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Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09

by Elbert Hubbard · English · Gutenberg #6449 · 496,066 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09

Author: Elbert Hubbard


        
Release date: September 1, 2004 [eBook #6449]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT, VOLUME 9

Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers

by

ELBERT HUBBARD






CONTENTS

JOHN WESLEY
HENRY GEORGE
GARIBALDI
RICHARD COBDEN
THOMAS PAINE
JOHN KNOX
JOHN BRIGHT
BRADLAUGH
THEODORE PARKER
OLIVER CROMWELL
ANNE HUTCHINSON
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU




JOHN WESLEY


  My horse was very lame, and my head did ache exceedingly. Now what
  occurred I here avow is truth--let each man account for it as he
  will. Suddenly I thought, "Can not God heal man or beast as He
  will?" Immediately my weariness and headache ceased; and my horse
  was no longer lame.
  --_Wesley's Journal_


Once in a speech on "The Increase of Population," Edmund Burke
intimated his sympathy with Malthus, and among other interesting data
made note that Susanna Wesley was the twenty-fourth child of her
parents. Burke, however, neglected to state how many sisters and
brothers Susanna had who were younger than herself, and also what
would have been the result on church history had the parents of
Susanna named their twenty-third child Omega.

John Wesley was the fifteenth child in a family of nineteen. And yet
the mother did her own work, thus eliminating the servant-girl
problem, and found time to preach better sermons to larger
congregations than did her husband. Four of Susanna's children became
famous--John, Charles, Samuel and Martha.

John rebuked and challenged the smug, self-satisfied and formal
religion of the time; had every church-door locked against him;
sympathized with the American Colonies in their struggle for freedom;
and founded a denomination which today is second in wealth and numbers
to one alone.

John Wesley left no children after the flesh, but his influence has
colored the entire fabric of Christianity. There is no denomination
but that has been benefited and bettered by his beautiful spirit.

Charles Wesley was the greatest producer of hymns the world has ever
seen, having written over six thousand songs, and rewritten most of
the Bible in lyric form. He was "the brother of John Wesley," and
delighted all his life in being so called. No one ever called John
Wesley the brother of Charles. John had a will like a rope of silk--it
slackened, but never broke. He was resourceful, purposeful,
courageous, direct, healthy, handsome, wise, witty, happy; and he rode
on horseback, blazing the way for many from darkness into light.
Charles followed.

Three of the children of Charles Wesley became great musicians, and
one of them was the best organist of his time in England.

The third noted brother in this remarkable family was Samuel, who was
thirteen years older than John, and exercised his prerogative to pooh-
pooh him all his life. Samuel was an educated High Churchman, a Latin
scholar, and a poet of quality. Samuel always had his dignity with
him. He wrote and published essays, epics, and histories of nobodies;
but of all his writings, the only thing from his pen that is now read
and enjoyed is a letter of remonstrance to his mother because he hears
that she has joined "Jack's congregation of Methodists, and is a
renegade from the true religion." Needless to say the "true religion"
to Samuel was the religion in which he believed--all others were
false. Samuel being an educated Churchman did not know that all
religions are true to the people who believe in them.

The fourth Wesley of note was Martha, who looked so much like her
brother John that occasionally, in merry mood, she dressed herself in
his cassock and surplice, and suddenly appearing before the family
deceived them all until she spoke. Martha was the only girl in the
brood who was heir to her mother's mind. Had she lived in this age she
would have made for herself a career. A contemporary says, "She could
preach like a man," a remark, I suppose, meant to be complimentary. In
one respect she excelled any of the Wesleys--she had a sense of humor
that never forsook her. John usually was able to laugh; Charles smiled
at rare intervals; and Samuel never. As it was, Martha married and was
swallowed by the conventions, for the times subdue us, and society
takes individuality captive and binds it hand and foot with green
withes.

But the times did not subdue John Wesley: he was the original circuit-
rider, and his steed was a Pegasus that took the fences of orthodoxy
at a bound, often to the great consternation and grief of theological
squatters. He was regarded as peculiar, eccentric, strange,
extravagant, just as any man ever has been and would be today who
attempted to pattern his life after that of the Christ. Perhaps it is
needless to say that the followers of John Wesley do not much resemble
him, indeed not more so than they resemble Jesus of Nazareth.

John Wesley and Jesus had very much in common. But should a man of the
John Wesley pattern appear, say, in one of the fashionable Methodist
churches of Chicago, the organist would drown him out on request of
the pastor; and the janitor, with three fingers under his elbow, would
lead him to the door while the congregation sang "Pull for the Shore."

       *       *       *       *       *

Julia Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah and Sarah Wedgwood, and sister to
the mother of Darwin, wrote a life of John Wesley. In this book Miss
Wedgwood says, "The followers of a leader are always totally different
from the leader." The difference between a leader and a follower is
this: a leader leads and a follower follows. The shepherd is a man,
but sheep are sheep. As a rule followers follow as far as the path is
good, but at the first bog they balk. Betrayers, doubters and those
who deny with an oath are always recruited from the ranks of the
followers. In a sermon John Wesley once said: "To adopt and live a
life of simplicity and service for mankind is difficult; but to follow
the love of luxury, making a clutch for place, pelf and power,
labeling Paganism Christianity, and imagining you are a follower of
Christ, this is easy. Yet all through life we see that the reward is
paid for the difficult task. And now I summon you to a life of
difficulty, not merely for the sake of the reward, but because the
life of service is the righteous life--the right life--the life that
leads to increased life and increased light."

A most remarkable woman was Susanna Wesley. The way she wound her mind
into the minds of her sons, John and Charles, was as beautiful as it
was extraordinary. Very few parents ever really get acquainted with
their offspring. Parents who fail to keep their promises with their
children, and who prevaricate to them, have children that are
secretive and sly. But often no one person is to blame, for children
do not necessarily have any spiritual or mental relationship to their
parents: their minds are not attuned to the same key--they are not on
the same wire.

Indeed, even with the great Susanna Wesley, there was a close and
confiding intimacy with only two of her brood. John Wesley has
written, "I can not remember ever having kept back a doubt from my
mother--she was the one heart to whom I went in absolute confidence,
from my babyhood until the day of her death."

The Epworth Parsonage, where John Wesley was born, was both a house
and a school. Probably the mother centered her life on John and
Charles because they responded to her love in a way the others did
not. In the year Seventeen Hundred Nine, the parsonage burned, with a
very close call for little John, who was asleep in one of the upper
chambers. The home being destroyed, the family was farmed out among
the neighbors until the house could be rebuilt. John was sent to the
home of a neighboring clergyman, ten miles away. After a week we find
him writing to his mother asking her if she has lost a little boy,
because if so he is the boy--a most gentle way of reminding her that
she had not written to him. At this time he was but six years old, yet
we see his ability to write a letter. This peculiar letter is the
earliest in a long correspondence between mother and son. Mrs. Wesley
preserved these letters, just as the mother of Whitman treasured the
letters of Walt with a solicitude that seems tinged with the romantic.
Much of the correspondence between John Wesley and his mother has been
published, and in it we see the intimate touch of absolute mental
undress where heart speaks to heart in abandon and self-forgetfulness.
The person who reaches this stage in correspondence has passed beyond
the commonplace. This formulation of thought for another is the one
exercise that gives mental evolution or education.

John Wesley was sent to Charterhouse School when he was eleven years
old, and he remained there for six years, when he went to Oxford.
After his twelfth year he was denied the personal companionship of his
mother, but every day he wrote to her--sometimes just a line or two,
and then at the end of the week the letter was forwarded.

In his later years Wesley did not think that either the "Charity
School" or Oxford, where he went on a scholarship, had benefited him
except by way of antithesis: but the correspondence with his mother
was the one sweet influence of his life that could not be omitted.
Their separation only increased the bond. We grow by giving; we make
things our own by reciting them; thought comes through action and
reaction; and happy is the man who has a sympathetic soul to whom he
can outpour his own. When Charles Kingsley was asked to name the
secret of his insight and power, he paused, and then answered, "I had
a friend!"

John Wesley had a friend; incidentally, that friend was his mother.
She died when he was thirty-nine years of age, after he had learned to
wing his way on steady pinions. And in the flight she was not left
behind.

We are familiar with the lives of many great men, but where among them
all can you name a genius whose mother's mind matched his, even in his
maturity?

       *       *       *       *       *

The primitive Christian is a reactionary product of his time. Humanity
continuing in one direction acquires success, and finally through an
overweening pride in its own powers, relaxation enters, and self-
indulgence takes the place of effort. No religion is pure except in
its inception and in its state of persecution.

A religion grown great and rich and powerful becomes sloth and swag,
its piety being performed perfunk; and then ceases to be a religion at
all. It is merely an institution.

Religions multiply by the budding process. Every new denomination is
an offshoot from a parent stem. "A new religion" is a contradiction in
terms--there is only one religion in the world. A brand-new religion
would wither and die as soon as the sun came out.

New denominations begin with a protest against the lapses and
grossness of the established one, and the baby religion feeds and
lives on the other until it has grown strong enough to break off and
live a life of its own. Buds are being broken off all the time, but
only a few live; the rest die because they lack vitality. That is why
all things die--I trust no one will dispute the fact.

Christian Science, for instance, appropriated two great things from
the parent stock: the word "Christian," and the Oxford binding, which
made "Science and Health" look just like the Bible. One could carry it
on the street as he went to church without fear of accusation that he
was on the way to the circulating-library. It fulfilled the
psychological requirements.

John Wesley retained the word "Episcopal" for the new denomination,
and he also retained the gown and tippet. And it was near a hundred
years before the denomination had grown to a point where it could
afford to omit the gown--and possibly its omission was an error then.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of university education at this time let Miss Wedgwood speak:

  We can hardly wonder that the time spent at Oxford was, to a man
  like Gibbon, "the most idle and unprofitable period of his life," to
  use his own words. Even under the very different system which
  prevailed in the early portion of the present century, one of the
  most fertile thinkers of our day has been heard to speak of his
  university career as the only completely idle interval of his life.
  How often it may have proved not a mere episode, but the foundation
  of a life of idleness, no human being can tell. Nor was the evil
  merely negative. While the student lounged away his time in the
  coffeehouse and the tavern, whilst the dice-box supplied him with a
  serious pursuit, and the bottle a relaxation, he was called upon at
  every successive step to his degree to take a solemn oath of
  observance to the academical statutes which his behavior infringed
  in every particular. While the public professors received a thousand
  pounds a year for giving no lectures, the candidates for degrees
  were obliged to ask and pay for a dispensation for not having
  attended the lectures that never were given.

  The system in every public declaration solemnly recognized and
  accepted was in every private action utterly defied. Whatever the
  Oxford graduate omitted to learn, he would not fail to acquire a
  ready facility in subscribing, with solemn attestations, professions
  which he violated without hesitation or regret. The Thirty-nine
  Articles were signed on matriculation, without any attempt to
  understand them. "Our venerable mother," says the great historian
  from whom we have already quoted, "had contrived to unite the
  opposite extremes of bigotry and indifference"; and these blended
  influences, which led Gibbon first to Rome, and then to skepticism,
  proved no doubt to the average mind a mere narcotic to all spiritual
  life. Gibbon is not the only great writer who has recorded his
  testimony against Hanoverian Oxford. Adam Smith in that work which
  has been called, with pardonable exaggeration, "the most important
  book that ever was written," the "Wealth of Nations," has, in the
  following remarks on universities, evidently incorporated his
  anything but loving recollections of the seven years which he spent
  at Baliol College. "In the University of Oxford the greater part of
  the professors have for these many years given up even the pretense
  of teaching. The discipline is in general contrived not for the
  benefit of students, but for the interest, or, more properly
  speaking, for the ease of the masters. In England the public schools
  are less corrupted than the universities; the youth there are, or at
  least may be, taught Greek and Latin, which is everything the
  masters pretend to teach. In the university the youth neither are,
  nor can be, taught the sciences which it is the business of those
  incorporated bodies to teach." It is the last statement to which
  attention is here directed. It is not that the university drew up a
  bad program, nor even that this scheme was badly carried out. That
  might be the case also; but the radical vice of the system was not
  that it was essentially incomplete in theory or faulty in practise,
  but that it was false. Its worst result was not poor scholars, but
  insincere and venal men.

  I believe Europe can not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge
  in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and
  all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If
  there is an inferiority, it is in the persons, not in the places or
  their constitution. And here I can not help confessing that a desire
  to please the great, and bring them to the universities, causes a
  compliance with fashionable manners, a relaxation of discipline, and
  a connivance at ignorance and folly, which errors he confesses
  occasioned the English universities to be in less repute than they
  were formerly. The fashion of sending young men thither was even in
  some degree abated among that class who at the present day would be
  the most reluctant to omit it--the nobility. The useless and
  frivolous exercises required for the attainment of academic honors,
  and the relaxation of discipline, had by this time created a
  widespread and deeply felt contempt for the whole system of which
  they formed a part; and the indulgent but candid observer, who tries
  to dilute his censure with the truism that he could not have been
  placed anywhere in this sublunary world without discovering many
  evils, informs us that in his seven years' residence at the
  university he saw immorality, habitual drunkenness, idleness,
  ignorance and vanity openly and boastfully obtruding themselves on
  public view, and triumphing without control over the timidity of
  modest merit.

It is under such conditions that the strong man of right intent
rebukes the sloth and hypocrisy of his time. Very seldom, if ever,
does he faintly guess the result of his protest. Jesus rebuked the
iniquities and follies of Jerusalem, pleading for simple honesty,
directness of speech and love of neighbors. In wrath the Pharisees
made the usual double charge against Him--heresy and treason--and He
was crucified.

Heresy and treason are invoked together; one is an offense against the
Church, the other against the State. "The man is a traitor to God and
a traitor to his country," that settles it--off with his head! The
offenses of Socrates, Jesus, Savonarola, Huss, Wyclif, Tyndale, Luther
and John Wesley were all identical. Reformers are always guilty--
guilty of telling unpleasant truths. The difference in treatment of
the man is merely the result of a difference in time and local
environment. Oxford was professedly a religious institution; it was a
part of the State. John Wesley, the undergraduate, perceived it was in
great degree a place of idleness and dissipation. John wrote to his
mother describing the conditions. She wrote back, pleading that he
keep his life free from the follies that surrounded him, and band
those who felt as he did into a company, and meet together for prayer
and meditation in order that they might mutually sustain one another.

Susanna Wesley was the true founder of Methodism, a fact stated by
John Wesley many a time.

As early as Seventeen Hundred Nine, she wrote to her son Samuel, who
was then at Oxford, and who was never converted from Oxford
influences: "My son, you must remember that life is our divine gift--
it is the talent given us by Our Father in Heaven. I request that you
throw the business of your life into a certain method, and thus save
the friction of making each day anew. Arise early, go to bed at a
certain hour, eat at stated times, pray, read and study by a method,
and so get the most out of the moments as they swiftly pass, never to
return. Allow yourself so much time for sleep, so much for private
devotion, so much for recreation. Above all, my son, act on principle,
and do not live like the rest of mankind, who float through the world
like straws upon a river."

In hundreds of her letters to John and Charles at Oxford, their mother
repeats this advice in varying phrase: "We are creatures of habit; we
must cultivate good habits, for they soon master us, and we must be
controlled by that which is good. Life is very precious--we must give
it back to God some day, so let us get the most from it. Let us
methodize the hours, so we may best improve them."

John Wesley was a leader by nature, and before he was twenty he had
gathered about him at Oxford a little group of young men, poor in
purse, but intent in purpose, who held themselves aloof from the
foibles and follies of the place, and planned their lives after that
of the Christ. In ridicule they were called Methodists. The name
stuck.

In this Year of Grace, Nineteen Hundred Seven, there are more than
thirty million Methodists, and about seven million in America, The
denomination owns property to the value of more than three hundred
million dollars in the United States, and has more than one hundred
thousand paid preachers.

       *       *       *       *       *

After Wesley's graduation he was importuned by the authorities to
remain and act as tutor and teacher at Christchurch College. He was a
diligent student, and his example was needed to hold in check the
hilarious propensities of the sons of the nobility.

In due time John was ordained to preach, and often he would read
prayers at neighboring chapels. His brother Charles was his devoted
echo and shadow. Then there was an enthusiastic youth by the name of
George Whitefield, and a sober, serious young man, James Hervey, who
stood by the Oxford Methodists and endured without resentment the
sarcastic smiles of the many.

These young men organized committees to visit the sick; to search out
poor and despondent students and give them aid and encouragement; to
visit the jails and workhouses. The intent was to pattern their lives
after that of the Apostles. They were all very poor, but their wants
were few, and when John Wesley's income was thirty pounds a year he
gave two pounds for charity. When it was sixty pounds a year he gave
away thirty pounds; and here seems a good place to say that, although
he made more than a hundred thousand pounds during his life from his
books, he died penniless, just as he had wished and intended.

Thus matters stood in the year Seventeen Hundred Thirty-five, when
James Oglethorpe was attracted to that Oxford group of ascetic
enthusiasts. The life of Oglethorpe reads like a novel by James
Fenimore Cooper. He was of aristocratic birth, born of an Irish
mother, with a small bar sinister on his scutcheon that pushed him out
and set him apart. He was a graduate of Oxford, and it was on a visit
to his Alma Mater that he heard some sarcastic remarks flung off about
the Wesleys that seemed to commend them. People hotly denounced
usually have a deal of good in them. Oglethorpe was an officer in the
army, a philanthropist, a patron of art, and a soldier of fortune. He
had been a Member of Parliament, and at this particular time was
Colonial Governor of Georgia, home on a visit.

He had investigated Newgate and other prisons and had brought charges
against the keepers and succeeded in bringing their inhumanities
before the public. Hogarth has a picture of Oglethorpe visiting a
prison, with the poor wretches flocking around him telling their woes.
In a good many instances prisoners were given their liberty on the
promise of Oglethorpe that he would take them to his colony. The heart
of Oglethorpe was with the troubled and distressed; and while his
philanthropy was more on the order of that of Jack Cade than it was
Christian, yet he at once saw the excellence in the Wesleys, and
strong man that he was, wished to make their virtue his own. He
proposed that the Wesleys should go back with him to America and
evolve an ideal commonwealth.

Oglethorpe had with him several Indians that he had brought over from
America. They were proud, silent, and had the reserve of their kind.
Moreover, they were six feet high, and when presented at court wore no
clothes to speak of.

King George the Second, when these sons of the forest were presented
to him, appeared like a pigmy. Oglethorpe knew how to march his forces
on an angle. London society went mad trying to get a glimpse of his
savages. He declared that the North American Indians were the finest
specimens--intellectually, physically and morally--of any people the
world had ever seen. They needed but one thing to make them perfect--
Christianity.

The Wesleys, discouraged by the small impress they had made on Oxford,
listened to Oglethorpe's arguments and accepted his terms. Charles was
engaged as Secretary to the Governor, and John Wesley was to go as a
missionary.

And so they sailed away to America. On board ship they methodized the
day--had prayers, sang hymns and studied, read, exhorted and wrote as
if it were their last day on earth. This method excited the mirth of
several scions of nobility who were on board, and Oglethorpe opened
out on the scoffers thus: "Here, you damned pirates, you do not know
these people. They forget more in an hour than you ever knew. You take
them for tithe-pig parsons, when they are gentlemen of learning, and,
like myself, graduates of Oxford. I am one of them, I would have you
know. I am a religious man and a Methodist, too, and I'll knock hell
out of anybody who, after this, smiles at either my friends or my
religion!"

Long years after, Wesley told this story to illustrate the fact that a
man might give an intellectual assent to a religion and yet not have
much of it in his heart. Oglethorpe looked upon Methodism as a good
thing--cheaper than a police system--and sure to bring good results.
If John Wesley and George Whitefield could convert his colony and all
the Indians round about, his work of governing would be much reduced.
Oglethorpe was a very practical man.

       *       *       *       *       *

John Wesley did not convert the Indians, because he could not find
them, they being away on wars with the other tribes. Besides that, he
could not speak their language and was wholly unused to their ways.
The Indian does not unbosom himself to those who do not know him, and
the few Indians Wesley saw were stubbornly set in the idea that they
had quite as good a religion as his. And Wesley was persuaded that
probably they had.

In the city of Savannah, there were just five hundred eighteen people
when John Wesley was there. About half of these were degenerate sons
of aristocrats, ex-convicts, soldiers of fortune, and religious
enthusiasts--the rest were plain, every-day folk.

Pioneer people are too intent on maintaining life to go into the
abstrusities of either ethics or theology. Wesley soon saw that his
powers demanded a wider field. The experience, though, had done him
much good, especially in two ways. He had gotten a glimpse of chattel
slavery and made a remark about it that is forever fixed in
literature, "Human slavery is the sum of all villainies." Then he had
met on shipboard a party of Moravians, and was so impressed by them
that he straightway began to study German. In six weeks' time he could
carry on an acceptable conversation in that language. At the end of
the two years which he spent in Georgia, through attending the
services of the Moravians, he could read, write and preach in the
German language.

The Moravians seemed to him the only genuine Christians he had ever
seen, and their example of simple faith, industry, directness of
speech, and purity of life made such an impress upon him that
thereafter Methodism and Moravianism were closely akin.

At Savannah there were some people too poor to afford shoes, and when
these people appeared at church in bare feet they were smiled at by
the alleged nobility. Seeing this, on the following Sunday, John
Wesley appeared barefoot in the pulpit, and this was his habit as long
as he was in Georgia. This gave much offense to the aristocrats; and
Wesley also made himself obnoxious by preaching salvation to the
slaves. Indeed, this was the main cause of his misunderstanding with
the Governor. Oglethorpe considered any discussion or criticism of
slavery "an interference with property-rights."

And so Wesley sailed back to England, sobered by a sense of failure,
but encouraged by the example of the Moravians, who accepted whatever
Providence sent, and counted it gain.

The overseers of Oxford, like Oglethorpe, had no special personal
sympathy with the peculiar ideas of Wesley; but as a matter of policy
they recognized that his influence in the great educational center was
needed for moral ballast. And so his services were secured as Greek
Professor and occasional preacher.

Concerning the moral status of Oxford at this time, Miss Wedgwood
further says:

  The condition of Oxford at the time of the rise of Methodism has
  been too little noted among those who have studied the great
  Evangelical Revival. Contemplating this important movement in its
  latter stage, they have forgotten that it took its rise in the
  attempt made by an Oxford tutor to bring back to the national
  institution for education something of that method which was at this
  time so disgracefully neglected. To surround a young man with
  illustrations of one kind of error is the inevitable preparation for
  making him a vehement partisan of its opposite, and in education the
  influence on which we can reckon most certainly is that of reaction.
  The hard external code and needless restrictions of Methodism should
  be regarded with reference to what Wesley saw in the years he spent
  in that abode of talent undirected and folly unrestrained.

It was to the Oxford here described--the Oxford where Gibbon and Adam
Smith wasted the best years of their lives, and many of their
unremembered contemporaries followed in their steps with issues not
less disastrous to themselves, however unimportant to others--to the
Oxford where young men swore to observe laws which they never read,
and renewed a solemn promise when they had discovered the
impossibility of keeping it--that Wesley, about a score of years after
his entrance to the University, poured forth from the pulpit of Saint
Mary's such burning words as must have reached many a conscience in
the congregation.

"Let me ask you," he said in his university sermon for Seventeen
Hundred Forty-four, "in tender love and in the spirit of meekness, is
this a Christian city? Are we, considered as a community of men, so
filled with the Holy Ghost as to enjoy in our hearts, and show forth
in our lives, the genuine fruits of that Spirit? I entreat you to
observe that here are no peculiar notions now under consideration:
that the question is not concerning doubtful opinions, but concerning
the undoubted fundamental branches (if there be any such) of our
common Christianity. And for the decision thereof I appeal unto your
own consciences. In the presence of the great God, before whom both
you and I shall shortly appear, I pray you that are in authority over
us, whom I reverence for the sake of your office, to consider (and
that not after the manner of dissemblers with God), are you living
portraitures of Him whom ye are appointed to represent among men? Do
you put forth all your strength in the vast work you have undertaken?
Let it not be said that I speak here as if all under your care were
intended to be clergymen. Not so: I speak only as if they were
intended to be Christians. But what example is set us by those who
enjoy the beneficence of our forefathers, by Fellows, Students,
Scholars, and more especially those who are of some rank and eminence?
Do ye, who are of some rank and eminence--do ye, brethren, abound in
the fruits of the Spirit, in holiness of mind, in self-denial and
mortification, in seriousness and composure of spirit, in patience,
meekness, sobriety, temperance; and in unwearied, restless endeavors
to do good to all men? Is this the general character of Fellows of
Colleges? I fear it is not. Rather, have not pride and haughtiness,
impatience and peevishness, sloth and indolence, gluttony and
sensuality been objected to us, perhaps not always by our enemies, nor
wholly without ground? Many of us are more immediately consecrated to
God, called to minister in holy things. Are we then patterns to the
rest in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity? Did we indeed enter
on this office with a single eye to serve God, trusting that we were
inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost to take upon us this ministration,
for the promoting of His glory, and the edifying of His people? Where
are the seals of our apostleship? Who that were dead in trespasses and
sins have been quickened by our word? Have we a burning zeal to save
souls from death? Are we dead to the world and the things of the
world? When we are smitten on one cheek, do we not resent it, or do we
turn the other also, not resisting evil, but overcoming evil with
good? Have we a bitter zeal, inciting us to strive sharply and
passionately with those that are out of the way? Or is our zeal the
flame of love, so as to direct all our words with sweetness, lowliness
and meekness of wisdom?

"Once more: what shall we say of the youth of this place? Have you
either the form or the power of Christian godliness? Are you diligent
in your business, pursuing your studies with all your strength? Do you
redeem the time, crowding as much work into every day as it can
contain? Rather, are ye not conscious that you waste day after day
either in reading that which has no tendency to Christianity, or in
gaming, or in--you know not what? Are you better managers of your
fortune than of your time? Do you take care to owe no man anything? Do
you know how to possess your bodies in sanctification and honor? Are
no drunkenness and uncleanness found among you? Yea, are there not
many of you who glory in your shame? Are there not a multitude of you
that are forsworn? I fear, a swiftly increasing multitude. Be not
surprised, brethren--before God and this congregation I own myself to
have been of the number solemnly swearing to observe all those customs
which I then knew nothing of, and all those statutes which I did not
so much as read over, either then, or for a long time afterwards. What
is perjury, if this is not? But if it be, oh, what a weight of sin--
yea, sin of no common dye--lieth upon us! And doth not the Most High
regard it?

"May it not be a consequence of this that so many of you are a
generation of triflers with God, with one another, and your own souls?
Who of you is, in any degree, acquainted with the work of the Spirit,
His supernatural work in the souls of men? Can you bear, unless now
and then in a church, any talk of the Holy Ghost? Would you not take
it for granted, if any one began such a conversation, that it was
hypocrisy or enthusiasm? In the name of the Lord God Almighty I ask,
What religion are ye of?"

We may hope that, even in that cold and worldly age, there was more
than one in Saint Mary's church whose conscience was awakened so to
re-echo that question that he joined with his whole soul in the prayer
with which the sermon concluded: "Lord, save or we perish! Take us out
of the mire that we sink not. Unto Thee all things are possible.
According to the greatness of Thy power, preserve Thou them that are
appointed to die!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The fervor of Wesley's zeal gave offense to the prim and precise
parsons who recited their prayers with the aid of a T-square.

To them religion was a matter of form, but to Wesley it was an
experience of the heart. From the Moravians he had acquired the habit
of interjecting prayers into his sermons--from speaking to the people,
he would suddenly change, raise his eyes aloft, and speak directly to
Deity. This to many devout Churchmen was blasphemous. Of course the
trouble was that it was simply new--we always resent an innovation.
"Did you ever see anything like that?" And the fact that we have not
is proof that it is absurd, preposterous, bad.

Wesley went one day to hold evening prayers at a village church near
Oxford. His fame had preceded him: the worthy warden securely locked
the doors and deposited the key in the capacious depths of his
breeches-pocket and went a-fishing. Several old women were waiting to
attend the service, and rather than send them away, Wesley, standing
on the church-steps, read prayers and spoke. It was rather an unusual
scene, and the unusual attracts. Loafers from the tavern across the
way came over, children gathered in little groups, people who had
never entered a place of worship stopped and listened. Some laughed,
others looked serious, and most of them remained to the close of the
meeting.

Thus does everything work together for good for everybody. The warden
and his astute vestrymen thought to block the work of Wesley, and
Wesley did the only thing he could: spoke outside of the church, and
thus did he speak to the hearts of people who had never been inside
the church and who would not go inside the building. Street preaching
was not the invention of John Wesley, but up to his time no clergyman
in the Church of England had attempted so undignified a thing.

Wesley was doing what his mother had done the very year he was born.
She had preached to the people of the village of Epworth in the
churchyard, because, forsooth, the chancel was a sacred place and
would suffer if any one but a man, duly anointed, spoke there. The
woman had a message and did the only thing she could: spoke outside,
and spoke to two hundred fifty people, while the regular attendance to
hear her husband was twenty-five.

And so John Wesley had made a discovery, and that was that to reach
the submerged three-quarters, you must make your appeal to them on the
street, in the marketplaces--from church-steps. His experience on
shipboard and in America had done him good. They had taught him that
form and ritual, set time and place, were things not necessary-that
whenever two or three were gathered together in His name, He was in
their midst.

And it was in preaching to the outcasts that Wesley found himself, and
was "converted." He says, "My work in America failed because I had not
then given my heart to my Savior."

Now he got the "power," and whether this word means to his followers
what it meant to him is a question we need not analyze. Power comes by
abandonment: the orator who flings convention to the winds and gives
himself to the theme finds power.

The opposition and the ridicule were all very necessary factors in
allowing Wesley to find his true self.

He wrote to his mother telling what he was doing, and she wrote back
giving him her blessing, writing words of encouragement. "Son John
must speak the words of love on any and every occasion when the spirit
moves," she said.

John Wesley was attracting too much attention to himself at Oxford:
there came words of warning from those in authority. To these
admonitions he replied that he was a duly ordained clergyman of the
Church of England, and there was nothing in the canons that forbade
his holding services when and where he desired. And then he adds: "To
show simple men and women the way of life, and tell them of Him who
died that we might live, surely can not be regarded as an offense. I
must continue in my course." That settled it--Oxford the cultured was
not for him. He was a preacher without a pulpit--a teacher without a
school.

He saddled his horse and with all his earthly possessions in his
saddlebags traveled toward London--following that storied road which
almost every great and powerful man of England had traversed. He was
penniless, but he owned his horse. He was a horse-lover: he delighted
in the companionship of a horse, and where the way was rough he would
walk and lead the patient animal. It comes to us with a slight shock
that the Reverend John Wesley anticipated Colonel Budd Doble by
saying, "God's best gift to man--a horse!"

So John Wesley rode, not knowing where he was going or why--only that
Oxford no longer needed him. When he started he was depressed, but
after passing the confines of the town, and once out upon the highway
with the green fields on either side, he lifted up his voice and sang
one of his brother's hymns. Exile from Oxford meant liberty.

Arriving at a village he would stand on the church-steps, on a street-
corner, often from a tavern-veranda, and speak. In his saddlebags he
carried his black robe and white tippet. He could put these on over
his travel-stained clothes and look presentable. His hair was worn
long and parted in the middle; his face was cleanly shaved, and
revealed comely features of remarkable strength.

The man was a commanding figure. People felt the honesty of his
presence. The crowd might cat-call, and jeer, but those who stood near
offered no violence. Indeed, more than once the roughs protected him.
He preached of righteousness and judgment to come. He pleaded for a
better life--here and now. And so he traveled, preaching three or four
times a day, and riding from twenty to fifty miles. At London he
preached on the "heaths," and thousands upon thousands who never
entered a church heard him. That phrase, "They came to scoff and
remained to pray," is his.

Wesley's oratory was not what is known to us as "the Methodist style."
He was quiet, moderate, conversational, but so earnest that his words
carried conviction. The man was honest--he wanted nothing--he gave
himself.

Such a man today, preaching in the same way, would command marked
attention and achieve success. The impassioned preaching of Whitefield
was what gave the "Methodist color." Charles Wesley was much like
Whitefield, and was regarded as a greater preacher than his brother
because he indulged in more gymnastics--but John was far the greater
man. And so the Great Awakening began; other preachers followed the
example of the Wesleys, and were preaching in the fields and by the
roadside and were organizing "Methodist Societies." But John Wesley
was their leader and exemplar.

Neither of the Wesleys nor did Whitefield have any idea at this time
of organizing a separate denomination or of running opposition to the
Established Church.

They belonged to the Church, and these "Societies" were merely for
keeping alive the spiritual flame which had been kindled.

The distinguishing feature of John Wesley's work seemed to be the
"class" which he organized wherever possible. This was a
schoolteacher's idea. There was a leader appointed, and this class of
not more than ten persons was to meet at least once a week for prayer
and praise and to study the Scriptures. Each person present was to
take part--to stand on his feet and say something.

In this Wesley was certainly practical: "All must take part, for by so
doing the individual grows to feel he is a necessary part of the
whole. Even the humblest must read or pray or sing, or give testimony
to the goodness of God."

And so we get the circuit-rider and see the evolution of the
itinerancy. And then comes the "local preacher," who was simply a
"class leader" who had gotten "the power."

Wesley saw with a clear and steady vision that the paid preacher, the
priest with the "living" was an anomaly. To make a business of
religion was to miss its essence, just as to make a business of love
evolves a degenerate. Our religion should be a part of our daily
lives. The circuit-rider was an apostle: he had no home, drew no
salary, owned no property; but gave his life without stint to the
cause of humanity. It was Wesley's habit to enter a house--any house--
and say, "Peace be unto this house." He would hold then and there a
short religious service. People were always honored by his presence:
even the great and purse-proud, as well as the lowly, welcomed him.
All he wanted was accommodations for himself and his horse, and these
were freely given. He looked after the care of his horse himself, and
always the last thing at night he would see that his horse was
properly fed and bedded.

One horse he rode for ten years; and when it grew old and lame, his
grief at having to leave it behind found vent in a flood of tears as
he stood with his arms about its neck. Was ever mortal horse so
honored? To have carried an honest man a hundred thousand miles, and
been an important factor in the Great Awakening! Is there a Horse
Heaven? In the State of Washington they say, "Yes." Perhaps they are
right. Often before break of day, before the family was astir, Wesley
would be on his way.

       *       *       *       *       *

As an argument against absolute innocency in matters of love, the
unfortunate marriage of Wesley, at the discreet age of forty-eight,
has been expressed at length by Bernard Shaw. If Wesley had roamed the
world seeking for a vixen for a wife, he could not have chosen better.
Mrs. Vazeille was a widow of about Wesley's age--rich, comely, well
upholstered. In London he had accepted her offers of hospitality, and
for ten years had occasionally stopped at her house, so haste can not
be offered as an excuse. The fatal rock was propinquity, and this was
evidently not on the good man's chart; neither did he realize the ease
and joy with which certain bereaved ladies can operate their lacrimal
glands. On the way down "The Foundry" steps at night, Wesley slipped
and sprained his ankle. He hobbled to the near-by residence of Mrs.
Vazeille. On sight of him, the lady burst into tears, and then for the
next week proceeded to nurse him.

He was due on the circuit and anxious to get away; he could not ride
on horseback, and therefore if he went at all, he must go in a
carriage. Mrs. Vazeille had a carriage, but she could not go with him,
of course, unless they were married.

So they were married, and were miserable ever afterward.

Mrs. Wesley was glib, shallow, fussy, and never knew that her husband
belonged to the world, and to her only incidentally. She took sole
charge of him and his affairs; ordered people away who wanted to see
him if she did not like their looks; opened his mail; rifled his
pockets; insisted that he should not go to the homes of poor people;
timed his hours of work; and religiously read his private journal and
demanded that it should be explained. This woman should have married a
man who kept no journal, and one for whom no one cared. As it was, no
doubt she suffered up to her capacity, which perhaps was not great,
for God puts a quick limit on the sensibilities of the stupid.

She even pulled him about by the hair before they had been married a
year; and made faces at him as he preached, saying sotto voce, "I've
heard that so often that I'm sick of it." In company, she would
sometimes explain to the assembled guests what a great and splendid
man her first husband was.

But worst of all, she took Wesley's faithful saddle-horse "Timothy,"
and hitched him alongside of a horse of her own to a chaise, with a
postboy in a red suit on his back, tooting a horn.

Poor Wesley groaned, and inwardly said, "It is a trial sent by God--I
must bear it all."

Finally the woman renounced him and left for Scotland. He then stole
his own horse from her stable, and rode away as in the good old days.
But alas! in a month she was on his trail. She caught up with him at
Birmingham and fell on his neck, after the service, explaining that
she was Mrs. John Wesley. The poor man could neither deny it nor run
away, without making a scene, and so she accompanied him to his
lodgings.

Her protests of reformation vanished in a week, and the marks of her
nails were again on his fine face. This program was kept up for
thirty-one years, with all the variations possible to a jealous woman,
who had an income sufficient to allow her to indulge her vagaries and
still move in good society. On October Fourteenth, Seventeen Hundred
Eighty-one, Wesley wrote in his Journal, "I am told my wife died
Monday and was buried on this evening."

Wesley once wrote to Asbury, "She has cut short my life full twenty
years." If this were true, one can see how Wesley would otherwise have
made the century run. However, Wesley was right: it was not all bad;
the Law of Compensation never sleeps, and as a result of his
unfortunate marriage, Wesley knew things which men happily married
never know.

John Wesley did not blame anybody for anything. Once when he saw a
drunken man reeling through the street, he turned to a friend and
said, "But for the grace of God, there goes John Wesley!" All his
biographies agree that after his fiftieth year his power as a preacher
increased constantly until he was seventy-five. He grew more gentle,
more tender, and there was about him an aura of love and veneration,
so that even his enemies removed their hats and stood silent in his
presence. And we might here paraphrase his own words and truly say of
him, as he said of Josiah Wedgwood, "He loved flowers and horses and
children--and his soul was near to God!"

The actual reason for breaking away or "coming out" is a personal
antipathy for the leader. Like children playing a game, theologians
reach a point where they say, "I'll not play in your back yard." And
not liking a man, we dislike his music, his art, his creed. So they
divide on free grace, foreordination, baptism, regeneration, freedom
of the will, endless punishment, endless consequences, conversion,
transubstantiation, sanctification, infant baptism, or any one of a
dozen reasons which do not represent truth, but are all merely a point
of view, and can honestly be believed before breakfast and rejected
afterward.

However, the protest of Wesley had a basic reason, for at his time the
State Religion was a galvanized and gilded thing, possessing
everything but the breath of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so John Wesley went riding the circuit from Land's End to John
O'Groat's, from Cork to Londonderry, eight thousand miles, and eight
hundred sermons every year. In London he spoke to the limit of his
voice--ten thousand people. Yet when chance sent him but fifty
auditors he spoke with just as much feeling. His sermons were full of
wit, often homely but never coarse. He knew how to interest tired men;
how to keep the children awake. He interspersed anecdote with
injunction, and precept with homely happenings. He yearned to better
this life, and to evolve souls that were worth saving.

Wesley grew with the years, and fully realized that preaching is for
the preacher. "Always in my saddlebags beside my Bible and hymnal I
carried one good book." He knew history, science as far as it had been
carried, and all philosophy was to him familiar. The itineracy he
believed was a necessity for the preacher as well as for the people. A
preacher should not remain so long in a place as to become cheap or
commonplace. New faces keep one alive and alert. And the circuit-rider
can give the same address over and over and perfect it by repetition
until it is most effective.

The circuit-rider, the local preacher or class-leader, the classes,
the "love-feast," or general meeting--these were quite enough in the
way of religious machinery.

Finally, however, Wesley became convinced that in large cities an
indoor meeting-place was necessary in order to keep the people banded
together. Often the weather was bad, and then it was too much to
expect women and children to stand in the rain and cold to hear the
circuit-rider.

So London supplied an abandoned warehouse called "The Foundry," and
here the Wesleys met in a vast body for a service of song and praise.
Methodism is largely a matter of temperament--it fits the needs of a
certain type. The growing mind is not content to have everything done
for it. The Catholics and Episcopalians were doing too much for their
people, and not letting the people do enough for themselves. The
Methodist class-meeting allowed the lowliest member to lift up his
voice and make his own appeal to the Throne of Grace. Prayer is for
the person who prays, and only very dull people doubt its efficacy.
The God in your own heart always harkens to your prayer, and if it is
reasonable and right, always answers it.

"Methodism raised the standard of intellect in England to a degree no
man can compute," says Lecky the freethinking historian. Drunkenness,
gambling, dog-fighting, bear-baiting in whole communities were
replaced by the singing of hymns, prayers and "testimonies," in which
every one had a part. Wesley loved flowers and often carried garden-
seeds to give away, and then on his next trip would remember to ask
about results. He encouraged his people to be tidy in their dress and
housekeeping, and gentle in their manners.

Thousands learned to read that they might read the Bible; thousands
sang who had never tried to sing before; and although the singing may
have been of a very crude quality and the public speaking below par,
yet it was human expression and therefore education, evolution,
growth. That Wesley thought Methodism a finality need not be allowed
to score against him. His faith and zeal had to be more or less blind,
otherwise he would not have been John Wesley; philosophers with the
brain of Newton, Spencer, Hegel, Schopenhauer, could never have done
the work of Wesley. Had Wesley known more, he would have done less. He
was a God-intoxicated man--his heart was aflame with divine love.

He carried the standard far to the front, and planted the flowing
pennant on rocky ramparts where all the world could see. To carry the
flag further was the work of others yet to come.

It was only in the year Seventeen Hundred Eighty-four, when Wesley was
eighty-one years old, that he formally broke loose from the mother-
church and Methodism was given a charter from the State. At this time
John Wesley announced himself as a "Scriptural Episcopus," or a bishop
by divine right, greatly to the consternation of his brother Charles.
But the morning stars still sang together, even after he had ordained
his comrade, Asbury, "Bishop of America" and conferred the title of
bishop on a dozen others. It was always, however, carefully explained
that they were merely Methodist-Episcopal bishops and not Episcopal
bishops. A year before his death Wesley issued an order that no
Methodist services should be held at the hours of the regular church
service, and that no Methodist bishop should wear a peculiar robe,
have either a fixed salary, residence or estate, nor should he on any
account allow any one to address him as "My Lord."

It was a very happy life he led--so full of work that there was no
time for complaint. The constant horseback riding kept his system in
perfect health. At eighty-five he said: "I never have had more than a
half-hour's depression in my life. My controlling mood has been one of
happiness, thankfulness and joy." Wesley endeavored not to make direct
war upon the Established Church--he hoped it would reform itself. He
did not know that men with fixed and fat incomes seldom die and never
resign; and his innocence in thinking he could continue on his course
of organizing "Methodist Societies," and still keep his place within
the Church, reveals his lack of logic. Moreover, he never had enough
imagination to see that the Methodist Church would itself become great
and strong and powerful and rich, and be an institution very much like
the one from which in his eighty-first year he at last broke away.
Charles Wesley and Whitefield died members of the Church of England,
and were buried in consecrated ground; but John Wesley passed
peacefully out in his eighty-eighth year, requesting that his body be
buried in City Road Chapel, in the plot of ground that he by his life,
love and work had consecrated. And it was so done.




HENRY GEORGE


  The more you study this question, the more you will see that the
  true law of social life is the law of love, and law of liberty, the
  law of each for all and all for each; that the golden rule of morals
  is also the golden rule of the science of wealth; that the highest
  expressions of religious truth include the widest generalizations of
  political economy.
  --_Henry George_


[Illustration: HENRY GEORGE]

Henry George died in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven. Nearly twenty
years have passed since men heard his voice, looked on his strong,
lithe, active form, saw the gleam of his honest eyes, and felt the
presence of a man--a man who wanted nothing and gave everything--a man
who gave himself. Twenty years!

And in those years the world has experienced, and is now passing
through, a peaceful revolution such as men have never before seen.
Those years have given us a new science of religion; a new education;
a new penology; a new healing art; a new method in commerce.

The wisdom of honesty as a business asset is nowhere questioned, and
the clergy has ceased to call upon men to prepare for death. We are
preparing to live, and the way we are preparing to live is by living.

The remedy Henry George prescribed for economic ills was as simple as
it was new, and new things and simple things are ever looked on as
objectionable. The universality of conservatism proves that it must
have its use and purpose in the eternal order. It keeps us from going
too fast; it prevents us from bringing about changes for which mankind
is not prepared. Nature's methods are evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Slaves can not be made free by edict. Moses led his people out of only
one kind of captivity, and in the wilderness they wandered in bondage
still. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free the colored
race, because it is the law of God that he who would be free must free
himself. A servile people are slaves by habit, and habit is the only
fetter. Freedom, like happiness, is a condition of mind. A whining,
complaining, pinching, pilfering class that listens for the whistle,
watches the clock, that works only when under the menacing eye of the
boss, and stands in eternal fear of the blue envelope here, and
perdition hereafter, can never be made free by legislative enactment.
Freedom can not be granted, any more than education can be imparted:
both must be achieved, or we yammer forever without the pale. A
simple, strong and honest people is free. People enslaved by
superstition and ruled by the dead have work at filing fetters ahead
of them, which only they themselves can do. Henry George did not
realize this, and his strength lay in the fact that he did not. He did
not know when men get the crook out of their backs, the hinges out of
their knees, and the cringe out of their souls, that then they are
free. Slaves place in the hands of tyrants all the power that tyrants
possess. Fortunate it was for Henry George, and for the world, that he
did not know that any man who labors to help the workingman will be
mobbed by the proletariat for his pains a little later on. Monarchies
maybe ungrateful, but their attitude is a sweet perfume compared to
the ingratitude of the laborer. He can be helped only by stealth, and
his freedom must come from within. The moral weakness of man is the
one thing that makes tyranny possible.

Tyranny is a condition in the heart of serfs. Tyrants tyrannize only
over people of a certain cast of mind. Tyrants are men who have stolen
power--convicts who have wrested guns from their guards. Watch them,
and in a little while they will again shift places. Henry George was a
very great man: great in his economic, prophetic insight; great in his
faith, his hope, his love. He gave his message to the world, and
passed on, scourged, depressed, undone, because the world did not
accept the truths he voiced. Yet all for which he strived and
struggled will yet come true--his prayer will be answered. And the
political parties and the men who in his life opposed him are now
adopting his opinions, quoting his reasons, and in time will bring
about the changes he advocated. Of all modern prophets and reformers,
Henry George is the only one whose arguments are absolutely
unanswerable and whose forecast was sure.

       *      *       *       *       *

Henry George was that rare, peculiar and strange thing--an honest man.
Whether he had genius or not we can not say, since genius has never
been defined twice alike, nor put in the alembic and resolved into its
constituent parts. All accounts go to show that from very childhood
Henry George was singularly direct and true. His ancestry was Welsh,
Scotch and English in about equal proportions, and the traits of the
middle class were his, even to a theological sturdiness that robbed
his mind of most of its humor. Reformers must needs be color-blind,
otherwise they would never get their work done--they see red or purple
and nothing else. Born in Philadelphia in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-
nine, on Tenth Street, below Pine, in a house still standing, and
which should be marked with a bronze plate, but is not, Henry George
took on a good many of the moral traits of his Quaker neighbors. His
father was a clerk in the Custom-House, having graduated from a
position as sea-captain on account of an excess of caution and a taste
for penmanship. Later the good man went into the publishing business,
backed by the Episcopal Church, and issued Sunday-School leaflets,
sermons and prayer-books. In fact, he became the official printer of
the denomination. With him was a man named Appleton, who finally went
over to New York and started in on his own account, founding the firm
of D. Appleton and Company, which forty years thereafter was to
publish to the world a book called, "Progress and Poverty."

The worthy father of Henry George was a good Churchman, but not a
businessman. He bought the things he ought not, and left unsold the
things he should have worked off. He didn't know the value of time.
Other people did things while he was getting ready to commence to
begin.

And so the whirligig of time sent him back to his desk at the Custom-
House, on a salary so modest that it meant poverty, and progress crab-
fashion.

The children old enough to work got jobs, and Henry of the red hair
and freckles found a place as printer's devil at two dollars a week.
College was out of the question, and Girard Institute was regarded as
infidelic. However, episcopacy did not have quite so strong a hold
on this household as it once had. The Georges believed in freedom and
took William Lloyd Garrison's paper, "The Liberator," and the mother
read it aloud by the light of a penny dip. Next came "Uncle Tom's
Cabin," and when, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six, the Republican Party
was born, the George family, father, mother and children, all had
pronounced views on the subject of human rights--very different views
from those held by the royal Georges of England. When Henry George was
sixteen, the restlessness of coming manhood found expression, and he
shipped before the mast and sailed away to the Antipodes. The boy had
the small, compact form, the physical activity and the daring which
make a first-class sailor, but happily his brain was too full of ideas
to transform him into a dog of the sea.

A trip to Australia, with salt pork all the time, sea-biscuit every
day, lobscouse on Sundays, plum-duff once a month, and a total absence
of mental stimulus, cured him of the idea that freedom was to be found
on the bounding wave and the rolling deep.

At seventeen he was back at the case, setting type and getting a man's
pay because he was able to "rastle the dic.," which means that he was
on familiar terms with the dictionary and could correct proof.

Education is a matter of desire, and the printer's case with bad copy
to revise is better than "English Twenty-two" at Harvard. Henry George
moused nights at the Quaker Apprentices' Library, and he also read
Franklin's "Autobiography"; his mind was full of Poor Richard maxims,
which he sprinkled through his diary; but best of all, with seven
other printers he formed another "Junta," and they met twice a week to
discuss "poetry, economics and Mormonism." It was very sophomoric, of
course, but boys of eighteen who study anything and defend it in
essays and orations are right out on the highway which leads to
superiority. The trouble with the 'prentice is that he does not know
how to spend his evenings; the love of leisure and the wish for a good
time cause the moments to slip past him, out of his reach forever, out
into the great ocean of time.

Life is a sequence--the logical, farseeing mind is a cumulative
consequence. Men who are wise at forty were not idle at twenty. "Read
anything half an hour a day, and in ten years you will be learned,"
says Emerson.

Henry George worked and read, and the "Junta" gave him the first taste
of that intoxicating thing, thinking on one's feet. We grow by
expression, and never really know a thing until we tell it to somebody
else. Henry George was getting an education, getting it in the only
way any one ever can, or has, or does--getting it by doing.

But the wanderlust was again at work; California was calling--the land
of miracle--and printer's ink began to pall. Henry George was a
sailor; every part of a sailing ship was to him familiar--from bilge-
water to pennant, from bowsprit to sternpost. He could swab the
mainmast, reef the topsail in a squall, preside in the cook's-galley,
or if the mate were drunk and the captain ashore he could take charge
of the ship, put for open sea and ride out the storm by scudding
before the wind.

Ships in need of sailors were lying in the offing. When young Henry
George took a walk it was always along the docks. He knew every ship
there in the Delaware, and visited with the sailormen, who told of the
happenings in far-off climes. News from California much interested
him; California was another America, hopelessly separated from us by
an impassable range of forbidding mountains, reinforced with desert
plains, peopled only by hostile savages. But the sea was an open
highway to this land of enchantment. California called! And finally
Henry George overcame temptation by succumbing to it, and sailed away
southward in the staunch little ship "Shubrick," bound for the modern
Eldorado by way of Cape Horn. It was a six months' passage, with many
stops and much trading, and time that seem lifted out of the calendar
and thrown away. Henry George arrived in California penniless. But he
had health and a willingness to work. He became a farmhand, a tramp
pedler, a laborer shoveling gravel into a sluice-way and standing all
day knee-deep in water. It was all good, for it taught the youth that
life was life; and wherever you go you carry your mental and spiritual
assets, as well as your cares, on the crupper. Then there came a job
in the composing-room of a newspaper, and the life-work of Henry
George was really begun, for his employers had discovered that he
could "rastle the dic.," and if copy were scarce he could create it.

       *       *       *       *       *

The gold-fever got into the blood of Henry George, and his savings
became a shining mark for the mining-shark. A thousand men lose money
at mining where one strikes pay-gravel. Henry George was one of the
thousand.

He got good wages and boarded at the best hotel in San Francisco, the
"What Cheer House." This storied hostelry was owned by a man named
Woodward, who had a few ideas of his own. Woodward not only hated Rum,
Romanism and Rebellion, but also women. Woodward was a confirmed
bachelor, having been confirmed by a lady bachelor in some dark,
mysterious way, years before. So no woman was allowed either to stop
at the hotel or to work in it. The labor was done by Chinese, and
Henry George wrote home to his sisters, describing the place as an
immaculate conception.

Next to the fact that no women were allowed in the "What Cheer House,"
was the further more astounding proposition that the place was run on
absolutely temperance principles, thus, for the time at least,
silencing that hoary adage of the genus wiseacre that no hotel can
succeed without a bar. Woodward became rich, and from the proceeds of
his temperance hotel founded Woodward Gardens--a park beloved by all
who know their San Francisco.

The third peculiar thing about this hotel was that it had a library of
a thousand volumes.

It was the only public library in San Francisco at that time, and it
was the books that led Henry George to spend twice as much for board
as he otherwise would have done.

While Henry George was at the "What Cheer House," an English traveler
added a volume to the little library, Buckle's "History of
Civilization." Woodward tried to read the book, but failing to become
interested in it, between serving the soup and the fish, handed it to
a waiter saying, "Here, give it to that red-headed printer; he can get
something out of it if anybody can." Henry George took the book to his
room, and that night sat reading it until two o'clock in the morning.
That statement of Buckle's, "Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' has
influenced civilization more profoundly than any other book ever
written, save none," caught the young printer's attention.

The next day he looked in the library for the "Wealth of Nations," and
sure enough, it was there! He began to read. He read and reread. And
whether Buckle's statement is correct or not, this holds: Adam Smith's
"Wealth of Nations" influenced Henry George more profoundly than any
other book he had ever read.

Henry George was not yet immune from the gold-fever microbe, and
several times was lured away into the mountains, "grubstaking" a man
with hope plus and secrets as to gold-bearing quartz that would
paralyze the world.

When twenty-one we find our young man one of six printers who bought
out the "Evening Journal." Henry George was foreman of the composing-
room, but took a hand anywhere and everywhere. A curious comment on
the business acumen of the "Journal" men lies in their agreement that
all should have an equal voice in the policy of the paper. Hence we
infer that all were equally ignorant of the stern fact that in
business nothing succeeds but one-man power. So the "Journal" went
drifting on the rocks in financial foggy weather and the hungry waves
devoured her.

When Fate desires a great success she sends her chosen one failure.
Henry George at twenty-two was ragged, in debt--and also in love. The
"What Cheer House" was all right for a man getting good wages, but
when you go into business for yourself it is different, and George
found board with a private family.

The lady in the case was Miss Fox, ward and niece of the landlord with
whom the impecunious printer boarded.

Annie Fox and our printer read Dana's "Household Book of Poetry," with
heads close together.

The inevitable happened--they decided to pool their poverty in the
interests of progress. To ask the landlord for his blessing seemed out
of the question, in view of the fact that the printer was two weeks
behind in his board. The girl had the proverbial clothes on her back.

Matthew McClosky, the uncle, was a good deal of a man. He showed his
shrewdness and appreciation of the present order by buying a large
tract of land near the city, and grew rich on the unearned increment.
Had his niece and the printer confided in him they might have shared
in his prosperity, in which case "Progress and Poverty" would never
have been written.

It was the memorable year of Eighteen Hundred Sixty-one. The heart of
Henry George was with the Union--he had decided to enlist. He told the
girl so behind the kitchen-door. Her answer was a flood of tears, and
a call to arms. The result was that the next night the couple stole
out, and made their way to a Methodist parsonage, where they were
married.

Henry George was nominally a member of the Methodist Church, but the
creed of Thomas Paine was more to his liking--"The world is my
country; mankind are my friends; to do good is my religion." The young
lady was a Catholic, and so the preacher compromised by reading the
Episcopal service. The only witnesses were the minister's wife and
Henry George's chum, Isaac Trump. "I didn't catch your friend's name,"
said the minister in filling out the marriage-certificate.

"I. Trump," was the reply.

"I observe you do," was the answer; "but oblige me with the
gentleman's name."

There are three great epochs in life--birth, death, marriage. The
first two named you can not avoid. Since life is a sequence, no one
can say what would have happened had not this or that occurred. Mrs.
George proved an honest, earnest, helpful wife. Her conservatism
curbed the restless spirit of her husband and gave his mind time to
ripen, for until his marriage the ideals of the French Revolution were
strong in his heart. He saw the evils of life and was intent on
changing them. The Catholic faith is an elastic one, both esoteric and
exoteric, and those who are able can take the poetic view of dogma
instead of the literal, if they prefer. Henry George and his wife took
the spiritual or symbolic view, and moved steadily forward in the
middle of the road. He was too gentle and considerate to quote
Voltaire and Rousseau at inopportune times, and she sustained and
encouraged his mental independence. All of which is here voiced with
one foot on the soft pedal, and with no thought of putting forth an
argument to the effect that young gentlemen with liberal views should
marry ladies who belong to the Catholic persuasion.

The day after his marriage the bridegroom found work in a printery at
twelve dollars a week, and thus was the pivotal point safely rounded.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here was a man absolutely honest, with no bad habits, industrious and
economical, but lacking in that peculiar something which spells
success. The type is not rare. One trouble was that our Henry George
stuck to no one place long enough to make himself a necessity. Men of
half his ability made twice as much money.

The days went by, and Henry George wrote to Trump, "I am advance-agent
for the stork." Now storks bring love and hope--and care, and anxious
days and sleepless nights. Henry George's domestic affairs had
steadied his bark, and while his relatives in Philadelphia thought he
carried an excess of Romish ballast, it was all for the best. He read,
studied, thought, and wanting little his mind did not list either to
port or to starboard.

Henry George had graduated from the case into the editorial room. He
worked on all the newspapers, by turn, in San Francisco and
Sacramento, and had come to be regarded as one of the strongest
editorial writers on the Coast. The business office was beyond his
province, and as a newspaper was a business venture, and is run
neither to educate the public nor for the proprietor's health, the
manager did not look upon Henry George as exactly "safe." And hence
the reason is plain why George was regarded as a sectional bookcase
and not as a fixture.

At thirty he had evolved to a point where the New York "Tribune" asked
him to write a signed editorial for them on the Chinese question. Then
he wrote for the "Overland Monthly"; and when a great literary light
came to San Francisco to appear on the lyceum stage, Henry George was
asked to introduce him to the audience, especially if the man was
believed to have heresy secreted on his person, in which case of
course the local clergy took no risks of contamination, not being
immune.

On the occasion of the death of a certain tramp printer, whose name is
now lost to us in the hell-box of time, no clergyman being found to
perform the service, Henry George officiated, and preached a sermon
which rang through the city like a trumpet-call, extolling not what
the man was, but what he might have been.

This custom of the laity taking charge of funerals still exists in the
West, to a degree not known, say, in New England, where in certain
localities people are not considered legally dead unless both an
orthodox doctor and an orthodox preacher officiate.

The very poor, and the outcasts of society, in San Francisco began to
look upon Henry George as the Bishop of Outsiders. Often he was called
upon to go and visit the stricken, the sick and the dying. And there
was a kind of poetic fitness in all this, for the man possessed that
superior type of moral and intellectual fiber which makes a great
physician or an excellent priest--he could "minister." And it was only
division of labor that separated the offices of doctor and priest, and
actually they are and should be one.

In Sacramento now lives a successful merchant, a Jew by birth, and a
man of great grace of spirit, who has this superior, spiritual quality
which makes his services sought after, and in response to demand he
goes all over the State saying the last words over the dust of those
who in their lives had lost faith in the established order, or had too
much faith in God.

After his thirty-sixth year Henry George slipped by natural process
into this semi-religious order--a priest after the order of
Melchizedek. He was spokesman for those who had no social standing, a
voice for the voiceless, a friend to the friendless, even those who
were not friends to themselves.

But at thirty-seven he was up on the mountain-side where he saw to a
distance that very few men could. He felt his own dignity and knew his
worth. The president of the University of California, recognizing his
ability as a thinker and speaker, asked him to give a course of
lectures on economics.

He gave one--this was all they could digest.

California colleges have had a lot of trouble with economics--it has
been a theme more fraught for them with danger than theology. How
Californians make their money and how they spend it is a topic which
in handling requires great subtlety of intellect, a fine delicacy of
expression and much diplomacy, otherwise twenty-three petards!

Here is a passage from Henry George's lecture before the University of
California:

  For the study of political economy you need no special knowledge, no
  extensive library, no costly laboratory. You do not even need
  textbooks or teachers if you will but think for yourselves. All that
  you need is care in reducing complex phenomena to their elements, in
  distinguishing the essential from the accidental, and in applying the
  simple laws of human action with which you are familiar. Take
  nobody's opinion for granted; "try all things; hold fast to that
  which is good." In this way, the opinions of others will help you
  by their suggestions, elucidations and corrections; otherwise they
  will be to you as words to a parrot.

  All this array of professors, all this paraphernalia of learning, can
  not educate a man. They can but help him educate himself. Here you may
  obtain the tools; but they will be useful to him only who can use
  them. A monkey with a microscope, a mule packing a library, are fit
  emblems of the men--and unfortunately, they are plenty--who pass
  through the whole educational machinery, and come out but learned
  fools, crammed with knowledge which they can not use--all the more
  pitiable, all the more contemptible, all the more in the way of real
  progress, because they pass, with themselves and others, as educated
  men.

  California is a land of extremes--everything grows big and fast,
  especially ideas. No country ever saw such wealth and such poverty
  side by side. The mansions on Nob Hill were so grand that their
  magnificence discouraged the owners and abashed visitors; at
  receptions, a keg of beer on a sawbuck in the kitchen and champagne in
  a washtub, with ham sandwiches in a bushel basket, were all that could
  be assimilated. And yet past the high iron gates of these palaces
  prowled want--gaunt, hungry and menacing.

  Land was never so cheap nor so dear as it has been in California. We
  gave a railroad-company twenty-five thousand acres of land for every
  mile of track it built, and for years a dollar an acre was the ruling
  price at which you could buy to your limit. And yet there were at the
  same time little half-acres for which men pushed a hundred thousand
  dollars in gold-dust over the counter and then crowed about their
  bargain.

Henry George studied economics at first hand. The dignified frappe
which he received in way of honorarium for his university lecture had
its advantages. People in San Francisco wanted to hear what the editor
had to say as well as to read his utterances. He was invited to give
the Fourth of July oration at the Grand Opera House--a very great
compliment.

Henry George was a reformer, and reformers have but one theme, and
that theme is Liberty. We grow by expression. There is no doubt that
the university lecture and the Fourth of July oration added cubits to
the stature of Henry George. In these two addresses we find the kernel
of his philosophy--a kernel that was to germinate into a mighty tree
which would extend its welcoming shade to travelers for many a decade
yet to come.

       *       *       *       *       *

Like every other great book (or great man), "Progress and Poverty" was
an accident--a providential accident. The book was ten years in the
incubation. It began with a newspaper editorial in Eighteen Hundred
Sixty-nine, and found form in a volume of five hundred pages in
Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine.

The editorial merely called attention to the fact that California, in
spite of her vast wealth, was peopled, for the most part, with people
desperately poor; and that ground in the vicinity of any city, town or
place of enterprise was held at so exorbitant a figure that the poor
were actually enslaved by the men who owned the land. That is to say,
the men who owned the land controlled the people who had to live on
it, for man is a land animal, and can not live apart from land, any
more than fishes can live at a distance from water. And moreover we
tax for the improvements on land, thus really placing a penalty on
enterprise.

The article attracted attention, and opened the eyes of one man at
least--and that was the man who wrote it. He had written better than
he knew; and any writer who does not occasionally surprise himself
does not write well.

Henry George had surprised himself, and he wrote another editorial to
explain the first. These editorials extended themselves into a series,
and hand-polished and sandpapered, were reprinted in pamphlet form in
Eighteen Hundred Seventy-one, under the title of "Our Land Policy."
The temerity which prompted the printing of this pamphlet was evolved
through a letter from John Stuart Mill. Henry George knew he was right
in his conclusions, but he felt that he needed the corroboration of a
great mind that had grappled with abstruse problems; so he sent one of
his editorials to Mill, the greatest living intellect of his time.

Mill showed his interest by replying in a long letter, wherein he
addressed George as a man with a mind equal to his own, not as a
sophomore trying his wings.

The letter from Mill was to him a white milepost. The corroboration
gave him courage, confidence, poise.

The thousand copies of the pamphlet cost Henry George seventy-five
dollars. The retail price was twenty-five cents each. Twenty-one
copies were sold. The rest were given away to good people who promised
to read them. Pamphlets are for the pamphleteer, but let the fact here
be recorded that new ideas have always been issued at the author's
expense--and also risk. Martin Luther, Dean Swift, John Milton, Paine,
Voltaire, Sam Adams were all pamphleteers. The early Colonial
"broadsides" were pamphlets issued by men with thoughts plus, and all
of the men just named fired inky volleys which proved to be shots
heard 'round the world.

As the years passed, Henry George was gathering gear; he was getting
an education. Providence was preparing him for his work. All he
expressed by tongue or pen had land, labor, production and
distribution in mind. He was getting acquainted with every phase of
the subject--anticipating the objections, meeting the objectors,
opening up side-paths.

And so, in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-eight, when he sat down to write a
magazine article on "Our Government Land Policy," the air was full of
reasons. Soon the article stretched itself beyond magazine length, and
in order to cover the theme he set down headings:

  1 Wages
  2 Capital
  3 Division of Labor
  4 Population
  5 Subsistence
  6 Rent
  7 Interest
  8 The Remedy for Unequal Distribution

He wrote all one night--wrote in a fever. The next day his pulse got
back to normal, and on talking the matter over with his wife he
decided to begin it all over and work his philosophy up into a book,
writing as he could, only one or two hours a day.

He was absolutely without capital, dependent on his income from space-
writing in the daily newspapers, but he began and the work grew.

It was all done on "stolen time," to use the phrase of Macaulay, and
therefore vital, for things done because you have to do them--done to
get rid of them--contain the red corpuscle.

On March Twenty-second, Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine, the precious
bundle of manuscript was shipped to D. Appleton and Company, New York,
with instructions that if the work was not accepted, to hold subject
to the author's order.

In six weeks came a letter from the Appletons, gracious,
complimentary, "but"--in fact, no work on political economy had ever
sold sufficiently either to make money for the author or to pay the
bare cost of the book to the publisher.

Here was a dampener, and if Henry George had been a trifle more astute
in the laws of literary supply and demand, he could and would have
anticipated the result, even in spite of the natural prejudice which
an author always feels for the offspring of his brain.

A letter was now sent Thomas George, the author's brother, in
Philadelphia, requesting him to go over to New York and find a market
for the wares.

Thomas had the work passed on by the Harpers, by Scribner, and all
"much regretted."

The next thing was to interest Professor Swinton and several New York
friends, and have them go in a body and storm the castle of Barabbas.
The committee called on D. Appleton and Company, and again laid the
case before them.

Finally the publishers agreed that if the author would advance money
for the electrotype-plates, they would undertake the publication.

But alas, the author was in the proverbial author's condition. On the
offer being laid before Henry George by mail, he replied that he could
make the electrotype-plates himself. He was a typesetter and he had
friends who would give him the use of their printing-outfits. The
offer was satisfactory to the Appletons, provided Professor Swinton
would agree to take on his own account a hundred copies of the work on
suspicion.

The Professor agreed. And the manuscript was sent back to San
Francisco, a trifle dog-eared and the worse for five months' wear.

The author began his typesetting with the same diligence that he had
brought to bear in the writing. This was stolen time, too. He worked
an hour in the morning and two hours at night. Other printers offered
to help, and a genial, bum electrotyper, damnably cheerful, offered to
come in and lend a hand, provided Henry George would agree to give a
funeral oration over the derelict one's grave at the proper time.
Henry George gleefully agreed.

So the work of making the electrotype-plates moved on apace. In the
meantime some of Henry George's political friends had interviewed the
Governor and Henry George was made inspector of gas-meters, at fifteen
hundred dollars a year.

It was four months' work to make the plates, but early in the year
Eighteen Hundred Eighty they were shipped to New York, a few proofs of
the book being taken, stitched up and sent out for review.

So far as we know, there was no one in California able to read the
book and intelligently review it. Leastwise they never did.

The Appletons, however, gradually awoke to the fact that they had a
prize, and they made efforts to get the work into right reviewing
hands. Better still, they began to inquire about what manner of man
Henry George was.

Next they wrote to the author suggesting that, if he would come to New
York and personally present his views, it would help in the sale of
the books.

Fortunately Henry George was not hampered by the ownership of real
estate, nor an excess of personal property, so he hastily packed up,
transportation having been secured by John Russell Young, a capitalist
who had faith in his genius from the first.

Henry George arrived in New York penniless, but Professor Swinton, E.
L. Youmans (that excellent blind man of great insight), John Russell
Young and the Appletons gave him a rich reception.

The tide had turned.

       *       *       *       *       *

Henry George received all the recognition that any thinker and writer
could desire, from August, Eighteen Hundred Eighty, to the day of his
death, October Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven. Men might
not agree with him in his conclusions, but few indeed dare meet him in
a duel of argument, either by pen or upon the public platform.

He spoke in churches, halls and private parlors. His newspaper and
magazine articles commanded a price. He met the greatest minds of
America and of Europe on an equal footing.

In England his book was having a sale far beyond what it had met with
at home.

And when he spoke in London and the chief cities of Great Britain, the
halls were packed to suffocation. He appealed to the Messianic
instinct of English workingmen, and they hailed him as the coming man
--their deliverer. They stripped doors from their hinges and carried
him aloft upon the improvised platform. They unhitched the horses from
his carriage and drew him through the streets in triumphal state. This
all meant little--it was only campaign exuberance--the glare and flare
of smoky kerosene-torches, and the blare of brass.

Henry George was right in the same class with Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall
and John Stuart Mills, none of whom, happily, was a college man, and
therefore all were free from the handicap of dead learning and
ossified opinion, and saw things as if they were new. Ignorance is a
very necessary equipment in doing a great and sublime work that is to
eclipse anything heretofore performed.

The mind of Henry George was a flower of slow growth. At thirty-seven
he was just reaching mental manhood. According to all reasonable
tables of expectancy, he should have rivaled Humboldt and been in his
prime at eighty. His brain was the brain of Ricardo; but instead of
sticking to his boos, he got caught in the swirl of politics, and was
matched up with the cheap, the selfish, the grasping. The people who
snatched Henry George out of his proper sphere as a thinker, writer
and lecturer, and flung him into the turmoil of practical politics,
were of exactly the class who would, if they could, have a little
later ridden him on a rail.

It was all a little like that speech of a man in Indianapolis who
nominated James Whitcomb Riley for the Presidency of the United
States. The mob diluted the thought of Henry George and trod his proud
and honest heart into the mire.

Had he been elected mayor of New York, he could have done little or
nothing for reform, for a mayor has only the power delegated to him by
the ward boss and the genus heeler. Beyond this he can merely apply
the emergency-brake by the use of the veto.

Henry George was a racehorse hitched by spoilsmen to an overloaded
jaunting-car with a drunken driver, bound for Donnybrook Fair.

And soon men said he was dead.

       *       *       *       *       *

The logic of Henry George's book and its literary style are so
insistent that it has been studied closely by economists of note in
every country on the globe. Its argument has never been answered, and
those who have sought to combat it have rested their case on the
assertion that Henry George was a theorist and a dreamer, and so far
as practical affairs were concerned was a failure. With equal logic we
might brand the Christian religion as a failure because its founder
was not a personal success, either in his social status or as a
political leader.

Gradually the thinking men of the world, the statesmen and the doers,
are beholding the fact that mankind is an organism, and that a country
is only as rich as its poorest citizen; that an athlete with Bright's
disease is not worth as much to humanity as a small, lively and
healthy boy of ten with cheek of tan and freckles to spare. Health
comes from right living, and living without useful effort is only
existence.

People living on the pavement or in sky-scrapers soon degenerate.

Man can not thrive apart from land. Abject poverty is found only in
great cities, where population is huddled like worms in a knot.

The highest average of intelligence, happiness and prosperity is found
in villages, where each family owns its home, and the renter is the
rare exception.

The word "renter" we used Out West as a term of contempt. The
ownership of an acre of land gives a sense of security which religion
can not bestow. God's acre, with vegetables, fruits, flowers, a cow
and poultry, places a family beyond the reach of famine, even if not
of avarice. Moreover, this single acre means sound sleep, good
digestion and resultant good thoughts, all from digging in the dirt
and mixing with the elements. "All wealth comes from the soil," says
Adam Smith, and he might have added, man himself comes from the soil
and is brother to the trees and the flowers. Men can no more live
apart from land than can the grass. The ownership of a very small plot
of ground steadies life, lends ballast to existence, and is a bond
given to society for good behavior.

"I am no longer an anarchist--I have bought a lot and am building a
house," a Russian refugee advised his restless colleagues at home,
when they wrote, asking him for quotations on dynamite.

It is obvious and easy to say that the people who make city slums
possible do not want to own houses and would not live upon land and
improve it, if they could.

The worst about this statement is that it is true. They are so sunken
in fear, superstition and indifference that they lack the squirrel's
thrift in providing a home and laying in a stock of provisions; they
are even without the ground-hog's ambition to burrow. They are too
sodden to know what they are missing, and are lacking in the
imagination which pictures a better condition.

They are like those pigmy bondsmen who work in the cotton-mills of the
South--yellow, gaunt, too dead to weep, too hopeless to laugh, too
pained to feel.

From these creatures and creators of slums it is absurd to talk of
gratitude for the offer of betterment. People who expect gratitude do
not deserve it. Neither can the slumsters by force be placed on land
and be expected to till it. A generation, at least, will be required
to work a change, and this change will come through educating the
children--through the kindergarten and the kindergarten methods--and
most of all through school-gardens. The so-called "back districts" are
fast being annihilated, for quick transportation is bringing city and
country close together. The time is coming, and shortly, too, when a
fare of one cent a mile will be the universal rule, and a mile a
minute will not be regarded as an unusual speed.

Now here is something which Henry George did not say, and if he knew
was too diplomatic to mention: The reason the people have not had
possession of the land is because they did not want it. The ownership
of the land you need to use comes in answer to prayer--and prayer is
the soul's desire, uttered or unexpressed. The will of the people is
supreme. If fraud and rascality exist in high places, it is because we
elect rascals to office.

The will of the people is supreme. When we cease toadying to brainless
nabobs, and quit imitating them as soon as we get the money, we will
be on the road to reformation. As it is, most poor people are just
itching to live as the rich do. The average servant-girl who gets
married quits work then and there, and is quite content to live the
rest of her life as a slave, asking her husband for a quarter at a
time and cajoling the money out of him by hook or crook, or else
explorating his trousers for free coinage when opportunity offers.
Fresh air is free, but the average individual does not know it; and
neither would this same person use land if it were given him. Freedom
is a condition of mind.

Yet apart from the "submerged tenth" is a very large class of people
to whom land and a home would be a positive paradise, and who are
simply forced into flats and tenements on account of present economic
conditions: the land is monopolized, and held by men who neither
improve it themselves nor will they allow others to. Then hold it
awaiting a rise in value.

This increase in value is not on account of anything the owner may do
--in fact, he is usually an absentee and does nothing. The increase
comes from the enterprise and thrift of people for whom the owner has
no interest, beyond contempt.

If these enterprising people who do the work of the world--making the
things the world needs--want more land for their business or for
homes, they have to pay the absentee for the increased value which
they themselves have brought about. When you beautify and enrich the
value of your own lot by improving it, you are making it impossible to
buy the vacant lot next to you without bankruptcy.

Moreover, you are taxed by the State for any improvement you make on
your land, and this taxation on improvements must of necessity tend
toward discouragement of improvement. It is really a surer way to make
money, to hang on to land and do nothing, than to improve it.

The remedy proposed by Henry George is simply the Single Tax, and this
tax to be on land values and not on improvements.

That is to say, with the Single Tax, the man who owns the vacant lot
covered with briars and brambles would pay the same tax that you pay
on your lot next door upon which you have built a house, barn and
conservatory and planted trees and flowers.

The immediate tendency of this policy would be to cause the gentleman
who owned the vacant lot devoted to cockleburs to put up on it a sign,
"For Sale Cheap."

Even the opponents of the Single Tax agree that its inauguration would
at once throw on the market a vast acreage of unimproved land, and
that is just the one reason why they oppose it. All those thousands of
acres held by estates, trustees and idle heirs, in the vicinity of
Boston, Philadelphia and up the Hudson, would be for sale.

The single tax would give the land back to the people, or at least
make it possible for people who want it to get what they could use.
Those who have the desire to improve land, and improve themselves by
improving it, would no longer be blocked.

The fresh blood of the country which makes the enterprise of cities
possible comes from the boys and the girls who warmed their feet on
October mornings where the cows lay down; who have been brought up to
work on land, to plant and hoe and harvest and look after livestock.
This is all education, and very necessary education. "A sand-pile and
dirt in which to dig is the divine right of every child," says Judge
Lindsey.

And if it is the divine right of a child to dig in the dirt, why isn't
it the divine right of the grown-up? It is, and would be so recognized
were it not for the fact that we have been obsessed by a fallacy
called "the divine right of property." This idea has come down to us
from the Reign of the Barons, when a dozen men owned all of England,
and plain and unlettered people could not legally own a foot of land.
All paid tribute to the Barons, who were actually and literally
robbers.

We will grant of course that what a man produces and creates is his,
but the land to which he may be legal heir and which probably he has
never seen, and which certainly he does not use or improve, is his
only through a legal fiction. When the matter of legal fiction was
explained to Colonel Bumble and he was told that legally a husband
knew the whereabouts of his wife, because the law regarded a man and
wife as one, Colonel Bumble replied with acerbity, "The law is a
hass."

Comparatively few people have the courage of Colonel Bumble, so they
do not express themselves; but the commonsense of the world is now
coming to believe that the law was made for man, and not man for the
law.

The only people who oppose the single tax are the holders of land who
are hanging on to it expecting to grow rich through inertia.

The problem of civilization is to eliminate the parasite. The idle
person is no better than a dead one and takes up more room. The man
who lives on the labor of others is a menace to himself and to
society.

The taxes necessary to support the government should be paid by those
who have the funds wherewith to be idle; no longer should the chief
burden fall on the home-maker.

Tax the land, and the man who owns it will have to make it productive
by labor, or else get out and allow some one else to have a chance.

Do not drive the landlords out--tax them out.

Let the land gravitate to the people who have the disposition and the
ability to improve it--and that is just what the Single Tax will do.
So this, then, is the philosophy of Henry George.




GARIBALDI


  Priests look backward, not forward. They think that there were once
  men better and wiser than those who now live, therefore priests
  distrust the living and insist that we shall be governed by the dead.
  I believe this is an error, and hence I set myself against the Church
  and insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in
  their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their
  lives in their own way, too.
  --_Garibaldi_


[Illustration: Garibaldi]

The writer who tells the simple facts in the life of Garibaldi lays
himself open to the charge of evolving melodrama, wild and riotous.

Garibaldi's personal friends and admirers always referred to him in
such words as these: patriot, savior, father-noble, generous, pure-
hearted, unselfish, devoted, philanthropic.

They transferred the infallibility of Pope Pius the Ninth to his
enemy, Garibaldi.

The Pope was not much given to rhetorical lyddite, so when the name of
Garibaldi was mentioned he simply stopped his ears and hissed. He
acknowledged that in all the bright lexicon of words there was not a
symbol strong enough to express his contempt for Joseph Garibaldi.

The actual fact was that Pio Nono, for whom Garibaldi named his
favorite donkey, had very much in common with Garibaldi. Had they met
as strangers on sea or plain, they would have delighted in each
other's society. They were both kind, courteous, considerate, highly
intelligent men. They were lovers of their kind.

Garibaldi's passion was to benefit men by giving them freedom. The
Pope's prayer was to benefit men by giving them religion.

But freedom without responsibility leads to license, and license
unrestrained means slavery, and religion not safeguarded by freedom is
superstition; and what is superstition but slavery?

Before Garibaldi was twenty he began to read Mazzini, whom Margaret
Fuller called the Emerson of Italy--and Margaret Fuller knew both
Emerson and Mazzini intimately and well. She lived for one and died
for the other.

Mazzini, the delicate, the esthetic, the spiritual, the subtle, was a
candle whose beams burned bright for all Italy. His dream of a free
and united Italy caught Garibaldi, the rugged, daring son of the sea,
and fired his heart. Mazzini was a thinker; Garibaldi a fighter.

Italy had twice been queen of the world: first, when Julius Caesar
ushered in an age of light; and second, when Columbus, child of Genoa,
the same city that mothered Mazzini, sailed the seas. The first
Italian Renaissance we call the Age of Augustus; the second, the Age
of Michelangelo.

The third great tidal wave of reason, Garibaldi said, would live as
the Age of Mazzini.

But there be those in Italy now, wise and influential, who call it the
Age of Garibaldi.

Without Mazzini, there would have been no Garibaldi. Italy would today
probably be where she was when these young men conceived their
patriotic dream: the Pope supreme temporal ruler of Rome, and the rest
of Italy divided up into a dozen cringing provinces, each presided
over by a princeling, who, on favor of some patron, Austria, Germany
or France, the favor duly viseed by the Pope, was allowed to call
himself king. The final authority of the Pope was undisputed in things
both temporal and spiritual, and he who questioned or expressed his
doubts was guilty of two crimes: heresy and treason, the two
artificial papier-mache offenses which made the Dark Ages very dark.

The hope of Mazzini was to make Italy a republic. But the time was not
yet ripe. They ousted the Pope, but Fate compromised with Destiny, and
Victor Emmanuel, a republican monarchist from Sicily, was made king in
name, but with a safety-brake in way of a ministry that could annul
his edicts.

And so Mazzini and Garibaldi, each individually a failure, won--
although success came not in the way they expected, nor was it their
heart's desire.

That bold and magnificent equestrian statue of Garibaldi crowns the
heights of Rome, looking down upon the Eternal City; the dust of
Mazzini rests in a village churchyard; but both live in the hearts of
humanity as men who gave their lives to make men free.

      *       *       *       *       *

Garibaldi was born in the city of Nice in Eighteen Hundred Seven,
being one of the advance-guard of a brigade of genius, for great men
come in groups. His parents were poor, and being well under the heel
of the priest, were only fairly honest. The father was a waterman who
plied the Riviera in a leaky schooner--poling, rowing, or sailing, as
Providence provided. Once the good man was returning home after a
cruise where ill luck was at the helm. The priest had blessed him when
he started, and would be on hand when he came back to receive his
share of the loot, for business was then, and is yet, in Italy, a kind
of legalized freebooting. Then it was that the honest fisherman lapsed
and lifted the nets of another between the dawn and the day.

The son, then only twelve years of age, scorned the act and declared
he would steal a ship or nothing. The boy was duly punished in the
interests of piety and also to relieve the pent-up emotions of the
parents.

The heroic spirit of Garibaldi was not a legacy from either his father
or his mother. However, they dowered him with health and great bodily
strength, and this physical superiority had much, no doubt, to do in
shaping his life's course.

Men fall victims to their facility. Musicians, for instance, often
become intoxicated by their own sweet sounds, and are lured on to
unseemliness, making much discord in life's symphony.

The late-lamented Brann had a felicity and a facility in the use of
words that finally cost him his life. Men with pistol facility and
word felicity die by the pistol. The brain of the prizefighter does
not convolve: he relies more on his "jabs" than on thoughts that burn
--and those who live by the hammer die by the hammer.

There is no doubt that Garibaldi's romantic career in a lifelong fight
for freedom was born of a liking for the fray, to express it bluntly,
with freedom as a convenient excuse. This sounds unkind, but it is
not. Garibaldi loved peace so much that he was willing to fight for it
any day.

While yet a youth he became captain of his father's craft, and
Garibaldi Senior took the wheel and obeyed orders.

Then we hear that Garibaldi was an expert swimmer, a rather unusual
accomplishment for a sailor. He was always on the lookout for an
opportunity to dive overboard, disrobing in the air, and rescuing the
perishing. There is even a legend of his having saved a washer-woman
from drowning when he was but eight years old. A captious critic has
remarked that probably the old lady fell into her washtub. Thereupon,
a kinsman of the great man comes forward to give the facts, which are
that the woman was doing laundry-work by the riverside, and stooping
over, fell into the damp and was rescued by the boy. But it also seems
on the word of Garibaldi himself that the woman would not have fallen
in had not the boy suddenly appeared behind her playing bear, thus
bringing about the catastrophe which he averted.

When Garibaldi was twenty-one he was in command of a small schooner
bound for the Black Sea on a trading expedition. The intent of the
expedition was twofold: to sell the merchandise which the ship
carried, and also if possible to capture certain bands of pirates that
were infesting the dank, dark waters. It is perhaps quite needless to
say that pirates are often men who are engaged in the laudable
undertaking of protecting the shipping from pirates, just as admission
to the bar is a sort of commercial letter of marque and reprisal.

That Garibaldi was a pirate, only his enemies said. But anyway,
Garibaldi and a band of twenty boys, all younger than himself, sailed
away to victory or to death.

It proved to be neither; for they were captured by pirates, who took
their arms, provisions, merchandise, and even their compasses and
clothing, leaving only their ship and the sky overhead and the water
beneath.

Garibaldi took the capture as coolly as did Caesar under similar
conditions, and talked poetry and philosophy with the pirates, and the
gentlemen gave back a few provisions, with apologies and regrets for
having troubled so fine a gentleman.

The next day, our friends, innocent of clothing, fell in with an
English ship that ministered to their wants. Captain Taylor of the
English ship was so impressed with the young captain that he wrote
home about him, describing his courtesy, intelligence, and poetic
fervor, all made manifest as Garibaldi stood on the deck of his
schooner clad only in a doormat.

At this time Garibaldi had read the history of his country; in
imagination he saw the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was
Rome. And better still, he had figured out in his own mind why sleep
and death, and moth and dust, and rust and ruin had settled down upon
the race, and mankind had endured a thousand years of theological
nightmare.

He knew that save in freedom alone does the intellect flower and
blossom; that joy is the legal tender of the soul; that only through
liberty can men progress and grow; and that great and beautiful work
can be done only by a free and happy people.

The torch that fired his intellect was Mazzini, who was publishing a
little periodical of protest that voiced what its editor felt, who
wrote right out of his heart, and whose cry was, "Freedom and United
Italy--an Italy free from the rule of the Pope."

Mazzini, the son of a doctor, expressed what many thought and felt,
but dare not say. He had stated in no mincing phrase that the rule of
the priest meant mental subjugation and a gradual, creeping, insidious
return of the Dark Ages. He printed it on slips of paper and passed
them out upon the street when but a youth in the High School.

Thereupon, Mazzini had been duly cautioned, and on repeating his
offense his little folder of ideas was suppressed, and the precious
fonts and presses thrown into the sea with the street-sweepings of the
town.

The next month Mazzini's magazine appeared just the same, printed by
night at the office of a friend, and then its author was safely placed
behind prison-bars. The authorities dare not kill him--besides, what
is the use?--but they proposed to teach him a wholesome lesson and
break his fiery spirit if possible, this being the policy that had
continued from the time of Socrates. To hold truth secure by putting
down the man of initiation--the man of insight who could see a better
condition--all who were filled with a discontent that challenged the
perfection of the present order--this to the many meant safety; the
men in power simply taking their cue from the rabble--"Away with him!"

And Garibaldi hearing of the trouble that had come to Mazzini, whom he
admired but had not yet met, hastened home and threw himself into the
cause. He got together a little band of foolish youths, and planned a
revolution.

He enlisted as a sailor on board the "Eurydice," a government craft,
intending to revolt, steal the ship and go to the rescue of Mazzini.
But about this time Mazzini was released with a warning, it being
thought that a dreamy, penniless lawyer's clerk could not make much
trouble anyway.

Mazzini and Garibaldi were totally different in their methods and
habits of thought. Garibaldi reverenced Mazzini and called him master,
and Mazzini admired the daring of Garibaldi, and no doubt was
influenced and encouraged by him to continue sending out his little
leaflets of liberty, which were secretly printed and circulated, read
and reread, and passed along. Examined by us now, they seem innocent
indeed, as harmless as pages lifted from Emerson's essay on "Nature,"
but actually they were the dynamite that was to rend the rocks of
Italy's Gibraltar of orthodoxy.

Matters were now culminating fast. Mazzini and Garibaldi were
organizing secret bands of "Young Italy." The arrangement was to
secure and hold a certain point on the Swiss frontier as headquarters,
and from there make open war upon Austria and the Pope. Like John
Brown, these zealous revolutionaries felt sure that, at the call to
arms, the subjugated provinces would cast off their shackles and join
hands with the liberators. They did not realize that slavery is a
condition of mind, and that as a class slaves are quite happy in their
serfdom, being as unaware of their true condition as are those caught
in the coils of superstition. No one sees the coils but the free man
on the outside. The beauty of freedom's fight is that it frees the
fighter.

The secret societies known as "Young Italy" failed in their secrecy.
No secrets can be kept except for a day. Spies were duly initiated,
and the report of the daily doings was handed in to the Pope and his
council. To capture Garibaldi and Mazzini and hang them would have
been easy; but to do this might bring about the very storm so much
feared. So the word was passed that the conspirators were to be
arrested; a price was placed upon their heads, and an opportunity was
given them to escape.

Mazzini traveled leisurely through France, which offered him safe
passage to London. Garibaldi remained on the border, and with a little
band engaged in joyous guerrilla warfare, hoping for a general revolt.
The time was not yet ripe, and nothing he could then do would gather
up the scattered forces of freedom and crystallize them.

Fighting was then going on in South America--when are they not
fighting in South America?--and Garibaldi thought he saw an
opportunity to strike a blow for freedom, and so he sailed away for
the equator, filled with a passion for freedom, desiring only to give
himself for the benefit of humanity. Yet his heart was with "Young
Italy," and that the time would come when he would return and break
the fetters that the Pope had forged for the minds of men, he always
knew and prophesied. Such was the firm purpose and unwavering faith of
Joseph Garibaldi.

       *       *       *       *       *

Arriving in South America, Garibaldi took time to investigate
conditions. Then he offered his services to Don Gonzales, who had set
up a republic on a side street, and was fighting the power of the
Emperor of Brazil.

Don Gonzales was delighted with Garibaldi--Garibaldi won every one he
desired to win. He had the rare quality which we call "personal
charm."

Garibaldi was fitted out with a ship which he manned with sixteen of
his countrymen--fighters of his own selection, men of his own intrepid
spirit. This crew constituted the navy of the new republic, and
Garibaldi was given the title, "Secretary of the Navy." He called his
ship the "Mazzini," writing to the prophet and patriot in London for
his blessing; but without waiting for it sailed away to victory. The
first bout with the enemy secured them a prize in the way of a ship
four times the size of their own, well provisioned and carrying one
hundred men. Garibaldi at once scuttled his own craft, ran up his flag
on board the prize, and calling all hands on deck solemnly christened
her the "Mazzini," in loving token of the ship just sent to Davy
Jones' locker. Then the question arose, What should be done with the
prisoners?

Garibaldi gave them their choice of being sent ashore in safety, with
a week's provisions and their side-arms, or re-enlisting under his own
glorious banner. The men without parley, one and all cried, "We are
yours to do with as you will!" Emerson says, "The work of eloquence is
to change the opinions of a lifetime in twenty minutes." This being
true, Garibaldi must have been eloquent, and eloquence is personality.
The Corsican, in his Little Corporal's uniform, walked out before the
legions sent to capture him, and before he had uttered a word, they
cried, "Command us!" and threw down their arms.

The power of Garibaldi over men was superb. He won through the
devotion of his soldiers. When he struck he hit quick and hard, and
then he made his victory secure by magnanimity toward the defeated. It
was his policy never to put prisoners in irons, or disgrace or
humiliate them. He banished hate from their hearts by saying: "You are
brave fighters! You are after my own heart. I need you!"

Julius Caesar had a deal of this same temperament, and if the sober,
serious, spiritual and priestly quality of Mazzini could have been
fused with the fighting spirit of Garibaldi we would have had the
Julian soul once more with us. Possibly Rome is not yet dead,
Shakespeare to the contrary notwithstanding.

       *       *       *       *       *

Garibaldi and his gallant crew on board the "Mazzini" kept the enemy
speculating. On one occasion when pursued, Garibaldi ran his ship up a
narrow bay, one of the winding mouths of the Amazon. The two ships in
pursuit were sure they had him in a trap and followed fast, intending
to drive him so far inland that when the tide turned he would be held
fast on the rocks, and then they could land a force, as they had five
times as many men as he, and shoot his ship full of holes at their
leisure from the shore. But Garibaldi was a sailor, and he had the
true pilot's intuition for finding the channel. Suddenly, as the
pursuing ships rounded a bend, from the height of a commanding
precipice a deadly stream of shot and shell was poured down through
the defenseless decks. And the gunners on the ships could not elevate
their cannon to get the range. Garibaldi had taken his best cannon
from his ship and masked this battery on shore. For two months he had
worked to lure the enemy to their ruin. The scheme worked.

On shore he was equally fertile in resource, and his plan of getting
his troops in the neighborhood of the enemy, and lighting long lines
of campfires so as to mislead as to the number of his troops, was with
him a common form of strategy. Then lo! as his campfires burned
brightly, he would circle the foe and stampede them by simultaneous
attacks on both flanks, making a mob of what twenty minutes before was
an army.

He also had a way of retreating before the enemy, and at last making a
seemingly stubborn resistance on some friendly ridge or hilltop. The
enemy would then pause, re-form and charge. But a thousand yards
before the hilltop would be reached, Garibaldi's men, secreted in
sunken roadways or the dry beds of waterways, would rise like
sprouting dragons' teeth and scatter their rain of death. His men wore
bright red shirts so as to protect themselves from the danger of being
shot by their own comrades. Later, the appearance of the red shirt
struck terror to the foe. In Italy now, when you see a red-shirted
brigade, do not imagine it is a volunteer fire-company out for a
holiday--it is merely a company of militia called "The Garibaldians."

Garibaldi became a sort of superstition in South America. His
appearance on land or sea, at seemingly the same time, his sudden
sallies and miraculous disappearances, carried out the idea that he
was the Devil incarnate. The armies sent to capture him came home with
the report, "We would have killed or captured him, but alas, God
ordained that he should not be found!"

Fighting along the shore with simply a few ships, by co-operating with
the land forces, and having that scouted and maligned thing, "horse
marines," at his quick command, he wore the enemy to a frazzle. His
tactics were those of Quintus Fabius, who supplied us our word
"Fabian"--opportunist. Fabius fought the combined hosts of Hannibal
for ten years, as one to five, and was never captured and never
defeated. When peace was declared he dictated his own terms, and was
given royal honors when he rode through the streets of Rome at the
head of his tattered troops, just as Christian DeWet, the valiant
Boer, was tendered an ovation when he visited London, which he had
first festooned with crape.

       *       *       *       *       *

Garibaldi was operating in a horse country, a country, by the way, in
physical features, not unlike that over which DeWet occasionally rode
at the rate of one hundred miles from sunset to day-dawn. Garibaldi,
although a sailor born, did not ride a horse with face toward the
horse's tail, as sailormen are said to do in one of Kipling's merry
tales. However, he might have done so, for he was a most daring rider,
and in South America filled in the time with many excursions ashore,
where he chose his companions from the ship by lot, there always being
a great desire among the men to follow close to their beloved leader.
He insisted that all of his men should be horsemen as well as
soldiers, for no one could tell when they might have to abandon their
ships and take to the land.

These wild, free excursions into the sparsely settled interior were
not fraught with much danger, for the plainsmen were mostly with the
republic, and Garibaldi took great pains to treat with the citizen's
family. For instance, although cattle were plentiful and of little
value, when he wanted fresh meat he always asked for it. The same with
horses. "Treat citizens as friends, informing them that you come to
protect, not to destroy," was his injunction.

One valuable possession Garibaldi secured in Brazil, however, was
taken without legal permission. It seems Garibaldi on one of his
journeys inland had halted with six of his band for dinner at the
house of a planter and ranchman. The place was fair to look upon, the
house situated in a clump of trees that lined the bank of a stream.
Near at hand were orange-groves and great banks of azaleas in full
bloom. On the hillside were grapes that grew in purple clusters, which
made poor Garibaldi think of his far-off Italy, the home from which he
was exiled, and to which return meant death.

Garibaldi reined into the yard and sat hatless on his horse, looking
at this scene of peace, prosperity, and gentle, smiling beauty. A
sense of loneliness swept over him. He thought of himself as a
homeless outcast, without love, friendless, fighting an eternal fight
for people whom he did not know, and very few of whom indeed knew him
even by name.

A barking of the dogs brought several servants to the door. On seeing
the red-shirted soldiers, their rifles across the pommels of their
saddles, the servants hastily ran back and proceeded to bar the doors
and windows. Garibaldi smiled wearily and was inwardly debating
whether he would try to show the inmates of the house that he was a
friend or ride away.

Just then the door opened and a woman came out on the veranda. She was
a young woman, not over twenty--dark, slight, handsome and
intelligent. She looked at Garibaldi, and her self-possession made the
invincible fighter blush to the roots of his long yellow hair and
tawny beard. She was not afraid. She walked down the steps, and in a
pleasant voice said, "You are Garibaldi." And Garibaldi was on the
point of denying it, for he had not heard a woman's voice in four
months, and was all unnerved. His tongue refused to do its bidding,
and he only bowed, and then tried to apologize for his intrusion.

"You are Garibaldi, and if you insist on remaining to dinner, I will
prepare the meal for you--I can do nothing else."

She spoke in Spanish, and as Garibaldi replied, he was mindful that
his Castilian was terribly broken. Then he spoke in Italian, and when
she answered in very broken Latin, they both smiled. They were even.
When he learned that her husband was not at home, he refused to enter
the house, but sat on the veranda, and there the lady served him and
his companions with her own fair hands, as the servants stood by and
looked on perplexed. Garibaldi did not eat much--his appetite had
vanished. He followed the frail and beautiful young woman furtively
with his eyes as she moved back and forth heaping the plates of his
hungry troopers. He thought she looked sad and preoccupied.

Garibaldi tried to speak, but his Spanish had suddenly taken wing. But
when the lady entered the house and returned with one of Mazzini's
little pamphlets on liberty, he started and then almost sobbed as he
read the well-remembered words, "Do that which is right, and fear no
man, for man was made to be free."

He saw that the pamphlet was one of the master's earliest productions,
and how it should have preceded him four thousand miles he could only
guess, and the lady's command of Italian was not sufficient to
explain. But in his joy he held out his hand to her, and she responded
to his grasp. There was an understanding. They were both lovers of
liberty.

Garibaldi felt that he must not remain--he must hasten away ere he
said or did something foolish. "You must not come back, my husband is
a royalist," said the lady, "and he will be greatly displeased when he
knows you have been here. But you were hungry and I have fed you--now
good-by." She held out her hand and then hastily broke away before the
soldier could take it. Garibaldi mounted his horse, and followed by
the troopers rode slowly down the bed of the stream, and as they
disappeared into the thicket of azaleas, Garibaldi looked back. The
lady was standing on the veranda leaning against a pillar. She held up
the Mazzini pamphlet. Garibaldi removed his hat.

       *       *       *       *       *

Garibaldi was on a tour of inspection, getting a good idea of the
coast-line, and patriotism and duty should have kept him steadily on
the march.

But something else was tugging at his heart. He rode ten miles, halted
and pitched camp. Early the next morning he rode back alone, leaving
his rifle behind, but keeping his pistols in his belt. He wanted to
see the husband of the beautiful young lady. The man must be a pretty
good kind of man--a royalist by birth probably, but if he could be
rightly informed might become a friend of the cause.

When Garibaldi reached the house, the lady was on the veranda--she
seemed to be expecting him. She was sad, pale, serious, and dressed in
blue. She called her husband out and introduced him, and he and
Garibaldi shook hands. Garibaldi tried to talk with him about Mazzini,
but as near as Garibaldi could guess the rancher had never heard the
name.

The man was fully twenty years older than his wife, and Garibaldi
guessed, from his looks, that his wealth was an inheritance, not an
accumulation. A little further talk and the facts developed as
Garibaldi had suspected--the man was a degenerate scion of Spanish
aristocracy. He seemed too stupid or too indifferent to know who his
visitor was, or what he stood for. He brought out strong drink and
then suggested cards as a diversion.

Garibaldi did not like the looks of the man, and courteously declined
his pasteboard suggestions. All the time the young woman stood a
little way off and looked wistfully at the red-shirted soldier. Her
lips moved in pantomime--she was trying to say something to him.
Garibaldi talked about nothing, laughed aloud, and requested his host
to mix him a drink. While the man was busy at the sideboard, Garibaldi
moved carelessly toward the woman and caught her whispered words, "Do
not drink--go at once--he has sent for help--the place will be
surrounded in half an hour--go, I implore you!"

And all the time Garibaldi talked garrulously and sauntered around the
room. He took up the glass the man handed him, and raising it to his
lips, did not drink--but tossed the contents full into the face of the
person who had prepared the mixture. The man coughed, sputtered, swore
and Garibaldi backed to the door, one hand on a pistol at his belt. He
reached the veranda and looked for his horse. The horse was gone!
Garibaldi sprang back into the house, covering the royalist with his
pistol. "My horse, or you die--order my horse brought to the door!"
The man protested, begged, swore he knew nothing about the horse.
"I'll fetch your horse!" called the woman, and running around the
house brought the horse from a thicket, where it had evidently been
led by some servant. Again Garibaldi backed out of the house,
requesting the man to follow, which he obediently did at a distance of
five paces, his hands high in the air, as if in blessing. With pistol
still in hand Garibaldi mounted the horse, and as he did so the little
lady moaned, "He may kill me for this, but I would do it again--for
you!" Garibaldi kicked his right foot out of the stirrup, and held out
his hand. The lady without the slightest hesitation placed her foot in
the empty stirrup and leaped lightly up behind. As she did so
Garibaldi fired two shots well over the head of the paralyzed husband
of his late wife, and gave his horse the spurs. In a minute horse and
riders, two, were more than a quarter of a mile away over the plain,
the lady seated safely behind, her arms gently but surely enfolding
the red shirt. As they passed over a ridge they looked back, and there
stood the degenerate scion of royalty, his hands high above his head.
He had forgotten to take them down.

       *       *       *       *       *

But should any prosaic reader imagine that this little story is too
melodramatic to be true, I refer him to the monograph, "Garibaldi the
Patriot," by Alexandre Dumas, who got his data from the record written
by Garibaldi, himself. Moreover, Anita, for it was she, told the tale
to Madame Brabante, who in turn gave the facts to Margaret Fuller
Ossoli.

We do not know Anita's last name. When she placed her foot in the
stirrup of Garibaldi's saddle, she gave herself to him, body, mind and
spirit, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, through evil
and good report, forever. By that act she left the past behind: even
the name "Anita" was a name that Garibaldi gave her, and if he ever
knew the story of her life before they met, he never thought it worth
while to mention it. Probably he did not care--life for both of them
really dated from the day they met. He was thirty-one, she was twenty-
two.

When Garibaldi rode into camp, with the lady on the crupper, the six
red-shirted ones in waiting were not surprised. They were never
surprised at anything their master did. They believed in him as they
believed in God--only more so. And so they asked no questions--for
Garibaldi was one of the men that common men never interrogated.

"Break camp!" was the order, and in ten minutes they were on the
march, two men trailing a mile behind as a rear-guard. At midnight
they were safely aboard the good ship "Mazzini."

Anita proved herself a worthy mate for Garibaldi. She was the first
woman to wear a Garibaldi waist, although for the most part she wore
men's clothes, with two pistols in her belt and a rifle in her hands,
and wherever Joseph went, there went Anita. She was his servant, his
slave, his comrade, his wife. Read his autobiography and you will find
how lasting, loyal and tender his devotion was toward her. He was a
fatalist--a man without fear--and many times when surrounded by an
overwhelming foe, he simply bided his time and fought his way through
to safety. "When other men are ready to surrender, I hold fast," he
said. When once cut off by four soldiers of the enemy, and they
approached with loaded rifles and bayonets fixed, he drew his sword
and shouted, "I am Garibaldi--you are my prisoners!" and down went the
rifles.

At another time he and Anita were caught by a band of forty troopers
in a log cabin in a clearing. They flung open the door, and standing,
one on each side, showed only the long glittering point of a spear
across the doorway. The enemy demanded a parley, but finally, not
knowing the number of persons inside, and realizing that a charge
meant death for two of the company, they withdrew. Silence and the
unknown are the only things really terrible.

And so Joseph and Anita lived and loved and fought, and incidentally
studied the few books which they possessed, and at odd times wrote
poetry. A year after that first ride on the back of the horse that
carried double, a son was born to them. A contemporary tells of seeing
Anita riding horseback, the chubby babe carried like a papoose,
looking out wonderingly at the world, which for him was just six
months old. In three years this baby boy was riding behind his mother
on the crupper, and another baby had come to do the papoose act.

So passed eight years of adventure by land and sea, in wood and vale,
on mountain and plain. Garibaldi had given Brazil all the freedom she
deserved--all she knew how to use. He was crowned as "The Hero of
Montevideo," and could have taken a place high in the councils of the
State. But across the sea he heard the rumble of battle going on in
his beloved fatherland, and the dream of a United Italy was still
vivid in his mind, and of course, vivid, too, in the mind of Anita. So
they sailed away, taking with them a hundred of their loyal, loving
men in the red shirts, who refused to be left behind. Arriving in
Italy, Garibaldi went at once to the home of his mother, who had
mourned him as lost and now received him as one risen from the dead.
Anita and the children appealed to the good woman, and her heart went
out to them, as if, indeed, they were all her own, loved into life.

When all at once, remembering her son's indifference for the Church,
she asked when and where they were married, Joseph looked at Anita,
and Anita looked at Joseph, and then they acknowledged that they had
only been married by a sailor, who had said the ceremony as he
remembered it, adding, "And may God have mercy on your souls." Hastily
the mother packed them off to a priest, who administered the right of
extreme marital unction, and charged them double fee on account of
their carelessness. They paid the fee, laughing inwardly, but glad to
relieve the mother of her qualms.

The children were left in the care of the grandmother, and Joseph and
Anita went forth to enlist under the banner of Charles Albert of
Piedmont and make war on superstition and the Pope.

       *       *       *       *       *

Charles Albert had been a staunch supporter of the very conditions
against which the striplings, Joseph Mazzini and Joseph Garibaldi, had
made war twenty years previous. But nations, like men, sometimes have
experiences that make them grow by throes and throbs, by leaps and
bounds. The writings of Mazzini had been constantly distributed and
circulated, and the fact that they were tabued by the government added
to the joys of the illicit. A well-defined wave of republicanism swept
the land. Those sensitive to ideas awoke, like lilacs sensitive to the
breath of May.

King Charles Albert, of all the Italian kinglets, alone guessed the
temper of his people, and issued to them a constitution with the right
of franchise. This meant war upon the Austrian protectorate and the
Pope.

Volunteers from the other provinces flocked to the standard of
Piedmont. And about this time it was that Garibaldi and Anita offered
their services to the insurgent army. Charles Albert feared his old-
time foe, for Garibaldi was of a nature that detested compromise, and
the Piedmontese could not understand how he was willing to fight under
the banner of a king, even a king who had forsworn tyranny and reform.
But other provinces were seceding, and erelong Joseph Garibaldi found
himself at the head of a thousand Neapolitans, all clad in red shirts,
well armed, carrying banners upon which were sentiments like these:
"Man was made to be free!" "Down with priest and Pope!" and "Let us
own ourselves!"

The reformer paints things with a broom: exaggeration indeed is a
necessary part of his equipment. Garibaldi could not understand that
Italy was not ripe for a simple religion of love for wife, child and
neighbor, paying one's debts, and earning one's daily bread by honest
toil. He could not appreciate that the many really did not care for
either political or mental freedom, much preferring mendicancy to
work, and quite willing to delegate their thinking to a college of
cardinals. And so he waged his earnest fight, with a faith as full and
complete as the faith that actuated Old John Brown, whose soul goes
marching on.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, some of the provinces had capitulated
and joined forces with France and Austria, the insurgent leaders
having been promised places in the excise--the compromise hastened no
doubt by cold and hunger. Garibaldi's own force was much reduced and
he took to the mountains, abandoning his cavalry equipment. Orders
were out that he, or any of his band, caught should be shot, without
trial, by fours in presence of their companions and the army. Thirty
of his men and four of his best officers had been so executed.

He and Anita were surrounded and had taken refuge in a cornfield.
Anita was wounded and delirious with thirst and fever. A Garibaldian
had volunteered to go for water across an open field. Garibaldi
watched the man and saw him shot down by French soldiers in ambush. He
remained, knowing the enemy would soon come out of hiding to rob the
dead. Garibaldi waited close beside the body of his dead companion,
and killed with his own hands the man who had done the deed.

He got the water and carried it back to Anita in the cornfield. But
she now had no need of it--she was dead. Garibaldi remained by the
body until nightfall, and then carried it to the house of a peasant
nearby. He made the peasant woman understand that the dead was a
woman, a mother, like herself, and must be given decent burial--the
woman understood.

The torches of the enemy could be seen near at hand, trailing
Garibaldi from the cornfield to the house. He covered the beloved form
with his scarf, and giving the peasant woman his purse, hurried forth
barely in time to elude the pursuers. He made his way alone to the
seashore and found refuge in Venice.

There was a price upon his head, but still there were many throughout
Italy from Milan to Sicily who spoke of him as patriot and savior.

As a diplomatic move Rome relented, and Garibaldi was allowed to move
to Caprera, a rocky island ten miles from the coast. Here he lived
with his mother and children, writing, studying, farming; lived as
Victor Hugo lived at Guernsey, only without the wealth, but in touch
with Mazzini, exiled in London.

In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three, Garibaldi came to New York and
remained nearly two years. He went into business under an assumed name
and accumulated two thousand dollars, so the little business must have
prospered.

In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four Naples was again in revolt, and
Garibaldi heard the trumpets of battle from afar. He returned to
Italy, and with his two thousand dollars bought the Island of Caprera,
that his children might be insured a home, and also, possibly, to
convince the government at Rome that he had come to stay.

Twice he left his beloved Caprera to work out his great dream of a
United Italy. He fought with troops that had no commissary; battled
with superstition; and saw his name belittled by those he sought to
serve. Finally he entered Naples at the head of an army and was
proclaimed Dictator. But statesmanship is business; and business is to
organize and discipline, and use the forces of monotonous peace.
Garibaldi expected too much: he wanted to see the Church uprooted, the
princes sent on their way, and the people supreme. This was not to be.
He did, however, live to see the Pope relinquish his temporal power,
and a United Italy, but with Victor Emmanuel, son of Charles Albert,
as king. The people still wanted a king, and they wanted their Church,
even though an emasculated one.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy, Garibaldi and his son, the firstborn of
Anita, offered their services to Gambetta and enlisted with France to
fight against Germany. And yet Garibaldi had nothing against Germany,
and had fought France in many a tedious campaign, but he thought that
France now stood opposed to papal power, while Germany sympathized
with it.

After the war Garibaldi was elected to the Italian Parliament, and
performed, at least, one good piece of work: he succeeded in getting
an appropriation to erect a statue of Bruno upon the exact spot where
this lover of truth and right was burned alive, by order of the Pope,
for teaching that the earth revolved.

In September, Nineteen Hundred Four, the World's Free-Thought
Convention was held in Rome, and a committee was appointed to decorate
the statue of Bruno and hold at its base a memorial meeting. The
principal address was by Ernst Haeckel. In the course of his remarks
Haeckel said:

  We meet in the Eternal City in the cause of liberty and the cause of
  truth. We need to express, each in his own way, unfettered and
  unvexed by coercion and fear of suppression, the things we believe
  are right and just and beautiful, and should be said. We know but
  little, but in this we are agreed--that there is no final, arbitrary
  and dogmatic truth. Truth is a point of view; as we know more and
  comprehend more, we will express more. Man has today freedom to
  breathe, freedom to study, freedom to grow, such as he never before
  had since time began. Man has today more faith than he ever had
  before--more faith in himself, more faith in his fellows. Thinking,
  like the physical act of walking, is a matter of faith. For the
  privilege of being here today, in this place, expressing what we
  think, we are under special obligations to one man, and the entire
  world of progress is under obligation to this man--and that man is
  Garibaldi.

Garibaldi passed peacefully away at his beloved Caprera in Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-two, aged seventy-five, gently ministered to by his
children and grandchildren. The insurance-company that might have
insured his life when he was twenty would have made money on the
transaction regardless of rate. Yet he was the hero of sixty-seven
battles on land and sea, and engaged in more than two hundred personal
encounters, where rifles, pistols, stilettos, swords or cudgels played
their part. Behold the irony of Fate!

No man was ever more detested, hated, feared--no man was ever better
loved. That he was a sternly honest, sincere man, singularly pure in
motive and abstemious in habit, even his bitterest enemies do not
dispute. If Savonarola was God-intoxicated, Garibaldi was freedom-
mad.

He refused bribes, declined honors, put aside titles, and died as
penniless as he was born, and as he had lived. His life was
consecrated to one thing--Liberty.




RICHARD COBDEN


  What I contend is that England is today so situated in every
  particular of her domestic and foreign circumstances that, by
  leaving other governments to settle their own business and fight out
  their own quarrels, and by attending to the vast and difficult
  affairs of her own enormous realm, and the condition of her people,
  she will not only be setting the world an example of noble morality,
  which no other nation is so happily free to set, but she will be
  following the very course which the maintenance of her own greatness
  most imperatively demands. It is precisely because Great Britain is
  so strong in resources, in courage, in institutions, in geographical
  position, that she can, before all other European powers, afford to
  be moral, and to set the example of a mighty nation walking in the
  paths of justice and peace.
  --_Cobden_


[Illustration: Richard Cobden]

Richard Cobden never had any chance in life. He was born in an obscure
hamlet of West Sussex, England, in Eighteen Hundred Four. His father
was a poor farmer, who lost his freehold and died at the top, whipped
out, discouraged, when the lad was ten years old. Richard Cobden
became a porter, a clerk, a traveling salesman, a mill-owner, a member
of parliament, an economist, a humanitarian, a statesman, a reformer.
Up to his thirteenth year he was chiefly interested in the laudable
task of making a living--getting on in the world. During that year,
and seemingly all at once and nothing first, just as bubbles do when
they burst, he beheld the problem of business from the broad vantage-
ground of humanitarianism. But he did not burst, for his dreams were
spun out of life's realities, and today are coming true; in fact, many
of them came true in his own time. Richard Cobden ceased to be
provincial and became universal.

He saw that commerce, instead of being merely a clutch for personal
gain, was the chief factor in civilization. He realized that we are
educated through our efforts to get food and clothing; and therefore
the man who ministers to the material wants of humanity is really the
true priest. The development of every animal has come about through
its love-emotions and its struggle to exist.

A factory in a town changes every person in the town, mentally and
physically. This being true, does not the management of this factory
call for men of heart and soul--broad-minded, generous, firm in the
right? Then every factory is influenced by the laws of the land, and
each country is influenced by the laws of other countries, since most
countries that are engaged in manufacturing find a market abroad.

Cobden set himself to inquire into the causes of discontent and
failure, of progress and prosperity. And not content merely to
philosophize, he carried his theories into his own enterprises.

Many of our modern business betterments seem to have had their rise in
the restless, prophetic brain of Richard Cobden. He of all men sought
to make commerce a science, and business a fine art. The world moves
slowly.

It is only a few years ago that we in America thought to have in our
President's Cabinet a Secretary of Commerce and Labor.

Listen to what Cobden wrote in Eighteen Hundred Forty-three:

  In the close council of every king, or president, or prince, should
  be a man of affairs whose life is devoted to commerce and labor, and
  the needs and requirements of peace. His work is of far greater
  moment than that of men-of-war. Battleships ever form a suggestion
  for their use, and as long as we have armies, men will kill, fight
  and destroy. Soldiers who do not want to fight are not of this
  earth. Prepare for war and war will come. When government gives to
  the arts of peace the same thought and attention that it gives to
  the arts of war, we will have peace on earth and good-will among
  men. But so long as the soldier takes precedence of the businessman
  in the political courts of the world, famine, death, disease and
  want will crouch at our doors. Commerce is production, war is
  destruction. The laws of production and distribution must and will
  be made a science; and then and not until then will happiness come
  to mankind and this earth serve as a pattern for the paradise of
  another life, instead of being a pandemonium.

       *       *       *       *       *

Emerson defines commerce as carrying things from where they are
plentiful to where they are needed. Business is that field of human
endeavor which undertakes to supply the materials to humanity that
life demands.

The clergy are our spiritual advisers, preparing us for a pleasant and
easy place in another world. The lawyers advise us on legal themes--
showing us how to obey the law, or else evade it, and they protect us
from lawyers. The doctors look after us when disease attacks our
bodies--or when we think it does.

We used to talk about "The Three Learned Professions"; if we use the
phrase now, it is only in a Pickwickian sense, for we realize that
there are at present fifty-seven varieties of learned men.

The greatest and most important of all the professions is that of
Commerce, or Business. Medicine and law have their specialties--a
dozen each--but business has ten thousand specialties, or divisions.

So important do we now recognize business, or this ministering to the
material wants of humanity, that theology has shifted its ground, and
within a few years has declared that to eat rightly, dress rightly,
and work rightly are the fittest preparation for a life to come.

The best lawyers now are businessmen, and their work is to keep the
commercial craft in a safe channel, where it will not split on the
rocks of litigation nor founder in the shallows of misunderstanding.
Every lawyer will tell you this, "To make money you must satisfy your
customers."

The greatest change in business came with the one-price system.

The old idea was for the seller to get as much as he possibly could
for everything he sold. Short weight, short count, and inferiority in
quality were considered quite proper and right, and when you bought a
dressed turkey from a farmer, if you did not discover the stone inside
the turkey when you weighed it and paid for it, there was no redress.
The laugh was on you. And moreover a legal maxim--caveat emptor, "Let
the buyer beware"--made cheating legally safe.

Dealers in clothing guaranteed neither fit nor quality, and anything
you paid for, once wrapped up and in your hands, was yours beyond
recall--"Business is business," was a maxim that covered many sins.

A few hundred years ago business was transacted mostly through fairs
and ships, and by pedlers. Your merchant of that time was a
peripatetic rogue who reduced prevarication to a system.

The booth gradually evolved into a store, with the methods and customs
of the irresponsible keeper intact: the men cheated their neighbors
and chuckled in glee until their neighbors cheated them, which, of
course, they did. Then they cursed each other, began again, and did it
all over. John Quincy Adams tells of a certain deacon who kept a store
near Boston, who always added in the year 1775, at the top of the
column, as seventeen dollars and seventy-five cents.

The amount of misery, grief, disappointment, shame, distress, woe,
suspicion and hate caused by a system which wrapped up one thing when
the buyer expected another, and took advantage of his innocence and
ignorance as to quality and value, can not be computed in figures.
Suffice it to say that duplicity in trade has had to go. The self-
preservation of the race demanded honesty, square dealing, one price
to all. The change came only after a struggle, and we are not quite
sure of the one-price deal yet.

But we have gotten thus far: that the man who cheats in trade is tabu.
Honesty as a business asset is fully recognized. If you would succeed
in business you can not afford to sell a man something he does not
want; neither can you afford to disappoint him in quality, any more
than in count. Other things being equal, the merchant who has the most
friends will make the most money. Our enemies will not deal with us.
To make a sale and acquire an enemy is poor policy. To a pedler or a
man who ran a booth at a bazaar or fair, it was "get your money now or
never." Buyer and seller were at war. One transaction and they never
met again. The air was full of hate and suspicion, and the savage
propensity of physical destruction was refined to a point where
hypocrisy and untruth took the place of violence--the buyer was as bad
as the seller: if he could buy below cost he boasted of it. To catch a
merchant who had to have money was glorious--we smote him hip and
thigh! Later, we discovered that being strangers he took us in.

The one-price system has come as a necessity, since it reduces the
friction of life, and protects the child or simple person in the
selection of things needed, just the same as if the buyer were an
expert in values and a person who could strike back if imposed upon.
Safety, peace and decency demanded the one-price system. And so we
have it--with possibly a discount to the clergy, to schoolteachers,
and relatives as close as second cousins. But when we reach the point
where we see that all men are brothers, we will have absolute honesty
and one price to all.

And this change in business methods, in our mental attitude towards
trade, has all grown out of a dimly perceived but deeply felt belief
in the brotherhood of man, of the solidarity of the race--also, in the
further belief that life in all of its manifestations is Divine.

Therefore, he who ministers to the happiness and well-being of the
life of another is a priest and is doing God's work. Men must eat,
they must be clothed, they must be housed. It is quite as necessary
that you should eat good food as that you should read good books, hear
good music, hear good sermons, or look upon beautiful pictures. The
necessary is the sacred.

There are no menial tasks. "He that is greatest among you shall be
your servant." The physical reacts on the spiritual and the spiritual
on the physical, and, rightly understood, are one and the same thing.
We live in a world of spirit and our bodies are the physical
manifestation of a spiritual thing, which for lack of a better word
we call "God." We change men by changing their environment. Commerce
changes the environment and gives us a better society. To supply good
water, better sanitary appliances, better heating apparatus, better
food, served in a more dainty way--these are all tasks worthy of the
highest intelligence and devotion that can be brought to bear upon
them, and every Christian preacher in the world today so recognizes,
believes and preaches. We have ceased to separate the secular from
the sacred. That is sacred which serves.

Once, a businessman was a person who not only thrived by taking
advantage of the necessities of people, but who also banked on their
ignorance of values. But all wise men now know that the way to help
yourself is to help humanity. We benefit ourselves only as we benefit
others. And the recognition of these truths is what has today placed
the businessman at the head of the learned professions--he ministers
to the necessities of humanity.


Out of blunder and bitterness comes wisdom. Men are taught through
reaction, and all experience that does not kill you is good.

When the father of Richard Cobden gave up hope and acknowledged
defeat, the family of a full dozen were farmed out among relatives.
The kind kinsmen who volunteered to look after the frail and sensitive
Richard evaded responsibility by placing the lad in a boys' boarding-
school. Here he remained from his tenth until his sixteenth year. Once
a year he was allowed to write a letter home to his mother, but during
the five years he saw her but once.

Hunger and heartache have their uses. Richard Cobden lived to strike
the boarding-school fallacy many a jolting blow; but it required
Charles Dickens to complete the work by ridicule, just as Robert
Ingersoll laughed the Devil out of church. We fight for everything
until the world regards it as ridiculous, then we abandon it. So long
as war is regarded as heroic, we will fight for it; when it becomes
absurd it will die.

Said Richard Cobden in a speech in the House of Commons: "Of all the
pathetic fallacies perpetuated, none seems to me more cruelly absurd
than the English Boarding-School for boys. The plan of taking the
child of seven, eight or ten years away from his parents, and giving
him into the keeping of persons who have only a commercial interest in
him, and compelling him to fight for his life among little savages as
unhappy as himself, or sink into miserable submission, seems too
horrible to contemplate." Yet this plan of so-called education
continued up to about fifty years ago, and was upheld and supported by
the best society of England, including the clergy, who were usually
directly "particeps criminis" in the business.

Logic and reason failed to dislodge the folly, and finally it was left
to a stripling reporter, turned novelist, to give us Squeers and
Dotheboys Hall. This fierce ridicule was the thing which finally
punctured the rhinoceros hide of the pedagogic blunder.

There is one test for all of our educational experiments--will it
bring increased love? That which breeds hate and fosters misery is bad
in every star. Compare the boarding-school idea with the gentle
philosophy of Friedrich Froebel, and note how Froebel always insists
that the education of the mother and her child should go forward hand
in hand. Motherhood is for the mother, and she who shifts the care of
her growing child to a Squeers, not only immerses her child in misery
but loses the opportunity of her life.

When Richard was sixteen he was transferred from the boarding-school
to his uncle's warehouse in London. His position was that of a poor
relation, and his work in the warehouse was to carry bundles and
manipulate a broom. His shy and sensitive ways caught the attention of
a burly and gruff superintendent, whose gruffness was only on the
outside. This man said to the boy, before he had been sweeping a week:
"Young 'un, I obsarve with my hown hies that you sweeps in the
corners. For this I raises your pay a shilling a week, and makes you
monkey to the shipping-clerk."

In a year the shipping-clerk was needed as a salesman, and Richard
took his place. In another year Richard was a salesman, and canvassing
London for orders. Very shortly after he became convinced that to work
for relations was a mistake. Twenty years later the thought
crystallized in his mind thus: Young man, you had better neither hire
relatives nor work for them. It means servility or tyranny or both.
You do not want to be patronized nor placed under obligations, nor
have other helpers imagine you are a favorite. To grow you must be
free--let merit count and nothing else. Probably this was what caused
a wise man to say, "The Devil sent us our relatives, but thank Heaven
we can choose our friends for ourselves."

Relatives often assume a fussy patronizing management which outsiders
never do. And so at twenty we find Cobden cutting loose from
relatives. He went to work as a commercial traveler selling cotton
prints. That English custom of the "commercial dinner," where all the
"bagmen" that happened to be in the hotel dine at a common table, as a
family, and take up a penny collection for the waiter, had its rise in
the brain of Cobden. He thought the traveling salesman should have
friendly companionship, and the commercial dinner with its frank
discussions and good-fellowship would in degree compensate for the
lack of home. This idea of brotherhood was very strong in Richard
Cobden's heart. And always at these dinners he turned the conversation
into high and worthy channels, bringing up questions of interest to
the "boys," and trying to show them that the more they studied the
laws of travel, the more they knew about commerce, the greater their
power as salesmen. His journal about this time shows, "Expense five
shillings for Benjamin Franklin's 'Essays,'" and the same for
"'Plutarch's Lives.'" And from these books he read aloud at the
bagmen's dinners.

Cobden anticipated in many ways that excellent man, Arthur F. Sheldon,
and endeavored to make salesmanship a fine art.

From a salesman on a salary, he evolved into a salesman on a salary
and commission. Next he made a bold stand with two fellow-travelers
and asked for the exclusive London agency of a Manchester print-mill.
A year later he was carrying a line of goods worth forty thousand
pounds on unsecured credit. "Why do you entrust me with all these
goods when you know I am not worth a thousand pounds in my own name?"

And the senior member of the great house of Fort, Sons and Company
answered: "Mr. Cobden, we consider the moral risk more than we do the
financial one. Our business has been built up by trusting young,
active men of good habits. With us character counts." And Cobden went
up to London and ordered the words, "Character Counts!" cut deep in a
two-inch oak plank which he fastened to the wall in his office.

At twenty-seven his London brokerage business was netting him an
income of twelve hundred pounds a year. It seems at this time that
Fort and Sons had a mill at Sabden, which on account of mismanagement
on the part of superintendants had fallen into decay. The company was
thinking of abandoning the property, and the matter was under actual
discussion when in walked Cobden.

"Sell it to Cobden," said one of the directors, smiling.

"For how much?" asked Cobden.

"A hundred thousand pounds," was the answer.

"I'll take it," said Cobden, "on twenty years' time with the privelege
of paying for it sooner if I can." Cobden had three valuable assets in
his composition--health, enthusiasm and right intent. Let a banker
once feel that the man knows what he is doing, and is honest, and
money is always forthcoming.

And so Cobden took possession of the mill at Sabden. Six hundred
workers were employed, and there was not a school nor a church in the
village. The workers worked when they wanted, and when they did not
they quit. Every pay-day they tramped off to neighboring towns, and
did not come back until they had spent their last penny. In an
endeavor to discipline them, the former manager had gotten their ill-
will, and they had mobbed the mill and broken every window. Cobden's
task was not commercial: it was a problem in diplomacy and education.
To tell of how he introduced schools, stopped child labor, planted
flowerbeds and vegetable-gardens, built houses and model tenements,
and disciplined the workers without their knowing it, would require a
book. Let the simple fact stand that he made the mill pay by
manufacturing a better grade of goods than had been made, and he also
raised the social status of the people. In three years his income had
increased to ten thousand pounds a year.

"At thirty," says John Morley, "Cobden passed at a single step from
the natural egotism of youth to the broad and generous public spirit
of a great citizen." Very early in his manhood Cobden discovered that
he who would do an extraordinary work must throw details on others,
and scheme for leisure. Cobden never did anything he could hire any
one else to do. He saved himself to do work that to others was
impossible. That is to say, he picked his men, and he chose men of his
own type--healthy, restless, eager, enthusiastic, honest men. The
criticism of Disraeli that "Cobden succeeded in business simply
because he got other people to do his work," is sternly true. It
proves the greatness of Cobden.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so we find Richard Cobden, the man who had never had any chance in
life, thirty years old, with an income equal to thirty-five thousand
dollars a year, and at the head of a constantly growing business. He
had acquired the study habit ten years before, so really we need
shed no tears on account of his lack of college training. He knew
political history--knew humanity--and he knew his Adam Smith. And
lo! cosmic consciousness came to him in a day. His personal business
took second place, and world problems filled his waking dreams.

These second births in men can usually be traced to a book, a death, a
person, a catastrophe--a woman. If there was any great love in the
life of Cobden I would make no effort to conceal it--goodness me!

But the sublime passion was never his, otherwise there would have been
more art and less economics in his nature. Yet for women he always had
a high and chivalrous regard, and his strong sense of justice caused
him to speak out plainly on the subject of equal rights at a time when
to do so was to invite laughter.

And so let x--Miss X--symbol the cause of Richard Cobden's rebirth. He
placed his business in charge of picked men, and began his world
career by going across to Paris and spending three months in studying
the language and the political situation. He then moved on to Belgium
and Holland, passed down through Germany to Switzerland, across to
Italy, up to Russia, back to Rome, and finally took ship at Naples for
England by way of Gibraltar. On arriving at Sabden he found that,
while the business was going fairly well, it had failed to keep the
pace that his personality had set. When the man is away the mice will
play--a little. Things drop down. Eternal vigilance is not only the
price of liberty, but of everything else, and success in business most
of all.

Cobden knew the truth--that by applying himself to business he could
become immensely rich. But if he left things to others, he could at
the best expect only a moderate income on the capital he had already
acquired. Everything is bought with a price--make your choice!
Richard Cobden chose knowledge, service to mankind, and an all-round
education, rather than money. He spent six months at his print-mill,
and again fared forth upon his journeyings.

He visited Spain, Turkey, Greece and Egypt, spending several months in
each country, studying the history of the place on the spot. What
interested him most was the economic reasons which led to advance and
fall of nations. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five he started for
America on a sailing-vessel, making the passage in just five weeks.
One letter to his brother from America contains the following:

  I am thus far on my way back again to New York, which city I expect
  to reach on the Eighth instant, after completing a tour through
  Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Lake Erie to
  Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Albany (via Auburn, Utica, Schenectady), and
  the Connecticut Valley to Boston and Lowell. On my return to New
  York, I propose giving two days to the Hudson River, going up to
  Albany one day, and returning the next; after which I shall have two
  or three days for the purpose of taking leave of my good friends in
  New York, previous to going on board the "Britannia" on the
  Sixteenth. My journey may be called a pleasure-trip, for without an
  exception or interruption of any kind I have enjoyed every minute of
  the too short time allowed me for seeing this truly magnificent
  country. No writer has yet done justice to America. Her lakes,
  rivers, forests and cataracts are peculiarly her own, and when I
  think of their superiority to all that we have in the Old World, and
  still more, when I recollect that by a mysterious ordinance of their
  Creator, these were hid from "learned ken" till modern times, I fell
  into the fanciful belief that the Western continent was brought
  forth at a second birth, and intended by Nature as a more perfect
  specimen of her handiwork. But how in the name of breeding must we
  account for the degeneracy of the human form in this otherwise
  mammoth-producing soil? The men are but sorry descendants from the
  noble race that begot their ancestors. And as for the women--my eyes
  have not found one that deserves to be called a wholesome, blooming,
  pretty woman since I have been here! One-fourth part of the women
  look as if they had just recovered from a fit of jaundice; another
  quarter would in England be termed in a state of decided
  consumption; and the remainder are fitly likened to our fashionable
  women, haggard and jaded with the dissipation of a London season.
  There, now, haven't I out-Trolloped Mrs. Trollope! But leaving the
  physical for the moral, my estimate of American character has
  improved, contrary to my expectations, by this visit. Great as was
  my previous esteem for the qualities of this people, I find myself
  in love with their intelligence, their sincerity, and the decorous
  self-respect that actuates all classes. The very genius of activity
  seems to have found its fit abode in the
  souls of this restless and energetic race.

Among other interesting items which Cobden made note of in America was
that everywhere wood was used for fuel, "excepting at Brownsville,
Virginia, where beds of coal jut out of the hillside, and all the
people have to do is to help themselves." Pittsburgh interested him,
and he spent a week there: went to a theater and heard England hissed
and Columbia exalted. Pittsburgh burned only wood for fuel, the wood
being brought down on flatboats. At Youngstown, Ohio, were three
hundred horses used on the many stagecoaches that centered there.
There was a steamboat that ran from Cleveland to Buffalo in two days
and a night, stopping seven times on the way to take on passengers and
goods and wood for fuel. At Buffalo you could hear the roar of Niagara
Falls and see the mist. Arriving at the Canada side of the Falls he
was shaved by a negro who was a runaway slave, all negroes in Canada
being free.

Cobden says: "The States are not especially adapted for agricultural
products, the land being hilly and heavily wooded. American exports
are cotton, wool, hides and lumber." It will thus be seen that in
Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six America had not been discovered.

Arriving in England, Cobden began to write out his ideas and issue
them in pamphlet form at his own expense. For literature, as such, he
seemed to have had little thought, literature being purely a secondary
love-product.

       *       *       *       *       *

Cobden's work was statistical, economic, political and philosophic.
From writing he read his pamphlets before various societies and
lyceums. Debates naturally followed, and soon Cobden was forced to
defend his theories.

He was nominated for a seat in Parliament and was defeated. Next year
he ran again and was elected. The political canvass had given freedom
to his wings; he had learned to think on his feet, to meet
interruption, to parry in debate. The air became luminous with
reasons.

England then had a tax on everything, including bread. On grains and
meat brought into England there was an import tax which was positively
prohibitive. This tax was for the dual purpose of raising revenue for
the Government, and to protect the English farmer. Of course, the
farmer believed in this tax which prevented any other country from
coming into competition with himself.

Cobden thought that food-products should pass unobstructed to where
they were needed, and that any other plan was mistaken and vicious.
The question came up in the House of Commons, and Cobden arose to
speak. Anyone who then spoke of "free trade" was considered disloyal
to his country. Cobden used the word and was hissed. He waited and
continued to speak. "Famine is possible only where trade is
restricted," and he proved his proposition by appeals to history, and
a wealth of economic information that hushed the House into respectful
silence. As an economist he showed he was the peer of any man present.
The majority disagreed with him, but his courteous manner won respect,
and his resourceful knowledge made the opposition cautious.

Soon after he brought up a public-school measure, and this was voted
down on the assumption that education was a luxury, and parents who
wanted their children educated should look after it themselves, just
as they did the clothing and food of the child. At best, education
should be left to the local parish, village or city government.

Cobden was in the minority; but he went back to Manchester and formed
the Anti-Corn-Law League, demanding that wheat and maize should be
admitted to the United Kingdom free of duty, and that no tax of any
kind should be placed on breadstuffs. The farmers raised a howl--
incited by politicians--and Cobden was challenged to go into farming
communities and debate the question. The enemy hoped, and sincerely
believed, he would be mobbed. But he accepted the challenge, and the
debate took place, with the result that he was for the most part
treated with respect, since he convinced his hearers that agriculture
was something he knew more about than did the landlords. He showed
farmers how to diversify crops and raise vegetables and fruits, and if
grains would flow in cheaper than they could raise them, why then take
the money they received from vegetables and buy grain! It was an
uphill fight, but Cobden threw his soul into it, and knew that some
day it would win.

Cobden's contention was that all money necessary to run the Government
should be raised by direct taxation on land, property and incomes, and
not on food any more than on air, since both are necessary to actual
existence. To place a tariff on necessities, keeping these things out
of the country and out of the reach of the plain and poor people who
needed them, was an inhumanity. A tariff should be placed on nothing
but articles of actual luxury--things people can do without--but all
necessities of life should flow by natural channels, unobstructed. An
indirect tax is always an invitation to extravagance on the part of
Government, and also, it is a temptation to favor certain lines of
trade at the expense of others, and so is class legislation.
Government must exist for all the people, never for the few, and the
strong and powerful must consider the lowly and weak.

The landed gentry upheld the Corn Laws and used the word "commercial"
as an epithet. Very naturally they made their tenants believe that if
free trade were allowed, the farmers would be worse than bankrupt, and
commercialism rampant. Cobden stood for the manufacturing public and
the cities. The landlords tried to disparage Cobden by declaring that
smoky, dirty Birmingham was his ideal. Cobden's task was to make
England see that the less men tampered with the natural laws of trade
the better, and that no special class of citizens should suffer that
others might be prosperous, and that business and manufacturing must
and could be rescued from their low estate and be made honorable. And
so the fight went on. From a curiosity to hear what Cobden might say,
interest in the theme subsided, and the opposition adopted the
cheerful habit of trooping out to the cloakroom whenever Cobden arose
to speak.

Cobden had at least one very great quality which few reformers have:
he was patient with the fools. Against stupidity he never burst forth
in wrath. Impatience with stupidity is a fine mark of stupidity. He
knew the righteousness of his cause, and repeated and kept repeating
his arguments in varied form. His platform manner was conversational
and friendly. He often would use the phrase, "Come, let us just talk
this matter over together." And so he quickly established close,
friendly terms with his hearers, which, while lacking the thrill of
oratory, made its impress upon a few who grew to love the man. John
Bright tells of "the mild, honest look of love and genuineness that
beamed from his eyes," and which told the story even better than his
words.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so the Anti-Corn-Law agitation continued. Sir Robert Peel, as head
of the Ministry, sought in every possible way to silence Cobden and
bring him into contempt, even to denouncing him as "a dangerous
agitator who would, if he could, do for London what Robespierre did
for Paris." But time went on as time does, and Cobden had been before
the country as the upholder of unpopular causes for more than ten
years. There was famine in Ireland. By the roadside famishing mothers
held to their withered breasts dying children, and called for help
upon the passers-by. Cobden described the situation in a way that
pierced the rhinoceros hides of the landlords, and they offered
concessions of this and that. Cobden said, "Future generations will
stand aghast with amazement when they look back upon this year and
see children starving for bread in Ireland, and we forbidding the
entry of corn into the country with a prohibitive tariff, backing up
this law with armed guns."

The common people began to awake. If famine could occur in Cork and
Dublin, why not in Manchester and London? The question came close,
now. The Anti-Corn-Law League saw its opportunity. Mass meetings were
held in all cities and towns. In Manchester, Cobden asked for funds to
carry on the agitation. He himself headed the list with a thousand
pounds. Twenty-three manufacturers followed his lead in three minutes.
Windsor and Westminster now sat up and rubbed their sleepy eyes, and
Sir Robert Peel sent word to Cobden asking for a conference. Cobden
replied, "All we desire is an immediate repeal of the Corn Laws--no
conference is necessary."

Sir Robert Peel sent in his resignation as Prime Minister, saying he
could not in conscience comply with the demands of the mob, and while
compliance seemed necessary to avoid revolution, others must make the
compromise. The Queen then appointed Lord John Russell as Prime
Minister and ordered him to form a new Cabinet and give an office to
Cobden. Lord Russell tried for four days to meet the issue, and
endeavored to placate the people with platitude and promise. Cobden
refused all office, and informed Lord Russell that he preferred to
help the Crown by remaining an outside advocate.

Every Government, at the last, is of the people, by the people, but
whether for the people depends upon whether the people are awake. And
now England did not care for a radical change of rulers; all the
citizens wanted was that those in power recede from their position and
grant the relief demanded. The Queen now reconsidered the resignation
of Sir Robert Peel and refused to accept it, and he again assumed the
reins. An extraordinary session of the House of Commons was called and
the Corn Laws were repealed. The House of Lords concurred. The
nobility was absolutely routed, and Cobden, "the sooty manufacturer,"
had won.

Strangely enough, panic did not follow, nor did the yeomanry go into
bankruptcy. The breadstuffs flowed in, and the manufacturing
population being better fed at a less outlay than formerly, had more
money to spend. Great general prosperity followed, and the gentry, who
had threatened to abandon their estates if the Corn Laws were
repealed, simply raised their rents a trifle and increased the gaming
limit.

Sir Robert Peel publicly acknowledged his obligation to Cobden, and
Lord Palmerston, who had fought him tooth and nail, did the same,
explaining, "A new epoch has arisen, and England is a manufacturing
country, and as such the repeal of the Corn Laws became desirable." As
though he would say, "To have had free trade before this new epoch
arose, would have been a calamity." A large sum had been subscribed
but not used in the agitation. And now by popular acclaim it was
decided that this money should go to Cobden personally as a thank-
offering. When the proposition was made, new subscriptions began to
flow in, until the sum of eighty thousand pounds was realized.
Cobden's business had been neglected. In his fight for the good of the
nation his own fortune had taken wing. He announced his intention of
retiring from politics and devoting himself to trade, and this was
that which, probably, caused the tide to turn his way. He hesitated
about accepting the gift, which amounted to nearly half a million
dollars, but finally concluded that only by accepting could he be free
to serve the State, and so he acceded to the wishes of his friends.
Some years later, Lord Palmerston offered him a baronetcy and a seat
in the cabinet, but he preferred still to help the State as an outside
advocate.

John Morley, the strongest and sanest of modern English statesmen,
says:

  "Cobden had an intrepid faith in the perfectibility of man. His
  doctrine was one of non-intervention; that the powerful can
  afford to be lenient; that mankind continually moves toward the
  light if not too much interfered with. By his influence the darker
  shapes of repression were banished from the education of the young;
  the insane were treated with a consideration before unknown; the
  criminal was regarded as a brother who deserved our gentlest
  consideration and patience; the time-honored and ineffective
  processes of violence and coercion fell into abeyance, and a
  rational moderation and enlightenment appeared on the horizon. He
  elevated and refined the world of business, just as he benefited
  everything he touched. His early death at the age of sixty-one
  seemed a calamity for England, for we so needed the help of his
  generous, gentle and unresentful spirit. He lived not in vain; yet
  years must pass before the full and sublime truths for which he
  stood are realized."




THOMAS PAINE


  These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the
  sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of
  his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and
  thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily
  conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the
  conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap,
  we esteem too lightly; 't is dearness only that gives everything its
  value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and
  it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as FREEDOM
  should not be highly rated.
  --_Paine, in "The Crisis"_


[Illustration: THOMAS PAINE]

Thomas Paine was an English mechanic, of Quaker origin, born in the
year Seventeen Hundred Thirty-seven. He was the author of four books
that have influenced mankind profoundly. These books are, "Common
Sense," "The Age of Reason," "The Crisis," and "The Rights of Man."

In Seventeen Hundred Seventy-four, when he was thirty-seven years old,
he came to America bearing letters of introduction from Benjamin
Franklin.

On arriving at Philadelphia he soon found work as editor of "The
Pennsylvania Magazine."

In Seventeen Hundred Seventy-five, in the magazine just named, he
openly advocated and prophesied a speedy separation of the American
Colonies from England. He also threw a purple shadow over his
popularity by declaring his abhorrence of chattel slavery.

His writings, from the first, commanded profound attention, and on the
advice and suggestion of Doctor Benjamin Rush, an eminent citizen of
Philadelphia, the scattered editorials and paragraphs on human rights,
covering a year, were gathered, condensed, revised, made into a book.

This "pamphlet," or paper-bound book, was called "Common Sense."

In France, John Adams was accused of writing "Common Sense." He
stoutly denied it, there  being several allusions in it stronger than
he cared to stand sponsor for.

In England, Franklin was accused of being the author, and he neither
denied nor admitted it. But when a lady reproached him for having used
the fine alliterative phrase, applied to the king, "The Royal British
Brute," he smiled and said blandly, "Madame, I would never have been
so disrespectful to the brute creation as that."

"Common Sense" struck the keynote of popular feeling, and the
accusation of "treason," hurled at it from many sources, only served
to advertise it. It supplied the common people with reasons, and gave
statesmen arguments. The Legislature of Pennsylvania voted Paine a
honorarium of five hundred pounds, and the University of Pennsylvania
awarded him the degree of "Master of Arts," in recognition of eminent
services to literature and human rights. John Quincy Adams said,
"Paine's pamphlet, 'Common Sense,' crystallized public opinion and was
the first factor in bringing about the Revolution."

The Reverend Theodore Parker once said: "Every living man in America
in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, who could read, read 'Common Sense,'
by Thomas Paine. If he was a Tory, he read it, at least a little, just
to find out for himself how atrocious it was; and if he was a Whig, he
read it all to find the reasons why he was one. This book was the
arsenal to which the Colonists went for their mental weapons."

As "Common Sense" was published anonymously and without copyright, and
was circulated at bare cost, Paine never received anything for the
work, save the twenty-five hundred dollars voted to him by the
Legislature.

When independence was declared, Paine enlisted as a private, but was
soon made aide-de-camp to General Greene. He was an intrepid and
effective soldier and took an active part in various battles.

In December, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, he published his second
book, "The Crisis," the first words of which have gone into the
electrotype of human speech, "These are the times that try men's
souls." The intent of the letters which make up "The Crisis" was to
infuse courage into the sinking spirits of the soldiers. Washington
ordered the letters to be read at the head of every regiment, and it
was so done.

In Seventeen Hundred Eighty-one, Paine was sent to France with Colonel
Laurens to negotiate a loan. The errand was successful, and Paine then
made influential acquaintances, which were later to be renewed. He
organized the Bank of North America to raise money to feed and clothe
the army, and performed sundry and various services for the Colonies.

In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one he published his third book, "The
Rights of Man," with a complimentary preface by Thomas Jefferson. The
book had an immense circulation in America and England. By way of
left-handed recognition of the work, the author was indicted by the
British Government for "sedition." A day was set for the trial, but as
Paine did not appear--those were hanging days--and could not be found,
he was outlawed and "banished forever."

He became a member of the French Assembly, or "Chamber of Deputies,"
and for voting against the death of the king came under suspicion, and
was cast into prison, where he was held for one year, lacking a few
weeks. His life was saved by James Monroe, America's Minister to
France, and for eighteen months he was a member of Monroe's household.

In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-four, while in France, there was published
simultaneously in England, America and France, Paine's fourth book,
"The Age of Reason."

In Eighteen Hundred Two, Thomas Jefferson, then President of the
United States, offered Paine passage to America on board the man-of-
war "Maryland," in order that he might be safe from capture by the
English, who had him under constant surveillance and were intent on
his arrest, regarding him as the chief instigator in the American
Rebellion. Arriving in America, Paine was the guest for several months
of the President at Monticello. His admirers in Baltimore, Washington,
Philadelphia and New York gave banquets in his honor, and he was
tendered grateful recognition on account of his services to humanity
and his varied talents. He was presented by the State of New York, "in
token of heroic work for the Union," a farm at New Rochelle, eighteen
miles from New York, and here he lived in comparative ease, writing
and farming.

He passed peacefully away, aged seventy-two, in Eighteen Hundred Nine,
and his body was buried on his farm, near the house where he lived,
and a modest monument erected marking the spot. He had no Christian
burial, although, unlike Mr. Zangwill, he had a Christian name. Nine
years after the death of Paine, William Cobbett, the eminent English
reformer, stung by the obloquy visited upon the memory of Paine in
America, had the grave opened and the bones of the man who wrote the
first draft of our Declaration of Independence were removed to
England, and buried near the spot where he was born. Death having
silenced both the tongue and the pen of the Thetford weaver, no
violent interference was offered by the British Government. So now the
dead man slept where the presence of the living one was barred and
forbidden. A modest monument marks the spot. Beneath the name are
these words, "The world is my country, mankind are my friends, to do
good is my religion."

In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-nine, a monument was erected at New
Rochelle, New York, on the site of the empty grave where the body of
Paine was first buried, by the lovers and admirers of the man. And
while only one land claims his birthplace, three countries now
dispute for the privilege of honoring his dust, for it so happened
that in France a strong movement was on foot demanding that the
remains of Thomas Paine be removed from England to France, and be
placed in the Pantheon, that resting-place of so many of the
illustrious dead who gave their lives to the cause of Freedom, close
by the graves of Voltaire, Rousseau and Victor Hugo. And the reason
the bones were not removed to Paris was because only an empty coffin
rests in the grave at Thetford, as at New Rochelle. Rumor says that
Paine's skull is in a London museum, but if so, the head that
produced "The Age of Reason" can not be identified. And the end is
not yet!

       *       *       *       *       *

The genius of Paine was a flower that blossomed slowly. But life is a
sequence, and the man who does great work has been in training for
it. There is nothing like keeping in condition--one does not know
when he is going to be called on. Prepared people do not have to hunt
for a position--the position hunts for them. Paine knew no more about
what he was getting ready for than did Benjamin Franklin, when at
twenty he studied French, evenings, and dived deep into history.

The humble origin of Paine and his Quaker ancestry were most helpful
factors in his career. Only a working-man who had tasted hardship
could sympathize with the overtaxed and oppressed. And Quakerdom made
him a rebel by prenatal tendency. Paine's schooling was slight, but
his parents, though poor, were thinking people, for nothing sharpens
the wits of men, preventing fatty degeneration of the cerebrum, like
persecution. In this respect, the Jews and Quakers have been greatly
blessed and benefited--let us congratulate them. Very early in life
Paine acquired the study habit. And for the youth who has the study
habit no pedagogic tears need be shed. There were debating-clubs at
coffeehouses, where great themes were discussed; and our young weaver
began his career by defending the Quakers. He acquired considerable
local reputation as a weaver of thoughts upon the warp and woof of
words. Occasionally he occupied the pulpit in dissenting chapels.

These were great times in England--the air was all athrob with
thought and feeling. A great tidal wave of unrest swept the land. It
was an epoch of growth, second only in history to the Italian
Renaissance. The two Wesleys were attacking the Church, and calling
upon men to methodize their lives and eliminate folly; Gibbon was
writing his "Decline and Fall"; Burke, in the House of Commons, was
polishing his brogue; Boswell was busy blithering about a book
concerning a man; Captain Cook was sailing the seas finding
continents; the two Pitts and Charles Fox were giving the king
unpalatable advice; Horace Walpole was setting up his private press
at Strawberry Hill; the Herschels--brother and sister--were sweeping
the heavens for comets; Reynolds, West, Lawrence, Romney and
Gainsborough were founding the first school of British Art; and David
Hume, the Scotchman, was putting forth arguments irrefutable. And
into this seething discontent came Thomas Paine, the weaver, reading,
studying, thinking, talking, with nothing to lose but his reputation.
He was twenty-seven years of age when he met Ben Franklin at a
coffeehouse in London. Paine got his first real mental impetus from
Franklin. Both were workingmen. Paine listened to Franklin one whole
evening, and the said, "What he is I can at least in part become."
Paine thought Franklin quite the greatest man of his time, an opinion
which, among others held by him, the world now fully accepts.

       *       *       *       *       *

Paine at twenty-four, from a simple weaver, had been called into the
office of his employer to help straighten out the accounts. He tried
storekeeping, but with indifferent success. Then it seems he was
employed by the Board of Excise on a similar task. Finally he was
given a position in the Excise. This position he might have held
indefinitely, and been promoted in the work, for he had clerical
talents which made his services valuable. But there was another theme
that interested him quite as much as collecting taxes for the
Government, and that was the philosophy of taxation. This was very
foolish in Thomas Paine--a tax-collector should collect taxes, and
not concern himself with the righteousness of the business, nor about
what becomes of the money.

Paine had made note of the fact that England collected taxes from
Jews, but that Jews were not allowed to vote because they were not
"Christians," it being assumed that Jews were not as fit, either
intellectually or morally, to pass on questions of state as members
of the "Church." In Seventeen Hundred Seventy-one, in a letter to a
local paper, he used the phrase, "The iniquity of taxation without
representation," referring to England's treatment of the Quakers.
About the same time he called attention to the fact that the
Christian religion was built on the Judaic, and that the reputed
founder of the established religion was a Jew and his mother a Jewess,
and to deprive Jews of the right of full citizenship, simply because
they did not take the same view of Jesus that others did, was a
perversion of the natural rights of man. This expression, "the
natural rights of man," gave offense to a certain clergyman of
Thetford, who replied that man had no natural rights, only
privileges--all the rights he had were those granted by the Crown.
Then followed a debate at the coffeehouse, followed by a rebuke from
Paine's superior officer in the Excise, ordering him to cease all
political and religious controversy on penalty.

Paine felt the smart of the rebuke; he thought it was unjustifiable,
in view of the fact that the excellence of his work for the Government
had never been questioned. So he made a speech in a dissenting chapel
explaining the situation. But explanations never explain, and his
assertion that the honesty of his service had never been questioned
was put out of commission the following week by the charge of
smuggling. His name was dropped from the official payroll until his
case could be tried, and a little later he was peremptorily
discharged. The charge against him was not pressed--he was simply not
wanted--and the statement by the head exciseman that a man working for
the Government should not criticize the Government was pretty good
logic, anyway. Paine, however, contended that all governments exist
for the governed, and with the consent of the governed, and it is the
duty of all good citizens to take an interest in their government, and
if possible show where it can be strengthened and bettered.

It will thus be seen that Paine was forging reasons--his active brain
was at work, and his sensitive spirit was writhing under a sense of
personal injustice.

One of his critics--a clergyman--said that if Thomas Paine wished to
preach sedition, there was plenty of room to do it outside of England.
Paine followed the suggestion, and straightway sought out Franklin to
ask him about going to America.

Every idea that Paine had expressed was held by Franklin and had been
thought out at length. Franklin was thirty-one years older than Paine,
and time had tempered his zeal, and beside that, his tongue was always
well under control, and when he expressed heresy he seasoned it with a
smile and a dash of wit that took the bitterness out of it. Not so
Paine--he was an earnest soul, a little lacking in humor, without the
adipose which is required for a diplomat.

Franklin's letters of introduction show how he admired the man--what
faith he had in him--and it is now believed that Franklin advanced him
money, that he might come to America.

William Cobbett says:

  As my Lord Grenville has introduced the name of Edmund Burke, suffer
  me, my Lord, to introduce the name of a man who put this Burke to
  shame, who drove him off the public stage to seek shelter in the
  pension-list, and who is now named fifty million times where the
  name of the pensioned Burke is mentioned once. The cause of the
  American Colonies was the cause of the English Constitution,
  which says that no man shall be taxed without his own consent. A
  little cause sometimes produces a great effect; an insult offered to
  a man of great talent and unconquerable perseverance has in many
  instances produced, in the long run, most tremendous effects; and it
  appears to me very clear that the inexcusable insults offered to Mr.
  Paine while he was in the Excise in England was the real cause of
  the Revolution in America; for, though the nature of the cause of
  America was such as I have before described it, though the
  principles were firm in the minds of the people of that country,
  still it was Mr. Paine, and Mr. Paine alone, who brought those
  principles into action.

Paine's part in the Revolutionary War was most worthy and honorable.
He shouldered a musket with the men at Valley Forge, carried messages
by night through the enemy's country, acted as rear-guard for
Washington's retreating army, and helped at break of day to capture
Trenton, and proved his courage in various ways. As clerk, secretary,
accountant and financier he did excellent service.

Of course, there had been the usual harmonious discord that will occur
among men hard-pressed and over-worked, where nerve-tension finds vent
at times in acrimony. But through all the nine long, weary years
before the British had had enough, Paine was never censured with the
same bitterness which fell upon the heads of Washington and Jefferson.
Even Franklin came in for his share of blame, and it was shown that he
had expended an even hundred thousand pounds in Europe, with no
explanation of what he had done with the money. When called upon to
give an accounting for the "yellow-dog fund," Franklin simply wrote
back, "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn." And
on the suggestion of Thomas Paine, the matter was officially dropped.

Paine was a writing man--the very first American writing man--and I am
humiliated when I have to acknowledge that we had to get him from
England. He was the first man who ever used these words, "The American
Nation," and also these, "The United States of America." Paine is the
first American writer who had a literary style, and we have not had so
many since but that you may count them on the fingers of one hand.
Note this sample of antithesis: "There are but two natural sources of
wealth--the earth and the ocean--and to lose the right to either, in our
situation, is to put the other up for sale."

Here is a little tribute from Paine's pen to America which some of our
boomers of boom towns might do well to use:

  America has now outgrown the state of infancy. Her strength and
  commerce make large advances to manhood; and science in all its
  branches has not only blossomed, but even ripened upon the soil. The
  cottages as it were of yesterday have grown into villages, and the
  villages to cities; and while proud antiquity, like a skeleton in
  rags, parades the streets of other nations, their genius, as if
  sickened and disgusted with the phantom, comes hither for recovery.
  America yet inherits a large portion of her first-imported virtue.
  Degenera

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