 '* To say that everything is going along beauti- 
 fully is, manifestly, either a hallucination or a lie. 
 Nothing ever went along beautifully with any coun- 
 try in any war ever fought. To say that everything 
 is hopelessly impossible is equally a hallucination or 
 a lie. A lot of things have been badly done. A 
 
PLEASE FACE It I G H T ! 63 
 
 lot of things have been well done. We have been 
 tragically, inexcusably and almost fatally slow in 
 the matter of ships. On the other hand, in passing, 
 and putting into effect, conscription we have been 
 there with bells on! 
 
 **And speaking of conscription leads us at once 
 to one of our main and most egregious mistakes and 
 one that we are fatuously and supinely persisting in. 
 It is the question of Universal Military Training and 
 Service. 
 
 " We do not know how long the war is going to 
 last. But this we do know : that it is going to last 
 a long time and that we are going to need a lot of 
 soldiers. And we're going to need them for a long 
 time after this war is over. 
 
 '* Nobody argues, of course, against conscription. 
 For getting a lot of soldiers in a hurry, conscription 
 is the only effective thing. 
 
 " But there is a policy of army-making and na- 
 tion-building better and broader and finer, and 
 deeper than conscription. And it is Universal Mili- 
 tary Service. Conscription puts leaves on the na- 
 tional tree. But Universal Military Training 
 waters the roots. 
 
 " With conscription you dip your bucket into the 
 national stream and hurriedly train a certain number 
 of youths to be soldiers. 
 
64 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 " With Universal Military Training you tap the 
 fountain head and let loose a constantly increasing 
 stream of soldiery that are carefully and completely 
 trained. 
 
 ''Which may be mixing metaphors; but is the 
 simple truth. 
 
 " It is precisely as though, having no education in 
 the country, you had to have a lot of educated men 
 in a hurry. The first step, naturally, would be to 
 grab all the eligible youths you could and educate 
 'em as fast as you could. But the second and more 
 important step would be to establish a system of 
 schools that would take 'em when they were young 
 and educate them slowly and thoroughly to the point 
 desired. A man, by cramming, may be able to do a 
 lot of work quickly. But he can do it better if he 
 has more time, more care, and if he begins at a period 
 in life when his mind and body are more malleable 
 and additionally receptive. 
 
 ** At present we have to fight this war only a lot 
 of students whose education has been crammed into 
 them in a few short months. 
 
 " How much eflfective, if we could bring to the 
 aid of these, additional thousands of youth who had 
 been carefully, thoroughly and systematically trained 
 to do the work that they must do ! 
 
 " Consider it all carefully. 
 
P I. E A S E F ACE RIG II T ! 05 
 
 " This nation is at war for an indeterminate in- 
 terval. Much as we hate to admit and believe this, 
 it is true. There is no end to this war in sight. 
 Germany, at present, has all the best of it. She is 
 fighting everywhere on enemy terrain. She has, by 
 trickery and propaganda, two weapons that ourselves 
 and the Allies hardly knew existed, defeated Russia 
 and pushed back the formerly victorious armies of 
 Italy. She has opened up the storehouses of the 
 East; her armies are unbroken and undefeated. 
 She will be licked, of course. But she will take a 
 lot of licking before that happens. 
 
 " This means that we have got to get into this war 
 as soon as we know how, and as hard as we know 
 how, and for how long we don't know. But it will 
 be a matter not of months, but of years. And 
 maybe longer than that. 
 
 " To endure this bitter and indeterminate struggle 
 the first thing we must have is soldiers. Naturally 
 we want the best soldiers that we can have, and as 
 many of them as we can have. 
 
 " And here is where enters the argument between 
 conscription and Universal Military Training and 
 Service. 
 
 " Which gives the best soldiers ? 
 
 " Universal Military Training. It gives you the 
 best soldiers first because it gives you younger sol- 
 
66 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 diers. Boys in the early twenties make the best 
 soldiers. They are physically, mentally and spirit- 
 ually more fit. 
 
 '' It gives you the best soldiers because it gives 
 you soldiers that are carefully trained over a period 
 of months. 
 
 " It gives you the best soldiers because it gives you 
 soldiers that have been educated in national spirit 
 and national traditions, in uniformity of purpose and 
 understanding of ideals. It gives you soldiers in 
 whom have been carefully imbedded the spirit and 
 aims of national service and obligation. 
 
 " Beyond that it gives you these soldiers at the 
 smallest economic loss. Conscription, taking older 
 men, men trained in other lines of business, disjoints 
 industry and disorganizes business. It disrupts 
 families. It causes endless complications in the 
 body politic. A man with a wife and three chil- 
 dren must be recompensed in one way ; a man with a 
 dependent mother and a sick sister must be recom- 
 pensed in another; the ramifications are infinite. 
 But with Universal Service all that is eliminated at 
 the start. A boy of nineteen or twenty is economi- 
 cally inconsiderable. He is not married. As a rule 
 he has no dependents. As a rule he has no job 
 that he is vitally essential to. He likes army life 
 better, and takes to it more quickly. He learns 
 
PLEASE FACE right! 67 
 
 faster. He is better fitted to endure hardship. 
 He recuperates more quickly. He can stand 
 more. 
 
 " Beyond this, as I have said, it gives us an ever- 
 growing strength of 500,000 carefully trained, care- 
 fully prepared soldiers every year. In five years, 
 2,500,000; in ten years, 5,000,000. . . . In fifteen 
 years, 7,500,000 men. . . . Think you that any 
 nation on God's green footstool would then attack 
 these United States of America? . . . Strength 
 is the safety that God has given man to protect him- 
 self, whether against the disease that is of war, or 
 the disease that is of germs. As a strong body 
 throws ofT the germs of disease, so a strong nation 
 throws ofif the germs of war. . . . Had England 
 and France been strong and ready, there would have 
 been no war with Germany. Germany thought 
 them weak; so she attacked. . . . And so they 
 were. But lay within them latent strength that 
 Germany did not see. Hence they battle with the 
 horrid disease that has seized them. . . . 
 
 " And it gives you a double benefit. It not only 
 protects the country, but it improves the boys them- 
 selves. 
 
 " I saw the boys of the first draft of the National 
 Army going away to camp, pimply-faced, stoop- 
 shouldered, sallow-skinned. I saw them march, 
 
68 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 only a few months after. You wouldn't have 
 known them for the same crowd ! They stood erect. 
 They stepped firmly. Their heads were back, their 
 chins were in. They belonged to something, and 
 something belonged to them; something that when 
 they w^ent away, they didn't even know existed. 
 When they went away they were just boys. 
 But when they came back they were Ameri- 
 cans ! 
 
 " They have told me about it, at the camps ; of 
 man after man that had lived in holes and hovels, 
 and that had never even had a good bath in their 
 lives, never known good food, pure air, sunlight, 
 exercise. 
 
 " And that is what Universal Military Training 
 and Service will do for all our boys. As it makes 
 for patriotism, it makes for cleanliness. As it 
 makes for spirituality, it makes for health. As it 
 makes for education, it makes for happiness. 
 Boys of nineteen, malleable for good or for evil, are 
 taught the benefits of systematic living; of exercise; 
 of the care of their bodies ; of the * early to bed and 
 early to rise ' precepts of Franklin. They are 
 taught cohesion; communism; the value of con- 
 certed efforts. They are taught that they have 
 duties to perform as well as privileges to enjoy; 
 and that no man has a right to the enjoyment of his 
 
pleasefaceright! 69 
 
 privileges until he has made them safe by perform- 
 ing his duties. . . . And they see the flag floating 
 above them; a flag of red, of v^hite, and of blue. 
 . . . They are taught that that flag means some- 
 thing. . . . They learn that it doesn't fly there 
 by accident, or merely because some old party gets 
 up early and hauls on a rope. . . . 
 
 " We have in this country a tremendous amount 
 of undigested immigration; of men who came to 
 this country merely to enjoy the opportunity that 
 it offered them to make money. No sense have they 
 of their duties. Their idea is merely to get as rich 
 as possible as fast as possible by taking advantage 
 of conditions made possible for them by the loyalty 
 and faith and devotion and glorious honour of the 
 Boys of '76, and of '61, of whom these new comers 
 never even heard. ... To take these immigrants ; 
 to take their growing sons; to put them in line be- 
 side our sons, your sons and mine; to make them 
 feel that they belonged to something ; that the coun- 
 try was their country, to love, to live for, to fight 
 for, to die for; that the flag of red, of white, of 
 blue, was their flag, too ! . . . If this were all that 
 Universal Military Training and Service could ac- 
 complish then ought we to get down on our knees 
 and pray to God. 
 
 "All these things argue for Universal Military 
 
70 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 Training and Service. And what arguments have 
 there been adduced against it ? 
 
 " Since we entered the war, I have heard but 
 one : that it is to be hoped that after this war there 
 won't be any more wars and that therefore we won't 
 need it! 
 
 " There's a convincing one for you ! Aside from 
 the fact that it talks about what is going to happen 
 after this war when as far as we are concerned 
 this war hasn't started yet, and aside from the fact 
 that nobody can possibly know what's going to hap- 
 pen after this war; and aside from the fact that 
 wars have been going on on this earth for five 
 thousand years without a break, it is great reason- 
 ing. 
 
 " It wants to base our national policy on a hope. 
 
 " It forgets that from 19 14 until 19 17 we based 
 our national policy on a hope. We hoped we 
 wouldn't get into this war. But we did. We got 
 in entirely unready and entirely unprepared; so 
 unready and so unprepared that after being in it a 
 year, we are still practically powerless. Only the 
 armies of France and the navy of England have 
 saved us from the horrors of Belgium. And that's 
 what basing a national policy on a hope does for a 
 country ! 
 
 '' No, sir. If we're going to take our part in put- 
 
PLEASE FACE RIGHt! 71 
 
 ting down this foray on civilization of the new Attila 
 and his modern Huns, we've got to organize as a na- 
 tion, equip as a nation, and act as a nation. 
 
 "And the first step toward being a nation, in 
 thought as in act, in deed as in spirit, is Universal 
 Military Training and Service." 
 
CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 THE ALCOHOLOCAUST 
 
CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 THE ALCOHOLOCAUST 
 
 MY friend laid down his magazine, thought- 
 fully. 
 ''What is it?" I queried. 
 
 "A booze article," he returned. 
 
 He sat for a moment, in silence. I did not in- 
 terrupt. 
 
 "I wish," he said, at length, ''that sometime an 
 article about alcohol, instead of being written by a 
 pro person, or a con person, could be turned out by 
 a thoroughly impartial neutral. It would be a lot 
 more convincing. 
 
 " As it is," he continued, " they're written com- 
 monly either by a press agent for a distillery, or by 
 some gentleman who has gone to the mat with the 
 Demon and been thrown for the count, and then 
 some. Whereat they're either replete of fulsome 
 flattery, telling you that alcohol is a blessing to 
 humanity, a food, an exercise, a cure for anything 
 from ingrowing hair to fallen arches, and a gentle- 
 manly form of indoor sport; or else it's an unmiti- 
 gated, unadulterated, dyed-in-the-wool curse and 
 
 75 
 
76 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 not even fit to burn in a chafing dish. They seem 
 too enthusiastic to remember that there are several 
 kinds of alcohol, and several kinds of uses, and 
 abuses, for the same. To their minds, alcohol is 
 alcohol ; and that's all there is to it. 
 
 " I hold no brief, mind you, for alcohol. Booze, 
 as booze, is a delusion and a snare. There's no 
 argument in the world about that. It's the concen- 
 trated quintessence of poison; and does just as little 
 good in the world as infantile paralysis, or hook 
 worms, and infinitely more harm. Only booze 
 doesn't cover the whole alcoholic question any more 
 than hydrophobia covers the question of dogs. 
 There are a lot of other angles; which so far, I have 
 never seen touched. And they should be. That's 
 all." 
 
 " How do you regard it ? " I queried. 
 
 " In considering a question like alcohol," he re- 
 turned, " it's a great idea to get back to first prin- 
 ciples. And to do this, we must first, of necessity, 
 divide alcohol — that is, drinkable alcohol — into two 
 classes: the first class comprizing those forms of 
 alcoholic liquor whereof the percentage of alcohol is 
 so low as to be almost negligible, such as fight wines 
 and beer; and the second class taking in the high 
 percentage drinks, like rum, gin, whiskey, brandy, 
 and the jumbled admixtures thereof, such as cock- 
 
THEALCOHOLOCAUST 77 
 
 tails, sours, fizzes, rickeys, pousse cafes, and so 
 forth. 
 
 "In the course of a long and multifarious ac- 
 quaintance with alcohol in all its forms, I cannot re- 
 call where I have seen any great harm done by beer 
 and light wines. To be sure, an overplus of the 
 former will often make a man bloated as to appear- 
 ance and cause his kidneys to drop their moorings 
 and gaily sail away, while continual internal bathings 
 in the latter might cause an insurance examiner, 
 carefully inspecting the applicant's moods and tenses, 
 to wag his head and exclaim, sadly, * Alas, poor 
 Uric ! ' — which is no more than could be accom- 
 plished by a steady diet of chocolate caramels, or nut 
 sundaes. And I have been in places where the water 
 was so much worse (and incidentally so much more 
 expensive) than the wine, that only a fanatic, or a 
 Rockefeller, would hesitate in choosing between 
 them. All of which brings us around gracefully to 
 the conclusion that beer and light wines are a nega- 
 tive form of vice, like blood-rare roastbeef, choco- 
 late eclairs and red pepper, any of which, if indulged 
 in to excess, will do strange things to your works 
 and make you wish you hadn't. 
 
 " And in corroboration of this, I have one friend 
 who has totally ruined his digestion and his nervous 
 system by becoming an ice-cream soda dipsomaniac. 
 
78 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 and another who has cremated the Hning of his stom- 
 ach by putting paprika on almost everything he eats. 
 '* On the other hand, if you should ask me what 
 good is accomplished by beer and light wines, I 
 should answer you just as cheerfully, ' Not any.' 
 They are like tea and coffee. Anybody and every- 
 body would be better off without them. The system 
 doesn't need them, and shouldn't have them. And 
 they can be defended only on the grounds on which 
 we can defend tea and coffee : that they don't do any 
 great amount of harm; that people are used to hav- 
 ing them; and that to invade the personal liberties 
 of private individuals in virtually innocuous matters 
 causes widespread discontent and confusion and ac- 
 complishes more harm than it does good. If five 
 thousand men are used to having a can of beer a day, 
 to take away that can of beer upsets five thousand 
 minds a lot and benefits five thousand stomachs but 
 a little. Life, after all, is not a question of abso- 
 lute perfection on the one hand, and absolute imper- 
 fection on the other. Life is not a question of 
 perfection at all. It's a question of approximation 
 — of batting averages. And a public move that 
 reaps a ten percent benefit, and accomplishes a 
 twenty percent injury is not a reform at all, but a 
 retrogression. 
 
 " But I want to add this, and add it in a hurry. 
 
THE ALCO HOLOCAUST 70 
 
 All men, women and children in the world should 
 be weaned away from beer and light wines as 
 quickly and as thoroughly as possible. But they 
 should be weaned, and not ravished. Make beer 
 and light wines more expensive and harder to get. 
 And offer no substitutes. To cure a man of one 
 vice by offering him another, is as foolish as it is 
 destructive. When you are doing wrong, there is 
 only one course to pursue. Stop doing wrong, and 
 begin to do right. A procedure of palliation does 
 not correct; it only confuses. 
 
 *' It is on the question of beer and light wines that 
 so many well-meaning but unbalanced people have 
 gone wrong to the general injury of a worthy and a 
 vital cause. My earliest recollections are of a lot of 
 long-haired men and short-haired women raving 
 their heads off, as to how the pouring into his anat- 
 omy of one glass of the red ink that is served with 
 an Italian table d'hote would damn a man's soul to 
 everlasting hellfire and perdition. These were the 
 same people who considered a friendly game of 
 progressive euchre a sufficient cause for excom- 
 munication from the church; and who deemed that 
 if, on Sunday, a person didn't go to church at least 
 three times, read any book but the Bible, took a stroll 
 to any place except the cemetery, and let his face 
 assume any other position except that of an inverted 
 
80 T II E U N C I V I L ^V A K 
 
 Y, that person was doing a nose-dive straight for 
 the nethermost depths of hell, and great would be 
 the joy of the there assembled Satanic stokers at his 
 arrival. 
 
 " And there's another funny thing. The picture 
 of a house-warming in hell always struck me as 
 singularly unconvincing from any Christian view- 
 point. 
 
 '' These well-meaning but misguided souls were, 
 and always have been, to the cause of Temperance 
 precisely what the White House pickets are to the 
 cause of suffrage — the lunatic fringe that brings 
 into disrepute the clean, fine cloth that it edges. 
 And they do a tremendous harm ; for after one peek 
 at them, a person is ready to line up with the other 
 side no matter what it is. 
 
 " A man might have no idea in the world of 
 taking a drink. But on getting one flash at a col- 
 lection of the strange human fungi above-alluded to, 
 he would be very liable to say to himself, ' If that 
 outfit means Prohibition, me for rum ! ' Just as, 
 after standing around watching a lady with a dis- 
 couraged pompadour and a vintage skirt trying to 
 pour glue into a mail box, any ordinary citizen 
 who likes to be able to distinguish his monthly bills 
 from a collection of second-hand fly-paper would be 
 more than liable to say to himself, * If that's suf- 
 
THE AI.COHOLOCAUST 81 
 
 f rage, count me among the antis ! ' It isn't that suf- 
 frage is wrong. It's that a few pin-headed ex- 
 ponents thereof are doing their best to make it ap- 
 pear so. And I venture to say that not a few 
 perfectly innocent gentlemen have been driven into 
 saloons to get away from the gas attacks of the very 
 ones who were trying to keep them out. 
 
 "The trouble is that from time beyond record, 
 the Prohibitionists have overshot the mark. Good- 
 ness knows, there are enough damning truths 
 against alcohol that one can tell without resorting to 
 lies. Alcohol is guilty of plenty of crimes without 
 racking one's imagination to find new ones to blame 
 it for. But no! That didn't satisfy them. And 
 they used to tell stories about Champagne Charlie 
 who drank a glass of claret lemonade at a whist 
 party, and came staggering home a confirmed drunk- 
 ard and hext morning robbed a bank and mur- 
 dered the watchman and died on the gallows 
 murmuring, ' Let all young men take a lesson from 
 me, and never look upon the wine when it is red 
 for it stingeth like a serpent and biteth like an adder.' 
 They also used to send out lecturers, with coloured 
 charts, showing the terrible effects of alcohol on the 
 human stomach (which they invariably pronounced 
 *stummick'). Most of these charts were very 
 pretty in colour, though crude as to composition. 
 
82 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 And the lecturers carried with them Horrible Ex- 
 amples in the shape of human derelicts; and it took 
 all the profits to buy enough gin to keep the example 
 sufficiently horrible. Oftentimes the lecturer was 
 even more horrible than the example. Which com- 
 plicated matters to the lecturee. 
 
 " Now if these people had spent their time, their 
 money and their effort in slamming at the real issue, 
 which is the high percentage drinks, like gin, 
 whiskey, brandy, rum and the so-called mixed 
 drinks — all those manifold straight and concocted 
 beverages that come under the generic head of 
 booze — , an infinite amount of confusion might have 
 been saved and an infinite amount of good accom- 
 plished. For in these high percentage drinks, you 
 face an entirely different proposition. And again, 
 in order to get a good viewpoint from which to look 
 them over, you must again go back to first principles 
 and ask yourself two questions: 
 
 " What is booze ? 
 
 '* Why do people drink it ? 
 
 " The answers are easy. 
 
 " Booze is nothing more, and nothing less than a 
 form of drug. 
 
 " People drink booze because they want to be 
 drugged. 
 
 " For booze there is no mor^ extenuation, or ex- 
 
THEALCOHOLOCAUST 83 
 
 cuse, or reason, or apology than there is for cocaine, 
 or morphine, or opium, or any other form of drug. 
 It is a vice, pure and simple ; that it is a modified vice 
 makes it but the more insidious; that it is an open 
 vice makes it but more dangerous. And that, in 
 many instances, it leads to the deeper and rottener 
 forms of vice, is indisputable. 
 
 " Only this, in justice and in encouragement, must 
 be said : that it is easier to break with booze than 
 with the stronger drugs. 
 
 " As for the people that drink it : there are as 
 many forms of drinkers as there are of drinks, and 
 more. 
 
 "First, there is the common, or garden drinker, 
 who drinks just because he likes to get drunk. He 
 is commonly sodden, sordid and uninteresting, and 
 never gets sober if he can help it. 
 
 " Second, there is the sociable drinker. He brags 
 that he never thinks about taking a drink when he's 
 by himself. But he loves to lean his wish-bone up 
 against a rail and bask in the false sunlight of alco- 
 holic camaraderie ; a camaraderie that is as false as 
 the drug that engenders it. Properly pickled, he 
 loves everybody and everybody loves him and every- 
 thing ish wunnerful until the morning after. Then 
 it isn't. 
 
 " Third, the lone drinker. He drinks because the 
 
84 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 load of life and life's responsibilities is too heavy for 
 him to bear without alcoholic aid. He is obsessed 
 of work, or of care. He drinks because he feels 
 bad. And he feels bad because he drinks. 
 Whereat he is what is technically known as whip- 
 sawed. He's done before he begins and he hasn't 
 got a chance in the world to win. 
 
 " Fourth, the playful drinker. He drinks be- 
 cause he finds that it makes him the life of the party. 
 Ordinarily, dull and retrusive, he finds that three 
 or four hookers will enable his conversation to 
 scintillate and his repartee to scorch. He is spurred 
 on by the admiring laughter of the gathering, and if 
 he doesn't overdo it, he gleams beautifully as long as 
 his light stays lit. But when his wick burns out, 
 he's all done, and graduates into either class i or 
 class 2. 
 
 "Fifth, the youthful drinker. He drinks because 
 he thinks it's smart. He breaks his mother's heart, 
 and makes his father say bitter things beneath his 
 breath. . . . He is easily led into folly, crime, 
 ruin or disease or all the rotten quartette. . . . 
 If he escapes, it is only because God is very good to 
 him indeed. . . . 
 
 " Sixth, the imaginative drinker. He drinks to 
 get more out of life than there is in it. He could 
 save time by taking hashish. 
 
THEALCOHOLOCAUST 85 
 
 "Seventh, the sensuous drinker. He loves to 
 play with his stomach, with his brain, with his eyes, 
 with his ears. He finds that cocktails and highballs 
 give added zest to his appetite; that cordials warm 
 his stomach. He finds that a few drinks make en- 
 tertaining ordinarily stupid ; that colours take added 
 glow, music an added melody, when assimilated 
 through a gas mask of alcohol. He is never 
 normal, never himself. Life he views through a 
 purple haze. The good resolutions that he makes at 
 night, die still born in the cold grey gloom of the 
 morning after. He comes in at three p. m., mur- 
 murs a subdued ' good morning,' and leaves it to 
 the bartender to do the best he can. 
 
 "Eighth, the idle rich drinker. He has been 
 everywhere, done everything, seen everything. He 
 drinks because alcohol gives him a new sensation. 
 At the finish it usually enables him to see something 
 new. He sees it alone. And it isn't in any zoo- 
 logical work ever compiled. 
 
 " Female drinkers can be herded with the males 
 into most of these categories. But, as women can 
 rise to greater heights in life than men, so can 
 they sink to greater depths. ... A drunken 
 man is sodden. A drunken woman is sicken- 
 ing. 
 
 " As for the so-called Moderate Drinker, there is 
 
86 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 no question in my mind that he does exist ; in negli- 
 gible quantities, it is true; for he is the alcoholic 
 rara avis. But he is there, nevertheless. I myself 
 have known several of him. But the trouble with 
 him is that he writes no articles for magazines. 
 Said articles for the main part are contributed by 
 human submarines who have been so busy plumbing 
 the poisoned depths that they haven't had time to 
 notice the few and insignificant skip- jacks on the 
 surface. 
 
 **This, mind you, is no defence even for the 
 moderate drinker, who deserves no credit for his 
 moderation. He is blessed usually with a congenital 
 indifiference to alcohol ; he drinks only because some- 
 body asks him to, and it's too much trouble to say 
 no. Whereat he pollutes his insides slightly with 
 a small amount of liquid poison that he would be 
 much better without, and achieves neither joy nor 
 sorrow thereat. Occasionally, you find a moderate 
 drinker of another description : the person of pro- 
 found and ironbound habit, who lives by rote. 
 Two of these I have known : and I knew them best 
 when they were eighty or past. It was their never- 
 failing custom, at the fall of day, to partake of a 
 glass — one glass, no more, — of hot water, lemon 
 juice, sugar, with a modicum of rye whiskey. 
 One glass, no more, they took ; and they spoiled the 
 
THE ALCO HOLOCAUST 87 
 
 better part of an hour in so doing. I never could 
 conceive that it did anything to shorten their 
 days, or drive them into a drunkard's grave. 
 On the other hand, I used to wonder if they 
 wouldn't enjoy it just as much if they had used 
 Jamaica ginger, or something, in place of the 
 whiskey. 
 
 " I can conceive, too (although I have seen it 
 vehemently denied) that alcohol possesses its 
 medicinal values. A life saving crew, shivering and 
 shaking in the clammy cold of a winter's night — a 
 raiding party in the mud and muck and slush of the 
 January trenches — can be warmed up and reinvigo- 
 rated by a proper dose of alcohol medicinally ap- 
 plied. Of course piping hot tea, scalding footbaths, 
 plenty of warm blankets and hot-water bottles might 
 do the same thing. But until life boats and trench 
 parties can be equipped with tea cosies, footbaths, 
 blankets and hot-water bottles, it would seem to me 
 that the simpler and equally efficacious remedy 
 should be adhered to. But it should be remembered 
 that here alcohol is used as a medicine. To sell 
 alcohol over a bar as a beverage is just as sensible as 
 to open a small stand for the vending of strychnine 
 pills as a candy. 
 
 "To me booze, as a beverage and as an amuse- 
 ment stands naked, shameless and without excuse. 
 
88 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 I have heard many pleas for booze so handled, many 
 excuses, many arguments. But never yet have I 
 heard a good one. 
 
 ** I have heard many arguments in favour of 
 saloons ; but never yet a good one. Liquor dealers, 
 most of whom by the way, are teetotalers, are fond 
 of upholding the saloon as the poor man's club. If 
 the poor man must have a club in which he can 
 drink up all the money that ought go to feeding and 
 clothing his wife and children, or spend in buying 
 new limousines for the saloon keeper the money 
 with which he should be purchasing a Liberty Bond 
 or which he should be putting aside for a spell 
 of inclement weather, he's better ofif without any 
 club. 
 
 ** If a man can't have a club from which he can 
 walk home like a gentleman at a decent hour, instead 
 of staggering in at 2 g. m. with an Alice blue liver, 
 he'd better give up the nonchalant life of the man- 
 about-town and settle down to something that 
 doesn't include vertigo, physical prostration and 
 wife-beating. Which is what the saloon does, and 
 you can't get away from it. 
 
 '* For the saloon, there is absolutely no excuse, 
 argument or palliation. Honest saloon keepers 
 themselves will tell you so. It is legalized vice and 
 open temptation. It ruins and wrecks more men 
 
THE ALCOIIOLOCAUST 89 
 
 than any other influence in the known world. It is 
 absolutely and utterly rotten. Every saloon in the 
 world should be closed to-day, and never again 
 opened. If no more than 200,000 men spend an 
 average of half an hour a day in saloons, there alone 
 are roo,ooo hours a day wasted to the individual and 
 to the world — 100,000 hours which means about 
 4,000 days, or between 10 and ri years that could 
 be devoted to something decent, useful, helpful, 
 healthful. Consider that economic waste alone. 
 And then add to that the active harm to livers and 
 stomachs and morals that goes with it. No, sir, any 
 man that can discover any excuse whatever for a 
 saloon would make Christopher Columbus look like 
 a hermit ! 
 
 '*I have seen a thousand rotten things done by 
 booze — and not one good one. 
 
 *' I could talk for hours of the crimes of booze 
 that I have seen, and known. Good men turned 
 into living corpses ; happy marriages wrecked ; busi- 
 ness failures made; dollars and lives and love and 
 self respect and manhood and womanhood and vir- 
 tue and honour and character all washed away in 
 this rotten, putrid stream that man has made to 
 poison his own kind. 
 
 " One friend I had, and one I loved. He drank 
 at first because he found that, when drinking, he 
 
90 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 always had a good time. Later he found that 
 drinking sustained him for his work and his fun. 
 It coloured his pleasure, and concealed his 
 cares. ... At thirty-five Booze got him. . . . 
 And now he is a distorted, human grotesque — a liv- 
 ing dead man. 
 
 "Another friend I have. At one time he was 
 rich, loved, useful. He worked too hard. He 
 could not sleep. He found that Booze quieted him ; 
 that drinking, he could attain a condition that, while 
 not sleep, was at least surcease. ... It marked 
 the beginning of the end. . . . His money, his 
 friends, all have gone. . . . Not even health has 
 he left. . . . 
 
 " I have two other friends. At night their good 
 resolutions are wonderful. But when morning 
 comes they are heavy, dull, despondent. They wait 
 for noon, and strength. So do they never see the 
 mornings of their lives. Without drink they would 
 be men. . . . But the drink is there. . . . And 
 the years are fast passing. 
 
 "I can see no argument in favour of booze. I 
 can see it only as a crime against humanity. . . . 
 And a crime that should be stopped completely. It 
 should be stopped now, and for all time. There 
 should be no more treating with John Barleycorn 
 than with the German Kaiser. He is faithless, 
 
THEALCOHOLOCAU8T 91 
 
 treacherous, lying, cruel, and absolutely untrust- 
 worthy in all his dealings, 
 
 " But the main thing of all that I want to pin on 
 old John Barleycorn is the fact that while he is a 
 tough guy at heart, and the King of Confidence 
 Men, in the early stages of one's acquaintance, he 
 looks like a gentleman. He wears a dress suit, and 
 a diamond pin, and has money in all his pockets; 
 and he's full of good stories, and bonhomie and 
 camaraderie and esprit and savoir faire and as he 
 slaps you on the back with one hand, and pours a 
 drink down your neck with the other, you think to 
 yourself, ' My goodness, here's the nicest fellow I've 
 met yet ! ' 
 
 " And you and John (you're probably calling him 
 Jack by this time) go trailing around together, and 
 having the time of your lives. . . . And every 
 one of his stories is better than the last! . . . And 
 the drinks he hands you don't taste very good, but 
 they make you feel great ! . . . And he knows so 
 many good fellows ! Every place you go — clubs, 
 saloons, restaurants — and as I've murmured before, 
 you love everybody, and everybody loves you, and 
 ain't life wunnerful and my! what a beautiful shun- 
 shet! What two beautiful shunshets! 
 
 *' Yes, he's a wonderful companion, and stays that 
 way until there comes a day when he wants you to 
 
92 TIIEUNCIVILWAR 
 
 do something that you feel you shouldn't. . . . 
 Then he begins to get nasty. . . . 
 
 '' This is the crucial time. Unless you've courage 
 and strength to leave him flat and go your own way, 
 leaving him to go his, things begin to happen. . . . 
 And much to your surprise, you find that where 
 formerly it was friend and friend, now it has be- 
 come master and man. . . . He is your owner, 
 you his slave. . . . He has sapped your 
 will. . . . You have to go to him to decide things 
 for you; to help you through the day. . . . And 
 invariably he decides for evil. . . . His counsel is 
 always toward harm. 
 
 ** And then you learn him for what he is — a 
 cankered soul, rotten to the core, lying, deceitful, 
 treacherous, evil-minded, vile. . . . He is without 
 respect for women; without ethics toward man; 
 specious, sophistric, sullen. . . . More than likely, 
 by this time, he's got you right where he wants 
 you. And if, by this time, you aren't diseased of 
 body and of mind, it isn't his fault, but God's 
 mercy. . . . 
 
 " And the toughest part of it all is, that when 
 you, who have known him, and joined in his parties, 
 try to tell his new victims what he really is, they 
 distrust you, they disbelieve you. They think 
 you're an old crab; and a sorehead who, because he 
 
THE ALCO HOLOCAUST 93 
 
 can't stand the pace any longer, is trying to put the 
 kibosh on the whole show. 
 
 " You come into a club and see John, sitting in a 
 corner scintillating before a lot of his new friends. 
 They're having a great time and thinking my ! ain't 
 he the cutest lad you ever met? 
 
 " ' Sit down,' invites the Latest Victim, * and meet 
 my old friend, Mr. Barleycorn.' 
 
 *' ' No, thanks,' you say, * I know him already.' 
 
 "'You do!' exclaims another of the group, in 
 surprise. ' Why I didn't know that ! ' 
 
 " * Yes,' you return, ' he did me out of a good 
 business, a wife and three children, and most of my 
 digestion. I don't believe I care to associate with 
 him any more.' 
 
 " * What ! ' exclaims the Latest Victim, incredu- 
 lously. * You don't mean to accuse my good friend 
 Barleycorn of doing all that!' 
 
 " * I do,' you return, * absolutely.' 
 
 " The Latest Victim sniffs scornfully. 
 
 '* ' Then it must have been your own fault,' re- 
 turns the Latest Victim. ' I've known him a couple 
 of weeks, and he's the greatest little playmate I've 
 hit since I left the Old Farm.' 
 
 " * Oh, let that poor grouch go home,* says an- 
 other Victim, eyeing you with alcoholic disfavour. 
 ' He'sh got to put out the cat and wind the clock 
 
94 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 and he'sh late already.' And he picks up a glass and 
 begins to sing something about it always being fair 
 weather when goo' fellersh getsh toghezzer. 
 While you sigh, and murmur to yourself, * What's 
 the use ? ' and go your weary way. 
 
 " I suppose the trouble is that to Youth, Age will 
 always be dull, stupid and old fogyish. The fact 
 that Age was Youth once himself and, as Youth was 
 just as willing to and just as capable of, making an 
 1 8 karat darned fool of himself as Youth now is, 
 seems to escape Youth completely, as does also the 
 fact, that in a few fleeting years. Youth himself will 
 be Age, in turn. 
 
 " But all my life I've wanted to tell Youth a 
 few things. I don't expect many of them to listen, 
 or to believe. But if even one does, then will 
 the time and efifort be well spent, and I shall be 
 glad. . . . 
 
 " I've wanted to tell girls, * Don't drink.' Clean 
 men don't like it. It makes dirty men think dirty 
 things of you. It coarsens your looks. It makes 
 wrinkles in your face. It makes your figures fat 
 and gross. It cheapens you in every way, physi- 
 cally, mentally, morally. And it's dangerous. It's 
 a delicate thing to gauge. Some night you may get 
 a little too much. And then, if you happen to fall 
 into the hands of a rotten man, — a crystal vase 
 
THEALCOHOLOCAUST 95 
 
 can be so broken in a minute, that not all the aeons 
 can serve to mend it. . . . 
 
 " I've wanted to tell boys, not to drink. It isn't 
 that I'm an old prude. I know what I'm talking 
 about. Booze stimulates the body for evil; and 
 with body stimulated, the will weakens, the mind 
 grows flaccid. It leads to nasty thoughts. And in 
 nastiness of thought, lies nastiness of action. And 
 in nastiness of action lie sickness, and the horrid, 
 rotting diseases of flesh and brain that make a man 
 wish to God he had died instead! And before you 
 lie only years of shame, and torture and horror — 
 the contempt of all decent people- — and when you 
 want to grow up to be a clean man, and maybe have 
 boys of your own, you cannot, because those boys 
 will be as rotten, as diseased, as you are. . . . 
 College coaches teach you to cut out alcohol, to live 
 cleanly, and regularly. Why? It isn't to please 
 them, is it? It's because you can do better work; 
 it's because it makes you stronger, healthier, more 
 vigourous. 
 
 ** For, after all, your body is merely the machine 
 in which you, as an individual, ride around. You 
 wouldn't think of throwing sand in the gears of 
 your automobile, would you? Then why throw 
 alcohol into the gears of your body ? Don't you care 
 as much for your body as you do for your auto- 
 
96 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 mobile? Then why take such good care of your 
 automobile, and such poor care of your body? But 
 bodies don't cost anything, you say? True. But 
 you can buy a new automobile when the old one 
 wears out. But you can never get but one 
 body. . . . Take care of it when it's young. Or 
 you'll be mighty sorry, when it begins to get old. 
 
 " And I've wanted to tell parents : * Don't bring 
 up your children in ignorance.' If you don't think 
 they've got sense enough ever to understand any- 
 thing, then hire a keeper for them. But if you do 
 turn them loose on life, at least point out the pit- 
 falls. Would you send a child out to play in a 
 meadow full of hidden wells? Then why send a 
 child out to play in the fields of life that are full 
 of poisoned traps a thousand times worse than 
 death ? 
 
 " I knew the mother of two of the most beautiful 
 girls I've ever seen. Before taking them out to 
 dinner, she would split a pint of champagne be- 
 tween the two, to make their eyes bright, their con- 
 versation sparkling. Whose fault if these two girls 
 go straight to hell and stay there? A mother like 
 that isn't fit to have children. That God should 
 ever have given them to her is beyond human under- 
 standing. Nor is the husband of that mother fit to 
 have children. They haven't even the sense of ani- 
 
THEALCOHOLOCAUST 97 
 
 mals; they are a form of human swine beyond the 
 contempt of decent people. 
 
 " When God gives you the joy of having children, 
 He gives you also the responsibility of their care. 
 See to it that you fulfil that responsibility; nor by 
 laziness, selfishness and ignorance let them reap the 
 fatal consequences of your own neglect. 
 
 *' Booze is an open cesspool on the highway of 
 life. It should be filled in, graded off, and for- 
 gotten. And it should be done now." 
 
CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 
 
CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 
 
 " T UST what do you think," I asked my friend, 
 
 %J **of the Thrift Campaign that the gov- 
 ernment has started ? " 
 
 He turned. 
 
 "What do I think?" he repeated. "What can 
 anybody with sense enough to wind a watch think of 
 a movement Hke that except that it is probably the 
 greatest national factor for good that has hit this 
 country since the day when Columbus shinned up 
 the front smokestack and said, ' Boys, ii looks like 
 Brooklyn ! ' 
 
 " As an idea it's a pippin. As a conception, it's a 
 bird. And as practical development for a country 
 that has loved to remain both impractical and unde- 
 veloped, it's a whale. 
 
 "Here we've been going on for at least all the 
 years that I can remember with but one idea in our 
 heads. Which was to see how much more money 
 we could make than the next lad, and how much 
 faster we could spend it. Speeding forward from 
 
 JOl 
 
1Q2 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 the days when a high-wheeled bicycle and a tennis 
 blazer meant untold affluence, we had come to a 
 point where, if a man didn't have an automobile, a 
 first and second mortgage and a bad attack of indi- 
 gestion, he was regarded as a comparative pauper, 
 not to say a social outcast. 
 
 " Far behind in the dim and hazy past had been 
 left the good old axioms like * Take care of the 
 pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.' 
 No such antique and outworn ideas as that for us ! 
 We had a new motto. ' Take care of the millions 
 and leave the chicken feed for the pikers.' And 
 we lived up to it, too, by golly! Not that we all 
 took care of the millions. Far be it from such. 
 But we were at least consistent in our attitude to- 
 ward the chicken feed. No man kept any of that 
 unless perchance he were bed-ridden, and had lost 
 his fountain pen and his check-book. And in this 
 case, his family came nobly to his assistance. 
 
 '* It was not so in the old days. This country was 
 neither founded nor upbuilt on the basis that money 
 was some sort of a sociological set piece that, the 
 moment it came, should be stuck up in the backyard 
 and set fire to. It has remained for the plethora of 
 riches that came of later years to afflict us with that 
 impression; just as, if a man has one bullet and one 
 charge of powder and he needs those to kill his 
 
EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 103 
 
 breakfast with, he doesn't indulge himself in any 
 vainglorious celebrations therewith. 
 
 " It's only when he gets so much powder that he 
 doesn't know what to do with it that he takes to 
 shooting a lot just to hear the noise. 
 
 ** Up to fifty years ago, this country was not so 
 affluent of rose nobles and louis d'ors that it could 
 take to throwing 'em into the lake just to see how 
 big a splash they'd make. Money came too hard, 
 and too infrequently for that. Every dollar had a 
 suction on it like an octopus. And pennies would 
 burrow down into the sand in a way to make a 
 cohaug clam think he was a skylark. 
 
 " Father'd start out before breakfast in the morn- 
 ing with an 1836 overcoat and an 1823 hat, a pair 
 of vintage rubbers and an umbrella that was by 
 rights a museum specimen. And if he came back 
 home not more than two hours late for supper with 
 a total accumulation of a dollar and eighty-three 
 cents and three water blisters, he'd think he had a 
 good day. And mother wouldn't even feed him un- 
 til she'd tucked the dollar eighty-three sacrosanctly 
 away in the little old cracked sugar bowl along with 
 the nine seventy-one already there that was being 
 saved up for a rainy day; and goodness knows in- 
 clement intervals were seldom far apart. 
 
 *' Dollars in those days had the homing instinct. 
 
104 T H E U N C I V I L W A R 
 
 They cuddled up together like day-old chicks. And 
 the more there were, the closer they cuddled. 
 
 " Not that they couldn't be coaxed out if the need 
 arose. They could. And willingly. There was 
 always a dime for the Sunday morning beans. 
 There were always a couple of dollars ready for a 
 warm coat, or to take dancing lessons, and when 
 Adelbert and Ernest and Hector J. got old enough 
 to go to Dartmouth or Paducah, there were dollars 
 ready to escort them there in comfort, if not with 
 the auriferous magnificence of a circus parade. 
 
 "And when dad and mother got old they could 
 always go to the sugar bowl and find the taxes and 
 the rent, and enough to pay the grocery and meat 
 bills, and to settle with the family doctor against 
 lumbago, and things, and a little to help the young 
 folks along with if they came to a bare spot. 
 
 '' And that was because in those days people were 
 Builders. They were constructive. Starting with 
 a firm foundation, they created the edifices of their 
 lives, firmly, splendidly. And they modelled those 
 life-creations upon the pyramids, solid, and square 
 and permanent of base, and tapering with the years 
 into the graceful, sky-reaching tips of their apexes. 
 Big and full and strong were their lives in the be- 
 ginning. Gentler and finer and softer toward the 
 end. . . . And that, whether it be a life, or a pyra- 
 
i: X T K A V A C] A N C E V S . K C O N O M Y 105 
 
 mid, is the way to construct. If you don't believe 
 it Well, did you ever try to push over a pyra- 
 mid? . . . 
 
 " In those days, too, people taught their children 
 to build similarly. Which is another factor that has 
 been tremendously overlooked of later years. * As 
 the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined ' is a good old 
 saying, as true now as when it was first spoken. 
 Also, 'The child is father of the man.' 
 
 "And in those days twigs were Ijent carefully to- 
 ward the direction in which they should grow; 
 children were reared conscientiously that they might 
 be good fathers to their parents. 
 
 " They were not given eight thousand dollar 
 runabouts as toys ; nor a forty dollar a week saloon 
 allowance. A nickel, or a dime, every Saturday 
 morning — to be at once carefully interned in a bank 
 that looked like the capitol at Washington and was 
 twice as hard to get anything out of; and for the 
 rest, an occasional hard won penny for a lollypop; 
 an occasional dollar achieved by mending, sewing, 
 making beds, chopping wood or running errands. 
 Which taught children that dollars didn't grow on 
 fathers like Brussels sprouts on their respective 
 stalks, but were the product of industry, labour, 
 brains and effort. 
 
 " Children were then, as they should be, taught 
 
ll)() r H K I' N CM V I L W AK 
 
 the proper respect, iiiulerstaiulini;- aiul valuation of 
 money, aiul that it was hard to get. hard to keep, 
 easy to spend, good to i\aye. potent iov harm, essen- 
 tial tor good, and that, wisely handled, it made tor 
 health, wealth and happiness. 
 
 " But gradually, of the added yohime of wealth, 
 and of the added ease of muniticence, came the 
 change. And what a difference! 
 
 " Take a peek at father leaving the house to- 
 day ! He wears an up-to-minute coat, with that 
 daring tiare ahout the collar that designates the 
 buccaneer spirit of the real tkuieur. a nifty pair of 
 trousers done with all the delicate esprit of the at 
 once artistic and vagroni spirit that marks the sar- 
 torial knight errant, and a pair of spats that are of 
 exactly as much use to him, and no more, than would 
 be a second pair of cuff's, or two neckties. 
 
 *' Thus festooned, he teeters across the richly em- 
 bossed sidewalk and crawls lugubriously into an 
 automobile that looks like a cross between Napo- 
 leon's coach and a British tank. And promptly at 
 three g. m. he gets as far back toward home as the 
 club, with an intlammable breath and a hundred and 
 eighty thousand dollars which is almost enough to 
 pay the interest on the six million he borrowed to 
 make the hundred and eighty thousand with. And 
 mother later meets his blurred but still degage form 
 
K X 'J It A V A r; A N C K vs. K C f> N O M Y 1 07 
 
 at the front door to shake him down for another 
 sixty thousand that he doesn't know whether he's 
 got or not, and couldn't find out without the aid of 
 a coufjJe of receivers and a bankruptcy court, so that 
 she can buy herself a set of silver fox furs because 
 somebody left the ventilator open in the family en- 
 trance of her town car and she hasn't got a thing in 
 the world to wear anyway (which is the way she 
 wears it) except eighty or ninety evening gowns and 
 a couple of hundred street dresses and not one offers 
 her any protection above the tropic of Capricorn be- 
 yond that that she can get with a lip stick. 
 
 " Dollars no longer had the homing instinct. 
 The minute two of them were put together they got 
 on each other's nerves so that they had hysterics and 
 had to go out to a cabaret or something. And when 
 it came time to send Reginald Plantagenet, or 
 Montmorency or little Alphonso dePeyster to col- 
 lege, they woke 'em up from under the bar in the 
 aristocratic club of which they were inmates only to 
 find that a disagreeable-looking person with a turn- 
 down collar had come into the pater's offices and 
 was serving papers on him, and when the court and 
 the lawyers got through with him, it would be just a 
 question of how much he owed. 
 
 " Commonly speaking, there was no such thing 
 as old age. Because people got old when they 
 
108 r H v. r N I I V 1 1, w ak 
 
 should liavc been wniuL;. aiul bv tho time thcv shcniUi 
 have been old they were dead. 
 
 And it's because, c^t later years, pec^ple have not 
 been Builders, but W'reeking- Concerns. Their idea 
 of a successfully constructed edifice was one of these 
 moving picture apartment houses that is built Mon- 
 day, used for people to fall out of Tuesday, and is 
 blown cwer by the wind and busted all to thunder 
 not later than Wednesday afternoon. Oi\ly, we 
 must admit, it did look great while it lasted ! 
 
 " And children had departed from the good old 
 precepts even further than their parents. No longer 
 do fathers or mothers worry their hectic lives about 
 such old-fashioned folderol as twigs and trees. 
 Twigs grew any old way they good-and-gol-darned 
 pleased, and the trees usually wound up about the 
 shape and contour of a pretzel. As for the child 
 being the father of the man — well, it was a wise 
 father that knew his own son even by sight. Chil- 
 dren had no more regard for money than for a last 
 year's bird's nest until they tried to earn some; 
 when, usually, it was too late. 
 
 '* For people were not only not building them- 
 selves; but they were failing miserably to teach their 
 children to build. And if there's any one thing a 
 parent owes to the child he brings into the world, 
 it's a fair start, and a fair chance for his white alley. 
 
L X '] it A V A ^ A N f; K V 8 . K C O S O M Y ] ()[) 
 
 Why U:',i(}i a f:hi]d not to cat with hi:, knife, and fail 
 to teach him the value of money ? Why teach a child 
 to say, * Yes, sir,' and ' no, rna'am,' and turn him 
 Ujcjsa in the world to hecome food for the stock 
 brokers and the other vultures? Is it fair? Is it 
 just? Is it even common, human decency? 
 
 " In the last pocketful of ^generations, people have 
 not, as a matter of fad, tried to Luild anythin;,^ at 
 all. 'J hey have, like their children, merely heen 
 playin;^ with the blrx:ks. i:5uildin^ requires pa- 
 tience, brains and perseverance. We have all been 
 too busy to take time to possess ourselves of any of 
 the three. 
 
 " Let some other poor slob do the building;. We 
 should worry ! On with the dance ! I_^t joy be un- 
 refined ! And away we go, skallyhooting over the 
 landscape in a motor that sounds like a machine gun, 
 and shoots even faster. iJorne;" What's that? 
 Are we going to bother our heads over servant 
 troubles, and sick cows, and tent caterpillars and 
 what school the children shall go to? Not us! 
 For us the little old apartment, vvith the four rooms 
 and thirty-two baths; the peaceful dinner at the 
 cabaret show; the quiet supper at the Midnight 
 Revels; and soothing ride home in the drunken taxi- 
 cab with the paretic driver; and next day up with the 
 whip-poor-will and at it again! 
 
110 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 " Early to bed and early to rise ? Sure ! Why 
 not? In bed at three a.m. and up at one p.m. 
 And what could be earlier than that ? 
 
 " A penny saved is a penny earned ? Maybe so. 
 But who the Billy blazes wants to bother with 
 pennies ? 
 
 " A fool and his money are soon parted? Right 
 every time. He's just the guy I'm looking for. 
 
 "Waste not, want not? Oh, the poor pikers! 
 Who wants to struggle along on a beggarly twenty- 
 five thousand a year when the world is full of loose 
 change just waiting for some smart lad coming 
 along to pick it up ! 
 
 '' And so we've gone along, like a flock of cow 
 punchers in a frontier town, hooting and howling 
 and squandering our substance in riotous living with 
 no thought of the morrow beyond an occasional 
 vague premonition of the head we're going to have. 
 Coal Oil Johnny was supposed to have been quite a 
 lad in his day, and some spender. But I opine that 
 alongside us, said Kerosene Celebrity would have 
 deemed himself a miser, ^nd rightly. 
 
 " And the trouble has been not that we haven't 
 any sense but just that we've been too busy to use 
 it. The game has been too big, and too swift, and 
 too exciting. Where one lad is riding around on a 
 horse and shooting off a gun, who wants to sit home 
 
EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 111 
 
 on the front porch and knit antimacassars ? Where 
 one gentleman is parting the atmosphere in the 
 middle with an eighteen cylinder automobile, who 
 wants to go out for a pleasant afternoon's ride be- 
 hind a team of oxen? 
 
 '' When everybody else is staying up and having a 
 party, who wants to go to bed at seven-thirty? 
 When all life is a horse race, who wants to sit 
 home in the kitchen playing cat's cradle with 
 grandma ? 
 
 '' When everybody you know is riding around in 
 automobiles, it takes a lot of moral courage to walk; 
 especially when you've got more money in the bank 
 than they have, and know it, besides. 
 
 *' It comes back to the old idea of mob psychology. 
 Mobs will rise to greater heights and sink to greater 
 depths than individuals ever will. Look at all the 
 women you see knitting nowadays. Is it because 
 women like to knit now any better than they did a 
 year ago ? Is it because each individual woman has 
 made up her mind that she ought to knit, and there- 
 fore is doing it ? 
 
 " Not at all. It's because some women decided 
 that knitting was the thing and began to knit. 
 Whereupon, mob psychology got in its work, and 
 now they're all knitting. It's like a lynching. A 
 lynching isn't pulled off because a lot of men make 
 
112 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 up their minds they're going to hang somebody. 
 It's because a few do, and the rest are borne along 
 in the current of their excitement, until feeling that 
 excitement they become a part of that current them- 
 selves. Mobs will go into a saloon and get peace- 
 ably pickled ; or they'll stand outside that saloon and 
 chuck rocks through it, according as the psychology 
 motivates them. 
 
 " And so it is with extravagance. A lot of peo- 
 ple making darned fools of themselves inspire a lot 
 of other people to do hkewise. When everybody 
 is blowing in his money for a party, everybody else 
 wants to do the same. 
 
 " Come back to the cow punchers again. On the 
 range, they are sober, saving, industrious. That's 
 because everybody on the range is similarly sober, 
 saving and industrious. 
 
 " But turn said bunch of cow persons loose in a 
 town where everybody is drinking, gambling and 
 fighting, and said cow persons are in the middle of 
 it in a minute! and making just as ornate, spangled 
 and complicated idiots of themselves as the best of 
 their compeers. 
 
 " To be led is to be human. To be easily influ- 
 enced is to be human. To be more easily influenced 
 by the attractive and the pleasant than by the diffi- 
 cult and the dutiful, is also to be human. It is 
 
EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 113 
 
 easier to be foolish than to be wise. It is easier to 
 be dissipated than ascetic. It is easier to be dis- 
 honest than honest. It is easier to be immoral than 
 moral. 
 
 " Yet, on the other hand, it is really not so much 
 more difficult to live cleanly, straightly and intelli- 
 gently if one will only try. And it is much easier to 
 do this, if one's friends and neighbours and ac- 
 quaintances are doing it. If all men are honest, to 
 be honest is not hard. If all men are hard-working, 
 to work is no effort. If all men are clean, and 
 straight and moral, cleanness and straightness and 
 morality become the normal daily existence, hence 
 are accepted as such, and lived without question. 
 
 " And considered as a straight business proposi- 
 tion, there is no comparison between the two modes 
 of life. Looseness, laxness, and folly are a sucker 
 play from start to finish. The little that you get is 
 more than offset by all that you lose. It's like put- 
 ting up a hundred dollars to win a rotten apple. If 
 you win, you win nothing of value; if you lose, you 
 lose, anyhow, and there you are. It's a crooked 
 game, and there's no way to beat it. 
 
 ** Look at the thing clearly. 
 
 '' Here, on the one hand, you see that well-known 
 and widely-admired gentleman, Mr. Philbert J. Ex- 
 travagance. To the eye, he looks great. He's all 
 
114 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 dressed up like a birthday cake, and as he rolls 
 along the boulevard distributing largesse to the popu- 
 lace, you'd think nobody was more favoured of 
 fortune than he. In your heart, you envy him. 
 You think it must be wonderful to have so many 
 friends, so many motors, so many rich and beautiful 
 wives, so many splendiferous jewels, a marble man- 
 sion on Main Street, and money in every pocket ! 
 
 "And yet, after all, is it? Is he, actually, to be 
 envied, or to be pitied with a pity as deep as it is 
 real? 
 
 "Like you, he has only one brain. It's full of 
 worries. He has only one stomach. It's full of 
 aches. He has only one body to be carted around 
 in all his expensive motors. It hurts and would like 
 to stay at home only the discontent of his worried 
 brain won't let it. His success is what? The 
 empty fawnings of sycophants. His happiness is 
 where? Burnt to the ground and no insurance. 
 His health? Gone where the woodbine twineth. 
 He's a hollow shell suffused of vain regrets ; a bird 
 in a gilded cage, and liable to be thrown out any 
 minute. 
 
 " And it's all because his foundation is bad. Liv- 
 ing beyond his means makes him worry as to how 
 he's going to settle up when the time comes. 
 Worrying as to how he's going to settle up ruins 
 
EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 115 
 
 his digestion. His ruined digestion makes him so 
 peevish that nobody can stand him except those that 
 do it for business reasons. And those who stand 
 him know he's a poor chump for doing what he's 
 doing and have no use for him in the first place. 
 And there you are. There you have poor Philbert 
 J., coppered in the cradle and all wrong from the 
 start. 
 
 " On the other hand, consider that staunch old 
 citizen, Mr. Amos P. Economy. 
 
 ** As he strolls pleasantly down Washington 
 Street and nears the corner of Maple Avenue, we 
 see the vigour of his step; the clearness of his eye; 
 the firmness of his lips ; the pleasant smile about his 
 mouth. 
 
 "Has he troubles? If any, they are not of his 
 own making; hence he wears them lightly. His 
 rent is paid, and his taxes. No creditors dog his 
 footsteps. He hasn't sat up late nights trying to 
 spend money he hasn't got on food that isn't in the 
 cook book; hence is his digestion good and his 
 stomach like a child's. His friends are his friends 
 not because they think they can get something out of 
 him; but because they like him. His brain is free 
 of worries because he doesn't do anything to worry 
 it. If he rides in a motor, it is because he wants to 
 and can afford it; and not because he thinks it will 
 
116 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 make other people think what he thinks they'll think. 
 He fears no man; and no man fears him. He 
 sleeps well ; eats well ; feels well ; thinks clearly. 
 
 " And it is all because his foundation is good. 
 He has builded not like an ambitious adolescent with 
 a box of dominoes; but well, and carefully. His 
 foundation is firm. Hence the structure of his life 
 rises solidly and stands securely. Passing winds 
 shake it not; nor do winter's frost and summer's 
 droughts crack or warp. 
 
 '' And now that the government has decreed that 
 these two gentlemen shall enter the ring together, 
 which one are you, personally, going to back? 
 Which way shall we, the mob, go? Which fighter 
 shall our psychology favour? For, as the country 
 was ruled for a time by the psychology of extrava- 
 gance; so now must it be ruled by either the one 
 psychology or the other. 
 
 ''Are we for Extravagance? Or for Economy? 
 It's a clear issue, ladies and gentlemen. One or the 
 other must win. One or the other will win ! And 
 it's up to you to decide which. 
 
 " And, while making up your minds, let us recall 
 a few salient and essential facts. 
 
 ''Extravagance has lived through all the years 
 and all the ages. And it has always meant na- 
 tional, as well as individual, disaster. For Ex- 
 
EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 117 
 
 travagance is the crumbling corner-stone that makes 
 for the downfall of human edifices. Even as 
 Economy is the solid block that makes for perma- 
 nence, Extravagance stands for waste, both human 
 and material; for looseness of living and of thought; 
 for the propagation of vice and the stifling of vir- 
 tue ; for the breeding of folly and the race suicide of 
 wisdom; for watering the weeds, and plucking the 
 flowers. Extravagance, by and large, is a national 
 lemon, and a sociological quince, and never done no- 
 body nothing but harm nowhere. 
 
 "You think we are, perhaps, a bit prejudiced? 
 or unduly harsh? or unwarrantably condemnatory? 
 
 " Try, then, like a conscientious lawyer in a hope- 
 less case, to find one plea, one extenuating excuse, 
 for Extravagance. What would it be? 
 
 "That it is pleasant while it lasts? 
 
 " Perhaps. And yet, take it from one who 
 knows, there is no pleasure so evanescent, so fleet- 
 ing and so hollow, as is that selfsame extravagance. 
 It is like the pleasure that comes from other forms 
 of dissipation. Great for a few minutes, but, 
 fooey! what a head it leaves. 
 
 "Cut loose! Spend money! Buy yourself a 
 flock of things you're better off without with money 
 you can't afford to spend. Swim in the wine, 
 mingle with the women, join in the song! Wallow 
 
118 T H E IT N CM V I I. W A R 
 
 in aiitoniohilos and jewels and pousse cafes and 
 costly trappings! Glnt yourself with fancy foods 
 and fancier friends. Sleep all day and stay up all 
 night. Crock yourself all up physically, morally, 
 mentally, financially, spiritually and ethnologically. 
 And what have you then? 
 
 " Remorse. That's all. Just plain old General 
 R. E. Morse. Whether you play the game through 
 to the end ; or whether you quit after a few hands, 
 it's all the same. It's just a question of how much 
 you get. 
 
 " It's as clear, and as open, as a cross-roads with 
 a signbixird on the corner. One road leads to the 
 good things of life. The other to the evil. And 
 you can no more find the good things on the bad 
 road than you can find the bad things on the good 
 road. One leads up over the hills. The other 
 down through the valleys. 
 
 ** Nor will you find water moccasins on the moun- 
 tains, any more than you can find the clean, pure 
 air of heaven in the iridescently noisome depths of 
 the swamps. 
 
 *'And Economy is this right road. It is the 
 right road not so much that it is the road itself 
 that is right. It is because of the right things to 
 which the road leads. As Extravagance, as a road, 
 might not be so bad were it not for the bitterer 
 
EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 119 
 
 evils that lie along its winding length. But as it 
 
 is 
 
 " Economy means happiness. Extravagance 
 means unhappiness, and worse. And when you've 
 said that, you've said it all." 
 
CHAPTER SIX 
 
 THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 
 
CHAPTER SIX 
 
 THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 
 
 " A MONG the multifarious happenings that are 
 
 Jl\. daily contributing to keep one's American 
 
 Angora in a state of continuous agitation," said my 
 
 friend, *' none is at present more obvious than " 
 
 "Yes?" I queried. 
 
 " The foreign language press." 
 
 He was silent a moment. 
 
 *' Have you quite grasped all that that ques- 
 tion of the foreign language press means ? " he 
 asked. 
 
 ^'Why, I don't know," I answered. "I " 
 
 " Then do it," he said, " and do it now." 
 
 "Here are we," he went on, "the so-called Melt- 
 ing Pot of the world. Yet how do we proceed to 
 melt? 
 
 " To an unprejudiced mind, it would seem that 
 the proper way to melt the heterogeneous ingredi- 
 ents in our world melting pot would be to light 
 beneath that pot the fires of patriotism, of common 
 ideals, of common purpose, of common understand- 
 ing, of common sympathy and, in the white heat 
 
 123 
 
124 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 of these glowing flames, fuse beyond disintegration 
 the metal of our peoples. And what wouldn't melt, 
 should be thrown on the slag heap. 
 
 *'But is this what we do ? Not so that you could 
 observe. Instead, when the pot gets nicely full, we 
 take a peek over the edge. 
 
 " ' Good morning, ingredients,' we say, gently. 
 * Are you all there ? * 
 
 " Some of the ingredients answer politely; but 
 half of them eye us in a contemptuous manner that 
 indicates that they have what George Ade would 
 call a Terrible Grouch. 
 
 Well, now that you are all in the pot,' we say, 
 in a kindly voice, ' just go ahead and melt your- 
 selves. That's a dear ! ' 
 
 " And we hurry down to the Red Cross to knit 
 things for the soldiers. And when, next day, we 
 come back and find instead of the nicely-flowing 
 molten mass that we had expected, that one side of 
 the pot is only simmering, and the other is stone cold, 
 and the small part that is trying to boil is full of 
 rocks, and hunks of scrap iron, we're that surprised 
 it's painful. 
 
 "And yet how can we expect anything different? 
 Nothing melts itself — not even your collar. Steel 
 is not made by asking the ore if it would like to 
 be melted. It's by throwing the ore into the pot 
 
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 125 
 
 and melting it whether or no. Left to itself, the 
 ore would be satisfied to stay ore the rest of its life. 
 It's used to being ore and it hasn't sense enough to 
 want to be anything better. So that under the 
 optional system, your melting pot bogs down right 
 at the jump. 
 
 ** No, sir. If you're going to run a melting pot, 
 you've got to get busy and run one. You've got 
 to build the fire, and stoke the coals, and fill the 
 pot, and empty it when it's done. And you can't 
 lie down on the job a minute ! You've got to mould 
 the good metal, and chuck away the dross. You've 
 got to work away, early and late, and if you fall 
 down on any part of the process, the whole potful 
 is spoiled and not even fit for window weights. 
 
 " And then, when comes the crucial test, and 
 you need good true metal to forge to your needs, 
 all you've got is a lot of ninth-rate pig iron, and 
 some skimmings, combined with hunks of stuff that 
 looks like iron but is really dirt. And the gent 
 across the street, who has been running his pot 
 intelligently, can outsell you and undersell you and 
 oversell you and put you out of business in a jiffy. 
 
 *' Running a melting pot is like running any- 
 thing else. It should be done intelligently, or not 
 at all. 
 
 " And that is why we, doing our earnest best to 
 
126 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 throw the weight of our country behind the cause 
 of world democracy, are encountering so many ob- 
 stacles. Our pot was too full, our fires too low. 
 Beyond this, we had in that pot a lot of ingredients 
 that never should have been allowed there in 
 the first place, such as paving blocks and dynamite 
 and hyphens, to say nothing of Prussic acid delib- 
 erately thrown in by our enemies when we weren't 
 watching, to eat out the bottom of our pot and let 
 the whole business down into the fire. 
 
 " We're stoking now. We're raking the coals 
 and fanning the flames. We're trying our gol- 
 darndest to bring the whole mass to the boiling 
 point; and the clean, pure ingredients are already 
 there. But floating around in the pot to choke 
 the heat and poison the contents are the scum, and 
 the acid and the unmeltable ingredients that we al- 
 lowed to be put there in the moments of our care- 
 lessness; pro-German muck and anti-British fos- 
 sils, pacifist feathers and political rags and bottles, 
 all are there, filthing the clean metal of America, 
 corrupting the soul-heated product of American 
 hearts and American hands. 
 
 " A pity it is. A great, grievous pity. . . . 
 Yet it is the truth. The best that the best of us 
 can do is being spoiled and poisoned by the spuri- 
 ous material that we, in our innocence and our 
 
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 127 
 
 ignorance, allowed to be foisted upon us in the 
 guise of honest metal. 
 
 " However, it is one thing to make a mistake. 
 . . . But it is something very different to persist 
 in making the same mistake once that mistake is 
 clear. You can forgive the man whose horse is 
 stolen. You can sympathize with the emotional 
 vagary of the man who locks the stable door after 
 the horse is stolen. But what the Sam Hill are 
 you going to think of the man who, after his horse 
 is stolen, leaves the door open and puts in a new 
 horse ? 
 
 " For years we have been taking into this country 
 Germans and Swedes and Norwegians and Rouma- 
 nians and Bulgarians and Fijians and Slovacs and 
 Polanders and Finns and Russians and Samoans 
 and Filipinos and Argentinians and Turks and 
 Arabs and Peruvians and Nicaraguans and Cos- 
 sacks and Cubans and Spaniards and Slavs and 
 Egyptians and Patagonians and Esquimaux and 
 Mexicans and Guineas and Servians and Danes 
 and Algerians and Austrians and Hungarians and 
 Australasians and Colombians and Ecuadorians and 
 Persians and Croatians, whatever they are. 
 
 '' This melting pot of ours has been asked to melt 
 up more different kinds of stuff than the Depart- 
 ment of Mineralogy ever heard of. It's got more 
 
128 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 things in it than a New England Boiled Dinner, or 
 a rummage sale. And to have gotten all these 
 ingredients properly melted would have meant that 
 every second man was a stoker and every first a 
 coal miner. 
 
 *' But instead of that, every second man has been 
 an automobile manufacturer and every first an open 
 market. 
 
 *' And the result has been that so far from melt- 
 ing these different ingredients, we haven't done 
 anything with them at all. They have just been 
 dumped in and lain there, here a pile of Armenians, 
 there a bunch of Germans, over yonder a pile of 
 Jews, and beyond that a chunk of Chinese. And 
 New York, which has been our biggest receiving 
 station, has come to take on the appearance of one 
 of those dishes of hors d'oeuvres that you strike in 
 Italian restaurants — sardines in one compartment, 
 olives in another, sausage in a third, anchovies in a 
 fourth, and so on, all separate, distinctive and in- 
 dividual. And as the United States comprizes 
 forty-nine states, so does each of our states com- 
 prize forty-nine or more cities, and each of our 
 cities forty-nine different colonies of unmixed and 
 often unmixable nationalities. 
 
 " The boy that remarked, ' In Union There is 
 Strength,' admittedly remarked an orotund mouth- 
 
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 129 
 
 ful. But he neglected to observe also that ' In 
 Disunion There is Weakness.' And forty-nine 
 colonies of people in one city, each different colony 
 having separate ideas, separate ideals, separate in- 
 terests, separate modes of thought and of living, and 
 speaking a separate language, doesn't make much 
 for strength. 
 
 " Can you see John McGraw trying to get up a 
 ball team composed of eleven hundred players, 
 neither one of whom knew what the other ten 
 hundred and ninety-nine was talking about? How 
 far would he get toward grabbing the pennant ? 
 
 " Now in considering the whole matter from the 
 broad basis of life, what is the first and most 
 requisite equipment of the individual for mundane 
 existence ? 
 
 ** It is thinking. 
 
 " So far so good. 
 
 " But how do we know that a person does, or 
 does not, think ? 
 
 '' By his conversation. 
 
 *' So that, the first outward and visible manifesta- 
 tion of thought is talking. And this is evidenced 
 by the fact that long before he can navigate the 
 hidden perils that beset the road from the nursery 
 to his mother's room, the incipient citizen has 
 learned to enunciate a handful of more or less well- 
 
130 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 chosen words that are perfectly understandable to 
 his parents even if they are lost to posterity. 
 
 *'The desire to eat, it is true, precedes the desire 
 to think and to talk. But eating is an instinct 
 of the stomach. Talking is the first instinct of the 
 brain. Sometimes it is also the last, and only, as 
 evidence certain of our leading pacifists and one 
 of our most prominently ex ex-secretaries of state. 
 
 " Be that as it may talking and its concomitant, 
 listening, are the first fundamentals of life. And 
 writing is but second-hand conversation, at best. 
 
 " Whereby, if you would strike at the funda- 
 mentals of the individual and of the race, you must 
 strike first at its talking and its listening. And, 
 failing to be ubiquitous enough to be able to talk 
 and to listen to everybody personally, you must 
 of necessity avail yourself of the written or printed 
 medium. 
 
 '' That which people read affects their brains. 
 Their brains govern their opinions. Their opinions 
 govern their actions. It's a simple mathematical 
 calculation. One and one are two. Two and two 
 are four. Four and four are eight. 
 
 ''And yet we, in this country, are entrusting the 
 fundamentals of our country's life to our enemies, 
 to traitors, to criminals and to fools while we our- 
 selves hurry around trying to find a possible im- 
 
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 131 
 
 possibility or an impossible possibility with which 
 to do the thing for which the instrument is at our 
 hand for the taking, 
 
 " The reading of Slavic papers written by Slavs 
 for Slavs doesn't make a race of Americans. It 
 perpetuates a race of Slavs living in America. The 
 printing of German papers in German by Germans 
 doesn't make a race of good United States citizens. 
 It puts in our country a German colony, loyal to 
 Germany, believing in Germany, but ready and will- 
 ing and even eager to stab in the back this strange, 
 outland country of America in which it lives. 
 
 " It is all perfectly understandable. Foreign 
 language papers present to their readers only the 
 sentiment of foreign writers. America is not repre- 
 sented. It is precisely as though in a court there 
 was no counsel for the defense, but only a counsel 
 for the prosecution. What chance, do you think, 
 would the prisoner have under such conditions? 
 And the funny part of it all is that it's our court! 
 
 " It can be stated without fear of successful con- 
 troversion that the first step toward Americanizing 
 America is the abolition of the foreign language 
 press. ' American news for American citizens ' 
 should be our motto. And it should be lived up 
 to. 
 
 " There are those fatheaded enough to argue that 
 
132 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 to abolish the foreign language press would be in 
 contravention to free speech. I see no such con- 
 travention. Free speech is one thing. Free speech 
 that nobody but the free speakers can understand 
 is something entirely different. If I'm going to 
 be insulted, I'd like to know what it's all about. 
 The fact that a couple of red-eyed Teutons with 
 no head behind the ears can stand around and gargle 
 things behind my back that I can't understand has 
 no more bearing on free speech than a bunch of 
 children talking hog Latin behind the North Center 
 school. If speech is going to be free, why not let 
 us all in on it? 
 
 " The main idea that I hear about freedom of 
 speech, is like Germany's idea of the freedom of the 
 seas. They want it free for Germany, and closed 
 up tighter than a drum otherwise. 
 
 " Foreign language speech never has been, and 
 never can be free. It's for the select few, of 
 necessity. They are the only ones that can talk, 
 and understand. To be free, speech should be uni- 
 versal. And the more universal it is, the freer it 
 becomes. So that the argument for the freedom 
 of foreign language speech defeats itself at the out- 
 set. 
 
 " And were there any argument there in the 
 first place, which there isn't, consider this: 
 
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 133 
 
 " The United States of America has joined the 
 Allies to make war for the salvation of world de- 
 mocracy against the autocracy of Germany. It is 
 fighting a life and death struggle against enslave- 
 ment by the Hun. It is fighting to keep its men 
 from slaughter, and its women from rape, its chil- 
 dred from mutilation. To do this, it is mobilizing 
 milHons of men and bilHons of dollars. No man's 
 private fortune or private life or private rights 
 count now against the welfare of the coun- 
 try. Private enterprises have become govern- 
 mental. Food control has become universal. 
 The government has called the country to the 
 colours, and the country has responded nobly, 
 magnificently. 
 
 '' And yet, on top of this, we still permit, we 
 still foster the poisoning of our patriotism, the 
 laxing of our morals, the fomenting of national dis- 
 trust and the defeating of sympathetic understand- 
 ing by the foreign language press. 
 
 " Can you picture the Kaiser allowing any such 
 thing to be pulled off in his imperial empire? 
 
 " Despise, and deplore, and loathe, and abomi- 
 nate the Kaiser as you will and must, it still will 
 have to be admitted that, in the genial terminology 
 of the hoi poUoi, he is a bear at efficiency and when 
 it comes to getting the maximum results with the 
 
134 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 minimum effort, he's there four ways from the 
 jack. 
 
 " Can you imagine the Kaiser letting such stuff 
 be done in his country, in war times? 
 
 *' Picture him coming out of the imperial storage 
 warehouse where he keeps his imperial uniforms, 
 his imperial wife and his other imperial crosses 
 some bright imperial winter morning, and starting 
 down imperial Main Street on his way to the im- 
 perial Great Headquarters. 
 
 " Of a sudden, something chances to catch his 
 eye. He stops and looks. 
 
 " It is a news stand. 
 
 " Peering coyly out between his medals and his 
 mustache, the Kaiser takes an imperial peek at the 
 displayed wares thereon. Then he picks up one. 
 
 "It is the NDGRWSTZKUGHWICK CGD- 
 GFTGHWDTZ. It is printed entirely in the origi- 
 nal Russian, and sometimes w and y. 
 
 " The Kaiser drops this quickly and picks up an- 
 other. This one is Roumanian. He grabs an- 
 other. It is Servian. Yet another. It is Japanese. 
 
 " Does the Kaiser wait to see whether what he 
 is about to do is constitutional or not? Not that 
 baby! Calling a couple of gendarmes, he places 
 the news stand under martial law and, grabbing 
 an armful of the evidence, he boils down to the 
 
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 135 
 
 imperial chancellery where the Imperial Chancellor 
 is imperially chancelling himself as per usual. 
 
 " Hey ! What the Sam Hill do you mean by 
 this ? " he demands hotly. 
 
 ** By what, your highness ? " asks the chancellor, 
 his knees bumping together like a couple of casta- 
 nets in a Spanish fandango. 
 
 " *Do you think,' demands the Kaiser, in an im- 
 perial, or sarcastic, tone, ' that I'm going to work 
 myself to skin and bones trying to fight a defensive 
 war that will leave me spread all over Europe, to 
 say nothing of North and South America, Japan 
 and China and the Malay Archipelago, and at the 
 same time be sucker enough to leave a lot of guys 
 at home to print things about me that I can't read ? ' 
 
 " ' I got four fronts to take care of, to say noth- 
 ing of my roof,' he says. *rd look fine leaving a 
 bunch of word assassins here in Berlin to stab me 
 in the base of supplies the minute my back is 
 turned ! ' 
 
 '''What are these things about anyway?' he 
 howls, shaking the daily prints in the imperial chan- 
 cellor's more or less proletarian visage. 
 
 " ' I do' know,' quakes that crestfallen party, 
 and I pause right here to remark that Uncle Tom's 
 job was a cinch compared to that of the imperial 
 chancellor, ' I can't read that kind of reading.' 
 
136 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 '* ' Then get someone that can,' howls the Kaiser. 
 'And if he finds that any of 'em have made any 
 remarks that are calculated to put a crimp in any of 
 my endeavours in which God is doing the best He 
 can to assist me, but having a hard time to keep up 
 the pace, I'll hang 'em so high that their friends will 
 have to take an aeroplane to visit 'em !' 
 
 " And when, on sending out and getting a trans- 
 lator, they find that the Potsdam Argus is remark- 
 ing in English that Germany has been licked from 
 the jump, hasn't got any more chance to win than 
 a rabbit; and that the Cologne Pilot is advocating 
 the people to lay off the new loan as Germany is 
 busted flat and where's she going to get the money 
 to pay up with if she gets licked; and that the 
 Mannheim Mercury is full of stories of internal dis- 
 sension to prove that the country is not solidly be- 
 hind the war; and that the Munich Sentinel has a 
 nine-column interview with Robert M. Lafolluch 
 in which he says that no matter what the country 
 is doing, it's wrong; and that the Limberg Gazette 
 is calHng him a big piece of cheese, the Kaiser goes 
 up in the air and breaks all records for altitude and 
 sustained flight. 
 
 " * But,' protests the chancellor, ' it's no more than 
 America is allowing to go on there every day ! ' 
 
 " ' If America wants to fight this war with one 
 
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 137 
 
 hand tied behind its back, let it ! ' hollers the Kaiser. 
 * But not for Willy ! When I make war, I make 
 war. And before I get through with them, 
 America, or anybody else that thinks this thing is 
 funny, is going to get a wallop in the nose that 
 won't do 'em a bit of good. The longer America 
 plays that sucker game, the better pleased I'll be. 
 But when you expect me to do it, you've picked the 
 wrong party.* 
 
 " * You take a squad of the Class of Seventy- 
 Six and go out and round up those jocose journal- 
 ists, and take 'em for a walk. Don't bother to 
 bring 'em back,' he says. ' And make 'em dig their 
 own graves. There's many a gent has dug his 
 grave with his teeth,' he says; * but this is my first 
 recollection of it having been done with a foun- 
 tain pen. Put that down, Goodwig,' he says, to his 
 secretary ; ' that's a good one, I'll pull it at dinner 
 to-night, and knock 'em cold; for I am witty,' he 
 says, * as well as wise.' 
 
 " And the next day you couldn't find a copy of 
 the Potsdam Argus or the Cologne Pilot or the 
 Mannheim Mercury or the Munich Sentinel or the 
 Limberg Gazette, or of the respective editors 
 thereof, with a search warrant. And the Kaiser is 
 free to make war with the solid — and you might 
 even say solid ivory — support of his followers. 
 
138 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 " Now whether or not you Hke the appHcation, 
 you must admit the idea is right. AppHed to good 
 influences, or evil, the principles remain the same. 
 A murderer with one hand tied is crippled for at- 
 tack. Similarly, an honourable man, with one hand 
 tied, is crippled for self defense. And if the United 
 States must fight a murderer, it should at least have 
 as good a chance as the murderer that wants to 
 murder it. 
 
 *' Your Uncle Sam is hurrying into a great, an 
 honourable, an unavoidable war. He is hurrying in 
 with fools, theorists and cowards dragging at one 
 arm, with traitors, malcontents and alien enemies 
 dragging at the other. These he will have to shake 
 off as soon, and as determinedly, as he can. And 
 God grant that he do it both soon, and deter- 
 minedly ! 
 
 " But of the worst of his handicaps — a handicap 
 that holds plumbless possibilities for corruption, for 
 demoralization, for inefficiency — a handicap that 
 already has meant the blood of his sons and the 
 tears of his daughters — he can rid himself, and 
 must rid himself. It is the foreign language press. 
 
 " And the foreign language press should be 
 stopped. There should be no waiting; no hesitat- 
 ing, no delaying. It should be stopped to-day! 
 Yes, now! 
 
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 139 
 
 '' If the language of our country isn't good 
 enough for these people, then our country isn't good 
 enough. And if our country isn't good enough, 
 they should get out. 
 
 " We want no half Americans in this land for 
 which our sons are fighting and dying! We want 
 no foreign colonies of disloyal aliens in this country 
 of ours for which Washington and Lincoln and 
 Jefferson and Grant gave the marrow of their lives ! 
 
 " We want honest, honourable, clean Americans 
 — all American — speaking American, thinking 
 American, living American ! 
 
 '' And that we will never have so long as we 
 have a foreign language press." 
 
CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 CABARETROGRESSION 
 
CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 CABARETROGRESSION 
 
 MY friend sighed. 
 " It almost looks as though we had a war 
 coming to us, at that," he said, at length. 
 
 "What? "I queried. 
 
 " It seems a horrible thing to think that you've 
 got to kill half the world to make the other half 
 have any sense," he continued. " But there doesn't 
 seem to be any other way." 
 
 He turned. 
 
 " Have you by any chance stopped in your mad, 
 or American, career, during the last few years 
 long enough to take a good, long look at things as 
 they really were? " 
 
 *' I've been terribly busy," I began, '' and " 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 " That's exactly wliat I mean," he said. " You 
 haven't, nor has anybody else. You've been too 
 terribly busy. It's only since we ourselves got into 
 this war that you've learned that you had a brain, 
 and have begun to try to use it. Before that time, 
 you were terribly busy ruining your health to make 
 
 143 
 
144 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 more money than you needed to buy yourself things 
 that you were better off without in the first place. 
 
 " But cheer up ! You weren't lonesome. You 
 were in a merry company comprizing about one 
 hundred million of people, whose main objects in 
 life seemed to be darkness saving, and to support 
 Henry Ford in the style to which he has so re- 
 cently become accustomed. 
 
 " In the rich, full generation that anteceded the 
 year of our Lord 191 7, most of our citizens had 
 become similarly afflicted. Fortune had smiled on 
 us so hard that at times it looked almost as though 
 she were giving us the laugh. The humblest home 
 boasted its second mortgage and its Tin Lizzie while 
 the mansions of the rich were distended with for- 
 eign motors that looked like peripatetic conserva- 
 tories, and imported indigestion in all its forms. 
 
 " Life, from being the simple, one-lunged affair 
 that our fathers knew, had become as complicated 
 as the existence of a Swiss Bell Ringer with the 
 hives. If a man sat down for a minute, he felt 
 that he was missing something; so he got right 
 up again and tried to find out what it was. And 
 the commotion he made in doing it, added to the 
 commotion made by the other ninety-nine million, 
 nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hun- 
 dred and ninety-nine people who were doing the 
 
CABA RETROGRESSION 145 
 
 same thing, made a strike riot look like a Sunday 
 afternoon in a blind asylum. And the lost motion 
 would have built a Panama Canal every three hours 
 of the day and night. But the country thought it 
 was happy; so there was no use arguing with it; 
 any more than with a crowd of college boys that are 
 biting hunks out of one another's straw hats. Both 
 elements think they are enjoying themselves. So 
 what's the use? 
 
 '' To give one a correct line on anything, whether 
 it's life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness, there 
 is but one known method. Comparison. Suppose, 
 for the sake of trying to establish the true valua- 
 tion of the last twenty years, we go back and take 
 a look at the twenty that preceded those . . . 
 
 " Hold onto your hat ! It's going to be a quick 
 trip . . . Here we go ! . . . 
 
 "What's that? ... Oh, that's only a horse 
 car . . . What funny clothes the people wear? 
 ... All clothes are funny . . . The clothes 
 you've got on now are just as funny to these people 
 as theirs are to you . . . The only clothes that 
 aren't hilariously amusing are the ones you happen 
 to have on at the time; and the only reason they 
 aren't is because you're used to 'em. . . . See that 
 chap out buggy-riding! . . . Driving with one 
 hand, too! . . . Good looking girl, . . . Couldn't 
 
146 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 do that where we just came from. . . . He*d 
 have on a pair of maroon goggles and be trying to 
 make Bangor, Maine, in three hours! 
 
 " Here we are ! Back in the eighties, or the 
 nineties, or somewhere. . . . Let's get out and 
 look about a bit. 
 
 ** Something the matter ? . . . I know what you 
 miss. Automobiles. . . . No. They haven't been 
 invented yet . . . And everything so dark ! . . . 
 Electric lights are also still unborn. . . .And so 
 quiet! . . . No trolleys. . . . But it is restful, 
 isn't it? . . . And all the streets look so attrac- 
 tive ! . . . That's because the movies haven't been 
 invented, to plaster the walls and the fences with 
 the Dizzy Doings of Dotty, or the Perils of Pearl, 
 or the quaint conceits of the Bloody Hand, or the 
 Mystery of the Hidden Ring. 
 
 "And the people? Of course they look funny. 
 The young women have waists that would appear 
 to defy the most penetrating efforts of anything 
 more drastic than spaghetti; while the old ones 
 have comfortable tummies on which to rest their 
 hands in their leisure hours. The men run to skin 
 tight pants and woven wire whiskers, technically 
 known as lambrequins, or wind-sifters. Some of 
 them wear long, shining mustaches, gracefully 
 arched, like thos^ gf a walrus. . . . But their 
 
CABARETROGRESSION 147 
 
 faces are singularly unlined; their movements slow 
 and methodical and unhurried. . . .That's because 
 not yet have been invented, either, those strange 
 and complicated nervous disorders, like neuritis, 
 and nephritis and neurasthenia, not to mention plain 
 nuttiness. . . . 
 
 " Ah, those dear, dead days. Not that they 
 didn't have their drawbacks after all. Busting the 
 ice in the pitcher to attain your matutinal ablutions 
 wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Nor was the 
 Saturday night bath, in the woodshed, just off the 
 kitchen, with Estrella and Hector and Junius Brutus 
 and Hannah and Eliphalet, Jr. making unkind com- 
 ments on your personal pulchritude through the key- 
 hole! 
 
 " But in the main life flowed sweetly, and 
 smoothly. As I recollect, outside of the large cities, 
 no one was very rich, no one very poor. Twenty- 
 five dollars a week was a comfortable income to 
 raise a family on, and the man who had twenty-five 
 thousand was the village nabob and lived in the 
 largest house in town which was painted red and 
 trimmed with scallops that looked as though they 
 had been turned out by a drunkard with a jig-saw. 
 
 '' People went to work early in the morning and 
 went to bed early at night, and all seemed well and 
 happy except farmers' wives who, trying personally 
 
148 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 to take care of the labour problem, occasionally 
 cracked under the strain. Wispish, bent little 
 women, with thin, colourless hair; strange it 
 seemed for them to be the mothers of those great, 
 freckled, red-fisted boys working in the corn or 
 the potatoes! 
 
 " But in the main contentment and prosperity. 
 Nobody needed much money because so little money 
 would buy such a lot. Eighteen cents a pound for 
 steak. Twenty cents a dozen for eggs. Flour for 
 four dollars a barrel. . . .And father's pants 
 could be cut down for Willy without immediately 
 causing the social eclipse of said scion. Estrella 
 got the first hack at the ladies' shoes, with Hannah 
 a happy second. As to the gents. Hector, being the 
 oldest, led. Junius Brutus and Eliphalet followed 
 in turn. You got them last; a little frayed at toe 
 and heel but not so bad but that half an hour at 
 the shoe polishing box with the paste and the dauber 
 and the other concomitants wouldn't make them 
 quite respectable, and the envy of Buck, and Hank, 
 and Skinny Jones whom the exigencies of economy 
 forced to go about with their feet clad principally 
 in stone bruises and rags, on week days, saving 
 their shoes for Sunday. 
 
 " Locomotion was slow but sure. Railroad 
 trains dashed along at eighteen miles an hour. 
 
CABARETROGRESSION 149 
 
 Horse cars were sociably dilatory ; they were heated 
 by a coal stove, in the middle of the starboard side, 
 and had straw on the floor; and the conductor knew 
 all the passengers personally and would sit down 
 and chat with the ladies at the switches. And 
 pleasure-riding was achieved behind old Dobbin, in 
 the carryall, or if one were young and sportive, 
 one took the colt and the side bar buggy. This 
 was a favourite place for courting; except when 
 the colt ran away; when one was much too busy. 
 
 '* For amusements, one had, in summer, picnics, 
 bathing in the lake, ocean or creek, boating, straw- 
 berry socials, and nice long walks. Occasionally 
 came a minstrel show; and once in a while in the 
 large metropolises Booth and Barrett, or Jenny 
 Lind, or Sol Smith Russell, or somebody. And 
 the only thing that kept people up after nine thirty 
 was sickness or a fire. 
 
 " The limits of a respectable debauch in those 
 days was an afternoon's sleighing on the Mill Dam, 
 or who should be first to McGowan's Pass Tavern 
 on runners for a magnum of champagne. There 
 was also the Eden Musee. Nor must we forget 
 Niblo's Garden which was a scandal in those days 
 although, in retrospect, it would seem as though the 
 ladies of the Kiralfy ballet were actually overdressed 
 to the point of prudishness. 
 
150 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 " There was of course Vice, then. But Vice 
 in those days was plain Vice. Bedizened, blowsy 
 and blear-eyed, with run-down heels and shoddy 
 skirts, she haunted the brothels of the cities; and 
 one had to go there to find her . . .It was not as 
 now, when she may be sitting on your right at 
 dinner, or in the pew ahead, at church. . . . 
 
 " And people, somehow, were different. 
 
 " Grandfathers, in those days, were old parties 
 that looked like the pictures of Solomon that one 
 sees in the Bible. They wore waterfall whiskers 
 with or without smooth upper lips, and their favour- 
 ite attitude was sitting down with their hands 
 clasped on the yellowed-ivory handle of an old 
 cane . . . Grandmothers wore black silks and 
 white caps . . . They were gentle, and kindly, 
 for the most part ... I like to think they all 
 were; and I am not far wrong in so thinking . . . 
 And they gave one things to eat between meals, and 
 had the most wonderful photograph albums that 
 they kept in the dark parlour, on the marble-topped 
 table, right between the wax flowers and the stuffed 
 bird in the glass globe . . . And these albums 
 were full of photographs of Uncle Henry's first 
 cousin's aunt's sister, and Aunt Elvira's daughter's 
 niece's first husband all looking very stiff and 
 woodeny and as though the iron fingers of that 
 
CABARETROGRESSION 151 
 
 thingumboob, that the photographer used to hold 
 their heads still, were hurting them. . . . 
 
 '' And one was never rushed for time. One 
 never hurried. There was plenty of time for 
 everybody — except when, in haying time, it began 
 to look like rain; or when the butter was just 
 coming; or when Aunt Jemima started off on her 
 annual visit to her niece and got up at four o'clock 
 to catch the nine thirty train; Aunt Jemima not 
 being used to Odysseys, and consequently excited. 
 . . . No, sir. Hurry, too, is a modern invention 
 that one can find no trace of in history. Noah took 
 plenty of time to build the ark. Even Marion, the 
 Swamp Fox, used to go home and put in a few 
 months raising yams and things between battles 
 . . . Hurry was invented right between trolley 
 cars and automobiles and even the creators of 
 ladies' lace shoes, and dresses that hooked up the 
 back and around the sides and down the middle 
 and inside out, and outside in, have been powerless 
 against it! 
 
 " Those were the old days. But then, what? 
 
 " First came the bicycle. It had one large wheel, 
 with a little wheel behind, so that when you fell 
 off you lit comfortably on your nose. After this 
 had happened a" few times, they put the little wheel 
 in front and fell off backwards. This palling, some- 
 
152 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 one invented the safety bicycle possessing two 
 wheels of the same size. You had to fall off this 
 sideways. It was considered a remarkable achieve- 
 ment. 
 
 " Ladies meanwhile accompanied one on a tri- 
 cycle. It was designed along the lines of a steam 
 roller and weighed about the same, though the 
 noise it made was more like that of a reaper and 
 binder. 
 
 *' These inventions got people into the habit of 
 hurrying a little. But it was not until the advent 
 of the trolley car that they really began to hurry 
 at all well. The trolley car made people really 
 hurry. They had to, or get run over. Anybody 
 could get out of the way of a horse car, or a 
 bicycle; but a trolley car offered new difficulties. 
 
 " Then it was that imbued with this spirit of 
 hurry, they began to go further afield. And bye 
 and bye they got in too much of a hurry to wait at 
 switches. So they put in double tracks. And so 
 many people began to travel that the conductor 
 would look in and shake his head abjectly. Prac- 
 tically the whole carload were strangers ! 
 
 " Then came electric lights. 
 
 " Prior to this time, everybody went to bed at 
 sundown or shortly after; the light was so rotten 
 they couldn't do anything else. Only a few extra- 
 
CABARETROGRESSION 153 
 
 adventurous spirits stayed up to play old maid, or 
 knit socks, by the aid of a tallow dip. 
 
 " But with the advent of electricity, all this was 
 changed. Why go to bed when by merely turning 
 a button you could get a light almost as good as 
 day? And so begun to start the riotous night life 
 of the period — the euchre parties, and the dances at 
 the Armoury where they did the Yorke, and the 
 Portland Fancy and the Lancers and the White 
 Wings and the Hull's Victory. Also stores could 
 stay open at night. For the first time in the world's 
 history, you could see what you were buying. 
 
 " Then automobiles. With them. Hurry stuck 
 out his chest, and cocked his hat and wouldn't speak 
 to anybody for weeks! Automobile immediately 
 became Hurry's middle name. In the old days, 
 a man taking his family out for a pleasant drive 
 was satisfied to go ten miles at four miles an hour, 
 and have a good time. With automobiles, he had 
 to do a couple of hundred miles, or he didn't know 
 he'd been riding. The carefree and happy smiles 
 that marked the equipagic peregrinations of other 
 days vanished almost overnight. And the family 
 of modern motorists, properly adorned for a pleas- 
 ant trip, looked like a cross between a bunch of 
 Arctic explorers, and a first line trench party ready 
 for a gas attack. And finally limousines were in- 
 
154 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 vented so that people could ride and hardly know 
 it ! Nowadays, when you see a party of the Grossly 
 Rich bound for Newport by motor, you wonder 
 why they don't seal themselves hermetically in 
 caskets and have themselves shipped by express. 
 
 " Thus was all the pleasure removed from riding 
 and only the Hurry left. 
 
 " Coincidentally, with all the hurry, came the 
 need of more money with which to purchase all 
 the complicated things that one must have to be able 
 to hurry correctly and with proper eclat; for just 
 to rush around like a village Red Shirt at a three 
 alarm blaze was not enough. Anybody could do 
 that. To hurry properly, one must be equipped. 
 And all this took money. 
 
 *' Consequently everybody started in to work 
 harder. A man who formerly could make a good 
 living by labouring six hours a day, found out he 
 had to toil twelve. Everybody else was; so he had 
 to, or get lost in the shuffle. A number of gentlemen 
 got together and found out a way to beat this. By 
 cheating a little, in a perfectly gentlemanly way, 
 they could get results beyond those that honest toil 
 would give them. So they hopped to it. And 
 trusts were formed. 
 
 " But all this sudden scrimmage for wealth, 
 caused a disruption in values. Where so much 
 
CABARETROGRESSION 155 
 
 money was being circulated, money quickly began 
 to lose its purchasing power. And before long, 
 United States Currency began to look more like 
 Confederate money than the real thing. It was, 
 'Henry, take a wheelbarrow load of bills and go 
 down and g&t a loaf of bread,' or * Miranda, what 
 did you do with that peck of greenbacks I left in 
 the hall last night ? ' As everybody began to spend 
 more, everybody had to have more. Not that it 
 would buy any more. It wouldn't. Not that it 
 made anybody any happier to have it. It didn't. 
 It was only Old Man Hurry, getting in some more 
 of his good licks. 
 
 *' And it was not alone in money that he mani- 
 fested himself. Oh, no, indeed ! 
 
 " As they got to be in too much of a hurry to 
 sit down, so they got to be in too much of a hurry 
 to think. People can't think standing up. When 
 people cease to sit, they cease to think. 
 
 "But Old Man Hurry was ready for 'em. Seeing 
 that thinking had come to be unpopular and intelli- 
 gent conversation thereby a lost art, he built theatres 
 for them with a two hundred dollar sign outside 
 and a two dollar show inside. He gave them mov- 
 ing pictures, which involved no thought on the part 
 of anybody, not even the producers thereof. And 
 he revived dancing; not the old, graceful forms of 
 
156 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 the dance that were wont to be indulged in by the 
 disciples of Terpsichore, but the new forms that 
 appealed both to the Tipsy and the Sick; wherein 
 besotted couples grabbed each other in a sort of 
 Grapevine Twist and cavorted around the floor to 
 music furnished mostly by a steam heated Nubian 
 and a snare drum. 
 
 " It was one of the blessings of this form of 
 dancing that long after people became too inebriated 
 to stand alone, they could still keep erect by hanging 
 onto each other. 
 
 " As you have seen, hurry first crept among us 
 insidiously and treacherously, riding on a bicycle, 
 with a trolley car in one hand and an electric light 
 in the other. With hurry, naturally, came excite- 
 ment; hurry and excitement being the original Sia- 
 mese twins. With excitement, as with a drug, 
 came a desire for more excitement; our nerves were 
 tense; we couldn't let down. 
 
 " In the old days, when evening came, we were 
 quite satisfied to spend an evening in the lamplight, 
 with a book. We were satisfied because we knew 
 there was nothing else to do, except go to bed, and 
 it was too early for that; or go out for a walk or 
 a call; and there was nowhere to walk, and we'd 
 called on everybody already. 
 
 " But with the coming of all these complicated 
 
CABARETROGRESSION 157 
 
 opportunities for excitement, this was changed. 
 There were so many exciting things to do that 
 everybody got all excited trying to decide which 
 excitement they should excite themselves with. 
 
 " And it soon became so that the average indi- 
 vidual had about as much homelife as a hammer- 
 head shark, and lived it in about the same spirit. 
 He tore from cereal to office; from office to lunch; 
 from lunch to office; from office to dinner; from 
 dinner to dance or theatre or card party. His 
 wife, meanwhile, raced madly from breakfast to 
 shopping, from shopping to lunch, from lunch to 
 movie, from movie to dinner, and caught up with 
 husband in a nose to nose finish in the stretch! 
 Even the children got it. They couldn't tell you 
 much about Julius Caesar or Joan of Arc; but you 
 bet your life they knew all about Charlie Chaphn! 
 
 '' And then old man Hurry pulled off his chef 
 d'oeuvres, the road house and the cabaret. 
 
 " A road house is a form of suburban saloon 
 where people go to pay eighteen dollars for a dinner 
 for which they'd fire the cook at home. A road 
 house is usually composed of four parts discomfort, 
 seven parts electric lights, thirty-two parts noise, 
 and the other fifty-seven parts highway robbery. 
 The proprietor of a road house is a direct descend- 
 ant of road agent. It usually has a highly imagina- 
 
158 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 tive and original name, like the Blue Moon, or the 
 Pink Lion, or the Blossom Brae, bestowed, prob- 
 ably, on the same theory that makes people call one 
 of those hot-beds of ignorance an Intelligence Office. 
 
 " As for the cabaret show, the least said the bet- 
 ter. It is an ideal amusement for people that can't 
 read and write and that have no friends. It would 
 make a great Home for the Ostracized. Provided 
 you've got the price, no questions are asked, and 
 the imitation poison ivy that adorns the ceiling is 
 the limit. 
 
 " It must make a first class restaurant sick at its 
 stomach to see what has befallen its anciently re- 
 spectable calling. 
 
 " In the old days, when one went into a restau- 
 rant, one went primarily to eat. If with a con- 
 genial companion, a pleasant chat was a desired 
 concomitant of the edibles. And one ate quietly, 
 calmly, happily and discriminatingly. 
 
 *'But Old Man Hurry fixed this ! With the com- 
 ing of the cabaret, food was the last thing to be 
 considered in a restaurant. As F. P. A. says, he 
 was the boy to take the rest out of restaurant and 
 put the din into dinner! 
 
 " The first thing a customer at a cabaret restau- 
 rant considers is whether or not he can get a ring 
 side seat and knows the head waiter well enough 
 
CABARETROGRESSION 159 
 
 to call him by his first name. The second is how 
 much he is going to be robbed for. And if he 
 doesn't have a toe dancer in his soup, a slide trom- 
 bone blaring into one ear, and a lady with a sand- 
 paper contralto and very little else asking him whose 
 baby he is in the other, he feels that his whole even- 
 ing has been spoiled. Usually he stays until about 
 two thirty and goes home with a complexion like a 
 shrimp salad. His liver has reluctantly retired 
 about two hours earlier. If his wife is with him, 
 they aren't speaking. 
 
 *' Concerning the food in a cabaret, enough said 
 is too much. But cocktails composed of one third 
 alcohol and two thirds warm water, with a dash of 
 bichloride of mercury, are supposed to gloss over all 
 short-comings. 
 
 ** As regards the show, it is commonly partici- 
 pated in by ladies whose structural defects preclude 
 their being chosen for a regular show. Ladies with 
 prognathous knees, or built along the general lines 
 of a croquet wicket, need never despair as long as 
 cabaret shows are de rigeur. 
 
 " Then there is usually a young man with hair 
 carefully coiffed into a resemblance of an imitation 
 sealskin muff, and a Palm Beach suit that has 
 merely a bowing acquaintance with the cleaned. 
 Also Hawaiian girls. They come usually from the 
 
160 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 lower East Side, and wear much the same costume 
 as does a broom. 
 
 " Between numbers, and of afternoons, when 
 ladies worn and weary of their labours of trying 
 to get a $2.98 shirtwaist for $0.89 stroll in for a 
 bit of feminine refreshment like a couple of boxes 
 of cigarettes and a stein of gin or something, one 
 is brought face to face with one of the lowest- 
 known forms of animal life. It comes just between 
 a microbe and a protoplasm, and is scientifically 
 classified as the professional partner, or instructor, 
 as the case may be; but is commonly called a Lounge 
 Lizard. 
 
 " It is a species of vermin usually between five 
 and six feet tall, and wears clothes almost like a 
 man's. It has a face, two eyes, a nose, a mouth 
 and a skin like that of a fish's belly. It has noth- 
 ing in the head except a sense of rhythm; like a 
 woodpecker. Its instincts are low and predatory. 
 It preys particularly on young and foolish girls, 
 and why they kill gypsy moths and cockroaches and 
 rattlesnakes and let it live, is a mystery yet un- 
 solved. 
 
 " I have often thought that the cabaret, best of 
 anything, exemplifies to what estate had we fallen 
 prior to the beginning of the war ; the war, that is, 
 as far as we are concerned. 
 
CABARETROGRESSION 161 
 
 ^' The average person had too much of every- 
 thing except sense. Time he had, and money, and 
 the drugged craving for excitement in all its roots 
 and most of its branches. I don't mean to say 
 that all of us were that way. Poverty was still 
 with us, and Respectability, and Wisdom, in spots, 
 and Sedate Age. But, as a usual thing, people 
 had changed. Grandfathers were not as a genera- 
 tion ago. The grandfather of to-day had become 
 something that the doctors had ceased to fool with 
 only because of what there was in it. While grand- 
 mothers were ladies that tried to look like sixteen, 
 and to act like quarter past twelve. 
 
 " Life had become encumbered of too many com- 
 plexities, and too many possessions. If youVe one 
 suit of clothes, you don't have to worry about what 
 you'll put on. When you have sixteen, it's differ- 
 ent. If you have no automobile, you're willing to 
 stay at home. When you have one, you not un- 
 naturally want to go somewhere. When the end 
 of the week finds you broke, you don't worry about 
 where you'll go over Sunday. When it finds you 
 with a full purse, a steam yacht, and a dozen invi- 
 tations to this place and that, naturally you try to 
 utilize one or more of your possessions. Why stay 
 at home, when there are so many places open? 
 Why read a book when you can go down to the 
 
162 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 Regent or the Pleasant Hour and watch your amuse- 
 ment for a dime ? Why sit and converse when you 
 can dance, or play cards, or go trolley-riding, or 
 motoring? 
 
 " That was the trouble. Things were coming 
 too fast for us. We tried to catch 'em all and 
 muffed the bunch! We were like Mark Twain's 
 young man that tried to do too much and did it. 
 We were like a lot of baseball players trying to play 
 the national game with fifteen balls instead of one. 
 It just couldn't be done! 
 
 '' The war has steadied us a lot; but it still has a 
 long way to go. Cabarets and road houses and 
 kindred asininities are still with us, and going 
 strong. Waste and extravagance are still rampant; 
 and Folly, though forced to go home at midnight 
 instead of riding back to the flat with the milkman, 
 is still ringing his bells and waggling his points. 
 Gentlemen with floating kidneys are still bravely 
 endeavouring to keep them afloat; and ladies that 
 should know better are giving parties that would 
 keep a Belgian family, children and all, in luxury 
 for a year. 
 
 "For war is a great steadier. When death 
 stands above the world with outstretched hand, peo- 
 ple go not quite so fast. The false glamour of arti- 
 ficial pleasure loses its glow. . . . Realities, long 
 
CABARETROGRESSION 163 
 
 gloomed, become again distinct. ... A son, a 
 chum, a brother cut down by the bloody scythe, and 
 not so glittering the bubbles in the wine, not so 
 funny the alcoholically-pointed jest, not so alluring 
 the blaring music or the shimmering floor . . . 
 Comes more the sobered brow, the steady eye . . . 
 Comes more the desire to know the mystery of life 
 . . . Comes thought — quiet thought, and in the 
 great helplessness of it all, the conversation that 
 lies beyond words. . . . 
 
 *' It's going to sober up many a thoughtless 
 gentleman to pick up his morning paper and read: 
 Anstruther, George K. Killed. 
 
 " And ladies, in whose wisdom it has lain to think 
 utterly of themselves, are going to have another 
 thought to think about; one that will turn their 
 champagne to gall, and their cigarettes to dust, and 
 their pretty parties into deep mourning. . . . And 
 God in His infinite wisdom knows the good it will 
 do them ! 
 
 *' It's a horrible thing to think that half the world 
 must be maimed and slaughtered to make the other 
 half think . . . But if so it must be, can't you 
 who may be left, begin to think now? Or must 
 the slaughter go on to the bitter, bloody end before 
 you realize? 
 
CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 E. FLURRIBUS UNUM! 
 
CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 E. FLURRIBUS UNUM ! 
 
 ** ^ I ^HERE is one thing about this war," said my 
 JL friend, " that people ought to begin to un- 
 derstand, and to understand now: that the differ- 
 ence between an autocracy and a democracy is pre- 
 cisely the difference between a stripped-down racing 
 automobile and a comfortable touring car; one is 
 built for speed, and the other for pleasure. 
 
 " It is to be admitted, without argument, that 
 the racing car is the fastest, but who wants to ride 
 in a racing car? 
 
 " And yet, when it comes to a race, no one but 
 a darned fool would bet on the touring car to win. 
 
 " And that's precisely what so far has been the 
 trouble with the war. 
 
 " Germany, all begoggled and beoiled, with the 
 mud guards taken off and no body to speak of, 
 carrying no excess weight except spare gas and 
 extra oil, has been piling down the boulevard at a 
 hundred miles an hour; while the Allies, settled back 
 all comfortable among the cushions of a large red 
 
 167 
 
168 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 limousine, have been following along and wonder- 
 ing why they can't catch up to her. 
 
 " And the reason is almost too obvious to need 
 explanation. It's because the respective govern- 
 ments were not designed and built for identic pur- 
 poses. The German machine is purely a racing 
 machine; the Allied machine is purely a car for 
 comfort. Hence right from the jump it ceases to 
 be a race and becomes a procession. 
 
 " It's because, also, that autocracies are the hard- 
 bitten product of necessity; while democracies are 
 the plushlined result of security. 
 
 " In the beginning, all governments were autoc- 
 racies. They had to be; or they got licked by, and 
 merged into, the first autocracy that happened to 
 notice 'em. So that they thereby became autoc- 
 racies anyway. 
 
 '' And autocracies went on being autocracies until, 
 having licked everything in sight, there was no 
 longer any need for them to remain autocracies; 
 and out of that safely-certain sanctity, they began 
 to grow careless, and ethical, and lax, and decent, 
 and easy-going and altruistic; for when a man is 
 busy every day fighting for his life he hasn't much 
 time to sweep off the back stoop and put new wall 
 paper in the front hall. Progress comes of peace. 
 But efficiency comes of war. And there you are. 
 
E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 169 
 
 " But there is one advantage that a democracy 
 has over an autocracy — if it will only use it. A 
 democracy can take off its touring body, strip down 
 to the buff, and race with any of them; while 
 an autocracy must always remain a racing machine 
 and nothing else. That is the advantage a democ- 
 racy has over an autocracy — if, as I say, it will only 
 use it. . . . But will it? . . . That, my child, 
 is the question. ... It does use it, sometimes ; but 
 generally only when it is too late. . . . 
 
 " But if it will use it, then it has both the chance 
 to win the race, and the added benefit of still having 
 its comfortable touring body to put back on the 
 chassis after the race is won. 
 
 " And, yes, there is one other advantage that 
 democracy has over autocracy; that it is human 
 nature for a man to fight better and harder and 
 more intelligently for something in which he has a 
 direct personal interest than for something for 
 which he fights only because he has to or get him- 
 self shot at sunrise. The French fight for France. 
 But the Germans go to war largely because they'd 
 rather face the French than their own officers; 
 which puts them on the field as defensive fighters 
 whichever way the battle goes. 
 
 " And this is the thing above all others, for the 
 United States to learn: that if it would be within 
 
170 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 whistling distance in this race at the finish, it must 
 take off its touring body and strip down for busi- 
 ness. If it doesn't, it's liable to find out how bitterly 
 true is that old adage about to the victors belong the 
 spoils. And the beautiful touring car that is now 
 ours will be stripped down anyway — but not by us. 
 It will be peeled down for us by the Germans and 
 used as a two ton truck to help carry off silverware 
 and bric-a-brac and other loot for that noble youth 
 who guards the lives of his subjects with the same 
 loving devotion that he would those of so many 
 fish worms — we mean the Crown Prince. 
 
 *'Why are we afraid of an autocrat, when it is, 
 and will always be in our power, as a democracy, 
 to get rid of an autocrat the minute we don't need 
 him? An autocrat to be self-perpetuating must 
 control the armed forces of an armed nation. 
 America is not, nor ever will be, an armed nation; 
 nor could any man control what armed forces she 
 may have against their own well-being; said forces 
 are too intelligent; and education is always the suc- 
 cessful foeman of unjust absolutism. 
 
 " Why are we afraid of an autocrat when every 
 day we have before us countless examples of what 
 autocracy, under democracy, can do ? All the best- 
 conducted private enterprises, those enterprises that 
 are alike our boast and our pride before the world, 
 
E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 171 
 
 are pure autocracies. Autocracies under demo- 
 cratic control, it is true; but autocracies they are, 
 nevertheless. 
 
 "Look at John Wanamaker's stores. Autoc- 
 racies, pure and simple. Look at the Saturday 
 Evening Post. Another autocracy. Look at the 
 Pennsylvania railroad. Yet another autocracy. 
 And there are as many more as the leaves of the 
 tree, or the telephone book — which is by way of 
 being still another beautifully conducted autocracy. 
 
 "All these things run like well-oiled, perfectly- 
 acting machines. Everybody admires them to 
 death! Yet when it is suggested that the central 
 government adopted this approved and demon- 
 strated manner of conducting its business, thousands 
 of well-meaning but peanut-headed persons all over 
 the country climb up on their hind legs and begin to 
 holler against autocracy! 
 
 " And this in the face of the fact that beyond any 
 possible contravention the best possible form of gov- 
 ernment in the world is a benevolent autocracy; 
 while the worst possible form is malevolent democ- 
 racy — which is only another name for chaos. 
 
 " But benevolent autocracy cannot be trusted 
 because, at the demise of the benevolent autocrat, 
 it almost invariably falls into the hands of crooks 
 and grafters and rogues ; benevolent autocrats being 
 
172 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 exceeding few and far between; while malevolent 
 democracy can't be trusted at all in the first place. 
 
 "If you doubt this, what is the best-run and hap- 
 piest family that you know? for government, after 
 all, is but the extension and enlargement of the 
 human family into larger groups. Isn't it the one 
 where father, as the head of the house, sits at the 
 top of the table and carves the duck, while mother, 
 his helpmate, advises and counsels and aids him, 
 taking her helpful share in all things, and Aunt 
 Hannah and Uncle Henry and Jack and Lizzie and 
 Maude S. and little William J. sit around the sides, 
 shoving in the provender, and thinking ain't life 
 swell ? 
 
 ** There's a benevolent autocracy; and sometimes 
 mother has more say about things even than father, 
 although she's too sensible to let him know it. 
 
 " Isn't this better than the other family you know, 
 where every time they want to do anything, mother 
 says she won't, and Aunt Mehitabel wants to do 
 something else, and Uncle John says hell be good- 
 and-gol-darned if he will, and little Amelia is pulling 
 the cat's tail while Hiram Jr. is jabbing the baby in 
 the eye with one hand and pinching his leg with the 
 other, and the wliole thing breaks up in a fight ? 
 
 " Democracies are only right when all the in- 
 habitants thereof will get together and allow one 
 
E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 173 
 
 democrat to become an autocrat. The degree of 
 success that a democracy obtains depends solely upon 
 the amount of controlled autocracy that democracy 
 contains. That the post office is well-administered 
 isn't because the letter carriers all get together and 
 think that maybe they'd better deliver the letters. 
 It's because there is at the head of the department 
 an autocrat that tells them that they'll have to de- 
 liver the letters or get fired. John Wanamaker 
 doesn't make a success of his stores by going down 
 in the basement and asking the coal passers how 
 many platinum lavalieres he'd better purchase for 
 the fall trade. He buys what he darned pleases; 
 while the coal passers can pass coal or quit, as the 
 spirit moves. Hence is the store a democracy as 
 far as the coal passers are concerned; but where 
 John is involved, it's an autocracy, and an autocracy 
 right. In an absolute autocracy, like Germany, the 
 coal passers would be chained to the furnace; and if 
 they didn't pass coal fast enough, they'd be encour- 
 aged with a blacksnake whip. And their quitting 
 time would come only when they were carried out 
 feet first. Democracy gives them their choice of 
 what they shall do; autocracy makes them do it, or 
 get out of the way for somebody that can; and 
 democracy again gives them the power to throw the 
 autocrat in the cooler if his work should begin to 
 
174 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 transcend the law, or get too rough for ordinary 
 consumption. 
 
 " As, in Germany, we have a beautiful illustration 
 of what too much autocracy means, so in Russia, we 
 have an illustration of the almost as great evil of too 
 much democracy. As too much autocracy becomes 
 abuse ; so does too much democracy become anarchy. 
 But Russia is a hop ahead of Germany, at that. 
 For what Russia is now going through, Germany 
 will have to come to. Only it may well be that 
 the Germans, being educated, when once they see 
 the light, will be able to read by it ; which the Rus- 
 sians, never having been even to night school, can- 
 not. 
 
 " As an autocracy, even an autocracy with a 
 couple of flat tires and only three cylinders work- 
 ing, Russia was able to cripple along and still retain 
 some degree of momentum. At any rate she still 
 had a chauffeur, and a mechanician. 
 
 " But then along came Democracy, all full of 
 vodka and unused-to freedom and the liberty that is 
 license. 
 
 " * Hey! Le' me in that machine ! ' yells Democ- 
 racy. 
 
 " And Democracy gives Autocracy a push in the 
 nose, and lands him in a snow-drift. Then he kicks 
 out Autocracy's mechanician and climbs in himself, 
 
E. FLURRIBUS UNUM! 175 
 
 and he invites all his friends to take a joy ride, and 
 they all try to run it, and one man has the brake, and 
 another the clutch, and another the gas, and another 
 the spark, and yet another takes out the spark plugs 
 to see what makes it go, and still another experi- 
 ments on the two well tires with a case knife, while 
 encore un autre, having heard that gasoline explodes 
 when brought in communion with a flame, drops a 
 lighted match in the tank to find out, which he does. 
 And there you have the poor old thing to-day, stuck 
 stock still, with flat tires, and the engine taken apart 
 and hidden in the grass, and the chassis all burned 
 up, and the environing countryside covered with 
 arms and legs and broken bottles and consonants 
 and things, while another autocracy, which is Ger- 
 many, and efficient, comes along and tells its slaves 
 to pick up the pieces for she needs some of them to 
 repair her own machine, which is getting full of 
 carbon, and leaking badly around the valves. 
 
 " And it all goes to show that, as Richard Wash- 
 burn Child quotes a Chinese friend, democracy is 
 like a tight rope ; an attractive amusement for those 
 who understand it, but apt to prove disastrous for 
 those that don't. It's also like a revolver. It's 
 highly effective in the hands of a trained man; but 
 it's a mighty poor plaything to give the baby. Fur- 
 thermore, it's like brandy; a stimulant and a medi- 
 
176 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 cine for those who have knowledge enough to use it ; 
 but a terrible jag for those who have no better sense 
 than to abuse it. And that knowledge comes only 
 with brains, intelligence, education and experience. 
 
 " Our own South, after the Civil War, was an- 
 other interesting experiment in uncontrolled democ- 
 racy; when the Negroes, suddenly accorded a free- 
 dom for which they were not prepared, just nat- 
 urally busted loose and raised hob until along came 
 autocracy to put them back where they belonged and 
 fit them for their new freedom by a proper course of 
 education and training. Thus does efficient autoc- 
 racy control inefficient democracy to be in turn 
 controlled by efficient democracy. 
 
 *' And what we now have before us in this coun- 
 try, only thank God in a greatly modified degree is 
 inefficient democracy as yet uncontrolled by the effi- 
 cient autocracy that will mean efficient democracy. 
 But while Democracy is thus experimenting on how 
 to get some theoretical speed out of her impractical 
 automobile, does Germany wait ? Not so you could 
 observe ! 
 
 " The Kaiser comes out in the morning, and 
 climbs aboard his war machine. Von Hindenberg 
 is at the wheel. 
 
 *' * Give her the juice. Von,' says the Kaiser. 
 ' Step on her tail and let's get out of here.' 
 
E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 177 
 
 ** ' Right, oh, Kais,' says Von Hindenberg, and 
 twenty-seven minutes later they've gone through 
 Roumania and come out on the other side. And if, 
 when they stop for lunch, any nosey interloper 
 comes around and tries to peek into the hood, both 
 Von Hindenberg and the Kaiser mutually and 
 coincidentally kick him spang in the nose and he 
 alights thirty-eight feet off in the poison ivy — and 
 when another machine comes along he's that car-shy 
 he up and beats it and you don't see him again for 
 weeks ! 
 
 *' Meanwhile the Kaiser tears around, with the 
 exhaust open, carrying no excess weight but a couple 
 of spare tires and an extra can of gas, and one day 
 he's busting loose the echoes in Flanders, and the 
 next he's coming out the big end of the Golden 
 Horn, and all with no more lost motion than a ma- 
 chine-gun. And if he sees Von Hindenberg begin- 
 ning to slow down under the strain, he pushes him 
 out and puts in Von Somebody Else; and when he 
 weakens, the Kaiser cans him, and in goes Von 
 Who's-Is. And all the superfluous old parties with 
 whiskers and ideals and morals and decency and 
 things, that want to give him advice and talk things 
 over, he sticks in the Reichstag where they can sing 
 themselves to sleep without bothering him or con- 
 fusing his chauffeur. For he's out to make time. 
 
178 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 and by golly, he sure makes it ! Despise him or not, 
 you've got to admit that. 
 
 " And that's the way the Kaiser gets around. 
 
 " But what, meanwhile, has been happening to 
 your Uncle Sam ? 
 
 " He comes down to the garage in a hurry, to get 
 out his car. The Kaiser's run over Belgium, leav- 
 ing her a mangled pulp ; and butted into France, and 
 chased Roumania up a tree and is about to bulge into 
 Russia who is sitting on top of what's left of his 
 chassis with a monkey wrench in one hand and a 
 pair of pliers in the other wondering whether he'd 
 better take down the engine, or look over the differ- 
 ential, or get a new car, or something. Also the 
 Kaiser has run over a double handful of Uncle 
 Sam's own children. And your uncle is as sore as a 
 boil and as hot as a lady who's lost money. 
 
 ** * Gi' me my car, and give it to me quick ! * he 
 says. * I'm going over there and take a wallop at 
 that lad if it's my last act on earth. Nobody can 
 mess up my folks like that and get away with it, and 
 don't you forget it ! ' 
 
 "Well, he waits around a while, and nobody 
 brings out his car. 
 
 "* Where's my machine anyway?' he demands, 
 getting impatient. 
 
 " * It's probably in the attic, or the cellar, or some- 
 
E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 179 
 
 where/ says the efficient garage man. * Anyhow, 
 you ain*t had it out since eighteen ninety-eight, in 
 the first place.' 
 
 " * Well, I want it now,' says your Uncle. * And 
 I want it quick! I got business to attend to and I 
 can't wait.' 
 
 " I'll ask Joe if he knows where it is,' says the 
 garage man. * Hey, Joe ! Have you seen the 
 boss's machine around anywhere ? ' 
 
 "But Joe hasn't seen it; so he asks Newt; and 
 Newt asks somebody else; and somebody else asks 
 some one else. And then they all get out and look 
 around. Finally they find it, tucked away in the 
 back end of the carriage house between a victoria 
 and a one-horse chaise. It's full of whiskers and 
 somebody's been sleeping in it. 
 
 " Your Uncle Sam gets a peek at it, and is sorer 
 than ever. 
 
 " ' Whose job was it to take care of this thing, 
 anyway ? ' he asks, excitedly. 
 
 " * The Democrats,' says the Republicans. 
 
 " ' The Republicans,' says the Democrats. 
 
 "Uncle Sam sees it's no use trying to find any- 
 body to blame, and there isn't any time anyway. 
 
 " ' Well, let's get it out where we can see it,' he 
 says. 
 
 " So they all take off their coats, and roll up their 
 
180 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 sleeves, and shine their shoes, and shave, and comb 
 their hair, and manicure their nails, and go home 
 and take a bath, and then they bring it out. It looks 
 like a Ford, only funnier. It's got one cylinder, and 
 hardly that. And the tonneau buttons up the back, 
 and somebody's been using the radiator to boil water 
 in. And it weighs five hundred pounds per horse- 
 power. 
 
 " ' Do you suppose we can get it started ? ' asks 
 Uncle Sam. 
 
 " * Yes,' says Joe. 
 
 " ' No,' says Newt. 
 
 " * Well, can we ? ' asks your Uncle. 
 
 " ' No,' says Joe. 
 
 " ' Yes,' says Newt. 
 
 " So they try. 
 
 *' But first they need some gas. 
 
 " ' I want some gas,' says your Uncle. 
 
 " ' You can't have it,' says an old party with long, 
 white whiskers, rubbing his eyes as though he just 
 awoke from a long sleep. 
 
 '' * Who are you anyhow ? ' demands your Uncle. 
 
 " ' Congress,' says the strange party. ' And you 
 can't get nothing except through me.' 
 
 " ' How do I get it through you ? ' asks Uncle 
 Sam. 
 
 *' ' You ask me for it,' says Congress, smothering 
 
E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 181 
 
 a yawn. 'And then, maybe I give it to you, and 
 maybe I don't. Usually,' he explains politely, *I 
 don't.' 
 
 But I've got to have some gasoline ! ' exclaims 
 your Uncle. * You must give me some ! ' 
 
 Must ? ' says Congress, frowning a little, 
 ' them's harsh words, Nell. And besides, kerosene's 
 much cheaper. Also I have an uncle in the kerosene 
 business, in ' 
 
 But this car won't burn kerosene,' says Uncle 
 Sam, pleadingly. 
 
 Then have it fixed so it will,' says Congress, 
 ' Unless you prefer tomato soup. My nephew has 
 
 an interest in a concern that ' 
 
 "'But look!' says Uncle Sam, pointing across 
 the pond to where the Kaiser has stopped long 
 enough in his favourite outdoor sport of running 
 over Belgians to look over and give your Uncle a 
 loud, coarse laugh. ' That feller's killing everybody 
 and I've got to go after him or I can never look in 
 the glass again as long as I live.' 
 
 " Congress looks and rubs his eyes once more. 
 Dearie me ! ' he says, ' when did all this hap- 
 pen?' 
 
 " ' It's been going on a long time,' says your 
 Uncle. 
 
 Strange ! ' murmurs Congress, stroking his 
 
182 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 whiskers caressingly. ' So you're going over there, 
 are you ? ' 
 
 " * You bet your sweet life ! * returns your Uncle. 
 * Nobody can bounce all that off me and get away 
 with it ! ' 
 
 " * You really think it wise ? ' queries Congress, 
 cautiously. * He looks like a tough guy — I mean a 
 strangely uncouth person. And it might irritate 
 him to have you ' 
 
 " ' I'm going all right,* says your Uncle. ' But 
 it isn't only me; I mean, I. The people are with me 
 in this thing, and if you'll listen ' 
 
 " Congress bends and puts his ear to the ground. 
 From long practise he's got so he can do it standing 
 up. 
 
 " * I do hear a murmur,' he says. 
 
 " Meanwhile everybody around the garage has 
 had a hack at the machine. It won't go. 
 
 " * What we need,' says the garage man, * is a man 
 who understands automobiles.' 
 
 "* Don't you?' demands Uncle Sam. 
 
 " The garage man laughs cordially. 
 
 " * Not yet,' answers the garage man. ' I've only 
 been here six years. And besides, I never seen a 
 machine before in my life.' Anyway, I don't like 
 automobeels in the first place. I prefer a nice team 
 of oxen.' 
 
E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 183 
 
 "*Then how did you get the job in the first 
 place ? ' demands your uncle. 
 
 " ' I'm a deserving Prohibitionist,' says the garage 
 man, with a wink. 
 
 " Seeing he can't get anything out of the garage 
 man, your Uncle calls in a lot of experts. They're 
 good men, and patriotic. They leave their homes, 
 and their businesses, and come to Washington full 
 of high ideals and patriotism and ready to do every- 
 thing in their power (and it's a lot) to help Uncle 
 Sam in his great emergency. 
 
 '' But when they get to Washington, they find that 
 nobody's job is clear and nobody's clear as to his 
 job. The hotels are charging eleven dollars an hour 
 for a hat closet to sleep in, and seven fifty for a 
 cup of weak tea. Most of the gentlemen in au- 
 thority are so badly afflicted with red-tapeworms 
 that their physical strength is taxed to the limit 
 merely by passing the buck. Nobody seems to 
 know what anybody else is doing and seems to care 
 less. Over in the corner a couple of gentlemen are 
 engaged in an acrimonious discussion as to whether 
 solid tires are better than pneumatic; while on the 
 front stoop sits an agitated party trying to figure 
 how he can get people to save gasoline when they 
 won't do it and he has no authority to make them. 
 Everybody's talking about what kind of spark plugs 
 
184 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 we ought to order; while nobody's ordering the 
 kind of spark plugs that we could possibly get. 
 
 " It's a confusion thrice confused, and multiplied 
 by six. And the fact that everybody's so earnestly 
 willing to help only makes it that much the worse. 
 
 " But out of the chaos at last is coming a real 
 machine. And it will be a good machine; the best 
 that money and brains and time can build. It has 
 been delayed by false starts; by futile discussions; 
 by false promises and false optimism; by lack of 
 practical wisdom and executive ability. But it is 
 coming. The country at last is keen and tense in 
 its upbuilding. Congress long since took off its 
 coat and went to work. And now our machine will 
 soon be ready. 
 
 " And when at length it comes out of its experi- 
 mental stage and into its practical perfection, we've 
 got to remember a lot of things. 
 
 " We've got to remember that running a machine, 
 whether it's a ninety horsepower racer or a high- 
 way beetle, whether it's a war machine or a sewing 
 machine, is a one man job. 
 
 "The President of the United States, being ex 
 officio commander-in-chief of the army and navy, is 
 the man who automatically takes that job. 
 
 " Hence it becomes his job, and his only. 
 
 " But we must remember with equal clarity that 
 
E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 185 
 
 the machine belongs to us; that he is hired by us to 
 drive the machine for us. Hence it is not only our 
 right but our duty to demand that he drive it care- 
 fully, successfully and well. He shall not drive too 
 fast. On the other hand he must not drive too 
 slow. If he employ incompetent mechanics, he must 
 be told, and made, to fire them and get good ones. 
 So long as he follows the right road, he should be 
 praised. If he starts to go up side streets or down 
 blind alleys, he should be blamed and corrected. 
 
 " We should remember, too, that the fact that he 
 happens to be our driver doesn't necessarily make 
 him omnipotent or put a halo on him. He remains 
 merely an individual citizen of the United States, 
 subject to indigestion, old age and water on the 
 knee just like all the rest of us. The only difference 
 between him and us is that we've hired him to work 
 for us for four years, at a comfortable salary, with 
 house rent free. Following that, he will either be 
 re-engaged, or retired to private life. Meanwhile he 
 has a position of tremendous power, of limitless re- 
 sponsibility, and of infinite prestige. It is a posi- 
 tion to be respected, to be deferred to, to be 
 honoured. But it is not to be idolized. To deify 
 authority is a German trick. It has no place in an 
 intelligent democracy. 
 
 ** We must give him all necessary powers to con- 
 
186 THE UNCIVIL WAR 
 
 trol the machine. But we must not give him so 
 much power that he can tell the rest of us to stay 
 at home while he goes joy-riding, or draws the car 
 up alongside the road to make speeches, or pick wild 
 flowers, or something. We must give him power to 
 use. And we must see that he uses it. He must 
 be let alone to do things. But we must see that they 
 are done. 
 
 " For stripping our democratic touring car down 
 to an autocratic racing machine is only half the 
 battle. The other, and just as important, half is to 
 see that that racing machine shall be efficiently 
 driven. A good car badly handled becomes no bet- 
 ter than a bad car. What we have got to have is a 
 good car well handled if we want to win this race." 
 
 THE END 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper procej 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date^^y ^QOl 
 
 PreservationTechnologies 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATU 
 
 111 Thomson Park Drive 
 Cranberry Township, PA 16066