The Unpopular Review Vol. I
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Title: The Unpopular Review Vol. I
Author: Various
Editor: Henry Holt
Release date: February 15, 2015 [eBook #48268]
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Language: English
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THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW
[Illustration]
_PUBLISHED QUARTERLY_
VOL. I
JANUARY-JUNE
1914
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1913, 1914,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
No. 1. JANUARY-MARCH, 1914
THE NEW IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT =The Editor= 1
THE MAJORITY JUGGERNAUT =Fabian Franklin= 22
THE DEMOCRAT REFLECTS =Grant Showerman= 34
THE NEW MORALITY =Paul Elmer More= 47
PROFESSOR BERGSON AND PSYCHICAL RESEARCH =The Editor= 63
TWO NEGLECTED VIRTUES =F. J. Mather, Jr.= 112
THE UNFERMENTED CABINET =E. S. Martin= 124
A NEEDED UNPOPULAR REFORM =H. B. Brougham= 133
OUR TOBACCO: ITS COST =Henry W. Farnam= 145
OUR ALCOHOL: ITS USE =Clayton Hamilton= 163
THE MICROBOPHOBIAC =Grant Showerman= 175
THE STANDING INCENTIVES TO WAR =David Starr Jordan= 185
THE MACHINERY FOR PEACE =H. B. Brougham= 200
EN CASSEROLE: Tobacco and Alcohol--Answering Big
Questions--Decency and the Stage--What's the Matter with our
Colleges? (VERNON L. KELLOGG)--Proportionate News (F. J.
MATHER, JR.)--Simplified Spelling 212
No. 2. APRIL-JUNE, 1914
THE SOUL OF CAPITALISM =Alvin S. Johnson= 227
A SOCIOLOGICAL NIGHTMARE =W. P. Trent= 245
SOCIAL UNTRUTH AND THE SOCIAL UNREST =Fabian Franklin= 252
NATURAL ARISTOCRACY =Paul Elmer More= 272
THE RIGHT TO BE AMUSED =F. J. Mather, Jr.= 297
HOW WOMAN SUFFRAGE HAS WORKED =H. B. Brougham= 307
THE BABY AND THE BEE =Vernon L. Kellogg= 333
THE CASE FOR PIGEON-HOLES =Grant Showerman= 343
THE GREEKS ON RELIGION AND MORALS =Emily J. Putnam= 358
OUR SUBLIME FAITH IN SCHOOLING =Calvin Thomas= 375
THE BARBARIAN INVASION =Warner Fite= 389
TRUST-BUSTING AS A NATIONAL PASTIME =Henry R. Seager= 406
OUR GOVERNMENT SUBVENTION TO LITERATURE =Charles W. Burrows= 415
EN CASSEROLE: Special to our Readers--A Specimen of "Uplift"
Legislation--A Model of Divinatory Criticism (CALVIN
THOMAS)--Some Deserving "Climbers"--Simplified Spelling 431
The Unpopular Review
VOL. 1 JANUARY, 1914 NO. 1
THE NEW IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT
We call it new. Yet there is nothing new under the sun--which
statement, like most proverbs, is but a half truth.
The world has always been full of irrepressible conflicts, and will be
as long as life is worth living in it--and longer. There was one
between centrifugal and centripetal force, at the very start (assuming
a start), when the star dust began to whirl, and all that have been
since have been but differentiations from it. Old ones are between
sex-instinct and monogamy, between license and order, or call it
liberty and authority if you please, or freedom and slavery.
Sex-instinct, license, liberty, freedom are centrifugal; monogamy,
order, authority, even slavery, are centripetal. The conflict between
freedom and slavery gave rise to the phrase The Irrepressible
Conflict. It came through Seward at the time of the Civil War.
That Irrepressible Conflict has been succeeded by one which we have
called new, but which, though in a comparatively quiescent state, is
older than Jack Cade or even than Cleon. It took its start in the fact
that in human evolution, from the pithecanthropos up, some of us have
not got along as fast as others. Primitively, the conflict began by
those in front enslaving those behind--the minority enslaving the
majority. But that built Athens; and with it, civilization--as we
regard it. (This starting point is selected somewhat arbitrarily, but
most starting points must be.) It now looks, though, as if the boot
were getting on the other leg--the majority trying to enslave the
minority; and if they do before humanity is much farther evolved, what
Athens started will stop. But probably the result of the conflict
will not be as bad as that. Something like it has happened at times,
however--say when Southern Europe was rolled over by Northern Europe,
and when the Paris that had breeches was rolled over by the Paris that
had none; and possibly something like it began when Americans that had
three thousand dollars a year and found work for the rest of the
people, and paid wages, and bought the produce of the soil, and made
commerce and finance and the best in statecraft and science and
letters and the arts--when in two instances these men were legislated
away from powers and immunities granted to others.
* * * * *
Of all human conditions, the difference among men in capacities, and
consequently in possessions, is perhaps the most troublesome; and yet
it is because of that very condition, that most men have done most of
the things that raised them from the lowest savagery. The progress of
the world, as a whole, has depended upon the superior man leading the
way, and upon the mass of men working to keep up with him. Of course
we in our wisdom can ask why it was necessary to evolve men at
different rates, thus imposing upon most of us the pains of
inferiority and envy, and the strains of emulation. We don't know, but
so it is. Life is full of such paradoxes, way down to the existence
side by side of free will and necessity; and the only effective way of
life is to devote to each of the opposing conditions the best action
our little intellects can direct, without wasting them over vain
efforts at reconciliations that are beyond us.
* * * * *
Although the wage-earner of to-day is better off than the kings of
yore in every particular except that there are more men for him to
envy, that particular is a constant source of unhappiness to him, and
is rapidly making him a constant source of unhappiness to everybody
else. The man behind is getting more and more in conflict with the man
in front. Until lately the disturbances have been local and spasmodic.
Now they have become nation-wide and world-wide; and until evolution
has got so near its goal of equilibration that the differences
between men are much less than now, and the sympathies much greater,
the conflict will be irrepressible.
The differences from which it springs were, as is well known, much
less among the ancestors who shaped our government than they are among
ourselves. Leaving out the slaves who did nothing in that work, the
population was nearer homogeneous in wealth and race than it is now,
and the differences were not so great as to cause much conflict. There
was virtually no proletariat. In those days it took character to
emigrate to these shores: in these days, it almost seems to take
character not to. The nation consisted then almost entirely of farmers
and land-owners, and there continued some sort of basis for all the
talk of equality, until the proletariat "tasted blood" in the
greenbacks issued as a war measure. The impression brought by them
into the minds of the ignorant, and fostered by the demagogues, was
that to make everybody rich, it was only necessary to print more. This
delusion dropped into the minds of the first proletariat in the world
which had long enjoyed common-school education, and in that soil it
grew rapidly, and whenever put down in one form, it has arisen in
another. When people were satisfied that the millennium could not be
brought about by greenbacks, they felt certain, under the instruction
of that eminent financier our present Secretary-of-State, that it
could be brought about by silver. When they got through playing with
that delusion, they were entirely ready to welcome a flood of other
delusions which had found their principal sources in Europe among men
denied the electoral franchise. Up to that time the toy of political
equality had kept the American proletariat sufficiently amused to
prevent their paying much attention to the socialism, anarchism and
similar "isms" which had agitated the same classes abroad. But the
essential conditions had all the while been the same here, and the
assassination of McKinley illustrated that the great republic was at
last as far along in a certain sort of "progress" as the older
civilizations. It was the direct consequence of the crazy doctrines
preached all the way from Emma Goldman up to some of the most
"progressive" of the college professors.
* * * * *
But however discouraging the situation among the wage-earners may be,
it is perhaps better than one of ox-like content. The average man is
beginning to have ideals--not very high ideals; most of them concern
merely his back and his belly; but there are a few which find vent in
the orchestras and dramatic efforts at the settlements and village
halls; and in the bandstands on the village greens, horrible as
generally are the noises made in them. But these awakening ideals also
appear in the boycotts among the Danbury hatters, in the vandalisms of
the I. W. W., in the Los Angeles dynamiting, and in murders among the
Chicago teamsters and Pennsylvania miners, as well as in the
assassination of McKinley.
Then there is an intermediate showing of them, neither in art nor in
physical force, but in the opinions behind the force, in all sorts of
schemes toward the material basis of enlarged life. The people seek
short cuts across the gulf, and follow like sheep those who promise
them what they want. Just as Jack Cade promised them that every pint
pot should hold a quart, so Bryan promised them, virtually, that
silver should be as good as gold, and Roosevelt virtually promised
them that all judges should be afraid to decide against them in
industrial conflicts. True, he explains all that away in the Hibbert
Journal. But the people he harangues do not read the Hibbert Journal,
and he is astute enough to know it.
* * * * *
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Irrepressible Conflict is
where it is not between two sides wanting the same dollars, but
between the real and the ideal. Nearly all the schemes are ideal,
eminently desirable, but utterly impossible in any state of human
nature that we know or can clearly foresee. Yet they appeal to the
sympathies of all, and therefore mislead the judgments of many. We
wish we felt as certain as we do of sunrise that in the present stage
of American evolution democratic government is not one of these
ideals; but we cannot. The American people has just passed its first
two measures of distinct and unqualified class legislation, and has
been running wild after the two greatest demagogues in history. But
fortunately as they both promise substantially the same things--"steal
each other's clothes," they tend to neutralize each other.
* * * * *
The sources of the most pronounced conflict between facts and ideals
are that ordinarily a man cannot have more than he creates and
conserves; that the desire to will torture those who create and
conserve little, as long as they have to look upon others who create
and conserve much; and that, as long as the difference lasts, those
who have little will want to get hold of what is held by those who
have much. The things that all men want, but few men have. Those who
have not, envy and often hate those who have. Of late this disposition
has been greatly intensified by the multitude of rapid fortunes from
the new control of Nature and from the trusts, and the parvenu
ostentation accompanying them. It makes a difference whether princely
state surrounds the king's son, or one's own pal of yesterday.
Worst of all, so many of these fortunes have been obtained wrongfully
that they intensify the impression that _all_ fortunes above the
average have.
Now the fundamental question in this conflict is: to whom does that
money rightfully belong? Among wise people who are not economists, the
width and profundity of the ignorance on this point tends to dissipate
the current skepticism regarding the miraculous.
The fortunes wrongfully acquired are exceptional and abnormal. Nearly
all comfortable fortunes come from legitimate industry. Within a
generation the economists have got the question of to whom they
rightfully belong, into the qualitative stage of settlement. The
quantitative stage is a much nicer and more complicated problem, and
varies more with different cases. Possibly the first germ of the
solution appeared a generation ago in a sentence in Marshall's
"Economics of Industry."
It was: "The earnings of management of a manufacturer represent the
value of the addition which his work makes to the total product of
capital and industry." The same holds true of a farmer, miner,
transporter, merchant or anybody else who directs industry. It is more
easily recognized in the case of the inventor. Francis A. Walker took
up this theme and gradually demonstrated that so far from the
employer's profits being wrung out of the wage-earner, they are
generally greatest where wages are highest, and proceed from devices
and economies effected by the employer, and would not exist without
them. This is being constantly illustrated by some employers
succeeding where others have failed, and failing where others have
succeeded. In support of the general thesis Walker says: "Discussions
in Economics and Statistics," (Vol. I., pp. 367-75):
"Looking at the better employers of whatever grade ... we note
that they pay wages, as a rule, equal to those paid by those
employers who realize no profits, or even sustain a loss; and
that, indeed, if regularity of employment be taken, as it should
be, into account, the employers of the former class pay really
higher wages than the latter class. We note, further, that the
successful men of business pay as high prices for materials and
as high rates of interest for the use of capital, if the scale of
their transactions and the greater security of payment be taken,
as it should be, into account.
"Whence, then, comes the surplus which is left in the hands of
the higher grades of employers, after the payment of wages, the
purchase of materials and supplies, the repair and renewal of
machinery and plant? I answer, This surplus, in the case of any
employer, represents that which he is able to produce over and
above what an employer of the lowest industrial grade can produce
with equal amounts of labor and capital. In other words, this
surplus is of his own creation, produced wholly by that business
ability which raises him above and distinguishes him from, the
employers of what may be called the no-profits class.
"... The excess of produce which we are contemplating comes from
directing force to its proper object by the simplest and shortest
ways; from saving all unnecessary waste of materials and
machinery; from boldly incurring the expense--the often large
expense--of improved processes and appliances, while closely
scrutinizing outgo and practicing a thousand petty economies in
unessential matters; from meeting the demands of the market most
aptly and instantly; and, lastly, from exercising a sound
judgment as to the time of sale and the terms of payment. It is
on account of the wide range among the employers of labor, in the
matter of ability to meet these exacting conditions of business
success, that we have the phenomenon, in every community and in
every trade, in whatever state of the market, of some employers
realizing no profits at all, while others are making fair
profits; others, again, large profits; others, still, colossal
profits. Side by side, in the same business, with equal command
of capital, with equal opportunities, one man is gradually
sinking a fortune, while another is doubling or trebling his
accumulations....
"If this be correct, we see how mistaken is that opinion too
often entertained by the wages class, which regards the
successful employers of labor--men who realize large fortunes in
manufactures or trade--as having in some way injured or robbed
them....
"In this view, profits constitute no part of the price of goods,
and are obtained through no deduction from the wages of labor. On
the contrary, they are the creation of those who receive them,
each employer's profits representing that which he has produced
over and above what the employers of the lowest industrial grade
have been able to produce with equal amounts of labor and
capital."
All this is now accepted doctrine among those entitled to opinions,
but as already intimated, the ignorance of it among even people of
good general intelligence is astounding, while the laboring classes
and their leaders shut their eyes to it. No man of inferior fortune
likes to admit, as this principle asks him to, that the inferiority is
in himself. And small blame to him for his reluctance.
Yet to state what is usually and normally the source of wealth, is not
to claim that individual wealth never has any other source, or to deny
that it is often increased by taking an undue advantage of inferior
capacity, and by monopoly and sundry other forms of disguised robbery.
But that wealth is _generally_ the result of pillage, and not of
invention, good management and other good forces, is probably the
worst and most destructive fallacy ever preached.
This destructive fallacy has seriously exaggerated the estimates of
the injustices and robberies on the part of employers; and in the
attempt to curb them, it has been busy for many years in impeding good
management, and has cost Labor terribly in unjustifiable strikes.
This, however, is by no means saying that there are no justifiable
strikes. They are inevitably a part of the present irrepressible
conflict, but its bitterness and cruelties are largely fed by a
general feeling that wealth generally has been accumulated at the
expense of the poor, when the truth is that generally, though not
always, it has been accumulated to their profit.
Yet it is far from plain how the man who tugs and sweats should justly
have little, while the man who does not tug and sweat should justly
have much. The man who tugs and sweats saw his own hands make, or
extract from the earth or the forests or the fields, or transport or
exchange what the other man has, and no one saw the hands of the man
who has it, do anything. Naturally, then, the man who has it not,
thinks that the man who has it, stole it--that it belongs to the man
who handled it. And he is going to take it.
But he is not going to take it by force: robbery he feels to be wrong.
He is going to take it "by due process of law"--by his vote: the law
has given him a vote, and the law is justice itself. As he is in
various ways permitted to vote away other people's possessions to his
own use, he takes it for granted that he has a moral as well as a
legal right to do so to any extent, and is full of schemes to that
end. But the law has also given the other man the property and the
means of holding onto it. Here is another outcrop of the Irrepressible
Conflict: the law is in conflict with itself. The conflict must be
reconciled: the man who wants the property must elect legislators and
judges who will change the law so the other man cannot get the
property away from the man who makes it with his own hands, and cannot
hold on to what he has already got of it.
At the outset, and to a certain extent, he is right: for to a certain
extent the principle of the greatest good of the greatest number is
unquestionably in conflict with the principle _suum cuique_. The
problem in each case is to draw the line between these opposing
forces.
Most of the expenses for public education, museums, parks, public
concerts, and even making, lighting and policing streets, and of the
courts and jails, have long been paid by taxpayers mainly for the
benefit of non-taxpayers, and no one wishes these expenses stopped. To
the education in the common schools are now being added medical
supervision, care of the eyes, dentistry, lunches, transportation to
and fro. These things are not done for the children of the people who
pay most of the money for them.
In still other ways, however, the poor man is increasing through law
his facilities for using the accumulations of the rich man. As already
indicated, we are just entering upon a system of income taxation where
there is not a pretence of making the poor man pay, or even the man of
moderately comfortable means; the poor man has had numerous statutes
passed relieving from the penalties of the common law, his
conspiracies to cripple the rich man's business if the poor man's
demands are not granted; and he has lately had wage-earners and
farmers exempted from the prosecutions under a fund for punishing
conspiracies in restraint of trade. How far can we continue along the
same road before we shall find legislation exempting the man in need,
or even fancied need, from any constraint against taking what he wants
wherever he can find it? That legislation has now entered upon that
road seems obvious. Where is it going to stop, and what is going to
stop it?
Are wage-earners and farmers going to be more definitely arrayed
against the rest of the community? We incline to think not, because
the farmer, as a rule, has property to protect, and although this
legislation is in favor of his annual income, it cannot go much
farther--especially in distributing favors elsewhere--without
attacking his accumulations. Moreover it seems impossible that there
should be a long continuance of the present degree of oblivion to the
desirability of having every man feel his interest in government,
through _some_ degree of the pinch of taxation.
Any considerable increase of the recent legislation, would of course
lead to the diminution of capital, both through expenditure and
through discouragement of accumulation. It would also diminish the
activity of those who are able to handle capital profitably, and the
consequent effect on wages would perhaps in time become apparent to
even the order of intellect behind the legislation.
How far can it go without drying up the springs of charity? There is
already free talk of saving income taxes out of charities.
Such legislation is certainly nursing antagonisms, and whether the
spread of general intelligence can be expected to be rapid enough to
prevent serious harm, is doubtful. It even sometimes appears a
question whether the conflict can be settled without more serious
bloodshed. Fortunately neither side has yet as much to complain of as
one side had in the revolutions which cost Charles I and Louis XVI
their heads; and it is doubtful whether either side has the power or
coherence or disposition to drive it to arms--whether the existing
sentiment in any civilized nation is longer such as to make such a
consummation possible. Times are growing more peaceful. Not only has
the biggest army in the world for nearly half a century been the
biggest engine of peace; not only has a permanent international
courthouse been built among the fortresses, after several temporary
ones had already done good service; but when the brotherhood of
locomotive engineers gets into conflict with their employers, instead
of settling it in the freight yards with torches and brickbats, both
sides go to the Waldorf-Astoria and have a judicial proceeding. For a
centrifugal explosion, they substitute a centripetal adjustment. And
the brawn supplies its share of the brains to do it.
The fundamental question is, of course, whether before serious harm
has been done, the differences in men's fortunes which, as said at the
outset, largely mean differences in men's powers, can be sufficiently
decreased to leave room for little conflict.
One answer is that the equalization is already taking place at a rate
that few people realize. Amid the poor, the impression that the rich
are growing richer and the poor poorer, is quite general, and of
course is fostered by the demagogues who make their living out of the
discontent--out of the justifiable discontent less perhaps than out of
the unjustifiable. Worse still, perhaps, the educated whose sympathies
lead them to instruct the ignorant, are to a shameful degree ignorant
of the truth in this regard, and, it must be feared, of the facts of
the economic situation generally: somehow the softness of heart which
actuates many such well-meaning people seems often to accompany a
softness of head which recoils from all hard facts that would narrow
the field where they delight to exercise their sympathies.
Nobody will question the progress of the average man from status to
contract--from slavery, serfdom, feudal dependence, to wage-earning;
but since the time of Marx, the claim of rich richer, and poor poorer
has been general--among the ignorant rich as well as the ignorant
poor. Nevertheless abundant authorities prove the exact contrary.
In the "poor poorer" part of the assertion, there was undeniably much
truth during the early part of the nineteenth century, especially
before industry became adjusted to the new machinery, and before the
rise of the trades unions and the overthrow of the _laissez-faire_
policy in legislation. But after those changes, there was a rapid
advance in wages, shortening of hours, and reduction in the price of
commodities. So great was the change that even Marx himself, who had
done more than any other man to spread the "increasing misery" theory,
abandoned it in an address delivered in 1864. Yet he so little
understood the force of admissions that he then made, that he let the
elaborate _a priori_ demonstration of the theory which he had already
built up, stand in his "Capital," which he did not publish till
1867.[1] But the admissions of 1864 did not end in theory. Facts
began to accumulate to confirm it. Early in the twentieth century the
changed conditions had attracted attention, and there were gathered
many data which proved that rapid betterment had taken place in the
condition of wage-earners.
[Footnote 1: See Simkhovitch: _Marxism versus Socialism_, pp.
122f.]
We have space for but a few of the facts, and they are not all up to
date. Of the results of the Census of 1910 which bear on this subject,
very few are yet published. Most of those of the Census of 1900 were
not published till 1907, and it is only up to about that time that
many data are at the moment available. But we hope before long to
present a careful study of the conditions up to the present time.
Meanwhile, it is pleasant to note the following:
In the United States wages in manufacturing industries averaged $247
in 1850, $427 in 1899, and $519 in 1909. And of course other
industries could not fall very far below manufactures.
The cost of living did not begin to show any such advance. Dun's
tables show that the yearly cost of living per capita in 1860, before
the civil war, was $16.87 _more_ than in 1905. For the sixteen years
1880 to 1895, inclusive, the average yearly cost was $101.65. For the
ten years 1896 to 1905, inclusive, the average was $81.52, $20.13
_less_ than for the earlier period. There has been a sharp advance
since 1905, but taking the whole period from 1850 to the present time,
nothing to compare with the advance in wages.
Although the recent class legislation in favor of the labor trusts
also included any possible farmer trust, the farmer appears to have
progressed with the wage-earner. His products have lately materially
advanced in price, and the abstract of the Census of 1910 says (p.
295):
The total value of the land and buildings of the 1,006,511 farms
shown for 1910 was $6,330,000,000, and the amount of debt was
$1,726,000,000, or 27.3 per cent. of the value. The corresponding
proportion in 1890, as shown in the reports, was 35.5 per cent.,
and to make this figure strictly comparable it would presumably
have to be increased slightly. There was thus during the 20
years a marked diminution in the relative importance of mortgage
debt ... but the average owner's equity per farm increased from
$2,220 to $4,574, or more than doubled.
Wholesale clothing dealers report a great increase in average size and
quality of clothes demanded, which shows that the people are better
fed and exercised and better off. Over all highly civilized countries
the consumption of food has been increasing faster than population.
This cannot mean that the rich eat and drink more; for they ate and
drank all they wanted before: so it must prove that the proportion of
those who can eat and drink freely is increasing.
Moreover, hours of labor have been decreasing without any diminution
of production. The United States Labor Bureau reports for 1913 show
that the average wage-earner is working shorter hours than ever
before, that he is receiving more pay for the short-hour week than he
formerly received for the long-hour week, and that the increase in his
average wage in most industries has been so great that its purchasing
power has risen, notwithstanding the increase in prices of many
commodities.
As to the "rich richer" fallacy: in Massachusetts for the period
1829-31 the probated estates under $5,000 were 85.6 per cent. of the
whole, in the period 1889-91 they had fallen to 69.5 of the whole. It
is nevertheless true that a few of the rich are richer than men have
been before, and in the case of an increasing proportion of them, it
has been for the good of all of us.
In Great Britain from 1840 to 1890, the number of estates subject to
succession tax increased twice as fast as population, while the
average amount per estate had not increased at all.
In France from 1853 to 1883 wages advanced some sixty per cent., and
in the principal occupations of women (outside of domestic service),
they nearly doubled.
Mr. W. H. Mallock, after an elaborate investigation in the British
Census reports, the details of which are given in his "Classes and
Masses," states the following conclusions: "The poor" (except those
who have nothing at all) "are getting richer; the rich, on an
average, getting poorer ... and of all classes in the community, the
middle class is growing the fastest." Since 1830 the population has
increased "in the proportion of 27 to 35; the increase of the section
in question [the middle class] was in the proportion of 27 to 84."
"The middle class has increased numerically in the proportion of 3 to
10; the rich class has increased only in the proportion of 3 to 8." In
1881, there were seven thousand windowless cabins occupied by families
in Scotland; by 1891, these had "almost disappeared; the one-roomed
dwellings with windows have decreased 25 per cent.; the two-roomed
dwellings have _increased_ by 8 per cent., and the three-roomed and
four-roomed dwellings by 17 per cent."
In 1815 there were 100,000 paupers in London. At the rate of increase
of population in 1875, there should have been 300,000. There actually
were less than 100,000, while from 1871 to 1908 the percentage of
population "relieved" fell from 31 to 22.
In Germany, income-tax statistics prove the same thing. In Prussia,
from 1876 to 1888, Dr. Soetbeer (quoted by Professor Mayo-Smith) finds
that the proportion of income-tax payers with their families, to the
whole population, had increased about 22 per cent., that is from 2.3
per cent. of the population to 2.8 per cent., and that the classes
which had increased at the most rapid rate were those with incomes of
over $500. And although the most rapid increase of all had been in the
class with incomes of over $25,000, the average incomes of that class
had decreased.
We regret that more recent figures than some we have given cannot be
had in time for the present article, but as already said, we hope
before long to present the results of a special study backed by the
forthcoming census bulletin, and attempting to weigh judicially the
confusing factor introduced into the situation by that part of the
rise in prices due to the unprecedented increase in the supply of
gold. Were it not for that extraneous circumstance, the showing for
the wage-earner's advance would be even greater.
The very recent and probably temporary rise in prices is principally
attributed to the unprecedented production of gold, the rush away
from the farms to the cities, the rise in wages, and certain wastes in
labor. In some trades wages have been forced to a height which, acting
on the prices of products, has in many particulars nullified the
advance in wages. All raising of wages by limiting labor instead of
increasing product, by increasing friction instead of efficiency, by
getting more than one's own instead of making one's own larger, must
raise prices. So, to put it more in detail, must all such adventitious
tricks as limiting apprentices; limiting each laborer's speed to that
of the slowest; limiting the kinds of things a man can reasonably
do--in short, all limiting of labor below its best efficiency by men
or masters, masters remembering of course that to best efficiency
reasonable rest, food and other good conditions are essential. So must
all making of work by putting onto a job more labor than can
accomplish it economically, as by calling a painter, a carpenter and a
plumber to do a little job that any one of them could complete alone,
and destroying good old product to make a call for new. Under ordinary
conditions there will always be work enough for everybody without
these efforts to create work artificially, and the extraordinary
conditions where there is not enough, are only multiplied and
intensified by such efforts.
But despite these influences contributory to the rise of prices in
recent years, the improvements in the wage-earner's lot that had been
noted for over half a century, have on the whole continued to the
present time.
* * * * *
All the forms of industrial conflict are but manifestations of
Nature's striving for equilibration--the goal of all evolution; and
only with a nearer equilibration of men's fortunes will there be
peace. How can it be brought about?
Will a victory of the socialists bring it? Yes, if, by premature
action, you make a desert and call it peace, or if you wait until the
civic virtues are so far developed that selections at the polls will
be as unbiassed and discriminating as those of Nature. But if that
time is approaching, it is with leaden feet; and to act as if it had
arrived would only delay it. Our steps must be cautious and
tentative. That the frightful wastes of both competition and monopoly
should be avoided by state management of all industries or even to any
great extent by state control, is a far-off ideal--so far-off that men
wise enough to be successful are slow to express opinions about it.
Beside this ideal, as beside the ideal of the land directly providing
the government revenue, stalks, as the extreme fallacy generally
stalks beside the truth, the false ideal of the government management
or the land tax producing enough revenue to take care of everybody,
and doing it, leaving to no one the saving duty of taking care of
himself.
The steps already taken toward that ideal, it may perhaps be worth
while to glance at. Outside of government's fundamental functions--the
maintenance of order and justice--it has also managed the post-office,
the coast and geological surveys, the currency, the census, the public
schools, the streets, and the care of the sick and incapable. Some
highly centralized and highly civilized governments have added the
railways, but the privately owned ones, with all their shortcomings,
are better; government telegraph service has been cheapened at the
expense of the taxpayers, and government telephone service has been
abominable. All this has been non-competitive work. There is not yet
any sign that government could make a success of competitive
industries. All the indications are the other way. Governments have so
far been too slow to invent or even adopt improvements, especially
where they involve scrapping old plant; and so far, government has
generally been an extravagant and wasteful employer.
* * * * *
Unlike many other conflicts, the new Irrepressible Conflict can never
be settled by violence: for violence cannot remove that difference in
the capacities of men from which the conflict arises. Violence, even
violence disguised under votes, may spasmodically lessen the natural
differences in property, but they will reappear as long as there are
differences in productive capacity, and society secures to the
individual a reasonable share of his production. In this and all
cases, advantageous exchange of course is productive of additional
value; and there is a less frequent exchange which tends not to mutual
increase of fortune, but to increased difference in fortune. Should
society ever go so far as to take from the inventor, the
capital-saver, the work-finder, the work-manager and the exchanger
their share of the products which, without them, would not exist, and
which are shared in by all, production would fall off, probably below
the starvation point.
If, then, the conflict cannot be fought out, how is peace to be
attained, even the limited degree of peace enjoyed before the modern
unrest? Simply by reducing to a negligible point the difference in the
productive powers of men--in their intelligence, energy and
reliability; and this by leveling up, not by leveling down, as some of
the trades unions, from noble but mistaken motives, attempt.
"Simply!" The general proposition is simple enough, but there are many
perplexities of detail. One inheres in the definition of "productive
powers." Probably it will serve to call them the _capacities of
furnishing satisfactions_; and to include in satisfactions those
produced for oneself as well as those exchanged. In this sense the
impecunious philosopher has high productive powers--often so high that
he would not exchange them for those of the captain of industry, and
he does not often feel discontent enough to make him a very active
factor in the Irrepressible Conflict. He does sometimes, though,
especially when he feels the pinch of his narrow financial income
compared with that of the producer of more material satisfactions. As
he is usually a man of gentle make-up, the effect of his narrow income
is increased by sympathy with the unfortunate, and sometimes these
combined influences send out mighty queer doctrine from professorial
chairs. Such phenomena, however, do not controvert the general
proposition that the satisfactions of the spirit are to be included
among those upon whose more equal production depends the disappearance
of the conflict that must be till then irrepressible.
There is no way to peace, then, other than increasing the productive
power of the less productive man. Sharing with him material goods,
except to tide over emergencies that his powers cannot meet, won't do
the trick at all, as has been abundantly proved, from the English poor
laws down, and as is going to be proved again before some of our
recent "progressive" legislation has run its course.
This is far from saying, however, that legislation really progressive
in this direction is impossible. We for our part, however, do not see
as much hope in legislation as in improvement in knowledge and
understanding and disposition among people generally. That great
improvement in disposition may be near at hand, seems indicated by
recent experiences among the most revolutionary and suggestive in
human annals. The recent meeting at Gettysburg, not to speak of the
minor earlier ones at Lookout Mountain and elsewhere, indicates an
advance in human nature so immense that it has not been realized. Not
the least significant thing it demonstrated, is the vast decrease in
the necessity of wasting thousands of lives and billions of treasure
to settle differences of opinion.
As this is now so startlingly indicated regarding the Irrepressible
Conflict which culminated at Gettysburg, and which _could_ be settled
by force, is there not even much more reason to hope for a settlement
not very remote, by methods of reason, of our new Irrepressible
Conflict, which _cannot_ be settled by force?
* * * * *
But even if the outcroppings of the conflict are so soon settled, the
fundamental conflict will persist as long as the difference in men is
so great, and that difference is the most important thing to be dealt
with by all lovers of peace and humanity. The only way to cancel it is
for the men in front to help those behind, and for those behind to
help themselves--to everything that does not belong to somebody else.
But those in front are entitled to have their judgments followed where
they are not plainly tainted by self-interest, and it will pay them to
keep self-interest out of their judgments so far as self-preservation
does not demand it. But how much self-preservation can properly cover,
is a difficult question, and space permits little more than the
suggestion of it. Shall a man's self rightly be a wearer of but one
suit of clothes, an occupant of a hut, an eater of the plainest food,
and an entertainer of no guests: or shall his self rightly be clothed
beautifully and suitably for all occasions, occupy a house that shall
be a pleasure to gaze upon, consume the food essential to both the
greatest refinement and the greatest efficiency, dispense a generous
hospitality, broaden his mind and develop his taste so that he can
enlighten and inspire others, encourage letters and the arts, and have
leisure to devote to charities, education and the common good? There
are plenty of illustrations that a man may preserve a self as large as
this--as large as Goethe's or Marcus Aurelius's--and yet issue no
advice unworthy of the respect of smaller men, and be of an advantage
to the race beside which the cost of maintaining such a self is
nothing.
If most men cannot have the things just enumerated, and if many of
those who have them abuse them, is it best that none should have them?
That all should have them is, in the present stage of human
development, impossible. If all the wealth of the United States were
divided equally among us, we would have but a little over $1,300
apiece,[2] and much of it would be wasted at once, and no conceivable
laws would prevent what might be left, being in a very short time as
unevenly distributed as now. The only glimpse we can see of a time of
even fortunes, is of a time of even capacities; and the only rational
way we can see to such a time is through helping each other: every
other experiment toward it has proved illusive.
[Footnote 2: According to the State Census of 1904 as compiled in
a Bulletin of the National Census issued in 1907. The
corresponding data for the Census of 1910 are not yet arranged.]
The principal roots of the difficulty are generalized as ignorance and
incompetence. The ignorance has already been strongly, though very
blunderingly, attacked in the public schools, but not much more
blunderingly perhaps than in the universities. It is a strange paradox
that education, though the special care of the educated, should be
among the most backward of the arts, yet so the highest-educated are
the first to admit it to be. We are making hopeful progress in it,
though, and are rapidly developing it to care for incompetence not
only in mind but in body and disposition.
Then in the struggles of wage-earners and wage-payers, the principle
of arbitration is certainly making rapid inroads on the practice of
violence. The settlement of the recent great railroad controversies
was by deliberative assemblies, not by mobs.
The farther lessening of the difference in material possessions by
leveling down on one side as well as leveling up on the other, has
lately become a very real and active question. While the inventor has
seldom realized his share of production, and while the average
director of industry has seldom realized more than his, undoubtedly
extortionists and monopolists have rolled up fortunes out of all
proportion to their deserts; and the regulation of these, though not
doing much to fill up the differences, will do more to relieve the
spirit of discontent.
It will be interesting to see how much of the share now going to the
employer can go to the employee without stopping the employer's
functions of finder, organizer and director of profitable work. We
cannot intelligently foresee conditions in which these functions on
his part will not be absolutely essential to the progress of society.
The functions, however, are being more and more performed, even under
the trusts, by men rising from the ranks; and even the men remaining
in the ranks are probably performing more and more of those same
functions, though some of the short-sighted policies of the unions are
obstructing them.
And the unions themselves, despite policies not yet outgrown, have
unquestionably done much to raise the wage-earners' fortunes, and are
probably, with more experience and wider outlook, to do vastly more.
But not until they get beyond the policy of holding their own best men
back, will they enter on their full career, and then their least
effective men will most benefit. Moreover, the wisest and most
effective men are those most ready to learn from criticism, and when
the unions realize it, they will have another avenue to usefulness.
They will be helped to realize it, however, by more patience, candor
and disinterestedness on the part of the critics. So far, everybody is
bellicose, as first at Gettysburg. Cannot both sides to the present
Irrepressible Conflict better anticipate a conciliatory disposition
than did those heroes of fifty years ago?
When we can always carry the Irrepressible Conflict into courts and
arbitrations and, as Godkin said, substitute for the shock of battle,
the shock of trained intellects, peace will be in sight.
Its first essential is always a clear understanding. There are lies
somewhere in every human conflict. Probably the most pitiful and
pernicious of all lies is that all men are equal. The only remedy is
to make it true.
THE MAJORITY JUGGERNAUT
During the past five years the agitation in favor of so modifying our
governmental system as to remove all those barriers which stand
between the will of the majority and its immediate execution has
attained formidable dimensions. That the defects which American
government has exhibited in many directions have been so serious and
so persistent as to furnish great justification for this agitation no
candid observer can deny. In both of the two ways upon which advocates
of the initiative and referendum lay so much stress, our
representative institutions have indeed sadly failed of being ideally
representative. Venality of individual legislators, or the control of
whole bodies of them by corrupt bosses, has resulted in innumerable
instances of special legislation for the benefit of powerful private
interests and contrary to the interests of the people. And it must be
admitted that apart from any question of venality or corruption there
has often been a degree of inertia in the enactment of enlightened and
progressive legislation which cannot be ascribed to legitimate
conservatism, but must be set down either to the unfitness of
legislatures for their responsibilities or to obstacles which an
extreme interpretation of constitutional restraints has unnecessarily
put in its way.
Nor can it be denied that the referendum and the initiative have
intrinsic value as remedies adapted to the counteracting of these two
evils respectively. Given a legislature owned by special interests, or
controlled by a boss, its power to give away valuable franchises or
otherwise to squander the people's inheritance can be held in check by
the requirement that upon proper demand such action shall be rendered
subject to a veto by the people at large. And if, owing to the
intricacies of party organization or to other circumstances, a
legislature is stubbornly obstructive, the initiation of legislation
by means of popular petition undeniably offers an instrument for the
overcoming of such inertia. Were it true that the control of
legislatures by private interests is on the increase, or even showing
no sign of diminution; were it true that legislation for social
betterment is making little or no headway; were it true that our
courts show no disposition to realize that a more liberal
interpretation of constitutional provisions is demanded by the changed
conditions of our time; it would probably be admitted by all except a
few irreconcilables that, however serious might be the objections to
the remedies proposed, their adoption appears to be almost dictated by
that kind of imperious necessity that knows no law.
As a matter of fact the diametrical opposite of these things is what,
upon a large survey of the state of the whole country, is unmistakably
evident. It is doubtful whether one can point anywhere to a
legislature owned as the Pennsylvania legislature used to be owned by
the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Maryland legislature by the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad, the New Hampshire legislature by the Boston and
Maine Railroad. Child labor laws and workmen's compensation laws are
being enacted and strengthened in state after state, very much after
the fashion in which the Australian ballot laws were being passed in
state after state a quarter of a century ago. And as for our courts,
the Supreme Court of the United States, once regarded as the very
stronghold of extreme constitutionalism, has been steadily setting an
example of liberal construction; while such a decision as that of the
New York Court of Appeals in the Ives case is pointed to on all hands
as being rather in the nature of a survival of a past attitude of mind
than typical of the present temper of the courts of last resort in our
leading states.
Nevertheless, enough remains, and more than enough, to constitute a
serious grievance. The progress that has been made towards the removal
of scandalous practices or exasperating impotence is not sufficient to
justify complacency. But it is sufficient to dispose of that plea of
desperate necessity to which advocates of the "rule of the people" are
so prone to resort as over-riding all other considerations. Indeed,
the state of mind of these advocates is in no small measure an
illustration of that remarkable psychological phenomenon to which
Herbert Spencer has drawn attention as marking the progress of reform
agitations--that their excitement usually becomes most intense when
the object to which they are directed has been almost attained. A
dozen years ago it might plausibly have been urged that in our
existing representative institutions effective control of public
service corporations was impossible; but the railroad-rate legislation
of the national Congress and the institution of Public Service
Commissions in state after state have been accomplished without a jar.
A few years ago it was still the fashion to speak of the United States
Constitution as virtually incapable of amendment, this belief being
based on the fact that, apart from the amendments brought about by the
Civil War, none had been adopted since the early days of the republic.
The adoption of the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments in rapid
succession has disposed of that notion for good and all; and yet it is
only now that a proposal to substitute an easy and rapid method of
amendment in place of that now provided in the Constitution has been
brought forward and urged. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that
to-day's impatience with our existing governmental system, to-day's
readiness to welcome short-cut remedies, is attributable rather to
exasperation with the difficulties and evils of yesterday than to the
conditions of to-day or the prospects of to-morrow.
Into the merits and defects of the various proposals for "direct rule
of the people" it is not the purpose of this brief paper to enter in
detail. Many valid considerations have been urged in their favor, and
many sound objections have been advanced against them. Speaking
generally, these arguments relate to the question of the honesty,
intelligence, and efficiency of legislation as it has been, or is
likely to be, affected by the change in question. Advocates of the new
order have pointed to the well-known deficiencies of our legislatures
as they are. Its opponents have given instances of errors, and of the
misleading of voters, under the initiative system. In the main,
however, since experience--in spite of Switzerland's long, but
sparing, use of the method--has as yet been but of the slightest
extent, serious writers on both sides have dwelt chiefly on the
inherent tendency of the system. That it cannot cover the whole
province of legislation both sides are fully agreed; and
objectors lay chief stress on the inevitable tendency of the
initiative-and-referendum system to reduce the importance and dignity
of legislatures and consequently to end all hope of raising the
quality of their membership, while advocates of the system set great
store by the educative value of the exercise of direct legislative
judgment upon the whole body of the citizenship.
There is, however, one consideration, and that perhaps the most vital
of all, which appears to have been strangely neglected. Every-day
efficiency, even every-day right-mindedness, is not the only thing
about which there is occasion for solicitude. It seems usually to be
forgotten on both sides of the discussion that there occur every now
and then, in the history of a nation, questions of a crucial nature
upon the right or wrong decision of which rest momentous and enduring
consequences. Such questions, under the traditions of representative
government as they have grown up in the course of ages, are fought out
in a very different way from that which marks the ordinary routine of
legislation and government. They are not settled by an instantaneous
show of hands. What may take place in England if it shall come to be
governed by a single chamber and under a closure system which makes
parliamentary obstruction impossible, no man can say; but up to the
present time nothing like this kind of unlimited rule by majority vote
in a parliamentary body has existed either in that country or in our
own. There has always been in both a possibility of resistance, in one
form or another, to the immediate desire of a majority of the people's
representatives; and this has profoundly affected the course of
history upon those matters which are of most vital moment.
The difference between questions of this type and the ordinary
subjects of every-day legislation is more than a mere difference of
degree. It is not only that they are more momentous; they are
different in kind, in that their decision involves a result which,
humanly speaking, is irreversible. Nothing is more common than to say
that if an act of the people should prove to be a mistake, they will
correct that mistake. But there are mistakes that cannot be corrected.
If the question of union or disunion had been put to the touch of a
majority vote, and had been decided in favor of disunion, the result
of that one day's voting would, in all human probability, have been a
permanent severance of this nation into two mutually alien parts.
Since the Civil War there has been one great issue which, though in a
wholly different way, quite as distinctly illustrates the irrevocable
character which the decision of a public question may have. It _might_
be no calamity for this country to live, either temporarily or
permanently, under a silver standard. But the truly vital point in the
silver question which occupied the attention of the nation for twenty
years was not that of the silver standard as such, but of the
repudiation and currency-debasement involved in substituting the
silver dollar, at the ratio of sixteen to one, for the gold dollar as
the monetary unit. Had this substitution been effected, the
repudiation and debasement would have taken place; and a subsequent
return to the gold standard would not in the slightest degree have
redressed the wrong. Under the existing system of government there was
opportunity for obstruction, for compromise, for the effective
influence of a few strong minds and a few powerful personalities.
Under the "direct rule of the people" the whole matter might have been
settled at a stroke; and it is by no means improbable that it would
have been so settled, at some stage or other of the struggle, in favor
of the silver standard. For it must be remembered that the very
existence of this possibility would have stimulated in an incalculable
degree the efforts of the silver agitators; and nothing is more
probable than that during the years of depression, distress, and
discontent that followed upon the panic of 1893, a moment would have
been found when the popular cry of "more money" would have swept the
country.
That questions not less fundamental, and the decision of which is not
less irrevocable, are destined to arise in the future it should be
unnecessary to argue. Never, in this country at least, has the
atmosphere been so charged with issues affecting the very bases of the
economic and social order. These issues are for the most part vague
and undefined, but their gravity and sweep is none the less apparent.
But if an illustration were needed of a more specific nature, and one
which relates to a question partly of the past and partly of the
future, such an illustration lies ready to hand. The agitation against
the right of private property in land which was started forty years
ago by Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" has only within the last
few years become a serious factor in practical politics. The shape
which it assumes in the actual proposals urged for immediate adoption
is that of a mere reduction of the tax now levied on buildings and the
placing of a corresponding additional tax on land. But the earnest
advocates of this step and its earnest opponents alike rest their case
on the animating purpose behind it. That purpose flows from the
conviction, which its leading advocates often find it politic to keep
in the background but which they seldom disavow, that the owners of
land have no rights which, in the eye of justice, the rest of the
community is bound to respect. The fiery zeal that shines through the
pages of "Progress and Poverty" is animated by this conviction on the
one hand, and on the other by the unhesitating belief that under the
regime of private property in land human wretchedness must continually
increase, while its abolition would carry with it the extinction of
poverty. Henry George did not balk at the word confiscation. Indeed it
is precisely the assertion of the right to confiscate land which,
apart from the eloquent and plausible presentation, constituted the
distinctive character of George's work. John Stuart Mill had long
advocated the interception by the state of the "unearned increment" of
the future, but firmly held that expropriation of landowners without
compensation is morally indefensible. Henry George, in spite of his
profound reverence for Mill, dismissed this judgment of the great
liberal economist and philosopher with undisguised contempt. After
quoting a certain passage from Mill, George exclaims:
In the name of the Prophet--figs! If the land of any country
belong to the people of that country, what right, in morality and
justice, have the individuals called landowners to the rent? If
the land belong to the people, why in the name of morality and
justice should the people pay its salable value for their own?
But while Henry George was convinced that outright confiscation would
be perfectly just, he proposed to accomplish the substance of
confiscation without introducing its form. "Confiscation," he said,
"would involve a needless shock to present customs and habits of
thought;" and the method he proposed for achieving his end was "to
abolish all taxation save that upon land values." But he made no
pretence whatever of there being any difference in substance between
the two things. It was of the essence of his plan that the single tax
should be tantamount to confiscation. The mere placing of the present
entire burden of taxation upon the landowners would be far from
sufficing for his purpose; and he expressly counted on what he
regarded as the inevitable and rapid growth of the land tax, when once
his principle was acknowledged, to such dimensions as to swallow up
the entire rental value of land. Not the mere expenses of government
as we are now familiar with them, but all the outlay for social and
individual betterment which the entire revenue now attaching to the
ownership of land could supply was to be available for the public
good. The idea of his program was epigrammatically, but sufficiently
accurately, conveyed in a motto that was prominent in his campaign for
mayor of New York: "No taxes at all, and a pension for everybody."
Now it requires no extraordinary effort of the fancy to imagine what
would be the natural course of such an agitation as this under a
system of government in which the idea of the direct rule of the
people had become thoroughly established; and by "thoroughly
established" we must understand, in the case of our own country, the
dominance of that idea in the nation as well as in the separate
States. If in those conditions a doctrine like that of Henry George
were put forward, and commanded the devotion of a band of earnest and
able men, the form which its propaganda would take would, in the
nature of things, be wholly different from that which we have
actually witnessed. The goal towards which all effort would be
directed would be the obtaining of a popular majority for some single
proposal, the adoption of which would insure the fulfilment of the
great purpose. The preoccupation of the nation with other issues that
divide parties or factions would be no hindrance. In order to bring
the question up for immediate decision by popular vote, all that would
be necessary would be the satisfaction of some minimum requirement
laid down in the initiative system; a minimum requirement which, be it
noted, under the principle of "direct rule," has for its only _raison
d'être_ the practical need of avoiding an intolerable multiplication
of election questions. With this minimum satisfied, the champions of
the change would advance to the charge year after year, fired with the
consciousness that the gaining of a popular majority at the very next
election would end once for all the iniquitous institution by which
mankind has been robbed of its birthright, and make poverty and
wretchedness a thing of the past.
But, it may be objected, is there after all any essential difference
between this process and that which goes on under the traditional
representative system, when it is truly representative? If the people
are really convinced that land ownership is robbery, and that they
should resume what they hold to be their own, are they not able, and
ought they not to be able, to obtain their wish through the
legislative assembly which represents them? The answer is that under
the representative system as we know it--and quite as much at its best
as at its worst--the influence of the wishes of the electorate upon
the representative body is not uniform and mechanical. Representatives
are elected not upon one issue, but upon many, and it is always a
question how definite the popular "mandate" has been upon any one of
them. From this alone it follows that there is a large, though
indefinite, region in which a representative may feel free to act
according to the dictates of his own individual judgment. In the case
of any question involving a fundamental and momentous change, it is
necessary that the mandate be extremely clear before it can be
regarded by intelligent and conscientious legislators as binding upon
them; and to accomplish this the strength of the feeling among the
people in favor of the measure must be shown in ways far more
emphatic, far more conclusive of a firm and fixed desire, than the
mere existence of a majority vote. The issue must virtually raise
itself to a prominence and intensity commensurate with its importance.
It must find its way not merely to a position in which, when people
are challenged to say yes or no, a few more say yes than say no, but
to a position in which it dominates other issues and is seen to
represent the deliberate and imperative desire of the people. And when
we add to this the constitutional checks that have thus far obtained
both in England and in this country, together with the legitimate
possibilities of parliamentary obstruction, we see how profound is the
difference between the representative system and that of direct rule.
It may almost be likened to the difference between a living organism,
endowed with the power of discrimination and judgment, and a crude
mechanical contrivance. In the one case, a great issue has to go
through an ordeal fitted to its nature; in the other, it is put into
the hopper along with the veriest trifles of every-day business, and
its fate is settled by the same monotonous turn of the wheel.
The difference which I have been endeavoring to bring out is not
identical either with the difference between conservatism and
progressiveness or the difference between carefulness and looseness in
legislation. Much has been said both for and against "direct rule" as
related to these qualities; it has been contended that direct
legislation is more conservative and less conservative, more prone to
error and less prone to error, than legislation by representative
assemblies. But what is usually held in view, on both sides, is the
course of what I have been referring to as every-day legislation.
Important, however, as the question may be in relation to such
matters, the transcendent issue involved in the question of direct
rule of the people is how it would operate in those supreme trials
which the nation is sure to be called upon in the future, as it has
been in the past, to undergo. The cardinal objection that I find to it
is not that it is radical or that it is careless, but that it is
intrinsically incapable of making that vital distinction which should
be made between these grand issues and the ordinary questions of
legislative routine. And no merely mechanical modification would
overcome this difficulty. The influences which, upon great occasions,
have been brought into play to stay the flood of immediate popular
desire perform a function for which no automatic device can serve as a
substitute. These influences are sometimes noble, as in Cleveland's
adamantine resistance to currency debasement, or in the act of the
seven Republican Senators who, at tragic cost to themselves, voted
against the conviction of Andrew Johnson; sometimes ignoble, as in the
gigantic campaign fund raised by Mark Hanna in 1896; sometimes not
specially to be marked with any moral label, but embodying the weight
naturally accorded, in any system except that of the absolute and
mechanical rule of the majority, to intellectual ability and personal
force as such. Under the system of direct rule of the people, all
possibility of such interposition would be swept away. Union or
disunion, currency debasement or currency integrity, land confiscation
or the observance of the rights of property--issues like these could
be brought before the people with the same facility as a measure
authorizing the purchase of a toll-road or defining the duties of a
sheriff; and their fate would be decided by the same simple yes or no
of the majority.
Opponents of direct rule are more or less in the habit of speaking of
it as the rule of the mob. Its advocates have no trouble in disposing
of this characterization by pointing out that the distinguishing mark
of a mob is disorder or lawlessness, while the process of taking a
vote of the people, on measures even more than on men, is eminently
orderly and regular. The phrase is open to objection; taken literally,
it cannot be defended. But in all probability what those who use it
really mean, more or less distinctly, is something very like what has
been dwelt on in this paper. What they have in mind is not the
turbulence of the mob, but its brute power, its inaccessibility to
complex considerations, its incapacity for taking counsel or modifying
its purpose, the dumb finality of its acts. A system under which the
highest questions of fundamental public policy were submitted to the
peremptory decision of a majority vote at the polls would be so
vitally different from the system of representative government as we
have known it that, allowance made for the picturesque exaggeration of
the figure, the likening of it to mob rule is by no means without
excuse.
There are of course many advocates of the initiative and referendum
who qualify their support in various ways; and, so far as that goes,
there are many opponents who admit that, within proper limitations,
these methods may be desirable. With all this I am not concerned. The
real force behind the general movement--including not only direct
legislation but also the recall of judges and the nullification of
judicial decisions by popular vote--is the dogma of the inherent
rightfulness of the unlimited rule of the majority. In the collection
of papers on the subject issued by the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, the leading place is given to a paper by Senator
Bourne, of Oregon. Of any hesitation as to the application of the
direct legislation method to the irreversible decision of fundamental
questions, he shows not the faintest trace. On the contrary, it is
precisely to questions of the highest moment, to the decision of
issues of great sweep and significance, that he regards the
application of the direct vote as peculiarly just and desirable. "It
is not proposed," he says, "that the people shall act directly in all
the intricate details of legislation." The great function of the
initiative is in the field of ideas: "Under the initiative any man can
secure the submission of his ideas to a vote of all the people,
provided eight per cent. of the people sign a petition asking that the
measure he proposes be so submitted." That any such question, so
submitted, will be decided as it should be, Senator Bourne not only
does not doubt, but apparently does not imagine that anybody else can
be so perverse as to doubt. "The people of a state will never vote
against their own interests, hence they will never vote to adopt a
law unless it proposes a change for the improvement of the general
welfare." No sign of consciousness that there may be a difference
between the interests of the majority and the interests of the whole
people, between immediate interests and permanent interests, between
apparent interests and real interests; still less of any possible
conflict between interests--as that word is commonly understood--and
the abiding principles of justice or of honor. The 300,000 are certain
to be right if the count of noses against them is but 290,000. To be
sure, no rational man can actually believe this; and there is little
doubt that Senator Bourne would repudiate such an interpretation of
his words. But there is equally little doubt as to the position he
would fall back upon. "The chief function"--this is the declaration
with which he opens his discussion--"the chief function of the
initiative and referendum is to restore the absolute sovereignty of
the people." The idea that the sovereignty of the people means
absolute and unrestricted rule over the whole people according to the
immediate will and pleasure of fifty-one per cent. of the people--a
crude error whose almost unchallenged currency among the
"progressives" of our day is one of the most remarkable psychological
phenomena of our time--lies at the bottom of the whole direct-rule
propaganda.
THE DEMOCRAT REFLECTS
The Democrat was disillusioned, but he really was a democrat. He had
been cradled and taught in the atmosphere of democracy, and was
possessed by lifelong conviction of the righteousness of the
democratic ideal. For a long time, too--until he had come to know more
of the actual business of democracy--he had never questioned
democratic practice. He was young and innocent.
But the scales had fallen from his eyes; the enlightened vision of
manhood's years had disclosed in democracy a multitude of undemocratic
things of whose existence in his youthful days he had not even
dreamed. The preceptors of his boyhood had never told him--or his
hopeful heart had not let him understand--that men had to struggle
against other men to preserve even that equality to which they were
born; that justice, even in the courts, could be, in the very nature
of things, nothing more than an approximation, and that, among men of
the world in general, it was often might that made right; that there
were ways of depriving men of the ballot, in spite of enactments; that
laws could be made by the will of minorities, or of single
individuals. Even town-meetings could sometimes be undemocratic, and
his ears were startled by those who declared that, in the nation's
life at large, there was nothing left of democracy but seeming.
His faith in men had suffered the same rude shocks as his faith in
democracy--quite naturally, for neither faith stood alone. He had come
to see that the sordidness of human beings reached heights and depths
which his youth, slow to believe and slower to perceive, had never
imagined. Surely, the love of money _was_ the root of all evil--or of
nearly all. The heated oratory of the campaign was mostly inspired by
love of money or place. The patriotic sentiment that so abounded in
the press was mostly gush, the news was colored, and the whole
belonged to men with axes to grind. Yes, the press, that boasted
educator of the people, of whose wondrous achievement and
potentiality--yes, and whose freedom--he and his schoolfellows had
written and declaimed, was sometimes bought. Votes at the polls and in
legislative halls were sometimes bought. Contracts with the government
were sometimes bought. Expert scientific opinion was sometimes bought.
War scares were manufactured for a purpose. Great industries could use
intimidation to secure a party the votes of their employees. There was
no form of meanness in life high or low that could not find ready a
hand for its undertaking. Cities were sinks of rottenness and
suffering because it paid their democratic administrators to have them
so. The greed of men could force other men to live and beget their
children in unhealthful, degrading environment, birth into which was
birth into slavery and disease of body and soul. "Life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness" was a mockery to tens of thousands.
And all this took place under a democracy--a government which he had
been taught was the most equitable on earth, the refuge of the poor
and the oppressed, who sailed into the haven where Liberty was
Enlightening the World to enter the Land of Promise where all their
tears should be wiped away! And the worst of it was, that those who
talked most loudly of the democratic ideal were those most eager to
profit at its expense. If he could have laid it all to the rich or the
aristocratic, it would not have been so bad; but he couldn't. The poor
were by nature as greedy and unjust as the rich, and showed themselves
as bad in practice when they had the chance, and the democrat turned
tyrant as soon as it suited his purse or ambition. It was dismaying.
The contrast between the actual workings of democracy and the ideal
his innocence had worshipped was so enormous that he sometimes doubted
whether they had anything at all in common.
But in time dismay, and even surprise, had worn away, and he recovered
equanimity. He was disillusioned, but still a democrat. At the same
time he learned of the weakness of his idol, he learned of the
weakness of human nature. He knew that the evils he lamented were due
much more to human weakness than to the form of government under
which the evils occurred. With a philosopher of his own land, he
agreed that no form of government was so good as not to work ill in
the hands of the bad, and none so bad as not to work well in the hands
of the good. Henceforth, if he must worry, let it be about men.
Thus it was that the Democrat, from being a partisan, became a
Spectator. Democracy--or what was called that--was amusing: it was so
human--so human in its faults, so human in its self-deception. He was
moved to smiles at the spectacle of a nation of individuals all wisely
thinking themselves intelligent voters, patriots, and capable managers
of their country's affairs.
Was it, after all, a democracy? The Democrat possessed the none too
common art of looking behind mere words, and contemplating Things as
They Are. He was reading his magazine one evening--it contained one of
those comforting political science essays, entitled "Whither Are We
Drifting?"--when the notion seized on him to find some better name for
the government under which he lived. So he laid aside the essay, and
let his thoughts run.
Elimination seemed to appeal as a method. He made a whimsical
beginning: it wasn't a timocracy; however much the love of honor
flourished, it seemed agreed that it was not that which ruled the
nation. That the government wasn't an ochlocracy he also felt sure;
for, in spite of the rule of mobs, in labor troubles, lynchings,
institutions of learning, and weddings in high life, he well knew that
the real authority of the land lay in fewer hands.
Was it, then, an aristocracy? That could not be, for no one was better
than anyone else. In matters of personal worth there was no
superlative; there was not even a comparative. At least, there was no
surer path to defeat at the polls than for a candidate to be called
"better," to say nothing of "best."
Whether it was a theocracy hardly needed consideration. True, the coin
of the realm recorded the nation's Trust in God, and God was
frequently quoted as being heartily in favor of a variety of political
projects; but on the whole the Democrat was convinced that the
function of the inscription was decorative, and felt that any proposal
to entrust God alone with the affairs of the nation would create a
mighty upheaval in politics and commerce, and be followed by a period
of depression. He couldn't really see that God had much part in the
actual government, though he would not go so far as Epicurus, and say
that He cared nothing about what men were doing. He felt more like
agreeing with the Hebrew who conceived God as laughing men to
derision. And besides, to say that the government was at present a
theocracy would place the Democrat in the position of an adverse
critic of the Almighty, which was as much as to say that he himself
was better than the Almighty; and that would be undemocratic.
On the whole, those who called the government an oligarchy seemed to
be getting more near to reality; for at certain crises it became quite
clear that a few men determined the measures of government. And yet,
the individuals of the group were not always the same, but varied
according to the interests involved; and they were not an openly
constituted and declared body, elected by the people. To be sure, they
operated through legislators, but they themselves were more often than
not far removed from open political life. To call the real government
a plutocracy, its governing agents plutocrats, and their instruments
the legislators, seemed reasonable enough. It was humiliating, it
seemed the fact that the great democracy was ruled, not by itself, but
by a Thing.
However, the rule of money, that is, financial self-interest, was not
really a form of government; it was only an influence, and one that
might work good as well as ill. It underlay, more or less, all
governments, not only modern, but ancient as well, and had to, in the
nature of things, so long as property existed and prosperity meant
increase. What else did the phenomenon of economic history-writing
signify but the appreciation of this fact?
The Democrat concluded to let the government under which he lived
stand as a democracy. The term might not be absolutely sufficient, but
it covered the case as well as any. At any rate, whatever the
reality, the government was cast in the democratic mold: every man had
a vote, and was sovereign over it, and could sell it, or throw it
away, or even make use of it, as he chose; and he was represented, or
at least thought he was, by someone whom he elected, or thought he
elected; and was heeded when he clamored his desires or his
indignation, provided it didn't interfere too much with what his
representative was induced to conceive to be the interests of "the
people."
And there were also other manifestations of the democratic ideal which
really distinguished the government under which he lived from that of
many other nations. There was democracy in education. The public set
out to educate _all_ its sons and daughters, from kindergarten to
college Commencement. The day was past when education was only for
gentlemen's sons; the children of the people, rich and poor,
blue-blooded and flat-footed, male and female, brainy and brainless,
came to college, and within its walls there was no connection, it was
said, between honors and money or place. Students dressed from the
same clothes-shop, yelled the same college yell, bought their
apparatus at a co-operative store, ate at the same boarding-house,
took the same examinations, often subserving the cause of democracy by
evading aristocratic tyranny in the person of the faculty and making
democratic use of their neighbors' learning, and asked no questions
about each other's finances or forbears--except, of course, the
fraternity and sorority students, who had _tria nomina_ and were the
exceptions to prove the rule.
And not only were the college rolls and records indicative of
democracy, but there was a democracy of subjects to study. You had
free election: one subject was as good as another, one course as
valuable as another. So long as you had the required number of
credits, the character of the credits made no difference: an hour
contained sixty minutes, and no hour set up to be better than its
fellows. A college education was defined as "something of everything
for everybody," and the definition was especially applicable to the
education of the State Universities, those great examples of learning
in action. In them anyone might study anything at any time under any
instructor under any conditions and in any place--for you could study
in absence, and by correspondence, and hypnotism, and Christian
Science. And when you got through, whatever your method or matter or
capacity or docility or imbecility, you were labelled A. B., and were
as good as any other A. B., and had a fortune assured--until you found
out that the great democratic world thought A. B. no better than D.
F., or any other combination of letters, or no letters at all.
Yes, and there was democracy of religion as well as of education.
Ministers wore plain clothes, avoided religion in conversation,
greeted everyone with the loudness which in some way had become
confused with cordiality, romped with children, attended kissing
parties, and used slang in sermons. Men believed anything, or nothing;
it was a free country, a free age. Any religion, or any interpretation
of it, was as good as any other, so long as you really believed it.
You could pray kneeling, or standing, or sitting, or walking, or
jumping--as you chose. You could interpret your creed literally, or
symbolically, or allegorically, or pragmatically. You could devote
your church edifice to God, or you could make it a meeting-house for
the people, and use it for socials, athletics, kindergarten, lyceum,
vaudeville, soup kitchens, rummage sales, teachers' institutes--and
when all these religious activities grew too extensive for it, you
could sell it to the liveryman or the storage company or the
movie-man. What were churches for, if not for the people?
There was democracy in art, too--especially in literature. Poets wrote
in what vein and in what meter they chose, at what length, with what
attention to rhyme and rhythm, with what preparation or equipment they
chose. They bowed before no laws, ancient or modern. If they made use
of the great names in poetry, it was to justify their own vagaries.
They not only pleaded Tennyson for Tennysonian liberties, but took
what additional license they chose on the ground of personal liberty.
Didn't Homer nod? Of course; and, taking advantage of the example,
they slept the sleep of the unworrying. Poets could write in prose,
and prose authors dress their commonplace thoughts in verse. In
oratory and the novel, matter was all, form nothing. Men were content
if their readers _could_ get their meaning; the compelling power of
style and accurate expression were qualities for which they were
unwilling to pay the price of long and patient preparation. Olympus,
Helicon, and Arcadia had become the paradise of anarchists, to say
nothing of democrats. Who cared now when Zeus's ambrosial locks were
shaken in wrath, or Apollo slammed his baton down in a rage? Who were
they, to set up to be better than others?
And, as for painters and sculptors, and architects and musicians, who
should presume to tyrannize over them by requiring standards of style
or subject? If an architect chose to construct a High School that
looked like a prison or a warehouse, why shouldn't he? After all, what
was the High School but the people's college, and what was its purpose
if not to fit the sons and daughters of the commonwealth for life, and
why _should_ it be built in the Tudor style, or in any other style?
What the people needed was usefulness, not style. And if a musician
wished to compose an overture imitative of all the noises that
accompanied the Retreat from Moscow, including French and Russian
profanity, or if a painter preferred to paint a drunken prostitute
rather than Diana or a Daughter of the Revolution, why shouldn't he?
It was a free country, a democratic age, and it was time art entered
into the service of the people.
And there was democracy of manners, too, and of dress. Democracy had
grown so used to insisting on clothes not making the man, that
distinction in dress had long been a rarity, and men were no longer
constrained to live up to the garb they wore. You could wear a white
vest without obligation to keep it clean, and you could appear with
silk hat and long coat without being suspected of religion or
literature. Men made the clothes now: the process was reversed; they
made them by the wholesale, every season, and if you weren't satisfied
with a good democratic costume--i. e., the one imposed by the despotic
democratic fashion of the season--and had your clothing made to
adorn, why, you were an aristocrat.
And if clothes didn't oblige, neither did _noblesse_, that other
aristocratic bugbear, oblige. Gentlemen? Family? Why, everyone was a
gentleman, from pugilist to preacher. Who said so? Why, who but the
gentleman himself? It was a free country, and a man had a right to be
a gentleman if he chose, didn't he? Just what a gentleman was, to be
sure, no one seemed able to say; but no one failed to lay claim to the
title, or to pull off his coat and prove the justice of his claim if
you denied it. Surely there was no greater proof of the beneficent
power of democracy than that it made all men gentlemen, and all women
ladies.
And there was democracy in the home as well. The American husband was
so democratic that he bettered the apostolic instruction which told
wives to be obedient to their husbands. You might have thought that it
read the reverse. And children--the children of democratic America
were famous the world over for their unquestioning assumption of
knowledge and authority, for their assurance and aggressiveness; for
their easy contradiction of their parents, who were intimidated by the
pedagogical direction never to let your child fear you. Travellers
returned from Europe and reported no Hans and Giovannino who made wide
the mouth and thrust out the tongue in the streets of aristocracy.
Since the time of the bald-headed prophet and the two and forty
she-bears, it had been natural for youth to presume on its
superiority, but it was only the spirit of democracy which seemed to
_encourage_ the presumption.
But why not? If democracy meant equality, why not be consistent? If
all men--black and white, good and bad, rich and poor, wise and
foolish--were to be made equal, why not all women with them? Women
were surely members of the commonwealth. And why not all children?
Hadn't Spencer said so? Children were members of the commonwealth,
too. And why not the beasts, wild and tame, who were also part and
parcel of the population of the country? Why stop merely with men?
Yes, the Democrat concluded, his country was best described as a
democracy, even though the few ruled over the many in matters of
substance, and the many ruled over the few in art and manners, and
both were tyrants. He remembered Plato's definition--Plato the
blasphemer--and it seemed applicable to his own time: "Democracy, a
charming form of government, full of variety and diversity, and
dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike." It was marvellous
how men believed in their equality with other men, what
self-confidence they possessed, and what assurance came to them from
the oft repeated word liberty. "This is a free country, and I'm just
as good as you" could be said by anyone, and was said by everyone, and
as a result his back was a little stiffer and his head a degree or two
more erect. Foreigners learned to say it before they learned to speak
the language. The very animals seemed to understand it; it was Plato
over again: "And the horses and asses had come to have a way of
marching along with all the rights and dignities of free men; and they
would run at anybody whom they met in the street if he did not get out
of their way: and all things were just ready to burst with liberty."
The Democrat, you see, through his habit of looking at Things as They
Are, had come to possess a lively sense of the ridiculous side of
democracy--its inconsistencies, its unconscious enjoyment of words,
its silly self-deception and placid self-satisfaction.
Now that you have seen the workings of his mind, you will easily
understand, too, how the expression of his thoughts might provoke
those who were always on the lookout for the red rag of aristocracy.
And the fact is, that on occasion he did express his thoughts with
great frankness and no little vehemence; and, as no one likes to be
told his faults by even a friendly critic, he often brought the angry
hornets of democracy about his ears.
Yes, and by your smiling you seem to say that he deserved it. And yet
I assure you now, as I did in the beginning, that he was really a
democrat. You must not mistake realization of the faults of democracy
in operation for hostility to democracy itself. He had seen something
of life in aristocratic countries, and was thankful above all things
that there _was_ something in the atmosphere of his own land which had
the effect of making men look up. This virtue alone covered a
multitude of the sins of democracy. There _was_ something in his
country more than the mere form of democratic society. Whether men got
their rights or not, they knew they had rights, and anyone who wanted
to make them consent to injustice had at least to take the trouble of
giving it the appearance of justice. And not only were they possessed
of a lively sense of their own rights, but the air was full of talk
about other people's having _their_ rights. Generosity and benevolence
were abroad in the land. It was, to be sure, something of the sort of
Sidney Smith's benevolence--the feeling which A experienced when he
thought B ought to do something to relieve C's necessities; but even
that kind was better than none. It was vastly important whether large
classes of human beings acquiesced in being regarded as cattle--as
they seemed to in the Old World--or not.
But if he had a vivid sense of the desirability of the democratic
ideal, he had just as vivid a sense of the dangers of democratic
practice. It was not difficult to see that the universal talk about
making all men equal, vapid as it might be, was having an effect which
could but make the judicious grieve. It was pulling excellence from
her lofty seat to set her on a level with mediocrity. Democracy aimed
at equality. But equality on a high plane was impossible. Certain
men--most men--could not rise to a high plane, or would not. Those
therefore who could climb were not to keep on climbing, but to remain
at the lower level, or return from the heights, or assist those who
were at the lowest of all. Not all could reach the mountain top;
therefore let those who _were_ able to make the ascent engage in
assisting the great majority to attain the _middle_ space of the
incline. Not all could take a college degree; therefore let the
college degree be brought within the reach of all. Not all could be
gentlemen; therefore reconstruct and democratize the definition of the
gentleman. In scholarship, religion, manners, in literature, in all
the arts--in everything except the art of making money--democracy
seemed in danger of fostering the mediocre, and discouraging the
excellent. In its effort for breadth, it was encouraging shallowness.
It might be that for the poorest, the meanest, and the stupidest,
democracy meant individualism and opportunity; but for the brightest
and most ambitious, it seemed to partake of the nature of tyranny. The
main idea in Plato's Republic was the sacrifice of the individual to
the whole. In the Modern Republic it seemed something like the
sacrifice of the best to the good, the leveling down of the highest as
well as the raising up of the lowest. Certain kinds of talent and
effort were in great danger of neglect--the kind of talent and effort
which had made nations live in history. If there was anything in the
record of the past, if civilization was not on the wrong track, and if
literature and religion and the arts were indeed the supremely worth
while, it seemed plain that the encouragement of uniformity beyond
limits was a crime against the race. The atoms of Democritus,
streaming forever downward in parallel lines, would never have
accomplished a world. It needed an Epicurus and a Lucretius to
recognize that they must have swerved from their deadly course of
uniformity. It took friction and collision to beget a universe. The
democratic passion for freedom and equality and uniformity once fully
realized, what deadness and monotony! And as for the boasted educating
power of responsibility, there was as little chance for it in the
frictionless machine of perfect democracy as under despotism itself.
Democracy certainly did savor of the machine; just as the object of
machinery was to insure a uniform product without personal handling of
each individual piece, so the object of democracy seemed to be in such
wise to regulate the affairs of men that justice would be automatic.
The fact was, human laziness occupied great space in the foundations
of the democratic spirit. There were other qualities also, of course.
There was misapprehension. The democratic poor imagined ideal
possession on the part of those more prosperous than themselves, and
the democratic rich imagined the extreme of unpossession on the part
of those poorer than themselves; and both forgot, or had never
discovered, what Horace knew two thousand years ago, that the poor man
was seasick in the hired skiff the same as the rich man in his private
trireme. And there was the spirit of restlessness--the everlasting
desire of the human animal for new things, and his perennial ignorance
of the fact that a change of sky did not necessarily mean a change of
heart. And of course there was human sympathy, the greatest of them
all.
But the place of human laziness was great. Men shrank from
responsibility; uniformity and automatic justice appealed to them.
Democracy was a labor-saving device. The meting out of justice by and
to individuals was difficult, and took time, and, what was worse,
thought. It was much easier to legislate a form of equality, and have
done with it--to press a button, have a uniform product, and not
bother with hand-made goods.
Not that equality and uniformity were undesirable. The trouble with
the popular democratic ideal consisted only in its exaggeration. The
democracy of the enthusiastic multitude was an extreme. Aristocracy
went to the extreme of inequality and diversity, and democracy went to
the extreme of equality and uniformity. Both extremes were vicious;
for vices are only exaggerated virtues. And vices are easier than
virtue, extremes easier than the golden mean. To proceed on the
assumption that all men could be treated as free and equal was easier
by far than to recognize and study their inequalities and limitations,
and to attempt the best for each individual; but the result was only a
vicious approximation.
Let democracy recognize that there were two sides to the shield. The
Democrat sympathized with the ignorant and needy, and believed that
the more fortunate should make cheerful sacrifice to help them rise.
As for himself, he would regulate his conduct among men on the basis
of worth, not wealth or blood,
_scilicet uni æquus virtuti atque eius amicis_,
and stand ready to obey unselfishly any measure for the common good,
however undesirable from his particular point of view. If, however, he
demanded sacrifice on the part of the more fortunate in the interest
of the masses, he demanded no less the spirit of sacrifice on the
part of the masses for the sake of such of their fellows as gave
evidence of superior worth. A democracy should be a great family, in
which the sons of promise were gladly helped on their way to honor and
usefulness, even at the cost of deprivation and suffering on the part
of the rest of the household--as in many an actual family which
performed such sacrifice, and rejoiced in it--and by the sacrifice
added to its own glory and strength. It should give all its sons and
daughters the greatest possible opportunity of self-realization, but
never fail to recognize that some selves were more worth realization
than others. Whatever was levelled, let it not be intellect or
character.
After all, government was a means, not an end. The end was
character--individual _and_ national. A form of government was good or
bad as it succeeded or failed to produce that depth and breadth of
individual and collective spirit which marked great eras in
history--such a spirit as that which made possible the Parthenon or
the North Portal of the Erechtheum; or turned back the Armada; or
inspired the Italian Risorgimento; or crystallized into the dramas of
Shakespeare or Sophocles; or formed the soul of other periods when men
were actuated by passionate desire for the common good and common
glory, for time _and_ eternity. The momentary good of the
individual--his comfort or enjoyment--was a worthy ideal only in so
far as it contributed to character. Without elevation of the ideals of
the individual citizen, there could be no great leaders; without great
leaders there was no vision, and the people perished.
So it appears that the Democrat's ideal society was somewhere between
that of Plato, who thought that, until the union of political power
and philosophy in the same person could be effected, there would be no
relief, and that in which the Democrat lived, where men were chosen
lawmakers and rulers ostensibly because they were good fellows, or at
least none of your damned aristocrats.
THE NEW MORALITY
Some ten or twelve years ago a certain young woman, then fresh from
the hands of an esteemed but erratic professor of English literature,
wrote a novel the plot of which was roughly as follows. A college
graduate suddenly finds himself the inheritor of a shoe factory in a
New England town. Filled with the benevolent ideas absorbed in the
academic contemplation of economics, he undertakes to introduce
profit-sharing with his employees and otherwise to conduct his
business for the benefit of the community. So far, good. But hard
times follow, and his competitors by lowering wages and reducing labor
are able to undersell him. Now there is in his control a considerable
sum of money which a widow had entrusted to his father to invest for
her, and the question arises whether he shall shut down his mills and
inflict suffering upon his men, or shall divert this trust fund to his
business and so try to tide over the period of stress. He yields to
his sympathies and virtually embezzles the trust fund; but fails
nevertheless, and with his own loss brings ruin upon the widow. The
story was called "The Burden of Christopher," with the implication
that the hero was a bearer of Christ in his misfortune, and the author
indicates pretty clearly her sentiment that in surrendering his
personal integrity for the expected good of his working people he was
following the higher of two conflicting codes of ethics.
The book no doubt has gone its own way to the "limbo large and broad,"
where the heroes of ancient fiction wander with
Embryoes and idiots, eremits and friars;
but it made a lasting impression on one reader at least, as the first
popular presentation to come under his notice of a theory which now
confronts him wherever he turns his eyes. There has, in fact, been an
astonishing divulgation in the past decade of what is called, with
magnificent audacity, the New Morality.
Perhaps the most honored teacher of this code is the mistress of Hull
House, who by her devoted life and her services to the people of
Chicago in various times of need has won the right to speak with a
certain authority for the striving generation of the day. And in one
of her books, the "Newer Ideals of Peace," Miss Addams tells of an
actual occurrence and infers a moral which points in the same
direction as the novel of "Christopher." A family of five children is
left motherless. The father, a drunkard, disappears, and the household
is left to the care of a feeble old grandmother. Thereupon work is
found for the oldest boy, "a fine, manly little fellow" of twelve, who
feels keenly "his obligation to care for the family"; but after a time
he becomes "listless and indifferent," and at sixteen turns to
professional tramping. "It was through such bitter lessons as these,"
observes Miss Addams, "we learned that good intentions and the
charitable impulse do not always work for righteousness." As the story
is told there is a plain implication that to find work for a boy under
such circumstances is "cruel and disastrous" (her own comment), and
that society, and not his own nature, was responsible for his relapse.
One would suppose that scarcely an honest workman, or prosperous
merchant, or successful professional man had ever taken up the burden
of life in youth or childhood. Certainly, hardship and physical waste
often result from the demands of life, but there is not a single word
in Miss Addams's account to indicate that she has felt the higher need
for the future citizen of developing in him a sensitiveness to the
peculiar duties that confront him, or has reflected on the moral evil
that might have been done the boy if he had been relieved of his
natural obligations and his family had been supported by society. "Our
democracy," as she says with approval, "is making inroads upon the
family, the oldest of human institutions."
This is not an isolated case in Miss Addams's works, nor does it in
any wise misrepresent her. In another book, "The Spirit of Youth and
the City Streets," the thesis is maintained and reiterated, that
crime is for the most part merely the result of repressing a wholesome
"love for excitement" and "desire for adventure." In the year 1909
"there were arrested and brought into court [in Chicago] fifteen
thousand young people under the age of twenty, who had failed to keep
even the common law of the land. Most of these young people had broken
the law in their blundering efforts to find adventure." The inference
to be drawn here and throughout the book is that one need only relieve
the youth of the land from the necessity of "assuming responsibility
prematurely," affording them meanwhile abundant amusement, and the
instincts of lawlessness and the pursuit of criminal pleasure will
vanish, or almost vanish, of themselves--as if there were no Harry
Thaws, and the sons of the rich were all virtuous.
But it must not be supposed that Hull House occupies a place of lonely
isolation as the fountain of these ideas. From every self-authorized
centre of civic virtue in which a type-writer is at work, the stream
proceeds. The very presses groan, as we used to say when those
machines were still in the mythological stage, at their labor of
supplying the world with the new intellectual pabulum. At this moment
there lies before the writer of this article a pile of books, all
recently published, which are devoted more or less specifically to the
subject, and from all of which, if he had courage to go through them,
he might cull abundant examples and quotations. He was, indeed, about
to enter this "hollow cave, amid the thickest woods," when, an
unvaliant knight, he heard the warning of the lady Una:
Yea but (quoth she) the perill of this place
I better wot then you, though now too late
To wish you backe returne with foule disgrace,
Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate,
To stay the steppe, ere forced to retrate.
We have in fact to deal with the consummation of a long and
deep-seated revolution, and there is no better way to understand the
true character of the movement than by turning aside a moment to
glance at its historical sources. The attempt to find a new basis of
conduct, as we see it exemplified in the works of Miss Jane Addams
and a host of other modern writers, is in fact only one aspect of the
slow drift from mediæval religion to humanitarianism. For a thousand
years, and well into the second thousand, the ethical feeling of
Christian Europe may be said to have taken its color from the saying,
"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and
lose his own soul?"--which in extreme cases was interpreted as if it
read, If he _reform_ the whole world; and on the other, kindred
saying, "Sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and
thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me"--in which the
command of charity was held to be not so much for the benefit of the
poor as for the liberation of the giver's own soul from the powers of
this world. Such was the law, and its binding force was confirmed by
the conception of a final day of wrath when the souls of men should
stand before a merciless tribunal and be judged to everlasting joy or
everlasting torment. The vivid reality of the fear that haunted men,
at least in their moments of reflection, may be understood from the
vivid horrors of such a picture as Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment,"
or from the meditations of one of the most genial of English
cavaliers. In his little treatise on "Man in Darkness"--appropriate
title--Henry Vaughan puts the frank question to himself:
And what madness then is it, for the enjoying of one minute's
pleasure for the satisfaction of our sensual corrupt appetite, to
lie forever in a bed of burning brass, in the lake of eternal and
unquenchable fire? "Suppose," saith the same writer [Drexelius],
"that this whole globe of earth were nothing else but a huge mass
or mountain of sand, and that a little wren came but once in
every thousand years to fetch away but one grain of that huge
heap; what an innumerable number of years would be spent before
that world of sand could be so fetched away! And yet, alas! when
the damned have lain in that fiery lake so many years as all
those would amount to, they are no nearer coming out than the
first hour they entered in."
No doubt practice and precept were at variance then, as to a certain
extent they are at all times, and there were many texts in the Bible
which might be taken to mitigate the harsher commands; but such in
its purest, highest form was the law, and in the more sensitive minds
this conception of the soul naked before a judging God must have
created a tremendous anxiety in practice. Morality was obedience and
integrity and scorn of the world for an ideal of inner righteousness;
it created a sense of individual responsibility for every word and
deed; and, say what we will, there was something magnificent in this
contempt of the reckoning of other men for that eternal fame which
... lives and speaks aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.
But there was also in this law something repellent and even monstrous.
Who has not shuddered with amazement at the inscription which Dante
set over the portal of Hell: E 'L PRIMO AMORE? Was it Love that
prepared those winding coils of torture to enclose for endless time
the vast majority of mankind? Was it even justice to make the
everlasting doom of a soul depend on its grasp of truth in these few
years spent in a world of shadows and illusions? There is something
repulsively irrational in the notion of an unchanging eternity
suspended on the action of a moment of time--_ex hoc momento pendet
æternitas_. It should seem to be unthinkable, if it had not actually
been thought. As a matter of fact the rigor and crudity of this
doctrine had been mitigated in the Middle Ages by the interposition
between man and God of the very human institution of the Church with
its substitution of temporal penances and pardons, and an interposed
Purgatory in place of the terrible paradox of irrevocable judgment. It
remained for the Reformation and particularly for the Calvinistic
Puritans to tear away those veils of compromise and bring man face to
face with the awful abstraction he had created. The result was for a
while a great hardening and strengthening of character, salutary
indeed after what may be called the almost hypocritical compromise of
Catholicism; but in the end human nature could not endure the rigidity
of its own logic, and in revolting turned, not to another compromise,
but to questioning of the very hypothesis of its faith.
The inevitable reaction from the intolerable logic of the Protestants
was Deism, in which God was stript altogether of his judicial and
moral attributes and reduced to a kind of immanent, all-benevolent
force in nature. "But now comes a modern Sage," says Warburton of
Bolingbroke, "... who tells us 'that they made the Basis of Religion
far too wide; that men have no further concern with GOD than TO
BELIEVE THAT HE IS, which his _physical Attributes_ make fully
manifest; but, that he is _a rewarder of them who diligently seek
him_, Religion doth not require us to believe, since this depends on
God's MORAL ATTRIBUTES, of which we have no conception.'" But such a
position was manifestly untenable, for it left no place for the
undeniable existence of evil in this world and life. From the
unaccountable distribution of wrong and suffering the divine had
argued the certainty of adjustment in a future state; the deist had
flown in the face of facts by retaining the belief in a benevolent
Providence while taking from it the power of supernatural retribution;
the atheist was more logical, he denied the existence of Providence
altogether and turned the universe over to chance or blind law. Such
was the progress of thought from Baxter to Bolingbroke and from
Bolingbroke to Hume.
The positive consequences of this evolution are written large in the
literature of the eighteenth century. With the idea of an avenging
deity and a supernatural test there disappeared also the sense of deep
personal responsibility; the very notion of a radical and fundamental
difference between good and evil was lost. The evil that is apparent
in character comes to be regarded merely as the result of the
restraining and thwarting institutions of society as these exist--why,
no one could explain. Envy and jealousy and greed and the sheer
ambition of power, all those traits, which were summed up in the
single Greek word _pleonexia_, _the desire to have more_, are not
inherent in the human heart, but are artificially introduced by the
possession of property and a false civilization. Change these
institutions or release the individual entirely from restrictions, and
his nature will recoil spontaneously to its natural state of virtue.
He needs only follow the impulse of his instinctive emotions to be
sound and good. And as a man feels of himself, so he feels of others.
There is no real distinction between the good and the evil, but all
are naturally good, and the superficial variations we see are caused
by the greater or less freedom of development. Hence we should condemn
no man, even as we do not condemn ourselves. There is no place for
sharp judgment, and the laws which impose penalties and restrictions,
and set up false discriminations between the innocent and the
criminal, are subject to suspicion, and should be made as flexible as
possible. In place of judgment we are to regard all mankind with
sympathy, feeling with them a sort of emotional solidarity, the one
great virtue, in which are included, or rather sunk, all the law and
the prophets. In fine, we have arrived at humanitarianism; humanity
has become God.
It was the great work of the eighteenth century, beginning in England
and developing in France, to formulate this change, and indoctrinate
with it the mind of the unthinking masses. Here is not the place to
follow the development in detail, and those who care to see its
outcome may be referred to the keen and unjustly neglected chapters in
La Harpe's "Lycée" on the _philosophes_. To those, indeed, who are
acquainted with the philosophical writings that preceded and
introduced the French Revolution, the epithet "new" as it is attached
to our present-day morality may seem a bit presumptuous, for it would
be difficult to find a single fundamental idea in current literature
on this subject which could not be closely paralleled by a quotation
from Rousseau, or Diderot, or Helvétius, or one of their compeers.
Thus, in our exaltation of sympathy above judgment, and of the
unrestrained emotions generally as the final rule of character, we are
but following Diderot's philosophy of the heart: "Les passions
amorties dégradent les hommes extraordinaires"; and when we read in
Ellen Key, and a host of other feminist liberators, the apotheosis of
love as higher than any divine or human obligations, we are but
meeting again with Toussaint's religion a little disguised: "On aime
de même Dieu et sa maîtresse." Our revolt from constitutional law as
a power imposed by the slower reflection of men upon their own
immediate desires and opinions, is essentially the same as the
restlessness consecrated by the French _économistes_ in the phrase,
"le despotisme légal." And, to return whence we began, the economics
of Hull House flow only too easily from Helvétius' definition of
virtue as "le désir du bien public," and from his more specific
statement: "The integrity which is related to an individual or to a
small society is not the true integrity; integrity considered in
relation to the public is the only kind that really deserves and
generally obtains the name."
Miss Addams herself has been disturbed by these reminiscences. Thus
she quotes from one of the older humanitarians a characteristic
saying: "The love of those whom a man does not know is quite as
elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man does know," and
repudiates it as vague and impractical beside the New Morality. She
ought to know, and may be right; yet it is not easy to see wherein her
own ethics are any less vague, when she deplores the act of a boy who
goes to work for his starving grandmother because in doing so he is
unfitting himself for future service to society. And as for
effectiveness, it might seem that the French Revolution was a
practical result fairly equivalent in magnitude to what has been
achieved by our college settlements. But Miss Addams is by no means
peculiar in this assumption of originality. Nothing is more notable in
the Humanitarian literature of the day than the feeling that our own
age is severed from the past, and opens an entirely new epoch in
history. "_The race has now crossed the great divide of human
history!_" exclaims an hysterical doctor of divinity in a book just
published. "The tendency of the long past has been toward _diversity_,
that of the longer future will be toward _oneness_. The change in this
stream of tendency is not a temporary deviation from its age-long
course--a new bend in the river. It is an actual reversal of the
current, which beyond a peradventure will prove permanent." To this
ecstatic watcher, the sudden reversal took place at no remote date,
but yesterday; and by a thousand other watchers the same miracle is
vociferously heralded. Beyond a peradventure! Not a little of this
flattering assumption is due to the blind and passionate hope of the
human heart clamoring against the voice of experience from similar and
different movements in the past, which have somehow failed to renovate
the world. So many prophets before now have cried out, looking at the
ever-flowing current of time, and having faith in some Thessalian
magic:
Cessavere vices rerum.
... Amnisque cucurrit
Non qua pronus erat.
So often they have been disappointed; but at last we have seen--beyond
a peradventure. If the vicissitudes of fate have not ceased, yet at
least we have learned to look with complacency on the very law of
mutation, from which the eyes of men had hitherto turned away in
bewildered horror, at last the stream has turned back upon its
sources, and change itself is carrying us no longer towards diversity,
but towards the consummation of a divine oneness.
But it would equally be an error to insist too dogmatically on the
continuity of the present-day movement with that of the eighteenth
century, for, after all, "the world do move." It is true for one thing
that for a hundred years or thereabout there was a partial reaction
against the doctrines of the _philosophes_, during which time the
terrors of the Revolution lay like a warning nightmare in the
imagination of the more thoughtful men. A hundred years is a long
period for the memory to bridge, particularly in a time when the
historical sense has been weakened. Superficially, too, the
application of the theory is in some respects different from what it
was; the law of social sympathy has been developed into different
conceptions of Socialism, and we have devised fresh schemes for giving
efficacy to the immediate will of the people. Even deeper is the
change that has come over the attitude of religious organizations
towards the movement. In the age of the Revolution the Church, both
Catholic and Protestant, was still strongly entrenched in the old
beliefs, and offered a violent resistance to the substitutions of
humanitarianism for responsibility to itself and to a God. Now this
last barrier has been almost swept away. Indeed, not the least
remarkable feature of this literature is the number of clergymen who
are contributing to it, with their constant appeal to the New Morality
as the test of faith. Open one of these books before us--let us take
"The Christian Reconstruction of Modern Life," for the promise of its
title--and you will be pretty likely to come upon such a passage as
this: "Faith's fellowship with Jesus is one with the realization of
our fellowship in humanity"; or, on another page: "If the fundamental
of the true philosophy cannot be found by common men, what advantage
in any man's finding it? If life's secret, direction, and power ... is
not attainable by the lowliest, then a man of this age, living in the
social passion of our time, is forced to be indifferent to that which
would be the monopoly of a few gifted souls." If such a social passion
means anything, it means the reconstruction of life to the level of
the gutter. It is the modern sham righteousness which would have
called from Jesus the same utter scorn as that which he poured upon
the Pharisaical cant of his own day. Yet it is not in religious books
alone that you will meet with this sort of irreligion. For one sermon
you will hear on the obligation of the individual soul to its maker
and judge, and on the need of regeneration and the beauty of holiness,
you will hear a score on the relation of a man to his fellows and on
the virtue of social sympathy. In effect, the first and great
commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and
with all thy soul and with all thy mind," has been almost forgotten
for the second, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Worship in
the temple is no longer a call to contrition and repentance, but an
organized flattery of our human nature, and the theological seminary
is fast becoming a special school for investigating poverty and
spreading agnosticism. In this sense, or degree, that humanitarianism
is no longer opposed by organized religion, but has itself usurped the
place of religion, the New Morality may really justify its name.
What are the results of this glorification of humanity? What does the
New Morality mean in life and conduct? Well, of such matters it is
wise to speak cautiously. The actual morals of an age are an extremely
complicated and elusive network of facts, and it is only too easy to
generalize from incomplete observation. On the other hand we must
guard against allowing ourselves to be deceived by the fallacy
everywhere heard, that, because the preacher has always, even from the
remotest record of Egypt, bewailed his own times as degenerate,
therefore no age has fallen off in morality from its predecessor. Such
an argument is a complete _non-sequitur_; there have been periods of
degeneration, and there may yet be. As for our own age, only a fool
would dogmatize; we can only balance and surmise. And in the first
place a certain good must almost certainly be placed to the credit of
humanitarianism. It has softened us and made us quicker to respond to
the sufferings of others; the direct and frightful cruelty that runs
through the annals of history like a crimson line has been largely
eliminated from civilization, and with it a good deal of the brutality
of human nature. We sometimes hear the present age compared with the
later Roman Republic and the Empire, and in some respects speciously,
but the callousness of the great Romans to human misery and their
hardness are almost unthinkable to-day. Consider a sentence or two
from Appian: "The head and hand of Cicero were suspended for a long
time from the rostra in the forum where formerly he had been
accustomed to make public speeches, and more people came together to
behold this spectacle than had previously come to listen to him. It is
said that even at his meals Antony placed the head of Cicero before
his table, until he became satiated with the horrid sight." Such an
episode scarcely stands out from the hideous story of the Civil Wars;
to the modern reader it brings a feeling almost of physical sickness.
So much we seem to have gained, and the change in this respect even
from our own seventeenth century shows that the credit is due in no
small part to the general trend of humanitarianism.
But in other directions the progress is not so clear. Statistics are
always treacherous witnesses, but so far as we can believe them and
interpret them we can at best draw no comfort from the prevalence of
crime and prostitution and divorce and insanity and suicide. At least,
whatever may be the cause of this inner canker of society, our social
passion seems to be powerless to cure it. Some might even argue that
the preaching of any doctrine which minimizes personal responsibility
is likely to increase the evil. Certainly a teacher who, like Miss
Jane Addams, virtually attributes the lawless and criminal acts of our
city hoodlums to the wholesome desire of adventure which the laws
unrighteously repress, would appear to be encouraging the destructive
and sensual proclivities which are too common in human nature, young
and old. Nor are the ways of honesty made clear by a well-known
humanitarian judge of Denver, who refused to punish a boy for stealing
a Sunday-School teacher's pocketbook, for the two good reasons, as his
honor explained in a public address, "that the boy was not
responsible, and, secondly, that there were bigger thieves in the pews
upstairs." So, too, a respectable woman of New York who asks whether
it may not be a greater wrong for a girl to submit to the slavery of
low wages than to sell herself on the street, is manifestly not
helping the tempted to resist. She is even doing what she can with her
words to confuse the very bounds of moral and physical evil.
There is, in fact, a terrible confusion hidden in the New Morality, an
ulcerous evil that is ever working inward. Sympathy, creating the
desire for even-handed justice, is in itself an excellent motive of
conduct, and the stronger it grows, the better the world shall be. But
sympathy, spoken with the word "social" prefixed, as it commonly is on
the platforms of the day, begins to take on a dangerous connotation.
And "social sympathy" erected into a theory which leaves out of
account the responsibility of the individual, and seeks to throw the
blame of evil on the laws and on society, though it may effect
desirable reforms here and there in institutions, is bound to leave
the individual weakened in his powers of resistance against the
temptations which can never be eliminated from human life. The whole
effect of calling sympathy justice, and putting it in the place of
judgment, is to relax the fibre of character, and nourish the passions
at the expense of reason and the will. And undoubtedly the conviction
is every day gaining ground among cool observers of our life that the
manners and morals of the people are beginning to suffer from this
relaxation in many insidious ways apart from acts which come into the
cognizance of the courts. The sensuality of the prevailing music and
dancing, the plays that stir the country as organs of moral
regeneration, the exaggeration of sex in the clothing seen on the
street, are but symptoms more or less ominous to our mind as we do or
do not connect them with the regnant theory of ethics. And in the end
this form of social sympathy may itself quite conceivably bring back
the brutality and cruelty from which it seems to have delivered us.
The Roman who gloated over the head of his and the people's enemy
lived two thousand years ago, and we think such bloodthirstiness is no
longer possible in public life. Yet not much more than a century ago
the preaching of social sympathy could send a Lebon and his kind over
France with an insatiable lust for killing, complicated with Sadism,
while at home the leader of the Government of the most civilized
country of Europe was justifying such a régime on the pious principle
that, "when the sovereign people exercises its power, we can only bow
before it; in all it does all is virtue and truth, and no excess,
error, or crime is possible." The animal is not dead within us, but
only asleep. If you think he has been really conquered, read what he
has been doing in Congo and the Putomayo Indians, or among the
redeemers of the Balkan states. Or if you wish to get a glimpse of
what he may yet do under the spur of social sympathy, consider the
callous indifference shown by the labor unions to the revelation, if
it deserves the name, of the system of dynamiting and murder employed
in the service of "class-consciousness." These things are to be taken
into account, not as bugbears, for society at large is no doubt sound
at heart and will arouse itself at last against its false teachers,
but as symptoms to warn and prepare.
To some few the only way out of what seems a state of moral blindness
is through a return to an acknowledgment of the responsibility of the
individual soul to its maker and inflexible judge. They may be right.
Who can tell what reversal of belief may lie before us or what
religious revolution may be preparing in the heart of infidelity? But
for the present, at least, that supernatural control has lost its
general efficacy, and even from the pulpit has only a slight and
intermittent appeal. Nor does such a loss appear without its
compensations, when we consider the harshness of mediæval theology or
the obliquities of superstition that seem to be inherent in the purest
of religions. Meanwhile, the troubled individual, whatever his
scepticism may be, need not be withheld from confirming his moral
faith by turning from the perverted doctrine of the "Enlightenment"
and its recrudescence in modern humanitarianism, to the larger and
higher philosophy which existed long before the materialism of the
eighteenth century, and before the earlier anthropomorphism, and which
persisted unchanged, though often half-concealed, through those ages,
and still persists as a kind of shamefast inheritance of truth. It is
not necessary to go to ancient books to recover that faith. Let a man
cease for a moment to look so strenuously upon what is right for his
neighbors. Let him shut out the voices of the world, and disregard the
stream of informing books which pour upon him from the modern press,
as the "floud of poyson" was spewed upon Spenser's Knight from
"_Errours den_":
Her fruitful cursed spawne of serpents small.
Let him retire into himself, and in the silence of such recollection
examine his own motives and the sources of his self-approval and
discontent. He will discover there in that dialogue with himself, if
his abstraction is complete and sincere, that his nature is not simple
and single, but dual, and the consequences to him in his judgment of
life and in his conduct will be of incalculable importance. He will
learn, with a conviction which no science or philosophy falsely
so-called can shake, that beside the passions and wandering desires
and blind impulses and the cravings for pleasure and the prod of
sensations, there is something within him and a part of him, rather in
some way his truer self, which controls and checks and knows and
pronounces judgment, unmoved amid all motion, unchanged amid continual
change, of everlasting validity above the shifting valuations of the
moment. He may not be able to express this insight in terms that will
satisfy his own reason or will convince others, but if his insight is
true, he will not waver in loyalty to it, though he may sin against it
times without number in spoken word and impulsive deed. Rather his
loyalty will be confirmed by experience. For he will discover that
there is a happiness of the soul which is not the same as the pleasure
of fulfilled desires, whether these be for good or for ill, a
happiness which is not dependent upon the results of this or that
choice among our desires, but upon the very act itself of choice and
self-control, and which grows with the habit of staying the throng of
besetting and inflicting impulses always until the judicial _fiat_ has
been pronounced. It is thus that happiness is the final test of
morality, bringing with it a sense of responsibility to the
supernatural command within the soul of the man himself, as binding as
the laws of religion, and based on no disputable revelation or outer
authority. Such a morality is neither old nor new, and stands above
the varying customs of society. It is not determined essentially by
the relation of a man to his fellows or by their approval, but by the
consciousness of rightness in the man's own breast,--in a word, by
character. Its works are temperance, truth, honesty, trustworthiness,
fortitude, magnanimity, elevation; and its crown is joy.
Then, under the guidance of this intuition, a man may turn his eyes
upon the world with no fear of being swayed by the ephemeral winds of
doctrine. Despite the clamor of the hour he will know that the
obligation to society is not the primal law, and is not the source of
personal integrity, but is secondary to personal integrity. He will
believe that social justice is in itself desirable, but he will hold
that it is far more important to preach first the responsibility of
each man to himself for his own character. He will admit that equality
of opportunity is an ideal to be aimed at, but he will think this a
small thing in comparison with the universality of duty. In his
attitude towards mankind he will not deny the claims of sympathy, but
he will listen first to the voice of judgment:
Away with charity that soothes a lie,
And thrusts the truth with scorn and anger by.
He will be sensitive to the vast injustices of life, and its
widespread sorrows, but he will not be seduced by that compassion into
the hypocrisy of saying that "the love of those whom a man does not
know is quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man
does know."
PROFESSOR BERGSON AND THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
When, some months since, M. Bergson delivered his inaugural address as
President of the Society for Psychical Research, the circumstance was
considered of enough importance to justify many cablegrams in the
American papers, and much editorial comment. Had the address not been
in French, it probably would have been reproduced here. Yet the event
was not exceptional enough for that feature to explain the attention
of the press. Men to be named in the same breath with Professor
Bergson, for instance Professor William James and Mr. Arthur Balfour,
had already been presidents of the Society. Therefore the importance
attached to M. Bergson's acceptance of the presidency may indicate not
merely an interest in his views of the subjects attacked by the
Society, but a growing interest in the subjects themselves--perhaps an
interest that may lead such of our readers as have not already studied
them, to welcome some account of both. The information is doubly worth
giving, as there is such a wide belief that the Society is but a group
of cranks, while in fact it has always included some of the best minds
of the age. This account, however, despite the disproportionate space
we venture to allot to it, can give but a pitifully inadequate idea of
the Society's work, and has been prepared mainly on the chance that it
may lead a few readers to seek adequate knowledge elsewhere.
There is also a better reason for attention to the subject. No
argument is needed to convince thinking people that this age stands in
peculiar need of a revival, from some source, of that interest in the
mysteries surrounding our little experience, without which no age has
been really great.
The work hardly seemed worth doing at all unless on the present scale.
If any reader begrudges the space, we can pretty safely promise that
the subject will not call for so large a proportion in future
[Editor].
In 1882 a group of friends who had been meeting occasionally at
Cambridge for the discussion of mysterious phenomena, formed the
Society for Psychical Research, and took rooms in London. The best
known of the early members were Professor (now Sir William) Barrett,
Professor Henry Sidgwick, Frederick W. H. Myers, Fellow of Cambridge,
Arthur J. Balfour, Richard Holt Hutton (Editor of _The Spectator_);
Professor Balfour Stewart, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Lord Houghton and
Archbishop Trench. They were soon joined by, among others, Professor
(now Sir William) Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace, Lord Raleigh,
Ruskin, Tennyson, William James, Edmund Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Frank
Podmore, Professor (now Sir Oliver) Lodge, and Professor Schiller.
The Society's Proceedings now fill twenty-six octavo volumes, and it
has also published a Journal for its members which has reached fifteen
large twelvemo volumes.
All were originally published in "parts," of which, in all but two or
three cases, several composed a volume. Any portion of the material
can be obtained from the Society's American agents, the W. B. Clarke
Co. of Boston.
The topic first reported on by the society was thought-transference.
Experiments were made with cards, words, pictures and all sorts of
objects. The Society published scores, possibly hundreds, of pairs of
drawings, one of each pair having been made by a person not seeing the
original, who had copied it closely enough to be recognized, in
consequence of willing to copy it, and being similarly willed by
another person drawing or gazing at it. Some of the duplicates would
have been very fair performances even if the originals had been in
sight.
The conviction before existing that all sorts of impressions could be
conveyed at the will of a hypnotist, was abundantly confirmed, and a
strong conviction was aroused in some minds, and it seems to be
increasing, that all transference of thought without visible means has
a hypnotic element, and is much more frequent than yet generally
recognized.
Pictures were of course conveyed as subjective visions, and the
Society began very early to collect and classify accounts of visions
of all kinds, applying rigid canons of verification.
In 1886 the Society published a collection of "Phantasms of the
Living" compiled by Gurney, Myers and Podmore. Seven hundred cases
were thought sufficiently verified to be worth including.
This work was severely criticised by Mr. Charles Pearce in the
Proceedings of a short-lived American society, and he was there
answered by Mr. Gurney.
Gurney died while preparing a work on Phantasms of the Dead. His
material was put in shape by Myers, and published in the Proceedings
of the Society, Vol. V, pp. 403f. "Phantasms of the Living" is now out
of print but much of its material is obtainable in Journal I and the
Reports of the Literary Committee in the early volumes of the
Proceedings.
Space does not admit of enough citation and discussion from these
works to be of value. It may be said in general, however, that with
one class of partial exceptions, there is hardly any ghost story that
one has ever heard of which does not find its parallel here, confirmed
by excellent witnesses and often by considerable supplementary
investigation. The partial exceptions are the stories of freezing
horror which, the evidence now suggests, would appear to have little,
if any, basis in actual experience, but to be mainly the products of
imagination--often of deliberate imagination laboring for dramatic
effect. The authenticated phenomena are generally of gentle and
innocuous character--appearance of dying friends, etc. There are some
apparently of troubled souls, but hardly ever of malevolent ones.
The vast majority of the experiences have taken place in bed, and
therefore are presumably dreams, and there is much reason to believe
that the others come in some sort of a dream state, the whole business
probably being associated, as before indicated, with telepathy, and
telepathy probably being associated with hypnotism, not always
voluntary or conscious.
The experiences are apparently of sight, sound, touch--all the
senses. And yet in connection with visions, there have been few
changes in objective Nature to account for them.
* * * * *
Much regarding hypnotism was published in the early volumes, but that
subject is now so much a part of the knowledge of the medical world,
and even the world in general, that we will not enlarge upon it here.
* * * * *
As there have "always" been stories of visions and hypnotic control,
so there have been stories of objects moved by human beings without
the exercise of muscular force, and indeed without contact. Years
before the foundation of the S. P. R., the present writer saw a
conclusive illustration of the first. It was an exhibition of
something to which it might be well to transfer the name of
zoömagnetism, which was originally suggested by Dr. Liebault for the
force assumed to act in hypnotism. That assumption is now abandoned.
For the effects of the force--the manifestations to the senses, the
name telekinesis is accepted by the Society.
This zoömagnetic force with telekinetic effects seems quite plainly a
mode of the cosmic energy. Putting it forth generally leaves the agent
much exhausted, although very strangely in one of the best accounts,
in Pr. S. P. R. VII, 175f. by Professor Alexander, of the University
of Rio Janiero, regarding his neighbors the Davis children's
performance, he says that they were not fatigued. This seems like a
denial of the persistence of force. But there may be a force
manifested by the human system and yet not generated in it (or
appropriated by it from food and air), but merely passing through it,
as some classes of thoughts are held by some students to be entirely
independent of human origination. If so, there are _two_ modes of
force as yet uncorrelated with our knowledge, which produce
telekinetic effects: for there is certainly one which exhausts human
energies. (See Pr. VI, VII, IX, XII.)
Perhaps a more certain correlation of the zoömagnetic force with the
modes of force already well correlated, is that, if the evidence
collected by the S. P. R. is reliable, it is, like them, mutable into
the production of light--including the alleged magnetic aura, even
around persons--sound, electricity and the other modes of force
already well known. (See Pr. IV, VIII, IX, XI.) These modes possibly
include that which moves the dowser's rod. But as we know of no case
where a dowser has manifested any of the more definitely correlated
modes of zoömagnetic force, the chance of dowsing being one is small.
Much information regarding dowsing, which convinced several eminent
scientists--Sir William Barrett among them, is published by the
Society in Pr. II, XIII, XV. Moreover, there is evidence (Jour. IX,
Pr. XV), so far as it goes, that the zoömagnetic force can _resist_
heat, not only in the Fijian "fire walk," but in London drawing-rooms
in the person of the medium Home, but in him alone--that it has
enabled him and many others to counteract the effects of gravity upon
their own persons; and to "materialize," that is to produce on the
senses of other people, possibly by hypnotizing several at once,
without the aid of matter as we know it, the impressions of light,
sound, resistance and pressure which ordinarily indicate the presence
of the living human body, when no such object in the ordinary sense is
actually present. (For all this see Jour. VI, Pr. VI, IX.)
The Society investigated the display of these phenomena by many
agents, among them the notorious Eusapia Palladino. Her working in the
dark and with a "cabinet" and other apparatus favorable for fraud, was
of course against her, but it seems the unescapable conclusion that of
her phenomena some were genuine--and some fraudulent. With
unintelligent and uneducated mediums, the doctrine "falsus in uno
falsus in omnibus" does not hold: for such mediums, often, sometimes
involuntarily, eke out the lion's skin with the fox's.
* * * * *
The records of the Society contain much evidence of a connection
between telekinetic power and the telepsychic power of conveying
thought already described. Perhaps Mrs. Piper is the only well known
medium not manifesting both. The two powers are shown together in
tipping furniture or producing sounds or lights to signal yes and no;
and while the alphabet is being enunciated, to mark letters so as to
spell out significant words and sentences. There is strong reason to
believe that the intelligence in these indications has been generally
that of the operator, often acting involuntarily and entirely
honestly, and sometimes, especially in the case of "planchette," that
of some other person present, acting telepathically through the
operator. (Pr. VII, IX, XI.)
Of course there has not been the slightest necessity of attributing
any of these queer manifestations of zoömagnetism to "spirits," and,
despite one or two exceptions (notably the late Stainton Moses), the
members of the Society for Psychical Research have not so attributed
them. But the average man has attributed all mysterious things to
spirits, ever since the primitive times when everything was
mysterious.
* * * * *
Unfortunately, two of the most remarkable mediums, perhaps the most
remarkable, Foster and Home, were too early to come directly under the
investigation of the S. P. R. as a body; but fortunately Sir William
Crookes did come into association with Home in the early Seventies
before the foundation of the Society, tested his zoömagnetism many
times in the laboratory, with entirely satisfactory results, and later
gave the Society the results of his observations, which were published
in Journals VI and IX, and Pr. VI, IX and XV. Of course his testimony
to a laboratory experiment is the last word, but many of his accounts
of social sittings with Home stagger belief, and tempt an impression
that there must have been hypnosis somewhere. But the Proceedings
contain considerable collateral evidence. And Myers and Sir William
Barrett applied "the higher criticism" to Home's autobiography and his
wife's accounts of him, and published the results, which were
favorable, in Jour. IV, VI.
* * * * *
But while the evidence for the things already recounted here was
pouring in, there came evidence too strong to be thrown aside without
examination, of things harder to attribute to any incarnate power.
Home's accordeon, we are told by no less an authority than Sir William
Crookes, and by several others (Pr. Vol. VI), was often played
intelligently and beautifully without the apparent agency of human
hands; and the inspirational writing which in earlier times had come
from overwrought religious mystics, began to appear from people who
were by no means overwrought or mystical, or even religious, though
the most noted of them was. This was the Rev. W. Stainton Moses, the
first remarkable medium who associated freely with the members of the
Society. It is alleged that he manifested movement of objects without
contact, lights, sounds in both the air and material objects,
levitation and materialization--all the modes of zoömagnetism except
resistance to heat--assuming that to be one of them. His molecular
telekineses indicated intelligence.
Myers says (Pr. IX, 250f.):
"In 1882 he aided in the foundation of the Society for Psychical
Research; but he left that body in 1886, on account of its
attitude towards Spiritualism, which he regarded as unduly
critical.... Many members of the Society held an intellectual
position widely differing from that of Mr. Moses, and although
his own published records were of a kind not easily credible, no
suspicion as to his personal probity and veracity was ever, so
far as I know, either expressed or entertained.
"... [Moses] was very reticent about exhibiting his powers, and
consequently almost the only records are his own and those of his
physician, Dr. Stanhope Speer, Mrs. Speer, and their son, Mr.
Charlton T. Speer, Associate of the Royal Academy of Music--all
persons of undoubted capacity and probity.... Dr. Speer's cast of
mind was thoroughly materialistic, and it is remarkable that his
interest in Mr. Moses' phenomena was from first to last of a
purely scientific, as contrasted with an emotional or religious
nature."
There are half a dozen other good witnesses, however.
Despite Moses' telepsychic telekineses, his principal alleged
communications with the spirit world were by automatic (we prefer to
call it heteromatic) writing. Of this he left twenty-four note books.
The writings in these were in several different hands and bore the
marks of as many different characters, that were never mixed up. They
signed the names, Imperator, Rector, Doctor, etc., and declared their
earthly selves to have been various eminent persons in the remote
past.
* * * * *
We shall find later that after Moses' death, his alleged spirit gave
an entirely different set of names for the earthly originals of these
alleged personalities. Myers, having seen all the heteromatic writing,
tacitly endorses Moses' statements regarding its visible qualities.
Moses continues:
"By degrees I found that many spirits who were unable to
influence my hand themselves sought the aid of a spirit 'Rector'
[a gentleman whom we shall meet often. Editor of this article],
who was apparently able to write more freely and with less strain
on me;
He says that they differed from him and criticised him severely, but
ultimately converted him to a higher faith than the Anglicanism he had
previously preached.
* * * * *
Myers comments (Pr. XI, 69):
"The tone of the spirits towards Mr. Moses himself is habitually
courteous and respectful. But occasionally they have some
criticism which pierces to the quick, and which goes far to
explain to me Mr. Moses's unwillingness to have the books fully
inspected during his lifetime."
We have no space for any of this script, and it probably would not
tend much to edification if we had. After a good deal of reading and
pondering, I find the proportion of Moses' self in all these
proceedings looming in my apprehension larger and larger. The benefits
he got from them look to me like that portion--how large a portion I
am not saying--of the benefits of prayer which are independent of
external results, and consist in the effect upon character of intense
absorption in an inspiring subject.
Myers testifies that Moses' heteromatic writing announced the death of
a friend of Myers before it could have been known by other means, and
that the writing closely resembled hers. Moses himself declares, and
many fairly judicious people believed him, that among other marvels,
the writing told him, in advance of any other possible agency, of the
death of President Garfield, and of a suicide in London under a steam
roller. The latter statement has several confirmatory witnesses.
The account of Moses is given here, not so much because of himself, as
to prepare for later appearances of Imperator, Rector, Doctor & Co.,
which will be of more interest.
* * * * *
In America there was of course not leisure enough to continue the Am.
S. P. R., which had been started a couple of years after the English
one, and it was merged with the English Society, becoming a "branch."
In 1887 Dr. Richard Hodgson, who had been lecturing at Cambridge, was
sent over as secretary to take charge of it, and soon began a set of
experiences which immeasurably surpass all others in connection with
the subject.
In 1886, Professor William James had found a remarkable medium in Mrs.
Piper, a New England woman of average position and education, and Dr.
Hodgson devoted himself to her phenomena. In trance she spoke as a
self-alleged French physician who called himself Dr. Jean Phinuit
Schliville, and who professed to be in the other world in association
with friends of people who came to sit with Mrs. Piper. Dr. Phinuit
professed to give messages from them, and to deliver the sitters'
messages to them. The only thing apparently unprecedented in these
proceedings was the consistently dramatic character of Dr. Phinuit
himself, and the verisimilitude, varying but often astounding, between
the utterances, dramatic characterizations and recollections of the
alleged message senders, and the persons as known in life.
Mrs. Piper's career with Dr. Phinuit was an inheritance by her from a
Dr. Cocke, who was controlled by a Dr. Finney. Dr. Cocke was an
"inspirational healer" and in 1884 Mrs. Piper went to consult him
about some physical ailment. A circle was being held, and she joined
it. On a second visit she experienced a sensation as of a blinding
flash, and then fainted, and on recovering began to talk in trance as
somebody else.
Hodgson says (Pr. VIII, 46f.):
"She was said to have been controlled by an Indian girl who gave
the name 'Chlorine,' and to have given a remarkable test to a
stranger who was present. She had several more sittings with Mr.
Cocke, and was again controlled, apparently on each occasion by
'Chlorine.'
This name is evidently pitched upon on account of its euphony and
apparent femininity, by some consciousness--we can't tell whose,
perhaps Mrs. Piper's subliminal (whatever that may mean)--unaware of
the meaning of the word, which I hardly need tell the reader usually
refers to a rather fetid gas. Hodgson continues:
"She was also ostensibly controlled at occasional times by Mrs.
Siddons, Bach, Longfellow, Commodore Vanderbilt, and Loretta
Ponchini. It was said that 'Mrs. Siddons' recited a scene from
Macbeth, Longfellow was said to have written some verses, and
Loretta Ponchini (who purported to be an Italian girl) to have
made some drawings....
"Dr. Phinuit only came at first to give medical advice. He
'didn't care to come for other matters,' as he thought them 'too
_trivial_.'
"Finally Sebastian Bach said they were going to concentrate all
their powers on Phinuit, and he became ultimately the chief
control.
"Mr. Piper says that there is no question but that it is the same
Phinuit or personality who controls Dr. Cocke, no matter how
their names are spelt."
All this seems clap-trap, but wait.
* * * * *
The questions regarding Phinuit are different from those regarding
most of the other controls in the Society's records: for, with the
exception of the Imperator group, they, in ordinary life, were
generally known, personally or historically, to the sitters; while
Phinuit has loomed upon the world as free from origins as Melchizedek,
and some people think, despite his lack of priestly ways, with as
important a mission. But he has alleged a lot of origins that, so far,
cannot be traced. Even, however, if they never can be, the fact would
not prove that he never existed.
After a while the communications began to be occasionally in writing,
and at times the voice would be speaking as Phinuit, and the hand
writing as somebody else. There was at least one occasion (Pr. XIII,
293) when Phinuit was joking with a lot of young girls, and the hand
writing on other subjects with Dr. Hodgson.
The records of the S. P. R. contain the most contradictory accounts of
Phinuit's character and attainments. Several habitual sitters are very
fond of him. He and Sir Oliver Lodge were intimate friends, and while
I have had but one conversation with him, I find reading him as
delightful as reading Falstaff. Yet Professor Shaler calls him a
preposterous scoundrel, as was Falstaff; but I can't find serious
dishonesty in Phinuit.
Professor William James, who went to school in French Switzerland, and
was entirely at home in French, says Phinuit knew none. Other sitters
agree with him. Mr. Rogers Rich, who was equally at home in the
language, says he and Phinuit talked French together a good deal, to
Mr. Rich's entire satisfaction. Other sitters indicate the same. Mrs.
Piper knew no French. Mr. Rich and many sitters, including Sir Oliver
Lodge, in whose family Dr. Phinuit practiced extensively, found
benefit in his prescriptions; he successfully gave one treatment which
seems to the lay mind the opposite of reasonable, and yet I myself
found prompt relief through a similar one given by an eminent New York
physician. Nevertheless there are those who call Phinuit a shameless
quack. While in the Pr. S. P. R. there are several prescriptions by
him in correct technical language, there are also several statements
that he does not know the ordinary terms of the pharmacopeia.
The following particulars are taken from a report on Mrs. Piper's
trance which Hodgson made to the S. P. R. in 1892 published in Vol.
VIII of their Proceedings. Although the messages generally went
through Dr. Phinuit, sometimes the alleged personages themselves took
control and carried on conversations with their friends through the
vocal organs and gestures of Mrs. Piper. The voices of the controls
varied with the alleged personalities.
_R. Hodgson. First Sitting. May 4th, 1887._ (Pr. VIII, 60.)
[From notes made on return to my rooms immediately after the
sitting.]
"Phinuit began, after the usual introduction, by describing
[correctly] members of my family....
"Phinuit mentioned the name 'Fred.' ... 'He says you went to
school together. He goes on jumping-frogs, and laughs.... He had
convulsive movements before his death, struggles. He went off in
a sort of spasm.... [My cousin Fred far excelled any other person
that I have seen in the games of leap-frog, fly the garter,
etc.... He injured his spine in a gymnasium ... lingered for a
fortnight, with occasional spasmodic convulsions, in one of which
he died.] Phinuit described a lady, in general terms, dark hair,
dark eyes, slim figure, etc., and said she was much closer to me
than any other person: that she 'died slowly.' ... She had two
rings; one was buried with her body; the other ought to have gone
to you. The second part of her first name is--sie.' [True, with
the exception of the statement about the rings, which may or may
not be true.... No ring ever passed between the lady and
myself.... After trying in vain to 'hear distinctly' the first
part of the name, Phinuit gave up the attempt, and asked me what
the first name was. I told him. I shall refer to it afterwards as
'Q.']"
All this could well have been involuntary telepathy from Hodgson to
the medium. But again, wait.
At Hodgson's second sitting, November 18th, 1887, Phinuit referred to
the beautiful teeth of "Q." and Hodgson says: "'Q.'s' teeth were not
beautiful."
* * * * *
Here is something better (Pr. VIII):
"5, Boylston-place, _March 6th, 1889_.
"Mr. Robertson James has just called here on return from a
sitting with Mrs. P., during which he was informed by Mrs.
P.--entranced--that 'Aunt Kate' had died about 2 or 2.30 in the
morning. Aunt Kate was also referred to as Mrs. Walsh.
"Mrs. Walsh has been ill for some time and has been expected
during the last few days to die at any hour. This is written
before any despatch has been received informing of the death, in
presence of the following:--
"RICHARD HODGSON.
"WILLIAM JAMES.
"ROBERTSON JAMES.
"On reaching home an hour later I found a telegram as
follows:--'Aunt Kate passed away a few minutes after
midnight.--E. R. WALSH.'
"(Signed) WM. JAMES.
"Mrs. William James, who accompanied Mr. Robertson James to the
sitting on March 6th, writes as follows:--
"18, Garden-street, CAMBRIDGE, _March 28th, 1889_.
"Concerning the sitting mentioned above on March 6th, I may add
that the 'control' said, when mentioning that Aunt Kate had died,
that I would find 'a letter or telegram' when I got home, saying
she was gone.
"ALICE H. JAMES."
Now all this seems quite possibly telepathy and coincidence. But how
about this?
"_July, 1890._
"Early at this sitting I inquired, 'How is Aunt Kate?' The reply
was, 'She is poorly.' This reply disappointed me, from its
baldness. Nothing more was said about Aunt Kate till towards the
close of the sitting, when I again said, 'Can you tell me nothing
more about Aunt Kate?' The medium suddenly threw back her head
and said in a startled way, 'Why, Aunt Kate's here. All round me
I hear voices saying, "Aunt Kate has come."' Then followed the
announcement that she had died very early that morning, and on
being pressed to give the time, shortly after two was named.
"A. H. J."
And here is a manifestation eight months after Mrs. Walsh's death:
_R. Hodgson. November 7th, 1889._ (Pr. VIII, 93-4.)
[From a letter written to Professor W. James on the day of the
sitting.]
"Mrs. D. and I had sitting to-day at Arlington Heights, and the
usurpation by 'Kate Walsh' was extraordinary. The personality
seemed very intense, and spoke in effortful whispers.
"'William--William--God bless you.' Sitter: 'Who are you?'
'Kate--Walsh.' (S. 'I know you.') 'Help me--help me----' [Taking
(_i. e._, Mrs. Piper "taking," &c. Ed.) my right hand with her
right, and passing it to her left and making me take hold of her
left hand.] 'That hand's dead--dead--this one's alive' [_i. e._,
the right]--'help me.'
"The left hand ... was cooler than either of my hands, while the
right hand was warmer than either of my hands [the implication
being that Mrs. Piper was possessed by Mrs. Walsh. Ed.]
"I'm alive--I'm alive--Albert's coming over soon. He can't
stay--poor boy--poor boy--Albert--Albert--Alfred--Albert--I know
you--Alice--Alice--William--Alice----' (S. 'Yes, I know. I'll
tell them. You remember me. I stayed with you in New York.')
'Yes, I know. But, oh, I can't remember. I'm so cold--I'm so
cold. Oh, help me--help me'--[making tremulous movements of
hands]. (S. 'I know. I'll tell them. You remember me; my name's
Hodgson.') 'Yes. Mr. Hodgson. Where are the girls? Yes. You had
fish for breakfast on the second day, didn't you?' (S. 'I don't
remember very well.') 'And the tea--who was it spilt the cup of
tea? Was it you or William?' [I think I remember something about
the tea, but not very clearly. R. H.] 'You were in the corner
room--bedroom--upstairs. Were you cold? Then there was some
blancmange--you didn't like that. No. It was cream--Bavarian
cream. [Is all this Mrs. Piper, or is it Shakspere, or is it the
spirit of a fussy old lady? Ed.] Albert--poor boy; he's coming
soon. William--[something about arranging the
property]--William--God bless him.'
"The above was much less than was really said. But that was the
sort of thing, and nothing _à la mode_ Phinuit at all. It was the
most strikingly personal thing I have seen."
This, some commentators want us to believe, was still "another
personality" of Mrs. Piper--if Phinuit was. Four in the case of Sallie
Beauchamp are well established, and nine in the case of Dr. Wilcox's
patient. I wonder how many Dr. Prince would consider a probable
number, and at what number the spiritistic hypothesis would begin to
appear easier than the divided personality one. All unquestionable
cases of secondary personality that I know of do not cross the sex,
and are the results of brain injury or disease. Mrs. Piper and most of
the mediums are normal people, and do their best when physically at
their best.
The following report (Pr. VIII, 126f.) by Mr. T. Rogers Rich, a well
known artist of Boston, made from contemporary notes of the sittings,
is among the best:
"My first sitting with her was on September 6th, 1888. With
little trouble she went into the trance ... and after a moment's
silence ... I was startled by the remarkable change in her
voice--an exclamation, a sort of grunt of satisfaction, as if the
person had reached his destination and gave vent to his pleasure
thereat by this sound, uttered in an unmistakably male voice, but
rather husky. I was at once addressed in French with, 'Bonjour,
Monsieur, comment vous portez vous?' to which I gave answer in
the same language, with which I happen to be perfectly familiar.
My answer was responded to with a sort of inquiring grunt, much
like the French 'Hein?'.... Nearly all my interviews were begun
in the same manner.... I was quite unwell with nervous
troubles.... The first thing told me was of a 'great light behind
me, a good sign,' &c. Then suddenly all my ills were very clearly
and distinctly explained and so thoroughly that I felt certain
that Mrs. Piper herself would have hesitated to use such plain
language! Prescriptions were given to me...."
"_Second Sitting on October 5th._--... The 'Doctor' told me of my
niece being frequently 'in my surroundings,' and that she was
then at my side. Up to this time I had not heard my name
mentioned, so I asked for it from my niece. The 'Doctor' was
again puzzled and said, 'What a funny name--wait, I cannot go so
fast!' Then my entire name was correctly spelt out but entirely
with the French alphabet, each separate letter being clearly
pronounced in that language. My niece had been born, lived most
of her short life, and died in France. Then the attempt to
pronounce my name was amusing--finally calling me 'Thames
Rowghearce Reach.' The 'Doctor' never called me after that
anything but 'Reach.'"
The spelling of a name "entirely with the French alphabet, each
separate letter being clearly pronounced in that language," is a feat
that few English-speaking students could accomplish, because the
matter is of little consequence, and generally neglected. I have been
in France some, and have translated two French books without incurring
critical censure that I am aware of, and yet that feat would be far
beyond me.
"One day Mrs. Piper pointed to a plain gold ring on my finger and
said: 'C'est une alliance, how you call that? A wedding ring,
n'est-ce pas?' This was true. Now if Mrs. Piper had learned
French at school here [which she did not or anywhere else. Ed.]
she would most probably have called this ring 'un anneau de
marriage,' and not have given it the technical name 'alliance.'"
There are many cases of mediums speaking in languages which they did
not know, but which the control, when incarnate, did. Mr. Rich
continued:
"Breaking into the run of conversation, the 'Doctor' of a sudden
said, 'Hullo, here's Newell!' [pseudonym] (mentioning the name of
a friend who had died some months before).... 'Newell' had
frequently purported to communicate directly with his mother
through Mrs. Piper at previous sittings, but this was the first
time that any intimation of his presence was given to me. I was
totally unprepared for this, and said, 'Who did you say?' The
name was repeated with a strong foreign accent, and in the
familiar voice and tone of the 'Doctor.' Then there seemed for a
moment to be a mingling of voices as if in dispute, followed by
silence and heavy breathing of the medium. All at once I was
astonished to hear, in an entirely different tone and in the
purest English accent, 'Well, of all persons under the sun,
Rogers Rich, what brought you here? I'm glad to see you, old
fellow! How is X and Y and Z, and all the boys at the club?' Some
names were given which I knew of, but their owners I had never
met, and so reminded my friend 'Newell,' who recalled that he
followed me in college by some years and that all his
acquaintances were younger than I. I remarked an odd movement of
the medium while under this influence; she apparently was
twirling a mustache, a trick which my friend formerly practised
much."
Now if all this drama is telepathy, it certainly is not of the "common
or garden variety," and if "Newell" is a secondary personality of Mrs.
Piper, it is one of hundreds of instances of that woman having
secondary personalities who are men. I have read accounts of a good
many undoubted cases of secondary personality, and have yet to read of
one where the sex was crossed. Aren't these interpretations growing to
look a little absurd? Mr. Rich goes on:
"_June 3rd, 1889._--This time I asked to communicate with my
friend 'Newell.' ... The 'Doctor' said, 'I'll send for him,' and
kept on talking with me for a while. Then he said, 'Here's
Newell, and he wants to talk with you "Reach," so I'll go about
my business whilst you are talking with him, and will come back
again later.' ... My name was called clearly as 'Rogers, old
fellow!' without a sign of accent [Remember that 'Phinuit'
always pronounced it with an accent. Ed.] and the same questions
put as to how were the 'fellows at the club.' My hand was
cordially shaken [by the medium. Ed.], and I remarked the same
movement of twisting the mustache, ... When 'Newell' left me
there was the usual disturbance in the medium's condition, and
then the resumption of the familiar voice, accent and mannerisms
of Dr. Phinuit...."
Mr. Rich continues (Pr. VIII, 130):
"I produced a dog's collar. After some handling of it [by the
medium] the 'Doctor' recognized it as belonging to a dog which I
had once owned. I asked 'If there were dogs where he was?'
'Thousands of them!' and he said he would try to attract the
attention of my dog with this collar. In the midst of our
conversation he suddenly exclaimed, 'There! I think he knows you
are here, for I see [him] coming from away off!' He then
described my collie perfectly, and said, '_You_ call him, Reach,'
and I gave my whistle by which I used to call him. 'Here he
comes! Oh, how he jumps! There he is now, jumping upon and around
you. So glad to see you! Rover! Rover! No--G-rover, Grover!
That's his name!' The dog was once called Rover, but his name was
changed to Grover in 1884, in honor of the election of Grover
Cleveland."
The knowledge here may have been telepathic, but how about the
dramatization?
* * * * *
Mrs. Piper's English Sittings of 1889-90 were held under the
supervision of Sir Oliver Lodge and Dr. Walter Leaf, and the report of
them has an introduction by Myers, and is followed by a statement of
impressions of Mrs. Piper by James. All these experts expressed
perfect confidence in the honesty of the medium, and that the
phenomena were not explicable by any agency yet known to science.
Sir Oliver Lodge says (Pr. VI, 445):
"The details given of my family are just such as one might
imagine obtained by a perfect stranger surrounded by the whole of
one's relations in a group and able to converse freely but
hastily with one after the other; not knowing them and being
rather confused with their number and half-understood messages
and personalities, and having a special eye to their physical
weaknesses and defects. [Phinuit was (?) a doctor. Ed.] A person
in a hurry thus trying to tell a stranger as much about his
friends as he could in this way gather, would seem to me to be
likely to make much the same kind of communication as was
actually made to me."
Here is an episode explaining a nickname that Phinuit habitually
applied to Sir Oliver (Pr. VI, 471f.):
"Cousin married, and the gentleman passed out at sea, round the
sea.... Hullo, he's got funny buttons, big, bright.... A uniform.
He has been a commander, an officer, a leader; not military, but
a commander.... [A little further on Phinuit suddenly brings out
the word Cap'n in connection with him, but, in a curious and half
puzzled way, applies it to me. It remained my Phinuit nickname to
the end, though quite inapplicable.] Your mother has got a good
picture of him taken a long time ago, pretty good, old-fashioned,
but not so bad of him. Yes, pretty good. He looks like that now.
He looks younger than he did...."
As in this vision, so it was in one of my own dreams which I suspect
was in several respects veridical; and in two other dreams where I
cannot trace any veridicity: the persons had grown young.
This recalls Peter Ibbetson's statement that he and his beloved kept
themselves about twenty-seven. There are reports that Peter Ibbetson
is not all fancy, but even if it were, such reports would be
inevitable.
But in another dream which I fully believe to have been veridical, the
person had grown older in proportion to the time since "passing over,"
but there was a peculiar reason for such a manifestation: I fancy that
my friend may have wanted to appear to "grow old with me."
There are some things to suggest that if there are post-carnate souls,
they can appear as of any age in their experience--and so show their
history since separation, to anyone rejoining them.
* * * * *
Edmund Gurney, author of "Phantasms of the Living," and a very active
member of the S. P. R. died in 1888. In December, 1889, his ostensible
spirit communicated at several sittings with Sir Oliver Lodge through
Mrs. Piper. Sir Oliver says (Pr. XXIII, 141f.):
"I learned in this way more about the life and thoughts of Edmund
Gurney than I had known in his lifetime."
And Mrs. Piper knew less. Then where did it come from? These Gurney
sittings are very interesting and suggestive, but we can use our
limited space to better advantage.
* * * * *
Here are some characteristic Phinuit Touches (Pr. VI, 484):
"She remembers more than you do. What do you think she says to
me? She says, don't swear, doctor; she did, sure as you live....
"Dr.: 'Do you know who Jerry--J--E--R--R--Y--is?' O. L.: 'Yes.
Tell him I want to hear from him.' U[ncle] J[erry. Ed.]: 'Tell
Robert, [his brother] Jerry still lives. I will be very glad to
hear from me. This is my watch. Uncle Jerry--my watch.'...
"P.: 'I say, Captain, your friends have a lot to tell you,
they're just clamoring to get at you. Why the devil don't you
give them a chance?' O. L.: 'Well, I will next time.' (Watch
handled again. It was a repeater, and happened to go off.) P.:
'Hullo, I didn't do that. Jerry did that, to remind you of him.
Here, take it away--it goes springing off--it's alive.' ... 'It
was Uncle Jerry, the one that had the fall. I'll bring you some
more news of him. Give me back his nine-shooter.' (Meaning the
watch.)"
Phinuit and the Lodge family and their next-door neighbors, the
Thompsons, got to be great friends. Phinuit had given them much good
advice, professional and other, and had really been of considerable
service to them, even if only through their imaginations.
At the end of their second series of sittings, Feb. 23, 1890, he said:
"Now, all you people come here. Good-by, Susie. Good-by, Ike.
Good-by, Nelly. Now, all clear out and let me talk to Marie.
(Long conversation of a paternal kind, with thoroughly sensible
advice. Then O. L. returned.) Captain, it's not good-by, it's _au
revoir_, and you shall hear of me when I've gone away.' O. L.:
'How can I?' P.: 'Oh, I will tell some gentleman a message and he
will write it for me. You'll see.
"_Au revoir, au revoir, &c._"
Hodgson's inclination while writing his report, was to attribute the
phenomena to telepathy from the sitter. This might account for a part
of the knowledge which the medium displayed, but it did not account
for knowledge which the sitter never had, but left such knowledge to
be accounted for by the vastly less probable hypothesis of
teloteropathy from absent persons, which begins to approach the
improbability of spiritism itself. But after the medium's possession
of the knowledge is accounted for, the main problem is yet to be
approached. Knowledge of a particular circumstance is virtually the
same in all minds possessing it. But after a medium, say Mrs. Piper,
has obtained an item of knowledge from, let it be granted for
argument's sake, the sitter's mind, what makes her emotional attitude
regarding it not that of the sitter or of herself, but of some
departed friend of the sitter? What makes her rejoice in it or regret
it as this departed friend, alone among all intelligences, would? What
makes the play of her mind regarding it--suggestion, response,
appreciation or depreciation, comment and discussion of all kinds,
just what would be that of the departed soul which professes to be
speaking through her? And what makes all this occur with a fidelity to
the character and situation worthy of the greatest dramatists? And how
comes that average New England woman to display that supreme dramatic
genius virtually every day for a generation? This is not telepathy or
teloteropathy. When Hodgson wrote his first report, he and the
researchers generally had not got as far as the questions raised by
the dramatic features. But he closed with the following mysterious
paragraph:
"The foregoing report is based upon sittings not later than 1891.
Mrs. Piper has given some sittings very recently which materially
strengthen the evidence for the existence of some faculty that
goes beyond thought-transference from the sitters, and which
certainly _primâ facie_ appear to render some form of the
'spiritistic' hypothesis more plausible. I hope to discuss these
among other results in a later article."
The occasion for this paragraph was made plain in his next report,
issued in 1898, and published in Pr. S. P. R., Vol. XIII.
A young man alluded to in the S. P. R. reports as George Pelham, had
died. He was a member of a very prominent English family, and on the
distaff side, of an equally prominent family in New York. He had
graduated at Harvard and spent some years as a housemate with the
Howards (pseudonym) in Boston, though he died in New York, after some
later years passed there. He was well known to the present writer, who
finds the utterances of his alleged post-carnate self entirely in
character. He was of a very philosophic bent, and no mean writer in
both prose and verse. Psychical research was by no means his most
prominent interest, or Hodgson his most intimate friend, though he had
discussed the subject several times with Hodgson, and been introduced
by him, under a pseudonym, for a single sitting with Mrs. Piper. For a
month after G. P.'s death Hodgson's regular sittings with Mrs. Piper
went on without there being any manifestation professing to come from
G. P., when Mr. John Hart (pseudonym) who had been much more intimate
with G. P. than Hodgson had, was sitting, in Hodgson's presence, with
Mrs. Piper, and after Phinuit had announced a "George," an uncle of
Mr. Hart, he went on, as Hodgson reports (Pr. XIII, 297f.):
"There is another George who wants to speak to you. How many
Georges are there about you any way? [Hodgson continues. Ed.]
"The rest of the sitting, until almost the close, was occupied by
statements from G. P., Phinuit acting as intermediary. George
Pelham's real name was given in full, also the names, both
Christian and surname, of several of his most intimate friends,
including the name of the sitter. Moreover, incidents were
referred to which were unknown to the sitter or myself. One of
the pair of studs which J. H. was wearing was given to Phinuit
[_i. e._ to the medium. Ed.].... '(Who gave them to me?)
[Throughout these sittings, the sitters' remarks are in
parentheses. Ed.] That's mine. Mother gave you that. (No.) Well,
father then, father and mother together. You got those after I
passed out. Mother took them. Gave them to father, and father
gave them to you. I want you to keep them. I will them to you.'
Mr. Hart notes: 'The studs were sent to me by Mr. Pelham as a
remembrance of his son....
"James and Mary [Mr. and Mrs.] Howard [Pseudonyms. Ed.] were
mentioned with strongly specific references, and in connection
with Mrs. Howard came the name Katharine. 'Tell her, she'll know.
I will solve the problems, Katharine.' Mr. Hart notes: 'George,
when he had last stayed with [the Howards], had talked frequently
with Katharine (a girl of fifteen years of age) upon such
subjects as Time, Space, God, Eternity, and pointed out to her
how unsatisfactory the commonly accepted solutions were. He added
that some time he would solve the problems.' Mr. Hart added that
he was entirely unaware of these circumstances. I was myself
unaware of them, and was not at that time acquainted with the
Howards.
No telepathy then. Phinuit continues:
"'Who's Rogets? [Phinuit tries to spell the real name.] (Spell
that again.) [At the first attempt afterwards Phinuit leaves out
a letter, then spells it correctly.] Rogers.... Rogers has got a
book of mine. (What is he going to do with it?)'
"[Both Hart and G. P. knew Rogers, who at that time had a certain
MS. book of G. P. in his possession. The book was found after G.
P.'s death and given to Rogers to be edited. G. P. had promised
during his lifetime that a particular disposition should be made
of this book after his death. This action ... was here, and in
subsequent utterances which from their private nature I cannot
quote, enjoined emphatically and repeatedly, and had it been at
once carried out, as desired by G. P., much subsequent
unhappiness and confusion might have been avoided.]
"During the latter part of the sitting, and without any relevance
to the remarks immediately before and after, which were quite
clear as expressions from G. P. came the words, 'Who's James?
Will--William.' [It must be remembered that Phinuit was reporting
G. P. throughout.] This was apparently explained by Phinuit's
further remarks at the close of the sitting.
"Phinuit: 'Who's Alice? (What do you want me to say to her?) [To
R. H.] Alice in spirit. Alice in spirit says it's all over now
and tell Alice in the body all is well. Tell Will I'll explain
things later on. He [George] calls Alice, too, in the body. I
want her to know me, too, Alice and Katharine.... He won't go
till you say good-by. [The hand then wrote: George Pelham. Good
day (?) John.] ...'
"[Alice James, the sister of Professor William James, had
recently died in England. The first name of Mrs. James is also
Alice. Alice, the sister of Katharine, is the youngest daughter
of Mr. Howard and was very fond of G. P.]
"As I have already said, the most personal references made at the
sitting cannot be quoted; they were regarded by J. H. as
profoundly characteristic of Pelham.
This was followed by the most remarkable experiences of the kind that
ever occurred before Hodgson himself passed over to the majority and
was ostensibly manifested to his surviving friends through Mrs. Piper
and other mediums. G. P. sent for his friends the Howards (pseudonym)
with whom he had been a housemate in Boston, for his parents, and for
other friends. All of these came, very skeptical regarding the
genuineness of the manifestations, but Mr. Howard--an eminent scholar
of wide experience of the world, became convinced that he was in
converse with the postcarnate intelligence of his old friend; the
majority of the relatives, who were of a more orthodox habit than Mr.
Howard, were brought at least to a condition of agnosticism on the
subject, and the arch-critic Hodgson who had exposed more
"spiritualistic" frauds than all other men put together, was turned
into a militant spiritualist. G. P. was asked.
"(Can't you tell us something he or your mother has done?) 'I saw
her brush my clothes and put them away. I was by her side as she
did it. I saw her take my sleeve buttons from a small box and
give them to my father. I saw him send them to John Hart. I saw
her putting papers, etc., into a tin box.'
"The incident of the 'studs' was mentioned at the sitting of
Hart. G. P.'s clothes were brushed and put away, as Mrs. Pelham
wrote, not by herself, but by 'the man who had valeted George.'"
This incident is used by Mrs. Sidgwick in Pr. XV, 31, in support of
the thesis that a medium's communications are influenced by education
and social habits. I am disposed entirely to endorse this. The
communications seem to me to come from a blending of the control, the
medium, and the sitter. Perhaps this utterance will seem less Delphic
as we go on.
The following (Pr. XIII, 416f.) does not seem much like telepathy.
"Mrs. Piper [on coming out of the trance. Ed.]: 'There is the man
with the beard' [whom she saw in the trance. Ed.] Mrs. Piper then
described what she thought was a dream. 'I saw a bright light and
a face in it, a gentleman with a beard on his face, and he had a
very high forehead and he was writing.' R. H.: 'Would you know it
again if you saw it?' Mrs. Piper: 'Oh, yes. I would know it, I
think.' R. H.: 'Well, try and recall it....'
"After Mrs. Piper comes out of [a second. Ed.] trance she is
shown a collection of thirty-two photographs, nine of them being
of men, from which she selects the picture of the person whom she
saw when coming out of trance the first time. The photograph that
she first picked out was an excellent likeness of G. P. She
afterwards picked out another photograph of him. She stated that
she never knew the gentleman when living."
Within twenty-four hours of this experience, or some other reported
elsewhere, the dream recollection had, like dream recollections
generally, faded away: she could not recognize the photograph. We can
talk about telopsis here, if we want to, but telopsis of what? Of that
photograph? Nonsense! And as strange as anything else about it, is
that there is nothing strange about it. In my own dreams I see any
number of people I never saw before, just as plainly as I see any
number on the street, and if photographs were handed me, as those were
to Mrs. Piper, immediately on awaking, I could identify them. This
identification is nothing out of the ordinary course of nature, only
the wit to see that it is, has but just come.
But with any sitter, Mrs. Piper _may_ have had telepathically just as
definite an idea as the sitter has, or she _may_ always have been
telepathically impressed in her dream by the post-carnate man himself.
Each one of us will have to fumble to his own conviction, if he ever
reaches one.
Hodgson continues (Pr. XIII, 321-2):
"It was during this sitting [Dec. 22, 1892] that perhaps the most
dramatic incident of the whole series occurred....
"Mr. Howard: 'Tell me something that you and I alone know,
something in our past that you and I alone know.' G. P.: 'Do you
doubt me, dear old fellow?' Mr. H.: 'I simply want something--you
have failed to answer certain questions that I have asked--now I
want you to give me the equivalent of the answers to those
questions in your own terms....' G. P.: 'You used to talk to me
about....'
"The writing which followed ... contains too much of the personal
element in G. P.'s life to be reproduced here. Several statements
were read by me, and assented to by Mr. Howard, and then was
written 'private' and the hand gently pushed me away. I retired
to the other side of the room, and Mr. Howard took my place close
to the hand where he could read the writing. He did not, of
course, read it aloud, and it was too private for my perusal. The
hand, as it reached the end of each sheet, tore it off from the
block-book, and thrust it wildly at Mr. Howard, and then
continued writing. The circumstances narrated, Mr. Howard
informed me, contained precisely the kind of test for which he
had asked, and he said that he was 'perfectly satisfied,
perfectly.'
"Characteristic also of the living G. P. was the remark made to
me later, apparently with reference to the circumstances of the
private statements:
"'Thanks, Hodgson, for your kind help and reserved manners, also
patience in this difficult matter.'"
All this, I suppose, is mere telepathy or the subliminal self, or
divided self, or some other self, of an average New England housewife!
In this report the sittings take up some two hundred pages, and
Hodgson devoted about fifty pages to his reasons for accepting the
spiritistic hypothesis regarding them. James said: "I know of no more
masterly handling anywhere of so unwieldy a mass of material"; and yet
he never squarely agreed with Hodgson, though he often says he was
tempted to.
Hodgson's reasons cannot be fairly understood without familiarity with
the evidence. They are very ingenious and interesting, and would give
the most skeptical reader pause, but we have space for only a few
generalizations.
"The manifestations of this G. P. communicating have not been of
a fitful and spasmodic nature, they have exhibited the marks of a
continuous living and persistent personality ... what change has
been discernible is a change not of any process of
disintegration, but rather of integration and evolution...."
"That G. P. could get into some closer relation with his father
and the Howards than with Miss M. or myself is intelligible; but
it is not so obvious why Mrs. Piper's _secondary personality_
should...."
"... The mixtures of truth and error bear no _discernible_
relation to the consciousness of the sitters, but suggest the
action of another intelligence groping confusedly among its own
remembrances."
"We get all varieties of communication; some of them, purporting
to come from persons who when living were much mentally
disturbed, suggesting the incoherency of delirium; others of
them, purporting to come from persons who have been dead very
many years, suggesting a fainter dreaminess [or more remoteness.
Ed.]; others purporting to come from persons recently deceased
whose minds have been clear, showing a corresponding clearness.
My own conclusion ... is forced upon me by experience, and
strengthened by various statements of the communicators
themselves concerning the causes of confusion."
"Again, that persons just 'deceased' should be extremely confused
and unable to communicate directly, or even at all, seems
perfectly natural after the shock and wrench of death.
"Of such confusions as I have indicated above I cannot find any
satisfactory explanation in 'telepathy from the living,' but they
fall into a rational order when related to the personalities of
the 'dead.'"
"In cases where we should _a priori_ be led to expect that the
communicators would certainly not be confused, or, if they were
confused, the confusion would not make much difference, Phinuit
was particularly successful. The cases I refer to are those of
little children recently deceased."
This seems to me a very strong point. Its force will be realized by
most of those who read the Sutton and Thaw sittings in Pr. XIII.
Phinuit, the "preposterous old scoundrel," is eminently "the
children's friend." Hodgson continues:
"Having tried the hypothesis of telepathy from the living for
several years, and the 'spirit' hypothesis also for several
years, I have no hesitation in affirming with the most absolute
assurance that the 'spirit' hypothesis is justified by its
fruits, and the other hypothesis is not."
"Since Phinuit's 'departure' [explained below. Ed.] the voice has
been used on a few rare occasions only, and almost exclusively by
communicators who purported to be relatives of the sitters, and
who had used the voice before Phinuit's 'departure.' ... But
there never seemed to be any confusion between the personality
using the hand, whether this was 'clear' or not, and the
personality using the voice."
This consideration and those before associated with it seem to me more
for the spiritistic hypothesis than any others which we have met so
far.
G. P. soon developed into the Mercury of the spiritistic Pantheon,
turned up at almost all sittings, went to seek the friends of the
sitters in the "spirit-world," and acted as intermediary for those who
were new to the conditions of communication or had not enough of the
psychokinetic power which was alleged to be necessary to use them
effectively.
* * * * *
It should be noted that during G. P.'s life, telepathy from the sitter
had been reluctantly conceded as a defense against the spiritistic
hypothesis, but it was not till after his death that teloteropathy
from persons at a distance had been conceded; and it was not until
1909--seven years later, that James, one of the most steadfast holders
of the conservative fort, in his report on the communications from
Hodgson's alleged spirit, in Pr. XXIII, admitted, as among the
possible "sources other than R. H.'s surviving spirit for the
veridical communications from the Hodgson control," "access to some
cosmic reservoir, where the memory of all mundane facts is stored and
grouped around personal centers of association."
James had a subtler mind than mine or almost anybody's. Mine is not
subtle enough to be very seriously impressed by the difference between
"memory of mundane facts stored and grouped around personal centers of
association," and a surviving personality; and what difference does
impress me, is pretty well filled up when the "personal center" also
has "grouped around" it, the initiative, response, repartee and
emotional and dramatic elements that, as shown not only by the G. P.
control, but, years later, by the Hodgson control, and by hundreds of
others, make a gallery of characters more vivid than those depicted by
all the historians. But even claiming them to be historical, as in a
sense they are, would not be claiming them to be surviving. Many
historical characters have put in that claim through Mrs. Piper and
other mediums, and while our greatest psychologist knew as much as
anybody about the claims, and seemed somewhat on the road to admitting
them to be from surviving personalities, he did not live to go farther
than memories "stored and grouped around personal centers of
association."
But _à bas_ the "memories"! one is tempted to say; credit them all to
telepathy if you will: what are they beside the active and spontaneous
emotions and responses?
* * * * *
Meantime in 1892 our old acquaintance Stainton Moses had "passed
over," and in 1895 had ostensibly appeared through Mrs. Piper to
Professor Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania, and Professor
Newbold asked him to bring his friends Imperator, Rector, etc. These
high-toned personages--none high-toneder, as John Hay of blessed
memory, puts it--nor more bombastic or long-winded, had manifested
before only through Moses (for convenience I am using the simple
phraseology that would attend their genuineness, but do not mean to
convey any opinion), and when they came through Mrs. Piper, they
professed to find her in a very bad way because of the "earth-bound"
Phinuit, and they professed to remove him to a higher sphere where he
would be purified and disinfected and sanctified and turned from a
genial sympathetic, humorous and, it must be admitted, occasionally
slangy and profane soul, into a prig of purest ray serene. Rector now
generally took his place with Mrs. Piper, which he had done to some
extent before. The gang was very well satisfied with G. P., however,
and he appeared for some years as their valued friend and
collaborator, until in 1897 they declared his work done, and his
proper place a "higher sphere." He bade his friends here affectionate
farewells, but has occasionally sent back messages, and has once or
twice spoken himself. Mind, I am throughout speaking only
provisionally; but I would defy any writer to escape the
verisimilitude, and even if that were possible, it would involve
intolerable verbiage.
Imperator & Co. now proposed to do most of the talking themselves, and
they did a frightful amount of it; and occasionally really said
something.
Moreover, they took charge of Mrs. Piper and Hodgson too, in their
goings and comings and all their ways, dictated their diet and
exercise, and even whom they should have at sittings, giving the
preference to people of exceptionally high character, and to those in
deep distress from loss of friends, and eager to communicate with
them.
The present writer and some others are tempted to think that these
autocratic personages are products telepathically conveyed to Mrs.
Piper from the unconscious imagination of Hodgson and his recollection
of Moses' writings, with perhaps a little involuntary dash of Prof.
Newbold. But if they are, the imagination is expanded to a degree
entirely outside of ordinary experience, and its study must enlarge
our conception of the range of human faculty. Whatever they were, if
only an allegorized form of faith cure, there is no question about
their beneficial effect on the clearness of the sittings, and on the
health and happiness of Mrs. Piper and Hodgson.
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