presented to the 
 UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SAN DIEGO 
 
 by 
 Mr. Qttn T.
 
 THE BOOK OF LIFE
 
 The 
 
 Book of Life 
 
 Mind and Body 
 
 UPTON SINCLAIR 
 
 HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY 
 
 GIRARD, KANSAS
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 The writer of this book has been in this world some forty- 
 two years. That may not seem long to some, but it is long 
 enough to have made many painful mistakes, and to have 
 learned much from them. Looking about him, he sees others 
 making these same mistakes, suffering for lack of that same 
 knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This being the 
 case, it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus the 
 blunders and the pain. 
 
 There come to the writer literally thousands of letters 
 every year, asking him questions, some of them of the 
 strangest. A man is dying of cancer, and do I think it can 
 be cured by a fast ? A man is unable to make his wife happy, 
 and can I tell him what is the matter with women? A man 
 has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him 
 what to do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has 
 only a little time for self-improvement, and will I tell him 
 what books he ought to read? Many such questions every 
 day make one aware of a vast mass of people, earnest, hungry 
 for happiness, and groping as if in a fog. <The things they 
 most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in 
 the newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend. Of 
 these agencies, the first is not entirely competent, the secon 
 is not entirely honest, and the third is not entirely up to d 
 Nor is there anywhere a book in which the effort has been 
 made to give to everyday human beings the everyday informa- 
 tion they need for the successful living of their lives. 
 
 For the present book the following claims may be made. 
 First, it is a modern book; its writer watches hour by hour 
 the new achievements of the human mind, he reaches out for 
 information about them, he seeks to adjust his own thoughts 
 to them and to test them in his own living. Second, it is, or 
 tries hard to be, a wise book; its writer is not among those 
 too-ardent young radicals who leap to the conclusion that 
 because many old things are stupid and tiresome, therefore 
 everything that is old is to be spurned with contempt, and 
 everything that proclaims itself new is to be taken at its own 
 valuation. Third, it is an honest book; its writer will not 
 
 yii
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 pretend to know what he only guesses,, and where it is neces- 
 sary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally, it is a kind 
 book; it is not written for its author's glory, nor for his 
 enrichment, but to tell you things that may be useful to you 
 in the brief span of your life. It will attempt to tell you how 
 to live, how to find health and happiness and success, how to 
 v/ork and how to play, how to eat and how to sleep, how to 
 love and to marry and to care for your children, how to deal 
 with your fellow men in business and politics and social life, 
 how to act and how to think, what religion to believe, what 
 art to enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the boys 
 phrase it! 
 
 There are several ways for such a book to begin. It might 
 begin with the child, because we all begin that way ; it might 
 begin with love, because that precedes the child ; it might begin 
 with the care of the body, explaining that sound physical health 
 is the basis of all right living, and even of right thinking; it 
 might begin as most philosophies do, by defining life, discussing 
 its origin and fundamental nature. 
 
 The trouble with this last plan is that there are a lot of 
 people who have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; 
 they have creeds and catechisms which they know by heart, 
 and if you suggest to them anything different, they give you 
 a startled look and get out of your way. And then there is 
 another, and in our modern world a still larger class, who say, 
 "Oh, shucks! I don't go in for religion and that kind of 
 thing." You offer them something that looks like a sermon, 
 and they turn to the baseball page. 
 
 Who will read this Book of Life? There will be, among 
 others, the great American tired business man. He wrestles 
 with problems and cares all day, and when he sits down to 
 read in the evening, he says: "Make it short and snappy." 
 There is the wife of the tired business man, the American 
 perfect lady. She does most of the reading for the family; 
 but she has never got down to anything fundamental in her 
 life, and mostly she likes to read about exciting love affairs, 
 which she distinguishes from the unexciting kind she knows 
 by the word "romance." Then there is the still more tired 
 American workingman, who has been "speeded up" all day 
 under the bonus system or the piece-work system, and is apt 
 to fall asleep in his chair before he finishes supper. Then there 
 is the workingman's wife, who has slaved all day in the kitchen,
 
 INTRODUCTORY ix 
 
 and has a chance for a few minutes' intimacy with her hus- 
 band before he falls asleep. She would like to have somebody 
 tell her what to do for croup, but she is not sure that she has 
 time to discuss the question whether life is worth living. 
 
 Yet, I wonder ; is there a single one among all these tired 
 people, or even among the cynical people, who has not had 
 some moment of awe when the thought came stabbing into his 
 mind like a knife : "What a strange thing this life is ! What 
 am I anyhow ? Where do I come from, and what is going to 
 become of me? What do I mean, what am I here for?" 
 I have sat chatting with three hoboes by a railroad track, 
 cooking themselves a mulligan in an old can, and heard one 
 of them say: "By God, it's a queer thing, ain't it, mate?" 
 I have sat on the deck of a ship, looking out over the midnight 
 ocean and talking with a sailor, and heard him use almost the 
 identical words. It is not only in the class-room and the 
 schools that the minds of men are grappling with the funda- 
 mental problems ; in fact, it was not from the schools that the 
 new religions and the great moral impulses of humanity took 
 their origin. It was from lonely shepherds sitting on the hill- 
 sides, and from fishermen casting their nets, and from car- 
 penters and tailors and shoemakers at their benches. 
 
 Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a 
 difference what you believe about life, how it comes to be, 
 where it is going, and what is your place in it. Is there a 
 heaven with a God, who watches you day and night, and knows 
 every thought you think, and will some day take you to eternal 
 bliss if you obey his laws? If you really believe that, you will 
 try to find out about his laws, and you will be comparatively 
 little concerned about the success or failure of your business. 
 Perhaps, on the other hand, you have knocked about in the 
 world and lost your "faith"; you have been cheated and ex- 
 ploited, and have set out to "get yours," as the phrase is; to 
 "feather your own nest." But some gust of passion seizes you, 
 and you waste your substance, you wreck your life ; then you 
 wonder, "Who set that trap and baited it? Am I a creature 
 of blind instincts, jealousies and greeds and hates beyond my 
 own control entirely ? Am I a poor, feeble insect, blown about 
 in a storm and smashed? Or do I make the storm, and can 
 I in any part control it?" 
 
 No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you 
 may be, it will pay you to get such things straight: to know
 
 x INTRODUCTORY 
 
 a little of what the wise men of the past have thought about 
 them, and more especially what science with its new tools of 
 knowledge may have discovered. 
 
 The writer of this book spent nine years of his life in 
 colleges and universities ; also he was brought up in a church. 
 So he knows the orthodox teachings, he can say that he has 
 given to the recognized wise men of the world every oppor- 
 tunity to tell him what they know. Then, being dissatisfied, 
 he went to the unrecognized teachers, the enthusiasts and the 
 "cranks" of a hundred schools. Finally, he thought for him- 
 self ; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself. 
 As a result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or 
 final truth; but he has what he might describe as a rough 
 working draft, a practical outline, good for everyday purposes. 
 He is going to have confidence enough in you, the reader, to 
 give you the hardest part first ; that is, to begin with the great 
 fundamental questions. What is life, and how does it come 
 to be? What does it mean, and what have we to do with it? 
 Are we its masters or its slaves? What does it owe us, and 
 what do we owe to it? Why is it so hard, and do we have 
 to stand its hardness? And can we really know about all 
 these matters, or will we be only guessing? Can we trust our- 
 selves to think about them, or shall we be safer if we believe 
 what we are told? Shall we be punished if we think wrong, 
 and how shall we be punished? Shall we be rewarded if we 
 think right, and will the pay be worth the trouble? 
 
 Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the 
 simplest language possible. I would avoid long words alto- 
 gether, if I could ; but some of these long words mean certain 
 definite things, and there are no other words to serve the 
 purpose. You do not refuse to engage in the automobile busi- 
 ness because the carburetor and the differential are words of 
 four syllables. Neither should you refuse to get yourself 
 straight with the universe because it is too much trouble to 
 go to the dictionary and learn that the word "phenomenon" 
 means something else than a little boy who can play the piano 
 or do long division in his head.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART ONE: THE BOOK OF THE MIND 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER I. THE NATURE OF LIFE 3 
 
 Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the 
 bounds of real truth as distinguished from phrases and 
 self-deception. 
 
 CHAPTER II. THE NATURE OF FAITH 8 
 
 Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and 
 what we know intuitively; what is implied in the process 
 of thinking, and without which no thought could be. 
 
 CHAPTER III. THE USE OF REASON 12 
 
 Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies 
 we are compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY 17 
 
 Compares the ways of Nature with human morality, and 
 tries to show how the latter came to be. 
 
 CHAPTER V. NATURE AND MAN 21 
 
 Attempts to show how man has taken control of Nature, 
 and is carrying on her processes and improving upon them. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. MAN THE REBEL 27 
 
 Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, 
 in which man finds himself, and how he can advance to 
 a securer condition. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. MAKING OUR MORALS 31 
 
 Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit 
 human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human 
 reason. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION 37 
 
 Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of 
 means to ends, and depends upon the understanding of a 
 particular set of circumstances. 
 
 xi
 
 xii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER IX. THE CHOOSING OF LIFE 42 
 
 Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is 
 best in life, and decide what we wish to make of it. 
 
 CHAPTER X. MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR 50 
 
 Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the 
 relative importance of our various duties. 
 
 CHAPTER XL THE MIND AND THE BODY 53 
 
 Discusses the interaction between physical and mental 
 things, and the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed 
 causes. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. THE MIND OF THE BODY 61 
 
 Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does 
 to the body, and how it can be controlled and made use 
 of by the intelligence. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS 67 
 
 Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and 
 other methods by which a new universe of life has been 
 brought to human knowledge. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY 74 
 
 Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point 
 of view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling 
 us to live forever? 
 
 CHAPTER XV. THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL 81 
 
 Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of 
 spiritism thus put before us. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. THE POWERS OF THE MIND 91 
 
 Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and igno- 
 rance is slavery, and what science means to the people. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND 98 
 
 Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to 
 preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our 
 lives and the lives of all men.
 
 CONTENTS 
 PART TWO: THE BOOK OF THE BODY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. THE UNITY OF THE BODY 105 
 
 Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is 
 not a matter of many different organs and functions, but 
 is one problem of one organism. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. EXPERIMENTS IN DIET . . 115 
 
 Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and 
 his conclusions as to what to eat. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. ERRORS IN DIET 123 
 
 Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they 
 play in the making of health and disease. 
 
 CHAPTER XXL DIET STANDARDS 134 
 
 Discusses various foods and their food values, the quan- 
 tities we need, and their money cost 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. FOODS AND POISONS 145 
 
 Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon 
 the system of stimulants and narcotics. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. MORE ABOUT HEALTH . 156 
 
 Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, cloth- 
 ing, bathing and sleep. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. WORK AND PLAY 163 
 
 Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and 
 the overworked. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. THE FASTING CURE 169 
 
 Deals with Nature's own remedy for disease, and how to 
 make use of it. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. BREAKING THE FAST 177 
 
 Discusses various methods of building up the body after 
 a fast, especially the milk diet. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. DISEASES AND CURES 182 
 
 Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and 
 what is known about their cause and cure.
 
 PART ONE 
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE NATURE OF LIFE 
 
 (Attempts to show what we know about life ; to set the bounds 
 of real truth as distinguished from phrases and self-deception.) 
 
 If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what^ 
 Life is. But unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The? 
 only consolation I can find is in the fact that nobody elsei 
 knows either. 
 
 We ask the churches, and they tell us that male and female 
 created He them, and put them in the Garden of Eden, and 
 they would have been happy had not Satan tempted them. 
 But then you ask, who made Satan, and the explanation grows 
 vague. You ask, if God made Satan, and knew what Satan 
 was going to do, is it not the same as if God did it himself ? 
 So this explanation of the origin of evil gets you no further 
 than the Hindoo picture of the world resting on the back of 
 a tortoise, and the tortoise on the head of a snake and noth- 
 ing said as to what the snake rests on. 
 
 Let us go to the scientist. I know a certain physiologist, 
 perhaps the greatest in the world, and his eager face rises 
 before me, and I hear his quick, impetuous voice declaring 
 that he knows what Life is; he has told it in several big 
 volumes, and all I have to do is to read them. Life is a 
 tropism, caused by the presence of certain combinations of 
 chemicals ; my friend knows this, because he has produced the 
 thing in his test-tubes. He is an exponent of a way of thought 
 called Monism, which finds the ultimate source of being in 
 forms of energy manifesting themselves as matter ; he shows 
 how all living things arise from that and sink back into it. 
 
 But question this scientist more closely. What is this 
 "matter" that you are so sure of? How do you know it? 
 Obviously, through sensations. You never know matter itself, 
 you only know its effects upon you, and you assume that the 
 matter must be there to cause the sensation. In other words, 
 "matter," which seems so real, turns out to be merely "a 
 permanent possibility of sensation." And suppose there were 
 to be sensations, caused, for example, by a sportive demon 
 
 2 July 22. 
 
 3
 
 4 MIND AND BODY 
 
 who liked to make fun of eminent physiologists then there 
 might be the appearance of matter and nothing else ; in other 
 words, there might be mind, and various states of mind. So 
 we discover that the materialist, in the philosophic sense, is 
 making just as large an act of faith, is pronouncing just as 
 bold a dogma as any priest of any religion. 
 
 This is an old-time topic of disputation. Before Mother 
 Eddy there was Bishop Berkeley, and before Berkeley, there 
 was Plato, and they and the materialists disputed until their 
 hearers cried in despair, "What is Mind? No matter! What 
 is Matter? Never mind!" But a century or two ago in a 
 town of Prussia there lived a little, dried-up professor of 
 philosophy, who sat himself down in his room and fixed his 
 eyes on a church steeple outside the window, and for years 
 on end devoted himself to examining the tools of thought with 
 which the human mind is provided, and deciding just what 
 work and how much of it they are fitted to do. So came the 
 proof that our minds are incapable of reaching to or dealing 
 with any ultimate reality whatever, but can comprehend only 
 phenomena that is to say, appearances and their relations 
 one with another. The Koenigsberg professor proved this 
 once for all time, setting forth four propositions about ulti- 
 mate reality, and proving them by exact and irrefutable logic, 
 and then proving by equally exact and irrefutable logic their 
 precise opposites and contraries. Anybody who has read and 
 comprehended the four "antinomies" of Immanuel Kant* 
 knows that metaphysics is as dead a subject as astrology, and 
 that all the complicated theories which the philosophers from 
 Heraclitus to Arthur Balfour have spun like spiders out of 
 their inner consciousness, have no more relation to reality 
 than the intricacies of the game of chess. 
 
 The writer is sorry to make this statement, because he 
 spent a lot of time reading these philosophers and acquainting 
 himself with their subtle theories. He learned a whole lan- 
 guage of long words, and even the special meanings which 
 each philosopher or school of philosophers give to them. When 
 he had got through, he had learned, so far as metaphysics is 
 concerned, absolutely nothing, and had merely the job of 
 clearing out of his mind great masses of verbal cobwebs. 
 It was not even good intellectual training; the metaphysical 
 method of thought is a trap. The person who thinks in abso- 
 
 *See Paulsen: "Ufe of Kant."
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 5 
 
 lutes and ultimates is led to believe that he has come to con- 
 clusions about reality, when as a matter of fact he has merely 
 proved what he wants to believe ; if he had wanted to believe 
 the opposite, he could have proven that exactly as well as his 
 opponents will at once demonstrate. 
 
 If you multiply two feet by two feet, the result repre- 
 sents a plain surface, or figure of two dimensions. If you 
 multiply two feet by two feet by two feet, you have a solid, 
 or figure of three dimensions such as the world in which 
 we live and move. But now, suppose you multiply two 
 feet by two feet by two feet by two feet, what does that 
 represent? For ages the minds of mathematicians and 
 philosophers have been tempted by this fascinating prob- 
 lem of the "fourth dimension." They have worked out by 
 analogy what such a world would be like. If you went into 
 this "fourth dimension," you could turn yourself inside out, 
 and come back to our present world in that condition, and 
 no one of your three-dimension friends would be able to 
 imagine how you had managed it, or to put you back again 
 the way you belonged. And in this, it seems to me, we have the 
 perfect analogy of metaphysical thinking. It is the "fourth 
 dimension" of the mind, and plays as much havoc with sound 
 thinking as a physical "fourth dimension" would play with 
 say, the prison system. A man who takes up an absolute 
 God, immortality, the origin of being, a first cause, free will, 
 absolute right or wrong, infinite time or space, final truth, 
 original substance, the "thing in itself" that man disappears 
 into a fourth dimension, and turns himself inside out or 
 upside down or hindside foremost, and comes back and exhibits 
 himself in triumph ; then, when he is ready, he effects another 
 disappearance, and another change, and is back on earth an 
 ordinary human being. 
 
 The world is full of schools of thought, theologians and 
 metaphysicians and professors of academic philosophy, tran- 
 scendentalists and theosophists and Christian Scientists, who 
 perform such mental monkey-shines continuously before our 
 eyes. [They prove what they please, and the fact that no two 
 of therfi prove the same thing makes clear to us in the end 
 that none of them has proved anything. /The Christian Scien- 
 tist asserts that there is no such thing as matter, but that pain 
 is merely a delusion of mortal mind; he continues serene in 
 this faith until he runs into an automobile and sustains a com-
 
 6 MIND AND BODY 
 
 pound fracture of the femur whereupon he does exactly what 
 any of the rest of us do, goes to a competent surgeon and 
 has the bone set. On the other hand, some devoted young 
 Socialists of my acquaintance have read Haeckel and Dietzgen, 
 and adopted the dogma that matter is the first cause, and 
 that all things have grown out of it and return to it; they 
 have seen that the brain decays after death, they declare that 
 the soul is a function of the brain and because of such 
 theories they deliberately reject the most powerful modes 
 of appeal whereby men can be swayed to faith in human 
 solidarity. 
 
 The best books I know for the sweeping out of meta- 
 physical cobwebs are "The Philosophy of Common Sense" and 
 "The Creed of a Layman, by Frederic Harrison, leader of 
 the English Positivists, a school of thought established by 
 Auguste Comte. But even as I recommend these books,, I 
 recall the dissatisfaction with which I left them; for it ap- 
 pears that the Positivists have their dogmas like all the rest. 
 Mr. Harrison is not content to say that mankind has not the 
 mental tools for dealing with ultimate realities ; he must needs 
 prove that mankind never will and never can have these tools. 
 I look back upon the long process of evolution and ask myself, 
 What would an oyster think about Positivism? What would 
 be the opinion of, let us say, a young turnip on the subject 
 of Mr. Frederic Harrison's thesis? It may well be that the 
 difference between a turnip and Mr. Harrison is not so great 
 as will be the difference between Mr. Harrison and that super- 
 race which some day takes possession of the earth and of all 
 the universe. It does not seem to me good science or good 
 sense to dogmatize about what this race will know, or what 
 will be its tools of thought. What does seem to me good 
 science and good sense is to take the tools which we now 
 possess and use them to their utmost capacity. 
 
 What is it that we know about life ? We know a seemingly 
 endless stream of sensations which manifest themselves in 
 certain ways, and seem to inhere in what we call things and 
 beings. We observe incessant change in all these phenomena, 
 and we examine these changes and discover their ways. The 
 ways seem to be invariable ; so completely so that for practical 
 purposes we assume them to be invariable, and base all our 
 calculations and actions upon this assumption. Manifestly, 
 we could not live otherwise, and the spread of scientific knowl-
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 7 
 
 edge is the further tracing out of such "laws" that is to say, 
 the ways of behaving of existence and the extending of our 
 belief in their invariability to wider ancj wider fields. 
 
 Once upon a time we were told that "the wind bloweth 
 where it listeth." But now we are quite certain that there 
 are causes for the blowing of the wind, and when our re- 
 searches have been carried far enough, we shall be able to 
 account for and to predict every smallest breath of air. Once 
 we were told that dreams came from a supernatural world; 
 but now we are beginning to analyze dreams, and to explain 
 what they come from and what they mean. Perhaps we still 
 find human nature a bewildering and unaccountable thing; 
 but some day we shall know enough of man's body and his 
 mind, his past and his present, to be able to explain human 
 nature and to produce it at will, precisely as today we produce 
 certain reactions in our test-tubes, and do it so invariably that 
 the most cautious financier will invest tens of millions of 
 dollars in a process, and never once reflect that he is putting 
 too much trust in the permanence of nature. 
 
 In many departments of thought great specialists are now 
 working, experimenting and observing by the methods of 
 science. If in the course of this book we speak of "certainty," 
 we mean, of course, not the "absolute" certainty of any meta- 
 physical dogma, but the practical certainty of everyday com- 
 mon sense; the certainty we feel that eating food will satisfy 
 our hunger, and that tomorrow, as today, two and two will 
 continue to make four.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE NATURE OF FAITH 
 
 (Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and 
 what we know intuitively ; what is implied in the process of think- 
 ing, and without which no thought could be.) 
 
 The primary fact that we know about life is growth. Her- 
 bert Spencer has defined this growth, or evolution, in a string 
 of long words which may be summed up to mean : the process 
 whereby a number of things which are simple and like one 
 another become different parts of one thing which is complex. 
 If we observe this process in ourselves, and the symptoms of 
 it in others, we discover that when it is proceeding success- 
 fully, it is accompanied by a sensation of satisfaction which 
 we call happiness or pleasure; also that when it is thwarted 
 or repressed, it is accompanied by a different sensation which 
 we call pain. Subtle metaphysicians, both inside the churches 
 and out, have set themselves to the task of proving that there 
 must be some other object of life than the continuance of these 
 sensations of pleasure which accompany successful growth. 
 They have proven to their own satisfaction that morality will 
 collapse and human progress come to an end unless we can 
 find some other motive, something more permanent and more 
 stimulating, something "higher," as they phrase it. All I can 
 say is that I gave reverent attention to the arguments of these 
 moralists and theologians, and that for many years I believed 
 their doctrines ; but I believe them no longer. 
 
 I interpret the purpose of life to be the continuous unfold- 
 ment of its powers, its growth into higher forms that is to 
 say, forms more complex and subtly contrived, capable of 
 more intense and enduring kinds of that satisfaction which is 
 nature's warrant of life. If you wish to take up this state- 
 ment and argue about it, please wait until you have read the 
 chapter "Nature and Man," and noted my distinction between 
 instinctive life and rational life. For men, the word "growth" 
 does not mean any growth, all growth, blind and indiscriminate 
 growth. It does not mean growth for the tubercle bacillus, 
 nor growth for the anopheles mosquito, nor growth for the 
 
 8
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 9 
 
 house-fly, the spider and the louse. Neither do we mean 
 that the purpose of man's own life is any pleasure, all 
 pleasure, blind and indiscriminate pleasure; the pleasure of 
 alcohol, the pleasure of cannibalism, the pleasure of the modern 
 form of cannibalism which we call "making money." We 
 have survived in the struggle for existence by the cooperative 
 and social use of our powers of judgment ; and our judgment 
 is that which selects among forms of growth, which gives 
 preference to wheat and corn over weeds, and to self-control 
 and honesty over treachery and greed. 
 
 So when we say that the purpose of life is happiness, we 
 do not mean to turn mankind loose at a hog-trough ; we mean 
 that our duty as thinkers is to watch life, to test it, to pick 
 and choose among the many forms it offers, and to say : This 
 kind of growth is more permanent and full of promise, it is 
 more fertile, more deeply satisfactory; therefore, we choose 
 this, and sanction the kind of pleasure which it brings. Other 
 kinds we decide are temporary and delusive ; therefore we put 
 in jail anyone who sells alcoholic drink, and we refuse to 
 invite to our home people who are lewd, and some day we shall 
 not permit our children to attend moving picture shows in 
 which the modern form of cannibalism is glorified. 
 
 The reader, no doubt, has been taught a distinction between 
 "science" and "faith." He is saying now, "You believe that 
 everything is to be determined by human reason? You reject 
 all faith?" I answer, No; I am not rejecting faith; I am 
 merely refusing to apply it to objects with which it has nothing 
 to do. You do not take it as a matter of faith that a package 
 of sugar weighs a pound; you put it on the scales and find 
 out in other words, you make it a matter of experiment. But 
 all the creeds of all the religious sects are full of pronounce- 
 ments which are no more matters of faith than the question 
 of the weighing of sugar. Is pork a wholesome article of 
 food or is it not? All Christians will readily acknowledge 
 that this is a matter to be determined by the microscope and 
 other devices of experimental science ; but then some Jew 
 rises in the meeting and puts the question: Is dancing in- 
 jurious to the character ? And immediately all members of the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church vote to close the discussion. 
 
 What is faith? j Faith is the instinct which underlies all 
 being, assuring us that life is worth while and honest, a thing 
 to be trusted ;/in other words, it is the certainty that successful
 
 J-0 MIND AND BODY 
 
 growth always is and always will be accompanied by pleasure. 
 The most skeptical scientist in the world, even my friend the 
 physiologist who proves that life is nothing but a tropism, 
 and can be produced by mixing chemicals in test-tubes this 
 eager friend is one of the most faithful men I know. He 
 is burning up with the faith that knowledge is worth possessing, 
 and also that it is possible of attainment. With what bound- 
 less scorn would he receive any suggestion to the contrary 
 for example, the idea that life might be a series of sensations 
 which some sportive demon is producing for the torment ot 
 man ! More than that, this friend is burning up with the cer- 
 tainty that knowledge can be spread, that his fellow men will 
 receive it and apply it, and that it will make them happy when 
 they do. Why else does he write his learned books in defense 
 of the materialist philosophy? 
 
 And that same faith which animates the great monist ani- 
 mates likewise every child who toddles off to school, and every 
 chicken which emerges from an egg, and every blade of grass 
 which thrusts its head above the ground. Not every chicken 
 survives, of course, and all the blades of grass wither in the 
 fall ; nevertheless, the seeds of grass are spread, and chickens 
 make food for philosophers, and the great process of life con- 
 tinues to manifest its faith. In the end the life process pro- 
 duces man, who, as we shall presently see, takes it up, and 
 judges it, and makes it over to suit himself. 
 
 You will note from this that I am what is called an opti- 
 mist; whereas some of the great philosophers of the world 
 have called themselves pessimists. But I notice with a smile 
 that these are often the men who work hardest of all to spread 
 their ideas, and thus testify to the worthwhileness of truth 
 and the perfectibility of mankind. There has come to be a 
 saying among settlement workers and physicians, who are 
 familiar with poverty and its effects upon life, that there are 
 no bad babies and good babies, there are only sick babies and 
 well babies. In the same way, I would say there are no pessi- 
 mists and optimists, there are only mentally sick people and 
 mentally well people. Everywhere throughout life, both ani- 
 mal and vegetable, health means happiness, and gives abundant 
 evidence of that fact. All healthy life is satisfactory to itself ; 
 when it develops reason, it tries to find out why, and this is 
 yet another testimony to the fact that having power and using 
 it is pleasant. When I was in college the professor would
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 11 
 
 propound the old question: "Would you rather be a happy 
 pig or an unhappy philosopher?" My answer always was: 
 "I would rather be a happy philosopher." The professor re- 
 plied: "Perhaps that is not possible." But I said: "I will 
 prove that it is!"
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE USE OF REASON 
 
 (Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies 
 we are compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it.) 
 
 The great majority of people are brought up to believe that 
 some particular set of dogmas are objects of faith, and that 
 there are penalties more or less severe for the application of 
 reason to these dogmas. What particular set it happens to 
 be is a matter of geography; in a crowded modern city like 
 New York, it is a matter of the particular block on which the 
 child is born. A child born on Hester Street will be taught 
 that his welfare depends upon his never eating meat and butter 
 from the same dish. A child born on Tenth Avenue will be 
 taught that it is a matter of his not eating meat on Fridays. 
 A child born on Madison Avenue will be taught that it is a 
 question of the precise metaphysical process by which bread is 
 changed into human body and wine into human blood. Each 
 of these children will be assured that his human reason is 
 fallible, that it is extremely dangerous to apply it to this 
 "sacred" subject, and that the proper thing to do is to accept 
 the authority of some ancient tradition, or some institution, or 
 some official, or some book for which a special sanction is 
 claimed. 
 
 Has there ever been in the world any revelation, outside 
 of or above human reason? Could there ever be such a thing? 
 In order to test this possibility, select for yourself the most 
 convincing way by which a special revelation could be handed 
 down to mankind. Take any of the ancient orthodox ways, 
 the finding of graven tablets on a mountain-top, or a voice 
 speaking from a burning bush, or an angel appearing before 
 a great concourse of people and handing out a written scroll. 
 Suppose that were to happen, let us say, at the next Yale- 
 Harvard football game; suppose the news were to be flashed 
 to the ends of the earth that God had thus presented to man- 
 kind an entirely new religion. What would be the process by 
 which the people of London or Calcutta would decide upon 
 that revelation? First, they would have to consider the ques- 
 
 12
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 13 
 
 tion whether it was an American newspaper fake by no 
 means an easy question. Second, they would have to consider 
 the chances of its being an optical delusion. Then, assuming 
 they accepted the sworn testimony of ten thousand mature 
 and competent witnesses, they would have to consider the pos- 
 sibility of someone having invented a new kind of invisible 
 aeroplane. Assuming they were convinced that it was really 
 a supernatural being, they would next have to decide the 
 chances of its being a visitor from Mars, or from the fourth 
 dimension of space, or from the devil. In considering all this, 
 they would necessarily have to examine the alleged revelation. 
 What was the literary quality of it? What was the moral 
 quality of it ? What would be the effect upon mankind if the 
 alleged revelation were to be universally adopted and applied ? 
 
 Manifestly, all these are questions for the human reason, 
 the human judgment ; there is no other method of determining 
 them, there would be nothing for any individual person, or for 
 men as a whole to do, except to apply their best powers, and, 
 as the phrase is, "make up their minds" about the matter. 
 Reason would be the judge, and the new revelation would be 
 the prisoner at the bar. Humanity might say, this is a real 
 inspiration, we will submit ourselves to it and follow it, and 
 allow no one from now on to question it. But inevitably there 
 would be some who would say, "Tommyrot!" There would 
 be others who would say, "This new revelation isn't working, 
 it is repressing progress, it is stifling the mind." These people 
 would stand up for their conviction, they would become 
 martyrs, and all the world would have to discuss them. And 
 who would decide between them and the great mass of men ? 
 Reason, the judge, would decide. 
 
 IlJS-. perfectly true that human reason is fallible. In- 
 fallibility is an absolute, a concept of the mind, and not a 
 reality. Life has not given us infallibility, any more than it 
 has given us omniscience, or omnipotence, or any other of 
 those attributes which we call divine. Life has given us 
 powers, more or less weak, more or less strong, but all capable 
 of improvement and development. Reason is the tool whereby 
 mankind has won supremacy over the rest of the animal 
 kingdom, and is gradually taking control of the forces of 
 nature. It is the best tool we have, and because it is the best, 
 we are driven irresistibly to use it. And how strange that 
 some of us can find no better use for it than to destroy its
 
 14 MIND AND BODY 
 
 own self ! Visit one of the Jesuit fathers and hear him seek 
 to persuade you that reason is powerless against faith and 
 must abdicate to faith. You answer, "Yes, father, you have 
 persuaded me. I admit the fallibility of my mortal powers; 
 and I begin by applying my doubts of them to the arguments 
 by which you have just convinced me. I was convinced, but 
 of course I cannot be sure of a conviction, attained by fallible 
 reason. Therefore I am just where I was before except that 
 I am no longer in position to be certain of anything." 
 
 You answer in good faith, and take up your hat and depart, 
 closing the door of the good father's study behind you. But 
 stop a moment, why do you close the door? You close the 
 door because your reason tells you that otherwise the cold air 
 outside will blow in and make the good father uncomfortable. 
 You put your hat on, because your reason has not yet been 
 applied to the problem of the cause of baldness. You step out 
 onto the street, and when you hear a sudden noise, you step 
 back onto the curbstone, because your reason tells you that 
 an automobile is coming, and that on the sidewalk you are 
 safe from it. So you go on, using your reason in a million 
 acts of your life whereby your life is preserved and developed. 
 And if anybody suggested that the fallibility of your reason 
 should cause you to delay in front of an automobile, you would 
 apply your reason to the problem of that person and decide 
 that he was insane. And I say that just as there is insanity in 
 everyday judgments and relationships, so there is insanity in 
 philosophy, metaphysics and religion; the seed and source of 
 all this kind of insanity being the notion that it is the duty 
 of anybody to believe anything which cannot completely justify 
 itself as reasonable. 
 
 Nowadays, as ideas are spreading, the champions of dogma 
 are hard put to it, and you will find their minds a muddle of 
 two points of view. The Jewish rabbi will strive desperately 
 to think of some hygienic objection to the presence of meat 
 and butter on the same plate ; the Catholic priest will tell you 
 that fish is a very wholesome article of food, and that any- 
 how we all eat too much ; the Methodist and the Baptist and 
 the Presbyterian will tell you that if men did not rest one day 
 in seven their health would break down. Thus they justify 
 faith by reason, and reconcile the conflict between science and 
 theology. Accepting this method, I experiment and learn that 
 it improves my digestion and adds to my working power if I
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 15 
 
 play tennis on Sunday. I follow this indisputably rational 
 form of conduct and find myself in conflict with the "faith" 
 of the ancient State of Delaware, which obliges me to serve a 
 term in its state's prison for having innocently and unwittingly 
 desecrated its day of holiness ! 
 
 If you read Professor Bury's little book, "A History of 
 Freedom of Thought," you will discover that there has been 
 a long conflict over the right of men to use their minds 
 and the victory is not yet. The term "free thinker," which 
 ought to be the highest badge a man could wear, is still almost 
 everywhere throughout America a term of vague terror. In 
 the State of California today there is a Criminal Syndicalism 
 Act, which provides a maximum of fourteen years in jail for 
 any person who shall write or publish or speak any words 
 expressive of the idea that the United States government 
 should be overthrown in the same way that it was established 
 that is, by force; only a few months ago the writer of this 
 book was on the witness stand for two days, and had the pain- 
 ful, almost incredible experience of being battered and knocked 
 about by an inquisitive district attorney, who cross-examined 
 him as to every detail of his beliefs, and read garbled extracts 
 from his published writings, in the effort to make it appear 
 that he held some belief which might possibly prejudice the 
 jury against him. The defendant in this case, a returned 
 soldier who had spent three years as a volunteer in the trenches, 
 and had been twice wounded and once gassed, was accused, 
 not merely of approving the Soviet form of government, but 
 also of having printed uncomplimentary references to priests 
 and religious institutions. 
 
 Nowadays it is the propertied class which has taken pos- 
 session of the powers of government, and which presumes 
 to censor the thinking of mankind in its own interest. But 
 whether it be priestcraft or whether it be capitalism which 
 seeks to bind the human mind, it comes to the same thing, 
 and the effort must be met by the assertion that, in spite of 
 errors and blunders, and the serious harm these may do, there 
 is no way for men to advance save by using the best powers 
 of thinking they possess, and proclaiming their conclusions to 
 others. Speaking theologically for the moment, God has given 
 us our reasoning powers, and also the impulse to use them, 
 and it is inconceivable that He should seek to restrict their 
 use, or should give to anyone the power to forbid their use.
 
 16 MIND AND BODY 
 
 It is His truth which we seek, and His which we proclaim. 
 In so doing we perform our highest act of faith, and we re- 
 fuse to be troubled by the idea that for this service He will 
 reward us by an eternity of sulphur and brimstone. 
 
 Throughout the remainder of this book it will be assumed 
 that the reader accepts this point of view, or, at any rate, that 
 he is willing for purposes of experiment to give it a trial 
 and see where it leads him. We shall proceed to consider the 
 problems of human life in the light of reason, to determine 
 how they come to be, and how they can be solved.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY 
 
 (Compares the ways of nature with human morality, and tries 
 to show how the latter came to be.) 
 
 Seventy years ago Charles Darwin published his book, 
 "The Origin of Species," in which he defied the theological 
 dogma of his time by the shocking idea that life had evolved 
 by many stages of progress from the diatom to man. This 
 of course did not conform to the story of the Garden of Eden, 
 and so "Darwinism" was fought as an invention of the devil, 
 and in the interior of America there are numerous sectarian 
 colleges where the dread term "evolution" is spoken in awed 
 whispers. Only the other day I read in my newspaper the 
 triumphant proclamation of some clergyman that "Darwinism" 
 had been overthrown. This reverend gentleman had got mixed 
 up because some biologists were disputing some detail of the 
 method by which the evolution of species had been brought 
 about. Do species change by the gradual elimination of the 
 unfit, or do they change by sudden leaps, the "mutation" theory 
 of de Vries? Are acquired powers transmitted to posterity, 
 or is the germ plasm unaffected by its environment ? Concern- 
 ing such questions the scientists debate. But the fact that life 
 has evolved in an ordered series from the lower forms to the 
 higher, and that each individual reproduces in embryo and in 
 infancy the history of this long process these facts are now 
 the basis of all modern thinking, and as generally accepted 
 as the rotation of the earth. 
 
 You may study this process of evolution from the outside, 
 in the multitude of forms which it has assumed and in their 
 reactions one to another ; or you may study it from the inside 
 in your own soul, the emotions which accompany it, the im- 
 pulse or craving which impels it, the elan vital, as it is called 
 by the French philosopher Bergson. The Christians call it 
 love, and Nietzsche, who hated Christianity, called it "the 
 will to power," and persuaded himself that it was the opposite 
 of love. 
 
 You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one en- 
 
 17
 
 18 MIND AND BODY 
 
 titled "Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the com- 
 plete immorality of nature, and declares that there is no way 
 by which what mankind knows as morality can have originated 
 in the process of nature or can be reconciled to natural law. 
 This statement, coming from a leading agnostic, was welcome 
 to the theologians. But when I first read the essay, as a student 
 of sixteen, it seemed to me narrow ; I thought I saw a stand- 
 point from which the contradiction disappeared. The differ- 
 ence between the morality of Christ and the morality of 
 nature is merely the difference between a lower and a higher 
 stage of mental development. The animal loves and seeks by 
 instinct to preserve the life which it knows that is to say, 
 its own life and the life of its young. The wolf knows noth- 
 ing about the feelings of a deer ; but man in his savage state 
 develops reasoning powers enough to realize that there are 
 others like himself, the members of his own tribe, and he 
 makes for himself taboos which forbid him to kill and eat 
 the members of that tribe. At the present time humanity has 
 developed its reason and imaginative sympathy to include in 
 the "tribe" one or two hundred million people ; while to those 
 outside the tribe it still preserves the attitude of the wolf. 
 
 How came it that a mind so acute as Huxley's went so 
 far astray on the question of the evolution of morality? The 
 answer is that this was the factory age in England, and the 
 great scientist, a rebel in theological matters, was in economics 
 a child of his time. We find him using the formulas of 
 bourgeois biology to ridicule Henry George and his plea for 
 the freeing of the land. "Competition is the life of trade," 
 ran the nineteenth century slogan ; and competition was the 
 god of nineteenth century biology. Tennyson summed it up 
 in the phrase: "Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin;" 
 and this was found convenient by Manchester manufacturers 
 who wished to shut little children up for fourteen hours a 
 day in cotton mills, and to harness women to drag cars in the 
 coal mines, and to be told by the learned men of their colleges 
 and the holy men of their churches that this was "the survival 
 of the fittest," it was nature's way of securing the advance- 
 ment of the race. 
 
 But now we are preparing for an era of cooperation, and 
 it occurs to our men of science to go back to nature and find 
 out what really are her ways. If you will read Kropotkin's 
 "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution," you will find a com-
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 19 
 
 plete refutation of the old bourgeois biology, and a view of 
 nature which reveals in it the germs of human morality. 
 Kropotkin points out that everywhere throughout nature it 
 is the social and not the solitary animals which are most 
 numerous and most successful. There are many millions of 
 ants and bees for every hawk or eagle, and certainly in the 
 state of nature there were thousands of deer for every lion 
 or tiger that preyed upon them. And all these social creatures 
 have their ways of being, which it requires no stress of the 
 imagination to compare with the tribal customs and the moral 
 codes of mankind. The different animals prey upon one an- 
 other, but they do not prey upon their own species, except in 
 a few rare cases. The only beast that makes a regular prac- 
 tice of exploiting his own kind is man. 
 
 By hundreds of interesting illustrations Kropotkin shows 
 that mutual aid and mutual self-protection are the means 
 whereby the higher forms of being have been evolved. In- 
 sects and birds and fish, nearly all the herbivorous mammals, 
 and even a great many of the carnivores, help one another 
 and protect one another. The chattering monkeys in the tree- 
 tops drove out the saber-tooth tiger from the grove because 
 there were so many of them, and when they saw him they 
 all set up a shriek and clamor which deafened and confused 
 him. And when by and by these monkeys developed an 
 opposed thumb, and broke off a branch of a tree for a club, 
 and fastened a sharp stone on the end of it for an axe, and 
 fell upon the saber-toothed tiger and exterminated him, they 
 did it because they had learned solidarity even as the workers 
 of the world are today learning solidarity in the face of the 
 beast of capitalism. 
 
 Man has survived by the cunning of his brain, we are told, 
 and that is true. But first among the products of that cunning 
 brain has been the knowledge that by himself he is the most 
 helpless and pitiful of creatures, while standing together and 
 forming societies and developing moralities, he is master of 
 the world. He has not yet learned that lesson entirely; he 
 has learned it only for his own nation. Therefore he takes 
 the highest skill of his hand and the subtlest wit of his brain, 
 and uses them to manufacture poison gases. At the present 
 hour he is painfully realizing that his poison formulas all 
 become known to the tribes whom he calls his enemies, and 
 so it is his own destruction he is engaged in contriving. In 
 
 3
 
 20 MIND AND BODY 
 
 other words, man has come to a time when his mechanical skill, 
 his mastery over the forces of nature, has developed more 
 rapidly than his moral sense and his imaginative sympathy. 
 His ability to destroy life has become dangerously greater than 
 his desire to preserve it. So he confronts the fair face of 
 nature as an insane creature, wrecking not merely everything 
 that he himself has built up, but everything that nature has 
 built in the ages before him. He is striving now with infinite 
 agony to make this fact real to himself, and to mend his 
 evil ways; and the first step in that process is to root out from 
 his mind the devil's doctrine which in his blindness and greed 
 he has himself implanted, that there is any way for him to find 
 real happiness, or to make any worth while progress on this 
 earth, by the method of inflicting misery and torment upon 
 his fellow men.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 NATURE AND MAN 
 
 (Attempts to show how man has taken control of nature, and 
 is carrying on her processes and improving upon them.) 
 
 If the argument of the preceding chapter is sound, human 
 morality is not a fixed and eternal set of laws, but is, like 
 everything else in the world, a product of natural evolution. 
 We can trace the history of it, just as we trace the story of 
 the rocks. It is not a mysterious or supernatural thing, it is 
 simply the reaction of man to his environment, and more 
 especially to his fellow men. The source of it is that same 
 inner impulse, that love of life, that joy in growing, that faith 
 which appears to be the soul of all being. 
 
 Man is a part of nature and a product of nature ; in many 
 fundamental respects his ways are still nature's ways and his 
 laws still nature's laws. But there are other and even more 
 significant ways in which man has separated himself from 
 nature and made himself something quite different. In order 
 to reveal this clearly, we draw a distinction between nature 
 and man. This is a proper thing to do, provided we bear in 
 mind that our classification is not permanent or final. We 
 distinguish frogs from tadpoles, in spite of the fact that at 
 one stage the creature is half tadpole and half frog. We 
 distinguish the animal from the vegetable kingdom, despite 
 the fact that in their lower forms they cannot be distinguished. 
 
 What, precisely, is the difference between nature and man ? 
 The difference lies in the fact that nature is apparently blind 
 in her processes ; she produces a million eggs in order to give 
 life to one salmon, she produces countless millions of salmon 
 to be devoured by other fish apparently no better than salmon. 
 Poets may take up the doctrine of evolution and dress it out in 
 theological garments, talking about the "one far off divine event 
 towards which the whole creation moves," but for all we can 
 see, nature, apart from man, is just as well satisfied to move 
 in circles, and to come back exactly where she started. Nature 
 made a whole world of complicated creatures in the steamy, 
 luke-warm swamps of the Mesozoic era, and then, as if decid- 
 
 21
 
 22 MIND AND BODY 
 
 ing that the pattern of a large body and a small brain was not 
 a success, she froze them all to death with a glacial epoch, 
 and we have nothing but the bones to tell us about them. 
 
 No one understands anything about evolution until he has 
 realized that the phrase "the survival of the fittest" does not 
 mean the survival of the best from any human point of view. 
 It merely means the survival of those capable of surviving 
 in some particular environment. We consider our present 
 civilization as "fit"; but if astronomical changes should cause 
 another ice age, We should discover that our "fitness" de- 
 pended upon our ability to live on lichens, or on something 
 we could grow by artificial light in the bowels of the earth. 
 
 So much for our ancient mother, nature. But now 
 whether we say with the theologians that it was divine provi- 
 dence, or with the materialist philosophers that it was an 
 accidental mixing of atoms at any rate it has come about that 
 nature has recently produced creatures who are conscious of 
 her process, who are able to observe and criticize it, to take 
 up her work and carry it on in their own way, for better or 
 for worse. Whether by accident or design, there has been 
 on parts of our planet such a combination of climate and soil 
 as has brought into being a new product of nature, a heightened 
 form of life which we call "intelligence." Creation opens its 
 eyes, and beholds the work of the creator, and decides that 
 it is good yet not so good as it might be! Creation takes 
 up the work of the creator, and continues it, in many respects 
 annulling it, in other respects revising it entirely. Whether 
 a sonnet is a better or a higher product than a spider is a 
 question it would be futile to discuss ; but this, at least, should 
 be clear nature has produced an infinity of spiders, but nature 
 never produced a sonnet, nor anything resembling it. 
 
 Man, the creature of God, takes over the functions of God. 
 This fact may shock us, or it may inspire us; to the meta- 
 physically minded it offers a great variety of fascinating prob- 
 lems. Can it be that God is in process of becoming, that there 
 is no God until he has become, in us and through us? H. G. 
 Wells sets forth this curious idea; and then, of course, the 
 bishops and the clergy rise up in indignation and denounce 
 Mr. Wells as an upstart and trespasser upon their field. They 
 have been worshiping their God for some three or four thou- 
 sand years, and know that He has been from eternity; He 
 created the world at His will, and how shall impious man
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 23 
 
 presume to rise up and criticize His product, and imagine 
 that he can improve upon it? Man, with his cheap and silly 
 little toys, his sonnets and scientific systems, his symphony 
 concerts and such pale imitations of celestial harmonies! 
 
 Mr. Wells, in his character of God in the making, has 
 created a bishop of his own, and no doubt would maintain 
 the thesis that he is a far better bishop than any created by 
 the God of the Anglican churches. We will leave Mr. Wells' 
 bishop to argue these problems with God's bishops, and will 
 merely remind the reader of our warning about these meta- 
 physical matters. You can prove anything and everything, 
 whichever and however, all or both ; and discussions of the 
 subject are merely your enunciation of the fact that you have 
 your private truth as you want it. It may be that there is 
 an Infinite Consciousness, which carries the whole process of 
 creation in itself, and that all the seeming wastes and blunders 
 of nature can be explained from some point of view at present 
 beyond the reach of our minds. On the other hand it may 
 be that consciousness is now dawning in the universe for the 
 first time. It may be that it is an accident, a fleeting product 
 like the morning mist on the mountain top. On the other 
 hand, it may be that it is destined to grow and expand and 
 take control of the entire universe, as a farmer takes control 
 of a field for his own purposes. It may be that just as our 
 individual fragments of intelligence communicate and merge 
 into a family, a club, a nation, a world culture, so we shall 
 some day grope our way toward the consciousness of other 
 planets, or of other states of being subsisting on this planet 
 unknown to us, or perhaps even toward the cosmic soul, the 
 universal consciousness which we call God. 
 
 But meantime, all we can say with positiveness is this: 
 man, the created, is becoming the creator. He is taking up 
 the world purpose, he is imposing upon it new purposes of his 
 own, he is attempting to impose upon it a moral code, to test 
 it and discipline it by a new standard which he calls economy. 
 To the present writer this seems the most significant fact 
 about life, the most fascinating point of view from which life 
 can be regarded. The reader who wishes to follow it into 
 greater detail is referred to a little book by Professor E. Ray 
 Lankester, "The Kingdom of Man"; especially the opening 
 essay, with its fascinating title, "Nature's Insurgent Son." 
 
 In what ways have the reasoned and deliberate purposes of
 
 24 MIND AND BODY 
 
 man revised and even supplanted the processes of nature? 
 The ways are so many that it would be easier to mention 
 those in which he has not done so. A modern civilized man 
 is hardly content with anything that nature does, nor willing 
 to accept any of nature's products. He will not eat nature's 
 fruits, he prefers the kinds that he himself has brought into 
 being. He is not content with the skin that nature has given 
 him; he has made himself an infinite variety of complicated 
 coverings. He objects to nature's habit of pouring cold 
 water upon him, and so he has built himself houses in which 
 he makes his own climate; he has recently taken to creat- 
 ing for himself houses which roll along the ground, or which 
 fly through the air, or which swim under the surface of 
 the sea; so he carries his private climate with him to all 
 these places. It was nature's custom to remove her blunders 
 and her experiments quickly from her sight. But man has 
 decided that he loves life so well that he will preserve 
 even the imbeciles, the lame and the halt and the blind. In a 
 state of nature, if a man's eyes were not properly focused, 
 he blundered into the lair of a tiger and was eaten. But 
 civilized man despises such a method of maintaining the 
 standard of human eyes ; he creates for himself a transparent 
 product, ground to such a curve that it corrects the focus of 
 his eyes, and makes them as good as any other eyes. In ten 
 thousand such ways we might name, man has rebelled against 
 the harshness of his ancient mother, and has freed himself 
 from her control. 
 
 But still he is the child of his mother, and so it is his way 
 to act first, and then to realize what he has done. So it comes 
 about that very few, even of the most highly educated men, 
 are aware how completely the ancient ways of nature have 
 been suppressed by her "insurgent son." It is a good deal 
 as in the various trades and professions which have developed 
 with such amazing rapidity in modern civilization; the paper 
 man knows how to make paper, the shoe man knows how to 
 make shoes, the optician knows about grinding glasses, but 
 none of these knows very much about the others' specialties, 
 and has no realization of how far the other has gone. So it 
 comes about that in our colleges we are still teaching ancient 
 and immutable "laws of nature," which in the actual practice 
 of men at work are as extinct and forgotten as the dodo. 
 In all colleges, except a few which have been tainted by
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 25 
 
 Socialist thought, the students are solemnly learning the so- 
 called "Malthusian law," that population presses continually 
 upon the limits of subsistence, there are always a few more 
 people in every part of the world than that part of the world 
 is able to maintain. At any time we increase the world's pro- 
 ductive powers, population will increase correspondingly, so 
 there can never be an end to human misery, and abortion, 
 war and famine are simply nature's eternal methods of adjust- 
 ing man to his environment. 
 
 Thus solemnly we are taught in the colleges. And yet, nine 
 out of ten of the students come from homes where the parents 
 have discovered the modern practice of birth control; all the 
 students are themselves finding out about it in one way or 
 another, and will proceed when they marry to restrict them- 
 selves to two or three children. In vain will the ghost of 
 their favorite statesman and hero, Theodore Roosevelt, be 
 traveling up and down the land, denouncing them for the 
 dreadful crime of "race suicide" that is to say, their pre- 
 suming to use their reason to put an end to the ghastly situa- 
 tion revealed by the Malthusian law, over-population eternally 
 recurring and checked by abortion, war and famine ! In vain 
 will the ghost of their favorite saint and moralist, Anthony 
 Comstock, be traveling up and down the land, putting people 
 in jail for daring to teach to poor women what every rich 
 woman knows, and for attempting to change the entirely man- 
 made state of affairs whereby an intelligent and self-governing 
 Anglo-Saxon land is being in two or three generations turned 
 over to a slum population of Italians, Poles, Hungarians, 
 Portuguese, French-Canadians, Mexicans and Japanese ! 
 
 Likewise in every orthodox college the student is taught 
 what his professors are pleaded to call "the law of diminishing 
 returns of agriculture." That is to say, additional labor ex- 
 pended upon a plot of land does not result in an equal increase 
 of produce, and the increase grows less, until finally you come 
 to a time when no matter how much labor you expend, you 
 can get no more produce from that plot of land. All pro- 
 fessors teach this, because fifty years ago it was true, and 
 since that time it has not occurred to any professor of political 
 science to visit a farm. And all the while, out in the suburbs 
 of the city where the college is located, market gardeners are 
 practicing on an enormous scale a new system of intensive 
 agriculture which makes the "law of diminishing returns" a 
 foolish joke.
 
 26 MIND AND BODY 
 
 As Kropotkin shows in his book, "Fields, Factories and 
 Workshops," the modern intensive gardener, by use of glass 
 and the chemical test-tube, has developed an entirely new 
 science of plant raising. He is independent of climate, he 
 makes his own climate; he is independent of the defects of 
 the soil, he would just as soon start from nothing and make 
 his soil upon an asphalt pavement. By doubling his capital 
 investment he raises, not twice as much produce, but ten 
 times as much. If his methods were applied to the British 
 Isles, he could raise sufficient produce on this small surface 
 to feed the population of the entire globe. 
 
 So we see that by simple and entirely harmless devices 
 man is in position to restrict or to increase population as he 
 sees fit. Also he is in position to raise food and produce the 
 necessities of life for a hundred or thousand times as many 
 people as are now on the earth. But superstition ordains in- 
 voluntary parenthood, and capitalism ordains that land shall 
 be held out of use for speculation, or shall be exploited for 
 rent! And this is done in the name of "nature" that old 
 nature of the "tooth and claw," whose ancient plan it is "that 
 they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who 
 can" ; that ancient nature which has been so entirely suppressed 
 and supplanted by civilized man, and which survives only as 
 a ghost, a skeleton to be resurrected from the tomb, for the 
 purpose of frightening the enslaved. When a predatory 
 financier wishes a fur overcoat to protect himself from the 
 cold, or when he hires a masseur to keep up the circulation 
 of his blood, you do not find him troubling himself about the 
 laws of "nature"; never will he mention this old scarecrow, 
 except when he is trying to persuade the workers of the world 
 to go on paying him tribute for the use of the natural resources 
 of the earth!
 
 (Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, in 
 which man finds himself, and how he can advance to a securer 
 condition.) 
 
 In the state of nature you find every creature living a 
 precarious existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the 
 creature survives only so long as it keeps itself at the top of 
 its form. The result is the maintenance of the type in its 
 full perfection, and, under the competitive pressure, a gradual 
 increase of its powers. Excepting when sudden eruptions of 
 natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly provided with 
 a set of instincts for all emergencies ; it is in harmonious rela- 
 tionship to its environment, it knows how to do what it has 
 to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection. 
 But now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, 
 abolishes the competitive struggle, and changes at his own 
 insolent will both his environment and his reaction thereto. 
 
 Man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; 
 they are for his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the 
 inconveniences of nature and the stresses of the competitive 
 struggle. In a state of nature there are no fat animals, but in 
 civilization there are not merely fat animals, but fat men to 
 eat the fat animals. In a state of nature no animal loafs very 
 long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. But man, by 
 his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, 
 and also his fellow men. So he produces unlimited wealth 
 for himself ; not merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he 
 wants, but he builds a whole elaborate set of laws and moral 
 customs and religious codes about this power, he invents man- 
 ners and customs and literatures and arts, expressive of his 
 superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of his ability 
 to enslave and exploit them. So he destroys for his imperious 
 self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained 
 over him ; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thou- 
 sand monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. 
 And each one of these diseases and abnormalities is a new 
 
 27
 
 28 MIND AND BODY 
 
 life of its own; it develops a body of knowledge, a science, 
 and perhaps an art ; it becomes the means of life, the environ- 
 ment and the determining destiny of thousands, perhaps mil- 
 lions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the colossal 
 structure which we call civilization in part still healthy and 
 progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer. 
 
 What is to be done about this cancer ? First of all, it must 
 be diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the 
 causes of it determined. Man, the rebel, has rejected his 
 mother nature, and has lost and for the most part forgotten 
 the instincts with which she provided him. He has destroyed 
 the environment which, however harsh to the individual, was 
 beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of it a 
 gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving 
 pictures and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' 
 furnishing establishments." 
 
 Shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, 
 that he shall no longer make asylums for the insane and 
 homes for the defective, eye-glasses for the astigmatic and 
 malted milk for the dyspeptic? There are some who preach 
 that. Among the multitude of strange books and pamphlets 
 which come in my mail, I found the other day a volume from 
 England, "Social Chaos and the Way Out," by Alfred Baker 
 Read, a learned and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein 
 with all the paraphernalia of learning it is gravely maintained 
 that the solution for the ills of civilization is a return to the 
 ancient Greek practice of infanticide. Every child at birth is 
 to be examined by a committee of physicians, and if it is 
 found to possess any defect, or if the census has established 
 that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this 
 baby shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. You 
 might think that this is a joke, after the fashion of Swift's 
 proposal for eating the children of famine-stricken Ireland. 
 I have spent some time examining this book before I risk 
 committing myself to the statement that it is the work of a 
 sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun. 
 
 If we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first 
 point we have to understand is that nature has nothing to do 
 with it. We cannot appeal to nature, because we are many 
 thousands of years beyond her sway. We left her when the 
 first ape came down from the treetop and fastened a sharp 
 stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable good-bye
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 29 
 
 to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and 
 altered his diet by means of fire. Therefore, it is no argu- 
 ment to say that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." 
 Our choice will lie among a thousand different courses, but 
 the one thing we may be sure of is that none of them will be 
 "natural." Bairnsfather, in one of his war cartoons, portrays 
 a British officer on leave, who got homesick for the trenches 
 and went out into the garden and dug himself a hole in the 
 mud and sat shivering in the rain all night. And this amuses 
 us vastly ; but we should be even more amused if any kind of 
 reformer, physician, moralist, clergyman or legislator should 
 suggest to us any remedy for our ills that was really "accord- 
 ing to nature." 
 
 Civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no 
 love for nature except as an object for the play of his fancy 
 and his wit. He means to live his own life, he means to 
 hold himself above nature with all his powers. Yet, obviously, 
 he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot give his life- 
 blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper tissues 
 starve. He must somehow divert the flow of his energies, 
 his social blood-stream, so to speak, from the cancer to the 
 healthy growth. To abandon the metaphor, man will deter- 
 mine by the use of his reason what he wishes life to be; he 
 will choose the highest forms of it to which he can attain. 
 He will then, by the deliberate act of his own will, devote 
 his energies to those tasks; he will make for himself new 
 laws, new moral codes, new customs and ways of thought, 
 calculated to bring to reality the ideal which he has formed. 
 So only can man justify himself as a creator, so can he realize 
 the benefit and escape the penalties of his revolt from his 
 ancient mother. 
 
 And then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we 
 have come back to nature, only in a new form. Nature, 
 harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind as we call her, yet had her 
 deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she protected and 
 preserved the type. Man, in his new pride of power, has in- 
 vented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "in- 
 dividualism." He lives and works for himself ; he chooses 
 to wear silk shirts, and to break the speed limit, and to pin 
 ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now what he must do with 
 his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from degenera- 
 tion, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old
 
 30 MIND AND BODY 
 
 mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, 
 as an act of high daring: I will protect the species, I will 
 preserve the type ! I will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic 
 intoxication, because it damages the health of my offspring; 
 I will deny myself the amusement of sexual promiscuity for 
 the same reason. I will devise imitations of the chase and 
 of battle in order that I may keep my physical body up to the 
 best standard of nature. Because I understand that all civilized 
 life is based upon intelligence, I will acquire knowledge and 
 spread it among my fellow men. Because I perceive that 
 civilization is impossible without sympathy, and because sym- 
 pathy makes it impossible for me to be happy while my fellow 
 men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my ener- 
 gies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all 
 forms of exploitation of man by his fellows. 
 
 Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay 
 entitled "A Moral Equivalent for War." He sets forth the 
 idea that men have loved war through the ages because it has 
 called forth their highest efforts, has made them more fully 
 aware of the powers of their being. He asks, May it not be 
 possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his love 
 of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to 
 invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the 
 destruction of other men and their enslavement, but upon 
 cooperative emulation in the unfoldment of the powers of the 
 mind? That this can be done by men, I have never doubted. 
 That it will be done, and done quickly, has been made certain 
 by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all think- 
 ing people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been 
 such that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization 
 more damage than it is able to endure.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 MAKING OUR MORALS 
 
 (Attempts to show that human morality must ckange to fit 
 human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human reason.) 
 
 Assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be 
 accepted, it appears that human life is in part at least a 
 product of human will, guided by human intelligence. Man 
 finds himself in the position of the crew of a ship in the 
 middle oi the ocean ; lie does not know exactly how the ship 
 was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but 
 he has discovered how the engines are run, and how the ship 
 is steered, and the meaning of the compass. So now he takes 
 charge of the ship, and keeps it afloat amid many perils; and 
 meantime, on the bridge of the vessel, there goes on a furious 
 argument over the question what port the ship shall be steered 
 to and what chart shall be used. 
 
 It is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile 
 is useful because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable 
 are the conditions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent 
 the problems with which he finds himself confronted. The 
 moral and legal codes of mankind may be compared to the 
 steering orders which are given to the helmsman of the vessel. 
 Northeast by north, he is told ; and if during the night a heavy 
 wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard, 
 then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direc- 
 tion. If he does not do so, he may find that his vessel has 
 swung around and is going to some other part of the world. 
 Next morning the passengers may wake up and find the ship 
 on the rocks because the helmsman persisted in following 
 certain steering directions which were laid down in an ancient 
 Hebrew book two or three thousand years ago! 
 
 If life is a continually changing product, then the laws 
 which govern conduct must also be continually changing, and 
 morality is a problem of continuous adjustment to new cir- 
 cumstances and new needs. If man is free to work upon this 
 changing environment, he must be free to make new tools and 
 devise new processes. If it is the task of reason to choose 
 
 31
 
 32 MIND AND BODY 
 
 among many possible courses and many possible varieties of 
 life, then clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every 
 detail of his laws and customs and moral codes. 
 
 This is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of 
 all religions. So far as I know there is no religion which 
 does not teach that the conduct of man in certain matters has 
 been eternally fixed by some higher power, and that it is 
 man's duty to conform to these rules. It is considered to be 
 wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact, to do so is 
 the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than 
 any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be. 
 
 Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us take, 
 for a test, the Ten Commandments. These commandments 
 were graven upon stone tablets some four thousand years ago, 
 and are supposed to have been valid ever since. "Thou shalt 
 not kill," is one ; others phrase it, "Thou shall do no murder" ; 
 and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of 
 controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former ver- 
 sion, while if you are a member of the military general staff 
 of your country you accept the latter. You maintain the right 
 to kill your fellow men, provided that those who do the killing 
 have been previously clad in a special uniform, indicating their 
 distinctive function as killers of their fellow men. You main- 
 tain, in other words, the right of making war; and presently, 
 when you get into making war, you find yourself maintaining 
 the right to kill, not merely by the old established method of 
 the sword and the bullet, but by means of pcison gases which 
 destroy the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city 
 full at a time. 
 
 And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided 
 the killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a 
 man who sits upon a raised bench and wears a black robe, 
 and perhaps a powdered wig. You consider that by the simple 
 device of putting this man into a black robe and a powdered 
 wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the 
 divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to 
 human reason; and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so 
 subjected, you call him by the dread name "pacifist," and 
 if he attempts to preach his idea, you send him to prison for 
 ten or twenty years, which means in actual practice that you 
 kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and tubercular 
 infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 33 
 
 killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "C. O.," and you 
 bully and beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water 
 cure" in your dungeons. 
 
 Or take the commandment that we shall not commit 
 adultery. Surely this is a law about which we can agree! 
 But presently we discover that unhappily married couples 
 desire to part, and that if we do not a41ow them to part, we 
 actually cause the commission of a great deal more adultery 
 than otherwise. Therefore, our wise men meet together, and 
 revise this divine law, and decide that it is not adultery if 
 a man takes another wife, provided he has received from a 
 judge an engraved piece of paper permitting him to do so. 
 But some of the followers of religion refuse to admit this 
 right of mere mortal man. The Catholic Church attempts to 
 enforce its own laws, and declares that people who divorce 
 and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mor- 
 tal sin. The Episcopal Church does not go quite so far as 
 that; it allows the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. 
 Other churches are content to accept the state law as it stands. 
 Is it not manifest that all these groups are applying human 
 reason, and nothing but human reason, to the interpreting 
 and revising of their divine commandments? 
 
 Or take the law, "Thou shalt not steal." Surely we can 
 all agree upon that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets 
 us nowhere, because we have to set up a human court to 
 decide what is "stealing." Is it stealing to seize upon land, 
 and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for your own, 
 and hand it down to your children forever? Yes, of course, 
 that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your 
 statement. It is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number 
 of years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by 
 law, and held unchangeable forever. Also, we run up against 
 the fact that it is not stealing, if it is done by the State, by 
 men who have been dressed up in the costume of killers before 
 they commit the act. 
 
 Again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, 
 while other men are starving and dying for lack of land to 
 labor upon? Some of us call this stealing, but we are im- 
 politely referred to as "radicals," and if we venture to suggest 
 that anyone should resist this kind of stealing, we are sen- 
 tenced to slow death from malnutrition and tubercular infec- 
 tion. Again, is it stealing for a victim of our system of land
 
 34 MIND AND BODY 
 
 monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of 
 his starving child? The law says that this is stealing, and 
 sends the man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of 
 mankind protests, and I have heard a great many respectable 
 Americans venture so far in "radicalism" as to say that they 
 themselves would steal under such circumstances. 
 
 One could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is 
 enough to make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to 
 attempt to talk about "divine" rules for human conduct. Re- 
 gardless of any ideas you may hold, or any wishes, you are 
 forced at every hour of your life to apply your reason to the 
 problems of your life, and you have no escape from the task 
 of judging and deciding. All that you do is to judge right 
 or to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery 
 upon yourself and upon all who come into contact with you. 
 How much more sensible, therefore, to recognize the fact of 
 moral and intellectual responsibility ; to investigate the data of 
 life with which you have to deal, the environment by which 
 you are surrounded, and to train your judgment so that you 
 will be able to fit yourself to it with quickness and certainty ! 
 
 "But," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves man- 
 kind without any guide or authority. How can human beings 
 act, how can they deal with one another, if there are no laws, 
 no permanent moral codes?" 
 
 The answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of 
 morality does not mean at all that there will be no permanent 
 laws and working principles. Many of the facts of life are 
 fixed for all practical purposes the purposes not merely of 
 your life and my life, but the life of many generations. We 
 are not likely to see in our time the end of the ancient Hebrew 
 announcement that "the sins of the father are visited upon the 
 children" ; therefore it is possible for us to study out a course 
 of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down 
 to his children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. 
 The Catholic Church has had for a thousand years or more 
 the "mortal sin" of gluttony upon its list; and today comes 
 experimental science with its new weapons of research, and 
 discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the arteries, 
 and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will 
 ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. Indeed, science has 
 added to gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of 
 alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes; we have done this in
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 35 
 
 spite of the manifest fact that the drinking of wine was not 
 merely an Old Testament virtue, but a New Testament reli- 
 gious rite. 
 
 To say that human life changes, and that new discoveries 
 and new powers make necessary new laws and moral customs, 
 is to say something so obvious that it might seem a waste of 
 paper and ink. Man has invented the automobile and has 
 crowded himself into cities, and so has to adopt a rigid set of 
 traffic regulations. So far as I know, it has never occurred 
 to any religious enthusiast to seek in the book of Revelation 
 for information as to the advisability of the "left hand turn" 
 at Broadway and Forty-second Street, New York, at five 
 o'clock in the afternoon. But modern science has created 
 new economic facts, just as unprecedented as the automobile ; 
 it has created new possibilities of spending and new possibilities 
 of starving for mankind; it has made new cravings and new 
 satisfactions, new crimes and new virtues; and yet the great 
 mass of our people are still seeking to guide themselves in 
 their readjustments to these new facts by ancient codes which 
 have no more relationship to these facts than they have to the 
 affairs of Mars! 
 
 I am acquainted with a certain lady, one of the kindest 
 and most devoted souls alive, who seeks to solve the problems 
 of her life, and of her large family of children and grand- 
 children, according to sentences which she picks out, more 
 or less at random, from certain more or less random chapters 
 of ancient Hebrew literature. This lady will find some words 
 which she imagines apply to the matter, and will shut her 
 devout eyes to the fact that there are other "texts," bearing 
 on the matter, which say exactly the opposite. She will place 
 the strangest and most unimaginable interpretations upon the 
 words, and yet will be absolutely certain that her interpretation 
 is the voice of God speaking directly to her. If you try to 
 tell her about Socialism, she will say, "The poor ye have 
 always with you" ; which means that it is interfering with 
 Divine Providence to try to remedy poverty on any large 
 scale. This lady is ready instantly to relieve any single case 
 of want; she regards it as her duty to do this; in fact, she 
 considers that the purpose of some people's poverty is to 
 provide her with a chance to do the noble action of relieving 
 it. You would think that the meaning of the sentence, "Spare 
 the rod and spoil the child," would be so plain that no one 
 
 4
 
 36 MIND AND BODY 
 
 could mistake it; but this good lady understood it to mean 
 that God forbade the physical chastisement of children, and 
 preferred them "spoiled." She held this idea for half a life- 
 time until it was pointed out to her that the sentence was 
 not in the Bible, but in "Hudibras," an old English poem!
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION 
 
 (Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of means 
 to ends, and depends upon the understanding of a particular set 
 of circumstances.) 
 
 Some years ago I used to know an ardent single tax propa- 
 gandist who found my way of arguing intensely irritating, 
 because, as he phrased it, I had "no principles." We would 
 be discussing, for example, a protective tariff, and I would 
 wish to collect statistics, but discovered to my bewilderment 
 that to my single tax friend a customs duty was "stealing" 
 on the part of the government. The government had a right 
 to tax land, because that was the gift of nature, but it had 
 no right to tax the products of human labor, and when it took 
 a portion of the goods which anyone brought into a country, 
 the government was playing the part of a robber. Of course 
 such a man was annoyed by the suggestion that in the early 
 stages of a country's development it might possibly be a good 
 thing for the country to make itself independent and self- 
 sufficient by encouraging the development of its manufactures ; 
 that, on the other hand, when these manufactures had grown 
 to such a size that they controlled the government, it might be 
 an excellent thing for the country to subject them to the 
 pressure of foreign competition, in order to lower their value 
 as a preliminary to socializing them. 
 
 The reader who comes to this book looking for hard and 
 fast rules of life will be disappointed. It would be convenient 
 if someone could lay down for us a moral code, and lift from 
 our shoulders the inconvenient responsibility of deciding about 
 our own lives. There may be persons so weak that they have 
 to have the conditions of their lives thus determined for them ; 
 but I am not writing for such persons. I am writing for 
 adult and responsible individuals, and I bear in mind that 
 every individual is a separate problem, with separate needs 
 and separate duties. There are, of course, a good many rules 
 that apply to everybody in almost all emergencies, but I cannot 
 think of a single rule that I would be willing to say I would 
 
 37
 
 38 MIND AND BODY 
 
 apply in my life without a single exception. "Thou shalt not 
 kill" is a rule that I have followed, so far without exception ; 
 but as soon as I turn my imagination loose, I can think of 
 many circumstances under which I should kill. I remember 
 discussing the matter with a pacifist friend of mine, an out- 
 and-out religious non-resistant. I pointed out to him that 
 people sometimes went insane, and in that condition they 
 sometimes seized hatchets and killed anyone in sight. What 
 would my pacifist friend do if he saw a maniac attacking his 
 children with a hatchet? It did not help him to say that he 
 would use all possible means short of killing the maniac; he 
 had finally to admit that if he were quite sure it was a ques- 
 tion of the life of the maniac or the life of his child, he would 
 kill. And this is not mere verbal quibbling, because such 
 things do happen in the world, and people are confronted with 
 such emergencies, and they have to decide, and no rule is a 
 general rule if it has a single exception. There is a saying 
 that "the exception proves the rule," but this is very silly; it 
 is a mistranslation of the Latin word "probat," Which means, 
 not proves, but tests. No exception can prove a rule. What 
 the exception does is to test the rule by showing that the 
 result does not follow in the exceptional case. 
 
 The only kind of rule which can be laid down for human 
 conduct is a rule in such general terms that it escapes excep- 
 tions by leaving the matter open for every man's difference 
 of opinion. Any kind of rule which is specific will sooner or 
 later pass out of date. Take, by way of illustration, the 
 ancient and well-established virtue of frugality. Obviously, 
 under a state of nature, or of economic competition, it is 
 necessary for every man to lay by a store "for a rainy day." 
 But suppose we could set up a condition of economic security, 
 under which society guaranteed to every man the full product 
 of his labor, and the old and the sick were fully taken care 
 of then how foolish a man would seem who troubled to 
 acquire a surplus of goods ! It would be as if we saw him 
 riding on horseback through the main street of our town in a 
 full suit of armor! 
 
 I devote a good deal of space to this question of a fixed 
 and unchangeable morality, because it is one of the heaviest 
 burdens that mankind carries upon its back. The record of 
 human history is sickening, not so much because of blood and 
 slaughter, but because of fanaticism; because wherever the
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 39 
 
 mind of man attempts to assert itself, to escape from the blind 
 rule of animal greed, it adopts a set of formulas, and proceeds 
 to enforce them, regardless of consequences, upon the whole 
 of life. Consider, for example, the rule of the Puritans in 
 England. The Puritans glorified conscience, and it is per- 
 fectly proper to glorify conscience, but not to the entire sup- 
 pression of the beauty-making faculties in man. Macaulay 
 summed up the Puritan point of view in the sentence that 
 they objected to bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the 
 bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. As a 
 result of applying that principle, and lacing mankind in a 
 straight-jacket by legislation, England swung back into a re- 
 action under the Cavaliers, in which debauchery held more 
 complete sway than ever before or since in English life. 
 
 This is a hard lesson, but it must be learned: there is no 
 virtue that does not become a vice if it is carried to extremes ; 
 there is no virtue that does not become a vice if it is applied 
 at the wrong time, or under the wrong circumstances, or at 
 the wrong stage of human development. In fact, we may 
 say that most vices are virtues misapplied. The so-called 
 natural vices are simply natural impulses carried to excess, 
 while the unnatural vices result from the suppression and 
 distortion of natural impulses. The Greeks had as their 
 supreme virtue what they called "sophrosune." It is a beau- 
 tiful word, worth remembering; it means a beautiful quality 
 called moderation. We shall find, as we come to investigate, 
 that life is a series of compromises among many different 
 needs, many different desires, many different duties; and 
 reason sits as a wise and patient judge, and appoints to each 
 its proper portion, and denies to it an excess which would 
 starve the others. Such is true morality, and it is incompatible 
 with the existence of any fixed code, whether of human origin 
 or divine. 
 
 The fixed morality is a survival of a far-off past, of the 
 days of instinct and servitude. Human reason has developed 
 but slowly, and perhaps only a few people are as yet entirely 
 capable of taking control of their own destiny; perhaps it is 
 really dangerous to think for oneself ! But if we investigate 
 carefully, we may decide that the danger is not so much to 
 ourselves as it is to others. The most evil of all the habits 
 that man has inherited from his far-off past is the habit of 
 exploiting his fellows, and in order to exploit them more
 
 40 MIND AND BODY 
 
 safely the ruling castes of priests and kings and nobles and 
 property owners have taken possession of the moralities of 
 the world and shaped them for their own convenience. They 
 have taught the slave virtues of credulity and submission; 
 they have surrounded their teachings with all the terrors of 
 the supernatural ; they have placed upon rebellion the penalties, 
 not merely of this world, but of the next, not merely of the 
 dungeon and the rack, but of hellfire and brimstone. 
 
 I do not wish to go to extremes and say that the moral 
 codes now taught in the world are made wholly in this evil 
 way. As a matter of fact they are a queer jumble of the two 
 elements, the slave terrors of the past and the common sense 
 of the present. There is not one moral code in the world 
 today, there are many. There is one for the rich, and an 
 entirely different one for the poor, and the rich have had a 
 great deal more to do with shaping the code of the poor than 
 the poor have had to do with shaping the code of the rich. 
 There is one code for governments, and an entirely different 
 one for the victims of governments. There is one code for 
 business, and an entirely different one, a far more human and 
 decent one, for friendship. Above all, there is one code for 
 Sunday and another code for the other six days of the week. 
 Most of our idealisms and our sentimental fine phrases we 
 reserve for our Sunday code, while for our every-day code 
 we go back to the rule of the jungle : "Dog eat dog," or "Do 
 unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first." When 
 you attempt to suggest a new moral code to our present day 
 moral authorities, it is the fine phrases of the Sunday code 
 they bring out for exhibition purposes; and perhaps you are 
 impressed by their arguments until Monday morning, when 
 you attempt to apply this code at the ofHce, and they stare at 
 you in bewilderment, or burst out laughing in your face. 
 
 What I am trying to do here is to outline a code that will 
 not be a matter of phrases but a matter of practice. It will 
 apply to all men, rich as well as poor, and to all seven days 
 of the week. I am not so much suggesting a code, as pointing 
 out to you how you can work out your own code for yourself. 
 I am suggesting that you should adopt it, not because I tell 
 you to, but because you yourself have taken it and tested it, 
 precisely as you would test any other o-f the practical affairs 
 of your life potatoes as an article of diet, or some particular 
 sack of potatoes that a peddler was trying to sell to you. It is
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 41 
 
 not yet possible for you to be as sure about everything in 
 your life as you can be about a sa"ck of potatoes; human 
 knowledge has not got that far; but at least you can know 
 what is to be known, and if anything is a matter of uncer- 
 tainty, you can know that. Such knowledge is often the most 
 important of all just as the driver of an automobile wants 
 to know if a bridge is not to be depended on. 
 
 So I say to you that if you want to find happiness in this 
 life, look with distrust upon all absolutes and ultimates, all 
 hard and fast rules, all formulas and dogmas and "general 
 principles." Bear in mind that there are many factors in every 
 case, there are many complications in every human being, 
 there are many sides to every question. Try to keep an open 
 mind and an even temper. Try to take an interest in learning 
 something new every day, and in trying some new experi- 
 ment. This is the scientific attitude toward life; this is the 
 way of growth and of true success. It is inconvenient, be- 
 cause it involves working your brains, and most people have 
 not been taught to do this, and find it the hardest kind of 
 work there is. But how much better it is to think for your- 
 self, and to protect yourself, than to trust your thinking to 
 some group of people whose only interest may be to exploit 
 you for their advantage !
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 THE CHOOSING OF LIFE 
 
 (Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is best 
 in life, and decide what we wish to make of it.) 
 
 We have made the point about evolution, that it may go 
 forward or it may go backward. There is no guarantee in 
 nature that because a thing changes, it must necessarily be- 
 come better than it was. On the contrary, degeneration is as 
 definitely established a fact as growth, and it is of the utmost 
 importance, in studying the problem of human happiness and 
 how to make it, to get clear the fact that nature has produced, 
 and continues to produce, all kinds of monstrosities and para- 
 sites and failures and abortions. And all these blunders of 
 our great mother struggle just as hard, desire life just as 
 ardently as normal creatures, and suffer just as cruelly when 
 they fail. Blind optimism about life is just as fatuous and 
 just as dangerous as blind pessimism, and if we propose to 
 take charge of life, and to make it over, we shall find that we 
 have to get quickly to the task of deciding what our purpose is. 
 
 "Choose well, your choice is brief and yet endless," says 
 Carlyle. You are driven in your choice by two facts first, 
 that you have to choose, regardless of whether you want to 
 or not; and second, that upon your choice depend infinite 
 possibilities of happiness or of misery. The interdependence 
 of life is such that you are choosing not merely for the present, 
 but for the future ; you are choosing for your posterity forever, 
 and to some extent you are choosing for all mankind. Matthew 
 Arnold has said that "Conduct is three-fourths of life"; but 
 I, for my part, have never been able to see where he got his 
 figures. It seems to me that conduct is practically everything 
 in life that really counts. Conduct is not merely marriage and 
 birth and premature death ; it is not merely eating and drink- 
 ing and sleeping : it is thinking and aspiring ; it is religion and 
 science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the light- 
 ning and the cyclone, but with the spread of knowledge it is 
 coming to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may 
 be even the comet and the rising of the sun. 
 
 42
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 43 
 
 We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous 
 problem of human conduct ; we are going to ask ourselves the 
 question: What kind of life do we want? What kind of life 
 are we going to make ? What are the standards by which we 
 may know excellence in life, and distinguish it from failure 
 and waste and blunder in life? Obviously, when we have done 
 this, we shall have solved the moral problem ; all we shall have 
 to say is, act so that your actions help to bring the desirable 
 things into being, and do not act so as to hinder or weaken 
 them. 
 
 We shall not be able to go to nature to settle this ques- 
 tion for us. This is our problem, not nature's. But we shall 
 find, as usual, that we can pick up precious hints from her; 
 we shall be wise to study her ways, and learn from her suc- 
 cesses and her failures. We are proud of her latest product, 
 ourselves. Let us see how she made us ; what were the stages 
 on the way to man? 
 
 First in the scale of evolution, it appears, came inert matter. 
 We call it inert, because it looks that way, though we know, 
 of course, that it consists of infinite numbers of molecules 
 vibrating with speed which we can measure even though we 
 cannot imagine it. This "matter" is enormously fascinating, 
 and a wise man will hesitate to speak patronizingly about it. 
 Nevertheless, considering matter apart from the mind which 
 studies it, we decide that it represents a low stage of being. 
 We speak contemptuously of stones and clods and lumps of 
 clay. We award more respect to things like mountains and 
 tempest -tossed oceans, because they are big ; in the early days 
 of our race we used to worship these things, but now we think 
 of them merely as the raw material of life, and we should 
 not be in the least interested in becoming a mountain or an 
 ocean. 
 
 Almost everyone would agree, therefore, that what we 
 call "life" is a higher and more important achievement of 
 nature. And if we wish to grade this life, we do so accord- 
 ing to its sentience that is to say, the amount and intensity 
 of the consciousness which grows in it. We are interested in 
 the one-celled organisms which swarm everywhere throughout 
 nature, and we study the mysterious processes by which they 
 nourish and beget themselves; we suspect that they have a 
 germ of consciousness in them; but we are surer of the 
 meaning and importance of the consciousness we detect in
 
 44 MIND AND BODY 
 
 some complex organism like a fish or bird. We learn to know 
 the signs of consciousness, of dawning intelligence, and we 
 esteem the various kinds of creatures according to the amount 
 of it they possess. We reject mere physical bigness and 
 mere strength. Joyce Kilmer may write: 
 
 "Poems are made by men like me, 
 But only God can make a tree'* 
 
 And that seems to us a charming bit of fancy ; but the com- 
 mon sense of the thing is voiced to us much better in the 
 lines of old Ben Jonson: 
 
 "It is not growing like a tree 
 In bulk doth make man better be." 
 
 If we take two animals of equal bulk, the hippopotamus and 
 the elephant, we shall be far more interested in the elephant, 
 because of the intelligence and what we call "character" which 
 he displays. There are good elephants and bad elephants, 
 kind ones and treacherous ones. We love the dog because we 
 can make a companion of him; that is, because we can teach 
 him to react to human stimuli. Of all animals we are fasci- 
 nated most by the monkey, because he is nearest to man, and 
 displays the keenest intelligence. 
 
 Someone may say that this is all mere human egotism, 
 and that we have no way of really being sure that the life of 
 elephants and hippopotami is not more interesting and sig- 
 nificant than the life of men. Never having been either of 
 these animals, I cannot say with assurance; but I know that 
 I have the power to exterminate these creatures, or to pen 
 them in cages, and they are helpless to protect themselves, 
 or even to understand what is happening to them. So I am 
 irresistibly driven to conclude that intelligence is more safe 
 and more worth while than unintelligence ; in short, that intelli- 
 gence is nature's highest product up to date, and that to 
 foster and develop it is the best guess I can make as to the 
 path of wisdom that is, of intelligence! 
 
 When we come to deal with human values, we find that 
 we can trace much the same kind of evolution. Back in the 
 days of the cave man, it was physical strength which dominated 
 the horde; but nowadays, except in the imagination of the 
 small boy, the "strong man" does not cut much of a figure.
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 45 
 
 We go once, perhaps, to see him lift his heavy weights and 
 break his iron bars, but then we are tired of him. Mere 
 strength had to yield in the struggle for life to quickness of 
 eye and hand, to energy which for lack of a better name we 
 may call "nervous." The pugilist who has nothing but muscle 
 goes down before his lighter antagonist who can keep out of 
 his reach, and the crowd loves the football hero who can duck 
 and dodge and make the long runs. One might cite a thou- 
 sand illustrations, such as the British bowmen breaking down 
 the heavily armored knights, or the quick-moving, light vessels 
 of Britain overcoming the huge galleons of Spain. And as 
 society develops and becomes more complex, the fighting man 
 becomes less and less a man of muscle, and more and more 
 a man of "nerve." Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon would 
 have stood a poor chance in personal combat against many of 
 their followers. They led, because they were men of energy 
 and cunning, able to maintain the subtle thing we call prestige. 
 
 Now the world has moved into an industrial era, and who 
 are the great men of our time, the men whose lightest words 
 are heeded, whose doings are spread upon the front pages of 
 our newspapers? Obviously, they are the men of money. 
 We may pretend to ourselves that we do not really stand in 
 awe of a Morgan or a Rockefeller, but that we admire, let 
 us say, an Edison or a Roosevelt. But Edison himself is a 
 man of money, and will tell you that he had to be a man of 
 money in order to be free to conduct his experiments. As for 
 our politicians and statesmen, they either serve the men of 
 money, or the men of money suppress them, as they did 
 Roosevelt. The Morgans and the Rockefellers do not do much 
 talking; they do not have to. They content themselves with 
 being obeyed, and the shaping of our society is in their hands. 
 
 And yet, some of us really believe that there are higher 
 faculties in man than the ability to manipulate the stock 
 market. We consider that the great inventor, the great poet, 
 the great moralist, contributes more to human happiness than 
 the man who, by cunning and persistence, succeeds in monopo- 
 lizing some material necessity of human life. "Poets," says 
 Shelley, "are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." 
 If this strange statement is anywhere near to truth, it is surely 
 of importance that we should decide what are the higher 
 powers in men, and how they may be recognized, and how 
 fostered and developed.
 
 46 MIND AND BODY 
 
 What is, in its essence, the process of evolution from the 
 lower to the higher forms of mental life? It is a process of 
 expanding consciousness; the developing of ability to appre- 
 hend a wider and wider circle of existence, to share it, to 
 struggle for it as we do for the life we call our "own." The 
 test of the higher mental forms is therefore a test of univer- 
 sality, of sympathetic inclusiveness ; or, to use commoner 
 words, it is a test of enlightened unselfishness. 
 
 Every human individual has the will to life, the instinct 
 of self-preservation, which persuades him that he is of im- 
 portance; but the test of his development is his ability to 
 realize that, important though he may be, he is but a small 
 part of the universe, and his highest interests are not in him- 
 self alone, his highest duties are not owed to himself alone. 
 And as the life becomes more of the intellect, this fact be- 
 comes more and more obvious, more and more dominating. 
 Men who monopolize the material things of the world and 
 their control are necessarily self-seeking; but in the realm 
 of the higher faculties this element, in the very nature of the 
 case, is forced into the background. It is evident that truth 
 is not truth for the Standard Oil Company, nor for J. P. 
 Morgan and Company, nor yet for the government of the 
 United States ; it is truth for the whole of mankind, and one 
 who sincerely labors for the truth does so for the universal 
 benefit. 
 
 There may be, of course, an element of selfishness in the 
 activities of poets and inventors. They may be seeking for 
 fame; they may be hoping to make money out of their dis- 
 coveries; but the greatest men we know have been dominated 
 by an overwhelming impulse of creation, and when we read 
 their lives, and discover in them signs of petty vanity or 
 jealousy or greed, we are pained and shocked. What touches 
 us most deeply is some mark of self-consecration and humility ; 
 as, for example, when Newton tells us that after all his life's 
 labors he felt himself as a little child gathering sea-shells on 
 the shore of the great ocean of truth ; or when Alfred Russel 
 Wallace, discovering that Darwin had been working longer 
 than himself over the theory of the origin of species, gen- 
 erously withdrew and permitted the theory to go to the world 
 in Darwin's name. 
 
 There are three faculties in man, usually described as in- 
 tellect, feeling and will. According as one or the other faculty
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 47 
 
 predominates, we have a great scientist, a great poet, or a 
 great moralist. We might choose a representative of each 
 type let us say Newton, Shakespeare and Jesus and spend 
 much time in controversy as to which of the three types is 
 the greatest, which makes the greatest contribution to human 
 happiness. But it will suffice here to point out that the three 
 faculties do not exclude one another; every man must have 
 all three, and a perfectly rounded man should seek to develop 
 all three. Jesus was considerable of a poet, and we should pay 
 far less heed to Shakespeare if he had not been a moralist. 
 Also there have been instances of great poets and painters who 
 were scientists for example, Leonardo and Goethe. 
 
 The fundamental difference between the scientist and the 
 poet is that one is exploring nature and discovering things 
 which actually exist, whereas the other is creating new life 
 out of his own spirit. But the poet will find that his creations 
 take but little hold upon life, if they are not guided and shaped 
 by a deep understanding of life's fundamental nature and 
 needs in other words, if the poet is not something of a 
 scientist. And in the same way, the very greatest discoveries 
 of science seem to us like leaps of creative imagination; as if 
 the mind had completed nature, through some intuitive and 
 sympathetic understanding of what nature wished to be. 
 
 The point about these higher forms of human activity is 
 that they renew and multiply life. We may say that if Jesus 
 had never lived, others would have embodied and set forth 
 with equal poignancy the revolutionary idea of the equality 
 of all men as children of one common father. And perhaps 
 this is true ; but we have no way of being sure that it is true, 
 and as we look back upon the last nineteen hundred years of 
 human history, we are unable to imagine just what the life of 
 mankind during those centuries would have been if Jesus had 
 died when he was a baby. We do not know what modern 
 thought might have been without Kant, or what modern music 
 might have been without Beethoven. We are forced to admit 
 that if it had not been for the patient wisdom and persuasive 
 kindness of Lincoln, the Slave Power might have won its 
 independence, and America today might have been a military 
 camp like Europe, and the lives and thoughts of every one of 
 us would have been different. 
 
 Or take the activities of the poet. Many years ago the 
 writer was asked to name the men who had exercised
 
 48 MIND AND BODY 
 
 the greatest influence upon him, and after much thought he 
 named three : Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. And now consider 
 the significance of this reply. One of these people, Shelley, 
 was what we call a "real" person ; that is, a man who actually 
 lived and walked upon the earth. Concerning Hamlet, it is 
 believed there was once a Prince of Denmark by that name, 
 but the character who is known to us as Hamlet is the crea- 
 tion of a poet's brain. As to the third figure, Jesus, the authori- 
 ties dispute. Some say that he was a man who actually lived ; 
 others believe that he was God on earth; yet others, very 
 learned, maintain that he is a legendary name around which 
 a number of traditions have gathered. 
 
 To me it does not make a particle of difference which of 
 the three possibilities happens to be true about Jesus. If he 
 was God on earth, he was God in human form, under human 
 limitations, and in that sense we are all gods on earth. And 
 whether he really lived, or whether some poet invented him, 
 matters not a particle so far as concerns his effect upon others. 
 The emotions which moved him, the loves, the griefs, the 
 high resolves, existed in the soul of someone, whether his 
 name were Jesus or John; and these emotions have been re- 
 corded in such form that they communicate themselves to us, 
 they become a part of our souls, they make us something 
 different from what we were before we encountered them. 
 
 In other words, the poet makes in his own soul a new life, 
 and then projects it into the world, and it becomes a force 
 which makes over the lives of millions of other people. If 
 you read the vast mass of criticism which has grown up about 
 the figure of Hamlet, you learn that Hamlet is the type of the 
 "modern man." Shakespeare was able to divine what the 
 modern man would be; or perhaps we can go farther and 
 say that Shakespeare helped to make the modern man what 
 he is ; the modern man is more of Hamlet, because he has taken 
 Hamlet to his heart and pondered over Hamlet's problem. 
 Or take Don Quixote. No doubt the follies of the "age of 
 chivalry" would have died out of men's hearts in the end; 
 but how much sooner they died because of the laughter of 
 Cervantes! Or take "Les Miserables." Our prison system 
 is not ideal by any means, but it is far less cruel than it was 
 half a century ago, and we owe this in part to Victor Hugo. 
 Every convict in the world is to some degree a happier man 
 because of this vision which was projected upon the world
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 49 
 
 from the soul of one great poet. No one can estimate the 
 part which the writings of Tolstoi have played in the present 
 revolution in Russia, but this we may say with certainty : there 
 is not one man, woman or child in Russia at the present 
 moment who is quite the same as he would have been if 
 "Resurrection" had never been written. 
 
 In discussing the highest faculties of man we have so far 
 refrained from using the word "genius." It is a word which 
 has been cheapened by misuse, but we are now in position to 
 use it. The things which we have just been considering are 
 the phenomena of genius and we can say this, even though 
 we may not know exactly what genius is. Perhaps it is, as 
 Frederic Myers asserts, a "subliminal uprush," the welling up 
 into the consciousness of some part of the content of the 
 subconscious mind. Or perhaps it is something of what man 
 calls "divine." Or perhaps it is the first dawning, the Lrst 
 hint of that super-race which will some day replace mankind. 
 Perhaps we are witnessing the same thing that hapitened on 
 the earth when glimmerings of reason first broke upon the 
 mind of some poor, bewildered ape. We cannot be sure; 
 but this much we can say: the man of genius represents the 
 highest activity of the mind of which we as yet have knowledge. 
 He represents the spirit of man, fully emancipated, fully con- 
 scious, and taking up the task of creation ; taking human life 
 as raw material, and making it over into something more 
 subtle, more intense, more significant, more universal than it 
 ever was before, or ever would have been without the inter- 
 vention of this new Go,d-man.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR 
 
 (Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the 
 relative importance of our various duties.) 
 
 So now we may say that we know what are the great and 
 important things in life. Slowly and patiently, with infinite 
 distress and waste and failure, but yet inevitably, the life of 
 man is being made over and multiplied to infinity, by the power 
 of the thinking mind, impelled by the joy and thrill of the 
 creative action, and guided by the sense of responsibility, 
 the instinct to serve, which we call conscience. To develop 
 these higher faculties is the task we have before us, and the 
 supreme act to which we dedicate ourselves. 
 
 So now we are in position to define the word moral. 
 Assuming that our argument be accepted, that action is moral 
 which tends to foster the best and highest forms of life we 
 know, and to aid them in developing their highest powers ; that 
 is immoral which tends to destroy the best life we know, or 
 to hinder its rapid development. 
 
 Let us now proceed to apply these tests to the practices 
 of man ; first as an individual, and then as a social being. 
 What are my duties to myself, and what are my duties to the 
 world about me? 
 
 You will note that these questions differ somewhat from 
 those of the old morality. Jesus told us, first, that we should 
 love the Lord our God, and, second, that we should love our 
 neighbor as ourself. Some would say that modern thought 
 has dismissed God from consideration; but I would prefer 
 to say that modern thought has decided that the place where 
 we encounter God most immediately is in our own miraculously 
 expanding consciousness. Our duty toward God is our duty 
 to make of ourselves the most perfect product of the Divine 
 Incarnation that we can become. Our duty to our neighbor 
 is to help him to do the same. 
 
 Of course, as we come to apply these formulas, we find 
 that they overlap and mingle inextricably; the two duties are 
 really one duty looked at from different points of view. We 
 
 60
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 51 
 
 decide that we owe it to ourselves to develop our best powers 
 of thinking, and we discover that in so doing we make our- 
 selves better fitted to live as citizens, better equipped to help 
 our fellow men. We go out into our city to serve others by 
 making the city clean and decent, and we find that we have 
 helped to save ourselves from a pestilence. 
 
 The most commonly accepted, or at any rate the most 
 commonly preached, of all formulas is the "golden rule," "Do 
 unto others as you would have them do unto you." This 
 formula is good so far as it goes, but you note that it leaves 
 undetermined the all-important question, what ought we to 
 want others to do unto us. If I am an untrained child, what 
 I would have others do unto me is to give me plenty of 
 candy; therefore, under the golden rule, my highest duty 
 becomes to distribute free candy to the world. The "golden 
 rule" is obviously consistent with all forms of self-indulgence, 
 and with all forms of stagnation ; it might result in a civiliza- 
 tion more static than China. 
 
 Or let us take the formula which the German philosopher 
 Kant worked out as the final product of his thinking: "Act 
 so that you would be willing for your action to become a 
 general rule of conduct." Here again is the same problem. 
 There are many possible general rules of conduct. Some 
 would prefer one, some others ; and there is no possible way 
 of escape from the fact that before men can agree what to 
 do, they must decide what they wish to make of their lives. 
 
 To the formula of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
 as thyself," the answer is obvious enough: "Suppose my 
 neighbor is not worthy of as much love as myself ?" To be 
 sure, it is a perilous thing for me to have to decide this ques- 
 tion; nevertheless, it may be a fact that I am a great in- 
 ventor, and that my neighbor is a sexual pervert. There is, 
 of course, a sense in which I may love him, even so; I may 
 love the deeper possibilities of his nature, which religious 
 ecstasy can appeal to and arouse. But in spite of all ecstasies 
 and all efforts, it may be that his disease physical, mental 
 and moral has progressed to such a point that it is necessary 
 to confine him, or to castrate him, or even to asphyxiate him 
 painlessly. To say that I must love such a man as myself 
 is, to say the least, to be vague. We can see how the in- 
 discriminate preaching of such a formula would open the 
 flood-gates of sentimentality and fraud.
 
 52 MIND AND BODY 
 
 Modern thinking says: Thou shalt love the highest pos- 
 sibilities of life, and thpu shalt labor diligently to foster them ; 
 moreover, because life is always growing, and new possibilities 
 are forever dawning in the human spirit, thou shalt keep an 
 open mind and an inquiring temper, and be ready at any time 
 to begin life afresh. 
 
 Such is the formula. It is not simple ; and when we come 
 to apply it, we find that it constantly grows more complex. 
 When we attempt to decide our duty to ourselves, we find that 
 we have in us a number of different beings, each with separate 
 and sometimes conflicting duties and needs. We have in us 
 the physical man and the economic man, and these clamor 
 for their rights, and must have at least a part of their rights, 
 before we can go on to be the intellectual man, the moral 
 man, or the artistic man. So our life becomes a series of 
 compromises and adjustments between a thousand conflicting 
 desires and duties ; between the different beings which we might 
 be, but can be only to a certain extent, and at certain times. 
 We shall see, as we come to investigate one field after another 
 of human activity, that we never have an absolute certainty, 
 never an absolute right, never an absolute duty; never can 
 we shut our eyes, and go blindly ahead upon one course of 
 action, to the exclusion of every other consideration ! On the 
 contrary, we sit in the seat of self-determination as a highly 
 trained and skillful engineer. We keep our eyes upon a dozen 
 different gauges ; we press a lever here and touch a regulator 
 there; we decide that now is a time for speed, and now for 
 caution ; and knowing all the time that the safety, not merely 
 of ourselves, but of many passengers, depends upon the deci- 
 sions of each moment.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 THE MIND AND THE BODY 
 
 (Discusses the interaction between physical and mental things, 
 and the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed causes.) 
 
 It is our plan, so far as possible, to discuss the problems 
 of the mind in one section of this book, and the problems of 
 the body in another; but just as we found that we could not 
 separate our duties to ourself from our duties to our neigh- 
 bors, so we find that the mind and the body are inextricably 
 interwoven, and that whenever we probe deeply into one, we 
 discover the other. The interaction of the mind and the body 
 is a fascinating problem into which we must look for a 
 moment, not because we expect to solve it, but because it 
 illuminates the whole subject. 
 
 The human body is a machine. It takes in carbon and 
 oxygen, and burns them, and gives out carbon dioxide and 
 other waste products, and develops energy in proportion to 
 the amount of carbon it consumes. This machine has its 
 elaborate apparatus of action and reaction, its sensory organs 
 where outside stimuli are received, its nerves like telegraph 
 wires to carry these impressions, its brain cells to store them 
 and to transform them into reactions. We know to some 
 extent how these brain cells work. We know what portions 
 of the brain are devoted to this or that activity. W T e know 
 that if we stick a pin into a certain spot we shall paralyze 
 the left forefinger. We know that by injecting a certain drug, 
 or by breathing a certain gas, we can cause this or that sensa- 
 tion or reaction, such as laughing or weeping or mania. We 
 know what poisons are generated in the system by anger, and 
 what chemical changes takes place in a muscle that is tired. 
 All this is part of a vast new science which is called bio- 
 chemistry, or the chemistry of life. 
 
 Our bodies, therefore, are part of the material universe, 
 and subject to the laws or ways of being of this universe. 
 The first of these laws that we know is the law of causation. 
 Every change in the universe has its cause, and that in turn 
 
 53
 
 54 MIND AND BODY 
 
 had another cause ; this chain is never broken, no matter how 
 far we go, and the same causes universally produce the same 
 effects. If you see a ball move on a billiard table, you know 
 that the ball did not move itself ; you know that something 
 struck the ball or tilted the table. You discover that the motion 
 of the ball moves the air around it, and the waves of that 
 motion are spread through the room. They strike the walls, 
 and the motion is carried on through the walls, and if we 
 had instruments sensitive enough, we could feel the motion of 
 that billiard ball at the other side of the world, and a few 
 million years from now at the most remote of the stars. This 
 is what is called the law of the conservation of energy, and 
 when we discover something like radium which seems to violate 
 that law by giving out unlimited quantities of energy, we 
 investigate and discover a new form of energy locked up in 
 the atom. In the disintegration of the atom we have a source 
 of power which, when we have learned to use it, will multiply 
 perhaps millions of times the powers we are now able to use 
 on this earth. But energy, no matter how many times it is 
 transformed, and in what strange ways it reappears, always 
 remains, and is never destroyed, and never created out of 
 nothing. 
 
 My friend the great physiologist once took me into his 
 laboratory and showed me a little aquarium in which some 
 minute creatures were wiggling about young sea-urchins, if 
 I remember. The physiologist took a bottle containing some 
 chemical, and dropped a single drop into the water, and in- 
 stantly all these little black creatures, which had been darting 
 aimlessly in every direction through the water, turned and 
 swam all in one direction, toward the light. They swam until 
 they touched the walls of the aquarium, and there they stuck, 
 trying their best to swim farther. "And now," said my friend, 
 "that is what we call a 'tropism,' and all life is a tropism. 
 What you see in that aquarium means that some day we shall 
 know just what combination of chemicals causes a human being 
 to move this way or that, to do this thing or that. When bio- 
 chemistry has progressed sufficiently, we shall be able to make 
 human qualities, perhaps in the sperm, perhaps in the embryo, 
 perhaps day by day by means of diet or injection." 
 
 Said I : "Some day, when bio-chemistry has progressed 
 far enough, you will know what combination of chemicals 
 causes a man to vote the Democratic or Republican ticket."
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 55 
 
 "Why not?" answered my friend. (He has a sense of 
 humor about all things except this sacred bio-chemistry.) 
 
 Said I : "When you have got to that stage, keep the secret 
 carefully, and we will fix up a scheme, and a few days before 
 election we will release some gas in our big cities, and sweep 
 the country for the Socialist ticket." 
 
 But jesting aside: if the human body is a material thing, 
 existing in the material world and subject to causation, there 
 must be material reasons for the actions of human bodies, 
 just the same as for the moving of billiard balls. We hear 
 the sound of a billiard ball striking the cushion, and we are 
 prepared to accept the idea that the thing we call hearing in 
 us is caused by the impinging of sound waves upon our ear- 
 drums. And if we investigate human beings in the mass, we 
 find every reason to believe that they act according to laws, 
 and that there are material causes for their acts. If you get 
 up and shout fire in a theater, you know how the audience 
 will behave. If you study statistics, you can say that in any 
 large city a certain fixed number of human beings are going 
 to commit suicide every month; you can even say that more 
 are going to commit suicide in the month of June than in 
 any other month. You can say that more people are going 
 to die at two o'clock in the morning than at any other hour. 
 You know that certain changes in the weather will cause all 
 human beings to behave in the same way. You know that an 
 increase of prices or an increase of unemployment will cause 
 a certain additional number of men to commit crimes, and a 
 certain additional number of women to become prostitutes. 
 You know that if a man overeats, his thoughts will change their 
 color; he will have what he calls "the blues." I might cite a 
 thousand other illustrations to prove that human minds are 
 subject to material laws, and therefore to investigation by 
 the bio-chemists. 
 
 But now, stop a moment. Here you sit reading a book. 
 Something in the book pleases you, and you say, "Good!" 
 Perhaps you slap your knee or clench your fist. Now here 
 is a motion of your hand, which stirs the air about you, and 
 which, according to the laws of energy, will spread its effects 
 to the other side of the world, and even to the farthest of 
 the stars. Or perhaps the book makes you angry, and you 
 throw it down in disgust; an entirely different motion, which 
 will affect the other side of the world and the farthest of the
 
 56 MIND AND BODY 
 
 stars in an entirely different way. The machine of the uni- 
 verse will be forever altered because of that slapping of your 
 knee or that throwing down of your book. 
 
 And what was the cause of these things ? So far as we can 
 see, the material cause was exactly the same in each case 
 the reading of certain letters. Two human beings, sitting side 
 by side and reading exactly the same letters, might be affected 
 in exactly opposite ways. It seems hardly rational to main- 
 tain that the material difference of two pairs of eyes, moving 
 over exactly the same set of letters, could have resulted in 
 two such different motions of the hands. As a matter of fact, 
 the very same letters may affect the same person in different 
 ways. The composer, Edward MacDowell, once told me how 
 on his birthday his pupils sent him a gift, with a card con- 
 taining some lines from the opera "Rheingold," beginning, 
 "O singe fort" that is, "Oh, sing on." But the composer 
 happened, when glancing at the card, to think French instead 
 of German, and got the message, "Oh, powerful monkey!" 
 This, of course, was disconcerting to a famous piano per- 
 former, and his pupils, if they had been watching his face, 
 would have seen an unexpected reaction. It seems manifest, 
 does it not, that the cause of this difference of reaction was 
 not any difference of the letters, but purely a difference of 
 thought? So it appears that thoughts may change the mate- 
 rial universe; they may break the chain of causation, and 
 interfere with material events. 
 
 Compare the two things, a state of consciousness and say, 
 a steam shovel. They are entirely different, and so far as we 
 can see, entirely incompatible and unrelated. Can anyone 
 imagine how a thought can turn into a steam shovel, or a 
 steam shovel into a thought ? We can understand how a steam 
 shovel lifts a mass of earth out of the ground, and we can 
 understand how a human hand moves a lever which causes 
 the shovel to act; but we are unable to conceive how a state 
 of mind whether it be a desire for pay, or an ideal of service, 
 or a vision of the Panama Canal can so affect a steam shovel 
 as to cause it to move. We can sit and think motion at a 
 billiard ball for a thousand years, and it does not move; but 
 when we think motion at our hand, it moves instantly, and 
 passes on the motion to the billiard ball or the steam shovel. 
 When fire touches our hand it sends some kind of vibration 
 to the brain, and in some inconceivable way that vibration is
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 57 
 
 turned into a state of consciousness called pain, and that is 
 turned, "as quick as thought," into another kind of motion, 
 the jerking back of our hand. 
 
 So it seems certain that consciousness really does "butt in" 
 on the chain of natural causation. And yet, just see in what 
 position this leaves the scientist who is investigating life! 
 Imagine if you can, the plight of a doctor who wanted to 
 prescribe a diet for a sick person, if he knew that every piece 
 of chicken and every piece of fish were free to decide of its 
 own impulse whether or not it would be digested in the human 
 stomach. But the plight of this doctor would be nothing to 
 the plight of the chemist or the biologist or the engineer who 
 was asked to do his thinking and his planning in a world con- 
 taining a billion and a quarter human beings, each one a law- 
 less agent, each one a source of new and unforeseeable energies, 
 each one acting as a "first cause," and starting new chains of 
 activity, tearing the universe to pieces according to his own 
 whims. What kind of a universe would that be? It would 
 simply be a chaos; there could be no thinking, there could 
 be no life in it; there could be no two things the same in it, 
 and no laws of any sort. 
 
 So then we fall back into the hands of the "determinists," 
 who assert one unbreakable chain of natural causation, and 
 regard the human body as an automaton. We go back to the 
 bio-chemist, who purposes some day to ascertain for us just 
 exactly what molecules of matter in just what positions and 
 combinations in the brain cells of William Shakespeare caused 
 him to perpetrate a mixed metaphor. We go back to the 
 belief that human beings act as they must act, because the 
 clock of life, wound up and started, must move in such and 
 such a fashion. 
 
 But now, let us see what are the implications of that 
 theory! Here am I writing a book, appealing to men to act 
 in certain ways. Of course, I know that not all will follow 
 my advice. Some will be foolish or what seems to me foolish. 
 Others will be weak, and will resolve to act in certain ways, 
 and then go and act in other ways. But some will be just ; 
 some will be free; some will use their brains because, you 
 see, I am convinced that they can use their brains ! I am con- 
 vinced that ideas will affect and stir them, in complete defiance 
 of the bio-chemist, who tells me that they act that way because 
 of certain chemicals in their brain cells, and that I write my
 
 58 MIND AND BODY 
 
 book because of other chemicals, and that my idea that I am 
 writing the book because I want to write it is a delusion, and 
 that the whole thing is happening just so because the universe 
 was wound up that way. 
 
 Now, this is an unsolved problem, and I have no solution 
 to offer. What I have set forth is in substance one of the 
 four "antinomies" of Kant, and you can see for yourself how 
 it is possible to prove either side, and impossible to be sure of 
 either. Perhaps there is really a duality in life.' Perhaps 
 there are two aspects of the universe, the material and the 
 spiritual, and perhaps they do not really interact as they seem 
 to, but both are guided and determined by some higher reality 
 of life of which we know nothing. In that case there would 
 really be a chemical equivalent for every thought, and there 
 would be a trace of consciousness for every material atom 
 in the universe. Maybe the theologians are right, and in the 
 universal consciousness of God the whole future exists pre- 
 determined. Maybe to God there is no such thing as time; 
 the past, the present, and the future are all alike to Him. 
 
 There is nothing more painful to the human mind than to 
 have to confess its own impotence. Yet I can see no escape 
 from the dilemma we are here facing. There is not a man 
 alive who does not assume the freedom of the will, who does 
 not show in all his acts that he agrees with old Dr. Samuel 
 Johnson: "We know we are free and there's an end on't." 
 Without a belief in freedom we cannot get beyond the animal, 
 we cannot become the masters of our own souls. And yet, the 
 man who swallows that idea whole, and goes out into the 
 world and preaches personal morality to the neglect of the 
 fundamental economic facts, the facts of the body in its rela- 
 tionship to all other bodies we know what happens to that 
 man; he becomes a shouting fool. Unless he is literally a 
 fool, or a knave, he quickly discovers his own futility, and 
 proceeds to use his common sense, in spite of all his theories. 
 "Come to Jesus !" cried William Booth, and he went out in the 
 streets of London to save souls with a bass drum; but pres- 
 ently, in day by day contact with the degradation of the Lon- 
 don slums, he realized that he could not save souls so long 
 as those souls were dwelling in starved and lousy bodies. So 
 William Booth with his Salvation Army took to starting night 
 shelters and cast-off clothing bureaus ! 
 
 And of exactly the same sort is the bewilderment which
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 59 
 
 falls to the lot of the scientist who is honest and willing to 
 face the facts. The bio-chemist with his test tubes and his 
 microscopes and his complex apparatus of research sits him- 
 self down and accumulates a mass of information about the 
 human body. He investigates the diseases of the body and 
 learns in detail just how these diseases spread and sometimes 
 how they are caused; he can present you with a diagnosis, 
 showing the exact stage to which the degeneration of a cer- 
 tain organ has proceeded, and perhaps he can suggest to you 
 a change of diet or some drug which will, for a time at least, 
 check the process of the breakdown. But in other cases he will 
 be perfectly helpless; he will be, as it were, buried under the 
 mass of detail which he has accumulated ; he will find the vital 
 energy depressed, and he will not know any way to renew it. 
 But along will come some mental specialist, who in a half 
 hour's talk with the patient, by a simple change in the patient's 
 ideas, will completely make over the patient's life, and set 
 going a new vital process which will restore the body to its 
 former health. A religious enthusiast may do this, a psycho- 
 therapist may do it, a moral genius may do it ; and the physi- 
 cian with all his learning will find himself like a man on the 
 outside of a house, peering in through the windows and trying 
 in vain to find out something about the life of the family and 
 its guests. 
 
 This is humiliating to the chemist and the medical man, but 
 they have to face it, because it is a fact. In the seat of author- 
 ity over the human body there sits a higher being which, with- 
 out any religious implications, we may call the soul ; or, if it is 
 impossible to get away from the religious implication of that 
 word, we will call it the consciousness, or the personality. 
 This master of the house of life is in many ways dependent 
 upon the house. If the furnace goes out he freezes, and if 
 the house takes fire and burns up well, he disappears and 
 leaves no address. But in other ways the master of the house 
 is really master, and is a worker of miracles. He does things 
 which we do not at all understand, and cannot yet even foresee, 
 but which often completely make the house over. 
 
 William James, a scientist of real authority, has a wonder- 
 ful essay, "The Powers of Men," in which he sets forth the 
 fact that human beings as a general rule make use of only a 
 small portion of the energies which dwell in their beings, and 
 that one of our problems is to find the ways by which we can
 
 60 MIND AND BODY 
 
 draw upon stores of hidden energy which we have within us. 
 Also, in a fascinating book, "Varieties of the Religious 
 Experience," James has endeavored to study and analyze the 
 phenomena which hitherto the physician and the biologist have 
 been disposed to ridicule and neglect. But unless I am mis- 
 taken, every scientist in the end will be forced to come back to 
 the central fact, that life is a unity, and that the heart of it is 
 the spirit ; that what we call the will is not an accident, not a 
 delusion, not some by-product of nature, but is the very secret 
 of life ; and that behind it is a vast ocean of power, which now 
 and then sweeps away all dykes, and floods into the human 
 consciousness. 
 
 The writer of this book is now a patient and plodding 
 teacher of a certain economic doctrine, a preacher of what he 
 might call anti-parasitism. He has come to the conclusion that 
 the habit of men to enslave their fellows and exploit them and 
 draw their substance from them without return that this 
 habit is destructive to all civilization, and is incompatible with 
 any of the higher forms of life, intellectual, moral or artistic. 
 He has come to the conclusion that there is no use attempting 
 to build a structure of social life until there is a sound founda- 
 tion ; in other words, until the capitalist system has been re- 
 placed by cooperation. But in his youth he was, or thought 
 he was, a poet, and touched upon that strange and wonderful 
 thing which we call genius. He saw his own consciousness, as 
 it were a leaf driven before a mighty tempest of spiritual 
 energy. And he believes that this experience was no delusion, 
 but was a revelation of the hidden mysteries of being. He 
 still has memories of this startling experience, still hints of it 
 in his consciousness ; something still leaps in his memory, like 
 a race-horse, or like the war-horse of Revelations, which 
 "scenteth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and 
 the shouting." Because of these things he can never accept 
 any philosophy which shackles the human spirit, he will never 
 in his thought attempt to set bounds to the possibilities of 
 human life. The very heart of life beats in us, the wonder of 
 it and the glory of it swells like a tide behind us. New uni- 
 verses are born in us, or, if you prefer, they are made by us ; 
 and the process is one of endless joy, of rapture beyond any- 
 thing that the average man can at present imagine, or that 
 any instruments invented by science can weigh or measure.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 THE MIND OF THE BODY 
 
 (Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does to 
 the body, and how it can be controlled and made use of by the 
 intelligence.) 
 
 The importance of the mind in matters of health be- 
 comes clearer when we understand that what we commonly 
 call our minds the mental states which confront us day by 
 day in our consciousness are really but a small portion of 
 out total mind. In addition to this conscious mind there is an 
 enormous mass of our personality which is like a storehouse 
 attached to our dwelling, a place to which we do not often go, 
 but to which we can go in case of need. This storehouse is 
 our memory, the things we know and can recall at will. And 
 then there is another, still vaster storehouse no one has ever 
 measured or guessed the size of it which apparently contains 
 everything that we have ever known, perhaps also everything 
 that our ancestors have known. A common simile for the 
 human mind is that of an iceberg; a certain portion of it 
 appears above the surface of the sea, but there is seven times 
 as much of it floating out of sight under the water. 
 
 This subconscious mind seems to be the portion most 
 closely united with the body. It has its seat in the back parts 
 of the brain, in the spinal cord and the greater nervous ganglia, 
 such as the solar plexus. It is the portion of our mind which 
 controls the activities of our body, all those miraculous things 
 which went on before we first opened our eyes to the light, 
 and which go on while we sleep, and never cease until we die. 
 When we cut our finger and admit foreign germs to our 
 blood, some mysterious power causes millions of our blood 
 corpuscles to be rushed to this spot, to destroy and devour the 
 invading enemy. We do not know how this is done, but it is 
 an intelligent act, measured and precisely regulated, as much so 
 as a railroad time-table. When the supply of nourishment in 
 the body becomes low, something issues a notice by way of our 
 stomach, which we call hunger; when we take food into the 
 stomach, something pours out the gastric juice to digest it; 
 when this digested food is prepared and taken up in the blood 
 
 61
 
 62 MIND AND BODY 
 
 stream, something decides what portion of it shall be turned 
 into muscle, what into brain cells, what into hair, what into 
 finger nails. Sometimes, of course, mistakes are made and we 
 have diseases. But for the most part all this infinitely intricate 
 process goes on day and night without a b'tch, and it is all the 
 work of what we might call "the mind of ihe body." 
 
 And just as our material bodies are the product of an 
 age-long process of development repeated in embryo by every 
 individual, so is this mental life a product of long development, 
 and carries memories of this far-off process. In our instincts 
 there dwells all the past, not merely of the human race, but of 
 all life, and if we should ever succeed in completely probing 
 the subconscious mind and bringing it into our consciousness, 
 it would be the same as if we were free to ramble about in all 
 the past. Huxley set forth the fact that all the history of 
 evolution is told in a piece of chalk; and we probably do not 
 exaggerate in saying that all the history of the universe is in 
 the subconscious mind of every human being. When the par- 
 tridge which has just come out of the egg sees the shadow of 
 the hawk flit by and crouches motionless as a leaf, the partridge 
 is not acting upon any knowledge which it has acquired in the 
 few minutes since it was hatched. It is acting upon a knowl- 
 edge impressed upon its subconscious mind by the experience 
 of millions of partridges, perhaps for tens of thousands of 
 years. When the physician lifts the newly born infant by its 
 ankle and spanks it to make it cry, the physician is using hi.s 
 conscious reason, because he has learned from previous expe- 
 rience, or has been taught in the schools that it is necessary for 
 the child's breathing apparatus to be instantly cleared. But 
 when the child responds to the spanking with a yell, it is not 
 moved by reasoned indignation at an undeserved injury; it is 
 following an automatic reaction, as a result of the experience 
 of infants in the stone age, experience which in some obscure 
 way has been registered and stored in the infant cerebellum. 
 
 Science is now groping its way through this underworld of 
 thought. Obviously we should have here a most powerful 
 means of influencing the body, if by any chance we could con- 
 trol it. We are continually seeking in medical and surgical 
 ways to stimulate or to retard activities of the body, which are 
 controlled entirely by this subconscious mind. If we are suf- 
 fering intense pain in a joint, we put on a mustard plaster, 
 what we call a counter-irritant, to trouble the skin and draw
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 63 
 
 the congested blood away from the place of the pain. On the 
 other hand, we may stimulate the functions of the intestines 
 by the application of hot fomentations, to bring the blood more 
 actively to that region. But if by any means we could make 
 clear our wishes to the subconscious mind, we should be deal- 
 ing with headquarters, and should get quicker and more 
 permanent results. 
 
 Can we by any possibility do this? To begin with, let me 
 tell you of a simple experiment that I have witnessed. I once 
 knew a man who had learned to control the circulation of his 
 blood by his conscious will. I have seen him lay his two 
 hands on the table, both of the same color, and without moving 
 the hands, cause one hand to turn red and the other to turn 
 pale. And, obviously, so far as this man is concerned, the 
 problem of counter-irritants has been solved. He is a mental 
 mustard plaster. 
 
 And what was done by this man's own will can be done to 
 others in many ways. The most obvious is a device which we 
 call hypnotism. This is a kind of sleep which affects only the 
 conscious control of the body, but leaves all the senses awake. 
 In this hypnotic sleep or "trance" we discover that the sub- 
 conscious mind is a good deal like the Henry Dubb of the 
 Socialist cartoons; it is faithful and persistent, very strong in 
 its own limited field, but comically credulous, willing to believe 
 anything that is told it, and to take orders from any one who 
 climbs into the seat of authority. You have perhaps attended 
 one of the exhibitions which traveling hypnotists are accus- 
 tomed to give in country villages. You have seen some bump- 
 kin brought upon the stage and hypnotized, and told that he is 
 in the water and must swim for his life, or that he is in the 
 midst of a hornets' nest, or that his trousers are torn in the 
 seat any comical thing that will cause an audience to howl 
 with laughter. 
 
 These facts were first discovered nearly a hundred and 
 fifty years ago by a French doctor named Mesmer. He was a 
 good deal of a charlatan, and would not reveal his secrets, and 
 probably the scientific men of that time were glad to despise 
 him, because what he did was so new and strange. There is a 
 certain type of scientific mind which sits aloft on a throne with 
 a framed diploma above its head, and says that what it knows 
 is science and what it does not know is nonsense. And so 
 "mesmerism" was left for the quacks and traveling showmen.
 
 64 MIND AND BODY 
 
 But half a century later a French physician named Liebault 
 took up this method of hypnotism, without all the fakery that 
 had been attached to it. He experimented and discovered that 
 he could cure not merely phobias and manias, fixed ideas, hys- 
 terias and melancholias; he could cure definite physical dis- 
 eases of the physical body, such as headache, rheumatism, and 
 hemorrhage. Later on two other physicians, Janet and Char- 
 cot, developed definite schools of "psychotherapy." They 
 rejected hypnotism as in most cases too dangerous, but used a 
 milder form which is known as "hypnoidization." You would 
 be surprised to know how many ailments which baffle the skill 
 of medical men and surgeons yield completely to a single brief 
 treatment by such a mental specialist. 
 
 All that is necessary is some method to tap the subconscious 
 mind. In many cases the subconsciousness knows what is 
 the matter, and will tell at once a secret that is completely 
 hidden from the consciousness. For example, a man's hands 
 shake ; they have been shaking for years, and he has no idea 
 why, but his subconscious mind explains that they first began 
 to shake with grief over the death of his wife ; also, the sub- 
 conscious mind meekly and instantly accepts the suggestion 
 that the time for grief is past, and that the hands will never 
 shake again. 
 
 Or here is a woman who has become convinced that 
 worms are crawling all over her. Everything that touches her 
 becomes a worm, even the wrinkles in her dress are worms, 
 and she is wild with nervousness, and of course is on the way 
 to the lunatic asylum. She is hypnotized and sees the operator 
 catching these worms one by one and killing them. She is told 
 that he has killed the last, but she insists, "No, there is one 
 more." The operator clutches that one, and she is perfectly 
 satisfied, and completely cured. Her husband writes, express- 
 ing his relief that he no longer has to "sleep every night in a 
 fish pond." This instance with many others is told by Pro- 
 fessor Quackenbos in his book, "Hypnotic Therapeutics." 
 
 Among the most powerful means to influence the subcon- 
 scious personality is religious excitement. Religion has come 
 down to us from ancient times, and its fears and ecstasies are 
 a part of our instinctive endowment. Those who can sway 
 religious emotions can cure disease, not merely fixed ideas, but 
 many diseases which appear to be entirely physical, but which 
 psycho-analysis reveals to be hysterical in nature. Of course
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 65 
 
 these religious persons who heal by laying on of hands or by 
 purely mental means deny indignantly that they are using hyp- 
 notism or anything like it. I am aware that I shall bring upon 
 myself a flood of letters from Christian Scientists if I identify 
 their methods of curing with "animal magnetism" and "ma- 
 nipulation," and other devices of the devil which they repu- 
 diate. All I can say is that their miracles are brought about 
 by affecting the subconscious mind ; there is no other way to 
 bring them about, and for my part I cannot see that it makes 
 a great difference whether the subconscious mind is affected 
 by a hand laid on the forehead, or by a hand waved in the air, 
 or by an incantation pronounced, or by a prayer thought in 
 silence. If you can persuade the subconscious mind that God 
 is operating upon it, that God is omnipotent and is directing 
 this particular healing, that is the most powerful suggestion 
 imaginable, and is the basis of many cures. But if in order to 
 achieve this, it is necessary for me to persuade myself that I 
 can find some meaning in the metaphysical moonshine of 
 Mother Eddy why, then, I am very sorry, but I really prefer 
 to remain sick. 
 
 But such is not the case. You do not have to believe any- 
 thing that is not true; you simply have to understand the 
 machinery of the subconscious, and how to ope raf e it. We are 
 only beginning to acquire that knowledge, and we need an 
 open mind, free both from the dogmatism of the medical men 
 and the fanaticism of the "faith curists." A few years ago in 
 London I met a number of people who were experimenting in 
 an entirely open-minded way with mental healing, and I was 
 interested in their ideas. I happened to be traveling on the 
 Continent, and on the train my wife was seized by a very 
 dreadful headache. She was lying with her head in my lap, 
 suffering acutely, and I thought I would try an experiment, so 
 I put my hand upon her forehead, without telling her what I 
 was doing, and concentrated my attention with the greatest 
 possible intensity upon her headache. I had an idea of the 
 cause of it; I understood that headaches are caused by the 
 irritation of the sensory nerves of the brain by fatigue poisons, 
 or other waste matter which the blood has not been able to 
 eliminate. I formed in my mind a vivid picture of what the 
 blood would have to do to relieve that headache, and I concen- 
 trated my mental energies upon the command to her subcon- 
 scious mind that it should perform these particular functions.
 
 66 MIND AND BODY 
 
 In a few minutes my wife sat up with a look of great surprise 
 on her face and said, "Why, my headache is gone ! It went all 
 at once!" 
 
 That, of course, might have been a coincidence ; but I tried 
 the experiment many times, and it happened over and over. 
 On another occasion I was able to cure the pain of an ulcer- 
 ated tooth ; I was able to cure it half a dozen times, but never 
 permanently, it always returned, and finally the tooth had to 
 come out. My wife experimented with me in the same way, 
 and found that she was able to cure an attack of dyspepsia; 
 but, curiously enough, she at once gave herself a case of dys- 
 pepsia something she had never known in her life before. 
 So now I will not allow her to experiment with me, and she 
 will not allow me to experiment with her! But we are quite 
 sure that people with psychic gifts can definitely affect the 
 subconscious mind of others by purely mental means. We are 
 prepared to believe in the miracles of the New Testament, and 
 in the wonders of Lourdes, as well as in the healings of the 
 Christian Scientists and the New Thoughters, which cannot be 
 disputed by any one who is willing to take the trouble to inves- 
 tigate. We can face these facts without losing our reason, 
 without ceasing to believe that everything in life has a cause, 
 and that we can find out this cause if we investigate 
 thoroughly.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS 
 
 (Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and 
 other methods by which a whole new universe of life has been 
 brought to human knowledge.) 
 
 One of the most common methods of exploring the sub- 
 conscious mind is the method of automatic writing. I have 
 never tried this myself, but tens of thousands of people are 
 sitting every night with a "ouija" in front of them, holding a 
 pencil on a piece of paper and letting their subconscious minds 
 write what they please. Most of them are hoping to get mes- 
 sages from the dead a problem which we shall discuss in the 
 next chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that automatic 
 writing and table rapping and other devices of mediumship 
 have opened up to us a vast mass of subconscious mentality. 
 A part of the scientific world still takes a contemptuous atti- 
 tude and calls this all humbug, but many of our greatest scien- 
 tists have been persuaded to investigate, and have become con- 
 vinced that in this mass of subconsciousness there is mingled, 
 not merely the mind of the medium, but the minds of all those 
 present, and possibly other minds as well. For my part, I do 
 not see how any one can study disinterestedly the proceedings 
 of the Society for Psychical Research and not become con- 
 vinced that telepathy at least is one of the powers of the sub- 
 conscious mind. 
 
 Telepathy is what is popularly known as "thought trans- 
 mission." Every one must know people who are what is called 
 "psychic," and will know what is happening to some friend in 
 another part of the world, or will go upstairs because they 
 "sense" that some one wants them, or will go to the door 
 because they "have a hunch" that some one is coming. And 
 maybe these things are only chance, but you will be unscientific 
 if you do not take the trouble to read and learn what modern 
 investigators have brought out on such subjects. 
 
 This much is certain, and is denied by no competent investi- 
 gator: whatever has been in your mind is there still, and it is 
 possible to find a way of tapping the buried memory. An old 
 
 67
 
 68 MIND AND BODY 
 
 woman, delirious with fever, begins to babble in a strange 
 language, and it is discovered that she is talking ancient 
 Hebrew. The woman is entirely illiterate, and her conscious 
 memory knows no language but her own, her conscious mind 
 has no ideas beyond those of her domestic life and the 
 gossip of the village. But investigation is made, and it is 
 discovered that when this woman was a girl, she worked in 
 the home of a Hebrew scholar, and heard him reading aloud. 
 She did not understand a word of what she heard, and was not 
 consciously listening to it ; nevertheless, every syllable of it had 
 been stored away forever by her subconscious mind. Innu- 
 merable cases of this sort have been established; and, as a 
 matter of fact, we might have been prepared for such dis- 
 coveries by the memory-feats of the conscious mind. It is 
 well known that Mozart, when a child, could listen to a new 
 opera, and go home and play it over note for note. At present 
 there is a child in America, giving exhibitions in public, carry- 
 ing on thirty games of chess at the same time. There have 
 been others who do sums of mental arithmetic, such as multi- 
 plying thirty-two figures by thirty-two figures, or reciting the 
 Bible backwards. 
 
 All this seems incredible; and yet there is something still 
 more incredible. Suppose that these same powers, which are 
 stored in our subconscious minds, were stored also in the minds 
 of animals ! A few years ago Maurice Maeterlinck published 
 a book, "The Unknown Guest," in the course of which he tells 
 about his experiments with the so-called Elberf eld horses : two 
 animals which had been trained for years by their owner to 
 give signals by moving their forefeet, and which apparently 
 could count and divide and multiply large sums, and extract 
 square and cube root, and spell out names, and recognize 
 sounds, scents and colors, and read time from the face of a 
 watch. Of course, it is easy to say that this is absurd, that 
 the horses must have got some signals from their trainer ; but, 
 as it happened, they would do their work in the absence of 
 their trainer; they would do it in the dark, or with a sack 
 over their heads, and the best scientific minds of Germany were 
 unable to suggest any test conditions which could not be met. 
 There have been many gigantic frauds in the world, and this 
 may have been one of them; on the other hand, there have 
 been many new discoveries, and for my part I will finish 
 exploring the miracles of the subconscious mind of man,
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 69 
 
 before I presume to say that anything is impossible in the sub- 
 conscious mind of a horse or a dog. Also I will wait for some 
 learned person to explain to me how the subconscious minds 
 of horses and dogs know enough to build and repair their 
 bones and teeth, so cleverly that modern architectural and engi- 
 neering science could teach them nothing. I ask, also, if it is 
 possible to find a region in the subconsciousness which is com- 
 mon to two people, why is it absurd to suggest that there might 
 be a region common to a man and a horse? Why is this any 
 more absurd than that they should eat the same food and 
 breathe the same air and feel the same affection and be 
 frightened at the same dangers? 
 
 The only persons who will be dogmatic about such subjects 
 are the persons who are ignorant. Those who take the trouble 
 to investigate, discover more wonderful things every day, and 
 they realize that we have here a whole universe of knowledge, 
 to which we have as yet barely opened the doors. Consider, 
 for example, the facts which we are acquiring on the subject 
 of personality and what it means. You would say, perhaps, 
 that if there is anything you know positively, it is that you are 
 one person, and have never been anybody else, and that your 
 body belongs to you, and that nobody else ever has used or ever 
 can use it. But what would you say if I told you that tomor- 
 row "you" might cease to be, and somebody else might be in 
 possession of your body, walking it around and wearing its 
 clothes and spending its money? What if I were to tell you 
 that there might be in "you," or in your body, half a dozen 
 different personalities which you have never known or dreamed 
 of, and that tomorrow there might break out a war between 
 them and "you," as to which of the half dozen people should 
 hear with your ears and speak with your tongue and walk 
 about with your clothes on ? Unless you are familiar with the 
 literature of multiple personality, you would surely say that 
 this was unbelievable quite as much so as a mathematical 
 horse ! 
 
 Let us begin with the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne, 
 who was many years ago a perfectly respectable clergyman in 
 a Rhode Island town. One day he disappeared, and his family 
 did not hear of him. A year or two later there was a store- 
 keeper in a town in Pennsylvania, who suddenly came to him- 
 self as the Reverend Ansel Bourne, not knowing what he had 
 been in the meantime, or how he came to be keeping a store.
 
 70 MIND AND BODY 
 
 Under hypnotism it developed that he had in him two per- 
 sonalities, and his trance personality recollected all that had 
 been happening in the meantime and told about it freely. 
 
 Or take the still more fascinating case of the young lady 
 who is known in the literature of psychotherapy as Miss Beau- 
 champ. Her story is told in a book, "The Dissociation of a 
 Personality," by Dr. Morton Prince of Boston. Some thirty 
 years ago Miss Beauchamp, a very conscientious and dignified 
 young lady, became nervous and ill, and took to doing strange 
 things, which were a source of shame and humiliation to her. 
 Under hypnotism it was discovered to be a case of multiple 
 personality. The other personality, who finally gave herself 
 the name of Sally, was entirely different in character from 
 Miss Beauchamp, being mischievous, vain, and primitive as a 
 child. She conceived an intense dislike for Miss Beauchamp, 
 whom she called by abusive names ; at times when she could 
 get possession of Miss Beauchamp's body, she delighted in 
 playing humiliating tricks upon her enemy, spending her 
 money, running her into debt, breaking her engagements, dis- 
 gracing her before her friends. Sally was always well and 
 Miss Beauchamp was always ill, and Sally would take the 
 body, for which they fought for possession, and take it for 
 long and exhausting walks, and leave it cold and miserable, 
 lost and penniless, in the possession of Miss Beauchamp ! And 
 of course this made Miss Beauchamp more and more a wreck, 
 and Sally took possession of more and more of her time. 
 Sally knew everything that Miss Beauchamp did and thought, 
 but Miss Beauchamp did not know about Sally. She only 
 knew that there were gaps in her life, during which she did 
 things she could not explain. And because she did not want 
 her friends to think her insane, she would try to hide this 
 dreadful condition of affairs; but Sally would spoil her plans 
 by writing' letters to her friends, and also by writing insulting 
 letters for Miss Beauchamp to find when she took possession 
 again. 
 
 Then one day, after several years of treatment, there 
 appeared yet another personality, who knew nothing about 
 Miss Beauchamp or Sally either, and only knew what Miss 
 Beauchamp had known up to some years before. Miss Beau- 
 champ had a college education, and wrote and spoke French; 
 Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it ; the new 
 personality did not have a college education at all. Neverthe-
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 71 
 
 less, after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating 
 as any novel you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was 
 the real Miss Beauchamp; the others were "split off" per- 
 sonalities. He traced the cause to a severe mental shock, and 
 succeeded in the end in combining the first Miss Beauchamp 
 with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate and wanton 
 Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally mur- 
 dering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but 
 he condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sen- 
 tence. It is a "movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I 
 should think it would make disconcerting reading to persons 
 who believe that each of us is one immortal soul, or "has" one 
 immortal soul, and is responsible for it to a personal God. 
 
 There is never any end to the problems of these multiple 
 personalities, and each case is a test of the judgment and 
 ingenuity of the specialist. He will try to make one personality 
 "stick," and will fail, and will have to accept another, or a com- 
 bination of two. In one case, he found that he could not get 
 the right personality to "stick" except under hypnosis, so he 
 decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and the new 
 personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If 
 you wish to know more about this subject you can find books 
 in any well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of 
 Personality," by H. Addington Bruce, because it contains in 
 the appendix an excellent list of the literature of the subcon- 
 scious in all its many aspects. 
 
 There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring 
 this underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. 
 Some fifteen years ago a psychotherapist in New York told 
 me about the discoveries of a physician in Vienna, and gave me 
 some pamphlets, written in very difficult and technical Ger- 
 man. Since then this Professor Freud has been translated, 
 and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers 
 make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up 
 Jesus because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves 
 Christians, and in the same way we have no right to blame 
 Freud for all the absurdities of the psychoanalysts. 
 
 Probably there never was a time in human history when 
 there were not people who interpreted dreams, and you can 
 still buy "dream books" for twenty-five cents, and learn that 
 a white horse means that you are going to get a letter from 
 your sweetheart tomorrow; then you can buy another dream
 
 72 MIND AND BODY 
 
 book, telling you that a white horse means there is going to 
 be a death in your family within the year. Naturally this 
 prejudices thinking people against dream analysis ; yet, dreams 
 are facts, and every fact has its cause, and if you dream about 
 a white horse, there must assuredly be some reason for your 
 dreaming this particular thing. Of course we know that if 
 you eat mince-pie and welsh-rabbit at midnight, you will dream 
 about something terrible ; but will it be snakes, or will it be a 
 railroad wreck, or will it be white horses trampling over you? 
 Obviously, it may be a million different unpleasant things ; and 
 what is it that picks out this or that from the infinite store 
 of your memory, and brings it into the region of half- 
 consciousness which we call the dream? 
 
 Professor Freud's discovery is in brief that the dream is a 
 wish-fulfillment. Our instincts present to our consciousness a 
 great mass of impulses and desires, and among these the con- 
 sciousness selects what it pleases, and represses and refuses to 
 recognize or to act upon the others. But maybe these decisions 
 are not altogether satisfactory to the subconsciousness. The 
 mind of the body is in rebellion against the mind shall we say 
 of reason, or shall we say of society? The mind of society, 
 otherwise known as the moral law, says that you shall be a 
 good little boy, and shall go to school and learn what you are 
 told, and on Sunday go to church and sit very still through a 
 long sermon; whereas, the body of a boy would rather be a 
 savage, hunting birds' nests and scalping enemies and explor- 
 ing magic caves full of precious jewels. So the subconscious- 
 ness of the boy, balked and miserable, awaits its time, and finds 
 its satisfaction when the boy is asleep and his moral censor has 
 relaxed its control. 
 
 This dream mind is not a logical and orderly thing like the 
 conscious mind ; it is not business-like and civilized, it does not 
 deal in abstractions. It is far more interested in things than 
 in words ; it does not present us with formulas, but with pic- 
 tures, and with stories of weird and wonderful happenings. It 
 is like the mind of the race, which we study in legends and 
 religions. It does not tell us that the sun is a mass of incan- 
 descent hydrogen gas, so and so many miles in diameter; it 
 tells us that the sun is a cosmic hero who slays the black 
 dragon of night. So the mind of our body presents us with 
 innumerable pictures, and symbols, exactly such as we find in 
 poetry. There may be, and frequently is, dispute as to just
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 73 
 
 what a poet meant by this or that particular image, but if we 
 read all the work of any particular poet, we get a certain 
 impression of that poet's individuality. If he is always talk- 
 ing about the perfume of women's hair and the gleam of the 
 white flesh of nymphs in the thickets, we are not left in doubt 
 as to what is wrong with this poet. 
 
 And just so, when the expert sets to work to examine all 
 the dreams that any one person can remember, day after day, 
 sooner or later the expert observes that these dreams hover 
 continually about one particular subject; and by questioning 
 the person, he can find out what is the secret which is troubling 
 the person, perhaps without the person himself being aware of 
 it. Of course there are many people who like nothing so much 
 as to talk about themselves; and many are spending their 
 time and their money on the latest fad of being "psyched," 
 who would, in any properly organized world, be put to work 
 at hoeing weeds or washing their own clothes. Nevertheless, 
 it is a fact that there are real mental disorders in the world, 
 and innumerable honest and earnest people who have some- 
 thing the matter with them which they do not understand. 
 Here is one way by which the conscientious investigator can 
 find out what the trouble is, and make it clear to them, and by 
 establishing harmony between their conscious and their sub- 
 conscious minds, can many times put them in the way of health 
 and happiness. 
 
 Through psychoanalysis we are enabled to understand 
 the "split" personality and its cause. We discover that almost 
 everyone has more or less rudimentary forms of multiple per- 
 sonality hidden within him; made out of desires and traits 
 which he does not like, or which the world forces him to drive 
 into the deeps of his being. These may be evil impulses, of 
 sex or violence; they may be the most noble altruisms, or 
 artistic yearnings, ridiculous things in a world of "hustle." A 
 quite normal man or woman may keep a separate self, apart 
 from the world, living a Jekyll life of business propriety and 
 a Hyde life of religious or musical ecstasy. Or again, the 
 repressed impulses may integrate themselves in the un- 
 conscious, and you may have genius or lunacy or both 
 "great wits to madness near allied." The modern knowledge 
 on such dark mysteries you may find in Hart's "The Psychol- 
 ogy of Insanity."
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 (Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of 
 view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live 
 forever?) 
 
 As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own 
 and other people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange 
 question: Is it all our own mind, and that of other living 
 people, or are we by any chance dealing with the minds of 
 those who are dead? A great many earnest people, and some 
 very learned people, are fully convinced that the latter is the 
 case, and we have now to consider their arguments. 
 
 When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost 
 stories, and would shudder over them; but I was given to 
 understand that all this was just imagination, I must not take 
 ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or dragons or nymphs 
 or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts seriously 
 well, such a person would be almost as comical as that 
 supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you 
 believe it, in those days there actually were people who believed 
 they could learn to fly in the air, and spent their time manu- 
 facturing machines for this purpose ! There was a scientist in 
 Washington who had this "bug," and built himself a machine 
 and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac river. We all 
 laughed at him we laughed so long and so loud that we killed 
 the poor man ; and then, a few years later, somebody took that 
 machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! 
 But that was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not 
 quite so ready to laugh at an idea because it was new. 
 
 I remember vividly my first meeting with a man who 
 believed in ghosts. He was a Unitarian clergyman, the 
 Reverend Minot J. Savage of New York. I was sixteen years 
 old, and just breaking out of my theological shell, and 
 Doctor Savage helped to pry me loose. He was a grave and 
 kindly man, of great learning and intelligence, and I remember 
 vividly my consternation when one day he told me oh, yes, he 
 had seen many ghosts, he was accustomed to talk with ghosts 
 
 74
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 75 
 
 every now and then. There was no doubt whatever that 
 ghosts existed! 
 
 He told me many stories. I remember one so well that I do 
 not have to go back to his books to look up the details. It was 
 in the days before the Atlantic cable, and he had a friend who 
 took a steamer to England. One night Doctor Savage was 
 awakened and found the ghost of his friend standing by his 
 bedside. The ship had gone down off the Irish coast, so the 
 ghost declared, but the friend did not want Doctor Savage to 
 think that he had suffered from the pangs of drowning; he 
 had been struck on the left side of the head by a beam of the 
 ship and had been killed instantly. Doctor Savage wrote down 
 these circumstances and had them witnessed by a number of 
 people, and two or three weeks later he received word that the 
 body of his friend had been found on the Irish coast, with the 
 left side of the head crushed in. 
 
 So then, of course, I studied the subject of ghosts. I have 
 studied it off and on ever since, and have read most of the 
 important new discoveries and arguments of the psychic 
 researchers. To begin with, I will mention the contents of two 
 large volumes, Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living." In this 
 book are narrated many hundreds of cases, of which 
 Doctor Savage's story is a type. It appears that persons at the 
 moment of death, or in times of great mental stress, do some- 
 how have the power to communicate with other people, even 
 at the other side of the world. A few such cases might be 
 attributed to coincidence or to fraud, but when you have so 
 many cases, attested in minute detail by so many hundreds of 
 otherwise honest people, you are not being scientific but simply 
 stupid if you dismiss the whole subject with contempt. 
 
 Gurney discusses the phenomenon and its probable causes. 
 We know, of course, that hallucinations are among the most 
 common of psychic phenomenon. Your subconscious mind can 
 be caused to see and hear and feel anything; likewise it has 
 power to cause you to see and hear and feel anything. In 
 practically all cases of multiple personality some of the split- 
 off personalities can cause the others to see and hear and feel. 
 And the consciousness, you must understand, takes these things 
 to be just as real as real things; there is no way you can 
 tell an hallucination from reality except to ask other people 
 about it. And if we admit the idea of telepathy, we may 
 say that phantasms are hallucinations caused by this means;
 
 76 MIND AND BODY 
 
 that is, the subconscious mind of your wife or your mother or 
 your friend who is ill or dying, transmits to your subconscious 
 mind some vivid impression, which causes your own subcon- 
 scious mind to present to your consciousness a perfect image 
 of that person, walking and talking with you, and your con- 
 sciousness has no way of telling but that the image is real. 
 
 So much for phantasms of the living. But are there any 
 phantasms of the dead? Are there any cases in which the 
 time of the appearance can be proven to be subsequent to the 
 time of death ? Even this would not prove survival, of course ; 
 it is perfectly possible that the telepathic impulse might be 
 delayed in our own minds, it might not flash into consciousness 
 until our own state of mind made it possible. Can we say that 
 there are cases in which the facts communicated are such as 
 to convince us that the person was already dead, and was 
 telling us something as a dead person and not as a living one ? 
 
 Before we go into this question, let us clear the ground for 
 the subject by discussing the survival of personality from a 
 more general standpoint. What is it that we want to prove? 
 What are the probabilities of its being true? What would be 
 the consequences of its not being true? Have we any grounds, 
 other than those of psychic research, for thinking that it is 
 true, or that it may be true, or that it ought to be true ? What, 
 so to speak, are the morals of the doctrine of immortality? 
 
 Well, to begin with, the survival of the soul after death 
 and forever is one of the principal doctrines of the Christian 
 religion. Many devout Christians will read this book, and I 
 will seem to them blasphemous when I say that this argument 
 does not concern me. I count myself one of the lovers and 
 friends of Jesus, I am presumptuous enough to believe that if 
 he were on earth, I would understand him and get along with 
 him excellently; but I do not know any reason why I should 
 believe this, that, or the other doctrine about life because any 
 religious sect, founded upon the name of Jesus, commands me 
 so to believe. I see no more reason for adopting the idea of 
 heaven because it is a Christian idea than I see for adopting 
 the idea of reincarnation because it is a precious and holy idea 
 to hundreds of millions of Buddhists. I have some very good 
 friends who are Theosophists, and are quite convinced of this 
 idea of reincarnation; that is, that the soul comes back into 
 life over and over again in many different bodies, thus com- 
 pleting itself and renewing itself and expiating its sins. My
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 77 
 
 Theosophist friends have a most elaborate and complicated 
 body of what they consider to be knowledge on this subject; 
 yet I have to take the liberty of saying that I cannot see that 
 it has any relation to reality. It seems to me as completely 
 unproven as any other fairy story, or myth, or legend for 
 example, the seven infernos of Dante, and the elaborate and 
 complicated torments that are suffered there. 
 
 But, it will be argued, Jesus rose from the dead, and thus 
 proved the immortality of the soul. Now, in the first place, 
 there are many learned investigators who consider there is 
 insufficient evidence for believing that Jesus ever lived; and 
 certainly if this be so, it will be difficult to prove that he rose 
 from the dead. Again, it was a common occurrence for cru- 
 cified men not to die ; sometimes it happened that their guards 
 allowed them to be spirited away even nowadays we have 
 known of prison guards being bribed to allow a prisoner to 
 escape. Again, the events of the return of Jesus may have 
 been just such psychic phenomena as we are trying in this 
 chapter to explain. Or, once more, they may have been purely 
 legends. A very brief study will convince a thinking person 
 that the people of that time were ready to believe anything, 
 and to accept facts upon such authority, and to make them the 
 basis for a scientific conclusion, is simply to be childish. 
 
 I shall be told, of course, that it is in the Bible, and there- 
 fore it must be true. The Bible is inspired, you say ; and per- 
 haps this is so. But then, a great deal of other literature is 
 inspired, and that does not relieve me of the task of compar- 
 ing these various inspirations, and judging them, and picking 
 out what is of use to me. The Bible is the literature of the 
 ancient Hebrews for a couple of thousand years. It repre- 
 sents what the race mind of a great people for one generation 
 after another judged worth recording and preserving. You 
 may get an idea what this means, if you will picture to your- 
 self a large volume of English literature, containing some 
 Teutonic myths, and the Saxon chronicles, and the "Morte 
 d'Arthur," and several of Chaucer's stories, and some Irish 
 fairy tales, and some of Bacon's essays, and Shakespeare's 
 "Venus and Adonis," and the English prayer-book, and the 
 architect's specifications for Westminster Abbey, and a good 
 part of "Burke's Peerage" ; also Blackstone's "Commentaries," 
 a number of Wesley's hymns, and Pope's "Essay on Man," and 
 some chapters of Carlyle's "Past and Present," and Glad-
 
 78 ^IIND AND BODY 
 
 stone's speeches, and Blake's poems, and Captain Cook's story 
 of his voyage around the world, and Southey's "Life of Nel- 
 son," and Morris's "News from Nowhere," and Blatchford's 
 "Merrie England," and scores of pages from Hansard, which 
 is the equivalent of our Congressional Record. You may find 
 this description irreverent, but do not think it is meant so. Do 
 me the honor to get out your Bible and look it over from this 
 point of view ! 
 
 But, you say, if we die altogether when we finish - this 
 earthly life, what becomes of moral responsibility and the pun- 
 ishment of sins? What shall we say to the wicked man to 
 make him be good, if we cannot reward him with a heaven 
 and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is that 
 we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand 
 years, and the results seem to indicate that we might better 
 seek out some other method of inducing men to behave them- 
 selves. They do not believe so completely in heaven and hell 
 these days, but there were times in history when they did 
 believe completely, and not merely were the believers just as 
 cruel, they were just as treacherous and just as gluttonous and 
 just as drunken. If you want to satisfy yourself on this point, 
 I refer you to my book "The Profits of Religion," page 129. 
 
 Now, as a matter of fact, I think I can discern the outlines 
 of a system of rewards and punishments automatically work- 
 ing in the life of men. I am not sure that I can prove that the 
 wicked always get punished and the virtuous always rewarded ; 
 yet, when I stop and think, I am sure that I would not care to 
 change places with any of the wicked people that I know in 
 this world. Life may not always be "getting" them, but it has 
 a way of "getting" their descendants, and I could not be 
 entirely happy if I knew that my son and his sons were going 
 to share the fate which I now observe befalling, for example, 
 the grand dukes of Russia and their children. Life is one 
 thing, and it does not exist for the individual, but for the race ; 
 its causes and effects do not always manifest themselves in one 
 individual, but in a line of descendants. "Why are they called 
 dynasties ?" asked one of my professors of history ; and a stu- 
 dent brought the session to an end by answering: "Because 
 that is what they always seem to do !" 
 
 But this is not perfect justice, you will argue. It is not 
 perfect, from the point of view of you or me ; but then, I ask, 
 what else is there in the world that is perfect from that point
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 79 
 
 of view? Why should our justice be any more perfect than, 
 for example, our health or our thinking or our climate or our 
 government? And, may it not very well be that our justice is 
 up to us, in precisely the same way that some of these other 
 things are up to us ? Maybe what we have to do is to set to 
 work to see to it that virtue does always get rewarded and 
 vice does always get punished, right here and now, instead of 
 waiting for an omnipotent God to attend to it in some hypo- 
 thetical heaven. 
 
 I find this life of mine very wonderful, and enormously 
 interesting. I am willing to take it on the terms that it is 
 given, and to try to make the best of it ; and I do not see that 
 I have any right to dictate what shall be given me in some 
 future life. If my father gives me a Christmas present, I am 
 happy and grateful ; and, of course, if I know that he is going 
 to give me another present next Christmas, I am still more 
 happy; but I do not see that I have any right to argue that 
 because he gives me one Christmas present, he must give me 
 an unlimited number of them, and I think it would be very 
 ungrateful of me to refuse to thank him for a Christmas 
 present until I had made sure that I was to get one next time ! 
 
 Neither do I find myself such a wonderful person that I 
 can assert that the morality of the universe absolutely depends 
 upon the fact that I am immortal. Of course, I should like to 
 live forever, and to know all the wonderful things that are 
 going to happen in the world, and if it is true that I am so to 
 live, I shall be immensely delighted. But I cannot say that it 
 must be true, and all I can do is to investigate the prob- 
 abilities. On this point my view is stated in a sentence of 
 Spinoza's : "He who would love God rightly must not desire 
 that God love him in return." 
 
 To sum up, the question of immortality is purely a ques- 
 tion of fact. It is one to be approached in a spirit of open- 
 minded inquiry, entirely unaffected by hopes or fears or dog- 
 mas or moral claims. It is worth while to get clear that we 
 may be immortal, even though we do not now know it and 
 cannot now prove it; it is possible that all psychic research 
 might end in telepathy, and still, when we die, we might wake 
 up and find ourselves alive. It might possibly be that some of 
 us are immortal and not all of us. It might be that some parts 
 of us are immortal and not the rest. It might be that our sub- 
 consciousness is immortal and not our consciousness. It might
 
 80 MIND AND BODY 
 
 be that all of us, or some part of us, survive for a time, but 
 not forever. This last is something which I myself am 
 inclined to think may be the case. 
 
 Also, it seems worth while to mention that it is no argu- 
 ment against immortality that we cannot imagine it, that we 
 cannot picture a universe consisting of uncountable billions of 
 living souls, or what these souls would do to pass the time. It 
 may very well be that among these souls there is no such thing 
 as time. It may be that they are thoroughly occupied in ways 
 beyond our imagining, or again, that they are not occupied, and 
 under no necessity of being occupied. Let the person who 
 presents such arguments begin by picturing to you how the 
 brain cells manage to store up the uncounted millions of 
 memories which you have, the thousands of words and com- 
 binations of words, and the thoughts which go with them, 
 musical notes and tunes, colors and odors and visual impres- 
 sions, memories of the past and hopes of the future and 
 dreams that never were. Where are all those hundreds of 
 millions of things, and what are they like when they are not 
 in our consciousness, and how do they pass the time, and 
 where were they in the hundreds of millions of years before 
 we were born, and where will they be in the hundreds of mil- 
 lions of years of the future? When our wise men can answer 
 these questions completely, it will be time enough for them to 
 tell us about the impossibility of immortality.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL 
 
 (Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of 
 spiritism thus put before us.) 
 
 Let us now take up the question of survival of personality 
 after death from the strictly scientific point of view; let us 
 consider what facts we have, and the indications they seem to 
 .jive. First, we know that to all appearances the conscious- 
 ness and the subconsciousness are bound up with the body. 
 They grow with the body, they decline with the body, they 
 seem to die with the body. We can irretrievably damage the 
 consciousness by drawing a whiff of cyanogen gas into the 
 lungs, or by sticking a pin into the brain, or by clogging one 
 of its tiny blood vessels with waste matter. It is terrible to us 
 to think that the mind of a great poet or prophet or statesman 
 may be snuffed out of existence in such a way ; but then, it is 
 no argument against a fact to say that it is terrible. Insanity 
 is terrible, war is terrible, pestilence is terrible, so also are 
 tigers and poisonous snakes ; but all these things exist, and all 
 these things have power over the wisest and greatest mind, to 
 put an end to its work on this earth at least. 
 
 And now we come with the new instrument of psychic 
 research, to probe the question: What becomes of this con- 
 sciousness when it disappears ? Can we prove that it is still in 
 existence, and is able by any method to communicate with us? 
 Those who answer "Yes" argue that the mind of the dead 
 person, unable to use its own bodily machinery any longer, 
 manages in the hypnotic trance to use the bodily machinery of 
 another person, called a "medium," and by it to make some 
 kind of record to identify itself. 
 
 This, of course, is a strange idea, and requires a good deal 
 of proof. The law of probability requires us not to accept an 
 unlikely explanation, if there is any more simple one which can 
 account for the facts. When we examine the product of auto- 
 matic writing, table-tipping, and other psychic phenomena, we 
 have first to ask ourselves, Is there anything in all this which 
 cannot be explained by what we already know ? Then, second, 
 
 81
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 we have to ask, Is there any other supposition which will 
 explain the facts, and which is easier to believe than the spirit 
 theory ? 
 
 These "spirits" apparently desire to convince us of their 
 reality, and they tell us many things which are expected to 
 convince us; they tell us things which we ourselves do not 
 know, and which spirits might know. But here again we run 
 up against the problem of the subconsciousness, with its in- 
 finite mass of "forgotten" knowledge. It is not so easy for 
 the "spirits" to tell us things which we can be sure our sub- 
 conscious mind could not possibly contain. Also, there comes 
 the additional element of telepathy. It appears to be a fact 
 that under trance conditions, or under any especially exciting 
 conditions of the consciousness, one mind can reach out and 
 take something out of another mind, or one mind can cause 
 something to be passed over to another mind ; and so informa- 
 tion can be communicated to the mind of a medium, and can 
 appear in automatic writing, or in clairvoyance, or in crystal 
 gazing. 
 
 One of the most conscientious and earnest of all the in- 
 vestigators of this subject was the late Professor Hyslop, 
 who many years ago sought to teach me "practical morality" 
 ' (from the bourgeois point of view) in Columbia University. 
 Professor Hyslop worked for fifteen years with a medium 
 by the name of Mrs. Piper, who was apparently sincere and 
 was never exposed in any kind of fraud. In Professor 
 Hyslop's books you will find innumerable instances of amaz- 
 ing facts brought out in Mrs. Piper's trances. You will find 
 Professor Hyslop arguing that the only way telepathy can 
 account for these facts is by the supposition that there is a 
 universal subconscious mind, or that the subconscious mind 
 of the medium possesses the power to reach into the sub- 
 conscious mind of every other living person and take out 
 anything from it. But for my part, I cannot see that the 
 case is quite so difficult. Professor Hyslop recites, for example, 
 how Mrs. Piper would tell him facts about some long dead 
 relative facts which he did not know, but was later able 
 to verify. But that proves simply nothing at all, because 
 there could be no possible way for Professor Hyslop to be 
 sure that he had never known these facts about his relatives. 
 The facts might have been in his subconscious mind without 
 having ever been in his conscious mind at all ; he might have
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 83 
 
 heard people talking about these matters while he was reading 
 a book, or playing as a boy, paying no attention to what was 
 said. 
 
 And then came Sir Oliver Lodge with his investigations. 
 I will say this for his work he was the first person who was 
 able to make real to my mind the startling idea that perhaps 
 after all the dead might be alive and able to communicate 
 with us. You will find what he has to say in his book, "The 
 Survival of Man," and it seems fair that a great scientist and 
 a great man should have a chance to convince you of what 
 seem to him the most important facts in the world. 
 
 Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in the war, and it 
 is claimed that he began at once to communicate with his 
 family. Among other things, he told them of the existence 
 of a picture, which none of them had ever seen or heard of, 
 a group photograph which he described in detail. But, of 
 course, other people in this group knew of the existence of 
 the photograph, and so we have again the possibility that some 
 member of Sir Oliver's family may have taken into his sub- 
 conscious mind without knowing it an impression or descrip- 
 tion of that picture. If you care to experiment, you will find 
 that you can frequently play a part in the dreams of a child 
 by talking to it in its sleep ; and that is only one of a thousand 
 different ways by which some member of a family might 
 acquire, without knowing it, information of the existence of 
 a photograph. 
 
 There is another possibility to be considered that a por- 
 tion of the consciousness may survive, and not necessarily 
 forever. We are accustomed when death takes place to see 
 the body before us, and we know that we can preserve the 
 body for thousands of years if we wish. Why is it not possible 
 that when conscious life is brought to a sudden end, there may 
 remain some portion of the consciousness, or of the sub- 
 consciousness, cut off from the body, and slowly fading back 
 into the universal mind energy, whatever we please to call it? 
 There is a hard part of the body, the skeleton, which survives 
 for some time; why might there not be a central core of the 
 mind which is similarly tough and enduring? Of course, if 
 consciousness is a function of the brain, it must decay as the 
 brain decays; but how would it be if the brain were a func- 
 tion of the consciousness which is, so far as I can see, quite 
 as likely a guess.
 
 84 MIND AND BODY 
 
 I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility 
 of this idea. I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits 
 of those recently dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. 
 Of course, you can go to any seance in the "white light" dis- 
 trict of your city and receive communications from the souls 
 of Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Poca- 
 hontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary, 
 you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and 
 Siegfried and Achilles; but you will not find much reality 
 about any of these people, they will not tell you very much 
 about the everyday details of their lives. This fact that so 
 much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our own time tends 
 to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever. How 
 simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles 
 would come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to 
 find copies of his lost tragedies! You would think that the 
 soul of Sophocles, seeing our great need of beauty and wis- 
 dom, would be interested to give us his works ! From genius, 
 operating under the guidance of the conscious mind, we get 
 sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums 
 give us suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the 
 operation of the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, 
 for example, from dissociated personalities. 
 
 There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, pro- 
 duced by the automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who 
 tells us in evident good faith that her conscious personality is 
 entirely innocent of Patience, and all her thought and doings. 
 Patience writes long novels and dramas in a quaint kind of 
 old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing about 
 this language. But does she positively know that when she 
 was a child, she never happened to be in the room with 
 someone who was reading old English aloud ? Nothing seems 
 more likely than that her subconscious mind heard some quaint, 
 strange language, and took possession of it, and built up a 
 personality around it, and even made a new language and a 
 new literature from that starting point. 
 
 That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subcon- 
 scious revels. It creates new characters, with an imagination 
 infinite and inexhaustible. Who has not waked up and been 
 astounded at the variety and reality of a dream? Who has 
 not told his dreams and laughed over them ? The subconscious 
 will play at games, it will act and rehearse elaborate roles;
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 85 
 
 it will put on costumes, and delight in being Caesar and 
 Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Ham- 
 let and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will 
 even play at being "spirits"! It will be mischievous and 
 impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of its own im- 
 portance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's 
 most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. 
 It will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a grief- 
 stricken family ; it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," 
 and cause an earnest professor of "practical morality" to give 
 up a respectable position in Columbia University and write 
 books to convince the world that the dead are sending him 
 messages. 
 
 Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss 
 Beauchamp. Remember that here we are not dealing with 
 any guess work about "spirits"; here we have half a dozen 
 different "controls," none of them the least bit dead, but all 
 of them a part of the consciousness of one entirely alive young 
 lady. A specialist has spent some six years investigating the 
 case, day after day, week after week, writing down the minute 
 details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant 
 known as "Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom 
 you ever held in your arms. Sally has love and hate, fear 
 and hope, pain and delight and Sally is a little demon, created 
 entirely out of the subconsciousness of a highly refined and 
 conscientious young college graduate of Boston. Sally spends 
 Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally pawns 
 Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; 
 Sally uses Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about 
 Miss Beauchamp; Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or 
 makes her hear exactly the opposite of what is spoken to her. 
 Yes, and Sally pleads and fights frantically for her life ; Sally 
 enters into intrigues with other parts of Miss Beauchamp, 
 and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who is her 
 Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge! 
 
 And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a 
 grieving mother, and made that mother think she was talking 
 to the ghost of a long lost child? Can anybody doubt that 
 Sally could and would play the part of any person she had 
 ever known, or of any historic character she had ever read 
 ab^ut? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the 
 c^tiscious Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this,
 
 86 MIND AND BODY 
 
 and was horrified when she was told about it. So here you 
 have the following situation, no matter of guesswork, but 
 definitely established : your dearest friend may act as a medium, 
 and in all good faith may bring to the surface some part of 
 his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in 
 a hundred different roles, and plays upon you with deliberate 
 malice the most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks. 
 
 And how much worse the situation becomes when to this 
 there is added the possibility of conscious fraud! When the 
 medium is a person who is taking your money, and thrives 
 by making you believe in the "spirits" she produces! You 
 may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of the 
 Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, 
 and in row after row of tents you may hear, and even see, 
 every kind of spirit you ever dreamed of, ringing bells and 
 shaking tambourines and dancing jigs. And you may see poor 
 farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their cheeks, listen- 
 ing to the endearments of their dead children, and to wisdom 
 from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a 
 Bowery accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years 
 ago by Will Irwin in a book called "The Medium Game" ; and 
 then after traveling from one kind of medium to another, 
 and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he went into a 
 "parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who 
 had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most inti- 
 mate secrets of his life! 
 
 It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is 
 at work upon a device to enable spirits to communicate with 
 the living, if there really are spirits seeking to do this. It is 
 Edison's idea that spirits may inhabit some kind of infinitely 
 rarefied astral body, and he proposes to manufacture an in- 
 strument which is sensitive to an impression many millions 
 of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This 
 should make it easier for the spirits, and should constitute a 
 fairer test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is 
 perfected and put to work by scientific men, I wish to suggest 
 a few tests which will convince me that there really are spirits, 
 and that the results are not to be explained by telepathy. 
 
 First, assuming that the spirits live forever, there are 
 some useful things which were known to the people of ancient 
 time, and are not known to anyone living now. For example, 
 let one of the Egyptian craftsmen come forward and tell us
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 87 
 
 the secret of their glass-staining, which I understand is now 
 a lost art. And then Sophocles, as I have already suggested, 
 will tell us where we can find his lost dramas ; or if he doesn't 
 know where any copies are buried, let him find in the spirit 
 world some scribe or librarian or book-lover who can give 
 us this priceless information. All over the ancient lands are 
 buried and forgotten cities, and in those cities are papyrus 
 scrolls and graven tablets and bricks. Infinite stores of knowl- 
 edge are thus concealed from us; and how simple for the 
 ancient ones who possess this information to make it known 
 to us, and so to convince us of their reality ! 
 
 Or, again, supposing that spirits are not immortal, but 
 that they slowly fade from life as do their bodies. Suppose 
 that a Raymond Lodge or other recently dead soldier wishes 
 to communicate with his father and to convince his father 
 that it is really an independent being, and not simply a part 
 of the father's subconscious mind let him try something like 
 this. Let the father write six brief notes, and put them in 
 six envelopes all alike, and shuffle them up and put them in 
 a hat and draw out one of them. Now, assuming that the 
 experimenter is honest, there is no living human being who 
 knows the contents of that envelope, and if the medium is 
 dipping into the subconscious mind of the experimenter, the 
 chances are one in six of the right note being hit upon. Assum- 
 ing that spirits may not be able to get inside an envelope and 
 read a folded letter, there is no objection to the experimenter, 
 provided he is honest, and provided there are no mirrors or 
 Other tricks, holding the envelope behind his back, and tearing 
 it open, and spreading it out for the convenience of the spirit. 
 And now, if the spirit can read that letter correctly every 
 time, we shall be fairly certain that whatever force we are 
 dealing with, it is not the subconscious mind of the experi- 
 menter. 
 
 Or, let us take another test. Let us have a roulette wheel 
 in a covered box, or hidden away so that no one but the 
 spirit can see it. We spin the wheel, and any one of the 
 habitues of Monte Carlo can figure out the chance of the little 
 ball dropping into any particular number. If now the spirit 
 can tell us each time where we shall find the ball, we shall 
 know that we are dealing with knowledge which does not exist 
 either in the conscious or the subconscious mind of any living 
 human being.
 
 88 MIND AND BODY 
 
 Among the things that "spirits" have been accustomed to 
 do, since the days when they first made their appearance with 
 the Fox sisters in America, are the lifting of tables and the 
 ringing of bells and the assuming of visible forms. These 
 are what is known as "materializations," and when I was a 
 boy, and used to hear people talking about these things, there 
 was always one test required : let the materializations manifest 
 themselves upon recording instruments scientifically devised; 
 let photographs be taken of them, let them be weighed and 
 measured, and so on. Well, time has moved forward, and 
 these tests have been met, and it appears that "materializa- 
 tions" are facts although it is still as uncertain as ever what 
 they are materializations of. An English scientist, Professor 
 Crawford, has published a book entitled "The Reality of 
 Psychic Phenomena," in which he tells the results of many 
 years of testing materializations by the strictest scientific 
 methods. When the medium "levitates" a table that is, 
 causes it to go up in the air without physical contact it 
 appears that her own weight increases by exactly the weight 
 of the table. When she exert5 any force, which apparently 
 she can do at a distance, the recording instruments show the 
 exact counter-force in her own body. 
 
 The results of these investigations are calculated at first 
 to take your breath away. It begins to appear that the 
 theosophists may be right, and that we may have one or 
 more "astral" bodies within or coincident with the physical 
 body ; and that under the trance conditions we mold and make 
 over this "astral" body in accordance with our imaginations, 
 precisely as a sculptor molds the clay. At any rate, our sub- 
 consciousness has the power to project from it masses of 
 substance, and to cause these to take all kinds of forms, for 
 example, human faces, which have been photographed innum- 
 erable times. Or the body can shoot out long rods or snaky 
 projections, which lift tables, and exert force which has been 
 recorded upon pressure instruments and weighed by scales. 
 
 As I write, a friend lends me a fifteen-dollar volume, a 
 translation just published of an elaborate work by Baron von 
 Schrenck-Notzing, a physician of Munich, giving minute de- 
 tails of four years' experiments in this field. So rigid was 
 this investigator in his efforts to exclude fraud, that not merely 
 was the medium stripped and sewed up in black tights, but 
 the "cabinet" in which she sat was a big sack of black cloth,
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 89 
 
 everywhere sewed tight by machine. Every crevice of the 
 medium's body was searched before and after the tests, and 
 every inch of the "cabinet" gone over. The investigators sat 
 within a couple of feet of the medium, and would draw back 
 the curtains, and while holding her hands and and feet, would 
 watch great masses of filmy gray and white stuff exude from 
 the medium's mouth, from her armpits and breasts and sides. 
 This would happen in red light of a hundred candle power, 
 by which print could be easily read; and the medium would 
 herself illuminate the phenomena with a red electric torch. 
 The investigators would be privileged to examine these 
 "phantom" forms, to touch them gently, and be touched by 
 them soft and slimy, like the tongue of an animal ; but some- 
 times the things would misbehave, and strike them in the eye, 
 hurting them. 
 
 The medium, a young French girl living in the home of 
 the wife of a well-known French playwright, had begun with 
 spiritualist ideas, but came to take a matter-of-fact attitude 
 to what happened, and in her trances would labor to mold 
 these emanations into hands or faces, as requested by those 
 present. She finally succeeded in allowing them to separate 
 the soft mucous stuff from her body, and keep it for chemical 
 and bacteriological examination. All this time she would be 
 surrounded by a battery of cameras, nine at once, some of 
 them inside the cabinet; and when the desired emanation was 
 in sight, all these cameras would be set off by flashlight, and 
 in the book you have over two hundred such photographs, 
 showing faces and hands from every point of view. There 
 are even moving-pictures, showing the material coming out 
 of her mouth and going back! 
 
 It is evident that we have here a whole universe of unex- 
 plored phenomena; and it seems that many of the old-time 
 superstitions which were dumped overboard have now to be 
 dragged back into the boat and examined in the light of new 
 knowledge. What could smack more of magic and fraud 
 than crystal-gazing? Yet it appears that the subconsciousness 
 has power to project an image of its hidden memories into a 
 crystal ball, where it may be plainly seen. We find so well- 
 recognized an authority as Dr. Morton Prince using this method 
 to enable one of the many Miss Beauchamps to recall inci- 
 dents in her previous life which were otherwise entirely lost 
 to her. Likewise this exploration of the disintegration of
 
 90 MIND AND BODY 
 
 personality enables us to watch in the making all the phe- 
 nomena of trance and ecstasy which have had so much to do 
 with the making of religions. We know now how Joan of 
 Arc heard the "voices," and we can make her hear more voices 
 or make her stop hearing voices, as we prefer. Also we know 
 all about demons and "demoniac possession." We can cast 
 out demons and without having to cause them to enter a 
 herd of swine ! We may some day be prepared to investigate 
 the wonder stories which the Yogis tell us, about their ability 
 to leave their physical bodies in a trance, and to appear in 
 England at a few moments' notice for the transaction of their 
 spiritual business! 
 
 But we want things proven to us, and we don't want 
 the people with whom we work to be animated either by 
 religious fanaticism or by money greed. We are ready to un- 
 limber our minds, and prepare for long journeys into strange 
 regions, but we want to move cautiously, and choose our route 
 carefully, and be sure we do not lose our way! We want 
 to deal rationally with life ; we don't want to make wild guesses, 
 or to choose a complicated and unlikely solution when a simple 
 one will suffice. But, on the other hand, we must be alive to 
 the danger of settling down on our little pile of knowledge, 
 and refusing to take the trouble to investigate any more. That 
 is a habit of learned men, I am sorry to say ; the law of inertia 
 applies to the scientist, as well as to the objects he studies. 
 The scientists of our time have had to be prodded into con- 
 sidering each new discovery about the subconscious mind, pre- 
 cisely as the scientists of Galileo's time had to be prodded to 
 watch him drop weights from the tower of Pisa. When he 
 told them that the earth moved round the sun instead of the 
 sun round the earth, they tortured him in a dungeon to make 
 him take it back, and he did so, but whispered to himself, 
 "And yet it moves." And it did move, of course, and con- 
 tinued to move. And in exactly the same way, if it be true 
 that we have these hidden forces in us, they will continue to 
 manifest themselves, and masses of people will continue to 
 flock to Lily Dale, and to pay out their hard-earned money, 
 until such a time as our learned men set to work to find out 
 the facts and tell us how we can utilize these forces without 
 the aid of either superstition or charlatanry.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 THE POWERS OF THE MIND 
 
 (Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance 
 is slavery, and what science means to the people.) 
 
 We have now completed a brief survey of the mind and 
 its powers. Whatever we may have .proved or failed to prove, 
 this much we may say with assurance : the reader who has 
 followed our brief sketch attentively has been disabused of 
 any idea he may have held that he knows it all; and this is 
 always the first step towards knowledge. 
 
 The mind is the instrument whereby our race has lifted 
 itself out of beasthood. It is the instrument whereby we hold 
 ourselves above the forces which seek to drag us down, and 
 whereby we shall lift ourselves higher, if higher we are to go. 
 How shall we protect this precious instrument? How shall 
 we complete our mastery of it? What are the laws of the 
 conduct of the mind? 
 
 The process of the mind is one of groping outward after 
 new facts, and digesting and assimilating them, as the body 
 gropes after and digests and assimilates food. The senses 
 bring us new impressions, and we take these and analyze them, 
 tear them into the parts which compose them, compare them 
 with previous sensations, recognize difference in things which 
 seem to be alike, and resemblances in things which seem to 
 be different ; we classify them, and provide them with names, 
 which are, as it were, handles for the mind to grasp. Above 
 all, we seek for causes; those chains of events which make 
 what we know as order in the world of phenomena. And 
 when the mind has what seems to be a cause, it proceeds to 
 test it according to methods it has worked out, the rules and 
 principles of experimental science. 
 
 It is a comparatively small number of sensations which 
 the body brings to the mind of itself ; it is a narrow world in 
 which we should live if our minds adopted a passive attitude 
 toward life. But some minds possess what we call curiosity; 
 they set out upon their own impulse to explore life ; they dis- 
 cover new laws and make new experiences and new sensa- 
 
 91
 
 92 MIND AND BODY 
 
 tions for themselves. The mind forms an idea, and at first, 
 after the fashion of the ancient Greek philosophers, it glorifies 
 that idea and sets it in the seat of divinity. But presently 
 comes the empirical method, which refuses authority to any 
 idea unless it can stand the test of experiment, and prove 
 that it corresponds with reality. Nowadays the thinker 
 amasses his facts, and forms a theory to explain them, and 
 then proceeds to try out this theory by the most rigid method 
 that he or his critics can devise. If the theory doesn't "work" 
 that is, if it doesn't explain all the facts and stand all the 
 tests it is thrown away like a worn-out shoe. So little by 
 little a body of knowledge is built up which is real knowledge : 
 which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can use as 
 foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization. 
 
 By this method of research man is expanding his universe 
 beyond anything that could have been conceived in the pre- 
 scientific days. Hour by hour, while we work and play and 
 sleep, the mind of our race is discovering new worlds in which 
 our posterity will dwell. For uncounted ages man walked 
 upon the earth, surrounded by infinite swarms of bacterial life 
 of whose existence he never dreamed. The invisible rays of 
 the spectrum beat upon him, and he knew nothing of what they 
 did to him, whether good or evil. He lifted his head and saw 
 vast universes of suns, in comparison with which his world 
 was a mere speck of dust; yet to him these universes were 
 globes or lanterns which some divinity had hung in the sky. 
 
 One of the most fascinating illustrations of how the mind 
 runs ahead of the senses is the story of the planet Uranus, 
 which, less than two hundred years ago, had never been beheld 
 by the eye of man. A mathematician seated in his study, 
 working over the observations of other planets, their motions 
 in relation to their mass and distance, discovered that their 
 behavior was not as it should be. At certain times none of 
 them were in quite the right place, and he decided that this 
 variation must be due to the existence of an unknown body. 
 He worked out the problem of what must be the mass and 
 the exact orbit of this body, in order for it to be responsible 
 for the variations observed ; and when he had completed these 
 calculations, he announced to the astronomical world, "Turn 
 your telescopes to a certain spot in the heavens at a certain 
 minute of a certain night, and you will find a new planet of 
 a certain size." And so for the first time the human senses
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 
 
 became aware of a fact, which by themselves they might not 
 have discovered in all eternity. 
 
 Now, the importance of exact knowledge concerning a new 
 planet may not be apparent to the ordinary man; but if the 
 thing which is discovered is, for example, an unknown ray 
 which will move an engine or destroy a cancer, then we realize 
 the worth whileness of research, and the masters of the world's 
 commerce are willing to give here and there a pittance for 
 the increase of such knowledge. But men of science, who 
 have by this time come to a sense of their own dignity and 
 importance, understand that there is no knowledge about reality 
 which is useless, no research into nature which is wasted. 
 You might say that to describe and classify the fleas which 
 inhabit the bodies of rats and ground-squirrels, and to study 
 under the microscope the bacteria which live in the blood of 
 these fleas that this would be an occupation hardly worthy 
 of the divinity that is in man. But presently, as a result of 
 this knowledge about fleas and flea diseases being in existence 
 and available, a bacteriologist discovers the secret of the dread 
 bubonic plague, which hundreds of times in past history has 
 wiped out a great part of the population of Europe and Asia. 
 Mark Twain tells in his "Connecticut Yankee" how his 
 hero was able to overcome the wizard Merlin, because he 
 knew in advance of an eclipse of the sun. And this was 
 fiction, of course; but if you prefer fact, you may read in 
 the memoirs of Houdin, the French conjurer, how he was 
 able to bring the Arab tribes into subjection to the French 
 government by depriving the great chieftains of their strength. 
 He gathered them into a theatre, and invited their mighty 
 men upon the stage, and there was an iron weight, and they 
 were able to lift it when Houdin permitted, and not to lift 
 it when he forbade. These noble barbarians had never heard 
 of the electro-magnet, and could not conceive of a force that 
 could operate through a solid wooden floor beneath their feet. 
 Such things, trivial as they are, serve to illustrate the 
 difference between ignorance and knowledge, and the power 
 which knowledge gives. The man who knows is godlike to 
 those who do not know; he may enslave them, he may do 
 what he pleases with their lives, and they are powerless to 
 help themselves. Anyone who would help them must begin 
 by giving them knowledge, real knowledge. There is no such 
 thing as freedom without knowledge, and it must be the best
 
 94 MIND AND BODY 
 
 knowledge, it must be new knowledge; he who goes against 
 new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the Chinese 
 who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, 
 and with umbrellas over their heads. 
 
 Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings 
 and priests and ruling castes; but this supreme power has 
 been wrested from them, and this is the greatest step in human 
 progress so far taken, "Seek and ye shall find," is the law 
 concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall be opened 
 unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that 
 knowledge is your priceless birthright, and that you should 
 repudiate all men and all institutions and all creeds and all 
 formulas which seek to keep this heritage from you. Beware 
 of men who bid you believe something because it is told you, 
 or because your fathers believed it, or because it is written 
 in some ancient book, or embodied in some ancient ceremonial. 
 Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at the same 
 time beware of the modern spells which have been contrived 
 to replace them! Beware of party cries and shibboleths, the 
 idols of the forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which 
 are set as snares for your feet. Beware of cant that para- 
 phernalia of noble sentiments, artificially manufactured by 
 politicians and newspapers for the purpose of blinding you to 
 their knaveries. Remember that you live in a world of class 
 conflicts ; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged 
 by secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately 
 released by people who seek to make use of you for purposes 
 which are theirs and not yours. In the fairy-tales we used 
 to love, the hero was provided with magic protection against 
 the perils of those times; but what hero and what magic will 
 guard the modern man against the propaganda of militarism, 
 nationalism, and capitalist imperialism? 
 
 The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can 
 be taught sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. 
 There are many books on mind and memory training, some 
 of which are useful, and some of which are trash. There is 
 an English system widely advertised, called "Pelmanism," of 
 which I have personally made no test, but it has won endorse- 
 ments of a great many people who do not give their en- 
 dorsements lightly. 
 
 This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in 
 medicine, or in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount
 
 95 
 
 of charlatanry, but there is also genuine knowledge being 
 patiently accumulated and standardized. When the United 
 States government had to have an army in a hurry it did 
 not make its millions of young men into teamsters or aviators 
 at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction 
 times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently 
 I visited the Whittier Reform School in California, where 
 delinquent boys are educated by the state. A boy had been 
 set to work in the tailor shop, and it had been found that 
 he was unable to make the buttons and the buttonholes of a 
 coat come in the right place. For nine years the state of 
 California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been labor- 
 ing to teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; 
 the effort had cost some five thousand dollars, to say nothing 
 of all the coats which were spoiled, and all the mental suffer- 
 ing of the victim and his teachers. Finally someone persuaded 
 the state of California to spend a few thousand dollars and 
 install a psychological bureau for the purpose of testing all 
 the inmates of the institution ; so by a half hour's examination 
 the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective. 
 Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was 
 only eight years old, and so he would never be able to achieve 
 the feat of making buttons and buttonholes meet. 
 
 This is a new science which you may read about in Ter- 
 man's "The Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal 
 children, it is established that certain tasks can be performed 
 at certain ages. A child of three can point to his eyes, his 
 nose and his mouth ; he can repeat a sentence of six syllables, 
 and repeat two digits, and give his family name. Older chil- 
 dren are asked to look at a picture and then tell what they saw ; 
 to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according 
 to their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note ab- 
 surdities in statements, to count backwards, and to make 
 change. Children of fifteen are asked to interpret fables, to 
 reverse the hands of a clock, and so on. Of course there are 
 always variations; every child will be better at some kinds of 
 tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and 
 taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child 
 which may be widely different from its physical age. You 
 may find some whose minds have stopped growing altogether, 
 and can only be made to grow by special methods of educa- 
 tion. Enlightened communities are now conducting separate
 
 96 MIND AND BODY 
 
 schools for defective children replacing the old-fashioned 
 schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor 
 little wretches to learn what was beyond their power. 
 
 In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, 
 and in the detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast 
 amount of "fake," but also the beginning of a science. Our 
 laws do not as yet permit the use of automatic writing and 
 the hypnotic trance in the investigation of crime, but they 
 have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for 
 example, those of memory association. The examiner pre- 
 pares a list of a hundred names of objects, and reads those 
 names one after another, and asks the person he is investigat- 
 ing to name the first thing which is suggested to him by each 
 word in turn. "Engine" will suggest "steam," or perhaps it 
 will suggest "train"; "coat" will suggest "trousers," or per- 
 haps it will suggest "pocket," and so on. The examiner holds 
 a stop-watch, and notes what fraction of a second each one 
 of these reactions takes. The ordinary man, who is not trying 
 to conceal anything, will give all his associations promptly, 
 and the reaction times will be approximately alike. But sup- 
 pose the man has just murdered somebody with an axe, and 
 buried the body in a cellar with a fire shovel, and taken a 
 pocketbook, and a watch, and a locket, and a number of various 
 objects, and climbed out of the cellar window by breaking the 
 glass; and now suppose that in his list of a hundred objects 
 the psychologist introduces unexpectedly a number of these 
 things. In each case the first memory association of the 
 criminal will be one which he does not wish to give. He will 
 have to find another, and that inevitably takes time. One or 
 two such delays might be accidental ; but if every time there 
 is any suggestion of the murder, or the method or scene of 
 the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be 
 sure that the conscious mind is interfering with the subcon- 
 scious mind. The difference between the conscious and the 
 subconscious mind is always possible to detect, and if you are 
 permitted to be thorough in your experiments, you can make 
 certain what is in the subconscious mind that the conscious 
 mind is trying to conceal. 
 
 Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and 
 expert knowledge confers mastery over the shrewdest un- 
 trained mind. The only trouble is that under our present 
 social system the trained mind is very apt to be working in
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 97 
 
 the interest of class privilege. The psychologist who is em- 
 ployed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may 
 be as little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in 
 making poison gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for 
 the extermination of its rebellious slaves. But what this proves 
 is not that scientific knowledge is untrustworthy, but merely 
 that the workers must acquire it, they must have their own 
 organizations and their own experiments in every field. To 
 give knowledge to the masses of mankind, slow and painful 
 as the process seems, is now the most important task con- 
 fronting the enlightened thinker. 
 
 The method of psychoanalysis gives us also much insight 
 into the phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may 
 ultimately come to understand it. At present we are em- 
 barrassed because genius is so often closely allied to eccentric- 
 ity ; the supernormal appears in connection with the subnormal 
 and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets and 
 painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, 
 adopt irresponsibility as their religion ; they live in a world of 
 their own, they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, 
 or to be true to their wives. They are followed by a host of 
 disciples, who adopt the defects of the master as a substitute 
 for his qualities. And so there grows up a perverted notion of 
 what genius is, and wholly false standards of artistic quality. 
 There is nothing mankind needs more than sure and exact 
 tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to acquire 
 languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability 
 to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time 
 shaping and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting 
 masses of facts and weaving them into a pattern calculated to 
 awaken the emotion in others. This is the last and greatest 
 work of the human spirit, and to select the men who can do it, 
 and foster their activity, is the ultimate purpose of all true 
 science.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND 
 
 (Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to 
 preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our lives 
 and the lives of all men.) 
 
 Someone wrote me the other day, asking, "When is the 
 best time to acquire knowledge?" I answer, "The time is 
 now." It is easier to learn things when you are young, but 
 you cannot be young when you want to be, and if you are 
 old, the best time to acquire knowledge is when you are old. 
 It is true that the brain-cells seem to harden like the body, 
 and it is less easy for them to take on new impressions; but 
 it can be done, and just as Seneca began to learn Greek at 
 eighty, I know several old men whom the recent war has 
 shaken out of their grooves of thought and compelled to deal 
 with modern ideas. 
 
 But if you are young, then so much the better ! Then the 
 divine thrill of curiosity is keenest; then your memory is 
 fresh, and can be trained; your mind is plastic, and you can 
 form sound habits. You can teach yourself to respect truth 
 and to seek it, you can teach yourself accuracy, open-minded- 
 ness, flexibility, persistence in the search for understanding. 
 
 First of all, I think, is accuracy. Learn to think straight 1 
 Let your mind be as a sharp scalpel, penetrating unrealities 
 and falsehoods, cutting its way to the facts. When you set 
 out to deal with a certain subject, acquire mastery of it, so 
 that you can say, "I know." And yet, never be too sure that 
 you know! Never be so sure, that you are not willing to 
 consider new facts, and to change your way of thinking if it 
 should be necessary. I look about me at the world, and see 
 tigers and serpents, dynamite and poison gas and forty-two 
 centimeter shells yet I see nothing in the world so deadly to 
 men as an error of the mind. Look at the mental follies 
 about you! Look at the prejudices, the delusions, the lies 
 deliberately maintained and realize the waste of it all, the 
 pity of it all! 
 
 Every man, it seems, has his net delusions, which he hugs 
 
 98 "
 
 THE BOOK or THE MIND 99 
 
 to his bosom and loves because they are his own. K you try 
 to deprive him of those delusions, it is as though you tore 
 from a woman's arms the child she has borne. I have written 
 a book called "The Profits of Religion," and never a week 
 passes that there do not come to me letters from people who 
 tell me they have read this book with pleasure and profit, 
 they are grateful to me for teaching them so much about the 
 follies and delusions of mankind, and it is all right and all 
 true, save for two or three pages, in which I deal with the 
 special hobby which happens to be their hobby! What I say 
 about all the other creeds is correct but I fail to understand 
 that the Mormon religion is a dignified and inspired religion, 
 a gift from on high, and if only I would carefully study the 
 "Book of Mormon," I would realize my error! Or it is all 
 right, except what I say about the Christian Scientists, or the 
 Theosophists, or perhaps one particular sect of the The- 
 osophists, who are different from the others. Today there lies 
 upon my desk a letter from a man who has read many of my 
 books, and now is grief-stricken because he must part com- 
 pany from me; he discovers that I permit myself to speak 
 disrespectfully about the Seventh Day Adventist religion, 
 whereas he is prepared to show the marvels of biblical prophecy 
 now achieving themselves in the world. How could any save 
 a divinely revealed religion have foreseen the present move- 
 ment to establish the Sabbath by law? Yes, and presently I 
 shall see the last atom of the prophecy fulfilled there will be 
 a death penalty for failure to obey the Sabbath law! 
 
 Cultivate the great and precious virtue of open-mindedness. 
 Keep your thinking free, not merely from outer compulsions, 
 but from the more deadly compulsions of its own making 
 from prejudices and superstitions. The prejudices and super- 
 stitions of mankind are like those diseased mental states which 
 are discovered by the psychoanalyst ; what he calls a "complex" 
 in the subconscious mind, a tangle or knot which is a center 
 of disturbance, and keeps the whole being in a state of con- 
 fusion. Each group of men, each sect or class, have their 
 precious dogmas, their shibboleths, their sacred words and 
 stock phrases which set their whole beings aflame with fanati- 
 cism. They have also their phobias, their words of terror, 
 which cannot be spoken in their presence without causing a 
 brain-storm. 
 
 At present the dread word of our time is "Communist.'*
 
 100 MIND AND BODY 
 
 You can scarcely say the word without someone telephoning 
 for the police. And yet, when you meet a Communist, what 
 is he? A worn and fragile student, who has thought out a 
 way to make the world a better place to live in, and whose 
 crime is that he tells others about his idea! Or perhaps you 
 belong to the other side, and then your word of terror is the 
 word "Capitalist." You meet a Capitalist, and what do you 
 find ? Very likely you find a man who is kindly, generous in his 
 personal impulses, but bewildered, possibly a little frightened, 
 still more irritated and made stubborn. So you realize that 
 nearly all men are better than the institutions and systems 
 under which they live ; you realize the urgent need of applying 
 your reasoning powers to the problem of social reorganization. 
 
 Cultivate also, in the affairs of your mind, the ancient 
 virtue of humility. There is an oldtime poem, which perhaps 
 was in your school readers, "Oh, why should the spirit of 
 mortal be proud?" My answer is, for innumerable reasons. 
 The spirit of mortal should be proud and must be proud be- 
 cause life throbs in it, and because life is a marvelous thing, 
 and the excitement of life is perpetual. Yesterday I met a 
 young mother ; and of what avail is all the pessimism of poets 
 against the pride of a young mother? "Oh!" she cried, and 
 her face lighted up with delight. "He said 'Goo'!" Yes, he 
 said "Goo !" and never since the world began had there been 
 a baby which had achieved that marvel. Presently it will be, 
 "Look, look, he is trying to walk!" Then he will be getting 
 marks at school, and presently he will be displaying signs of 
 genius. Always it will take an effort of the mind of that young 
 mother to realize that there are other children in the world 
 as wonderful as her own ; and perhaps it will take many gen- 
 erations of mental effort before there will be young mothers 
 capable of realizing that some other child is more wonderful 
 than her child. 
 
 In other words, it is by a definite process of broadening 
 our minds that we come to realize the lives of others, to trans- 
 fer to them the interest we naturally take in our own lives, 
 and to admit them to a state of equality with ourselves. This 
 is one of the services the mind must render for us; it is the 
 process of civilizing us. And there is another, and yet more 
 important task, which is to make clear to us the fact that we 
 do not altogether make this life of ours, that there is a uni- 
 verse of power and wisdom which is not ours, but on which
 
 THE BOOK OF THE MIND 101 
 
 we draw. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," 
 said the Psalmist. We know now that fear is an ugly emotion, 
 destructive to life; but it may be purified and made into a true 
 humility, which every thinking man must feel towards life and 
 its miracles. 
 
 Also the man will have joy, because it is given him to 
 share the high, marvelous adventure of being. To the pleasures 
 of the body there is a limit, and it comes quickly; but the 
 pleasures of the mind are infinite, and no one who truly under- 
 stands them can have a moment of boredom in life. To a 
 man who possesses the key to modern thought, who knows 
 what knowledge is and where to look for it, the life of the 
 mind is a panorama of delight perpetually unrolled before 
 him. To the minds of our ancestors there was one universe ; 
 but to our minds there are many universes, and new ones con- 
 tinually discovered. 
 
 The only question is, which one will you choose? Will 
 you choose the universe of outer space, the material world of 
 infinity? Consider the smallest insect that you can see, crawl- 
 ing upon the surface of the earth; small as that insect is in 
 relation to the earth, it is not so small, by millions of times, 
 as is the earth in relation to the universe made visible to our 
 eyes by the high-power telescope, plus the photographic 
 camera, plus the microscope. If you want to know the miracles 
 of this world of space, read Arrhenius' "The Life of the 
 Universe," or Simon Newcomb's "Sidelights on Astronomy." 
 Suffice it here to say that we have a chemistry of the stars, by 
 means of the spectroscope ; that we can measure the speed and 
 direction of stars by the same means; that we have learned 
 to measure the size of the stars, and are studying stars which 
 we cannot even see! And then along comes Einstein, with 
 his theories of "relativity," and makes it seem that we have to 
 revise a great part of this knowledge to allow for the fact 
 that not merely everything we look at, but also we ourselves, 
 are flying every which way through space ! 
 
 Or will you choose the universe of the atom, the infinity 
 of the material world followed the other way, so to speak? 
 Big as is the universe in relation to our world, and big as is 
 our world in relation to the insect that crawls on it, the insect 
 is bigger yet in relation to the molecules which compose its 
 body ; and these in turn are millions of millions of times bigger 
 than the atoms which compose them ; and then, behold, in the
 
 102 MIND AND BODY 
 
 atom there are millions of millions of electrons tiny particles 
 of electric energy! We cannot see these infinitely minute 
 things, any more than we can see the electricity which runs 
 our trolley cars ; but we can see their effects, and we can count 
 and measure them, and deal with them in complicated mathe- 
 matical formulas, and be just as certain of their existence as 
 we are of the dust under our feet. If you wish to explore 
 this wonderland, read! Duncan's "The New Knowledge," or 
 Dr. Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science,"*] 
 
 Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our 
 racial past locked up in the secret chambers of our mind ? Or 
 will you choose the universe of the superconscious, the infinity 
 of genius manifested in the arts? By the device of art man 
 not merely creates new life, he tests it, he weighs it and 
 measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the physicist with 
 the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out what 
 works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral 
 and spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker 
 of life. 
 
 Written words can give but a feeble idea of the wonders 
 that are found in these enchanted regions of the mind. Here 
 are palaces of splendor beyond imagining, here are temples 
 with sacred shrines, and treasure-chambers full of gold and 
 priceless jewels. Into these places we enter as Aladdin in 
 the ancient tale ; we are the masters here, and all that we see is 
 ours. He who has once got access to it he possesses not merely 
 the magic lamp, he possesses all the wonderful fairy properties 
 of all the tales of our childhood. His is the Tarnhelm and 
 the magic ring which gives him power over his foes ; his is the 
 sword Excalibur which none can break, and the silver bullet 
 which brings down all game, and the flying carpet upon which 
 to travel over the earth, and the house made of ginger-bread, 
 and the three wishes which always come true, and the philter 
 of love, and the elixir of youth, and the music of the spheres, 
 and who knows, some day he may come upon heaven, with 
 St. Peter and his golden key, and the seraphim singing, and 
 the happy blest conversing!
 
 PART TWO 
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 THE UNITY OF THE BODY 
 
 (Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is 
 not a matter of many different organs and functions, bat is one 
 problem of one organism.) 
 
 The reader who has followed pur argument this far will 
 understand that we are seldom willing to think of the body 
 as separate from the mind. The body is a machine, to be 
 sure, but it is a machine that has a driver, and while it is 
 possible for a sound machine to have a drunken and irrespon- 
 sible driver, such a machine is not apt to remain sound very 
 long. Frequently, when there is trouble with the machine, 
 we find the fault to be with the driver; in other words, we 
 find that what is needed for the body is a change in the 
 mind. 
 
 If you wish to have a sound body, and to keep it sound 
 as long as possible, the first problem for you to settle is 
 what you want to make of your life ; you must have a pur- 
 pose, and confront the tasks of life with energy and interest. 
 What is the use of talking about health to a man who has no 
 moral purpose? He may answer indeed, I have heard vic- 
 tims of alcoholism answer "Let me alone. I have a right 
 to go to hell in my own way." 
 
 I am aware, of course, that the opposite of the proposition 
 is equally true. A man cannot enjoy much mental health 
 while he has a sick body. It is a good deal like the old 
 question, Which comes first, the hen or the egg? The mind 
 and the body are bound up together, and you may try to deal 
 with each by turn, but always you find yourself having to 
 deal with both. Most physicians have a tendency to over- 
 look the mind, and Christian Scientists make a religion of 
 overlooking the body, and each pays the penalty in greatly 
 reduced effectiveness. 
 
 My first criticism of medical science, as it exists today, 
 is that it has a tendency to concentrate upon organs and 
 functions, and to overlook the central unity of the system. 
 You will find a doctor who specializes in the stomach and its 
 
 105
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 diseases, and is apt to talk as if the stomach were a thing 
 that went around in the world all by itself. He will discuss 
 the question of what goes into your stomach, and overlook 
 to point out to you that your stomach is nourished by your 
 blood-stream, which is controlled by your nervous system, 
 which in turn is controlled by hope, by ambition, by love, by 
 all the spiritual elements of your being. A single pulse of 
 anger or of fear may make more trouble with the contents 
 of your stomach than the doctor's pepsins and digestive fer- 
 ments can remedy in a week. 
 
 Of course, you may do yourself some purely local injury, 
 and so for a time have a purely local problem. You may 
 smash your finger, and that is a problem of a finger; but 
 neglect it for a few days, and let blood poison set in, and 
 you will be made aware that the human body is one organ- 
 ism, and also that, in spite of any metaphysical theories you 
 may hold, your body does sometimes dominate and control 
 your mini. 
 
 Some one has said that the blood is the life; and cer- 
 tainly the blood is both the symbol and the instrument of 
 the body's unity. The blood penetrates to all parts of the 
 body and maintains and renews them. If the blood is normal, 
 the work of renewal does not often fail. If there is a fail- 
 ure of renewal that is, a disease we shall generally find 
 an abnormal condition of the blood. The distribution of the 
 blood is controlled by the heart, a great four-chambered 
 pump. One chamber drives the blood to the lungs, a mass 
 of fine porbus membranes, where it comes into contact with 
 the air, and gives off the poisons which it has accumulated 
 in its course through the body, and takes up a fresh supply 
 of oxygen. By another chamber of the heart the blood is 
 then sucked out of the lungs, and by the next chamber it 
 is driven to every corner of the body. It takes to every cell 
 of the body the protein materials which are necessary for the 
 body's renewal, and also the fuel materials which are to be 
 burned to supply the body's energy; also it takes some thirty 
 million millions of microscopic red corpuscles which are the 
 carriers of oxygen, and an even greater number of the white 
 corpuscles, which are the body's scavengers, its defenders 
 from invasion by outside germs. 
 
 There are certain outer portions of the body, such as nails 
 and the scales of the skin, which are dead matter, produced
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 107 
 
 by the body and pushed out from it and no longer nourished 
 by the blood. But all the still living parts of the body are 
 fed at every instant by the stream of life. Each cell in the 
 body takes the fuel which it needs for its activities, and com- 
 bines it with the oxygen brought by the red corpuscles; and 
 when the task of power-production has been achieved, the 
 cell puts back into the blood-stream, not merely the carbon 
 dioxide, but many complex chemical products ammonia, uric 
 acid, and the "fatigue poisons," indol, phenol and skatol. The 
 blood-stream bears these along, and delivers some to the 
 sweat glands to be thrown out, and some to the kidneys, and 
 the rest to the lungs. 
 
 All of this complicated mass of activities is in normal 
 health perfectly regulated and timed by the nervous system. 
 You lie down to sleep, and your muscles rest, and the vital 
 activities slow up, your heart beats only faintly ; but let some- 
 thing frighten you, and you sit up, and these faculties leap 
 into activity, your heart begins to pound, driving a fresh 
 supply of blood and vital energy. You jump up and run, and 
 these organs all set to work at top speed. If they did not 
 do so, your muscles would have no fresh energy; they would 
 become paralyzed by the fatigue poisons, and you would be, 
 as we say, exhausted. 
 
 All the rest of the body might be described as a shelter 
 and accessory to the life-giving blood-stream; all the rest is 
 the blood-stream's means of protecting itself and renewing 
 itself. The stomach is to digest and prepare new blood ma- 
 terial, the teeth are to crush it and grind it, the hands are to 
 seize it, the eyes are to see it, the brain is to figure out its 
 whereabouts. Man, in his egotism, imagines his little world 
 as the center of the universe; but the wise old fellow who 
 lives somewhere deep in our subconsciousness and looks after 
 the welfare of our blood-stream he has far better reason 
 for believing that all our consciousness and our personality 
 exist for him! 
 
 Now, disease is some failure of this blood-stream properly 
 to renew itself or properly to protect itself and its various 
 subsidiary organs. When you find yourself with a disease, 
 you call in a doctor; and unless this doctor is a modern and 
 progressive man, he makes the mistake of assuming that the 
 disease is in the particular organ where it shows itself. You 
 have, let us say, "follicular tonsilitis." (These medical men
 
 108 MIND AND BODY 
 
 have a love for long names, which have the effect of awing 
 you, and convincing you that you are in desperate need of 
 attention.) Your throat is sore, your tonsils are swollen 
 and covered with white spots; so the doctor hauls out his 
 little black bag, and makes a swab of cotton and dips it, say 
 in lysol, and paints your tonsils. He knows by means of the 
 microscope that your tonsils are covered and filled with a 
 mass of foreign germs which are feeding upon them ; also he 
 knows that lysol kills these germs, and he gives you a gargle 
 /for the same purpose, puts you to bed, and gradually the 
 swelling goes down, and he tells you that he has cured you, 
 and sends you a bill for services rendered. But maybe the 
 swelling does not go down ; maybe it gets worse and you die. 
 Then he tells your family that nature was to blame. Nature 
 is to blame for your death, but it never occurs to anyone to 
 ask what nature may have had to do with your recovery. 
 
 I do not know how many thousands of diseases medical 
 science has now classified. And for each separate disease 
 there are complex formulas, and your system is pumped full 
 of various mineral and vegetable substances which have been 
 found to affect it in certain ways. Perhaps you have a fever ; 
 then we give you a substance which reduces the temperature 
 of your blood-stream. It never occurs to us to reflect that 
 maybe nature has some purpose of her own in raising the 
 temperature of the blood ; that this might be, so to speak, the 
 heat of conflict, a struggle she is waging to drive out invading 
 germs; and that possibly it would be better for the tempera- 
 ture to stay up until the battle is over. Or maybe the heart 
 is failing; then our medical man is so eager to get something 
 into the system that he cannot wait for the slow process of 
 the mouth and the stomach, he shoots some strychnine di- 
 rectly into the blood-stream. It does not occur to him to 
 reflect that maybe the heart is slowing up because it is over- 
 loaded with fatigue poisons, of which it cannot rid itself, and 
 that the effect of stimulating it into fresh activity will be 
 to leave it more dangerously poisoned than before. 
 
 We are dealing here with processes which our ancient 
 mother nature has been carrying on for a long time, and 
 which she very thoroughly understands. We ought, there- 
 fore, to be sure that we know what is the final effect of our 
 actions ; more especially we ought to be sure that we under- 
 stand the cause of the evil, so that we may remove it, and
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 109 
 
 not simply waste our time treating symptoms, putting plasters 
 on a cancer. This is the fundamental problem of health; 
 and in order to make clear what I mean, I am going to begin 
 by telling a personal experience, a test which I made of med- 
 ical science some twelve or fourteen years ago, in connection 
 with one of the simplest and most external of the body's 
 problems the hair. First I will tell you what medical science 
 was able to do for my hair, and second what I myself was 
 able to do, when I put my own wits to work on the problem. 
 
 I had been overworking, and was in a badly run down 
 condition. I was having headaches, insomnia, ulcerated teeth, 
 many symptoms of a general breakdown; among these I 
 noticed that my hair was coming out. I decided that it was 
 foolish to become bald before I was thirty, and that I would 
 take a little time off, and spend a little money and have my 
 hair attended to. I did not know where to go, but I wanted 
 the best authority available, so I wrote to the superintendent 
 of the largest hospital in New York, asking him for the name 
 of a reliable specialist in diseases of the scalp. The super- 
 intendent replied by referring me to a certain physician, who 
 was the hospital's "consulting dermatologist," and I went to 
 see this physician, whose home and office were just off Fifth 
 Avenue. 
 
 He examined my scalp, and told me that I had dandruff 
 in my hair, and that he would give me a prescription which 
 would remove this dandruff and cause my hair to stop fall- 
 ing out. He charged me ten dollars for the visit, which in 
 those days was more money than it is at present. Being of 
 an inquiring turn of mind, I tried to get my money's worth 
 by learning what there was to learn about the human hair. 
 I questioned this gentleman, and he told me that the hair 
 is a dead substance, and that its only life is in the root. He 
 explained that barbers often persuade people to have their 
 hair singed, to keep it from falling out, and that this was 
 an utterly futile procedure, and likewise all shampooing and 
 massage, which only caused the hair to fall out more quickly. 
 It was better even not to wash the hair too often. All that 
 was needed was a mixture of chemicals to kill the dandruff 
 germs; and so I had the prescription put up at a drug store, 
 and for a couple of years I religiously used it according to 
 order, and it had upon my hair absolutely no effect what- 
 ever.
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 So here was the best that medical science could do. But 
 still, I did not want to be bald, so I went among the health 
 cranks people who experiment without license from the med- 
 ical schools. Also, I experimented upon myself, and now I 
 know something about the human hair, something entirely 
 different from what the rich and successful "consulting der- 
 matologist" taught me, but which has kept me from becoming 
 entirely bald. 
 
 First, the human hair is made by the body, and it is made, 
 like everything else in the body, out of the blood-stream. It 
 is perfectly true that the dandruff germ gets into the roots, 
 and makes trouble, and that the process of killing this germ 
 can be helped by chemicals ; but it does not take a ten-dollar 
 prescription, it only takes ten cents' worth of borax and salt 
 from the corner grocery. (Put a little into a saucer, moisten 
 it, rub it into the scalp, and wash it out again.) But infi- 
 nitely more important than this is the fact that healthy hair 
 roots are a product of healthy blood, and that unhealthy 
 blood produces sick hair roots, which cannot hold in the 
 hair. Most important of all is the fact that in order to make 
 healthy hair roots the blood must flow fully and freely to 
 these hair roots; whereas I had been accustomed for many 
 hours every day of my life to clap around my scalp a tight 
 band which almost entirely stopped the circulation of the 
 life-giving blood to my sick hair roots. In other words, by 
 wearing civilized hats, I was literally starving my hair to 
 death. 
 
 As soon as I realized this I took off my civilized hat, and 
 have never worn one since. As a rule, I don't wear anything. 
 On the few occasions when I go into the city, I wear a soft 
 cap. Now and then I experience inconvenience from this 
 the elevator boy in ?ome apartment house tells me to come 
 in by the delivery entrance, or the porter of a sleeping-car 
 will not let me in at all. I remember discussing these em- 
 barrassments with Jack London, who went even further in 
 his defiance of civilization, and wore a soft shirt. It was 
 his custom, he said, to knock down the elevator boys and 
 sleeping-car porters. I answered that that might be all right 
 for him, because he could do it; whereas I was reduced to 
 the painful expedient of explaining politely why I went about 
 without the customary symbols of my economic superiority. 
 
 The "consulting dermatologist" had very solemnly and
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 111 
 
 elaborately warned me concerning the danger of moving my 
 hair too violently, and thus causing it to come out; but now 
 my investigations brought out the fact that moving the hair, 
 that is, massaging the scalp, increases the flow of blood to 
 the hair roots, and further increases resistance to disease. As 
 for causing the hair to fall out, I discovered that the more 
 quickly you cause a hair to fall out, the greater is the chance 
 of your getting another hair. If a hair is allowed to die in the 
 root, it kills that root forever, but if it is pulled out before 
 it dies, the root will make a new hair. Every "beauty parlor" 
 specialist knows this; she knows that if a hair is pulled, it 
 grows back bigger and stronger than ever, and so to pull 
 out hair is the last thing you must do if you want to get rid 
 of hairs! 
 
 I know a certain poet, who happens to have been well- 
 endowed with physical graces by o-ur mother nature. He 
 finds it worth while to preserve them they being accessory 
 to those amorous experiences which form so large a part of 
 the theme of poetry. Anyhow, this poet values his beautiful 
 hair, and you will see him sitting in front of his fireplace, 
 reading a book, and meanwhile his fingers run here and there 
 over his head, and he grabs a bunch of hair and pulls and 
 twists it. He has cultivated this habit for many years, and 
 as a result his hair is as thick and heavy as the "fuzzy- 
 wuzzies" of Kipling's poem. It is a favorite sport of this 
 poet to lure some rival poet into a contest. He will mildly 
 suggest that they take hold of each other's hair and have a 
 tug of war. The rival poet, all unsuspecting, will accept the 
 challenge, and my friend will proceed to haul him all over 
 the place, to the accompaniment of howls of anguish from 
 the victim, and howls of glee from the victor, who has, of 
 course, a scalp as tough as a rhinoceros hide. 
 
 I am not a poet, and it is not important that I should be 
 beautiful, and I have been too busy to remember to pull my 
 hair ; but by giving up tight hats, and by limiting the amount 
 of my overworking, I have managed to keep what hair I had 
 left when the hair specialist had got through with me. I tell 
 this anecdote at the beginning of my discussion of health, 
 because it illustrates so well the factors which appear in 
 every case of disease, and which you must understand in 
 seeking to remedy the trouble. 
 
 We have a phrase which has come down to us from the
 
 112 MIND AND BODY 
 
 ancient Latins, "vis medicatrix naturae," which means the 
 healing power of nature. So long ago men realized that it 
 is our ancient mother who heals our wounds, and not the 
 physician. Out of this have grown the cults of "nature cure" 
 enthusiasts; and according to the fashion of men, they fly 
 to extremes just as unreasonable and as dangerous as those 
 of the "pill doctors" they are opposing. I have in mind a 
 man who taught me probably more than any other writer on 
 health questions, and with whom I once discussed the sub- 
 ject of typhoid, how it seemed to affect able-bodied men in 
 the prime of their physical being. This, of course, was con- 
 trary to the theories of nature cure, and my friend had a 
 simple way of meeting the argument he refused to believe 
 it. He insisted that, as with all other germ infections, it must 
 be a question of bodily tone; no germ could secure lodgment 
 in the human body unless the body's condition was reduced. 
 
 "But how can you be sure of that?" I argued. "You 
 know that if you go into the jungle, you are not immune 
 against the scorpion or the cobra or the tiger. There is noth- 
 ing in all nature that is safe against every enemy. What pos- 
 sible right have you to assert that you are immune against 
 every enemy which can attack your blood-stream?" 
 
 We shall find here, as we find nearly always, that the 
 truth lies somewhere between the extremes of two warring 
 schools. Our race has been existing for a long time in a cer- 
 tain environment, and its very existence implies superiority 
 to that environment. The weaklings, for whom its hardships 
 were too severe, were weeded out; hostile parasites invaded 
 their blood-stream and conquered and devoured them. But 
 those who survived were able to make in their blood-stream 
 the substances known as anti-bodies, the "opsonins," to help 
 the white blood corpuscles devour the germs. As the result 
 of their victory, we carry those anti-bodies in our system, 
 which gives us immunity to those particular diseases, or at 
 any rate gives us the ability to have the diseases without 
 dying. Every time we go into a street car, we take into 
 our throat and lungs the germs of tuberculosis. Examina- 
 tion proves that we carry around with us in our mouths the 
 germs of all the common throat and nose diseases, colds, 
 bronchitis, tonsilitis. No matter what precautions we might 
 take, no matter if we were to gargle our throats every few 
 minutes, we could never get rid of such germs. And they
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 113 
 
 wage continual war upon the body's defenses; they batter in 
 vain upon the gates of our sound health. But take us to 
 some new environment to which we are not accustomed ; take 
 us to Panama in the old days of yellow fever, or take us to 
 Africa, and let the tsetse fly bite us, and infect us with 
 "sleeping sickness." Here are germs to which our systems 
 are not accustomed; and before them we are as helpless as 
 the ancient knights-at-arms, who had conquered everything 
 in sight, and ruled the continent of Europe for many hundreds 
 of years, but were wiped off the earth by a chemist mixing 
 gunpowder. 
 
 In the Marquesas Islands, in the South Seas, there lived 
 a beautiful and happy race of savages, believed to have been 
 descended, long ages ago, from Aryan stock. From the point 
 of view of physical perfection, they were an ideal race, living 
 a blissful outdoor life, which you may read about in Mel- 
 ville's "Typee," and in O'Brien's "White Shadows in the 
 South Seas." This race conformed to all the requirements 
 of the nature enthusiast. They went practically naked, their 
 houses were open all the time, they lived on the abundant 
 fruits of the earth. To be sure, they were cannibals, but 
 this was more a matter of religious ceremony than of diet. 
 They ate their war captives, but this was only after battle, 
 and not often enough to count, one way or the other, in 
 matters of health. They had lived for uncounted ages in 
 perfect harmony with their environment; they were happy 
 and free ; and certainly, if such a thing were possible to human 
 beings, they should have been proof against germs. But a 
 ship came to one of these islands, and put ashore a sailor 
 dying of tuberculosis, and in a few years four-fifths of the 
 population of this island had been wiped out by the disease. 
 What tuberculosis left were finished by syphilis and small- 
 pox, and today the Marquesans are an almost extinct race. 
 
 But there is another side to the argument and one more 
 favorable to the nature cure enthusiast. We civilized men, 
 by soft living, by self-indulgence and lack of exercise, may 
 reduce the tone of our body too far below the standard which 
 our ancestors set for us ; and then the common disease germs 
 get us, then we have colds, sore throats, tuberculosis. The 
 nature cure advocate is perfectly right in saying that there 
 is no use treating such diseases; the thing is to restore the 
 body to its former tone, so that we may be superior to our 
 normal environment and its strains.
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 You know the poem of the "One Hoss Shay,** which was 
 so perfectly built in every part that it ran for fifty years and 
 then collapsed all at once in a heap. But the human body is 
 not built that way. It always has one or more places which 
 are weaker than the others, and which first show the effects 
 of strain. In one person it will take the form of dyspepsia, 
 in another it will be headaches, in another colds, in another 
 decaying teeth, in another hardening of the arteries or stiffen- 
 ing of the joints. But whatever the symptoms may be, the 
 fundamental cause is always the same, an abnormal condi- 
 tion of the blood-stream, and a consequent lowering of the 
 body's tone. Therefore, studying any disease and its cure, 
 you have first the emergency question, are there any germs 
 lodged in the body, and if so, how can you destroy them? 
 As part of the problem, you have to ask whether your blood- 
 stream is normal, and if not, what are the methods by which 
 you can make it normal and keep it so? Also you have to 
 ask, what are the reasons why your trouble manifests itself 
 in this or that particular organ? Is there some weakness or 
 defect there, and can the defect be remedied, or can your 
 habits be changed so as to reduce the strain on that organ? 
 Are there any measures you can take to increase the flow of 
 blood to that organ, and to promote its activity ? In the study 
 of your health, you will find that circumstances differ, and 
 the importance of one factor or the other will vary; but you 
 will seldom find any problem in which all these factors do 
 not enter, and you will seldom find an adequate remedy unless 
 you take all the factors into consideration.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 EXPERIMENTS IN DIET 
 
 (Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and 
 his conclusions as to what to eat.) 
 
 Students of the body assure us that every particle of 
 matter which composes it is changed in the course of seven 
 years. It is obvious that everything that is a part of the 
 body has at some time to be taken in as food ; so the problem 
 of our diet today is the problem of what our body shall con- 
 sist of seven years from now, and probably a great deal sooner. 
 
 I begin this discussion by telling my own personal ex- 
 periences with food. I am not going to recommend my diet 
 for anyone else; because one of the first things I have to 
 say about the subject is that every human individual is a 
 separate diet problem. But I am going to try to establish a 
 few principles for your guidance, and more especially to 
 point out the commonest mistakes. I tell about my own mis- 
 takes, because it happens that I know them more intimately. 
 
 I was brought up in the South, where it is the custom of 
 people to give a great deal of time and thought to the sub- 
 ject of eating. Among the people I knew it was always taken 
 for granted that there should be at least one person in the 
 kitchen devoting all her time to the preparing of delicious 
 things for the family to eat. This person was generally a 
 negress, and, needless to say, she knew nothing about the 
 chemistry of foods, nothing about their constituents or nu- 
 tritive qualities. All she knew was about their taste ; she had 
 been trained to prepare them in ways that tasted best, and 
 was continually being advised and exhorted and sometimes 
 scolded by the ladies of the family on this subject. At the 
 table the family and the guests never failed to talk about 
 the food and its taste, and not infrequently the cook would be 
 behind the door listening to their comments ; or else she would 
 wait until after the meal, for the report which somebody 
 would bring her. 
 
 In addition to this, the ladies of the family were skilled 
 in what is called "fancy cooking." They did not bother with 
 
 115
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 the meats and vegetables, but they mixed batter cakes, and 
 made all kinds of elaborate desserts, and exchanged these 
 treasures and the recipes for them with other ladies in the 
 neighborhood. In addition to this, there were certain periods 
 of the week and of the year especially devoted to the pre- 
 paring and consuming of great quantities of foods. Once 
 every seven days the members of the family expressed their 
 worship of their Creator by eating twice as much as usual; 
 and at another time they celebrated the birth of their Redeemer 
 by overeating systematically for a period of two or three 
 weeks. Needless to say, of course, the children brought up 
 in such an environment all had large appetites and large stom- 
 achs, and their susceptibility to illness was recognized by 
 the setting apart for them of a whole classification of troubles 
 "children's diseases," they were called. In addition to 
 children's diseases, there were coughs and colds and sore 
 throats and pains in the stomach and constipation and diarrhea, 
 which the children shared with their adults. 
 
 I had a little more than my share of all these troubles. 
 Always a doctor would be sent for, and always he was wise 
 and impressive, and always I was impressed. He gave me 
 some pills or a bottle of liquid, a teaspoonf ul every two hours, 
 or something like that I can hear the teaspoon rattle in the 
 glass as I write. I had a profound respect for each and every 
 one of those doctors. He was wisdom walking about in 
 trousers, and whenever he came, I knew that I was going to 
 get well ; and I did, which proved the case completely. 
 
 Then I grew up, and at the age of eighteen or nineteen 
 became possessed of a desire for knowledge, and took to 
 reading and studying literally every minute of the day and a 
 good part of the night. I seldom let myself go to sleep before 
 two o'clock in the morning, and was always up by seven and 
 ready for work again. I did this for ten years or so, until 
 nature brought me to a complete stop. During these ten years 
 I was a regular experiment station in health; that is, I had 
 every kind of common ailment, and had it over and over 
 again, so that I could try all the ways of curing it, or failing 
 to cure it, and keep on trying until I was sure, one way or 
 the other. I came recently upon a wonderful saying by John 
 Burroughs, which will be appreciated by every author. "This 
 writing is an unnatural business. It makes your head hot 
 and your feet cold, and it stops the digesting of your food."
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 117 
 
 This trouble with my digestion began when I was writing 
 my second novel, camping out on a lonely island at the foot 
 of Lake Ontario. I went to see a doctor in a nearby town, 
 and he talked learnedly about dyspepsia. The cause of it, he 
 said, was failure of the stomach to secrete enough pepsin, and 
 the remedy was to take artificial pepsin, obtained from the 
 stomach of a pig. He gave me this pig-pepsin in a bottle 
 of red liquid, and I religiously took some after each meal. 
 It helped for a time; but then I noticed that it helped less 
 and less. I got so that a simple meal of cold meat and boiled 
 potatoes would stay in my stomach for hours, in spite of any 
 amount of the pig-pepsin ; I would lie about in misery, because 
 I wanted to work, and my accursed stomach would not let 
 me. 
 
 All the time, of course, I was using my mind on this 
 problem, groping for causes. I found that the trouble was 
 worse if I worked immediately after eating. I found also 
 that it was worse when I was writing books. When I got 
 sufficiently desperate, I would stop writing books and go off 
 on a hunting trip. I would tramp twenty miles a day over 
 the mountains, looking for deer, and I would come back at 
 night too tired to think, and in a week or two every trace 
 of my trouble would be gone. So my life regimen came to 
 be first the writing of a book, and then a hunting trip to 
 get over the effects of it. But as time went on, alas, I noticed 
 that the recuperation was more slow and less certain. The 
 working times grew shorter, and the hunting times grew 
 longer, until finally I had got to a point where I couldn't 
 work at all ; I would go to pieces in a few days if I tried it. 
 It was apparently the end of my stomach, and the end of my 
 sleeping, and the end of my writing books. My teeth were 
 decaying, not merely outside but inside; I would have ab- 
 scesses, and most frightful agonies to endure. I would lie 
 awake all night, and it would seem to me that I could feel 
 my body going to pieces an extremely depressing sensation ! 
 
 I had been trying experiments all this time. I had been 
 going to one doctor after another, and had got to realize that 
 the doctors only treated symptoms ; they treated the "diseases" 
 "when they appeared but nobody ever told you how to keep 
 the "diseases" from appearing. Why could there not be a 
 doctor who would look you over thoroughly, and tell you 
 everything that was wrong with you, and how to set it right ?
 
 118 MIND AND BODY 
 
 A doctor who would tell you exactly how to live, so that you 
 might keep well all the time! I was studying economics, and 
 becoming suspicious of my fellow man ; it occurred to me that 
 possibly it might be embarrassing to a doctor, if he cured 
 all his patients, and taught them how to live, so that none of 
 them would ever have to come to him again. It occurred to 
 me that possibly this might be the reason why "preventive 
 medicine," constructive health work, was getting so little at- 
 tention from the medical fraternity. 
 
 Two things that plagued me were headache and constipa- 
 tion, and they were obviously related. For constipation, the 
 world had one simple remedy; you "took something" every 
 night or every morning, and thought no more about it. My 
 stout and amiable grandmother 1 had drunk a glass of Hunyadi 
 water every morning for the last thirty or forty years, and 
 that she finally died of "fatty degeneration of the heart" 
 was not connected with this in the mind of anyone who knew 
 her. As for the headaches, people would tell you this, that, 
 and the other remedy, and I would try them that is, unless 
 they happened to be drugs. I was getting more and more 
 shy of drugs. I had some blessed instinct which saved me 
 from stimulants and narcotics. I had never used tea, coffee, 
 alcohol or tobacco, and in my worst periods of suffering I 
 never took to putting myself to sleep with chloral, or to stop- 
 ping my headaches with phenacetin. 
 
 At the end of six or eight years of purgatory, I came upon 
 a prospectus of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This seemed 
 to me exactly what I wanted; this was constructive, it dealt 
 with the body as a whole. So I spent a couple of months 
 at the "San," and paid them something like a thousand dol- 
 lars to tell me all they could about myself. 
 
 The first thing they told me was that meat-eating was 
 killing me. It was perfectly obvious, was it not, that meat 
 is a horrible feeding place for germs, that rotten meat is 
 dreadfully offensive, and likewise digested meat consider the 
 excreta of cats, for example! I listened solemnly while 
 Doctor Kellogg read off the numbers of billions of bacteria 
 per gram in the contents of the colon of a carnivorous person. 
 It certainly seemed proper that the author of "The Jungle" 
 should be a vegetarian, so I became one, and did my best to 
 persuade myself that I enjoyed the taste of the patent meat- 
 substitutes which are served in hundred calory portions in 
 the big Sanitarium dining-room.
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 
 
 There also I met Horace Fletcher, and learned to chew 
 every particle of food thirty-two times, and often more. I 
 exercised in the Sanitarium gymnasium, and watched the ster- 
 ilized dancing the men with the men and the women with 
 the women. I was patiently polite with the Seventh Day 
 Adventist religion, and laid in a supply of postage stamps on 
 Friday evening. Finally, and most important of all, I went 
 once a day to the "treatment rooms," and had my abdomen 
 doctored alternately with hot cloths and ice. By this means 
 I kept up a flow of blood in the intestinal tract, and stimu- 
 lated these organs to activity ; so my constipation was relieved, 
 and my headaches were less severe so long as I stayed at 
 the Sanitarium, and was boiled and frozen once every day. 
 But when I left the Sanitarium, and abandoned the treat- 
 ments, the troubles began to return. Meantime, however, I 
 had written a book in praise of vegetarianism a book which 
 has got into the libraries, and cannot be got out again! 
 
 I went on to a new variety of health crank, the real 
 "nature cure" practitioners. Vegetarianism was not enough, 
 they insisted ; the evil had begun long before, when man first 
 ruined his food and destroyed its nutritive value by means of 
 fire. There was only one certain road to health, and that was 
 by the raw food route, the monkey and squirrel diet. I had 
 gone out to California for a winter's rest, and decided I would 
 give this plan a thorough trial. For five months I lived by 
 myself, and the only cooked food I ate was shredded wheat 
 biscuit. For the rest I lived on nuts and salads and fresh and 
 dried fruits; and during this period I enjoyed such health 
 as I had never known in my life before. I had literally not a 
 single ailment. I was not merely well, but bubbling over 
 with health. I had a friend who said it cheered him up just 
 to see me walk down the street. 
 
 I thought that it was entirely the raw food, and that I 
 had solved the problem forever; but I overlooked the fact 
 that during those five months I had done no hard brain work, 
 no writing. I went back to writing again, and things began 
 to go wrong ; my wonderful raw foods took to making trouble 
 in my stomach and I assure you that until you try, you have 
 no idea the amount of trouble that can be made in your 
 stomach by a load of bananas and soaked prunes which has 
 gone wrong ! For a year or two I agonized ; I could not give 
 up my wonderful raw food diet, because I had always before
 
 120 MIND AND BODY 
 
 me the vision of those months in California, and could not 
 understand why it was not that way again. 
 
 But the time came when I would eat a meal of raw food, 
 and for hours afterwards my stomach would feel like a blown- 
 up football. Then somebody gave me a book by Dr. Salis- 
 bury on the subject of the meat diet. Of all the horrible 
 things in the world, a meat diet sounded to me the worst; 
 I had been a vegetable enthusiast for three years, and thought 
 of eating meat as you would think of cannibalism. But there 
 has never been a time in my life when I would not hear 
 something new, and give it a trial if it sounded well; so I 
 read the books of Doctor Salisbury, which have long been 
 out of print, and have been curiously neglected by the med- 
 ical profession. Salisbury was a real pioneer, an experi- 
 menter. He wrote in the days before the germ theory, and 
 so missed his guess regarding tuberculosis, but he perceived 
 that most of the common diseases are caused by dietetic errors, 
 and he set to work to prove it. He showed that hog cholera 
 and army diarrhea are the same disease, and come from the 
 same cause. He took a squad of men and fed them on army 
 biscuit for two or three weeks, until they were nearly dead, 
 and then he put them on a diet of lean beef and completely 
 cured them in a few days. He did this same thing with one 
 kind of food after another, and in each case he would bring 
 his men as near to death as he dared, and then he would cure 
 them. He showed that meat is the only food which contains 
 all the elements of nutrition, the only food upon which a 
 person can live for an unlimited period. As Salisbury said, 
 "Beef is first, mutton is second, and the rest nowhere." 
 
 It was his idea that tuberculosis of the lungs is caused 
 by spores of fermenting starch clogging the minute blood 
 vessels. He claimed that there is an early stage of tubercu- 
 losis, in which the spores are floating in the blood stream ; he 
 put large numbers of patients upon a diet of lean beef, 
 ground and cooked, and he cured them of tuberculosis, and 
 if one of them would break the diet and yield to a craving 
 for starch or sugar, Salisbury claimed that he could find it 
 out an hour or two later by examining a drop of their blood 
 under the microscope. In his books he described vividly the 
 effects of an excess of starch and sugar in the diet. He 
 called it "making a yeast-pot of your stomach"; and you 
 can imagine how that hit my stomach, full of half digested 
 bananas and prunes!
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 121 
 
 I tried the Salisbury diet, and satisfied myself of this 
 one fact, that lean meat is for brain-workers the most easily 
 assimilated of all foods. Salisbury claimed that you could 
 not overeat on meat, but I do not believe there is any food 
 you cannot overeat on, nor do I believe that anyone should 
 try to live on one kind of food. We are by nature omnivorous 
 animals. Our digestive tracts are similar to those of hogs 
 and monkeys, which eat all varieties of food they can get. One 
 of the common errors of the nature cure enthusiast is to cite 
 the monkey and the squirrel as fruit and nut-eating animals, 
 when the fact is that monkeys and squirrels eat meat when 
 they can get it, and the ardor with which they go bird-nesting 
 is evidence enough that they crave it. If there is any race of 
 man which is vegetarian, you will find that it is from neces- 
 sity alone. The beautiful South Sea Islanders, who are the 
 theme of the raw feeders' ecstasy, spend a lot of their time 
 catching fish, and sometimes they kill a pig, and celebrate 
 the event precisely as Christians celebrate the birth of their 
 Redeemer. 
 
 From this you may be able to guess my conclusions, as 
 the result of much painful blundering and experimenting. 
 So far as diet is concerned, I belong to no school; I have 
 learned something from each one, and what I have learned 
 from a trial of them all is to be shy of extreme statements 
 and of hard and fast rules. To my vegetarian friends who 
 argue that it is morally wrong to take sentient life, I answer 
 that they cannot go for a walk in the country without com- 
 mitting that offense, for they walk on innumerable bugs and 
 worms. We cannot live without asserting our right to sub- 
 ject the lower forms of life to our purposes; we kill in- 
 numerable germs when we swallow a glass of grape juice, or 
 for that matter a glass of plain water. I shall be much sur- 
 prised if the advance of science does not some day prove to 
 us that there are rudimentary forms of consciousness in all 
 vegetable life; so we shall justify the argument of Mr. 
 Dooley, who said, in reviewing "The Jungle," that he could 
 not see how it was any less a crime to cut off a young tomato 
 in its prime, or to murder a whole cradleful of baby peas in 
 the pod ! 
 
 There is no question that meat-eating is inconvenient, ex- 
 pensive, and dirty. I have no doubt that some day we shall 
 know enough to be able to find for every individual a diet
 
 122 MIND AND BODY 
 
 which will keep him at the top of his power, without the 
 maintenance of the slaughter-house. But we do not possess 
 that knowledge at present; at least, I personally do not pos- 
 sess it. I happen to be one of those individuals there are 
 many of them with whom milk does not agree; and if you 
 rule out milk and meat, you find yourself compelled to get 
 a great deal of your protein from vegetable sources, such as 
 peas, beans and nuts. All these contain a great deal of starch, 
 and thus there is no way you can arrange your diet to escape 
 an excess of starch. Excess of starch, so my experience has 
 convinced me, is the deadliest of all dietetic errors. It is also 
 the commonest of errors, the cause, not merely of the com- 
 mon throat and nose infections, but of constipation, and like- 
 wise of diarrhea, of anemia, and thus, through the weakening 
 of the blood stream, of all disorders that spring from this 
 source decaying teeth and rheumatism, boils, bad complexion, 
 and tuberculosis. Starch foods are the cheapest, therefore 
 they form the common diet of the poor, and are responsible 
 for the diseases of undernourishment to which the poor are 
 liable. 
 
 On the other hand, of course, there are perfectly definite 
 diseases of overnourishment ; high blood pressure, which cul- 
 minates in apoplexy; kidney troubles, which result from the 
 inability of these organs to eliminate all the waste matter that 
 is delivered to them; fatty degeneration of the heart, or of 
 the liver, or any of the vital organs. You may cause a head- 
 ache by clogging the blood stream through overeating, or you 
 tnay cause it by eating small quantities of food, if those foods 
 are unbalanced, and do not contain the mineral elements 
 necessary to the making of normal blood. Whatever the 
 trouble with your health, it is my judgment that in two cases 
 out of three you will find it dates back to errors in diet. I 
 do not think I exaggerate in saying that a knowledge of what 
 to eat and how much to eat is two-thirds of the knowledge 
 of how to keep yourself in permanent health.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 ERRORS IN DIET 
 
 (Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they 
 play in the making of health and disease.) 
 
 It is my purpose in this chapter to lay down a few general 
 principles to aid you in the practical problem of selecting 
 the best diet for yourself. But it must be made clear at the 
 outset that there can be no hard and fast rule. All human 
 bodies are more or less alike, but on the other hand all are 
 more or less different. Modern civilization has given very 
 few bodies the chance to be perfect ; nearly all have some 
 weakness, some abnormality, and need some special modifi- 
 cation in diet to fit their particular problem. The ideal in 
 each case would be a complete study of the individual system. 
 Some day, no doubt, medical science will analyze the digestive 
 juices and the gland secretions and the blood-stream of every 
 human being, and say, you need a certain percentage of starch 
 and a certain percentage of protein; you need such and such 
 proportion of phosphorus and iron; you should avoid cer- 
 tain acids and so on. But at present we are devoting our 
 science to the task of killing and maiming other people, in- 
 stead of enabling ourselves to live in health and happiness; 
 so it is that most of those who read this book will be too 
 poor to command the advice of a diet specialist. The best 
 you can do is to get a few general ideas and try them out, 
 watching your own body and learning its peculiarities. 
 
 Human food contains three elements: proteins, fats and 
 carbohydrates. The proteins are the body-building material, 
 and the foods which are rich in proteins are lean meat, the 
 white of eggs, milk and cheese, nuts, peas and beans. A cer- 
 tain amount of this kind of food is needed by the body. If 
 it is missing, the body will gradually waste away. If too 
 much of it is taken, the body can turn it into energy-making 
 material, but this is a wasteful process, and the best evidence 
 appears to be that it is a strain upon the system. Experi- 
 ments conducted by Professor Chittenden of Yale have proven 
 conclusively that men can live and maintain body weight upon 
 
 123
 
 124 MIND AND BODY 
 
 much less protein food than previous dietetic standards had 
 indicated. 
 
 The fats are found in fat meats and dairy products, and 
 in nuts, olives, and vegetable oils. The body is prepared to 
 digest and assimilate a certain amount of fat, no one knows 
 how much. I have found in my own case that I require a 
 great deal less than people ordinarily eat. I have for many 
 years maintained good health upon a diet containing no more 
 fat than one gets with lean meat once or twice a day. I never 
 use butter or olive oil, nor any fat in cooking. My reason 
 for this is that fats are the most highly concentrated form of 
 food, and the easiest upon which to overeat. Excess of fat 
 is a cause, not merely of obesity, but also of boils and pim- 
 ples and "pasty" complexion, and other signs of a clogged 
 blood-stream. 
 
 The third variety of food is the carbohydrates, and of 
 these there are two kinds, starches and sugars. Starch is the 
 white material of the grains and tubers; the principal food 
 element of bread and cereals, rice, potatoes, bananas, and 
 many prepared substances such as corn-starch, tapioca, farina 
 and macaroni. Starchy foods compose probably half the 
 diet of the average human being. In my own case, they com- 
 pose about one-sixth, so you see to what extent my beliefs 
 differ from the common. Starch is not really necessary in the 
 diet at all. I have a friend who is subject to headaches, and 
 finds relief from them by a diet of meat, salads, and fresh 
 fruits exclusively. The first thing that excess of starch or 
 sugar does is to ferment in the system, and cause flatulence 
 and gas. But strange as it may seem, if the excess of starch 
 is perfectly digested and assimilated into the system, the con- 
 dition may be worse yet, because you may have a great 
 quantity of energy-producing material, without the necessary 
 mineral elements which the body requires in the handling of it. 
 
 If you cremate a human body and study the ashes chem- 
 ically, you find a score or more of mineral salts. You find these 
 in the blood, and no blood is normal and no body can be kept 
 normal which does not contain the right percentage of these 
 elements. It is not merely that they are needed to build 
 bones and teeth ; they are needed at every instant for the 
 chemistry of the cells. Every time you move a muscle, you 
 fill the cells of that muscle with a certain amount of waste 
 matter. You may prove how deadly this matter is by bind-
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 125 
 
 ing a tight cord about your arm, and then trying to use the 
 arm. We are only at the beginning of understanding the 
 subtle chemistry of the body; but this much we know, the 
 cells transform the waste products, and they are thrown out 
 of the system as ammonia, uric acid, etc. ; and for this proc- 
 ess the blood must have a continual supply of many mineral 
 salts. 
 
 So vital are they, and so fatal to health is their absence, 
 that it is far better for you to eat nothing at all than to eat 
 improperly balanced foods, or foods which are deficient in the 
 organic salts. You may prove this to yourself by a simple 
 experiment. Put two chickens in separate pens, where nobody 
 can feed them but yourself. Feed one of them on water and 
 white bread, or corn starch, or sugar, or any energy-making 
 substance which contains little of the mineral elements. Feed 
 the other chicken on plain water. You will find that the 
 one which has the food will quickly become droopy and sickly ; 
 its feathers will fall out, it will have what in human beings 
 would be known as headaches, colds, sore throats, decaying 
 teeth and boils. At the end of a couple of weeks it will be 
 a dead chicken. The one which you feed on water alone will 
 not be a happy chicken, neither will it be a fat chicken, 
 but it will be a live chicken, and a chicken without disease. 
 I am going later on to discuss the subject of fasting. For 
 the present I will merely say that a chicken which has nothing 
 but water is living upon its own flesh, and therefore has a 
 meat diet, containing the mineral elements necessary to the 
 elimination of the fatigue poisons. 
 
 I am going to try not to be dogmatic in this book, and 
 not to say things that I do not know. I confess to innumer- 
 able uncertainties about the subject of diet; but one thing I 
 think I do know, and that is that human beings should elim- 
 inate absolutely from their food those modern artificial prod- 
 ucts, which look so nice, and are so easy to handle, and are 
 put up in packages with pretty labels, and have been in some 
 way artificially treated to remove the wastes and impurities 
 including the vital mineral salts. Among such food substances 
 I include lard and its imitations made from cottonseed oil, 
 white flour, all the prepared and refined cereals, polished 
 rice, tapioca, farina, corn starch, and granulated and powdered 
 sugar. Any of these substances will kill a chicken in a couple 
 of weeks, and the only reason they take a longer time to kill
 
 126 MIND AND BODY 
 
 you is because you mix them with other kinds of foods. But 
 to the extent that you eat them, your diet is deficient; and 
 do not console yourself with the idea that the mineral ele- 
 ments will be made up from other foods, because you don't 
 know that, and nobody else knows it. Nobody knows just 
 how much of any particular organic salt the body needs. All 
 we know is that the primitive races, which ate natural foods, 
 enjoyed vigorous health, while the American people, who 
 consume the greatest proportion of the so-called "refined" 
 foods, have the very best dentists and the very worst teeth 
 in the world. 
 
 There are many kinds of sugar, found in the sugar-cane 
 and the beet, and in all fruits. Sugar may also be made from 
 any form of starch; this is glucose, which is put up in cans 
 and sold as an imitation of maple syrup. The ordinary gran- 
 ulated and powdered sugar is made by taking from the natu- 
 ral syrup every trace of mineral elements; so I have no hesi- 
 tation in saying that the ordinary cane sugar and beet sugar 
 of our breakfast tables and our confectionery stores is not a 
 food, but a slow poison. The causes of the wonderful prog- 
 ress of American dentistry, which is the marvel of the civi- 
 lized world, are cane sugar, white flour, and the frying-pan, 
 each of which dietetic crimes I shall take up in turn. 
 
 We have the richest country in the world; we eat more 
 food, probably by 50 per cent, and we waste more food, 
 probably by 500 per cent, than any other people in the world ; 
 and yet, go to any small farming community in America, and 
 what do you find? You find the teeth of the young children 
 rotting in their heads, and having to be pulled out before 
 their second teeth come. You find these second teeth rot- 
 ting often before the age of twenty. A friend of mine, 
 who knows the American farmer, sums it up this way : "He 
 has two things that he requires if he is to be really respectable 
 and happy. First, he wants to get all the fireplaces in his 
 home boarded up, and all the windows nailed tight; and sec- 
 ond, he wants to get all his teeth out, and an artificial set 
 installed. Out of the farmers' wives in my neighborhood, not 
 one in ten keeps her own teeth until she is thirty." 
 
 If you go to the Balkans, where the peasants live on sour 
 milk, with grains which they grind at home; or to southern 
 Italy and Sicily, where they live on cheese and black bread 
 and olives; or among savage people, where they hunt and
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 127 
 
 fish and gather the natural fruits, you find old men without a 
 single decayed tooth. There must be some reason for this, 
 and the reason is found in our denatured grocery-store foods. 
 The farmer's wife will gather up her eggs and her butter 
 and cheeses, and take them to the store and bring back cans 
 of lard and packages of sugar. The farmer will sell his per- 
 fectly good wheat and corn meal, and bring back in his wagon 
 cases of "refined" cereal foods, for which he has paid ten 
 times the price of the grain ! 
 
 Dentists will tell you that the way candy injures the teeth 
 is by sticking to them and fermenting, forming acids, which 
 destroy the tooth structure. And that may be a part of the 
 reason. But the principal reason why the teeth decay is 
 because the blood-stream is abnormal, and is unable to keep up 
 the repairs of the body. Your teeth are living structures, 
 just as much as any other part of you, and they will resist 
 decay if you supply them with the proper nourishment. 
 
 You need sugar; you need a considerable quantity of it 
 every day. Nature provides this sugar in combination with 
 the organic salts, and also with the precious vitamines, whose 
 function in the body we are only beginning to investigate. All 
 the mineral substances which give the color and flavor to 
 oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, figs, prunes, raisins all 
 these you take out when you make sugar. Or perhaps you 
 put in some imitations of them, made from coal tar chemicals, 
 and drink them at your soda fountains! So little apprecia- 
 tion has the American farmer's wife of natural fruits, that 
 when she preserves them, she considers it necessary to fill 
 them full of cane sugar; in fact, she has a notion that they 
 won't keep unless she cooks them up with sugar! So snob- 
 bish are we Americans about our eating, that we make the 
 best of our foods into bywords. We make jokes in our comic 
 papers about the "boarding-house prune" ; and yet prunes and 
 raisins are among the wholesomest foods we have, and if we 
 fed them to our children instead of cakes and candy and 
 coal-tar flarorings, our dental industry would rapidly decline. 
 
 And the same thing is true of bread. When I was a boy, 
 I thought I had to have hot bread at least twice a day, and 
 if I were called upon to eat bread that was more than a day 
 old, I felt that I was being badly abused by life. I used 
 to read fairy stories, in which something called "black bread" 
 was mentioned, something obscure and terrible ; the symbol of
 
 128 MIND AND BODY 
 
 human misery was Cinderella sitting in the ashes and eating 
 a crust of dry "black bread." But now since I have studied 
 diet, I have taken my place with Cinderella. I can afford to 
 buy whatever kind of bread I want ; I can have the best white 
 bread, piping hot, three times a day, if I want it; but what 
 I eat three times a day is a crust of hard dry "black bread." 
 
 "Black bread" is the fairy story name for bread made of 
 the whole grain. It is eaten that way by the peasant because 
 he has no patent milling machinery at his disposal, to fan 
 away the life-giving elements of his food. Nearly all the 
 mineral elements of the grain are contained in the outer, 
 dark-colored portion. The white part is almost pure starch; 
 and when you use white flour, you are not merely starving 
 your blood-stream, your bones, and your teeth, you are also 
 depriving the digestive tract of the rough material which it 
 is accustomed to handle, and which it needs to stimulate it 
 to action. I am aware that whole grain products are a trifle 
 less easy of digestion, but we should not pamper and weaken 
 our digestive tract any more than we let our muscles get 
 flabby for lack of action. We should require our stomachs 
 to handle the ordinary natural foods, precisely as we accustom 
 our body to react from cold water, and to stand honest hard 
 work. 
 
 For ages the Japanese peasants have lived on rice, with 
 a little dried fish. Quite recently there began to spread through- 
 out Japan a mysterious disease known as beri-beri. It was 
 especially prevalent in the army, and so the scientists of Japan 
 set out to discover the cause, and it proved to be the modern 
 practice of polishing rice, which takes off the outer coating of 
 the grain. Rice is one of the most wholesome of foods, if 
 it is eaten in the natural state; but in order to get it in that 
 state in this country, you have to find a special food store of 
 the health cranks, and have to pay a special price for it. You 
 have to pay a higher price for whole wheat bread because 
 ninety-nine people out of a hundred are ignorant, and insist 
 upon having their foodstuffs pretty to look at! 
 
 Probably you have read sea stories, and know of the hor- 
 rors of scurvy. Scurvy and beri-beri are similar diseases, 
 with a similar cause. The men on the old sailing ships used 
 to have to live on white biscuit and salt meat, and they always 
 knew that to recover from their gnawing illness, they must 
 get to port and get fresh vegetables and fruits, especially
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 129 
 
 onions and lemons, which contain the vitamines as well as 
 the salts. But you will see the modern housewife going into 
 the grocery store, and surveying the shelves of "package" 
 goods, and in her ignorance picking out the scurvy-making 
 products, and frequently paying for them a much higher 
 price than for the health-making ones! 
 
 Then, when she has got her white flour, and her cane 
 sugar, and her lard, she will take it home, and mix it up, and 
 put it in the frying pan, and serve it hot to her husband and 
 children. Nature has so constituted her husband and chil- 
 dren that they digest starch before they digest fat; that is to 
 say, the starch is digested mainly in the stomach, while the 
 fat is digested mainly after the food has been passed on into 
 the small intestine. But by frying the starch before it is eaten, 
 the housewife carefully takes each grain of the starch and 
 protects it with a little covering of fat. Thus the digestive 
 juices of the stomach cannot get at the starch, and the starch 
 goes down into the small intestine a good part undigested. If 
 some evil spirit, wishing to make trouble for the human or- 
 ganism, had charge of the laying out of our diet, he could 
 hardly devise anything worse than that. And yet it would 
 be no exaggeration to say that the average American, espe- 
 cially the average farmer, eats out of a frying-pan. If his 
 potatoes have to be warmed over, they go into the frying-pan ; 
 his precious batter-cakes and doughnuts are cooked in a fry- 
 ing-pan, and all his precious hot breads are mixed with lard. 
 If it were not for the fact that you cannot broil a beefsteak 
 over a modern gas range, I would tell you that the first step 
 toward health for the average American would be to throw 
 the frying-pan out of the window, and to throw the cook- 
 book after it. 
 
 The whole modern art of cooking is largely a perversion; 
 a product of idleness, vanity, and sensuality. It is one of 
 the monstrous growths consequent upon our system of class 
 exploitation. 'We have a number of idle people with nothing 
 to do but eat, and who demonstrate their superiority to the 
 rest of us by their knowledge of superior foods, and superior 
 ways of preparing them. They have the wealth of the world 
 at their disposal, also the services of their fellow man with- 
 out limit, and they set their fellow man to work to enable 
 them to give elaborate banquets, and to sit in solemn state 
 and gorge themselves, and to have a full account of their be-
 
 130 MIND AND BODY 
 
 havior published in the next morning's newspapers. A great 
 part of this perverse art we owe to what is called the "ancient 
 regime" in France a regime which starved the French peas- 
 antry until they were black skinned beasts hiding in caves 
 and hollow trees. So it comes about that our modern food 
 depravity parades itself in French names, and American snob- 
 bery requires of its devotees a course in the French language 
 sufficient to read a menu card. Needless to say, this elaborate 
 gastronomic art has been developed without any relation to 
 health, or any thought of the true needs of the body. It is 
 one of the products of the predatory system which we can 
 say is absolute waste. Having done my own cooking for the 
 past twenty-five years, I make bold to say that I can teach 
 anybody all he needs to know about cooking in one lesson of 
 half an hour, and that the total amount of cooking required 
 for a large family can be done by one person in twenty 
 minutes a day. 
 
 In the first place, a great many foods do not have to be 
 cooked at all, and are made less fit by cooking. In the next 
 place, the only cooking that is ever required is a little boil- 
 ing, or in the case of meat, roasting or broiling. In the next 
 place, the art of combining foods in cooking is a waste art, 
 because no foods should be combined in cooking. Every 
 food has its own natural flavor, which is lost in combination, 
 and if anybody is unable to enjoy the natural flavors of sim- 
 ply cooked foods, there is one thing to say to that person, 
 and that is to wait until he is hungry. Let him take a ten- 
 mile walk in the open air, and he will have more interest 
 in his next meal. I am not a fanatic, and have no desire to 
 destroy the pleasures of life; I am recommending to people 
 that they should seek the higher pleasures of the intellect, 
 and those pleasures are not found in standing over a cook 
 stove, nor in compelling others to stand over a cook stove. 
 Moreover, I know that the artificial mixing of foods to tempt 
 peoples' palates is one of the principal causes of overeating, 
 and therefore of ill health, and therefore of the ultimate 
 destruction of the pleasures of life. 
 
 I went out from the world of cooks before I was twenty. 
 I wanted to write a book, and to be let alone while I was 
 doing it. I lived by myself, and found out about cooking by 
 practical experience. On a few occasions since then, I have 
 lived in a house with a servant, and had some cooking done
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 131 
 
 for me, but it was always because somebody else wanted it, 
 and against my protest. In the last ten years we have had 
 no servant in our home, and because I want my wife to give 
 her energy to more important things than feeding me, I do 
 my share of getting every meal. We have worked out a 
 system of housekeeping by which we get a meal in five min- 
 utes, and when we finish it, it takes three minutes to clear 
 things away. 
 
 If I tell you what I eat, please do not get the impression 
 that I am advising you to eat these same things. My diet 
 consists of the foods which I have found by long experience 
 agree with me. There are many other foods which are just 
 as wholesome, but which I do not eat, either because they 
 don't happen to agree with me, or because I don't care for 
 them so much. I am fond of fruit, and eat more of that 
 than of anything else. It is not a cheap article of diet, but 
 you can save a good deal if you buy it in quantities, as I do. 
 A little later I am going to discuss the prices of foods. 
 
 For breakfast I eat a slice of whole wheat bread, three 
 good-sized apples, stewed, and eight or ten dates. It takes 
 practically no time to prepare this breakfast. The bread has 
 to be baked, of course, but this is done wholesale; we buy 
 four loaves at a time, and it is just as good at the end of 
 a couple of weeks as when we buy it. When I lived in the 
 world of cooks, I would call for apple sauce; which meant 
 that somebody had to pare apples, cut them up, stew them, 
 mix them with sugar, grate a little nutmeg over them, set 
 them on ice, and serve them to me on a glass dish, with a 
 little pitcher of cream. But now what happens is that I put 
 a dozen apples in a big sauce-pan and let them simmer while 
 I am eating. We have a rule in our family that we do 
 not do any cooking except while we are eating, because if 
 we try it at any other time of the day, we get buried in a 
 book or in a manuscript, and forget about it until the smoke 
 causes somebody in the street to summon the fire depart- 
 ment. So the apples for my breakfast were cooked during 
 last night's supper; and during the breakfast there will be 
 some vegetable cooking for lunch. 
 
 At this lunch, which is my "square meal," I eat a large 
 slice of beefsteak, say a third of a pound. Jack London 
 used to say that the only man who could cook a beefsteak 
 was the fireman of a railway locomotive, because he had a hot,
 
 132 MIND AND BODY 
 
 clean shovel. The best imitation you can get is a hot, clean 
 frying-pan; and when you are sure that it is hot, let it get 
 hotter. The whole secret of cooking meat is to keep the 
 juices inside, and to do that you must cook it quickly. When 
 you slap it down on a hot frying-pan, the meat is seared, and 
 the juices stay inside, and if you do not turn it over until it 
 is almost ready to burn, you don't need to cook it very long 
 on the other side. That is the one secret of cooking worth 
 knowing; it doesn't cost anything, and saves time instead of 
 wasting it. As I have never found anybody else capable of 
 learning it, I reserve the cooking of the beefsteak as one of 
 my family duties. 
 
 To continue the lunch, a slice of whole wheat bread, and 
 a large quantity of some fresh salad, such as celery, or let- 
 tuce and tomatoes, without dressing. For a part of this may 
 be substituted a vegetable, one or two beets or turnips, cooked 
 during a previous meal, and warmed up in a couple of 
 minutes; and we do not throw away the tops of the turnips 
 and beets and celery, we put them on and cook them, and they 
 serve for the next day's meal. If you would eat a large quan- 
 tity of such "greens" once a day, you would escape many of 
 the ills that your flesh is at present heir to. Finally, for 
 dessert, an orange and a small handful of raisins, or one or 
 two figs. 
 
 The evening meal will be the same as the breakfast ; except 
 once in a while when I am especially hungry, and want some 
 meat. I am writing in the winter season, so the fruits sug- 
 gested are those available in winter. The menu will be varied 
 with every kind of fruit at the season when it is cheapest 
 and most easily obtained. The beefsteak will appear at about 
 three meals out of four; occasionally it will be replaced by 
 the lean meat of pork or mutton, or by fish. The bread may 
 be replaced by rice, or boiled potatoes, either white or sweet, 
 and occasionally by graham crackers. I know that these 
 contain a little fat and sugar, but I try not to be fanatical 
 about my diet, and the rules I suggest do not carry the death 
 penalty. There was a time when I used to allow my friends 
 to make themselves miserable by trying to provide me with 
 special foods when they invited me to a meal, but now I 
 tell them to "forget it," and I politely nibble a little of every- 
 thing, and eat most of what I find wholesome; if there is 
 nothing wholesome, I content myself with the pretense of a
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 133 
 
 meal. If I find myself in a restaurant, I quite shamelessly 
 get a piece of apple or pumpkin pie, omitting most of the 
 crust. As I don't go away from home more than once or 
 twice a month, I do not have to worry about such indulgence. 
 The main thing is to arrange one's home diet on sound lines, 
 and learn to enjoy the simple and wholesome foods, of which 
 there is a great variety obtainable, and at prices possible to 
 all but the wretchedly poor. 
 
 In conclusion, since everybody likes to have a feast now 
 and then, I specify that my diet regimen allows for holidays. 
 Assuming that I am your guest for a day, and that you wish 
 to "blow" me, regardless of expense, here will be the menu. 
 Breakfast, some graham crackers, a bunch of raisins, a can of 
 sliced pineapple in winter, or a big chunk of watermelon in 
 summer. Dinner, or lunch, roast pork, a baked apple, a 
 baked sweet potato and some spinach. Supper, lettuce, dates, 
 and a dish of popcorn flavored with peanut butter. Try this 
 next Christmas! 
 
 P. S. After this book had been put into type, I chanced 
 to be looking over Herbert Quick's illuminating book, "On 
 Board the Good Ship Earth." Discussing the importance of 
 certain organic salts to the body, Dr. Quick states : "Animals 
 have been fed, as an experiment, on foods deficient in phos- 
 phorus. For a while they seemed to do well. Then they 
 collapsed. It takes only three months of a ration without 
 phosphorus to wreck an animal. Individual creatures were 
 killed after a month of this diet, and it was found that the 
 flesh was taking the phosphate for the phosphorus exists in 
 the body in that form from the bones to supply its need. In 
 other words, the body was eating its own bones! When this 
 process had robbed the bones to the limit, the collapse came, 
 and the animal could never recover."
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 DIET STANDARDS 
 
 (Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities 
 we need, and their money cost.) 
 
 I think there is no more important single question about 
 health than the question of how much food we should eat. 
 It is one about which there is a great deal of controversy, even 
 among the best authorities. We shall try here for a common- 
 sense solution. At the outset we have to remind ourselves 
 of the distinction we tried to draw between nature and man. 
 To what extent can civilized man rely upon his instincts to 
 keep him in perfect health? 
 
 Let us begin by considering the animals. How is their 
 diet problem solved? Horses and cattle in a wild state are 
 adjusted to certain foods which they find in nature, and so 
 long as they can find it, they have no diet problem. Man 
 comes, and takes these animals and domesticates them; he 
 observes their habits, and gives to them a diet closely ap- 
 proaching the natural one, and they get along fairly well. But 
 suppose the man, with his superior skill in agriculture, taking 
 wild grain and planting it, reaping and threshing it by machin- 
 ery, puts before his horse an unlimited quantity of a con- 
 centrated food such as oats, which the horse can never get 
 in a natural state will that horse's instincts guide it? Not 
 at all. Any horse will kill itself by overeating on grain. 
 
 I have read somewhere a clever saying, that a farm is 
 a good place for an author to live, provided he can be per- 
 suaded not to farm it. But once upon a time I had not 
 heard that wise remark, and I owned and tried to run a farm. 
 I had two beautiful cows of which I was very proud, and one 
 morning I woke up and discovered that the cows had got 
 into the pear orchard and had been feeding on pears all night. 
 In a few hours they both lay with bloated stomachs, dying. 
 A farmer told me afterwards that I might have saved their 
 lives, if I had stuck a knife into their stomachs to let out 
 the gas. I do not know whether this is true or not. But 
 my two dead cows afford a perfect illustration of the reason 
 
 134
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 135 
 
 why civilized man cannot rely upon his instincts and his 
 appetites to tell him when he has had enough to eat. He can 
 only do this, provided he rigidly restricts himself to the foods 
 which he ate in the days when his teeth and stomach and 
 bowels were being shaped by the process of natural selection. 
 If he is going to eat any other than such strictly natural 
 foods, he will need to apply his reason to his diet schedule. 
 
 In a state of nature man has to hunt his food, and the 
 amount that he finds is generally limited, and requires a lot 
 of exercise to get. Explorers in Africa give us a picture of 
 man's life in the savage state, guided by his instincts and very 
 little interfered with by reason. The savages will starve for 
 long periods, then they will succeed in killing a hippopotamus 
 or a buffalo, and they will gorge themselves, and nearly all 
 of them will be ill, and several of them will die. So you see, 
 even in a state of nature, and with natural foods, restraint 
 is needed, and reason and moral sense have a part to play. 
 
 What do reason and moral sense have to tell us about 
 diet? Our bodily processes go on continuously, and we need 
 at regular intervals a certain quantity of a number of different 
 foods. The most elementary experiment will convince us that 
 we can get along, maintain our body weight and our work- 
 ing efficiency upon a much smaller quantity of food than 
 we naturally crave. Civilized custom puts before us a great 
 variety of delicate and appetizing foods, upon which we are 
 disposed to overeat; and we are slow observers indeed if we 
 do not note the connection between this overeating and ill 
 health. So we are forced to the conclusion that if we wish 
 to stay well, we need to establish a censorship over our habits ; 
 we need a different diet regimen from the haphazard one 
 which has been established for us by a combination of our 
 instincts with the perversions of civilization. 
 
 Up to a few years ago, it was commonly taken for granted 
 by authorities on diet that what the average man actually 
 eats must be the normal thing for him to eat. Governments 
 which were employing men in armies, and at road building, 
 and had to feed them and keep them in health, made large 
 scale observations as to what the men ate, and thus were 
 established the old fashioned "diet standards." They are ex- 
 pressed in calories, which is a heat unit representing the 
 quantity of fuel required to heat a certain small quantity of 
 water a certain number of degrees. In order that you may
 
 136 MIND AND BODY 
 
 know what I am talking about, I will give a rough idea of 
 the quantity of the more common foods which it takes to 
 make 100 calories: one medium sized slice of bread, a piece 
 of lean cooked steak the size of two fingers, one large apple, 
 three medium tablespoonfuls of cooked rice or potatoes, one 
 large banana, a tablespoonful of raisins, five dates, one large 
 fig, a teaspoonful of sugar, a ball of butter the size of your 
 thumbnail, a very large head of lettuce, three medium sized 
 tomatoes, two-thirds of a glass of milk, a tablespoonful of oil. 
 You observe, if you compare these various items, how little 
 guidance concerning food is given by its bulk. You may eat 
 a whole head of lettuce, weighing nearly a pound, and get no 
 more food value than from a half ounce of olive oil which 
 you pour over it. You may eat enough lean beefsteak to 
 cover your plate, and you will not have eaten so much as a 
 generous helping of butter. A big bowl of strawberries will 
 not count half so much as the cream and sugar you put over 
 them. So you may realize that when you eat olive oil, butter, 
 cream, and sugar, you are in the same danger as the horse 
 eating oats, or as my two cows in the pear orchard; and if 
 some day a surgeon has to come and stick a knife into you, 
 it may be for the same reason. 
 
 The old-fashioned diet standards are as follows : Swedish 
 laborers at hard work, over 4,700 calories ; Russian workmen 
 at moderate work, German soldiers in active service, Italian 
 laborers at moderate work, between 3,500 and 3,700 calories; 
 English weavers, nearly 3,500 calories; Austrian farm labor- 
 ers, over 5,000 calories. Some twenty years ago the United 
 States government made observations of over 15,000 persons, 
 and established the following, known as the "Atwater stand- 
 ards" : men at very hard muscular work, 5,500 calories ; men 
 at moderately active muscular work, 3,400 calories; men at 
 light to moderate muscular work, 3,050 calories; men at 
 sedentary, or women at moderately active work, 2,700 calories. 
 
 In the last ten or .fifteen years there has arisen a new 
 school of dietetic experts, headed by Professors Chittenden 
 and Fisher of Yale University. Professor Chittenden has 
 published an elaborate book, "The Nutrition of Man," in which 
 he tells of long-continued experiment upon a squad of soldiers 
 and a group of athletes at Yale University, also upon average 
 students and professors. He has proved conclusively that all 
 these various groups have been able to maintain full body
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 137 
 
 weight and full working efficiency upon less than half the 
 quantity of protein food hitherto specified, and upon any- 
 where from one-half to two-thirds the calory value set forth 
 in the former standards. 
 
 When I first read this book, I set to work to try its 
 theories upon myself. During the five or six months that I 
 lived on raw food, I took the trouble to weigh everything that 
 I ate, and to keep a record. It is, of course, very easy to 
 weigh raw foods exactly, and I found that I lived an active 
 life and kept physical health upon slightly less than 2,500 
 calories a day. I have set this as my standard, and have 
 accustomed myself to follow it instinctively, and without 
 wasting any thought upon it. Sometimes I fall from grace; 
 for I still crave the delightful cakes and candies and ice 
 cream upon which I was brought up. I always pay the pen- 
 alty, and know that I will not get back to my former state 
 of health until I skip a meal or two, and give my system a 
 chance to clean house. The average man will find the regi- 
 men set forth in this book austere and awe-inspiring; I do 
 not wish to pose as a paragon of virtue, so perhaps I should 
 quote a sarcastic girl cousin, who remarked when I was a boy 
 that the way to my heart was with a bag of ginger-snaps. I 
 live in the presence of candy stores and never think of their 
 existence, but if someone brings candy into the house and 
 puts it in front of me, I have to waste a lot of moral energy 
 in letting it alone. A few years ago I had a young man as 
 secretary who discovered this failing of mine, and used to 
 afford himself immense glee by buying a box of chocolates 
 and leaving it on top of my desk. I would give him back the 
 box with some of the chocolates missing but he would per- 
 sist in "forgetting it" on my desk; he would hide and laugh 
 hilariously behind the door, until my wife discovered his 
 nefarious doings, and warned me of them. 
 
 Professor Chittenden states quite simply the common sense 
 procedure in the matter of food quantity. Find out by prac- 
 tical experiment what is the very least food upon which you 
 can do your work without losing weight. That is the correct 
 quantity for you, and if you are eating more, you certainly 
 cannot be doing your body any good, and all the evidence 
 indicates that you are doing it harm. You need not have 
 the least fear in making this experiment that you will starve 
 yourself. Later on, in a chapter on fasting, I shall prove to
 
 138 MIND AND BODY 
 
 you that you carry around with you in your body sufficient 
 reserve of food to keep you alive for eighty or ninety days; 
 and if you draw on a small quantity of this you do not do 
 yourself the slightest harm. Cut down the amount of your 
 food; eat the bulky foods, which contain less calory value, 
 and weigh yourself every day, and you will be surprised to 
 discover how much less you need to eat than you have been 
 accustomed to. 
 
 One of the things you will find out is that your stomach 
 is easily fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a 
 meal consisting of a moderate quantity of lean meat, a very 
 little bread, a heaping dish of turnip greens, and a big slice 
 of watermelon, you will feel fully satisfied, yet you will not 
 have taken in one-third the calory value that you would at an 
 ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and dessert. The 
 bulky kind of food is that for which your system was adapted 
 in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large 
 stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you 
 had lived on refined and concentrated foods such as butter, 
 sugar, olive oil, cheese and eggs. You have a long intestinal 
 tract, adapted to slowly digesting foods, and to the work of 
 extracting nutrition from a mass of roughage. You have a 
 very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian 
 scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the 
 problems of health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous 
 stage of evolution, and a source of much disease. The best 
 thing you can do with that lower bowel is to give it lots of 
 hay, as it requires ; in other words, to eat the salads and greens 
 which contain cellulose material. This contains no food value, 
 and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and stimulates 
 it to activity. 
 
 If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, 
 it may not be digested, and in that case it will fill your sys- 
 tem with poisons. Second, it may be assimilated, but not 
 burned up by the body. In that case it has to be thrown out 
 by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and this puts upon these 
 organs an extra strain, to which in the long run they may 
 be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up 
 as fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to 
 tide you over the times when food was scarce. If you were 
 a bear, you would naturally want to eat all you could, and be 
 as fat as possible in November, so that you might be able
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 139 
 
 to hunt your prey when you came out from your winter's 
 sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to 
 eat your regular meals all winter; you have established a 
 system of civilization which makes you certain of your food, 
 and the place where you keep your surplus is in the bank, or 
 sewed up in the mattress, or hidden in your stocking. In 
 other words, a civilized man saves money, and the habit of 
 storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is a sur- 
 vival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health. 
 Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra 
 weight around with him, but his body has to keep it and tend 
 it; and what are the effects of this is fully shown by life 
 insurance tables. People who are five or ten per cent over 
 weight have five or ten per cent more chance of dying all 
 the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under 
 weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of 
 life expectation. There is no answer to these figures, which 
 are the result of the tabulation of many hundreds of thou- 
 sands of cases. The meaning of them to the fat person is to 
 put himself on a diet of lean meat, green vegetables and 
 fresh fruits, until he has brought himself down, not merely 
 to the normal fatness of the civilized man, but to the normal 
 leanness of the athlete, the soldier on campaign, and the 
 student who has more important things to think about than 
 stuffing his stomach. 
 
 There is, of course, a certain kind of leanness which is 
 the result of ill health. There are wasting diseases; tuber- 
 culosis, for example, and anemia. There are people who 
 worry themselves thin, and there are a few rare "spiritual" 
 people, so-called, who fade away from lack of sufficient in- 
 terest in their bodies. That is not the kind of leanness that 
 I mean, but the active, wiry leanness, which sometimes lives 
 a hundred years. Nearly always you will find that such people 
 are spare eaters; and you will find that our ideal of rosy 
 plumpness, both for adults and children, is a wholly false 
 notion. We once had in our home as servant an Irish girl, 
 who was what is popularly called "a picture of health," with 
 those beautiful flaming cheeks that Irish and English women 
 so often have. She was in her early twenties, and nobody 
 who knew her had any idea but that her health was perfect. 
 But one morning she was discovered in bed with one side 
 paralyzed, and in a couple of weeks she was dead with ery-
 
 140 MIND AND BODY 
 
 sipelas. The color in her cheeks had been nothing but dis- 
 eased blood vessels, overloaded with food material ; and with 
 the blood in that condition, one of the tiny vessels in the brain 
 had become clogged. 
 
 In the same way I have seen children, two or three years 
 old, plump and rosy, and considered to be everything that 
 children should be; but pneumonia would hit them, and in 
 two or three days they would be at death's door. I do not 
 mean that children should be kept hungry; on the contrary, 
 they should have four or five meals a day, so that they do 
 not have a chance to become too hungry. But at those meals 
 they should eat in great part the bulky foods, which contain 
 the natural salts needed for building the body. If a child 
 asks for food, you may give it an apple, or you may give it 
 a slice of bread and butter with sugar on it. The child will 
 be equally well content in either case; but it is for you, with 
 your knowledge of food values, to realize that the bread with 
 butter and sugar contains two or three times as much nutri- 
 ment as the apple, but contains practically none of the pre- 
 cious organic salts which will make the child's bones and 
 teeth. 
 
 So far I have discussed this subject as if all foods grew 
 on bushes outside your kitchen door, and all you had to do 
 was to go and pick off what you wanted. But as a matter 
 of fact, foods cost money, and under our present system of 
 wage slavery, the amount of money the average person can 
 spend for food is strictly limited. In a later book I am going to 
 discuss the problem of poverty, its causes and remedies. All 
 that I can do here is to tell you what foods you ought to 
 have, and if society does not pay you enough for your work 
 to enable you to buy such foods, you may know that society 
 is starving you, and you may get busy to demand your rights 
 as human beings. Meantime, however, such money as you 
 do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of 
 you spend it very unwisely indeed. 
 
 In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most 
 wholesome foods are cheap often because people do not know- 
 enough to value them. We insist upon having the choice 
 cuts of meats, because they are more tender to the teeth, 
 but the cheaper cuts are exactly as nutritious. We insist upon 
 having our meats loaded with fat, although fatness is an 
 abnormal condition in an animal, and excess of fat is a
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 
 
 grave error in diet. I live in a country where jack rabbits 
 are a pest, and in the market they sell for perhaps one- 
 fourth the cost of beef, and yet I can hardly ever get them, 
 because people value them so little as food; they prefer the 
 meat of a hog which has been wallowing in a filthy pen, and 
 has been deliberately made so fat that it could hardly walk! 
 
 I have already spoken of prunes, a much despised and 
 invaluable food. All the dried fruits are rich in food values, 
 and if we could get them untreated by chemicals, they would 
 be worth their cost. I was brought up to despise the cheaper 
 vegetables, such as cabbage and turnips ; I never tasted boiled 
 cabbage until I was forty, and then to my great surprise 
 I made the discovery that it is good. Raw cabbage is as 
 valuable as any other salad; it is a trifle harder to digest 
 for some people, but I do not believe in pampering the 
 stomach. Both potatoes and rice are cheap and wholesome, 
 if only we would get unpolished rice, and if we would 
 leave the skins on the potatoes until after they are cooked. 
 Nearly all the mineral salts of the potato are just under the 
 outer skin, and are removed by the foolish habit of peeling 
 them. 
 
 The prices of food differ so widely at different seasons 
 and in different parts of the world, that there is not much 
 profit in trying to figure how cheaply a person can live. I 
 have found that I spend for the diet I have indicated here, 
 from sixty to eighty cents a day. I do not buy any fancy 
 foods, but on the other hand, I do not especially try to 
 economize ; I buy what I want of the simple everyday foods 
 in their season. Most everyone will find that it is a good 
 business proposition to buy the foods which he needs to keep 
 in health. If the average workingman would add up the money 
 he spends, not merely in the restaurants, but in the candy 
 stores, the drug stores, the tobacco stores, and the offices 
 of doctors and dentists, he would find, I think, that he could 
 afford to buy himself the necessary quantity of wholesome 
 natural foods. For a family of three, in the place where I 
 live, enough of these foods can be purchased for a dollar 
 a day, and this is about one-fourth what common labor is 
 being paid, and one-eighth of what skilled labor is being paid. 
 I will specify the foods: a pound and a half of shoulder 
 steak, a loaf of whole wheat bread or a box of shredded 
 \vheat biscuit, a head of cabbage, a pound of prunes, and 
 four or five pounds of apples.
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 There are many ways of saving in the purchase of food 
 if you put your mind upon it. If you are buying prunes, 
 you may pay as high as fifty cents or a dollar a pound for the 
 big ones, and they are not a bit better than the tiny ones, 
 which you can buy for as low as eight cents a pound in bulk. 
 When bread is stale, the bakers sell it for half price, despite 
 the fact that only then has it become fit to eat. If you buy 
 canned peaches, you will pay a fancy price for them, and 
 they will be heavy with cane sugar; but if you inquire, you 
 find what are known as "pie peaches," put up in gallon tins 
 without sugar, and at about half the price. The butcher 
 will sell you what he calls "hamburg steak" at a very low 
 price, and if you let him prepare it out of your sight, he will 
 fill it with fat and gristle; but let him make some while you 
 watch, and then you have a very good food. One of my 
 diet rules is that I do not trust the capitalist system to fix 
 me up any kind of mixed or ground or prepared foods. I 
 have not eaten sausage since I saw it made in Chicago. 
 
 Also there is something to know about the cooking of 
 foods, since it is possible to take perfectly good foods and 
 spoil them by bad cooking. Once upon a time our family 
 discovered a fireless cooker, and thought that was a wonder- 
 ful invention for an absent-minded author and a wife who 
 is given to revising manuscripts. But recent investigations 
 which have been made into the nature of the "vitamines," 
 food ferments which are only partly understood, suggest that 
 prolonged cooking of food may be a great mistake. The 
 starch has to be cooked in order to break the cell walls by the 
 expansion of the material inside. Twenty minutes will be 
 enough in the case of everything except beans, which need 
 to be cooked four or five hours. Meat should be eaten rare, 
 except in the case of pork, which harbors a parasite danger- 
 ous to the human body; therefore pork should always be 
 thoroughly cooked. The white of eggs is made less digestible 
 by boiling hard or frying. Eggs should never be allowed to 
 boil ; put them on in cold water, and take them off as soon 
 as the water begins to boil. It is not necessary to cook either 
 fresh fruit or dried. The dried fruits may be soaked and 
 eaten raw, but I find that several fruits, especially apples and 
 pears, do not agree with me well if they are eaten raw, so 
 I stew them for fifteen or twenty minutes. I have no ob- 
 iection to canned fruits and vegetables, provided one takes
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 
 
 the trouble in opening them to make sure there is no sign of 
 spoiling. If you put up your own fruits, do not put in any 
 sugar. All you have to do is to let them boil for a few 
 minutes, and to seal them tightly while they are boiling hot. 
 The whole secret of preserving is to exclude the air with its 
 bacteria. 
 
 If you live on a farm, you will have no trouble in fol- 
 lowing the diet here outlined, for you can produce for your- 
 selves all the foods that I have recommended; only do not 
 make the mistake of shipping out your best foods, and taking 
 back the products of a factory, just because you have read 
 lying advertisements about them. Take your own wheat and 
 oats and corn to the mill, and have it ground whole, and make 
 your own breads and cereals. Try the experiment of mix- 
 ing whole corn meal with water and a little salt, and baking 
 it into hard, crisp "corn dodgers." I do not eat these but 
 only because I cannot buy them, and have no time to make 
 them. 
 
 Another common article of food which I do not recom- 
 mend is salted and smoked meats. I do not pretend to know 
 the effects of large quantities of salt and saltpetre and wood 
 smoke upon the human system, but I know that Dr. Wiley's 
 "poison squad" proved definitely that a number of these in- 
 organic minerals are injurious to health, and I prefer to take 
 fresh meat when I can get it. I use a moderate quantity of 
 common salt on meat and potatoes, because there seems to 
 be a natural craving for this. I know that many health en- 
 thusiasts insist that I am thus putting a strain on my kidneys, 
 but I will wait until these health enthusiasts make clear to 
 me why deer and cattle and horses in a wild state will travel 
 many miles to a salt-lick. I have learned that it is easy to 
 make plausible statements about health, but not so easy to 
 prove them. For example, I was told that it is injurious 
 to drink water at meals, and for years I religiously avoided 
 the habit; but it occurred to some college professor to find 
 out if this was really true, and he carried on a series of 
 experiments which proved that the stomach works better 
 when its contents are diluted. The only point about drink- 
 ing at meals is that you should not use the liquid to wash 
 down your food without chewing it. 
 
 I can suggest two other ways by which you may save 
 money on food. One is by not eating too much, and another
 
 144 MIND AND BODY 
 
 is by eating all that you buy. The amount of food that is 
 wasted by the people of America would feed the people of 
 any European nation. The amount of food that is thrown 
 out from any one of our big American leisure class hotels 
 would feed the children of a European town. I think it may 
 fairly be described as a crime to throw into the garbage pail 
 food which might nourish human life. In our family we 
 have no garbage pail. What little waste there is, we burn 
 in the stove, and my wife turns it into roses. It consists of 
 the fat which we cannot help getting at the butcher's, and 
 the bones of meat, and the skins of some fruits and vege- 
 tables. It would never enter into our minds to throw out a 
 particle of bread, or meat, or other wholesome food. If we 
 have something that we fear may spoil, we do not throw it 
 out, but put it into a saucepan and cook it for a few minutes. 
 If you will make the same rule in your home, you will stop 
 at least that much of the waste of American life ; and as to 
 the big leisure class hotels, and the banquet tables of the 
 rich just wait a few years, and I think the social revolu- 
 tion will attend to them!
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 FOODS AND POISONS 
 
 (Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon 
 the system of stimulants and narcotics.) 
 
 A few years ago there died an old gentleman who had 
 devoted some twenty years of his life to teaching people 
 to chew their food. Horace Fletcher was his name, and his 
 ideas became a fad, and some people carried them to comical 
 extremes. But Fletcher made a real discovery ; what he called 
 ''the food filter." This is the automatic action of the swal- 
 lowing apparatus, whereby nature selects the food which 
 has been sufficiently prepared for digestion. If you chew a 
 mouthful of food without ever performing the act of swal- 
 lowing, you will find that the food gradually disappears. 
 What happens is that all of it which has been reduced to a 
 thin paste will slip unnoticed down your throat, and you may 
 go on putting more food into your mouth, and chewing, and 
 can eat a whole meal without ever performing the act of 
 swallowing. Fletcher claimed that this is the proper way to 
 eat, and that you can train yourself to follow this method. 
 I have tried his idea and adopted it. One of my diet rules, 
 to which there is no exception, is that if I haven't the time 
 to chew my food properly, I haven't the time to eat; I skip 
 that meal. 
 
 The habit of bolting food is a source of disease. To be 
 sure, the carnivorous animals bolt their food, but they are 
 tougher than we are, and do not carry the burden of a 
 large brain and a complex nervous system. If you swallow 
 your meals half chewed, and wash them down with liquids, 
 you may get away with it for a while, but some day you will 
 pay for it with dyspepsia and nervous troubles. And the 
 same thing applies to your habit of jumping up from meals 
 and rushing away to work, whether it be work of the muscles, 
 or of brain and nerves. Proper digestion requires the pres- 
 ence of a quantity of blood in the walls of the stomach and 
 digestive tract. It requires the attention of your subcon- 
 scious mind, and this means rest of muscles and brain centers. 
 
 145
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 If you cannot rest for an hour after meals, omit that meal, 
 or make it a light one, of fruit juices, which are almost im- 
 mediately absorbed by the stomach, and of salads, which do 
 not ferment. You may rest assured that it will not hurt you 
 to skip a meal, and make up for it when you have time to 
 be quiet. I have been many times in my life under very 
 intense and long continued nervous strain; for example, dur- 
 ing the Colorado coal strike, I led a public demonstration 
 which kept me in a state of excitement all the day and a 
 good part of the night several weeks. During this period 
 I ate almost nothing; a baked apple and a cup of custard 
 would be as near as I would go to a meal, and as a result 
 I came through the experience without any injury whatever 
 to my health. I lost perhaps ten pounds in weight, but that 
 was quickly made up when I settled back to a normal way 
 of life. 
 
 I have been on camping trips when I had a great deal 
 of hard work to do, carrying a canoe long distances on my 
 back, or paddling it forty miles a day. On the mornings 
 of such a trip I have seen a guide cook himself an elaborate 
 breakfast of freshly baked bread, bacon, and even beans, 
 and make a hearty meal and then go straight to work. My 
 meal, on the contrary, would consist of a small dish of stewed 
 prunes, or perhaps some huckleberries or raspberries, if they 
 could be found. I will not say that I could do as much as 
 the guide, because he was used to it, and I was not. But I 
 can say this if I had eaten his breakfast at the start of 
 the day, I would have been dead before night ; and I mean the 
 word "dead" quite literally. I know a man who started to 
 climb Whiteface mountain in the Adirondacks. He climbed 
 half way, and then ate lunch, which consisted of nine hard 
 boiled eggs. Then he started to climb the rest of the moun- 
 tain, and dropped dead of acute indigestion. 
 
 There are few poisons which can affect the system more 
 quickly, or more dangerously, than a mass of food which is 
 not digested. The stomach is an ideal forcing-house for 
 the breeding of bacteria. It provides warmth and moisture, 
 and you, in your meal, provide the bacteria and the material 
 upon which they thrive. Under normal conditions, the stom- 
 ach pours out a gastric juice which kills the bacteria ; but let 
 this gastric juice for any reason be lacking because your 
 nervous energy has gone somewhere else, or because your
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 147 
 
 blood-stream, from which the gastric juice must be made, 
 has been drawn away to the muscles by hard labor; then you 
 have a yeast-pot, with great quantities of gases and poisons. 
 In acute cases the results are evident enough: violent pains 
 and convulsions, followed by coma and the turning black of 
 the body. But what you should understand is that you may 
 produce a milder case of such poisoning, and may do it day 
 after day habitually, and little by little your vital organs 
 will be weakened by the strain. 
 
 It does not make any difference at what hour of the 
 twenty-four you take the great bulk of your food. It is 
 one of the commonest delusions that you get some strength- 
 ening effect from your food immediately, and must have this 
 strength in order to do hard work. To be sure, there are 
 substances, such as grape-sugar, which require practically no 
 digesting; you can hold them in the mouth, and they will be 
 digested by the saliva, and absorbed at once into the blood- 
 stream. But unless you have been starved for a long period 
 you do not need to get your strength in this rush fashion. 
 If you ate your normal meals on the previous day, your 
 blood-stream is fully supplied with nutriment which has been 
 put through a long process of preparation, and you can get 
 up in the morning and work all day, if necessary, upon what 
 is already in your system. To be sure, you may feel hungry, 
 and even faint, but that is merely a matter of habit ; your 
 system is accustomed to taking food and expects it. But if 
 you are a laborer doing hard work, you can easily train your- 
 self to eat a light meal in the morning, and another light 
 meal at noon, and to eat a hearty meal when your work is 
 done and you can rest. Two light meals and a hearty meal 
 are all that any system needs, and you can prove it to your- 
 self by trying it, and watching your weight once a week. 
 
 I have tried many experiments, and the conclusion to which 
 I have come is that there is no virtue in any particular meal- 
 hours or any particular nuniber of meals. For several years 
 I tried the experiment of two meals a day. I was living 
 a retired life, and had little contact with the world, and I 
 would make a hearty meal at ten o'clock in the morning, and 
 another at five in the afternoon. But later on I found that 
 inconvenient, and now I take a light breakfast, and two mod- 
 erate-sized meals at the conventional hours of lunch and 
 dinner. I can arrange my own time, so after meal times is 
 11
 
 148 MIND AND BODY 
 
 when I get my reading done. Sometimes, when I am tired, 
 I feel sleepy after meals, but I have learned not to yield to 
 this impulse. I do not know how to explain this; I have 
 observed that animals sleep after eating, and it appears - to 
 be a natural thing to do; but I know that if I go to sleep 
 after a meal, nature makes clear to me that I have made a 
 mistake, and I do not repeat it. I never eat at night, and 
 always go to bed on an empty stomach, so I am always hungry 
 when I open my eyes in the morning. I never know what it 
 is not to be hungry at meal times, and my habits are so 
 regular that I could set my watch by my stomach. 
 
 Another common habit which is harmful is eating be- 
 tween meals. I have known people who are accustomed to 
 nibble at food nearly all the time. Shelley records that he 
 tried it as an experiment, thinking it might be a convenient 
 way to get digestion done but he found that it did not work. 
 The stomach is apparently meant to work in pulses; to do 
 a job of digesting, and then to rest and accumulate the juices 
 for another job. It will accustom itself to a certain regime, 
 and will work accordingly, but if, w T hen it has half digested 
 a load of food, you pile more food in on top, you make as 
 much trouble as you would make in your kitchen if you 
 required your cook to prepare another meal before she has 
 cleaned up after the last one. Three times a day is enough 
 for any adult to eat. Children require to eat oftener, be- 
 cause their bodies are more active, and they not merely have 
 to keep up weight, but to add to it. The simplest way to 
 arrange matters with children is to give them three good 
 meals at the hours when adults eat, and then to give them a 
 couple of pieces of fruit between breakfast and lunch, and 
 again between lunch and supper. I have never seen a child 
 who would not be satisfied with this, when once the habit 
 was established. 
 
 I have already spoken of the cooking and serving of food. 
 I consider that the "gastronomic art," as it is pompously 
 called, is ninety-nine per cent plain rubbish. To be sure, if 
 foods are appetizingly prepared, and look good and smell 
 good and taste good, they will cause the gastric juices to flow 
 abundantly, as the Russian scientist Pavlov has demonstrated 
 by practical experiment with the stomach-pump. But I know 
 without any stomach-pump that the best thing to make my 
 gastric juices flow is hard work and a spare diet. When I
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 149 
 
 come home from five sets of tennis, and have a cold shower 
 and a rub-down, my gastric juices will flow for a piece of 
 cold beefsteak and a cold sweet potato, quite as well as for 
 anything that is served by a leisure class "chef." Needless 
 to say, I want food to be fresh, and I want it to be clean, 
 but I have other things to do with my time and money than 
 to pamper my appetites and encourage food whims. 
 
 If you have a grandmother, or ever had one, you know 
 what grandmothers tell you about "hot nourishing food" ; but 
 I have tried the experiment, and satisfied myself that there 
 is absolutely no difference in nourishing qualities between hot 
 food and cold food. If you chew your food sufficiently, it will 
 all be ninety-eight and six-tenths degree food when it gets 
 to your stomach, and that is the way your stomach wants it. 
 Of course, if you have been out in a blizzard, and are chilled, 
 and want to restore the body temperature, a hot drink wijl 
 be one of the quickest ways, and if the emergency is extreme, 
 you may even add a stimulant. On the other hand, if you 
 are suffering from heat, it is sensible to cool your body by 
 a cold drink. But you should use as much judgment with 
 yourself as you would with a horse, which you do not permit 
 to drink a lot of cold water when he is heated up, and is 
 going into his stall to stand still. 
 
 I have mentioned the word "stimulants," and this opens 
 a large subject. There are drugs which affect the body in 
 two different ways : some excite the nerves, and through the 
 nerves the heart and blood-stream, to more intense activity; 
 others have the effect of deadening the nerves, and dulling 
 the sense of exhaustion and pain. One of these groups is 
 called stimulants, and the other is called narcotics; but as a 
 matter of fact the stimulants are really narcotics, because they 
 operate by dulling the nerves whose function it is to prevent 
 the over-accumulation of fatigue poisons ; in other words, 
 they keep the nerves and muscles from knowing that they 
 are tired, and so they go on working. 
 
 It is possible, of course, to conceive of an emergency in 
 which that is necessary. Once upon a time, on a hunting trip, 
 I had been traveling all day, and was caught in a rain storm, 
 and exhausted and chilled to the bone; I had to make camp 
 without a fire, so when I got the tent up I wrapped myself 
 in blankets and drank a couple of tablespoons full of whiskey. 
 That is the only time I have ever taken whiskey in my life,
 
 150 MIND AND BODY 
 
 and k warmed me almost instantly, and did me no harm. In 
 the same way there were two or three occasions when I was 
 on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and could not sleep, 
 and let the doctor give me a sleeping powder. But in each 
 case I knew that I was fooling with a dangerous habit, and 
 I did no more fooling than necessary. No one should make 
 use of either stimulants or narcotics except in extreme emer- 
 gency, and never but a few times in a lifetime. What you 
 should do is to change your habits so that you will not need 
 to over-strain. 
 
 All these drugs are habit forming; that is to say, they 
 leave the body no better, and with a craving for a repetition 
 of the relief. When you are tired, it is because your muscles 
 and nerves are storing up fatigue poisons more rapidly than 
 your blood-stream can get rid of them. You need to know 
 about this condition, and exhaustion and pain are nature's 
 protective warning. If you put a stop to the warning, you 
 are as unintelligent as the Eastern despots who used to cut 
 off the head of the messenger who brought bad tidings. If, 
 when you have a headache, you go into a drug store and let 
 the druggist mix you one of those white fizzy drinks, what 
 you are doing is not to get rid of the poisons in your blood- 
 stream, but merely to reduce the action of your heart, so 
 as to keep the blood from pressing so fast into the aching 
 blood vessels and nerves. You may try that trick with your 
 heart a number of times, but sooner or later you will try it 
 once too often your heart will stop a little bit quicker than 
 you meant it to! 
 
 Drugs are poisons, and their action depends upon their 
 poisoning some particular portion of the body, and tempo- 
 rarily paralyzing it. And bear this in mind, they are none 
 the less poisonous because they are "natural" products. You 
 can kill yourself by cyanide of potassium, which comes out 
 of a chemist's retort; but you can kill yourself just as dead 
 with laudanum, which comes out of a plant, or with the con- 
 tents of the venom sac of a snake. You are poisoning your- 
 self none the less certainly if you use alcohol, which is made 
 from the juices of beautiful fruits, and has had hosts of 
 famous poets writing songs about it; or you can poison 
 yourself with the caffein which you get in a lovely brown 
 bean which comes from Brazil, fragrant to the nostrils and 
 delicious to the taste. You may drink wine and tea and coffee
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 151 
 
 for a hundred years, and have your picture published in the 
 newspapers as a proof that these habits conduce to health; 
 but nothing will be said about the large number of people 
 who practiced these habits, and didn't live so long, and about 
 how long they might have lived if they hadn't practiced these 
 habits. 
 
 I was brought up in the South, and my "elders" belonged 
 to a generation which had grown up in war time. For this 
 reason many of the men both drank and smoked to excess, 
 and in my boyhood I lived among them and watched them, 
 and with the help of advice from a wise mother, I conceived 
 a horror of every kind of stimulant. The alcoholic poets 
 could not fool me; I had been in the alcoholic wards of the 
 hospitals. I had seen one man after another, beautiful and 
 kindly and gracious men, dragged down into a pit of tor- 
 ment and shame. 
 
 Alcohol is, I think, the greatest trap that nature ever set 
 for the feet of the human race. It is responsible for more 
 degradation and misery than any other evil in the world ; 
 and I say this, knowing well that my Socialist friends will 
 cry, "What about Capitalism?" My answer is that I doubt 
 if there ever would have been any Capitalism in the world, 
 if it had not been for alcohol. If the workers had not been 
 systematically poisoned, and all their savings taken from 
 them by the gin-mill, they would never have submitted to 
 the capitalist system, they would have built the co-operative 
 commonwealth at the time they were building the first fac- 
 tories. I listen to the arguments of my radical friends about 
 "personal liberty," but I note that in Russia, when it was a 
 question of making a practical revolution and keeping it alive, 
 the first thing the leaders did was to drag out the contents 
 of the wine-cellars of the palaces, and smash them in the 
 gutters. 
 
 Tea and coffee are, of course, much milder in their effects 
 than alcohol ; you can play with them longer, and the punish- 
 ment will be less severe. But if you make habitual use of 
 them, you will pay the penalty which all drugs exact from 
 the system. Your brain and your nerve centers will be less 
 sensitive, less capable of working except under the influence 
 of drugs; their reacting power will be dulled, and they will 
 wear out more quickly. I have watched the slaves of the 
 "morning cup of coffee," and know how they suffer when
 
 152 MIND AND BODY 
 
 they do not get it. Likewise, I have watched the tea drinkers. 
 It is comical to live in England, and see all the able-bodied 
 men obliged to leave their work at four o'clock in the after- 
 noon, and seek the regular stimulus for their tired nerves. 
 If you are to meet anybody, it is always for "tea" that the 
 ceremony is set, and if you refuse to drink tea, your hostess 
 will be uncomfortable, unable to talk about anything but the 
 strange, incredible notion that one can live without tea. I 
 discovered after a while the solution of this problem; I 
 would say that I preferred a little hot water, if you please, 
 and so my hostess would pour me a cup of hot water, and I 
 would sit and gravely sip it, and everybody would be per- 
 fectly content: I was conforming to the outward appearance 
 of normality, which is what the British conventions require. 
 
 I have never drunk a cup of coffee, so I do not know 
 what its effect on me would be. But some fifteen years ago 
 I drank a glass of very weak iced tea at eight o'clock in the 
 evening, and did not get to sleep until four or five the next 
 morning. So I know that there is really a drug in tea. I 
 know also that I might accustom my system to it, just as I 
 might learn to poison my lungs with nicotine without being 
 made immediately and suddenly ill; but why should I wish 
 to do this? Life is so interesting to me that I do not need 
 to stimulate my brain centers in order to appreciate the thrill 
 of it. And when I am tired, I can rest myself by listening 
 to music, or by reading a worth-while novel things which I 
 have found do not leave the after effects of nicotine. 
 
 I remember the first time I met Jack London. Our meet- 
 ing consisted in good part of his "kidding" me, because I 
 was lacking in the congenial vices of the cafe. He told me 
 how much I had missed, because I had never been drunk; 
 one ought to try the great adventure, at least once! Poor 
 Jack is gone, because his kidneys gave out at forty; and 
 nothing could seem more ungracious than to point out that 
 I am still alive, and finding life enjoyable. Yet, in this 
 book we are trying to find out how to live, and if there are 
 habits which wreck and destroy a magnificent physique, and 
 bring a great genius to death at the age of forty surely the 
 rest of us want to know about it, and to be warned in time. 
 I mention Jack London in this connection, because he has 
 said the last word on the subject of alcohol. Read "John 
 Barleycorn," and especially read between the lines of it,
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 153 
 
 and you will not need my argument to persuade you to be 
 glad that the Eighteenth Amendment has been written into 
 the Constitution, and that it is your duty as a Socialist, not 
 merely to obey it, but to vote for its enforcement. 
 
 I am proceeding on the assumption that your life is of 
 importance to you ; that you have a job to do which you know 
 to be worth while, and to which you desire to apply your 
 powers. You agree with me that the workers of the world 
 are suffering, and that k is necessary for them to find their 
 freedom, and that this takes hard work and hard thinking. 
 You may say that I exaggerate the amount of harm that is 
 done to the system by tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. 
 Well, let us assume that in moderate quantities they do no 
 harm at all: even so, I have the right to ask you to show 
 that they do some good ; otherwise, surely, it is a mistake for 
 the workers to spend their savings upon them. 
 
 Consider, for example, the amount of money which the 
 wage slaves of the world spend upon tobacco. Suppose they 
 could be persuaded for two or three years to spend this 
 amount upon good reading matter do you not think there 
 would be an improvement in their condition? Surely you 
 cannot maintain that the use of tobacco is necessary to the 
 activities of the brain ! Surely you do not think that a man 
 has to have a cigarette in order to stimulate his thoughts, or 
 to smoke a pipe to rest himself after his work is done! I 
 offer myself as evidence in such a controversy; I have writ- 
 ten as many books as any man in the radical movement, and 
 the sum total of my lifetime smoking amounts to one-half 
 of one cigarette. I tried that when I was eight years old, and 
 somebody told me a policeman would arrest me if he caught 
 me, and I threw away the cigarette, and ran and hid in an 
 alley, and have not yet got over my scare. 
 
 In the "Journal for Industrial Hygiene" for October, 1920, 
 is an article entitled "Fatigue and Efficiency of Smokers in a 
 Strenuous Mental Occupation." Experiments were conducted 
 among telegraph operators, and the result showed that "the 
 heavy smokers of the group show a higher output rate at 
 the beginning of the day than the light smokers, but their 
 rate falls off more markedly in the late hours, and their 
 production for the whole day is definitely less than that of 
 the light smokers. The heavy smokers also show less ability 
 than the light smokers to respond to increasing pressure of
 
 154 MIND AND BODY 
 
 work in the late hours of the day by handling their full share 
 of the work presented." 
 
 One point upon which every medical authority agrees is 
 that the use of nicotine is of deadly effect upon the immature 
 organism. Half-grown youths who smoke cigarettes will 
 never be full-sized men ; they will never have normal lungs 
 or a normal heart. And likewise, all authorities agree about 
 the effect of smoking upon the organism of women. I gave 
 what little help I could to the task of helping to set women free, 
 and to make them the equals of men ; but I was always pained 
 when I discovered that some of my feminist friends understood 
 by woman's emancipation no more than her right to adopt men's 
 vices. I would say to these ardent young female radicals, who 
 cultivate the art of dangling a cigarette from their lower lip, 
 and sip cocktails put of coffee-cups in Greenwich Village 
 cafes, that they will never be able to bear sound children ; 
 but I know that this would not interest them they don't 
 want to bear any children at all. So I say that they will 
 never be able to think straight thoughts, and will be nervous 
 invalids when they are thirty. 
 
 We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, 
 and we put several millions of our young men into armies, 
 and if there were any of them who did not already know 
 how to smoke cigarettes, they learned it under official sanc- 
 tion. So now we have a national tobacco bill that runs up 
 to two billions, and will insure us a new generation of "Class 
 C" rating. Speaking to the young radicals who are reading 
 my books, I say : We want to make the world over, to make 
 it a place of freedom and kindness, instead of the hell of 
 greed and hate that it is today. For that purpose we need 
 a new moral code, and we can never win our victory without 
 it. I have attended radical conventions, sitting in unven- 
 tilated halls amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and listening to 
 men wrangle all through the day and a great part of the 
 night ; I have watched the fatal dissensions in the movement, 
 the quarrelings of the right wingers and the left wingers and 
 all stages and degrees in between, and I have wondered 
 not jestingly, but in pitying earnest how much of all those 
 personalities and factional misunderstanding had their origin 
 in carbon dioxide and nicotine. There is no use suggesting 
 such ideas to the older men, whose habits are fixed; but a 
 new generation is coming on, with a new vision of the enor-
 
 THE BOOK or THE BODY 
 
 mous task before it; and is it too much to expect of these 
 young men and women, that they shall realize in adrance 
 the grim tasks they have to do, and shall learn to run the 
 machine of their body so as to get out of it the maximum 
 amount of service? Is it too much to hope for, that some 
 day we shall have a race of young fighters for truth and 
 justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and con- 
 secrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from 
 wage slavery and war?
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 MORE ABOUT HEALTH 
 
 (Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing, 
 bathing and sleep.) 
 
 In discussing the question of health, we have given the 
 greater part of the space to the subject of diet, for the rea- 
 son that experience has convinced us that diet is two-thirds 
 of health, and that nearly always in disease you find errors 
 of diet playing a part. There are, however, other important 
 factors of health, now to be discussed. 
 
 Everything of which the body makes use is taken in 
 the form of food and drink, with the exception of one sub- 
 stance, the oxygen we get out of the air. Every time we draw 
 a breath we take in a certain amount of oxygen, and every 
 time we expel a breath, we drive out a certain amount of a 
 gas called carbon dioxide, which is what the body makes of 
 the fuel it burns. The body can get along for several days 
 without water, and for two or three months without food, but 
 it can only get along for two or three minutes without oxygen. 
 It should be obvious that when the body expels carbon dioxide, 
 with a slight mixture of other more poisonous gases, and sucks 
 back what it expects will be a fresh supply of oxygen, it 
 wants to get oxygen, and not the same gases it has just ex- 
 pelled, nor gases which have been expelled from the lungs 
 of other people. 
 
 In the days when primitive man lived outdoors, he did 
 not have to think about this problem. When he breathed 
 poison from his lungs, the moving air of nature blew it away, 
 and the infinite vegetation of nature took the carbon dioxide 
 and turned it back into oxygen. And even when man built 
 himself shelters, he was not cunning enough to make them 
 air-tight; he had to leave a big hole for the smoke to get 
 out, and smaller holes through which to get light. But now 
 our wonderful civilization has solved these problems; we 
 make our walls of air-tight plaster, and we have invented a 
 substance which will admit light without admitting air. So 
 we have the "white plague" of tuberculosis, and so we have 
 
 156
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 157 
 
 innumerable minor plagues of coughs and colds and sore 
 throats. 
 
 In the summer time the solution of the problem is easy. 
 Have as many doors and windows in your home as possible, 
 and keep them open, and have nothing in your home to make 
 dust or to retain dust. But then comes stormy and cold 
 weather, and you have to close your doors and windows, and 
 keep your home at a higher temperature than the air outside. 
 How shall you do this, and at the same time get a continual 
 supply of fresh air? 
 
 I will take the various methods of heating one by one. 
 The problem in each case is simple and can be made clear 
 in a sentence or two. 
 
 First, the open fireplace. This is a perfect solution, if 
 you have enough fuel, and do not have to worry about the 
 waste of heat. An open fireplace draws out all the air in 
 the room in a short time, and you do not have to bother 
 about opening doors or windows; you may be sure that the 
 air is getting in through some cracks, or else the fire would 
 not burn. 
 
 Second, a wood or coal or gas stove in the room, provided 
 with a proper vent, so that all the gases of combustion are 
 drawn up the chimney. This changes the air more slowly 
 than an open fireplace, but it does the work fairly well. All 
 that you have to be careful about is that your vent is suf- 
 ficiently large and is working properly. If your fire does 
 not "draw," you will have smoke or coal-gas in the house, 
 and this is bad for the lungs; but worse for the lungs is a 
 gas that you can neither see nor smell nor taste, the deadly 
 carbon monoxide. This gas is produced by incomplete com- 
 bustion, and whenever you see yellow flames from gas or 
 coal, you are apt to have this poisonous substance. Small 
 quantities of it are sufficient to cause violent headaches, and 
 repeated doses of it are fatal. Men who work in garages 
 which are not properly ventilated run this risk all the time, 
 because carbon monoxide is one of the products of imper- 
 fect combustion in the gas engine. 
 
 Next, the furnace. A furnace sends fresh warm air into 
 your house; the only trouble is that it takes out all the 
 moisture, and some authorities say that this is bad for the 
 lungs and throat. I do not know whether this is true, but all 
 furnaces are supposed to have a water chamber to supply
 
 158 MIND AND BODY 
 
 moisture to the air, and you should keep a pan of water on 
 every stove or radiator in your house. 
 
 Next, steam heat, which includes hot-water heating. This 
 is one of the abominations of our civilization, and one of the 
 methods by which our race is committing suicide. There is 
 nothing wrong about steam heat in itself ; the room is wanned 
 in a harmless way; but the trouble is it stays warm only so 
 long as the doors and windows are kept shut. You are in 
 an air-tight box, and can be warm provided you do not mind 
 being suffocated. The moment you open a door or window, 
 you have a cold draft on your feet, and if you wish to change 
 the air entirely you have to let out all the heat ; so, of course, 
 you never do change it entirely, but go on breathing the 
 same air over and over, and every time you breathe it the 
 condition of your body is a little more reduced. 
 
 The solution of this problem is not to heat the air in the 
 room, but to use your steam coils to heat fresh air, and then 
 drive this air, already warmed, into the room, at the same time 
 providing a vent through which the old air can be pushed out. 
 This is the hot air system of heating, and it requires some kind 
 of engine or dynamo, and therefore is expensive. It has been 
 installed in a few office buildings and theaters. One of the 
 most perfect systems I ever inspected is in the building of 
 the New York Stock Exchange, where the air is warmed in 
 winter, and cooled in summer, and freed from dust, and 
 exactly the right quantity is supplied. It is a humorous com- 
 mentary upon our civilization that we take perfect care of 
 the breathing apparatus of our stock-gamblers, but pay no 
 attention to the breathing apparatus of our senators and con- 
 gressmen, whose one business in life is to use their lungs. 
 The stately old building with its white marble domes looks 
 impressive in moving pictures and on illustrated postcards, 
 but it has no system of ventilation whatever, and is a death- 
 trap to the poor wretches who are compelled to spend their 
 days, and sometimes their nights, within its walls. This con- 
 trast is one symptom of the rise of industrial capitalism and 
 the collapse of political democracy. 
 
 We have reserved to the last a method of heating which 
 is the worst, and can only be described as a crime against 
 health: the use of gas and oil stoves set out in the middle 
 of the room, without a vent, and discharging their fumes into 
 the room. These stoves are simply instruments of slow death.
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 
 
 and their manufacture should be prohibited by law. In the 
 meantime, what you have to do is to refuse to live in a 
 room or to work in an office where such stoves are used. 
 I have heard dealers insist that this or the other kind of 
 gas or oil stove was so contrived as to consume all the fumes. 
 Do not let anybody fool you with such nonsense. There has 
 never been any form of combustion devised which consumes 
 all the fumes. No such thing can be, because the products 
 of combustion are not combustible. The so-called "wickless 
 blue flame" stoves do burn all the oil, and a properly regu- 
 lated gas stove will burn all the gas, but that simply means 
 that it turns the oil and gas into carbon dioxide, the very sub- 
 stance which your lungs are working day and night to get 
 out of your body. 
 
 Moreover, there is no oil or gas stove which ever burns 
 perfectly all the time, either because there is too much gas 
 or insufficient air. Oil and gas stoves sometimes give a partly 
 yellow flame. You can cause them to give a yellow flame at 
 any time by blowing air against them, and that yellow flame 
 means imperfect combustion, and a probability of the deadly 
 carbon monoxide. These facts are known to every chemist and 
 to every student of hygiene, and the fact that civilized people 
 continue to burn such oil and gas stoves in their homes and 
 offices is simply one more proof that our civilization values 
 human welfare and health at nothing whatever in compari- 
 son with profits. 
 
 Not merely should you see that you have a continuous 
 supply of fresh air in your home, but you should try to keep 
 down dust in your home, and especially fine particles of lint. 
 Once upon a time our ancestors were unable to make houses 
 and floors tight, and so they put rugs on the floors and hung 
 tapestries on the walls to keep out the wind. We civilized 
 people are able to make both floors and walls absolutely tight, 
 and yet we continue to use rugs and curtains, it being the 
 first principle of our education that propriety requires us to 
 continue to do the things which our ancestors did. I am 
 unable to think of a more silly or stupid thing in the world 
 than a rug or a curtain, but I have lived in the house with 
 them all my life, because, alas, the ladies cannot be happy 
 otherwise. They want their homes to be "pretty," and so 
 they continue to set dust traps, and to set themselves futile 
 jobs of house cleaning and shopping.
 
 160 MIND AND BODY 
 
 Not all of us are able to be out of doors as much as we ought 
 to be, but all of us spend seven or eight hours out of every 
 twenty-four in sleep, and this time at least we ought to spend 
 out of doors. I understand that this is futile advice to give 
 to the very poor. I was poor myself for many years, and had 
 to put all my clothes on at night in order to keep warm, and 
 even then I could not always do it. Nevertheless, from the 
 time I first realized the importance of ventilation I never slept 
 in a room with a closed window. 
 
 I say, sleep outdoors if you possibly can. You do not 
 have to be afraid of exposure, for cold will not hurt you if 
 you keep your body in proper condition. I have slept out 
 in a rubber blanket, with the rain beating on my head and 
 face; I have spread a rubber blanket on a hummock in the 
 midst of a swamp, and waked up in the morning with my 
 hair and face soaked in cold, white fog, but I never caught 
 cold from such things; there is no harm whatever in damp- 
 ness or in "night air," if you are in proper condition. Of 
 course, you may get your ears frostbitten in the middle of 
 winter, but you can have a sleeping hood to remove that 
 danger. 
 
 The "nature cure" enthusiasts, who lay so much stress 
 upon an outdoor life, also insist that the wearing of clothes 
 is a harmful civilized custom. They urge us to take "sun 
 baths" and to "ventilate the skin." Now, as a matter of fact, 
 the skin does not breathe, it merely gives out moisture, and 
 it does not give out any less because we have clothing on us, 
 provided the clothing is dry and clean, and will absorb moist- 
 ure. But bye and bye the clothing becomes loaded with the 
 waste substances given out by the skin, and then it will 
 absorb no more, and if you do not change your clothing, no 
 doubt it may have some effect upon health. 
 
 But the principal evil of civilized clothing is that it binds 
 the body and prevents the free play of the muscles, and, 
 more important yet, stops the free circulation of the blood. I 
 have already discussed hats, which are the principal cause 
 of baldness. I will go to the other extremity of the body, and 
 mention tight shoes, which, strange as it may seem, cause 
 headaches and colds. You will be able to find a few civilized 
 men with normal feet, but you will hardly ever find a woman 
 whose toes are not crowded together and misshapen. I have 
 said that the human body is one organism, and that it is fed
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 161 
 
 and its health maintained by the blood-stream; I say now 
 that the circulation of the blood is one thing, and if you block 
 it at any one place, you block it everywhere. Of course, not 
 all the blood-stream goes down into the feet, but some of 
 it does, and if it is clogged in the feet, and the blood vessels 
 cramped and crowded, there is a certain amount of poison 
 kept in the system, which the system should have got rid of. 
 
 Why do women wear tight shoes? Because the leisure 
 class members of their sex have been kept in harems and 
 used as the playthings of men. To be fragile and delicate 
 was the thing admired by the masters of wealth, and to have 
 small hands and feet was a sign that women belonged to this 
 parasite class. Therefore at all hazards women's feet must 
 be kept small, even at the expense of their health and happi- 
 ness ; and so they put themselves up on several inches of 
 heels, which cause them to toddle around like marionettes on 
 a stage, with all their toes crowded down into a lump. 
 
 Why do men wear tight bands around their scalps, which 
 cause their hair to drop out, and tight, stiff columns around 
 their necks, which stop the circulation of the blood into their 
 heads, and cause them to have headaches instead of ideas? 
 The reason is that for ages the rulers of the tribe have wished 
 to demonstrate publicly their superiority to the common herd, 
 which does the menial tasks. In England all gentlemen 
 wear tall black silk band-boxes on their heads, and in America 
 they have a choice among several varieties of round tight 
 boxes. All men who work in offices wear stiffly starched 
 collars and cuffs, as a means of demonstrating their supe- 
 riority to the common workers, who have to sweat at their 
 necks. I think it is not top much to hope that when class 
 exploitation is done away with, we shall also get rid of these 
 class symbols, and choose our clothing because it is warm and 
 comfortable, and not according to the perverted imbecilities of 
 "style." 
 
 The skin gives out perspiration which is greasy; also the 
 skin is constantly growing, putting out layers of cells which 
 dry up and are worn off. We need to bathe with soap to 
 remove the grease, and we need to rub with a towel to brush 
 away the dead cells of the skin, so that the pores may be 
 kept open. No one is taking care of his body who does not 
 wash and rub it once every twenty-four hours, and once or 
 twice a week with warm water and soap. It is often stated
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 that hot baths are weakening, but I have never found it so; 
 however, I think it is a bad practice to pamper the body, 
 which should be accustomed to the shock of cold water. The 
 rule as to bathing, both as to temperature and time, is simple. 
 If, after the bath and rub-down, your body has reacted and 
 you feel vigorous and fresh, that bath has done you good. 
 If, on the other hand, you feel chilled and depressed, then 
 you have been too long in the water, or its temperature was 
 too low. Every person has to find his own rules in such 
 matters. The only general rule is that as one grows older 
 the body reacts less quickly. 
 
 All day, as we work and think, we store up more poisons 
 in our cells than the body can get rid of, and the time comes 
 when the cells are so loaded with poisons that we have to 
 stop for a while, and let our blood-stream clean house. The 
 quantity of sleep one needs is a problem like that of cold 
 water ; each person has to find his own rule. In general, one 
 needs less and less sleep as one grows older. Infants sleep 
 the greater part of the time; growing children should sleep 
 ten or eleven hours, adults seven or eight, and old people, 
 unless they have let themselves get fat, generally do not want 
 to sleep more than six, and part of this in short naps. When 
 you sleep, your bodily energies relax, and you make less heat, 
 therefore you need extra clothing; but this clothing should 
 never cover the mouth and nose, nor should it be so heavy 
 as to make breathing a burden. If you are in good condition, 
 it will do you no harm to be chilly when you sleep, except 
 that you do not sleep so soundly. Sleeping too much is just 
 as harmful as sleeping too little. Nature will tell you that. 
 The important thing, as in all other problems of health, is to 
 have something interesting to think about, some exciting work 
 to do in the world, and then you will sleep as little as you 
 have too.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 WORK AND PLAY 
 
 (Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and 
 the overworked.) 
 
 In discussing the important question of exercise, there is 
 one fundamental fact to begin with: that our present civili- 
 zation divides men sharply into two classes, those who do 
 not get enough exercise, and those who get too much. 
 Obviously it would be folly to make the same recommenda- 
 tions to the two classes. 
 
 I begin with those who get too much exercise. They 
 include a great number, probably the majority of those who 
 do the manual work of the world. They include the farmers 
 and the farm-hands, who work from dawn to sunset, and 
 sometimes by lantern light. They include also the farmers' 
 wives, the kitchen slaves of whom the old couplet tells: 
 
 "Man's work ends from sun to sun, 
 But woman's work is never done." 
 
 I am aware that men have worked that way for count- 
 less ages, and yet the race is still surviving; but I am aware 
 also that men wither up with rheumatism, and contract chronic 
 diseases of the kidneys and the blood vessels, consequent upon 
 the creation of greater quantities of fatigue poisons than the 
 body can regularly eliminate. 
 
 I have very little interest in the past, and none whatever 
 in finding fault with it. My purpose is to criticize the present 
 for the benefit of the future, and therefore I say that modern 
 machinery and the whole development of modern large-scale 
 production make it absolutely unnecessary that women should 
 slave all their waking hours in kitchens, or that men should 
 slave all day. I say it is monstrous folly that men should 
 work for twelve-hour stretches in steel mills, and for ten and 
 eleven hours in factories and mines. Organized labor has 
 adopted the slogan, "Eight hours for work, eight hoars for 
 sleep, eight hours for play"; but my slogan is "Four hours 
 for work, four hours for study, eight hours for sleep, and eight 
 hours for play." 
 
 163
 
 164 MIND AND BODY 
 
 I know, and am prepared to demonstrate to any think- 
 ing man, that modern civilization can produce, not merely all 
 the necessities, but all the comforts of life for every man, 
 woman and child in the community, by the expenditure of 
 four hours a day work of the adult, able-bodied men and 
 women. So to all the wage slaves of the factories and mines, 
 the fields and the kitchens, I say that too much exercise is 
 what is the matter with you, and what you need is to get off in a 
 quiet nook in the woods and read a good novel, not merely for a 
 few hours, but for a few months, until you get over the 
 effects of capitalist civilization. I know that not many of 
 you can get away as yet, but I urge you to insist upon getting 
 away, to fight for the chance to get away; and I will here 
 suggest a few of the novels for you to read when finally you 
 do get away. I choose the easy ones, which the dullest and 
 most tired of you will love; I say, make up your mind to 
 read these thirty-two books before you die, and do not let 
 the world cheat you out of your chance! 
 
 Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's 
 Court. Charles D. Stewart: The Fugitive Blacksmith. W. 
 Clark Russell : The Wreck of the Grosvenor. R. L. Steven- 
 son: Treasure Island, Kidnapped. Jack London: The Sea 
 Wolf, The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden. Joseph Conrad: 
 Youth. H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds, When the 
 Sleeper Wakes, The Sea Lady, The History of Mr. Polly, 
 The Food of the Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Upton 
 Sinclair: The Jungle, King Coal, Jimmie Higgins, 100 Per 
 Cent. Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie. George Moore: 
 Esther Waters. Frank Norris: The Octopus. Brand Whit- 
 lock: The Turn of the Balance. De Foe: Robinson Crusoe. 
 Fielding: Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild the Great. Thackeray: 
 The Adventures of Barry Lyndon. Marmaduke Pickthall: 
 The Adventures of Hadji Baba. Blasco Ibanez: The Fruit 
 of the Vine. Frank Harris: Montes the Matador. Frederik 
 van Eeden: The Quest. Tolstoi: Resurrection. 
 
 And now for the people who do not get enough exercise. 
 In the armies of King Cyrus it was the law that every man 
 was required to sweat once every twenty-four hours, and that 
 is still the law for every business man and office-worker and 
 writer of books. There is no substitute for it, and there is 
 no health without it. I have heard Dr. Kellogg say that the 
 modern woman sends out her health with her washing, and
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 165 
 
 I have heard the leisure class ladies at the Sanitarium dis- 
 cuss this cryptic utterance and wonder what he meant by it. 
 I know that there is use telling leisure class ladies what ex- 
 ercise at the wash-tub would do for their abdomens and backs. 
 I will only tell them that unless they can find some kind of 
 vigorous activity which keeps them in a free perspiration for 
 an hour or two each day, they will never be really well, and 
 will never bear children without agony and abortion. 
 
 For myself, I have found that the minimum is three or 
 lour times a week. Unless I get that much hard exercise I 
 am soon in trouble. So my advice to the business man is to 
 take off his coat and collar and turn out and help his truck- 
 man; my advice to the white collar slave is to get a part- 
 time job, and dig ditches the rest of the time. To the man 
 who has cares which pursue him, and likewise to the ardent 
 student and brain-worker, I say that they should find, not 
 merely exercise, but play. The distinction between the two 
 things is important. There can be play that is not exercise, 
 for example cards and chess; and, of course, there can be 
 exercise that is not play. What you must have is something 
 that is both play and exercise; something that not merely 
 causes your heart to beat fast, and your lungs to pump fast, 
 and your sweat glands to throw out poisons from your body, 
 but something that fully occupies your mind and gives your 
 higher brain centers a chance to relax. 
 
 Our civilization has very largely destroyed the possibility 
 of play and the spirit of play. We civilized people no longer 
 know what play is, and regard the desire to play as something 
 abnormal a form of vice. We allow children to play after 
 school hours, and on Saturdays; but for grown-up, serious- 
 minded men and women to want to play would be almost as 
 disreputable as for them to want to get drunk. What could 
 be more pitiful than the spectacle of tens of thousands of men 
 crowding into our baseball parks and amusement fields to 
 watch other men play for them! Imagine, if you can, a 
 crowd of people gathering in a restaurant or theater to watch 
 other people eat for them! Imagine yourself a man from 
 Mars, coming down to a world with so many people in want, 
 and finding whole classes of men forbidden to do any work, 
 under penalty of disgrace, and compelled, in order to exercise 
 their muscles, to pull on rubber straps and lift weights and 
 wave dumb-bells and Indian clubs in the air methods of ex-
 
 166 MIND AND BODY 
 
 pending their muscular energy which are respectable because 
 they accomplish nothing! 
 
 When I was a boy, I was fond of all kinds of games. 1 
 was a good tennis player, and in the country an incessant 
 hunter and fisherman. When on the city streets we boys could 
 not find any other game to play, we would get up on the roofs 
 of the houses and throw clothes-pins and snow-balls at the 
 "Dagoes" working in the nearby excavations; so we had the 
 fine game of being chased by the "Dagoes," with the chance, 
 real or imaginary, of having a knife stuck into us. But then, 
 as I grew older, and became aware of the pain and misery 
 of the world, I lost my interest in games, and for ten years 
 or so I never played; I did nothing but study and write. So 
 my health gave way, and I had the problem of restoring it, 
 and I spent some twenty years wrestling with this problem, 
 before I thoroughly convinced myself on the point that there 
 can be no such thing as sound and permanent health without 
 a certain amount of play. 
 
 I don't think there is any kind of hard physical work I 
 failed to try, in the course of my experiments. I rode horse- 
 back, and took long walks, and climbed mountains, and swam, 
 and dug gardens, and chopped down whole groves of trees 
 and cut them up and carried them to the fireplace. I have 
 done this latter work for a whole winter in the country, sev- 
 eral hours every day, and it has done my health no good to 
 speak of ; I have been ready for a breakdown at the end of 
 it. The reason is that all the time I was doing these things 
 with my body, I was going right on working my brain. While 
 I was swimming or climbing a mountain or galloping on horse- 
 back, I was absorbed in the next chapter of the book I was 
 writing, so that I literally did not know where I was. I would 
 make up my mind that I would not think about my work, 
 and would make desperate efforts not to do so; but it was 
 like walking along the edge of a slippery ditch sooner or later 
 I was bound to fall in, and go floundering along, unable to 
 get out again ! 
 
 And the same thing applies to all gymnastic work. I have 
 experimented with a dozen different systems of exercises, and 
 with all kinds of water treatments; I have used dumb-bells 
 and Indian clubs and Swedish gymnastics, MacFadden's ex- 
 ercises in bed, and the Yogi breathing exercises, and more 
 Jcinds of queer things than I can remember now ; but for me
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 167 
 
 there is only one solution of the problem, which is to have 
 an antagonist. It may be a deer I am trying to shoot, or 
 some trout I am trying to lure out of their holes; it may be 
 some boys I am trying to beat at football or hockey, or it may 
 be the game I know best and find most convenient, which is 
 tennis. If it is tennis, then it has to be someone who can 
 make me work as hard as I know how; for if it is someone 
 I can beat easily, why, before I have been playing ten min- 
 utes, I am busily working out the next chapter of a book, 
 or answering letters I have just got in the mail. 
 
 Recently I came upon a book, "The Psychology of Relax- 
 ation," by Dr. Patrick, in which the theory of this is set forth. 
 Civilized man is working his higher brain centers more than 
 his body can stand; his brain is running away with him, ab- 
 sorbing a constantly increasing share of his energies. True 
 relaxation is only possible where the higher brain centers are 
 lulled, and the back lobes of the brain brought into activity. 
 One of the means of doing this is alcohol, and that is why 
 through the ages all races of men have craved to get drunk. 
 There is a method which is harmless, and does not break 
 down the system, and that is play. When we become really 
 interested in play, we are as children, or as primitive man; 
 we do all the things that our race used to do many ages ago ; 
 we hunt and fight, we pit our wits against the wits of our 
 enemies, and struggle with desperation to get the better of 
 them. If our play is physical play, if we are absorbed in a 
 game or bodily contest, then we are exerting and developing 
 all those portions of us which civilization tends to atrophy 
 and deaden. 
 
 There are people who will dispute with you about Social- 
 ism, and ask, how we are going to provide incentives if we 
 do away with wage slavery. When you tell them that activity 
 is natural to human beings, and that if there were no work, 
 men and women would have to make some, they shake their 
 heads mournfully and tell you about the problem of "human 
 nature." But consider games and sports: men do not have 
 to work their bodies, yet they go out and deliberately hunt 
 for trouble! They invent themselves subtle and complicated 
 games, and are not content until they find people who can 
 beat them at it, or at any rate can make them work to the 
 limit of their strength, until they are in a dripping perspira- 
 tion and thoroughly exhausted ! I may be too optimistic about
 
 168 MIND AND BODY 
 
 "human nature," but I believe that this is the attitude every 
 normal human being takes toward the powers, both mental 
 and physical, which he possesses; he wants to use them, and 
 for all they are worth. If you don't believe it, just take any 
 group of youngsters, give them a baseball and bat, turn them 
 loose in a vacant lot, and watch them "choose up sides" and 
 fall to work, screaming and shouting in wild excitement! 
 There are some races of the earth which do not yet know 
 baseball, but the Filipinos and the Japanese have learned it, 
 and even the war-worn "Poilus" and the supercilious "Tom- 
 mies" condescended to experiment with it. And if you think 
 it is only physical competition that young human animals en- 
 joy, try them at putting on a play, or printing a magazine, or 
 conducting a debate, or building a house anything whatever 
 that involves healthy competition, and is related to the big 
 things of life, but without being for the profit of some ex- 
 ploiter! Get clear the plain and simple distinction between 
 work and play: play is what you want to do, while work is 
 what the profit system makes you do!
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 THE FASTING CURE 
 
 (Deals with nature's own remedy for disease, and how to make 
 use of it.) 
 
 We have next to consider the various human ailments, 
 what causes them, and how they can be remedied. As it 
 happens, I know of a cure that comes pretty near being 
 that impossible thing, a "cure-all." At any rate, it is so far 
 ahead of all other cures, that a discussion of it will cover 
 three-fourths of the subject. 
 
 When I was a boy living in New York, there was a man 
 by the name of Dr. Tanner, who took a forty-day fast. He 
 was on public exhibition at the time, and was supposed to be 
 watched day and night; the newspapers gave a great deal 
 of attention to the story, and crowds used to come to gaze at 
 him. I remember very well the conversations I heard about 
 the matter. People were quite sure that it couldn't be true. 
 The man must be getting something to eat on the sly; he 
 must have some nourishment in the water he drank ; no human 
 being could fast more than five or six days without starving 
 to death. 
 
 In the year 1910 I published in the United States and 
 England a magazine article telling how on several occasions 
 I had fasted ten or twelve days, and what I had accomplished 
 by it. I found that I had the same difficulty to confront as 
 old Dr. Tanner; I received scores of letters from people who 
 called me a "faker," and I read scores of newspaper editorials 
 to the same effect. The New York Times published a dispatch 
 about three young ladies on Long Island who were trying 
 a three-day fast, and the Times commented editorially to the 
 effect that these young ladies were "the victims of a shallow 
 and unscrupulous sensationalist." 
 
 The notion that human beings can perish for lack of food 
 in a few days is deeply rooted in people's minds. Recently 
 a group of eleven Irishmen in jail set to work to starve them- 
 selves to death, as a protest against British rule in their 
 country. Day after day the newspapers reported the news 
 
 169
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 from Cork prison, and at about the twentieth day they began 
 to state that the prisoners were dying, that the priest had 
 been sent for, that their relatives were gathered on the prison 
 steps. Day after day such reports continued, through the 
 thirties, and the forties, and the fifties, and the sixties, and 
 the seventies. One man died on the eighty-eighth day, and 
 MacSwiney died on the seventy-fourth. The other nine gave 
 up after ninety-four days and were all restored to health. I 
 watched carefully the newspaper and magazine comment on 
 this incident, yet I did not see a single remark on the med- 
 ical aspects of it; I could not discover that scientific men had 
 learned anything whatever about the ability of the body to 
 go without food for long periods. 
 
 Get this clear at the outset: Nobody ever "starved to 
 death" in less than two months, and it is possible for a fat 
 person to go without food for as long as three or four months. 
 People who "starve to death" in shorter times do not die of 
 starvation, but of fright. The first time I fasted happened 
 to be at the time of the Messina earthquake. I was walking 
 about, perfectly serene and happy, having been without food 
 for three days, and I read in my newspaper how the rescue 
 ships had reached Messina, and found the population raven- 
 ous, in the agonies of starvation, some of the people having 
 been without food for seventy-two hours! (It sounds so 
 much worse, you see, when you state it in hours.) 
 
 The second point to get clear is that the fast is a physio- 
 logical process; that is to say, it is something which nature 
 understands and carries through in her own serene and efficient 
 way. When you take a fast, you are not carrying out a freak 
 notion of your own, or of mine; you are discovering a lost 
 instinct. Every cat and dog knows enough not to take food 
 when it is ill; it is only in hospitals conducted by modern 
 medical science that the custom prevails of serving elaborate 
 "trays" to invalids. I remember a story about a man who 
 made himself a reputation and a fortune by curing the pet 
 dogs of the rich. These beautiful little creatures, which sleep 
 between silken covers, and have several servants to wait upon 
 them, and are fed from gold and silver dishes upon rich and 
 elaborately cooked foods, fall victim to as many diseases as 
 their mistresses, and they would be brought to this specialist, 
 who conducted his dog hospital in an old brickyard. In each 
 one of the compartments of the brick kiln he would shut up
 
 171 
 
 a dog with a supply of fresh water, a crust of stale bread, 
 a piece of bacon rind, and the sole of an old shoe; and after 
 a few days he would go back and find that the dog had eaten 
 the crust of bread, and then he would write to the owner 
 that the dog was on the high road to recovery. He would 
 go back a few days later and find that the dog had eaten 
 the piece of bacon rind, and then he would write that the 
 dog was very nearly cured. He would wait until the dog 
 had eaten the piece of shoe leather, and then he would write 
 that the dog was completely cured, and the owner might come 
 and take it away. 
 
 Just what is the process of the fast cure? I do not pre- 
 tend to know positively. I can only make guesses, and wait 
 for science to investigate. I believe that the main source of 
 the diseases of civilized man is improper nutrition, and the 
 clogging of the system with food poisons in various stages. 
 And when you fast you do two things : first, you stop entirely 
 the fresh supply of those food poisons, and second, you allow 
 the whole of the body's digestive and assimilative tract to 
 rest to go to sleep, as it were so that all the body's energy 
 may go to other organs. The body carries with it at all 
 times a surplus store of nutriment, which can be taken up 
 and used by the blood stream, apparently with much less 
 trouble than is required to convert fresh food to the body's 
 uses. In other words, the body can feed on its own tissues 
 more easily than it can feed from the stomach. In the fast you 
 may lose anywhere from half a pound to two pounds in weight 
 per day, and this will be taken, first from your store of fat, and 
 then from your muscular tissues. Every part of your muscular 
 tissue will be taken, before anything is taken from your vital 
 organs, your nerves or your blood-stream. So long as there is 
 a particle of muscular material left, so long as you can make 
 even the slightest movement of one finger, you are still fasting, 
 and it is only when your muscular tissue is all gone that you 
 begin at last to starve. So far as I know, the cases of Mac- 
 Swiney and the other Irishman are the only cases on record 
 where fasters have died of starvation. 
 
 What the body does during the fast is quite plain, and 
 can be told by many symptoms. It begins a thorough house- 
 cleaning, throwing out poisonous material by every channel. 
 The perspiration and the breath become offensive, the tongue 
 becomes heavily coated, so that you can scrape the material
 
 172 MIND AND BODY 
 
 off with a knife. I have heard vegetarians explain this by 
 saying that when the body is living off its own tissues, it is 
 following a cannibal diet; but that is all nonsense, because 
 you can live on meat exclusively, and quickly satisfy yourself 
 that none of these symptoms occurs. It is evident that the 
 body is taking advantage of the opportunity to get rid of waste 
 products; and this will go on for ten days, for twenty days, 
 in some cases for as long as forty or fifty days ; and then 
 suddenly occurs a strange thing: in spite of the "cannibal 
 diet" the symptoms all come to a sudden end. The tongue 
 clears, the breath becomes sweet, the appetite suddenly 
 awakens. 
 
 During the period of a normal fast you lose all interest in 
 food. You almost forget that there is such a thing as eating ; 
 you can look at food without any more desire for it than you 
 have to swallow marbles and carpet tacks. But then suddenly 
 appetite returns, as I have explained, and you find that you 
 can think of nothing but food. This is what students of the 
 subject describe as a "complete fast," and while I do not want 
 to go to extremes and say that the "complete fast" will cure 
 every case of every disease, I can certainly say this: in the 
 letters which have come to me from people who tried the fast 
 at my suggestion, there are cases of every kind of common 
 disease. In my book, "The Fasting Cure," I give the results 
 in cases reported to me after the publication of my first mag- 
 azine article. I quote two paragraphs: 
 
 "The total number of fasts taken was 277, and the average 
 number of days was six. There were 90 of five days or over, 
 51 of ten days or over, and six of 30 days or over. Out of 
 the 119 person who wrote to me, 100 reported benefit, and 
 17 no benefit. Of these 17 about half give wrong breaking 
 of the fast as the reason for the failure. In cases where 
 the cure had not proved permanent, about half mentioned 
 that the recurrence of the trouble was caused by wrong eat- 
 ing, and about half of the rest made this quite evident by 
 what they said. Also it is to be noted that in the cases of 
 the 17 who got no benefit, nearly all were fasts of only three 
 or four days. 
 
 "Following is the complete list of diseases benefited -45 
 of the cases having been diagnosed by physicians : indigestion 
 (usually associated with nervousness), 27; rheumatism, 5; 
 colds, 8 ; tuberculosis, 4 ; constipation, 14 ; poor circulation, 3 ;
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 173 
 
 headaches, 5 ; anaemia, 3 ; scrofula, 1 ; bronchial trouble, 5 ; 
 syphilis, 1 ; liver trouble, 5 ; general debility, 5 ; chills and 
 fever, 1 ; blood poisoning, 1 ; ulcerated leg, 1 ; neurasthenia, 6 ; 
 locomotor ataxia, 1 ; sciatica, 1 ; asthma, 2 ; excess of uric 
 acid, 1 ; epilepsy, 1 ; pleurisy, 1 ; impaction of bowels, 1 ; 
 (eczema, 2; catarrh, 6; appendicitis, 3; valvular disease of 
 heart, 1 ; insomnia, 1 ; gas poisoning, 1 ; grippe, 1 ; cancer, 1." 
 
 There are many diseases with many causes, and some 
 yield more quickly than others to the fast. In the first group 
 I put the diseases of the digestive and alimentary tract. 
 Stomach and bowel troubles, and the nervous disorders oc- 
 casioned by these, stop almost immediately when you fast. 
 Next come disorders of the blood-stream, which are gen- 
 erally a second stage of digestive troubles. Everything im- 
 mediately due to impurities of the blood, pimples, boils, and 
 ulcers, inflammation, badly healing wounds, etc., respond to 
 a few days of fasting as to the magic touch of the old-time 
 legends. When it comes to diseases caused by germ infec- 
 tions, you have a double aspect of the problem, and must have 
 a double method of attack. I would not like to say that 
 fasting could cure such a disease as sleeping sickness, to the 
 germs of which our systems are not accustomed, and against 
 which they may well be helpless. On the other hand, in 
 the case of common infections, such as colds and sore throats, 
 the fast is again the touch of magic. Having been plagued 
 a great deal by these ailments in past times, I am accustomed 
 to say that I would not trade my knowledge of fasting for 
 everything else that I know about health. 
 
 The first thing you must do if you want to take a fast is 
 to read the literature on the subject and make up your mind 
 that the experiment will do you no injury. You should also 
 try to get your relatives to make up their minds, because 
 you are nervous when you are fasting, and cannot withstand 
 the attacks of the people around you, who will go into a 
 panic and throw you into a panic. As I said before, it is 
 quite possible for people to die of panic, but I do not be- 
 lieve that anybody ever died of a fast. I have known of 
 two or three cases of people dying while they were fasting, 
 but I feel quite certain that the fast did not cause their death ; 
 they would have died anyhow. You must bear in mind that 
 among the people who try the fast, a great many are in a 
 desperate condition ; some have been given up by the doctors,
 
 174 MIND AND BODY 
 
 and if now and then one of these should die, we may surely 
 say that they died in spite of the fast, and not because of it. 
 There is no physician who can save every patient, and it 
 would be absurd to expect this. I have read scores of letters 
 from people who were at the point of death from such "fatal" 
 diseases as Bright's disease, sclerosis of the liver, and fatty 
 degeneration of the heart, and were literally snatched out of 
 the jaws of death by beginning a fast. I would not like to 
 guess just what percentage of dying people in our hospitals 
 might be saved if the doctors would withdraw all food from 
 them, but I await with interest the time when medical science 
 will have the intelligence to try that simple experiment and 
 report the results. 
 
 Just the other day in the Los Angeles county jail, a 
 chiropractor went on hunger strike, as a protest against im- 
 prisonment, and he fasted 41 days, Then he broke his fast, 
 the reason being given that his pulse was down to 54, and he 
 was afraid of dying. I smiled to myself. The normal pulse 
 is 70. I have taken my pulse many times at the end of a 
 ten-day fast, and it has been as low as 32, and I am not 
 dead yet, and if I wait to die from the symptoms of a fast, 
 I expect to live a long time indeed! 
 
 The first time I fasted, I felt very weak, and lay around 
 and hardly cared to lift my head; if I walked from my bed 
 to the lawn, I was tired in the legs. But since then I have 
 grown used to fasting. I have fasted for a week probably 
 twenty or thirty times, and on such occasions I have gone 
 about my business as if nothing were happening. Of course 
 I would not try to play tennis, or to climb a mountain, but 
 it is a fact that on the seventh day of a fast in New York, 
 I climbed the five or six flights of stairs to the top of the 
 Metropolitan Opera House, and felt no ill effects from doing 
 this. I climbed slowly, and was careful not to tire myself. 
 The simple rule is not to have anything that you must do 
 on the fast, and then do what you feel like doing. Lie down 
 and rest, and read a book, and take as much exercise as 
 you find you enjoy. Keep your mind quiet and free from 
 worries, and lock out of the house everybody who tells you 
 that your heart is going to stop beating in the next few 
 minutes, and that you must have an injection of strychnine 
 to start it, and some beefsteak and fried onions to "restore 
 your strength." Give yourself up to the care of your wiso.
 
 175 
 
 old mother nature, who will attend to your heart just as 
 securely and serenely as she attended to it in the days before 
 you were born. 
 
 By fasting I mean that you take no food whatever. I 
 know some nature cure teachers who practice what they call 
 a "fruit fast." All I know is that if I eat nothing but fruit, 
 I soon have my stomach boiling with fermentation, and also 
 I suffer with hunger; whereas, if I take a complete fast, I 
 promptly forget all about food. You must drink all the 
 water you can on the fast. This helps nature with her house- 
 cleaning; it is well to drink a glass of water every half hour 
 at least. Do not try to go without water, and then write me 
 that the fasting cure is a failure. Also please do not write 
 and ask me if it will be fasting if you take just a little crackers 
 and milk, or some soup, or something else that you think 
 doesn't count! 
 
 I recommend a dose of laxative to clean out the system 
 at the beginning of a fast, because the bowels are apt to 
 become sluggish at once, and the quicker you get the sys- 
 tem cleansed, the better. It does no good to take laxatives 
 if you are going to pile in more food, but if you are going 
 to fast, that is a different matter. You should take a full 
 warm enema every day during the fast, so long as it brings 
 any results. There are some people whose bowels are so 
 frightfully clogged that I have known the enema to bring 
 results even in the second and third weeks. On the other 
 hand, if there is no solid matter to be removed, a small 
 enema every day will suffice. Take a warm bath every day; 
 and needless to say, you should get all the fresh air you can, 
 and should sleep as much as you can. You may have dif- 
 ficulty in sleeping, because the fast is apt to make you nervous 
 and wakeful. I have known people who could not fast be- 
 cause they could not sleep, and I have taught them a little 
 trick, to put a hot water bottle at the feet, and another on 
 the abdomen, to draw the blood away from the head. So they 
 would quickly fall asleep, and they got great benefit from 
 their fasts. 
 
 You should supply yourself with good music if you can, 
 and with plenty of good reading matter. You will be amazed 
 to find how active your mind becomes; perhaps you had 
 never known before what a mind you had. Your blood has 
 always been so clogged with food poisons that you didn't
 
 176 MIND AND BODY 
 
 know you could think. My three act play, "The Nature 
 Woman," was conceived and written in two days and a half 
 on a fast; but I do not recommend this kind of thing on 
 the contrary, I strongly urge against it, because if you work 
 your brain on a fast, you do not get the good from your 
 fast, and do not recover so quickly. Put off all your problems 
 until you have got your health back, and seek only to divert 
 your mind while fasting.
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 BREAKING THE FAST 
 
 (Discusses various methods of building up the body after a 
 fast, especially the milk diet) 
 
 There remains, the question of how to break the fast, 
 and this is the most important part of the problem. You 
 may undo all the good of your fast by breaking it wrong, and 
 you are a thousand times as apt to kill yourself then, as while 
 you are fasting. When your hunger comes back, it comes 
 back with a rush, and some people have not the will power 
 to control it. 
 
 I do not advocate a complete fast in any case except of 
 serious chronic disease, and then only under the advice of 
 someone with experience; but I advocate a short fast of a 
 week or ten days for almost every common ailment, and I 
 know that such a fast will help, even where it may not com- 
 pletely cure. You may go on fasting so long as you are 
 quiet and happy; but when you find you are becoming too 
 weak for comfort, or for the peace of mind of your family 
 physician and your friends, you may break your fast, and 
 show them that it is possible to restore your strength and 
 body weight, and then they won't bother so much when you 
 try it again! Take nothing but liquid foods in the break- 
 ing of a fast; I recommend the juices of fruits and toma- 
 toes, also meat broths. If you have fasted a week or two, 
 take a quarter of a glass; if you have fasted a month, take 
 a tablespoonful, and wait and see what the results are. Re- 
 member that your whole alimentary tract is out of action, 
 and give it a chance to start up slowly. Take small quan- 
 tities of liquid food every two hours for the first day. Then 
 you can begin taking larger quantities, and on the next day 
 you can try some milk, or a soft poached egg, or the pulp 
 of cooked apples or prunes. Do not take any solid food 
 until you are quite sure you can digest it, and then take only 
 a very little. Do not take any starchy food until the third 
 day. 
 
 I have known people to break these rules. I knew a 
 
 177
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 man who broke his fast on hamburg steak, and had to be 
 helped out with a stomach pump. Once I broke a week's 
 fast with a plate of rich soup, because I was at a friend's 
 house and there was nothing else, and I yielded to the claims 
 of hospitality, and made myself ill and had to fast for sev- 
 eral days longer. 
 
 The easiest way to break a fast is upon a milk diet. I 
 have seen hundreds of people take this diet, and very few 
 who did not get benefit. The first time I fasted, which was 
 twelve days, I lost 17 pounds, and I took the milk diet for 
 24 days thereafter, and gained 32 pounds. I took it at Mac- 
 Fadden's Sanitarium, where I had every attention. Since 
 then, I have many times tried to take a milk diet by myself, 
 but have never been able to get it to agree with me. I do 
 not know how to explain this fact; I state it, to show how 
 hard it is to lay down general rules. On the milk diet you 
 take into your system two or three times as much food as 
 you can assimilate, and this is a violation of all my diet 
 rules; but it appears that the bacteria which thrive in milk 
 produce lactic acid, which is not harmful to the system, 
 and if you do not take other foods you may safely keep the 
 system flooded with milk. 
 
 After a fast you should begin with small quantities of 
 milk, and by the third day you may be taking a full glass of 
 warm milk every half hour or every twenty minutes, until 
 you have taken seven or eight quarts per day. It is better 
 to take it warm, but sometimes people take it just as well 
 without warming. Dr. Porter, who has a book on the milk 
 diet, insists upon complete rest, and makes his patients stay 
 in bed. MacFadden, on the other hand, recommends gym- 
 nastics in the morning before the milk, and during the after- 
 noon he recommends a rest from the milk for a couple of 
 hours, followed by abdominal exercises to keep the bowels 
 open. This is very important during a fast, because you 
 are taking great quantities of material into your system and 
 it must not be permitted to clog. Therefore take an enema 
 daily, if necessary to a free movement. Also take a warm 
 bath daily. Take the juice of oranges and lemons if you 
 crave them. 
 
 Upon one thing everyone who has had experience with 
 the milk diet agrees, and that is the necessity of absolute
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 179 
 
 mental rest. If you become excited, or nervous, or angry 
 on a milk diet, you may turn all the contents of your stomach 
 into hard curds, and may put yourself into convulsions. The 
 wonderful thing about the milk diet is the state of physical 
 and mental bliss it makes possible. It is the ideal way of 
 breaking a fast, because it leaves you no chance to get hun- 
 gry; you have all the food you want, and your system is 
 bathed in happiness, a sense of peace and well-being which 
 is truly marvelous and not to be described. You gain any- 
 where from half a pound to two pounds a day, and you feel 
 that you have never before in your life known what perfect 
 health could be. The fast sets you a new standard, you 
 discover how nature meant you to enjoy life, and never again 
 are you content with that kind of half existence with which 
 you managed to worry along before you discovered this 
 remedy. 
 
 But let me hasten to add that I do not recommend the 
 fast as a regular habit of life. The fast is an emergency 
 measure, to enable the body to cleanse itself and to cure 
 disease. When you have got your body clean and free from 
 disease, it is your business to keep it that way, and you 
 should apply your reason to the problem of how to live so 
 that you will not have to fast. If you find that you con- 
 tinue to have ailments, then you must be eating wrongly, or 
 overworking, or committing some other offense against nature ; 
 either that, or else you must have some organic trouble a 
 bone in your spine out of place, as the osteopaths tell you, 
 or your eyes out of focus, or your appendix twisted and 
 infected. I do not claim that the fasting cure will supplant the 
 surgeons and the oculists and the dentists. It will not mend 
 your bones if you break them, and it will not repair your 
 teeth that are already decayed; but it will help to keep your 
 teeth from decaying in the future, and it will help you to 
 prepare for a surgical operation, and to recover from it 
 more quickly. I had to undergo an operation for rupture 
 a couple of years ago, and I fasted for two days 'before the 
 operation, and for three days after it, and I had no particle 
 of nausea from the ether, and was able to tend to my mail 
 the day after the operation. 
 
 There is one disease for which I hesitate to recommend 
 the fast, and that is tuberculosis, because I have been told 
 of cases in which the patient lost weight and did not recover 
 
 13
 
 180 MIND AND BODY 
 
 it. However, in my tabulation of 277 cases, you will note 
 four cases of tuberculosis, and in my book is given a letter 
 from a patient who claimed great benefit. If I had the 
 misfortune to contract tuberculosis, I would take a three or 
 four day fast, followed by a milk diet for a long period. 
 The milk diet is pleasant to take, and it cannot possibly do 
 any harm. If it did not effect a cure, I would try the Salis- 
 bury treatment that is, lean meat ground up and medium 
 cooked, and nothing else, except an abundance of hot water 
 between meals. Prof. Irving Fisher wrote me that there 
 is urgent need of experiment to determine proper diet in 
 tuberculosis; and until these experiments have been made, 
 we can only grope. I am quite sure that the "stuffing system," 
 ordinarily used by doctors, is a tragic mistake. 
 
 In the case of any other disease whatever, even though 
 I might take medical or surgical treatment, I would supple- 
 ment this by a fast, because there is no kind of treatment 
 which does not succeed better with the blood in good con- 
 dition. In the case of emergencies, accidents, wounds, etc., 
 I would rest assured that recovery would be more prompt 
 if I were fasting. When David Graham Phillips was shot, 
 I wrote a letter to the New York Call, saying that his doctors 
 had killed him, because they had fed him while he was lying 
 in a critical condition in the hospital. To take nutriment 
 into the body under such circumstances is the greatest of 
 blunders. 
 
 The fast will help children, just as it helps adults, only 
 they do not need to fast so long. It will help the aged and 
 make them feel young. (You need not be afraid to fast, 
 no matter how old you are.) It is, of course, an immediate 
 cure for fatness, and strange as it may seem, it is also a 
 cure for unnatural thinness. People with ravenous appetites 
 are just as apt to be thin as to be fat, because it is not what 
 you eat that builds up your body, but only what you assim- 
 ilate, and if you eat too much, you can make it impossible to 
 assimilate anything properly. If you take a fast and break it 
 carefully, your body will come to its normal weight, and all 
 your functions to their normal activity. 
 
 A physician wrote me, taking me to task for listing among 
 the cures reported in my tabulation a case of locomotor ataxia. 
 This disease, he explained, is caused because a portion of a 
 nerve has been entirely destroyed, and it is a disease that is
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 181 
 
 absolutely and positively and forever incurable. I answered 
 that I knew this to be the teaching of present day medical 
 science, but I invited him to consider for a moment what 
 happens in nature. When a crab loses a claw, we do not 
 take it as a matter of course that the crab must go about 
 with one claw for the balance of its life; nature will make 
 that crab another claw. Man has lost the power of replac- 
 ing a lost leg, but he stills retains the power of replacing 
 tissue which has been cut away by a surgeon's knife, and 
 medical science takes this as a matter of course. How shall 
 anybody say that nature has forever lost the power of re- 
 building a bit of nervous tissue? How shall anyone say that 
 if the blood-stream is cleansed of poisons, and the energy 
 of the whole body restored, one of the results may not be 
 the repairing of a broken nerve connection? I invite my 
 readers who have ailments, and especially I invite all med- 
 ical men among my readers, to make a fair test of the fast- 
 ing cure. The results will surprise them, and they will 
 quickly be forced to revise their methods of treating illness.
 
 XXVII 
 DISEASES AND CURES 
 
 (Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and what 
 is known about their cause and cure.) 
 
 I begin with the commonest of all troubles, known as a 
 "cold." This name implies that the cause of the trouble lies 
 in exposure or chill. All the grandmothers of the world 
 are agreed about this. They have a phrase or at least they 
 had it when I was a boy : "You will catch your death." 
 Every time I went out in the rain, every time I played with 
 wet feet, or sat in a draft, or got under a cold shower, I 
 would hear the formula, "You will catch your death." 
 
 And, on the other hand, there are the "health cranks," 
 who declare vehemently that the name "cold" is a misnomer 
 and a trap for people's thoughts. Cold has nothing to do 
 with it, they say, and point to arctic explorers who frequently 
 get frozen to death, but do not "catch cold" until they get 
 back into the warm rooms of civilization. As for drafts, 
 the "health cranks" aver that a draft is merely "fresh air 
 moving"; which is supposed to settle the matter. However, 
 when you come to think about it, you realize that a cyclone 
 is likewise merely "fresh air moving," so you have not decided 
 the question by a phrase. 
 
 While I was writing these chapters on health I contracted 
 a severe cold which was a joke on me. The history of 
 this cold is as clear in my mind as anything human can be f 
 and it will serve for an illustration, showing how much truth 
 the grandmothers have on their side, and how much the 
 "health cranks" have. 
 
 To begin with, I had been overworking. All sorts of 
 appeals come to me ; hundreds of people write me letters, and 
 I cannot bear to leave them unanswered. I accepted calls to 
 speak, and invitations where I had to eat a lot of stuff of 
 which my reason disapproves; so one morning I woke up 
 with a slight sore throat. I fasted all day, and by evening 
 ifelt all right. But there came another call, and I consented 
 to take a long automobile ride on a cold and rainy night, and 
 
 182
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 183 
 
 when I got back home, after five or six hours, I was thor- 
 oughly chilled, and my "cold" came on during the night. 
 
 This explanation will, I imagine, be satisfactory to all 
 the grandmothers of the world. All the dear, good grand- 
 mothers know that an automobile ride on a cold, rainy night 
 is enough to give any man "his death." But listen, grand- 
 mothers! I have lain out watching for deer all night in the 
 late fall, with only a thin blanket to cover me, and gotten up 
 so stiff with cold that I could hardly move; yet I did not 
 "catch cold." When I was a youth, I have ridden a bicycle 
 twenty miles to the beach in April, with snow on the ground, 
 and plunged into the surf and swam, and then ridden home 
 again. I have bathed in the sea when I had to run a quarter 
 of a mile in a bathing suit along a frost-covered pier, and 
 with an icy wind blowing through my bones ; yet I never 
 took cold from that, and never got anything but a feeling of 
 exhilaration. So it must be that there is some reason why 
 exposure causes . colds at one time and not at another. 
 
 The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." 
 They understand that your blood-stream must be clogged, 
 your bodily tone reduced by bad air and lack of exercise, 
 and more especially by over-eating, or by an improperly bal- 
 anced diet. But then most of them go to extremes^ and in- 
 sist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my 
 body had nothing to do with my cold. But I know other- 
 wise I have watched the thing happen so often. In times 
 when I was run down, the slightest exposure would cause 
 me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got myself a 
 sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with 
 nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with 
 wet feet, or by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, 
 when I had been perspiring a little. How to explain this 
 I am not sure, but my guess is that you drive the blood 
 away from the surface of the body at a time when it is weak- 
 ened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army 
 of the white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body 
 to the germs. 
 
 I know there are nature curists who argue that germs 
 have nothing to do with disease; but they have never been 
 able to convince me germs are too real, and too many, and 
 too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of meat exposed to 
 the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will settle 
 
 14
 
 184 MIND AND BODY 
 
 upon it and begin to feed upon it and to multiply; the meat, 
 being dead, is powerless to protect itself. But your nose 
 and throat are also meat, and just as good food for the 
 germs. The only difference is that this meat is alive, there 
 is a living blood-stream circulating through it, and several 
 score billions of the body's own kind of germs, the blood 
 corpuscles. If these blood corpuscles are sound and properly 
 nourished, and are brought to the place of infection, they 
 are able to destroy all the common germs; so it is that you 
 do not have diseases, but instead have health. But your health 
 always implies a struggle of your organism against other 
 organisms, and it is the business of your reason to watch 
 your body and give all the help you can in protecting it. 
 Coughs and colds, sore throats and headaches, are the first 
 warnings that your defenses are being weakened. As a rule 
 these ailments are not serious in themselves, but they are 
 signs of a wrong condition, and if you neglect this condi- 
 tion, pretty soon you will find that you have to deal with 
 something deadly. 
 
 My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, 
 eat nothing for twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. 
 If you have a severe cold or sore throat, you will be wise to 
 lie in bed for a day or two, by an open window. You may 
 also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you will find 
 them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous 
 membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In 
 the old sad days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go 
 to the doctor, and have my throat and nose pumped full of 
 black and green and yellow and purple liquids, which did 
 me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay on for 
 two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and 
 I would be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by 
 inches, and not one of the doctors could tell me why. 
 
 The next most common ailment is a headache, and this 
 means poisons in your blood-stream. It may be from im- 
 proper diet, from alcohol, or drugs, or bad air, or nervous 
 excitement. If it is none of these things, then you should 
 begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for 
 example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths 
 and the chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made 
 important discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the 
 nervous force which directs the blood-stream is carried to
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 185 
 
 the organs of the body by nerves which leave the spinal cord 
 through openings between the vertebrae. If any of these 
 openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply, 
 which means ill-health in that part of the body to which 
 the nerve leads. That such trouble can be corrected by 
 straightening the bones of the spine, seems perfectly reason- 
 able; but like most people with a new idea, the discoverers 
 proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have before me 
 an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral 
 displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety- 
 five per cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per 
 cent being due to subluxations of other skeletal segments." 
 Naturally people who believe this will devote nearly all their 
 study to the bones and the nervous system. But surely, there 
 are other parts of your body which are necessary besides 
 bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts happen 
 to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not 
 focus properly, and you are continually wearing out the 
 optic nerve, thus giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia? 
 What if you have an appendix that has been twisted and 
 malformed from birth, and is a center of infection so long 
 as it remains in the body? 
 
 Several years ago I had an experience with the appendix, 
 from which I learned something about one of the commonest 
 of human ailments, constipation, or sluggishness of the bowels. 
 This is a cause of innumerable chronic ailments grouped under 
 the head of auto-intoxication, or the poisoning of the body by 
 the absorption into the system of the products of fermentation 
 and decay in the bowels. The bowels should move freely 
 two or three times every day, and the movements should be 
 soft. I suffered from constipation for some twenty years, 
 and tried, I think, every remedy known both to science and 
 to crankdom. In the beginning the doctors gave me drugs 
 which by irritating the intestinal walls cause them to pour 
 out quantities of water, and hurry the irritating substances 
 down the intestinal tract. That is all right for an emergency ; 
 if you have swallowed a poison, or food which is spoiled, or 
 if you have overeaten and are ill, get your system cleaned 
 out by any and every device. But if you habitually swallow 
 mild poisons, which is what all laxatives are, you weaken the 
 intestinal tract, and you have to take more and more of these 
 poisons, and you get less results. We may set down as posi-
 
 186 MIND AND BODY 
 
 live the statement that drugs are not a remedy for constipation. 
 
 Next comes diet. Eat the rough and bulky foods, say 
 the nature curists, and stimulate the intestinal walls to activ- 
 ity. I tried that. I listened to the extreme enthusiasts, 
 and boiled whole wheat and ate it, and consumed quantities 
 of bran biscuit, and of a Japanese seaweed which Dr. 
 Kellogg prepares, and of petroleum oil, and even the skins 
 of oranges, which are most uncomfortable eating, I assure 
 you. I would eat things like this until I got myself a case 
 of diarrhea and so was cured of constipation for a time! 
 Strange as it may seem to you, there are even people who 
 tell you to eat sand. I listened to them, and ate many quarts. 
 
 Then there is exercise. MacFadden taught me a whole 
 series of exercises for developing the muscles of the abdom- 
 inal walls and the back, which are greatly neglected by 
 civilized man. The fundamental cause of constipation is a 
 sluggish life, and to exercise our bodies is a duty; but to me 
 it was always an agony of boredom to lie on a bed and wiggle 
 my abdomen for a quarter of an hour. The same thing 
 applies to hot water treatments, . which are effective, but a 
 nuisance and a waste of time. I never could keep them up 
 except when I was in trouble. 
 
 Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual 
 irritating pain in my right side, which I quickly realized must 
 lie in the appendix. I tried massage, and hot and cold water 
 treatments, and my favorite remedy, a week's fast. The pain 
 disappeared, but it returned, so finally I decided, to the dis- 
 may of my physical culture friends, to have the appendix 
 out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature 
 curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of 
 the body, which pours an oil or something into the intes- 
 tinal tract, and so helps to prevent constipation. Well, evi- 
 dently my appendix wasn't doing its job, so I took it to 
 a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been twisted 
 and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of con- 
 tinous infection. From the time I had that operation, I have 
 never had to think about the subject of constipation. This 
 experience suggests to me how easy it is for people to make 
 statements about health which have no relationship to facts. 
 
 I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly 
 well realize that if human beings would take proper care of 
 their health, the great proportion of surgical operations would
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 187 
 
 be unnecessary. I realize, also, that surgeons get paid by 
 the job, and therefore have a money interest in operating, 
 and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of them will 
 ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is 
 true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and 
 that by standing a little temporary inconvenience you can 
 save yourself a life-time of discomfort. 
 
 Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here 
 a natural weakness, from which there results a dangerous 
 and uncomfortable affliction. Hundreds of thousands of men 
 are going around all their lives wearing elaborate and ex- 
 pensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely useless, and 
 trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An op- 
 eration takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, 
 and when our government drafted its young men into the 
 army and found that fourteen in every thousand of them 
 had rupture, it shipped them into the hospitals wholesale and 
 sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords one case 
 where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there 
 were practically no returns from the great number of army 
 cases. 
 
 Likewise you find extreme statements repeated concern- 
 ing the evils of vaccination; but if you will read Parkman's 
 "History of the Jesuits in North America," you will see 
 the horrible conditions under which the Indians lived in the 
 United States noble savages, you understand, entirely un- 
 contaminated by civilized white men, and whole populations 
 regularly wiped out every few years by epidemics of small- 
 pox. That these epidemics ceased was due to the discovery 
 that by infecting the body with a mild form of the disease, 
 it could be made to develop substances which render it im- 
 mune to the deadly form. Here in California we have a 
 law which makes vaccination for school children optional, 
 and so we may some day have another epidemic to test the 
 theories of the anti-vaccinationists. 
 
 I know, of course, the dreadful stories of people who 
 have been given syphilis and other diseases by impure vac- 
 cines. I don't know whether such stories are true; but I 
 do know that people who live in houses are sometimes killed 
 by earthquakes and by lightning, yet we do not cease to 
 live in houses because of this chance. It seems to me that 
 the remedy for such vaccination evils is not to abolish vac-
 
 188 MIND AND BODY 
 
 cination, but to take more care in the manufacture of our 
 vaccines. 
 
 This danger is removed by using vaccines which are sterile, 
 and are made especially for each person. Germs are taken 
 from the sick person, and injected into an animal. The 
 body of the animal develops with great rapidity the "anti- 
 bodies" necessary to resistance to the germs; and as these 
 "anti-bodies" are chemical products, not affected by heat, 
 we can take a serum from the animal, sterilize it, and then 
 inject it into the system of the patient, thus increasing re- 
 sistance to the disease. I admit that the best way to increase 
 such resistance is to take care of your health; but some- 
 times we confront an emergency, and must use emergency 
 remedies. We have serums that really cure diphtheria and 
 meningitis, and one that will prevent lock-jaw; anyone who 
 has ever seen with his own eyes how the deadly membranes 
 of diphtheria melt away as a result of an injection, will be 
 less dogmatic about the efforts of science to combat disease. 
 
 Of course it is much pleasanter if you can destroy the 
 source of the disease, and keep it from getting into the human 
 body. Every few years the southern part of our country 
 used to be devastated by yellow fever epidemics. Every kind 
 of weird and fantastic remedy was tried; people would go 
 around with sponges full of vinegar hung under their noses; 
 they would burn the clothing and bedding of those who died 
 of the disease ; they would wear gloves when they went shop- 
 ping, so as not to touch the money with their hands. But at 
 last medical experimenters traced the disease to a certain 
 kind of mosquito, and now, if we drain the swamps and 
 screen our houses and stay in doors after sundown, we do 
 not get yellow fever, nor malaria either. In the same way, 
 if we keep our bodies clean with soap and hot water, we 
 do not get bitten by lice, and so do not die of typhus. If we 
 take pains with our drains and water supply, so that human 
 excrement does not get into it, and if we destroy the filth-car- 
 rying housefly, we do not have epidemics of typhoid. 
 
 But under conditions of battle it is not possible for men 
 to take these precautions, and so when they go into the army 
 they get a dose of typhoid serum. And this illustrates the 
 difference between a true or hygienic remedy for disease, 
 and a temporary or emergency remedy. If you say that 
 you want to abolish war, and with it the need for typhoid
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 189 
 
 vaccination, I cheerfully agree with you in this. All that 
 I am trying to do is to point out the folly of flying to 
 extremes, and rejecting any remedy which may help. What 
 is the use of making the flat statement that vaccinations and 
 serums never aid in the cure of disease, when any man can 
 see with his own eyes the proof that they do? In the Span- 
 ish war, before typhoid vaccination, many times more soldiers 
 died of this disease than died of bullets; but in the late war 
 there was practically no typhoid at all in the army camps. 
 On the other hand, it was noticed that the men who had just 
 come in, and who therefore had just been vaccinated, were 
 considerably more susceptible to influenza; which shows that 
 vaccination does reduce the body condition for a time. The 
 reader may say that in this case I am trying to sit on both 
 sides of the fence; but the truth is that I am trying to keep 
 an open mind, and to consider all the facts, and to avoid mak- 
 ing rash statements. 
 
 One of the statements you hear most frequently is that 
 drugs can never remedy disease, or help in remedying it. 
 Now, I abhor the drugging system of the orthodox medical 
 men ; I have talked with them, and heard them talk with one 
 another, and I know that they will mix up half a dozen different 
 substances, in the vague hope that some one of them will have 
 some effect. Even when they know definitely the effects they 
 are producing, they are in many cases merely suppressing 
 symptoms. On the other hand, however, it is a fact that 
 medical science has had for a generation or two a specific 
 which destroys the germs of one disease in the blood, without 
 at the same time injuring the blood itself. That disease is 
 malaria, and the drug is quinine. Of course, the way to avoid 
 malaria is to drain the swamps ; but you cannot do that all at 
 once, nor can you always screen your house and stay in at 
 sundown. When you first go into a country, you have no 
 house to screen, and some emergency will certainly arise that 
 exposes you to mosquito bites. So you will need quinine, and 
 will be foolish not to use it, and know how to use it. 
 
 Recently medical chemists discovered another remedy, this 
 time for syphilis. It is called salvarsan, and while it does 
 not always cure, it frequently does. In laboratories today 
 men are working over the problem of constructing a com- 
 bination of molecules which will destroy the germ of sleep- 
 ing sickness, without at the same time injuring the blood.
 
 190 MIND AND BODY 
 
 If they find it, they will save hundreds of millions of lives. I 
 do not see why we cannot recognize such a possibility, while at 
 the same time making use of physical culture, of diet and fasting. 
 
 When the manuscript of this book was sent to the printer, 
 there appeared in this place a paragraph telling of the work 
 of Dr. Albert Abrams of San Francisco, in the diagnosis and 
 cure of disease by means of radio-active vibrations. As the 
 book is going to press, the writer finds himself in San Fran- 
 cisco, attending Dr. Abrams' clinics ; and so he finds it possible 
 to give a more extended account of some fascinating dis- 
 coveries, which seem destined to revolutionize medical science. 
 If I were to tell all that I have seen with my own eyes in 
 the last twelve days, I fear the reader would find his powers 
 of credulity overstretched, so I shall content myself with trying 
 to tell, in very sober and cautious language, the theory upon 
 which Abrams is working, and the technic which he has evolved. 
 
 Modern science has demonstrated that all matter is simply 
 the activity of electrons, minute particles of electric force. 
 This is a statement which no present-day physicist would dis- 
 pute. The best evidence appears to indicate that a molecule 
 of matter is a minute reproduction of the universe, a system 
 of electrons whirling about a central nucleus. No eye has 
 ever beheld an electron, for it is billions of times smaller than 
 anything the microscope makes visible; but we can see the 
 effects of electronic activity, and all modern books of physics 
 give photographs of such. It is possible to determine the 
 vibration rates of electrons, and to Dr. Abrams occurred the 
 idea of determining the vibration rates of diseased tissue and 
 disease germs. He discovered that it was invariably the same ; 
 not merely does all cancerous material, for example, yield 
 the same rate, but the blood of a person suffering from cancer 
 yields that rate, at all times and under all circumstances. The 
 vibration of cancer, of tuberculosis, of syphilis each is dif- 
 ferent, uniform and invariable. Likewise in the blood are 
 other vibrations, uniform and dependable, which reveal the 
 sex and age of the patient, the virulence of the disease and 
 the period of its duration yes, and even the location in the 
 body, if there be some definite infected area. So here is a 
 modern miracle, an infallible device for the diagnosis of 
 disease. Dr. Abrams does not have to see the patient; all 
 he has to have is a drop of blood on a piece of white blotting 
 paper, and he sits in his laboratory and tells all about it,
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 191 
 
 and somewhere several thousand miles away in Toronto or 
 Boston or New Orleans a surgeon operates and finds what 
 he has been told is there! 
 
 And that is only the beginning of the wonder; because, 
 says Abrams, if you know the vibration rate of the electrons 
 of germs, you can destroy those germs. It used to be a 
 favorite trick of Caruso to tap a glass and determine its 
 musical note, and then sing that note at the glass and shatter 
 it to bits. It is well known that horses, trotting swiftly on a 
 bridge, have sometimes coincided in their step with the vibra- 
 tion of the bridge and thus have broken it down. On that 
 same principle this wizard of the electron introduces into 
 your body radio-activity of a certain rate and shall I say that 
 he cures cancer and syphilis and tuberculosis of many years 
 standing in a few treatments? I will not say that, because 
 you would not and could not believe me. I will content 
 myself with telling what my wife and I have been watching, 
 twice a day for the past twelve days. 
 
 The scene is a laboratory, with rows of raised seats at 
 one side for the physicians who attend the clinic. There is 
 a table, with the instruments of measurement, and Dr. Abrams 
 sits beside it, and before him stands a young man stripped 
 to the waist. The doctor is tapping upon the abdomen of 
 this man, and listening to the sounds. You will find this the 
 weirdest part of the whole procedure, for you will naturally 
 assume that this young man is being examined, and will be 
 dazed when some one 'explains that the patient is in Toronto 
 or Boston or New Orleans, and that this young man's body 
 is the instrument which the doctor 'uses in the determining 
 of the vibration rates of the patient's blood. Dr. Abrams 
 tried numerous instruments, but has been able to find nothing 
 so sensitive to electronic activity as a human body. He ex- 
 plains to his classes that the spinal cord is composed of mil- 
 lions of nerve fibres of different vibration rates; hence a 
 certain rate communicated to the body, is automatically sorted 
 out, and appears on a certain precise spot of the body in the 
 form of increased activity, increased blood pressure in the 
 cells, and hence what all physicians know as a "dull area," 
 which can be discovered by what is known as "percussion," a 
 tapping with a finger. To map out these areas is merely a 
 matter of long and patient experiment; and Abrams has been 
 studying this subject for some twenty years he is author of
 
 192 MIND AND BODY 
 
 a text-book on what is known as the "reactions of Abrams." 
 So now he provides the world with a series of maps of the 
 human body; and he sits in front of his "subject," and his 
 assistant places a specimen of blood in a little electrically con- 
 nected box, and sets the rheostat at some vibration number 
 say fifty and Dr. Abrams taps on a certain square inch of 
 the abdomen of his "subject," and announces the dread word 
 "cancer." Then he places the electrode on another part of the 
 "subject's" body, and taps some more, and announces that it 
 is cancer of the small intestine, left side ; some more tapping, 
 and he announces that its intensity is twelve ohms, which is 
 severe ; and pretty soon there is speeding a telegram to the phy- 
 sician who has sent this blood specimen, telling him these facts, 
 and prescribing a certain vibration rate upon the "oscilloclast," 
 the instrument of radio-activity which Dr. Abrams has devised. 
 
 Now, you watch this thing for an hour or two, and you 
 say to yourself : "Here is either the greatest magician in the 
 history of mankind, or else the greatest maniac." You may 
 have come prepared for some kind of fraud, but you soon 
 dismiss that, for you realize that this man is desperately in 
 earnest about what he is doing, and so are all the physicians 
 who watch him. So you seek refuge in the thought that he 
 must be deluding himself and them, perhaps unconsciously. 
 But you talk with these men, and discover that they have 
 come from all over the country, and always for one reason 
 they had sent blood specimens to Abrams, and had found 
 that he never made a mistake; he told them more from a 
 few drops of the patient's blood than they themselves had 
 been able to find out from the whole patient. And then into 
 the clinic come the doctor's own patients I must have heard 
 sixty or eighty of them tell their story and many of them 
 have been lifted from the grave. People ten years blind 
 from syphilis who can see; people operated on several times 
 for cancer and given up for dying; people with tumors on 
 the brain, or with one lung gone from tuberculosis. It is 
 literally a fact that when you have sat in Abrams' clinic for 
 a week, all disease loses its terrors. 
 
 This, you see, is really the mastery of life. If we can 
 measure and control the minute universe of the electron and 
 the atom, we have touched the ultimate source of our bodily 
 life. I might take chapters of this book to tell you of the 
 strange experiments I have seen in this clinic showing you, 
 for instance, how these vibrations respond to thought, how
 
 THE BOOK or THE BODY 193 
 
 by denying to himself the disease the patient can for a few 
 moments cancel in his body the activity of the harmful germs ; 
 showing how the reactions differ in the different sexes and at 
 different ages, and how they respond to different colors and 
 different drugs. Abrams' method has revealed the secret of 
 such efficacy as drugs possess their work is done by their 
 radio-activity, and not by their chemical properties. Also the 
 problem of vaccination has been solved for Abrams has dis- 
 covered a dread new disease, which is bovine syphilis, 
 originally caused in cattle by human inoculation, and now 
 reintroduced in the human being by vaccination, and becoming 
 the agent which prepares the soil of the body for such dis- 
 orders as tuberculosis and cancer. And it appears that we can 
 all be rendered immune to these diseases, by a few electronic 
 vibrations, introduced into our bodies in childhood ; so is opened 
 up to our eyes a wonderful vision of a new race, purified and 
 made fit for life. So here at last is science justified of her op- 
 timism, and our faith in human destiny forever vindicated. Take 
 my advice, whoever you may be that are suffering, and find out 
 about this new work and help to make it known to the world. 
 
 There are many romances of medical science, some of 
 them fascinating as murder mysteries and big game hunting. 
 Turn to McMasters' "History of the People of the United 
 States" and read his account of the terrible epidemic of yellow 
 fever in Philadelphia a hundred years ago; I have already 
 referred to the weird and incredible things the people did in 
 their effort to ward off this plague sponges of vinegar under 
 their noses and "fever fires" burning in the streets; and then 
 a mosquito would fly up and bite them, and in a few hours 
 they would be dead! Or what could be stranger than the 
 tracing of the bubonic plague, which has cost literally billions 
 of human lives, to a parasite in the blood of fleas which live 
 on the bodies of rats! Or what could be more unexpected 
 than the tracing of our rheumatic aches and twinges to the 
 root canals of the teeth ! 
 
 One of the common ailments which afflict poor humanity 
 is rheumatism, a cause of endless suffering. It was sup- 
 posed to be due to damp climate and exposure, and this 
 is true to a certain extent, in the same way that colds are 
 due to exposure. But the investigators realized that there 
 must be some bodily condition rendering one susceptible, and 
 they set to work to trace this condition down. The pains 
 of rheumatism are caused by uric acid settling in the joints
 
 MIND AND BODY 
 
 of the body. What causes the uric acid? Well, there is 
 uric acid in red meat, so let us forbid rheumatic people to 
 eat it ! But this is overlooking the fact that the human body 
 itself is a uric acid factory; and also the fact that uric acid 
 taken into the stomach may not remain uric acid by the 
 time it gets to the blood-stream. We know that you may 
 eat a great deal of fruit acid without necessarily making- 
 acid blood. On the other hand, you can make acid blood 
 by eating a lot of sugar! So you see it isn't as simple as 
 it sounds. 
 
 Rheumatism has been traced to its lair, which is found 
 to be the roots of the teeth. Here is a part of the body dif- 
 ficult to get at, and as a consequence of bad diet and un- 
 wholesome ways of living, infections will start there, and pus 
 sacs be formed, and the poisons absorbed into the blood-stream 
 and distributed through the body. The first thought is to 
 draw the infected teeth; but that is a serious matter, be- 
 cause you need your teeth to chew your food. So the dentist 
 has to go through a complicated process of opening up the 
 tooth and cleaning out the root canals, and treating the in- 
 fected spots at the roots. Then he has to fill the tooth all 
 the way down to the roots, leaving no place for infection 
 to gather. This, of course, takes time and costs money, and 
 is one more illustration of the fact that there is one health 
 law for the rich and another health law for the poor. 
 
 All the time that I write these chapters about health I 
 feel guilty. I know that the wholesome food I recommend 
 costs money, and I know that surgery and dentistry cost 
 money yes, even sunlight and fresh air and recreation ; even 
 a fast, because you have to rest while you take it, and you 
 have to have a roof over your head, and warmth in winter 
 time, and somebody to wait upon you when you are weak. 
 I know that for a great many of the people who read what 
 I write, all these things are impossible of attainment ; I know 
 that for the great majority of the common people the ben- 
 efits of science do not exist. Science discovers how to pre- 
 vent disease, but the discoveries are not applied, because 
 the profit system controls the world, and the profit system 
 wants the labor of the poor, regardless of what happens to 
 their health. If the people fall ill, they are thrown upon 
 the scrap heap, and the profit system finds others to take 
 their place.
 
 THE BOOK OF THE BODY 
 
 Take, for example, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a germ 
 infection, but it practically never gets hold upon a human 
 body except when the body is reduced by undernourishment 
 and lack of fresh air. Tuberculosis, therefore, is a disease 
 of slums and jails. It is definitely and indisputably a dis- 
 ease of poverty. It could be wiped off the face of the earth 
 in a single generation; and the same is true of typhus and 
 typhoid. There is another whole host of ailments which 
 could be wiped out by measures of public hygiene, plus edu- 
 cation. This includes all the infant diseases, and the deadly 
 venereal diseases. But the profit system stands in the way; 
 and so, in these closing paragraphs of this Book of the Body, 
 I say that there is one disease which is the deadliest of all, 
 and the source of all others, and that disease is poverty. 
 
 I know a certain physician to the rich, who is an nonest 
 and conscientious man. He said, "I loath my work. I am 
 wasting my time. I am called in by these fat, over-fed rich 
 people in their leisure class hotels, and what am I to say to 
 them? Shall I say to them, 'You are living an abnormal 
 life, and you can never be well until you cut out root and 
 branch all your habits of self indulgence which are destroy- 
 ing you ?' But no, I can't say that not one time in a thou- 
 sand. I am expected to be polite and serious, and to listen 
 to them while they tell the long tiresome story of their symp-. 
 toms, and I have to encourage them, and give them some 
 temporary device that will remove some of the symptoms 
 of their trouble." 
 
 And what should one say to this honest physician ? Should 
 one tell him to go and be a physician to the poor? Would 
 he be any happier there? He could tell the poor the causes 
 of their diseases, and they would listen patiently they are 
 trained to listen, and to accept what they are told. Here 
 is a girl living in an inside bedroom in a tenement, and work- 
 ing ten or eleven hours a day in an unventilated factory, and 
 she is ill with tuberculosis. The physician tells her that she 
 needs plenty of fresh air and rest, and a lot of eggs and 
 milk in her diet. He tells her that, and he knows that she 
 has as much chance of carrying out his orders as of flying 
 to the moon. Or maybe he comes upon a typhoid epidemic, 
 and discovers, as happened to a friend of mine in Chicago, 
 that there is defective plumbing in some houses owned by 
 the political leader of the district. Or maybe it is a case 
 
 14
 
 196 MIND AND BODY 
 
 of venereal disease, in a young man who was drafted into 
 the army and turned loose amid the joys of Paris. Maybe 
 it is just a commonplace, every-day story of a room full of 
 school children, 22 per cent of them undernourished, as is 
 the case in New York City, and the parents out of work 
 a part of the time, and with no possibility in their lives of 
 ever earning enough to feed the children properly. When 
 you confront these universal facts of our present social order, 
 you realize that the problem of disease is not merely a prob- 
 lem of the body, but is a problem of the mind as well; a 
 problem of politics and religion and philosophy, of the whole 
 way of thinking of the so-called civilized world. A book of 
 health which did not point out these facts would be, not a 
 book of health, but a book of sham. 
 
 But meantime, while we are trying to change the world's 
 ideas, we have to live, and we can do our work better if we 
 keep as well as possible. I have tried to point out the way; 
 it is, as you can see, a matter in part of the body and in part 
 of the mind. All the bodily regime here laid out has its basis 
 in mental habits; all wise and wholesome ways of life can, 
 at the age when our minds are plastic, be made into "second 
 mature" things which we do automatically, without effort or 
 temptation to do otherwise. This is the real secret of true 
 happiness in the conduct of our personal lives ; to acquire self- 
 control, to rule our desires and our passions, not harshly and 
 spasmodically, but serenely, as one drives a car which he thor- 
 oughly understands. It is in vain that we preach freedom to 
 men who have not this self-mastery ; as the poet tell us : "The 
 sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves of their own com- 
 pulsion." And of all the personal possessions which man can 
 attain on this earth, the most precious is the one of a sound 
 mind controlling a sound body. I close this book by quoting 
 some verses written by Sir Henry Wotton three hundred years 
 ago, which I have all my life considered one of the noblest 
 pieces of poetry in our heritage: 
 
 THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE 
 
 How happy is he born and taught 
 
 That serveth not another's will ; 
 Whose armour is his honest thought 
 
 And simple truth his utmost skill!
 
 THE BOOK or THE BODY 197 
 
 Whose passions not his masters are, 
 Whose soul is still prepared for death, 
 
 Not tied unto the world with care 
 Of public fame, or private breath. 
 
 Who envies none that chance doth raise 
 
 Or vice; who never understood 
 How deepest wounds are given by praise; 
 
 Nor rules of state, but rules of good: 
 
 Who hath his life from rumours freed, 
 Whose conscience is his strong retreat; 
 
 Whose state can neither flatterers feed, 
 Nor ruin make accusers great: 
 
 Who God doth late and early pray 
 More of His grace than gifts to lend; 
 
 And entertains the harmless day 
 With a well-chosen book or friend; 
 
 This man is freed from servile bands 
 
 Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; 
 Lord of hknself, though not of lands; 
 
 And having nothing, yet 'hath all
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abrams, Dr. 
 
 190 Conduct 42 
 
 Adultery 33 
 
 Adventist 99 
 
 Agriculture 25 
 
 Alcohol 151 
 
 Anti-bodies 188 
 
 Antinomies 58 
 
 Appendix 186 
 
 Arnold 42 
 
 Arrhenius 101 
 
 Automatic writing 67 
 
 Bairnsfather 29 
 
 Bathing 162 
 
 Battle Creek Sanitarium 118 
 
 Beauchamp 70, 85, 89 
 
 Beethoven 47 
 
 Bergson 17 
 
 Beri-beri 128 
 
 Bible 77 
 
 Bio-chemist 59 
 
 Black bread 128 
 
 Blood 106 
 
 Body 53, 105 
 
 Booth 58 
 
 Bourne 69 
 
 Bruce 71 
 
 Bury 15 
 
 Caffein 150 
 
 Calories 135 
 
 Candy 137 
 
 Capitalist ( 100 
 
 Carbohydrates 124 
 
 Carbon monoxide 157 
 
 Children 140, 180 
 
 Chiropractors 174, 184 
 
 Chittenden 136 
 
 Christian Scientists 5, 65, 105 
 
 Clothing 160 
 
 Coffee 151 
 
 Colds 183 
 
 Commandments 32 
 
 Communist 99 
 
 Complete fast 172 
 
 C4mstock 25 
 
 Consciousness 56 
 
 Constipation 185 
 
 Cooking 129, 142 
 
 Crawford 88 
 
 Cyrus 164 
 
 Dandruff 109 
 
 Dante 77 
 
 Darwin 17, 46 
 
 Dentistry 126, 190 
 
 Determinists 57 
 
 Diet 131 
 
 Diet Standards 135 
 
 Digestion 145 
 
 Diphtheria 188 
 
 Diseases 107, 117 
 
 Dogs 17 
 
 Draft 182 
 
 Drugs 118, 150, 185, 189 
 
 Dubb 63 
 
 Duncan 102 
 
 Dyspepsia 117 
 
 Eddy ., 65 
 
 Edison 45, 86 
 
 Einstein 101 
 
 Elberfeld horses 68 
 
 Evolution 8, 17 
 
 Exercise 163 
 
 Faith 9 
 
 Faith curists 65 
 
 Fast cure 171 
 
 Fatness 139 
 
 Fats 124 
 
 Fever 108 
 
 Food filter 145 
 
 Fourth dimension 5 
 
 Fireless cooker 142 
 
 Fireplace 157 
 
 Fisher 136 
 
 Fletcher 119, 145 
 
 Free thinker 15 
 
 Freud 71 
 
 199
 
 200 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Fruit fast 175 
 
 Frugality 38 
 
 Frying-pan 129 
 
 Furnace 15? 
 
 Gargles 184 
 
 Gastronomic art 148 
 
 Genius 49, 60 
 
 George 18 
 
 Germs 183 
 
 God 22, 50 
 
 Goethe 47 
 
 Golden rule 51 
 
 Greens 132 
 
 Gymnastic work 166 
 
 Hair 109 
 
 Hallucinations 75 
 
 Hamlet 48 
 
 Happiness 9 
 
 Harrison 6 
 
 Hats 110 
 
 Headache 122, 150, 184 
 
 Health cranks 182 
 
 Heart 108 
 
 Houdin 93 
 
 Hugo 48 
 
 Huxley 17, 62 
 
 Hyslop 82 
 
 Iceberg 61 
 
 Infanticide 28 
 
 Instincts 134 
 
 Intelligence 22 
 
 Immortality 79 
 
 Irwin, Will 86 
 
 James 30, 59, 60 
 
 Jesus 47, 48, 50, 51, 76 
 
 John Barleycorn 152 
 
 Johnson 58 
 
 Jonson 44 
 
 Kant, Immanuel.. ..4, 47, 51, 58 
 
 Kellogg, Doctor 118; 164, 186 
 
 Kilmer, Joyce 44 
 
 Knowledge 94 
 
 Kropotkin 18, 26 
 
 Langley 74 
 
 Lankester, Prof. E. Ray.... 23 
 
 Laxatives 175, 185 
 
 Leanness 139 
 
 Leonardo 47 
 
 Liebault 64 
 
 Life 3 
 
 Lily Dale 86, 90 
 
 Lincoln 47 
 
 Locomotor ataxia 180 
 
 Lodge, Sir Oliver 83 
 
 Lodge, Raymond 87 
 
 London, jack 152 
 
 Macaulay 39 
 
 MacDowell, Edward 56 
 
 MacFadden 178, 186 
 
 MacSwiney 170 
 
 Maeterlinck, Maurice 68 
 
 Malaria 189 
 
 Malthusian law 25 
 
 Marquesans 113 
 
 Materializations 88 
 
 Matter 3 
 
 Meal-hour 147 
 
 Measurement of Intelligence, 
 
 Terman's 95 
 
 Meat 121 
 
 Medical science 105 
 
 Mesmer 63 
 
 Messina earthquake 170 
 
 Metaphysics 4 
 
 Metchnikoff 138 
 
 Milk diet 128 
 
 Moderation 39 
 
 Monism 3 
 
 Morality 21, 31, 34, 50 
 
 Morgan 45 
 
 Mormon 99 
 
 Mozart 68 
 
 Multiple personality 69 
 
 Mutation 17 
 
 Myers 49 
 
 Nature 21, 24, 29 
 
 Nature cure 160 
 
 Nature Woman 176 
 
 Neighbor 50 
 
 Newcomb, Simon 101 
 
 Newton 47
 
 INDEX 
 
 201 
 
 New York Times 169 
 
 Nicotine 154 
 
 Nietzsche 17 
 
 Novels 164 
 
 Nutrition of Man 136 
 
 Oil stoves 158 
 
 Opspnins 112 
 
 Optimism 42 
 
 Osteopaths 184 
 
 Ouija 67 
 
 Overeating 134 
 
 Oxygen 156 
 
 Patrick, Dr 167 
 
 Pavlov 148 
 
 Phantasms 75 
 
 Phillips, David Graham 180 
 
 Piper, Mrs 62 
 
 Play 165 
 
 Poisons 146 
 
 Pork 142 
 
 Porter, Dr 178 
 
 Positivists 6 
 
 Poverty 194 
 
 Prices of food 141 
 
 Prince, Dr. Morton 70, 89 
 
 Profits of Religion 78,99 
 
 Proteins 123, 
 
 Prunes 127 
 
 Psychology 96 
 
 Psychotherapy 64 
 
 Puritans 39 
 
 Quackenbos 64 
 
 Quinine 188 
 
 Quixote 48 
 
 Raisins 127 
 
 Raw food 119 
 
 Read, Alfred Baker 28 
 
 Reason 13 
 
 Refined foods 126 
 
 Relaxation 167 
 
 Religion 32 
 
 Reincarnation 76 
 
 Rest 146 
 
 Revelation 12 
 
 Rheumatism 193 
 
 Rice 128 
 
 Rockefeller 45 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore 25, 45 
 
 Rugs 159 
 
 Rupture 187 
 
 Sabbath 99 
 
 Salisbury 120 
 
 Sally 70, 85 
 
 Salt 143 
 
 Meats, salted 143 
 
 Salts 124 
 
 Salvarsan 189 
 
 Savages 135 
 
 Savage, Rev. Minot J 74 
 
 Schrenck-Notzing 88 
 
 Scurvy 128 
 
 Seneca 98 
 
 Shakespeare 47 
 
 Shelley 45, 48 
 
 Sleep 162 
 
 Sleeping sickness 113, 173 
 
 Smokers 153 
 
 Socialism 167 
 
 Sophocles 87 
 
 Sore throat 183 
 
 Spencer 8 
 
 Spinoza 79 
 
 Spirits 82 
 
 Spiritualists 86 
 
 Starch 122, 124 
 
 Stealing 33 
 
 Steam heat 158 
 
 Stimulant 149 
 
 Stock Exchange 158 
 
 Stomach 105, 138, 148 
 
 Style 161 
 
 Subconscious mind 61 
 
 Sunday code 40 
 
 Sugar 126 
 
 Surgery 186 
 
 Survival 81 
 
 Survival of the fittest 22 
 
 Syndicalism 15 
 
 Syphilis 189 
 
 Tanner, Dr 169 
 
 Tariff 37 
 
 Tea 151 
 
 Teeth 127 193 
 
 Telepathy 67, 75 
 
 Theosophists 76
 
 202 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Tight shoes 161 
 
 Tobacc* 153 
 
 Tolstoi 49 
 
 Tonsilitis 107 
 
 Trance 63 
 
 Tropism 64 
 
 Tuberculosis 
 
 112, 120, 179, 194, 195 
 
 Twain, Mark 93 
 
 Typhoid 112, 188, 192 
 
 Uranus 92 
 
 Uric acid.. 193 
 
 Vaccination 187, 189 
 
 Vaccines 188 
 
 Vegetarian 121 
 
 Vitamines 127, 142 
 
 Wallace 46 
 
 Wells, H. G 22 
 
 Williams, Dr. Henry Smith.. 102 
 
 Worth, Patience. 84 
 
 Yellow fever 188 
 
 Yogis 90 
 
 W.B.C.
 
 THE BOOK OF LIFE 
 
 VOLUME TWO: LOVE AND SOCIETY
 
 To 
 
 <rane 
 
 hi acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a 
 better world, and her fidelity to those 
 who struggle to achieve it
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART THREE: THE BOOK OF LOVE 
 
 PAGfi 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. THE REALITY OF MARRIAGE .... 3 
 Discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world, 
 and their relation to the ideal of monogamous love. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARRIAGE ... 8 
 Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its his- 
 tory, the stages of its development in human society. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. SEX AND YOUNG AMERICA 15 
 
 Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect 
 the future generation. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. SEX AND THE "SMART SET" 23 
 
 Portrays the moral customs of those who set the fashion 
 in our present-day world. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. SEX AND THE POOR 29 
 
 Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and 
 the diseases which result from it 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. SEX AND NATURE 33 
 
 Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of 
 natural or physical disharmony. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. LOVE AND ECONOMICS 36 
 
 Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due 
 to the displacing of love by money as a motive in mating. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. MARRIAGE AND MONEY 40 
 
 Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher 
 form of prostitution known as the "marriage of conven- 
 ience." 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. LOVE VERSUS LUST 46 
 
 Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it 
 should be followed and when repressed. 
 
 vii
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. CELIBACY VERSUS CHASTITY .... 51 
 The ideal of the repression of the sex-impulse, as against 
 the ideal of its guidance and cultivation. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE DEFENSE OF LOVE 55 
 
 Discusses passionate love, its sanction, its place in life, 
 and its preservation in marriage. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. BIRTH CONTROL 60 
 
 Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the 
 greatest of man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's 
 enslavement, and placing the keys of life in his hands. 
 
 CHAPTER XL. EARLY MARRIAGE 66 
 
 Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the 
 duty of parents in respect to them. 
 
 CHAPTER XLI. THE MARRIAGE CLUB 71 
 
 Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to 
 avoid unhappy marriages. 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE 75 
 
 Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that 
 we have the right and the duty to teach it. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. THE MONEY SIDE OF MARRIAGE .... 79 
 Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of 
 matrimony. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. THE DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY 83 
 
 Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should 
 endeavor to preserve it. 
 
 CHAPTER XLV. THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY 89 
 
 Discusses the question, to what extent one person may 
 hold another to the pledge of love. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVI. THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE 93 
 
 Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and 
 one of the means of preventing infidelity and prostitution. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVII. THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE .... 97 
 Discusses the circumstances under which society has the 
 right to forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.
 
 CONTENTS ix 
 
 PART FOUR: THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER XLVIII. THE EGO AND THE WORLD 103 
 
 Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant 
 and in primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment 
 to life. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVIX. COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION . . . 107 
 Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and 
 the part which selfishness and unselfishness play in the 
 development of social life. 
 
 CHAPTER L. ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY 115 
 
 Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and 
 whether there is a natural basis for such a doctrine. 
 
 CHAPTER LI. RULING CLASSES 119 
 
 Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained, 
 and what sanction it can claim. 
 
 CHAPTER LII. THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION . . . 122 
 Discusses the series of changes through which human 
 society has passed. 
 
 CHAPTER LIII. INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION 126 
 
 Examines the process of evolution in industry and the 
 stage which it has so far reached. 
 
 CHAPTER LIV. THE CLASS STRUGGLE 132 
 
 Discusses history as a battle-ground between ruling and 
 subject classes, and the method and outcome of this 
 struggle. 
 
 CHAPTER LV. THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM 136 
 
 Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and 
 the effect of this system upon the minds of the workers. 
 
 CHAPTER LVI. THE CAPITALIST PROCESS 142 
 
 How profits are made under the present industrial sys- 
 tem and what becomes of them. 
 
 CHAPTER LVIL HARD TIMES 145 
 
 Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing, 
 and why abundant production brings distress instead of 
 plenty.
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER LVIII. THE IRON RING . 148 
 
 Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles pro- 
 duction, and makes true prosperity impossible. 
 
 CHAPTER LIX. FOREIGN MARKETS 151 
 
 Considers the efforts of capitalism to save itself by mar- 
 keting its surplus products abroad, and what results from 
 these efforts. 
 
 CHAPTER LX. CAPITALIST WAR 155 
 
 Shows how the competition for foreign markets leads 
 nations automatically into war. 
 
 CHAPTER LXI. THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRODUCTION . . . 158 
 Shows how much wealth we could produce if we tried 
 and how we proved it when we had to. 
 
 CHAPTER LXII. THE COST OF COMPETITION 162 
 
 Discusses the losses of friction in our productive ma- 
 chine, those which are obvious and those which are 
 hidden. 
 
 CHAPTER LXIII. SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM 166 
 
 Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the 
 state, and the idea of its management by the trade unions. 
 
 CHAPTER LXIV. COMMUNISM AND ANARCHISM .... 170 
 Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the 
 idea of a society without compulsion, and how these 
 ideas have fared in Russia. 
 
 CHAPTER LXV. SOCIAL REVOLUTION 175 
 
 How the great change is coming in different industries, 
 and how we may prepare to meet it. 
 
 CHAPTER LXVI. CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION . . . 179 
 Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they 
 afford to do it, and what will be the price? 
 
 CHAPTER LXVII. EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS . . 183 
 Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its 
 chances for success in the United States.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER LXVIII. THE PROBLEM OF THE LAND .... 188 
 Discusses the land values tax as a means of social read- 
 justment, and compares it with other programs. 
 
 CHAPTER LXIX. THE CONTROL OF CREDIT ...... 192 
 
 Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of 
 industry, and may play in the freeing of industry. 
 
 CHAPTER LXX. THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY ...... 198 
 
 Discusses various programs for the change from indus- 
 trial autocracy to industrial democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER LXXI. THE NEW WORLD ......... 202 
 
 Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning 
 with its money aspects ; the standard wage and its va- 
 riations. 
 
 CHAPTER LXXII. AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION ..... 206 
 Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster 
 co-operative farming and co-operative homes. 
 
 CHAPTER LXXIII. INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION ..... 210 
 Discusses scientific, artistic, and religious activities, as 
 a superstructure built upon the foundation of the stan- 
 dard wage. 
 
 CHAPTER LXXIV. MANKIND REMADE ........ 215 
 
 Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what 
 happens to these in the new world.
 
 PART THREE 
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 THE REALITY OF MARRIAGE 
 
 (Discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world, and 
 their relation to the ideal of monogamous love.) 
 
 Just as human beings through wrong religious beliefs tor- 
 ture one another, and wreck their lives and happiness; just 
 as through wrong eating and other physical habits they make 
 disease and misery for themselves; just so they suffer and 
 perish for lack of the most elementary knowledge concerning 
 the sex relationship. The difference is that in the field of 
 religious ideas it is now permissible to impart the truth one 
 possesses. If I tell you there is no devil, and that believing 
 this will not cause you to suffer in an eternity of sulphur and 
 brimstone, no one will be able to burn me at the stake, even 
 though he might like to do so. If I advise you that it is not 
 harmful to eat beefsteak on Friday, or to eat thoroughly 
 cooked pork any day of the week, neither the archbishops 
 nor the rabbis nor the vegetarians will be able to lock me in 
 a dungeon. But if I should impart to you the simplest and 
 most necessary bit of knowledge concerning the facts of your 
 sex life things which every man and woman must know if 
 we are to stop breeding imbecility and degeneracy in the world 
 then I should be liable, under federal statutes, to pay a fine 
 of $5,000, and to serve a term of five years in a federal peni- 
 tentiary. Scarcely a week passes that I do not receive a letter 
 from someone asking for information about such matters ; but 
 I dare not answer the letters, because I know there are agen- 
 cies, maintained and paid by religious superstition, employing 
 spies to trap people into the breaking of this law. 
 
 I shall tell you here as much as I am permitted to tell, in 
 the simplest language and the most honest spirit. I believe 
 that human beings are meant to be happy on this earth, and 
 to avoid misery and disease. I believe that they are given the 
 powers of intelligence in order to seek the ways of happiness, 
 and I believe that it is a worthy work to give them the knowl- 
 edge they need in order to find happiness. 
 
 8
 
 4 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 At the outset of this Book of Love we are going to examine 
 the existing facts of the sex relationships of men and women 
 in present-day society. We shall discover that amid all the 
 false and dishonest thinking of mankind, there is nowhere 
 more falsity and dishonesty than here. The whole world is 
 a gigantic conspiracy of "hush," and the orthodox and respect- 
 able of the world are like worshippers of some god, who 
 spend their day-time burning incense before the altar, and 
 in the night-time steal the sacred jewels and devour the con- 
 secrated offerings. These worshippers confront you with the 
 question, do you believe in marriage; and they make the 
 assumption that the institution of marriage exists, or at some 
 time has existed in the world. But if you wish to do any 
 sound thinking about this subject, you must get one thing 
 clear at the outset; the institution of marriage is an ideal 
 which, has been preached and taught, but which has never 
 anywhere, in any society, at any stage of human progress, 
 actually existed as the general practice of mankind. What 
 has existed and still exists is a very different institution, 
 which I shall here describe as marriage-plus-prostitution. 
 
 By this statement I do not mean to deny that there are 
 many women, and a few men, who have been monogamous 
 all their lives ; nor that there are many couples living together 
 happily in monogamous marriage. What I mean is that, con- 
 sidering society as a whole, wherever you find the institution 
 of marriage, you also find, co-existent therewith and comple- 
 mentary thereto, the institution of prostitution. Of this double 
 arrangement one part is recognized, and written into the law; 
 the other part is hidden, and prohibited by law; but those 
 who have to do with enforcing the law all know that it exists, 
 and practically all of them consider it inevitable, and a great 
 many derive income from it. So I say: if you believe in 
 marriage-plus-prostitution, that is your right; but if marriage 
 is what you believe in, then your task is to consider such 
 questions as these: Is marriage a possible thing? Can it ever 
 become the sex arrangement of any society? What are the 
 forces which have so far prevented it from prevailing, and 
 how can these forces be counteracted? 
 
 It is my belief that monogamous love is the most desirable 
 of human sex relationships, the most fruitful in happiness and 
 spiritual development. The laws and institutions of civilized 
 society pretend to defend this relationship, but the briefest
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 5 
 
 study of the facts will convince anyone that these laws and 
 institutions are not really meant to protect monogamous love. 
 What they are is a device of the property-holding male to 
 secure his property rights to women, and more especially to 
 secure himself as to the paternity of his heirs. In primitive 
 society, where land and other sources of wealth were held 
 in common, and sex monogamy was unknown, there was no 
 way to determine paternity, and no reason for doing so. But 
 under the system of private property and class privilege, it 
 is necessary for some one man to support a child, if it is to 
 be supported; and when a man has fought hard, and robbed 
 hard, and traded hard, and acquired wealth, he does not want 
 to spend it in maintaining another man's child. That he 
 should let himself be fooled into doing so is one of the great- 
 est humiliations his fellowmen can imagine. If you read 
 Shakespeare's plays, and look up the meaning of old words, 
 so as to understand old witticisms and allusions, you will 
 discover that this was the stock jest of Shakespeare's time. 
 
 In order to protect himself from such ridicule, the man 
 maintained in ancient times his right to kill the faithless wo- 
 man with cruel tortures. He maintains today the right to de- 
 prive her of her children, and of all share in his property, even 
 though she may have helped to earn it. But until quite recent 
 times, the beginning of the revolt of women, there was never 
 any corresponding penalty for faithlessness in husbands. Un- 
 der the English law today, the husband may divorce his wife 
 for infidelity, but the wife must prove infidelity plus cruelty, 
 and the courts have held that the cruelty must consist in knock- 
 ing her down. While I was in England, the highest court 
 rendered a decision that a man who brought his mistress to 
 his home and compelled his wife to wait upon her was not 
 committing "cruelty" in the meaning of the English law. 
 
 This is what is known as the "double standard," and the 
 double standard prevails everywhere under the system of 
 marriage-plus-prostitution, and proves that capitalist "monog- 
 amy" is not a spiritual idaal, but a matter of class privilege. 
 It is a breach of honor for the ruling class male to tamper 
 with the wife of his friend; it is frequently dangerous for 
 him to tamper with the young females of his own class; but 
 it is in general practice taken for granted that the young 
 females of lower classes are his legitimate prey. In England 
 a man may have a marriage annulled, if he can prove that 
 
 2 May 22.
 
 6 
 
 the woman he married had what is called a "past" ; but every- 
 body takes it for granted that the man has had a "past"; it 
 is covered by the polite phrase, "sowing his wild oats." Wher- 
 ever among the ruling class you find men bold enough to 
 discuss the facts of the sex order they have set up, you find 
 the idea, expressed or implied, that this "wild oats" is a nec- 
 essary and inevitable part of this order, and that without 
 it the order would break down. The English philosopher, 
 Lecky, making an elaborate study of morals through the ages, 
 speaks of the prostitute in the following frank language: 
 
 "Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the 
 most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchal- 
 lenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, 
 and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, 
 think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known 
 the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded 
 and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might 
 have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds 
 and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of human- 
 ity, blasted for the sins of the people." 
 
 I invite you to study these sentences and understand them 
 fully. Remember that they are the opinion of the most learned 
 historian of sex customs who has ever written in English; 
 a man whose authority is recognized in our schools, whose 
 books are in every college library. William Edward Hartpole 
 Lecky is not in any sense a revolutionist ; he is a conventional 
 English scholar, an upholder of English law and order and 
 patriotism. He is not of my school of thought, but of those 
 who now own the world and run it. I quote him, because 
 he tells in plain language what kind of world they have made ; 
 I invite you to study his words, and then judge my state- 
 ment that the sex arrangement under which we live in modern 
 society is not monogamous love, but marriage-plus-prostitu- 
 tion. 
 
 It is my hope to point the way to a higher system. I 
 should like to call it marriage; but perhaps it would be more 
 precise to call it marriage-minus-prostitution. In working it 
 out, we shall have to think for ourselves, and discard all 
 formulas. It is obvious that our present-day religious creeds, 
 ethical ideals, legal codes, and social rewards and punishments 
 have been powerless to protect marriage, or to make it the 
 rule in sex relationships. So we shall have to begin at the
 
 beginning and find new reasons for monogamous love, a new 
 basis of marriage other than the protection of private prop- 
 erty. We shall have to inform ourselves as to the fundamen- 
 tal purposes of sex; we shall have to ask ourselves: What 
 are the factors which determine Tightness and wrongness in 
 the sex relationship ? What is love, and what ought it to be ? 
 These questions we shall try to approach without any fixed 
 ideas whatever. We shall decide them by the same tests that 
 we have used in our thinking about God and immortality, 
 health and disease. We shall ask, not what our ancestors 
 believed, not what God teaches us, not what the law ordains, 
 not what is "respectable," nor yet what is "advanced," accord- 
 ing to the claim of modern sex revolutionists and "free lovers." 
 We shall ask ourselves, what are the facts. We shall ask, 
 what can be made to work in practice, what can justify itself 
 by the tests of reason and common sense.
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARRIAGE 
 
 (Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its history, 
 the stages of its development in human society.) 
 
 What, in the most elemental form, is sex? It is a differ- 
 ence of function which makes it necessary for two organisms 
 to take part in the reproduction of the species. The purpose, 
 or at any rate the effect, of this sex difference is the mixing 
 of characteristics and qualities. If the sex relationship were 
 unnecessary to reproduction, variations might begin, and be 
 propagated and carried to extremes in one line of inheritance, 
 without ever affecting the rest of the species. Very soon 
 there would be no species, or rather an infinity of them ; each 
 line of descent would fly apart, and become a group all by 
 itself. You have perhaps heard people comment on the fact 
 that blondes so frequently prefer brunettes, and that tall men 
 are apt to marry short women, and vice versa. This is 
 perhaps nature's way of keeping the type uniform, of spread- 
 ing qualkies widely and testing them thoroughly. Nature is 
 continually trying out the powers of every individual in every 
 species, and by the process of sexual selection she chooses, 
 for the reproduction of the species, the individuals which are 
 best fitted for survival. This, of course, refers to nature, con- 
 sidered apart from man. In human society, as I shall presently 
 show, sexual selection has been distorted, and partly sup- 
 pressed. 
 
 Sex differentiation and sexual selection exist almost uni- 
 versally throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, every- 
 where save in the lowest forms of being. They take strange 
 and startling forms, and like everything else in nature mani- 
 fest amazing ingenuity. People who wish to prove this or 
 that about human sex relations will advance arguments from 
 nature; but as a matter of fact we can learn nothing what- 
 ever from nature, except her determination to preserve the 
 products of her activity and to keep them up to standard. 
 Sometimes nature will give the precedence in power, speed 
 and beauty to the male, and sometimes to the female. She 
 
 8
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 9 
 
 is perfectly ruthless, and willing in the accomplishment of 
 her purpose to destroy the individuals of either sex. She 
 will content the most rabid feminist by causing the female 
 spider to devour her mate when his purpose has been accom- 
 plished; or by causing the male bee to fall from his mating 
 in the air, a disemboweled shell. 
 
 As for man, he has won his supremacy over nature by his 
 greater power to combine in groups; by his more intense 
 gregarious, or herd instincts, which enabled him to fight 
 and destroy creatures which would have exterminated him 
 if he had fought them alone. So in primitive society every- 
 where, we find that the individual is subordinated to the group, 
 and the "folkways" give but little heed to personal rights. 
 Very thorough investigations have been made into the life 
 of primitive man in many parts of the world, and the anthro- 
 pologists are now arguing over the exact meaning of the data. 
 We shall not here attempt to decide among them, but rest 
 content with the statement that communism and tribal owner- 
 ship is a widespread social form among primitive man, so 
 much so as to suggest that it is an early stage in social 
 evolution. 
 
 And this communism includes, not merely property, but 
 sex. In the very earliest days there was often no barrier 
 whatever to the sex relationship; not even between brothers 
 and sisters, nor between parents and children. In fact, we 
 find savages who do not know that the sex relationship has 
 anything to do with procreation. But as knowledge increases, 
 sex "tabus" develop, some wise, and some foolish. From 
 causes not entirely clear, but which we discuss in Chapter 
 XLVIII, there gradually evolves a widespread form of sex 
 relationship of primitive man, the system of the "gens," as it is 
 called. This is the Latin word for family, but it does not mean 
 family in the narrow sense of mother and father and children, 
 but in the broad sense of all those who have blood relationship, 
 however far removed uncles and aunts and cousins, as far 
 as memory can trace. In primitive communism a man is not 
 permitted to enter into the sex relationship with a woman 
 of the same gens, but with all the women of some other gens. 
 It is difficult for us to imagine a society in which all the 
 men named Jones would be married to all the women named 
 Smith ; but that was the way whole races of mankind lived 
 for many thousands of years.
 
 10 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 In that primitive communist society, the woman was gener- 
 ally the equal of the man. It is true that she did the drudgery 
 of the camp, but the man, on the other hand, faced the hard- 
 ships of battle and the chase on land and sea. The woman was 
 as big as the man, and except when handicapped by pregnancy, 
 as strong as the man ; she was as much respected, if not more 
 so. Her children bore her name, and were under her control, 
 and she was accustomed to assert herself in all affairs of the 
 tribe. In Frederick O'Brien's "White Shadows in the South 
 Seas," you may read a comical story of a journey this trav- 
 eler made into the interior of one of the cannibal islands. 
 Everywhere he was treated with courtesy and hospitality, but 
 was embarrassed by continual offers from would-be wives. 
 In one case a powerful cannibal lady, whose advances he 
 rejected, picked him up and proceeded to carry him off, and 
 he was quite helpless in her grasp ; he might have been a 
 cannibal husband today, if it had not been for the interven- 
 tion of his fellow travelers. 
 
 The basis of this sex equality under primitive communism 
 is easy to understand. All goods belonged to the tribe, and 
 were shared alike according to need. Children were the tribe's 
 most precious possession; therefore the woman suffered little 
 handicap from having a child to bear and feed. Primitive 
 woman would bear her child by the roadside, and pick it up 
 in her arms, and continue her journey; and when she needed 
 food, she did not have to beg for it if there was food for 
 anyone, there was food for her and her child. She did her 
 share of the gathering and preparing of food, because that 
 was the habit and law of her being; she had energies, and 
 had never heard of the idea of not using them. 
 
 This primitive communism generally disappears as the tribe 
 progresses. We cannot be sure of all the stages of its dis- 
 appearance, or of the causes, but in a general way we can 
 say that it gives way before the spread of slavery. In the 
 beginning primitive man does not have any slaves, he does 
 not have sufficient foresight or self-restraint for that. When 
 he kills his enemies in battle, he builds a fire and roasts 
 their flesh and eats them ; and those whom he captures alive, 
 he binds fast and takes with him, to be sacrificed to his voodoo 
 gods. But as he comes to more settled ways of living, and 
 as the tribe grows larger, it occurs to the chiefs in battle 
 that the captives would be glad to give their labor in return
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 11 
 
 for their lives, and that it would be convenient to have some 
 people to do the hard and dirty work. So gradually there 
 comes to be a class at the bottom of society, and another class 
 at the top. Those who capture the slaves and keep them at 
 work lay claim to the products of their labor at first better 
 weapons and personal adornments, then separate homes for 
 the chiefs and priests, separate gardens, separate flocks and 
 herds, and what more natural? separate women. 
 
 This process becomes complete when the tribe settles down 
 to agriculture, and the ruling classes take possession of the 
 land. When once the land is privately owned, classes are 
 fixed, and class distinctions become the most prominent fact 
 in society. And step by step as this happens, we see women 
 beaten down, from the position of the cannibal lady, who 
 could ask for the man she wanted and carry him off by 
 force if necessary, to the position of the modern woman, 
 who is physically weak, emotionally unstable, economically 
 dependent, and socially repressed. You may resent such 
 phrases, but all you have to do is to read the laws of civilized 
 countries, written into the statute books by men to define 
 the rights and duties of women ; you will see that everywhere, 
 before the recent feminist revolt, women were classified under 
 the law with children and imbeciles. 
 
 Maternity imposes on woman a heavy burden, and before 
 the discovery of birth control, a burden that is continuous. 
 For nine months she carries the child in her body, and then 
 for a year or two she carries it in her arms, or on her back; 
 and by that time there is another child, and this continues 
 until she is broken down. Having this burden, she cannot 
 possibly compete with the unburdened male for the posses- 
 sion of property. So wherever there is economic com- 
 petition; wherever certain individuals or classes in the tribe 
 or group are allowed to seize and hold the land; wherever 
 the products of labor cease to be the community property, 
 and become private property, the objects of economic 
 strife; then inevitably and by natural process, woman comes 
 to>be placed among those who cannot protect themselves 
 that is, among the children and the imbeciles and the slaves. 
 Of course, some children are well cared for, and so are some 
 imbeciles, and some slaves, and some women. But they are 
 cared for as a matter of favor, not as a matter of their own 
 power. They proceed no longer as the cannibal lady, but
 
 12 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 by adopting and cultivating the slave virtues, by making 
 themselves agreeable to their masters, by flattering their mas- 
 ters' vanity and sensuality in other words by exercising what 
 we are accustomed to call "feminine charm." 
 
 From early barbaric society up to the present day, we 
 observe that there are classes of women, just as there are 
 classes of men. The position of these classes changes within 
 certain limits, but in broad outline the conditions are fixed, 
 and may be easily defined. There is, first of all, the ruling 
 class woman. She must have birth; she may or may not 
 have wealth, according as to whether the laws of that society 
 or tribe permit her to have possessions of her own, or to 
 inherit anything from her parents. If she has no wealth, 
 then she will need beauty. She is the woman who is selected 
 by the ruling class man to bear his name and his children, 
 and to have charge of the household where these children 
 are reared, and trained for the inheriting of their father's 
 wealth and the carrying on of his position. This confers 
 upon the ruling class woman great dignity, and makes her 
 a person of responsibility. She rules, not merely over the 
 slaves of the household, but over men of inferior social classes, 
 and in a few cases an exceptionally able woman has become 
 a queen, and ruled over men of her own class. This ruling 
 class woman has been known through all the ages by a spe- 
 cial name, and the ways and customs regarding her have 
 been studied in an entertaining book, "The Lady," by Emily 
 James Putnam. 
 
 Next in privilege and position to the "lady" is the mistress, 
 the woman who is selected by the ruling class man, not pri- 
 marily to bear his children, but to entertain and divert 
 him. She may, of course, bear children also. In barbaric 
 societies, and up to quite recent times, the importance of the 
 ruling class man was indicated by the number of concubines 
 he had, and the position of these women was hardly inferior 
 to that of the wife or queen. In the days of the French 
 monarchy, the king's mistress was frequently more impor- 
 tant than the queen ; she was a woman of ability, maintaining 
 her supremacy in the intrigues of the court. In ancient 
 Greek society, the "hetairae" were a recognized class, and 
 Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, was the most brilliant and 
 most conspicuous woman in Athens. In modern France, the 
 position of the mistress is recognized by the phrase "demi-
 
 THE BOOK or LOVE 13 
 
 monde," or half-world. The American plutocracy has devel- 
 oped upon a superstructure of Puritanism, and therefore, in 
 America, hypocrisy is necessary. But in the great cities of 
 America, the vast majority of the ruling class men keep mis- 
 tresses before marriage, and a great many keep them after- 
 wards ; and these mistresses are coming to be more and more 
 openly flaunted, and to acquire more and more of what is called 
 "social position." It is possible now in the "smart set" for 
 a lady to accept the status of mistress, delicately veiled, with- 
 out losing caste thereby, and actresses and other free lance 
 women who got their start in life by taking the position of 
 mistress, are coming more and more to be recognized as 
 "ladies," and to be received into what are called the "best 
 circles." 
 
 There remains to be considered the position of the lower 
 class women. In barbarous society these women were very 
 little different from slaves. They had no rights of their own, 
 except such rights as their master man chose to allow them 
 for his own convenience. They were sold in marriage by 
 their parents, and they went where they were .sold, and 
 obeyed their new master. They became his household drudges, 
 and reserved their affections for him; if they failed to do 
 this, he stoned them to death, or strangled them with a cord 
 and tied them in a sack and threw them into the river. 
 
 And, of course, the rights of the master man yielded to the 
 rights of men of higher classes. The king or nobleman could 
 take any woman he wished at any time, and he made laws 
 to this effect and enforced them. In feudal society the lord 
 of the manor claimed the right of the first night with the 
 wives of his serfs; this was one of the ruling class privileges 
 which was abolished in the French revolution. Wherever 
 the French revolution did not succeed in affecting land tenure, 
 ' the right of the land owner to prey upon his tenant girls con- 
 tinues as a custom, even though it is not written in the law, 
 and would be denied by the hypocritical. It prevails in Poland, 
 as you may discover by reading Sienkewicz's "Whirlpools"; 
 it prevails in England, as you may discover from Hardy's 
 "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." You will find that it prevails 
 in every part of the world where women have poverty and 
 men have wealth and prestige, dress suits and automobiles. 
 You will find it wherever there are leisure class hotels, or 
 colleges, or other gatherings of ruling class young males. You
 
 14 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 will find it in the theatrical and moving picture worlds. It 
 is well understood in the theatrical world of Broadway that 
 the woman "star" in the profession gets her start in life by 
 becoming the mistress of a manager or "angel." In the mov- 
 ing picture world of Southern California it is a recognized 
 convention, known to everyone familiar with the business, 
 that a young girl parts with her virtue in exchange for an 
 important job.
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 SEX AND YOUNG AMERICA 
 
 (Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect the 
 future generation.) 
 
 Our first task is to consider how people actually behave 
 in the matter of sex as distinguished from the way they 
 pretend to behave. The first and most necessary step in the 
 cure of any disease is a correct diagnosis, and in this case 
 we have not merely to make the diagnosis, but to prove it; 
 because the most conspicuous fact about our present sex- 
 arrangements is a mass of organized concealment. Not merely 
 do teachers and preachers for the most part suppress all men- 
 tion of these subjects; but the defenders of our present 
 economic disorder are accustomed to acclaim the private prop- 
 erty regime as the only basis of family life. So long as people 
 hold such an idea, there is no use trying to teach them any- 
 thing on the subject. There is no use talking to them about 
 monogamous love, because all they understand is hypocrisy. 
 In this chapter, therefore, we shall proceed to hold up the 
 mirror in front of capitalist morality. 
 
 I pause and consider: Where shall I begin? At the top 
 of society, or at the bottom? With the city or the country? 
 With the old or the young? I think you care most of all 
 about your boys and girls, so I am going to tell you what 
 is happening to the youth of America in these days of tri- 
 umphant reaction. 
 
 I hare a son, about whom naturally I think a great deal; 
 just now he is a student at one of our state universities, 
 and he wrote me the other day: "I went to a dance, and 
 believe me, father, if you knew what these modern dances 
 mean, you would write something about them." I know 
 what they mean. They have come to us straight from the 
 brothels of the Argentine, among the vilest haunts of vice in 
 the world. Others have come from the jungle, where they 
 were natural. The poor creature of the jungle has his sex- 
 desire and nothing else; he is not troubled with brains, he 
 does not have a complicated social organism to build up and 
 
 15
 
 16 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 protect, consequently he does not need what are called "mor- 
 als." But we civilized people need morals, and we are losing 
 them, and our society is disintegrating, going back to the 
 howling and fighting and cannibalism of the jungle. 
 
 Prof. William James, America's greatest psychologist, tells 
 us that going through the motions appropriate to an emotion 
 automatically causes that emotion to be felt. If you watch 
 an actor preparing to rush on the stage in an emotional scene, 
 you will see him walking about, clenching his fists, stamping 
 his feet, making ferocious faces, "working himself up." And 
 now, what do you think is going on in the minds of young 
 men and women, while with their bodies they are going 
 through procedures which are nothing and can be nothing but 
 imitations of sexual contact? 
 
 The parents, it appears, are ignorant and unsophisticated, 
 and have left it for the children to find out what these dances 
 mean. In Rhode Island, one of our oldest states, is Brown 
 College, chosen by New England's aristocracy for the educa- 
 tion of its sons; and these boys go to social affairs in the 
 best homes in Providence, and they call them "petting-parties." 
 And here is what they write in their college paper : 
 
 "The modern social bud drinks, not too much, often, but 
 enough. She smokes unguardedly, swears considerably, and 
 tells 'dirty* stories. All in all, she is a most frivolous, 
 passionate, sensation-seeking little thing." 
 
 This statement, published in a college paper, causes a 
 scandal, and a newspaper reporter goes to interview the col- 
 lege boy who edits the paper, and this boy talks. He tells 
 how he met a lovely girl at a dance, and his heart was thrilled 
 with the rapture of young love. "Frankly, between you and 
 me, I was pretty smitten with this particular little lady. Felt 
 about her, don't you know, like a real guy feels about the 
 girl he could imagine himself married to. Thought she was 
 too nice to touch, almost; you know the grave sort of love 
 affair a man always has once in a lifetime. Well, we walked 
 a bit, and I guess I didn't say much, for a while. I felt 
 plenty respectfully just the same. And as we turned the 
 corner of one of the buildings here, she grasped my hand. 
 Hers was trembling. 'Love and let love is my motto, dearie,' 
 said this seraph of my dreams; 'come, we're losing a lot of 
 time getting started.' That girl thought I was dead slow. She 
 didn't know that just then I imagined the great love of my
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 17 
 
 life was just entering the door. It was cruel the way she 
 got down from the pedestal I had built for her." 
 
 Suppose I should ask you to name the influence that is 
 having most to do with shaping the thoughts of young Amer- 
 ica what would you answer? Undoubtedly, the moving 
 pictures. It is from the "movies" that your children learn 
 what life is; if I can show you that a certain thing is in the 
 "movies," you can surely not deny that it is passing every 
 day and night into the hearts and minds of millions of our 
 boys and girls. Take a vote among the girls, what would 
 they consider the most delightful destiny in life; surely nine 
 out of ten would answer, to become a screen star, and pose 
 before a world of admirers, and be paid a million dollars a 
 year. Make a test and see; and put that fact together with 
 the one I have already stated, that in order to get an impor- 
 tant job in the "movies," a girl must regularly and as a mat- 
 ter of course part with her virtue. 
 
 You will be told, no doubt, that this is a slanderous state- 
 ment, so let me give you a little evidence. I happened within 
 the past year to be in the private office of a well known mov- 
 ing picture producer, a man who is married, and takes care 
 to tell you that he loves his wife. He was producing a play, 
 the heroine of which was supposed to be a daughter of Puri- 
 tan New England. To play this part he had engaged a chaste 
 girl, and as a result was in the midst of a queer trouble, 
 which he poured out to me. His "leading man" had refused 
 to act with this girl, insisting that no girl could act a part of 
 love unless she had had passionate experience; no such thing 
 had ever been heard of in moving pictures before. Likewise, 
 the director agreed that no girl who is chaste could act for 
 the screen, and the producer asked my advice about it. Mr. 
 William Allen White, of Kansas, was present in the office, 
 and authorizes me to state that he substantiates this anecdote. 
 We both advised the producer to stand by the girl, and he 
 did so; and the picture went out, and proved to be what in 
 trade parlance is termed a "frost" ; that is to say, your children 
 didn't care for it, and it cost the producer something like a 
 hundred thousand dollars to make this attempt to defy the 
 conventions of the moving picture world. 
 
 I will tell you another story. I have a friend, a prom- 
 inent man in Los Angeles, who was appealed to by a young 
 lady who wished to act in the "movies." My friend intro-
 
 18 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 duced this young lady to a very prominent screen actor, who 
 in turn introduced her to one of the biggest producers in 
 America, one of the men whose "million dollar feature pic- 
 tures" are regularly exploited. The producer examined the 
 young lady's figure, and told her that she would "do"; he 
 added, quite casually, and as a matter of course, that she 
 would be expected to "pay the price." The young lady 
 took exception to this proposition, and gave up the chance. 
 She told my friend about it, and he, being a man of the 
 world, accustomed to dealing with the foibles of his fellow- 
 men, wrote a note to the actor, explaining that inasmuch as 
 this young lady had been socially introduced to him, and by 
 him socially introduced to the manager, she should not have 
 been expected to "pay the price." To this the actor answered 
 that my friend was correct, and he would see the manager 
 about it. The manager conceded the point, and the young 
 lady got her chance in the "movies" and made good without 
 "paying the price." This story tells you all you need to 
 know about the difference in sex ethics that society applies 
 to the "lady" and to the daughter of the common people. 
 
 You know, of course, what is the stock theme of all 
 moving pictures the virtuous daughter of the people, who 
 resists all temptations, and is finally rescued from -her would- 
 be seducer by the strong and sturdy arm of a male doll. 
 Could one ask a more perfect illustration of capitalist hy- 
 pocrisy than the fact that the girl who plays this role is 
 required to pay with her virtue for the privilege of playing 
 it! And if you know anything about young girls, you can 
 watch her playing it on the screen, and see from her every 
 gesture that what I am telling you is true. My wife knows 
 young girls, and I took her, the other day, to see a moving 
 picture. She said: "I have solved a problem. When I 
 come home on the street-cars, it happens that I ride with a 
 lot of. young girls from the high school. I have been watch- 
 ing them, and I couldn't imagine what was the matter with 
 them. All simple, girlish straightforwardness is gone out of 
 them; they are making eyes, in the strangest manner and 
 at nobody; just practicing, apparently. They wear yearn- 
 ing facial expressions; when they start to walk, they do not 
 walk, but writhe and wiggle. I thought there must be some 
 nervous eye and lip disease got abroad in the school. 
 But now, when I go to a moving picture, I discover what it 
 means. They are imitating the 'stars' on the screen!"
 
 THE BOOK or LOVE 19 
 
 In these pictures, you know, there are "ingenues," young 
 girls engaged in making a happy ending to the story by 
 capturing a rich lover; and then there are "vamps," engaged 
 in seducing young men, or breaking up some happy home. 
 In old-style melodrama it was possible to tell the "ingenue" 
 from the "vamps"; the former would trip lightly, and glance 
 coyly out of the corners of her eyes, while the "vamp" moved 
 with slow, languished writhing, blinking heavy-lidded, sin- 
 ister eyes. But now-a-days the "vamps" have learned to 
 pose as "ingenues," and the "ingenues" are as vicious as the 
 "vamps"; they both make the same glances, and culminate 
 in the same sensual swoon. It is all sex, and nothing else 
 except revolvers and fighting, and wild rushing about. 
 
 And then, too, there are the musical comedies, made 
 wholly out of sex, being known as "girl shows," or more 
 frankly still, "leg shows." A row of half naked women, 
 prancing and gyrating on the stage, and in front of them 
 rows of bald-headed old men, gazing at them greedily; also 
 college boys, or boys too imbecile to get through college, 
 sending in their cards with boxes of costly flowers. You 
 will be shocked as you read my plain statements of fact, but 
 if you are the average American, you will take your family 
 to a musical show which has come straight from the brothels 
 of Paris, every allusion of which is obscene. I remember 
 once being in a small town in the South, when one of these 
 "road shows" arrived from New York, and I realized that 
 this institution was simply a traveling house of ill fame; the 
 whole male portion of the town was a-quiver with excite- 
 ment, a mixture of lust and fear. 
 
 I live in Southern California, one of many places in 
 America where the idle rich gather for their diversion. The 
 country is dotted with palatial hotels, and a golden flood of 
 pleasure-seekers come in every winter. I have talked with 
 some of the college boys in this part of the country, and 
 also with teachers who try to save the boys ; they report 
 these "swell" hotels as hot-beds of vice, haunted by married 
 women with automobiles, and nothing to do, who wish to go 
 into the canyons for sexual riots. Even elderly women, white- 
 haired women, old enough to be your grandmother! I have 
 had them pointed out to me in these hotels, their cheeks and 
 lips covered with rouge, with pink silk tights on their calves, 
 and nothing else almost up to their knees and nothing at all
 
 20 LOTE AND SOCIETY 
 
 half way down their backs. These old women seek to prey 
 on boys, wanting their youth, and being willing to lavish 
 money upon them. They are preying on your boys you 
 prosperous business men, who have preached the gospel of 
 "each for himself," and are proud of your skill to prey upon 
 society. You heap up your fortunes, and call it success, and 
 are secure and happy. You have made your children safe 
 against want, you think ; but how are you going to make them 
 safe against the "vamps" who prey upon the overwhelming 
 excitements of youth, and betray your sons before your very 
 eyes teaching them lust in their youth, so that love may never 
 be born in their stunted hearts? All the haunts of "gilded 
 vice" are thriving, and somebody's boy is paying the interest 
 on the capital, to say nothing of paying the police. 
 
 Many years ago I paid a call upon Anthony Comstock, 
 head of the Society for the Prevention of Vice. Comstock 
 was an old-style Puritan, and many insist that he was like- 
 wise an old-style grafter. However that may be, he had a 
 collection of the literature of pornography which would cause 
 any man to hesitate in condemning his activities. There is 
 a vast traffic in this kind of thing ; it is sold by pack-peddlers 
 all over the country, and it is sold in little shops in the neigh- 
 borhood of public schools. You may be sure that in your 
 school there are some boys who know where to get it, even 
 though they will not tell what they know. I will describe 
 just one piece that a school boy brought to me, a catalogue 
 of obscene literature, for sale in Spain, and to be ordered 
 wholesale. You know how men with wares to sell will 
 expend their imaginations and exhaust their vocabulary in 
 describing to you the charms of each particular article for 
 sale. Here was a catalogue of one or two hundred pages, 
 listing thousands of items, pictures, pamphlets and books, 
 and various implements of vice, all set forth in that imitation 
 ecstasy of department stores and seed catalogues: here was 
 "something neat," here was a "fancy one," this one was 
 "a peach," and that one was "a winner." 
 
 When I was a lad, I was tramping in the Adirondack 
 mountains and was picked up by an itinerant photographer. 
 We rode all day together, and he became friendly, and showed 
 me some obscene pictures. Presently he discovered that he 
 was dealing with a young moralist, and apparently it was 
 the first time he had ever had that experience; he talked
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 21 
 
 honestly, and we became friends on a different basis. This 
 man had a wife and children at home, but he traveled all 
 over the mountains, and was like the sailor with a girl in 
 every port. Also he was thoroughly familiar with all forms 
 of unnatural vice, and took this also as a matter of course, 
 and spread it on his journeys. 
 
 The other day I read a statement by a prominent phy- 
 sician in New York; he had been talking with a police 
 captain, and had asked him to state what in his opinion was the 
 most significant development in the social life of New York. 
 The answer was, "The spread of male prostitution." Here 
 is a subject to which I have to admit my courage is unequal. 
 I cannot repeat the jokes which I have heard young men tell 
 about these matters, and about the attitude of the police to 
 them. Suffice it to say that these hideous forms of vice are 
 now the commonplace of the under-world of all our great 
 cities. The other day a friend of mine was talking with 
 a prostitute who had left a high-class resort, where the price 
 charged was ten dollars, and gone to live in a "fifty-cent 
 house," frequented by sailors. She was asked the reason, and 
 her explanation was, "The sailors are natural." Dr. William 
 J. Robinson has written in his magazine an account of the 
 haunts in Berlin which are frequented by the victims of un- 
 natural vice, there allowed to meet openly and to solicit. 
 Frank Harris, in his "Life of Oscar Wilde," tells how when 
 that scandal was at its height, and further exposure threatened, 
 swarms of the most prominent men in England suddenly 
 discovered that it was advisable for them to travel on the 
 Continent. The great public schools of England are rotten 
 with these practices; the younger boys learn them from the 
 older ones, and are victims all the rest of their lives. And 
 the corruption is creeping through our own social body and 
 you think that all you have to do is not to know about it ! 
 
 My friend Floyd Dell, reading this manuscript, insists that 
 this chapter and the one following are too severe. In case 
 others should agree with him, I quote two newspaper items 
 which appear while I am reading the proofs. The first is 
 from an interview with H. Gordon Selfridge, the London 
 merchant, telling his impressions of America. He tells about 
 the "flappers," and then about the "shifters." 
 
 "The other is the newly exploited 'shifters.' The 'shifters' 
 are an organization of mushroom growth among high school
 
 22 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 girls and boys which is spreading through the eastern States 
 and winning converts among youngsters. It is described as 
 the 'flapper Ku Klux,' and its emblem, if worn by a girl, 
 according to high school teachers and children's society leaders 
 who oppose it, to be nothing more nor less than an invitation 
 to be kissed. 
 
 "To call it an organization even is exaggeration, for the 
 'shifters' are better described as a secret understanding with- 
 out any responsible head. 
 
 "From being a seemingly harmless group whose emblem 
 was originally a brass paper clip fastened in the coat lapel it 
 has developed by rapid strides. Manufacturers of emblems 
 are coining money by the sale of hands, palm outstretched. 
 The significance is take what you want or, as the motto of the 
 order says, 'be a good fellow; get something for nothing.' 
 One of the principles is to 'do' one's parents, referred to as 
 'they.' " 
 
 The second item is an Associated Press despatch: 
 "ST. LOUIS, March 10. In reiterating his statement 
 that a girls' and a boys' secret organization requiring that all 
 applicants must have violated the moral code before admission 
 was granted, existed in a local high school, Victor J. Miller, 
 president of the Board of Police Commissioners, tonight named 
 the Soldan High School as the one in which the alleged 
 immoral conditions exist. The school is attended largely by 
 children of the wealthy West End citizens.
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 
 SEX AND THE "SMART SET" 
 
 (Portrays the moral customs of those who set the fashion in 
 our present-day world.) 
 
 We have discussed what is happening to our young people ; 
 let us next consider what our mature people are doing. Hav- 
 ing mentioned conditions in England, I will give a glimpse of 
 London "high life" two years before the war. 
 
 As a visiting writer, I was invited to luncheon at the home 
 of a woman novelist, whose books at that time were widely 
 read both in her country and here. Present at the luncheon 
 was a prominent publisher, who I afterwards learned was 
 the lady's lover; also the lady's grown and married son. 
 The publisher looked like a buxom hunting squire, but the 
 lady told me that he was very unhappy, because his wife 
 would not divorce him. The lady had just come from a 
 week-end party at the home of an earl, who at this moment 
 occupies one of the highest posts in the gift of the British 
 Empire. Things had gone comically wrong at this country 
 house party, she said, because the hostess had failed to remem- 
 ber that Lord So-and-so was at present living with Lady 
 Somebody-else. One of the duties of hostesses at house parties, 
 it appears, is to know who is living with whom, in order 
 that they may be put in connecting rooms. In this case his 
 Lordship had been grouchy, and everybody's pleasure had 
 been spoiled. 
 
 This produced a discussion of the subject of marriage, 
 and the son remarked that marriage was like an old slipper; 
 you wore it, because you had got used to it, but you did 
 not talk about it, because it was unimportant and stupid. I 
 went away, and happened to mention these matters to a friend, 
 who had met this woman novelist in Nice. The novelist had 
 there, in a group of people, been introduced to a young girl 
 who was suffering from neurasthenia. "My dear," said the 
 novelist, affectionately, "what you need is to have an illegit- 
 imate baby." 
 
 This, you will say, is the "old world," and you always 
 
 23
 
 24 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 knew that it was corrupt. If so, let me tell you a few things 
 that I have seen among the "upper circles" of our own great 
 and virtuous democracy. My first acquaintance with New 
 York "society" came after the publication of "The Jungle." 
 As the author of that book I was a sensation, almost as much 
 so as if I had won the heavy-weight championship of the 
 world. Out of curiosity I accepted an invitation for a week- 
 end amid what is called the "hunting set" of Long Island. 
 Here was a gorgeous palace with many tapestries, and soft- 
 footed servants, and decanters and cocktails at every stage 
 of one's journey about the place, like coaling stations on the 
 trade routes of the British Empire. One of the first sights 
 that caught my young eye was a large and stately lady in 
 semi-undress, smoking a big black cigar. If I were to men- 
 tion her name, every newspaper reader in America would 
 know her; and before I had been introduced to her, I heard 
 two young men in evening dress make an obscene remark 
 about her, and what she was waiting for that evening. 
 
 I discovered quickly that, while there was a great deal of 
 sex among these people, there was very little love. There was 
 principally a wish to score cleverly and subtly at the expense 
 of another person's feelings. It is called the "smart set," 
 you understand, and I will give you an idea of how "smart" 
 it is. I was walking down a passage with a lady, and on a 
 couch sat another lady, side by side with a certain very 
 famous lawyer, whose golden eloquence you have probably 
 listened to from platforms, and whom for the purpose of this 
 anecdote I will name Jones. Mr. Jones and the lady on the 
 sofa were sitting very close together, and my companion, with 
 a bright smile over her shoulder, called out: "Be careful, 
 Mary ; you'll be scattering a lot of little Joneses around here 
 if you don't watch out!" Quite "continental," you perceive; 
 and a long way from the Puritanism of our ancestors! 
 
 From there I went to the billiard-room, and observed a 
 young man of fashion trying to play billiards when he was 
 half drunk. It was a funny spectacle, and they took away 
 his cigarette by force, for fear he would drop it on the cloth 
 of the billiard table. Pretty soon he was telling about a racing 
 meet, and an orgy with negro women in a stable. Therefore 
 I returned to where the ladies were gathered, and one middle- 
 aged matron, who had read widely, including some of my 
 books, engaged me in serious conversation. I came later on to
 
 THE BOOK or LOVE 25 
 
 know her rather well, and she told me her views of love; 
 the source of all the sex troubles of humanity was that they 
 took the relationship seriously. Modern discoveries made it 
 unnecessary to attach importance to it. She herself, acting 
 upon this theory, probably had had relations with my friends, 
 reading the proofs of this book, beg me to omit the number 
 of men, because you would not believe me! 
 
 You may argue that this is not typical; say that I fell 
 into the clutches of some particular group of degenerates. 
 All I can tell you is that these people are as "socially prom- 
 inent" as any in New York City. I will say furthermore that 
 I have sat in the home of the best known corporation lawyer 
 in America, who was paid a million dollars to organize the 
 steel trust the late James B. Dill, at that time a member 
 of the Court of Appeals of New Jersey and have heard him 
 "muck-rake" his business friends by the hour with stories of 
 that sort. I have heard him tell of the "steel crowd" hiring 
 a trolley car and a load of prostitutes and champagne, and 
 taking an all-night trip from one city to another, smashing 
 up both the car and the prostitutes. I have heard him tell 
 of sitting on the deck of a Sound steamer, and overhearing 
 two of his Wall Street associates and their wives arranging 
 to trade partners for the night. 
 
 I have mentioned a lady who had a great many lovers. 
 Once in the dining-room of a club on Fifth Avenue, commonly 
 known as "the Millionaires'," a companion pointed out various 
 people, many of whom I had read about in the newspapers, and 
 told me funny stories about them. "See that old boy with 
 a note-book," said my host. "That is Jacob So-and-so, and 
 he is entering up the cost of his lunch. He keeps accounts 
 of everything, even of his women. He told me he had had 
 over a thousand, and they had cost him over a million." 
 
 . It is impossible to say what is the most terrible thing in 
 capitalist society, but among the most terrible are assuredly 
 the old men. The richest and most powerful banker in Amer- 
 ica was in his sex habits the merry jest of New York society. 
 He took toward women the same attitude as King Edward 
 VII; if he wanted one, he went up and asked for her, and 
 it made no difference who she was, or where she was. This 
 man's personal living expenses were five thousand dollars a 
 day, and all women understood that they might have anything 
 within reason.
 
 26 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 When I was a boy, living in New York, there was a cer- 
 tain aged money-lender about whom one read something in 
 the newspapers almost every day. He was a prominent figure, 
 because he was worth eighty millions, yet wore an old, rusty 
 black suit, and saved every penny. Every now and then you 
 would read in the paper how some woman had been arrested 
 for attempting to blackmail him in his office. It seemed 
 puzzling, because you wouldn't think of him as a likely sub- 
 ject for blackmail. Some years later I met Dorothy Richard- 
 son, author of "The Long Day," a very fine book which has 
 been undeservedly forgotten. Miss Richardson had been a 
 reporter for the New York Herald, and had been sent to 
 interview this old money-lender. She was ushered into his 
 private office, and as soon as the attendant had gone out and 
 closed the door, the old man came up, and without a word 
 of preliminaries grabbed her in his arms like a gorilla. She 
 fought and scratched, and got out, and was wise enough to 
 say nothing about it; therefore there was nothing published 
 about another attempt to blackmail the aged money-lender! 
 
 What this means is that men of unlimited means live lives 
 of unbridled lust, and then in their old age they are helpless 
 victims of their own impulses. There was a certain enor- 
 mously wealthy United States Senator from West Virginia, 
 who came very near being Vice President of the United 
 States. This doddering old man would go about the streets 
 of Washington with a couple of very decorous and carefully 
 trained attendants; and whenever an attractive young woman 
 would pass on the street, or when one would approach the 
 Senator, these two attendants would quietly slip their arms 
 into his and hold him fast. They would do this so that the 
 ordinary person would not suspect what was going on, but 
 would think the old man was being supported. 
 
 You do not have to take these things on my word; the 
 newspapers are full of them all the time, and they ar.e proven 
 in court. Just now as I write, the president of the most 
 powerful bank in America is claiming in court that his children 
 are not his own, but that their father is an Indian guide. His 
 wife, on the other hand, is accusing the banker of having 
 played the role of husband to several other women. He 
 would take these women traveling on his yacht, which, quaint- 
 ly enough, was termed the "Modesty." 
 
 Also the papers have been full of the "Hamon case."
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 27 
 
 Here is a wealthy man, Republican National Committeeman 
 from Oklahoma, who is about to go to Washington to advise 
 our new President whom to appoint to office from that state. 
 Before he goes, he casts off his mistress, and she shoots him. 
 She was his secretary, it appears, and helped him to make 
 his fortune; she has made many friends, and a million dol- 
 lars is spent to save her life. The prosecuting attorney calls 
 her a "painted snake," and accuses her of having sat week 
 after week "displaying to the jury twenty-four inches of silk 
 stockinged shin-bone." The jury, apparently unable to with- 
 stand this allurement, acquits the woman, and she announces 
 that she intends to bring suit under the man's will to get his 
 money! Also, she is going into the "movies," and tells us 
 that it is to be "for educational purposes." Everything in 
 our capitalist society must be "educational," you understand. 
 It was P. T. Barnum who discovered that the American people 
 would flock to look at a five-legged calf, if it was presented 
 as "educational." 
 
 The moving pictures and the theatres are the honey-pots 
 which gather the feminine beauty and youthful charm of our 
 country for the convenience of rich men's lust. These girls 
 swarm in the theatrical agencies, and in the artists' studios; 
 they starve for a while, and finally they yield. In every great 
 city there are thousands of men of wealth, whose only occu- 
 pation is to prey upon such girls. I know a certain theatrical 
 manager, the most famous in the United States, a sensual, 
 stout little Jew. He is a man of culture and subtle insight, 
 and in the course of his conversation he described to me, quite 
 casually and as a matter of course, the charm of deflowering 
 a virgin. Nothing could equal that sensation; the first time 
 was the last. 
 
 Many years ago there was a horrible scandal in New York. 
 The most famous architect in America was murdered, and 
 the newspapers probed into his life, and it was revealed to 
 us that many of the most famous artists and men about town 
 in New York maintained elaborate studios, equipped with 
 every luxury, all the paraphernalia of all the vices of the 
 ages ; and through these places there flowed an endless stream 
 of beautiful young girls. In every large city in America you 
 will find an "athletic club," and if you go there and listen to 
 the gossip, you discover that there are scores of idle rich men 
 with automobiles and private apartments, and a staff of pro-
 
 28 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 curers used in preying, not merely upon young girls, but also 
 upon young boys. And these are not merely the children of 
 the poor, they are the children of all but the rich and power- 
 ful. In the "movies" you see pictures of girls lured into 
 automobiles, and carried out into the country, or seduced by 
 means of "knock-out drops," and you think this is just "melo- 
 drama" ; but it is happening all the time. In every big city 
 of our country the police know that hundreds of young girls 
 disappear every year. At a recent convention of police chiefs 
 in Washington, it was stated, from police records, that sixty- 
 thousand girls disappear every year in the United States, 
 leaving no trace. Unless the parents happen to be in position 
 to make a fuss, not even the names of the girls are published 
 in the newspapers. I do not ask you to believe such things 
 on my word; believe District Attorney Sims of Chicago, who 
 made the most thorough study of this subject ever made in 
 America, and wrote: 
 
 "When a white slave is sold and landed in a house or dive 
 she becomes a prisoner. ... In each of these places is a 
 room having but one door, to which the keeper holds the 
 key. Here are locked all the street clothes, shoes and ordinary 
 apparel. . . . The finery provided for the girls is of a 
 nature to make their appearance on the street impossible. 
 Then in addition to this handicap, the girl is placed at once 
 in debt to the keeper for a wardrobe. . . . She cannot 
 escape while she is in debt, and she can never get out of 
 debt. Not many of the women in this class expect to live 
 more than ten years perhaps the average is less. Many die 
 painful deaths by disease, many by consumption, but it is 
 hardly beyond the truth to say that suicide is their general 
 expectation,"
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 SEX AND THE POOR 
 
 (Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and the 
 diseases which result from it) 
 
 It is manifest that the rich cannot indulge in vices, with- 
 out drawing the poor after them; and in addition to this, 
 the poor have their own evil instincts, which fester in neglect. 
 There were several hundred thousand dark rooms, that is rooms 
 without light or ventilation, in New York City before the war. 
 Now the country is reported to be short a million homes, and 
 in New York City working girls are sleeping six or eight in 
 a room. In the homes of the poor in the slums, parents and 
 children and boarders all sleep in one room indiscriminately, 
 and the world moves back to that primitive communism, in 
 which incest is an everyday affair, and little children learn 
 all the vices there are. I have in my hand a pamphlet by a 
 physician, in charge of a hospital in New York, who in 
 fifteen years has examined nine hundred children who have 
 been raped, and the age of the youngest was eight months ! 
 I have another pamphlet by a settlement worker, who dis- 
 cusses the problem of the thousands of deserted wives, most 
 of them with children, many with children yet unborn. As 
 I write, there are millions of men out of work in our country, 
 and these men are desperate, and they quit and take to the 
 road. They join the army of the casual workers, the "blanket 
 stiffs" ; and, of course, the more there are of these men, the 
 more prostitutes there have to be, and the more homosexuality 
 there will inevitably be. 
 
 Also the girls are out of work, and are on the streets. 
 Many years ago I visited the mill towns of New England, 
 "she-towns" they are called, and one of the young fellows 
 said to me that you could buy a girl there for the price of 
 a sandwich. Read "The Long Day," to which I have pre- 
 viously referred, and see how our working girls live. Dor- 
 othy Richardson describes her room-mate, who read cheap 
 novels which she found in the gutter weeklies. She read 
 them over and over; when she had got to the bottom of the 
 
 29
 
 30 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 pile, she began again, because her mind was so weak that she 
 had forgotten everything. And then one day Miss Richard- 
 son happened to be groping in a corner of a closet, and 
 came upon a great pile of bottles, and examined them, and 
 was made sick with horror abortion mixtures. 
 
 Dr. William J. Robinson, an authority on the subject, 
 estimates that there are one million abortions in the United 
 States every year. Some of these are accidental, caused by 
 venereal disease, but the vast majority are deliberate acts, 
 crimes under the law, murder of human life. Dr. Robinson 
 also estimates, from the many thousands of cases which come 
 to him, that ninety-five per cent of all men have at some time 
 practiced self-abuse. He is a strenuous opponent of what he 
 calls "hysteria" on the subject of venereal disease, and insists 
 that its prevalence is exaggerated; that instead of one person 
 in ten being syphilitic, as is commonly stated, the proportion 
 is only one in twenty. He insists that the percentage of per- 
 sons having had gonorrhea is only twenty-five per cent, 
 instead of seventy-five or eighty-five. I find that other author- 
 ities generally agree in the statement that fifty per cent of 
 young men become infected with some venereal disease before 
 they reach the age of thirty. The Committee of Seven in 
 New York estimated in 1903 that there were two hundred 
 thousand cases of syphilis in the city, and eight hundred 
 thousand of gonorrhea. There were villages in France before 
 the war in which twenty-five per cent of the inhabitants were 
 syphilitic, and in Russia there were towns in which it was 
 said that every person was syphilitic. We may safely say 
 that these latter are the only towns in Europe in which there 
 was not an enormous increase of this disease during and since 
 the war. 
 
 What are the consequences of these diseases? The con- 
 sequences are frightful suffering, not merely to persons guilty 
 of immorality, but to innocent persons. Dr. Morrow, gen- 
 erally recognized as the leading authority on this subject, 
 estimates that ten per cent of all wives are infected with 
 venereal disease by their husbands; he estimates that thirty 
 per cent of all the infected women in New York were wives 
 who had got the disease from their husbands. It is estimated 
 that thirty per cent of all the births, where either parent has 
 syphilis, result in abortions. It is estimated that fifty per cent 
 of childlessness in marriage is caused by gonorrhea, and twen-
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 31 
 
 ty-five per cent of all existing blindness. In Germany, before 
 the war, there were thirty thousand persons born blind from 
 this cause. It is estimated that ninety-five per cent of all abdom- 
 inal operations performed upon women are due to gonorrhea. 
 And any of these horrors may fall upon persons who lead 
 lives of the strictest chastity. There was a case reported 
 in Germany of 236 children who contracted venereal disease 
 from swimming in a public bath. 
 
 All these things are products of our system of marriage- 
 plus-prostitution. They are all part of that system, and no 
 study of the system is complete without them. Everywhere 
 throughout modern civilization prostitution is an enormous 
 and lucrative industry. In New York it is estimated to give 
 employment to two hundred thousand women, to say nothing 
 of the managers, and the runners, and the men who live off 
 the women. There are thousands of resorts, large and small, 
 high-priced and cheap, and the police know all about it, and 
 derive a handsome income from it. And you find it the same 
 in every great city of the world; in every port where sailors 
 land, or every place where crowds of men are expected. If 
 there is to be a football game, or a political convention, the 
 managers of the industry know about it, and while they 
 may never have heard the libel that Socialism preaches sex- 
 ual license, they all know that capitalism practices it, and 
 they provide the necessary means. In the United States 
 there are estimated to be a half a million prostitutes, count- 
 ing the inmates of houses alone. 
 
 During the late war, at the army bases in France, the 
 British government maintained official brothels; but if you 
 published anything about this in England, you ran a chance 
 of having your paper suppressed. During the occupation of 
 the Rhine country, the French sent in negro troops, savages 
 from the heart of Africa, whose custom it is to cut off the 
 ears of their enemies in battle; and the French army com- 
 pelled the German population to supply white women for 
 these troops. I have quoted in "The Brass Check" a pious 
 editorial from the Los Angeles Times, bidding the mothers 
 of America be happy, because "our boys in France" were 
 safe in the protecting arms of the Y. M. C. A. and the Knights 
 of Columbus. I dared not publish at this time a passage 
 which I had clipped from the London Clarion, in which A. M. 
 Thompson told how he watched the "doughboys" in the cafes
 
 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 of Paris, with a girl on each knee, and a glass of wine in 
 each hand. 
 
 I will add one little anecdote, giving you a glimpse of the 
 sex conventions of war. The American army made desperate 
 efforts to keep down venereal disease, and required all men 
 to report to their regimental surgeon immediately after hav- 
 ing had sex relations. Our army moved into Coblentz, and 
 the regulations strictly forbade any fraternizing with the 
 inhabitants. But immediately it was discovered that there 
 was an increase of disease, and investigation was made, and 
 revealed that men had been ceasing to report to the surgeons, 
 because they were afraid of being punished for having "frat- 
 ernized with the enemy." So a new order was issued, pro- 
 viding that having sexual intercourse would not be considered 
 as "fraternizing." I do not know any better way to distinguish 
 my ideal of morality from the military ideal, than to say 
 that according to my understanding of it, the sex relationship 
 should always and everywhere imply and include "fraterniz- 
 ing." 
 
 Finally, in concluding this picture of our present-day sex 
 arrangements, there is a brief word to be said about divorce. 
 In the year 1916, the last statistics available as I write, there 
 were just over a million marriages in the United- States, and 
 there were over one hundred and twelve thousand divorces. 
 This would indicate that one marriage in every nine resulted in 
 shipwreck. But as a matter of fact the proportion is greater, 
 because the marriages necessarily precede the divorces, and the 
 proportion of divorces in 1916 should be calculated upon the 
 number of marriages which took place some five or ten years 
 previously. Of the one million marriages in 1916, we may say 
 that one in seven or one in eight will end in the divorce 
 courts. Let this suffice for a glimpse of the system of mar- 
 riage-plus-prostitution a field of weeds which we have some- 
 how to plow up and prepare for a harvest of rational and 
 honest love!
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 SEX AND NATURE 
 
 (Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of nat- 
 ural or physical disharmony.) 
 
 Elie Metchnikoff, one of the greatest of scientists, wrote 
 a book entitled "The Nature of Man," in which he studied 
 the human organism from the point of view of biology, 
 demonstrating that in our bodies are a number of relics of 
 past stages of evolution, no longer useful, but rather a source 
 of danger and harm. We have, for example, in the inner 
 corner of the eye a relic of that third eyelid whereby the 
 eagle is enabled to look at the sun. This is a harmless relic. 
 But we have also an appendix, a degenerate organ of diges- 
 tion, or gland of secretion, which now serves as a center of 
 infection and source of danger. We have likewise a lower 
 bowel, a survival of our hay-eating days, and a cause of auto- 
 intoxication and premature death. Among the sources of 
 trouble, Metchnikoff names the fact that the human male 
 possesses a far greater quantity of sexual energy than is 
 required for purposes of procreation. This becomes a cause 
 of disharmony and excess, it causes man to wreck his health 
 and destroy himself. 
 
 Manifestly, this is a serious matter; for if it is true, 
 our efforts to find health and happiness in love are doomed 
 to failure, and Lecky is right when he describes the prosti- 
 tute as the "guardian of virtue," the eternal and necessary 
 scapegoat of humanity. But I do not believe it is true; I 
 think that here is one more case of the endless blundering 
 of scientists and philosophers who attempt to teach physi- 
 ology, politics, religion and law, without having made a study 
 of economics. I do not believe that the sex troubles of 
 mankind are physiological in their nature, but have their 
 origin in our present system of class privilege. I believe 
 they are caused, not by the blunders of nature, but by the 
 blunders of man as a social animal. 
 
 Let us take a glimpse at primitive man. I choose the 
 Marquesas Islands, because we have complete reports about 
 
 33
 
 34 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 them from numerous observers. Here was a race of people, 
 not interfered with by civilization, who manifested all that 
 overplus of sexual energy to which Metchnikoff calls atten- 
 tion. They placed no restraint whatever upon sex activity, 
 they had no conception of such an idea. Their games and 
 dances were sex play, and so also, in great part, was their 
 religion. Yet we do not find that they wrecked themselves. 
 Physically speaking, they were one of the most perfect races 
 of which we have record. Both the men and women were 
 beautiful; they were active and strong from childhood to 
 old age, and here is the significant thing they were happy. 
 They were a laughing, dancing, singing race. They hardly 
 knew grief or fear at all. They knew how to live, and they 
 enjoyed every process and aspect of their lives, just as children 
 do, naively and simply. This included their sex life; and 
 I think it assures us that there can be no such fundamental 
 physical disharmony in the human organism as the great Rus- 
 sian scientist thought he had discovered. 
 
 Is it not a fact that throughout nature a superfluity of 
 any kind of energy or product may be a source of happiness, 
 rather than of distress? Consider the singing of the birds! 
 Or consider nature's impulse to cover a field with useless 
 plants, and how by a little cunning, we are able to turn it into 
 a harvest for our own use! In the life of our bodies one 
 may show the same thing again and again. We have within 
 us the possibility of and the impulse toward more muscular 
 activity than our survival makes necessary; but we do not 
 regard this additional energy as a curse of nature, and a 
 peril to our lives we turn out and play baseball. We have 
 an impulse to see more than is necessary, so we climb moun- 
 tains, or go traveling. We have an impulse to hear more, 
 so we go to a concert. We have an impulse to think more, 
 so we play chess, or whist, or write books and accumulate 
 libraries. Never do we think of these activities as signs of 
 an irrevocable blunder on the part of nature. 
 
 But about the activities of love we feel differently; and 
 why is this? If I say that it is because we have an unwhole- 
 some and degraded attitude toward love, because, as a result 
 of religious superstition we fear it, and dare not deal with 
 it honestly, the reader may suspect that I am preparing to 
 hint at some self-indulgence, some form of sex orgy such 
 as the "turkey trot" and the "bunny hug" and the "grizzly
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 35 
 
 bear," the "shimmy" and the "toddle" and the "cuddle." I 
 hasten to explain that I do not mean any of the abnormali- 
 ties and monstrosities of present-day fashionable life. Neither 
 do I mean that we should set out to emulate the happy can- 
 nibals in the South Seas. In the Book of the Mind I set 
 forth as carefully as I knew how, the difference between 
 nature and man, the life of instinct and the life of reason. 
 It is my conviction that if civilized life is to go on, there 
 must be a far wider extension of judgment and self-control 
 in human affairs; our lost happiness will be found, not by 
 going "back to nature," but by going forward to a new and 
 higher state, planned by reason and impelled by moral ideal- 
 ism. 
 
 But we find ourselves face to face with horrible sex dis- 
 orders, and a great scientist tells us they are nature's tragic 
 blunder, of which we are the helpless victims. Manifestly, 
 the way to decide this question is to go to nature, and see if 
 primitive people, having the same physical organism as ours, 
 had the same troubles and spent their lives in the same 
 misery. If they did, then it may be that we are doomed; 
 but if they did not, then we can say with certainty that it is 
 not nature, but ourselves, who have blundered. Our task 
 then becomes to apply reason to the problem; to take our 
 present sex arrangements, our field of bad-smelling weeds, 
 and plow it thoroughly, and sow it with good seed, and raise 
 a harvest of happiness in love. It is my belief that, admitting 
 true love honest and dignified and rational love it .is pos- 
 sible to pour into it any amount of sex energy, to invent a 
 whole new system of beautiful and happy love play.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 LOVE AND ECONOMICS 
 
 (Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due to 
 the displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.) 
 
 If the cause of our sex disorders is not physiological, 
 what is it? Everything in nature must have a cause, and 
 this includes human nature, the actions and feelings of men, 
 both as individuals and as groups. We hear the saying : "You 
 can't change human nature" ; but the fact is that human nature 
 is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can 
 watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, 
 and if we had the intelligence to use the forces now at our 
 command, we could mold human nature, as precisely as a 
 brewer converts a carload of hops into a certain brand of 
 beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and virtue 
 are products like vinegar." 
 
 Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and 
 class privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and 
 the natural sources of wealth by a group. This enables the 
 privileged group to live in idleness upon the labor of the 
 rest of society; it confers unlimited power with practically 
 no responsibility a strain which not one human being in a 
 thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the 
 past five thousand years is one demonstration after another 
 that the conferring upon a clas.s of power without responsi- 
 bility means the collapse of that class and the downfall of 
 its civilization. 
 
 So far as concerns the ruling class male, what the system 
 of privilege does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge 
 his sex desires. What it does for the female is to submit 
 her to the male desires, and to abolish that mutuality in sex, 
 that interaction between male and female influence, which is 
 the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a predatory 
 society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of class as 
 well as of sex, and the result is the perverting of sexual 
 selection, and a constantly increasing tendency towards the 
 survival of the unfit. 
 
 36
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 37 
 
 In a state of nature the males compete among them- 
 selves for the favor of the female. The female is not raped, 
 nor is she kidnapped; on the contrary, she exercises her 
 prerogative, she inspects the various male charms which are 
 set before her, and selects those which please her, according 
 to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak 
 and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce them- 
 selves, and the procreating is done by the highest specimens 
 of the type. 
 
 But now we have a world which is ruled by money, in 
 which opportunity, and indeed survival, depend upon money, 
 and the whole tendency of society is to make money stand- 
 ards supreme. We do not like to admit this, of course; 
 our instincts revolt against it, and our higher faculties rein- 
 force the revolt, so we carefully veil our money motives,, 
 and invent polite phrases to conceal them. You will hear 
 people deny it is money which determines admission into what 
 is called "society," the intimate life of the ruling class. They 
 will tell you that it is not money, it is "good taste," "refine- 
 ment," "charm of personality," and so on. But if you analyze 
 all these things, you speedily discover that they are made out 
 of money; they are symbols 6f the possession of money, 
 devised by those who possess it, as a means of keeping them- 
 selves apart from those who do not possess it. I would safely 
 defy a member of the ruling class to name a single element 
 in what he calls "refinement," or "good taste," that is not in 
 its ultimate analysis a symbol of the possession of money. 
 Let it be the pronunciation of a word, or the cut of a coat, 
 or the method of handling a fork whatever it may be, it 
 is part of a code, revealing that the person, or more impor- 
 tant yet, the ancestors of the person, have belonged to the 
 leisure class, and have had time and opportunity to learn to 
 do things in a certain precise conventional way. I say "con- 
 ventional," for very frequently these tests have no relation- 
 ship whatever to reality. Considered as a matter of common 
 sense and convenience, it is a great deal better to eat peas 
 with a spoon than with a fork, and to use both a knife and 
 fork in eating lettuce; but if you eat peas with a spoon, or 
 use a knife on lettuce, every member of the ruling class will 
 instantly know that you are an interloper, as much so as 
 if you took to throwing the china at your hostess. 
 
 Our culture is a money culture, our standards are money
 
 38 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 standards, and our sex decisions are based upon money, not 
 upon love. Any man can have money in our society, provided 
 the accident of birth favors him, and it is everywhere known 
 that any man who has money can get a wife. It is certainly 
 not true that any man with no money can get a wife, and 
 it is true that most men who have little money have to 
 take wives who have less that is, who belong to a lower 
 class, according to the world's standards. The average young 
 girl of the propertied classes is trained for marriage as for 
 any other business. She is taught to be sexually cold, but 
 to imitate sexual excitement deliberately, so as to arouse it 
 in the male, and to keep herself surrounded with a swarm 
 of males; this being the basis of her prestige, the factor 
 which will cause the "eligible" man, the "catch," to desire 
 her. In polite society this proceeding is known as "coquetry," 
 or "charm," and it would be no exaggeration to say that 
 seventy-five per cent of all the novels so far written in the 
 world are expositions of this activity; also that when we 
 go to the theater, we go in order to watch and sympathize 
 with these manifestations of pecuniary sexuality. 
 
 As a rule the young girl knows what she is doing, but 
 she is taught to camouflage it, to preserve her "innocence." 
 She would not dream of marrying for money; she wants to 
 marry something "distinguished" that is to say, something 
 which has received the stamp of approval from a world which 
 approves money. She wants to marry somebody who is 
 "elegant," who is in "good form"; she wants to marry with- 
 out having to think about the horrid subject of money at all, 
 and so she is carefully chaperoned, and confined to a world 
 where nothing but money is to be met. In Tennyson's poem, 
 "The Northern Farmer," the old fellow is coaching his son 
 on the subject of marriage, and they are driving along a 
 road, and the farmer listens to his horses' hoofs, and they are 
 saying, "Proputty, proputty, proputty !" The farmer sums up 
 in one sentence the doctrine of pecuniary marriage as it is 
 taught to the ruling class virgin: "Doan't thee marry for 
 money, but goa wheer money is." 
 
 In this process, of course, the ruling class virgin must 
 spend a great deal of money in order to keep up her own 
 prestige; and when she is married, she must spend it to 
 keep up the prestige of her unmarried sisters, and then of 
 her children. As a result of this, the only ruling class males
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 39 
 
 who can afford to marry are the rich ones. There are always 
 some who are richer, and these are the most desirable; so 
 the tendency with each generation is to put the period of 
 marriage further off; the man has to wait until he has accu- 
 mulated enough "proputty" to satisfy the girl of his desires 
 a girl whom he admires because of her pecuniary prestige. 
 He delays, and meantime he satisfies his passions with the 
 daughters of the poor. As a result of this, when he does 
 finally come to marry, he is apt to be unlovely and unlovable. 
 The woman frequently does not love him at all, but takes 
 him cold-bloodedly because he is "eligible"; in that case she 
 is a cold and "sexless" wife. Or else, after she has married 
 him she discovers his unloveliness, and either decides that 
 all men are selfish brutes, and reconciles herself to a celibate 
 life, or else she goes out and preys upon the domestic hap- 
 piness of other women.
 
 CHAPTER XXXV 
 
 MARRIAGE AND MONEY 
 
 (Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher form 
 of prostitution known as the "marriage of convenience.") 
 
 I realize that all these sex problems are complicated. 
 Every case is individual, and in no two cases can you give 
 exactly the same explanation. But it is my thesis that what- 
 ever the cause, if you trace down the causes of the cause, 
 you will find economic inequality and class privilege. It is 
 evident in the lives of the rich, and it is even more evident 
 in the lives of the poor, who are not permitted the luxury 
 of pretense. The poor live in a world dominated by forces 
 which they seldom understand, subjected to enormous pres- 
 sure which crushes and destroys them, without their being 
 able to see it or touch it. In the world of the poor there 
 is first of all poverty; there is insecurity of employment and 
 insufficiency of wage, and the daily and hourly terror of star- 
 vation and ruin. Above this is a world of power and luxury, 
 a wonderland of marvels and thrills, seen through a colored 
 mist of romance. The working-class girl, born to drudgery 
 and perpetual child-bearing, has a brief hour in which her 
 cheeks are red and her beauty is ripe; and out of the heaven 
 above her steps a male creature panoplied in the armor of 
 ruling class prestige that is to say, a dress suit and scatter- 
 ing about him a shower of automobile rides, jewelry and candy 
 and flowers. She opens her arms to him; and then, when 
 her brief hour of rapture is past, she becomes the domestic 
 drudge of some workingman, or else the inmate of a brothel. 
 
 It is a custom of social workers and church people, seek- 
 ing data about these painful subjects, to interview numbers 
 of prostitutes, and question them as to the causes of their 
 "fall"; so you read statistics to the effect that seventeen per 
 cent of prostitution has an economic cause, that twenty-six 
 per cent is caused by love of finery, etc. These pious people, 
 employed by the ruling class to maintain ruling class prestige 
 by demonstrating that wage slavery has nothing to do with 
 
 40
 
 THE BOOK or LOVE 41 
 
 white slavery, attain their purpose by restricting the word 
 "economic" to food and shelter; forgetting that young girls 
 do not live by bread alone, but also by ribbons, and silk 
 stockings, and moving picture shows, and trips to Coney Island, 
 and everything else that gives a momentary escape from 
 drudgery into joy. We all understand, of course, that the 
 daughters of the rich are entitled to joy, and we provide 
 them with it as a matter of course; but the daughters of 
 the poor are supposed to work in a cotton mill ten or eleven 
 hours a day from earliest childhood, and the joy we provide 
 for them is vicarious. As a woman poet sets it forth: 
 
 . "The golf links lie so near the mill 
 
 That almost every day. 
 The laboring children can look out 
 And see the men at play." 
 
 Some years ago my wife and I were invited to meet Mrs. 
 Mary J. Goode, a keeper of brothels in the "Tenderloin," 
 who had revolted against the system of police graft, and had 
 exposed it in the newspapers. My wife questioned her closely 
 as to the psychology of people in her business, and she insisted 
 that the majority of prostitutes were not oversexed, nor were 
 they feeble minded; they were women who had loved and 
 trusted, and had been "thrown down." As Mrs. Goode 
 phrased it, they said to themselves: "Never again! After 
 this, they'll pay!" 
 
 As a matter of fact, the causes of prostitution are so 
 largely economic that the other factors are hardly worth men- 
 tioning. The sale of sex is unknown in savage society, and 
 would be unknown in a Socialist society. If here and there 
 some degenerate individual would rather sell her sex than 
 do her share of honest labor in a free and just world, such 
 an individual would become a patient in the psychopathic 
 ward of a public hospital. Economic forces drive women to 
 prostitution, first, by direct starvation, and second, by teach- 
 ing them money standards of prestige, the ideal of living 
 without working, which is the heaven achieved by the rich 
 and longed for by the poor. Contributory to the process 
 are policemen, politicians, and judges who protect the prop- 
 erty of the rich, and prey upon the disinherited; also news- 
 paper editors, college professors, priests of God and preach-
 
 42 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 ers of Jesus, who attribute the social evil to "original sin," 
 or the "weakness of human nature." 
 
 So far as men are concerned, economic forces operate 
 by three main channels ; late marriage, loveless marriage, and 
 drudgery in wives. You will find patronizing and maintain- 
 ing the brothels the following kinds of males; first, young 
 boys who have been taught that it is "manly" to gratify their 
 sex impulses; second, young men who take it for granted 
 that they cannot afford to marry; third, old bachelors who 
 have looked at marriage and decided that it is not a paying 
 proposition; fourth, married men who have been picked out 
 for their money, and have come to the conclusion that "good 
 women" are necessarily sexless; and finally, married men 
 whose wives have lost the power to charm them by continuous 
 childbearing, and the physical and nervous strain of domestic 
 slavery. 
 
 This latter applies not merely to the wives of the poor. 
 It applies to members of the middle classes, and even of the 
 richer classes, because the job of managing many servants 
 is often as trying as the doing of one's own work. To explain 
 how domestic drudgery is caused by economic pressure would 
 require a little essay in itself. The home is the place where 
 the man keeps his sex property apart under lock and key, 
 and it is, therefore, the portion of our civilization least 
 influenced by modern ideas. Women still drudge in separate 
 kitchens and nurseries, as they have drudged for thousands 
 of years. They cook their dinners over separate fires, and 
 have each their own little group of children, generally ill cared 
 for, because the work is done by an untrained amateur. 
 Moreover, the prestige of this home has to be kept up, because 
 the social position and future prosperity of the man depend 
 upon it. The children must be dressed in frilled and starched 
 clothing, which makes them miserable, and wears out the 
 tempers and pocketbooks of the mothers. Costly entertain- 
 ments must be given, and twice a day a meal must be prepared 
 for the father of the family all good wives have learned the 
 ancient formula for the retention of masculine affections: 
 "Feed the brute!" Living in a world of pecuniary prestige, 
 every particle of the woman's surplus energy must go into 
 some form of ostentation, into buying or making things which 
 are futile and meaningless. In such a blind world, dazed by 
 such a struggle, women become irritable, they lose their sex
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 43 
 
 charm, they forget all about love; so the husband gives up 
 hoping for the impossible, accepts the common idea that love 
 and marriage are incompatible, and adopts the formula that 
 what his wife doesn't know will not hurt her. 
 
 And step by step, as economic evolution progresses, as 
 vested wealth becomes more firmly established and claims for 
 itself a larger and larger share of the total product of society 
 so step by step you find the pecuniary ideals becoming more 
 firmly established, you find marriage becoming more and 
 more a matter of property, and less and less a matter of love. 
 In European countries there may still be some love mar- 
 riages among the poor, but in the upper classes there is no 
 longer any pretense of such a thing, and if you spoke of it 
 you would be considered absurd. In countries of fresh and 
 naive commercialism, like America, the women select the men 
 because of their money prestige ; but in Germany, the process 
 has gone a step further the men are so firmly established 
 in their class positions that they insist upon being bought 
 with a fortune. The same is true when titled foreigners 
 condescend to visit our "land of the dollar." They will 
 stoop to a vulgar American wife only in case her parents 
 will make a direct settlement of a fortune upon the husband, 
 and then they take her back home, and find their escape from 
 boredom in the highly cultivated mistresses of their own land. 
 
 Everywhere on the Continent, and in Great Britain also, 
 it is accepted that marriages are matters of business, and 
 only incidentally and very slightly of affection. The initiative 
 is commonly taken, not by the young people, but by the heads 
 of the families. Preliminary protocols are exchanged, and 
 then the family solicitors sit down and bargain over the mat- 
 ter. If they were making a deal for a carload of hams, they 
 would be governed by the market price of hams at the moment, 
 also by the reputation of that particular brand of ham; and 
 similarly, in the case of marriage, they are governed by the 
 prestige of the family names, and the market price of hus- 
 bands prevailing. Always the man exacts a cash settlement, 
 and in Catholic countries he becomes the outright owner of 
 all the property of his wife, thus reducing her completely to 
 the status of a chattel. If any young couple dares to break 
 through these laws of their class, the whole class unites to 
 trample them down. One of the greatest of English novel- 
 ists, George Meredith, wrote his greatest novel, "The Ordeal
 
 44 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 of Richard Feverel," to show how, under the most favorable 
 circumstances, the union of a ruling class youth with a farm- 
 er's daughter could result in nothing but shipwreck. 
 
 The country in which the property marriage is most firmly 
 established is probably France; and in France the rights of 
 nature are recognized in a kind of supplementary union, 
 which constitutes what is known as the "domestic triangle," 
 or in the French language, "la vie trois" The young girl 
 of the French ruling classes is guarded every moment of her 
 life like a prisoner in jail. She is sold in marriage, and is 
 expected to bear her husband an heir, possibly two or three 
 children. After that, she is considered, not under the law or 
 by the church, but by the general common sense of the com- 
 munity, to be free to seek satisfaction of her love needs. Her 
 husband has mistresses, and she has a lover, and to that 
 lover she is faithful, and in her dealings with him she is 
 guided by an elaborate and subtle code. Practically all French 
 fiction and drama deal with this "life in threes," and the com- 
 plications and tragedies which result from it. I name one 
 novel, simply because it happens to be the last that I myself 
 have read, "The Red Lily," by Anatole France. 
 
 Of course, every human being knows in his heart that 
 this is a monstrous arrangement, and there are. periods of 
 revolt when real feeling surges up in the hearts of men, and 
 we have stories of true love, young and unselfish love, such 
 for example as Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," or St. 
 Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," or Halevy's "L'Abbe Constan- 
 tin." Everybody reads these stories and weeps over them, 
 but everybody knows that they are like the romantic shepherds 
 and shepherdesses of the ancient regime; they never had any 
 existence in reality, and are not meant to be taken seriously. If 
 anybody attempts to carry them into action, or to preach them 
 seriously to the young, then we know that we are dealing 
 with a disturber of the foundations of the social order, a 
 dangerous and incendiary villain, and we give him a name 
 which sends a shudder down the spine of every friend of 
 law and order we call him a "free-lover." 
 
 I see before my eyes the wretch cowering upon the witness 
 stand, and the virtuous district attorney, who has perhaps 
 spent the previous night in a brothel, pointing a finger of 
 accusing wrath into his face, and thundering, "Do you believe 
 in free love?" The wretch, if he is wise, will not hesitate
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 45 
 
 or parley ; he will not ask what the district attorney means by 
 love, or what he means by freedom. Here in very truth is a 
 case where "he who hesitates is lost !" Let the wretch instantly 
 answer, No, he does not believe in free love, he believes in 
 love that pays cash as it goes; he believes in love that 
 investigates carefully the prevailing market conditions, decides 
 upon a reasonable price, has the contract in writing, and lives 
 up to the bargain "till death do us part." If the witness 
 be a woman, let the answer be that she believes in slave love ; 
 that she expects to be sold for the benefit of her parents, 
 the prestige of her family and the social position of her future 
 offspring. Let her say that she will be a loyal and devoted 
 servant, and will never do anything at any time to invalidate 
 the contract which is signed for her by her parents or 
 guardians.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI 
 LOVE VERSUS LUST 
 
 (Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it should 
 be followed and when repressed.) 
 
 We have considered the sex disorders of our age and 
 their causes. We have now to grope our way towards a basis 
 of sanity and health in these vital matters. 
 
 Consider man, as Metchnikoff describes him, with his over- 
 plus of sex energy. From early youth he is besieged by 
 impulses and desires, and as a rule is left entirely uninstructed 
 on the subject, having to pick up his ideas from the conver- 
 sation of older lads, who have nothing but misinformation 
 and perversions to give him. Nearly all these older lads 
 declare and believe that it is necessary to gratify the sex 
 impulse, that physically it is harmful not to do so. I have 
 even heard physicians and trainers maintain that idea. Op- 
 posed to them are the official moralists and preachers of 
 religion, who declare that to follow the sex impulse, except 
 when officially sanctioned by the church, is to commit sin. 
 
 At different times in my life I have talked with all kinds 
 of people, young and old, men and women, doctors and clergy- 
 men, teachers and trainers of athletes, and a few wise and 
 loving mothers who have talked with their own boys and 
 other boys. As a result I have come to agree with neither 
 side in the debate. I believe that there is a distinction which 
 must be drawn, and I ask you to consider it carefully, and 
 bear it in mind in all that I say on the problem of happiness 
 and health in sex. 
 
 I believe that a normal man is one being, manifesting 
 himself in various aspects, physical, emotional, intellectual. 
 I believe that all these aspects of human activity go normally 
 together, and cannot normally be separated, and that the 
 separation of them is a perversion and source of harm. I 
 believe that the sex impulse, as it normally manifests itself, 
 and would manifest itself in a man if he were living a normal 
 life, is an impuse which includes every aspect of the man's 
 being. It is not merely physical desire and emotional excite- 
 
 46
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 47 
 
 ment; it is intellectual curiosity, a deep and intense interest, 
 not merely in the body, but in the mind and heart and per- 
 sonality of the woman. 
 
 I appreciate that there is opportunity for controversy here. 
 As a matter of psychology, it is not easy to separate instinct 
 from experience, to state whether a certain impulse is innate 
 or acquired. Some may argue that savages know nothing 
 about idealism in sex, neither do those modern savages whom 
 we breed in city slums ; some may make the same assertion 
 concerning a great mass of loutish and sensual youths. We 
 have got so far from health and soundness that it is hard 
 to be sure what is "normal" and what is "ideal." But with- 
 out going into metaphysics, I think we can reasonably make 
 the following statement concerning the sex impulse at its 
 first appearance in the average healthy youth in civilized 
 societies; that this impulse, going to the roots of the being, 
 affecting every atom of energy and every faculty, is accom- 
 panied, not merely by happiness, but by sympathetic delight 
 in the happiness of the woman, by interest in the woman, by 
 desire to be with her, to stay with her and share her life and 
 protect her from harm. In what I have to say about the 
 subject from now on, I shall describe this condition of being 
 and feeling by the word "love." 
 
 But now suppose that men should, for some reason or 
 other, evolve a set of religious ideas which denied love, and 
 repudiated love, and called it a sin and a humiliation; or 
 suppose there should be an economic condition which made 
 love a peril, so that the young couple which yielded to love 
 would be in danger of starvation, or of seeing their children 
 starve. Suppose there should be evolved classes of men and 
 women, held by society in a condition of permanent semi- 
 starvation; then, under such conditions, the impulse to love 
 would become a trap and a source of terror. Then the ener- 
 gies of a great many men would be devoted to suppressing 
 love and strangling it in themselves; then the intellectual and 
 spiritual sanctions of love would be withdrawn, the beauty 
 and charm and joy would go out of it, and it would become 
 a starvling beggar at the gates, or a thief skulking in the 
 night-time, or an assassin with a dagger and club. In other 
 words, sex would become all the horror that it is today, in 
 the form of purchased vice, and more highly purchased mar- 
 riage, and secret shame, and obscure innuendo. So we should
 
 48 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 have what is, in a civilized man, a perversion, the possibility 
 of love which is physical alone; a purely animal thing in a 
 being who is not purely animal, but is body, mind and spirit 
 all together. So it would be possible for pitiful, unhappy 
 man, driven by the blind urge of nature, to conceive of desir- 
 ing a woman only in the body, and with no care about what 
 she felt, or what she thought, or what became of her after- 
 wards. 
 
 That purely physical sex desire I will indicate in our 
 future discussions by the only convenient word that I can 
 find, which is lust. The word has religious implications, 
 so I explain that I use it in my own meaning, as above. 
 There is a great deal of what the churches call lust, which 
 I call true and honest love ; on the other hand, in Christian 
 churches today, there are celebrated innumerable marriages 
 between innocent young girls and mature men of property, 
 which I describe as legalized and consecrated lust. 
 
 We are now in position to make a fundamental distinc- 
 tion. I assert the proposition that there does not exist, in 
 any man, at any time of his life, or in any condition of his 
 health, a necessity for yielding to the impulses of lust; and 
 I say that no man can yield to them without degrading his 
 nature and injuring himself, not merely morally, but men- 
 ially, and in the long run physically. I assert that it is the 
 duty of every man, at all times and under all circumstances, 
 to resist the impulses of lust, to suppress and destroy them 
 in his nature, by whatever expenditure of will power and 
 moral effort may be required. 
 
 I know physicians who maintain the unpopular thesis that 
 serious damage may be done to the physical organism of both 
 man and woman by the long continued suppression of the sex- 
 life. Let me make plain that I am not disagreeing with 
 such men. I do not deny that repression of the sex-life 
 may do harm. What I do deny is that it does any harm to 
 repress a physical desire which is unaccompanied by the 
 higher elements of sex; that is to say, by affection, admira- 
 tion, and unselfish concern for the sex-partner and her wel- 
 fare. When I advise a man to resist and suppress and destroy 
 the impulse toward lust in his nature, I am not telling him 
 to live a sexless life. pi am telling him that if he represses 
 lust, then love will come; whereas, if he yields to lust, then 
 love may never come, he may make himself incapable of love,
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 49 
 
 incapable of feeling it or of trusting it, or of inspiring it in 
 a woman. And I say that if, on the other hand, he resists 
 lust, he will pour all the energies of his being into the chan- 
 nels of affection and idealism. Instead of having his thoughts 
 diverted by every passing female form, his energies will be- 
 come concentrated upon the search for one woman who 
 appeals to him in permanent and useful ways. We may be 
 sure that nature has not made men and women incompatible, 
 but on the contrary, has provided for fulfillment of the desires 
 of both. The man will find some woman who is looking 
 for the thing which he has to offer that is, love^J 
 
 And now, what about the suppression of love? Here I 
 am willing to go as far as any physician could desire, and 
 possibly farther. Speaking generally, and concerning nor- 
 mal adult human beings, I say that the suppression of love 
 is a crime against nature and life. I say that long continued 
 and systematic suppression of love exercises a devastating 
 effect, not merely upon the body, but upon the mind and all 
 the energies of the being. I say that the doctrine of the sup- 
 pression of love, no matter by whom it is preached, is an 
 affront to nature and to life, and an insult to the creator of 
 life. I say that it is the duty of all men and women, not 
 merely to assert their own right to love, but to devote their 
 energies to a war upon whatever ideas and conventions and 
 laws in society deny the love-right. 
 
 The belief that long continued suppression of love does 
 grave harm has been strongly reinforced in the last few years 
 by the discovery of psycho-analysis, a science which enables 
 us to explore our unconscious minds, and lay bare the secrets 
 of nature's psychic workshop. These revelations have made 
 plain that sex plays an even more important part in our men- 
 tal lives than we realized. Sex feeling manifests itself, not 
 merely in grown people, but in the tiniest infants; in these 
 latter it has of course no object in the opposite sex, but the 
 physical sensations are there, and some of their outward mani- 
 festations; and as the infant grows, and realizes the outside 
 world, the feelings come to center upon others, the parents 
 first of all. These manifestations must be guided, and some- 
 times repressed; but if this is done violently, by means of 
 terror, the consequences may be very harmful the wrong 
 impulses or the terrors may survive as a "complex" in the 
 unconscious mind, and cause a long chain of nervous disorders
 
 50 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 and physical weaknesses in the adult. These things are no 
 matter of guesswork, they have been proven as thoroughly 
 as any scientific discovery, and are used in a new technic of 
 healing. Of course, as with every new theory, there are 
 unbalanced people who carry it to extremes. There are 
 : fanatics of Freudianism who talk as if everything in the 
 human unconsciousness were sex; but that need not blind us 
 to the importance of these new discoveries, and the confir- 
 mation they bring to the thesis jlfhat sane and normal love, 
 wisely guided by common sense and reasoned knowledge, is 
 at a certain period of life a vital necessity to every sound 
 human being.J
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII 
 
 CELIBACY VERSUS CHASTITY 
 
 (The ideal of the repression of the sex impulse, as against the 
 ideal of its guidance and cultivation.) 
 
 There are two words which we need in this discussion, 
 and as they are generally used loosely, they must now be 
 denned precisely. The two words are celibacy and chastity. 
 We define celibacy as the permanent and systematic suppres- 
 sion of love. We define chastity, on the other hand, as the 
 permanent and systematic suppression of lust. Chastity, as 
 the word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing 
 for it ; it is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially 
 in the young, of consecrating their beings to the search for love, 
 and to becoming worthy for love. In that sense we regard 
 chastity as one of the most essential of virtues in the young. 
 It is widely taught today, but ineffectively, because unintel- 
 ligently and without discrimination; because, in other words, 
 it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and 
 one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases. 
 
 The origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. 
 At a certain stage in human development the eyes of the mind 
 are opened, and to some man comes a revelation of the life 
 of altruism and sympathetic imagination. To use the com- 
 mon phrase, the man discovers his spiritual nature. But under 
 the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside him is 
 in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and 
 trample it into the mire. One of the most powerful of these 
 destructive agencies, as it seems to the man, is sex. By 
 means of sex he is laid hold upon by strange and terrible 
 creatures who do not understand his higher vision, but seek 
 only to prey upon him, and use him for their convenience. 
 At the worst they rob him of everything, money, health, time 
 and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they 
 put him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. In 
 the words of a wise old man of the world, Francis Bacon, 
 "He who marries and has children gives hostages to fortune." 
 In a world wherein war, pestilence, and famine held sway, 
 
 51
 
 52 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 the man of family had but slight chance of surviving as a 
 philosopher or prophet or saint. Discovering in himself a 
 deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, 
 he imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away 
 to the desert, and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and 
 lashed himself with whips, and allowed worms and lice to 
 devour his body, in the effort to destroy in himself the 
 impulse of sex. 
 
 So the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, 
 not of much use, but better than nothing; and so we still have 
 in the world celibate priesthoods, and what is more danger- 
 ous to our social health, we have the old, degraded notions 
 of the essential vileness of the sex relationship notions per- 
 meating all our thought, our literature, our social conventions 
 and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true wisdom 
 and health and happiness in love. 
 
 I say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral 
 disease ; it is a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her 
 energies to breaking it down, and she always succeeds. There 
 never has been a celibate religious order, no matter how noble 
 its origin and how strict its discipline, which has not sooner 
 or later become a breeding place of loathsome unnatural 
 vices. And sooner or later the ideal begins to weaken, and 
 common sense to take its place, and so we read in history 
 about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who 
 have "nieces" and attractive servant girls. Make the acquain- 
 tance of any police sergeant in any big city of America, and 
 get him to chatting on friendly terms, and you will discover 
 that it is a common experience for the police in their raids 
 upon brothels to catch the representatives of celibate religious 
 orders. As one old-timer in the "Tenderloin" of New York 
 said to me, "Of course, we don't make any trouble for the 
 good fathers." Nor was this merely because the old sergeant 
 was an Irishman and a Catholic; it was because deep down 
 in his heart he knew, as every man knows, that the craving 
 of a man for the society and companionship of a woman is 
 an overwhelming craving, which will break down every bar- 
 rier that society may set against it. 
 
 There is another form of celibacy which is not based upon 
 religious ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely 
 selfish in its nature. It is unorganized and unreasoned, and 
 is known as "bachelorhood"; it has as its complements the
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 53 
 
 institutions of old maidenhood and of prostitution. Both 
 forms of celibacy, the religious and the economic, are entirely 
 incompatible with chastity, which is only possible where love 
 is recognized and honored. Chastity is a preparation for love ; 
 and if you forbid love, whether by law, or by social conven- 
 tion, or by economic strangling, you at once make chastity a 
 Utopian dream. You may preach it from your pulpits until 
 you are black in the face; you may call out your Billy Sun- 
 days to rave, and dance, and go into convulsions; you may 
 threaten hell-fire and brimstone until you throw whole audi- 
 ences into spasms but you will never make them chaste. On 
 the contrary, strange and horrible as it may seem, those very 
 excitements will turn into sexual excitements before your 
 eyes! So subtle is our ancient mother nature, and so deter- 
 mined to have her own way ! 
 
 The abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of 
 womanhood, its distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, 
 is not yet dead in the world. It is in our very bones, and 
 is forever appearing in new and supposed to be modern forms. 
 Take a man like Tolstoi, who gained enormous influence, not 
 merely in Russia, but throughout the world among people who 
 think themselves liberal humanitarians, pacifists, philosophic 
 anarchists. Tolstoi's notions about sex, his teachings and 
 writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one con- 
 tinuous manifestation of disease. All through his youth and 
 middle years, as an army officer, popular novelist, and darling 
 of the aristocracy, his life was one of license, and the attitude 
 toward women he thus acquired, he never got out of his 
 thoughts to his last day. Gorky, meeting him in his old age, 
 reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole 
 attitude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome sly- 
 ness. 
 
 But Tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the 
 great moral consciences of humanity. He looked about him 
 at a world gone mad with greed and hate, and he made con- 
 vulsive efforts to reform his own spirit and escape the power 
 of evil. As regards sex, his thought took the form of ancient 
 Christian celibacy. Man must repudiate the physical side of 
 sex, he must learn to feel toward women a "pure" affection, 
 the relationship of brother and sister. In his novel, "Resur- 
 rection," Tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a 
 beautiful peasant girl and conceives for her such a noble and 
 
 5
 
 54 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 generous emotion; but gradually the poison of physical sex- 
 desire steals into his mind, he seduces her, and she becomes 
 a prostitute. Later in life, when he discovers the crime he 
 has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, 
 and wins her to God and goodness by the unselfish and un- 
 sexual love which he should have maintained from the begin- 
 ning. 
 
 It was Tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward 
 this kind of love, and when it was pointed out to him that if 
 this doctrine were to be applied universally, the human race 
 would become extinct, his answer was that there was no rea- 
 son to fear that, because only a few people would be good 
 enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! Here 
 you see the reincarnation of the old Christian notion that we 
 are "conceived in sin and born in iniquity." We may be pure 
 and good, and cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life 
 continue. Some choose to sin, and these sinners hand 
 down their sinful qualities to the future; and so virtue 
 and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile 
 crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom 
 God has sent to call down destruction upon a world which 
 He had made through some mistake never satisfactorily 
 explained ! 
 
 It is easy nowadays to persuade intelligent people to laugh 
 at such a perverted view of life; but the truth is that this 
 attitude toward sex is written, not merely into our religious 
 creeds and formulas, but into most of our laws and social 
 conventions. It is this, which for convenience I will call the 
 "monkish" view of love, which prevents our dealing frankly 
 and honestly with its problems, distinguishing between what 
 is wrong and what is right, and doing anything effective to 
 remedy the evils of marriage-plus-prostitution. That is why 
 I have tried so carefully to draw the distinction between what 
 I call love and what I call lust ; between the ideal of celibacy, 
 which is a perversion, and the idea of chastity, which must 
 form an essential part of any regimen of true and enduring 
 love.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII 
 THE DEFENSE OF LOVE 
 
 (Discusses passionate love, its sanction, its place in life, and 
 its preservation in marriage.) 
 
 I have before me as I write a newspaper article by Robert 
 Blatchford, a great writer and great man. He is dealing 
 with the subject of "Love and Marriage," and his doctrine is 
 summed up in the following sentences : "There is a difference 
 between loving a woman and falling in love with her. The 
 love one falls into is a sweet illusion. But that fragrant dream 
 does not last. In marriage there are no fairies." 
 
 This expresses one of the commonest ideas in the world. 
 Passionate love is one thing, and marriage is another and 
 different thing, and it is no more possible to reconcile them 
 than to mix oil and water. Our notions of "romantic" love 
 took their rise in the Middle Ages, from the songs and nar- 
 ratives of the troubadours, and this whole tradition was based 
 upon the glorification of illegitimate and extra-marital love. 
 That tradition has ruled the world of art ever since, and rules 
 it today. I do not exaggerate when I say that it is the con- 
 ventional view of grand opera and the drama, of moving pic- 
 tures and novels, that impassioned and thrilling love is found 
 before marriage, and is found in adultery and in temptations 
 to adultery, but is never found in marriage. I have a pretty 
 varied acquaintance with the literature of the world, and I 
 have sat and thought for quite a while, without being able to 
 recall a single portrait of life which contradicts this thesis; 
 and certainly anyone familiar with literature could name ten 
 thousand novels and dramas and grand operas which support 
 the thesis. 
 
 English and American Puritanism have beaten the tradi- 
 tion down to this extent : the novelist portrays the glories and 
 thrills of young love, and carries it as far as the altar and 
 the orange blossoms and white ribbons and showers of rice 
 and stops. He leaves you to assume that this delightful 
 rapture continues forever after; but he does not attempt to 
 show it to you he would not dare attempt to show it, because 
 
 55
 
 56 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 the general experience of men and women in marriage would 
 make him ridiculous. So he runs away from the issue; if 
 he tells you a story of married life, it is a story of a "triangle" 
 the thrills of love imperiling marriage, and either crushed 
 out, or else wrecking the lives of the victims. Such is the 
 unanimous testimony of all our arts today, and I submit it 
 as evidence of the fact that there must be something vitally 
 wrong with our marriage system. 
 
 Personally, I am prepared to go as far as the extreme 
 sex-radical in the defense of love and the right to love. I 
 believe that love is the most precious of all the gifts of life. 
 I accept its sanctions and its authority. I believe that it is 
 to be cherished and obeyed, and not to be run away from or 
 strangled in the heart. I believe that it is the voice of nature 
 speaking in the depths of us, and speaking from a wisdom 
 deeper than we have yet attained, or may attain for many 
 centuries to come. And when I say love, I do not mean 
 merely affection. I do not mean merely the habit of living 
 in the same home, which is the basis of marriage as Blatch- 
 ford describes it. What I mean is the love of the poets and 
 the dreamers, the "young love" which is thrill and ecstasy, a 
 glorification and a transfiguration of the whole of life. I say 
 that, far from giving up this love for marriage, it is the true 
 purpose of marriage to preserve this love and perpetuate itj 
 
 To save repetition and waste of words, let us agree that 
 / from now on when I use the word love, I mean the passion- 
 ate love of those who are "in love." I believe that it is the 
 right of men and women to be "in love," and that there is no 
 true marriage unless they are "in love," and stay "in love." 
 I believe that it is possible to apply reason to love, to learn 
 to understand love and the ways of love, to protect it and 
 keep it alive in marriage. Blatchford writes the sentence, 
 "Matrimony cannot be all honeymoon." I answer that as- 
 suredly it can be, and if you ask me how I know, I tell you 
 that I know in the only way we really know anything 
 because I have proven it in my own life. I say that if men 
 and women would recognize the perpetuation of the honey- 
 moon as the purpose of marriage, and would devote to that 
 end one-hundredth part of the intelligence and energy they 
 now devote to the killing of their fellow human beings in 
 war, we might have an end to the wretched "romantic tradi- 
 tion" which makes the most sacred emotion of the human
 
 THE BOOK or LOVE 57 
 
 heart into a sneak-thief skulking in the darkness, entering 
 our lives by back alleys and secret stairways while greed 
 and worldly pomp, dullness and boredom, parade in by the 
 front entrance.../ 
 
 In the first ^ place, what is love young love, passionate 
 love, the love of those who "fall in" ? I know a certain lady, 
 well versed in worldly affairs, who says that it is at once 
 the greatest nonsense and the deadliest snare in the world. 
 This lady was trained as a "coquette" ; she, and all the young 
 ladies she knew, made it their business to cause men to fall 
 in love with them, and their prestige was based upon their 
 skill in that art. So to them "love" was a joke, and men 
 "in love" were victims, whether ridiculous or pitiable. To 
 this I answer that I know nothing in life that cannot be 
 "faked" ; but an imitation has value only as it resembles some- 
 thing that is real, and that has real value. 
 
 I am aware that it is possible for a society to be so cor- 
 rupted, so given up to the admiration of imitations, of the 
 paint and powder and silk-stocking-clad-ankle kind of love, 
 that true and genuine love interest, with its impulse to self- 
 sacrifice and self -consecration, is no longer felt or under- 
 stood. I am aware that in such a society it is possible for 
 even the very young to be so sophisticated that what they 
 take to be love is merely vanity, the worship of money, and 
 the grace and charm which the possession of money confers. 
 I have known girls who were "head over heels" in love, and 
 thought it was with a man, when quite clearly they were in 
 love with a dress suit or a social position. In such a society 
 it is hard to talk about natural emotions, and deep and abid- 
 ing and disinterested affections. 
 
 Nevertheless, amid all the false conventions, the sham 
 glories and cowardices of our civilization, there abides in the 
 heart the craving for true love, and the idea of it leaps con- 
 tinually into flame in the young. In spite of the ridicule of 
 the elders, in spite of blunders and tragic failures, in spite 
 of dishonesties and deceptions nevertheless, it continues to 
 happen that out of a thousand maidens the youth finds one 
 whose presence thrills him with a new and terrible emotion, 
 whose lightest touch makes him shiver, almost makes his knees 
 give way. 
 
 If you will recall what I have written about instinct and 
 reason, you will know that I am not a blind worshipper of
 
 58 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 our ancient mother nature. I am not humble in my attitude 
 toward her, but perfectly willing to say when I know more 
 than she does. On the other hand, when I know nothing or 
 next to nothing, I am shy of contradicting my ancient mother, 
 and disposed to give respectful heed to her promptings. One 
 of the things about which we know almost nothing at present 
 is the subject of eugenics. We are only at the beginning of 
 trying to find out what matings produce the best offspring. 
 Meantime, we ought to consider those indications which nature 
 gives us, just as we consider her advice about what food to 
 eat and what rest to take. 
 
 It is not my idea that science will ever take men and 
 women and marry them in cold blood, as today we breed 
 our cattle. What I think will happen is that young men and 
 women will meet one another, as they do at present, and will 
 find the love impulse awakening; they will then submit their 
 love to investigation, as to whether they should follow that 
 impulse, or should wait. In other words, I do not believe 
 that science will ever do away with the raptures of love, but 
 will make itself the servant of these raptures, finding out 
 what they mean, and how their precious essence may be 
 preserved. 
 
 I perfectly understand that the begetting of children is not 
 the only purpose of love. The children have to be reared and 
 trained, which means that a home has to be founded, and 
 the parents have to learn to co-operate. They have to have 
 common aims in life, and temperaments sufficiently harmo- 
 nious so that they can live in the house together without tear- 
 ing each other's eyes out. This means that in any civilized 
 society all impulses of love have to be subjected to severe 
 criticism. I intend, before long, to show just how I think 
 parents and guardians should co-operate with young people in 
 love; to help them to understand in advance what they are 
 doing, and how it may be possible for them to make their love 
 permanent and successful. For the moment I merely state, 
 to avoid any possible misunderstanding, that I am the last 
 person in the world to favor what is called "blind" love, the 
 unthinking abandonment to an impulse of sex passion. What 
 I am trying to show is that the passionate impulse, the pas- 
 sionate excitement of the young couple, is the material out 
 of which love and marriage are made. Passion is a part of 
 us, and a fundamental part. If we do not find a place for it
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 59 
 
 in marriage, it will seek satisfaction outside of marriage, and 
 that means lying, or the wrecking of the marriage, or both. 
 
 Passion is what gives to love and marriage its vitality, 
 its energy, its drive; in fact, it gives these qualities to the 
 whole character. It is a vivifying force, transfiguring the 
 personality, and if it is crushed and repressed, the whole 
 life of that person is distorted. Yet it is a fact which 
 every physician knows, that millions of women marry and 
 live their whole lives without ever knowing what passionate 
 gratification is. As a consequence of this, millions of men 
 take it for granted that there are "good" women and "bad" 
 women, and that only the latter are interesting. This, of 
 course, is simply one of the abnormalities caused by the sup- 
 planting of love by money as a motive in marriage. Love 
 becomes a superfluity and a danger, and all the forces of 
 society, including institutionalized religion, combine to outlaw 
 it and drive it underground. Or we might say that they lock 
 it in a dungeon and that the supreme delight of all the 
 painters, poets, musicians, dramatists and novelists of all climes 
 and all periods of history, is to portray the escape of the 
 "young god" from these imprisonments. The story is told 
 in six words of an old English ballad: "Love will find out 
 the way!" 
 
 Is it not obvious that there must be something vitally 
 wrong with our institutions and conventions in matters of sex, 
 when here exists this eternal war between our moralists and 
 our artists? Why not make up our minds what we really 
 believe ; whether it is true that poets are, as Shelley said, "the 
 unacknowledged legislators of mankind," or whether they are, 
 as Plato declared, false teachers and seducers of the young. 
 If they are the latter, let us have done with them, let us drive 
 them from the state, together with lovers and all other impas- 
 sioned persons. But if, on the other hand, it is truth the 
 poets tell about life, then let us take the young god out of his 
 dungeon, and bring him into our homes by the front door, 
 and cast out the false gods of vanity and greed and worldly 
 prestige which now sit in his place.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX 
 
 BIRTH CONTROL 
 
 (Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the great- 
 est of man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's enslavement, 
 and placing the keys of life in his hands.) 
 
 I assume that you have followed my argument, and are 
 prepared to consider seriously whether it may be possible to 
 establish love in marriage as the sex institution of civilized 
 society. If you really wish to bring such an institution into 
 existence, the first thing you have to do is to accomplish the 
 social revolution; that is, you must wipe out class control of 
 society, and prestige based upon money exploitation. But 
 that is a vast change, and will take time, and meanwhile we 
 have to live, and wish to live with as little misery as possible. 
 So the practical question becomes this: Suppose that you, as 
 an individual, wish to find as much happiness in love as may 
 now be possible, what counsel have I to offer? If you are 
 young, you wish this advice for yourself ; while if you are 
 mature, you wish it for your children. I will put my advice 
 under four heads: First, marriage for love; second, birth 
 control ; third, early marriage ; fourth, education for marriage. 
 
 The first of these we have considered at some length. A 
 part of the process of social revolution is personal conver- 
 sion; the giving up by every individual of the worldly ideal, 
 Che surrender of luxury and self-indulgence, the consecrating 
 of one's life to self education and the cause of social justice. 
 And do not think that that is an easy thing, or an unimpor- 
 tant thing, a thing to be taken for granted. On the contrary, 
 it is something that most of us have to struggle with at every 
 hour of our lives, because respect for property and worldly 
 conventions has become one of our deepest instincts; our 
 whole society is poisoned with it, and I can count on the 
 fingers of one hand the people I have known in my life who 
 have completely escaped from it. It is not merely a question 
 of refusing to marry except for love,Vit is a question of refus- 
 ing to lo^'e except for honest and worthy qualities^ It is a 
 question of saving our children from the damnable forces of 
 
 60
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 61 
 
 snobbery, which lay siege to their young minds and destroy 
 the best impulses of their hearts, while we in our blindness 
 are still thinking of them as babies. 
 
 r Of the other three topics that I have suggested, I begin 
 with birth control, because it is the most fundamental and 
 most important. Without birth control there can be no free- 
 dom, no happiness, no permanence in love, and there can be 
 no mastery of life. Birth control is one of the great funda- 
 mental achievements of the human reason, as important to the 
 life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of 
 printing. Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and 
 therefore of mankind also, from the blind and insane fecun- 
 dity of nature, which created us animals, and would keep us 
 animals forever if we did not rebel, j 
 
 Ever since the dawn of history, and probably for long 
 ages before that, our race has been struggling against this 
 blind insanity of nature. Poor, bewildered Theodore Roose- 
 velt stormed at what he called "race suicide," thinking it was 
 some brand new and terrible modern corruption ; but nowhere 
 do we find a primitive tribe, nowhere in history do we find 
 a race which did not seek to save itself from overgrowth 
 and consequent starvation. They did not know enough to 
 prevent conception, but they did the best they could by means 
 of abortion and infanticide. And because today superstition 
 keeps the priceless knowledge of contraception from the vast 
 majority of women, these crude, savage methods still prevail, 
 and we have our million abortions a year in the United States. 
 Assuming that something near one-fourth our population con- 
 sists of women capable of bearing children, we have one 
 woman in twenty-five going through this'agonizing and health- 
 wrecking experience every year. They go through with it, 
 you understand, regardless of everything all the moralists 
 and preachers and priests with their hell fire and brimstone. 
 They go through with it because we have both marriage with- 
 out love, and love without marriage; also because we permit 
 some ten or twenty per cent of our total population to suffer 
 the pangs of perpetual starvation, because more than half our 
 farms are mortgaged or occupied by tenants, and some ten or 
 twenty per cent of our workers are out of jobs all the time. 
 Some of our women know about birth control. They are 
 the rich women, who get what they want in this world. They 
 object to the humiliations and inconveniences of child bearing,
 
 62 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 and some of them raise one or two children, and others of 
 them raise poodle dogs. Also, our middle classes have found 
 out; our doctors and lawyers and college professors, and peo- 
 ple of that sort. But we deliberately keep the knowledge 
 from our foreign populations, by the terrors which the church 
 has at its command. And what is the practical consequence 
 of this procedure ? It is that while all our Anglo-Saxon stock, 
 those who founded our country and established its institutions, 
 are gradually removing themselves from the face of the earth, 
 our ignorant and helpless populations, whether in city slums 
 or on tenant farms, are multiplying like rabbits. Read Jack 
 London's "The Valley of the Moon" and see what is happen- 
 ing in California. You will find the same thing happening 
 in any portion of the United States where you take the trouble 
 to use your own eyes. 
 
 Now, I try to repress such impulses toward race prejudice 
 as I find in myself. I am willing to admit for the sake of 
 this argument that in the course of time all the races that are 
 now swarming in America, Portuguese and Japanese and 
 Mexican and French-Canadian and Polish and Hungarian and 
 Slovakian, are capable of just as high intellectual development 
 as our ancestors who wrote the Declaration of Independence. 
 But no one who sees the conditions under which they now 
 live can deny that it will take a good deal of labor, teaching 
 them and training them, as well as scrubbing them, to accom- 
 plish that result. And what a waste of energy, what a farce 
 it makes of culture, to take the people who have already been 
 scrubbed and taught and trained for self-government, and 
 exterminate them, and raise up others in their place ! It seems 
 time that we gave thought to the fundamental question, wheth- 
 er or not there is something self -destroying in the very process 
 of culture. Unless we can answer this we might as well give 
 up our visions and our efforts to lift the race. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt stormed at birth control for something 
 like ten years, and it would be interesting if we could know 
 how many Anglo-Saxon babies he succeeded in bringing into 
 the world by his preachments. If what he wanted was to 
 correct the balance between native and foreign births, how 
 much more sensible to have taught birth control to those poor, 
 pathetic, half-starved and overworked foreign mothers of our 
 slums and tenant farms! I can wager that for every Anglo- 
 Saxon baby that Theodore Roosevelt brought into the world
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 63 
 
 by his preachings, he could have kept out ten thousand foreign 
 slum babies, if only he had lent his aid to Margaret Sangeri 
 
 Ah, but he wanted all the babies to be born, you say! 
 I see before me the face of a certain devout old Christian 
 lady, known to me, who settles the question by the Bible 
 quotation, "Be fruitful and multiply." But what avails it to 
 follow this biblical advice, if we allow one out of five of the 
 new-born infants to perish from lack of scientific care before 
 they are two years old? What avails it if we send them to 
 school hungry, as we do twenty-two per cent of the public 
 school children of New York City? What avails it if we 
 allow venereal disease to spread, so that a large percentage of 
 the babies are deformed and miserable? What avails it if, 
 when they are fully grown, we can think of nothing better 
 to do with them than to take them by millions at a time and 
 dress them up in uniforms and send them out to be destroyed 
 by poison gases? Would it not be the part of common sense 
 to establish universal birth control for at least a year or two 
 until we have learned to take care of our newly born babies, 
 and to feed our school children, and to protect our youths 
 from vice, and to abolish poverty and war from the earth? 
 
 These are the social aspects of birth control. There are 
 also to be considered what I might call the personal aspects 
 of it. Because young people do not know about it, and have 
 no way to find out about it, they dare not marry, and so the 
 amount of vice in the world is increased. Because married * 
 women do not know about it, love is turned to terror, and 
 marital happiness is wrecked. Because the harmless and 
 proper methods are not sensibly taught, people use harmful 
 methods, which cause nervous disorders, and wreck marital 
 happiness, and break up homes. rThorough and sound knowl- 
 edge about birth control is just as essential to happiness in 
 marriage as knowledge of diet is necessary to health, or as 
 knowledge of economics is necessary to intelligent action as 
 a voter and citizenjThe suppression by law of knowledge 
 of birth control is just as grave a crime against human life 
 as ever was committed by religious bigotry in the blackest 
 days of the Spanish Inquisition. 
 
 Now this law stands on the statute books of our country, 
 and if I should so much as hint to you in this book what you 
 need to know, or even where you can find out about it, I 
 should be liable to five years in jail and a fine of $5,000, and
 
 64 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 every person who mailed a copy of this book, or any adver- 
 tisement of this book, would be in the same plight. But 
 there is not yet a law to prohibit agitation against the law, 
 so the first thing I say to every reader of this book is that 
 they should obtain a copy of the Birth Control Review, pub- 
 lished at 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, and also should join 
 the Voluntary Parenthood League, 206 Broadway, New York. 
 Get the literature of these organizations and circulate them and 
 help spread the light! 
 
 As to the knowledge which you need, the only advice I 
 am allowed to give is that you should seek it. Seek it, and 
 persist in seeking, until you find it. Ask everyone you know ; 
 and ask particularly among enlightened people, those who 
 are willing to face the facts of human life and trust in 
 reason and common sense. I do not know if I am violating 
 the law in thus telling you how to find out about birth 
 control. One of the charming features of this law, and others 
 against the spreading of knowledge, is that they will never 
 tell you in advance what you may say, but leave you to say it 
 and take your chances ! I believe that I am not violating 
 any law when I tell you that there are half a dozen simple, 
 inexpensive, and entirely harmless methods of preventing 
 undesired parenthood without the destruction of the marital 
 relationship. 
 
 I am one of those who for many years believed that the 
 destruction of the marital relationship was the only proper 
 and moral method. I was brought up to take the monkish 
 view of love. I thought it was an animal thing which required 
 some outside justification. I had been taught nothing else; 
 but now I have had personal experience of other justifications 
 of love, and I believe that love is a beautiful and joyful rela- 
 tionship, which not merely requires no other justification, but 
 confers justification upon many other things in life. 
 
 I used to believe in that old ideal of celibacy, thinking it 
 a fine spiritual exercise. But since then I have looked out on 
 life, and have found so many interesting things to do, so 
 much important work calling for attention, that I do not 
 have to invent any artificial exercises for my spirit. I have 
 looked at humanity, and brought myself to recognize the plain 
 common sense fact that whatever superfluous energy I may 
 have to waste upon artificial spirituality, the great mass of the 
 people have no such energy to spare. They need all their
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 65 
 
 energies to get a living for themselves and for their wives and 
 little ones. They have their sex impulses, and will follow 
 them, and the only question is, shall they follow them wisely 
 or unwisely? The religious people decide that sexual indul- 
 gence is wrong, and they impose a penalty and what is that 
 penalty? A poor, unwanted little waif of a soul, which never 
 sinned, and had nothing to do with the matter, is brought 
 into a hostile world, to suffer neglect, and perhaps starvation 
 in order to punish parents who did not happen to be suffi- 
 ciently strong willed to practice continence in marriage! 
 
 I used to believe that there was benefit to health and in- 
 crease of power, whether physical or mental, in the celibate 
 life. I have tried both ways of life, and as a result I know 
 that that old idea is nonsense. I know now that love is a 
 natural function. Of course, like any other function it can 
 be abused; just as hunger may become gluttony, sleeping may 
 become sluggishness, getting the money to pay one's way 
 through life may become ferocious avarice. But we do not 
 on this account refuse ever to eat or sleep or get money to 
 pay our debts. I do not say that I believe, I say I know, 
 that free and happy love, guided by wisdom and sound knowl- 
 edge, is not merely conducive to health, but is in the long run 
 necessary to health. 
 
 People who condemn birth control always argue as if one 
 wished to teach this knowledge indiscriminately to the young. 
 Perhaps it is natural that those who oppose the use of reason 
 should assume that others are as irrational as themselves. All 
 I can say is that I no more believe in teaching birth control 
 to the young than I believe in feeding beefsteak to nursing 
 infants. There is a period in life for beefsteaks or, if my 
 vegetarian friends prefer, for lentil hash and peanut butter 
 sandwiches ; in exactly the same way there is a time for teach- 
 ing the fundamentals of sex, and another time for teaching 
 the art of happiness in marriage, which includes birth con- 
 trol. That brings me, by a very pleasant transition, to the 
 other two subjects which I have promised to discuss: early 
 marriage and education for marriage.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 EARLY MARRIAGE 
 
 (Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the 
 duty of parents in respect to them.) 
 
 I have shown how economic forces in our society make for 
 later and later marriage; and at the present time economic 
 forces are so overwhelming that all other forces are hardly 
 worth mentioning in comparison. You are, let us say, the 
 mother of a boy of eighteen, and you have what you call 
 "common sense" meaning thereby a grasp of the money facts 
 of life. If your darling boy of eighteen should come to you 
 with a grave face and announce, "Mother dear, I have met the 
 girl I love, and we have decided that we want to get married" 
 you would consider that the most absurd thing you had 
 ever heard in all your born days, and you would tell the lad 
 that he was a baby, and to run along and play. If he per- 
 sisted in his crazy notion, you and your husband and all the 
 brothers and sisters and relatives and friends both of the 
 boy and the girl would set to work, by scolding and ridiculing, 
 to make life a misery for them, and ninety-nine times out of 
 a hundred you would break down the young couple's mari- 
 tal intention. 
 
 But now, let us try another supposition. Let us sup- 
 pose that your darling boy of eighteen should come to you 
 again and say, "Mother dear, some of the boys are going 
 to spend this evening in a brothel, and I have decided to go 
 along." Would you think that was the most absurd thing 
 you had ever heard in all your born days? Or would you 
 answer, "Yes, of course, my boy ; that is what I had in 
 mind when I made you give up the girl you loved"? No, 
 you would not answer that. But here is the vital fact 
 it doesn't matter what you would answer, for you would 
 never have a chance to answer. When a mother's darling 
 wants to get married, he comes and asks his mother's bless- 
 ing; but never does a mother's darling ask a blessing before 
 he goes with the other boys to a brothel. He just goes. 
 Maybe he borrows the money from some other fellow, and 
 
 66
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 67 
 
 next day tells you he went to a theater. Or maybe he picks 
 up some poor man's daughter on the street, and takes her 
 into the park, or up on the roof of a tenement. Some such 
 thing he does, to find satisfaction for an instinct which you in 
 your worldly wisdom or your heavenly piety spurn and ridicule. 
 
 I do not wish to exaggerate. If you are an exception- 
 ally wise and tactful mother, you may keep the confidence 
 of your boy, and guide him day by day through his tempta- 
 tions and miseries, and keep him chaste. But the more you 
 try that, the more apt you will be to come to my conclusion, 
 that late marriage is a crime against the race; the more 
 aware you will be of the danger, either that his boy friends 
 may break him down, or that some lewd woman may come 
 to his bedroom in the night-time. Never will you be able 
 to be quite sure that he is not lying to you, because of his 
 shame, and the pain he cannot bear to inflict upon you. 
 Never will you be quite sure that he is not hiding some 
 cruel disease, sneaking off to some quack who takes his 
 money and leaves him worse than before until finally he 
 shoots off his head, as happened to a nephew of an old and 
 dear friend of mine. 
 
 Such is the problem of the mother of a son; and now, 
 what about the mother of a daughter? This seems much 
 simpler ; because your daughter is not generally troubled with 
 sex cravings, and if you teach her the proprieties, and see 
 that she is carefully chaperoned, you may reasonably hope 
 that she will be chaste. But some day you expect that she 
 will marry; and then comes your problem. If you are the 
 usual mother, you are looking for some one who can main- 
 tain her in the state of life to which she is accustomed. 
 If a fairy prince would come along, or a plaster saint, you 
 would be pleased; but failing that, you will take a success- 
 ful business man, one who has made his way in the world 
 and secured himself a position. But turn back to the figures 
 I gave you a while ago. If this man is thirty years of age, 
 there is at least a fifty-fifty chance that he has had some 
 venereal disease; and while the doctors claim to cure these 
 diseases absolutely, we must bear in mind that doctors are 
 human, and sometimes claim more than they perform. Every 
 doctor will admit, if you pin him down, that these diseases 
 burrow deeply into the tissues, and many times are supposed 
 to be cured when they are only hidden.
 
 8 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 Here is, in a nutshell, the problem of the mother of a 
 daughter. If you marry your daughter at seventeen to a 
 lad of her own age, you have a very good chance of marry- 
 ing her to a person who is chaste. If you marry her to a 
 man of twenty-five, you have perhaps one chance in a hun- 
 dred. If you marry her to a man of thirty-five, you have 
 perhaps one chance in ten thousand. You may not like 
 these facts; I do not like them myself; but I have learned 
 that facts are none the less facts on that account. 
 
 You know the average society bud of eighteen, and her 
 attitude to a boy of the same age. She regards him as a 
 child; and you think, perhaps, that it is natural for a girl 
 to be interested in men of thirty-five and even forty-five. 
 But I tell you that it is not natural, it is simply one of the 
 perversions of pecuniary sex. The girl is interested in such 
 men, because all her young life she has been carefully coached 
 'for the marriage market; because she is dressed for it, and 
 solemnly brought out, and introduced to other players of 
 this exciting game of marriage for money, with its incred- 
 ible prizes of automobiles and jewels and palaces full of 
 servants, and magic check-books that never grow empty. 
 But suppose that, instead of regarding her as a prize in a 
 lottery, you let her grow up naturally, and taught her the 
 truth about herself, both body and mind; suppose that, in- 
 stead of dressing her in ways deliberately contrived to 
 emphasize her sex, you put her in a simple uniform, and 
 taught her to be honest and straightforward, instead of minc- 
 ing and coy; suppose she played athletic games with boys 
 of her own age, and invited them to her home, not for "jazz" 
 dancing and stuffing cake and candy, but for the sharing of 
 good music and literature and art don't you think that 
 maybe this girl might become interested in a lad of her own 
 age, and choose him with some understanding of his real self ? 
 
 You take it for granted that young people should not 
 marry until they can "affo,rd it." But stop and consider, is 
 not this a relic of old days? Always it takes time, and delib- 
 erate effort of the reason, to adjust our conventions to new 
 facts; so face this fact marriage today does not necessarily 
 mean children, it may just mean love. It involves little more 
 expense, because the young people need cost no more together 
 than they cost in the separate homes of their parents. If 
 they are children of the poor, they are already taking care
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 69 
 
 of themselves. If they are children of the moderately well 
 off, their parents expect to support them while they are get- 
 ting an education; and why can they not just as well live 
 together, and the parents of each contribute their share? 
 Let the parents of the boy give him, not merely what it costs 
 to keep him at home, but also the sums which otherwise the 
 boy would pay to the brothels. By this argument I do not 
 mean that I favor keeping young people financially dependent 
 upon their parents. My own son is working his own way 
 through college, and I should be glad to see every young man 
 doing the same. All that I am saying is that if parents are 
 going to support their children while they are getting an 
 education, they might just as well support them married as 
 single, instead of penalizing matrimony by making all allow- 
 ances cease at that point. 
 
 I know a certain ardent feminist, who is all for late mar- 
 riage for women, and abhors my ideas on this subject. She 
 wants women to get a chance to develop their personalities; 
 whereas I want to sacrifice them to the frantic exigencies of 
 the male animal! Young things of seventeen and eighteen 
 have no idea what they are, or what they want from life; 
 the mating impulse is a blind frenzy in them, and they must 
 be taught to control it, just as they are taught not to kill 
 when they are angry! 
 
 In the first place, I point out that young ladies in col- 
 leges and in ballrooms give a lot of time and thought to 
 sex, even though they do not call it by that inelegant term. 
 I very much question whether, if we should apply our wis- 
 dom to the task of getting our young people happily mated 
 before we sent them off to college, we should not get a lot 
 more serious study out of them than we now do, with all 
 their "fussing" and flirting and dancing. 
 
 Second, I am willing to make heroic moral efforts, where 
 I see any chance of adequate results, but I have examined 
 the facts, and definitely made up my mind that it is not 
 worth while, in our present stage of culture, to preach to 
 the mass of men the doctrine that they should abstain from 
 sex experience until they are twenty-five or thirty years of 
 age. You may storm at them, but they only laugh at you; 
 you may pass laws, and try to put them in jail, but you only 
 provide a harvest for blackmailers and grafters. As to sacri- 
 ficing the girl, my answer is simply that I believe in love; 
 
 6
 
 70 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 and in this I think the girl will agree with me, if you will 
 let her! I have never heard any qualified person maintain 
 that it hurts a girl to respond to love at the age of seventeen 
 or eighteen; nor do I think that it hurts a boy, provided that 
 he is taught the virtues of moderation and self-restraint. 
 Without these, it will hurt him to eat; but that is no argu- 
 ment for starving him. As for the question of his matur- 
 ity and power to judge, we are able at present to keep him 
 from marrying anybody, so I think we might reasonably hope 
 to keep him from marrying a wanton or a slut. Certainly we 
 might find somebody better than the peroxide blonde he now 
 picks up in front of the moving picture palace. 
 
 The question, at what ages we shall advise our young 
 couple to have children, is a separate one, depending upon 
 many circumstances. First, of course, they should not have 
 any until they are able financially to maintain them. As to 
 the age at which it is physically advisable, that is a question 
 to be settled by physicians and physiologists. I myself had 
 the idea that the proper age would be when the woman had 
 attained her full stature ; but my friend Dr. William J. Robin- 
 son sends me some statistics from the Johns Hopkins Hospital 
 Bulletin, which startle me. This publication for January, 
 1922, gives the results in five hundred childbirths, in which 
 the mother's age was from twelve to sixteen years inclusive. 
 It appears that pregnancy and labor at these ages are no 
 more dangerous than in older women ; but on the other 
 hand, the duration of the labor is actually shorter, and the 
 size of the children is not inferior. These facts are so con- 
 trary to the general impression that I content myself with 
 calling attention to them, and leave the commenting to be 
 done by feminists and others who oppose themselves to the 
 idea of early marriage.
 
 CHAPTER XLI 
 
 THE MARRIAGE CLUB 
 
 (Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to 
 avoid unhappy marriages.) 
 
 I will make the assumption that you would like to have 
 a trial of my cure for prostitution. You would like to do 
 something right here and now, without waiting for the social 
 revolution. Very well: I propose that you shall find a 
 few other parents of boys and girls who are in revolt against 
 our system of hidden vice, and that you will meet and form 
 a modern marriage club. Only you won't call it that, of 
 course; you will tactfully describe it as a literary society, 
 or a social circle, or an Epworth League. The parents who 
 run it will know what it is for, just as they do today; the 
 only difference being that it will exist to promote love matches 
 instead of money matches. It happens that I am myself 
 a tactless sort of a person, not skillful at avoiding saying 
 what I mean. So, in this chapter, I shall content myself 
 with setting forth exactly what this marriage club will do, 
 and leaving it to more clever people to supply the necessary 
 camouflage. 
 
 This club will begin by correcting the most stupid of all 
 our educational blunders, the assumption of the necessary 
 immaturity of the young. Our young people nowadays 
 have ten times as much chance to learn and ten times as 
 much stimulus to learn as we had; and it is a gen- 
 erally safe assumption that they know much more than 
 we think they do, and are ready to learn every sensible and 
 interesting thing. I am carrying on an epistolary acquaint- 
 ance with a little miss of twelve, who has read half a dozen 
 of my books among the "worst" of them and writes me 
 letters of grave appreciation. I have talked on Socialism to 
 a thousand school children, and had them question me for 
 an hour, and heard just as worth while questions as I have 
 heard from an audience of bankers. Never in my life have 
 I talked about real things with children that I did not find 
 them proud to be treated seriously, and eager to show that 
 
 71
 
 72 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 they were worthy of that honor. A great part of our foolish- 
 ness with children is due to the emptiness of our own heads. 
 
 These parents will delegate one man and one woman to 
 make a thorough study of the sex education of the young. 
 Of course, there is knowledge about sex which has to be 
 given to the very youngest child, and more and more must 
 be given as they grow older and ask more questions. But 
 what I have in mind here is that detailed and precise knowl- 
 edge which must be given to the young when they approach 
 the period of puberty. At this age of fourteen or fifteen the 
 man will take each of the boys apart, and the woman will 
 take each of the girls, and will explain to them what they 
 need to know. This duty will not be trusted to parents, for 
 parents have an imbecile fear of talking straight to their 
 children, and try to get by with rubbish about bees and 
 flowers. Let every child know that the days of the hole-and- 
 corner sex business is forever past, and that here is an 
 instructed person, who talks real American, and knows what 
 he is talking about, and will deal with facts, instead of with 
 evasions. 
 
 This club will help to educate the youngsters, and also 
 to give them a good time, developing both their minds and 
 bodies, and learning to know them thoroughly. When they 
 are sixteen each one will have another talk, this time about 
 marriage and what it means ; learning that it is not merely 
 flirtations and delicious thrills, but a business partnership, 
 and the deepest and best of all friendships. So when John 
 finds that he likes Mary best of all the girls he knows, this 
 won't be a subject for "kidding" and sly innuendo, and 
 blushes and simpering on Mary's part, but an occasion for 
 decent and sensible talk about what each of them really is, 
 and what each thinks the other to be. If they think they 
 are in love, then there will be a council of the elder states- 
 men, to consider that case, and what are the chances of hap- 
 piness in that love. This may sound forbidding, but it is 
 exactly what is done at present only it is not done honestly 
 and frankly, and therefore does not carry proper weight with 
 the young people. 
 
 fl am an opponent of long engagements, 'but I am also 
 an opponent of no engagements at all ; I know no truer prov- 
 erb than "Marry in haste and repent at leisure." It would 
 be my idea that a very young couple should announce their
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 73 
 
 engagement, and then wait six months, and be consulted 
 again about the matter, and have a chance to withdraw with 
 no hard feelings, if either party thought best. If they wished 
 to go on, they might be asked to wait another six months, 
 if their elders felt very certain there were reasons to doubt 
 the wisdom of the match". 
 
 There are, of course, people who, because of disease or 
 physical defect, should never be allowed to marry ; and others 
 who might marry, but should not be allowed to have children. 
 There should be laws providing for such cases, requiring 
 physical examination before marriage, and in extreme cases 
 providing for a simple and harmless surgical operation to 
 prevent the hopelessly unfit from passing on their defects to 
 the future. But dealing for the moment with normal young 
 persons, members of our modern marriage club, I should 
 say that if, after they have listened to the warning of their 
 elders, and have waited for a decent interval to think things 
 over, they still remain of the opinion that they can make a 
 successful marriage, then it is up to the elders to wish them 
 luck. I have known of young couples who have refused to 
 heed warnings, and regretted it; but I have known of others 
 who went ahead and had their own way and proved they were 
 right. There is a form of wisdom called experience and 
 there is another form called love. 
 
 I hear the worldly and cynical rail at the blindness of 
 "young love," and I can see the truth in what they say; 
 but also I can see the deeper truth in the magic dreams 
 of the young soul. Here is a youth who adores a girl, and 
 you know the girl, and it is comical to you, because you 
 know she is not any of the things the youth imagines. But 
 who are you that claim to know the last thing about a human 
 soul? Look into your own, and see how many different 
 things you are! Look back, if you can, to the time when 
 you were young, and remember the visions and the hopes. 
 They have lost all reality to you now; but who can say how 
 many of them you might have made real if there had been 
 one other person who believed in them, and loved them, and 
 would not give them up? 
 
 I write this ; and then I think of the other side the fools 
 that I have known in love! The trusting women, marrying 
 rotten men to reform them! The pitiful people who think 
 that fine phrases and sentimentality can take the place of
 
 74 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 facts! I implore my young couples to sit down and face 
 the realities of their own natures, to decide what they are, 
 and what they want to be and if there is going to be any 
 change, let it be made and tried out before marriage ! I 
 implore them to begin now to control their desires by their 
 reason and judgment; to begin, each of them at the very out- 
 set, to carry their share of the burdens and do their share 
 of the hard work. I implore them to value independence 
 and self-reliance in the other, and never above all things 
 to marry from pity, which is a worthy emotion in its place, 
 but has nothing to do with sex, which should be an affair 
 between equals, a matter of partnership and not of parasitism. 
 I think that, on the whole, the most dreadful thing in love 
 is the use of it for preying, for the securing of favors and 
 advantages of any sort, whether by men or by women.
 
 CHAPTER XLII 
 
 EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE 
 
 (Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that we 
 have the right and the duty to teach it.) 
 
 I assume now that our young couple have definitely made 
 up their minds, and that the wedding day is near. They 
 are therefore, both the man and the woman, in position to 
 receive information as to the physical aspects of their future 
 experience. This information is now for the most part pos- 
 sessed only by pathologists who impart it too late, after 
 people have blundered and wrecked their lives. The oppo- 
 nents of birth control ask in horror if you would teach it to 
 the young; I am now able to answer just when I would 
 teach it; I would teach it to these young couples about to 
 marry. I would make it by law compulsory for every young 
 couple to attend a school of marriage, and to learn, not merely 
 the regulation of conception, but the whole art of health and 
 happiness in sex. 
 
 Perhaps the words, "a school of marriage," strike you 
 as funny. When I was young I remember that Pulitzer 
 founded a school of journalism, and all newspaper editors 
 made merry they knew that journalism could only be learned 
 in practice. But nowadays every city editor gives preference 
 to an applicant who has taken a college course in reporting; 
 they have learned that journalism can be taught, just like 
 engineering and accounting. In the same way I assert that 
 marriage can be taught, and the art of love, physical, men- 
 tal, moral, and even financial; I think that the day will come 
 when enlightened parents would no more dream of trusting 
 their tender young daughter to a man who had not taken 
 a course in sex, than they would go up in an aeroplane with 
 a pilot who knew nothing about an engine. 
 
 The knowledge which I possess upon the art of love I 
 would be glad to give you in this book ; but unfortunately, if 
 I were to do so, my book would be suppressed, and I should 
 be sent to jail. 
 
 Some ten or twelve years ago I received a pitiful letter 
 
 75
 
 76 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 from a man who was in state's prison in Delaware, charged 
 with having imparted information as to birth control. Under 
 our amiable legal system, a perfectly innocent man may be 
 thrown into jail, and kept there for a year or two before he 
 is tried,, and if he is without money or friends, he might 
 as well be buried alive. I went to Wilmington to call on the 
 United States attorney who had caused the indictment in this 
 case, and had an illuminating conversation with him. The 
 official was anxious to justify what he had done. He assured 
 me that he was no bigot, but on the contrary an extremely 
 liberal man, a Unitarian, a Progressive, etc. "But Mr. Sin- 
 clair," he said, "I assure you this prisoner is not a reformer 
 or humanitarian or anything like that. He is a depraved 
 person. Look, here is something we found in his trunk when 
 we arrested him; a pamphlet, explaining about sex relations. 
 See this paragraph it says that the pleasure of intercourse 
 is increased if it is prolonged." 
 
 I looked at the pamphlet, and then I looked at the attor- 
 ney. "Do you think you have stated the matter quite fairly ?" 
 I asked. "Apparently the purpose is to explain that the emo- 
 tions of women are more slow to be aroused than those of 
 men, and that husbands failing to realize this, often do not 
 gratify their wives." 
 
 "Well," said the other, "do you consider that a subject 
 to be discussed?" 
 
 "Pardon me if I discuss it just a moment," I replied. "Do 
 you happen to know whether the statement is a fact?" 
 
 "No, I don't. It may be, I suppose." 
 
 "You have never investigated the matter?" 
 
 The legal representative of our government was evidently 
 annoyed by my persistence. "I have not," he answered. 
 
 "But then, suppose I were to tell you that thousands of 
 homes have been broken up for lack of just that bit of 
 knowledge; that tens of thousands of marriages are miser- 
 able for lack of it." 
 
 "Surely, Mr. Sinclair, you exaggerate!" 
 
 "Not at all. I could prove to you by one medical author- 
 ity after another, that if the desire of a woman in marriage 
 is roused, and then left ungratified, the result is nervous 
 strain, and in the long run it may be nervous breakdown." 
 
 The above covers only one detail of the pamphlet in 
 question. I read some pages of it, and argued them out with
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 77 
 
 the attorney. It was a perfectly simple, straightforward 
 exposition of facts about the physiology of sex; and one of 
 the reasons a man was to be sent to jail for several years 
 was not that he had circulated such a pamphlet, not that 
 he had showed it to young people, but merely that he had 
 it in his trunk! 
 
 There is an honest and very useful book, written by an 
 English physician, Dr. Marie C. Stopes, entitled "Married 
 Love," published by Dr. Wm. J. Robinson of New York, a 
 specialist of authority and integrity. The book deals with just 
 such vital facts in a perfectly dignified and straightforward 
 manner; yet Dr. Robinson has been hounded by the post- 
 office department because of it; he was convicted and forced 
 to pay a fine of $250, and the book was barred from the 
 mails ! 
 
 I have so much else of importance to say in this Book 
 of Love that it would not be sensible to jeopardize it by caus- 
 ing a controversy with our official censors of knowledge. 
 Therefore I will merely say in general terms that men and 
 women differ, not merely as a sex, but as individuals, and 
 every marriage is a separate problem, f Every couple has to 
 solve it in the intimacy of their love life, and for this there 
 are needed, first of all, gentleness on the part of the man, 
 especially in the first days of the honeymoon; and on the 
 part of both at all times consideration for the other's welfare 
 and enjoyment, and above all, frankness and honesty in talk- 
 ing out the subject. Reticence and shyness may be virtues 
 elsewhere, but they have no place in the intimacies of the sex 
 life ; if men and women will only ask and answer frankly, they 
 can find out by experience what makes the other happy, and 
 what causes pain. 1 
 
 We are dealing here with the most sacred intimacy of life, 
 and one of the most vital of life's problems It is here, in 
 the marriage bed, that the divorce problem is to be settled, 
 and likewise the problem of prostitution; for it is when men 
 and women fail to understand each other, and to gratify each 
 other, that one or the other turns cold and indifferent, per- 
 haps angry and hateful and then we have passions unsatis- 
 fied, and ranging the world, breaking up other homes and 
 spreading disease. So I would say to every young couple, 
 seek knowledge on this subject. Seek it without shame from 
 others who have had a chance to acquire it. Seek it also
 
 78 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 from nature, our wise old mother, who knows so much about 
 her children! 
 
 Be natural; be simple and straightforward; and beware 
 of fool nations about sex. If you will look in the code of Ham- 
 murabi, which is over four thousand years old, you will see the 
 provision that a man who has intercourse with a menstruat- 
 ing woman shall be killed. In Leviticus you will read that 
 both the man and the woman are to be cast put from their 
 people. You will find that most people still have some such 
 notion, which is without any basis whatever in health. And 
 this is only one illustration of many I might give of igno- 
 rance and superstition in the sex life. I would give this 
 as one very good rule to bear in mind; your love life exists 
 for the happiness and health of yourself and your partner, 
 and not for Hammurabi, nor Moses, nor Jehovah, nor your 
 mother-in-law, nor anybody else on the earth or above it. 
 
 Great numbers of people believe that women are naturally 
 less passionate than men, and that marital happiness depends 
 upon men's recognizing this. Of course, there are defective 
 individuals, both men and women; but the normal woman 
 is every bit as passionate as a man, if once she has been 
 taught; and if love is given its proper place in life, and 
 monkish notions not allowed to interfere, she will remain so 
 all through life, in spite of child-bearing or anything else. 
 I say to married couples that they should devote themselves 
 to making and preserving passionate gratification in love ; 
 because this is the bright jewel in the crown of marriage, and 
 if lovers solve this problem, they will find other problems com- 
 paratively simple.
 
 CHAPTER XLIII 
 
 THE MONEY SIDE OF MARRIAGE 
 
 (Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of mat- 
 rimony.) 
 
 So far we have discussed marriage as if it consisted only 
 of love. But it is manifest that this is not the case. Mar- 
 riage is every-day companionship, and also it is partnership 
 in a complicated business. In our school of marriage there- 
 fore we shall teach the rights and duties of both partners to 
 the contract, and shall face frankly the money side of the 
 enterprise. 
 
 One of the first facts we must get clear is that the eco- 
 nomics of marriage are in most parts of the world still based 
 upon the subjection of woman, and are therefore incom- 
 patible with the claims of woman as a partner and comrade. 
 They will never be right until the social revolution has abol- 
 ished privilege, and the state has granted to every woman a 
 maternity endowment, with a mother's pension for every child 
 during the entire period of the rearing and education of 
 that child. Until this is done, the average woman must 
 look to some man for the support of her child, and that, 
 by the automatic operation of economic force, makes her sub- 
 ject to the whims of the man. What women have to do is to 
 agitate for a revision of the property laws of marriage; and 
 meantime to see that in every marriage there is an extra- 
 legal understanding, which grants to the woman the equality 
 which laws and conventions deny her. 
 
 When I was a boy my mother had a woman friend who, 
 if she wanted to go downtown, would borrow a quarter from 
 my mother. This woman's husband was earning a generous 
 salary, enough to enable him to buy the best cigars by the 
 box, and to keep a supply of liquors always on hand; but 
 he gave his wife no allowance, and if she wanted pocket 
 money she had to ask him for it, each time a separate favor. 
 Yet this woman was keeping a home, she was doing just as 
 hard work and just as necessary work as the man. Mani- 
 festly, this was a preposterous arrangement. If a woman 
 
 79
 
 80 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 is going to be a home-maker for a husband, it is a simple, 
 common-sense proposition that the salary of the husband shall 
 be divided into three parts first, the part which goes to the 
 home, the benefit of which is shared in common; second, the 
 part which the husband has for his own use; and third, the 
 part which the wife has for hers. The second and third 
 parts should be equal, and the wife should have hers, not 
 as a favor, but as a right. If the two are making a homestead, 
 or running a farm, or building up a business, then half the 
 proceeds should be the woman's ; and it should be legally in her 
 name, and this as a matter of course, as any other business con- 
 tract. If the woman does not make a home, but merely displays 
 fine clothes at tea parties, that is of course another matter. Just 
 what she is to do is something that had better be determined 
 before marriage; and if a man wants a life-partner, to take 
 an interest in his work, or to have a useful work of her 
 own, he had better choose that kind of woman, and not merely 
 one that has a pretty face and a trim ankle. 
 
 The business side of marriage is something that has to 
 be talked out from time to time; there have to be meetings 
 of the board of directors, and at these meetings there ought 
 to be courtesy and kindness, but also plain facts and com- 
 mon sense, and no shirking of issues. Love is such a very 
 precious thing that any man or woman ought to be willing 
 to make money sacrifices to preserve it. But on the other 
 hand, it is a fact that there are some people with whom 
 you cannot be generous; the more you give them, the more 
 they take, and with such people the only safe rule is exact 
 justice. Let married couples decide exactly what contribu- 
 tion each makes to the family life, and what share of money 
 and authority each is entitled to. 
 
 I might spend several chapters discussing the various rocks 
 on which I have seen marriages go to wreck. For example, 
 extravagance and worldly show ; clothes for women. In Paris 
 is a "demi-monde," a world of brutal lust combined with 
 riotous luxury. The women of this "half-world" are in touch 
 with the world of art and fashion, and when the rich cos- 
 tumers and woman-decorators want what they call ideas, it 
 is to these lust-women they go. The fashions they design 
 are always depraved, of course; always for the flaunting of 
 sex, never for the suggestion of dignity and grave intelligence. 
 At several seasons of the year these lust-women are decked
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 81 
 
 out and paraded at the race-courses and other gathering places 
 of the rich, and their pictures are published in the papers 
 and spread over all the world. So forthwith it becomes nec- 
 essary for your wife in Oshkosh or Kalamazoo to throw 
 away all the perfectly good clothes she owns, and get a com- 
 plete new outfit because "they" are wearing something 
 different. Of course the costume-makers have seen that it is 
 extremely different, so as to make it impossible for your 
 wife and children to be happy in their last season's clothes. 
 I have a winter overcoat which I bought fourteen years ago, 
 and as it is still as good as new I expect to use it another 
 fourteen years, which will mean that it has cost me a dollar 
 and a half per year. But think what it would have cost me 
 if I had considered it necessary each year to have an over- 
 coat cut as the keepers of French mistresses were cutting 
 theirs ! 
 
 But then, suppose you put it up to your wife and daughters 
 to wear sensible clothes, and they do so, and then they observe 
 that on the street your eyes turn to follow the ladies in the 
 latest disappearing skirt? The point is, you perceive, that 
 you yourself are partly to blame for the fashions. They 
 appeal to a dirty little imp you have in your own heart, 
 and when the decent women discover that, it makes them 
 blazing hot, and that is one of the ways you may wreck 
 your domestic happiness if you want to. Unless I am greatly 
 mistaken, when the class war is all over we are going to 
 see in our world a sex war ; but it is not going to be between 
 the men and the women, it is going to be between the mother 
 women and the mistress women, and the mistress women 
 are going to have their hides stripped off. 
 
 Men wreck marriage because they are promiscuous; and 
 women wreck it because they are parasites. Woman has 
 been for long centuries an economic inferior, and she has 
 the vices of the subject peoples and tribes. Now there are 
 some who want to keep these vices, while at the same time 
 claiming the new privileges which go with equality. Such 
 a woman picks out a man who is sensitive and chivalrous; 
 who knows that women suffer handicaps, pains of childbirth, 
 physical weakness, and who therefore feels impelled to bear 
 more than his share of the burdens. She makes him her 
 slave ; and by and by she gets a child, and then she has him, 
 because he is bowed down with awe and worship, he thinks
 
 82 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 that such a miracle has never happened in the world before, 
 and "he spends the rest of his life waiting on her whims and 
 nursing her vanities. I note that at the recent convention 
 of the Woman's Party they demanded their rights and agreed 
 to surrender their privileges. There you have the final test 
 by which you may know that women really want to be free, 
 and are prepared to take the responsibilities of freedom,
 
 CHAPTER XLIV 
 THE DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY 
 
 (Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should en- 
 deavor to preserve it.) 
 
 So far in this discussion we have assumed that love means 
 monogamous love. We did so, for the reason that we could 
 not consider every question at once. But we have promised 
 to deal with all the problems of sex in the light of reason; 
 and so we have now to take up the question, what are the 
 sanctions of monogamy, and why do we refuse sanction to 
 other kinds of love? 
 
 First, let us set aside several reasons with which we have 
 nothing to do. For example, the reason of tradition. It is a fact 
 that Anglo-Saxon civilization has always refused legal rec- 
 ognition to non-monogamous marriage. But then, Anglo- 
 Saxon civilization has recognized war, and slavery, and specu- 
 lation, and private property in land, and many other things 
 which we presume to describe as crimes. If tradition can- 
 not justify itself to our reason, we shall choose martyrdom. 
 
 Second, the religious reason. This is the one that most 
 people give. It is convenient, because it saves the need of 
 thinking. Suffice it here to say that we prefer to think. 
 If we cannot justify monogamy by the facts of life, we shall 
 declare ourselves for polygamy. 
 
 What are the scientific and rational reasons for monog- 
 amy ? First among them is venereal disease. This may seem 
 like a vulgar reason, but no one can deny that it is real. 
 There was a time, apparently, when mankind did not suffer 
 from these plagues, and we hope there may be such a time 
 again. I shall not attempt to prescribe the marital customs 
 for the people of that happy age; I suspect that they will 
 be able to take care of themselves. Confining myself to my 
 lifetime and yours, I say that the aim of every sensible man 
 and woman must be to confine sex relations to the smallest 
 possible limits. I know, of course, that there are prophy- 
 lactics, and the army and navy present statistics to show that 
 they succeed in a great proportion of cases. But if you are 
 
 83
 
 84 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 one of those persons in whose case they don't succeed, you 
 will find the statistics a cold source of comfort to you. 
 
 John and Mary go to the altar, or to the justice of the 
 peace, and John says: "With all my worldly goods I thee 
 endow." But the formula is incomplete; it ought to read: 
 "And likewise with the fruits of my wild oats." Marriage is 
 a contract wherein each of the contracting parties agrees to 
 share whatever pathogenic bacteria the other party may have 
 or acquire; surely, therefore, the contract involves a right 
 of each party to have a say as to how many chances of 
 infection the other shall incur. John goes off on a busi- 
 ness trip, and is lonesome, and meets an agreeable widow, 
 and figures to himself that there is very little chance that so 
 charming a person can be dangerous. But maybe Mary 
 wouldn't agree with his calculations; maybe Mary would 
 not consider it a part of the marriage bargain that she should 
 take the diseases of the agreeable widow. What commonly 
 happens is that Mary is not consulted ; John revises the con- 
 tract in secret, making it read that Mary shall take a chance 
 at the diseases of the widow. How can any thinking person 
 deny that John has thus committed an act of treason to Mary ? 
 
 I know that there are people who don't mind running such 
 chances; that is one reason why there are venereal diseases. 
 All I can say is that the sex-code set forth in this book is 
 based upon the idea that to deliver mankind from the venereal 
 plague, we wish to confine the sex relationship within the 
 narrowest limits consistent with health, happiness and spirit- 
 ual development ; and that to this end we take the young and 
 teach them chastity, and we marry them early while they are 
 clean, and then we call upon them to make the utmost effort 
 to make a success of that union, and to make it a matter 
 of honor to keep the marital faith. We do this with some 
 hope of effectiveness, because we have made our program 
 consistent with the requirements of nature, the genuine needs 
 of love both physical and spiritual. 
 
 The second argument for monogamy is the economic one. 
 We have dreamed a social order where every child will be 
 guaranteed maintenance by the state, and where women will be 
 free from dependence on men. What will be the love arrange- 
 ments of men and women under this new order is another 
 problem which we leave for them to decide, in the certainty 
 that they will know more about it than we do. Meantime,
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 85 
 
 we are for the present under the private property regime, 
 and have to love and marry and raise our children accord- 
 ingly. The children must have homes, and if they are 
 to be normal children, they must have both the male 
 and female influence in their lives; which means that 
 their parents must be friends and partners, not quarrel- 
 ing in secret. This argument, I know, is one of expediency. 
 I have adopted it, after watching a great number of people 
 try other than monogamous sex arrangements, and seeing 
 their chances of happiness and success wrecked by the pres- 
 sure of economic forces. To rebel against social compulsion 
 may be heroism, and again it may be merely bad judgment. 
 For my part, the world's greatest evil is poverty, the cause 
 of crime, prostitution and war. I concentrate my energies 
 upon the abolishing of that evil, and I let other problems 
 wait. 
 
 The third reason is that monogamy is economical of hu- 
 man time and thought. The business of finding and wooing 
 a mate takes a lot of energy, and adjustment after marriage 
 takes more. To throw away the results of this labor and 
 do it all over again is certainly not common sense. Of course, 
 if you bake a cake and burn it, you have to get more ma- 
 terial and make another try; but that is a different matter 
 from baking a cake with the deliberate intention of throw- 
 ing it away after a bite or two. 
 
 The advocates of varietism in love will here declare 
 that we are begging the question. We are assuming that 
 love and the love chase are not worthy in themselves, 
 but merely means to some other end. Can it be that 
 love delights are the keenest and most intense that hu- 
 mans can experience, and that all other purposes of life are 
 contributory to them? Certainly a great deal of art lends 
 support to this idea, and many poets have backed up their 
 words by their deeds. As Coleridge phrased it: 
 
 "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 All are but ministers of Love 
 And feed his sacred flame." 
 
 This is a question not to be played with. Experimenting 
 in love is costly, and millions have wrecked their lives by 
 7
 
 86 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 it. The sex urge in us is imperious and cruel ; it wants 
 nothing less than the whole of us, body, mind and spirit, 
 and ofttimes it behaves like the genii in the bottle it gets 
 out, and not all the powers in the universe can get it back. 
 I have talked with many men about sex and heard them say 
 that it presents itself to them as an unmitigated torment, 
 something they would give everything they own to be free 
 of. And these, mind you, not men living in monasteries, 
 trying to repress their natural impulses, but men of the 
 world, who have lived freely, seeking pleasure and taking it 
 as it came. The primrose path of dalliance did not lead 
 them to peace, and the pursuit of variety in love brought them 
 only monotony. 
 
 I stop and think of one after another of these sex-ridden 
 people, and I cannot think of one whom I would envy. I 
 know one who in a frenzy of unhappiness seized a razor 
 and castrated himself. I think of another, a certain class- 
 mate in college whom I once stopped in a conversation, re- 
 marking: "Did you ever realize what a state you have got 
 your mind into ? Everything means sex to you. Every phrase 
 you hear, every idea that is suggested you try to make 
 some sort of pun, to connect it somehow or other with sex." 
 The man thought and said, "I guess that's true." The idea 
 had never occurred to him before ; he had just gone on letting 
 his instincts have their way with him, without ever putting 
 his reason upon the matter. 
 
 That was a crude kind of sex; but I think of another 
 man, an idealist and champion of human liberty. One of the 
 forms of liberty he maintained was the right to love as many 
 women as he pleased, and although he was a married man, 
 one hardly ever saw him that he was not courting some 
 young girl. As a result, his mental powers declined, and 
 he did little but talk about ideas. I do not know anyone today 
 who respects him except a few people who live the same 
 sort of life. The thought of him brings to my mind a 
 sentence of Nietzsche a man who surely stood for freedom 
 of personality: "I pity the lovers who have nothing higher 
 than their love." 
 
 A question like this can be decided only by the experience 
 of the race. Some will make love the end and aim of life, 
 and others will make it the means to other ends, and we 
 shall see which kind of people achieve the best results, which
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 87 
 
 kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the most original 
 and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the 
 experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough 
 of it and quit; I could name among these half a dozen of 
 our younger novelists. I know others who are still in it 
 and I watch their lives and find them to be restless, jealous, 
 egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is based upon 
 the fact that I have never known any happy or successful 
 "free lovers." Of course, I know some noble and sincere 
 people who do not believe in the marriage contract, and 
 refuse to be bound by law; but these people are as monog- 
 amous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor than if 
 they were duly married. 
 
 It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere 
 love to imagine permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. 
 If you aren't that much in love, you aren't really in love at 
 all, and you had better content yourself with strolling to- 
 gether and chatting together and dining together and play- 
 ing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in 
 which men and women can enjoy each other's company with- 
 out entering upon the sacred intimacy of sex ! You can learn 
 to take sex lightly, of course, but if you do so, you reduce 
 by so much the chances that true and deep love will ever 
 come to you; for true and deep love requires some patience, 
 some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals mate 
 quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries 
 about love, and the possibilities of the human soul 
 in love, have come because men and women have been 
 willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it seriously 
 and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, 
 the rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the 
 lives of such we learn that love is nature's device for taking 
 us out of ourselves, and making us truly social creatures. 
 
 Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Ger- 
 trude Atherton, in her glorification of the sex-corruptions of 
 capitalist society. She indicted American literature for its 
 "bourgeois" qualities among these the fact that American 
 authors had a prejudice in favor of living with their own 
 wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of sex promiscuity 
 as they are understood by European artists, and I ventured 
 in replying to remark that "one woman can be more to a man 
 than a dozen can possibly be." That sounds like a paradox,
 
 88 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 but it is really a profound truth, and the person who does 
 not understand it has missed the best there is in the sex 
 relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to 
 those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there 
 is no reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom 
 and satiety.
 
 CHAPTER XLV 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY 
 
 (Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold 
 another to the pledge of love.) 
 
 Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the 
 same who had me sent to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, 
 as I have narrated in "The Brass Check." I remember argu- 
 ing with him concerning his ideas of sex, which were of the 
 freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put 
 the great unanswerable question: "What are you going to 
 do about the problem of jealousy?" And I had no response 
 at hand; for jealousy is truly a most cruel and devastating 
 and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you escape it, if 
 you are going to preserve monogamy? 
 
 The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down 
 all the prejudices against sexual promiscuity. Free and un- 
 limited license was every person's right, and for any other 
 person to interfere was enslavement, for any other person to 
 criticize was superstition. But the power of superstition 
 is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men resent- 
 ful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of 
 their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disap- 
 proval of jealousy. 
 
 Other men, less purely physiological in their attitude to 
 sex, have wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. 
 G. Wells has a novel, "In the Days of the Comet," in which 
 he portrays two men, both nobly and truly in love with the 
 same woman. One in a passion of jealousy is about to mur- 
 der the other, when a great social transformation is magically 
 brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to uni- 
 versal love, and the two men nobly and lovingly share the 
 same woman. Shelley also dreamed this dream, inviting two 
 women to share him. I have known others who tried it, but 
 never permanently. I do not say that it never has succeeded, 
 or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing 
 the future I am trying to give practical advice to people, for 
 the conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on 
 
 89
 
 90 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 this point is that polygamous and polyandrous experiments 
 in modern capitalist society cost more than they are worth. 
 
 I once knew a certain high school teacher, who believed 
 religiously in every kind of freedom. When she married, 
 she and her husband, an artist, made a vow against jealousy ; 
 but as it worked out, this vow meant that the wife had a 
 steady job and took care of the husband, while he loafed and 
 loved other women. When finally she grew tired of it, he 
 accused her of being jealous; also, she had brought it down 
 to the matter of money! I know another woman, an Anar- 
 chist, widely known as a lecturer on sex freedom. She laid 
 down the general principle of unlimited personal freedom for 
 all, and she tried to live up to her faith. She entered into 
 a "free union" with a certain man, and when she discovered 
 that he was making love to another woman, in the presence 
 of a friend of mine she threw a vase of flowers at his head. 
 You see, her general principles had clashed with another gen- 
 eral principle, to the effect that a person who feels deep and 
 strong love inevitably desires that love to endure, and cannot 
 but suffer to see it preyed upon and destroyed. \ 
 
 Let us first consider the question, just what are the true 
 and proper implications of monogamous love? The Roman 
 Catholic church advocates "monogamy," and understands 
 thereby that a man and woman pledge themselves "till death 
 do us part," and if either of them cancels this arrangement 
 it is adultery and mortal sin. I hope that none of my readers 
 understands by "monogamy" any such system of spiritual 
 strangulation. My own idea is rather what some church- 
 man has sarcastically described by the term "progressive 
 polygamy." I believe that a man and woman should pledge 
 their faith in love, and should keep that faith, and endeavor 
 with all their best energies to make a success of it; they 
 should strive each to understand the other's needs, and unsel- 
 fishly to fulfill them, within the limits of fair play. But if, 
 after such an effort has been truly made, it becomes clear 
 that the union does not mean health and happiness for one 
 of the parties, that party has a right to withdraw from it, 
 and for any government or church or other power to deny 
 that right is both folly and cruelty. 
 
 Now, on the basis of this definition of monogamy or, 
 if you prefer, of progressive polygamy we are in position 
 to say what we think about jealousy. If two people pledge
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 91 
 
 their faith, and one breaks it, and the other complains, we 
 do not call that jealousy, but just common decency. Neither 
 do we call it jealousy if one expects the other to avoid the 
 appearance of guilt; for love is a serious thing, not to be 
 played with, and I think that a person who truly loves will 
 do everything possible to make clear to the beloved that he 
 is keeping and means to keep the plighted faith. 
 
 You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in en- 
 deavoring thus to distinguish between justifiable and unjusti- 
 fiable jealousy, and calling the former by some other name. 
 It does not make much difference about words, provided I 
 make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole string of 
 words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and can- 
 not be discussed without preliminary explanations and dis- 
 tinctions ; religion, for example, and morality, and aristocracy, 
 and justice, to name only a few. Most people's thinking 
 about marriage and love has been made like soup in a cheap 
 restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of scraps and notions 
 from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian 
 monkery and Renaissance license, absurdly called "romance." 
 So before you can do any thinking about a problem like 
 jealousy, you have to agree to use the word to mean some- 
 thing definite, whether good or bad. 
 
 We shall take jealousy as a "bad" word, and use it to 
 mean the setting up, by a man or woman, of some claim to 
 the love of another person, which claim cannot be justified 
 in the court of reason and fair play. This includes, in 
 the first place, all claims based upon a courtship, not 
 ratified by marriage. It is to the interest of society and 
 the race that men and women should be free to investi- 
 gate persons of the other sex, and to experiment with the 
 affections before pledges of marriage are made. If sen- 
 sible customs of love and just laws of marriage were made, 
 there would be no excuse for a woman's giving herself to a 
 man before marriage; she should be taught not to do it, and 
 then if she does it, the risk is her own, and the disgusting 
 perversion of venality and greed known as the "breach of 
 promise suit" should be unknown in our law. The young 
 should be taught that it is the other person's right to change 
 his mind and withdraw at any time before marriage; what- 
 ever pains and pangs this may cause must be borne in silence. 
 
 The second kind of jealousy is that which seeks to keep
 
 92 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 in the marriage bond a person who is not happy in it and 
 has asked to be released. The law sanctions this kind of 
 cowardly selfishness, which manifests itself every day on the 
 front pages of our newspapers a spectacle of monstrous and 
 loathsome passions unleashed and even glorified. Husbands 
 set the bloodhounds of the law after wives who have fled 
 with some other man, and send the man to a cell, and drag 
 the woman back to a loveless home. Wives engage private 
 detectives, and trail their husbands to some "love nest," and 
 then ensue long public wrangles, with washing of filthy linen, 
 and the matter is settled by a "separation." The virtuous wife, 
 who may have driven the man away by neglect or vanity or 
 stupidity, is granted a share of his earnings for the balance 
 of her life; and two more people are added to the millions 
 who are denied sexual happiness under the law, and are there- 
 by impelled to live as law violators. 
 
 For this there is only one remedy conceivable. We have 
 banned cannibalism and slavery and piracy and duelling, and 
 we must ban one more ancient and cruel form of human 
 oppression, the effort to hold people in the bonds of sex by 
 any other power save that of love. I am aware that the 
 reactionaries who read this book will take this sentence out 
 of its context and quote it to prove that I am a "free lover." 
 I shall be sorry to have that done, but even so, I was not 
 willing to live in slavery myself, and I am not willing to 
 advocate it for others. I am aware that there are degenerate 
 and defective individuals, and that we have to mlake special 
 provision for them, as I shall presently set forth; but the 
 average, normal human being must be free to decide what 
 is love for him, and what is happiness for him. Every per- 
 son in the world will have to deny himiself the right to demand 
 love where love is not freely given, and all lovers in the world 
 will have to 'hold themselves ready to let the loved one go 
 if and when the loved one demands it. I am aware that this 
 is a hard saying, and a hard duty, but it is one that life lays 
 upon us, and one that there is no escaping.
 
 CHAPTER XLVI 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE 
 
 (Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and 
 one of the means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.) 
 
 You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about 
 the "divorce evil," and you will find that to the preacher or 
 editor this "evil" consists of the fact that more and more people 
 are refusing to stay unhappily married. It does not interest 
 these moralizers if the statistics show that it is women who are 
 getting most of the divorces, and that the meaning of the phje- 
 nomenon is that women are refusing to continue living with 
 drunken and dissolute men. To the clergy, the breaking of a 
 marriage is an evil per se, and regardless of circumstances. 
 They know this because God has told them so, and in the name 
 of God they seek to keep people tied in sex unions which have 
 come to mean loathing instead of love. 
 
 Now, I will assert it as a mathematical certainty that a con- 
 siderable percentage of marriages must fail. It is essential to 
 progress that human beings should grow, both mentally and 
 spiritually, and manifestly they cannot all grow in the same way. 
 If they grow differently, must they not sometimes lose the power 
 to make each other happy in the marital bonds ? Who does not 
 know the man who masters life and becomes a vital force, 
 while his wife remains dull and empty ? If such a man changes 
 wives, the world in general denounces him as a selfish beast; 
 but the world does not know nor does it care about those thou- 
 sands of men who, not caring to be branded as selfish beasts, 
 fulfill the needs of their lives by keeping mistresses in secret. 
 
 I knew a certain country school teacher, one of the most 
 narrowly conventional young women imaginable, who was 
 engaged to a middle-aged business man. He went to New York 
 on a business trip, and stayed a couple of months, and wrote her 
 that he had met some Anarchists, and had discovered that all 
 he had read about them in the newspapers was false, and 
 that they were the true and pure idealists to whom the rest of 
 his life must be devoted. The young lady was horrified ; nor 
 was she any happier when she came to New York and met her 
 
 93
 
 94 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 fiance's new friends. She ought in common sense to have 
 broken the engagement ; but she was in love, and she married, as 
 many another fool woman does, with the idea of "reforming" 
 the man. She failed, and was utterly and unspeakably 
 wretched. 
 
 I know another man, a conservative capitalist of narrow 
 and aggressive temper, whose wife turned into an ardent Bol- 
 shevik. The man thinks that all Bolsheviks should be shut up 
 in jail for life, while the wife is equally certain that all jails 
 should be razed to the ground and all Bolsheviks placed in con- 
 trol of the government. These two people have got to a point 
 where they cannot sit down to the breakfast table without flying 
 into a quarrel. I know another case of a modern scientist, an 
 agnostic, whose wife, a half-educated, sentimental woman, took 
 to dabbling in mysticism, and drove him wild by setting up an 
 image of Buddha in her bedroom, and consorting with"swamis" 
 in long yellow robes. I know another whose wife turned 
 into an ultra-pious Catholic, and turned over the care of his 
 domestic life to a priest. Is it not obvious that the only possible 
 solution of such problems lies in divorce? Unless, indeed, we 
 are all of us going to turn over the care of our domestic lives to 
 the priests ! 
 
 Our grandfathers and grandmothers believed one thing, and 
 believed the same thing when they were seventy as when they 
 were twenty ; so it was possible for them to dwell in domestic 
 security and permanence till death did them part. But we are 
 learning to change our minds ; and whether what we believe is 
 better or worse than what our ancestors believed, at least it is 
 different. Also we are coming to take what we believe with 
 ^more seriousness ; the intellectual life means more and more to 
 us, and it becomes harder and harder for us to find sexual and 
 domestic happiness with a partner who does not share our con- 
 victions, but, on the contrary, may be contributing to the 
 campaign funds of the opposition party. 
 
 I do not mean by this that people should get a divorce as 
 soon as they find they differ about some intellectual idea ; on the 
 contrary, I have advocated that they should do everything pos- 
 sible to understand and to tolerate each other. But it is a fact 
 that intellectual convictions are the raw material out of which 
 characters and lives are made, and it is inevitable that some 
 characters and lives that fit quite well at twenty should fit very 
 badly at thirty or forty. When we refuse divorce under such
 
 THE BOOK or LOVE 95 
 
 circumstances we are not fostering marriage, as we fondly 
 imagine ; we are really fostering adultery. It is a fact that not 
 one person in ten who is held by legal or social force in an 
 unhappy sex union will refrain from seeking satisfaction out- 
 side; and because these outside satisfactions are disgraceful, 
 and in some cases criminal, they seldom have any permanence. 
 Therefore it follows that "strict" divorce laws, such as the 
 clerical propaganda urges upon us, are in reality laws for the 
 promotion of fornication and prostitution. 
 
 There is a short story by Edith Wharton, in which the 
 "divorce evil" is exhibited to us in its naked horror ; the story 
 called "The Other Two," in the volume "The Descent of Man." 
 A society woman has been divorced twice and married three 
 times, and by an ingenious set of circumstances the woman and 
 all three of the men are brought into the same drawing-room at 
 the same time. Just imagine, if you can, such an excruciating 
 situation : a woman, her husband, and two men who used to be 
 her husbands, all compelled to meet together and think of some- 
 thing to say ! I cite this story because it is a perfect illustration 
 of the extent to which the "divorce problem" is a problem of 
 our lack of sense. Mrs. Wharton will, I fear, consider me a 
 very vulgar person if I assert that there is absolutely no reason 
 whatever why any of those four people in her story should have 
 had a moment's discomfort of mind, except that they thought 
 there was. There is absolutely nothing to prevent a man and 
 woman who used to be married from meeting socially and being 
 decent to each other, or to prevent two men from being decent 
 to each other under such circumstances. I would not say that 
 they should choose to be intimate friends though even that 
 may be possible occasionally. 
 
 I know, because I have seen it happen. In Holland I met a 
 certain eminent novelist and poet, a great and lovable man. I 
 visited his home, and met his wife and two little children, 
 and saw a man and woman living in domestic happiness. The 
 man had also two grown sons, and after a few days he 
 remarked that he would like me to meet the mother of these 
 young men. We went for a walk of a mile or so, and met a 
 lady who lived in a small house by herself, and who received us 
 with a friendly welcome and talked with us for a couple of 
 hours about music and books and art. This lady had been the 
 writer's wife for ten years or so, and there had been a terrible 
 uproar when they voluntarily parted. But they had refused to
 
 96 
 
 pay attention to this uproar ; they understood why they did not 
 wish to remain husband and wife any longer, but they did not 
 consider it necessary to quarrel about it, nor even to break off 
 the friendship which their common interests made possible. 
 The two women in the case were not intimate, I gathered, but 
 they frequently met at the homes of others, and found no diffi- 
 culty in being friendly. I suggest to Mrs. Wharton that this 
 story is at least as interesting as the one she has told ; but I fear 
 she will not care to write it, because apparently she considers it 
 necessary that people who are well bred and refined should be 
 the helpless victims of destructive manias.
 
 CHAPTER XLVII 
 
 THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE 
 
 (Discusses the circumstances under which society has the right 
 to forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.) 
 
 We have quoted the old maxim, "Marry in haste and repent 
 at leisure," and we suggested that parents and guardians should 
 have the right to ask the young to wait before marriage, and 
 make certain of the state of their hearts. We have now the 
 same advice to give concerning divorce; the same claim to 
 enter on behalf of society that it has and should assert the 
 right to ask people to delay and think carefully before breaking 
 up a marriage. 
 
 What interest has society in the restriction of divorce? 
 What affair is it of any other person if I choose to get a divorce 
 and marry a new wife once a month ? There are many reasons, 
 not in any way based upon religious superstition or conven- 
 tional prejudice. In the first place, there are or may be chil- 
 dren, and society should try to preserve for every child a home 
 with a father and a mother in it. Second, there are property 
 rights, of which every marriage is a tangle, and the settlement 
 of which the law should always oversee. Third, there is the 
 question of venereal disease, which society has an unquestion- 
 able right to keep down, by every reasonable restriction upon 
 sexual promiscuity. And finally, there is the respect which all 
 men and women owe to love. It seems to me that society has 
 the same right to protect love against extreme outrage, as it has 
 to forbid indecent exposure of the person on the street. 
 
 There is in successful operation in Switzerland a wise and 
 sane divorce law, based upon common sense and not upon super- 
 stition. A couple wish to break their marriage, and they go 
 before a judge, and in private session, as to a friendly adviser, 
 they tell their troubles. He gives them advice about their dis- 
 agreement, and sends them away for three months to think it 
 over. At the end of three months, if they still desire a divorce, 
 they meet with him again. If he still thinks there is a chance 
 of reconciliation, he has the right to require them to wait 
 another three months. But if at the end of this second period 
 
 97
 
 98 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 they are still convinced that the case is hopeless, and that they 
 should part, the judge is required to grant the divorce. You 
 may note that this is exactly what I have suggested concerning 
 young couples who become engaged. In both cases, the parties 
 directly interested have the right to decide their own fate, but 
 the rest of the world requires them to think carefully about it, 
 and to listen to counsel. Except for grave offenses, such as 
 adultery, insanity, crime or venereal disease, I do not think that 
 anyone should receive a divorce in less than six months, nor do 
 I think that any personal right in contravened by the imposing 
 of such a delay. 
 
 Next, what are we going to say to the right, or the claim to 
 the right, on the part of a man or woman, to be married once a 
 year throughout a lifetime ? In order to illustrate this problem, 
 I will tell you about a certain man known to me. In his early 
 life he spent a couple of years in a lunatic asylum. He lays 
 claim to extraordinary spiritual gifts, and uses the language of 
 the highest idealism known. He is a man of culture and 
 good family, and thus exerts a peculiar charm upon young 
 women of refinement and sensitiveness. To my knowledge he 
 was three times married in six years, and each time he deserted 
 the woman, and forced her to divorce him, and to take care of 
 herself, and in one case of a child. In addition, he had begotten 
 one child out of marriage, and left the mother and child to 
 starve. For ten years or so I used to see him about once in six 
 months, and invariably he had a new woman, a young girl of 
 fine character, who had been ensnared by him, and was in the 
 agonizing process of discovering his moral and mental derange- 
 ment. Yet there was absolutely nothing in the law to place 
 restraint upon this man ; he could wander from state to state, 
 or to the other side of the world, preying upon lovely young 
 girls wherever he went 
 
 This particular man happens to call himself a "radical" ; but 
 I could tell yo.u of similar men in the highest social circles, or in 
 the political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world ; 
 they are in every rank of life, and are just as definitely and 
 certainly menaces to human welfare, and progress as pirates on 
 the high seas or highwaymen on the road. Nor are they con- 
 fined to the males; the world is full of women who use their 
 sex charms for predatory purposes, and some of them are far 
 too clever for any law that you or I can contrive at present. 
 But I think we might begin by refusing to let any man or
 
 THE BOOK OF LOVE 99 
 
 woman have more than two divorces in one lifetime, in any 
 state or part of the world. If any man or woman tries three 
 times to find happiness in love, and fails each time, we have a 
 right to assume that the fault must lie with that person, and not 
 with the three partners. 
 
 I think we may go further yet ; having made wise laws of 
 love and marriage, taking into consideration all human needs, 
 we have a right to require that men and women shall obey the 
 laws. At present the great mass of the public has sympathy for 
 the law-breaker; just as, in old days, the peasants could not 
 help admiring the outlaw who resisted unjust land laws and 
 robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist regime, we can 
 not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even 
 though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore. 
 But when we have made sex laws that we know are just and 
 sensible then we shall consider that we have the right to 
 restrain sex criminals, and in extreme cases we shall avail our- 
 selves of the skill of science to perform a surgical operation 
 which will render him unable in future to prey upon the love 
 needs of people who are placed at his mercy by their best 
 qualities, their unselfishness and lack of suspicion. 
 
 We clear out foul-smelling weeds from our garden, because 
 we wish to raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein. 
 There lives in California a student of plant life, who has shown 
 us what we can do, not by magic or by superhuman efforts, 
 but simply by loving plants, by watching them ceaselessly, 
 understanding their ways, and guiding their sex-life to our 
 own purposes. We can perform what to our ignorant ancestors 
 would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all 
 sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own 
 kind, and survive forever if we give them proper care. In 
 other words, Luther Burbank has shown us that we can "change 
 plant nature." 
 
 There flash back upon my memory all those dull, weary, 
 sick human creatures, who have repeated to me that dull, 
 weary, sick old formula, "You cannot change human nature." 
 I do not think I am indulging either in religious superstition 
 or in blind optimism, but am speaking precisely, in saying 
 that whenever human beings get ready to apply experimental 
 science to themselves, they can change human nature just as 
 they now change plant nature. By putting human bodies 
 together in love, we make new bodies of children more beautiful
 
 100 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 than any who have yet romped on the earth ; and in the same 
 way, by putting minds and souls together, we can make new 
 kinds of minds and souls, different from those we have pre- 
 viously known, and greater than either the man-soul or the 
 woman-soul alone. 
 
 Also, by that magic which is the law of mind and soul 
 life, each new creation can be multiplied to infinity, and shared 
 by all other minds and souls that live in the present or may 
 live in the future. We have shown elsewhere how genius 
 multiplies to infinity the joy and power of life by means of 
 the arts ; and one of the greatest of the arts is the art of love. 
 Consider the great lovers, the true lovers, of history how they 
 have enriched the lives of us all. It does not make any dif- 
 ference whether these men and women lived in the flesh, or in 
 the brain of a poet we learn alike from Dante and Beatrice, 
 from Abelard and Heloise, from Robert and Elizabeth Brown- 
 ing, from Tristan and Isolde, from Romeo and Juliet, what is 
 the depth and the splendor of this passion which lies hidden 
 within us, and how it may enrich and vivify and glorify all life.
 
 PART FOUR 
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY
 
 CHAPTER XLVIII 
 
 THE EGO AND THE WORLD 
 
 (Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant and 
 in primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment to life.) 
 
 We have now to consider the relationship of man to his 
 fellows, with whom he lives in social groups. Upon this prob- 
 lem floods of light have been thrown by the new science of 
 psycho-analysis. I will try to give, briefly and in simple 
 language, an idea of these discoveries. 
 
 One of the laws of biology is that every individual, in his 
 development, reproduces the history of the race; so that im- 
 pulses and mental states of a child reveal to us what our 
 far-off ancestors loved and feared. The same thing is dis- 
 covered to be true of neurotics, people who have failed in 
 adjusting themselves to civilized life, and have gone back, 
 in some or all of their mental traits, to infantile states. If 
 we analyze the unconscious minds of "nervous patients," and 
 compare them with what we find in the minds of infants, 
 and in savages, we discover the same dreams, the same long- 
 ings and the same fears. 
 
 The mental life of man begins in the womb. We cannot 
 observe that life directly, but we know that it is there, because 
 there cannot be organic life without mind to direct it, and 
 just as there is an unconscious mind that regulates the bodily 
 processes in adults, so in the embryo there must be an uncon- 
 scious mind to direct the flow of blood, the building of bones, 
 muscle, eyes and brain. The mental life of that unborn crea- 
 ture is of course purely egotistical; it knows nothing outside 
 itself, and it finds this universe an agreeable place every- 
 thing being supplied to it, promptly and perfectly, without 
 effort of its own. 
 
 But suddenly it gets its first shock; pain begins, and 
 severe discomfort, and the creature is shoved out into a cold 
 world, yelling in protest against the unsought change. And 
 from that moment on, the new-born infant labors to adjust 
 itself to an entirely new set of conditions. Discomforts 
 trouble it, and it cries. Quickly it learns that these cries are 
 
 103
 
 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 answered, and satisfaction of its needs is furnished. Some- 
 how, magically, things appear; warm and dry covering, a 
 trickle of delicious hot milk into its mouth. At first the infant 
 mind has no idea how all this happens ; but gradually it comes 
 to realize objects outside itself, and it forms the idea that 
 these objects exist to serve its wants. Later on it learns that 
 there are particular sounds which attach to particular objects, 
 and cause them to function. The sound "Mama," for example, 
 produces a goddess clothed in beauty and power, perform- 
 ing miracles. So the infant mind arrives at the "period of 
 magic gestures" and the "period of magic words" ; correspond- 
 ing to a certain type of myth and belief which we find in 
 every race and tribe of human being that now exists or ever 
 has existed on earth. All these stories about magic wishes and 
 magic rings and magic spells of a thousand sorts; and no- 
 where on earth a child which does not listen greedily to such 
 fancies ! The reason is simply that the child has passed 
 through this stage of mental life, and so recently that the feel- 
 ings are close to the surface of his consciousness. 
 
 But gradually the infant makes the painful discovery that 
 not everything in existence can be got to serve him; there 
 are forces which are proof against his magic spells; there are 
 some which are hostile, and these the infant learns to regard 
 with hatred and fear. Sometimes hatred and fear are 
 strangely mixed with admiration and love. For example, 
 there is a powerful being known as "father," who is some- 
 times good and useful, but at other times takes the atten- 
 tion of the supremely useful "mother," the source of food and 
 warmth and life. So "father" is hated, and in fancy he is 
 wished out of the way which to the infant is the same thing 
 as killing. Out of this grows a whole universe of fascinat- 
 ing mental life, which Freud calls by the name "the CEdipus 
 complex" after the legend of the Greek hero who murdered 
 his father and committed incest with his mother, and then, 
 when he discovered what he had done, put out his own 
 eyes. There is a mass of legends, old as human thought, 
 repeating this story; we cannot be sure whether they have 
 grown out of the greeds and jealousies of this early wish-life 
 of the infant, or whether they had their base in the fact that 
 there was a stage in human progress in which the father 
 really was killed off by the sons. 
 
 This latter idea is discussed by Freud, in his book, "Totem
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 105 
 
 and Taboo." It appears that primitive man lived in hordes, 
 which were dominated by one old male, who kept all the wo- 
 men to himself, and either killed the young males, or drove 
 them out to shift for themselves; so the young men would 
 combine and murder their father. The forming of human 
 society, of marriage and the family, depended upon one fac- 
 tor, the decision of the young victors to live and let live. The 
 only way they could do this was to agree not to quarrel over 
 the women of their own group, but to seek other women from 
 other groups. This may account for what is known as 
 "exogamy," an almost universal marriage custom of primitive 
 man, whereby a man named Jones is barred by frightful taboos 
 from the women named Jones, but is permitted relations with 
 all the women named Smith. 
 
 To return to our infant: he is in the midst of a painful 
 process of adjusting himself to the outside world ; discovering 
 that sometimes all his magic words and gestures fail, his 
 wishes no longer come true. There are beings outside him, 
 with wills of their own, and power to enforce them; he has 
 to learn to get along with these beings, and give up his pleas- 
 ures to theirs. These processes which go on in the infant soul, 
 the hopes and the terrors, the griefs and the angers, are of the 
 profoundest significance for the later adult life. For noth- 
 ing gets out of the mind that has once got into it; the infan- 
 tile cravings which are repressed and forgotten stay in the 
 unconscious, and work there, and strive still for expression. 
 The conscious mind will not tolerate them, but they escape 
 in the form of fairy-tales and stories, of dreams and delu- 
 sions, slips of the tongue, and many other mental events which 
 it is fascinating to examine. Also, if we are weakened by 
 ill .health or nervous strain, these infantile wishes may take 
 the form of "neuroses," and fully grown people may take to 
 stammering, or become impotent, or hysterical, or even insane, 
 because of failures of adjustment to life that happened when 
 they were a year or two old. These things are known, not 
 merely as a matter of theory, but because, as soon as by 
 analysis these infant secrets are brought into consciousness 
 and adjusted there, the trouble instantly ceases. 
 
 So it appears that the whole process of human life, from 
 the very hour of birth, consists of the correct adjustment of 
 men and women in relation to their fellows. Not merely is 
 man a social being, but all the prehuman ancestors of men,
 
 106 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 for ages upon geologic ages, have been social beings ; they 
 have lived in groups, and their survival has depended upon 
 their success in fitting themselves snugly into group relation- 
 ships. Failure to make correct adjustments means punish- 
 ment by the group, or by enemies outside the group ; if the 
 failure is serious enough, it means death. We may assert that 
 the task of understanding one's fellow men, and making one's 
 self understood by them, is the most important task that con- 
 fronts every individual. 
 
 And if we look about the world at present, the most super- 
 ficial of us cannot fail to realize that the task is far from being 
 correctly performed. So many people unhappy, so many striv- 
 ing for what they cannot get! So many having to be locked 
 behind bars, like savage beasts, because they demand something 
 which the world is resolved not to let them have ! So many 
 having to be killed, by rifles and machine-guns, by high explo- 
 sive shells and poison gas because they misunderstood the 
 social facts about them, and thought they could fulfill some 
 wishes which the rest of mankind wanted them to repress ! As 
 I read the psycho-analyst's picture of the newly born infant 
 with its primitive ego, its magic cries and magic gestures, I can- 
 not be sure how much of it is sober science and how much is 
 mordant irony a sketch of the mental states of the men and 
 women I see about me whole classes of men and women, yes, 
 even whole nations ! 
 
 The effort of the following chapters will be to interpret to 
 men and women the world which they have made, and to which 
 they are trying to adjust themselves. More especially we shall 
 try to show how, by better adjustments, men may change both 
 themselves and the world, and make both into something less 
 cruel and less painful, more serene and more certain and more 
 free.
 
 CHAPTER XLVIX 
 
 COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION 
 
 (Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and the part 
 which selfishness and unselfishness play in the development of 
 social life.) 
 
 Pondering the subject of this chapter, I went for a stroll 
 in the country, and seating myself in a lonely place, became 
 lost in thought; when suddenly my eye was caught by some- 
 thing moving. On the bare, hot, gray sand lay a creature 
 that I could see when it moved and could not see when it 
 was still, for it was exactly the color of the ground, and fitted 
 the ground tightly, being flat, and having its edges scalloped 
 so that they mingled with the dust. It was a lizard, covered 
 with heavy scales, and with sharp horns to make it unattrac- 
 tive eating. At the slightest motion from me it vanished 
 into a heap of stones, so quickly that my eye could scarcely 
 follow it. 
 
 This creature, you perceive, is in its actions and its very 
 form an expression of terror; terror of devouring enemies, 
 of jackals that pounce and hawks that swoop, and also of the 
 hot desert air that seeks to dry out its few precious drops of 
 moisture. Practically all the energies of this creature are con- 
 centrated upon the securing of its own individual survival. 
 To be sure, it will mate, but the process will be quick, and 
 the eggs will be left for the sun to hatch out, and the baby 
 lizards will shift for themselves that is to say, they will be 
 incarnations of terror from the moment they open their eyes 
 to the light. 
 
 The jackal seeks to pounce upon the lizard, and so inspires 
 terror in the lizard; but when you watch the jackal you find 
 that it exhibits terror toward more powerful foes. You find 
 that the hawk, which swoops upon the lizard, is equally quick 
 to swoop away when it comes upon a man with a gun. This 
 preying and being preyed upon, this mixture of cruelty and 
 terror, is a conspicuous fact of nature; if you go into any 
 orthodox school or college in America today, you will be 
 taught that it is nature's most fundamental law, and gov- 
 erns all living things. If you should take a course in polit- 
 
 107
 
 108 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 ical economy under a respectable professor, you would find 
 him explaining that such cruelty-terror applies equally in 
 human affairs; it is the basis of all economic science, and 
 the effort to escape from it is like the effort to lift yourself 
 by your boot-straps. 
 
 The professor calls this cruelty-terror by the name "com- 
 petition"; and he creates for his own purposes an abstract 
 being whom he names "the economic man," a creature who 
 acts according to this law, and exists under these conditions. 
 One of the professor's formulas is the so-called "Malthusian 
 law," that population presses always upon the limits of sub- 
 sistence. Another is "the law of diminishing returns of agri- 
 culture," that you can get only so much product out of a 
 certain piece of land, no matter how much labor and capital 
 you put into it. Another is Ricardo's "iron law of wages," 
 that wages cannot rise above the cost of living. Another 
 is embodied in the formula of Adam Smith, that "Competi- 
 tion is the life of trade." The professor enunciates these 
 "laws," coldly and impersonally, as becomes the scientist; but 
 if you go into the world of business, you find them set forth 
 cynically, in scores of maxims and witticisms : "Dog eat dog," 
 "the devil take the hindmost," "business is business," "do 
 others or they will do you." 
 
 Evidently, however, there is something in man which rebels 
 against these "natural" laws. In our present society man 
 has set aside six days in the week in which to live under 
 them, and one day in the week in which to preach an entirely 
 different and contradictory code that of Christian ethics, 
 which bids you "love your neighbor," and "do unto others as 
 you would they should do unto you." Between these Sun- 
 day teachings and the week-day teachings there is eternal con- 
 flict, and one who takes pleasure in ridiculing his fellow men 
 can find endless opportunity here. The Sunday preachers are 
 forbidden to interfere with the affairs of the other six days; 
 that is called "dragging politics into the pulpit." On the other 
 hand, incredible as it may seem, there are professors of the 
 week-day doctrine who call themselves Christians, and be- 
 lieve in the Sunday doctrine, too. They manage this by putting 
 the Sunday doctrine off into a future world; that is, we are 
 to pounce upon one another and devour one another under 
 the "iron laws" of economics so long as we live on earth, 
 but in the next world we shall play on golden harps and have
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 
 
 nothing to do but love one another. If anybody is so foolish 
 as to apply the Sermon on the Mount to present-day affairs, 
 we regard him as a harmless crank; if he persists, and sets 
 out to teach others, we call him. a Communist or a Pacifist, 
 and put him in jail for ten or twenty years. 
 
 In the Book of the Mind, I have referred to Kropotkin's 
 "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution," which I regard as 
 one of the epoch-making books of our time. Kropotkin 
 clearly proves that competition is not the only law of nature , 
 it is everywhere modified by co-operation, and in the great 
 majority of cases co-operation plays a larger part in the 
 relations of living creatures than competition. There is no 
 creature in existence which is entirely selfish; in the nature 
 of the case such a creature could not exist save in the 
 imaginations of teachers of special privilege. If a species 
 is to survive, some portion of the energies of the individual 
 must go into reproduction; and steadily, as life advances, we 
 find the amount of this sacrifice increasing. The higher the 
 type of the creature, the longer is the period of infancy, and 
 the greater the sacrifice of the parent for the young. Like- 
 wise, most creatures make the discovery that by staying 
 together in herds or groups, and learning to co-operate instead 
 of competing among themselves, they increase their chances 
 of survival. You find birds that live in flocks, and other 
 birds, like hawks and owls and eagles, that are solitary; and 
 you find the co-operating birds a thousand times as numerous 
 that is to say, a thousand times as successful in the strug- 
 gle for survival. You find that all man's brain power has 
 been a social product ; the supremacy he has won over nature 
 has depended upon one thing and one alone the fact that 
 he has managed to become different from the "economic man," 
 that product of the imagination of the defenders of privilege. 
 
 It is evident that both competition and co-operation are 
 necessary to every individual, and the health of the individual 
 and of the race lies in the proper combination of the two. If 
 a creature were wholly unselfish if it made no effort to 
 look after its own individual welfare it would be exter- 
 minated before it had a chance to reproduce. If, on the other 
 hand, it cannot learn to co-operate, its progeny stand less 
 chance of survival against creatures which have learned this 
 important lesson. We have a nation of a 110,000,000 people, 
 who have learned to co-operate to a certain limited extent.
 
 HO LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 Some of us realize how vastly the happiness of these millions 
 might be increased by a further extension of co-operation; 
 but we find ourselves opposed by the professors of privilege 
 and we wish that these gentlemen would go out and join 
 the lizards of the desert sands or the sharks of the sea, 
 creatures which really practice the system! of "laissez faire" 
 which the professors teach. 
 
 The plain truth is that we cannot make a formula out of 
 either competition or co-operation. We cannot settle any 
 problem of economics, of business or legislation, by proclaim- 
 ing, for example, that "Competition is the life of trade." 
 Competition may just as well turn out to be the death of 
 trade; it depends entirely upon the kind of competition, and 
 the stage of trade development to which it is applied. In the 
 early eighteenth century, when that formula of Adam Smith 
 was written, competition was observed to keep down prices 
 and provide stimulus to enterprise, and so to further abun- 
 dant production. But the time came when the machinery for 
 producing goods was in excess, not merely of the needs of 
 the country, but of the available foreign markets, and then 
 suddenly the large-scale manufacturers made the discovery 
 that competition was the death of trade to them. They pro- 
 ceeded, as a matter of practical common sense, and without 
 consulting their college professors, to abolish competition by 
 forming trusts. We passed laws forbidding them to do this, 
 but they simply refused to obey the laws. In the United 
 States they have made good their refusal for thirty-five years, 
 and in the end have secured the blessing of the Supreme 
 Court upon their course. 
 
 So now we have co-operation in large-scale production and 
 marketing. It is known by various names, "pools," "syndi- 
 cates," "price-fixing," "gentlemen's agreements." It is a bless- 
 ing for those who co-operate, but it proves to be the death 
 of those who labor, and also of those who consume, and we 
 see these also compelled to combine, forming labor unions 
 and consumers* societies. Each side to the quarrel insists 
 that the other side is committing a crime in refusing to com- 
 pete, and our whole social life is rent with dissensions over 
 this issue. Manifestly, we need to clear our minds of dead 
 doctrines; to think out clearly just what we mean by com- 
 petition, and what by co-operation, and what is the proper 
 balance between the two.
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 111 
 
 I have been at pains in this book to provide a basis for 
 the deciding of such questions. It is a practical problem, the 
 fostering of human life and the furthering of its develop- 
 ment. We cannot lay down any fixed rule ; we have to study 
 the facts of each case separately. We shall say, this kind 
 of competition is right, because it helps to protect human life 
 and to develop its powers. We shall say, this other kind 
 of competition is wrong because it has the opposite effect. 
 We shall say, perhaps, that some kind was right fifty years 
 ago, or even ten years ago, because it then had certain 
 effects; but meantime some factor has changed, and it is 
 now having a different effect, and therefore ought to be 
 abolished. 
 
 There has never been any kind of human competition 
 which men did not judge and modify in that way; there is 
 no field of human activity in which ethical codes do not 
 condemn certain practices as unfair. The average English- 
 man considers it proper that two men who get into a dispute 
 shall pull off their coats, and settle the question at issue by 
 pummeling each other's noses. But let one of these men 
 strike his opponent in the groin, or let him kick his shins, 
 and instantly there will be a howl of execration. Likewise, 
 an Anglo-Saxon man who fights with the fists has a loath- 
 ing for a Sicilian or Greek or other Mediterranean man who 
 will pull a knife. That kind of competition is barred among 
 our breeds ; and also the kind which consists of using poisons, 
 or of starting slanders against your opponent. 
 
 If you look back through history, you find many forms 
 of competition which were once eminently respectable, but 
 now have been outlawed. There was a time, for example, 
 when the distinction we draw between piracy and sea- war was 
 wholly unknown. The ships of the Vikings would go out and 
 raid the ships and seaports of other peoples, and carry off 
 booty and captives, and the men who did that were sung as 
 heroes of the nation. The British sea-captains of the time 
 of Queen Elizabeth Drake, Frobisher, and the rest of them 
 are portrayed in our school books as valiant and hardy men, 
 and the British colonies were built on the basis of their activ- 
 ities; yet, according to the sea laws in force today, they 
 were pirates. We regard a cannibal race with abhorrence; 
 yet there was a time when all the vigorous races of men 
 were cannibals, and the habit of eating your enemies in
 
 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 battle may well have given an advantage to the races which 
 practiced it. 
 
 On the other hand, you find sentimental people who reject 
 all competition on principle, and would like to abolish every 
 trace of it from society, and especially from education. But 
 stop and consider for a moment what that would mean. Would 
 you abolish, for example, the competition of love, the right 
 of a man to win the girl he wants? You could not do it, 
 of course; but if you could, you would abolish one of the 
 principal methods by which our race has been improved. 
 Of course, what you really want is, not to abolish competi- 
 tion in love, but to raise it to a higher form. There is an 
 old saying, "All's fair in love and war," but no one ever 
 meant that. You would not admit that a man might com- 
 pete in love by threatening to kill the girl if she preferred a 
 rival. You would not admit that he might compete by poison- 
 ing the other man. You would not admit that he might com- 
 pete by telling falsehoods about the other man. On the other 
 hand, if you are sensible, you admit that he has a right to 
 compete by making his character known to the girl, and if 
 the other man is a rascal, by telling the girl that. 
 
 Would you abolish the competition of art, the effort of 
 men to produce work more beautiful and inspiring than 
 has ever been known before? Would you abolish the effort 
 of scientists to overthrow theories which have hitherto been 
 accepted? Obviously not. You make these forms of com- 
 petition seem better by calling them "emulation," but you do 
 not in the least modify the fact that they involve the right 
 of one person to outdo other persons, to supplant them and 
 take away something from them, whether it be property or 
 position or love or fame or power. In that sense, competition 
 is indeed the law of life, and you might as well reconcile 
 yourself to it, and learn to play your part with spirit and 
 good humor. 
 
 Also, you might as well train your children to it. You 
 will find you cannot develop their powers to the fullest with- 
 out competition; in fact, you will be forced to go back and 
 utilize forms of competition which are now out of date among 
 adults. I have told in the Book of the Body how I myself 
 tried for ten years or more to live without physical competi- 
 tion, and discovered that I could not; I have had to take up 
 some form of sport, and hundreds of thousands of other men
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 113 
 
 have had the same experience. What is sport? It is a delib- 
 erate going back, under carefully devised rules, to the savage 
 struggles of our ancestors. The very essence of real sport 
 is that the contestants shall, within the rules laid down, 
 compete with each other to the limit of their powers. With 
 what contempt would a player of tennis or baseball or whist 
 regard the proposition that his opponent should be merciful 
 to him, and let him win now and then! Obviously, these 
 things have no place in the game, and to be a "good sport" 
 is to conform to the rules, and take with enjoyment what- 
 ever issue of the struggle may come. 
 
 But then again, suppose you are competing with a child; 
 obviously, the conditions are different. You no longer play 
 the best you can, you let the child win a part of the time; 
 but you do not let the child know this, or it would spoil the 
 fun for the child. You pretend to try as hard as you know 
 how, and you cry out in grief when you are beaten, and the 
 child crows with delight. And yet, that does not keep you 
 from loving the child, or the child from loving you. 
 
 The purpose of this elaborate exposition is to make clear 
 the very vital point that a certain set of social acts may be 
 right under some conditions, and desperately wrong under 
 other conditions. They may be right in play, and not in 
 serious things ; they may be right in youth, and not in matur- 
 ity; they may be right at one period of the world's develop- 
 ment, while at another period they are destructive of social 
 existence. If, therefore, we wish to know what are right 
 and wrong actions in the affairs of men, if we wish to judge 
 any particular law or political platform or program of busi- 
 ness readjustment, the first thing we have to do is to acquire 
 a mass of facts concerning the society to which the law or 
 platform or program, is to be applied. We need to ask our- 
 selves, exactly what will be the effect of that change, applied 
 in that particular way at that particular time. In order to 
 decide accurately, we need to know the previous stages through 
 which that society has passed, the forces which have been 
 operating in it, and the ways in which they have worked. 
 
 But also we must realize that the lessons of history cannot 
 ever be accepted blindly. The "principles of the founders" 
 apply to us only in modified form; for the world in which 
 we live today is different from any world which has ever been 
 before, and the world tomorrow will be different yet. We
 
 114 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 are the makers of it, and the masters of it, and what it will 
 be depends to some extent upon our choice. In fact, that 
 is the most important lesson of all for us to learn; the final 
 purpose of all our thought about the world is to enable us 
 to make it a happier and a better world for ourselves and 
 our posterity to live in.
 
 CHAPTER L 
 ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 (Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and whether 
 there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.) 
 
 In the letters of Thomas Jefferson is found the follow- 
 ing passage: 
 
 "All eyes are open or opening to the rights of man. The 
 general spread of the light of science has already laid open 
 to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind 
 has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored 
 few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by 
 the grace of God." 
 
 This, which Jefferson, over a hundred years ago, described 
 as a "palpable truth," is still a long way from prevailing in 
 the world. We are trying in this book not to take anything 
 for granted, so we do not assume this truth, but investigate 
 it; and we begin by admitting that there are many facts 
 which seem to contradict it, and which make it more difficult 
 of proof than Jefferson realized. It is not enough to point 
 out the lack of saddles on the backs, and of boots and spurs 
 on the feet of newly born infants; for the fact is that men 
 are not exploited because of saddles, nor is the exploiting 
 accomplished by means of boots and spurs. It is done by 
 means of gold and steel, banks and credit systems, railroads, 
 machine-guns and battleships. And while it is not true that 
 certain races and classes are born with these things on them, 
 they are born to the possession of them, and the vast major- 
 ity of mankind are without them all their lives, and without 
 the ability to use them even if they had them. 
 
 The doctrine that "all men are created equal," or that 
 they ought to be equal, we shall describe for convenience as 
 the democratic doctrine. It first came to general attention 
 through Christianity, which proclaimed the brotherhood of 
 all mankind in a common fatherhood of God. But even as 
 taught by the Christians, the doctrine had startling limita- 
 tions. It was several centuries before a church council sum- 
 moned the courage to decide that women were human beings, 
 
 115
 
 116 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 and had souls; and today many devout Christians are still 
 uncertain whether Japanese and Chinese and Filipinos and 
 Negroes are human beings, and have souls. I have heard old 
 gentlemen in the South gravely maintain that the Negro is 
 not a human being at all, but a different species of animal. 
 I have heard learned men in the South set forth that the 
 sutures in the Negro skull close at some very early age, and 
 thus make moral responsibility impossible for the black race. 
 And you will find the same ideas maintained, not merely as 
 to differences of race and color, but as to differences of eco- 
 nomic condition. You will find the average aristocratic Eng- 
 lishman quite convinced that the "lower orders" are perma- 
 nently inferior to himself, and this though they are of the 
 same Anglo-Saxon stock. 
 
 For convenience I will refer to the doctrine that there is 
 some natural and irremovable inferiority of certain races or 
 classes, as the aristocratic doctrine. I will probably startle 
 some of my readers by making the admission that if there 
 is any such natural or irremovable inferiority, then a belief 
 in political or economic equality is a blunder. If there are 
 certain classes or races which cannot think, or cannot learn 
 to think as well as other classes and races, those mentally 
 inferior classes and races will obey, and they will be made 
 to obey, and neither you nor I, nor all the preachers and 
 agitators in the world, will ever be able to arrange it other- 
 wise. Suppose we could do it, we should be committing a 
 crime against life; we should be holding down the race and 
 aborting its best development. 
 
 Is there any such natural and irremovable inferiority in 
 human beings? When we come to study the question we 
 find it complicated by a different phenomenon, that of racial 
 immaturity, which we have to face frankly and get clear in 
 our minds. One of the most obvious facts of nature is that 
 of infancy and childhood. We have just pointed out that 
 if you are competing with a child, you do it in an entirely 
 different way and under an entirely different set of rules, and 
 if you fail to do this, you are unfair and even cruel to the 
 child. And it is a fact of our world that there are some 
 races more backward in the scale of development than other 
 races. You may not like this fact, but it is silly to try to 
 evade it. People who live in savage huts and beat on tom- 
 toms and fight with bows and arrows and cannot count be-
 
 THE BOOK or SOCIETY 117 
 
 yond a dozen such people are not the mental or moral 
 equals of our highly civilized races, and to treat them as equals, 
 and compete with them on that basis, means simply to exter- 
 minate them. And we should either exterminate them at once 
 and be done with it, or else make up our minds that they 
 are in a childhood stage of our race, and that we have to 
 guide them and teach them as we do our children. 
 
 There is no more useful person than the wise and kind 
 teacher. But suppose we saw some one pretending to be a 
 teacher to our children, while in reality enslaving and exploit- 
 ing them, or secretly robbing and corrupting them what 
 would we say about that kind of teacher? The name of that 
 teacher is capitalist commercialism, and his profession is 
 known as "the white man's burden"; his abuse of power is 
 the cause of our present racial wars and revolts of subject 
 peoples. A fair-minded man, desirous of facing all the facts 
 of life, hardly knows what stand to take in such a controversy ; 
 that is, hardly knows from which cause the colored races suf- 
 fer more the white man's exploitation, or their own native 
 immaturity. 
 
 To say that certain races are in a childhood stage, and 
 need instruction and discipline, is an entirely different thing 
 from saying they are permanently inferior and incapable of 
 self-government. Whether they are permanently inferior is 
 a problem for the man of science, to be determined by psy- 
 chological tests, continued possibly over more than one gener- 
 ation. We have not as yet made a beginning ; in fact, we 
 have not even acquired the scientific impartiality necessary 
 to such an inquiry. 
 
 In the meantime, all that we can do is to look about us 
 and pick up hints where we can. In places like Massachu- 
 setts, where Negroes are allowed to go to college and are 
 given a chance to show what they can do, they have not ousted 
 the white man, but many of them have certainly won his re- 
 spect, and one finds charming and cultured men among them, 
 who show no signs of prematurely closed up skulls. And one 
 after another we see the races which have been held down 
 as being inferior, developing leadership and organization and 
 power of moral resistance. The Irish are showing themselves 
 today one of the most vigorous and high-spirited of all races. 
 The Hindus are developing a movement which in the long 
 run may prove more powerful than the white man's gold and
 
 118 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 steel. The Egyptians, the Persians, the Filipinos, the Koreans, 
 are all devising ways to break the power of capitalist news- 
 paper censorship. How sad that the subject races of the 
 world have to get their education through hatred of their 
 teachers, instead of through love! 
 
 Of course, these rebel leaders are men who have absorbed 
 the white man's culture, at least in part; practically always 
 they are of the younger generation, which has been to the 
 white man's schools. But this is the very answer we have 
 been seeking as to whether the race is permanently inferior, 
 or merely immature and in need of training. It is not only 
 among the brown and black and yellow races that progress 
 depends upon the young generations; that is a universal fact 
 of life. 
 
 In the course of this argument we shall assume that the 
 Christian or democratic theory has the weight of probability 
 on its side, and that nature has not created any permanently 
 and necessarily inferior race or class. We shall assume that 
 the heritage of culture is a common heritage, open to all our 
 species. We shall not go so far as the statement which Jef- 
 ferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence, that "all 
 men are created free and equal" ; but we shall assert that they 
 are created "with certain inalienable rights," and that among 
 these is the right to maintain their lives and to strive for 
 liberty and happiness. Also, we shall say that there will 
 never be peace or order in the world until they have found 
 liberty, and recognition of their right to happiness.
 
 CHAPTER LI 
 
 RULING CLASSES 
 
 (Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained, 
 and what sanction it can claim.) 
 
 It is possible to conceive an order of nature in which all 
 individuals were born and developed exactly alike and with 
 exactly equal powers. Such is apparently the case with lower 
 animals, for example the ants and the bees. But among hu- 
 man beings there are great differences; some are born idiots 
 and some are born geniuses. Even supposing that we are able 
 to do away with blindness and idiocy, it is not likely that we 
 can ever make a race of uniform genius. There will always 
 be some more capable minds, who will discover new powers 
 of life, and will compel the others to learn from them. It 
 is to the interest of the race that this learning should be done 
 as quickly as possible. In other words, the great problem of 
 society is how to recognize superior minds and put them in 
 authority. 
 
 We look back over history, and discover a few wise men, 
 and many rulers; but very, very rarely does it happen tha* 
 the ruler is a wise man, or a friend of wise men. Far more 
 often we find the ruler occupied in suppressing the wise man 
 and his wisdom. There was a ruler who allowed the mob 
 to crucify Jesus, and another who ordered Socrates to drink 
 the hemlock, and another who tortured Galileo, and another 
 who chopped off the head of Sir Walter Raleigh and so on 
 through a long and tragic chronicle. And even when the 
 accident of a wise ruler occurs he is apt to be surrounded 
 by a class of parasites and corrupt officials who are busy to 
 thwart his will. 
 
 The general run of history is this: some group seizes 
 power by force, and holds it by the same means, and seeks 
 to augment and perpetuate it. Those who win the power 
 are frequently men of energy and practical sense, and do 
 fairly well as governors; but they are never able to hand on 
 their virtues, and their line becomes corrupted by sensuality 
 and self-indulgence, and the subject classes are plundered and 
 driven to revolt. Often the revolt fails, but in the course 
 
 119
 
 120 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 of time it succeeds, and there is a new dynasty, or a new 
 ruling class, sometimes a little better than the old, sometimes 
 worse. 
 
 How shall one judge whether the new regime is better 
 or worse? Obviously, this is a most important question; it 
 has to do, not merely with history, but with our daily affairs, 
 our voting. As one who has read some tens of thousands of 
 pages of history, and has pondered its lessons with heart-sick- 
 ness and despair, I lay down this general law by which revolts 
 and changes of power may be judged : If the change results 
 in the holding of power by a smaller number of people, it is 
 a reaction ; but if the change results in distributing the power 
 among a larger group of the community, then that community 
 has made a step in advance. 
 
 I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central Amer- 
 ican country Guatemala, I think which showed 130 revo- 
 lutions in less than a hundred years. Some rascal gets 
 together a gang, and seizes the government and plunders its 
 revenue. When he lias plundered too much, some other ras- 
 cal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang. Such 
 "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for 
 the Richard Harding Davis type of fiction ; but we do not 
 consider them as having any relationship to progress. We 
 describe them as "palace" revolutions. 
 
 But compare with this the various English revolutions. 
 We write learned histories about them, and describe England 
 as "the Mother of Parliaments." The reason for this is that 
 when there was political discontent in England, the protest- 
 ing persons proceeded to organize themselves, and to under- 
 stand their trouble and to remedy it. They had the brain 
 power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and 
 when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling 
 class to give way, they brought about a wider extension of 
 liberty, a wider distribution of power. Tennyson has pic- 
 tured England as a state "where freedom slowly broadens 
 down from precedent to precedent." We today, reading its 
 history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the word 
 "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a 
 community to move forward slowly than to move forward 
 rapidly and then move backward nearly as far. 
 
 We have pointed out several times the important fact of 
 biology that change does not necessarily mean progress from
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 121 
 
 any rational or moral point of view. Degeneration is just 
 as real a fact as progress, and it does not at all follow that 
 because things change they are changing for the better. It 
 is worth while to repeat this in discussing human society, for 
 it is just as true of governments and morals as of living spe- 
 cies. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundred- 
 fold the machinery of wealth production, and only be increas- 
 ing luxury and wantonness and graft. A nation may change 
 its governmental forms, its laws and social conventions, and 
 boast noisily of these changes in the name of progress, while 
 as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the road to ruin 
 which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I 
 can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you 
 can judge, and that is the test already indicated : Is the actual, 
 effective power of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller 
 percentage of the population than before the change took 
 place ? 
 
 You will note the words "actual, effective power." Noth- 
 ing is more familiar in human life than for forms to survive 
 after the spirit which created them is dead; and nothing is 
 more familiar than the use of these forms as masks to deceive 
 the populace. There have been many times in history when 
 people have gone on voting, long after their votes ceased to 
 count for anything; there have been many times when people 
 have gone through the motions of freedom long after they 
 have been slaves. Mexico under Diaz had one of the most 
 perfect of constitutions, and was in reality one of the most 
 perfect of despotisms; and we Americans are sadly familiar 
 with political democracies which do not work. 
 
 Shall we, therefore, join the pessimists and say that his- 
 tory is a blind struggle for useless power, and that the notion 
 of progress is a delusion? I do not think so; on the con- 
 trary, I think it is easily to be demonstrated that there has 
 been a steady increase in the amount of knowledge possessed 
 by the race, and in the spread of this knowledge among the 
 whole population. I think that through most of the period 
 of written history we can trace a real development in human 
 society. I think we can analyze the laws of this development, 
 and explain its methods; and I think this knowledge is pre- 
 cious to us, because it enables us to accelerate the process and 
 to make the end more certain. This task, the analysis of 
 social evolution, is the task we have next to undertake.
 
 CHAPTER LII 
 THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION 
 
 (Discusses the series of changes through which human so- 
 ciety has passed.) 
 
 We have now to consider, briefly, the history of man as 
 a social being, the groups he has formed, and the changes in 
 his group systems. Everything in life grows, and human so- 
 cieties are no exception to the rule. They have undergone 
 a long process of evolution, which we can trace in detail, 
 and which we find conforms exactly to the law laid down by 
 Herbert Spencer; a process whereby a number of single and 
 similar things become different parts of one complex thing. 
 In the case of human societies the units are men and women, 
 and social evolution is a process whereby a small and simple 
 group, in which the individuals are practically alike, grows 
 into a large and complex group, in which the individuals are 
 widely different, and their relations one to another are compli- 
 cated and subtle. 
 
 There are two powerful forces pressing upon human 
 beings, and compelling them to struggle and grow. The first 
 of these forces is fear, the need of protection against enemies ; 
 the second is hunger, the need of food and the means of 
 producing and storing food. The first causes the individual 
 to combine with his fellows and establish some form of gov- 
 ernment, and this is the origin of political evolution. The 
 second causes him to accumulate wealth, and to combine indus- 
 trially, and this is the origin of economic evolution. Because 
 the first force is a little more urgent, we observe in the his- 
 tory of human society that evolution in government precedes 
 evolution in industry. 
 
 I made this statement some twenty years ago, in an article 
 in "Collier's Weekly." I wrote to the effect that man's first care 
 was to secure himself against his enemies, and that when he 
 had done this he set out to secure his food supply. "Collier's" 
 called upon the late Professor Sumner of Yale University, a 
 prize reactionary and Tory of the old school, to answer me; 
 and Professor Sumner made merry over my statement, declar- 
 
 122
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 123 
 
 ing that man sought for food long before he was safe from 
 his enemies. Some years later, when Sumner died, one of his 
 admirers wrote in the New York "Evening Post" that he had 
 completely overwhelmed me, and I had acknowledged my de- 
 feat by failing to reply something which struck me as very 
 funny. It was, of course, possible that Sumner had over- 
 whelmed me, but to say that I had considered myself over- 
 whelmed was to attribute to me a degree of modesty of which 
 I was wholly incapable. As a matter of fact, I had had my 
 usual experience with capitalist magazines ; "Collier's Weekly" 
 had promised to publish my rejoinder to Sumner, but failed 
 to keep the promise, and finally, when I worried them, they 
 tucked the answer away in the back part of the paper, among 
 the advertisements of cigars and toilet soaps. 
 
 Professor Sumner is gone, but he has left behind him an 
 army of pupils, and I will protect myself againrt them by 
 phrasing my statement with extreme care. I do not mean to 
 say that man first secures himself completely against his ene- 
 mies, and then goes out to hunt for a meal. Of course he 
 has to eat while he is countering the moves of his enemies; 
 he has to eat while he is on the march to battle, or in flight 
 from it. But ask yourself this question: which would you 
 choose, if you had to choose to go a couple of days with noth- 
 ing to eat, or to have your throat cut by bandits and your 
 wife and children carried away into slavery? Certainly you 
 would do your fighting' first, and meantime you would scratch 
 together any food you could. While you were devoting your 
 energies to putting down civil war, or to making a. treaty 
 with other tribes, or to preparing for a military campaign, you 
 would continue to get food in the way your ancestors had 
 got it; in other words, your economic evolution would wait, 
 while your political evolution proceeded. But when you had 
 succeeded in putting down your enemies, and had a long period 
 of peace before you, then you would plant some fields, and 
 domesticate some animals, or perhaps discover some new way 
 of weaving cloth and so your industrial life would make 
 progress. 
 
 It is easy to see why Professor Sumner wished to con- 
 fuse this issue. He could not deny political evolution, because 
 it had happened. He despised and feared political democracy, 
 but it was here, and he had to speak politely to it, as to a 
 tiger that had got into his house. But industrial democracy
 
 124 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 was a thing that had not yet happened in the world; it was 
 only a hope and a prophecy, and therefore a prize old Tory 
 was free to ridicule it. I remember reading somewhere his 
 statement the notion that democracy had anything to do with 
 industry, or could in any way be applied to industry, was a 
 piece of silliness. So, of course, he sought to demolish my idea 
 that there was a process of evolution in economic affairs, par- 
 alleling the process of political evolution which had already 
 culminated in democracy. 
 
 Let us consider the process of political evolution, briefly 
 and in its broad outlines. - Take any savage tribe ; you find it 
 composed of individuals who are very much alike. Some are 
 a little stronger than others, a little more clever, more power- 
 ful in battle; but the difference is slight, and when the tribe 
 chooses someone to lead them, they might as well choose 
 one man as another. They all have a say in the tribe councils, 
 both men and women; their "rights" in the tribe are the 
 same. They are, of course, slaves to ignorance, to degrading 
 superstition and absurd taboos ; but these things apply to 
 everyone alike, there is no privileged caste, no hereditary 
 inequality. 
 
 But little by little, as the tribe grows in numbers, and in 
 power and intelligence, as it comes to capture slaves in battle, 
 and to unite with other tribes, there comes to be an hereditary 
 chieftain and a group of his leading supporters, his courtiers 
 and henchmen. When the society has evolved into the stage 
 which we call barbarism, there is a permanent superior caste ; 
 there are hereditary priests, who have in their keeping the 
 favor of the gods ; and there is a subject population of slaves. 
 
 The society moves on into the feudal stage, in which the 
 various grades and classes are precisely marked off, each with 
 its different functions, its different privileges and rights and 
 duties. The feudal principalities and duchies war and struggle 
 among themselves; they are united by marriage or by con- 
 quest, and presently some stronger ruler brings a great ter- 
 ritory under his power, and we have what is called a king- 
 dom; a society still larger, still more complex in its organi- 
 zation, and still more rigid in its class distinctions. Take 
 France, under the ancient regime, and compare a courtier or 
 noble gentleman with a serf ; they are not only different 
 before the law, they are different in the language they use, 
 in the clothes they wear, in the ideas they hold; they are
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 125 
 
 different even in their bodies, so that the gentleman regards 
 the serf as an inferior species of creature. 
 
 The kings warred among themselves and emperors arose. 
 The ultimate ideal in Europe was a political society which 
 should include the whole continent, and this ideal was several 
 times almost attained. But it is the rule of history that 
 wherever a large society is built upon the basis of privilege 
 and enslavement, the ruling classes prove morally and intel- 
 lectually unequal to the burden put upon them; they become 
 corrupted, and their rule becomes intolerable. This happened 
 in Europe, and there came political revolutions first in Eng- 
 land, which accomplished it by gradual stages, and then in 
 the French monarchy, and quite recently in a dozen monarchies 
 and empires, large and small. 
 
 What precisely is this political revolution? Let us con- 
 sider the case of France, where the change was sudden, and 
 the issues precisely drawn. King Louis XIV had said, "I am 
 the state." To a person of our time that might seem like boast- 
 ing, but it was merely an assertion of the existing political 
 fact. King Louis was the state by universal consent, and by 
 divine authority, as all men believed. The army was his army, 
 the navy was his navy, and wars, when he made them, were 
 his wars. Everyone in the state was his subject, and all the 
 property of the state was his personal, private property, to 
 dispose of as he pleased. The government officials carried 
 out his will, and members of the nobility held the land and 
 ruled in his name. 
 
 But now suddenly the people of France overthrew the 
 king, and put him to death, and drove the nobles into exile; 
 they seized the power of the French state, and proclaimed 
 themselves equal citizens in the state, with equal voices in its 
 government and equal rights before the law. So we call 
 France a republic, and describe this form of society as polit- 
 ical democracy. It is the completion of the process of polit- 
 ical evolution, and you will see that it moves in a sort of 
 spiral; having completed a circle and got back where it was 
 before, but upon a higher plane. The citizens of a modern 
 republic are equal before the law, just as were the members 
 of the savage tribe; but the political organization is vastly 
 larger, and infinitely more complicated, and every individual 
 lives his life upon a higher level, because he shares in the 
 benefits of this more highly organized and more powerful 
 state.
 
 CHAPTER LIII 
 
 INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION 
 
 (Examines the process of evolution in industry and the stage 
 which it has so far reached.) 
 
 And now let us consider the process of industrial evolu- 
 tion. We shall find it to be exactly the same thing, repro- 
 ducing the changes in another field of activity. You may 
 picture two gigantic waves sweeping over the ocean. In some 
 places the waves are far apart, and in other places they are 
 closer together; for a time they may mingle, and perhaps 
 their bases always mingle. It would be easy for a critic to 
 point out how political affairs play a leading part in indus- 
 trial evolution, and vice versa ; it would be easy to argue that 
 property rules the political state, or again, that the main func- 
 tion of the political state is to protect property. As I have 
 said, man has to fight his enemies, and he has to seek food, 
 and often he has to do the two things at the same time; but 
 nevertheless, broadly speaking, we observe two great waves, 
 sweeping over human society, and most of the time these 
 waves are clearly separated and easily distinguished. 
 
 Industry in a savage tribe is, like government, simple and 
 uniform; all the members of the tribe get their living in the 
 same way. One may be a little more expert as a fisherman, 
 another as a gatherer of cocoanuts, but the fisherman gathers 
 cocoanuts and the cocoanut-gatherer fishes. In the days of 
 primitive communism there is little economic strife and little 
 change; but as slavery comes in, and the private property 
 system, there begins industrial war the members of the tribe 
 trade with one another, and argue over prices, and gradually 
 some get the better of others, they accumulate slaves and goods, 
 and later on they appropriate the land to their private use. 
 Of course, the men who do this are often the rulers of the 
 tribe, and so politics and industry are mixed ; but even assum- 
 ing that the state never interfered, assuming that the govern- 
 ment allowed business affairs to work themselves out in their 
 own way, the tendency of competition is always to end in 
 monopoly. The big fish eat the little fish, the strong gain 
 advantage over the weak, the rich grow richer, and the poor 
 
 126
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 127 
 
 grow relatively poorer. As the amount of trading increases, 
 and men specialize in the arts of bargaining, we see again and 
 again how money concentrates in the hands of a few. It does 
 this, even when the political state tries to prevent it; as, for 
 example, when the princes and dukes of the Middle Ages 
 would torture the Jewish money-lenders and take away their 
 treasure, but the Jews never failed to grow rich again. 
 
 It is when political evolution has completed itself, and a 
 republic has been set up, that a free field is given to economic 
 forces to work themselves out to their logical end. We have 
 seen this in the United States, where we all started pretty 
 much on the same economic level, and where political tyranny 
 has had little hold. Our civilization is a civilization of the 
 trader the business man, as we call him; and we see how 
 big business absorbs little business, and grows constantly 
 larger and more powerful. We are familiar with what we 
 call "graft," the use by business men of the powers of gov- 
 ernment to get trade advantage for themselves, and we have 
 a school of old-time thinkers, calling themselves "Jeffersonian 
 Democrats," who insist that if only there had never been any 
 government favors, economic equality and democracy would 
 have endured forever in our country. But it is my opinion 
 that government has done far more to prevent monopoly and 
 special privilege in business than to favor it; and neverthe- 
 less, monopoly has grown. 
 
 In other words, the tendency toward concentration in busi- 
 ness, the absorption of the small business by the big business, 
 is an irresistible natural process, which neither can be nor 
 should be hindered. The condition of competition, whether 
 in politics or in industry, is never a permanent one, and can 
 never be made permanent ; it is a struggle which automatically 
 brings itself to an end. Large-scale production and distribution 
 is more economical than small-scale, and big business has irre- 
 sistible advantages of credit and permanence over little busi- 
 ness. As we shall presently show, the blind and indiscriminate 
 production of goods under the competitive system leads to the 
 glutting of markets and to industrial crises. At such times 
 the weaker concerns are weeded out and the strong ones take 
 their trade; and as a result, we have the modern great cor- 
 poration, the most powerful machine of production yet devised 
 by man, and which corresponds in every aspect to the mon- 
 archy in political society.
 
 128 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 We are accustomed to speak of our "captains of industry," 
 our "coal kings," and "beef barons" and "lords of steel," and 
 we think we are using metaphors ; but the universality of these 
 metaphors points to a fundamental truth in them. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, our modern captain of industry fills in the eco- 
 nomic world exactly the same functions as were filled in 
 ancient days by the head of a feudal state. He has won his 
 power in a similar struggle, and he holds it by similar meth- 
 ods. He rules over an organization of human beings, arranged, 
 economically speaking, in grades and classes, with their author- 
 ities and privileges and duties precisely determined, as under 
 the "ancient regime." And just as King Louis said, "I am 
 the state," so Mr. Armour considers that he is Armour & 
 Co., and Mr. Morgan considers that he is the house of Mor- 
 gan, and that the business exists for him and is controlled 
 by him under divine authority. 
 
 If I am correct in my analysis of the situation, this proc- 
 ess of industrial evoluton is destined to complete itself, as 
 in the case of the political state. The subject populations of 
 industry are becoming more and more discontented with their 
 servitude, more and more resentful of that authority which 
 compels them to labor while others reap the benefit. They 
 are organizing themselves, and preparing for a social trans- 
 formation which will parallel in every detail the revolution 
 by which our ancestors overthrew the authority of King 
 George III over the American colonies, and made inhabi- 
 tants of those colonies no longer subjects of a king, but free 
 and equal citizens of a republic. I expect to see a change 
 throughout the world, which will take the great instruments 
 of production which we call corporations and trusts, out of 
 the hands of their present private owners, and make them 
 the property, either of the entire community, or of those who 
 do the work in them. This change is the "social revolution," 
 and when it has completed itself, we shall have in that society 
 an Industrial Republic, a form of business management which 
 constitutes economic democracy. 
 
 The history of the world's political revolutions has been 
 written almost exclusively by aristocratic or bourgeois histo- 
 rians; that is to say, by men who, whatever their attitude 
 toward political democracy, have no conception of industrial 
 democracy, and believe that industrial strife and enslavement 
 are the normal conditions of life. If, however, you will read
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 129 
 
 Kropotkin's "Great French Revolution," you will be inter- 
 ested to discover how important a part was played in this 
 revolution by economic forces. Underneath the political dis- 
 content of the merchants and middle classes lay a vast mass 
 of social discontent of the peasants and workers. It was the 
 masses of the people who made the revolution, but it was 
 the middle classes who seized it and turned it to their own 
 ends, putting down attempts toward economic equality, and 
 confining the changes, so far as possible, to the political field. 
 
 And everywhere throughout history, if you study revolu- 
 tions, you find that same thing happening. You find, for 
 example, Martin Luther fighting for the right to preach the 
 word of God without consulting the Pope; but when the 
 peasants of Germany rose and sought to set themselves free 
 from feudal landlords, Luther turned against them, and called 
 upon the princes to shoot them down. "The ass needs to be 
 beaten, and the populace needs to be controlled with a strong 
 hand." The landlords and propertied classes of England 
 were willing to restrict the power of the king, and to give 
 the vote to the educated and well-to-do; but from the time 
 of Jack Cade to our own they shoot down the poor. 
 
 But meantime, the industrial process continues; the mod- 
 ern factory system brings the workers together in larger and 
 larger groups, and teaches them the lesson of class conscious- 
 ness. So the time of the workers draws near. The first 
 attempt in modern times to accomplish the social revolution 
 and s.et up industrial democracy was in the Paris Commune. 
 When the French empire collapsed, after the war with Ger- 
 many in 1871, the workers of Paris seized control. They 
 were massacred, some 50,000 of them, and the propertied 
 classes of France established the present bourgeois republic, 
 which has now become the bulwark of reaction throughout 
 the Continent of Europe. 
 
 Next came the Russian revolution of 1905, and this was 
 an interesting illustration of the relation between the two 
 waves of social progress. Russia was a backward country 
 industrially, and according to theory not at all prepared for 
 the social revolution. But nowadays the thoughts of men cir- 
 culate all over the world, and the exiles from Russia had 
 absorbed Marxian ideas, and were not prepared to accept a 
 purely political freedom. So in 1905, after the Japanese war, 
 when the people rose and forced the Czar to grant a par-
 
 130 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 liament, the extremists made an effort to accomplish the social 
 revolution at the same time. The peasants began to demand 
 the land, and the workers the factories ; whereupon the capital- 
 ists and middle classes, who wanted a parliament, but did not 
 want Socialism, went over to the side of reaction, and both 
 the political and social revolutions were crushed. 
 
 But then came the great war, for which Russia with her 
 incompetent government and her undeveloped industry was 
 unprepared. The strain of it broke her down long before 
 the other Allies, and in the universal suffering and ruin the 
 Russian people were again forced to rise. The political revo- 
 lution was accomplished, the Czar was imprisoned, and the 
 Douma reigned supreme. Middle class liberalism throughout 
 the world gave its blessings to this revolution, and hastened 
 to welcome a new political democracy to the society of nations. 
 But then occurred what to orthodox democratic opinion has 
 been the most terrifying spectacle in human history. The 
 Russian people had been driven too far towards starvation 
 and despair; the masses had been too embittered, and they 
 rose again, overthrowing not only their Czar and their grand 
 dukes, but their capitalists and land-owners. For the first 
 time in history the social revolution established itself, and the 
 workers were in control of a great state. Ever since then 
 we have seen exactly what we saw in Europe from 1789 on- 
 ward, when the first political republic was established, and 
 all the monarchies and empires of the world banded them- 
 selves together to stamp it out. We have witnessed a cam- 
 paign of war, blockade, intrigue and propaganda against the 
 Soviet government of Russia, all pretending to be carried 
 on in the name of the Russian people, and for the purpose 
 of saving them from suffering but all obviously based upon 
 one consideration and one alone, the fear that an effort at 
 industrial self-government might possibly prove to be a 
 success. 
 
 Whether or not the Soviets will prove permanent, no one 
 can say. But this much is certain ; just as the French revolu- 
 tion sent a thrill around the world, and planted in the hearts 
 of the common people the Wonderful dream of freedom from 
 kings and ruling classes, just so the Russian revolution has 
 brought to the working masses the dream of freedom from 
 masters and landlords. Everywhere in capitalist society this 
 ferment is working, and in one country after another we
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 131 
 
 see the first pangs of the new birth. Also we see capitalists 
 and landlords, who once found "democracy," "free speech" 
 and "equality before the law" useful formulas to break down 
 the power of kings and aristocrats, now repudiating their 
 old-time beliefs, and going back to the frankest reaction. We 
 see, in our own "land of the free," the government refus- 
 ing to reprint the Declaration of Independence during the 
 war, and arresting men for quoting from it and circulating 
 it; we even see the Department of Justice refusing to allow 
 people to reprint the Sermon on the Mount!
 
 CHAPTER LIV 
 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 
 
 (Discusses history as a battle-ground between ruling and sub- 
 ject classes, and the method and outcome of this struggle.) 
 
 There is a theory of social development, sometimes called 
 the materialistic interpretation of history, and sometimes the 
 economic interpretation of history. It is one of the contri- 
 butions to our thought which we owe to Karl Marx, and like 
 all the rest of Marxian theory, it is a subject of embittered 
 controversy, not merely between Socialists and orthodox 
 economists, but between various schools of revolutionary doc- 
 trine. For my part, I have never been a great hand for 
 doctrine, whether ancient or modern; I am not much more 
 concerned with what Marx taught than I am with what St. 
 Paul taught, or what Martin Luther taught. My advice is 
 to look at life with your own eyes, and to state in simple 
 language the conclusions of your own thinking. 
 
 Man is an eating animal; he has also been described as a 
 tool-making animal, and might be described as an ideal-mak- 
 ing animal. There is a tendency on the part of those who 
 specialize in the making of ideals to repudiate the eating and 
 the tool-making sides of man; which accounts for the 
 quarrel between the Marxians and the moralists- All through 
 history you find new efforts of man to develop his emotional 
 and spiritual nature, and to escape from the humiliating limita- 
 tions of the flesh. These efforts have many of them been 
 animated by desperate sincerity, but none of them have 
 changed the fundamental fact that man is an eating animal, 
 an animal insufficiently provided by nature against cold, and 
 with an intense repugnance to having streams of cold water 
 run down back of his neck. The religious teachers go out 
 with empty purse, and "take no thought for the morrow"; 
 but the forces of nature press insistently upon them, and little 
 by little they make compromises, they take to shelter while 
 they are preaching, they consent to live in houses, and even 
 to own houses, and to keep a bank account. So they make 
 terms with the powers of this world, and the powers of 
 
 132
 
 THE BOOK or SOCIETY 133 
 
 this world, which are subtle, and awake to their own inter- 
 ests, find ways to twist .the new doctrine to their ends. 
 
 So the new religion becomes simply another form of the 
 old hypocrisy; and it comes to us as a breath of fresh air 
 in a room full of corruption when some one says, "Let us 
 have done with aged shams and false idealisms. Let us face 
 the facts of life, and admit that man is a physical animal, 
 and cannot do any sane and constructive thinking until he has 
 food and shelter provided. Let us look at history with un- 
 blinking eyes, and realize that food and shelter, the material 
 means of life, are what men have been seeking all through 
 history, and will continue to seek, until we put production and 
 distribution upon a basis of justice, instead of a basis of force." 
 
 Such is, as simply as I can phrase it, the materialistic 
 interpretation of history. Put into its dress of scientific lan- 
 guage it reads: the dominant method of production and 
 exchange in any society determines the institutions and forms 
 of that society. I do not think I exaggerate in saying that 
 this formula, applied with judgment and discrimination, is a 
 key to the understanding of human societies. 
 
 Wherever man has moved into the stage of slavery and 
 private property there has been some group which has held 
 power and sought to maintain and increase it. This group 
 has set the standards of behavior and belief for the commu- 
 nity, and if you wish to understand the government and reli- 
 gion, the manners and morals, the philosophy and literature 
 and art of that community, the first thing you have to do is 
 to understand the dominant group and its methods of keep- 
 ing itself on top. This statement applies, not merely to those 
 cultural forms which are established and ordained by the 
 ruling class; it applies equally well to the revolutionary 
 forms, the behavior and beliefs of those who oppose the rul- 
 ing class. For men do not revolt in a vacuum, they revolt 
 against certain conditions, and the form of their revolt is 
 determined by the conditions. Take, for example, primitive 
 Christianity, which was certainly an effort to be unworldly, 
 if ever such an effort was made by man. But you cannot 
 understand anything about primitive Christianity unless you 
 see it as a new form of slave revolt against Roman imperial- 
 ism and capitalism. 
 
 The theory of the class struggle is the master key to the 
 
 bewilderments and confusions of history. Always there is a 
 
 10 *
 
 134 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 dominant class, holding the power of the state, and always 
 there are subject classes; and sooner or later the subject 
 classes begin protesting and struggling for wider rights. When 
 they think they are strong enough, they attempt a revolt, and 
 sometimes they succeed. If they do, they write the histories 
 of the revolt, and their leaders become heroes and statesmen. 
 If they fail, the histories are written by their oppressors, 
 and the rebels are portrayed as criminals. 
 
 One of the commonest of popular assumptions is that if 
 the rebels have justice on their side, they are bound to succeed 
 in the long run; but this is merely the sentimental nonsense 
 that is made out of history. It is perfectly possible for a 
 just revolt to be crushed, and to be crushed again and again ; 
 just as it is possible for a child which is ready to be born to fail 
 to be born, and to perish miserably. The fact that the Huguenots 
 had most of the virtue and industry and intelligence of France 
 did not keep them from being slaughtered by Catholic bigots, 
 and reaction riveted upon the French people for a couple of 
 hundred years. The fact that the Moors had most of the indus- 
 try of Spain did not keep them from being driven into 
 exile by the Inquisition, and the intellectual life of the Spanish 
 people strangled for three hundred or four hundred years. 
 
 Some eight hundred years ago our ancestors in England 
 brought a cruel and despotic king to battle, and conquered 
 him, and on the field of Runnymede forced him to sign a grant 
 of rights to Englishmen. That document is known as Magna 
 Carta, or the Great Charter, and everyone who writes political 
 history today recognizes it as one of the greatest of man's 
 achievements, the beginning of a process which we hope will 
 bring freedom and equality before the law to every human 
 being on earth. 
 
 And now we have come to the stage in our industrial af- 
 fairs, when the organized workers seek to bring the monarchs 
 of industry into the council chamber, and force them to sign 
 a similar Great Charter, which will grant freedom and self- 
 government to the workers. Just as King John was forced 
 to admit that the power to tax and spend the public revenue 
 belonged to the people of England, and not to the ruler; 
 just so the workers will establish the principle that the finances 
 of industry are a public concern, that the books are 
 to be opened, and prices fixed and wages paid by the demo- 
 cratic vote of the citizens of industry. If that change is
 
 THE BOOK or SOCIETY 135 
 
 accomplished, the historian of the future will recognize it 
 as another momentous step in progress; and he will heed 
 the protests of the lords of industry, that they are being 
 deprived of their freedom to do business, and of their sacred 
 legal rights to their profits, as little as he heeded the protests 
 of King John against the "treason" and "usurpation" and 
 infringement of "divine right" by the rebellious barons.
 
 CHAPTER LV 
 
 THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM 
 
 (Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and the 
 effect of this system upon the minds of the workers.) 
 
 In the beginning man got his living by hunting and fish- 
 ing. Then he took to keeping flocks and herds, and later by 
 slow stages he settled down to agriculture. With the intro- 
 duction of slavery and the ownership of the land by ruling 
 classes, there came to be a subject class of workers, who 
 toiled on the land from dawn to dark, year in and year out, 
 and got, if they were fortunate, an existence for themselves 
 and their families. Whether these workers were called slaves 
 or serfs or peasants, whether their product was taken from 
 them in the form of taxes by the king, or of rent by the land- 
 lord, made no difference ; the workers were bound to the soil, 
 like the beasts with which they lived in intimate contact. They 
 were drafted into armies, and made to fight for their lords 
 and masters; they suffered pestilence and famine, fire and 
 slaughter; but with infinite patience they would rebuild their 
 huts, and dig and plant again, whether for the old master or 
 for a new one. 
 
 In the early days these workers made their own crude tools 
 and weapons ; but very early there must have been some who 
 specialized in such arts, and with the growth of towns and 
 communications came a new kind of labor, based upon a new 
 system. Some enterprising man would buy slaves, or hire 
 labor, and obtain a supply of raw material, and manufacture 
 goods to be bartered or sold. He would pay his workers 
 enough to draw them from the land, and would sell the prod- 
 uct for what he could get, and the difference would be his 
 profit. That was capitalism, and at first it was a thing of 
 no importance, and the men who engaged in it had no social 
 standing. But princes and lords needed weapons and supplies 
 for their armies, and the men who could furnish these things 
 became more and more necessary, and the states which en- 
 couraged them were the ones which rose to power. Mer- 
 chants and sea-traders became the intimates of kings, and by 
 
 136
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 137 
 
 the time of the Roman empire, capitalism was a great world 
 power, dominating the state, using the armies of the state for 
 its purposes. It went down with the rest of Roman civili- 
 zation, but in the Middle Ages it began once more to revive, 
 and by the end of the eighteenth century the merchants and 
 money lenders of France, with their retainers, the lawyers and 
 journalists, were powerful enough to -take the control of 
 society. 
 
 Then, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, came the 
 invention of machinery and of the power process. Capitalism 
 began to grow like a young giant among pygmies. In the 
 course of a century it has ousted all other methods of pro- 
 duction, and all other forms of social activity. A hundred 
 years ago the British House of Commons was a parliament 
 of landlords; today it is a Merchants' and Manufacturers' 
 Association. Out of the 707 members of the British House 
 of Commons, 361 are members of the "Federation of British 
 Industries," the labor-smashing organization of British "big 
 business." And the same is true of every other parliament 
 and congress in the modern capitalist state. Practically all 
 the wealth of the world today is produced by the capitalist 
 method, and distributed under capitalist supervision, and there- 
 fore capitalist ideas prevail in our society, to the practical 
 exclusion of all other ideas. I have shown in "The Profits 
 of Religion" how these ideas dominate the modern church, 
 and in "The Brass Check" how they dominate the modern 
 press. I plan to write two books, to show how they dominate 
 education and literature. 
 
 A hundred years ago an industry consisted of a half a 
 dozen or a dozen men, working under the personal super- 
 vision of an owner, and using crude hand tools. Today it 
 consists of a gigantic trust, owning and managing scores and 
 perhaps hundreds of mills and factories, each employing thou- 
 sands of workers. A corporation like the Steel Trust owns 
 enough of the sources of its raw material to give it prac- 
 tical monopoly; it owns a fleet of vessels especially designed 
 for ore-carrying; it owns its private railroads, to deliver the 
 ore to the mills. Through its system of dummy directorates 
 it has practical control of the main railroads over which it 
 distributes its products; also of banks and trust companies 
 and insurance companies, to gather the money of the public 
 to finance its undertakings. It owns huge office buildings,
 
 138 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 and vast tracts of land upon which the homes of its workers 
 are built. It has a private army for the defense of its prop- 
 erty a complete army of cavalry, infantry and artillery, in- 
 cluding a large and highly efficient secret service department, 
 with a host of informers and spies. It has newspapers for 
 the purpose of propaganda, and it controls the government 
 of every village, town and city in which it has important 
 interests. If you will take the trouble to visit a "steel town," 
 and make inquiries among public officials, newspaper men, 
 and others who are "on the inside," you will discover that those 
 in authority consider it necessary and proper that "steel" 
 should control, and are unable to conceive any other condition 
 of affairs. If you go to other parts of the country, where 
 other great industries are located, you find it taken for granted 
 that "copper" should control, or "lumber," or "coal," or "oil," 
 or whatever it may be. 
 
 Under the system of large scale capitalism, labor is a com- 
 modity, bought and sold in the market like any other com- 
 modity. Some years ago Congress was requested to pass a 
 law contradicting this fundamental fact of world capitalism. 
 Congress passed a law, very carefully worded so that no one 
 could be sure what it meant, and a few year., later the Su- 
 preme Court nullified the law. But all through this political 
 and legal controversy the status of labor remained exactly the 
 same; there was a "labor market," consisting of those mem- 
 bers of the community who, in the formula of Marx, had 
 nothing but their labor power to sell. These competed for 
 recognition at the factory gates, and highly skilled foremen 
 selected those who offered the largest quantity of labor power 
 for the stated wage. 
 
 So entirely impersonal is this process that there are great 
 industries in America in which ninety per cent of the common 
 labor force is hired and fired all over again in the course of 
 a year. These men are put to work in gangs, under a system 
 which enables one picked man to set the pace, and compel 
 all the others to keep up with him, under penalty of being 
 discharged. This process is known as "speeding up," and its 
 purpose is to obtain from each worker the greatest quantity 
 of energy in exchange for his daily wage. In the steel indus- 
 try men work twelve hours a day for six days in the week, 
 and then finish with a twenty-four-hour day. If they do not 
 work so long in other industries, it is because experience has
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 139 
 
 proven that the greatest quantity of energy can be obtained 
 from them in a shorter time. There are very few men who 
 can stand this pace for long. Those who are not crippled or 
 killed in accidents are broken down at forty, and all the great 
 corporations recognize this fact. Their foremen pick out the 
 younger men, and practically all concerns have an age rule, 
 and never hire men above forty or forty-five. 
 
 I shall not in this book go into details concerning the fate 
 of the worker under the profit system. I have written two 
 novels, "The Jungle" and "King Coal," in which the facts are 
 portrayed in detail, and it seems the part of common sense to 
 refer the reader to these text-books. It will suffice here to 
 set forth the main outlines of the situation. In every capitalist 
 country of the world the masses of the people are herded 
 into industries, in whose profits they have no share, and in 
 whose welfare they have no interest. They do not know the 
 people for whom they work ; they have no human relationship, 
 either with their work or with their employers. They see the 
 surplus of their product drawn off to maintain a class of 
 idlers, whose activities they know only through the scandals 
 of the divorce courts and the luxury-love of the moving pic- 
 ture screen. They compete with one another for jobs, and 
 bid down one another's wages ; and if they attempt to organize 
 and end this competition, their efforts are broken by newspaper 
 propaganda and policemen's clubs. At the same time they 
 know that monopoly, open or secret, prevails in the fixing of 
 prices, and so they find the struggle to "get ahead" a losing 
 one. In America it used to be possible for the young and 
 energetic to "go West"; but now the wave of capitalism has 
 reached the Pacific coast and been thrown back, and there 
 is no more frontier. 
 
 The man who works on the land has been through all the 
 ages a solitary man. He is better friends with his horse and 
 his cow than with his fellow humans. He is brutalized by 
 incessant toil, he lives amid dirt and the filth of animals, 
 he is, in the words of Edwin Markham : 
 
 <r A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 
 Stunted and stunned, a brother to the ox." 
 
 He is a victim of natural forces which he does not under- 
 stand, and inevitably therefore he is superstitious. Being alone,
 
 140 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 he is helpless against his masters, and only utter despera- 
 tion drives him to revolt. 
 
 But consider the capitalist system how different the con- 
 ditions of its workers! Here they are gathered into city 
 slums, and their wits are sharpened by continual contact with 
 their fellows. The printing press makes cheap the spread 
 of information, and the soap-box makes it even cheaper. Any 
 man with a grievance can shout aloud, and be sure of an 
 audience to listen, and he can get a great deal said before 
 the company watchman or the policeman can throttle him. 
 Moreover, the modern worker is not struggling with drought 
 and tempest and hail; he does not see his labors wiped out 
 by volcanic eruption or lightning stroke; he is dealing with 
 machinery, something that he himself has made, and that 
 he fully understands. If a machine gets out of order, he 
 does not fall down upon his knees and pray to God to fix 
 it. All the training of his life teaches him the relationship 
 of cause and effect, the adjustment of means to ends. So 
 the modern worker, as a necessary consequence of his daily 
 work, is practical, skeptical, and unsentimental in his psy- 
 chology. And what is more, he is making all the rest of 
 society of the same temperament. He is building roads out 
 into the country, and building machines to roll over them; 
 he is running telephone lines and sending newspapers and 
 magazines and moving picture shows to the peasant and the 
 farmer; so the young peasants and farmers hunger for the 
 city, and they learn to fix machinery instead of praying to 
 God. 
 
 Such is the psychology of the modern working class; and 
 the supreme achievement of their sharpened wits is an un- 
 derstanding of the capitalist process. As a matter of fact 
 they did not make this discovery for themselves ; it was made 
 for them by middle-class men, lawyers and teachers and 
 writers Fourier, Owen, Marx, Lassalle. The modern doc- 
 trine is called by various names: Socialism, Communism, 
 Anarchism, Bolshevism, Syndicalism, Collectivism. Later on 
 I shall define these various terms, and point out the distinc- 
 tions between them. For the moment I emphasize the fac- 
 tor they all have in common, and which is fundamental: they 
 wish to break the power of class ownership and control of 
 the instruments and means of production; they wish to 
 replace private capitalism by some system under which the
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 141 
 
 instruments and means of production are collectively owned 
 and operated; and they look to the non-owning class, the 
 proletarian, as the motive power by which this change is to 
 be compelled. I shall in future refer to this as the "social 
 revolutionary" doctrine ; taking pains to explain that the word 
 "revolutionary" is to be divested of its popular meaning of 
 physical violence. It is perfectly conceivable that the change 
 may be brought about peaceably, and I shall try to show 
 before long that in modern capitalist states the decision as 
 to whether it is brought about peaceably or by violence rests 
 with the present masters of industry.
 
 CHAPTER LVI 
 
 THE CAPITALIST PROCESS 
 
 (How profits are made under the present industrial system 
 and what becomes of them.) 
 
 We have next to examine the structure of the capitalist 
 order, basing our argument on facts which are admitted by 
 everyone, including the most ardent defenders of the present 
 system. 
 
 All men have to have certain material things which we 
 describe as goods. As these goods do not produce them- 
 selves, it is necessary that some should work. The workers 
 must have tools; also they must have access to the land and 
 the sources of raw materials. These means of production 
 are owned by some individuals in the community, and this 
 ownership gives them power to direct the work of the rest. 
 Those who own the land and the natural sources of wealth 
 we call capitalists, or business men, and those who do not 
 own these things, or whose share in them is insignificant, 
 are the proletariat, or working class. 
 
 If you state to the average American that there is a 
 capitalist class and a proletariat in this country, he will point 
 out that many who are now members of the capitalist class 
 were originally members of the proletariat ; they have worked 
 hard and saved, and accumulated property. But this is mere- 
 ly confusing the issue. The fact that some proletarians turn 
 into capitalists and some capitalists into proletarians is im- 
 portant to the individuals concerned, but it does not alter 
 the fact that there are two classes, capitalist and prole- 
 tarian. Consider, by way of illustrating, a field with trees 
 growing on it; we have earth, and we have trees, and the 
 distinction between them is unmistakable. The roots of the 
 trees go down into the earth, and take up portions of the 
 earth and turn it into tree. The leaves and the dead branches 
 fall, and in the course of time are turned once more to 
 earth. There are all sorts of stages between earth and tree, 
 and between tree and earth ; but you would not therefore say 
 that the word "earth" and the word "tree" are misnomers. 
 
 142
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 
 
 The working men go to the business man and apply for 
 work. The business man gives them work, and takes their 
 product, and offers it in the market at a price which allows 
 him a profit above cost. If he can sell at a profit, he repeats, 
 the process, and the worker has a job. If he cannot sell 
 at a profit, the worker is out of a job. Here and there may 
 be a benevolent business man who, rather than turn his work- 
 ers ,out of a job, will sell his goods at cost, or even for a 
 short time at a loss; but if he keeps the factory going simply 
 for the benefit of his workers, and with no expectation of 
 ever making a profit, that is a form of charity, and not the 
 common system under which our business is now carried on. 
 
 So it appears that the worker is dependent for his wages 
 upon the ability of the business man to make a profit. The 
 worker's life is inextricably bound up with the profit of the 
 capitalist no profit for the capitalist, no life for the worker. 
 The capitalist, going out to look for markets for his goods^ 
 is seeking, not merely profit for himself, but life for his 
 workers. 
 
 Now, the business man pays a certain percentage of his 
 total receipts for labor, another percentage for raw mate- 
 rials, another percentage for his overhead charges, and the 
 rest is profit in various forms, rent to the landlord, interest 
 to the bondholder, dividends to the stockholder. All this 
 total sum goes to human individuals, and each has thus a 
 certain amount of money to spend. They pay it over to 
 other individuals for goods or services, and so the money 
 keeps circulating, and business keeps going. That is as deep 
 as the average mind probes into the process. 
 
 But let us probe a little deeper. It is evident that, in the 
 course of all this exchanging of goods, some individuals get 
 a larger share than other individuals. Our government col- 
 lects an income tax, and thus we have statistics representing- 
 what people are willing to admit about the share they get. 
 In 1917 it appeared that, speaking roughly, one family out 
 of six had an income of over $1,000 a year, and one family 
 out of twelve had an income of over $2,000. But there were 
 19,000 families which admitted incomes of over $50,000 a 
 year, and 300 with over $1,000,000 a year. 
 
 Now the families that get less than a thousand dollars a 
 year obviously have to spend the greater part of their income 
 upon their immediate living expenscc. But the families that
 
 144 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 get $50,000 a year do not need to spend everything, and most 
 of them take the greater part of their income and reinvest 
 it that is, they spend it upon the creating of new machinery 
 of production, railroads, mills, factories, office buildings, the 
 whole elaborate structure of capitalist industry. 
 
 Exactly what proportion of the total product of industry 
 is thus taken and reinvested no one can say; but this we 
 know, our cities are growing at an enormous rate, our manu- 
 facturing power is increasing by leaps and bounds, we are 
 perfecting processes which enable one man to do the work 
 of a hundred men, which increase the product of one man's 
 labor a hundredfold. All this goes on blindly, automatically; 
 a Niagara of goods of all sorts is poured out, and we call it 
 "prosperity." 
 
 But then suddenly a strange and bewildering thing hap- 
 pens. All at once, and without warning, orders fall off, 
 values begin to drop, business collapses, factories are shut 
 down, and millions of men are thrown out of jobs. Mer- 
 chants look at one another with blanched faces ; each one has 
 been counting on paying his bills with the profits he was 
 going to make, and now his profits are gone, and he can't 
 pay. The newspapers and magazines keep insisting that it 
 can't be true, that business is going to revive next week, that 
 prosperity is just ahead. But the factories stay shut, and 
 the millions of men stay idle. 
 
 This is the condition in which we find ourselves as I write 
 this book. It has been happening regularly in our history 
 every ten years or so, ever since America started; we have 
 had a hundred years to reflect upon it and to probe into the 
 causes of it, and such is business intelligence in the most 
 enlightened country in the world, you may search the pages 
 of our newspapers from the first column of millionaire 
 divorce suits to the last column of "situations wanted/' and 
 nowhere can you find one word to explain this mysterious 
 calamity of "hard times" how it comes to happen to our social 
 system, or what could be done to prevent it I To supply this 
 deficiency in present day thinking is our next task.
 
 CHAPTER LVII 
 
 HARD TIMES 
 
 (Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing, and 
 why abundant production brings distress instead of plenty.) 
 
 Let us picture a small island inhabited by six men. One 
 of these men fishes, another hunts, another gathers cocoanuts, 
 another raises goats for clothing, and so on. The six men 
 among them produce by their labor all the necessities of their 
 lives, and they exchange their products with one another. The 
 island is productive, and each of the men is free, and makes 
 his exchanges on equal terms; on that basis the industry of 
 the island can continue indefinitely, and there will never be any 
 trouble. There may sometimes be over-production, but it will 
 not cause anyone to starve. If the fisherman is unusually 
 lucky one day, he will be able to take a vacation for a few 
 days, living on his fish and the products he exchanges for 
 his fish. For the sake of convenience in future reference, 
 I will describe this happy island as a "free" society; mean- 
 ing that each of the members of this society has access on 
 equal terms to the sources of wealth, and each owns the prod- 
 uct of his own labor, without paying tribute to any one else 
 for the right to labor, or to exchange his products. 
 
 But now let us suppose that one of the men on the island 
 is strong and aggressive; he takes a club and knocks down 
 the other five men, and compels them to sign a piece of 
 paper agreeing that hereafter he is the president of the land 
 development company of the island, the chief stockholder in 
 the goat-raising company, and owner of the fishing conces- 
 sion and the cocoanut grove; also, that hereafter goods shall 
 not be bartered in kind, but shall be exchanged for money, 
 and that he is the banker, and also the government, with 
 the right to issue money. In this society you will find that 
 the real work, the actually productive work, is done by five 
 men, instead of by six, and these five do not get the full value 
 of their labor. The fisherman will fish, but his product will 
 no longer belong to himself ; he will get part of it as wages, 
 while the "business man" takes charge of the balance. So 
 
 145
 
 146 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 when there is a lucky day, there will be prosperity in the 
 fishing industry, but this prosperity will not benefit the fisher- 
 man ; he will have only his wage, and when he has caught too 
 many fish, he will not have a few days' vacation, but will be 
 out of a job. 
 
 And exactly the same thing will happen to the goat-herd. 
 He will probably have work all the year round, because goats 
 have to be tended, but he will get barely enough to keep him 
 alive, and the surplus skins and milk will go to the owner 
 of the no-longer-happy island. Perhaps it will occur to the 
 owner that the man who raises cocoanuts might also keep an 
 eye on the goats, and so the goat-herd will be permanently 
 out of a job, and will turn into what is called a tramp, or 
 vagrant. Inasmuch as everything to eat on the island belongs 
 to the owner, the ex-goat-herd will be tempted to become a 
 criminal, and so it will be necessary for the owner to arm the 
 cocoanut man with a club and make him into a policeman; 
 or perhaps he will organize the fisherman and the hunter into 
 a militia for the preservation of law and order. They will 
 be glad to serve him, because, owing to the extreme produc- 
 tivity of the island, they will be out of jobs a great part of 
 the time, and but for the generosity of the business man, 
 would have no way of earning a living. 
 
 But suppose that the cocoanut man should invent a ma- 
 chine for gathering a year's supply of nuts in a week; sup- 
 pose the fisherman should devise a scheme to fill his boat 
 with fish in a few minutes; and suppose that as a result of 
 these inventions the business man got so rich that he moved 
 to Paris, and no longer saw his workers, or even knew their 
 names. Under these conditions you can see that overpro- 
 duction and unemployment might increase on the island; and 
 also the business man might seem less human and lovable to his 
 wage slaves, and might need a larger police force. It might 
 even happen that he would discover the need of a propaganda 
 department, in order to keep his police force loyal, and a secret 
 service to make sure that agitators did not get into the schools. 
 
 The five islanders, having filled all the barns and store- 
 houses, would be turned out to starve; and when they asked 
 the reason, they would be told it was because they had 
 produced a surplus of food. This may sound grotesque, but 
 it is what is being said to 5,000,000 men in America as I 
 write. There are clothing-workers who are going about in
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 147 
 
 rags, and they are told it is because they have produced too 
 much clothing. There are shoe-workers whose shoes are fall- 
 ing off their feet, and they are told it is because they have 
 produced too many shoes. There are carpenters who have 
 no homes, and they are told that a great many homes are 
 needed, but unfortunately it doesn't pay the builders to go 
 ahead just now. This may sound like a caricature, but it 
 happens to be -the most prominent single fact in the con- 
 sciousness of 5,000,000 Americans at the close of the year 
 1921. No wonder they are discontented with the present 
 order. 
 
 The soluHon of the mystery is so simple that the 5,000,000 
 unemployed cannot be kept permanently from understanding 
 it. The reason the five men on the island are starving is 
 because one man owns the island and the others own nothing. 
 If the island were community property, the five men would 
 each own a share of the contents of the barns and storehouses, 
 and would not be starving. If the 100,000,000 people of 
 America owned the productive machinery of America, then 
 instantly the unemployment crisis would pass like an evil 
 dream. The farm-workers who need shoes would exchange 
 their food with the starving shoe-workers, and the starving 
 shoe- workers would have jobs. They would want clothing, 
 and so the clothing-makers would start to work; and so on 
 all the way down the line. There is only one thing necessary 
 to make this possible, and that is the thing which we have 
 agreed to call the social revolution.
 
 CHAPTER LVIII 
 THE IRON RING 
 
 _( Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles produc- 
 tion, and makes true prosperity impossible.) 
 
 We have seen that in an exploiting society there is a sur- 
 plus which is taken by 'the exploiter; and that under the 
 modern system this surplus must be sold at a profit before 
 production can continue. The vital fact in such a society is 
 that the worker has not the money to buy back all that he 
 produces; therefore it is inevitable that a surplus product 
 should accumulate. When this happens, production must be 
 cut down, and during that period the worker is without a 
 job, and without means of living. The fact that he needs 
 the product does not help him; the point is that he has not 
 the money to buy it. In such a society the productive ma- 
 chinery is never used to the full. The machinery is controlled 
 by a profit-seeking interest, seeking an opportunity to make 
 sales, and restricting production according to the prospect 
 of sales. So the actual product bears no relationship to the 
 possible product, and people who live in an exploiting society 
 can form no conception of true prosperity. 
 
 For, you see, the market is limited by the competitive 
 wage system. We have seen that in our own rich, prosperous 
 country only one family out of six has more than $1,000 
 a year income; only one family out of twelve has $2,000 a 
 year. It does not make any difference that the warehouses 
 are bursting with goods; a family constitutes a market of 
 so many dollars a year, and then, so far as the profit system 
 is concerned, that family is non-existent; that family stops 
 consuming, and the productive machinery is halted to that 
 extent. 
 
 I have been accustomed to portray the profit system under 
 the simile of an iron ring riveted about the body of a baby. 
 That ring would cause the baby some discomfort at the begin- 
 ning, but it would not be serious, and the baby would get 
 used to it. But as the baby grew the trouble caused by the 
 ring would increase, and finally there would come a time 
 
 148
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 149 
 
 when the baby would be suffering from a whole complication 
 of troubles, and for each of these troubles there would be 
 but one remedy break the ring. Does the baby cry all the 
 time? Break the ring! Is its digestion defective? Break 
 the ring! Is it threatened with convulsions or with blood 
 poisoning? Break the ring! 
 
 Here is our industrial society, growing at a rate never 
 equalled by any human baby ; and here is this iron ring riveted 
 about its middle. Here is poverty, here is unemployment, 
 here is graft, here is crime, here is war and plague and famine ; 
 and for all these evils there is but one cause, and but one 
 remedy. Break the ring! Set production free from the 
 strangulation of the profit system. 
 
 I will admit that there may have been a time in the history 
 of the social infant when this ring was necessary. I admit 
 that if the great industrial machine was to be constructed, 
 it was necessary that the mass of the people should consume 
 only part of what they produced, and should allow the bal- 
 ance to be reinvested as capital. But now it has been done, 
 and the process is complete. We have a machine capable 
 of producing many times more than we can consume; shall 
 we still go on building that machine ? Shall we go on starving 
 ourselves, to save the money, to multiply over and over again 
 the products, in order that we may be thrown out of work, 
 and be starved even more completely? 
 
 A few generations ago we had in colonial America a so- 
 ciety that in part at least was "free." In that society every- 
 body got the necessities of life. They did not have the modern 
 Sunday supplement and the moving picture show, but they 
 had bread and meat and good substantial clothing, and fur- 
 niture so well made that we still preserve it. The children 
 in those days grew up to be strong and sturdy men and 
 women, who would have seen nothing to envy in the bodies 
 or minds of the slum population of New York and Chicago. 
 In short, they had all the true necessities of life ; and yet their 
 work was done by hand, the power process was unknown and 
 undreamed of. 
 
 Now comes modern machinery, and multiplies the pro- 
 ductive power of the hand laborer by five, by ten, sometimes 
 by a hundred. Here, for example, is the "Appeal to Rea- 
 son" selling millions of cheap books for ten cents apiece, and 
 making a profit on it ; installing a gigantic press which takes
 
 150 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 paper, sheet after sheet, prints 128 pages of a book at one 
 impression, and folds and stitches and binds the books, all in 
 one process, and turns them out complete at the rate of 
 10,000 copies per hour. Here is a factory which turns out 
 100,000 automobiles a month. Here is a mill which turns 
 out many millions of yards of cloth a month. If our colo- 
 nial ancestors had been told about these marvels, they would 
 have said instantly: "Then, of course, everybody in that 
 society will have all the books they want, and all the clothing 
 they want, and all the automobiles. Everybody in that society 
 will have five or ten or one hundred times as much goods as we 
 have." 
 
 Imagine the bewilderment of our colonial ancestor if he 
 had been told: "The majority of the people in that society 
 will not have so much of the real necessities of life as you 
 have. They will have a few cheap trinkets, designed to tickle 
 their senses; they will have cheap newspapers, carefully con- 
 trived to keep their minds vacant and to keep them contented 
 with their lot; they will have moving picture shows con- 
 structed for the same purpose; but all their material things 
 will be flimsy, put together for show and not for permanence ; 
 their food will be adulterated, their clothing will be shoddy, 
 everything they have will be made, not for their service, but 
 for the profit of some one who lives by selling to them. The 
 average wage earned by those who do the work of this new 
 machine civilization will be less than half the amount nec- 
 essary to purchase the necessities of a decent life, and one- 
 tenth of the total population will be living in such poverty 
 that they are unable to maintain physical fitness, or to rear 
 their children into full sized men and women."
 
 CHAPTER LIX 
 
 FOREIGN MARKETS 
 
 (Considers the efforts of capitalism to save itself by market- 
 ing its surplus products abroad, and what results from these 
 efforts.) 
 
 If our analysis of present-day society is correct, we have 
 the enormous populations of the modern industrial countries, 
 living always on the verge of starvation, their chance for 
 survival depending at all times upon the ability of their em- 
 ployers to find a profitable market for a surplus of goods. 
 At first the employer seeks that market at home; but when 
 the home markets are glutted, he goes abroad ; and so develops 
 the phenomenon of foreign trade and rivalry for foreign trade, 
 as the basic fact of capitalism, and the fundamental cause of 
 modern war. 
 
 Let us get clear a simple distinction concerning foreign 
 trade. There is a kind of trade which is normal, and would 
 thrive in a "free" society. In the United States we can 
 produce nearly all the necessities of life, but there are a few 
 which we cannot produce rubber, for example, and bananas, 
 and good music. These things we wish to import. We buy 
 them from other countries, and incur a debt, which we pay 
 with products which the other countries need from us ; wheat, 
 for example, and copper, and moving pictures with cowboys 
 in them. This is equal exchange, and a natural phenomenon. 
 A "free" society would produce such surplus goods as were 
 necessary to procure the foreign products that it desired. 
 When it had produced that much, the workers would stop 
 and take a vacation until they wanted more foreign prod- 
 ucts. 
 
 But under capitalism we have an entirely different con- 
 dition we produce a surplus of goods which we have to sell 
 in order to keep our factories running, and to keep our work- 
 ing population from starving. And note that it does not help 
 us to get back an equal quantity of foreign goods in ex- 
 change. We must have what we call "a favorable balance"; 
 that is, we must have other people going into debt to us, so 
 
 151
 
 152 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 that we can be continually shipping out more goods than 
 we take back; continually piling up credits which we can 
 "negotiate," or turn into cash, so that we can go on and repeat 
 the process of making more goods, selling them for more 
 profits, and putting the surplus into the form of more ma- 
 chinery, to make still more goods and still more profits. 
 
 And then, after a while, we come upon this embarrassing 
 phenomenon; nations which buy and do not sell must either 
 do it by sending us gold, or by our giving them credit. The 
 sending of gold cannot go on indefinitely, because then we 
 should have all the gold, and if other natiens had none that 
 would destroy their credit. On the other hand, business can- 
 not be done by credit indefinitely; for the very essence of 
 credit is a promise to pay, and payment can only be made in 
 goods, and how can we take the goods without ruining our 
 own industry? 
 
 Fifteen years ago I pointed this out in a book. The 
 argument was irrefutable, and the conclusion inescapable, 
 but the few critics who noted it repeated their usual formula 
 about "dreamers and theorists." Now, however, the busi- 
 ness mills have ground on, and what was theory has become 
 fact before our eyes. We have trusted the nations of Europe 
 for some $10,000,000,000 worth of goods, and they are power- 
 less to pay, and if they did pay, they would bankrupt Amer- 
 ican industry. France wishes to collect an enormous indem- 
 nity from Germany, but nobody can figure out how this indem- 
 nity can be paid without ruining French industry. The 
 French have demanded coal from Germany, and have got 
 more than they can use, and are "dumping" it in Belgium 
 and Holland, with the result that the British coal industry 
 is ruined. The French clamor that the Germans must pay 
 for the destruction they wrought in Northern France, and 
 the Germans offer to send German workmen to rebuild the 
 ruined towns; but the French denounce this as an insult it 
 would deprive French workingmen of their jobs! So I might 
 continue for pages, pointing out the manifold absurdities which 
 result from a system of industry for the profit of a few, 
 instead of for the use of all. 
 
 Ever since I first began to read the newspapers, some 
 twenty-five or thirty years ago, all our political life has been 
 nothing but the convulsions of a social body tortured by the 
 constricting ring of the profit system. Everywhere one group
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 153 
 
 struggling for advantage over another group, and politicians 
 engaged in playing one interest against another interest! My 
 boyhood recollections of public life consist of campaign slo- 
 gans having to do with the tariff: "production and prosper- 
 ity," "reciprocity," "the full dinner pail," "the foreigner pays 
 the tax," etc. 
 
 The workingman, under the profit system, is like a man 
 pounding away at a pump. He can get a thin trickle of 
 water from the spout of the pump if he works hard enough, 
 but in order to get it he has to supply ten times as much to 
 some one who has tapped the pipe. But the tapping has been 
 done underground, where the workingman cannot see it. All 
 the workingman knows is that there is no job for him if the 
 products of "cheap foreign labor" are allowed to be "dumped" 
 on the American market. That is obvious, and so he votes 
 for a tax on foreign imports, high enough to enable his own 
 employer to market at a profit. He does not realize that he 
 is thus raising the price of everything that he buys, and so 
 leaving himself worse off than he was before. 
 
 All governments are delighted with this tariff device, be- 
 cause they are thus enabled to get money from the public 
 without the public's knowing it. "The foreigner pays the 
 tax," we are told, and as a result of this arrangement the 
 steel trust just before the war was selling its product at a 
 high price to the American people, and taking its surplus 
 abroad and selling it to the foreigner at half the domestic 
 price. And we see this same thing in every line of manufac- 
 ture, and all over the world. We see one nation after another 
 withdrawing itself as a market for manufactured products, 
 and entering the lists as a marketer. One more nation now 
 able to fill all its own needs, and going out hungrily to look 
 ior foreign customers, adding to the glut of the world's manu- 
 factured products and the ferocity of international compe- 
 tition ! 
 
 At the close of the Civil War the total exports of the United 
 States averaged approximately $300,000,000, and the total im- 
 ports were about the same. In 1892 the exports first touched 
 $1,000,000,000, while the imports were about nine-tenths of 
 that sum. In the year 1913 the exports were nearly $2,500,- 
 000,000, while the 'imports were $600,000,000 less ; and in the 
 year 1920 our exports were over $8,000,000,000 and our im- 
 ports a little over $5,000,000,000! So we have a "favorable
 
 154 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 balance" of almost $3,000,000,000 a year and as a result we 
 are on the verge of ruin ! 
 
 This "iron ring" of overproduction and lack of market 
 exercises upon our industrial body a steady pressure, a slow 
 strangling. But because the body is in convulsions, strug- 
 gling to break the ring, the pressure of the ring is worse at 
 some times than at others. We have periods of what we call 
 "prosperity," followed by periods of panic and hard times. 
 You must understand that only a small part of our business 
 is done by means of cash payments, whether in gold or silver 
 or paper money. Close to 99% of our business is done by 
 means of credit, and this introduces into the process a psy- 
 chological factor. The business man expects certain profits, 
 and he capitalizes these expectations. Business booms, be- 
 cause everybody believes everybody else's promises ; credit 
 expands like a huge balloon, with the breath of everybody's 
 enthusiasm. But meantime real business, the real market, 
 remains just what it was before; it cannot increase, because 
 of the iron ring which restricts the buying power of the 
 mass of the people by the competitive wage. So presently 
 the time comes when somebody realizes that he has over-capital- 
 ized his hopes; he curtails his orders, he calls in his money, 
 and the impulse thus started precipitates a crash in the whole 
 business world. We had such a crash in 1907, and I remem- 
 ber a Wall Street man explaining it in a magazine article 
 entitled, "Somebody Asked for a Dollar." 
 
 We learned one lesson by that panic; at least, the big 
 financial men learned it, and had Congress pass what is called 
 the "Federal Reserve Act," a provision whereby in time of 
 need the government issues practically unlimited credit to 
 banks. This, of course, is fine for the banks; it puts the 
 credit of everybody else behind them, and all they have to 
 do is to stop lending money except to the big insiders 
 and sit back and wait, while the little men go to the wall, 
 and the mass of us live on our savings or starve. We saw 
 this happen in the year 1920, and for the first time we had 
 "hard times" without having a financial panic. But instead 
 we see prices staying high because the banks have issued so 
 much paper money and bank credits.
 
 CHAPTER LX 
 CAPITALIST WAR 
 
 (Shows how the competition for foreign markets leads nations 
 automatically into war.) 
 
 In a discussion of the world's economic situation, pub- 
 lished in 1906, the writer portrayed the ruling class of Ger- 
 many as sitting in front of a thermometer, watching the 
 mercury rising, and knowing that when it reached the top, 
 the thermometer would break. This thermometer was the 
 German class system of government, and the mercury was 
 the Socialist vote. In 1870 the vote was 30,000, in 1884 it 
 was 549,000, in 1893 it was 1,876,000, in 1903 it was 3,008,- 
 000, in 1907 it was 3,250,000, in 1911 it was 4,250,000. 
 Writing between 1906 and 1913, I again and again pointed out 
 that this increase was the symptom of social discontent in 
 Germany, caused by the overproduction of invested capital 
 throughout the world, and the intensification of the competi- 
 tion for world markets. I pointed out that a slight increase 
 in the vote would be sufficient to transfer to the working class 
 of Germany the political power of the German state; and I 
 said that the ruling class of Germany would never permit 
 that to happen when it was ready to happen Germany would 
 go to war, to seize the trade privileges of some other nation. 
 
 There was a time when wars were caused by national 
 and racial hatreds. There are still enough of these venerable 
 prejudices left in the world, but no student of the subject 
 would deny that the main source of modern wars is commer- 
 cial rivalry. In 1917 we sent Eugene V. Debs to prison for 
 declaring that the late world war was a war of capitalist 
 greed. But two years later President Wilson, who had waged 
 the war, declared in a public speech that everybody knew it 
 had been a war of commercial rivalries. 
 
 The aims of modern war-makers are two. First, capital- 
 ism must have raw materials, including coal and oil, the 
 sources of power, and gold and silver, the bases of credit. 
 Parts of the world which are so unfortunate as to be rich 
 in these substances become the bone of contention between 
 rival financial groups, organized as nations. Some sarcastic 
 writer has defined a "backward" nation as one which has 
 gold mines and no navy. We are horrified to read of the 
 
 155
 
 156 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 wars of the French monarchs, caused by the jealous quar- 
 rels of mistresses; but in 1905 we saw Russia and Japan go 
 to war and waste a million lives because certain Russian grand 
 dukes had bribed certain Chinese mandarins and obtained con- 
 cessions of timber on the Yalu River. We now observe France 
 and Germany vowed to undying hate because of iron mines 
 in Lorraine, and the efforts of France to take the coal mines 
 of Silesia from Germany, and give them to Poland, which is 
 another name for French capitalism. 
 
 The other end sought by the war-makers is markets for 
 manufactured products, and control of trade routes, coaling 
 stations and cables necessary to the building up of foreign 
 trade. England has been "mistress of the seas" for some 300 
 years, which meant that her traders had obtained most of 
 these advantages. But then came Germany, with her newly 
 developed commercialism, shoving her rival out of the way. 
 The Englishman was easy-going; he liked to play cricket, 
 and stop and drink tea every afternoon. But the German 
 worked all day and part of the night; he trained himself as 
 a specialist, he studied the needs of his customers all of 
 which to the Englishman was "unfair" competition. But here 
 were the populations of the crowded slums, dependent for 
 their weekly wage and their daily bread upon the ability of 
 the factories to go on turning out products! Here was the 
 ever-blackening shadow of unemployment, the mutterings of 
 social discontent, the agitators on the soap-boxes, the workers 
 listening to them with more and more eager attention, and 
 the journalists and politicians and bankers watching this phe- 
 nomenon with a ghastly fear. 
 
 So came the great war. Social discontent was forgotten 
 over night, and England and France plunged in to down their 
 hated rival, once and for all time. Now they have succeeded : 
 Germany's ships have been taken from her, and likewise her 
 cables and coaling stations; the Berlin-Bagdad Railroad is a 
 forgotten dream; the British sit in Constantinople, and the 
 traffic goes by sea. American capitalism wakes up, and rubs 
 its eyes after a debauch of Presbyterian idealism, and dis- 
 covers that it has paid out sorne $20,000,000,000, in order to 
 confer all these privileges and advantages upon its rivals! 
 
 Ever since I can remember the world, there have been 
 peace societies; I look back in history and discover that ever 
 since there have been wars, there have been prophets de-
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 157 
 
 claiming against them in the name of humanity and God. As 
 I write, there is a great world conference on disarmament 
 in session in Washington, and all good Americans hope that 
 war is to be ended and permanent peace made safe. All that 
 I can do at this juncture is to point out the fundamental 
 and all-controlling fact of present-day economics : that for the 
 ruling class of any country to agree to disarmament and the 
 abolition of war, is for that class to sign its own death war- 
 rant and cut its own throat. American capitalism can sur- 
 viye on this earth only by strangling and destroying Japanese 
 capitalism and British capitalism, and doing it before long. 
 The far-sighted capitalists on both sides know that, and are 
 making their preparations accordingly. 
 
 What the members of the peace societies and the diplo- 
 mats of the disarmament conferences do is to cut off the 
 branches of the tree of war. They leave the roots untouched, 
 and then, when the tree continues to thrive, they are astounded. 
 I conclude this chapter with a concrete illustration, cut from 
 my morning newspaper. We went to war against German 
 militarism, and to make the world safe for democracy mean- 
 ing thereby capitalist commercialism. We commanded the 
 German people to "beat their swords into plough-shares"; 
 that is, to set their Krupp factories to making tools of peace; 
 and they did so. We saddled them with an enormous indem- 
 nity, making them, our serfs for a generation or two, and 
 compelling them to hasten out into the world markets, to sell 
 their goods and raise gold to pay us. And now, how does 
 their behavior strike us? Do we praise their industry, and 
 fidelity to their obligations? Here are the headlines of a news 
 despatch, published by the Los Angeles Times on December 
 10, 1921, at the top of the front page, right hand column, 
 the most conspicuous position in the paper. Read it, and 
 understand the sources of modern war ! 
 
 NEW ATTACK BY BERLIN 
 
 DUMPING GOODS BY WHOLESALE 
 
 Cheap German Trash Puts Thousands of Americans 
 Out of Employment 
 
 Glove Plants Shut Down and Potash Industry Killed 
 by Teuton Intrigue
 
 CHAPTER LXI 
 THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRODUCTION 
 
 (Shows how much wealth we could produce if we tried, and 
 how we proved it when we had to.) 
 
 One of the commonest arguments in defense of the present 
 business system runs as follows : The amount of money which 
 is paid to labor is greatly in excess of the amount which is 
 paid to capital. Suppose that tomorrow you were to abolish 
 all dividends and profits, and divide the money up among 
 the wage workers, how much would each one get? The 
 sum is figured for some big industry, and it is shown that 
 each worker would get one or two hundred dollars additional 
 per year. Obviously, this would not bring the millennium; 
 it would hardly be worth while to take the risk of reducing 
 production in order to gain so small a result. 
 
 But now we are in position to realize the fallacy of such 
 an argument. The tax which capital levies upon labor is not 
 the amount which capital takes for itself, but the amount 
 which it prevents labor from producing. The real injury of 
 the profit system is not that it pays so large a reward to a 
 ruling class ; it is the "iron ring" which it fastens about indus- 
 try, barring the workers from access to the machinery of 
 production except when the product can be sold for a profit. 
 Labor pays an enormous reward to the business man for his 
 management of industry, but it would pay labor to reward 
 the business man even more highly, if only he would take 
 his goods in kind, and would permit labor, after this tax is 
 paid, to go on making those things which labor itself so des- 
 perately needs. 
 
 But, you see, the business man does not take his goods 
 in kind. The owner of a great automobile factory may make 
 for himself one automobile or a score of automobiles, but 
 he quickly comes to a limit where he has no use for any 
 more, and what he wants is to sell automobiles and "make 
 money." He does not permit his workers to make auto- 
 mobiles for themselves, or for any one else. He reserves 
 the product of the factory for himself, and when he can 
 
 158
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 159 
 
 no longer sell automobiles at a profit, he shuts the workers 
 out and automobile-making comes to an end in that com- 
 munity. Thus it appears that the "iron ring" which strangles 
 the income of labor, strangles equally the income of capital. 
 It paralyzes the whole social body, and so limits production 
 that we can form no conception of what prosperity might 
 and ought to be. 
 
 Consider the situation before the war. We were all of 
 us at work under the competitive system, and with the excep- 
 tion of a few parasites, everybody was occupied pretty close 
 to the limit of his energy. If any one had said that it would 
 be possible for our community to pitch in and double or 
 treble our output, you would have laughed at him. But sud- 
 denly we found ourselves at war, and in need of a great 
 increase in output, and we resolved one and all to achieve 
 this end. We did not waste any time in theoretical discus- 
 sions about the rights of private capital, or the dangers of 
 bureaucracy and the destruction of initiative. Our govern- 
 ment stepped in and took control; it took the railroads and 
 systematized them, it took the big factories and told them 
 exactly what to make, it took the raw materials and allotted 
 them where they were needed, it fixed the prices of labor, 
 and ordered millions of men to this or that place, to this or 
 that occupation. It even seized the foodstuffs and directed 
 what people should eat. In a thousand ways it suppressed 
 competition and replaced it by order and system. And what 
 was the result? 
 
 We took five million of our young men, the very cream of 
 our industrial force, and withdrew them from all productive 
 activities; we put them into uniforms, and put them through 
 a training which meant that they were eating more food and 
 wearing more clothing and consuming more goods than nine- 
 tenths of them had ever done in their lives before. We 
 built camps for them, and supplied them with all kinds of 
 costly products of labor, such as guns and cartridges, auto- 
 mobiles and airplanes. We treated two million of them to an 
 expensive trip to Europe, and there we set them to work 
 burning up and destroying the products of industry, to the 
 value of many billions of dollars. And not only did we sup- 
 ply our own armies, we supplied the armies of all our allies. 
 We built millions of dollars worth of ships, and we sent over 
 to Europe, whether by private business or by government loans,
 
 160 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 some $10,000,000,000 worth of goods more than ten years of 
 our exports before the war. 
 
 All the labor necessary to produce all this wealth had to 
 be withdrawn from industry, so far as concerned our domes- 
 tic uses and needs. It would not be too much to say that 
 from domestic industry we withdrew a total of ten million 
 of our most capable labor force. I think it would be rea- 
 sonable to say that two-thirds of our productive energies went 
 to war purposes, and only one-third was available for home 
 use. And yet, we did it without a particle of real suffering. 
 Many of us worked hard, but few of us worked harder than 
 usual. Most of us got along with less wheat and sugar, but 
 nobody starved, nobody really suffered ill health, and our 
 poor made higher wages and had better food than ever in 
 their lives before. If this argument is sound, it proves that 
 our productive machinery is capable, when properly organized 
 and directed, of producing three times the common neces- 
 sities of our population. Assuming that our average work- 
 ing day is nine hours, we could produce what we at present 
 consume by three hours of intelligently directed work per 
 day. 
 
 Let us look at the matter from another angle. Just at 
 present the hero of the American business man is Herbert 
 Hoover; and Mr. Hoover recently appointed a committee, 
 not of Socialists and "Utopians," but of engineering experts, 
 to make a study of American productive methods. The 
 report showed that American industry was only thirty-five or 
 forty per cent efficient. Incidentally, this "Committee on 
 Waste" assessed, in the case of the building industry, sixty- 
 five per cent of the blame against management and only 
 twenty-one per cent against labor; in six fundamental indus- 
 tries it assessed fifty per cent of the blame against manage- 
 ment and less than twenty-five per cent against labor. Fifteen 
 years ago a professor of engineering, Sidney A. Reeve by 
 name, made an elaborate study of the wastes involved in 
 our haphazard and planless industrial methods, and embodied 
 his findings in a book, "The Cost of Competition." His con- 
 clusion was that of the total amount of energy expended in 
 America, more than seventy per cent was wasted. We were 
 doing one hundred per cent of work and getting thirty per cent 
 of results. If we would get one hundred per cent of results, 
 we should produce three and one-third times as much wealth,
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 161 
 
 and the income of our workers would be increased one or 
 two thousand dollars a year. 
 
 Robert Blatchford in his Book, "Merrie England," has a 
 saying to the effect that it makes all the difference, when half 
 a dozen men go out to catch a horse, whether they spend their 
 time catching the horse or keeping one another from catching 
 the horse. Our next task will be to point out a few of the 
 ways in which good, honest American business men and 
 workingmen, laboring as intelligently and conscientiously as 
 they know how, waste their energies in keeping one another 
 from producing goods.
 
 CHAPTER LXII 
 
 THE COST OF COMPETITION 
 
 (Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine, 
 those which are obvious and those which are hidden.) 
 
 The United States government is by far the largest single 
 business enterprise in the United States; and a study of con- 
 gressional appropriations in 1920, made by the United States 
 Bureau of Standards, reveals the fact that ninety-three per 
 cent of the total income of the government went to paying 
 for past wars or preparing for future wars. We have shown 
 that modern war is a product of the profit system, and if 
 civilized nations would put their industry upon a co-opera- 
 tive basis, they could forget the very idea of war, and we 
 should then receive fourteen times as much benefit from 
 our government as we receive at present; we should have 
 fourteen times as good roads, fourteen times as many schools, 
 fourteen times as prompt a postoffice and fourteen times as 
 efficient a Congress. What it would mean to industry to abol- 
 ish war is something wholly beyond the power of our imagina- 
 tion to conceive; for along with ninety-three per cent of our 
 government money there goes into military preparation the 
 vast bulk of our intellectual energy and inventive genius, our 
 moral and emotional equipment. 
 
 Next, strikes and the losses incidental to strikes, and the 
 costs of preparing against strikes. This includes, not merely 
 the actual loss of working time, it includes police and militia, 
 private armies of gunmen, and great secret service agencies, 
 whose total income runs up into hundreds of millions of 
 dollars per year. Industrial warfare is simply the method 
 by which capitalists and wrkers determine the division of the 
 product of industry; as if two men should co-operate in rais- 
 ing poultry, and then fall to quarrelling over the ownership 
 of the eggs, and settle the matter by throwing the eggs at 
 each other's heads. 
 
 Next, bankruptcy. Statistics show that regularly some 
 ten per cent of our business enterprises fail every year. Take 
 any block occupied by little business men, grocers and haber- 
 
 162
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 163 
 
 dashers and "notions," and you will see that they are always 
 changing. Each change represents a human tragedy, and the 
 total is a frightful waste of human energy; it happens be- 
 cause we can think of no better way to distribute goods than 
 to go through the work of setting up a business, and then 
 discover that it cannot succeed because the neighborhood is 
 already overstocked with that kind of goods. 
 
 Next, fires which are a result of bankruptcy. You may 
 laugh, perhaps, thinking that I am making a joke; but every 
 little man who fails in business knows that he has a choice 
 of going down in the social scale, or of setting fire to his stock 
 some night, and having a big insurance company set him on 
 his feet again. The result is that a certain percentage of 
 bankrupts do regularly set fire to their stores. Some fifteen 
 years ago there was published in "Collier's Weekly" a study of 
 the costs to society of incendiary fires. The Fire Under- 
 writers' Association estimated the amount as a quarter of a 
 billion dollars a year ; and all this cost, you understand, is paid 
 out of the pockets of those who insure their homes and their 
 stores, and do not burn them down. 
 
 From this follows the costs of insurance, and the whole 
 insurance industry, ^which is inevitable under the profit sys- 
 tem, but is entire waste so far as true production is concerned. 
 Big enterprises like the Steel Trust do not carry insurance, 
 and neither does the United States Postoffice. They are 
 wealthy enough to stand their own losses. A national 
 co-operative enterprise would be in the same position, and the 
 whole business of collecting money for insurance and keep- 
 ing records and carrying on lawsuits would be forgotten. 
 
 Next, advertising. It would be no exaggeration to say 
 that seventy per cent of the material published in American 
 newspapers and magazines today is pure waste; and there- 
 fore seventy per cent of the labor of all the people who cut 
 down forests and manufacture and transport paper and set 
 up type and print and distribute publications is wasted. There 
 is, of course, a small percentage of advertising that is useful, 
 but most of it is boasting and falsehood, and even where it 
 tells the truth it simply represents the effort of a merchant 
 to persuade you to buy in his store instead of in a rival 
 store an achievement which is profitable to the merchant, 
 but utterly useless to society as a whole. 
 
 This same statement applies to all traveling salesmen, and
 
 164 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 to a great percentage of middlemen. It applies also to a 
 great part of delivery service. If you live in a crowded part 
 of any city, you see a dozen milk wagons pass your door 
 every morning, doing the work which could be done exactly 
 as well by one. That is only one case out of a thousand I might 
 name. 
 
 Next, crime. I have already discussed the crime of arson, 
 and I might discuss the crimes of pocket-picking, burglary, 
 forgery, and a hundred others in the same way. I am aware 
 of the fact that there may be a few born criminals ; there may 
 be a few congenital cheats, whom we should have to put in 
 hospitals. But we have only to consult the crime records, 
 during the war and after the war, in order to see that when 
 jobs are hunting men there are few criminals, and when men 
 are hunting jobs there are many criminals. I have no figures 
 as to the cost of administering justice in the United States 
 policemen, courts and jails but it must be hundreds of mil- 
 lions of dollars every year. 
 
 I have discussed at great length the suppression of the pro- 
 ductive power of society. I should not fail to mention the sup- 
 pression of the inventive power of society, a factor less obvious, 
 but probably in the long run even greater. Every one familiar 
 with the inside of a big industry knows that hundreds and even 
 thousands of useful processes are entirely suppressed, because 
 it would not pay one particular concern to stand the expense of 
 the changes involved. You know how, during the war, our gov- 
 ernment brought all the makers of engines together and per- 
 fected in triumph a "Liberty motor." But now we have gone 
 back to private interest and competition, and each concern is 
 jealously engaged in guarding its own secrets, and depriving 
 industry as a whole of the benefit of everything that it learns. 
 Each is spying upon the others, stealing the secrets of the 
 others, stealing likewise from those who invent new ideas and 
 thus discouraging them from inventing any more. 
 
 I use this word "discourage," and I might write a chapter 
 upon it. What human imagination can conceive the amount of 
 social energy that is lost because of the factor of discourage- 
 ment, directly caused by the competitive method ? Who can 
 figure what it means to human society that a great percentage 
 of the people in it should be haunted by fear of one sort or 
 another the poor in fear of unemployment, sickness and 
 starvation, the little business man in fear of bankruptcy and
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 165 
 
 suicide, the big business man in fear of hard times and treachery 
 of his competitors, the idle rich in fear of robbery and black- 
 mail, and the whole community in fear of foreign war and 
 domestic tumult! 
 
 Anyone might go on and elaborate these factors that I have 
 named, and think of scores of others. Anyone familiar with 
 business life or with industrial processes would be able to put 
 his finger on this or that enormous saving which he would be 
 able to make if he and all his rivals could combine and come to 
 an agreement. This has been proven over and over again in 
 large-scale industry ; it is the fact which has made of large-scale 
 industry an overwhelming power, sucking all the profits to 
 itself, reaching out and taking in new fields of human activity, 
 and setting at naught all popular clamor and even legal terrors. 
 How can anyone, seeing these facts, bring himself to deny that 
 if we did systematize production and make it one enterprise, 
 precisely adapted to one end, we should enormously increase the 
 results of human labor, and the benefit to all who do the world's 
 work? 
 
 A good deal of this waste we can stop when we get ready, 
 and other parts of it our bountiful mother nature will replace. 
 When in a world war we kill some ten or twenty millions of the 
 flower of our young manhood, we have only to wait several 
 generations, and our race will be as good as ever. But, on the 
 other hand, there is some waste that can never be repaired, 
 and this is the thing truly frightful to contemplate. When 
 we dig the iron ore out of the bowels of the earth and rust it 
 away in wars, we are doing something our race can never undo. 
 And the same is true of many of our precious substances : 
 phosphorus, sulphur, potash. When we cut down the forests 
 from our mountain slopes, and lay bare the earth, we not 
 merely cause floods and washouts, and silt up our harbors, we 
 take away from the surface of our land the precious life-giving 
 soil, and make a habitable land into a desert, which no irrigating 
 and reforesting can ever completely restore. The Chinese have 
 done that for many centuries, and we are following in their 
 footsteps; more than six hundred million wagon-loads of our 
 best soil are washed down to the sea every year ! If you wish to 
 know about these matters, I send you to a book, "On Board the 
 Good Ship Earth," by Herbert Quick. It is one of the most 
 heart-breaking books you ever read, yet it is merely a quiet 
 statement of the facts about our present commercial anarchy.
 
 CHAPTER LXIII 
 
 SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM 
 
 (Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the 
 state, and the idea of its management by the trade unions.) 
 
 Let us now assume that we desire to abolish the wastes of 
 the competitive method, and to put our industry on a basis of 
 co-operation. How should we effect the change, and how 
 should we run our industry after it was done? 
 
 Let us take the United States Steel Corporation. What 
 change would be necessary to the socializing of this concern? 
 United States Steel is owned by a group of stockholders, and 
 governed by a board of directors elected by them. The owners 
 are now to be bought out with government bonds, and the board 
 of directors retired. It may also be necessary to replace a cer- 
 tain number of the higher executive officials, who are imbued 
 entirely with the point of view of this board, and have to do 
 with finance, rather than with production. Of course, some 
 other governing authority would have to be put in control. 
 What would this authority be ? There are several plans before 
 the world, several different schools of thought, which we shall 
 consider one by one. 
 
 First, the Socialist program. The Socialist says, "Consider 
 the post-office, how that is run. It is run by the President, who 
 appoints a Postmaster-General as his executive. Let us there- 
 fore turn the steel industry over to the government, and let the 
 President appoint another member of his cabinet, a Director of 
 Steel; or let there be a commission, similar to the Interstate 
 Commerce Commission, or the various war industry boards." 
 Any form of management of the steel industry which provides 
 for its control and operation by our United States government 
 is Socialism of one sort or another. 
 
 There has been, of late, a great deal of dissatisfaction with 
 government, on the part of the general public, and also of labor. 
 The postoffice clerks, for example, complain that they are in- 
 adequately paid and autocratically managed, deprived of their 
 rights not merely as workers but as citizens. The steel workers 
 complain that when they go on strike against their masters, the 
 
 166
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 167 
 
 government sends in troops and crushes their strike, regardless 
 of the rights or wrongs of it. In order to meet such tactics, 
 labor goes into politics, and elects here and there its own repre- 
 sentatives; but these representatives become mysteriously 
 a:ffected by the bureaucratic point of view, and even where they 
 try hard, they do not accomplish much for labor. Therefore, 
 labor becomes disgusted with the political process, and labor 
 men do not welcome the prospect of being managed by govern- 
 ment. 
 
 If you ask such men, they will say: "No; the politicians 
 don't know anything about industry, and can't learn. The peo- 
 ple who know about industry are those who work in it. The 
 true way to run an industry is through an organization of the 
 workers, both of hand and brain. The true way to run the 
 Steel Trust is for all the workers in it, men and women, high 
 and low, to be recognized by law as citizens of that industry ; 
 each shop must elect its own delegates to run that shop, and 
 elect a delegate to a central parliament of the industry, and this 
 industry in turn must elect delegates to a great parliament or 
 convention of all the delegates of all the industries. In such a 
 central gathering every one would be represented, because every 
 person would be a producer of some sort, and whether he was a 
 steel worker or a street sweeper or a newsboy, he would have a 
 vote at the place where he earns his living, and would have a 
 say in the management of his job. The great central parliament 
 would elect an executive committee and a president, and so we 
 should have a government of the workers, by the workers, for 
 the workers." This idea is known as Syndicalism, derived from 
 the French word "syndicat," meaning a labor union. Since the 
 Russian revolution it has come to be known as soviet govern- 
 ment, "soviet" being the Russian word for trade council. 
 
 Now, taking these two ideas of Socialism and Syndicalism, 
 it is evident that they may be combined in various ways, and 
 applied in varying degrees. It is perfectly conceivable, for ex- 
 ample, that the people of the United States might elect a presi- 
 dent pledged to call a parliament of industry, and to delegate the 
 control of industry to this parliament. He might delegate the 
 control to a certain extent, and provide for its extension, step by 
 step ; so our society might move into Syndicalism by the way of 
 Socialism. You have only to put your mind on the possibilities 
 of the situation to realize that one method shades into the other 
 with a great variety of stages.
 
 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 Consider next the stages between capitalism and Socialism. 
 We have in the United States some industries which are purely 
 capitalistic; for example, the Steel Trust, which is privately 
 owned, and has been powerful enough, not merely to suppress 
 every effort of its workers to organize, but every effort of the 
 government to regulate it. On the other hand, the United 
 States Postoffice represents State Socialism ; although the work- 
 ers have been forbidden to organize, and the management of the 
 industry is so arbitrary that I have always preferred to call it 
 State Capitalism. Likewise the United States army and navy 
 represent State Socialism. When we had the job of putting the 
 Kaiser out of business, we did not hire Mr. Rockefeller to do 
 it ; it never once occurred to our advocates of "individualism," 
 of "capitalist enterprise and initiative," to suggest that we 
 should hire out our army and navy, or employ the Steel Trust 
 or the Powder Trust to organize its own army and navy to do 
 the fighting for us. Likewise, for the most part, we run the job 
 of educating our children by the method of municipal Social- 
 ism. We run our libraries in the same way, and likewise our 
 job of fire protection. 
 
 It is interesting to note how in every country the line be- 
 tween capitalism and Socialism is drawn in a different place. In 
 America we run practically all our libraries for ourselves, but it 
 would seem to us preposterous to think of running our theatres. 
 In Europe, however, they have state-owned theatres, which set 
 a far higher standard of art than anything we know at home. 
 Also, they have state-owned orchestras and opera-houses, some- 
 thing we Americans leave to the subscriptions of millionaires. 
 In Europe it seems perfectly natural to the poeple that the 
 state should handle their telegrams in connection with the post- 
 office ; but if you urge government ownership of the telegraphs 
 in the United States, they tell you that the proposition is "social- 
 istic," and that saves the need of thinking about it. We take 
 it for granted that our cities could run the libraries even 
 though we were glad when Carnegie came along and saved us 
 the need of appropriating money for buildings. Just why a city 
 should be able to run a library, and should not be able to run an 
 opera-house, or a newspaper, is something which has never 
 been made clear to me. 
 
 Let us next examine the stages between capitalism and Syn- 
 dicalism. A great many large corporations are making experi- 
 ments in what they call "shop management," allowing the work-
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 169 
 
 ers membership in the boards of directors and a voice in the 
 conditions of their labor. This is Syndicalism so far as it goes. 
 Likewise it is Syndicalism when the clothing workers and the 
 clothing manufacturers meet together and agree to the setting 
 up of a permanent committee to work out a set of rules for the 
 conduct of the industry, and to fix wages from time to time. 
 Obviously, these things are capable of indefinite extension, and 
 in Europe they are being developed far more rapidly. For 
 example, in Italy the agricultural workers are organized, and 
 are gradually taking possession of the great estates, which are 
 owned by absentee landlords. They wage war upon these 
 estates by means of sabotage and strikes, and then they buy up 
 the estates at bargain prices and develop them by co-operative 
 labor. This has been going on in Italy for ten years, and has 
 become the most significant movement in the country. It is a 
 triumph of pure Syndicalism; and such is the power of pure 
 capitalism in the United States that the American people have 
 not been allowed to know anything about this change. 
 
 Next, what are the stages between Socialism and Syndical- 
 ism ? These also are infinite in number and variety. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, there are very few Socialists who advocate State 
 Socialism without any admixture of Syndicalism. The regular 
 formula of the Socialist party is "the social ownership and dem- 
 ocratic control of the instruments and means of production;" 
 and what the phrase "democratic control" means is simply that 
 you introduce into your Socialist mixture a certain flavoring of 
 Syndicalism, greater or less, according to your temperament. 
 In the same way there are many Syndicalists who are inclined 
 toward Socialism. In every convention of radical trade union- 
 ists, such as, for example, the I. W. W., you find some who 
 favor political action, and these will have the same point of 
 view as the more radical members of the Socialist party, who 
 urge a program of industrial as well as political action.
 
 COMMUNISM AND ANARCHISM 
 
 (Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the idea 
 of a society without compulsion, and how these ideas have fared 
 in Russia.) 
 
 The Russian revolution has familiarized us with the word 
 Communism. In the beginning of the revolutionary movement 
 Communism denoted what we now call Socialism ; for example, 
 the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels became the plat- 
 form of the Social-democratic parties. But because most of 
 these parties supported their governments during the war, the 
 more radical elements have now rejected the word Socialism, 
 and taken up the old word Communism. In the Russian revo- 
 lution the Communists went so far as to seize all the property 
 of the rich, and so the word Communism has come to bear 
 something of its early Christian significance. 
 
 It is obvious that here, too, it is a question of degree, and 
 Socialism will shade into Communism by an infinite variety of 
 stages, depending upon what forms of property it is decided to 
 socialize. The Socialist formula commonly accepted is that 
 "goods socially used shall be socially owned, and goods privately 
 used shall be privately owned." If you own a factory, it will 
 be taken by the state, or by the workers, and made social prop- 
 erty like the postoffice ; but no Socialist wants to socialize your 
 clothing, or your books, any more than he wants to socialize 
 your toothbrush. 
 
 But when you come to apply this formula, you run quickly 
 into difficulties. Suppose you are a millionaire, and own a pal- 
 ace with one or two hundred rooms, and a hundred servants. 
 Do you use that socially, or do you use it privately ? And sup- 
 pose there is a scarcity of houses, and thousands of children 
 are dying of tuberculosis in crowded tenement rooms? You 
 own a dozen automobiles, and do you use them all privately ? I 
 point out to you that in time of emergency the capitalist state 
 does not hesitate over such a problem ; it seizes your palace and 
 turns it into a hospital, it takes all your cars and uses them to 
 carry troops. It should be obvious that a proletarian state 
 would be tempted by this precedent. 
 
 170
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 171 
 
 The Communists also have a formula, which reads : "From 
 each according to his ability, to each according to his necessity." 
 I do not see how any sensitive person can deny that this is an 
 extremely fine statement of an ideal in social life. We take it 
 quite for granted in family life; if you knew a family in which 
 that rule did not apply, you would consider it an unloving and 
 uncivilized family. I believe that when once industry has been 
 socialized, and we have a chance to see what production can 
 become, we shall find ourselves quickly adopting that family 
 custom as our law, for all except a few congenital criminals and 
 cheats. We shall find that we can produce so much wealth that 
 it is not worth while keeping count of unimportant items. If 
 today you meet someone on the street and ask him for a match 
 or a pin, you do not think of offering to pay him. This is an 
 automatic consequence of the cheapness of matches and pins. 
 Once upon a time you were stopped on the road every few miles 
 and made to pay a few cents toll. I remember seeing toll-gates 
 when I was a boy, but I don't think I have seen one for twenty 
 years. 
 
 In exactly the same way, under socialized industry, we shall 
 probably make street-car traffic free, and then railroad traffic ; 
 we shall abolish water meters and gas meters and electric light 
 meters, also telephone charges, except perhaps for long dis- 
 tances, and telegraph tolls for personal messages. Then, pres- 
 ently, we shall find ourselves with such a large wheat crop that 
 we shall make bread free; and then music and theatres and 
 clothing and books. At present we use furniture and clothing 
 as a means of manifesting our economic superiority to our f el- 
 lowmen. One of the most charming books in our language is 
 Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class," in which these proc- 
 esses are studied. We shall, of course, have to raise up a new 
 generation, unaccustomed to the idea of class and of class dis- 
 tinction, before we could undertake to supply people with all 
 the clothing they wanted free of charge. 
 
 The Russian theorists made haste to carry out these ideas 
 all at once ; they tried to leap several centuries in the evolution 
 of Russian society. They ordained complete Communism in 
 land; but the peasants would have nothing to do with such 
 notions each wanted his own land, and what he produced on 
 it. The Soviets have now been forced to give way, not merely 
 to the peasants, but to the traders ; and so we see once again that 
 it is better to take one step forward than to take several steps
 
 172 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 forward and then several steps backward. The Russian revo- 
 lution is not yet completed, so no one can say how many steps 
 backward it will be forced to take. 
 
 This revolution was an interesting combination of the ideas 
 of Socialism and Syndicalism. The trade unionists seized the 
 factories, and made an effort at democratic control of industry. 
 At the same time the state was overthrown by a political party, 
 the Bolsheviks, who set up a dictatorship of the proletariat. 
 Because of civil war and outside invasion, the democratic ele- 
 ments in the experiment Tiave been more and more driven into 
 the background, and the authority of the state has correspond- 
 ingly increased. This causes us to think of the Soviet system 
 as necessarily opposed to democracy, but this is not in any way 
 a necessary thing. There is no inevitable connection between 
 industrial control by the workers and a dictatorship over the 
 state. In Germany the state is proceeding to organize a 
 national parliament of industry, and to provide for management 
 of the factories by the labor unions. The Italian government 
 has promised to do the same thing. These, of course, are cap- 
 italist governments, and they will keep their promises only as 
 they are made to; but it is a perfectly possible thing that in 
 either of these countries a vote of the people might change the 
 government, and put in authority men who would really pro- 
 ceed to turn industry over to the control of the workers. That 
 would be the Soviet or Syndicalist system, brought about by 
 democratic means, without dictatorship or civil war. 
 
 Another group of revolutionary thinkers whose theories 
 must be mentioned are the Anarchists. The word Anarchy is 
 commonly used as a synonym for chaos and disorder, which it 
 does not mean at all. It means the absence of authority ; and it 
 is characteristic of people's view of life that they are unable to 
 conceive of there being such a thing as order, unless it is main- 
 tained by force. The theory of the Anarchist is that order is a 
 necessity of the human spirit, and that people would conform to 
 the requirements of a just order by their own free will and 
 without external compulsion. The Anarchist believes that the 
 state is an instrument of class oppression, and has no other 
 reason for being. He wishes the industries to be organized by 
 free associations of the people who work in them. 
 
 Some of the greatest of the world's moral teachers have 
 been Anarchists : Jesus, for example, and Shelley and Thoreau 
 and Tolstoi, and in our time Kropotkin. These men voiced the
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 173 
 
 highest aspirations of the human spirit, and the form of society 
 which they dreamed is the one we set before us as our final 
 goal. But the world does not leap into perfection all at once, 
 and meantime here we have the capitalist system and the cap- 
 italist state, and what attitude shall we take to them ? There are 
 impassioned idealists who refuse to make any terms with injus- 
 tice, or to submit to compulsion, and these preach the immediate 
 destruction of capitalist government, and capitalist govern- 
 ment responds with prison and torture, and so we have some 
 Anarchists who throw bombs. 
 
 There are those who call themselves "philosophic" Anar- 
 chists, wishing to indicate thereby that they preach this doctrine, 
 but do not attempt to carry it into action as yet. Some among 
 these verge toward the Communist point of view, and call them- 
 selves Communist-anarchists; such was Kropotkin, whose 
 theories of social organization you will find in his book "The 
 Conquest of Bread." There are others who call themselves 
 Syndicalist-anarchists, finding their centers of free association 
 in the radical labor unions. 
 
 After the Russian revolution, the Anarchists found them- 
 selves in a dilemma, and their groups were torn apart like every 
 other party and class in Russia. Here was a new form of state 
 set up in society, a workers' state, and what attitude should the 
 Anarchists take toward that? Many of them stood out for 
 their principles, and resisted the Bolshevik state, and put the 
 Bolsheviks under the embarrassing necessity of throwing them 
 into jail. We good orthodox Americans, who are accustomed 
 to dump Socialists and Communists and Syndicalists and 
 Anarchists all together into one common kettle, took Emma 
 Goldman and Alexander Berkman and shipped them over to 
 Russia, where we thought they belonged. Now our capitalist 
 newspapers find it strange that these Anarchists do not like the 
 Russian government any better than they like the American 
 government ! 
 
 On the other hand, a great many Anarchists have suddenly 
 found themselves compelled by the Russian situation to face the 
 facts of life. They have decided that a government is not such 
 a bad thing after all when it is your own government ! Robert 
 Minor, for example, has recanted his Anarchist position, and 
 joined the Communists in advocating the dropping of all dif- 
 ferences among the workers, all theories as to the future, and 
 concentrating upon the immediate task of overthrowing cap-
 
 174 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 italist government and keeping it overthrown. In every civil- 
 ized nation the Russian revolution has had this effect upon the 
 extreme revolutionists. It has given them a definite aim and a 
 definite program upon which they can unite ; it has presented to - 
 capitalist government the answer of force to force; it has 
 shown the masters of industry in precise and definite form 
 what they have to face unless they set themselves immediately 
 and in good faith to the task of establishing real democracy in 
 industry.
 
 CHAPTER LXV 
 SOCIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 (How the great change is coming in different industries, and 
 how we may prepare to meet it.) 
 
 From a study of the world's political revolutions we observe 
 that a variety of governmental forms develop, and that different 
 circumstances in each country produce different institutions. 
 Suppose that back in the days of the French monarchy some 
 one asked you how France was going to be governed as a politi- 
 cal republic; how would elections be held, what would be the 
 powers of the deputies, who would choose the premier, who 
 would choose the president, what would be the duties of each ? 
 Who can explain why in France and England the executive is 
 responsible to the parliament and must answer its questions, 
 while in the United States the executive is an autocrat, respon- 
 sible to no one for four years? Who could have foreseen that 
 in England, supposed to remain a monarchy, the constitution 
 would be fluid ; while in America, supposed to be a democracy, 
 the constitution would be rigid, and the supreme power of 
 rejecting changes in the laws would be vested in a group of 
 reactionary lawyers appointed for life? There will be similar 
 surprises in the social revolution, and similar differences 
 between what things pretend to be and what they are. 
 
 I used to compare the social revolution to the hatching of an 
 egg. You examine it, and apparently it is all egg ; but then sud- 
 denly something begins to happen, and in a few minutes it is all 
 chicken. If, however, you investigate, you discover that the 
 chicken had been forming inside the egg for some time. I 
 know that there is a chicken now forming inside our social egg ; 
 but having realized the complexity of social phenomena, I no 
 longer venture to predict the exact time of the hatching, or the 
 size and color of the chicken. 
 
 Perhaps it is more useful to compare the social revolution 
 to a child-birth. A good surgeon knows what is due to happen, 
 but he knows also that there are a thousand uncertainties, a 
 thousand dangerous possibilities, and all he can do is to watch 
 the process and be prepared to meet each emergency as it arises. 
 
 175
 
 176 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 The birth process consists of one pang after another, but no one 
 can say which pang will complete the birth, or whether it will be 
 completed at all. Karl Marx is author of the saying that "force 
 is the midwife of progress," so you may see that I am not the 
 inventor of this simile of child-birth. 
 
 There are three factors in the social revolution, each of which 
 will vary in each country, and in different parts of the country, 
 and at different periods. First, there is the industrial condition 
 of the country, a complex set of economic factors. The indus- 
 trial life of England depends primarily on shipping and coal. 
 In the United States shipping is of less importance, and rail- 
 roads take the place. In the United States the eastern portion 
 lives mainly by manufacture, the western by agriculture, while 
 the south is held a generation behind by a race problem. In 
 France the great estates were broken up, and agriculture fell 
 into the hands of peasant proprietors, who are the main support 
 of French capitalism. In Prussia the great estates were held 
 intact, and remained the basis of a feudal aristocracy. In 
 America land changes hands freely, and therefore one-third of 
 our farms are mortgaged, and another third are worked by ten- 
 ants. In Russia there was practically no middle class, while in 
 the United States there is practically nothing but middle class ; 
 the rich have been rich for such a short while that they still 
 look middle class and act middle class, in spite of all their 
 efforts, while the working class hopes to be middle class and is 
 persuaded that it can become middle class. Such varying fac- 
 tors produce in each country a different problem, and make 
 inevitable a different process of change. 
 
 The second factor is the condition of organization and edu- 
 cation of the workers. This likewise varies in every country, 
 and in every part of every country. There is a continual strug- 
 gle on the part of the workers to organize and educate them- 
 selves, and a continual effort on the part of the ruling class to 
 prevent this. In some industries in America you find the work- 
 ers one hundred per cent organized, and in other industries you 
 find them not organized at all. It is obvious that in the former 
 case the social change, when it comes, will be comparatively 
 simple, involving little bloodshed and waste ; in the latter case 
 there will be social convulsions, rioting and destruction of prop- 
 erty, disorganization of industry and widespread distress. 
 
 The third factor is the state of mind of the propertied 
 classes, the amount of resistance they are willing to make to
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 177 
 
 social change. I have done a great deal of pleading with the 
 masters of industry in my country; I have written appeals to 
 Vincent Astor and John D. Rockefeller, to capitalist news- 
 papers and judges and congressmen and presidents. I have 
 been told that this is a waste of my time ; that these people can- 
 not learn and will not learn, and that it is foolish to appeal 
 either to their hearts or their understanding. But I perceive that 
 the class struggle is like a fraction; it has a numerator and a 
 denominator, and you can increase the fraction just as well by 
 decreasing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. 
 To vary the simile, here are two groups of men engaged in a 
 tug of war, and you can affect the result just as decisively by 
 persuading one group to pull less hard, as by persuading the 
 other group to pull harder. 
 
 Picture to yourself two factories. In factory number one 
 the owner is a hard-driving business man, an active spirit in the 
 so-called "open-shop" campaign. He believes in his divine right 
 to manage industry, and he believes also in the gospel of "all 
 that the traffic will bear." He prevents his men from organiz- 
 ing, and employs spies to weed out the radicals and to sow dis- 
 sensions. When a strike comes, he calls in the police and the 
 strike-breaking agencies, and in every possible way he makes 
 himself hated and feared by his workers. Then some day 
 comes the unemployment crisis, and a wave of revolt sweeping 
 over the country. The workers seize that factory and set up a 
 dictatorship of the proletariat and a "red terror." If the owner 
 resists, they kill him ; in any case, they wipe out his interest in 
 the business, and do everything possible to destroy his power 
 over it, even to his very name. They run the business by a shop 
 committee, and you have for that particular factory a Syndical- 
 ist, or even Anarchist form of social reconstruction. 
 
 Now for factory number two, whose owner is a humane and 
 enlightened man, studying social questions and realizing his 
 responsibility, and the temporary nature of his stewardship. 
 He gives his people the best possible working conditions, he 
 keeps open books and discusses wages and profits with them, 
 he educates the young workers, he meets with their union com- 
 mittees on a basis of free discussion. When the unemployment 
 crisis comes and the wave of revolt sweeps the country, this 
 man and his workers understand one another. He says : "I can 
 no longer pay profits, and so I can no longer keep going under 
 the profit system ; but if you are ready to run the plant, I am
 
 178 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 ready to help you the best I can." Manifestly, this man will 
 continue the president of the corporation, and if he trains 
 his sons wisely, they will keep his place ; so, instead of having 
 in that factory a dictatorship and a terror, you will have a 
 constitutional monarchy, gradually evolving into a democratic 
 republic.
 
 CHAPTER LXVI 
 CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION 
 
 (Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they afford 
 to do it, and what will be the price?) 
 
 The problem of whether the social revolution shall be vio- 
 lent or peaceable depends in great part upon our answer to the 
 question of confiscation versus compensation. We are now 
 going to consider, first, the abstract rights and wrongs of the 
 question, and, second, the practical aspects of it. 
 
 There is a story very popular among single taxers and other 
 advocates of freedom of the land. An English land-owner met 
 a stranger walking on his estate, and rebuked him for trespass- 
 ing. Said the stranger, "You own this land ?" Said the other, 
 "I do." "And how did you get it ?" "I inherited it from my 
 father." "And how did your father get it?" "He inherited it 
 from his father." So on for half a dozen more ancestors, until 
 at last the Englishman answered, "He fought for it." Where- 
 upon the stranger took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and 
 said, "I'll fight you for it." 
 
 This is all there is to say on the subject of the abstract rights 
 of land titles. There is no title to land which is valid on a his- 
 torical basis. Everything rests upon fraud and force, continued 
 through endless ages of human history. We in the United 
 States took most of our land from the Indians, and in the 
 process pur guiding rule was that the only good Injun was a 
 dead Injun. We first helped the English kings to take large 
 sections of our country from the French and Spanish, and then 
 we took them from the English king by a violent revolution. 
 We purchased our Southwestern states from Mexico, but not 
 until we had taken the precaution of killing some thousands of 
 Mexicans in war, which had the effect of keeping down the 
 purchase price. It would be a simple matter to show that all 
 public franchises are similarly tainted with fraud. Proudhon 
 laid down the principle that "property is theft," and from this 
 principle it is an obvious conclusion that society has the right 
 to scrap all paper titles to wealth, and to start the world's indus- 
 tries over again on the basis of share and share alike. 
 
 179
 
 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 But stop and consider for a moment. "Property is theft/' 
 you say. But go to your corner grocery, and tell the grocer that 
 you deny his title to the sack of prunes which he exhibits in 
 front of his counter. He will tell you that he has paid for them ; 
 but you answer that the prunes were raised on stolen land, and 
 shipped to him over a railroad whose franchise was obtained by 
 bribery. Will that convince the grocer ? It will not. Neither 
 will it convince the policeman or the judge, nor will it convince 
 the voters of the country. Most people have a deeply rooted 
 conviction that there are rights to property now definitely estab- 
 lished and made valid by law. If you have paid taxes on land 
 for a certain period, the land "belongs" to you ; and I am sure 
 you might agitate from now to kingdom come without persuad- 
 ing the American people that New Mexico ought to be returned 
 to Mexico, or the western prairies to the Indian tribes. 
 
 Such are the facts ; now let us apply them to the right of 
 exploitation, embodied in the ownership of a certain number of 
 bonds or shares of stock in the United States Steel Corporation. 
 "Pass a law," says the Socialist, "providing for the taking over 
 of United States Steel by the government." At once to every 
 owner comes one single thought are you going to buy this 
 stock, or are you going to confiscate it? If you attempt con- 
 fiscation, the courts will declare the law unconstitutional; and 
 you either have to defy the courts, which is revolutionary 
 action, or to amend the constitution. If you adopt the latter 
 course, you have before you a long period of agitation; you 
 have to carry both houses of Congress by a two-thirds major- 
 ity, and the legislatures of three-fourths of the States. You 
 have to do this in the face of the most bitter and infuriated 
 opposition of those who are defending what they regard as their 
 rights. You have to meet the arguments of the entire cap- 
 italist press of the country, and you have the certainty of 
 widespread bribery of your elected officials. 
 
 The prospect of doing all this under the forms of law seems 
 extremely discouraging ; so come the Syndicalists, saying, "Let 
 us seize the factories, and stop the exploitation at the point of 
 production." So come the Communists, saying, "Let us over- 
 throw capitalist government, and break the net of bourgeois 
 legality, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, which 
 will put an end to privilege and class domination all at once." 
 What are we to say to these different programs ? 
 
 Suppose we buy out the stockholders of United States Steel,
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 181 
 
 and issue to them government bonds, what have we accom- 
 plished ? Nothing, say the advocates of confiscation ; we have 
 changed the form of exploitation, but the substance of it 
 remains the same. The stockholders get their money from the 
 United States government, instead of from the United States 
 Steel Corporation; but they get their money just the same the 
 product, not of their labor, but of the labor of the steel workers. 
 Suppose we carried out the same procedure all along the line ; 
 suppose the government took over all industries, and paid for 
 their securities with government bonds. Then we should have 
 capitalism administered by a capitalist government, instead of 
 by our present masters of industry; we should have a state 
 capitalism, instead of a private capitalism); we should have the 
 government buying and selling products, and exploiting labor, 
 and paying over the profits to an hereditary privileged class. 
 The capitalist system would go on just the same, except that 
 labor would have one all-powerful tyrant, instead of many 
 lesser tyrants, as at present. 
 
 So argue the advocates of confiscation. And the advocates 
 of purchase reply that in buying the securities of United States 
 Steel, we should fix the purchase price at the present market 
 value of the property, and that price, once fixed, would be per- 
 manent; all future unearned increment of the steel industry 
 would belong to the government instead of to private owners. 
 Consider, for example, what happened during the world war. 
 When I was a boy, soon after the Steel Trust was launched, its 
 stock was down to something like six dollars, and I knew small 
 investors who lost every dollar they had put in. But during the 
 war, steel stock soared to a hundred and thirty-six dollars per 
 share ; it paid dividends of some thirty per cent per year, and 
 accumulated enormous surpluses besides. 
 
 The same thing was true of practically all the big corpora- 
 tions. According to Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, there 
 were coal companies which paid as high as eight hundred per 
 cent per year ; that is to say, the profits in one year were eight 
 times the total investment. Assuming that our government 
 bonds paid five per cent, it appears that the owners of these coal 
 companies got one hundred and sixty times as much under our 
 present private property system as they would have got under 
 a system of state purchase. Even completely dominated by cap- 
 italism as our courts are today, they would not dare require us 
 to pay for industries more than six per cent on the market value 
 
 13
 
 182 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 of the investment; and from what I know of the inside graft 
 of American big business that would be restricting the private 
 owners to less than one-fourth of what they are getting at 
 present 
 
 We have already pointed out the economies that can be 
 made by putting industry under a uniform system. But all 
 these, important as they are, amount to little in comparison with 
 the one great consideration, which is that by purchasing large 
 scale industry, we should break the "iron ring"; we should 
 thenceforth be able to do our manufacturing for use instead of 
 for profit, and so we should put an end to unemployment. Our 
 cheerful workers would throng into the factories, to produce 
 for themselves instead of for masters ; and in one year of that 
 we should so change the face of our country that a return to the 
 system of private ownership would be unthinkable. In one year 
 we could raise production to such a point that the interest on 
 the bonds we had issued would be like the crumbs left over 
 from a feast. 

 
 CHAPTER LXVII 
 EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS 
 
 (Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its chances 
 for success in the United States.) 
 
 I am aware that the suggestion of paying for the industries 
 \ve socialize will sound tame and uninspiring to a lot of ardent 
 young radicals of my acquaintance. They will shake their 
 heads sadly and say that I am getting middle-aged and tired. 
 We have seen in Russia and Hungary and other places, so many 
 illustrations of the quick and easy way to expropriate the 
 expropriators that now there is in every country a considerable 
 group of radicals who will hear to no program less picturesque 
 than barricades and councils of action. 
 
 In considering this question, I set aside all considerations of 
 abstract right or wrong, the justification for violence in the 
 overthrow of capitalist society. I put the question on the basis 
 of cash, pure and simple. It will cost a certain amount of 
 money to buy out the owners, and that money will have to be 
 paid, as it is paid at present, out of the labor of the useful 
 workers. The workers don't want to pay any more than they 
 have to; the question they must consider is, which way will 
 they have to pay most. The advocates of the dictatorship of 
 the proletariat are lured by the delightful prospect of not hav- 
 ing to pay anything; and if that were really possible it would 
 undoubtedly be the better way. But we have to consider this 
 question : Is the program of not having to pay anything a reality, 
 or is it only a dream? Suppose it should turn out that we 
 have to pay anyhow, and that in the case of violent revolution 
 we pay much more, and in addition run serious risk of not 
 getting what we pay for? 
 
 Here are enormous industries, running at full blast, and it 
 is proposed that some morning the workers shall rise up and 
 seize them, and turn out the owners and managers, and run the 
 industries themselves. Will anybody maintain that this can be 
 done without stopping production in those factories for a single 
 day ? Certainly production must stop during the time you are 
 
 183
 
 184 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 fighting for possession; and the cruel experience of Russia 
 proves that it will stop during the further time you are fighting 
 to keep possession, and to put down counter-revolutionary con- 
 spiracies. Also, alas, it will stop during the time you are look- 
 ing for somebody who knows how to run that industry ; it will 
 stop during the time you are organizing your new administra- 
 tive staff. You may discover to your consternation that it 
 stops during the time you are arranging to get other industries 
 to give you credit, and to ship you raw materials ; also during 
 the time you are finding the workers in other industries who 
 want your product, and are able to pay for it with something 
 that you can use, or that you can sell in a badly disorganized 
 market. 
 
 And all the time that you are arranging these things, you 
 are going to have the workers at your back, not getting any pay, 
 or being paid with your paper money which they distrust, and 
 growling and grumbling at you because you are not running 
 things as you promised. You see, the mass of the workers are 
 not going to understand, because you haven't made them under- 
 stand ; you have brought about the great change by your pro- 
 gram of a dictatorship, of action by an "enlightened minority" ; 
 and now you have the terror that the unenlightened majority 
 may be won back by their capitalist masters, and may kick you 
 out of control, or even stand you up against a wall and shoot you 
 by a firing squad. And all the time you are worrying over these 
 problems, who can estimate the total amount the factory might 
 have been producing if it had been running at full blast? 
 Whatever that difference is, remember, it is paid by the work- 
 ers; and might that sum not just as well have been used to buy 
 out the owners? 
 
 If we were back in the old days of hand labor and crude, 
 unorganized production, I admit that the only way to benefit 
 the slaves might be to turn out the masters by force. But here 
 we have a social system of infinite complexity, a delicate and 
 sensitive machine, which no one person in the world, and no 
 group of persons understands thoroughly. In the running of 
 such a machine a slight blunder may cost a fortune ; and cer- 
 tainly all the skill, all the training, all the loyal services of our 
 expert engineers and managers is needed if we are to remodel 
 that machine while keeping it running. The amount of wealth 
 which we could save by the achieving of that feat would be 
 sufficient to maintain a class of owners in idleness and luxury
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 185 
 
 for a generation ; and so I say, with all the energy and convic- 
 tion I possess, pay them! Pay them anything that is necessary, 
 in order to avoid civil war and social disorganization! Pay 
 them so much that they can have no possible cause of complaint, 
 that the most hide-bound capitalistic-minded judge in the coun- 
 try cannot find a legal flaw in the bargain ! Pay them so that 
 every engineer and efficiency expert and manager and foreman 
 and stenographer and office-boy will stay on the job and work 
 double time to put the enterprise through! Pay them such a 
 price that even Judge Gary and John D. Rockefeller will be 
 willing to help us do the job of social readjustment ! 
 
 "Ah, yes," my young radical friends will say, "that sounds 
 all very beautiful, but it's the old Utopian dream of brother- 
 hood and class co-operation. That will never happen on this 
 earth, until you have first abolished capitalism." My answer is, 
 it could happen tomorrow if we had sufficient intelligence to 
 make it happen. That it does not happen is simply absence of 
 intelligence. And will anyone maintain that it is the part of an 
 intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent course than he 
 knows ? What is the use of our intelligence, if we abdicate its 
 authority, and give ourselves up to programs of action which 
 we know are blind and destructive and wasteful ? We may see 
 a great vessel going on the rocks ; we may feel certain that it is 
 going, in spite of everything we can do ; but shall we fail to do 
 what we can to make those in the vessel realize how they might 
 get safely into the harbor? 
 
 We have had the Russian revolution before us for four 
 years. Mankind will spend the next hundred years in studying 
 it, and still have much to learn, but the broad outlines of the 
 great experiment are now plain before our eyes. Russia was a 
 backward country, and she tried to fight a modern war, and it 
 broke her down. She had practically no middle class, and her 
 ruling class was rotten, and so the revolutionists had their 
 chance, and they seized it. Perhaps it would be more correct 
 to say that they came to the rescue of Russia, saving her from 
 the hands of those who were trying to force her to fight, when 
 she was utterly exhausted and incapable of fighting. 
 
 Anyhow, here was your dictatorship of the proletariat. It 
 turned out all the executive experts, or nearly all of them, 
 because they were tainted with the capitalist psychology ; and 
 then straightway it had to call them back and make terms with 
 them, because industry could not be run without them. And of
 
 186 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 course these engineers and managers sabotaged the revolution 
 every non-proletarian sabotaged it, both inside Russia and out- 
 side. You denounced this, and protested against this, but all 
 the same it happened; it was human nature that it should 
 happen, and it is one of the things you have to count on, in 
 any and every country where you attempt the social revolution 
 by minority action. 
 
 They have got power in Russia, and they dream of getting 
 power in America in the same way. But there is no such dis- 
 organization in our country as there was in Russia, and it 
 would take a generation of civil strife to bring us to such a con- 
 dition. We have a middle class, powerful, thoroughly organ- 
 ized, and thoroughly conscious. Moreover, this class has ideals 
 of majority rule, which are bred in its very bones ; and while 
 they have never realized these ideals, they think they have, and 
 they are prepared to fight to the last gasp in that belief. All 
 that the leaders of Moscow have to do is to bring about an 
 attempt at forcible revolution, and they will discover in Ameri- 
 can society sufficient power of organization and of brutal action 
 to put their movement out of business for a generation. 
 
 A hundred years ago we had chattel slavery firmly fixed as 
 the industrial system of one-half of these United States. To 
 far-seeing statesmen it was manifest that chattel slavery was a 
 wasteful system, and that it could not exist in competition with 
 free labor. There was a great American, Henry Clay, who 
 came forward with a proposition that the people of the United 
 States, through their, government, should raise the money, 
 about a billion dollars, and compensate the owners of all the 
 slaves and set them free. For most of his lifetime Henry Clay 
 pleaded for that plan. But the masters of the South were 
 making money fast ; they knew how to handle the negro as a 
 slave, they could not imagine handling him as a free laborer, 
 and they would not hear to the plan. On the other side of 
 Mason and Dixon's line were fanatical men of "principle," who 
 said that slavery was wrong, and that was the end of it. There 
 is a stanza by Emerson discussing this question of confiscation 
 versus compensation : 
 
 Pay ransom to the owner 
 
 And fill the bag to the brim. 
 Who is the owner? The slave is owner, 
 
 And ever was. Pay him.
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 187 
 
 This, you see, is magnificent utterance, but as economic 
 philosophy it is reckless and unsound. The abolitionists of the 
 North took up this poem, and the slave power of the South 
 answered with a battle-song : 
 
 War to the hilt, 
 
 Theirs be the guilt, 
 
 Who fetter the freeman to ransom the slave! 
 
 And so the issue had to be fought out. It cost a million 
 human lives and five billions of treasure, and it set American 
 civilization back a generation. And now we confront exactly 
 the same kind of emergency, and are coming to exactly the same 
 method of solution. We have white wage-slaves clamoring for 
 their freedom, and we have business men making money out of 
 them, and exercising power over them, and finding it convenient 
 and pleasant. They are going to fight it out in a civil war, 
 and which side is going to win I am not sure. But when the 
 historians come to write about it a couple of generations from 
 now, let them be able to record that there were a few men in 
 the country who pleaded for a sane and orderly and human 
 solution of the problem, and who continued to voice their con- 
 victions even in the midst of the cruel and wasteful strife !
 
 CHAPTER LXVIII 
 THE PROBLEM OF THE LAND 
 
 (Discusses the land values tax as a means of social readjust- 
 ment, and compares it with other programs.) 
 
 The writer of this book has been watching the social process 
 for twenty years, trying to figure out one thing how the 
 change from competition to co-operation can be brought about 
 with the minimum of human waste. He has come to realize 
 that the first step is a mental one; to get the people to 
 want the change. That means that the program must be sim- 
 ple, so that the masses can understand it. As a social engineer 
 you might work out a perfect plan, but find yourself helpless, 
 because it was hard to explain. As illustration of what I mean, 
 I cite the single tax, a theory which has a considerable hold in 
 America, but which politically has been utterly ineffective. 
 
 A few years ago a devoted enthusiast in Southern Califor- 
 nia, Luke North, started what he called the "Great Adventure" 
 to set free the idle land. In the campaign of 1918 I gave my 
 help to this movement, and when it failed I went back and took 
 stock, and revised my conclusions concerning the single tax. 
 Theoretically the movement has a considerable percentage of 
 right on its side. Land, in the sense that single taxers use it, 
 meaning all the natural sources of wealth, is certainly an impor- 
 tant basis of exploitation, and if you were to tax land values to 
 the full extent, you would abolish a large portion of privilege 
 just how large would be hard to figure. I was perfectly willing 
 to begin with that portion, so I helped with the "Great Adven- 
 ture." But a practical test convinced me that it could never 
 persuade a majority of the people. 
 
 The single tax proposal is to abolish all taxes except the 
 tax on land values. Then come the associations of the bankers 
 and merchants and real estate speculators, crying in outraged 
 horror, "What? You propose to let the rich man's stocks and 
 bonds go free? You propose to put no tax on his cash in the 
 vaults and on his wife's jewels? You propose to abolish the 
 income tax and the inheritance tax, and put all the costs of 
 government on the poor man's lot ?" 
 
 Now, of course, I know perfectly well that the rich man 
 dodges most of his income tax and most of his inheritance 
 
 188
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 189 
 
 tax. I know that he pays a nominal pittance on his cash in the 
 bank and on his wife's jewels, and likewise on his stocks and 
 bonds. I know that the corporations issuing these stocks and 
 bonds would be far more heavily hit by a tax on the natural 
 resources they own; they could not evade this tax, and they 
 know it, and that is why they are moved to such deep concern 
 for the fate of the poor man and his lot. I know that the tax 
 on the poor man's lot would be infinitesimal in comparison with 
 the tax on the great corporation. But how can I explain all this 
 to the poor man? To understand it requires a knowledge of 
 the complexities of our economic system which the voters 
 simply have not got. 
 
 How much easier to take the bankers and speculators at 
 their word ! To answer, "All right, gentlemen, since you like 
 the income and inheritance taxes, the taxes on stocks and bonds 
 and money and jewels, we will leave these taxes standing. 
 Likewise, we assent to your proposition that the poor man 
 should not pay taxes on his lot, while there are rich men and 
 corporations in our state holding twenty million acres of land 
 out of use for purposes of speculation. We will therefore 
 arrange a land values tax on a graduated basis, after the plan 
 of the income tax ; we will allow one or two thousand dollars' 
 worth of land exempt from all taxation, provided it is used by 
 the owner ; and we will put a graduated tax on all individuals 
 and corporations owning a greater quantity of land, so that in 
 the case of individuals and corporations owning more than ten 
 thousand dollars' worth of land, we will take the full rental 
 value, and thus force all idle land into the market." 
 
 Now, the provision above outlined would have spiked every 
 single argument used by the opposition to the "Great Adven- 
 ture" in California in 1918; it would have made the real intent 
 of the measure so plain as to win automatically the additional 
 votes needed to carry the election. But I tried for three years, 
 without being able to persuade a single one of the "Great 
 Adventure" leaders to recognize this plain fact. The single 
 taxer has his formula, the land values tax and no other tax, 
 and all else is heresy. Actually, the president of a big single 
 tax organization in the East declared that by the advocacy of 
 my idea I had "betrayed the single tax !" We may take this as 
 an illustration of the difference between dogmatism and science 
 in the strategy of the class struggle. 
 
 I first suggested my program immediately after the war,
 
 190 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 with the provision that the land thrown on the market should be 
 purchased by the state, and used to establish co-operative agri- 
 cultural colonies for the benefit of returned soldiers. But we 
 have preferred to have our returned soldiers stay without work, 
 or to displace the men and women who had been gallantly 
 "doing their bit." By this means we soon had five million men 
 out of work, and many other millions bitterly discontented with 
 their wages. Again I took up the proposition for a graduated 
 land tax, with the suggestion that the money should be used to 
 provide a pension, first for every dependent man or woman 
 over sixty years of age in the country, and second for every 
 child in the country whose parents were unable properly to sup- 
 port it, whether because they were dead or sick or unemployed. 
 
 You may note that in advocating this program, you would 
 not have to convert anybody to any foreign theories, nor would 
 you have to use any long words; you would not have to say 
 anything against the constitution, nor to break any law, nor to 
 give occasion for patriotic mobs to tar and feather you. To 
 every poor man in your state you could say, "If you own your 
 own house and lot, this bill will lift the taxes from both, and 
 therefore it will mean fifty or a hundred dollars a year in your 
 pocket. If you do not own a home, it will take millions of idle 
 acres out of the hands of the speculators, and break the price 
 of real estate, so that you can have either a lot in the city or a 
 farm in the country with ease." 
 
 Furthermore, you could say, "This measure will have the 
 effect of drawing the unemployed from the cities at once, and 
 so stopping the downward course of wages. At the same time 
 that wages hold firm, the cost of food will go down, because 
 there will be millions more men working on the land. In addi- 
 tion to that, the state will have an enormous income, many mil- 
 lions of dollars a year, taken exclusively from those who are 
 owning and not producing. This money will be expended in 
 saving from suffering and humiliation the old people of the 
 country, who have worked hard all their lives and have been 
 thrown on the scrap-heap; also in making certain that every 
 child in the country has food enough and care enough to make 
 him into a normal and healthy human being, so that he can do 
 his share of work in the world and pay his own way through 
 life." 
 
 I submit the above measure to those who believe that the 
 road to social freedom lies by some sort of land tax. But before
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 191 
 
 you take it up I invite you to consider whether there may 
 not be some other way, even easier. There is a homely old say- 
 ing to the effect that "molasses catches more flies than vinegar" ; 
 and I am always looking for some way that will get the poor 
 what they want, without frightening the rich any more than 
 necessary. 
 
 I know a certain type of radical whom this question always 
 exasperates. He answers that the opposition will be equally 
 strong to any plan; the rich will do anything for the poor 
 except get off their backs and so on. In reply I mention that 
 among the most ardent radicals I know are half a dozen million- 
 aires ; I know one woman who is worth a million, who pleads 
 day and night for social revolution, while the people who work 
 for her are devoted and respectful wage slaves. Herbert 
 Spencer said that his idea of a tragedy was a generalization 
 killed by a fact. I shall not say .that the existence of millionaire 
 Socialists and parlor Bolsheviks kills the theory of the class 
 struggle, but I certainly say it compels us to take thought of the 
 rich as well as of the poor in planning the strategy of our cam- 
 paign. 
 
 And manifestly, if we want to consider the rich, the very 
 last device we shall use is that of a tax. Nobody likes to pay 
 taxes ", everybody agrees in classifying taxes with death. Each 
 feels that he is paying more than his share already ; each knows 
 that the government which collects the tax is incompetent or 
 worse. Stop and recall what we have proven about the "iron 
 ring"; the possibilities of production latent in our society. 
 Realize the bearings of this all-important fact, that we can offer 
 to mankind a social revolution which will make everybody 
 richer, instead of making some people poorer ! Exactly how to 
 do this is the next thing we have to inquire.
 
 CHAPTER LXIX 
 
 THE CONTROL OF CREDIT 
 
 (Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of 
 industry, and may play in the freeing of industry.) 
 
 How is it that the rich are becoming richer? The single 
 taxer answers that it is by monopoly of the land, the natural 
 sources of wealth ; the Socialist answers that it is by the control 
 of the machinery of production. But if you go among the rich 
 and make inquiry, you speedily learn that these factors, large 
 as they are, amount to little in comparison with another factor, 
 the control of credit. There are hosts of little capitalists and 
 business men who deal in land and produce goods with machin- 
 ery, but the men who make the real" fortunes and dominate the 
 modern world are those who control credit, and whose business 
 is, not the production of anything, but speculation and the 
 manipulation of markets. 
 
 "Money makes the mare go," our ancestors used to say; 
 and money today determines the destiny of empires. What is 
 money ? We think of it as gold and silver coins, and pieces of 
 engraved paper promising to pay gold and silver coins. But the 
 report of the U. S. Comptroller of the Currency for 1919 shows 
 that the business of the country was done, 5% by such means 
 and 95% by checks ; so, for practical purposes, we may say that 
 money consists of men's willingness to trust other men, or 
 groups or organizations of men, when they make written prom- 
 ise to pay. In other words, money is credit ; and the control of 
 credit means the control of industry. The problem of social 
 readjustment is mainly but the problem of taking the control of 
 credit out of the hands of private individuals, and making it a 
 public or social function. 
 
 Who controls credit today ? The bankers. And how do they 
 control it ? We give it to them ; we, the masses of the people, 
 who take them our money and leave it with them. A very little 
 real money in hand becomes, under our banking system, the 
 basis of a great amount of imaginary money. The Federal 
 Reserve law requires that banks shall hold in reserve from seven 
 
 192
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 193 
 
 to thirteen per cent of demand deposits ; which means, in sub- 
 stance, that when you leave a dollar with a banker, the banker 
 is allowed, under the law, to turn that dollar into anywhere 
 from seven to thirteen dollars, and lend those dollars out. In 
 addition, he deposits his reserves with the Federal Reserve 
 bank, and that bank keeps only thirty-five per cent in reserve 
 in other words, the seven to thirteen imaginary dollars are mul- 
 tiplied again by three. 
 
 Under the stress of war, this process of credit inflation has 
 been growing like the genii let out of the bottle. Under the 
 law, the Federal Reserve banks are supposed to hold a gold 
 reserve of 40% to secure our currency. But in December, 
 1919, these banks held a trifle over a billion dollars' worth of 
 gold, while our paper money was over four billion. In addi- 
 tion, our banks have over thirty-three billions of deposits, and 
 all these are supposed to be secured by gold ; in addition, there 
 are twenty-five billions of government bonds, and uncounted 
 billions of private notes, bonds and accounts, all supposed to be 
 payable in gold. So it appears that about one per cent of our 
 outstanding money is real, and the rest is imaginary that is, 
 it is credit. 
 
 The point for you to get clear is this: The great mass of 
 this imaginary money is created by law, and we have the power 
 to abolish it or to change the ownership of it at any time we 
 develop the necessary intelligence. Let us consider the ordinary 
 paper money, the one and two and five and ten dollar "bills," 
 with which we plain people do most of our business. These 
 are Federal Reserve notes, and there are about three billions of 
 them ; how do they come to be ? Why, we grant to the national 
 banks by law the right to make this money; the government 
 prints it for them, and they put it into circulation. And what 
 does it cost them? They pay one per cent for the use of the 
 money ; in some cases they pay only one-half of one per cent ; 
 and then they lend it to us, the people and what do they 
 charge us? The answer is available in a recent report of the 
 U. S. Comptroller of the Currency, as follows : 
 
 "I have the record of the loans made by one Texas national 
 bank to a hard-working woman who owned a little farm a few 
 miles from town. She borrowed, in the aggregate, $2,375, 
 making about thirty loans during the year. Listen to the 
 details of the robbery : $162.50 for 30 days at 36 per cent ; $377. 
 for 34 days at 44 per cent ; $620.25 for 23 days at 77 per cent ;
 
 194 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 $11. for 30 days at 120 per cent; $21.50 for 30 days at 90 per 
 cent ; $33. for 2 days at 93 per cent ; $27. for 15 days at 195 per 
 cent ; $1 10. for 30 days at 120 per cent that was to buy a horse 
 for her plowing ; $20 for 48 days at 187 per cent ; $6 for 10 
 days at 720 per cent ; $7 for 3 days at 2,000 per cent, and so on ; 
 every cent paid off by what sweat and struggle only God 
 knows." 
 
 In Oklahoma, where the legal rate of interest is six per cent, 
 with ten per cent as the maximum under special contract, 
 harassed farmers paid all the way from 12 to 2400 per cent, 
 with 40 per cent as the average. In the case of one bank, the 
 Comptroller proved that not a single solitary loan had been 
 made under fifteen per cent. He cited one particular case that 
 he asked to be regarded as typical. In the spring the farmer 
 went to the bank and arranged for a loan of $200. Out of his 
 necessity he was compelled to pay 55 per cent interest charge. 
 Unable to m'eet the note at maturity, he had to agree to 100 per 
 cent interest in order to get the renewal. The next renewal forced 
 him up to 125 per cent. For four years the thing went on, and 
 all the drudgery of the father and the mother and the six chil- 
 dren could never keep down the terrible interest or wipe out 
 the principal. As a finish the bank swooped down and sold 
 him out ; the wretched man, barefoot and hungry, went to work 
 clearing a swamp, caught pneumonia and died; the county 
 buried him, and neighbors raised a purse to send the widow and 
 children back to friends in Arkansas. 
 
 This is the thing called the Money Trust in action, and this 
 is the power we have to take out of private control. It is our 
 first job, and all other jobs are in comparison hardly worth 
 mentioning. How are we going to do it ? 
 
 The farmers of North Dakota have shown one way. They 
 took the control of their state government into their own hands, 
 and the most important and significant thing they did was to 
 start a public bank. The interests fought them tooth and nail ; 
 not merely the interests of North Dakota, not merely of the 
 Northwest, but of the entire United States. They fought them 
 in the law courts, up to the United States Supreme Court, which 
 decided in favor of the people of North Dakota. Therefore, 
 make note of this vital fact the most important single fact in 
 the strategy of the class struggle every state can, under the 
 constitution, have a public bank ; every city and town can have 
 one, and no court can ever forbid it !
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 195 
 
 Therefore, I say to all Socialists, labor men and social 
 reformers of every shade and variety, nail at the top of your pro- 
 gram of action the demand for a public bank in your commu- 
 nity, to take the control of credit out of the hands of specula- 
 tors and use it for the welfare of the people. Make it your first 
 provision that every dollar of public money shall be deposited 
 in this bank and every detail of public financing handled by 
 this bank; make it your second provision that the purpose of 
 this bank shall be to put all private banks out of business, and 
 take over their power for the people. 
 
 At present, you understand, it is taken for granted that the 
 first purpose of the government is to foster the private credit 
 system. Take, for example, the postal savings bank. The pri- 
 vate banks fought this for a generation, and finally they allowed 
 us to have it, on condition that it should be turned into a device 
 for collecting money for them. Our postal bank turns over all 
 its money to the private banks, at the grotesque rate of two per 
 cent interest ; and recently I read of the director of the postal 
 bank appearing before a convention of bankers, asking for some 
 small favor, and humbly explaining that it was not his idea to 
 make the postal bank a rival of the private savings banks. Why 
 should he not do so ? Let us nail it to our radical program that 
 the postal savings bank is to fight for business, just as do the 
 private banks, and lend its funds direct to the people on good 
 security. 
 
 Let our Federal banking system also become the servant of 
 the public welfare, and let its energy be devoted to breaking the 
 strangle-hold of predatory finance on our industry. Let the 
 government issue all money, and use it for the transfer of 
 industry from private into public hands. Do we want to social- 
 ize our railroads, our coal mines, our telegraphs and telephones ? 
 Do we want to buy them, in order to avoid the wastes of civil 
 war and insurrection ? We have agreed that we do ; and here 
 we have the way of doing it. If the bankers can create, out of 
 our willingness to trust them, billions upon billions of imaginary 
 money, then so can we, the people of the United States, create 
 money out of our willingness to trust ourselves. And do not 
 let anybody fool you for a single second by talking about "fiat 
 money" and "inflation of the currency." If you are paying 
 twice as much for everything as you did before the war, you 
 are paying it because the bankers have doubled the amount of 
 money in circulation for that reason and that alone. That
 
 196 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 double money the bankers own; the only question now to be 
 decided is, who is to own the double money that will be created 
 tomorrow ? 
 
 Make note of the fact that it costs nothing to start a public 
 bank. If you want to put the steel trust out of business by 
 competition, you have several hundred thousand dollars worth 
 of rolling mills and ore land to buy ; but the banks can be put 
 out of business by nothing but a law. The material parts of a 
 bank, the white marble columns and bronze railings and mahog- 
 any trimmings, are as nothing compared with the inner soul of 
 a bank, its control of the life-blood of your business and mine ; 
 and this we can have for the taking. We can keep our own 
 "credit" ; instead of sending it to Wall Street, where speculators 
 use it to bleed us white, we can set it to building up our own 
 community, under the direction of officials whom we select. 
 Also, we can have our gigantic national bank, controlling all our 
 thirty-three billions of dollars of deposits, and likewise the hun- 
 dreds of billions of credit built upon them. 
 
 The first time you suggest this plan to a banker or business 
 man, you will be told that increase of money by the government 
 does not benefit labor or the general consumer ; "inflation of the 
 currency" causes prices to go up correspondingly. To this I 
 will furnish an effective reply : that at the same time the gov- 
 ernment issues new money, the government will also fix prices ; 
 and then watch the face of your banker or business man ! If he 
 is a man who can really think, and is not just repeating like a 
 parrot the formulas he has learned from others, he will perceive 
 that the combination of currency inflation and price-fixing would 
 catch him as the two parts of a nut-cracker catch a nut ; and he 
 will know that you can take the meat out of him any time you 
 please. He may argue that it is not fair ; but point out to him 
 that it is exactly what the big banks and the trusts have been 
 doing to us right along increasing the amount of money in 
 circulation, and at the same time raising the prices we pay for 
 goods, and so taking out the meat from us nuts ! 
 
 We have agreed that we do not mean to be unfair either to 
 the banker or the manufacturer; we are simply going to stop 
 their being unfair to us. We are going to convince them that 
 their power to catch us in a nut-cracker is forever at an end. 
 We allow them six per cent on their investments, and guar- 
 antee them this by turning over to them some of our new 
 money that is, government bonds. When we have thoroughly
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 197 
 
 convinced them that they can't get any more, they will take 
 these bonds and quit ; and thus simply, without violence or 
 destruction of property, we shall slide from our present system 
 of commercial cannibalism into the new co-operative common- 
 wealth. 
 
 We have had "cheap money" campaigns in the United 
 States many times, and as this book is written, it becomes evi- 
 dent that we are to have another. Henry Ford is advocating 
 the idea, and so is Thomas A. Edison. The present writer 
 would like to make plain that in supporting such a program, he 
 does it for one purpose, and one only the taking over of the 
 industries by the community. The creation of state credit for 
 that purpose is the next step in the progress of human 
 society; whereas the creation of state credit for the con- 
 tinuance of the profit system is a piece of futility amounting 
 to imbecility. This distinction is fundamental, and is the test 
 by which to judge the usefulness of any new program, and the 
 intelligence of those who advocate it.
 
 CHAPTER LXX 
 
 THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY 
 
 (Discusses various programs for the change from industrial 
 autocracy to industrial democracy.) 
 
 The program of the railway workers for the democratic 
 management of their industry is embodied in the Plumb plan. 
 You may learn about it by addressing the weekly paper of the 
 railway brotherhoods, which is called "Labor," and is published 
 in Washington, D. C. It appears that our transportation indus- 
 try can be at once socialized, because of a clause in the consti- 
 tution which gives the national government power over "roads 
 and communications." Through decades of mismanagement 
 under the system of private greed, the railroads have been 
 brought to such a financial condition that they will be forced 
 into nationalization, whenever we stop them from dipping their 
 fingers into the public treasury. 
 
 Under the Plumb plan the government is to purchase the 
 roads from their present owners, paying with government 
 bonds. The management is to be under the control of a board 
 consisting in part of representatives of the government, and in 
 part of the workers this being a combination of the methods 
 of Socialism and Syndicalism. The same program can be 
 applied constitutionally to telegraphs and telephones, to inter- 
 state trolley systems, express companies, oil pipe lines, and all 
 other means of interstate communication and distribution. 
 
 The Plumb plan also deals with coal and steel and other 
 great industries. These could not be nationalized without a 
 constitutional amendment, but it appears that in the majority of 
 the constitutions of the states are provisions that all corporate 
 charters are held subject to the power of the legislature to 
 amend, modify, or revoke the same. That gives us a right to 
 take over these corporations through state action. The only 
 preliminary is to elect state administrations which will represent 
 us, instead of representing the corporations. Also, most state 
 constitutions contain the provision that "no corporation shall 
 
 198
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 199 
 
 issue its stocks or bonds, except for money, labor, or property 
 actually received." The word "labor" gives the opening wedge 
 for the Plumb plan. The state can purchase these industries, 
 giving bonds in exchange, and can issue to the workers labor 
 stock, which stock will carry part control of the industry. 
 
 Also, the railroad brotherhoods have started their own bank, 
 in Cleveland, Ohio, and it is proving an enormous success. 
 Make note of this point; every large labor union can have its 
 own bank, to finance its industries and its propaganda. Stop 
 and consider how preposterous it is that the five million organ- 
 ized workers of the United States should deposit their hundreds 
 of millions of savings in capitalist banks, to be used to finance 
 private undertakings which crush unions and hold labor in 
 bondage. Let every big labor union have its own building, its 
 own banking and insurance business, its own vacation camp in 
 the country, its own school for training its future leaders. 
 Also, let every labor council in every big city start a labor daily, 
 to tell the workers the truth and point the way to freedom. Let 
 every farmers' organization follow suit; and let these groups 
 get together, to exchange their products upon a co-operative 
 basis. Already the railway men are arranging with the fann- 
 ers, to buy the farm products and distribute them co-opera- 
 tively ; they are getting together with the clothing workers, to 
 have the latter make clothing for them, and with the shoe- 
 workers to make shoes. 
 
 This is the co-operative movement, which has become the 
 largest single industry in Great Britain, and is the backbone of 
 industrial democracy and sound radicalism. It is spreading 
 rapidly in America now. It is taking the money of the people 
 out of the control of the profit system, and diverting it into 
 channels of public service. It is training men to believe in 
 brotherhood instead of in greed. It is giving them business 
 experience, so that when the time comes the taking over of our 
 industrial machine will not have to be done by amateurs, but by 
 men who know what co-operation is, and how to make a success 
 of it. 
 
 This work will go on more rapidly yet when the workers 
 have united politically, and brought into power a government 
 which will assist them instead of assisting the bankers. A most 
 interesting program for the development of working-class 
 financial credit is known as the "Douglas plan," which is advo- 
 cated by a London weekly, the "New Age," and is explained in
 
 200 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 two books, called "Economic Democracy" and "Credit Power 
 and Democracy," by Douglas and Orage. This program is in 
 brief that the furnishing of credit shall become a function of 
 organized labor, based upon the fact that the true and ultimate 
 basis of all credit is the power of hand and brain labor to pro- 
 duce wealth. The labor unions, or "guilds," shall pay the man- 
 agement of industry and pay capital for the use of the industrial 
 plant, and shall finance production and new industrial develop- 
 ment out of their "credit power," their ability to promise pro- 
 duction and to keep their promises. 
 
 This "Douglas plan" seeks to break the Money Trust by the 
 method of Syndicalism. Another method of breaking it, 
 through state regulation of bank loans, you will find most com- 
 pletely set forth in an extremely able book, "The Strangle 
 Hold," by H. C. Cutting, an American business man, whom 
 you may address at San Lorenzo, California. Another method, 
 utilizing the third factor in industry, the consumer, is the 
 method of banking by consumers' unions. Such are the Raff ei- 
 sen banks, widely known in Germany, and a specimen of which 
 exists in the single tax colony at Arden, Delaware. Those who 
 wish to know about the co-operative bank, or other forms of 
 co-operation, may apply to the Co-operative League of Amer- 
 ica, 2 West 13th Street, New York, whose president is Dr. 
 James P. Warbasse. Information concerning public ownership 
 may be had from the Public Ownership League, 127 N. Dear- 
 born Street, Chicago ; also from the Socialist party, 220 South 
 Ashland Boulevard, Chicago, and from the Bureau of Social 
 Research of the Rand School of Social Science, New York. 
 
 Also, I ought to mention the very interesting plan for social 
 reconstruction set forth by Mr. King C. Gillette, inventor of the 
 safety razor. This plan you may find in your public library in 
 two encyclopedic volumes, "Gillette's Social Redemption," and 
 "Gillette's World Solution." The politician seeks to solve the 
 industrial problem by means of the state, and the labor leader 
 seeks to solve it by the unions; it is to be expected that Mr. 
 Gillette, a capitalist, should seek to solve it by means of the cor- 
 poration. He points out that the modern "trust" is the greatest 
 instrument of production yet invented by man ; and he asks why 
 the people should not form their own "trust," to handle their 
 own affairs, and to purchase and take over the industries from 
 their present private masters. It is interesting to note that Mr. 
 Gillette's solution is fully as radical and thorough-going as those
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 201 
 
 of the State Socialists or the Syndicalists. The "People's Cor- 
 poration" which he projects and plans some day to launch upon 
 the world would be a gigantic "consumers' union," whose 
 "credit power" would speedily dominate and absorb all other 
 powers in modern society; it would make us all stockholders, 
 and give us our share of the benefits of social productivity.
 
 CHAPTER LXXI 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 (Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning with 
 its money aspects; the standard wage and its variations.) 
 
 It has been indicated that the new society will be different 
 in different countries and in different parts of the same coun- 
 try, in different industries and at different times. No one can 
 predict exactly what it will be, and anyone who tries to predict 
 is unscientific. But every man can work out his own ideas of 
 the most economical and sensible arrangements for a co-opera- 
 tive society, and in these final chapters I set forth my ideas. 
 
 One of the first things people ask is, "Will there be money 
 in the new society, or how will labor be rewarded and goods 
 paid for ?" I answer that there will be money, and the business 
 methods of the new society will be so nearly the same as at 
 present that in this respect you would hardly realize there had 
 been any change. The only difference will be that in the new 
 society you will be paid several times as much for your labor ; 
 or, if you prefer to put it the other way, you will be able to buy 
 several times as much with your money. Why should we waste 
 our time working out systems of "credit-cards," when we 
 already have a system in the form of gold and silver coins and 
 paper currency? Why should we bother with "labor checks," 
 when we have a banking and clearing-house system, understood 
 by everyone but the illiterate? The only difference we shall 
 make is that nobody can get gold and silver coins or paper cur- 
 rency, except by performing labor to pay for them; nobody 
 can have money in the bank and draw checks against it, until 
 he has rendered to society an equivalent amount of service. 
 
 When you have earned your money in the new world, you 
 will spend it wherever you please, and for whatever you please ; 
 the only difference being that the price you pay will be the exact 
 labor-cost of producing that article, with no deduction for any 
 form of exploitation. As I wrote sixteen years ago in "The 
 "Industrial Republic," you will be able to get, if you insist 
 upon it, a seven-legged spider made of diamonds, and the only 
 
 202
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 203 
 
 question society will ask is, Have you performed services equiva- 
 lent to the material and labor necessary to the creating of that 
 unusual article of commerce? Of course, society won't put it 
 to you in that complicated formula ; it will simply ask, "Have 
 you got the price?" Which, you observe, is exactly the ques- 
 tion society asks you at present. 
 
 The next thing that everybody wants to know is, "Shall we 
 all be paid the same wages?" I answer, yes and no, because 
 there will be three systems of payment. There will be a basic 
 wage, which everybody will get for every kind of useful service 
 necessary to production ; this will be, as it were, the foundation 
 of our economic structure. On top of this will be built a system 
 of special payments for special services, which are of an intel- 
 lectual nature, and cannot be standardized and dealt with 
 wholesale. In addition, there will be for a time a third arrange- 
 ment, applying to agricultural work, which is in a different 
 stage of development, and to which different conditions apply. 
 
 Let us take, first, our standard wage. The census of our 
 Utopian commonwealth reveals that we have ten million able- 
 bodied workers engaged in mining, manufacturing, and trans- 
 portation; this including, of course, office-work and manage- 
 ment everything that enters into these industries. By scien- 
 tific management, the best machinery, and the elimination of all 
 possible waste, we find that they produce eighty million dollars 
 worth of goods an hour. A portion of this we have to set aside 
 to pay for the raw materials which they do not produce, and 
 for the upkeep of the plant, and for margin of error what our 
 great corporations call a surplus. We find that we have fifty 
 million dollars per hour left, and that means that we can pay 
 for labor five dollars per hour, or twenty dollars for the regular 
 four-hour day. This is our standard wage, received by all able- 
 bodied workers. 
 
 But quickly we find that our industries are not properly bal- 
 anced. A great many men want to work at the jobs which are 
 clean and pleasant, such as delivering mail, and very few want 
 to work at washing dishes in restaurants and cleaning the sew- 
 ers. There is no way we can adjust this, except by paying a 
 higher wage, or by reducing the number of hours in the work- 
 ing day, which is the same thing. The only other method would 
 be to have the state assign men to their work, and that would 
 be bureaucracy and slavery, the essence of everything we wish 
 to get away from in our co-operative commonwealth.
 
 204 LOYE AND SOCIETY 
 
 What we shall have, so far as concerns our basic industries, 
 is a government department, registering with mathematical 
 accuracy the condition of supply and demand in all the indus- 
 tries of the country. Our demand for shoes is increasing, for 
 some reason or other ; a thousand more shoe-workers are needed, 
 therefore the price of labor in the shoe industry is increased 
 five cents per day or whatever amount will draw that number 
 of workers from other occupations. On the other hand, there 
 are too many people applying for the job of driving trucks, 
 therefore we reduce slightly the compensation for this work. 
 There are more men who want jobs in Southern California than 
 in Alaska, therefore the payment for the same grade of work in 
 Alaska has to be higher. All this is not merely speculation, it is 
 not a matter of anybody's choice ; it is an automatic, self-adjust- 
 ing system, subject to precise calculations. The only change 
 from our present system is from guesswork to exact measure- 
 ment. At present we do not know how many shoes our country 
 will require next season, neither do we know how many shoes 
 are going to be made, neither do we know how many people can 
 make shoes, nor how many would like to learn, nor how many 
 would like to quit that job and take to farming. It would be 
 the simplest matter in the world to find out these things far 
 simpler that it was to register all our possible soldiers, and 
 examine them physically and mentally, and train them and 
 leed them and ship them overseas to "can the Kaiser." 
 
 Of course, we drafted the men for this war job ; but in the 
 new world nobody is drafted for anything. It is any man's 
 privilege to starve if he feels like it ; it is his privilege to go out 
 into the mountains and live on nuts and berries if he can find 
 them. Nobody makes him go anywhere, or makes him work at 
 anything unless, of course, he is a convicted criminal. To the 
 free citizen all that society has to say is, if he buys any prod- 
 ucts, he must pay for those products with his own labor, and 
 not with some other man's labor. Of course, he may steal, or 
 cheat, as under capitalism ; our new world has laws against 
 stealing and cheating, and does its best to enforce them. The 
 difference between the capitalist world and our world is merely 
 that we make it impossible for any man to get money legally 
 without working. 
 
 Under these conditions the average man wishes to work, 
 and the only question remaining is, how shall he work? If he 
 wants to work by himself, and in his own way, nobody objects
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 205 
 
 to it. He is able to buy anything he pleases, whether raw 
 materials or finished products. If he wants to buy leather and 
 make shoes after his own pattern, no one stops him, and if he 
 can find anyone to buy these shoes, he can earn his living in that 
 way. He is able to get land for as long a time as he wants it, by 
 paying to the state the full rental value of that land, and if he 
 wants to farm the land, he can do so, and sell his products. As 
 a matter of theory, he is perfectly free to hire others to farm 
 the land for him, or with him. There is no law to prevent it, 
 neither is there any law to prevent his renting a factory and 
 buying machinery, and hiring labor to make shoes. 
 
 But, as a matter of practical fact, it is impossible for him to 
 do this, because the community is in the business of making 
 shoes, and on an enormous scale, with great factories run demo- 
 cratically by the workers, and there is very small chance of any 
 private business man being able to draw the workers away from 
 these factories. The community factories have all the latest 
 machinery ; they apply the latest methods of scientific manage- 
 ment, and they turn out standard shoes at such a rate that pri- 
 vate competition is unthinkable. Of course, there may be some 
 special kind of shoes, involving an intellectual element, in which 
 there can be private competition. This kind of manufacture is 
 covered in our second method of payment ; but before we dis- 
 cuss it, let us settle the problem of our most important basic 
 industry, which is agriculture.
 
 CHAPTER LXXII 
 AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION 
 
 (Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster 
 co-operative farming and co-operative homes.) 
 
 Farming the land is a very ancient industry, and while its 
 tools have been improved, its social forms have been the same 
 for a long time. The worker on the land is conservative, and 
 the Russian Bolsheviks, who tried to rush their peasants into 
 Communism, found that they had only succeeded in stopping 
 the production of food. We make no such blunder in our new 
 society. We have found a way to abolish speculation in land, 
 and exploitation based on land-ownership, while leaving the 
 farmer free to run his business in the old way if he wants to. 
 
 In our new society we take the full rental value of all land 
 which is not occupied and used by the state. The farmer and 
 the city dweller alike "own" their land, in the sense that they 
 have the use of it for as long as they please, but they pay to the 
 state the rental value of the land, minus the improvements. So 
 they cannot speculate in the land or rent it out to others ; they 
 can only use it, and they only pay for what they actually use. 
 They may put improvements on the land, with full assurance of 
 having the use and benefit thereof, and they may sell the 
 improvements, and the new owner enters into possession, with 
 no obligation but to pay the rental value of the unimproved land 
 to the state. 
 
 The farmer goes on raising his products, and if he wants 
 to drive to town and deliver them to his customers, he may do 
 so ; but he finds it cheaper to market them through the great 
 labor co-operatives and state markets. As there is no longer 
 any private interest involved in these activities, no one has any 
 interest in cheating him, and he gets the full value of the prod- 
 ucts, less the cost of marketing. If the farmer wishes to con- 
 tinue all his life in his old style individualistic method of work- 
 ing the land, he is free to do so. But here is what he sees going 
 on within a few miles of his place : 
 
 The state has bought a square mile of land, and has taken 
 down the fences and established an agricultural co-operative for 
 
 206
 
 207 
 
 purposes of experiment and demonstration. The farm is run 
 under the direction of experts ; the soils are treated with exactly 
 the right fertilizers for each crop, the best paying crops are 
 raised, the best seed is used, and the best machinery. The work- 
 ers of this new agricultural co-operative receive the standard 
 wage, and they live in homes specially built for them, with all 
 the conveniences made possible by wholesale production. Also, 
 these co-operators live in a democratic community ; they deter- 
 mine their own conditions of labor, being represented on the 
 governing board, along with the experts appointed by the state. 
 
 The farmer watches this experiment, at first with suspicion ; 
 but he finds that his sons have less suspicion than he has, and 
 his sons keep pointing out to him that their little farm is not 
 making the standard wage or anything like it ; and, moreover, 
 the standard wage is constantly increasing, whereas, the price 
 of farm-products is dropping. And here is the state, ready to 
 direct new co-operative ventures, inviting a score of farmers in 
 the community to combine and buy out the unwilling ones, and 
 establish a new co-operative. Sooner or later the old farmer 
 gives way ; or he dies, and his sons belong to the new world. 
 
 So ultimately we have our national agricultural system, in 
 which all the requirements of our people are studied, and all the 
 possibilities of our soil and climate, and the job of raising 
 the exact quantities of food that we need, both for our own use 
 and for export, is worked out as one problem. We know how 
 much lumber we need, and we raise it on all our hillsides and 
 mountain slopes, and so protect ourselves from floods and the 
 denuding of our continent. We know where best to raise our 
 wheat, and where best to raise our potatoes and our cabbages, 
 and we do not do this by crude hand-labor, nor by the labor of 
 women and children from daybreak till dark. We have special 
 machines that plant each crop, and other machines that reap it 
 or dig it out of the ground and prepare it for market. 
 
 A few days ago I read a discussion in the Chamber of Com- 
 merce of Calcutta. Some one called attention to the wastes 
 involved in the current method of handling rubber. One con- 
 signment of rubber had been sold more than three hundred 
 separate times, and the cost of these transactions amounted to 
 three times the value of the rubber. This is only one 
 illustration, and I might quote a thousand. If you doubt my 
 figures as to the possibility of production in the new society, 
 remind yourself that a large percentage of the things you use
 
 have been bought and sold many scores of times before you get 
 them. Consider the cabbage, for which you pay six or eight 
 cents a pound in the grocery store, and for which the fanner 
 gets, say, half a cent a pound. 
 
 In this new world the state has an enormous income, derived 
 from its tax on land values. It no longer has to send around 
 men once a year to ask you how many diamond rings your wife 
 has, and to tax you on your honesty, if you have any. It no 
 longer has to make its money by such lying devices as a tariff, 
 therefore its moral being is no longer poisoned by a tariff -lobby. 
 It taxes every citizen for the right to use that which nature 
 created, and leaves free from taxation that which the citizens' 
 own labor created ; this kind of taxation is honest, and fair to 
 all, because no one can evade it. The state uses the proceeds of 
 this land tax in the public services, the libraries and research 
 laboratories and information bureaus ; in free insurance against 
 fire and flood and tempest ; and in a pension to every member of 
 society above the working age of fifty-five, or below the work- 
 ing age of eighteen. Of course, the state might leave it to every 
 man to save up for his old age, but not all men are this wise, 
 and the state cannot afford to let the unwise ones starve. It is 
 more convenient for the state to figure that all men, or nearly 
 all, are going to be old, and to hold back some of their money 
 while they are young and strong, in the certainty that when they 
 are old, they will appreciate this service. Also the state takes 
 care of the sick and incapacitated, and the mentally or physi- 
 cally defective. But we do not leave these latter loose in the 
 world to reproduce their defects; we have in our new world 
 some sense of responsibility to the future, and there is nothing 
 to which we devote more effort than making certain that noth- 
 ing unsound or abnormal is allowed entrance into life. 
 
 The problem of the care of children is a complicated one, 
 and our new society is in process of solving it. We look back 
 on the old world in which the having of children was heavily 
 taxed, in the form of an obligation to care for these children 
 until they were old enough to work. Then the parents were 
 allowed to exploit the labor of the children, so that among the 
 very poor the raising of children was a business speculation, 
 like the raising of slaves or poultry. But in our new world we 
 consider the interest of the child, and of the society in which 
 that child is to be a citizen. We decide that this society must 
 have citizens, and that the raising of the future citizens is a
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 209 
 
 work just exactly as necessary and useful as the raising of a 
 crop of cabbages. Therefore, we pay a pension to all mothers 
 while they are raising and caring for children. At the same 
 time we assert the right to see that this money is wisely spent, 
 and that the child is really cared for. If it is neglected, we are 
 quick to take it away from its parents, and put it in one of our 
 twenty-f our-hour-a-day schools. 
 
 We realize that the home is an ancient industry, even more 
 ancient than agriculture, and we do not try to socialize it all at 
 once. But just as we demonstrate to farmers that the indi- 
 vidual farm does not pay, so we demonstrate to mothers the 
 wastefulness of the single laundry, the single kitchen, the single 
 nursery. We establish community laundries, community kitch- 
 ens, community nurseries, and invite our women to help in 
 these activities, and to learn there, under expert guidance, the 
 advantages of domestic co-operation. We convince them by 
 showing better results in the health and happiness of the chil- 
 dren, and in the time and strength of the mothers. So, little by 
 little, we widen the field of co-operative endeavor, and increase 
 the total product of human labor and the total enjoyment of 
 human life.
 
 CHAPTER LXXIII 
 
 INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION 
 
 (Discusses scientific, artistic and religious activities, as a 
 superstructure built upon the foundation of the standard wage.) 
 
 Karl Kautsky, intellectual leader of the German Social- 
 democracy, gives in his book, "The Social Revolution," a useful 
 formula as to the organization of the future society. This for- 
 mula is: "Communism in material production, Anarchism in 
 intellectual production." It will repay us to study this state- 
 ment, and see exactly what it means. 
 
 Material production depends directly upon things; and as 
 there is only a limited quantity of things in the world, if any 
 one person has more than his share, he deprives some other 
 person to that extent. So there have to be strict laws concern- 
 ing the distribution of material products. But with intellec- 
 tual things exactly the opposite is the case. There is no limit in 
 quantity, and any one person can have all he wants without 
 interfering with anybody else. Everybody in the world can 
 perform a play by Shakespeare, or play a sonata by Beethoven, 
 and everybody can enjoy it as much as he pleases without keep- 
 ing other people from enjoying it all they please. Also, mate- 
 rial production can be standardized; we can have great facto- 
 ries to turn out millions of boxes of matches, each match like 
 every other match, and the more alike they are the better. But 
 in intellectual affairs we want everyone to be different, or at 
 least we want everyone to be free to be different, and if some 
 one can become much better than the others, this is the most 
 important kind of production in the world, for he may make 
 over our whole intellectual and moral life. 
 
 For the production of material things our new society has 
 great factories owned in common, and run by majority vote of 
 the workers, and we place the products of that factory at the 
 disposal of all members of society upon equal terms. That is our 
 "Communism in material production." On the other hand, in 
 our intellectual production we leave everybody free to live his 
 own life, and to associate himself with others of like aims, and 
 we place as few restrictions as possible upon their activities. 
 
 210
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 211 
 
 This is the method of free association, or "Anarchism in intel- 
 lectual production." 
 
 Our problem would be simple if material and intellectual 
 production never had to mingle. But, as it happens, every kind 
 of intellectual production requires a certain amount of material, 
 and every kind of material production involves an intellectual 
 element. Therefore, our two methods have to be combined, and 
 we have a complex problem which we have to solve in a variety 
 of different ways, and upon which we must experiment with 
 open minds and scientific temper. 
 
 First, let us take the intellectual elements involved in the 
 production of purely material things, such as matches and 
 shoes and soap. Let us take invention. Naturally, we do not 
 want to go on making matches and shoes and soap in the same 
 old way forever. On the contrary, we want to stimulate all the 
 workers in these industries to use their wits and improve the 
 processes in every possible way. The whole of society has an 
 interest in this, and the soap workers have an especial interest. 
 Our soap industry has an invention department, with a group 
 of experts appointed by the executive committee of the national 
 council of soap workers. All soap workers are taxed, say five 
 cents a day, for the support of this activity. Likewise the state 
 contributes a generous sum out of its income toward the work 
 of soap research. In addition to this, the soap industry offers 
 prizes and scholarships for suggestions as to the improvement 
 of every detail of the work, and at meetings of every local of 
 soap workers somebody makes new suggestions as to methods 
 of stimulating their intellectual life not merely as regards 
 soap, but as regards citizenship, and art and literature, and 
 human life in general. Our soap workers, you must under- 
 stand, are no longer wage-slaves, brutalized by toil and poverty ; 
 they are free citizens of a free society. Our soap workers' local 
 in every city has its own theatre and concert hall and lecture 
 bureau, and publishes its own magazine. 
 
 Every industry has its immediate intellectual problems, its 
 trade journals in which these are discussed, and its research 
 boards in which they are worked out. The ambitions of the 
 young workers in that industry are concentrated upon getting 
 into this intellectual part of their trade. Examinations are held 
 and tests are made to discover the most competent men, and 
 written suggestions are considered by boards of control. It is, 
 of course, of great importance to every worker that the chan-
 
 212 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 nels of promotion should be kept open, and that the man who 
 really has inventive talent shall get, not merely distinction and 
 promotion, but financial reward, so that he may have time and 
 materials to continue his experiments. 
 
 This research department, you perceive, is a sort of super- 
 structure, built upon the foundation of our standard wage ; and 
 this same simile applies to numerous other forms of intellectual 
 production. For example, our community paper mills turn out 
 paper, and our community printers are prepared to turn out 
 millions of books. How shall we determine what is to be the 
 intellectual content of these material books? There are many 
 different methods. First, there is the method of individualism. 
 A man has something to say, and he writes a book ; he works in 
 the soap factory, and saves a part of his standard wage, and 
 when he has money enough he orders the community printers 
 to print his book, and the community booksellers to handle it 
 for him, and the community postoffice to deliver it for him. 
 Again, a group of men organize themselves into an association, 
 or club, or scientific society, and publish books. The Authors' 
 League takes up the work of publishing the writings of its 
 members, and the Poetry Society does the same. 
 
 This is the method of Anarchism, or free association. But 
 there is no reason why we should not have along side it the 
 method of Socialism; there is no reason why we should not 
 have state publishing houses, just as we have state universities 
 and state libraries. The state should certainly publish standard 
 works of all sorts, bibles and dictionaries and directories, and 
 cheap editions of the classics. In this new world our school 
 boards are not chosen by business men for purposes of graft, 
 they are chosen by the people to educate our children; so it 
 seems to us perfectly natural that the National Educational 
 Association should conduct a publication department, and order 
 the printing of the school books which the children use. 
 
 In the same way, anyone is free to write a play, or to put 
 on a play, and invite people to come and see it. But, like the 
 individual farmers and the individual mothers of families, the 
 play-producer in our society is in competition with great com- 
 munity enterprises, which set a high standard and make com- 
 petition difficult. The same thing applies to the opera, and to 
 concerts, and to all the arts and sciences. You can start a pri- 
 vate hospital if you wish, but you will be in competition with 
 public institutions, and you can only succeed if you are a man
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 213 
 
 of genius that is, if you have something to teach, too new and 
 startling for the public boards of control to recognize. You try 
 your new method, and it works, and that becomes a criticism of 
 the public boards of control, and before long the people by their 
 votes turn out the old board of control and put you in. 
 
 That is politics, you say ; but we in our new world do not 
 use the word politics as one of contempt. We really believe 
 that public sentiment is in the long run the best authority, and 
 the appeal to public sentiment is at once a social privilege and a 
 social service. What we strive to do is to clear the channels of 
 appeal, and avoid favoritism and stagnation. To that end we 
 maintain, in every art and every science and every department 
 of human thought, endless numbers of centers of free, inde- 
 pendent, co-operative activity, so that every man who has an 
 inspiration, or a new idea, can find some group to support him 
 or can form a new group of his own. 
 
 This is our "Anarchism in intellectual production," and it is 
 the method under which in capitalist society men organize all 
 their clubs and societies and churches. Devout members of the 
 Roman Catholic Church will be startled to be told that theirs is 
 an Anarchist organization; but nevertheless, such is the case. 
 The Catholic Church owns a great deal of property, and specu- 
 lates in real estate, and to that extent it is a capitalist institu- 
 tion. It holds a great many people by fear, and to that extent 
 it is a feudal institution. But in so far as members of the 
 church believe in it and love it and contribute of their free will 
 to its support, they are organizing by the method which all 
 Anarchists recommend and desire to apply to the whole of 
 society. Anarchist clubs and Christian churches are both free 
 issociations for the advocacy of certain ideas, the only differ- 
 ence being in the ideas they advocate. 
 
 In our new world such organizations have been multiplied 
 many fold, and form a vast superstructure of intellectual activ- 
 ity, built upon the foundation of the standard wage. In this 
 new world all the people are free. They are free, not merely 
 from oppression, but from the fear of oppression; they have 
 leisure and plenty, and they take part naturally and simply in 
 the intellectual life. The old, of course, have not got over the 
 dullness which a lifetime of drudgery impressed upon them, 
 but the young are growing up in a world without classes, and in 
 which it seems natural that everyone should be educated and 
 everyone should have ideas. They earn their standard wage, 
 
 15
 
 214 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 and devote their spare time to some form of intellectual or 
 artistic endeavor, and spend their spare money in paying writers 
 and artists and musicians and actors to stimulate and entertain 
 them. 
 
 These latter are the ways of distinction in our new society ; 
 these are the paths to power. The only rich men in our world 
 are the men who produce intellectual goods ; the great artists, 
 orators, musicians, actors and writers, who are free to serve or 
 not to serve, as they see fit, and can therefore hold up the public 
 for any price they care to charge. Just now there is eager dis- 
 cussion going on in our world as to whether it is proper for an 
 opera singer, or a moving picture star, or a novelist, to make a 
 million dollars. Our newspapers are full of discussions of the 
 question whether anyone can make a million dollars honestly, 
 and whether men of genius should exploit their public. Some 
 point out that our most eminent opera singer spends his mil- 
 lions in endowing a conservatory of art; but others maintain 
 that it would be better if he lowered his prices of admission, 
 and let the public use its money in its own way. The extre- 
 mists are busy founding what they call the Ten-cent Society, 
 whose members agree to boycott all singers and actors who 
 charge more than ten cents admission, and all moving picture 
 stars who receive more than a hundred thousand dollars a year 
 for their service. These "Ten-centers" do not object to paying 
 the money, but they object to the commercializing of art, and 
 declare especially that the moral effect of riches is such that no 
 rich person should ever, under any circumstances, be allowed 
 to influence the youth of the nation. In this some of the great- 
 est writers join them, and renounce their copyrights, and agree 
 to accept a laureateship from some union of workers, who pay 
 them a generous stipend for the joy and honor of being associ- 
 ated with their names. The greatest poet of our time began life 
 as a newsboy, and so the National Newsvenders' Society has 
 adopted him, and taken his name, and pays him ten thousand 
 dollars a year for the privilege of publishing his works.
 
 CHAPTER LXXIV 
 MANKIND REMADE 
 
 (Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what hap- 
 pens to these in the new world.) 
 
 We have briefly sketched the economic arrangements of 
 the co-operative commonwealth. Let us now consider what are 
 the effects of these arrangements upon the principal social dis- 
 eases of capitalism. 
 
 The first and most dreadful of capitalism's diseases is war, 
 and the economic changes here outlined have placed war, along 
 with piracy and slavery, among the half-forgotten nightmares 
 of history. We have broken the "iron ring," and are no longer 
 dependent upon foreign concessions and foreign markets for 
 the preservation of our social system and the aggrandizement 
 of a ruling class. We can stay quietly at home and do our own 
 work, and as we produce nearly everything we need, we no 
 longer have to threaten our neighbors. Our neighbors know 
 this, and therefore they do not arm against us, and we have no 
 pretext to arm against them. We take toward all other civilized 
 nations the attitude which we have taken toward Canada for 
 the past hundred years. 
 
 We have a small and highly trained army, a few regiments 
 of which are located at strategic points over the country. This 
 army we regard and use as we do our fire department. When 
 there is widespread damage by fire or flood or storm or earth- 
 quake, we rush the army to the spot to attend to the work of 
 rescue and rebuilding. Also, we have a small navy in interna- 
 tional service ; for, of course, we are no longer an independent 
 and self-centered nation ; we have come to realize that we are 
 part of the world community, and have taken our place as one 
 state in the International Socialist Federation. We send our 
 delegates to the world parliament, and we place our resources 
 at the disposal of the world government. However, it now 
 takes but a small army and navy to preserve order in the world. 
 We govern the backward nations, but the economic arrange- 
 ments of the world are such that we are no longer driven to 
 exploit and oppress them. We send them teachers instead of 
 
 215
 
 216 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 soldiers, and as there are really very few people in the world 
 who fight for the love of fighting, we have little difficulty in pre- 
 serving peace. We pay the backward peoples a fair price for 
 their products which we need. Our world government takes no 
 money out of these countries, but spends it for the benefit of 
 those who live in the countries, to teach them and train their 
 young generations for self-government. 
 
 Next, what are the effects of our new arrangements upon 
 political corruption and graft? The social revolution has 
 broken the prestige of wealth. Money will buy things, but it no 
 longer buys power, the right to rule other men; it no longer 
 buys men's admiration. Everybody now has money, and 
 nobody is any longer afraid of starvation. It is no longer the 
 fashion to save money any more than it is the fashion to carry- 
 revolvers in drawing-rooms or to wear chain mail in place of 
 underclothing. So our political life is cleansed of the money 
 influence. People now get power by persuading their fellows, 
 not by buying them or threatening them. The world is no 
 longer full of men ravenous for jobs, and ready to sell their 
 soul for a "position." So it is no longer possible to build up a 
 "machine" based on desire for office. 
 
 The changes have resulted in an enormous intensification of 
 our political activities. We hare endless meetings and debates ; 
 we have so many propaganda societies that we cannot keep 
 track of them. And some of these societies, like the Catholic 
 Church, have a large membership, and large sums of money at 
 their disposal. But a few experiments at carrying elections by 
 a "campaign-chest" have convinced everybody that to have the 
 facts on your side is the only permanent way to political power. 
 Our new society is jealous of attempts to establish any sort of 
 ruling class, and the surest way to discredit yourself is to advo- 
 cate any form of barrier against freedom of discussion, or the 
 right of the people's will to prevail. 
 
 Next, what is the status of crime? We have too recently 
 escaped from capitalism to have been able to civilize entirely 
 our slum population, and we still have occasional crimes of vio- 
 lence, especially crimes of passion. But we have almost entirely 
 eliminated those classes of crime which had to do with property, 
 and we have discovered that this was ninety-five per cent of all 
 crime. We have eliminated them by the simple device of mak- 
 ing them no longer profitable. Anybody can go into our com- 
 munity factories, and under clean and attractive working condi-
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 217 
 
 tions, and without any loss of prestige or social position, can 
 earn the means of satisfying his reasonable wants by three 
 hours work a day. Almost everybody finds this easier than 
 stealing or cheating. 
 
 But more important yet, as a factor in abolishing crime, is 
 the abolition of class domination and the prestige of wealth. 
 We no longer Have in our community a ruling class which lives 
 without working, and which offers to the weak-minded and 
 viciously inclined the perpetual example of luxury. We no 
 longer set much store on jewels and fine raiment ; we do not 
 make costly things, except for public purposes, where all may 
 enjoy them; and nobody stores great quantities of money, 
 because everyone has a guarantee of security from the state. 
 So we are gradually putting our policemen and jailers and 
 judges and lawyers to constructive work. 
 
 Next, what about disease? The diseases of poverty are 
 entirely done away with. We are now able to apply the knowl- 
 edge of science to the whole community, and so we no longer 
 have to do with tuberculosis and typhoid, or with rickets and 
 anaemia in children, or with heavy infant mortality. We have 
 sterilized our unfit, the degenerates and the defectives, and so 
 do not have to reckon with millions of children from these 
 wretched stocks. We now give to the question of public health 
 that prominence which in the old days we used to give to war 
 and the suppression of crime and social protest. Our public 
 health officers now replace our generals and admirals, and we 
 really obey their orders. 
 
 Next, as to prostitution. Just as in the case of crime, we 
 are still too close to capitalism not to have among us the victims 
 of social depravity, both men and women. We still have a great 
 deal of vice which springs from untrained animal impulse, and 
 we have some cultivated and highly sophisticated pornography. 
 But we have entirely done away with commercial vice, and we 
 have done it by cutting the root which nourished it. Women in 
 our communities are really free ; and by that we do not mean 
 the empty political freedom which existed in the days of wage 
 slavery we mean that women are permanently delivered from 
 economic inferiority, by the recognition on the part of the state 
 of the money value of their special kind of work, the bearing 
 and training of children. This kind of work not merely 
 receives the standard wage, it also receives the best surgical and 
 nursing treatment free. Housework and home-making are
 
 218 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 legally recognized services; and the woman before marriage 
 and after her children have been nursed is free to go into the 
 community factories and earn for herself the standard wage, 
 with no loss of social position. Consequently, no woman sells 
 her sex, and no man buys it. 
 
 This does not mean, of course, that we have solved the sex 
 problem in our new society. There are two great social prob- 
 lems with which we have to deal, the first of these being the sex 
 problem, and the second the race problem. Our scientists are 
 occupied with eugenics, and we are finding out how to guide 
 our young people in marriage, so that our race may be built up, 
 and the ravages of capitalism remedied as quickly as possible. 
 Also we are trying to find out the laws of happiness and health 
 in love. We are founding societies for the purpose of pro- 
 tecting love, and, as hinted in the Book of Love, we have a 
 determined social struggle between two groups of women the 
 mother-women and the mistress-women those who take love 
 gravely, as a means of improving the race, and those who take 
 it as a decoration, a form of play. Our men are embarrassed 
 by having to choose between these groups, and occupy them- 
 selves with trying to keep the struggle from turning into civil 
 war. 
 
 Second, the race problem. Our economic changes have, of 
 course, done away with some of the bitterest phases of this 
 strife. White workingmen in the North no longer mob and 
 murder negro workingmen for taking their jobs, and in the 
 South our land values tax prevents the landlord from exploiting 
 either white or negro labor. But our white race is still irresisti- 
 bly bent upon preserving its integrity of blood, and the more 
 far-seeing among the negroes have come to realize that there 
 can never be any real happiness for them in a society where 
 they are denied the higher social privileges. There is a move- 
 ment for the development of a genuine Negro Republic in 
 Africa, and for mass emigration. Also there is a proposition, 
 soon to be settled at an election, for the dividing of the United 
 States into three districts upon racial lines. First, there are to 
 be, in the Far South, three or four states which are inhabited 
 and governed solely by negroes, and to which white men may 
 come only as temporary visitors ; a large group of states in the 
 North which are white states, and to which negroes may come 
 only as visitors ; and finally, a middle group of states, in which 
 both whites and black are allowed to live, as at present, but with
 
 THE BOOK OF SOCIETY 219 
 
 the proviso that no one may live there who takes part in any 
 form of racial strife or agitation. This program gives to race- 
 conscious negroes their own land, their own civilization, their 
 own chance of self-realization ; it gives to race-conscious white 
 men the same opportunity ; and it leaves to those who are not 
 troubled by the problem, a country where black and white may 
 dwell in quiet good fellowship. 
 
 Finally, what has been the effect of our economic changes 
 upon the purely personal vices which gave us so much trouble 
 and unhappiness in the old days ? What, for example, has been 
 the effect upon vanity? You should see our new crop of chil- 
 dren in our high schools! There are no longer any social 
 classes among them ; the rich ones do not arrive in private auto- 
 mobiles, to make the poor ones envious, and they do not isolate 
 themselves in little snobbish cliques. They arrive in community 
 automobiles, and all wear uniforms one of the simple devices 
 by which we repress the impulse of the young toward display 
 of personal egotism. They are all full of health and happy 
 play, and their heads are busily occupied with interesting ideas. 
 Our girls are trained to thinking, instead of to personal adorn- 
 ment ; they are developing their minds, instead of catching a 
 rich husband by sexual charms. So we have been able, in a sin- 
 gle generation of training, to make a real and appreciable differ- 
 ence in the amount of vanity and self -consciousness to be found 
 among our young people. 
 
 And the same thing applies to a score of other undesirable 
 qualities, which, under the system of competitive commercial- 
 ism, were overstimulated in human beings. In those old days 
 everyone was seeking his own survival, and certain qualities 
 which had survival value became the principal characteristics of 
 our race. Those qualities were greed and persistence in acquisi- 
 tiveness, cunning and subtlety, also bragging and self-assertive- 
 ness. In that old world people destroyed their fellows in order 
 to make their own safety and power; they wasted goods in 
 order to be esteemed, to preserve what they called their "social 
 position." But now we have cut the roots of all these vile 
 weeds. We have so adjusted the business relationships of men 
 that we do not have to have hysterical religious revivals in order 
 to keep the human factors alive in their hearts. We have estab- 
 lished it as a money fact, which everyone quickly realizes, that 
 it pays better to co-operate ; there is more profit and less bother 
 in being of service to others. So we have prepared a soil in
 
 220 LOVE AND SOCIETY 
 
 which virtues grow instead of vices, and we find that people 
 become decent and kindly and helpful without exhortation, and 
 with no more moral effort than the average man can comfort- 
 ably make. Of course, we have still personal vices to combat, 
 and new virtues to discover and to propagate ; but this has to do 
 with the future, whereas we are here confining ourselves to 
 those things which have been demonstrated in our new society.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abortion 61 
 
 Abortions 30 
 
 Advertising 163 
 
 Agricultural co-operative 206 
 
 Anarchism 210 
 
 Anarchist 89, 90 
 
 Anarchy 172 
 
 Anglo-Saxon 62, 111 
 
 "Appeal to Reason" 149 
 
 Aristocratic doctrine 116 
 
 Armour 128 
 
 Atherton, Gertrude 87 
 
 Babies 63 
 
 Bachelorhood 52 
 
 Bacon, Francis 51 
 
 Banking system 192 
 
 Bankruptcy 162 
 
 Barbarism 124 
 
 Barnum, P. T 27 
 
 Berkman, Alexander 173 
 
 Biology 103 
 
 Birth control 61, 76 
 
 Birth Control Review 64 
 
 Blatchford, Robert 55, 161 
 
 "Blind" love 58 
 
 Bolsheviks 172 
 
 Breach of promise suit 91 
 
 Brothel 66 
 
 Brothels 31 
 
 Burbank, Luther 99 
 
 Business man 143 
 
 Capital 158 
 
 Capitalism 136, 168 
 
 Capitalists 142 
 
 Carnegie 168 
 
 Catholic Church 213, 216 
 
 Celibacy 51, 52, 64 
 
 Chastity 51 
 
 Chattel slavery 186 
 
 Childbirths 70 
 
 Children 70, 72, 85, 208 
 
 Christianity 115, 133 
 
 "Clarion" 31 
 
 Class struggle 133, 177 
 
 Clay, Henry 186 
 
 Coleridge 85 
 
 "Collier's Weekly" 122, 163 
 
 Committee on Waste 160 
 
 Commune 129 
 
 Communism 10, 170, 210 
 
 Compensation 179 
 
 Competition 108, 127 
 
 Competitive wage system 148 
 
 "Complex" 49 
 
 Comstock, Anthony 20 
 
 Confiscation 179 
 
 Congress 138 
 
 Contraception 61 
 
 Co-operation 109, 199, 200 
 
 Coquetry 38 
 
 Corporation 127 
 
 Courtship 91 
 
 Credit 152, 154, 192, 200 
 
 Credit-cards 202 
 
 Crime 164, 216 
 
 Culture 62 
 
 Cutting, H. C 200 
 
 Dances 15 
 
 Debs, Eugene V 155 
 
 Degeneration 121 
 
 "Demi-monde" 80 
 
 Democratic doctrine 115 
 
 Dictatorship 180, 183, 185 
 
 Dill, James B 
 
 Disarmament 1 57 
 
 Discouragement 164 
 
 Disease 217 
 
 Divorce 32, 93, 97 
 
 Double standard 5 
 
 "Douglas plan" 199 
 
 "Dumping" 152 
 
 Economic evolution 1 
 
 Economic man 108 
 
 Emerson 186 
 
 Emulation 112 
 
 Engagements 72 
 
 England 120, 156, 175 
 
 Eugenics 58 
 
 221
 
 222 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Evolution 122 
 
 Exogamy 105 
 
 Exploitation 181 
 
 Exploiting 148 
 
 Exports 153 
 
 Factory system 129 
 
 Farming 206 
 
 "Favorable balance" 151 
 
 Fear 122, 164 
 
 Federal Reserve Act 154 
 
 Feminist 69 
 
 Feudal stage 124 
 
 Fires 163 
 
 Foreign trade 151 
 
 "Free love" 44, 87 
 
 "Free lover" 92 
 
 France 175 
 
 France, Anatole 44 
 
 Freud 104 
 
 Gens 9 
 
 Germany 155, 156 
 
 Gillette, King C 200 
 
 Goldman, Emma 173 
 
 Gonorrhea 30 
 
 Goode, Mary J 41 
 
 Government 166 
 
 "Graft" 127, 216 
 
 "Great Adventure" .. .188 
 
 Hammurabi 78 
 
 "Hamon case" 26 
 
 "Hard times" 144 
 
 Hardy 13 
 
 Harris, Frank 21 
 
 "High life" 23 
 
 Home 42, 209 
 
 Honeymoon 56 
 
 Hoover, Herbert 160 
 
 House of Commons 137 
 
 Huguenots 134 
 
 Human nature 99 
 
 Hunger 122 
 
 Ideals 132 
 
 Imports 153 
 
 Income tax 143, 188 
 
 Industrial evolution ... . 126 
 
 Infant 103 
 
 Infanticide 61 
 
 Inflation 196 
 
 Inheritance tax 188 
 
 "Ingenues" 19 
 
 Instinct 57 
 
 Insurance 163 
 
 Intellectual production 211 
 
 "Iron ring" 158 
 
 Island 145 
 
 I. W. W 169 
 
 James, William 16 
 
 Jealousy 89 
 
 Jews 127 
 
 Kautsky, Karl 210 
 
 "King Coal" 139 
 
 Kropotkin 109, 129, 173 
 
 Labor 1 58 
 
 Labor checks 202 
 
 Labor union 199 
 
 Laissez faire 110 
 
 Land tax 190 
 
 Land titles 179 
 
 Land values 208 
 
 Late marriage 67 
 
 Lecky 6, 33 
 
 Leviticus 78 
 
 Liberty motor 164 
 
 London, Jack 62 
 
 Los Angeles Times 157 
 
 Love 34, 47, 100, 112, 218 
 
 Lust 48 
 
 Luther, Martin 129 
 
 Luxury 60 
 
 Machinery 149 
 
 "Magic gestures" 104 
 
 Magna Charta 134 
 
 Malthusian law 108 
 
 Markham, Edwin 139 
 
 Marquesas Islands 33 
 
 Marriage 4 
 
 Marriage club 71 
 
 Marriage market 68 
 
 Marx, Karl 132, 138, 176 
 
 Materialistic interpretation... 132
 
 INDEX 
 
 223 
 
 Material production 210 
 
 Maternity endowment 79 
 
 Meredith, George 43 
 
 "Merrie England" 161 
 
 Metchnikoff, Elie 33, 46 
 
 Mexico 121 
 
 Middle class 176, 186 
 
 Minor, Robert 173 
 
 Mistress 12 
 
 Money 37, 192, 202 
 
 Money Trust 194 
 
 Monogamy 5, 83, 90 
 
 (Moors 134 
 
 Moralists 59 
 
 JMorgan 128 
 
 Mother's pension 79 
 
 Moving pictures 17 
 
 Negro 218 
 
 Negroes 116 
 
 Neuroses 105 
 
 Neurotics 103 
 
 North Dakota 194 
 
 North, Luke 188 
 
 O'Brien, Frederick 10 
 
 Oedipus complex 104 
 
 "Open-shop" 177 
 
 Panic 154 
 
 Parasitism 74 
 
 Passion 58 
 
 Permanence 87 
 
 Piracy Ill 
 
 Pity 74 
 
 Plumb plan 198 
 
 Political evolution 123 
 
 Political revolution 125 
 
 Politics 213 
 
 Pornography 20 
 
 Postal savings bank 195 
 
 Poverty 40 
 
 Primitive man 9 
 
 Privilege 36 
 
 Professor Sumner 122 
 
 Profit system 148, 158 
 
 "Progressive polygamy" 90 
 
 Proletariat 142 
 
 Promiscuity 87 
 
 Property marriage 44 
 
 Prosperity 144 
 
 Prostitute 6 
 
 Prostitution 4, 31, 41, 217 
 
 Proudhon 179 
 
 Psycho-analysis 49, 103 
 
 Public bank 194 
 
 Publishing 212 
 
 Quick, Herbert 165 
 
 Race prejudice 62 
 
 Race problem 218 
 
 Racial immaturity 116 
 
 Raffeisen bank 200 
 
 Reeve, Sidney A 160 
 
 Republic 125 
 
 Research 212 
 
 "Resurrection" 53 
 
 Revolt 134 
 
 Ricardo 108 
 
 Richardson, Dorothy 26 
 
 Ring 148 
 
 Robinson, Dr. William J, 
 
 21,30,70,77 
 
 Roman Catholic church 90 
 
 "Romance" 91 
 
 "Romantic" love 55 
 
 Roosevelt 61 
 
 Rulers 119 
 
 Russia 129, 185 
 
 Sanger, Margaret 63 
 
 School of marriage 75 
 
 Selection 8 
 
 Sex 8 
 
 Sex education 72 
 
 Sex impulse 46 
 
 Sex problem 218 
 
 Sex urge 86 
 
 Sex war 81 
 
 Shelley 59, 89 
 
 "She-towns" 29 
 
 Shop management 168 
 
 Sienkiewicz 
 
 Sims, District Attorney 28 
 
 Single tax 188 
 
 Slavery 10, 126, 136 
 
 "Smart set" 24 
 
 Smith, Adam 108 
 
 Snobbery 61
 
 224 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Socialism 166 
 
 Social revoluton 128, 147, 175 
 
 Soviets 130, 171 
 
 "Speeding up" 138 
 
 Spencer, Herbert 122 
 
 Spirituality 64 
 
 Sport 113 
 
 Standard wage . . 203 
 
 Steel Trust 137 
 
 Stopes, Dr. Marie C 77 
 
 Strikes 162 
 
 Syndicalism 167 
 
 Syphilis 30 
 
 Tabu 9 
 
 Tariff 153 
 
 Taxes 191 
 
 Tennyson 38, 120 
 
 "The Brass Check" 31, 137 
 
 "The Conquest of Bread" 173 
 
 "The Cost of Competition".. 160 
 "The Industrial Republic".... 202 
 
 "The Jungle" 139 
 
 "The Lady" 12 
 
 "The Long Day" 26, 29 
 
 "The Nature of Man" 33 
 
 "The Profits of Religion".... 137 
 
 "The Social Revolution" 210 
 
 "The Strangle Hold" 200 
 
 Thompson, A. M 31 
 
 Tolstoi 53 
 
 "Totem and Taboo" 104 
 
 "Triangle" 56 
 
 Unconscious 105 
 
 Unemployment 147 
 
 "Vamps" 19 
 
 Vanity 219 
 
 Varietism 85 
 
 Venereal disease 30, 67, 83 
 
 Voltaire 36 
 
 Voluntary Parenthood League 64 
 
 War .162 
 
 Wars 155 
 
 Waste 165 
 
 Wells, H. G 89 
 
 Wharton, Edith 95 
 
 "Wild oats" 6 
 
 White man's burden 117 
 
 White, William Allen 17 
 
 Worker 140 
 
 Workers 176 
 
 Working class 140 
 
 (Woman 12 
 
 "Young love" 56. 73
 
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