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The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 01

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Title: The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 01

Author: Ambrose Bierce


        
Release date: September 27, 2004 [eBook #13541]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 01 ***

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF



AMBROSE BIERCE



VOLUME 1

1909




CONTENTS


ASHES OF THE BEACON

THE LAND BEYOND THE BLOW
  THITHER
  SONS OF THE FAIR STAR
  AN INTERVIEW WITH GNARMAG-ZOTE
  THE TAMTONIANS
  MAROONED ON UG
  THE DOG IN GANGEWAG
  A CONFLAGRATION IN GHARGAROO
  AN EXECUTION IN BATRUGIA
  THE JUMJUM OF GOKEETLE-GUK
  THE KINGDOM OF TORTIRRA
  HITHER

FOR THE AHKOOND

JOHN SMITH, LIBERATOR

BITS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
  ON A MOUNTAIN
  WHAT I SAW OF SHILOH
  A LITTLE OF CHICKAMAUCA
  THE CRIME AT PICKETT'S MILL
  FOUR DAYS IN DIXIE
  WHAT OCCURRED AT FRANKLIN
  'WAY DOWN IN ALABAM'
  WORKING FOR AN EMPRESS
  ACROSS THE PLAINS
  THE MIRAGE
  A SOLE SURVIVOR




ASHES OF THE BEACON




ASHES OF THE BEACON

AN HISTORICAL MONOGRAPH WRITTEN IN 4930


Of the many causes that conspired to bring about the lamentable failure of
"self-government" in ancient America the most general and comprehensive
was, of course, the impracticable nature of the system itself. In the
light of modern culture, and instructed by history, we readily discern the
folly of those crude ideas upon which the ancient Americans based what
they knew as "republican institutions," and maintained, as long as
maintenance was possible, with something of a religious fervor, even when
the results were visibly disastrous. To us of to-day it is clear that the
word "self-government" involves a contradiction, for government means
control by something other than the thing to be controlled. When the thing
governed is the same as the thing governing there is no government, though
for a time there may be, as in the case under consideration there was, a
considerable degree of forbearance, giving a misleading appearance of
public order. This, however, soon must, as in fact it soon did, pass away
with the delusion that gave it birth. The habit of obedience to written
law, inculcated by generations of respect for actual government able to
enforce its authority, will persist for a long time, with an ever
lessening power upon the imagination of the people; but there comes a time
when the tradition is forgotten and the delusion exhausted. When men
perceive that nothing is restraining them but their consent to be
restrained, then at last there is nothing to obstruct the free play of
that selfishness which is the dominant characteristic and fundamental
motive of human nature and human action respectively. Politics, which may
have had something of the character of a contest of principles, becomes a
struggle of interests, and its methods are frankly serviceable to personal
and class advantage. Patriotism and respect for law pass like a tale that
is told. Anarchy, no longer disguised as "government by consent," reveals
his hidden hand, and in the words of our greatest living poet,

            lets the curtain fall,
  And universal darkness buries all!

The ancient Americans were a composite people; their blood was a blend of
all the strains known in their time. Their government, while they had one,
being merely a loose and mutable expression of the desires and caprices of
the majority--that is to say, of the ignorant, restless and reckless--gave
the freest rein and play to all the primal instincts and elemental
passions of the race. In so far and for so long as it had any restraining
force, it was only the restraint of the present over the power of the
past--that of a new habit over an old and insistent tendency ever seeking
expression in large liberties and indulgences impatient of control. In the
history of that unhappy people, therefore, we see unveiled the workings of
the human will in its most lawless state, without fear of authority or
care of consequence. Nothing could be more instructive.

Of the American form of government, although itself the greatest of evils
afflicting the victims of those that it entailed, but little needs to be
said here; it has perished from the earth, a system discredited by an
unbroken record of failure in all parts of the world, from the earliest
historic times to its final extinction. Of living students of political
history not one professes to see in it anything but a mischievous creation
of theorists and visionaries--persons whom our gracious sovereign has
deigned to brand for the world's contempt as "dupes of hope purveying to
sons of greed." The political philosopher of to-day is spared the trouble
of pointing out the fallacies of republican government, as the
mathematician is spared that of demonstrating the absurdity of the
convergence of parallel lines; yet the ancient Americans not only clung to
their error with a blind, unquestioning faith, even when groaning under
its most insupportable burdens, but seem to have believed it of divine
origin. It was thought by them to have been established by the god
Washington, whose worship, with that of such _dii minores_ as Gufferson,
Jaxon and Lincon (identical probably with the Hebru Abrem) runs like a
shining thread through all the warp and woof of the stuff that garmented
their moral nakedness. Some stones, very curiously inscribed in many
tongues, were found by the explorer Droyhors in the wilderness bordering
the river Bhitt (supposed by him to be the ancient Potomac) as lately as
the reign of Barukam IV. These stones appear to be fragments of a monument
or temple erected to the glory of Washington in his divine character of
Founder and Preserver of republican institutions. If this tutelary deity
of the ancient Americans really invented representative government they
were not the first by many to whom he imparted the malign secret of its
inauguration and denied that of its maintenance.

Although many of the causes which finally, in combination, brought about
the downfall of the great American republic were in operation from the
beginning--being, as has been said, inherent in the system--it was not
until the year 1995 (as the ancients for some reason not now known
reckoned time) that the collapse of the vast, formless fabric was
complete. In that year the defeat and massacre of the last army of law and
order in the lava beds of California extinguished the final fires of
enlightened patriotism and quenched in blood the monarchical revival.
Thenceforth armed opposition to anarchy was confined to desultory and
insignificant warfare waged by small gangs of mercenaries in the service
of wealthy individuals and equally feeble bands of prescripts fighting for
their lives. In that year, too, "the Three Presidents" were driven from
their capitals, Cincinnati, New Orleans and Duluth, their armies
dissolving by desertion and themselves meeting death at the hands of the
populace.

The turbulent period between 1920 and 1995, with its incalculable waste of
blood and treasure, its dreadful conflicts of armies and more dreadful
massacres by passionate mobs, its kaleidoscopic changes of government and
incessant effacement and redrawing of boundaries of states, its
interminable tale of political assassinations and proscriptions--all the
horrors incident to intestinal wars of a naturally lawless race--had so
exhausted and dispirited the surviving protagonists of legitimate
government that they could make no further head against the inevitable,
and were glad indeed and most fortunate to accept life on any terms that
they could obtain.

But the purpose of this sketch is not bald narration of historic fact, but
examination of antecedent germinal conditions; not to recount calamitous
events familiar to students of that faulty civilization, but to trace, as
well as the meager record will permit, the genesis and development of the
causes that brought them about. Historians in our time have left little
undone in the matter of narration of political and military phenomena. In
Golpek's "Decline and Fall of the American Republics," in Soseby's
"History of Political Fallacies," in Holobom's "Monarchical Renasence,"
and notably in Gunkux's immortal work, "The Rise, Progress, Failure and
Extinction of The Connected States of America" the fruits of research have
been garnered, a considerable harvest. The events are set forth with such
conscientiousness and particularity as to have exhausted the possibilities
of narration. It remains only to expound causes and point the awful moral.

To a delinquent observation it may seem needless to point out the inherent
defects of a system of government which the logic of events has swept like
political rubbish from the face of the earth, but we must not forget that
ages before the inception of the American republics and that of France and
Ireland this form of government had been discredited by emphatic failures
among the most enlightened and powerful nations of antiquity: the Greeks,
the Romans, and long before them (as we now know) the Egyptians and the
Chinese. To the lesson of these failures the founders of the eighteenth
and nineteenth century republics were blind and deaf. Have we then reason
to believe that our posterity will be wiser because instructed by a
greater number of examples? And is the number of examples which they will
have in memory really greater? Already the instances of China, Egypt,
Greece and Rome are almost lost in the mists of antiquity; they are known,
except by infrequent report, to the archæologist only, and but dimly and
uncertainly to him. The brief and imperfect record of yesterdays which we
call History is like that traveling vine of India which, taking new root
as it advances, decays at one end while it grows at the other, and so is
constantly perishing and finally lost in all the spaces which it has
over-passed.

From the few and precious writings that have descended to us from the
early period of the American republic we get a clear if fragmentary view
of the disorders and lawlessness affecting that strange and unhappy
nation. Leaving the historically famous "labor troubles" for more extended
consideration, we may summarize here a few of the results of hardly more
than a century and a quarter of "self-government" as it existed on this
continent just previously to the awful end. At the beginning of the
"twentieth century" a careful study by trustworthy contemporary
statisticians of the public records and those apparently private ones
known as "newspapers" showed that in a population of about 80,000,000 the
annual number of homicides was not less than 10,000; and this continued
year after year to increase, not only absolutely, but proportionately,
until, in the words of Dumbleshaw, who is thought to have written his
famous "Memoirs of a Survivor" in the year 1908 of their era, "it would
seem that the practice of suicide is a needless custom, for if a man but
have patience his neighbor is sure to put him out of his misery." Of the
10,000 assassins less than three per cent. were punished, further than by
incidental imprisonment if unable to give bail while awaiting trial. If
the chief end of government is the citizen's security of life and his
protection from aggression, what kind of government do these appalling
figures disclose? Yet so infatuated with their imaginary "liberty" were
these singular people that the contemplation of all this crime abated
nothing of the volume and persistence of their patriotic ululations, and
affected not their faith in the perfection of their system. They were like
a man standing on a rock already submerged by the rising tide, and calling
to his neighbors on adjacent cliffs to observe his superior security.

When three men engage in an undertaking in which they have an equal
interest, and in the direction of which they have equal power, it
necessarily results that any action approved by two of them, with or
without the assent of the third, will be taken. This is called--or was
called when it was an accepted principle in political and other
affairs--"the rule of the majority." Evidently, under the malign
conditions supposed, it is the only practicable plan of getting anything
done. A and B rule and overrule C, not because they ought, but because
they can; not because they are wiser, but because they are stronger. In
order to avoid a conflict in which he is sure to be worsted, C submits as
soon as the vote is taken. C is as likely to be right as A and B; nay,
that eminent ancient philosopher, Professor Richard A. Proctor (or
Proroctor, as the learned now spell the name), has clearly shown by the
law of probabilities that any one of the three, all being of the same
intelligence, is far likelier to be right than the other two.

It is thus that the "rule of the majority" as a political system is
established. It is in essence nothing but the discredited and
discreditable principle that "might makes right"; but early in the life of
a republic this essential character of government by majority is not seen.
The habit of submitting all questions of policy to the arbitrament of
counting noses and assenting without question to the result invests the
ordeal with a seeming sanctity, and what was at first obeyed as the
command of power comes to be revered as the oracle of wisdom. The
innumerable instances--such as the famous ones of Galileo and Keeley--in
which one man has been right and all the rest of the race wrong, are
overlooked, or their significance missed, and "public opinion" is followed
as a divine and infallible guide through every bog into which it blindly
stumbles and over every precipice in its fortuitous path. Clearly, sooner
or later will be encountered a bog that will smother or a precipice that
will crush. Thoroughly to apprehend the absurdity of the ancient faith in
the wisdom of majorities let the loyal reader try to fancy our gracious
Sovereign by any possibility wrong, or his unanimous Ministry by any
possibility right!

During the latter half of the "nineteenth century" there arose in the
Connected States a political element opposed to all government, which
frankly declared its object to be anarchy. This astonishing heresy was not
of indigenous growth: its seeds were imported from Europe by the
emigration or banishment thence of criminals congenitally incapable of
understanding and valuing the blessings of monarchical institutions, and
whose method of protest was murder. The governments against which they
conspired in their native lands were too strong in authority and too
enlightened in policy for them to overthrow. Hundreds of them were put to
death, thousands imprisoned and sent into exile. But in America, whither
those who escaped fled for safety, they found conditions entirely
favorable to the prosecution of their designs.

A revered fetish of the Americans was "freedom of speech": it was believed
that if bad men were permitted to proclaim their evil wishes they would go
no further in the direction of executing them--that if they might say what
they would like to do they would not care to do it. The close relation
between speech and action was not understood. Because the Americans
themselves had long been accustomed, in their own political debates and
discussions, to the use of unmeaning declamations and threats which they
had no intention of executing, they reasoned that others were like them,
and attributed to the menaces of these desperate and earnest outcasts no
greater importance than to their own. They thought also that the foreign
anarchists, having exchanged the tyranny of kings for that of majorities,
would be content with their new and better lot and become in time good and
law-abiding citizens.

The anarchist of that far day (thanks to the firm hands of our gracious
sovereigns the species is now extinct) was a very different person from
what our infatuated ancestors imagined him. He struck at government, not
because it was bad, but because it was government. He hated authority, not
for its tyranny, but for its power. And in order to make this plain to
observation he frequently chose his victim from amongst those whose rule
was most conspicuously benign.

Of the seven early Presidents of the American republic who perished by
assassination no fewer than four were slain by anarchists with no personal
wrongs to impel them to the deed--nothing but an implacable hostility to
law and authority. The fifth victim, indeed, was a notorious demagogue who
had pardoned the assassin of the fourth.

The field of the anarchist's greatest activity was always a republic, not
only to emphasize his impartial hatred of all government, but because of
the inherent feebleness of that form of government, its inability to
protect itself against any kind of aggression by any considerable number
of its people having a common malevolent purpose. In a republic the crust
that confined the fires of violence and sedition was thinnest.

No improvement in the fortunes of the original anarchists through
immigration to what was then called the New World would have made them
good citizens. From centuries of secret war against particular forms of
authority in their own countries they had inherited a bitter antagonism to
all authority, even the most beneficent. In their new home they were worse
than in their old. In the sunshine of opportunity the rank and sickly
growth of their perverted natures became hardy, vigorous, bore fruit. They
surrounded themselves with proselytes from the ranks of the idle, the
vicious, the unsuccessful. They stimulated and organized discontent. Every
one of them became a center of moral and political contagion. To those as
yet unprepared to accept anarchy was offered the milder dogma of
Socialism, and to those even weaker in the faith something vaguely called
Reform. Each was initiated into that degree to which the induration of his
conscience and the character of his discontent made him eligible, and in
which he could be most serviceable, the body of the people still cheating
themselves with the false sense of security begotten of the belief that
they were somehow exempt from the operation of all agencies inimical to
their national welfare and integrity. Human nature, they thought, was
different in the West from what it was in the East: in the New World the
old causes would not have the old effects: a republic had some inherent
vitality of its own, entirely independent of any action intended to keep
it alive. They felt that words and phrases had some talismanic power, and
charmed themselves asleep by repeating "liberty," "all men equal before
the law," "dictates of conscience," "free speech" and all manner of such
incantation to exorcise the spirits of the night. And when they could no
longer close their eyes to the dangers environing them; when they saw at
last that what they had mistaken for the magic power of their form of
government and its assured security was really its radical weakness and
subjective peril--they found their laws inadequate to repression of the
enemy, the enemy too strong to permit the enactment of adequate laws. The
belief that a malcontent armed with freedom of speech, a newspaper, a vote
and a rifle is less dangerous than a malcontent with a still tongue in his
head, empty hands and under police surveillance was abandoned, but all too
late. From its fatuous dream the nation was awakened by the noise of arms,
the shrieks of women and the red glare of burning cities.

Beginning with the slaughter at St. Louis on a night in the year 1920,
when no fewer than twenty-two thousand citizens were slain in the streets
and half the city destroyed, massacre followed massacre with frightful
rapidity. New York fell in the month following, many thousands of its
inhabitants escaping fire and sword only to be driven into the bay and
drowned, "the roaring of the water in their ears," says Bardeal,
"augmented by the hoarse clamor of their red-handed pursuers, whose
blood-thirst was unsated by the sea." A week later Washington was
destroyed, with all its public buildings and archives; the President and
his Ministry were slain, Congress was dispersed, and an unknown number of
officials and private citizens perished. Of all the principal cities only
Chicago and San Francisco escaped. The people of the former were all
anarchists and the latter was valorously and successfully defended by the
Chinese.

The urban anarchists were eventually subdued and some semblance of order
was restored, but greater woes and sharper shames awaited this unhappy
nation, as we shall see.

In turning from this branch of our subject to consider the causes of the
failure and bloody disruption of the great American republic other than
those inherent in the form of government, it may not be altogether
unprofitable to glance briefly at what seems to a superficial view the
inconsistent phenomenon of great material prosperity. It is not to be
denied that this unfortunate people was at one time singularly prosperous,
in so far as national wealth is a measure and proof of prosperity. Among
nations it was the richest nation. But at how great a sacrifice of better
things was its wealth obtained! By the neglect of all education except
that crude, elementary sort which fits men for the coarse delights of
business and affairs but confers no capacity of rational enjoyment; by
exalting the worth of wealth and making it the test and touchstone of
merit; by ignoring art, scorning literature and despising science, except
as these might contribute to the glutting of the purse; by setting up and
maintaining an artificial standard of morals which condoned all offenses
against the property and peace of every one but the condoner; by
pitilessly crushing out of their natures every sentiment and aspiration
unconnected with accumulation of property, these civilized savages and
commercial barbarians attained their sordid end. Before they had rounded
the first half-century of their existence as a nation they had sunk so low
in the scale of morality that it was considered nothing discreditable to
take the hand and even visit the house of a man who had grown rich by
means notoriously corrupt and dishonorable; and Harley declares that even
the editors and writers of newspapers, after fiercely assailing such men
in their journals, would be seen "hobnobbing" with them in public places.
(The nature of the social ceremony named the "hobnob" is not now
understood, but it is known that it was a sign of amity and favor.) When
men or nations devote all the powers of their minds and bodies to the
heaping up of wealth, wealth is heaped up. But what avails it? It may not
be amiss to quote here the words of one of the greatest of the ancients
whose works--fragmentary, alas--have come down to us.

"Wealth has accumulated itself into masses; and poverty, also in
accumulation enough, lies impassably separated from it; opposed,
uncommunicating, like forces in positive and negative poles. The gods of
this lower world sit aloft on glittering thrones, less happy than
Epicurus's gods, but as indolent, as impotent; while the boundless living
chaos of ignorance and hunger welters, terrific in its dark fury, under
their feet. How much among us might be likened to a whited sepulcher:
outwardly all pomp and strength, but inwardly full of horror and despair
and dead men's bones! Iron highways, with their wains fire-winged, are
uniting all the ends of the land; quays and moles, with their innumerable
stately fleets, tame the ocean into one pliant bearer of burdens; labor's
thousand arms, of sinew and of metal, all-conquering everywhere, from the
tops of the mount down to the depths of the mine and the caverns of the
sea, ply unweariedly for the service of man; yet man remains unserved. He
has subdued this planet, his habitation and inheritance, yet reaps no
profit from the victory. Sad to look upon: in the highest stage of
civilization nine-tenths of mankind have to struggle in the lowest battle
of savage or even animal man--the battle against famine. Countries are
rich, prosperous in all manner of increase, beyond example; but the men of
these countries are poor, needier than ever of all sustenance, outward and
inward; of belief, of knowledge, of money, of food."

To this somber picture of American "prosperity" in the nineteenth century
nothing of worth can be added by the most inspired artist. Let us simply
inscribe upon the gloomy canvas the memorable words of an illustrious poet
of the period:

  That country speeds to an untoward fate,
  Where men are trivial and gold is great.

One of the most "sacred" rights of the ancient American was the trial of
an accused person by "a jury of his peers." This, in America, was a right
secured to him by a written constitution. It was almost universally
believed to have had its origin in Magna Carta, a famous document which
certain rebellious noblemen of another country had compelled their
sovereign to sign under a threat of death. That celebrated "bill of
rights" has not all come down to us, but researches of the learned have
made it certain that it contained no mention of trial by jury, which,
indeed, was unknown to its authors. The words _judicium parium_ meant to
them something entirely different--the judgment of the entire community of
freemen. The words and the practice they represented antedated Magna Carta
by many centuries and were common to the Franks and other Germanic
nations, amongst whom a trial "jury" consisted of persons having a
knowledge of the matter to be determined--persons who in later times were
called "witnesses" and rigorously excluded from the seats of judgment.

It is difficult to conceive a more clumsy and ineffective machinery for
ascertaining truth and doing justice than a jury of twelve men of the
average intelligence, even among ourselves. What, then, must this device
have been among the half-civilized tribes of the Connected States of
America! Nay, the case is worse than that, for it was the practice to
prevent men of even the average intelligence from serving as jurors.
Jurors had to be residents of the locality of the crime charged, and every
crime was made a matter of public notoriety long before the accused was
brought to trial; yet, as a rule, he who had read or talked about the
trial was held disqualified to serve. This in a country where, when a man
who could read was not reading about local crimes he was talking about
them, or if doing neither was doing something worse!

To the twelve men so chosen the opposing lawyers addressed their
disingenuous pleas and for their consideration the witnesses presented
their carefully rehearsed testimony, most of it false. So unintelligent
were these juries that a great part of the time in every trial was
consumed in keeping from them certain kinds of evidence with which they
could not be trusted; yet the lawyers were permitted to submit to them any
kind of misleading argument that they pleased and fortify it with
innuendoes without relevancy and logic without sense. Appeals to their
passions, their sympathies, their prejudices, were regarded as legitimate
influences and tolerated by the judges on the theory that each side's
offenses would about offset those of the other. In a criminal case it was
expected that the prosecutor would declare repeatedly and in the most
solemn manner his belief in the guilt of the person accused, and that the
attorney for the defense would affirm with equal gravity his conviction of
his client's innocence. How could they impress the jury with a belief
which they did not themselves venture to affirm? It is not recorded that
any lawyer ever rebelled against the iron authority of these conditions
and stood for truth and conscience. They were, indeed, the conditions of
his existence as a lawyer, a fact which they easily persuaded themselves
mitigated the baseness of their obedience to them, or justified it
altogether.

The judges, as a rule, were no better, for before they could become judges
they must have been advocates, with an advocate's fatal disabilities of
judgment. Most of them depended for their office upon the favor of the
people, which, also, was fatal to the independence, the dignity and the
impartiality to which they laid so solemn claim. In their decisions they
favored, so far as they dared, every interest, class or person powerful
enough to help or hurt them in an election. Holding their high office by
so precarious a tenure, they were under strong temptation to enrich
themselves from the serviceable purses of wealthy litigants, and in
disregard of justice to cultivate the favor of the attorneys practicing
before them, and before whom they might soon be compelled themselves to
practice.

In the higher courts of the land, where juries were unknown and appointed
judges held their seats for life, these awful conditions did not obtain,
and there Justice might have been content to dwell, and there she actually
did sometimes set her foot. Unfortunately, the great judges had the
consciences of their education. They had crept to place through the slime
of the lower courts and their robes of office bore the damnatory evidence.
Unfortunately, too, the attorneys, the jury habit strong upon them,
brought into the superior tribunals the moral characteristics and
professional methods acquired in the lower. Instead of assisting the
judges to ascertain the truth and the law, they cheated in argument and
took liberties with fact, deceiving the court whenever they deemed it to
the interest of their cause to do so, and as willingly won by a
technicality or a trick as by the justice of their contention and their
ability in supporting it. Altogether, the entire judicial system of the
Connected States of America was inefficient, disreputable, corrupt.

The result might easily have been foreseen and doubtless was predicted by
patriots whose admonitions have not come down to us. Denied protection of
the law, neither property nor life was safe. Greed filled his coffers from
the meager hoards of Thrift, private vengeance took the place of legal
redress, mad multitudes rioted and slew with virtual immunity from
punishment or blame, and the land was red with crime.

A singular phenomenon of the time was the immunity of criminal women.
Among the Americans woman held a place unique in the history of nations.
If not actually worshiped as a deity, as some historians, among them the
great Sagab-Joffoy, have affirmed, she was at least regarded with feelings
of veneration which the modern mind has a difficulty in comprehending.
Some degree of compassion for her mental inferiority, some degree of
forbearance toward her infirmities of temper, some degree of immunity for
the offenses which these peculiarities entail--these are common to all
peoples above the grade of barbarians. In ancient America these chivalrous
sentiments found open and lawful expression only in relieving woman of the
burden of participation in political and military service; the laws gave
her no express exemption from responsibility for crime. When she murdered,
she was arrested; when arrested, brought to trial--though the origin and
meaning of those observances are not now known. Gunkux, whose researches
into the jurisprudence of antiquity enable him to speak with commanding
authority of many things, gives us here nothing better than the conjecture
that the trial of women for murder, in the nineteenth century and a part
of the twentieth, was the survival of an earlier custom of actually
convicting and punishing them, but it seems extremely improbable that a
people that once put its female assassins to death would ever have
relinquished the obvious advantages of the practice while retaining with
purposeless tenacity some of its costly preliminary forms. Whatever may
have been the reason, the custom was observed with all the gravity of a
serious intention. Gunkux professes knowledge of one or two instances (he
does not name his authorities) where matters went so far as conviction and
sentence, and adds that the mischievous sentimentalists who had always
lent themselves to the solemn jest by protestations of great
_vraisemblance_ against "the judicial killing of women," became really
alarmed and filled the land with their lamentations. Among the phenomena
of brazen effrontery he classes the fact that some of these loud
protagonists of the right of women to assassinate unpunished were
themselves women! Howbeit, the sentences, if ever pronounced, were never
executed, and during the first quarter of the twentieth century the
meaningless custom of bringing female assassins to trial was abandoned.
What the effect was of their exemption from this considerable
inconvenience we have not the data to conjecture, unless we understand as
an allusion to it some otherwise obscure words of the famous Edward Bok,
the only writer of the period whose work has survived. In his monumental
essay on barbarous penology, entitled "Slapping the Wrist," he couples
"woman's emancipation from the trammels of law" and "man's better prospect
of death" in a way that some have construed as meaning that he regarded
them as cause and effect. It must be said, however, that this
interpretation finds no support in the general character of his writing,
which is exceedingly humane, refined and womanly.

It has been said that the writings of this great man are the only
surviving work of his period, but of that we are not altogether sure.
There exists a fragment of an anonymous essay on woman's legal
responsibility which many Americologists think belongs to the beginning of
the twentieth century. Certainly it could not have been written later than
the middle of it, for at that time woman had been definitely released from
any responsibility to any law but that of her own will. The essay is an
argument against even such imperfect exemption as she had in its author's
time.

"It has been urged," the writer says, "that women, being less rational and
more emotional than men, should not be held accountable in the same
degree. To this it may be answered that punishment for crime is not
intended to be retaliatory, but admonitory and deterrent. It is,
therefore, peculiarly necessary to those not easily reached by other forms
of warning and dissuasion. Control of the wayward is not to be sought in
reduction of restraints, but in their multiplication. One who cannot be
curbed by reason may be curbed by fear, a familiar truth which lies at the
foundation of all penological systems. The argument for exemption of women
is equally cogent for exemption of habitual criminals, for they too are
abnormally inaccessible to reason, abnormally disposed to obedience to the
suasion of their unregulated impulses and passions. To free them from the
restraints of the fear of punishment would be a bold innovation which has
as yet found no respectable proponent outside their own class.

"Very recently this dangerous enlargement of the meaning of the phrase
'emancipation of woman' has been fortified with a strange advocacy by the
female 'champions of their sex.' Their argument runs this way: 'We are
denied a voice in the making of the laws relating to infliction of the
death penalty; it is unjust to hold us to an accountability to which we
have not assented.' Of course this argument is as broad as the entire body
of law; it amounts to nothing less than a demand for general immunity from
all laws, for to none of them has woman's assent been asked or given. But
let us consider this amazing claim with reference only to the proposal in
the service and promotion of which it is now urged: exemption of women
from the death penalty for murder. In the last analysis it is seen to be a
simple demand for compensation. It says: 'You owe us a _solatium_. Since
you deny us the right to vote, you should give us the right to
assassinate. We do not appraise it at so high a valuation as the other
franchise, but we do value it.'

"Apparently they do: without legal, but with virtual, immunity from
punishment, the women of this country take an average of one thousand
lives annually, nine in ten being the lives of men. Juries of men, incited
and sustained by public opinion, have actually deprived every adult male
American of the right to live. If the death of any man is desired by any
woman for any reason he is without protection. She has only to kill him
and say that he wronged or insulted her. Certain almost incredible recent
instances prove that no woman is too base for immunity, no crime against
life sufficiently rich in all the elements of depravity to compel a
conviction of the assassin, or, if she is convicted and sentenced, her
punishment by the public executioner."

In this interesting fragment, quoted by Bogul in his "History of an
Extinct Civilization," we learn something of the shame and peril of
American citizenship under institutions which, not having run their
foreordained course to the unhappy end, were still in some degree
supportable. What these institutions became afterward is a familiar story.
It is true that the law of trial by jury was repealed. It had broken down,
but not until it had sapped the whole nation's respect for all law, for
all forms of authority, for order and private virtues. The people whose
rude forefathers in another land it had served roughly to protect against
their tyrants, it had lamentably failed to protect against themselves, and
when in madness they swept it away, it was not as one renouncing an error,
but as one impatient of the truth which the error is still believed to
contain. They flung it away, not as an ineffectual restraint, but as a
restraint; not because it was no longer an instrument of justice for the
determination of truth, but because they feared that it might again become
such. In brief, trial by jury was abolished only when it had provoked
anarchy.

Before turning to another phase of this ancient civilization I cannot
forbear to relate, after the learned and ingenious Gunkux, the only known
instance of a public irony expressing itself in the sculptor's noble art.
In the ancient city of Hohokus once stood a monument of colossal size and
impressive dignity. It was erected by public subscription to the memory of
a man whose only distinction consisted in a single term of service as a
juror in a famous murder trial, the details of which have not come down to
us. This occupied the court and held public attention for many weeks,
being bitterly contested by both prosecution and defense. When at last it
was given to the jury by the judge in the most celebrated charge that had
ever been delivered from the bench, a ballot was taken at once. The jury
stood eleven for acquittal to one for conviction. And so it stood at every
ballot of the more than fifty that were taken during the fortnight that
the jury was locked up for deliberation. Moreover, the dissenting juror
would not argue the matter; he would listen with patient attention while
his eleven indignant opponents thundered their opinions into his ears,
even when they supported them with threats of personal violence; but not a
word would he say. At last a disagreement was formally entered, the jury
discharged and the obstinate juror chased from the city by the maddened
populace. Despairing of success in another trial and privately admitting
his belief in the prisoner's innocence, the public prosecutor moved for
his release, which the judge ordered with remarks plainly implying his own
belief that the wrong man had been tried.

Years afterward the accused person died confessing his guilt, and a little
later one of the jurors who had been sworn to try the case admitted that
he had attended the trial on the first day only, having been personated
during the rest of the proceedings by a twin brother, the obstinate
member, who was a deaf-mute.

The monument to this eminent public servant was overthrown and destroyed
by an earthquake in the year 2342.

One of the causes of that popular discontent which brought about the
stupendous events resulting in the disruption of the great republic,
historians and archæologists are agreed in reckoning "insurance." Of the
exact nature of that factor in the problem of the national life of that
distant day we are imperfectly informed; many of its details have perished
from the record, yet its outlines loom large through the mist of ages and
can be traced with greater precision than is possible in many more
important matters.

In the monumental work of Professor Golunk-Dorsto ("Some Account of the
Insurance Delusion in Ancient America") we have its most considerable
modern exposition; and Gakler's well-known volume, "The Follies of
Antiquity," contains much interesting matter relating to it. From these
and other sources the student of human unreason can reconstruct that
astounding fallacy of insurance as, from three joints of its tail, the
great naturalist Bogramus restored the ancient elephant, from hoof to
horn.

The game of insurance, as practiced by the ancient Americans (and, as
Gakler conjectures, by some of the tribesmen of Europe), was gambling,
pure and simple, despite the sentimental character that its proponents
sought to impress upon some forms of it for the greater prosperity of
their dealings with its dupes. Essentially, it was a bet between the
insurer and the insured. The number of ways in which the wager was
made--all devised by the insurer--was almost infinite, but in none of them
was there a departure from the intrinsic nature of the transaction as seen
in its simplest, frankest form, which we shall here expound.

To those unlearned in the economical institutions of antiquity it is
necessary to explain that in ancient America, long prior to the disastrous
Japanese war, individual ownership of property was unrestricted; every
person was permitted to get as much as he was able, and to hold it as his
own without regard to his needs, or whether he made any good use of it or
not. By some plan of distribution not now understood even the habitable
surface of the earth, with the minerals beneath, was parceled out among
the favored few, and there was really no place except at sea where
children of the others could lawfully be born. Upon a part of the dry land
that he had been able to acquire, or had leased from another for the
purpose, a man would build a house worth, say, ten thousand _drusoes_.
(The ancient unit of value was the "dollar," but nothing is now known as
to its actual worth.) Long before the building was complete the owner was
beset by "touts" and "cappers" of the insurance game, who poured into his
ears the most ingenious expositions of the advantages of betting that it
would burn down--for with incredible fatuity the people of that time
continued, generation after generation, to build inflammable habitations.
The persons whom the capper represented--they called themselves an
"insurance company"--stood ready to accept the bet, a fact which seems to
have generated no suspicion in the mind of the house-owner. Theoretically,
of course, if the house did burn payment of the wager would partly or
wholly recoup the winner of the bet for the loss of his house, but in fact
the result of the transaction was commonly very different. For the
privilege of betting that his property would be destroyed by fire the
owner had to pay to the gentleman betting that it would not be, a certain
percentage of its value every year, called a "premium." The amount of this
was determined by the company, which employed statisticians and actuaries
to fix it at such a sum that, according to the law of probabilities, long
before the house was "due to burn," the company would have received more
than the value of it in premiums. In other words, the owner of the house
would himself supply the money to pay his bet, and a good deal more.

But how, it may be asked, could the company's actuary know that the man's
house would last until he had paid in more than its insured value in
premiums--more, that is to say, than the company would have to pay back?
He could not, but from his statistics he could know how many houses in ten
thousand of that kind burned in their first year, how many in their
second, their third, and so on. That was all that he needed to know, the
house-owners knowing nothing about it. He fixed his rates according to the
facts, and the occasional loss of a bet in an individual instance did not
affect the certainty of a general winning. Like other professional
gamblers, the company expected to lose sometimes, yet knew that in the
long run it _must_ win; which meant that in any special case it would
_probably_ win. With a thousand gambling games open to him in which the
chances were equal, the infatuated dupe chose to "sit into" one where they
were against him! Deceived by the cappers' fairy tales, dazed by the
complex and incomprehensible "calculations" put forth for his undoing, and
having ever in the ear of his imagination the crackle and roar of the
impoverishing flames, he grasped at the hope of beating--in an unwelcome
way, it is true--"the man that kept the table." He must have known for a
certainty that if the company could afford to insure him he could not
afford to let it. He must have known that the whole body of the insured
paid to the insurers more than the insurers paid to them; otherwise the
business could not have been conducted. This they cheerfully admitted;
indeed, they proudly affirmed it. In fact, insurance companies were the
only professional gamblers that had the incredible hardihood to parade
their enormous winnings as an inducement to play against their game. These
winnings ("assets," they called them) proved their ability, they said, to
pay when they lost; and that was indubitably true. What they did not
prove, unfortunately, was the _will_ to pay, which from the imperfect
court records of the period that have come down to us, appears frequently
to have been lacking. Gakler relates that in the instance of the city of
San Francisco (somewhat doubtfully identified by Macronus as the modern
fishing-village of Gharoo) the disinclination of the insurance companies
to pay their bets had the most momentous consequences.

In the year 1906 San Francisco was totally destroyed by fire. The
conflagration was caused by the friction of a pig scratching itself
against an angle of a wooden building. More than one hundred thousand
persons perished, and the loss of property is estimated by Kobo-Dogarque
at one and a half million _drusoes_. On more than two-thirds of this
enormous sum the insurance companies had laid bets, and the greater part
of it they refused to pay. In justification they pointed out that the deed
performed by the pig was "an act of God," who in the analogous instance of
the express companies had been specifically forbidden to take any action
affecting the interests of parties to a contract, or the result of an
agreed undertaking.

In the ensuing litigation their attorneys cited two notable precedents. A
few years before the San Francisco disaster, another American city had
experienced a similar one through the upsetting of a lamp by the kick of a
cow. In that case, also, the insurance companies had successfully denied
their liability on the ground that the cow, manifestly incited by some
supernatural power, had unlawfully influenced the result of a wager to
which she was not a party. The companies defendant had contended that the
recourse of the property-owners was against, not them, but the owner of
the cow. In his decision sustaining that view and dismissing the case, a
learned judge (afterward president of one of the defendant companies) had
in the legal phraseology of the period pronounced the action of the cow an
obvious and flagrant instance of unwarrantable intervention. Kobo-Dogarque
believes that this decision was afterward reversed by an appellate court
of contrary political complexion and the companies were compelled to
compromise, but of this there is no record. It is certain that in the San
Francisco case the precedent was urged.

Another precedent which the companies cited with particular emphasis
related to an unfortunate occurrence at a famous millionaires' club in
London, the capital of the renowned king, John Bui. A gentleman passing in
the street fell in a fit and was carried into the club in convulsions. Two
members promptly made a bet upon his life. A physician who chanced to be
present set to work upon the patient, when one of the members who had laid
the wager came forward and restrained him, saying: "Sir, I beg that you
will attend to your own business. I have my money on that fit."

Doubtless these two notable precedents did not constitute the entire case
of the defendants in the San Francisco insurance litigation, but the
additional pleas are lost to us.

Of the many forms of gambling known as insurance that called life
insurance appears to have been the most vicious. In essence it was the
same as fire insurance, marine insurance, accident insurance and so forth,
with an added offensiveness in that it was a betting on human
lives--commonly by the policy-holder on lives that should have been held
most sacred and altogether immune from the taint of traffic. In point of
practical operation this ghastly business was characterized by a more
fierce and flagrant dishonesty than any of its kindred pursuits. To such
lengths of robbery did the managers go that at last the patience of the
public was exhausted and a comparatively trivial occurrence fired the
combustible elements of popular indignation to a white heat in which the
entire insurance business of the country was burned out of existence,
together with all the gamblers who had invented and conducted it. The
president of one of the companies was walking one morning in a street of
New York, when he had the bad luck to step on the tail of a dog and was
bitten in retaliation. Frenzied by the pain of the wound, he gave the
creature a savage kick and it ran howling toward a group of idlers in
front of a grocery store. In ancient America the dog was a sacred animal,
worshiped by all sorts and conditions of tribesmen. The idlers at once
raised a great cry, and setting upon the offender beat him so that he
died.

Their act was infectious: men, women and children trooped out of their
dwellings by thousands to join them, brandishing whatever weapons they
could snatch, and uttering wild cries of vengeance. This formidable mob
overpowered the police, and marching from one insurance office to another,
successively demolished them all, slew such officers as they could lay
hands on, and chased the fugitive survivors into the sea, "where," says a
quaint chronicle of the time, "they were eaten by their kindred, the
sharks." This carnival of violence continued all the day, and at set of
sun not one person connected with any form of insurance remained alive.

Ferocious and bloody as was the massacre, it was only the beginning. As
the news of it went blazing and coruscating along the wires by which
intelligence was then conveyed across the country, city after city caught
the contagion. Everywhere, even in the small hamlets and the agricultural
districts, the dupes rose against their dupers. The smoldering resentment
of years burst into flame, and within a week all that was left of
insurance in America was the record of a monstrous and cruel delusion
written in the blood of its promoters.

A remarkable feature of the crude and primitive civilization of the
Americans was their religion. This was polytheistic, as is that of all
backward peoples, and among their minor deities were their own women. This
has been disputed by respectable authorities, among them Gunkux and the
younger Kekler, but the weight of archæological testimony is against them,
for, as Sagab-Joffy ingeniously points out, none of less than divine rank
would by even the lowest tribes be given unrestricted license to kill.
Among the Americans woman, as already pointed out, indubitably had that
freedom, and exercised it with terrible effect, a fact which makes the
matter of their religion pertinent to the purpose of this monograph. If
ever an American woman was punished by law for murder of a man no record
of the fact is found; whereas, such American literature as we possess is
full of the most enthusiastic adulation of the impossible virtues and
imaginary graces of the human female. One writer even goes to the length
of affirming that respect for the sex is the foundation of political
stability, the cornerstone of civil and religious liberty! After the
break-up of the republic and the savage intertribal wars that followed,
Gyneolatry was an exhausted cult and woman was relegated to her old state
of benign subjection.

Unfortunately, we know little of the means of travel in ancient America,
other than the names. It seems to have been done mainly by what were
called "railroads," upon which wealthy associations of men transported
their fellow-citizens in some kind of vehicle at a low speed, seldom
exceeding fifty or sixty miles an hour, as distance and time were then
reckoned--about equal to seven _kaltabs_ a _grillog_. Notwithstanding this
slow movement of the vehicles, the number and fatality of accidents were
incredible. In the Zopetroq Museum of Archæology is preserved an official
report (found in the excavations made by Droyhors on the supposed site of
Washington) of a Government Commission of the Connected States. From that
document we learn that in the year 1907 of their era the railroads of the
country killed 5,000 persons and wounded 72,286--a mortality which is said
by the commissioners to be twice that of the battle of Gettysburg,
concerning which we know nothing but the name. This was about the annual
average of railroad casualties of the period, and if it provoked comment
it at least led to no reform, for at a later period we find the mortality
even greater. That it was preventable is shown by the fact that in the
same year the railroads of Great Britain, where the speed was greater and
the intervals between vehicles less, killed only one passenger. It was a
difference of government: Great Britain had a government that governed;
America had not. Happily for humanity, the kind of government that does
not govern, self-government, "government of the people, by the people and
for the people" (to use a meaningless paradox of that time) has perished
from the face of the earth.

An inherent weakness in republican government was that it assumed the
honesty and intelligence of the majority, "the masses," who were neither
honest nor intelligent. It would doubtless have been an excellent
government for a people so good and wise as to need none. In a country
having such a system the leaders, the politicians, must necessarily all be
demagogues, for they can attain to place and power by no other method than
flattery of the people and subserviency to the will of the majority. In
all the ancient American political literature we look in vain for a single
utterance of truth and reason regarding these matters. In none of it is a
hint that the multitude was ignorant and vicious, as we know it to have
been, and as it must necessarily be in any country, to whatever high
average of intelligence and morality the people attain; for "intelligence"
and "morality" are comparative terms, the standard of comparison being the
intelligence and morality of the wisest and best, who must always be the
few. Whatever general advance is made, those not at the head are
behind--are ignorant and immoral according to the new standard, and unfit
to control in the higher and broader policies demanded by the progress
made. Where there is true and general progress the philosopher of
yesterday would be the ignoramus of to-day, the honorable of one
generation the vicious of another. The peasant of our time is incomparably
superior to the statesman of ancient America, yet he is unfit to govern,
for there are others more fit.

That a body of men can be wiser than its wisest member seems to the modern
understanding so obvious and puerile an error that it is inconceivable
that any people, even the most primitive, could ever have entertained it;
yet we know that in America it was a fixed and steadfast political faith.
The people of that day did not, apparently, attempt to explain how the
additional wisdom was acquired by merely assembling in council, as in
their "legislatures"; they seem to have assumed that it was so, and to
have based their entire governmental system upon that assumption, with
never a suspicion of its fallacy. It is like assuming that a mountain
range is higher than its highest peak. In the words of Golpek, "The early
Americans believed that units of intelligence were addable quantities," or
as Soseby more wittily puts it, "They thought that in a combination of
idiocies they had the secret of sanity."

The Americans, as has been said, never learned that even among themselves
majorities ruled, not because they ought, but because they could--not
because they were wise, but because they were strong. The count of noses
determined, not the better policy, but the more powerful party. The weaker
submitted, as a rule, for it had to or risk a war in which it would be at
a disadvantage. Yet in all the early years of the republic they seem
honestly to have dignified their submission as "respect for the popular
verdict." They even quoted from the Latin language the sentiment that "the
voice of the people is the voice of God." And this hideous blasphemy was
as glib upon the lips of those who, without change of mind, were defeated
at the polls year after year as upon those of the victors.

Of course, their government was powerless to restrain any aggression or
encroachment upon the general welfare as soon as a considerable body of
voters had banded together to undertake it. A notable instance has been
recorded by Bamscot in his great work, "Some Evil Civilizations." After
the first of America's great intestinal wars the surviving victors formed
themselves into an organization which seems at first to have been purely
social and benevolent, but afterward fell into the hands of rapacious
politicians who in order to preserve their power corrupted their followers
by distributing among them enormous sums of money exacted from the
government by threats of overturning it. In less than a half century after
the war in which they had served, so great was the fear which they
inspired in whatever party controlled the national treasury that the total
sum of their exactions was no less annually than seventeen million
_prastams_! As Dumbleshaw naïvely puts it, "having saved their country,
these gallant gentlemen naturally took it for themselves." The eventual
massacre of the remnant of this hardy and impenitent organization by the
labor unions more accustomed to the use of arms is beyond the province of
this monograph to relate. The matter is mentioned at all only because it
is a typical example of the open robbery that marked that period of the
republic's brief and inglorious existence; the Grand Army, as it called
itself, was no worse and no better than scores of other organizations
having no purpose but plunder and no method but menace. A little later
nearly all classes and callings became organized conspiracies, each
seeking an unfair advantage through laws which the party in power had not
the firmness to withhold, nor the party hoping for power the courage to
oppose. The climax of absurdity in this direction was reached in 1918,
when an association of barbers, known as Noblemen of the Razor, procured
from the parliament of the country a law giving it a representative in the
President's Cabinet, and making it a misdemeanor to wear a beard.

In Soseby's "History of Popular Government" he mentions "a monstrous
political practice known as 'Protection to American Industries.'" Modern
research has not ascertained precisely what it was; it is known rather
from its effects than in its true character, but from what we can learn of
it to-day I am disposed to number it among those malefic agencies
concerned in the destruction of the American republics, particularly the
Connected States, although it appears not to have been peculiar to
"popular government." Some of the contemporary monarchies of Europe were
afflicted with it, but by the divine favor which ever guards a throne its
disastrous effects were averted. "Protection" consisted in a number of
extraordinary expedients, the purposes of which and their relations to one
another cannot with certainty be determined in the present state of our
knowledge. Debrethin and others agree that one feature of it was the
support, by general taxation, of a few favored citizens in public palaces,
where they passed their time in song and dance and all kinds of revelry.
They were not, however, altogether idle, being required out of the sums
bestowed upon them, to employ a certain number of men each in erecting
great piles of stone and pulling them down again, digging holes in the
ground and then filling them with earth, pouring water into casks and then
drawing it off, and so forth. The unhappy laborers were subject to the
most cruel oppressions, but the knowledge that their wages came from the
pockets of those whom their work nowise benefited was so gratifying to
them that nothing could induce them to leave the service of their
heartless employers to engage in lighter and more useful labor.

Another characteristic of "Protection" was the maintenance at the
principal seaports of "customs-houses," which were strong fortifications
armed with heavy guns for the purpose of destroying or driving away the
trading ships of foreign nations. It was this that caused the Connected
States to be known abroad as the "Hermit Republic," a name of which its
infatuated citizens were strangely proud, although they had themselves
sent armed ships to open the ports of Japan and other Oriental countries
to their own commerce. In their own case, if a foreign ship came empty and
succeeded in evading the fire of the "customs-house," as sometimes
occurred, she was permitted to take away a cargo.

It is obvious that such a system was distinctly evil, but it must be
confessed our uncertainty regarding the whole matter of "Protection" does
not justify us in assigning it a definite place among the causes of
national decay. That in some way it produced an enormous revenue is
certain, and that the method was dishonest is no less so; for this
revenue--known as a "surplus"--was so abhorred while it lay in the
treasury that all were agreed upon the expediency of getting rid of it,
two great political parties existing for apparently no other purpose than
the patriotic one of taking it out.

But how, it may be asked, could people so misgoverned get on, even as well
as they did?

From the records that have come down to us it does not appear that they
got on very well. They were preyed upon by all sorts of political
adventurers, whose power in most instances was limited only by the
contemporaneous power of other political adventurers equally unscrupulous.
A full half of the taxes wrung from them was stolen. Their public lands,
millions of square miles, were parceled out among banded conspirators.
Their roads and the streets of their cities were nearly impassable. Their
public buildings, conceived in abominable taste and representing enormous
sums of money, which never were used in their construction, began to
tumble about the ears of the workmen before they were completed. The most
delicate and important functions of government were intrusted to men with
neither knowledge, heart nor experience, who by their corruption imperiled
the public interest and by their blundering disgraced the national name.
In short, all the train of evils inseparable from government of any kind
beset this unhappy people with tenfold power, together with hundreds of
worse ones peculiar to their own faulty and unnatural system. It was
thought that their institutions would give them peace, yet in the first
three-quarters of a century of their existence they fought three important
wars: one of revenge, one of aggression and one--the bloodiest and most
wasteful known up to that time--among themselves. And before a century and
a half had passed they had the humiliation to see many of their seaport
cities destroyed by the Emperor of Japan in a quarrel which they had
themselves provoked by their greed of Oriental dominion.

By far the most important factor concerned in bringing about the
dissolution of the republic and the incredible horrors that followed it
was what was known as "the contest between capital and labor." This
momentous struggle began in a rather singular way through an agitation set
afoot by certain ambitious women who preached at first to inattentive and
inhospitable ears, but with ever increasing acceptance, the doctrine of
equality of the sexes, and demanded the "emancipation" of woman. True,
woman was already an object of worship and had, as noted before, the right
to kill. She was treated with profound and sincere deference, because of
certain humble virtues, the product of her secluded life. Men of that time
appear to have felt for women, in addition to religious reverence, a
certain sentiment known as "love." The nature of this feeling is not
clearly known to us, and has been for ages a matter of controversy
evolving more heat than light. This much is plain: it was largely composed
of good will, and had its root in woman's dependence. Perhaps it had
something of the character of the benevolence with which we regard our
slaves, our children and our domestic animals--everything, in fact, that
is weak, helpless and inoffensive.

Woman was not satisfied; her superserviceable advocates taught her to
demand the right to vote, to hold office, to own property, to enter into
employment in competition with man. Whatever she demanded she eventually
got. With the effect upon her we are not here concerned; the predicted
gain to political purity did not ensue, nor did commercial integrity
receive any stimulus from her participation in commercial pursuits. What
indubitably did ensue was a more sharp and bitter competition in the
industrial world through this increase of more than thirty per cent, in
its wage-earning population. In no age nor country has there ever been
sufficient employment for those requiring it. The effect of so enormously
increasing the already disproportionate number of workers in a single
generation could be no other than disastrous. Every woman employed
displaced or excluded some man, who, compelled to seek a lower employment,
displaced another, and so on, until the least capable or most unlucky of
the series became a tramp--a nomadic mendicant criminal! The number of
these dangerous vagrants in the beginning of the twentieth century of
their era has been estimated by Holobom at no less than seven and a half
_blukuks_! Of course, they were as tow to the fires of sedition, anarchy
and insurrection. It does not very nearly relate to our present purpose,
but it is impossible not to note in passing that this unhappy result,
directly flowing from woman's invasion of the industrial field, was
unaccompanied by any material advantage to herself. Individual women, here
and there one, may themselves have earned the support that they would
otherwise not have received, but the sex as a whole was not benefited.
They provided for themselves no better than they had previously been
provided for, and would still have been provided for, by the men whom they
displaced. The whole somber incident is unrelieved by a single gleam of
light.

Previously to this invasion of the industrial field by woman there had
arisen conditions that were in themselves peculiarly menacing to the
social fabric. Some of the philosophers of the period, rummaging amongst
the dubious and misunderstood facts of commercial and industrial history,
had discovered what they were pleased to term "the law of supply and
demand"; and this they expounded with so ingenious a sophistry, and so
copious a wealth of illustration and example that what is at best but a
faulty and imperfectly applicable principle, limited and cut into by all
manner of other considerations, came to be accepted as the sole
explanation and basis of material prosperity and an infallible rule for
the proper conduct of industrial affairs. In obedience to this "law"--for,
interpreting it in its straitest sense they understood it to be
mandatory--employers and employees alike regulated by its iron authority
all their dealings with one another, throwing off the immemorial relations
of mutual dependence and mutual esteem as tending to interfere with
beneficent operation. The employer came to believe conscientiously that it
was not only profitable and expedient, but under all circumstances his
duty, to obtain his labor for as little money as possible, even as he sold
its product for as much. Considerations of humanity were not banished from
his heart, but most sternly excluded from his business. Many of these
misguided men would give large sums to various charities; would found
universities, hospitals, libraries; would even stop on their way to
relieve beggars in the street; but for their own work-people they had no
care. Straman relates in his "Memoirs" that a wealthy manufacturer once
said to one of his mill-hands who had asked for an increase of his wages
because unable to support his family on the pay that he was getting: "Your
family is nothing to me. I cannot afford to mix benevolence with my
business." Yet this man, the author adds, had just given a thousand
_drusoes_ to a "sea-man's home." He could afford to care for other men's
employees, but not for his own. He could not see that the act which he
performed as truly, and to the same degree, cut down his margin of profit
in his business as the act which he refused to perform would have done,
and had not the advantage of securing him better service from a grateful
workman.

On their part the laborers were no better. Their relations to their
employers being "purely commercial," as it was called, they put no heart
into their work, seeking ever to do as little as possible for their money,
precisely as their employers sought to pay as little as possible for the
work they got. The interests of the two classes being thus antagonized,
they grew to distrust and hate each other, and each accession of ill
feeling produced acts which tended to broaden the breach more and more.
There was neither cheerful service on the one side nor ungrudging payment
on the other.

The harder industrial conditions generated by woman's irruption into a new
domain of activity produced among laboring men a feeling of blind
discontent and concern. Like all men in apprehension, they drew together
for mutual protection, they knew not clearly against what. They formed
"labor unions," and believed them to be something new and effective in the
betterment of their condition; whereas, from the earliest historical
times, in Rome, in Greece, in Egypt, in Assyria, labor unions with their
accepted methods of "striking" and rioting had been discredited by an
almost unbroken record of failure. One of the oldest manuscripts then in
existence, preserved in a museum at Turin, but now lost, related how the
workmen employed in the necropolis at Thebes, dissatisfied with their
allowance of corn and oil, had refused to work, broken out of their
quarters and, after much rioting, been subdued by the arrows of the
military. And such, despite the sympathies and assistance of brutal mobs
of the populace, was sometimes the end of the American "strike."
Originally organized for self-protection, and for a time partly
successful, these leagues became great tyrannies, so reasonless in their
demands and so unscrupulous in their methods of enforcing them that the
laws were unable to deal with them, and frequently the military forces of
the several States were ordered out for the protection of life and
property; but in most cases the soldiers fraternized with the leagues, ran
away, or were easily defeated. The cruel and mindless mobs had always the
hypocritical sympathy and encouragement of the newspapers and the
politicians, for both feared their power and courted their favor. The
judges, dependent for their offices not only on "the labor vote," but, to
obtain it, on the approval of the press and the politicians, boldly set
aside the laws against conspiracy and strained to the utmost tension those
relating to riot, arson and murder. To such a pass did all this come that
in the year 1931 an inn-keeper's denial of a half-holiday to an under-cook
resulted in the peremptory closing of half the factories in the country,
the stoppage of all railroad travel and movement of freight by land and
water and a general paralysis of the industries of the land. Many
thousands of families, including those of the "strikers" and their
friends, suffered from famine; armed conflicts occurred in every State;
hundreds were slain and incalculable amounts of property wrecked and
destroyed.

Failure, however, was inherent in the method, for success depended upon
unanimity, and the greater the membership of the unions and the more
serious their menace to the industries of the country, the higher was the
premium for defection; and at last strike-breaking became a regular
employment, organized, officered and equipped for the service required by
the wealth and intelligence that directed it. From that moment the doom of
labor unionism was decreed and inevitable. But labor unionism did not live
long enough to die that way.

Naturally combinations of labor entailed combinations of capital. These
were at first purely protective. They were brought into being by the
necessity of resisting the aggressions of the others. But the trick of
combination once learned, it was seen to have possibilities of profit in
directions not dreamed of by its early promoters; its activities were not
long confined to fighting the labor unions with their own weapons and with
superior cunning and address. The shrewd and energetic men whose capacity
and commercial experience had made them rich while the laborers remained
poor were not slow to discern the advantages of coöperation over their own
former method of competition among themselves. They continued to fight the
labor unions, but ceased to fight one another. The result was that in the
brief period of two generations almost the entire business of the country
fell into the hands of a few gigantic corporations controlled by bold and
unscrupulous men, who, by daring and ingenious methods, made the body of
the people pay tribute to their greed.

In a country where money was all-powerful the power of money was used
without stint and without scruple. Judges were bribed to do their duty,
juries to convict, newspapers to support and legislators to betray their
constituents and pass the most oppressive laws. By these corrupt means,
and with the natural advantage of greater skill in affairs and larger
experience in concerted action, the capitalists soon restored their
ancient reign and the state of the laborer was worse than it had ever been
before. Straman says that in his time two millions of unoffending workmen
in the various industries were once discharged without warning and
promptly arrested as vagrants and deprived of their ears because a sulking
canal-boatman had kicked his captain's dog into the water. And the dog was
a retriever.

Had the people been honest and intelligent, as the politicians affirmed
them to be, the combination of capital could have worked no public
injury--would, in truth, have been a great public benefit. It enormously
reduced the expense of production and distribution, assured greater
permanency of employment, opened better opportunities to general and
special aptitude, gave an improved product, and at first supplied it at a
reduced price. Its crowning merit was that the industries of the country,
being controlled by a few men from a central source, could themselves be
easily controlled by law if law had been honestly administered. Under the
old order of scattered jurisdictions, requiring a multitude of actions at
law, little could be done, and little was done, to put a check on
commercial greed; under the new, much was possible, and at times something
was accomplished. But not for long; the essential dishonesty of the
American character enabled these capable and conscienceless
managers--"captains of industry" and "kings of finance"--to buy with money
advantages and immunities superior to those that the labor unions could
obtain by menaces and the promise of votes. The legislatures, the courts,
the executive officers, all the sources of authority and springs of
control, were defiled and impested until right and justice fled affrighted
from the land, and the name of the country became a stench in the nostrils
of the world.

Let us pause in our narrative to say here that much of the abuse of the
so-called "trusts" by their victims took no account of the folly,
stupidity and greed of the victims themselves. A favorite method by which
the great corporations crushed out the competition of the smaller ones and
of the "individual dealers" was by underselling them--a method made
possible by nothing but the selfishness of the purchasing consumers who
loudly complained of it. These could have stood by their neighbor, the
"small dealer," if they had wanted to, and no underselling could, have
been done. When the trust lowered the price of its product they eagerly
took the advantage offered, then cursed the trust for ruining the small
dealer. When it raised the price they cursed it for ruining themselves. It
is not easy to see what the trust could have done that would have been
acceptable, nor is it surprising that it soon learned to ignore their
clamor altogether and impenitently plunder those whom it could not hope to
appease.

Another of the many sins justly charged against the "kings of finance" was
this: They would buy properties worth, say, ten millions of "dollars" (the
value of the dollar is now unknown) and issue stock upon it to the face
value of, say, fifty millions. This their clamorous critics called
"creating" for themselves forty millions of dollars. They created nothing;
the stock had no dishonest value unless sold, and even at the most corrupt
period of the government nobody was compelled by law to buy. In nine cases
in ten the person who bought did so in the hope and expectation of getting
much for little and something for nothing. The buyer was no better than
the seller. He was a gambler. He "played against the game of the man who
kept the table" (as the phrase went), and naturally he lost. Naturally,
too, he cried out, but his lamentations, though echoed shrilly by the
demagogues, seem to have been unavailing. Even the rudimentary
intelligence of that primitive people discerned the impracticability of
laws forbidding the seller to set his own price on the thing he would sell
and declare it worth that price. Then, as now, nobody had to believe him.
Of the few who bought these "watered" stocks in good faith as an
investment in the honest hope of dividends it seems sufficient to say, in
the words of an ancient Roman, "Against stupidity the gods themselves are
powerless." Laws that would adequately protect the foolish from the
consequence of their folly would put an end to all commerce. The sin of
"over-capitalization" differed in magnitude only, not in kind, from the
daily practice of every salesman in every shop. Nevertheless, the popular
fury that it aroused must be reckoned among the main causes contributory
to the savage insurrections that accomplished the downfall of the
republic.

With the formation of powerful and unscrupulous trusts of both labor and
capital to subdue each other the possibilities of combination were not
exhausted; there remained the daring plan of combining the two
belligerents! And this was actually effected. The laborer's demand for an
increased wage was always based upon an increased cost of living, which
was itself chiefly due to increased cost of production from reluctant
concessions of his former demands. But in the first years of the twentieth
century observers noticed on the part of capital a lessening reluctance.
More frequent and more extortionate and reasonless demands encountered a
less bitter and stubborn resistance; capital was apparently weakening just
at the time when, with its strong organizations of trained and willing
strike-breakers, it was most secure. Not so; an ingenious malefactor,
whose name has perished from history, had thought out a plan for bringing
the belligerent forces together to plunder the rest of the population. In
the accounts that have come down to us details are wanting, but we know
that, little by little, this amazing project was accomplished. Wages rose
to incredible rates. The cost of living rose with them, for
employers--their new allies wielding in their service the weapons
previously used against them, intimidation, the boycott, and so
forth--more than recouped themselves from the general public. Their
employees got rebates on the prices of products, but for consumers who
were neither laborers nor capitalists there was no mercy. Strikes were a
thing of the past; strike-breakers threw themselves gratefully into the
arms of the unions; "industrial discontent" vanished, in the words of a
contemporary poet, "as by the stroke of an enchanter's wand." All was
peace, tranquillity and order! Then the storm broke.

A man in St. Louis purchased a sheep's kidney for seven-and-a-half
dollars. In his rage at the price he exclaimed: "As a public man I have
given twenty of the best years of my life to bringing about a friendly
understanding between capital and labor. I have succeeded, and may God
have mercy on my meddlesome soul!"

The remark was resented, a riot ensued, and when the sun went down that
evening his last beams fell upon a city reeking with the blood of a
hundred millionaires and twenty thousand citizens and sons of toil!

Students of the history of those troublous times need not to be told what
other and more awful events followed that bloody reprisal. Within
forty-eight hours the country was ablaze with insurrection, followed by
intestinal wars which lasted three hundred and seventy years and were
marked by such hideous barbarities as the modern historian can hardly
bring himself to relate. The entire stupendous edifice of popular
government, temple and citadel of fallacies and abuses, had crashed to
ruin. For centuries its fallen columns and scattered stones sheltered an
ever diminishing number of skulking anarchists, succeeded by hordes of
skin-clad savages subsisting on offal and raw flesh--the race-remnant of
an extinct civilization. All finally vanished from history into a darkness
impenetrable to conjecture.

       *       *       *       *       *

In concluding this hasty and imperfect sketch I cannot forbear to relate
an episode of the destructive and unnatural contest between labor and
capital, which I find recorded in the almost forgotten work of Antrolius,
who was an eye-witness to the incident.

At a time when the passions of both parties were most inflamed and scenes
of violence most frequent it was somehow noised about that at a certain
hour of a certain day some one--none could say who--would stand upon the
steps of the Capitol and speak to the people, expounding a plan for
reconciliation of all conflicting interests and pacification of the
quarrel. At the appointed hour thousands had assembled to hear--glowering
capitalists attended by hireling body-guards with firearms, sullen
laborers with dynamite bombs concealed in their clothing. All eyes were
directed to the specified spot, where suddenly appeared (none saw
whence--it seemed as if he had been there all the time, such his
tranquillity) a tall, pale man clad in a long robe, bare-headed, his hair
falling lightly upon his shoulders, his eyes full of compassion, and with
such majesty of face and mien that all were awed to silence ere he spoke.
Stepping slowly forward toward the throng and raising his right hand from
the elbow, the index finger extended upward, he said, in a voice ineffably
sweet and serious: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even
so do ye also unto them."

These strange words he repeated in the same solemn tones three times;
then, as the expectant multitude waited breathless for his discourse,
stepped quietly down into the midst of them, every one afterward declaring
that he passed within a pace of where himself had stood. For a moment the
crowd was speechless with surprise and disappointment, then broke into
wild, fierce cries: "Lynch him, lynch him!" and some have testified that
they heard the word "crucify." Struggling into looser order, the
infuriated mob started in mad pursuit; but each man ran a different way
and the stranger was seen again by none of them.




THE LAND BEYOND THE BLOW

(After the method of Swift, who followed Lucian, and was himself followed
by Voltaire and many others.)


THITHER

A crowd of men were assisting at a dog-fight. The scene was one of
indescribable confusion. In the center of the tumult the dogs, obscure in
a cloud of dust, rolled over and over, howling, yarring, tearing each
other with sickening ferocity. About them the hardly less ferocious men
shouted, cursed and struck, encouraged the animals with sibilant
utterances and threatened with awful forms of death and perdition all who
tried to put an end to the combat. Caught in the thick of this pitiless
mob I endeavored to make my way to a place of peace, when a burly
blackguard, needlessly obstructing me, said derisively:

"I guess you are working pockets."

"You are a liar!" I retorted hotly.

That is all the provocation that I remember to have given.


SONS OF THE FAIR STAR

When consciousness returned the sun was high in the heavens, yet the light
was dim, and had that indefinable ghastly quality that is observed during
a partial eclipse. The sun itself appeared singularly small, as if it were
at an immensely greater distance than usual. Rising with some difficulty
to my feet, I looked about me. I was in an open space among some trees
growing on the slope of a mountain range whose summit on the one hand was
obscured by a mist of a strange pinkish hue, and on the other rose into
peaks glittering with snow. Skirting the base at a distance of two or
three miles flowed a wide river, and beyond it a nearly level plain
stretched away to the horizon, dotted with villages and farmhouses and
apparently in a high state of cultivation. All was unfamiliar in its every
aspect. The trees were unlike any that I had ever seen or even imagined,
the trunks being mostly square and the foliage consisting of slender
filaments resembling hair, in many instances long enough to reach the
earth. It was of many colors, and I could not perceive that there was any
prevailing one, as green is in the vegetation to which I was accustomed.
As far as I could see there were no grass, no weeds, no flowers; the earth
was covered with a kind of lichen, uniformly blue. Instead of rocks, great
masses of metals protruded here and there, and above me on the mountain
were high cliffs of what seemed to be bronze veined with brass. No animals
were visible, but a few birds as uncommon in appearance as their
surroundings glided through the air or perched upon the rocks. I say
glided, for their motion was not true flight, their wings being mere
membranes extended parallel to their sides, and having no movement
independent of the body. The bird was, so to say, suspended between them
and moved forward by quick strokes of a pair of enormously large webbed
feet, precisely as a duck propels itself in water. All these things
excited in me no surprise, nor even curiosity; they were merely
unfamiliar. That which most interested me was what appeared to be a bridge
several miles away, up the river, and to this I directed my steps,
crossing over from the barren and desolate hills to the populous plain.

For a full history of my life and adventures in Mogon-Zwair, and a
detailed description of the country, its people, their manners and
customs, I must ask the reader to await the publication of a book, now in
the press, entitled _A Blackened Eye_; in this brief account I can give
only a few of such particulars as seem instructive by contrast with our
own civilization.

The inhabitants of Mogon-Zwair call themselves Golampis, a word signifying
Sons of the Fair Star. Physically they closely resemble ourselves, being
in all respects the equals of the highest Caucasian type. Their hair,
however, has a broader scheme of color, hair of every hue known to us, and
even of some imperceptible to my eyes but brilliant to theirs, being too
common to excite remark. A Golampian assemblage with uncovered heads
resembles, indeed, a garden of flowers, vivid and deep in color, no two
alike. They wear no clothing of any kind, excepting for adornment and
protection from the weather, resembling in this the ancient Greeks and the
Japanese of yesterday; nor was I ever able to make them comprehend that
clothing could be worn for those reasons for which it is chiefly worn
among ourselves. They are destitute of those feelings of delicacy and
refinement which distinguish us from the lower animals, and which, in the
opinion of our acutest and most pious thinkers, are evidences of our close
relation to the Power that made us.

Among this people certain ideas which are current among ourselves as mere
barren faiths expressed in disregarded platitudes receive a practical
application to the affairs of life. For example, they hold, with the best,
wisest and most experienced of our own race, and one other hereafter to be
described, that wealth does not bring happiness and is a misfortune and an
evil. None but the most ignorant and depraved, therefore, take the trouble
to acquire or preserve it. A rich Golampi is naturally regarded with
contempt and suspicion, is shunned by the good and respectable and
subjected to police surveillance. Accustomed to a world where the rich man
is profoundly and justly respected for his goodness and wisdom (manifested
in part by his own deprecatory protests against the wealth of which,
nevertheless, he is apparently unable to rid himself) I was at first
greatly pained to observe the contumelious manner of the Golampis toward
this class of men, carried in some instances to the length of personal
violence; a popular amusement being the pelting them with coins. These the
victims would carefully gather from the ground and carry away with them,
thus increasing their hoard and making themselves all the more liable to
popular indignities.

When the cultivated and intelligent Golampi finds himself growing too
wealthy he proceeds to get rid of his surplus riches by some one of many
easy expedients. One of these I have just described; another is to give
his excess to those of his own class who have not sufficient to buy
employment and so escape leisure, which is considered the greatest evil of
all. "Idleness," says one of their famous authors, "is the child of
poverty and the parent of discontent"; and another great writer says: "No
one is without employment; the indolent man works for his enemies."

In conformity to these ideas the Golampis--all but the ignorant and
vicious rich--look upon labor as the highest good, and the man who is so
unfortunate as not to have enough money to purchase employment in some
useful industry will rather engage in a useless one than not labor at all.
It is not unusual to see hundreds of men carrying water from a river and
pouring it into a natural ravine or artificial channel, through which it
runs back into the stream. Frequently a man is seen conveying stones--or
the masses of metal which there correspond to stones--from one pile to
another. When all have been heaped in a single place he will convey them
back again, or to a new place, and so proceed until darkness puts an end
to the work. This kind of labor, however, does not confer the satisfaction
derived from the consciousness of being useful, and is never performed by
any person having the means to hire another to employ him in some
beneficial industry. The wages usually paid to employers are from three to
six _balukan_ a day. This statement may seem incredible, but I solemnly
assure the reader that I have known a bad workman or a feeble woman to pay
as high as eight; and there have been instances of men whose incomes had
outgrown their desires paying even more.

Labor being a luxury which only those in easy circumstances can afford,
the poor are the more eager for it, not only because it is denied them,
but because it is a sign of respectability. Many of them, therefore,
indulge in it on credit and soon find themselves deprived of what little
property they had to satisfy their hardfisted employers. A poor woman once
complained to me that her husband spent every _rylat_ that he could get in
the purchase of the most expensive kinds of employment, while she and the
children were compelled to content themselves with such cheap and coarse
activity as dragging an old wagon round and round in a small field which a
kind-hearted neighbor permitted them to use for the purpose. I afterward
saw this improvident husband and unnatural father. He had just squandered
all the money he had been able to beg or borrow in buying six tickets,
which entitled the holder to that many days' employment in pitching hay
into a barn. A week later I met him again. He was broken in health, his
limbs trembled, his walk was an uncertain shuffle. Clearly he was
suffering from overwork. As I paused by the wayside to speak to him a
wagon loaded with hay was passing. He fixed his eyes upon it with a
hungry, wolfish glare, clutched a pitchfork and leaned eagerly forward,
watching the vanishing wagon with breathless attention and heedless of my
salutation. That night he was arrested, streaming with perspiration, in
the unlawful act of unloading that hay and putting it into its owner's
barn. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to six months' detention in
the House of Indolence.

The whole country is infested by a class of criminal vagrants known as
_strambaltis_, or, as we should say, "tramps." These persons prowl about
among the farms and villages begging for work in the name of charity.
Sometimes they travel in groups, as many as a dozen together, and then the
farmer dares not refuse them; and before he can notify the constabulary
they will have performed a great deal of the most useful labor that they
can find to do and escaped without paying a _rylat_. One trustworthy
agriculturist assured me that his losses in one year from these
depredations amounted to no less a sum than seven hundred _balukan_! On
nearly all the larger and more isolated farms a strong force of guards is
maintained during the greater part of the year to prevent these outrages,
but they are frequently overpowered, and sometimes prove unfaithful to
their trust by themselves working secretly by night.

The Golampi priesthood has always denounced overwork as a deadly sin, and
declared useless and apparently harmless work, such as carrying water from
the river and letting it flow in again, a distinct violation of the divine
law, in which, however, I could never find any reference to the matter;
but there has recently risen a sect which holds that all labor being
pleasurable, each kind in its degree is immoral and wicked. This sect,
which embraces many of the most holy and learned men, is rapidly spreading
and becoming a power in the state. It has, of course, no churches, for
these cannot be built without labor, and its members commonly dwell in
caves and live upon such roots and berries as can be easily gathered, of
which the country produces a great abundance though all are exceedingly
unpalatable. These _Gropoppsu_ (as the members of this sect call
themselves) pass most of their waking hours sitting in the sunshine with
folded hands, contemplating their navels; by the practice of which
austerity they hope to obtain as reward an eternity of hard labor after
death.

The Golampis are an essentially pious and religious race. There are few,
indeed, who do not profess at least one religion. They are nearly all, in
a certain sense, polytheists: they worship a supreme and beneficent deity
by one name or another, but all believe in the existence of a subordinate
and malevolent one, whom also, while solemnly execrating him in public
rites, they hold at heart in such reverence that needlessly to mention his
name or that of his dwelling is considered sin of a rank hardly inferior
to blasphemy. I am persuaded that this singular tenderness toward a being
whom their theology represents as an abominable monster, the origin of all
evil and the foe to souls, is a survival of an ancient propitiatory
adoration. Doubtless this wicked deity was once so feared that his
conciliation was one of the serious concerns of life. He is probably as
greatly feared now as at any former time, but is apparently less hated,
and is by some honestly admired.

It is interesting to observe the important place held in Golampian affairs
by religious persecution. The Government is a pure theocracy, all the
Ministers of State and the principal functionaries in every department of
control belonging to the priesthood of the dominant church. It is
popularly believed in Mogon-Zwair that persecution, even to the extent of
taking life, is in the long run beneficial to the cause enduring it. This
belief has, indeed, been crystallized into a popular proverb, not capable
of accurate translation into our tongue, but to the effect that martyrs
fertilize religion by pouring out their blood about its roots. Acting upon
this belief with their characteristically logical and conscientious
directness, the sacerdotal rulers of the country mercilessly afflict the
sect to which themselves belong. They arrest its leading members on false
charges, throw them into loathsome and unwholesome dungeons, subject them
to the crudest tortures and sometimes put them to death. The provinces in
which the state religion is especially strong are occasionally raided and
pillaged by government soldiery, recruited for the purpose by conscription
among the dissenting sects, and are sometimes actually devastated with
fire and sword. The result is not altogether confirmatory of the popular
belief and does not fulfil the pious hope of the governing powers who are
cruel to be kind. The vitalizing efficacy of persecution is not to be
doubted, but the persecuted of too feeble faith frequently thwart its
beneficent intent and happy operation by apostasy.

Having in mind the horrible torments which a Golampian general had
inflicted upon the population of a certain town I once ventured to protest
to him that so dreadful a sum of suffering, seeing that it did not
accomplish its purpose, was needless and unwise.

"Needless and unwise it may be," said he, "and I am disposed to admit that
the result which I expected from it has not followed; but why do you speak
of the _sum_ of suffering? I tortured those people in but a single, simple
way--by skinning their legs."

"Ah, that is very true," said I, "but you skinned the legs of one
thousand."

"And what of that?" he asked. "Can one thousand, or ten thousand, or any
number of persons suffer more agony than one? A man may have his leg
broken, then his nails pulled out, then be seared with a hot iron. Here is
suffering added to suffering, and the effect is really cumulative. In the
true mathematical sense it is a _sum_ of suffering. A single person can
experience it. But consider, my dear sir. How can you add one man's agony
to another's? They are not addable quantities. Each is an individual pain,
unaffected by the other. The limit of anguish which ingenuity can inflict
is that utmost pang which one man has the vitality to endure."

I was convinced but not silenced.

The Golampians all believe, singularly enough, that truth possesses some
inherent vitality and power that give it an assured prevalence over
falsehood; that a good name cannot be permanently defiled and irreparably
ruined by detraction, but, like a star, shines all the brighter for the
shadow through which it is seen; that justice cannot be stayed by
injustice; that vice is powerless against virtue. I could quote from their
great writers hundreds of utterances affirmative of these propositions.
One of their poets, for example, has some striking and original lines, of
which the following is a literal but unmetrical translation:

  A man who is in the right has three arms,
  But he whose conscience is rotten with wrong
  Is stripped and confined in a metal cell.

Imbued with these beliefs, the Golampis think it hardly worth while to be
truthful, to abstain from slander, to do justice and to avoid vicious
actions. "The practice," they say, "of deceit, calumniation, oppression
and immorality cannot have any sensible and lasting injurious effect, and
it is most agreeable to the mind and heart. Why should there be personal
self-denial without commensurate general advantage?"

In consequence of these false views, affirmed by those whom they regard as
great and wise, the people of Mogon-Zwair are, as far as I have observed
them, the most conscienceless liars, cheats, thieves, rakes and all-round,
many-sided sinners that ever were created to be damned. It was, therefore,
with inexpressible joy that I received one day legal notification that I
had been tried in the High Court of Conviction and sentenced to banishment
to Lalugnan. My offense was that I had said that I regarded consistency as
the most detestable of all vices.


AN INTERVIEW WITH GNARMAG-ZOTE

Mogon-Zwair and Lalugnan, having the misfortune to lie on opposite sides
of a line, naturally hate each other; so each country sends its dangerous
political criminals into the other, where they usually enjoy high honors
and are sometimes elevated to important office under the crown. I was
therefore received in Lalugnan with hospitality and given every
encouragement in prosecuting my researches into the history and
intellectual life of the people. They are so extraordinary a people,
inhabiting so marvelous a country, that everything which the traveler
sees, hears or experiences makes a lively and lasting impression upon his
mind, and the labor of a lifetime would be required to relate the
observation of a single year. I shall notice here only one or two points
of national character--those which differ most conspicuously from ours,
and in which, consequently, they are least worthy.

With a fatuity hardly more credible than creditable, the Lalugwumps, as
they call themselves, deny the immortality of the soul. In all my stay in
their country I found only one person who believed in a life "beyond the
grave," as we should say, though as the Lalugwumps are cannibals they
would say "beyond the stomach." In testimony to the consolatory value of
the doctrine of another life, I may say that this one true believer had in
this life a comparatively unsatisfactory lot, for in early youth he had
been struck by a flying stone from a volcano and had lost a considerable
part of his brain.

I cannot better set forth the nature and extent of the Lalugwumpian error
regarding this matter than by relating a conversation that occurred
between me and one of the high officers of the King's household--a man
whose proficiency in all the vices of antiquity, together with his service
to the realm in determining the normal radius of curvature in cats' claws,
had elevated him to the highest plane of political preferment. His name
was Gnarmag-Zote.

"You tell me," said he, "that the soul is immaterial. Now, matter is that
of which we can have knowledge through one or more of our senses. Of what
is immaterial--not matter--we can gain no knowledge in that way. How,
then, can we know anything about it?"

Perceiving that he did not rightly apprehend my position I abandoned it
and shifted the argument to another ground. "Consider," I said, "the
analogous case of a thought. You will hardly call thought material, yet we
know there are thoughts."

"I beg your pardon, but we do not know that. Thought is not a thing,
therefore cannot _be_ in any such sense, for example, as the hand _is_. We
use the word 'thought' to designate the result of an action of the brain,
precisely as we use the word 'speed' to designate the result of an action
of a horse's legs. But can it be said that speed _exists_ in the same way
as the legs which produce it exist, or in any way? Is it a thing?"

I was about to disdain to reply, when I saw an old man approaching, with
bowed head, apparently in deep distress. As he drew near he saluted my
distinguished interlocutor in the manner of the country, by putting out
his tongue to its full extent and moving it slowly from side to side.
Gnarmag-Zote acknowledged the civility by courteously spitting, and the
old man, advancing, seated himself at the great officer's feet, saying:
"Exalted Sir, I have just lost my wife by death, and am in a most
melancholy frame of mind. He who has mastered all the vices of the
ancients and wrested from nature the secret of the normal curvature of
cats' claws can surely spare from his wisdom a few rays of philosophy to
cheer an old man's gloom. Pray tell me what I shall do to assuage my
grief."

The reader can, perhaps, faintly conceive my astonishment when
Gnarmag-Zote gravely replied: "Kill yourself."

"Surely," I cried, "you would not have this honest fellow procure oblivion
(since you think that death is nothing else) by so rash an act!"

"An act that Gnarmag-Zote advises," he said, coldly, "is not rash."

"But death," I said, "death, whatever else it may be, is an end of life.
This old man is now in sorrow almost insupportable. But a few days and it
will be supportable; a few months and it will have become no more than a
tender melancholy. At last it will disappear, and in the society of his
friends, in the skill of his cook, the profits of avarice, the study of
how to be querulous and in the pursuit of loquacity, he will again
experience the joys of age. Why for a present grief should he deprive
himself of all future happiness?"

Gnarmag-Zote looked upon me with something like compassion. "My friend,"
said he, "guest of my sovereign and my country, know that in any
circumstances, even those upon which true happiness is based and
conditioned, death is preferable to life. The sum of miseries in any life
(here in Lalugnan at least) exceeds the sum of pleasures; but suppose that
it did not. Imagine an existence in which happiness, of whatever
intensity, is the rule, and discomfort, of whatever moderation, the
exception. Still there is some discomfort. There is none in death, for (as
it is given to us to know) that is oblivion, annihilation. True, by dying
one loses his happiness as well as his sorrows, but he is not conscious of
the loss. Surely, a loss of which one will never know, and which, if it
operate to make him less happy, at the same time takes from him the desire
and capacity and need of happiness, cannot be an evil. That is so
intelligently understood among us here in Lalugnan that suicide is common,
and our word for sufferer is the same as that for fool. If this good man
had not been an idiot he would have taken his life as soon as he was
bereaved."

"If what you say of the blessing of death is true," I said, smilingly, for
I greatly prided myself on the ingenuity of my thought, "it is unnecessary
to commit suicide through grief for the dead; for the more you love the
more glad you should be that the object of your affection has passed into
so desirable a state as death."

"So we are--those of us who have cultivated philosophy, history and logic;
but this poor fellow is still under the domination of feelings inherited
from a million ignorant and superstitious ancestors--for Lalugnan was once
as barbarous a country as your own. The most grotesque and frightful
conceptions of death, and life after death, were current; and now many of
even those whose understandings are emancipated wear upon their feelings
the heavy chain of heredity."

"But," said I, "granting for the sake of the argument which I am about to
build upon the concession" (I could not bring myself to use the idiotic
and meaningless phrase, "for the sake of argument") "that death,
especially the death of a Lalugwump, is desirable, yet the act of dying,
the transition state between living and being dead, may be accompanied by
the most painful physical, and most terrifying mental phenomena. The
moment of dissolution may seem to the exalted sensibilities of the
moribund a century of horrors."

The great man smiled again, with a more intolerable benignity than before.
"There is no such thing as dying," he said; "the 'transition state' is a
creation of your fancy and an evidence of imperfect reason. One is at any
time either alive or dead. The one condition cannot shade off into the
other. There is no gradation like that between waking and sleeping. By the
way, do you recognize a certain resemblance between death and a dreamless
sleep?"

"Yes--death as you conceive it to be."

"Well, does any one fear sleep? Do we not seek it, court it, wish that it
may be sound--that is to say, dreamless? We desire occasional
annihilation--wish to be dead for eight and ten hours at a time. True, we
expect to awake, but that expectation, while it may account for our
alacrity in embracing sleep, cannot alter the character of the state that
we cheerfully go into. Suppose we did _not_ wake in the morning, never did
wake! Would our mental and spiritual condition be in any respect different
through all eternity from what it was during the first few hours? After how
many hours does oblivion begin to be an evil? The man who loves to sleep
yet hates to die might justly be granted everlasting life with everlasting
insomnia."

Gnarmag-Zote paused and appeared to be lost in the profundity of his
thoughts, but I could easily enough see that he was only taking breath.
The old man whose grief had given this turn to the conversation had fallen
asleep and was roaring in the nose like a beast. The rush of a river near
by, as it poured up a hill from the ocean, and the shrill singing of
several kinds of brilliant quadrupeds were the only other sounds audible.
I waited deferentially for the great antiquarian, scientist and courtier
to resume, amusing myself meantime by turning over the leaves of an
official report by the Minister of War on a new and improved process of
making thunder from snail slime. Presently the oracle spoke.

"You have been born," he said, which was true. "There was, it follows, a
time when you had not been born. As we reckon time, it was probably some
millions of ages. Of this considerable period you are unable to remember
one unhappy moment, and in point of fact there was none. To a Lalugwump
that is entirely conclusive as to the relative values of consciousness and
oblivion, existence and nonexistence, life and death. This old man lying
here at my feet is now, if not dreaming, as if he had never been born.
Would not it be cruel and inhuman to wake him back to grief? Is it, then,
kind to permit him to wake by the natural action of his own physical
energies? I have given him the advice for which he asked. Believing it
good advice, and seeing him too irresolute to act, it seems my clear duty
to assist him."

Before I could interfere, even had I dared take the liberty to do so,
Gnarmag-Zote struck the old man a terrible blow upon the head with his
mace of office. The victim turned upon his back, spread his fingers,
shivered convulsively and was dead.

"You need not be shocked," said the distinguished assassin, coolly: "I
have but performed a sacred duty and religious rite. The religion
(established first in this realm by King Skanghutch, the sixty-second of
that name) consists in the worship of Death. We have sacred books, some
three thousand thick volumes, said to be written by inspiration of Death
himself, whom no mortal has ever seen, but who is described by our priests
as having the figure of a fat young man with a red face and wearing an
affable smile. In art he is commonly represented in the costume of a
husbandman sowing seeds.

"The priests and sacred books teach that death is the supreme and only
good--that the chief duties of man are, therefore, assassination and
suicide. Conviction of these cardinal truths is universal among us, but I
am sorry to say that many do not honestly live up to the faith. Most of us
are commendably zealous in assassination, but slack and lukewarm in
suicide. Some justify themselves in this half-hearted observance of the
Law and imperfect submission to the Spirit by arguing that if they destroy
themselves their usefulness in destroying others will be greatly abridged.
'I find,' says one of our most illustrious writers, not without a certain
force, it must be confessed, 'that I can slay many more of others than I
can of myself.'

"There are still others, more distinguished for faith than works, who
reason that if A kill B, B cannot kill C. So it happens that although many
Lalugwumps die, mostly by the hands of others, though some by their own,
the country is never wholly depopulated."

"In my own country," said I, "is a sect holding somewhat Lalugwumpian
views of the evil of life; and among the members it is considered a sin to
bestow it. The philosopher Schopenhauer taught the same doctrine, and many
of our rulers have shown strong sympathetic leanings toward it by
procuring the destruction of many of their own people and those of other
nations in what is called war."

"They are greatly to be commended," said Gnarmag-Zote, rising to intimate
that the conversation was at an end. I respectfully protruded my tongue
while he withdrew into his palace, spitting politely and with unusual
copiousness in acknowledgment. A few minutes later, but before I had left
the spot, two lackeys in livery emerged from the door by which he had
entered, and while one shouldered the body of the old man and carried it
into the palace kitchen the other informed me that his Highness was
graciously pleased to desire my company at dinner that evening. With many
expressions of regret I declined the invitation, unaware that to do so was
treason. With the circumstances of my escape to the island of Tamtonia the
newspapers have made the world already familiar.


THE TAMTONIANS

In all my intercourse with the Tamtonians I was treated with the most
distinguished consideration and no obstacles to a perfect understanding of
their social and political life were thrown in my way. My enforced
residence on the island was, however, too brief to enable me to master the
whole subject as I should have liked to do.

The government of Tamtonia is what is known in the language of the island
as a _gilbuper_. It differs radically from any form known in other parts
of the world and is supposed to have been invented by an ancient chief of
the race, named Natas, who was for many centuries after his death
worshiped as a god, and whose memory is still held in veneration. The
government is of infinite complexity, its various functions distributed
among as many officers as possible, multiplication of places being
regarded as of the greatest importance, and not so much a means as an end.
The Tamtonians seem to think that the highest good to which a human being
can attain is the possession of an office; and in order that as many as
possible may enjoy that advantage they have as many offices as the country
will support, and make the tenure brief and in no way dependent on good
conduct and intelligent administration of official duty. In truth, it
occurs usually that a man is turned out of his office (in favor of an
incompetent successor) before he has acquired sufficient experience to
perform his duties with credit to himself or profit to the country. Owing
to this incredible folly, the affairs of the island are badly mismanaged.
Complaints are the rule, even from those who have had their way in the
choice of officers. Of course there can be no such thing as a knowledge of
the science of government among such a people, for it is to nobody's
interest to acquire it by study of political history. There is, indeed, a
prevalent belief that nothing worth knowing is to be learned from the
history of other nations--not even from the history of their errors--such
is this extraordinary people's national vanity! One of the most notable
consequences of this universal and voluntary ignorance is that Tamtonia is
the home of all the discreditable political and fiscal heresies from which
many other nations, and especially our own, emancipated themselves
centuries ago. They are there in vigorous growth and full flower, and
believed to be of purely Tamtonian origin.

It needs hardly to be stated that in their personal affairs these people
pursue an entirely different course, for if they did not there could be no
profitable industries and professions among them, and no property to tax
for the support of their government. In his private business a Tamtonian
has as high appreciation of fitness and experience as anybody, and having
secured a good man keeps him in service as long as possible.

The ruler of the nation, whom they call a _Tnediserp_, is chosen every
five years but may be rechosen for five more. He is supposed to be
selected by the people themselves, but in reality they have nothing to do
with his selection. The method of choosing a man for _Tnediserp_ is so
strange that I doubt my ability to make it clear.

The adult male population of the island divides itself into two or more
_seitrap_[1] Commonly there are three or four, but only two ever have any
considerable numerical strength, and none is ever strong morally or
intellectually. All the members of each _ytrap_ profess the same political
opinions, which are provided for them by their leaders every five years
and written down on pieces of paper so that they will not be forgotten.
The moment that any Tamtonian has read his piece of paper, or _mroftalp_,
he unhesitatingly adopts all the opinions that he finds written on it,
sometimes as many as forty or fifty, although these may be altogether
different from, or even antagonistic to, those with which he was supplied
five years before and has been advocating ever since. It will be seen from
this that the Tamtonian mind is a thing whose processes no American can
hope to respect, or even understand. It is instantaneously convinced
without either fact or argument, and when these are afterward presented
they only confirm it in its miraculous conviction; those which make
against that conviction having an even stronger confirmatory power than
the others. I have said any Tamtonian, but that is an overstatement. A few
usually persist in thinking as they did before; or in altering their
convictions in obedience to reason instead of authority, as our own people
do; but they are at once assailed with the most opprobrious names, accused
of treason and all manner of crimes, pelted with mud and stones and in
some instances deprived of their noses and ears by the public executioner.
Yet in no country is independence of thought so vaunted as a virtue, and
in none is freedom of speech considered so obvious a natural right or so
necessary to good government.

    [1] The Tamtonian language forms its plurals most irregularly, but
        usually by an initial inflection. It has a certain crude and
        primitive grammar, but in point of orthoepy is extremely
        difficult. With our letters I can hardly hope to give an
        accurate conception of its pronunciation. As nearly as possible
        I write its words as they sounded to my ear when carefully
        spoken for my instruction by intelligent natives. It is a harsh
        tongue.

At the same time that each _ytrap_ is supplied with its political opinions
for the next five years, its leaders--who, I am told, all pursue the
vocation of sharpening axes--name a man whom they wish chosen for the
office of _Tnediserp_. He is usually an idiot from birth, the Tamtonians
having a great veneration for such, believing them to be divinely
inspired. Although few members of the _ytrap_ have ever heard of him
before, they at once believe him to have been long the very greatest idiot
in the country; and for the next few months they do little else than quote
his words and point to his actions to prove that his idiocy is of entirely
superior quality to that of his opponent--a view that he himself,
instructed by his discoverers, does and says all that he can to confirm.
His inarticulate mumblings are everywhere repeated as utterances of
profound wisdom, and the slaver that drools from his chin is carefully
collected and shown to the people, evoking the wildest enthusiasm of his
supporters. His opponents all this time are trying to blacken his
character by the foulest conceivable falsehoods, some even going so far as
to assert that he is not an idiot at all! It is generally agreed among
them that if he were chosen to office the most dreadful disasters would
ensue, and that, _therefore_, he will not be chosen.

To this last mentioned conviction, namely that the opposing candidate
(_rehtot lacsar_) cannot possibly be chosen, I wish to devote a few words
here, for it seems to me one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the
human mind. It implies, of course, a profound belief in the wisdom of
majorities and the error of minorities. This belief can and does in some
mysterious way co-exist, in the Tamtonian understanding, with the deepest
disgust and most earnest disapproval of a decision which a majority has
made. It is of record, indeed, that one political _ytrap_ sustained no
fewer than six successive defeats without at all impairing its conviction
that the right side must win. In each recurring contest this ytrap was as
sure that it would succeed as it had been in all the preceding ones--and
sure _because_ it believed itself in the right! It has been held by some
native observers that this conviction is not actually entertained, but
only professed for the purpose of influencing the action of others; but
this is disproved by the fact that even after the contest is decided,
though the result is unknown--when nobody's action can have effect--the
leaders (ax-sharpeners) continue earnestly to "claim" this province and
that, up to the very last moment of uncertainty, and the common people
murder one another in the streets for the crime of doubting that the man
is chosen whom the assassin was pleased to prefer. When the majority of a
province has chosen one candidate and a majority of the nation another,
the mental situation of the worthy Tamtonian is not over-easy of
conception, but there can be no doubt that his faith in the wisdom of
majorities remains unshaken.

One of the two antagonistic idiots having been chosen as ruler, it is
customary to speak of him as "the choice of the people," whereas it is
obvious that he is one of the few men, seldom exceeding two or three, whom
it is certainly known that nearly one-half the people regard as unfit for
the position. He is less certainly "the people's choice" than any other
man in the country excepting his unsuccessful opponents; for while it is
known that a large body of his countrymen did not want him, it cannot be
known how many of his supporters really preferred some other person, but
had no opportunity to make their preference effective.

The Tamtonians are very proud of their form of government, which gives
them so much power in selecting their rulers. This power consists in the
privilege of choosing between two men whom but a few had a voice in
selecting from among many millions, any one of whom the rest might have
preferred to either. Yet every Tamtonian is as vain of possessing this
incalculably small influence as if he were a Warwick in making kings and a
Bismarck in using them. He gives himself as many airs and graces as would
be appropriate to the display of an honest pin-feather upon the
pope's-nose of a mooley peacock.

Each congenital idiot whom the ax-grinders name for the office of
_Tnediserp_ has upon the "ticket" with him a dead man, who stands or falls
with his leader. There is no way of voting for the idiot without voting
for the corpse also, and _vice versa_. When one of these precious couples
has been chosen the idiot in due time enters upon the duties of his office
and the corpse is put into an ice-chest and carefully preserved from
decay. If the idiot should himself become a corpse he is buried at once
and the other body is then haled out of its ice to take his place. It is
propped up in the seat of authority and duly instated in power. This is
the signal for a general attack upon it. It is subjected to every kind of
sacrilegious indignity, vituperated as a usurper and an "accident," struck
with rotten eggs and dead cats, and undergoes the meanest
misrepresentation. Its attitude in the chair, its fallen jaw, glazed eyes
and degree of decomposition are caricatured and exaggerated out of all
reason. Yet such as it is it must be endured for the unexpired term for
which its predecessor was chosen. To guard against a possible interregnum,
however, a law has recently been passed providing that if it should tumble
out of the chair and be too rotten to set up again its clerks
(_seiraterces_) are eligible to its place in a stated order of succession.
Here we have the amazing anomaly of the rulers of a "free" people actually
appointing their potential successors!--a thing inexpressibly repugnant to
all our ideas of popular government, but apparently regarded in Tamtonia
as a matter of course.

During the few months intervening between the ax-men's selection of
candidates and the people's choice between those selected (a period known
as the _laitnediserp ngiapmac_) the Tamtonian character is seen at its
worst. There is no infamy too great or too little for the partisans of the
various candidates to commit and accuse their opponents of committing.
While every one of them declares, and in his heart believes, that honest
arguments have greater weight than dishonest; that falsehood reacts on the
falsifier's cause; that appeals to passion and prejudice are as
ineffectual as dishonorable, few have the strength and sense to deny
themselves the luxury of all these methods and worse ones. The laws
against bribery, made by themselves, are set at naught and those of
civility and good breeding are forgotten. The best of friends quarrel and
openly insult one another. The women, who know almost as little of the
matters at issue as the men, take part in the abominable discussions; some
even encouraging the general demoralization by showing themselves at the
public meetings, sometimes actually putting themselves into uniform and
marching in procession with banners, music and torchlights.

I feel that this last statement will be hardly understood without
explanation. Among the agencies employed by the Tamtonians to prove that
one set of candidates is better than another, or to show that one
political policy is more likely than another to promote the general
prosperity, a high place is accorded to colored rags, flames of fire,
noises made upon brass instruments, inarticulate shouts, explosions of
gunpowder and lines of men walking and riding through the streets in cheap
and tawdry costumes more or less alike. Vast sums of money are expended to
procure these strange evidences of the personal worth of candidates and
the political sanity of ideas. It is very much as if a man should paint
his nose pea-green and stand on his head to convince his neighbors that
his pigs are fed on acorns. Of course the money subscribed for these
various controversial devices is not all wasted; the greater part of it is
pocketed by the ax-grinders by whom it is solicited, and who have invented
the system. That they have invented it for their own benefit seems not to
have occurred to the dupes who pay for it. In the universal madness
everybody believes whatever monstrous and obvious falsehood is told by the
leaders of his own _ytrap_, and nobody listens for a moment to the
exposures of their rascality. Reason has flown shrieking from the scene;
Caution slumbers by the wayside with unbuttoned pocket. It is the
opportunity of thieves!

With a view to abating somewhat the horrors of this recurring season of
depravity, it has been proposed by several wise and decent Tamtonians to
extend the term of office of the _Tnediserp_ to six years instead of five,
but the sharpeners of axes are too powerful to be overthrown. They have
made the people believe that if the man whom the country chooses to rule
it because it thinks him wise and good were permitted to rule it too long
it would be impossible to displace him in punishment for his folly and
wickedness. It is, indeed, far more likely that the term of office will be
reduced to four years than extended to six. The effect can be no less than
hideous!

In Tamtonia there is a current popular saying dating from many centuries
back and running this way: "_Eht eciffo dluohs kees eht nam, ton eht nam
eht eciffo_"--which may be translated thus: "No citizen ought to try to
secure power for himself, but should be selected by others for his fitness
to exercise it." The sentiment which this wise and decent phrase expresses
has long ceased to have a place in the hearts of those who are
everlastingly repeating it, but with regard to the office of _Tnediserp_
it has still a remnant of the vitality of habit. This, however, is fast
dying out, and a few years ago one of the congenital idiots who was a
candidate for the highest dignity boldly broke the inhibition and made
speeches to the people in advocacy of himself, all over the country. Even
more recently another has uttered his preferences in much the same way,
but with this difference: he did his speechmaking at his own home, the
ax-grinders in his interest rounding up audiences for him and herding them
before his door. One of the two corpses, too, was galvanized into a kind
of ghastly activity and became a talking automaton; but the other had been
too long dead. In a few years more the decent tradition that a man should
not blow his own horn will be obsolete in its application to the high
office, as it is to all the others, but the popular saying will lose none
of its currency for that.

To the American mind nothing can be more shocking than the Tamtonian
practice of openly soliciting political preferment and even paying money
to assist in securing it. With us such immodesty would be taken as proof
of the offender's unfitness to exercise the power which he asks for, or
bear the dignity which, in soliciting it, he belittles. Yet no Tamtonian
ever refused to take the hand of a man guilty of such conduct, and there
have been instances of fathers giving these greedy vulgarians the hands of
their daughters in marriage and thereby assisting to perpetuate the
species. The kind of government given by men who go about begging for the
right to govern can be more easily imagined than endured. In short, I
cannot help thinking that when, unable longer to bear with patience the
evils entailed by the vices and follies of its inhabitants, I sailed away
from the accursed island of Tamtonia, I left behind me the most pestilent
race of rascals and ignoramuses to be found anywhere in the universe; and
I never can sufficiently thank the divine Power who spared me the
disadvantage and shame of being one of them, and cast my lot in this
favored land of goodness and right reason, the blessed abode of public
morality and private worth--of liberty, conscience and common sense.

I was not, however, to reach it without further detention in barbarous
countries. After being at sea four days I was seized by my mutinous crew,
set ashore upon an island, and having been made insensible by a blow upon
the head was basely abandoned.


MAROONED ON UG

When I regained my senses I found myself lying on the strand a short
remove from the margin of the sea. It was high noon and an insupportable
itching pervaded my entire frame, that being the effect of sunshine in
that country, as heat is in ours. Having observed that the discomfort was
abated by the passing of a light cloud between me and the sun, I dragged
myself with some difficulty to a clump of trees near by and found
permanent relief in their shade. As soon as I was comfortable enough to
examine my surroundings I saw that the trees were of metal, apparently
copper, with leaves of what resembled pure silver, but may have contained
alloy. Some of the trees bore burnished flowers shaped like bells, and in
a breeze the tinkling as they clashed together was exceedingly sweet. The
grass with which the open country was covered as far as I could see
amongst the patches of forest was of a bright scarlet hue, excepting along
the water-courses, where it was white. Lazily cropping it at some little
distance away, or lying in it, indolently chewing the cud and attended by
a man half-clad in skins and bearing a crook, was a flock of tigers. My
travels in New Jersey having made me proof against surprise, I
contemplated these several visible phenomena without emotion, and with a
merely expectant interest in what might be revealed by further
observation.

The tigerherd having perceived me, now came striding forward, brandishing
his crook and shaking his fists with great vehemence, gestures which I
soon learned were, in that country, signs of amity and good-will. But
before knowing that fact I had risen to my feet and thrown myself into a
posture of defense, and as he approached I led for his head with my left,
following with a stiff right upon his solar plexus, which sent him rolling
on the grass in great pain. After learning something of the social customs
of the country I felt extreme mortification in recollecting this breach of
etiquette, and even to this day I cannot think upon it without a blush.

Such was my first meeting with Jogogle-Zadester, Pastor-King of Ug, the
wisest and best of men. Later in our acquaintance, when I had for a long
time been an honored guest at his court, where a thousand fists were
ceremoniously shaken under my nose daily, he explained that my luke-warm
reception of his hospitable advances gave him, for the moment, an
unfavorable impression of my breeding and culture.

The island of Ug, upon which I had been marooned, lies in the Southern
Hemisphere, but has neither latitude nor longitude. It has an area of
nearly seven hundred square _samtains_ and is peculiar in shape, its width
being considerably greater than its length. Politically it is a limited
monarchy, the right of succession to the throne being vested in the
sovereign's father, if he have one; if not in his grandfather, and so on
upward in the line of ascent. (As a matter of fact there has not within
historic times been a legitimate succession, even the great and good
Jogogle-Zadester being a usurper chosen by popular vote.) To assist him in
governing, the King is given a parliament, the Uggard word for which is
_gabagab_, but its usefulness is greatly circumscribed by the _Blubosh_,
or Constitution, which requires that every measure, in order to become a
law, shall have an affirmative majority of the actual members, yet forbids
any member to vote who has not a distinct pecuniary interest in the
result. I was once greatly amused by a spirited contest over a matter of
harbor improvement, each of two proposed harbors having its advocates. One
of these gentlemen, a most eloquent patriot, held the floor for hours in
advocacy of the port where he had an interest in a projected mill for
making dead kittens into cauliflower pickles; while other members were
being vigorously persuaded by one who at the other place had a clam ranch.
In a debate in the Uggard _gabagab_ no one can have a "standing" except a
party in interest; and as a consequence of this enlightened policy every
bill that is passed is found to be most intelligently adapted to its
purpose.

The original intent of this requirement was that members having no
pecuniary interest in a proposed law at the time of its inception should
not embarrass the proceedings and pervert the result; but the inhibition
is now thought to be sufficiently observed by formal public acceptance of
a nominal bribe to vote one way or the other. It is of course understood
that behind the nominal bribe is commonly a more substantial one of which
there is no record. To an American accustomed to the incorrupt methods of
legislation in his own country the spectacle of every member of the Uggard
_gabagab_ qualifying himself to vote by marching up, each in his turn as
his name is called, to the proponent of the bill, or to its leading
antagonist, and solemnly receiving a _tonusi_ (the smallest coin of the
realm) is exceedingly novel. When I ventured to mention to the King my
lack of faith in the principle upon which this custom is founded, he
replied:

"Heart of my soul, if you and your compatriots distrust the honesty and
intelligence of an interested motive why is it that in your own courts of
law, as you describe them, no private citizen can institute a civil action
to right the wrongs of anybody but himself?"

I had nothing to say and the King proceeded: "And why is it that your
judges will listen to no argument from any one who has not acquired a
selfish concern in the matter?"

"O, your Majesty," I answered with animation, "they listen to
attorneys-general, district attorneys and salaried officers of the law
generally, whose prosperity depends in no degree upon their success; who
prosecute none but those whom they believe to be guilty; who are careful
to present no false nor misleading testimony and argument; who are
solicitous that even the humblest accused person shall be accorded every
legal right and every advantage to which he is entitled; who, in brief,
are animated by the most humane sentiments and actuated by the purest and
most unselfish motives."

The King's discomfiture was pitiful: he retired at once from the capital
and passed a whole year pasturing his flock of tigers in the solitudes
beyond the River of Wine. Seeing that I would henceforth be _persona non
grata_ at the palace, I sought obscurity in the writing and publication of
books. In this vocation I was greatly assisted by a few standard works
that had been put ashore with me in my sea-chest.

The literature of Ug is copious and of high merit, but consists altogether
of fiction--mainly history, biography, theology and novels. Authors of
exceptional excellence receive from the state marks of signal esteem,
being appointed to the positions of laborers in the Department of Highways
and Cemeteries. Having been so fortunate as to win public favor and
attract official attention by my locally famous works, "The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire," "David Copperfield," "Pilgrim's Progress," and
"Ben Hur," I was myself that way distinguished and my future assured.
Unhappily, through ignorance of the duties and dignities of the position I
had the mischance to accept a gratuity for sweeping a street crossing and
was compelled to flee for my life.

Disguising myself as a sailor I took service on a ship that sailed due
south into the unknown Sea.

It is now many years since my marooning on Ug, but my recollection of the
country, its inhabitants and their wonderful manners and customs is
exceedingly vivid. Some small part of what most interested me I shall here
set down.

The Uggards are, or fancy themselves, a warlike race: nowhere in those
distant seas are there any islanders so vain of their military power, the
consciousness of which they acquired chiefly by fighting one another. Many
years ago, however, they had a war with the people of another island
kingdom, called Wug. The Wuggards held dominion over a third island,
Scamadumclitchclitch, whose people had tried to throw off the yoke. In
order to subdue them--at least to tears--it was decided to deprive them of
garlic, the sole article of diet known to them and the Wuggards, and in
that country dug out of the ground like coal. So the Wuggards in the
rebellious island stopped up all the garlic mines, supplying their own
needs by purchase from foreign trading proas. Having few cowrie shells,
with which to purchase, the poor Scamadumclitchclitchians suffered a great
distress, which so touched the hearts of the compassionate Uggards--a most
humane and conscientious people--that they declared war against the
Wuggards and sent a fleet of proas to the relief of the sufferers. The
fleet established a strict blockade of every port in Scamadumclitchclitch,
and not a clove of garlic could enter the island. That compelled the
Wuggard army of occupation to reopen the mines for its own subsistence.

All this was told to me by the great and good and wise Jogogle-Zadester,
King of Ug.

"But, your Majesty," I said, "what became of the poor
Scamadumclitchclitchians?"

"They all died," he answered with royal simplicity.

"Then your Majesty's humane intervention," I said, "was not
entirely--well, fattening?"

"The fortune of war," said the King, gravely, looking over my head to
signify that the interview was at an end; and I retired from the Presence
on hands and feet, as is the etiquette in that country.

As soon as I was out of hearing I threw a stone in the direction of the
palace and said: "I never in my life heard of such a cold-blooded
scoundrel!"

In conversation with the King's Prime Minister, the famous Grumsquutzy, I
asked him how it was that Ug, being a great military power, was apparently
without soldiers.

"Sir," he replied, courteously shaking his fist under my nose in sign of
amity, "know that when Ug needs soldiers she enlists them. At the end of
the war they are put to death."

"Visible embodiment of a great nation's wisdom," I said, "far be it from
me to doubt the expediency of that military method; but merely as a matter
of economy would it not be better to keep an army in time of peace than to
be compelled to create one in time of war?"

"Ug is rich," he replied; "we do not have to consider matters of economy.
There is among our people a strong and instinctive distrust of a standing
army."

"What are they afraid of," I asked--what do they fear that it will do?"

"It is not what the army may do," answered the great man, "but what it may
prevent others from doing. You must know that we have in this land a thing
known as Industrial Discontent."

"Ah, I see," I exclaimed, interrupting--"the industrial classes fear that
the army may destroy, or at least subdue, their discontent."

The Prime Minister reflected profoundly, standing the while, in order that
he might assist his faculties by scratching himself, even as we, when
thinking, scratch our heads.

"No," he said presently; "I don't think that is quite what they
apprehend--they and the writers and statesmen who speak for them. As I
said before, what is feared in a case of industrial discontent is the
army's preventive power. But I am myself uncertain what it is that these
good souls dislike to have the army prevent. I shall take the customary
means to learn."

Having occasion on the next day to enter the great audience hall of the
palace I observed in gigantic letters running across the entire side
opposite the entrance this surprising inscription:

"In a strike, what do you fear that the army will prevent which ought to
be done?"

Facing the entrance sat Grumsquutzy, in his robes of office and surrounded
by an armed guard. At a little distance stood two great black slaves, each
bearing a scourge of thongs. All about them the floor was slippery with
blood. While I wondered at all this two policemen entered, having between
them one whom I recognized as a professional Friend of the People, a great
orator, keenly concerned for the interests of Labor. Shown the inscription
and unable or unwilling to answer, he was given over to the two blacks
and, being stripped to the skin, was beaten with the whips until he bled
copiously and his cries resounded through the palace. His ears were then
shorn away and he was thrown into the street. Another Friend of the People
was brought in, and treated in the same way; and the inquiry was
continued, day after day, until all had been interrogated. But Grumsquutzy
got no answer.

A most extraordinary and interesting custom of the Uggards is called the
_Naganag_ and has existed, I was told, for centuries. Immediately after
every war, and before the returned army is put to death, the chieftains
who have held high command and their official head, the Minister of
National Displeasure, are conducted with much pomp to the public square of
Nabootka, the capital. Here all are stripped naked, deprived of their
sight with a hot iron and armed with a club each. They are then locked in
the square, which has an inclosing wall thirty _clowgebs_ high. A signal
is given and they begin to fight. At the end of three days the place is
entered and searched. If any of the dead bodies has an unbroken bone in it
the survivors are boiled in wine; if not they are smothered in butter.

Upon the advantages of this custom--which surely has not its like in the
whole world--I could get little light. One public official told me its
purpose was "peace among the victorious"; another said it was "for
gratification of the military instinct in high places," though if that is
so one is disposed to ask "What was the war for?" The Prime Minister,
profoundly learned in all things else, could not enlighten me, and the
commander-in-chief in the Wuggard war could only tell me, while on his way
to the public square, that it was "to vindicate the truth of history."

In all the wars in which Ug has engaged in historic times that with Wug
was the most destructive of life. Excepting among the comparatively few
troops that had the hygienic and preservative advantage of personal
collision with the enemy, the mortality was appalling. Regiments exposed
to the fatal conditions of camp life in their own country died like flies
in a frost. So pathetic were the pleas of the sufferers to be led against
the enemy and have a chance to live that none hearing them could forbear
to weep. Finally a considerable number of them went to the seat of war,
where they began an immediate attack upon a fortified city, for their
health; but the enemy's resistance was too brief materially to reduce the
death rate and the men were again in the hands of their officers. On their
return to Ug they were so few that the public executioners charged with
the duty of reducing the army to a peace footing were themselves made ill
by inactivity.

As to the navy, the war with Wug having shown the Uggard sailors to be
immortal, their government knows not how to get rid of them, and remains a
great sea power in spite of itself. I ventured to suggest mustering out,
but neither the King nor any Minister of State was able to form a
conception of any method of reduction and retrenchment but that of the
public headsman.

It is said--I do not know with how much truth--that the defeat of Wug was
made easy by a certain malicious prevision of the Wuggards themselves:
something of the nature of heroic self-sacrifice, the surrender of a
present advantage for a terrible revenge in the future. As an instance,
the commander of the fortified city already mentioned is reported to have
ordered his garrison to kill as few of their assailants as possible.

"It is true," he explained to his subordinates, who favored a defense to
the death--"it is true this will lose us the place, but there are other
places; you have not thought of that."

They had not thought of that.

"It is true, too, that we shall be taken prisoners, but"--and he smiled
grimly--"we have fairly good appetites, and we must be fed. That will cost
something, I take it. But that is not the best of it. Look at that vast
host of our enemies--each one of them a future pensioner on a fool people.
If there is among us one man who would willingly deprive the Uggard
treasury of a single dependent--who would spare the Uggard pigs one
_gukwam_ of expense, let the traitor stand forth."

No traitor stood forth, and in the ensuing battles the garrison, it is
said, fired only blank cartridges, and such of the assailants as were
killed incurred that mischance by falling over their own feet.

It is estimated by Wuggard statisticians that in twenty years from the
close of the war the annual appropriation for pensions in Ug will amount
to no less than one hundred and sixty _gumdums_ to every enlisted man in
the kingdom. But they know not the Uggard customs of exterminating the
army.


THE DOG IN GANEGWAG


A about the end of the thirty-seventh month of our voyage due south from
Ug we sighted land, and although the coast appeared wild and inhospitable,
the captain decided to send a boat ashore in search of fresh water and
provisions, of which we were in sore need. I was of the boat's crew and
thought myself fortunate in being able to set foot again upon the earth.
There were seven others in the landing party, including the mate, who
commanded.

Selecting a sheltered cove, which appeared to be at the mouth of a small
creek, we beached the boat, and leaving two men to guard it started inland
toward a grove of trees. Before we reached it an animal came out of it and
advanced confidently toward us, showing no signs of either fear or
hostility. It was a hideous creature, not altogether like anything that we
had ever seen, but on its close approach we recognized it as a dog, of an
unimaginably loathsome breed. As we were nearly famished one of the
sailors shot it for food. Instantly a great crowd of persons, who had
doubtless been watching us from among the trees, rushed upon us with
fierce exclamations and surrounded us, making the most threatening
gestures and brandishing unfamiliar weapons. Unable to resist such odds we
were seized, bound with cords and dragged into the forest almost before we
knew what had happened to us. Observing the nature of our reception the
ship's crew hastily weighed anchor and sailed away. We never again saw
them.

Beyond the trees concealing it from the sea was a great city, and thither
we were taken. It was Gumammam, the capital of Ganegwag, whose people are
dog-worshipers. The fate of my companions I never learned, for although I
remained in the country for seven years, much of the time as a prisoner,
and learned to speak its language, no answer was ever given to my many
inquiries about my unfortunate friends.

The Ganegwagians are an ancient race with a history covering a period of
ten thousand _supintroes_. In stature they are large, in color blue, with
crimson hair and yellow eyes. They live to a great age, sometimes as much
as twenty _supintroes_, their climate being so wholesome that even the
aged have to sail to a distant island in order to die. Whenever a
sufficient number of them reach what they call "the age of going away"
they embark on a government ship and in the midst of impressive public
rites and ceremonies set sail for "the Isle of the Happy Change." Of their
strange civilization, their laws, manners and customs, their copper
clothing and liquid houses I have written--at perhaps too great length--in
my famous book, "Ganegwag the Incredible." Here I shall confine myself to
their religion, certainly the most amazing form of superstition in the
world.

Nowhere, it is believed, but in Ganegwag has so vile a creature as the dog
obtained general recognition as a deity. There this filthy beast is
considered so divine that it is freely admitted to the domestic circle and
cherished as an honored guest. Scarcely a family that is able to support a
dog is without one, and some have as many as a half-dozen. Indeed, the dog
is the special deity of the poor, those families having most that are
least able to maintain them. In some sections of the country, particularly
the southern and southwestern provinces, the number of dogs is estimated
to be greater than that of the children, as is the cost of their
maintenance. In families of the rich they are fewer in number, but more
sacredly cherished, especially by the female members, who lavish upon them
a wealth of affection not always granted to the husband and children, and
distinguish them with indescribable attentions and endearments.

Nowhere is the dog compelled to make any other return for all this honor
and benefaction than a fawning and sycophantic demeanor toward those who
bestow them and an insulting and injurious attitude toward strangers who
have dogs of their own, and toward other dogs. In any considerable town of
the realm not a day passes but the public newsman relates in the most
matter-of-fact and unsympathetic way to his circle of listless auditors
painful instances of human beings, mostly women and children, bitten and
mangled by these ferocious animals without provocation.

In addition to these ravages of the dog in his normal state are a vastly
greater number of outrages committed by the sacred animal in the fury of
insanity, for he has an hereditary tendency to madness, and in that state
his bite is incurable, the victim awaiting in the most horrible agony the
sailing of the next ship to the Isle of the Happy Change, his suffering
imperfectly medicined by expressions of public sympathy for the dog.

A cynical citizen of Gumammam said to the writer of this narrative: "My
countrymen have three hundred kinds of dogs, and only one way to hang a
thief." Yet all the dogs are alike in this, that none is respectable.

Withal, it must be said of this extraordinary people that their horrible
religion is free from the hollow forms and meaningless ceremonies in which
so many superstitions of the lower races find expression. It is a religion
of love, practical, undemonstrative, knowing nothing of pageantry and
spectacle. It is hidden in the lives and hearts of the people; a stranger
would hardly know of its existence as a distinct faith. Indeed, other
faiths and better ones (one of them having some resemblance to a debased
form of Christianity) co-exist with it, sometimes in the same mind.
Cynolatry is tolerant so long as the dog is not denied an equal divinity
with the deities of other faiths. Nevertheless, I could not think of the
people of Ganegwag without contempt and loathing; so it was with no small
joy that I sailed for the contiguous island of Ghargaroo to consult,
according to my custom, the renowned statesman and philosopher,
Juptka-Getch, who was accounted the wisest man in all the world, and held
in so high esteem that no one dared speak to him without the sovereign's
permission, countersigned by the Minister of Morals and Manners.


A CONFLAGRATION IN GHARGAROO

Through the happy accident of having a mole on the left side of my nose,
as had also a cousin of the Prime Minister, I obtained a royal rescript
permitting me to speak to the great Juptka-Getch, and went humbly to his
dwelling, which, to my astonishment, I found to be an unfurnished cave in
the side of a mountain. Inexpressibly surprised to observe that a favorite
of the sovereign and the people was so meanly housed, I ventured, after my
salutation, to ask how this could be so. Regarding me with an indulgent
smile, the venerable man, who was about two hundred and fifty years old
and entirely bald, explained.

"In one of our Sacred Books, of which we have three thousand," said he,
"it is written, '_Golooloo ek wakwah betenka_,' and in another, '_Jebeb uq
seedroy im aboltraqu ocrux ti smelkit_.'"

Translated, these mean, respectively, "The poor are blessed," and, "Heaven
is not easily entered by those who are rich."

I asked Juptka-Getch if his countrymen really gave to these texts a
practical application in the affairs of life.

"Why, surely," he replied, "you cannot think us such fools as to disregard
the teachings of our gods! That would be madness. I cannot imagine a
people so mentally and morally depraved as that! Can you?"

Observing me blushing and stammering, he inquired the cause of my
embarrassment. "The thought of so incredible a thing confuses me," I
managed to reply. "But tell me if in your piety and wisdom you really
stripped yourself of all your property in order to obey the gods and get
the benefit of indigence."

"I did not have to do so," he replied with a smile; "my King attended to
that. When he wishes to distinguish one of his subjects by a mark of his
favor, he impoverishes him to such a degree as will attest the exact
measure of the royal approbation. I am proud to say that he took from me
all that I had."

"But, pardon me," I said; "how does it occur that among a people which
regards poverty as the greatest earthly good all are not poor? I observe
here as much wealth and 'prosperity' as in my own country."

Juptka-Getch smiled and after a few moments answered: "The only person in
this country that owns anything is the King; in the service of his people
he afflicts himself with that burden. All property, of whatsoever kind, is
his, to do with as he will. He divides it among his subjects in the ratio
of their demerit, as determined by the _waguks_--local officers--whose
duty it is to know personally every one in their jurisdiction. To the most
desperate and irreclaimable criminals is allotted the greatest wealth,
which is taken from them, little by little, as they show signs of
reformation."

"But what," said I, "is to prevent the wicked from becoming poor at any
time? How can the King and his officers keep the unworthy, suffering the
punishment and peril of wealth, from giving it away?"

"To whom, for example?" replied the illustrious man, taking the forefinger
of his right hand into his mouth, as is the fashion in Ghargaroo when
awaiting an important communication. The respectful formality of the
posture imperfectly concealed the irony of the question, but I was not of
the kind to be easily silenced.

"One might convert one's property into money," I persisted, "and throw the
money into the sea."

Juptka-Getch released the finger and gravely answered: "Every person in
Ghargaroo is compelled by law to keep minute accounts of his income and
expenditures, and must swear to them. There is an annual appraisement by
the _waguk_, and any needless decrease in the value of an estate is
punished by breaking the offender's legs. Expenditures for luxuries and
high living are, of course, approved, for it is universally known among
us, and attested by many popular proverbs, that the pleasures of the rich
are vain and disappointing. So they are considered a part of the
punishment, and not only allowed but required. A man sentenced to wealth
who lives frugally, indulging in only rational and inexpensive delights,
has his ears cut off for the first offense, and for the second is
compelled to pass six months at court, participating in all the gaieties,
extravagances and pleasures of the capital, and----"

"Most illustrious of mortals," I said, turning a somersault--the
Ghargarese manner of interrupting a discourse without offense--"I am as
the dust upon your beard, but in my own country I am esteemed no fool, and
right humbly do I perceive that you are _ecxroptug nemk puttog peleemy_."

This expression translates, literally, "giving me a fill," a phrase
without meaning in our tongue, but in Ghargarese it appears to imply
incredulity.

"The gaieties of the King's court," I continued, "must be expensive. The
courtiers of the sovereign's entourage, the great officers of the
realm--surely they are not condemned to wealth, like common criminals!"

"My son," said Juptka-Getch, tearing out a handful of his beard to signify
his tranquillity under accusation, "your doubt of my veracity is noted
with satisfaction, but it is not permitted to you to impeach my
sovereign's infallible knowledge of character. His courtiers, the great
officers of the realm, as you truly name them, are the richest men in the
country because he knows them to be the greatest rascals. After each
annual reapportionment of the national wealth he settles upon them the
unallotted surplus."

Prostrating myself before the eminent philosopher, I craved his pardon for
my doubt of his sovereign's wisdom and consistency, and begged him to cut
off my head.

"Nay," he said, "you have committed the unpardonable sin and I cannot
consent to bestow upon you the advantages of death. You shall continue to
live the thing that you are."

"What!" I cried, remembering the Lalugwumps and Gnarmag-Zote, "is it
thought in Ghargaroo that death is an advantage, a blessing?"

"Our Sacred Books," he said, "are full of texts affirming the vanity of
life."

"Then," I said, "I infer that the death penalty is unknown to your laws!"

"We have the life penalty instead. Convicted criminals are not only
enriched, as already explained, but by medical attendance kept alive as
long as possible. On the contrary, the very righteous, who have been
rewarded with poverty, are permitted to die whenever it pleases them.

"Do not the Sacred Books of your country teach the vanity of life, the
blessedness of poverty and the wickedness of wealth?"

"They do, O Most Illustrious, they do."

"And your countrymen believe?"

"Surely--none but the foolish and depraved entertain a doubt."

"Then I waste my breath in expounding laws and customs already known to
you. You have, of course, the same."

At this I averted my face and blushed so furiously that the walls of the
cave were illuminated with a wavering crimson like the light of a great
conflagration! Thinking that the capital city was ablaze, Juptka-Getch ran
from the cave's mouth, crying, "Fire, fire!" and I saw him no more.


AN EXECUTION IN BATRUGIA

My next voyage was not so prosperous. By violent storms lasting seven
weeks, during which we saw neither the sun nor the stars, our ship was
driven so far out of its course that the captain had no knowledge of where
we were. At the end of that period we were blown ashore and wrecked on a
coast so wild and desolate that I had never seen anything so terrifying.
Through a manifest interposition of Divine Providence I was spared, though
all my companions perished miserably in the waves that had crushed the
ship among the rocks.

As soon as I was sufficiently recovered from my fatigue and bruises, and
had rendered thanks to merciful Heaven for my deliverance, I set out for
the interior of the country, taking with me a cutlas for protection
against wild beasts and a bag of sea-biscuit for sustenance. I walked
vigorously, for the weather was then cool and pleasant, and after I had
gone a few miles from the inhospitable coast I found the country open and
level. The earth was covered with a thick growth of crimson grass, and at
wide intervals were groups of trees. These were very tall, their tops in
many instances invisible in a kind of golden mist, or haze, which proved
to be, not a transient phenomenon, but a permanent one, for never in that
country has the sun been seen, nor is there any night. The haze seems to
be self-luminous, giving a soft, yellow light, so diffused that shadows
are unknown. The land is abundantly supplied with pools and rivulets,
whose water is of a beautiful orange color and has a pleasing perfume
somewhat like attar of rose. I observed all this without surprise and with
little apprehension, and went forward, feeling that anything, however
novel and mysterious, was better than the familiar terrors of the sea and
the coast.

After traveling a long time, though how long I had not the means to
determine, I arrived at the city of Momgamwo, the capital of the kingdom
of Batrugia, on the mainland of the Hidden Continent, where it is always
twelve o'clock.

The Batrugians are of gigantic stature, but mild and friendly disposition.
They offered me no violence, seeming rather amused by my small stature.
One of them, who appeared to be a person of note and consequence, took me
to his house (their houses are but a single story in height and built of
brass blocks), set food before me, and by signs manifested the utmost good
will. A long time afterward, when I had learned the language of the
country, he explained that he had recognized me as an American pigmy, a
race of which he had some little knowledge through a letter from a
brother, who had been in my country. He showed me the letter, of which the
chief part is here presented in translation:

"You ask me, my dear Tgnagogu, to relate my adventures among the
Americans, as they call themselves. My adventures were very brief, lasting
altogether not more than three _gumkas_, and most of the time was passed
in taking measures for my own safety.

"My skyship, which had been driven for six moons before an irresistible
gale, passed over a great city just at daylight one morning, and rather
than continue the voyage with a lost reckoning I demanded that I be
permitted to disembark. My wish was respected, and my companions soared
away without me. Before night I had escaped from the city, by what means
you know, and with my remarkable experiences in returning to civilization
all Batrugia is familiar. The description of the strange city I have
reserved for you, by whom only could I hope to be believed. Nyork, as its
inhabitants call it, is a city of inconceivable extent--not less, I should
judge, than seven square _glepkeps_! Of the number of its inhabitants I
can only say that they are as the sands of the desert. They wear
clothing--of a hideous kind, 'tis true--speak an apparently copious though
harsh language, and seem to have a certain limited intelligence. They are
puny in stature, the tallest of them being hardly higher than my breast.

"Nevertheless, Nyork is a city of giants. The magnitude of all things
artificial there is astounding! My dear Tgnagogu, words can give you no
conception of it. Many of the buildings, I assure you, are as many as
fifty _sprugas_ in height, and shelter five thousand persons each. And
these stupendous structures are so crowded together that to the spectator
in the narrow streets below they seem utterly devoid of design and
symmetry--mere monstrous aggregations of brick, stone and metal--mountains
of masonry, cliffs and crags of architecture hanging in the sky!

"A city of giants inhabited by pigmies! For you must know, oh friend of my
liver, that the rearing of these mighty structures could not be the work
of the puny folk that swarm in ceaseless activity about their bases. These
fierce little savages invaded the island in numbers so overwhelming that
the giant builders had to flee before them. Some escaped across great
bridges which, with the help of their gods, they had suspended in the air
from bank to bank of a wide river parting the island from the mainland,
but many could do no better than mount some of the buildings that they had
reared, and there, in these inaccessible altitudes, they dwell to-day,
still piling stone upon stone. Whether they do this in obedience to their
instinct as builders, or in hope to escape by way of the heavens, I had
not the means to learn, being ignorant of the pigmy tongue and in
continual fear of the crowds that followed me.

"You can see the giants toiling away up there in the sky, laying in place
the enormous beams and stones which none but they could handle. They look
no bigger than beetles, but you know that they are many _sprugas_ in
stature, and you shudder to think what would ensue if one should lose his
footing. Fancy that great bulk whirling down to earth from so dizzy an
altitude!...

"May birds ever sing above your grave.

"JOQUOLK WAK MGAPY."

By my new friend, Tgnagogu, I was presented to the King, a most
enlightened monarch, who not only reigned over, but ruled absolutely, the
most highly civilized people in the world. He received me with gracious
hospitality, quartered me in the palace of his Prime Minister, gave me for
wives the three daughters of his Lord Chamberlain, and provided me with an
ample income from the public revenues. Within a year I had made a fair
acquaintance with the Batrugian language, and was appointed royal
interpreter, with a princely salary, although no one speaking any other
tongue, myself and two native professors of rhetoric excepted, had ever
been seen in the kingdom.

One day I heard a great tumult in the street, and going to a window saw,
in a public square opposite, a crowd of persons surrounding some high
officials who were engaged in cutting off a man's head. Just before the
executioner delivered the fatal stroke, the victim was asked if he had
anything to say. He explained with earnestness that the deed for which he
was about to suffer had been inspired and commanded by a brass-headed cow
and four bushels of nightingales' eggs!

"Hold! hold!" I shouted in Batrugian, leaping from the window and forcing
a way through the throng; "the man is obviously insane!"

"Friend," said a man in a long blue robe, gently restraining me, "it is
not proper for you to interrupt these high proceedings with irrelevant
remarks. The luckless gentleman who, in accordance with my will as Lord
Chief Justice, has just had the happiness to part with his head was so
inconsiderate as to take the life of a fellow-subject."

"But he was insane," I persisted, "clearly and indisputably _ptig nupy
uggydug_!"--a phrase imperfectly translatable, meaning, as near as may be,
having flitter-mice in his campanile.

"Am I to infer," said the Lord Chief Justice, "that in your own honorable
country a person accused of murder is permitted to plead insanity as a
reason why he should not be put to death?"

"Yes, illustrious one," I replied, respectfully, "we regard that as a good
defense."

"Well," said he slowly, but with extreme emphasis, "I'll be _Gook
swottled_!"

("_Gook_," I may explain, is the name of the Batrugian chief deity; but
for the verb "to swottle" the English tongue has no equivalent. It seems
to signify the deepest disapproval, and by a promise to be "_swottled_" a
Batrugian denotes acute astonishment.)

"Surely," I said, "so wise and learned a person as you cannot think it
just to punish with death one who does not know right from wrong. The
gentleman who has just now renounced his future believed himself to have
been commanded to do what he did by a brass-headed cow and four bushels of
nightingales' eggs--powers to which he acknowledged a spiritual
allegiance. To have disobeyed would have been, from his point of view, an
infraction of a law higher than that of man."

"Honorable but erring stranger," replied the famous jurist, "if we
permitted the prisoner in a murder trial to urge such a consideration as
that--if our laws recognized any other justification than that he believed
himself in peril of immediate death or great bodily injury--nearly all
assassins would make some such defense. They would plead insanity of some
kind and degree, and it would be almost impossible to establish their
guilt. Murder trials would be expensive and almost interminable, defiled
with perjury and sentiment. Juries would be deluded and confused, justice
baffled, and red-handed man-killers turned loose to repeat their crimes
and laugh at the law. Even as the law is, in a population of only one
hundred million we have had no fewer than three homicides in less than
twenty years! With such statutes and customs as yours we should have had
at least twice as many. Believe me, I know my people; they have not the
American respect for human life."

As blushing is deemed in Batrugia a sign of pride, I turned my back upon
the speaker--an act which, fortunately, signifies a desire to hear more.

"Law," he continued, "is for the good of the greatest number. Execution of
an actual lunatic now and then is not an evil to the community, nor, when
rightly considered, to the lunatic himself. He is better off when dead,
and society is profited by his removal. We are spared the cost of exposing
imposture, the humiliation of acquitting the guilty, the peril of their
freedom, the contagion of their evil example."

"In my country," I said, "we have a saying to the effect that it is better
that ninety-nine guilty escape than that one innocent be punished."

"It is better," said he, "for the ninety-nine guilty, but distinctly worse
for everybody else. Sir," he concluded with chilling austerity, "I infer
from their proverb that your countrymen are the most offensive blockheads
in existence."

By way of refutation I mentioned the English, indignantly withdrew from
the country and set sail for Gokeetle-guk, or, as we should translate the
name, Trustland.


THE JUMJUM OF GOKEETLE-GUK

Arriving at the capital of the country after many incredible adventures, I
was promptly arrested by the police and taken before the Jumjum. He was an
exceedingly affable person, and held office by appointment, "for life or
fitness," as their laws express it. With one necessary exception all
offices are appointive and the tenure of all except that is the same. The
Panjandrum, or, as we should call him, King, is elected for a term of ten
years, at the expiration of which he is shot. It is held that any man who
has been so long in high authority will have committed enough sins and
blunders to deserve death, even if none can be specifically proved.

Brought into the presence of the Jumjum, who graciously saluted me, I was
seated on a beautiful rug and told in broken English by an interpreter who
had escaped from Kansas that I was at liberty to ask any questions that I
chose.

"Your Highness," I said, addressing the Jumjum through the interpreting
Populist, "I fear that I do not understand; I expected, not to ask
questions, but to have to answer them. I am ready to give such an account
of myself as will satisfy you that I am an honest man--neither a criminal
nor a spy."

"The gentleman seems to regard himself with a considerable interest," said
the Jumjum, aside to an officer of his suite--a remark which the
interpreter, with characteristic intelligence, duly repeated to me. Then
addressing me the Jumjum said:

"Doubtless your personal character is an alluring topic, but it is
relevant to nothing in any proceedings that can be taken here. When a
foreigner arrives in our capital he is brought before me to be instructed
in whatever he may think it expedient for him to know of the manners,
customs, laws, and so forth, of the country that he honors with his
presence. It matters nothing to us what he is, but much to him what we
are. You are at liberty to inquire."

I was for a moment overcome with emotion by so noble an example of
official civility and thoughtfulness, then, after a little reflection, I
said: "May it please your Highness, I should greatly like to be informed
of the origin of the name of your esteemed country."

"Our country," said the Jumjum, acknowledging the compliment by a movement
of his ears, "is called Trustland because all its industries, trades and
professions are conducted by great aggregations of capital known as
'trusts.' They do the entire business of the country."

"Good God!" I exclaimed; "what a terrible state of affairs that is! I know
about trusts. Why do your people not rise and throw off the yoke?"

"You are pleased to be unintelligible," said the great man, with a smile.
"Would you mind explaining what you mean by 'the yoke'?"

"I mean," said I, surprised by his ignorance of metaphor, but reflecting
that possibly the figures of rhetoric were not used in that country--"I
mean the oppression, the slavery under which your people groan, their
bond-age to the tyrannical trusts, entailing poverty, unrequited toil and
loss of self-respect."

"Why, as to that," he replied, "our people are prosperous and happy. There
is very little poverty and what there is is obviously the result of vice
or improvidence. Our labor is light and all the necessaries of life, many
of the comforts and some of the luxuries are abundant and cheap. I hardly
know what you mean by the tyranny of the trusts; they do not seem to care
to be tyrannous, for each having the entire market for what it produces,
its prosperity is assured and there is none of the strife and competition
which, as I can imagine, might breed hardness and cruelty. Moreover, we
should not let them be tyrannous. Why should we?"

"But, your Highness, suppose, for example, the trust that manufactures
safety pins should decide to double the price of its product. What is to
prevent great injury to the consumer?"

"The courts. Having but one man--the responsible manager--to deal with,
protective legislation and its enforcement would be a very simple matter.
If there were a thousand manufacturers of safety pins, scattered all over
the country in as many jurisdictions, there would be no controlling them
at all. They would cheat, not only one another but the consumers, with
virtual immunity. But there is no disposition among our trusts to do any
such thing. Each has the whole market, as I said, and each has learned by
experience what the manager of a large business soon must learn, and what
the manager of a small one probably would not learn and could not afford
to apply if he knew it--namely, that low prices bring disproportionately
large sales and therefore profits. Prices in this country are never put up
except when some kind of scarcity increases the cost of production.
Besides, nearly all the consumers are a part of the trusts, the stock of
which is about the best kind of property for investment."

"What!" I cried,--"do not the managers so manipulate the stock by
'watering' it and otherwise as to fool and cheat the small investors?"

"We should not permit them. That would be dishonest."

"So it is in my country," I replied, rather tartly, for I believed his
apparent _naïveté_ assumed for my confusion, "but we are unable to prevent
it."

He looked at me somewhat compassionately, I thought. "Perhaps," he said,
"not enough of you really wish to prevent it. Perhaps your people
are--well, different from mine--not worse, you understand--just
different."

I felt the blood go into my cheeks and hot words were upon my tongue's
end, but I restrained them; the conditions for a quarrel were not
favorable to my side of it. When I had mastered my chagrin and resentment
I said:

"In my country when trusts are formed a great number of persons suffer,
whether the general consumer does or not--many small dealers, middle men,
drummers and general employees. The small dealer is driven out of the
business by underselling. The middle man is frequently ignored, the trust
dealing directly, or nearly so, with the consumer. The drummer is
discharged because, competition having disappeared, custom must come
without solicitation. Consolidation lets out swarms of employees of the
individual concerns consolidated, for it is nearly as easy to conduct one
large concern as a dozen smaller ones. These people get great sympathy
from the public and the newspapers and their case is obviously pitiable.
Was it not so in this country during the transition stage, and did not
these poor gentlemen have to"--the right words would not come; I hardly
knew how to finish. "Were they not compelled to go to work?" I finally
asked, rather humbly.

The great official was silent for several minutes. Then he spoke.

"I am not sure that I understand you about our transition state. So far as
our history goes matters with us have always been as they are to-day. To
suppose them to have been otherwise would be to impugn the common sense of
our ancestors. Nor do I quite know what you mean by 'small dealers,'
'middle men,' 'drummers,' and so forth."

He paused and fell into meditation, when suddenly his face was suffused
with the light of a happy thought. It so elated him that he sprang to his
feet and with his staff of office broke the heads of his Chief Admonisher
of the Inimical and his Second Assistant Audible Sycophant. Then he said:

"I think I comprehend. Some eighty-five years ago, soon after my induction
into office, there came to the court of the Panjandrum a man of this city
who had been cast upon the island of Chicago (which I believe belongs to
the American archipelago) and had passed many years there in business with
the natives. Having learned all their customs and business methods he
returned to his own country and laid before the Panjandrum a comprehensive
scheme of commercial reform. He and his scheme were referred to me, the
Panjandrum being graciously pleased to be unable to make head or tail of
it. I may best explain it in its application to a single industry--the
manufacture and sale of gootles."

"What is a gootle?" I asked.

"A metal weight for attachment to the tail of a donkey to keep him from
braying," was the answer. "It is known in this country that a donkey
cannot utter a note unless he can lift his tail. Then, as now, gootles
were made by a single concern having a great capital invested and an
immense plant, and employing an army of workmen. It dealt, as it does
to-day, directly with consumers. Afflicted with a sonant donkey a man
would write to the trust and receive his gootle by return mail, or go
personally to the factory and carry his purchase home on his
shoulder--according to where he lived. The reformer said this was
primitive, crude and injurious to the interests of the public and
especially the poor. He proposed that the members of the gootle trust
divide their capital and each member go into the business of making
gootles for himself--I do not mean for his personal use--in different
parts of the country. But none of them was to sell to consumers, but to
other men, who would sell in quantity to still other men, who would sell
single gootles for domestic use. Each manufacturer would of course require
a full complement of officers, clerks and so forth, as would the other
men--everybody but the consumer--and each would have to support them and
make a profit himself. Competition would be so sharp that solicitors would
have to be employed to make sales; and they too must have a living out of
the business. Honored stranger, am I right in my inference that the
proposed system has something in common with the one which obtains in your
own happy, enlightened and prosperous country, and which you would
approve?"

I did not care to reply.

"Of course," the Jumjum continued, "all this would greatly have enhanced
the cost of gootles, thereby lessening the sales, thereby reducing the
output, thereby throwing a number of workmen out of employment. You see
this, do you not, O guest of my country?"

"Pray tell me," I said, "what became of the reformer who proposed all this
change?"

"All this change? Why, sir, the one-thousandth part is not told: he
proposed that his system should be general: not only in the gootle trust,
but every trust in the country was to be broken up in the same way! When I
had him before me, and had stated my objections to the plan, I asked him
what were its advantages.

"'Sir,' he replied, 'I speak for millions of gentlemen in uncongenial
employments, mostly manual and fatiguing. This would give them the kind of
activity that they would like--such as their class enjoys in other
countries where my system is in full flower, and where it is deemed so
sacred that any proposal for its abolition or simplification by trusts is
regarded with horror, especially by the working men.'

"Having reported to the Panjandrum (whose vermiform appendix may good
angels have in charge) and received his orders, I called the reformer
before me and addressed him thus:

"'Illustrious economist, I have the honor to inform you that in the royal
judgment your proposal is the most absurd, impudent and audacious ever
made; that the system which you propose to set up is revolutionary and
mischievous beyond the dreams of treason; that only in a nation of rogues
and idiots could it have a moment's toleration.'

"He was about to reply, but cutting his throat to intimate that the
hearing was at an end, I withdrew from the Hall of Audience, as under
similar circumstances I am about to do now."

I withdrew first by way of a window, and after a terrible journey of six
years in the Dolorous Mountains and on the Desert of Despair came to the
western coast. Here I built a ship and after a long voyage landed on one
of the islands constituting the Kingdom of Tortirra.


THE KINGDOM OF TORTIRRA

Of this unknown country and its inhabitants I have written a large volume
which nothing but the obstinacy of publishers has kept from the world, and
which I trust will yet see the light. Naturally, I do not wish to publish
at this time anything that will sate public curiosity, and this brief
sketch will consist of such parts only of the work as I think can best be
presented in advance without abating interest in what is to follow when
Heaven shall have put it into the hearts of publishers to square their
conduct with their interests. I must, however, frankly confess that my
choice has been partly determined by other considerations. I offer here
those parts of my narrative which I conceive to be the least
credible--those which deal with the most monstrous and astounding follies
of a strange people. Their ceremony of marriage by decapitation; their
custom of facing to the rear when riding on horseback; their practice of
walking on their hands in all ceremonial processions; their selection of
the blind for military command; their pig-worship--these and many other
comparatively natural particulars of their religious, political,
intellectual and social life I reserve for treatment in the great work for
which I shall soon ask public favor and acceptance.

In Tortirran politics, as in Tamtonian, the population is always divided
into two, and sometimes three or four "parties," each having a "policy"
and each conscientiously believing the policy of the other, or others,
erroneous and destructive. In so far as these various and varying policies
can be seen to have any relation whatever to practical affairs they can be
seen also to be the result of purely selfish considerations. The
self-deluded people flatter themselves that their elections are contests
of principles, whereas they are only struggles of interests. They are very
fond of the word _slagthrit_, "principle"; and when they believe
themselves acting from some high moral motive they are capable of almost
any monstrous injustice or stupid folly. This insane devotion to principle
is craftily fostered by their political leaders who invent captivating
phrases intended to confirm them in it; and these deluding aphorisms are
diligently repeated until all the people have them in memory, with no
knowledge of the fallacies which they conceal. One of these phrases is
"Principles, not men." In the last analysis this is seen to mean that it
is better to be governed by scoundrels professing one set of principles
than by good men holding another. That a scoundrel will govern badly,
regardless of the principles which he is supposed somehow to "represent,"
is a truth which, however obvious to our own enlightened intelligence, has
never penetrated the dark understandings of the Tortirrans. It is chiefly
through the dominance of the heresy fostered by this popular phrase that
the political leaders are able to put base men into office to serve their
own nefarious ends.

I have called the political contests of Tortirra struggles of interests.
In nothing is this more clear (to the looker-on at the game) than in the
endless disputes concerning restrictions on commerce. It must be
understood that lying many leagues to the southeast of Tortirra are other
groups of islands, also wholly unknown to people of our race. They are
known by the general name of _Gropilla-Stron_ (a term signifying "the Land
of the Day-dawn"), though it is impossible to ascertain why, and are
inhabited by a powerful and hardy race, many of whom I have met in the
capital of Tanga. The Stronagu, as they are called, are bold navigators
and traders, their proas making long and hazardous voyages in all the
adjacent seas to exchange commodities with other tribes. For many years
they were welcomed in Tortirra with great hospitality and their goods
eagerly purchased. They took back with them all manner of Tortirran
products and nobody thought of questioning the mutual advantages of the
exchange. But early in the present century a powerful Tortirran demagogue
named Pragam began to persuade the people that commerce was piracy--that
true prosperity consisted in consumption of domestic products and
abstention from foreign. This extraordinary heresy soon gathered such head
that Pragam was appointed Regent and invested with almost dictatorial
powers. He at once distributed nearly the whole army among the seaport
cities, and whenever a Stronagu trading proa attempted to land, the
soldiery, assisted by the populace, rushed down to the beach, and with a
terrible din of gongs and an insupportable discharge of stink-pots--the
only offensive weapon known to Tortirran warfare--drove the laden vessels
to sea, or if they persisted in anchoring destroyed them and smothered
their crews in mud. The Tortirrans themselves not being a sea-going
people, all communication between them and the rest of their little world
soon ceased. But with it ceased the prosperity of Tortirra. Deprived of a
market for their surplus products and compelled to forego the comforts and
luxuries which they had obtained from abroad, the people began to murmur
at the effect of their own folly. A reaction set in, a powerful opposition
to Pragam and his policy was organized, and he was driven from power.

But the noxious tree that Pragam had planted in the fair garden of his
country's prosperity had struck root too deeply to be altogether
eradicated. It threw up shoots everywhere, and no sooner was one cut down
than from roots underrunning the whole domain of political thought others
sprang up with a vigorous and baleful growth. While the dictum that trade
is piracy no longer commands universal acceptance, a majority of the
populace still hold a modified form of it, and that "importation is theft"
is to-day a cardinal political "principle" of a vast body of Tortirra's
people. The chief expounders and protagonists of this doctrine are all
directly or indirectly engaged in making or growing such articles as were
formerly got by exchange with the Stronagu traders. The articles are
generally inferior in quality, but consumers, not having the benefit of
foreign competition, are compelled to pay extortionate prices for them,
thus maintaining the unscrupulous producers in needless industries and a
pernicious existence. But these active and intelligent rogues are too
powerful to be driven out. They persuade their followers, among whom are
many ignorant consumers, that this vestigial remnant of the old Pragam
policy is all that keeps the nation from being desolated by small-pox and
an epidemic of broken legs. It is impossible within these limits to give a
full history of the strange delusion whose origin I have related. It has
undergone many modifications and changes, as it is the nature of error to
do, but the present situation is about this. The trading proas of the
Stronagu are permitted to enter certain ports, but when one arrives she
must anchor at a little distance from shore. Here she is boarded by an
officer of the government, who ascertains the thickness of her keel, the
number of souls on board and the amount and character of the merchandise
she brings. From these data--the last being the main factor in the
problem--the officer computes her unworthiness and adjudges a suitable
penalty. The next day a scow manned by a certain number of soldiers pushes
out and anchors within easy throw of her, and there is a frightful beating
of gongs. When this has reached its lawful limit as to time it is hushed
and the soldiers throw a stated number of stink-pots on board the
offending craft. These, exploding as they strike, stifle the captain and
crew with an intolerable odor. In the case of a large proa having a cargo
of such commodities as the Tortirrans particularly need, this bombardment
is continued for hours. At its conclusion the vessel is permitted to land
and discharge her cargo without further molestation. Under these hard
conditions importers find it impossible to do much business, the
exorbitant wages demanded by seamen consuming most of the profit. No
restrictions are now placed on the export trade, and vessels arriving
empty are subjected to no penalties; but the Stronagu having other
markets, in which they can sell as well as buy, cannot afford to go empty
handed to Tortirra.

It will be obvious to the reader that in all this no question of
"principle" is involved. A well-informed Tortirran's mental attitude with
regard to the matter may be calculated with unfailing accuracy from a
knowledge of his interests. If he produces anything which his countrymen
want, and which in the absence of all restriction they could get more
cheaply from the Stronagu than they can from him, he is in politics a
_Gakphew_, or "Stinkpotter"; if not he is what that party derisively calls
a _Shokerbom_, which signifies "Righteous Man"--for there is nothing which
the Gakphews hold in so holy detestation as righteousness.

Nominally, Tortirra is an hereditary monarchy; virtually it is a
democracy, for under a peculiar law of succession there is seldom an
occupant of the throne, and all public affairs are conducted by a Supreme
Legislature sitting at Felduchia, the capital of Tanga, to which body each
island of the archipelago, twenty-nine in number, elects representatives
in proportion to its population, the total membership being nineteen
hundred and seventeen. Each island has a Subordinate Council for the
management of local affairs and a Head Chief charged with execution of the
laws. There is also a Great Court at Felduchia, whose function it is to
interpret the general laws of the Kingdom, passed by the Supreme Council,
and a Minor Great Court at the capital of each island, with corresponding
duties and powers. These powers are very loosely and vaguely defined, and
are the subject of endless controversy everywhere, and nowhere more than
in the courts themselves--such is the multiplicity of laws and so many are
the contradictory decisions upon them, every decision constituting what is
called a _lantrag_, or, as we might say, "precedent." The peculiarity of a
_lantrag_, or previous decision, is that it is, or is not, binding, at the
will of the honorable judge making a later one on a similar point. If he
wishes to decide in the same way he quotes the previous decision with all
the gravity that he would give to an exposition of the law itself; if not,
he either ignores it altogether, shows that it is not applicable to the
case under consideration (which, as the circumstances are never exactly
the same, he can always do), or substitutes a contradictory _lantrag_ and
fortifies himself with that. There is a precedent for any decision that a
judge may wish to make, but sometimes he is too indolent to search it out
and cite it. Frequently, when the letter and intent of the law under which
an action is brought are plainly hostile to the decision which it pleases
him to render, the judge finds it easier to look up an older law, with
which it is compatible, and which the later one, he says, does not repeal,
and to base his decision on that; and there is a law for everything, just
as there is a precedent. Failing to find, or not caring to look for,
either precedent or statute to sustain him, he can readily show that any
other decision than the one he has in will would be _tokoli impelly_; that
is to say, contrary to public morals, and this, too, is considered a
legitimate consideration, though on another occasion he may say, with
public assent and approval, that it is his duty, not to make the law
conform to justice, but to expound and enforce it as he finds it. In
short, such is the confusion of the law and the public conscience that the
courts of Tortirra do whatever they please, subject only to overruling by
higher courts in the exercise of _their_ pleasure; for great as is the
number of minor and major tribunals, a case originating in the lowest is
never really settled until it has gone through all the intermediate ones
and been passed upon by the highest, to which it might just as well have
been submitted at first. The evils of this astonishing system could not be
even baldly catalogued in a lifetime. They are infinite in number and
prodigious in magnitude. To the trained intelligence of the American
observer it is incomprehensible how any, even the most barbarous, nation
can endure them.

An important function of the Great Court and the Minor Great Court is
passing upon the validity of all laws enacted by the Supreme Council and
the Subordinate Councils, respectively. The nation as a whole, as well as
each separate island, has a fundamental law called the _Trogodal_, or, as
we should say, the Constitution; and no law whatever that may be passed by
the Council is final and determinate until the appropriate court has
declared that it conforms to the Trogodal. Nevertheless every law is put
in force the moment it is perfected and before it is submitted to the
court. Indeed, not one in a thousand ever is submitted at all, that
depending upon the possibility of some individual objecting to its action
upon his personal interests, which few, indeed, can afford to do. It not
infrequently occurs that some law which has for years been rigorously
enforced, even by fines and imprisonment, and to which the whole
commercial and social life of the nation has adjusted itself with all its
vast property interests, is brought before the tribunal having final
jurisdiction in the matter and coolly declared no law at all. The
pernicious effect may be more easily imagined than related, but those who
by loyal obedience to the statute all those years have been injured in
property, those who are ruined by its erasure and those who may have
suffered the severest penalties for its violation are alike without
redress. It seems not to have occurred to the Tortirrans to require the
court to inspect the law and determine its validity before it is put in
force. It is, indeed, the traditional practice of these strange tribunals,
when a case is forced upon them, to decide, not as many points of law as
they can, but as few as they may; and this dishonest inaction is not only
tolerated but commended as the highest wisdom. The consequence is that
only those who make a profession of the law and live by it and find their
account in having it as little understood by others as is possible can
know which acts and parts of acts are in force and which are not. The
higher courts, too, have arrogated to themselves the power of declaring
unconstitutional even parts of the Constitution, frequently annulling most
important provisions of the very instrument creating them!

A popular folly in Torti

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