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PRESENTED TO
THE LIBRARY
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OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
By the author
Sumanth 189....
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PROBLEMS
OF
THE NEW LIFE
BY
MORRISON I. SWIFT.
XSXsk
ASHTABULA, OHIO.
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR.
1891.
The Writings of Morrison #. $ wift.
6
SOCIAL UNIVERSITY MONOGRAPHS.
I. The Plan of a Social University.
II. The Old and the New Life. (Published also in
the present volume.)
Price of each;
$ 20
PROBLEMS OF THE NEW LIFE.
Price, in cloth,
$1 00
The same in paper,
50
PRESSWORK BY DEMOCRATIC STANDARD,
ASIITABULA, 0.
CONTENTS.
I.
PAGE.
1-16
--
THE SOCIAL ORDEAL OF CHRISTIANITY
II.
THE OLD AND THE NEW LIFE
17-44
III.
45-68
EDUCATION AND POWER
I. Science and Vitality.
II. The Increase of Power.
III. How to Make the Schools Serve Us.
IV.
THE EXTENSION OF CULTURE
1. University Extension,
2. The Sociological Function of Universities.
3. The Endowment of Innovation.
V.
68-84
-
-
NATIONALISM
85-94
-
.
I
94-103
VI.
FRAGMENTS AND RANDOM LETTERS
1. A Defense of Strikes.
2. Shall We Believe in College Professors ?
- Dreams
4. Social Responsibilities.
5. The Educated Man.
3.
VII.
THE AWAKENED FARMERS
103-110
VIII.
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE GROWING REVOLUTION
111-126
1
Some portions of “ The Old and The New Lifehave already appeared
in The Open Court, and through the courtesy of that journal I reprint the
section entitled "The Sociological Function of Universities.”
On pages 29 and 30 I have described the unique course of a business
firm who voluntarily raised the wages of their employes. The case is
stronger in their favor than I have there stated it, since it is also the prac-
tice of this firm to divide ten per cent of its profits among its employes
annually.
The Social Ordeal of Christianity. .
BY MORRISON I. SWIFT.
I.
dred years.
Dr. Ernst Barth has written a book of somewhat general interest.*
It is a review of the condition of society, and some hard questions about
existing institutions are asked in it. The prayer, “Thy Kingdom Come,
he says, is offered every Sunday in the churches and daily in the schools
: and at homne. In this mauner we have been praying for eighteen hun-
But when is the Kingdom to come, and where are even the
simplest beginnings of it? The thought must give us shame that even in
Christian countries the social requirements laid upon men in this petition
from Christ have received almost no attention. And there is not the ex-
cuse that the powerful of the earth have opposed the religion that offers
this prayer; they have long been its protectors. Yet when we look for the
fruits of our religion and consider withal the social distress, we must
recognize that we have not brought it to much more than an empty, arro-
gant word-Christianity, and that we are not worthy to bear the name of
Christ.
Are the causes ascertainable ? Consider the poor. What can be
hoped of people so oppressed with want and care and labor that they have
neither time, repose, nor collectedness to think of the higher problems of
humanity? Indeed one who, year in and year out, in the midst of cruel
distress, can only think about the scanty support of his family, and who
sees his children starve and his wife pine away, will not have much time or
strength to labor for the Kingdom of God. Material things engross the
attention of those who are prosperous; scholars and specialists feel the
pressing demands of their profession. Meanwhile human misery, bodily
and moral, persists.
will
Die Reform der Gesellschnuft durch Neubelebung des Gemeinde wesens in staat, Schule
ul. Kirche.- von Dr. Ernst Barth.
2
In the opinion of this writer the saving power is still Christianity, but
Christianity knowing that the kingdom of God was to come on this earth.
His plan of reform and revitalization proposes no departure from existing
and accepted ground principles.
There is a different view. It may be that not many people are yet
aware that bodies of men and women in New York, Chicago and some
other cities have joined themselves together in the name of a new religion.
Certain it is, at all events, that the import of this action is scarcely appre-
ciated. Where do the leaders of this movemont stand? *
In consonance with the opinion already cited they recognize the evils
of the present society as few not actually suffering from them have yet
done. They reject, without compromise, the too prevalent thought that
the varying lot of men is ordered by Divine Providence, that the
social order which exists with its classes and distinctions, has a
Divine sanction. They commit themselves with absolute assurance to the
thought 'that the Perfect Order of things, which Omnipotence was to pro-
duce for us in another world, we are ourselves are to create here. With
a clearness of conviction that may well cause our cheap moralities to
shudder, they give utterance to the deep meaning of human responsibility
“A perfect order of society, how can it ever dawn on the earth,
man sets his heart upon it and determines that it shall be???
The present age “is not inclined to accept the order of human life as
it is, but to try it and test it by a thought of what it ought to be, to see
whether it meets the wants, the righıs of human beings and of all human
beings; and it is mightily inclined to helieve, too, that the satisfaction of
these wants and the doing justice to those rights, need not be delayed to a
future world, but may be undertaken here, and that by no other power
than ourselves."
To this task Christianity is unequal. Protestantism “has not given us
aný new faith such as the world wants. 'It has seemed to regard moral
idealism as exhausted in the statements of the Sermon on the Mount.'
“An era of social righteousness is the want of the world, and this is what
Protestantism has not given us, what it has apparently had no aim of giv-
And the religion that declares these principles fetters itself to no
NOW).
save
as
ing us.
The following quotations are from two pripted lectures of Mr W.M. Salter. of Chicago,
entitled “Why Unitarianism Does not Satisfy Us.' and "The Success and Failure of Protestantism."
i
3.
1
cance.
theology. Its last and deepest utterance is: “Perfect freedom for the
mind, a righteous life rather than any creed, and the worth, the sacredness
of human beings.
Thus from two very different sides we find a recognition of the great
wrongs existing in society, and of the inadequacy, hitherto, of the efforts
of all organizations for lifting mankind. They agree no further. One
awaits help and conquering life from a reanimated Christianity; the other
will work new veins of moral inspiration.
There are many, no doubt, who view the Ethical movement as they
would a new-born sect within the church. They see in it no great signifi-
To us it is one of the way-marks of the time. It is one of the
most decisive expressions of powerfully moving tendencies that we have
yet beheld. It contains ideas to which men must listen from this time on,
and that will sooner or later reform conduct. To say the very least about
it, it is a protestation against the exaggerated emphasis of ideas that
will every day mean less to men, and that already confuse and mystify in-
stead of helping such as thirst after excellence. And it would appear that
the right and abiding attitude toward the movement is not the attitude of
silent indifference, or of condemnation for its standing toward Christianity,
but acceptance of the hint its mere existence gives, and probing of the
tendencies that brought it into being. And since it does but repeat the
arraignment of inefficiency against the religion of the day brought by those
in no sense hostile to it, but holding it as the light of the world, there
remains no release from the constraint of its message.
It cannot be denied that these criticisms of what now passes for
Christianity disclose the main causes of its weakness. For reasons in part
doctrinal, Christianity has lost faith in its power to regenerate the world
and its attempts are responsively ſeeble. This we say with full recognition
of the noble efforts of individuals scattered here and there. It is to
Christianity as a whole that we refer, and its efforts are singularly inade-
quate to the needs of the day, and wholly out of proportion to its resources.
1t would appear that the idea of bringing the Kingdom of Heaven upon
earth is not one of the things in which it believes. Those who believe in
the greatness of Jesus declare this perfidy to him. But the
message
of
cheer from the doctrinaries is that the world must gird itself to patience
and wait improvement through supernatural interferences of Christ. A
departure so gross as this by dogmatists from the l'easonable level of natural
4
now
cause and effect is the signal for a reaction of humanity against theology
and for this reason the Ethical Culture movement has arisen among us.
It
stands for a simple yet final principle. No man, it says, shall hereafter
call himself Christian, or religioas, or moral, whose life object is less than
the enlargement of mankind. And before this criticism our theological
Christianity is impotent. For it permits men whose life ends are selfish
and who indulge in luxury and display at the cost of suffering and want in
those whom Christ designated as brothers to call themselves Christians and
in startling defiance of old-time morality to announce themselves religion-
ists.
But religion is not going one or a very few steps of the way and then
stopping; it is going the whole way, and the merit of the Ethical Culture
leaders is that they have seen this. They practically say, we have had the
name of religion trying to do the work of religion for a long time; let us
see what the reality can do for the world. Against the 'dove-tailed
mechanism of religion this charge is not incorrect. If any one imagines
that it is, let him reflect that the supporters of the Christian organization
possess and control the bulk of the material resources of the world, and use
them mostly for their individual pleasure, ' In denying that this practice is
compatible with religion the Ethical Culturists are giving language to the
awakening moral sentiment of our generation. Many people are now
thinking that if Christians would divert their resources from pleasing selfish
channels to the help of the world, the Kingdom of God, in which they have
so little earthly confidence, might actually begin to appear.
The recognition that help must come through our own efforts does not
deny God. It is the only discerning and unselfish obedience. It perceives
that God works through us and not over our heads. Upon the individual
it places the mighty responsibility of being wrought with hy God for the
world's renewing, God being the vital fire in us.
A second reason why a new movement is now necessary is because the
Christian organization has spent so great a portion of its strength in con-
tests within itself, and in needless conflict with speculative opponents out-
side, when the thing to be done was to unite its energies to subdue the
world to the principles and spirit of its originator. The Christian church
has been anxious to conquer the world to technicalities and interpretations,
when before it, in grand outlines, stood the character of its founder, expres-
sive of duties so diflicult that the performance of them would tax all
ö
ordinary powers if subtle doctrine and new readings and metaphysical
chimeras and creations were given a long truce. Yet this great char: cter
stands there neglected and his modern disciples contest among poor
medineval dogmas and the dry, un hallowed bones of a fabricated salvation.
Have not people enough gone astray through this grotesque and pitiful
blundering? · And will deliverance of this world ever come through those
who cannot abate their advocacy of hypotheses about some other world?
Even today the Churoh dreams of converting the world to the Chris-
tianity of dogmas and fables. And having nothing but this perversion to
proffer, the church is weak for the great crisis impending and already here.
Into this crisis it glides sleeping and futile. In its satisfied monopoly of
the path of life it postpones the single act by which it can save itself and
the world, its own regeneration. For in truth, the Christian Church stands
in need of moral transformation, at a moment too when a great organiza-
tion rightly inspired could tide society over the grave dangers to an ex-
panded life. And yet it holds the key to the situation still; it can still do
something or nothing at its choice; though how long the privilege shall be
vouchsinfed when the irresistible progressive tendency of the time requires
that something. not yet undertaken shall be done, no one can say. But
very few will believe this and we shall be called in fatuited.
Here again the founders of the Ethical Culture organization have rec-
ognized the progressive tendency of the time and placed themselves in the
ciirrent with it. They build on the fact that the world is entering a new
period of its history.
There is a third justification for the new movement. The masses are
being repelled from the church and the popular religion. Defection is an
inevitable accompaniment of the deepening intelligence. The church is
somewhat charitable, but even its benevolences move with weighted step.
Whatever interest it has in the laboring classes beyond the accustomed
contribution is incidental and surprising. The admired policy of our theo-
logical era is acquisition by whatever means the courts do not scourge, and
a visible conferring of minor benefits in the glamour of deceptive gener-
osity. Thereby is acquired the subsequent luxury of virtue. It assumes
to give its own. But if rights were conferred instead of charities, gifts
might cease. The church has not accepted for its mission the elevation of
all the inferior ones to an actual brotherhood with the best and to the
li:1equivocal exercise of every right. The masses are at length learning
6:
the depth of this evangelical virtue. They discover but one business
method for all, and that religionists are not less skillful in its use than
others. They know that in the exercise of this method the commonest
principles of morality are habitually disregarded, and they cannot see that
wrong is converted into right by teubnical disguises or legal escapements.
For these reasons they discard the church and its pretensions. We must
check the progress of enlightenment if their movement away from the
church in its present insufficiency is to cease. Religion may momentarily
suffer in the transition. When an uncultured person abandons a system of
dogmas he may disport himself as a truant from moral law. But society
may hold itself happy if this is the only price paid to recall the church from
fictions to realities, or to demonstrate the necessity of a new church, if the
old one is deaf to the voice of the times. And the departure of the masses
will be an act of worship and a prayer answerable on earth.
We return to the point that reinains central. Religion may be much
more but it cannot be less than the lifting up of humanity, and this
achievement involves inore than the chiefs and elders of the church are
willing to undertake. It requires sacrifices, and the people who name.
themselves after the inau who made unusual sacrifices, and discredit those
who cry not their allegiance to him in the market places, are ready to show
that the practical teachings of this ancient person do not apply literally
now-a-days and to them.
We hardly care to multiply the evidences of Christian unfaithfulness.
But while Christianity forbids preference of persons, aristocratic discrimina-
tion is a prominent characteristic of the 'Protestant church. The rich and
the poor mingle not together. A commonplace of the day is the discom-
fiture of the poor at the shrines of the rich. Persons of influence and
deportment, rich owners of the house of God, have been made committees
to welcome the poor and set thein at ease before Deity, but even this
cordiality fails. The poor will not come, and the only discovered way to
get religion to thein is to build chapels where they can worship alorie.
They may have caught the secret that numbers of the churches are hardly
more than close corporations for the satisfaction of social instincts. The
line of exclusion is the poverty line.
Patronage is the relation of the enterpled rich toward the unchurched
poor. Many people there are who could easily and willingly be poor, but
.
7 y
who cannot with equanimity endure suggestions of inferiority. Submis- .
sion to them is the death of self-respect. Their instinct to reject patronage
awakens admiration, yet this patronage, this travesty on the manner of
Jesus, comes masquerading in the person of his followers. It is subver-
sive of the innermost intention of Christianity. Christianity sought to
cultivate breadth and depth of character; the unutterable dignity, the
self-inclosed value of the individual, were its vital and perpetual themes;
it saw through stations in lifu and possessions and spoke of them as husks;
it perceived the majesty of manhood and laid its reverence there. Such
was Christianity. It inspired by the infusion of self-respect. Modern
Christianity is different; it has become astigmatic; it lays its reverence not
on manhood but on money.
Without doubt the Ethical societies appear at an opportune moment.
They start with immense advantages. They are hampered by none of the
long traditions of unfaithfulness and injustice that prejudice the people
against the church and diminish the effectiveness of even its purest efforts.
They are free from the tremendous internal weight of practical conserva-
tism which the church must lift before it can meet the present crisis, a con-
servatism that signifies more than simple indifference or outright disinclina-
tion to the reforms upon which success is distinctly conditionell; whose
root lies in the fact that the church is still the slumbering place of so large
a number whose lives are devoted to doing the things that drive the masses
out, and who are resolute enemies of the necessary reform. Free from
this perplexing internal contradiction, with the masses of men adrift and
and wanting refuge, it singularly favorable opportunity offers itsill to the
Ethical organizations to do a vast service. They are the neeil of the
moinent; maybe they will become the church of the future, not for the poor
only, but for those 'not caring for human distinctions, who prefer humanity
to aristocracy, and who see their own needs and rights reflected in every
other man.
But to Ethical societies will be applied the same tests that
condem: the prosperous church. In the hour that they temporize and
hearken to the voice of the oppressors of the poor, and seek for standing
among the influential of the land, or desert the province of moral enlight-
enment for the uprearing of pleasing institutions, their singular usefulness
will be past, and they will take rank among the agencies that are more
sensitive to the whisperings of temporal comfort and prudence than to the
voice of God.
8
II.
:: The important question, then, is, what course shall the church pursue
in this emergency, and how may it hope to maintain, purify and extend its
influence. We may venture the conviction that it can sustain itself only
through an unmistakable practical demonstration of the principles of its
founder. It must show that it means seriously to execute the commands
laid upon it, and it must take up this work with so much earnestness
that the need of other organizations to save men will cease. It must be
lieve that this world can be regenerated, it must see that this is its business,
it must throw its entire energy into this great task. It must prove its truth
not so much by theoretical controversy as by what it does. By a radical
transformation of itself it must show that in reality, as well as in precept, it
believes in the intrinsic equality of all men. Unless these changes occur
the Protestant church will continue steadily to lose its hold upon the minds
of men.
It is just now important for society that the church take this high
practical course, for the social crisis can only be met by the united exertion
of all who realize the value of past human achievements and care to pre-
serve them. It is important for the church itself that it manifest a re-
vived and convincing loyalty to its practical principles, and develop them
to meet the requirements of modern emergencies. For the fact is not to
be blurred or evaded that theology and argumentation can no longer take
the place of action. Where the church is made an asylum for those who
desire to experience security of soul without materially bettering their lives
it may, in numbers, increase. In this numerical absorption it is customary
for the church to see the spread of religion. It resembles rather the ex-
tension of fashion and conformity, and a deeper diagnosis would see in it
the likeness of a deadly disease.
Storms of experience and discovery have lately swept through human
consciousness and altered its character, but the church has no recent chart,
and wise men are apprehensive of resigning themselves unreservedly to its
pilotage. The emphasis of Christianity is upon a life to come; its theory of
salvation refers to future existence; its principal test of salvation is the
adoption of a theory' relating to the future. But elsewhere the re-action
against the improper use of theory is making rapid way and with clear-
thinking, straight-seeing men this life is beginning to get its dues. Re-
9
ligion, they contend, has for its deepest purpose the increase of life, and
primarily of life here and now. The postponement in theory or practice of
the present life to the future places religion awry with the best tendencies
of the modern world. Life is ours in this world and it is and must be our
great concern; the true 'purpose of salvation is to save us 10 a better life
here; salvation, whether for the present or the future, cannot be obtained
by subscription to a theory. What then is to be said about a life to come ?
This simply, that we cannot conceive it but as growing out of the present,
and that salvation to it can only be hoped for as the result of life here, and
not of theory. For life and salvation hereafter there is all but universal
hope, but when they are made the goal of our present existence, when the
future is conceived as the absoluteness and perfection and totality of being
instead of as another phase of being, the helpfulness of this anticipation
turns to mischief and detriment. For the importance of the transient
present will shrink in comparison with the value of the infinite future.
Contempt of our brief earthly sojourn will cause us to do ourselves and it in-
justice, for it will diminish our care for the being and living of this moment,
where the supremest aim should be their exaltation and expansion. It con-
fines and lessens life and we sought its increase. And granting that salvation
beyond can be conditioned only upon fulness of life here, does it not fol-
low that this constant reference to the future, through its contracting in-
fluence upon the present, diminishes the chances of a future life? Is not
the entire process an inversion of the natural order of worlds and fatal to
our completeness ? ;
When we are rightly related to the present world we shall be rightly
related to the world to come. The hope of Christianity lies in a reversal of
its order of procedure. It must go to the next world through this, and not
come to this through the next; it must save mien to a future life by saving
them to the present one, instead of making the way to life here lie through
salvation to life hereafter. Because the hereafter has been so absorbing
many persons have not been saved even to this world. And at length it is
certain that if the doctrines of Christianity are all-essential, in one way
only can they overcome the world and obtain acknowledgement. Those
who believe must change the world. Those whose actions are vital and
innerved with undeflecting principles will command all followings, name
them as we may
A grave test is to be put upon institutions that are called Christian.
1
10
:
Will they take the highest ground of which we have knowledge, and firmly
adhere to it until society is remodeled? Or will they take the apparently
safer, middle course and bid for the favor of those who are determined to
sacrifice no more than necessity compels? In the latter case we may look
forward to sad times for the church. For a body of men will arise
who will choose the higher course, and to them the world will
gravitate. There will come men who believe intensely in the good at the
heart of the Universe, and in the power and reality of the ideal, as did the
Hebrew prophets. They will place themselves immovably upon the rock
of affirmation. They will shake off the yoke of irrationality and crystallized
antiquity which crushes human life and stays its progress. They will say,
,
“We ourselves will form a nucleus of rational existence. We will live in
the world as free beings, clearly and absolutely renouncing those inherited
ideas and damning customs, great and small, which repress and destroy
individuality and manhood. We will give ourselves from the remotest cor-
ners of our being to the best that we can conceive, believing that this very
power of conception is a revelation of corresponding realities lying at the
depths of the Universe and related to us. Our strongest desire shall be for
the pure truth , for from this source alone can life be drawn.” When such
men come—and let no one doubt that come they will there will be a
crumbling of outworn beliefs, of institutions that had their birth in a more
barbarous past and have out-lived it. These characters will make an end
of playing with religion. They will show their belief in God by an as-
tonishing method, namely by living as if there were a God.
And let any one who is familiar with the world ask himself what it man
would now be led to do who proposed to be absolute with his religion. He
would spend days and nights in the wilderness casting off oldi garments.
He would come forth with scarcely a point of attachment with what now
exists. But he would sit down in the very nidst of this contracted,
slavish, corrupt modern life, a free man, and live in truthful relations to
God under the tranquil light of heaven. He would care for none of the
possessions of this world, for none of the objects of human endeavor as
mankind now cares for them. He would scorn the endless self-seeking of
his fellowmen, their petty prudences, their contracted estimates of worth.
And upon the little spot which he had swept clear of the fossils of un-
reason, aided by reason and godliness, he would strive to reconstruct all
human values and relations. He would not return to nature, he would not
11
retire from the world. He would go forward to nature, and he would hew
out a model for humanity in the very heart of modern life.
That men of this stamp will appear there can be no reasonable doubt.
They are the inevitable, the necessary, outcome of our present conditions.
They will simply give utterance to the future. About them a new social
and religious world will form itself.
Will the church produce these men ? Will it yield itself to the high-
est inspiration of the time and lead in' that reformation of life, in that
searching transformation of aims and ideas, of society itself, which, only,
will satisfy the claims of reason and morality in this day? This is the
gravest question that the church has now to face. Before it other prob-
lems sink into insignificance. The success of the church depends upon its
ability to subordinate all other questions to this one. If the Christian or-
ganization cannot produce such reformers there is still a compensating way
open to her. She can welcome them when they appear and try to raise
herself to their level.
III.
The religion of our time needs to be permeated by a new love of truth.
As one cannot grow effectively in knowledge or intellectual power without
openness of mind, neither can he grow in religious comprehension and
depth without the same unprejudiced receptivity. The scientific spirit is
catholic. It keeps steadily in view as its controlling aim the ascertain-
ment of truth. Those of the most contradictory opinions may work har-
moniously in science. They work experimentally and the truth slowly
emerges out of their combined efforts.
The same purpose and feeling and method should characterize those
who labor for what concerns increase and consummation of life, namely
religion. Life is something that unfolds constantly and widens, and it is
therefore, like other branches of knowledge, a suliject for investigation.
New truth regarding it is being continually discovered; hence, in its sphere
also, the right attitude is that of openness and expectation. The office of
religion, as it works upon and within the individual, is to instruct liim and
to inspire him to the most complete realization of his being. If religion is
to perform this its legitimate and high function it must accept the contin -
ually recurring revelations of the human spirit, and thereby keep pace with
12
its growth. These revelations come with the deepening of human experi-
ence, and they are the latest word of God. Men cannot be saved to life
except ly listening to these utterances of the Almighty, and hy making
them the soul of their conduct.
This freedom of spirit, then, which listens finally to no voice but that
which speaks from the depths of one's own being, accomplishes the end of
religion. Largeness and fulluess of life, the unfoldment of being, at which
religion aims, can come to the individual only if he gives free play to his
own powers and tendencies and lets them grow naturally into the truth.
What the individual was intended to be he in this manner becomes. The
life element in him is nurtured and conserved and allowed to attain its per-
fect expression. This process is the development of individuality.
It has not always been seen that expansion of life, the developinent
and preservation of natural individuality, is the central purpose of religion.
Even to-day the freedom and independence of mind that are indispensable
to the ripening of individual strength are widely dreaded and discounten-
anced. In familiar Christianity an initial step is the subjugation of reason,
of the integrity of the self, not their preservation and emancipation. he
Christian system has become at length a complicated mechanism for the
restriction of original tendencies and the suppression of strength. This
course is self-destructive. It is religion bravely laboring to defeat its own
ends.
The position of every man toward his neighbor in religious concerns
should be, “What have you to tell me regarding this greatest of all sub.
jects ? ” I doubt if there is any sadder commentary upon our modern en-
lightenment than this, that one individual must often withhold his honest
opinions upon religious topics from fear of offending others. Those who
can take umbrage at the truthful expression of conviction merit the pro-
found compassion of their fellowmen. Their attitude of mind belongs to
those earlier times when we understood more vaguely than now the destiny
of man; it is essentially slavish. It is repressive of some of the rarest at-
tributes of the race.
Against this we hold it the duty of every man to revolt. If there was
ever in the days of inherited and compulsory reverence for authority a
proper time for submission to popular requirements and suppression of
hönest sentiments, that time is past. It cannot be urged that a compliant
course is useful. At present the course of utility is the course of outright.
13
in us.
and audible honesty, for: we are beset by troubles that have arisen from
temporizing and self-deception. Because this repressive tendency lingers
to damage and discourage, the strong man has a special mission. He must
live himself out into the world that others may learn of him that this is
likewise their supreme duty. He must utter forth the treasure of his in-
most self that those whose lives touch his may have the benefit of a true
human experience. An immeasurable increase of honesty and character
would there be if this were once believed in as the single acceptable way
for true men. There would occur a surprising and salutary moral and re-
ligious revolution. There would be a return to reality, for reality wells up
We have no higher duty than allegiance to it. For this sole pur-
pose is a man here, to let reality speak truthfully through him, to contrib-
ute himself to humanity. How small and mean and mistaken, then, to
mumble and prevaricate or be silent! And for what reason is this annihil-
ation of self? Because the remuant of some soul that has starved and
stultified its substance would erect itself as the pattern for all humanity,
and bids us eat no more the bread of life. Not so, we are compelled to
cry, by all that we reverence in the Universe! We pain these phantoms
by our singularity and they would nullify us. They are terrified by our
insistence on the duty of having flesh and blood, and being what God
meant us to be. And yet every individual is a point at which Divinity
speaks, and in a new language. To these revelations of Deity we are en-
joined to close our ears. Is it the youthful temper of imitation that makes
us obey these counsellors, while we deny God; or is it fondness for their
friendship, or fear ? Surely they are not true friends who would have us
commit moral suicide. Perchance we are enamored of safe and reputable
silence. Every representative of our race that has contributed to inake life
what it is for us broke through the fabric of current respectabilities and
showed where there was something more respectable. Woe be it to us in
this age of enlightenment, if we do not put a new and more rational habit
into the blood of our race, and make it easier for those who shall follow us
to liye as men.
That there should be some possible penalties, attached to return to
truth, to the harmonizing of seeming with being, convincingly proves the
need in which the world stands of such a revolution. These penalties are
the safe-guards of stagnation. When men of strength and original view
keep silence regarding their convictions because of the dangers of public
14
t
opinion, it is easy to foresee the surpassingly injurious effects of this power
on weaker minds. It narrows and limits and sometimes totally perverts
their growth, and the world loses their contribution to progress. No sacri-
fice that would help to bring this mutilating custom of humanity to an end
would be too great. And yet every one who has an independent thought
still unexpressed is refusing to make this sacrifice. Everyone who writhes
into conformity with what he cannot unqualifiedly believe, is even worse ;
he is a traitor to himself and to his fellows who may rightly demand the
service of his one, or five, or ten talents. Not by forced conformity, or
silence, or huskiness of voice can he benefit anyone, and by far the least
those who clamor for lethargy of the faculties on a subject so vital as re-
ligion. What other men want is a knowledge of our own experiences.
They are struggling in secret over the same difficulties, and to know the
way that we have honestly traveled cannot fail to give them light and
strength. Let no one ask another to believe as he does, but let him freely
reveal his inner life and opinions.
These considerations teach that the attitude of the religionist and of
the scientist should be the same. . One seeks the truth, the other the good,
and the finding of each is a perpetual process in which every seeker aids.
The reason that science is today a resistless progressive force in the civi-
lized world, and the current religion paralyzed and feeble and hardly able
to keep itself respected, is that the former has recognized this principle of
growth while the latter has not. The current ,religion will never recover
its lost ground, and it ought not to recover it, until in this fundamental re-
spect it has changed. It asks men to 'adopt' certain opinions and there-
after to be dead to all irreconcilable considerations. It says : This is
true ; accept it and live by it.” It should say:
It should say: "This is my conviction ;
it is the expression of my deepest self, after careful study and reflection and
growth. Test candidly my belief and the reasons for it, aided by all the
knowledge you can get. Improve upon it, or overthrow it, if you can.
And let your own final opinions be the outcome of all your.labors, the re-
sult of the necessity of your nature, Grow to them, do not force yourself
to have them. And above all permit no human being to draw you from the
path of your own judgment. Meantime, while you are thinking with abso-
lute integrity, likewise act with absolute integrity. Act, as you think,
according to the highest that you know." The religion of the time does
not often speak in this manner, and the same vice permeates our institu-
CC
15
tions of learning, so that perfect freedom of thought and expression on sub-
jects relating to life is rarely found. The penalty is a heavy one, and we
are paying it in the form of feeble characters and timid thinkers, and a re-
ligion apparently tottering to its fall.
The good can only be promoted and our knowledge of it enlarged
when each individual, becoming an investigator of himself, searches out and,
assiduously cultirates whatever elements of good he finds in his being in
the way peculiar and suitable to him, and presents himself and bis discov-
eries an original contribution to the total good in the world. The good is
always in individuals, and living, not something hanging over them in the
air to be captured and held fast in the form of an opinion. An opinion is
almost worthless because so essentially meaningless until it has grown out
of one's native tendencies and epitomizes one's intimate character. Hence
our practice of imposing opinions upon others is a twofold error. It does
not reproduce in anyone a life that vitally conforms to the imparted
thought, for transplanted opinions are like memorized formulas and cannot
inspire the soul ; and furthermore, human spirits encased in an iron gar-
ment whose form they must assume never mature, they never confer their
unique quota of goodness and truth on the world, the fruits that no one
else could yield and they were created to bear die in the bud.
The matter may be looked at in several ways. The common estimate
finds it a virtuous proceeding; some consider the general welfare, and re:
yret that there needs must be such sacrifice of costly energy; a few think
of the mutilated individuals themselves and ponder the inscrutable economy
that must wither mind and morals to obtain spiritual beauty. But the
judgment that is worthy our thought is that of living and late morality.
It does not satisfy itself with weak regrets and relapse into speculative ac-
quiescence. It pronounces these practices to be sinful practices and de-
clares that they must cease wherever it can permeate. Are they performed
in the name of religion ? Then this religion in sanctioning them is inimi-
cal to God and man. For each of these marred beings, made, we say, by
God and in the image of God, was intended to perfect the potentialities of
his divinely implanted nature. When men come forward to thwart this
sacred potency they wrest the universe from God. It is sublime insolence.
They assume a knowledge of creative purposes more intimate and deep
than has Omniscience himself. This is atheism, true and pure and noxious.
These purposes relating to the individual are not advertised to the public;
16
only he for whom they exist knows them; they disclose themselves in his
innermost being, in the tendencies of his nature. In them the ruler of
worlds reveals himself to each unit of the race ; the office of religion is to
teach the individual how to detect these tendencies in himself and to fol-
low them with singleness of purpose to their highest fulfilment.
Opinions arrived at through freedom lead toward this end. They be-
come a part of the fibre of the person, the living truth for him. Mankind
must attain this wisdom, it must learn the sacredness of the person and
insist that he be not tampered with. A religion that does not encourage
and develop individuality is defective and impotent. It is not yet the
world religion.
When these truths are recognized religion will assume the attitude of
philosophy and science. It will be in harmony, then, with all forces work-
ing to perfect mankind ; not despairingly antagonistic to them. Deny this
antagonism we may, but it exists and must exist while religion has methods
that ignore experience and reason. On this higher ground differences of
opinion will not be assailed as calamitous. They will be recognized as
riching life and as valuable elements of that whole from which the true
and good arise in their completer form for each generation. In compari-
son with the average human character possible under the repressive, self-
interested, effeminating system of the present, the characters that will then
appear in abundance will have colossal proportions.
en-
17
The Old and the New Life.
No one has ever undertaken to compute the effects upon mankind in
these imodern days, of insufficient exercise of the voluntary muscles. While
we pass, as we are now passing, from the period essentially physical and
muscular to that of prevalent brain and intelligence and refined emotions,
we are certain, with characteristic human one-sidedness, to slight what we
seem about to transcend and exaggerate what we begin to admire. And we
are slighting the body.
But the body is a very good friend of the mind, is partner in all men-
tal acts, is the masculine parental element of not the lowest instincts only
but of the purest feelings and noblest longings. Medical science has seen
that an invalid may long preserve a sweet temper, but under incurable suf-
fering will almost certainly decay into querulousness. The process is not
that of soul or spirit resisting the inroads of disease in an alien body, and
capable of eternal resistance but for the failure of its own faith and willing-
ness to be firm. No, disease encroaches upon the elements of which we are
framed, it strikes one organ first, perhaps, and begins to communicate pro-
gressive imperfection to all. If the liver is the centre of trouble the vigor
of all processes abates; the blood comes back from the lungs impure, the
heart beats feebler, the brain goes lame; and thus all other organs begin to
co-operate with the sick one to make it sicker and to drag the whole system
down. The blood that returns to the recalcitrant liver is scant of the qualj.
ties that repair because the lungs are now crippled, and it runs laboriously
and slowly on account of the disaffection of the heart and the reservoirs of
propulsive, nerve force.
We usually neglect the physical for a singular reason.
It is to save
time. We would like to expand the brain life to the utinost. It seems to
us that the moments taken from the brain are squandered. That the brain
18
?
and body are functionally inseparable has not penetrated our theory. That
physical pleasure is glorious and necessary we seem to be making ourselves
forget. The wholesome sensation of fine physical existing is, next to life
itself, the choicest of heaven's gifts. Nothing can take its place. There
is no joy in genius without it; in its absence the moral man asks himself the
meaning and profit of morality.
In our adoration of the mental we do not perspicaciously see for what
we wish to save time. Is it that life shall be more wealthy in experiences ?
It is dangerous to have no guide in the selection of experiences. By crowd-
ing in some things others are crowded out. No one transcends his capacity.
He inherits a fixed degree of life power: if he is skillful the most will come
of it, if unskillful he will never climb the topmost peak of his potentiality,
If we crave more mentality than nature planned for us we sacrifice both
mental and physical powers and fall in disappointment and decrepitude.
There are pre-established harmonies. The secret of secrets that we shall
spend our days searching and applying is the equilibrium of our forces, that
we may wear no faculty out by wilful over-use, neglecting the noble treas-
ures of fresh and untried talent. Scheining to circumvent our capacities is
a most inortal mistake. When we cannot enjoy a foreșt the power to make
a great speech or improve the calculus is piteous; when the eye shows care,
and vibrancy has died from the laugh, it were nothing to have taken a city
or absorbed the railroad systems of a continent. We do not gain time, or
cogency, or bliss by disregarding the balance in nature; the condition of
completeness is to learn how all elements of our constitution minister to one
another, and to apply the law of this service.
Various are the misconceptions growing out of the past that lead us
astray. Our traditions concerning labor involve us in troublesome shallows.
It has been thought demeaning to perform physical labor of any but selected
sorts; an idea that lingers with us and is potent still. The misconception
formerly affected only a few. It was not optional with the most of mankind
to be genteel; they were outcasts by necessity and the accompaniment of
their inferiority was manual toil. Besides this they were men at arms, fight-
ing for their masters or superiors. And the superiors themselves? They
too were fighters—in earnest most of the time, the rest of it in play, and
they were always training in warlike exercises. So, although labor was
contemptuously esteemned, it did not result in the abandonment of physical
life by the patrician clements. Far otherwise. Their absorbing function
19
was physical.. They were warriors, leading the most active lives.
Modern life changes the picture. War becomes exceptional, not con-
stant. The pratrician class loses its primitive function. It separates into
two sections, the people of leisure and the managers of commerce. The for-
mer are the true descendants of the earlier patrician caste, they inherited
wealth without labor; the latter have gradually forced their way to recog-
nition, and have had their wealth to create. For the definite and necessary
and energetic occupation that they lost the former have fostered sports, ri-
ding and hunting and fishing, open air games of strength and skill. The
patricians that emerged from trade have not had leisure. They were obliged
to make themselves patrician by amassing wealth, which occupied their days
and nights. They neglected the sports of necessity and being from ancestral
habit and tradition workers more than warriors or sportsmen, had no inclina-
tion to physical pursuits for nothing but pastime.
The nature of their new activities was mental rather than physical. There
were two general grades of the new labor, the one ownership and manage-
ment, the other the subordinate processes which were extensively manual and
muscular. The first involved a minimum of physical exertion, and the
greater part of it none. But it was this and not the other, the managing
and mental functions and not the subordinate ones, that conferred the patri-
cian degree. In other words, the new patricians of the industrial order were
divorced in their occupations from the use of the body, and since it did not
descend to them naturally in any other form, it dropped out of their lives.
In this evolution the uppermost criterion of gentility makes against the
physical at nearly all points. In great centres of trade a distinction is drawn
between large and small enterprises, and wholesale merchants are perceived
to be qualified for a higher social elevation than retailers. This discrimina-
tion was another against the body. Sons of “good” families may become
bank clerks and book-keepers, and this is congenial to their birth and social
repute, but they have to defy public opinion to learn a trade or follow ordi-
nary labor. In the one case they bring the physical powers into play, in the
other it is the brain they work, mechanically, in a close and generally şunles :
place, and this they do through all the best hours of the day. Nevertheless
it is genteel and manual toil is not. In the shadowy differentiations of
Save on the farm, wbich however carries with it so many drawbacks that most who can avoid
it.
20
their progeny
social eminence the preference goes against physical duration and welfare.
What is the result? The breeding of a class of physical weaklings and
thereby a class of mental weaklings. Every inducement that society com-
mands is used to snare the best specimens of the race into these deteriorating
conditions. The keen spur of social ambition pricks men wherever they are
in the scale of life, and as they go up they leave the support and growth of
the physical forces through exercise and sun and air, fountain sources of all
forms of vigor, below. And what is this process when stript.of social encomi-
ums? It is the organized promotion of the choicer individuals of the race to
conditions of slow but, certain death. It moves them toward an imagined,
chimerical eminence of human things, in order to destroy their vigor and spoil
It analogues the church method with its saints, and colleges
of a late date with their bachelor fellowships for the best minds.* It was
humanly ordained that such should not marry, that whatever eminence of
piety or intelligence showed itself was to be headed off, cornered and extir-
pated. The finest characteristics were struck from the breed; the human
stock was skimmed of its cream. Celibacy is not in our day enjoitied upon
those who show capacity for the superior places ; they may have posterity,
but deteriorated posterity, posterity worse than none. Nature does not for-,
forgive this arch crime of civilization, the holding of physical concerns in
little esteem.
There are sometimes advantages with the change, as where promotion
enlarges the income. Food and domestic environment are improved, there
are vacations and in some instances leisure. But commonly the mechanic
who assumes the mantle of gentility by becoming a clerk does not gain in dol-
lars. Nevertheless he loses his exercise and digestion. Our farmers are said
to overwork, and the report is that the clerks out-marched them in the last
That would not hinder me from preferring the farmer's organization,
and knowing that his son will become proprietor of the store before any of its
town-born clerks. The-robust children of rural districts, of less cultivated
habits of attention than town-born children, are found to be slower in receiv-
ing ideas,' observers tell us; but with cultivation they are brought up to
equal capacities of attention, and to greater retentiveness of the matter taught,
than the common classes of town-born children,'t
We might as well admit that we cannot cheat the body of its, open air
War.
See Francis Galton. .
+ Chadwick's National Health, p 100
21
life without stealing from the brain its best thoughts and its power and im-
pulse to execute.
The higher avenues of life are of course deleterious for other
reasons, and our genteel dismissal of the categorical imperative of
bodily law is therefore the more to our loss. The internecine quality
of competition increases with the commercial altitude of competitors,
and the stony path to financial eminence is for most of those who bend their
steps thither the way to hell and destruction. The Bible uses such forcible
language to impress upon man that conduct ruinous to the perfect action of
the bodily elements, and in some particular sense of those latest manufactured
elements so directly associated with the higher sentiments, lead to the deepest
deeps of suffering and degradation, to damnation and hell. And adapting
biblical revelation and language to the revelations of science in this day, we
find agreement in this, that the way to wealth is the way to hell. Compare the
canonical denunciations of the pursuit of riches with the ultimatum of the
scientist :* Psychical disturbances are a prolific source of diseases of the
nervous system, and it is probable that as civilization advances these causes
will exercise a more and more. predominant influence in the production of
nervous disease. The depressing passions, such as fright, alarm, disgust,
terror, and rage, lave, no doubt, in all ages, exerted a deleterious influence
on the nervous system ; but in the present day the keen competition evoked
by the struggle for existence in the higher departments of social life must
subject the latest evolved portion of the nervous system to a strain so great,
that those only possessing the strongest and best balanced nervous system
can escape unscathed,”'
The breaking of the balance of the nervous system is hell. The nerv-
ous system is a delicate musical instrument; if you disturb the least of its
atoms the harmony begins to falter. It depends upon such apparently re-
mote things as the girth of the chest, the lifting power, and the density of
the flesh. There is a moment of utmost physical perfection and at that very
moment the nervous system is playing the Ninth Symphony and
singing supernal songs. A day indoors drives out Beethoven and shuts up
heaven. A year at the counter or desk or dictionary may forever cloud the
face of God. When love dies God dies, said Tolstoi, if not in these words
Dr. Rose,
+ See Popular Science Monthly, Feb. 1888, p. 508. Art, by Mary T. Bissell, M. D.
22
by suggestion in his wonderful title “Where love is there God is.'' Love
and God are functions of the nervous system. In that moment of utmost
physical perfection love is alive and God is there. God dies by inches out
of most lives. These beautiful presences, God and love, depend on the love
and God capacity. An ounce of food taken daily beyond the need of food
banishes daily more than an ounce of God. The progressive atrophy of the
tissues through want of use denotes the atrophy of God and love. Love is
the self-annihilating instinct of one being in the presence of another—and .
the power of instincts is greatest in the prime of man. Love is charity, and
in the immense recuperative morning of life generosity is supreme.
Let us be not mocked. Age kills God.
“What is it to grow old ?
*
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young ;
It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion-nope. t
We must grow old but we need not grow prematurely old. Every depart-
ure from the perfect physical life is expiated by premature age. Age
neither suffers nor enjoys. Where feeling is not there God is not. The
tranquility of an old man is not happiness. “Do you say that old age is
unfeeling?” asks Oliver Wendell Holmes.
os It has not vital energy
enough to supply the waste of the more exhausting emotions." Can
we postpone old age? This is the question at the heart of all bibles and
moral treatises. This same youthful octogenarian, Dr. Holmes, gives us
warning with genial sadness of what must happen to every daring survivor
who scales the white peaks of age. “Nature's kindly anodyne is telling
upon us more and more with every year. Our old doctors used to give an
opiate which they called the black drop.' It was stronger than laudanum,
and, in fact, a dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that
potent drug in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of
need,—the later stages of life. She commonly begins administering it at
about the time of the grand climacteric,'the ninth septennial period, the
. of Matthew Arnold, Growing old.
23
*
sixty-third year. More and more freely she gives it, as the years go on, to
her grey-haired children, until, if they last long enough, every faculty is
benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep under its benign influence."
Happiness is contingent upon the degree of life and sensation and these have
ebbed low in the old man. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him
with the scythe so often as with the sand bag. He does not cut, but he
stuns and stupifies.
There are no tumultuous sufferings in age, but I cannot acquit the pre-
maturely old of the sorrows of hell. In them “festers the dull remem-
brance of a change” that wisdom might have deferred.
Physical and moral are at last one.' They have the same root and
trunk; we differentiate them by analysis, and fictitiously. Moral pains are
as physical as the hand or foot. They are the discomfiture of the physical
elements, and are caused alike by infractions of the so-called moral law and
by bodily distempers. ' A cold not only sharpens the knives of conscience
but its effect is incipient moral insanity. We may be sure that conduct
which in none of its consequences tends to the destruction of the physical is
not immoral. The greater part of moral suffering in the world is the product
of a misunderstanding. Actions are supposed to be injurious that are not
injurious, and they are met with the moral lash. The moral castigation
causes unmeasured suffering but suffering that was gratuitous, mistaken,
ignorance-born. "Terrible to me are the awful sufferings from trifles and
unnecessary catastrophes,” said Rakhmetof. +
Thus. at last all morality and all religion, all questions of the conduct of
life and the attainment of happiness and heaven and God, return in the
grand sweep of the circle wherein the universe is compassed to this,--the
perfection of man's body. Whatever goods we know are ascending
goods while the sun of life goes up, lessening all the fading afternoon until
darkness sombrely invests them and terminates all. It were worthy the ec-
stasies and sacrifices of all the best of a generation or of ten generations to
establish this central and spherical character of the body, at bottom the grop-
ing aim of fetish-worshipper and priest and scientist in all generations since
the cenozoic time, altho obscured by many obscurations of theory, conscious
purpose and method.
of Over the Tea-Cups, p. 30,
In Tcbernuish vesky's A Vital Question.
24
--
I have gone a long way and said much to show how deep and heavy the
curse of our commercial and social method is, that it weighs down to hell-a
tangible, present, demonstrable hell, the mother-hell of all moral obliquities
—and that it is not to be lifted until the flaming sword of a higher thought
banishes the prime satan of gain by one man through the labor and loss of
another, competition, and all that brood.
But there are many more manifestations of the curse by which we die,
-knowing the remedy. A vitiating fallacy of our lives is that goods, material
possessions, are requisite to culture and gentility. After some few ordinary
comforts of life it is social standing, the patrician rank, that people crave;
and because wealth and standing have been cousins-german until now in the
world's evolution, they imagine them inseparable organically and forever.
There is no vital bond between them. Their association in the past was
natural. Culture required leisure, and leisure was freedom from drudgery.
It was bought by wealth or power, either of which engaged that drudgery
should be done by someone else. In the earlier organization of the world it
was only possible to cultivate a few persons at a time. If the effort had been
made to cultivate many, it must have failed, and the failure would have
hindered even the few who won culture from getting it. It was a matter of
arithmetic. The means of culture were few; had they been spread out, had
there been a little less for those who captured them, it must have been at
the expense of cultivation itself.
But it may be going too far to say that it was a matter of arithmetic.
Perhaps had the men been different there might have been an extension of
culture without sacrifice of its intensity. But the men were not different.
It took thousands of years to make them different, and this process of mak-
ing them different was culture. Culture was then a different thing from
now; not different in essence but different in the qualities it had to train.
In order that the development of the race might go on at all it was essential
to establish certain' habits in the race. Bagehot has taught us of what pri-
mary importance it was for the development of society that obedience should
become a radical instinct. "Perhaps,” says that writer, "every young
Englishman who comes nowadays to Aristotle or Plato is struck with their
conservatism : fresh from the liberal doctrines of the present age, he wonders
at finding in those recognized teachers so much contrary teaching. They
both-unlike as they are—hold with Xenophon—so unlike both—that man
25
*
is the 'hardest of all animals to govern.' Of Plato it might indeed be
plausibly said that the adherents of an intuitive philosophy, being the 'tories
of speculation,' have commonly been prone to conservatism in government;
but Aristotle, the founder of the experience philosophy, ought, according to
that doctrine, to have been a liberal, if any one ever was a liberal.
In fact,
both of these men lived when men had not had time to forget’: the difficul-
ties of government. We have forgotten them altogether. We reckon, as
the basis of our culture, upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, of pre-
scriptive governability, which these philosophers hoped to get as a principal
result of their culture. We take without thought as a datum what they
hunted as a quaesitum.” *
People were then learning the rudiments of morality. A great deal
had to be postponed. The power of inhibition was cultivated by asceticism,
but this aceticism dwarfed nature in other parts. The way to eternal life is
through the portal of sacrifice, of death,” says Davidson.
But centuries of grim experience have now prepared the ground for
culture of higher morality ; hereditary traits like obedience are fairly estab-
lished and even too well established. We must ascertain the nature of this
higher morality, what outward conditions it must create to accomplish its
dominion of the world.
The first and sustaining stratum of the new order is, as we have shown,
that the physical life be promoted to its right rank. It shall not be left to
casual volition, or an evanescent impulse to steal an hour for the body
against conscience and financial welfare ; but shall become a part of the un-
alterable ordering of the day and year and century, for each man and
woman, a part of his function as tenant of the earth, not to be shirked with:
out deep pangs of spirit and stringent social penalties. The social opprobrium
shall set sternly against those who tempt or compel or permit their fellows' to ex-
ceed the natural limits of exertion, whether physical or mental, or who them-
selves from false ambition or perverted conscience over-step them.
And how is this to be done? Not by subsidizing games or eulogizing
self-restraint. It is to be done by making manual labor a function neces-
sary to each, and undelegable, absolutely undelegable by the well. The
manual workers now. overwork, not because overwork is a necessity
unavoidable if the world is to have its present quantity of goods for con-
؛
Physics and Politics. III
26
sumption ; they overwork because a large percentage of the population, to its
own hurt, does no manual work at all. Those who do no physical labor,
whether brain workers or idlers, suffer from physical disuse and softening
tissues, not because there is no bodily labor to be performed, but because so-
ciety has so put itself together that it is disgraceful, to do the bodily labor;
or difficult or impossible, from the mechanical arrangement of industry, to do
some without doing too much.
A simple change of industrial mechanism will correct this monstrous
evil. The manual worker now stands at his post eight, ten, twelve, fifteen
hours daily, always the same man. Let this custom be modified so that those
who wish may work one-half the day instead of all day, or even less than
half, being then replaced by other men wishing to work but part of the day.
There would be some increase of complexity, tho very slight as against the
enormous advantages. The feeling of utility would give character and at-
tractiveness to the exercise one took with a practical end. All the argu-
ments that have been advanced for manual training flow to the support of
this system. The one-sidedness of business men and students, their de-
ficiency in manual skill and lack of brain.culture responding to manual prac-
tice, would be mitigated. Why should a man go irksomely to a gymnasium
for exercise when a fellow man in the neighboring shop has twice the exer-
cise each day that he was made for?
But how would it affect the productive capacity of the brain working
managers, for whom the day is already too short and whose midnights prolong
it, to subtract some hours for an alien occupation ? Nothing would more
enhance it. For now the manager is jaded and congested, then he would
have freshness and the energy of sufficient muscular life. What a man does
is not so much a question of time consumed on it, as of brain condition
brought to bear, which varies directly with physical vigor. And then these
managers are also men, sent here to live, not to be scape-goats for the inabil-
ity of others. At the loss of some material products is it not their right to
live a little more pleasantly and lastingly in place of cutting an air line to
counting-room glory and extinction? The costly residence and fortune of
Thomas Scott, a typical industrialist in life and death, remain to his own gen-
eration and he is dead, thirty years too soon. Franklin Gowen, another
manager, born for eighty years, dies at fifty-four.
fifty-four. “Perhaps," the New
York World moralizes, she should be regarded as another victim of the
American pace, which kills. He worked too hard, crowded too much into
27
his life, worried too much, and-paid the penalty.” The industrial order-
ing of our period extracts too much from the managers. Set life over against
a dry goods store, a thousand miles of railroad, all the petroleum in the ground,
the very world itself, and what man would hesitate? Sleep and dynamic
blood are the price our managers are to pay for their industrial eminence and
fortunes.
But how does it occur that industry hinges all in all on a handful of
captains? In some lines of manufacture only a few producers succeed while
numbers fail because there is a scarcity of capable managers in their depart-
ments. What is the cause of this but the general low intellectual level of
those engaged in industry? The workers cannot become intelligent. Man-
aging capacity cannot be produced if each man works all day at one thing.
The blindness of the captains is their own destruction. They believe in
making conditions that shall train for them the fewest assistants—they call
them competitors-in fabricating what the world needs, and so they take a
weight upon their own shoulders that right soon crushes them down.
I need hardly call attention to the rent these few skilled managers
charge for themselves because they are few. Rent is paid for good land be-
cause good land is scarce; rent likewise has to be paid to good managers be-
cause good managers are scarce. The good land is not responsible for keep-
ing itself scarce , the good managers make a special point of keeping good
managers scarce, because this enables those there are to collect rent of the
consumers of what they make. It was never believed that scarcity of good
land is a profitable thing for mankind, tho it is an immensely profitable thing
for the good land owners. It is not a good thing for mankind to have few
skilled managers, tho it is financially a great stroke for the managers them-
selves to keep down the supply, and to rent themselves out at a great figure.
Because there are but few skilled managers the product is small. Con-
sumers not only pay a high price for what they get—this being scarcity rent
for the good managers—but they are denied a sufficiency. Scarcity of mana-
gers operates as a trust: the out-put is readily kept so small as to yield a
monopoly price.
A breach in the ranks of the industrial captains that let in a few more
captains would give a welcome relief to this over-worked class, tho it also
diminished their profits. It is not worth while to get nothing but business
out of life, even at monopoly profit. The objection is that some one else en-
joys the profit. The plan of having every one take a turn at something
28
manual each day solves this riddle of a limited captaincy. Men of large
brain tract brought to operate mechanical processes will master them and re-
lieve the weary captains. The workmen, too, will become a new race of
men. Getting a little bodily reprieve, their minds must begin to move and
before long will evolve inventions and quicker processes. It is curious that
a manager does not study the psychology of his men. I have heard working
men and women say that the work lags toward the end of the day, on account
of their fatigue, and confess how they set their pace slow in the morning
when they are fresh and husband their strength for the long journey. There
is no particular economy to the employer in this. Boys have described to me
the speed of their work when a half holiday was in sight, or even one un-
usual hour of vacation before sun-down.
The injury to men through minimal division of labor is one of the
heavy indictments against modern society. The advantages of division of
labor are so great that we are not to relinquish them, but the hardships that
they involve we must remove. Division of labor is now division of occupa-
tion and division of men. It is however unnecessary that a man should do
the same work from dawn till night, for rotation of duties is possible, divid-
ing the day into fourths, and giving each man four specialties—to vary the
monotony and illuminate the brain. The objections are, loss of time in
learning four arts instead of one, loss of time in changing work, apathy of
the workmen themselves to the improvement; in reply to which : the sub-
division of a process is quickly learned, fifteen minutes lost in change twice
a day would act like recesses at school, and the workmen are apathetic be-
cause they have lived too long in a treadmill.
Of course such arrangement would be only the beginning of economic
rationalizing of industry. After it, is necessary: a syetem of promotions
reaching to the errand boys. Said a western employer of labor, It is my
interest to keep each of my men ignorant of all but his particular work; it is
their interest to get as much knowledge of the business as possible, and each
side acts accordingly. If they become too versed and proficient they require
pay for it, and I find it cheaper to pay them less' and have them know less.
The more, they know the more consideration they want. An inside knowl-
edge of the business makes thein valuable to other firms, or dangerous com-
My policy is therefore to restrict their sphere.'. This again illus-
trates that, tho efficient helpers and captains of industry are needed, the-pres-
petitors.
.
29
ent captains thwart their evolution all they can. A man of the world said,
* There are more men in business who do not advance their employes' wages
and position when they deserve it, than those who do.' The government
endorses this injustice. The head clerk of a postoffice, who is kept through
successive changes of postmasters because he understands the business, which
the postmaster does not, receives lower salary than his superior. This is
discouraging to merit.
A blacksmith's apprentice whom I know was paid $2.75 a week for the
first year, with promise of one dollar a week more yearly until five years had
been served. This reward cannot be called stimulating. But at the end of
the second year the employer refused to make the stipulated advance, excus-
ing himself by saying that business was dull. There seems to be hardly
anything that a working-man can be sure of.
Are working-men worth no more at the end of ten years than of two ?
Some say not, and verily this may be true after ten years of sordid, spirit-
breaking life. They are not solicited by their environment to become better.
The compulsion of opportunities, crushing others to get them, is an act of
savages. The better natures shrink from this brutal self-assertion, and
consign themselves to more honorable lowliness if not extinction. All em-
ployments should be made schools, educating the operators froni grade to
grade. Those who are not capable of much progress shall be rewarded for
faithfulness and length of service by increasing pay. The doing of mechani-
cal, disagreeable or monotonous work year after year, deserves a rising re-
ward precisely because it is 'mechanical, disagreeable, or monotonous.
: There are honorable exceptions to this hard selfishness of the employer
toward the employed, and when they occur they show how crazy the old in-
dustrial hulk we are riding in is, and how the wise industrialist will put off
in a skiff by himself. Industry in our day and generation is like unto a man
who planted a field and put no richness thereon, and when the harvest time
came the product was small. He starves his men of human constituents and
they, because figs do not grow on thistles, starve him of his individual pro-
duct. The good industrialist feedeth his flock. It is great prudence to
feed one's flock. So it has been proved by the Richards Brothers, who are
wholesale and retail grocers in the town where I live. If any one cares for
worldly prudence, and some do, they have proved that it is great worldly
prudence, and this will ensure its general adoption. They were paying their
assistants $10 a week, a sum considered sufficient in these parts. They raised
30
, the salaries of all uniformly to $12, without being solicited. They
give their men regular holidays and require them to take vacations, and
they are now contemplating seven o'clock evening closing of their retail de-
partment, in the face of a backward sentiment of the community, where
most stores put out their lights at nine or after. The employes of this es-
tablishment work unusually well.
But the principal effect is upon the public. In these days of en-
trenched selfishness no one readily fathoms the motive of a man who volun-
tarily throws away on each employe two dollars a week more than he must.
Some explanations by the firm disclosed the point. “We discovered,
explained the Richards Brothers, "that one of our men, tho thrifty and
careful, was able to save nothing from his ten dollars and provide for his
family. And yet he is one of the creators of our income. Is he not en-
titled to something more than a bare living if we are?” These employers
do not have an inflated opinion of what they have done; they know that it
was an act of clear justice, not generosity,--a thing they were bound in
honor to do. It had a bracing influence upon the other clerks of the town,
for some saw that they were also entitled to higher wages, which their em-
ployers, in consequence of what the Richards had done, could not deny.
The episode shows how much more than words actions are, and how the
thinking individual may walk through the standing straw of custom and
make a path.
The same firm has just established a reading room for the public, in its
retail store. It has created something like a panic in domestic circles by
carrying its respect for justice home and paying the persons who are usually
called servants what they earn.
Ashtabula is neither a very old nor a very
rich village, but there is a distinction between the sewing-girl and her mis-
tress nevertheless. There is an upper and lower class just as there is in
London and Hoochoofoo. I do not know but this is right and proper, tho I
am very much confused to know which is upper and which is lower. I
have noticed that the class which dresses best and has the money is called
upper, but I have discovered so many depravities of character in this class,
which I do not find in the other class, that I think a mistake has surely been
made. The class that suffers from these depravities cannot be an upper
class, and the class that is without them is not a lower one. . Pride is one of
these depravities, the people who have pride thinking they are better than
other people; and this is a sure mark of low breeding and depraved charac-
:
31
ter. Members of the "upper " class almost always bear this' mark, which
is a badge of servility to base ideas and of inferior associations. Pride is the
food and drink of the supper” class, and it is no wonder that on such diet
it becomes morally scrofulous. We have in Ashtabula, as there are, God
save us ! in other villages, a number of persons who are called the better
people.” They are the people of "society," and the upper class. After
much reflection and observation I say of these better people that the ideas
upon which they pride themselves and the attributes by. which they know
they are better than others are corrupting, and that in assorting the children
of the town their children must be marked damaged stock. If I am brought
up to think that the person who cooks my food for wages is a less person
than myself, one properly relegated to the kitchen and kitchen-chamber and
the companionship of underlings, my moral vision is distorted and I am con-
demned to degradation of soul throughout my life. I like a man who goes
heroically down the decalogue, breaking the whole ten, better than the glis-
tering better sort, who are always at work on their social fences to let the
proper individuals in and keep the improper individuals out. I know well
that their ubiquitous occupation is fencing and that while they are talking
with me about Dr. Koch's lymph they are weighing their own social merits
against mine. If I am born to a family of social fence-makers I know that
unless I am a hero of consummate mold my doom is written ; for whether I
pray at the church or entertain a guest at home I am driving a social picket,
and when I marry I am digging a social post-hole. All the springs of the
inoral life of persons reared to this occupation are tainted; all their motives
are frivolous and mean, and they are hollow and false, because, for the
standards of their conduct, they descend not into the mighty realities of Nature,
but abide in the senseless proprieties of their social class. Do you wonder
why their children are rakes and dolls? So when I learned that a family
had decided to pay its maid-servant what she earned I was not surprised to
learn soon after that a right christian pledge had been circulated among the
affrighted house-wives to pay their kitchen girls not more than a dollar and
fifty a week. I wonder they did not bind themselves to charge their ser-
vants for second-table board and garret lodging.
The upper class is uncompaniopable because it has staked off the sky of
.conversation and one cannot lead the talk upon a vital theme without com-
ing up against the barbed wire of a prejudice. I may not hear the select in-
formation or the cultivated' intonations and complicated implications, nor be
32'
1
sure that the physical postures are right, but my soul is not lacerated with
moral evasions when I talk with a common person and I know that his
means have not allowed him to cultivate deception as an art.
It is not always necessary to go to Boston or Berlin for great informa-
tion. I noticed all these things in Ashtabula ; but I do not want anybody
to think that Ashtabula is the only place where the “upper" class is er-
roneously called upper. I have noticed the same thing in Saybrook and
Philadelphia and wherever I have been. I have learned to look to the poor
man for help when I needed it, and if I arrived at a town with no money in
my purse I would never go to the man with a fine house or the minister to
ask where I might find work. Give me the poor man for friendship. He
hasn't much to give me but I know he'll not hesitate to give that-if I am in
want. The rich man cannot be a friend, for a friend is ready to give away
everything on emergency. The genius of a rich man is to keep and not to
give. What is the defining quality of elevation? Friendship. Who then
are the upper class ?
Without a system of promotions according to industry and merit and
length of service, the working people liave nothing to cheer them on to ef-
fort. Hope is a great economic factor. It will revolutionize industry by
and by as surely as electricity will. It has not yet been harnessed to pro- .
duction. By hope the middle class, when they were poor, invented and
created the gigantic industries that bring down wealth from heaven to their
owners like manna; by hope the lower class will find out how to make the
earth a paradise. Only. we must give them the gift of hope. I think of
the great wasted. powers of the common people as I think of the steam that
used to idle about the planet before this century, conscious of its latent pow-
ers and chafing for the birth of its interpreter.
And on the other hand it is premonitory when the common people are
gradually but surely deprived of that remnant of hope which has found
them in courage to wait ever a little longer for the day of deliverance. Our
true rulers, the Goulds and Rockefellers, are taking possession of one prov-
ince of industry after another, and their power is greater than all under or
over them combined. The president of the nation is their tool and they are
a congress above congress. What is the use of talking about supreme courts
when these men are the supreme courts of the land ? Let us embalm justice
and lay her away for an age when the billionaires are dead. She has no
country and no home and no occupation now. These men are good organ-
33
izers, but they always organize selfishly. They are Napoleons in organiza-
tion, and they are as ruthless of human life and happiness. But Napoleon
was providential and so are they. Napoleon represented the growing pains
of European civil institutions, and they express the growing pains of indus-
try. Some few hundred thousand hearts stopped beating, but I suppose it
was not Napoleon's business to care. God sent Napoleon to do his work ;
not to care. We've strapped up the young infant industry until he can't
grow, and the Goulds and Rockefellers are cutting the straps. It seems to
be almost a foregone certainty, looking at the past, that only hard, selfish
men who do not care can do these things. How much organization of in-
dustry is being undertaken unselfishly?
We are living in the age of industrial feudalism, as many savants have
informed us. Each factory is a castle; each owner would like to extermi-
nate the others. Society is in a state of anarchy. A few of the barons are
finally beginning to get the upper hand. Numerous petty trade sovereigns
have already been reduced to vassalage. There will be soon evolved a trade
kingdom, when one despot becomes mighty enough to subjugate his rivals.
Then will begin the process of stripping the king of his industrial prerog-
atives, which will continue until he is as powerless as the president of the
United States. The king used to think that he owned his realm and his
subjects ; so seem to think our commercial kings that they own theirs. It
is not acceptable now to claim divine rights for rulers, but the rights of
property are still god-given.
After the lords fought it out among themselves in feudal Europe and
the kings got themselves established, the yeomanry and artisans had still to
be heard from. They were the material of our present society, and the
process of retiring the king and lordling from the scene began. Our farm-
ers and artisans are still to be heard from and they are the material of a still
better society to come. They play the part of god in the world, being al-
ways unreckoned on, but coming in at the right time to do the mighty
works that everyone had pronounced impossible. There are no miracles ;
anything can be done that people set out to do.
But before these classes arouse themselves from their lethargy things
usually go very far to the bad. One would think that they would never for
a moment be content with their sinking condition, but they look on for a
long time uncomprehendingly. For they still have hope, the virgin Ameri-
can hope that any man can become rich, that the common laborer can com-
34
pete with the trust.
But now our true rulers are shattering their hope. Lord
Bacon hath furnished a prudent and Machiavellian maxim for our true
rulers the rich, from which they are departing in their prosperous garnering
season of the liberties and properties of their countrymen. He proffers
sound counsels to rulers for "removing discontentments,” such as "to give
moderate liberty for griefs and discontentments to evaporate (so it be without
too great insolency or 'bravery) in a safe way; for he that turneth the hu-
mors back, and maketh the wound bleed inwards, endangereth malign
ulcers, and pernicious impostumations;" and he cautions the rulers that
(the politic and artificial nourishing and entertaining of hopes, and carry-
ing men from hopes to hopes, is one of the best antidotes against the poison
of discontentments; and it is a certain sign of a wise government and pro-
ceeding when it can hold men's bearts by hopes when it cannot by satisfac-
tion, and when it can handle things in such manner as no evil shall appear
so peremptory but that it hath some outlet of hope." * But our true ru-
lers attend not to classic wisdom. Great capitals casily consolidate, and
then, under the fictions of the rights of property, their sovereignty is abso-
lute. The Napoleonic law is that the greatest capitals pass into the hands
of the men of least conscience, the Goulds and Rockefellers. Then these
men of iron selfishness become the supreme rulers and hope dies in the peo-
ple. Then it is that the miracle is performed, that the peasants and arti-
sans throw off their sleep and cleanse the Augean stables, and the world puts
on a new dress.
Hope might easily be spared-a deceptive hope it may be, but one
that can hold inen's hearts" in such manner as “no evil' shall appear per-
emptory. So small a thing as a system of promotions inay preserve hope,
and if truly pursued obtain the substance of things hoped for.
A particularly hurtful form of specialization has entered every depart-
ment of life. It first divides life by a fast and inflexible line into two
periods, the spring of play and intended preparation, and the mature season
of performance. The distinction is unnatural and paralyzing. It results in
a highly organized system of preparation, but one at cross purposes with the
thing to be prepared for. After elaborate training in the schools, young
men discover with consternation that they have fitted themselves for a con-
dition of things that does not anywhere exist, or anywhere but in the training
* Essay: Of Seditions and Troubles.
-
.
35
schools from which they have come. Emerging from these schools they
find themselves at a fork in the highway of life. Stepping down from the
artificial to the actual they may begin a second time their prepar-
tion for the struggle after existence: and this for men who have
achieved the summit of things in one world is a sore requisition indeed.
The educated man is ready for no industrial occupation, with exceptions
hardly note-worthy. * It is humiliating to begin on the ground, amidst
men of an alien and despised culture, yet conspicuously better in the one
matter that there really counts. Only a single circunstance softens the
situation and gives a lucrative tinge to liberal education, the circumstance
that education is so much the privilege of the possessing classes; wherefore
during education friendly companionships are formed with the possessing
classes, and the educated are subsequently favored in business at the ex-
pense of the rest.
But there remains another path, seemingly more rosy and dignified
than this. By cleaving to the ark of education itself one may evade the
irritating delays and vulgar associations of commercialism. The office of
education is like the ceremonial of a primitive worship, or the astonishing
inventions of à secret society. The training of an adept is wonderful and
difficult. The complicated surprises are a splendid synthesis of human in-
genuity. But the crowning marvel is that all these fine creations belong to
dream-land or the temple. Waking life is all outside. Albeit in the very
haze and maze of the priestly employment there is terrestrial compensation.
The carpenters of this dream life did not build without the perception that ·
their livelihood was there. And they reared an imaginative edifice, wherein
abilities of strength and scope would find vocation. The temple of educa-
is such a dove-tailed world. Education has been brought to its towering
isolation from the earth by a long line of professional men, giants, many of
them, vying to consummate an ideal scheme. It is not of the earth, but
the mechanics of this cloud castle have cast about it a mystic dignity that
sanctions its inhabitants to bear themselves with condescension to the people
of the great actual firmament. Fifty devoted life-times would not afford
perfection in the sacerdotal duties of this worship. It is a career that is
unique; its emoluments are many; and those who consecrate to it their lives
are exempt from comprehending the other life, that of the millions, beyond
The industrial chemist, for example.
36
!
1
the triangles of knowledge. The laws that reign in this republic of letters
are not the laws that reign in the republic of life.
This is the other path. One must select if he will cut himself off from
his race, choosing the fireside and tea, to the wild winds and life's masculine
struggle. It is not uninteresting to be a pillar of this pseudo, competitive
life. Yet it is expensive to the common-day workers who hold these pillars
up; and it is grieving to realize the sorry awakening one must have if ever
he sets out across the space that divides the palace of fancies from the world
where God and the majority live.
Even an educator may come out into the light and toil with his
hands. The sight would be stimulating. None of the bibles say that a
professor shall always be trim and grand. I have a yearning to see one of
them in a flannel shirt and blouse going to a mill for a fifty minutes' turn at
labor with the men who pay his salary. It is the common workers, you
know, who pay these dignitaries' salaries at last. A workingman's garb is
easily got. If President Eliot in Boston, President Low in New York, and
Presidant Gilman in Baltimore would just get it and go into a factory, well,
one hour a month, at first, until their muscles hardened,—one twelve-hour
day in the long year we know it would portend an education a little unified
with life, as well as a grain of the new life we are always talking about. For
these steepled presidents do not know anything about real life, up there
where they are ; and yet they are the conductors of the educational express
train which advertises to leave passengers at all stations on life's journey in
the best fashion. Every professor ought to have a trade; not a trade that
he points back to with the turgid pride of a German princeling, saying, 'I
made this chair, this whole chair,' and well might he add, and nothing but
this chair.' A reminiscent trade acts well its part, as that patched marble
shoe on the Prussian king's statue acts well its part. It is a good symptom
to patronize trades and economy. Jay Gould, the American Trade Czar,
with his mouse-trap in one hand and transcontinental railroads in the other,
probably takes pride in saying, 'I have a trade,' and holds up his mouse
trap. It was a true emblem. Jesus symbolized the net, and became a fisher
of men ; Gould became a trapper of men.
But symbolic trades and symbolic labor are not for our day. We are
earnest to have men of symmetry produced, and symmetry will not descend
save on those who labor with their hands and earn a part of what they eat
and wear by this labor. Such is the inexorable law. We are therefore re-
37
quired to bring our scholars under the dispensation of physical service.
“The true philosophers," as said Montaigne, “if they were great in science,
were yet much greater in action.” Does scholarship grow ever nore com-
plicated and difficult so that scholars are forbidden to be philosophers and
may only drill their lives away at one hole? Then have they not even
chosen the economic way to make the deepest hole. For brain workers
think to accomplish the best by giving their uttermost time and energy to
brain labor. But this is not the way it is done. It is done by having an-
other occupation, supplementary to the brain specialty. Actual trial has
already gone some way toward proving this, in the English half-time factory
schools. Says Sir Edwin Chadwick, “The preponderant testimony is that
in the same schools, where the half-time factory pupils are instructed with
the full-time day scholars, the book attainments of the half-time scholars are
fully equal to those of the full-time scholars, in, the three hours' are as
productive as the six hours' mental labor daily. I commend the chapter
in “ National Health " * from which this is taken—The power to learn
with health ofebody”--to all brain-workers, but most of all to students and
teachers. The author finds ground for asserting “ that the general average
school time is in excess full double of the psychological limits of the ca-
pacities of the average of children for lessons requiring mental effort," and
for believing sthat the school and collegiate requirements are everywhere
more or less in excess of psychological limits." So far as an individual
may observe I have found this almost uniformly true in colleges and uni-
versities." It is the bane of the life of a university that all are living to
accomplish something and none are living to live; and I believe it is an
infallible truth that only by living to live will any man accomplish his
appointed quota. At Johns Hopkins the greatest effort is made by every-
body to accomplish something, and the students and inferior professors are
the most worried and overworked company I ever met. It is perhaps de-
voted to live in that way—altho not devoted to anything very high—but it
is not life. These men, and the Johns Hopkins institution, are all making
the mistake that Sir Walter Scott made when he fell into debt. In his days
of prosperity Sir Walter had declared of his daily effort that he worked
for three hours with pleasure, but that beyond about four hours he worked
with pain.
"After his misfortunes, however, he allowed himself no relaxa-
" “National Health" is Ir Benjamin Ward Richardson's abridgement of Sir Edwin Chad-
wick's "The Health of Nations, and is a book of great value.
38
tion, and there can be little doubt that this over-exertion contributed as much
as the moral suffering which he endured to the production of the disease of the
brain, which ultimately caused his death." * The Johns Hopkins men are
working without relaxation, and that is the spirit of the institution. They
go on the principle of getting goods and appreciating life afterward. But
man is twenty-five years old once only in his life, and when he is distin-
guishėd and forty and has a salary he looks about for the joy of youth that
he deferred and finds that it belonged to the years of youth, years that are
gone; he looks about for the compensation of those surrendered years, and
finds that he has distinction, salary and a little completed work. Yes, he
has his work; that was why he gave away the joys of youth while they were
his and invited the pains of age,-he burned to win another islet from the
unknown for his race to dwell upon. Years of soul-tumult and suppression
were his, happiness has departed forever into the silent past, he has worked
and worked and is only on the threshold of the task he promised, the re-
muneration for his great sacrifices. But he can still work, he will yet gain
the islet. Then it is he learns that with youth and the joy of youth the
power and joy of labor departed and nothing remains but the dying
dream, distinction bought by some petty, promising achievments, and a
salary.
Hence the imposing falsity of the Johns Hopkins spirit that presses its
best blood to toil and tire and crucify life, ever straining for what it cannot
get except it be born to the knowledge that accomplishment and joy are
linked to each other as brain and heart.
There are many things that the true scholar would naturally do if he
carried out the ambitions which his knowledge inspires. He would wish to
reform the world. Lowly ambition his, say common men, enforcing their
brave indifference with the song—.
*do you dare to be
Of the great majority?''
Yes, the scholar dares to be of the great majority, for to-day they also long
to reform the world, their own world, in which they are denied home and
rest. · The scholar is singular and illustrious in asking for the reform, not
only of one institution and some other, but for the reform of the world. In
olden times there were philosophers, said Tchernuishevsky, in modern times
!
National Health, p. 106.
39
1
they of philosophic genius and spirit are reformers. And Tolstoi with the
same thought says, there were only a few great men in former ages, now we
have a process to make them to order. But the really great man may
always be known, he is constrained by the eternal forces in him to improve
his sphere.
Shall we ask then why the American scholar “shined upon by all the
stars of God,' does not leap to the acceptance of this splendid mission?
We pause before descending from these magnetic batteries of genius whom
the cold night of hunger and opposition can only animate and gladden on
their predestined course, to the sedentary absorption of the scholarly ma-
jority in the matter of daily bread. We cannot tell how much of their
moral disability and inaction is depravement of physical tone, the discord
and frailty of tissues that have aged too early because the scholar had no
trade or play to relax and spare him. But it is certain that the secret of
the moral sterility of our scholars has some manner of connection with this
question of bread. Nowhere have our thinkers achieved perfect inde-
pendence; they must still ponder the reception of their thought, asking
themselves timorously as each word is written if it will depress the sale of
the book, or if the president of their college can withstand the indignation
of the church-goers or capitalists after that cautiously progressive sentiment
is published. The offended public can deprive them of a laboratory and
-leisure to investigate and a salary to buy bread; if they do not honey their
words and exhibit their advanced opinions to the world through a smoked
glass. I am afraid the Hebrew prophets and very few of the Greek phil-
osophers would bave made good American university professors. Progress
is painfully won in a system organized to starve progressive and non-con-
forming thinkers.. But it happens to have been so always, with the quali-
fication that in some ages the innovators have not been given time to starve.
Renan has beautifully described the never-ceasing play of this principle, his
subject being the conviction of Jesus:-
"Starting from principles accepted at the outset by all ancient polity,
Hanan and Caiaphas were right in saying: "Better the death of one man
than the ruin of a people.' This reasoning seems to us detestable. · But
this reasoning has been that of all conservative parties from the origin of
human societies. The party of order' (I use this expression in the mean
and narrow sense) has always been the same. Thinking that the final word
40
of government is to check popular emotions, it believes that it is doing an
act of patriotism when it prevents by juridical murder the tumultuous effu-
sion of blood. Little thoughtful of the future, it dreams not that by declar-
ing war against all progress, it runs the risk of wounding the idea which is
destined, some day, 'to triumph. The death of Jesus was one of the
thousand applications of this polity.” *
How to obtain for the thinker immunity from this law, that is the
question which presses for an answer amid great difficulties. He must have
a material basis of life beyond patronage—for the endower of a college chair
and the president who selects its occupant are patrons of the incumbent; he
must make his wants few and simple and learn to live by his hands. He
may eat bread and drink water in a loft but he will throw his smoked
glass out the window; he may spend less hours at his desk and books, but
his work will be more choice and enduring.
The world is flooded with books where common-places are elaborately
said. The Book of Daniel was not long, still briefer was the sermon on the
mount; the writings of Descartes, which were the germ of modern phil-
osophy, are soon read through. These men meditated, mastered the art of
pregnant brevity by right brain usage, and having said a few immensely
potent words left all mankind to be their commentators and elongators.
They will have health, their words will shimmer with the sunshine in their
blood. They will be free; there shall be for them no more groping in in-
tellectual and moral night, the star of God in their spirits shall lead them.
They will live in life, belonging to the great majority, receiving theuce the
secrets of the Time-Spirit, doing it's behests. You may ask what would be-
come of our institutions if our profoundest minds abandoned them for the
Alpine paths of independence: I do not care what becomes of our institu-
tions ; if truth and character are hounded to bush to die there, they are
pretentious lies. Our institutions must go through the fire of change before
they can serve life, and I have little love for them as they are. The World
is the University. I long for the time when the highest minds shall turn
their backs on these fine stone piles mis-called universities.
Would there be some postponement of scientific discovery? It would
be temporary. And in its place we should have great lives and inspiration
and then redoubled discovery. All of scientific discovery is for what but
"Life of Jesus," Tr. p. 310.
.
41
--
the eventual obtaining of great lives? We put their coming afar off, and
apply. ourselves sordidly to contriving means. But there are present ever
wings for the highest flights. There were great men in the time of Abra-
ham. Scientific research can flourish only under the tutilage of the superior
minds, and shackles are no magnet for superior minds. The alternative
being solitude and royal independence of life away from the foundations
for research, or constricted character as the buying price of their privileges,
the profounder heads must leave the alluring places for shallow brains and
nurture research on the everlasting hills of freedom. It is probable that no
capitalist will build a memorial hall on these foundations nor endow them
with a telescope, but the stars will shine in there and God will be visible
without lenses. The way to abundant (eternal) life is direct. Our thou-
sand painful years of research in the vestibule are noble, but the serene
tones of life's grand organ sink and swell within, and before the thousand
years are gone we shall be dead. Must we do penance a thousand years ?
There is a way to cheat time and enter the portals and live the life of a
thousand years hence in the days that are ours. We can imagine the per-
fect life, the time when youth shall run its glad course up to ninety years
and care shall not cark, when the meridian of life shall be one hundred and
peace shall mantle the declining days of a century of old age.
imagine the unselfishness of the perfect life when burrowing science shall
have built its vast-mound. But we need not wait. We can be as unselfish
now as all will be in a thousand years. Life is within us. We may build
our own heaven there as the birds nest in the wide-armed oak... We may
live in this blind, supplicating time by the laws of the winged fancy that
seeth earth and heaven and hell in its flight. Shall we die. without one
glimpse and trial of paradise? We are at the gate, the gate stands open,
one word decides all now and forever, —courage.
I distinctly see a loss of touch with his fellows for one who can say this
word. I see no stopping place if the career is begun, no slippered ease, no
hearth, no purse. But I see peace, an occasional friend dearer than the hom-
age of millions, and a surpassing certainty that life has not been given to the
dogs. Hard and stony the way to the physical feet, but withal the physical joy
and power of the mountaineer, and in the soul the wisdom and consciousness
and happiness of all the centuries to come. "I know the difficulties will be
upon me presently," writes one who has entered the upland path. “Has
anyone who left the lowlying broad road,' dusty with over travel, failed to
We can
//
42
meet them? I am not too brave, and I own I am afraid of the whirlwinds and
the rocky climb. But the fever-damp in the valley! I can see the deathful
vapors rising there---if I am afraid to go forward, how dare I turn back?”
But the duty of the thinker to industrial life is something higher than
the expediency of an independent livelihood. Some of the disagreeable
manual work of the world belongs to him. It may be shirked, those who
could have ever shirked it, but only by incurring a debt sometime to be
paid. The time to balance this particular account has seemingly arrived.
Some have done the degrading toil of the race, toil that was degrading not
because it was toil nor manual or uncomfortable, but because it was excessive
and devoured all time and capacity to improve. Others have gone scot
free, speeding along the track of culture, toward the goal of humanity:
But it is written that in this race all shall come in together, neck to neck.
The course of culture wheels back upon itself, and now we find the masses
to whom we had left the harsher functions of life, straining their difficult
way onward, in our front and we cannot pass them. What we have won
by excelling them the eternal laws now require for them or we shall all tarry
long at this station. The debt is now to be paid ; all the long sad outlay of
these common ones for our progress is to be reimbursed. They never vol-
unteered to degrade themselves for our culture, we compelled it. We tried
to get something for nothing; but we cannot cheat God. Our culture is
only a mask. What is the state of soul of those behind the mask whose
handsome gilding has been purchased by the sorrows of many billions
through ages and ages? We must pay the debt, giving them all that their
denial has given us. We must lift from them the curse of degrading toil.
taking it equally upon ourselves, making it for all an education and glory.
Mere hewers of wood and drawers of water shall be known on the earth no
more
With the energy peculiarly his, Tolstoi has exposed the ordering of
life by the law of division of labor, when some stake off for their private
occupancy the intellectual field, and pay over a precarious living and
assured premature dying to those whom they leave outside in the wilderness
of drudgery. “Division of labor!” he exclaims, with a sense of the ex-
travagant irony of the situation. "Some are busied in mental or moral,
others in muscular or physical, labor. With what confidence people enun-
ciate this! They wish to think so, and it seems to them that, in point of
fact, a perfectly regular exchange of services docs take place......But it is
43
1
impossible for us to wink at it, for our last justification is slipping from
beneath our feet. We have become specialized. We have our particular
functional activity. We are the brains of the people. They support us,
and we have undertaken to teach them. It is only under this pretense that
we have excused ourselves from work. But what have we taught them,
and what we are we now teaching them? They have waited for years—for
tens, for hundreds of years. And we keep on diverting our minds with
chatter, and we instruct each other, and we console ourselves, and we have
utterly forgotten them. We have so entirely forgotten them, that others
have undertaken to instruct them, and we have not even perceived it. We
have spoken of the division of labor with such lack of seriousness, that it is
obvious that what we have said about the benefits which we have conferred
on the people was simply a shameless evasion.
But there is a conception abroad that the gracious acceptance of indus-
trialism is a tendency toward materialism and the vulgarization of life. A
few years ago Mr. Charles Dudley Warner issued a protest against “The
Demand of the Industrial Spirit," † maintaining truly that we are in the
stream of a movement toward every sort of material development and ad-
vancement, toward the sort of education only that can be made immediately
serviceable to material ends.' He censures the materialistic spirit which
insists that the knowledge of how to shoe and cure a horse, set type, build
4 railway, assay metals, suit fertilizers to soils, conduct a business, is an edu-
cation; and if you throw in a modern language or two, a liberal education,
and to save the higher life it seems to him that just at this moment there
is need of insisting upon the importance in life of a pure intellectual culture
for as many persons as can obtain it, and of supplementing the practical
training with the intellectual culture whenever possible.” But it has es-
caped Mr. Warner that this pure intellectual culture has itself become
material in the most degrading manner. It is in these days as much the
part of good husbandry to address oneself to the constructions of Greek
syntax as it is to shoe or cure a horse, and, remembering the economic value
of respectability, it is immensely more remunerative. I am compelled to be-
lieve from the conduct of their lives that the spirit of the average gramma-
rian and litterateur, when denuded of the classic garb of expression and
i
"What to Do ?" pps. 191-193.
of North American Review. Sept. 1884.
44
withdrawn from the softened lights and incense of the scholarly atmosphere,
is as gross and grovelling as the spirit of the master of a brick yard or car
company.
If an advanced course in Latin, mathematics, or physical
science leaves the mind on the same level of ideas and action as the mind of
an iron-master, what profiteth these spiritual disciplines more than the ma-
terial and hypothetically vulgarizing one of improving steel? And I find
the scholar and commercial manager of a piece. It is not by the introduc-
tion of technical and mechanical interests that our seminaries of learning are
being vulgarized, as they steadily and surely are ; it is by reducing learning
to the commercial level of commercial profit that they are being hopelessly
vulgarized. I do not wish to exaggerate, but I say without hope of contra-
diction—and it is the pride of these institutions that the saying cannot be
contradicted—that the highest motive of our universities is to help men to
climb up to pay and popular consideration. What more vulgar is there in
the purpose of a banker or bridge-builder? If any one has perchance in-
clinations to develop faculties that are not exchangeable for dollars, the
university has cold encouragemeut for him; and indeed well it may have,
for it is conscious of no aptitude for this higher culture and it knows not
what to do with one who cannot be appeased with its pretenses of higher cul-
ture, and deadening, spirit-starving routine. Poets, reformers, philosophers
and philosophical scientists linguists and educators, the universities of our
day cannot produce. They can produce scientists and linguist and educators
whom you like to meet as you do your physician, when technical and ab-
struse matters need diagnosing.
The solution of the great riddle of life, which this question of sounder
education permanently is, lies not in 'a pure intellectual culture for as many
as can obtain it,' in ballooning' them out of the so-called material and
vulgar to make intellectual saints and celibates of them, but in education of
commingled material and intellectual culture, setting them free from the
material through participation and comprehension and mastery of it, by full
payment of their debt to it, from which none may ever be exempt here,
1
:
45
Education and Power.
I
SCIÈNCÉ AND VITALITY.
The particular point of attack upon women for indulging in higher
education is her damage to posterity, if she retains the power of posterity.
Some of the last words of warning come from Mr. Grant Allen, being :
Emancipate women (if women will let you, which is more than doubtful)
but leave her woman still, not a dulled and spiritless epicene automaton.
This last, it is to be feared, is the one existing practical result of the higher
education of women, up to date. Both in England and America, the women
of the cultivated classes are becoming unfit to be wives or mothers. Their
sexuality (which lies at the basis of everything) is enfeebled or destroyed.
In some cases they eschew marriage altogether-openly refuse and despise
it, which surely shows a lamentable weakening of wholesome feminine in-
stincts. In other cases, they marry, though obviously ill adapted to bear
the strain of maternity; and in such instances they frequently break down
with the birth of their first or second infant."
This concerns higher education, but it is a fact very well attested that
the excessive study or anxiety of girls in the earlier schools, during the
years when the reproductive organs are forming, often prevents these organs
from coming to maturity and the future woman is sexless.
The evil consequences of the over-study and confinement and insuf-
ficient muscular movement of girls and young women have been more writ-
ten of lately than the injuries that boys and young men sustain from the
As concerns women there has been no exaggeration, but the
case has not been treated with equal vigor concerning men. It is quite as
true to say that men who have hopelessly undermined their physical vitality
in school and lecture rooms should never think of becoming fathers, as to
say that women unsexed by education should not try to be mothers. Less
same causes.
“Plain Words on the Woman Question'." Fortnightly Review, 1889
46
attention is given the harm that overtakes young men and boys, they being
thought able to take care of themselves, and because the integrity of the
educational system is supposed to be paramount to some male sacrifices.
There is no limit to what a studious boy will undertake. His whole
being is disgraced if he feels that he is not accomplishing the expectation of
his teacher, and in his young inexperience he does not question that all
required of him is rightfully required. This is where he passes onto unsafe
ground, for the opinion created around him by teachers and professors is all
against observing the limits of nature.
Apply the consequences of this contempt of nature to the next genera-
tion, and the next. A proportion of those best fitted by heredity to improve
under education will render themselves puny and transmit to descendants
physical energy so diminished that the latter will not be able to build upon
the foundations of culture laid with such infinite pain and sacrifice by their
fathers. The mental and moral powers of the second generation will be less
through the physical deterioration with which the parents unwittingly af-
flicted themselves. Thus the principle of heredity, instead of being em-
ployed to aid a growing culture, is arrayed against it and what should be a
tide of improvement in educated families, rising steadily through genera-
tions, is a series of waves, the youth of new families coming on continually
to replace the shattered fragments of the families preceding them.
It has been remarked that the presurnably natural course of heredity
seems often to swerve in children of the best educated people, and this may
be due to a deterioration of the parent through literary excesses.
no statistics of those injured by literary excess. Isolated physicians have
their own records of cases and occasionally write on the basis of their ex-
perience, but no scientific attempt has been made to estimate the collective
damage. In some minds—fairly intelligent ones too—the subject occa-
sions levity. Au opinion holds that young men are naturally too lazy to.
overwork. Moreover those hurt while young are not distinguished enough
to be observed and mourned beyond a small circle; of the older and distin
guished it is said that they were old enough to be wise. On the whole few
cases of injury are recognized for what they really are, the most of these are
forgotten, especially when the old health is apparently regained, and ata-
vism in the children of educated people is therefore attributed to every cause
but this true one, or its explanation is supposed to be hidden in those ob-
There are
47
1
scure regions of heredity not yet conquered. Often, I apprehend, the cause
is on the hither side of the unthreaded labyrinth, and is only, the physical
depravity of parents who consumed in disastrous ventures at brain-building,
stamina that was the inalienable right of posterity, if posterity they were
to have.
I am not pretending that this is a universal rule with educated families.
There are families that thrive and branch from generation to generation.
The sons and daughters keep within the lines of accumulating development
laid down by nature. But there is never certainty of continued immunity,
for as the successive youths go into the temptations of a system that is
increasing its tension faster than its safe-guards the chances that members
of resisting families will fall increase.
The proportion of serious students made degenerate by education has at
least been guessed at. Guizot is recorded as saying in epigramatic language
that one-third of the university students of Europe die prematurely from
the effects of bad habits acquired at college ; one-third die prematurely from
the effects of close confinement at their studies; and the other third govern
Europe.' Guizot's estimate of the expense of education when made a vice,
if near the truth, does not fully represent the energy neutralized, for it does
not take consideration of the detriment sustained by those still keeping force
enough to lead Europe. The death of eminent scientists in middle life or
early old age is partially traceable to this cause. Four recent names may
be mentioned, Stanley Jevons, T. H. Green, George S. Morris and O. H.
Mitchell, and the problem is, were they prematurely lost to leadership in
thought though unsound education? The imperfect health of Charles Dar-
win is cited to show the vast working possibilities of a physically feeble
man, and some one has observed that a notably large number of the great
modern men have combatted ill-health. In 1864, after an illness of several
months in which all labor had been suspended, Darwin wrote to a friend
concerning his work on Animals and Plants,' "God knows when the book
will ever be completed, for I find that I am very weak and on my best days
canpot do inore than one or one and a half hours' work. Could the
drag of physical failure have been escaped by these intellectual rulers of
Europe and America the world must have gained immeasurably by their
better service.
* Life and Letters, vol. II, ch. 1.
48
The immense achievements of Goethe during the second half of his life
are referred to by his biographer Grimm to show the advantage that long
life gave him over other men of genius who have died or aged young.
“Goethe," this biographer says, “had a twofold life measured out to him,
whose latter half, indeed, proved most important to the full completion of
that which he had begun in the earlier part. He was allowed to enter into
the enjoyment of a secure and undisturbed inheritance of the conquests of
his youth, as if he were his own heir and successor to the throne. To how
few has been granted this privilege! The latter half of the lives of Les-
sing and Herder was blighted. Schiller began gradually to die just as he
was beginning really to live ; just as he had begun to unfold his capacities,
and freely to make the most of his creative power. We recall the names of
many others, whose career was interrupted before their fortieth year, al-
though they seemed to possess a vigor which should not have been exhausted
in double that number of years. " * The progress of Goethe was never
“interrupted by useless delays, to which he must look back as upon so
much lost time. He was healthy, handsome, and vigorous. Schiller, on
the other hand, “worked feverishly,” “the grandest productions of his life
were crowded into ten wretched years, one day the golden store was ex-
hausted ; there was a sudden close as with Byron, Raphael, Mozart. Had
these lived slower, they might perhaps have overcome the fell disease which
destroyed them; but they had lived too fast, too extravagantly, to have
anything in reserve for such an emergency.
And Grimm adds regret-
fully, “One always has the feeling that there was some mistake about Schil-
ler's early death,—as if the misfortune might have been averted." +
How are the offspring affected by this fast literary living? Are the
children born before the deadly consequences of physical heedlessness have
progressed far enough in the parents to be inherited ? It is altogether un-
likely. The eagerness of capable brain workers is so great that it commonly
drives them to early intellectual debauchery; the irreparable hurt that
causes untimely death, or that blights the latter half of powerful lives as
Lessing's and Herder's were blighted, that makes them bring to their ma-
ture work constitutions already exhausted, like Schiller, so that “just as
they are beginning really to live they begin. gradually to die,' this irreme-
77
.
* Life and Times of Goethe. Tr. p. 9.
+ The same, pp. 417, 418, 419.
49
diable wound they have often inflicted on themselves during the years of
youth and preparation, before they have discovered the laws of intellectual
increase and achievement. Their children are certain to reflect in a dimmer
spark of vitality the deterioration of the parents.
An index of vital energy is the reproductive power. From investiga-
ting the families of English men of science Mr. Galton finds that the fertility
of the parents of these scientific men exceeded their own fertility, the
families of their parents beïng unusually large, and, the average taken,
larger than their own. This implied diminution of fertility as compared
with that of their own parents confirms the common belief in the tendency
to an extinction of men who work hard with the brain.' As a provisional
explanation of the falling off of the offspring of scientific men Mr. Galton
observes that "a relative deficiency of health and energy, in respect to that
of their own parents, is very common among them. Their absolute health
and energy may be high,” he says, “far exceeding those of people gener-
ally ; but I speak of a noticeable falling off from the yet more robust con-
dition of the previous generation : it is this which appears to be dangerous
to the continuance of the race. The figures also give the remarkable
result that there are no children at all in one out of every three of these
cases.'
This applies to our investigation in the following manner. If these
vigorous men of science have lapsed from the robust condition of their par-
ents to the extent of lessening their fertility, we may be sure that their
* relative deficiency of health and energy will manifest itself in the health
and energy of their offspring as well as in the number of their offspring. If
these children adopt the vocation of their parents they bring to it feebler
constitutions than their parents, and they make the same demands upon their
vitality. What wears upon a rugged man wears more upon a frailer one,
and the number and strength of their offspring must be less relatively to
their parents than those of their parents were to their grand-parents. It
remains for the children or grand-children of scientific men to pursue science
with more moderation, to abandon science for a more healthful occupation,
or to anticipate descendants who will have no choice but to renounce the in-
tellectual life, and whose vigor will not sustain them in any important
undertaking. If in the first generation there are no children at all in one
* English Alen of Science, ch. i.
50
#
out of every three of the cases studied,' in the second generation it is likely
that there will be children in one out of every four or five cases only.
Mr. Galton in his investigation, seems to have omitted one factor that
is influential. In considering the diminished number of children of the able
men of science he seeks for an explanation only in the fathers, omitting
reference to the mothers. But a relative inferiority of the wives of scientific
men to the inothers of these men would, if it exists, account for some
portion of the falling off of their families. Now, taking the average of
both, such an inferiority probably does exist. For to produce the excep-
tional powers which the men of science inherited, both parents must as a
rule have had unusual vigor. That they have unusual vigor may be easily
shown from Mr. Galton's data. He finds "only two cases,
only two cases, neither very
strongly marked, in which both parents are described as unhealthy." So
much is direct statement. He further finds that 'the returns seem to show
that the issue of these marriages—those in which both parents are unhealthy
—are barely capable of pushing their way to the front ranks of life,
whereas on the other hand “the health of the men in his list is remarkable,
only one quarter making complaints or reservations, and the inference is
that since great scientific attainment has a close connection with health,
the parents between them must have possessed physical health in an uncom-
mon degree. And since "all statistical data concur in proving that healthy
persons are far more likely than others to have healthy progeny," we may
conclude that "the exceptionally good physique of scientific men” * could
only seldom have arisen with one parent unhealthy, and that it was the for-
tunate union of two vigorous individuals that endowed them with their
unusual energy. Although health in both the parents does not insure emi-
nence to the offspring it may be regarded as one of the most important con-
ditions, almost an indispensable condition, to eminence.
But in marriage choice on the ground of health and energy is but in-
frequently made, and if in a family the fortunate concurrence of such individ-
uals has taken place in one generation the chances are that it will not be re-
peated in the next, that is to say it will be quite an exceptional occurrence if
the wife of the successful man of science is as healthy and energetic as his
mother was, and if she is not the stock will degenerate in quality and prob-
ably decrease numerically. A part, then, of the lessened fertility which
* For the quotations in this paragraph see English Men of Science, pp. 99-102.
51
។
!
Mr. Galton attributes to the relative deficiency of health of the scientific
man himself, is, if this reasoning be true, traceable to the inferior
stamina of the consort that he selects. ,
And this view is sustained by a consideration of the social tendencies in
which the rising man of science lives. Having won his fame by hard work
and established a social position he is, at about the age of thirty-five, ready
to marry, and in a conspicuously large number of cases he selects a woman
of social accomplishments whose culture has been fashionable and who is the
inheritor of some wealth. In preference to the woman of book education he
as yet chooses the woman of society education. Many of the successful
scholars rose from social obscurity if not cramping material conditions, and
a social marriage therefore strengthens their social connection and adds a
relieving competence to their not very generous salaries. But the women
whose attainments belong to the drawing-room have not led to life that
conduces to race perpetuity, and it could therefore be predicted that their
families would be smaller and show more instances of sterility than the
families that produced their husbands. In cases of heiresses—often the
single child—whose fathers married late, after a wearing industrial struggle,
and who have themselves led a society life, the prospect of strong and
numerous issue is minimized.
As the skepticism concerning intellectually educated women
away and their higher education becomes common it may be anticipated that
educated men will more and more seek educated women for wives. Among
the cultured the value of intellectual fellowship in the family is every day
more highly prized; it is perceived ever more clearly that the most perfect
mutual enjoyments and benefits require that husband and wife be upon the
same level, that each have his own well-assured intellectual and moral as
well as material basis, and, perhaps most of all, it is perceived that the du-
ties belonging to a mother and guide of children are so unlimited and com-
plicated and solemn that her poise of soul and knowledge may be infinite
and yet not too sufficient. Our inquiry therefore opens the question what
effect these unions of the educated, if they become prevalent, will have on
the race of educated persons.
An English writer has maintained that the health of mankind, contin-
ually vitiated by selfish indulgences and sensualism in men, is renewed in
each generation of children, because they derive balf their nature from their
wears
:
52
comparatively non-vitiated mothers, and that hence it was justly said by
Bronson Alcott: "Women and children are perpetual messiahs." '*
This statement would have to be corrected by balancing against the vices of
man some essentially feminine indulgences, which though not yet morally
reprobated are perhaps as inimical to individual health and race toughness
as the more characteristic masculine excesses. Scientists sometimes question
if lacing the body is not as deadly a custom as the masculine habit of drink.
It acts upon the offspring by enfeebling the mother through the years pre-
vious to her maternity, then through the non-natural and imperfect intra-
uterine life of the child, and later in all its infancy and youth through the
teasing ways and incompetence that anaemia and lassitude and fragile nerves
in the mother necessitate. Furthermore there is the consuming social regi-
men which draws copiously upon the vital capital of women. A corres-
pondent of Mr. Galton's who is singularly well qualified to form a just
opinion on the matter to which he so forcibly calls attention,” says, “The
principal hindrance to inquiry and all other intellectual progress, in the
people of whom I see much, is the elaborate machinery for wasting time
which has been invented and recommended under the name of social du-
ties.' Considering the mental and material capital of which the richer
classes have the disposal, I believe that much more than half the progres-
sive force of the nation runs to waste from this cause. + If the attempt
is made by men to combine this elaborate social life with a serious pursuit,
either the serious pursuit or the men will come off poorly. A woman will
suffer more.
But social opinion will condone the negligence of social duties
in men-of whom a collateral occupation is comprehensible--where it will
not yet pardon their neglect by women. It is claimed by the friends of
pressure in female education that a noteworthy fraction of the women who
lose health in college lose it from trying to combine social gayety with study.
Experience shows that the advanced education of women makes strongly
against their adherence to these deteriorating customs, but of course great
damage to health must be done before the ideals of society change or studi-
ous women as a class learn to treat them with self-conserving independence.
The present difficulty is that the families of many intellectually aspiring
women will not let them ignore society traditions, and thus force upon them
*. Westminister Review, July 1888, art. “Mental Deterioration "
of English Men of Science, p. 228.
53
two lives, either of which in the eagerness that distinguishes our day would
be absorbing enough.
The more serious side is that if studious men with every inherited ad-
vantage of
of trained brain texture decline from the vigor of their
fore-fathers in consequence of the rigors of scientific life, intellectual women
will be sure to decline as much from the physical plane of their parents.
There is all moderation in this deduction. It does not require us to accept
the postulates of Mr. Grant Allen and Mrs. Lynn Linton or Dr. Clarke
that women are more liable than men to suffer from intemperate exertion,
because they lack the guards that centuries have framed about male educa-
tion, because women have not been trained to endure intense mental life,
and because of the enormous requisitions upon their vitality of a purely
physical nature during the years when the reproductive organs are com-
ing to maturity *—almost self-evident though these opinions are--but it is
an argument from sober analogy, showing that if what is considered mod-
erate and reasonable use of the brain in men seems to injure them, the
same degree of moderation and reasonableness will assuredly injure women.
Assuming that these educated classes will continually intermarry more, the
effects that Mr. Galton has observed in the diminishing families of scientific
men, will, if they arise from the cause that he conjectures, be doubled and
the rate of decrease and deterioration of the offspring will be twice as great
as he has found it. The farther inference is that there will be an increase
of the already strikingly large number of sterile marriages among the edu-
cated.
"A girl is something more than an individual; she is the potential mother of a race; and the
last is greater and more important that the first. Let her learn by all means. Let her store her
mind and add to her knowledge, but always with quietness and self-control-always under restric-
tions bounded by her sex and its future possible function Or, if she disregards these restrictions,
and goes in for competitive examinations, with their exhausting strain and ſeverish excitement--if
she takes up a profession where she will have to compete wiih men and suffer all tbe pain and anx-
iety of the unequal struggle—let her then dedicate herself from the beginning as the vestal of knowl-
edge, and forego the exercise of that function the perfec'ion of which her own self-improvement has
destroyed. We cannot combine opposites por reconcile confiicting conditions. If the mental strain
consequent on this higher education does waste the physical energies, and if the gain of the individ-
ual is lows to the race, then must that gain be sacrificed or isolated.” Mrs. E. Lyon Linton:—“The
Higher Education of Women," Fortnightly Review, vol. 46.
0
54
II.
THE INCREASE OF POWÈR.
The not altogether welcome deductions of the preceding section indicate
that higher education and the higher scientific activity are not themselves
scientifically conducted. The aim of education and science is the increase
of human power. Power should first appear in the scientist and educator.
But science and education diminish the power of the scientist and educator,
the guage of diminution being their less powerful offspring. After adopting
the science and education that were to increase our power, and finding our
power diminished, we come to our senses and urgently beg for information
whence and to whom will come the increase of power. By diligently press-
ing the question we learn that it was not particularly planned to have it
arise in us, as we are only individuals and not of more consequence. than
mere individuals .ever are, but in the race, and not just now but sometime.
The revelation bewilders uis. We had been extravagantly solicited to adopt
education and science on the promise of power, and unfalteringly assured of
an income of power to ourselves,—until we were too well committed to turn
back, and found our power already diminished, whereon.we were taken into
the confidence of those whose power had been decreased before us and the
mystery was revealed to us that we and our power are fleeting and unim-
portant and the race power of the future is what everybody has his mind on.
We are not so generous ourselves, and we know that none of the rest of
these diminished persons are so generous. We know that where they are
not blind they are ravaged by a disappointment they are trying to conceal
from themselves, that they were baited by the solemn promise of education
and science to increase their power, and when they found their powers
dwindling under these incompetent preceptors, they were loath to acknowl- :
edge it and dissembled and said to everybody, We are growing large and
strong, come with us and grow likewise large and strong ;-and with these
false words ever on their lips many of them came to believe in their own
deception.
It is perfectly evident that education and science which do not increase
the power of the educated and scientific persons, and that leave powerless
".
55
??
offspring, are but the first rude attempts at true education and true science.
I have respect for a nineteenth century scientist who turns his blood into
water to arrive at a discovery ahead of everybody else. I also have respect
for the sixth century knights, each one of whom wanted to spill his blood
on the ground if he could not spill that of his enemies, “big boobies,
Mark Twain discourteously calls them, sticking to fighting and taking pride in
it clear up into full age and beyond, like a couple of boys, strangers, meet-
ing by chance, and saying simultaneously, “I can lick you,” and going at
it on the spot-an operation which one had always imagined belonged to
children only and was a mark and sign of childhood.' * The ambition for
getting ahead of adversaries in science or spilling the blood of posterity in
the unselfish endeavor, is beginning already to awaken in correcter heads
antequarian interest, and some Mark Twain of the twenty-fifth century will
turn his eye back to our quarter of time and call these naive contestants for
silly glory big children, not much better than those sixth century ones.
Thus Emerson's caution to reformers may be turned to gourmands of edu-
cation and the unbalanced, bellicose children of science: “It is of little
moment that one or two, or twenty errors of our social system be corrected,
but of much that the man be in his senses.
It is a fair demand that anyone who has an important work to do for
the human race should not himself neglect to remain human, to be in his
Perhaps he had better pot give us his gift if he cannot give it in
the right way and be fit to look upon and love. There are people who are
slaves to the senses and them we call sensualists; there are others, the sci-
entists, who are in servile bondage to thinking,—they are sensualists of
thought, epicures at the intellectual table, inebriates at the feast. They :
despise the sensualist of the body but they are his brothers, not less licen-
tious, not less debauched. License is immoderation and the thralls of
ap-
petite and thought are alike. Both are rather victims of passion than mas-
ters of it. The unreasonable enjoyment of the senses is much vilified and
the excessive gratification of mental lust highly honored, but there is not so
much choice. The products are libertines, one physical one intellectual.
I took lectures of a public teacher once, who had knowledge in abun-
dance, and whom with all his knowledge I wish I had never seen.
scientific teacher has lost his senses in becoming a scientist, I will omit his
7?
senses.
.
If my
* A Yankee in King Arthur's Court, ch. 11.
56
:
science from my accomplishments if it is necessary for me to have it of him.
If scientific and educated persons are trying to increase the power of, man-
kind I want them to show that their own power is increased before I will
either believe in them or venture to let them apply their theories to me.
I do not believe a man can do anything for me who cannot do anything for
himself, and if I see that he has done for himself badly and calls it good
and wishes to do the same kind of good to me, I pray I may be sensible
enough not to walk into his web. There would not be many yawning un-
der the professors if they looked at it as I do. They would be saying to the
professors, “My good fellows, where is the color you ought to have in your
cheeks? Why are your legs so small? Do you want to make me like
that? Well, I do not care to be like that. Why can you not go out into the
landscape and live and live for days and weeks as children and sound men
live, happy without a book to mar the scenery or a careful thought? You
have been increasing your power,' and that is why, until you are now so
powerful that it is a burden even to drag yourselves out of your studies to
stimulate a miserable digestion with a miserable walk."
To win people to the hypothesis that education and science increase
power the best persuasion will be beautiful and symmetrical followers of
these callings, brimming with the power they eulogize. For if they have so
little reverence for power as to deface and assail it in their own persons
what evidence have we that they sincerely desire it for other people in the
future; and if they are so mistaken in the nature of power as to think they
are acquiring it for themselves while they are continually consuming it,
what faith have we that their ability to capture power for the race will ex-
ceed their ability to obtain it for themselves? And so we can only half
rely on the educators and scientists, and if we have anything to do with
them we must keep a narrow scrutiny right and left or they will lead us
where we would not for our lives.go.
And it appears when we come to know them yet more intimately that
we were quite right in restraining our confidence, for when the smoke of
their devotion to science clears off we are apprised that their motive is not
the pure hope to increase human power but has a great leaden alloy of am-
bition for fame and advancement for themselves. To couple one's name
with a discovery is a scientist's aspiration, as rich men buy their perpetuity
with philanthrophic buildings. There are scientists who will not patent
57
+
i
their discoveries, having a scorn for anything-sordid or commercial, and
thereby standing high above inventors like Edison, Bell and Brush who
will make the world pay long and dear for any good thing they do ; but if
these scientists itch for glory and degrees and election to honorable scientific
bodies-matters of vanity and moral adolescence—they must not cast stones
at the patent-seekers, who want their public pay in different coin. The
commercial discoverer is superior on one account to his co-laboring scientist,
for he takes his ground openly on the everlasting proposition, 'I have a
right to enjoy myself in the world,' tho his practice leads him away
from the goal.
Ambition for fame in. science is not the lowest motive but it gives a
clue to the value of the scientists' announcement of their vocation to in-
crease power, as well as a new opinion of their enthusiasm for the cause of
power in the later human race. For there is hardly anything that will make
men so neglectful of their own symmetry and durability and power as this
ambition for some personal distinction. Half the years of their lives will
they willingly give for a little eminence. "The silliest animal of all ani-
mals is without question man, says the writer of a fable. "Man thinks
ever of the future, and seldom enjoys the present. His whole life long
doth he labor and worry, instead of employing the present moment, and be-
ing of good cheer and ever in buoyant spirits.” That secret of employing
the present moment and being of good cheer man has never yet learned nor
faithfully tried to learn. "There will always be something worth living
for while there are shimmery afternoons. After life has been tried among
the thorny paths of some absorbing wish and in the failure or achievement
has turned out vain and bitter, we discover that there are shimmery after-
noons, and that life in their tender glory is sweet, sweet, sweet.'
there not shimmery afternoons while we toiled with bleeding feet and heart
after the cheating desire? "Ah! life is delicious; to sit there, gloating in
the sunlight, was perfect. It was worth having been a little child, and
having cried and prayed, so one might sit there ;' * .worth alse spending
years among the sunless follies of erring aspiration, so one might finally
learn that the riches of God lie about us from our infancy on the unlabori-
ous earth, we wasting the priceless irredeemable days gazing wistfully and
Were
The Story of an African Farm.
58
despairingly on the dumb sky. .“ Absolute happiness flees when we enter
our ’teens,” if amid the cries and prayers of childhood it ever alighted even
a moment on the youngest. It is man's own doing. Happiness is possible
to him, he is himself the magician whose will it must obey.
It is not forever the destiny of man to find the wine of life and obtain
the holy grail of peace at the eleventh hour when the supple frame has stiff-
ened with bootless quests. Even at the eleventh hour the shimmery after-
noons breathe of Elysium, and old men, just born at last, exclaim, life is
sweet, sweet, sweet, and fain would live on so always. It would be rending
the veil of heaven and flooding the earth with paradise did those
old warriors impart the secret of their life-long failure, for the young to
enter in their lusty prime the real life. Joyously would they enter if truly
informed of the way. We disdain the possibility and say as of old each
must learn for himself amid sorrow and the, bitterness of failure, for it is
the law of life. But the only impossible thing is prevailing upon the seers
of the vision to impart it and bring up children to believe in it and live the
new life. This is indeed hard, for these older people who have made dis-
coveries and abandoned wasting prejudices for themselves have not the
courage or faith or energy to liberate others, being worn out by their long
servitude to false thinking and living. So the young must repeat their
failures and perchance when too late remake their discoveries, and yearn
and die sorrowful.
But the remedial hour is approaching. The young are to learn that
the ideals of life set before them in the family, in society, by. the schools,
by the churches and by the laws are moss-grown ruins, walling them in
from the raidiant glories of existence, ideals of an immature race, to be shed
and sloughed off in the time of manhood and self-understanding. The young
are to obtain success and happiness by abandoning the accepted standards
of life and announcing their allegiance to the inner aspirations that will de-
molish one by one the sacred idolatries of school, state, church and fireside.
There is but one source of life, all the great have reached it and to reach it
is to become great, it is the internal self. Its promptings are above rules
and teachings and habits, and it will break these hourly and without cere-
mony; it scans bibles inquiringly and asks, can these reverend commandments
reconcile themselves with the present law of my consciousness? Who is this
Moses or Jesus who lays down laws for my conduct? They and all the
5
59
caravan that have lived and gone are in me, the divine all-including self,
and something more is in me than they all. There are moral problems born
of my constitution that no one who ever lived and not the totality of those
that have lived ever had or conceived, and only the forces and perceptions
of my constitution can see and solve these problems that are constitutionally
my own.
Thus the old is to pass away, the institutions that have frozen and for-
malized men, marriage that keeps spirits apart, the family that is a nucleus
and excuse for selfishness, that vaunts its antique encroachments upon the
individual and its selfishness as virtues, the laws which hold the many in
cruel subjugation, the fabulous fraud that has come to be called religion,
and the great nursery of dead and septic ideals and ambitions, the schools.
All these are to pass away or be born anew in forms that the spirit of life
will draft and animate.
I arraign the educators as the parties most responsible for the continu-
ance of society in a grade of culture that assigns to every voyager to the
continent of life an unseaworthy ship, and a map of the waters and stars
that will turn him sheer away from his course and wreck him, if the hulk so
long survives, on barren rocks to die. Why, tell me, are these educators
themselves subservient to mendacious principles of life, and why, knowing
them false and sterile, do they sow these principles year after year in minds
that will reap from them a whirlwind of sorrow and death? I will not at-
tempt to answer these prodigious questions further than to say that these
sterile educators were produced by the same sterilizing education and have
seemingly missed the salient qualities that enshrine freedom and truth and
hand them on.
III.
HOW TO MAKE THE SCHOOLS SERVE US. .
Strange that we should be called to consider the problem of making
the schools serve us! But they are not serving us now, they are serving
their own ends, the ends of professional educators. They have formed a
theory that doing certain things is education ; if anyone dues these things,
tho he remain a wooden and impeding creature, he is educated ; if he omits
.
60
to do them, tho he finds in some private unofficial way the ingress to genius
and power, he is uneducated. An educated man must observe regular-
ity; he must wear a tag, B. A., M. A., Ph. D. These are a great acces-
sion to his dignity and prospects. If a company of scholars find in their
midst a powerful mind that has mounted some other way than the decent
and uniform road of examinations, they are ashamed of his presence until
they have clothed him in the respectable seeming of a degree. Degrees
have become a fetish, and the name of education is obscuring the substance.
We are entering upon a slavery to institutional education that must. cause
lively alarm to those wlio consider education the untrammeled expansion of
individual spirits.
The student is not free in spirit. Something depends upon how he
comports himself with the professor. His standing and degree depend upon
it. The professor is the examining power. Only so much influence as by
their character and knowledge they naturally exert should these professors
have; the authority to examine and disgrace gives them an adventitious
and baleful influence. The student cannot be to his instructor as equal
man to man; he must trim to the prejudices and foiables of a superior who
carries the signet of promotion. He grows by permission. The age or ;
mental limitations of a professor may preclude. him comprehension of the
thought that is rising on the next generation "Sir,”
Sir,” says his spirit to
the intuition of his pupil, " you cannot imbibe this last heresy and bask in
While" this intrinsic patronage seems necessary to the student,
he lives in leading strings.
The examining and degree giving powers of our institutions are em-
ployed to force the students through a regular course. There is no hope of
high dynamic attainments while any element of compulsion remains in ed-
ucation. Your ordinary honor man is usually a man of mechanical acquisi-
tions, a good calculator of educational usury. He will probably run
through life automatically and amass a fortune of profitable facts and prin-
ciples. He may become a great workman with these tools, but we shall
never call him an artist. We shall never admit that he was educated, for
education is not a mechanical accomplishment. Education grows, it is not
made. Each mind has a law of growth, and these are
and these are as many as are
minds. It is difficult to conceive how the experience of educators could
ascertain the educational law for a mind that has now for the first time ap-
my favor."
61
peared. Every mind is such a new fact, reducible by no preceding laws.
The educators have nevertheless formulated laws and courses and with the
assistance of examinations and degrees they prevail upon unripe students to
sacrifice the dawning law of their growth to an articifial law pieced to-
gether from the experiences of dissimilar minds. The most original minds
have either rebelled against the routinary education set for them or have
afterwards deplored the hours dissipated in its painful task-work. Over the
entrance of every school and college should be inscribed the testimony of
Montaingne who said of his own mind, “I do really believe it had been to-
tally impossible to have made it to submit by violence and force.” Mon-
taigne went to college, protected as far as could be, by his father who pro-
vided him the most able tutors and reserved several particular rules con-
.trary to the college practice; “but so it was that, with all these precau-.
tions, it was a College still." Here he first took pleasure in reading the
fables of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which made him think the less of the
other lessons prescribed him; "and here it was infinitely to my advantage
to have to do with an understanding tutor, who was wise enough to connive
at this and other truantries of the same nature; for by this means I ran
through Virgil's Æneids, and then Terence; and then Plautus, and some
Italian comedies, allured by the pleasure of the subject; whereas had he
been so foolish as to have taken me off this diversion, I do really believe I
had brought nothing away from the College but a hatred of books, as al-
most all our young gentlemen do." It would trouble us now to find stu-
dents pursuing work allured by the pleasure of the subject, altho education,
is this alone. If it were not for the tabulated, appointed work leading to
the glories of a degree there would be time for the allurements of education.
The schools give degrees but they do not educate. Degrees are bribes to
exertion. The schools should allure to effort by the necromancy of pleas-
That is difficult, and it is very easy to offer a degree. Outwardly..
examinations and degrees have all the show and circumstance of an educa-
tion. I have somewhere read that “a professor at Berlin, where Bismarck
finished his education, once said : · He did me the honor to place his name :
on my class roll, but I never saw him in the lecture room. Yet the fu-
ture chancellor passed his state examination with credit, having crowded the
work of six semesters into one.
.
ure.
62.
.
Let us get freedom from the educational establishment any way we can.
The law of growth for each total personality is our pursuit and no tutor or
faculty knows it. Give these professors and faculties much liberty and
they will kill personality. The part to be performed by them is the prepar-
ation of food invitingly and digestibly, having always ready an abundance
of nutriment for the intellectual appetite, but resisting the temptation to
cram the contents of any scientific dish down their throats. Who. but
pedants remember or care for what was stuffed into them?
Is there any way to avoid these institutional evils? Yes, by shunning
the declivity of regular courses and treating the deceptive blandishments of
degrees with scorn. Must I have a degree to hold up my head in the pres-
ence of professional scholars? They must be children and I will find older
and better companions. .
It has been discovered that examinations wear upon the emotions; and
yet I should sooner expect to see professional educators abolish the emotions
than abolish examinations. Examinations postpone growth. Cramming is
not growth altho Professor W. T. Harris assures us it helped him. Knowledge
packed up to recite is very differently grasped from that grappled with to
impart to learners or to use as an expert. The accretions gathered for ex-
aminations stay a little while and melt away, leaving generally a poorer
mind. Cramming is a dropsical accummulation, being a temporary process
of high feeding, as fowls are stuffed and fattened for the market. The
tension of intellect and emotions engendered by severe examinations in-
duces a depression to be recovered from at great loss of time. One whose
mind is elevated above the fleeting seductions of a degree is likewise re-
deemed from servitude to examinations.
Competence for responsible positions is naively settled by the candidate's
ability, to win a degree. Quality of thinking is unexaminable and the poor-
est-thinker may glide through brilliantly. Examinations and degrees are
prolific breeders of haste. Education does not count the years and does not
care to have celebrity clapped onto it by a learned body at the customary
age. Spurious education—that is our institutional education—does not feel
that anything is being done unless this clapping goes on semi-annually.
Students obtaining education are compelled by the institutional methods to
be always fretting about results. It is their business to have no thought
of results but to be free from care, doing the work of the moment with a
63
light heart and love for it... Examinations pump the food out of the sto-
mach hourly to see how it is digesting. Says Professor William James with
exceeding wisdom, "We become saints in the moral, and authorities and
experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and
hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his
education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keeps faithfully busy
each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself.
He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to
find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pur-
suit he may have singled out. Silently, between all the details of his busi-
ness, the power of judging in all that class of matter will have bụilt itself
up within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people
should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably en-
gendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking
on arduous careers than all other causes put together. " * Has this dis-
covery just been made by the professors themselves? Is Professor James
the only one who has made it? Is every student informed of this mighty
educational fact when he enters Harvard where Professor James is, that he
may be preserved from the baseless "discouragement and faint-hearted-
" that afflict many sensitive students all their course? No, I fear not.
The whole fabric of Harvard and every existing school would have to be
changed from the ground up if this canon of education were adopted. It
would require the development of a new class of educators, and the educa-
cators we have cloak their incapacity for the higher work by decrying it.
It is a simple process to examine a man, to hear him recite, to get a thesis
of him. Our educators have been developed to perform these duties. An
intellectual automaton could perform them. So much more is required of
the educator that it will be a generation or two before he can be produced.
His office is to ingrain the student with such laws of human growth as this
Professor James has published; to exorcise the superstitious practices that
would now make it entirely impossible for any one to study in an institution
and obey laws of healthy and natural development; and to touch the minds
of his younger associates in the quest for knowledge and wisdom (the stu-
dents, I mean) with such a fury of interest that recitations, examinations,
ness
* Psychology, Vol. I. p. 127.
64
1
>>
bribes and rewards, educational husks, the very substance of the educational
manikin now, might be dispensed with.
I hear it said this is impossible, most youths must be forced to study.
Quite true—to study for our present system. The natural instinct of their
uncorrupted natures rebels against the sham they easily penetrate. It is a
matter of self-preservation not to fall into the educational canal. Speaking
broadly the less they shine as students the better for them, and the stronger
men will they be. In an order of education not spurious they would be as
prodigal of intellectual energy to acquire knowledge as all young people are
of physical energy in their games. " A child naturally loves to deal with
wholes, and, if its food is wholesome, its mental appetite is vast and its di-
gestion marvelous." This is the observation of our best educator, Presi-
dent Stanley Hall. The mental appetite does not fail any more than the
physical appetite fails unless disease supervenes. Disease supervenes when
the laws of the system are broken, and this is why there are more haters
than lovers of education. If the physical and mental systems are kept in
health the mental appetite will not fail and the eagerness to annex new ter-
ritories of knowledge will enlarge with the capacity. The burdensome
routine, arch-enemy of power and life which turns out bodiless and soulless
apparitions of men will come to an end; the days of education will be days
of joy, holidays, cloudless.
Institutions will not yet comprehend this higher conception of education
and the more powerful-minded students must therefore establish it for them-
selves. Going as free lances, neither working for nor accepting any tin-
seled honors, prizes, scholarships, fellowships or degrees, cutting across the
curriculum along the trail of interest, jumping the ditches of examination,
they will form around them the conditions of vast skyward growth of
intellect, physique and character. Sweeping in their own orbits they will
take professors for what they are moons not suns.
If degrees are still to be given there is a right way to employ them.
They are at very best dangerous toys. Like stays and bandages they give
a peripheral support to an internal weakness. I find that degrees are a
crutch on which morally lame men hobble about. Once I heard such a
cripple refine about the etiquet of degrees. Until a writer is celebrated, :
he said, he must sign his degree with his name. That is it.. Our thoughts
65
must be endorsed; the public would not know that they were good thoughts
without à title. It also relieves a writer of the necessity of having good
thoughts, for the trade-mark is the public criterion of quality. Perceiv-
ing which a religious newspaper, the New York Independent, once issued a
notification that only writers of standing should appear on its pages, and
since then many senators have published their wisdom there.
A genuine man is embarassed by the ridiculous consideration obtaining
with a degree. Have those few words and inches of parchment contributed
a new essence to him? To be through ticketed to men's good estimation by
the jugglery of an document is a canker to his self-respect. On the other
hand the throng of degree-takers whose moral fiber is not well knit are
overcome by temptation and set a false value on themselves and swagger
.before the world. Thus our learned institutions become nurseries and hos-
pitals of vanity. The old masquerade of titles and decorations that sur-
vives in slender senility in the courts of Europe and at which we smile
indulgently, is being revived by us in the salons of science where it is
repeating its havoc with solid manliness. Many a one mocks at decorations
and titles until he gains one himself, observes a writer who grew up in the
land of these trinkets. The great law of human value is simplicity, for as
of old the mightier a discerning man becomes the more reluctantly will he
say to another “I am superior to thee,” knowing their intrinsic equality.
A degree is the public declaration that one man is greater than others,
which being necessary to announce carries the lie with it. Superiority does
not suffer itself to disparage others and is modest. When a university
graduate punctually employs the device of his guild, the Ph. D., it is not
safe to invest in him, there is somewhere a flaw.
It is an application of the transcendent cosmic fact : parts are worth-
less. Scholarship without character is chaff. Our universities are eleva-
tors for the storage of chaff. The world cries out with pent up longing for
men and the universities give it Doctors of Philosophy. What can be
expected? Simplicity and reality dwell at the top of the mountain peak
and the schools are just commencing the climb. Aspirants for simplicity
and truth can not wait to make the ascent with this parade-loving Persian
rout. They must throw off incumbrances, handsome clothes, money-bags,
school standards of excellence, academic advancernent, and the leaden long-
ing for a sounding title, and with the mountain staff of independence mount
I
.
66
the cliffs alone. Then the world will cease to cry for men.
Escaping the waxing idolatry of degrees. I have said there is a right
way to confer them if we still playfully desire to classify and praise our-
selves to the outward eye. Merely the weight a student is under who feels
that he is "getting up" his subject for the test of a degree condemns our
wrong way. These years have a manufactured and artificial gloom. He
can neither be light-hearted, enjoy his work, nor gain the rightful profit
from it. He is straining, his nerves are being injured, the professors nag
him on and make the most of this abnormal state. Without any reserva-
tions I
say let this absurd farce cease or close up the doors of these neurotic
factories until the faculties regain their sanity. What right has any one
being “educated," properly the most joyous and fruitful operation of all
life, to live in ominous shadow these otherwise happy years! All con-
cerned in making him do so are criminals against the most sacred things
known, happiness, power and life.
To abolish these festering scholastic vices let degrees be given (ever as-
suming that persons can be found to accept them on the basis of the per-
sonal knowledge of the student by his teacher, knowledge gained by conver-
sation, in meetings of clubs which the teacher will form with the students,
in the class room, and through the student's original work. I said earlier
that this implied a new quality of teachers vastly more original and dy-
namic and constructive than those we develop now. But I counsel all
students to have no commerce with degrees or graduations until this larger
type of educator is produced.
We know very well what a travesty the title-giving process is when seen
from the inside of the faculty. It is seldom that these weighty persons, the
professors, do not know to whom they will award the titles before examina-
tions are approached. The examination is therefore an intrinsically mean-
ingless form. But it must serve some purpose or the wise educators would
abolish it.' They know perfectly that three or four months of high press-
ure reading do not give the aspirant for a doctorate any qualifications for
scholarly promotion that he had not before, or at least would have won by
quietly pursuing those last four months the even course of growth that
alone had given him real title to recognition, without the climax and catas-
trophe of an examination. If the professors do not know who the success-
ful candidates will be before the cram is begun, they are.ill adapted to their
.67
place. Knowing this, then, they concur in perpetrating upon the students
a conscious fraud. They doubtless honestly think it is best to keep up the
delusion, and believe that the fabric of learning would collapse without it.
Their misconception is easy to explain when we reflect that advanced educa-
tion is a growth out of the education of children, and that the unskillful
ages from which we have ascended and obtained our educational practices re-
lied chiefly upon compulsion and penalties to prod the young to development.
The examination then is the professor's goad and that is why he thinks it the
most indispensible tool of his kit. Solomon would have been a little more
guarded about saying "spare the rod and spoil the child” if he had
known that the rod would sometime become an examination to be laid on
the backs of strapping men and women by school teachers. It awakens
mirth just to think of Plato or Socrates using the examination, tho only
very broad minds should be entrusted with this dubious privilege. But
with us it is placed indiscriminately in the hands of a class with narrow
training and sympathies and these “professionals” are seldom brought to
book for their misuse of it.
· As institutions are wholly unready to pass on from the use of the rod
to the adoption of mature methods and reason, the students who determine
not to be children manipulated after childish principles by older children of
interrupted moral growth, being deprived of the friendly advancement ac-
corded to those who observe the adjusted procedures of the educational ma-
chine, will have to lay their foundations for life intelligently. It will be
doubly advisable for them to acquire some unprofessional method of support,
which will render them superior to the disposition of scholarships and fel-
low ships. Advancing deliberately, incurring no debts, dependent on none,
laying solid and indestructible foundations, developing not forcing them-
selves, mastering their ground as they occupy it, despising educational show
and charlatanry, they will be living as they proceed and storing up the ele-
ments of power that will make them prodigious, recuperative world-forces.
It will lie in the power of a personality of this caliber to speak on all sub-
jects as he thinks, to be a character as well as a specialist. He will be an
individual, uncontaminated by the petty "club judgment” and provincial-
isms of the university. In perfect physical preservation and mental sanity,
never knowing the anxieties and pressures that have already made old men
of his contemporaries, he will go out to the labors of the world with the in-
68
vincible strength and spirit of the heroes of the golden age, a new kind of
man, unwonted, the highest evolution, not readily comprehended by our little
imaginations, colossal, portending virile deeds, titanic transformations and
new social systems and happiness.
The Extension of Culture.
1.
UNIVERSITY EXTENSION,
The University Extension system has become an established part of
British education. I will describe its leading features in a few words.
The movement originated in the perception that higher culture is confined
to too few people. All people cannot go to the university, the university
must therefore be brought to the people. University extension consists of a
series of lectures on special subjects given by specialists in places accessible
to the public. The universities and towns have co-operated in the project.
"The university undertakes the educational organization ; the town, the
funds and local management: the whole constituting a network of local
branches, working independently, in association with the universities as a
common center.” † Two classes of persons are reached, those who merely
attend the lectures, called the "audiences,” and a sprinkling of students
who do additional work. For such audiences and students the movement
provides courses of lectures, accompanied with classes, weekly exercises,
and examinations for certificates.
Each course upon a single subject consists of twelve lectures, one be-
ing given each week. A syllabus containing the substance of the course is
printed in pamphlet form and distributed at the opening lecture. It
This section was originally published in the Overland Monthly of July 1889.
of The following quotations are mainly from Mr. Richard G. Moulton's pamphlet,
versity Extension Movement."
"The Uni-
69.
1
contains, beside an outline of the lecturer's thought, references to books
and paragraphs relating to the subject and arranged under appropriate
topics. The syllabus also contains an exercise for each week, and this the
student is expected to write at home and present to the lecturer for inspec-
tion. A class immediately follows or precedes each lecture, and in it the
subject matter of the previous lecture is discussed. Those who have pre-
pared their weekly exercises to the satisfaction of the lecturer are given a
final examination, not however by the lecturer, but by an appointee of the
university. To those who pass certificates are granted for each twelve
weeks' course.
An important phase of the extension movement is the connection of its
students with the university By combining single courses an extended
plan of study covering three years is formed, and those who successfully
complete this work "receive the title of Students Affiliated to the Univer-
sity,' and have the right at any subsequent time to proceed to the univer-
sity, and obtain its degrees with two years' residence in place of three.
Affiliated students are required to complete a special series of courses,
a general series, and to pass an elementary examination. The special series
is composed of six single courses of lectures, the general series of two single
courses belonging to a different group from that of the special series, and
the elementary examination comprises Latin and one foreign language, Eu-
clid, books I-III, and algebra to quadratics, unless the student can show in
some other way that this preliminary education has been obtained. .
The organization on the side of the towns to meet the expenses of the
lectures is varied. The funds may be supplied by endowment, by a society
with definite subscriptions, by the sale of membership tickets, or by a com-
bination of these methods. The lecturer's fee for a single course is usually
forty-five pounds, and if each lecture is repeated the same week at some
other extension centre the fee is increased by one-half. There are two ses-
sions in the year.
Mr. Moulton says that.“ where comparison has been possible with
work done in the universities themselves, the general advantage of such
comparison has been with the extension students.' He also cites
from the reports of various persons connected with the movement, to show
that the new method has obtained a fair footing with the artisan class. On
the other hand, one of the leaders of the movement declares that so far as
:
70
on his
this portion of the community is concerned the effort is a failure.
The first class to reach in America are the well-to-do or those of aver-
age leisure. Some of our present richest people had few opportunities for
education when they were young. There are a great number now growing
up who cannot very well sequester themselves at a preparatory school and
college for six or eight years. If a man is going to make a triumphant
competitor in these individualistic days he must begin to work
armor when he leaves the nursery. He must go through a severe training,
lasting many years. But at the same time, society, while opening its doors
to the mere rich man, and being amazingly considerate of him in public,
and anxious to have its name associated with his or his wife's, is not all ad-
miration of him when he is away ; and worthy as he is, he cannot but think
on blue days that some of the general love for him is feigned, and depend-
ent on cumbersome external things not himself. So, if he could combine
the right culture and education with his parlor and parks, he feels that he
would be able to command the respect due his intrinsic merits. He realizes
that if he went through college he might get too much culture, and have his
mind drawn away from central good of life, for the getting of actual cul-
ture and the getting of millions are incompatible. But a certain amount of
culture he must have, and his sons must have a certain amount of it, just
enough to make them at ease at a dinner party of professors, though not so
much as to obstruct the money making and money keeping proficiency.
There ought therefore in this country to be no difficulty in getting the
university extension system heavily endowed, since it offers learning and.
cultivation to a class so much in need of them, and so amply able to pay.
Then there is the large class of the comparatively well off, who never
expect to be rich but whose love for information is genuine. They cannot
send their sons or daughters to college, without that oppressive economy
described by Balzac in the family of Eugene Rastignac. In rather the ma-
jority of middle-class families even this deprivation would not pay the bills.
Besides, after going through college a son of such a family would be
ashamed—and all his friends would be trebly ashamed for him—to take a
clerkship for ten dollars a week or a factory position at one dollar and fifty
cents a day, altho possibly by the time of his graduation the family ex-
chequer would be so drained that the customary legal or medical course
would be impracticable. Therefore, since the college man is from the na-
71
ture of things so raised above every common vocation, it must be a real
question of every middle-class family whether their exceptional child can
be spared from the humble bread-winning ranks to those of painful and un-
remunerative culture.
It seems as if university extension had been particularly devised for
this class by a special act of creative kindness. Of those who have
merely taken a few extension courses, the public will be generous enough
not to require brilliant public careers. They may keep their ten dollar po-
sitions without humiliation, but they will know more about many inexpen-
sive refinements and pleasures, and will care less about playhouses and
secret societies and torchlight processions. Adventitious things will then
lose some of their false glamor, and discontent must wane before the percep-
tion that riches are the forces and capacities of the individual.
But we cannot be content in this country unless the artisan classes are
also reached. Let us see how this can be done. No very large number of
the workingmen and women are to be reached by merely planting lecture
balls in various parts of a city, and extending a general invitation to the
people to come up and be educated. They are tired and indifferent, and
want amusement at the end of their monotonous, exhausting ten hours.
Moreover, they seem in a certain manner incredulous of the value to them
of nice attempts at their cultivation, because their surroundings are all in-
imical to aspirations after culture.
To win this class the unit of culture should be houses instead of halls.
Under the breath it is sometimes admitted that refined people do not like
lectures very well, and we lately heard of a congregation that voted to limit
the sermon to ten minutes ; but here are people--the laboring people, I
mean--who by universal consent have no refinements whatever, except re-
finements of vice, as temperance women have often told me, and yet we can-
not understand why they do not flock gratefully to halls the moment we
open the doors and put up a lecture sign.. But if in higher circles music
precedes and a banquet follows a few remarks to make them palatable, we
ought to remember that though we are now of substantially different mould
from the masses, and our blood has gone through long ages of straining
and purification denied them by Providence, our ancestors, and the nature of
things, we arose somewhere in far anterior times from the same progenitor,
and bear in our constitution traces of similarity to them.
And it is con-
72
It can
ceivable that this law of recreation is still common to both branches of the
original human stock, and if so, when we go among the ordinary people on
our noble mission of mercy and uplifting, pleasure should precede and be
ever the companion of set and solid instruction.
An adequate clubhouse would contain, besides a great variety of other
things, a hall for lectures, concerts, and other entertainments, rooms, for
club meetings for adults and young people, a library and reading room a
gymnasium and bath room, apartments for those conducting the work, à
dining room and culinary department; but nothing should be adequate at
first, and a hall with a picture and piano in it would be a brilliant enough
beginning.
The clubhouse must be the center of communal life for the district in
which it lies. This is a very simple way of making a neighborhood whose
sights and sounds are so oppressive that just to visit it shortens life a few
minutes a place to which all sorts of people come in their carriages to be di-
verted, instructed, or inspired to start a clublouse of their own.
transform the most uninteresting and iniquitous spot of the modern city in-
to a social experiment of higher value and attractiveness than is being tried
where money flows in rivulets. The well-to-do have no such centre for
common life, and they too greatly suffer from its absence. The fashionable
club approaches the conception ;, only the several who lay some claims to
fashion but cannot pay the fees feel so left out; and the church, when
opened at all hours of all days, and supplied with parlors and periodicals
and books, as some writer has suggested, will come even nearer to it, be-
cause a less number will be left out. I suggest to this advocate of church
expansion to plead also for a church gymnasium, since one of the best
prayers and most speedily answered a man or woman can offer is a half hour
on the rowing machine. My own fancy leads me to believe that the modern
library will have its parlors and gymnasiums, and perhaps become more the
nucleus of organic community life than anything else. I am sure the up-
per people yearn after these experiments in the slums, partly because théy
feel how little they themselves as yet have learned about the conservation
of social energy, and because they mean to profit by the new discoveries.
Some college men have believed that they were more trained by the
influences of their secret societies than by the college itself. It would be an
education to frequent one of these clubhouses. Those who came would find
73
various proficiencies not possessed by them within their reach, and would
want them. The extent to which such houses would open a new world
to the tenement population cannot be understood without some acquain-
tance with tenemerit-house life.
By this time the people are ready for extension lectures. · We need
not doubt that they would be acceptable to many under these new condi-
*tions, and that they would soon perceptibly raise the character of a wide
circle not directly reached by them.
We may be assured that this way of propagating culture is best, from
a study of the late manner of treating lunatics. Formerly insane persons
were chained in dungeons, but now it is the custom-except in Chicago—to
see that sunlight enters their rooms, to supply them with invigorating diet,
to put them at easy labor in the open air. Inmates of insane hospitals live
beyond comparison more hygienically than inmates of city tenement districts,
and the former often recover. So the day has come when social maladies,
both of mind and body, should be treated with sunlight and pure air, and a
generous diet, and music. A weekly.excursion to the country would prob-
ably improve the morals of the people of the slums more than a weekly lec-
ture, but if the outing were preparatory to the lecture the latter would attain
its maximum of effectiveness. Just as attempts to reason nervous patients
into health have given place to direct physical treatment and hygiene, in
whatever is undertaken for the artisan he should first be given the oppor-
tunity.,
"To mix his blood with sunshine, and to take
The wind into his pulses."
Hence the perennial importance of pleasure in the schedule of educa-
tion.
À woman who has been active in work for the young people of lower
New York writes : *The dancing evenings are not only pleasant to me for
the sake of the enjoyment of the boys and girls, but in thinking over the
Guild work in relation to the two clubs (the one for boys and the other for
ġirls], it seeins to me that these evenings of all others have had the most
satisfactory and refining influence." The other evenings referred to aim
at more direct instruction. Thus we shall overcome the difficulties of reach-
ing the artisan class with university extension.
.
74
2. THE SOCIOLOGICAL FUNCTION OF UNIVERSITIES,*
However superficially we look at society, it is clear that old things are
passing away and new things are to be. What once appealed to men no
longer moves them as before. The church is losing its hold, the common
schools are attacked, we hear of the university as out of joint with life. So
it is necessary to plan movements that all can believe and assist in, particu-
larly with reference to helping the many who are compelled to lead unsani-
tary lives in cities.
It is important to bear always in mind the central difficulty, and to
arrange all sociological and philanthrophio schemes with it before us. This
central difficulty is that the working people as a class do not receive enough
pay for their work, that a considerable portion of the social product that
belongs to them, is intercepted before it reaches them. Diluted philan-
throphy is one thing; anybody can go slumming' in coupe and kids, or
send a Christmas turkey to employes whom he underpays all other days of
the year; but this sort of philanthropy, and any other that does not have
the wage-problem before it, are insufficient.
The people must first learn what to do, and thinkers ought to be striv-
ing to tell them, for the wage-problem is economic and ethical. But our
universities are rather exalted and exclusive, and think a little cheaply of
propositsons to turn energy that might be devoted to monographic historic
insights, to the solution of problems that have not yet receded to the realms
of pure and cool theory. On themes relating to Socrates and Seneca, or
the text in which they spoke, our universities are laudably alive, but is it
not curious that in the objects at which those gentlemen aimed, the very
same universities are unanimously torpid and comatose? There are living
ethical problems and the great English colleges are cordially facing them,
while our representative college people for the most part deem such lay pro-
ceedings opposed to the university idea. Perhaps our retrospective feelings
will hereafter be more comfortable if we hasten rapidly over this period.
Assuming that the university idea will grow, which cannot be doubted,
what shall the university undertake in these modern times, and what can it
First published in The Open Court, lanuary 2, 1890.
75
suitably encourage and support? I will sketch a brief program.
The Kindergarten is the basis of all good educational work. The
universities should give more attention to the development of these begin-
nings. The Kindergarten is likewise the basis of much that is best in so-
ciological work. Every neighborhood in the worse portions of cities should
have its Kindergarten-room, and these rooms should be utilized for some of
the following projects.
1. Economic Conferences. This enterprise has already been initiated
in Chicago, where series of addresses on economic subjects have been
given to the public by representative men from the camps of labor and
capital respectively. The two sides are brought together, the grievances of
each are heard by the other. Work of this kind should be organized in
every city, and it presents few difficulties.
2. Concerts and Lectures. A hall may be obtained in the poorer
part of town where from time to time concerts, arranged by the well-to-do,
and lectures shall be given free to those specially invited, or at a nominal
cost—if concerts—to the public. The low Variety Theatre now occupies
the field, and in regard to it we think everybody must agree in its condem-
nation, with a writer in The Westminster Revicu on - The Characteristics
of American Cities." *
66 The Varieties' Theatre is a vile can.
cer, which is eating the life out of many a community in the United States,
and nowhere is there a viler one than in Portland in Oregon. It is to be
hoped that in time the municipality may provide for the native working-
classes within its limits, entertainments as decent, sober, and honorable as
those which the Chinese have provided for themselves. To this a Western
critic will at once reply that the Varieties' are visited only by the lower
class of Americans, and that the vice of these classes stops there ; whereas
the Chinese—decent enough in publicmare in private profoundly immoral,
having, in fact, no sense of what morality is. We are convinced that this
statement is exaggerated. The Varieties ' theatre—with its cheap debit of
the corruptions of Europe and of the great cities of the American Atlantic
coast-does reach and corrupt other than the lowest American classes. A
theatre into which decent women will not go, but which their husbands and
brothers think it no shame occasionally to frequent, is a public danger
He says,
The Westminster Review, July, 1899.
:
76
which cannot be too soon done away with.” Is it not time to begin to
„supplant the “ Varieties” with something better?
3. Taking Residence. Young men, graduate students of the Uni-
versity, and others, may go into those parts of town where higher influences
are needed, simply to live. They would continue their studies and work
elsewhere as before. Perhaps nothing is so necessary as a movement of this
kind, and it involves no machinery. Any one can do it. If the rent of a
room in the better quarter of the city can be paid, the less rent in a worse
district can be met easier.
4. University Extension Lectures. Out of 2d and 3d the Extension
Lecture would in time naturally grow.
5. A University and City Committee. To promote the mutual in-
terests of the university and city in these and various other ways, to obtain
for the city the greatest advantages from the university, and for the univer-
sity the fullest support of the city, a conference committee, composed of a
small number of representative persons from each body, might be estab-
lished. Every city of importance either contains a university or has one
near it.
*
What would be the results of this expansion of the university? I
have elsewhere described some of them, and I will quote from that paper.
"A man in the college or university looks at the world through spectacles,
and it takes him a year or more to learn to conduct himself with perfect
rationality in real life. But if he goes at once to teach, he makes his faulty
judgments inveterate. A few months with sturdy, unveneered, plain-
speaking, substance-wishing men of physical toil would vaporize many dear
delusions. A near acquaintance with uncompromising facts and persons
wishing to know defiņitely what to do and resolved to do it, would be in-
valuable training to him... It would be both a pedagogical and humani-
tarian study. It would teach him sincerity.; it would show him what there
is for educated men to do in the world. It would instruct him how to be
plain, and direct, and simple, and forever tolerant, for it would let him into
the secrets of human nature, laying bare its needs and defects and workings.
The average teacher has had no experience with which to compare youths.
He has never mingled and struggled with unprofessional men, nor visited
insane hospitals.
!
1
$
* Journal of Education, June 7th, 1888, Art. University Extension."
77
“The educated man should lead society out of its prejudices toward
breadth;
he should therefore not become an aristocrat nor partial; he
should affiliate with all classes. Nothing would lift and educate and en-
courage the people like this intercourse. The university is the product of
all society ; wage-workers have helped to create it, their disaffection would
annihilate it; the artisan class has then a claim to its direct and intentional
interest. A conduit must be formed between the university and the people
which will give the latter the immediate benefit of progressive knowledge.
The very act of establishing this relation between the working-classes and
the highest educators would be an immense stride toward mutual compre-
hension of classes and social harmony. I have already hinted at its value
as helping to furnish truthful conceptions to economist and moralist. It is
no less bad to sit in a study and theorize about the needs of an economic
class without ever going among them, than it would to speculate about am-
putations without having seen a knife; also a morality to-day that does not
take hold of actual situations and renovate real lives, that is not social and
cannot improve the relations of social classes, is abortive and metempirical.
But for this purpose it is necessary to know society and classes first hand."
It will be readily seen that I am inclined to doubt if the university is
the highest court of appeal on all subjects. In the days of Lord Salisbury's
connection with the Saturday Review, when that journal « made a specialty
of scorn and contempt for everybody who did not keep hunters or had not
graduated from Oxford or Cambridge, " the university had a theory of it-
self at which our time is amused; but the tradition of those days is hardly
extinct. "The higher education is not for the helots of society, but for the
captains,” said some recent writer, and unfortunately this view finds sup-
porters in the university itself. Professor Swing is wiser. “ After the
youth has passed through the common school, of country or city, self-edu-
cation not only becomes possible, but easy." * I would say more.
The
education that a young man may obtain by keeping bimself clear of the
university, so long as it is subject to ideas that at present have mastery in
it, may be much better than he could obtain in the university itself. The
university lessens the personality of many men. But universities are enter-
ing upon a period of expansion, and the main question is, When will the
See article "Aids to Seil-Education," in The Christian. Union. December 6, 1888.
78
breath of life. be breathed into this or that educational body?
If there were some single organization devoted not to all reforms and
good works but to social reforms specifically, and this were to take these new
projects in charge, they would soon prove their feasibility and usefulness.
Perhaps the Nationalist Societies which are springing up so rapidly, will
appropriate this field. The power of education has not yet been fairly tried
in matters that relate to the improvement of society, and it should be the
object of an organization for social progress to institute an education based
on its conception of society as it should be, and tending to make the better
arrangement real. In connection with universities, or with the aid of inde-
pendent university men, they could inaugurate the work here suggested.
3. THE ENDOWMENT OF INNOVATION,
Plans for University Extension are being formed in various parts of
America. As yet our university learning reaches only a slender portion of
the population. The majority of people do not understand the aims of uni-
versities nor do they sympathize with them; the universities on their part
do not comprehend the people or the needs of the people. A university
professor of philosophy and conduct in the West complacently deposed in
the presence of fifty witnesses that the universities embody the highest
thought and the profoundest wisdom of our period, altho he had just ended
a vigorous denuciation of some of the leading progressive movements of
the time, movements that will soon make his mode and mould of thought
seem a thousand years old. A university colony has its standards and
ideals and pastes upon them the words 'truest' and 'highest,' as a novice
in botany picks up some plant that pleases him and bottles it and writes a
grand name on. We may call the world square if it pleases us. Hence
the university is often an attenuator of previous culture more than a pro-
spector for culture that suits and satisfies the present.
On the other hand the university has many important principles and
facts hidden in its vaults. There is sound knowledge enough buried there ,
to considerably extend and intensity human life, even to dissipate the vul-
garity of a race: whose god is Money. But vulgar the crowd must remain,
79
for most of them have no way to gain admission to these treasures before
vulgarity has stamped its deep and final impress upon them, and then they
no longer care for the grand and high. You will notice how excellent a
university professor rates himself. He cannot mingle with the herd with-
out nausea. To a selected few he can unbend and impart: not to you and
me, common offspring of the ground. He has not time, energy, capacity,
taste for us. But we nevertheless want his wares and have them at last we
must though universities of new patterns be built and old ones be turned to
the storage of fertilizers, the approaching utility, we are told, of the English
parliament houses. There can be no forgiveness for withholding from a
man the knowledge that would add one hour or one joy to his life. A des-
picable thing is the sham wisdom that trickles down from the universities to
the multitude. The scholar is apt to be somewhat of an aristocrat, and to
profess not much inclination for common folks, however common his father
and mother might have been. The American can change his skin in less
than ten years. I know of an inhabitant of the City of Brotherly Love on
the South Side of Market Street, who changed his in less than two years.
He formerly lived on the north side of Market street, five minutes out of
the jurisdiction of Brotherly Love. But by carefully saving the earnings
of his working' men he made a fortune and moved over the sentimental bar-
ricades into civilization and in less than two years could not remember that
he had ever lived any where else. Here is a problem for Th. Ribot and
his cases of double and alienated personality.
It is past imagining why the mentally emaciated multitudes do not
break into the bakeries of knowedge and use the ovens that are being kept
red hot night and day to supply a few gouty minds with pastry, to cook
wheat bread and cow's flesh for their absolute necessities. Carlyle seems to
have wondered over the same inexplicable circumstance fifty years ago
when he wrote Chartism, and unless some prophet like Mohammed by and
by comes who can pray and declaim and handle a sword also, fifty years
more will not render his words antiquated. .- Who would suppose that
education were a thing which had to be advocated on the ground of local
expediency, or indeed on any ground? As if it stood dot on the basis of
everlasting duty, as a prime necessity of man. It is a thing that should
need no advocating ; much as it does actually need. To impart the gift of
thinking to those who cannot think, and yet who could in that case think :
80
this, one would imagine, was the first function a government had to set
about discharging. Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any province of an
empire, the inhabitants living all mutilated in their limbs, each strong man
with his right arm lamed? How much crueller to find the strong soul,
with its eyes still sealed, its eyes extinct so that it sees not! Light has
come into the world, but to this poor peasant it has come in vain. For six
thousand years the Sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have been devising,
doing, discovering; in mysterious infinite indissoluble communion, warring,
a little band of brothers, against the great black empire of Necessity and
Night; they have accomplished such a conquest and conquests : and to this
man it is all as if it had not been. The four-and-twenty letters in the
Alphabet are still Runic enigmas to him. He passes by on the other side ;
and that great Spiritual Kingdom, the toilwon conquest of his own brothers,
all that his brothers have conquered, is a thing non-extant for him. An
invisible empire; he knows it not, suspects it not. And is it not his withal ;
the conquests of his own brothers, the lawfully acquired possession of all
men? Baleful enchantment lies over him, from generation to generation;
he knows not that such an empire is at all...... Heavier wrong is not done
under the sun. It lasts from year to year, from century to century; the
blinded sire slaves himself out and leaves a blinded son ; and men, made in
the image of God, continue as two-legged beasts of labor ;—and in the lar-
gest empire of the world, it is a debate whether a small fraction of the
Revenue of one Day (30,0001. is but that) shall, after Thirteen Centuries,
be laid out on it, or not laid out on it."
With sovereign American liberality we on this side of the sea, a half
century later, snug-harbored amid fabulous natural resources and riches of
unparalleled degree, do carry many people as far as their letters. But af-
terwards it is much the same as if they could not read, for they must
always work and hunger. And the things that dignify life and beautify it
and give it happy. length, these are still Runic enigmas to them; the con-
quests of broad new acres of light are to these present-day toilers as if they
had not been. The great heritage of the Past, the distilled wisdom of man-
• kind's infinite labors and sorrows, the knowledge of life and its preserving
laws are here, in our towns, in the minds of some favored men, in books-
all kept sedulously away from most of us who go our barren way dying for
these secrets of life. It is a riddle past solution why the hosts of maimed
81
bodies and souls do not organize themselves into armies and lay siege to the
fortifications that shut them out in the marshes and miasmas of ignorance
and capitulate never until these frowning walls come down and the barbaric
guns of private and privileged knowledge are spiked.
But of a few men we cannot ask miracles : for there are a few college
men whose blood is still circulating and vibrant. The public is not gener-
ous to them. It puts heavy taxes on their time and is thankless. If
money could be supposed to reward for the kindling and delivering of souls,
this deed, supremest of all deeds done on earth, is not rated high by the
plutocracy.
So, clearly, some new educational machinery is needed for the work
that the present force and organization are totally inadequate to do, and
from the example of University. Extension a sufficient system of education
for the people may germinate. There are many persons who have said to
themselves, “The pulpit, the liberal platform, the occasional lecture does
not furnish us the broad and specific knowledge that we desire; we have
not time to confront the vast literature of every subject, we cannot go to
college.' The busiest men are learning that sound ideas and a well-ordered
life have intimate connection with a knowledge of facts, enlightenment.
about the situation, and are not solely the reward of raw enthusiastic im-
· pulses to be right. These men ask for a digest of the new knowledge and
thinking, petition that their wants be a little considered in the educational
mechanism, that the fruits of culture be placed within their reach without
their abdication of a working life.
The University will go part way to meet this class by an extension of
its organization. What the university serves to the people will be only
that which has received the approbation of a slow-moving, over-estimated
coterie that composes the learned world, which the ever reliable Walter
Bagehot judged when, correcting the opinion of the French poet Beranger
that asylums of the commonplace academies must ever be,' he said, “But
that sentence is too harsh ; the true one is—the academies are the asylums
of the ideas and the tastes of the last age. By the time,' I have heard a
most eminent man of science observe, by the time a man of science attains
eminence on any subject he becomes a nuisance upon it, because he is sure
to retain errors which were in vogue when he was young, but which the
new race have refuted.' These are the sort of ideas which find their
82.
home in academies, and out of their dignified windows pooh-pooh new
things." * Always we must remember that what the universities will con-
vey to the people is the best thought of the last age and not of this, thought
that ought to be taken charily and strengthened by infusions from the
higher and newer sources.
Happily we need not depend altogether upon the university for the
best progressive work. Two things only are necessary to begin an inde-
pendent movement: a number of persons desiring lectures, willing to pro-
vide a place for their delivery and payment of the lecturer's fee, and
lecturers properly prepared for the work.
As churches broaden they will become places for popular education,
Social Colleges for the people. They may readily become centres of much
higher and truer education than the localities now particularly licensed for
brain exercitation. Whatever a man does being conduct, and the aim of
education being to elevate conduct, the traditional aim and sentiment of the
churches are more exactly educational than those of the schools. With the
decay of transmitted theology these sentiments will play an invaluable part
in an education as large as human nature.
In the immediate present these new educational nuclei may be started
at will by any group that can command a private parlor or public hall. It
is the especial opportunity for that large liberal element which has been
thus far extremely slow to devise effectual methods for propagating enlight-
enment. Every town has them and in every town they might play the part
of the redeeming remnant. In every avenue of opinion and action they
could become the initiators. The ideas of a community are changed through
frequent hearing of broader ideas and the identification of a handful of per-
sons with them. Familiarity wears away opposition. Singularly enough
society has institutions for the preservation and resuscitation of nearly every
conceivable thing, but no institution for improvers. The world has always
accorded them a chilly reception and buried them as soon as it could. And
now it comes to light scientifically that progress and not rest is the organic
law of species, which lays upon society the novel necessity of providing a
college of innovators and going to school to those whom in other days it
would have piously burned. It is useless to antagonize Nature and if evo-
* Physics ani Politics, II 2.
!
83
lution is the law of ideas and practice it were economy of life and labor to
place ourselves on Nature's side and work for evolution with her. Man
has ever behaved toward nature as an enemy, resenting the efforts of this
benignant Mother to bring him to a state of comfort and respectability.
Nature has always been equal to the emergency, brushing aside the palpita-
ting impediments that opposed themselves to her will and never abandoning
the purpose to make something of man in spite of himself. Man is like a
convivial Indian brave who defied a locomotive engine and said it should not
pass.
But thus far we have labored under a misapprehension, now happily
dissipated, that life is static, that nature wished to be opposed, and had a
crown of glory for those who resisted her inducements to change. Now we
establish a partnership with nature for the specific object of change. The
elements of this coalition on the human side are the liberals and that exten-
sive class of educated young men and women who have followed long
courses of study at the educational institutions and who find in the end no
acceptable place to apply their talents. The latter are specialists and wish
to continue their chosen researches, hence neither the pulpit nor free plat-
form is a field ; but they are not specialists to the extremity of binding
their thought to a dislocated section of time and space, pruning away every
divaricating interest, insisting upon a single phase of being as central and
inclusive, censuring others for not accepting their limited perceptions as
universal laws of being and conduct. They are not ready to feed the dis-
ease of institutional education by ensconcing themselves in the colleges and
universities as conservative l'epeaters. Nor can they sacrifice their freedom
of growth and expression to the deviations and prevarications of schools
whose source of life is popularity and pretension. They are conscious that
an institution is not the place for a true teacher. For a teacher is of slim
consequence unless he can be admired by his pupil, and the most important
thing that any man does for another he does through his personality. It is
not by lectures, conferences, explanations or studied efforts, but the man
back of these superficial and imperfect modes of expression, the deeper and
essential elements of him, which bave Tessons to impart that language and
volition are unequal to, and which the mind of the learner will grasp and grow
on if they are there or miss and starve for if absent. This is the highest thing
in education. If the specialist have not these intangible lessons to teach out
84
!
of his nature, he cannot be a great teacher of anything; and though first in
the Kingdom of Mathematicians he is not a true and sufficing instructor of
mathematics. In an earlier day this truth was so forcibly realized among
us by the people of a strong religious cast that piety was deemed prerequi-
site, if not complete, equipment for a professor in any branch ; but now the
reaction against this partial sight has come on so vigorously as to hide the
truth that our forefather's enjoyed. Piety stood for character and person-
ality, for certain qualities behind an educated memory and understanding
that transformed these latter things from clay to gold, and made it safe and
estimable to have an educated memory and understanding. For our fore-
fathers were quite knowing to the fact that many people of eminent wisdom
and virtúes in past times owed none of their excellence to scholarly disci-
plines since in these they had been wanting wholly, and they must have
observed even in their own day a circumstance very striking in our's, that
eminent wisdom and superlative virtues are rarely produced by the very
perfect contrivances for their creation which the moderns have arrived at.
All this is in keeping with university aims. A man of generous pattern
would be too large for a university Universities peer about the world with
a candle for intellectual nimbleness, and when they find an uncommonly
agile person they blazon his name through the land as the great coming
teacher. Now Socrates was a great teacher and Jesus also, and Plato cer-
tainly knew the secret of great teaching, and important as it is that these
new and banqueted athletes should know perfectly the tactics of their ring,
it is not less important that they should have the secret of Socrates and Je-
sus and Plato, and if they have not this secret let them sit apart and write
monographs but never undertake to teach.
The time is certainly near for the evolution of another species of edu-
cation, a more perfect flower, above the university and above the church,
where human forces will be unfettered and the conscious aim will be perfect
men.
85
Nationalism. *
*
At length a few people have found one another out and broken silence.
In sorrow and indignation they long witnessed the foolishness and wrong of
society but found no vent for their effort, no audience for their counsels.
This is changed. The issue of the Twentieth century has been accepted,
the gauntlet of imbecility and evil taken up.
I look upon this Club as an ethical revolt of our most independent class.
The fictions of American pre-eminence have stilled their misgivings and de-
layed their thought, but the iron has begun to pierce their own souls. In
the class of medium wealth there are many people who would like to be hon-
est but discover that they cannot be; there are many who crave no magnifi-
cence but only days of moderation and peace, and these are denied them.
They are at length asking why. And this question once asked has startled
and astounded many. It has set unwonted trains of thought going. Why
do so many turn old at the threshold of life? Why is such abundance of
shining beauty and freshness eclipsed in their radiant morning to shine no
more ; kingdoms of talent and genius and sweetness lost in a struggle for
mere bread and breath?
While this curse rested only on the proletarians we have been able to
bear it. Yes, our virtue was sufficient for that. But when our own loved
ones are stricken, then we say the social disease is creeping toward the vi-
tals and in fear we cry for succor.
Lecture before the Nationaliet Club of Oakland, Cal., in 1869, with some additions.
86
A
The strength of the Nationalists lies in their splendid abandonment of
policy and preverication. No other class institution has dared to announce
itself the unconditional champion of social regeneration, none have yielded
entire submission to the thought that nothing is sacred, be it theory or cus-
tom or institution, that hinders the complete working out of a perfected
society. Others say, Wait, let us feel our way'; the Nationalist says,
We have already waited too long, let us begin at once.' Others cry for
caution and conciliation and the enlistment of financial influences ; 'beg that
nobody be antagonized; the Nationalists points to the genesis of great his-
torical movements, and replies, Not by taking thought; in crises. true
policy over-rides compliance and compromise.
But with so wide a task before it the deepest wisdom is essential. How
are you to begin, how are you to make the most of energies that are not yet
fed from many sources ? It is to the answer of these questions that I shall.
address myself.
The working class has been valiantly fighting a noble battle against the
sneers and opposition of all mankind. Cannot the Nationalists lend them a
hand? I have noticed how certain thrifty workingmen itch for the conde-
scending approval and friendship of their social superiors. They will not
join labor organizations for fear of the cold shoulder from this quarter and
make themselves great impediments to the industrial emancipation.
Nationalists can imbue these laborers with social insight and courage by
espousing the cause of the Knights of Labor and every similar combina-
tion. Going on beyond the useful encouragement of others in good works
the Nationalists can undertake good works themselves. Working people
without number are but the property of their employers, a sorry state of
affairs in a land of equality.
The health, comfort, development of these hired ones is nothing to the
wage payer. As many hours as they are bought for must they be on the
move, whether their movements serve an end or no. Unless the server is
exhausting himself in some way, the master thinks himself defrauded. If
an artisan can do his work as well or better sitting, he must not sit for ap-
pearance's sake. * If he is actually tired and rests he is pronounced lazy.
.
I was
* I learned this by experience wnile I worked in a Rubber Factory in San Francisco
running & mill and a part of the time wbile waiting for the material to mix I rested upon the lever.
One day the foreman came to me and said he had rather I would stand; it would look better.
87
In this contract of salary.or wages for hours no human weakness or necessity
is respected. The health of a mule is considered ; a workman is jeered and
discharged if he insists upon proper conservation of his health. He is
dubbed a shirk. If he is working in poisons he must not wince until na-
ture prostrates him. Young working women are being steadily unfitted for
motherhood, because the employer owns them for nearly half the day and
has but one thought regarding them, to profit the utmost from that owner-
ship. It is damnable. The fact cannot be quietly spoken of. These girls
do later become mothers in many instances and they bear children for sick-
ness, vice and crime. They have no stamina. Their employer sucked
away their virility before they were born by the slow merciless radical de-
struction of their mothers. He thought he had a right to their full energy
80 many hours. But he had no such right, and when some able champions
of the weak, of justice, of the integrity of humanity arise, the power to thus
desolate will be speedily and completely taken from him.
A society like the Nationalists can rescue them. It can ascertain what
storekeepers are encroaching on the principles of humanity and withdraw
its trade from them and advertise their heartlessness to the community
through published reports. It can extend this system of investigation to all
forms of industry, to shops and factories and railroads, directly or indirectly
withdrawing its patronage when possible, and in all cases arousing public
indignation. The whole intelligent laboring population will be its coadju-
.tors. Its action could ruin a business, as a business deserves ruin if its
manager derives success from disregard of humanity in the persons of his
helpers. With this power behind it a word of suggestion or warning to sel-
fish firms would ensure reform.
At the present time working people have no efficient champions. Ma-
chinery is improperly guarded and the workman daily risks his life and per-
haps is finally maimed or killed. Consider railroad brakemen. But if he,
in his insignificant capacity of workingman, should suggest to the foreman
or employer that a railing should be here and a shield there, he would meet
a look of astonishment and derision and be told that he could leave if he
wished. So it is in other things. The mere workingman carries no weight.
He may protest and it ends there, unless it be thought desirable to punish
him with dismissal. He is so dependent and powerless that he usually
dares not even protest, but goes on doing the thing that he knows is killing
1
88:
+
him, yet having no power to escape, no friend or tribunal to appeal to.
What difference is it how many laboring men are killed off? Are there not..
more of them ? ' A workingman always knows that his situation hạngs by a
thread, that over him in his shop life the manager or owner is despot. The
situation is a cruel one. The toiler is never delivered from it. The preju-
dices of a hot tempered boss may fall on him, and if he thinks the shop has
duties to him it is positively certain to fall on him.
To realize the case put an educated man and one, accustomed to gentle-
manly treatment in this environment. He would feel continually outraged
at the indignities of the position, at the cheap estimate put upon his com.
fort, his health, his: wishes. You say, "Yes, but the gentleman has been
used to something else and the workingman has not, and therefore does not
feel the harshness. ' . But are not these marks of respect the prerogatives
of every man, even tho he works? Far beyond the insight of school theo-
rists is Mr. Ruskin's observation on this point. "In his office as governor
of the men employed by him, the merchant or manufacturer is invested with
a distinctly paternal authority and responsibility. In most cases a youth
entering a commercial establishment is withdrawn altogether from home in-
fluence; his master must become his father, else he has, for practical and
constant help, no father at hand: in all cases the master's authority, to-
gether with the general tone and atmosphere of his business, and the char-
acter of the men with whom the youth is compelled. in the course of it to
associate, have more immediate and pressing weight than the home influence,
and will usually neutralize it either for good or evil; so that the only means
which the master has of doing justice to the men employed by him is to ask
himself sternly whether he is dealing with such subordinate as he would
with his own son, if compelled by circumstances to take such a position.
Supposing the captain of a frigate saw it right; or were by any chance
obliged; to place his own son in the position of a common sailor; as he
would then treat his son he is bound always to treat everyone of the.
under him. So, also, supposing the master of a manufactory saw.it right,
or were by any chance obliged, to: place his own son in the position of an
ordinary workman; as he would then treat his own son, he is bound always
to treat every one of his men. This is the only effective, true, or practical
Rule which can be given on this point of political economy.” *
men
*Unto This Last, Essay 1.
89
?
1
1
When we make these comparisons, putting people of a higher social
scale, wouted to respect, in the position of the workingmen, we see how de-
graded their condition is. So they need champions who will not lose their live-
lihood if the truth is said, and whose voice cannot be silenced. Manifestly
too we must not wait for the workingman to come to us from his ten-hour
prison house—such is the factory—with his wrongs. His spirit is too far
broken, he cannot believe in disinterested care for him. We must go our-
selves and ascertain the facts of his dull existence.
We can at once advocate the eight-hour day for labor. When the
working day is diminished two hours so much time and energy are presented
to the whole laboring class in which to learn the requisites of social improv-
ment and to prepare themselves to apply them, and make themselves our
allies. It is beyond description inhuman to keep men and women ten
hours in a shop, day in day out a life long. The most of the work that is
done is intolerably monotonous. The air is bad, the room is dusty, damp
or dark. When eight hours is the day this great wage population will be-
come stronger and more intelligent helpers in the reformation we seek than
is possible now, overworked as they are, dispirited and without leisure to
read or think or hear. Does a workingman have a summer outing? Does
he rest for a few days in the winter? Not unless the shop closes and then
his pay stops and his relaxing period becomes one of cramped anxiety.
One of them said to me, 'A workingman is treated as a person treats an-
other man's horse.
If the working days were reduced to eight hours the store-keeping prob-
lem would be simplified. It is one of the oddities of our time to suppose
that stores must be kept open so many hours. At present, to be sure, the
ten-hour artisan has no day-light hour to trade, and some stores wait for
him in the evening. What a life the clerks of such establishments lead!
But there need be no evening stores if the wage class have two hours of
daylight allowed them. We must also learn to economize life by more
limited hours for shopping. Why, for the conveniece of those who might
like to trade in the night, are not the stores kept open all night? They are
now. kept open all day for the accommodation of people who have no system
about buying and clerks idle about waiting for the fancy of customers to
come in, or show goods for the idle enjoyment of the "shopper.
knew that all stores opened an hour later in the morning or closed one hour
t
1)
If they
90-
1
1
or two earlier in the afternoon they could adapt themselves to the new
limits. * In country towns and small cities dry goods stores and others
keep their doors open till nine o'clock ; in great towns they close at six ; it
is a matter of custom ; why should they not close at four? If all stores
made these changes none would suffer, the inter-relation would remain pre-
cisely what it is.
Early closing would be a relief to employers. I know a sinall city
where all dry goods merchants banded together to close at an early hour in
the evening, all save one who would not join, and he defeated the sensible
measure and kept the rest at their posts until a late hour. He should have
lost all his trade. The small employer is often more a victim of his position
than even his clerks. There are those who go to business before their chil-
dren are up and return after they are abed. Sir John Lubbock has been
enumerating the pleasures of life in two volumes. When we apply his
chapters to wage earners, to clerks, to the mass of salaried men and to many
employers we discern that few people to-day are permitted to live, few to
taste the pleasures of existence. The duty of happiness, the happiness of
duty, books, friends, time, travel, home, science, education, ambition,
wealth, health, love, art, poetry, music, nature, the troubles of life, labor
and rest, religion, the hope of progress, the destiny of man, these are the
subjects he presents, but to the majority of men most of them, in the form
and proportion that make them pleasures, do not exist. And it.is because
no people have yet wisely and deliberately willed that they shall exist.
A society with the catholic aims of the Nationalists must perform some
of the work that would naturally fall to institutions of learning, in a more
advanced moral state. It has been my observation of the colleges and uni-
versities of the country that they have little capacity or wish to develop .
original men. They do not reach out to fresh realities. To make a man
like some who have already been made satisfies them. What originality
they will tolerate is not the originality of a whole brain but of a circum-
I
There might be some severity in this arrangement for those who sbnp as a luxury. A Phila-
delphia woman informed me that she had been in Wanamaker's a few days before from nine in the
morning till five at night without vacation. Wanamaker has a res 'aurant as well as a bargain coun.
ter, which renders this f'eut possible without a lunch basket. In Philadelphia there are vagrant
stories about the sales girls broken down in this great emporium, next to Benjamin Frauklin the
pride of the city, but the pleasure shoppers from nine to ive ba've no more to do with this'than
Wanamaker bus himself.
91
i
scribed brain area. The college has the reputation of keeping alive ideals
but: the idealş, are, time;worn; they have not reckoned with change and
progress. But morality, we begin to learn, is progressive. A “new. con-
science” has finally spoken. The college still looks backward. For re-
creating the world, for wide minded leadership it has no inspiration and no
department. Observing the routinary, disciplinary, departmental tendency.
of the colleges Mr. Emerson asked, " But what doth such a school to form
a great and heroic character? What abiding Hope can it inspire? What
Reformer will it nurse? What poet will it breed to sing to the human
race? What discoverer of Nature's laws will it prompt to enrich us by dis-
closing in the mind the statute which all matter. must obey? What fiery
soul will it send out to warm a nation with his charity? What tranquil
mind will it have fortified to walk with meekness in private and obscure du-
ties, to wait and to suffer? Is it not manifest that our academic institutions
should have a wider scope ; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts
of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heart-
ily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation,
should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life ; that the moral
nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be
treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?
But the college does fail and it therefore comes to be the duty of others
to supply encouragement to the higher qualities. It is curious that so many
men should pass through college without being wakened to the sense of any
noble mission, it is altogether unbearable that the pure and heaven-born
fire of so many should be put out there. If young nien of enthusiasm are
universally told that they are dreamers, how many will come forth pre-
served and sound? A society for social progress must find such spirits out
þefore they are lost, and assure them that the world needs not some mechan-
ical mental capacity that the schools would catch at and countenance, but
them, their highest sentiments, their stirring and noble resolves, and it must
convince them that somewhere there is a band of their fellows needing them
and awaiting the impregnation of their spirits. My friends, when such
characters walk the earth more plentifully life will be fresh and promising,
and you and I shall gain courage to take up arms against wrong, glad in
*
* Education.
92
the confidence that victory, daughter of wisdom and will, is with us.
In a cursory review of the powers that are for and against the higher
progress one cannot leave the newspaper altogether unnoticed. It is some-
what remarkable that no vigorous class of people has yet taken effective
exceptions to its cheap moral sentiments and crass standards and cowardice.
The press represents great vested interests and though outwardly formidable
and fearless no agency is more timorous and fluctuating at heart.
Its con-
cern is to read the public mind before it formulates its own. This is not a
high mission, but it renders the press swiftly sensitive to new demands from
the community. There will soon enough be papers discovering and adopt-
ing the principles that a body of citizens has adopted. Because of its vested
interests the newspaper is by nature the friend and supporter of vested in-
terests in general. It opens to advancing ideas reluctantly, wishing to move
with the powers that purchase. Under the combined requirements of Na-
tionalists and Proletarians the press will speedily find unanswerable reasons
for joining them, when the extent to which it is always a trembling and
calculating suppliant for favor, masked in boldness and noise, will become
manifest.
In the newspaper the vice of one man power, the plant owner's dicta-
torship, appears in notable measure. This single man is autocrat and the
rest puppets. The rudder of a newspaper's policy is the business depart-
ment. Public opinion is to be enlightened? Yes, in the way that will most
swell the profits of the proprietor. The working staff are pawns. Some of
the hardest worked men are newspaper men, but they have poor pay and
less thanks." :One of the things yet to be acceptably explained is why these
men should toil so and be mental and moral slaves for the financial bene-
fit of a single man or stock company. Still worse is it when we reflect upon
the quality and character of the man who may at any time control this in-
fluence. Then we see how perfectly inadequate to the progressive needs of
humanity is the system that placés unlimited power in the hands of the
owner of anything.' Here again, as at every step in the review of present
industry, the question arises why newspaper men below proprietors have not
combined to assert and protect their rights and interests. Surely if any
can promote this combination it will aid to emancipate many earnest and in-
dustrious men from a tyranny that renders manhood impossible and fuists
upon the public anaemic and manufactured opinions.
93
It has been the whim of those who dreamed of a better human society
to go out from their fellows and to colonize alone. There is loss in this
method, if also some gain; the truer procedure is to form a nucleus of col-
onization within society itself and thence to leaven the lump. The Na-
tionalist Association is from its principles such a nucleus. If some things
can but be actually done and with no compulsion of law, or organization, but
through the impulse of a higher thought in the individual, the change of
social system is begun. Why not inaugurate Nationalism among National-
ists, exchanging services on the new principles within the group? What
relief to escape the voracity of competition, even in some relations!
But I exceed the limits of time and a few words will express my closing
thought. There is now an opportunity to give an impetus to reforms that
start at the bottom. In the struggle between labor and capital something
of a crisis has come. Great bodies of workingmen in all parts of the world
are making a stand for an eight-hour day and for higher wages. Capital
does not readily comply. A despatch from Pittsburg announces that the
leading railroads running into that city have decided not to recognize the
Federation of Railroad Employes, or any general committees, but each com-
pany will treat only with such men as are in its employ. * The working-
men are everywhere nobly fighting their own battle with their own funds.
But it is not their battle alone, it is the struggle for a higher society they
are prosecuting, it is the cause of every just man, and supremely it is the
cause of the Nationalists. Every dollar that is contributed to their efforts
aids this cause. Every voice that is raised to say, You are in the right,'
hastens the victory. I therefore do not understand why the working people
are permitted to bear the burden and the heat of this contest unsupported,
while we look idly or critically on. We can raise money to sustain their
strikes, we can publicly declare ourselves on their side, we can prove that
it is not a selfish class warfare they are engaged in, but one that enlists those
who are not of their class. In this way we shall alter public opinion on the
labor problem and unite two great camps that ought to be fighting
The New York Tribune has the following:-"Portland, Ore., April 17.-"About 500 union car-
penters were discharged yesterday in accordance with a resolution adopted by the Builders' Ex-.
change A coutractor has employed a non-union carpenter and the union men threatened to strike
if he was unt discharged. It was decided by the builders to discharge the uniou men in anticipatiou
of a strike iu Muy."
94
together in this crusade for industrial liberty, the wage and middle classes.
It was the moral and physical support that came from without the laborers'
ranks that made the London dockmen's strike peculiarly successful and in-
structive. But the spirit in which we may suspect some of this aid was
given is not the spirit that I commend to you or that you have. The pow-
erful leader of English labor, Mr. John Burns, said, 'I look upon the con-
cession that the Emperor of Germany has been making to the Democracy in
the same light as I view the charitable contributions of wealthy Englishmen
to the dock strikers, as merely a sop to Cerberus,' If the object of these
contributors was to quiet the minds of the working people with temporary
generosity but with no fixed purpose to work a revolution in their condition,
their object is not ours. And the thing that will give unprecedented weight
to whatever we do when we learn the secret of strength, is this fact that we
are serving no ulterior and selfish aim of our own in what we attempt, that
we are not seeking to sustain a position for ourselves at the cost of a posi-
tion to others, that our idea of reform is not an occasional handful of cop-
pers to our toiling brothers while we still ride on their backs, but that we
are pledged to an order of things in which we walk and work side by side,
bearing burdens according to our strength and sharing rewards justly.
Fragments and Random Letters.
1. A DEFENSE OF STRIKES.
During the New York Central strike I prepared and circulated the fol-
lowing subscription paper :
"Believing that the day of oppression of the laboring man must be
brought to an end, that the New York Central railroad strikers are justly.
fighting to terminate this oppression, that their battle is the battle equally
of all workingmen and of all high-minded citizens, that it is therefore the
duty of the general public to sustain them in their unequal struggle, and
hoping that these interruptions of travel and traffic may lead to the early
assumption and management of the railroads by the State, we subscribe in
support of this strike.
95
.
This called from a sympathizer with the working class the query con-
cerning the methods of the strikers : “I cannot understand how they ex-
pect to gain anything from their persistent efforts to injure others.
This, I imagine, is the feeling of many who have a warm love for their
fellows.
The following consideration should make them supporters of strikers.
1. Striking is the only way the working people have to awaken the
country to the sadness and wrong of their situation.
2. Those who inaugurated the industrial war implied in the strike
were not the strikers, but their employers, who have been on a perpetual
strike against the working classes, the method of their strike being payment
only of such wages as competition among the working people forced them to
accept. The working people under compulsion finally adopted the same
weapon, and in self-defense, struck in return, their method of using the
weapon being to refuse to work for those who only paid them competition
wages.
My complaint against the working people is that they did not begin to
strike sooner, and that they do not organize themselves so as to strike with a
thousand-fold more effect. The capitalists are not friends of the working
people, and it seems time to drop the pretense that they are.
A great
strike that would paralyze the business of the country should show the com-
fortable that the masses will toil for them and suffer for them no more, and
I would welcome such a strike.
1.
SHALL WE BELIEVE IN COLLEGE PROFESSORS ?
The proclamation of the Rev. Prof. N. J. Morrison, of Marietta Col-
lege, against the Golden Rule and the anarchy of its teachings bas caused
me to think back over my college days to explain, if I could, the mental
attitude of this gentleinan. I shall have to confess that hardly anyone in
the institutions that I have known was aware of the social movement that
is going on in the world. One has to learn all about life after he goes away
from college. I can honestly say of most of the professors that my experi-
ence compels me to think of them as the blind leading the blind. The
* This and the following letter were published in the Cincinnati Golden Rule.
1
1
96
majority of them are merely busy teaching lessons to-boys; a few others are
devoted to what is called original research ; but all seem unconscious that
the supreme need of the people is to know how to live, and that a professor
should have something sound to say about that, or he had better seek a field
where his deficiency in the chief matter of his calling will not do so much
harm.
I do not blame Prof. Morrison so much as others more favorably sit-
uated. The wave of social interest has not yet reached many of the Ohio
towns, when our largest seaboard institutions, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Har-
vard, are so radically deficient and so far behind English universities in this
matter. But after all it is hard to think that men who do not comprehend ;
the most significant intellectual and moral movements of our century, should
be at work in what is called the field of higher education. I would like to
see a university whose work should be to show people how to live.
ticipation, hope, and disappointment!” says a celebrated modern writer, ,
summing up life. Who can hope for us anything but disappointment when
we grow up by chance? We go to the schools to be educated, but they have
no important teaching for us. We are still left to grow up by chance, for
none of those who are there have any light to impart. Lifeneducation.
They are now divorced. The professor with his information and book mor-
ality is the last person to be able to tell us how to live without disappoint-
meut.
66 An-
3,
DREAMS."
- To a small girl-child, who may yet live to grasp somewhat of that
which for us is yet sight, not touch,” Olive Schreiner dedicates a great book
called “Dreams." It is not a long book but some who read it will be
changed and new-born. It is a bird from the land of Freedom, wonderfully.
assuring us that Freedom is our own destiny.
A mother slept and strange shapes came and would touch the spot
where the child lay that was yet to be born. Health, Wealth, Fame,
Love, Talent, came, each to give the child its own dower, but the
mother refused. Then came one that promised not any of these, but failure.
And the mother said "Touch.
And he leaned forward and laid his hand upon the sleeper, and whis-
97
>>
pered to it, smiling; and this only she heard— This shall be thy reward-
that the ideal shall be real to thee.'
And the child trembled ; but the mother slept on heavily and her brain
picture vanished. But deep within her the antenatal thing that lay here
had a dream. In those eyes that had never seen the day, in that half-
shaped brain was a sensation of light! Light—that it had never seen.
Light—that perhaps it never should see. Light—that existed somewhere!
And already it had its reward : The Ideal was real to it.”
When I read this book. I too had a dream. I saw many persons and no
cloud of care or weariness on any face. The Restraints of life were gone.
They were of all ages, but all were beautiful and all were happy. They
seemed to fill the world. Then a film fell from my eyes and I saw that
these chosen ones. moved among innumerable others who were one and all
clad in the garment of Restraint. But the chosen were not harmed for
they did ever their own will, and the customs of the rest were to them as if
they did not exist.
A woman came and sat down by me, and I said, "Is not the crowd
angry with these fearless ones??? " At first,” she said, “it was angry
"
and tried to destroy them. Then it became en vious, perceiving that they
only are the truly happy.
By what laws are they governed ?" I said.
“By no laws,” she said. - The nature of each is his law, and none
question or inquire about this law save from curiosity and to become more
enlightened.'
"Do the laws of different natures never conflict?” I asked.
Said she, ** All love and respect one another and the principle of Free-
dom too well to have conflict.".
I pondered a while and then said, "Was this happy life not hard to
introduce ?''
She replied, smiling, “It was easy. One person did it first, declining
to live by the law of custom and altogether desipising it. Then followed
others, and you see how many there are now.”
I was again silent.
Then I asked, “Is this the Future?"
“ No,” she said, “it is the Present.
I awoke. The air was fresher than I had ever breathed. I thought I
could hear the stars singing.
98
4. SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES,
The time has come when the intelligence and morality of communities
must act, or pay dearly for their inaction. Unless wrongs are righted,
wrongs perpetrated by society upon its wage-earning class, by the selfish
rich, whose millions have often been acquired by dishonor and extortion,
against the defenseless poor, who shall blame the oppressed for rising
against their tyrants? If we persist in our inhumanity toward them they
were indeed despicable if they did not prepare to cast off our yoke. And
in this mighty crisis what of the moral forces on which we are wont to rely ?
The church resounds with elegant essays; we of the universities debate
warmly over a Latin clause and hold up to admiration the heroes of
Thermopylae, but there is little heroism in us. Ah yes! At this moment we
are cowards.
Something a little more sinewy than the Sunday School and Bethel
spirit is needed in reformers of our day. There is no call for people who
go among the poor to soothe them, and to convince them that the rich who
stand afar off are their friends; friends do not stand afar off, friends do
not pay starvation wages. Pitiable is the person who goes to the poor thus
to mollify them and to dissuade them from energetic deeds. Sterner work
waits. The missionary who would save himself from the sore humiliation of
having his labors go to preserve to the heartless rich their elegance and aris-
tocratic powers, who would see his efforts tell for real progress, must under-
stand the economic and social measures by means of whichi a just income
shall be secured to every laboring man. Knowledge of these measures ho
must unweariedly teach, and he must arouse in his hearers the spirit to exe-
cute them. Shall the stunting of children and the withering of all the
manhood and womanhood of adults in shops and factories go on? Shall the
dire curse of the tenement house that the rent of the owner may be fat con-
tinue much longer ? Shall the situations and therefore the prosperity and
independence and happiness of men who work for wages be forever at the
whim of an irresponsible owing employer? Shall unrestricted monopolies
From an uddress before the Woman's Industrial Union of San Francisco.
99
suck the life out of whole communities that railroad magnates and trust
manipulators may live in palaces and vie in vulgar, enervating opulence ?
Not if there are even a few persons of feeling and decision alive.
Look about you and observe how the great fortunes have been, and are
being, made. Note how morality has died out of the making and out of the
using of them. A few reap the benefits of civilization, the majority are
slaves and savages. Wealth breeds wealth almost without toil. But this
is social wealth and those who privately get it have no real and rightful
claims to it. Ours is the era when the few who possess the land and in-
struments of production drain and sap the very blood of their fellows in the
labor required of them, and in return for it all give them less than enough
to sustain life properly. My friends, this is infamous. Do our statesmen
turn their attention to the terrible social evils? Far from it; they are
themselves mainly the rich, or they are statesmen for the purpose of becom-
iug rich. Does labor have a fair hearing anywhere? Never. The two
political parties bid for the labor vote and care not a fig for the voters there-
after. And yet grand and glorious, better I assure you, infinitely better than
plundering the community in the respectable guise of business, than becom-
ing richer by making girls work an half hour more in the factory, or men an
extra hour on the railroad or cable car, is the earning one's daily bread by
the labor of one's hands. Do you wonder that the working classes say that
this system of ours is doomed? I do not.
I do not. I am wholly with them in say-
ing it.
5.
THE EDUCATED MAN.
How do tliese matters of social reconstruction concern us as educated
men? Perhaps closer than any other class. We are privileged persons.
Only a few have our opportunities. While we study here and there and
have our leisure, somebody is digging the ground from ten to fifteen hours
daily to grow the food we are eating; quite a number more prepare this food,
and weave and stitch our clothes, and get in readiness the divers things we
use. We are undoubtedly privileged persons. There are a great many
who cannot have these privileges though they may intensely crave them
* From an address before the Student's Association of the University of California. 1889.
100
and be more capable and deserving than we. What is it that singles us
out for favor? We have a chance to reflect and are taught how to reflect.
We have not to go and hew the stones for our mental structure out of the
resisting mountain; they are brought to us polished off, and shaped to our
need, shaped sometimes too well. We are judges. We view the past with
serenity; we look out upon the present passionless, still free, still free.
Pause a moment. What is it to be uncommitted? Outside the struggle
rages. Other men are born to sides, predestined by circumstance to hold
their views. They never looked but in one direction. This man's father
was a storekeeper ; from youth he has seen with his father's eyes whom he
followed. Here is the son of a manufacturer, here of a Republican, of a
Democrat-we know their bent. But the collegian! He has time to re-
vise himself. He looks out on the struggle; does it please him? Can be
become a partisan? Can he be clay to the industrial requirements ? The
men down there who are bleeding from the wounds of their fellows and deal-
ing them lustily, probably never knew that there are two reasonable sides,
and a third middle place still more reasonable. They never viewed the field
from an eminence, for the university is an eminence. Looking from this
height and enlightened by plentiful rays from the past, we cannot see the
scene as the combatants do. We cannot take sides by lot and hotly storm
the casual enemy. Our friends are on both sides, our enemies are on both
sides. In a word the educated man is from necessity the seer, and if not he
is no true son of his environment,
What then shall he do? He shall ponder these questions : whether to
go into life accepting things as he inherits them, looking about for the best
place there is and making for it, seeing that he says what people want him
to say and getting well paid therefor, sagaciously keeping bis conscience
where it will not interfere with his prospects; whether to be a time-server
then and, under the irreproachable guise of a lawyer's fee, an editor's salary
or a flattering office of corporate influence, to sell himself to the best bid-
der ; whether to enter the melee and bear away as many golden bags as he
cao, a get-penny.
It is said now that the brains of the land go where the money beckons
and do what the money bids them. I will not take side on this point. But
it is a pertinent question what educated men are doing in this hour of in-
comparable issues and why such things are said of them. I know not
accurately if the university is up to its great duty. Perhaps Tolstoi was
101
right in saying, “It always seems to those who claim at any given period
to be the representatives of science and art, that they have performed and
are performing, and most of all—that they will presently perform, the
most amaziņg marvels, and that beside them there never has been and there
is not any science or any art. Thus it seemed to the sophists, the scholas-
tics, the alchemists, the cabalists, the talmundists; and thus it seems to our
own scientific science, and to our art.” * And possibly he divined truly
in speaking of the university as “an establishment where, apparently, they
manufacture the learned man or the artist (but in point of fact they manu-
facture destroyers of science and art,) who receives a diploma and a certifi-
cate, who would be glad not to think and not to express that which is
imposed on his soul,......" +
I do at least know this, that there are educated men who have broken
internally with the system of corruption and wrong in which we live but
who timorously say it would cost them their business and standing to expose
their minds. Whose duty is it, I pray you, to set these wrongs right?
Whose if not that of the man who sees the wrongs ? And whatever the cost
may be it is his duty. Verestchagin has a painting named " A Crucifixion
under the Romans. He describes it somewhat as follows: "The sky is
overcast by heavy black clouds. Just outside the walls of Jerusalem, on a
small rock, are erected three crosses, all of the same size, shape and appear-
The figures on the two sides are of a vulgar type and of coarse build,
while the central figure is of a more refined form. His face is not seen ; it is
hid by long auburn hair that hangs over it; long hair indicates that the cruci-
fied was a man who dedicated himself to God. ..." In one corner of the pic-
ture is a woman weeping bitterly, presumably the mother of one of the cruci-
fied men.
Her face cannot be seen, but her sorrow must be great indeed,
and none of the women surrounding her seem likely to be able to console her.
Many a time, probably, had she tried to avert her son from his chosen
course, but all in vain, and now his time has come. What do we owe
to this man for refusing to be averted froin his chosen course? But had he
lived to-day and attended the modern universities, he might have learned to
put a check on his enthusiasm for the race, he might have been taught to
ance.
"What to Do?" p. 208.
of The Same, p. 22'.
102
And I sup-
criticise the lives of other great men according to comparative literary
canons, but it is likely that his time would never have come.
pose the universities have leveled for us more than one grand moral purpose.
Let us not exceed bounds, let us not be ridiculously in earnest, let us coolly
behold our fellow-men dying in damnable dens for the want of work or just
wages, while we seek an introduction to the families of the personages
who use them so, that we may be invited to their princely receptions.
For is it not our right? Are we not educated ?
Are we not educated? And we will prepare à
theory for them, showing that these people in the garrets do not starve from
any fault of theirs, but because Evolution is a just God. Yes, our function
as educated men is glorious and indispensable. And if we cultivate the
graces we shall be able to marry rich and shine as consummations of human
:: progress. I counsel you all to do it, for of such, peradventure, is the Em-
pire of the Nineteenth Century University. With tact and reticence and
supple knees we may win the smiles and patronage of the present kings of
the world. I have read lately the description of one of them.
• He is sey-
eral times a millionaire.' His residence in Minneapolis??-$0 runs the
narrative" is the lařgest, and is said to be the finest. of any in the west-
ern country. It is built of magnificent Minnesota stone, four stories high,
and resembles more a palace than an American residence. He is another
of the long list of millionaires who will take seats upon the Republican
side of the Senate. It is said that his election cost him upward of $250,-
000......He employs hundreds of workmen in his mills, and has done much
in that section of the country to break down the organization of the Knights
of Labor. He is a cold, haughty, aristocratic, selfish man. He has built
and wrecked several railroads, but always came out on top, while his vic-
tims went empty handed...... As an illustration of his wealth, and disposition
to spend it in a social way, last November his only daughter was introduced
into society at her home in Minneapolis. It was the most fashionable event
that ever occurred in that marvellous young city. There were over 1000
guests and it was said at the time that it was a reception which cost upward
of $30,000.'
Yes, this world is after all kind and sweet to a few of us. Let us join
the few if we can and gladly enjoy the day, for soon the sun sets. And
outside will stand duty, but we will close the doors upon her. She will
knock to tell us that nobility and transcending beauty and freedom are
103
there with her, but we will drink the wine of comfort and bar her entrance.
And by degrees we shall learn that we wedded death instead of life, our out-
ward good fortune will bring no good cheer to the decaying soul. To us as
educated men much, infinitely much, was given ; but the gift was mis-
placed. It was a mistake to expect anything strong and admirable of us.
li
The Awakened Farmers. *
*
7
It is a unistake of the American people to think they have departed far
from European traditions. Our revolution freed our purses from English
taxation, but it did not free our minds from English ideas. We inherited
our instinct to be money-worshippers, to care very much for appearances,
and to think very highly of forms and formalities, for these are all English
traits. We came over determined to be free from rank, but after all we let
rank and aristocracy in, and we have our chosen and graded circles quite as
if we called one “ her majesty” and a few " his grace.
We are not a
democratic country and popular happiness is no greater than it is in Eng-
land.
When we began our career as a people we thought we had great things
ahead. The vast land acreage seemed to promise that by no possible al-
chemy could the soil ever go out of the hands of its tillers, and these immeas-
Curable diameters of the land offered prosperous homes to countless of the
earth's children. This was not to be so. While the world teenied with
plenty the life of the worker of the ground was to become hard and cramped.
Poverty was to sit like a spectre before him and finally to swallow up house
and lands and himself. That is the deplorable condition of the farmer to-
day. He is beset by mortgages and the certain loss of what he owus. The
official records show farm mortgages in the various states as follows: †
Andarens to Ashtabula Farmers, Jan: 20, 1891
+ Washingtou Gladden, "The Embattled Farmers," iu The Forum, November, 1890.
104
19
In Ohio "the State bureau of statistics reported, for the year 1888,
391,640 mortgages upon real estate, and the amount for which the land is
mortgaged is stated to be $330,999,000. The assessed value of real estate
was $1,220,262,000. The mortgage indebtedness, therefore, was, within a
fraction, one third the value of the whole real estate of Ohio. Making
what allowance is necessary for undervaluation in assessment the proportion
is significant.
“ The total number of real estate mortgages in Illinois in 1887, apart
from those on city lots, was 92,777, for the amount of $142,400,000. The
over-due interest was $4,919,754, and the total indebtedness of the farmers,
therefore, was $147,320,000.”. Adding to these the mortgages on town
lots and chattels, the total mortgage indebtedness of the people of Illinois
in 1887 was $416,378,975. '
In a district of Kansas there are “38 renters of farms, no unmortgaged
farms, and 26 mortgaged ones, with a debt of $24,702.' A great many
have had to borrow interest from the banks, and others have not paid in-
terest for two years.
Formerly nearly all farmers were working their own farms or expected
soon to pay for them from the profits of their farming. Now there are
many renters and the number of tenant farmers is increasing. It does
not look as if a farmer could very soon pay for his farm from the profits of
his farm, when according to the labor bureau of Connecticut“the average
annual reward of the farm proprietor of that State, for his expenditure of
muscle and brain, is $181.31, while the average annual wages of the ordi-
nary hired man is $386.36.” † Many of the farmers have gone into some
mechanical wage-work, and are no longer independent owners of anything,
not even themselves.
And yet this is not a poor country. The New York World has
gathered statistics and finds that the United States is the richest country in
the world, and contains more millionaires than probably all the nations
of Europe together.' There are 35 persons owning $1,085,000,000, and
three of these, Rockefeller, Astor and Gould, own together $350,000,000.
Says the World,' Only an earthquake devastating Manhattan Island could
wipe out the fortune of the Astors, which is one of real estate and rents.'
to The figures are taken from "Western Farm Mortgages,a' paper in the November 1890
Foruin by Daniel Reaves Goodloe.
105
!
· Every cent of Rockefeller's money has been made within a few years in
Standard vil.' The Connecticut farmer applies his brain and muscle year
after
year for an annual remuneration of $181.31, while in a few years Rocke-
feller's accumulated reward is $125,000,000. I believe it has taken about
fifteen years for Rockefeller to eke out this fortune, and it would take 50,-
000 Connecticut farmers, each laboring fifteen years, or one Connecticut
farmer laboring 750,000 years, to lay by. the same sum. In other words
Rockefeller gives a day's service on condition that 50,000 men shall serve
him a day.
It is not very strange. that the farmers are poor. They are dupes of
the commercial system. By means of the commercial system capitalists
extract enormous toll from them. In simpler language the capitalists rob
them. This daily robbing is carried on legally, but what is law? It is a
book of rules written down by the rich and the hirelings of the rich—the
lawyers to enable them to rob the poor.
If a man does not get what he earns, but somebody else gets it, he is
robbed. The farmer does not get what he earns ; let us consider the ma-
chinery by which he is robbed.
I. The farmer is robbed by the railroad.. The railroad carries the
produce of the farmer to market. It demands high freight rates for this
service. When these high rates are paid but little profit for his hard year's
labor is left to the farmer. He has been shorn of his earnings by the rail-
road. It is in this way that the railroad magnates, Jay Gould, the Van-
derbilts, Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mrs. Mark Hopkins and the
others, become prodigiously rich and the farmer whom they have shorn
becomes so poor that at length his very farm goes into the hands of his
robbers.
The remedy is, for the whole people, the government, to take the rail-
roads out of the hands of these private toll-collectors, and to carry them on
for the good of all. Then the grain of the farmer would be conveyed to
market at legitimate rates; those working the railroads would be paid legiti-
-mate wages for a day of proper · length; and if there remained profits they
would go into the public treasury to decrease taxes or to provide general
improvements, such as paved country roads, as there are in Germany, and
the like. We should escape the burdensome curse of Goulds and Vander-
106
own.
bilts, and millions of people would live in greater comfort and security.
II. The farmer is robbed by the Trust. The trust is a monopoly. It
is a combination of the manufacturers of a certain article to determine how
much shall be manufactured and what price shall be charged. Through a
trust the people get less than they want of articles and pay more than they
ought to pay. It is by means of a trust that Rockefeller can command the
labor of 50,000 Connecticut farmers in return for one day's labor of his
His wealth is mainly the result of the direct robbery of the consumers
of oil. He can say to the farmer, “So much of your crops must you give
to me annually for the privilege of burning oil.” The farmer re-
plies, “You ask too much, I cannot afford such a profit to you.
What
can the farmer do about it? He can sit in the dark evenings or burn tal-
low, for Rockefeller has throttled the other refiners of oil so that there is
practically no one but himself left to buy of. So it is with every other
article of use where a trust can be formed, whether it is. sugar, farmer's
tools, copper or rubber.
And the farmer sits passive and allows himself to be robbed until his
whole farm is robbed away, all without an effort to protect himself.
It is the consumer of necessaries who is knifed iu a vital part by the
trust, and the fariners and mechanic classes are the principal body of con-
sumers. The trusts levy toll just as the railroads do. They might as well
go to a man in the night and say give iis a third or half of your earnings
for the year.
1
Trusts can be formed in nearly every line of production. Every new
trust robs the farmer and wage-earner more. At length monopoly will de-
termine the price of everything to the farmer, and then every farm will be
mortgaged and soon after lost.
The remedy is this : for the farmers and wage-earners to take the gov-
ernment out of the hands of their enemies the lawyers and capitalists, and
to fix the prices that trusts may charge. Trusts are the natural develop-
ment of business from competition to combination and co-operation. The
people should not destroy the trusts but should take possession of them and
make their benefits reach all instead of merely the capitalist owners.
At the same time there is no reason why the government should not
buy some of these great plants at a right figure-just as the English buy
:
107
our successful breweries and flouring and iron mills—and enjoy their future
profits. The English retain the same managers and so should the govern-
ment do; there would be no more danger of government loss than of
English loss; and there would be a certainty of great profit to the people
instead of vast wealth to Rockefeller and Carnegie and the other monopolist
pirates.
III. The farmer is robbed by the wholesale and retail store. Look
how farmers and wage-earners are made to support towns-people by this
wasteful system of competitive store-keeping! Let us consider drug stores.
In this section of five or six thousand people there are four drug stores bid-
ding for trade. Roughly figured their annual expenses are as follows:
Rent for rooms,
1500 00
Clerk hire, .....
1800 00
Profits of owners,.
3200 00
Fuel, lights etc.,
500 00
Advertising,..
.... 200 00
Total,......
$7200 00
All the business of these four stores might be more conveniently done
in one store, by a manager and two assistants. Expenses would then be :
Rent for room,.
$ 500 00
Assistants' salaries,
1200 0)
Manager's salary,
800 00
Fuel, lights etc.,
150 00
Advertising ,..
000 00
.
Total,...
$2650 00
The annual saving is $4550 00.
There are other unnecessary expenses that cannot so easily be set out.
in numbers, namely :-
Four sets of drug furniture, such as show cases, bottles, etc.
Loss from boxing, freight and express charges, cartage and billing of
goods to four stores in place of one. ·
Loss from purchase of goods in four small quantities instead vi vilu
large, with wholesale reduction.
108
Expense of wholesale traveling salesmen, going about the country to
keep purchasers attached to their firms.
Expense of keeping up competitive wholesale houses, of which the
foregoing criticisms of retail stores may be repeated. The number of stores,
managers and clerks, is several times too large.
All of these unnecessary losses and expenses are paid by the consumer
of the goods. He pays, in a high price for the goods, the rent, salaries,
and advertising of the superfluous wholesale and retail stores.
What is true of the drug trade is true of other trades. The idle retail
dealers and their clerks sit waiting for customers; out there in the fields
and factories and upon railroads men are putting in from ten to fifteen
hours of real labor at a stretch. Would it not be economy in production if
two-thirds of the store-tenders were set loose to go and work where the
workers have more than they can do?
This then is the remedy, for the people to have their own stores in
common, putting in their own managers, buying direct from the producer
and manufacturer. Store-keeping is monotonous, confining, worrying,
health-ruining. Store-keepers are a puny set of in-door folk. Think how
in their prisons they are cut off from the delights and strength of the living
earth! Take pity on theni and let them out, as most of them would be
glad to be let out.
IV. The farmer is robbed by the banks, or the money lenders, whose
agents the banks are. After the railroads, the trusts, and the stores have
cut their slices out of his product, he finds that he has not enough left to
buy his machinery and fertilizers to begin next year's toil for these corpu-
lent interests. So he goes to the bank and borrows money, securing it by
his laud. He purchases the machinery and begins to work again for the
railroad owners the trusts and the store-keepers. But now he has to give a
share of his produce to a fourth person, the banker, who takes it in the
form or 8 per cent interest. He was not able to give the railroad the trust
and the store what they exacted from him before the banker's turn came,
and how then will he be able to satisfy their appetites and the banker's too ?
He will satisfy them all by increasing the mortgage from year to year, and
by and by he will give them full satisfaction by giving them his farm.
When he goes to buy the machines with money borrowed of the bank,
he is paying the bank eight per cent for the privilege of using machines
109
principally for the benefit of the railroad, the trust, and the store. Al-
together these agencies are so hard with him that they will not allow him a
fair living for working for them, and enough besides to keep his farm from
decay. They want his work and the farm too. When his farm is gone lie
is even less independent, and they can get still more work from him without
the pay of a fair living.
The remedy, so far as the banks and money lenders are concerned, is
to make all interest (or all over a definite small amount) payable to the
government, the banks acting as agents of the government and transacting
the business. Interest may be a necessity under our present commercial
system, but it should not go to private persons since the loaner of money
manifestly does nothing to earn the interest. It should go to the people as
a whole, to be used for public works, education and other improvements.
When interest goes to the government the rent of land should likewise
go to the government for public uses. A great deal of wealth that is
created by the public passes into private hands because land is treated as
private property. State ownership of land would secure all increased value
of land through growth of the community, to the State.
It is not very difficult to see how these great beneficent changes nay
be set going. Hitherto we have allowed a class, the monied class—to lave
their own way about most things. They have looked out for themselves
very well, but they have reduced the rest of the population to bondage.
The farmers, the wage-earners, and the people generally with small piear:s
are the great sufferers. But then they are the overwhelming majority.
They may change the laws to day and legislate the fortunes out of existence,
and legislate justice to themselves. The ballot is wonderfully providential
if there is.enlightenment and moral force behind it. By just one sitting, ci
Congress and the Legislatures, all the rich oppressors might be unlinged
and stript of their power to enslave. Beautiful is the mechanism of the
ballot, which can work revolutions without one drop of blood.
The farmer and the mechanic are brothers in this matter of brir giig
the robbery of trusts and railroads and banks to an end. The labor organi-
zations and the Farmer's Alliance have opened the campaign.
It is a con-
flict between capitalists and citizens. If the capitalists survive the citizens
will not survive, for citizenship is not possible without independenc., and
combined capital leaves no chance for that.
110
:
war.
Is this my only suggestion you ask? Have not politics proved them-
selves unutterably vicious and barren? Not wholly. Politics entered into
the late war of rebellion and parties had something to do with freeing the
slave. But the parties are sold out to the capitalists now, and legisla-
tion is not the first work that the working people have to do. The secret of
their success lies in organization. Capital is consolidating and now the peo-
ple must consolidate or be crushed. The matter has come to the point of
Capitalists can starve miners, mill hands, railroaders and farmers and
are doing it every day. They have taken the field against the rest of man-
kind with their heavy artillery of monopoly and their light arms of church
and government. It is easy for them to mow down women and children
and unarmed men, and this they are doing, playfully murdering the weak
by refusing them the means to buy bread. Perhaps the cowed and pillaged
rabble—and to that number you and I belong—will one day learn that their
only relief lies in combination, in the organization of a great league of mid-
dle class and poor men to sweep capital rule from the face of the earth.
We have a thousand times their number and yet we go like lambs to be
killed and eaten by them.
After the formation of an immense combination of all working classes
which should refuse longer to sell its labor and itself to the capitalist lord-
lings, setting up a permanent strike-against the present masters and tyrants,
they should proceed through their representatives in the legislatures and
congress to enact a new order of society where slavery and economic mur-
der would not be known. And against the solid columns of our organized
and determined foe they have no other hope.
Such, my friends, is the condition of our country, about which you
have asked me to speak. We are many of us blind to it, but this happy
blindness cannot last. You will help to determine the future, and if you
are strong and courageous you will set yourselves free.
111
Some Thoughts on the Growing Revolution.
as
In a timely paper by one of the most temperate ethical and economic
writers, Professor Henry Sidgwick, the morality of strife is critically in-
vestigated. * He argues that the time of peace among nations and men is
still far in the futune. Among individuals the growth of sympathetic
resentment against wrongs seems not unlikely to cause
much
strife as the diminution of mere selfishness prevents, for in a world
where most men are still as selfish as now “enthusiasm for humanity,
though it will diminish an individual's tendency to fight in his own
quarrels, will make him more eager to take part with others who are
wronged;' and between nations one convinced that its claim is right must
to an important extent be judge in its own cause and cannot feel justified
in risking its interests to arbitration.
We are impressed with the Socialistic claims for complete justice for
all men and a conception of humanity wide enough to obliterate national
interests in an organic world sentiment; but while we dream of this con-
summation the unyielding fact confronts us that‘nost men are still selfish,'
and the task of the minority in effecting a social reconstruction seems very
great. It is here that the principle entertained by Mr. Sidgwick seems to
apply, for the more the humane and enlightened few recognize the blind in-
domitable compulsion the majority are under from the selfishness of their
natures to cohere to their selfish pursuits, and as they comprehend the
awful penalties brought down upon the whole race by this obdurate self-
seeking, and the keen horrors endured by the weak, the more fearfully
urgent and immediate becomes the obligation upon them to circumvent,
* International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 1 No. 1.
112
.
+
vanquish and terminate this selfishness and haughty wrong and save
mankind from longer havoc thro its curse. Then is their consciousness of
weakness greatest, and then also they know that the thing must be done.
It behooves such to consider the relation that physical force bears to
progress, for it is not certain that physical force may not be again necessary
to achieve this progress. Our whole humanity, cries out to the depths in
hope that it may not be necessary, but the deeps wing back no answer and
we must prepare ourselves for the slow decision of time. Albeit some
things we may believe the internal powers have deliberated on and settled,
settled after ages of neglect and somnolence, and greatest and best of their
decrees is this one, that the inequalities of life are to be stopped, contro-
vened, leveled. If this cannot be done without force it must be done with
force, for their continuance cannot by any reason or sophistry be justified.
Do some remind us of the horrors of war, the lives sacrificed, the hates
bred, the swift tearing down of good with bad, and the long slow recupera-
tion and the difficulty of even regaining ground apparently lost?. Let us
give the honest people who chant in this vein something to think about.
Why have wars ever been entered on? To terminate a state of suffering in
which some section of the race experienced steadily more misery than the
war could bring to them and misery not to be removed except by war.
War
brings on disease and shortens life : so does the way these people are forced
to exist. Wars mutilate : so do factories and railroads and mines. But
all these horrible injuries are passed quietly by and treated as nothing, tho
their amount in each decade far exceeds a war that would cure them.
There is a misplaced sentimentality on this subject. The secret of it is
that if war supervened the upper and powerful class with their property
would suffer, and now only the lower and weak class suffers and that is of
no account. The weak class might continually suffer ten times over what
the powerful class would suffer by a war, and the powerful class would de-
nounce the inhumanity of the war and cry down vengeance from heaven upon
those villainous ones who made the war to deliver themselves from ten-fold
worse. This has been the course of history, a fact to which Mr. Froude has
borne striking evidence in the following paragraph from his “ Julius
Cæsar. '' « Patricians and plebeians, aristocrats and democrats, have alike
stained their hands in blood in working out the problem of politics. But
113
impartial history declares, also, that the crimes of the popular party have in
all ages been the lighter in degree, while in themselves they have more to
excuse them; and if the violent acts of revolutionists have been held up
more conspicuously for condemnation, it has been only because the fate of
noblemen and gentlemea has been more impressive to the imagination than
the fate of the peasant or artisan. But the endurance of the inequalities of
life by the poor is the marvel of human society. When the people complain,
said Mirabeau, the people are always right. The popular cause has been
the cause of the laborer struggling for a right to live and breathe, and
think as a man. Aristocrats fight for wealth and power : wealth which
they waste upon 'luxury and power which they abuse for their own
interests.
The people have always been deterred from sweeping away these in-
equalities fully by the superstition that there was some historic justice in
them, a myth that the aristocrats have assiduously fed. They have been
taught to believe it impious to strike for equality and freedom, when the
impious course was to endure inequality and slavery. Now this superstition
has been given up, and the charge of impiety and criminality is reversed,
being brought against those who are accountable for the inequalities, who
create, enjoy and retain them, the aristocrats, the powerful. It is high time
to rid ourselves of this extra respect for aristocracies, whether they be of
blood or money.
Mr. Goldwin Smith has within a week published these
unanswerable words: It does not seem to me that the British aristocracy,
since the days of the first Tudor, from which the present group of families
really dates its origin, has done much good either to its own nation or to
humanity. Its history appears to me to be an almost unvaried record of
class selfishness Plainer condemnation could not be spoken. And yet
nark: this class, these aristocrats, useless, not paying their way in the
world, living by the labor of others, robbing others legally by laws
they made, vast social burdens, selfish beyond belief, this class has the
power to stamp every effort to throw them off by the beridden race that
they plunder, as vicious, inhuman, incendiary, to be crushed out with
bullets and bastiles and guillotines. We cannot credit it. · We are cer-
> *
New York Inilependent, March 19, 1891.
114
1
tain we hear the mighty masses laughing these mad pretensions to scorn ;
we see the farce of thrones and titles concluded by the hand of the
giant Proletarians, and unearned incomes and properties revoked. Tủe
hideous false view of life these gentry sustain! Their power to make the
right seem wrong and the wrong right! What, in the catechism of hu-
manity, is the first duty of mankind? To remove these aristocrats from
power and wealth.
What—in the catechism of the aristocracy—is the
chief, vilest, and most damnable crime? To take from them a shred or
feather-weight or iota of their power to tax, exploit, rob and degrade the
rest of us. A singular ethical divergence! and because, as Mr. Froude
says, "the fate of nobleman and gentleman has been more impressive to the
imagination than the fate of the peasant or artisan,” because aristocrats
own the imagination of the press, pulpit, court and law-making body-own-
ing them physically and materially for the most part also—they have made
their catechism the generally accepted one, and the worse cause appear the
better.
I am not speaking now solely of British aristocrats, in whom I have no
especial interest, but of aristocracies in all countries, including aristocrats
of wealth. The last faction brings us onto American soil. Continuing his
fine and truthful description of the British aristocracy Mr. Goldwin Smith
says: “I could only wish to see its political interference on this continent
brought to an end, and its efforts to aggrandize itself in this hemisphere
confined to marrying American heiresses and speculating in land. Its in-
terventions here have neither been salutary to the inhabitants of this conti-
nent nor creditable to itself. ...... That artificial rank exalts the sentiment of
its possessors and lifts them above the sordid selfishness of the vulgar, is the
most baseless of fictions....... Unless the spirit of the American people is
poorer and lower than well-wishers would willingly believe it to be, the day
has dawned in which this continent will be finally set free from European
interference and given up without reserve to its own destiny as the home of
a new and happier humanity."
During the Corn-Laws' agitation in England, Sir Edward Knatchbull,
who was a Cabinet minister said, “ The duty on corn should be calculated
in such a manner as to return to the landed interest full security for their
property, and for the station in the country which they had hitherto
115
.
held.” * The same Sir Edward Knatchbull spoke of the peculiar bur-
dens””. laid upon the land, which ought to be considered, one of these being
the duty of " making provisions for younger children,” wherefore the
cheapening of food for the poor thro abolition of the Corn-Laws was quite
impracticable." † This is the spirit and intelligence of an aristocracy.
We may set ourselves free from the interference of British aristocracy,
as we shall doubtless soon effectually and with good consequences do; but
we shall then find that all aristocracies are in their essential character the
sime and that we have been breeding and pampering an endemic aristoc-
racy of our own, an aristocracy of wealth. Our own rich stand to us as the
titled aristocrats do to British subjects. Take away the property of all
these title-wearers and what would their power be? The inner principle of
all aristocracies is a superiority not eminating from the nature of the man,
extraneous and therefore artificial. It may be given by rank or money,
both spacial attachments, not constituents of character. And both will
work out the same results, selfishness and vulgarity. The aristocratic spirit
has always been bound up with possessions, which are essential to it. This
was true when rank was a far more real thing than it is now. In the Mc-
dea of Euripides Jason defended himself by saying :
“But to me it seemed
Of great importance that we both might live
As suits or rank, nor suffer abject need,
Well knowing that each friend avoids the poor."
The substance of aristocracy will go wherever great and unequal possessions
go.
The whole past is on the side of aristocracy and unequal possessions,
and yet in the light of reason these things are trumpery. They simply an-
nihilate happiness for the majority. They should abdicate but they will
not; their genius is absolute dominion. They unwilling must be con-
strained to abdicate. Let it be a gentle constraint at first, but let these
antique injuries be at length utterly out-rooted. This determination of
* * Concerning which Mr. M. V. Trumbull (in bis - The American Lesbou of the Free Trade
Struggle in England," p. 75 ) Bays: No matter how biting the hunger of the industriou3 poor might
be, the price of bread must be kept so high that the idle, fox-hunting, horse-racing aristocracy might
still riot in profligate extravagance."
+ The same, p. 115.
116
si *
aristocracy and the selfish power for possession to stay, coupled with the
general inertia and superstition of mankind, give rise to the doubt whether
strife and the necessity for physical force have yet been transcended. We
have had Mr. Bagebot assuring us that “ Experience shows how incredibly
difficult it is to get men really to encourage the principle of originality.
They will admit it in theory, but in practice the old error—the error which
arrested a hundred civilizations--returns again. Men are too fond of their
own life, too credulous of the completeness of their own ideas, too angry at
the pain of new thoughts, to be able to bear easily with a changing exist.
ence ;” and Henry Maine has dwelt with even greater emphasis
upon the relatively small portion of the human race which will
so much as tolerate a proposal or attempt to change its usages, laws,
and institutions. He declares that us to the fact that the enthusiasm
for change is comparatively rare must be added the fact that it is
extremely modern. It is known but to a small part of mankind, and to
that part but for a short period during a history of incalculable length.
And yet it is certain that what good mankind has attained has come
through change. And by those who would have the fruition for the race
of all past efforts to attain infinitely greater good than we have yet reached,
the inertia must again be overcome. They must meet this opposition with
deliberation, cool resolve and will. The change is worth any effort that
may be put forth to gain it; if the opposition is formidable and determined
the will to break it down must be formidable and complete. The temper
of all present-day reformers must be that displayed by Lincoln in his Peoria
speech of 1854. He said Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's
nature-opposition to it, in the love of justice. These principles are in
eternal antagonism ; and when brought into collision as fiercely as slavery
extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must follow cease-
lessly. Repeal the Missouri Compromise ; repeal all compromises ; repcal
the Declaration of Independence; repeal all past history ; you. cannot re-
peal human nature. It will still be in the abundance of man's heart that
slavery extension is wrong, and out of the abundance of his heart his mouth
will continue to speak.. Material inequality is slavery. Justice says,
:
+
* Popular Government, pp. 132, 134.
117
abolish this. There will be no peace on earth until inequality is abolished,
and there should be no peace. If equality must be bought by bloodshed,
let us have bloodshed ; let us have riots and rebellions and violent revolu-
tions, if necessary. For the reward of these sorrows is worth any price, the
reward is human happiness, human freedom, human development. Let us
not flinch: wars are deplorable, but there are other evils immeasurably
more deplorable. The life we now lead is more deplorable ; it is an unut-
terable shame to us that we consent to lead it ; if war and many deaths
would lift us higher, out of this death in life, let us welcome war and
cleath.
Revolution-violent revolution, I mean--has many enemies, all doubt-
less with some thought of the French Revolution. One writes of it in its
relation to present movements as follows:
"We do need, as you say, a
revolution of a certain kind, and yet it may be well to be a little slow about
using that word. The revolution which we desire will accomplish the
greatest amount of enduring good if it is a gradual and peaceful one. I
used to be a great admirer of the French Revolution, but the more I reflect
upon it and the more I study history and present social conditions, the more
I am inclined to regard it as most unfortunate. The mere fact of the
French Revolution is one of the most serious obstacles which social reform-
ers have to encounter to-day. The very mention of it is to the ordinany
mind an argument against far reaching social reform. Perhaps you may
not have studied carefully the period immediately preceding the French
Revolution. There were at that time, it seems to me, in France and else-
where many good movements, and very promising movements, which might
have accomplished far more for us had not the French Revolution inter-
rupted their normal development. It is, to me, a sufficient answer to
this argument to reflect how slow all reforms were before the Revolution,
and how slow they must have continued to be without the new precedent
and encouragement of the Revolution. Men then began to have substantial
hopes, to make somewhat adequate demands, and to harbor ideals concern-
ing their possible state that must previously have been unthinkable and
undared. Centuries of peaceful "development” would not so effectually
have annihilated some of the most injurious political and social superstitions,
as did the uprising of the French people in one day. In all our present re-
118
Looking
forms and ideas of reform we are banking on the capital of that event, altho
we may think it a great hindrance to the acceptance of our ideas.
The view that Mr. Frederic Harrison has given of this matter seems to
me the most philosophical of any. * - The Revolution,
as he says, “did
not happen in 1789 nor in 1793. The Terror was in '93; the Old System
collapsed in ’89. But the Revolution is continuing still, violent in France,
deep and quiet in England. No one of its problems is completely solved ;
no one of them is removed from solution; no one of its creations has com-
plete possession of the field. The reconstruction begûn more than a hun.
dred years ago is doing still. For they see history upside down who look
at the Revolution as a conflagration instead of a reconstruction ; or who find
in the eighteenth century a suicide instead of findivg a birth.”
at the event thus constructively our business now is to endeavor to conduct
this Revolution to maturity and its consummation, and not to be misled
into talking of the violent part of it as a misfortune, unless we intend to
say that man's nature is a misfortune and the fact that he was not created
perfect at the beginning a mistake. We have come up thro wars and revo-
lutions and we had to come up so, being what we were beforehand. It was
a sad way to come, but it was better to come that way. than not to come at
all. If the necessity of wars and revolutions is upon us still as the condi-
tion of higher ascensions, sad as the process is let us mount that way in
preference to stagnating and dying here. It would have been mere and
sheer sentimentality to have opposed war as an instrument of progress in
the past, and if hating and opposing war now is to prevent progress now it
is still sentimentality. We can hardly decide whether it is so.
But being
of necessity uncertain we must not set ourselves unconditionally, unrecon-
cilably and unreasoningly against violent means, nor Ainch from them if it
becomes apparent that progress still requires them.
Physical force therefore still has a significance and possible utility and
function which it is best for us to study critically. Physical force stands in
a relation to progress that it is weak to overlook or permit any one to
banish from our memories. It signifies resolution. It typifies the state of
mind of one who is quite determined to have the thing he wishes accom-
!
"The Eighteenth Century."
119
plished at any expense whatever. This is very different from the average
frame of mind, which does not want anything daring done, and thinks that
if things are not going well they at any rate could not be got to go better.
A letter of John Boyle O'Reilly's is so good a description of the average
frame of mind that we may adopt it as the norm by which to determine
those who belong to the average multitude. "I am no cynic, dear old
man ; " the letter reads, “but the world is telling on me. For I am begin-
ning to be ashamed of enthusiasm ; and it is dawning ou me, like a bleak
coast coming out of a mist on a gray day in the fall, that the glorious hopes
and beliefs were delusions ; that the world is hard and mean and censorious
and unchangeable ; that unless you live for appearance' sake and become a
practical snob (for you are judged and valued by your own label, and those
who live by the heart have no label, only a tag) you will be set down as a
fool, and avoided by all the precise and safe and successful people.
19* None
of the precise and safe and successful people want to venture anything for
progress. They prefer to leave progress to God, or to evolution—another
practical abstraction that lets them out of personal responsibility and effort.
The majority of precise and safe and successful people do not care to raise
the pressure on the unsuccessful crowd from whom they filch their success.
The earth is always full-peopled with majorities of this quality, "hard and
mean and censorious and unchangeable" persons if ever you propose pro-
gress to them, tho affable in social and religious connections and sacrificing
themselves for their wives and children whom they wish to lift in the social
scale and endow. The task before the lover of progress is to surprise these
hard and unchangeable persons out of their meanness and censoriousness
and contracted devotion to the social consequence of their wives and daugh-
ters, ihto actions that tend to the general good; or, if he cannot get this
unchangeable class to lend a hand at general improvement, to find means to
accomplish progress despite their opposition and disdain. It is plain that
this task is not an easy one and that those who set their affections on prog-
ress must have determination of the finest temper and inextinguishable
enthusiasm.
The man of average mental frame, if he became so far alive that he
"
Geor;e Parsons Lathrop. in The Independent, Nov. 6, 1890.
120
felt a leisure-hour interest in the cause of good, would quickly abandon it
for innocuous silence when he found the other precise and safe and success-
ful people ill-disposed to his nascent enthusiasm. He has particular
stomach to get what delectation he can of the passing hour without the
thought to improve it. He is affrighted of the fray when the outposts of
· the difficulties appear to him. Strenuous action was the whole orbit more
then he bargained for. What he lightly dreamed of was a dress-parade diver-
sion, as many a now scarred veteran went to the late war for a few weeks'
escapade ;—but with the first smoke this brave warrior for ideas skipped the
ranks. He did not calculate on the elevated eyebrows of his intimates,-
this was too much. And like this man the most of our moderns are. Shal-
low, self-satisfied, doing what others do, thinking old, dilapidated thoughts,
without a premonition that life can grow and be glorified, void of trust in
man's capacity to recreate his conduct and customs at inclination.
Imagine relying on these precious people for disinterested enterprise !
Imagine believing in their Sunday declamations of virtue! They bave not
the metal in them to introduce a new life; they have it not in their blood to
perceive the vast gains of a new life or even to be tolerant of those who,
from their amazement before the glory of living there is to be, would con-
quer these gains by their own labors.
Therefore, over against this ill-disposed class of fat and impenetrable
minds, there must be some who say with the prescience and assurance of
the sun's warmth in May, a new life shall arise. It is the condition of
progress. The many wait and oppose, a few press beyond the barriers and
bear down opposition and initiate. They are men of such central resolution
that no mental rigidity, no resistance of selfishness, of masonry, of cannon,
of the rope, can prevent their implantation of the germinant spiritual
realities.
The new thought has had slow development because of the heaven-
failing indecision and prudence and timidity of those entrusted with it.
They entreat that we may gradually educate, and time will perform the
rest;_time, god, evolution. Alas not to see that we are time, god, evolu-
tion! Had St. Paul and the apostles appealed to this trinity and let their
own incomparable energy sleep, where were the world now? They believed
in Christ, in god, the God that lay coiled in their own prodigious capacity
121
to act. The Christ of whom they learned was not a rambling incoherent
dreamer, but one of so masterful comprehension that the irrelevancies and
mere dressing of a case fell away when his mind enveloped it and his swift
moving thought and perfect will left no chasm between conception and
deed. His might lay in the directness and concentration of his nature.
His will became the axis of the moral world, so firm-fixed was it in
comparison with the shifting irresolutions of other men. Aud touched
with this spirit his followers compassed the earth with superhuman joy and
success, the inalienable property of those with unfailing will.
These people might have believed in their thought to a less degree,
and said, If we go on proclaiming the things we have in wardly seen and felt
there will be struggles and turmoil ; let us therefore quench the flame that
burns in us.
What had then become of the world? Wisely they divulged
their revolutionary visions. It was not their affair if the world were rent a
thousand ways by them. They announced with the earnestness that we
know to have been invincible, the coming of a new heaven and a new earth,
the passing away of old things—and so they have passed away. Persons of
less depth would have tempered their expressions, saying, "It would be well
if old things could pass away,' but such would have made no indentation
on the hard finish of the Roman world. Jesus truly did not say, revolt,
but he said, Change ye your hearts,' and change of heart carried revul-
sions and revolutions and alterations of the earth engermed within it. No
changed heart could have suffered the old world to survive as it was, and
had the old world survived there could have been no changed hearts in the
deep Christian sense. And in reality it was a question of depth. Nothing
partial sufficed the founder of the new life because the partial has shallow
and perishable foundations. Depth only can awaken depth, and Jesus, by
descending to the last basis of right and ordaining absolute justice and abso-
lute progress of man, made his work and his method everlasting and eternal.
Had he availed himself of partial principles to gain temporary results, he
would have been like modern reformers, the apostles of science and culture,
and his name must soon have disappeared.
The unique feature of the highest type of reformers, of whom Jesus
was one, is that they do not pause sated and complacent at any measured
quantity of valiant achievement, but propound absolute and all-inclusive
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demands. The successful and decent proprietors of land and sky, strung by
rudimentary consciences, or the fear of the wrath to come, or the knowledge
that the one-time solid soil of unearned privilege is sinking under their feet,
offer concessions : Leave us on our caste pinnacle and we will contribute
generously to God; we will write his name imperishably in the architecture
of our temples, that he may wanton in this beauty and forget the poor out-
side. Say nothing about the tenement houses from which we derive our
rents and we will subscribe salvation to the Arabians. Look not into our
factories nor digress from the beaten way heavenward by.prating of wages,
and we will see that these factory outcasts have reading-rooms, dance-halls,
sections of Y. M. C. A., and a christmas present. Many a lover of the
stars is tricked by these decent people. It is good to eat at broad boards
imid shining silver and gold, good to hear the sparkling words of elegant
sympathy and philanthrophy, and to sip the ambrosial wines that are had
from the marrow of an hundred factory families. And when the moral re-
former is invited here he feels that God indeed is with him and has set a
seal of triumph on his work. How can blinded iconoclasts proclaim against
such loveliness of character as here abounds! Rude, course, harsh persons
these misstyled improvers' must be to foam against the transparent hu-
manity of these resplendent souls. So it is the clear-browed, heaven-scaling
youth, oracle and expectation of the trampled millions, succumbs to the
soothing spell of palaces and bullion and becomes an apologist for silken,
plausible tyranny. His heart is changed ; a new light is born upon his
soul. The client of gold-fed culture perceives now the injustice done
against the rich and will mitigate its flagrancy. He will bring the classes
together by the sweet compulsion of amalgamating love, christian love,
cosmic love, lighting his torch at the furnace of imperishable love seething
in rich hearts, discovered by himself, unaccountably hidden from several
billion contemporary mortals not yet invited to sip soup and chat in the im-
maculate circlet of these irradiating angels. Could there be a more god-like
occupation than interpreting the effulgent goodness of the rich to the dark-
ened understandings of the poor? or a more heavenly harbinger of perfect
unison of classes and masses than his own alliance with some high bred
daughter of fortune to share with him the complicated and appalling under-
takings of social regeneration ?
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Steinhoff is one of Ibsen's reformers, who founds a young men's
League and announces that “the money-bag has ceased to reign here.
He turns his weapens against the “honorable and capable” men of the
community. One of them invites him to dinner. “ Fine furniture, piano,
flowers and rare plants
are there.
" What the devil could I do?" asks
the reformer. - I could not offend such decent people.
Apologists of the defamed rich preach that reformers who cut themselves
off from the rich are guilty of the grossest folly. The rich are the source of
supplies, I have heard a complaisant professor drawing a drowsy salary say.
The arm of the Lord must be upheld. All movements for good require 'sin-
ews of war,' and who will supply them if not the rich ? Since the power is in
the pockets of the rich we must not antagonize their pockets. The budding
good in the rich should not be discouraged. The rich are probably turies
thro ignorance (not selfishness) and we ought to be good enough to enlighten
them, good enough if necessary to endevor to soften their hearts with the
ulterior purpose of loosening their purse-cords and promoting the growth of
excellent works.
Not to cut yourself off from the rich in these days is to capitulate and
lose the game. To work with the rich is to surrender to the enemy. For
riches love not justice and equity and the rich love not justice, and long
have they bought of the powers of sunny youth a respite from the judgment
that hangs by a thread above them.
And when will mighty youth cease to sell itself? All power belongs
to early springing manhood : the earth and its fullness, and the calm en-
nobling night. As long ago as the seven and thirtieth year of this century
Mr. Emerson spoke sorrowfully to an audience of selected Americans of the
evil fate which hid from American youths their incompatible power.
"Young men,
” said he, "of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our
shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of
God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from
action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed in-
spire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is
the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hope-
ful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the
single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts -and there abide, the
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huge world will come round to him. Patience,-patience; with the shades
of all the good and great for company ; and for solace the perspective of
your own infinite life ; and for work the study and the comunication of
principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the
world." * And still after fifty-three years, " public and private avarice
make the air we breathe thick and fat; Still - the scholar is decent, in-
dolent, complaisant.
The prophecy of Emerson may be realized now. The young may de-
cline to enter the active occupations of life on the old terms. I know a
young man whose apparent business is groceries ; but he is much more than
this, as every dealer in salt and flour might be. His leisure hours are
spent studying the lives of his humbler fellowmen and revolving plans to
exalt their lives. He visits the poor, eats with them, knows them as Jesus
knew the lowly, and says “I am getting my political economy and my re-
ligion from the poor. Him I honor. I compare him with the political
economists who constitute the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, "nearly all the prominent writers and thinkers in the economic
and political field in this country and many foreign scholars,
the an-
nouncement certifies, who issue several considerable volumes of economic
reflections yearly, and I say this young economist who labors with his hands
nine tenths of the day is' on higher ground than all the Academy. The
mere fact that he works with his hands places him immeasurably above
them, on ground that they cannot reach until they work with their hands.
But an Academist working with his hands is at present unthinkable.
Hereafter there can be no real political economist who does not work with
his hands. Very significant words are those of a recent reviewer; “The
reason why so few good books are written,' said the late Walter Bagehot,
is that so few people who can write, know anything ;' and by this he
meant that the literary class, leading a retired existence, has little experi-
ence of life in its broader aspects. I recall the majority of economists
that I have known and the memory chills me; I cannot but pity the young
mind over which they gain ascendency. They are barren and they make
the student lives of those that believe in them barren. But here is an ob-
The American Scholar.
125
.
I tell you
server who is living and feeling, and going to the fountain head of econ-
omics, the daily lives of men.
Inspiration does not today. come from those who are set apart and sur-
rounded with privileges in order that they may render us back the highest
inspiration and the wisest suggestion, but from the man who rises from the
soil of common actual life, obedient to his instincts, trusting his feelings
and genius.
I know a Christian minister * of such unwonted sensitiveness to the
mandates of the Eternal, that he has gone forth from comfort and the de-
cent crowd to make his home among the poorest and become the introducer
of an order of social right. The great carnal world whose last flowers are
Ward McAllister and John Wanamaker announce concerning men who
like him go out of the lazy ranks to fight alone, that their influence is now
justly dead and the estimable world will hear of them no more.
the most dangerous foe the world has is just this man. Let the carnal so-
ciety of our day look to its very self-preservation when there is even one
such between the borders of the two seas.
A
young writer of uncommon promise, Miss Jessie Genevieve Tucker-
man, says in her brief description of "A Revival of Religion,” “Imagine
a thousand souls pledging themselves to follow the life of Christ in the
widest sense.
Only a thousand among so many millions of people, but a
leaven that would set the nation heaving. Think of the necessities such
vows would impose upon you and me.
What social customs must we not
disregard, what opinions must we not dare, what contempt and ridicule
could we escape !!!
What means such writing as this? It is the declaration of independ-
ence of the younger minds of our day. It informs that the subordination
of their spirits to those who' but respect and repeat the habitual practices of
the world is finished. They will go to church, but only to return sorrowing
that the pulpit has no longer aught to teach them; they will go to college
but only to learn that in this western empire with all the illustrious tra-
ditions of Aryan enterprise and expansion a wasting conformity may be
taught; and they will go out to order their lives as their own reasons bid,
the enemies and outcasts of their kind if the need is, but free, free.
Mr. E. P. Foster, of Cincinnati.
126
Already the new life is ours when these souls breathe. You may take
away their houses and lands and you have given them deliverance from a
burden whose engrossing care robs them of energy to live; you may deprive
them of support and they are glad for it throws them the more upon the
rugged and fruitful realities and shows them channels to the heart of truth
they had not explored ; you may strip them of friends, and this too is good
for the friendly universe is within them, vast and companionable, and
nobler spiritual kindred, scaling new glories for the race by the might of
of invincible rectitude, wait to welcome them.
It matters no longer if the massive world goes its accustomed course
impatient of the handful who have set themselves to stay and change it.
The power is with the few. The death of the old order is declared. ·
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