The Unpopular Review

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CONTENTS OF THE PRECEDING NUMBER (18, for April-June, 1918)

  • WHY AMERICA LAGS, Alvin S. Johnson, Professor in Stanford University.
  • ON GOING AFOOT, Charles S. Brooks.
  • THE PROBLEM OF ALSACE-LORRAINE, C. D. Hazen, Professor in Columbia University.
  • VISCOUNT MORLEY, Paul Elmer More, Advisory Editor of The Nation.
  • THE ADVENTURE OF THE TRAINING CAMP, George R. MacMinn, Professor in University of California.
  • HALF SOLES, Herbert Wilson Smith.
  • PRICE FIXING BY GOVERNMENT, David McGregor Means.
  • TURKEY UNDER GERMAN TUTELAGE, Rufus W. Lane.
  • MACHINE AND MAN, Grant Showerman, Professor in University of Wisconsin.
  • THE ATHLETIC HABIT OF MIND, Edward F. Hayward.
  • ARBITERS OF FATE, Virginia Clippinger.
  • FOOD CONSERVATION AND THE WOMAN, Mary Austin.
  • SOME REFLECTIONS ON REVOLUTION, T. Lothrop Stoddard.
  • THE JOB AND THE OUTSIDER, H. W. Boynton.
  • DURCHALTEN! Vernon L. Kellogg, Professor in Stanford University.
  • A NEW PSYCHIC SENSITIVE, The Editor.
  • CORRESPONDENCE: “The Obscurity of Philosophers”—Our Tax Troubles Again.
  • EN CASSEROLE: Concerning these Hasty War Marriages—Bergson and the Yellow Peril—A Problematic Personality—“Clause” and “Phrase.”

CONTENTS

FOR JULY-SEPTEMBER, 1918

The Unpopular Review

No. 19

JULY-SEPTEMBER

Vol. X

NATURALIZATION IN THE SPOTLIGHT OF WAR

Amid the manifold uncertainties into which the war has plunged us, one fact stands out with increased definiteness—that in our midst, and even voting on our policies, of life or death,—we have had for many years large numbers of people who at best give only a divided allegiance to this country, and at worst are devoted and violent partisans of some foreign state. The evidence of this truth has been of the most diversified character, including the destruction of warehouses, docks, and munitions factories, the burning of immense quantities of food, the manufacture of ineffective torpedoes, the attempted blowing up of war ships, and the dissemination of disease germs among children, soldiers, and cattle. The uniform object of all these activities has been the decrease of the war efficiency of the United States. The indications seem conclusive that the perpetrators have been, not special German spies or agents sent over here after our entry into the war or in anticipation of it, but among the candidates for Mr. Gerard’s five thousand lampposts—persons who have lived in our midst for long periods, and have been accepted as belonging to us.

So suddenly overwhelming has been the demonstration since the war began, and particularly since the United States entered the war, that there is great danger that the impression will become established that the war created the situation, that the danger is a war danger, and that the problem will automatically solve itself when the war is over. Nothing could be more prejudicial to a correct understanding of the situation, and to a sound solution of the national problems which will confront us when the war is over. The war has not created the danger from alien-hearted members of the body politic, it has merely revealed it. The situation is the creation of our traditional policy toward foreigners, and the menace inherent in the situation existed, and was discerned by many close students of political affairs, long before the war was dreamed of. Although then the manifestations of this danger were less spectacular, the danger itself was no less persistent, pervasive, and insidious. When Carl Petersen is triumphantly inducted into municipal office, not because he is a Republican or a Democrat, not because he stands thus and so on important public questions, but because he is a Swede; when Patrick O’Donnell is made detective sergeant, not because he has the highest qualifications of all the men available, but because he belongs to the same Irish lodge as the chief of police; when Salvini, and Goldberg, and Trcka receive political preferment or judicial favor because of the race from which they spring or the nation from which they come, the essence of the peril is exactly the same as when Hans Ahlberg tries to sink an American merchantman because its cargo of wheat is destined for England instead of Germany.

The peril in question is the peril of having in a democracy large groups of voters actuated by racial and national affiliations other than those of the country in which they live: in other words, large elements of unassimilated foreigners. The assertion of this danger does not necessarily carry the implication of any inferiority, mental, physical, or moral, on the part of the foreigners. Difference without inferiority is dangerous, difference coupled with inferiority is definitely injurious. There is no need to reiterate the manifold evils which have already developed, and which threaten to develop, from immigration of the poor quality which our selective tests have not sufficed to prevent. Undoubtedly the physical and mental average of our people, possibly also the moral average, has already been definitely reduced, and the progress of the working classes toward a reasonably high standard of living has been checked, but the point which needs emphasis here is that difference in itself is dangerous. The immigrant who is still a foreigner in sympathy and character exerts a prejudicial influence upon the life of the nation at every point of contact. It is impossible for him to function as a normal unit in the social complex. If by naturalization he acquires the right to participate in political affairs, the opportunity for injury is multiplied. He cannot possibly approach public questions as if his allegiance were wholly with the country of his residence. These facts are particularly illustrated with us by the very large element known as “birds of passage.” The only way these evils can be overcome is through genuine assimilation.

Assimilation is a spiritual metamorphosis. It manifests itself in many changes of dress, of language, of manners, and of conduct. But these outward semblances are not assimilation. An alien is thoroughly assimilated into a new society only when he becomes completely imbued with its spiritual heritage. He must cease to think and feel and imagine in ways determined by his old social environment, and must respond to the stimuli of social contact in all ways exactly as if from the very beginning he had developed under the influence of his adopted society. And this involves, of course, the entire abandonment of any sympathy, affection, or loyalty different from that which might be felt by any native of his new home for the country of his origin or the people of that country. Complete assimilation so defined may seem impossible to the adult immigrant. This is almost universally the truth. The spiritual impress of the environment of one’s infancy, childhood, and youth, can seldom be eradicated during the later years of life. Realizing this, those who hate to admit that our immigrants are not being assimilated, hasten to modify the definition. But this does not help the case, because it does not alter the situation.

In this respect, the war has already rendered a distinct service to this country. No longer can we blind ourselves to the fact that national unity does not exist. Professor William Graham Sumner used often to remark that the United States had no just claim to the name of nation, because of the presence of the negroes within its borders. Whether that particular definition of “nation” is adopted or not, there can be no doubt that real national homogeneity is wholly lacking, and that the negro is by no means the only discordant element. In fact, in many ways the immigration problem is more imminent and menacing than the negro problem: for the negro problem is in a sense static, since it is not aggravated by continuous accessions from without. We know what the negro problem is, and can state it in terms which will be relatively permanent. But the immigration problem presents constantly changing aspects, not only because of its growing numerical proportions, but because of the diversity of its elements, and the uncertainty as to its future developments.

One of the striking manifestations of this new recognition of our dangerous situation is the change of front of those who are opposed to the restriction of immigration. The stock answer to the warnings of the restrictionists used to be the assertion that assimilation was taking place with perfectly satisfactory rapidity and completeness. America was the great “melting-pot” of the nations, out of which was to flow—was, in fact, actually flowing—a new and better type of man, purged of all slag and dross. As conclusive proofs of this claim, were advanced all those superficial adaptations to new surroundings which the immigrant and his children make with so much display and gusto. The assimilating power of the American People was asserted to be unlimited, and if there were any hitches in the process, they could all be remedied by distribution. How suddenly has this elaborate erection of analogies, metaphors, and pseudo-arguments been shown up for the flimsy camouflage that it really was! Miss Grace Abbott, the avowed champion of the immigrant, is forced to admit that “unity of religion, unity of race, unity of ideals, do not exist in the United States. We are many nationalities scattered across a continent.” Miss Frances Kellor writes a book on Straight America, in which she confesses the failure of assimilation in the past, and turns to universal military service as a last resort. Mrs. Mary Antin remains discreetly silent, and Mr. Isaac A. Hourwich is less in the public eye than formerly.

But even yet the opponents of restriction are not willing to submit to the logic of the situation, and instead of admitting the present need of true restriction, come forward with a new substitute. This substitute goes by the general name of “Americanization,” and is urged upon us as the appropriate and adequate remedy for the ills which none can longer deny. The essence of this movement is that those who embody the true American ideas and ideals—a group seldom named or definitely described, but usually vaguely referred to as “we”—should bend all their energies toward the assimilation of our foreign population, and should seek by artificial and purposive expedients to accomplish that cultural transmutation for which the natural and unconscious relationships of the immigrant have proved wholly inadequate. And it must be freely granted that many of the specific proposals of the “Americanizers” are intrinsically meritorious and worthy of adoption. When it is suggested that our foreign populations ought to be better housed, fed, clothed, educated and amused, we all rise in assent—provided he will do his share toward it; yet in self-defence we must do more than ours. When we are urged to assist the immigrant to learn the English language and familiarize himself with the political history and government of this nation, our common sense gives ready response. The gross absurdity of the movement lies in the assumption that any or all of these things, good as they are, constitute assimilation, or will, in the natural course of their accomplishment, produce assimilation. Who will undertake to show that those persons of foreign birth who, in the last three and a half years, have most flagrantly violated their obligations to the country of their adoption, are on the whole less well educated, less familiar with the English language, less prosperous, or even less versed in American institutions, than those who have remained loyal at heart, or at least in conduct? By all means let us have as small a proportion of our people as possible who cannot read and write, who do not understand the English language, who treat their women according to the code of mediaeval semi-barbarism, and who are content with living conditions something lower than what we consider proper for domestic animals. But let us not imagine that those who have freed themselves from these anomalies are therefore true Americans.

However, the crowning insult offered to the intelligence of the American people by the Americanization movement is the soberly uttered and persistently reiterated proposition that the best way to cure the evils of a heterogeneous population is to naturalize the foreigners! In the voluminous literature issued by the group of organizations directly connected with this movement, the three injunctions to the foreigner which appear with the greatest frequency and emphasis are: “Attend night school,” “Learn the English language,” “Become an American citizen.” As already stated, no fault can be found with the first two admonitions in themselves. But the third calls for close scrutiny, particularly as it involves a fundamental question which is sure to rise to prominence when the war is over. What benefits can be expected from our hasty naturalization of aliens? What is the effect upon the aliens and upon the country, of this urgent invitation to become citizens? Ought it to be made easier or harder to acquire citizenship?

The first step in the answer to the foregoing questions is the examination of the real meaning of naturalization, and the process by which it is achieved in the United States. Naturalization is the act of conferring citizenship by a certain state upon a certain individual who hitherto has been a citizen or subject of another state. Citizenship implies rights and privileges, allegiance and obligations. The only difference that may be looked for in an individual after naturalization is that he now enjoys such rights and privileges, and owes such duties and obligations as appertain to State B instead of State A. The act of naturalization is not a developmental experience or process, but merely the registry of a change of status. Any transformations in the character of the individual which are regarded as essential to fitness for citizenship in State B should have taken place before naturalization. The act of naturalization will not produce them, nor is there adequate ground for assuming that they will generally follow that act. The only question which concerns the naturalizing official is whether the candidate is already affiliated at heart with the new country instead of the old, and the tests imposed upon the candidate are theoretically designed to determine or guarantee that affiliation. If, therefore, the foreigner was in any degree dangerous to his adopted country while an alien, there is no reason to suppose that he will be materially less so as a naturalized citizen. On the contrary, he is in a position to do much greater harm, because of the new powers and opportunities which naturalization confers, and because of the new confidence and trust which he enjoys through his citizenship.

The harm thus done by naturalized but unassimilated citizens may be malicious and intentional or incidental. Many of the notorious election scandals of the past have been made possible by large numbers of foreigners who, having sought citizenship for narrowly selfish reasons, have used it in unscrupulous ways. It is true that they have frequently been abetted by native-born politicians; but the foreigners furnished the material. The injury done involuntarily, however, by well-intentioned voters who simply are not Americans, is even more serious because more extensive and more insidious. These are the men who have taken the oath of allegiance in all sincerity, supposing themselves to be as much in tune with the spirit of American life as the occasion called for. They have lived up to their lights as consistently, perhaps, as the majority of native-born voters of the same class. But their participation in public affairs has constantly been colored by racial or national affiliations, by a foreign outlook on life, and by incapacity to appreciate the true genius of the American nation. Their influence has therefore been to neutralize or thwart the efforts of conscientious intelligent Americans to grapple with national problems. An interesting case in point is the naturalized German referred to in “A Family Letter” in the December Atlantic Monthly, who refused to buy an inch of land in this country, in order that he might be free at any time to return to Germany. It has taken the emergency of a war to reveal to many naturalized citizens how mistaken they were (this at least is the most charitable interpretation) when they supposed that the old allegiance had been thoroughly subordinated.

It is a most extraordinary inversion of logic, this mental process by which people persuade themselves that rushing our aliens through the naturalization courts will better our national situation. The line of argument seems to be something like this: A foreign resident of the United States who desires to participate fully in the life of the nation, and who is sincerely devoted to the best interests of the country, will wish to become a citizen; therefore, every naturalized citizen desires to participate fully in the life of the nation and is sincerely devoted to its best interests. Or perhaps a slightly less fantastic process of cerebration might be this: Naturalization is conferred upon foreigners who have fitted themselves to be received into citizenship; therefore, to accelerate the process of naturalization is to reduce the number of foreigners unfitted for citizenship.

If our naturalization laws were so strict, and the courts which administer them so scrupulous, that no alien could acquire citizenship except upon a convincing demonstration of his assimilation, it would do less positive harm to urge aliens to become citizens, because they would know, or would in time learn, that to do so they must bring themselves into complete harmony with the spirit of the nation. It is therefore essential to examine the prescribed qualifications for naturalization, and see exactly what citizenship papers stand for.

The requirements are simply stated. The candidate must be a free white person, or a person of African nativity or African descent. He must be twenty-one years of age. He must have resided continuously five years in the United States, and one year in the State in which he makes application. He must have had his “first paper” at least two years, but not more than seven years. He must be of good moral character, must be attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and must be able to speak English (unless registered under the Homestead Laws) and to sign his name. He must not be an anarchist or a polygamist. He must renounce any hereditary title or order of nobility, and all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign potentate, prince, city, or state of which he is a subject. He must affirm his intention to reside permanently in the United States, and must declare on oath that he will “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” He must have as witnesses two citizens of the United States who testify as to his residence in the United States, his moral character, his attachment to the Constitution, and his general fitness (in their opinion) to be admitted to citizenship.

Now, assuming for the time being that the court officials apply the law with the utmost possible rigor, what is there in the foregoing list of requirements that guarantees that the newly made citizen is free from any lingering attachment to any other country, and ready to enter single-heartedly into the life of the nation, ready to share its burdens and the responsibility of grappling with its problems, in a way at all comparable to the native-born citizen?

The qualifications in question fall into two groups: first, those which are matters of demonstrable fact, and second those which are mere asseverations of the candidate himself, or of his witnesses. Most important in the first category is the period of residence. With the aid of the records of the immigration bureau this fact can be definitely established. But what of it? What does a residence of five years mean as to assimilation? Under modern conditions almost nothing. This provision was written into the law over a century ago, after heated debate, and has never been changed, though in the middle of the nineteenth century it was subjected to vigorous attacks by powerful parties who wished the period raised to twenty-one years. In a simpler organization of society, there was some meaning in the five-year requirement. When communities were small, when foreigners were few, when the United States still preserved some of the character of mediæval society, of which it has been said, “the essence … was that, in every manor, every one knew everything about his neighbor,” it was scarcely possible for an alien to reside five years in the country without becoming well known to a number of native citizens in his community, and establishing many points of contact with Americanizing influences. But in twentieth century America conditions are completely reversed. It is not only possible, but in innumerable cases the fact, that an alien may live, not only five nor twenty-one, but forty or fifty years in the midst of an American community without experiencing more than the most infinitesimal molding from a definitely American environment. In fact, the majority of recent immigrants do not really live in America at all, in anything more than a strictly geographical sense, but in communities almost as foreign as those from which they came. The mere physical fact of five years residence of itself signifies absolutely nothing as to the fitness of the alien to share in controlling the destiny of the nation. Let us therefore examine the other requirements in this group.

The candidate must be twenty-one years of age. This is reasonable and desirable, but tells us nothing of the alien’s fitness for citizenship. The period of at least two years intervening between the issue of the first and second papers was presumably designed to give opportunity for investigation of the candidate’s fitness, but rarely serves that purpose now. There remain, then, three positive requirements of fact—race, and ability to speak English and to sign one’s name. The general question of the greater desirability of one race over another, as material for American citizenship, is too involved to be adequately treated in this connection; clearly there is nothing here to indicate the fitness of the individual. This leaves just two tests of real assimilation, viz., ability to speak English and to sign one’s name. These are assuredly among the minimum requirements for citizenship, but they do not go very far.

Turning then to the qualifications which rest upon the statements of the candidate and his witnesses, we find that he must be of good moral character, and not a polygamist nor an anarchist. Assuming that the truth is told, these requisites are beyond objection, but what do they tell us of the fitness of the alien for American citizenship? To renounce hereditary titles is a proper enough requirement, but one that throws no light upon the candidacy of the majority of modern immigrants. The statement of intention of permanent residence in this country is meant as a guarantee of the good purposes of the alien in becoming a citizen. But naturally this will be treated most lightly by those who need it most, and it is a question whether a foreigner whose motives are questionable is any more desirable in the country than out of it. Anyway, the destination of good intentions is proverbial. Finally, then, the alien must renounce all foreign allegiance and fidelity, and swear to his attachment to the principles of the Constitution of this country, and engage to support and defend it and the laws against all enemies.

Remembering that, whatever may have been the efficacy of the provision about witnesses in the early stages of our history, it has degenerated into a sorry farce in modern times, when professional witnesses hang about the courts, ready to swear to anything for anybody, what does the whole naturalization procedure, as stipulated by law, amount to? Practically to nothing more than the statement by the alien himself that he wishes to transfer his allegiance from a foreign state to this, and the swearing of fidelity. We virtually offer citizenship freely to any alien who can meet certain arbitrary requirements as to residence, race, etc., and is willing to take the oath of allegiance. The one tangible thing is the oath, and the unreliability of the oath as a guarantee of undivided allegiance has been demonstrated over and over again in past decades, and most emphatically by the traitorous behavior of some of our naturalized citizens since 1914.

In practice, officials may or may not add to the requirements of the law a brief examination designed to reveal the candidate’s knowledge of the workings of the federal and state governments. But even at best, these questions and their appropriate answers occupy only half a dozen pages or so in a convenient little textbook, which assures the alien that if he “thoroughly familiarizes himself with the meaning of the questions and with the answers thereto, he will be sufficiently qualified to be admitted to citizenship,” even though the order in which the questions are asked should be varied a little. To cram up on this examination could hardly occupy an intelligent high school boy a couple of hours.

Since we thus offer citizenship almost for the asking to any white or African alien who has resided here five years, it follows that the issuance of naturalization papers does not guarantee any degree of assimilation, and to urge aliens to become naturalized is in no sense equivalent to urging them to fit themselves for the responsibilities of citizenship. There is accordingly absolutely nothing to be said in defense of the notion that urging naturalization upon our aliens will improve our domestic situation.

But what of the opposite side of the case? Are there any positive objections to the propaganda in question? The answer involves an analysis of the probable effects upon the alien of such vigorous encouragement, and the probable effects upon the United States of a large increase of naturalized citizens. The latter problem practically resolves itself into the query whether an unassimilated foreigner is less dangerous as citizen than as an alien. This has already been answered. Because of the added power, opportunity, and protection which the naturalized citizen enjoys, and because of the greater demands he may make upon the government, he is in a position to do much more harm, maliciously or otherwise, as a citizen than as an alien. It is true that federal naturalization does not give him the right to vote. The suffrage is a matter of states’ rights. Most states require federal naturalization; some require additional qualifications, such as literacy, while about fifteen allow even unnaturalized aliens to vote.

In the absence of guarantees to the contrary, it is quite possible, not only that the alien may not be fitted for citizenship, but that he may desire citizenship for unworthy or ulterior purposes. Until stopped by a recent law, it was a common practice for subjects of backward or despotic foreign countries to come to the United States, remain five years and take out their citizenship papers, with no intention of even remaining longer, but with the definite purpose of returning to their native land and there carrying on their various businesses in the enjoyment of the greater facilities and protection given by the American flag.

Another common motive is to qualify for a better municipal or state job. Among the documents issued by the Americanizing agencies is a poster, bordered in red, white, and blue, and illustrated by a representation of Uncle Sam, his right hand clasping that of a sturdy immigrant, while his left points invitingly to the judge who is issuing naturalization papers. After the customary plea to become a citizen, the legend continues: “It means a better opportunity and a better home in America. It means a better job. It means a better chance for your children. It means a better America.” (Why not add, “It means a chance to turn a few honest dollars on election day?”) If these statements were true, the case would be bad enough, as, with the exception of the last, they appeal to a decidedly low motive for seeking citizenship. But they are not true. The newly made citizen in time finds out that they are not true, and then he feels cheated. When the better home and better job fail to materialize, any budding sense of obligation to his new country receives a sad shock.

Urging citizenship upon the alien must inevitably produce an attitude of mind exactly the opposite from that which would make him a useful citizen. That which comes easily is lightly regarded, and that which is presented in such a way that the taking of it appears a favor, is not looked upon with great reverence or respect. In this respect much of the literature of the Americanization movement is most pernicious. Moreover the emphasis is all on the personal advantages of citizenship, not at all on its duties or responsibilities.

In this particular our forefathers were much wiser than we. They recognized that American citizenship was a thing of great value, to be regarded as a boon, procurable only by earnest endeavor and true merit. They could not have comprehended how the liberties for which the Revolutionary heroes fought and bled could ever be so degraded as to be hawked about the market place. We would do well to follow their example. We esteem the United States most highly of all nations. We believe that it owes a peculiar debt to posterity, that those entrusted with its career should be imbued with the most profound respect for it, the deepest sense of their responsibility to it, and the most thorough equipment for the adequate performance of their duties with respect to it. To participate in the control of the destiny of this great democracy is an undertaking of the gravest sort; and five years residence and the other requirements of the naturalization law are no more a fit preparation for it than five years of service in the office of a corporation and familiarity with the office routine fit the office boy to become a director.

Any propaganda directed toward our aliens should therefore take the form of urging, even to the point of insistence, that they fit themselves for citizenship. This will make them more useful and less troublesome residents, whether they are eventually naturalized or not. But citizenship itself should be held aloft, portrayed to them as a priceless boon, to be won only as a reward of long and patient effort, and a complete demonstration of their fitness. If this results in discouraging some foreigners from coming to this country, no harm will be done. If it results in increasing the proportion of residents who do not share in the government, and if this is in itself an evil, the remedy is to be applied at the ports of entry, and not in the naturalization courts.

It is emphatically true that changes in our naturalization procedure are needed. But they should be in the direction of greater strictness, not of greater laxity. It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss in detail what these changes should be, but to emphasize the necessity that in general the requirements should be more inclusive, more positive, more significant of the assimilation and fitness of the candidate, more determinative of his good intentions in presenting his petition. One change that is certainly called for is the modification of state laws, by federal coercion if necessary, so as to make it impossible for aliens to vote. As social organization becomes more complex, the influence of government upon the life of the individual becomes more extensive, more intimate, and more vital; and as the sphere of government expands, the responsibilities of the electorate become heavier and more intricate. When peace is restored, and the period of reconstruction commences, the demands upon the intelligence, fidelity, and conscience of the voter will be vastly greater than ever before in the world’s history. It is essential to the maintenance of democracy and the progress of humanity that the United States face this critical period with the most efficient and harmonious electorate possible.

Does emphasis upon national homogeneity and solidarity seem too reactionary in this crisis of the world’s history? Does it appear that laying stress on the differentiation of nationalities within our borders will prevent the United States from playing its appropriate part in the coming period of reconstruction, which, we are told, must involve recognition of the principle of internationality? A moment’s thought will make it clear that this position is a mistaken one when the war is over. Nations will still exist, nor will they pass out of existence with the progress of any revolutionary international adjustments that may be made. Whatever action is taken in the direction of a world federation must be made by self-conscious units, and must rest upon the basis of well-knit nations. The recent unusually sound and suggestive piece of sociological thinking, Community, by Mr. R. M. Maciver, contains a most timely chapter on “Co-ordination of Community.” In the course of his study of the way the principle of association and common action is extended, the author observes:

Whether the ideal of nationality grows stronger or weaker in the future, the fact of nationality … will always remain…. Understanding the service and limits of nationality, we are now in a position to consider how nations both are and can be co-ordinated within the wider community which they build. Such co-ordination can be directly achieved only through the State, which is the primary association corresponding to the nation…. It is true that the limits of nations and States are still far from being coincident, but the great historical movements have been leading towards that ideal. In any case it must be the co-operation of States, whether they do or do not coincide with nations, which will bring order into the still existing chaos of the nations.

In the period following the war, the necessity will be greater than ever before that the government of the United States shall be able to deal with intricate and far reaching problems with intelligence, unity, harmony, and force. This can be done only through an electorate that is intelligent, homogeneous, sympathetic, and free from divisions into antagonistic or incongruous groups.

An extreme but significant illustration of this principle is furnished by the present situation in Russia. If a general truce were declared tomorrow, and the nations sought to get together to discuss a permanent basis of settlement, one of the greatest obstacles in the way of success would be Russia, simply for the reason that at present there is no Russia in the sense that a nation must exist to participate in such a council as that supposed. There is no danger that the United States will fall into any such state of disruption as Russia. But there is a distinct danger that it may suffer from a lesser degree of the same malady, the existence of discordant elements in the body politic, and consequent inability to exert her maximum force in attacking the problems of reconstruction.

The period following the war will be a time for new things. Easier than ever before will it be to shake off the trammels of tradition and precedent, and inaugurate approved though novel political policies. Foremost among the matters which the United States will be called upon to see to will be the reconsideration of our entire attitude toward aliens, and their naturalization. The time to prepare for that reconsideration is now.

WAR PROPHETS

The war is generating prophets as the Nile generated frogs under the mandate of Moses, and there is a similarity in the speech of both products. The prophets are too cautious to risk their reputation in predicting the events of the war; their forecasts relate to the sort of a world we shall find ourselves in after peace returns. But even this measure of prediction is a by-product of the soothsayers who, whether their lips have been touched with a coal from off the altar, or not, certainly wield the pen of the ready writer. The main industry of the busy prophets is to expound to us the meaning of the war, and to disclose to us those causes of the war which we should never have discovered for ourselves.

The ordinary uninspired man feels when he has read the diplomatic correspondence of a couple of weeks at the end of July and the beginning of August, 1914, that he knows fairly well what were the immediate causes of the war, and where the responsibility lies. If he carries his reading back as far as the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, he is satisfied that he has a pretty comprehensive view of the forces that precipitated the war. And if he has read pretty abundant selections from the Pan-German literature and the panegyrics on war—such a literature as no branch of the human race, Christian or pagan, ever produced before—he thinks he understands how it was possible to plunge the German nation into this attack on the world.

But all this is merely a matter of reading and reflection. Any one can reach such conclusions. The prophet must reach some different conclusion in order to sustain his claim to inspiration:

If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,

Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be.

The prophet has got to attribute the war to causes that would not have occurred to the common mortal, and see in it meanings that ordinary eyes cannot trace, or abdicate his tripod.

It is equally unreasonable and equally immoral to say that the war proves that Christianity is a failure, and to say that it proves Christianity has never been tried. Because if either of these hypotheses be correct, one set of belligerents is as deep in the mud as the other is in the mire, and there is no personal culpability for this war, and no national culpability either. We are all guilty of not being Christians, or all unfortunate in having grown up in ignorance of revelation, and beyond that there is no blame for the war.

If this war is not the result of certain perfectly well known individuals using their own nations for an attack on others, but is the result of impersonal enmity between Teuton and Slav, then no person or persons are responsible for the war, there is no more blame on one side than there is on the other, and the moral element is as lacking as it is in an encounter between the inhabitants of the jungle. It is a curious thing that the prophet assumes the role of a moral censor, and devotes much the greater part of his energies to confusing the moral issues, to obliterating moral distinctions, and to blunting the ethical sense.

To condemn all war, which is a congenial theme for a moralist, is rank immorality; for it puts the nation that attacks, and the nation that repels the invader, in the same category, and refuses to make any distinction between the burglar, the householder who resists him, and the policeman who overpowers him and drags him away to jail.

The prophet readily drops his eye on armies, and at once announces that it is their existence that accounts for the war. If there were no armies there would possibly be no wars, but we have shown more than once that armies can be pretty rapidly extemporized. Besides, this, too, confuses the moral issues. All nations have armies, and if America and England had relatively small armies before this war, they had the largest navy in the world and the navy which ranked second or third. The highwayman carries a pistol, and so does the paymaster who is obliged to transport a treasure chest. If the possession of a revolver was the cause of the homicide that occurred, the guilt lies equally on the souls of both.

We are told that no truth is more certain than that “if you create a vast fighting machine it will sooner or later compel you to fight, whether you want to fight or not”—which is about as dubious a truth as was ever paraded as an axiom—that “these vast machines, whether armies or engines of war, are made to be used,” and that “the military machine will overpower the minds which have called it into being.” Then their responsibility is not for the ensuing war, but for carelessness in leaving a war weapon around. But if these vast military machines were made to be used, then why complicate the question of responsibility by representing the machine as overpowering its careless but really peaceful creator, and compelling him to fight whether he wants to fight or not?

If the Kaiser and the Crown Prince and the General Staff and the military caste and the Pan-German element created the army to use against other nations, in accordance with Bernhardi’s alternative of “world domination or decline,” and if all the professors and preachers and pamphleteers had taught the people that war was a high, holy, and beautiful thing, and—more particularly—that Germany could beat any other nation in a few weeks, and the armies would return loaded down with spoils and indemnities and title deeds to new provinces, and that “our good old German God” had specially deputized the German nation to overpower all the rest of the world, make German the universal tongue, and the primitive moral code of Germany the ethical law of the world, then we know precisely who is guilty of this war. But if the German army compelled the German Government to back Austria in an attack on Servia, and on its own account to invade Russia, Belgium and France, we are very much at sea about the place where the moral burden is to be laid.

The prophet is particularly prone to find the causes of the war in a material civilization, in our existing industrial system, and especially in greed. The prophet and the political orator are equally stern in their denunciation of greed. At a time when prophets were so accustomed to physical exercise that they could run ahead of Ahab’s chariot, and in the absence of normal sources of supply, were fed by the ravens, their indignation at greed, their contempt for commerce, and their superiority to a material civilization, was free from incongruity. The modern prophet does not live on locusts and wild honey, nor is his wardrobe limited to a belt of camel’s hair. His uncompromising denunciation of his age is somewhat impaired by the obvious fact that he has “some of the pork.”

The deliverances of the prophet on this class of themes are rather tiresome in their iteration, and distinctly irritating in their oblivion to history. There is no civilization that does not rest upon the possession and acquisition of property; there is no clime or time in which men have not worked for their living, and sought the means of buying the things which their tastes, coarse or refined, craved, in which there have not been rich and poor, and in which it has not been much pleasanter to be the former than the latter. The earliest social satirist, like the latest, berated the accursed greed for gold, and castigated his contemporaries for their love of luxury and their eager pursuit of money. It would seem as if the prophet might recognize that it is a very old sermon he is preaching, and familiarize himself with the extraordinary age of those evils of his own day which he feels it his mission to chastise.

What distinguishes this age from others, and our own country from others is that here and now wealth is acquired more easily and more rapidly than at other times and places. This being the very obvious fact, it shakes our confidence in the whole fraternity of prophets that they should, one and all, attribute the larger fortunes made here and now to the greater love of money, or its more assiduous pursuit. The rich man is more successful in amassing wealth than the poor man, but he is not more mercenary. Two men try equally hard to get rich; one succeeds, and the other fails; the man who failed is quite likely to be more eager for money than the man who succeeded.

The industrial system never meets the approval of the prophet. An occasional prediction is that the war will destroy our deplorable economic life, in which every man is trying to get as high wages or as large a salary or as ample profits as possible, and will usher in the golden age, in which such base considerations as pecuniary compensation will have a very secondary place in every man’s mind. Before this war came, the most eminent educator in America assured the workingman that he ought to work for the pleasure of it, and not for the contents of his Saturday night envelope. Such admonitions have occurred, in one form or another, in the literature of the sages, for centuries and millenniums. But it was never evolved by a man who was digging postholes, and a noble ambition to mine the very best coal cannot carry a miner far when he is obliged to cut such coal as there is in front of him.

It is barely possible that by devoting some weeks to the task, a man could produce a pair of shoes notably superior to the ordinary run of shoes, and his professional pride as a devout follower of St. Crispin might take keen delight in the work of his hands; in the fact that he had made the very finest pair of shoes in the world. But, after all, he needs food, and possibly he is obliged to pay rent, and he ought to have a wife to make comfortable, and children to send to school in presentable form: so something besides pride in his work is necessary. If he is to be adequately compensated for his labor on that pair of shoes, their price will be such that only the rich—if the rich are to be permitted to survive—can buy them; and if such shoemakers prevail, the greater part of mankind will go barefoot. For does not the prophet who has poured out the phials of his wrath upon an economic system that makes quantity and cheapness, instead of real excellence, its ideals, recognize that the purpose of quantity is to supply the wants of a greater number of human beings, and the purpose of cheapness is to enable human beings to supply more of their needs? For certainly if the shoes which are the very best shoes in the whole world, and whose excellence affords the keenest satisfaction to the soul of the shoemaker, cost $50, then it is quite certain that the customer who carries them home will go without many other things that he ought to have. If the shoes are made by machinery and sold for $3, they may not be quite so beautiful or durable as the artistic product of hand labor, regardless of time, and yet be in the interest of the customer and the community.

After the prophet has got through with his ravings at the present industrial system, the fact will remain that there are a good many millions of us on this earth, and that we have got to earn our livings, and that the agriculture and industries of the Middle Ages would not keep all of us alive. In addition to which, we may also venture to suggest that the people of the Middle Ages were not quite as honest as we are, and were not less particular about getting a financial return for their exertions. The modern industrial system was not created by capital for capitalists; it is the result of the efforts of the community as a whole to supply the needs of all of its members, and to afford employment to all of them. Hunting and fishing are pleasanter than most of the industries, but 100,000,000 of civilized people are living and are equipped with intellectual and moral accessories, where a quarter of a million Indians once roamed. And although they toiled not (systematically), neither did they spin (much), they were not happier or better than we are.

One prophet of more discrimination than most of his clan admits that the industry and thrift which produce capital are valuable qualities morally, but he is still confident that the great wealth of the modern world is thoroughly demoralizing. Whence it appears that the safe course for the world to pursue is to work hard and save carefully and burn up its accumulations every year in order to keep itself poor but pious, like the parents of the subjects of a style of religious biography now quite out of date. Of course this prophet would prefer the wiser course of not earning enough to afford wealth to accumulate. If we would only adopt his system and work for the pleasure of working, and for the satisfaction of producing absolutely perfect products of our own skill, there would be no danger of our sinking our souls into perdition with a load of gold. Noah and his sons appear to have built the Ark by the processes of domestic industry, in distinction from the accursed factory or capitalist system. How their support was provided for during the 120 years has not been recorded, but if one man undertook to build a locomotive, instead of merely making repetitions of a single part, it would be necessary to make arrangement for this. And when we are trying to replace the vessels destroyed by German submarines, it seems necessary to use more rapid methods of construction than sufficed before the Deluge.

Will some prophet please tell us how poor we must be in order to be virtuous and pacific, and how virtuous and pacific the world was before it became prosperous? Were there no wars before the Twentieth Century? The extent of this war is scarcely a result of the world’s opulence, when Sir Edward, now Viscount, Grey, offered to keep England out of it if Germany would limit the war to the Balkans or to Russia. The war has involved most of the world because Germany began it by attacking France and Belgium, and followed that up by attacking Americans on the high seas, where they had as much right to be as at home.

This argument that the war is the result of wealth is immoral, because it makes the guilt of America and England even greater than that of Germany (for they are richer); and because it is the argument of the communist—that theft is not wrong, because it is the inevitable consequence of private property: if no one has any right to anything, then no one will steal anything.

Nothing holds the attention of the prophet better than the idea that the war is the result of commercial competition. This also is an invention of the devil to exculpate Germany. All of us are in business for gain; we are actuated by greed; we are making cotton cloth to cover Africans for the profit that we can get out of it; we ought to think only of clothing the naked, and if we would only give the cotton cloth to the Hottentots without material return, we should have the proud satisfaction of seeing them draped in chintzes, and we should be safe from that wealth which is so certain to make us wicked. On those terms there would be very little competition in supplying the Hottentots, and no danger whatever that any nation would fight us to gain that portion of the export trade.

But the “peaceful penetration” of all other countries by German industry and commerce had been going on for thirty years before the war. England had stamped “Made in Germany” upon the imports from that country under the delusion that people would not buy them if they knew they were not made by domestic industry, but the only result was to advertise German business. Shipping interests at Antwerp, factories in France, hotels in Switzerland, iron works in Italy, commercial establishments in China and South America, the trade and transportation of Turkey, passed into German hands, and no nation offered armed resistance. No less a witness than Prince von Buelow testifies that England could easily have stopped German naval expansion, but did not do so. German commercial expansion did not cause the war, unless Great Britain, the principal sufferer from German business success, attacked Germany in 1914. And this is the German official explanation of the war supplied for domestic consumption. And yet it is repudiated by the highest witness who could be put upon the stand. No less a person than Prince Lichnowsky, who was German Ambassador in London at the outbreak of the war, traces the war to Austrian projects in the Balkans, with the “blank check” of Germany, together with irritation in Russia caused by Germany’s own efforts to establish a dominating influence in Constantinople. This leaves nothing of the story invented for the German people, and propagated by the university professors, that England attacked Germany because the latter was getting its trade away from it. And this falsehood, invented to shield the guilty nation, has a special fascination for the prophets. It looks so much like taking a broad and general and impartial view of the world. Satan is very liberal; it pains him to have guilt attached to any individual. It is more in accord with his philosophic and humane ideas to regard crime as a product of social conditions, and war as the result of trade competition.

But the guilt of Germany is betrayed by the selection by Germans of Sir Edward Grey as the especial subject of hatred among all the hated British race. Nothing but the consciousness of guilt can explain the extraordinary vituperation of the British Minister who did in 1914 precisely what he was highly praised for doing in 1913 in a speech in the Reichstag by Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg. That was the speech calling on the Reichstag for an increase of about 136,000 men in the German army, an addition of $50,000,000 a year to the military budget, and a non-recurring capital tax for military purposes of $250,000,000. The difference between 1913 and 1914 was not in anything that Sir Edward did, but in the fact that before the army increase of 1913 Germany was not prepared for war and supported Sir Edward’s efforts for peace. After that increase Germany was prepared for war, and would do nothing to support Sir Edward’s efforts to avert war, and the coarse abuse of Sir Edward is a “smoke box” designed to conceal the changed position of Germany.

Dr. von Jagow, Foreign Minister from 1913 to 1916, has been put forward to reply to Prince Lichnowsky, but agrees with the Prince that England did not desire war, and that Sir Edward Grey, who is described by a German divine as having “a cancerous tumor in place of a heart,” acted in good faith in his efforts to find a peaceful solution for the difficulty. One American writer finds the origin of the war in the rival interests of Germany and England in the Bagdad Railway, but Dr. Paul Rohrbach, now or recently of the German Colonial Office, has admitted that just before the war opened the interests of the two nations were settled by a treaty, in which England made surprisingly large concessions. This is also stated by Prince Lichnowsky. So that the testimony of three particularly eminent Germans destroys the fiction that England attacked Germany because it was jealous of German commercial expansion.

The fundamental trouble with the whole race of war prophets is that they think the war is a new thing, and they feel called upon to tell the rest of us what to make of it. War is about the oldest human industry. This is the greatest of all wars, but that does not alter the meaning of war. Nor does it necessarily alter the results of war. While it is the greatest of all wars, it is not yet a long war, and in proportion to the population it is not certain that it is greater than other wars. It is not even certain that in proportion to the men involved, it is more bloody than other wars. We have no means of getting at the figures except in the loosest way, because the several Governments do not tell how many men they have at any given time or place, or the casualties in any individual engagements. But some approximations have been made, and they do not indicate that the great war is decidedly more bloody, in proportion to the armies, than other wars have been. Our Civil War lasted full four years; the War of Independence occupied seven. Before that was the seven years of the French and Indian war, and one war is known as the Thirty Years War. From the beginning of the French Revolution to Waterloo was more than quarter of a century, and at the end of that period another Bourbon was on the throne of France. Our Civil War made nearly, if not quite, as heavy a draft upon the population as the present war has made upon the population of England or France.

The moral and religious questions involved in war are not notably different in the greatest of all wars and in wars which are not quite so great. Most of them are involved in the ordinary administration of the criminal law by which an orderly community protects itself from its predatory members. Doubtless there will be social and political results from this war, but if other wars have not created a new heaven and a new earth, why should this one? The prediction that this war will produce great changes in the direction of democracy and of applied religion are probably well founded. But the war will act only as an accelerator. These changes have been going on for a long time; the movements for fifteen or twenty years before the war opened were very evident. Woman suffrage and prohibition seem impending, but they are not the products of this war: they had made great progress between 1900 and 1914.

None of the prophets betray any knowledge of history, or see things in any perspective. The great war is the first great cataclysm that they seem to be aware of, and they are rushing to and fro, like the Chaldeans, to find explanations of it, and to impress the public by their ability to forecast its consequences.

But when peace comes it will leave us face to face with greed and materialism, and an industrial system in which some men prosper and others do not, and an obligation to labor from which no important fraction of mankind can escape, and wants will multiply as fast as the means of satisfying them increase, and for the greater part of us the weekly pay envelope and the possibilities of a competence, and the demand from the other side of the world for the grain we produce, will continue to be our principal incentives to work.

Progress, intellectual and moral as well as material, has been made in the past, but the world has not taken great leaps ahead as the result of great wars, and still less has it changed the direction of its movement as the result of wars. The one thing of which the vastness of this war gives us a fairly good assurance, is that no nation will again be trained from infancy to old age to regard war as a high, holy and beautiful process of attaining its manifest destiny to rule the rest of mankind. For generations no statesman will purpose a war, and no monarch will again have the power of hurling his people at neighboring nations. If Germany fails in its present effort, neither Germany nor any other nation will repeat the experiment of 1914.

But the prophets will have no chance to point with pride to the great religious, moral and economic revolutions whose advent they pointed out amid the clash of arms. We have found our soul, the prophets love to tell us. They disagree on some things, and those who have no revelation upbraid the others for not giving us a spiritual interpretation and getting a vision of the future from the carnage of the war, as the augurs pretended to see the future when they were only looking at the viscera of their victims. But all of them agree that we have found our soul. When did we lose our soul? When Mr. Roosevelt was President he was very apprehensive that we had lost our “fighting edge.” Is any one worried now about our lack of a “fighting edge?” Possibly our soul was never lost. We betrayed some evidences of possessing a soul very early in the war.

The charge that we had lost our soul, or, at least, had mislaid it, rests on two facts. One is that we are prosperous. That fatal alliteration of poverty and piety has a fearful hold upon the soul of the prophet. The other is that we did not go to the rescue of Belgium when it was invaded. But Mr. Roosevelt himself did not realize that we ought to have gone to the rescue of Belgium, till March, 1916. He is on record in September, 1914, as satisfied with the course of the Administration, and convinced that we should not have entered the war when our own interests were not touched. And it ought to be forgiven a statesman, if he is very reluctant to plunge his country into war, and declines to put his Government in the position of a knight errant, wandering around the world in search of maidens to be delivered from donjons. And furthermore, as the Monroe Doctrine is the corner stone of our foreign policy, we were properly slow about intruding into a European quarrel, until it became unmistakable that it was much more than a European quarrel—that it was an attack upon civilization and popular Government. We were also justified in assuming that Great Britain, France and Russia, three of the five guarantors of Belgian neutrality, were capable of punishing the two guarantors who violated their pledge, several times renewed by Germany, even up to the day before Germany invaded the country it had pledged its honor to protect.

But our soul, whether it was lost or not, is now in our possession. Let us be thankful that the prophets recognize that encouraging fact. And if our mind is also in our possession, we may look forward to a world not entirely different from the one we have known, but unquestionably less likely to play with firearms, and quite certainly one in which the common people will have much greater control of their political destinies, and one in which no War Lord, with chatter about shining swords and shining armor and mailed fists, will be able to hurl his nation against the others in a desperate effort to establish for himself an overlordship of the world. Nor will any nation ever be likely to rhapsodize over carnage, and feed its sordid soul with thoughts of the territories and indemnities to be got by war, or intoxicate itself with the delusion that it is a race of supermen charged by the Almighty with the duty of forcing its harsh language and its brutal habits upon all other nations.

MY FRIEND THE JAY

Every man who comes into the world has need of friends.” What Ursa Major thus profoundly observes of mankind, from China to Peru, might be applied with special force to the blue jay, at least to those jays that come into the world. Of the rest “deponent saith not.” For by common consent the blue jay is a rascal, nay even a villain; and to deepen his turpitude to an infinity of wickedness, I have heard one uncherished female with a disposition slightly acid liken him to a Man. Indeed, were some of his detractors to be believed, there is scarcely a crime in the whole avian calendar that has not been meditated upon and hatched in his nest.

It is true that there are people of such impinging personality that merely mild dislike with respect to them seems impossible. The reactions they produce are violent. Their admirers, when they have any, pursue their loyalty to an O Altitudo! their enemies (and such are usually legion) make of their names a hissing, and spit them out of the mouth. To particularize, I might refer to a gentleman who was vigorously active in the political unpleasantness of 1912. His friends saw in him a Godefroy, come to lead the politically pure against the hordes of the standpat infidels; his enemies, when they had wiped the froth from their lips, turned the vocabulary of prayer to evil uses, and accused him of being in league with the devil.

But these are merely individuals. The cases in which an indictment is drawn up against a whole people are comparatively rare,—the Goths, perhaps, the Turks, and the bloodthirsty Belgians, to bring it down to modern times, will serve as examples. Just such an inclusive indictment is brought against the jay. “I fear,” says one amiable and authoritative writer on bird life, “that the blue jay is a reprobate”; and in this opinion most authorities concur. Are there not, then, three righteous jays in all Israel? No, say his judges. Peradventure one? “Only in the museums of natural history,” they inexorably answer. All living jays are impudent, profane, mischievous, cannibalistic, “the hul cussed tribe of ’em,” as one exasperated gardener wrathfully declared to me.

Dear, dear! This is a terrible situation. Like Fuzzy Wuzzy, the poor blue jay “‘asn’t got no papers of his own.” Nor can he follow the example of those benevolent corporations whose judicious investments in advertising space temper the unshorn lamb to receive the shears in a docile mood, and at the same time protect them from too close scrutiny by the newspapers. He must bear the slings and air-guns of outrageous boyhood with scarcely a voice raised in his behalf. It seems hardly fair.

It is true that the jay is not delicate in his appetite. He cannot, like the ethereal maiden whom Burton mentions, subsist for months on the smell of a rose. I knew one old gentleman, to be sure, who secured a brief respite from care, and achieved a state of mild hilarity, by applying his nose to the mouth of a whiskey jug. But the jay enjoys not these olfactive refections. He needs more substantial food. He is omnivorous; and out of that important characteristic springs his most reprehensible trait: he eats little birds.

One morning last summer I got up rather earlier than usual to transplant some asters before the sun should come out hot. It was a calm, breezeless morning, with scarcely a sound to disturb the cool quietude, except the song of a robin on the top of the old maple. Heaven be praised! we have no trolley cars in our village, and no factories. Suddenly there broke out in the alley, the wildest commotion imaginable. It sounded as though the sparrows from five counties were there, and had eaten of the insane root. The air was filled with shrill cries, chirps, and excited chatterings. I rushed to the fence, my fingers all mud, and looked over. In the midst of a flock of sparrows forty or more in number, all hopping about distractedly but none daring to attack him, stood a big blue jay with his crest militantly erect. From time to time he pecked at something, but what that something was, like Peterkin, I could not well make out. At every stroke of his strong black beak the cries of the sparrows shrilled louder; whenever he paused and looked around in his truculent contempt, their frenzied crescendos somewhat abated.

Curious, I drew nearer and discovered that the object of his unpleasant attention was a young sparrow, a mere fledgeling, scarcely old enough to be out of the nest. He was murderously pecking it in the eye. The wee helpless thing fluttered weakly in its agony and cheeped piteously. I grabbed up an empty fruit jar that had protected a rose cutting from the blasts of winter, and hurled it at the jay. He flew screaming to a sour cherry tree a short distance away, from which safe vantage point he cursed me with every oath and revilement in his scandalous vocabulary. The little sparrow I put out of its misery.

As I went back to my asters, I could not help reflecting on the scene I had witnessed. I seemed to see in it a small counterpart of what had happened in Europe. Here was little Servia in the person of this young sparrow—something of a nuisance, perhaps, yet comparatively defenseless. And here in the arrogant, domineering jay, relentless and powerful, was Austria. A similitude might likewise be made out for Belgium and Germany. And where, I wondered, did my own country come in? With almost sinister significance a sleek bronze grackle, plump and round, his eyes standing out with fatness, emerged leisurely from among the currant bushes and gobbled up a worm. I had been vaguely aware of his presence from the first, and now as I noted his well-fed complacency, and remembered that he had been foraging around utterly oblivious of the little tragedy being enacted in the alley, I lost my patience and let fly a good-sized clod.

But jays are jays, and it were unfair to demand from them a standard of conduct that even human beings, with all their centuries of moral education, find it hard to apply. As a matter of fact the only jay I ever caught red-beaked at such murderous work was the one in the alley, and my field of observation has extended clear from the coast of Maine part way to the Rocky Mountains. Yet if a man from Mars were to pick up a bundle of newspapers, and could make out the strange little characters imprinted thereon, he would probably infer that murder was a trade common enough among human beings, particularly to-day. He would see it as a highly organized and severely technical activity carried on by whole nations under the direction of their respective governments. It must be said, however, that although the sensitive nerve of national honor seems oftenest to reside in the national belly, nations rarely murder with the object of eating their victims. And those jays that murder are censurable chiefly in this: they have learned so little from humanity’s civilized forbearance.

To tell the truth, the jay is not the fiercely courageous and militantly aggressive biped his harsh cries and erected crest might lead one to suppose. His aspect is doubtless frightful to some small birds, but most of them recognize in him much of the Pistolian braggart. I have seen a house-wren, about the size of a large colored gentleman’s thumb, drive him away from her vine-shaded dwelling. Robins quickly put him to flight, and so, too, do catbirds and cardinals. Even the mourning dove (gentlest of birds) does not fear to measure her mild weapons with his; and one of the most amusing spectacles I ever witnessed was the comical bluff of a dove who puffed out her breast, fierce as a lamb, and literally pushed the swash-buckling blue jay clean off the feed board.

That the jay does not always exercise the discretion of which the timid proverb speaks, the crown of my head can very well testify. One pleasant afternoon, while I was breathlessly pursuing the phantom of an idea through the syntactical mazes of a freshman theme, I became aware of the sharp screaming of a pair of jays directly beneath my open window. I glanced out and saw (item) one baby jay squatting all hunched up on the close-cut lawn in the sunlight; (item) one long, lithe, black cat in the shadow of the syringa bush, blinking its greedy yellow eyes and moving its tail with a gentle, snaky, anticipatory motion; and (item) two frantic parent jays darting viciously at the black sphinx, and shrieking like a couple of suffragettes in the hands of a pair of miserable London bobbies. I watched the little drama until I saw the cat quivering for the spring; whereupon, forsaking the rôle of spectator, I threw my bottle of red ink and drove the dark marauder from the field. Surely never was preceptorial red ink put to more humane uses.

As I turned back to my themes, it occurred to me that here was the very opportunity I had been looking for. My favorite hobby is taking bird pictures, and I had long desired a picture of a young jay. Most fledgelings bear a ludicrous likeness to very old men. They wear an expression of solemn and pessimistic wisdom such as comes only to those who have looked long on the vanities of mankind. And it has always seemed to me that the infant jay bears a weird resemblance to England’s Grand Old Man, Mr. Gladstone, after he had passed the prime of old age. Out of regard, then, for the great Liberal minister, and also because I am no rifler of nests, I seized my old black hat and a camera, and dashed downstairs. My plan was to drop the hat over the unsuspecting fledgeling so that I could pick him up without any fuss, and pose him on the grape-vine behind the house. But the young rascal, divining my intention, hopped away, and kept with exasperating nicety just out of reach. Finally, by dint of much scrambling along on my knees, taking care to preserve as innocent an expression as I could, I managed to clap the hat over him. But as I took him out from the sudden gloom, he gave one terrified shriek, and the next instant BING! something sharp, something penetrating, something entirely unexpected, struck me on the head. It was the marvellously efficient beak of Mr. Jay.

I did not try to reason with him or placate him in wheedling tones. The ambient air was too full of a shrapnel burst of screaming, darting, pecking, whirling, shrieking blue jay. His shrill and angry cries, moreover, called to his aid three other jays, and such a stream of feathered Billingsgate followed as, I felt sure, must fix the eyes of all the neighborhood upon me. And so I retreated to the house, endeavoring in my gait to preserve that dignity of bearing which is generally supposed to be the fruit of an academic life. But the jay, with the uncomfortable persistence of a bee or a small heel-snapping terrier, pursued me to the very door, and might have chased me upstairs had it not been for the screen. After that I decided never again to attempt kidnapping a jay without the protection of a policeman’s helmet.

But the fierce detractors of the blue jay will doubtless scoff at this as evidence of a sometimes resolute daring. I do not resent the implied aspersion of my own courage; I am content to leave that to the judgment of my readers. There is, however, one bit of commendation to which even they must “assent with civil ear,” as a freshman of mine put it. The blue jay is almost humanly intelligent. Mind, I do not argue that he can, offhand, give you the distinction between free verse and a page from a real poet’s note-book, or that he can explain precisely why certain matters are deleted by the British censors. But with the intrepidity of a new Congressman delivering a speech in the Record, I dare assert, “without fear of successful contradiction,” that the blue jay is among the most intelligent of feathered bipeds.

Not long ago, during a particularly sharp attack of bitter weather, with frosty bayonets in the air but no snow on the ground, I was holding a conference in the English office with one of my students, a girl whose sweet deep eyes gave no flicker of understanding as I tried to make clear to her the difference between a sentence and a clause. To conceal my sorrow I stepped to the window and gazed off through the grayish-blue beeches with their dead brown leaves shivering in the keen air, trying, meanwhile, to recall what principle of pedagogic efficiency I had failed to employ. Presently a blue jay with something white in its beak alighted upon the twisted limb of a maple not a rod from the window, and began a close inspection of the rough bark. He found what he was looking for, a hole; and into this he thrust the white substance which he carried in his beak, suet possibly, from the feed-board below, or a bit of bread. He cocked his head on one side and eyed the little cache in a thoughtful manner. Then he dropped to the ground.

I thought that was the end, but I was mistaken. Soon he shot up to the limb, this time with a dead leaf in his beak. I watched intently and saw him carefully lay the leaf over the hole where he had hidden the suet. A gust of wind, however, blew the leaf off the limb, and sent it swirling to the ground. Quick as a hawk the jay swooped after it in an ineffectual attempt to capture it while it was still in the air. They reached the ground together. Convinced apparently that the leaf was too large, he selected another, much smaller, and carried it up to the limb. This time he did not merely lay the leaf over the hole; he had learned his lesson. Instead, he rammed the leaf into the hole on top of the suet, a really difficult job, and packed it firmly with his beak. It was safe from the other jays if not from the inquisitive redheaded woodpecker who lived only a few branches away. Now all you host of cocksure psychologists, was it instinct or reason that led the jay?

I know it has been argued that since a jay will attack a stuffed owl placed near his nest, he must be without the power of reason. The test seems hardly fair, for the ghoulish mystery of the taxidermist is known to no animal but man. Thus at the very start the jay is laid under an unreasonable handicap. Consider, too, the ingeniously cruel nature of this test; it pierces him as it were in the eye of his most sensitive instinct. Even human parents, faced by an ordeal at all comparable to this in sudden poignancy, would scarcely act in a manner calmly rational. What mother, leaving her infant slumbering in the cradle, and suddenly returning to find a brutal visaged mannikin bent over it in a posture of menace, would expend the millionth of a second in the psychologist’s reflective delay? Like the jay, she would act in such a situation from instinct alone, nor would we consider her deficient in intelligence.

But even if the jay were as stupid as an old-model political prison-warden, or an English official in Ireland, which he indubitably is not, I would still look upon him with an indulgent eye. The redbird excepted, he is the sole bit of lively color in our winter landscape. No matter how sharp the wind or deep the snow, you will find him foraging among the low bushes or uttering his cheerfully vigorous jay! jay! jay! from the airy chambers of some tall, bare maple. And if you are of that generous company who share their winter bounty with the birds, from none of your feathered charity scholars will you receive more evident tokens of full appreciation than from the maligned jay. He is as prompt to the feeding board as an impecunious college professor to the bursar’s office at the end of the first quarter. To be sure, his table manners are somewhat rude, but what he lacks in elegance he more than atones for with a certain robust beef-and-pudding gusto that I have somehow come to associate with Lord Macaulay.

It is in the spring, however, in the days of warm sunshine and clear air, when the grass begins to quicken along the walks and around the roots of the big elm-trees, when the vanguard of the crocus legions have thrust their green spear-heads up through the sere lawn, and the buds on the lilac bushes along the garden fence have begun to swell, that the jay reveals how really amiable he can be. To many who do not know him well it will come as a surprise to learn that he possesses vocal attainments far beyond the harsh cry from which he takes his name. Under the spell of love he becomes truly melodic. He will sit for ten minutes at a time in the old black cherry-tree, and beginning with a soft, prelusory, ventriloquial whistle, as though he were a musician testing his flute, he will run through a series of little musical snatches surprising in their mimetic variety. Now it will seem like a baby’s silver rattle, or like clear water gurgling over a sunny bed of pebbles; again you will hear a note or two of the robin, or a plaintive echo of the bluebird’s song, or even the beautiful sliding legato of the cardinal,—with a crack in it, perhaps.

As the head of a family the blue jay is exemplary. He is not one of those who think they perform the whole duty of husbands when they preen their gay feathers in the sunlight, or lift their voices in flattering song, while their plain little wives build the nest, hatch the eggs, and go in search of the nourishing worm. Not much! He believes that marriage is a partnership involving equal duties and responsibilities; and so, during the nesting season, you will see him busily at work, searching for the best twigs, paper, string, tendrils, and rootlets obtainable. I once saw a nest that had a piece of yellow paper sticking out of its side, with the cryptic legend—otes for wom—plainly legible on it, but I am not sure that it had any real significance. Feeding the young jays, too, he considers part of his fatherly duties, and sometimes, though not often, he even treats Mrs. Jay to a specially delicate tidbit of bug or worm. If the latter should happen to be fuzzy, he will follow his careful wife’s example and thoroughly wipe the fuzz off on the rough bark of some tree.

And he likes his bath; no monocled Englishman better. Indeed, if you really wish to enjoy a treat, set a rusty shallow pan of water on your lawn, not too near the tulip-bed or shrubbery (Cats!), and see what follows. If you have been thoughtful enough to place a stone or a piece of brick near the rim of the pan, Mr. and Mrs. Jay will step right in and enjoy a thorough wetting without much preliminary skirmishing. But little Willie Jay and his four brothers will exhibit all the delicious trepidation of childhood. While their parents are in the bath, they will be bold enough, even to running up and allowing themselves to be splashed on; but when it comes to actually entering the water, ugh! They will linger around the edge of the pan, fluttering their wings, hop across it, dip their beaks into the water, turn around, and splash the water with their tails—in short, go through all the motions of a small boy having his first “duck under” without the assuring grasp of his father’s strong hand. But once let them get in, and oh, what a joyous splashing ensues, what a ruffling of feathers, what a beating of wings, what a fan-like fluttering of the tail! Like most small boys, too, they will stay in until they are thoroughly soaked, scarcely able, in fact, to fly up to some sunny limb where they may preen themselves and dry off out of harm’s reach.

No, the jay is not an unprincipled scoundrel, not the bloodthirsty reprobate he is sometimes made out to be. He has his faults, it is true, properly censurable; but he has some very commendable virtues as well. And I am sure that if the reader will watch his career as carefully as I have, from his fledgeling childhood to his gay and dashing cavalier youth, he will agree with me that the imaginations of the blue jay’s heart are not wholly evil.

THE FLEMISH QUESTION

Divide ut imperes—make a faction among your enemies, and thus overcome them. This is German policy all over the world. By it the Danes of Slesvig have been to a large extent robbed of their own language and national traditions. By it the Prussian intruders have, with characteristic inability to understand foreign souls, endeavored, in their periods of repose after acts of brutality, to alienate from France the French-speaking and French-minded inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine. It has failed not only there, but notoriously also in Posen or Prussian Poland, where it was long ago abandoned in favor of a system of downright and unscrupulous repression. It has succeeded, for the moment at least, in Russia, which now lies dismembered at the feet of a triumphant betrayer. What was a year ago Russia is now dissolved into Lithuania, Livonia, Esthonia, Courland, Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, the country of the Don Cossacks, the Caucasus, and the vague and fluctuating realm of Bolshevism. Historic memories, linguistic variations, religious differences, local jealousies, class feeling, and commercial rivalries have been emphasized by German agents behind the frontier, and through the gaps thus made the German sword has pushed its point, breaking up the old mortar of loyalty and union. One typical example of the method employed may be cited here. According to the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger of March 26, 1917, Zimmermann, the German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, our Zimmermann, welcomed a delegation of Lithuanians and piped sweetly to them about the tender interest his government took in the welfare of their people, promising to satisfy various local desires. We have seen the result.

German intrigue of the same sort has long been at work in India, where it has happily been baffled by the good sense of the Indian population who appreciate the fact that with all their numerous languages, races, and religions, they owe their concord to the light rule of Britain and to her even-handed justice. One of the boldest, meanest, and cruelest instances of the same policy of treacherous penetration was the effort to cause a rebellion in Ireland, for the Germans knew that rebellion meant the destruction of their own tools and Ireland’s shame and ruin. As Americans, we have reason to keep our eyes upon the large German colonies in southern Brazil and upon the outposts of German imperialism in Mexico, Chile, and Argentina, and still greater reason to look out for the thin wedges of Prussian intrigue insinuating themselves among our own many racial and confessional varieties.

The most thinly disguised of all German attempts to conquer by division is also one of the latest to be disclosed, although it began at least three years ago. “Love me,” says the Kaiser to the outraged daughters of the Belgian household; “or if you will not both love me, I shall take the likelier of you, and give her a seat at the royal feast, and put my ring upon her finger, and make her sister serve us in our mirth.”

As is well known, there is no such thing as a Belgian language, and the people of Belgium speak one or both of two languages, French and Flemish. Both French and Flemish are and have long been officially recognized by the Belgian government, and are used in Parliament, in public documents, in the courts, and in the national schools. The French spoken and written by educated Belgians is standard or central French, differing in no essential respect from the language of France; but among the people who have French as their native tongue, the Walloons, there is employed a dialect of French, just as the people of many parts of France, and indeed of all countries, have their local dialects. The Walloons differ from the rest of the Belgians chiefly in language and in the fact that they inhabit the southern and southeastern parts of the kingdom, where mining and metallurgical industry are highly developed. They also have more points of contact with France, both geographically and morally. If you take a map of Belgium and draw a line from Visé, the point where the Meuse passes into Holland, almost straight west through Brussels, Audenarde, and Courtrai, or a little south of these cities, you will have traced the northern boundary of the Walloon country. Almost anywhere along this imaginary line, one can, by going a short distance south, be among people who nearly all speak French or the Walloon dialect of French, and, by going a little way north, be among people who, though they may write French and speak it as an acquired language, use Flemish as their native tongue. Nevertheless, in this densely populated, busy, rich, and closely unified kingdom, the various elements of the population were happily mingled. Thousands of Belgian families are part Walloon and part Flemish. When a Walloon family moves north into a Flemish village it usually changes its language in the second generation, and vice versa. Many Walloons have Flemish names; many Flemings have Walloon names.

Flemish is scarcely distinguishable from Dutch. Although philologically they may be regarded as twin dialects of one tongue, they are for practical purposes the same. There are, to be sure, a few slight differences of idiom, and numerous differences of vocabulary, even between standard written Flemish and standard written Dutch, but scarcely more important than those between the English of Mr. Howells and the English of Mr. Hardy. In popular speech the gap is naturally wider, and perhaps justifies the view that Flemish and Dutch are separate dialects of one language, though “dialect” may really be too strong a word. From my own observation in East Flanders, I should say that a Dutchman would be in about the same situation there with regard to difference of speech as a New Englander in Virginia.

According to the census of 1910, there were in Belgium about 3,832,000 persons speaking French or belonging to French-speaking families, and about 4,153,000 speaking Flemish or belonging to Flemish families. The Flemish population, being to a larger extent agricultural, has for many years been increasing faster than the Walloons. Yet French, being by acquisition or second-nature a language perfectly familiar to all educated Belgians, appears to have, and really has, an immense advantage over Flemish. The literature of the French language is enriched and glorified with the names of many great authors, from Jean Froissart and Philippe de Comines to Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, who belong by birth or residence to what we now call Belgium.

But the Flemish had, and probably always will have, a pride of their own. In the Middle Ages their cities were among the first in Northern Europe to emerge from obscurity. The names of Flemish towns strike the ear with a strange ruggedness in the liquid lapse of Dante’s lines, but a stranger thing it is that even in the thirteenth century these vigorous municipalities were looked to for independence, and called upon for vengeance on tyranny; we hear, in the Purgatorio, of “the evil plant that overshadows all the Christian land,” and are told that “if Douai, Lille, Ghent and Bruges had power, there would soon be vengeance taken.” A curious example this of “ancestral voices prophesying war.”

In the sixteenth century Flanders was the scene of tragic resistance to Spain and the Inquisition. Liberty was lost and recovered and lost again; but prosperity still bloomed from the ashes of destroyed commerce, the language and institutions of the land were redeemed with a fearful price, civilization was preserved with blood and sorrow, art flourished in the midst of horrors; and how all this came to pass is explained only by the stubbornness with which the people kept up their local patriotism. The visible signs of this municipal pride and glory were, until four years ago, and in part still are, the great churches, town-halls, and guild-houses of Flanders. Among the most impressive of these monuments were the Cloth Hall at Ypres, the Belfry of Bruges, the Town-halls of Audenarde, Alost, Termonde, Louvain, Brussels, and Ghent, the Cathedrals of Antwerp and Malines, the quaint Béguinages or cities of retirement for religious women, and many another less renowned but hardly less beautiful expression of ancient faith and community of enterprise.

The Austrian yoke was shaken off at the time of the French Revolution, and after a short period of republican government Belgium, together with France, came under the domination of Napoleon. At the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, Belgium and Holland were united under the name of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in an ill-assorted combination which lasted only till 1830, when the present Kingdom of Belgium was established. From that year to 1914 the Flemish people of Belgium, though more than satisfied to live in political union with the Walloons, and indeed being the more prosperous and rapidly growing part of the population, were solicitous to preserve their local customs and particularly their own language. Societies were formed for the cultivation of Flemish literature. Endowments for the same purpose were established. One of the parliamentary aims of political parties in the provinces of East and West Flanders and Antwerp and the northern sections of Brabant and Limbourg was the safe-guarding of Flemish as one of the official languages and a medium of instruction. There was not the slightest flavor of disloyalty in this desire. It was entirely constitutional. It expressed itself openly, and had no need for secrecy. The tendency thus created was called the Flamingant movement. No one connected with it, so far as I can discover, entertained the slightest notion of appealing to Germany for countenance or support. The Flemings in general and the Flamingants in particular would have been the last people in the world to admit that their language was a dialect of German or that their manifest destiny was absorption in the German Empire. The unity of Belgium was as precious to them as to the Walloons, and was placed above every consideration of race and speech. But there is no country under the sun in which local self-government and community interests are so highly developed as in Belgium. Under the Belgian constitution the communes enjoy the maximum of freedom. Civic pride nowhere else burns so bright. It is the habit of local self-government, the strong personalities developed under this system, and the spirit of the communes that have saved Belgium from starvation during the war. As every one of Mr. Hoover’s American delegates in Belgium will testify, the spectacle was and is magnificent. As early as October, 1914, when the wave of invasion had passed over Belgium, the communes stood firm, and in all of them committees with almost absolute power, and enjoying the perfect confidence of the people, were formed and got to work commandeering the visible supply of food and distributing it prudently.

Within a very short time after the invasion the Germans showed that they intended to take advantage of the difference between Flemings and Walloons, a difference which, as we have seen, was purely domestic, and concerned with no really vital political issue. Among the offices of his hated administration, Governor-General von Bissing established a bureau for dealing with “the Flemish question,” a bureau consisting of German specialists in philology and discord. For about seven months, this commission, which was working in secret, attracted hardly any attention. Then it began to operate visibly. In the summer of 1915, I was stationed, as delegate of the Hoover commission, in Ghent, the capital of East Flanders, and witnessed the beginning of German coquetry. As may be imagined, it was very clumsy and ineffectual. One day an attempt would be made to flatter the local pride of the peasants by printing official notices and war bulletins in Flemish and German only, instead of Flemish, German, and French, as had previously been the practice; the next day they would be informed, in these same posters, that they must surrender their hay-crop to the German military authorities. The Germans appeared to be as much detested in Flanders as anywhere else in Belgium. I saw the wife of a distinguished citizen of Ghent burst into tears of vexation and anxiety because a German officer of high rank spoke to her in a restaurant. She said she feared she would be distrusted for the rest of her life by her fellow-citizens for having listened to a German officer. Yet he was evidently a gentleman, behaved with propriety, and had the excuse for addressing her that he was quartered in her house. I have known persons in Ghent to go willingly to prison rather than comply with German rules or pay fines into the German treasury. “Do you see that man?” said to me an acquaintance in Ghent one day, pointing to a German in uniform who was speaking Flemish to some peasants. “He lived here before the war; he will not be able to live here after the war; his life will not be safe.”

Before the war there were four universities in Belgium: the Catholic university of Louvain, the liberal or non-sectarian university of Brussels, and the two state universities of Liége and Ghent. The instruction was given entirely in French, except that there were certain courses at Louvain and Ghent which were paralleled, rather expensively, one would think, by courses in Flemish. In 1911 a bill was introduced in the Belgian Parliament looking to the gradual transformation of the University of Ghent into an institution completely Flemish. In 1912 this proposal was again discussed, and was reported favorably in the Chamber of Representatives. The war of course put an end to the project.

Now the Germans have taken it up with enthusiasm, trying to harvest for their own purposes the sympathies that were formerly cultivated in its favor. Whether they annex all or part or none of Belgium, they desire to pose as the liberators of Flanders, and to foment a permanent jealousy between the Flemish-speaking people and the rest of the Belgian population. This is precisely like their conduct in the south of Ireland, in the Province of Quebec, and in Russia. They have their eye on Antwerp, which they intend to keep, whatever happens, and they realize that Flanders would be a good basis for the eventual absorption of Holland.

On December 2, 1915, it became known in Belgium that the German authorities purposed to reopen the University of Ghent, which of course had been closed, and to make Flemish the language of instruction. Their design was instantly understood by everybody, including the leaders of the old Flamingant movement, who, instead of falling in with it, met it with a vigorous protest. This was disregarded, and on the 31st of December the decree was promulgated. A commission of German professors was empowered to draw up regulations for carrying out the plan of transformation. Meanwhile, in order to encourage as many Belgian young men as possible to escape from the country and find their way into the Belgian army, the real authorities of the four universities were keeping these institutions closed. Their passive resistance enraged the Germans, who, on March 18, 1916, arrested the two most celebrated professors of Ghent, Henri Pirenne, and Paul Frédéricq, eminent historians, and sent them to prison-camps in Germany, where they have been treated with disgusting brutality. The colleagues of these two brave men were not less courageous themselves, and signed a second protest. Thereupon the Germans made up a ridiculous little faculty of their own, and imposed it upon the university, which, we must remember had no students. There were at first seven of these professors, of whom one was a German, another a native of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and five were Belgians without distinction in the learned world or respectability as citizens. To these were later added a number of equally insignificant Dutch and German teachers of minor rank, and a very few Belgians. Opinion in Holland rose in disgust, and an unpleasant life awaits the Dutch instructors if they ever dare return to the land of their birth. They have been canny enough to make sure of pensions from the German government, in view of the probability that they will in the near future be men without a country.

On April 5, 1916, the German Chancellor, making a curious mixture of cynicism and hypocrisy, in a speech before the Reichstag, promised that the Imperial Government would help the Flemish population to free itself from “the preponderance of French culture.” The Germans no doubt expected some backing from the Flamingant societies, the trustees of the Flemish endowment funds, and the former political supporters of the Flemish movement. In this they have been disappointed, for their conduct has aroused protest upon protest from all these quarters. It is difficult to determine, from the boasts in the German newspapers and the denials of exiled Belgians, just how many teachers and students had been scraped together by the beginning of 1917, but the faculty was a motley collection of German, Dutch and Belgian nonentities, and there were less than three students for every teacher. To-day there is only one student in agriculture, the subject that would naturally be most sought in a Flemish university. Of all the war-babies, this University of Ghent is surely the most anæmic. Yet if we are to believe General von Bissing in the speech in which he declared it alive and viable, “The God of War held it at the baptismal font with naked sword in hand!” This is echt Deutsch in taste and feeling. And while these proceedings were solemnly going on, the deportation of workmen from Ghent was beginning; on the very day of inauguration, husbands and fathers were being torn from their families to suffocate in German salt-mines, to sweat and faint in German collieries, to dig and die in German trenches. Has the world ever seen a more revolting instance of hypocrisy? I happened to be in Courtrai one morning when a number of Flemish wives and mothers were herded into the jail there, from the village of Sweveghem, because their men had refused to make barbed wire for the Germans. International law forbids a conqueror to compel the vanquished to produce munitions of war, but what of that!

Parallel with the ludicrous pretence of enriching Belgium with a Germano-Flemish university, close observers of Belgian affairs, by reading the Dutch and German newspapers, have watched the development of another German scheme for producing discord. On February 14, 1917, thirty Belgian tools of the German military authorities set themselves up, or rather were set up by German backers, as a “Council of Flanders,” with the avowed purpose of creating an autonomous state out of the Flemish-speaking portion of Belgium. The plot began to culminate in Baron von Bissing’s decree of March 21, 1917, establishing two administrative regions, one Flemish, the other Walloon. Brussels was to be the capital of the former, Namur of the latter. This decree sent consternation into the hearts of all true Belgians, and has led finally to an ominous result, the resignation of nearly all the Belgian judiciary. Up to this time, protected by international law and by the national constitution, which even the Germans professed to respect, the magistrates of Belgium had continued to perform some of their functions, thereby shielding the people to a certain extent from direct contact with German judges and police officers, and no doubt saving the country from bloody and useless insurrections: for if the minute and daily administration of local affairs, such as the collection of private debts and the enforcement of town ordinances, had been all this time in German hands, the irritation would have been unbearable.

With a few delightful exceptions, newspapers in Belgium, even though appearing under their old names and in French, are controlled by the Germans. I used to amuse myself, in 1915, by translating passages from Le Bruxellois, ostensibly a real Belgian journal, back into the German in which they were originally written or thought. The style betrayed a Teutonic source. The delightful exceptions are the brave little clandestine Libre Belgique and other papers of a similar character, which keep up the spirits of the Belgian people and drive the Germans to impotent fury.

In this case, as in that of the University of Ghent, the Germans professed to be responding to Belgian desires. They point to the so-called Council of Flanders, in reality a collection of renegade Belgians who were brought together by German influence, and protected by German arms from the violence of Flemish mobs, who dared to hiss them and insult them. A delegation of these worthies was conducted to Berlin, where they presented a humble request for the strangulation of Belgian liberty and the partition of their native land. Against this plot all Belgium has risen. How can Belgium have risen? The answer will give some idea of the bravery of those people, even in the isolation and darkness and hunger of their present life. Last June between four and five hundred Belgian magistrates and members of the bar signed a fruitless petition to the German Chancellor against the decree. Judges and local administrative officials gave up their functions and their livelihood. For this, many of them were arrested and deported to Germany. Against the decree of separation, and in favor of “the Belgian Fatherland, Free and Indivisible,” petitions have been signed by nearly all the former senators and deputies remaining in Belgium, by the Flamingant leaders, by municipal councils, and by the heroic Cardinal Mercier. The Cardinal especially drew attention to the fact that international law demands that the domestic administration of an invaded country shall be allowed to proceed unmolested, if military necessity permits. To this point Baron von Falkenhausen, the German Governor-General, made the following insolent rejoinder: “Your Eminence addressed to me on the 6th of June a letter in which, taking your stand on the principles of international law, you criticize certain of my official acts. I must respectfully reply to your Eminence that I refuse to enter with you upon a discussion of this subject.”

Decree has followed decree with steady insistence. The courts, even in Brussels, which is mainly a French-speaking city, must hold their sessions in Flemish; official correspondence north of the imaginary line must be in Flemish; the Official Bulletin of German Laws and Decrees in Occupied Belgium is printed in German and Flemish for one part of the country and in German and French for the other. On August 9, 1917, von Falkenhausen issued an edict declaring that in the Flemish administrative region “Flemish must be the exclusive official language of all the authorities and all the functionaries of the state, the provinces, and the communes, as well as their establishments, including educational institutions and the teachers therein.” On October 6 the communes in the Province of Brabant were ordered immediately to organize courses in Flemish for the instruction of their employees who did not know that language.

The invaders have tried to create a Belgian faction in support of their policy, and have here and there, at different times, organized meetings and processions of so-called “Activists,” or pro-German Belgians. But these assemblages have never been other than contemptible in size and composition. They have been hissed and mobbed by vast crowds of patriotic Belgians, and in Belgium it takes courage to attack a movement which is protected by German bayonets. On February 9, 1918, the Chief Justice and two Associate Judges of the Belgian Court of Appeals at Brussels were arrested for instituting proceedings against the “Activists,” and were ordered to be deported to Germany.

With all their cunning the Germans in Belgium have shown themselves densely stupid. Their near-sighted pedantry inclines them to put their trust in formulas, when the thing they are dealing with is life. They think they can decree an indomitable people into submission. Having begun with butchery, they declined into robbery, and now they imagine that because bribery is less rude, it will be regarded as a sort of mercy. Jealous and quarrelsome at home, fussy and petty in their own local and domestic affairs, they cannot understand magnanimity in others. German writers have often admitted and lamented the tendency of the German people to be parochial (kleinstädtisch) in their outlook, and stencilled (schablonenhaft) in their personality. So they are; and these bad qualities render them incapable of understanding the spirit of Belgium, which is independent, individual, far-sighted, and bold. Since July, 1914, the German heel has stamped its imprint on regions several times as extensive as the German Empire itself. But a nation of pedants will never rule the world, and the echo of those iron-bound, blood-spattered boots will cease to ring when the American people realize that what the Germans have done in Belgium they will try to do wherever they find room to tramp.

IMMORTALITY IN LITERATURE

“Come l’uom s’eterna”

Now that the immortals in literature have been caught and measured; now that we know that they fill not more than five feet of shelf room, we may be pardoned for asking a question or two as to how they “arrived,” what their chances are for “staying put,” and whether the place for classics is inevitably “upon the shelf.” These are of course awkward questions, but there are other regions beside heaven which one must be as a little child to enter—the Garden of Understanding among them.

It is in a certain sense a positive relief to find that the really persistent literature of the past is so compressible, and it is reassuring as one looks forward to the long future, to think that the people towards the end of time will not be so unimaginably burdened with the deathless monuments of their past; although when one multiplies five feet, the sediment of five millennia, by x, the classic library of the end of things seems to us of this unheroic age, a trifle depressing. Of course, the men of the Ultima Thule of time may take their classics less seriously, and it may be that they will find less of a gap than we between the thoughts and speech of the immortals and those of daily intercourse. But since the immortals die not, there is no escaping their accumulation.

Yet after all, come to think of it, there is a good deal of an assumption in the assertion that our five feet of immortals are all going to perch upon that last library shelf. There have been immortals of the past who failed to reach even our days; had they all fulfilled their promise and the prophecies of their friends, the publishers would not be willing to let us buy our modest set of unquestionable classics on monthly payments without the guarantee of our great grandchildren. Paradoxical as it may seem, many immortals have proved mortal, and the deathless have died. We must lay this troublesome fact to the loose speech of our forefathers. They were hyperbolic now and then, and they dubbed a volume immortal without stopping to think whether the twentieth century A. D. would also find it interesting, and so, of course, really immortal. Humanity has been fallible in the past, and the result is that we are forced most unscientifically to accept contradictory ideas with gravity—in short, to speak of “relative immortality.” The work that outlives its contemporaries is, we may admit, relatively deathless. Such a statement makes no prophecy, however, as to the remote future. Relative immortality merely means that a work goes on interesting for a few years, a generation or two, a century or more. It is only the simon pure immortal who will not have to get up at the sound of Gabriel’s trump. Blessed relief—the final shelf of unforgettable classics may be only five feet long after all, and may be even shorter!

Naturally, your enduring work must have a strong constitution; it must have all the characteristics of a live creature except the power of growth within itself, and, alas, of propagating its kind. Perhaps one might liken it to the Leyden jar which we of the older generation used to read of in our physics—I do not know whether it is remembered now-a-days. It has a charge of electricity of more or less strength, and it has a retaining capacity of more or less endurance, so that to touch it as the ages pass, is to receive a spark of life.

Many a work has started out with a tremendous appeal to its first audience, but has not been able to hold its second or third. The first night is not always a sure test of the length of a “run.” Such a work had a momentary word to speak which was appropriate, which came as pat as Vice in the old comedy; but like a jest called out by a passing event, it raised its crackle of laughter and died. One need not go far to find examples. Mrs. Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho is pigeonholed here; and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle are tied by the same tape, in spite of a certain uncanny habit of reappearance of Mrs. Stowe’s painful tale. Much literature of this sort is, of course, temporarily valuable; but Time promptly and wisely puts it into the wallet at his back. Without endurance, fame is as the fire of thorns under the pot; without vitality, naught can endure.

As a matter of fact a work need not be brutally vital to have a fair chance at long life. It must interest somebody very much indeed. Of course, the great immortals start out in life popular in the best sense; but there are lesser immortals too. One does not have to be Dante or Shakespeare to win out. So long as the second class passengers persist in interesting a few hearers on the various stages of the road, they will not be forgotten. They may be, as they usually are, caviare to the general, but they find from age to age fit audience. Poets like Horace and Spenser and Blake, the authors of Emma or Cranford may cross the final line side by side with their great competitors. And some of us who venture diffident prophecy, expect greater endurance for Mr. Robert Frost and his shy North of Boston than for the dramatic anachronisms of the late Stephen Phillips, or the epic longueurs of Mr. Alfred Noyes. Long life in literature concerns itself with the length of Clotho’s thread, and not at all with the question as to whether it be labelled “No. 60” or “No. 90.”

But to have transcended its own time by a generation or so is no promise of immortality. Every work if not hopelessly tangled in the perishabilities of its own age, is liable to be so tangled in those of its own century or epoch. How often have men watched with exultation the endurance of a work, and jumped to conclusions, when wisdom would have recognized that it could last only while certain ideals or moods prevailed. Was not Byron a god for a generation? But, alas, as the waters of time rose, he found himself caught in the eel-grass of romanticism, and pulled under. And did not the Romance of the Rose hold men bound by its myriad lines for centuries—and where is it now? Dusty upon dusty shelves. Its voice was that of Mediævalism, not of humanity. It perished with the conventions and provincialism of its era.

The time never was when a new work appeared to the world without some external circumstance to modify for good or ill its early reputation. Even the “anonymous” early ballads must have depended at first in some measure upon the impression of “good time” which lingered in the minds of the junketers among whom they sprang up. Even the Iliad or the Song of Roland must have gained or lost according to the effectiveness of the reciter or the social status of the patron. And to-day it is a thousand times truer than ever before, that at the start the genuine fame which endures is bound up with much that is purely factitious.

A new book comes to birth and finds a waiting world to welcome, but not impartial in its attitude. Have not the friends and family announced the arrival in joyful and ringing tones? Advertiser and advance reviewer have been busy; the publisher now-a-days is preëminently efficient. The result is a sort of pre-natal notoriety built up regardless of real worth. The advertising campaign may be likened to an attack by gas-bombs on the reading public; but fortunately from long experience a large part of the public has provided itself with a tolerably good supply of masks to receive the assault, and—to finish the figure with all possible despatch—“waits till the clouds roll by.”

Then for the first time, the work gradually emerges for what it is worth. The public reads and judges; recommends it to its friends, or warns them off; and speaks the fateful word, which if it is favorable, leads others to read, and at least makes strangers admit that the book is “well spoken of.” Here is real fame, still struggling for existence, yet independent of the handicaps of early puffing. Yet it must be said in all fairness that the early puffing, with its manufactured audience, hastens for the good book the chance for genuine fame; and makes more decisive the collapse of the poor book, by bringing sooner to proof the pinchbeck prophecies.

But even then the new book has got to stand up against convictions and prejudices, conventions and dogmas. The public at large—and incidentally the professional critic—wants more of “the same thing,” more like that of its earlier loves and admirations. Figures of previous experience rise in the readers’ minds with malicious menaces against the upstart—Dickens, Austen or Trollope; Ward, Sinclair or Tarkington; perhaps Fielding or Goldsmith—figures moribund or vigorous still, all are alert to impose “has been” upon “to be.” Let the new book differ at its peril; it becomes easily “revolutionary,” “decadent,” “not art”—is damned, in short, unless, by a curious freak of the moment, it takes the world by storm through its very “freshness.” And even then Kipling joins the ring, and henceforth struggles to impose the Kiplingesque. Such dangers, such threats—mostly unreal when brought to the proof—the new book must live through. The vigorous and vital book will be unabashed, for its claims to long life must rest on stronger virtues than conformity or non-conformity.

The ages confirm with Jovian nod the trite fact that every period has a general cast of opinion about any literary work. San Francisco may not accept the same order among “the best sellers” as New York, nor New York as London; yet we accept the unity of age in our use of older epithets, such as “Elizabethan” and “Victorian,” even while we overlook it in the hurlyburly of the present. It is a complicated and, perhaps, ultimately, an inexplicable phenomenon; but strong leadership plays its part in clarifying and fixing the momentary appraisement. Let Dr. Johnson or the Edinburgh Review utter a critical judgment, and society follows like the traditional flock of sheep. If such notorious dictatorship is rare in our larger world, there are yet many smaller Judges and Prophets scattered abroad, apparent mouthpieces of the Zeitgeist. We are all familiar with the small theatre party. One or two members have definite ideas about the play and its presentation, and the rest experience all the sensations but are more or less neutral. The neutrals inevitably fall in behind the leaders, and the whole party is easily unanimous. Such in miniature is the working of the critical leadership at large. The only requirement is, that the leader must not be too far ahead or behind his time. Thus it would have taken more than Dryden to make Whitman a success in the days of the Restoration; and we can hardly fancy Jeffreys forcing The Widow in the Bye Street upon the Edinburgh subscribers. But as all real leadership is moderate, neat unity seems to be fairly easy to the backward look.

Yet the judgment of an age may seem to us the veriest nonsense of perversity. It irritates us, at the same time that it flatters our sense of superiority, to see the citizens of the Seventeenth Century tossing up their caps over Cowley, and proclaiming him celestial; and to see those of the Eighteenth lose their heads over Pope. We know better. Cowley and Pope, indeed! Would not any college sophomore place them for us—Why, of course, Cowley wrote the Sonnets of Pindar, and Pope was a pseudonym. It is pedantic to have read them, and we are proud to know them only by reputation. Yet we must not blame our unfortunate ancestors. The old formula reappears:—they clung to what interested them, and called it deathless. The humor lies rather more in the inability of the next generation, perhaps our own, to break away from the stereotyped verdicts of those remote days of questionable authority. We were all taught that Addison was one of the mighty of earth, and that his style was the acme of lucidity and charm—“Spend your days and nights with Addison.” But we must admit that this estimate is but the sluggish echo of auld lang syne. For have you, gentle reader, perused a single Spectator Paper since you were preparing for your college examinations? Of course, if Addison really interested his own age by touching as no one else did its concerns, he deserved the audience he gathered about him and the fame that transpired; but why should we talk of him as if he actually interested us profoundly, when no one reads him? And how about Tom Jones and Clarissa Harlowe and The Tale of a Tub, and Tristram Shandy or The Vicar of Wakefield? It is the tendency of long enduring fame to become sluggish and to sink into dogmatism.

It is one of the duties lying nearest to the present—wherever that present may be—to right the wrongs of the weak, and to humble the pride of usurpers. Distrust of one’s own taste and power, whatever may be the case among individuals, is impossible to a whole generation. To judge and to accept as final one’s own conclusion is the prerequisite for true results and positive progress. The saints have always been vigorous in their unshaken conviction of the truth that is in them; it is the insinuating voice of the devil which doubts. So, without misgiving, the Eighteenth Century which wrote up Addison, wrote down Shakespeare; and the Nineteenth Century which wrote up Browning, wrote down Pope. We, too, are conscious of wise catholicity, and judge with decisive orthodoxy. We adore the vigorous brutalities of Kipling and Masefield, we are interested in the formless feebleness of certain new poets; we scorn Gray and Landor, and overlook the poetry of Arnold. We are hospitable to the “newer movements,” even to the outré; we despise the ways of our parents and our grandparents, though they were men who walked with God. We cannot help it, to be sure, and are most unconscious of our little ways; but now and then it is possible for some of us to transport ourselves in spirit to the higher ground of the next century, and to look back upon the plain of our own time. Then it is hard to be convinced that the universe was not devised to furnish laughter for the gods.

Nothing is harder than for us to laugh at ourselves; we prefer to dwell upon the seriousness, the impressiveness of lasting fame, as proof of the unity of the human race. When the world of twenty-five centuries after Homer can thrill at the twang of the bow of Odysseus, and smile at the laughter of Nausikaa and her maidens, we are kinsmen of the distant Greeks. Time and race are annihilated before the mighty genius which touches the deeps of the heart. Institutions and nations may decay, but the song of Homer calls us brothers. Impressive, indeed, and yet—how many really thrill and smile over the Odyssean tale? How many in this age of broad enlightenment ever read the Odyssey at all, or have dipped into its pages for love of their pure serene? The candid answer is: Very few. And yet Homer is one of the two or three who reign supreme, as we almost all still conventionally admit.

This vaunted proof of racial unity is overworked; Homer has but few relatives to-day, and they are that select handful who love to widen their horizons by looking backwards. In spite of our boasted education—which does not, any more than other panaceas, live up to its promises—the disciples of the great past will always be few. But since no age can walk entirely by its lone, there will always be a loyal band who will spend the best portions of their lives in the great backward and abysm of time, and will with shining faces bring good tidings to their fellowmen. How grateful the early Nineteenth Century should have been to Lamb for his specimens of the well-nigh forgotten Elizabethan Dramatists; how grateful we should be to Mr. Gilbert Murray for pointing out to us once more the splendors of Athenian Tragedy! Upon scholars like these we must rely that too much is not forgotten.

The saying that the greater the fame the fewer the readers, is a random shot, and yet it hits the target, and not the outermost ring. Every approving reader gained for a work hands on the word to a dozen who have not read, nor will ever read it. Fame enlarges its sweep through time like the surge thrown off the prow of a moving steamship, broadening over the sea until it stretches beyond all apparent relation to the ship which first stirred it up. But here the figure breaks: for while in most cases the waves subside, in others, the commotion bids fair to last to the end of human history.

The classic once established becomes so sacred to the unthinking public that to doubt it is lèse majesté; at least, its fame produces a sort of hypnotism. No one, for instance, can approach a play of Shakespeare for the first time unbiassed. He may be actually bored, but he will not admit it. Perhaps he will make himself believe that he enjoys it, but he will not be found with it in his hours of honest play. He hardly dares know what he thinks, lest he should be found heretical, and he feels safer to swell the lusty chorus of praise. The most influential critics in such a case get no real hearing. They may capture a few individual opinions, but the public at large will lend no ear to qualifications. Only if repetition is carried to the point of damnable iteration, will modification of appraisal begin slowly to sink down through class after class; it takes an unconscionable time to reach the bottom, perhaps centuries. One recalls lesser literature still lingering moribund upon front parlor tables in village homes—Thomson’s Seasons or, perhaps, Young’s Night Thoughts. No one reads them; they remain as closely shut as the parlor doors; but there they lie, the cherished signs of family respectability, and still accepted unquestioningly as living things.

Literary fame is a slippery and indefinite thing. There are countless impossible questions one could ask. How many readers must a work have to be considered alive at all? Is fame to be allowed to some of the obscure poets like Campion, Traherne, and Shenstone, who are known only to the specialist? Definiteness and finality are as difficult of attainment as to tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is northerly. But it is certain that the immortals are dependent upon an amazingly small set of followers, which tends to grow smaller as the ages turn. Yet those who deserve long life will in the long run reach an old age, frosty but kindly. And we may leave them with confidence in the hands of Time, who, after all, like Autolycus, pockets only what have come to be unconsidered trifles.

CARLYLE AND KULTUR

I

The opinions anyone holds in this momentous crisis are largely determined by those he has imbibed from the thinkers of the past, and it is interesting to notice how much Carlyle has been brought into the discussion on both sides. A somewhat systematic consideration of the bearing of his teachings on the present war may therefore not be altogether profitless.

For many reasons he is not the sort of man to invite much attention from journalistic, academic, and dilettante writers. He is unpopular in a double sense; for he is neither superficial nor facile, and his ideas are opposed to the optimistic convictions that dominate in this generation. Some insist that he is responsible for the extravagant paradox and persistent denial of the obvious and the accepted indulged in so freely by such journalistic products as Shaw and Chesterton, but these men only imitate his manner to pervert his meaning. That they imitate him, however, is proof of his influence; for the popular writer does not imitate anyone whose repute is not of the highest.

The academic mind is indifferent or hostile to him because the formlessness of his writings and their abnormal character seem serious defects to those to whom the formal is more important than the substantial. His learning, too, while undoubtedly extensive, is not always accurate or orthodox. The king is not the “cunning or the kenning” man, and his contempt for “logic-choppers” and “word-mongers” does not commend him to such as value the theoretical above the practical.

To the dilettante he is equally repellant. He hated mediocrity and superficiality, and he had inconveniently high standards. This latter reason is the openly avowed one for hostility towards him in the case of an English writer, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, who freely denounces him in his diffuse discussions of the war, but also cites facts that tend to disprove his contention that Carlyle is without influence; for he tells of repeated experiences with British workingmen who were readers of Carlyle and ardent believers in his gospel.

Carlyle is undoubtedly a strong influence in Great Britain. The superficial regard him as a reactionary and an obscurantist who believed in despotism and serfdom, but those who live closer to the realities of life detect in his writings a passionate sympathy for the humble and the oppressed. He may not exert much influence in the learned or the artistic world, but he is certainly a social and a political force. Writers on British politics constantly refer to his influence over the more intelligent voters of the working classes, and this demonstrates power of the most pregnant kind.

Outside of Great Britain, too, there are evidences of his influence. It is mostly within the English speaking world, but some accuse him of being the progenitor of Nietzsche and his cult of the superman. This is only superficially true, however, for Nietzsche was exactly the sort of person he denounced as “quack” and “simulacrum;” but, as in the case of Shaw and Chesterton, this proves influence, even though it be of a negative sort. In the United States his French Revolution has apparently had much influence in the way of making our attitude towards the past less formal and academic, and in bringing about a tendency to look more at the principles than at the facts of history. He has also given us such familiar expressions as “captains of industry,” the “unspeakable Turk,” and many others not generally recognized as his; and the man who fashions our daily speech gives the strongest possible proof of influence. Here, too, however, his influence is chiefly in the political and social world, and we can see the effect of his ideas in one of our most important pieces of recent legislation, the selective draft; for this act aims to realize his cardinal principle, that the necessary work of a nation shall be compulsory and shall be apportioned equitably and in such a way as to ensure each man getting the task for which he is fitted.

II

The chief question about Carlyle at present, however, is not the extent of his influence, but how far his teachings justify the theories and practices now dominant in Germany. The Germans point to his advocacy of their cause in 1870, and to his glorification of Frederick the Great, as proofs that he would approve of, and even exalt, all that they have done. The kaiser has quoted him in a widely discussed speech about “one man with God being a majority,” while less prominent Germans have freely appealed to his authority. The English speaking world has seemed, on the whole, disposed to admit that Carlyle’s doctrines justify, or at least tend to produce, ideas such as those that now obsess Germany. Some writers, like the Mr. Hueffer already mentioned, have seized the opportunity to belabor his memory as a traitor; while others have risen up to defend him, although they seem to do so less from conviction than a desire to deprive the Germans of support. Anyone who knows Carlyle more than superficially, however, knows that the present German policy would earn from him nothing but furious denunciation; and the reason would not be because the Germans began the war, as D. A. Wilson argues in The Fortnightly Review for February, 1916, nor because he was pro-Russian, nor because of any other personal prejudice or predilection, but because the German nation today exhibits about all the vices he inveighed against as most dangerous to the peace of the world and the progress of civilization.

It would be idle to deny that Carlyle did exalt the German nation and German policies to the English-speaking world, but we shall have to qualify this exaltation if we accept Dr. Johnson’s principle that an author’s works need editing a generation or so after their composition. This dictum is based on the obvious necessity of recognizing that the force of what a man says is conditioned by the current opinion of his time and by his attitude towards it, and it also recognizes the truth of one of Carlyle’s own observations: “It is man’s nature to change his dialect from century to century; he cannot help it though he would.” The dialect of the nineteenth century was not that of the twentieth, and Carlyle’s use of it was affected by several things that still further obscure his meaning for us. He opposed strongly what he regarded as many popular fallacies of his time, and in opposing them he overemphasized things that seemed to him to discredit or to disprove them. To the undisciplined British populace, impatient of all control and clamoring for the removal of all restrictions on individual liberty, he extolled the docile German people; but it was not their absolute so much as their comparative virtue that he was praising, and he would have recognized that, under other circumstances, their submissiveness could prove a vice, as, indeed, it has. Another fact, pointed out by Colonel T. W. Higginson, a man whose extreme humanitarianism was calculated to make him unsympathetic towards the eulogist of Dr. Francia, is that Carlyle was a humorist and a man to whom the humorous attitude was second nature. It will be necessary, therefore, to discount his praise of the German people and of German institutions, for two reasons; the first, because it was heightened to serve as a corrective to the tendency towards license in his countrymen; and the second, because, as a humorist, and also because of his ardent temperament, he invariably indulged in over-statement.

There is much besides this to indicate that Carlyle’s praise of Germany in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is anything but evidence that he would endorse Kultur and Schrecklichkeit. His fundamental teaching is that we must not be formal, rigidly logical, or addicted to any fixed method of thinking. The nature of things must be determined from their effects, and not from any external characteristics. The national attributes of any people are not permanent, but they are capable of wide variation, and much of his invective and striking metaphor was poured forth in an effort to prove that this variation is very largely a question of good or bad leadership. In sustaining this thesis he traces the history of Germany more completely than he does that of any other country; and he indicates several periods, notably that of the Thirty Years’ War, and the reign of Frederick I, when Prussia, at least, was contemptible in its policies. France, too, he argues, has not always been the mischief-maker of Europe; for to him the French Revolution was a salutary outburst of the native integrity of the French people, to sweep away the intolerable hypocrisies and injustices of the Old Regime, and to improve not only French, but human society as well.

It is plain, therefore, that he did not affirm the Germans to be intrinsically good and the French intrinsically bad. His aim was to show that nations rise in proportion to the extent to which their purposes are just and their methods intelligent, and that they invariably fall if they deal unjustly with their own citizens or their neighbors. Sometimes he contrasted the French unfavorably with the Germans, as, for instance, when he says that the martial ardor of the French may be compared to blazing straw, while that of the Germans is more like the burning of anthracite coal. This, however, is due to his having, like a great many other people, an impression that the French are more likely to exhibit superficial and glittering qualities, while the Germans are conspicuous for the commonplace virtues of industry and thoroughness. Nothing was more insidious, in his opinion, than to prefer brilliancy to solid worth; and it was the danger of this preference he was emphasizing, more than the native depravity of the French national character, when he compared the Gallic temperament unfavorably with the Teutonic.

III

His attitude towards efficiency was also the direct opposite of the present German conception of it. To him efficiency was a matter of adaptation and improvisation, while the German theory is that it is a question of fixed method and elaborate mechanism. Nobody ever despised more than Carlyle the perennial fallacy that things can be done better by the hocus pocus of procedure than by the intelligent application of the available means to the end desired. He censured any effort to achieve things automatically. He was never tired of ridiculing trust in formulas. He insisted that the intelligence must be unfettered by preconceptions or by a rigid plan. His hero was a man who had “swallowed all the formulas,” and who proceeded to adapt means to ends in any way that was effective, passing rough-shod over theory, convention, dogmas, or any other restrictions on his freedom of action. It is true that he did insist on the necessity of having accurate and comprehensive knowledge, and on thoroughness and other essentials of what the Germans regard as scientific procedure. These things, however, were to him not major but minor virtues. They were the auxiliaries to success, but they were never to be considered as sufficient to ensure success, for they had always to be supplemented by intelligence and insight. This is shown by his depreciation of mere “beaver” industry, and by his fondness for satirizing “pipe-clay,” by which he meant senseless military routine. No crime, in his eyes, was worse than a failure to recognize the dominant importance of the sensibly and intellectually imponderable and intangible elements that are part of every human problem; so that he reprehended as vices the very things that have been most characteristic of the Germans during the present war.

Another thing that Carlyle abused and the Germans display, is insincerity. Nothing comes in for more invective from him than this, and to him it meant primarily a subjective attitude. Vanity was its chief cause, in his opinion. Truth, however unpalatable, must be recognized; while fiction, however flattering, must be scorned. Personal relationships must not sway our judgment, and he railed with especial violence against unwarranted optimism inspired by conceit. He pointed out, as one of Frederick the Great’s chief virtues, the fact that he was influenced by no delusions created by vanity or sentimentality. He says Frederick looked facts squarely in the face, and instances his once offending his brother, the Crown Prince, by telling him that he had surrounded himself with flatterers, and reminding him that the Austrians, his enemies in the field, would not flatter him. Carlyle also points out that Frederick’s wars were all conducted on a frank basis, so far, at least, as acknowledgment to himself of the real situation was concerned. There was no indulgence in the theatrical or the spectacular, certainly in none that deceived only himself. Frederick wasted no energy in striving for apparent triumphs that had no practical worth. He disregarded purely political or sentimental influences. Berlin was twice entered by the enemy during the Seven Years War, because Frederick never paid a military price for a political or a temporary victory, but he yielded territory whenever strategy demanded it. How different is this from Germany’s present military policy, which sacrifices permanent advantages for the appearance of victory, and does not succeed in achieving even a convincing appearance of that? It is plain that the cheap posturing of the German military policy is just the sort of thing Carlyle hated and despised, and nobody who has read him more than casually can have escaped realizing that his insistence on the necessity of recognizing fact in an honest and unbiased manner is a condemnation of the delight in conscious and unconscious mendacity displayed by the present German government.

Stupidity he warned against as one of the chief implements of the devil. There is no other crime, he often said, for morality is largely a matter of intelligence. Better be a villain than a fool, he implies, by quoting approvingly the boast of the Scotch family that it had produced “many a blackguard but not one blockhead.” The mind which cannot or will not perceive the obvious, or which persists in denying the unflattering, is not only hopeless but vicious. Preferring to credit their prejudices or their desires, instead of the lesson of events, was the chief crime he ascribed to the men he held responsible for the worst catastrophes of history. For mere density and well-intentioned incompetence, as in the case of Louis XVI, he had some pity; but for stupidity arising from wanton obstinacy and arrogance he had nothing but wrath and scorn. It would be difficult to find in history a parallel for the infatuated folly of the German military and political policy during this war, but we find Carlyle reprehending less aggravated and perverse displays of trust in bombast, brutality, and pretension, in the case of countries like Spain and Austria; and this is only one of many things that show how monstrous in his eyes would seem the insensate policy which has made Germany the shame of civilization, and has alienated from her every country in the world except a few contiguous ones that tolerate or assist her through fear or rapacity.

What proves the German policy most at variance with Carlyle’s philosophy, however, is the fact that it is guided by materialistic and cynical convictions. His basic belief was that the fundamental law of existence is morality; they jeer at any power that is not material. Besides this, he believed that reliance on the baser qualities of human nature can never lead anywhere but to perdition. The leadership which aims to secure itself by appealing to the selfishness or by satisfying the folly of mankind, is courting disaster. The German policy boastfully proceeds on the assumption that the only motives that govern human action are self interest of some base sort, and it credits humanity with as little intelligence as morality. It is true that Carlyle had slight respect for the intelligence or the integrity of the masses, but he insisted that nobility is inherent in human nature, and that a hero who knows how to arouse it, invariably appears whenever a government becomes so unjust or so incompetent as to be intolerable. The German theory is that the weak have no friends; Carlyle’s conviction was that nature avenges all injustice. The Germans declare that might makes right; Carlyle preached that right makes might, and on every question of fundamental morality he was diametrically opposed to them. “Savage animalism is nothing; inventive spiritualism is all,” he writes in one place, and implies in a thousand. The Germans proceed on exactly the opposite assumption. They trust in nothing but force, and the neo-Darwinism that guides their policy is only a combination of the ideas he denounced in the works of such men as Hume, Bentham, Comte, and Darwin himself, mixed with a sentimental egoism that he abominated above everything else.

IV

There is, of course, some reason for believing that Carlyle’s ideas resemble those of which the German policy is the expression, but there is none if we look beyond his superficial meaning. One reason for branding him as an advocate of German practices is his exaltation of Frederick the Great. Frederick began his first war by seizing Silesia, very much as Wilhelm II began the present war by seizing Belgium. As Carlyle justified the seizing of Silesia, many people cannot see why that does not warrant the conclusion that he would also justify the seizure of Belgium. Such people, however, forget that the Prussia of 1740 was not even the Prussia of 1914, to say nothing of the German Empire or the Teutonic Alliance. Carlyle would detect in Prussia a change in spirit, but even if this cannot be established, there is certainly no parallel between Frederick’s seizure of Silesia and Germany’s attack on Belgium. In 1740, Prussia was one of the small countries of Europe. Its population was about half that of Belgium in 1914, and its political importance was not much greater. It was situated between militaristic France and imperialistic Austria; and its immediate neighbors: Saxony, Bavaria, Poland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms, were ready at any moment to profit by its misfortunes. Prussia’s seizure of Silesia was, therefore, very much as if Belgium, learning in advance of Germany’s plan of invasion, had seized German territory adjacent to its frontiers, and used it as a buffer to defend itself. It was the case of a small state preserving itself from the aggressions of a big neighbor aiming at world dominion. The methods employed may not have been technically legal, but they were justified; therefore Carlyle endorsed them. He believed that Frederick, cynic and materialist though he admits him to have been, nevertheless proved himself the valiant defender of his country’s right to self government. He also regarded Frederick as the man who did most in the eighteenth century to preserve Europe from being dominated by a lawless imperialism. The rulers of Austria, because of their almost uninterrupted possession of the office of Holy Roman Emperor, openly aimed at universal dominion, and never lost an opportunity of trying to realize it by force of intrigue. France, too, was striving for the domination of Europe, and Russia was just becoming conspicuous for the brutality and unscrupulousness of its political methods quite as much as for the vastness of the power it had suddenly developed. When these facts are considered, Frederick’s action must be admitted to have been, if not in the interests of democracy, at least in support of the principle of self-determination for which the Allies claim to be fighting against Germany; and Carlyle’s endorsement of it at least creates the presumption that he would not sympathize with Germany, which today, greatly extended, is playing the part of the bullying nations he commended Frederick for thwarting.

He seems, however, to advocate autocracy, and to deride democracy, and this would appear to put him in agreement with the kaiser and his professorial prompters. It is true that he did deride the notion that the decision of the majority is always right. He likewise insisted that all the constitutionality and legality conceivable will not ensure good government or justify incompetence or unrighteousness in power; and that, conversely, no formal or technical irregularity disqualifies a government which is beneficent and capable. He ridiculed the idea that political equality is synonymous with justice, but this does not mean that he believed in caste rule. His opposition to political equality was inspired by no respect for inherited authority or the sanctity of property, but was the result of a conviction that it is a crude and materialistic way of trying to solve an immensely complicated problem by a simple mechanical process. Not external equality, but equity, must be achieved to make government effective and successful, was his contention. Making men equal in political power, in his opinion, ensured that the government would be dominated by the ignorance and selfishness of the mass of men, rather than by the enlightenment and integrity of the relatively small portion of mankind whom nature fits for leadership by endowing them with superior moral and intellectual powers. He believed no man entitled to authority except on the basis of character and ability, and he was as bitterly opposed to the German scheme of class rule as he was to the quantitative methods of the radicals. It is entirely wrong to think that, because he denied that universal suffrage will guarantee justice and humanity, he endorsed injustice and oppression. He didn’t care how a government was organized or what it claimed to do, but he only inquired what it had succeeded in doing, and by this he judged it. The results of the German policy have been disaster for the world as well as for Germany, and he would condemn the German government for this, without being at all concerned about its form. He attached no importance to a government’s form; all he judged by was its spirit. He believed that a government is inevitably the expression of the intelligence and morality of the people it represents, and that any form is capable of proving either good or bad in operation. Germany may be an autocracy in form, but the German people almost unanimously endorsed the war and its enormities; so what we have is an exhibition of the fallibility of popular judgment more than a display of the evils of autocracy. On this point Carlyle’s position is clear, while that of the critics who accuse him of having endorsed German practices, because he denied that the majority is always right, is much more susceptible of being considered a justification of Kultur.

According to his interpretation of history, the case of Germany is perfectly plain. It is simply an instance of the degeneracy that, he claimed, inevitably follows the adoption of selfish or materialistic ambitions. The patient industry and the steady pursuit of the practical instead of the spectacular brought Germany to greatness, and placed vast power in the hands of her rulers. Then those rulers were tempted to misuse that power, and they fell. They decided to corrupt the people and make them the instrument by which world dominion could be achieved. They therefore cultivated the baser passions of the populace, and with infinite thoroughness and resource, they used every agency of the government to secure public endorsement for a policy of aggression, and for a swash-buckling and bombastic procedure that appealed only to the shallow and the reckless. They found this the easier because circumstances worked with them. The Franco-Prussian War inflamed German chauvinism and inflated German conceit to an incredible extent. The success of the war was more the result of France’s weakness than Germany’s strength, but it filled the German nation with extravagant enthusiasm, and inspired it with blind faith in its own invincibility. Then Germany changed from a country largely agricultural to one mainly industrial, and wealth came to kindle in a naturally gross and sensual people a passion for luxury, and to impart to a naturally arrogant one the insolence of material power. The effect of the first of these things is shown in the famous night-life of Berlin, which, before the war, was more gross and lavish than that of any other city in the world; while the overbearing character of the average German abroad shows how general was the influence of the second. Thus a change has been effected in the spirit of Germany. From a nation dull but honest, rude but sincere and kindly, it has been transformed by bad leadership and sudden prosperity into a people whose dominant characteristics are brutality and mendacity. Therefore the Germany that Carlyle praised is not the Germany that perpetrated the present war, and there is no doubt that his attitude towards the apostles of Kultur would be the direct opposite of what it was towards Frederick the Great and Bismarck.

THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS

It need not be difficult either to define or to secure the freedom of the seas if the governments of the world sincerely desire to come to an agreement concerning it.” At first thought, the most striking characteristic of these words of President Wilson in his address to the Senate last January is their optimism. Freedom of the seas, according to German authorities, is to be secured by various agencies, including the unrestricted use of the submarine and an independent Ireland. Primarily it is to be secured by the destruction of British naval predominance. Now British authorities have an inconvenient habit of stating that freedom of the seas was won long ago by means of the British navy, that it exists today in time of peace, and that its continuance depends upon Britannia ruling the waves. Our correspondence with Germany before we entered the war contains polite references to our coöperation with that country to secure freedom of the seas through recognition by treaties and international agreement of principles such as that of the immunity of private property, not contraband, from capture at sea. But Germany no longer thinks it possible to secure the freedom of the seas by the medium of scraps of paper, and other nations show an unflattering unanimity on this point, with regard to any scraps of paper to which the present German government might be a party. As to the submarine as a means of securing freedom of the seas, our entrance into the war is perhaps a sufficient indication of our estimate of it. The usefulness of an independent Ireland toward this end would seem even more likely to be limited. There remains the British navy, and it promises to remain.

And how are we to define the freedom of the seas? The term has been used in the past, and examination of our diplomatic correspondence will show that it has been used in this war, in three different ways. It has been used in protest against the appropriation by a single nation of definite areas of the high seas for exclusive uses. The sowing of mines and the proclamation of danger areas have led to its revival in this sense. It has been believed to mean the right of private citizens to continue sea-borne commerce in war time with a minimum of interruption. Our preoccupation with this usage of the term during the first years of the war won us a good deal of unpopularity with our present co-belligerents. It has been used with reference to the safety of human life on the sea. We are fighting Germany today upon this issue.

Is the problem one of war times only, or is there anything in the contention that the potential pressure of sea power operates in times of peace in restraint of commercial development? The question is not a simple one, and perhaps it will aid us in understanding the seeming optimism of our historian-president if we try to understand how this matter has been dealt with in the past. The sailing ship has given way to the turbine propeller, the galleon to the dreadnaught, the pinnace to the submarine, but is the freedom of the seas which is being fought for to-day of a kind different from that which was fought for in the days of Drake? And is it to be secured by the same or by different means?

We need not dwell upon the recognition by Roman law of the principle of the right of all to use the seas as a highway, nor upon the claims of various city-states, notably Venice, to dominate portions of the Mediterranean. In view of recent pronouncements from the Vatican, it is interesting to remember that the claim of Venice, picturesquely symbolized by the annual ceremony of wedding the Adriatic, was based in part upon the gift of a ring accompanying an alleged papal grant, and that the struggle for the freedom of the ocean seas began as a challenge of two actual papal grants of wider significance. In 1454 Nicholas V rewarded the pertinacity of the Portuguese in pushing their discoveries southward along the coast of Africa, by granting to the crown of Portugal exclusive rights of navigation and trade south of Capes Bojador and Non. In 1493, Alexander VI rewarded the crown of Castile for the exploit of Columbus, by giving Spain rights similarly exclusive beyond the meridian one hundred degrees west of the Azores. The details of these arrangements were later modified by mutual agreement of the powers concerned, the final understanding being that Portugal had exclusive rights of trade and navigation by the eastern approach to the Indies, and Spain in the waters of what was supposed to be the western route thither.

Both powers stood ready to defend the privileges which the highest international authority of the period had granted them. They proceeded to deal summarily with all foreign vessels found in their preserves. Although the medieval maritime code, the Consolato del Mare, provided for sparing the lives of the crew of a captured vessel, the humanitarianism of the king of Portugal took a different form. John II issued orders to his captains to seize all vessels encountered in the barred zone, and instructed them to cast the crews into the sea, “In order that they may die a natural death.”

It was the mariners of France who most frequently braved this earlier form of “spurlos versenkt.” They persisted in navigating the waters claimed by Portugal, and established a lucrative trade in Brazil. Their sovereign, Francis I, seems to have been the earliest champion among rulers of the freedom of the ocean seas. To the expostulations of the king of Portugal he maintained, “The act of traffic and exchange of goods is of all rights one of the most natural and best grounded.” To the remonstrances of the Spanish ruler, the Emperor Charles V, he replied, “The sun shines for me as well as for others. I should like to see the clause of Adam’s will which excludes me from the partition of the world.” The tales of the exploits of Jean Ango, merchant of Dieppe, who sank his enormous fortune in his ventures; of his captains, Fleury, Verrazano, the brothers Parmentier, is an absorbing one. Seeking fortunes for themselves and revenge for comrades fallen into the hands of the enemy and treated as pirates; justifying their acts on the principle that the paths of the sea are free to all; they dared and suffered, and explored new lands, and brought glory to the maritime annals of France. They laid the foundations of her overseas commerce and colonies, but owing to the religious wars at home the superstructure was not built until a later age.

The exploits of the French sailors against the Spanish monopoly were succeeded by those of Hawkins and Drake. Elizabeth’s dictum that the sea and the air were common to all was as emphatic as Francis I’s utterances on the subject, and Elizabeth’s was the better maintained. The victories of Drake in the Caribbean Sea in 1586 meant the death blow to Spain’s hopes of effectually barring the western seas. She was felt to be within her rights, however, in establishing a monopoly of trade with her colonies in the new world. The English, in their efforts to obtain trading concessions, or at least a recognition of their right to trade in regions not actually occupied by Spain, following French precedent, sedulously avoided making any agreement that might seem to acknowledge Spain’s right to prevent the vessels of other nations from sailing the American seas.

While England was combating Spain’s claims in western waters, a new maritime power, the Netherlands, was breaking down the monopoly of Portugal in the east. The ships of the Dutch East India Company won their way against the Portuguese and made prize of their vessels. It was apparently to set at rest the consciences of members of the company who hesitated to pocket profits that had not been won in peaceful trade, that the Dutchman Grotius wrote his treatise on the law of prize, one chapter of which, under the title Mare Liberum, was published as an independent work. The book claimed the seas as a free highway for the ships of all nations, and freedom of trade for all nations on every sea. That age was not ready to accept either claim in its entirety. Two Englishmen, Welwod and Selden, wrote books to vindicate England’s traditional sovereignty over the British seas, the limits of which no one was quite certain about. Even the British admirals who were supposed to defend British authority there, could never get the Crown lawyers to pronounce exactly on the point, some holding that British seas extended to the English settlements in America, others being satisfied with a line drawn from Norway to Cape Finisterre. Charles I set out, with his ship money fleets, to supplement the discourses of his subjects by “the louder language of a powerful navy.” But it was left for his great successor, Cromwell, to use this latter language effectively, and to wring from the Dutch the concession that their ships should strike flag and topsail in the narrow seas. They always insisted, however, that this was done in courtesy, not as a recognition of British sovereignty over any part of the high seas. International incidents arising from the refusal of French captains to salute occurred until England relinquished her claim during the Napoleonic wars.

As to freedom of trade, the English Navigation Laws stood as a witness that Spain’s policy of monopolizing colonial trade was considered worthy of emulation. Such monopolies were carefully guarded, as in Elizabeth’s day, and as in her day efforts were made to break them down. To Cromwell’s request that Englishmen be allowed liberty of conscience and of trade in the West Indies, the Spanish ambassador replied that it was to ask his master’s two eyes. Thereupon Cromwell stopped asking, but despatched a fleet to the West Indies to seize a post which might become a centre of British trade.

This action of Cromwell links his day to ours. That the keynote of modern diplomacy and its accompaniment of wars is to be found in rivalry for the possession of land and markets in the extra-European world, has been fully pointed out by historians. It is a fact which cannot be emphasized too strongly. Its significance increases with the study of the whole modern period.* * And its illusions were set forth in “The Expansionist Fallacy,” No. 5 of this Review.—Ed. One has only to dip into the pamphlet literature of the eighteenth and late seventeenth centuries, or to read a few pages of parliamentary debates, to realize the importance of trade in the eyes of all men. It becomes apparent that the aim of each progressive nation was to increase its overseas commerce at the expense of other nations, and that every new enterprise of foreigners loomed as a menace to national prosperity. Sea-borne trade was the nursery of seamen, and commerce must be restricted to nationals by navigation acts, while commercial ventures of rival states were not alone a menace because they meant diverting profits to the benefit of a rival, but dangerous as the possible foundation for hostile naval power. Since commerce was carried on most successfully by trading companies, it was good policy to give them governmental countenance, and although occasional voices were raised in criticism of their monopolies and the high prices for which they were felt to be responsible, their shares were popular forms of investment, and many of their shareholders sat in the seats of the mighty. The English and Dutch East India Companies were among the first to carry on overseas commerce on a large scale, and much international history is written between the lines of their annals.

“And you, Belgians, courage, courage! Continue to defend intrepidly your rights and your freedom, and with them the freedom of the human race!” It was not in August of 1914 that these words were spoken. They occur in a pamphlet published in 1727, and the struggle in which they urge the Belgians to persist was a struggle for the freedom of the seas. The ruler of the Belgians in those days was popularly called the German emperor, and though not a Hohenzollern, he was a Hapsburg. The Emperor Charles VI was pursuing a project which bade fair to give the Hapsburg lands something they have not attained to this day: importance as a maritime power. He had issued a charter to a group of Belgian merchants who were already carrying on a lucrative trade with the far east from the port of Ostend. The Dutch and English East India companies, seeing their monopolies endangered, complained to their respective governments, which immediately set in motion machinery for the suppression of the Ostend Company. Diplomatic agents busied themselves at Charles’ court, and a flood of pamphlets, in those days of limited newspaper publicity, did what they could in the manufacturing of public opinion. The Belgian pamphlets maintained the principle that “the right to trade in any part of the globe is inherent in all sovereign peoples.” The Dutch pamphlets opposed the company on the ground of alleged infringement of treaty rights and agreements. The English pamphlets, wisely refraining from much comment on documents based on papal grants whose authority England had never recognized, argued that English pocketbooks would suffer if the Ostend Company continued to do business. Pitt many years later stated in Parliament that the English government had no right to demand the suppression of the company. But, as the British ambassador said to the Emperor, in language strikingly reminiscent of that of the Spanish ambassador of Cromwell’s day, “In attacking our commerce, you fly in the eyes of the English nation.” In the complicated diplomacy of five years, the question of the Ostend Company held its own, but in 1731 Charles VI abandoned it, as he had abandoned many other things of value, to obtain one more ratification of the Pragmatic Sanction.

Eight years later it was England that was carrying on a struggle for the principle of freedom of the seas. Modern research has established beyond any reasonable doubt that the immortal Jenkins did actually have an ear sliced off by a Spaniard who was searching his ship for smuggled goods, and that the tale was not a fabrication of the Opposition that desired to force Walpole to plunge England into war. The Opposition certainly recognized the recruiting value of the incident. “The tale of Jenkins’ ear will raise us troops enough!” exclaimed one member on the floor of the House of Commons. Whether or not Jenkins commended his soul to God and his cause to his country, his country embraced his cause as that of the freedom of British commerce from search by Spaniards in time of peace. The British vessels searched were usually smugglers, but the British public was not interested in the right of Spain to safeguard her monopoly of trade with her colonies; they objected to search and to the contention that British ships must not be found in American waters outside the straight path between England and her colonies, and they besieged the doors of Parliament with the slogan: “A free sea or war!” And so was fought the war of Jenkins’ Ear, which might have been avoided had it not been for the powerful influence, both with the people and with Parliament, of the South Sea Company; and which did nothing toward settling the point in controversy.

Thus far the principle of freedom of the seas had been invoked in connection with efforts to preserve for the benefit of a whole nation or of favored groups of nationals, all access to the trade and resources of certain regions. During the wars for colonies and commerce which arose from these efforts, the principle was brought forward against interruption of commerce in time of war. In the days when privateering was a recognized adjunct of maritime, warfare, commerce-destroying was reduced to a science that only the last three years have rivalled. The seizure as contraband of anything which might help the enemy to prolong the struggle, and the confiscation of cargoes of neutral ships, on the ground that part of the cargo belonged to the enemy, caused endless international complications. Treaties of peace began to contain provisions designed to render less burdensome these rights claimed by belligerents. The first step toward anything like international agreement was taken in the treaties of Utrecht in 1713. By these treaties contraband was limited to articles directly useful in war, exclusive of foodstuffs; enemy goods on neutral ships were protected on the principle later reduced to a formula, as “free ships, free goods”; and the method of visit and search was regulated. These arrangements did not outlast the peace, but many later treaties renewed, and some developed more fully, these restrictions, which were naturally more popular with neutral powers and with powers possessing small navies, than with the power which possessed the command of the sea. As that enviable position was held practically without interruption by Great Britain, and as in time of war she used unsparingly the advantages her position gave her, she gained in the eyes of opponent and neutral the reputation of being the enemy of freedom of the seas.

At the beginning of the Seven Years’ War France, realizing that she would not be able to control the trade with her colonies, threw it open to neutrals. Great Britain thereupon laid down her famous “Rule of 1756” that commerce illegal in time of peace was not legal in time of war, and attacked neutral ships found trading with French colonies. The answer of Denmark and Sweden to this policy was the formation of the first league of neutrals to protect neutral commerce. The French, hoping that the contrast of their policy with that of Great Britain would help their cause with neutral powers, were careful not to authorize interference with neutral trade. It is interesting to find the doctrine of which we have heard so much of late, of the menace of British “navalism,” formulated in the eighteenth century by the minister of a state which, like England’s opponent in the twentieth, was stronger on land than on the sea. It was a French diplomat who expressed the hope that some day a union of nations would be able to cope with England and “establish firmly after the peace, or even during the war, a balance of commerce: for without it no other people will ever enjoy any but a precarious navigation, which will last only as long as it is to the interest of the English government not to destroy it.” This statement owes its significance to the fact that it voiced the attitude of a government which, under stress of circumstances, indeed, and not because it saw a light, was departing from the prevailing practice of mercantilism, the reservation for nationals of the benefits of colonial trade.

A British statesman has recently made the assertion that the United States owes its existence to the struggle for the freedom of the seas. He was referring to the Elizabethan struggle against Spain’s policy of exclusion, but is not the statement true also in another sense? In so far as the restrictions laid upon the development of the colonies by the trade and navigation laws contributed in bringing about the American Revolution, that movement was a protest against the mercantile system, under which no freedom of the seas was possible.

The United States early ranged herself, also, on the side of the nations that championed freedom of the seas for commerce in time of war. Her treaty with France regulated the right of search, limited contraband to munitions of war, and proclaimed the principle, “free ships, free goods.” The treaty which Franklin later negotiated with Prussia established American advocacy of the immunity of private property from capture at sea. In the meantime, Great Britain’s refusal to limit herself in any interference with commerce which might hinder her victory over her revolted colonies and France, gave umbrage to the Scandinavian powers and to Russia, and in 1780 Catherine II proclaimed the Armed Neutrality of the North. To the principle of “free flag, free goods,” and the limitation of contraband to actual munitions of war, the Armed Neutrality joined the principle that a blockade to be binding must be effectively maintained. Although Catherine jested with the British ambassador about her armed neutrality, calling it an armed nullity, she told him that Russian trade and Russian ships were her children, and that she was determined to protect them. France had favored the formation of the Armed Neutrality, and Louis XVI improved the occasion by explaining that his only motive in participating in the war was his attachment to the principle of the freedom of the seas.

It is difficult for us today to preserve the proper attitude of respect for the word of a king in this connection, but it is not so difficult for us to understand what was the real attitude of France. England had won from France the greater part of her colonies, and with them a lucrative commerce, and her remaining commerce was being crippled by the war policy of the mistress of the seas. Behind the England which refused to limit her power as a belligerent by accepting a revision of maritime law, stood the England which was the successful commercial rival of France.

The French Republic inherited this much of the view point of Louis XVI. The remedy for the situation France saw in an imitation of England’s policy. It enacted a navigation law copied after those of Great Britain, and while declaring that its war against England was a war to free the seas, it proclaimed that as a war measure it was abandoning the principle, “free ships, free goods.” Napoleon took up the convenient formula, writing to the Royal Society on paper decorated by a vignette representing Liberty sailing in a shell, and bearing the motto, Liberté de Mer. Years later he read the same meaning into the formula; outlining to Narbonne his idea that England should be attacked through the Orient; he said that the same blow which destroyed her mercantile greatness in India, would win independence for the west, and the freedom of the sea. England’s attitude toward sea law gave him a convenient weapon, and he induced his admirer the Czar to form a new Armed Neutrality, announcing that France would not make peace until neutral flags were properly respected, “and until England shall have acknowledged that the sea belongs to all nations.” Whether the device of a league of neutrals could really be an effective force in protecting commerce in wartime was not proved in 1800, for after the assassination of the Czar Paul the coalition went to a pieces. As in the present war, both belligerents used their naval forces to cut off supplies from the territories controlled by the enemy, and to ruin her commerce. Napoleon in his attempt to close the markets of Europe to Great Britain maintained that he was defending the freedom of the seas against Great Britain’s refusal “to recognize international law as observed by other nations,” while England defended her “paper blockades” and policy toward neutrals, as necessary, since she must preserve her command of the seas as an “essential to the protection of independent states, and for the prosperity and good of the human race.”

The damage done to American commerce in the pursuit of these high-sounding aims precipitated the war of 1812, which was indubitably a war for the freedom of the seas for neutral commerce in time of war, and which would probably have been fought with France instead of with Great Britain had it not been for the question of impressment, and the popular prejudices which had survived the American Revolution. Our championship of rules limiting belligerent rights against sea borne commerce, and our activities in the suppression of the Barbary pirates, have led us into a rather complacent attitude with regard to our position as to freedom of the seas. It is salutary therefore for us to remember the Bering Sea controversy. When, in 1821, Russia claimed sovereignty over Bering Sea, both the United States and Great Britain protested, and Russia withdrew her claim. But when in 1886 our activities in connection with pelagic sealing caused friction with Great Britain, our defense was based in part upon a claim to have inherited from Russia rights which in 1821 we had refused to admit that she possessed. And when the case was heard before an international court, one of our advocates even justified visit and search in time of peace, regardless of our traditional position on that subject. However, after a certain amount of journalistic jubilation when the award went against us, our cousins overseas charitably allowed the memory of our peccadillo to accumulate dust. That the question of the right of a nation to protect fisheries in adjacent waters is not a closed one, was shown by Russia’s claim in the White Sea put forward in 1911. That question, as well as the whole matter of the three-mile limit, is bound to demand further consideration in the near future.

What has been the attitude of Great Britain since 1815, and how far does it foreshadow her future policy? It must not be forgotten that in the long struggle to safeguard human life as well as property upon the seas, the chief burden has been borne by her. In the old days of her proud claim to a salute in the narrow seas, she felt her responsibility to police those seas, and this sense of responsibility has widened with the extension of her commerce, so that she has put the whole world in her debt by rendering the seven seas a safe highway in time of peace. Her adoption of the principle of free trade was probably the greatest single step that has been taken in modern times toward freedom of the seas, in the sense of breaking down the barriers of trade restriction which supposed national interest had erected. On the other hand, in the race for markets and raw materials, she has not escaped the tendency toward that return to the mercantilistic policy of exclusion in favor of nationals which is so marked in the whole movement today, and which is the crux of the problem. In the aspect of the question which has to do with limitation of belligerent right, she has shown herself responsive to the tendency, so noticeable from 1815 to 1914, to regard war as something to be limited so far as possible to the armed forces of the belligerents. Her substantial concessions in 1856, many of her statesmen have never ceased to deprecate, and it was the growing feeling that she could not afford to part with any more of the advantages her command of the sea gave her, that prevented the ratification of the Declaration of London. The events of the present war make very vital the question how far rules of this sort contribute toward the solution of the problem.

The attitude of the English press toward Lord Lansdowne’s suggestion that Great Britain declare her willingness to discuss the problems connected with the freedom of the seas reflects the shades of British opinion at present. Certain papers see the problem as one of war times only, and point out, what American opinion will not fail to echo, that the submarine question will have to be dealt with first and foremost. Two writers face the problem squarely as one of commercial policy in time of peace, and offer solutions according to their creeds. The Saturday Review expresses the belief that “so far from examining with other Powers the question of the freedom of the seas, we must re-enact, without delay, the Navigation Laws, which we foolishly repealed in 1849.” On the other hand, the London Nation sees the impartial distribution of the world’s raw materials as one aspect of the real freedom of the seas, and agrees with the French Socialists that the mistress of the seas that must secure this freedom for all nations willing to live by the rule of peace, must be, not Great Britain, but the future League of Nations. The harmonizing of these two view-points does not promise to be an easy task, and we may be sure that the whole question will have full and free discussion in England and throughout her empire in the months to come. American citizens do not have to consider the problem of resigning to the keeping of a League of Nations a proud and long-cherished tradition of wardenship of the seas. But we are one of the great commercial nations, and no voice will have a more respectful hearing than ours at the peace settlement. Barére, phrase-maker of the French Revolution, summed up the foreign policy of France in 1798 by saying that she had inscribed upon her flags, “Freedom of the seas, peace to the world, equal rights to all nations.” We have seen how the first of these phrases has been used again and again in the past to cloak jealousies of the commercial dominance of a rival nation. We know that one thing that it means today is that never again must the history of the world be stained by the wanton destruction of the lives of peaceful travelers upon the world’s highway. If it has a meaning also in relation to the world’s commerce, in peace or in war, we must see that it is a different meaning from that of the past. For we, too, have inscribed Freedom of the seas upon our battle flags, and it behooves us to be certain just where our army belongs in the long procession of armies with banners—just what is the direction in which our standards point.

THE CONDITIONS OF TOLERANCE

There is one virtue which we implicitly assume when we discuss philosophy, and usually invoke when we venture to discuss religion. It is the favorite “intellectual virtue” of our time: for, as the sophists disquietingly remarked in their day, and as Professor Sumner shows in Folkways, moral touchstones, like clothes, are subject to change of fashion; those of a former generation, taken for granted in all soberness, rise out of old books with a quaintness like that of the “ye” and the long “ſ” of our forefathers. The “great, the awful, the respectable virtues,” such as godliness and righteousness, as terms of approval, are seldom on our lips; the old stalwart, rigid qualities are less admired today than those which are more gracious and humane—than flexibility of mind, universal sympathy, open vision.

But these latter in their turn we have now accepted as ideals, with no warning Socrates at our elbow to demand: “Precisely what do you mean by these new standards which you take for granted?”

“Toleration is so prodigious an impiety,” said a member of the Westminster Assembly, “that this religious parliament cannot but abhor the meaning of it.” Yet, in that constant gradual “transvaluation of all values” which humanity performs, tolerance has become the golden word of modern thought. And, like all popular ideas, it is unthinkingly accepted and facilely claimed. Even those who admit that they have not attained full measure of it, hide themselves behind the remark: “I am tolerant of everything except intolerance,” and thereby yield them altogether: for to be tolerant only of a corresponding tolerance, is like confining your courtesy to polite people. The only attitude which tests the quality of tolerance is precisely the intolerant attitude.

But passing by these simple folk, we may yet find in the more serious-minded the sense of an inconsistency in the very conception, which puts it forever beyond our reach. We may be undertaking the difficult experiment of eating our cake and having it too. Yet even so there may be a refuge: for if paradox should prove to be the final form of truth—a union of opposites present in all living facts—inconsistency will have no devastating effect on it. The very fabric of truth may be woven of just such contradictions; reality may never be consistent. But whether or no this be the way out, there are plainly difficulties to be considered, if we are to understand, and at the same time accept, the ideal of tolerance.

At the outset the distinction must be drawn between outward physical toleration and the inward spiritual grace of tolerance. In the first place, tolerance refers to thought, not to conduct. That heretics are no longer burned at the stake is the outcome of a change in social policy; in so far as this change is more than the discovery that heretics are after all not dangerous to the state, it is due to the obvious fact that where there is no clearly delineated, uniform orthodoxy, there can be no heresy—the species is extinct. Whenever the government in power concludes that an idea is dangerous to the state, it does not hesitate to break through whatever safeguards to individual liberty of opinion may have been erected in the past. If such action is not legally justified, it is at once shown that laws are dead things, powerless against living human fears and needs. The application of the Defense-of-the-Realm act in England to distributing copies of the hitherto innocuous Sermon on the Mount, is evidence enough that the governmental attitude towards the subject has not changed in principle. And if, in addition to fear, we have a sharply defined orthodox view, we find that, though ordinary people no longer advocate capital punishment for doubting the Trinity, they did attempt to lynch Max Eastman for doubting the righteousness of the war. In other words, we have ceased to believe that religious opinions matter to social conduct, while still believing that political opinions do.

The genuine intolerance of the middle ages rested on a different basis. We say: Think what you please, so long as you act in conformity with what public opinion pleases. Plenty of anarchists and pacifists and upholders of the Susan B. Anthony Federal Amendment are still at large because their actions, though not their thoughts, are orthodox. The Inquisition struck deeper, because it was convinced of the genuine importance of thought, in relation to conduct. It was not content with binding the heretic to hold his peace—he must recant. It was so utterly convinced that not merely expediency, but final universal truth, lay in its keeping, that mere error, in the face of this revealed truth, became the ultimate sin.

The question of the meaning of tolerance, then, if it is not simply a matter of social usage, becomes the question, How far is it compatible with conviction? Tolerance may be defined as willingness to sanction the existence of views at variance with our own. The point at issue is not the expression of such views; the most intolerant man may egg on his opponent to complete expression, that he may argue him out of his error. The real tolerance refers to the relation of thought to thought, not of thought to speech. The above definition is one which, I believe, the seeker after tolerance will agree to accept (I have tried it on several). And yet, though presenting a fair idea of the attitude, it holds within itself the difficulty which puts the ideal out of reach.

This inherent contradiction may be stated, in the terms of our definition, thus: we are willing for an opposite view to exist only when we are not entirely convinced that our own view is true. The real belief in absolute truth is a missionary state of mind, and carries with it the faith that truth is the one thing worth having. In our day, the infinite variety of ideas which custom does not stale, has long forced itself upon our attention. In consequence we no longer share the faith of Plato that knowledge, as distinct from opinion, can be secured. We cannot believe anything quite as firmly as the mediæval Catholic believed in an eternal church independent of argument, or indeed of humanity. If we could, we should be as intolerant as Billy Sunday, whom “the pale cast of thought” has never tinged, and, if we were metaphysicians, should go up and down the world preaching the dangers of neo-realism, as the evangelist fulminates against the blasphemy of biological evolution. But Billy Sunday is an inverted anachronism; it is not in the power of a modern of the commencement de siècle to recapture his fine careless rapture.

If this be true, if we have grown too modest to declare the eternal constitution of the universe, what degree of conviction and what quality of tolerance are left us?

The first answer is, that we may be willing to admit a view differing from our own because we realize that both may be right. But such a realization, if it is to be more than verbal politeness, implies that the difference is only partial or nominal, and consequently that my opponent’s error does not shut him out from acknowledging my truth. I may be a woman suffragist, and yet be tolerant of the views of a friend who opposes suffrage, not on grounds of sex, but because he believes that the suffrage is already too wide, requiring restriction rather than enlargement. If I also am in theory an aristocrat, I can admit the notion that both of us are in a measure right.

But the only real tests of tolerance are the far more common cases, in which, if I am right, you must be wrong. Present species are or are not the result of development or special creation; the world is or is not an intelligible order; our individual personalities do or do not survive bodily death. We cannot be content here to fall back on a different statement of the problem. When we say: “Oh, yes, we both believe in God; to me he is Life Force; to you, Jehovah,” we know in our hearts that we are simply conniving at the draining of all definite meaning from the word, in order to confuse the issue and keep the peace. The one thing needful is, not that we should find blanket terms under which we seem to agree, but that we should drag our disagreement into the clearest possible light, and so find out what we are talking about. Not only our language, but our intelligence suffers from preferring vague unity to distinct differentiation.

Even in such cases there are, however, three conditions which make tolerance tenable. The first of them is, that we do not really care about the issue; we have taken sides, but only because it is necessary to hold some opinion, and so we have no active conviction. We are tolerant because, after all, we know little about the subject, and are willing to leave enthusiasm to experts. I have a friend who, even in the crisis of the present war, keeps critically aloof from questions of politics, seeming tolerant because his own position is held only “academically”; he does not care enough about the subject for that particular truth to seem supremely important. He is tolerant with the ease of indifference. It is easy to give free play to ideas in which we have no compelling interest. In consequence, many of us pretend to a general tolerance, when the fact is, that we carefully choose our examples from among the issues which least concern us.

Much of the modern religious tolerance is of this type. Our culture is so predominantly pagan that Christianity has ceased to play more than a nominal part in our tests of ideas and conduct. This tendency has infiltrated even those who are unaware of the influence; the saving of souls according to Christian theology has become less important than the preservation of good taste, whose standards are set by an unconsciously pagan public opinion. On the other hand, the prevailing paganism has not become self-conscious, since it is hidden behind Christian words; and few have the time or courage to look beneath words to test their consonance with things. Being the result, not of directed effort, but of drifting, the pagan element in our civilization is not eager to assert itself. So the avowed pagans are tolerant of Christianity, saying: “I do not care for it for myself, but it is good for the masses. As to the church, for people who like that sort of thing, why, that is the sort of thing they like.” And the Christians are tolerant of pagan ideals of self-realization, of personal pride and the worldly splendor of luxury and art, on the ground that some of the ideals which they are supposed to accept are after all inapplicable to modern life. Since neither cares to assert itself for what it is, there is the mutual tolerance of indifference. If these two ideals dared to stand forth and contest the field, there would be an end of tolerance,—a holy war, and clearing of the atmosphere.

The second condition of tolerance implies deeper thought on the disputed subject than does the first. It relates to things, about which we are not indifferent; but it indicates a mental sophistication which is too cautious lightly to put Q. E. D. at the close of a demonstration. Our conviction has, as it were, a string to it. I read once in a novel a phrase like this: “He was as amazed as a Christian, who, waking after death, should look round the universe and find that there was no God.” Imagination gives us tolerance by marring every faith with the suggestion that we may wake up and find ourselves mistaken. And this is just the faith that cannot remove mountains. The idea that the other fellow may be right, paralyzes activity. Only bigots and fanatics set fire to the world without scruple. We sit before the hearth, perhaps, and argue about the brutality and cowardice of much of our current morality, and the obstacles which convention often raises against a sincere and heroic life; and yet, unspoken behind our preaching, is the haunting fear that the wisdom of the ages may not be the hoary folly it seems, that the melodramatic novels may be true, that considerations unguessed may be involved—and we continue to sit before the hearth.

The presence of the little imp of skeptical imagination marks the difference between philosophical and religious convictions. For good or ill, the other person’s point of view, once seen, cannot cease for us. Our most ardent idealism is not a belief for which we would willingly be martyred by the realists: for we might wake and look round the universe in vain for an Absolute. It may be a good thing that the quality of religious conviction has died out among us, or it may be a necessary evil of civilized thinking. But the fact remains that we have no need of tolerance towards views which, consciously or unconsciously, we admit may be more nearly true than our own. We are merely not sure enough of ourselves to risk annihilating the views of our opponents.

The third form of imperfect conviction on which tolerance may rest is the view of truth as purely personal or relative. Subjectivism has been used as a bad name in philosophy for so long that the suspicion of it is usually resented. But it peers out from behind the respectable robe of many a philosophy which has not learned to call hard names. To reduce truth to a fact in individual experience, is to destroy the problem. Genuine conviction, without which tolerance is a mere form devoid of substance, is impossible if the truth for me and the truth for you are isolated facts, having and needing no relation to each other. But little private truths are sufficient only for little private affairs.

All of us want, and most of us take for granted, a real beauty in whose light it is irrelevant that Longfellow is read by a larger number of people than is Shelley. If I really love Shelley, I must believe that in some impersonal sense Prometheus Unbound is superior to The Psalm of Life. This insistence upon a standard is at the root of all our serious thinking; de gustibus non disputandum is a foolish saying: for nothing as a matter of fact is more fiercely disputed than questions of taste. The social character of thought is so firmly rooted that a thought which is limited to a personal impression ceases to interest us. It has become a mere fact; and we live in a world not of mere facts but of facts which gain their importance only through meaning. It is only of the most trivial acts that we say: This is right for me but wrong for you, because you think it wrong. We do not really even then put the You and the I on the same level, but imply that you will, if properly educated, agree with me. Human nature demands that we habitually will that the maxim of our thought at least, should become a universal law. Only when we apply our convictions, æsthetic, ethical, or metaphysical, to others outside ourselves, do they become more than fancies.

If we go the whole way with Professor Sumner, for example, in the relativity of morals, we are not really, from the standpoint of modern Western teaching, looking tolerantly upon other theories which approve, for instance, the summary extermination of undesirable members of the family. We are simply refusing to adopt the morality of our own or any other age, more seriously than as a guide of conduct whereby we avoid punishment by society. The owning of slaves in the United States, says Professor Sumner, is no longer expedient; but, under changes of social and industrial conditions, it may again become so. Morality, that is, is what its etymology implies—simply custom.

The holder of such a theory has no real conviction of the position which, by geographical and temporal accidents, he holds. He is really trying to place himself at the center of indifference, and his one conviction is that all standards are relative. Of opposition to this, he is frequently intolerant enough. The man who holds that Buddhism best meets the religious needs of India, as Christianity satisfies the conditions of life in the West, thinks himself tolerant of religious differences, because all the examples are on his side; but he is intolerant—and on his premises justly so—of missionaries, who are his real opponents.

Such are the forms of incomplete conviction which make tolerance plausible. There remain those attitudes which frankly abandon, for both sides, the claim to truth in any absolute sense. Our opinions in any case, they maintain, are but aspects of an all-embracing truth which can be known only to a consciousness of the whole. Your opinion and mine are, therefore, in the limited sense which is alone applicable, equally true. But the only ideas which we can admit to have an equal claim to partial truth, are those which are not mutually exclusive, so that the different facets of the universal truth shall not interfere with one another. Unless we mean simply that a variety of opinion makes the world less dull, in which case conviction does not come in at all, we are unable to admit that a belief diametrically opposed to our own is “just as good,” not as a foil, or a spur, to our own thinking, but in its own right. It may be that the Bradleyan Absolute can admit contradictories as equally true, but such mental acrobatics do not come naturally to human thinking. Since we cannot view the world as the Absolute sees it, we cannot, in practice, be guided by the theory that opposite answers to living problems, set in all their complex conditions, are equally true.

The conviction that is softened by an historic sense or by use of the terms of biological evolution, meets the same difficulty. In so far as there is any real demand for tolerance, it must be in the conflict of present issues. We do not need to be tolerant of the past, unless we imagine ourselves in that past, and regard its issues as, for the time being, contemporary with us. Ideas opposing our own may be gently dealt with, as necessary stages of civilization. But if a stage is now no longer necessary, the excuse fails. Cannibalism could not be defended as a civilized practice, simply because it represents a stage of development. Still less can we tolerate on the same ground what seems to us wrong in modern life. For we cannot without undue vanity maintain that the rest of mankind living under our conditions are less highly developed than we. So the sincere pacifist, for example, cannot properly be tolerant of war as an expression of prevailing savagery, beyond which he has himself advanced.

The theory that opinions and institutions are justified as “stepping-stones,” survivals not yet quite outworn, always carries the presumption that we are the apex—an assumption, of course, which evolutionary theory does not bear out. It is possible that our seeming progress may be retrogressive, that the true apex may have been reached in Greece some two thousand years ago. When we look kindly upon (to us) impossible views, with some idea of thesis and antithesis in our minds, we are taking our own position as the synthesis, and, placing ourselves at the standpoint of the whole, implying knowledge of that far off, divine event towards which the Tennysonian creation moves. But if we really think the truth of our vision worth striving for, it is dangerous to hold our reputation for urbanity to be of more importance than insight, by smiling down on opponents as on children at play, not worth fighting. Imperfect as it is, our little truth must seem to us, as it stands, better than any other, without smoothing away the stark contradiction between it and its opposite, and without claiming for it a higher level than for them, if it is to be at once effective and humble.

To all of this it may be answered that our idea of tolerance has been an impossible ideal; that simply by making the definition unwarrantably strict, the quality has been pushed out of reach; and that, on these terms of course it cannot exist. Nevertheless the exact quality of current attempts at tolerance is made visible in the light of that extreme form which we have been considering: as Plato judged the success of actual forms of the state by comparison with that perfect justice which was to be found in none of them. But if, as the situation suggests, the degree of tolerance is in inverse ratio to the force of conviction, we cannot hold both as ideals. The question is, Which is the more valid?

By assuming tolerance as a possession or even as a goal, we have lost that driving power of conviction which more primitive, less imaginative forms of belief still hold. Perfect tolerance would be an anæsthetic influence; it would militate against that clash of open conflict in which alone are ideas tested. If tolerance is to be achieved only by proportionate weakening of conviction, the prevailing acceptance of such an ideal may be not merely a crying for the moon, but for a burning toy balloon which would be of no value to us if we had it.

The past few centuries have deepened the conception of tolerance, given inner meaning as a virtue to what was originally only a convenience of social conduct. Tolerance in act has been proved practically advisable. It rests on the recognition that the intolerant Calvin, burning Servetus, was a more positively objectionable member of society than the Greek sage whose skepticism was so complete that he would commit himself to nothing more than the wagging of his finger. But if we are right in maintaining the incompatibility of tolerance and conviction, each gaining ground only at the expense of the other, are we not following the wrong star? Calvin was doubtless less pleasant to live with than the Greek skeptic; but, since clear definition of issues is the first step in judgment, the following of the harsher example may clear the way for those battles of thought which change the boundaries of its territories, when diplomacies accomplish nothing.

Socrates, according to Plato, must have spent a good many hours and days in buttonholing young men on the streets of Athens, and pricking the airy bubbles of the catchwords which they used so glibly. His inveterate questioning often seemed to lead only to a deadlock. “What is this justice, this temperance, this courage, of which you seem so sure?”—he would ask, and, after leading them a merry chase along the mazes of thought, brought them to the reluctant conclusion that virtue is not so simple, after all. There was something of the spirit of the detective in this sleuthing among ideas, this quick recognition and rejection of clues. What Socrates was chiefly trying to do—and no wonder he was accused of corrupting the young men!—was to cultivate in his interlocutors the rare art of questioning, to extirpate in them the prevalent stupidity of taking things for granted.

But Socrates did not cure the world of using catchwords. In war, in politics, in religion, even in science, they still pass for the coin of the realm. They are always dangerous: for they always delude one into thinking to be easy that which is in truth most difficult. There is hardly a virtue which we can have without crowding out another virtue. We of the twentieth century have taken tolerance for granted, as if it were as much to be expected as good manners. And we have scarcely thought to ask the price for which it is bought.

If it is only a utilitarian matter of social policy, to be relinquished when that policy changes, we have done foolishly to exalt it as a moral virtue. If we must choose between tolerance and our sense of ascertainable truth in the world, our eyes should be open to the terms of that choice; if we must have a slogan, shall it be, Live and Let Live, or The Truth is Mighty and Shall Prevail? If, on the other hand, the field of tolerance is limited to cases in which we are indifferent or skeptical, much is to be gained in humility and sincerity by the frank avowal. We may cut the Gordian knot, and boldly accept the paradox. In any case, something is gained, if only that we have asked, What do we mean by tolerance?

THE NEO-PARNASSIANS

“… But I would implore them to abstain from wearing their knees out before the shrine of the ugly and grotesque when there is all the beauty of the world for the choosing.”—Sir Johnstone Forbes-Robertson.

Away back in the dark ages, when the kindergarten was still an experiment, a stern elderly person—doubtless a relic of the yet earlier age in which children addressed their mother as “Honoured Madam,” and never sat down in their father’s presence—a person of far-seeing but ruthless mind, would every now and then arise to predict that Froebel and his disciples, by making things too easy for the infant intelligence, would produce a spineless generation, with the mentality of rubber dolls. Changing the figure, with apparently an eye upon the dentist, this pessimist would point out that a pap-fed race could have occasion for, and therefore would develop, no teeth.

It is far from my purpose to venture, with presumptuous foot, into the happy fields of pedagogy: it is only that certain straws, gyrating in the intellectual zephyrs of the moment, have arrested an inquiring eye, and awakened a mental question as to how far the disaffected prophet may have been right. Is the multiplication-table set to music, and gayly sung rather than acquired with labor and sorrow in the dark watches of the study-hour after school, really responsible for a contemporary mental condition which seems to demand that even the simplest short story be expounded by the editor, in type which dwarfs the title, lest the readers’ brains grope vainly for its meaning? Have our early fumblings with strips of many-colored paper rendered us incapable of coping with even the most obvious canvas? Were those well-beloved blocks and cubes the true instigators of Csaky, Brancusi, Delaunay, and the rest—sculptors who last year set us gasping? Did “Birdie in the treetop” blaze the trail for the divers exponents of “interpretative dancing?” Most harrowing of all, have the “finger-plays” of babyhood, designed for the gradual awakening of the child’s consciousness to his five senses and his little ego, led up to the reverberating chaos of words which we are now called upon seriously to regard as poetry?

Let the responsibility rest where it may, we have been relentlessly herded and driven far by those who in this day and generation assume to mold our opinions for us. We have survived the onslaught of Cubism, Futurism, St. Vitism and what not, in art: is there anything in stone or bronze, or on canvas, that can now take us by surprise? We have outlived the shock, and can even derive pleasure from the spectacle, of our elders joyously cavorting between the tables when we ask them out to dine; other times, other manners. We have learned to listen unabashed and with the proper modicum of concern while Sweet-and-twenty, who has been to the “movies” and knows whereof she speaks, discourses between the soup and fish upon themes erstwhile supposed to be undiscussible, unless by physicians and students of sociology. We can even look without remonstrance upon our nearest and dearest attired only less frankly than Josephine when she essayed to convince the world of the superiority of her challenged charms to those of Madame Tallien. We have had hitherto one refuge when all this grew too much for us: we could exclaim, if we still had the hardihood to quote Tennyson, “I will bury myself in my books”—of course omitting the remainder of the line, which is “unsocial.” Now this stronghold also has been battered down. If we seek diversion in a story which is really a story, and not a tract—if we venture still to take pleasure in those who until to-day have been considered poets—we are upheld to the contumely of our fellows as “primitive,” “elementary,” and our beliefs are made a by-word and a hissing in the public prints. Ours not to reason why, ours not to make reply: we are expected to go for artistic and literary pabulum where we are sent—“forty feeding as one,” like Wordsworth’s cattle; and perhaps, to borrow once more from the Light Brigade, ours but to do and die, intellectually, may be the result.

Doubtless most of the “advanced investigators” (inspired circumlocution of M. Andre Salmon) in both art and literature are sincere; yet it seems an almost unavoidable conclusion that this epidemic which is upon us in many forms, all disagreeable and unnecessary, like any other epidemic, arises from a physiological condition akin to the tarantism which once swept southern Europe, giving the tarantella its name, and not to be cured even by the startling method of burying the victim up to the neck in earth. The mythic spider having bitten him, whirl he must, until he drop exhausted. Crueler than the earlier spider of whose bite noble Tom Thumb died, the ferocious arachnid of our day, like the Lycosa tarantula of the Middle Ages, is ravaging at will, and sparing no age, sex, or previous condition of activity. The “bite” may not prove fatal: but while the madness lasts, clarity of vision, calm and coherent utterance, are not to be expected. The dervish-like frenzy of literary and artistic production will of course eventually wear itself out; but until it does, those who by Heaven’s mercy have been spared the infection can only, with what patience the gods vouchsafe, stand out of the way and look on, deafened by the insistent remedial strains.

Even as heat-waves above the summer fields and sands cause fixed objects to shimmer and fluctuate before the eyes, sometimes creating actual mirage, so the extraordinary brain-waves of our day seem to influence human conduct and, necessarily, its reflex, achievement in art and letters. It is not that both subject and handling are so often grotesque or deplorable; it is not—though the spread of any epidemic is regrettable—that more and more worthy craftsmen fall victims, hypnotised by others’ gyral eccentricities, and by what a recent promulgator of the cult terms “the strident and colossal song.” It is that these, clamoring for their own prepossession, deny us ours!

“Dolly,” besought the heroine of Miss Broughton’s first novel, the novel which created a school of fiction, and which her unsuspecting father told her was unfit for her, a young woman, to read: “Dolly, am I so very ugly? Look!” Her sister, thus adjured, surveyed the appealing face. “I do not admire you,” she returned, calmly. “But that is no reason why some one should not!” Cannot the apostles of the tarantist persuasion, in its varying manifestations, show us an equal liberality? They do not admire what one of them has summed up as “the completely solved, tabulated, indexed problems of the past:” but may not others who do be permitted to enjoy them in peace, unobjurgated? Those who are labelled “early-Victorian,” “primitive,” “elementary,” are usually possessed of the ornament, no less out of date, of a meek and quiet spirit; and, if let alone, will continue on their unobtrusive way, neither assailing nor disparaging schools whose inspirations do not attract them. Why may they not be permitted to adhere to their ideals, unwhipt of neo-justice?—since the untrammelled tarantist proclaims with no hesitating voice his right to stand up, naked and unashamed, for his own!

There is one certain result of intellectual or any other sort of bullying; present forcibly enough to any man that he is merely a worm, and he is bound in the nature of things to “turn,” with what vigor he may—and as the late Sir William Gilbert well said, “Devil blame the worms!” Tell a man often enough, and contemptuously enough, that he doesn’t know what he is talking about, and his most cherished beliefs are only so much junk, and you inevitably goad him into nailing his colors to the mast. The holy martyrs need not have died for their convictions if they had not been badgered into, not merely holding, but flaunting them! Again, to fall back upon my Gilbert, “versifier” and master of “smart-aleckry” though it seems he was, as measured by a recent standard—

“I hate to preach, I hate to prate,

I’m no fanatic croaker;”

and I am driven to couch my lance and gallop into the lists chiefly by a modern form of challenge unrecognized of Chivalry: “My ladye is fairest because yours is foul and void of grace!” Your lady is fairest?—no man has a better right than you to think so, or to say so: but it is unknightly to attempt bolstering up her claims by a personal attack upon my ladye, whose charms I justifiably hold to be supreme. The glaive being down, there is nothing for it but the onset—and may the best man win!

In less archaic phrase, no man who knows his Milton and his Wordsworth can sit silent and be told that “when a perfect sonnet” (a perfect sonnet, remember!) “is duly whittled out, it is usually found to be worth about as much as a well-crocheted lambrequin”—whatever that may be. No man who has delighted in his Praed, his Ingoldsby, his Locker, Calverley, Lang, Austin Dobson, Owen Seaman and the rest, can see them all swept into the scrap-heap as “worn out—an exhibition of adroitness … for impressing a circus audience!” No man can hear with patience the undoubted fact that the blank verse of Shakspeare and Milton was “written quite without rhyme,” adduced, with an air of giving light to them that sit in darkness, by way of supporting a hurly-burly of words which has been well compared to “pumpkins rolling over a barn-floor.” That blank verse does not rhyme is too “elementary” to need discussion: and the Eocene minds which still read Shakspeare, Milton, and even Tennyson, are thoroughly aware that the construction of blank verse is governed by no less rigorous rules than the sonnet or the dainty old French forms which Austin Dobson and our own Bunner made exquisite in English. But the foe of rhyme is by no means limited to blank verse in support of his thesis: experiments in unrhymed metre are by no means new. Bulwer tamed the Latin verse-forms to eat out of his hand; Ossian and his collateral descendant, “Fiona Macleod,” made chamber music of the wild harp of the Gael; Aldrich, in his youth, went far toward establishing his fame with the Ballad of Baby Bell: Charles Henry Lüders, untimely dead a generation ago, achieved a gem in his brief dirge, The Four Winds. One may be a poet without ever having written a line in metre. It is doubtful whether Mrs. Meynell’s well-won reputation—a reputation which brought her, in a “popular ballot” for England’s laureateship, nearly six thousand votes, and a place second only to Rudyard Kipling—does not rest quite as much upon the poetic beauty of her essays as upon her verse. “The mighty engine of English prose” is always available for the writer with “a message;” Lincoln did not elect to “sing” his Gettysburg address, which no recent bard whom it has been my privilege to read has surpassed. If the bearer of the “message” have not the sense of music which produces that perfection of rhythm needing no grace of rhyme; if he object to rhyme “because,” according to a recent candid outburst, “it is so confoundedly hard to find!” the lyre and even the oaten pipe are not for him. Nothing is easier to compass, in either prose or metre, than the cryptic, the portentous; the bellow of the trombone, the thud of the big drum, will always cause some one to listen, at least long enough to find out what is causing the disturbance. But neither Vorticist, Polyrhythmicist, nor any other specialist in Parnassian wares, need flatter himself that lines of assorted lengths, huddled like jack-straws, make poetry. If any message be there, it is obscured and marred by its uncouth disguise; if there be no message, the “work” has even less excuse for being. I am far from denying the right of every one to express himself in whatever way he think fit: it is wholly his own affair, and it may be, like Benedick’s hypothetical lady’s hair, “of what color it please God.” But if it be neither verse nor honest prose—if it be cacophony for mere cacophony’s sake—he who takes in vain for it the name of poetry, does it little service.

One of the strange symptoms of the modern tarantism is this unrelenting hostility to beauty: in fashion not less than in art it is the ugly and the queer, in fiction and verse the pathological, the unpleasant, that seem to be assiduously striven for. The arts are sisters, children of one father; their aims are closely allied, and if one step down from her high estate, the others are likely soon to show the unfortunate influence of her example. Bad taste in sculpture affects us more disagreeably than bad taste in painting, because sculpture stands forth with us, in our own atmosphere, while the picture confines within its frame an atmosphere of its own; bad taste in dancing is worse in the drawing room than on the stage, being by so much nearer; and bad taste in literary expression is more distressing than any, because, after all, it is only music which has so intimate an appeal as the written word. Only music and the written word become a part of us, dwelling with us unsought, singing to us unurged, lingering with us in the silent hours when our mental sentinels or taskmasters are off guard, and if a graceless pretender, professing to be what he is not, intrude upon the starry company of the heaven-born, shall not the intrusion be resented?

What is poetry? There are many definitions with which few of us can quarrel; but one of the most direct, and at the same time most comprehensive, is that poetry is the expression, in terms of beauty, of what humanity feels—that beauty of thought, beauty of feeling, beauty of form, which implies truth, sympathy, clarity of vision, imagination, and the unerring sense of fitness which is good taste. And if this God-given beauty, twin-sister to music, be not inextricably woven, like a three-fold thread of gold, through and through the very fabric of the soul, it is never to be acquired—no mastery of prosody, of rules, of libraries full of the “best examples,” will avail. It is distinct from inspiration, which may be a single bolt from the blue: it is rather an attribute, to venture upon the methods of Sir Boyle Roche, of the voice of that inmost higher self which the late F. W. H. Myers called “the subliminal mind” and which Maeterlinck has termed “our unknown guest.” Let the man whose literary endeavor, well-intended though it be, is without this essence, call himself what he please: he is not, nor can he ever be, a poet.

Meanwhile, those who remain unbitten of the dread Lycosa may find peace in M. Andrè Salmon’s dictum that “critics encourage the most absurd, for the most absurd is necessary to art”—which may be stretched to include the art of letters—and anything that is really necessary may, by right effort, be endured. It is sufficiently clear that not on this side of the bridge of Al Sirat shall we and the Neo-Parnassians agree: but we can at least avoid each other like gentlemen.

HUMANISM AND DEMOCRACY

When our fathers formulated their program for democracy, and announced that its chief objective was to secure for the individual, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, contemporary records show that they generally believed that if these ends could be attained, a new golden age would be inaugurated among men, and that all the various ills would drop out of life. We have been disillusioned. Since the formulation of the Declaration of Independence we have learned the extreme antiquity of man upon the earth, and we have learned by what slow and tortuous paths the human family has zigzagged up to its present state of imperfection. To-day we do not hope that any form of government can assure us an immediate millennium, and we look with suspicion upon any prophet who promises an immediate utopia. Condemned as we are to look with straining eyes towards a distant land of promise, some remote perfection of our race, we are all the more jealous of our chance to do our bit in achieving that goal. The inalienable right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, has yielded place to the inalienable right to grow. Forms of government seem worthy to endure, in proportion as they minister to growth. We still cling to democracy, because it still seems to promise the largest chance for growth. It is a significant fact that along with the phrase “make the world safe for democracy,” there has sprung into existence the phrase “make democracy safe for the world,” as if to warn us that democracy like all forms of government, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, and that end is humanism.

In conceiving this paper, my patriotic purpose was to prove how humanism helps democracy, but all the way along I have been conscious of being guilty of an enormous hysteron proteron, for the real issue is not how humanism helps democracy, but how much democracy helps humanism. And what is humanism? Something too large to be defined in a single sentence or paragraph. It is a number of things. In the first place humanism is humaneness; not exactly, however, the kind of humaneness that the editor of the New Republic believes in. Perhaps you remember how a year ago a distinguished professor of Greek hung a metaphorical millstone about the neck of Mr. Abraham Flexner and cast him into the midst of the sea, because he had attempted to poison the well-springs of knowledge for a whole generation of young people. On the millstone was inscribed the indictment: “Mr. Flexner is not the first man who has had the courage of his insensibilities.” At this the editor of the New Republic declared that the distinguished professor had been very inhumane, and was therefore an unfit exponent of the humanities. One wonders with what gentle and humane words Minos and Aeacus and Rhadamanthus will speak to Mr. Flexner when he comes to judgment in that long line of those who, having done irreparable harm in this world, present as their only excuse the fact that they were sincere in their good intentions. Humanism is humaneness based where Socrates and Plato based it, on knowledge, understanding and intelligence.

Humanism is a conservation of the highest achievements of the human spirit. It gives substance to the seemingly paradoxical belief that for the rank and file of men, nine-tenths of the future lies in the past,—that certain giant men long dead, still have power to lead the race to heights that the majority of us but dimly see. To put it negatively, humanism represents the belief that a majority of each generation go to their graves without having entered upon their inheritance, without even having suspected that they had an inheritance, having lived not so much in their sins, as in ignorance of the glory that humanity has already attained.

A true humanism will include and properly appraise the mental achievements of its own age. The danger always is that the newer achievements will be seen out of all proportion, and overrated because of their nearness. To-day we are dazzled and blinded by the stupendous achievements of a new materialism, a materialism far subtler than that which sprung up a century ago. In the first half of the Nineteenth Century some men of repute were saying that “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile,” and “life is but the action of the sun’s rays upon carbon.” Against this gross and crass materialism Emerson arose as our champion, a prophet who had lighted his torch at the altar of Prometheus in the Academy of Plato. By the light of that torch men again began to see things in true proportion, and to-day we can say of those earlier materialists “their knowledge is the wisdom of yesterday.” But the new materialism is far subtler, boasting far greater achievements. Two years ago the headlines in the papers announced that a man in Washington had talked by wireless telephony with a man in Hawaii. We were filled with pride at this new demonstration of the power of the human mind to master the laws of the external universe. And yet after all, the question is not how far you talk, but what you say. Did the man in Washington say to the man in Hawaii anything so important as the messages which Plato sent by wireless across the centuries to Emerson? When we read the prayer which Plato put into the mouth of Socrates at the close of the Phædrus: “Give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be as one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a wise and temperate man can bear and carry,” we are ready to strive to prepare ourselves to be torch-bearers in the great race.

This is no small program that humanism undertakes:—to make a man thoroughly humane; to eradicate all the brutal instincts and all the cruel traits which two hundred thousand, perhaps two million years of savagery have implanted in his nature; to conserve for him and in him all the highest spiritual experiences of the race; to make him a worthy member of any celestial gathering however nobly conceived and constituted, this is a program requiring not merely the fifteen or twenty years usually allotted to formal education, but a lifetime, and perhaps a million years beyond. The million years beyond is too much for the practical man, and he holds up his hands in protest, declaring: “Such doctrine is too other-worldly for me. If you train the children to tune their harps for another world, who is going to kill the hogs, and dig the sewers, and mine the coal?” To such a question I would reply in the same tone: “You need not worry. There is a certain gentleman, a veritable colossus on the educational sky-line, who uses one foot to direct the schools at Gary, and the other foot to trample down an over-rampant idealism in New York City. He will see to it that the millennium is not ushered in too hastily.” In the last municipal election in the city of New York, we had a splendid example of Tammany’s political astuteness in temporarily aligning itself with the idealism of the proletariat on the east side. To the foreigner who comes to this country, America means one thing above all else, and that is the chance to emerge from the class in which he was born. The rebellion among the foreign population of New York against the Gary system, was not a rebellion against industrial education as such, but a rebellion against the idea that their children were to have industrial education and nothing more. Our practical man, even if he is unwilling to look forward a million years, must at any rate look back a million years. No one can hope to see our educational problem in its true perspective unless he is willing to take his stand at the entrance of a palæolithic cave, and look across the centuries at the toils of our race as it has attempted to differentiate the brutal from the human.

In every school house there are palæolithic children, neolithic children, bronze age children, iron age children, children of the golden age, children of a thousand different aptitudes and limitations. The mussed up condition of our educational program, the incoherent wrangling about educational theory, is largely due to our failure to keep this steadily in mind. Somehow we have not fully appreciated the fact that endowment is more than training, and we are still hoping that in some way we can perform the miracle and carry the neolithic child on our shoulders across the ten thousand, or possibly the fifty thousand, years that intervene between him and abstract thought. And because we have wished to do the greater miracle, we have failed to do the lesser one that makes for the slow but sure growth of the race. It is not strange that a cry has gone up for vocational training. It is strange, however, that we did not foresee this just demand, and meet it even before the demand was made. At the present moment there is danger that the interests of the more gifted child will be sacrificed to meet the need of the less gifted one, that our whole public school system will be Garyized, and that the proper foundation of our higher education will be impaired if not destroyed. In a neighboring state a year or two ago, the state superintendent of education sent out notes to the smaller high schools advising that courses in domestic science and agriculture be substituted for geometry and Virgil. It did not occur to him that he could establish a lower form of education without destroying a higher form. It did not occur to him that the state was rich enough to pay for both forms. Many years ago I lived near a rich stock-man who owned the finest herd of shorthorn cattle in the Middle West. He paid a man $2,000 a year to care for his cattle; he sent his children to a school where no teacher received more than five hundred dollars a year. I will not say that he cared four times as much for his cattle as for his children, but I will say that we have here the solution of our problem. If we would spend four times as much money on our elementary schools, vocational and industrial courses could be properly established, classes could be reduced from fifty to fifteen, the needs of each pupil could be carefully studied, the pupil of lesser gifts could be directed into industrial courses without humiliation, and the pupil of higher gifts would make his way normally and naturally to geometry and Virgil.

In one year of the war we are spending twenty billion dollars. The interest on this vast sum at four per cent. is eight hundred million dollars a year,—or just fifty millions more than we spent on all forms of education last year in the United States. We are willing to spend this amount of money to make the world safe for democracy. Are we willing to spend a similar sum to put real meaning and content into the word democracy? It is conceivable that during the war we may become so accustomed to giving and tax-paying that after the war we may be willing to make similar sacrifices that democracy may have a fair chance to bear its true and legitimate fruits. In the first year of the war Mr. Rockefeller has given to the Red Cross and other philanthropic causes $70,000,000. He has done this with immense satisfaction, and without serious inconvenience. It is to be hoped that during the war he and our twenty-two thousand other millionaires may become so accustomed to paying income taxes that it may degenerate into a habit, and that after the war, from this source our funds for education may be doubled or trebled. Mr. Rockefeller should be financing not merely Mr. Flexner’s experiment station in secondary education; he should be financing a hundred other secondary schools in an equally splendid way. But we can never hope to make our educational program really significant, merely by compelling the millionaires to pay their rightful share of the expense. We shall never succeed in this program, until we have become sufficiently interested in the matter to be willing to make sacrifices ourselves. It is with extreme regret that I am compelled to admit that the heart of this great problem is economic, and that the streets of the New Jerusalem we are striving to build, must be not metaphorically, but literally paved with gold.

If we can assume that after the war industrial education will be properly established and financed without diverting funds from the higher forms of education, if we can even assume that the funds available for the more humanistic training will be greatly increased, there still remain two potent forces in our educational world which seriously threaten to undermine and impair our democracy and the humanism which is its eventual goal. I refer to the corrupting influence of athletics in our high schools and colleges, and the attitude of the state towards the small college.

One can hardly “see life steadily and see it whole” without recognizing the fact that it is necessary to house a sound mind in a sound body; but after all, the supreme thing is the sound mind. If our school and college athletics had been willing to make this its chief objective, little or nothing could be said in arraignment of athletic contests. But the present athletic situation makes one ready to cry aloud that ancient indictment found in a fragment of the Autolycus of Euripides: “Of all the countless ills that prey on Hellas, there is none that can be compared with this tribe of athletes.”

Since athletics have been introduced into the public high schools of the Middle West, there is no question that a somewhat larger number of boys have continued in the high schools. There is also no question that there has been a very marked lowering of intellectual standards. And what is worse, our high school students and whole communities have been imbued with a false sense of proportion. To run half as fast as a greyhound, to jump one-fifth as far as a kangaroo, to kick one-tenth as hard as a Missouri mule, these are the principal things, these are the weightier matters of the law. These contests with the brute world, in which we are always defeated, have taken the place of the higher intellectual contests of humanism. The school superintendent or principal who can turn out a winning team, he is the man, the new patriot in our democracy. Let me illustrate. Three years ago in one of the small towns of Iowa, the superintendent of schools received a considerable increase in salary because he had turned out a basket ball team that had defeated all the teams in the neighboring high schools. The next fall four members of the winning team entered the State University of Iowa as freshmen. Before the end of the year they had all been sent home because they could not do their intellectual tasks.

But to turn to a second menace to humanism—the attitude of the state towards the small college, or perhaps it would be truer to say the attitude of the administrative officials of our state institutions towards the small college. A conversation which I had last summer with the dean of the college of liberal arts in one of our state universities, will illustrate what I mean. In this conversation the dean expressed the opinion that the great majority of small colleges in the Middle West would be reduced to junior colleges (i. e. their work would be limited to the freshman and sophomore years), or meet with entire extinction. He was even more specific in his prophecy, saying that five per cent. of the colleges of the type of College X would die or become junior colleges during the war (if the war lasted three years) because of the reduced income from tuition, and reduced financial assistance from private gifts. He made this prophecy with a smile, as one heralding a blessing. For the moment he forgot that a majority of the students in his graduate school came from colleges of the same class as College X, and he failed to foresee that if his prophecy were fulfilled, large sections of the state would be left in educational darkness. Now College X has had an honorable history of forty-five years. It has done much to make democracy safe for the world. It has sent out hundreds of graduates and ex-students fit to participate in self-government, and with some notion of what is meant by an international mind. At the present moment it counts among its alumni one hundred and forty-two who are engaged in teaching, including one university president who administers $18,000,000 for educational purposes, and twenty-five college professors in such institutions as Beloit, Drury, Dupauw, Lawrence, Grinnell. Many others of its alumni, on their way to law, medicine, theology, have served the state effectively as teachers. And yet the dean would brush aside this work with a smile, would allow this college and similar colleges to die or be reduced to junior colleges, without a word of protest, perhaps in the thought that his own college of liberal arts would minister adequately to the educational needs of the state. In that state at the present moment privately endowed institutions are caring for more than twenty thousand students, and are making an annual gift to the state of more than three million dollars. These institutions are well scattered, and reach localities untouched by the university. Higher education must be carried to the various communities. The number of young people that can be sent to college is increased fivefold, if those young people can be housed and boarded at home, and if there is no railroad fare to pay. To illustrate: the county in which the state university in question is located, sends seven hundred and eighty-nine students to the university, more than the total number sent by sixty-three counties in remote corners of the state. Out of five hundred degrees conferred by the university in one year, one-fifth go to students residing in the county in which the university is situated. It is obvious that the university is bringing higher education to one county, and failing to bring it to sixty-three counties. The work however is being done by the small colleges. But the dean was right when he intimated that many of these small colleges are fighting for their lives. Twenty-five years ago the professors in College X were receiving $1,500 a year,—a home missionary’s salary even in those days; but to-day they are still getting $1,500. Last year a deficit made a considerable inroad on the endowment fund. This year the deficit will be larger, because seventy of her advanced students have gone into the army. And the state stands by in indifference, watching an institution die that has served it well for forty-five years—an institution that it must replace at public expense, or leave a corner of the state in educational darkness. I think that the real hope of the dean was that such colleges might be reduced to junior colleges, and that the available funds might be spent in improving the instruction in the freshmen and sophomore years. But he could hardly say this, for last year the students in his own university were loudly protesting that they were being neglected, and that teaching had been sacrificed on the altar of research. But even if the dean could not say it, why is it not a reasonable suggestion? Why not cut off the last two years of the college course and improve the instruction in the earlier years? For the simple reason that the state is too rich to permit of any curtailment of the opportunity of intellectual growth for its young people. It is gratuitous assumption that the students who had done two years’ work in the small college would complete their work in the university. The small minority who are going into professional work would do this, but the large majority would end their training with the sophomore year, and democracy and humanism would suffer simultaneously an irremediable blow. Let us hope that the historians of later times will not be compelled to write: “In 1917 the Kaiser not only blew up the cathedrals in France, but he also helped to dynamite our American colleges.”

There is an old proverb to the effect that the streets of Jerusalem were kept clean by every man sweeping that part which lay before his own door. On one side of our domain runs the Lincoln Highway, on the other side the road which began before the altar of Prometheus in the groves of Academe. Both of these roads later converge in that straight and narrow path that leads unto life. It is our high function to keep these roads free and unobstructed—to walk a few parasangs with gifted young people; to fit them to be effective ambassadors of Truth, by persuading them to thumb a Latin lexicon until they have attained a reasonable precision of speech; to help them attain the refinement of diction that shall eventually result in a greater refinement of character; to teach them to appreciate the beauty of a Greek temple or of a fragment of Greek sculpture, furnishing them with a basis of æsthetic judgment, that will serve them well until they meet Plato’s archetypes face to face; to feed their imagination with the radiant buoyant life of Homer; to show them how Horace fashioned a livable life philosophy out of the aurea mediocritas of Aristotle; to initiate them into the Socratic doctrine that Knowledge is the mother of all the virtues; to crown them with a universal sympathy by interpreting with them the “Lachryma rerum” of Virgil. Can anyone conceive a life in which pleasure and duty are more inextricably intermingled?

This is the humanism that is the fairest fruit of democracy, and which in turn makes democracy possible. Two years ago I heard one of our most eminent political economists say in a public address that the chance of success for a democratic form of government was in direct proportion to the number of citizens who were capable of abstract thought. We do our abstract thinking in the main through the help of Greek and Latin derivatives. Let us not underestimate, and let us not permit anyone else to underestimate, the importance of our contribution to the success of democracy, when we train our students to a certain precision in the use of Greek and Latin derivatives, by long years of patient drill in careful translation. It is our privilege to help develop their latent powers of abstract thought by furnishing them with the tools with which they may do their thinking. This is the largest single contribution we can make to human life, the largest single offering we can lay on the altar of Truth.

Our success in holding ourselves and our students to this great task will be determined largely by the set of life values we carry into the class room, and by our ability to differentiate that which is important in Greek and Roman civilization from that which is negligible and unessential. I sometimes fear that we have forgotten that only the higher elements of any civilization are worthy to be transmitted to posterity, and that forgetting this we have permitted many of our courses to be denaturized, dehumanized, and Germanized.

In seven out of ten of the text-books of the classics edited for college use, the notes are written, not for freshmen and sophomores, but for those who have already attained or are going to attain the degree of doctor of philosophy, a degree that was first made in Germany. This blight of the doctor’s degree has invaded not only our courses in the classics, but every course in the university curriculum that can in any sense be called a humanistic course. It is high time that we form a solemn procession and make an offering on the altar of Robigo, god or goddess of the rust.

In the natural and physical sciences we do not resent or criticize futile experimentation. We are willing that that six hundred and five futile experiments may be made that the six hundred and sixth may be successful. We expect this work of experimentation to be more or less dehumanizing, in its drudgery, that in the end the fruit of the successful experiment may confer some blessing upon the human family. We do not protest against a doctor’s dissertation in science in which the results are wholly negative. But we do protest against a doctor’s dissertation in literature or history, which has compelled the doctor designatus to spend months of his time on some inconsequential subject, giving him a false perspective and a false sense of proportion that it will take him years to get rid of in his teaching.

Let it be understood that this protest against the doctor’s degree is not a protest against the length of time that is given to graduate studies in preparation for teaching. This should be increased rather than diminished. It is a protest against some of the objects to which years of graduate study have been devoted under the shadow of the doctor’s degree. It is “a place in the sun” that we are demanding. In using this phrase “a place in the sun,” I am not plagiarizing that one whom Henry Van Dyke has christened “the damned vulture of Potsdam,” but a far better man, Diogenes of Sinope, who once requested Alexander the Great to get out of his daylight and give him his place in the sun.

In conclusion let me cite an incident from the life of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. It is related that Zeno once asked the oracle what he ought to do to live in the most excellent way. The reply came back that he ought to become of the same complexion as the dead. Whereupon he immediately inferred that he ought to apply himself to reading the books of the ancients. This is the Zeno who promulgated the doctrines of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, who fashioned the molds in which the Roman Law and Roman Christianity were cast, who conceived of a world democracy in which friendship should be the guiding principle, and in which Greek and barbarian alike should have equal privileges and equal opportunities for growth.

THE MODERN MEDICINE MAN

Medicine, like other natural phenomena tends to the cyclic. Having passed safely through the drug period of evolution, both allopathic and homeopathic, into the no-drug state of so-called “preventive medicine” which has nothing to do with medicine as the word is commonly understood, this ancient mystery of the cure of bodies is now reunited to its equally ancient but long alienated mate the cure of souls, and this bewildered generation is confronted with the amazing spectacle of the lion of science and the lamb of religion lying down together. Whether the ultimate resting place of the lamb will be inside the lion is not yet disclosed to the anxious and inquiring mind. Again the priest and the physician are combined in one person, and we see before us the modern counterpart of the antique medicine man who exorcised the devils that possessed and tormented the soul and the body, and by sorcery and incantations treated impartially diseases of the spirit and of the flesh. Again the accepted cure for blindness is to “go and sin no more.”

It is especially that borderland where soul and body meet and fuse in what a recent treatise on the diseases of the nervous system calls “the psychic or symbolic system” that the modern medicine man takes as his province. In this No Man’s Land he is master of all he surveys, and his sextant comprises the universe in its angle.

We are prone to think of diseases of the mind as a specialty of modern life. But the briefest review of history would indicate that these symptoms of maladjustment to the environment have been evident from the earliest times. Adam and Eve are said to have developed “paranoiac delusions of persecution,” a kind of manie à deux, accompanied by hallucinations of vision described as “seeing snakes.” Their elder son was afflicted with a “homicidal mania,” while the younger was apparently a case of “constitutional inferiority.” Noah was a well recognized “alcoholic,” Job was subject to severe “depressions,” Nebuchadnezzar exhibited “praecox dilapidations of conduct” and Saul was a pronounced “manic-depressive.” The Bible contains many edifying and well worked-out case histories with prescriptions for the treatment of such difficulties. It was Isaiah who outlined the newer method when he said, on the highest authority, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”

It was perhaps through dwelling on his own race history and literature that the newest prophet in Israel, the famous, to some infamous, Viennese professor, Sigmund Freud, came to invent the latest prophylaxis for mental disorders, now widely known under the name of psychoanalysis, at present the best recognized specific for many mental disorders, and particularly for those orgies and “hang-overs” of the soul, the “manic-depressive psychosis.”

This is the chief of the new designations for one of the old diseases, the failing reserved for the especially refined and subtle mind, the form of complex developed most frequently in the most delicate psychological machinery. This psychosis is the protest of the winged spirit against the humdrum dead levels of the main-traveled roads, a near relation to the “hysteric” refuge of the æsthetic nature from the vulgarities of everyday life, the “præcox” preference for childhood’s happy hour, and the “paranoiac” escape from the banalities of a society composed too exclusively of well-meaning, friendly but unbearably tiresome folk. All these phenomena are but the outbreak of the higher nature, the reaction of the superman, that creature of light and air, to the dullness and dreariness of this underworld, in which the chrysalis drags out its drab and worm-like existence before the emergence of the butterfly.

In view, however, of the stubborn fact that the superman must continue to exist (unless indeed non-existence is the state preferred) in a world made up largely of subnormal, or even more deadly normal beings, the overbred and super-sensitive must seek some form of reconciliation to the fundamental absurdities that pass for real life, must even submit to something in the nature of a “cure” for the disease of superevolution, some esoteric bloodletting process as it were, in order to restrain the impulse to skip like a lamb in the sun on the hillside, and confine the gait to an anemic crawl along the narrow path of the commonplace.

Psychoanalysis appears to be the “indicated” treatment for these adjustment difficulties, and it is the purpose of this article to suggest to the as yet uninitiated some of the novel features in the mechanism of this psychotherapy, and to offer a few reflections thereon.

To assume the greater ease of the first person singular, I should perhaps say in passing, or by way of apology, that if I appear somewhat unduly and indecently personal in my observations on the new psychology, it is a habit fastened upon me by a half year of indulgence in an orgy of such voluble self discussion and analysis as I had previously fondly fancied to exist only in young ladies’ boarding schools. Figure to yourself, if you can, the inevitable result of conversing about your “soul,” and unburdening all its secrets and reserves in tri-weekly sessions with an inquisitive stranger! The process is a throw-back to those unsophisticated days when the Knight of La Mancha and a group of other romantics, met for the first time by accident in a country inn, whiled away the long evening in the unrestrained and interminable narrations of their lives and loves, complacently revealing to one anothers’ sympathetic and, one would imagine, sometimes startled gaze, the secret springs of their existence.

The psychoanalytic process begins, I may explain, with such a relating of one’s personal history, occupying many hours, and covering all that one has ever done, said or thought. One starts with reminiscences of the nursery and the kindergarten, and passes on to a detailed description of the coloring, height and contour of one’s first love. As this, in the case of a woman, is supposed to be her father, it is necessary to pause for some time on the aspects of the paternal figure, which affect all her subsequent emotional reactions, according to the well-known course of the so-called “Oedipus complex.” This is the imposing designation for the generally observed preference for each other of mothers and sons and of fathers and daughters, a phenomenon that the new psychologists, who take the common place with a seriousness! deem worthy of the most painstaking examination and erudite elucidation. “The root complex” and “the family romance” are other alluring titles for this parental-filial relation. This sentiment is supposed to modify all the so-called “affective” life. If father happens to be tall and thin and blond, then daughter, having a “fixation” on him, is, for all time to come, particularly susceptible to the attractions of tall, thin, blond men of advanced years. The analyst inquires minutely into the shades of complexion of all the patient’s inamorati in a manner that recalls the familiar “I see a dark man coming over deep water” of the tea-leaves in the tea-cup stage of one’s experience.

After the patient has sternly and heroically resisted the temptation to invent in the interest of her own self-respect, and also in mitigation of the ill-concealed contempt of the masculine practitioner for the paucity of her experience, a few more numerous and more romantic emotional episodes than have actually been doled out to her by a penurious fate, and has completed the short and simple annals of her poverty-stricken heart history, and after the incredulous inquisitor has become at last convinced that there is indeed nothing more to be told, this chapter is closed, and then begins the régime of dreams and “free association.”

The interpreting of one’s dreams seems to furnish the doctor with a secret source of amusement that he tries in vain to dissemble, and as one is only too glad to make up to him in some measure for the hours of obvious boredom that he has endured while listening to one’s apologia pro vita sua, one indulges him by forming the careful habit of grasping firmly by the tail every elusive dream as it tries to whisk around the corner of consciousness during one’s first waking moments, pulling it painfully and resistingly back for close and detailed scrutiny, and laboriously committing to memory and subsequently describing its every feature and function at the next matinée performance at which one makes an appearance.

The chastening discovery of the dreamer who relates his dreams to the professional interpreter is that all that has been carefully withheld from revelation in the related autobiography, is disclosed with the most embarrassing crudity, and that secret sins of which one was quite unconscious are displayed with mortifying clarity. The dream is a mechanism for letting the cat out of the bag, all kinds of strange cats, of the existence of which their harborer was often unaware.

Dreams seem to reveal the dreamer as a hypocritical, evasive, self-deluding coward, unable to face the commonest facts of life, or to call a spade anything less innocent than a parasol, or even to confront his own friends and acquaintances, except by forcing them to masquerade under some so-called “surrogate” form.

My previous personal experience had led me to identify a surrogate as some kind of judge, but I soon learned that this narrow and technical meaning must be replaced by the more general signification of “substitute,” though why the word substitute should not be considered good enough to use in this connection, I never learned. This is but one of the many examples of the perverse preference of the technicians of the new science for strange distortions of words with well recognized and frequently quite different meanings in common parlance. It comes as somewhat of a shock to the beginner to hear all emotion summarily classified as “sexual,” normal filial or parental affection designated as “incestuous,” friendship as “homosexual,” self-respect as “narcissistic” and the life force or will to power as “the libido.” Soon, however, one becomes as resigned to this strong language as to the evolutionary hypothesis, and finds it a no more unpalatable thought that all emotion is derived from sex than that all human beings are descended from an apelike ancestor. That this common use of the exaggerated statement leaves no adequate expression for the more intense emotions fails to disturb a cult that apparently regards all differences of feeling as of degree rather than of kind.

The narration of dreams puts slight work on the dreamer, and sorely taxes the mental resources and the ingenuity of the interpreter, but the real labor, the strenuous and unremitting toil to which the unhappy victim of this ritual is subjected by a pitiless practitioner is in the rigors of what goes by the disingenuous name of “free association.” This may sound like some pleasant if not spicy and highly unconventional pastime, but is in fact and literally a procrustean bed of torture. The helpless patient is forced to remove her bonnet and shawl and recline upon a couch with her eyes closed. Her merciless tormentor retires to a comfortable armchair in a corner of the room. There, because he is out of sight of the patient, he is supposed, according to the workings of the mysterious masculine psychology, to be entirely removed from her consciousness, so that she can concentrate her mind on nothingness, just as if she were alone by the fireside. Then he starts in with something like the following initiation of the third degree: “What are your associations with the word authority?” You are supposed to respond to this irrelevant inquiry with something like the following idiotic emanations, “Government—Washington—the President—Mrs. Wilson—orchids—grandfather’s greenhouse,” and if you are entirely resigned to making a fool of yourself, and can abandon yourself to the spirit of this child’s play, this is what you finally learn to do, after many strenuous efforts to play the game, and the final attainment of a reasonable self-stultification.