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Watson’s
Jeffersonian Magazine
Vol. IIIJANUARY, 1909No. 1

CONTENTS

Published Monthly by

THOS. E. WATSON

Temple Court Building, Atlanta, Ga.
$1.00 Per Year10 Cents Per Copy

WESTERN ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE:
Wm. E. Herman, 112 Dearborn St., Chicago, Ill.

CHICAGO SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE:
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Entered as second class matter December 21, 1906, at the Post Office at Atlanta, Ga.

SYDNEY LANIER

Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine

Vol. III   JANUARY, 1909   No. 1

EDITORIALS

An Estimate of Abraham Lincoln

(The Editor of a Northern magazine applied to me for an article on Abraham Lincoln.

After some hesitation, I decided to comply with the request. In doing so, my rule of SAYING WHAT I THINK was followed. Mr. Lincoln was “sized up”, just as I would try to measure the proportions of Cromwell, of Robert Bruce or of Gladstone, or any other historical character.

But the Northern editor was “afraid” my article would stir up “sectional feeling.” He, therefore, returned it with the polite letter which follows.

Whosoever reads this rejected Lincoln article, which the Jeffersonian Magazine now presents, will probably feel some surprise that so liberal an estimate of Mr. Lincoln was ruled out, as contraband, by a non-political Northern magazine.

It is proper for me to say that so much of the article as follows the paragraph in which the South’s feeling toward Mr. Lincoln is expressed, was written after the MS came back. Even with these additions, I fear that my Northern brother would have been afraid to publish my estimate of Lincoln.

“New York, November 21, 1908.

“The Hon. Thomas E. Watson,

“Dear Sir: We have read your estimate of Abraham Lincoln. We tried our best to figure out some way by which it could be shaped around in a manner that would be suitable for our magazine. You see, first of all, in dealing with Lincoln or any Civil War subject we cannot afford in any way to stir up sectional feeling. I am afraid your article is open to criticism in this respect. If you were only in New York, and we could go over this thing personally, I have no doubt but what we might frame up an article that would be mutually satisfactory. The time is so limited that I suppose we will just have to give it up. Yours very truly,

Editorial Department.”)

When the editor of —— Magazine applied to me for an article on Abraham Lincoln, my first inclination was to decline the commission. Although it is high time that some one should strike a note of sanity in the universal laudation of Mr. Lincoln, a Southern man is not, perhaps, the proper person to do it. On further consideration, however, it occurred to me that my position was radically different from that of any other public man in the South. People on the other side of Mason and Dixon’s line cannot be ignorant or oblivious of the fact that for the last twenty years I have waged warfare upon the Bourbonism of my own section and the narrowness of my own people. In every possible way I have appealed to them to rise above sectional prejudice and party bigotry. While I, myself, have suffered terribly during this long series of years, some good has followed my work. Twenty years ago, a white man in the South who openly professed himself a member of the Republican party was socially ostracised. Every one realizes how completely that state of things has been revolutionized,—we see it in the heavy Republican vote cast in Southern States in the recent election; we see it in the ovations given to Mr. Roosevelt and to Mr. Taft in the Southern cities.

My part in bringing about this change for the better is so well known in the North that no well informed man or woman will attribute to sectionalism anything in my estimate of Mr. Lincoln which may appear to be harsh or unjust.

Let us see to what extent the adulation of Mr. Lincoln has gone.

In Harper’s Weekly for November 7th, 1908, a British gentleman of the name of P. D. Ross offers to amend the high estimate which Colonel Harvey had already placed upon Mr. Lincoln by classing our martyred President as “The greatest man the world has produced.” Colonel Harvey soberly accepts the amendment,—thus Miss Ida Tarbell is left far behind, and Hay and Nicolay eclipsed.

One of the more recent biographers of Mr. Lincoln hotly denounced as untrue the statement that “He used to sit around and tell anecdotes like a traveling man.”

Do we not all remember how, as children, we were fascinated with the story of “The Scottish Chiefs”, by Miss Jane Porter? Did not the Sir William Wallace of that good lady’s romance appeal to us as a perfect hero, an ideal knight, exemplifying in himself the loftiest type of chivalry? Yet, when we grew to be older, we were not surprised to learn that Sir Walter Scott—certainly a good judge of such matters, and certainly a patriotic Scotchman—wrathfully and contemptuously found fault with Miss Porter because she had made “a fine gentleman” out of a great, rugged, national hero. Every well balanced American, North and South, ought to feel the same way toward those authors who take Abraham Lincoln into their hands, dress him up, tone him down, polish him and change him until he is no longer the same man.

The outpouring of Lincolnian eulogy which will greet the country in February will probably be all of a sort—indiscriminate praise—each orator and speaker straining and struggling to carry the high water mark of laudation higher than it has ever yet gone.

Let us study Mr. Lincoln with an earnest desire to find out what he was. Let it be remembered that the biography of him written by his law partner, Mr. Herndon, was that biography in which the best picture of him might have been expected. His law partner was his friend, personally and politically. It was that law partner who converted him to abolitionism. To the task of writing the biography of the deceased member of the firm, Mr. Herndon brought devotion to the memory of a man whom he had respected and loved; yet, being honest, he told the truth about Mr. Lincoln,—painting his portrait with the warts on. The fact that this record, written by a sorrowing friend, was destroyed, and a spurious, after-thought Herndon biography put in its place, must always be a fact worthy of serious consideration.

I can imagine one of the reasons for the suppression of Herndon’s original manuscript when I note, with amusement, the vigor and indignation with which a later biographer defends Mr. Lincoln from the terrible accusation of “sitting around and telling anecdotes to amuse a crowd.”

Those who take the least pains to ascertain the facts as to Mr. Lincoln’s story telling habits soon convince themselves that nothing said upon the subject could well be an exaggeration. In his day, the broadest, vulgarest anecdotes were current in the South and West, and thousands of public men, who ought to have been ashamed of themselves for doing so, made a practice of repeating these stories to juries in the court house, to crowds on the hustings, and to groups in the streets, stores and hotels.

Upon one occasion, while I was in conversation with Thomas H. Tibbles, a surviving personal acquaintance of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, I interrogated him eagerly as to both. Directing his attention to this matter of Mr. Lincoln’s alleged fondness for the relation of smutty stories, Mr. Tibbles very promptly replied that the very first time he ever saw Mr. Lincoln he was directed to his room in the hotel by a series of bursts of loud laughter. Mr. Tibbles’ curiosity was aroused by the continuous hilarity which resounded from this particular room and he went to it. There he found a great, long, raw-boned man seated in a chair with his big feet up on the table, telling smutty yarns to a circle of men who were exploding with laughter at the end of each story.

Every man must be judged by the standards of his time. People of elegance and refinement, according to the standards of the Elizabethan age, listened to comedies which were considered in good taste then, but which would not be tolerated in any decent community now. The manners of the West and of the rural South in Mr. Lincoln’s day, were quite different from what they are now. Even now, however, there are men who call themselves gentlemen, and women who think they are ladies, that make a specialty of cultivating a talent for the relation of doubtful stories. The fact that Mr. Lincoln let his gift of entertainment and his fondness for the humorous lead him down to the low plane of his audience does not by any means indicate a defect of heart or mind. As a lawyer and as a politician, it was a part of his business to cultivate popularity. He made friends in just such circles as that into which Mr. Tibbles walked. The men who laughed with Mr. Lincoln, enjoying the inimitable way in which he related anecdotes, naturally warmed to him, and they gave him verdicts and votes.

Mr. P. D. Ross, Editor of the Ottawa (Canada) National, claims that Mr. Lincoln was “The greatest man the world has produced”, and the editor of Harper’s Weekly soberly falls into line.

Well, there should be some standard by which one is enabled to measure a man’s greatness. Mr. Lincoln was a lawyer, a statesman, and a chief magistrate of a republic. In each of these capacities let us see what was his rank.

Does any one claim that he was the greatest lawyer that ever lived? Surely not. There is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Lincoln was a famous verdict getter. He could do about as much with a jury as any advocate in the West, but he certainly never won any court house victories that were more famous than those of Dan Voorhees, Emory Storrs, Bob Ingersoll, Matt Carpenter, Sargent Prentiss, Robert Toombs and of scores of other lawyers who could easily be named. In knowledge of the law, force of mental power of the judicial sort,—such as Chief Justice John Marshall and Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate had,—does anybody for a moment claim that Mr. Lincoln out-ranks all other lawyers? Surely not. He is not to be named in the same class as Reverdy Johnson, Jeremiah Black, or Senator Edmunds, Charles O’Connor,—to say nothing of Jeremiah Mason, of Massachusetts, and Luther Martin, of Maryland, William Pinckney, of the same State, and Edmund Randolph, of Virginia.

Mr. Lincoln served in Congress. Did he cut any figure there? None whatever. He appeared to be out of his element. His Congressional record is not to be compared to that of Thaddeus Stevens or Stephen A. Douglas. We look into the lives of such men as Benjamin Franklin, the elder Adams, of Thomas Jefferson, of Clay, Calhoun and Webster, of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, and there is no trouble in finding their foot-prints on the sands of time; but in the achievements of statesmanship where are the foot-prints of Mr. Lincoln? You will look into the statute-books in vain to find them. We have a great financial policy, born of the creative, forceful statesmanship of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay; we have a great protective system, owing its origin to the same two statesmen; we have a great homestead policy, which owes its birth to Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee; we have a great national policy of internal improvements, but Mr. Lincoln was not its father. Consequently, there is not a single national line of policy which owes its paternity to this statesman whom Mr. Ross classes as “The greatest man the world has produced.”

In the State of Illinois, compare Mr. Lincoln’s work with Mr. Jefferson’s work in the State of Virginia. Did Mr. Lincoln leave his impress any where upon the established order in Illinois? I have never heard of it. In Virginia, Jefferson found the church and state united, both taxing the people and dividing the spoils. Mr. Jefferson divorced the church from the state, confiscated the church’s ill-gotten wealth, devoting it to charitable and educational purposes; and put an end to legalized religious intolerance. In Virginia there was a land monopoly, perpetuated by entails and primogenitures. Mr. Jefferson made war upon it, broke it up, and thus overthrew the local aristocracy. He formulated a school system and established in America its first modern college. Can anything which Mr. Lincoln, the statesman, did in Illinois compare with Mr. Jefferson’s work in Virginia?

So far as national statesmanship is concerned, Mr. Lincoln is not to be classed with either of “The Great Trio”, nor with Mr. Jefferson, nor with Alexander Hamilton. Each of the five named were statesmen of the first order, possessing original, creative ability in that field of work. There is no evidence whatever that Mr. Lincoln possessed that talent.

It must be, then, as chief magistrate of the republic that he won the title of “great.” That, in fact, is the case. He was a great chief executive. As such, he deserves immortality. Because he sealed his work with his life-blood, his memory will always be sacred. But, is it absolutely certain that no other American would have succeeded in piloting the vessel of state through the storm of the Civil War? Is it quite certain that Stephen A. Douglas, himself, would not have succeeded where Mr. Lincoln succeeded? Who knows and can dogmatically say that Thaddeus Stevens or Oliver Morton, or Zach Chandler, or Ben Wade could not have done it? What was it that Mr. Lincoln did during the Civil War that was so much greater and grander than what might have been expected from Andrew Jackson in the same crisis? Somehow I fail to see it. He did not lose courage, but there were brave men before Agamemnon, and the world has never been lacking in heroic types that stand forth and meet emergencies.

In studying Mr. Lincoln’s course during the Civil War we can discover a great deal of patience, a great deal of tact, a great deal of diplomacy, a great deal of determination to win, a great deal of consecration to patriotic duty. He struck the right key-note when he said that he was fighting not to free the negroes but to preserve the Union. This insight into the situation which enabled him to take the strongest possible position showed political genius of a high order. This alone would entitle him to be classed as a great statesman, a great chief magistrate, a great national leader.

When we calmly reflect upon what he had to do, and the means which were at his command for doing it, we see nothing in the result that borders upon the miraculous. All the advantage was on his side. The fire-eaters of the South played into his hands beautifully. They were so very blind to what was necessary for their success that they even surrendered possession of Washington City, when they might just as well have held it and rushed their troops to it, thus making sure not only of Baltimore, but of the whole State of Maryland—to say nothing of the enormous moral advantage of holding possession of the capital of the nation. It was a clever strategy which, while talking peace, adopted those measures which compelled the Confederate authorities to fire upon the flag at Fort Sumter. But that most effective bit of strategy appears to have had its birth in the fertile brain of William H. Seward. The diplomacy which kept dangling before the eyes of the border states the promise to pay for the slaves until the necessity of duping the waverers had passed, was clever in its way; but there is no evidence that the fine Italian hand of Mr. Seward was not in this policy also.

After the battle of Bull Run, Congress passed a resolution declaring that the war was being waged for the sole purpose of preserving the Union, and that the Federal Government had no intention of interfering with slavery. This was subtle politics and it had the desired effect upon the doubtful Southern States; but there is no evidence that Mr. Lincoln was the first to suggest the resolution.

Was Mr. Lincoln sincere in making the beautiful and touching plea for peace, in his first inaugural? Unquestionably. Yet he would make no concessions, nor encourage any efforts at reconciliation. He opposed the Crittenden Compromise, which demanded no sacrifice of principle by the North and which surrendered much that had been claimed by the South. Of the 1,200,000 square miles of public domain, the Southern leaders offered to close 900,000 square miles to slavery, leaving it to the people of the remaining 300,000 square miles to decide for or against slavery when they came to frame their state constitutions. Democrats, North and South, favored this Compromise. The Republicans rejected it. Then, the last hope of peaceable settlement was gone.

Mr. Lincoln threw his influence as President-elect against the Peace Congress, and rejected the South’s offer to adjust the sectional differences by a restoration and extension of the old Missouri Compromise line.

The proclamation in which Mr. Lincoln assured the seceding states that slavery should not be disturbed provided the insurgents laid down their arms by the 1st of January, 1863, proves that Mr. Lincoln is not entitled to the very great credit that is given him for signing the Emancipation Act. Mr. Lincoln was never a rabid abolitionist, and was an eleventh hour man, at that; he bore none of the brunt of the pioneers’ fight; he could show no such scars as Wendell Phillips and Lloyd Garrison and Cassius M. Clay carried; he never ran the risk of becoming a martyr, like Lovejoy; he stood aside, a good Whig, until the abolition movement was sweeping his own section, and then he fell into line with it like a practical, sensible, adjustable politician. He himself joked about the manner in which Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade and Charles Sumner nagged at him from week to week, and month to month, because of his luke-warmness in the matter of emancipation. Of and concerning those three more rabid abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln told his somewhat celebrated anecdote of the little Sunday School boy and those “same three damn fellows, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.”

Not until it became a military necessity to do it, did Mr. Lincoln sign the Emancipation Act. Therefore, his hand having been forced by military policy rather than by the dictates of philanthropy, it does not seem just to class him with the crusaders of the abolition government.

If he meant what he said in his famous letter to Alexander H. Stephens, if he meant what he said even in his last inaugural,—to say nothing of the first,—it was never Lincoln’s intention to go farther than to combat the South in her efforts to extend slavery into the free states and territories.

In guiding the non-seceding states through the perils of civil strife, Mr. Lincoln’s position was never so difficult as was that of Mazarin, nor that of Richelieu; not so difficult as that of Cromwell; not so difficult as that of William the Silent, or William of Orange, and very much less difficult than that of the younger Pitt,-“the pilot that weathered the storm” of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Mr. Lincoln’s achievements as chief magistrate and as a statesman certainly do not outrank those of George Washington, nor even those of Cavour, to whom modern Italy owes her existence; nor of Bismarck, creator of the German Empire. Finally, it should be remembered that the South was combating the Spirit of the Age and the Conscience of Mankind. This fact lightened Mr. Lincoln’s task, immensely.

How do the people of the South feel toward Lincoln? Kindly. We honor his memory. We think that he was broad-minded, free from vindictiveness, free from sectionalism, free from class-hatred. We think he was a strong man, a sagacious man, and a very determined man. We have always regarded his assassination as the worst blow the South got after Appomattox. We think that he, alone, could have stemmed the torrent of sectional hatred, and could have worked out a simple plan of restoring the seceding states to the Union which would have reunited the family without that carnival of debauchery and crime known as the “Reconstruction period.”

We think that the man who made the appeal to the South which he made in his first inaugural, and the man who at Gettysburg, soon after the battle, praised the courage of the troops who made the effort to storm such heights as those, and who on the night of Lee’s surrender called upon the bands to play “Dixie,” was not a bitter partizan of the Thaddeus Stevens stripe, who, after the guns had been stacked and the flags furled, would have used all of the tremendous and irresistible power of the Federal Government to humiliate, outrage, despoil and drive to desperation a people who were already in the dust.

It is not true that Mr. Lincoln offered generous terms to the South at the Hampton Roads Conference. He did not say to the Confederate Commissioners, “Write the word ‘Union’ first and you may write whatever you please after that.”

It is not true that he offered payment for the slaves.

The official reports made to both Governments, as well as Mr. Stephens’ story of the celebrated Conference, conclusively prove that Mr. Lincoln demanded the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy as a preliminary to any discussion of terms.

In fact, at the close of the Conference of four hours, Mr. R. M. T. Hunter, one of the Confederate Commissioners, feelingly complained of the harshness and humiliation involved in the “unconditional surrender” demanded of the seceding states.

Mr. Lincoln declined to commit himself, officially, to the proposition that the South, by laying down her arms and submitting to the restoration of the national authority throughout her limits, could resume her former relations to the Government. Personally, he thought she could. He refused officially to commit himself on the subject of paying the slave-owners for their slaves. Personally, he was willing to be taxed for that purpose, and he believed that the Northern people held the same views. He knew of some who favored a Congressional appropriation of $400,000,000 for that purpose. But give any pledges? Oh, no. The Confederacy must first abolish itself,—then there would be a discussion of terms!

Fort Fisher, North Carolina, had recently fallen; the Confederacy was reeling under the shock of repeated disaster, the thin battle lines of the Gray were almost exhausted,—and Mr. Lincoln was now certain that secession was doomed.

In the “Recollections” of J. R. Gilmore, there is a curious account of an informal mission undertaken by himself and Col. J. F. Jaquess for the purpose of ending the war. According to Gilmore, he went to Washington, had an interview with Mr. Lincoln, and drew from him a statement of the terms which he was willing to offer the Confederate Government.

The gist of his several propositions was that the Confederacy should dissolve, the armies disband, the seceding states acknowledge national authority and come back into Congress with their representatives, that slavery should be abolished and that $500,000,000 be paid the South for the slaves. This was in June 1864.

Gilmore and Colonel Jaquess were given passage through the lines, went to Richmond and saw Mr. Davis. After listening to the unofficial proposals of the self-appointed envoys, Mr. Davis declared that the South was not struggling to maintain slavery, but to make good “our right to govern ourselves.”

As the terms offered took away this fundamental right from the South, Mr. Davis declined to treat.

How hopeless, at that time, must have seemed the cause for which Jefferson Davis stood! How eternally assured that of Mr. Lincoln! Yet, see how old Father Time works his miracles,—the Jefferson Davis principle has risen from the ashes, a very Phoenix of life immortal. The Lincoln position has been abandoned by the Party which made him its first President. The cause of Home Rule is stronger throughout the world than when the fugitive President of the broken Confederacy faced his official family, at its last Cabinet meeting, in the village of Washington, Georgia, and asked, despairingly, “Is it all over?”

The hateful Amendments, which struck so foul and cruel a blow at “our right to govern ourselves,” are now nothing more than monuments reared by political partisans to their own vindictive passions. The better element throughout the North would be glad to forget them. They have been distorted by the Federal Judiciary and have proven to be a curse to the whole country, in that they are the refuge of the corporations which plunder the people.

Republican leaders look on, acquiescent, while state after state that seceded from the Union puts into practice the principle for which the South fought in the Civil War,—the right to regulate our own domestic concerns.

A Republican President has made an Ex-Confederate soldier the official head of the military establishment of the United States; a Republican President has stood his ground against negro resentment upon the proposition that the South may disfranchise the negroes if she likes; a Republican President-elect manfully held the same position throughout a heated campaign in which niggerites and Bryanites assaulted both Taft and Roosevelt because of this pro-Southern attitude.

“We are fighting, not for slavery, but for the right to govern ourselves.” So said our President; so said our Statesmen; so said our soldiers; so said our civilians. And today we are vindicated.

The insanest war in history, as one studies it, is seen to have been fought for a principle which both sides now admit to have been right, and which Mr. Lincoln repeatedly and most earnestly declared was right, before a shot was fired.

Why Mr. Bryan Can Never Be President

In 1896, it cost the Republicans six million dollars to defeat Bryan; in 1900, it cost them four millions; in 1908, they “beat him to a frazzle” with less than two millions.

In 1896, every chance was in his favor; he was young, handsome, magnetic, eloquent, without a stain on his record. In the general enthusiasm aroused by his “crown-of-thorns, cross-of-gold” speech, people did not give heed to the craftiness and selfishness of the Bland delegate who used Bland’s name as a stalking horse to get the nomination for himself. For twenty years Richard P. Bland had labored for Bi-metallism. He had won the fight by sheer bulldog pluck. The Bland-Allison act of 1878 was a Bland triumph. The Sherman law of 1890 was a Bland victory, for Sherman himself said it must be passed to head off a free-coinage act. When the Congress of 1892 convened, the Bland forces had an overwhelming majority. Why then could we not make a law restoring the white metal to its constitutional place as the equal of gold? Because, in the contest for the Speakership, the Northern Congressmen got control of the Committees as an exchange for the office of Speaker.

But the tide of public feeling in favor of “Constitutional money” kept on rising, and there is no doubt whatever that a majority of our people in 1896, favored Bi-metallism. But Bryan, cunning and ambitious, used his opportunities as a Bland delegate to undermine Bland, and at the psychological moment treated Bland to what Garfield had treated Sherman.

What had Bryan done for Bi-metallism? Nothing. He did not even understand the true meaning of it. As for Bland, he had fought the battle of “Constitutional money” while Bryan was at school, and when, in the hour of Silver’s triumph, the hero of its struggle was cast aside by his ungrateful party, it broke the old man’s heart and he died.

When I think of the long series of years during which Mr. Bland was the unflinching, untiring leader of the forces of Bi-metallism, and when I think of the very substantial fruits of his labors, the manner in which Bryan and the Democratic party flung him aside—the old horse turned out to graze till he should drop—seems to me to be one of the most convincing illustrations of the fact that “politics is hell.”

Having captured the Democratic nomination, Bryan turned his attention to the Populists. They had proved that they could poll nearly two million votes. Bryan wanted them. Through Allen of Nebraska and Jones of Arkansas he laid his plans to get them. By as foul a trick as ever was played in American politics, the Populist Convention was inveigled into giving its Presidential nomination to Bryan. Having got what he sought, he broke the contract, turned a deaf ear to all appeals, underrated the measure of Mid-road Populist resentment, invaded “the enemy’s country,” cherished the delusion that he could win New England, hung on to the impossible Sewall, and so lost the Presidency.

It is a fact that the Republicans had no hope of success, after the action of the Populist Convention, until Bryan himself adopted the insane policy of making the race with two Vice-Presidential candidates swinging on to the ticket.

In that campaign, the whole money question was dwarfed to the discussion of “Free Silver.” The great issue of Constitutional, scientific Bi-metallism was shunted on to the spur track of Free Silver. In that campaign he lost the East and the North, irrevocably. Instead of making a strong, broad, easily understood plea for a restoration of the financial system of Jefferson, of Madison, of Monroe, of Jackson, of Benton, of Calhoun, he selected that detail of the money question which was of the least consequence, which was the most difficult to explain to the ordinary voter, and which,—on account of the selfish interests of the Silver Kings—lent itself most favorably to Republican assault.

This error was Bryan’s own folly, for the Greenbacker and the Populist had already demonstrated the advantage of treating the question in the broad, fundamental way. To this day, Mr. Bryan pays the penalty. To the business world, of every section of the Union, he is known as the “Free Silver” crank, and the business world is dead against him.

In 1900, the Spanish war had temporarily engulfed economic questions. Bryan was astute enough to feel this; consequently, he discovered a new Paramount Issue. It was Imperialism. But Bryan was not the man to derive any benefit from it, for the simple reason that he was as much responsible for it as the Republicans themselves. Tired of camp life at Tampa, Mr. Bryan hurried to Washington City, exerted his personal influence with certain Democratic Senators, and prevailed upon Senator Clay and others to vote with the Republicans to ratify the Treaty of Paris.

As our Imperialism grows out of this Treaty, Mr. Bryan’s political dishonesty in raising such an issue against the Republicans was so glaring that they had very much less trouble in defeating him in 1900 than they had had in 1896.

Then came the ugly affair of the Bennett will; of Bryan’s acceptance of gifts of money aggregating $12,000; of his efforts to secure, secretly, a legacy of $50,000; of his astonishing lack of delicacy in drawing up, in his home, a will for a doting old man who was Bryan’s guest; of his mercenary persistence in his struggle against Bennett’s widow; of his claim for a large fee as Executor of a will which he had drawn and which the courts had set aside.

Then came the revelation that while appearing to the public as the devoted, unselfish, patriotic champion of Free Silver, he had been in the pay of the Silvre Kings all the time. Then we could understand why he had narrowed the money question to that pitiful detail. Millionaire Silver Mine-owners, like Marcus Daly and William A. Clark, didn’t care a rap about Constitutional money. What they wanted was the personal profit to be gained by them in carrying fifty cents’ worth of the white metal to the U. S. Mints and having it turned into a dollar. Free Silver meant millions of dollars to these Silver Kings. Therefore they paid Bryan big prices to make speeches for Free Silver. And the Peerless orator stuck to his text. And when the Silver Kings discontinued the pay, Mr. Bryan discontinued the speeches.

Afterwards came the campaign against Parker’s nomination in 1904. Pretty much everything that could be said to prove that such a nomination would be a base betrayal of the Jeffersonian element of the Democratic party, Bryan said. In Chicago, notably, he hired a hall, collected the faithful around him, made an impassioned speech setting forth the shame of such a Ryan-Belmont candidacy as that of Parker, and said that a Democrat ought to be ready and willing to die rather than submit to such a surrender of principle as would be involved in the nomination of Parker.

Similar heroic declarations Mr. Bryan made against the Clevelandites, the Wall Street element of his party, the undemocratic advocates of the British gold standard which had chained the world to London. In his book, in his paper, in his speeches,—particularly at Birmingham,—he vowed that he would never support a gold standard candidate and that he would quit the Democrats if the party adopted a gold standard platform.

“Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?” That was the tone of Bryan’s indignant reply whenever he was asked whether he would follow his party if it deserted its principles.

Alas! The heroics sounded well—but where was the hero?

We admit that Bryan made a great fight against the Ryan-Belmont hirelings in the Democratic National Convention of 1904. His forensic powers are of a high order, and they were magnificently displayed in that debate. But he wasn’t true grit, wasn’t dead game,—did not prove himself a thoroughbred. No, he is not the kind of bird that dies in the cock-pit; he showed the “dominecker.”

Had he met Parker’s gold telegram with a defiant, “I accept the challenge! Let those who are true to Democratic principles follow me out of this Convention!” he would have smashed the Ryan-Belmont slate, forced Parker out of the lists, won the nomination for himself, and might have been President.

But he sunk the popular hero into the party hack,—let them put the harness on, hitch him up and drive him in a direction that his record, his vows and his convictions made it a disgrace for him to travel.

Then came the speeches in which he said as much in favor of Parker as he had said against him,—and Parker had not changed a bit. The change was there, and it was vast,—but it was in Bryan.

Then came the swing backwards to radicalism again. Bryan spoke at the Jefferson Day banquet in Chicago in 1906 and said that the time had come for the Democratic party to declare itself in favor of the Government Ownership of the railroads. He advanced the proposition that the states should own the local lines while Uncle Sam ran the trunk lines. This absurd plan was the burden of the Bryan talk and Bryan editorials for more than a year,—long enough for the whole country to realize what an impractical “statesman” he is. So ludicrous a “break” queered him still further with the men of the business world, and told heavily against him in the campaign of this year.

Then, after his home-coming speech in Madison Square Garden, he made his final declaration in favor of Government Ownership. Having toured Europe and witnessed the advantages of State-owned public utilities, his own convictions in favor of that system had been strengthened.

But Democratic editors and politicians raised a Bourbon outcry against Government Ownership, and Bryan, after shuffling about awhile, took to the woods.

Then he fell in love with the Initiative and Referendum. Mightily in favor of giving Direct Legislation to the people was Bryan. But again the Bourbons raised their hands in holy horror, and again Bryan flunked. “Willing to teach the children that the earth is flat, or that it is round, whichever a majority of the School Board prefer”;—that’s the kind of pedagogue partisan politics has made out of W. J. B.

Then we heard him endorse Roosevelt, and agree with the President that Congress ought to pay the campaign expenses of the two old twins,—Chang and Eng,—and that honest bankers should be punished for crimes they didn’t commit, and that the Government should not establish Postal savings banks but should perpetuate the National banks!

Then we saw him dictate the Denver platform which is more Hamiltonian than the Parker platform of 1904, and less favorable to the masses than the platform of Mr. Taft. We saw him choose a Standard Oil tool for the Chairmanship of his Finance Committee; we saw the Tobacco represented on the same Committee; we saw him courting David B. Hill, Judge Parker, Charles Murphy, Pat McCarren and “Fingy” Conners; we saw him yoke up with the liquor interests in Maine, Indiana and Ohio; we saw him change his whole political creed until Ryan, Belmont, Harriman and Rockefeller had nothing to fear from him, and we saw him conduct a campaign in which he stood for no distinct vital democratic principle, whatever. Then we saw him dodge when the President asked him, through the newspapers, how he stood on the Pearre bill which seeks to have Congress declare that a man’s business is not entitled to the same protection as his property. Impaled on that point, Bryan could do nothing but squirm.

Then indeed, he lost out with level-headed men of all parties.

II.

Burdened with the record of his own instability, Bryan this year lost, practically, everything excepting the South. True, he got Nevada (two electoral votes,) and Colorado (five votes,) and Nebraska, (eight votes,) but this state he carried by making a piteous, tearful personal appeal,—and even then he got only a plurality, not a majority, and ran far behind the Democratic State ticket; but the West has repudiated him, just as the South and East have done.

It would not be worth while to dwell upon the humiliation of that political serfdom which kept the South in the Bryan column.

The South voted for Bryan, and is glad he wasn’t elected. Everybody, who knows anything, knows that. The fact ought to be able to penetrate the conceit of Bryan himself.

But is the fact important? It is, for its first consequence will be the elimination of Bryan, and its second will be the restoration of the South to her historic position in the Republic. It is the beginning of Southern self-assertion; the end of her political nullity.

Never again can Mr. Bryan hope to secure the support of the South. His record makes it impossible for her delegates to acquiesce in his nomination.

This being so, the Bryanites of other sections will recognize the folly of nominating him—for without the Solid South no Democrat can hope to win the Presidency.

When Bryan adopted that policy of Africanizing the Democratic party, he drove nails into his political coffin. The facts were not aired by the Southern papers during the campaign, but Bryan will hear from them when he bobs up serenely and goes after a fourth nomination. Ever since the Civil War, the Democratic party in the South has claimed to be the white man’s party. Because it was feared that a division of the whites into two parties would result in giving to the negroes the balance of power, the Southern people have allowed the Democracy of other sections to legislate against our interests, to ignore our industrial existence, to rob our producers under forms of law, to foist upon us candidates not of our choosing, and platforms which we detested.

The Democrats of other sections were permitted to treat us as though we belonged to them, because we feared to divide into two competitive white parties,—feared Negro Domination.

For thirty years the South has been struggling to establish White Supremacy, and to diminish the political importance of the negro.

Yet in this campaign of 1908 we heard Bryan’s lieutenant, Henry Watterson, declare that the time had come for the Negroes to divide and thus increase their political importance. The whole Bryanite campaign was pitched to that key. “The time has come to increase the political importance of the negro!”

In other words, the Bryanites deserted the Democratic position on the negro question, and went over to the Thad Stevens-Sumner position, at the very time that the Republicans, led by Roosevelt and Taft, were coming over to the Southern view. We saw Bryan flirting with the negro leaders, and seeking to make a Democratic asset out of the resentment which they felt because of Roosevelt’s pro-Southern position on the matter of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We likewise saw Mr. Bryan witness with seeming approval, the parade of negro clubs on whose banners were displayed extracts from Foraker’s speeches denouncing the President for his dismissal from the army of the black brutes who on their way to Brownsville insolently declared “When we get there all the women will look alike to us, white, black and Mexican”; and who put a climax to a series of outrages and threats by shooting up the town—killing one man at his own gate, bringing down the Chief of police with a shattered arm, riddling hotel and private houses with bullets; and terrorizing men, women and children.

Yes, we saw Bryan receiving negro delegations who came to confer with him about the negro soldiers; we saw the colored delegations cordially met and hospitably entertained; and we heard them say, that they were perfectly satisfied with the assurances which Mr. Bryan had given them. They circulated, by the hundred thousand, a letter, bearing the names of the most prominent negroes of the land, in which the statement occurs that “We have been in communication with Mr. Bryan for weeks and have received satisfactory assurances from him” as to patronage, recognition, and the amendments.

Mr. Bryan must have been aware of the fact that this circular letter was being used in his behalf. It is highly probable that his Campaign Committee furnished the money which paid for the printing and the mailing of it; and there is no doubt that the negro speakers who went about asking for votes for Bryan, because of Brownsville and because of the Southern Disfranchisement laws, were paid by the Bryanite Committee.

It would have been a calamity to the country had the desperate tactics of the Bryanites met with success. The impression would have been made that the negro vote elected him, and there is no telling how far that would have influenced Mr. Bryan in his official dealings with the negro leaders.

We must remember that he earnestly supported the candidacy of a negro against a white man, in Nebraska. The negro got the office. It is said that no such thing had occurred in Nebraska before.

He educated his daughter and one of his sons at the Social Equality “University of Nebraska,” and another of his sons is a student there now. To this Social Equality College, Mr. Bryan annually donates two hundred and fifty dollars.

He has never uttered a word against the mixed schools of Nebraska wherein the negro children are educated on terms of Social Equality with the whites. He has never condemned the intermarriage of blacks and whites. There is no law against it in Nebraska, and miscegenation is common.

Born and reared in Illinois, Mr. Bryan holds the anti-Southern view of the race question. By birth, education and environment, he got the belief that Social Equality is right, and he practices what he believes when he sends his children to be educated along with the negroes.

How can the South, knowing these things as she now does, ever support Bryan again? To do so would be to reverse her position on that question which to her is the most important of all. During the heat of the campaign, Southern editors who knew of these things kept mum. It will not be so when Bryan seeks the fourth nomination.

In the next national convention of the Democratic party, the South will not be run over as the Bryanites ran over her at Denver.

If she demands the Vice-Presidency in 1912, it won’t go to the attorney of the Brewers’ Combine of Indiana. If Lincoln’s name should again be lugged into the Convention, it will again be honored, but when the name of Robert E. Lee is mentioned it will not be hooted and hissed. Democrats of the other sections may not be pleased by the attitude of Southern delegations, but we venture the prediction that no Haskell brass-bands will insult them by tauntingly playing, “Marching thro’ Georgia.”

III.

But it is not such a misfortune to Mr. Bryan that he will never be President. Several millions of very respectable men share that lot with him. He is rich,—the only man that ever got rich doing reform work. In Bryan’s case, indeed, there has been no reform work,—just floods of talk about it.

He has friends everywhere, has no personal enemies, is of sanguine temperament, is rounding out into a comfortable fatness, has no bad habits, no gentlemanly vices, and is so unconsciously self-righteous in all that he does that he fails to realize what bad taste he displays when he introduces his wife’s name into a public speech and sets forth at length her qualifications for the position of “First Lady in the land.”

Personally, we bear Mr. Bryan no ill will and wish him no harm, but it is our deliberate opinion that his inordinate ambition for office and his mistakes as a leader have done more immense injury to the cause of reform. He destroyed the Populist party, he has wrecked the Democratic party, he has driven thousands of Conservative men into the Republican ranks, and thousands of radical Democrats and Populists to the Socialists.

His career has been rich in substantial rewards to Mr. Bryan himself, but, on the whole, it has been the bane of Jeffersonian democracy.

Foreign Missions

The action of the South Georgia Conference of the Methodist Church in voting $65,000 to Foreign Missions, last week, moves the Jeffersonian to say another word upon that subject.

Some time ago, the New York World published a statement to the effect that, out of every ninety dollars contributed in this country to the Foreign Mission fund, only one dollar reached the heathen. This is a sweeping arraignment of the honesty and efficiency of the management of the funds which we are not prepared to indorse.

Our criticism follows a different line. The question raised by the Jeffersonian is this,—What moral right have American Christians to leave their own poor,—unfed, unclothed and unredeemed,—and to drain off into foreign lands millions upon millions of American dollars to feed and clothe and redeem the poor of those foreign lands?

It is a most serious question, Brother.

You tell us, as per formula, that we are commanded to carry the Gospel to all the world. Granted. But where are we commanded to leave our own poverty-stricken wretches to die like poisoned rats in their holes, while we relieve the physical distress of the Chinese?

What moral right have we to deny the beggar at our gate, and to heed the plaint of the Chinese beggar?

One of our private correspondents a little while ago, wrote us that a certain preacher, whose attention he called to our statements on this subject, declared that said statements “were misleading.”

Wherein? They could not mislead. If what we have said about our foreign missionaries furnishing food, clothing, medicine, fuel, etc., to foreign “converts” is the truth, our people are entitled to know it.

If our statements are false, we want to know it.

A very prominent and able Baptist minister,—who has long been a laborer in the Foreign Missions field,—and a well-known Methodist minister, who has been similarly engaged, are responsible for the statements made by the Jeffersonian.

One of these noble men said that the most discouraging thing about the Foreign Missions work was, that when the rations to the “converts” were cut off, the convert lost interest in the Christian faith.

What words could we employ that would arraign the system more severely?

The idea of the Jeffersonian is that each nation of the world should take care of its own poor. We are not responsible for pauperism, vice and crime in China. There is no more reason why we should be taxed for contributions to maintain a commissary in Pekin or Hong Kong than in Paris, Berlin or London. We leave to the French the task of providing for the Parisian poor; we don’t think of supplying food, raiment and medicine to Berlin paupers; and we consider it the duty of the English to provide for London outcasts. Why, then should we virtually coerce our American Christians into sending money to heathen lands for the purpose of relieving the physical distress of the heathen?

While penning this editorial, it occurred to us to glance at a New York exchange, for the purpose of noting some contemporaneous instance of starvation, or of suicide because of hunger and lack of employment. The newspapers of the North have been gruesomely full of many ghastly incidents of that kind.

Yes, there it was, page 3, of the N. Y. Evening Journal, of December 4th, 1908.

A white woman, sick and starving, and with a babe at her breast, fell exhausted on Fifth Avenue,—the home-street of the richest men the world has ever known. All of them are Christians. When prosecuted for their criminal methods of taking other people’s property away from them, they blandly perjure themselves, escape the feeble clutches of the law, turn up serenely at church, next Sunday, and contribute handsomely to Foreign Missions.

The woman who fell starving, on the street where these richest of men live, was named Mrs. Mary Schrumm. She was young, thinly dressed, and had not tasted food for two days. The child was nearly famished, almost frozen and had acute bronchitis. Her husband was out of work; an old woman with whom she had found shelter had been given notice to vacate; and Mrs. Schrumm had gone into the streets to seek refuge in some one of the charitable institutions. She had been turned away from each of these that she could reach. She had begged that her babe, at least, might be taken in. No; the babe was sick, and they could not take in a sick child!

God! And we talk about what the heathen need! The hardest-hearted heathen that Jehovah ever made are some of the seared hypocrites who call themselves Christians.

Denied everywhere, poor Mrs. Schrumm wandered about the streets, in the bitterly cold wind, until she fell, completely tired out.

Then, indeed, charity had to sit up and take notice. The starving woman was put into an ambulance, and carried to a hospital. She will probably recover; her child will probably die.

Then, what moral right have you to let such unfortunates as these fall starving in your streets, while you are sending hundreds of millions of dollars abroad to feed, clothe, physic and make fires for the hungry, “thinly clad,” sick and shivering Chinese?

Doesn’t your own “mother wit” tell you that Foreign Missions could not consume such vast sums of money, if the missionaries limited themselves to preaching the gospel!

Put on your think cap, son.

In the New York World of December 5, 1908, is reported the case of George Schulze who shot himself to death, in spite of the pleadings of his wife and children, because he was out of work, had tried in vain to secure employment and was in despair.

If these were not typical cases, we would not dwell upon them. But they are typical cases, and you know it.

Treasure Trove

The writer of the ballad which the Jeffersonian presents to its readers this month was Clara V. Dargan. She was born near Winnsboro, S. C., the daughter of Dr. K. S. Dargan, descendant of an old Virginia family of the highest standing. Her mother was a native Charlestonian of Huguenot blood, and from her the poetess inherited vivacity, social charm and a love for romance. The Dargan family was wealthy, but lost everything by the war. Miss Dargan published many poems and short prose stories in the periodicals of the time. In 1863, she was the literary editor of the “Edgefield Advertiser.”

One of her stories, “Philip, My Son,” was considered by so good an authority as Henry Timrod to be equal to any story published in “Blackwood’s.”

“Jean to Jamie” seems to us almost the perfection of a poem of that class. The pathos of it is so genuine, so unobtrusive and so deep that one feels, instinctively, that the lines of the poem ran from the heart of one who had suffered. Henry Timrod said of it, “The verse flows with the softness of a woman’s tears.” The poem, published in 1866, has long since been lost to current literature. Believing it to be a treasure that ought to be recovered, we reproduce it.

Jean to Jamie

What do you think now, Jamie, What do you think now? ’Tis many a long year since we parted; Do you still believe Jean honest-hearted— Do you think so now?

You did think so once, Jamie, In the blithe spring-time; “There’s never a star in the blue sky That’s half sae true as my Jamie,” quo’ I— Do you mind the time?

We were happy then, Jamie, Too happy, I fear; Sae we kissed farewell at the cottage door— I never hae seen you since at that door This many a year.

For they told you lies, Jamie; You believed them a’! You, who had promised to trust me true Before the whole world—what did you do? You believed them a’!

When they called you fause, Jamie, And argued it sair, I flashed wi’ anger—I kindled wi’ scorn, Less at you than at them; I was sae lorn, I couldna do mair.

After a bit while, Jamie,— After a while, I heard a’ the cruel words you had said— The cruel, hard words; sae I bowed my head— Na tear—na smile—

And you took your letters, Jamie, Gathered them a’, And burnt them one by one in the fire, And watched the bright blaze leaping higher— Burnt ringlet and a’!

Then back to the world, Jamie, Laughing went I; There ne’er was a merrier laugh than mine; What foot could outdance me—what eye outshine? “Puir fool!” laughed I.

But I’m weary of mirth, Jamie, ’Tis hollowness a’; And in these long years sin’ we were parted, I fear I’m growing aye colder-hearted Than you thought ava!

I hae many lovers, Jamie, But I dinna care; I canna abide a’ the nonsense they speak— Yet I’d go on my knees o’er Arran’s gray peak To see thee ance mair!

I long for you back, Jamie, But that canna be; I sit all alone by the ingle at e’en, And think o’ those sad words: “It might have been”— Yet never can be!

D’ye think o’ the past, Jamie? D’ye think o’ it now? ’Twad be a bit comfort to know that ye did— Oh, sair, would I greet to know that ye did, My dear, dear Jamie!

The Passing of Lucy and Rollo

Gentle reader, did you ever steep your mind in one of those Sunday School hooks which were in circulation previous to our Civil War? If not, ransack your grandmother’s garret until you find a specimen of that Arcadian literature.

The little boy in those blessed books never quarrelled, never had a fight, never had dirty hands, and would have been inexpressibly shocked had he made a conversational slip in grammar. He was an intolerable angel in breeches—was this little boy of the Sunday school book. He couldn’t “talk back,” nor handle slang, nor throw rocks, nor skin-the-cat, nor ride the billy-goat, nor tie things to a dog’s tail, nor put a pin in a chair for somebody to sit on. If the Bad Boy hit him in the stomach, he wept meekly, quoted a text, and went home to his mamma.

In common conversation, the language of this Good Boy was drawn from wells of English undefiled. Erasmus never used choicer words; and Chesterfield was not more perfect in manners, than was this detestable Good Boy.

Among youths of his own age, he was a miniature Socrates, washed and otherwise purified. Wisdom oozed from him in hateful streams. The sagacity of sages sat on him with uncanny ease.

When a grown man spoke to this Good Boy, the G. B. never replied until he had lifted his right hand and ejaculated “Oh, Sir!” After the salute and the “Oh, Sir,” came the response, which always did infinite credit to the manners, mind and heart of this outrageously Good Boy.

Life was an easy-going affair to the G. B. All things came his way. He was virtuous and he was happy. Nothing ever occurred to soil his clothes or tangle his hair. His nose never bled, he never bit his tongue, never struck his funny-bone, never mashed his thumb with the hammer, never had his drink to go the wrong way. He was never drowned while bathing in the pond, for the simple reason that he didn’t “go in” on the Sabbath. The Bad Boy “went in washing” on Sunday and was drowned, as a matter of course.

Daniel in the lion’s den was not safer amid the perils than was the Good Boy among the ills which are incident to boyhood. Past vicious bulls and snappish curs he walked serene and unharmed. Neither his gun, nor his pony ever kicked him; neither the wasp, nor the bee, nor the yellow-jacket ventured to sting him; nettles avoided his bare feet; no boil came to afflict his nose, nor stye to distort his eye. No limb of a tree ever broke under him, and gave him a nasty fall. He never tumbled into the creek, nor snagged his “pants,” nor sprained his ankle, nor cut his finger, nor bumped his head, nor walked against the edge of the door at night.

Nothing could happen to this insufferable Good Boy—nothing bad, I mean. His shoes never blistered his heels, his hat never blew away, he never lost his hand-kerchief, never had a stone-bruise, never missed his lessons, never soiled his book, never played truant, and never ate anything which caused him to clap both hands to a certain place in front while he doubled up and howled.

Oh, a pink of perfection was this odious boy of the ante-bellum Sunday School books.

And next to him in comprehensive unbearableness was the little girl who was the counterpart of this little boy.

Her name was Lucy. Or, perhaps, Marielle. Or, for the sake of variety, Lucretia.

And what a portentous proposition in pantalettes she was, to be sure!

“Rollo, Lucy and Mariette went Together.”

She talked just as exquisitely as did the Good Boy. Her selection of words was artistic, and her grammar immaculate. If William Pitt’s natural style was that of the “State Paper,” the colloquial standard of Lucy, Lucretia and Marielle was that of Madame de Stael.

She walked with primness; if she ran at all, it was with dignity; she did not giggle, did not romp, never made a mud pie, never pinched the Good Boy, and was such a formidable little thing, generally, that even the Bad Boy never snatched her bonnet. Such a thought as that of stealing a kiss from her never entered the head of any boy, good, bad or indifferent.

This unearthly girl always seemed an impossibility to me, after I became a grown-up, until I chanced to read about the daughter of John Adams, second President of these United States. Mr. Adams married a stately woman whose name was Abigail. What else could you expect, if not that a girl born to John Adams and his wife, Abigail, would be a tremendous little girl from the very start? Her parents named her Abigail,—as an additional guarantee against chewing gum, coca-cola, slang, and tomboyishness.

ABIGAIL ADAMS

At the age of eighteen, we find Miss Abigail Adams writing about her father as though he were some Sphinx or Pyramid that she had been viewing. Please go slow, as you read what this young lady says of her own papa:

“I discover a thousand traits of softness, delicacy and sensibility in this excellent man’s character. How amiable, how respectable, how worthy of every token of my attention has this conduct rendered a parent, a father, to whom we feel due even a resignation of our opinions.”

Did you ever? Just try to put yourself at the view-point of a girl who could calmly sit down and analyze her father, as a naturalist would disjoint a rare beetle. Think of a daughter referring to her father as “this excellent man,” and classing him “respectable”! Think of a daughter dutifully conceding, in writing, that her dad is “worthy of my attention” and “even a resignation of our opinions.”

And, after all, she jumped from the sublime to the ridiculous by marrying a man named Smith!

But she has restored my confidence in the girl of the Sunday school book. Lucy did appear on this planet in the flesh; and when she talked and wrote her style was that of little Abigail Adams. Marielle was not an impossibility, nor was Lucretia. Even that obnoxious Good Boy was true to life—if John Adams’ description of his son John Quincy is not too highly colored by paternal pride. After reading said paternal description I can understand how it was that, while Henry Clay made friends out of those whom he refused, John Quincy Adams made enemies by his manner in granting favors.

But no matter how many Lucys and Rollos existed prior to our War between the States, it would be mighty hard to find a Lucy or a Rollo now. Times have changed, manners have changed, types have changed. What is responsible for the bold-eyed girl—the girl of loose speech and loud manners? What is responsible for the irreverent boy—the boy of the cigarette and of the look which undresses every handsome woman that he meets? These are the boys that greet girls with a “Hello!” and a leer that should offend. These are the girls who shout “Hello!” to the boys, and who lie prone by the side of young men during a “straw-ride” at night. Are all such maidens the daughters of mothers who drink and gamble? Are all such youths the sons of men who have no morals? By no means. Our whole social and industrial situation has changed, and the people have changed with it.

Would that I could believe that our Public System is guiltless in this matter. Use your eyes as you pass a crowded academy and note the conditions which make against common decency—to say nothing of that deference and respect with which every properly trained boy should treat members of the other sex.

But there are causes deeper, more universal than the promiscuous mix-up in the Public Schools. The centripetal power of class legislation is drawing capital inward to the small centre of the Privileged. To the masses is left a constantly smaller proportion of the nation’s annual production of wealth. In turn, this law-made and abnormal condition of things over-crowds the cities. In fact, rural life has become so unattractive that the trend of population is from the farm to the town. Every village has its surplus—the men and boys, white and black, who have no visible means of support and who can not be persuaded to work. In every town is the girl who hardly knows why she’s there,—but she’s there.

“‘Oh! Look,’ cried Lucy.”

And the pace-that-kills in the Chicagos and New Yorks is faithfully represented, on a small scale, in each of our towns. Don’t all of us know it? We do. But what is the remedy?

The temperance people believe that whiskey is at the bottom of the trouble. The church people believe that irreligion is the source of the evil. The school teacher believes that education will save the day.

But can not the student of human affairs see that the demoralization incident to four years of civil strife shook our entire social system like an earthquake? Did not the Spanish war light up,—luridly, vividly, horribly,—the almost universal corruption which had seized upon the body politic?

“Eat, drink and be merry—tomorrow we die.” When a nation rings with that cry, it is close to the whirlpool. “Let us have a good time!” The man drinks and makes much of his food; the woman drinks and thinks a deal about her eating; the boy drinks and knows the good dishes; the girl drinks and daintily scans the menu. “Hello!” shouts the dashing boy; “Hello!” answers the dashing girl, and off they hurry to some place where talk, songs, pictures and conduct are “up-to-date,”—and in many and many a case the Hello couple are reeling hellward by midnight.

Don’t we know that our statute-book is the Iliad of our woes?

The few are wickedly rich while the many are helplessly poor, because the laws have been made for the purpose of bringing about that very state of affairs. There is a fierce struggle for existence which waxes more desperate every year. Men fight each other for a job, with a ferocity like that of starving dogs fighting over a bone. Girls are forced into positions where delicacy of feeling is trampled out and where it requires heroic courage to resist the tempters who are ever on her trail to pull her down.

Who does not know that the ten million dollars which one of our religious denominations recently sent abroad for Foreign Missions would be better employed if it were devoted to the breaking up of our hideous marketing of white women to lewd houses? Who does not feel that the hundreds of millions which our Government has spent in the Philippines had better have been left in the pockets of the taxpayers here at home? Who does not know that we ought to tremble for our future when we see how our law-makers have been the willing tools of those who ruin the millions of men and women, girls and boys, in order that a few hundreds of ravenous rascals like Rockefeller and Carnegie and Havemeyer and Ryan and Vanderbilt and Gould and Harriman shall each be richer than any king ever was?

Most of us do know it. Some of us have long been trying to arouse the patient, victimized millions to a sense of their own wrongs. But it is an uphill work. Some despair, some scoff, some are callous, some won’t listen, some are timid, some are interested in keeping things as they are, some think it is God’s will that a favored few should reach the Paradise of unlimited riches while the unfavored multitudes sink into a hell of eternal wretchedness.

The lotus-eater’s plaint of “Let us alone” is to me as fearful as that reckless, creedless, madly selfish cry “Let us eat, drink and be merry: tomorrow we die.”

Jay Gould contemptuously dismissed the suggestion that, some day, the American people might rise in arms against its swinish plutocracy. Said Jason, the cynical,

“I could hire one-half of the people to shoot the other half.”

The man who said that was not more contemptuous of us than are the plutocrats who rule and rob us now. But perhaps what he said is the truth. They manage to keep us divided, about half and half, in the bloodless battle of ballots; perhaps, if it came to shooting they could divide us the same way.

“He Certainly Was Good To Me.”

New York American

A Survey of the World

By Tom Dolan

Congress Reassembles—The President’s Message

The attention of the sixty-first Congress was naturally given first to the President’s annual document, which this year lost none of its usual length. In its entirety it is a plea for centralization of governmental authority in “the administration,” alleging that the nation cannot be “in peril from any man who derives authority from the people and who is from time to time compelled to give an account of its exercise to the people.” Mr. Roosevelt should know, and does know, however, that under our present manner of electing executives “the people” are as a mass too indifferent, or too ignorant, to demand such an accounting and until election by popular vote is incorporated as a principle of proceeding, he is virtually suggesting a monarchy, upheld by a special caste consisting of the holders of Federal office and the recipients of Administrative favor.

For the control of the trusts, he offers nothing new—nothing that he has not already woven into the fabric of “my policies.” He denounces the Sherman law, and believes in regulation and control by strong central authority.

On the question of the currency, he was pathetically weak and eagerly willing to leave it to his monetary commission to “propose a thoroughly good system which will do away with the existing defects,” and very guardedly admits that there was a “monetary disturbance in the fall of 1907 which immensely increased the difficulty of ordinary relief.”

On the labor question—a matter upon which Hamiltonians may much more safely grow expansive than those of finance—Mr. Roosevelt declared against child labor, for diminution of work on the part of women, and a general shortening of the hours of labor and for an inheritance tax that would help to equalize the burden of taxation which now falls so heavily upon those least able to bear it. He commended highly the intelligence of the labor vote, which refused to be “swung” as a unit for any candidate and took occasion to pay his respects to Mr. Taft as an ideal Judge. On protection to workingmen, Mr. Roosevelt displayed a sympathetic attitude which does him much credit. “When a workman is injured, he needs not an expensive and dreadful lawsuit, but the certainty of relief through immediate administrative action. No academic theory about ‘freedom of contract’ should be permitted to interfere with this movement.” He urged Congress to pass without delay an Employers’ Liability Law, which should serve as a model, covering the District of Columbia.

Among the old issues to which Mr. Roosevelt adverted were recommendations pertaining to the preservation of forests and the encouragement of industrial education. The Philippine policy is to continue and independence is promised so indefinitely that it is apparent that no voluntary, relinquishment is ever intended. Both the Parcels Post and Postal Savings Banks were favored, the former being strongly urged.

Washington, D. C. Herald

Results—not the sinking of money for no adequate return—was stressed as to inland waterways. Considerations in reference to public health came in for a word, and the Pure Food Law was lauded in superlative terms. The President advocated increased appropriations for educational departments and for increasing the “now totally inadequate pay of our judges.”

Mr. Roosevelt advises abandonment of the idea of combining New Mexico and Arizona into one State, and suggests that they each be given independent Statehood.

He averred that the nation’s foreign policy is “based on the theory that right must be done between nations as between individuals.” This is a specimen of “speaking softly.” The “Big Stick” follows almost immediately in the almost frantic state of mind he seems to be in concerning the needs for a great army and navy. Even the small boys ought to be trained in rifle practice! If he had added the hope that small girls would be taught to mould bullets and scrape lint, he would have been patriotically sublime!

That portion of his message which demands that members of legislative branch of the government be prosecuted as are those in the executive, and his sneer at Congress as being afraid of the Secret Service has created intense excitement in both houses and the language used in the message may be totally expunged from the records. Both Democrats and Republicans concur in the disposition to ignore matters of party and act in this matter, casting a stigma upon them all, as a whole.

Mr. Roosevelt’s bold assertion that the Panama Canal is a model for all work of that kind will meet many challengers. Philippe Bunau-Varilla, formerly Panama minister to the United States, has just issued a statement declaring that the Canal will cost $280,000,000 and that the plan now being carried out, owing to the dangers from the Gatun Dam, (which has already shown itself unreliable) “will result almost surely in the greatest disaster in the history of public undertakings.”

The President’s message, altogether, is like the President himself: commendable in some respects, partisan to a degree and strong in language rather than logic.

Reforming the House of Lords

Someone has said that every twentieth Englishman is a genius and the balance dolts, or something of that tenor. The Special committee of the House of Lords, in its report recommending a radical change in that body, seems actuated by a desire to retain as many of the twentieth type as possible and eliminate the rest.

At present, this august body contains 618 members, consisting of the royal princes, the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, two dozen minor bishops, the English peers and those Scotch and Irish peers who have been elected by their fellows to represent the nobility of these respective countries.

The committee each of the colonies send elective peers; that the 24 bishops elect one-third of their number to the Lords at each Parliament. The Archbishops are to remain permanent features and about 130 hereditary peers are to be retained, including such as have held the position of Cabinet minister, or of Governor-General of Canada, or Viceroy of India or have enjoyed high positions in the army or navy; and all who have served for twenty years in the House of Commons. Five judges are to be added as “law lords” and of the remaining number 200 are to be elected as representative peers.

By this selective, as well as elective, method, the fittest in brains, skill and ability would survive. It is equally probable, however, that, so far as broad, progressive policies are concerned, a House of Lords so made up would be even a greater handicap to the popular will than as it stands today. The average Lord now accepts his seat therein with that nonchalance which characterizes his attitude toward those other favors of fortune which are his by birth. He feels no added pride and seldom any real obligation to interest himself in measures that come before the House. While he is an obstructionist, it is after a rather passive fashion. To change this so as to make a seat in the galaxy of Lords a prize to be contested for, while limiting the eligibles to the race in the arbitrary manner proposed, would inevitably mean a powerful governing body, supersaturated with class-consciousness and hyper-sensitive to the faintest breath against its own aristocratic dominance. The reactionaries would entrench themselves by electing the most brilliant men of their own views. The lonely members from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa would have slight influence in shaping the destiny of the Empire as a whole and none as to England’s domestic affairs. To public opinion, then, as now, the House of Lords would be almost impervious. How, indeed, can any set of men taught to regard themselves, from infancy, as superior beings, be affected by the ideas of the plebeians? They have always assumed their class to be the natural governor and guardian of the hoi polloi. If the H. P. doesn’t thrive, it’s not the fault of the nobility.

It is no wonder that the House of Lords itself should be shamed over the survival of a caste system which permits even an idiot, born to the purple, to share the honors and responsibilities of membership in the highest assembly of their government, but even those apologists who maintain that the Britisher of rank feels obligations to humanity as does no other public man must take fright at the proposed concentration of power the new plan would insure. Certes, after many years of thwarted hopes for bettering of general conditions, the patient English people could only rise, in holy wrath, and abolish the House of Lords altogether. And, as a real and permanent reform measure, why don’t they do it now?

The German Incident Closed

“The toot of the Teuton is tootin’ no more, All sober sits Berlin, beside the wild Spree;”

The words of this classic were never more apropos. The ebullition of German indignation over their Kaiser’s indiscreet interview, published in the London Daily Telegraph recently, the salient features of which were summarized in the December Jeffersonian, has subsided and the hard words, as proverbial, have “broken no bones.” That something drastic should be done to prevent such outbreaks in future, as well as to reprimand the “Great War Lord” for the unfortunate garrulity, was the generally held, resentful opinion; but doing it, was another matter, unless the mincing of words between the Emperor and his Imperial Chancellor could so be construed. After their meeting for the purpose of discussing the matter, Von Bulow announced to the Reichstag that he was convinced the Kaiser would hereafter “observe that reserve, even in private conversations, which is equally indispensable in the interest of a uniform policy, and for the authority of the Crown.” This assurance was further bolstered by an official publication that Emperor William “approved this statement” and “gave Prince Bulow the assurance of his continued confidence.” This pacification the Reichstag was apparently glad to accept, in lieu of a constitutional guarantee of a check upon the Kaiser. During the national hysteria, when all were alike guilty of lese-majeste, it was safe to join the popular clamor. In his official capacity, no member of the Reichstag seemed bold enough to attempt to storm the fortress of “Divine Right.” It would have required a now impossible unification of opposing forces in that body, under leadership fearless of the consequences to self, to have magnified the disturbance into a real revolution in the German government. So, on all sides, there was a refluencing tide of displeasure—but the water-mark will remain for many a day to show that patience has its limits even in a people of almost unexampled docility. And, after having enjoyed a very carnival of free speech, they will never again submit to the gagging which has heretofore obtained.

Whether the Kaiser feels the humiliation accredited to him or not, is rather doubtful. At any rate, he viewed the storm with superb outward indifference, causing it to be understood, while he was enjoying himself on a hunting trip with the heir to the Austrian throne, that he was “heedless of the exaggerations of public criticism which he regarded as incorrect.” He is still The State—chance confidences with interviewers notwithstanding. But his subjects may not be quite so passive as before.

Freight Rates Increase

Events in China

One of the strangest, strongest characters in history passed from the stage when the Dowager Empress of China, best known to us as Tsi An, yielded to Death—her only conqueror—some time in November last. Born a slave, the story of how her wit, beauty, determination and utter unscrupulousness placed an empire boasting at least 400,000,000 subjects at her feet, is well known. For fifty years she reigned an absolute despot, while other nations rose and fell, maps were changed, the tide of Occidental civilization began to beat down the ancient barriers of her realm. Knowing that the summons had come to her, did she yet stretch out her still powerful hand and remove the weakling Emperor, whose demise preceded her own by so short a time? A physical wreck—a virtual prisoner and perhaps the victim of some brain stupefying drug, there were still dangers to be feared to the dynasty she so long upheld, and all her record shows she would not have hesitated at any step necessary to preserve the reign of the Manchus and repel the efforts which reformers might make, through Tsai-ti’ien, to hasten forward a foreign type of government. Much evil is said of the Dowager Empress—and much evil perhaps she did, according to some standards; yet she selected her ministers with some wisdom and can scarcely be censured for refusing to let herself and the Chinese masses—both intensely conservative—be harried into “reforms” for which they were unprepared. The national and racial pride of such highly informed Chinese as had received not only the education appropriate to their class at home, but who had enjoyed foreign advantages, is in nowise typical—and it must be remembered that Tsi An was dealing with “teeming millions” indeed. She was not stubbornly unprogressive, as various Imperial edicts issued within the past decade demonstrated. Indeed, it was not long since that one assurance was given that a Constitution would be granted within nine years.

Prince Chun—named recently as regent, will link the ideas and methods of the ancient Pure Dynasty with those which must prevail long ere little Pu Yi, his baby Emperor, who toddled into the Manchu succession the other day, can take the reins of government for himself. The people have accepted the tiny monarch designed to continue the present dynasty with no ill will. Chinese discontent has been constant for lo! these centuries, for the Manchus are a foreign Mongol race, but the almost simultaneous deaths of the nominal ruler and his iron-willed aunt, and the installation of a three-year-old as puppet king, made comparatively slight impression. Indeed, it is not likely that all China knows even yet that there has been any change, so slowly does news travel in some parts thereof. Under such torpid conditions, there may be uprisings against Viceroys in certain provinces, but anything like a general revolution will not in many years threaten the peace of the empire. The emancipation of China will come through enlightened rulers; or be deferred by intrigue within the Court. Three uprisings have taken place against the Manchu rule, but they were all before foreign interests and influence had intervened to give the yellow race a common cause against white aggression and patriotic Chinamen and Manchus will prefer a government by all the people rather than a mere change in the throne. Unless signs speedily fail, no real “crisis” is imminent.

“THE DONKEY IS A PATIENT ANIMAL.”—W. J. Bryan.

New York World

The Japanese Alliance and Elihu Root

“The people of the United States hold for Japan a peculiar feeling of regard and friendship” wrote Theodore Roosevelt after the visit to himself and Elihu Root of Baron Kogoro Takahira, Japanese Ambassador, last September. After much that has seemed unnecessarily subterranean in the negotiations between Takahira and the Secretary of State, admissions have been wormed from official sources that these gentlemen have consummated a pact that is variously regarded as a miracle of deft diplomacy; a dangerous entangling alliance or as a farcical declaration of non-binding intentions.

Subjected to examination, the “agreement” covers the following main points, stated in brief:

A mutual wish to “encourage the free and peaceful development of their commerce in the Pacific.”

Since the imperialistic idea is that peace is best preserved by being prepared for war, this “peaceful development” inevitably means to the United States a vastly increased naval burden. No less if Japan be honest than if she be insincere.

The second article declares for the maintenance of the existing status quo and the “defense of the principle of equal opportunity for commerce and industry in China.”

Has the Chinese boycott of Japanese goods anything to do with this? Takahira or Marquis Katsura, Japanese premier, please answer.

The third article obligates each nation to respect the territorial possessions in the Pacific of the other.