The Arena, Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891
by Various · English · Gutenberg #25909 · 335,888 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Arena, Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891
Author: Various
Editor: B. O. Flower
Release date: June 27, 2008 [eBook #25909]
Most recently updated: January 3, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ARENA, VOLUME 4, NO. 24, NOVEMBER, 1891 ***
Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Richard J. Shiffer
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THE ARENA.
No. XXIV.
NOVEMBER, 1891.
[Illustration: H. C. Lodge (with signature)]
A PARADISE OF GAMBLERS.
BY EDGAR FAWCETT.
Many religious journals throughout the country have poured eulogies
upon the pious head of our Postmaster General because of his raid
against all letters bearing the least uncanny relation to that
abhorred criminal body, the Louisiana Lottery. In one sense this
action is not ill-advised; the national laws against gambling are
distinct, and even if they were unjust their existence would be no
excuse for their infringement. The highly moral action of Mr.
Wanamaker, however, happening as it does at a time when his own
relations with the hazards and plots of Wall Street have grown the
talk of our entire country, teem with a suggestion that should be
patent to thousands. If gnats are strained at and camels are
swallowed, there is certainly a pardonable satire in congratulating
those who devour the latter on their noteworthy powers of digestion.
As an immoral institution the Louisiana Lottery, evil as it is, cannot
be compared with Monte Carlo, which arrays itself in facile splendors
of enticement and smiles in mirrors and gildings on the rash gamesters
whom it ruins. But the Louisiana Lottery, which of late it has become
the fashion to revile, devises its chief gains in a much less faulty
manner. For such disbursements as one dollar, two dollars, five
dollars, a good deal of golden expectancy and anticipation can be
enjoyed, and there is no confirmed proof whatever that the citizens
who are rash enough to expend these massive amounts have ever been
swindled at the monthly New Orleans drawings. Indeed, they have
ample proof, if they care to sift it, that somebody in Maine, or
Indiana, or California, has received a small fortune for part of a
ticket purchased at the same cheap terms as their own. Naturally,
unless they were complete fools, they knew previous to their
investment that the chances against them were extremely large, and
that their prospect of winning anything very handsome was about equal
to that of their being struck by lightning or having an unknown
relative leave them a fat legacy. Could it once be proved that the
Louisiana Lottery is really dishonest in its dealings--really more
dishonest than the bright-lit bar-room that shiningly says to one,
"Come and get drunk in me if you choose, but if you don't choose drink
only as much as you want in me, and if you don't choose to enter me at
all, avoid me forever and a day"--then the iniquity of the whole
organization could not be scorned in terms too harsh. But at present
all indictments against this particular species of gambling would seem
to be just as airy as those against the alluring tavern. The
"prohibition extremists" are like lawyers who can never make their
case, yet are incessantly fuming against their own failure. These
extremists forget that their shadowy moral client is plaintiff in a
kind of curious divorce-suit, where the defendant is human nature and
the co-respondent human will. It is most probable that men will
continue to get drunk just so long as education remains for them an
incident force of inferior potency. As to their liking and upholding
certain milder games of chance (after the style of the Greeks, let us
say, at their very highest period of culture), that is perhaps not an
educational question at all, but one of simple diversion. There are
kinds of gambling, however, with which no believer in racial progress
will admit that the loftier forms of civilization can possibly deal,
and foremost among these must be counted the reckless license, the
odious libertinage of venture which now shames a republic never tired
of vaunting its virtues to the transatlantic monarchies from which it
sprang.
He who would note and study, in all their terror, melancholy, and
pathos, the selfishness and avarice of his fellow-men, might search
the whole known globe and never find a field for his observations at
once more fruitful and more discouraging than that of Wall Street. To
realize in its full glare of vicious vulgarity the influence of this
environment, let us take the case of some refined young man just after
he has quitted school and entered the office of a thrifty
broker--perhaps a warm friend of his father, who hugs the keenly
American doctrine that a youth should be put in the way of piling
dollars together as quickly as possible after he leaves the
educational leash. By degrees this young man will discover that the
only difference between Wall Street and a huge, crowd-engirt
gaming-table is one between simplicity and complexity. He will see
that the play of the former is far more difficult to learn and that it
requires a number of _croupiers_ instead of one. He will see that
these _croupiers_ are in most cases men whose names posterity will
hand down, if it hands them down at all, as those of stony egotists,
and sometimes of gigantic thieves. He will gradually gain insight into
certain of their methods, as when, only a few years back, one or two
of them seized an entire railroad under cover of what was the merest
parody of purchase and opposed both to law and to public policy,
afterward defending their outrage in the courts through the brazen aid
of venal judges and bringing to Albany (headquarters of their
attempted theft) a great carload of New York ruffians, each with a
proxy in his soiled and desperate hand--an instrument almost as
illegal as the pistol which those hands had doubtless too often
fingered if not fired amid the squalor of their owners' native
slums.[1]
[1] It is a fact that the late James Fisk, Jr., was
appointed by Judge Barnard, of New York, receiver of a
railway (the Albany and Susquehanna) which lay a hundred
miles outside of that magistrate's judicial district.
The neophyte in speculators' creeds and customs may amuse himself,
however, with reminiscences like the preceding only in a sense of that
proud historic retrospect which concerns past radiant records of "the
street." He may, if so minded, con other pages of its noble archives,
and dazzle his young brain with admiration for the shining exploits of
"Black Friday," an occasion when greed held one of its most sickening
revels, and a clique of merciless financiers gathered together so many
millions of gold coin that its price bred fright among the holders of
depreciating stocks. Agony, ruin, the demolition of firesides,
resulted from this infamous "corner" wrought by a league of miserly
zealots. But our young student of Wall Street annals will soon
harden his nerves against any silly commiseration. As well soil the
glory of Lexington or Bunker Hill by brooding over the pangs of those
who were its victims. All great victories necessitate bloodshed. It is
not every man who can wrest vast wealth from the turmoils of a "Black
Friday." ... And so, after turning the pages of a revolting chronicle,
all of which teem with calamity to the many and plethoric gain to the
bullying and insolent few, he surveys that active boil and ferment of
the present, seeking to discern there some course of trick and scheme
by which he too may fatten his purse, even though he blunts conscience
into a callous nullity. Between old days and new he finds but slight
difference. Rises and panics prevail now as then. The "margin,"
beloved of the wily broker, first lures and then robs the trustful
buyer. "Pools," open and secret, grasping and malicious, may wreak at
any hour disasters on the unwary. "Points" are given by one operator
to another with the same mendacious glibness as of yore. The market is
now dull with the torpor of a sleeping cobra, now aflame, like that
reptile, with treacherous and poisonous life. In its repose as in its
excitement our novice begins to know it, fear it, and heartily love it
besides. The chances are nine out of ten that he loves it too much and
fears it too little. Its hideous vulgarity has ceased to shock him.
Its "bulls," with their often audacious purchases of stock for which
they do not pay but out of whose random fluctuations in value they
expect to reap thousands from the "bears," who sell in a like blind,
betting-ring fashion; its devices of "spreads," and of "straddles,"
which are combinations of "puts" and "calls" whereby the purchaser
limits his loss and at the same time suits the chances of his winning
to those of vacillant prices themselves; its unblushing compromises on
the part of debtors with creditors, fifty cents on the dollar being
frequently paid by bankrupts to the extent of one, two, or three
hundred thousand dollars, in order that they may resume their highly
legitimate undertakings and perhaps grow rich again in company with
their fellow-gamblers; all these, and many more features of Wall
Street life, equally vivid and equally soiled by sordid materialism,
have at length wrapped the mind of this young observer in their
drastic and sinister spells. When he "starts out for himself," as he
is presently quite sure to do, his ultimate success is enormously
doubtful. His reign as a leading personality in Wall Street means to
have been a Childe Roland who, indeed, to the Dark Tower did actually
come. The horn that such a victor lifts to his mouth has been wrought,
as one might say, from the bones of some comrade slain in the same
arduous pilgrimage, and the peal of triumph which his lips evoke from
it might be called a blending of countless wretched cries from the
lips of other perished strugglers in the same daring design. Great
success with him, if he achieves it, will be--what? An almost Titanic
power to torture and affright at will hundreds, thousands of his
fellow-men. He will have before him the example of a man who locked up
$12,500,000 in one of his riotous assaults against honest
stock-exchange dealing--money notoriously not his own. He may desire
to imitate that course of behavior which had Samuel Bowles abducted
and unlawfully imprisoned because he published in his paper the truth
about Wall Street trickery and villany, or which sandbagged Dorman B.
Eaton in the streets of New York for having fought with legal weapons
of honest denunciation that malodorous craft of a compact between
incarnate kleptomania in finance and the unspeakable "boss" burglar of
Tammany Ring.
But needless are further details of those abominations on which our
rising young aspirant may turn an envious eye. He cannot but acquaint
himself with the whole horrid list of chicanery, since its items are
rungs of the ladder on which he himself may hereafter seek to mount.
If he aims to be a great Wall Street spider he must perforce fully
acquaint himself with what material will go toward the spinning of
that baleful tissue, his proprietary web. It must be woven, this web,
out of perjuries and robberies. Its fibres must mean the heart-strings
torn from many a deluded stockholder's breast, and the morning dew
that glitters on it must be the tears of widows and orphans. The laws
of a great republic are the foliage (alas, of a tree not too sturdy!)
on which its devilish meshes are wrought! There is no exaggeration in
stating that the financial history of the past three decades in
America has been one of peerless turpitude. Rome under the dying
glories of the empire scarcely parallels its knavish gluttonies of
illegal seizure. And Wall Street has been the boiling point of all
this infectious train of outrages against a patient people--one that
presumes to rate itself really democratic, and to sneer at countries
over seas in which to-day a Credit Mobilier, a Pacific Railroad
atrocity, a Manhattan Railroad brigandage, would make Trafalgar Square
or the Place de la Concorde howl with savage tumult.
But let us return to our would-be Wall Street magnate. Suppose he has
not the "grit" or the "go" (or whatever it would be termed in that
classic purlieu so noted for elegance of every-day rhetoric) either to
crown himself with the tarnished crown of a monetary "king" or even to
hold a gilt-edged but scandal-reeking portfolio at the footstool of
some such reigning tyrant. In this case he may join the great
rank-and-file of those whose pockets have become irremediably voided
and who seldom refer to Wall Street unless with muttered curses while
dragging out maimed careers in various far less feverish pursuits; or
he may, on the other hand, drift into that humble crowd of petty
brokers ("curb-stone" or domiciled) whose incomes vary from fifteen
hundred to as many thousands a year, and who pass hours each day in
envy, whether secret or open, of the dignitaries towering above them.
As one of these inferior persons his existence will continue, no
doubt, until he changes it for the tomb: and meanwhile what sort of an
existence has it been? All the finer human aims have appealed to him
as pearls appeal to swine. He has, perhaps, possessed faculties which
might have allowed him to shine ably and yet honorably in the state or
national congress, whose votes his friends and rivals, to ensure the
passage of their unscrupulous railroad-bills, have bought so often and
with such bloodless depravity. But these faculties have been miserably
misused. He may have loved some woman, and married her, and begotten
children by her; domestic affection may have warmed his being, just as
it does that of many a day-laborer. But in the arid air of Wall Street
all his intellectual and ethical possibilities will have wilted and
died. Lust for greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering
disappointment at not having attained them, will replace the healthier
impulses of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of high
attainments, unless their coffers brim with lucre, affect him no more
than the company of the most unlettered oaf. He becomes, in other
words, the typical Wall Street man, and he becomes this with a
stolid indifference to all known motors of mental betterment.
It is not in any sense an attractive type. The Wall Street men are
lilies that toil and spin ("tiger" lilies, one might term them, in
remembrance of the old gambler-slang about faro and roulette); but
their industries, however distinct, are what the political economists
would call those of non-productive consumers. They are active drones,
to speak with paradox, in the great hive of human energy. Like all
gamesters, all men who live by the turning of the dice-box, they have
a devil-may-care demeanor, now and then rather sharply peppered with
wit, though wit not always avoidant of the obscene. For the most part,
they are as ignorant of the large onward push of human thought as if
they were farmers in some remote county of Arkansas. And yet they
affect, at all times, an amusing omniscience. To "know it all" is a
phrase beloved as sarcasm by their nimble vernacular, and though this
(like "Come off!" and "Look here, what are you giving us?") is a form
of speech incessantly on their lips, one is prone sometimes to reflect
how amazing is the meagreness of real knowledge which their "knowing
it all" piteously represents. They are sometimes keen sportsmen, but a
good many scamps, dolts, and cads are that. Their acquaintance with
contemporary literature could be summed up by stating that if you
should ask an average number of their class whether he had read the
last novel of Mr. James, he might pull his moustache (the Wall Street
man usually has a moustache, and often a symmetric and well-tended
one) desiring to learn whether you had reference or no to _G. P. R._
James, of the "two horse-men" celebrity. Their ignorance, however, is
not equal to their self-sufficiency. Almost whenever the average Wall
Street man goes into good society he makes himself more pronounced
there by his assurance than his culture. Of the latter quality he has
so little that the best clubs of which he is a member tolerate rather
than accept him. In most cases he is deplorably curt of speech and
brusque of deportment. Suavity, repose, that kindliness which is the
very marrow and pith of high-breeding, shock you in his manners as
acutely by their absence as if they were rents in his waistcoat or
gapes in his boot-leather. The "bluff," impudence, and swagger of the
Stock Exchange cling to him in society like burrs to the hair of
horse or dog. He would be far more endurable, this socially rampant
and ubiquitous Wall Street man, if he revealed the least shred of
respect for those ideas and faiths on which his hard, cold course of
living has necessarily trampled rough-hooved. He is so bright and
intelligent, as a rule, that you wonder why he is so phenomenally
vulgar. But his brightness and intelligence are of the quality, nearly
always, that throws into hysteric giggles the "summer girl" on piazzas
of third-rate hotels. Ordinarily, too, he has not the faintest
conception of how deeply and darkly he bores people who would live
apart from him, from his bejewelled and supercilious wife (her pretty
head always goes an inch further backward when "Tom" or "Dick" has
"made a strike in stocks"), and from the French maid, with her frilled
cap, whom his children gabble to in their grammarless American-French,
but whose unctuous idioms are Sanscrit alike to madame and himself.
Conceive that you or I shall wish to talk with the ordinary Wall
Street man, on the piazza of his watering-place hotel, on the deck of
his record-breaking steamer. (When he goes to Europe, which he
incessantly does, he invariably takes a record-breaking steamer in
preference to all others.) What does he know? What can he tell us?
Politics? He reproduces, if he be a Republican, the last tirade of his
favorite newspaper in behalf of protection and Mr. Blaine. If he be a
Democrat he will spout the last editorial of his favorite newspaper in
favor of free trade and Mr. Cleveland. History? The Wall Street man
rarely knows in what year Columbus discovered America, and would be in
straits wild enough to horrify that talented arch-prig, Mr. Andrew
Lang, if you mentioned either Cortes or Pizarro. Fiction? He admired
Robinson Crusoe when a boy, and since then he has read a few
translated volumes of Dumas the elder. Poetry? He doesn't like it "for
a cent"; but he once did come across something (by Tennyson or
Longfellow--he forgets which) called "Beautiful Snow." That "fetched
him," and "laid over" any other verse he recollects.
Here, let us insist, is no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street
man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry
lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were,
with the oil of his own slippery speculations. If he resents the
honest drawing of his well-known features, why, so much the better.
His indignation may be fraught with wholesome reactions. Perhaps he
will have his defenders--interested ones, of course. We may pluck the
cactus-flower with hands cased in buckskin, and swear that it harbors
no sting below its roseate and silken cockade of bloom. Prejudice is
too often the saucepan on which we cook our criticisms; and when these
are done to a turn we cast the vessel into a dust-bin, trying with
mighty valor of volition to forget that it even exists as old iron.
Never was more blatant humbug aired than that about our "brilliant"
Wall Street financiers. Their "brilliancy" is merely a repulsive
egotism in one of its worst forms,--that of cupidity. They are like
misers with longer, quicker, and more sinewy fingers than other
misers, in the gathering together of dollars. Their shrewdness may be
exceptional, but a quality which consists half in accurate guessing
and half in bullying defiance is hardly worthy of the name. As for
their "nerve" and "coolness," these are not endowments that in such
connection can be admired or praised. For surely the gambler who
cannot face bravely those very slings and arrows of variant if not
always outrageous fortune which form the chief indices of his dingy
profession, cuts a mean enough figure in the cult of it. "Jim" Fisk
had traits like these, but who now applauds them? As well admire the
courage of a house-breaker in scaling a garden-wall at midnight, or
his exquisite tact in selecting a bed-chamber well-stored with jewels
and money. The so-called "great men" of Wall Street are foes of
society--foes merciless and malign. Their "generalship," their
"Napoleonic" attributes are terms coined by people of their own
damaging class, people with low motives, with even brutish morals. It
is time that this age of ours, so rich in theoretic if impracticable
humanitarianisms, forebore to flatter the spirits which work against
it in its efforts toward higher and wiser achievement. The anarchists
hanged in Chicago were men of mistaken purpose and fatuous belief. But
at least they were conceivably sincere, however dangerous to peace and
order. These czars and tycoons of finance, on the other hand, are
scoffers at the integrity of the commonweal, and have for their Lares
and Penates hideous little gods carved by their own misanthropy from
the harsh granite of self-worship. Every new conspiracy to amass
millions through wrecking railroads, through pouring vast sums upon
the stock market, through causing as vast sums to disappear from
public use, stains them blacker with the proof of their horrible
inhumanity. Even death does not always end their monstrous rapine, for
when they pay what is called the debt of nature they too often fling,
in their wills, a posthumous sneer at that still larger debt owed to
their fellow-creatures, and make some eldest son their principal heir.
Charity may get a few niggardly thousands from them, and handsome
bequests usually go to their younger children; yet the bulk of the big
gambler's treasure passes intact to one who will most probably guard
with avid custody the alleged prestige of its possession.
But we should remember that on many occasions it is not even a game of
chance with these potentates of Wall Street. They play, as it were,
with marked cards, and can predict to a certainty, having such mighty
capital at their disposal, just how and when particular stocks will
rise or fall. Spreading abroad deceitful rumors through their little
subservient throngs of henchmen brokers, they create untold ravage and
despair. Fearful cruelty is shown by them then. The law cannot reach
it, though years of imprisonment would be far too good for it.
Families are plunged into penury by their subtly circulated frauds;
forgery and embezzlement in hundreds of individual cases result; banks
are betrayed and shattered; disgrace and suicide are sown broadcast
like seeds fecund in poison. One often marvels that assassination does
not spring up in certain desperate human hearts as a vengeance against
these appalling wrongs. Murder is ghastly enough, in whatever shape it
meets us, and from whatever cause. But if Lincoln and Garfield fell
the prey of mad fanatics, it seems all the stranger, as it is all the
more fortunate, that agonized and ill-governed human frenzy should
thus far happily have spared us new public shudders at new public
crimes.
Conjecture may indeed waste its liveliest ardors in seeking to
determine what place this nineteenth century of ours will hold among
the centuries which have preceded and are destined to follow it. But
there is good reason to believe, after all, that in one way it will be
held remarkable, perhaps even unique,--as an age of violent contrasts,
violent extremes. Here we are, seeking (however pathetically) to
grapple with problems whose solution would wear an almost millennial
tinge. There are men among us--and men of august intellects, too--who
urge upon society the adoption of codes and usages which would assume,
if practically treated, that the minds and characters of mortals are
little short of angelic. And coevally with these dreamers of grand
socialistic improvement, we are met by such evidence as that of Wall
Street, its air foul with the mephitic exhalations that rise from dead
and rotting principle. When the state is corrupt, and large bodies of
its citizens are not only corrupt but wholly scornful of every
fraternal and philanthropic purpose as well,--when communities like
this of Wall Street, cold-blooded, shameless, injurious, are bowed to
as powers, instead of being shunned as pests, then the ideals of such
men as Karl Marx and his disciples loom distant and indefinite on the
horizon of the future. Tritest of metaphors though it may be, all
civilization is a garden, and in this garden of our own western
tillage Wall Street towers to-day like a colossal weed, with roots
deep-plunging into a soil they desiccate and de-fertilize. When and
whose will be the extirpating hand?
Here dawns a question with which some modern Sphinx may defy some
coming OEdipus. Let us hope it will prove a question so adequately
answered that the evil goddess using it as a challenge--the
conventional deity of injustice, duplicity, and extortion--will
dramatize her compulsory response to it by casting herself headlong
into the sea!
PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE--WHICH?
BY HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE, M. C.
The advocates of free trade in this country at the present time are
very unlike Emerson's "fine young Oxford gentlemen" who said "there
was nothing new, and nothing true, and no matter." They not only
believe their pet doctrine to be true, but they seem to assume that it
is also new. They further treat it as if it were an exact science and
a great moral question as well. Unwarranted assumptions merely confuse
and this question of national economic policy is too important to be
clouded with confusions. It is worth while, therefore, to look at
these assumptions one by one and try, before attempting any discussion
of the tariff, to clear the ground from cant and to see the question
exactly as it is.
In the first place, the question of free trade or protection is in no
sense a moral one. Free traders are prone to forget that their great
prophet, Adam Smith, drew this distinction very plainly at the outset.
He wrote two important works. One of them all the world has read. It
is called "The Wealth of Nations," deals with the selfish interests of
mankind, and embodies the author's political economy. The other is an
equally elaborate work entitled "The Moral Sentiments." It is the
complement of "The Wealth of Nations," which is devoted to the selfish
side of human nature and the world at large has found no trouble in
forgetting it. Adam Smith himself was under no confusion of mind as to
his subject when he wrote about political economy. He knew that he was
dealing with questions of a selfish character, of an enlightened
selfishness, no doubt, but none the less questions of self-interest.
He never for a moment thought of putting his political economy on a
plane of pure morality.
When the great political movement toward free trade began in England,
it was largely a movement of the middle classes and of the industrial
interests of Great Britain. The great middle class of England, which
furnishes the backbone and sinew of the nation, is essentially a moral
class, and in appealing to it the political leader is always tempted
to put forward the moral aspect of his theme, even if he has to twist
his argument and his facts to find one. The manufacturers of England
believed that free trade would be profitable, but it soothed them to
be assured that the system was also highly moral. It is to the
Manchester School, therefore, that we owe the attempt to give to the
entire free trade system a moral coloring for which the narrower
question of the repeal of the corn laws afforded an opportunity. Our
own free traders for the most part are devout followers of the
Manchester School, and take all their teachings and practices with
little discrimination. They are essentially imitative. The anti-corn
law agitators pointed their arguments by exhibiting loaves of bread of
different sizes, and so our free traders, during a campaign, have gone
about in carts and held up pairs of trousers, a more humorous if less
intelligent form of object lesson. They attempt, too, in like fashion,
to give the weight of morality to their doctrines. Unfortunately for
them, inasmuch as everyone likes to be moral at some one's else
expense, their position is untenable. Adam Smith's distinction was a
broad and sound one; and deeply important as political economy and
questions of tariff are, they are in no sense matters of morals. They
are purely questions of self-interest, of profit and loss, and can be
decided properly on these grounds alone.
In the second place, the assumption made tacitly, at least, if not
avowedly, that political economy is an exact science is wholly
misleading. Political economy covers a wide range of subjects of which
the tariff is only one; but in none of its branches is it an exact
science. Modern investigation has, no doubt, revealed certain economic
laws which we may fairly say operate with reasonable certainty, but
this is a very different proposition from that which would make the
conclusions of economists in all directions as absolute as those of
mathematicians. Political economy, in fact, does not differ greatly in
this respect from history, because both deal with subjects where the
conditions and sympathies of men and women play a large part, and
where human passions are deeply engaged. In fields like these, where
the personal equation of humanity plays a controlling part, it is
absurd to attempt to argue as if we were dealing with a mathematical
formula. There may be a philosophy of political economy as there is
of history; there may be scientific methods of dealing with it and
certain economic laws, subject to many exceptions, which we may
consider to be established, but nevertheless it is as far from being
an exact science as one can conceive. The exact science notion is the
misconception of cloistered learning which can build impregnable
systems where there are none to attack them, but which has no idea of
the practical difficulties of an unsympathetic world where the
precious system must meet every possible objection and not merely
those devised by its framers. In discussing a question of political
economy, therefore, it is well to bear in mind that we are handling a
subject where new facts are always entering in to modify old
conclusions, and where there are many conditions, the effect of which
it is impossible to calculate.
In the third place, the ardent tariff reformer at the present moment
always discourses upon his subject as if he had some perfectly new
truth to lay before the world from which it would be as impossible to
differ, unless one was illiterate or corrupt, as from the conclusion
of Galileo in regard to the movement of the earth. In one of our
recent political campaigns I quoted an argument of Hamilton's in favor
of protection from his famous Report of Manufactures. Thereupon one of
my opponents in a public speech, referring to this quotation, said it
would be as sensible to adopt Hamilton's views on the tariff as to go
back to stage coaches simply because those vehicles were the means of
conveyance in Hamilton's time. I could not help wondering what my
learned opponent would have thought if I had retorted that, by parity
of reasoning, we ought to reject the "Wealth of Nations" because Adam
Smith flourished a little earlier than Hamilton, and stage coaches
were used in his day also. The simple truth is that there is nothing
very new to-day in the question of free trade or protection. The
subject is one which has been under consideration for some time. It
has received great developments in the last hundred years, and is
still so far from the last word that it is safest not to be too
dogmatic about it.
In this matter of the tariff, then, we have before us a question which
is not new, which is not moral, but which deals simply with matters of
self-interest according to the dictates of an enlightened selfishness.
What is the condition of the question of free trade to-day in its
practical aspect? Fifty years ago, roughly speaking, the movement for
it in England became successful, and the English people abandoned a
protective tariff which they had maintained for some centuries and
adopted the free trade tariff which they have to-day. The latter
system has had a thorough trial in England under the most favorable
circumstances. If there is any country in the world which, by its
situation, its history and its condition, is adapted for free trade,
England is that country. If free trade, therefore, is the certain and
enormous benefit which its advocates assert, and if it is the only
true system for nations to adopt, its history in England ought to
prove the truth of these propositions. How near has free trade come to
performing all that its original promoters claimed in its behalf? How
brilliant has been its success in practise? One thing at least is
certain: it has not been such an overwhelming and glittering success
as to convince any other civilized nation of its merits. England
stands alone to-day, as she has stood for the last fifty years, the
one free trade nation in the world. Possibly England of all the
nations may be right and everybody else may be wrong, but there is, at
least, a division of opinion so respectable that we may assume, with
all due reverence for our free trade friends, that there are two sides
to this question as to many others.
Let us look for a moment at some of the early promises. Free trade,
according to its originators, was to usher in an era of peace and
good-will. It was, in its extension, to put an end to wars. It has
certainly not brought peace to England, which has had a petty war of
some sort on her hands almost every year since the free trade gospel
was preached. I do not mean to say that this is in the least due to
free trade, but it is quite obvious that free trade did not stop
fighting. The prosperity of England has, of course, been undeniably
great, and it has been especially great among the vast industrial and
manufacturing interests which supported the free trade policy.
Possibly they have thriven better under this system than they would
have done under the old one, but this must remain mere speculation,
and as we know that some protected countries have prospered as much if
not more than England, the prosperity argument has little weight.
There are, however, other fields where we need not rely on conjecture.
Has free trade been an unquestionable benefit not merely to the
industrial but to all classes in England? It certainly has not put an
end to strikes, for strikes have never been more frequent anywhere
than they have been in Great Britain of late years. It does not seem
to have perceptibly diminished poverty, if we may judge from such
recent books as "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London," and "Through
Darkest England." The state of Ireland has not been indicative of a
healing and life-giving prosperity. In a word the great problems of
labor, of poverty, and of over-population seem as severe in free trade
England as in protective countries. Free trade again does not seem to
have prevented the rise of trusts and syndicates, nor to have stopped
the accumulation of vast wealth in a few hands. In other words, there
is no evidence that free trade has had any effect on the most serious
questions of the day, which touch the welfare of the great masses of
the people. All that can be said is that the manufacturing and
industrial interests of Great Britain seem to have thriven under it.
For a system which arrogates to itself absolute truth, this is a
meagre showing.
Free trade has not demonstrated its infallibility in the single
country where it has been tried. The question, therefore, for the
people of the United States is, whether under their conditions it is
well to make the change which England made nearly fifty years ago, and
to adopt a system of which the success has been doubtful in its chosen
field. In order to decide the question intelligently we must put aside
all vague confusions about an exact science which will work the same
results everywhere because it operates under an immutable law. Even if
free trade had been a brilliant and conclusive success in England, of
which there is no proof, does it follow that it would be a better
system for us? We have, to begin with, in our possession, instead of a
small island a continent capable of almost every variety of natural
production and mechanical industry. This is also a new country and a
young country. We have been developing our resources rapidly for the
last hundred years, but they are still not fully developed. The policy
of the United States, although with many fluctuations, has been in the
main to develop all our natural and mechanical opportunities to their
fullest extent. The free trader is always ready with the terse
statement that, "You cannot make yourself rich by taxing yourself,"
followed by a freshly humorous allusion to lifting one's self by one's
boot-straps. He then feels that he has met the case. If political
economy and the financial policy of nations were as simple as this
argument seems to imply, life would be an easier thing both for
nations and individuals. Unluckily the problems of mankind which
engage their interests and passions cannot be solved by cheap
aphorisms. The statement of the free trader about taxing yourself in
order to grow rich has a final and conclusive sound, but it is simply
sound. There are, for example, plenty of towns in New England which
have built factories and relieved certain persons from taxation in
order to secure their capital and industry, and the additional
population and the increased taxes which have thus come to the town
have made it rich or at least richer than it was before. It is quite
possible to adjust taxes or to offer bounties or premiums in such a
way as to add to the aggregate wealth of the community.
The free trader's question is not really pertinent. The point is not
whether you will tax yourself in order to grow rich, but whether you
will so frame your tax laws and so raise your revenues as to
discriminate in favor of your own production and your own wages
against the production and wages of other countries, or whether, on
the other hand, you will let everything strictly alone and leave the
country to come out the best way it can. The general policy of the
United States has been to give encouragement to the domestic producer
and manufacturer, and maintenance to high rates of wages, by laying
duties in such a way as to discriminate in their favor against those
outside. The result, speaking broadly, has been to put the United
States as a competitor into countless lines of new industries. The
effect of the competition of the United States, added to that already
existing in the rest of the world, has been to reduce the world's
prices in the products of those industries according to the well-known
laws of competition. Hence comes the lowering of prices to the
consumer in protected articles, a fact which is the cause of much
satiric laughter to the free trader because he can neither deny nor
explain it.
The practical question now before the people of the United States is
twofold: shall we protect new and nascent industries, and shall we
continue to guard existing industries and existing rates of wages
against an undue competition? John Stuart Mill admits the soundness of
the former policy, and with that admission protectionists may be
content. In fact, it may be doubted whether any intelligent man would
argue to-day that it would have been wiser for the United States never
to have built up any industries, but to have remained a purely
agricultural community, dependent on Europe for everything in the way
of manufacture. I think we may assume that the wisdom of protecting
nascent industries in a country with such capacities and resources as
the United States can hardly be questioned.
Nevertheless, the most hotly contested feature of the McKinley bill
was that which continued the policy of protecting nascent industries
in certain products, and notably that of the manufacture of tin plate.
If the protection of nascent industries at the beginning of this
century was a sound policy, then it is a sound policy to industries of
that description to-day. Whether we have tin mines or not (and it now
appears that we have) there is no reason on the surface why we should
not buy our Straits tin and manufacture tin plate as well as England.
Some Democratic newspapers appear to have an idea that the tin mines
of Cornwall and Wales make a monopoly in this direction for England.
They forget that to-day the tin used by England comes chiefly from the
Straits, and she can buy it there on no better terms than the United
States. If the policy of protection to nascent industries is sound,
then the tariff of 1890 is sound in this direction, and we should seek
its results in the new industries which have been started since it
became a law.
In the second branch, the question of whether we should continue
protection to industries already established is one largely of degree
and of discretion. Where a removal of the duty would mean either a
heavy reduction of wages or a stopping of existing industries with the
rise of prices consequent upon the withdrawal of the United States
from the world's competition, then the removal of the duty would be a
misfortune. It would be a misfortune not only to the industry which
was ruined and to the wage earners who were reduced to idleness or
poverty, but it would be an injury to the consumer because it would in
a short time raise the price of the world's production diminished by
our withdrawal. In industries where no such results could possibly
be feared, or where the production of the article is not possible in
the United States, it would certainly be wise to remove duties, and
this has been the purpose of the protectionists and of the Republican
party.
The policy of protection has received its most recent expression in
this country in the tariff of 1890. It is a truism that no tariff
bill, whether passed by free traders or protectionists, can hope to be
perfect. It is sure to have defects in detail and some inequalities.
The McKinley bill was not exempt from error, but the question for the
people to decide now is whether it is well to abandon the protective
policy and substitute that of free trade. In 1888 the cry was that we
must get rid of the surplus revenue and that that necessity made a
revision of the tariff imperative. The Republican party since it has
been in power has taken two hundred and forty-six millions of the
accumulated surplus and paid off the bonded indebtedness of the
country to that amount. It has also, by the removal of the duty on
sugar and other articles, reduced the annual surplus revenue some
fifty or sixty millions. The danger from the surplus, therefore (and
it was a very real danger), is at an end. No party need be called upon
now to dispose of the annual surplus which was taking so many millions
out of the channels of trade. The question between the parties and
before the country on this issue is very much simpler than it was. It
is whether we shall repeal the tariff of 1890, abandon the protective
system and take up free trade, or whether we shall maintain the
protective system, making such amendments to the law as may from time
to time seem necessary.
I have tried to state the general argument upon the question of free
trade or protection in its broadest way. It only remains to bring
forward so far as possible the facts which show, in part at least, the
results of the tariff of 1890, for upon those results as a whole its
justification or condemnation must rest. It is important to know first
whether the new industries which the McKinley bill was designed to
encourage have begun to start, and second, whether the bill has had
the disastrous effect in raising prices which was so loudly asserted
and prophesied by its opponents at the last election.
I will give first a table showing comparative prices before and after
the tariff of 1890 of some of the cotton fabrics most commonly used.
They are all protected industries and ought to have been advanced in
price if any part of the assertions made by the advocates of free
trade during the last campaign were true.
PRICES OF PRINT GOODS SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE MCKINLEY TARIFF PASSED
COMPARED WITH THEIR PRESENT PRICES.
Before New Under New
Trade Names of Prints. Tariff. Tariff.
Allen's Pink Checks $.06 and .06-1/2 $.05-1/2
Allen's Shirtings .04-3/4 and .05 .04
Allen's Turkey Reds .06-1/2 .05-3/4
American Indigo Blue .06-1/2 .06
American Shirting .05 and .05-1/2 .04-1/2
Anchor Shirting .05 and .05-1/4 .04-1/2
Arnold Long Cloth C .09 .08-1/2
Berlin Solids .06 .05
Berlin Red, 3/4 .07-1/3 .07
Berlin Red, 4-4 .11 .10
Cocheco XX Twills .06-3/4 .06-1/2
Charter Oak Fancies .05 and .05-1/4 .04
Eddystone Fancy .06-1/2 .06
Eddystone Sateen .06-1/2 .06
BLEACHED SHIRTINGS AND SUITINGS.
Before Under
Trade Name of Goods. New New Old New
Tariff. Tariff. Duty. Duty.
Our Reliance $.05-1/2 $.05-1/4 $.04 $.04-1/2
Pride of the West .13 .11-1/2 .05 .05-1/2
Pocahontas .07-3/4 .07-1/2 .04 .04-1/2
Sagamore C .05 .04-3/4 .04 .04-1/2
Utica Steam Nonpareil .10-3/4 .10-1/2 .04 .04-1/2
Wauregan 100's .10-1/2 .09-1/2 .04 .04-1/2
Wauregan Combine .10 .09-1/2 .04 .04-1/2
GINGHAMS AND WASH FABRICS.
Before New Under New
Trade Name of Goods. Tariff. Tariff.
Everett Classics $.08-1/2 $.08
Fidelity .06-1/2 .06
Lombardy .07 .06-1/2
Tacoma .08-1/2 .07-1/2
Arlington Staple $.06-1/4 and .06-1/2 $.06 and .06-1/4
Bates Staple .06-1/2 .06-1/4 and .06-1/2
Bates Warwick Dress .08-1/2 .08
Glenaine .06-1/2 .06 and .06-1/4
Johnson Chalon Cloth .10-1/2 .09-1/2
Johnson Indigo Blue .09-1/2 and .11 .09-1/2
Lancaster Normandie .08-1/2 .08 and .08-1/2
White Calcutta Dress Styles .08-1/2 and .09-1/2 .08 and .08-1/2
Westbrook Dress Style .08-1/2 .08
York Manufacturing Co.'s Staples .06-1/2 .06-1/4 and .06-1/2
I give now a table comparing the market quotations for 1890 of the
articles which enter most largely into the cost of living, with those
for the same period in 1891:--
Week ending Week ending
Aug. 29, 1891. Aug. 30, 1890.
BREADSTUFFS:--
Flour, No. 2 Extra, barrels $4.25 @ $4.50 $3.75 @ $4.25
Patents, " 5.75 @ 6.10 5.50 @ 6.15
Rye, Superfine, " 3.50 @ 4.00 2.75 @ 3.00
Oats, No. 2 White, bushel, .43 .48
Corn, West, mixed, No. 2, bushel, .80-1/2 .62 @ .62-1/2
Shorts, Winter Wheat, ton 18.00 @ 18.75 21.00
" " Middling, " 25.00 25.00
" Spring Wheat, " 17.00 @ 18.00 19.00
" " Middling " 23.00 22.50 @ 23.00
COTTON, Middling Upland, pound .08-1/4 .11-3/4
" Low " " .07 11c.
COTTON GOODS. Print Cloths, 64x64, .02-13/16 .03-5/16-l%
FISH:--
Large Dry Cod (Georges), qtl. 6.50 5.50
Mackerel, No. 1 Mess, barrel 12.50 @ 14.00 23.00 @ 24.00
Labrador Herring 6.25 5.00 @ 5.50
HAY, Choice, ton 17.00 @ 17.50 15.00 @ 16.50
Straw, Rye 14.00 @ 14.50 15.00 @ 16.00
" Oat 7.00 @ 9.00 7.00 @ 7.50
HEMP, Manilla, pound 07-1/4 @ .07-3/8 .09 @ .09-1/4
Jute Butts (bagging) .01-3/4 @ .01-7/8 .02 @ .02-1/4
HIDES:--
Brighton Steers .09 .09-1/2 @ .10-1/2
Buenos Ayres Kips .11 @ .11-1/2 .13
HOPS. Prime State (N. Y.), pound .17 @ .21 .19 @ .25
DRUGS. Opium (small lots) 2.20 @ 2.40 3.80 @ 4.10
DYES. Logwood, North Hayti 35.00 33.00 @ 34.00
" South Hayti 24.00 @ 25.00 24.00 @ 25.00
" Extracts (solid) .08-1/2 @ .09-1/2 .08-1/2 @ .09-1/2
Hemlock Bark, Eastern 8.00 @ 9.00 10.00
" " Pennsylvania 9.00 @ 10.00 10.00
IRON, American Pig, ton 17.00 @ 18.50 18.00 @ 19.00
LEAD, Domestic, 100 pounds 4.55 @ 4.60 4.80 @ 5.00
COPPER, Lake, pound .12-1/4 @ .12-1/2 .16-7/8
SPELTER .05 @ .05-1/8 5.55
LEATHER:--
Hemlock Sole, light, pound .17 @ .17-1/2 19-1/2 @ .20
Oak Sole, light, pound .20 .24 @ .25
Grain No. 1, Boot .14 @ .15 .15 @ .18
Buff No. 1, 4-1/2 oz .11-1/2 @ .12 .14-1/2 @ .15
CALFSKINS:--
Tannery Finished, 20 to 29 pounds,
dozen .75 @ .85 .75 @ .90
Rough Hemlock, average .18 @ .18-1/2 .24 @ .25
Rough Splits, prime .10 @ .12 .13 @ .15
MOLASSES, N. O. Prime, gallon .29 @ .31 .37
LUMBER:--
Hemlock Boards (rough) 10.50 11.50
Spruce Boards (1st-class floor) 19.00 @ 20.00 19.00 @ 21.00
Pine (Coarse, No. 5) 16.00 16.00 @ 17.00
Week ending Week ending
Aug. 29, 1891. Aug. 30, 1890.
NAVAL STORES:--
Spirits Turpentine, gallon .42 .45
Common Rosin, barrel 1.75 @ 2.25 1.75 @ 2.25
Pitch 2.25 2.25
Tar (Wilmington) 2.50 2.50
OILS. Crude Whale, gallon .49 .45 @ .47
" Sperm, " .74 @ .75 .65
Linseed, " .43 .60
Lard (X No. 1), " .49 @ .50 .46
PETROLEUM:--
Crude, gallon .07-1/2 .07-1/2
Refined, " .08-1/4@ .09 .08-1/2
PROVISIONS:--
Pork, Short Ribs, Mess, barrel 13.75 @ 14.00 13.25
Beef, pound .08-12/100 .07-36/100
Mutton, " .10 .09
Beef Hams (Med.), " .10-1/4@ .10-3/4 .11
Veal, " .09-1/2 .09
Lard, Western, " .06-1/2@ .06-3/4 .06-1/2
Butter, Prime, " .23 @ .24 .21 @ .22
Cheese (Fine Factory), pound .09-1/4@ .09-1/2 .08-1/2@ .08-3/4
RICE, Domestic Choice, " .06 @ .06-1/2 .06-1/2@ .07
SALT, Liverpool Ground (in bond),
hhd. 1.00 @ 1.15 1.00 @ 1.15
SUGAR:--
Cuba, fair refining, pound .03 .05-1/8
Refined Hard, Granulated, pound, .04-5/16@ .04-3/8 .06 @ .06-5/16
TALLOW, Prime .05 .04-3/4@ .05-1/2
RUBBER, Fine Para, new .62 @ .63 .93 @ .95
" " old .65 .98 @ 1.00
STARCH, Corn, pound .02-1/8 .03-1/2
Potato, " .04-1/2@ .04-5/8 .04-3/8@ .04-1/2
TOBACCO:--
Havana Wraps 5.00 @ 7.00 3.50 @ 5.00
Pennsylvania Wraps .20 @ .40 .20 @ .40
Sumatra Wrap 2.50 @ 3.25 2.00 @ 2.75
WOOL. Ohio, XX, pound. .31 @ .32 .33 @ .34
Michigan, X, " .27 .28 @ .29
TEA:--
Oolong, Amoy Super $.17 $.13-1/2
Formosas, Superior .28 .23
Japan, Choice .30 .23
Hyson, 1st .35 .30
COFFEE:--
Java, Pa. Packages, Pale $.26 @ .26-3/4 .24-1/2
Mocha .25 $.24 @ .24-1/2
Rios, Fair .18-1/2 .20-1/2
EGGS:--
Near-by and Cape .22 @ .23 .23 @ .25
Vermont and New York .20 .21 @ .22
N. S. and N. B. Firsts .19 @ .20
POTATOES 1.50 @ 1.62 2.50 @ 2.75
ONIONS 2.00 @ 2.25 3.00 @ 3.25
SQUASH, Marrow .60 @ .75 1.75 @ 2.00
APPLES, Gravensteins 1.50 @ 2.50 5.00 @ 5.50
If the articles given in the foregoing table be classified we find the
following results as to the rise and fall of prices before and after
the tariff of 1890.
PRICES.
Risen. Fallen. Unchanged.
Flour. Oats. Dyes, S. Hayti.
Rye. Shorts. Dyes, extracts.
Corn. Cotton. Rosin.
Cod. Print cloths. Pitch.
Herring. Mackerel. Tar.
Hay. Rye straw. Petroleum.
Oat straw. Hemp--Manilla. Salt.
Dyes, N. Hayti. Jute butts. Tallow.
Whale oil. Hides, domestic and foreign. Lard.
Sperm oil. Hops. Pa. wrappers.
Lard. Opium.
Pork. Hemlock bark.
Butter. Pig iron.
Cheese. Lead.
Potatoes. Copper.
Havana wrappers. Spelter.
Sumatra wrappers. Leather--all kinds.
Tea. Molasses.
Coffee. Lumber.
Beef. Turpentine.
Linseed.
Beef hams.
Rice.
Sugar.
Rubber.
Cornstarch.
Wool.
Eggs.
Potatoes.
Onions.
Squash--Marrow.
Apples--Gravenstein.
Mutton.
Veal.
From these tables it is obvious that there has been, in the first
place, no general rise of prices such as was confidently predicted by
the panic-mongers of last year. On the contrary, the large majority of
prices show a downward tendency. But more important than this is the
fact made obvious by these tables that the price of the protected
product has not risen. The foreign goods have advanced in some
instances and been shut out in consequence, but domestic goods have
taken their places, the price being kept down by domestic competition.
In a word these tables prove that except for the enormous reduction in
the cost of sugar, the new tariff has had but slight effect if any on
the course of prices of the necessaries of life, and that the
statements of the free traders as to a general rise of prices was
entirely false.
The following extract is from a letter from one of the largest
wholesale clothing firms in Boston. It tells its own story:--
"In reply to yours of the 10th inst., would say that we sold
clothing in every grade in August, 1891, at fully 10 per cent.
less in prices than in August, 1886; for instance, a cassimere
suit sold then for $12.00 which we sell now for $10.50, and one
sold for $13.50 and we sell the same now for $12.00. An overcoat
sold then for $11.50 which we sell now for $10.00. Another grade
sold then for $16.50 and sells for $15.00 now. This difference
will run through all grades in proportion to prices. The
difference in prices between August, 1890, and '91, is very
little, if any; less rather than more in '91."
As to the development of manufacturing under the McKinley bill I will
quote first the opinion of a disinterested witness. The British
Consular General at New York, in his report of May 8, 1891, speaks as
follows:--
"Influenced by the new and higher duties afforded for the benefit
of American manufacturing interests, new life has been imparted
to the cotton, worsted, woollen, and knit underwear industry.
Everywhere, especially in the Southern States, new textile mills
have been going up with surprising activity, and all the old
corporations have been operated on full time....
"As a rule, all the cotton mills have had a year of unusual
activity. The production has been of larger volume than in any
previous year, and the goods have found a ready sale generally
but at comparatively low prices, considering the high prices
which prevailed during the first six months of the year for
cotton. Market prices, except in a few cases, did not vary with
the price of cotton. Opening generally at low rates, cotton goods
have been steady, the home and export demand being sufficient to
absorb the supply of all standard and staple makers of brown,
bleached, and colored goods, if we except printing cloths and
calicoes....
"The worsted goods industry has been marked by fresh life since
the new tariff has, to a great extent, cut off the importation of
the lowest grades of such goods. All the old factories have
started up, and are making goods on safe orders; and new mills
are being erected by European and British capitalists with a view
to manufacturing a finer class of dress goods, etc., than ever
before has been produced in this country. The woollen goods
industry, apart from ladies' cloths, does not show any
perceptible signs of improvement, but keeps on a slow, steady
gait, apart from carpetings and woollen underwear. Both of the
latter industries have been unusually busy during the last six
months at fairly profitable prices."
To give a complete list of the new industries started since the
passage of the McKinley bill would be impossible, and would occupy
more space than THE ARENA could spare. I give, therefore, a partial
list compiled from the _Boston Commercial Bulletin_, and covering only
the first three months after the passage of the law, that is, from
Oct. 1, 1890. These are the months most unfavorable to the bill, but
the statistics show what the growth of new and old industries has been
under the tariff of 1890 in three months, and indicate what the future
increase is likely to be.
SHOES AND LEATHER.
Shoe factory at Portsmouth, Va.
Tannery and horse collar manufactory at Demorest, Ga.
Shoe factory building by the town of Ayer to cost $15,000.
White Bros, new tannery at Lowell for finishing fine upper leather.
Towle's new shoe factory at Northwood, N. H.
New shoe factory at Natick, Mass.
New shoe factory at Beverly, Mass.
New shoe factory at Salisbury, N. C.
Voltaire Electric Shoe Co., of Manchester, N. H. (Capital, $50,000.)
New factory at Ellsworth, Me.
New factory at Sherman, Me.
New factory at Whitman, Mass., for Commonwealth Shoe Co.
New factory at East Pepperell, Mass. (Employs over 700 hands.)
Manhattan Rubber Shoe Co., at New York. (Capital, $50,000.)
Crocker Harness Co., of Tisbury, Mass. (Capital, $77,000.)
COTTON.
Mutual Land & Mfg. Co., at Durham, N. C. (Capital, $280,000.)
Stock company (capital, $250,000) to erect cotton mill, at Fort
Worth, Texas.
Cabot Cotton Mfg. Co., at Brunswick, Me. (70,000 spindles.)
Shirt factory at Milford, Del. (To employ 30 women.)
New mill at New Bedford, Mass., for the manufacture of fine
yarn, on account of the high tariff on this grade of goods.
New mill at Dallas, Texas. (15,000 spindles.)
New cotton mill at Monroe, La. (Capital, $200,000.)
New mill at Austin, Texas, to cost $500,000.
Cotton factory at New Iberia, Ky.
Stock company (capital, $500,000) at Atlanta, Ga., to work the
fibre of the cotton stalk into warp for cotton bales.
New cotton factory at Abbeville, S. C.
New cotton factory at Summit, Miss.
Jean pants and cotton sack factory, at Louisiana State Penitentiary.
New cotton mill at Moosup, Conn.
New cotton mill at Wolfboro, N. H. (Capital, $800,000.)
Bagging mills at Sherman, Texas.
Cotton batting factory at Columbia, S. C. (Capital, $40,000.)
Cotton mill at Greenville, Tenn.
Cotton tie factory at Selma, Ala.
WOOLLEN.
Harvey's carpet mills at Philadelphia, Pa.
Arlington mills at Lawrence. (Worsted--500 hands.)
Knitting mills at Cohoes, N. Y.
Knitting mills at Bennington, Vt. (75 hands.)
Woollen mill at Barre Plains near Worcester. (Fancy Cassimeres.)
Crescent yarn and knitting mills at New Orleans, La.
(Capital, $75,000. Capacity 500 dozen of hose per day.)
Wytheville Woollen & Knitting Co. at Wytheville, W. Va.
(Capital, $30,000.)
Yarn factory at Athens, S. C.
Coat factory at Ellsworth, Me. (Employs 75 to 100 hands.)
Woollen mills at Lynchburg, Va.
Woollen manufactory at Philadelphia, Pa.
Knitting mill (200 x 90) at Cohoes, N. Y.
Woollen factory at Worcester, Mass.
Knitting mill at Raleigh, N. C. ($25,000.)
Knitting mill at Pittsboro, N. C.
Cotton and woollen yarns at Catonsville, Md. (Capital, $10,000.)
Yarn factory at Lambert's Point, Va. (Capital, $25,000.)
New factories of the Merrimack Coat and Glove Co., at Waban, N. H.
Knitting mill at Rockton, N. Y.
Yarn manufactory at Winsted, Conn.
Worsted manufactory at Woonsocket, R. I.
POTTERY AND GLASS.
Chattanooga Pottery Co. Pottery mills at Millville, Tenn.
Glass factory to manufacture glass jars and bottles at
Middletown, Indiana.
Window glass factory at Baltimore, Md.
Glass manufactory at Fostoria, Ohio. (125 persons operate 12 pots.)
Parmenter Mfg. Co. at East Brockfield, Mass. (Capital, $250,000.)
Glass manufactory at Grand Rapids, Mich.
American Union Bottle Co. Glass works at Woodbury, N. J.
A. Busch Glass Works at St. Louis, Mo.
Large glass plant at Denver, Col., by Chicago parties.
(To employ between 300 and 400 men.)
Diamond Plate Glass Co., at Kokomo, Indiana.
(Capacity, 5,500 ft. per day.)
New green glass factory at Alton, Ills. (To employ 425 men.)
Union Glass Co. at Malaga, N. J. (Capital, $100,000.)
Window Glass Co. of Pittsburgh, Pa. (Capital, $100,000.)
Window glass factory at Millville, N. J.
Glass manufactory at North Baltimore, Md. (Optical goods.)
PAPER AND PULP.
New paper mill at Newport and Sunapee, N. H.
Otis Falls Pulp Co. at Livermore Falls, Me.
Mill for the manufacture of glazed hardware paper at Hemington, Conn.
Girvins Falls Pulp Co. of Concord, N. H. (Capital, $40,000.)
Paper mill at Manchester, Col.
New pulp mill at Howland, Me.
New pulp mill at Saxon, Wis.
New paper mill at Orono, Mo.
Large paper mill at Reading, Pa.
Brookside Paper Mill at Manchester, Conn.
Paper box factory at Richmond, Va. (Cost $7,000.)
Eureka Paper Mill Co. at Lower Oswego Falls, N. Y.
Shattuck & Babcock Co. of Depue, Wis. (Capital, $500,000.)
Pulp mill at Huntsville, Ala., by American Fibre Co. of New York.
(Capital $80,000.)
IRON AND STEEL.
Liberty Iron Co., at Columbia Furnace, Va. (Capital, $50,000.)
Basic steel plant, at Roanoke, Va. (Capital, $750,000. Capacity,
200 tons per day.)
Ashland Steel Co., at Ashland, Ky. (400 tons finished steel per day.)
Tredegar Steel Works, at Tredegar, Ala. (100 tons per day.)
Pennsylvania Steel Co., of Philadelphia. (Large ship building plant
at Sparrow Point, on Chesapeake Bay.)
Pittsburg Malleable Iron Co., of Pittsburg, Pa. (Capital, $25,000.)
Beaver Tube Co., of Wheeling, W. Va. (Capital, $1,000,000.)
$1,000,000 stock company at Wheeling, W. Va., to develop coal and
iron mines, etc.
New plant at Morristown, Tenn.
Iron furnace at Winston, N. C., by Washington and Philadelphia
parties.
Buda Iron Works, of Buda, Ill. (Capital, $24,000. Railroad supplies
and architectural iron work.)
Simonds Manufacturing Co., of Pennsylvania. (Iron and steel.
Capital, $50,000.)
Iron City Milling Co., of Pittsburg, Pa. (Capital, $50,000.)
One hundred and twenty-five ton blast furnace, at Covington, Va.
Iron works at Jaspar, Tenn. (Capital, $30,000.)
Planing mill at Jaspar, Tenn. (Capital, $10,000.)
METAL WORKING.
Peninsular Metal Works, of Detroit, Mich. (Capital, $100,000.)
Iron and brass foundry at Easton, Md.
Tinware factory at Petersburgh, Va.
Steel Edge Japanning & Tinning Co., at Medway, Mass.
(Factory 800 x 60 feet.)
Horsch Aluminium Plating Co., of Chicago, Ill. (Capital, $5,000,000.)
Tin plate manufactory at Chicago, Ill.
MACHINERY AND HARDWARE.
Lynn Lasting Machine Co., at Saco, Me. (Capital, $50,000.)
Tin plate mill at Chattanooga, Tenn.
New plow factory at West Lynchburg, Va.
Machine works for Edison Electric Co., at Cohoes, N. H.
Haywood Foundry Co., at Portland, Me. (Capital, $150,000.)
Larrabee Machinery Co., at Bath, Me. (Capital, $250,000.)
Manufactory of mowers at Macon, Ga. (Capital, $50,000.)
Cooking stove manufactory at Blacksburg, S. C.
Nail, horse-shoe, and cotton tie factory at Iron Gate, Va.
Iron foundry and stove works at Ivanhoe, Va.
Wire fence factory at Bedford City, Va.
Nail mill and rolling mill with 28 puddling furnaces at
Buena Vista, Va.
Car works by Boston capitalists at Beaumont, Texas.
(Capital, $500,000.)
Car works plant at Goshen, Va.
Car works plant at Lynchburg, Va.
Nail mill at Morristown, Tenn.
Machine and iron works at Blacksburg, S. C. (Capital, $120,000.)
Eureka Safe & Lock Co. at Covington, Ky. (Capital, $50,000.)
Agricultural implements factory at Buchanan, Va. (Capital, $50,000.)
Tin can and pressed tinware factory at Canton, Md.
New hosiery factory at Charlotte, N. C.
$10,000 chair factory and $25,000 foundry and machine shop at
Attalla, Ala.
Iron foundry and machine shops at Bristol, Tenn. (Capital, $25,000.)
Large skate factory at Nashua, N. H.
Stove Foundry & Machine Co. in Llano, Texas. (Cost, $100,000.)
Safety Package Co., at Baltimore, Md. (Capital, $1,000,000.
To manufacture safes, locks, etc.)
Stove foundry at Salem, Va. (Cost $20,000. Capital, $60,000.)
Locomotive works plant at Chattanooga, Tenn. (Capital, $500,000.)
Fulton Machine Co., at Syracuse, N. Y. (Capital, $33,000.)
Chicago Machine Carving & Mfg. Co., at Chicago, Ill.
(Capital, $50,000. To manufacture interior decorations,
mouldings, etc.)
Standard Elevator Co., of Chicago, Ill. (Capital, $300,000.)
Wire nail mill at Salem, Va. (To employ over 100 men.)
TIN PLATE.
The following firms are manufacturing tin-plate, or building new mills
or additions to old ones for that purpose.
Demmler & Co., Philadelphia.
Coates & Co., Baltimore.
Fleming & Hamilton, Pittsburg.
Wallace, Banfield & Co., Irondale, Ohio.
Jennings Bros. & Co., Pittsburg.
Niedringhaus, St. Louis.
There is one other charge which was freely made against the tariff of
1890, that deserves a brief answer. It was said that the McKinley bill
would stop trade with other countries, and that it raised duties "all
along the line."
A plain tale from the "Statement of Foreign Commerce and Immigration,"
published by the Treasury Department for June, 1891, puts this
accusation down very summarily.
Total imports free of duty for nine months,
ending June 30, 1891 $295,963,665
Total imports free of duty for nine months,
ending June 30, 1890 208,983,873
------------
Balance in favor of nine months,
ending June 30, 1891. 86,979,792
Total dutiable imports for nine months,
ending June 30, 1890 389,786,032
Total dutiable imports for nine months,
ending June 30, 1891 334,242,340
-----------
Balance in favor of nine months,
ending June 30, 1891 55,543,692
Total imports for nine months,
ending June 30, 1891 630,206,005
Total imports for nine months,
ending June 30, 1890 598,769,905
-----------
Balance in favor of nine months,
ending June 30, 1891 31,436,100
BISMARCK IN THE GERMAN PARLIAMENT.
BY EMILIO CASTELAR.
I cannot pardon the historian Bancroft, loved and admired by all, for
having one day, blinded by the splendors of a certain illustrious
person's career, compared an institution like the new German empire
with such an institution as the secular American Republic. The
impersonal character of the latter and the personal character of the
former place the two governments in radical contrast. In America the
nation is supreme--in Germany, the emperor. In the former the saviour
of the negroes--redeemer and martyr--perished almost at the beginning
of his labors. His death did not delay for one second the emancipation
of the slave which had been decreed by the will of the nation,
immovable in its determinations, through which its forms and
personifications are moved and removed. In America the President in
the full exercise of his functions is liable to indictment in a
criminal court; he is nevertheless universally obeyed, not on account
of his personality and still less on account of his personal prestige,
but on account of his impersonal authority, which emanates from the
Constitution and the laws. It little matters whether Cleveland favors
economic reaction during his government, if the nation, in its
assemblies, demands stability. The mechanism of the United States,
like that of the universe, reposes on indefectible laws and
uncontrollable forces. Germany is in every way the antithesis of
America; it worships personal power. To this cause is due the
commencement of its organization in Prussia, a country which was
necessarily military since it had to defend itself against the Slavs
and Danes in the north, and against the German Catholics in the south.
Prussia was constituted in such a manner that its territory became an
intrenched camp, and its people a nation in arms. Nations, even though
they be republican, which find it necessary to organize themselves on
a military model, ultimately relinquish their parliamentary
institutions and adopt a Caesarian character and aspect. Greece
conquered the East under Alexander; Rome extended her empire
throughout the world under Caesar; France, after her victories over the
united kings, and the expedition to Egypt under Bonaparte, forfeited
her parliament and the republic to deliver herself over to the emperor
and the empire. Consequently the terms emperor and commander-in-chief
appear to be the synonyms in all languages. And by virtue of this
synonymy of words the Emperor of Germany exercises over his subjects a
power very analogous to that which a general exercises over his
soldiers. Bismarck should have known this. And knowing this
truth--intelligible to far less penetrating minds than his--Bismarck
should in his colossal enterprise have given less prominence to the
emperor and more to Germany. He did precisely the contrary of what he
should have done. The Hohenzollern dynasty has distinguished itself
beyond all other German dynasties by its moral nature and material
temperament of pure and undisguised autocracy. The Prussian dynasty
has become more absolute than the Catholic and imperial dynasties of
Germany. A Catholic king always finds his authority limited by the
Church, which depends completely on the Pope, whereas a Prussian
monarch grounds his authority on two enormous powers, the dignity of
head of the State, and that of head of the Church. The autocratic
character native to the imperial dynasties of Austria is greatly
limited by the diversity of races subjected to their dominion and to
the indispensable assemblies of the diet around his imperial majesty.
But a king of Prussia, always on horseback, leader in military times,
defender of a frontier greatly disputed by formidable enemies, whose
soil looks like a dried-up marsh from which the ancient Slav race had
been obliged to drain off the water, is required to direct his
subjects as a general does an army. The intellectual, political, and
military grandeur of Frederick the Great augmented this power and
assured it to his descendants for a long epoch. It has happened to
each king of Prussia since that time to perform some colossal task,
grounded in an irreducible antinomy. Frederick William II. devoted
himself to the reconciliation of Calvinism and Lutheranism as divided
in his days as during the thirty years war, which was maintained by
the heroism of Gustavus Adolphus, and repressed by the exterminating
sword of Wallenstein. Frederick William IV. endeavored to unite
Christianity and Pantheism in his philosophical lucubrations; the
Protestant churches were deprived of their churchyards and statues by
virtue of and in execution of Royal Lutheran mandates, as was also the
Catholic Cathedral of Cologne, restored to-day in more brilliant
liturgical splendor with the sums paid for pontifical indulgences.
Bismarck did as he liked with the empire when it was ruled by William
I., and did not foresee what would be the irremissible and natural
issue of the system to which he lent his authority and his name. When
William I. snatched his crown from the altar, as Charlemagne might
have done, and clapped it on his head, repeating formulas suited to
Philip II. and Charles V., the minister was silent and submitted to
these blasphemies, derived from the ancient doctrine of the divine
right of kings, because they increased his own ministerial power,
exercised under a presidency and governorship chiefly nominal and
honorary. But a thinker of his force, a statesman of his science, a
man of his greatness, should have remembered what physiologists have
demonstrated with regard to heredity, and should have known that it
was his duty and that of the nation and the Germans to guard against
some atavistic caprice which would strike at his own power. The
predecessor of Frederick the Great was a monomaniac and the
predecessor of William the Strong was a madman. Could Bismarck not
foresee that by his leap backwards he ran the risk of lending himself
to the fatal reproduction of these same circumstances, of
transcendental importance to the whole estate, nay, to the whole
nation? A king of Bavaria singing Wagner's operas among rocks and
lakes; a brother of the king of Bavaria resembling Sigismund de
Calderon by his epilepsy and insanity; Prince Rudolph showing that the
double infirmity inherent in the paternal lineage of Charles the Rash
and in the maternal line of Joanna the Mad continues in the Austrians;
a recent king of Prussia itself shutting himself up in his room as in
a gaol, and obliged by fatality to abdicate the throne of his
forefathers during his lifetime in favor of the next heir, must prove,
as they have done, what is the result of braving the maledictions of
the oracle of Delphi, and the catastrophes of the twins of OEdipus
with such persistency, in this age, in important and mature
communities, which cannot become diseased, much less cease to exist
when certain privileged families sicken and die. Not that I would ask
people to do what is beyond their power and prohibited by their honor.
There was no necessity, as a revolutionist might imagine, to overturn
the dynasty. A very simple solution of the problem would have been to
take against the probable extravagances of the Fredericks and Williams
of Prussia the same precautions that were taken in England against the
Georges of Hanover. These last likewise suffered from mental
disorders. And so troubled were they by their afflictions that they
were haunted by a grave inclination to prefer their native, though
unimportant hereditary throne in the Germany of their forefathers to
the far more important kingdom conferred on them by the parliamentary
decision of England. But the English, to obviate this, showed
themselves a powerful nation and respected the dynasty. Bismarck
wished to make the king absolute in Prussia; he desired that a Caesar
should reign over Germany; and to-day the king and the Caesar are
embodied in a young man who has set aside the old Chancellor, and
believes himself to have received from heaven, together with the right
to represent God on this earth, the omnipotence and omniscience of God
himself. Can it be doubted any longer that history reveals an inherent
providential justice? To-day we see it unfold itself as if to show us
that the distant perspectives of the past live in the present and
extend throughout futurity.
II.
Bismarck was on his guard against Frederick the Good, from whom a
progressive policy was expected on account of his philosophical ideas,
and a liberal and parliamentary government on account of the domestic
influences which surrounded him. Knowing the humanitarian tendencies
which sparkled in his disappointed mind, and the ascendency exercised
over his diseased heart by the loved Empress Victoria, Bismarck
availed himself of the terrible infirmity with which implacable fate
afflicted the second Lutheran Emperor of Germany, and retained the
imperial power in his own person, as though William I. were not dead.
The enormous corpse of the latter, like that of Frederick Barbarossa,
made a subject for analogous legends by German tradition, was replaced
by another corpse, and in the decomposition consequent to his
frightful infirmity, the unfortunate Frederick III. seems to have
realized the title of a celebrated Spanish drama, "To Govern After
Death" (_Reinar Despues de Morir_). All that he could do, when already
ravaged by cancer, when the microbes of a terrible disease, like the
worms of the sepulchre, were attacking and destroying him, was to open
up a vista to timid hope, and to publish certain promises animated by
an exalted humaneness, in spite of and unknown to the Chancellor who
was not consulted in these declarations, which might be said to have
descended from heaven on the wings of the angel of death. Bismarck
went to and fro among the doctors, who naturally refused to declare
the terrible disease mortal, and prepared to vanquish the moribund
will of Frederick and the British notions of his widow, fearing that
when the last breath of the imperial life had ceased the whole policy
of Germany would have to be changed, as a scene in a theatre must be
changed if it has been hissed. It was certain that there was as great
a difference between the ideas of the Emperor William I. and those of
Frederick III., separated by so brief a space, as between those of the
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and those of the Emperor Frederick II.,
his successor, after the long period of two hundred years had changed
the capital features of the Middle Ages; the first was an unalloyed
Catholic, notwithstanding his dissidences with the Guelph cities, and
even with the Pope a stern Caesar, like the good Roman Caesars in time
of war and defence, a veritable orthodox crusader, whose piety was
concealed as in a colossal mountain whence he awaited the reconquest
of outraged Jerusalem by the Christians; whereas the second was an
almost Pantheistic poet and philosopher, whose Catholicity was mingled
with Orientalism, who was equally given to the discussion of
theological and of scientific questions, who followed the crusades in
fulfilment of an hereditary tradition, who penetrated into the
Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre by virtue of an extraordinary covenant
with the infidel, and whose own beliefs were so cosmopolitan that they
brought down a sentence of excommunication upon himself and of
interdiction upon his kingdom. To Pope Innocent III., the former
typified the Catholic emperor of the Middle Ages; Frederick II.
appeared to him very much the same as in our days the Lutheran emperor
appeared to Prince Bismarck, who took every possible precaution
against the humanitarianism and parliamentarism of his dying pupil,
and at the same time impelled his eldest son, the next heir to the
crown, with all his influence and advice towards absolutist principles
and reactionary propensities. No upright mind can ever forget the
terrible desecration committed when, a few days before the death of
his father, young William spoke of the empire as of a possession which
it was to be understood he had already entered upon, and awarded the
arm and head of his iron Chancellor the title of arm and head
connatural with the Caesarian institution. I know of no statesman in
history who has given, under analogous circumstances, such proof of
want of foresight as was given by Bismarck, comprehensible only if the
body could assume the authority of the will, as did his, and if the
intelligence could disappear, as did his, in an hydropic and
unquenchable desire for power. Frederick, holding progressive ideas
opposed to those of Bismarck and of William, would have greatly
considered public opinion, and on account of that consideration would
have perhaps respected, till the hour of his death, the Pilot, who,
dejected by the new direction of public government, inferred that
irreparable evil must result therefrom. When Maurice of Saxony trod on
the heels of Charles V., whom he had defeated at Innsbruck, he was
asked why he did not capture so rich a booty, and replied: "Where
should I find a cage large enough for such a big bird?" Assuredly the
conscience and mind of such a parliamentarian and philosopher as was
Frederick III., must have addressed to him a similar question when he
inwardly meditated sacrificing the Chancellor's person and prescinding
his power: "Where should I find a place outside the government for
such a man, who would struggle under bolts and chains, making the
whole state tremble in sympathy with his own agitation?" The
experience and talent of Frederick, together with his respect for
public opinion, led him to retain Bismarck at his post, subject only
to some slight restrictions. But the Chancellor, in his
shortsightedness, filled young William's head with absolutist ideas;
spurred and excited him to display impatience with his poor father;
and when thus nurtured, his ward opened his mouth to satisfy his
appetite, he swallowed up the Chancellor as a wild beast devours a
keeper.
It was the hand of Providence!
III.
The onus of blame devolves on Bismarck's native ideas, which persisted
in him from his cradle and resisted the revelations of his own
personal experience as well as the spirit of our progressive age. In
Bismarck there always subsisted the rural fibre of the Pomeranian
rustic, in unison with the demon of feudal superstition and
intolerance. In politics and religion he was born, like certain of the
damned in "Dante's Inferno," with his head turned backwards by
destiny. A quarrelsome student, a haughty noble, pleased only with his
lands and with the privileges ascribed to the land owner, incapable of
understanding the ideal of natural right and the contexture of
parliamentary government, a Christian of merely external routine and
formalist liturgy, he excited in the pusillanimous Frederick William,
in his earliest counsels and during his early influence in the crisis
of '48, a horror of democratic principles and progressist schools
which led him to salute the corpses of his own victims, stretched out
on the beds of his own royal palace, and to prostrate himself at the
feet of Austria in the terrible humiliation of Olmutz, that political
and moral Jena of the civil wars of the Germanic races. Very
perspicuous in discerning the slightest cloud that might endanger the
privileges of the monarchy and aristocracy, he was blind of an
incurable blindness with respect to the discernment of the breath of
life contained in the febrile agitations of new Germany, which
discharged from its revolutionary tripod sufficient magnetism and
electricity between the tempests, similar to those which flash, and
thunder, and fulminate, from the summits of all the Sinais of all
histories, to inflame a higher soul in any other more progressive
society. The world cannot understand that he should have been
perturbed by the external clamor of the revolution, when the idea of
Germanic unity had become condensed in the soul of the nation,
revealing itself by volcanic eruptions, like an incipient or radiant
star; he could not understand how the Congress of Frankfort, cursed by
him, foreshadowed the future, as though inspired by tongues of fire;
and could not avail himself of all that ether whose comet-like
violence, cooled down in the course of time, was to compose the new
German nationality, and was to give it a greater fatherland where
its inherent genial nature should glow and expand. In his
shortsightedness, in his lack of progressive spirit, in his want of
the prophetic gift, he imagined the principle of Germanic unity lost
at Olmutz, like the principle of Italian unity at Novara, and
ridiculed those who, certain of the immortality of such principles,
foretold for both a Passover of Resurrection. He never understood the
innermost essence and intrinsic substance of the principle, to which
it owes its force and glory, sufficiently to adopt it, until he had
witnessed its success in Italy, insulted in his speeches during the
tempestuous dawn of the new common idea. It is on this account that I
am rendered indignant by any comparison of Bismarck and Cavour, as I
am rendered equally indignant by a comparison of Washington and
Bonaparte. The father of the Saxon fatherland of America, and the
father of the Italian fatherland in Europe, alike rendered worship to
goodness, and never deviated from right in any degree; whereas the
founders of French imperialism and of Germanic imperialism, much
addicted to violence and very vain of their conquests, relinquished
something as great and as fragile and sinister as the works produced
by the genius of evil and outer darkness in all theogony. In the last
years of the reign of Napoleon III., during the discussion of a
message in the French Legislative Corps, Rouher extolled the public
and private virtues of the emperor. My late lamented friend, Jules
Favre, replied to him in a speech worthy of Demosthenes: "You may be
content to be the minister of such a Marcus Aurelius; to such paltry
dignities, I prefer the higher privilege of calling myself a citizen
of a free country." Bismarck preferred to maintain himself in power by
the help of his kings--quite the contrary of what Gladstone does, who
maintains his sovereign. Whom can he blame but himself? Emperors are
accustomed to be ferocious with their favorites when they are weary of
them. Just as Tiberius expelled Sejanus, just as Nero killed Seneca,
just as John II. hanged D. Alvaro de Luna, just as Philip II.
persecuted Antonio Perez till he died, just as Philip III. beheaded D.
Rodrigo Calderon, William II. has morally beheaded Bismarck, without
any other motive than his imperial caprice. _Sic volo, sic jubeo._ So
now will the Chancellor venture to present himself in parliament
because he has been dismissed from the royal palace like a lackey?
_Quae te dementia caepit?_ When, after Waterloo, Napoleon, adopting the
theatrical style of an Italian _artiste_, suitable to his tragical
disposition, and repeating a few badly learned Plutarchesque phrases,
suitable to the classical education of his age, asked the English, his
enemies, to accord him hospitality, as in ancient times Themistocles
might have petitioned his enemies the Persians, the English replied by
sending him to St. Helena. Bismarck in disfavor and disgrace solicits
an asylum from his enemies, the commons, whom he has never defeated,
yet whom he has always disdained. And as the English condemned their
troublesome guest to live on a gloomy little island, the electors
condemn their repugnant petitioner to a second ballot. But the
Chancellor will be completely undeceived; he possesses no
qualifications whatever for the position he has chosen. An orator, a
great orator, he one day failed to keep his pledged word, and the
apostate word condemns him to never regain the executive power through
its intervention. In the sessions of parliament he will resemble the
plucked and cackling hen thrown by the Sophists into Socrates'
lecture-room. The admired Heine, so fertile in genial ideas,
represented the gods of Phidias and Plato, besides being downfallen
and vagabond, selling rabbit skins on the seashore, and being forced
to light brushwood fires by which to warm their benumbed bodies during
the winter nights. To-day the writers, salaried by Bismarck, known as
reptiles, now turn on him, for a similar salary, the venomous fangs
which he formerly aimed at his innumerable enemies. And yonder, in the
parliament where formerly he strode in with sabre, and belt, and
spurred boots, a helmet under his arm, a cuirass on his breast, he
will now enter like a chicken-hearted charity-school boy, and that
assembly which he formerly whipped with a strong hand, like
school-boys, laughed at and caricatured in often brutal sarcasm,
ridiculed at every instant, ignored in the calculation of the budget
and the army estimates during long years, and sometimes divided and
dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like
the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and
eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in
Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon.
IV.
In few statesmen has it been seen so clearly as in the case of the
Chancellor that no great man can make himself greater than a great
idea. Opposed to the Germanic union in the commencement of its
creative period, at the time of the revolution of '48, he accepted it
much later, not so much of his own initiative and free will as in
obedience to the teachings of unpleasant experiences. Between his
anti-union and almost feudal speeches which softened the disaster of
Olmutz, and his conversion, more than fourteen years ensued, the whole
space of time which extended from the dawn of the revolution to the
triumph of Italy. In that conversion lay the veritable glory of his
life, and he proved therein, by successive and tardy gradations, that
he could tenaciously avail himself of his courage, and lead up to the
triumph of the newly created and loved project with marvellous art.
The policy developed against Austria at Frankfort by its snares, by
its traps, by its deceits, and by its tricks, exhibited him to history
as a prodigy of cunning and foresight, in whom the enthusiasm of a
living sentiment was associated with computations of consummate
dexterity. His embassy to Paris and to St. Petersburg, where he united
against Austria persons so opposed to concord as Napoleon and
Alexander, each for his own part determined to do nothing which might
increase the power of Germany, surpassed in cleverness everything ever
achieved in celebrated combinations by such diplomats as Talleyrand
and Metternich, the two illustrious models of political strategy. The
inclusion of Austria in the incidents of the duchies of the River Elbe
and the jugglery done with the territory acquired with its direct
assent, in addition to the preparation of the final stroke for the
presidency of the Germanic federation, by means of a war prepared with
cunning stealth and carried out with rapid triumph, are among the
greatest feats for which praises and deifications are due to him and
which testify to his merit. I cannot forget that to his efforts we owe
the ruin of Austrian despotism, and of Napoleonic Caesarism; the
re-establishment of Hungarian independence; the return of Italy's
long lost provinces to her bosom; the end of the Pope's temporal
power, and the fortunate occasion of the new birth of the republic in
France. In his schemes Bismarck forwarded a higher ideal of progress
and, consciously or unconsciously, he--than whom nobody was ever more
inspired by motives and triumphant in his undertakings--has served the
universal interests of the democracy. But he has achieved his
undeniable victories by means and procedures which have not fitted him
for the position of a German deputy, and do not lend him any force,
either moral or material, for his new elective office. The whole of
his great edifice is founded on a complete oblivion of parliamentary
traditions, to-day courted lovingly by its most crafty enemy, whose
inconstancy is extraordinary. Reservedness, dissimulation, secrecy,
deceit, double meanings in words, what by analogy with the former we
call duplicity of character, treaties made by stealth, midnight
conspiracies, imposition of taxes not voted by parliament, levies
arbitrarily decreed by the executive without authorization and even
without consultation as in Asia, the right of conquest practised in
the light of reason, violent annexations which dismembered one nation
for the glory of another--such is the sum total of fatal traditions
which Bismarck now solicits to be allowed to continue by means of free
discussion, and in the bosom of open parliament. Palmerston and
Gortchakoff cannot hop in the same bag. The minion of a Czar and the
representative of a nation cannot be united in one and the same
person. What programme can Bismarck develop to his colleagues which
will have the moral character of necessary work? Moreover, the divine
word called human eloquence descends only on the lips of that
apostleship which redeems a nation from slavery and impels it forward.
You could not understand Daniel defending the kings of Babylon,
Demosthenes defending Philip, Cicero defending Mark Antony, O'Connell
defending the landlords of Ireland, and Vergniaud or Mirabeau
defending the absolute kings of France. If Bismarck accepts the
liberal and tolerant policy of to-day, will he not thereby countenance
the emperor who has ridiculed him and Caprivi who has audaciously
seated himself in that exalted position from which Bismarck thought
never to fall before his death? The great man is a poor appraiser of
ideas, accepting them from every quarter whence they blow to him if
only they will fill his sails and propel his bark; but he will never
understand what mischief he could work to his enemies by opposing a
programme of advanced democratic reform to the imperial programme
whose fixity resembles the rigidity of death. But what liberty can he
invoke--he who has disavowed and injured all liberties? Not personal
liberty--abused and trampled on constantly by his menials; not
commercial liberty, sold for thirty pieces of silver after the
Germanic Zollverein had brought great wealth to Prussia; not religious
liberty, placed in grave danger by complacency with anti-Jewish
preachers and by the May laws; not scientific liberty, after having
persecuted every department of science--even history--and invested the
state with full power to enforce the teaching of official doctrines
everywhere and by everybody; not industrial liberty, wasted away by
the regulation of labor which has transformed the workshops into
garrisons, and made of the workmen an army. What remains for him to
do? He has absolutely no resource at his disposal with which to
undertake a campaign of active opposition. In social questions nothing
is more worn out and useless than his pontifical socialism. This
species of abortion has lately resulted in advancing the parturition
of increased aspirations of the laborers, and as every kind of
abortion leaves the womb which bears it, has done so violently. His
law for the insurance of workmen, though dating only from '82, is
already tottering in almost decrepit decay. He even admitted himself
that it needed perfecting by means of a law that should establish
compulsory corporations, like the ancient guilds, which proposal was
objected to by the workmen themselves, more inclined to Saxon
individualism and revolutionary co-operation than to his socialism, in
which he saw salvation, and which they regarded as pedantic and
hybrid. Bismarck's system had no justification and derogated all laws
of ethics and justice. With his Utopian schemes the professors in
their lecture-rooms endeavored to excite the Socialists, who, if they
had listened and demanded their realization would have been exposed to
be shot down in the streets by the soldiery, without anyone being able
even to raise a protest against such indignities being possible in the
country. Even his foreign policy can scarcely be justified; however
skilful may have been the diplomatic and military preparations which
led to his first triumph, it has proved a perplexed and confused
policy since his final triumph. The Chancellor had no other
alternative than to come to an agreement either with France and
England against Russia, or else with Russia against France and
England. To come to an arrangement with France against Russia
necessitated the restitution of Alsace and Lorraine; to come to an
understanding with Russia, it was necessary to permit the Russians to
enter Constantinople. By these perplexities which shut out all hope of
retaliation from France, thus exciting its colonial appetite, and
which opened to Russia the path to the Bosphorus in a final eastern
war, detaining her for a time in St. Stephens and preparing the two
Bulgarias for an Austrian protectorate, Bismarck could have extricated
himself from danger from both Russia and France when the bonds of the
Triple Alliance were loosened at Rome by the fall of Crispi, and at
Vienna by the Treaty of Commerce. We have not spoken of the Chancellor
as an argonaut, of the Chancellor as a colonizer. All that he has been
able to do, after having given occasion for enormous difficulties with
Australia and England, with the United States and Spain, placing
himself and placing us in danger of war for the Carolines, has been to
break poor unlucky Emin Pasha's backbone, and to barter the
protectorate of Zanzibar for the sponge known as Heligoland. And may
thanks be given to William II. and to Caprivi for having, at such
small cost, got over the difficulties of the Socialist laws of his
home policy, and the colonial entanglements of his foreign policy.
Bismarck may believe an old admirer of his personality and of his
genius, though an adversary of his policy, and of the government
dependent on that policy. Society, like nature, devours everything
that it does not need. The death of William I., the Caesar; the death
of Roon, the organizer; the death of Moltke, the strategist, all say
to him that the species of men to which he belongs is fading out and
becoming extinct. Modern science teaches that extinct species do not
re-appear. Bossuet would say that the Eternal has destroyed the
instrument of His providential work, because it is already useless.
Remain, then, Bismarck, in retirement, and await, without neurotic
impatience, the final judgment of God and of history.
THE DOUBTERS AND THE DOGMATISTS.
BY PROF. JAMES T. BIXBY, PH.D.
An eminent ecclesiastic of the Church of England not long ago
characterized the present age as pre-eminently the age of _doubt_, and
lamented that whether he took up book, or magazine, or sermon, he was
confronted with some form of it.
This picture of our age is not an unjust one. The modern mind is
thoroughly wide awake and has quite thrown off the leading-strings of
ancient timidity. It looks all questions in the face and demands to be
shown the real facts in every realm. All the traditions of history,
the laws of science, the principles of morals are overhauled, and the
foundations on which they rest relentlessly probed. And our modern
curiosity can see no reason why it should cease its investigations
when it comes to the frontiers of religion. It deems no dogma too old
to be summoned before its bar; no council nor conclave too sacred to
be asked for its credentials; no pope or Scripture too venerable to be
put in the witness-box and cross-examined as to its accuracy or
authority. In all the churches there is a spirit of inquiry abroad;
almost every morning breeze brings us some new report of heresy, or
the baying of the sleuth-hounds of orthodoxy, as they scent some new
trail of infidelity; and the slogan of dogmatic controversy echoes
from shore to shore.
As we look around the ecclesiastical horizon, we find agitation and
controversy on all sides. In one denomination, it is the question of
the salvation of the _heathen_; in another, that of the virgin birth
of Christ and the apostolic succession; in a third, it is the invasion
of doubt as to the eternal torment of the wicked; in a fourth, the
evidential value of the miracles; in a fifth, the grand questions
included under the higher criticism of the Scriptures and the relative
authority of reason and the Bible. In Congregational, Episcopalian,
Baptist, Universalist, and Presbyterian folds, it is the same,
everywhere some heresy to be disciplined, some doubt to be
suppressed, some doctrinal battle hotly waged.
To the greater part of the Church, this epidemic of scepticism is a
subject of grave alarm. Unbelief seems to them, as to Mr. Moody, the
worst of sins; and they consider the only proper thing to do with it,
is to follow the advice of the Bishop of London, some years ago, and
fling doubt away as you would a loaded shell. They apparently look
upon Christianity as a huge powder magazine, which is likely to
explode if a spark of candid inquiry comes near it.
Others, on the contrary, fold their arms indifferently and regard this
new spirit of investigation as only an evanescent breeze, which can
produce no serious result upon the citadel of faith. A third party
hail it with exultation as the first trumpet blast of the theological
Goetterdaemerung, the downfall of all divine powers and the destruction
of the Christian superstition, to give place to the naked facts of
scientific materialism.
What estimate, then, shall we put on this tendency?
In the first place we must recognize that it is a serious condition;
that it is no momentary eddy, but a permanent turn in the current of
the human mind. Humanity is looking religion square in the face,
without any band over its eyes, in a way it never has before; and when
humanity once gets its eyes open to such questions,--it is in vain to
try to close them, before the questions have been thoroughly examined.
Certainly, Protestantism cannot call a halt upon this march. For it
was Protestantism itself, proclaiming at the beginning of her struggle
with Rome the right of private judgment, which started the modern mind
upon this high quest; and Protestantism is therefore bound in logic
and honor to see it through to the end, whatever that end may be.
And in the next place, I believe that quest will end in good. Why the
champions of faith should regard doubt as devil-born, rather than a
providential instrument in God's hand, is something I do not
understand. If doubt humbles the Church and acts as a thorn in its
flesh, may not such chastening be providential, quite as much as the
things which puff it up? As Luther well expressed it, "We say to our
Lord, that if he will have his church, he must keep it, for we cannot.
And if we could, we should be the proudest asses under heaven." As
Attila was the scourge of God to the Roman world, when God needed to
clear that empire out of the way, as he built his new Christendom, so
may not doubt be the scourge of God to the easy-going, sleepy, too
credulous piety of to-day, which gulps down all the husks of faith so
fast that it never gets a taste of the kernel?
Yes, doubt is often the needed preparation for obtaining truth. We
must clear out the thorny thicket of superstition before we can begin
to raise the sweet fruit of true religion.
There are times when careful investigation is rightly called for. When
doubting Thomas demanded to see the print of the nails, and touch and
handle the flesh of the risen Christ, before he would believe in the
resurrection of his Lord, his demand for the most solid proof of the
great marvel was a wise and commendable one; one for which all
subsequent generations of Christians are deeply indebted to him. To
believe without evidence, or to suppress doubt where it legitimately
arises, is both fostering superstition and exposing ourselves to error
and danger. What shall we say of the merchant who refuses to entertain
any question about the seaworthiness of his vessel, but sends her off
across the Atlantic undocked and unexamined, piously trusting her to
the Lord? Shall we commend him? or not rather charge him with culpable
negligence? And what we say of such a merchant seems to me just what
we should say of the Christian who refuses to investigate the
seaworthiness of that ship of faith which his ancestors have left him.
In astronomy, in politics, in law, we demand what business the dead
hand of the past has on our lip, our brain, our purse? Why should the
dead hand of an Augustine or Calvin be exempt from giving its
authority? Why should these mediaeval glimpses of truth be given the
right to close our eyes to-day from seeing what we ourselves can see
and speaking forth what we can hear of heavenly truth?
In all other departments of knowledge, investigation has brought us up
to a higher outlook, where we see the true relations of things better
than before. In all other branches, God has given us new light, so
that we discern things more as they really are. Science has risen by
making a ladder of its earlier errors and by treading them under foot,
reaching to higher truths. The Bible itself is the growth of ages; and
Christian doctrine and Christian creeds have been the evolution of a
still longer period. The dogmas of the churches are most manifold and
conflicting. Is it not rather immodest and absurd for each church to
claim infallibility for its present creed, and that wisdom died when
the book of Revelation closed the Bible, or the Council of Trent or
the Westminster Assembly adjourned its sitting? It seems to me that
the churches ought, instead, to be willing and anxious to receive
whatever new light God may grant them to-day, and with the potent
clarifying processes of reason, separate the pure gold of religion
from the dross and alloys of olden superstition and misguided
judgment.
But to the modern devotees of dogma, any subjection of it to the
cleansing of the reason seems shocking. The forefront of Dr. Briggs'
recent offending, for which he is about to be formally tried as a
heretic, is that he admits errors in the Bible and gives reason (by
which he means, as he explains, not merely the understanding, but also
the conscience and the religious instinct in man), a conjoint place
with the Bible and the Church in the work of salvation and the
attainment of divine truth. To the modern dogmatist, these positions
seem sceptical and pernicious. But to the philosopher, who knows the
laws of human nature, to every scholar who knows the actual history of
the Bible, these positions seem only self-evident. That in the
Scriptures there are innumerable errors in science, mistakes in
history, prophecies that were never fulfilled, contradictions and
inconsistencies between different books and chapters,--these are facts
of observation which every Biblical student knows full well. Granting,
for the sake of the argument, that the Bible was given originally by
infallible divine dictation, yet the men who wrote down the message
were fallible; the men who copied it were fallible; the men who
translated it (some of it twice over, first from Hebrew to Greek, and
then from Greek to English) were fallible; and the editors, who from
the scores of manuscripts, by their personal comparison and decisions
between the conflicting readings, patched together our present text,
were most fallible. And when thus a Bible reader has got his text
before him, how can he understand it, except by using his own reason
and judgment? Instruments, again, most fallible.
How is it possible, then, to get Bible-truth independently of the
reason or in entire exemption from error? The only way would be to
say, that not only was the Bible verbally inspired, but all its
authors, copyists, editors, and pious readers were also infallibly
inspired. As in the old Hindoo account of how the world was supported,
the earth was said to be held up on pillars, and the pillars on an
elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and when the defender of the
faith was asked what, then, did the tortoise rest on, he sought to
save himself in his quandary, by roundly asserting that "it was
tortoise all the way down";--so the defender of the infallibility of
the Scripture has to take refuge in "inspiration all the way down."
But if this be so, ought not the modern scripture editors and
revisers, translators and Biblical professors also to be inspired, as
much as those of King James' day or the printers at the Bible house?
And thus we reach, as the _reductio ad absurdum_ of this argument,
this result: that Tischendorff, and Koenen, and the Hebrew professors,
among whom Doctor Briggs is a foremost authority, while accused of
heresy are really themselves the very channels of infallible
inspiration.
The sincere investigators into the character of the Bible and the
nature of Christ are charged with exalting human reason above the word
of God. But as soon as the subject is investigated and a Professor
Swing or a Mr. MacQueary corroborates his interpretation by the
Scripture itself, or Doctor Briggs shows his views to be sustained by
history, by philosophy, by a profounder study of both nature and the
Bible, then the ground is shifted, and it is maintained that it is not
a question whether the views are true, but whether they conform to the
creed; that the Catechism is not to be judged by the Bible or the
facts in the case, but Bible and facts are to be interpreted by the
words of the Confession; and if they do not agree with this, then
heresy and infidelity are made manifest. The question is not whether
the water of truth be found, but whether it is drunk out of an
orthodox bottle, with the Church's label glued firmly upon it. The
pretext for the charge of heresy against these eminent Biblical
scholars is that they are undermining the Bible; but in conducting the
trial, prosecutors themselves refuse to abide by the testimony of the
Scriptures to decide the matter and erect above them soul creed or
catechism.
But let us stop for a moment and ask whence came these creeds and
catechisms themselves? What else was their origin than out of the
reason of man; out of the brains of scholars, as they in former years
criticised and interpreted the same Scripture, and nature, and laws of
God? And these scholars of the past were quite as fallible, quite as
partisan, and far less well informed than our scholars to-day. Thus it
is the dogmatists themselves who exalt the reason of man above the
word of God, forbidding us to listen to the more direct voice of God
in our own soul; forbidding us to decipher the revelations which the
Divine Hand has written on the rocks, and tree, and animal structure,
and even frowning upon that profounder study of the Scripture called
the higher criticism, but bidding us accept, in its stead, the
man-made substitute of some council or assembly of former generations.
There have undoubtedly been periods when the doubt with which the
Church had to deal was mainly frivolous or carnal; a passionate
rebellion of the worldly nature, attacking the essential truths of
religion. But such is not the nature of the doubt which is at present
occupying the public eye; such is not the doubt most characteristic of
our generation. It proceeds from serious motives. It is a doubt marked
by essential reverence and loyalty to truth. It is a desire for more
solid foundations; for the attainment of the naked realities of
existence. It is a necessary incident of the great intellectual
awakening of our century. As the modern intellect comes back on Sunday
from its week-day explorations of the history of Rome, or the myths of
Greece, or the religious ideas of Buddha or Zoroaster, it must return
to the contemplation of the Christian dogmas under new influences. It
will necessarily demand what better evidence the law of Moses or the
creed of Nicea has than the law of Mana or the text of the Zendavesta?
The scepticism of our age is not so much directed against the great
truths of religion as against the man-made dogmas that have usurped
the sacred seat. If irreverent, scoffing scepticism were to be found
anywhere to-day, it would most likely be found manifested among
the throng of young men gathered at our most progressive
University,--Harvard. But Dr. Lyman Abbot, after several weeks'
association with the students there, and a careful study of their
states of mind, not long ago testified, that "if they are sceptical,
it is because they are too serious-minded and too true to accept
convictions ready made, traditional creeds for personal beliefs, or
church formularies for a life of devotion." Now to call such a state
of mind irreligious or infidel is most unjust. The irreligion lies
rather with those who make a fetish of the Bible and substitute a few
pet texts from it; that sustain their own private opinions, in place
of that divine light that lighteth every man that cometh into the
world. The real infidels are they who reject the revelation which God
is making us continually in the widening light of modern knowledge,
and by a species of ecclesiastical lynching, condemn, before trial,
the sincere, painstaking, and careful scholars and reverent disciples
of Christ, who are so earnestly seeking after truth, because the
results of their learned researches do not agree with the prejudices
of their anathematizers. It is with no less cogency of argument than
nobility of feeling that Dr. Briggs replied to his assailants: "If it
be heresy to say that rationalists, like Martineau, have found God in
the reason, and Roman Catholics, like Newman, have found God in the
Church, I rejoice in such heresy, and I do not hesitate to say that I
have less doubt of the salvation of Martineau and Newman than I have
of the modern Pharisees who would exclude such noble men,--so pure, so
grand, the ornaments of Great Britain and the prophets of the
age,--from the kingdom of God."
Scepticism and religious questioning are, then, no sins; they are not
irreligious. But surely they do vex the Church. What shall the Church
do about them? In the first place, we should not try to suppress them.
Nor should we tell religious inquirers to shut their eyes and put the
poppy pillow of faith beneath their heads and go to sleep again, and
dream. They have got their eyes wide open and they are determined to
know whether those sweet visions which they had on faith's pillow are
any more than illusions. Nor will they be satisfied and cease to
think, by having a creed of three hundred or fifteen hundred year's
antiquity recited to them. The modern intellects that have taken Homer
to pieces, and excavated Agamemnon's tomb, and unwound the mummy
wrappings of the Pharaohs, that have weighed the stars and chained the
lightnings, are not to be awed by any old-time sheepskin or any
council of bishops. They demand the facts in the case; fresh manna to
satisfy their heart hunger; the solid realities of personal
experience. No. It is too late to-day for the churchmen to play the
part of Mrs. Partington, and sweep back the Atlantic tide of modern
thought with their little ecclesiastical broom. The old ramparts are
broken through and we must give the flood its course. The only spirit
to meet it in is that of frankness and friendliness. Let us not foster
in these questioning minds the suspicion that there is any part of
religion that we are afraid to have examined. We smile at the bigoted
Buddhist who, when the European attempted to prove by the microscope
that the monk's scruples against eating animal food were futile
(inasmuch as in every glass of water he drank he swallowed millions of
little living creatures), smashed the microscope for answer, as if
that altered at all the facts. But are not many of the heresy-hunters
in Christendom quite as foolish in their efforts to smash the
microscope of higher criticism, or the telescope of evolution, and
suppress the testimony which nature, and reason, and scholarship every
day present afresh?
Let us, therefore, give liberty, yes, even sympathy, to these
perplexed souls who are struggling with the great problems of
religion.
And secondly, let us be honest with them, and not claim more certainty
for religious doctrines or more precise and absolute knowledge about
divine and heavenly things than we have. One of the great causes of
modern doubt is, unquestionably, the excessive claims that theology
has made. It has not been content with preaching the simple truths
necessary to a good life; that we have a Maker to whom we are
responsible,--a divine Friend to help us, a divine voice within to
teach us right and wrong; that in the life that is to follow this,
each shall be judged according to his deeds, and that in the apostles
and prophets, especially the spotless life of Jesus, we have the noble
patterns of the holy life set up before us for our imitation; a
revelation of moral and religious truth all sufficient for salvation.
The Church has not been content with these almost self-evident truths;
but it must go on, to make most absolute assertions about God's
foreknowledge, and foreordination, and triune personality; and the
eternal punishment of the wicked, and the double nature and
pre-existence of Christ,--things not only vague and inconsistent, but
contradictory to our sense of justice and right. It must go on to make
manifold assertions about the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the
Bible and the details of the future life and the fall of human nature,
which are utterly incredible to rational minds. And the worst of it
is, that all these things are bound up in one great theological
system, and poor, anxious inquirers are told that they must either
take all or none; and so (soon coming face to face with some palpable
inconsistency or incredibility) they not unnaturally give up the
whole. Trace out the religious history of the great sceptics,--the
Voltaires, the Bradlaughs, the Ingersolls, the Tom Paines,--and you
will see that the origin of their scepticism has almost always been in
a reaction from the excessive assumptions of the ecclesiastics
themselves. It is too fine spun and arrogant orthodoxy that is itself
responsible for half of the heterodoxy of which it complains.
Let the Church, then, be honest, and claim no more than it ought. Let
it respect and encourage honesty in every man in these sacred matters.
The Church itself should say to the inquirer: You are unfaithful to
your God if you go not where He, by the candle of the Lord (i. e., the
reason and conscience he has placed within you), leads you. And when a
man in this reverent and sincere spirit pursues the path of doubt, how
often does he find it circling around again toward faith and
conducting him to the Mount of Zion! The true remedy for scepticism is
deeper investigation. As all sincere doubt is at bottom a cry of the
deeper faith that only that which is true and righteous is divine, so
all earnest doubt, thought through to the end, pierces the dark cloud
and comes out in the light and joy of higher convictions. It lays in
the dust our philosophic and materialistic idols and brings us to the
one Eternal Power, the ever-living Spirit, manifested in all, that
Spirit whose name is truth, whose word is love.
You remember, perhaps, the story of the climber among the Alps, who,
having stepped off a precipice, as he thought, frantically grasped, as
he fell, a projecting root and held on in an agony of anticipated
death, for hours, until, utterly exhausted, he at last resigned
himself to destruction, and let go of his support, to fall gently on
the grassy ledge beneath, only a few inches below his feet. So when we
resign ourselves to God's hand, our fall, be it little or be it great,
lands us gently in the everlasting arms that are ever underneath.
Do not fear, then, to wrestle with doubt, or to follow its leadings.
Out of every sincere soul-struggle, your faith shall come forth
stronger and calmer. And do not hesitate to proclaim your new
convictions when they have become convictions. Such is the
encouragement and sympathy that the Church should give the candid
questioner.
On the other hand, it may wisely caution him, not to be precipitate in
publishing his doubt. Let him wait till it has become more than a
doubt; till it has become a settled and well-considered conclusion,
before he inflicts it upon his neighbor. The very justification for
doubting the accepted opinion, the sacredness of truth, commands
caution and firm conviction that our new view is something more than a
passing caprice of the mind, before we publish it. But when the
doubter is sure of this, then let him no longer silence his highest
thoughts.
Again, the Church is justified in cautioning the doubter not to be
proud of his doubt as a doubt. There is no more merit, it is well to
remember, in disbelieving than in believing; and if your opinions
have, as yet, only got to the negative state and you have no new
positive faith or philosophy to substitute for the old, you are doing
your neighbor a poor service in taking away from him any superstition,
however illogical, that sustains his heart and strengthens his virtue.
And further, let me say, I would dislike very much to have you
contented with doubt. Doubt makes a very good spade to turn up the
ground, but a very poor kind of spiritual food for a daily diet. It is
a useful, often an indispensable half-way shelter in the journey of
life; but a very cold home in which to settle down as the end of that
journey.
In all our deepest hours, when our heart is truly touched, or our mind
satisfied, we believe. It is each soul's positive faith, however
unconventional or perhaps unconscious that faith may be, that sustains
its hope, that incites its effort, that supports it through the trials
of life. Any doubt, even, that is earnest and to be respected, is
really an act of faith, faith in a higher law than that of human
creeds; in a more direct revelation, within ourselves, in our own
sense of justice and consistency, than in any manuscript or print.
The very atheist, who in the name of truth repudiates the word God, is
really manifesting (in his own different way) the belief which he
cannot escape, in the divine righteousness and its lawful claim on
every human soul.
She is right who sings:--
"There is no unbelief;
And day by day, and night by night, unconsciously
The heart lives by that faith the lips deny,--
God knows the why."
Finally, and most important of all, let us not worry ourselves so much
about the intellectual opinions of men; but look rather to their
spiritual condition. The church ought to think less of creed and more
of character. The essence of faith lies not in correct conclusions
upon doctrinal points; but in righteousness, and love, and trustful
submission to God's will. No scepticism concerning dogmas touches the
heart of religion. If that seems at all heretical, let me cite good
orthodox authority. I might quote Bishop Thirlwall, of the Church of
England, in his judgment concerning Colenso's attack upon the accuracy
of the history of the Exodus in the Pentateuch, that "this story, nay,
the whole history of the Jewish people, has no more to do with our
faith as Christians, than the extraction of the cube or the rule of
three." Or I might quote Canon Farrar's weighty words, in a recent
article in the _Christian World_, upon the true test of religion. "The
real question," he declares, "to ask about any form of religious
belief, is: Does it kindle the fire of love? Does it make the life
stronger, sweeter, purer, nobler? Does it run through the whole
society like a cleansing flame, burning up that which is mean and
base, selfish and impure? If it stands that test it is no heresy."
That answers the question as aptly as it does manfully. And to the
same effect is the noble sermon of Dr. Heber Newton a few weeks ago,
in which he subordinated the question of the denominational fold to
the higher interests of the Christian flock; and that notable saying
of Dr. MacIlvaine's at the Presbyterian Presbytery the other day,
when, quoting the admission of one evangelical minister, that it was
the Unitarian Martineau who had saved his soul and kept his Christian
faith from shipwreck, he added significantly, "You must first find God
in your soul before you can find Him elsewhere." Yes, the prime and
essential thing is to find God in the soul; to worship him in spirit,
by a pure conscience, a loyal will, a heart full of devotion to God's
righteousness and love to all our kind. This is to worship God in
truth. And what have Calvin's five points, or the composite origin of
the Pentateuch, or the virgin birth of Christ to do with such
worship? If a man likes to believe them, very well. But if he cannot
honestly credit them, why should we shut the doors of the church
against him and threaten him with excommunication? Were these the
requirements that Jesus Christ laid on his disciples? Not at all. Look
all through the Sermon on the Mount, study the Golden Rule, and the
Parable of the Good Samaritan, or the conditions Jesus lays down in
his picture of the last judgment as the conditions of approval by the
heavenly Judge, and see if you find anything there about the
infallibility of Scripture, or the Apostolic succession, or the Deity
of Christ, or any other of the dogmas on account of which the
ecclesiastical disciplinarians would drive out the men whom they are
pursuing as heretics. How grimly we may fancy Satan (if there be any
Satan) smiling to himself as he sees great Christian denominations
wrought up to a white heat over such dogmas and definitions, while the
practical atheism, and pauperism, and immorality of our great
metropolis is passed over with indifference.
Sunday after Sunday, the Christian pulpit complains that the great
masses of the people keep away from their communion tables and do not
even darken their doors.
Does not the fault really lie in the folly--I may almost say sin,--of
demanding of men to believe so many things that neither reason nor
enlightened moral sense can accept, and making of these dogmas
five-barred gates through which alone there is any admission to
heaven?
If we wish the Church to regain its hold on thinking men it must
simplify and curtail its creeds; it must recognize that the love of
God is not measured by the narrowness of human prejudice, and that
God's arms are open to receive every honest searcher after truth. Let
him come with all his doubts, provided he comes with a pure heart and
brings forth the fruits of righteousness. Let us no longer pretend
that it is necessary for a Christian life to know all the mysteries of
God. Let it no longer be thought a mark of wickedness for a man
honestly to hold a conviction different from the conventional
standard; but let us respect one another's independent search and
judgment of truth. True faith consists not in any special theory of
God or His ways, but in the uplifting of our spirit to touch His
spirit, and the diffusing of whatever grace or gift we have received
from Him in generous good-will amongst our fellows.
If the Christian Church is to go forward successfully again in the
power and spirit of that Master whom it constantly invokes as "the
way, the truth, and the life," it must make that way and life its
guiding truth. It must aim constantly at greater simplicity in its
teaching, and a broader, more fraternal co-operation in Christian
work. Its motto should be the motto of the early Church, "In
essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things,
charity." Then shall a new and grander career open before its upward
footsteps.
THE SIOUX FALLS DIVORCE COLONY AND SOME NOTED COLONISTS.
BY JAMES REALF, JR.
The thriving city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has recently been
pitchforked into unjust notoriety by certain irresponsible
correspondents of certain sensational and habitually inveracious
newspapers that infest New York and Chicago. It has been represented
as having an easy divorce mill that constantly grinds out divorces of
a more or less bogus nature. This is fundamentally false. The laws of
South Dakota are liberal, but they are strictly interpreted. These
unscrupulous newspapers, whom it is unnecessary to name, have gone
still further in their distortion of truth, dissemination of error and
attempted degradation of the high and noble calling of journalism.
They have made false and unwarranted statements about the laws of the
Dakotas and of the United States generally on the subject of divorce.
Nor is this all in their race for a temporary and unsubstantial
circulation,--they have maligned certain unfortunate and meritorious
women and men, and added insult to injury by publishing bogus
portraits of beautiful ladies whose misfortunes should have provoked
respectful sympathy rather than coarse insinuation and vulgar
ridicule. Because these women were prominent in what has been termed
the Divorce Colony of Sioux Falls, either from social rank in their
former spheres, or by reason of the legal peculiarities enmeshing
their cases, they are legitimate subjects for honest journalistic
treatment, and some of them, triumphing over the natural shrinkingness
of their sex, for the sake of truth and for the sake of other women
who may need examples and incitements to achieve freedom from
dishonoring marriages, are perfectly willing to sacrifice their own
personal desires for obscurity and have their lives and their cases
properly presented. I have even prevailed on a few to permit the use
of their photographs to add to the personal interest of this article.
[Illustration: EVA LYNCH-BLOSSE.]
[Illustration: MRS. J. G. BLAINE, JR.]
[Illustration: MRS. MINA HUBBARD.]
[Illustration: DR. THOMAS D. WORRALL.]
The case of greatest interest, perhaps, because it has a transatlantic
notoriety, is that of Eva Lylyan Lynch-Blosse, an English lady, who
came to Sioux Falls early last winter and attracted almost instantly
the respectful attention of the citizens. Not because she was a
strikingly beautiful woman, for a student of statues might find some
faults in her features, but because out of the shy, violet eyes a
high, indomitable spirit occasionally gleamed and a stray flash from
them, combined with her radiant freshness of complexion and perfect
grace of figure and of carriage, would light up the common sordid
streets of the common masculine mind and turn them, for the nonce,
into vistas of imagination.
Some persons, passing us, inspire the thought: There goes a being with
a strange life-history, or full of great capacities, moral or mental.
Such was, undoubtedly, the chief component of her charm, felt equally
by the grave and learned lawyer, ex-Judge Garland, who conducted her
case, and by the street-loungers who respectfully hastened to make way
for her passage. It was the high character that radiated from her,
scorning the conventionalities that conspire to belittle her sex,
determined to be free and not afraid of being a pioneer in baffling
the barbarism of her native laws. A singular story hers, that demands
to be told in full, since it is full of inspiration to oppressed
womanhood everywhere.
The daughter of an English clergyman, she married at seventeen Lieut.
Edward Falconer Lynch-Blosse, an Irishman of good family, but bad
habits. In a few months this girl-wife discovered not only that she
had mistaken for affection what was merely the gratified vanity of a
boarding-school miss when wooed by a good-looking uniform, but that
there was absolutely nothing in the nature of the animated uniform on
which even respect could be built. Active brutality was soon begun by
the lieutenant. Simple adultery not being a sufficient amusement for
his hours of ease, he tried to compel his refined and delicate wife to
receive his paid paramours as her associates; and on her demurring, he
became mad with indignation and proceeded to discipline her, according
to the Englishman's time-honored right of violence. As a minor but
very embarrassing matter to a sensitive woman, he plunged into debt
and forced her to contend with and pacify his duns out of her private
fortune, and even worried her into an attempt to raise money for him
by pledging her annuity, though, luckily, no Jew in London was plucky
enough to take a long risk on the life of the wife of so brutal a
husband. This daily inferno of disgust and terror the woman endured
for three years, for the barbarous English law requires the woman, not
the man, to prove extreme cruelty besides adultery; and cruelty is
often not so easy to prove, for Englishmen, as a rule, do not beat
their wives on the housetops. It is generally a strictly boudoir
performance, with locked doors and the rabble excluded, as befits the
solemnity of such a marital right. At last, owing to the lieutenant's
culpable carelessness in castigation, she was able to go to court with
plenty of provable cruelty. But here again the barbarous English law
stepped in and said: "This is all very true, but wait a bit. You shall
have a decree _nisi_," which meant that she must wait six months and
then a certain musty, overpaid, and underworked humbug, styled the
Queen's Proctor, after hobnobbing with an attorney-general, would, if
his dinner agreed with him, confirm the decree and make it final.
During this suspense the ineffably mean uniform that had been
masquerading as a man was visited by an idea, and wrote a letter to
Mrs. Lynch-Blosse depicting himself as on the brink of starvation and
consumption, and begging for some money. The woman's pity was aroused.
She had once fancied for a brief while, with the undeveloped heart of
girlhood, that she liked this empty, tinkling symbol of a man. She
wrote him a kind letter enclosing the money. It takes but little
imagination to understand what such a creature would do with the cash;
that he would hasten to celebrate the success of his cunning by a
revel at which he could brag to some loose companion how neatly he had
cheated a generous and noble woman. But he did something more, almost
inconceivable in its baseness; he took that letter to the Queen's
Proctor and showed it to that archive of centuried insapience as a
proof that there had been collusion in the case, that his wife and he
were really on good terms, and that he was anxious to regain her. The
Proctor took his word, and without going into the case further, when
the six months were up, refused to confirm the decree. And then her
friends said: "You had better give up. England has decided that you
cannot be free." And her lawyers said: "Even with fresh evidence it
would be foolish to re-open the fight. The action of the Queen's
Proctor is so insurmountable." But the woman said to herself: "Though
England has decided that I must be a slave, nevertheless I will be
free." Meantime Lieutenant Lynch-Blosse, after endeavoring to blacken
his wife's character in his regiment, and getting soundly thrashed for
his pains, eloped with a light-headed Scotch peeress whose husband,
Lord Torphichen, promptly obtained a divorce, with the custody of his
children, and the elopers fled the kingdom, leaving a small army of
swindled tradesmen who are still exceedingly anxious to discover their
whereabouts. When last heard of, the ex-uniform was living in Chicago
under an _alias_, and he will probably remain one of the many English
ornaments of this country, for the same English law that permits a man
to castigate his wife in moderation is excessively severe if he
swindles tradesmen.
Mrs. Lynch-Blosse obtained her Dakotan divorce on the ground of
adultery, the evidence being the record of the Scotch suit of Lord
Torphichen against Lady Torphichen, otherwise styled the Right Hon.
Ellen Frances Gordon, and apart from the wrongs, the beauty, and the
pioneer courage of Mrs. Lynch-Blosse, picturesque as they made it, her
case possesses profound interest to the legal mind. It adds to the
weight of such cases as except to the old rule of domicile (Ditson
_v._ Ditson, 4 R. I., 87; Harding _v._ Alden, 9 Mo. 140; Hollister
_v._ Hollister, 6 Pa. St., 449; Derby _v._ Derby, 14 Ill. App., 645)
by showing that where a husband is guilty of such conduct as would
entitle even to a limited divorce, the wife is at liberty to establish
a separate jurisdictional domicile. Moreover, Mrs. Lynch-Blosse might
have obtained a divorce on grounds less strong than she did, for a
divorce good at the place of domicile will be sustained in England,
though the same grounds would have been insufficient to obtain it
there. (Harvey _v._ Farnie, L. R. 8 App. Cas. 43; Turner _v._
Thompson, L. R., 13 P. D. 37.) Of this law, probably, comity of
nations is the chief component. Those who admire moral courage and
feel a glow of indignation at the fact that, in order to secure her
natural right to own herself, a woman in the closing years of the
nineteenth century has to spend thousands of dollars, travel thousands
of miles, and sojourn among strangers, may be glad to know that since
her freedom she has married an English gentleman of high character,
and is living restfully in a charming little cottage on the banks of
what Macaulay calls, in his picturesque way, "the river of the ten
thousand masts." The great, feverous heart of London throbs near.
Another very interesting personage in the Sioux Falls Divorce Colony,
is Mrs. James G. Blaine, Jr., now living in a cosy cottage on the
fashionable avenue with her sister, Miss Nevins, her son, James G.
Blaine, 3d, and her maids. When Marie Nevins, piquantly pretty, witty,
and accomplished, made a stolen match with the ungreat son of one of
America's greatest political figures, she little dreamed what the
hands of the Fates--who are sometimes the Furies--were spinning for
her; yet she wears her robes of sorrow with some of that grace of
patience which comes to her sex like an instinct born of centuried
servitude. How her husband ever fascinated so fascinatingly elusive a
creature is a mystery to all who know him and a miracle to all who
know her; but who has ever guessed the riddle of a woman's heart?
Surely no man yet known to the world, except possibly Balzac, and he
only occasionally by some sort of electric, psychological accident.
The true story of Mrs. Blaine's infelicities has been carefully hidden
from the public, although some superserviceable, would-be friends have
now and then busied themselves with starting absurd rumors, as if for
the fun of contradicting them; for instance, a precious yarn spun
lately to the effect that Mrs. Blaine, senior, looked down on her
daughter-in-law as not aristocratic enough to have married a Blaine.
How intrinsically absurd is such an idea in connection with a family
as close to what Lincoln called "the plain people"--and as really
proud of so being--as that of the famous Republican leader! Blaine is
a man so thoroughly democratic that only a very stupid enemy of his
could have invented such a piece of self-convicting nonsense; for if
aristocracy entered into the question, Mrs. James G. Blaine, Jr.,
could make a better showing than her spouse, since, if it confers any
_quasi_-patent of nobility in this country to have a distinguished
father, it must give a larger halo of social splendor to have a
distinguished grandfather, etc., etc. Now, Mrs. Blaine, Jr., had a
grandsire who was a power in his day, a forceful, brilliant man,
Samuel Medary, who was successively governor of three States, Ohio,
Kansas, and Minnesota. Mrs. Blaine, Jr., apart from her marital
misfortunes, deserves much sympathy for her physical fate. Just lately
her leg was broken again and her surgeons fear that her lameness must
be perpetual. Yet the talk about her going on the stage has some
basis, and no one who ever talked with her, and enjoyed the prismatic
play of her facial expression and the flexions of her vibrant voice,
could doubt her fitness for certain popular roles. Nor need her
lameness defeat her of success. A play of mingled pathos and humor
could be written for a lame heroine. One excellent writer has offered
to do it, and Hamlin Garland could do it excellently. Balzac in his
marvellous book, "The Alkahest," declares that she is blest among
women, who, having some great bodily defect, nevertheless wins a man's
affections, for she never loses her hold on them, and it might very
easily be the same with a lame actress and the affections of the
public.
As to Mrs. Blaine's case an immense interest is felt, an interest
which lies not alone in the points of law. Mrs. Blaine, Jr., is a
Catholic, and her example in taking this step contrary to the custom
of her church is likely to be fruitful. It is a pretty safe prophecy
that the next Pope will see the advisability of returning to the
policy of the church prevalent before the Council of Trent, and will
allow a wiser freedom to his spiritual subjects in this matter of
divorce. Hearts were created before creeds, and the primal laws of God
still possess, and exert in emergencies, their ancient vigor of
eminent domain.
It is noticeable that nearly all the women in the colony have
children, and nearly all are women of unusual grace or beauty, or
mental gift--sometimes all three in one.
A very interesting person occasionally seen on the streets with a
little golden-haired boy is Mrs. Mina Hubbard, formerly of Redbank, N.
J. She has one of those olive, oval faces so often met in the south of
Spain, and she has a voice whose beauty and volume are equally
impressive. One day in the cosy, dozy little Methodist Church last
summer she happened to join in the singing, and several pious nappers
were sweetly startled from their theologic dreams. After that event
there was such a marked increase in the masculine attendance that the
lady's modesty took fright, and she refrained from the pleasure of
church-going. When I asked her if she had lost her fondness for
Methodism and music, she replied archly: "Oh, no! I am extremely fond
of going to church and hearing good congregational music, _but_ I can
_restrain_ myself."
Hon. Thomas D. Worrall, M. D., who has recently obtained a divorce and
now lives in Sioux Falls, is another person of note. Born in England
sixty-five years ago, he came to America young, moved to Boston and
achieved reputation as an anti-slavery orator, even when the peerless
Phillips was in his first blaze. Then he went to Colorado, was a
member of the territorial legislature, and wrote his name largely and
honorably on her early annals. Horace Greeley, who liked him heartily,
persuaded him next to accept a professorship in New York in the
American College of Medicine. Two years later, going to New Orleans,
he became a member of the famous Warmouth Legislature, and as sanitary
physician to New Orleans, added to his world-wide host of friends.
While in England, in 1873, his lectures on the resources of the
Mississippi Valley attracted wide attention, and he was greeted on his
return by an ovation in the New Orleans Academy of Music. Colorado
again claimed him for seven happy, industrious years, marked by an
eloquent defence of the Denver Mining Exposition, for which they
presented him with a cabinet of minerals that, according to experts,
is intrinsically worth $5,000, though it would take vastly more to buy
it from a man so covetous of honor. Removing to Washington, he
published a curious little book called "Slander and Defamation of
Character."
Sickness came to this learned and benevolent man, and he went to
London for treatment, but famous surgeons, after operating, could give
him no hope, and he came back to his adopted country to die. To his
amazement he found his home broken up, his valuable furniture sold,
his wife gone. "The mystery of the case," he has said, "is that my
wife and I never had the least falling out. Her desertion of me in my
old age and supposed last illness was like lightning out of a clear
sky. The thought came to me, 'Dying man that I am, it will be sweet to
die free.'" He then came West and settled in Sioux Falls, and either
the invigorating climate, or the inspiration of freedom, or the shock
of his wife's desertion (for in some diseases a sudden shock delays or
defeats death by effecting an electric change in the bodily currents
setting restward) have worked a marvellous change, for to-day this
amiable and accomplished old man is the picture of health and vital
power.
There are many other cases of great interest in the Divorce Colony at
Sioux Falls, but this plain statement of a few is enough to show how
grossly the _personnel_ and character of the colony have been
slandered by certain sensational and corrupt newspaper correspondents.
For more than six months I have studied the conduct and natures of the
persons who compose the divorce colony, and every reputable citizen of
Sioux Falls will substantiate my statement that, with possibly three
exceptions, the divorce seekers have been remarkable for the inherent
justice of their suits and the dignity of their behavior during their
residence in this town. The attempt to give them and the place an
unenviable notoriety, made by certain newspapers, is a stain on
American journalism. Men and women suffer enough before they seek a
divorce court. It is ghoulish to pursue them in the press with
misrepresentation and ridicule, or with exposure of their marital
miseries. Divorce is not merely a legal right of the individual; it is
often a moral duty which ought to be demanded by society from a truly
dignified woman or man; for to cohabit where there is no love between
husband and wife, worse still where the atmosphere has become
surcharged with hate, and to foist on society children begotten and
reared in an atmosphere that may crush out every noble impulse and
lofty desire, besides the subtle discords of heredity that must mark
their temperaments, is not merely a most pathetic blunder for the
parties primarily affected, but a wrong to the race--a crime against
civilization.
THE WOMAN MOVEMENT.
BY LUCINDA B. CHANDLER.
The woman movement is a world-wide fact. An agitation which has
gathered impetus and strength during more than forty years is a
significant phenomenon in the realm of mind and of social progress.
Since, in 1848, the rebellion of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, at the humiliating position accorded them as delegates to an
international convention in London, England, led them to inaugurate
the "woman's rights" movement in this country, at Seneca Falls, New
York, the growth of this "mustard seed" of truth has become a "great
tree" whose branches overshadow continents, and the thought and active
moral forces of nations "dwell in the branches thereof."
If not from "Greenland's icy mountains," at least from the boundaries
of the United States and British America to "India's coral strand,"
the onsweeping wave of woman's elevation is steadily advancing.
Ramabai in India seeking the deliverance of the child widow, who has
no earthly existence, nor any hope of one beyond mortal life except as
a wife, and who, as a widow, is but an outcast, this woman missionary
from the opposite side of the globe has clasped hands and is in
heart-fellowship with her American sisters who are still seeking the
enlargement of woman's freedom and opportunities in this favored
country.
It was a logical position that besieged the ballot as the first agency
of deliverance in our land. The suffrage is, under our form of
government and constitutional rights, the badge of equality.
Everywhere, in Church and State, woman was discriminated against, and
the distinguishing disability imposed upon her by law and custom was
her suppressed opinion and will in the administration of affairs.
In the church she might contribute her labor, carry forward
enterprises to pay the minister's salary, furnish the edifice, support
social movements that would tend to increase membership, and sustain
the religious services; but, were she a machine, minus brains, choice,
or will, she could be no more completely a nonentity when the pastor
was to be chosen, the amount of his salary fixed, or any matters of
finance or administration decided upon.
The acceptance of her work for its support was the only recognition of
her individuality, or her common share in the institution. She was
cudgelled with Paul in the Church and with her inability to fight by
the State.
Muscular force having been, and still widely held to be, the bulwark
of civilization, and submission to the authority of man socially and
ecclesiastically the measure of her religious excellence, at least of
the excellence of the wifely portion of womanhood, woman has been a
cipher at the left-hand side of the unit man in both civil and
religious institutions.
But the evolution of brains, which is nature's method of human
development, has unsettled this standard of civilization and the
relation of the sexes. The woman who thinks has come, and the struggle
is no longer one of muscle, nor can it ever again become so.
The woman of the future can no more be remanded to the merely patient
plodder in kitchen and nursery, with no horizon but the cook-stove and
cradle illuminated by the weekly church service, than the lightning
printing-press of to-day can be remanded to the clumsy instrument of a
century ago, or the electric light to the tallow dip.
If the demand of woman for equal opportunity to win all the prizes of
life, and to control her special function, involving the most serious
and sacred responsibilities to the race, and the necessity of her own
growth and advancement,--if this new demand is one that is not worthy
the consent and co-operation of men and institutions, the mistake was
fatal which permitted her to learn the alphabet.
This mistake, if mistake it was, has extended its mighty influence in
widening circles through the past three centuries. Francois Saintonge,
a young widow of France, toward the close of the sixteenth century,
obtained the consent of her father to teach some girls to read if she
would give her lessons at five o'clock in the morning. Without bed,
bread, or fire, she and her five pupils stayed the first night in the
house for which the only fifty pounds she possessed were paid.
Simultaneously a young girl in Italy made an effort to set in motion
the brain cells of the girls of her country by giving them a chance to
learn the alphabet.
The heroic courage of women in striving to attain the weapons of
intelligence affords evidence of the invincible proceeding of
evolution inherent in the constitution of humanity.
The woman movement is demonstration of the power of thought beyond the
power of muscle; it is evidence that the intangible forces of mind are
superior to the external material powers of muscle, and sword, and
bullet. It is reassuring to forecast that, spite of the present
inefficacy, or but very limited success of woman's protest against
barbarous laws and usages, and the destructive errors and vices of the
degree of civilization we have reached, the protest is a prophecy that
the moral elevation of the race is to be the result of woman's
increased intelligence and equipment, and of her ascent to the full
proportions of womanhood.
As a builder of material structures and enterprises, man is a superb
success. The bridge, the triumphs of architecture, the steam engine,
the almost intelligent machine are marvellous manifestations of
inventive genius, and of the uses of muscle.
But the statistics of social progress in morals do not bear testimony
to masculine superiority as builder of the higher humanity. A man has
elaborated "The New Education," but he allowed, without stint, that
the moral elevation aimed at cannot be achieved except by the equal
opportunity and co-operation of woman.
In the administration of affairs and the institution of government man
is not a success. His first resort and last reliance is upon force.
Harmony, and justice, and fraternity, and purity, and honesty cannot
be brought into human society by fighting, nor evolved by the methods
of force. Neither the ballot nor the bullet, the legislature nor the
policeman, can make people honest or morally upright and sound.
The promotion of individual integrity, honesty, benevolence, and
purity are the great requirements of humanity and of civilization.
The infusion of the gentler, more persuasive influences and methods of
feminine nature, and the higher quality and freedom of motherhood, are
the only possible means of advancing the race to the altitude which
the best specimens prefigure as the possibility of all.
The laws of Christendom and the usages of all civilizations are based
upon the idea of the superiority and supremacy of masculine quality
and of force. Upon the supposition that the husband is the bread
winner and provider, he is virtually in law and actually in fact as
effectually the owner of his wife and children as though he had bought
them for a sum, as is still the custom among some primitive peoples on
the planet.
In the Orient the idea that woman possesses a soul is rejected with
contempt. But in the more spiritualized Occident where she is
considered to be the possessor of a soul, she is by law, and
oftentimes by usage, not allowed to be possessor of her body.
Christianity in its inception and in its primitive purity accomplished
for woman the dignity of being possessor of a soul. She is still, even
in the most degenerate churchianity, counted responsible as a soul,
and accorded equal hope of redemption and of future equal standing in
another stage of existence.
But this fact, too, has bred in woman rebellion against the estimate
of her inferiority still held in the Church by many of the priestly
order, and actualized in the majority of Protestant denominations, and
universally in the Roman Catholic Church, by her exclusion from equal
powers and opportunities in its administration and equal positions of
honor and influence.
Having learned the alphabet woman has also learned to interpret
Scripture, and having read the New Testament, she knows that her
adorable Saviour left no theological system, creed, nor sanction of
the supremacy and dominion of male over female.
The woman movement is setting the perception of mind feminine over
against the conceptions and speculations, the theological systems and
interpretations, of the mind masculine, in the realm of the religious
quality of human nature.
It is on this ground that a higher standpoint for human progress is to
be achieved. Woman is becoming the possessor of her brains and of an
equipment that will facilitate her use of them. When through
generations of experience she has fully learned her true position in
the order of the universe and of human unfoldment, a new created world
of humanity will blossom on this old earth.
Man is normally the builder in the material realm. It is his to press
the more tangible elements and forces into the service of man's
material and intellectual needs, and to master and subdue the earth.
It is woman's to become builder in the spiritual realm of the higher
nature. It is woman's first' to give bias to the brain cells and soul
impulses of ante-natal and post-natal infantile life. It is woman's,
the normal mother and teacher, to look, and feel, and speak into
impressible child life, the fine ennobling sentiments, the solid
truths of social relations, the sterling principles of rightness, and
honor, and honesty, and fraternal love.
This trained experience and exercise of motherhood is a precious
wealth that the race needs to carry it on and up toward its
perfectness.
All that was pronounced "good," in man, in "the beginning" is innate
in human nature. Social life and social relations are the life school
in which this "good"-ness can be educed, strengthened, matured, in the
individual.
Woman is not only the creative agency for building bodies, but the
perfecting agency to build character, and to gestate and bring to
birth the higher nature in humanity. Woman is man's mother spiritually
as well as physically. He is to be born into his spiritual life
through the divine feminine, as he has been born into the physical
life through the natural (or physical) feminine.
It is to this end that evolution is in every direction placing woman
to-day in the foreground and quickening her to make new demands upon
the resources of intelligence and moral power.
Having furnished to the child the "three R's," manual training,
industrial habits, and quickening the higher sentiments with a solid
foundation of principles of right conduct and pure habits, are more
important to the advancement of the human race than literary
researches, languages, or higher mathematics. To know the
physiological and psychological processes of embryotic growth, and the
possible influences of motherhood over the coming child, and how to
neutralize poor heredity, would achieve more for race elevation than
the combined wisdom of schools and pulpits minus these.
There would be no need of laws for the suppression of vicious
literature, were all mothers faithful and capable of pre-empting the
plastic mind and imagination of childhood by intelligent explanations
and true statements concerning the origin of life, and the vital
purities and sanctities that can save every child from demoralization
and debauchery. The boy who has been blest with a wise conscientious
motherhood is not the boy to dwell in secret on lascivious thoughts
and vile communications, nor will he be led away by vicious
associations.
The true place of woman in the order of all things, is a link between
the material and spiritual, especially in her creative function.
Woman is more intuitive. She sees, seizes upon, grasps, where man
toils to question, investigate, prove, demonstrate. She is touched by
the secret springs of life, and vibrates in response, like the AEolian
harp.
"When men are as good as their obituaries, and when women are as good
as men think they are, the recording angel in heaven can take his long
needed vacation."
The woman movement indicates that women ought to have an opportunity
to become "as good as men think they are." It is impossible that men
shall hold a higher ideal of woman than it is possible for woman to
become. But first she must be free. Free to think, act, live, study,
experiment, exercise judgment, assume and be held to responsibilities.
She does not need man's protection except that he shall protect her
from himself, i. e., protect her from the invasion and intrusion of
his wishes, opinion, and will, his dictation and demand.
Equality before the law is a right principle and therefore should
obtain, especially under our Constitution. But what woman needs is
personal freedom to be the most womanly woman.
Under legal disability, marital subjection, and ecclesiastically
assigned inferiority, woman has been bred to servility in mind and
morals. She does not need training in the tricks of caucus and
wire-pulling politics, but she does need freedom and choice of action
that will give her the powers of her own mind and nature in full
possession, as a woman.
She does not need that men shall instruct her what a woman ought to
be, but she needs to be let alone to find out for herself this
precious and important knowledge.
It is not an incident or an accident that the agitation of woman's
advancement and the agitation of industrial reform are simultaneous
movements. The priority of woman's demand for equal rights before the
law in this country, has placed woman in literature, on the platform,
in the press, and even in the political field of action, in the
position of co-worker with man to achieve the highest outcome and
greatest blessing of civilization, the right of every person to an
opportunity to achieve subsistence, and the right of every worker to
the full reward of his labor.
Already in Kaweah Colony in California, woman is an equal participator
in the administration of affairs. She has equal opportunity to achieve
subsistence and equal pay for her labor.
The star of equity, justice, and fraternity, is shining in the west.
When the fraternal order of society is established, woman as mother
will be, in her training and her conception of her high office, and in
the position and advantage provided for her, exalted as the artist of
humanity.
She will be so furnished mentally, and so provided for materially,
that she can furnish to her babes what no textbooks, or Scripture, or
statutes can convey to them. The mother who can recite to her children
the songs of the American poets, the character of Dickens, and Eliot,
and Scott, who can portray the noble characters of Lincoln and
Lucretia Mott, who is able to devote the time required to entertain
her children, will become the most effective moral educator.
The woman of the good time coming will not hold lightly the moral
education of labor, for she will learn that many solid virtues are
carved into the beautiful character by the blessed exercise that
manual industry and regular duties alone can furnish.
But she will have leisure also to cultivate the finer sentiments, and
paint for the admiration of her babes the grand ideals of noble
manhood and womanhood.
Two problems belong to the woman question in the not remote future.
First, the industrial and financial independence of woman.
She must have this to acquire the dignity and moral strength of
self-support, and that wifehood and motherhood shall be assumed by her
solely according to the dictates of her heart, and the sanction of her
best judgment. Second, the financial independence of motherhood,
without a bread-winning occupation, that her time, energies, and
talents may be devoted to the careful training and moral and religious
education of her children.
The opportunities for single women to achieve subsistence in the realm
of intellectual and sedentary occupations especially, are increasing.
But co-operative housekeeping of some kind is the only hope for
mothers to be saved from overwork and worry, and to have leisure for
the proper training and entertaining of their children.
The provision in Kaweah Colony for the maintenance and education of
orphan children, or of children whose parents are disabled by sickness
or calamity, is another feature that is commendable in its wisdom and
justice.
The paternal and maternal community of voluntary co-operators is the
brightest dream of human association we can imagine.
If woman is to become the wise, sensible, self-helpful, cultured
mother, with proper opportunity to exercise maternal function for the
highest good of the future child, and without being herself dragged
into a spiritless machine, we must have her fortified, not only by a
"higher education," but a better home environment.
The woman question involves and forecasts a higher social order,
industrial evolution, economic adjustment, moral advancement, and the
adoption of the "_New Education_," which will develop and cultivate in
harmony all the powers and talents belonging to the threefold nature
of humanity.
NEW TESTAMENT SYMBOLISMS.
BY PROF. S. P. WAIT.
Although the many doctrines built up about the personality of Jesus
attribute to him in some peculiar sense the relation of sonship with
God, he does not so say of himself, but by every word and work
declares a common spiritual fatherhood and human brotherhood. When
Nicodemus testified to his superior power, Jesus did not trace its
origin to a special interposition of Providence in his birth or life,
but he made of general application the law that governed his
conception by the emphatic assertion that all men must realize
themselves as begotten and born from above before they can understand
the forces of the unseen universe within and without. He affirmed the
kingdom of God and of heaven to be latent in the life of man, and
promised no peace for the soul here or hereafter until its innate
capabilities for wisdom, love, and power for good are developed and
exercised. His precepts and example would be foolishness and a
stumbling-block, his character an unattainable ideal, were it other
than the first fruit ripened on the tree of life, the promise of a
perfected race.
We only apprehend its vital value, as we can trace in our own
experience and that of others, the growth and fruition of that
seed-principle of Truth around which the New Testament story has been
crystallized. This re-conception of the Christ is, like the first one,
essentially of the soul and intrinsically immaculate. It then matters
little when or by whom the Gospels and Epistles were originally
written; for the book as a whole is lifted forever above the level of
legend and myth, on the one hand, and that of a merely historical
narrative on the other, because the persons and events mentioned and
described represent laws and principles permanent in operation, and
reveal faculties whose reality and value we are daily called upon to
demonstrate. We can, when we so will it, verify, each in his own
subjective consciousness, all that the wondrous story of nineteen
centuries ago relates as having taken place in the outward objective
world of form and phenomena. For unto every "excellent Theophilus,"
every lover of the good and true, the gospel of the Christ is, through
the conscience, reconveyed, even as delivered by those who from the
first have been its messengers.
The faith of Abraham and law of Moses, the line of patriarch, priest,
and prophet, that linked the life of Jesus with that of primitive man,
we find repictured in the working of those evolutionary forces that
constitute each one of us an epitome of the past, a miniature of
society. As children of earth we give due credit to each factor in
heredity and environment that makes us what we are as we pass through
planes of physical, intellectual, and moral development. But a still
higher kingdom of consciousness is at hand, which forces us to feel
that as brethren of the Son of Man we are also sons of God.
In every wilderness of human life that stands instead of the oncoming
paradise, a voice of preparation loudly calls. It is the self-same cry
which of old the Baptist first sent forth, and which the Nazarene with
emphasis took up. This watchword, Repent ye, repent ye! means, as
_metanoia_ always meant, _newness and rightness of thought_, and
consequently a thorough and abiding betterment of motive, character,
disposition and habit, in every department and relation of individual
and social human life. To effect this transformation from ignorance to
knowledge, from selfishness to its opposite, is eternally the mission
of that principle of truth personified as Jesus. We recognize its
saving power only as it is set up within us as a rule of thought and
action. When we pattern after it, we then realize all sin to be just
what the Hebrew _chattah_ and the Greek _amartia_ indicate, _i. e._, a
missing of the mark, a lack of conformity to type, the type being man
finished in his creation, harmoniously developed, physically,
intellectually, morally, spiritually. And we learn that sins are not
forgiven by the setting aside of any law, or the amelioration of the
consequences of the violation of law, knowingly, or unknowingly; but
by the ordination in the nature of things of those agencies that tend,
even though it be through the penalty of pain, to bring us to the
knowledge of, and obedience to, every law written in the body and mind
of man and governing his environment seen or unseen. Sin is
incompletion, immaturity, unwholeness, ignorance, as well as the
violation of some understood and accepted moral code. As the green
fruit on the tree is forgiven for its unripeness by the baptism of
sunlight, moisture, and all other forces needed to mature it, so man
forgives and is forgiven by the impartation of strength where weakness
is in body or in mind, by the diffusion of science to take the place
of superstition, and by every other sure though slow, as we count
time, redemptive evolutionary trend. The only sin unpardonable in this
aeon or the next is _non-receptivity_ to the spirit that in every age
impels to righteousness. So long as man keeps his eyes closed, he
cannot be forgiven for being in a state of darkness. But it is an
utterly unthinkable as well as unscriptural idea that there be any so
perverse as to refuse throughout an endless time, to look upon the
glory of a world of light and color, when by opening the windows of
the soul they can exchange their trouble and unrest for peace that
will not pass away.
As for the babe of Bethlehem there was no other birthplace than a
manger, so when the universal Christ is cradled in our souls, its
resting place is in the midst of a well-nurtured animalism. The Herod
of a ruling selfishness seeks to obliterate the loftier ideal. But
while he summons all his strength to prevent the embodiment of the new
thought, there are other faculties that perceive the star of promise
and follow it as a harbinger of truth.
The years of Jesus' life of which we have no record, save the one
instance of his questioning and answering the wise ones in the temple,
represent the time of preparation, discipline, study, culture,
contemplation, necessary to fit us to give to others the benefit of
our experience and attainment. For no one can lift another to a higher
round of the ladder of life than that upon which he stands himself.
The immersion in the Jordan shows a willingness to conform to existing
customs, when no principle is sacrificed thereby and a point of
contact with the masses can thus be established, so that the truth
symbolized by the rite of baptism can be shown forth through the
action of those formative, purifying, spiritual forces that sustain to
the psychical realm the same relation that water bears to the physical
world.
The temptation of Jesus is typical of the time of testing that comes
to every one who takes a step in advance of the age in which he
lives. The principle of resistance called Satan confronts such an one
at the very outset of his mission, and seemingly insuperable obstacles
arise as foes to his progress. But he who first meets and masters all
inward opposition, through knowledge of the law and allegiance
thereto, can conquer every outward phase of hybrid beast and human,
whose selfish pride and cruel greed have been well imaged as a devil
with cloven foot and fiendish face.
The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of spiritual axioms. It lays
before us the law of love for the neighbor, as the very instinct of
self-preservation. Not to do for others as we would be done by, is to
fail to furnish food, raiment, and shelter for our own souls. Physical
and intellectual man gains worldly strength and honor as he takes to
himself and retains riches and knowledge regardless of the rights of
others. In contradistinction to this, the spiritual man gets treasure
and wisdom imperishable, as he serves his fellow men, and freely gives
of whatsoever he may have, of which his neighbor stands in need.
The beatitudes, with which the speech begins, such as man never spake
before, tell, in a symbolism that is self-evidently true, the way by
which alone, real happiness is won. We are blessed or cursed of God,
through the working of His laws immutable, according as our relation
to those laws is one of knowledge and obedience, or of ignorance and
perversity. As, in the Hebrew tongue the words we render, "to curse,"
and "to bless," run back to the same root idea, so in point of fact,
the very suffering which, sooner or later, comes to us when we are out
of touch with the divine order of love to God and love to man, is the
means appointed to bring us to that harmony which all must gain.
The lowest things are often seen to signify the things most high. A
parable, _paraballo_, is that which "throws before" us such concrete
imagery as best serves to foreshadow and to fit the mind to understand
a certain abstract principle. As we become disciples, "learners" of
the Truth, we find it speaks to us only through such emblems as enable
us to reason from the things we do already know to those concerning
which we wish to be informed. The words of Jesus went forth
full-freighted with vitality. They were truly spirit and life, because
charged with a virtue that can only come from a soul in submission to
the law by his lips enunciated. Hence we see why, in the mystical
language with which the Gospel of St. John begins, he is called the
Logos, Reason or Word of God, from God and one with God, because he
reveals the divine thought concerning man, inherently perfect from the
first, but requiring time and space for its outworking. That human
individuality may be maintained, man is uplifted only over the fulcrum
of his own will. This volitional power is the ray in us of that
Creative Energy whose name Jehovah signifies, _I will be what I will
to be_. Thus, then, oneness with God is not sameness with God, nor the
absorption of human personality in the Infinite Being. It is simply a
state to be reached in our progressive creation where we will come to
a knowledge of the laws of life, and will consciously co-operate with
those divine decrees governing the origin, nature, and destiny of the
soul. To illustrate the possibility of such achievement and exemplify
the way of its attainment, was the mission of the Christ. But it has
been so much easier to idolatrously worship his person than to embody
his principles, that ceremonials and doctrines have been substituted
for the life he lived. This is a sufficient reason for the manifestly
unsaved condition that the so-called Christian world still exhibits in
all manner of bigotry and disease, social unrest and iniquity.
The name Jesus signifies "_that which makes whole_." So we find the
one who bore it, true to his title, healing the bodies of men and
giving to their souls a cure for sorrow. Yet, even he was made to feel
that of himself he could do nothing, so keenly was he conscious of the
fact that every self-denying sympathetic soul becomes a mediator,
through whom the reconstructive forces of the universe make their
impress felt upon the race. He speaks of prayer and faith, as mental
states to be entered into and maintained, if we would _be_ and _do_
the best we can. His injunctions in reference to prayer correspond
well with the meaning of the Greek verb _euchomai_ which we render "to
pray," and which signifies to put forth effort rightly, _i. e._, along
the lines of laws understood. He said that true prayer is not the
repetition of any words, nor the asking for that which we may think it
best that we should have. For the spiritual man knows that his labor
for others insures of himself the results that are best. So the
discourse of Jesus in this connection defines prayer, in its highest
sense, as an inward, not an outward attitude; a state of mental
receptivity to the guidance of truth and desire for the good of
others, always to be observed, not the mere utterance of terms of
petition or praise. He tells us to withdraw into the soul's most
secret place, where God already sits enthroned, and there commune with
Him.
Before in spirit and with understanding we can in thought, and word,
and deed, articulate Our Father! we must pass back in review through
all the cycles that have rolled around, since this old earth of ours
first turned in space. We then behold the most attenuate form of
matter of which we can conceive, as a condensation of creative energy,
yet but a matrix fitted for the reception of a planet seed or soul. We
recognize a divine involution as the antecedent and causation of all
so-called natural evolution. We see each link in the chain of being,
from least to greatest, from the simplest to the most complex; grass,
herb, and tree, fish, reptile, bird, and beast, as multiple yet
orderly expressions of the immanence and permanence of the fatherhood
of God. We view the creation of man as His highest handiwork, in which
the seed of human life, bearing latent within it every high attribute
and potency possessed by its celestial source, is placed or planted in
a prepared material environment. We look back through the ages upon
the travail of this our soul, and are satisfied as we see it gradually
rising to the mastery and reformation of the physical form and animal
soul, in which and with which it has been tabernacled to gain a
necessary experience. From savagery to civilization, through planes of
physical, intellectual, and moral consciousness we pass, borne upward
by the overshadowing power of God to realize the omnipresence of its
fatherhood. From this right starting-point there follows of necessity
a conception of that vital fraternity of man which makes us members of
one body, and which precludes the possibility of the gaining of a
lasting good by any individual part thereof without a benefit to all.
Each other portion of the prayer of prayers is seen to have a
correspondingly deep significance, when carefully analyzed, although
formulated as an object lesson in our spiritual kindergarten, the
church. The name of God we hallow, but not as did the ancient
Israelites, by refusing even to mention the sacredly incommunicable
_Yahweh_. For we have learned that the right name is what expresses
the nature of that which is named. So that the only way in which we
can reverence the name of God or Christ is by the consecration of our
time and talent to the expression of all the God-like, Christ-like
qualities with which, as human beings, we are gifted.
What foolishness, if not blasphemy, it would be for us to ask that the
will of God should be obeyed in the world about us, when His laws of
gravitation and chemical affinity, crystallization and cell-growth,
rule supremely in each of earth's kingdoms. But the constant
aspiration of our hearts should be that the elements of earthiness
within us, that militate against the expression of our highest ideals,
shall hear and heed a juster rule than that of selfishness. For no
outward act of legislation can usher in heaven's kingdom on the earth,
in human institutions, until many individuals have by its inward
presence been guided and illumined.
For a sufficiency of material food from day to day, we rightly ask by
the proper use of each faculty and member God has given us, to compel
the earth to yield up its resources for our sustenance, which it would
do in ample abundance for all, were it not for the inordinate greed
and lust, or the gross lethargy, of that many-phased, still
unhumanized beast that man has to conquer in himself. But happy is he
who hungers for the manna of law and the bread of truth, whose prayer
is a sincere desire to be so fed thereon that there shall be such
strength in the muscles of his soul as shall make of him a power for
good to all with whom he comes in contact.
As to our enemies, we can no longer cherish feelings of resentment
toward anyone, however they may misconstrue our purest motive, or
malign our best intent. We see that every one must show, when tested,
the exact degree of growth he has attained. Hence, the slander and
persecution, the "all manner of evil" falsely arrayed against us, we
apprehend as the necessary means to determine our fidelity to the
truth to which we have pledged allegiance, and to prove that what is
of good cannot come to naught though all the powers of earth and hell
be set against it. To forgive, _aphiemi_, is to cause advancement, to
bear away burdens. Thus we see it as an axiom that only as we aid the
weak, instruct the ignorant, develop the undeveloped, can we receive
in turn what we most need to carry us farther forward on the upward
path.
Lead us not into temptation, is what we silently say when our thought
and action show that we have well learned the lessons that were for us
in past trial and tribulation, and so order our course that the
leading of His laws, by which alone God ever guides, brings to us joy
instead of pain. Then, whatsoever may betide, as men count weal or
woe, we see the gold pass from the fire freed from its base alloy.
Then all the prayer is answered as with the eye of the prophet to whom
the future is as now, we see the soul delivered from, born out of
evil, _poneros_, which well represents the six days or epochs of
labor, strife, and friction, of gestation in materiality, that precede
and prepare the way for the Sabbath day to dawn.
The word "amen" is a Hebrew term for faith, which it defines as a firm
prop or support, a foundation that abides. It pictures to us faith,
not as emotion or credulity, nor the mere belief in, or acceptance of,
some formulated creed; but as that clear assurance of what the present
will produce or what the future has in store, which can only come as
we perceive how God, by laws immutable, has ruled throughout the past.
And faithful prayer is oneness of the will of man with that of God,
through knowledge of His laws and glad obedience thereto. Thus, this
word, as a symbol, stands for that which is the first and last of all
true prayer.
The works of Jesus, like his words, were all of a symbolic character,
in that each so-called miracle foreshadowed a result to be realized as
a common heritage of men through the age-lasting evolution of the same
intelligence that then produced the transient tokens of its presence.
In the New Testament there are four words used, in the original Greek,
which have been translated as descriptive of miraculous occurrences.
Their basic meaning is as follows: 1, _dunamis_, power, energy, a
faculty or ability to do; 2, _ergon_, a work, an arrangement in order,
with purpose and skill; 3, _teras_, to turn, to resolve, to excite
wonder or fear; 4, _semeion_, the word most frequently employed,
indicates a sign, mark, or token by which a thing is shown, something
used to represent something else. Our word "miracle" is often and
erroneously used for a phenomenon supposed to have occurred outside
the realm of law. Yet, in the strictest sense, the bursting of a blade
of grass from out the ground, the conception and birth of any form of
life, are as stupendous miracles, marks of creative power, as the mind
of man can ever contemplate.
The wise and great in any department of progress have always towered
like gods above their fellowmen. The natural product of their lives
has been a constant miracle to those about them. In spiritualizing the
story of the prodigies performed by Jesus, we would not question the
psychic power, transforming virtue of such an one as he, who was
fitted to convey a re-creative influence to the world. But we would
wish to show how far those phenomenal evidences of power and
intelligence transcended the domain of mediumistic wonder-working or
spiritistic occultism. This is easily accomplished as we continue to
apply the same principle of interpretation that has already shown us
that the supposed miraculous conception and birth of the Christ was
but a consummation of the plan, and in obedience to the same laws by
which the heavens were made, the earth begotten and born, mineral and
vegetable kingdoms formed and sustained, animal life brought forth and
evolved, and, finally, man progressively created in the image,
according to the likeness of his God. Because the same spiritual
nature that the typical man so perfectly embodied has been begotten in
our souls and is seeking to express itself along the lines he pointed
out, the truth, of which his so-called miracles were illustrative and
prophetical, is made apparent. His walking on the sea of Galilee, or
bidding its tempestuous waves be still, was not so marvelous a proof
of power as has been the advancement of the principle he represented
upon the seething ocean of humanity, causing the tumultuous tides of
lust and passion, sin and ignorance to subside. The literal narrative
of the miraculous draught of fishes vouchsafed to the disciples
affords but a feeble symbol of the abundant life that has come to men
and nations who have cast their nets, put forth their efforts, in
obedience to the injunctions of the Law-giver of the New Testament.
The wonder of the marriage-feast is re-performed as Christ attends the
wedding of our souls to truth, that union which cannot by man be put
asunder. As this takes place the water turns to wine; that within our
mental make-up which before was unformed, unstable, in a condition of
flux and change, becomes vivified with creative power, and bubbles and
sparkles with newness of life and inspiration, refreshing and
stimulating the soul with higher emotions and desires, imparting to
the very cells and tissues of the body a reconstructive tendency to
health.
By the breaking of the bread of life, the hidden manna of the Word,
the reality behind appearance, the multitude of faculties is fed and
that unseen assembly nourished whose lives are linked with ours at
this Lord's Supper of the soul. Blinded perceptions are restored to
sight from day to day, and gifted with a constantly enlarging field of
vision in the realm of truth and law. The understanding that was deaf
vibrates with joy in response to the call of a salvatory science. The
antitypes of palsied arm and crippled foot, which are the lack of
power to do and of ability to advance in a higher, mental life, are
healed by the transforming touch that makes its impress on the soul
when first made conscious, that by its own free will its highest
ideals are to become realities. Even those who have been so
earth-bound and selfish as to be lifeless, cold, and dead to the
knowledge of God and love to the neighbor are commencing to arise in
answer to the spirit of the approaching altruistic age. Accompanying
this present resurrection, the veil is being rent that for so long has
intervened between this life and the next. And although no outward
cloud is sundered for a personal Messiah to descend to rule as
temporal prince, the denser fogs of a gross materialism are parting
fast before the rising glory of that day whose dawn we see afar on the
horizon. For the signs are many and are strikingly apparent that those
splendid souls, the wisely great ones of the past, the saviors and
educators of the race, are to co-operate with us in the formation of
that kingdom and republic which their prophetic vision saw and fervent
words foretold. Then, as a spiritual reality, will we understand the
truth symbolized by the doctrines of the church concerning the
resurrection of the dead and communion with the saints, as the first
fruits of them that slept appear to us. And what is now prefigured by
the phenomena and personations of modern spiritualism, will then
become a blessed fact as our missing loved ones labor with us for our
and their redemption and the good of all mankind. Had they been
permitted, or were they able, to return for any other purpose, the
result would be the furtherance of selfishness and materiality.
Spiritualism, with its convincing tests of an unseen intelligence, and
its crude communications, sustains the same relation to the angelic
intercourse which it simulates, that the symbolic conversion, baptism,
and bread and wine of the church bear to the organic experiences of
a true life. They are all, alike, signs and forms, shadows cast before
the substance drawing nigh, the Christ that is to be.
Our present space will not permit us now to even touch upon, much less
delineate, the all-important principles symbolized by the recorded
martyrdom of Jesus, and the doctrine of atonement. But they, and all
the eschatology of the Gospels, and with which the apocalyptic book of
riddles is filled, will be readily unravelled as we still farther
trace the working of those laws already seen, that are not restricted
in their operation by relations of time and space, but govern through
the ages the travail of the embodied or disembodied soul. Suffice it
then to say that hell and heaven are not the names of _places_ to
which the wicked or the good are called upon to go. Sheol, Gehenna,
Hades, Tartarus, and the opposite Kingdom of God, are terms expressing
symbolically the experiences and conditions of undeveloped and
developed souls here as well as hereafter.
THE TRUE POLITICS FOR PROHIBITION AND LABOR.
BY EDWIN C. PIERCE.
A vast body of American citizens have a deep concern in the temperance
cause, and are bound in conscience to do their utmost to give early
success to the movement for the legal suppression of the drinking
saloon, which they rightly regard as the fountain of intemperance.
Some of them are rich and some of them are poor. Some of them are
conservative and some of them of radical tendency as to questions
concerning wealth. They belong to the industrious, intelligent, moral,
and patriotic reserves of the country. With them in sympathy is the
motherhood of America. I think it is only fair to say, and that all
social reformers should see, that the radical prohibition
constituency--dispersed now in several political parties--is larger
than the following commanded by any other single reform idea, and it
is distinguished by exceptional persistency. There is also a large and
increasing body of American citizens absorbed in what is called the
labor question. Some of them are rich and some of them are poor. Some
of them are also on the side of prohibition and some of them are
hostile or indifferent.
The labor question is the question of social justice, and no question
can be higher than that. Stated in other terms, the labor question is
the question of how to approximate more nearly to an equal
distribution of wealth, not so much of the wealth already amassed by
society as of the wealth that is to be produced by labor in the
future. Now, while there are very few people who think that entire
equality of fortune in this world is either possible or desirable;
every free democracy will wish to work towards equality of social
condition, looking forward to a glorious time when uninvited poverty
shall be outgrown, when manhood shall be of more social weight than
wealth.
There is as much high moral sentiment put into the labor question
to-day, as ever was put into any crusade against any form of
oppression or evil.
If, however, only the radicals with fixed convictions and unflagging
zeal were counted, neither of these humane causes would have a
majority of American voters. Deeply interested in both, I frankly
confess that I do not believe either prohibition or labor can win
alone. As we study our political history, we find that political
issues are not carried except in combination, and as part of the
policy of a political party to the cohesion and the power of which
many issues and many forces contribute. We are not under the Swiss
referendum; we are a representative republic, with two legislative
chambers, each constituted in a peculiar way. Our national life is
complex. To hold in party association the six millions or more of
American men whose support, continued for years, is necessary to carry
a great measure, requires the proper connection with the past, and
trenchant dealing with the present which is full of imperious demands.
Abraham Lincoln was not borne into the presidency in 1860 solely by
the strength of the anti-slavery issue, but found necessary support in
Pennsylvania from the committal of the Republicans to the protective
principle, while in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and the West
generally, he was greatly aided by the homestead issue. Several
distinct issues have usually been involved in our presidential
elections. Exceptions are presented by the victories of sentiment or
tendency under the extraordinary leadership of Jefferson in 1800, and
in the extraordinary demonstration for General Jackson and Democracy
in 1828.
Successful parties in the United States, as in England, have generic
rather than specific names. Federalist, Democratic-Republican, Whig,
Democratic, and Republican; all represent popular triumphs and
administrations of the government. Anti-Masonic, Liberty, American,
Free Soil, Greenback, Prohibition, Labor,--these party names represent
no partisan victories. In the Cabinet of the first President of the
Republic, Thomas Jefferson was Secretary of State, and Alexander
Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. To each of them Washington
submitted the question whether Congress had power to incorporate a
bank. Jefferson, believing popular liberty safe only in a strict
construction of the Constitution, denied the power to create a bank
because no such power is expressed, or is strictly necessary to the
exercise of any power expressly granted. Hamilton, believing that a
liberal construction of the Constitution was essential to the
development of America, answered that Congress had the power, that the
power was incidental to the national character of the government. He
construed the grant of "necessary" powers in these words: "It is a
common mode of expression to say that it was necessary for a
government or a person to do this or that thing, when nothing more is
intended or understood than that interests of the government or person
require or may be promoted by the doing of this or that thing. The
imagination can be at no loss for exemplifications on the use of the
word in this sense. And it is the true one, in which it is to be
understood as used in the Constitution." The Supreme Court, quoting
these very words with approval, has adopted Hamilton's construction.
With the writing of those two opinions in the Cabinet of Washington,
the enduring lines of party division in America were drawn. There
ought to be early recognition of the fact, that in case a new party of
the people shall be formed, a party determined upon reform of existing
abuses and oppressions, upon the suppression of the liquor traffic as
we know it, upon the overthrow of every semblance of plutocracy, upon
opening to every child of the American democracy an equality of
opportunity as yet unknown, resort must be had to those broad,
liberal, and constructive constitutional doctrines which the existing
Democratic party steadily opposes, and which the Republican party does
not sufficiently apply for the benefit of the masses. It is the duty
and opportunity of the prohibitionists to make such a party. A party
going to Thomas Jefferson for a baptism of Democratic feeling, and
content with no sprinkling, and to the school of Hamilton for its
constitutionalism, can supplant the Republicans, and only such a party
can meet the case of labor. The woollen manufacturers of Massachusetts
have just remonstrated against further reduction of the hours of labor
unless the reduction be uniform in all the manufacturing States, and
they made the significant suggestion that Congress has power to
establish uniform hours of labor. Congress does have that power as a
part of the power to regulate commerce. The eight-hour day can only
come in this country by act of Congress, and the construction that
sustains such an act sustains national regulation of the liquor
traffic. The general welfare of the Union is involved in each case.
American industry is a unit so far as the interests of American homes
require the rule of uniformity, and the home life of America is a unit
so far as it needs that protection which, in order to be complete,
must come from the national authority. I venture to suggest that one
thing that has hindered the cementing of the alliance between labor
and prohibition, is the tendency of the prohibitionists while
recognizing the importance of labor problems to insist that
prohibition must come first. The labor men will never go into any
party that puts it quite in that way. Is it not sufficient to claim
urgency for the prohibition issue, to say that no work should take
precedence of prohibition in party performance? I think the time has
come when this issue can be taken up by a political party and I
recommend a party that shall declare for prohibition with the same
emphasis with which the Republican party declared for protection in
1884 and in 1888. I think, however, that the party that carries a bill
for national control of the manufacture and traffic in liquors through
Congress, to be s
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