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.